I would hope that moderators are fair enough to send comments up or down depending on their quality, not whether their point of view is agreeable. Even if someone says something we completely disagree with, as long as they say it well and bring facts to the table, it is worth hearing.
the only draw back [sic] to AbiWord is that it currently does not feature a grammar checker, though a plug-in is in the works.
My wetware grammar checker inform me that it's "drawback".
Compounds often change through time from two words, to hyphenated words, to a single word.
But most software grammar checkers are useless to anyone who knows how to write, producing all sorts of false positives and missing important things like subject-verb agreement or distinctions between nominative ("who") and accusative ("whom") cases.
Get yourself a copy of Strunk and White's The Elements of Style for fifteen bucks, and read it. It's actually a pretty engaging (and slim) volume; you'll enjoy reading it.
(I got mine free for taking the SAT when I was twelve and getting a high-ish (600+) on the Verbal section. Any other Slashdotters pass through Hopkins's CTY/OTID gauntlet?)
Learn why the way I made "Hopkins" into a possessive is actually correct, and try and memorize that "try and" should be "try to", and that unique does not take a qualifier, because there's only one of anything that's really unique.
Turns out that [a mini-screwdriver] is also on the "no" list [of items allowed on commercial planes]. I guess someone is afraid that he is going to unscrew the cabin door or something. Is it just me or is this whole "security" bullshit getting out of hand?
Come on, you know the answer to this.
"Why do you hate America? Your dissent only aids the terrorists. We're at war with terrorism! Your neighbor could be a terrorist! Be safe and turn him in! Protesters with signs are terrorists! Arrest them! Fear! Fear! Live in Fear! And vote George W. Bush or else the terrorists will win!"
Well, if you didn't realize that's the standard answer to reasonable and insightful questions like yours, you've got five more days of the Republican Convention, where you'll be able to hear that answer, or variations of it, over and over and over again.
Because discussing the real issues would be so... un-American.
I'm canceling my XM account. And um... It had nothing to do with this, or any other screw-ups with XM programming.
Parent isn't off-topic: he's riffing on the RIAA denial:
"News.com is reporting that XM has decided to "quietly discontinue" the XMPCR.... The RIAA, it should be noted, claims that they weren't 'behind the discontinuation of the PCR'".
While not a "freaking goggle fest", it's a smart and subtle jab at the RIAA's less-than-believable denial.
I won't presume to speak for anyone else, but I got a grin from it and I'd have modded it up Funny. Modding it down off-topic is simply bizarrely wrong.
chimpo13 (471212)Grown Ups don't want to be reminded of the time they drank a fifth of whiskey and ran around nekkid screaming "The South Shall Rise Again!!" while throwing puke at people.
Given that your username is "chimpo", are you sure it was puke you were flinging?
"The Internet At 25"... but it started in 1969. I think this "Internet" is a lot like some 35 year old guys I've seen in various chatrooms trying to convince all of the co-eds that they're really 25.
They'd have much better luck if they just said they were 35 and used the experience card.
Since you mentioned it's about picking up women in chatrooms, which specific expereince card would you recommend?
MasterCard or Visa?
P.S. My name is Sexy Tiffeni2762 ! Come see my FREE personal webcam <a href="WeLikeBigLosersWithBigWallets"> HERE! <a> Only $6.99 per half-minute!
(The <ecode> tag appears not to be working, and my user page is now being subjected to ugly colors. Let us pray somebody at Slashdot notices before the New Year.)
organizations like NOW and the sierra club are near the pinnacle of human hypocrisy. They are morons if the think they're saving the planet/life. Life has survived long before humans, it will survive long after.
Well yes.
That's exactly the point: the Sierra Club and other organizations to protect the environment are trying to prevent us from destroying the environment to such an extent that human life is put at threat.
Supporting such organizations is almost entirely selfish: global warming and fresh water depletion threaten all human life on this planet. Understand that when the ocean encroaches on Holland and Bangladesh and coastal India, when fresh water depletion brings about famine in Iran and Pakistan, these peoples will not go gently into that good night.
And these peoples who will rage against the dying of their light, all have access to modern military weapons, in some cases including nuclear weapons.
So what do you expect will happen? Faced with starvation or homes inking beneath the waves, millions of people will be looking for new homes and fresh water and food. They won't be humbly petitioning you, "guv'nor can you spare a dime". No, they'll be showing up on your doorstep with machetes, Colt '45s, and cruise missiles to persuade you -- or their neighbors -- to share.
At best, you can expect environmental crashes to mean a greatly reduced standard of living for you as the world adjusts to waves of crop failure and famine. And even as your standard of living declines, as long as your world includes a TV and car and a personal computer and a PS/2 for each person, the guy living in a hut in a village that shares one TV among all inhabitants will look on with envy, and wonder if he's be better off with 72 virgins in Paradise after blowing himself up along with you.
