It'd really depend on how the BBC put it - if they wrote, "a Chinese blog has been taken down by the Chinese gov't," then they're guilty of not following through on their fact-checking. If they wrote, "a Chinese blog has been taken down, and as of now it is unknown whether the Chinese gov't was involved, but we suspect...," then they're a little better off.
The best thing they could have done was do a little research; contact the blog owners, for example. Apparently the owners of the blog didn't say anything about the Chinese gov't, and so all the BBC (and other reporters) could do was speculate.
I only did a cursory test (searched for a couple programming languages, seemed to be alright), and I'll take your word on the decreasing quality for more obscure searches.
Not that I'm loathe to accept a better search engine or anything - Google just does what I want (most of the time)... Thanks for checking it out a little further.
Unfortunately, you'll get hyena-like behavior in any group with more than a few people. While I don't support it, I also recognize that anyone in Torvalds's position (being known by millions of people) is going to have his/her detractors, occasionally vocal and caustic.
If a better, revised GPLv3 emerges, one that two people or more can actually understand and agree upon, which is more than can be said for the present draft
There are actually quite a few people that understand and agree on the GPLv3 draft. Since you don't voice any of your own complaints, I assume you share the same as Linus. As others have said (including RMS himself, IIRC), the DRM clause isn't adding or removing any of the original intent of the GPL. One of the freedoms the license is built to protect is "the freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits" (The Free Software Definition), and if nobody else can run your improved program, the whole community will not benefit.
The idea with the clause was to keep people from releasing code under the GPL while not allowing the end-user to improve it and give the improvements back to the public in a meaningful way. I think it's a good way of doing so, but if you have a better idea on how to word it (perhaps one that Torvalds and yourself would understand and agree upon), please let the FSF know - I'm sure they would appreciate the feedback. This is what drafts are for, anyway.
The FSF folks would be ecstatic to have busnesses actually embrace the open source model, be commercial, and sell lots and lots of support, installation, and maintenance for software that is still modifiable by the end customer.
To pick nits: you're even allowed to sell the software itself; you just have to provide the source code with it. I just don't know of anybody that's created a working business model yet still packages it with the source (Red Hat Enterprise, perhaps? or are the disks free, and they just charge for support?).
I don't have the slightest idea where my copy of Empires: Dawn of the Modern World is, and so if I wanted to play it without the No-CD crack I'd be out of luck.
Hah - I know exactly where my E:DMW cds are, and I still can't play: the installer dies on the second disc with a "corrupt cabinet" error.
You can drop that even farther: Gentoo is really a child of Debian, for example.
If you want, you could just say that they're all just "Linux."
An earlier post made the statement that it really didn't matter what Dell put on their boxes; as long as it works with some distro, it'll work with them all. They might want to have a standard kernel configuration online, and if they use a distro with a centralised application repository (Gentoo, Debian, the BSDs have a ports system, right?), they might want to help support that financially.
If Dell wants into the big business, they might want to go Red Hat and provide a support contract as an option.
It wouldn't be tough if someone did their research. Honestly - what is Dell going to do with the seven (that's the current estimate, right?) versions of Vista?
This situation doesn't really have a well defined vendor and client. On the one hand, Dell is the vendor (producing computers) and FOSS users/devs are the clients (using computers). On the other hand, FOSS devs are the vendors (producing software) and Dell is the client (using/configuring software).
In the right situation an 11 pound package might work; like if the social workers used the notebooks on their desks and took them home to fill in an occasional form after work. But that's not what their totally IT and workflow unconscious bosses wanted them to do. They wanted their minions to fill in forms on the notebooks in real time as they did their work. To that end, the bosses had almost every paper form used by the social workers transformed into an Acrobat or Word form and decreed that paper forms could no longer be used.
At that point, continuing to distribute it as GPL3'd means that you're letting people use your API key. If the end user can't modify it and still run it, it's not open source, by the FSF definition.
Not saying I agree, necessarily, just that this was the intent as I understand it.
The intent with the changes to the GPL is to preserve the FSF's "freedom 3": "The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits."
If the end user can't modify and run a modified version of the program, they no longer have this freedom. For your example, if a developer releases a program for the Google API under GPL3, there's no problem, because new users can create new keys, freely from Google, and modify the program as they wish.
That's the reason for this change to the GPL - it's a clarification; you can't distribute under the GPL unless your end-user can modify and run modified code.
