1) There is no legally recognized concept of "abandonware." Unlike with trademarks, copyrights do not require evidence of enforcement or support or anything other than assertion of copyright (and proof of copyright, if disputed).
2) Even if there were, win95 would clearly not be abandonware, as other versions of Windows are still supported. One can hardly say that v2.0 of a program is "abandoned" because the company only supports v3.0 - the program is still supported.
Well, that was later, in the Mac era. In the Apple ][ era (and even early Mac era) most kids liked the Apples - they had more games and were easier to use than IBM-clones, which pretty much just ran a bunch of business software on DOS. By the mid 90s the Macs were just a leftover, so obviously nobody liked them, since by then everybody had PCs at home.
While QuickTime was certainly ahead of its time, and the format itself is not bad, the clients are simply horrible. Perhaps they were okay for the early 90s, but they never progressed; hell the current version of the Windows client still hasn't even implemented a full-screen mode...
I thought the whole point was an open-source replacement for Exchange?
Isn't this the same Miguel de Icaza who started GNOME because KDE was dependent on the (at the time) proprietary Qt libraries? If we shouldn't use KDE because it's proprietary, why should we use his proprietary software? Because the money goes to him instead of TrollTech?
There's also some basic philosophical differences. Windows is ease-of-use-first, while Linux (and all UNIX systems) tend to be power-first. This is manifested in a variety of ways - even the best graphical UNIX development tools, for example, tend to be far more command-line-driven than their Windows brethren; I don't think you could claim that ddd (debugger) is nearly as full-featured or intuitive as the one in MSVC++, for example. Or powerful text editors? In Windows, you have UltraEdit32, among many others, while in UNIX you need to use either vi or emacs to reach the same editing power, both of which are far harder to use than UltraEdit32 is (albeit even more powerful).
Granted, Linux is getting better - you can now do simple things like configure X graphically with XF86Setup, rivalling Windows's auto-configure desktop options (though it's still not perfect). But there's still some ways to go.
If the experiments are able to produce human-like creatures without coitus and traditional conception, the only reasonable conclusion that can be drawn is that the "soul" does not exist, and that humans are no more sophisticated than the most advanced carbon-based machine we can invent.
I'm not aware of any major religious leaders who argue this point in the first place, so you're just knocking down a straw man. To argue this position would be to argue that babies conceived through in-vitro fertilization - already a common practice - do not have souls. I'm not aware of any major religious leaders having argued this.
In addition, producing "human-like creatures" is not akin to producing humans. If the hypothesis is that humans have souls and animals do not, the mere fact that you are able to produce a human-like creature does not refute this hypothesis - it is entirely possible that this human-like creature has no soul, while "real" humans do have souls (and thus the "human-like" - the similarity being only physical).
Mind you, I don't believe in the existence of souls, human or otherwise, but I don't see how this research could disprove their existence.
I don't see how this is a troll. Michael posted a misleading headline, and misleadingly updating it without using the update: tag. This poster was merely pointing that out.
The original headline read "Interplay Targeted by Bio-Warfare."
I disagree - the GPL is also an English text, protected by copyright law (it even includes a lengthy philosophical section in the Preamble). The function of the GPL is not protected, as it is not patented. This is why the MPL is legal, despite being heavily GPL-influenced, because it does not contain any actual stolen-from-the-GPL wording.
If you're going to use the Artistic License, I'd strongely suggest using v2.0, the new one created for licensing Perl 6. The original Artistic License (used on all previous Perl versions) is badly written - in its attempt to be clever rather than legalistic, it ends up being extremely vague in places, so much so that depending on the legal interpretation of some of the vague passages the license might not be a free software license at all.
Of course the problem with your analogy is that the Libertarian Party would be unlikely to follow the strategies and policies laid out in Das Kapital, while our hypothetical author of GPL software is by the very action of GPL'ing his software following GNU's strategy.
Whoohoo! In this age of a million open source licenses, it's nice to see that a sensible license that fills a gap in open source gets approved while the frivolous crap gets flushed.
I'm not denying that it fills a gap, but a cursory reading of the license doesn't seem to indicate to me what gap it's filling. Why was it not possible/desirable to license Python under one of the existing Free Software licenses, and instead necessary to come up with another one?
No, the entire reason the GPL exists is to promote Free Software; it's the GNU Foundation's opinion that allowing modification of the GPL would not work towards this goal. The main concern is that there would be a plethora of "GPL-derived" but not Open Source or Free Software licenses, thus diluting the usefulness of the license.
