Huh?? Only time will tell, I suppose, but if you'd bother to take the time to research our military actions over the last ten years, I think you would find that we work pretty hard to avoid civilian casualties.
Despite all the fuss about "smart bombs" and the like, the US still managed to kill about 10,000 Iraqi civillians in the Gulf War. Oh well, it was in the name of democra...,er, corrupt ruling family of Kuwait.
Frankly, I doubt this claim.
Can you substantiate it?
Perhaps, but where did this nasty Taliban come from? The US trained and funded the thugs that later became the Taliban (and Bin Laden, I might add) when they were fighting Soviet troops. Reminds one of Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" doesn't it?
I must say that I am impressed by your
imagination and by your determination not to
let your own ignorance keep you out of this
debate.
The Taliban's history is not so hard to track
down, if you will just do a little research.
You see, "Talib" means "student" or "seeker".
The Taliban movement started in the Islamic
schools of Pakistan.
Now many of those students were orphans of the
war between the Mujahadin and the Soviets, so
in that sense, you might attribute some of the
blame to us, on those grounds, since we helped
supply the Mujahadin with weapons so that they
could actually fight and die and leave orphans
behind.
But the Paks are the real source of the Taliban.
The problem is that the Paks see a border
dispute on the horizen, and they wanted to see
a government in power in Afghanistan that is
unlikely to carry through this dispute.
Some of the Mujahadin have joined the Taliban,
but many more are with the Northern Alliance.
Please, Jonathan, there's a goldmine of
information from organizations as diverse as
the UNHCR and the Federation of American
Scientists.
Do a little research, and you'll come off
looking a whole lot smarter.
Of course, I wouldn't be surprised if there
were reminders of "Heart of Darkness" to be
found, but not precisely the ones you are
looking for.
> It is a sad fact, but the Taliban are
> well-known to have been supported by the US
> when Soviet forces tried to take afghanistan.
This could only be a sad fact if it were true.
The fact is, the Soviets were out of the
picture when the Taliban came on the scene.
The Mujahadin are probably more represented
by the Northern Alliance.
> This is not war. War attacks military
> structures. The cruel and inhumane
> attacks on areas populated by civilians
> is best described as mutual genocide.
We are attacking military targets.
Maybe you should get off your computer and
go watch the news, or something.
> and I'm sure more Afghani civillians will
> be killed than were killed in the WTC.
Huh??
Only time will tell, I suppose, but if
you'd bother to take the time to research our
military actions over the last ten years, I
think you would find that we work pretty hard to
avoid civilian casualties.
I'm not a betting man, but if I had to
place a bet, I'd say we are going to keep
the number of civilians deaths that we cause
to something far short of 1000.
I'll be pretty disappointed in my governement
if we end up killing 6000 civilians or more.
That's way more than is reasonable to expect.
> In reality, the events of September 11th, as tragic as
> they were, were an insignificant blow to the US.
What a statement.
6000 Afghan civilian deaths would be tragic,
although in this case,
I suspect that we, as Americans, probably place
more value on the lives of Afghan civilians
than the Taliban does.
Any government that is so determined to keep women
from working that it leaves a widow with no choice
but to beg on the streets for money to feed her
children has lost all moral authority to claim
concern about its people.
These claims that the Afghan civilians have more
to fear from us than from the Taliban are
simply ludicrous.
I just hope we won't abandon them completely
after we've brought the Taliban down.
> > Should the U.S. not retaliate or otherwise defend itself
> NO, the US is attacking them. Someone committed a crime, not and act of war, and the US is responding by making war.
> its always wrong.
This is nonsense.
All nations have some responsibility to make sure
that they are not, under normal circumstances,
used a shelters from which to stage attacks on
other countries,
unless they are prepared to be accused of
acts of war against the attacked country.
A position as naive and irresponsible as the
one you are advocating in the remarks I quoted
above can only come from someone who has lived
a life that has been sheltered by people who are
less naive and more responsible than you.
No nation can afford to sit on its hands
in the face of acts of mass murder simply
because the self-proclaimed governement that
shelters the perpetrators pleads ignorance.
> America is not blameless.
I have to agree with you here, but only to say
that we are not completely blameless.
The palestinians should not be made second
class citizens in the country in which they are
born.
All people born in a democratic country should
be full citizens and should enjoy the full
rights.
By failing to make ethnic palistinians full
citizens when those palistinians are born in
Israel, the Israelies are pushing palistinians
who might not be inclined toward simpathy to
terrorists into the arms of terrorist
organizations.
Democracy is not just important for its
symbolic value;
It is also a final outlet through which people
can peacefully express their discontent with
government.
In the absense of this outlet, it is only natural
that palistinians express their discontent
through attacts on Israeli soldiers.
Having said this, indiscriminate attacks on
Israeli civilians cannot be justified
this way.
By continuing to permit palistinian controlled
areas to be used to stage attacks on Israeli
civilians, the would be governement of
palistine has drawn its fitness to govern
into question.
If the palistinians want to prove themselves
fit to govern themselves, they must confine
themselves to attacks on the Israeli government,
and they must work to bring those who commit and
actively support acts of terrorism to justice.
In the mean time, the Israelis must give all
law abiding people that it governs equal
opportunities to participate in government,
without regard to ethnic or religious
background or affiliation.
But if you ask me whether I am going to support
the people that dance in the streets at the mass
murder of thousands of Americans or the imperfect
people that honestly pledge their support in
helping us fight the mass murderers,
my choice is clear.
I hope the Israelies will, in the months ahead,
give serious thought to the way they deal with
the palistinians the govern;
But, even if they don't, I am on the side of
the Israelies.
Dancing in the streets to celibrate the mass
murder of Americans is not a good way to get
American sympathy for one's cause.
I hope we, as Americans, will do the mature
thing and pressure the Israelies to do some
serious thinking in spite of this attack,
but appart from that, this attack makes me
even more sympathetic to the Israelies,
no matter that they are less than perfect.
> you are most certainly wrong when you say
this is NOT an attack on Islam -
it most certainly is.
This is really stupid.
Nothing I've ever heard about Islam suggests
that it advocates terrorism.
Everything I've heard suggests precisely
the opposite.
When we are finished with our work in
Afghanistan, I am sure it will still be
a country of Islamic people.
Even those parts of Afghanistan that are not
under control of the Taliban still function
under some form of Islamic Law.
While I am against any government sponsorship
of religion, Islamic Law appears to be what
the people of Afghanistan want.
I hope that, after the Taliban, the people
of Afghanistan at least choose a more modern
form of Islamic Law.
I hope that they do not attempt to continue
this cowardly and shameful mistreatment
of the women in their country.
Dispite our president's unfortunate and
ill considered choice of the word "Crusade"
in his speech before Congress,
I don't think even a substantial minority of
Americans believe that Afghanistan will not
be an Islamic country when we are finished
bringing the terrorists and the Taliban militia
that sheltered them to justice.
We should not attack a people because they
are Islamic, but neither should we tolerate
the mass murder of thousands of Americans
on our own soil simply because the perpetrators
make an incredible attempt to hide behind
this religion who's very laws they have violated.
