These employees don't likely give half a shit what you did to get those items, they're just doing their job.
I take it you're polite to telemarketers, too. If you're doing an odious job, you'll get crap for it. And you deserve it, because you'll helping the system work. The "I was just doing my job" defense has never worked, in part because if you and everyone else refused to do that job, it wouldn't be done.
Do I _REALLY_ want to pull in libpng and libSDL just to do this?
You're going to write your own code to read PNG files?!? Just how much time do you have to write code and fix bugs?
How much will this bloat my code?
You think that rewriting the code will take less space then interfacing to an existing library?
Will users be confused from the different versions of these libraries?
Much less then the users will be confused when they run into a file that you can't read and all their other programs can. All code has bugs, but libpng has a lot of testing and is actively being improved, unlike your code. And standards change, and the libpng people have more time to chase any changes to the standard then you do.
What if I one day want to port to a platform that these libraries [don't] work on?
libpng should work on any platform with an ANSI C compiler, and has been tested on far more systems then you can. Your code to display it on the screen is going to be system dependent; at least third party code has a chance of working on multiple systems out of the box. And if you have to port it to a system that it doesn't support, it's just as easy to port it to that system or add your code to support that system as an alternative to the graphic library, as it is to write it from scratch. And you saved yourself the trouble of writing the code for Linux and Windows and anything else that worked out of the box, as well as working on systems you would never have got to.
Turns out it's usually simpler, easier, and less risky to just roll your own.
It's going to be more buggy (and have different bugs from the standard), and require you to write a lot of code, especially every time you port to a new system. I see minimal advantages to a user, especially with a library as ubiquitous as libpng.
$ time perl -e "use POE"
0.23s real 0.21s user 0.01s system
If you can reimplement what you need, and never be more then a quarter of a second less effiecent, and never crash or abort where the original wouldn't have (because a crash or abort takes minutes and pisses off the user much more then waiting for the program to start up), and justify spending the time reinventing the wheel over.6 seconds of startup time, then go for it. But unless you writing MacOS or Mozilla or X, it's just not worth it.
an ASCII text version of a printed book is really more like an analog facsimile than is a version in XML that has been tagged for structural features. [...] (like the table of contents and the copyright page from the transcribed edition, which the PG version unaccountably omits). XML tags mark all the line and page breaks of the original.
You seem to contradict yourself - the format that preserves line and page breaks and the copyright page and other details that are only of interest to the scholar is more like an analog facsimile then one that extracts the meaning and ignores all the details of how it happened to be dumped on the page by the typesetter.
I think you're confusing two different things here. Everyone at PG wants to preserve the contents of the original book - the sidenotes, footnotes, tables, etc. - and there are continual improvements going on in that area. More and more books are being posted as HTML, for example. But some of those details that were "unaccountably" lost are because they aren't part of the text; they're edition details of interest only to the scholar. Even most analog facsimiles drop the copyright page, and page breaks and line breaks are rarely preserved in reprints and new editions. In the opinion of most of the people at PG, it's not worth the extra work to preserve all those details that had nothing to do with the original author, and are only of interest to the scholar.
But now that the PG dream of preserving and distributing the printed word through digital technology has stagnated into a dogmatic cult with the goal of preserving ASCII
Obviously spoken by someone who hasn't checked out PG in the last few years. When possible, PG keeps an ASCII copy, yes. But PG also has Japanese and Chinese texts with no ASCII copy. Even for mthose that PG offers an ASCII text (including for some reason French texts), many of them have Latin-1, UTF-8 and/or HTML copies in the same directory.
Encoding the PG texts in Unicode would require no extra effort on the part of the PG volunteers
No extra effort? I don't know what world you live in, but Unicode is not the simplest thing for everyone in the world to handle. Considering the almost non-existant technical savy of some of the volunteers at Distributed Proofreaders, using Unicode would be a serious pain to explain and would drive away many of our proofers.
please stop using linefeeds every 70 characters within paragraphs. WTF do you Project Gutenbergers imagine we read these texts on TRS-80s?
WTF do you imagine we read these texts on TRS-80s? I read mine in an xterm using less. IMO, there's no point in producing a plain text version without linefeeds like this; if you expect to wrap the text, you might as well go ahead and produce a simple HTML text.
No one likes losing addresses from their netblock assignment.
