Bernstein is standing behind his code, but he can only do that if it is in fact his code, his distribution.
True but irrelevant. It's great that he's standing behind his code, but it is not true that there is a logical connection between the guarantee (which is good) and the licensing terms (which are not good). He could easily guarantee only those qmail packages that have specific md5 checksums (the terms under which he currently allows redistribution are written that way), while still allowing third parties to modify and redistribute the code. The guarantee would work exactly as it does today, that is, tied to md5 checksums, yet it would be possible for third parties to fork qmail if they wanted. Qmail is licensed in such a way as to rule out forking. And that's bad.
Defend his decision to make qmail unfree if you like, but don't use bad arguments to do it.
Here's a note from Stallman on this topic, from: http://old.lwn.net/2001/0607/letters.php3
> From: Richard Stallman > To: class5@pacbell.net > Subject: Re: License trouble everywhere. > Date: Sat, 2 Jun 2001 14:48:49 -0600 (MDT) > Cc: letters@lwn.net, djb@cr.yp.to, class5@pacbell.net
> It is clear that your goals and values are very different from mine. > I don't think technical merit can make up for a lack of freedom to > distribute modified versions, any more than a capable despot who makes > the trains run on time can make up for a lack of democracy.
Another point is raised on that page: what if djb dies and a security problem with qmail is discovered? Would there be any way to fix it?
I'm happy enough, though, accepting an argument from authority on this topic. Stallman doesn't regard qmail as free, and Debian classifies it as "non-free". I know that the people who made that classification have thought a lot more about free software than I ever have.
From http://openacs.org/about/licensing/open-source-lic ensing:
"An author can thus decide to distribute source code if she wants to. This distribution does not give the recipients of the source code any rights other than to make use of it. Some developers use this simple distribution method: Qmail is distributed this way. Users can freely download it and use it, but they cannot create derivative works and redistribute them. This is why qmail developers distribute their work as patches to the original source code, which is the equivalent of distributing an additional chapter to a book without the original content: the end-user is responsible for assembling the pieces in a way that makes sense."
"The key point here is that these additional chapters - these source code patches - are copyrighted by their respective authors. Thus, while they cannot redistribute qmail with their patches, the original qmail author cannot redistribute these patches with qmail, either!"
The inability to create derivative works makes qmail unfree.
So far we've seen one implementation (the one mentioned in the article) that depends on an unfree MTA (qmail), and another implementation (Eric Raymond's) that depends on an unfree library (HP's judy).
Is there no implementation yet that doesn't depend on unfree software? I mean, it's already been three days since the first Slashdot article was posted!
Paradiso is pages and pages of crap about how wonderful heaven is. Boooooring.
What any given reader finds boring depends on many factors outside the author's control. The fact that you find the Paradiso boring says more about you than about the Paradiso.
The girl already knows the answer to the question before you ask anyway (she's been thinking about it since the day you met, trust me.)
I'm sure that's true for a lot of people, but not for everyone. It certainly wasn't true for my wife. She had no intention of getting married. Wow, that was over 20 years ago!
This would indicate, if it stands and sets a precedent,
Precedents are set when decisions are made in legal cases. This was just a corporation sending a threatening letter to an individual. There's no precedent being set.
I drove like an idiot when I was 16. It's a miracle I didn't kill somebody. My parents never knew, because I never got in an accident, and always drove responsibly when they were in the car.
There will be a huge market for this product, and it will probably save a lot of lives.
I've been shocked over the years to learn that several Chileans I have known were actually supporters of Pinochet. I'd assumed, like you, that he was very unpopular with his own people.
I remember going to Disneyland when you had to buy individual ride tickets instead of "all day passes"....It really made for a "nervous energy" that really took away from the experience... Having to chose either Space Mountain or The Materhorn (but not enough tickets for both).
