Private companies will make their lists available to the department of homeland security! Even your own writeup says this!
I don't think so, read that again. It says:... the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security are developing a database that will allow private companies to submit lists of individuals to be screened for a connection to terrorism.
The conventional interpretation of that language would be the same as if you submitted peoples names for drug screening, or credit checks. The submittee (government) does the screening and reports back to the submitter (companies), on the status of the submitted (me). Also it makes sense that the government wants to protect the critical infrastructure, and it doesn't make sense that these companies would have identified any terrorists. Im pretty sure you read that wrong.
... a professor in technology and culture. shudder. You know, a subset of those liberal arts people who all spend their entire lives studying "culture" but still manage to be more out of touch with the people they are studying than anyone else on the planet.
Second, NM does not have much sand What are you talking about? Have you ever driven between Socorro and Las Cruces? It is as baren as Texas. Sure, the northern quarter of the state has lots of trees and hills and a fair amount of people, but at least half of the state is pretty much just dirt and sage brush with with a few pinons and juniper thrown in for good measure. And I mean that in a good way. Santa Fe != New Mexico.
Third, the presence of sand has zero significance to anyone trying to achieve orbit. Not in and of itself, but the sparse population and vegitation is good for doing things that you wouldn't want to do in, say, the middle of New York city or the Amazon rain forest.
Your saying you don't want a spaceship to crash land in your backyard? Dude you would be the coolest geek in the state if you had a burnt spaceship in your backyard! I would totally come and visit it, and you would be all like, "yeah, I was just sitting here and then crrrrrraaahh sshh BOOOMMMM, and there was a spaceship in my backyard", and I'd be all like "whoa, cool".
You're not fooling me. You are really from florida and are trying to get New Mexicans scared so they launch in florida and you can watch.
But seriously, New Mexico is big, and it has alot of sand and I seriously doubt that a crash would actually hit anything. Besides I don't think any of these teams would risk their lives unless they were pretty darn certain that they craft was going to work. I live here and am not worried in the least bit.
Re:Why PDF?
on
Free Culture
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
DON'T use pdf for book distribution! No, please DO use pdf for book distribution. It is the most widely supported format that has all the features you need and is open enough.
DON'T however write the book strait into pdf. Use something like DocBook, which can be converted into many formats after the fact, and will probably make your life easier anyway.
I read last night's headline as "Tivo Plans CowboyNeal on Demand"
I was very disturbed, and decided it was time for me to go to bed. What a plesent surprise to find this morning that I had just transposed lines:)
Tivo Plan Commercials On Demand Posted by CowboyNeal on Wed 24 Mar
Re:a question of goals
on
The Wrong Stuff
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
One small caveat - the future of mankind depends on colonization, not exploration. Until we find a way to have a sustatainable colony, then we are tourists. Sending a man to mars really isn't that big of a technical challenge (relatively). We have already sent people to the moon, and we have sent rovers to Mars. The only real transportation challenge would be landing. Sending a man to Mars will only take time and money.
If we are serious about getting our eggs out of this basket then we need to start working out how to survive on Mars. Starting with and how to design a structure that can be completely repaired without help from earth, how to grow food, how to generate enough energy, and finally how to create all the materials we need on mars itself. Eventually we will need to try this stuff out on Mars, and we will have to do things in stages - there is no way we will be completely sustainable on the first try. But there is a ton that we can and should be doing here on Earth. We should be working on taking stuff like this to the next level.
I don't want our Mars mission to turn into another Apollo, where we have a wonderfull achievment and then the program dies because there is nothing to do up there. Or worse another ISS. When we send a man to mars I want us to be sending a trailbreaker, not a political statement.
Good points. In processes of sifting through them. One thing that is tickling my brain:
Service sector spending is purchasing leisure, thereby decreasing the total output of the economy and acting as a drag on the reinvestment of profits (the people who sit around in newfound idleness are subsequently underproducing).
