All told, these darlings of the stock market aren't actually making profits. The government recognizes this in their tax policy, so they aren't charged for their nonexistent profit.
People who go work for a company like MS get most of their pay in stock options; the employees know this and factor it into their pay. So the company gets employees of greater quality than their salary alone accounts for.
The reason that the feds consider them broke for tax purposes but they report a profit everywhere else is that the value of the stock options is factored in as an expense for tax purposes but ignored otherwise.
If you consider people exercising their stock options to be equivalent to the company paying them the value of the stock (which it obviously is), and count it as an expense, then these companies are actually losing money.
MS and Cisco are pure "Baseball Card" stock. They could not pay, and never could have paid, dividends equal to the on-paper profit of their stockholders.
Their value is based on their perceived value. At some point in the past, people saw their prices go up and (absurdly) considered a simple extrapolation of this trend to be a reasonable assumption about future behavior. As long as a sufficient number of people believe that the price will go up, and toss their money at it in that belief, it will.
Other people call it a "stock bubble", because it's empty and eventually bursts. I prefer "baseball card stock" because this exact thing happens with baseball cards (and pokemon cards and any other inherently worthless junk that starts to increase in value because of clever marketing to naive children and then carries on as people begin to believe in a reasonable probability of future resale and consider it an investment).
Another name for it is "pyramid scam". Because, like any pyramid scam, eventually it reaches a point where everyone who can be suckered in is, and then there's no new money to keep pushing the value up; at that point, the upward trend that everyone believed would go on forever stops, once that happens, everybody realizes they've been scammed and tries to sell it while it's still worth something. Crash.
Neither MS nor Cisco are sound businesses. They attract the best employees with stock options they can't afford in the long run. When the stock stops going up, they either lose all their good employees (and go under due to employee incompetence) or pay them what the stock options would have been worth as salary (and go under due to paying out more than they're taking in).
I dunno about MS (which seems to make money from promoting inferior software over superior alternatives, and is thus harmful to everyone in general), but 3 cheers for the Cisco scam! We get all that good Cisco stuff for less than it really costs to make, and dumb stock market investors are footing the bill. A fool and his money are always parted, at least the public at large is getting some good stuff out of it (and we, as heavy internet users, are making out like bandits).
Civilizations existed quite happily for millenia without the "progess" we think new technologies will bring us
...and were then crushed when progressive civilizations decided to move into their territories.
The purpose of progress is not a more pleasurable life (as many have discovered, and enshrined in religions and philosophies that ought to be considered forms of insanity, perfect eternal happiness is simply a matter of learning to ignore your sensory input), but survival. The societies which progress and become stronger crush those which grow more slowly.
Putting the brakes on and deciding that you've progressed far enough is societal suicide.
...with advanced degrees in physics, chemistry, and hyperspace geometry. Froin-glaven!
In all seriousness, obvious when you know what regular diamond crystals are like because the increased density version would involve collapsing the electron shells, which is frowned upon among civilized chemists (only those boorish astrophysicists would dare such an offense against the proper state of matter).
This is why the BSD license (sans advertising clause) is perfectly compatible with the GPL, despite being a different license with different legal implications.
Think about it. The BSD license sans advertising clause as is considered to be compatible with the GPL is essentially public domain, and no license at all.
However, the BSD license (even sans advertising clause) is not actually compatible with the GPL, because it requires that a copy of the BSD license be distributed with the software. This is an "additional restriction" that is not permitted by the letter of the GPL.
Whatever Stallman says, or the official position of the FSF, the GPL demands absolute exclusivity. A copy of software can be under the GPL alone or not under the GPL at all, but it can't be simultaneously under the GPL and any other license that requires that further copies also be placed under that other license and the software contain notices to that effect (which is the defining characteristic of redistributable software licenses).
No, for a license to be compatible with the GPL, it must contain a GPL-surrender, like the WxWindows license or the LGPL.
Even assuming I'm wrong, answer me this: how, exactly, is a license which doesn't require source to be distributed with binaries, but does require the source to be placed under the same license (which gives full permission to redistribute, modify, and compile to everybody) if it is distributed, less free than the GPL?
To me, this seems like a slight difference in philosophy which the GPL is intolerant of.
