One of the scariest things about this last extension is that some copyrights HAD expired, then were reinstated.
I believe it was a different extension, and it only applies to works by foreigners that failed to fulfil certain technicalities of US law at the time. Which, IMO, is fair; it's reasonable to ask Americans to take whatever random actions it takes to get copyright in American, but to ask everyone to jump through hoops (different for each country) is not acceptable.
College is where people are taught to turn off their minds and subscribe to politically-correct orthodoxy
Outside of college, I haven't found a whole lot of people who think, or really know the details of any orthodoxy. For the first time in my scholastic career, I had a history class that went beyond "We had a revolutionary war in 1776. We had a civil war in 1860. Abraham Lincoln was president. The good guys won both wars." and actually asked you to think about stuff. I've talked to people both on the far right and the far left and everywhere in between. Most people at high school didn't care enough to be right or left, beyond the "Republicans good; Democrats bad!" level. Yes, I've heard stories of political correctness being forced on people at universities, but it's not at every one, and even at those universities, you'll find an amazing diversity of opinion if you actually talk to the students and teachers.
If you're compiling a super tight kernel for a beowulf cluster, you've already got the expertise needed to compile your own kernel. You don't need hardware detection. And, if you're Joe User, then please, for pity's sake, use one of the nice, modular kernels that comes with your distribution.
Joe User deserves to get as much out of his computer as the beowulf people. And what if Joe User is using a CD-RW drive, or something else that the nice modular kernel doesn't handle?
Yes, if what you want to send is a bitmap graphic.
or maybe an html document in a gzip?
Yes, if what you want to send me is an html document.
It seems like you are troubled by the poor use of HTML email not HTML email par se.
Yes, but as you say
99% of the HTML mail I receive is either better as plain text or better to not get at all.
If it weren't for that 99%, there wouldn't be enough reason to support HTML email in most email clients, especially as it has had so many security holes and privacy leaks.
there is your card on public display.
Why would it be? All the webcard services give you cookies in the link to make sure it's not on public display.
Should we be disallowed enjoyment because *you* can't see any benefit?
Should we all fall silent when you enter the room, because we may offend you? It brings me absolutely no benefit, and I feel free to bitch about it. Feel free to ignore it, but I don't see why I should shut up, because you like it.
Re:Swapping Values Without Using a Temporary Varia
on
The Python Cookbook
·
· Score: 2
b = a + b; a = b - a; b = b - a;
In the case where you're using unsigned integers with wrap around semantics, yes. In the case that a,b are floats, integers on some systems (this won't work on signed magnitude systems, or in programming languages (like Ada) that have overflow checking), it doesn't work. It's nowhere as clear as "a,b = b,a", and doesn't work on general variables.
A book publisher is not forced to publish his work in braille. And internet site is comprised nearly entirely of text and graphics
HTML is designed to made up nearly entirely of text. And the fact that that text is displayed as a series of Bezier curves, rather than raw binary, or raised bumps, or sound, is a technology coincidence.
talk about how Palladium will help reduce software piracy and thus lower the cost of software to the consumer.
On one hand, you've got the large chunk of consumers who do pirate, and aren't going to like the concept; on the other, you've got the IT people who have dealt with copy-protection and how it screws over the good and the bad alike. I think pretty most people are very cynical about the concept of the company passing the savings on to you, so I'm not sure that will be a help either.
No; it's also for people who want me to want a half hour to get my mail over my modem, so I can get the exact same message but with lots of HTML tags. (And invariablly lots of HTML tags - it never bears any resemblence to clean hand-written HTML.)
The ability to send HTML forms to employees is a boon among other benefits.
And what happens when you need to make a change to that form? Why not just stick it your own private webspace?
Maybe you've never shared the joy of sending an HTML birthday card to your child or parent.
Ah, yes; the wonderous feeling of "you crossed my mind, but I couldn't be bothered to walk to the store for a _real_ birthday card".
It's a little more valid, but it's still something that can be done via web.
