Either WWI or WWII was the first war to have more civilians than soldiers killed (I do not remember which).
For centuries of human history, accurate wartime "body counts" were not available, at least until the 20th century. Don't forget that during the Peloponnesian War, it was not unusual for one faction to literally kill every resident (men & women of all ages, plus children) of an opposing faction's city. When they weren't killing them all, they would enslave them. The same for Genghis Khan, The Roman Army, European Medieval States, and on throughout history. So, civilian deaths have not been unknown in war. It is just that in the past 100 years or so, civilian deaths have become propoganda.
That was a (weak) reference to something I have heard/read sometime, but you are of course correct in that this has probably been the state of affairs (or close) for many wars during history. Thank you for correcting/adjusting me.
Military organizations and resistance movements target the enemy's military organization and protect civilians. Terrorists target civilians and hide among them as cover.
This is a false argument.
In case you have not noticed yet, civilians have been targets in any war since (at least) World War II. Germany bombed English cities and England bombed German cities
where civilian casualties were an explicit wanted effect. The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed more civilians than military. Either WWI or WWII was the first
war to have more civilians than soldiers killed (I do not remember which).
The ratio of civilians killed per solider is typically something like 10 to 1 in "modern" wars.
So if Hezbolla is killing civilians it does not make them special at all. Israel is also killing civilians. Your "argument" proves nothing
except that it sounds like a confirmation bias on your part.
... you cannot predict in front how much time you need as you don't know the problems you will encounter...
This is by some called 2OI, second order of ignorance. The following is a short extract from my master thesis.
One particular interesting article about software development
is The Laws of Software Process
by Phillip G. Armour which has a telling observation:
In some circles, software process is considered to be the issue that
needs to be resolved to fix "the software crisis". Improving process
has become an article of faith in some corners, while avoiding it has
assumed the status of guerrilla warfare in others.
The author states that
"Perhaps our problem isn't process, it's what we are asking process to do, and when and where we apply it."
He then formulates three laws of software process based on what he defines
as "The Five Orders of Ignorance":
0OI - Lack of Ignorance. You know something.
1OI - Lack of Knowledge. You know that you do not know something.
2OI - Lack of Awareness. You do not know that you do not know something.
3OI - Lack of Process. You have no method of converting 2OI into either 1OI or 0OI.
4OI - Meta Ignorance. You do not know about the Five Orders of Ignorance.
0th Order Ignorance, 0OI, represents when you have the answer and 1OI represents
that you have a well defined question that can be answered. For these two
levels detailed, well defined processes work well. On the other hand,
for 2OI a detailed process, based on some pre-existing knowledge which might or might
not be relevant, does not make sense. The different levels of ignorance
must therefore be handled differently.
The challenge is all projects have different quantities of 0OI, 1OI, 2OI, and even 3OI, and therefore require different types of processes.
An alternative source should be
"Armour, P.G. The five orders of ignorance. Commun. ACM 43, 10 (Oct. 2000), 17-20."
Pair programming is a drastic waste of programmer time.
I think this claim is false. According to
this article
the time spent overhead is only 15% and that not a drastic amount. Nor is it waste; pair programming is a
quality investment reducing bugs as well as having other positive effects like improving learning, satisfaction, communication, etc.
What you typically get is an alpha who overwhelms and neutralizes the work of his partner.
There is of course no guarantee that this will not happen, but in that case they are not
doing proper pair programming. The book Pair Programming Illuminated
by Laurie Williams and Robert Kessler
addresses several of the practical aspects of pair programming and there is a chapter titled
My Partner Is a Total Loser and Other Excess Ego Problems which deals with this.
Ah, I was not aware of that. Thank you for the enlightenment. I
see now that some of them makes more sense, but when writing for
a large audience like slashdot, whatever cultural references you
use, someone are guarantied to not get them. I therefore prefer to
always include a little hint or reference to counter that, like for instance in this
post. It was moderated redundant which was sort of fair enough since
it was not the first reference to digital watches being overrated,
but all of the then existing posts assumed that the reader already had knowledge of Douglas Adams'
works. That is why I wrote mine.
And Wikipedia tells me: Ø is basically equivalent to 'o' with an umlaut from German, so I can only deduce that the proper Anglification of the letter would be "oe", as in my last name. This letter does not exist in the English language at all, so I assert that it has as much right to be in English documents as Korean characters do.
By the way, I do not think that your argument here is valid.
