Just wondering, when Linus made Linux, what was Minix using? Was it GNU? Should we call it GNU/Minix? OK, the last question was rhetorical, but the first two were real.
Here's the original article, but that doesn't really shed that much more light on things. That article does say "Stallman said he was concerned over issues of naming only when they helped to focus attention on the freedom to change and redistribute software", but unfortunately that wasn't a direct quote, so you'd have to guess what the actual question and answer were. I agree with you though, I initially took the quote to mean that names and software freedom are two separate issues. Of course I read pretty much every Slashdot article with the understanding that 99% percent of them are based on misquotes and misunderstandings. That's half the fun of slashdot, with the other half coming from the fact that they occassionally point to interesting news stories that I wouldn't have noticed otherwise.
In English, the more specific usually comes first, and the less specific second. Of course, in English we usually don't put a / in between the two words, and we commonly just drop the more general part altogether, because it's implied.
And almost all of your routine interaction with the operating system is GNU-centric.
Not at all. Almost all of the routine interaction with the OS is unix-like, but that doesn't mean it's GNU-centric. Whether the tool was made by GNU or Berkely or AT&T doesn't really matter, and it certainly doesn't make your interaction any different just because the copyright was signed over to the FSF.
Refusing to give GNU proper credit is to do them a great disservice
What you call a product has nothing to do with whether or not you are giving them proper credit.
This wasn't a press release or anything. The Sydney Morning Herald asked RMS for an interview, and he gave it. They asked him some questions, and he answered them. Then SMH published a news article about it, obviously losing some of the context, but terribly so. Then ZDNet copied a few quotes from that news article and created a totally misleading title, probably made up a sensationalistic fact out of thin air ("Stallman's words put him at odds with some members of the free software movement"), and wrote an article which took the quote even more out of context. Then Slashdot picked up the story, repeated the misleading title, and stuck in the quote without any context whatsoever. Suddenly, RMS is a whining brat for giving an interview.
No, it's not the issue, it's still a side issue, and that's not referring to what names "you're allowed to call" the operating system, it's what name you should call it.
Corporate purpose is irrelevant once a sale has been approved
Even if this is true, and I seriously doubt it is (the Revlon case didn't touch upon corporate purpose as far as I can tell), this presumes that a sale is approved in the first place!
So, fine, I'll give you that corporate purpose might not matter in the case of a sale of a for-profit corporation. But barring a sale (which requires shareholder approval among other things), it still is the primary concern of the directors.
But the corporate purpose is irrelevant once a sale decision has been made, anyway. The director's duty is to maximize sale value even if it means acting contrary to the corporate purpose, and doing otherwise would be illegal.
The thing is, exactly the opposite is true. The director's duty is to ensure that the corporation does whatever the corporate purpose says it should do, and doing otherwise would be illegal.
I hear in England they're hooking up the cameras to the M-16s, so that anyone wearing a jacket or who looks vaguely like a terrorist will be instantly shot on sight.
In the city that never sleeps, it'd make more sense to just run them all 24/7. Why add a new point of failure? But that's probably the plan, anyway. The point of the motion detectors is probably more to alert people viewing things in real time, not to activate the cameras.
The majority of shareholders can't vote to screw the minority shareholders. Otherwise as soon as one person acquired 51% of the company they could vote to sell it to themselves for a dollar--or some group that had 51% could collude to sell the whole company to themselves for pennies on the dollar.
By the way, I just noticed you were referring to the shareholders here, and not the directors. In fact the shareholders can vote any way they want, but such a vote would not be binding in any way upon the directors, who are the ones that would actually be responsible for selling the company. In fact, such a vote to act in opposition to the corporate purpose would never be held, because the directors of the corporation would never bring it up in the shareholder meeting, because to do so would be illegal.
This is simply not true of publically traded companies.
I'm not sure what it is you're claiming isn't true, but whatever it is maybe you could point to an SEC ruling which says so. Honestly though, I doubt the SEC would have any say in such a matter, as such corporate governance matters are generally handled by the state, and have nothing to do with whether or not a company is publically traded.
As soon as the vote is made to sell the company, the corporate officers have a legal obligation to sell the company at the highest value they can get.