The ability to communicate with the richness of HTML expression
To be or not to be; that is the question. Whether 'tis greater to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortunes, or by dying, end them. . ..
I fail to see how this could be made richer by adding HTML. In general, just straight plain text is an extraordinarily powerful medium for communication. Frequently, HTML seems to be used as a means to doodle on the email, rather then add any information or emotional empact.
No, it's like he's blind and he's suing because he's unable to use a visual medium. I feel for blind people, I don't know what I would do if I lost my sight. But you're blind, you're not going to be able to use visual (WWW) media anymore!
The WWW is a digitial medium. It has large purely visual aspects, as well as auditory (surely you've been to a website and had music start playing.) But the base of the web is human language, and that can be equally communicated through auditory and visual means (in the case of the web, we do have a bias towards visual, as it's encoded as text, but text to speech has largely been solved.) The HTML is not and was not designed to be a visual layout language; it was designed to hold information.
Give me one good scenario in which a version control system would be the appropriate place to archive binaries.
If you import your whole source into CVS, what happens to the png's (e.g. icons) that are in the directory? A version control system may not be able to do much with them, but the least it can do is not mangle them.
One question: if you're making some kind of version controll system, why whould you use BK to develop it?
Note that the license doesn't say you can't use BK to develop the competition; it says you can't use BK if you're developing the competition. So you can't use BK to develop the kernel if you also work on Subversion.
Also, one example was that Ben Collins wanted to use BK to import the kernel into a Subversion system and keep it uptodate with the BK version.
if I gave you a 4000$ equiv block of palladium, would you turn it away because no central authority would accept it as tender?
If you were giving it away, probably not. If you were trying to trade me something for it, probably, unless you were losing very badly on the deal. After shipping and finding a buyer and getting screwed by that buyer, I could maybe get a couple hundred bucks for that block of palladium, and that's after spending several days trying to hunt down a buyer and making the exchange.
Money has value not only because it's wanted by the US government; the fact is, it would be infeasible for every Wal-Mart cashier to make barter for anything the customer came up with. If the government stopped making or supporting any type of money, then Wal-Mart would have to find some way to take your barter at a standardized rate, and then would then give you Wal-Mart bucks to give to the cashier. Many companies would probably pay you in Wal-Mart bucks - you can have 30 thousand dollars worth of computers, which will depreciate quickly and you'll have to lug around in your car to trade and make sure they don't get broken, or you can have 20 thousand Wal-Mart bucks, which you can hand into the cashier for food without question.
I don't see any reason to assume we couldn't have a digital equivalent.
You said it yourself: why gold has value is because it was a limited resource, and the reason money has value is because it is backed up by the coercive force of government
There's no such thing as a digital limited resource; with complex enough cryptographical tricks, you can get unique digitial strings, but they aren't a limited resource - the only way to make them valuable is the backing of a central authority.
Premature optimization is the root of all evil. This is not the place to start worrying about this; get a working program, and then you can worry about all the deep optimization then. Even most of the upper level optimization - data structures and such - you can rewrite once you know where you're going.
Here's where C++ comes in handy. You can make both timelines and keyframes a class.
You mean object orientation, right? The same OO you can do in Simula, Smalltalk, Ada, Java, and dozens of other languages.
Neither company supports mod chipping and for all intents and purposes it always invalidates your warranty and support.
The company may find it the coolest thing since swiss cheese, and it will still invalidate your warranty. Changing things in your PC invalidates your warranty; what company is going to support a system after you've gone in there with a soldering gun?
Lazy admissions departments would just rather plug numbers into a computer than actually learn about potential students.
Give them a way to do so, and they might. But even if you drag student the thousands of miles it would take many of them to reach you for an interview, how much does that really tell you? Test numbers are somewhat reliable ways to pull the best students out of the mix.
skim off the top ten percent for the top ten percent of schools [...] Podunk Community College doesn't have decent research facilities
Right. I went to Podunk High School and scored very well on the SAT. I've taken a look at the GRE study guides - looks like the exact same type of test. You don't need research facilities; you need a brain. And Podunk Community has a library and Podunk State (right across the street) certainly does.
