I think Linus pronounces it incorrectly.
on
Linux on Jeopardy
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· Score: 1
Allow me to explain why!
In 'english.au', Linus pronounces Linux 'Linux'. Americans, confused by an unfamiliar phoneme, start pronouncing it using a short 'i', English's closest equivalent. Linus moves to America and eventually starts pronouncing Linux 'Linnux' because it's too much effort to fight the tide.
I maintain that the correct way to pronounce it is using the appropriate transliteration (that's not the right word - whatever the phonetic equivalent of transliteration is). So in English, it's 'Lie-nux'.
Viruses don't approach you first and ask you whether or not you wish to be infected. That's the crucial difference and that's why the term virus is not appropriate.
Allow me to emphasize this again: if I choose to copy any of the Emacs code, then the programme I write must be GPLed.
As to your final note, you can't tell. And you can bet it goes on a lot.
Oh, you mean freedom in the 'freedom for Corel' sense.
So to translate what you wrote: The GPL is not pro-freedom as defined by Arandir, it is pro-freedom as defined by GNU, and that's a huge difference.
I cannot but agree. The GNU license protects your software from ever being stolen (in the sense of "deriving benefit from my work whilst preventing others from deriving benefit from theirs"), whilst giving you the option of making a special provision when its protection proves overbearing.
Licenses are restrictive, by definition. What was your problem with that again?
Forgive me if I'm arguing from ignorance, but it's my understanding that I can take BSD code, incorporate it into my proprietary product, and enhance it without making those enhancements available to anyone else.
This is what the GPL is trying to avoid. What's wrong with that? I dislike the idea of others deriving benefit from my work whilst preventing others from deriving benefit from theirs. It's not a fair exchange. So I use a license which allows me to release my code under protection from those who would take advantage in such a way.
But God went to great lengths (he died under torture according to Christians) so that you might be saved from sin.
I've never understood this one. If God is so keen to save me from sin, why did he create me without the inclination to believe in Him?
Analogous to what God did would be if I saved your life, losing my own, after you held me up at gun point and raped my wife and child.
No, analogous to what God does is if I raped your wife and child, asked you whether you believed I loved you, and if you said no, threw you in jail and tossed away the key.
Sin is really its own punishment, believe it or not.
So tell me, why does God choose to create so many people purely to be punished? Please don't refer me to your previous answer "If you can say, for an instant, that God is "just can't wait to throw you into hell" then you don't understand it." - I understand that you think Hell is separation from God, I just want to know why you think He designed us to be sinners when you claim that He "went to great lengths so that you might be saved from sin".
I agree that, on the whole, the atheists I've met are, on average, more willing to critically examine their own beliefs. However.. have you ever tried convincing an atheist that a God in some form might exist? You'll get about as far as trying to convince a Christian that God doesn't exist, yet atheists can't really offer any more proof for their belief than Christians can.
The problem I have with most organised religions is that they try to claim too much. For example, Christianity tries to claim that God is good, but unfortunately He created me without the inclination to believe in Him, for which I am set to languish in Hell for eternity. Thanks a bunch. How good is free will when you're basically faced with the choice of a.) Go with God's will or b.) suffer for it?
Conversely, there is no reason to be an atheist, because everything around you defies explanation. I don't mean that you can't explain some things in terms of others; I mean that there are things that you don't (and maybe can't) understand, and my name for the sum of those things is God. If you want to label me, I would suggest 'gnostic pantheist' as a fairly close approximation.
I make no attempt to anthropomorphise my God; to do so would be, to bastardise a concept from other religions, blasphemous. The only claims that I make about my God are unverifiable. You will find that many atheists are prepared to accept the existence of this form of God - their main problem is usually just the name I give to it.
Money has this habit of accumulating, wheras looks have this habit of deteriorating. So this exchange isn't really fair, because the advantage is always with you.
