The official measurement of volume in the UK is how many double-decker buses would fit into a space. And the measurement of length is always by comparison with Nelson's Column. I'm not sure what the unit for area is, but you could simply divide one by the other, thus measuring area in 'double-decker buses per Nelson's Column'.
As for Surrey, do you mean the ancient county, or the administrative county after chopping off most of south-west London?
No, the person reading the message to does _not_ necessarily know what you're replying to. If you have a one-to-one conversation by mail, quoting might not be needed, although if the person you're replying to is busy or gets a lot of mail then he might appreciate a bit of context to jog his memory.
But on a public list, most of the recipients cannot be expected to instantly recall what you're talking about. Especially not if there are two or three discussions going on at the same time. Help them out by writing your message so that any reader could instantly get the gist of things.
That doesn't mean making them scroll through pages and pages of quoted text. Just select a few lines which are relevant. Alternatively, you could include comments like '[style of quoting in messages] ' to make it clear what you're talking about. Or you could avoid quoting altogether and rephrase things in your own words (like this message).
If you're reading messages on a handheld, you can set up procmail to summarize them (eg show the first two non-comment lines). But also remember that a message like 'I agree' followed by pages and pages of quoted junk (as people tend to produce with Outlook) is also unreadable on a handheld.
You _can_ set up Outlook to do things properly. If you have Outlook 98 or later you can tell it to post in plain text; I think the option is probably there in older versions too, though you have to dig for it.
That would constitute a restriction on _use_ rather than on copying and distribution. Are you really in favour of legally-binding click-through licences and all the other unpleasant things that big proprietary software vendors try to force on the market, just in order to have some extra restriction in the GPL?
In my personal opinion, restrictions on _using_ a program make it non-free. RMS criticized Apple's APSL because it attempted to restrict the act of running a program, something which the GPL explicitly does not restrict.
There is at least one program that does roughly what you say - GPLtrans, which translates between human languages. The author has an unusual interpretation of the GPL, namely that just using the program on a publicly viewable website compels you to provide the source. IMHO GPLtrans despite its name is not a true GPLed program because of this strange restriction (which may not carry any legal weight, but still makes the program non-free).
The ISP should feel free to log anything. Anyone who wants their data to be secure will be using https or ssh anyway.
Okay, that might be a bit extreme, but it seems the only workable and enforceable policy. If you choose any other criterion, there will always be some unscrupulous ISPs which ignore it, and it gives people a false sense of security.
I've read that the only withdrawal symptom you get from giving up caffeine is a headache. This has certainly been my own experience. But then I'm not a proper caffeine junkie.
I'm not an IP lawyer - I'm a fresh CS graduate so if anyone wants to employ me get in touch;) - but to my knowledge copyright lawyer does not say that distribution is forbidden unless stated otherwise.
IANAL also, of course. Maybe you have to include the magic words 'All rights reserved'. I'm not sure. But I do know that if you buy a book, you are not allowed to copy it except as permitted by the law for fair dealing or library privelege. This applies even if the book doesn't contain any sort of 'licence' or explicit statement of what you may and may not do, because (AFAIK) even something without any copyright notice is still copyrighted. It follows that a piece of software without any copyright statement or licence works the same way. I have plenty of old software at home that doesn't come with any sort of licensing nonsense, but I'd still be breaking the law if I distributed copies of it.
So if you want to ignore the GPL, that's fine - just treat the program like any other literary work that doesn't come with a licence granting you extra rights. You can copy it as allowed for fair dealing, but not otherwise.
So the GPL doesn't have any meaning. That's fine. But remember, the software is still covered by copyright, and under copyright law you are not allowed to distribute it without a licence.
The GPL explicitly says 'you do not have to agree to this License, since you have not signed it'. The GPL grants you extra rights above what copyright law gives you by default; if somebody just deleted the COPYING file then you would not be permitted to distribute the software at all.
Are you sure that software patents, as we now have them, are a good thing? Is it a good thing to have thousands of patents on trivial ideas, or trivial combinations of existing ideas, any one of which you could unwittingly violate in writing your program?
You could speculate about having a 'proper' software patent system in which patents are only granted for new and inventive algorithms that required some amount of research. (I'd be opposed to that too BTW - I see no evidence that such research would not be done anyway, without needing to grant a monopoly on the results.) But that's not what we have now, and it's not the choice being offered in places like the EU where lobbyists are pushing for software patents.
The choice is either a broken patent system that damages competition in the software industry, creates a legal minefield for developers, and effectively allows patents on business and educational methods - or no software patents at all, relying on copyright to reward authors.
Patents are a good thing for their intended use, which is physical goods (including computer hardware). They do not make sense for computer software; in this field, copyright is the best way to secure rewards for authors. Patents on computer programs create a legal minefield for small developers and allow companies to get monopolies on business methods, by phrasing their patent as one on software.
The critique at lpf.ai.mit.edu was written several years ago, but the points it makes are just as true today. Also freepatents.org has some useful links.
People who oppose software patents are not (in general) opposed to patents themselves. It's just that patents are inappropriate for computer software.
