Even if it were safer than one might think, who cares?
Do you think your wife and kids will have no problem drinking water that smells funny and ignites?
What do you think it will do to the value of your house if the water ignites? I suspect you'll suddenly find yourself with a mortgage on a house that you can't even give away.
Don't knock niche languages. If a company needs someones who knows one, they *really* need them. Don't forget that it isn't just about job supply, but about supply vs. demand. With a niche language, you won't be competing for jobs with every schoolkid in the country smart enough to figure out how to download a free compiler. This means employers don't(can't) care about age that much, and you may even find yourself working with a lot of follks your own age. The one real drawback is that you can't be overly picky about job location. But if you don't mind moving every time a job ends, you won't ever have to worry about unemployment.
It really isn't a good idea to listen to shows (of any political stripe) that take the attitude that they know up front what the answer to everything is, and they just need to find the facts that support it. The only good information you can really get out of such is what they want you to believe today (and 90% of the time you could guess that).
Everybody has a certian bias, just in picking what topics to cover each day. That you have to learn to live with and account for. But it is pointless to even listen to folks who are interested in selling an ideology, rather than looing at *all* the facts of the situation, and following where they lead. This is a problem with every modern right-wing TV or Radio show I've seen, along with just about all the avowedly left-wing ones.
In particular, watch out for those that try to drum up conspiriacy theories and hate. Particularly those that work to dehumanize or deligitimate "Liberals" or "Conservatives". Such radio shows were instrumental in starting and organizaing the Rwandan Genocide, and this country has a history of partisan media touching off such things as well. So do your country a favor and don't listen.
I haven't really done enough research to fully understand it, but I has made me think...
This is a sticky one. Austrian School Economists (eg: Libertarians) love this particular recession for that fact. However, this was a very unusual recession. It was almost certianly triggered by the end of WWI, and the Fed was brand new and made lots of rookie mistakes. Most importantly, it is the only example they can really find in 235 years of US history of this happening. Herbert Hoover tried the same Libertarian trick for the Great Depression, and it didn't work (to put it mildly). In fact, the recovery from the Great Depression tracked rather well with government expenditures.
In my book it is smarter to go with proven mainstream economic theory, rather than radical ideas that rely on cherry-picked examples and funding from rich folks who their ideas just happen to benefit disproportionally (amazing coincidence, that). Mainstream economists tell you that government really ought to act contrarian (eg: spend like mad during downturns, and slow spending way, way down during upturns). That attitude worked pretty well in the 90's, but this current Congress refuses to do it.
regardless of the math, S&P's reasoning is sound. let's not try to find scapegoats, please
Kinda had to laugh at this, since "their reasoning" essentially blamed the whole thing on Congressional Republicans. Of course, one could argue that "scapegoating" doesn't apply when the target is in fact cheifly responsible for the situation, but somehow I suspect most Republicans in this country (about 30%) would not agree with that.
GNU Emacs and GCC were the "traditional, closed, corporate approach to software development"? That's news to me!
There are a couple of things you need to realise here.
The first is ESR had(has?) issues with Stallman, and always hated his style. Stallman has a rather Socialist outlook on life, and ESR is a committed Libertarian. So one of ESR's missions in life (at least back then) was to marginalize Stallman. These projects were, in ESR's view, tainted by Stallmanisim, so he's going out of his way to denigrate them. This is also why he helped invent the term "OpenSource". A prime goal of CatB was to establish a foundation for the movement that Libertarians (like ESR himself) could get behind, rather than the Socialist-sounding GNU Manifesto.
The second is that there was actuall a grain of truth in those complaints at the time. When that essay was written, there was an active fork going on of GCC, due in part to the intransigence of the maintainers. Emacs had more forks than it would be easy to count (most notably XEmacs), for similar reasons. Both of these situations are much better today, so these complains may seem an anachronisim.
No, I would say, the people responsible should suffer, not a company that is a non-sentient being. You seem to have a weird idea of what a corporation is.
Actually, I'd say the same about you. The entire point of corporations is that the people responsible for the corporation's actions are not personally liable in civil court for the corporation's actions. This is why one of the first things a person does when they get rich (and start getting good financial/legal advice) is incorporate.
There's a reason why the FCC is saying this. They know they were the real killers, and they are trying to make you look elsewhere. Preferably at some target like "the Internet" that has no good way to speak up for itself.
