In 1998, the average per student expenditure for U.S. elementary and high schools was roughly the same as the per student expenditure at Harvard (NOT the tuition, but Harvard's expenditure).
I find that doubtful.
This page shows that in 1991, the publicly funded portion of education expenditure per primary and secondary students in the United States was $4,605.
This page show's that Harvards's library and information resources expenditure alone per student in 1999 was $3,904.
In 1998, with expenses of $1.6 billion and a student population of 18,500, Harvard's expense per student was...almost $88,000. We probably shouldn't count research expenses toward that, so take away the 23% for that and it's still $68,000 per student for instruction and related support.
I doubt that private expenditures were high enough to make up that $60,000+ difference, or that education spending rose enough during the 90s to catch up.
More importantly, "average" hides many things. Average a kid at an expensive private school with a $16,000 yearly expenditure with a kid at a near-bankrupt inner city school with a $2,000 yearly expenditure, and you've got an average of $9,000 per student year.
The idea that "American public schools are failing" is false because there is no American public school system - each county can be a radically different case.
That's well illustrated in my area, where within the space of a few miles the Baltimore City school system is on the verge of failing, Baltimore County schools are generally adequate (though that varies significantly in different parts of the county), and Howard County schools are doing well. The pass rates on the High School Assessment tests are 33%, 50%, and 74% respectively - more than a factor of 2 between Howard County and Baltimore City.
Without employers (mostly corporations), the people would have no money.
In an economy ruled by corporations, yes. In a sensible economy, we wouldn't have a capitalist class of employers; people would work for themselves, trading labor as sole proprietorships, co-ops, collectives, and employee-owned companies, not as wage slaves to an owning class.
The idea that people have to rely on capitalists for employment is a manifestation of what I call "the fallacy of the king's table scraps..."
Once there was a king. He wasn't all that bad as kings went, didn't impale his subjects for his own amusement or stuff like that, which made him more popular with his subjects than the last few kings.
Still, he was a king, and he was strongly of the opinion that everything in his kingdom belonged to him by divine right. He took the best, and left the rest to the peasants. But he knew the value of a pacified populace; he gave his table scraps to the hungry, and no one starved.
Then among the hungry serfs there came a rabble rouser. "Wait a minute! Why should the king get the best while we live on scraps from his table? We should get rid of this guy!"
The peasants were not receptive to the idea. "He's so much better than our last few kings! Surely he'd just be replaced by someone worse!"
The rabble rouser tried to explain. "No, don't you see? I'm not saying replace the king with a new one, I'm saying get rid of kings altogether!"
But the hungry peasants would have none of it. "Shut up! Shut up! Without a king, who would give us the table scraps we live on?"
So where do drug dealers and smugglers get their authority to do business?
Drug dealers and smugglers are not dealing in copyright, patents, resource exploitation rights, ownership of stock, or other artifical property.
There's a difference between owning a pack of cigarettes and owning a tobacco farm. The former is a natual ownership that would be recognized in any culture; the latter requires the state to control territory by "right of conquest" (all land claims rest on force), define land as ownable, and to issue a land deed.
On the other hand, drug dealers and smugglers are dealing in property made artificially scarce, and thus enjoy tremendous price-supports from the government.
Lasseiz-faire libertarians don't realize that capitalism in and of itself does not provide social structure...A government needs to be on hand to keep the capitalists from oppressing the people.
Libertarian socialists, on the other hand, realize that government is exactly what enables capitalists to oppress the people.
Capitalism is not a "ground state" that emerges from a minimal government, it requires a strong government to create and enforce the artificial property rights (land held for rent or exploitation, "intellectual property", inherited wealth, stock ownership) on which capitalism depends.
But then the government pays companies to develop drugs that make you happy no matter how shitty your life really is (SSRIs, the new super-tranqs like Ativan, etc.)
Careful there, people will think you're guilty of drug evasion...
Anarchy is too unstructured to be of real use, though. If we had *no* structure, we would be in just as bad a shape as we are with too much.
You seems to hold a common misconception. Anarchy does not mean "no structure". It means "no rulers", no hierarchy.
It is of course a difficult ideal to reach. I'm a Zenarchist:
Universal Enlightenment is a prerequisite to abolition of the State, after which the State will inevitably vanish. Or - that failing - nobody will give a damn.
Look, if you can't compete with third-world technical labor, that's YOUR problem. Nobody owes you a thing in this country.
Corporations owe their existence to the state. Capitalists owe their ability to own such artifical property as copyright, patents, and resource exploitation rights, to the state.
