That can happen to anybody - all vendors have some lemons. The question is, how many and how do they handle it when they sold you something with a problem? A good vendor will take care of it to the best of their ability and leave you with as little problems as possible - a bad vendor will ignore you.
I got an outdated DPT RAID controller from a friend a decade ago. It had problems cooperating with my BIOS - it would only boot correctly (exactly) every second time, or something like that. Not something that was a big deal to me, and the card was about five years old at that time (and I was not the original owner). However, I sent them an email to just ask if they had a solution. They immediately (as in same day, and without me asking for it) sent me new firmware chips by Fedex. Shipping came to $70 - more than the card was worth on the second hand market.
I've had other vendors that have driven out in the middle of the night with replacement servers when I suspected that there was a problem with one of the servers they'd delivered.
It's not the failure - it's the failure to handle the failure.
This is about a court interpreting what restrictions are OK to place. The previous precedent is for restrictions says that legal restrictions to certain activities do not apply if the restrictions are used to block the only way to achieve interoperability. If the vendor id is made a functional requirement by Apple (and the USB IF allows making it a functional requirement) then this weaken the position of the USB IF, and would seem likely to have those clauses of the contract/spec narrowed by interpreting as "unless made necessary to allow interoperability", just like copyright and trademark law was narrowed.
It's not a done deal, as there's complications through the use of a separate entity (the USB IF), but it's a relevant precedent.
The conflict seems fairly clear: Palm wants to provide the smooth iTunes experience with the Pre that you get with the iPod and iPhone. This means you don't have to install extra software, and the device to sync shows up directly inside iTunes. Apple don't want this to work; they want to make sure that for anybody that already have an iTunes library (e.g, most Mac users, prior iPod users) the experience with other players is less smooth than the experience with iPod/iPhone.
Sega vs Accolade is a court case. I'll keep you from having to look it up as the grandparent asked you to: It concludes that you can't use copyright/trademark law to block interoperability. The case originally deals with some copied code necessary to make Sega Genesis (AKA Sega Megadrive) games work, but I would guess the court would likely apply same legal line to the ids in question. (The original issue that lead to Accolade doing the reverse engineering was that Sega charged licensing fees for producing cartridges; Accolade avoided these fees by reverse engineering everything, bypassing the check and producing the cartridges themselves.)
Your description of disinfectants is not really correct. Different disinfectants function in different ways. Anti-biotic resistance *does* form from use of anti-bacterial soap, crossing over to resistance against anti-biotics used in humans. The transfer is through plasmids, and can happen between very different "species"[1] of bacteria. (Information reproduced from discussion with a medical doctor that is doing research in this area.)
I also doubt the grandparent: I don't think the cleaning is the cause of anti-biotic resistance in hospitals - it seems more likely to be from overuse of human antibiotics and just the chance to transfer to lots of hosts with weak immune systems. This is strengthened by the fact that anti-biotic resistance is more common in countries that have worse hygiene and in countries that have less restrictive use of antibiotics.
[1] I use quotes around species because species of bacteria are defined fairly differently than species of animals and plants, and assuming they're regular species lead to confusion. Since bacteria reproduce by fission, species are defined purely by similarities of function.
[Citation needed] Actually, some logic and reason is called for here -- WHY does it need drive and motivation?
Your "laws" won't really work because brains don't work that way
We're not building brains. You can tweak your simulation any way you want.
There's not a "don't kill humans" neuron you can put in there.
My neurons tell me not to kill humans, don't yours?
No. They tell me to restrict killing humans to certain scenarios, like direct threats to myself or others that can only be stopped by killing the aggressor.
"Animals are machines" is an analogy, meaning that "animals function in an organized manner, working on top of physics (and mostly classical physics)". Don't stop seeing the forest just because you learn of more trees.
If you're going to protect people from other people on the net, it's easy: Make the first level responsible. If your machine is used to attack me, you're responsible - even if your machine was broken into in turn. Then require people to have insurance to handle the risk.
The insurance companies will spend the effort to find the risk profile, and if you do things to decrease your risk - like taking this kind of certificate - you'll get lower insurance. Basic economics then sort out how to get appropriate safety on the net.