As other people point out, once you're using that space, even very sparsely, it's a pain to fix that. Rather go to IPv6 then try and wrestle some scraps from people who are already using them.
Build your own addressing, implement it, and enough with the complaining about how the USA chooses to do its business!
Imagine a system where the US and the rest of the world used different Internet systems. Sounds like paradise, doesn't it? It's not like Americans needed to hear about Linux until someone could snailmail a copy in. And instead of having one kernel project and one Debian, we could have one American and one overseas, because there's no way they could communicate. And the American branches of IBM and Sun and Microsoft and every other international corporation could build their own private subnets over the multiple subsystems, which would be faster and easier to debug then just having one Internet.
Back in real life, everyone works together on stuff like this (except for assholes who can profit because of confusion) because it's a pain in the ass if you don't. Kludging up every system in the world because of some jingoist, proprietary attitude just adds pain and misery to the world.
It's by no means easy to accomplish, especially with higher and higher level programming languages
It seems like a higher level language would sometimes help, especially if they aren't running a highly optimizing compiler, because it has more patterning. An assembly language subroutine could be a chunk of code that's simply goto'ed to, or even if it does use the standard subroutine opcodes, it could use whatever calling ABI it wanted. A C subroutine, by most compilers, is going to surrounded by code to push and pop the stack, and is going to have one standard ABI. Even a highly optimizing compiler is usually only going to optimize tail-recursion and leaf calls. A compiled APL program might be trivial to decompile, with each character either being represnted by a function call or fairly standard chunk of code.
Do you read on the bus? Do you feel guilty about it? 'cause you really ought to be focusing on communting, you know.
If I read on the bus, and it means I miss my stop, then I need to stop reading and start focusing on my commuting. He is using the work as a reason to close his door, which gets in the way of his office hours.
If you have your door closed, how would you know how many students come but are turned away by the closed door?
2. Rather than sitting there waiting for Godot, I always tried to get some work done.
As a general rule, teachers don't like students doing homework in their classes. If this is a office hour, perhaps that should be your main focus here.
4. A sign on the door indicating "Please knock" or clearly showing office hours should be enough impetus for an intelligent student not to hesitate from knocking.
I hate disturbing people. I hate making requests of people, or showing my ignorance. An office visit almost always involved one of the latter. A sign saying "Please knock" would help, but if you just have your door closed (office hours or no), I'm lead to the conclusion that you're doing other work, or possibly working with another student, and that I'm going to be disturbing you. And say whatever you may about my psyche, but there's nothing merely academic that will get me to knock on that door under those circumstances. If you want your shyer students to come in, you've got to make them feel welcome.
it is ok for the open source crowd to simply remove the offending code, but not for those who have GPL violations, like OpenTV to simply remove their offending code?
For one thing, OpenTV is a company who diliberately and obviously committed copyright violations, fully understanding the consequences. The open source community is not a legal entity; those members of the open source community (Debian, Red Hat, etc.) that allegedly distributed this code had no knowledge that they were committing copyright infringement. Furthermore, instead of discussing the issue with the violaters and trying for a quick and fair solution, which may include removing the code depending on the violation, like the FSF does, SCO has spread FUD and has had no intention of working towards a quick or fair solution, and furthermore have behaved in a way that left many with doubts whether there is any copyright infringement. Totally different behaviors.
I find it amazing that Buffy is even mentioned in the same breath as shows such as CSI, The West Wing and 24.
I haven't seen the recent seasons of Buffy. But at the heart of Buffy is a show that plays off high school, and what it means to be a geek or an outsider there in. From what I've seen of Charmed, it's just another sitcom once you remove the magic. Also, there was a lot of continuing plot and character changes in Buffy. You don't get a stream of redshirts; major characters die, or undergo huge changes. It's not like everything always turned out fine at the end of the episode.
The West Wing plays in the same ballpark, but doesn't aim at the Slashdot crowd. I really don't see why you would put CSI in the same group. Outside a light dusting of character development, there's no character growth or overall plot; it crams two murder investigations into 30 minutes, and doesn't even touch on modern events or emotional subjects. Buffy has story arcs, and has characters you can feel for.
Actually, within the GPL, there are clauses verifying what I say.
There are? Which ones? The only clause that comes close is #4:
4. You may not copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute the Program except as expressly provided under this License. Any attempt otherwise to copy, modify, sublicense or distribute the Program is void, and will automatically terminate your rights under this License. However, parties who have received copies, or rights, from you under this License will not have their licenses terminated so long as such parties remain in full compliance.
which says nothing about the subject, except that their license is terminated.
