No, you're completely right, it would be ridiculous to have a real scientific observatory there just for altitude and light pollution reasons. That's why it struck me as very odd.
When I first read that my first thought was that they would have telescopes up there. But all they mean is an observation deck. How disappointing.
Yeah that didn't make much sense to me... It wouldn't even be close to the highest observatory, because those usually go on mountains which still beat the pants off our structures. And they also go as far from civilization as possible because of light pollution.
Oh well. I still see no reason they couldn't put a reasonably big telescope on it!
If that fails, well it'll make an awesome post-apocalyptic wasteland.
True, but who is going to want to climb that many flights of stairs to have their climactic last-stand against the zombie hordes on the observatory deck?
It doesn't matter in the end with which epistemological view you adhere, as they are two sides of the same coin. If you are a verificationist, you keep doing experiments that will verify your hypothesis until you find one that doesn't. If you are a falsationist, you keep doing experiments that will falsify your hypotesis while you wait for the one that succeed in doing that.
It does matter, actually, in the sense that even if you are a "verificationist", you must design experiments intended to falsify your hypothesis. If you do not, you could be ascending "an endless stair of confirmation" of the wrong hypothesis which a single attempt to falsify could have shown.
One could reasonably state that a properly designed experiment by a verificationist would do that, but that's my point: A properly designed experiment must include a serious attempt to falsify for it to have value as verification. Whereas a falsification experiment inherently provides verification, if falsification fails. The relationship between the two is non-symmetrical.
So sure, once you've conducted your experiment it may not make much difference if you view a positive result as "another failure to falsify" or "more verification". But when designing the experiment, if you aren't thinking like a falsificationist, then you're quite possibly not doing it right.
Even astronomers talk about the sun rising and setting. They'll talk about sunrise and sunset on Luna or Mars. The sun does rise and set, the only thing that has changed is our understanding of why.
The terminology is just fine. GP was just being inappropriately pedantic.
Polar bear fur isn't hollow, but it is transparent, and directs sunlight down to the bear's skin like a coat of fiber optic cables, which is basically what they are.
But yeah, this isn't that unusual. Chewing and grooming are normal behaviors for rats. The hairs could have evolved for any number of reasons, and may have been quite different, maybe just specialized whiskers, before the poison plant made predator-poisoning the main selective pressure.
There's other cases of this kind of thing. For example, hummingbirds and the flowers they feed from will often undergo runaway evolution where the hummer's bill will be specialized to feed on the flower's specialized form that only the hummer's bill will fit. Even more amazing, there's a species on a Caribbean island where the males and females aren't just different in plumage, but also very different in bill shape which is unusual. Each of the two sexes feeds exclusively from two different but closely related species of flower.
The theory was that when the hummers first arrived on the island, there was only one species of flower, and the more aggressive males monopolized the flowers that had the highest nectar output while the females were stuck with the ones with lesser output. The result was that the higher output plants were cross-pollinated by the males while the lower output plants were pollinated by the females, setting the stage for the two populations of flowers to begin diverging into separate species, and for each sex of hummer to follow.
I wouldn't call chewing bark tool use. Nor grooming. It's "manipulation" only in the broadest sense of "using", but eating food is "using" an object for the animal's benefit.
Regardless of semantics, it is doubtful this is a sign of intelligence (which tool use is usually taken to suggest).
However it is a sign of awesome. Punk rock murder rats? Hell yes.
Unfortunately, a planet is too "normal" to be of any use as an explanatory device in situations like this. I've tried using the example of inferring the existence of exoplanets from gravitational evidence to explain how we infer the existence of dark matter from gravitational evidence. But dark matter is "too weird", so even though it's relying on the same force, one is perfectly acceptable, but the other must just mean that our understanding of gravity is wrong.
A multiverse, inferred from evidence in the CMBR and created by a presumably unknown form of interaction? Yeah, not going to help.
But aside from that it is a good analogy about inference.:)
This can't be right, how can we, "inside" our own universe observe anything else "outside"our universe? Wouldn't anything we observe withing our universe be our universe?
We can't, and it would.
