Soft of price fixing of course the phones are not even worth 200 dollars maybe not even the price the carriers charge, but since we only have a handful of phone producers, almost a cartel no one will change that
A handful, huh? There are many brands. And many brands have been in big trouble and even disappeared (Motorola, Ericsson, and more obscure ones like Philips, Benefon...), because they couldn't compete. In other words, they couldn't produce good enough products for the price they had to ask to be profitable.
The reason high-end phones cost as much as they do is precisely because they are worth it to many people. If they weren't, nobody would buy them, they'd buy the cheaper phones instead.
Of course the pure materials and manufacturing cost of the phone is... at most 30% of the unlocked street price, I think, probably less for software-intensive products like smartphones. Rest is mostly R&D cost and supply chain cost. They can't get the phones to you any cheaper, because everybody from the programmer to the factory floor sweeper to the owners of the retail store wan't their cut. As they should, why else whould they be doing their job to bring you the phone?
The mobile phone market is just too diverse and too global and way, way too bloody competitive, that there can't be any real cartel or monopoly.
Depending on what you're doing, even that may not be an issue. If you're doing massive database stuff, then yes. However, if your disk I/O isn't all heavy you can set a daemon up to automatically mirror changes made in the RAMdisk to the "hard" copy. From your POV everything is instant, but any crash will only result in the loss of data from however far behind the harddrive copy is lagging. Personally, what little I do need saved is simply text files - my notes in class, my homework, etc, and so I can just write to a partition on the harddrive that isn't loaded to RAM. It doesn't suffer at all from the harddrive I/O - I can't really type faster then a harddrive can write.
tl;dr: It's perfectly feasible for (some) people to do as you've described, and it works quite nicely. It's not really necessary to wait for this perpetually will-be-released-in-5-to-10-years technology, it's available today.
Not just "available", but that's pretty much how all current operating systems work today. Software operates on a copy in memory (wether reading or writing), and OS writes back any changes at it's leisure. It's just a matter of available RAM vs. required RAM, and only if you run out of RAM, only then the disk becomes a bottleneck. I don't think data read from disk to memory is ever discarded even if unused for a long time, unless you run out of RAM (why would it be, that's just unnecessary extra work for OS when there's plenty of unused ram available already).
But what you say would make the GPL quite weak. I could just write my own header file I include. The function names and argument types have to match. But that is what we call the API and an API itself can't be protected with copyright. Then I just have to link dynamically and then there are no GPL bits in the binary.
While I think that would be a rational and usable description of "derivative work" I don't think this is what the people using the GPL for their programs have in mind.
It doesn't matter what people have in mind, what matters is what is written in law and what is written in the license.
What you describe is not an issue., because it's too much work, too hard to maintain and distribute. And it'd be useless for embedded devices, since you'd have to distribute the GPL library in the device anyway, in a way that it's automatically combined with your code.
It would work for a PC software, where you distribute the binary blow that was compiled with your own #include files, so that your distribution does not include any GPL code. There's nothing in the binary that is under GPL, so GPL simply does not apply to it. How could it?
There's always at least one in the bunch that fails to understand the GPL.
GPL is about forcing you to give back, through copyright
No, it's not. It's about not allowing you to redistribute a copylefted program (or derivative) without also providing access to the source.
or it's about restricting people who refuse to give back from using it.
Again, not true. In fact, I'd wager that well over 99% of people who have used GPL'd software have never, and will never, "give back."
Releasing even unmodified source, and allowing users to keep modifying it is a form of "giving back". And GPL is exactly about forcing this kind of giving back. I mean, that's the whole point of the license, forcing you to grant equal rights to the users of the GPL code, even if you'd rather just release the binary containg some GPL stuff. Forcing is just a bad word for it, because it implies there's something unfair about it. Being forced to pay in a store is not unfair, so generally people don't say they're forced to pay, even though they technically are.
But free software, as a concept, doesn't require the GPL. Nor does free software, as a movement, rely on the GPL at this stage.
I think you mean open source. Free software is an established term that very much relies on the GPL, and is in fact, founded on the GPL.
FSF may try to make "Free software" mean something specific, but that's futile, because "free software" sounds exactly the same, looks almost same on paper, but (according to FSF) means something else. And telling people "please don't say 'free software' because we've reserved 'Free Software' is just as stupid as it sounds like when you say it aloud.
Actually, it's more to do without pointing out that while copyright is generally about restrictions, "copyleft" is about freedoms.
Whenever anyone attributes "communist" aspects to the GPL (i.e., your repeated assertion that the GPL forces one to share/contribute/give back), it speaks more to the mindset of the poster than it does any insight into the GPL. The GPL is about one thing and one thing *only*, and that is software freedom.
But that's ambiguous to the point of being meaningless. BSD is also about software freedom. Releasing to public domain can be about software freedom. Releasing proprietary closed source software development tools for free use can be about software freedom too.
My interpretation is, that GPL is about striving for a world where any(?) digitally copyable content is freely available for use, modification and re-distribution. It's a noble goal, and one I think would benefit mankind enormously, because of the nature of digitally copyable content. Even though it would restrict software business opportunities, it would create those opportunities elsewhere. People would have to get paid for the *act* of adding value, instead of the actual value they created. It's the same goal as copyrights and patents have, and GPL wouldn't even be needed if it weren't for the speed of current technological and cultural change, and the fundamentally different nature of digital content as compared to anything that existed when patents and copyrights were invented.
Isn't it ultimately matter of #included code. If you #include GPL code in your compilation, then the binary becomes GPL. Or "import" in a way that includes something from the imported thing in your code, or whatever.
If you don't include GPL data in your binary, then there's no problem. It's just that nobody maintains independent non-GPL include files for various GPL libraries, so using GPL libraries without using GPL include files is a non-issue for practical reasons.