Even if what you say were true, they could still remove the GPL'ed code from their code all-together -- they do *not* have to GPL their code.
They might. A court might rule that they have to GPL their code, or the copyright holder might insist on it, with going to court having negative enough results that they are effectively compelled to do so.
"Us" would have to prove that it's common practice to examine all of the source code for an OSS distribution (it isn't)
It is common pratice to have some idea what you're sending out. Speaking as a Debian developer, there are people who argue and practice that a developer should read every new line in every update, including Branden, our X developer. (I've done it, but mainly because I'm small fry.) To be completely ignorant of what you are sending out is ill-advised.
Actually, no. The GPL does not state that corps caught with GPL'ed code in their proprietary software have to GPL their entire program. They have to EITHER GPL their entire program, or REMOVE all of the GPL'ed code from their proprietary program. Their choice.
No. By doing so, they've committed copyright infringement. They can either make a deal with the owner of the infringed code, or go to court. They cannot unilaterly fix it.
Free speech is an externality. For those of you who know econ, that means that it's something that affects the people around you and not just you.
What isn't? There is no important right that just affects you.
Have we the arrogance to pass judgment on another culture like that?
First, no country is an island. Their culture is increasingly interdependent on the cultures of the rest of the world. Secondly, you are arrogant enough to pass judgement on other people from your culture, from highly variant subcultures, and for other cultures, as this is not purely an American website.
So what is to say that they are right, even when the majority thinks otherwise?
The majority is frequently wrong. Each person must judge for themself on each issue, judging from their knowledge and experiances. From my knowledge, I judge this move bad, and excersize the rights that I believe to be that of all mankind, but in the very least are given me by my culture in expressing that.
Or rather, gcc version >= 3.0 is not in widespread use.
All modern Linux distributions use gcc >= 3.0. Debian uses gcc >= 3.0, and did so even in the last stable release for some platforms. Apple also uses a gcc >= 3.0. Just those groups would constitute "widespread use" by themselves, IMO.
But once you can no longer buy a DVD that will last more than 48 hours, what argument do you have that you should be allowed to back it up?
Unless you have a contract, or they let the "implied contract" fly, you have the perfect argument to back it up - it doesn't have a long lifespan, so you have to make a copy to preserve it. Same reason you can back-up ordinary movies, except this is going from "what, do you use your DVD's as frisbees?" to "well, of course, it's going to break".
Now maybe we can get some decent applications without needing to code the whole UI experience every time.
There's at least a dozen GUI interfaces to X: GTK+, QT, FLTK, WxWindows . . . It's been a long time since you had to code the whole UI experience to get a decent UI, at least anymore then you have to on Windows or Mac.
Ever heard of Palladium or whatever it is now called (THCP?). If in 20 years there is no signed DivX player it may make that scenario possible.
Then my biggest concern won't be DivX. But even if there is Palladium, there's going to be enough of a market for unsigned hardware to make it possible to do whatever you want, even if you can't run some of the new stuff on the unsigned hardware.
The problem with "curing" people with faulty genes is that you promote decay in the overall genetic pool.
Toss away several thousand pairs of genes, because two or three of them don't work together in an unusually strong way, and happened to be triggered by events in someone's life? It seems wasteful on the genetic level, and cruel and heartless on the human level. And yes, Nazi-like, given that one of the first things they did was start getting rid of the mentally ill.
There is still a major inlet for therapy to be had within the native language of the patient, without resorting to enforcing fantasy behaviors.
Do you have your Ph.D. in psychotherapy? What qualifies you to say how a patient needing therapy should be treated? I've never meant to argue medicine; I would leave that subject up to a professional, like I would appreciate that he, if he has no professional training in programming, would do for me.
Illness is a sign of inferiority. It's not a pity thing, it's not anything else. It's inferiority. Darwin had it down.
Ah, a social Darwinist. Darwin never said anything about inferiority; to be inferior is a human judgement that has nothing to do with nature. Early cancer is a solid Darwinist sign of inferiority, as many people can't have children after that. People who have elective sterilization is an even more solid Darwinist sign of inferiority. The welfare mom with 16 children, however, is vastly superior to you or I in a Darwinist since.
