Looks like he posted his opinion based on his experience, and you posted your opinion based on your experience. So you should quit making blanket statements based on nothing too.
Neither of you posted statistics. Where are yours?
I think you misunderstood his posting. He is saying, "Look, if I use your loose methods of argument, I can 'prove' the opposite! Watch!"
The US Supreme Court has also recognized the concept of the Beaten Path. As best I recall, this means that people generally have a right to cross your private property in order to approach your front door. In order to remove this right, you have to put up no trespassing signs. Whether they have to actually knock in order to invoke the right, I do not know.
I'm sure they'll agree that taking photos on private property counts as criminal mischief in Texas, assuming it's clearly posted as private property.
Criminal Mischief is a defined offense, not "whatever we don't like". It basically means vandalism. To construing the act of photographing, as criminal mischief would be perverse.
I'd like to know how the truly religious cope the fact that the book they read today has been rewritten over and over and perverted so many times that it can hardly reflect what was 'supposed' to be there.
They don't have to.
Many like to believe that the Bible has been rewritten many times to suit the politics of the day. They, like you, assert that the Bible that people read today bears little resemblence to the original manuscripts. But ancient manuscripts such as the Codex Siniaticus show that this is not the case.
I would suggest reading the Wikipedia article on the Codex Sinaiticus. If I understand this article correctly, the differences can be divided into three general categories:
* Brief passages which other manuscripts omit
* Brief passages which the Codex Sinaiticus ommits but other manuscripts include
* Differences in spelling
Most of the thousands of differences between ancient manuscripts that scholars count are in the last category.
The discovery of the Codex Sinaiticus, which did not differ substantially from previously known, much younger manuscripts, supported rather than undermined the belief that the Bible has been transmitted substantially as written./p.
Another problem with this kind of research is that people do not always answer questions about their native language correctly. When asked "how does one say X?" they will often answer "You can't say X." They will get hung up on the mode of expression and lose sight of the idea being expressed.
For example, there is a Russian stand-up comic (whose name I have forgoten) who does a routine about his visit to the USA. He cites the interesting fact that the English language has no word for "soul". How did he arrive at this absurd conclusion? It appears he tried to ask Americans how to say, "that is not in accord with my doosha." and attempted to explain the meaning of the word "doosha". When nobody could understand what this expression might mean, he concluded that the word "doosha" (soul) is untranslatable. It seems nobody realized that he wanted to know how to say, "I don't care for that very much."
Another problem is that native speakers often understand that the learner is seeking guidance but do not correctly understand what kind of guidance he wants. So when he asks how to say X, he may be told to say Y, not because it is impossible to say X but because saying X sounds silly or crude.
>Finally, since all information within the VR machine is controlled by the VR machine, any experiment we design is itself
>fully under the control of the VR machine. All data we perceive is perceived because the VR machine has elected to let us
>perceive it. Ergo, no experiment we could produce would allow us to discern the reality of the VR machine unless it chose >to reveal itself to us.
This would seem to be an overstatement, probably because you are making the implicit assumption that the primary purpose of the supposed simulation must be to make us believe we live in a real universe. You assume that this goal is so important that the 'system administrators' would stop the simulation and adjust it whenever we tried to run an experiment which could reveal the computational nature of the universe.
But how likely is it that the supposed simulation is being run simply to fool us? Does one run VMware simply for the intellectual triumph of 'fooling' the programs into thinking they are running on real hardware? Or does one run it in order to benefit from the work they perform or to be entertained by them. If one of the programs has code which attempts to detect that the hardware is virtualized, would you, the operator know? If you did, would you care?
>While "ru" written with cyrillic letters may look confusingly similar to "py", it is not the same.
Confusingly similar is an understatement. In many fonts the same glyphs are used. Yes, the same glyph is printed for both latin p and cyrillic r and the same glyph is printed for both latin y and cyrillic ew.
