You being a Jew, and conflating Hitler and the Moral Majority, I'd say you're doing your best to either:
disprove the article's hypothesis of higher intelligence for Ashkenazi Jews, or
prove you're not an Ashkenazi Jew.
Quite seriously, Moral Majority had some objectionable policies, in large part because it was led by non-Christian cretins, but they never tried to gas all the Jews. Furthermore, even the non-Christian cretins who led it would have fought to the death to prevent the Holocaust, had they been around in Hitler's day.
Are you sure you're a Jew, and not some crypto-neo-Nazi-weirdo troll?
Do you think it's people who want to get in on the Oil checks (I don't know what it's called) [It's called the Permanent Fund Dividend] you guys get?
Definitely not that. The PFD doesn't begin to make up for our high cost of living and generally low wages.
Because everywhere else in the US, nurses get a sign-on bonuses of $10,000+ (I've seen the ads myself) for just starting to work there.
Places in Alaska are making the same sort of offers. I just recently heard from a nurse who's moving to Juneau on exactly such a deal. I think that she mentioned $15,000, though I could be completely wrong. She wants to work in her field, so she's taking a job that stinks (my opinion, not hers).
What I'm saying is, those nurses can leave Alaska and make a really nice living.
Well, here or there, they can make a decent yearly salary for long hours of back breaking, stressfull work that is made more backbreaking and more stressfull by the fact that they're always understaffed. Short-staffing is the new perennial complaint of nurses today, joining the traditional complaint of low pay. As for a ``nice living'', well, you need to look at the yearly income, and the hours you work to get it. Nursing is a little less a ``nice living'' than the yearly income indicates, if you're working much more than 2000 hours a year to get it, or if the stress is ruining your physical and mental health.
I haven't checked (don't have that sort of access to the state's occupational licensing database), but I suspect that most of those nurses who aren't working in patient care are already making a nice living in some other sort of health care work, like filling out insurance forms or selling bedpans and wheelchairs to invalids.
What I do know is what I said: there are far more licensed, able-to-work nurses than there are jobs. Here, there are twice as many licensed nurses as nursing jobs, and I suspect that's equally true in every state in the union. There's a shortage, alright: a shortage of licensed nurses who are willing to accept bad pay and bad conditions, relative to what their training will let them earn elsewhere. If the hospitals ever get back to full staffing and pay a market rate, there will be more than enough nurses to go around.
My friend, bless her, said "When working conditions and pay are IMPROVED FOR NURSES, I MAY help you, until then I do not believe there's a "shortage".
I learned a couple of years ago that Alaska has about twice as many licensed, ready-to-work nurses as there are nursing jobs in the state. There is either a glut of nurses, or a shortage of jobs nurses are willing to take. There is definitely no shortage of nurses.
When someone is telling your kid that nursing is the hot field, remember that: the wages and the working conditions stink, and the woods are full of experienced nurses who are biding their time, waiting for nursing jobs that don't stink. That means that nursing jobs that don't stink will be few and far between for a very long time to come.
2. Apple will provide hooks for all published MS API's, allowing 90% of Windows programs to run natively within OS X on Intel.
Unfortunately, what that means in practice will be: ``90% of each Windows program will run natively. The remaining 10% of each Windows program will crash.''
Now, you might say that would be the hallmark of a successful Windows emulation, but having about 10% of the menu items consistantly end your program, or even simply fail, is a bit worse than native performance under Windows[1]. It'll be like a bad version of Wine[2]: most things will mostly run, but most things that run will have problems. Apple would be inviting people to buy the competitor's software, and then proving to them that they'd have been better off buying the competitor's machine. Oops.
3. Apple will open source the Cocoa API's. They will provide the API's for Windows, leaving others to port them to Linux, etc.
So, anyone can port Mac programs to Windows, where they can suck because the unrestricted hardware environment leads to buggy drivers and crashes, and because the user interface sucks, and on and on? How does this help Apple? How does this help Apple sell hardware? How does selling only software help Apple?
4. Steve will claim to have saved the world by freeing the world from Windows.
If he says that after doing what you propose, they'll haul him off to the laughing academy. I suspect that running Windows programs worse than Windows would do Apple no good whatsoever, and running them perfectly might be worse. Being able to run Mac programs on Windows would do nothing for Apple, and I doubt it woudl give Microsoft any heartburn whatsoever. After all, MS Office is a big seller on the Mac.
Finally, is there any evidence that Jobs cares about ``...freeing the world from Windows''? Becoming the dominant hardware and software platform, maybe, as a business proposition, but ``...freeing the world from Windows'' as a crusade? That sounds doubtful.