Claiming that using an interface provided by GPL stuff forces GPL on your stuff will never hold on court. Only if your binary (or whatever package) contains bits that are derived from GPL stuff, only then it becomes GPL. If all bits of your package are of non-GPL origin, no problem.
And to clarify about output of GPL programs: FSF interpretation seems to be that output of GPL program is GPL only if it's direct copy GPL data in the GPL program. And single words (or comparable pieces of data) are too short to be under copyright, so novel combinations of words isn't under GPL either. But novel combinations of long enough pieces to be under copyright automatically make the output to be under GPL too.
And the other way too, if you pass GPL stuff through a non-GPL program that does something to it, output is GPL, because output is derived from the GPL input.
GPL is more than just about copyright. It's about giving back.
No, giving back is about giving back.
GPL is about forcing you to give back, through copyright -- or it's about restricting people who refuse to give back from using it.
Indeed, but saying "forcing to give back" is trying to intentionally put a bad spin on it. It's like saying you're forced to pay for the stuff you take from a shop. Yes, technically true, but being intentionally misleading, something a communist or a hippie might say.
Better way would be to say GPL is about making the use of open source code a fair transaction. What confuses people is claiming one or the other is more free without defining what they mean with "freedom". BSD gives the current user the freedom to forbid future users from modifying (etc) the code, while GPL forbids the current user from take freedom of modification (etc) away from future users.
And of course BSD license can be just as much about making use of open source code a fair transaction, because "fair" is subjective.
But majority of non-professional OSS contributors do feel that BSD license doesn't give them the fair transaction they want, so they don't release code they care about under BSD.
It's just that more people are willing to contribute, when they feel that fruits of their labor can't be just "taken" as freely as BSD license allows.
Bullshit, and there are plenty of very popular projects which would demonstrate the contrary -- sqlite, for example, has no license. That's because it's entirely public domain.
You failed to read my (now emphasized) word "more" above.
Just think of the BSD network stack. Do you really think it's bullshit, that majority of open source crowd would be really really unhappy if their code was used like that?
Well, trust me on this: majority would be unhappy (different people for different reasons and to different degrees, but unhappy none the less). And why would they release their code under license, if it may make them unhappy, especially if their code is good enough to be used by others?
Then tehre are people who don't feel unhappy about it, or maybe feel their personal direct unhappiness is less than their happiness of indirectly benefitting mankind (even if it helps to put more cash into Bill Gates' bank account, at least some if may go to some charity of Bill's choosing...).
That's quite true -- in fact, it might have been better if it'd been under a BSD license.
I doubt that very much. I believe GPL is the reason why Linux dominates over BSD variants. It's just that more people are willing to contribute, when they feel that fruits of their labor can't be just "taken" as freely as BSD license allows.
That's the first time I've ever heard this, but I'll believe it. Nothing, I repeat nothing, will ever surprise me about the evolution of x86 any more.
I seem to remember that this was the situation originally. Not that surprising really, when you think about it. FPU was a sizable chunk of the processor die (caches were still very small those days, even though 486 already had L1 cache) and being able to sell the processors that had faulty FPU must have increased yields quite nicely. Later on they made pure 486SX processors that didn't have FPU on them, I believe.
All from memory, could be totally wrong, read above at your own risk..
Sorry but you are conflating proof with observation and extrapolation. Your prediction that no rat can survive is based on very strong evidence but it's not proof. Nature does not have to obey logic, you cannot under any circumstances predict the future with 100% certainty. Proof is found in axiomatic systems such as maths, it is not found in science.
But that applies to positive "proofs" as well, and I commented on the claim that you can never prove a negative.
Of course the real glitch is thinking in the terms of positive/negative. It's better to ask for example "What are the parameters of an environment where no rat will survive for 2 hours, never ever". Then you can start with "temperature and pressure where entire mass of the planet containing the rat will reach ionization temperature in 2 hours due to laws of thermodynamics" and go down from that.
You're misunderstanding what a negative argument is.
Go try to test this hypothesis: "No rat can survive 2+ hours in 0degree salt water, ever."
You can test it all you like, with a million rats if you so desire. But you can never confirm it, even if you test a million of them. There might be some rat genotype out there capable of surviving, and you can't prove there isn't. That's trying to prove a negative.
Sure you can prove that kind of negative buy turning it into positive. You can perhaps (if it is true, though in this particular case I very much doubt it) prove that some essential moleculer or cellular structure in rats body will not survive that environment for that long, ever. Just increasing the temperature of the environment by a few hundred degrees would probably allow proving that no rat will survive there 2+ hours, ever, for any sensible definition of "rat", "survive" and "ever".
Assuming you'll be heavily involved and you know Java (or are willing to learn), I'd go with Java+NetBeans (or Java+Eclipse, or whatever). You'll program the framework (like a canvas for drawing), and let your brother to put the meat into it. Don't try to do any object oriented stuff, just imperative programming that happens to be in a class method. You'll provide a class with just one empty function with the canvas (or whatever) as argument to start with (and "throws Exception" so he doesn't need to worry about those, and whatever else secondary comes up). And then, program away.
Using Java above is beside the point. The real point is, good IDE will show typos and syntax errors, and provide immediate argument help for any functions he wants to call, and has "scripting language feel" even though it's compiled. Oh, and teach him to let the IDE auto-format the code. That way he'll learn to look at correctly formatted code, while not being burdened with having to be pedantic himself, and he'll learn that if auto-formatting formats the code wrong, then there's a syntax error. I'd go as far as to bind auto-formatting to TAB key... In general, let him skip the required pedantry of any modern, complex programming language by letting the IDE show how it's done. Java just happens to be one of the languages with best free, modern, fully-featured IDEs, while not being the horror known as C++...
