If your application package includes the library, then it doesn't matter what the courts think a derivative work is, because you're still distributing someone else's library, and therefore must abide by the licence.
This has nothing to do with derivative works. This argument could only apply if you didn't distribute the library, and required users to download it separately.
But as soon as you start copying names, I don't think that's merely what we're talking about "ideas" here, that would count as expressions. (In general, characters can be copyrighted AFAIK - "expression" is broader than simply "copying the exact book itself", it's just not as broad as concepts such as "a school for wizards". Or it shouldn't be, imo.)
The GPL applies to all "derivative works". The GPL's authors don't get to decide what constitutes a derivative work
I don't see how that's relevant here - the point is that if you're distributing the library (which he presumably is, unless he expects users to download it themselves, which could perhaps be another way round it), he has to abide by the licence. It doesn't matter whether his application is considered a derivative work or not.
Remember, the GPL grants permission for activities which are otherwise prohibited by copyright law
Yes, and distributing someone else's library (however your application interacts with it) is otherwise prohibited by copyright law.
My point is that in both cases, it's unfair to characterize all jobs (or religions) as having that nefarious intent.
The OP may have generalised too broadly, but Ost99 made his point specifically for Christianity. Do you now concede that Christianity preys on fears (just as some people prey on fears of poverty), and you're now just back-peddling to make the point that not every religion is like this? I would agree with that.
What if I were to say that "promising $100k if you just show up to work, write some software, and make sure that software works is just preying on the fear of poverty"?
If you had to work all your life before getting the money, and no one knew if you'd ever hand over the money, then sure, I'd be questioning such promises.
Just because something happens
Right, get back to me when something "happens" and a religion actually does something.
You may as well claim that doctors prey on the fear of disease.
If there were people who were peddling products claiming to cure people, when there was no evidence that their cures worked, then sure that would be a fair comparison. Since that isn't true for doctors, your analogy fails.
Let me fix it for you:
You may as well claim that homeopaths prey on the fear of disease.
I don't think it implies a conspiracy - I'm sure that they really believe what they do, but when people in positions of power say "We must do this because God says so" or "X is immoral because it's written in the Bible", that's control. They still get to sway other people to their views (either legally in politics, or the pope with about a billion believers).
Forcibly trying to covert people to your belief is also control, such as when all children in the country are indoctrinated in schools (e.g., the UK). That's still control, it doesn't matter that they themselves believe it.
What other mechanism is there for leading us to "truth" about how the Universe works?
If I were wrong, we would never abandon any discovery made through the scientific process, ever. The fact that we do indeed disprove things that were considered scientific fact a scant generation ago is mute evidence that your position is wrong.
Such as what? Anyhow, just because a process isn't 100% accurate, doesn't mean you aren't getting closer to the truth. Newton was mostly right. Einstein was even more right - how is that not getting closer to the truth? How is that not gaining knowledge about the universe?
The sad irony is that hundreds of years of scientific progress have resulted in advanced technology like computers and the Internet, just so people like you can spout how it's all rubbish, and we're better off obtaining knowledge by magic. If you really believed that, why not come back when you have a computer powered by such knowledge?
So if you only know what on earth the religious statement means until it's independently discovered scientifically, and you come along and twist the meaning of the words, what use is it?
In that case, I have a broken clock I'd like to sell you - it's correct twice a day! Just a shame you won't know when that is, unless you compare to another clock.
Next you'll be telling me about Nostradamus's predictions!
Give me an example of a testable prediction today, that has yet to be accepted scientifically? Just like Nostradamus, telling us the "prediction" after it happens isn't what we call a prediction, by definition.
I give you B- for creativity btw. Could do better though.
He didn't say "list a true thing which some religious people happened to believe" - obviously there's plenty of that! What he asked for was predictions made by a "religious system". Behaviour about washing and so on wasn't a religious system. These were also never things that science ever claimed wasn't true (it was simply that we didn't fully understand the mechanisms).
Let me make it clearer for you: give me an example of a religious belief, that is not accepted by science, but which does make testable predictions?
Likewise, my atheist peers think I'm a fool for my faith.