But then again, a hundred years ago it was all about advancing the knowledge of humanity.
A hundred years ago? "Hey, we got mail from Podunk!" "You mean that place that just became a state? I hear they actually let women vote. Barbarians." "They sent an application. Some miner who probably can't speak a word of Latin thinks he can join Ivy. What arrogance." And the application got trashed.
China didn't explore further to the west (you know--the big fucking mountains)
But the Chinese had big fucking ships, just like the Europeans did.
You do realize that every alphabetic system in the world (with the exception of Hangul, depending on where you group it), is a derivative of Greek? So you would judge them for not being cultural descendents of Greece?
What are you talking about?
What about Korean?
Korean's a language; Hangul is the script used to write that language.
Probably the most advanced written language ever.
How is the concept of taking little shapes to represent sounds and putting them in little boxes and arranging them in lines anymore advanced than the concept of taking little shapes to represent sounds and arranging them in lines?
Or Japanese (hiragana, and katakana--not kanji)? There are more too, look it up (arabic?--not sure about this one).
As I said, every alphabetic system other than Hangul is Greek-derived. Hiragana and katakana are syllablaries. Arabic is a abjad - it only writes consonants.
You are oversimplifying the issue ad nauseum. I could make a language where one line represents an entire Shakespearian sonet
I oversimplify? Words, especially in an isolating language, are the basic units of language. Sonnets aren't a basic unit of communication.
the bits required to display that, or the time required to read it, is shorter than a phonetic writting system doesn't make it more efficient.
So I can read it faster, and it takes less space in a computer and on paper, but it's not more efficent?
People can and do learn the language everyday. It's not the easiest to learn, perhaps, but if you're spending 12 years in school anyway, it may be worth spending the extra time to learn the better system.
Introducing a phonetic writting system would effectively segregate a large portion of the society from the standard.
Sort of like English; except for it's somehow superior to use collections of letters that supposedly represent sounds, but has to be memorized seperately from the pronounciation, that to just admit that the writing system isn't phonetic?
Chinese civilization 5000 years ago was clearly more advanced than European civilization.
Try 1000 years ago, when your civilization was destroying priceless works of Greek writing and literature so it could make more copies of one work. (The only reason why some of those works survived, was because the Arabs took care of them.) I have a work by Hite, Neumeier and Schiffer that claims that as late as 1400, China could have dominated Europe had they chosen to continue exploring outward.
In fact, the Chinese have been so stagnant that they are still using ideograms as a system of writing.
You do realize that every alphabetic system in the world (with the exception of Hangul, depending on where you group it), is a derivative of Greek? So you would judge them for not being cultural descendents of Greece?
Chinese ideograms are faster to read than English (for a native reader), are more compact than English, and even in UTF-8, which takes up 1.5 times as much space as EUC-CN for ideograms, it still takes fewer bytes for equivelent content then any other language (based off http://www.unicode.org/WhatIsUnicode.html pages). You have to carry around large tables for English hyphenation; you can break a line of Chinese anywhere. Don't worry about justification, as all characters are the same size. No kerning or no ligatures in Chinese, either. This is not to mention that fact that thousands of years of writing was in ideographs, and a change in the writing system is an extraordinarily hard change for any literate society - ask the Azerbijania whose official script is Latin, but can still only read thier language in Cryllic. There are significant advantages to ideographs, making a switch-over far from cut and dried.
Re:Promoting progress through copyright extension
on
Eldred vs. Ashcroft
·
· Score: 2
* Every single copyright extension has extended the copyright of existing works.
a statment as horribly circular that could poison the judjes against their entire case
Why is that circular? You can extend the length of copyright in general without extending it for existing workds.
But while their threads will be slow, they will be to handle the text the users are entering; vastly more useful than the most optimized eight-bit character horror you would turn out.
As far as forgetting about K&R's contribution to Unix, we haven't forgot their contribution. But we don't have to call it K&R/Unix, either.
