The authors mistake in his response: overestimating his audience.
The author's mistake in his response: making a response, and not simply putting this embarassing episode behind him.
The author's original mistake: writing a book of made-up symbolism supposedly in a popular movie, without doing one lick of research or attempting to interview the creative minds behind it. He just watched the movie and made it all up from there. Some of it fit... sort of... other stuff he clearly found because he desperately wanted to find something.
It's sheer wishful thinking. I could buy a few clever inside jokes, but this dumbass reads a subtle message into everything in the movie. "NO MEAT" and "bathroom tiles" are just particularly obvious examples of the fact that if you reach far enough, you can imagine anything as symbolic of anything else. You could as easily match up every detail to Genesis, the Lord of the Rings, or an episode of Ranma 1/2.
Get over it. He's exactly the kind of pompous ass who deserves to be mocked mercilessly. --
Perhaps they'll think twice before calling someone "loony" next time -- because that guy just might be reading.
...and respond, proving his complete and utter loonyness.
Do you really think Kubrik and Clarke spent all their time working subtle symbolism into every detail of the movie? Enough to fill a book?!
As if they didn't have enough trouble making a good story and getting the visuals right...
I am reminded of a response to a long pompous analysis of the symbolism of a minor feature of some literary work I can't properly attribute:
"Sir, after long discussion with the author, I can assure you that the chicken in this scene symbolizes absolutely nothing." --
From the above poster's linked site:
"The technology behind Falling Bodies is now patented. This broad patent covers most spring/damper character simulation systems. If it falls, it has joints, it looks right, and it works right, it's probably covered by our patent."
Unbelievable. It seems to be nicely tuned, but it's a dead obvious concept.
Anyone who files a bogus (or bogusly broad) patent should be held financially responsible for the damage it causes by threatening innovators. Yeah, it would be a nightmare to work out, but at least it would give people some reason not to just reach for as much patent control as possible. --
It's true. Linux stuff is usually a huge pain in the ass to install. Get 30 libraries, spend hours compiling them all, patch the kernel, pray it works, see what other software you just broke by "updating" your shared libraries. In particular, web browsers are bad for this.
I've often had to modify the source just to get stuff to compile.
I've had to replace sound cards, video cards, and network cards to make Linux work on a system.
To me, the results are often worth it. But it's a hell of a lot of work, and if I judged it by the same standard used in this review, Linux, and most Linux software, would get the same 0/10 ("You had to do what with the seat?").
If it's an awesome game on compatible systems, it deserves better than that. --
This doesn't make sense. If you don't want to GPL your software, don't use someone else's GPLed software. How is that an attack?
The GNU project, which the GPL was written for, is an attempt to clone existing proprietary systems. Not to produce something new, but to legally create freely redistributable copies of existing works which the creators restrict to secure a profit to fund their development efforts. The only restriction on these copies is that the proprietary developers may not incorporate them into their work.
This is an attack. A deliberate, carefully designed attack.
So is the propaganda campaign characterizing proprietary development as evil and urging other programmers to participate in such cloning projects. --
"good faith" and "GPL" don't even belong on the same page, and their "ethical position" is that selling people useful software is evil. Not inefficient, not annoying, not less than ideal, but baby-eating evil.
The GPL is not about gaining some consideration for use, but denying a certain use to a certain group. It is designed purely as a deliberate attack on proprietary software developers.
They have no willingness to negotiate, and despite offering it to proprietary software developers, they deliberately prohibit the use it's wanted for.
By traditional contract standards, this is not at all reasonable.
It's not an offer of contract in good faith, it's an attempt to place something essentially in the public domain, except restricted from the use of people and businesses they are politically opposed to. The other party can hardly be blamed for not treating it as a sincere attempt at a mutually-agreeable arrangement. --
RMS as inflammatory as ever.
on
GPL FAQ
·
· Score: 2
So we recommend that you approach them when the program is only half-done, saying, "If you will agree to releasing this as free software, I will finish it." Don't think of this as a bluff. To prevail, you must have the courage to say, "My program will have liberty, or never be born."
To release a non-free program is always ethically tainted,
I'd like to modify GPL-covered programs and link them with the portability libraries from Money Guzzler Inc. [...]
A major goal of the GPL is to build up the Free World [...]
In general, proprietary software projects hinder [...] the cause of freedom.
Yeah, reasonable and friendly, 100% positive information using neutral language.
