You're confused. The actual statement is "either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version".
There is no reason at all to believe that a version 3 would not be covered by that statement. And to say otherwise you'd have to show that the FSF did not intend this to cover future versions such as version 3, which they indeed did. Which is also why Linus chose not to include this statement.
Unless "do what you want with the code" includes using it yourself in a proprietary project, or re-licensing it under some other additional license.
Wrong. When you assign copyright on your code to the FSF, the FSF simutanously gives you an full, irrevocable license to to whatever you want with the code. Including the right to sublicense it.
we would someday have bacteria that can excrete carbon nanotube
Well, I think finding any decent catalyst for nanotubes would be a huge breakthrough. The way they're made today is basically by blasting carbon (creating a whole bunch of different crap) and sorting out the bits you want. Not very efficient or controlled.
or perhaps even Hydrogen gas
There are already bacteria who produce hydrogen gas. Current research is already trying to do stuff with this. For instance, the EU is funding a project to try and couple this to Photosystem II and have an enzyme which could produce hydrogen gas directly from water and sunlight cheaply and efficiently.
We do that too, of course. But it's not analogous, that reaction produces NADH+ and FADH2 (citric acid cycle) and enters the electron transport chain, where the final step (in Cytochrome C oxidiase) is to reduce oxygen to water.
AFAIK it's usually a quite energy demanding procedure.
Yes, it is. (The analogy to huamns doesn't hold here, since reducing oxygen produces energy). But photosynthesis is (IMHO) even more impressive. And energy-demanding.
What if we can mutate them to extract lead or other heavy metals? Could be useful.
The article says they're actually using it for that already.
Can you name an emulator that does not implement a programming interface (software or hardware)?
That's a poor way to define the word 'emulator' though, since that would make any implementation of any API an 'emulator'. Heck, your web browser could be said to be an emulator.
Back 30 years ago or so, emulators were pieces of hardware wich did the same work as other pieces of hardware. Doing so in software was a 'simulator'.
The word 'simulator' has mostly been replaced by 'emulator' to refer to a hardware simulation.
'Emulating' software is a meaningless word because it would include anything which implements some defined interface. In software there is no difference between 'simulating' an interface or 'implementing' it.
So it's not clearer to speak of 'hardware emulation', because 'software emulation' simply does not exist. Things only get confused if you try to paste the word 'emulator' onto software-on-software.
Then there are virtual machines and interpreters as well, but that's another story.
As a side-note: There is a very large practical difference between emulating hardware and implementing a software API. The former is far more difficult, since in emulating hardware, you usually need to replicate the internal functions of the hardware in detail. It's more complex, and harder to estimate what level of detail is needed.
With a software API, things are far simpler. You have a clearly-delimited interface with defined inputs and outputs. You do not need to follow the internal functionality to the same extent. (Although this depends on the API. But it is never as bad as with hardware.)
No, they don't carry signals. (What signals would there be to carry?)
The reduction of metal (iron) in a geobacter metallireducens bacteria functions as little more than an electron sink for getting rid of electrons at the end of the respiratory chain.
Fe3+ (metal ion from the environment) + 3 e- --> Fe (metal)
There are other bacteria which turn nitrate into nitrogen and sulphur into H2S (smelly bastards!), among others.
We humans (and our relatives) do this using oxygen: O2 (oxygen from the environment) + 4 e- + 4H+ --> 2 H2O (water)
There's nothing particularily surprizing about the fact that it produces metal. Nor is it terribly surprizing that the metal comes out as a long strand. Respiration is a rather continuous process, after all!
So no signalling. (And what could they possibly signal anyway?) But that doesn't mean there couldn't be benefits for the bacteria to have its metal threads connected. It might help ground any excess negative charge on the resulting metal, aiding the respiration process.
Does every "good" programmer have a degree in computer science?
No, and far from everyone with a degree in CS is a good programmer. But it helps.
Can mediocre programmers be MADE into good programmers?
People can improve. That doesn't mean that they don't have limits to their capacity. And different people have different limits. (e.g. I can run a mile in five minutes. But no matter how much I train, I'm not going to run one in under four minutes. I don't have that capacity.)