There's a risk that you'll have problems with non-standard configurations etc, but I suspect that with competition in the marketplace that will only end up a little more expensive - or maybe even a little cheaper, if you deny insuring Windows people.
Errhm...There's a reason that so many people have poor experiences with work -- it is almost guaranteed that you will make significantly more money by crushing them beneath your booted heel...
I believe the reason is almost this, but subtly different: It is easy to get the perception that you'll make significantly more money if you crush them beneath your booted heel. However, many of the companies that make the most money (Google, Gore Technologies (behind Gore-Tex), Microsoft) treat their employees well. I seem to remember research showing a direct correlation; in the same vein, I at least remember seeing a direct correlation between having a written ethics statement for employees that is followed and making significantly more money. Over 50% more for comparable businesses. And at fist glance, you'd expect that not having ethics would allow you a wider choice of behavior that should give more profit.
That's like saying C is a bad language because it allows you to use both underscore_names and CamelCaseNames in the same program. If your developers don't follow your development policies and problems result then it's their fault and not the fault of the tools.
The question isn't who is at fault - the question is which combination of tools, policies and people tend to give what results. If one particular tool tend to lead to one particular behavior, that's a fact about the world - and disregarding this fact when designing a development environment is a recipe for trouble.
Different tools lend themselves to different kinds of use; a scalpel lends itself to a precise cut (but is slow for large cuts), a butcher's knife lends itself to a rapid cut (but not as precise). The cuts of each could be done with the other and enforced with a policy - but it's better to give a tool that leads to the kind of behavior you want.
Ref diabetes: Have you seen anything about what's happening with the capsaicin treatments for diabetes? See e.g. http://www.naturalnews.com/021345.html (also previously discussed on Slashdot.)
The researcher that originally reported it don't seem to have made any publications that seem directly relevant, see his sickkids.ca page.
"I was always dreading having my wisdom teeth taken out."
Its not THAT bad...I had mine out when I was like 16 or so I think.
My dentist told me the wisdom teeth fasten as you get older, and that it's a good idea to take them out as early as possible if you're going to remove them. (I've had several dentists - they also seem to have quite different opinions about the utility of wisdom teeth, with one having the opinion "Take 'em out" and the other having the opinion "You never know when you're going to need a tooth...")
What's missing is the reciprocated love, but casual sex takes that pain away. It's a medicine, not a replacement.
It's still like eating three snickers bars in a row. It doesn't take away the pain, it just covers it up for a few minutes until you realize you're still hungry for something and go for the next bad coping mechanism on the list.
...but it fills the hole and takes the suffering away. It's the medicine that heals.
Having meaningless sex doesn't heal, it just obscures the real problem -- meaningless sex isn't real different from masturbation.
OK, I can agree with that. However, your statement assumes that "casual sex" is always meaningless sex, and that casual sex is the same for everybody in every situation. I think you'll agree with me when I say that as it involves human relationships - even if shallow human relationships - it will be different in every case, and different for each of the participants.
When it comes to healing a broken heart, my own way of looking at it - which has worked for me and which I've been able to use to help other men - is that it mostly comes down to roles. When you've been in a relationship with somebody, you've taken that person into your life, filling a number of different psychological roles for you. Trying to heal this as a "block" is very difficult. However, if you try to find - or help people find - different relationships that each cover some number of different roles, it is often possible to fully heal.
One role that is important to men, and that I believe is automatically filled for most young women and therefore don't come onto the radar - is "Provider of self esteem through sexual interest". Casual sex can fill this role. It doesn't fill all the other roles, but dropping the casual sex can easily lead to a situation where it is hard to get casual sex (due to lack of practice) and where the need for that role becomes dominant.
And please, don't condescend to me. You're way out of your depth here. You clearly do not understand how men work. We're built fundamentally differently from girls when it comes to emotions. What the emotional world looks like to you has no relation to how it is for guys.
I should apologize for advising people to build mutually empowering and beneficial long-term relationships instead of one night stands? I do have a good grasp on what the "emotional world" of the average guy looks like -- it's mostly a desolate wasteland of drinking buddies, hobbies that long ago lost their luster, and filled with cliched advice from so-called friends and coworkers.
Do you remember the cliche about "patriarchy" that feminists come with about men's power and inability to see it?
