MooKore 2004: "I know that everyone and their dog here at Slashdot hates SCO, but is it really necesscary to call them names?"
I'm not sure it's really name calling if someone calls SCO, for instance, "fucking pricks". That just an accurate description.
But hey, what do I know? I was the one who told Darl he'd be a "complete idiot" (way back in September, in response to his first Open Letter) to tell the judge that he didn't know he was releasing his own code under the GPL for three fucking years.
AC: "the only copyrights SCO claims are to sysV unix (and some older unices that don't matter). They also have contractual rights to *derivative works* made from sysV. IBM's AIX is such a derivative work, and IBM cannot release it without SCO approval - for sure they can't turn AIX into GPL code."
This is actually not correct, though you're at least in the right ballpark. SCO claims all copyrights for all UNIX and UNIXWARE. Including, in SCO's opinion System V. This language does come from the APA.
Unfortuantely, for SCO, there are a *lot* of clauses in the Novell-OldSCO Purchasing Agreement that *exclude* most rights in System V. About the only right SCO has in Sys V, as far as I can read into the APA, is the right to collect Sys V licensing fees for Novell, send dunning letters for unpaid bills, and to be at the table for discussions over Sys V license buyouts. And even the latter is questionable.
Whether or not AIX is a "derivative work" is debatable, and largely turns on the semantics by which you define "derivative". What isn't debatable is that those portions of AIX that *include* Sys V code are "derivative", as that meets the minimal, least general, definition of "derivative". SCO has so far failed to identify *any* Sys V code in AIX (or Dynix) that has been contributed to Linux. They have only claimed to identify original AIX & Dynix code that have been contributed to Linux, which isn't covered by the contract according to ATT's old statements.
So, we probably shouldn't say that AIX is a "derivative work" of Sys V, although some *portions* of it may be.
It's like saying Linux is a derivative work of BSD, which we all know it isn't, even though we also all know that some files in Linux are derived from BSD.
And maybe not even Oracle plays in that arena anymore. Peoplesoft and SAP are both bigger than Oracle now.
And you forgot CA, which is still a huge software vendor, despite the lousy quality of most of their products, at least the ones I've dealt with. Presumably they make their money in the mainframe and mini-computer markets, rather than PC's.
Male circumcision is a far cry from female genital mutilation. While male circumsion is largely unnecessary now, excepting the rare case where the "hood is too small for the engine", in ancient cultures, where a bathtub or shower was not part of the regular household plumbing and bathing was not a daily excercise, there's a possibility that the flans could get more easily infected.
In other words, there *may* have been some health benefits to circumcision before daily bathing became common-place.
There isn't any such justification for female circumcision, which is far more painful, and can have brutal consequences.
This is just a nitpick, but: Washington DC doesn't have any say in the presidential elections. It's not a state, so it doesn't have any electoral votes.
Doesn't have any Senators either. I think they have one token rep. in the house for lobbying purposes, but the rep. isn't allowed to vote.
In terms of federal representation, DC is even more screwed than NYC.
"A font geek is someone with 15,000 truetype fonts..."
Ok. I guess this is semantics and we're just defining things differently.
For instance, what you describe as a "type nerd" is what I think of as a "font geek". And what you describe as a "font geek" (see above) is what I think of as just another variant of "clueless idiot".
You do know that the Times of London is a crappy paper, don't you?
A hundred years ago George Bernard Shaw was making fun of it in his plays (cf. Major Barbara), and it hasn't changed since.
It's still the paper inbred Tories read to form/osmote their opinions since they're too stupid to formulate any of their own, and the only reason they don't read Page 3 of The Sun is because the desire got paddled out of them in Public School.
One can in fact convincingly argue that the Times of London's best feature is its illegibility.
In principle, the Court could determine that the selection of electors had been unconstitutional and void.
Perhaps it's a legalistic point that we could argue either way till kingdom come, but my reading of the Constitution on that particular point is that, in the event of a federal election, in particular, given the modifications to election processes over the past two centuries, in the event of a presidential election, it's up to *Congress* to determine whether the selection of electors is Constitutional or not. Not the Supremes.
IANAL, either. Could be wrong. But that's the way I read it, and why I said there was no *Constitutional* support for the Supremes to step into the election.
Umm, yeah, if that were the case, then Gore would have won hands down. There's no doubt that he won the popular vote in 2K.
But, you know, here in the US, we use an electoral system that grants presidential votes depending on how the majority voted in each given state.
Interestingly enough, the electoral system was developed as a compromise to allow slave states a greater say in choosing the president.
No doubt, you've heard of the 3/5 compromise. The one that declared slaves, in particular black men, as 3/5 of a person for the purposes of calculating census populations for electoral votes?
Yeah, I know it's offensive, and I'm likely to get modded as flamebait for even bringing it up. But the problem is that the whole electoral college system is a holdover from that kind of thinking.