And Wikipedia tells me: π is an irrational number with an infinite number of decimals, the first 50
being 3.14159 26535 89793 23846 26433 83279 50288 41971 69399 37510, so I can only deduce that the proper Anglification of the number would be "3.14", as learned in school. This letter does not exist in the English language at all, so I assert that it has as much right to be in English documents as Korean characters do.
(unfortunately slashdot does not accept the pi characters as input, so I had to write as π)
And Wikipedia tells me: Ø is basically equivalent to 'o' with an umlaut from German, so I can only deduce that the proper Anglification of the letter would be "oe", as in my last name.
You are correct in that "ø" -> "oe" is a normal translation, although "ø" -> "o" is also sometimes used.
The LaTeX command is "\o{}", html code is "ø".
In Swedish the ø is written as "ö", but is otherwise the same character.
The pronounciation is somewhat similar to the english words hurry and Sir, like "Yes, Sør, hørry up".
Prof. Bialystok first noticed bilingual children were proficient in
blocking out irrelevant information about 20 years ago. When asked to
identify a grammatically correct sentence, for example, both bilinguals
and monolinguals are, by age 5, able to choose, "Apples grow on trees,"
over "Apple trees on grow" as the correct one.
But when it came to asking "Apples grow on noses" versus "Apples nose
on grow," only the bilingual children were able to choose the right
answer. Although the first sentence is grammatically correct, monolingual
children could not get over its silliness. "That's crazy," they'd shout,
"You can't say that!"
Incidentally, a little politeness can go a long way when dealing with government workers, especially in places like an airport or the DMV. Just think: these people deal with complaining a**holes all day for crappy pay, you might actually make their day a little brighter by being polite, or, God forbid, almost friendly.
This reminded me of the following classic obnoxious airline passenger story.
An award should go to the United Airlines gate agent in Denver for being smart and funny, and making her point, when confronted with a passenger who probably deserved to fly as cargo.
During the final days at Denver's old Stapleton airport, a crowded United flight was cancelled. A single agent was rebooking a long line of inconvenienced travelers.
Suddenly an angry passenger pushed his way to the desk. He slapped his ticket down on the counter and said, "I HAVE to be on this flight and it has to be FIRST CLASS."
The agent replied, "I'm sorry sir. I'll be happy to try to help you, but I've got to help these folks first, and I'm sure we'll be able to work something out." The passenger was unimpressed. He asked loudly, so that the passengers behind him could hear, "Do you have any idea who I am?"
Without hesitating, the gate agent smiled and grabbed her public address microphone. "May I have your attention please?" she began, her voice bellowing throughout the terminal. "We have a passenger here at the gate WHO DOES NOT KNOW WHO HE IS. If anyone can help him find his identity, please come to Gate 17."
With the folks behind him in line laughing hysterically, the man glared at the United agent, gritted his teeth and swore "Fuck you."
Without flinching, she smiled and said, "I'm sorry, sir, but you'll have to stand in line for that too."
The purpose is not to stop terrorists. It's abundantly clear that the measures that have been taken are ineffective at doing so. The purpose of airline security is assure middle America that Something Is Being Done.
[micro pre rant]
It is sad that your post has gotten Troll mods. I strongly disagree with what you are saying, but it is an opinion you are free to have and you should not been modded Troll. The meta-moderation helps somewhat I guess, but this is in principle "damage control". It would be better to have something that prevented unfair moderation. I am all for openness in control/steering issues. Read Animal farm for an example of how bad things turn out when decisions are made behind the scenes.
So I would like to see slashdot's moderations have attribution of who that made them. Now, anonymity is important as well and there might be times where one would like to not give an Insightful moderation publicly. So I think a system where moderations are public by default but where anonymous moderations is possible, perhaps only for 2 or 3 points and most certainly not for Troll mods. [/micro pre rant]
Please feel free to disagree with any of my opinions. The things that are
marked as facts though should be impossible to disagree with and if you
do you must come with an argument of why you think the fact is invalid.
[opinion]
To me it sounds like you strongly believe that, to put it perhaps a bit naively,
a free marked exists and left to itself without any external influence
everything will automatically turn into optimal performance. Right?
[/opinion]
Well, I hope you will start considering the following: [fact]The free marked is a model,
and as a model it does not fully describe the reality[/fact].
All models are wrong, some models are useful.
-- George Box
As already described in this
post [fact]the free marked model is dependent on total information.