One of the things that I have noticed is that I am better off if I pay a restraunt to cook my food and work that extra half hour that I would otherwise spent cooking. Or in the more likely case - because I have to work longer hours I have to eat out, but it works out better for me (financially at least) anyway. So the service sector really isn't me underproducing - it is the marketization of part of the previously hidden economy of home chores.
Then again I haven't got much sleep lately, so I may look at this post in a couple days and wonder what the heck I was thinking.
Something about those equations was bugging me, and I finally realized that we have lost D dollars from layoffs not F. Duh. Anyway, when you work this out you get a net gain when F/D (M-1)/M, which still shows a net gain in most cases, but not quite as much as I originally proported.
Damn, no more posting during sleep deprivation. After this post. I swear.
Sorry, I just read Shivetya's post for the fourth time and realized that I had missed the second sentance the previous three times. Boy do I feel stupid. But nevertheless, what I said in my post still stands except the parts where I told you to RTFP.
Yes the Cato Institute has bias, just like your "strait views on the subject", but what they said in this article was spot on. I won't defend any of their other views or your accusation that they are intentionally deceptive because I honestly don't know much about them. But I will take issue with this:
Free trade is about benefiting from illegal corporate practices (such as worker abuse) by simply allowing American companies to do it overseas, and letting the market do the rest.
Companies outsource because they they want the work done cheaper. There are many reasons that foriegn labor is less expensive, but the biggest is that the workers don't have as high of a standard of living. They don't expect their salary to buy a house and two cars, eat out every night, and take 3 weeks of vacation every year.
Some companies do expose their workers to unsafe conditions (textiles), and this should be stopped. But the savings due to this are really quite small when compared to savings gained from being in a poor country, where it doesn't take as much money to live.
Furthermore, the thing that well meaning activists always forget is that these jobs help poor countries get out of poverty. The people who are working them choose to work there because it is better than what they had before. Not as good as we have it in the states but a step forward. In fact, jobs and education are the only things that will ever get these countries out of poverty.
Lastly, in addition to helping the foriegn country outsourcing helps the US as a whole as well. See these two posts for an explaination why.
Everything that you said is true, and none of it has anything to do with the parent. Yes, unemployment is still down and we are not creating jobs fast enough to keep up with growth. No, it has nothing to do with outsourcing.
When jobs were being replaced my automation people screamed the sky was falling. When manufacturing jobs were being lost to china, they did the same thing, and you know what, we went on to have one of the lowest periods of unemployment ever. Free trade really does work. Here is how:
D is the cost to produce something domestically. F is the cost to produce the same elsewhere. S = (D-F) are the savings due to outsourcing.
Not unless you are a cartel or monopoly, nearly all of these savings will end up having to be passed onto the customer in the long run because of competition. Now the consumers will have S more dollars to spend than they used to. They will spend most of it and it will pay the salaries of new jobs providing whatever goods and services the consumers purchased with this extra money (see note 1). Likewise the vast majority of the salary of these new employees will be spent creating more jobs. So the ecomony will grow by: = (k*S) + (k*(k*S)) + (k*(k*(k*S)) +... = sum(i=0..inf)(k^i*S) where k is the percentage of money that is actually spent as opposed to being saved by individuals or corporations (aka profit). If I remember right, in the US it has been found that this equations works out to about 4*S. This is called the mulitiplication factor, and we will call it M.
Therefore the US has lost F dollars from layoffs, and gained 4*S from growth due to less expensive goods. NET = M*S - F NET = M*(D-F) - F NET = M*D - (M+1)*F
So if M*D > (M+1)*F then outsourcing will create a net gain. Or in other words if F/D < M/(M+1). Even in the worse case where M=1 (every dollar spent, in the first round of savings goes strait to profit or out of country), we will still break even if the product is half as expensive to produce. In the typical case of M=4, net growth will occur even if the outsourced work is only 25% cheaper.
Keep up the cheerleading He wasn't. He was stating the facts and trying to inform intelgent people so they don't make rash judgements and pressure our congress into implementing trade restrictions that make the economic situation worse than it already is.
