It's worth pointing out that no-one (except a court) is really in a position to 'decree' what the LGPL clause 6 means
The FSF can certainly decree what the clause means. If you disagree with them or another copyright holder that agrees with them, you're welcome to go to court over it, which is often enough deterence in and of itself.
If, however, I want to include GPLed code in my program, the GPL forces me to release my program under the GPL. It has *infected* my program.
If you take a knife, and stab it into your chest, the knife has not *infected* your chest; you put it there of your own free will, knowing exactly what it would do.
doing it to piss people off will not get you very far,
Duh. Doing things to piss people off doesn't usually get people very far. But BSD people seem have a tendency to whine about people making GPL-covered changes to BSD works. You're the one who chose the license that lets us do that.
Apple saw that the FreeBSD system was solid and they added to it to make it a system they thought was overly viable for them and then later released an entire project (darwin) back under the BSD code it was incepted with.
No, Apple never released Darwin under the BSD license. They released it under the APSL license which includes the statement "You must make Source Code of all Your Deployed Modifications publicly available under the terms of this License...".
The FSF writes their licenses. Any subsequent ambiguities are to be decided in court.
How much does your attorney charge? If the FSF says that their license means such and such, are you really ready to go to court about it? Any group has the right to interpret their licenses or contracts as they will, and sue you if you don't follow their interpretation. Since the (L)GPL has never gone to trial, for all pratical purposes, in every case we've seen, it means what the FSF says it means.
if I go to your neighbors' doors and say "I think TheCarp is a soulless child molesting felon" there's nothing they can do because of the "I think" part.
Nonsense. Stating a fact as an opinion doesn't change its nature as libel. You are trying to destroy the reputation of someone else with falsehoods. That's the essence of libel, and whether or not it's stated as an opinion doesn't matter.
I have noticed the increased use of the 'she' pronoun to describe positions that are in all honesty dominated by males.
Does it bother you when people use he to describe positions that are usually held by females? So what if most administrators are male - the generic pronoun doesn't really matter anymore.
I am in favor of the creation of a new word to avoid the confusion between third person singular and plural.
If you lived in France, you could try that. However, English, like most languages, has no academy to dictate usage, so the only way to get a new word in is to use it and convince other people to use it. "They" works and is in usage. Arbitrarily using he and she is also in usage. "e" or "pe" is not in usage, and unless something changes, doesn't look like it will be used.
There are maybe a few dozen people in the world who could even partially decipher indo-european
Maybe if you pounded on the door at 3:30 in the morning and demanded the decipher it right then. Assuming what we think we know about Indo-European is correct, there's probably millions of people who could decipher it by going down to their library and checking out the right books.
But that misses part of the point. Homer's Greek was not the origin of thousands of languages, nor spoke over a huge area; but it was written, and what was written in it was important enough to preserve. As long as any fragment of the scholarly culture that would study Aristole or Homer or the New Testament survives, ancient Greek will still be readable. Part of the reason Indo-European isn't known is because it wasn't written, and hence there's no reason to learn it besides purely linguistic reasons.
Now, instead of 10,000, what is it were 100,000 years. How many people would speak it then?
That's a good question. There is, however, a material difference between the future and the past: writing and libraries. Unless we assume widespread distruction on a unprecedented level, there still will be people who understand some of the major languages of this era. Written language is very compact and clear, compared to pictographs; it'd be worth a try in addition to pictographs, especially for the most heavily radioactive first couple thousand years.
True, but you can still label something with Caesar's Latin or Homer's Greek or, if I'm not mistaken, Confucius's Chinese and every town with a population of over 10,000 has someone who could puzzle it out.
[buffer overflows are] the number-one way to whack any system, Microsoft or not.
Any system that's written in a language that's vulnerable to buffer overflows, like C or Assembly. Trying to hack a Lisp machine via a buffer overflow is probably pretty futile.