SubtleNuance, I wonder just how much thought
you've really put into all this.
Perhaps you should change your name to
"SubtleNuisance".
In the mid 80's, I remeber using
Turbo-C/Borland-C, and the licence agreement
(called a "No Nonsense Licence Agreement")
said something about using the software "like
a book".
You could make all the copies you wanted, loan
it to friends, install it on as many different
systems as you wanted, as long as you made sure
that only one copy was in use at a time.
Does any one else remember that??
I don't have a copy of it any more.
I'm not sure its simply a matter of vigilance.
When you install a "patch" from Microsoft, you
run the risk of breaking your system.
It's frequently true that the only way to fix
it (unless you have a real backup and recovery
strategy, rather than just backups) is to
reinstall and then go back to reapply all the
old patches except for the one that broke your
system.
Even if you know what you are doing,
and if you really are committed to doing things
the right way, all these statements that you
just have to be "vigilant about patching"
your system (and many have said this, mblase, so I'm not just picking on you) is unrealistic.
There's a great deal of risk associated with
this automatic application of new patches that
I keep seeing people insist on.
Linux is not immune from worms.
But it is modular enough that simply creating
and testing a security patch is much easier,
so when we get a patch, it is more likely to
be safe to install.
When something goes wrong with a patch, most of
the system still works, so we are better
positioned (on a Unix box) to troubleshoot
the problem and find a workaround.
If we must back out the patch, some Unix varients
have specific and fairly reliable procedures for
doing this.
Those that don't are modular enough that you have
a good chance of figuring out enough about the
problem to remove the new software and reinstall
the old.
Keeping a Unix system up-to-date, patchwise, is
a lot safer than this same task for Windows.
Beyond this, I'm convinced that most Unix
varients are simply better written.
The programmers that write them are more
professional, on average, and they are not
trying to cover for their boss's perjury
before congress and in the courts by tangling
things together than any first year computer
science student knows should be kept separate
(can you say "Modularity"??).
MicroSoft starts of by setting a bad example,
and the application writers are almost forced
to follow.
By the time you finish all the mid-project
design changes that you have to make to cope
with the fact that the API's do not function as
they are documented to function, a non-trivial
application will no longer be true to its
original design.
Those of you that say Unix/Linux is not safe
from worms and viruses are correct, but this
fact should not be made to suggest that Unix
and MS-Windows are equally vulnerable.
Most versions of Unix are better written than
MS-Windows because most Unix vendors are more
committed to quality work than is MicroSoft.
If MicroSoft doesn't like the reputation they've
earned, then they should start earning a different
one and stop whining about how Unix is not perfect
either.
Unix is not perfect, but it is
much better.
If dubya finds out that I read/. an hour a day at work, so be it.
This is thoughtless and shortsighted.
Even if we ignore, for the sake of argument,
that the government does make mistakes and that
self righteous prosecutors act more like
persecutors, sometimes,
think about those foreign dissidents that count
on encryption to safely get news in and out of
their countries.
As ineffective as we are, at times, at detecting
foreign spies in our own government, do you
really think we can safely tell these dissidents
that they do not need to fear that anyone in
the US government might be unlawfully accessing
those encryption keys through the legally
mandated backdoor and selling the keys to their
respective foreign governments?
Wouldn't we be better off doing everything we
can to encourage foreigners to use the strongest
encryption they can get to thwart their
governments' efforts to control the news they get?
During the Chinese crackdown on Tiananmen Square,
Chinese students studying in the US were using
BitNet to send real new home, and then fax
machines were used to relay the news all over
China.
At the time, the government of China (the PRC)
did not have the means to capture and examine
a significant amount of traffic from BitNet,
and they could not afford to close down BitNet
because of the important scientific exchange
that it supported.
The government of China is now much better
positioned to examine Internet traffic for
politically unacceptable content.
In Afganistan, the Taliban "government" fears
this exchange so much that they are attempting
to forbid uncontrolled use of the Internet.
Unscrupulous elements in law enforcement and
in Congress in the US are always arguing that
they must strip us of the very rights they are
sworn to protect if they are to fight crime.
It is better to wait until more courageous
people find better ways to fight crime without
taking away our rights.
Every politician who has sworn to defend the
Constitution of The United States and then
argues that law abiding citizens have no need
for a right to privacy has brushed his oath
aside, and is not to be trusted.
Law enforcement CAN find other options
for keeping us safe without stripping us of
our rights;
They do it every day.
The fact that all those rights seem inconvenient
to law enforcement at times is not grounds to
throw them all away,
even if the process of throwing them all away
is slow enough and spread out enough that we
can't really remember exactly where we lost them.
Unless I'm mistaken, click through licences are
usually unenforcible when they are used as a
unilateral attempt to change the terms of an
existing contract.
When you purchase software, you are entering
into a contract with the publisher, and the terms
of that contract have to be understood by both
parties when it is established.
Once the contract is established, the publisher does not have the right to demand that you agree
to additional terms before you have access to
the software you have already purchased the
right to use.
This same reasoning would not apply to a case
where you did not have a prior contract.
The logic that renders click through licencing
agreements meaningless in a case of already purchased software may not be applicable to a case where where you are clicking through agreements on a web site as part fo the process of establishing
a contract.
Does anyone out there have the expertese to settle this question?
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
The Constitution does give the United States the power to enter into treaties, and when the US does so, it is not a matter of the treaty powers negating the Tenth Amendment.
The Tenth Amendment is no obstacle to powers that are, in fact, delegated to the US.
Nothing about this suggests that the treaty powers of the US are a threat, in any way, to the First Amendment.
> > The censor must actually go to the original
> > site to see what the content looks like.
> If the site uses https, then all the sniffer
> sees is that somebody accessed that site.
> But not the exact path of the contents,
> because the request is encrypted as well!
That's certainly true, but it's not the point.
What the sniffer sees when the censor goes to
the original site is not relevant, because the
censor goes to the original site by hand.
The censor can cut and paste the URL from his
browser into the list of URLs to block.
In cases like this, the sniffer is only a factor
when attempting to detect mirror sites,
automatically.
And thwarting these attempts at automatically
detecting mirror sites is where SSL can be
most helpful.
Your search engine idea may, indeed, be a way that the censor could attempt to regain the upper hand.
A search engine could be set up to speak SSL,
and search mirror sites for offensive material.
The sniffer idea would still be defeated for
scanning content, but could be used to capture
addresses for SSL sites that could be searched
for forbidden content.
The next step would be for the good guys to
attempt to characterize the IP addresses used
by the bad guys (the censors) to conduct the
searches.
Perhaps a list of censor operated search engines
could be used to let mirror sites send phony
content.
An additional step that the good guys could take
occurs to me.
If we knew what the censors were searching for,
we could replace specific words in the forbidden
documents on the mirror sites with graphical
images of those words.
Actually, another thought occurs to me.
What if someone sent a forged stream of
TCP packets by the sniffer that made it look
like illicit content was coming from something
like "www.departmentofstate.gov" and other
prominent sites, and started making their system
filter out all sorts of good content.