Don't take it personally. There are a lot of discussions about software patenting, domain name trademarking etc. on Slashdot, and the signal to noise ratio is lower when people get confused over the differences between the three. They are not "synonyms" as you imply.
Also, your original post was more offtopic than Jerf's - at least he mentioned trademarks!
Hamish
p.s. There is much more international co-operation over trademarks and copyright than over patents.
I think I would be more inclined to agree with you if you were arguing that we should use English because other languages have a large number of words borrowed from it.
I seem to remember, once upon a time, stumbling upon a website which was promoting a grassroots approach to the problems of domain name registration: namely, persuading enough ISPs to point to other DNS servers than the 'official' TLD ones, and thereby siezing control. I bookmarked it, but Netscape Ate My Bookmarks, so I never got round to reading how they intended to avoid the 'some animals are more equal than others' scenario.
Does anyone know what I'm talking about here? Could someone please point me to it?
Have you never noticed that the audience's margin of surety decreases the harder (i.e. the closer to the million) the questions get?
And in a quizshow, there is a right answer. When you vote for a politician or party, you tend to have to make compromises (unless you're unbelievably lucky).
The kinds of minds that make good soldiers and the kinds of minds that make good voters are probably too dissimilar. The former must not question any authority higher than themselves, wheras that is exactly what you must ask the latter to do.
Linux is a moving target. For how long has the source to 2.2.12 been open? Of course it's not possible to guarantee zero security holes, even where the source is available. The question is whether or not opening the source is a benefit to bug-spotting; the answer is a priori yes.
I don't think it's a question of 'no-one will be bothered to work it out' - after all, doesn't Red Hat include non-free (in all senses of the word) software (such as MetroX?), for which they need to work out royalties anyway?
Rather, I think that what would happen is that Red Hat (or other less scrupulous vendors) would 'fork' "Slightly Better FTP" into a GPL version, and then put it on the CD. Then no-one has to pay any royalties to anyone.
Assuming we're still talking about a royalties-based version of the TGPL, of course.
Surely the benefit of releasing your product as open source now is the same as it has ever been - that in three year's time, it will have many fewer bugs in it than your competitors' products? The TGPL provides protection against other companies taking your code into their own product.
Anyway, why does the company in your hypothetical situation bother to release the source code after three years? Why not just keep it closed?
Hamish
Re:No, there *AREN'T* competing telcos
on
ISP War in the UK
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· Score: 1
You know that you can get what basically amounts to a BT line from LocalTel for less money (they lease the line from BT and undercut their charges by 10%)? Plus, then you can go to screaming.net and get free evening and weekend Internet access. I imagine C&W would be forced by Oftel to provide the same sort of arrangement.
But I cannot agree with you more about the TransCo model. It makes so much sense. I wonder whether it would work if everything under the road was owned by a single company, and roadworks could be better-coordinated (like the Heinekin advert)?
Here are a couple of pairs of sentences that do not fit well together:
1a.But then you have less optimal members of society disguising themselves as more desireable mates. 1b.Cosmetics do not give any kind of drastic improvement in the chances of any one female to secure a mate simply for the reason that she can't wear makeup all the time.
So I take it you're going with 1b rather than 1a, because it's difficult ground to argue that cosmetics throw the balance of natural selection but medicines don't.
But natural selection is skewed in all sorts of ways: for instance, rich old men often wear young blondes on their arm, and how they look when they're not wearing their makeup is a secondary factor. Even where this is not the case, simply increasing your chances during the stages of first contact improves your subsequent chances of reproduction.
Conversely, the use of medicines significantly increases the likelihood of a negative genetic trait being continued into the next generation.
2a.Also, it can be demonstrated that whatever is good for the individual is good for the society as a whole in most cases. 2b.I suggest we all go back to our self serving greed and trust nature to correct itself
Now 2a is rather difficult to defend when we're talking natural selection, which is what you're suggesting in 2b. So which is it?