At worst, a nice upstanding Dutch burgher will have to decide between seeing you survive or seeing his kids survive, and six million years of human fratricide bets that, nice as that Dutchman is today, he'll choose for his kids -- just as you'll choose for yours.
Melvin Konner, in the revised (and almost entirely re-written) edition of his classic book subtitled "Biological Constraints on the Human Spirit", The Tangled Wing, explains that (emphasis orthogonal's)
United Nations assessments [at the 1992 Rio de Janeiro environmental summit, 12 years ago!] found a continuing loss of topsoil and productive farmland and a growing scarcity of fresh water. In the late nineties a third of the world's people had inadequate fresh water, and this is expected to double to two-thirds by 2020.
Many future wars will be fought over water.
Like you, I was always somewhat contemptuous of "save the environment" activists, until I read about the numerous deserts created by man throughout prehistory, the Near East, in Americas (as by the Anasazi Indians), in the Pacific on Easter Island. Jared Diamond writes movingly -- even shockingly -- about this in several of his books, and in this article (emphasis orthogonal's)
The fifteenth century marked the end not only for Easter's palm but for the forest itself. Its doom had been approaching as people cleared land to plant gardens; as they felled trees to build canoes, to transport and erect statues, and to burn; as rats devoured seeds; and probably as the native birds died out that had pollinated the trees' flowers and dispersed their fruit. The overall picture is among the most extreme examples of forest destruction anywhere in the world: the whole forest gone, and most of its tree species extinct.
The destruction of the island's animals was as extreme as that of the forest: without exception, every species of native land bird became extinct. Even shellfish were overexploited, until people had to settle for small sea snails instead of larger cowries. Porpoise bones disappeared abru
He can't demand back what he has already GPL-licensed.
I imagine that he can't demand that anyone who has exercised the rights granted under his license to retroactively remove his work from their own.
But if he decides not to license his work under the GPL anymore, what right do you or I have to use his code in a new project? We have no license from him, so we'd be violating his copyright.
The situation, of course, gets muddier: if I had incorporated, for example, the entirety of his GPL'd code in some project of mine, and had released my project under the GPL, presumably you could use the GPL license I grant for my project, and use my project that incorporates his code in your new project. (Although I'd question the morality of my continuing to provide his code, and the morality of your using it if you knew he'd rescinded his license.)
On the other hand, if I had merely incorporated his work by reference in my code (as say, by relying on a header file he provided, and by linking to a binary library compiled from his code) I'd say it can be argued that while you could compile my (still GPL'd) code, you couldn't compile his library -- but probably could use an existing binary copy of his library.
So on a new OS for which his library had never been compiled, I'd say that compiling it -- even to get my still GPL'd code to work -- would be a violation of his copyright.
It's conundrums like this that have always made me leery of open sourcing code -- it's not that the GPL is so onerous, it's that once you stick a finger into that tar-baby you can never again extract yourself. And clearly it was worries like this that led to the Lesser GPL ("LGPL") license.
I have a bit of code I'm thinking of open-sourcing -- I've kept it closed simply because it's essentially a web-spider, and I incorporated pauses in it, to spare other people's servers, that I don't want selfish users to remove. I wish there were an established license that would allow me to open source it with conditions, like "don't remove the pauses". And I really wouldn't want anyone to, for instance, re-brand and sell my code -- as they can with the GPL, so long as they offer the source code.
I know that a license that could be rescinded would be less attractive to businesses -- businesses wouldn't want to base long term strategy on the variable whims on a licensor -- but I doubt any business would be using my code anyway. And I'm not big on giving away freebie code to businesses -- I'm interested in helping out fellow hobbyists, not MBAs with a bonus for every job they outsource. (Just as I'm tired of writing articles for Wikipedia only to see dozens of ad-supported commercial sites rip off my work without even crediting me.)
So what's the license for me to use? It's not the BSD license, and it's not the GPL license. Does the Open Source movement have an answer for people like me, who want to maintain "moral" control of their code?
Given the headline "Tech Support Levels Dropping", I assumed it meant that companies were decreasing the level (that is, the amount) of staffing -- or at least decreasing staffing in the U.S.
But what the headline is really trying to cmmunicate is that satisfaction with tech support is dropping -- especially overseas tech support -- which might lead to more tech support staff being hired in the U.S.
So should I complain "Slashdot Headline Clarity Dropping", or should I just be grateful it's not a dupe?
Nope. This is eating own dogfood, having a stance and keeping it. Businesses can be sure that there's no fucking around rules of linux development. It's either playing by the rules or not playing at all.
Um, whose rules?
If open source is about choice, I've just lost the choice to use both Phillips-based webcams and linux. Now my choice is one or the other.
But if by "rules" you mean that the linux developers are making me -- and many others -- bear the costs of the developers' ideological fights, then say so. Explain to me honestly that linux isn't about "choice", it's about forcing anyone who wants to play with linux to license everything under the GPL (or BSD, or release to the public domain).