The FCC killed local news themselves, by allowing all the local papers to consolodiate into one owner starting back in the 80's. It was always competiton with the other city dailies that drove all the tough reporting back in the day. Back when people had a choice, if you could get a good juicy expose or two, you could get people into the habit of chosing you instead of one of the others papers. Now that there is no competition, the local newspaper's main concern is to not tick anybody off. So the only contraversy it is ever OK to stir up will be about outsiders (eg: Shock Rock Musicians), or about those already locally despised (eg: "sex offenders", "criminals", poor drug users). It is no coincidence that the US prison population skyrocketed in the 80's at the same time local competition in news disappeared.
So now that the death of local reporting has become clear for all to see, the FCC is trying desperately to point the finger somewhere else. It figures.
This isn't the Middle Ages here, and there are lives at stake. If someone seriously believes there is a safety issue here, there must be scientific studies to show what is going on one way or another.
You are misreading this. He (Ahmadinejad) is using "Arab brothers" in almost exactly the same paternalistic way an oldest child might use "little brothers." This is a term he has used in the past.
Actually, no. Most of the ones that caused "scandals" did so because they told uncomfortable truths. Like that our Packastani "allies" were actually in cahoots with the terrorists, or that Israel wasn't even trying for peace.
My personal favorite was the one that revealed that the US was actually not all that close to, or fond of, Tunisian strongman Ben-Ali, and that his government was a laughable cesspool of corruption. He'd held onto power in part by convincing his people that he unreservedly had the US's support.
When the embarrassing truth came out for all to see, he proved unable to stop the next periodic riots. He's gone now.
Why even have such a silly list? It would seem simpler to keep a list of things that have been conclusively shown to not be related to cancer, rather than keep a list of things that have no proven relation, and thus could conveivably contain nearly everything in the world.
For 2, why not just use the LGPL? Doesn't it already include those exceptions?
Ahh, a great question! I just addressed this in a sibling answer, but it is an important point.
LGPL only contains exceptions for code that is linked with a LGPL library. The act of linking will not "infect" the client program with (L)GPL. However, there are a couple of other ways that you can get some of the "library" code in your client code. For example, C libraries typically come with header files, which the compiler textually includes in the client source file. Most folks don't consider that a problem. However, if that header file contains C macros, then using one of those macros in your code is effectively taking some of that LGPL code and putting it into your source code, where it is not seperately linked but actually compiled within the client code. It is the opinion of quite a few sofware lawyers that this makes the client code subject to the LGPL too. Languages that have facillities like C++ templates and Ada generics have the same problem if those features are used in the interface to the "library."
This is why the runtime of the FSF Ada compiler uses GPL with exceptions for its specification files, rather than LGPL.
Interestingly, another response pointed out a blog post from Bruce Perens, where he (independenly) came up with the exact same taxonomy I listed above.
We really only differed in the licenses we picked for the three types of projects. We both picked GPL for our most tied down license. For what he called "gift code", he (like the FSF) picked the Apache license, where I use Public Domain (CC0). From a legal liability standpoint, I'm willing to admit that he and the FSF have a good point on that one. I'm hardly someone worth suing, but they certianly are, and probably need the extra protection.
For the intermediate level, he picked LGPL, whereas I use GPL with exceptions. On this one, I'm pretty sure Bruce has it wrong. LGPL works OK for this purpose if your library is written in C, with no macros in its client header files. However, if your library has client-included macros, or is written in a language that supports generic programming (eg: C++ templates or Ada generics), then LGPL is no different that GPL. With either, some of the facility's code gets "included" in the client code, rendering the whole program LGPL. This is why the FSF version of the Ada compiler uses GPL with exceptions instead of LGPL. Bruce, if you are reading this, I'm curious about your opinon on it.
Having written quite a few assundry Free Software projects myself, I actually came up with my own list through trial-and-error. It goes like this:
Basicaly, there are three levels of needs:
I want the entire program to keep my license when modified
I want my facility to keep my license when modified and distributed, but I don't want to restrict programs that use my facility to any particular license
I don't want any restrictions on the license that modified copies of my code have to use
For 1: use the full on GPL. For 2: use the GPL with linking and inclusion exceptions. Expat's license is an example, but many many libraries do this. Typically, this is just GPL with something like the following tacked on:
As a special exception, if other files instantiate templates or use macros or inline functions from this file, or you compile this file and link it with other works to produce a work based on this file, this file does not by itself cause the resulting work to be covered by the GNU General Public License. However the source code for this file must still be made available in accordance with section (3) of the GNU General Public License
IMHO, CC0 is the only one I care for. It is probably the best license to use if you don't want the "restrictions" of the GPL to apply to the work. It essentially makes the work Public Domain.
If you'd like restrictions on reuse of your work, that's where the GPL comes in. So the other CC's aren't of much interest to me, unless I need to use someone else's work that used it.
