Immoral people will do immoral things. Should moral people not do moral things because of it?
Define "moral people". The racists in my example, along with much of the South, certainly thought they were moral. I'm not saying this specific case wouldn't benefit from jury nullification. Just that generally disregarding the law in favor of your own opinion is a slippery slope, if not immoral in its own right.
The only problem with that is not everyone may have the same sense of morals. Your same rationale has been used to let off racists who kill black people, because while it's certainly against the law to kill any person, those jurors thought killing black folk was morally acceptable. That's why we should stick to the law, and if you don't like the law then write your congreeman.
With the huge number of VOIP providers, and the many faster cooler-running AMD chips out there, does this really matter? We don't have any technical reason to buy Skype or Intel. Now we have a moral reason not to as well. They've both definitely lost me as a customer.
And like the sign in the garage that says 'we are not responsible for anything' it has no effect. The point of those disclaimers is that they discourage the ignorant from filing suit, not that they have legal effect. If you can proved that you suffered a loss as a result of negligence on the part of the garage then you can sue, the right to sue for negligence cannot be surrendered under contract law.
So what you're saying is if I loose a lot of money because some badly written software crashed in the middle of a transaction, then the software vendor can't hide behind the clause in their EULA/license that basically states "use this at your own risk". If that's the case, why haven't Microsoft, or even some large open source projects, been sued over large bugs or security holes?
How does the GPL apply to "creative works" like images? If you GPL an image and then use it as art in a program, does that make the whole program GPL or just the image? I've always thought the GPL was mainly applicable to source code.
In all fairness, he'll probably be marked inconsequential. Seriously, how will this information change anything? The ones who already knew this still know it, and one's who didn't either aren't paying attention or simply don't care. The fact is we're in Iraq *now* and arguing about how we got in isn't going to help us get out. The unfortunate reality is, if testimony like this held any sway then a majority of voters wouldn't have *re-elected* Bush in 2004.
I'm sure this is true if you're working for Microsoft, but check out job postings on Craigslist and elsewhere. While there's definitely a lot of postings for.net/c#, you'll find equal or greater numbers for SQL, C, Java and C++.
Re:Interestingly...
on
Why Use GTK+?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
It'd be interesting to see if such a "claim" would ever hold up in court. You'd think if it did, AOL or MSN would have sued Gaim years ago for breaking their "license". Commonsense would dictate if Gaim can implement a proprietary protocol for interoperability, than anyone could implement MySQL's protocol for the same reason. I don't have a reference on hand, but I believe a court decided client-server interaction didn't constitute a level of usage where licenses like the GPL were applicable.
I cited the Indiana bill because it was probably the real-world basis for the the Heinlein conceit. That there's a version of the urban legend involving Alabama is irrelevant.
If you only wanted to cite Indiana, then there was no reason to reference Snopes, which only concerns the urban legend. I was merely pointing out a factual inconsistency (I know, on Slashdot!?). Don't take it personally.
Heinlein fans among us will recall a passage in Stranger in a Strange Land describing a Tennessee statute setting the value of pi to be exactly 3. But Snopes tells us it was apparently the Indiana House of Representatives who unanimously passed a measure redefining the area of a circle and the value of pi.
The Snopes article specically concerns Alabama, not Indiana, although it does make mention of the 1897 Indiana House decision, which fortunately died in the state's senate.
If all humans are descended from Adam and Eve, then why the biblical prohibition on incest?
Good point. If the Bible were true, and we're all products of incest, you'd think there'd be a lot more gullible, dim-witted people walking arou...oh wait, never mind;)
And one can buy a great many books about things like Hobbits, Zeus, Odin, Vishnu, Buddha, and, sure enough, Jesus. Just because there are books does not make a thing true, and no amount of repeating an untrue thing ever will.
In a perfect world, you'd be right. However, the unfortunate reality is that if something's repeated enough times, and with enough conviction, people will start believing it. Just look at Bush's strong rhetoric against Iraq at the onset of the war, and how around 50% of Americans came to believe Saddam was personally involved in 9/11.
While the somewhat harsh language makes me suspect someone spoofed Linus's email address, he makes a valid point. I remember when I posted a bug report about how the Gnome keyboard shortcuts for the workspace switcher doesn't wrap around. If you're in WS 1 and you want to go to WS 10 you can't just press the left arrow key. I gave some reasonably sound logic for adding this feature, which would of required modifying all of *2* lines of code, but was politely told it would confuse users and that they'd never add that feature.