This is little different that the "anti-spam" campaigners who -- admittedly with virtuous goals -- blacklist email from domains which can't avoid sharing an upstream provider with a spammer. The blacklisters know full well that many of the blacklisted domains have nothing to do with spammers -- and in fact they count on that -- because they hope that by injuring innocent third parties, those third parties will demand that their ISPs stop hosting the spammers (or more often, that their ISPs upstream's upstream will stop hosting a client which sub-leases to another company which hosts a spammer).
The kernel developers apparently hope that we will all now boycott Phillips and companies like Logitech which use the Phillips chip-set, and this in turn will forceforcing Phillips and inconveniencing thousands (millions?) of end-users?
If the GPL such a terrible idea that it can only work when people are forced to use it, maybe it's time to re-think the GPL.
Or maybe the kernel developers cold figure out a more direct avenue of action, that doesn't inconvenience third parties: imagine a GPL that read, "everybody can use linux (and apache, and gcc, and PHP) except Phillips. End-users wouldn't be inconvenienced, but Phillips -- well, I'm guessing they probably use quite a few linux machines for development, and gcc on them, and probably an apache webserver or three.
Now, of course, that's not going to happen, not least because the developers get a real thrill from listing all the companies that use linux, and threatening to take it away from one company would cause a whole lot of companies to reconsider their use of Open Source tools.
But a similar bludgeon is being wielded on the common home and hobbyist end-user here. And that's fine: the kernel developers have every right to write the kernel the way they want, and to use it for political purposes if they so choose. But then don't come to me and tell me linux is about "choice". Be honest, and tell me linux is about pushing an ideological agenda.
Unfortunately the DOJ doesn't have the option of picking and choosing which laws to enforce--and especially not according to YOUR whims.
Yeah! So there!
That's why when an individual or small company calls the FBI, the FBI always requires damages of at least $5000 before they'll even consider investigating.
Yeah, that's why prosecutors have no discretion about what charges they dismiss and which they prosecute -- and they never decide to "make an example" of a defendant, or give a sweet plea bargain to a connected defendent, or dig up all sorts of unrelated charges in order to get any conviction after their original charges fall through.
Yeah! So there!
So you're saying that when Ashcroft came on board as Attorney General, it wasn't his choice to de-emphasize anti-terrorism enforcement so as to concentrate on cracking down on porn and Tommy Chong? Huh, because he touted those decisions at the time as reasons his Fundamentalist base should be happy about the Bush administration.
Yeah! So there!
Hey, tell me, on Big Rock Candy Mountain where you live, how many licorice dollars did your condo cost, 'cause if Bush wins in November, I gotta move there, ok?
Your comment might be construed as saying "Ashcroft may be a bad guy, but he's not Catholic", implying that being Catholic would make him somehow worse. Was that your intention?
No, it wasn't his intention, it was because the great-grandparent referred to the Witch-Finder General as "Pope Ashcroft".
You didn't read closely enough, and the grandparent, failing to understand that "Pope" was a metaphorical allusion to theocracy and not a factual statement about Ashcroft's religion (Ashcroft is Pentecostal) was trying to "correct" the great-grandparent poster.
Now both you and the grandparent poster take deep breaths.
And if GWB didn't have the job, most of the yahoos reading this board would be employed by now.
Typical liberal crap. I'll have you know that all the top executives of Halliburton are doing quite well. And trickle-down economics works: by outsourcing the jobs of lazy Americans, the execs are able to hire lots of illegal immigrants as servants at sub-minimum wage market rates.
True, some of the guys actually doing the Halliburton's work in Iraq are getting killed, but, they should be proud to be allowed to make sacrifices for their company^W country so that the richest one percent's tax cuts are ensured.
"History And Moral Philosophy" class from Heinlein's "Starship Troopers"
Better Col. Dubois than Chickenhawk Cheney or Wolfowitz.
I just recenty re-read Starship Troopers (for the, what, 10th time? I'm a big Heinlein fan); for those unfamiliar with the novel it is perhaps Heinlein's most controversial novel (it's often maligned as "fascist") because the society Heinlein approvingly depicted in the novel limits the franchise (that is, the right to vote) to persons who have voluntarily completed a term of "Federal Service", which (essentially) means military service.
Heinlein was not necessarily advocating this form of goverment (any more than the constitutional monarchy in Double Star, the world government in Stranger in a Strange Land, or the Howard Family gerontocracy on Secundus in Time Enough for Love), nor did he claim that such a government would be wiser than another form (indeed, he has that government specifically teach that that form is not necessarily wiser).
But Heinlein was making the argument that those who voluntarily place themselves at risk to defend their country are demonstrating that they consider their country's survival more important than their own, and that thus they can be better trusted to put the national interest ahead of their particular interests when voting or otherwise exercising power (but also see Heinlein's possible rebuttal to himself in his much later The Cat Who Walked Through Walls).