This isn't just a general list of licenses. They already have that here (where in fact several different flavors of BSD are mentioned). This is their reccomended list of licenses to use for any given goal, and thus will only list one license for each need.
They don't mention BSD for a fairly simple reason: BSD licenses weren't designed to interact well with GPL licenses, and thus tend not to. If you are liable to end up needing software with different licenses to interact, and some of it is using a FSF license (as is likely if you are going to the FSF for advice in the first place), then using a BSDish license is liable to complicate things.
They have another page which gets into details of compatibily of various licenses.
If you aren't at all interested in using any FSF licenses (I gather in your case for idealogical reasons), then you are the one being "rediculous" for going to a FSF page discussing licenses in the first place. Go to your BSD-ish reccomended licenses page (wherever that is), and leave the rest of us alone, please. We are trying to get stuff done here.
Well, we are actually talking about UNESCO "World Heritage Sites", not Sid Meyer-esque "World Wonders". Since it is "sites", perhaps one has to nominate individual websites? Nominating the entire internet would be like nominating the entire earth as a "World Wonder".
It looks like a cool holiday. Sadly it mostly seems to celebrate "liberation" from being ruled by non-Africans, rather that "liberation" in the sense of African people actually being able to choose their own rulers (and get rid of bad ones through peaceful civil processes). Still, one can hope that one day it can be celebrated as a true Liberation Day.
Well, looking over the RFC, it looks like you could get quite a bit higher bandwidth using donkeys, as the legs you duct-tape the notes to are far longer, and there are four of them instead of just two.
The big problem I see is the handling of different services. RFC1149 uses pecking order for that, but donkeys don't socialize in that manner. They are solitary animals, so service negotiation would need to be carried out over long distances using their innate braying facility. This may drasticaly increase the danger of packets being intercepted in a hostile environment.
Because all of the government agencies that really are charged with defending the country (Military, CIA, FBI, etc.) were too politically powerful to allow themselves to be subsumed into a new agency. So it just became a grab-bag of smaller less prestigous agencies like FEMA, INS, etc.
My SWAG would be that they viewed the ability to confiscate domains as a cyber-secuirity issue. That agency is so unfocused though, it could have been damn near anything.
Slashdot Mirror
Even if it were safer than one might think, who cares?
Do you think your wife and kids will have no problem drinking water that smells funny and ignites?
What do you think it will do to the value of your house if the water ignites? I suspect you'll suddenly find yourself with a mortgage on a house that you can't even give away.
Don't knock niche languages. If a company needs someones who knows one, they *really* need them. Don't forget that it isn't just about job supply, but about supply vs. demand. With a niche language, you won't be competing for jobs with every schoolkid in the country smart enough to figure out how to download a free compiler. This means employers don't(can't) care about age that much, and you may even find yourself working with a lot of follks your own age. The one real drawback is that you can't be overly picky about job location. But if you don't mind moving every time a job ends, you won't ever have to worry about unemployment.
Good. That'll keep them from asking me to fix theirs.
If you'd take a mild point of criticism...
It really isn't a good idea to listen to shows (of any political stripe) that take the attitude that they know up front what the answer to everything is, and they just need to find the facts that support it. The only good information you can really get out of such is what they want you to believe today (and 90% of the time you could guess that).
Everybody has a certian bias, just in picking what topics to cover each day. That you have to learn to live with and account for. But it is pointless to even listen to folks who are interested in selling an ideology, rather than looing at *all* the facts of the situation, and following where they lead. This is a problem with every modern right-wing TV or Radio show I've seen, along with just about all the avowedly left-wing ones.
In particular, watch out for those that try to drum up conspiriacy theories and hate. Particularly those that work to dehumanize or deligitimate "Liberals" or "Conservatives". Such radio shows were instrumental in starting and organizaing the Rwandan Genocide, and this country has a history of partisan media touching off such things as well. So do your country a favor and don't listen.
I haven't really done enough research to fully understand it, but I has made me think ...
This is a sticky one. Austrian School Economists (eg: Libertarians) love this particular recession for that fact. However, this was a very unusual recession. It was almost certianly triggered by the end of WWI, and the Fed was brand new and made lots of rookie mistakes. Most importantly, it is the only example they can really find in 235 years of US history of this happening. Herbert Hoover tried the same Libertarian trick for the Great Depression, and it didn't work (to put it mildly). In fact, the recovery from the Great Depression tracked rather well with government expenditures.