I see a similar thing for women and sexuality. Women know that if they want to have sex without regards to the partner, they can put an advert in a magazine and no matter what their looks, age or personality, there will be men interested in having sex with them. Men don't. Men know they could put that ad, and there would be no response. Sometimes, they know they can go out every day for a year, and there most likely will be no response. Just like last year, and the year before. That there is nobody out there for them - there might be somebody in the future, possibly, but there is nobody. And, always, the fear that there will never be anybody sexually interested.
They're lucky if they've got that one guy-friend who they can be vulnerable to and trust not to rake their masculinity over the coals for doing so. The end result? When a man's heart breaks, it's not the quiet little death that us girls experience -- it's a suicidal plunge into darkness that takes years, sometimes decades, to repair. I've seen too many nice guys fall apart in the worst ways possible from a broken heart and never fully heal from it... and it's because of crap like what you're saying
"Or to put it another way: being part of a company doesn't give the people involved a mystical get-out-of-jail free card to be irresponsible or unethical."
I disagree. We, the people of the west, have allowed our governments and corporations to turn the ideals of free market action into an unholy marriage between all three arms of government and the powerful elite of the private sector. We have allowed powerful members of industry and government to usurp the right to do anything they want, so long as they can afford lawyers to justify their actions, ethical or otherwise. Don't like it? Sorry, it's a two party system, and both parties play the same game.
The west != the US. Though I feel your pain and would like for you to have a more citizen-influenced system, it is good to know that there are countries with systems that do give that.
Slashdot contains a lot of geeks; some of us are seduction geeks. Fast Seduction used to be a good place to start, if too much focused on the technical aspects just leading to getting a girl to bed; I don't know if it still is, I've restricted myself to private sites for a few years (and lately not even that).
This has all worked well for me - I'm getting married in a month:) (And yes, she does know about my studies.)
It's only really messy in other parts of the world (In this case, Switzerland.) In the United States the courts have long ruled, and it is well established that pretty much anyone can take pictures of your home if they want as long as they're on public property (sidewalk, street, park, etc...) They can also take pictures of YOU if you are in public. Shock! Horror!
It's a privacy violation. One that the US has decided to allow, but not one that is the only way to do it. Norway (where I'm from) allows each person to control their picture; you're not allowed to take a picture of a person in public except for somebody that's a celebrity in the moment (ie, they're doing something noteworthy) or as an incidental part of a motif. Ie, it's OK to take a picture of a street with people on it; it's not OK to take a picture of an individual alone on that street.
There's other routine privacy violations in US law, too - the one that seems most egregious to me is identifying somebody that's accused of a crime. It destroys innocent until proven guilty, replacing it with "Let's have the social group punish him."
Because I was using it as a workstation. This means that it included my SSH keys and client documents, and I wanted to keep it secure from physical compromise.
Now, I worked as a security consultant at the time, so it at various times included data such as network layouts for clients, incident response plans for financial institutions, new vulnerabilities that could be used to trick an online banking system, and so on, so I could possibly have used that to demonstrate that I had strong reasons to encrypt that disk.
However, even before I started working as a security consultant, I had a habit of tightly securing machines, and I still tend to be fairly careful. And I know people that are paranoid about it - to the level where it could be considered clinical. That's not enough that they should be put in prison if they also have a lapse of memory.
Yes, and as we all know, apart from the license, BSD and Linux are *exactly identical*, including having the exact same popularity, features and development model.
I just thought I'd make sure to remind people of this exact equality, just in case they'd forgotten and thereby misunderstood your post as comparing apples to oranges.
It's also true that BSD get no support whatsoever from businesses, and that code contributions like the VM system maintenance and the SCSI subsystem and the netgraph subsystem and various full time maintainer positions *are all lies spread by Linux' enemies*!
I'm miffed at whoever moderated this "Troll". Sarcasm should be allowed even towards your scared cow, especially in the context of an actual example that's labeled as a textual demonstration.
One thing you never seem to understand is that there are other differences between Linux development and *BSD development than the license. I point out stuff that's directly license related, and you attempt to pretend that *everything* is license.