You might also say that the use of a already worldly known character would make a film easier to sell to viewers, but since the film wouldn't be from Disney, who would be running to the theatres to see it just because of Mickey (it could even be a porn movie, not that you would like your kids to see that, would you?).
What about Pinocchio, or Cinderalla? I'm sure Disney would love to lock those characters up. There have been porn movies based on Pinocchio and Cinderalla, but most people can tell the different - the X-rated sign, the other movies at the theater or in the rental show. Heck, there have been other movies based on Pinnochio and Cinderalla - has it really made much difference to Disney? It's easy to tell the difference between the whip-driven, minimum-wage animated stuff and stuff professionally done, and even the other well done Pinocchio movies haven't had nearly the impact of the Disney version.
There are 32 movies with Pinocchio in the title in the IMDB, including The Erotic Adventures of Pinocchio. Show me that not controlling Pinocchio has really hurt Disney, and I might start to believe it about Mickey.
Storm Troopers are exceptional shots trained in an accelerated fashion
Yeah, watch how they dealt with the ewoks.
Role-Playing games are always meant to capture the essence of a genre or franchise like Star Wars and add some realism to it.
Not realism, playability. Your character is mortal because it makes the game more fun, not because it makes the game more realistic.
My complaint was not that you can die though, it was about who was vulnerable. In an RPG version of Indian Jones, a lightly armed character with no body armor can take on a tank brigade singlehandly, and if he fails, he'll probably be captured, not killed. In an RPG version of Saving Private Ryan, the same character will die if he tries the same tactics. In Star Wars, Greedo's battle armor gave him no real advantage over Han Solo.
(Okay, so the bad guy cleaved me in two and I reform? Okay, I blast him into atoms with my atom blaster... Okay so he reforms instantly... Okay, so he cleaves me in two and I reform? Okay, so I blast... You get the picture...)
This sounds just like Quake or Halo deathmatch, or some of the D&D games where there was an unlimited supply of Raise Dead spells around.
If you look at the stories in AD&D, Tolkien, Jordan, and others, you notice that very few things just spawn from thin air,
If you look at real life, you'll notice that very few things just spawn from thin air. That doesn't mean that I want to sit around making them. I can't remember anybody in a D&D ever spending the time to make a magic item; they'd rather go fight the next bad guy.
That a very poorly outfitted long played character could be potentially defeated by a VERY well equipped nearly beginning character in combat. (Which is more realistic and much like real life then any other MMORPG I have played beside Ultima Online.)
So a character in full body armor with distance weapons (a stormtrooper) could kill someone with no body armor and no distance weapons (Luke)? It may be like real life, but it's nothing like Star Wars.
Why you'd ZIP an HTML file that you're offering on a web site is beyond me.
Because one common reason to do an HTML edition is pictures, and the system is set up to have one file per document.
we're doing a lot of mark-up anyway
Italics is not a lot of markup. XML calls for a lot of details that would take work. How many books have you post-processed? They accept XML; why don't you find out how hard it is to make an XML edition first hand?
A few years ago I was given a demo of TCP-dump by a resident BOFH. First step was to read all of the private communications between a certain user and other people in a chat room. The next was to take a look at some people's emails as they were relayed through the router (including their POP3 passwords)
OTOH, if you were interested, how hard would it have been to walk into the room when he wasn't there and tap the keyboard/install a hacked chat client/browse his email (and the password's probably right there, for the email program to read.) Why worry about one point if you aren't worry about all of them?
Ada does have the possibility to specify the precision of a number, but I am not sure that it reverts to BCD based library to do arithmetic with those.
It has the ability to use fixed point decimal numbers.
about Intel Coprocessors again, you can use BCD numbers
Actually, x86-64 doesn't support the old BCD instructions in 64 bit mode, reusing those codes for other things.
And the conventions for math and science formulas and equations produces a complex linear format I can't believe anyone would actually want to read.
