I think you either didn't understand my reply or you don't understand the licence. You're not agreeing to a licence when you download GPLed code. How could you? The GPL says you're licensed to use it no matter what. It's when you come to redistribute a binary that the GPL gets involved. The GPL recognizes that if I give you some executable which I alone have produced (not using anybody else's libraries or code), you have no rights to redistribute that binary. What the GPL does is to give you more rights - in other words you can redistribute the binary if you want to, so long as you include the source or an offer to provide the source. However, there are certain other caveats and the patent issue is one. The GPL says (in the section I posted before) that if there is some patent issue that is preventing you from passing on the rights defined in the GPL to somebody you distribute the program to, you lose the right to redistribute the code. This affects SuSE, not Microsoft. What SuSE says is that you're covered in patent terms if you use SuSE Linux. But if I buy or download their software and then redistribute it under my name (CtID's Linux), my customers are not covered by the patent covenant. Therefore, I and my customers are liable to a patent attack from Microsoft whereas SuSE and their customers are not. For GPLed code, this is a no-no. As I stated before, this doesn't relate to Microsoft's patents; it relates to SuSE's right to redistribute other people's GPLed code.
You're right that Microsoft can license their patents to whomever they choose. You're right that GPL is a copyright licence. But you're wrong that patents have nothing to do with copyrights, as part of the extended rights offered by the GPL are contingent on a patent issue. This is the paragraph to which I refer:
7. If, as a consequence of a court judgment or allegation of patent infringement or for any other reason (not limited to patent issues), conditions are imposed on you (whether by court order, agreement or otherwise) that contradict the conditions of this License, they do not excuse you from the conditions of this License. If you cannot distribute so as to satisfy simultaneously your obligations under this License and any other pertinent obligations, then as a consequence you may not distribute the Program at all. For example, if a patent license would not permit royalty-free redistribution of the Program by all those who receive copies directly or indirectly through you, then the only way you could satisfy both it and this License would be to refrain entirely from distribution of the Program.
The problem that SuSE has is that if they release their product with Microsoft's "patent covenant, the GPL says that they are not allowed to restrict someone else's use of it. So if I buy it from them, they cannot stop me from offering "CtID's Linux" which offers the GPLe'd portions of their product at a "low low price". But if I am going to get sued by Microsoft because I'm infringing their patents then SuSE loses its rights to distribute their product. The problem is SuSE's, not Microsoft's.
Instead of taking that premise and working from it, we just call Windows advocates stupid, lazy bums who just dont get it. Yeah, that's how you build a movement, just insult all the people you care to influence.
This is just a commonplace, surely? Like the article itself, what you're saying just sounds out of date - it was correct several years ago but under KDE (and I guess Gnome - I don't use it) Linux just works. In fact my experience using Linux at home is far superior to my experience using Windows at work.
"If you want to run Linux, you had better be running SuSE Linux, because we're going to start attacking people based on our patent portfolio." That was unbelievably ugly.
They did say two things about Linux developers: First of all for those people who work on Linux as a hobby (but specifically do not get paid for this work), they don't have to worry about the patent issue. Secondly, those people who do get paid for working on Linux were protected so long as their work was available in (or to) OpenSuSE - it wasn't clear whether that meant that you had to have a specific relationship, or whether you were allowed to do what you like so long as OpenSuSE could in principle use your work. It was hard to understand that part because anyone contributing the the GPLed Linux Kernel is of course making their work available to SuSE because the GPL specifically prevents them from excluding any person or group from using your software.
Given that the kernels are not significantly changed by the distribution sellers, could Microsoft sue (eg) RedHat for patent infringement while not sueing SuSE over the same piece of code? It would seem a bit strange to say of GPLed software that it can only be used if it was obtained as part of a SuSE distribution - the same software obtained from RedHat is infringing a patent. After all, under the terms of the GPL, SuSE can't prevent anybody else from getting access to the GPLed software in their distribution. I think that will be a very interesting launch, especially as Steve Ballmer of all people is going to be there!
Clarifying for the last time. Science is when scientific experiments are involved, meaning repeatable measurements in controlled environment. That defines the scope of the systems one can scientifically research. Earth biosphere is not one of them. You cannot do repeatable experiments on Earth biosphere on a global scale.
Oceaongraphy. Meteorology. These are also not science by your definition.