Heinlein's argument seems particularly timely when a President who managed to avoid Vietnam by getting a heavily sought after post in the Air Guard defending Alabama from the Viet Cong and a Vice President who "had other priorities" during Vietnam (enough other priortities to get five draft deferments!) have sent 970 American men and women to die in what increasingly appears to be an unecessary and ultimately pointless war -- and are questioning the patriotism of an opponent who actually volunteered for dangerous duty in Vietnam, got shot at, saved the lives of his men, and won numerous decorations for that.
For Paul Wolfowitz, the Iraq war is pieces on a game board (and in testimony to Congress he even forgot about 200 dead American soldiers), for Dick Cheney, numbers on a Haliburton balance sheet, for George W. Bush, the chance to pose for re-election ads in a flight suit on the deck of an aircraft carrier. But for 970 American soldiers, Iraq has been a place to die; and for countless others a place to leave arms and legs and youth -- or at Abu Ghraib, honor -- behind.
Maybe Heinlein had a good idea. We can do better by our soldiers and by our country than the Boy President.
Then again, there is no theoretical reason why every subatomic particle in your body could not simultaneously jump one foot to the left.
Oh yeah? Sure there is! Everyone knows that subatomic particles use the metric system not English measurements, and a displacment of of 3.048 E14 just isn't a round enough number to be likely.
Hmm. Can they use all that nifty technology and virtual reality to make sure Military Police and Military Intelligence units understand the Geneva Conventions?
Seriously. The leadership failures that allowed (or even encouraged) the US military atrocities at Abu Ghraib have cost us far more than any VR simulation, and will continue to cost us as a nation for decades, in both world respect and in the recruitment of America-hating terrorists.
Perhaps the miltary should shelve some of this gee-whiz "VR-tainment" favor of simple classrooms with wooden benches and a blackboard and high-ranking instructors who state unequivocally that torture is un-American, repugnant to our values, and will not be tolerated at all in the US military.
Paraphrasing the Christian Bible, Mark 8:36,for what shall it profit an army, if it shall defeat the whole world, and lose its own soul?
From the linked interview, on the subject of secret airport laws: (emphasis orthogonal's) "[i]t even worked at the District Court; our judge decided that if she couldn't see the law then it must by definition be constitutional (she ruled that I had no possible way to show it is unconstitutional)."
Is this the United States the Founding Fathers built, or Stalinism by way of Kafka?
snip four line shell script that pretty much (except converting to mp3 format) accomplishes what is desired by submitter
What amazes me is that this precisely the sort of thing to do in software, yet the submitter contends that up until now they've done it with a custom designed and custom built chip.
I mean, the guys at http://rockbox.haxx.se could do it in about 15 minutes, and provide a GUI on the MP3 recorder.
Naturally, this is easier to do when MP3 recorders are running open source software, so to an extent this is a rant at all the manufacturers of computing appliances who see a competive advantage in closed source: you lost my purchase, and who knows how many purchases from this professor and while requiring him to shell out even more for a custom chip to do in hardware what is ridiculously easy to do in software (as the parent poster shows by using that complex and little-known software technique, calling sleep()).
I'm not criticizing the parent: his code does the right and the simplest thing; the problem is with manufacturers whose use of closed source precludes such elegantly simple solutions.
A big part of the reason that the IBM PC took off in such a big way in the early 1980s was becuase it was open source: not the code to MS-DOS, but the architechtural specification of the hardware itself. This cost IBM money when "clone"-makers were able to produce "monkey copies" of the PC, but that very competetion made PCs much more popular, and soon dominant over other (possivly techically superior) brands like Ape or Amiga. The open specs also allowed a myriad of other companies to offer add-on hardware from co-processors to graphics cards, and even allowed software authors to optimize for the IBM-PC (who here is old enough to remember what peripheral's memory was mapped to address B800, and the advantages to manipulating the data there directly?)
Did opening the IBM-PCs architecture finally cost or benefit IBM. We'll never know. But it is likely that the PC market, and thus the market for home PCs and peripherals, and software for home PCs and the World Wide Web, would never have been near as big without IBM's decision to open the PC even to competitors.
Manufacturers of closed-source appliances would do well to consider what they gain, and what they lose by preventing customers from fully using their products. (The careful reader will see that the antecedent of "their" in the previous sentence is ambiguous; the astute reader will understand why: just whose product is it, the company that makes it or the customer who buys it?)
SCO is still being generally evil, and no doubt is thinking up more desperate, frivolous lawsuits
Why am I being such a buzz-kill? Because we can't just sit back and let the librarians fight all out battles for us, can we?
You can ignore politics (for a while), but it won't ignore you -- and one day you'll wake up and find the new regime expects you to out on nice shiny fetters and crawl like a slave.