I liked the old ticket system at Disneyland. It made you slow down and go to some of the places you might have missed if you only went to E-ticket rides. Some of my most fond childhood memories of Disneyland have to do with things like the Abraham Lincoln animatronics, the GE Carousel of Progress, and the Monsanto ride, none of which was an E ticket. With an all-day pass, I might have just spent all day going from the Matterhorn to Space Mountain and back again.
if someone is stabbed, and people think this is a bad thing, DON'T GO BACK!
If people think this is a bad thing?! What if the teenagers in question don't think someone being stabbed is a bad thing? Suppose they fatalistically think it's a natural part of teenage life? I imagine you think it's not government's job to tell teenagers that gang violence is not a natural part of life...it's the parents' job, and if they don't get it done, too bad!
What linux user is going to buy a book when there is a free version available online?
I bought it a few months ago and have found it very useful. I can consult it when I'm away from a computer.
Re:It doesn't use draggable windows. Wrong game, b
on
Uplink
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· Score: 1
There are small windows, 'panes' really inside the game that you can drag around, and it took WAY to long for them to actually move...
One of the goals in the game is to upgrade to a better computer with more and faster processors, more memory and the like. Perhaps you never got around to upgrading?
Why anybody would prefer to pay twice as much "in smaller, spread out ammounts" is beyond me.
One reason a person might sign up for the new plan and not the ordinary subscription is in order to try out being a subscriber without having to commit much money to it. If they like it, they can sign up for the longer term. If they don't like it, they're only out $6.
As for why a person would continue to pay $6 month after month, I can't say.
For the record, this is coming from a 10-year pack-a-day smoker who just quit 5 months ago. I just stopped one day[...]
Supposedly it makes a big difference what age you were when you first started smoking regularly. The younger you start, the harder it is to quit. How old were you when you started regularly smoking?
While this seems to work well in theory, one should note how simple the desktops in the screenshots are.
In Ion, if you want to see two things at once, you can simply split the frame you're in, and put the new window in the new frame.
In several months of using Ion as my sole window manager, I've never encountered a situation where I felt that I couldn't see exactly what I wanted to see, exactly where I wanted to see it. And I routinely have a dozen or more windows open at a time, often in only a single workspace.
I've been using ion as my sole window manager for several months now, and can't imaging going back to a window manager that uses the desktop metaphor. Papers tend to get buried on my actual desktop, so it only makes sense that windows tend to get buried in window managers that treat windows as if they were pieces of paper.
In Ion, windows never get buried, and switching between windows is quite easy. Frames can be resized and windows can be moved between frames.
Several threads have already recycled the myth that you "can't fool" the MMPI because it repeats questions and checks your answers for consistency. According to an NPR interview I heard several years ago with the people who designed the MMPI, however, this simply isn't true.
It _is_ true that the MMPI repeats questions (at least it used to be true; I assume it still does), but the explanation has nothing to do with something sophisticated like checking to see whether you answer the same questions the same way. Instead, when the original designers of the test first wrote it, they discovered that they didn't have enough questions for the grading machine they were using. Their machines (using punch cards I think) required that a certain number of answers be marked or they would spit out the answer sheet, but the test designers were short a few questions, and didn't have any questions they particularly wanted to add. So they simply interspersed a random handful of questions throughout the test in order to get the grading machine to accept the answer sheets.
Later on, when the grading equipment improved and no longer required a certain number of questions, they retained the extra questions, because by that time the MMPI had already become a widely-used standard, and there was no reason to change it. But the repeated questions never entered into the grade, and were never checked for consistency. The scientists admitted to NPR that they knew (now, years after the fact) that having the repeat questions made people uncomfortable, but this was no part of the design of the test, and never entered into the grading of the test.
Still, whenever the MMPI comes up in conversation, someone claims that you "can't fool" the MMPI because it repeats questions and checks for consistency.
