Oh, I didn't mean he's trying to force anybody to use GPL. Clearly that's not true. But it seems one of his objectives for those using the GPL is to make sure they're nice. Now maybe I'm wrong and he doesn't care about how people treat each other, as long as the terms of the license are satisfied, but that's not my impression. I just think licensing and contracts aren't very effective at ensuring people are nice to each other.
I can see already the RMS bashers are out in force, but after reading this article I thought it came off as very reasonable in comparison to many other speeches.
Especially the part where he said it's unethical to charge money for software. Very reasonable.;-)
I'm very happy that once again he defends FREEDOM with GPL 3 and will make the company's who want to use copyleft software play nice with you and me.
I like freedom as much as the next guy (depending on who the next guy is I guess) but that's actually one of the things I don't like so much about his approach. Some of what he's trying to do is just to preserve freedoms for software users, which is great. But some of it is trying to force authors to be nice. Being nice is of course a Good Thing, but it seems to me that trying to enforce being nice via legal agreements is questionable. It's too easy to come up with a way to satisfy the terms of the contract without actually being nice. I think it's better to just guarantee freedoms, and make the agreement as clear as possible so everyone knows what's allowed and what isn't. Then try to build a culture where almost everyone wants to play nice. There will always be bad apples, and trying to block them using the GPL could lead to a huge, cumbersome, obtuse text that people no longer find useful.
RMS says better no software at all than non-free software. I wonder if he realizes that the anti-tivo clause(s) in GPLv3 could actually increase the amount of proprietary software. I mean if there's a market for something, it's going to get sold, so if the vendor can't satisfy themselves or their stakeholders with free software they'll do it with closed software - they won't just all decide not to release a product. Since according to him proprietary software is evil, this new license could actually increase the amount of evil in the world. Now why would he support that?? Maybe he thinks it's better to have closed software running on open hardware than free software running on closed hardware? Maybe he should change the name of the foundation to the Free Software and Hardware Foundation.
Right. I paid for it; crypto processor, DRM, and all. If I don't like them I won't pay for it.
That sounds great now. My fear is that it will become difficult and/or expensive to get hardware that doesn't enforce treacherous computing. What if Intel and AMD both make only TC chips? Am I wearing a tinfoil hat, or in 10 years will a free-as-in-speech computer cost 10 times as much as a winblows box and have a 2 year backlog to get the basic components? I'm not worried at all about access to free software, but hardware requiring billion-dollar fab plants is another story. Somebody make me feel better!
Actually Eclipse is a wonderful example of too many choices. I've gone to the site several times to try it out for Java development. I've gotten overwhelmed with the sheer number of downloads and can't figure out which one is a Java IDE. So I just close the window and go back to codeguide.
Doesn't seem that bad. Go to the main page, click the big yellow button, then the link that says Download now: Eclipse SDK 3.2.1. Pick a mirror, and that's it. Why the SDK download link comes after the distros link I don't know, but there are just two giant links on that page, so if the first one doesn't seem right it stands to reason to try the other one. Or maybe that's just me.
If your brain hurts after thinking about that, software developer might not be the best profession for you.
Gosh, I wonder if he might have been joking. On second thought, I wonder if I should tell you that I'm being sarcastic too. Nah, you'll get it this time. Right?
All the problems that optical scan systems have also exist with paper only ballots,
I disagree. With electronic vote counting, it's possible to rig the election without getting the cooperation of the people in charge of the counting. With manual counting that is not so.
If we're saying, it is theirs, you have licensed it, by a one time payment with no further obligations to them, how does it differ from a sale except in name?