Slashdot Mirror
I would hope that moderators are fair enough to send comments up or down depending on their quality, not whether their point of view is agreeable. Even if someone says something we completely disagree with, as long as they say it well and bring facts to the table, it is worth hearing.
Mod deviationist down!
September 4th is the 20th anniversary of what is now Firebird./i.
It's a great browser, but I think this is a bit premature.
the only draw back [sic] to AbiWord is that it currently does not feature a grammar checker, though a plug-in is in the works.
My wetware grammar checker inform me that it's "drawback".
Compounds often change through time from two words, to hyphenated words, to a single word.
But most software grammar checkers are useless to anyone who knows how to write, producing all sorts of false positives and missing important things like subject-verb agreement or distinctions between nominative ("who") and accusative ("whom") cases.
Get yourself a copy of Strunk and White's The Elements of Style for fifteen bucks, and read it. It's actually a pretty engaging (and slim) volume; you'll enjoy reading it.
(I got mine free for taking the SAT when I was twelve and getting a high-ish (600+) on the Verbal section. Any other Slashdotters pass through Hopkins's CTY/OTID gauntlet?)
Learn why the way I made "Hopkins" into a possessive is actually correct, and try and memorize that "try and" should be "try to", and that unique does not take a qualifier, because there's only one of anything that's really unique.
Turns out that [a mini-screwdriver] is also on the "no" list [of items allowed on commercial planes]. I guess someone is afraid that he is going to unscrew the cabin door or something. Is it just me or is this whole "security" bullshit getting out of hand?
Come on, you know the answer to this.
"Why do you hate America? Your dissent only aids the terrorists. We're at war with terrorism! Your neighbor could be a terrorist! Be safe and turn him in! Protesters with signs are terrorists! Arrest them! Fear! Fear! Live in Fear! And vote George W. Bush or else the terrorists will win!"
Well, if you didn't realize that's the standard answer to reasonable and insightful questions like yours, you've got five more days of the Republican Convention, where you'll be able to hear that answer, or variations of it, over and over and over again.
Because discussing the real issues would be so... un-American.
And um... It had nothing to do with this, or any other screw-ups with XM programming.
Parent isn't off-topic: he's riffing on the RIAA denial:
While not a "freaking goggle fest", it's a smart and subtle jab at the RIAA's less-than-believable denial.
I won't presume to speak for anyone else, but I got a grin from it and I'd have modded it up Funny. Modding it down off-topic is simply bizarrely wrong.
chimpo13 (471212)Grown Ups don't want to be reminded of the time they drank a fifth of whiskey and ran around nekkid screaming "The South Shall Rise Again!!" while throwing puke at people.
Given that your username is "chimpo", are you sure it was puke you were flinging?
The only thing I do not like is the weird quark all optical mice have.
.
:)
Ahem.
I think you meant strange quark
Sorry, correcting incorrect assumptions about physics is a strange quirk. of mine.
The physicists also demonstrated what they call 'open-destination teleportation,' a way to teleport quantum information within and between computers."
See honey, I wasn't lying when I told you I knew nothing about it!
One of those physicists must have teleported that donkey porn onto my computer!
They'd have much better luck if they just said they were 35 and used the experience card.
Since you mentioned it's about picking up women in chatrooms, which specific expereince card would you recommend?
MasterCard or Visa?
P.S. My name is Sexy Tiffeni2762 ! Come see my FREE personal webcam <a href="WeLikeBigLosersWithBigWallets"> HERE! <a> Only $6.99 per half-minute!
<i>That would be nice indeed. But how would [Google] generate revenue from [remote file storage]?</i>
/mnt/gmail
<ecode>
$ ls -pX
drafts/ etc/ home/ kazaa/
mail/ porn/ spam/ usr/
access.log bookmarks.html restart.sh text.out
~this.listing ~brought.to.you ~by.Pfizer ~Pharmacutical
~makers.of ~the.best ~restorer.of ~your.hard.drive
~Viagra! ~special.trial ~offer.for ~gmail.users
</ecode>
(The <ecode> tag appears not to be working, and my user page is now being subjected to ugly colors. Let us pray somebody at Slashdot notices before the New Year.)
Well yes.
That's exactly the point: the Sierra Club and other organizations to protect the environment are trying to prevent us from destroying the environment to such an extent that human life is put at threat.
Supporting such organizations is almost entirely selfish: global warming and fresh water depletion threaten all human life on this planet. Understand that when the ocean encroaches on Holland and Bangladesh and coastal India, when fresh water depletion brings about famine in Iran and Pakistan, these peoples will not go gently into that good night.
And these peoples who will rage against the dying of their light, all have access to modern military weapons, in some cases including nuclear weapons.
So what do you expect will happen? Faced with starvation or homes inking beneath the waves, millions of people will be looking for new homes and fresh water and food. They won't be humbly petitioning you, "guv'nor can you spare a dime". No, they'll be showing up on your doorstep with machetes, Colt '45s, and cruise missiles to persuade you -- or their neighbors -- to share.