I don't think any atheist would disagree with using the Bible as a historical text (which, like any historical text, may or may not be true, and should be carefully judged like any other work).
We're atheists (or specifically, not Christians) because we don't believe in God, and we don't believe in Jesus as the son of God.
I wouldn't call you a fool in the strict sense of being unintelligent, because there's plenty of evidence to show that even people who are generally very clever have beliefs in gods or other superstition. But I do believe what you believe to be untrue. I can imagine someone might call you a "fool" in a more general sense of "accepting something not supported by evidence". Similar to "he's a gullible fool" - this isn't meant to imply a lack of intelligence, nor would I say it's meant to be that offensive, despite the derision.
If the most disgusting thing in the world was "some people thinking some other people to be fools", I'm not sure that's really that bad!
What evidence? Studies paid for by pharmaceuticals?
All of them.
Perhaps you can point me to the repeatable scientific double-blind experiment showing homeopathy to have an effect better than a placebo?
PS - I've got a magic pebble that can cure all diseases. Would you like to buy it? No studies have disproven it, and even if I had, that's no different to the studies that claimed no benefit to chiropractic, right?
Nonsense, there is overwhelming evidence that the earth is over 6,000 years old. If by "proof", you mean "There isn't 100% prove, we could be brains in a vat or maybe God/the FSM made it look that way", then by that logic we can't prove anything. Should nothing be taught in schools then?
there is evidence that can suggest a much shorter time too
Citation needed - which US schools, that children were required to attend, were teaching that God doesn't exist or that religion is false?
The only case this might indirectly apply is when it comes to the falsifiable disproven beliefs (e.g., the story of Genesis). When it comes to the ones that can't be disproven, I know of no school that has claimed they are false.
Evolution and the big bang is not fact, it can be wrong, there are several different theories within the subjects
Evolution is a fact, and the fact of evolution is explained by the theory of evolution.
But hang on - if you really believed that science isn't incompatible with religion, why did you try to discredit scientific facts (that have overwhelming amounts of evidence supporting them, btw)? If your religion is incompatible with scientific facts such as evolution or the big bang, then it's no longer true to say that science can't disprove it!
Fairly good post btw, but could do better. Maybe we'll see improvement in your other 9 posts.
I don't think anyone is claiming that creationists should be censored (I do hope you're not trying to claim that not teaching it in science lessons is censorship) - that's a straw man.
We're just pointing out that it's completely untrue. That it is either disproven, or unfalsifiable (depending on which version you pick). A load of rubbish, if you will. And not at all science. And that the theory and fact of evolution is supported by overwhelming amounts of evidence.
Sure, but one should be honest about it - either outright stating you are playing devil's advocate, or using speculative phrasing such as "But what about... ?"
Find common ground. Often when you make the counter argument you realize there is common ground that comes up. Eg. Intelligent Design (not to be confused with Creationism) and Evolution are actually quite similar ideas (I didn't say theories), with the only real difference in the term Random meaning. Where Random is either the Hand of God making an extremely complex decision of the direction of the Universe, or just random as it is unpredictable without any Hand of a being.
No, they are not. They are not even remotely the same, except in what they attempt to explain. This argument implies that the theory of evolution is simply "Life as we see it today appeared randomly" (since that's what you get if you take ID, and replace "as a result of being designed by an Intelligent Designer" with "randomly"). I have no idea what you are thinking of, but it's not the theory of evolution.
You're not playing devil's advocate here, are you? Because if you are, that's still no excuse for making straw man versions of what you are arguing against - that sort of devil's advocacy has no value, and just wastes everyone's time.
Teaches you not to always go with the flow. Humans naturally have Gang Behavior such exercises helps assert individuality.
Sure, but that doesn't apply here. If anything, going with the flow is more likely to be true of religious belief (where children are brought up believing it). The issue here is what is true, not going with the flow.
If they made it open source, it could have grown faster. Now even Chrome has overtaken Opera, because it's open and people are developing cool stuff for it.
Citation needed?
And there are vast numbers of counter examples of software where closed source is used vastly more than open source software (Windows vs Linux being the obvious choice).