I wouldn't recommend Python, it's too big and complicated for a first language IMHO, and I don't think there are good enough IDEs (or good enough Python support in existing IDEs) to compensate for it. Once he know the basics of programming, then python+pygame or python+pyglet can be a lot of fun, but getting started with them has the risk of getting frustrated with run-time exceptions that should be compile-time errors, manually keeping the indentation right, and perhaps too many complex concepts to start with.
That is breeding - and a rather simple and limited form of it.
If we are to call that evolving, then we may just as well start talking how Australians have evolved to be more resilient to heat and hardship than their British ancestors. After all, weaker ones have all died out. Right?
They might have, but it's been awfully few generations, so the effects are probably miniscule.
But to the point, yes, that's evolution in the timescale of a few generations. Not really noticeable, lost in the noise mostly, but if the same selection pressures keep up for thousands of generations, it'll start to show. Just witness how quickly humans adapt to different amounts of sunlight, in both directions (very dark skinned people of southern India are an example of evolving dark skin back after losing it, but I'm not sure if this is true).
Because we are human, and human actions are of greater interest and special to us, and we're able to distinguish stuff that happens only by humans from stuff that happens without human intervention, and need labels for them.
Evolution - Has new genetic information been added?
I'm not sure what definition of "genetic information" you're using, but are you aware that the biblical creationist definition of genetic information is "information in genes that does not increase". By this definition, if it gets added to DNA, it's not real genetic information.
Of course I'm just guessing that you're thinking of the creationist genetic information... Apologies if you're not.
And if you go back and re-read TFA, you'll see that's pretty much where this is goin. This guy's not interested in an alternative to alcohol, he's looking for a substitute for alcohol. Even if he is working in good faith, his efforts will be used to help the neo-prohibitionists.
Ah ha haa. Well, ok, maybe on the western side of Atlantic, but just try to imagine removing wine from French or Italian food table, or beer from English or German pubs... Things might get medieval for the politicians who put such a law into effect.
There's just one problem with this example, which makes it totally irrelevant to this case: The boy will have to use a lot of time and effort to unload the truck.
This is not a problem - the boy would be hanging around and helping other people for the rest of the day. His time and effort is a sunk cost. The only important difference is his choice of who to help (and whether to help.) His choice is *not* based on economic factors.
Sure it is based on economics of available time. He wants to help some people, but not just anybody. If he helps those he doesn't want to, he'll have less time to help those he wants to help.
So what is the boy's motivation to decline? There is only one major reason to do so - abuse of his generosity.
If it does not affect the boy in any way, if the boy doesn't even notice it, how can it be abuse? The society as a whole benefits by virtue of getting more done, of having less redundant stuff done. If the truck is already unloaded (code available for download), why must the truck driver spend time unloading it himself (writing his own code)? How is that fair?
People do things for free, for other people, when they feel that other people need their help. Boy scouts help elderly people; adults help everyone who is in distress; programmers give their code away to anyone, and so on. However many people are unwilling to render free assistance when they know that the recipient of that assistance is just getting a free ride, though he is already given money for a taxi. Essentially the abuser of generosity is pocketing the money that he has been already paid (the truck driver) or will be paid (the commercial programmer.) Are you likely to give money to a young, healthy panhandler who, by all indications, is just too lazy to hold a real job?
Again money, which is a finite resource. Code in a repository is not a finite resource. If I had a magical $100 bill, that if I give it once to somebody, it duplicates so that I always have the $100 bill anyway, then why wouldn't I give it to the young, healhty panhandler? He'd just spend it on something and make some some shop owner a bit happier, so why not?
It does not matter if the abuse happens out of your sight, it is still an abuse. People instinctively feel wrong when someone is rewarded for a job that they didn't do, and it's doubly wrong when it's you who did the job for them.
Again, I don't see how this applies to open source code freely available for download, for which the creator himself never intended to get a reward for. Now he suddenly wants it after all? Sound like greed to me.
So the damage is not to the programmer, but to the fabric of the society, by letting people receive rewards that they haven't earned. So unearned rewards is the key here. GPL specifically forbids such rewards, excepting only additional labor that you may do on your own (such as compiling, support, making physical copies, etc. - I'm not going to be detailed here.)
I presume you mean that GPL forbids asking money for source code above distribution cost? That's not the issue here. The issue is that writer of the GPL code wants certain control over all the code that gets combined with his GPL code. If he didn't want, he'd use LGPL or BSD license or release to public domain. Greed of power, as demonstrated by the fact of having alternatives that don't try to assert as much (or any) control.
Also, unjust rewards cut both ways. Somebody creates a complex piece of software, in which they use a small GPL library code. Now the copyright holder of the GPL code expects the full reward (of having the complete, complex code GPL licensed) as compensation of essentially no work, and this is not usually negotiable, and if the complex code uses proprietary 3rd party code, the writer of the GPL code is certainly not going to chip in to get that code GPL licensed too. No, he wrote a s
"It could be argued that forced freedom is no freedom at all."
As in people in countries with laws against slavery cannot be Free? Forced freedom as it were?
Eh? If a slave doesn't want to be a slave, then the freedom is not forced on them, so it's not forced freedom from their point of view, now is it? Now if somebody wants to be a (real) slave, and law forbids it, then certainly this forced freedom is not really freedom from the point of view of that wanna-be slave. But I think we both know (and hopefully agree to) the main arguments why it's not legal to be a (legally real) slave even if one wants to be. And I don't really see how bringing slavery, which is a human rights issue, into a software license discussion is in any way relevant, unless you propose that software has something equal to human rights...?