In a democracy, the state owes its existance to the people. (Not individually, obviously, but en masse.)
Therefore, corporations indirectly owe their existance and capitalists indirectly owe their riches to the people.
If we're going to allow our government to funnel economic power into the hands to a few and to create legal monsters that are capable only of seeking profit, it's sensible for us to demand that it keep them leashed. That includes demanding employment practices that are not a race to the bottom.
While Turing's work in the area of AI was certainly revolutionary for its time it is now generally considered by experts that his test is not an effective way to establish if an agent is intelligent.
The question at hand is not about "intelligence" but about "thinking". Vision and planning may require "intelligence" (depending on how we define that word) but have nothing to do with the question Turing was considering:
I propose to consider the question, "Can machines think?" This should begin with definitions of the meaning of the terms "machine" and "think." The definitions might be framed so as to reflect so far as possible the normal use of the words, but this attitude is dangerous, If the meaning of the words "machine" and "think" are to be found by examining how they are commonly used it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the meaning and the answer to the question, "Can machines think?" is to be sought in a statistical survey such as a Gallup poll. But this is absurd. Instead of attempting such a definition I shall replace the question by another, which is closely related to it and is expressed in relatively unambiguous words....
That doesn't even get into the whole Searle's Chinese Room thing (whether you buy the argument or not.)
Searle's Chinese Room objection is a load of fetid dingo's kidneys.
and a lot of effort has gone into hiding that complexity in a modern car
Insulating is not quite the same as hiding.
The difference is that with cars a user knows there is underlying complexity, and is prepared to recieve dozens of hours of training and take it to experts (and pay real money!) for maintenance and when problems develop - even undergo government mandated licencing and safety and pollution inspections. Yet many expect a computer, orders of magnitude more complex, to "just work" for them without any effort on their part.
I'm not saying that using a computer effectively has to be hard, just that it can never be trivially easy.
Or in other words, the computer's specific purpose is to be a general purpose device. It has an untold number of exclusive intended uses, while a car only has one. This is why I feel that the car:computer analogy is a poor one.
Depends on the context of the analogy. To fuse your argument with mine, if a car which has only one purpose requires training for it to be used effectively, why would be beleive for a moment that a general purpose device could be used effectively by the ignorant?
Oh wait, you didn't know that those were all computers? Sorry, I guess I have been working in embedded systems for too long....
Then I'm sure that you understand the difference between a general-purpose personal computer and an embedded systems, neh? One of them being that end users tend not to install other software on an embedded system. Or demand a theme-able skinnable GUI. Or run your software on incompatible hardware platforms. Speaking of which...
For example, why do the printer drivers for my Laserjet IID stink so bad under Linux?
Ask HP. Perhaps if you want to run Linux you should buy a printer that works more than "Mostly" with Linux? (I recommed Samsung's ML-1430, it's worked great for me.)
It gaming systems are so easy to use, why is the 'desktop' so stinking hard?
Because the things you do in games are fewer and less complex than things you do on the desktop, as are the things you do them to and with.
Game designed get to contrain actions, subjects, and objects, but computer users want to create their own objects (files), and install their own software (creating new actions and subjects).
An elevator has only six possible states: going up, going down, or stopped, multiplied by doors open or doors closed. While getting into those states may have required skill in old elevators, the complexity was inherently limited.
Your computer has a whole bunch more potential states of configuration and execution. Just assuming ten programs that may or may not be running at a given time, right there you've got 1,024 states. Then there's the state of each of those programs - say each program is not just running or not, but can be in one of five states (which is not unreasonable - not running, loading, reading, writing, and closing). Now you've got 5^10=9,765,625 possible states for your system to be in. Six orders of magnitude more complex than the elevator. Then assume a few variables of configuration - just ten binary values would take us up to ten billion states. (And that's assuming only ten programs - right now ps -ax | wc says I've got over 100 processes running.)
It gets worse if you take a finer-grained view of what a state is - the RAM in your system can assume more states than the number of elementary particles in the Universe.
Of coruse in theory, our operating system partitions that complexity, so you only have to deal with the states of one program at a time. And one way it does that it by separating user privileges.
The "users should have to learn" mentality is what keeps computers complicated and difficult to use.
Computers are complicated and difficult to use properly, and until we all admit that the picture for safety and security remains bleak.
Automobiles are much less complicated, but we don't try to hide that complexity; we assume that people must be trained in their proper use. Why not computers?
A few people are sloppy and let couple refer to the "few", meaning, but most people prefer the definition referring to a pair.
