Actually as several other people have pointed out using the GPL v2.0 doesn't automaticaly grant the right of those recieving the GPL'd software to re-distribute under a later version. You are encourage to give them that choice by stating so, but you can just as easily say "program FOO is released under the Gnu Public License version 2.0 only". It's purely the option of the person granting the license. You could even say "Program FOO is released under GPL v2.0 or the Apache license or the BSD liscence or any later version thereof you choose". The actual GPL version 2.0 doesn't grant the option in it's actual terms and conditions, it only recomends doing so on the part of the licensor.
Nothing stopping anyone from creating thier own 'gpl like' or simular lisence now. After all there could web servers or graphics & widget systems or other things with thier own 'open source' or 'free' liscences it they wanted. Oh wait.....
Seriously I've often thought of various tweeks I wouldn't mind seeing in the gpl or other liscences for some uses. I just don't code anything worthwhile these days so I don't bother. Of course not having a law degree, or at least a lot of the training that goese with one, kinda slows me down as well.
In that case the obvious thing to do is distribute source only, or alternatively when someone clicks to download the binary create the tagged source then compile and send both the binary and the source.
Of course on projects of any size this could be problematic. Now if you distributing by removeable media only it becomes a much more realistic option.
This assumes that tagging code would be considered different from the build source for the purposes of complying with the GPL. I honestly don't know the law enough to say, for all I know it (or a court ruling) says something like comments or other code that in no way changes the functionality do/don't apply.
That can be a bit reaching. I could also point out that reading a book requires 'copying it' to your retina and brain. Hey that's at least two copies.
Any 'copying' necessary to actually use the work in a normal fashion should be seen in the same light as the 'imaged copy' on your retina of the book, the analogy is strongest in reference to ram storage of the pieces of code and data in use as they are temporary as is the image on your retina from said book.
I don't see any other rational way to consider it.
I dunno, it's been considered standard for a proposed contract to presented on paper for quite a while now. How about just doing it right, if you want to offer a 'liscence' then do so, not just display it AFTER the product is alread bought and paid for and try and bully the customer by telling them they have already agreed to a contract they may not have already known about, and much more likely had no way to know the details of ahead of time.
Some good thinking there, the small charge areas at high use,wait zones is a good idea. Along with warning signs could also help with the potential "melt the poor guys ipod in his pocket" issues by limiting places where it could happen.
Biodiesels are also a good option in many cases. I honestly thing reducing our oil dependance and improving our polution problems is going to be multifaceted in an answer. I see electric cars as being more a suburban/urban commuter solution with possibly good public transportation as a partner in denser population areas. Biodiesel is good anywhere diesel is good. Add in hybrids for those on the outer edge of suburbia, or who need the range (hey what about biodiesel hybrids??). You could even have bycycle-ways for cities in nicer climes (San Diago springs to mind) and help keep people healthy.
Another thing I'd like to see is proliferation of people producing some of thier own electric through wind or solar, not necessarily all or most, just some. Properly done this could greatly improve the robustness of the system and free up quite a bit of electric production for such things as powering electric cars and so on.
Absolutely there would be no NEED for ongoing tracking to cover billing, I'm worried about legislative DESIRE or even corporate interest. Just like there is no NEED for tracking cookies to make the internet work.
I'm just concerned over the privacy issues that could occur should we get bamboozled into such a system. I can even think of a few excuses, eg; "of course we need direct feedback, else what would keep people from simply rolling back thier pay odometers just like unscrupulous used car dealers do..." a bs scenario, but when has that stoped government or corporate from using them to justify whatever they want.
Good grief, screw the robotic arm, extension cords and other crap. Just use induction to charge the car. Your automated system then only need to figure out if the car is parked or not and a sufficiently sealed system could be imbeded in a driveway if you didn't have a garage.
Also parking garages could make some money by having a charging system in each parking place and a simple way to pay for the charging, like a parking meter where you pre-pay, possibly a ccard reader built in etc.
Batteries are a chemical reaction, lower temps tend to SLOW chemical reactions. What are you thinking of that would cause batteries to work better in cold? I've only seen the opposite hold true.
From what I've seen this car is what in women I'd call a 'type'. Some are universaly beautiful or ugly, and some are both depending on who's looking.
I personally can't make up my mind other than 'odd'.