Another example would be a GPL-like license, but requiring that full joint copyright permissions to all modifications be transferred to the originator (or, for that matter, that the modifications be placed in the public domain), so he can re-release it under any terms he later decides without having to hunt down. This would be in all practical ways identical to the GPL, except that if license incompatibilities later arised, the originator could fix it. But the GPL would not be tolerant of this slight difference in philosophy, either.
The LGPL is almost as much of a pain in the butt: this kind of linking is okay, that kind isn't. That is why all my software goes into the public domain, the only "license" that really allows anyone to do anything with your work, except monopolize it and keep it from others.
The truth is, it wouldn't be hard to duplicate GPL'd software for proprietary code. The code's right in front of you, it's easy to rewrite it (hell, it would probably be worth doing just to clean up the syntax and make it match your personal standards). Furthermore, anyone who made a minor effort to modify GPL'd code so that it appears to be an original work would succeed. The GPL is not enforceable against someone who knowingly sets out to break it and not get caught. If they make the court complaint "It looks suspiciously like our work" they could easily say, "Of course, we read their code, it was freely available for educational use. Naturally we would produce something similar. They don't own the methods they used, just the text that they typed."
The question is, is it worthwhile to attack proprietary code producers and add a slight inconvenience to the process of making a proprietary variant of your work if it causes problems to people who honestly want to produce free software?
Copyright law can't produce the protection the GPL was designed for in an enforceable way. The GPL is nothing but an inconvenience to everyone involved. It is just one more example of the ridiculous naivety and petulant idealism of the FSF, and there is no shortage of those.
...if the mass is being held constant, which it obviously isn't. The crystals are smaller because they contain a million times fewer atoms, not because they contain the same number of atoms packed a million times tighter.
For an A, the computer must be vaporized by a nuclear blast.
For an A+ the computer must be hurled into a black hole (some information might be gathered from the trajectories of the particles thrown off by the nuclear blast).
Perhaps it would make more sense to concentrate on reusable film designed specifically to be scanned once, and refreshed to its original state by heating, or exposure to a certain kind of light. I've certainly heard of optical memory that is supposed to work something like this.
Surely a one-row high-res scanning reader and a roll of chemical film is cheaper than a giant IC and several gigabytes of flash RAM.
I doubt very much that he is legally obligated to sign a patent claim to something he doesn't think he invented.
All he has to do is tell his employer, "Sorry, this patent isn't what we invented, it is too broad and I won't sign it unless it is narrowed down to what we actually did do."
I think a better question is where all the money in a large school goes.
They don't consider themselves as delivering the product of education, and justify their expenses based on how they help to deliver this product. Instead, everybody fights for the money to do whatever they want to do, and scrambles to get even more money from outside.
Teaching is just a chore that must be done, not the main purpose. Everyone there has another agenda.
Any chance to grab extra cash is taken. That's why universities have wealth-based "assistance programs"; actually, they have sliding prices based on the principle of "take every penny they can lay their hands on".
It's not just expensive, it's specifically as expensive as they can get away with. Of course, this varies a lot depending on the political climate. In some countries, there is a strong political push for education to be "free", so the students just don't get charged tuition (they get 'em where they can, though).
Everybody's always "short of money" because everybody has a bottomless appetite for the stuff. Anything that can be cut off of someone else's budget will be... at least until they fight back.
So, in a nutshell, universities are bottomless money-sinks by their very nature. Don't expect any relation between what you pay and what you get, there isn't one.
"We are looking to become the Windows of the campus Webtop"
-Chad Muir, CEO
That sums it up for me: evil monopolistic business practices, lousy product, contempt for the user, and a confusing marketing buzzword for spice. They're really setting out to imitate MS in every way they can.
Plain ASCII with no formatting standards is not "doing it right".
They don't even use any means to encode italics, which can significantly affect the meaning.
Without any kind of standards of how to mark things like chapter changes, page numbers (even optional), paragraph changes, and so forth, it's very hard to make a half-decent Gutenberg text viewer.
Every book in the P.G. collection is just going to have to be re-done, to put the typesetting back in.
