Forking Linux would be like forking the GPL itself, which is not only possible, but trivially easy: all you have to do is re-write it however you like, and rename it (e.g., "ACPL," for "Anonymous Coward's Public License").
The GPLv2 says at the top
Copyright (C) 1989, 1991 Free Software Foundation, Inc. 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.
Sometimes I'd do the problem independently and then share the results with others, other times I'd make little or no progress and have someone explain it to me. It wasn't about copying answers, it was about understanding the methodology.
There's an obvious solution here--just give credit. "The idea to apply power series expansions here was hit on in conversations with Paul X." Or "Thanks to Sally Z. for pointing out a typo in the statement of problem 3." I've turned in homework that said that kind of thing before.
At worst they can say "hey, I didn't want any collaboration on this assignment", and mark you down. But hey, the result will probably be better (both in terms of grades, and learning) than if you'd just given up on the problem entirely.
In most Western Countries, you can choose where you live. I could have chosen to live within the City Limits, where the store is within walking distance (and public transportation is actually quite good).
Where I live (Ann Arbor, Michigan) this is increasingly untrue. In the 12 years I've lived here, off the top of my head, downtown has lost two or three grocery stores, a department store, and a hardware store. Their replacements are the big stores out by the freeway exits. I don't see any sign of this trend abating.
This makes it more and more inconvenient to live near downtown without a car. So more people drive for their basic shopping. As this happens, there's more demand for amenities (ample free parking, wider roads) that can only be provided by large stores in the suburbs. That in turn drives development policies that increase the flight of retail to the suburbs, making more people dependent on driving. Etc., etc.
I worry that we're increasingly building ourselves into a situations where it becomes impossible to live within walking distance of both work and basic retail. And that one day we're going to wake up and realize the environmental impact and energy-inefficiency of that situation is going to become painfully clear.
If Linus continues to dig in and refuses to accept GPLV3 with its anti-DRM provisions
Good grief:
GPLv3 isn't even finished yet. This is a little premature.
Linus states his opinions very clearly and forcefully. That *doesn't* mean he isn't willing to change his mind. He's done it before. BUT:
Even if Linus did "accept GPLV3", he doesn't own the copyright in most of the kernel himself at this point--for each piece of the code he doesn't own copyright in, somebody would have to either track down the copyright-holder (or their heirs, if necessary...) and get their permission, or rewrite their code. The kernel is really big; the chances of this happening are extremely small.
Does he teach one how to make presentations that use trickery to guide the viewer to a conclusion desired by the presenter, facts be damned, or does he concern himself with accuracy, truthfulness and information transference?
Poster's point was that there is a place in the market for tools that do what Tufte tries to stop.
No doubt. Most of us, fortunately (and Tufte more than most of us) do get some choice about how to make our living.
Seriously, though. In Tufte's world, those without something truthful to say simply would say nothing. I like that world. But, I live in the Internet Age and know that world, perfect as it is, does not exist.
A lot of his work is more about how to analyze presentations as it is about how to create them. That's an invaluable skill in the world of bad PowerPoint presentations.
I can't decide who's more crazy here, the reviewer, the original author, or the commenters.
I now have more respect for the standard Slashdot story quality now that I've seen what happens when there's a major screw-up.
They can prevent it in part because parts of the GSM protocol are secret (the encryption algorithms, for example) or patent-encumbered.
In the long term I doubt they can really hope to keep stuff like encryption algorithms secret. Even if it's running on entirely separate hardware, I assume it's not *that* hard to reverse engineer. And of course if they ever release those algorithms as software (even if only in binary form), it becomes much easier.
(UMTS is less secret, as I understand it, but it's also much, much more patent-encumbered.)
Someone who wants to just screw around with the network on their own may not care about the patents. (And may not even be subject to them, in fact--I think of patents as intended to give a monopoly over commercial exploitation of an invention, not to control what people can fool around with on their own in their basement; but I'm not sure of the legal details there.)
I guess it all depends on who exactly they're trying to prevent from doing what.
They are not gonna let any random idiots access the GSM network directly with any device. Period.
Hm. I wonder how long they'll be able to prevent that.
But anyway, if they need that level of guarantee then, as another poster says, they'll need the code in question actually running in an entirely different piece of hardware; if it was just in a driver somewhere (even if only a binary), it'd still be possible to mess around with. So the other poster was probably right, and the code the spokesman was talking about here is actually running on a different processor and communicating with the linux kernel over some very simple interface.