Personally I tend to like the types in both cases. Assuming the rest is at least halfway decent.
Mycroft
Re:I'd love a cheap, mass produced 200 mile electr
on
230mph Electric Car
·
· Score: 1
Ahh we finaly find that nasa engineers slashdot handle.
just kidding, all in good fun, no offence intended,IANAPC, don't try this at home, etc.
"*Note: 200lbs is a rather rough assumption of what a battery would be. It could easily be halved or doubled... "
For an all electric car carrying one person, you might get away with just doubling, halving you get a 20min go cart for the youngsters.
IIRC one prototype 5 person vehicle had over 1/2ton of batteries for just few hours use.
Another proposed system (with even bigger infrastructure requirements) would be inductance chargeing using road imbeded wiring. Of course you'd need a method of chargeing for the juice, eigther by having system where the car and road communicate so a bill could be sent based on useage, or a mileage based fee when you renew your plates or personal property taxes or some such.
As far as environmental concerns go, you still have to generate the juice somehow, and that will likely have environmental impact that has to be acounted for. The downside being reduced effeciency (chemical/thermal to electrical to storage to mechanical vs combustion to mechanical) and the upside being centralized power is more readily controlled for emisions than millions of cars.
I actually like the induction system for the fact that it reduces on-board storage requirements and thus weight making the vehical more effecient, but worry about how they'll figure out how much you owe. If the billing is 'realtime' so to speak then how hard would it be for them to figure you did 100 miles travel, over non-highways, in 30 minutes and decide to issue a speeding ticket. Or that you visited 2 landmarks a farming suply store and a gun shop and decide to 'detain' you for 'potential terrorist activity'.
Mycroft
Re:how is that different from other companies
on
NYT on EA Games
·
· Score: 1
Gah he's just living in a very low paying area. I could get $7-$8.0 flipping burgers here just past the edge of suburbia(the rural edge, not the city edge) in the midwest if I was to take an overnight shift. couple bucks more for bottom end management.
Mycroft
Re:how is that different from other companies
on
NYT on EA Games
·
· Score: 1
"Further, jobs that involve brainwork generally have a higher level of responsibility than those that don't. Getting paid more means that it's your ass when things break."
Guesse what, getting paid less also means it's your ass when things break.
The only problem with this is that using the filibuster is using a non-constitutional procedure (oustide of the reference to the legislative bodies making thier own rules of conduct) to interfere with a constitutional one.
Breaking a filibuster requires IIRC 2/3 majority, whereas judicial nominations only require a simple majority by the constitution.
In effect what you have is senators overiding the consitution with procedure. I really don't trust that. If the framers of the constitution had meant for confirmation to require 2/3 majority they would have so as they did in a few other specific cases.
I've done five or six sp2 installs myself, using the cd, and not had a problem yet. Just more anectedotal evidence and thus take with standard issue grain of salt.
I would hope not, AFIAK the aperture size is software changeable and most games will adjust it if needed. Though I suppose there might be a chipset/bios out there that locks to the bios settings somehow I doubt that could acount for the large numbers of complaints.
So if the aperture settings in bios is causing a problem it's still due to a lack in the game engine.
Actually human fov is a bit less than 180, but it's more than 90. don't recall exactly. but your basicaly right, you have a mono source(human eyes are stereo) covering a limited portion of your field of view and this is indeed why you get fishbowl with narrower fov's than your personal fov.
Now with stereo gogles it's possible to go out much further. I'd be curious to try a wide fov and plant my face much closer to the monitor and see if that helps, can't remember enough about how the retina is set to know if it'd work, or if the flatness of the screen would keep it looking funky. Have to try that later with 3dsmax and render some sceen with wide angle virtual lense.
The difference is a) they PAID FOR IT, and b)they CANT do anything about it except return it, and even that problematic.
Personally I have HIGHER standards for somthing I buy than for what is effectively a gift.
And it gets worse when the bought item comes with unrelated restrictions on use the possibilty of getting dragged into to court for mearly trying to get it to work (such as by bypassing a copy-protection scheme that's causing issues). whereas the free item not only comes with permision, but outright encouragement to make it work how I want it to.