Isn't that how some other professions work? What is medical internship all about? What about the journeyman status in the building trades? It's all about mentoring and moving people to the next level of expertise.
RTFA. The explicit point he is making here is that in programming, as in all creative professions, being 'good' is not as simple as being experienced. That's practically the definition of what talent is. This is not to say that experience isn't valuable. But it's not the whole story.
(Continuing the analogy: A more talented runner will be able to run faster than you do on the same amount of training.)
Finding a good middle ground is what the elected politicians are there for.
Those of us on the anti-patent side of this should be grateful towards Stallman: His radical opinions make the FFII position look more like the reasonable middle-ground that they are looking for.
If the anti-patent people advocate the "middle-ground" and the pro-patent people don't, then all we have is an actual middle-ground on the pro-patent side.
I wonder how easy it would be to associate any particular activity with 'terrorism.'
Well, if you've got the imagination of certain fellows, you may find that:
[..] slashdot.org is an far-right wing Internet news website that posts libelous and defamatory content and is used by Open Source Community members to anonymously post hate speech, death threats, threats to murder and promotes and advocates acts of domestic terrorism within the United States.
So there you go! And while we're quoting the guy:
The beheading and murder of United States Citizens in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and other countries have been videotaped, converted to MPEG and other images for viewing on the public Internet through the use of OSS and Linux software and computer technology developed and purloined by Linux and OSS members and illegally exported from the United States.
Yes. Seems we're all terrorists nowadays if you just ask the right person.
For one there is a natural resources issue. There are billions of barrels of oil buried along the north slope of Alaska and Canada not too far from this island.
Look on a map? Here's one. That white spec is Hans Island, in the sound between Greenland and Ellesmere Island. Now zoom out and check the distance to the Canadian-Alaskan border where the oil. It's pretty damn far. (Yes, the distance is distorted in this projection, but it's still about half the width of the USA.)
The idea here is that this route will pass within the territorial boundary marker of Hans Island. Denmark has far more to lose in this regard, because without Hans Island their westernmost border is Greenland which is nowhere near the upcoming shipping lanes.
I'm the only one giving arguments here, you are just reapeatedly saying "it fits better there" and "it's closer to Lithium than Fluorine" without any further motivations.
Hydrogen acts different from the alkali metals in every single way it possibly could. Not just when it's ionized.
I was just pointing out that you can't dismiss the properties of metallic hydrogen as unimportant, since it's likely the most common liquid in the galaxy.
I didn't say the the properties were unimportant. I do say they are unimportant in the context of determining if it's an alkali metal or not, since it clearly isn't.
And talking about water dissolving in itself is certainly a silly way to try to force reality to fit the model.:p
Are you saying that water does not dissociate into a proton and a hydroxyl group in water? It does. And the context here was the contrasting that to the dissociation of alkali hydroxides in water.
Sorry if that went over your head, but I've got a master's degree in Physical Chemistry and I certainly don't need lessons in how solvation works.
I had to laugh at that. OK, I know what you probably meant - pure water doesn't ionize much - but really the concept of a liquid failing to dissolve in itself is a Lewis Carroll sort of nonsense.
Assuming other people are fools doesn't make you smarter.
All that you say is true - hydrogen isn't much like an alkali metal, but it's still a lot more like lithium than like florine.
Go back and read the post again. I'm not saying "it's more like fluorine than lithium" I'm saying that it cannot be placed into the alkali metals or the halogens in any meaningful way.
Go study some chemistry, dude. I have.
Putting hydrigen above lithium isn't a good answer, but it's still the best answer - it does have 1 electron free for interaction, and you want to show that somehow.
Yes, it has an s1 configuration, just like the alkali metals. So does chromium, silver, rhodium, ruthenium, molebdenum, niobium and platinum (among others). Helium is s2, I guess it should it be moved over to the top of the alkaline earth metals.
The periodic table is useful, but it has its limits. You are advocating that reality be set aside so that the 'theory' fits better, the theory being the oversimplified model of high-school chemistry. Guess what? The octet rule doesn't always work either.
