Just as a point of general curiosity, why don't you use a more capable RDBMS like Oracle or PostgreSQL? I find the extra checks performed by such databases help uncover errors in my application layer, which in turn leads to much quicker development time.
I'd recommend making a series out of "Heart of the Comet" (Benford and Brin), then. One of my favorite SF books, and most of the technology is at least superficially feasible.
Basically it is about a group of researchers that hitch a ride on a halley's comet for a 76-year round-trip. Unfortunately they run into some unexpected problems, and end up having to fight for their survival.
self expression is not obscene, and the only time you should be ashamed of someone else's message is when it speaks ill of you.
I'm not at all opposed to self-expression, and shame has nothing to do with it. What I'm opposed to is the $4000 - $5000 that we have to spend to keep our building clean. Just for the record, I do not want to live inside somebody else's self-expression. I believe I should have that freedom, as a part-owner of the building.
Would you agree to let me come to your house and spray paint in any location I choose (be it on your car, your windows, your dog, your music collection, or whatever)? Because I dearly want to express myself in such manner. I promise I won't write anything nasty about you.
On a similar note: if I ever catch someone vandalizing my house I'll happily spray all the paint he carries over his clothes, his body and his vehicle, as an act of self-expression on my part.
Fine, I have no trouble with that. But could you please send me your contact details so _you_ can pay the thousands of dollars we spend each year to keep our apartment building free from 'art'?
"spread and perfection of democracy around the world" = "spread and perfect of American hegemony around the world"
"without rushing to judgement about which means will be most affective in producing it" = "we may use lies, economic sanctions or outright war to get what we want"
And since power in the USA resides with the corporations that means that pushing their agenda is indeed compatible with the AdTI's mission.
Nope, don't see any slums either. But I think I can spot a few houses that do not actually have a swimming pool in the garden, so I guess that proves your point, whatever it was.
Next time you're in Europe, get away from the popular (among tourists) cities. You'll find very large numbers of people living in what amount to shacks.
Excuse me!? What exactly do you call a "shack"? What country are you thinking about (Albania?)?
I'm asking because I'm cannot think of any place in western Europe where people live in shacks.
But I'll check carefully, next time I'm in Europe. [gazes out of the window, which offers a pretty good view of a small city] No. No shacks. I can see a couple of churches, a school, a bank, a train station, a bloody big hospital, a wind mill, and more houses than I care to count, but no shacks. Wait, that's wrong - there is a bike shack right below the building. Didn't spot anyone living there when I put my bike there this morning, though.
Just for the record, I really can see all the items linked to from behind my desk;-)
Another sucker falls for the Slashdot Group Mind Fallacy. Slashdot has hundreds of thousands of readers. Some of these strictly adhere to the GPL, others copy music. There is probably some overlap in there, but you have no way of telling.
The "average slashdotter" you have constructed is made of straw, and your attack on it is nonsensical.
Anyway, being opposed to Orrin Hatch is not the same as being opposed to copyright, and being in favor of limited copyright is not the same as being in favor of unlimited copyright. For all we know, mr. Hatch could very well be proposing new laws that make GPL-style use of copyright illegal (I'm sure some method can be found, and don't think Microsoft et al haven't thought of it).
I find it sad to the extreme that people will happily post things like "the US president is a clown" with nothing more to fear than being modded down, yet you are afraid to post criticism of scientology. That, more than anything, tells me they are a dangerous bunch of crooks that should be removed from the face of the earth ASAP.
So, how does one take out a fake religion? Is it possible to sue? Get it declared an illegal organisation, somehow? Could we reasonably accuse them of terrorism? Your link proves I'm not the first to have this thought, but evidentally not much is happening...
We tried it. It failed to read our existing Word files correctly (standard company document features coming out wrong, that sort of thing), so we decided against using it for now.
However, we also reported every problem we could find and the good news is that quite a few seem to be fixed now. Once 2.0 gets released we'll reevaluate it for use in the office.
OOo Writer has at least one killer feature: PDF export, which is something we need badly and which is a pain with Word.
And unlike Word, OOo Writer hasn't yet gone and destroyed any of my documents. Word tends to do that, and I believe it is using its Intellisense to sniff out approaching deadlines so it can concentrate its evil powers where it can do the most harm. Example: last week we lost a day's worth of work on a document when it was inexplicably eaten by Word at the end of the working day. Yes, we keep backups. No, they don't run halfway through the day. And then the next day it happened again with the same document, repeating the same changes as the day before. Buh...