What we would hypothetically be observing is the effect, in our universe, of interactions with another universe. Things in our universe from which we would infer the existence of others.
It is certainly possible that there are interactions between these universes that are not possible within them, and vice versa. For example we live within a (nominally) 4-dimensional space-time. This bubble of space time could interact in a higher dimension with other bubbles of space-time, having an observable effect on the nature of our space-time bubble, but not allowing us to directly look across into the other.
If we expand our notion of "universe" to include these extra interactions and ergo anything capable of producing them, then sure we've automatically ruled out any kind of falsifiable multiverse, because if we can observe it then it's not a multiverse, and if a multiverse exists we can't observe it. By definition. Meaning, not with any consequence for reality.
Meaning, it would still make sense to look for indications in the CMBR of such interactions, regardless of what you'd call it if they were found.
Yes I know, "First known", and yes it is implied. It's always implied. "Biggest meat-eating dinosaur", "earliest hominid", "most spectacular bosoms", "fastest man on earth" -- everything regarding these statements has an implicit "known" qualifier.
In cases where there is actually some reason to believe that there cannot possibly be something earlier, bigger, faster, etc -- i.e. cases where they are going beyond the implicit claim of "known" -- they will use some other qualifier. Like, "most massive star possible". Of course even then it's "to the best of our knowledge", whether they explicitly state that or not.
I believe the companies who received the incomplete source and redistributed it can be said to have acted in good faith. In many jurisdictions that does make a difference. Moreover I don't consider it to be in the spirit of open source to sue over mistakes.
Indeed, and just about everyone agrees, which is why in the vast, vast majority of cases GPL issues are resolved simply by having the distributor in question comply with the license. It's what everyone wants, and will doubtless be how this issue is resolved. Especially because this isn't a closed-source vendor trying to get away with including free software in their closed package, but rather every Linux distributor who are obviously willing -- and were already trying! -- to comply.
Point is just -- it is a compliance issue that needs to be fixed. Which RMS' email itself said, and will be the result.
What I don't get is why some morons think it's so important to argue that this isn't a GPL issue.
Really? You can't access the CEDET version control system? Have you asked one of those distros for the missing files and they said no they won't send them to you?
The existence of the source on a 3rd-party site is not sufficient for compliance with GPL V2 section 3a or V3 section 6a/d requirements. Providing the source only on request is only valid compliance with V2 3b/c or V3 6b/c if you accompany the binaries with the offer to provide source on request which most did not because that's not the method by which they chose to comply with the GPL!
Go figure someone who said something as stupid as "Another fine example of why any intelligent company keeps as far away from GPL as possible" wouldn't understand the GPL.
Not giving you instant online access is not a violation.
It is unless the binaries are accompanied with a written offer to provide the source on request. Read the GPL, idiot. Hypothetically being willing to provide source if someone asks is not sufficient for compliance.
Unless of course the actual copyright holder has granted these people the right to distribute the binaries without the source.
Yes, unless that's the case, you're completely wrong and just as stupid as you appear. Kinda a thin hypothetical to be hanging your whole superiority complex on isn't, it? Especially when basic reasoning skills suggest that it is highly unlikely that every single downstream distributor of Emacs has received specific dispensation, since they'd have no reason to think there was a problem and the copyright holder would have no reason to know the distributor exists. It is also unlikely that they created a general dispensation for all recipients of emacs from 3rd parties to redistribute without complying with the GPL, because the GPL is the license they chose to allow all Nth generation recipients to redistribute.
Did you follow that, or did I lose you at "basic reasoning skills"?
But nevertheless I admit that while your understanding of GPL compliance is without a doubt stupid and wrong, as is your estimation of whether current emacs distributions are in compliance, there's a very slim chance that you aren't completely wrong. Go you!
Of course even then, they still wouldn't be complying with the GPL, now would they? And what has been claimed? Oh, right.
Would you be able to untwist your panties if we instead said "highly probably GPL violations" or even just "possible", or did you already suck them up inside you?
Oh right, and then here's your other big insight that there's more to a copyright violation lawsuit than license compliance.