Why should kids be taught the wrong things just because it makes the overall picture simpler?
What does the prevalence of metallic hydrogen have to with anything? It doesn't make it any more of an alkali metal. And you haven't been able to give a single reason why it should be considered one other than 'hydrogen is in the first group'. I suspect you merely looked at the Wikipedia entry for 'metallic hydrogen' (which indeed also claims it's an 'alkali metal' without further explanation).
Well, when dealing with water chemistry, clearly hydogen hydroxide is a special case amoung the alkalines!
In any chemistry it's different. Hydrogen isn't an alkaline metal. And saying 'hydrogen hydroxide' is a misnomer for that reason. The H-OH bond does not have a strongly ionic character. Hydrogen is far more electronegative than the alkali metals. Water is many orders of magnitude less soluble in water than alkali-metal hydroxides.
It still makes more sense to have hydrogen over lithium than over florine, however.
No, it doesn't really make sense to have it above either. The electronegativities of the alkali metals (Li, Na, K, Rb, Cs) are 0.98, 0.93, 0.82, 0.82, 0.72. Hydrogen is at 2.2.
And inded there are a good number of periodic tables out there which don't put hydrogen above lithium.
It is all very simple. Unlike the alkali metals, hydrogen cannot lose an electron and gain a noble-gas configuration. It merely becomes a proton, with no electrons to provide any form of shielding or charge diffusion/polarization. That is a huge effect. Add to that the fact that hydrogen can form a quite stable anion, which none of the alkali metals can.
It's silly to say that metallic hydrogen is an alkali metal. Now metallic means something in this context, but saying that it's an alkali metal does not.
Alkali metals have certain properties that other metals don't have, and those properties simply don't apply when talking about metallic hydrogen. For instance, alkali metals react with oxygen at room temperature. Metallic hydrogen doesn't exist at room temperature. (and ordinary hydrogen does not.) And no substances are particularily reactive at 20 K.
Alkali metals have very low melting points. Metallic hydrogen doesn't even have one - it probably sublimates. And the melting points increase upwards in the group.
Choose any defining property of alkali metals you want, and hydrogen - metallic or otherwise - does not fit in.
And there are perfectly good reasons for hydrogen not to fit in, which become obvious once you advance beyond high-school chemistry.
As for the new layout it dystroys this simple oh what orbital is being filled layout. as well as for the life of me I cant figure out why H, He, Be, and Li are on the same rung.
Depends what you want to mean by an 'alkali metal'. If you mean 'metal in the first group', then sure.
But the difference between metallic hydrogen and the rest of the alkali metals is still bigger than the difference between the alkali metals and the alkaline earth metals in group two.
So if you want to make metallic hydrogen an alkali metal, it becomes a rather useless concept.
No, there is a reason to have it close to carbon: Electronegativity.
Hydrogen is about equal to carbon in electronegativity, and not at all like the of the alkali metals. Hydrogen is not an alkali metal!
There are a lot of traditional charts which also move hydrogen away from there as well.
Re:Quantum Consciousness, Not Size, Counts
on
Humanoid Robot HR-2
·
· Score: 1
"Quantum conciousness" is a load of bull. Max Tegmark disproved that stuff years ago. And most didn't believe with it to begin with. (see Science, Feb 4, 2000.)
Slashdot Mirror
You're confused. The actual statement is "either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version".
There is no reason at all to believe that a version 3 would not be covered by that statement. And to say otherwise you'd have to show that the FSF did not intend this to cover future versions such as version 3, which they indeed did. Which is also why Linus chose not to include this statement.
Unless "do what you want with the code" includes using it yourself in a proprietary project, or re-licensing it under some other additional license.
Wrong. When you assign copyright on your code to the FSF, the FSF simutanously gives you an full, irrevocable license to to whatever you want with the code. Including the right to sublicense it.
Yes you can.
Are you saying the FSF is lying about this?
Where'd you get that from? The FSF owns quite a chunk of the Linux kernel. For instance, they own most of Linux S/390, which IBM donated to them.