The answer is for gnutella to communicate tunnelled over https. Because https is encrypted it will be impossible to tell whether a packet is from Gnutella, or from somebody shopping online. Or at least it will be more difficult.
Alternatively you could tunnel gnutella through ssh, which was designed for this sort of thing. But https might be more fun - can you imagine the headlines if 'ISP accidentally blocks e-commerce'?
D'oh! What I posted was what my maths teacher at school told me. But it turns out he was wrong. According to the OED, billion = million ^ 2, trillion = million ^ 3.
So there isn't any real advantage to one system over the other - but they are still incompatible once you go above 'million'.
I've never used it but apparently TeXmacs might do what you want. I don't know what formats it can import though.
Re:x86 is popular to hate, but not that bad really
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Is The x86 Obsolete?
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ARM was not designed for embedded systems either, at least not originally. The ARM1 and ARM2 from which the instruction set is derived were general-purpose CPUs (and very good / cheap ones too).
I can't think of any examples right now, but I'm sure plenty will come up next time I watch a wildlife or 'geography' type programme featuring animals or some ancient tribe. Which will probably not be for a while:-)
Re:x86 is popular to hate, but not that bad really
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Is The x86 Obsolete?
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· Score: 2
It's not necessarily true that RISC code is good for compilers. ARM assembler is pleasant to code by hand, but most compilers generate relatively poor code for it. At least, gcc was not blazingly fast on ARM last I checked, and neither was Norcroft C.
I thought you brits used the million->milliard->billion system instead of the million->billion->trillion system?
Most people have given up on trying to preserve the binary system (thousand = 1000 ^ 1, million = 1000 ^ 2, billion = 1000 ^ 4, trillion = 1000 ^ 8) and switched to the American unary version (1000 ^ [1, 2, 3, 4]). That's a shame, because the English version covers a wider range of numbers with less redundancy (compare binary vs unary numbers).
However I still wouldn't use 'billion' or 'trillion' because it's ambiguous. You can say 'milliard' for 1000 ^ 3 but that sounds a bit archaic. Best to use computer-style suffixes, eg £5G is 5 milliard pounds.
We all know about sheep and fish, and people just put up with them. But it's a bad idea to introduce yet more special cases.
As for the trend being towards -s plurals in the long run, what about words like 'antelope', which used to have a plural form but don't seem to any longer? It looks to me as if people are pretentiously discarding the plural for any vaguely foreign-looking word.
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No, no, you've got it all wrong.
The official measurement of volume in the UK is how many double-decker buses would fit into a space. And the measurement of length is always by comparison with Nelson's Column. I'm not sure what the unit for area is, but you could simply divide one by the other, thus measuring area in 'double-decker buses per Nelson's Column'.
As for Surrey, do you mean the ancient county, or the administrative county after chopping off most of south-west London?
You can make kickstart work over NFS. The problem is updating each machine automatically. For that you can use autorpm.
Window manager plug: icewm can easily be set up to be inimal but still functional (start menu, taskbar, nothing else).
No, the person reading the message to does _not_ necessarily know what you're replying to. If you have a one-to-one conversation by mail, quoting might not be needed, although if the person you're replying to is busy or gets a lot of mail then he might appreciate a bit of context to jog his memory.
But on a public list, most of the recipients cannot be expected to instantly recall what you're talking about. Especially not if there are two or three discussions going on at the same time. Help them out by writing your message so that any reader could instantly get the gist of things.
That doesn't mean making them scroll through pages and pages of quoted text. Just select a few lines which are relevant. Alternatively, you could include comments like '[style of quoting in messages] ' to make it clear what you're talking about. Or you could avoid quoting altogether and rephrase things in your own words (like this message).
If you're reading messages on a handheld, you can set up procmail to summarize them (eg show the first two non-comment lines). But also remember that a message like 'I agree' followed by pages and pages of quoted junk (as people tend to produce with Outlook) is also unreadable on a handheld.
You _can_ set up Outlook to do things properly. If you have Outlook 98 or later you can tell it to post in plain text; I think the option is probably there in older versions too, though you have to dig for it.
That would constitute a restriction on _use_ rather than on copying and distribution. Are you really in favour of legally-binding click-through licences and all the other unpleasant things that big proprietary software vendors try to force on the market, just in order to have some extra restriction in the GPL?
In my personal opinion, restrictions on _using_ a program make it non-free. RMS criticized Apple's APSL because it attempted to restrict the act of running a program, something which the GPL explicitly does not restrict.
There is at least one program that does roughly what you say - GPLtrans, which translates between human languages. The author has an unusual interpretation of the GPL, namely that just using the program on a publicly viewable website compels you to provide the source. IMHO GPLtrans despite its name is not a true GPLed program because of this strange restriction (which may not carry any legal weight, but still makes the program non-free).
The ISP should feel free to log anything. Anyone who wants their data to be secure will be using https or ssh anyway.
Okay, that might be a bit extreme, but it seems the only workable and enforceable policy. If you choose any other criterion, there will always be some unscrupulous ISPs which ignore it, and it gives people a false sense of security.