It's basically TeX, the one true math typesetting system. Most mathematicans and many scientists know it quite well. It beats the heck out of MathML (one example in a MathML tutorial was 8 characters in TeX, and about 50 in MathML.)
Wouldn't it be possible to rig up a high-speed scanner based on digital video technology?
A large part of the speed problem is the page turning or moving the page past the sensors. In any case, digital cameras haven't shown enough detail for good scans, and plantery scanners (expensive digital cameras for scanning) cost several thousand dollars.
In point of fact, Project Gutenberg has long outgrown the 96 graphic characters in ASCII, though I think they themselves are ignorant of the fact.
Then I invite you to actually take a look at some of the texts. The Gutenberg people know quite well when they're using ASCII and when they're using Latin-1. If you'll look at the books that are posted, some of the books are posted just in ASCII, and some in 7foo.txt and 8foo.txt files, where 7foo is ASCII and 8foo is Latin-1, and a few just in Latin-1, and the Gutenberg index file lists some posted in Unicode and CP850 (Polish) and other formats.
But now XML technology is pretty mature. It makes sense to store new Gutenberg texts in XML
Except for the fact that everyone is familiar with plain text, but very few of our editors are familiar with XML.
The second is that the old Gutenberg hands have been doing things a certain way for 32 years, and don't want to change. That's not a valid reason.
I take it if they came out with DVD 2.0, which has 6 gigabyte disks and uses MPEG-4 instead of MPEG-2, you'd immediately run out to buy new drives, movies and players? Conversion from one format to another is a complex, time consuming and problem causing procedure; changing before your completely ready and before there's a large proven benefit isn't good.
The fact is that the Gutenberg people think they're using ASCII, but are actually using Latin1. So Gutenberg texts will display correctly on any system that's localized for the U.S., Canada, or Western Europe. But not elsewhere.
Excuse me? The Gutenberg people know quite well when they're using ASCII and when they're using Latin-1. If you'll look at the books that are posted, some of the books posted from DP are posted just in ASCII, and some in 7foo.txt and 8foo.txt files, where 7foo is ASCII and 8foo is Latin-1, and a few just in Latin-1.
New scientific ideas cannot gain acceptance, because they conflict with established scientific beliefs.
This century, we discovered that the geometry of the universe is not Euclidean, an idea so radical that Kant had used the fact that the universe was Euclidean as that something that could be just taken as a given. This century, we discovered that we can liberate large amounts of energy by splitting the atom (from the Greek word meaning indivisible), an idea Lord Kelvin found ludicrous.
Do you really think if someone found solid scientific evidence that the earth is less than 10,000 years old, that it would be accepted in the scientific community?
Until 1800-1850, the scientists of the west were pretty solid on the earth being less then 10,000 years old. Between then and now, the evidence has been weighted and the conclusion was that Earth is far older. Yes, if you find evidence that the earth is less then 10,000 years old, you'll have a lot of opposition, just like if you said the moon was made of green cheese, because all the other evidence says otherwise. But so far, no one has come up with articles with such evidence rejected by scientific journals, so nobody has even given scientists a chance. Is it because of the close-mindness of scientists, or because they don't want the evidence to get serious scrutiny?
Is there some blazingly fast, free, accurate OCR software floating around that people have been using to cheat wet forms?
Why does it need to be blazingly fast or free? There's decent, not-too-expensive OCR software out there, and how long would it take to write an OCR program for the specific task, given that you know the size and position and probably number of characters, all of which come from a limited set?
If it was to watch episodes of a TV show I liked, why couldn't I just download them from gnutella or the equivalent?
Can you really get that wide a variety of TV showes from gnutella? I've only seen a few geek shows (Buffy, Enterprise) - I haven't even found Andromeda. Secondly, between watching the shows live, or spending hours searching and trying to find a reliable source or wait 18 hours to have it drop right before the ending, I think I'd rather watch it live.
