And all of that stuff is simple to do for the non-tech savvy crowd (80-90%) of the population), right?
Yes. the non-tech savvy crows do not choose the packaging system, they just use the GUI package manager than comes with their distro. Start the add remove programs app, search for what you want, tick, click "install".
it took some actual evidence-medicine to separate the few that work from the thousands that don't work. There's a name for traditional medicine that actually worked: medicine. The whole alternative gang is the ones that don't.
There is still a lot that yet to be properly tested, and then there are things like special diets, diagnosis etc. (also testable).
On the other hand drug trials paid for my pharma companies are far from an ideal scientific test: not compared to multiple independent studies.
People loved when CDDB offered to identify CD's so when ripping you could not have to type everything in for your music app. Many people donated time to this "project"... but once it was done, suddenly developers started to have to pay Gracenote for the data, and"free" music programs went away for paid-for-somehow models like Windows Media Player, iTunes, and the such.
They just used Free DB instead. K3B works just fine apart from the dd typo (and checking track names when you rip is not a huge issue).
I don't have time to look this up at the moment, but what I recall as the most important and least conventional GPL interpretation is that MySQL (the company) took the position that applications that depended on MySQL (the RDBMS) as one of their components were derivative works that incorporated the RDBMS--and that details about linking or protocols were just not relevant. Therefore, unless you bought a commercial license from the company, such applications had to be distributed under GPL terms.
Not quite. The client library is GPL licensed, so any app that links the client library has to be GPL.
Presumably, there is nothing stopping anyone else who wants to from developing their own BSD licensed client or client library (they could probably reuse at least some of the mysqlnd devs work). The fact that it has not happened probably demonstrates that not all that many people want to bundle MySQL with a closed source app.
So the lesson here is one should not put too much stock on arguments about static vs. dynamic linking, linking vs. network protocols, or other such technical details, because judges will most likely find that none of those details are really the essential issue.
Interesting, thanks for that link. I had often wondered whether judges were likely to decide it on a purely technical point, without taking intent, level of integration etc, into account, it looks like not. This works both ways: in some circumtances it weakens the FSF position that any software than runs in the same process is a derivative work.
My money making site, which most people read from work, is getting 18% IE 6 - almost as much as Firefox and not far behind IE 7 or IE 8, and a lot more than Chrome, Safari or Opera.
My blog traffic is 48% Firefox, with IE6 down to less than 2%.
Rubbish. If you have an installed Linux system, what do you need to learn to do everyday tasks like web surfing or word processing? That you use "firefox" instead of "The blue E" and "OpenOffice" instead of "Office".
the number of businesses who do not have a large corporate IT department (or a competent one)
So that's most of them then!
That's one of the things that people say is good about Windows - that it's so easy, anyone can use it.
They may say that - both they are wrong.
Keeping Windows secure (locking stuff down, separating user and admin accounts, installing and updating anti-malware, etc.) is too hard for most home users I know. Why do you think IE has a porn browing mode? Because the whole family shares a single login.
Installing software on Windows is difficult (compared to Linux as long as its in the repos, anyway)
The Windows UI is very familiar because it is widely used, but it is not actually particularly easy - if someone had never used a computer before Windows would not be the easiest OS to learn.
Democracy, as most of us understand, does not mean that the majority can do whatever they like without regard to the rights of the minority. It is illegal to be a Christian in Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan, or to have gay sex in most of Asia. The majority of Germans in the 1930s backed laws discriminating against Jews and Gypsies (a good many were happy with killing them as well). These laws are undoubtedly backed by the majority, but that does not make them right.
Human rights are more important than free speech, and a blatantly religiously discriminatory law is not acceptable.
No but it is blatantly discriminatory and unjust, and, like the ban on violent games, follow a pattern of banning anything that the majority dislike without regard to the rights of individuals.
You are an experienced Linux user and you think you need to edit config files to change setting in your GUI? It has not occurred to you to try using Gnome, KDE, LXDE, XFCE, ICE WM or numerous others that let you change settings from the GUI - have never edited a config file to change a KDE setting, and my desktop is very far from the defaults.
You are a liar - either an idiot, an astroturfer, or a troll.
Can you imagine if Osama Bin Laden were a major trading partner of ours in 2020?
His country is an important strategic ally. His family are respected businessmen. People closely linked to him, and who have possibly financing him, do business in the US and UK.
Also, if you stopped trading with every government that had killed some of its own people for protesting, that would lose a lot of trade.
In product after product, Microsoft continues to ship fewer vulnerabilities than our competitors.