That is to say, that at the time of the writing of the Constitution, Southern states were unlikely to ratify the Constitution because they had far fewer actual voters than the Northern states. The 3/5 compromise was a method used to grant more leverage to the implicity white Southern voters in elections, and the electoral college was a further compromise to maximize that leverage.
So, yes, the historical antecedents that created the current system for choosing a president are completely *fucked*. And, consequently, the electoral college system should have been killed off during reconstruction after the Civil War. Which would have left us with the "One person, one vote" system you have so glibly advocate.
Problem is, that would have been, "One *man*, one vote" at the time, since women weren't granted the right to vote until the 20th Century.
Second problem is, the most populous states clearly outweigh the least in terms of potential voters, simply because they have more people. The Constitution is clearly concerned with balancing the desires of the majority with the needs of the minority. Perhaps "clearly" is a bit of a misnomer there. It's not particular evident in the Constitution itself, unless you read between the lines and add in the Bill of Rights.
But, it *is* evident in the Federalist Papers, which were written to explain the intent of the Constitution, and as propaganda to get state Congresses to ratify it.
Taking into account the motives and ideals expressed within the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Federalist Papers, we're left with the clear idea that the founders did not want a *strict* majority rule. They *preferred* it, but they wanted some leeway for the minority to be heard and respected. This minority includes: small states.
So: How to preserve that voice for small states? Rather than addressing the question at the end of the Civil War, as should have been done, most Congressmem decided that sticking with the electoral college provided the safest way of doing so. It didn't require any changes, and no one was coming up with a better solution. Nor was it evident at the time that a better solution was required.
This is why, even though I live in New York City, the vote of someone living in Wyoming state counts literally *ten* times as much as my vote in a presidential election.
Am I pissed about it? Damn straight I am.
You see, I really do believe that smaller states should have a forum in which their voices can be heard equally with the larger states, and that their votes will count as much. But I think the Senate takes care of that imbalance: 2 votes, 2 Senators for each state, no matter the population.
The electoral college *should* be abandoned. Not because of the "one person, one vote" principal, but because the electoral college has its roots in justifying and accomadating *slavery*, and because the other problem it was designed to address, imbalance in the representation of small states against populous states, is already adequately addressed by equal representation for each state in the Senate.
"Could you show me where in the constitution it says that a contested slate of electoral votes would allow the issue to devolve to the senate...?"
Doofus. Of course I can. Wouldn't have said it otherwise.
Article II. Section 1. Clause 3. US Constitution.
The Electors shall meet in their respective States, and vote by Ballot for two Persons, of whom one at least shall not be an Inhabitant of the same State with themselves. And they shall make a List of all the Persons voted for, and of the Number of Votes for each; which List they shall sign and certify, and transmit sealed to the Seat of the Government of the United States, directed to the President of the Senate. The President of the Senate shall, in the Presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the Certificates, and the Votes shall then be counted. The Person having the greatest Number of Votes shall be the President, if such Number be a Majority of the whole Number of Electors appointed; and if there be more than one who have such Majority, and have an equal Number of Votes, then the House of Representatives shall immediately chuse by Ballot one of them for President; and if no Person have a Majority, then from the five highest on the List the said House shall in like Manner chuse the President. But in chusing the President, the Votes shall be taken by States, the Representation from each State having one Vote; A quorum for this Purpose shall consist of a Member or Members from two thirds of the States, and a Majority of all the States shall be necessary to a Choice. In every Case, after the Choice of the President, the Person having the greatest Number of Votes of the Electors shall be the Vice President. But if there should remain two or more who have equal Votes, the Senate shall chuse from them by Ballot the Vice President. (See Note 8)
And you know something? Here's a link to the US Constitution, just so you can check for yourself:
"I hope you aren't saying that it was somehow wrong to take that election to court. That's the reason we have courts -- when everything else breaks down, they are the final arbiters of right and wrong."
Well, there is a Constitutional process documented, yes, right there in the Constitution, that throws the election into the House and Senate in the event of a contested slate of electoral votes from any particular state.
If your going by the Constitution, the recount should have proceeded and, since whichever side lost probably would have taken it to Congress, Congress should have decided.
That, of course, would have ended up a huge political mess, since, as VP, Gore would have had the tie-breaking vote in the Senate, and the Senate was split 50-50 at the time.
There is an argument that letting the Supreme Court decide prevented a greater crisis in Congress, and nationally. But there really was no Constitutional support for it.
So, yes, I am saying it was somehow wrong for that election to end in the Supreme Court. However, I'm not sure that the prescibed Constitutional procedure would have been any better. Taking it to the Supremes *may* have been the least wrong of all possible wrongs.
"...George W. won all of the recounts, including ones done by the independent press..."
Actually, not to get into the argument of whether there was a fix or not, but the independent press tally came up with different winners, depending on how the vote was counted.