Slashdot Mirror
It's worth pointing out that no-one (except a court) is really in a position to 'decree' what the LGPL clause 6 means
The FSF can certainly decree what the clause means. If you disagree with them or another copyright holder that agrees with them, you're welcome to go to court over it, which is often enough deterence in and of itself.
See
http://www.opensource.apple.com/apsl/
If, however, I want to include GPLed code in
my program, the GPL forces me to release my program under the GPL. It
has *infected* my program.
If you take a knife, and stab it into your chest, the knife has not *infected* your chest; you put it there of your own free will, knowing exactly what it would do.
doing it to piss people off will not get you very far,
Duh. Doing things to piss people off doesn't usually get people very far. But BSD people seem have a tendency to whine about people making GPL-covered changes to BSD works. You're the one who chose the license that lets us do that.
Apple saw that the FreeBSD system was solid and they added to it to make it a system they thought was overly viable for them and then later released an entire project (darwin) back under the BSD code it was incepted with.
No, Apple never released Darwin under the BSD license. They released it under the APSL license which includes the statement "You must make Source Code of all Your Deployed Modifications publicly available under the terms of this License...".
See .
The FSF writes their licenses. Any subsequent ambiguities are to be decided in court.
How much does your attorney charge? If the FSF says that their license means such and such, are you really ready to go to court about it? Any group has the right to interpret their licenses or contracts as they will, and sue you if you don't follow their interpretation. Since the (L)GPL has never gone to trial, for all pratical purposes, in every case we've seen, it means what the FSF says it means.
if I go to your neighbors' doors and say "I think TheCarp is a soulless child molesting felon" there's nothing they can do because of the "I think" part.
Nonsense. Stating a fact as an opinion doesn't change its nature as libel. You are trying to destroy the reputation of someone else with falsehoods. That's the essence of libel, and whether or not it's stated as an opinion doesn't matter.
I have noticed the increased use of the 'she' pronoun to describe positions that are in all honesty dominated by males.
Does it bother you when people use he to describe positions that are usually held by females? So what if most administrators are male - the generic pronoun doesn't really matter anymore.
I am in favor of the creation of a new word to avoid the confusion between third person singular and plural.
If you lived in France, you could try that. However, English, like most languages, has no academy to dictate usage, so the only way to get a new word in is to use it and convince other people to use it. "They" works and is in usage. Arbitrarily using he and she is also in usage. "e" or "pe" is not in usage, and unless something changes, doesn't look like it will be used.
There are maybe a few dozen people in the world who could even partially decipher indo-european
Maybe if you pounded on the door at 3:30 in the morning and demanded the decipher it right then. Assuming what we think we know about Indo-European is correct, there's probably millions of people who could decipher it by going down to their library and checking out the right books.
But that misses part of the point. Homer's Greek was not the origin of thousands of languages, nor spoke over a huge area; but it was written, and what was written in it was important enough to preserve. As long as any fragment of the scholarly culture that would study Aristole or Homer or the New Testament survives, ancient Greek will still be readable. Part of the reason Indo-European isn't known is because it wasn't written, and hence there's no reason to learn it besides purely linguistic reasons.
Now, instead of 10,000, what is it were 100,000 years. How many people would speak it then?
That's a good question. There is, however, a material difference between the future and the past: writing and libraries. Unless we assume widespread distruction on a unprecedented level, there still will be people who understand some of the major languages of this era. Written language is very compact and clear, compared to pictographs; it'd be worth a try in addition to pictographs, especially for the most heavily radioactive first couple thousand years.
Language drifts and changes.
True, but you can still label something with Caesar's Latin or Homer's Greek or, if I'm not mistaken, Confucius's Chinese and every town with a population of over 10,000 has someone who could puzzle it out.
[buffer overflows are] the number-one way to whack any system, Microsoft or not.
Any system that's written in a language that's vulnerable to buffer overflows, like C or Assembly. Trying to hack a Lisp machine via a buffer overflow is probably pretty futile.