At best, you can expect environmental crashes to mean a greatly reduced standard of living for you as the world adjusts to waves of crop failure and famine. And even as your standard of living declines, as long as your world includes a TV and car and a personal computer and a PS/2 for each person, the guy living in a hut in a village that shares one TV among all inhabitants will look on with envy, and wonder if he's be better off with 72 virgins in Paradise after blowing himself up along with you.
At worst, a nice upstanding Dutch burgher will have to decide between seeing you survive or seeing his kids survive, and six million years of human fratricide bets that, nice as that Dutchman is today, he'll choose for his kids -- just as you'll choose for yours.
Melvin Konner, in the revised (and almost entirely re-written) edition of his classic book subtitled "Biological Constraints on the Human Spirit", The Tangled Wing, explains that (emphasis orthogonal's)
Like you, I was always somewhat contemptuous of "save the environment" activists, until I read about the numerous deserts created by man throughout prehistory, the Near East, in Americas (as by the Anasazi Indians), in the Pacific on Easter Island. Jared Diamond writes movingly -- even shockingly -- about this in several of his books, and in this article (emphasis orthogonal's)
anyway, I have seen and own a pretty mouse - the MAPP mouse by elecom is gorgeous
If by "gorgeous" you mean "resembles a Klingon torture device", then yes, it's gorgeous.
"The German CCC issued a Call For Papers.... The motto for this year, 'The Usual Suspects'..."
The Germans are going to be asking "the usual suspects" for their papers?
I think we all know how that went last time.
So will the conference keynote address be followed by the invasion of Poland again?
He can't demand back what he has already GPL-licensed.
I imagine that he can't demand that anyone who has exercised the rights granted under his license to retroactively remove his work from their own.
But if he decides not to license his work under the GPL anymore, what right do you or I have to use his code in a new project? We have no license from him, so we'd be violating his copyright.
The situation, of course, gets muddier: if I had incorporated, for example, the entirety of his GPL'd code in some project of mine, and had released my project under the GPL, presumably you could use the GPL license I grant for my project, and use my project that incorporates his code in your new project. (Although I'd question the morality of my continuing to provide his code, and the morality of your using it if you knew he'd rescinded his license.)
On the other hand, if I had merely incorporated his work by reference in my code (as say, by relying on a header file he provided, and by linking to a binary library compiled from his code) I'd say it can be argued that while you could compile my (still GPL'd) code, you couldn't compile his library -- but probably could use an existing binary copy of his library.
So on a new OS for which his library had never been compiled, I'd say that compiling it -- even to get my still GPL'd code to work -- would be a violation of his copyright.
It's conundrums like this that have always made me leery of open sourcing code -- it's not that the GPL is so onerous, it's that once you stick a finger into that tar-baby you can never again extract yourself. And clearly it was worries like this that led to the Lesser GPL ("LGPL") license.
I have a bit of code I'm thinking of open-sourcing -- I've kept it closed simply because it's essentially a web-spider, and I incorporated pauses in it, to spare other people's servers, that I don't want selfish users to remove. I wish there were an established license that would allow me to open source it with conditions, like "don't remove the pauses". And I really wouldn't want anyone to, for instance, re-brand and sell my code -- as they can with the GPL, so long as they offer the source code.
I know that a license that could be rescinded would be less attractive to businesses -- businesses wouldn't want to base long term strategy on the variable whims on a licensor -- but I doubt any business would be using my code anyway. And I'm not big on giving away freebie code to businesses -- I'm interested in helping out fellow hobbyists, not MBAs with a bonus for every job they outsource. (Just as I'm tired of writing articles for Wikipedia only to see dozens of ad-supported commercial sites rip off my work without even crediting me.)
So what's the license for me to use? It's not the BSD license, and it's not the GPL license. Does the Open Source movement have an answer for people like me, who want to maintain "moral" control of their code?
Given the headline "Tech Support Levels Dropping", I assumed it meant that companies were decreasing the level (that is, the amount) of staffing -- or at least decreasing staffing in the U.S.
But what the headline is really trying to cmmunicate is that satisfaction with tech support is dropping -- especially overseas tech support -- which might lead to more tech support staff being hired in the U.S.
So should I complain "Slashdot Headline Clarity Dropping", or should I just be grateful it's not a dupe?
Nope. This is eating own dogfood, having a stance and keeping it. Businesses can be sure that there's no fucking around rules of linux development. It's either playing by the rules or not playing at all.
Um, whose rules?
If open source is about choice, I've just lost the choice to use both Phillips-based webcams and linux. Now my choice is one or the other.
But if by "rules" you mean that the linux developers are making me -- and many others -- bear the costs of the developers' ideological fights, then say so. Explain to me honestly that linux isn't about "choice", it's about forcing anyone who wants to play with linux to license everything under the GPL (or BSD, or release to the public domain).