Scammers could exploit the fact that people in Russia pronounce the domain "ru" as "rew". If they see the glyphs "py" and do not remember that the glyphs should be interpreted according the the latin alphabet, they will pronounce them as "rew" as well. Thus, one could easily fail to notice the difference between "rambler.ru" and "rambler.py".
Russian does have the verb "to be", just not in the present tense.
Funny you should mention that since the conjugation of the verb "to be" in Russian has undergone a simplification even more radical than what is described in the article.
For a couple hundred years now Russians have tended not to pronounce the verb "to be" in the present tense. For example, instead of saying, "That is a cat," they say "That--cat." The result is that people gradually forgot how to conjugate the verb in the present tense. Once there were six present-tense forms, for first, second, and third person both singular and plural. Today only two of them survive of which one is seldom used and then only in writing. Most people, on the rare occasions when they pronounce "to be" in the present tense use only the third-
person singular.
If this were done in English, it would work something like this:
I am --> I is
We are --> We is
Thou art --> Thou is
You are --> You is
He/She/It is (remains the same)
They are --> They is (except occasionally in writing where the traditional form is preserved)
The article summary is vague to the point that one is unsure what the subject of the article is.
The "IP holders" of the title are trademark registrants of companies which help trademark registrants identify possible infringement. The Whois data referred to is not the public data to which we all have access. Rather it is the names and addresses of the actually domain name registrants in those cases where the domain registrar is acting as a proxy and has placed its own contact information in the public Whois database.
The dispute is about who should have access to this secret data and under what circumstances.
I believe the last sentence actually means: "As a result, after a few hours, the entire Skype network reached the point of refusing service...". In other words, it took a few hours to bring down all the servers. Then the maintanance teem "turned off authentication" and it presumably came back up.
>They are disembarking from their port of origin, and embarking on a mission to study the ocean floor gash.
The first part of this sentence would make sense only if disembark meant to set out on a journey. It actually means to get off a barque which is a type of ship. It is frequently used loosely to mean to get off any ship or even any large conveyance. But it never means to set out on a journey.
The second part of the sentence is probably correct since they will most certainly have to get on a ship in order to visit the ocean floor.
I can understand why you shouldn't go posting a few "dozens" of copyrighted bytes... though I don't agree with the runaway copyright system that allows stuff to remain copyright protected for years after it's obsolete.
Why exactly shoud one not post a few dozen copyrighted bytes? This is clasic fair use and firmly in legal territory. Every time a book reviewer quotes a passage from a book he is copying a few dozen copyrighted words. Every time a TV movie review shows a clip from a movie they are copying a piece of a copyrighted work. I have just copied a few dozen of your copyrighted words in order to comment on them. None of these acticties requires the permission of the copyright holder. Nor does the copyright holder have the power to forbid it. This right of fair use is a cornerstone of free speach. Simply put, it is impossible to meaningfully and convincingly discuss a copyright protected work without quoting from it directly.
As represented here on Slashdot, this researcher published an article in which he quoted a passage from a copyright protected program and proceded to comment on it in detail. If this isn't fair use, nothing is. If the copyright holders convinced the court otherwise, they could only have done so by confusing the court as to the facts.
If the information is clasified, then the government will have to prove it. That means proving they have the right to classify it. As best I understand, they have the right to classify information of military value, and certain information about foreign policy. It could be the NYT is hoping to back the government into a corner to the point where a judge will have to decide if the information the NYT requesting is really classified. If they are looking for evidence of government wrongdoing, then this strategy makes sense since it is difficult to claim that evidence that one has commited a crime is a military or foreign policy secret.
Asking for the names of the people monitored may seem silly, since they are supposedly terrorism suspects. But that is exactly what the NYT is trying to determine. I think they want the government to have to go into a private room with a judge and go through the list name by name and explain why they can't release each one. If some of them turned out to be human rights activists (as has happened in other cases), the judge would not be amused and might be able to release those names.