One small thing you should be aware of, the Nvidia optimized ide drivers are NOT compatable with the copy protection system on some games, I know from first hand experience that neighter FarCry nor Doom3 will run with them installed. Instead they complain you don't have the proper cd in the drive. All I had to do to that computer to get it to work was use the driver rollback feature of xp-pro(sp2) and they both now work fine on that system.
"but some customers, in particular the die-hard fans, apparently are willing to accept some problems on day one and will put up with the problem until a patch is released eventually."
This is partly why I usually wait for the first drop in price of a game before buying.
By doing this I usually get a later 'production run' of the game, which often means the first patches have been added, or at least available online. I also save $10-$20 and get a chance to hear enough to know if I'll like the game. Last time I voilated rule was Morrowind, I got lucky there as the first 'patch' was to d/l newer vid drivers. Sadly I may break rule this again for thier next game in the elder scrolls series at it looks like it may even more moddable than than Morrowind.
But my point is that early adopters pay more for less(remember 1x cdr drives that cost $800 and would often ruin a $15 disc?, my current dual layer dvd burner cost <$90 and hasn't burned a coaster yet and probably wont unless the $1 disc is bad to start with), but I don't hold that against them as thier the ones that make it affordable and stable for the rest of us:)
"For some level variety, try FarCry. You can get lost on some of those maps. "
CAN?!? how about will. seriously it's a pretty good looking game with a LONG active distance, when you can get to a high point and binoc in to see people almost a mile a way doing thier thing, then shoot them with a sniper riffle, that's a big area. and few load times, all of them hidden behind a cut scene.
Morrowind had an interesting way of handling 'loading' times mostly the boundries are invsible and only involve 1/2 second or so, and it's the non-visible mostly that's loaded. Eigther that or thier loading chunklets before they would be visible at set boundries.
you also have.ini setting you can change so the loads are more frequent, but much quicker. Frankly I've never used it as the loads on even the first machine (duron 600 IIRC) I ran it on were rarely 2 seconds worst case.
" There are no loading delays in real life, after all. "
Strange I suffer a 7-8 hour loading delay everytime I have to load a new day. sometimes I can skip it, but somehow gameplay suffers horribly and the graphics suffer odd artifacts if I do it to many times in a row.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually as several other people have pointed out using the GPL v2.0 doesn't automaticaly grant the right of those recieving the GPL'd software to re-distribute under a later version. You are encourage to give them that choice by stating so, but you can just as easily say "program FOO is released under the Gnu Public License version 2.0 only". It's purely the option of the person granting the license. You could even say "Program FOO is released under GPL v2.0 or the Apache license or the BSD liscence or any later version thereof you choose". The actual GPL version 2.0 doesn't grant the option in it's actual terms and conditions, it only recomends doing so on the part of the licensor.
Mycroft
Nothing stopping anyone from creating thier own 'gpl like' or simular lisence now. After all there could web servers or graphics & widget systems or other things with thier own 'open source' or 'free' liscences it they wanted. Oh wait .....
Seriously I've often thought of various tweeks I wouldn't mind seeing in the gpl or other liscences for some uses. I just don't code anything worthwhile these days so I don't bother. Of course not having a law degree, or at least a lot of the training that goese with one, kinda slows me down as well.
Mycroft
In that case the obvious thing to do is distribute source only, or alternatively when someone clicks to download the binary create the tagged source then compile and send both the binary and the source.
Of course on projects of any size this could be problematic. Now if you distributing by removeable media only it becomes a much more realistic option.
This assumes that tagging code would be considered different from the build source for the purposes of complying with the GPL. I honestly don't know the law enough to say, for all I know it (or a court ruling) says something like comments or other code that in no way changes the functionality do/don't apply.
Mycroft
That can be a bit reaching. I could also point out that reading a book requires 'copying it' to your retina and brain. Hey that's at least two copies.
Any 'copying' necessary to actually use the work in a normal fashion should be seen in the same light as the 'imaged copy' on your retina of the book, the analogy is strongest in reference to ram storage of the pieces of code and data in use as they are temporary as is the image on your retina from said book.
I don't see any other rational way to consider it.
Mycroft
I dunno, it's been considered standard for a proposed contract to presented on paper for quite a while now. How about just doing it right, if you want to offer a 'liscence' then do so, not just display it AFTER the product is alread bought and paid for and try and bully the customer by telling them they have already agreed to a contract they may not have already known about, and much more likely had no way to know the details of ahead of time.