I wish he had cited some. It does not seem to be anyone's experience, and the only study I have ever seen that said that Windows was more secure than Linux did so by counting each Linux vulnerability several times (once per distro), and comparing just Windows against entire Linux repositories.
He also looks only at whether more eyeballs are good, neglecting the disadvantage of the uniformity of the WIndows monoculture, etc.
He also argues that the Coverity scan was not an example of many eyeballs because it was government funded. So, the government paid for it - but it still happened.
He does cite some stuff including, hilariously, a study carried out in 2002 that concluded that Linux was close to becoming unmaintainable. Eight years later I am pretty sure it is being maintained.
I am also wondering about the advantages of there beinga lot of code that is shared by multiple projects. I remember a BSD code review catching an X Windows bug. In that particular case it was not fixed upstream because the XFree86 people were being awkward, but I wonder how many cases there are of stuff getting fixed.
It is also easier to report open source bugs. I have never reported a bug in a proprietary app, but I have reported lots of Linux bugs (mostly distro level, or fixable at distro level) because I can follow what it happening, and I know what the (usually good) reaction to my individual report is.
Finally, Judaism was not of great significance for most of history
It has been pretty influential though. Thing of the number of Jewish scientists, writers etc: something that can be attributed to a religious and cultural respect for learning, and, perhaps, a reaction too persecution.
Islamic peoples lost their power at about the same time as their religion became oppressive
Intolerant versions of Islam did exist at times and places when it was powerful. The current rise in fundamentalism seems to be rooted in once particularly group of nutcases, the Saudis, getting more power (oil = money = power). I heard Fatima Bhutto (yes, once of that family) talking about how better funding is encouraging Wahabbism at the cost of Sufism in Pakistan, and I heard similar stories from all over the world.
Look at just the high profile stuff. Who funded the Taliban? Where does Osama Bin laden come from? Where does the money for fundamentalist madrasas come from?
A free host is likely to take content down even if your site is legiit because they do not want the hassle.
Being a paying customer puts you in a position to expect that the host will let you file a counter-notice and carry on. Furthermore, if you own the domain and have backups then you just move to another host.
In those circumstances the author is still not passing off other people's work as their own.
Even then, I would say that (again, morally, not legally) the original author should receive credit prominently enough that everyone who reads it knows, even if they are less knowledgeable than the intended audience.
The standard argument against calling copyright infringement theft does not apply here: if you steal credit, you do deprive the other person of it.
The idea of launching anything potentially dangerous from the air seem highly unlikely when they don't even use it on the ground.
Especially after something goes wrong a few times. It is not easy to hit the right thing from an aircraft, so once a few kids/old peopple/obvious innocents have been tasered, or one of these has been flow into a house, it will get very unpopular.
It also looks very xenophobic. It It requires anyone with a broad range of links to a foreign government or a foreign or international political organisation would have to register e..g:
1) A member of the Swedish Pirate Party. 2) A group (I can imagine some British citizens living there doing it) set up to support the British Conservative party. 3) A branch of a British company that has received government subsidies (perhaps even export credit guarantees, if they are still around). 4) Possibly members of Amnesty International (its based in London and can esaily be classified as a political organisation) 5) Any foreigner who has "speaking engagements" in South Carolina 6) An academic who does some work for a foreign government funded university.
Having met several politicians who I believe actually have some principles (crazy thought!) I can't believe the bill would pass vote after vote if it were truly so evil.
They are probably well intentioned, but they can still be mistaken (they tend to have a bias towards government control being a good thing), manipulated, mislead, or biased. Also, remember that the important efforts to corrupt are focused on the people at the top.
Anyone suggesting a global government is implicitly assuming that it will be democratic so it would not be the current Chinese, Zimbabwean etc. leaders.
And I don't want uncivilized savages from the Middle East having any kind of say about what goes on in my life.
The population of the Middle East that meets that description represents quite a small population (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, etc.). The average Iranian or Iraqi (theya re tradidionally well educated societies) is probably more reasonable that all those American right wing nut-cases, or British cowards who want a nanny government to remove all risk from life - its just that they have nasty governments (Iran) or instability (Iraq).
We are also already well on the way to having a global government anyway: an increasing amount of domestic policy and law is constrained by international agreements - ACTA, WTO (especially with regard to non-tariff barriers), etc.
My object to a global government is the concentration of power involved. Large countries like the US, India and EU are already bureaucratic, corrupt and out of touch at the centre, so imagine how much worse a global government would be.
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On the other hand, it's frustrating when even copy/paste doesn't always work
When does copy/paste not work?
And all of that stuff is simple to do for the non-tech savvy crowd (80-90%) of the population), right?