This is not the first time a newspaper has gone up against the government demanding documents which supposedly contain state secrets. The Washington Post has done this very interesting and even amusing results.
I am frankly suprised by the many negative comments about the quality of Harbor Freight's goods. I think some of the posters may be showing off.
I have over the past three years bought dozens of tools from them. I have overall been very happy with the quality. Of course it may be that I have owned and broken enough poor-quality tools to know what they look like and avoid them on the basis of the catalog illustrations.
My only complaints:
* One set of 24" long drills wasn't ground to relieve friction along the length. As a result then bind up after about 6". (I have also bought six other sets of drills, all of which were excelent.)
* Some woodworking tools such as some chisels and a plane iron weren't fully sharpened. Whether this is a problem depends on whether you know how to sharpen them or not.
I have been satisfied with the stationary house-brand power tools, including a drill press, a planer, and a benchtop sander.
The air tools and air fittings are of decent quality, similar to Campbel-Housfield (or however one spells it).
Socket sets, pliers, wrenches, socket sets, and hammers have all been of respectable quality for the price. Some of them are even excelent. They are all properly machined, no cast "white metal" stuff. The cutting edges meet and the steel is hardened.
I am reserving judgement on the house-brand power tools. I own three of their drills. The smallest is a 3/8" which is physically much smaller than I had expected. On the other hand I can find no fault with its performance. I assume one should not try to drill 1" holes through oak with it. I paid $20 for it. I also have a 1/2" drill with D handle and a very heavy-duty 5/8" right-angle drill for drilling through studs. I have not disassembled either, but externally they seem solid and well-built. I haven't managed to break them yet, but then I haven't used them every day or abused them.
It is true that Harbor Freight tools are basic in design and not always highly polished. But I don't think we should confuse fancy cases and highly polished surfaces with quality.
This is a good point. MS-DOS 2.0 introduced sub-directories, but all changes since they have been simply changes in the size of data items such as FAT entries, root directory, or storage clusters. Perforance improvements have been the result of impovements to the implementation code, not to the on-disk structures.
The Slashdot item doesn't say that this is a study. It says that the author is a "legal studies professor". That means that his field of study is the law.
This is correct. Judges tend not to sympathize with the casinos' arguments. The Casino management claims that the card counters are "cheating". They justify this statement by saying that the patrons are receiving a service called "entertainment" which they pay for by losing bets. Under this theory, anyone who deliberately refrains from losing is cheating, even if he plays according to the rules of the game. This is similiar to the argument that one is stealing TV programs if one doesn't watch the commercials.
Smart judges have ruled that blackjack is a game of skill and that card counters are simply skillful players. Some have even enjoined casinos from ejecting them.
Re:Who was the interviewer? I smell a rat.
on
Bill Gates On Linux
·
· Score: 1
Another odd thing about the interview is that the questions are very poorly written. For example:
USA TODAY: There has been some criticism of the way in which you're been competing against Linux, and in The New York Times, assuming it was accurate, reporting that the e-mails in Europe talked about undercutting Linux at any cost, per se. How do you react to that, and where do you cross the line of that going back to some of the behaviors that surfaced in the Justice Department case?
I had to read this several times before I could I could parse it. I think it means something like:
USA TODAY: There has been some criticism of the way in which you're been competing against Linux. The New York Times has reported that e-mails in Europe [between Microsoft executives?] talked about undercutting Linux at any cost. Do you have a response to this report? How far can Microsoft go without returning to the anti-competitive behavior condemned in the Justice Department case?
It sounds like the interviewer is writing the question while he is talking and is stumbling. I think this is probably an indication of a lack of preparation. But, another explanation is that Microsoft wrote the questions. Their spokesmen often speak in this almost incomprehensible manner.
That depends on whether we are analyzing this question from an electrical prospective or an ethical one.
If it is electrical, then white to blue and brown to black sound much safer since white and black are typical colors for hot and neutral and brown and blue are the colors of hot and neutral in some power cords which I have seen.