This is a condition not fulfilled in the real world[/fact], and the post
describes [opinion]very clearly[/opinion] how government regulation can
increase competition.
No government mandate on companies is ever good for consumers
because it decreases the amount of competition in a market and it raises
prices. You can't prove otherwise.
[fact]The above mentioned post does prove that (at least) one kind of
government mandate will increase competition[/fact].
[fact]Another thing that the free marked model is dependent on is a
large number of insignificant sellers and buyers[/fact]. [opinion]While
the consumers usually fulfill this criteria, the producers seldom or
never does[/opinion]. [fact]This can be another reason for government
intervention to make sure that no single company or group of company
controls a too large part of the marked (anti-trust)[/fact].
So there you have two counter-proves to your "You can't prove otherwise".
[opinion]
Sometimes people argue that the best companies will win long-term, using nature
evolution as a model for economics. But this is grossly misleading when used
in context of single entities; evolution is never about single individuals
but many generations. This model can be used sensible if talking about trends,
for instance open source vs closed source.
"Survival of the fittest" from an evolutionary aspect is extremely
different from anything related to human corporate business because there
are some fundamental and huge differences between nature and economics.
In nature
All animals in a race are approximately the same size.
All animals start completely from scratch (I.e. there is no heritage
and just because you are son of the leader wolf that does not make
you special).
Evolutionary changes are relatively small (No animal will say increase
100% in size over just one generation[1]).
While this is the complete opposite for corporations.
So if you are one of those using the expression "survival of the fittest" about
companies, please stop.
[/opinion]
[1]
Perhaps unless you start with one single cell I guess...
a whole lot of things foreign companies like to put in their licenses are null and void in Norway no matter whether or not the customer has signed a contract in blood and sworn on their mothers life that they'd accept it
And the fact that such invalid terms are just void is a major weakness in my opinion.
It should be a criminal offense for a company to try fool a customer to follow terms
that the company knew or should have known were not legally just.
With punishment either like for illegal price cooperation or higher.
Lxr is good for browsing "static" code like the different linux releases.
But as a tool for browsing arbitrary source code it is too cumbersome to
set up and use.
I have sometimes used GNU
Global which makes indexed html pages of the code. Somewhat
similar to lxr but there is no setup, just run two commands, gtags
and htags. One nice thing about global is that it can be used on any
incomplete subset of a software system. Want to just look at the files
in the drivers/net/wireless directory in the linux kernel tree? Fine,
just run gtags and htags from that directory (and no other setup is necessary).
I have also used NCC
which "compiles" each file and makes a index file with information like
"function AAA calls functions BBB, CCC and DDD, reads variables EEE,
writes variables FFF and GGG". The format is not exactly like that but you
get the idea. NCC includes a text mode gopher-like variable usage/function
call browser and there is a script to make graphical call graphs (via
dot from graphviz). At work I have also used information from ncc files
in combination with with information from the map file to find maximum
stack usage.
This study
(which I just found while writing this) seems to have an interesting analysis
of this topic.
There are things you can't do with these items, even though you own them. Because you're constrained by law.
I think you hit the nail on the head. What the law says is that you have every right except for those that have been specifically prohibited. What the MPAA/RIAA wants (and wants you to think already exists) is a system where you have only the rights that they specifically assign to you.
And to add my points, notice that these restrictions are
independent of your ownership.
not individually imposed by the copyright holders but are
general restrictions imposed by the government.
While there are some restrictions on playing music publicly, this is independently of
wether you are playing your own CDs or if you have borrowed them.
A book author should (of course) have no right to restrict your use of your copy of a book
in any way (for instance "this book cannot be read on Sundays"). Only the government has the right
to restrict peoples freedom to do whatever they want with their own property. And your copy of a book/CD/DVD/MP3/whatever
is (or should be) 100% your property. The copyright mafia (RIAA/MPAA) wants to change that, and have
unfortunately to some degree succeded (which is why I had to include "or should be" in previous sentence).
None of the new TLDs created or proposed in recent years makes any sense from a internet user point of view[1].
The real reason for ICANN wanting to add new TLDs is of course so that they can make more money.
[1]
Perhaps with the exception of.xxx. This is the only case where it might be
beneficial provided that it is only given out for porno sites
(but of course I would really like to have a zorro.xxx domain!!).
However I strongly doubt that it would turn out overall useful. But at least in this case there some arguments supporting it.