"Our guy" Martin Garbus is the main lawyer behind the initially-successful efforts of Margaret Mitchell's estate to suppress publication of the forthcoming novel by Alice Randall, The Wind Done Gone! (The New York Times had a story on this just four days ago.) Garbus's side is trying to suppress Randall's soon-to-be-published parody of Gone with the Wind, as told from the perspective of a black slave on Tara. It's hard to imagine a more anti-First-Amendment stance to take. So what's the deal? Is it just that he's a lawyer, or does he have a principled view of the world that can include both of his positions in these two cases?
Sorry if someone's already pointed this out on Slashdot. I haven't seen it.
doesn't mean they aren't real. How about this instead:
1. Rights are not a primitive moral reality, but are rooted in considerations about conditions required to pursue the human good, including the conditions required to pursue the truth about that good.
2. Property rights are rooted in the universal ordination of material goods to the common good, and are therefore not absolute.
3. Property rights are nonetheless real, and it's nonsense to say they're "socially constructed," whatever that might mean.
In any case, the line of reasoning I've outlined is in the mainstream of the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition, and is to be preferred to sophomoric attempts to create a moral theory out of thin air.
Argh. I hate the op-ed format! Doesn't anyone read books anymore?
WARNING: Read slowly. Wittgenstein writes an unusual, compressed style that many find frustrating. You won't be able to follow this unless you read it v-e-r-y-s-l-o-w-l-y.
+++++++++
But a machine surely cannot think! -- Is that an empirical statement? No. We only say of a human being and what is like one that it thinks. We also say it of dolls and no doubt of spirits too. Look at the word 'to think' as a tool.
The chair is thinking to itself:...
WHERE? In one of its parts? Or outside its body; in the air around it? Or not anywhere at all? But then what is the difference between this chair's saying something to itself and another one's doing so, next to it? - But then how is it with man: where does he say things to himself? How does it come about that this question seems senseless; and that no specification of a place is necessary except just that this man is saying something to himself? Whereas the question where the chair talks to itself seems to demand an answer. - The reason is: we want to know how the chair is supposed to be like a human being; whether, for instance, the head is at the top of the back and so on.
What is it like to say something to oneself; what happens here? - How am I to explain it? Well, only as you might teach someone the meaning of the expression 'to say something to oneself'. And certainly we learn the meaning of that as children. - Only no one is going to say that the person who teaches it to us tells us 'what takes place'.
-- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations
Slashdot Mirror
Bernstein is standing behind his code, but he can only do that if it is in fact his code, his distribution.
True but irrelevant. It's great that he's standing behind his code, but it is not true that there is a logical connection between the guarantee (which is good) and the licensing terms (which are not good). He could easily guarantee only those qmail packages that have specific md5 checksums (the terms under which he currently allows redistribution are written that way), while still allowing third parties to modify and redistribute the code. The guarantee would work exactly as it does today, that is, tied to md5 checksums, yet it would be possible for third parties to fork qmail if they wanted. Qmail is licensed in such a way as to rule out forking. And that's bad.
Defend his decision to make qmail unfree if you like, but don't use bad arguments to do it.
Here's a note from Stallman on this topic, from :
http://old.lwn.net/2001/0607/letters.php3
> From: Richard Stallman
> To: class5@pacbell.net
> Subject: Re: License trouble everywhere.
> Date: Sat, 2 Jun 2001 14:48:49 -0600 (MDT)
> Cc: letters@lwn.net, djb@cr.yp.to, class5@pacbell.net
> It is clear that your goals and values are very different from mine.
> I don't think technical merit can make up for a lack of freedom to
> distribute modified versions, any more than a capable despot who makes
> the trains run on time can make up for a lack of democracy.
Another point is raised on that page: what if djb dies and a security problem with qmail is discovered? Would there be any way to fix it?
I'm happy enough, though, accepting an argument from authority on this topic. Stallman doesn't regard qmail as free, and Debian classifies it as "non-free". I know that the people who made that classification have thought a lot more about free software than I ever have.