Mycroft
Some good thinking there, the small charge areas at high use,wait zones is a good idea. Along with warning signs could also help with the potential "melt the poor guys ipod in his pocket" issues by limiting places where it could happen.
Biodiesels are also a good option in many cases. I honestly thing reducing our oil dependance and improving our polution problems is going to be multifaceted in an answer. I see electric cars as being more a suburban/urban commuter solution with possibly good public transportation as a partner in denser population areas. Biodiesel is good anywhere diesel is good. Add in hybrids for those on the outer edge of suburbia, or who need the range (hey what about biodiesel hybrids??). You could even have bycycle-ways for cities in nicer climes (San Diago springs to mind) and help keep people healthy.
Another thing I'd like to see is proliferation of people producing some of thier own electric through wind or solar, not necessarily all or most, just some. Properly done this could greatly improve the robustness of the system and free up quite a bit of electric production for such things as powering electric cars and so on.
Mycroft
Absolutely there would be no NEED for ongoing tracking to cover billing, I'm worried about legislative DESIRE or even corporate interest. Just like there is no NEED for tracking cookies to make the internet work.
I'm just concerned over the privacy issues that could occur should we get bamboozled into such a system. I can even think of a few excuses, eg; "of course we need direct feedback, else what would keep people from simply rolling back thier pay odometers just like unscrupulous used car dealers do..." a bs scenario, but when has that stoped government or corporate from using them to justify whatever they want.
Mycroft
Good grief, screw the robotic arm, extension cords and other crap. Just use induction to charge the car. Your automated system then only need to figure out if the car is parked or not and a sufficiently sealed system could be imbeded in a driveway if you didn't have a garage.
Also parking garages could make some money by having a charging system in each parking place and a simple way to pay for the charging, like a parking meter where you pre-pay, possibly a ccard reader built in etc.
Mycroft
Batteries are a chemical reaction, lower temps tend to SLOW chemical reactions. What are you thinking of that would cause batteries to work better in cold? I've only seen the opposite hold true.
Mcyroft
From what I've seen this car is what in women I'd call a 'type'. Some are universaly beautiful or ugly, and some are both depending on who's looking.
I personally can't make up my mind other than 'odd'.
Personally I tend to like the types in both cases. Assuming the rest is at least halfway decent.
Mycroft
Ahh we finaly find that nasa engineers slashdot handle.
just kidding, all in good fun, no offence intended,IANAPC, don't try this at home, etc.
Mcyroft
"*Note: 200lbs is a rather rough assumption of what a battery would be. It could easily be halved or doubled... "
For an all electric car carrying one person, you might get away with just doubling, halving you get a 20min go cart for the youngsters.
IIRC one prototype 5 person vehicle had over 1/2ton of batteries for just few hours use.
Mycroft
Another proposed system (with even bigger infrastructure requirements) would be inductance chargeing using road imbeded wiring. Of course you'd need a method of chargeing for the juice, eigther by having system where the car and road communicate so a bill could be sent based on useage, or a mileage based fee when you renew your plates or personal property taxes or some such.
As far as environmental concerns go, you still have to generate the juice somehow, and that will likely have environmental impact that has to be acounted for. The downside being reduced effeciency (chemical/thermal to electrical to storage to mechanical vs combustion to mechanical) and the upside being centralized power is more readily controlled for emisions than millions of cars.
I actually like the induction system for the fact that it reduces on-board storage requirements and thus weight making the vehical more effecient, but worry about how they'll figure out how much you owe. If the billing is 'realtime' so to speak then how hard would it be for them to figure you did 100 miles travel, over non-highways, in 30 minutes and decide to issue a speeding ticket. Or that you visited 2 landmarks a farming suply store and a gun shop and decide to 'detain' you for 'potential terrorist activity'.
Mycroft
Gah he's just living in a very low paying area. I could get $7-$8.0 flipping burgers here just past the edge of suburbia(the rural edge, not the city edge) in the midwest if I was to take an overnight shift. couple bucks more for bottom end management.
Mycroft
"Further, jobs that involve brainwork generally have a higher level of responsibility than those that don't. Getting paid more means that it's your ass when things break."
Guesse what, getting paid less also means it's your ass when things break.