I think there is a really excellent chapter in the following book Pair Programming Illuminated which discusses this.
Indeed. From the table of contents:
Chapter 22: "My Partner a Total Loser" and Other Excess Ego Problems
Chapter 23: "My Partner Is SO Smart" and Other Too Little Ego Problems
I have bought and read the Getting things Done book and while I find the
concepts very appealing, I have trouble getting it working (maybe because I
have not put enough effort into it).
Does anyone have experience and recommendations of tools? I have been thinking that I want
to start low-tech by using pen and paper before I dive into a specialized tool,
but maybe it is time to reconsider that.
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.
Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.
Yes, you have a point. But on the other hand competition in the music business is somewhat special
since the music publisher typically have a distribution monopoly of their artists,
so if you like a given artist you have no choice of who to buy from.
A credit card company would have a harder time if they sold your personal buying habits
to whomever would pay, since you if you did not like that could relatively easily switch
to some other company.
When the government fears the public, you have democracy.
When the public fears the government, you have tyranny.
Perhaps a weak analogy, but if companies started seriously fearing public opinion
- as opposed to say Sony BMG[1] - that would certainly be a good thing.
Fear of the public will stimulate healthy competition (and not under the table/behind closed doors
competition).
[1] Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?
--SonyBMG manager Thomas Hesse
Programming languages 100 years from now
on
Beyond Java
·
· Score: 1
In a somewhat related essay,
Paul Graham is writing about what he thinks programming languages will
be like in 100 years.
... or in other words, I fully agree with what the parent post says.
To se an extreme fiction exploration
about this
(scaringly close to reality sometimes...),
please read the appendix
in the book
1984
about
Newspeak
.
A quick check at http://lxr.linux.no/source/COPYING reveals that this was added sometime beween 2.2.26 and 2.4.18, i.e. this was decided a long time ago and is not just a reaction to the forthcomming version 3.
Did all copyright holders agree to this change!?
I wrote that very imprecise, almost misleading, sorry about that. Linus has always been
clear on that version 2 is the only version (for his parts of the code), and the addition the text to COPYING was
done (only) to stress this. I.e. this was not a new decision done between 2.2.26 and 2.4.18 (which my previous post seemed to imply).
Some other copyright holders in the kernel have a different policy:
.../linux_kernel/linux-2.6.15.1/fs>grep -l 'either version 2 of the License' */*.[ch] | wc 134 134 1925 .../linux_kernel/linux-2.6.15.1/fs>
while some other does not specify a version of GPL at all (like the xfs code by SGI).
Usually GPLed code contains this statement: "This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version."
I bet this is true for linux source code as well.
No, this is not true for the linux source code. As pointed out several times already, linux has
always been released under GPLv2 only. The following text is from the COPYING file:
Also note that the only valid version of the GPL as far as the kernel
is concerned is _this_ particular version of the license (ie v2, not
v2.2 or v3.x or whatever), unless explicitly otherwise stated.
A quick check at http://lxr.linux.no/source/COPYING reveals that this was added sometime beween
2.2.26 and 2.4.18, i.e. this was decided a long time ago and is not just a
reaction to the forthcomming version 3.
Slashdot Mirror
That was a (weak) reference to something I have heard/read sometime, but you are of course correct in that this has probably been the state of affairs (or close) for many wars during history. Thank you for correcting/adjusting me.
This is a false argument.
In case you have not noticed yet, civilians have been targets in any war since (at least) World War II. Germany bombed English cities and England bombed German cities where civilian casualties were an explicit wanted effect. The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed more civilians than military. Either WWI or WWII was the first war to have more civilians than soldiers killed (I do not remember which). The ratio of civilians killed per solider is typically something like 10 to 1 in "modern" wars.
So if Hezbolla is killing civilians it does not make them special at all. Israel is also killing civilians. Your "argument" proves nothing except that it sounds like a confirmation bias on your part.
This is by some called 2OI, second order of ignorance. The following is a short extract from my master thesis.
An alternative source should be "Armour, P.G. The five orders of ignorance. Commun. ACM 43, 10 (Oct. 2000), 17-20."
Ah, I was not aware of that. Thank you for the enlightenment. I see now that some of them makes more sense, but when writing for a large audience like slashdot, whatever cultural references you use, someone are guarantied to not get them. I therefore prefer to always include a little hint or reference to counter that, like for instance in this post. It was moderated redundant which was sort of fair enough since it was not the first reference to digital watches being overrated, but all of the then existing posts assumed that the reader already had knowledge of Douglas Adams' works. That is why I wrote mine.