[1] Well, I guess it would be worse than native performance of a clean, uncorrupted version of Windows. After a week of using Outlook to open viruses, maybe not.
[2] By this standard (i.e., everything must work), is there a good version of Wine?
It would be expensive to fire everyone and start over. He certainly can do that if it's less expensive than the alternative.
Given that IBM has employees on at least six of the seven continents, in many, many countries, firing everyone in a given country probably wouldn't require an unlimited source of income, and Palmisano definitely has a backup source of engineers.
I don't think that we're going to see IBM fire all its U.S. or all its U.K. engineers, but that's not because they couldn't. Become expensive or irritating enough, and you will learn exactly how important you really are.
You need to charge the party who can't wriggle out of paying. Unfortunately, parties like that are few and far between, if we're talking about a state-level effort.
If a state tries to get the consumer to pay for disposal at the end of the computer's life, he's quite likely to toss it in the ditch, which is worse than tossing it directly into the dump.
If a state tries to get the manufacturer, wholesaler or retailer to pay for disposal at first sale or import into the state, you run into the same collection problems that sales taxes have: how are you going to collect for the computer that somebody buys across the state line and drives home with? How are you going to collect for the computer which is mail-ordered from some business with no presence in your state?
Neither system is going to work very well, but you'll see less electronic trash in the ditch with the second.
If we're talking about a federal effort, then we can decree that all importers and manufacturers shall pay the fee upon manufacture or import, and have a reasonable expectation of catching the vast majority of the devices.
One big advantage to having such a program would be that the manufacturers would have a strong incentive to reduce the number of their machines being disposed of. We might begin to see significantly more upgradability, and less planned obsolescence. The manufacturers would have some incentive to encourage reuse, too. Leaving aside the environmental impact, those would be a great things.
The FSF has known about the problem of knowing who holds the copyright for many years. That's part of why they ask that authors assign copyright to them. This ensures that they have standing to enforce the license for the software for which they're responsible.
Only the copyright holder or his assignee can enforce the license.
TFA says:
... the defending party could argue that the copyright appears to belong to the Free Software Foundation, according to Guibault.
"The only name that appears on the licence is the Free Software Foundation -- they appear to be the licensor,"
The license makes no copyright claims, except to assert the FSF's copyright on the license itself. The license gives the terms under which the copyrighted material may be distributed.
So, yes, we need to know who that copyright holder is, yes, we've known this for years, yes, it's covered where it should be, rather than where the author of that article chose to look and yes, the author is stupid, stupid, stupid.
How stupid? Here's RMS's take on it, from TFA:
"If free software licenses are not valid in the Netherlands, copyright law still applies, so the result could be that no one is allowed to distribute or change free software there. However, the FSF will continue to respect everyone's right to do so," said Stallman.
"Whatever happens in the Netherlands, it won't be a disaster for free software in general. If the Netherlands has put something foolish in its laws, it will just have to fix their laws to do the right thing," Stallman added.
If just one guy sends the e-mail to Sam, he gets fired. If everyone sends an e-mail at the same time, nobody gets fired.
Didn't the air traffic controllers try this tactic with President Regan? Didn't he fire every one of them, and replace them?
Yes, and yes.
Don't assume that Palmisano can't fire everyone and start over. He can do whatever you make worth his while. I'd put some effort into making it worth his while to fund those pensions.
... when you're the last remaining creature, standing on a barren planet (or what's left of it)
That sounds like a definition of winning to me.
I suppose you are free to not win, if you don't like that definition. Or, you could look for a definition you like better, but I suspect getting it generally accepted will be an uphill struggle.
I am under no illusions about how painful, difficult, and disappointing raising my daughter maybe if she turns out to have Downs...
Maybe it won't be quite as bad as you think. The families I've seen rasing Downs Syndrome kids seemed to be doing ok. The goals and milestones are very different, but they still grow and progress, however slowly, and they have their triumphs. Some friends of ours had a baby with DS. About six months later, they adopted a second DS child. They said that those were the most pleasant, loving babies they'd ever had (and they'd had a passel of 'em). The DS adults I've known were a pretty good bunch, too. They didn't have a mean bone in them, and they seemed to be pretty happy most of the time.
You will have some worries that most parents don't have. Better start thinking sooner rather than later about how the kid is going to get by after you're gone. Time enough for that when she's 10 or so.
I'll be praying that she's born normal, just as you are, but don't panic if not: it's not the end of the world for you.
