BTW, in all seriousness, I'm 100% all for signing a pre-nup that opts the couple out of any state involved divorce proceeding and instead substitutes that with a jury trial via a local church. The shaming alone from that process as an old person on the jury yells out "I'VE BEEN MARRIED 60 YEARS AND YOU WANT TO DO WHAT? MAN THE 1!@$123 UP SON!" will produce sound results. OK fine maybe it isn't for everyone, but it should be an option.
My wife got into a routine of whiling away her evenings by hoeing into bourbon, playing on Facebook, and yelling abuse at me. Should I venture to say anything back, she'd really crank it up, stomping around slamming doors, or get right in my face screaming, and follow me wherever I go. She has lied about me, e.g. telling her friends and family that I said "I didn't marry you to get this fat", when I have never said anything of the sort. Also we had a joint account, and, after the bills were paid (thankfully, I guess), she would spend the remainder on bourbon, tobacco, junk food, gifts for her friends and family, and "to make it fair", gifts for me, that I didn't want. ("See, I got you something, why aren't you happy?"). When I tried to talk to her about things, she'd either promise to improve, and perhaps do so for a while, or she'd yell abuse.
I stuck with her. Eventually, I separated our bank accounts, and moved all my stuff into the basement, and put a lock on it, and things are now going relatively well. It's hard though, especially since she's spread it around that this has all come out of nowhere, and she's very hurt but she's just doing her best to cope, and "thinking about the kids".
Anyway, you'll have to excuse me if I take a different point of view, and tell you where you can shove your ignorant-as-shit old church person, and their "MAN THE 1!@$123 UP SON!"
No, if we're staying legal here, men can only offer to have sex with women. He can't make her have sex, he can't make her stop taking birth control, he can't prevent her from getting an abortion.
Okay, technically perhaps I should have said "A joint decision by a man and a woman can lead to the woman being pregnant, but can not lead to the man being pregnant." I didn't mean to suggest that it's not in part the woman's doing, only to point out that it is in part the man's doing, but only the woman becomes pregnant. The argument for the woman being allowed to choose whether or not she has an abortion is that it's her body. We could argue about when there is also a child involved. That's a legitimate question. The man's body, however, is not involved.
But they can make men pay child support, even if he never wanted kids, even if he never consented to sex. Can you at least admit that that isn't fair?
Admit it would be unfair if the man was raped? Yes, although I doubt that's a very common occurrence.
Or admit it's unfair that women have wombs and men don't? Yes, but only in so far as it's unfair that some people are born smarter, stronger, and more attractive than others. The world isn't fair. (And this particular inequality is a two-edged sword. Personally, I'm quite happy without.)
If we're going to be a pro choice nation, let's go all the way. How much of a fucking double standard is it that a mother can "choose" keep a child or not, but a father gets forced to support a child for 18 years. If pro choice supporters don't want to be flaming hypocrites, they need to fight for the end of child support.
The situation's not symmetrical, because men can make women pregnant, but women can't make men pregnant.
When the copyright holder voluntarily uses the GPL that instance of their source code is absolutely bound by the GPL. That is why dual licensing is necessary for proprietary distribution, a non-GPL instance is required.
I'm at a loss to understand how you think this could work. If the copyright holder licenses a work under the GPL, and doesn't adhere to the terms of the licence themselves, who do you think could sue them, and for what? (e.g. Do you think licensees could sue them for breach of copyright?)
The copyright holder doesn't have to agree to the licence to get rights to modify and redistribute their own code, because they already have these rights anyway. (Even if they did, however, it still wouldn't be a problem, because only the copyright holder can enforce the licence.)
That's not the issue. The issue is if the copyright holder can release a proprietary binary built from the GPL version of their source code, no they can not.
It is the same issue, because binaries are a kind of derivative of the source. The GPL treats them as a special case, but that doesn't matter, because the copyright holder doesn't have to agree to the GPL. The GPL acts to grant others a subset of the rights that the copyright holder already has. But even if the copyright holder did have to agree to the GPL, only they would have a legal right to sue themselves for breach of it. (If there were multiple authors, then any could enforce the licence against the others, though.)
No. You can not GPL your own code and make proprietary binaries. The terms of the GPL require everyone, including the original copyright holder, to provide source to anyone they gave a binary to and grant these people the right to modify and redistribute...
The copyright holder doesn't have to agree to the licence to get rights to modify and redistribute their own code, because they already have these rights anyway. (Even if they did, however, it still wouldn't be a problem, because only the copyright holder can enforce the licence.)
To create a proprietary version the original copyright holder has to dual license....