In many ways, people who are mentally ill are sometimes superior to other people. They can be stronger, more intelligent or more compassionate.
Allowing them to get by speaking Klingon is like allowing them to speak like a baby. It just isn't healthy.
I take it you would speak to the mentally retarded at the furthest reaches of your vocabulary; allowing them to speak like children is not healthy, so we must speak to them as if they were Francis Bacon and expect them to understand.
And, once again, this person who only speaks Klingon is a hypothetical construct. Some might even argue that if he appears, he has the right to be treated as a individual and dealt with as apropriate for them.
These are the same people that think Wil Weaton should be killed because of his role on Star Trek...
All these people, and Wil Weaton actually having public appearances, and somehow he lives. I think perhaps that you are the one have the trouble telling between fiction and reality, and that no one was of the actual opinion that he should be killed.
I was only commenting on the uselessness of Klingon and Esperanto, two constructed languages with no native speakers.
Actually Esperanto has some native speakers - between 200 and 2000, according to the Ethnologue. That's more then many languages in the world.
I currently speak four languages (to one degree or another): English, Spanish, Korean, and Arabic.
All chosen out of that list of twenty languages of economic importance. (Okay, I didn't have Korean on that list, but it was oversight.)
And I plan on learning more languages in the future.
Choctaw? Basque? Xhosa? Pashto? Yiddish? Heck, even something like Finnish or Farsi, Latin or Sanskrit? Let me guess, they come from the following list: French, German, Russian, Chinese (Mandarian), Japanese, Hindi, Indonesian, Malay, Portuguese (Brazilian), Italian, Hebrew or Swedish. (That's only sixteen for what was supposed to be a list of twenty, but even some of those are of marginal relevance.)
There's reasons to speak a language besides the fact that its speakers make up a important economic block. A language is a way of entering a culture, of a new way of thinking, of a new literature. While Klingon has no native literature (though the other reasons still stand), Esperanto has all three.
Slashdot Mirror
These employees don't likely give half a shit what you did to get those items, they're just doing their job.
I take it you're polite to telemarketers, too. If you're doing an odious job, you'll get crap for it. And you deserve it, because you'll helping the system work. The "I was just doing my job" defense has never worked, in part because if you and everyone else refused to do that job, it wouldn't be done.
Do I _REALLY_ want to pull in libpng and libSDL just to do this?
You're going to write your own code to read PNG files?!? Just how much time do you have to write code and fix bugs?
How much will this bloat my code?
You think that rewriting the code will take less space then interfacing to an existing library?
Will users be confused from the different versions of these libraries?
Much less then the users will be confused when they run into a file that you can't read and all their other programs can. All code has bugs, but libpng has a lot of testing and is actively being improved, unlike your code. And standards change, and the libpng people have more time to chase any changes to the standard then you do.
What if I one day want to port to a platform that these libraries [don't] work on?
libpng should work on any platform with an ANSI C compiler, and has been tested on far more systems then you can. Your code to display it on the screen is going to be system dependent; at least third party code has a chance of working on multiple systems out of the box. And if you have to port it to a system that it doesn't support, it's just as easy to port it to that system or add your code to support that system as an alternative to the graphic library, as it is to write it from scratch. And you saved yourself the trouble of writing the code for Linux and Windows and anything else that worked out of the box, as well as working on systems you would never have got to.
Turns out it's usually simpler, easier, and less risky to just roll your own.
It's going to be more buggy (and have different bugs from the standard), and require you to write a lot of code, especially every time you port to a new system. I see minimal advantages to a user, especially with a library as ubiquitous as libpng.
$ time perl -e "use POE"
.6 seconds of startup time, then go for it. But unless you writing MacOS or Mozilla or X, it's just not worth it.
0.23s real 0.21s user 0.01s system
If you can reimplement what you need, and never be more then a quarter of a second less effiecent, and never crash or abort where the original wouldn't have (because a crash or abort takes minutes and pisses off the user much more then waiting for the program to start up), and justify spending the time reinventing the wheel over
an ASCII text version of a printed book is really more like an analog facsimile than is a version in XML that has been tagged for structural features.
[...]
(like the table of contents and the copyright page from the transcribed edition, which the PG version unaccountably omits). XML tags mark all the line and page breaks of the original.