This is little different that the "anti-spam" campaigners who -- admittedly with virtuous goals -- blacklist email from domains which can't avoid sharing an upstream provider with a spammer. The blacklisters know full well that many of the blacklisted domains have nothing to do with spammers -- and in fact they count on that -- because they hope that by injuring innocent third parties, those third parties will demand that their ISPs stop hosting the spammers (or more often, that their ISPs upstream's upstream will stop hosting a client which sub-leases to another company which hosts a spammer).
The kernel developers apparently hope that we will all now boycott Phillips and companies like Logitech which use the Phillips chip-set, and this in turn will forceforcing Phillips and inconveniencing thousands (millions?) of end-users?
If the GPL such a terrible idea that it can only work when people are forced to use it, maybe it's time to re-think the GPL.
Or maybe the kernel developers cold figure out a more direct avenue of action, that doesn't inconvenience third parties: imagine a GPL that read, "everybody can use linux (and apache, and gcc, and PHP) except Phillips. End-users wouldn't be inconvenienced, but Phillips -- well, I'm guessing they probably use quite a few linux machines for development, and gcc on them, and probably an apache webserver or three.
Now, of course, that's not going to happen, not least because the developers get a real thrill from listing all the companies that use linux, and threatening to take it away from one company would cause a whole lot of companies to reconsider their use of Open Source tools.
But a similar bludgeon is being wielded on the common home and hobbyist end-user here. And that's fine: the kernel developers have every right to write the kernel the way they want, and to use it for political purposes if they so choose. But then don't come to me and tell me linux is about "choice". Be honest, and tell me linux is about pushing an ideological agenda.
Unfortunately the DOJ doesn't have the option of picking and choosing which laws to enforce--and especially not according to YOUR whims.
Yeah! So there!
That's why when an individual or small company calls the FBI, the FBI always requires damages of at least $5000 before they'll even consider investigating.
Yeah, that's why prosecutors have no discretion about what charges they dismiss and which they prosecute -- and they never decide to "make an example" of a defendant, or give a sweet plea bargain to a connected defendent, or dig up all sorts of unrelated charges in order to get any conviction after their original charges fall through.
Yeah! So there!
So you're saying that when Ashcroft came on board as Attorney General, it wasn't his choice to de-emphasize anti-terrorism enforcement so as to concentrate on cracking down on porn and Tommy Chong? Huh, because he touted those decisions at the time as reasons his Fundamentalist base should be happy about the Bush administration.
Yeah! So there!
Hey, tell me, on Big Rock Candy Mountain where you live, how many licorice dollars did your condo cost, 'cause if Bush wins in November, I gotta move there, ok?
Your comment might be construed as saying "Ashcroft may be a bad guy, but he's not Catholic", implying that being Catholic would make him somehow worse.
Was that your intention?
No, it wasn't his intention, it was because the great-grandparent referred to the Witch-Finder General as "Pope Ashcroft".
You didn't read closely enough, and the grandparent, failing to understand that "Pope" was a metaphorical allusion to theocracy and not a factual statement about Ashcroft's religion (Ashcroft is Pentecostal) was trying to "correct" the great-grandparent poster.
Now both you and the grandparent poster take deep breaths.
And if GWB didn't have the job, most of the yahoos reading this board would be employed by now.
Typical liberal crap. I'll have you know that all the top executives of Halliburton are doing quite well. And trickle-down economics works: by outsourcing the jobs of lazy Americans, the execs are able to hire lots of illegal immigrants as servants at sub-minimum wage market rates.
True, some of the guys actually doing the Halliburton's work in Iraq are getting killed, but, they should be proud to be allowed to make sacrifices for their company^W country so that the richest one percent's tax cuts are ensured.
Obviously, you're some sort of commie.
"History And Moral Philosophy" class from Heinlein's "Starship Troopers"
Better Col. Dubois than Chickenhawk Cheney or Wolfowitz.
I just recenty re-read Starship Troopers (for the, what, 10th time? I'm a big Heinlein fan); for those unfamiliar with the novel it is perhaps Heinlein's most controversial novel (it's often maligned as "fascist") because the society Heinlein approvingly depicted in the novel limits the franchise (that is, the right to vote) to persons who have voluntarily completed a term of "Federal Service", which (essentially) means military service.
Heinlein was not necessarily advocating this form of goverment (any more than the constitutional monarchy in Double Star, the world government in Stranger in a Strange Land, or the Howard Family gerontocracy on Secundus in Time Enough for Love), nor did he claim that such a government would be wiser than another form (indeed, he has that government specifically teach that that form is not necessarily wiser).
But Heinlein was making the argument that those who voluntarily place themselves at risk to defend their country are demonstrating that they consider their country's survival more important than their own, and that thus they can be better trusted to put the national interest ahead of their particular interests when voting or otherwise exercising power (but also see Heinlein's possible rebuttal to himself in his much later The Cat Who Walked Through Walls).