You don't technically have to dual license the free version yourself. What you do need, if you want to incorporate derivatives into your proprietary version, is to have the authors of derivatives dual license their contributions. Dual licensing the free version shows the authors of derivatives, by example, what you would like them to do.
where you run into trouble:...
someone puts a patch against BAR in the GPL version out on GitHub (or anywhere else)....
Unless you get permission from the patch creator you can't pull BAZ back into your proprietary trunk....
So sure someone can dual licence, but it can really be a PITA, and thus just going MIT licence is so much less headache.
If you license the free version under MIT/BSD, then derivatives can have additional requirements (e.g. derivatives could be made proprietary by someone else), so you can't necessarily even incorporate derivatives into the free version, let alone your proprietary version. You'd be worse off, not better off.
... the GPL isn't about freedom.... ... Freedom isn't about telling other people exactly what they can and can't do. That's tyranny.... ... Just look at how long the text of the GPL is compared to much freer licenses like the BSD or MIT licenses....
Allowing people freedom requires preventing people from restricting others' freedom. Countries have laws, and they are often long. We can't accurately compare the freedom of countries by comparing how long their laws are.
Besides, much of the GPL (aside from the requirement to disclose source) is designed to counter the requirements in copyright laws (which are generally very long, and full of restrictions and limitations).
"interviewed four Microsoft customers" if that is 4 people.... that is statistically invalid especially if you are going to extrapolate to 24k users.
If that is 4 bussinesses (which tend to use the same hardware across everyone).. it is still invalid as that only means that it works for a certain small subset of hardware.
In short, the intentionally, skewed the data using known happy customers.
They don't have to pick known happy customers, or in any way rig the study. All they have to do is commission 10 (completely independent) small studies, with contracts giving them sole right of publication, then publish only the most favourable one.
It's wordy and ugly. It reminds me a bit of COBOL.
I like C-style curly braces, but in general I find VB easy to read. I never had to use COBOL (or the older VB, until recently), so I don't have these associations. VB reminds me of Pascal. I learnt Pascal before C, and never grew to like C syntax.
In by far the majority of locations around the globe, the only conditions of sale applicable are those on 'actual' display at the point of sale and they must be clearly visible.
I think the idea with software EULAs is that use of the software requires copying it (on to a hard drive to install it, into memory to load it, and into cache to run it), and copyright law expressly forbids copying without a licence. If this is the case, then you can purchase and possess a copy without agreeing to the EULA, but you need a license to copy (and therefore to use) the software. I don't know if this has been tested in court though.
Since have put a lot of effort into legally defining death as cessation of brain activity, why not use the start of brain activity as the definition of humanity in secular law?
I think this is on the right track. However I think it's specifically higher brain function, thoughts and feelings, which is important. Lower brain functions, such as automatic reflexes, just serve a supporting role, IMO. I have heard that this is covered in Morowitz and Trefil (1992)--The facts of life: Science and the abortion controversy. Apparently it's the cerebral cortex that's the seat of consciousness--i.e. thoughts and feelings--and it doesn't begin to form connections until 20 weeks gestation (18 weeks of pregnancy).
2. As has been discussed elsewhere in the thread, the core question involved here is this: "At what point is it 'human'?".
Although that's close to the right question, I think it need a bit of adjustment. Firstly, insert "a", as in "At what point is it 'a human'?" The unfertilised egg is arguably already 'human'--it's human tissue--but not a human. Secondly, possibly further change "a human" to "a person". If we're thinking of "a human" as an animal, i.e. as a body, that's the wrong approach. We can quite happily talk about multi-headed animals, e.g. Cerberus the three-headed dog, but we'd never talk about "multi-headed people". We'd talk about conjoint twins. Reposting something I posted elsewhere:
I think it's a mind, not a body, that defines a person. One body is usually associated with one mind. However if we think about (or postulate) cases where this isn't the case, I think it becomes obvious that it's the mind that's important, and the body is just a vessel.
e.g. We think of Conjoint/Siamese twins as twins, two people, not one person, because there are two minds, despite there being only one body. If a person is decapitated, they are dead and gone, regardless of whether their body could be kept on life support, because it is the mind that is important not the body, and the mind is gone. Considering the hypothetical situation in "body swap" stories like Freaky Friday, we would say that the people are in different bodies, not that the people have different minds in them, because it is the mind, not the body, that defines the person.
There can't be a mind until after 20 weeks gestation (18 weeks after fertilisation), because connections don't begin to form in the cerebral cortex until then, so until then there is just an empty vessel, IMHO.