But we do call it Unix, which is what they wanted it to be called. Seriously - the trademark is not for Unix, it's for UNIX, and companies that sell them call them UNIX, not Unix. But K&R use Unix, which is part of the reason the Jargon file uses Unix, and both of which are part of the reason most people call it Unix.
If you're just using cryptography for the sake of using cryptography, what's the point?
Let's assume that GnuPG has a bug; on one level, it could be an incredibly stupid one, so the kid with the box down the street can decrypt your messages, or it could just be the NSA has enough resources/special hacks to do a brute-force on it. Or even someone's willing to do rubberhose decryption on you. If you encrypt everything, it's harder to tell what's worth decrypting. If you encrypt one thing, then everyone knows which message is the valuable one.
If I encrypt all my messages, the fact that my message to someone@sharif.edu.ir is encrypted tells no one anything - it could just be random programming stuff. If I only encrypt that message, I may be looking a rubberhose decryption, or more subtle and reliable forms of interigation. (And just might, in RL.)
However, what GNU would have done had BSD been the thing that came along was that they'd have insisted other distros call themselves GNU/FreeBSD and GNU/NetBSD, etc.
I seriously doubt it. FreeBSD isn't a GNU system; the only core part that is really GNU is GCC and binutils. They would have built a system based off the BSD kernel and added the GNU utilities and called that GnuBSD, because that would be a GNU system.
I just don't get the sense of community that I get from the FreeBSD people
Probably because Mandrake and SuSe are commerical distributions designed to serve a wider set of users than just community players. If you want community, I invite you to listen on the Debian lists, where all the development and flame wars are done in the open.
Slashdot Mirror
One of the scariest things about this last extension is that some copyrights HAD expired, then were reinstated.
I believe it was a different extension, and it only applies to works by foreigners that failed to fulfil certain technicalities of US law at the time. Which, IMO, is fair; it's reasonable to ask Americans to take whatever random actions it takes to get copyright in American, but to ask everyone to jump through hoops (different for each country) is not acceptable.
College is where people are taught to turn off their minds and subscribe to politically-correct orthodoxy
Outside of college, I haven't found a whole lot of people who think, or really know the details of any orthodoxy. For the first time in my scholastic career, I had a history class that went beyond "We had a revolutionary war in 1776. We had a civil war in 1860. Abraham Lincoln was president. The good guys won both wars." and actually asked you to think about stuff. I've talked to people both on the far right and the far left and everywhere in between. Most people at high school didn't care enough to be right or left, beyond the "Republicans good; Democrats bad!" level. Yes, I've heard stories of political correctness being forced on people at universities, but it's not at every one, and even at those universities, you'll find an amazing diversity of opinion if you actually talk to the students and teachers.
If you're compiling a super tight kernel for a beowulf cluster, you've already got the expertise needed to compile your own kernel. You don't need hardware detection. And, if you're Joe User, then please, for pity's sake, use one of the nice, modular kernels that comes with your distribution.
Joe User deserves to get as much out of his computer as the beowulf people. And what if Joe User is using a CD-RW drive, or something else that the nice modular kernel doesn't handle?
so you'd prefer me to send you a png attachement,
Yes, if what you want to send is a bitmap graphic.
or maybe an html document in a gzip?
Yes, if what you want to send me is an html document.
It seems like you are troubled by the poor use of HTML email not HTML email par se.
Yes, but as you say
99% of the HTML mail I receive is either better as plain text or better to not get at all.
If it weren't for that 99%, there wouldn't be enough reason to support HTML email in most email clients, especially as it has had so many security holes and privacy leaks.
there is your card on public display.
Why would it be? All the webcard services give you cookies in the link to make sure it's not on public display.
Should we be disallowed enjoyment because *you* can't see any benefit?
Should we all fall silent when you enter the room, because we may offend you? It brings me absolutely no benefit, and I feel free to bitch about it. Feel free to ignore it, but I don't see why I should shut up, because you like it.
b = a + b;
a = b - a;
b = b - a;
In the case where you're using unsigned integers with wrap around semantics, yes. In the case that a,b are floats, integers on some systems (this won't work on signed magnitude systems, or in programming languages (like Ada) that have overflow checking), it doesn't work. It's nowhere as clear as "a,b = b,a", and doesn't work on general variables.