As most other companies, Oracle support Linux over FreeBSD because Linux is more popular than FreeBSD. Oracle used FreeBSD as basis for an appliance due to licensing, but chose to not release the DB for FreeBSD due to the lower popularity of FreeBSD. Linux is more popular than FreeBSD for a variety of reasons, and whether the licensing of either is a positive or negative for popularity is a debatable point.
If you're looking for me to concede some point around this, I'll concede that the propaganda around the GPL is much stronger than whatever little is available for the BSD license, and that this is effective at converting a bunch of people to support the GPL - and may actually be overall enough to make GPLed projects grow more popular, though I haven't seen any clear evidence in either direction. If the GPL propanda makes the GPLed projects become more popular, I find it unfortunate, as I think it's harmful.
I have a old machine with a locked disk lying around the house. I have it around because I hope that I will somehow manage to remember the key to it; I used it every day for about year. The disk contains various semi-completed FreeBSD patches, which represent a reasonable of work and would be nice to finish and commit to FreeBSD if I ever get it opened. It does not contain any illegal data whatsoever.
However, if I should happen to be accused while in the UK, that disk means that I'd get five years in prison - because I *cannot* give the key to it.
What he was saying is that Linux is working now because of the GPL during its development.
Of course most end users don't give a rat's ass about the GPL, but it is this GPL which allowed one modification made to Linux to be used anywhere. Without it, we would have an IBM Linux, a Red Hat Linux, etc.
Actually, we do. And it doesn't matter, since it's just minor patches.
It is not at all clear whether the difference in forking behavior is due to the license or the external development velocity / source code organization. We don't have a large scale IBM BSD, a Red Hat BSD, etc - we have a few open source BSDs and Mac OS X, and IBM choose to contribute to an open source BSD (FreeBSD through Whistle) rather than create their own pure fork. Mac OS X also contribute changes back.
I'm attributing the major differences in fork behavior mostly to source code organization (BSD is a large tree containing the entire OS, "GNU/Linux" is a bunch of small trees that are aggregated to form a bunch of different operating systems which are close enough that people think of them as they were the same rather than forks.)
It means when IBM incorporates JFS, or hires kernel-hackers, that those changes benefit every last linux user.
Let me present you with an even freer license, which I've unfortunately had some problems with getting people to use software under: The sex-with-your-wife license. It means that whenever Joe Blow use the SWYWL-licensed software, *every last Linux user gets to have sex with Joe Blow's wife*! Sure sounds like freedom to me.
This was written to illustrate two points: YOu're really taking away freedom, and whenever you change the license, you change the likelihood of people using that software. This happens with the GPL, too. And it means that by licensing under the GPL, you lose contributions from companies like Whistle (first Multilink PPP in *BSD, the Netgraph stack in FreeBSD), Justin Gibbs (the entire SCSI stack in FreeBSD and the Adaptec drivers), and Oracle (supplied manpower for the rewrite of the BSD VM system, delivering a system that beat Linux for a decade and a half until the FreeBSD VM maintainer decided to support with the VM redesign for Linux 2.6). And of course my own very modest contributions as part of making an appliance a decade ago.
Because when we make proprietary stuff based on a free codebase, it makes sense to give a bunch of it back. When you deny us the ability to create proprietary derivates - we don't use your codebase, and we don't contribute to it. The extra code you get is the code that would have been written *anyway* (it has a large enough incremental value to be written for pure use value) but would have been kept proprietary for strategic advantage if it was written. That means that the strategic value must be higher than the combination of maintenance costs, morale boost for the employees, and community goodwill. Most code isn't - it's plumbing.
And for this, you give up the ability to have people invest in software for special interests. You could, for instance, have a free application that perfectly well served the seeing - but needed substantial modification to work for the blind. A commercial developer could take on that risk, and then sell the end result (with the added value that it is usable for the blind) to the blind. This would add value for the developers, and it would add value for the blind. The developers wouldn't do this out of the charity of their heart if they couldn't earn money on it - it wouldn't be possible to invest as much time. So, by GPLing in this example, you're denying the developer the freedom to make a derivative - and you're denying the blind the freedom to actually have a usable app at all.
So - you can argue for the GPL - but please keep to the truth: It is taking away freedom, significant freedom, to attempt different goals.
Slashdot Mirror
That can happen to anybody - all vendors have some lemons. The question is, how many and how do they handle it when they sold you something with a problem? A good vendor will take care of it to the best of their ability and leave you with as little problems as possible - a bad vendor will ignore you.