Our doctors wanted to advise us about our "options".... I just can't imagine anyone wanting to do such a thing - especially since we've seen her in full motion 3D video on two seperate occasions...
I think that high resolution ultrasound has to be the abortion industry's greatest nightmare. After you see that baby in there, it's not a choice you're killing, or a foetus, but your baby. And that's different.
And for the worst shame of all, doctors who repeatedly promote termination of even marginally defective babies and are constantly harping about options -alternatives! - to life.
Anyone who is in favor of killing innocent people isn't fit to practice medicine. ``Euthanasia'' is how the Germans got started on their ``final solution''. The German medical establishment began killing defective people, like the old and the retarded and the terminally ill. Then they moved on to the crippled (Germany had lots of those, after WWI). This was promoted by the country's leading doctors. By the time the Nazis were ready to do something final about the Jews, the medical establishment was ready to accept large scale slaughter of innocents, and doctors like Mengele were accepted in the German medical profession.
Any doctor who will do an elective abortion is unfit to practice medicine, just surely as Dr. Mengele and Charles Manson are.
Also, the idea of St. Augustine that children learn the meaning of words by associating sounds that they hear with particular objects that they observe is now also considered rather dubious.
I've got one learning language right now.
She points to something and asks: ``Wha'sthis? Wha'sthis? Wha'sthis? Wha'sthis? ''. We tell her, and she repeats with the same something, to see what we'll say this time. Repetition is important to kids. Then she says the word back to us, and she's ready for the next object. ``Wha'sthis? Wha'sthis? Wha'sthis? Wha'sthis? ''.
I agree that doesn't give you a very sophisticated view of meaning, but it's an essential first step, I think. I can see how St. Augustine fell into his error: that's the only learning process (related to meaning, that is) that you can really see.
Just to get totally off-topic, she has evolved a unique approach to grammar. She's hearing english and chinese, and when she wants something, e.g. milk, she says something like: ``Noo-nai baby''. If she wants big sister to give her the book, she says: ``jae-jae shoo baby''. Those are ``Milk baby'' and ``Big sister book baby'', respectively. If I should give the book to Mama, it's ``Baba Mama shoo''. All nouns, and the verb is implied. Her order seems to be subject object, which works in either language.
The other two kids have kept their english and chinese separate, and have been less experimental in their grammar. This one throws words at us until she gets what she wants.
Parody is funny when it's based on the truth. As much as a piece of garbage that XP Home is, arguing (tongue in cheek or otherwise) that it's not ready for the desk top is a bit silly.
I wonder if that was the point? By the standards that the ``Linux isn't ready for the desktop'' crowd apply to Linux, Windows isn't ready for the desktop, either.
I haven't tried to install OSX, so I can say that no OS that I am familiar with is ``ready for the desktop'' by those standards.
Roblimo just took the standard ``Linux isn't ready for the desktop'' article, replaced Linux with Windows and visa versa, and threw in a couple of very accurate slams at Windows weak points.
Good parody, based on truth. That's why it was funny.
If you mean: ``you never have to worry about anything'', then no browser is safe. Not even lynx.
If you mean: ``not the easiest target for the bad guys'', then most browsers are safe, most of the time.
I'd say that any browser which consistantly avoids being the lowest-hanging fruit is as close to safe as most of us need. To achieve that, all you need is a development team that emphasises security, even at the expense of convenience, and gets useful patches out, fast.
I can think of one browser with a large market share which fails both those tests, and I suspect there are several with smaller market shares which do fairly well on both those criteria.
How many of you travellers were forced to carry your Visa/MC/AmEx and ATM cards by your government?
More than you think, perhaps.
We can't carry large amounts of cash overseas. It's illegal: if you don't declare it, then when they find it during the strip searches, you're a terrorist or drug dealer and they confiscate it. If you do declare it, you're a terrorist or drug dealer and they confiscate it before the strip search.
Yes, I'm exaggerating, but not by as much as you think. It is illegal to take large amounts of cash out of the country without declaring it, and the government (usually local cops) will confiscate any large stashes of cash they find. They claim it's drug money, and charge the money with a crime. You have to prove that the money is innocent to get it back (scroll down to the bottom of that link).
No, I am not making any of that up.
So, you can carry travelers checks, you can carry your Visa, but you're taking a big risk if you carry cash. The really dangerous criminals are the ones in the uniforms.
I think that this is the first slashdot post that has actually made me laugh out loud. That's kind of embarrassing, here in the cubicles. Good thing it's break time, and everyone is off eating the boss's chocolate cake.
I wish I wasn't on a diet. He makes good cake.