(Though I don't know why they care whether the sensitive code is open-source or not. It's the hardware, not the license, that keeps you from modifying the code. Or does the code also contain information about using the network that's supposed to be secret?)
the baseband is a whole other processor in the system, which it likely communicates with over a tty or something
Yeah, OK, so if I replace "interface with" by "run on" in the quote from the article:
Except for the components that [run on] the baseband processor, everything in Qtopia Phone Edition necessary to develop applications is available under an open source license
Except for the components that interface with the baseband processor, everything in Qtopia Phone Edition necessary to develop applications is available under an open source license
I'm a little worried about that "except"; does this mean they're using a kernel with proprietary drivers?
"BSD licenses are not Free Software because they do not "preserve freedom" (sic) in the way GPL does. i think i agree that it's a stupid distinction, but the FSF has fought hard to promote a given definition of "Free Software""
Who told you this???
Here is the FSF's definition of "free software". There's no such "preserve freedom" clause.
They also have a list of free software licenses free software licenses. Note that BSD is included. (It is non-copyleft, but free.)
They certainly *do* prefer the GPL, in general (though not necessarily everywhere), but they definitely do not do that by claiming that non-GPL'd software is not free software.
"given that you're using the capital F and S, you seem to imply GNU's definition of "Free", as embodied in the GPL. in which case, sure, you can't build a system which is based on GNU's philosophy without a good chunk of GNU's code. but is that surprising? it's practically a tautology."
Uh, no, you're confused about the FSF's definition of "free". Go read their web pages sometime. Despite an obvious preference for the GPL, they most definitely consider BSD-licensed software to be free.
That's very odd - because I'm solidly middle class, and so is (was) my father-in-law. Yet we just barely missed having to pay estate taxes on our inheritance. It's quite easy, if you make around $150k/yr from your early thirties, and live prudently, to amass an inheritance that will get taxed.
So, with prudent investments and $150k a year from your early thirties, you *still* missed the estate tax.
That sounds completely in agreement with the statement that "99% of people who die don't pay [the estate tax]. Only those that leave large estates do."....
The article, sadly, doesn't push on finding out why people were carrying around laptops full of sensitive information.
Why did they need it? "Oh, I'll just download an Excel file of every students personal details so I can make that Powerpoint presentation I want!"
Maybe they're talking about research data. Enforcing standard procedures for everyone in the registration office could be easier than, say, policing every PhD candidate that's collecting data from human subjects....
On Thu, 20 Apr 2006, Linus Torvalds wrote: > > I claim that Mach people (and apparently FreeBSD) are incompetent idiots.
I also claim that Slashdot people usually are smelly and eat their boogers, and have an IQ slightly lower than my daughters pet hamster (that's "hamster" without a "p", btw, for any slashdot posters out there. Try to follow me, ok?).
Furthermore, I claim that anybody that hasn't noticed by now that I'm an opinionated bastard, and that "impolite" is my middle name, is lacking a few clues.
Finally, it's clear that I'm not only the smartest person around, I'm also incredibly good-looking, and that my infallible charm is also second only to my becoming modesty.
If Linux systems ever want to develop greater market penetration and actually challenge the dominance of Windows
The only reason why I care whether Linux succeeds or not is because it's free software. If the price of having Linux succeed is that it has to pick up a lot of proprietary bits that defeat the purpose of its being free software, then I'm not really interested in it any more.
Kernel modules have an well-known API, just like user-space programs.
Not true. The kernel developers have consistently refused to commit to a stable in-kernel API. See, e.g., stable_api_nonsense, also available in the Documentation directory of your friendly local kernel source tree.
The API for kernel modules is covered by the exported symbol names that the modules link against. This is no different than calling routines that exist in a shared library with a known API. These APIs are relatively stable within the same major kernel release (2.4, 2.6, etc.).
Yes, you can technically read from and write to any memory area in the kernel's memory space, but this is extremely dangerous without using the supplied symbol names, especially as locations of most things will change from kernel build to kernel build.
The API includes "functions" that are just macros or otherwise inlined into the caller's code, and hence expect to know e.g. structure layouts that may change from one kernel version to the next or one.config to the next. (Try inserting a module into a kernel that was defined with different values of CONFIG_PREEMPT or CONFIG_SMP....)
The Linux kernel offers API's and services that allow proprietary applications to run. If you look at a video driver as an "application to display information" then I see no reason why a proprietary driver couldn't be used with the Linux kernel.