From what I gather, the FSF folks think that code should not be subject to copyright at all and then everyone would be Free. Since under the laws of many countries, code is subject to copyright, they designed copyleft to use those laws to undo the effects of those laws. Now, the thing is, how can someone who believes in those "rights", argue against someone using those "rights" in the manner they choose?
Oh, I'm not arguing against that. I argue that GPL is not really about freedom, it's about promoting the ideology you describe above at the cost of some freedom (like freedoms which are preserved by LGPL).
IIRC, the LGPL was designed as a practical matter. Pragmatism as it were. The thinking is document by the license designers. What flaws do you find in that thinking?
The only flaw is advertising that LGPL is less free than GPL, while from any non-ideological point of view it's the other way around. No flaw in the licenses, no flaw in using them to promote ideology, only flaw is self-delusion about what's what, and the confusion this causes to those who don't share the ideology.
"What's not fine is pretending that forcing an ideological version of freedom on other people's creations is any kind of freedom."
Surely there is no forcing going on. We are not talking patents after all. Just write your own replacement and go your own way. There is a deal being negotiated in the market place here. Accept the terms or don't. I will trade you the right to use my stuff if you will trade me the right to use yours. And it is not even all of your stuff that I insist on the rights to in the trade.... right?
It's the same kind of forcing that eg. proprietary software uses: "You're of course free to not use our code, as long as you do what we tell you to do with your stuff (code or money)." When patents are not involved, you're always free to roll your own version, so by that metric most commercial licenses are just as free as GPL... If you call that "freedom", I respectfully disagree.
LGPL doesn't force the user to do anything with stuff that is theirs, it only forces the user to do something with the LGPL code itself. It's the huge philosophical difference between "my stuff is mine and your stuff is yours, freely use my stuff as long as you let others use it freely too" and "my stuff is our common stuff and your stuff must become our common stuff too!"
an upshot of this is that it would effectively increasse the total number of usable IP's, because the effective IP address length would be extended by however many bits of address you put into the extension header. This process could even be chained through multiple levels of NAT's _theoretically_ indefinitely, but in practice would always be limited by the sizes of the routing tables involved, and whatever the minimum MTU for an IP packet is at the time (which is theoretically as small as 68 bytes today, but nobody uses them anywhere close to that small). Individual IPv6 packets have a maximum size of 64K each, so there's a hard limit in how big it can get regardless of how much the MTU goes up.
In the context of extending available address space, there's also a hard limit on number of addressable entities (such as atoms or Planck length grid positions in space-time) in our universe. Just a small fraction of 64K maximum packet size should be plenty for having enough extension header space for addressing whatever you can imagine to address.
"Free software is a matter of the users' freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. More precisely, it means that the program's users have the four essential freedoms"
It is just that it is basically impossible to ensure these freedoms for all users without restricting the ability to limit these freedoms. I could be wrong and if you know of some way to see to it that all users always get to legally enjoy these freedoms while not putting in such restrictions, I am sure there are a goodly number of people who would be happy to learn about it.
There is not doubt that with copyright laws as they are now, copyleft has issues. If you could ensure the freedoms of the users without the problems copyleft brings...
But that's just another way of saying that code must be free, no matter the user.
In short, the ideology behind GPL claims that the end sanctifies the means: it doesn't matter if the user "suffers" while striving towards a world where all code is GPL compatible.
Another anti-freedom thing about GPL is that it forces certain ideology on all software combined with GPL code. It could be argued that forced freedom is no freedom at all.
LGPL proves that GPL restricts users freedom to distribute code in unreasonable way. This proves that GPL is not so much about freedom, but about ideology, about forcing a version of "freedom" on users, on creations of other people even if they don't subscribe to the ideology behind GPL. Because that's the only real difference between GPL and LGPL.
Now this is just fine, I believe that creator of code (or whatever) has very broad freedom to require just about anything from those who want to use the code. Using GPL code to promote an ideology is just fine, just about the best way to promote an ideology I can think of. What's not fine is pretending that forcing an ideological version of freedom on other people's creations is any kind of freedom.
That may be the point of open source software. But I seriously doubt it is the point of Free Software. I have a vague feeling that the point of Free Software is Software Freedom. Complete Software Freedom. No non-Free Software needed by any software user. Ever. Perhaps I have gotten it wrong all these years though.
Also worth noticing, that Free Software is about Freedom of Software. Not the user, not the developer, but the Software. It limits the freedom of developing original code on top of existing code (as opposed to just tweaking existing code), and that can have also a negative (not only positive) impact on the user as well.
even if you isolate all human effects, you're still going to have a dangerous heating up or cooling down at some point
"At some point" will be in geological timescale. Any preparations we do now doesn't really have any meaning in this timescale. Either we're extinct, living in caves, or adjusting orbit of Earth at will to maximize whatever "we" might want to maximize at that point, or something like that. In any case, any current preparation will be totally meaningless in countering any natural climate change.
No, the only step that makes sense now is to stop making the climate change so fast. We don't have the technology to really counter what we're doing now, so only viable alternatives are either doing it a lot less, or just keep doing it and accept the consequences.
Once we can make global things happen by bio- or nanotechnology, then we may be able to effectively fix the Earth, but for now, we need to buy enough time to develop that technology.
That said, "renewable energy" is a bit of a misnomer, as oil will get created, at large enough timescales (though nowhere near fast enough to match consumption). On the other hand, so long the Sun is there we'll keep getting energy from it.
A good definition is "energy source that is renewed at the same rate it's used". It also nicely covers using things like wood for energy, which can be either sustainable or non-sustainable.
Slashdot Mirror
Soft of price fixing of course the phones are not even worth 200 dollars maybe not even the price the carriers charge, but since we only have a handful of phone producers, almost a cartel no one will change that
A handful, huh? There are many brands. And many brands have been in big trouble and even disappeared (Motorola, Ericsson, and more obscure ones like Philips, Benefon...), because they couldn't compete. In other words, they couldn't produce good enough products for the price they had to ask to be profitable.