This illustrates the one caveat about open source; the overbearing developer. *They* know what's best for users even if their users are screaming otherwise or jumping ship for another program like KDE. Sure, I could download the source code for Metacity, switch those 2 lines, then recompile. Of course, I'll have to do that for every future Gnome release, and forget about using Apt-get, Yum, or any other update manager for automatically updating Gnome.
Oh well. In any case, few others responded in defense of my post, so maybe it's a feature that noone really wants or needs. I still like and use Gnome, although it can be frustrating when you run across that one rare need, like playing a midi or playing a game of chess on FICS, and the Gnome app is either non-existant (midi?, chess?) or vastly inferior to its KDE equivalent (Kmid, Knights).
I think you may have stumbled over a useful feature for Wikipedia. Each page should display some sort of "volatility" ratio, representing the number of edits per day/month/year/whatever with respect to the article's age. When the article is young, a low volatility would indicate possible inaccuracy (e.g. Someone posts a quick, poorly researched stub article), and a high volatility would indicate better accuracy (e.g. a lot of people adding new information and editing out inaccuracies). As the article gets older, the inverse becomes true. If say, after a year, the article is still being edited on a daily basis, then there might be a group of sparing ideologues trying to reinforce their agenda. However, if the article has become relatively stable, you might be able to assume greater accuracy and reliability.
From ElexTex technical documents: "This sensor [alternates] measuring X position, Y position and Z pressure. The limitation is that two simultaneous areas being pressed will be interpreted as a single press half-way between them."
I'm not sure how useful a robot will be, even an "amatour" one, that can only detect a single point of contact. Sure, you could use several small patches of fabric in a grid arrangement to detect multiple points, but now its not really a single piece of fabric but a mangled patch-work of sensors. Plus, we already have relatively small and cheap ($7) pressure-sensitive switches to do just this.
That and how Eleksen appears to only "license" the use of its material to product designers makes it unlikely amateur robotics hobbyists will see this stuff anytime soon. Unless of course you feel like chopping out the little 2x3 inch swath of Elektex from your $600 designer coat.
And yes, I meant to say "Autodesk" instead of "Autocad". Software creating and selling other software with restrictive licensing terms is too terrible a thought to even imagine.
I remember 5 years ago, if you bought a license for Autocad's 3D Studio Max, you couldn't even sell it to someone else. I don't mean you couldn't sell copies of the software (illegal of course). I mean you couldn't sell the original box, manual, cd with the software on it; basically, everything you paid for. If you aren't satisfied with your $1000 investment, tough. No refunds, no transfers. You're stuck with it forever. Try and sell it online, like on Ebay, and your posting would be quickly deleted followed by a "polite" email from one of their lawyers explaining how you were in breach of the license. It was one of the most restrictive licenses in the industry, and unsurprisingly *not* reflected in competing products such as Maya or Lightwave. I believe Autocad has since changed its licensing policies, but to the extend of embracing open-source, this is quite the turn-around.
And what was that message exactly? That you shouldn't be able to read the ID off his *ID card*? Sure, there are some concerns about RF technology, but this grandstanding was just childish and only trivialized whatever valid message he might have had.
Do you have any case law supporting this? Common sense would seem to dictate that even the government has to obey its own laws, and that if they begin dismissing foreign patents then there's little to stop other countries from disregarding our own patents in return. The WTO has already ruled against the US on free trade issues. Indemnifying companies for patent infringement simply because its in the interests of the US government certainly isn't going to help matters.
Nonsense. I resent your implication that those supporting the view of evolution are simply atheists with a religious agenda. It doesn't take an "atheist" to see that teaching non-science in a science class is a bad idea. You may think this whole issue is bullshit, and to some extent it is, but there are (unfortunately) many who would gladly support science taking a back-seat to religion in public schools. Sticking your head in the sand by dismissing the issue as "bullshit" isn't going to make it go away.
If you consider minor tweaks to the screensaver and browser bookmarks as constituting a "distro", then I suppose you're right. However, when someone says Redhat==Linux, they're most likely referring to more than simple cosmetic changes. Redhat's given back to the community, made substantial code contributions to Linux and funded many open source projects. Obviously, both companies deal with operating systems, but any deeper comparison would be likening apples to oranges.
If you consider minor tweaks to the screensaver and browser bookmarks as constituting a "distro", then I suppose you're right. However, when someone says Redhat==Linux, they're most likely referring to Redhat's substantial code contributions to Linux and open source software. Based on that, Redhat is hardly analogous to Dell.
Does Dell maintain a customized Windows distribution or contribute code to Microsoft? No? Well, Redhat *does* maintain its own Linux distribution and contribute code. Perhaps the association is more relavant than you think.
Slashdot Mirror
Immoral people will do immoral things. Should moral people not do moral things because of it?