The standard Linux kernel API (syscalls, etc.) presumably isn't sufficient to write a high-performance video driver. That's why they're writing kernel modules instead of applications. But kernel modules by their nature are loaded into the same memory space as the kernel itself and muck around with its internals quite a bit; they no longer communicate purely over well-known stable APIs.
How are systems like this to defend against such issues
By doing exactly what they did--bringing in the original student and other actual people to determine the truth of the charges.
I for one do not trust that every teacher / prof / dean will do the right thing, and would rather rubber stamp a transcript with the expelled mark for plagerism
Of course not. Colleges have procedures for handling this kind of situation. I've never heard of one that's fully automatated, with no chance for the accused to respond.
We are in the middle of a major website redesign (the current site has not been updated in over 8 years) and everyone is asking why it takes so long to complete, and almost daily I have to explain that I do not have enough manpower. Of course, I can't prove ROI until the new site is launched (a great Catch22).
Sounds like reason #65536 to never launch a "major redesign" of anything....
Isn't there some way this could be broken down into steps that could show actual day-to-day improvements (even if only very minor ones?)?
I have it on good authority that some branches of the DoD are moving away from Microsoft software because they keep getting their tech support calls routed to India and they *require* support from engineers in the US.
Because it's obvious that none of the 300 million people in the US are security risks? Because it's impossible for a non-US attacker to get a plane ticket to the US and get a job at a call center?
The devices you're talking about already exist -- they're smartphones and PDAs.
They phones seem insanely proprietary. (Charging for simple tivo access? For individual ringtones???) For example, are there any phones I can install my own OS and software on (preferably something free and hackable...) and still have them work as phones?
2203.004. REQUIREMENT TO USE STATE PROPERTY FOR STATE
PURPOSES. State property may be used only for state purposes. A
person may not entrust state property to a state officer or employee
or to any other person if the property is not to be used for state
purposes.
Hah, you're right, very amusing. I wonder how it's been applied in practice? It'd be kinda hard to argue that a student or professor running personal email through a state-owned mail server (and typically probably doing so using state-licensed mail client software on a machine in a state-owned lab...) isn't "using" state property for personal purposes. And professors are certainly state employees (as are students, quite frequently).
Maybe they just don't care enough to pursue such cases--it's obviously to noone's benefit--or maybe they just take a significantly broad view of "state purposes"--when state property is being used in a dorm where people live, for example, the U. has contracted with people to provide them *personal* uses. But maybe the broader purpose of providing student housing is what counts.
As a practical matter I think it'd be in the best interests of the state to deal with the major obvious abuses (employees running a sideline porn business on the server under their desk...) as they arise and ignore the rest. If the student open source club wants to run a personal CVS server for fun personal projects on a school lab network, I think encouraging that sort of thing probably serves the university's educational purpose, and it'd be better just to let it go rather than make them go through a bunch of beaurocracy to approve the use.
Slashdot Mirror
Where I live (Ann Arbor, Michigan) this is increasingly untrue. In the 12 years I've lived here, off the top of my head, downtown has lost two or three grocery stores, a department store, and a hardware store. Their replacements are the big stores out by the freeway exits. I don't see any sign of this trend abating.
This makes it more and more inconvenient to live near downtown without a car. So more people drive for their basic shopping. As this happens, there's more demand for amenities (ample free parking, wider roads) that can only be provided by large stores in the suburbs. That in turn drives development policies that increase the flight of retail to the suburbs, making more people dependent on driving. Etc., etc.
I worry that we're increasingly building ourselves into a situations where it becomes impossible to live within walking distance of both work and basic retail. And that one day we're going to wake up and realize the environmental impact and energy-inefficiency of that situation is going to become painfully clear.
Good grief:
No doubt. Most of us, fortunately (and Tufte more than most of us) do get some choice about how to make our living.
A lot of his work is more about how to analyze presentations as it is about how to create them. That's an invaluable skill in the world of bad PowerPoint presentations.
I can't decide who's more crazy here, the reviewer, the original author, or the commenters. I now have more respect for the standard Slashdot story quality now that I've seen what happens when there's a major screw-up.
Has Archimedes Plutonium taken over Slashdot?
In the long term I doubt they can really hope to keep stuff like encryption algorithms secret. Even if it's running on entirely separate hardware, I assume it's not *that* hard to reverse engineer. And of course if they ever release those algorithms as software (even if only in binary form), it becomes much easier.