Anyway, back to what I meant to say: that's a genuinely funny post, for some reason, and me with no mod points. Somebody mod it up, please, +1 surreal or +1 underrated, anything but funny, so more people can get the giggles at work.
Judges and juries eventually began to deal with this by simply refusing to convict people, even obviously guilty ones, because the punishment would have to be too harsh.
Mostly right, except for the part about the judges. Judges were usually part of the problem you're describing, not (generally) part of the solution. What you're describing is called jury nullification, and is the real purpose of the jury: to be a last test of a law before it is applied to an individual case. You can read more about this sort of thing here.
if you add what americans pay PRIVATELY for their health care to their tax bill... they become the most taxed people on earth.
I pay about $900 per month for health insurance for our family of 5. That's a lot, but it buys essentially all of our health care needs, including dental care.
The care [in Canada] is excellent. I refer you to the 100% coverage, illness rates, infant mortality rates and life expectancy.
I notice you don't refer to the long delays for urgent care and the rationing, which have lead thousands of American doctors to set up clinics near the border, where Canadians pay for services they might, eventually receive free at home.
I've looked into moving to Canada. I'd really like to live near Vancouver. One of the big things that's stopping me is the fact that my healthcare would go way downhill. It would be like going to an HMO plan here... an HMO plan which was quite likely to close its hospitals for half the year, because they had spent their budget. An HMO which might tell me that it doesn't make sense to treat people in their 50s for certain diseases which even a U.S. HMO would treat. I don't personally know of an example of that from Canada, but I've heard from Britains that their NHS does that regularly.
Then you talk about infant mortality rates and life expectancy. Infant mortality and life expectancy for those who aren't living in ghettos (all of Canada and about 90% of the U.S.) are about the same, because they are determined more by public sanitation than by medicine. The U.S. ghettos have terrible infant mortality rates because of poor personal sanitation (they have public sanitation, sewers and clean water, just like the rest of us) and low life expectancy because of high crime and drug abuse rates. That drags up the infant mortality and drags down the life expectancy rates for the U.S. as a whole, but when you compare like to like (that is, control for education and income), the U.S. and Canada aren't that different.
America has a high standard of living because of its massive income... but their system is *NOT* a model to emulate.
We're rich, and we live well because of it (even our poor are the envy of the world), but you want no part of that? Ok. Long as you're happy.
THis action is nothing more than fascism, i.e., the corporate takeover of government.
Historically, Fascism has been government takeover of control of the corporations (it was distinguished from communism by the fact the Fascists didn't take over ownership). Notice that corporatism doesn't necessarily refer to corporations, but to:
... certain unelected bodies take[ing] a critical role in the decision-making process. This original meaning was not connected with the specific notion of a business corporation, being a rather more general reference to any incorporated body.
If you're going to call names, use the right ones.
These agents and their bosses should be tried in a court of law for treason,...
They'd be at the end of a long line, if this sort of thing were ever actually punished in the courts. The people who murdered Viki Weaver, and the people who murdered all those kids in Waco would all be in front of them. It'll never happen.
Given that Nokia themselves distribute GPL software in their products, they have to either make a full patent grant covering all uses of the GPLd code or else cease and desist their infringing activities.
This doesn't apply to all GPL'd programs everywhere, but only to the GPL'd program which they distribute, and only if it includes the particular patent in question. That is, if they distribute the kernel, but not kde, they can't enforce the patent against the kernel, but could enforce the same patent against kde (assuming that kde violated the same hypothetical patent).
For example, if a patent license would not permit royalty-free redistribution of the Program by all those who receive copies directly or indirectly through you, then the only way you could satisfy both it and this License would be to refrain entirely from distribution of the Program.
So, if you're distributing the kernel, your enforcement of your patents can't restrict distribution of copies of that program (notice the GPL doesn't mention derivitives here). You could certainly take patent enforcement actions which restricted distribution of other programs which you were not distributing. That would include, I think, derivatives you didn't distribute. remember, the only stick the GPL has is the potential loss of the right to redistribute. Back to my example of the kernel and kde, if you aren't distributing kde, you've nothing to lose by restricting the distribution of kde, even though you distribute the kernel.
In fact, if Nokia distributes the kernel but little else that is GPL'd, I think we've found the reason for this peculiar action. I'll bet that the kernel they distribute comes from a source which is best described like this:
"Linux Kernel"
means any version of the Linux kernel which (i) is released as "stable version", (ii) is licensed under the "GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE Version 2, June 1991 for the Linux operating system" and (iii) has been published by the Kernel.org Organization, Inc on its Linux Kernel Archive website at www.kernel.org.