First of all this assumes the vote is going to be made to sell the company in the first place, which is extremely unlikely in a case like Google where three people control nearly 50% of the votes and have all stated that they aren't interested in selling. Then, you assume that the vote is made to sell, stating who not to sell to, but not stating who to sell to. That's simply not the way it ever works. What would happen in reality is that the buyer would be chosen first, probably by the board without even letting the public know, and then the deal would be submitted to the shareholders for approval. In fact, I seriously doubt it's legal in most states for the shareholders to approve dissolution without first having the terms of the dissolution made clear. Finally, you make an assertion about what is not legal without backing it up in any way. I don't think you're right, the corporate purpose is the overriding concern here, not purely making money.
The majority of shareholders can't vote to screw the minority shareholders. Otherwise as soon as one person acquired 51% of the company they could vote to sell it to themselves for a dollar--or some group that had 51% could collude to sell the whole company to themselves for pennies on the dollar.
What you're referring to here is a breach of the "duty of loyalty". But the duty of loyalty is owed not to the shareholders but to the corporate purpose (see http://www.mackrell.net/papers/duties.htm). Further, in your example the director received an "improper personal benefit", which completely changes the situation from one where a director merely chose not to cause the corporation to be evil. This link was to a description of Florida law, but I seriously doubt that any state would have a law against a director or officer working in direct fulfillment of the corporate purpose in a way which is reasonably believed to maximize corporate profits anyway. In fact, if anything would be illegal it would be for a director or officer to work counter to the corporate purpose. If a corporation is formed "to make money without being evil", then it is illegal for that corporation to make money in any other way. This is why most corporations are formed "to engage in any lawful act or activity for which corporations may be organized under the General Corporation Law of [insert state here]", and in fact Delaware Corporate law specifically states that "by such statement all lawful acts and activities shall be within the purposes of the corporation, except for express limitations, if any".
Too often Linux users are trying to push the view point of how few sacrifices you'll need to make when switching to Linux. In reality, for people to truly switch from one platform to another, they need benefits, not a shorter list of things they're loosing.
The main benefit is obvious, though. Linux is open, so you aren't reliant on it being in the best interests of a single corporation to improve it. Since Microsoft will never be able to compete with this benefit, all Linux has to do is eliminate the negatives.
You say use whatever works best for you, but that seems to imply attention to the short term. Switching to Linux isn't about the short term, it's about the long term.
I just wish I could get the damn product to work on my laptop. I've created three different live-CDs now and all of them boot up on my girlfriend's desktop but crash on my laptop. I did get Damn Small Linux to boot up, but that uses an old kernel which doesn't support my Novatel V620.
Also, the signal has to get to the AP, generally meaning wiring, the cost of buying and setting up the AP, and the cost of buying the data service to the AP.
You're not thinking peer-to-peer. There is no need for wiring or buying any data service to a central AP. Every client is also an AP.
Sure, it's called a mesh network, and it'd work fine for low bandwidth stuff, for short distance connections, and for static content which can be readily cached (think Coral Cache).
Why do you think it's an obligation in the first place? Your obligation as an officer of the corporation is to perform the duties for which you were hired. Your obligation as a director is to perform the duties outlined in the corporate bylaws and incorporation documents. Most corporations are set up with a purpose which is to make money, but not all are.
But you aren't allowed to get away with intentional failure to maximize shareholder value by adhering to a philosophy that was thought years ago to be good for that end, but is now not thought to be so.
You can if it's in your stated purpose in your incorporation papers, but I don't know if that's true with Google or not. But are you implying that not being evil is not thought to be a good idea? I'm not sure I'd agree with that, and even then, it'd have to amount to I believe gross negligence to be actionable, and I just don't think not being evil can be considered gross negligence.
In a public one, it's at best a statement of what seems to be a profitable approach now, but is subject to change without notice.
Sure, if the board or the shareholders vote to change it.
In the public company, shareholders can vote out the board at any time
Considering that the three founders control nearly 50% of the votes in the company, I don't see that happening.
The thing that bugs me is the entitlement mentality that some have about this. If it is "WiFi" then it should be free.
I think the mentality is that if it's the internet then it should be free. This is due to the fact that that's how the internet was designed. Of course, free in this sense means that there aren't any payments between peers in the system. When MIT connected to Harvard neither of them paid each other for the privilege, but they both had to share the cost of the wires.