It's one huge wasted effort because they arbitrarily decided to throw out integral information that would be just a little harder to put in. Don't support P.G., your efforts can be spent better on public domain texts that won't be thrown out and re-done in a few years.
But at the end of the day, it is the excitement of turning the next page to see what is going to happen, the smell of the paper, the heft and prestige of a good book that will keep them alive.
Yes, and that's why everybody does their writing with a hand-cut dip-pen. These newfangled fountain pens, cheap ball-point gadgets, and ridiculously expensive type-writers and word-processing computers, despite their much greater convenience, just don't have the same classic feel.
It's also why people always prefer to pay 5 times the price for hard cover editions, instead of buying more copies of the cheap paperbacks, despite the fact that paperbacks are released at the same time as hardcovers so they can compete directly with them.
Books are preferred over our current lousy LCD screens because they provide a much better image: higher resolution, higher contrast.
When somebody makes an e-book platform that looks as good as a sheet of paper, and sells it for under a hundred dollars (for a hardcover-sheet size), with conveniences like wireless instant download, week-long battery life, and availability of the complete offerings of all the popular authors, it will replace book sales almost completely.
It won't happen overnight, but it will happen. The technology isn't quite there and once it is, the industry will take a few years to adapt, but claiming that fragile, expensive, heavy, bulky paper books will indefinitely (rather than just for the next 5-10 years) remain the primary means of distributing text is ridiculous.
Sure, there will be a niche market for paper books in the future, like there is for calligraphy supplies and similar charmingly obsolete things. Most people will probably still have one or two treasured old hardback paper books... and several gigabytes of e-books.
I can only imagine that's due to the danger of talking on the phone while driving.
Studies have shown that a person can hold up their end of a conversation without hurting their driving abilities one bit. That is, unless they are asked something that requires spacial or mathematical thought. It appears that talking and driving use different areas of the brain that can can work on seperate things without any trouble.
Driving with a cell phone is likely dangerous because of the dialing and then using one hand for the phone.
So a headset with a voicerec autodialer ought to make it perfectly safe to use a cell phone.
All of them hate it when people make broad, sweeping statements that are supposed to apply accurately to every hacker.
This is because hackers are highly individualistic and all deeply resent being referred to as having anything in common with other hackers than the ability to program computers.
Also, all hackers are open-minded and sensitive, so they don't like to exclude people who don't fit the description.
Finally, hackers universally reject all religion as superstitious nonsense, so they are annoyed by the suggestion that they believe in mystical crap.
I suppose all the websites could be fakes, but I could take you to a convention where you could see it with your own eyes.
You could probably go and confirm it yourself too, if you just go to the store in town with a name like "The Dragon's Dicecup", "Gandalf's Library", or "The Android's Dungeon".
Or perhaps you are referring to the TV show. A lot of people have foggy half-memories that they suspect might be false, but if you watch Fox tomorrow morning, you can confirm that one for yourself, too.
Oh, by the way, the whole "pagan" movement mostly has to do with trying to justify orgies.
Orgies need no justification. An orgy is an end unto itself.
Hmmm, perhaps you forgot to add "...to your girlfriend." That makes more sense. If what it takes is some chanting, candle mood-lighting, and a bucket of goat's blood to get her going, you just thank your lucky stars that that's all.
"hostile to organized religion in general" and "enjoy `parody' religions" come a lot closer to being religious bigotry than they are to being hostile to religious bigotry.
Hah! Organized religions are really organized religious bigotry. Organization and religious tolerance don't go together. They are systems for gaining profit for the priests, and as such, they are generally as ruthless and intolerant as they can get away with, which is generally a function of what percentage of the population they can claim. This is why minority religions almost always seem gentler and friendlier: they are weak and could be wiped out if they made too much fuss. For example, Judaism seems a gentle, harmless religion (especially in America), but look in the Old Testament and you'll find that ancient Hebrew law in the days when it had a local near-monopoly was as brutally intolerant as the Catholic inquisition; look to modern Isreal and you can just how "gentle" and "harmless" it is becoming once again, now that the very government is based on the religion (mind you, this would happen with any organized religion; it doesn't matter what it's "about", the priesthood will always attract those who enjoy exercising the power abusing their authority gives them). Look to Iran, if you want to see the threat of organized religion with general support over a long period.