This is the same-old I Can't Believe It's Not Communism bullshit, with weighted words and little digs at every opportunity, and always The Cause. This guy makes us all look like fruitcakes. --
You must distribute source code with binaries to this program.
If someone spends 1 day downloading the binaries for your linux distro, but stops the download before the 2-day download of the sources is done, you have to hunt him down and forcibly copy the source code onto his computer.
All software distributed with this program must be licensed under this license.
Yeah, no putting any non-GPL software on the same internet!
You may not restrict the distribution of this software in any other way.
So you may not restrict others from taking and distributing your hard-drive containing this software, however, any derivative works of this software may be restricted at will.
While we're at it, let's toss out the legal system and switch over to the ten commandments. --
Can I blame this on the slashcode?
on
GPL FAQ
·
· Score: 1
"If GPL'd software can't be distributed or stored alongside proprietary Oops! Put in a clause for it!"
Should be:
"If GPL'd software can't be distributed or stored alongside proprietary software, people will have to either go full-GNU or never touch GPL'd software. How will anyone get started? Oops! Put in a clause for it!" --
What the FSF really wants is to decide on a case by case basis what uses are and aren't good for promoting Free Software. This is impossible.
If GPL'd software can't be used on a proprietary OS, we lose a lot of bootstrapping potential. Hmm... we'd put some a clause in to allow that.
If GPL'd software can't be distributed or stored alongside proprietary Oops! Put in a clause for it!
If the GPL makes any claim on the output of GPL'd software, only full-fledged FSF fanatics will use it. We'd better make sure not to do that.
However, if you allow your software to be modified freely to take input and give output in any format, distributed freely with proprietary software, and run on proprietary systems, you allow it to be incorporated into proprietary systems. Any attempt to prohibit this can only prohibit certain direct methods, unless you want to either cripple it for end-users or open up the "intent" can of worms and make any case a chess game between lawyers (if it doesn't invalidate the contract altogether).
So they can either have a license with proprietary incorporation loopholes, or they can have a license with "legitimate use" litigation loopholes. They chose the former, making the GPL nearly meaningless, rather than choosing the latter, and scaring off everybody even thinking of touching GPL'd software. Now it's just a matter of who gets better lawyers and the quirks of the judge.
I've never believed that the GPL would survive a direct court challenge. I certainly don't think it'll be used successfully to sue someone who segregates their proprietary and GPL'd source, though anything is possible in court. --
Despite what many people seem to think, an OS is not an inherently complex thing.
As far as I can see, there are only two extremely difficult (read: time-consuming, tedious) things to do re something as familiar and well-defined as an OS: comply fully with someone else's standard, and tune an entirely original design (not borrowing the main character from a familiar system).
Making a unix-like OS is not much harder than making a compiler for a c-like language (I dunno about you, but I could do the latter in a couple of days). But then supplying every library routine and going and checking that you comply with the POSIX standard on every point would take forever (alone, that is).
The win32 thing is a hundred times harder than that, because it's a huge, poorly designed, inaccurately specified, buggy interface. It's painful enough to even use that the vast majority of windows programmers hide it behind some other tool. Recreating it perfectly, without access to the source, is an exercise in futility, far harder than making it in the first place. --
The profound and brilliant invention of edible underwear!
Discarded paper table "linen" and rayon underwear are bought by chemical factories to be converted into candy. --
Re:How many points for telling you the odds?
on
Bioinformatics
·
· Score: 2
First multiplying by M-N will, for a big enough M, give you a probability greater than 1. Clearly this is wrong. What you seem to want is a series of Bernoulli trials where each trial has the probability of randomly matching the N characters.
True. That was sloppy of me, each successive trial would have its probability of success multiplied by probability of failure of all preceding trials. So the difference only lowers the probability of a match, and not significantly in this case.
However there are not going to be M-N independent trials. This is because when checking character 1 through N of the longer sequence with the shorter sequence, there are going to be a lot a matches and mismatches on the individual characters. This is going to impose constraints on getting a match for characters 2 through N+1. So you just can't shift the sequence over one character and get an independent trial.
This doesn't affect the probability calculation. Each substring of a random string is still a random string, and they are no more probable to be equal to one another than two successive randoms generated independently. If you calculated how the randomly distributed matches and mismatches of one trial changes the probability of the next trial, you'd find that on average they don't affect it at all.
However, it can affect the number of expected matches, if you examine the characteristics of the given short string. A string of one symbol repeated is more likely to get more than one match than a string in which there are no symbol repetitions. But the probability of just "one or more" matches is unaffected.