Not at all. In phrases such as "a couple of dollars" or "a couple of minutes", the "few" meaning is clearly meant by the majority of speakers. The page you link to has a good usage note from the American Heritage Dictionary:
Although the phrase
a couple of has been well established in English since before the Renaissance, modern critics have sometimes maintained that a couple of is too inexact to be appropriate in formal writing. But the inexactitude of a couple of may serve a useful purpose, suggesting that the writer is indifferent to the precise number of items involved. Thus the sentence She lives only a couple of miles away implies not only that the distance is short but that its exact measure is unimportant. This usage should be considered unobjectionable on all levels of style.
My car can "fly" for 4 hours at 110 mph, and it often does, too. Any particular reason for wanting to go half the speed, quarter as far, just because it's above ground?
Going "point to point" and not having traffic congestion, you might get much further in two hours flying 55mph, than four hours driving.
From what I have understood from the GPL, and specifically that quote of it, it seems that the criterion for sufficiently close linkage for the GPL's "derived work" can be identified as "the same process".
Nither the GPL nor the FSF gets to define what constitutes a derivative work. That's comes purely from copyright law, and it's still vague when applied to software.
The FSF has its opinions on the matter, and is not shy about expressing them, but we shouldn't mistake their intention or explanation of the GPL for its actual legal meaning.
Perhaps the situation could be resolved by looking at the analogy of an interpreter.
I think the best analogy for a library is...a library. If I'm writing a book and go to my dead-trees library, photocopy a bunch of pages from FooBar in a Nutshell and include them in my book, my book's clearly a derivative work. But if I say in my book "See Sections 1.7, 2.3, 2.7.18, and 3.14 of FooBar in a Nutshell", my book is not a derived work, even though it requires the reader to have FooBar in a Nutshell in their library to use it.
That's true even if the two books are meant to be used together. Say my book is a cookbook, and the referred book is a book of descriptions of cooking techniques, and you have to have them both open on your kitchen counter to get something cooked - in the same "reading space" if you will. My book is still not a derivative work.
Don't get me wrong; I'm a fan and supporter of the FSF and the GPL. I just don't agree with this specific assertation made by the former about the latter.
I understand FSF asserts a program that dynamically links to a GPL library is a derived work of that library, hence subject to the GPL. I have tried without success to discover the legal reasoning behind that assertion.
What constitutes combining two parts into one program? This is a legal question, which ultimately judges will decide. We believe that a proper criterion depends both on the mechanism of communication (exec, pipes, rpc, function calls within a shared address space, etc.) and the semantics of the communication (what kinds of information are interchanged).
If the modules are included in the same executable file, they are definitely combined in one program. If modules are designed to run linked together in a shared address space, that almost surely means combining them into one program.
By contrast, pipes, sockets and command-line arguments are communication mechanisms normally used between two separate programs. So when they are used for communication, the modules normally are separate programs. But if the semantics of the communication are intimate enough, exchanging complex internal data structures, that too could be a basis to consider the two parts as combined into a larger program.
I'm not sure I agree that the fact that modules are designed to run in a shared address space means in itself that they should be considered one work. There's going to have to be a legal ruling on that at some point, I think.
The only quibble I have with that is that it's classified as an "exception". In order to be bound by the GPL, you have to somehow actively agree to it. Like when you download GPL software, you're tacitly agreeing to the GPL in exchange for using the software.
Incorrect.
The GPL does not regulate your right to use the software, only to copy, distribute, and make derivative works: Activities other than copying, distribution and modification are not covered by this License; they are outside its scope.
And you don't have to actively agree to it - but if you don't, by default under copyright law you have no right to copy, distribute, or derive from the work. You are not required to accept this License, since you have not signed it. However, nothing else grants you permission to modify or distribute the Program or its derivative works. These actions are prohibited by law if you do not accept this License. Therefore, by modifying or distributing the Program (or any work based on the Program), you indicate your acceptance of this License to do so, and all its terms and conditions for copying, distributing or modifying the Program or works based on it.
It clearly doesn't apply if a font is distributed under the GPL without such an addition.
No, it's not clear.
"Font licensing is a complex issue which needs serious consideration," FSF says, and suggests the additional clause to avoid the complexity.
They're not saying "All your documents are belong to us unless you use this clause," they're saying "Somebody might try to claim `All your documents are belong to us' unless you use this clause."
I don't think anyone could successfully argue that using a font to which copyright applies makes a text document a derivative work. On the other hand, if you are creating a work of graphic design in which font figures prominently, things might be more complex.