The statement means that if Nokia has a concept patented that would be beneficial to have in the kernel, the developers can write it and include it without fear of litigation.
Eh, not quite.
It means that if they wrote it into the kernel, and it was in the right stable kernel before 25 MAy 2005, they need not fear litigation. Anything which didn't make the magic deadline in the magic line of kernels still carries the same old fear of litigation it always did.
This is a free pass for some (but not all) hypothetical existing infringements in one GPL'd program. All infringements in any other GPL'd programs and all new infringements in the kernel are not covered by it.
My guess is that since Nokia couldn't find a good patent lawsuit against the kernel developers, they've contrived a great way to get some cheap PR from the current lack of meaningful infringement.
The fact that this is a concern in the first place is the basis for the outcries against software patents.
Preach on, brother MynockGuano! What a pity there's no one listening but the choir. You're right, but until your legislators hear it from names like IBM and Nokia, nothing's going to happen.
it must remain clear that software patents are, in the long term, of utmost danger to OSS.
Absolutely! But still, there's nothing to reject; there's no offer.
We should respond with something like: ``This is a harmless, meaningless gesture from Nokia. Open source and Libre software developers still need a useful commitment on patents from them.''
Or, perhaps, if we want to sound a little nastier and more cynical: ``Since Nokia couldn't find any lawsuits they wanted to file, they've made a big noise about not filing any. They still haven't foresworn any future lawsuits, so this is meaningless.''
Slashdot Mirror
You being a Jew, and conflating Hitler and the Moral Majority, I'd say you're doing your best to either:
Quite seriously, Moral Majority had some objectionable policies, in large part because it was led by non-Christian cretins, but they never tried to gas all the Jews. Furthermore, even the non-Christian cretins who led it would have fought to the death to prevent the Holocaust, had they been around in Hitler's day.
Are you sure you're a Jew, and not some crypto-neo-Nazi-weirdo troll?
Was than any more than you pay to unproductive employees when the work isn't stopped?
Think before you answer. I'm a government economist, and I know about these things.
Definitely not that. The PFD doesn't begin to make up for our high cost of living and generally low wages.
Because everywhere else in the US, nurses get a sign-on bonuses of $10,000+ (I've seen the ads myself) for just starting to work there.
Places in Alaska are making the same sort of offers. I just recently heard from a nurse who's moving to Juneau on exactly such a deal. I think that she mentioned $15,000, though I could be completely wrong. She wants to work in her field, so she's taking a job that stinks (my opinion, not hers).
What I'm saying is, those nurses can leave Alaska and make a really nice living.
Well, here or there, they can make a decent yearly salary for long hours of back breaking, stressfull work that is made more backbreaking and more stressfull by the fact that they're always understaffed. Short-staffing is the new perennial complaint of nurses today, joining the traditional complaint of low pay. As for a ``nice living'', well, you need to look at the yearly income, and the hours you work to get it. Nursing is a little less a ``nice living'' than the yearly income indicates, if you're working much more than 2000 hours a year to get it, or if the stress is ruining your physical and mental health.
I haven't checked (don't have that sort of access to the state's occupational licensing database), but I suspect that most of those nurses who aren't working in patient care are already making a nice living in some other sort of health care work, like filling out insurance forms or selling bedpans and wheelchairs to invalids.
What I do know is what I said: there are far more licensed, able-to-work nurses than there are jobs. Here, there are twice as many licensed nurses as nursing jobs, and I suspect that's equally true in every state in the union. There's a shortage, alright: a shortage of licensed nurses who are willing to accept bad pay and bad conditions, relative to what their training will let them earn elsewhere. If the hospitals ever get back to full staffing and pay a market rate, there will be more than enough nurses to go around.
Well, see for yourself.
Some folks think they're really inflammatory.
Others call them mass murders.
I learned a couple of years ago that Alaska has about twice as many licensed, ready-to-work nurses as there are nursing jobs in the state. There is either a glut of nurses, or a shortage of jobs nurses are willing to take. There is definitely no shortage of nurses.
When someone is telling your kid that nursing is the hot field, remember that: the wages and the working conditions stink, and the woods are full of experienced nurses who are biding their time, waiting for nursing jobs that don't stink. That means that nursing jobs that don't stink will be few and far between for a very long time to come.
And it says:
Sorry, none of those are ``European'' languages. You're screwed.Unfortunately, what that means in practice will be: ``90% of each Windows program will run natively. The remaining 10% of each Windows program will crash.''
