When someone resorts to personal attacks when making an argument,
[...]
Since the above-quoted is not, in fact, a personal attack, your observation,
while true, is a non sequitur.
If VIM was GPL, Bram would need to get the permission of every single
person who has ever made a patch for VIM available before releasing a
non-GPL version of VIM.
(shrug) Bram would need permission to redistribute third-party patches no
matter what license he used. What's your point?
He said specifically that he wants to have the power to decide whether
or not someone who's made modifications (and intends to distribute the
resulting binaries) has to release the source for their modifications or
not.
He already has that power, by virtue of being the copyright holder. No
license is needed to give him that power, and no license can take it away
from him.
The GPL does not allow him to decide...
This is a category error. The GPL is a decision on the part of
the copyright holder. If Bram licenses Vim to person X under the GPL, that
is a decision by Bram that person X should not be allowed to distribute
binaries without distributing sources. If Bram believes that person Y
should be allowed to distribute binaries without distributing sources, he
can effect that decision by licensing Vim to person Y under some
other license which specifically grants that permission. You
appear to be asserting that the GPL can somehow deny Bram his authority as
copyright holder to do this.
See, this is why (to answer an earlier assertion by someone else) we claim
that GPL opponents simply don't understand the GPL: all the objections to
the GPL that I've seen demonstrate a misunderstanding of the GPL.
The 1973 War Act attempts to limit the President's ability to declare
war, while also giving the option to pass a euphemistic "use of force"
resolution rather than old fashioned (and honest) declaration of war.
But the War
Powers Act is not carte blanche. Section 5(b) requires the President
to withdraw the military after 60 days if Congress hasn't given him a
declaration of war by then. Both Clinton and Bush the Elder have been
sued by Congress
over violations of this. It remains, then, to be seen what will happen
this time around. When did the clock officially start on this one?
The "Have you stopped beating your wife" question is a classic no-win
paradox based on verbal ambiguity that goes back at least to the 1930s,
probably earlier.
I agree dictionaries do not "change" a term's meaning. But they do
"define" it.
No. Dictionaries codify and document mainstream usage of terms, correct or
otherwise. Terms of art such as this are properly defined by the community
which originates and uses them. The meanings of the terms "quark" and
"meson" are determined by the physics community; the meanings of the terms
"capitalism" and "socialism" are determined by the political science
community.
I simply refuse to adopt your incorrect word usages.
My correct word usage, sir. Go play your word games somewhere
else.
Just out of curiosity, why didn't you respond to this part:
Because it wasn't what I was responding to, and it wasn't what I was
interested in. I couldn't care less what sort of political or economic
system the GPL might or might not resemble. And yes, it was red-baiting;
you won't admit it, of course, but you were implicitly accusing me of
endorsing Stalinism -- a dirty trick, and one typical of the loser in such
an argument.
Hitler took a supermajority in the 1929 plebescite. The German people
voted him chancellor. The fact that he was previously appointed does not
change the fact that he was democratically selected by the voting
public.
Um, Hitler
didn't even become Chancellor until 1933. As late as 1928,
the Nazi party had only 12 seats out of about 600 in Germany's parliament;
and in the 1930 elections, the Nazi party pulled in a mere 18 percent of
the vote. In fact, in 1932 Hitler lost the election to Paul von
Hindenburg, by a decisive 53 percent to 37 percent margin. Hitler never
had enough popular support to be democratically elected Chancellor.
Well you can define those terms that way if you want to.
Those are the textbook political science definitions of the terms, their
misuse in Cold War propaganda notwithstanding.
Stalin considered himself a socialist, [...]
Stalin called what he was doing socialism publicly, to gain the
favorable (at the time) cachet of the term; that doesn't mean he actually
believed his own press releases.
I think Stalin's definition is definition that dictionaries use.
Dictionaries have followed the Cold War misuse of the term, yes, as said
misuse was and is widespread, but that doesn't change the term's actual
meaning. You can use the term 'quark', say, to mean whatever you want;
that doesn't change the physics definition of the term.