(Note 1) There is also the possibility that some of the new jobs created will also be overseas, however the vast majority of the money spent in the US stays in the US. Futhermore, as people get more money they tend to spend it on things like eating out more and buying nicer houses rather than buying more expensive gadgets. Therefore as outsourcing increases you would expect to see an increase in the service sector of the market, which is exactly what empirical evidence shows us.
The C-x part is pretty unintuitive. What does the x stand for? What does the : stand for? Pretty unintuitive. They are both the same thing - a meta key that gets you into command mode. You learn it once and then it makes sense forever.
The only really annoying thing about emacs for me is the fact that ^x^y and ^xy can be different commands, and it is a pain to remember which you need.
Is this the norm? Well, there really isn't a norm yet. Napster is worse than this - basically all the same restrictions, and you are only renting the music, not buying it. Apple's usage policy is much better, but the practical aspects are simular - can only play on iTunes and iPod at the moment, but you can burn or transcode to any format. I forget Rhapsody and MusicMatch, although I remember I didn't like what I saw.
In my opinion, none of the music stores are worth it. For just 10% more you can get music in a format that has better quality, less restrictions, a bigger catalog, more players than you can imagine, and comes with free hardcopy and art work. Oh and you are supporting the local teenage slackys that work at Hastings - keep dem kids off the street:) Until someone offers a service better than that I have no reason to stop using CD.
I really thought that walmart had a good shot at becoming the biggest music store on the net for this very reason. But they have done a horrible job at selling it. No one knows about it. Maybe this will change not that they have had their second opening, but for their first opening I don't even think that they advertized it in their own store yet alone anywhere else. They are treating it as just another ho-hum part of the walmart website.
Between that, and the fact that the only people who do know about it probably wouldn't buy there because they censor their music, I don't see walmart as making much of a splash at all. I hope it stays that way:)
Still takes a lot of Oil, Water, and Electricity to recycle that paper. As it does to run a huge computer sever, and hundreds of clients that access that server. I don't know which way would be more environmentally friendly. It would interesting to see a study on that.
An AC said: In this entire point I see nothing about prayer groups. Whether or not he has prayer groups is irrelevant, anyone should be able to pray in public. Forcing people to join prayer groups is an entirely different matter. In any case, if you're going to be that paranoid about repercussions you have to ban any reference to any beliefs in places like school. After all, a teacher could take a person's personal beliefs into account when grading assignments. It goes both ways.
Yes, this exactly what I was getting at. Holi is right that the corporate prayer that Mr Ashcroft has at work does have problems and the tone of my post made it sound like I was absolving him completely, which I don't.
The reason that I lashed out on the subject is because I feel that near the end of Clinton's term the seperation of church and state issues were getting to the point of being unnecisarrily descriminatory. What I mean is that everyone has beliefs of some sort (or at least strong opinions) and what difference does it make if you call your beliefs religous and I don't. At my school teachers were practically banned from even stating that they were christian, and yet my literature teachers could cram their secular humanism beliefs down our throughts all they wanted. Which is verging on exactly the problem that we wanted get away from in the first point - one state endorsed belief system (in this case tolerence, embrasing all cultures, putting superficial peace above moral beliefs).
I think the correct balence in this is to allow everyone, even public leaders and teachers, to express their beliefs whether religious or not, but crack down on any actions by government officials, in their role as such, that could be seen as pressuring others to have the same belief, and also any actions by citizens in an authority position, and acting in their role as such, that could be seen as discriminating based on beliefs. I believe that gives the fullest possible freedom to live according your belief system while still protecting the freedom of belief of others.
Oh, and I don't think that praying and disliking being in a picture with a boob makes Ashcroft a nutcase, but the cynical moderators have spoken:)
Actually licencing is not an issue and hasn't been for years. They are both a combination of GPL and LGPL.
Argh, I wish they had interviewed a developer. This article is extremely vague. It says they are not merging KDE and gnome code bases - just making a single desktop with all their features. So which one? Are they adding gnome features to KDE, or KDE features to gnome? What features are we talking about here?