From http://openacs.org/about/licensing/open-source-lic ensing:
"An author can thus decide to distribute source code if she wants to. This distribution does not give the recipients of the source code any rights other than to make use of it. Some developers use this simple distribution method: Qmail is distributed this way. Users can freely download it and use it, but they cannot create derivative works and redistribute them. This is why qmail developers distribute their work as patches to the original source code, which is the equivalent of distributing an additional chapter to a book without the original content: the end-user is responsible for assembling the pieces in a way that makes sense."
"The key point here is that these additional chapters - these source code patches - are copyrighted by their respective authors. Thus, while they cannot redistribute qmail with their patches, the original qmail author cannot redistribute these patches with qmail, either!"
The inability to create derivative works makes qmail unfree.
So far we've seen one implementation (the one mentioned in the article) that depends on an unfree MTA (qmail), and another implementation (Eric Raymond's) that depends on an unfree library (HP's judy).
Is there no implementation yet that doesn't depend on unfree software? I mean, it's already been three days since the first Slashdot article was posted!
What any given reader finds boring depends on many factors outside the author's control. The fact that you find the Paradiso boring says more about you than about the Paradiso.
I'm sure that's true for a lot of people, but not for everyone. It certainly wasn't true for my wife. She had no intention of getting married. Wow, that was over 20 years ago!
Precedents are set when decisions are made in legal cases. This was just a corporation sending a threatening letter to an individual. There's no precedent being set.
There will be a huge market for this product, and it will probably save a lot of lives.
Mod this up!!
I've been shocked over the years to learn that several Chileans I have known were actually supporters of Pinochet. I'd assumed, like you, that he was very unpopular with his own people.
I liked the old ticket system at Disneyland. It made you slow down and go to some of the places you might have missed if you only went to E-ticket rides. Some of my most fond childhood memories of Disneyland have to do with things like the Abraham Lincoln animatronics, the GE Carousel of Progress, and the Monsanto ride, none of which was an E ticket. With an all-day pass, I might have just spent all day going from the Matterhorn to Space Mountain and back again.
If people think this is a bad thing?! What if the teenagers in question don't think someone being stabbed is a bad thing? Suppose they fatalistically think it's a natural part of teenage life? I imagine you think it's not government's job to tell teenagers that gang violence is not a natural part of life...it's the parents' job, and if they don't get it done, too bad!
I bought it a few months ago and have found it very useful. I can consult it when I'm away from a computer.
One of the goals in the game is to upgrade to a better computer with more and faster processors, more memory and the like. Perhaps you never got around to upgrading?
One reason a person might sign up for the new plan and not the ordinary subscription is in order to try out being a subscriber without having to commit much money to it. If they like it, they can sign up for the longer term. If they don't like it, they're only out $6.
As for why a person would continue to pay $6 month after month, I can't say.
For the record, this is coming from a 10-year pack-a-day smoker who just quit 5 months ago. I just stopped one day[...]
Supposedly it makes a big difference what age you were when you first started smoking regularly. The younger you start, the harder it is to quit. How old were you when you started regularly smoking?
YES!!
While this seems to work well in theory, one should note how simple the desktops in the screenshots are.
In Ion, if you want to see two things at once, you can simply split the frame you're in, and put the new window in the new frame.
In several months of using Ion as my sole window manager, I've never encountered a situation where I felt that I couldn't see exactly what I wanted to see, exactly where I wanted to see it. And I routinely have a dozen or more windows open at a time, often in only a single workspace.
I've been using ion as my sole window manager for several months now, and can't imaging going back to a window manager that uses the desktop metaphor. Papers tend to get buried on my actual desktop, so it only makes sense that windows tend to get buried in window managers that treat windows as if they were pieces of paper.
In Ion, windows never get buried, and switching between windows is quite easy. Frames can be resized and windows can be moved between frames.
It's definitely worth checking out.
I've been off caffeine for over 5 years, and it's worth it. It's not so hard to avoid if you just pay attention.