You must think this information is relevant to the discussion because your head is too stuck up your own strawman's ass to notice nobody is talking about suing anybody.
No, I choose not to ignore ignorant fucks such as yourself. You and people like you give GPL a bad name. I don't make deals with idiots, I make fun of them.
You make a good point. Here I was trying to offer a convenient and face-saving way for you to back off from your idiotic blatherings to some more moderate compromise position. But why should I do that? This is the internet!
You don't understand the GPL (but pretend to). You don't understand what is actually being claimed (but pretend to). You don't understand the difference between copyright license compliance and a charge copyright infringement (and don't even pretend to). You also don't even pretend to understand the issue of innumerable downstream distributors that can't possibly have all received separate licenses. And to top of this hilariously stupid cake w
The GPL requires the source to be available, it is, its just not included by default, which is perfectly acceptable.
No, it isn't available, which is the entire problem.
If you downloaded the source package for emacs from the repositories of your chosen distro, you would not receive the files in question.
Again: Many organizations are distributing emacs binaries, but not making the full source available. That's a GPL violation.
Second, in order for this to be a violation, the authors of said files have to call it a violation
That's simply not true. If you are not in compliance with the terms of a license agreement, then you are not in compliance with the terms of that license agreement whether anyone knows or cares that you are.
For this violation to result in legal action the copyright holder has to know and care.
The only thing going on here is a few people getting their panties in a bunch over nothing.
It isn't nothing, but it also isn't a huge deal because the non-compliance was accidental and the solution straightforward.
The response seems commensurate with the issue. Oh Shit we screwed up, but oh well shit happens.
How about you just ignore whatever few people you see as over-reacting as the outliers they are, and I'll ignore the idiocy you spouted immediately after the last quote up there. Deal?
To comply via methods b) or c) where you only need to make the source available to those who request it, you do have to include an offer saying that this is the case with the object code.
But they aren't doing that because nearly everyone distributing emacs is complying with the GPL via methods d -- allowing an optional source download from the same place they downloaded the emacs binary -- or method a -- including the source itself along with the object files in a physical medium.
But because of the omission of the original bison files, they aren't complying with this method either, because they don't have the source and hence aren't making it available either on the source disks or the online source repositories.
That's ignoring the fact that if they were trying to comply via methods b) or c), they still couldn't because they don't have the source. It's immaterial though because that's not how Linux distros (or virtually anyone else) comply with the GPL.
That's why this is a GPL violation. They are not complying.
But it wasn't their fault, it was the fault of those upstream. Which is why the solution is to simply fix it by providing them with the original bison files. Of course "fix it" is the preferred resolution for all GPL compliance issues, but in this case in particular it's the obvious choice.
No No... This makes sense... Stay with me, but the climate is warming, right? Regardless what you think about why. And I've notices that people seems to be getting stupider and stupider...
Right, right, and successful high-seas piracy requires intelligence and so rising global stupid leads to a decline in global pirates, which we already know is what causes the rising global temperature. It's a big feedback loop.
Don't neglect the "gravitational dominance" aspect, which can be calculated using the Planetary Discriminant (also described on that page), and essentially subsumes the "comparable size" part. If there were other objects of comparable size, then these metrics would necessarily be much smaller.
I dunno, but if this stuff was transparent to infrared, we could call it "TrI-Lithium".
'course that would mean referencing an audaciously awful movie that most people would rather forget. In fact forget I said anything. oh but I'm still hitting "submit".
No planet has cleared it's orbit 100%, which is okay because that never was the requirement.
Earth has done the job of clearing its orbit 100,000,000 times better than Pluto has. it doesn't have to be perfect to clearly be in a different class.
Slashdot Mirror
No, you're completely right, it would be ridiculous to have a real scientific observatory there just for altitude and light pollution reasons. That's why it struck me as very odd.
When I first read that my first thought was that they would have telescopes up there. But all they mean is an observation deck. How disappointing.
Yeah that didn't make much sense to me... It wouldn't even be close to the highest observatory, because those usually go on mountains which still beat the pants off our structures. And they also go as far from civilization as possible because of light pollution.
Oh well. I still see no reason they couldn't put a reasonably big telescope on it!