The reason high-end phones cost as much as they do is precisely because they are worth it to many people. If they weren't, nobody would buy them, they'd buy the cheaper phones instead.
Of course the pure materials and manufacturing cost of the phone is... at most 30% of the unlocked street price, I think, probably less for software-intensive products like smartphones. Rest is mostly R&D cost and supply chain cost. They can't get the phones to you any cheaper, because everybody from the programmer to the factory floor sweeper to the owners of the retail store wan't their cut. As they should, why else whould they be doing their job to bring you the phone?
The mobile phone market is just too diverse and too global and way, way too bloody competitive, that there can't be any real cartel or monopoly.
Depending on what you're doing, even that may not be an issue. If you're doing massive database stuff, then yes. However, if your disk I/O isn't all heavy you can set a daemon up to automatically mirror changes made in the RAMdisk to the "hard" copy. From your POV everything is instant, but any crash will only result in the loss of data from however far behind the harddrive copy is lagging. Personally, what little I do need saved is simply text files - my notes in class, my homework, etc, and so I can just write to a partition on the harddrive that isn't loaded to RAM. It doesn't suffer at all from the harddrive I/O - I can't really type faster then a harddrive can write.
tl;dr: It's perfectly feasible for (some) people to do as you've described, and it works quite nicely. It's not really necessary to wait for this perpetually will-be-released-in-5-to-10-years technology, it's available today.
Not just "available", but that's pretty much how all current operating systems work today. Software operates on a copy in memory (wether reading or writing), and OS writes back any changes at it's leisure. It's just a matter of available RAM vs. required RAM, and only if you run out of RAM, only then the disk becomes a bottleneck. I don't think data read from disk to memory is ever discarded even if unused for a long time, unless you run out of RAM (why would it be, that's just unnecessary extra work for OS when there's plenty of unused ram available already).
But what you say would make the GPL quite weak. I could just write my own header file I include. The function names and argument types have to match. But that is what we call the API and an API itself can't be protected with copyright. Then I just have to link dynamically and then there are no GPL bits in the binary.
While I think that would be a rational and usable description of "derivative work" I don't think this is what the people using the GPL for their programs have in mind.
It doesn't matter what people have in mind, what matters is what is written in law and what is written in the license.
What you describe is not an issue., because it's too much work, too hard to maintain and distribute. And it'd be useless for embedded devices, since you'd have to distribute the GPL library in the device anyway, in a way that it's automatically combined with your code.
It would work for a PC software, where you distribute the binary blow that was compiled with your own #include files, so that your distribution does not include any GPL code. There's nothing in the binary that is under GPL, so GPL simply does not apply to it. How could it?
There's always at least one in the bunch that fails to understand the GPL.
GPL is about forcing you to give back, through copyright
No, it's not. It's about not allowing you to redistribute a copylefted program (or derivative) without also providing access to the source.
or it's about restricting people who refuse to give back from using it.
Again, not true. In fact, I'd wager that well over 99% of people who have used GPL'd software have never, and will never, "give back."
Releasing even unmodified source, and allowing users to keep modifying it is a form of "giving back". And GPL is exactly about forcing this kind of giving back. I mean, that's the whole point of the license, forcing you to grant equal rights to the users of the GPL code, even if you'd rather just release the binary containg some GPL stuff. Forcing is just a bad word for it, because it implies there's something unfair about it. Being forced to pay in a store is not unfair, so generally people don't say they're forced to pay, even though they technically are.
But free software, as a concept, doesn't require the GPL. Nor does free software, as a movement, rely on the GPL at this stage.
I think you mean open source. Free software is an established term that very much relies on the GPL, and is in fact, founded on the GPL.
FSF may try to make "Free software" mean something specific, but that's futile, because "free software" sounds exactly the same, looks almost same on paper, but (according to FSF) means something else. And telling people "please don't say 'free software' because we've reserved 'Free Software' is just as stupid as it sounds like when you say it aloud.
Actually, it's more to do without pointing out that while copyright is generally about restrictions, "copyleft" is about freedoms.
Whenever anyone attributes "communist" aspects to the GPL (i.e., your repeated assertion that the GPL forces one to share/contribute/give back), it speaks more to the mindset of the poster than it does any insight into the GPL. The GPL is about one thing and one thing *only*, and that is software freedom.
But that's ambiguous to the point of being meaningless. BSD is also about software freedom. Releasing to public domain can be about software freedom. Releasing proprietary closed source software development tools for free use can be about software freedom too.
My interpretation is, that GPL is about striving for a world where any(?) digitally copyable content is freely available for use, modification and re-distribution. It's a noble goal, and one I think would benefit mankind enormously, because of the nature of digitally copyable content. Even though it would restrict software business opportunities, it would create those opportunities elsewhere. People would have to get paid for the *act* of adding value, instead of the actual value they created. It's the same goal as copyrights and patents have, and GPL wouldn't even be needed if it weren't for the speed of current technological and cultural change, and the fundamentally different nature of digital content as compared to anything that existed when patents and copyrights were invented.
Isn't it ultimately matter of #included code. If you #include GPL code in your compilation, then the binary becomes GPL. Or "import" in a way that includes something from the imported thing in your code, or whatever.
If you don't include GPL data in your binary, then there's no problem. It's just that nobody maintains independent non-GPL include files for various GPL libraries, so using GPL libraries without using GPL include files is a non-issue for practical reasons.
Claiming that using an interface provided by GPL stuff forces GPL on your stuff will never hold on court. Only if your binary (or whatever package) contains bits that are derived from GPL stuff, only then it becomes GPL. If all bits of your package are of non-GPL origin, no problem.