"Monsanto, the US biotech corporation, has indicated that it is considering a major climbdown over genetically modified food in Britain. It has offered to use its vast gene databases to help plant breeders create new varieties of crops using traditional cross-breeding techniques." The Guardian, Sunday September 26th 1999
"The Soil Association yesterday described as "hugely significant" indications from the US biotech company Monsanto that it might be prepared to rethink its commitment to genetically modified food in Britain." The Guardian, Monday 27th September 1999
Now... what's going on here? I suspect that Monsanto is trying to regain shareholder confidence (after the Deutschbank recommended against investment in GM foods), or trying to bolster PR and associate their name with benevolence before they hit us with GM food again five or ten years from now. The less cynical side of me, however, is rather hoping that they've actually rethought the direction of their business due to public pressure. Power to the people!
And by the same token torturing a few thousand animals to death for my own amusement isn't going to be the end of the world either.
I quite agree, but that wasn't where I was going with this point.
Increasing the longevity of humans by the use of medicine creates as many problems as it solves. The reason why we're all into the idea of developing medicines is self-preservation, as you quite rightly pointed out, but it's individual, not species-wide, self-interest. So what's the difference between that and cosmetics - when in fact you've got a good chance of promoting your individual self-interest by painting your face to give you a higher chance of choosing a mate of superior breeding quality?! People don't make drugs for the benefit of the human race; they make drugs for their own (financial) benefit, i.e. for their own self-interest. Cosmetics manufacturers are just the same.
Slashdot Mirror
Allow me to explain why!
In 'english.au', Linus pronounces Linux 'Linux'. Americans, confused by an unfamiliar phoneme, start pronouncing it using a short 'i', English's closest equivalent. Linus moves to America and eventually starts pronouncing Linux 'Linnux' because it's too much effort to fight the tide.
I maintain that the correct way to pronounce it is using the appropriate transliteration (that's not the right word - whatever the phonetic equivalent of transliteration is). So in English, it's 'Lie-nux'.
Just my 2 Euro's worth.
Hamish
Viruses don't approach you first and ask you whether or not you wish to be infected. That's the crucial difference and that's why the term virus is not appropriate.
Allow me to emphasize this again: if I choose to copy any of the Emacs code, then the programme I write must be GPLed.
As to your final note, you can't tell. And you can bet it goes on a lot.
Hamish
Oh, you mean freedom in the 'freedom for Corel' sense.
So to translate what you wrote: The GPL is not pro-freedom as defined by Arandir, it is pro-freedom as defined by GNU, and that's a huge difference.
I cannot but agree. The GNU license protects your software from ever being stolen (in the sense of "deriving benefit from my work whilst preventing others from deriving benefit from theirs"), whilst giving you the option of making a special provision when its protection proves overbearing.
Licenses are restrictive, by definition. What was your problem with that again?
Hamish
Forgive me if I'm arguing from ignorance, but it's my understanding that I can take BSD code, incorporate it into my proprietary product, and enhance it without making those enhancements available to anyone else.
This is what the GPL is trying to avoid. What's wrong with that? I dislike the idea of others deriving benefit from my work whilst preventing others from deriving benefit from theirs. It's not a fair exchange. So I use a license which allows me to release my code under protection from those who would take advantage in such a way.
Hamish
But God went to great lengths (he died under torture according to Christians) so that you might be saved from sin.
I've never understood this one. If God is so keen to save me from sin, why did he create me without the inclination to believe in Him?
Analogous to what God did would be if I saved your life, losing my own, after you held me up at gun point and raped my wife and child.
No, analogous to what God does is if I raped your wife and child, asked you whether you believed I loved you, and if you said no, threw you in jail and tossed away the key.
Sin is really its own punishment, believe it or not.
So tell me, why does God choose to create so many people purely to be punished? Please don't refer me to your previous answer "If you can say, for an instant, that God is "just can't wait to throw you into hell" then you don't understand it." - I understand that you think Hell is separation from God, I just want to know why you think He designed us to be sinners when you claim that He "went to great lengths so that you might be saved from sin".