(Have copyright claims on a font ever been tested in court? There seem to be any number of rip-offs and clones of any popular font.)
And, if you'll remember, one part of Gene Roddenberry's vision of humanity's future was that, by the time of Star Trek, we'd have progressed beyond such superstitious nonsense.
Religion played a role in several TOS episodes.
We had the "Son-worshipers" on the paralell Earth with a 20th-century Rome, in which ep McCoy states "we represent many different faiths".
The M5 computer essentially commits suicide after coming to believe that murder is "against the laws of man and god".
The Vulcans seem awefully Zen-like with their robes and their meditation. (Of course people argue whether Zen is a religion or not.)
The asteroid world Yonada was ruled by a priestess
They're software users. They can't even tell the difference. To them, all formats are proprietary.
You don't need to know anything about automobile engines to understand why buying a car with a hood that can only be opened by the dealer is not a good idea.
If you add Nifty New Feature(tm) to your Open Source-based product, the odds are that you'll have to serialize the data associated with the feature. Suddenly, you're forced to wait until The World Agrees(sm) to deploy the new version of the product.
What the heck are you talking about? There's nothing about any open source or free software license that makes you wait until anyone agrees before you release code.
Developers and enterpreneurs need to eat, too, and their kids need braces just like everyone else's kids. Whether you [or I] like it or not, software is a business now.
Smart developers and enterpreneurs are learning to make money off free software. Hint - people want services and systems.
Inability to innovate privately is incompatible with a free-market economy.
Nonsense. Copyright and patents that make knowledge private are state interventions in the marketplace; free software is closer to true free market conditions than proprietary software.
How about if I let you read my views for free, but you need to look at some ads too? Will that work for you?
Just how are you going to ensure that I look at your ads? Like this perhaps?
If I come to your site, it's not to have things pitched at me, therefore I have no intention of paying any attention to your ads. Sending them at me is at best a waste of processor power and bandwidth.
Slashdot Mirror
I find that doubtful.
This page shows that in 1991, the publicly funded portion of education expenditure per primary and secondary students in the United States was $4,605.
This page show's that Harvards's library and information resources expenditure alone per student in 1999 was $3,904.
In 1998, with expenses of $1.6 billion and a student population of 18,500, Harvard's expense per student was...almost $88,000. We probably shouldn't count research expenses toward that, so take away the 23% for that and it's still $68,000 per student for instruction and related support.
I doubt that private expenditures were high enough to make up that $60,000+ difference, or that education spending rose enough during the 90s to catch up.
More importantly, "average" hides many things. Average a kid at an expensive private school with a $16,000 yearly expenditure with a kid at a near-bankrupt inner city school with a $2,000 yearly expenditure, and you've got an average of $9,000 per student year.
Again in 1991, public U.S. expenditures per student ranged from $2,600 in Mississippi to $7,900 in Alaska.
The idea that "American public schools are failing" is false because there is no American public school system - each county can be a radically different case.
That's well illustrated in my area, where within the space of a few miles the Baltimore City school system is on the verge of failing, Baltimore County schools are generally adequate (though that varies significantly in different parts of the county), and Howard County schools are doing well. The pass rates on the High School Assessment tests are 33%, 50%, and 74% respectively - more than a factor of 2 between Howard County and Baltimore City.
Or brilliant.
Ellison got the screenplay for I, Robot right decades ago. It's a tragedy that it will never be filmed.
When have I suggested that enlightenment involves acquiring some sort of external source, or is incompatible with "being" or "doing"?
"The mystical power and wondrous function is carrying water and lugging firewood." - Layman Pang.
In an economy ruled by corporations, yes. In a sensible economy, we wouldn't have a capitalist class of employers; people would work for themselves, trading labor as sole proprietorships, co-ops, collectives, and employee-owned companies, not as wage slaves to an owning class.
The idea that people have to rely on capitalists for employment is a manifestation of what I call "the fallacy of the king's table scraps..."
Once there was a king. He wasn't all that bad as kings went, didn't impale his subjects for his own amusement or stuff like that, which made him more popular with his subjects than the last few kings.
Still, he was a king, and he was strongly of the opinion that everything in his kingdom belonged to him by divine right. He took the best, and left the rest to the peasants. But he knew the value of a pacified populace; he gave his table scraps to the hungry, and no one starved.
Then among the hungry serfs there came a rabble rouser. "Wait a minute! Why should the king get the best while we live on scraps from his table? We should get rid of this guy!"