Remove that "no further obligations" bit. The software will periodically phone home and revalidate. You are obliged to allow it to do this. If you do not, you are in breach of the EULA. Since MS stated that you do not own the software, they're hoping this gives them the right to do whatever they want with it once you're in violation - after all, it's their software. IANAL, but I think there's probably a legal difference between buying and licensing software, even if it seems the same in practice. Consider that if you had to pay every month or every year, we would all see that it's a license that gets revoked if you fail to pay (that is, fail to meet your contractual obligation) and you haven't really bought the software. Is there something about payment, as opposed to other contractual obligations, that makes the transaction a license rather than a sale?
the average user is not going to want to deal with these complications and will likely stay with XP or switch to MacOS or an easy Linux install like Ubuntu.
The average user will not have to deal with these complications. For the average user, the activation will work just fine and they won't have to worry about a thing. Even if thousands of legit users have problems with it, for one thing that's a very small percentage, and for another the average user isn't going to consider switching OS unless they call MS and get told that they'll have to buy a new copy of Vista. MS knows this and I'm sure would rather give the buyer the benefit of the doubt than risk losing a loyal subject. As much as we might wish otherwise, even these issues will probably not be enough to break the stranglehold on the desktop. We'll just have to keep looking.:-)
Yes software activation is a pain. But so are pirated copies of windows sold as being legit. Which is what this is trying to stop. Yes there will be cracks and work arounds, there allways are. But if your mom buys a computer from the corner store, this will check to make sure that its legit.
Let's just be clear that they are not doing this because they care about my mom. If that were the case, they could pop up messages (screaming sirents, blinking lights, whatever) that it's not a valid copy of Windows, that she will not be able to get technical support, and her data and hardware could be at risk. She is an adult and can choose to continue at her own risk, or investigate what is going on. The fact that they instead shut down the OS indicates that it's all about the money, not the customer. Which any idiot could have guessed anyway I suppose.
With optical scan systems, there's always a paper trail that one can go back to. Yes, the scanning systems and vote tabulating systems are still vulnerable to attack, but at least it's POSSIBLE to do an accurate manual recount if it becomes necessary.
The problem is, if the election is just slightly shifted, there's no recount and so nobody knows what happened. You can always randomly manually count 1-5% of the ballots, but that may or may not expose any fraud or error. Plus, as shown in Hacking Democracy, sometimes "random" means "somebody chooses".
Why do we need a voice recognition machine that disabled people can use? That's why we have POLL WORKERS, so someone can help a disabled voter. Illiterate voters? Um... how did they vote before there were voice recognition systems? They have to either trust a poll worker or trust the voice recognition system, and if I was illiterate I think I'd rather trust a poll worker.
We need them because the law says everyone must be able to vote without human assistance.
All truly religious people, being Absolutist Authoritarians, have no capacity for morality by definition. They simply believe and do what they are told by the church authorities without question or conscience.
If human life is no more valuable than animal life, then a truly consist atheist would believe that there is no difference between eating meat and killing a person.
So what you're saying is that a moral code based on God saying "because I said so" is more rational than one based on a goal of having a functional society? Or one based on an individual deciding for themselves what they think is moral and immoral, based on their own values? Are you saying religion is the only way we can decide one thing is good and another bad? The only way that we can value something? Why do you accord religion this right, and deny it to all other systems?
But, the mere concept of adaption can't possibly be controversial.
I think Jerry Falwell et al would disagree. I'm not going to go through the torture of actually reading their works to find out for sure, but I don't think they would admit that God's creatures are slowly adapting to their environments. My understanding of their position is that life does not change - period. It exists today just as God created it.
I think it was a Best Buy store that did something even better. They knew they were getting 140 systems, so as soon as they had a line that big, they handed out vouchers to the first 140 people in the line and told everyone to go home because nobody else would be able to buy a system from that store. NPR covered it this morning.