Mocking organized religion is an example of intolerance of intolerance: superficially intolerant, but generally aimed at a net gain in tolerance.
They don't mock the belief, but the ridiculous convoluted propaganda that is used to promote the belief, and the hypocracy of prominent members of the religion.
an example that you see here frequently is the use of "xtian" and "fundie".
Are we reading the same website? I hear xtians bitching about this from time to time, but I never have read it other than that. Anyway, they're just abbreviations, don't get your panties in a bunch.
True, but these are just names. Other free software organizations exist, other free software licenses exist. Neither is really necessary for anything.
Free software has been around since they first let university students touch computers. It went on just fine in the public domain or with simple blanket permission-granting documents and without any central representative. The dramatic increase in free software production is a natural result of internet growth: suddenly students and hobbyists could show off their software to everyone interested in the world and collaborate with them, regardless of distance.
Without either of these there would be no gcc or GNU,
Without the gcc project sucking in most of the people who are interested in writing a C or C++ compiler, another free C or C++ compiler would have been made.
GNU is one of several "let's remake Unix in our own image!" projects. Unix was poorly marketed and overpriced, but popular, and lots of people had seen the source, so naturally someone would recreate it. FSF propaganda made GNU high-profile, thus it sucked in more programmers than other efforts.
Again, the primary difference is the names, the basic product was inevitable, regardless of the actions of any one individual.
Remember, the existence of a good, working program available freely is a disincentive to produce another one that serves the same purpose. People understand that they'll eternally be playing catch-up to the earlier project, and won't bother unless they strongly disagree with the way parts of it are done, and want to do something significantly different. With something like a C compiler producing a certain type of object file, once it is approaching compliance to the standard, the only differences are in the optimizer; even if you strongly disagree with how the optimizer is done, it only makes sense to fork the existing project (gcc, egcs).
Besides, other C compilers were written, like lcc and vbcc. You just don't hear about them because gcc is so much better. And, of course, gcc is better because the gcc project attracted the most attention at first, then once it was going, it didn't make sense to waste effort by working on others. There's only room for one great community C compiler.
without either of which there would be no Linux.
That Linus used GNUtilities doesn't mean they were necessary to produce Linux. Assuming, for the moment, that nothing like the GNU utilities that were running at the time would have existed at the time, the most you can say is that they made the early development easier. After that, I'd say Linux drew more people to work on "GNU" tools than the GNU project drew on its own before that.
Remember, Linux was based on Minix, which had a large community. Anyone who seriously undertook to convert Minix into a full-fledged useful OS would have had lots of support. There was much interest and several abortive attempts before the cheap and powerful 386 processor and the growth of the internet made Linux the successful one.
all of the *BSD's and XFree86 depend on gcc
No, they are compiled with gcc. Believe it or not, you can compile them without too much trouble with other C compilers. For the moment, let's ignore that in the absence of the gcc brand the same people would have just put their work into another free compiler project and made one of comparable quality. You don't need a free compiler to make free software. It's very handy, but not strictly necessary. Before free compilers, programmers just bought commercial compilers (or used the licensed ones at their school). These produce object files, the formats of which are documented, when you're making your own executable format, a linker isn't too hard to write (for basic utilities such as compilers, linkers, web browsers, etc. the biggest problem is conforming to someone else's standard, especially when it was "grown" in a haphazard manner).
It's amazing how many of you just have no idea how much RMS has done
It's amazing just how many of you attribute everything that's GPL'd or that has the "GNU" stamp on it to RMS. He didn't do that stuff, he didn't make it possible, he just provided some popular names (and a popular license that is the root of most license conflicts), then he went around bitching like spoiled brat when a popular piece of free software didn't include "GNU" in its name.
Slashdot Mirror
All told, these darlings of the stock market aren't actually making profits. The government recognizes this in their tax policy, so they aren't charged for their nonexistent profit.
People who go work for a company like MS get most of their pay in stock options; the employees know this and factor it into their pay. So the company gets employees of greater quality than their salary alone accounts for.
The reason that the feds consider them broke for tax purposes but they report a profit everywhere else is that the value of the stock options is factored in as an expense for tax purposes but ignored otherwise.