By the way, I do not think that your argument here is valid.
And Wikipedia tells me: π is an irrational number with an infinite number of decimals, the first 50 being 3.14159 26535 89793 23846 26433 83279 50288 41971 69399 37510, so I can only deduce that the proper Anglification of the number would be "3.14", as learned in school. This letter does not exist in the English language at all, so I assert that it has as much right to be in English documents as Korean characters do.
(unfortunately slashdot does not accept the pi characters as input, so I had to write as π)
You are correct in that "ø" -> "oe" is a normal translation, although "ø" -> "o" is also sometimes used. The LaTeX command is "\o{}", html code is "ø". In Swedish the ø is written as "ö", but is otherwise the same character. The pronounciation is somewhat similar to the english words hurry and Sir, like "Yes, Sør, hørry up".
Some of the comments made here ( 15506917, 15507239, 15507258, 15506976, 15506998, 15507060) gives an almost childish "look ma, a funny character" impression, but I assume this is a monolingual atrtifact like described in this article:
This reminded me of the following classic obnoxious airline passenger story.
An award should go to the United Airlines gate agent in Denver for being smart and funny, and making her point, when confronted with a passenger who probably deserved to fly as cargo.
During the final days at Denver's old Stapleton airport, a crowded United flight was cancelled. A single agent was rebooking a long line of inconvenienced travelers.
Suddenly an angry passenger pushed his way to the desk. He slapped his ticket down on the counter and said, "I HAVE to be on this flight and it has to be FIRST CLASS."
The agent replied, "I'm sorry sir. I'll be happy to try to help you, but I've got to help these folks first, and I'm sure we'll be able to work something out." The passenger was unimpressed. He asked loudly, so that the passengers behind him could hear, "Do you have any idea who I am?"
Without hesitating, the gate agent smiled and grabbed her public address microphone. "May I have your attention please?" she began, her voice bellowing throughout the terminal. "We have a passenger here at the gate WHO DOES NOT KNOW WHO HE IS. If anyone can help him find his identity, please come to Gate 17."
With the folks behind him in line laughing hysterically, the man glared at the United agent, gritted his teeth and swore "Fuck you."
Without flinching, she smiled and said, "I'm sorry, sir, but you'll have to stand in line for that too."
Also known as "Bread and Circuses" .
It is sad that your post has gotten Troll mods. I strongly disagree with what you are saying, but it is an opinion you are free to have and you should not been modded Troll. The meta-moderation helps somewhat I guess, but this is in principle "damage control". It would be better to have something that prevented unfair moderation. I am all for openness in control/steering issues. Read Animal farm for an example of how bad things turn out when decisions are made behind the scenes.
So I would like to see slashdot's moderations have attribution of who that made them. Now, anonymity is important as well and there might be times where one would like to not give an Insightful moderation publicly. So I think a system where moderations are public by default but where anonymous moderations is possible, perhaps only for 2 or 3 points and most certainly not for Troll mods.
[/micro pre rant]
Please feel free to disagree with any of my opinions. The things that are marked as facts though should be impossible to disagree with and if you do you must come with an argument of why you think the fact is invalid.
[opinion] To me it sounds like you strongly believe that, to put it perhaps a bit naively, a free marked exists and left to itself without any external influence everything will automatically turn into optimal performance. Right? [/opinion]
Well, I hope you will start considering the following: [fact]The free marked is a model, and as a model it does not fully describe the reality[/fact]. All models are wrong, some models are useful. -- George Box
As already described in this post [fact]the free marked model is dependent on total information. This is a condition not fulfilled in the real world[/fact], and the post describes [opinion]very clearly[/opinion] how government regulation can increase competition.
[fact]The above mentioned post does prove that (at least) one kind of government mandate will increase competition[/fact].
[fact]Another thing that the free marked model is dependent on is a large number of insignificant sellers and buyers[/fact]. [opinion]While the consumers usually fulfill this criteria, the producers seldom or never does[/opinion]. [fact]This can be another reason for government intervention to make sure that no single company or group of company controls a too large part of the marked (anti-trust)[/fact].
So there you have two counter-proves to your "You can't prove otherwise".