If it is an ethical question, you don't connect them until you are sure. Your and your company's possible gain does not justify recklessly placing others at such serious risk.
Nehemiah was a 6th or 5th century BCE govenor of Judea during a time when Judea was under Medo-Persian rule. I would describe Joshua, Samuel, and Nehemiah as figures from Jewish history rather than Christian mythology.
Of course, in the 19th century it was popular to assert that public figures mentioned in the Bible are figments of the writers' imagination, but this view seems to be largely discredited. The names of too many of these 'fictituous characters' showed up on monuments and public records uncovered by archeologists.
I dont think there's much of a case to support SCO being held to the requirments of the GPL in their "released software". They were inadvertently duped into it, and thus cant be held accountable.
This is a good point. A related point is that not all distributing under the GPL is the same. Copyright owners can place their works under the GPL and theirby grant everyone use and distribution rights and people who receive copies can pass those rights on to others. I would argue that if SCO inadvertently distributed its own code under the GPL, it did so as a recipient and simply passed on distribution rights without creating new ones. Since the code would have been placed under the GPL by someone who did not have the right to do so, whatever rights SCO passed on would be invalid.
It seems to me that placing code under the GPL requires two acts: 1) representing onself as the copyright holder, 2) definitely stating that the code may be distributed under the GPL. Since SCO did not do the former, the clauses of the GPL which create new rights did not become operative.
The reason they won't publically disclose the code in question is because they claim the code is a *Trade Secret* . The law requires they perform due diligence to protect their own trade secrets from public disclosure and also do everything posible to mitigate their own damages. If they publically release the code (even for comparision), they will legally destory their own trade secret. That's why they will only disclose it under Non-Disclosure Agreements.
This might make them hesitate to release the SCO code from which the Linux code was supposedly copied, but I don't see how it prevents them from pointing to the infringing lines. If they did that, we could investigate the origin of those lines.
Remember, SCO hasn't even said if the supposedly infringing code is in the Linux kernel or in some other piece of software commonly found on Linux systems. In fact, some things SCO has said could be understood to mean that the code is not in the Linux kernel.
Slashdot Mirror
Looks like he posted his opinion based on his experience, and you posted your opinion based on your experience. So you should quit making blanket statements based on nothing too.
Neither of you posted statistics. Where are yours?
I think you misunderstood his posting. He is saying, "Look, if I use your loose methods of argument, I can 'prove' the opposite! Watch!"
The US Supreme Court has also recognized the concept of the Beaten Path. As best I recall, this means that people generally have a right to cross your private property in order to approach your front door. In order to remove this right, you have to put up no trespassing signs. Whether they have to actually knock in order to invoke the right, I do not know.
I'm sure they'll agree that taking photos on private property counts as criminal mischief in Texas, assuming it's clearly posted as private property.
Criminal Mischief is a defined offense, not "whatever we don't like". It basically means vandalism. To construing the act of photographing, as criminal mischief would be perverse.
I'd like to know how the truly religious cope the fact that the book they read today has been rewritten over and over and perverted so many times that it can hardly reflect what was 'supposed' to be there.
They don't have to.
Many like to believe that the Bible has been rewritten many times to suit the politics of the day. They, like you, assert that the Bible that people read today bears little resemblence to the original manuscripts. But ancient manuscripts such as the Codex Siniaticus show that this is not the case.
I would suggest reading the Wikipedia article on the Codex Sinaiticus. If I understand this article correctly, the differences can be divided into three general categories:
* Brief passages which other manuscripts omit
* Brief passages which the Codex Sinaiticus ommits but other manuscripts include
* Differences in spelling
Most of the thousands of differences between ancient manuscripts that scholars count are in the last category.
The discovery of the Codex Sinaiticus, which did not differ substantially from previously known, much younger manuscripts, supported rather than undermined the belief that the Bible has been transmitted substantially as written./p.