A book publisher is not forced to publish his work in braille. And internet site is comprised nearly entirely of text and graphics
HTML is designed to made up nearly entirely of text. And the fact that that text is displayed as a series of Bezier curves, rather than raw binary, or raised bumps, or sound, is a technology coincidence.
talk about how Palladium will help reduce software piracy and thus lower the cost of software to the consumer.
On one hand, you've got the large chunk of consumers who do pirate, and aren't going to like the concept; on the other, you've got the IT people who have dealt with copy-protection and how it screws over the good and the bad alike. I think pretty most people are very cynical about the concept of the company passing the savings on to you, so I'm not sure that will be a help either.
HTML email is not just for spammers.
.
No; it's also for people who want me to want a half hour to get my mail over my modem, so I can get the exact same message but with lots of HTML tags. (And invariablly lots of HTML tags - it never bears any resemblence to clean hand-written HTML.)
The ability to send HTML forms to employees is a boon among other benefits.
And what happens when you need to make a change to that form? Why not just stick it your own private webspace?
Maybe you've never shared the joy of sending an HTML birthday card to your child or parent.
Ah, yes; the wonderous feeling of "you crossed my mind, but I couldn't be bothered to walk to the store for a _real_ birthday card".
It's a little more valid, but it's still something that can be done via web.
The ability to communicate with the richness of HTML expression
To be or not to be; that is the question. Whether 'tis greater to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortunes, or by dying, end them. . .
I fail to see how this could be made richer by adding HTML. In general, just straight plain text is an extraordinarily powerful medium for communication. Frequently, HTML seems to be used as a means to doodle on the email, rather then add any information or emotional empact.
No, it's like he's blind and he's suing because he's unable to use a visual medium. I feel for blind people, I don't know what I would do if I lost my sight. But you're blind, you're not going to be able to use visual (WWW) media anymore!
The WWW is a digitial medium. It has large purely visual aspects, as well as auditory (surely you've been to a website and had music start playing.) But the base of the web is human language, and that can be equally communicated through auditory and visual means (in the case of the web, we do have a bias towards visual, as it's encoded as text, but text to speech has largely been solved.) The HTML is not and was not designed to be a visual layout language; it was designed to hold information.
Give me one good scenario in which a version control system would be the appropriate place to archive binaries.
If you import your whole source into CVS, what happens to the png's (e.g. icons) that are in the directory? A version control system may not be able to do much with them, but the least it can do is not mangle them.
One question: if you're making some kind of version controll system, why whould you use BK to develop it?
Note that the license doesn't say you can't use BK to develop the competition; it says you can't use BK if you're developing the competition. So you can't use BK to develop the kernel if you also work on Subversion.
Also, one example was that Ben Collins wanted to use BK to import the kernel into a Subversion system and keep it uptodate with the BK version.
how many of those languages have 3D accelerated API's
Every language in the last twenty years can bind to a C function. Many of them can handle C++ functions.
aren't bloated
Oh, yes, C++, a language so big that four years after it was standardized there's still no compilers that handle the whole language.
allow for aggressive optimization?
Almost any language will optimize that inner loop the same way.
Ada?? Give me a break, and yes I have written many programs in Ada since it was my universities main langauge.
So because you've written some toy programs in the language, that makes you the one and only true expert on the language.
to avoid doing any unneccessary computation inside the rendering loop is important from the outset.
There is a set of things that must be done in that rendering loop. Anything else can be moved out later just as easily as earlier.
if I gave you a 4000$ equiv block of palladium, would you turn it away because no central authority would accept it as tender?
If you were giving it away, probably not. If you were trying to trade me something for it, probably, unless you were losing very badly on the deal. After shipping and finding a buyer and getting screwed by that buyer, I could maybe get a couple hundred bucks for that block of palladium, and that's after spending several days trying to hunt down a buyer and making the exchange.