It sure seems like ways like this will be found
to make the censors look stupid.
Not quite then end, I suspect.
I'm guessing that to sniff traffic for
offensive content, the censor must actually
go to the original site to see what the
content looks like.
(The article is sparse, but the phrase
"Rights Protection" suggest to me that
copyright violations may be part of the
motivation for this scheme.)
This initial build of the sniffing filter
rules for a particular file will probably
be done, at least in part, by hand, and adding
the URL in question to the list is easy to do
by hand, even if the retrieval of the original
offensive copy is encrypted by SSL.
It is, I think, precisely the possibility of
mirror sites that makes the idea of sniffing
additional traffic for evidence of other copies
of the content seem interesting.
I won't be so bold as to suggest that this is
now the end of the story, but I submit that
we are, at least, closer to the end.
8-)
There's an easy answer to this.
The mirror sites can require access through SSL.
The content would be encrypted, and the sniffers
wouldn't be able to read it.
These scientists you are talking about are probably not working for free and buying all their own equipment.
The companies are betting expensive resources (including these scientists' salaries) on finding useful drugs.
They will not make these bets (in the face of very long odds, since most of the substances they test don't turn out to be useful) without the promise of a big payoff in those cases where they win.
I'd like to see more of our tax dollars going to medical reesearch, but this notion that the scientists are the ones who should be getting rich simply makes no sense.
I want to start by saying that I'm please that
you made your reply rational and to the point.
It shows some insight into a viewpoint that has
not been expressed so well in other posts.
Having said that, there are a couple of things
I'd like to point out.
First, most of my reply was as much
to the notion that
there was no useful parellel to the open source
mentality in the business of science.
to the extent that this first point is true,
your point about "Science's" statement is
not really relevant.
My last paragraph, on the other hand,
was aimed directly at Celera, and does not,
therefore, enjoy any protection from the
point expressed in the previous paragraph.
This brings me to the second point.
In your own reply to my reply, you say:
Small quantities are completely unrestricted.
Larger quantities simply require a credible
signature stating that the data will not
redistributed or used for commercial purposes.
While this is important to point out,
there are a couple of potential problems
that occur to me with making experimental
data proprietary, even with this attempt
at a restricted kind of openness.
First, it means that if I try to do further
science using the entire body of data,
I will be bound by this agreement not to
redistribute the very data that I use to
form my conclusions.
If I can't release the data I use for
theoretical work, can I really claim that
I'm engaging in science, myself?
Any attempt at scientific work that is based on
Celera's data is tainted in an important way.
Second, corporations have a long history of
using legal harrassment to suppress science
and opinions that they don't like.
How many times have we seen corporations
send Cease and Desist letters for things that
any reasonably intelligent person must know
are perfectly legal and appropriate.
While I don't like this silly notion that
some people have that all lawyers are evil,
there is a class of scum sucking bastards
that happen to be lawyers who believe it is
ethical to send unsupportable legal threats
as a bluff in hopes that the target of these
threats will back down without a fight.
These bottom feeders deserve to be drawn
and quartered, and if you are one of these
sleasbags, you know who you are.
Anyway, imagine that you saw a flaw in Celera's
reasoning and published your own paper
using Celera's own data to refute their
conclusions and make them look silly.
Suppose that Celera's investors have sunk
a great deal of money into a product based
on some bit of flawed "science" that they've
attempted to do.
What do you think are the chances that they
will simply acknowledge the problem, and then
take their marbles and go home?
When news of such a problem for a drug
company hits the stock market, what
is the typical effect on the price of the
company's stock?
CEO's are generally under tremendous pressure
to maximize the value of their stock,
and that pressure often warps their sense
of proportion.
Personally, I can see the CEO of such a
company convincing himself that they will
find a way around the problem with a little
more research, and that he needs, first, to
maintain investor confidence or he will be
cheated of the chance to solve the problem and
give a good return on the investments that came
in before the bad news broke.
Such a CEO might think he has a duty to
discourage you from spreading news of this temporary setback any further.
Maybe you feel secure about being able to
conduct your science with data from Celera,
but what happens when Celera has second
thoughts about continuing to make these data
availible to the scientific community.
Since you can't publish Celera's data in your
research, you have no choice but to point your
readers to Celera to get their own copies of
the data that are the foundation of your research.
But if Celera is embarassed and stops making these
data availible to the scientist who are reading
your paper, suddenly, you will find yourself
trying to defend your own claims without being
able to show any data to support them.
What would you do if you received a Cease and
Desist letter from Celera?
What if you knew damn well that Celera had
no legal legs to stand on, and that this
effort on their part was simply legal harrasment?
What would you do?
Are you confident that you and a cheap lawyer
could prevail fight off an army of expensive
lawyers?
Did you get in the science business to advance
science and get a really good reputation,
or did you get in the business to become
notorious for legal battles and grandious
claims about your scientific prowess, which you
can't prove, BTW, because the corporate legal
army secured a temporary injuction barring
further distrubution of your "slanderous"
paper before you even realized you needed to
hire a lawyer?
I fear that the confidence that some have
expressed in Celera's reasonability is naive.
I think those of you who think it's acceptable
to make scientific data proprietary are not
really paying close attention to history.
Even if it turns out that we can trust Celera
this particular time, I have the feeling we
are on a slippery slope,
and that ultimately this trend will have a
positively chilling effect on science.
It's great, I think, that scientific progress
often leads to commercial and ecconomic
developement, but if we let corporations
own basic science, it seems obvious to me
that basic science will suffer for it, and
we will suffer along with it.
This argument is deeply and seriously flawed.
Your analogy to "open source AIDS research"
deserve to be debunked quickly.
You claim:
"debugging" requires that you already
have AIDS and you're willing to sacrifice
your last two or three years to help others
find a cure,
This statement is unsupportable.
Even a charitable interpretation of the
statement presupposes that only those who
are intimately involved in collecting data
can conduct research, and only gross ignorance
could lead one to believe that this is true.
You say:
biotech equipment is incredibly expensive.
I can only suppose that the irony of this
statement escapes you.
Let me spell it out for you.
Industry decides that it must keep its research
secret, so that it can profit from said research.
It put the fruits of that research into designing
research equipment, and when it patents all this
knowledge and equipment it can use its legal
monopoly on them to set any price it wants.
Of course knowledge and equipment are both often
prerequisites for research, and since the
entities that owned this initial knowledge
and equipment were free to charge whatever they
wanted for them, the cost of the research is
very high, so naturally when the research is
completed and bears its own fruit of knowledge
and equipment, industry has a good excuse for
setting the price on this new fruit very very
high, since they have to recoup the cost of this
new research.
Imagine how expensive the next generation of
research will be.
You say:
If you're going to do this kind of work,
it's really a full time job.
History is rife with cases where people from
disciplines thought to be unrelated to the
research in question stumbled across published
research and contributed insights that were
obvious to anyone in these unrelated disciplines.
Your statement presupposes that only laborious
and time consuming contributions to science
are valuable.