Several threads have already recycled the myth that you "can't fool" the MMPI because it repeats questions and checks your answers for consistency. According to an NPR interview I heard several years ago with the people who designed the MMPI, however, this simply isn't true.
It _is_ true that the MMPI repeats questions (at least it used to be true; I assume it still does), but the explanation has nothing to do with something sophisticated like checking to see whether you answer the same questions the same way. Instead, when the original designers of the test first wrote it, they discovered that they didn't have enough questions for the grading machine they were using. Their machines (using punch cards I think) required that a certain number of answers be marked or they would spit out the answer sheet, but the test designers were short a few questions, and didn't have any questions they particularly wanted to add. So they simply interspersed a random handful of questions throughout the test in order to get the grading machine to accept the answer sheets.
Later on, when the grading equipment improved and no longer required a certain number of questions, they retained the extra questions, because by that time the MMPI had already become a widely-used standard, and there was no reason to change it. But the repeated questions never entered into the grade, and were never checked for consistency. The scientists admitted to NPR that they knew (now, years after the fact) that having the repeat questions made people uncomfortable, but this was no part of the design of the test, and never entered into the grading of the test.
Still, whenever the MMPI comes up in conversation, someone claims that you "can't fool" the MMPI because it repeats questions and checks for consistency.
"Our guy" Martin Garbus is the main lawyer behind the initially-successful efforts of Margaret Mitchell's estate to suppress publication of the forthcoming novel by Alice Randall, The Wind Done Gone! (The New York Times had a story on this just four days ago.) Garbus's side is trying to suppress Randall's soon-to-be-published parody of Gone with the Wind, as told from the perspective of a black slave on Tara. It's hard to imagine a more anti-First-Amendment stance to take. So what's the deal? Is it just that he's a lawyer, or does he have a principled view of the world that can include both of his positions in these two cases?
Sorry if someone's already pointed this out on Slashdot. I haven't seen it.
doesn't mean they aren't real. How about this instead:
1. Rights are not a primitive moral reality, but are rooted in considerations about conditions required to pursue the human good, including the conditions required to pursue the truth about that good.
2. Property rights are rooted in the universal ordination of material goods to the common good, and are therefore not absolute.
3. Property rights are nonetheless real, and it's nonsense to say they're "socially constructed," whatever that might mean.
In any case, the line of reasoning I've outlined is in the mainstream of the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition, and is to be preferred to sophomoric attempts to create a moral theory out of thin air.
Argh. I hate the op-ed format! Doesn't anyone read books anymore?
WARNING: Read slowly. Wittgenstein writes an unusual, compressed style that many find frustrating. You won't be able to follow this unless you read it v-e-r-y-s-l-o-w-l-y.
+++++++++But a machine surely cannot think! -- Is that an empirical statement? No. We only say of a human being and what is like one that it thinks. We also say it of dolls and no doubt of spirits too. Look at the word 'to think' as a tool.
The chair is thinking to itself:...
WHERE? In one of its parts? Or outside its body; in the air around it? Or not anywhere at all? But then what is the difference between this chair's saying something to itself and another one's doing so, next to it? - But then how is it with man: where does he say things to himself? How does it come about that this question seems senseless; and that no specification of a place is necessary except just that this man is saying something to himself? Whereas the question where the chair talks to itself seems to demand an answer. - The reason is: we want to know how the chair is supposed to be like a human being; whether, for instance, the head is at the top of the back and so on.
What is it like to say something to oneself; what happens here? - How am I to explain it? Well, only as you might teach someone the meaning of the expression 'to say something to oneself'. And certainly we learn the meaning of that as children. - Only no one is going to say that the person who teaches it to us tells us 'what takes place'.
-- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations
I would be willing to pay $0.50 per month to post on Slashdot and stay active in the community, but I would never pay money to read it.
Same here. But would $0.50 be enough? How much would that raise per month?