You may be interested in my proposal for a 32 hour day, then. You'll get a few hours of sleep extra (in the middle of the day), and since we'll keep the 8-hour working day there will be a lot of hours to spend on actually doing interesting things, such as downloading and burning even more stuff you'll never find the time to look at.
I've heard this quote in relation to XML before, and I don't get it. LISP is a programming language. XML is a method for storing data. About the only relation between the two that I can find is that both use nesting. So, why does this get brought up whenever XML is being discussed?
You may be right, but ixemul was originally created by Markus Wild in 1991, and contains BSD-licensed code. Of course I have no idea how it evolved over the years, I've lost touch with the community. There is some information here.
I once released a small but popular Amiga icon editor and image converter as shareware.
Was that Iconian? If so, I beta tested for you long ago. Sorry to hear you didn't get much for it - it was a great tool.
Anyway, I know the feeling. I spent about six years of my life on fMSX Amiga, which was free (both speech and beer). I didn't formally license it (I was young and naive at the time), but I did put some restrictions on the source: I wanted to be properly credited, and I didn't want the completely disfunctional Colecovision support enabled because it just didn't work yet. Neither of these seem particularly unfair to me, and anyway, it was (and still is, for at least the next 80 years) _my_ source.
The result: there were four different "Colecovision emulators" around that were direct rip-offs of my source code. I don't know what I hated more: the ones that replaced my name with their own, claiming all rights to the work, or the ones that left my copyright notice intact, somehow making it seem I had released the utterly non-functioning software.
Anyway, I made a grand total of not even 20 euro's with fMSX Amiga, so don't feel too bad about it. As for the Amiga community, it turned unbelievably poisonous at some point. I'm not surprised if there are GPL-related problems now.
Basically what happened is that Daimaou pulled the company into something they are unhappy about. They should fire Daimaou if they are that unhappy.
"Pull the company"? Nah, the company had a responsibility to check that using this code was allowed. They didn't, and that is _their_ mistake, not his.
Of course, proposing to use the GPL'ed code and not getting the conclusions on paper was a stupid thing to do. I can understand how it happens - you have a quick discussion with your boss while getting coffee, he mumbles "ok, ok", and a few months later he has forgotten the whole thing and you are on the road to disaster. Or even better, some other company official doesn't give a flying fuck about your verbal agreement and simply claims ownership of the code.
But it is still the responsibility of the company to make sure they are not pirating that code.
Ignorance? Apathy? How about this: we don't want our mail controlled by yet another large US company. We don't want them to know who our friends are, who we communicate with, what we are talking about, etc.
Sure, they may claim to "not be evil". Whether or not that is true I have absolutely no way of telling - they could just as easily be a front for a US security agency or some other sinister group. But I'd rather trust my friendly local ISP (and only to a limited extent, at that) than yet another faceless behemoth on another continent.
Slashdot Mirror
Oops. That will teach me to "preview" next time...
A quick search on reveals there are 32,100,000 .us sites at this time. Not bad, but far less than the number of .com (1,570,000,000) or .net (143,000,000) or even .nl (34,200,000)...
Kickbacks, perhaps?
I was just thinking the same thing. Then you came along and spoiled it...
Basically it is about a group of researchers that hitch a ride on a halley's comet for a 76-year round-trip. Unfortunately they run into some unexpected problems, and end up having to fight for their survival.
No, that would be the mission phase. The decommissioning phase is not scheduled until several microseconds later.
Ah-ha, so *that's* where that 2nd hand aircraft carrier came from!
I'm not at all opposed to self-expression, and shame has nothing to do with it. What I'm opposed to is the $4000 - $5000 that we have to spend to keep our building clean. Just for the record, I do not want to live inside somebody else's self-expression. I believe I should have that freedom, as a part-owner of the building.
Would you agree to let me come to your house and spray paint in any location I choose (be it on your car, your windows, your dog, your music collection, or whatever)? Because I dearly want to express myself in such manner. I promise I won't write anything nasty about you.
On a similar note: if I ever catch someone vandalizing my house I'll happily spray all the paint he carries over his clothes, his body and his vehicle, as an act of self-expression on my part.
Fine, I have no trouble with that. But could you please send me your contact details so _you_ can pay the thousands of dollars we spend each year to keep our apartment building free from 'art'?