Since you love Chrome so much, why aren't you saying that Google should whither away and die, because they haven't open sourced their search engine code? Surely they should do that, right?
I take it you post the equivalent comment in every Apple thread about OS X? Please do so, so I can watch how quickly you get modded down.
It's curious that when it comes to Opera, we have no end of "but it's not open source" whining, yet no other product is held to the same standard.
I think that open source is a great thing. But that doesn't mean I think all closed source software should die - that's the sort of fringe argument that gives OS advocates a bad name. Except when it comes to Opera, for some reason. Honestly, I don't get all the Opera hate here - especially when they were the first browser to offer an alternative to IE, after it won the original browser wars, long before Firefox was even thought of.
It is becoming less and less relevant.
Nonsense. If market share is all that matters, by that reasoning we should all be running Windows and Internet Explorer. By your logic, Linux is "becoming less and less relevant".
Since when was Firefox the dominant browser? That argument applies to both Opera and Firefox, in comparison to IE.
And remember that Opera was around long before Firefox was thought of - your reason is in fact one of the reasons I won't bother switching to Firefox, because any benefits there may be are less than the costs of switching.
I think you misunderstood. I never said that software or the mind cannot be examined, but that the hardware has to be turned on and the brain has to be part of a living person. There is no way you can determine the personality, if it can be called that, of a computer that is not turned on. There is also no way to determine the personality of a dead human or animal. Software, whether in a computer or in the brain of a living creature must have properly functioning hardware.
Sure - this is why scientists are examining the brains of living humans and other creatures too.
Normally we tend to say: "show me and I will believe", but God does it the other way around,
I'm talking about the flying spaghatti monster - do you believe?
Jesus Christ revealed himself to me
In what way? If you saw a figure saying he was Jesus, then this would be a hallucination. These can be harmless, although if they happen often, I would suggest seeking medical advice. Whilst I'm sure it is comforting to interpret it with a religious meaning, hallucinations may be a sign of a medical issue.
It does not matter how you implement the software, rather where software originates that is important. No matter how you implement software
But if it's in hardware, then it's not software at all.
And hardware comes from a human mind too.
However, none of this argument supports your original argument. Even if the brain runs "software", we can still examine that software by examining the brain, just as we can examine both software and hardware in a computer. I still don't understand your software analogy, but even if I accepted it, there is nothing about software that makes it impossible to analyse. The fact that software originated in a human mind is irrelevant - it's still in the computer and can be analysed, just as our minds can be analysed.
Not all things are testable by science.
I take it you also BELIEVE in the flying spaghetti monster too? After all, he claims he exists, so obviously by your circular logic, he must exist, right?
I have no problem with defining "soul" to mean "consciousness" - that's a meaningful definition. But I still think it's a meaningless circular definition to define "soul" to mean "whatever causes consciousness"; that's nothing other than a label, and tells us nothing about what a soul actually is, other than it causes consciousness, which is only true by the very definition.
Also claiming that this cause of consciousness "transcends the physical" is an assumption, with no evidence (what does it mean to transcend the physical, anyway? Surely if it exists, it's physical?)
I prefer to avoid the word "soul", because it has so many other connotations (such as being supernatural, divine etc), and some use it in different ways, some of which have nothing to do with consciousness.
The physical description of an atom was for millenia something that was seriously lacking, yet when physical objects that resembled the ancient ideas were discovered, the ancient terminology was applied to those objects. I am suggesting something similar to a soul could apply here.
Well, perhaps we might use the word "soul", but that's simply a question of terminology. It doesn't mean that the people who talked about souls were right, it's simply that we borrowed the term. I am still curious to know what philosophies of Jesus etc will turn out to be right? And in this case, I'd hope that scientists avoid picking the term "soul" altogether, because of the connotations with the supernatural and religious (this wasn't the case with "atom", AFAIK).
Slashdot Mirror
If your application package includes the library, then it doesn't matter what the courts think a derivative work is, because you're still distributing someone else's library, and therefore must abide by the licence.
This has nothing to do with derivative works. This argument could only apply if you didn't distribute the library, and required users to download it separately.