"would the earth continue to support life if there were no humans here?". (1) That is not the question of the article. (2) The question is idiotic in its inconsistency, as if the atheists and agnostics do not assume that life have existed on Earth before humans. Now YOU make up your mind.
My question was not summarising the article. You stated that one couldn't define "good" and "bad" without a human context. I don't agree and the question was intended to challenge your assertion. I don't understand your point (2) at all - I assume that it's meaningless religious dogma.
This is my last reply. Stop writing, I will just ignore you.
1. The modality "would" does not make sense in science. It makes sense in model systems (only because you can experimentally prove or disprove it) but not in such complex systems as the biosphere.
Make up your mind. Is it in science or in "such complex systems as the biosphere" that you can't use the word "would". What on earth does this mean anyway? You're saying that a report of a scientific paper can't use the word, "would"? Or is it a scientific paper itself where the word is not allowed in your view?
2. My second point simply states that in defining what is good for the planet or what is bad you have to specify definitions of good and bad. You do not like me involving God? Fine. But you still cannot go without reference system of good and bad, which has been always defined only in antropocentric terms.
This makes no sense whatsoever, as far as I can see. One way of defining "good" and "bad" without involving humans is to ask, "would the earth continue to support life if there were no humans here?". We're not the only denizens of the planet, so it's reasonable to say that an outcome where life (albeit not human life) continues on earth is a "good" outcome. The fact that we wouldn't be there to experience it doesn't mean that we can't take a view now.
I still don't see anything to justify your insults from your first post.
I have read your original post several times. There is no content there that can justify your insults. As far as I can see, there's also no content in your responses to my comments. I guess that means you were just calling the author an idiot because you are superior in some way that is not obvious to mere mortals like me. No doubt your God will recognise your superiority and you'll get rewarded in heaven. In the meantime, you can expect the rest of us mere mortals to keep laughing at you, because you like to call people names when you don't agree with them.
Well I'm sure you'll have convinced lots of people with the power of your arguments. Just in case you are interested in defending your original position, you said that the author of the article was a "moron" and an "idiot". Apart from your apparent belief in God, you've offered nothing that could account for your insulting comments.
By the way, don't feel that you have to defend your views - it's perfectly fine to act like a little kid here.
Since the game has a Teen rating in the USA and a 15 rating here in Europe, I think that buying a copy and giving it to a twelve year-old would only be helping Mr Thompson's case!
You're confusing two murders, probably because the Slashdot editor has got himself confused. The Anthony Walker murder happened in Liverpool and was a racist murder - he was waiting at a bus-stop with his white girlfriend and his cousin and some white kids took exception and murdered him with an ice-pick. The killers are not still at large, although they were on the run for a little while afterwards. The Jesse James murder happened in Manchester (a completely different city, 35 miles from Liverpool). It wasn't a random shooting, but it seems to have been a case of mistaken identity; the murderers intended to murder a particular person and just got the wrong one. It's most likely that Jesse James (who is black) was murdered by another young black person. In this case, the perpetrators are still at large and the police fear that people who know who did it are too scared to come forward and testify against the killers.
Correct. He gave a talk at the Develop Conference at Brighton in the UK earlier this year. And there he spelled it out that he believed that the Intel integrated graphics systems were killing gaming on the PC. His view was that that most consumers had no intention of ever opening up their PCs and so would never install a more capable graphics card. Therefore, it would be hard to achieve a mass-market for "modern" games on the PC because "modern" games need significantly more than the integrated graphics systems that Intel offers. This caused a bit of an argument with some people saying that many casual games don't need sophisticated graphics hardware and that casual games are more likely to form the mass-market.
Incidentally, he also got into an argument when he said that episodic games would never be really successful because he couldn't see a business model - but perhaps that view is for the discussion on episodic games from yesterday!
As soon as it became clear that the figure was large, people started hyping it. Think about all the security cameras in stores. Think about the security cameras which monitor car parks. Have you ever been in a building where the caretaker (supervisor) sits in front of a bank of video monitors, or a single video monitor which cycles through several views of the building? What about railway stations at night? Tot all of these up in any modern society and you're going to get an astronomical number. This number will increase as the minimum wage increases, because the alternative is to have human guards wandering around. Not all of them are monitored by the thought police, you know.