That's sound advice if one of two things is true. Either nothing unexpected and expensive is going to happen to you, or the investment you make with the money you could have used for the purchase is at least as liquid as the item you purchase. If you buy your car with little money down and put your cash in something you can't withdraw it from quickly, then if something comes up (funeral expenses, medical expenses, lawsuit, unemployment, whatever) you have no money. If you buy the car with cash, you can at least sell the car quickly. OTOH, if you invest in something liquid, you can pull your money back out to deal with your emergency and maybe keep the car too. Financial security is more than just ending up with the greatest amount of wealth at the time of retirement. I would rather have no debt and no investments (other than the house I live in and a retirement account) than lots of debt (mortgage, car loan, student loans) and lots of money invested, even if it means I have less money in the end. But maybe that's just me.
My reaction is we would be lucky if we could actually manage to "terraform" (which in this case means "warm up" that much of Mars. Nobody is talking about planting crops or oxygenating the atmosphere. If Mars were so good at retaining heat that this plan could wreck the entire planet, then we wouldn't need to do it in the first place. But I'm sure we'll continue to disagree.
Not in my world. Things like proofs of algorithmic correctness, static code analysis tools and code reviews can consider infinite problem spaces. Automated testing is by its nature finite in what it tests. Since you cannot define our requirements in terms of a finite set of tests, you could not approach perfect TDD in our context.
Or perfect any other kind of testing, either. Sounds like you're in a very unusual niche - normally perfect testing by some means is theoretically possible, if not practical.
A lot of your objection seems to be not to TDD, but to the attitude that TDD solves everything. I'm sure that's out there, but of course that's an idiot problem, not a TDD problem.:-)
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Oh, I didn't mean he's trying to force anybody to use GPL. Clearly that's not true. But it seems one of his objectives for those using the GPL is to make sure they're nice. Now maybe I'm wrong and he doesn't care about how people treat each other, as long as the terms of the license are satisfied, but that's not my impression. I just think licensing and contracts aren't very effective at ensuring people are nice to each other.
RMS says better no software at all than non-free software. I wonder if he realizes that the anti-tivo clause(s) in GPLv3 could actually increase the amount of proprietary software. I mean if there's a market for something, it's going to get sold, so if the vendor can't satisfy themselves or their stakeholders with free software they'll do it with closed software - they won't just all decide not to release a product. Since according to him proprietary software is evil, this new license could actually increase the amount of evil in the world. Now why would he support that?? Maybe he thinks it's better to have closed software running on open hardware than free software running on closed hardware? Maybe he should change the name of the foundation to the Free Software and Hardware Foundation.
You're right, there's no excuse for that. My bad.
We need them because the law says everyone must be able to vote without human assistance.
I think it was a Best Buy store that did something even better. They knew they were getting 140 systems, so as soon as they had a line that big, they handed out vouchers to the first 140 people in the line and told everyone to go home because nobody else would be able to buy a system from that store. NPR covered it this morning.
That's sound advice if one of two things is true. Either nothing unexpected and expensive is going to happen to you, or the investment you make with the money you could have used for the purchase is at least as liquid as the item you purchase. If you buy your car with little money down and put your cash in something you can't withdraw it from quickly, then if something comes up (funeral expenses, medical expenses, lawsuit, unemployment, whatever) you have no money. If you buy the car with cash, you can at least sell the car quickly. OTOH, if you invest in something liquid, you can pull your money back out to deal with your emergency and maybe keep the car too. Financial security is more than just ending up with the greatest amount of wealth at the time of retirement. I would rather have no debt and no investments (other than the house I live in and a retirement account) than lots of debt (mortgage, car loan, student loans) and lots of money invested, even if it means I have less money in the end. But maybe that's just me.
My reaction is we would be lucky if we could actually manage to "terraform" (which in this case means "warm up" that much of Mars. Nobody is talking about planting crops or oxygenating the atmosphere. If Mars were so good at retaining heat that this plan could wreck the entire planet, then we wouldn't need to do it in the first place. But I'm sure we'll continue to disagree.
A lot of your objection seems to be not to TDD, but to the attitude that TDD solves everything. I'm sure that's out there, but of course that's an idiot problem, not a TDD problem.