If that fails, well it'll make an awesome post-apocalyptic wasteland.
True, but who is going to want to climb that many flights of stairs to have their climactic last-stand against the zombie hordes on the observatory deck?
Technically they take place on Deimos and Phobos -- alternate universe versions with a lot more gravity for some reason.
Doom 3 shifted the location to Mars itself, but I liked the shout-outs to the moons better myself, logic be damned. :)
It doesn't matter in the end with which epistemological view you adhere, as they are two sides of the same coin. If you are a verificationist, you keep doing experiments that will verify your hypothesis until you find one that doesn't. If you are a falsationist, you keep doing experiments that will falsify your hypotesis while you wait for the one that succeed in doing that.
It does matter, actually, in the sense that even if you are a "verificationist", you must design experiments intended to falsify your hypothesis. If you do not, you could be ascending "an endless stair of confirmation" of the wrong hypothesis which a single attempt to falsify could have shown.
One could reasonably state that a properly designed experiment by a verificationist would do that, but that's my point: A properly designed experiment must include a serious attempt to falsify for it to have value as verification. Whereas a falsification experiment inherently provides verification, if falsification fails. The relationship between the two is non-symmetrical.
So sure, once you've conducted your experiment it may not make much difference if you view a positive result as "another failure to falsify" or "more verification". But when designing the experiment, if you aren't thinking like a falsificationist, then you're quite possibly not doing it right.
Even astronomers talk about the sun rising and setting. They'll talk about sunrise and sunset on Luna or Mars. The sun does rise and set, the only thing that has changed is our understanding of why.
The terminology is just fine. GP was just being inappropriately pedantic.
Nevermind, I guess my info was outdated and wrong.
Polar bear fur isn't hollow, but it is transparent, and directs sunlight down to the bear's skin like a coat of fiber optic cables, which is basically what they are.
But yeah, this isn't that unusual. Chewing and grooming are normal behaviors for rats. The hairs could have evolved for any number of reasons, and may have been quite different, maybe just specialized whiskers, before the poison plant made predator-poisoning the main selective pressure.
There's other cases of this kind of thing. For example, hummingbirds and the flowers they feed from will often undergo runaway evolution where the hummer's bill will be specialized to feed on the flower's specialized form that only the hummer's bill will fit. Even more amazing, there's a species on a Caribbean island where the males and females aren't just different in plumage, but also very different in bill shape which is unusual. Each of the two sexes feeds exclusively from two different but closely related species of flower.
The theory was that when the hummers first arrived on the island, there was only one species of flower, and the more aggressive males monopolized the flowers that had the highest nectar output while the females were stuck with the ones with lesser output. The result was that the higher output plants were cross-pollinated by the males while the lower output plants were pollinated by the females, setting the stage for the two populations of flowers to begin diverging into separate species, and for each sex of hummer to follow.
I dunno, I thought that was neat.
I'm having a hard time telling whether this is a troll
Are you really?
I wouldn't call chewing bark tool use. Nor grooming. It's "manipulation" only in the broadest sense of "using", but eating food is "using" an object for the animal's benefit.
Regardless of semantics, it is doubtful this is a sign of intelligence (which tool use is usually taken to suggest).
However it is a sign of awesome. Punk rock murder rats? Hell yes.
Unfortunately, a planet is too "normal" to be of any use as an explanatory device in situations like this. I've tried using the example of inferring the existence of exoplanets from gravitational evidence to explain how we infer the existence of dark matter from gravitational evidence. But dark matter is "too weird", so even though it's relying on the same force, one is perfectly acceptable, but the other must just mean that our understanding of gravity is wrong.
A multiverse, inferred from evidence in the CMBR and created by a presumably unknown form of interaction? Yeah, not going to help.
But aside from that it is a good analogy about inference. :)
This can't be right, how can we, "inside" our own universe observe anything else "outside"our universe? Wouldn't anything we observe withing our universe be our universe?
We can't, and it would.
What we would hypothetically be observing is the effect, in our universe, of interactions with another universe. Things in our universe from which we would infer the existence of others.