Not to mention many individual developers who've assigned their contributions to the FSF.
It wouldn't surprize me if the FSF owns more code in the Linux kernel than any other single entity.
we would someday have bacteria that can excrete carbon nanotube
Well, I think finding any decent catalyst for nanotubes would be a huge breakthrough. The way they're made today is basically by blasting carbon (creating a whole bunch of different crap) and sorting out the bits you want. Not very efficient or controlled.
or perhaps even Hydrogen gas
There are already bacteria who produce hydrogen gas. Current research is already trying to do stuff with this. For instance, the EU is funding a project to try and couple this to Photosystem II and have an enzyme which could produce hydrogen gas directly from water and sunlight cheaply and efficiently.
Don't you mean that we use C and O2 to form CO2?
We do that too, of course. But it's not analogous, that reaction produces NADH+ and FADH2 (citric acid cycle) and enters the electron transport chain, where the final step (in Cytochrome C oxidiase) is to reduce oxygen to water.
AFAIK it's usually a quite energy demanding procedure.
Yes, it is. (The analogy to huamns doesn't hold here, since reducing oxygen produces energy). But photosynthesis is (IMHO) even more impressive. And energy-demanding.
What if we can mutate them to extract lead or other heavy metals? Could be useful.
The article says they're actually using it for that already.
Can you name an emulator that does not implement a programming interface (software or hardware)?
That's a poor way to define the word 'emulator' though, since that would make any implementation of any API an 'emulator'. Heck, your web browser could be said to be an emulator.
Back 30 years ago or so, emulators were pieces of hardware wich did the same work as other pieces of hardware. Doing so in software was a 'simulator'.
The word 'simulator' has mostly been replaced by 'emulator' to refer to a hardware simulation.
'Emulating' software is a meaningless word because it would include anything which implements some defined interface. In software there is no difference between 'simulating' an interface or 'implementing' it.
So it's not clearer to speak of 'hardware emulation', because 'software emulation' simply does not exist. Things only get confused if you try to paste the word 'emulator' onto software-on-software.
Then there are virtual machines and interpreters as well, but that's another story.
As a side-note: There is a very large practical difference between emulating hardware and implementing a software API. The former is far more difficult, since in emulating hardware, you usually need to replicate the internal functions of the hardware in detail. It's more complex, and harder to estimate what level of detail is needed.
With a software API, things are far simpler. You have a clearly-delimited interface with defined inputs and outputs. You do not need to follow the internal functionality to the same extent. (Although this depends on the API. But it is never as bad as with hardware.)
No, they don't carry signals. (What signals would there be to carry?)
The reduction of metal (iron) in a geobacter metallireducens bacteria functions as little more than an electron sink for getting rid of electrons at the end of the respiratory chain.
Fe3+ (metal ion from the environment) + 3 e- --> Fe (metal)
There are other bacteria which turn nitrate into nitrogen and sulphur into H2S (smelly bastards!), among others.
We humans (and our relatives) do this using oxygen:
O2 (oxygen from the environment) + 4 e- + 4H+ --> 2 H2O (water)
There's nothing particularily surprizing about the fact that it produces metal. Nor is it terribly surprizing that the metal comes out as a long strand. Respiration is a rather continuous process, after all!
So no signalling. (And what could they possibly signal anyway?) But that doesn't mean there couldn't be benefits for the bacteria to have its metal threads connected. It might help ground any excess negative charge on the resulting metal, aiding the respiration process.
Carbon isn't a semiconductor and isn't functioning as a semiconductor here.
Carbon is either a good conductor (nanotubes, fullerenes, graphite) or a good insulator (diamond).
That there are quantum mechanical problems with having the tubes alligned and getting a good signal through them.
Could you elaborate on that?
Does every "good" programmer have a degree in computer science?
No, and far from everyone with a degree in CS is a good programmer. But it helps.
Can mediocre programmers be MADE into good programmers?
People can improve. That doesn't mean that they don't have limits to their capacity. And different people have different limits.