You say:
The fields in which Open Source will work will probably discover it on their own.
This statement is perhaps the only source of genuine insight in your entire diatribe.
What you may have missed is that
science has already discovered
that an open model works best.
Secrecy might be good for profit and it
might be good for national security,
but its never good for science.
It's all very well to spout about big
companies and profits, but I wager that you'd
be the first person to scream if your government
raised taxes by 10 percent to fund research.
10% would be too much, but I would be happy to see
a 1% increase in every tax I pay if I knew that
the 1% would would be applied strictly to basic
non-profit, non-secret, non-proprietary science
What advocates of that raving lunatic RMS
don't seem to grasp is that the majority of
people are motivated to some extent by
self-interest and that one is unlikely to
achieve much by removing elements of
self-interest. I wait with interest to see
if these deluded people will eventually
work it out on their own.
I won't defend RMS, here, because he is a
fanatic ("raving lunatic" is, perhaps, unjustified).
But what many people don't seem to understand
about science is that science truely does
thrive only in an open intelectual environment.
Suppose you publish the results of your
experiments but keep your data and analysis
secret.
How can we check to make sure your experiment
is repeatable?
Even if the experient is repeatable, how can we
criticize the conclusions you've drawn?
When you claim to have interesting knowledge
but refuse to release the knowledge or refuse
to release the basis of the knowledge, you've
reduced potential science to mere advertising.
I'm not saying its evil, but I am saying it's
not science.
When you call it science, you are lying to
yourself and to the public.
What Celera is doing is not science.
I hope "Science" magazine is satisfied with
whatever compensation it is to recieve for
this advertising it is doing for Celera;
I'm certainly not happy with it.
This is not the only thing Adobe has done wrong.
They've stopped including fonts in their PDF files whenever those fonts are normally included with MS-Windows.
This means that those PDF files are not viewable under Linux.
I used to try to view PDF files under Linux on a regular basis,
but I find that it is getting harder to do all the time.
These days, most of the PDF files I try to view cannot be rendered properly
under 'acroread' (Adobe's own viewer) or under xpdf.
My take on this is that Adobe's attitude toward Linux is becoming more callous all the time,
so I recommend to anyone who will listen that they try to avoid using any Adobe product.
I can't even count the number of online companies that have lost any chance to get my business
because their online catalogs are amoung those PDF files that I can't view under Linux.
If you want to make fun of my government..
All I can say is, "Be my guest!"
Apparently holding hotly contested elections is not enough to keep my government (the US) in line, so maybe a good dose of redicule will help.
You might begin with the US's diabolically clever
plan to force encryption research overseas under
the guise of regulations to restrict the export
of "encryption technology".
Afterall, we can't let ourselves be outdone by a
tiny little country like Poland.
We've been jealous of all those Polish jokes
for much of this century, and time is running
out for us to take that title away from Poland
before the century is out.
Q: How many Polish government officials does it take to inforce a tax on free software?
A: The same number that it takes on horseback to charge German tanks.
What in the world with the government of Poland think of next?
Lets just make sure that it is the government of Poland that takes the flak for all this.
Anyone watching the news during the Eighties cannot have missed the courage shown by the people of Poland during the fall of communism.
Adrian
Richard Stallman claims not to be hostile to the
KDE community, but consider the following.
Suppose I had a license that was designed to
advance the cause of free software,
one very much like the GNU Public License.
Suppose the wording were a little different,
but in essence, the license had exactly the
same legal implications of the GPL.
Suppose I called this license the Griffis
Public License, and I wrote lots of software,
and put all my software under the Griffis
Public License.
No problem, so far..
Now suppose some third party wanted to
combine some of my
software with some other software covered by
the GNU Public License.
That third party notices that each of these
two licenses insists that all the parts combined
must be covered by itself,
but each licenses insists that you cannot change
it over to the other.
Now we have a problem.
Of course, the GNU Public License covers a lot
more software, and we all know how likely Mr.
Stallman is to budge on this sort of issue,
so this third party might contact me ask to
permission to switch my software over to
Stallman's license.
I would be reluctant, but on thinking about it,
I might agree at least that I ought to get along
with other licenses a little better.
Suppose I changed my license specifically to say
that it is okay to combine source code covered
under my license with software covered under and
of a number of approved free software licenses
and made the GNU Public License the first
license on the approved list.
Now the third party is free to go to Richard
Stallman and ask for a reciprocal change in
the GNU Public License.
I think we all know how likely such a change is.
Not all hostility is overt.
RMS claims that he is not hostile, but is this
really a sincere claim?
Perhaps I'm mistaken, but it is always seemed
to me that the GNU Public License exhibits an
intolerance to even the slightest differences
in philosophy.
I believe this quality of the GNU Public
License may parallel a similar quality in
Richard Stallman.
If I am correct, does it really make sense
for RMS to claim not to be hostile?
He may not be overtly hostile,
but is not intolerance a kind of hostility?
I think the low temperature was used because it
is easier to collect useful data without letting
other factors pollute the results.
Muon catalized fusion is considered a cooler
fusion mechanism because it can, in theory,
produce useful output at temperatures of 1000 C
or less.
It cannot be used to produce useful amounts of
energy (i.e. more energy than you put in) at
the extremely low temperatures cited in the
artcile, but it might produce useful
experimental results.
At first, I thought you were just another troll, but now I can see that you really believe what you are saying and are trying to argue in good faith.
What if we put our opposition to your viewpoint this way: It is possible to shape clay into a brick, and the vast majority of all bricks are not really works of art. But this does not mean that all acts of shaping clay are necessarily lacking in creativity.
In the same sense, a great deal of source code is not terribly artful. But, so are exquisite expressions of ideas or arguments that are difficult to express as well by any other means. I think there are probably more of these than many people realize. My favorite example is Duff's Device. Duff's Device is an answer to the argument that there is never any good reason to depart from some religious ideals about coding. The code used to express Duff's Device is the argument in its most concise form. The device is typically shown as:
send(to, from, count) register short *to, *from; register count; {
register n=(count+7)/8;
switch(count%8){ case 0: do{ *to = *from++;
case 7: *to = *from++;
case 6: *to = *from++; case 5: *to = *from++; case 4: *to = *from++; case 3: *to = *from++; case 2: *to = *from++; case 1: *to = *from++; }while(--n>0);
}
}
Understanding why this is significant involves a long standing controversy about programming style. The controversy itself is not important, here. What is important is that Duff's Device does provoke thought and some strong emotions amoung people involved in the controversy.
All this is true, but doesn't it seem like MS sets an awfully bad example when it comes to writing OS's and applications? When budding young programmers grow up in an environment where good programming practices are routinely sacrificed for time to market and other more questionable goals, isn't it easy to imagine these programmers getting out of the habit of thinking very much about the consequences of their coding shortcuts?
Just a thought.
Adrian
Re:Remote Display can be put into something New!
on
X Windows Must Die!
·
· Score: 1
So we should just keep working with it because it does remote display?
YES! That and the fact that it is the expression of an elegant design.