But as soon as you start copying names, I don't think that's merely what we're talking about "ideas" here, that would count as expressions. (In general, characters can be copyrighted AFAIK - "expression" is broader than simply "copying the exact book itself", it's just not as broad as concepts such as "a school for wizards". Or it shouldn't be, imo.)
The GPL applies to all "derivative works". The GPL's authors don't get to decide what constitutes a derivative work
I don't see how that's relevant here - the point is that if you're distributing the library (which he presumably is, unless he expects users to download it themselves, which could perhaps be another way round it), he has to abide by the licence. It doesn't matter whether his application is considered a derivative work or not.
Remember, the GPL grants permission for activities which are otherwise prohibited by copyright law
Yes, and distributing someone else's library (however your application interacts with it) is otherwise prohibited by copyright law.
My point is that in both cases, it's unfair to characterize all jobs (or religions) as having that nefarious intent.
The OP may have generalised too broadly, but Ost99 made his point specifically for Christianity. Do you now concede that Christianity preys on fears (just as some people prey on fears of poverty), and you're now just back-peddling to make the point that not every religion is like this? I would agree with that.
What if I were to say that "promising $100k if you just show up to work, write some software, and make sure that software works is just preying on the fear of poverty"?
If you had to work all your life before getting the money, and no one knew if you'd ever hand over the money, then sure, I'd be questioning such promises.
Just because something happens
Right, get back to me when something "happens" and a religion actually does something.
You may as well claim that doctors prey on the fear of disease.
If there were people who were peddling products claiming to cure people, when there was no evidence that their cures worked, then sure that would be a fair comparison. Since that isn't true for doctors, your analogy fails.
Let me fix it for you:
You may as well claim that homeopaths prey on the fear of disease.
Yes, I fully agree.
I don't think it implies a conspiracy - I'm sure that they really believe what they do, but when people in positions of power say "We must do this because God says so" or "X is immoral because it's written in the Bible", that's control. They still get to sway other people to their views (either legally in politics, or the pope with about a billion believers).
Forcibly trying to covert people to your belief is also control, such as when all children in the country are indoctrinated in schools (e.g., the UK). That's still control, it doesn't matter that they themselves believe it.
What other mechanism is there for leading us to "truth" about how the Universe works?
If I were wrong, we would never abandon any discovery made through the scientific process, ever. The fact that we do indeed disprove things that were considered scientific fact a scant generation ago is mute evidence that your position is wrong.
Such as what? Anyhow, just because a process isn't 100% accurate, doesn't mean you aren't getting closer to the truth. Newton was mostly right. Einstein was even more right - how is that not getting closer to the truth? How is that not gaining knowledge about the universe?
The sad irony is that hundreds of years of scientific progress have resulted in advanced technology like computers and the Internet, just so people like you can spout how it's all rubbish, and we're better off obtaining knowledge by magic. If you really believed that, why not come back when you have a computer powered by such knowledge?
So if you only know what on earth the religious statement means until it's independently discovered scientifically, and you come along and twist the meaning of the words, what use is it?
In that case, I have a broken clock I'd like to sell you - it's correct twice a day! Just a shame you won't know when that is, unless you compare to another clock.
Next you'll be telling me about Nostradamus's predictions!
Give me an example of a testable prediction today, that has yet to be accepted scientifically? Just like Nostradamus, telling us the "prediction" after it happens isn't what we call a prediction, by definition.
I give you B- for creativity btw. Could do better though.
He didn't say "list a true thing which some religious people happened to believe" - obviously there's plenty of that! What he asked for was predictions made by a "religious system". Behaviour about washing and so on wasn't a religious system. These were also never things that science ever claimed wasn't true (it was simply that we didn't fully understand the mechanisms).
Let me make it clearer for you: give me an example of a religious belief, that is not accepted by science, but which does make testable predictions?
Likewise, my atheist peers think I'm a fool for my faith.
I don't think any atheist would disagree with using the Bible as a historical text (which, like any historical text, may or may not be true, and should be carefully judged like any other work).