If you consider people exercising their stock options to be equivalent to the company paying them the value of the stock (which it obviously is), and count it as an expense, then these companies are actually losing money.
MS and Cisco are pure "Baseball Card" stock. They could not pay, and never could have paid, dividends equal to the on-paper profit of their stockholders.
Their value is based on their perceived value. At some point in the past, people saw their prices go up and (absurdly) considered a simple extrapolation of this trend to be a reasonable assumption about future behavior. As long as a sufficient number of people believe that the price will go up, and toss their money at it in that belief, it will.
Other people call it a "stock bubble", because it's empty and eventually bursts. I prefer "baseball card stock" because this exact thing happens with baseball cards (and pokemon cards and any other inherently worthless junk that starts to increase in value because of clever marketing to naive children and then carries on as people begin to believe in a reasonable probability of future resale and consider it an investment).
Another name for it is "pyramid scam". Because, like any pyramid scam, eventually it reaches a point where everyone who can be suckered in is, and then there's no new money to keep pushing the value up; at that point, the upward trend that everyone believed would go on forever stops, once that happens, everybody realizes they've been scammed and tries to sell it while it's still worth something. Crash.
Neither MS nor Cisco are sound businesses. They attract the best employees with stock options they can't afford in the long run. When the stock stops going up, they either lose all their good employees (and go under due to employee incompetence) or pay them what the stock options would have been worth as salary (and go under due to paying out more than they're taking in).
I dunno about MS (which seems to make money from promoting inferior software over superior alternatives, and is thus harmful to everyone in general), but 3 cheers for the Cisco scam! We get all that good Cisco stuff for less than it really costs to make, and dumb stock market investors are footing the bill. A fool and his money are always parted, at least the public at large is getting some good stuff out of it (and we, as heavy internet users, are making out like bandits).
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That's why I look up a book's web page.
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Civilizations existed quite happily for millenia without the "progess" we think new technologies will bring us
...and were then crushed when progressive civilizations decided to move into their territories.
The purpose of progress is not a more pleasurable life (as many have discovered, and enshrined in religions and philosophies that ought to be considered forms of insanity, perfect eternal happiness is simply a matter of learning to ignore your sensory input), but survival. The societies which progress and become stronger crush those which grow more slowly.
Putting the brakes on and deciding that you've progressed far enough is societal suicide.
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...with advanced degrees in physics, chemistry, and hyperspace geometry. Froin-glaven!
In all seriousness, obvious when you know what regular diamond crystals are like because the increased density version would involve collapsing the electron shells, which is frowned upon among civilized chemists (only those boorish astrophysicists would dare such an offense against the proper state of matter).
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This is why the BSD license (sans advertising clause) is perfectly compatible with the GPL, despite being a different license with different legal implications.
Think about it. The BSD license sans advertising clause as is considered to be compatible with the GPL is essentially public domain, and no license at all.
However, the BSD license (even sans advertising clause) is not actually compatible with the GPL, because it requires that a copy of the BSD license be distributed with the software. This is an "additional restriction" that is not permitted by the letter of the GPL.
Whatever Stallman says, or the official position of the FSF, the GPL demands absolute exclusivity. A copy of software can be under the GPL alone or not under the GPL at all, but it can't be simultaneously under the GPL and any other license that requires that further copies also be placed under that other license and the software contain notices to that effect (which is the defining characteristic of redistributable software licenses).
No, for a license to be compatible with the GPL, it must contain a GPL-surrender, like the WxWindows license or the LGPL.
Even assuming I'm wrong, answer me this: how, exactly, is a license which doesn't require source to be distributed with binaries, but does require the source to be placed under the same license (which gives full permission to redistribute, modify, and compile to everybody) if it is distributed, less free than the GPL?
To me, this seems like a slight difference in philosophy which the GPL is intolerant of.
Another example would be a GPL-like license, but requiring that full joint copyright permissions to all modifications be transferred to the originator (or, for that matter, that the modifications be placed in the public domain), so he can re-release it under any terms he later decides without having to hunt down. This would be in all practical ways identical to the GPL, except that if license incompatibilities later arised, the originator could fix it. But the GPL would not be tolerant of this slight difference in philosophy, either.