You mentioned remote display, I'd love to see something that cuts down on the overhead (ever tried to do remote display over a modem?).
I played freecell under WINE on a remote system over a 28.8 modem. Of course it was slow, but what exactly are you thinking of taking out to make it faster? I really don't understand the value of a non-specific wish for reduced overhead. What specifically do you think could be removed?
I'd also like to see some kind of standard widget set built into the server itself. (GTK would be fine with me). Its soooo incrediably annoying when I find programs that look really cool but don't run correctly (or not at all in my window manager).
WHAT!?!!??!? You resent incompatabilities in the widget sets, so you want to have us all locked into a single one at the server level? The whole point of the architecture of the X-Window System is to provide maximum flexability. This give the developement community the chance to experiment, and to find out what makes sense by seeing how people react to different ideas.
Consider this, for a moment. There were already graphics systems out there when X-Windows was conceived. The X-Windows System was designed to overcome the deficiencies in these other systems. Many of these deficiencies were the results of assumptions that a certain user experience was best and there would be no reason to change the fundamentals of the experience. Each different set of user experience preferences resulted in a new windowing system, and these windowing systems were not generally compatable. One of the goals of the X-Window System was to make sure that the programmer considering his options in a windowing system would not have to live with look and feel assumptions that he didn't like if he chose X-Windows. The fact that widget sets were not included in the server was not simply an oversight; It is central to the design of the X-Window System that look and feel decisions are NEVER made by the X-Server (the display).
It may be that there is a downside to programs with different looks and feels sharing the same display, but what should be done about this? Locking in these look and feel decisions at the display is an act of profound distrust of the programmer. Codifying such an act of distrust into the fundamental design of the standard is an appalling thing for other window system designers to have done. The last thing that I want to see if MIT making this same mistake with X-Windows.
I'd still like to see mulitple window managers to have different looks though.
But you just said you wanted a widget set, an implementation of assumptions about look and feel, to be put on the server. Do you not see the contradiction in your remarks?
Some people need a Windows/Mac look.
Fine. Tell your heros at Apple to stop their sleasy look and feel lawsuits and threats. Everytime anyone tries to create a Mac-like skin for Enlightenment, those sleashbags at Apple demand to have them removed. All we need is that kind of mentality slithering its way into X-Windows.
..I feel is pretty innovative.
Please, permit the rest of us this luxury.
I really hate to point this out but there was a benchmark at Linux Games that shows Windows beating Linux in 3d accelaration with several different cards. Personally I think this has a lot to do with X.
That's one way of looking at it, but let me ask you this: How do you give an application like a game complete control of the hardware without making the OS unstable? MicroSoft has taken a dangerous shortcut to get fast, pretty graphics. Consider the fact that when Q3A crashes under X-Windows, you probably still have a running system. X-Windows is a result of a decision to do things right, to keep the OS and the application separated. Try to be patient and you'll get the speed you want on a rock solid operating system.
Of course, this is not the only way to do things. I'm not saying love my favorate system or leave it. I genuinely hope that you come to enjoy your Linux experience more than you appear to, now. But there are plenty of OSs out there that have gone down the road of performance over stability. You don't have to destroy the things I love about Unix if you yourself decide that fast, pretty graphics and a standard look and feel are your priorities. Go with the OS that best suits your needs.
Slashdot Mirror
-
Huh?? Only time will tell, I suppose, but if you'd bother to take the time to research our military actions over the last ten years, I think you would find that we work pretty hard to avoid civilian casualties.
Frankly, I doubt this claim. Can you substantiate it?Despite all the fuss about "smart bombs" and the like, the US still managed to kill about 10,000 Iraqi civillians in the Gulf War. Oh well, it was in the name of democra...,er, corrupt ruling family of Kuwait.
- Perhaps, but where did this nasty Taliban come from? The US trained and funded the thugs that later became the Taliban (and Bin Laden, I might add) when they were fighting Soviet troops. Reminds one of Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" doesn't it?
I must say that I am impressed by your imagination and by your determination not to let your own ignorance keep you out of this debate.The Taliban's history is not so hard to track down, if you will just do a little research. You see, "Talib" means "student" or "seeker". The Taliban movement started in the Islamic schools of Pakistan. Now many of those students were orphans of the war between the Mujahadin and the Soviets, so in that sense, you might attribute some of the blame to us, on those grounds, since we helped supply the Mujahadin with weapons so that they could actually fight and die and leave orphans behind. But the Paks are the real source of the Taliban. The problem is that the Paks see a border dispute on the horizen, and they wanted to see a government in power in Afghanistan that is unlikely to carry through this dispute. Some of the Mujahadin have joined the Taliban, but many more are with the Northern Alliance.
Please, Jonathan, there's a goldmine of information from organizations as diverse as the UNHCR and the Federation of American Scientists. Do a little research, and you'll come off looking a whole lot smarter.
Of course, I wouldn't be surprised if there were reminders of "Heart of Darkness" to be found, but not precisely the ones you are looking for.
Adrian
> well-known to have been supported by the US
> when Soviet forces tried to take afghanistan.
This could only be a sad fact if it were true. The fact is, the Soviets were out of the picture when the Taliban came on the scene. The Mujahadin are probably more represented by the Northern Alliance.
> This is not war. War attacks military
> structures. The cruel and inhumane
> attacks on areas populated by civilians
> is best described as mutual genocide.
We are attacking military targets. Maybe you should get off your computer and go watch the news, or something.
Adrian
> be killed than were killed in the WTC.
Huh?? Only time will tell, I suppose, but if you'd bother to take the time to research our military actions over the last ten years, I think you would find that we work pretty hard to avoid civilian casualties. I'm not a betting man, but if I had to place a bet, I'd say we are going to keep the number of civilians deaths that we cause to something far short of 1000. I'll be pretty disappointed in my governement if we end up killing 6000 civilians or more. That's way more than is reasonable to expect.
> In reality, the events of September 11th, as tragic as
> they were, were an insignificant blow to the US.
What a statement. 6000 Afghan civilian deaths would be tragic, although in this case, I suspect that we, as Americans, probably place more value on the lives of Afghan civilians than the Taliban does. Any government that is so determined to keep women from working that it leaves a widow with no choice but to beg on the streets for money to feed her children has lost all moral authority to claim concern about its people.
These claims that the Afghan civilians have more to fear from us than from the Taliban are simply ludicrous. I just hope we won't abandon them completely after we've brought the Taliban down.
Adrian
> NO, the US is attacking them. Someone committed a crime, not and act of war, and the US is responding by making war.
> its always wrong.
This is nonsense. All nations have some responsibility to make sure that they are not, under normal circumstances, used a shelters from which to stage attacks on other countries, unless they are prepared to be accused of acts of war against the attacked country. A position as naive and irresponsible as the one you are advocating in the remarks I quoted above can only come from someone who has lived a life that has been sheltered by people who are less naive and more responsible than you. No nation can afford to sit on its hands in the face of acts of mass murder simply because the self-proclaimed governement that shelters the perpetrators pleads ignorance.
> America is not blameless.