Amazingly, you're happy to accuse Maryanovsky of "whining" when you're not even prepared to read the article properly. The article states specifically that the IChessU client does not connect through a socket.
I agree to an extent about this, but this is ridiculous:
If you think slashdot can survive with lack of IE support, that sounds like a pretty stupid business decision. You're throwing away 25% of your readers... Real smart! Do you people even know how to run a business?
Nobody is being thrown away - IE users simply have a worse experience of the site but they can still read the articles and participate in the discussions.
I have PDF and print versions of many technically references. The PDFs get opened first at which point the paper is usually only for browsing.
I'm 43 and I recognize that I have grown up with books and that I am comfortable using them. However, I've been playing around with computers for more than half of my life and I've been on the web since the start, so I'm used to reading stuff off a screen. My views on paper vs screen are based somewhat on the sheer shallowness of my students' approach to learning. I can't help feeling that they don't concentrate enough when they are trying to get information from a screen. It's unusual to see a student spend a significant time staring at a document on a screen, for instance. They tend to search for something else before they will scroll through the document they have already opened. On the other hand of course, they have no idea how to get information from a book.
I'm aware that much of what I'm saying is impressionistic - I've certainly never measured any of this stuff - but introducing my students to another source (ie books) must be better than what they are doing now.
I teach in a university in the UK and I must say that I'm not convinced that electronic books are the best way of reading around a subject for degree-level study. When I'm trying to learn about something that is very new to me, my preferred approach is to work with two or three books which cover the topic. I find the relevant section in each book and keep all the books open at the appropriate pages on the desk in front of me. After a while, I'll normally find that one of the books is easiest for me to understand, so I will focus on that one but refer to the others when I need clarification. If one of the books is not helping at all, I make another trip to the shelves to find something else and see what that can contribute.
I've never been able to replicate this "system" using electronic means and I tend not to try any more. However, my students never seem to try to use books in this way. If they want to find out about something, they type a phrase into Google and then start picking through the thousands of hits they inevitably get (I teach computing). Typically they will give up quickly because the amount of information coming back is overwhelming, but even if they do find something, I'm sure they struggle because it's very hard to take in a lot of information when you're reading it off a screen (I believe that this is less true if you already know something about a topic). Ironically, the only complaint we regularly get about our classes is that the library is not helpful, even though we have bought literally hundreds of titles in the last couple of years. We now believe that most of our new students have never used a library before they come to the university, so we're going to actually show them how we go about learning new things using books. Not sure how we're going to do that!
I think I've rambled off the topic a bit here; I think my point is that I would discourage my students from buying electronic books in general. As a university lecturer, I think it's my responsibility to: (a) Recommend the minimum possible number of books for purchase (usually one per module); (b) Ensure that there is a good variety of relevant books in the library; (c) Encourage my students to actually use the library when their Googling fails them.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you either didn't understand my reply or you don't understand the licence. You're not agreeing to a licence when you download GPLed code. How could you? The GPL says you're licensed to use it no matter what. It's when you come to redistribute a binary that the GPL gets involved. The GPL recognizes that if I give you some executable which I alone have produced (not using anybody else's libraries or code), you have no rights to redistribute that binary. What the GPL does is to give you more rights - in other words you can redistribute the binary if you want to, so long as you include the source or an offer to provide the source. However, there are certain other caveats and the patent issue is one. The GPL says (in the section I posted before) that if there is some patent issue that is preventing you from passing on the rights defined in the GPL to somebody you distribute the program to, you lose the right to redistribute the code. This affects SuSE, not Microsoft. What SuSE says is that you're covered in patent terms if you use SuSE Linux. But if I buy or download their software and then redistribute it under my name (CtID's Linux), my customers are not covered by the patent covenant. Therefore, I and my customers are liable to a patent attack from Microsoft whereas SuSE and their customers are not. For GPLed code, this is a no-no. As I stated before, this doesn't relate to Microsoft's patents; it relates to SuSE's right to redistribute other people's GPLed code.
The problem that SuSE has is that if they release their product with Microsoft's "patent covenant, the GPL says that they are not allowed to restrict someone else's use of it. So if I buy it from them, they cannot stop me from offering "CtID's Linux" which offers the GPLe'd portions of their product at a "low low price". But if I am going to get sued by Microsoft because I'm infringing their patents then SuSE loses its rights to distribute their product. The problem is SuSE's, not Microsoft's.