We're atheists (or specifically, not Christians) because we don't believe in God, and we don't believe in Jesus as the son of God.
I wouldn't call you a fool in the strict sense of being unintelligent, because there's plenty of evidence to show that even people who are generally very clever have beliefs in gods or other superstition. But I do believe what you believe to be untrue. I can imagine someone might call you a "fool" in a more general sense of "accepting something not supported by evidence". Similar to "he's a gullible fool" - this isn't meant to imply a lack of intelligence, nor would I say it's meant to be that offensive, despite the derision.
If the most disgusting thing in the world was "some people thinking some other people to be fools", I'm not sure that's really that bad!
What evidence? Studies paid for by pharmaceuticals?
All of them.
Perhaps you can point me to the repeatable scientific double-blind experiment showing homeopathy to have an effect better than a placebo?
PS - I've got a magic pebble that can cure all diseases. Would you like to buy it? No studies have disproven it, and even if I had, that's no different to the studies that claimed no benefit to chiropractic, right?
Blimey, I wish the worst that religious fundamentalists did was "make well argued posts against my point of view on a web-forum".
(What exactly do you mean by "venomous"? I don't see any insults or trolling from atheists here.)
Nonsense, there is overwhelming evidence that the earth is over 6,000 years old. If by "proof", you mean "There isn't 100% prove, we could be brains in a vat or maybe God/the FSM made it look that way", then by that logic we can't prove anything. Should nothing be taught in schools then?
there is evidence that can suggest a much shorter time too
Such as?
Citation needed - which US schools, that children were required to attend, were teaching that God doesn't exist or that religion is false?
The only case this might indirectly apply is when it comes to the falsifiable disproven beliefs (e.g., the story of Genesis). When it comes to the ones that can't be disproven, I know of no school that has claimed they are false.
Evolution and the big bang is not fact, it can be wrong, there are several different theories within the subjects
Evolution is a fact, and the fact of evolution is explained by the theory of evolution.
But hang on - if you really believed that science isn't incompatible with religion, why did you try to discredit scientific facts (that have overwhelming amounts of evidence supporting them, btw)? If your religion is incompatible with scientific facts such as evolution or the big bang, then it's no longer true to say that science can't disprove it!
Fairly good post btw, but could do better. Maybe we'll see improvement in your other 9 posts.
I don't think anyone is claiming that creationists should be censored (I do hope you're not trying to claim that not teaching it in science lessons is censorship) - that's a straw man.
We're just pointing out that it's completely untrue. That it is either disproven, or unfalsifiable (depending on which version you pick). A load of rubbish, if you will. And not at all science. And that the theory and fact of evolution is supported by overwhelming amounts of evidence.
PS - Good luck in your exams.
Sure, but one should be honest about it - either outright stating you are playing devil's advocate, or using speculative phrasing such as "But what about ... ?"
Find common ground. Often when you make the counter argument you realize there is common ground that comes up. Eg. Intelligent Design (not to be confused with Creationism) and Evolution are actually quite similar ideas (I didn't say theories), with the only real difference in the term Random meaning. Where Random is either the Hand of God making an extremely complex decision of the direction of the Universe, or just random as it is unpredictable without any Hand of a being.
No, they are not. They are not even remotely the same, except in what they attempt to explain. This argument implies that the theory of evolution is simply "Life as we see it today appeared randomly" (since that's what you get if you take ID, and replace "as a result of being designed by an Intelligent Designer" with "randomly"). I have no idea what you are thinking of, but it's not the theory of evolution.
You're not playing devil's advocate here, are you? Because if you are, that's still no excuse for making straw man versions of what you are arguing against - that sort of devil's advocacy has no value, and just wastes everyone's time.
Teaches you not to always go with the flow. Humans naturally have Gang Behavior such exercises helps assert individuality.
Sure, but that doesn't apply here. If anything, going with the flow is more likely to be true of religious belief (where children are brought up believing it). The issue here is what is true, not going with the flow.
And some of them get mod points, it seems!
It's a sad day when supporting evolution on a geek site of all places gets you labelled a "troll".
In other news, a study reported that Creationists are as intelligent as average two year old dogs.