"spread and perfection of democracy around the world" = "spread and perfect of American hegemony around the world"
"without rushing to judgement about which means will be most affective in producing it" = "we may use lies, economic sanctions or outright war to get what we want"
And since power in the USA resides with the corporations that means that pushing their agenda is indeed compatible with the AdTI's mission.
Nope, don't see any slums either. But I think I can spot a few houses that do not actually have a swimming pool in the garden, so I guess that proves your point, whatever it was.
Excuse me!? What exactly do you call a "shack"? What country are you thinking about (Albania?)?
I'm asking because I'm cannot think of any place in western Europe where people live in shacks.
But I'll check carefully, next time I'm in Europe. [gazes out of the window, which offers a pretty good view of a small city] No. No shacks. I can see a couple of churches, a school, a bank, a train station, a bloody big hospital, a wind mill, and more houses than I care to count, but no shacks. Wait, that's wrong - there is a bike shack right below the building. Didn't spot anyone living there when I put my bike there this morning, though.
Just for the record, I really can see all the items linked to from behind my desk ;-)
The "average slashdotter" you have constructed is made of straw, and your attack on it is nonsensical.
Anyway, being opposed to Orrin Hatch is not the same as being opposed to copyright, and being in favor of limited copyright is not the same as being in favor of unlimited copyright. For all we know, mr. Hatch could very well be proposing new laws that make GPL-style use of copyright illegal (I'm sure some method can be found, and don't think Microsoft et al haven't thought of it).
So, how does one take out a fake religion? Is it possible to sue? Get it declared an illegal organisation, somehow? Could we reasonably accuse them of terrorism? Your link proves I'm not the first to have this thought, but evidentally not much is happening...
However, we also reported every problem we could find and the good news is that quite a few seem to be fixed now. Once 2.0 gets released we'll reevaluate it for use in the office.
OOo Writer has at least one killer feature: PDF export, which is something we need badly and which is a pain with Word.
And unlike Word, OOo Writer hasn't yet gone and destroyed any of my documents. Word tends to do that, and I believe it is using its Intellisense to sniff out approaching deadlines so it can concentrate its evil powers where it can do the most harm. Example: last week we lost a day's worth of work on a document when it was inexplicably eaten by Word at the end of the working day. Yes, we keep backups. No, they don't run halfway through the day. And then the next day it happened again with the same document, repeating the same changes as the day before. Buh...
Who's with me?
I've heard this quote in relation to XML before, and I don't get it. LISP is a programming language. XML is a method for storing data. About the only relation between the two that I can find is that both use nesting. So, why does this get brought up whenever XML is being discussed?
Was that Iconian? If so, I beta tested for you long ago. Sorry to hear you didn't get much for it - it was a great tool.
Anyway, I know the feeling. I spent about six years of my life on fMSX Amiga, which was free (both speech and beer). I didn't formally license it (I was young and naive at the time), but I did put some restrictions on the source: I wanted to be properly credited, and I didn't want the completely disfunctional Colecovision support enabled because it just didn't work yet. Neither of these seem particularly unfair to me, and anyway, it was (and still is, for at least the next 80 years) _my_ source.
The result: there were four different "Colecovision emulators" around that were direct rip-offs of my source code. I don't know what I hated more: the ones that replaced my name with their own, claiming all rights to the work, or the ones that left my copyright notice intact, somehow making it seem I had released the utterly non-functioning software.
Anyway, I made a grand total of not even 20 euro's with fMSX Amiga, so don't feel too bad about it. As for the Amiga community, it turned unbelievably poisonous at some point. I'm not surprised if there are GPL-related problems now.
A new high contrast style and a complete monochrome icon set
I'll be damned - it is AmigaOS come back from the dead!
"Pull the company"? Nah, the company had a responsibility to check that using this code was allowed. They didn't, and that is _their_ mistake, not his.
Of course, proposing to use the GPL'ed code and not getting the conclusions on paper was a stupid thing to do. I can understand how it happens - you have a quick discussion with your boss while getting coffee, he mumbles "ok, ok", and a few months later he has forgotten the whole thing and you are on the road to disaster. Or even better, some other company official doesn't give a flying fuck about your verbal agreement and simply claims ownership of the code.
But it is still the responsibility of the company to make sure they are not pirating that code.
Sure, they may claim to "not be evil". Whether or not that is true I have absolutely no way of telling - they could just as easily be a front for a US security agency or some other sinister group. But I'd rather trust my friendly local ISP (and only to a limited extent, at that) than yet another faceless behemoth on another continent.
Patent reform in the US, after burying the rest of the world under software patents you mean?