The peasants were not receptive to the idea. "He's so much better than our last few kings! Surely he'd just be replaced by someone worse!"
The rabble rouser tried to explain. "No, don't you see? I'm not saying replace the king with a new one, I'm saying get rid of kings altogether!"
But the hungry peasants would have none of it. "Shut up! Shut up! Without a king, who would give us the table scraps we live on?"
Drug dealers and smugglers are not dealing in copyright, patents, resource exploitation rights, ownership of stock, or other artifical property.
There's a difference between owning a pack of cigarettes and owning a tobacco farm. The former is a natual ownership that would be recognized in any culture; the latter requires the state to control territory by "right of conquest" (all land claims rest on force), define land as ownable, and to issue a land deed.
On the other hand, drug dealers and smugglers are dealing in property made artificially scarce, and thus enjoy tremendous price-supports from the government.
Libertarian socialists, on the other hand, realize that government is exactly what enables capitalists to oppress the people.
Capitalism is not a "ground state" that emerges from a minimal government, it requires a strong government to create and enforce the artificial property rights (land held for rent or exploitation, "intellectual property", inherited wealth, stock ownership) on which capitalism depends.
Careful there, people will think you're guilty of drug evasion...You seems to hold a common misconception. Anarchy does not mean "no structure". It means "no rulers", no hierarchy.
It is of course a difficult ideal to reach. I'm a Zenarchist: Universal Enlightenment is a prerequisite to abolition of the State, after which the State will inevitably vanish. Or - that failing - nobody will give a damn.
Corporations owe their existence to the state. Capitalists owe their ability to own such artifical property as copyright, patents, and resource exploitation rights, to the state.
In a democracy, the state owes its existance to the people. (Not individually, obviously, but en masse.)
Therefore, corporations indirectly owe their existance and capitalists indirectly owe their riches to the people.
If we're going to allow our government to funnel economic power into the hands to a few and to create legal monsters that are capable only of seeking profit, it's sensible for us to demand that it keep them leashed. That includes demanding employment practices that are not a race to the bottom.
(The better alternative, of course, would be to altogether get rid of the state's power to enrich capitalists and charter corporations.)
The question at hand is not about "intelligence" but about "thinking". Vision and planning may require "intelligence" (depending on how we define that word) but have nothing to do with the question Turing was considering:
Searle's Chinese Room objection is a load of fetid dingo's kidneys.
Insulating is not quite the same as hiding.
The difference is that with cars a user knows there is underlying complexity, and is prepared to recieve dozens of hours of training and take it to experts (and pay real money!) for maintenance and when problems develop - even undergo government mandated licencing and safety and pollution inspections. Yet many expect a computer, orders of magnitude more complex, to "just work" for them without any effort on their part.
I'm not saying that using a computer effectively has to be hard, just that it can never be trivially easy.
The issue is not the consequences of mis-use, but the complexity of learning proper use.
Anyway - bad software kills. Probably the best known incident is the Therac 25 software failure.
Peter G. Neumann notes over 700 deaths in 24 incidents - and that was just by 1986. (All software developers should read PGN's RISKS Forum.) Some more fatal incidents can be found here.
Depends on the context of the analogy. To fuse your argument with mine, if a car which has only one purpose requires training for it to be used effectively, why would be beleive for a moment that a general purpose device could be used effectively by the ignorant?
Then I'm sure that you understand the difference between a general-purpose personal computer and an embedded systems, neh? One of them being that end users tend not to install other software on an embedded system. Or demand a theme-able skinnable GUI. Or run your software on incompatible hardware platforms. Speaking of which...
Ask HP. Perhaps if you want to run Linux you should buy a printer that works more than "Mostly" with Linux? (I recommed Samsung's ML-1430, it's worked great for me.)
Because the things you do in games are fewer and less complex than things you do on the desktop, as are the things you do them to and with.
Game designed get to contrain actions, subjects, and objects, but computer users want to create their own objects (files), and install their own software (creating new actions and subjects).
An elevator has only six possible states: going up, going down, or stopped, multiplied by doors open or doors closed. While getting into those states may have required skill in old elevators, the complexity was inherently limited.
Your computer has a whole bunch more potential states of configuration and execution. Just assuming ten programs that may or may not be running at a given time, right there you've got 1,024 states. Then there's the state of each of those programs - say each program is not just running or not, but can be in one of five states (which is not unreasonable - not running, loading, reading, writing, and closing). Now you've got 5^10=9,765,625 possible states for your system to be in. Six orders of magnitude more complex than the elevator. Then assume a few variables of configuration - just ten binary values would take us up to ten billion states. (And that's assuming only ten programs - right now ps -ax | wc says I've got over 100 processes running.)