I have to agree with you here, but only to say that we are not completely blameless. The palestinians should not be made second class citizens in the country in which they are born. All people born in a democratic country should be full citizens and should enjoy the full rights. By failing to make ethnic palistinians full citizens when those palistinians are born in Israel, the Israelies are pushing palistinians who might not be inclined toward simpathy to terrorists into the arms of terrorist organizations. Democracy is not just important for its symbolic value; It is also a final outlet through which people can peacefully express their discontent with government. In the absense of this outlet, it is only natural that palistinians express their discontent through attacts on Israeli soldiers.
Having said this, indiscriminate attacks on Israeli civilians cannot be justified this way. By continuing to permit palistinian controlled areas to be used to stage attacks on Israeli civilians, the would be governement of palistine has drawn its fitness to govern into question. If the palistinians want to prove themselves fit to govern themselves, they must confine themselves to attacks on the Israeli government, and they must work to bring those who commit and actively support acts of terrorism to justice. In the mean time, the Israelis must give all law abiding people that it governs equal opportunities to participate in government, without regard to ethnic or religious background or affiliation.
But if you ask me whether I am going to support the people that dance in the streets at the mass murder of thousands of Americans or the imperfect people that honestly pledge their support in helping us fight the mass murderers, my choice is clear. I hope the Israelies will, in the months ahead, give serious thought to the way they deal with the palistinians the govern; But, even if they don't, I am on the side of the Israelies. Dancing in the streets to celibrate the mass murder of Americans is not a good way to get American sympathy for one's cause. I hope we, as Americans, will do the mature thing and pressure the Israelies to do some serious thinking in spite of this attack, but appart from that, this attack makes me even more sympathetic to the Israelies, no matter that they are less than perfect.
> you are most certainly wrong when you say this is NOT an attack on Islam - it most certainly is.
This is really stupid. Nothing I've ever heard about Islam suggests that it advocates terrorism. Everything I've heard suggests precisely the opposite. When we are finished with our work in Afghanistan, I am sure it will still be a country of Islamic people. Even those parts of Afghanistan that are not under control of the Taliban still function under some form of Islamic Law. While I am against any government sponsorship of religion, Islamic Law appears to be what the people of Afghanistan want. I hope that, after the Taliban, the people of Afghanistan at least choose a more modern form of Islamic Law. I hope that they do not attempt to continue this cowardly and shameful mistreatment of the women in their country. Dispite our president's unfortunate and ill considered choice of the word "Crusade" in his speech before Congress, I don't think even a substantial minority of Americans believe that Afghanistan will not be an Islamic country when we are finished bringing the terrorists and the Taliban militia that sheltered them to justice. We should not attack a people because they are Islamic, but neither should we tolerate the mass murder of thousands of Americans on our own soil simply because the perpetrators make an incredible attempt to hide behind this religion who's very laws they have violated.
SubtleNuance, I wonder just how much thought you've really put into all this. Perhaps you should change your name to "SubtleNuisance".
Adrian
Does any one else remember that?? I don't have a copy of it any more.
Adrian
Linux is not immune from worms. But it is modular enough that simply creating and testing a security patch is much easier, so when we get a patch, it is more likely to be safe to install. When something goes wrong with a patch, most of the system still works, so we are better positioned (on a Unix box) to troubleshoot the problem and find a workaround. If we must back out the patch, some Unix varients have specific and fairly reliable procedures for doing this. Those that don't are modular enough that you have a good chance of figuring out enough about the problem to remove the new software and reinstall the old. Keeping a Unix system up-to-date, patchwise, is a lot safer than this same task for Windows.
Beyond this, I'm convinced that most Unix varients are simply better written. The programmers that write them are more professional, on average, and they are not trying to cover for their boss's perjury before congress and in the courts by tangling things together than any first year computer science student knows should be kept separate (can you say "Modularity"??). MicroSoft starts of by setting a bad example, and the application writers are almost forced to follow. By the time you finish all the mid-project design changes that you have to make to cope with the fact that the API's do not function as they are documented to function, a non-trivial application will no longer be true to its original design.
Those of you that say Unix/Linux is not safe from worms and viruses are correct, but this fact should not be made to suggest that Unix and MS-Windows are equally vulnerable. Most versions of Unix are better written than MS-Windows because most Unix vendors are more committed to quality work than is MicroSoft. If MicroSoft doesn't like the reputation they've earned, then they should start earning a different one and stop whining about how Unix is not perfect either. Unix is not perfect, but it is much better.
Adrian
This is thoughtless and shortsighted. Even if we ignore, for the sake of argument, that the government does make mistakes and that self righteous prosecutors act more like persecutors, sometimes, think about those foreign dissidents that count on encryption to safely get news in and out of their countries. As ineffective as we are, at times, at detecting foreign spies in our own government, do you really think we can safely tell these dissidents that they do not need to fear that anyone in the US government might be unlawfully accessing those encryption keys through the legally mandated backdoor and selling the keys to their respective foreign governments?
Wouldn't we be better off doing everything we can to encourage foreigners to use the strongest encryption they can get to thwart their governments' efforts to control the news they get? During the Chinese crackdown on Tiananmen Square, Chinese students studying in the US were using BitNet to send real new home, and then fax machines were used to relay the news all over China. At the time, the government of China (the PRC) did not have the means to capture and examine a significant amount of traffic from BitNet, and they could not afford to close down BitNet because of the important scientific exchange that it supported. The government of China is now much better positioned to examine Internet traffic for politically unacceptable content.
In Afganistan, the Taliban "government" fears this exchange so much that they are attempting to forbid uncontrolled use of the Internet.
Unscrupulous elements in law enforcement and in Congress in the US are always arguing that they must strip us of the very rights they are sworn to protect if they are to fight crime. It is better to wait until more courageous people find better ways to fight crime without taking away our rights.
Every politician who has sworn to defend the Constitution of The United States and then argues that law abiding citizens have no need for a right to privacy has brushed his oath aside, and is not to be trusted. Law enforcement CAN find other options for keeping us safe without stripping us of our rights; They do it every day.
The fact that all those rights seem inconvenient to law enforcement at times is not grounds to throw them all away, even if the process of throwing them all away is slow enough and spread out enough that we can't really remember exactly where we lost them.
Think about it.
Adrian
This same reasoning would not apply to a case where you did not have a prior contract. The logic that renders click through licencing agreements meaningless in a case of already purchased software may not be applicable to a case where where you are clicking through agreements on a web site as part fo the process of establishing a contract.
Does anyone out there have the expertese to settle this question?
Adrian
The Constitution does give the United States the power to enter into treaties, and when the US does so, it is not a matter of the treaty powers negating the Tenth Amendment. The Tenth Amendment is no obstacle to powers that are, in fact, delegated to the US.
Nothing about this suggests that the treaty powers of the US are a threat, in any way, to the First Amendment.
Adrian
> > site to see what the content looks like.
> If the site uses https, then all the sniffer
> sees is that somebody accessed that site.
> But not the exact path of the contents,
> because the request is encrypted as well!