In my book it is smarter to go with proven mainstream economic theory, rather than radical ideas that rely on cherry-picked examples and funding from rich folks who their ideas just happen to benefit disproportionally (amazing coincidence, that). Mainstream economists tell you that government really ought to act contrarian (eg: spend like mad during downturns, and slow spending way, way down during upturns). That attitude worked pretty well in the 90's, but this current Congress refuses to do it.
regardless of the math, S&P's reasoning is sound. let's not try to find scapegoats, please
Kinda had to laugh at this, since "their reasoning" essentially blamed the whole thing on Congressional Republicans. Of course, one could argue that "scapegoating" doesn't apply when the target is in fact cheifly responsible for the situation, but somehow I suspect most Republicans in this country (about 30%) would not agree with that.
It's not like they are natrually friends anyway.
Next Oklahoma will be passing a law making it illegal for the farmer and the cowman to be friends.
GNU Emacs and GCC were the "traditional, closed, corporate approach to software development"? That's news to me!
There are a couple of things you need to realise here.
The first is ESR had(has?) issues with Stallman, and always hated his style. Stallman has a rather Socialist outlook on life, and ESR is a committed Libertarian. So one of ESR's missions in life (at least back then) was to marginalize Stallman. These projects were, in ESR's view, tainted by Stallmanisim, so he's going out of his way to denigrate them. This is also why he helped invent the term "OpenSource". A prime goal of CatB was to establish a foundation for the movement that Libertarians (like ESR himself) could get behind, rather than the Socialist-sounding GNU Manifesto.
The second is that there was actuall a grain of truth in those complaints at the time. When that essay was written, there was an active fork going on of GCC, due in part to the intransigence of the maintainers. Emacs had more forks than it would be easy to count (most notably XEmacs), for similar reasons. Both of these situations are much better today, so these complains may seem an anachronisim.
No, I would say, the people responsible should suffer, not a company that is a non-sentient being. You seem to have a weird idea of what a corporation is.
Actually, I'd say the same about you. The entire point of corporations is that the people responsible for the corporation's actions are not personally liable in civil court for the corporation's actions. This is why one of the first things a person does when they get rich (and start getting good financial/legal advice) is incorporate.
There's a reason why the FCC is saying this. They know they were the real killers, and they are trying to make you look elsewhere. Preferably at some target like "the Internet" that has no good way to speak up for itself.
The FCC killed local news themselves, by allowing all the local papers to consolodiate into one owner starting back in the 80's. It was always competiton with the other city dailies that drove all the tough reporting back in the day. Back when people had a choice, if you could get a good juicy expose or two, you could get people into the habit of chosing you instead of one of the others papers. Now that there is no competition, the local newspaper's main concern is to not tick anybody off. So the only contraversy it is ever OK to stir up will be about outsiders (eg: Shock Rock Musicians), or about those already locally despised (eg: "sex offenders", "criminals", poor drug users). It is no coincidence that the US prison population skyrocketed in the 80's at the same time local competition in news disappeared.
So now that the death of local reporting has become clear for all to see, the FCC is trying desperately to point the finger somewhere else. It figures.
Seriously? "Anectdotal"?
This isn't the Middle Ages here, and there are lives at stake. If someone seriously believes there is a safety issue here, there must be scientific studies to show what is going on one way or another.
You are misreading this. He (Ahmadinejad) is using "Arab brothers" in almost exactly the same paternalistic way an oldest child might use "little brothers." This is a term he has used in the past.
Actually, no. Most of the ones that caused "scandals" did so because they told uncomfortable truths. Like that our Packastani "allies" were actually in cahoots with the terrorists, or that Israel wasn't even trying for peace.
My personal favorite was the one that revealed that the US was actually not all that close to, or fond of, Tunisian strongman Ben-Ali, and that his government was a laughable cesspool of corruption. He'd held onto power in part by convincing his people that he unreservedly had the US's support.
When the embarrassing truth came out for all to see, he proved unable to stop the next periodic riots. He's gone now.
Perhaps when played underwater, AC/DC's music sounds like Great White music. Did they try playing "Once Bitten Twice Shy"?
Why even have such a silly list? It would seem simpler to keep a list of things that have been conclusively shown to not be related to cancer, rather than keep a list of things that have no proven relation, and thus could conveivably contain nearly everything in the world.
For 2, why not just use the LGPL? Doesn't it already include those exceptions?
Ahh, a great question! I just addressed this in a sibling answer, but it is an important point.
LGPL only contains exceptions for code that is linked with a LGPL library. The act of linking will not "infect" the client program with (L)GPL. However, there are a couple of other ways that you can get some of the "library" code in your client code. For example, C libraries typically come with header files, which the compiler textually includes in the client source file. Most folks don't consider that a problem. However, if that header file contains C macros, then using one of those macros in your code is effectively taking some of that LGPL code and putting it into your source code, where it is not seperately linked but actually compiled within the client code. It is the opinion of quite a few sofware lawyers that this makes the client code subject to the LGPL too. Languages that have facillities like C++ templates and Ada generics have the same problem if those features are used in the interface to the "library."