Generally, "the workers" are the government when this is tried in
practice, [...]
No, that's the point: socialism hasn't been "tried in practice",
as you acknowledge.
[...] so there no distinction among "real world" socialism.
*sigh* The term "'real world' socialism" is incoherent, like "'real
world' unicorn"; neither currently actually exists in the 'real world'.
What you mean is non-socialist forms of government that deceptively label
themselves (or are mistakenly labelled) socialist.
I'm afraid that if you want to speak about ficticious forms of
government, then it's you that will have to pick new terminolgy.
Riiiight. I suppose the US will also have to invent new terminology for
our form of government, since China has appropriated the term 'republic'
for theirs.
By the way, I wonder what you think about the fact that the FSF often is
given outright copyright ownership for GPL works. Would this make free
software an act of "Stalinism" with RMS as dictator in your view?
Words most certainly can have two mutually exclusive meanings.
Please take an introductory semantics class, and then return to the
discussion. Thank you.
"Numbers most certainly can be odd; therefore, anyone objecting to
the claim that the number 2 is odd is obviously using faulty reasoning."
Please take an introductory logic class, and then return to the discussion.
Thank you.
In the enlish language, "he" does not imply gender unless the context
shows othe rwise. It is used for both the male and unknown pronoun. "She,"
on the other h and, does indicate gender.
When I run this through Babelfish on the 'ReactionaryKneejerk-to-English'
setting, I get the following:
In the English language, 'he' indicates the male gender and 'she' indicates
the female gender. In cases where ghe gender of a person cannot be
inferred from context, said person can and should be assumed to be male,
hence the use of 'he' is appropriate (and ironically, tends to reinforce
this very assumption). However, even though it is blindingly obvious that
this implicit assumption is being made, we strenuously deny that it is,
because we do not wish to admit, to ourselves or anyone else, that we are
doing so; instead, we pretend that the pronoun 'he' can somehow magically
have two mutually exclusive meanings.
So for those of you wondering why some of us always use "he" in the
unknown or g eneral case, it could very well be because we're speaking
English, rather than e ngaging in an Orwellian campaign to change the way
people think by modifying the language.
And again:
Anyone who dares to call us on this assumption can therefore be dismissed
out of hand as a Politically Correct Whiner(TM) whose position can be
summarily ignored on the grounds that they hold opinions we dislike. It is
not necessary to actually refute their position (fortunately, since we
cannot); the ad hominem suffices. [Sticking your fingers in your
ears and chanting, "La la la, 'he' is gender-neutral, la la la, I can't
hear you..." very loudly also works, but tends to look silly.]
See if they get caught off guard. If there is no Dave there, tell them
"Sorry, wrong number." and hang up.
Wasn't there a Calvin and Hobbes strip like that? I think the line Calvin
used was something like, "Hello, I'd like to order a large pepperoni
pizza," and the punch line was, "I like to make everyone's day a little
more surreal."
Think 20 years in the future, how can you see your world with DRM in
place?
Well, by then, of course, The Corporation(TM) will hold exclusive copyright
on your world, so to see your world with DRM in place you'll have to pay
The Corporation(TM)'s license fee and use The Corporation(TM)'s DRM-enabled
YourWorldViewer(TM). Your eyes, which you could use to see your world
without paying, will therefore be considered illegal circumvention devices
under the Domination by Media Corporations Act, and will be either removed
or retrofitted with DRM circuitry at birth.
Godwin's Law merely states that as a thread's length increases, the
probability of using Nazis or the Holocaust as a metric to compare peoples'
arguments approaches 1. There's nothing about who wins or who loses.
[...] There is a tradition in many groups that, once this occurs, that
thread is over, and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically lost
whatever argument was in progress. [...]
Re:Implication: the PC will fade away
on
Torvalds Tells All
·
· Score: 1
[...] toasters that know Sartre (and can help you with your
worldview) [...]