I got an outdated DPT RAID controller from a friend a decade ago. It had problems cooperating with my BIOS - it would only boot correctly (exactly) every second time, or something like that. Not something that was a big deal to me, and the card was about five years old at that time (and I was not the original owner). However, I sent them an email to just ask if they had a solution. They immediately (as in same day, and without me asking for it) sent me new firmware chips by Fedex. Shipping came to $70 - more than the card was worth on the second hand market.
I've had other vendors that have driven out in the middle of the night with replacement servers when I suspected that there was a problem with one of the servers they'd delivered.
It's not the failure - it's the failure to handle the failure.
Eivind.
This is about a court interpreting what restrictions are OK to place. The previous precedent is for restrictions says that legal restrictions to certain activities do not apply if the restrictions are used to block the only way to achieve interoperability. If the vendor id is made a functional requirement by Apple (and the USB IF allows making it a functional requirement) then this weaken the position of the USB IF, and would seem likely to have those clauses of the contract/spec narrowed by interpreting as "unless made necessary to allow interoperability", just like copyright and trademark law was narrowed.
It's not a done deal, as there's complications through the use of a separate entity (the USB IF), but it's a relevant precedent.
The conflict seems fairly clear: Palm wants to provide the smooth iTunes experience with the Pre that you get with the iPod and iPhone. This means you don't have to install extra software, and the device to sync shows up directly inside iTunes. Apple don't want this to work; they want to make sure that for anybody that already have an iTunes library (e.g, most Mac users, prior iPod users) the experience with other players is less smooth than the experience with iPod/iPhone.
Sega vs Accolade is a court case. I'll keep you from having to look it up as the grandparent asked you to: It concludes that you can't use copyright/trademark law to block interoperability. The case originally deals with some copied code necessary to make Sega Genesis (AKA Sega Megadrive) games work, but I would guess the court would likely apply same legal line to the ids in question. (The original issue that lead to Accolade doing the reverse engineering was that Sega charged licensing fees for producing cartridges; Accolade avoided these fees by reverse engineering everything, bypassing the check and producing the cartridges themselves.)
Eivind.
Lots of information in there.
Your description of disinfectants is not really correct. Different disinfectants function in different ways. Anti-biotic resistance *does* form from use of anti-bacterial soap, crossing over to resistance against anti-biotics used in humans. The transfer is through plasmids, and can happen between very different "species"[1] of bacteria. (Information reproduced from discussion with a medical doctor that is doing research in this area.)
I also doubt the grandparent: I don't think the cleaning is the cause of anti-biotic resistance in hospitals - it seems more likely to be from overuse of human antibiotics and just the chance to transfer to lots of hosts with weak immune systems. This is strengthened by the fact that anti-biotic resistance is more common in countries that have worse hygiene and in countries that have less restrictive use of antibiotics.
[1] I use quotes around species because species of bacteria are defined fairly differently than species of animals and plants, and assuming they're regular species lead to confusion. Since bacteria reproduce by fission, species are defined purely by similarities of function.
AI needs drive and motivation
[Citation needed] Actually, some logic and reason is called for here -- WHY does it need drive and motivation?
Your "laws" won't really work because brains don't work that way
We're not building brains. You can tweak your simulation any way you want.
There's not a "don't kill humans" neuron you can put in there.
My neurons tell me not to kill humans, don't yours?
No. They tell me to restrict killing humans to certain scenarios, like direct threats to myself or others that can only be stopped by killing the aggressor.
"Animals are machines" is an analogy, meaning that "animals function in an organized manner, working on top of physics (and mostly classical physics)". Don't stop seeing the forest just because you learn of more trees.
You've just managed to convince me. Good post.
If you're going to protect people from other people on the net, it's easy: Make the first level responsible. If your machine is used to attack me, you're responsible - even if your machine was broken into in turn. Then require people to have insurance to handle the risk.
The insurance companies will spend the effort to find the risk profile, and if you do things to decrease your risk - like taking this kind of certificate - you'll get lower insurance. Basic economics then sort out how to get appropriate safety on the net.