(e.g. I can run a mile in five minutes. But no matter how much I train, I'm not going to run one in under four minutes. I don't have that capacity.)
Isn't that how some other professions work? What is medical internship all about? What about the journeyman status in the building trades? It's all about mentoring and moving people to the next level of expertise.
RTFA. The explicit point he is making here is that in programming, as in all creative professions, being 'good' is not as simple as being experienced. That's practically the definition of what talent is. This is not to say that experience isn't valuable. But it's not the whole story.
(Continuing the analogy: A more talented runner will be able to run faster than you do on the same amount of training.)
Finding a good middle ground is what the elected politicians are there for.
Those of us on the anti-patent side of this should be grateful towards Stallman: His radical opinions make the FFII position look more like the reasonable middle-ground that they are looking for.
If the anti-patent people advocate the "middle-ground" and the pro-patent people don't, then all we have is an actual middle-ground on the pro-patent side.
I wonder how easy it would be to associate any particular activity with 'terrorism.'
Well, if you've got the imagination of certain fellows, you may find that:
[..] slashdot.org is an far-right wing Internet news website that posts libelous and defamatory content and is used by Open Source Community members to anonymously post hate speech, death threats, threats to murder and promotes and advocates acts of domestic terrorism within the United States.
So there you go! And while we're quoting the guy:
The beheading and murder of United States Citizens in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and other countries have been videotaped, converted to MPEG and other images for viewing on the public Internet through the use of OSS and Linux software and computer technology developed and purloined by Linux and OSS members and illegally exported from the United States.
Yes. Seems we're all terrorists nowadays if you just ask the right person.
+5 insightful?! Misinformed at best.
For one there is a natural resources issue. There are billions of barrels of oil buried along the north slope of Alaska and Canada not too far from this island.
Look on a map? Here's one. That white spec is Hans Island, in the sound between Greenland and Ellesmere Island. Now zoom out and check the distance to the Canadian-Alaskan border where the oil. It's pretty damn far. (Yes, the distance is distorted in this projection, but it's still about half the width of the USA.)
The idea here is that this route will pass within the territorial boundary marker of Hans Island. Denmark has far more to lose in this regard, because without Hans Island their westernmost border is Greenland which is nowhere near the upcoming shipping lanes.
This is complete nonsense. Again, Hans Island is in the sound between Ellesmere island and Greenland. Not Baffin Island. It is not anywhere near the North Western passage. (Heck, the island isn't even in-frame on Wikipedia's map)
And Denmark hasn't made any claim to the Northwest Passage anyway. The USA has though. (Or rather, the USA does not recognize it as Canadian waters)
When has this happened in the past?
Since it's named "Vores Oel", I'd guess it's an ale.
Bad guess. "Oel", is a translitteration of "Øl",which means "beer". Not any kind in specific.
Danes mostly drink lagers (Carlsberg & Tuborg), so most of the "øl" out there is not ale at all.
I'm the only one giving arguments here, you are just reapeatedly saying "it fits better there" and "it's closer to Lithium than Fluorine" without any further motivations.
:p
Hydrogen acts different from the alkali metals in every single way it possibly could. Not just when it's ionized.
I was just pointing out that you can't dismiss the properties of metallic hydrogen as unimportant, since it's likely the most common liquid in the galaxy.
I didn't say the the properties were unimportant. I do say they are unimportant in the context of determining if it's an alkali metal or not, since it clearly isn't.
And talking about water dissolving in itself is certainly a silly way to try to force reality to fit the model.
Are you saying that water does not dissociate into a proton and a hydroxyl group in water? It does. And the context here was the contrasting that to the dissociation of alkali hydroxides in water.
Sorry if that went over your head, but I've got a master's degree in Physical Chemistry and I certainly don't need lessons in how solvation works.
I had to laugh at that. OK, I know what you probably meant - pure water doesn't ionize much - but really the concept of a liquid failing to dissolve in itself is a Lewis Carroll sort of nonsense.
Assuming other people are fools doesn't make you smarter.
All that you say is true - hydrogen isn't much like an alkali metal, but it's still a lot more like lithium than like florine.