You seem to contradict yourself - the format that preserves line and page breaks and the copyright page and other details that are only of interest to the scholar is more like an analog facsimile then one that extracts the meaning and ignores all the details of how it happened to be dumped on the page by the typesetter.
I think you're confusing two different things here. Everyone at PG wants to preserve the contents of the original book - the sidenotes, footnotes, tables, etc. - and there are continual improvements going on in that area. More and more books are being posted as HTML, for example. But some of those details that were "unaccountably" lost are because they aren't part of the text; they're edition details of interest only to the scholar. Even most analog facsimiles drop the copyright page, and page breaks and line breaks are rarely preserved in reprints and new editions. In the opinion of most of the people at PG, it's not worth the extra work to preserve all those details that had nothing to do with the original author, and are only of interest to the scholar.
But now that the PG dream of preserving and distributing the printed word through digital technology has stagnated into a dogmatic cult with the goal of preserving ASCII
Obviously spoken by someone who hasn't checked out PG in the last few years. When possible, PG keeps an ASCII copy, yes. But PG also has Japanese and Chinese texts with no ASCII copy. Even for mthose that PG offers an ASCII text (including for some reason French texts), many of them have Latin-1, UTF-8 and/or HTML copies in the same directory.
Encoding the PG texts in Unicode would require no extra effort on the part of the PG volunteers
No extra effort? I don't know what world you live in, but Unicode is not the simplest thing for everyone in the world to handle. Considering the almost non-existant technical savy of some of the volunteers at Distributed Proofreaders, using Unicode would be a serious pain to explain and would drive away many of our proofers.
please stop using linefeeds every 70 characters within paragraphs. WTF do you Project Gutenbergers imagine we read these texts on TRS-80s?
WTF do you imagine we read these texts on TRS-80s? I read mine in an xterm using less. IMO, there's no point in producing a plain text version without linefeeds like this; if you expect to wrap the text, you might as well go ahead and produce a simple HTML text.
No one likes losing addresses from their netblock assignment.
As other people point out, once you're using that space, even very sparsely, it's a pain to fix that. Rather go to IPv6 then try and wrestle some scraps from people who are already using them.
Build your own addressing, implement it, and enough with the complaining about how the USA chooses to do its business!
Imagine a system where the US and the rest of the world used different Internet systems. Sounds like paradise, doesn't it? It's not like Americans needed to hear about Linux until someone could snailmail a copy in. And instead of having one kernel project and one Debian, we could have one American and one overseas, because there's no way they could communicate. And the American branches of IBM and Sun and Microsoft and every other international corporation could build their own private subnets over the multiple subsystems, which would be faster and easier to debug then just having one Internet.
Back in real life, everyone works together on stuff like this (except for assholes who can profit because of confusion) because it's a pain in the ass if you don't. Kludging up every system in the world because of some jingoist, proprietary attitude just adds pain and misery to the world.
It's by no means easy to accomplish, especially with higher and higher level programming languages
It seems like a higher level language would sometimes help, especially if they aren't running a highly optimizing compiler, because it has more patterning. An assembly language subroutine could be a chunk of code that's simply goto'ed to, or even if it does use the standard subroutine opcodes, it could use whatever calling ABI it wanted. A C subroutine, by most compilers, is going to surrounded by code to push and pop the stack, and is going to have one standard ABI. Even a highly optimizing compiler is usually only going to optimize tail-recursion and leaf calls. A compiled APL program might be trivial to decompile, with each character either being represnted by a function call or fairly standard chunk of code.
Do you read on the bus? Do you feel guilty about it? 'cause you really ought to be focusing on communting, you know.
If I read on the bus, and it means I miss my stop, then I need to stop reading and start focusing on my commuting. He is using the work as a reason to close his door, which gets in the way of his office hours.
1. Students often don't come to office hours.
If you have your door closed, how would you know how many students come but are turned away by the closed door?
2. Rather than sitting there waiting for Godot, I always tried to get some work done.
As a general rule, teachers don't like students doing homework in their classes. If this is a office hour, perhaps that should be your main focus here.
4. A sign on the door indicating "Please knock" or clearly showing office hours should be enough impetus for an intelligent student not to hesitate from knocking.