There's a risk that you'll have problems with non-standard configurations etc, but I suspect that with competition in the marketplace that will only end up a little more expensive - or maybe even a little cheaper, if you deny insuring Windows people.
Eivind.
Errhm...There's a reason that so many people have poor experiences with work -- it is almost guaranteed that you will make significantly more money by crushing them beneath your booted heel...
I believe the reason is almost this, but subtly different: It is easy to get the perception that you'll make significantly more money if you crush them beneath your booted heel. However, many of the companies that make the most money (Google, Gore Technologies (behind Gore-Tex), Microsoft) treat their employees well. I seem to remember research showing a direct correlation; in the same vein, I at least remember seeing a direct correlation between having a written ethics statement for employees that is followed and making significantly more money. Over 50% more for comparable businesses. And at fist glance, you'd expect that not having ethics would allow you a wider choice of behavior that should give more profit.
That's like saying C is a bad language because it allows you to use both underscore_names and CamelCaseNames in the same program. If your developers don't follow your development policies and problems result then it's their fault and not the fault of the tools.
The question isn't who is at fault - the question is which combination of tools, policies and people tend to give what results. If one particular tool tend to lead to one particular behavior, that's a fact about the world - and disregarding this fact when designing a development environment is a recipe for trouble.
Different tools lend themselves to different kinds of use; a scalpel lends itself to a precise cut (but is slow for large cuts), a butcher's knife lends itself to a rapid cut (but not as precise). The cuts of each could be done with the other and enforced with a policy - but it's better to give a tool that leads to the kind of behavior you want.
Ref diabetes: Have you seen anything about what's happening with the capsaicin treatments for diabetes? See e.g. http://www.naturalnews.com/021345.html (also previously discussed on Slashdot.)
The researcher that originally reported it don't seem to have made any publications that seem directly relevant, see his sickkids.ca page.
Eivind.
"I was always dreading having my wisdom teeth taken out."
Its not THAT bad...I had mine out when I was like 16 or so I think.
My dentist told me the wisdom teeth fasten as you get older, and that it's a good idea to take them out as early as possible if you're going to remove them. (I've had several dentists - they also seem to have quite different opinions about the utility of wisdom teeth, with one having the opinion "Take 'em out" and the other having the opinion "You never know when you're going to need a tooth...")
What's missing is the reciprocated love, but casual sex takes that pain away. It's a medicine, not a replacement.
It's still like eating three snickers bars in a row. It doesn't take away the pain, it just covers it up for a few minutes until you realize you're still hungry for something and go for the next bad coping mechanism on the list.
...but it fills the hole and takes the suffering away. It's the medicine that heals.
Having meaningless sex doesn't heal, it just obscures the real problem -- meaningless sex isn't real different from masturbation.
OK, I can agree with that. However, your statement assumes that "casual sex" is always meaningless sex, and that casual sex is the same for everybody in every situation. I think you'll agree with me when I say that as it involves human relationships - even if shallow human relationships - it will be different in every case, and different for each of the participants.
When it comes to healing a broken heart, my own way of looking at it - which has worked for me and which I've been able to use to help other men - is that it mostly comes down to roles. When you've been in a relationship with somebody, you've taken that person into your life, filling a number of different psychological roles for you. Trying to heal this as a "block" is very difficult. However, if you try to find - or help people find - different relationships that each cover some number of different roles, it is often possible to fully heal.
One role that is important to men, and that I believe is automatically filled for most young women and therefore don't come onto the radar - is "Provider of self esteem through sexual interest". Casual sex can fill this role. It doesn't fill all the other roles, but dropping the casual sex can easily lead to a situation where it is hard to get casual sex (due to lack of practice) and where the need for that role becomes dominant.
And please, don't condescend to me. You're way out of your depth here. You clearly do not understand how men work. We're built fundamentally differently from girls when it comes to emotions. What the emotional world looks like to you has no relation to how it is for guys.
I should apologize for advising people to build mutually empowering and beneficial long-term relationships instead of one night stands? I do have a good grasp on what the "emotional world" of the average guy looks like -- it's mostly a desolate wasteland of drinking buddies, hobbies that long ago lost their luster, and filled with cliched advice from so-called friends and coworkers.
Do you remember the cliche about "patriarchy" that feminists come with about men's power and inability to see it?