You might also say that the use of a already worldly known character would make a film easier to sell to viewers, but since the film wouldn't be from Disney, who would be running to the theatres to see it just because of Mickey (it could even be a porn movie, not that you would like your kids to see that, would you?).
What about Pinocchio, or Cinderalla? I'm sure Disney would love to lock those characters up. There have been porn movies based on Pinocchio and Cinderalla, but most people can tell the different - the X-rated sign, the other movies at the theater or in the rental show. Heck, there have been other movies based on Pinnochio and Cinderalla - has it really made much difference to Disney? It's easy to tell the difference between the whip-driven, minimum-wage animated stuff and stuff professionally done, and even the other well done Pinocchio movies haven't had nearly the impact of the Disney version.
There are 32 movies with Pinocchio in the title in the IMDB, including The Erotic Adventures of Pinocchio. Show me that not controlling Pinocchio has really hurt Disney, and I might start to believe it about Mickey.
Storm Troopers are exceptional shots trained in an accelerated fashion
Yeah, watch how they dealt with the ewoks.
Role-Playing games are always meant to capture the essence of a genre or franchise like Star Wars and add some realism to it.
Not realism, playability. Your character is mortal because it makes the game more fun, not because it makes the game more realistic.
My complaint was not that you can die though, it was about who was vulnerable. In an RPG version of Indian Jones, a lightly armed character with no body armor can take on a tank brigade singlehandly, and if he fails, he'll probably be captured, not killed. In an RPG version of Saving Private Ryan, the same character will die if he tries the same tactics. In Star Wars, Greedo's battle armor gave him no real advantage over Han Solo.
(Okay, so the bad guy cleaved me in two and I reform? Okay, I blast him into atoms with my atom blaster... Okay so he reforms instantly... Okay, so he cleaves me in two and I reform? Okay, so I blast... You get the picture...)
This sounds just like Quake or Halo deathmatch, or some of the D&D games where there was an unlimited supply of Raise Dead spells around.
If you look at the stories in AD&D, Tolkien, Jordan, and others, you notice that very few things just spawn from thin air,
If you look at real life, you'll notice that very few things just spawn from thin air. That doesn't mean that I want to sit around making them. I can't remember anybody in a D&D ever spending the time to make a magic item; they'd rather go fight the next bad guy.
That a very poorly outfitted long played character could be potentially defeated by a VERY well equipped nearly beginning character in combat. (Which is more realistic and much like real life then any other MMORPG I have played beside Ultima Online.)
So a character in full body armor with distance weapons (a stormtrooper) could kill someone with no body armor and no distance weapons (Luke)? It may be like real life, but it's nothing like Star Wars.
Why you'd ZIP an HTML file that you're offering on a web site is beyond me.
Because one common reason to do an HTML edition is pictures, and the system is set up to have one file per document.
we're doing a lot of mark-up anyway
Italics is not a lot of markup. XML calls for a lot of details that would take work. How many books have you post-processed? They accept XML; why don't you find out how hard it is to make an XML edition first hand?
A few years ago I was given a demo of TCP-dump by a resident BOFH. First step was to read all of the private communications between a certain user and other people in a chat room. The next was to take a look at some people's emails as they were relayed through the router (including their POP3 passwords)
OTOH, if you were interested, how hard would it have been to walk into the room when he wasn't there and tap the keyboard/install a hacked chat client/browse his email (and the password's probably right there, for the email program to read.) Why worry about one point if you aren't worry about all of them?
Ada does have the possibility to specify the precision of a number, but I am not sure that it reverts to BCD based library to do arithmetic with those.
It has the ability to use fixed point decimal numbers.
about Intel Coprocessors again, you can use BCD numbers
Actually, x86-64 doesn't support the old BCD instructions in 64 bit mode, reusing those codes for other things.
And the conventions for math and science formulas and equations produces a complex linear format I can't believe anyone would actually want to read.