That would be Talkie Toaster from Red Dwarf, who
gave us the
truly insightful question, "Given that God is infinite, and that the
universe is also infinite, would you like a toasted teacake?"
Not out loud, no, but it was hard to miss. It could be a "forest for the
trees" sort of thing; these assumptions may well be so deeply ingrained
that you don't even see them anymore.
Where the fuck did you get that?
From your own words, sir. Why else, for instance, offer "maybe they just
picked the best people for the job" as an explanation for "mostly white
males" unless you believed that "best people for the job" did
explain "mostly white males" --- in other words, that the "best people for
the job" would be mostly white males? The statement makes no
sense any other way.
Perhaps, just maybe, there were mostly white people who tried out for
the parts on the show.
Again, why would there be a correlation between race/gender and interest in
the parts? Now, it's plausible that there was a correlation between
race/gender and people available for the parts; that would be just
another symptom of the problem you so strenuously deny exists.
[...] except Voyager where perhaps Janeway was specifically cast because
they wanted a female captain.
Case in point again. You didn't even consider the possibility that Mulgrew
was hired because she was the best person for the job. No, it
must have been "'affirmative action'-type bullshit".
I'm not a bigot, I was raised without even realizing there was tension
among races in this country.
Exactly. You were raised with the assumption that there was no problem,
so when the problem is pointed out to you, you can't see it.
Sir, you need to embrace reality.
The words "pot", "kettle" and "black" spring to mind for no obvious reason.
Perhaps the creators of the show just picked the best people for the job
and were unconcerned with "affirmative action"-type bullshit.
Mm. Note the implicit assumptions being smuggled in here: that it is
reasonable to expect that "the best people for the job" will be mostly
white males (rather than being uncorrelated with race and sex, as a
non-racist, non-sexist person would expect), and thereby reasonable to
assume that if the cast actually does bear some passing resemblance to the
actual make-up of the population, it's probably the result of "'affirmative
action'-type bullshit".
No, you're certainly not a bigot. What could I have been
thinking?
When someone complains when there isn't more ethnic diversity or gay
people on a television show, I consider that to be whiny, [...]
Yes, I imagine you do. For reference, do you also consider the complaints
in other threads of redneck stereotyping (Cmdr. Tucker, the shotgun-toting
Oklahoma farmer) to be "whiny"? Or is it only "whining" if you disagree
with the complaint (or dislike the complainers)?
[...] especially in light of the fact that ST has always been very
ethnically diverse.
Um, yes, that was rather the original petitioner's point, as I understood
it -- that, so far at least, this latest outing in the Trek universe seems
markedly less so.
Oh no, they're more worried about trying to create a good show than
trying to be PC to pander to all the whiny wacko liberals who think it's
their right to force their views down everyone's throat.
You misspelled "who think it's their right not to have my views forced down
their throats" in the preceding. HTH.
We have now reached the point where every goon with a grievance, every
bitter bigot, merely has to place the prefix, 'I know this is not
politically correct, but...' in front of the usual string of insults
in order to be not just safe from criticism, but actually a card, a
lad, even a hero. Conversely, to talk about poverty and inequality, to
draw attention to the reality that discrimination and injustice are
still facts of life, is to commit the sin of political correctness.
Anti-PC has become the latest cover for creeps. It is a godsend for
every curmudgeon and crank, from fascists to the merely smug.
-- Finian O'Toole, The Irish Times, 5 May 1994
Another variant I've seen on some Unix systems is asprintf(),
which malloc()s its own buffer and grows it as necessary to
accommodate the sprintf() output.
Just to pick pits, but fgets() is no safer than
gets(). gets() is simply a more specific version of
fgets(), using stdin as the file handle.
With the all-important difference that fgets() allows (indeed,
requires) you to specify the buffer size, and gets() doesn't.
fgets(buf, sizeof(buf), stdin) will stop reading when the buffer
fills up if it hasn't hit a new-line yet; gets(buf) won't, and
there's no way to convince it to.
I know about--and use--apt-get source, but it's not aware of
dependencies [...]