If I said anti-Semitism was systemic in Nazi Germany, would you call me racist?
if you said the word "nazi" in your comment, when we're not even talking about anything relating to WWII, I'd know you're a troll
I suppose that's usually a fair assumption. My reasoning was that we are talking about a situation in which someone is alleging prejudice is widespread, and I wanted to draw an analogy with a situation in which it is accepted that prejudice is widespread, in order to question whether someone who alleges prejudice is widespread is necessarily themselves prejudiced. Nazi Germany is the first thing that sprung to mind as a situation in which it is accepted that prejudice is widespread. I guess I should have thought for a bit longer, and come up with another analogy. I'll do that now: If I said mice generally dislike cats, would you say I dislike cats? To me, it doesn't follow at all. I can believe (rightly or wrongly) that other people hold a view, and state that I believe other people hold a view, without holding that view myself.
Bastardizing the use of "they" is broken, but I guess that fits with all the rest of the "rules" of the this language... no point in being logical now:-)
As someone else has pointed out, "they" has been used as a singular for some time (see singular they). Also, the second person plural "you" is used as a singular in exactly the same way (i.e. it's grammatically plural, we say "you are", not "you is", but can refer to a single person), and even the the first person plural "we" is sometimes used as a singular (i.e. the "royal we"). Since this covers all the plural personal pronouns, it is arguably consistent, in a way.:-)
"The presenter cleared their voice and spoke" sounds almost as natural as his or her and is far better than using constructions like "his or her"
The presumed acceptance that transgenderism is the new normal is obscene.
I didn't read it that way. I read it as:
"The presenter cleared their voice and spoke" sounds almost as natural as "The presenter cleared his voice and spoke" or "The presenter cleared her voice and spoke" and is far more natural sounding than "The presenter cleared his or her voice and spoke"
If sexism is systemic in tech, how can women avoid dealing with it? What's the alternative? I think you're shooting the messenger here. If I said anti-Semitism was systemic in Nazi Germany, would you call me racist? (It seems about time to invoke Godwin's law.)
The very idea that a government watchdog group presumes to 'order' people to do anything is repulsive. Nanny state authoritarianism and a servile population of betas.
I don't have a problem with a government ordering someone to respect someone else's privacy. Not that I don't find some things governments do repulsive. I do have a problem with governments illegally invading their citizen's privacy, and then imprisoning whistle blowers. Jesus bloody Christ, worry about something that actually matters.
At what percentage would it be justified in to change the law, and not make it illegal anymore?
Never. That's not an option, because if the world succumbs to piracy, it will fall apart. We must continue efforts to address piracy in four ways:
Preventative technical protection measures
Monitoring
Streamlining prosecution
Harsher penalties
It's not impossible if you're willing to think outside the square. If the figure goes up around 90% we could just drop a nuke. We've got plenty, and we're not using them.
If Google had accidentally built their headquarters on someone else's land, that would be incompetence. Land boundaries can be reliably searched, and are well-defined. Infringing a patent is just bad luck. No-one has the resources to find all the patents that might be relevant to a large program, and it isn't even always clear what patents will be interpreted to mean.
Could you name the features the contemporary (or any) MS-Office has that are important to the average secretary and that are missing in LibreOffice?
Ease of use.
Yup, and this essentially amounts to doing things the way that MS Office does them. The way you've already learnt to do things is the easy way, because doing things any other way first requires unlearning the way you've already learnt.
100% perfect compatability with MS products since 99% of the people you will be exchanging info and docs with use MSkype products.
Yup, and it's exceedingly difficult to get 100% compatibility with MS Office without being MS Office. (Whereas MS Office gets it for free, by definition.)
Help and assistance on the Web when you need to figure something out. Easy with MS products just Google what you are trying to do and get 100s to 1000s of sites showing examples. With the FOSS options. That only works about 10% of the time.
Yup, and there'd need to be a large user base to change this
Need I go on?
Nope, that about covers it.
FOSS products for productivity and the desktop do not yet belong on the desktop in a corporate or government environment. They are still at least another decade away from such compatability.
About a decade away from compatibility with today's MS products. In another decade, they'll still be about a decade away. It's a moving target.
We're stuck with Vista because several of the Microsoft apps we have to run won't run on any newer version of Windows.
Never heard of a place that standardized on Vista of all things, that's kind of weird. Your employer better get themselves some 7 or 10
I'd guess that might be problematic on account of the apps they use that won't run on those versions of MS Windows? Good suggestion though. Are you an MCSA?