Now, you might say that would be the hallmark of a successful Windows emulation, but having about 10% of the menu items consistantly end your program, or even simply fail, is a bit worse than native performance under Windows[1]. It'll be like a bad version of Wine[2]: most things will mostly run, but most things that run will have problems. Apple would be inviting people to buy the competitor's software, and then proving to them that they'd have been better off buying the competitor's machine. Oops.
3. Apple will open source the Cocoa API's. They will provide the API's for Windows, leaving others to port them to Linux, etc.
So, anyone can port Mac programs to Windows, where they can suck because the unrestricted hardware environment leads to buggy drivers and crashes, and because the user interface sucks, and on and on? How does this help Apple? How does this help Apple sell hardware? How does selling only software help Apple?
4. Steve will claim to have saved the world by freeing the world from Windows.
If he says that after doing what you propose, they'll haul him off to the laughing academy. I suspect that running Windows programs worse than Windows would do Apple no good whatsoever, and running them perfectly might be worse. Being able to run Mac programs on Windows would do nothing for Apple, and I doubt it woudl give Microsoft any heartburn whatsoever. After all, MS Office is a big seller on the Mac.
Finally, is there any evidence that Jobs cares about ``...freeing the world from Windows''? Becoming the dominant hardware and software platform, maybe, as a business proposition, but ``...freeing the world from Windows'' as a crusade? That sounds doubtful.
[1] Well, I guess it would be worse than native performance of a clean, uncorrupted version of Windows. After a week of using Outlook to open viruses, maybe not.
[2] By this standard (i.e., everything must work), is there a good version of Wine?
It would be expensive to fire everyone and start over. He certainly can do that if it's less expensive than the alternative.
Given that IBM has employees on at least six of the seven continents, in many, many countries, firing everyone in a given country probably wouldn't require an unlimited source of income, and Palmisano definitely has a backup source of engineers.
I don't think that we're going to see IBM fire all its U.S. or all its U.K. engineers, but that's not because they couldn't. Become expensive or irritating enough, and you will learn exactly how important you really are.
If a state tries to get the consumer to pay for disposal at the end of the computer's life, he's quite likely to toss it in the ditch, which is worse than tossing it directly into the dump.
If a state tries to get the manufacturer, wholesaler or retailer to pay for disposal at first sale or import into the state, you run into the same collection problems that sales taxes have: how are you going to collect for the computer that somebody buys across the state line and drives home with? How are you going to collect for the computer which is mail-ordered from some business with no presence in your state?
Neither system is going to work very well, but you'll see less electronic trash in the ditch with the second.
If we're talking about a federal effort, then we can decree that all importers and manufacturers shall pay the fee upon manufacture or import, and have a reasonable expectation of catching the vast majority of the devices.
One big advantage to having such a program would be that the manufacturers would have a strong incentive to reduce the number of their machines being disposed of. We might begin to see significantly more upgradability, and less planned obsolescence. The manufacturers would have some incentive to encourage reuse, too. Leaving aside the environmental impact, those would be a great things.
The FSF has known about the problem of knowing who holds the copyright for many years. That's part of why they ask that authors assign copyright to them. This ensures that they have standing to enforce the license for the software for which they're responsible. Only the copyright holder or his assignee can enforce the license.
TFA says:
The license makes no copyright claims, except to assert the FSF's copyright on the license itself. The license gives the terms under which the copyrighted material may be distributed.So, yes, we need to know who that copyright holder is, yes, we've known this for years, yes, it's covered where it should be, rather than where the author of that article chose to look and yes, the author is stupid, stupid, stupid.
How stupid? Here's RMS's take on it, from TFA:
Didn't the air traffic controllers try this tactic with President Regan? Didn't he fire every one of them, and replace them?
Yes, and yes.
Don't assume that Palmisano can't fire everyone and start over. He can do whatever you make worth his while. I'd put some effort into making it worth his while to fund those pensions.
That sounds like a definition of winning to me.
I suppose you are free to not win, if you don't like that definition. Or, you could look for a definition you like better, but I suspect getting it generally accepted will be an uphill struggle.
Maybe it won't be quite as bad as you think. The families I've seen rasing Downs Syndrome kids seemed to be doing ok. The goals and milestones are very different, but they still grow and progress, however slowly, and they have their triumphs. Some friends of ours had a baby with DS. About six months later, they adopted a second DS child. They said that those were the most pleasant, loving babies they'd ever had (and they'd had a passel of 'em). The DS adults I've known were a pretty good bunch, too. They didn't have a mean bone in them, and they seemed to be pretty happy most of the time.