I posted this in another thread but it got buried. If you would like to see abandoned works enter into the public domain, and keep from loosing large portions of our cultural history then you should write your congress critter about the Public Domain Enhancement Act.
On the job? Absolutely, unless he's doing it during his lunch break and in private.
Why in private? There is nothing about seperation of church and state or freedom of religion that requires public leaders to hide their belief. As long as they are not imposing their religion on others there is no problem.
Would you also ban politicians from talking at the water cooler, receiving calls from his wife and reading the news? A reasonable amount of personal time at work is acceptable, especially concidering that someone like that is always on call and has a fairly hectic work schedule.
I don't know. All they are asking is for the courts to declare unconditional copyright unconstitutional. The actual state of copyright law after that would depend on congress:
13. If you win, how could copyright law change?
There are many ways Congress could change the copyright law back to a conditional system and still remain in compliance with the Berne Convention. One way would be to re-impose formalities for all works of U.S. authors -- these are most works published in the U.S., and Berne doesn't prohibit signatory nations from imposing formalities on their own authors. Another would be to pass the Public Domain Enhancement Act, which would impose a tiny renewal fee designed to move unused copyrighted work into the public domain. The PDEA also wouldn't violate Berne, because it would apply only to works of U.S. authors.
Another possibly valid option that they didn't mention was to require an initial registration which lasts the extent of your copyright term, without the need for registration. That would not be unconditional copyright, but would do nothing for abandonware since all of it would have been registered at one point.
I guess it would also depend on reason that the supreme court gave when deciding why unconditional copyright is unconstitional. If it is determined that not requiring renewal allows non-comercial work to be locked up, which actually hurts progress, then I would think that renewal would have to be part of the replacement. But if it is for one of their other reasons, who knows.
It is the difference between copyright and patents. When you copyright your create work (source code) you only get protection for that specific work. You do not get protection for the ideas in the work, which can be freely used by anyone in their own programs, so long as they don't copy your code verbatim. As a comparison if someone wrote an article about sheep shearing methods, it would be an infringement of copyright to copy his article verbatim, but not to write your own article discussing the same methods.
That is all it is saying about not being able to receive copyright protection for ideas and algorithms.
Slashdot Mirror
Private companies will make their lists available to the department of homeland security! Even your own writeup says this!
... the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security are developing a database that will allow private companies to submit lists of individuals to be screened for a connection to terrorism.
I don't think so, read that again. It says:
The conventional interpretation of that language would be the same as if you submitted peoples names for drug screening, or credit checks. The submittee (government) does the screening and reports back to the submitter (companies), on the status of the submitted (me). Also it makes sense that the government wants to protect the critical infrastructure, and it doesn't make sense that these companies would have identified any terrorists. Im pretty sure you read that wrong.
... a professor in technology and culture. shudder. You know, a subset of those liberal arts people who all spend their entire lives studying "culture" but still manage to be more out of touch with the people they are studying than anyone else on the planet.
Second, NM does not have much sand
What are you talking about? Have you ever driven between Socorro and Las Cruces? It is as baren as Texas. Sure, the northern quarter of the state has lots of trees and hills and a fair amount of people, but at least half of the state is pretty much just dirt and sage brush with with a few pinons and juniper thrown in for good measure. And I mean that in a good way. Santa Fe != New Mexico.
Third, the presence of sand has zero significance to anyone trying to achieve orbit.
Not in and of itself, but the sparse population and vegitation is good for doing things that you wouldn't want to do in, say, the middle of New York city or the Amazon rain forest.
yeah, yeah IHBT IHL HAND.
Your saying you don't want a spaceship to crash land in your backyard? Dude you would be the coolest geek in the state if you had a burnt spaceship in your backyard! I would totally come and visit it, and you would be all like, "yeah, I was just sitting here and then crrrrrraaahh sshh BOOOMMMM, and there was a spaceship in my backyard", and I'd be all like "whoa, cool".
You're not fooling me. You are really from florida and are trying to get New Mexicans scared so they launch in florida and you can watch.