Hamish
I agree that, on the whole, the atheists I've met are, on average, more willing to critically examine their own beliefs. However.. have you ever tried convincing an atheist that a God in some form might exist? You'll get about as far as trying to convince a Christian that God doesn't exist, yet atheists can't really offer any more proof for their belief than Christians can.
The problem I have with most organised religions is that they try to claim too much. For example, Christianity tries to claim that God is good, but unfortunately He created me without the inclination to believe in Him, for which I am set to languish in Hell for eternity. Thanks a bunch. How good is free will when you're basically faced with the choice of a.) Go with God's will or b.) suffer for it?
Conversely, there is no reason to be an atheist, because everything around you defies explanation. I don't mean that you can't explain some things in terms of others; I mean that there are things that you don't (and maybe can't) understand, and my name for the sum of those things is God. If you want to label me, I would suggest 'gnostic pantheist' as a fairly close approximation.
I make no attempt to anthropomorphise my God; to do so would be, to bastardise a concept from other religions, blasphemous. The only claims that I make about my God are unverifiable. You will find that many atheists are prepared to accept the existence of this form of God - their main problem is usually just the name I give to it.
Hamish
Bruce, plenty of your comments are much more positively-moderated than they would be if they had been written by someone without your name.
I never see you complaining about that.
Now, some of your comments have been more negatively-moderated than they deserve.
So it is with karma, in the truest sense.
Hamish
Money has this habit of accumulating, wheras looks have this habit of deteriorating. So this exchange isn't really fair, because the advantage is always with you.
Hamish
Don't take it personally. There are a lot of discussions about software patenting, domain name trademarking etc. on Slashdot, and the signal to noise ratio is lower when people get confused over the differences between the three. They are not "synonyms" as you imply.
Also, your original post was more offtopic than Jerf's - at least he mentioned trademarks!
Hamish
p.s. There is much more international co-operation over trademarks and copyright than over patents.
I think I would be more inclined to agree with you if you were arguing that we should use English because other languages have a large number of words borrowed from it.
Hamish
(for those who have never seen Paxman in action, the "erm..." always signifies the start of something interesting!)
Hamish
Perhaps it's in the interest of certain software companies (naming no names, obviou~1) that drivers are released single-platform, binary-only?
Hamish
I seem to remember, once upon a time, stumbling upon a website which was promoting a grassroots approach to the problems of domain name registration: namely, persuading enough ISPs to point to other DNS servers than the 'official' TLD ones, and thereby siezing control. I bookmarked it, but Netscape Ate My Bookmarks, so I never got round to reading how they intended to avoid the 'some animals are more equal than others' scenario.
Does anyone know what I'm talking about here? Could someone please point me to it?
thanks,
Hamish
Have you never noticed that the audience's margin of surety decreases the harder (i.e. the closer to the million) the questions get?
And in a quizshow, there is a right answer. When you vote for a politician or party, you tend to have to make compromises (unless you're unbelievably lucky).
Hamish
The kinds of minds that make good soldiers and the kinds of minds that make good voters are probably too dissimilar. The former must not question any authority higher than themselves, wheras that is exactly what you must ask the latter to do.
Hamish
Come on, Brett, you can do better than that.
Linux is a moving target. For how long has the source to 2.2.12 been open? Of course it's not possible to guarantee zero security holes, even where the source is available. The question is whether or not opening the source is a benefit to bug-spotting; the answer is a priori yes.
Hamish
Isn't the copyright holder, rather than the deriver, who has this say-so?
Hamish
I don't think it's a question of 'no-one will be bothered to work it out' - after all, doesn't Red Hat include non-free (in all senses of the word) software (such as MetroX?), for which they need to work out royalties anyway?
Rather, I think that what would happen is that Red Hat (or other less scrupulous vendors) would 'fork' "Slightly Better FTP" into a GPL version, and then put it on the CD. Then no-one has to pay any royalties to anyone.