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My wife got into a routine of whiling away her evenings by hoeing into bourbon, playing on Facebook, and yelling abuse at me. Should I venture to say anything back, she'd really crank it up, stomping around slamming doors, or get right in my face screaming, and follow me wherever I go. She has lied about me, e.g. telling her friends and family that I said "I didn't marry you to get this fat", when I have never said anything of the sort. Also we had a joint account, and, after the bills were paid (thankfully, I guess), she would spend the remainder on bourbon, tobacco, junk food, gifts for her friends and family, and "to make it fair", gifts for me, that I didn't want. ("See, I got you something, why aren't you happy?"). When I tried to talk to her about things, she'd either promise to improve, and perhaps do so for a while, or she'd yell abuse.
I stuck with her. Eventually, I separated our bank accounts, and moved all my stuff into the basement, and put a lock on it, and things are now going relatively well. It's hard though, especially since she's spread it around that this has all come out of nowhere, and she's very hurt but she's just doing her best to cope, and "thinking about the kids".
Anyway, you'll have to excuse me if I take a different point of view, and tell you where you can shove your ignorant-as-shit old church person, and their "MAN THE 1!@$123 UP SON!"
Okay, technically perhaps I should have said "A joint decision by a man and a woman can lead to the woman being pregnant, but can not lead to the man being pregnant." I didn't mean to suggest that it's not in part the woman's doing, only to point out that it is in part the man's doing, but only the woman becomes pregnant. The argument for the woman being allowed to choose whether or not she has an abortion is that it's her body. We could argue about when there is also a child involved. That's a legitimate question. The man's body, however, is not involved.
Admit it would be unfair if the man was raped? Yes, although I doubt that's a very common occurrence.
Or admit it's unfair that women have wombs and men don't? Yes, but only in so far as it's unfair that some people are born smarter, stronger, and more attractive than others. The world isn't fair. (And this particular inequality is a two-edged sword. Personally, I'm quite happy without.)
Is it? Why?
The situation's not symmetrical, because men can make women pregnant, but women can't make men pregnant.
I'm at a loss to understand how you think this could work. If the copyright holder licenses a work under the GPL, and doesn't adhere to the terms of the licence themselves, who do you think could sue them, and for what? (e.g. Do you think licensees could sue them for breach of copyright?)
It is the same issue, because binaries are a kind of derivative of the source. The GPL treats them as a special case, but that doesn't matter, because the copyright holder doesn't have to agree to the GPL. The GPL acts to grant others a subset of the rights that the copyright holder already has. But even if the copyright holder did have to agree to the GPL, only they would have a legal right to sue themselves for breach of it. (If there were multiple authors, then any could enforce the licence against the others, though.)
The copyright holder doesn't have to agree to the licence to get rights to modify and redistribute their own code, because they already have these rights anyway. (Even if they did, however, it still wouldn't be a problem, because only the copyright holder can enforce the licence.)
You don't technically have to dual license the free version yourself. What you do need, if you want to incorporate derivatives into your proprietary version, is to have the authors of derivatives dual license their contributions. Dual licensing the free version shows the authors of derivatives, by example, what you would like them to do.
If you license the free version under MIT/BSD, then derivatives can have additional requirements (e.g. derivatives could be made proprietary by someone else), so you can't necessarily even incorporate derivatives into the free version, let alone your proprietary version. You'd be worse off, not better off.
Allowing people freedom requires preventing people from restricting others' freedom. Countries have laws, and they are often long. We can't accurately compare the freedom of countries by comparing how long their laws are.
Besides, much of the GPL (aside from the requirement to disclose source) is designed to counter the requirements in copyright laws (which are generally very long, and full of restrictions and limitations).
They don't have to pick known happy customers, or in any way rig the study. All they have to do is commission 10 (completely independent) small studies, with contracts giving them sole right of publication, then publish only the most favourable one.
I like C-style curly braces, but in general I find VB easy to read. I never had to use COBOL (or the older VB, until recently), so I don't have these associations. VB reminds me of Pascal. I learnt Pascal before C, and never grew to like C syntax.
That's interesting, thanks.
I think the idea with software EULAs is that use of the software requires copying it (on to a hard drive to install it, into memory to load it, and into cache to run it), and copyright law expressly forbids copying without a licence. If this is the case, then you can purchase and possess a copy without agreeing to the EULA, but you need a license to copy (and therefore to use) the software. I don't know if this has been tested in court though.
I think this is on the right track. However I think it's specifically higher brain function, thoughts and feelings, which is important. Lower brain functions, such as automatic reflexes, just serve a supporting role, IMO. I have heard that this is covered in Morowitz and Trefil (1992)--The facts of life: Science and the abortion controversy. Apparently it's the cerebral cortex that's the seat of consciousness--i.e. thoughts and feelings--and it doesn't begin to form connections until 20 weeks gestation (18 weeks of pregnancy).