Actually, I think apt-get -b source will follow build dependencies
(the Build-Depends: line in debian/control), which IINM
is essentially the same thing that the ports are doing. Of course, it will
also try to compile the package immediately after downloading it, which is
counterproductive if you wanted to modify the package before building it;
it would, I agree be useful to have a more fine-grained option there.
Slashdot Mirror
Since the above-quoted is not, in fact, a personal attack, your observation, while true, is a non sequitur.
(shrug) Bram would need permission to redistribute third-party patches no matter what license he used. What's your point?
Alas, he does not; nor, apparently, do you.
He already has that power, by virtue of being the copyright holder. No license is needed to give him that power, and no license can take it away from him.
This is a category error. The GPL is a decision on the part of the copyright holder. If Bram licenses Vim to person X under the GPL, that is a decision by Bram that person X should not be allowed to distribute binaries without distributing sources. If Bram believes that person Y should be allowed to distribute binaries without distributing sources, he can effect that decision by licensing Vim to person Y under some other license which specifically grants that permission. You appear to be asserting that the GPL can somehow deny Bram his authority as copyright holder to do this.
See, this is why (to answer an earlier assertion by someone else) we claim that GPL opponents simply don't understand the GPL: all the objections to the GPL that I've seen demonstrate a misunderstanding of the GPL.
I'm sorry, but he is factually correct. Look up 'contrapositive' in that Boolean logic textbook of yours.
But the War Powers Act is not carte blanche. Section 5(b) requires the President to withdraw the military after 60 days if Congress hasn't given him a declaration of war by then. Both Clinton and Bush the Elder have been sued by Congress over violations of this. It remains, then, to be seen what will happen this time around. When did the clock officially start on this one?
And is more generally known as the Fallacy of Complex Question.
No. Dictionaries codify and document mainstream usage of terms, correct or otherwise. Terms of art such as this are properly defined by the community which originates and uses them. The meanings of the terms "quark" and "meson" are determined by the physics community; the meanings of the terms "capitalism" and "socialism" are determined by the political science community.
My correct word usage, sir. Go play your word games somewhere else.
Because it wasn't what I was responding to, and it wasn't what I was interested in. I couldn't care less what sort of political or economic system the GPL might or might not resemble. And yes, it was red-baiting; you won't admit it, of course, but you were implicitly accusing me of endorsing Stalinism -- a dirty trick, and one typical of the loser in such an argument.
Um, Hitler didn't even become Chancellor until 1933. As late as 1928, the Nazi party had only 12 seats out of about 600 in Germany's parliament; and in the 1930 elections, the Nazi party pulled in a mere 18 percent of the vote. In fact, in 1932 Hitler lost the election to Paul von Hindenburg, by a decisive 53 percent to 37 percent margin. Hitler never had enough popular support to be democratically elected Chancellor.
Those are the textbook political science definitions of the terms, their misuse in Cold War propaganda notwithstanding.
Stalin called what he was doing socialism publicly, to gain the favorable (at the time) cachet of the term; that doesn't mean he actually believed his own press releases.
Dictionaries have followed the Cold War misuse of the term, yes, as said misuse was and is widespread, but that doesn't change the term's actual meaning. You can use the term 'quark', say, to mean whatever you want; that doesn't change the physics definition of the term.
No, that's the point: socialism hasn't been "tried in practice", as you acknowledge.
*sigh* The term "'real world' socialism" is incoherent, like "'real world' unicorn"; neither currently actually exists in the 'real world'. What you mean is non-socialist forms of government that deceptively label themselves (or are mistakenly labelled) socialist.
Riiiight. I suppose the US will also have to invent new terminology for our form of government, since China has appropriated the term 'republic' for theirs.
Ooh, red-baiting. Color me unsurprised.
*sigh* This is exactly the sort of "'red scare' propoganda" the original petitioner was talking about. You're describing Stalinism, not socialism.
"Ooh, look, Alan Cox is merging with the kernel!"