Could you provide some examples? I speak Russian, but I am afraid I did not get the point of your post.
Odin ...
Dva
Tri
Chetyre
Piaty
Shesty
Semy
I don't see a pattern here.
You do not see a pattern because you are not counting anything. You are simply calling out numbers. Try this:
Odin rod ...
Dva roda
Tri roda
Chetyre roda
Pyat rodov
Shest rodov
Syem rodov
sans17 points out that when objects are counted, the word denoting the object goes through three declensions:
singular (odin rod)
genative singular (dva roda)
genative plural (pyat rodov)
He believes this may indicate a human tendency to divide quantities of counted objects into three categories: one or very few, a few, and many.
Another problem with this kind of research is that people do not always answer questions about their native language correctly. When asked "how does one say X?" they will often answer "You can't say X." They will get hung up on the mode of expression and lose sight of the idea being expressed.
For example, there is a Russian stand-up comic (whose name I have forgoten) who does a routine about his visit to the USA. He cites the interesting fact that the English language has no word for "soul". How did he arrive at this absurd conclusion? It appears he tried to ask Americans how to say, "that is not in accord with my doosha." and attempted to explain the meaning of the word "doosha". When nobody could understand what this expression might mean, he concluded that the word "doosha" (soul) is untranslatable. It seems nobody realized that he wanted to know how to say, "I don't care for that very much."
Another problem is that native speakers often understand that the learner is seeking guidance but do not correctly understand what kind of guidance he wants. So when he asks how to say X, he may be told to say Y, not because it is impossible to say X but because saying X sounds silly or crude.
>Finally, since all information within the VR machine is controlled by the VR machine, any experiment we design is itself >fully under the control of the VR machine. All data we perceive is perceived because the VR machine has elected to let us >perceive it. Ergo, no experiment we could produce would allow us to discern the reality of the VR machine unless it chose >to reveal itself to us. This would seem to be an overstatement, probably because you are making the implicit assumption that the primary purpose of the supposed simulation must be to make us believe we live in a real universe. You assume that this goal is so important that the 'system administrators' would stop the simulation and adjust it whenever we tried to run an experiment which could reveal the computational nature of the universe. But how likely is it that the supposed simulation is being run simply to fool us? Does one run VMware simply for the intellectual triumph of 'fooling' the programs into thinking they are running on real hardware? Or does one run it in order to benefit from the work they perform or to be entertained by them. If one of the programs has code which attempts to detect that the hardware is virtualized, would you, the operator know? If you did, would you care?
>While "ru" written with cyrillic letters may look confusingly similar to "py", it is not the same.
Confusingly similar is an understatement. In many fonts the same glyphs are used. Yes, the same glyph is printed for both latin p and cyrillic r and the same glyph is printed for both latin y and cyrillic ew.
Scammers could exploit the fact that people in Russia pronounce the domain "ru" as "rew". If they see the glyphs "py" and do not remember that the glyphs should be interpreted according the the latin alphabet, they will pronounce them as "rew" as well. Thus, one could easily fail to notice the difference between "rambler.ru" and "rambler.py".
Funny you should mention that since the conjugation of the verb "to be" in Russian has undergone a simplification even more radical than what is described in the article.
For a couple hundred years now Russians have tended not to pronounce the verb "to be" in the present tense. For example, instead of saying, "That is a cat," they say "That--cat." The result is that people gradually forgot how to conjugate the verb in the present tense. Once there were six present-tense forms, for first, second, and third person both singular and plural. Today only two of them survive of which one is seldom used and then only in writing. Most people, on the rare occasions when they pronounce "to be" in the present tense use only the third- person singular.