If they made it open source, it could have grown faster. Now even Chrome has overtaken Opera, because it's open and people are developing cool stuff for it.
Citation needed?
And there are vast numbers of counter examples of software where closed source is used vastly more than open source software (Windows vs Linux being the obvious choice).
Since you love Chrome so much, why aren't you saying that Google should whither away and die, because they haven't open sourced their search engine code? Surely they should do that, right?
I take it you post the equivalent comment in every Apple thread about OS X? Please do so, so I can watch how quickly you get modded down.
It's curious that when it comes to Opera, we have no end of "but it's not open source" whining, yet no other product is held to the same standard.
I think that open source is a great thing. But that doesn't mean I think all closed source software should die - that's the sort of fringe argument that gives OS advocates a bad name. Except when it comes to Opera, for some reason. Honestly, I don't get all the Opera hate here - especially when they were the first browser to offer an alternative to IE, after it won the original browser wars, long before Firefox was even thought of.
It is becoming less and less relevant.
Nonsense. If market share is all that matters, by that reasoning we should all be running Windows and Internet Explorer. By your logic, Linux is "becoming less and less relevant".
Since when was Firefox the dominant browser? That argument applies to both Opera and Firefox, in comparison to IE.
And remember that Opera was around long before Firefox was thought of - your reason is in fact one of the reasons I won't bother switching to Firefox, because any benefits there may be are less than the costs of switching.
I think you misunderstood. I never said that software or the mind cannot be examined, but that the hardware has to be turned on and the brain has to be part of a living person. There is no way you can determine the personality, if it can be called that, of a computer that is not turned on. There is also no way to determine the personality of a dead human or animal. Software, whether in a computer or in the brain of a living creature must have properly functioning hardware.
Sure - this is why scientists are examining the brains of living humans and other creatures too.
Normally we tend to say: "show me and I will believe", but God does it the other way around,
I'm talking about the flying spaghatti monster - do you believe?
Jesus Christ revealed himself to me
In what way? If you saw a figure saying he was Jesus, then this would be a hallucination. These can be harmless, although if they happen often, I would suggest seeking medical advice. Whilst I'm sure it is comforting to interpret it with a religious meaning, hallucinations may be a sign of a medical issue.
It does not matter how you implement the software, rather where software originates that is important. No matter how you implement software
But if it's in hardware, then it's not software at all.
And hardware comes from a human mind too.
However, none of this argument supports your original argument. Even if the brain runs "software", we can still examine that software by examining the brain, just as we can examine both software and hardware in a computer. I still don't understand your software analogy, but even if I accepted it, there is nothing about software that makes it impossible to analyse. The fact that software originated in a human mind is irrelevant - it's still in the computer and can be analysed, just as our minds can be analysed.
Not all things are testable by science.
I take it you also BELIEVE in the flying spaghetti monster too? After all, he claims he exists, so obviously by your circular logic, he must exist, right?
I have no problem with defining "soul" to mean "consciousness" - that's a meaningful definition. But I still think it's a meaningless circular definition to define "soul" to mean "whatever causes consciousness"; that's nothing other than a label, and tells us nothing about what a soul actually is, other than it causes consciousness, which is only true by the very definition.
Also claiming that this cause of consciousness "transcends the physical" is an assumption, with no evidence (what does it mean to transcend the physical, anyway? Surely if it exists, it's physical?)
I prefer to avoid the word "soul", because it has so many other connotations (such as being supernatural, divine etc), and some use it in different ways, some of which have nothing to do with consciousness.
The physical description of an atom was for millenia something that was seriously lacking, yet when physical objects that resembled the ancient ideas were discovered, the ancient terminology was applied to those objects. I am suggesting something similar to a soul could apply here.
Well, perhaps we might use the word "soul", but that's simply a question of terminology. It doesn't mean that the people who talked about souls were right, it's simply that we borrowed the term. I am still curious to know what philosophies of Jesus etc will turn out to be right? And in this case, I'd hope that scientists avoid picking the term "soul" altogether, because of the connotations with the supernatural and religious (this wasn't the case with "atom", AFAIK).