Now with WiFi there are no wires. There's still a cost, since it takes energy to broadcast a signal, but we still call it "free".
I think there's a distinction between sponsorship and advertising, and I think Google tends to be closer to the sponsorship side of things. With sponsorship, a company doesn't have to raise prices, the increased exposure provides them with the economies of scale so they can charge the same price, make more money, and still donate some of it back. Is it wrong for a sporting goods store to donate money to a teen basketball league, and for the basketball team to return the favor by printing their logo on the back of their shirt? It's a win-win-win situation. The kids get to play basketball, the store gets more customers, and the customers get lower prices due to the economies of scale (it's cheaper on a per unit basis to make or buy 1000 hockey sticks than 10.
Where it gets to be bad is when the ads start really getting forced upon people. Television and radio ads are the biggest examples, although many websites are getting there too. Google so far has been pretty good this way. In fact, if I had the choice to turn off Google ads on its search engine I'd still leave them on. I'd consider them more beneficial than they are annoying. Gmail ads are somewhat less useful, perhaps because they don't show up when I'm actually searching for something, but they're relatively unobtrusive.
If you want to buy things from places that don't advertise, that's your perogative, of course. And if Google does offer free Wifi there's no reason you have to take them up on it.
1) and 2) didn't work for NetZero or any of the other dot bombs. Why would it work for Google?
Besides, Google tries to be non-obtrusive with its advertising. Most likely if they ever implemented this they'd make their revenue by increasing their reach in the services they already provide. What that also means is that service will probably be crippled to some extent. Free web browsing through a proxy, maybe, but I doubt you'll be able to use Kazaa (or whatever the current P2P app is, I haven't been following).
Slashdot Mirror
Just wondering, when Linus made Linux, what was Minix using? Was it GNU? Should we call it GNU/Minix? OK, the last question was rhetorical, but the first two were real.
Linux is a kernel, right?
Wrong. When used as a noun, Linux almost always refers to the operating system, not the kernel.
Here's the original article, but that doesn't really shed that much more light on things. That article does say "Stallman said he was concerned over issues of naming only when they helped to focus attention on the freedom to change and redistribute software", but unfortunately that wasn't a direct quote, so you'd have to guess what the actual question and answer were. I agree with you though, I initially took the quote to mean that names and software freedom are two separate issues. Of course I read pretty much every Slashdot article with the understanding that 99% percent of them are based on misquotes and misunderstandings. That's half the fun of slashdot, with the other half coming from the fact that they occassionally point to interesting news stories that I wouldn't have noticed otherwise.
How do you decide which comes first?
In English, the more specific usually comes first, and the less specific second. Of course, in English we usually don't put a / in between the two words, and we commonly just drop the more general part altogether, because it's implied.
And almost all of your routine interaction with the operating system is GNU-centric.
Not at all. Almost all of the routine interaction with the OS is unix-like, but that doesn't mean it's GNU-centric. Whether the tool was made by GNU or Berkely or AT&T doesn't really matter, and it certainly doesn't make your interaction any different just because the copyright was signed over to the FSF.
Refusing to give GNU proper credit is to do them a great disservice
What you call a product has nothing to do with whether or not you are giving them proper credit.
This wasn't a press release or anything. The Sydney Morning Herald asked RMS for an interview, and he gave it. They asked him some questions, and he answered them. Then SMH published a news article about it, obviously losing some of the context, but terribly so. Then ZDNet copied a few quotes from that news article and created a totally misleading title, probably made up a sensationalistic fact out of thin air ("Stallman's words put him at odds with some members of the free software movement"), and wrote an article which took the quote even more out of context. Then Slashdot picked up the story, repeated the misleading title, and stuck in the quote without any context whatsoever. Suddenly, RMS is a whining brat for giving an interview.
No, it's not the issue, it's still a side issue, and that's not referring to what names "you're allowed to call" the operating system, it's what name you should call it.
RMS, the guy who says names are important, now says names are not important.
No, he didn't say names aren't important, he said trademark ("What names you're allowed to call a program"), "is a side issue."
Corporate purpose is irrelevant once a sale has been approved
Even if this is true, and I seriously doubt it is (the Revlon case didn't touch upon corporate purpose as far as I can tell), this presumes that a sale is approved in the first place!