Mycroft
The only problem with this is that using the filibuster is using a non-constitutional procedure (oustide of the reference to the legislative bodies making thier own rules of conduct) to interfere with a constitutional one.
Breaking a filibuster requires IIRC 2/3 majority, whereas judicial nominations only require a simple majority by the constitution.
In effect what you have is senators overiding the consitution with procedure. I really don't trust that. If the framers of the constitution had meant for confirmation to require 2/3 majority they would have so as they did in a few other specific cases.
Mycroft
I've done five or six sp2 installs myself, using the cd, and not had a problem yet. Just more anectedotal evidence and thus take with standard issue grain of salt.
Mycroft
I would hope not, AFIAK the aperture size is software changeable and most games will adjust it if needed. Though I suppose there might be a chipset/bios out there that locks to the bios settings somehow I doubt that could acount for the large numbers of complaints.
So if the aperture settings in bios is causing a problem it's still due to a lack in the game engine.
Mycroft
Actually human fov is a bit less than 180, but it's more than 90. don't recall exactly. but your basicaly right, you have a mono source(human eyes are stereo) covering a limited portion of your field of view and this is indeed why you get fishbowl with narrower fov's than your personal fov.
Now with stereo gogles it's possible to go out much further. I'd be curious to try a wide fov and plant my face much closer to the monitor and see if that helps, can't remember enough about how the retina is set to know if it'd work, or if the flatness of the screen would keep it looking funky. Have to try that later with 3dsmax and render some sceen with wide angle virtual lense.
Mycroft
The difference is a) they PAID FOR IT, and b)they CANT do anything about it except return it, and even that problematic.
Personally I have HIGHER standards for somthing I buy than for what is effectively a gift.
And it gets worse when the bought item comes with unrelated restrictions on use the possibilty of getting dragged into to court for mearly trying to get it to work (such as by bypassing a copy-protection scheme that's causing issues). whereas the free item not only comes with permision, but outright encouragement to make it work how I want it to.
Mycroft
One small thing you should be aware of, the Nvidia optimized ide drivers are NOT compatable with the copy protection system on some games, I know from first hand experience that neighter FarCry nor Doom3 will run with them installed. Instead they complain you don't have the proper cd in the drive. All I had to do to that computer to get it to work was use the driver rollback feature of xp-pro(sp2) and they both now work fine on that system.
Mycroft
"but some customers, in particular the die-hard fans, apparently are willing to accept some problems on day one and will put up with the problem until a patch is released eventually."
:)
This is partly why I usually wait for the first drop in price of a game before buying.
By doing this I usually get a later 'production run' of the game, which often means the first patches have been added, or at least available online. I also save $10-$20 and get a chance to hear enough to know if I'll like the game. Last time I voilated rule was Morrowind, I got lucky there as the first 'patch' was to d/l newer vid drivers. Sadly I may break rule this again for thier next game in the elder scrolls series at it looks like it may even more moddable than than Morrowind.
But my point is that early adopters pay more for less(remember 1x cdr drives that cost $800 and would often ruin a $15 disc?, my current dual layer dvd burner cost <$90 and hasn't burned a coaster yet and probably wont unless the $1 disc is bad to start with), but I don't hold that against them as thier the ones that make it affordable and stable for the rest of us
Mycroft
"For some level variety, try FarCry. You can get lost on some of those maps. "
CAN?!? how about will. seriously it's a pretty good looking game with a LONG active distance, when you can get to a high point and binoc in to see people almost a mile a way doing thier thing, then shoot them with a sniper riffle, that's a big area. and few load times, all of them hidden behind a cut scene.
Mycroft
Morrowind had an interesting way of handling 'loading' times mostly the boundries are invsible and only involve 1/2 second or so, and it's the non-visible mostly that's loaded. Eigther that or thier loading chunklets before they would be visible at set boundries. .ini setting you can change so the loads are more frequent, but much quicker. Frankly I've never used it as the loads on even the first machine (duron 600 IIRC) I ran it on were rarely 2 seconds worst case.
you also have
Mycroft
" There are no loading delays in real life, after all. "
Strange I suffer a 7-8 hour loading delay everytime I have to load a new day. sometimes I can skip it, but somehow gameplay suffers horribly and the graphics suffer odd artifacts if I do it to many times in a row.
Mycroft