It is certainly possible that there are interactions between these universes that are not possible within them, and vice versa. For example we live within a (nominally) 4-dimensional space-time. This bubble of space time could interact in a higher dimension with other bubbles of space-time, having an observable effect on the nature of our space-time bubble, but not allowing us to directly look across into the other.
If we expand our notion of "universe" to include these extra interactions and ergo anything capable of producing them, then sure we've automatically ruled out any kind of falsifiable multiverse, because if we can observe it then it's not a multiverse, and if a multiverse exists we can't observe it. By definition. Meaning, not with any consequence for reality.
Meaning, it would still make sense to look for indications in the CMBR of such interactions, regardless of what you'd call it if they were found.
Yes I know, "First known", and yes it is implied. It's always implied. "Biggest meat-eating dinosaur", "earliest hominid", "most spectacular bosoms", "fastest man on earth" -- everything regarding these statements has an implicit "known" qualifier.
In cases where there is actually some reason to believe that there cannot possibly be something earlier, bigger, faster, etc -- i.e. cases where they are going beyond the implicit claim of "known" -- they will use some other qualifier. Like, "most massive star possible". Of course even then it's "to the best of our knowledge", whether they explicitly state that or not.
That post is best read in an Emperor Palpatine voice.
Yes, duh. Everything involving human knowledge is implicitly prefaced with "known". Stating it is unnecessary.
I believe the companies who received the incomplete source and redistributed it can be said to have acted in good faith. In many jurisdictions that does make a difference. Moreover I don't consider it to be in the spirit of open source to sue over mistakes.
Indeed, and just about everyone agrees, which is why in the vast, vast majority of cases GPL issues are resolved simply by having the distributor in question comply with the license. It's what everyone wants, and will doubtless be how this issue is resolved. Especially because this isn't a closed-source vendor trying to get away with including free software in their closed package, but rather every Linux distributor who are obviously willing -- and were already trying! -- to comply.
Point is just -- it is a compliance issue that needs to be fixed. Which RMS' email itself said, and will be the result.
What I don't get is why some morons think it's so important to argue that this isn't a GPL issue.
Really? You can't access the CEDET version control system? Have you asked one of those distros for the missing files and they said no they won't send them to you?
The existence of the source on a 3rd-party site is not sufficient for compliance with GPL V2 section 3a or V3 section 6a/d requirements. Providing the source only on request is only valid compliance with V2 3b/c or V3 6b/c if you accompany the binaries with the offer to provide source on request which most did not because that's not the method by which they chose to comply with the GPL!
Go figure someone who said something as stupid as "Another fine example of why any intelligent company keeps as far away from GPL as possible" wouldn't understand the GPL.
Not giving you instant online access is not a violation.
It is unless the binaries are accompanied with a written offer to provide the source on request. Read the GPL, idiot. Hypothetically being willing to provide source if someone asks is not sufficient for compliance.
Unless of course the actual copyright holder has granted these people the right to distribute the binaries without the source.
Yes, unless that's the case, you're completely wrong and just as stupid as you appear. Kinda a thin hypothetical to be hanging your whole superiority complex on isn't, it? Especially when basic reasoning skills suggest that it is highly unlikely that every single downstream distributor of Emacs has received specific dispensation, since they'd have no reason to think there was a problem and the copyright holder would have no reason to know the distributor exists. It is also unlikely that they created a general dispensation for all recipients of emacs from 3rd parties to redistribute without complying with the GPL, because the GPL is the license they chose to allow all Nth generation recipients to redistribute.
Did you follow that, or did I lose you at "basic reasoning skills"?
But nevertheless I admit that while your understanding of GPL compliance is without a doubt stupid and wrong, as is your estimation of whether current emacs distributions are in compliance, there's a very slim chance that you aren't completely wrong. Go you!
Of course even then, they still wouldn't be complying with the GPL, now would they? And what has been claimed? Oh, right.
Would you be able to untwist your panties if we instead said "highly probably GPL violations" or even just "possible", or did you already suck them up inside you?
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/03/20/1810225/Righthaven-Copyright-Lawsuit-Backfires
Oh right, and then here's your other big insight that there's more to a copyright violation lawsuit than license compliance.