Heinlein's argument seems particularly timely when a President who managed to avoid Vietnam by getting a heavily sought after post in the Air Guard defending Alabama from the Viet Cong and a Vice President who "had other priorities" during Vietnam (enough other priortities to get five draft deferments!) have sent 970 American men and women to die in what increasingly appears to be an unecessary and ultimately pointless war -- and are questioning the patriotism of an opponent who actually volunteered for dangerous duty in Vietnam, got shot at, saved the lives of his men, and won numerous decorations for that.
For Paul Wolfowitz, the Iraq war is pieces on a game board (and in testimony to Congress he even forgot about 200 dead American soldiers), for Dick Cheney, numbers on a Haliburton balance sheet, for George W. Bush, the chance to pose for re-election ads in a flight suit on the deck of an aircraft carrier. But for 970 American soldiers, Iraq has been a place to die; and for countless others a place to leave arms and legs and youth -- or at Abu Ghraib, honor -- behind.
Maybe Heinlein had a good idea. We can do better by our soldiers and by our country than the Boy President.
Then again, there is no theoretical reason why every subatomic particle in your body could not simultaneously jump one foot to the left.
Oh yeah? Sure there is! Everyone knows that subatomic particles use the metric system not English measurements, and a displacment of of 3.048 E14 just isn't a round enough number to be likely.
Hmm. Can they use all that nifty technology and virtual reality to make sure Military Police and Military Intelligence units understand the Geneva Conventions?
Seriously. The leadership failures that allowed (or even encouraged) the US military atrocities at Abu Ghraib have cost us far more than any VR simulation, and will continue to cost us as a nation for decades, in both world respect and in the recruitment of America-hating terrorists.
Perhaps the miltary should shelve some of this gee-whiz "VR-tainment" favor of simple classrooms with wooden benches and a blackboard and high-ranking instructors who state unequivocally that torture is un-American, repugnant to our values, and will not be tolerated at all in the US military.
Paraphrasing the Christian Bible, Mark 8:36,for what shall it profit an army, if it shall defeat the whole world, and lose its own soul?
From the linked interview, on the subject of secret airport laws: (emphasis orthogonal's) "[i]t even worked at the District Court; our judge decided that if she couldn't see the law then it must by definition be constitutional (she ruled that I had no possible way to show it is unconstitutional)."
Is this the United States the Founding Fathers built, or Stalinism by way of Kafka?
snip four line shell script that pretty much (except converting to mp3 format) accomplishes what is desired by submitter
What amazes me is that this precisely the sort of thing to do in software, yet the submitter contends that up until now they've done it with a custom designed and custom built chip.
I mean, the guys at http://rockbox.haxx.se could do it in about 15 minutes, and provide a GUI on the MP3 recorder.
Naturally, this is easier to do when MP3 recorders are running open source software, so to an extent this is a rant at all the manufacturers of computing appliances who see a competive advantage in closed source: you lost my purchase, and who knows how many purchases from this professor and while requiring him to shell out even more for a custom chip to do in hardware what is ridiculously easy to do in software (as the parent poster shows by using that complex and little-known software technique, calling sleep()).
I'm not criticizing the parent: his code does the right and the simplest thing; the problem is with manufacturers whose use of closed source precludes such elegantly simple solutions.
A big part of the reason that the IBM PC took off in such a big way in the early 1980s was becuase it was open source: not the code to MS-DOS, but the architechtural specification of the hardware itself. This cost IBM money when "clone"-makers were able to produce "monkey copies" of the PC, but that very competetion made PCs much more popular, and soon dominant over other (possivly techically superior) brands like Ape or Amiga. The open specs also allowed a myriad of other companies to offer add-on hardware from co-processors to graphics cards, and even allowed software authors to optimize for the IBM-PC (who here is old enough to remember what peripheral's memory was mapped to address B800, and the advantages to manipulating the data there directly?)
Did opening the IBM-PCs architecture finally cost or benefit IBM. We'll never know. But it is likely that the PC market, and thus the market for home PCs and peripherals, and software for home PCs and the World Wide Web, would never have been near as big without IBM's decision to open the PC even to competitors.
Manufacturers of closed-source appliances would do well to consider what they gain, and what they lose by preventing customers from fully using their products. (The careful reader will see that the antecedent of "their" in the previous sentence is ambiguous; the astute reader will understand why: just whose product is it, the company that makes it or the customer who buys it?)
Yes, it is!
But before we start sing "Hosanna!", let's keep in mind:
Why am I being such a buzz-kill? Because we can't just sit back and let the librarians fight all out battles for us, can we?
You can ignore politics (for a while), but it won't ignore you -- and one day you'll wake up and find the new regime expects you to out on nice shiny fetters and crawl like a slave.