So, fine, I'll give you that corporate purpose might not matter in the case of a sale of a for-profit corporation. But barring a sale (which requires shareholder approval among other things), it still is the primary concern of the directors.
But the corporate purpose is irrelevant once a sale decision has been made, anyway. The director's duty is to maximize sale value even if it means acting contrary to the corporate purpose, and doing otherwise would be illegal.
The thing is, exactly the opposite is true. The director's duty is to ensure that the corporation does whatever the corporate purpose says it should do, and doing otherwise would be illegal.
I hear in England they're hooking up the cameras to the M-16s, so that anyone wearing a jacket or who looks vaguely like a terrorist will be instantly shot on sight.
In the city that never sleeps, it'd make more sense to just run them all 24/7. Why add a new point of failure? But that's probably the plan, anyway. The point of the motion detectors is probably more to alert people viewing things in real time, not to activate the cameras.
You know, a link would be nice, from either of you.
The majority of shareholders can't vote to screw the minority shareholders. Otherwise as soon as one person acquired 51% of the company they could vote to sell it to themselves for a dollar--or some group that had 51% could collude to sell the whole company to themselves for pennies on the dollar.
By the way, I just noticed you were referring to the shareholders here, and not the directors. In fact the shareholders can vote any way they want, but such a vote would not be binding in any way upon the directors, who are the ones that would actually be responsible for selling the company. In fact, such a vote to act in opposition to the corporate purpose would never be held, because the directors of the corporation would never bring it up in the shareholder meeting, because to do so would be illegal.
This is simply not true of publically traded companies.
I'm not sure what it is you're claiming isn't true, but whatever it is maybe you could point to an SEC ruling which says so. Honestly though, I doubt the SEC would have any say in such a matter, as such corporate governance matters are generally handled by the state, and have nothing to do with whether or not a company is publically traded.
As soon as the vote is made to sell the company, the corporate officers have a legal obligation to sell the company at the highest value they can get.
First of all this assumes the vote is going to be made to sell the company in the first place, which is extremely unlikely in a case like Google where three people control nearly 50% of the votes and have all stated that they aren't interested in selling. Then, you assume that the vote is made to sell, stating who not to sell to, but not stating who to sell to. That's simply not the way it ever works. What would happen in reality is that the buyer would be chosen first, probably by the board without even letting the public know, and then the deal would be submitted to the shareholders for approval. In fact, I seriously doubt it's legal in most states for the shareholders to approve dissolution without first having the terms of the dissolution made clear. Finally, you make an assertion about what is not legal without backing it up in any way. I don't think you're right, the corporate purpose is the overriding concern here, not purely making money.
The majority of shareholders can't vote to screw the minority shareholders. Otherwise as soon as one person acquired 51% of the company they could vote to sell it to themselves for a dollar--or some group that had 51% could collude to sell the whole company to themselves for pennies on the dollar.
What you're referring to here is a breach of the "duty of loyalty". But the duty of loyalty is owed not to the shareholders but to the corporate purpose (see http://www.mackrell.net/papers/duties.htm). Further, in your example the director received an "improper personal benefit", which completely changes the situation from one where a director merely chose not to cause the corporation to be evil. This link was to a description of Florida law, but I seriously doubt that any state would have a law against a director or officer working in direct fulfillment of the corporate purpose in a way which is reasonably believed to maximize corporate profits anyway. In fact, if anything would be illegal it would be for a director or officer to work counter to the corporate purpose. If a corporation is formed "to make money without being evil", then it is illegal for that corporation to make money in any other way. This is why most corporations are formed "to engage in any lawful act or activity for which corporations may be organized under the General Corporation Law of [insert state here]", and in fact Delaware Corporate law specifically states that "by such statement all lawful acts and activities shall be within the purposes of the corporation, except for express limitations, if any".
Too often Linux users are trying to push the view point of how few sacrifices you'll need to make when switching to Linux. In reality, for people to truly switch from one platform to another, they need benefits, not a shorter list of things they're loosing.
The main benefit is obvious, though. Linux is open, so you aren't reliant on it being in the best interests of a single corporation to improve it. Since Microsoft will never be able to compete with this benefit, all Linux has to do is eliminate the negatives.