This is just a commonplace, surely? Like the article itself, what you're saying just sounds out of date - it was correct several years ago but under KDE (and I guess Gnome - I don't use it) Linux just works. In fact my experience using Linux at home is far superior to my experience using Windows at work.
"If you want to run Linux, you had better be running SuSE Linux, because we're going to start attacking people based on our patent portfolio." That was unbelievably ugly.
They did say two things about Linux developers: First of all for those people who work on Linux as a hobby (but specifically do not get paid for this work), they don't have to worry about the patent issue. Secondly, those people who do get paid for working on Linux were protected so long as their work was available in (or to) OpenSuSE - it wasn't clear whether that meant that you had to have a specific relationship, or whether you were allowed to do what you like so long as OpenSuSE could in principle use your work. It was hard to understand that part because anyone contributing the the GPLed Linux Kernel is of course making their work available to SuSE because the GPL specifically prevents them from excluding any person or group from using your software.
Rather a depressing press conference, IMHO.
Given that the kernels are not significantly changed by the distribution sellers, could Microsoft sue (eg) RedHat for patent infringement while not sueing SuSE over the same piece of code? It would seem a bit strange to say of GPLed software that it can only be used if it was obtained as part of a SuSE distribution - the same software obtained from RedHat is infringing a patent. After all, under the terms of the GPL, SuSE can't prevent anybody else from getting access to the GPLed software in their distribution. I think that will be a very interesting launch, especially as Steve Ballmer of all people is going to be there!
Five years, surely?
Afghanistan is descending into chaos again and the Taliban is back on the march.
And failed miserably to handle the disaster in New Orleans.
No argument with this, and it's worth celebrating, in my opinion.
Oceaongraphy. Meteorology. These are also not science by your definition.
My question was not summarising the article. You stated that one couldn't define "good" and "bad" without a human context. I don't agree and the question was intended to challenge your assertion. I don't understand your point (2) at all - I assume that it's meaningless religious dogma.
You don't get to decide when I stop writing.
Make up your mind. Is it in science or in "such complex systems as the biosphere" that you can't use the word "would". What on earth does this mean anyway? You're saying that a report of a scientific paper can't use the word, "would"? Or is it a scientific paper itself where the word is not allowed in your view?
This makes no sense whatsoever, as far as I can see. One way of defining "good" and "bad" without involving humans is to ask, "would the earth continue to support life if there were no humans here?". We're not the only denizens of the planet, so it's reasonable to say that an outcome where life (albeit not human life) continues on earth is a "good" outcome. The fact that we wouldn't be there to experience it doesn't mean that we can't take a view now.
I still don't see anything to justify your insults from your first post.
I have read your original post several times. There is no content there that can justify your insults. As far as I can see, there's also no content in your responses to my comments. I guess that means you were just calling the author an idiot because you are superior in some way that is not obvious to mere mortals like me. No doubt your God will recognise your superiority and you'll get rewarded in heaven. In the meantime, you can expect the rest of us mere mortals to keep laughing at you, because you like to call people names when you don't agree with them.
Well I'm sure you'll have convinced lots of people with the power of your arguments. Just in case you are interested in defending your original position, you said that the author of the article was a "moron" and an "idiot". Apart from your apparent belief in God, you've offered nothing that could account for your insulting comments.
By the way, don't feel that you have to defend your views - it's perfectly fine to act like a little kid here.
I'd love to take credit for the phrase, but it comes from Get Your War On.
For somebody who believes in an invisible superhero who lives in outer space, you're pretty quick to use the terms "idiot" and "moron".
Forgive me, but I'm not completely convinced by that achievement!
Since the game has a Teen rating in the USA and a 15 rating here in Europe, I think that buying a copy and giving it to a twelve year-old would only be helping Mr Thompson's case!
You're confusing two murders, probably because the Slashdot editor has got himself confused. The Anthony Walker murder happened in Liverpool and was a racist murder - he was waiting at a bus-stop with his white girlfriend and his cousin and some white kids took exception and murdered him with an ice-pick. The killers are not still at large, although they were on the run for a little while afterwards. The Jesse James murder happened in Manchester (a completely different city, 35 miles from Liverpool). It wasn't a random shooting, but it seems to have been a case of mistaken identity; the murderers intended to murder a particular person and just got the wrong one. It's most likely that Jesse James (who is black) was murdered by another young black person. In this case, the perpetrators are still at large and the police fear that people who know who did it are too scared to come forward and testify against the killers.