This is why the runtime of the FSF Ada compiler uses GPL with exceptions for its specification files, rather than LGPL.
Interestingly, another response pointed out a blog post from Bruce Perens, where he (independenly) came up with the exact same taxonomy I listed above.
We really only differed in the licenses we picked for the three types of projects. We both picked GPL for our most tied down license. For what he called "gift code", he (like the FSF) picked the Apache license, where I use Public Domain (CC0). From a legal liability standpoint, I'm willing to admit that he and the FSF have a good point on that one. I'm hardly someone worth suing, but they certianly are, and probably need the extra protection.
For the intermediate level, he picked LGPL, whereas I use GPL with exceptions. On this one, I'm pretty sure Bruce has it wrong. LGPL works OK for this purpose if your library is written in C, with no macros in its client header files. However, if your library has client-included macros, or is written in a language that supports generic programming (eg: C++ templates or Ada generics), then LGPL is no different that GPL. With either, some of the facility's code gets "included" in the client code, rendering the whole program LGPL. This is why the FSF version of the Ada compiler uses GPL with exceptions instead of LGPL. Bruce, if you are reading this, I'm curious about your opinon on it.
Having written quite a few assundry Free Software projects myself, I actually came up with my own list through trial-and-error. It goes like this:
Basicaly, there are three levels of needs:
For 1: use the full on GPL. For 2: use the GPL with linking and inclusion exceptions. Expat's license is an example, but many many libraries do this. Typically, this is just GPL with something like the following tacked on:
As a special exception, if other files instantiate templates or use macros or inline functions from this file, or you compile this file and link it with other works to produce a work based on this file, this file does not by itself cause the resulting work to be covered by the GNU General Public License. However the source code for this file must still be made available in accordance with section (3) of the GNU General Public License
For 3: use Public Domain (preferably via CC0).
These are all the licenses a person really ever needs to use for software.
IMHO, CC0 is the only one I care for. It is probably the best license to use if you don't want the "restrictions" of the GPL to apply to the work. It essentially makes the work Public Domain.
If you'd like restrictions on reuse of your work, that's where the GPL comes in. So the other CC's aren't of much interest to me, unless I need to use someone else's work that used it.
This isn't just a general list of licenses. They already have that here (where in fact several different flavors of BSD are mentioned). This is their reccomended list of licenses to use for any given goal, and thus will only list one license for each need.
They don't mention BSD for a fairly simple reason: BSD licenses weren't designed to interact well with GPL licenses, and thus tend not to. If you are liable to end up needing software with different licenses to interact, and some of it is using a FSF license (as is likely if you are going to the FSF for advice in the first place), then using a BSDish license is liable to complicate things.
They have another page which gets into details of compatibily of various licenses.
If you aren't at all interested in using any FSF licenses (I gather in your case for idealogical reasons), then you are the one being "rediculous" for going to a FSF page discussing licenses in the first place. Go to your BSD-ish reccomended licenses page (wherever that is), and leave the rest of us alone, please. We are trying to get stuff done here.
Well, we are actually talking about UNESCO "World Heritage Sites", not Sid Meyer-esque "World Wonders". Since it is "sites", perhaps one has to nominate individual websites? Nominating the entire internet would be like nominating the entire earth as a "World Wonder".
It looks like a cool holiday. Sadly it mostly seems to celebrate "liberation" from being ruled by non-Africans, rather that "liberation" in the sense of African people actually being able to choose their own rulers (and get rid of bad ones through peaceful civil processes). Still, one can hope that one day it can be celebrated as a true Liberation Day.
Well, looking over the RFC, it looks like you could get quite a bit higher bandwidth using donkeys, as the legs you duct-tape the notes to are far longer, and there are four of them instead of just two.
The big problem I see is the handling of different services. RFC1149 uses pecking order for that, but donkeys don't socialize in that manner. They are solitary animals, so service negotiation would need to be carried out over long distances using their innate braying facility. This may drasticaly increase the danger of packets being intercepted in a hostile environment.
Because all of the government agencies that really are charged with defending the country (Military, CIA, FBI, etc.) were too politically powerful to allow themselves to be subsumed into a new agency. So it just became a grab-bag of smaller less prestigous agencies like FEMA, INS, etc.
My SWAG would be that they viewed the ability to confiscate domains as a cyber-secuirity issue. That agency is so unfocused though, it could have been damn near anything.