It gets worse if you take a finer-grained view of what a state is - the RAM in your system can assume more states than the number of elementary particles in the Universe.
Of coruse in theory, our operating system partitions that complexity, so you only have to deal with the states of one program at a time. And one way it does that it by separating user privileges.
Automobiles are much less complicated, but we don't try to hide that complexity; we assume that people must be trained in their proper use. Why not computers?
Not at all. In phrases such as "a couple of dollars" or "a couple of minutes", the "few" meaning is clearly meant by the majority of speakers. The page you link to has a good usage note from the American Heritage Dictionary:
Going "point to point" and not having traffic congestion, you might get much further in two hours flying 55mph, than four hours driving.
Sure, for markup languages. But your Postscript or PDF output can embed fonts, which makes the situation complex.
Nither the GPL nor the FSF gets to define what constitutes a derivative work. That's comes purely from copyright law, and it's still vague when applied to software.
The FSF has its opinions on the matter, and is not shy about expressing them, but we shouldn't mistake their intention or explanation of the GPL for its actual legal meaning.
I think the best analogy for a library is...a library. If I'm writing a book and go to my dead-trees library, photocopy a bunch of pages from FooBar in a Nutshell and include them in my book, my book's clearly a derivative work. But if I say in my book "See Sections 1.7, 2.3, 2.7.18, and 3.14 of FooBar in a Nutshell", my book is not a derived work, even though it requires the reader to have FooBar in a Nutshell in their library to use it.
That's true even if the two books are meant to be used together. Say my book is a cookbook, and the referred book is a book of descriptions of cooking techniques, and you have to have them both open on your kitchen counter to get something cooked - in the same "reading space" if you will. My book is still not a derivative work.
Don't get me wrong; I'm a fan and supporter of the FSF and the GPL. I just don't agree with this specific assertation made by the former about the latter.
I'm not sure I agree that the fact that modules are designed to run in a shared address space means in itself that they should be considered one work. There's going to have to be a legal ruling on that at some point, I think.
Incorrect.
The GPL does not regulate your right to use the software, only to copy, distribute, and make derivative works: Activities other than copying, distribution and modification are not covered by this License; they are outside its scope.
And you don't have to actively agree to it - but if you don't, by default under copyright law you have no right to copy, distribute, or derive from the work. You are not required to accept this License, since you have not signed it. However, nothing else grants you permission to modify or distribute the Program or its derivative works. These actions are prohibited by law if you do not accept this License. Therefore, by modifying or distributing the Program (or any work based on the Program), you indicate your acceptance of this License to do so, and all its terms and conditions for copying, distributing or modifying the Program or works based on it.
No, it's not clear.
"Font licensing is a complex issue which needs serious consideration," FSF says, and suggests the additional clause to avoid the complexity.
They're not saying "All your documents are belong to us unless you use this clause," they're saying "Somebody might try to claim `All your documents are belong to us' unless you use this clause."
I don't think anyone could successfully argue that using a font to which copyright applies makes a text document a derivative work. On the other hand, if you are creating a work of graphic design in which font figures prominently, things might be more complex.
(Have copyright claims on a font ever been tested in court? There seem to be any number of rip-offs and clones of any popular font.)
Religion played a role in several TOS episodes.
We had the "Son-worshipers" on the paralell Earth with a 20th-century Rome, in which ep McCoy states "we represent many different faiths".
The M5 computer essentially commits suicide after coming to believe that murder is "against the laws of man and god".
The Vulcans seem awefully Zen-like with their robes and their meditation. (Of course people argue whether Zen is a religion or not.)
The asteroid world Yonada was ruled by a priestess
And we had space hippies searching for Eden.
You don't need to know anything about automobile engines to understand why buying a car with a hood that can only be opened by the dealer is not a good idea.
What the heck are you talking about? There's nothing about any open source or free software license that makes you wait until anyone agrees before you release code.
Smart developers and enterpreneurs are learning to make money off free software. Hint - people want services and systems.
Nonsense. Copyright and patents that make knowledge private are state interventions in the marketplace; free software is closer to true free market conditions than proprietary software.
Just how are you going to ensure that I look at your ads? Like this perhaps?
If I come to your site, it's not to have things pitched at me, therefore I have no intention of paying any attention to your ads. Sending them at me is at best a waste of processor power and bandwidth.