Go back and read the post again. I'm not saying "it's more like fluorine than lithium" I'm saying that it cannot be placed into the alkali metals or the halogens in any meaningful way.
Go study some chemistry, dude. I have.
Putting hydrigen above lithium isn't a good answer, but it's still the best answer - it does have 1 electron free for interaction, and you want to show that somehow.
Yes, it has an s1 configuration, just like the alkali metals. So does chromium, silver, rhodium, ruthenium, molebdenum, niobium and platinum (among others). Helium is s2, I guess it should it be moved over to the top of the alkaline earth metals.
The periodic table is useful, but it has its limits. You are advocating that reality be set aside so that the 'theory' fits better, the theory being the oversimplified model of high-school chemistry. Guess what? The octet rule doesn't always work either.
Why should kids be taught the wrong things just because it makes the overall picture simpler?
What does the prevalence of metallic hydrogen have to with anything? It doesn't make it any more of an alkali metal. And you haven't been able to give a single reason why it should be considered one other than 'hydrogen is in the first group'. I suspect you merely looked at the Wikipedia entry for 'metallic hydrogen' (which indeed also claims it's an 'alkali metal' without further explanation).
Well, when dealing with water chemistry, clearly hydogen hydroxide is a special case amoung the alkalines!
In any chemistry it's different. Hydrogen isn't an alkaline metal. And saying 'hydrogen hydroxide' is a misnomer for that reason. The H-OH bond does not have a strongly ionic character. Hydrogen is far more electronegative than the alkali metals. Water is many orders of magnitude less soluble in water than alkali-metal hydroxides.
It still makes more sense to have hydrogen over lithium than over florine, however.
No, it doesn't really make sense to have it above either. The electronegativities of the alkali metals (Li, Na, K, Rb, Cs) are 0.98, 0.93, 0.82, 0.82, 0.72. Hydrogen is at 2.2.
And inded there are a good number of periodic tables out there which don't put hydrogen above lithium.
It is all very simple. Unlike the alkali metals, hydrogen cannot lose an electron and gain a noble-gas configuration. It merely becomes a proton, with no electrons to provide any form of shielding or charge diffusion/polarization. That is a huge effect. Add to that the fact that hydrogen can form a quite stable anion, which none of the alkali metals can.
It's silly to say that metallic hydrogen is an alkali metal. Now metallic means something in this context, but saying that it's an alkali metal does not.
Alkali metals have certain properties that other metals don't have, and those properties simply don't apply when talking about metallic hydrogen. For instance, alkali metals react with oxygen at room temperature. Metallic hydrogen doesn't exist at room temperature. (and ordinary hydrogen does not.) And no substances are particularily reactive at 20 K.
Alkali metals have very low melting points. Metallic hydrogen doesn't even have one - it probably sublimates. And the melting points increase upwards in the group.
Choose any defining property of alkali metals you want, and hydrogen - metallic or otherwise - does not fit in.
And there are perfectly good reasons for hydrogen not to fit in, which become obvious once you advance beyond high-school chemistry.
As for the new layout it dystroys this simple oh what orbital is being filled layout. as well as for the life of me I cant figure out why H, He, Be, and Li are on the same rung.
Um, because they're all s-orbital elements?
Isn't metalic hydrogen an alkali metal?
Depends what you want to mean by an 'alkali metal'. If you mean 'metal in the first group', then sure.
But the difference between metallic hydrogen and the rest of the alkali metals is still bigger than the difference between the alkali metals and the alkaline earth metals in group two.
So if you want to make metallic hydrogen an alkali metal, it becomes a rather useless concept.
What about hydrides then? ;-) /Physical chemist who says 'protons' too.
No, there is a reason to have it close to carbon: Electronegativity.
Hydrogen is about equal to carbon in electronegativity, and not at all like the of the alkali metals. Hydrogen is not an alkali metal!
There are a lot of traditional charts which also move hydrogen away from there as well.
"Quantum conciousness" is a load of bull. Max Tegmark disproved that stuff years ago. And most didn't believe with it to begin with. (see Science, Feb 4, 2000.)