"Numbers most certainly can be odd; therefore, anyone objecting to the claim that the number 2 is odd is obviously using faulty reasoning." Please take an introductory logic class, and then return to the discussion. Thank you.
When I run this through Babelfish on the 'ReactionaryKneejerk-to-English' setting, I get the following:
And again:
Wasn't there a Calvin and Hobbes strip like that? I think the line Calvin used was something like, "Hello, I'd like to order a large pepperoni pizza," and the punch line was, "I like to make everyone's day a little more surreal."
Well, by then, of course, The Corporation(TM) will hold exclusive copyright on your world, so to see your world with DRM in place you'll have to pay The Corporation(TM)'s license fee and use The Corporation(TM)'s DRM-enabled YourWorldViewer(TM). Your eyes, which you could use to see your world without paying, will therefore be considered illegal circumvention devices under the Domination by Media Corporations Act, and will be either removed or retrofitted with DRM circuitry at birth.
On other entries, I'm inclined to agree; I don't see, though, what agenda he could be furthering in this particular case.
Not strictly true, according to the Jargon File:
That would be Talkie Toaster from Red Dwarf, who gave us the truly insightful question, "Given that God is infinite, and that the universe is also infinite, would you like a toasted teacake?"
I imagine God would have to recuse Himself on the grounds of conflict of interest, considering that Microsoft owns his primary competitor.
Not out loud, no, but it was hard to miss. It could be a "forest for the trees" sort of thing; these assumptions may well be so deeply ingrained that you don't even see them anymore.
From your own words, sir. Why else, for instance, offer "maybe they just picked the best people for the job" as an explanation for "mostly white males" unless you believed that "best people for the job" did explain "mostly white males" --- in other words, that the "best people for the job" would be mostly white males? The statement makes no sense any other way.
Again, why would there be a correlation between race/gender and interest in the parts? Now, it's plausible that there was a correlation between race/gender and people available for the parts; that would be just another symptom of the problem you so strenuously deny exists.
Case in point again. You didn't even consider the possibility that Mulgrew was hired because she was the best person for the job. No, it must have been "'affirmative action'-type bullshit".
Exactly. You were raised with the assumption that there was no problem, so when the problem is pointed out to you, you can't see it.
The words "pot", "kettle" and "black" spring to mind for no obvious reason.
Mm. Note the implicit assumptions being smuggled in here: that it is reasonable to expect that "the best people for the job" will be mostly white males (rather than being uncorrelated with race and sex, as a non-racist, non-sexist person would expect), and thereby reasonable to assume that if the cast actually does bear some passing resemblance to the actual make-up of the population, it's probably the result of "'affirmative action'-type bullshit".
No, you're certainly not a bigot. What could I have been thinking?
Yes, I imagine you do. For reference, do you also consider the complaints in other threads of redneck stereotyping (Cmdr. Tucker, the shotgun-toting Oklahoma farmer) to be "whiny"? Or is it only "whining" if you disagree with the complaint (or dislike the complainers)?
Um, yes, that was rather the original petitioner's point, as I understood it -- that, so far at least, this latest outing in the Trek universe seems markedly less so.
You misspelled "who think it's their right not to have my views forced down their throats" in the preceding. HTH.
I'm reminded of a quote:
Another variant I've seen on some Unix systems is asprintf(), which malloc()s its own buffer and grows it as necessary to accommodate the sprintf() output.
With the all-important difference that fgets() allows (indeed, requires) you to specify the buffer size, and gets() doesn't. fgets(buf, sizeof(buf), stdin) will stop reading when the buffer fills up if it hasn't hit a new-line yet; gets(buf) won't, and there's no way to convince it to.
Actually, I think apt-get -b source will follow build dependencies (the Build-Depends: line in debian/control), which IINM is essentially the same thing that the ports are doing. Of course, it will also try to compile the package immediately after downloading it, which is counterproductive if you wanted to modify the package before building it; it would, I agree be useful to have a more fine-grained option there.