Money has value not only because it's wanted by the US government; the fact is, it would be infeasible for every Wal-Mart cashier to make barter for anything the customer came up with. If the government stopped making or supporting any type of money, then Wal-Mart would have to find some way to take your barter at a standardized rate, and then would then give you Wal-Mart bucks to give to the cashier. Many companies would probably pay you in Wal-Mart bucks - you can have 30 thousand dollars worth of computers, which will depreciate quickly and you'll have to lug around in your car to trade and make sure they don't get broken, or you can have 20 thousand Wal-Mart bucks, which you can hand into the cashier for food without question.
I don't see any reason to assume we couldn't have a digital equivalent.
You said it yourself: why gold has value is because it was a limited resource, and the reason money has value is because it is backed up by the coercive force of government
There's no such thing as a digital limited resource; with complex enough cryptographical tricks, you can get unique digitial strings, but they aren't a limited resource - the only way to make them valuable is the backing of a central authority.
Keep all your rendering loops tight. [etc.]
Premature optimization is the root of all evil. This is not the place to start worrying about this; get a working program, and then you can worry about all the deep optimization then. Even most of the upper level optimization - data structures and such - you can rewrite once you know where you're going.
Here's where C++ comes in handy. You can make both timelines and keyframes a class.
You mean object orientation, right? The same OO you can do in Simula, Smalltalk, Ada, Java, and dozens of other languages.
Neither company supports mod chipping and for all intents and purposes it always invalidates your warranty and support.
The company may find it the coolest thing since swiss cheese, and it will still invalidate your warranty. Changing things in your PC invalidates your warranty; what company is going to support a system after you've gone in there with a soldering gun?
At this point in time I think we all must sit back and ask whether GNU/HURD is *really* useful or just an overextended ego trip.
As if every open source program isn't an overextended ego trip. But just because some people from GNU are working on it, it's open to attack, eh?
Lazy admissions departments would just rather plug numbers into a computer than actually learn about potential students.
Give them a way to do so, and they might. But even if you drag student the thousands of miles it would take many of them to reach you for an interview, how much does that really tell you? Test numbers are somewhat reliable ways to pull the best students out of the mix.
skim off the top ten percent for the top ten percent of schools [...] Podunk Community College doesn't have decent research facilities
Right. I went to Podunk High School and scored very well on the SAT. I've taken a look at the GRE study guides - looks like the exact same type of test. You don't need research facilities; you need a brain. And Podunk Community has a library and Podunk State (right across the street) certainly does.
But then again, a hundred years ago it was all about advancing the knowledge of humanity.
A hundred years ago? "Hey, we got mail from Podunk!" "You mean that place that just became a state? I hear they actually let women vote. Barbarians." "They sent an application. Some miner who probably can't speak a word of Latin thinks he can join Ivy. What arrogance." And the application got trashed.
China didn't explore further to the west (you know--the big fucking mountains)
But the Chinese had big fucking ships, just like the Europeans did.
You do realize that every alphabetic system in the world (with the exception of Hangul, depending on where you group it), is a derivative of Greek? So you would judge them for not being cultural descendents of Greece?
What are you talking about?
What about Korean?
Korean's a language; Hangul is the script used to write that language.
Probably the most advanced written language ever.
How is the concept of taking little shapes to represent sounds and putting them in little boxes and arranging them in lines anymore advanced than the concept of taking little shapes to represent sounds and arranging them in lines?
Or Japanese (hiragana, and katakana--not kanji)? There are more too, look it up (arabic?--not sure about this one).
As I said, every alphabetic system other than Hangul is Greek-derived. Hiragana and katakana are syllablaries. Arabic is a abjad - it only writes consonants.
You are oversimplifying the issue ad nauseum. I could make a language where one line represents an entire Shakespearian sonet
I oversimplify? Words, especially in an isolating language, are the basic units of language. Sonnets aren't a basic unit of communication.
the bits required to display that, or the time required to read it, is shorter than a phonetic writting system doesn't make it more efficient.