[opinion] Sometimes people argue that the best companies will win long-term, using nature evolution as a model for economics. But this is grossly misleading when used in context of single entities; evolution is never about single individuals but many generations. This model can be used sensible if talking about trends, for instance open source vs closed source.
"Survival of the fittest" from an evolutionary aspect is extremely different from anything related to human corporate business because there are some fundamental and huge differences between nature and economics. In nature
- All animals in a race are approximately the same size.
- All animals start completely from scratch (I.e. there is no heritage
and just because you are son of the leader wolf that does not make
you special).
- Evolutionary changes are relatively small (No animal will say increase
100% in size over just one generation[1]).
While this is the complete opposite for corporations. So if you are one of those using the expression "survival of the fittest" about companies, please stop. [/opinion][1]
Perhaps unless you start with one single cell I guess...
And the fact that such invalid terms are just void is a major weakness in my opinion. It should be a criminal offense for a company to try fool a customer to follow terms that the company knew or should have known were not legally just. With punishment either like for illegal price cooperation or higher.
I have sometimes used GNU Global which makes indexed html pages of the code. Somewhat similar to lxr but there is no setup, just run two commands, gtags and htags. One nice thing about global is that it can be used on any incomplete subset of a software system. Want to just look at the files in the drivers/net/wireless directory in the linux kernel tree? Fine, just run gtags and htags from that directory (and no other setup is necessary).
I have also used NCC which "compiles" each file and makes a index file with information like "function AAA calls functions BBB, CCC and DDD, reads variables EEE, writes variables FFF and GGG". The format is not exactly like that but you get the idea. NCC includes a text mode gopher-like variable usage/function call browser and there is a script to make graphical call graphs (via dot from graphviz). At work I have also used information from ncc files in combination with with information from the map file to find maximum stack usage.
This study (which I just found while writing this) seems to have an interesting analysis of this topic.
And to add my points, notice that these restrictions are
While there are some restrictions on playing music publicly, this is independently of wether you are playing your own CDs or if you have borrowed them.
A book author should (of course) have no right to restrict your use of your copy of a book in any way (for instance "this book cannot be read on Sundays"). Only the government has the right to restrict peoples freedom to do whatever they want with their own property. And your copy of a book/CD/DVD/MP3/whatever is (or should be) 100% your property. The copyright mafia (RIAA/MPAA) wants to change that, and have unfortunately to some degree succeded (which is why I had to include "or should be" in previous sentence).
[1] .xxx. This is the only case where it might be
beneficial provided that it is only given out for porno sites
(but of course I would really like to have a zorro.xxx domain!!).
However I strongly doubt that it would turn out overall useful. But at least in this case there some arguments supporting it.
Perhaps with the exception of
Indeed. From the table of contents:
Chapter 22: "My Partner a Total Loser" and Other Excess Ego Problems
Chapter 23: "My Partner Is SO Smart" and Other Too Little Ego Problems
Does anyone have experience and recommendations of tools? I have been thinking that I want to start low-tech by using pen and paper before I dive into a specialized tool, but maybe it is time to reconsider that.
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.
Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.
(Copied from http://www.hhgttgonline.com/)
You have a far better argument than me. My view shall from now on be that companies should start caring about public opinion (not fearing it).
A credit card company would have a harder time if they sold your personal buying habits to whomever would pay, since you if you did not like that could relatively easily switch to some other company.
When the public fears the government, you have tyranny.
Perhaps a weak analogy, but if companies started seriously fearing public opinion - as opposed to say Sony BMG[1] - that would certainly be a good thing.
Fear of the public will stimulate healthy competition (and not under the table/behind closed doors competition).
[1]
Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?
--SonyBMG manager Thomas Hesse
In a somewhat related essay, Paul Graham is writing about what he thinks programming languages will be like in 100 years.
Some other copyright holders in the kernel have a different policy:
while some other does not specify a version of GPL at all (like the xfs code by SGI).I bet this is true for linux source code as well.
No, this is not true for the linux source code. As pointed out several times already, linux has always been released under GPLv2 only. The following text is from the COPYING file:
Also note that the only valid version of the GPL as far as the kernel is concerned is _this_ particular version of the license (ie v2, not v2.2 or v3.x or whatever), unless explicitly otherwise stated.
A quick check at http://lxr.linux.no/source/COPYING reveals that this was added sometime beween 2.2.26 and 2.4.18, i.e. this was decided a long time ago and is not just a reaction to the forthcomming version 3.