Assuming we're still talking about a royalties-based version of the TGPL, of course.
Hamish
Surely the benefit of releasing your product as open source now is the same as it has ever been - that in three year's time, it will have many fewer bugs in it than your competitors' products? The TGPL provides protection against other companies taking your code into their own product.
Anyway, why does the company in your hypothetical situation bother to release the source code after three years? Why not just keep it closed?
Hamish
You know that you can get what basically amounts to a BT line from LocalTel for less money (they lease the line from BT and undercut their charges by 10%)? Plus, then you can go to screaming.net and get free evening and weekend Internet access. I imagine C&W would be forced by Oftel to provide the same sort of arrangement.
But I cannot agree with you more about the TransCo model. It makes so much sense. I wonder whether it would work if everything under the road was owned by a single company, and roadworks could be better-coordinated (like the Heinekin advert)?
Hamish
Here are a couple of pairs of sentences that do not fit well together:
1a.But then you have less optimal members of society disguising themselves as more desireable mates.
1b.Cosmetics do not give any kind of drastic improvement in the chances of any one female to secure a mate simply for the reason that she can't wear makeup all the time.
So I take it you're going with 1b rather than 1a, because it's difficult ground to argue that cosmetics throw the balance of natural selection but medicines don't.
But natural selection is skewed in all sorts of ways: for instance, rich old men often wear young blondes on their arm, and how they look when they're not wearing their makeup is a secondary factor. Even where this is not the case, simply increasing your chances during the stages of first contact improves your subsequent chances of reproduction.
Conversely, the use of medicines significantly increases the likelihood of a negative genetic trait being continued into the next generation.
2a.Also, it can be demonstrated that whatever is good for the individual is good for the society as a whole in most cases.
2b.I suggest we all go back to our self serving greed and trust nature to correct itself
Now 2a is rather difficult to defend when we're talking natural selection, which is what you're suggesting in 2b. So which is it?
Hamish
Some of the seeds that are now supplied to farmers have been modified to not be able to breed at all.
Some of the dinosaurs that were supplied to Jurassic Park were modified not to be able to breed at all.
I know that was fiction, but Monsanto have made promises in the past which have turned out to be less than the whole truth.
Hamish
"Monsanto, the US biotech corporation, has indicated that it is considering a major climbdown over genetically modified food in Britain. It has offered to use its vast gene databases to help plant breeders create new varieties of crops using traditional cross-breeding techniques."
The Guardian, Sunday September 26th 1999
"The Soil Association yesterday described as "hugely significant" indications from the US biotech company Monsanto that it might be prepared to rethink its commitment to genetically modified food in Britain."
The Guardian, Monday 27th September 1999
Now... what's going on here? I suspect that Monsanto is trying to regain shareholder confidence (after the Deutschbank recommended against investment in GM foods), or trying to bolster PR and associate their name with benevolence before they hit us with GM food again five or ten years from now. The less cynical side of me, however, is rather hoping that they've actually rethought the direction of their business due to public pressure. Power to the people!
Hamish
And by the same token torturing a few thousand animals to death for my own amusement isn't going to be the end of the world either.
I quite agree, but that wasn't where I was going with this point.
Increasing the longevity of humans by the use of medicine creates as many problems as it solves. The reason why we're all into the idea of developing medicines is self-preservation, as you quite rightly pointed out, but it's individual, not species-wide, self-interest. So what's the difference between that and cosmetics - when in fact you've got a good chance of promoting your individual self-interest by painting your face to give you a higher chance of choosing a mate of superior breeding quality?! People don't make drugs for the benefit of the human race; they make drugs for their own (financial) benefit, i.e. for their own self-interest. Cosmetics manufacturers are just the same.
Hamish
How about:
Requiring an address to vote?
Requiring a driving license to drink alcohol?
and any other seemingly unconnected restriction/right pairs?
Hamish