The GPL is, in its essence, an ideological manifesto. Disallowing others from modifying your manifesto is not inconsistent with the GNU philosophy - the only thing they desire is that you allow others to modify your code, not your thoughts.
If you'd read the GPL, you would answer your own questions. The GPL is a copyrighted document that grants you explicit permission to redistribute it in unmodified form. Thus the GPLed software that includes the GPL license is obviously not in violation, as they are explicitly granted a right to distribute it. What is not granted is a right to modify the GPL itself. The reasoning for this was that if modification were allowed it would dilute the usefulness of the license, as "GPL-derived" licenses might not even be Free Software or Open Source.
You can however provided added or amended licensing conditions without modifying the actual text of the GPL; for example "this program may be distributed under the terms of the GNU GPL with the added requirement that [blah blah]."
I agree, that's the major thing I see wrong with their service. If I actually pay for an mp3 at prices even 50% of a physical album, I expect to get near CD quality. And I certainly expect my paid mp3 to be at least as good quality as the free ones I can get off filesharing services. Now unless they give WAVs there will always be someone unsatisfied, but they can at least do better than 128kbps. 320kbps, 256kbps, even 192kbps, or perhaps LAME VBR at a high setting would all be acceptable to me.
Yeah; I'd agree. If you think a DivX is "good enough," you're certainly not going to shell out $30 for a DVD, not to mention a DVD player. But an argument might be made that this online movie trading is cutting into movie rentals (e.g. Blockbuster), which both hurts that industry and by proxy the MPAA (since they can't sell as many rental copies to Blockbuster).
Slashdot Mirror
Well, the GNU Free Documentation License is probably closer to what you're looking for as a starting point.
1) There is no legally recognized concept of "abandonware." Unlike with trademarks, copyrights do not require evidence of enforcement or support or anything other than assertion of copyright (and proof of copyright, if disputed).
2) Even if there were, win95 would clearly not be abandonware, as other versions of Windows are still supported. One can hardly say that v2.0 of a program is "abandoned" because the company only supports v3.0 - the program is still supported.
Well, that was later, in the Mac era. In the Apple ][ era (and even early Mac era) most kids liked the Apples - they had more games and were easier to use than IBM-clones, which pretty much just ran a bunch of business software on DOS. By the mid 90s the Macs were just a leftover, so obviously nobody liked them, since by then everybody had PCs at home.
While QuickTime was certainly ahead of its time, and the format itself is not bad, the clients are simply horrible. Perhaps they were okay for the early 90s, but they never progressed; hell the current version of the Windows client still hasn't even implemented a full-screen mode...
I thought the whole point was an open-source replacement for Exchange?
Isn't this the same Miguel de Icaza who started GNOME because KDE was dependent on the (at the time) proprietary Qt libraries? If we shouldn't use KDE because it's proprietary, why should we use his proprietary software? Because the money goes to him instead of TrollTech?
There's also some basic philosophical differences. Windows is ease-of-use-first, while Linux (and all UNIX systems) tend to be power-first. This is manifested in a variety of ways - even the best graphical UNIX development tools, for example, tend to be far more command-line-driven than their Windows brethren; I don't think you could claim that ddd (debugger) is nearly as full-featured or intuitive as the one in MSVC++, for example. Or powerful text editors? In Windows, you have UltraEdit32, among many others, while in UNIX you need to use either vi or emacs to reach the same editing power, both of which are far harder to use than UltraEdit32 is (albeit even more powerful).
Granted, Linux is getting better - you can now do simple things like configure X graphically with XF86Setup, rivalling Windows's auto-configure desktop options (though it's still not perfect). But there's still some ways to go.
Except the Connector is proprietary.
If the experiments are able to produce human-like creatures without coitus and traditional conception, the only reasonable conclusion that can be drawn is that the "soul" does not exist, and that humans are no more sophisticated than the most advanced carbon-based machine we can invent.
I'm not aware of any major religious leaders who argue this point in the first place, so you're just knocking down a straw man. To argue this position would be to argue that babies conceived through in-vitro fertilization - already a common practice - do not have souls. I'm not aware of any major religious leaders having argued this.