And to clarify about output of GPL programs: FSF interpretation seems to be that output of GPL program is GPL only if it's direct copy GPL data in the GPL program. And single words (or comparable pieces of data) are too short to be under copyright, so novel combinations of words isn't under GPL either. But novel combinations of long enough pieces to be under copyright automatically make the output to be under GPL too.
And the other way too, if you pass GPL stuff through a non-GPL program that does something to it, output is GPL, because output is derived from the GPL input.
GPL is more than just about copyright. It's about giving back.
No, giving back is about giving back.
GPL is about forcing you to give back, through copyright -- or it's about restricting people who refuse to give back from using it.
Indeed, but saying "forcing to give back" is trying to intentionally put a bad spin on it. It's like saying you're forced to pay for the stuff you take from a shop. Yes, technically true, but being intentionally misleading, something a communist or a hippie might say.
Better way would be to say GPL is about making the use of open source code a fair transaction. What confuses people is claiming one or the other is more free without defining what they mean with "freedom". BSD gives the current user the freedom to forbid future users from modifying (etc) the code, while GPL forbids the current user from take freedom of modification (etc) away from future users.
And of course BSD license can be just as much about making use of open source code a fair transaction, because "fair" is subjective.
But majority of non-professional OSS contributors do feel that BSD license doesn't give them the fair transaction they want, so they don't release code they care about under BSD.
It's just that more people are willing to contribute, when they feel that fruits of their labor can't be just "taken" as freely as BSD license allows.
Bullshit, and there are plenty of very popular projects which would demonstrate the contrary -- sqlite, for example, has no license. That's because it's entirely public domain.
You failed to read my (now emphasized) word "more" above.
Just think of the BSD network stack. Do you really think it's bullshit, that majority of open source crowd would be really really unhappy if their code was used like that?
Well, trust me on this: majority would be unhappy (different people for different reasons and to different degrees, but unhappy none the less). And why would they release their code under license, if it may make them unhappy, especially if their code is good enough to be used by others?
Then tehre are people who don't feel unhappy about it, or maybe feel their personal direct unhappiness is less than their happiness of indirectly benefitting mankind (even if it helps to put more cash into Bill Gates' bank account, at least some if may go to some charity of Bill's choosing...).
That's quite true -- in fact, it might have been better if it'd been under a BSD license.
I doubt that very much. I believe GPL is the reason why Linux dominates over BSD variants. It's just that more people are willing to contribute, when they feel that fruits of their labor can't be just "taken" as freely as BSD license allows.
That's the first time I've ever heard this, but I'll believe it. Nothing, I repeat nothing, will ever surprise me about the evolution of x86 any more.
I seem to remember that this was the situation originally. Not that surprising really, when you think about it. FPU was a sizable chunk of the processor die (caches were still very small those days, even though 486 already had L1 cache) and being able to sell the processors that had faulty FPU must have increased yields quite nicely. Later on they made pure 486SX processors that didn't have FPU on them, I believe.
All from memory, could be totally wrong, read above at your own risk..
Sorry but you are conflating proof with observation and extrapolation. Your prediction that no rat can survive is based on very strong evidence but it's not proof. Nature does not have to obey logic, you cannot under any circumstances predict the future with 100% certainty. Proof is found in axiomatic systems such as maths, it is not found in science.
But that applies to positive "proofs" as well, and I commented on the claim that you can never prove a negative.
Of course the real glitch is thinking in the terms of positive/negative. It's better to ask for example "What are the parameters of an environment where no rat will survive for 2 hours, never ever". Then you can start with "temperature and pressure where entire mass of the planet containing the rat will reach ionization temperature in 2 hours due to laws of thermodynamics" and go down from that.
It didn't happen 50005 years ago, it happened 5 years ago and 50000 light years away. There is no objective time.
No, you've got it all wrong. It's happening as we speak. Just ask the photons.
You're misunderstanding what a negative argument is.
Go try to test this hypothesis: "No rat can survive 2+ hours in 0degree salt water, ever."
You can test it all you like, with a million rats if you so desire. But you can never confirm it, even if you test a million of them. There might be some rat genotype out there capable of surviving, and you can't prove there isn't. That's trying to prove a negative.
Sure you can prove that kind of negative buy turning it into positive. You can perhaps (if it is true, though in this particular case I very much doubt it) prove that some essential moleculer or cellular structure in rats body will not survive that environment for that long, ever. Just increasing the temperature of the environment by a few hundred degrees would probably allow proving that no rat will survive there 2+ hours, ever, for any sensible definition of "rat", "survive" and "ever".
Assuming you'll be heavily involved and you know Java (or are willing to learn), I'd go with Java+NetBeans (or Java+Eclipse, or whatever). You'll program the framework (like a canvas for drawing), and let your brother to put the meat into it. Don't try to do any object oriented stuff, just imperative programming that happens to be in a class method. You'll provide a class with just one empty function with the canvas (or whatever) as argument to start with (and "throws Exception" so he doesn't need to worry about those, and whatever else secondary comes up). And then, program away.
Using Java above is beside the point. The real point is, good IDE will show typos and syntax errors, and provide immediate argument help for any functions he wants to call, and has "scripting language feel" even though it's compiled. Oh, and teach him to let the IDE auto-format the code. That way he'll learn to look at correctly formatted code, while not being burdened with having to be pedantic himself, and he'll learn that if auto-formatting formats the code wrong, then there's a syntax error. I'd go as far as to bind auto-formatting to TAB key... In general, let him skip the required pedantry of any modern, complex programming language by letting the IDE show how it's done. Java just happens to be one of the languages with best free, modern, fully-featured IDEs, while not being the horror known as C++...