The LGPL is almost as much of a pain in the butt: this kind of linking is okay, that kind isn't. That is why all my software goes into the public domain, the only "license" that really allows anyone to do anything with your work, except monopolize it and keep it from others.
The truth is, it wouldn't be hard to duplicate GPL'd software for proprietary code. The code's right in front of you, it's easy to rewrite it (hell, it would probably be worth doing just to clean up the syntax and make it match your personal standards). Furthermore, anyone who made a minor effort to modify GPL'd code so that it appears to be an original work would succeed. The GPL is not enforceable against someone who knowingly sets out to break it and not get caught. If they make the court complaint "It looks suspiciously like our work" they could easily say, "Of course, we read their code, it was freely available for educational use. Naturally we would produce something similar. They don't own the methods they used, just the text that they typed."
The question is, is it worthwhile to attack proprietary code producers and add a slight inconvenience to the process of making a proprietary variant of your work if it causes problems to people who honestly want to produce free software?
Copyright law can't produce the protection the GPL was designed for in an enforceable way. The GPL is nothing but an inconvenience to everyone involved. It is just one more example of the ridiculous naivety and petulant idealism of the FSF, and there is no shortage of those.
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if volume [decreases], density increases.
...if the mass is being held constant, which it obviously isn't. The crystals are smaller because they contain a million times fewer atoms, not because they contain the same number of atoms packed a million times tighter.
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The Usenet: The Flaming rules.
Everything in there is pure 100% accurate information. Except this, apparently.
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Of course the systems they see are insecure. What kind of fools do they think the security agencies are?
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I think he would drive the moneychangers from the temple, if you know what I mean (wink, wink).
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For an A, the computer must be vaporized by a nuclear blast.
For an A+ the computer must be hurled into a black hole (some information might be gathered from the trajectories of the particles thrown off by the nuclear blast).
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Haven't any of you watched War Games?
Any kid with a C-64 can hack the Pentagon and set off a nuclear war.
Uh, it was a historical recreation, wasn't it?
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Perhaps it would make more sense to concentrate on reusable film designed specifically to be scanned once, and refreshed to its original state by heating, or exposure to a certain kind of light. I've certainly heard of optical memory that is supposed to work something like this.
Surely a one-row high-res scanning reader and a roll of chemical film is cheaper than a giant IC and several gigabytes of flash RAM.
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you are stuck and you'll have to sign
I doubt very much that he is legally obligated to sign a patent claim to something he doesn't think he invented.
All he has to do is tell his employer, "Sorry, this patent isn't what we invented, it is too broad and I won't sign it unless it is narrowed down to what we actually did do."
(IANAL)
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I think a better question is where all the money in a large school goes.
They don't consider themselves as delivering the product of education, and justify their expenses based on how they help to deliver this product. Instead, everybody fights for the money to do whatever they want to do, and scrambles to get even more money from outside.
Teaching is just a chore that must be done, not the main purpose. Everyone there has another agenda.
Any chance to grab extra cash is taken. That's why universities have wealth-based "assistance programs"; actually, they have sliding prices based on the principle of "take every penny they can lay their hands on".
It's not just expensive, it's specifically as expensive as they can get away with. Of course, this varies a lot depending on the political climate. In some countries, there is a strong political push for education to be "free", so the students just don't get charged tuition (they get 'em where they can, though).
Everybody's always "short of money" because everybody has a bottomless appetite for the stuff. Anything that can be cut off of someone else's budget will be... at least until they fight back.
So, in a nutshell, universities are bottomless money-sinks by their very nature. Don't expect any relation between what you pay and what you get, there isn't one.
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"We are looking to become the Windows of the campus Webtop"
-Chad Muir, CEO
That sums it up for me: evil monopolistic business practices, lousy product, contempt for the user, and a confusing marketing buzzword for spice. They're really setting out to imitate MS in every way they can.
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Plain ASCII with no formatting standards is not "doing it right".
They don't even use any means to encode italics, which can significantly affect the meaning.
Without any kind of standards of how to mark things like chapter changes, page numbers (even optional), paragraph changes, and so forth, it's very hard to make a half-decent Gutenberg text viewer.