Yes. the non-tech savvy crows do not choose the packaging system, they just use the GUI package manager than comes with their distro. Start the add remove programs app, search for what you want, tick, click "install".
it took some actual evidence-medicine to separate the few that work from the thousands that don't work. There's a name for traditional medicine that actually worked: medicine. The whole alternative gang is the ones that don't.
There is still a lot that yet to be properly tested, and then there are things like special diets, diagnosis etc. (also testable).
On the other hand drug trials paid for my pharma companies are far from an ideal scientific test: not compared to multiple independent studies.
People loved when CDDB offered to identify CD's so when ripping you could not have to type everything in for your music app. Many people donated time to this "project"... but once it was done, suddenly developers started to have to pay Gracenote for the data, and"free" music programs went away for paid-for-somehow models like Windows Media Player, iTunes, and the such.
They just used Free DB instead. K3B works just fine apart from the dd typo (and checking track names when you rip is not a huge issue).
I don't have time to look this up at the moment, but what I recall as the most important and least conventional GPL interpretation is that MySQL (the company) took the position that applications that depended on MySQL (the RDBMS) as one of their components were derivative works that incorporated the RDBMS--and that details about linking or protocols were just not relevant. Therefore, unless you bought a commercial license from the company, such applications had to be distributed under GPL terms.
Not quite. The client library is GPL licensed, so any app that links the client library has to be GPL.
This does not apply to PHP apps that use the PHP native driver (mysqlnd) as that was developed by PHP devs who wanted a PHP licensed (BSD like) MySQL driver.
Presumably, there is nothing stopping anyone else who wants to from developing their own BSD licensed client or client library (they could probably reuse at least some of the mysqlnd devs work). The fact that it has not happened probably demonstrates that not all that many people want to bundle MySQL with a closed source app.
So the lesson here is one should not put too much stock on arguments about static vs. dynamic linking, linking vs. network protocols, or other such technical details, because judges will most likely find that none of those details are really the essential issue.
Interesting, thanks for that link. I had often wondered whether judges were likely to decide it on a purely technical point, without taking intent, level of integration etc, into account, it looks like not. This works both ways: in some circumtances it weakens the FSF position that any software than runs in the same process is a derivative work.
My money making site, which most people read from work, is getting 18% IE 6 - almost as much as Firefox and not far behind IE 7 or IE 8, and a lot more than Chrome, Safari or Opera.
My blog traffic is 48% Firefox, with IE6 down to less than 2%.
It depends on your audience.
Rubbish. If you have an installed Linux system, what do you need to learn to do everyday tasks like web surfing or word processing? That you use "firefox" instead of "The blue E" and "OpenOffice" instead of "Office".
Whereas with Windows you have to spend hours trying to find the Windows registry incantation to stop it doing it.
the number of businesses who do not have a large corporate IT department (or a competent one)
So that's most of them then!
That's one of the things that people say is good about Windows - that it's so easy, anyone can use it.
They may say that - both they are wrong.
I wonder how many people will choose Chrome because they do not know the difference between a browser and a search engine?
Seriously, as 10 random non-geeks what web browser they use.
Why do they not ban all films, books, and CDs with content unsuitable for children as well?
Some members of a group break the law, so you think all members of the group should be discriminated against?
Democracy, as most of us understand, does not mean that the majority can do whatever they like without regard to the rights of the minority. It is illegal to be a Christian in Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan, or to have gay sex in most of Asia. The majority of Germans in the 1930s backed laws discriminating against Jews and Gypsies (a good many were happy with killing them as well). These laws are undoubtedly backed by the majority, but that does not make them right.
Human rights are more important than free speech, and a blatantly religiously discriminatory law is not acceptable.
No but it is blatantly discriminatory and unjust, and, like the ban on violent games, follow a pattern of banning anything that the majority dislike without regard to the rights of individuals.
[quote]Hopefully it's come along a bit since then.[/quote]
The decided to rewrite it. They lost the cool overlapping desktops feature, and it i unusably immature.
It was always lightweight used as a DE. I never tried it with Gnome.
You are an experienced Linux user and you think you need to edit config files to change setting in your GUI? It has not occurred to you to try using Gnome, KDE, LXDE, XFCE, ICE WM or numerous others that let you change settings from the GUI - have never edited a config file to change a KDE setting, and my desktop is very far from the defaults.
You are a liar - either an idiot, an astroturfer, or a troll.
Can you imagine if Osama Bin Laden were a major trading partner of ours in 2020?
His country is an important strategic ally. His family are respected businessmen. People closely linked to him, and who have possibly financing him, do business in the US and UK.