I hate disturbing people. I hate making requests of people, or showing my ignorance. An office visit almost always involved one of the latter. A sign saying "Please knock" would help, but if you just have your door closed (office hours or no), I'm lead to the conclusion that you're doing other work, or possibly working with another student, and that I'm going to be disturbing you. And say whatever you may about my psyche, but there's nothing merely academic that will get me to knock on that door under those circumstances. If you want your shyer students to come in, you've got to make them feel welcome.
it is ok for the open source crowd to simply remove the offending code, but not for those who have GPL violations, like OpenTV to simply remove their offending code?
For one thing, OpenTV is a company who diliberately and obviously committed copyright violations, fully understanding the consequences. The open source community is not a legal entity; those members of the open source community (Debian, Red Hat, etc.) that allegedly distributed this code had no knowledge that they were committing copyright infringement. Furthermore, instead of discussing the issue with the violaters and trying for a quick and fair solution, which may include removing the code depending on the violation, like the FSF does, SCO has spread FUD and has had no intention of working towards a quick or fair solution, and furthermore have behaved in a way that left many with doubts whether there is any copyright infringement. Totally different behaviors.
and 3 times 0 is 0 ...
The same principle applies to the stuff that Microsoft gives away for free. Go ahead, distribute it and see what they sue you for.
I find it amazing that Buffy is even mentioned in the same breath as shows such as CSI, The West Wing and 24.
I haven't seen the recent seasons of Buffy. But at the heart of Buffy is a show that plays off high school, and what it means to be a geek or an outsider there in. From what I've seen of Charmed, it's just another sitcom once you remove the magic. Also, there was a lot of continuing plot and character changes in Buffy. You don't get a stream of redshirts; major characters die, or undergo huge changes. It's not like everything always turned out fine at the end of the episode.
The West Wing plays in the same ballpark, but doesn't aim at the Slashdot crowd. I really don't see why you would put CSI in the same group. Outside a light dusting of character development, there's no character growth or overall plot; it crams two murder investigations into 30 minutes, and doesn't even touch on modern events or emotional subjects. Buffy has story arcs, and has characters you can feel for.
Actually, within the GPL, there are clauses verifying what I say.
There are? Which ones? The only clause that comes close is #4:
4. You may not copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute the Program except as expressly provided under this License. Any attempt otherwise to copy, modify, sublicense or distribute the Program is void, and will automatically terminate your rights under this License. However, parties who have received copies, or rights, from you under this License will not have their licenses terminated so long as such parties remain in full compliance.
which says nothing about the subject, except that their license is terminated.
Even if what you say were true, they could still remove the GPL'ed code from their code all-together -- they do *not* have to GPL their code.
They might. A court might rule that they have to GPL their code, or the copyright holder might insist on it, with going to court having negative enough results that they are effectively compelled to do so.
"Us" would have to prove that it's common practice to examine all of the source code for an OSS distribution (it isn't)
It is common pratice to have some idea what you're sending out. Speaking as a Debian developer, there are people who argue and practice that a developer should read every new line in every update, including Branden, our X developer. (I've done it, but mainly because I'm small fry.) To be completely ignorant of what you are sending out is ill-advised.
Actually, no. The GPL does not state that corps caught with GPL'ed code in their proprietary software have to GPL their entire program. They have to EITHER GPL their entire program, or REMOVE all of the GPL'ed code from their proprietary program. Their choice.
No. By doing so, they've committed copyright infringement. They can either make a deal with the owner of the infringed code, or go to court. They cannot unilaterly fix it.
Free speech is an externality. For those of you who know econ, that means that it's something that affects the people around you and not just you.
What isn't? There is no important right that just affects you.
Have we the arrogance to pass judgment on another culture like that?
First, no country is an island. Their culture is increasingly interdependent on the cultures of the rest of the world. Secondly, you are arrogant enough to pass judgement on other people from your culture, from highly variant subcultures, and for other cultures, as this is not purely an American website.
So what is to say that they are right, even when the majority thinks otherwise?
The majority is frequently wrong. Each person must judge for themself on each issue, judging from their knowledge and experiances. From my knowledge, I judge this move bad, and excersize the rights that I believe to be that of all mankind, but in the very least are given me by my culture in expressing that.
Or rather, gcc version >= 3.0 is not in widespread use.
All modern Linux distributions use gcc >= 3.0. Debian uses gcc >= 3.0, and did so even in the last stable release for some platforms. Apple also uses a gcc >= 3.0. Just those groups would constitute "widespread use" by themselves, IMO.
But once you can no longer buy a DVD that will last more than 48 hours, what argument do you have that you should be allowed to back it up?