It's basically TeX, the one true math typesetting system. Most mathematicans and many scientists know it quite well. It beats the heck out of MathML (one example in a MathML tutorial was 8 characters in TeX, and about 50 in MathML.)
Wouldn't it be possible to rig up a high-speed scanner based on digital video technology?
A large part of the speed problem is the page turning or moving the page past the sensors. In any case, digital cameras haven't shown enough detail for good scans, and plantery scanners (expensive digital cameras for scanning) cost several thousand dollars.
In point of fact, Project Gutenberg has long outgrown the 96 graphic characters in ASCII, though I think they themselves are ignorant of the fact.
Then I invite you to actually take a look at some of the texts. The Gutenberg people know quite well when they're using ASCII and when they're using Latin-1. If you'll look at the books that are posted, some of the books are posted just in ASCII, and some in 7foo.txt and 8foo.txt files, where 7foo is ASCII and 8foo is Latin-1, and a few just in Latin-1, and the Gutenberg index file lists some posted in Unicode and CP850 (Polish) and other formats.
But now XML technology is pretty mature. It makes sense to store new Gutenberg texts in XML
Except for the fact that everyone is familiar with plain text, but very few of our editors are familiar with XML.
The second is that the old Gutenberg hands have been doing things a certain way for 32 years, and don't want to change. That's not a valid reason.
I take it if they came out with DVD 2.0, which has 6 gigabyte disks and uses MPEG-4 instead of MPEG-2, you'd immediately run out to buy new drives, movies and players? Conversion from one format to another is a complex, time consuming and problem causing procedure; changing before your completely ready and before there's a large proven benefit isn't good.
The fact is that the Gutenberg people think they're using ASCII, but are actually using Latin1. So Gutenberg texts will display correctly on any system that's localized for the U.S., Canada, or Western Europe. But not elsewhere.
Excuse me? The Gutenberg people know quite well when they're using ASCII and when they're using Latin-1. If you'll look at the books that are posted, some of the books posted from DP are posted just in ASCII, and some in 7foo.txt and 8foo.txt files, where 7foo is ASCII and 8foo is Latin-1, and a few just in Latin-1.
Fox has canceled Futurama (at least in my city).
It's on on Sunday at 7:00 around here.
New scientific ideas cannot gain acceptance, because they conflict with established scientific beliefs.
This century, we discovered that the geometry of the universe is not Euclidean, an idea so radical that Kant had used the fact that the universe was Euclidean as that something that could be just taken as a given. This century, we discovered that we can liberate large amounts of energy by splitting the atom (from the Greek word meaning indivisible), an idea Lord Kelvin found ludicrous.
Do you really think if someone found solid scientific evidence that the earth is less than 10,000 years old, that it would be accepted in the scientific community?
Until 1800-1850, the scientists of the west were pretty solid on the earth being less then 10,000 years old. Between then and now, the evidence has been weighted and the conclusion was that Earth is far older. Yes, if you find evidence that the earth is less then 10,000 years old, you'll have a lot of opposition, just like if you said the moon was made of green cheese, because all the other evidence says otherwise. But so far, no one has come up with articles with such evidence rejected by scientific journals, so nobody has even given scientists a chance. Is it because of the close-mindness of scientists, or because they don't want the evidence to get serious scrutiny?
Is there some blazingly fast, free, accurate OCR software floating around that people have been using to cheat wet forms?
Why does it need to be blazingly fast or free? There's decent, not-too-expensive OCR software out there, and how long would it take to write an OCR program for the specific task, given that you know the size and position and probably number of characters, all of which come from a limited set?
If it was to watch episodes of a TV show I liked, why couldn't I just download them from gnutella or the equivalent?
Can you really get that wide a variety of TV showes from gnutella? I've only seen a few geek shows (Buffy, Enterprise) - I haven't even found Andromeda. Secondly, between watching the shows live, or spending hours searching and trying to find a reliable source or wait 18 hours to have it drop right before the ending, I think I'd rather watch it live.