First, this isn't Next Gen's research, it's some guy on the GAF. (I actually wrote about this the other day)
Second, it's only the latest generation - GameCube, XBox, PS2, etc. This excludes the NES/SNES/N64, Sega systems, etc. I'd like to see one that looks all the way back.
I'd bet that there might be two groups: the one who really doesn't care if OSS is widely adopted, for they aren't running a corp, they just want to make and use free things. The other group treats Linux like it's in a popularity contest, and as long as it's not the most-used platform, they're going to keep pushing.
Come to think of it, there might be a third group that would like OSS to be widely adopted only so they can get more software for it, and a fourth group that would like OSS to stay small so they can be cool and cutting edge.
People are interesting, psychologically and socially. C'est la vie.
Sarcasm perhaps, but that's a pretty bad test. I'm sure they could do it, but there's simply no reason. Replace it with something else you have no need of, but that doesn't have any negative consequences: perhaps you read lots of books. Could you stop? Sure, but why?
Many drugs (especially those that the media's trying to draw connections to) have major negative consequences. Gaming simply doesn't (except in the extremes, but then so does anything).
Most of the time, religion is just a good excuse to avoid facing our individual social responsability.
A lot of modern Christianity is moving away from predestination (basically theological fatalism) and towards personal responsibility, but I'd agree with your statement in general. I think that the best followers of any religion would say that's just passing the blame along, though, and that you're supposed to be responsible for where your life is at anyway.
But it's very far away from concepts like truth, good, or wrong. It' much closer to how a society manages to progress on a global level, and benefit to most of its members, not alienating the most powerful (who must benefit from their extra committment), and without desperating the weakest (who can become handy for some basic tasks).
But even if your formula works for a long time, it's still not the TRUTH as an inherent property of the statement "Mars revovles around the Sun in x years", because a pesky little rock can put Mars out of its course in 200 years from now, and the formula can wear out and become wrong in x billions years because there's a small force which hasn't been included in the scientific law.
Ah, but then your statement isn't true, by my definition, because it doesn't reflect reality. Now, you might phrase your formula like so: "Mars revolves around the Sun every approximately X years, providing no major changes in the physical properties of the system," and you might be closer to finding the Platonic (if you will) truth. Whether or not you get there makes no difference - a great many scientific statements might be revealed to not be the final truth, but act as estimates to help us get there.
Even our knowledge of past events is submitted to distortions or potentialities making the truth less absolute than it seems ; think for a moment of sollipsism (theory that I'm the only being thing "dreaming" of a complete universe, this universe including you). You can't prove that sollipsism is absolutely wrong. You can't even prove to yourself that you're not trapped in that dream, and nothings really exists outside of me. Scary, huh ?
Not too scary - the thing about those theories is that while they may or may not be true, the consequences do not really influence the physical aspects of my life:) Reminds me of Waking Life.
My personal position is that we souldn't bother of what's outside the scope of our minds ; that means that as far as I'm concerned, everybody's entitled to dream his own future the way he likes (sticking to wichever belief suits him), and shouldn't interfere with my own vision by trying to force his down my throat.
I'm completely with you on that: you can never really force your belief on someone anyway, for everyone must ultimately make his/her own choice. However, the dreamer's dream will either occur or not, and you can't get away from that.
Religions attempt to address the question of our future ; if we're good, then we'll go to paradise and yadayada. But we can't look to that future from our place, so they may be absolutely true, or absolutely wrong, but that doesn't alleviate that fact that the future is neither true nor false, it just isn't yet.
Ah, but (as the Christians put it) "faith without works is dead." If your religion and beliefs do not influence your behavior, they have no purpose. If you believe that it is good to be intelligent, for example, yet you do not work towards gaining that intelligence, your belief has no purpose. Most religions (if not all) have behaviors that they advocate - the Golden Rule, for example, or giving to charity. Christ, for example, said that on two things were the laws of the Jews based: love God and love your neighbor. Now, these aren't statements, and so they have no truth value, but you might argue against the morality they define. The fact remains that they define behaviors that a Christian should attempt to adhere to. I'm sure there are equivalents in any other modern religion - defined explicitly in the holy literature or implicitly in the values they support. I guess my main response is purely that religions contain a great deal more than places to go when you die.