But seriously, New Mexico is big, and it has alot of sand and I seriously doubt that a crash would actually hit anything. Besides I don't think any of these teams would risk their lives unless they were pretty darn certain that they craft was going to work. I live here and am not worried in the least bit.
DON'T use pdf for book distribution!
No, please DO use pdf for book distribution. It is the most widely supported format that has all the features you need and is open enough.
DON'T however write the book strait into pdf. Use something like DocBook, which can be converted into many formats after the fact, and will probably make your life easier anyway.
I read last night's headline as "Tivo Plans CowboyNeal on Demand"
:)
I was very disturbed, and decided it was time for me to go to bed. What a plesent surprise to find this morning that I had just transposed lines
Tivo Plan Commercials On Demand
Posted by CowboyNeal on Wed 24 Mar
One small caveat - the future of mankind depends on colonization, not exploration. Until we find a way to have a sustatainable colony, then we are tourists. Sending a man to mars really isn't that big of a technical challenge (relatively). We have already sent people to the moon, and we have sent rovers to Mars. The only real transportation challenge would be landing. Sending a man to Mars will only take time and money.
If we are serious about getting our eggs out of this basket then we need to start working out how to survive on Mars. Starting with and how to design a structure that can be completely repaired without help from earth, how to grow food, how to generate enough energy, and finally how to create all the materials we need on mars itself. Eventually we will need to try this stuff out on Mars, and we will have to do things in stages - there is no way we will be completely sustainable on the first try. But there is a ton that we can and should be doing here on Earth. We should be working on taking stuff like this to the next level.
I don't want our Mars mission to turn into another Apollo, where we have a wonderfull achievment and then the program dies because there is nothing to do up there. Or worse another ISS. When we send a man to mars I want us to be sending a trailbreaker, not a political statement.
I think is was more like this:
union {
cFather yhwh;
cSpirit holyghost
cMessiah jesus;
} God;
Theologists access all elements of the union simultaneously. Hilarity ensues.
Locke for Hegemon!
Good points. In processes of sifting through them. One thing that is tickling my brain:
Service sector spending is purchasing leisure, thereby decreasing the total output of the economy and acting as a drag on the reinvestment of profits (the people who sit around in newfound idleness are subsequently underproducing).
One of the things that I have noticed is that I am better off if I pay a restraunt to cook my food and work that extra half hour that I would otherwise spent cooking. Or in the more likely case - because I have to work longer hours I have to eat out, but it works out better for me (financially at least) anyway. So the service sector really isn't me underproducing - it is the marketization of part of the previously hidden economy of home chores.
Then again I haven't got much sleep lately, so I may look at this post in a couple days and wonder what the heck I was thinking.
Something about those equations was bugging me, and I finally realized that we have lost D dollars from layoffs not F. Duh. Anyway, when you work this out you get a net gain when F/D (M-1)/M, which still shows a net gain in most cases, but not quite as much as I originally proported.
Damn, no more posting during sleep deprivation. After this post. I swear.
Sorry, I just read Shivetya's post for the fourth time and realized that I had missed the second sentance the previous three times. Boy do I feel stupid. But nevertheless, what I said in my post still stands except the parts where I told you to RTFP.
Yes the Cato Institute has bias, just like your "strait views on the subject", but what they said in this article was spot on. I won't defend any of their other views or your accusation that they are intentionally deceptive because I honestly don't know much about them. But I will take issue with this:
Free trade is about benefiting from illegal corporate practices (such as worker abuse) by simply allowing American companies to do it overseas, and letting the market do the rest.
Companies outsource because they they want the work done cheaper. There are many reasons that foriegn labor is less expensive, but the biggest is that the workers don't have as high of a standard of living. They don't expect their salary to buy a house and two cars, eat out every night, and take 3 weeks of vacation every year.
Some companies do expose their workers to unsafe conditions (textiles), and this should be stopped. But the savings due to this are really quite small when compared to savings gained from being in a poor country, where it doesn't take as much money to live.
Furthermore, the thing that well meaning activists always forget is that these jobs help poor countries get out of poverty. The people who are working them choose to work there because it is better than what they had before. Not as good as we have it in the states but a step forward. In fact, jobs and education are the only things that will ever get these countries out of poverty.