(I also goofed about the number of trials, which would be M - N + 1) --
On average, the description of how to construct the data from substrings of a random string will be as long as the data itself. The human genome does not in any meaningful way include the data, any more than does a sufficiently long repeating string of the four bases (AGCTAGCTAGCT...).
Give it up. (speaking of which, I'm surprised nobody has turned this into an "All your base" joke) --
I goofed the approximation...
on
Bioinformatics
·
· Score: 1
I used 366 instead of 1464, so the odds are worse than that. My calculators keep puking on me, so I'll leave it at "beyond astronomical". --
How many points for telling you the odds?
on
Bioinformatics
·
· Score: 4
Stripped of header and gzipped, I get 366 bytes, X4 is 1464 nucleotides.
The probability of any two random sequences of the same length being equal is the inverse of the number of expressible sequences of that length. In this case, it is 4^length.
When you are looking for a random sequence (of length N) within a longer sequence (length M), the probability of finding it is the above probability multiplied by M-N (the same chance over and over again for every sub-sequence of length N, assuming you don't count wrapping substrings).
So N=1464, and M equals roughly 3 billion. So the probability is:
(3*10^9-1464)/4^1464
Which is in the neighborhood of one to a squared googol odds.
Of course, that assumes random data, but I figure it's a good enough approximation.
Don't knock yourself out looking for it. It's not there. --
Paying for a copy, or a subscription, tells the advertisers 2 useful things about the readers:
1) they are interested in its contents
2) they spend money
Furthermore, the way paper publications are made, ads are big enough to contain useful information and positioned so you have to look at them just to find the article you want to read, so:
3) they read ads
That makes circulation relevant to advertisers. OTOH, web users:
1) are often tricked into visiting a site, or only want to pop in for one piece of information, and disappear again
2) want stuff for free
3) often don't even see the ads, and they would have to click through, abandoning the information they actually wanted, to get any real information
Let's not kid ourselves. Web users run from ads they can't ignore. The advertising model of newspapers and magazines doesn't work here. That $0.25 is crucial to the advertiser (and as for free papers, I don't know about you, but I only pick them up for the ads).
For web advertising, you need a regular, well-defined audience that comes in to browse, not to hunt./. is a classic example, with thousands of high-salary geeks who like high-tech gadgets and caffeine, and come to/. to waste time on whatever shiny thing the editors post. If there's a shinier thing up top, like a good deal on an mp3 player, overclocking gear, or a novel caffeine drink like "Whoop Ass", many are just as happy to go look at that. Web comics, OTOH, are populated by people who want to look at the comic and then get on with what they were doing. I don't click on a banner ad for a web comic unless it leads to another comic, which is no way to fund an industry. Ditto for general news sites, movie review sites, online museums, etc. --
Lawyers can be as bad as anyone else at using misleading abbreviations. They also write loads of unenforceable and inaccurate stuff into most contracts. Clarity, you see, is not the lawyer's friend. Their entire profession is based on the difficulty of interpreting unclear language.
The GPL is quite clearly a licensing agreement, a contract offer (and later, a contract) that must be accepted whole, putting one who accepts it under permanent obligation, before any permission is granted. Not a license, simply giving permission in a way that precludes legal action for acting on that permission. Not a public license, simply extending such permission to every member of the public.
A contract offer is by no means a license, and people should stop calling it one. To accept this recent near-antonymic abbreviation is to further muddy the already opaque waters of legal speech.
But I suppose Profit is Loss, Restriction is Permission, and Obligation is Freedom in the brave GNU/world. --
The whole issue in question would never have come up had this been available in the days of "Programming Python [1st Edition]."
Instead of showing one simple way of doing it, he showed many complex ways of doing it, justifying it on the grounds of performance, thus implying that it was necessary for acceptable performance. These are exactly the kind of trade-offs and effort that one goes to a scripting language to not bother with.
Where Programming Perl tells you over and over again "do it however you like, it's okay to be ugly as long as it's useful, don't worry too much about performance unless it bites you," Programming Python emphasizes things like performance, at a time when Python was much slower than Perl (has this changed much?), and well-thought-out elegant, maintainable code, in a language that's supposed to replace my favorite hack-it-out-in-five-minutes kludge language. That's entirely aside from the poor organization and generally bad writing. --
Slashdot Mirror
The authors mistake in his response: overestimating his audience.
The author's mistake in his response: making a response, and not simply putting this embarassing episode behind him.