In addition, producing "human-like creatures" is not akin to producing humans. If the hypothesis is that humans have souls and animals do not, the mere fact that you are able to produce a human-like creature does not refute this hypothesis - it is entirely possible that this human-like creature has no soul, while "real" humans do have souls (and thus the "human-like" - the similarity being only physical).
Mind you, I don't believe in the existence of souls, human or otherwise, but I don't see how this research could disprove their existence.
Not to mention that sometimes I type a 2-paragraph reply and it tells me there's still 17 seconds left in the 20 seconds wait...
it appears in response to criticism michael has changed the headline.
without using the update tag of course.
I don't see how this is a troll. Michael posted a misleading headline, and misleadingly updating it without using the update: tag. This poster was merely pointing that out.
The original headline read "Interplay Targeted by Bio-Warfare."
Michael is also an idiot.
abusing +2 since 1998
The headline was edited, probably in response to criticism such as this. It originally read "Interplay Targeted by Biowarfare."
Whoever moderated this off-topic must not have ever written any Lisp code...
Of course, the same could be said about retail employees.
Remember you are dealing with people who cant handle jobs that require thought.
I remember that every time I talk to tech support or a clueless code monkey...
Uhh, it's not virus code. It may be deliberately defective audio data, but it's certainly not self-propagating code. In fact, it's not code at all.
I disagree - the GPL is also an English text, protected by copyright law (it even includes a lengthy philosophical section in the Preamble). The function of the GPL is not protected, as it is not patented. This is why the MPL is legal, despite being heavily GPL-influenced, because it does not contain any actual stolen-from-the-GPL wording.
If you're going to use the Artistic License, I'd strongely suggest using v2.0, the new one created for licensing Perl 6. The original Artistic License (used on all previous Perl versions) is badly written - in its attempt to be clever rather than legalistic, it ends up being extremely vague in places, so much so that depending on the legal interpretation of some of the vague passages the license might not be a free software license at all.
Of course the problem with your analogy is that the Libertarian Party would be unlikely to follow the strategies and policies laid out in Das Kapital, while our hypothetical author of GPL software is by the very action of GPL'ing his software following GNU's strategy.
Whoohoo! In this age of a million open source licenses, it's nice to see that a sensible license that fills a gap in open source gets approved while the frivolous crap gets flushed.
I'm not denying that it fills a gap, but a cursory reading of the license doesn't seem to indicate to me what gap it's filling. Why was it not possible/desirable to license Python under one of the existing Free Software licenses, and instead necessary to come up with another one?
No, the entire reason the GPL exists is to promote Free Software; it's the GNU Foundation's opinion that allowing modification of the GPL would not work towards this goal. The main concern is that there would be a plethora of "GPL-derived" but not Open Source or Free Software licenses, thus diluting the usefulness of the license.
The GPL is, in its essence, an ideological manifesto. Disallowing others from modifying your manifesto is not inconsistent with the GNU philosophy - the only thing they desire is that you allow others to modify your code, not your thoughts.
If you'd read the GPL, you would answer your own questions. The GPL is a copyrighted document that grants you explicit permission to redistribute it in unmodified form. Thus the GPLed software that includes the GPL license is obviously not in violation, as they are explicitly granted a right to distribute it. What is not granted is a right to modify the GPL itself. The reasoning for this was that if modification were allowed it would dilute the usefulness of the license, as "GPL-derived" licenses might not even be Free Software or Open Source.
You can however provided added or amended licensing conditions without modifying the actual text of the GPL; for example "this program may be distributed under the terms of the GNU GPL with the added requirement that [blah blah]."
I agree, that's the major thing I see wrong with their service. If I actually pay for an mp3 at prices even 50% of a physical album, I expect to get near CD quality. And I certainly expect my paid mp3 to be at least as good quality as the free ones I can get off filesharing services. Now unless they give WAVs there will always be someone unsatisfied, but they can at least do better than 128kbps. 320kbps, 256kbps, even 192kbps, or perhaps LAME VBR at a high setting would all be acceptable to me.
Morality and law alike are determined by the weight of the people.
So slavery was moral, and the opposition of the South to the civil rights movement was likewise moral?
Yeah; I'd agree. If you think a DivX is "good enough," you're certainly not going to shell out $30 for a DVD, not to mention a DVD player. But an argument might be made that this online movie trading is cutting into movie rentals (e.g. Blockbuster), which both hurts that industry and by proxy the MPAA (since they can't sell as many rental copies to Blockbuster).