Yikes, it's something like 3 in the morning in Paris - get some sleep, email me if you want to talk about anything; I enjoy intelligent discussion:)
I think that our definitions of truth are different, which is interesting. I define truth as an inherent property of the statement, not of our own knowledge. You define truth in terms of the knowledge we have of the statement. Interesting.
And no, your English is great - it's the subject that's a problem:)
(French as in France, or Quebec, or someplace in Africa, or what? My French is no longer very good, but if you want to use it to help get your point across, go for it.)
The fact that some options are mutualy exclusive and that therefore if one happens to be the truth, then others will be wrong, isn't into debate because once you'll know, it'll be too late to share your knowledge.
Not the point. The point is that truth reflects reality, not what we believe of reality. When I make a religious statement, like "there is no deity but Allah and Muhammad is His Messenger," that has a truth value, either true or false. Now, whether it's provable or not doesn't really matter (unless you're going to get into an argument about it), it still has a truth value. Just like string theory - some people think it isn't provable/disprovable, which would make it bad science, but it still is either true or false.
You seem to be arguing that if a statement isn't experimentally verifiable, it is neither true nor false, which is logically specious: the statement "it will rain tomorrow" isn't experimentally verifiable until tomorrow (at which time "it'll be too late to share your knowledge"), but it quite definitely is either true or false.
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It'd really depend on how the BBC put it - if they wrote, "a Chinese blog has been taken down by the Chinese gov't," then they're guilty of not following through on their fact-checking. If they wrote, "a Chinese blog has been taken down, and as of now it is unknown whether the Chinese gov't was involved, but we suspect...," then they're a little better off.
The best thing they could have done was do a little research; contact the blog owners, for example. Apparently the owners of the blog didn't say anything about the Chinese gov't, and so all the BBC (and other reporters) could do was speculate.
I only did a cursory test (searched for a couple programming languages, seemed to be alright), and I'll take your word on the decreasing quality for more obscure searches.
Not that I'm loathe to accept a better search engine or anything - Google just does what I want (most of the time)... Thanks for checking it out a little further.
Who cares about looks? It seems to work rather well, although I'm not ready to switch just yet.
Thanks anyway :) I'd have made a backup, but, (and back on topic!) well... :-P
There are actually quite a few people that understand and agree on the GPLv3 draft. Since you don't voice any of your own complaints, I assume you share the same as Linus. As others have said (including RMS himself, IIRC), the DRM clause isn't adding or removing any of the original intent of the GPL. One of the freedoms the license is built to protect is "the freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits" (The Free Software Definition), and if nobody else can run your improved program, the whole community will not benefit.
The idea with the clause was to keep people from releasing code under the GPL while not allowing the end-user to improve it and give the improvements back to the public in a meaningful way. I think it's a good way of doing so, but if you have a better idea on how to word it (perhaps one that Torvalds and yourself would understand and agree upon), please let the FSF know - I'm sure they would appreciate the feedback. This is what drafts are for, anyway.
*applause*
That seems to be it. It's freedom 3, coming from RMS's printer driver issue, at least partially.
You can drop that even farther: Gentoo is really a child of Debian, for example.
If you want, you could just say that they're all just "Linux."
An earlier post made the statement that it really didn't matter what Dell put on their boxes; as long as it works with some distro, it'll work with them all. They might want to have a standard kernel configuration online, and if they use a distro with a centralised application repository (Gentoo, Debian, the BSDs have a ports system, right?), they might want to help support that financially.
If Dell wants into the big business, they might want to go Red Hat and provide a support contract as an option.
It wouldn't be tough if someone did their research. Honestly - what is Dell going to do with the seven (that's the current estimate, right?) versions of Vista?
(foreword: I agree with the ggp's post)
This situation doesn't really have a well defined vendor and client. On the one hand, Dell is the vendor (producing computers) and FOSS users/devs are the clients (using computers). On the other hand, FOSS devs are the vendors (producing software) and Dell is the client (using/configuring software).
At that point, continuing to distribute it as GPL3'd means that you're letting people use your API key. If the end user can't modify it and still run it, it's not open source, by the FSF definition.
Not saying I agree, necessarily, just that this was the intent as I understand it.
The intent with the changes to the GPL is to preserve the FSF's "freedom 3": "The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits."
If the end user can't modify and run a modified version of the program, they no longer have this freedom. For your example, if a developer releases a program for the Google API under GPL3, there's no problem, because new users can create new keys, freely from Google, and modify the program as they wish.