Unless you have a contract, or they let the "implied contract" fly, you have the perfect argument to back it up - it doesn't have a long lifespan, so you have to make a copy to preserve it. Same reason you can back-up ordinary movies, except this is going from "what, do you use your DVD's as frisbees?" to "well, of course, it's going to break".
Now maybe we can get some decent applications without needing to code the whole UI experience every time.
There's at least a dozen GUI interfaces to X: GTK+, QT, FLTK, WxWindows . . . It's been a long time since you had to code the whole UI experience to get a decent UI, at least anymore then you have to on Windows or Mac.
Ever heard of Palladium or whatever it is now called (THCP?). If in 20 years there is no signed DivX player it may make that scenario possible.
Then my biggest concern won't be DivX. But even if there is Palladium, there's going to be enough of a market for unsigned hardware to make it possible to do whatever you want, even if you can't run some of the new stuff on the unsigned hardware.
I wouldn't really consider any of them native Esperanto speakers. Is there anyone who speaks nothing but Esperanto?
Is there anyone who grows up speaking only Choctaw, Hawaiian or Yiddish anymore?
These are people who were probably taught Esperanto growing up
Many had Esperanto as the primary language spoken around the house.
The problem with "curing" people with faulty genes is that you promote decay in the overall genetic pool.
Toss away several thousand pairs of genes, because two or three of them don't work together in an unusually strong way, and happened to be triggered by events in someone's life? It seems wasteful on the genetic level, and cruel and heartless on the human level. And yes, Nazi-like, given that one of the first things they did was start getting rid of the mentally ill.
There is still a major inlet for therapy to be had within the native language of the patient, without resorting to enforcing fantasy behaviors.
Do you have your Ph.D. in psychotherapy? What qualifies you to say how a patient needing therapy should be treated? I've never meant to argue medicine; I would leave that subject up to a professional, like I would appreciate that he, if he has no professional training in programming, would do for me.
Illness is a sign of inferiority. It's not a pity thing, it's not anything else. It's inferiority. Darwin had it down.
Ah, a social Darwinist. Darwin never said anything about inferiority; to be inferior is a human judgement that has nothing to do with nature. Early cancer is a solid Darwinist sign of inferiority, as many people can't have children after that. People who have elective sterilization is an even more solid Darwinist sign of inferiority. The welfare mom with 16 children, however, is vastly superior to you or I in a Darwinist since.
In many ways, people who are mentally ill are sometimes superior to other people. They can be stronger, more intelligent or more compassionate.
Allowing them to get by speaking Klingon is like allowing them to speak like a baby. It just isn't healthy.
I take it you would speak to the mentally retarded at the furthest reaches of your vocabulary; allowing them to speak like children is not healthy, so we must speak to them as if they were Francis Bacon and expect them to understand.
And, once again, this person who only speaks Klingon is a hypothetical construct. Some might even argue that if he appears, he has the right to be treated as a individual and dealt with as apropriate for them.
These are the same people that think Wil Weaton should be killed because of his role on Star Trek...
All these people, and Wil Weaton actually having public appearances, and somehow he lives. I think perhaps that you are the one have the trouble telling between fiction and reality, and that no one was of the actual opinion that he should be killed.
I was only commenting on the uselessness of Klingon and Esperanto, two constructed languages with no native speakers.
Actually Esperanto has some native speakers - between 200 and 2000, according to the Ethnologue. That's more then many languages in the world.
I currently speak four languages (to one degree or another): English, Spanish, Korean, and Arabic.
All chosen out of that list of twenty languages of economic importance. (Okay, I didn't have Korean on that list, but it was oversight.)
And I plan on learning more languages in the future.
Choctaw? Basque? Xhosa? Pashto? Yiddish? Heck, even something like Finnish or Farsi, Latin or Sanskrit? Let me guess, they come from the following list: French, German, Russian, Chinese (Mandarian), Japanese, Hindi, Indonesian, Malay, Portuguese (Brazilian), Italian, Hebrew or Swedish. (That's only sixteen for what was supposed to be a list of twenty, but even some of those are of marginal relevance.)
There's reasons to speak a language besides the fact that its speakers make up a important economic block. A language is a way of entering a culture, of a new way of thinking, of a new literature. While Klingon has no native literature (though the other reasons still stand), Esperanto has all three.