Lastly, in addition to helping the foriegn country outsourcing helps the US as a whole as well. See these two posts for an explaination why.
Everything that you said is true, and none of it has anything to do with the parent. Yes, unemployment is still down and we are not creating jobs fast enough to keep up with growth. No, it has nothing to do with outsourcing.
...
When jobs were being replaced my automation people screamed the sky was falling. When manufacturing jobs were being lost to china, they did the same thing, and you know what, we went on to have one of the lowest periods of unemployment ever. Free trade really does work. Here is how:
D is the cost to produce something domestically.
F is the cost to produce the same elsewhere.
S = (D-F) are the savings due to outsourcing.
Not unless you are a cartel or monopoly, nearly all of these savings will end up having to be passed onto the customer in the long run because of competition. Now the consumers will have S more dollars to spend than they used to. They will spend most of it and it will pay the salaries of new jobs providing whatever goods and services the consumers purchased with this extra money (see note 1). Likewise the vast majority of the salary of these new employees will be spent creating more jobs. So the ecomony will grow by:
= (k*S) + (k*(k*S)) + (k*(k*(k*S)) +
= sum(i=0..inf)(k^i*S)
where k is the percentage of money that is actually spent as opposed to being saved by individuals or corporations (aka profit). If I remember right, in the US it has been found that this equations works out to about 4*S. This is called the mulitiplication factor, and we will call it M.
Therefore the US has lost F dollars from layoffs, and gained 4*S from growth due to less expensive goods.
NET = M*S - F
NET = M*(D-F) - F
NET = M*D - (M+1)*F
So if M*D > (M+1)*F then outsourcing will create a net gain. Or in other words if F/D < M/(M+1). Even in the worse case where M=1 (every dollar spent, in the first round of savings goes strait to profit or out of country), we will still break even if the product is half as expensive to produce. In the typical case of M=4, net growth will occur even if the outsourced work is only 25% cheaper.
Keep up the cheerleading
He wasn't. He was stating the facts and trying to inform intelgent people so they don't make rash judgements and pressure our congress into implementing trade restrictions that make the economic situation worse than it already is.
(Note 1) There is also the possibility that some of the new jobs created will also be overseas, however the vast majority of the money spent in the US stays in the US. Futhermore, as people get more money they tend to spend it on things like eating out more and buying nicer houses rather than buying more expensive gadgets. Therefore as outsourcing increases you would expect to see an increase in the service sector of the market, which is exactly what empirical evidence shows us.
The C-x part is pretty unintuitive. What does the x stand for?
What does the : stand for? Pretty unintuitive. They are both the same thing - a meta key that gets you into command mode. You learn it once and then it makes sense forever.
The only really annoying thing about emacs for me is the fact that ^x^y and ^xy can be different commands, and it is a pain to remember which you need.
Is this the norm?
:) Until someone offers a service better than that I have no reason to stop using CD.
Well, there really isn't a norm yet. Napster is worse than this - basically all the same restrictions, and you are only renting the music, not buying it. Apple's usage policy is much better, but the practical aspects are simular - can only play on iTunes and iPod at the moment, but you can burn or transcode to any format. I forget Rhapsody and MusicMatch, although I remember I didn't like what I saw.
In my opinion, none of the music stores are worth it. For just 10% more you can get music in a format that has better quality, less restrictions, a bigger catalog, more players than you can imagine, and comes with free hardcopy and art work. Oh and you are supporting the local teenage slackys that work at Hastings - keep dem kids off the street
I really thought that walmart had a good shot at becoming the biggest music store on the net for this very reason. But they have done a horrible job at selling it. No one knows about it. Maybe this will change not that they have had their second opening, but for their first opening I don't even think that they advertized it in their own store yet alone anywhere else. They are treating it as just another ho-hum part of the walmart website.
:)
Between that, and the fact that the only people who do know about it probably wouldn't buy there because they censor their music, I don't see walmart as making much of a splash at all. I hope it stays that way
Still takes a lot of Oil, Water, and Electricity to recycle that paper.