That's certainly true, but it's not the point. What the sniffer sees when the censor goes to the original site is not relevant, because the censor goes to the original site by hand. The censor can cut and paste the URL from his browser into the list of URLs to block. In cases like this, the sniffer is only a factor when attempting to detect mirror sites, automatically. And thwarting these attempts at automatically detecting mirror sites is where SSL can be most helpful.
Your search engine idea may, indeed, be a way that the censor could attempt to regain the upper hand. A search engine could be set up to speak SSL, and search mirror sites for offensive material. The sniffer idea would still be defeated for scanning content, but could be used to capture addresses for SSL sites that could be searched for forbidden content. The next step would be for the good guys to attempt to characterize the IP addresses used by the bad guys (the censors) to conduct the searches. Perhaps a list of censor operated search engines could be used to let mirror sites send phony content.
An additional step that the good guys could take occurs to me. If we knew what the censors were searching for, we could replace specific words in the forbidden documents on the mirror sites with graphical images of those words.
Adrian
Adrian
It is, I think, precisely the possibility of mirror sites that makes the idea of sniffing additional traffic for evidence of other copies of the content seem interesting.
I won't be so bold as to suggest that this is now the end of the story, but I submit that we are, at least, closer to the end.
8-)
Adrian
Adrian
I'd like to see more of our tax dollars going to medical reesearch, but this notion that the scientists are the ones who should be getting rich simply makes no sense.
Adrian
First, most of my reply was as much to the notion that there was no useful parellel to the open source mentality in the business of science. to the extent that this first point is true, your point about "Science's" statement is not really relevant.
My last paragraph, on the other hand, was aimed directly at Celera, and does not, therefore, enjoy any protection from the point expressed in the previous paragraph. This brings me to the second point.
In your own reply to my reply, you say:
While this is important to point out, there are a couple of potential problems that occur to me with making experimental data proprietary, even with this attempt at a restricted kind of openness.
First, it means that if I try to do further science using the entire body of data, I will be bound by this agreement not to redistribute the very data that I use to form my conclusions. If I can't release the data I use for theoretical work, can I really claim that I'm engaging in science, myself? Any attempt at scientific work that is based on Celera's data is tainted in an important way.
Second, corporations have a long history of using legal harrassment to suppress science and opinions that they don't like. How many times have we seen corporations send Cease and Desist letters for things that any reasonably intelligent person must know are perfectly legal and appropriate. While I don't like this silly notion that some people have that all lawyers are evil, there is a class of scum sucking bastards that happen to be lawyers who believe it is ethical to send unsupportable legal threats as a bluff in hopes that the target of these threats will back down without a fight. These bottom feeders deserve to be drawn and quartered, and if you are one of these sleasbags, you know who you are.
Anyway, imagine that you saw a flaw in Celera's reasoning and published your own paper using Celera's own data to refute their conclusions and make them look silly. Suppose that Celera's investors have sunk a great deal of money into a product based on some bit of flawed "science" that they've attempted to do. What do you think are the chances that they will simply acknowledge the problem, and then take their marbles and go home? When news of such a problem for a drug company hits the stock market, what is the typical effect on the price of the company's stock? CEO's are generally under tremendous pressure to maximize the value of their stock, and that pressure often warps their sense of proportion. Personally, I can see the CEO of such a company convincing himself that they will find a way around the problem with a little more research, and that he needs, first, to maintain investor confidence or he will be cheated of the chance to solve the problem and give a good return on the investments that came in before the bad news broke. Such a CEO might think he has a duty to discourage you from spreading news of this temporary setback any further.
Maybe you feel secure about being able to conduct your science with data from Celera, but what happens when Celera has second thoughts about continuing to make these data availible to the scientific community. Since you can't publish Celera's data in your research, you have no choice but to point your readers to Celera to get their own copies of the data that are the foundation of your research. But if Celera is embarassed and stops making these data availible to the scientist who are reading your paper, suddenly, you will find yourself trying to defend your own claims without being able to show any data to support them.
What would you do if you received a Cease and Desist letter from Celera? What if you knew damn well that Celera had no legal legs to stand on, and that this effort on their part was simply legal harrasment? What would you do? Are you confident that you and a cheap lawyer could prevail fight off an army of expensive lawyers? Did you get in the science business to advance science and get a really good reputation, or did you get in the business to become notorious for legal battles and grandious claims about your scientific prowess, which you can't prove, BTW, because the corporate legal army secured a temporary injuction barring further distrubution of your "slanderous" paper before you even realized you needed to hire a lawyer?
I fear that the confidence that some have expressed in Celera's reasonability is naive. I think those of you who think it's acceptable to make scientific data proprietary are not really paying close attention to history. Even if it turns out that we can trust Celera this particular time, I have the feeling we are on a slippery slope, and that ultimately this trend will have a positively chilling effect on science. It's great, I think, that scientific progress often leads to commercial and ecconomic developement, but if we let corporations own basic science, it seems obvious to me that basic science will suffer for it, and we will suffer along with it.
Adrian
You claim:
This statement is unsupportable. Even a charitable interpretation of the statement presupposes that only those who are intimately involved in collecting data can conduct research, and only gross ignorance could lead one to believe that this is true.
You say:
I can only suppose that the irony of this statement escapes you. Let me spell it out for you. Industry decides that it must keep its research secret, so that it can profit from said research. It put the fruits of that research into designing research equipment, and when it patents all this knowledge and equipment it can use its legal monopoly on them to set any price it wants. Of course knowledge and equipment are both often prerequisites for research, and since the entities that owned this initial knowledge and equipment were free to charge whatever they wanted for them, the cost of the research is very high, so naturally when the research is completed and bears its own fruit of knowledge and equipment, industry has a good excuse for setting the price on this new fruit very very high, since they have to recoup the cost of this new research. Imagine how expensive the next generation of research will be.
You say:
History is rife with cases where people from disciplines thought to be unrelated to the research in question stumbled across published research and contributed insights that were obvious to anyone in these unrelated disciplines. Your statement presupposes that only laborious and time consuming contributions to science are valuable.
You say:
This statement is perhaps the only source of genuine insight in your entire diatribe. What you may have missed is that science has already discovered that an open model works best. Secrecy might be good for profit and it might be good for national security, but its never good for science.
Adrian
10% would be too much, but I would be happy to see a 1% increase in every tax I pay if I knew that the 1% would would be applied strictly to basic non-profit, non-secret, non-proprietary science
What advocates of that raving lunatic RMS don't seem to grasp is that the majority of people are motivated to some extent by self-interest and that one is unlikely to achieve much by removing elements of self-interest. I wait with interest to see if these deluded people will eventually work it out on their own.
I won't defend RMS, here, because he is a fanatic ("raving lunatic" is, perhaps, unjustified). But what many people don't seem to understand about science is that science truely does thrive only in an open intelectual environment. Suppose you publish the results of your experiments but keep your data and analysis secret. How can we check to make sure your experiment is repeatable? Even if the experient is repeatable, how can we criticize the conclusions you've drawn?