Every book in the P.G. collection is just going to have to be re-done, to put the typesetting back in.
It's one huge wasted effort because they arbitrarily decided to throw out integral information that would be just a little harder to put in. Don't support P.G., your efforts can be spent better on public domain texts that won't be thrown out and re-done in a few years.
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But at the end of the day, it is the excitement of turning the next page to see what is going to happen, the smell of the paper, the heft and prestige of a good book that will keep them alive.
Yes, and that's why everybody does their writing with a hand-cut dip-pen. These newfangled fountain pens, cheap ball-point gadgets, and ridiculously expensive type-writers and word-processing computers, despite their much greater convenience, just don't have the same classic feel.
It's also why people always prefer to pay 5 times the price for hard cover editions, instead of buying more copies of the cheap paperbacks, despite the fact that paperbacks are released at the same time as hardcovers so they can compete directly with them.
Books are preferred over our current lousy LCD screens because they provide a much better image: higher resolution, higher contrast.
When somebody makes an e-book platform that looks as good as a sheet of paper, and sells it for under a hundred dollars (for a hardcover-sheet size), with conveniences like wireless instant download, week-long battery life, and availability of the complete offerings of all the popular authors, it will replace book sales almost completely.
It won't happen overnight, but it will happen. The technology isn't quite there and once it is, the industry will take a few years to adapt, but claiming that fragile, expensive, heavy, bulky paper books will indefinitely (rather than just for the next 5-10 years) remain the primary means of distributing text is ridiculous.
Sure, there will be a niche market for paper books in the future, like there is for calligraphy supplies and similar charmingly obsolete things. Most people will probably still have one or two treasured old hardback paper books... and several gigabytes of e-books.
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I can only imagine that's due to the danger of talking on the phone while driving.
Studies have shown that a person can hold up their end of a conversation without hurting their driving abilities one bit. That is, unless they are asked something that requires spacial or mathematical thought. It appears that talking and driving use different areas of the brain that can can work on seperate things without any trouble.
Driving with a cell phone is likely dangerous because of the dialing and then using one hand for the phone.
So a headset with a voicerec autodialer ought to make it perfectly safe to use a cell phone.
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It's a rare genius that's understood in his own day.
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"How come abbreviated is such a long word?"
...so it can be used as an example to explain itself: abbr.
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All of them hate it when people make broad, sweeping statements that are supposed to apply accurately to every hacker.
This is because hackers are highly individualistic and all deeply resent being referred to as having anything in common with other hackers than the ability to program computers.
Also, all hackers are open-minded and sensitive, so they don't like to exclude people who don't fit the description.
Finally, hackers universally reject all religion as superstitious nonsense, so they are annoyed by the suggestion that they believe in mystical crap.
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Wow, what a skeptic!
I suppose all the websites could be fakes, but I could take you to a convention where you could see it with your own eyes.
You could probably go and confirm it yourself too, if you just go to the store in town with a name like "The Dragon's Dicecup", "Gandalf's Library", or "The Android's Dungeon".
Or perhaps you are referring to the TV show. A lot of people have foggy half-memories that they suspect might be false, but if you watch Fox tomorrow morning, you can confirm that one for yourself, too.
Oh, by the way, the whole "pagan" movement mostly has to do with trying to justify orgies.
Orgies need no justification. An orgy is an end unto itself.
Hmmm, perhaps you forgot to add "...to your girlfriend." That makes more sense. If what it takes is some chanting, candle mood-lighting, and a bucket of goat's blood to get her going, you just thank your lucky stars that that's all.
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"hostile to organized religion in general" and "enjoy `parody' religions" come a lot closer to being religious bigotry than they are to being hostile to religious bigotry.
Hah! Organized religions are really organized religious bigotry. Organization and religious tolerance don't go together. They are systems for gaining profit for the priests, and as such, they are generally as ruthless and intolerant as they can get away with, which is generally a function of what percentage of the population they can claim. This is why minority religions almost always seem gentler and friendlier: they are weak and could be wiped out if they made too much fuss. For example, Judaism seems a gentle, harmless religion (especially in America), but look in the Old Testament and you'll find that ancient Hebrew law in the days when it had a local near-monopoly was as brutally intolerant as the Catholic inquisition; look to modern Isreal and you can just how "gentle" and "harmless" it is becoming once again, now that the very government is based on the religion (mind you, this would happen with any organized religion; it doesn't matter what it's "about", the priesthood will always attract those who enjoy exercising the power abusing their authority gives them). Look to Iran, if you want to see the threat of organized religion with general support over a long period.