Someone who wants to just screw around with the network on their own may not care about the patents. (And may not even be subject to them, in fact--I think of patents as intended to give a monopoly over commercial exploitation of an invention, not to control what people can fool around with on their own in their basement; but I'm not sure of the legal details there.)
I guess it all depends on who exactly they're trying to prevent from doing what.
Hm. I wonder how long they'll be able to prevent that.
But anyway, if they need that level of guarantee then, as another poster says, they'll need the code in question actually running in an entirely different piece of hardware; if it was just in a driver somewhere (even if only a binary), it'd still be possible to mess around with. So the other poster was probably right, and the code the spokesman was talking about here is actually running on a different processor and communicating with the linux kernel over some very simple interface.
(Though I don't know why they care whether the sensitive code is open-source or not. It's the hardware, not the license, that keeps you from modifying the code. Or does the code also contain information about using the network that's supposed to be secret?)
"BSD licenses are not Free Software because they do not "preserve freedom" (sic) in the way GPL does. i think i agree that it's a stupid distinction, but the FSF has fought hard to promote a given definition of "Free Software""
Who told you this???
Here is the FSF's definition of "free software". There's no such "preserve freedom" clause.
They also have a list of free software licenses free software licenses. Note that BSD is included. (It is non-copyleft, but free.)
They certainly *do* prefer the GPL, in general (though not necessarily everywhere), but they definitely do not do that by claiming that non-GPL'd software is not free software.
"given that you're using the capital F and S, you seem to imply GNU's definition of "Free", as embodied in the GPL. in which case, sure, you can't build a system which is based on GNU's philosophy without a good chunk of GNU's code. but is that surprising? it's practically a tautology." Uh, no, you're confused about the FSF's definition of "free". Go read their web pages sometime. Despite an obvious preference for the GPL, they most definitely consider BSD-licensed software to be free.
So, with prudent investments and $150k a year from your early thirties, you *still* missed the estate tax.
That sounds completely in agreement with the statement that "99% of people who die don't pay [the estate tax]. Only those that leave large estates do."....
Maybe they're talking about research data. Enforcing standard procedures for everyone in the registration office could be easier than, say, policing every PhD candidate that's collecting data from human subjects....
The only reason why I care whether Linux succeeds or not is because it's free software. If the price of having Linux succeed is that it has to pick up a lot of proprietary bits that defeat the purpose of its being free software, then I'm not really interested in it any more.
Not unless you have a pretty inclusive definition of "relatively stable". Have you looked, e.g., at LWN's list of 2.6 in-kernel API changes?
The API includes "functions" that are just macros or otherwise inlined into the caller's code, and hence expect to know e.g. structure layouts that may change from one kernel version to the next or one .config to the next. (Try inserting a module into a kernel that was defined with different values of CONFIG_PREEMPT or CONFIG_SMP....)
The standard Linux kernel API (syscalls, etc.) presumably isn't sufficient to write a high-performance video driver. That's why they're writing kernel modules instead of applications. But kernel modules by their nature are loaded into the same memory space as the kernel itself and muck around with its internals quite a bit; they no longer communicate purely over well-known stable APIs.
Sounds like reason #65536 to never launch a "major redesign" of anything....
Isn't there some way this could be broken down into steps that could show actual day-to-day improvements (even if only very minor ones?)?
Because it's obvious that none of the 300 million people in the US are security risks? Because it's impossible for a non-US attacker to get a plane ticket to the US and get a job at a call center?
Hah, you're right, very amusing. I wonder how it's been applied in practice? It'd be kinda hard to argue that a student or professor running personal email through a state-owned mail server (and typically probably doing so using state-licensed mail client software on a machine in a state-owned lab...) isn't "using" state property for personal purposes. And professors are certainly state employees (as are students, quite frequently).
Maybe they just don't care enough to pursue such cases--it's obviously to noone's benefit--or maybe they just take a significantly broad view of "state purposes"--when state property is being used in a dorm where people live, for example, the U. has contracted with people to provide them *personal* uses. But maybe the broader purpose of providing student housing is what counts.
As a practical matter I think it'd be in the best interests of the state to deal with the major obvious abuses (employees running a sideline porn business on the server under their desk...) as they arise and ignore the rest. If the student open source club wants to run a personal CVS server for fun personal projects on a school lab network, I think encouraging that sort of thing probably serves the university's educational purpose, and it'd be better just to let it go rather than make them go through a bunch of beaurocracy to approve the use.