When you claim to have interesting knowledge but refuse to release the knowledge or refuse to release the basis of the knowledge, you've reduced potential science to mere advertising. I'm not saying its evil, but I am saying it's not science. When you call it science, you are lying to yourself and to the public.
What Celera is doing is not science. I hope "Science" magazine is satisfied with whatever compensation it is to recieve for this advertising it is doing for Celera; I'm certainly not happy with it.
Adrian
My take on this is that Adobe's attitude toward Linux is becoming more callous all the time, so I recommend to anyone who will listen that they try to avoid using any Adobe product. I can't even count the number of online companies that have lost any chance to get my business because their online catalogs are amoung those PDF files that I can't view under Linux.
Repeat after me: PDF is bad.. Adobe is bad..
Adrian
If you want to make fun of my government.. All I can say is, "Be my guest!"
Apparently holding hotly contested elections is not enough to keep my government (the US) in line, so maybe a good dose of redicule will help. You might begin with the US's diabolically clever plan to force encryption research overseas under the guise of regulations to restrict the export of "encryption technology". Afterall, we can't let ourselves be outdone by a tiny little country like Poland. We've been jealous of all those Polish jokes for much of this century, and time is running out for us to take that title away from Poland before the century is out.
Adrian
Q: How many Polish government officials does it take to inforce a tax on free software?
A: The same number that it takes on horseback to charge German tanks.
What in the world with the government of Poland think of next? Lets just make sure that it is the government of Poland that takes the flak for all this. Anyone watching the news during the Eighties cannot have missed the courage shown by the people of Poland during the fall of communism. Adrian
Suppose I had a license that was designed to advance the cause of free software, one very much like the GNU Public License. Suppose the wording were a little different, but in essence, the license had exactly the same legal implications of the GPL. Suppose I called this license the Griffis Public License, and I wrote lots of software, and put all my software under the Griffis Public License. No problem, so far..
Now suppose some third party wanted to combine some of my software with some other software covered by the GNU Public License. That third party notices that each of these two licenses insists that all the parts combined must be covered by itself, but each licenses insists that you cannot change it over to the other. Now we have a problem.
Of course, the GNU Public License covers a lot more software, and we all know how likely Mr. Stallman is to budge on this sort of issue, so this third party might contact me ask to permission to switch my software over to Stallman's license. I would be reluctant, but on thinking about it, I might agree at least that I ought to get along with other licenses a little better. Suppose I changed my license specifically to say that it is okay to combine source code covered under my license with software covered under and of a number of approved free software licenses and made the GNU Public License the first license on the approved list.
Now the third party is free to go to Richard Stallman and ask for a reciprocal change in the GNU Public License. I think we all know how likely such a change is.
Not all hostility is overt. RMS claims that he is not hostile, but is this really a sincere claim? Perhaps I'm mistaken, but it is always seemed to me that the GNU Public License exhibits an intolerance to even the slightest differences in philosophy. I believe this quality of the GNU Public License may parallel a similar quality in Richard Stallman. If I am correct, does it really make sense for RMS to claim not to be hostile? He may not be overtly hostile, but is not intolerance a kind of hostility?
Regards,
Adrian Griffis
Adrian
What if we put our opposition to your viewpoint this way: It is possible to shape clay into a brick, and the vast majority of all bricks are not really works of art. But this does not mean that all acts of shaping clay are necessarily lacking in creativity.
In the same sense, a great deal of source code is not terribly artful. But, so are exquisite expressions of ideas or arguments that are difficult to express as well by any other means. I think there are probably more of these than many people realize. My favorite example is Duff's Device. Duff's Device is an answer to the argument that there is never any good reason to depart from some religious ideals about coding. The code used to express Duff's Device is the argument in its most concise form. The device is typically shown as:
send(to, from, count)
register short *to, *from;
register count;
{
- register n=(count+7)/8;
}switch(count%8){
case 0: do{ *to = *from++;
- case 7: *to = *from++;
}case 6: *to = *from++;
case 5: *to = *from++;
case 4: *to = *from++;
case 3: *to = *from++;
case 2: *to = *from++;
case 1: *to = *from++;
}while(--n>0);
Understanding why this is significant involves a long standing controversy about programming style. The controversy itself is not important, here. What is important is that Duff's Device does provoke thought and some strong emotions amoung people involved in the controversy.
Adrian
Just a thought.
Adrian
YES! That and the fact that it is the expression of an elegant design.
I played freecell under WINE on a remote system over a 28.8 modem. Of course it was slow, but what exactly are you thinking of taking out to make it faster? I really don't understand the value of a non-specific wish for reduced overhead. What specifically do you think could be removed?
WHAT!?!!??!? You resent incompatabilities in the widget sets, so you want to have us all locked into a single one at the server level? The whole point of the architecture of the X-Window System is to provide maximum flexability. This give the developement community the chance to experiment, and to find out what makes sense by seeing how people react to different ideas.
Consider this, for a moment. There were already graphics systems out there when X-Windows was conceived. The X-Windows System was designed to overcome the deficiencies in these other systems. Many of these deficiencies were the results of assumptions that a certain user experience was best and there would be no reason to change the fundamentals of the experience. Each different set of user experience preferences resulted in a new windowing system, and these windowing systems were not generally compatable. One of the goals of the X-Window System was to make sure that the programmer considering his options in a windowing system would not have to live with look and feel assumptions that he didn't like if he chose X-Windows. The fact that widget sets were not included in the server was not simply an oversight; It is central to the design of the X-Window System that look and feel decisions are NEVER made by the X-Server (the display).
It may be that there is a downside to programs with different looks and feels sharing the same display, but what should be done about this? Locking in these look and feel decisions at the display is an act of profound distrust of the programmer. Codifying such an act of distrust into the fundamental design of the standard is an appalling thing for other window system designers to have done. The last thing that I want to see if MIT making this same mistake with X-Windows.
But you just said you wanted a widget set, an implementation of assumptions about look and feel, to be put on the server. Do you not see the contradiction in your remarks?
Fine. Tell your heros at Apple to stop their sleasy look and feel lawsuits and threats. Everytime anyone tries to create a Mac-like skin for Enlightenment, those sleashbags at Apple demand to have them removed. All we need is that kind of mentality slithering its way into X-Windows.
Please, permit the rest of us this luxury.
That's one way of looking at it, but let me ask you this: How do you give an application like a game complete control of the hardware without making the OS unstable? MicroSoft has taken a dangerous shortcut to get fast, pretty graphics. Consider the fact that when Q3A crashes under X-Windows, you probably still have a running system. X-Windows is a result of a decision to do things right, to keep the OS and the application separated. Try to be patient and you'll get the speed you want on a rock solid operating system.
Of course, this is not the only way to do things. I'm not saying love my favorate system or leave it. I genuinely hope that you come to enjoy your Linux experience more than you appear to, now. But there are plenty of OSs out there that have gone down the road of performance over stability. You don't have to destroy the things I love about Unix if you yourself decide that fast, pretty graphics and a standard look and feel are your priorities. Go with the OS that best suits your needs.
Adrian