As it does to run a huge computer sever, and hundreds of clients that access that server. I don't know which way would be more environmentally friendly. It would interesting to see a study on that.
An AC said:
:)
In this entire point I see nothing about prayer groups. Whether or not he has prayer groups is irrelevant, anyone should be able to pray in public. Forcing people to join prayer groups is an entirely different matter. In any case, if you're going to be that paranoid about repercussions you have to ban any reference to any beliefs in places like school. After all, a teacher could take a person's personal beliefs into account when grading assignments. It goes both ways.
Yes, this exactly what I was getting at. Holi is right that the corporate prayer that Mr Ashcroft has at work does have problems and the tone of my post made it sound like I was absolving him completely, which I don't.
The reason that I lashed out on the subject is because I feel that near the end of Clinton's term the seperation of church and state issues were getting to the point of being unnecisarrily descriminatory. What I mean is that everyone has beliefs of some sort (or at least strong opinions) and what difference does it make if you call your beliefs religous and I don't. At my school teachers were practically banned from even stating that they were christian, and yet my literature teachers could cram their secular humanism beliefs down our throughts all they wanted. Which is verging on exactly the problem that we wanted get away from in the first point - one state endorsed belief system (in this case tolerence, embrasing all cultures, putting superficial peace above moral beliefs).
I think the correct balence in this is to allow everyone, even public leaders and teachers, to express their beliefs whether religious or not, but crack down on any actions by government officials, in their role as such, that could be seen as pressuring others to have the same belief, and also any actions by citizens in an authority position, and acting in their role as such, that could be seen as discriminating based on beliefs. I believe that gives the fullest possible freedom to live according your belief system while still protecting the freedom of belief of others.
Oh, and I don't think that praying and disliking being in a picture with a boob makes Ashcroft a nutcase, but the cynical moderators have spoken
Actually licencing is not an issue and hasn't been for years. They are both a combination of GPL and LGPL.
Argh, I wish they had interviewed a developer. This article is extremely vague. It says they are not merging KDE and gnome code bases - just making a single desktop with all their features. So which one? Are they adding gnome features to KDE, or KDE features to gnome? What features are we talking about here?
What about license nazi's that don't like qt's license?
You mean the GPL?
how will they feel if it's 'unified' with gpl'd gnome?
Umm, since they are the same licence I don't think they'd mind at all. The parts of GNOME that are LGPL won't be an issue either.
I posted this in another thread but it got buried. If you would like to see abandoned works enter into the public domain, and keep from loosing large portions of our cultural history then you should write your congress critter about the Public Domain Enhancement Act.
On the job? Absolutely, unless he's doing it during his lunch break and in private.
Why in private? There is nothing about seperation of church and state or freedom of religion that requires public leaders to hide their belief. As long as they are not imposing their religion on others there is no problem.
Would you also ban politicians from talking at the water cooler, receiving calls from his wife and reading the news? A reasonable amount of personal time at work is acceptable, especially concidering that someone like that is always on call and has a fairly hectic work schedule.
Another possibly valid option that they didn't mention was to require an initial registration which lasts the extent of your copyright term, without the need for registration. That would not be unconditional copyright, but would do nothing for abandonware since all of it would have been registered at one point.
I guess it would also depend on reason that the supreme court gave when deciding why unconditional copyright is unconstitional. If it is determined that not requiring renewal allows non-comercial work to be locked up, which actually hurts progress, then I would think that renewal would have to be part of the replacement. But if it is for one of their other reasons, who knows.
It is the difference between copyright and patents. When you copyright your create work (source code) you only get protection for that specific work. You do not get protection for the ideas in the work, which can be freely used by anyone in their own programs, so long as they don't copy your code verbatim. As a comparison if someone wrote an article about sheep shearing methods, it would be an infringement of copyright to copy his article verbatim, but not to write your own article discussing the same methods.
That is all it is saying about not being able to receive copyright protection for ideas and algorithms.