Mocking organized religion is an example of intolerance of intolerance: superficially intolerant, but generally aimed at a net gain in tolerance.
They don't mock the belief, but the ridiculous convoluted propaganda that is used to promote the belief, and the hypocracy of prominent members of the religion.
an example that you see here frequently is the use of "xtian" and "fundie".
Are we reading the same website? I hear xtians bitching about this from time to time, but I never have read it other than that. Anyway, they're just abbreviations, don't get your panties in a bunch.
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I know, because I believe in solipsism absolutely and I am a geek.
(think about it)
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Without RMS there would be no FSF or GPL.
True, but these are just names. Other free software organizations exist, other free software licenses exist. Neither is really necessary for anything.
Free software has been around since they first let university students touch computers. It went on just fine in the public domain or with simple blanket permission-granting documents and without any central representative. The dramatic increase in free software production is a natural result of internet growth: suddenly students and hobbyists could show off their software to everyone interested in the world and collaborate with them, regardless of distance.
Without either of these there would be no gcc or GNU,
Without the gcc project sucking in most of the people who are interested in writing a C or C++ compiler, another free C or C++ compiler would have been made.
GNU is one of several "let's remake Unix in our own image!" projects. Unix was poorly marketed and overpriced, but popular, and lots of people had seen the source, so naturally someone would recreate it. FSF propaganda made GNU high-profile, thus it sucked in more programmers than other efforts.
Again, the primary difference is the names, the basic product was inevitable, regardless of the actions of any one individual.
Remember, the existence of a good, working program available freely is a disincentive to produce another one that serves the same purpose. People understand that they'll eternally be playing catch-up to the earlier project, and won't bother unless they strongly disagree with the way parts of it are done, and want to do something significantly different. With something like a C compiler producing a certain type of object file, once it is approaching compliance to the standard, the only differences are in the optimizer; even if you strongly disagree with how the optimizer is done, it only makes sense to fork the existing project (gcc, egcs).
Besides, other C compilers were written, like lcc and vbcc. You just don't hear about them because gcc is so much better. And, of course, gcc is better because the gcc project attracted the most attention at first, then once it was going, it didn't make sense to waste effort by working on others. There's only room for one great community C compiler.
without either of which there would be no Linux.
That Linus used GNUtilities doesn't mean they were necessary to produce Linux. Assuming, for the moment, that nothing like the GNU utilities that were running at the time would have existed at the time, the most you can say is that they made the early development easier. After that, I'd say Linux drew more people to work on "GNU" tools than the GNU project drew on its own before that.
Remember, Linux was based on Minix, which had a large community. Anyone who seriously undertook to convert Minix into a full-fledged useful OS would have had lots of support. There was much interest and several abortive attempts before the cheap and powerful 386 processor and the growth of the internet made Linux the successful one.
all of the *BSD's and XFree86 depend on gcc
No, they are compiled with gcc. Believe it or not, you can compile them without too much trouble with other C compilers. For the moment, let's ignore that in the absence of the gcc brand the same people would have just put their work into another free compiler project and made one of comparable quality. You don't need a free compiler to make free software. It's very handy, but not strictly necessary. Before free compilers, programmers just bought commercial compilers (or used the licensed ones at their school). These produce object files, the formats of which are documented, when you're making your own executable format, a linker isn't too hard to write (for basic utilities such as compilers, linkers, web browsers, etc. the biggest problem is conforming to someone else's standard, especially when it was "grown" in a haphazard manner).
It's amazing how many of you just have no idea how much RMS has done
It's amazing just how many of you attribute everything that's GPL'd or that has the "GNU" stamp on it to RMS. He didn't do that stuff, he didn't make it possible, he just provided some popular names (and a popular license that is the root of most license conflicts), then he went around bitching like spoiled brat when a popular piece of free software didn't include "GNU" in its name.
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