You will have some worries that most parents don't have. Better start thinking sooner rather than later about how the kid is going to get by after you're gone. Time enough for that when she's 10 or so.
I'll be praying that she's born normal, just as you are, but don't panic if not: it's not the end of the world for you.
Our doctors wanted to advise us about our "options". ... I just can't imagine anyone wanting to do such a thing - especially since we've seen her in full motion 3D video on two seperate occasions ...
I think that high resolution ultrasound has to be the abortion industry's greatest nightmare. After you see that baby in there, it's not a choice you're killing, or a foetus, but your baby. And that's different.
And for the worst shame of all, doctors who repeatedly promote termination of even marginally defective babies and are constantly harping about options -alternatives! - to life.
Anyone who is in favor of killing innocent people isn't fit to practice medicine. ``Euthanasia'' is how the Germans got started on their ``final solution''. The German medical establishment began killing defective people, like the old and the retarded and the terminally ill. Then they moved on to the crippled (Germany had lots of those, after WWI). This was promoted by the country's leading doctors. By the time the Nazis were ready to do something final about the Jews, the medical establishment was ready to accept large scale slaughter of innocents, and doctors like Mengele were accepted in the German medical profession.
Any doctor who will do an elective abortion is unfit to practice medicine, just surely as Dr. Mengele and Charles Manson are.
I've got one learning language right now.
She points to something and asks: ``Wha'sthis? Wha'sthis? Wha'sthis? Wha'sthis? ''. We tell her, and she repeats with the same something, to see what we'll say this time. Repetition is important to kids. Then she says the word back to us, and she's ready for the next object. ``Wha'sthis? Wha'sthis? Wha'sthis? Wha'sthis? ''.
I agree that doesn't give you a very sophisticated view of meaning, but it's an essential first step, I think. I can see how St. Augustine fell into his error: that's the only learning process (related to meaning, that is) that you can really see.
Just to get totally off-topic, she has evolved a unique approach to grammar. She's hearing english and chinese, and when she wants something, e.g. milk, she says something like: ``Noo-nai baby''. If she wants big sister to give her the book, she says: ``jae-jae shoo baby''. Those are ``Milk baby'' and ``Big sister book baby'', respectively. If I should give the book to Mama, it's ``Baba Mama shoo''. All nouns, and the verb is implied. Her order seems to be subject object, which works in either language.
The other two kids have kept their english and chinese separate, and have been less experimental in their grammar. This one throws words at us until she gets what she wants.
I wonder if that was the point? By the standards that the ``Linux isn't ready for the desktop'' crowd apply to Linux, Windows isn't ready for the desktop, either.
I haven't tried to install OSX, so I can say that no OS that I am familiar with is ``ready for the desktop'' by those standards.
Roblimo just took the standard ``Linux isn't ready for the desktop'' article, replaced Linux with Windows and visa versa, and threw in a couple of very accurate slams at Windows weak points.
Good parody, based on truth. That's why it was funny.
If you mean: ``not the easiest target for the bad guys'', then most browsers are safe, most of the time.
I'd say that any browser which consistantly avoids being the lowest-hanging fruit is as close to safe as most of us need. To achieve that, all you need is a development team that emphasises security, even at the expense of convenience, and gets useful patches out, fast.
I can think of one browser with a large market share which fails both those tests, and I suspect there are several with smaller market shares which do fairly well on both those criteria.
More than you think, perhaps.
We can't carry large amounts of cash overseas. It's illegal: if you don't declare it, then when they find it during the strip searches, you're a terrorist or drug dealer and they confiscate it. If you do declare it, you're a terrorist or drug dealer and they confiscate it before the strip search.
Yes, I'm exaggerating, but not by as much as you think. It is illegal to take large amounts of cash out of the country without declaring it, and the government (usually local cops) will confiscate any large stashes of cash they find. They claim it's drug money, and charge the money with a crime. You have to prove that the money is innocent to get it back (scroll down to the bottom of that link).
No, I am not making any of that up.
So, you can carry travelers checks, you can carry your Visa, but you're taking a big risk if you carry cash. The really dangerous criminals are the ones in the uniforms.
I wish I wasn't on a diet. He makes good cake.
Anyway, back to what I meant to say: that's a genuinely funny post, for some reason, and me with no mod points. Somebody mod it up, please, +1 surreal or +1 underrated, anything but funny, so more people can get the giggles at work.
Mostly right, except for the part about the judges. Judges were usually part of the problem you're describing, not (generally) part of the solution. What you're describing is called jury nullification, and is the real purpose of the jury: to be a last test of a law before it is applied to an individual case. You can read more about this sort of thing here.