If this were done in English, it would work something like this:
I am --> I is
We are --> We is
Thou art --> Thou is
You are --> You is
He/She/It is (remains the same)
They are --> They is (except occasionally in writing where the traditional form is preserved)
The article summary is vague to the point that one is unsure what the subject of the article is. The "IP holders" of the title are trademark registrants of companies which help trademark registrants identify possible infringement. The Whois data referred to is not the public data to which we all have access. Rather it is the names and addresses of the actually domain name registrants in those cases where the domain registrar is acting as a proxy and has placed its own contact information in the public Whois database. The dispute is about who should have access to this secret data and under what circumstances.
I believe the last sentence actually means: "As a result, after a few hours, the entire Skype network reached the point of refusing service...". In other words, it took a few hours to bring down all the servers. Then the maintanance teem "turned off authentication" and it presumably came back up.
>They are disembarking from their port of origin, and embarking on a mission to study the ocean floor gash.
The first part of this sentence would make sense only if disembark meant to set out on a journey. It actually means to get off a barque which is a type of ship. It is frequently used loosely to mean to get off any ship or even any large conveyance. But it never means to set out on a journey.
The second part of the sentence is probably correct since they will most certainly have to get on a ship in order to visit the ocean floor.
Why exactly shoud one not post a few dozen copyrighted bytes? This is clasic fair use and firmly in legal territory. Every time a book reviewer quotes a passage from a book he is copying a few dozen copyrighted words. Every time a TV movie review shows a clip from a movie they are copying a piece of a copyrighted work. I have just copied a few dozen of your copyrighted words in order to comment on them. None of these acticties requires the permission of the copyright holder. Nor does the copyright holder have the power to forbid it. This right of fair use is a cornerstone of free speach. Simply put, it is impossible to meaningfully and convincingly discuss a copyright protected work without quoting from it directly.
As represented here on Slashdot, this researcher published an article in which he quoted a passage from a copyright protected program and proceded to comment on it in detail. If this isn't fair use, nothing is. If the copyright holders convinced the court otherwise, they could only have done so by confusing the court as to the facts.
If the information is clasified, then the government will have to prove it. That means proving they have the right to classify it. As best I understand, they have the right to classify information of military value, and certain information about foreign policy. It could be the NYT is hoping to back the government into a corner to the point where a judge will have to decide if the information the NYT requesting is really classified. If they are looking for evidence of government wrongdoing, then this strategy makes sense since it is difficult to claim that evidence that one has commited a crime is a military or foreign policy secret.
Asking for the names of the people monitored may seem silly, since they are supposedly terrorism suspects. But that is exactly what the NYT is trying to determine. I think they want the government to have to go into a private room with a judge and go through the list name by name and explain why they can't release each one. If some of them turned out to be human rights activists (as has happened in other cases), the judge would not be amused and might be able to release those names.
This is not the first time a newspaper has gone up against the government demanding documents which supposedly contain state secrets. The Washington Post has done this very interesting and even amusing results.
I am frankly suprised by the many negative comments about the quality of Harbor Freight's goods. I think some of the posters may be showing off.
I have over the past three years bought dozens of tools from them. I have overall been very happy with the quality. Of course it may be that I have owned and broken enough poor-quality tools to know what they look like and avoid them on the basis of the catalog illustrations.
My only complaints:
* One set of 24" long drills wasn't ground to relieve friction along the length. As a result then bind up after about 6". (I have also bought six other sets of drills, all of which were excelent.)
* Some woodworking tools such as some chisels and a plane iron weren't fully sharpened. Whether this is a problem depends on whether you know how to sharpen them or not.
I have been satisfied with the stationary house-brand power tools, including a drill press, a planer, and a benchtop sander.
The air tools and air fittings are of decent quality, similar to Campbel-Housfield (or however one spells it).
Socket sets, pliers, wrenches, socket sets, and hammers have all been of respectable quality for the price. Some of them are even excelent. They are all properly machined, no cast "white metal" stuff. The cutting edges meet and the steel is hardened.