I see a similar thing for women and sexuality. Women know that if they want to have sex without regards to the partner, they can put an advert in a magazine and no matter what their looks, age or personality, there will be men interested in having sex with them. Men don't. Men know they could put that ad, and there would be no response. Sometimes, they know they can go out every day for a year, and there most likely will be no response. Just like last year, and the year before. That there is nobody out there for them - there might be somebody in the future, possibly, but there is nobody. And, always, the fear that there will never be anybody sexually interested.
They're lucky if they've got that one guy-friend who they can be vulnerable to and trust not to rake their masculinity over the coals for doing so. The end result? When a man's heart breaks, it's not the quiet little death that us girls experience -- it's a suicidal plunge into darkness that takes years, sometimes decades, to repair. I've seen too many nice guys fall apart in the worst ways possible from a broken heart and never fully heal from it... and it's because of crap like what you're saying
I
"Or to put it another way: being part of a company doesn't give the people involved a mystical get-out-of-jail free card to be irresponsible or unethical."
I disagree. We, the people of the west, have allowed our governments and corporations to turn the ideals of free market action into an unholy marriage between all three arms of government and the powerful elite of the private sector. We have allowed powerful members of industry and government to usurp the right to do anything they want, so long as they can afford lawyers to justify their actions, ethical or otherwise. Don't like it? Sorry, it's a two party system, and both parties play the same game.
The west != the US. Though I feel your pain and would like for you to have a more citizen-influenced system, it is good to know that there are countries with systems that do give that.
Slashdot contains a lot of geeks; some of us are seduction geeks. Fast Seduction used to be a good place to start, if too much focused on the technical aspects just leading to getting a girl to bed; I don't know if it still is, I've restricted myself to private sites for a few years (and lately not even that).
This has all worked well for me - I'm getting married in a month :) (And yes, she does know about my studies.)
Eivind.
It's only really messy in other parts of the world (In this case, Switzerland.) In the United States the courts have long ruled, and it is well established that pretty much anyone can take pictures of your home if they want as long as they're on public property (sidewalk, street, park, etc...) They can also take pictures of YOU if you are in public. Shock! Horror!
It's a privacy violation. One that the US has decided to allow, but not one that is the only way to do it. Norway (where I'm from) allows each person to control their picture; you're not allowed to take a picture of a person in public except for somebody that's a celebrity in the moment (ie, they're doing something noteworthy) or as an incidental part of a motif. Ie, it's OK to take a picture of a street with people on it; it's not OK to take a picture of an individual alone on that street.
There's other routine privacy violations in US law, too - the one that seems most egregious to me is identifying somebody that's accused of a crime. It destroys innocent until proven guilty, replacing it with "Let's have the social group punish him."
Because I was using it as a workstation. This means that it included my SSH keys and client documents, and I wanted to keep it secure from physical compromise.
Now, I worked as a security consultant at the time, so it at various times included data such as network layouts for clients, incident response plans for financial institutions, new vulnerabilities that could be used to trick an online banking system, and so on, so I could possibly have used that to demonstrate that I had strong reasons to encrypt that disk.
However, even before I started working as a security consultant, I had a habit of tightly securing machines, and I still tend to be fairly careful. And I know people that are paranoid about it - to the level where it could be considered clinical. That's not enough that they should be put in prison if they also have a lapse of memory.
(I hope you can read this with a smile :)
Yes, and as we all know, apart from the license, BSD and Linux are *exactly identical*, including having the exact same popularity, features and development model.
I just thought I'd make sure to remind people of this exact equality, just in case they'd forgotten and thereby misunderstood your post as comparing apples to oranges.
It's also true that BSD get no support whatsoever from businesses, and that code contributions like the VM system maintenance and the SCSI subsystem and the netgraph subsystem and various full time maintainer positions *are all lies spread by Linux' enemies*!
I'm miffed at whoever moderated this "Troll". Sarcasm should be allowed even towards your scared cow, especially in the context of an actual example that's labeled as a textual demonstration.
Sigh.
One thing you never seem to understand is that there are other differences between Linux development and *BSD development than the license. I point out stuff that's directly license related, and you attempt to pretend that *everything* is license.