So I can read it faster, and it takes less space in a computer and on paper, but it's not more efficent?
People can and do learn the language everyday. It's not the easiest to learn, perhaps, but if you're spending 12 years in school anyway, it may be worth spending the extra time to learn the better system.
Introducing a phonetic writting system would effectively segregate a large portion of the society from the standard.
Sort of like English; except for it's somehow superior to use collections of letters that supposedly represent sounds, but has to be memorized seperately from the pronounciation,
that to just admit that the writing system isn't phonetic?
Chinese civilization 5000 years ago was clearly more advanced than European civilization.
Try 1000 years ago, when your civilization was destroying priceless works of Greek writing and literature so it could make more copies of one work. (The only reason why some of those works survived, was because the Arabs took care of them.) I have a work by Hite, Neumeier and Schiffer that claims that as late as 1400, China could have dominated Europe had they chosen to continue exploring outward.
In fact, the Chinese have been so stagnant that they are still using ideograms as a system of writing.
You do realize that every alphabetic system in the world (with the exception of Hangul, depending on where you group it), is a derivative of Greek? So you would judge them for not being cultural descendents of Greece?
Chinese ideograms are faster to read than English (for a native reader), are more compact than English, and even in UTF-8, which takes up 1.5 times as much space as EUC-CN for ideograms, it still takes fewer bytes for equivelent content then any other language (based off http://www.unicode.org/WhatIsUnicode.html pages). You have to carry around large tables for English hyphenation; you can break a line of Chinese anywhere. Don't worry about justification, as all characters are the same size. No kerning or no ligatures in Chinese, either. This is not to mention that fact that thousands of years of writing was in ideographs, and a change in the writing system is an extraordinarily hard change for any literate society - ask the Azerbijania whose official script is Latin, but can still only read thier language in Cryllic. There are significant advantages to ideographs, making a switch-over far from cut and dried.
* Every single copyright extension has extended the copyright of existing works.
a statment as horribly circular that could poison the judjes against their entire case
Why is that circular? You can extend the length of copyright in general without extending it for existing workds.
But while their threads will be slow, they will be to handle the text the users are entering; vastly more useful than the most optimized eight-bit character horror you would turn out.
As far as forgetting about K&R's contribution to Unix, we haven't forgot their contribution. But we don't have to call it K&R/Unix, either.
But we do call it Unix, which is what they wanted it to be called. Seriously - the trademark is not for Unix, it's for UNIX, and companies that sell them call them UNIX, not Unix. But K&R use Unix, which is part of the reason the Jargon file uses Unix, and both of which are part of the reason most people call it Unix.
If you're just using cryptography for the sake of using cryptography, what's the point?
Let's assume that GnuPG has a bug; on one level, it could be an incredibly stupid one, so the kid with the box down the street can decrypt your messages, or it could just be the NSA has enough resources/special hacks to do a brute-force on it. Or even someone's willing to do rubberhose decryption on you. If you encrypt everything, it's harder to tell what's worth decrypting. If you encrypt one thing, then everyone knows which message is the valuable one.
If I encrypt all my messages, the fact that my message to someone@sharif.edu.ir is encrypted tells no one anything - it could just be random programming stuff. If I only encrypt that message, I may be looking a rubberhose decryption, or more subtle and reliable forms of interigation. (And just might, in RL.)
However, what GNU would have done had BSD been the thing that came along was that they'd have insisted other distros call themselves GNU/FreeBSD and GNU/NetBSD, etc.
I seriously doubt it. FreeBSD isn't a GNU system; the only core part that is really GNU is GCC and binutils. They would have built a system based off the BSD kernel and added the GNU utilities and called that GnuBSD, because that would be a GNU system.
I just don't get the sense of community that I get from the FreeBSD people
Probably because Mandrake and SuSe are commerical distributions designed to serve a wider set of users than just community players. If you want community, I invite you to listen on the Debian lists, where all the development and flame wars are done in the open.