Also, if you stopped trading with every government that had killed some of its own people for protesting, that would lose a lot of trade.
In product after product, Microsoft continues to ship fewer vulnerabilities than our competitors.
I wish he had cited some. It does not seem to be anyone's experience, and the only study I have ever seen that said that Windows was more secure than Linux did so by counting each Linux vulnerability several times (once per distro), and comparing just Windows against entire Linux repositories.
He also looks only at whether more eyeballs are good, neglecting the disadvantage of the uniformity of the WIndows monoculture, etc.
He also argues that the Coverity scan was not an example of many eyeballs because it was government funded. So, the government paid for it - but it still happened.
He does cite some stuff including, hilariously, a study carried out in 2002 that concluded that Linux was close to becoming unmaintainable. Eight years later I am pretty sure it is being maintained.
I am also wondering about the advantages of there beinga lot of code that is shared by multiple projects. I remember a BSD code review catching an X Windows bug. In that particular case it was not fixed upstream because the XFree86 people were being awkward, but I wonder how many cases there are of stuff getting fixed.
It is also easier to report open source bugs. I have never reported a bug in a proprietary app, but I have reported lots of Linux bugs (mostly distro level, or fixable at distro level) because I can follow what it happening, and I know what the (usually good) reaction to my individual report is.
Finally, Judaism was not of great significance for most of history
It has been pretty influential though. Thing of the number of Jewish scientists, writers etc: something that can be attributed to a religious and cultural respect for learning, and, perhaps, a reaction too persecution.
Islamic peoples lost their power at about the same time as their religion became oppressive
Intolerant versions of Islam did exist at times and places when it was powerful. The current rise in fundamentalism seems to be rooted in once particularly group of nutcases, the Saudis, getting more power (oil = money = power). I heard Fatima Bhutto (yes, once of that family) talking about how better funding is encouraging Wahabbism at the cost of Sufism in Pakistan, and I heard similar stories from all over the world.
Look at just the high profile stuff. Who funded the Taliban? Where does Osama Bin laden come from? Where does the money for fundamentalist madrasas come from?
A free host is likely to take content down even if your site is legiit because they do not want the hassle.
Being a paying customer puts you in a position to expect that the host will let you file a counter-notice and carry on. Furthermore, if you own the domain and have backups then you just move to another host.
In those circumstances the author is still not passing off other people's work as their own.
Even then, I would say that (again, morally, not legally) the original author should receive credit prominently enough that everyone who reads it knows, even if they are less knowledgeable than the intended audience.
The standard argument against calling copyright infringement theft does not apply here: if you steal credit, you do deprive the other person of it.
The idea of launching anything potentially dangerous from the air seem highly unlikely when they don't even use it on the ground.
Especially after something goes wrong a few times. It is not easy to hit the right thing from an aircraft, so once a few kids/old peopple/obvious innocents have been tasered, or one of these has been flow into a house, it will get very unpopular.
It also looks very xenophobic. It It requires anyone with a broad range of links to a foreign government or a foreign or international political organisation would have to register e..g:
1) A member of the Swedish Pirate Party.
2) A group (I can imagine some British citizens living there doing it) set up to support the British Conservative party.
3) A branch of a British company that has received government subsidies (perhaps even export credit guarantees, if they are still around).
4) Possibly members of Amnesty International (its based in London and can esaily be classified as a political organisation)
5) Any foreigner who has "speaking engagements" in South Carolina
6) An academic who does some work for a foreign government funded university.
Having met several politicians who I believe actually have some principles (crazy thought!) I can't believe the bill would pass vote after vote if it were truly so evil.
They are probably well intentioned, but they can still be mistaken (they tend to have a bias towards government control being a good thing), manipulated, mislead, or biased. Also, remember that the important efforts to corrupt are focused on the people at the top.
Anyone suggesting a global government is implicitly assuming that it will be democratic so it would not be the current Chinese, Zimbabwean etc. leaders.
And I don't want uncivilized savages from the Middle East having any kind of say about what goes on in my life.
The population of the Middle East that meets that description represents quite a small population (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, etc.). The average Iranian or Iraqi (theya re tradidionally well educated societies) is probably more reasonable that all those American right wing nut-cases, or British cowards who want a nanny government to remove all risk from life - its just that they have nasty governments (Iran) or instability (Iraq).
We are also already well on the way to having a global government anyway: an increasing amount of domestic policy and law is constrained by international agreements - ACTA, WTO (especially with regard to non-tariff barriers), etc.
My object to a global government is the concentration of power involved. Large countries like the US, India and EU are already bureaucratic, corrupt and out of touch at the centre, so imagine how much worse a global government would be.