As most other companies, Oracle support Linux over FreeBSD because Linux is more popular than FreeBSD. Oracle used FreeBSD as basis for an appliance due to licensing, but chose to not release the DB for FreeBSD due to the lower popularity of FreeBSD. Linux is more popular than FreeBSD for a variety of reasons, and whether the licensing of either is a positive or negative for popularity is a debatable point.
If you're looking for me to concede some point around this, I'll concede that the propaganda around the GPL is much stronger than whatever little is available for the BSD license, and that this is effective at converting a bunch of people to support the GPL - and may actually be overall enough to make GPLed projects grow more popular, though I haven't seen any clear evidence in either direction. If the GPL propanda makes the GPLed projects become more popular, I find it unfortunate, as I think it's harmful.
I have a old machine with a locked disk lying around the house. I have it around because I hope that I will somehow manage to remember the key to it; I used it every day for about year. The disk contains various semi-completed FreeBSD patches, which represent a reasonable of work and would be nice to finish and commit to FreeBSD if I ever get it opened. It does not contain any illegal data whatsoever. However, if I should happen to be accused while in the UK, that disk means that I'd get five years in prison - because I *cannot* give the key to it.
What he was saying is that Linux is working now because of the GPL during its development.
Of course most end users don't give a rat's ass about the GPL, but it is this GPL which allowed one modification made to Linux to be used anywhere. Without it, we would have an IBM Linux, a Red Hat Linux, etc.
Actually, we do. And it doesn't matter, since it's just minor patches.
It is not at all clear whether the difference in forking behavior is due to the license or the external development velocity / source code organization. We don't have a large scale IBM BSD, a Red Hat BSD, etc - we have a few open source BSDs and Mac OS X, and IBM choose to contribute to an open source BSD (FreeBSD through Whistle) rather than create their own pure fork. Mac OS X also contribute changes back.
I'm attributing the major differences in fork behavior mostly to source code organization (BSD is a large tree containing the entire OS, "GNU/Linux" is a bunch of small trees that are aggregated to form a bunch of different operating systems which are close enough that people think of them as they were the same rather than forks.)
Sure sounds like freedom to me.
It means when IBM incorporates JFS, or hires kernel-hackers, that those changes benefit every last linux user.
Let me present you with an even freer license, which I've unfortunately had some problems with getting people to use software under: The sex-with-your-wife license. It means that whenever Joe Blow use the SWYWL-licensed software, *every last Linux user gets to have sex with Joe Blow's wife*! Sure sounds like freedom to me.
This was written to illustrate two points: YOu're really taking away freedom, and whenever you change the license, you change the likelihood of people using that software. This happens with the GPL, too. And it means that by licensing under the GPL, you lose contributions from companies like Whistle (first Multilink PPP in *BSD, the Netgraph stack in FreeBSD), Justin Gibbs (the entire SCSI stack in FreeBSD and the Adaptec drivers), and Oracle (supplied manpower for the rewrite of the BSD VM system, delivering a system that beat Linux for a decade and a half until the FreeBSD VM maintainer decided to support with the VM redesign for Linux 2.6). And of course my own very modest contributions as part of making an appliance a decade ago.
Because when we make proprietary stuff based on a free codebase, it makes sense to give a bunch of it back. When you deny us the ability to create proprietary derivates - we don't use your codebase, and we don't contribute to it. The extra code you get is the code that would have been written *anyway* (it has a large enough incremental value to be written for pure use value) but would have been kept proprietary for strategic advantage if it was written. That means that the strategic value must be higher than the combination of maintenance costs, morale boost for the employees, and community goodwill. Most code isn't - it's plumbing.
And for this, you give up the ability to have people invest in software for special interests. You could, for instance, have a free application that perfectly well served the seeing - but needed substantial modification to work for the blind. A commercial developer could take on that risk, and then sell the end result (with the added value that it is usable for the blind) to the blind. This would add value for the developers, and it would add value for the blind. The developers wouldn't do this out of the charity of their heart if they couldn't earn money on it - it wouldn't be possible to invest as much time. So, by GPLing in this example, you're denying the developer the freedom to make a derivative - and you're denying the blind the freedom to actually have a usable app at all.
So - you can argue for the GPL - but please keep to the truth: It is taking away freedom, significant freedom, to attempt different goals.