I wouldn't recommend Python, it's too big and complicated for a first language IMHO, and I don't think there are good enough IDEs (or good enough Python support in existing IDEs) to compensate for it. Once he know the basics of programming, then python+pygame or python+pyglet can be a lot of fun, but getting started with them has the risk of getting frustrated with run-time exceptions that should be compile-time errors, manually keeping the indentation right, and perhaps too many complex concepts to start with.
That is breeding - and a rather simple and limited form of it.
If we are to call that evolving, then we may just as well start talking how Australians have evolved to be more resilient to heat and hardship than their British ancestors.
After all, weaker ones have all died out. Right?
They might have, but it's been awfully few generations, so the effects are probably miniscule.
But to the point, yes, that's evolution in the timescale of a few generations. Not really noticeable, lost in the noise mostly, but if the same selection pressures keep up for thousands of generations, it'll start to show. Just witness how quickly humans adapt to different amounts of sunlight, in both directions (very dark skinned people of southern India are an example of evolving dark skin back after losing it, but I'm not sure if this is true).
But, if we were to keep this up long enough we could very well wind up with an entirely new non-fox species.
To be pendantic, we would end up with an entirely new non-foxy species of fox.
Same way nature has for example ended up with entierly non-four-legged species of tetrapods (like snakes and whales)
WHY separate human actions in the first place?
Because we are human, and human actions are of greater interest and special to us, and we're able to distinguish stuff that happens only by humans from stuff that happens without human intervention, and need labels for them.
Evolution - Has new genetic information been added?
I'm not sure what definition of "genetic information" you're using, but are you aware that the biblical creationist definition of genetic information is "information in genes that does not increase". By this definition, if it gets added to DNA, it's not real genetic information.
Of course I'm just guessing that you're thinking of the creationist genetic information... Apologies if you're not.
And if you go back and re-read TFA, you'll see that's pretty much where this is goin. This guy's not interested in an alternative to alcohol, he's looking for a substitute for alcohol. Even if he is working in good faith, his efforts will be used to help the neo-prohibitionists.
Ah ha haa. Well, ok, maybe on the western side of Atlantic, but just try to imagine removing wine from French or Italian food table, or beer from English or German pubs... Things might get medieval for the politicians who put such a law into effect.
There's just one problem with this example, which makes it totally irrelevant to this case: The boy will have to use a lot of time and effort to unload the truck.
This is not a problem - the boy would be hanging around and helping other people for the rest of the day. His time and effort is a sunk cost. The only important difference is his choice of who to help (and whether to help.) His choice is *not* based on economic factors.
Sure it is based on economics of available time. He wants to help some people, but not just anybody. If he helps those he doesn't want to, he'll have less time to help those he wants to help.
So what is the boy's motivation to decline? There is only one major reason to do so - abuse of his generosity.
If it does not affect the boy in any way, if the boy doesn't even notice it, how can it be abuse? The society as a whole benefits by virtue of getting more done, of having less redundant stuff done. If the truck is already unloaded (code available for download), why must the truck driver spend time unloading it himself (writing his own code)? How is that fair?
People do things for free, for other people, when they feel that other people need their help. Boy scouts help elderly people; adults help everyone who is in distress; programmers give their code away to anyone, and so on. However many people are unwilling to render free assistance when they know that the recipient of that assistance is just getting a free ride, though he is already given money for a taxi. Essentially the abuser of generosity is pocketing the money that he has been already paid (the truck driver) or will be paid (the commercial programmer.) Are you likely to give money to a young, healthy panhandler who, by all indications, is just too lazy to hold a real job?
Again money, which is a finite resource. Code in a repository is not a finite resource. If I had a magical $100 bill, that if I give it once to somebody, it duplicates so that I always have the $100 bill anyway, then why wouldn't I give it to the young, healhty panhandler? He'd just spend it on something and make some some shop owner a bit happier, so why not?
It does not matter if the abuse happens out of your sight, it is still an abuse. People instinctively feel wrong when someone is rewarded for a job that they didn't do, and it's doubly wrong when it's you who did the job for them.
Again, I don't see how this applies to open source code freely available for download, for which the creator himself never intended to get a reward for. Now he suddenly wants it after all? Sound like greed to me.
So the damage is not to the programmer, but to the fabric of the society, by letting people receive rewards that they haven't earned. So unearned rewards is the key here. GPL specifically forbids such rewards, excepting only additional labor that you may do on your own (such as compiling, support, making physical copies, etc. - I'm not going to be detailed here.)
I presume you mean that GPL forbids asking money for source code above distribution cost? That's not the issue here. The issue is that writer of the GPL code wants certain control over all the code that gets combined with his GPL code. If he didn't want, he'd use LGPL or BSD license or release to public domain. Greed of power, as demonstrated by the fact of having alternatives that don't try to assert as much (or any) control.
Also, unjust rewards cut both ways. Somebody creates a complex piece of software, in which they use a small GPL library code. Now the copyright holder of the GPL code expects the full reward (of having the complete, complex code GPL licensed) as compensation of essentially no work, and this is not usually negotiable, and if the complex code uses proprietary 3rd party code, the writer of the GPL code is certainly not going to chip in to get that code GPL licensed too. No, he wrote a s
"It could be argued that forced freedom is no freedom at all."
As in people in countries with laws against slavery cannot be Free? Forced freedom as it were?
Eh? If a slave doesn't want to be a slave, then the freedom is not forced on them, so it's not forced freedom from their point of view, now is it? Now if somebody wants to be a (real) slave, and law forbids it, then certainly this forced freedom is not really freedom from the point of view of that wanna-be slave. But I think we both know (and hopefully agree to) the main arguments why it's not legal to be a (legally real) slave even if one wants to be. And I don't really see how bringing slavery, which is a human rights issue, into a software license discussion is in any way relevant, unless you propose that software has something equal to human rights...?