Although that's close to the right question, I think it need a bit of adjustment. Firstly, insert "a", as in "At what point is it 'a human'?" The unfertilised egg is arguably already 'human'--it's human tissue--but not a human. Secondly, possibly further change "a human" to "a person". If we're thinking of "a human" as an animal, i.e. as a body, that's the wrong approach. We can quite happily talk about multi-headed animals, e.g. Cerberus the three-headed dog, but we'd never talk about "multi-headed people". We'd talk about conjoint twins. Reposting something I posted elsewhere:
I think it's a mind, not a body, that defines a person. One body is usually associated with one mind. However if we think about (or postulate) cases where this isn't the case, I think it becomes obvious that it's the mind that's important, and the body is just a vessel.
e.g. We think of Conjoint/Siamese twins as twins, two people, not one person, because there are two minds, despite there being only one body. If a person is decapitated, they are dead and gone, regardless of whether their body could be kept on life support, because it is the mind that is important not the body, and the mind is gone. Considering the hypothetical situation in "body swap" stories like Freaky Friday, we would say that the people are in different bodies, not that the people have different minds in them, because it is the mind, not the body, that defines the person.
There can't be a mind until after 20 weeks gestation (18 weeks after fertilisation), because connections don't begin to form in the cerebral cortex until then, so until then there is just an empty vessel, IMHO.
I suppose that's usually a fair assumption. My reasoning was that we are talking about a situation in which someone is alleging prejudice is widespread, and I wanted to draw an analogy with a situation in which it is accepted that prejudice is widespread, in order to question whether someone who alleges prejudice is widespread is necessarily themselves prejudiced. Nazi Germany is the first thing that sprung to mind as a situation in which it is accepted that prejudice is widespread. I guess I should have thought for a bit longer, and come up with another analogy. I'll do that now: If I said mice generally dislike cats, would you say I dislike cats? To me, it doesn't follow at all. I can believe (rightly or wrongly) that other people hold a view, and state that I believe other people hold a view, without holding that view myself.
As someone else has pointed out, "they" has been used as a singular for some time (see singular they). Also, the second person plural "you" is used as a singular in exactly the same way (i.e. it's grammatically plural, we say "you are", not "you is", but can refer to a single person), and even the the first person plural "we" is sometimes used as a singular (i.e. the "royal we"). Since this covers all the plural personal pronouns, it is arguably consistent, in a way. :-)
I didn't read it that way. I read it as:
"The presenter cleared their voice and spoke" sounds almost as natural as "The presenter cleared his voice and spoke" or "The presenter cleared her voice and spoke" and is far more natural sounding than "The presenter cleared his or her voice and spoke"
If sexism is systemic in tech, how can women avoid dealing with it? What's the alternative? I think you're shooting the messenger here. If I said anti-Semitism was systemic in Nazi Germany, would you call me racist? (It seems about time to invoke Godwin's law.)
I don't have a problem with a government ordering someone to respect someone else's privacy. Not that I don't find some things governments do repulsive. I do have a problem with governments illegally invading their citizen's privacy, and then imprisoning whistle blowers. Jesus bloody Christ, worry about something that actually matters.
I know, right? Why can't I put a concealed, Internet-connected surveillance device in my daughter's bedroom? This is a clear violation of my freedoms!
At what percentage would it be justified in to change the law, and not make it illegal anymore?
Never. That's not an option, because if the world succumbs to piracy, it will fall apart. We must continue efforts to address piracy in four ways:
It's not impossible if you're willing to think outside the square. If the figure goes up around 90% we could just drop a nuke. We've got plenty, and we're not using them.
If Google had accidentally built their headquarters on someone else's land, that would be incompetence. Land boundaries can be reliably searched, and are well-defined. Infringing a patent is just bad luck. No-one has the resources to find all the patents that might be relevant to a large program, and it isn't even always clear what patents will be interpreted to mean.
Yup, and this essentially amounts to doing things the way that MS Office does them. The way you've already learnt to do things is the easy way, because doing things any other way first requires unlearning the way you've already learnt.
Yup, and it's exceedingly difficult to get 100% compatibility with MS Office without being MS Office. (Whereas MS Office gets it for free, by definition.)
Yup, and there'd need to be a large user base to change this
Nope, that about covers it.
About a decade away from compatibility with today's MS products. In another decade, they'll still be about a decade away. It's a moving target.
I'd guess that might be problematic on account of the apps they use that won't run on those versions of MS Windows? Good suggestion though. Are you an MCSA?