You must think this information is relevant to the discussion because your head is too stuck up your own strawman's ass to notice nobody is talking about suing anybody.
No, I choose not to ignore ignorant fucks such as yourself. You and people like you give GPL a bad name. I don't make deals with idiots, I make fun of them.
You make a good point. Here I was trying to offer a convenient and face-saving way for you to back off from your idiotic blatherings to some more moderate compromise position. But why should I do that? This is the internet!
You don't understand the GPL (but pretend to). You don't understand what is actually being claimed (but pretend to). You don't understand the difference between copyright license compliance and a charge copyright infringement (and don't even pretend to). You also don't even pretend to understand the issue of innumerable downstream distributors that can't possibly have all received separate licenses. And to top of this hilariously stupid cake w
The GPL requires the source to be available, it is, its just not included by default, which is perfectly acceptable.
No, it isn't available, which is the entire problem.
If you downloaded the source package for emacs from the repositories of your chosen distro, you would not receive the files in question.
Again: Many organizations are distributing emacs binaries, but not making the full source available. That's a GPL violation.
Second, in order for this to be a violation, the authors of said files have to call it a violation
That's simply not true. If you are not in compliance with the terms of a license agreement, then you are not in compliance with the terms of that license agreement whether anyone knows or cares that you are.
For this violation to result in legal action the copyright holder has to know and care.
The only thing going on here is a few people getting their panties in a bunch over nothing.
It isn't nothing, but it also isn't a huge deal because the non-compliance was accidental and the solution straightforward.
The response seems commensurate with the issue. Oh Shit we screwed up, but oh well shit happens.
How about you just ignore whatever few people you see as over-reacting as the outliers they are, and I'll ignore the idiocy you spouted immediately after the last quote up there. Deal?
To comply via methods b) or c) where you only need to make the source available to those who request it, you do have to include an offer saying that this is the case with the object code.
But they aren't doing that because nearly everyone distributing emacs is complying with the GPL via methods d -- allowing an optional source download from the same place they downloaded the emacs binary -- or method a -- including the source itself along with the object files in a physical medium.
But because of the omission of the original bison files, they aren't complying with this method either, because they don't have the source and hence aren't making it available either on the source disks or the online source repositories.
That's ignoring the fact that if they were trying to comply via methods b) or c), they still couldn't because they don't have the source. It's immaterial though because that's not how Linux distros (or virtually anyone else) comply with the GPL.
That's why this is a GPL violation. They are not complying.
But it wasn't their fault, it was the fault of those upstream. Which is why the solution is to simply fix it by providing them with the original bison files. Of course "fix it" is the preferred resolution for all GPL compliance issues, but in this case in particular it's the obvious choice.
That is really cool. I wasn't aware of that technique. It is fun to be wrong.
Unless it's in the context of things like "There's no way I'm about to be eaten by a slavering xenomorph!"
No No... This makes sense... Stay with me, but the climate is warming, right? Regardless what you think about why. And I've notices that people seems to be getting stupider and stupider...
Right, right, and successful high-seas piracy requires intelligence and so rising global stupid leads to a decline in global pirates, which we already know is what causes the rising global temperature. It's a big feedback loop.
Don't neglect the "gravitational dominance" aspect, which can be calculated using the Planetary Discriminant (also described on that page), and essentially subsumes the "comparable size" part. If there were other objects of comparable size, then these metrics would necessarily be much smaller.
I dunno, but if this stuff was transparent to infrared, we could call it "TrI-Lithium".
'course that would mean referencing an audaciously awful movie that most people would rather forget. In fact forget I said anything. oh but I'm still hitting "submit".
It's not even necessarily about the size of other objects, but about the total mass of objects.
Pluto is a tiny fraction of the mass in its orbit.
Everything else in earth's orbit is a tiny fraction of it (not counting Luna).
No planet has cleared it's orbit 100%, which is okay because that never was the requirement.
Earth has done the job of clearing its orbit 100,000,000 times better than Pluto has. it doesn't have to be perfect to clearly be in a different class.