The author's original mistake: writing a book of made-up symbolism supposedly in a popular movie, without doing one lick of research or attempting to interview the creative minds behind it. He just watched the movie and made it all up from there. Some of it fit... sort of... other stuff he clearly found because he desperately wanted to find something.
It's sheer wishful thinking. I could buy a few clever inside jokes, but this dumbass reads a subtle message into everything in the movie. "NO MEAT" and "bathroom tiles" are just particularly obvious examples of the fact that if you reach far enough, you can imagine anything as symbolic of anything else. You could as easily match up every detail to Genesis, the Lord of the Rings, or an episode of Ranma 1/2.
Get over it. He's exactly the kind of pompous ass who deserves to be mocked mercilessly.
--
Perhaps they'll think twice before calling someone "loony" next time -- because that guy just might be reading.
...and respond, proving his complete and utter loonyness.
Do you really think Kubrik and Clarke spent all their time working subtle symbolism into every detail of the movie? Enough to fill a book?!
As if they didn't have enough trouble making a good story and getting the visuals right...
I am reminded of a response to a long pompous analysis of the symbolism of a minor feature of some literary work I can't properly attribute:
"Sir, after long discussion with the author, I can assure you that the chicken in this scene symbolizes absolutely nothing."
--
From the above poster's linked site:
"The technology behind Falling Bodies is now patented. This broad patent covers most spring/damper character simulation systems. If it falls, it has joints, it looks right, and it works right, it's probably covered by our patent."
Unbelievable. It seems to be nicely tuned, but it's a dead obvious concept.
Anyone who files a bogus (or bogusly broad) patent should be held financially responsible for the damage it causes by threatening innovators. Yeah, it would be a nightmare to work out, but at least it would give people some reason not to just reach for as much patent control as possible.
--
Or is the issue more complex then that?
What part of 8P don't you people understand?
--
It's true. Linux stuff is usually a huge pain in the ass to install. Get 30 libraries, spend hours compiling them all, patch the kernel, pray it works, see what other software you just broke by "updating" your shared libraries. In particular, web browsers are bad for this.
I've often had to modify the source just to get stuff to compile.
I've had to replace sound cards, video cards, and network cards to make Linux work on a system.
To me, the results are often worth it. But it's a hell of a lot of work, and if I judged it by the same standard used in this review, Linux, and most Linux software, would get the same 0/10 ("You had to do what with the seat?").
If it's an awesome game on compatible systems, it deserves better than that.
--
If you paid for it, it's not free.
So, when you buy a computer for $2000, and it comes with Windows on it, that's a free OS.
But when you order a Debian CD for $3 from Cheapbytes, that's a non-free OS.
8P
--
This doesn't make sense. If you don't want to GPL your software, don't use someone else's GPLed software. How is that an attack?
The GNU project, which the GPL was written for, is an attempt to clone existing proprietary systems. Not to produce something new, but to legally create freely redistributable copies of existing works which the creators restrict to secure a profit to fund their development efforts. The only restriction on these copies is that the proprietary developers may not incorporate them into their work.
This is an attack. A deliberate, carefully designed attack.
So is the propaganda campaign characterizing proprietary development as evil and urging other programmers to participate in such cloning projects.
--
"good faith" and "GPL" don't even belong on the same page, and their "ethical position" is that selling people useful software is evil. Not inefficient, not annoying, not less than ideal, but baby-eating evil.
The GPL is not about gaining some consideration for use, but denying a certain use to a certain group. It is designed purely as a deliberate attack on proprietary software developers.
They have no willingness to negotiate, and despite offering it to proprietary software developers, they deliberately prohibit the use it's wanted for.
By traditional contract standards, this is not at all reasonable.
It's not an offer of contract in good faith, it's an attempt to place something essentially in the public domain, except restricted from the use of people and businesses they are politically opposed to. The other party can hardly be blamed for not treating it as a sincere attempt at a mutually-agreeable arrangement.
--
So we recommend that you approach them when the program is only half-done, saying, "If you will agree to releasing this as free software, I will finish it." Don't think of this as a bluff. To prevail, you must have the courage to say, "My program will have liberty, or never be born."
To release a non-free program is always ethically tainted,
I'd like to modify GPL-covered programs and link them with the portability libraries from Money Guzzler Inc. [...]
A major goal of the GPL is to build up the Free World [...]
In general, proprietary software projects hinder [...] the cause of freedom.
Yeah, reasonable and friendly, 100% positive information using neutral language.