That's the reason for this change to the GPL - it's a clarification; you can't distribute under the GPL unless your end-user can modify and run modified code.
Actually, I think a bunch of people are suggesting that.
Write them and thank them!
First, this isn't Next Gen's research, it's some guy on the GAF. (I actually wrote about this the other day)
Second, it's only the latest generation - GameCube, XBox, PS2, etc. This excludes the NES/SNES/N64, Sega systems, etc. I'd like to see one that looks all the way back.
No, I think that's pretty much everyone. :-P
I'd bet that there might be two groups: the one who really doesn't care if OSS is widely adopted, for they aren't running a corp, they just want to make and use free things. The other group treats Linux like it's in a popularity contest, and as long as it's not the most-used platform, they're going to keep pushing.
Come to think of it, there might be a third group that would like OSS to be widely adopted only so they can get more software for it, and a fourth group that would like OSS to stay small so they can be cool and cutting edge.
People are interesting, psychologically and socially. C'est la vie.
Sarcasm perhaps, but that's a pretty bad test. I'm sure they could do it, but there's simply no reason. Replace it with something else you have no need of, but that doesn't have any negative consequences: perhaps you read lots of books. Could you stop? Sure, but why?
Many drugs (especially those that the media's trying to draw connections to) have major negative consequences. Gaming simply doesn't (except in the extremes, but then so does anything).
Ah, that makes a little more sense - I'm a computer science/mathematics person, myself. It's always interesting, learning how other people think :)
A lot of modern Christianity is moving away from predestination (basically theological fatalism) and towards personal responsibility, but I'd agree with your statement in general. I think that the best followers of any religion would say that's just passing the blame along, though, and that you're supposed to be responsible for where your life is at anyway.
So do you think there is a right and wrong?
Ah, but then your statement isn't true, by my definition, because it doesn't reflect reality. Now, you might phrase your formula like so: "Mars revolves around the Sun every approximately X years, providing no major changes in the physical properties of the system," and you might be closer to finding the Platonic (if you will) truth. Whether or not you get there makes no difference - a great many scientific statements might be revealed to not be the final truth, but act as estimates to help us get there.
Not too scary - the thing about those theories is that while they may or may not be true, the consequences do not really influence the physical aspects of my life :) Reminds me of Waking Life.
I'm completely with you on that: you can never really force your belief on someone anyway, for everyone must ultimately make his/her own choice. However, the dreamer's dream will either occur or not, and you can't get away from that.
Ah, but (as the Christians put it) "faith without works is dead." If your religion and beliefs do not influence your behavior, they have no purpose. If you believe that it is good to be intelligent, for example, yet you do not work towards gaining that intelligence, your belief has no purpose. Most religions (if not all) have behaviors that they advocate - the Golden Rule, for example, or giving to charity. Christ, for example, said that on two things were the laws of the Jews based: love God and love your neighbor. Now, these aren't statements, and so they have no truth value, but you might argue against the morality they define. The fact remains that they define behaviors that a Christian should attempt to adhere to. I'm sure there are equivalents in any other modern religion - defined explicitly in the holy literature or implicitly in the values they support. I guess my main response is purely that religions contain a great deal more than places to go when you die.
Yikes, it's something like 3 in the morning in Paris - get some sleep, email me if you want to talk about anything; I enjoy intelligent discussion :)
I think that our definitions of truth are different, which is interesting. I define truth as an inherent property of the statement, not of our own knowledge. You define truth in terms of the knowledge we have of the statement. Interesting.
:)
And no, your English is great - it's the subject that's a problem
(French as in France, or Quebec, or someplace in Africa, or what? My French is no longer very good, but if you want to use it to help get your point across, go for it.)
Not the point. The point is that truth reflects reality, not what we believe of reality. When I make a religious statement, like "there is no deity but Allah and Muhammad is His Messenger," that has a truth value, either true or false. Now, whether it's provable or not doesn't really matter (unless you're going to get into an argument about it), it still has a truth value. Just like string theory - some people think it isn't provable/disprovable, which would make it bad science, but it still is either true or false.
You seem to be arguing that if a statement isn't experimentally verifiable, it is neither true nor false, which is logically specious: the statement "it will rain tomorrow" isn't experimentally verifiable until tomorrow (at which time "it'll be too late to share your knowledge"), but it quite definitely is either true or false.
By the way, what is your mother tongue?