The air is warmer in summer than the lake or ocean water, I bet. If there's ice in the winter, the water under it is WAY warmer than the air.
As long as you have a temperature gradient, you're in great shape. The bigger the better, too.
I pay about $900 per month for health insurance for our family of 5. That's a lot, but it buys essentially all of our health care needs, including dental care.
The care [in Canada] is excellent. I refer you to the 100% coverage, illness rates, infant mortality rates and life expectancy.
I notice you don't refer to the long delays for urgent care and the rationing, which have lead thousands of American doctors to set up clinics near the border, where Canadians pay for services they might, eventually receive free at home.
I've looked into moving to Canada. I'd really like to live near Vancouver. One of the big things that's stopping me is the fact that my healthcare would go way downhill. It would be like going to an HMO plan here ... an HMO plan which was quite likely to close its hospitals for half the year, because they had spent their budget. An HMO which might tell me that it doesn't make sense to treat people in their 50s for certain diseases which even a U.S. HMO would treat. I don't personally know of an example of that from Canada, but I've heard from Britains that their NHS does that regularly.
Then you talk about infant mortality rates and life expectancy. Infant mortality and life expectancy for those who aren't living in ghettos (all of Canada and about 90% of the U.S.) are about the same, because they are determined more by public sanitation than by medicine. The U.S. ghettos have terrible infant mortality rates because of poor personal sanitation (they have public sanitation, sewers and clean water, just like the rest of us) and low life expectancy because of high crime and drug abuse rates. That drags up the infant mortality and drags down the life expectancy rates for the U.S. as a whole, but when you compare like to like (that is, control for education and income), the U.S. and Canada aren't that different.
America has a high standard of living because of its massive income ... but their system is *NOT* a model to emulate.
We're rich, and we live well because of it (even our poor are the envy of the world), but you want no part of that? Ok. Long as you're happy.
Historically, Fascism has been government takeover of control of the corporations (it was distinguished from communism by the fact the Fascists didn't take over ownership). Notice that corporatism doesn't necessarily refer to corporations, but to:
If you're going to call names, use the right ones.These agents and their bosses should be tried in a court of law for treason,...
They'd be at the end of a long line, if this sort of thing were ever actually punished in the courts. The people who murdered Viki Weaver, and the people who murdered all those kids in Waco would all be in front of them. It'll never happen.
This doesn't apply to all GPL'd programs everywhere, but only to the GPL'd program which they distribute, and only if it includes the particular patent in question. That is, if they distribute the kernel, but not kde, they can't enforce the patent against the kernel, but could enforce the same patent against kde (assuming that kde violated the same hypothetical patent).
The pertinent portion of the GPL says:
So, if you're distributing the kernel, your enforcement of your patents can't restrict distribution of copies of that program (notice the GPL doesn't mention derivitives here). You could certainly take patent enforcement actions which restricted distribution of other programs which you were not distributing. That would include, I think, derivatives you didn't distribute. remember, the only stick the GPL has is the potential loss of the right to redistribute. Back to my example of the kernel and kde, if you aren't distributing kde, you've nothing to lose by restricting the distribution of kde, even though you distribute the kernel.In fact, if Nokia distributes the kernel but little else that is GPL'd, I think we've found the reason for this peculiar action. I'll bet that the kernel they distribute comes from a source which is best described like this:
Eh, not quite.
It means that if they wrote it into the kernel, and it was in the right stable kernel before 25 MAy 2005, they need not fear litigation. Anything which didn't make the magic deadline in the magic line of kernels still carries the same old fear of litigation it always did.
This is a free pass for some (but not all) hypothetical existing infringements in one GPL'd program. All infringements in any other GPL'd programs and all new infringements in the kernel are not covered by it.
My guess is that since Nokia couldn't find a good patent lawsuit against the kernel developers, they've contrived a great way to get some cheap PR from the current lack of meaningful infringement.
The fact that this is a concern in the first place is the basis for the outcries against software patents.
Preach on, brother MynockGuano! What a pity there's no one listening but the choir. You're right, but until your legislators hear it from names like IBM and Nokia, nothing's going to happen.
Absolutely! But still, there's nothing to reject; there's no offer.
We should respond with something like: ``This is a harmless, meaningless gesture from Nokia. Open source and Libre software developers still need a useful commitment on patents from them.''
Or, perhaps, if we want to sound a little nastier and more cynical: ``Since Nokia couldn't find any lawsuits they wanted to file, they've made a big noise about not filing any. They still haven't foresworn any future lawsuits, so this is meaningless.''