I've read that the only withdrawal symptom you get from giving up caffeine is a headache. This has certainly been my own experience. But then I'm not a proper caffeine junkie.
IANAL also, of course. Maybe you have to include the magic words 'All rights reserved'. I'm not sure. But I do know that if you buy a book, you are not allowed to copy it except as permitted by the law for fair dealing or library privelege. This applies even if the book doesn't contain any sort of 'licence' or explicit statement of what you may and may not do, because (AFAIK) even something without any copyright notice is still copyrighted. It follows that a piece of software without any copyright statement or licence works the same way. I have plenty of old software at home that doesn't come with any sort of licensing nonsense, but I'd still be breaking the law if I distributed copies of it.
So if you want to ignore the GPL, that's fine - just treat the program like any other literary work that doesn't come with a licence granting you extra rights. You can copy it as allowed for fair dealing, but not otherwise.
So the GPL doesn't have any meaning. That's fine. But remember, the software is still covered by copyright, and under copyright law you are not allowed to distribute it without a licence.
The GPL explicitly says 'you do not have to agree to this License, since you have not signed it'. The GPL grants you extra rights above what copyright law gives you by default; if somebody just deleted the COPYING file then you would not be permitted to distribute the software at all.
The answer is easy - all French companies can use strong encryption for their internal communications! Er, wait a minute...
Are you sure that software patents, as we now have them, are a good thing? Is it a good thing to have thousands of patents on trivial ideas, or trivial combinations of existing ideas, any one of which you could unwittingly violate in writing your program?
You could speculate about having a 'proper' software patent system in which patents are only granted for new and inventive algorithms that required some amount of research. (I'd be opposed to that too BTW - I see no evidence that such research would not be done anyway, without needing to grant a monopoly on the results.) But that's not what we have now, and it's not the choice being offered in places like the EU where lobbyists are pushing for software patents.
The choice is either a broken patent system that damages competition in the software industry, creates a legal minefield for developers, and effectively allows patents on business and educational methods - or no software patents at all, relying on copyright to reward authors.
Couldn't you just cross through the small print and then cash it?
Patents are a good thing for their intended use, which is physical goods (including computer hardware). They do not make sense for computer software; in this field, copyright is the best way to secure rewards for authors. Patents on computer programs create a legal minefield for small developers and allow companies to get monopolies on business methods, by phrasing their patent as one on software.
The critique at lpf.ai.mit.edu was written several years ago, but the points it makes are just as true today. Also freepatents.org has some useful links.
People who oppose software patents are not (in general) opposed to patents themselves. It's just that patents are inappropriate for computer software.
The answer is for gnutella to communicate tunnelled over https. Because https is encrypted it will be impossible to tell whether a packet is from Gnutella, or from somebody shopping online. Or at least it will be more difficult.
Alternatively you could tunnel gnutella through ssh, which was designed for this sort of thing. But https might be more fun - can you imagine the headlines if 'ISP accidentally blocks e-commerce'?
BTW, you can help stop software patents being introduced in Europe by putting your name to EuroLinux's petition.
D'oh! What I posted was what my maths teacher at school told me. But it turns out he was wrong. According to the OED, billion = million ^ 2, trillion = million ^ 3.
So there isn't any real advantage to one system over the other - but they are still incompatible once you go above 'million'.
I've never used it but apparently TeXmacs might do what you want. I don't know what formats it can import though.
ARM was not designed for embedded systems either, at least not originally. The ARM1 and ARM2 from which the instruction set is derived were general-purpose CPUs (and very good / cheap ones too).
No, 1000 x 10^3 is a thousand thousand, ie a million. A milliard is a thousand million. And a mallard is like a hammer.
I can't think of any examples right now, but I'm sure plenty will come up next time I watch a wildlife or 'geography' type programme featuring animals or some ancient tribe. Which will probably not be for a while :-)
It's not necessarily true that RISC code is good for compilers. ARM assembler is pleasant to code by hand, but most compilers generate relatively poor code for it. At least, gcc was not blazingly fast on ARM last I checked, and neither was Norcroft C.
A milliard is a kind of duck.
Most people have given up on trying to preserve the binary system (thousand = 1000 ^ 1, million = 1000 ^ 2, billion = 1000 ^ 4, trillion = 1000 ^ 8) and switched to the American unary version (1000 ^ [1, 2, 3, 4]). That's a shame, because the English version covers a wider range of numbers with less redundancy (compare binary vs unary numbers).
However I still wouldn't use 'billion' or 'trillion' because it's ambiguous. You can say 'milliard' for 1000 ^ 3 but that sounds a bit archaic. Best to use computer-style suffixes, eg £5G is 5 milliard pounds.
And you'd better not even mention 'kilobytes'We all know about sheep and fish, and people just put up with them. But it's a bad idea to introduce yet more special cases.
As for the trend being towards -s plurals in the long run, what about words like 'antelope', which used to have a plural form but don't seem to any longer? It looks to me as if people are pretentiously discarding the plural for any vaguely foreign-looking word.