From what I gather, the FSF folks think that code should not be subject to copyright at all and then everyone would be Free. Since under the laws of many countries, code is subject to copyright, they designed copyleft to use those laws to undo the effects of those laws. Now, the thing is, how can someone who believes in those "rights", argue against someone using those "rights" in the manner they choose?
Oh, I'm not arguing against that. I argue that GPL is not really about freedom, it's about promoting the ideology you describe above at the cost of some freedom (like freedoms which are preserved by LGPL).
IIRC, the LGPL was designed as a practical matter. Pragmatism as it were. The thinking is document by the license designers. What flaws do you find in that thinking?
The only flaw is advertising that LGPL is less free than GPL, while from any non-ideological point of view it's the other way around. No flaw in the licenses, no flaw in using them to promote ideology, only flaw is self-delusion about what's what, and the confusion this causes to those who don't share the ideology.
"What's not fine is pretending that forcing an ideological version of freedom on other people's creations is any kind of freedom."
Surely there is no forcing going on. We are not talking patents after all. Just write your own replacement and go your own way. There is a deal being negotiated in the market place here. Accept the terms or don't. I will trade you the right to use my stuff if you will trade me the right to use yours. And it is not even all of your stuff that I insist on the rights to in the trade.... right?
It's the same kind of forcing that eg. proprietary software uses: "You're of course free to not use our code, as long as you do what we tell you to do with your stuff (code or money)." When patents are not involved, you're always free to roll your own version, so by that metric most commercial licenses are just as free as GPL... If you call that "freedom", I respectfully disagree.
LGPL doesn't force the user to do anything with stuff that is theirs, it only forces the user to do something with the LGPL code itself. It's the huge philosophical difference between "my stuff is mine and your stuff is yours, freely use my stuff as long as you let others use it freely too" and "my stuff is our common stuff and your stuff must become our common stuff too!"
an upshot of this is that it would effectively increasse the total number of usable IP's, because the effective IP address length would be extended by however many bits of address you put into the extension header. This process could even be chained through multiple levels of NAT's _theoretically_ indefinitely, but in practice would always be limited by the sizes of the routing tables involved, and whatever the minimum MTU for an IP packet is at the time (which is theoretically as small as 68 bytes today, but nobody uses them anywhere close to that small). Individual IPv6 packets have a maximum size of 64K each, so there's a hard limit in how big it can get regardless of how much the MTU goes up.
In the context of extending available address space, there's also a hard limit on number of addressable entities (such as atoms or Planck length grid positions in space-time) in our universe. Just a small fraction of 64K maximum packet size should be plenty for having enough extension header space for addressing whatever you can imagine to address.
Not quite:
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
"Free software is a matter of the users' freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. More precisely, it means that the program's users have the four essential freedoms"
It is just that it is basically impossible to ensure these freedoms for all users without restricting the ability to limit these freedoms. I could be wrong and if you know of some way to see to it that all users always get to legally enjoy these freedoms while not putting in such restrictions, I am sure there are a goodly number of people who would be happy to learn about it.
There is not doubt that with copyright laws as they are now, copyleft has issues. If you could ensure the freedoms of the users without the problems copyleft brings...
But that's just another way of saying that code must be free, no matter the user.
In short, the ideology behind GPL claims that the end sanctifies the means: it doesn't matter if the user "suffers" while striving towards a world where all code is GPL compatible.
Another anti-freedom thing about GPL is that it forces certain ideology on all software combined with GPL code. It could be argued that forced freedom is no freedom at all.
LGPL proves that GPL restricts users freedom to distribute code in unreasonable way. This proves that GPL is not so much about freedom, but about ideology, about forcing a version of "freedom" on users, on creations of other people even if they don't subscribe to the ideology behind GPL. Because that's the only real difference between GPL and LGPL.
Now this is just fine, I believe that creator of code (or whatever) has very broad freedom to require just about anything from those who want to use the code. Using GPL code to promote an ideology is just fine, just about the best way to promote an ideology I can think of. What's not fine is pretending that forcing an ideological version of freedom on other people's creations is any kind of freedom.
That may be the point of open source software. But I seriously doubt it is the point of Free Software. I have a vague feeling that the point of Free Software is Software Freedom. Complete Software Freedom. No non-Free Software needed by any software user. Ever. Perhaps I have gotten it wrong all these years though.
Also worth noticing, that Free Software is about Freedom of Software. Not the user, not the developer, but the Software. It limits the freedom of developing original code on top of existing code (as opposed to just tweaking existing code), and that can have also a negative (not only positive) impact on the user as well.
even if you isolate all human effects, you're still going to have a dangerous heating up or cooling down at some point
"At some point" will be in geological timescale. Any preparations we do now doesn't really have any meaning in this timescale. Either we're extinct, living in caves, or adjusting orbit of Earth at will to maximize whatever "we" might want to maximize at that point, or something like that. In any case, any current preparation will be totally meaningless in countering any natural climate change.
No, the only step that makes sense now is to stop making the climate change so fast. We don't have the technology to really counter what we're doing now, so only viable alternatives are either doing it a lot less, or just keep doing it and accept the consequences.
Once we can make global things happen by bio- or nanotechnology, then we may be able to effectively fix the Earth, but for now, we need to buy enough time to develop that technology.
That said, "renewable energy" is a bit of a misnomer, as oil will get created, at large enough timescales (though nowhere near fast enough to match consumption). On the other hand, so long the Sun is there we'll keep getting energy from it.
A good definition is "energy source that is renewed at the same rate it's used". It also nicely covers using things like wood for energy, which can be either sustainable or non-sustainable.