Define "moral people". The racists in my example, along with much of the South, certainly thought they were moral. I'm not saying this specific case wouldn't benefit from jury nullification. Just that generally disregarding the law in favor of your own opinion is a slippery slope, if not immoral in its own right.
The only problem with that is not everyone may have the same sense of morals. Your same rationale has been used to let off racists who kill black people, because while it's certainly against the law to kill any person, those jurors thought killing black folk was morally acceptable. That's why we should stick to the law, and if you don't like the law then write your congreeman.
With the huge number of VOIP providers, and the many faster cooler-running AMD chips out there, does this really matter? We don't have any technical reason to buy Skype or Intel. Now we have a moral reason not to as well. They've both definitely lost me as a customer.
And like the sign in the garage that says 'we are not responsible for anything' it has no effect. The point of those disclaimers is that they discourage the ignorant from filing suit, not that they have legal effect. If you can proved that you suffered a loss as a result of negligence on the part of the garage then you can sue, the right to sue for negligence cannot be surrendered under contract law.
So what you're saying is if I loose a lot of money because some badly written software crashed in the middle of a transaction, then the software vendor can't hide behind the clause in their EULA/license that basically states "use this at your own risk". If that's the case, why haven't Microsoft, or even some large open source projects, been sued over large bugs or security holes?
How does the GPL apply to "creative works" like images? If you GPL an image and then use it as art in a program, does that make the whole program GPL or just the image? I've always thought the GPL was mainly applicable to source code.
In all fairness, he'll probably be marked inconsequential. Seriously, how will this information change anything? The ones who already knew this still know it, and one's who didn't either aren't paying attention or simply don't care. The fact is we're in Iraq *now* and arguing about how we got in isn't going to help us get out. The unfortunate reality is, if testimony like this held any sway then a majority of voters wouldn't have *re-elected* Bush in 2004.
I'm sure this is true if you're working for Microsoft, but check out job postings on Craigslist and elsewhere. While there's definitely a lot of postings for .net/c#, you'll find equal or greater numbers for SQL, C, Java and C++.
It'd be interesting to see if such a "claim" would ever hold up in court. You'd think if it did, AOL or MSN would have sued Gaim years ago for breaking their "license". Commonsense would dictate if Gaim can implement a proprietary protocol for interoperability, than anyone could implement MySQL's protocol for the same reason. I don't have a reference on hand, but I believe a court decided client-server interaction didn't constitute a level of usage where licenses like the GPL were applicable.
I cited the Indiana bill because it was probably the real-world basis for the the Heinlein conceit. That there's a version of the urban legend involving Alabama is irrelevant.
If you only wanted to cite Indiana, then there was no reason to reference Snopes, which only concerns the urban legend. I was merely pointing out a factual inconsistency (I know, on Slashdot!?). Don't take it personally.
Heinlein fans among us will recall a passage in Stranger in a Strange Land describing a Tennessee statute setting the value of pi to be exactly 3. But Snopes tells us it was apparently the Indiana House of Representatives who unanimously passed a measure redefining the area of a circle and the value of pi.
The Snopes article specically concerns Alabama, not Indiana, although it does make mention of the 1897 Indiana House decision, which fortunately died in the state's senate.
If all humans are descended from Adam and Eve, then why the biblical prohibition on incest?
;)
Good point. If the Bible were true, and we're all products of incest, you'd think there'd be a lot more gullible, dim-witted people walking arou...oh wait, never mind
And one can buy a great many books about things like Hobbits, Zeus, Odin, Vishnu, Buddha, and, sure enough, Jesus. Just because there are books does not make a thing true, and no amount of repeating an untrue thing ever will.
In a perfect world, you'd be right. However, the unfortunate reality is that if something's repeated enough times, and with enough conviction, people will start believing it. Just look at Bush's strong rhetoric against Iraq at the onset of the war, and how around 50% of Americans came to believe Saddam was personally involved in 9/11.
But the real question is, can it find Sarah Connor?
Judging from the photo in the article, only if Ms. Connor is 6 inches tall...
While the somewhat harsh language makes me suspect someone spoofed Linus's email address, he makes a valid point. I remember when I posted a bug report about how the Gnome keyboard shortcuts for the workspace switcher doesn't wrap around. If you're in WS 1 and you want to go to WS 10 you can't just press the left arrow key. I gave some reasonably sound logic for adding this feature, which would of required modifying all of *2* lines of code, but was politely told it would confuse users and that they'd never add that feature.