This is the same-old I Can't Believe It's Not Communism bullshit, with weighted words and little digs at every opportunity, and always The Cause. This guy makes us all look like fruitcakes.
--
You must distribute source code with binaries to this program.
If someone spends 1 day downloading the binaries for your linux distro, but stops the download before the 2-day download of the sources is done, you have to hunt him down and forcibly copy the source code onto his computer.
All software distributed with this program must be licensed under this license.
Yeah, no putting any non-GPL software on the same internet!
You may not restrict the distribution of this software in any other way.
So you may not restrict others from taking and distributing your hard-drive containing this software, however, any derivative works of this software may be restricted at will.
While we're at it, let's toss out the legal system and switch over to the ten commandments.
--
"If GPL'd software can't be distributed or stored alongside proprietary Oops! Put in a clause for it!"
Should be:
"If GPL'd software can't be distributed or stored alongside proprietary software, people will have to either go full-GNU or never touch GPL'd software. How will anyone get started? Oops! Put in a clause for it!"
--
What the FSF really wants is to decide on a case by case basis what uses are and aren't good for promoting Free Software. This is impossible.
If GPL'd software can't be used on a proprietary OS, we lose a lot of bootstrapping potential. Hmm... we'd put some a clause in to allow that.
If GPL'd software can't be distributed or stored alongside proprietary Oops! Put in a clause for it!
If the GPL makes any claim on the output of GPL'd software, only full-fledged FSF fanatics will use it. We'd better make sure not to do that.
However, if you allow your software to be modified freely to take input and give output in any format, distributed freely with proprietary software, and run on proprietary systems, you allow it to be incorporated into proprietary systems. Any attempt to prohibit this can only prohibit certain direct methods, unless you want to either cripple it for end-users or open up the "intent" can of worms and make any case a chess game between lawyers (if it doesn't invalidate the contract altogether).
So they can either have a license with proprietary incorporation loopholes, or they can have a license with "legitimate use" litigation loopholes. They chose the former, making the GPL nearly meaningless, rather than choosing the latter, and scaring off everybody even thinking of touching GPL'd software. Now it's just a matter of who gets better lawyers and the quirks of the judge.
I've never believed that the GPL would survive a direct court challenge. I certainly don't think it'll be used successfully to sue someone who segregates their proprietary and GPL'd source, though anything is possible in court.
--
It's a form of self-indulgent vandalism, just like trolling.
A "troll rebuttal" such as this should be modded down as "off topic".
--
Despite what many people seem to think, an OS is not an inherently complex thing.
As far as I can see, there are only two extremely difficult (read: time-consuming, tedious) things to do re something as familiar and well-defined as an OS: comply fully with someone else's standard, and tune an entirely original design (not borrowing the main character from a familiar system).
Making a unix-like OS is not much harder than making a compiler for a c-like language (I dunno about you, but I could do the latter in a couple of days). But then supplying every library routine and going and checking that you comply with the POSIX standard on every point would take forever (alone, that is).
The win32 thing is a hundred times harder than that, because it's a huge, poorly designed, inaccurately specified, buggy interface. It's painful enough to even use that the vast majority of windows programmers hide it behind some other tool. Recreating it perfectly, without access to the source, is an exercise in futility, far harder than making it in the first place.
--
The profound and brilliant invention of edible underwear!
Discarded paper table "linen" and rayon underwear are bought by chemical factories to be converted into candy.
--
First multiplying by M-N will, for a big enough M, give you a probability greater than 1. Clearly this is wrong. What you seem to want is a series of Bernoulli trials where each trial has the probability of randomly matching the N characters.
True. That was sloppy of me, each successive trial would have its probability of success multiplied by probability of failure of all preceding trials. So the difference only lowers the probability of a match, and not significantly in this case.
However there are not going to be M-N independent trials. This is because when checking character 1 through N of the longer sequence with the shorter sequence, there are going to be a lot a matches and mismatches on the individual characters. This is going to impose constraints on getting a match for characters 2 through N+1. So you just can't shift the sequence over one character and get an independent trial.
This doesn't affect the probability calculation. Each substring of a random string is still a random string, and they are no more probable to be equal to one another than two successive randoms generated independently. If you calculated how the randomly distributed matches and mismatches of one trial changes the probability of the next trial, you'd find that on average they don't affect it at all.
However, it can affect the number of expected matches, if you examine the characteristics of the given short string. A string of one symbol repeated is more likely to get more than one match than a string in which there are no symbol repetitions. But the probability of just "one or more" matches is unaffected.