You say use whatever works best for you, but that seems to imply attention to the short term. Switching to Linux isn't about the short term, it's about the long term.
I just wish I could get the damn product to work on my laptop. I've created three different live-CDs now and all of them boot up on my girlfriend's desktop but crash on my laptop. I did get Damn Small Linux to boot up, but that uses an old kernel which doesn't support my Novatel V620.
Also, the signal has to get to the AP, generally meaning wiring, the cost of buying and setting up the AP, and the cost of buying the data service to the AP.
You're not thinking peer-to-peer. There is no need for wiring or buying any data service to a central AP. Every client is also an AP.
Sure, it's called a mesh network, and it'd work fine for low bandwidth stuff, for short distance connections, and for static content which can be readily cached (think Coral Cache).
Why do you think it's an obligation in the first place? Your obligation as an officer of the corporation is to perform the duties for which you were hired. Your obligation as a director is to perform the duties outlined in the corporate bylaws and incorporation documents. Most corporations are set up with a purpose which is to make money, but not all are.
Sure there'd be connections, and everyone would provide an uplink and a downlink. Not useful? It's called the Internet.
But you aren't allowed to get away with intentional failure to maximize shareholder value by adhering to a philosophy that was thought years ago to be good for that end, but is now not thought to be so.
You can if it's in your stated purpose in your incorporation papers, but I don't know if that's true with Google or not. But are you implying that not being evil is not thought to be a good idea? I'm not sure I'd agree with that, and even then, it'd have to amount to I believe gross negligence to be actionable, and I just don't think not being evil can be considered gross negligence.
In a public one, it's at best a statement of what seems to be a profitable approach now, but is subject to change without notice.
Sure, if the board or the shareholders vote to change it.
In the public company, shareholders can vote out the board at any time
Considering that the three founders control nearly 50% of the votes in the company, I don't see that happening.
The thing that bugs me is the entitlement mentality that some have about this. If it is "WiFi" then it should be free.
I think the mentality is that if it's the internet then it should be free. This is due to the fact that that's how the internet was designed. Of course, free in this sense means that there aren't any payments between peers in the system. When MIT connected to Harvard neither of them paid each other for the privilege, but they both had to share the cost of the wires.
Now with WiFi there are no wires. There's still a cost, since it takes energy to broadcast a signal, but we still call it "free".
What's the tinfoil hat for, to use as an antenna to get better reception?
I think there's a distinction between sponsorship and advertising, and I think Google tends to be closer to the sponsorship side of things. With sponsorship, a company doesn't have to raise prices, the increased exposure provides them with the economies of scale so they can charge the same price, make more money, and still donate some of it back. Is it wrong for a sporting goods store to donate money to a teen basketball league, and for the basketball team to return the favor by printing their logo on the back of their shirt? It's a win-win-win situation. The kids get to play basketball, the store gets more customers, and the customers get lower prices due to the economies of scale (it's cheaper on a per unit basis to make or buy 1000 hockey sticks than 10.
Where it gets to be bad is when the ads start really getting forced upon people. Television and radio ads are the biggest examples, although many websites are getting there too. Google so far has been pretty good this way. In fact, if I had the choice to turn off Google ads on its search engine I'd still leave them on. I'd consider them more beneficial than they are annoying. Gmail ads are somewhat less useful, perhaps because they don't show up when I'm actually searching for something, but they're relatively unobtrusive.
If you want to buy things from places that don't advertise, that's your perogative, of course. And if Google does offer free Wifi there's no reason you have to take them up on it.
1) and 2) didn't work for NetZero or any of the other dot bombs. Why would it work for Google?
Besides, Google tries to be non-obtrusive with its advertising. Most likely if they ever implemented this they'd make their revenue by increasing their reach in the services they already provide. What that also means is that service will probably be crippled to some extent. Free web browsing through a proxy, maybe, but I doubt you'll be able to use Kazaa (or whatever the current P2P app is, I haven't been following).
Huh? In the US batteries are recycled. You simply take them down to anyone who sells them and they take them.
Out of sight, out of mind, huh? You don't think battery recycling produces no waste, do you?
And what are these extra features you speak of?
A second motor, regenerative braking, a transmission system which ties the two motors together, you know, the stuff that makes a hybrid a hybrid.