I am reserving judgement on the house-brand power tools. I own three of their drills. The smallest is a 3/8" which is physically much smaller than I had expected. On the other hand I can find no fault with its performance. I assume one should not try to drill 1" holes through oak with it. I paid $20 for it. I also have a 1/2" drill with D handle and a very heavy-duty 5/8" right-angle drill for drilling through studs. I have not disassembled either, but externally they seem solid and well-built. I haven't managed to break them yet, but then I haven't used them every day or abused them.
It is true that Harbor Freight tools are basic in design and not always highly polished. But I don't think we should confuse fancy cases and highly polished surfaces with quality.
This is a good point. MS-DOS 2.0 introduced sub-directories, but all changes since they have been simply changes in the size of data items such as FAT entries, root directory, or storage clusters. Perforance improvements have been the result of impovements to the implementation code, not to the on-disk structures.
The Slashdot item doesn't say that this is a study. It says that the author is a "legal studies professor". That means that his field of study is the law.
It is like Chaucer, but Chaucer is easier to understand. :-)
The best I can make out of it is this:
Pray thee, do not sport with the string or play with asperity. Winding the finger causes blood not to flow. Peril throughout.
In other words:
Don't play with the string or play roughly. Winding the string around one's finger cuts off circulation. It is quite dangerous.
This is correct. Judges tend not to sympathize with the casinos' arguments. The Casino management claims that the card counters are "cheating". They justify this statement by saying that the patrons are receiving a service called "entertainment" which they pay for by losing bets. Under this theory, anyone who deliberately refrains from losing is cheating, even if he plays according to the rules of the game. This is similiar to the argument that one is stealing TV programs if one doesn't watch the commercials.
Smart judges have ruled that blackjack is a game of skill and that card counters are simply skillful players. Some have even enjoined casinos from ejecting them.
Another odd thing about the interview is that the questions are very poorly written. For example:
I had to read this several times before I could I could parse it. I think it means something like:
It sounds like the interviewer is writing the question while he is talking and is stumbling. I think this is probably an indication of a lack of preparation. But, another explanation is that Microsoft wrote the questions. Their spokesmen often speak in this almost incomprehensible manner.
That depends on whether we are analyzing this question from an electrical prospective or an ethical one.
If it is electrical, then white to blue and brown to black sound much safer since white and black are typical colors for hot and neutral and brown and blue are the colors of hot and neutral in some power cords which I have seen.
If it is an ethical question, you don't connect them until you are sure. Your and your company's possible gain does not justify recklessly placing others at such serious risk.
Umm... What does this have to do with chimp DNA?
Nehemiah was a 6th or 5th century BCE govenor of Judea during a time when Judea was under Medo-Persian rule. I would describe Joshua, Samuel, and Nehemiah as figures from Jewish history rather than Christian mythology.
Of course, in the 19th century it was popular to assert that public figures mentioned in the Bible are figments of the writers' imagination, but this view seems to be largely discredited. The names of too many of these 'fictituous characters' showed up on monuments and public records uncovered by archeologists.
This is a good point. A related point is that not all distributing under the GPL is the same. Copyright owners can place their works under the GPL and theirby grant everyone use and distribution rights and people who receive copies can pass those rights on to others. I would argue that if SCO inadvertently distributed its own code under the GPL, it did so as a recipient and simply passed on distribution rights without creating new ones. Since the code would have been placed under the GPL by someone who did not have the right to do so, whatever rights SCO passed on would be invalid.
It seems to me that placing code under the GPL requires two acts: 1) representing onself as the copyright holder, 2) definitely stating that the code may be distributed under the GPL. Since SCO did not do the former, the clauses of the GPL which create new rights did not become operative.
This might make them hesitate to release the SCO code from which the Linux code was supposedly copied, but I don't see how it prevents them from pointing to the infringing lines. If they did that, we could investigate the origin of those lines.
Remember, SCO hasn't even said if the supposedly infringing code is in the Linux kernel or in some other piece of software commonly found on Linux systems. In fact, some things SCO has said could be understood to mean that the code is not in the Linux kernel.