Correct. He gave a talk at the Develop Conference at Brighton in the UK earlier this year. And there he spelled it out that he believed that the Intel integrated graphics systems were killing gaming on the PC. His view was that that most consumers had no intention of ever opening up their PCs and so would never install a more capable graphics card. Therefore, it would be hard to achieve a mass-market for "modern" games on the PC because "modern" games need significantly more than the integrated graphics systems that Intel offers. This caused a bit of an argument with some people saying that many casual games don't need sophisticated graphics hardware and that casual games are more likely to form the mass-market.
Incidentally, he also got into an argument when he said that episodic games would never be really successful because he couldn't see a business model - but perhaps that view is for the discussion on episodic games from yesterday!
As soon as it became clear that the figure was large, people started hyping it. Think about all the security cameras in stores. Think about the security cameras which monitor car parks. Have you ever been in a building where the caretaker (supervisor) sits in front of a bank of video monitors, or a single video monitor which cycles through several views of the building? What about railway stations at night? Tot all of these up in any modern society and you're going to get an astronomical number. This number will increase as the minimum wage increases, because the alternative is to have human guards wandering around. Not all of them are monitored by the thought police, you know.
Amazingly, you're happy to accuse Maryanovsky of "whining" when you're not even prepared to read the article properly. The article states specifically that the IChessU client does not connect through a socket.
Nobody is being thrown away - IE users simply have a worse experience of the site but they can still read the articles and participate in the discussions.
I'm 43 and I recognize that I have grown up with books and that I am comfortable using them. However, I've been playing around with computers for more than half of my life and I've been on the web since the start, so I'm used to reading stuff off a screen. My views on paper vs screen are based somewhat on the sheer shallowness of my students' approach to learning. I can't help feeling that they don't concentrate enough when they are trying to get information from a screen. It's unusual to see a student spend a significant time staring at a document on a screen, for instance. They tend to search for something else before they will scroll through the document they have already opened. On the other hand of course, they have no idea how to get information from a book.
I'm aware that much of what I'm saying is impressionistic - I've certainly never measured any of this stuff - but introducing my students to another source (ie books) must be better than what they are doing now.
Thanks very much for this recommendation. I've had a look at the reviews on Amazon and I've ordered a couple of copies for the library at work.
I teach in a university in the UK and I must say that I'm not convinced that electronic books are the best way of reading around a subject for degree-level study. When I'm trying to learn about something that is very new to me, my preferred approach is to work with two or three books which cover the topic. I find the relevant section in each book and keep all the books open at the appropriate pages on the desk in front of me. After a while, I'll normally find that one of the books is easiest for me to understand, so I will focus on that one but refer to the others when I need clarification. If one of the books is not helping at all, I make another trip to the shelves to find something else and see what that can contribute.
I've never been able to replicate this "system" using electronic means and I tend not to try any more. However, my students never seem to try to use books in this way. If they want to find out about something, they type a phrase into Google and then start picking through the thousands of hits they inevitably get (I teach computing). Typically they will give up quickly because the amount of information coming back is overwhelming, but even if they do find something, I'm sure they struggle because it's very hard to take in a lot of information when you're reading it off a screen (I believe that this is less true if you already know something about a topic). Ironically, the only complaint we regularly get about our classes is that the library is not helpful, even though we have bought literally hundreds of titles in the last couple of years. We now believe that most of our new students have never used a library before they come to the university, so we're going to actually show them how we go about learning new things using books. Not sure how we're going to do that!
I think I've rambled off the topic a bit here; I think my point is that I would discourage my students from buying electronic books in general. As a university lecturer, I think it's my responsibility to: (a) Recommend the minimum possible number of books for purchase (usually one per module); (b) Ensure that there is a good variety of relevant books in the library; (c) Encourage my students to actually use the library when their Googling fails them.
The article talks specifically about creating TATP in a toilet on an airplane. TATP is even in the title of the article.
It talks about the chance of depressurization as opposed to the destruction of the plane.
It talks about the likely effects of chucking the stuff down the toilet and explains that you'd likely get a violent reaction, but not an explosion.