(I also goofed about the number of trials, which would be M - N + 1)
--
On average, the description of how to construct the data from substrings of a random string will be as long as the data itself. The human genome does not in any meaningful way include the data, any more than does a sufficiently long repeating string of the four bases (AGCTAGCTAGCT...).
Give it up. (speaking of which, I'm surprised nobody has turned this into an "All your base" joke)
--
I used 366 instead of 1464, so the odds are worse than that. My calculators keep puking on me, so I'll leave it at "beyond astronomical".
--
Stripped of header and gzipped, I get 366 bytes, X4 is 1464 nucleotides.
The probability of any two random sequences of the same length being equal is the inverse of the number of expressible sequences of that length. In this case, it is 4^length.
When you are looking for a random sequence (of length N) within a longer sequence (length M), the probability of finding it is the above probability multiplied by M-N (the same chance over and over again for every sub-sequence of length N, assuming you don't count wrapping substrings).
So N=1464, and M equals roughly 3 billion. So the probability is:
(3*10^9-1464)/4^1464
Which is in the neighborhood of one to a squared googol odds.
Of course, that assumes random data, but I figure it's a good enough approximation.
Don't knock yourself out looking for it. It's not there.
--
I was wondering about the existence of Monte's Python Circus that Flies.
--
Wasn't he the guy who wrote the Altair game they based Circus Atari on?
Man, could he optimize. That code flew.
I wonder if he's reimplemented it in his new favorite language?
--
Which one was on top?
Oddly enough, there was a bit of the dialog on that very subject...
--
Paying for a copy, or a subscription, tells the advertisers 2 useful things about the readers:
/. is a classic example, with thousands of high-salary geeks who like high-tech gadgets and caffeine, and come to /. to waste time on whatever shiny thing the editors post. If there's a shinier thing up top, like a good deal on an mp3 player, overclocking gear, or a novel caffeine drink like "Whoop Ass", many are just as happy to go look at that. Web comics, OTOH, are populated by people who want to look at the comic and then get on with what they were doing. I don't click on a banner ad for a web comic unless it leads to another comic, which is no way to fund an industry. Ditto for general news sites, movie review sites, online museums, etc.
1) they are interested in its contents
2) they spend money
Furthermore, the way paper publications are made, ads are big enough to contain useful information and positioned so you have to look at them just to find the article you want to read, so:
3) they read ads
That makes circulation relevant to advertisers. OTOH, web users:
1) are often tricked into visiting a site, or only want to pop in for one piece of information, and disappear again
2) want stuff for free
3) often don't even see the ads, and they would have to click through, abandoning the information they actually wanted, to get any real information
Let's not kid ourselves. Web users run from ads they can't ignore. The advertising model of newspapers and magazines doesn't work here. That $0.25 is crucial to the advertiser (and as for free papers, I don't know about you, but I only pick them up for the ads).
For web advertising, you need a regular, well-defined audience that comes in to browse, not to hunt.
--
Lawyers can be as bad as anyone else at using misleading abbreviations. They also write loads of unenforceable and inaccurate stuff into most contracts. Clarity, you see, is not the lawyer's friend. Their entire profession is based on the difficulty of interpreting unclear language.
The GPL is quite clearly a licensing agreement, a contract offer (and later, a contract) that must be accepted whole, putting one who accepts it under permanent obligation, before any permission is granted. Not a license, simply giving permission in a way that precludes legal action for acting on that permission. Not a public license, simply extending such permission to every member of the public.
A contract offer is by no means a license, and people should stop calling it one. To accept this recent near-antonymic abbreviation is to further muddy the already opaque waters of legal speech.
But I suppose Profit is Loss, Restriction is Permission, and Obligation is Freedom in the brave GNU/world.
--
The whole issue in question would never have come up had this been available in the days of "Programming Python [1st Edition]."
Instead of showing one simple way of doing it, he showed many complex ways of doing it, justifying it on the grounds of performance, thus implying that it was necessary for acceptable performance. These are exactly the kind of trade-offs and effort that one goes to a scripting language to not bother with.
Where Programming Perl tells you over and over again "do it however you like, it's okay to be ugly as long as it's useful, don't worry too much about performance unless it bites you," Programming Python emphasizes things like performance, at a time when Python was much slower than Perl (has this changed much?), and well-thought-out elegant, maintainable code, in a language that's supposed to replace my favorite hack-it-out-in-five-minutes kludge language. That's entirely aside from the poor organization and generally bad writing.
--