This illustrates the one caveat about open source; the overbearing developer. *They* know what's best for users even if their users are screaming otherwise or jumping ship for another program like KDE. Sure, I could download the source code for Metacity, switch those 2 lines, then recompile. Of course, I'll have to do that for every future Gnome release, and forget about using Apt-get, Yum, or any other update manager for automatically updating Gnome.
Oh well. In any case, few others responded in defense of my post, so maybe it's a feature that noone really wants or needs. I still like and use Gnome, although it can be frustrating when you run across that one rare need, like playing a midi or playing a game of chess on FICS, and the Gnome app is either non-existant (midi?, chess?) or vastly inferior to its KDE equivalent (Kmid, Knights).
I think you may have stumbled over a useful feature for Wikipedia. Each page should display some sort of "volatility" ratio, representing the number of edits per day/month/year/whatever with respect to the article's age. When the article is young, a low volatility would indicate possible inaccuracy (e.g. Someone posts a quick, poorly researched stub article), and a high volatility would indicate better accuracy (e.g. a lot of people adding new information and editing out inaccuracies). As the article gets older, the inverse becomes true. If say, after a year, the article is still being edited on a daily basis, then there might be a group of sparing ideologues trying to reinforce their agenda. However, if the article has become relatively stable, you might be able to assume greater accuracy and reliability.
Problem solved. Well, that is before they start outlawing these anyways...
From ElexTex technical documents:
"This sensor [alternates] measuring X position, Y position and Z pressure. The limitation is that two simultaneous areas being pressed will be interpreted as a single press half-way between them."
I'm not sure how useful a robot will be, even an "amatour" one, that can only detect a single point of contact. Sure, you could use several small patches of fabric in a grid arrangement to detect multiple points, but now its not really a single piece of fabric but a mangled patch-work of sensors. Plus, we already have relatively small and cheap ($7) pressure-sensitive switches to do just this.
That and how Eleksen appears to only "license" the use of its material to product designers makes it unlikely amateur robotics hobbyists will see this stuff anytime soon. Unless of course you feel like chopping out the little 2x3 inch swath of Elektex from your $600 designer coat.
And yes, I meant to say "Autodesk" instead of "Autocad". Software creating and selling other software with restrictive licensing terms is too terrible a thought to even imagine.
I remember 5 years ago, if you bought a license for Autocad's 3D Studio Max, you couldn't even sell it to someone else. I don't mean you couldn't sell copies of the software (illegal of course). I mean you couldn't sell the original box, manual, cd with the software on it; basically, everything you paid for. If you aren't satisfied with your $1000 investment, tough. No refunds, no transfers. You're stuck with it forever. Try and sell it online, like on Ebay, and your posting would be quickly deleted followed by a "polite" email from one of their lawyers explaining how you were in breach of the license. It was one of the most restrictive licenses in the industry, and unsurprisingly *not* reflected in competing products such as Maya or Lightwave. I believe Autocad has since changed its licensing policies, but to the extend of embracing open-source, this is quite the turn-around.
And what was that message exactly? That you shouldn't be able to read the ID off his *ID card*? Sure, there are some concerns about RF technology, but this grandstanding was just childish and only trivialized whatever valid message he might have had.
Do you have any case law supporting this? Common sense would seem to dictate that even the government has to obey its own laws, and that if they begin dismissing foreign patents then there's little to stop other countries from disregarding our own patents in return. The WTO has already ruled against the US on free trade issues. Indemnifying companies for patent infringement simply because its in the interests of the US government certainly isn't going to help matters.
Someone has a case of the Muundays.
Nonsense. I resent your implication that those supporting the view of evolution are simply atheists with a religious agenda. It doesn't take an "atheist" to see that teaching non-science in a science class is a bad idea. You may think this whole issue is bullshit, and to some extent it is, but there are (unfortunately) many who would gladly support science taking a back-seat to religion in public schools. Sticking your head in the sand by dismissing the issue as "bullshit" isn't going to make it go away.
If you consider minor tweaks to the screensaver and browser bookmarks as
constituting a "distro", then I suppose you're right. However, when
someone says Redhat==Linux, they're most likely referring to more than simple cosmetic changes. Redhat's given back to the community, made substantial code contributions to Linux and funded many open source projects. Obviously, both companies deal with operating systems, but any deeper comparison would be likening apples to oranges.
If you consider minor tweaks to the screensaver and browser bookmarks as constituting a "distro", then I suppose you're right. However, when someone says Redhat==Linux, they're most likely referring to Redhat's substantial code contributions to Linux and open source software. Based on that, Redhat is hardly analogous to Dell.
Does Dell maintain a customized Windows distribution or contribute code to Microsoft? No? Well, Redhat *does* maintain its own Linux distribution and contribute code. Perhaps the association is more relavant than you think.