Ironically, using the counting method that the Democrats recommended would have resulted in a Bush victory, and using the counting method advocated by the Republicans would have resulted in a Gore victory.
But then the Supreme Court stepped in at the Republicans request, called off the recounts, and gave the victory to Bush. So the proper counting method for the recounts became a moot issue.
"Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz made the decision to scrap the system because Pentagon officials were not certain they could 'assure the legitimacy of votes that would be cast."
That doesn't sound like the Bush administration I know. Whatever happened to: every vote from the armed services should count, even if it was sent after the election? Trying to block those votes was in their view "bureaucratic nitpicking" if I remember correctly.
This reminds me of a book reading I went to last year. It was the staff of The Onion reading various pieces from their collected works, followed by a Q&A.
During the Q&A, one participant asked, "Do you ever hear from the Bush administration about the articles you write making fun of them?" The response was "No, no, of couse not. They don't care us. They don't care about The Onion, they've got far more important things to ignore, like, you know, the popular vote, or the will of the people."
So it just seems... ironic, that anyone from the Bush administration would care about "the legitimacy of the votes that would be cast". It certainly wasn't their modus operandi in Florida.
Yeah, there were a lot of odd things about that test. The first thing I noticed were the higher end sound and video cards. They could obscure the difference between processors, or even create differences if data transfers from chip to daughtercard have a thunking overhead for the Athlon.
Also, I thought the recommendations were a little off. Compared to what I saw in the tests, Intel (Northwood) would still be the better chip for most home users and gamers. I'm not sure why they chose the Athlon.
Hell, you could get 2 of them and do SMP for less than the cost of single Intel EE, and the way the Athlon failed to adequately scale up to 1600x1200 resolution for UT 2003 was quite disappointing. Certainly not a chip I'd want to use for Doom 3 (only two months away!).
Anyway, I think the AMD 64 bit technology is great, but these tests lead me to think it still needs a little work and tweaking.
If you read the article, you'll notice that they used Gentoo for the testing, so, even with your analysis, there's no reason why they couldn't have done the PPC testing mentioned above.
I'm not a Mac user or fanboy, but I would have liked seeing those results as well.
Slashdot Mirror
Would we call that "The Wookie Offense"?
Would "litigious pricks" be better?
Less libellous?
There doesn't seem to be a woman anywhere in their upper management, board of directors, or amongst their lawyers.
I think we can beat the defamation claim by henceforth referring to them as "litigious pricks".
C'mon, you Google-Bombers. Get on it!
Just a waste of a tomato if you didn't know which specific window was Darl's.
MooKore 2004: "I know that everyone and their dog here at Slashdot hates SCO, but is it really necesscary to call them names?"
I'm not sure it's really name calling if someone calls SCO, for instance, "fucking pricks". That just an accurate description.
But hey, what do I know? I was the one who told Darl he'd be a "complete idiot" (way back in September, in response to his first Open Letter) to tell the judge that he didn't know he was releasing his own code under the GPL for three fucking years.
AC: "the only copyrights SCO claims are to sysV unix (and some older unices that don't matter). They also have contractual rights to *derivative works* made from sysV. IBM's AIX is such a derivative work, and IBM cannot release it without SCO approval - for sure they can't turn AIX into GPL code."
This is actually not correct, though you're at least in the right ballpark. SCO claims all copyrights for all UNIX and UNIXWARE. Including, in SCO's opinion System V. This language does come from the APA.
Unfortuantely, for SCO, there are a *lot* of clauses in the Novell-OldSCO Purchasing Agreement that *exclude* most rights in System V. About the only right SCO has in Sys V, as far as I can read into the APA, is the right to collect Sys V licensing fees for Novell, send dunning letters for unpaid bills, and to be at the table for discussions over Sys V license buyouts. And even the latter is questionable.
Whether or not AIX is a "derivative work" is debatable, and largely turns on the semantics by which you define "derivative". What isn't debatable is that those portions of AIX that *include* Sys V code are "derivative", as that meets the minimal, least general, definition of "derivative". SCO has so far failed to identify *any* Sys V code in AIX (or Dynix) that has been contributed to Linux. They have only claimed to identify original AIX & Dynix code that have been contributed to Linux, which isn't covered by the contract according to ATT's old statements.
So, we probably shouldn't say that AIX is a "derivative work" of Sys V, although some *portions* of it may be.
It's like saying Linux is a derivative work of BSD, which we all know it isn't, even though we also all know that some files in Linux are derived from BSD.
And maybe not even Oracle plays in that arena anymore. Peoplesoft and SAP are both bigger than Oracle now.
And you forgot CA, which is still a huge software vendor, despite the lousy quality of most of their products, at least the ones I've dealt with. Presumably they make their money in the mainframe and mini-computer markets, rather than PC's.
Male circumcision is a far cry from female genital mutilation. While male circumsion is largely unnecessary now, excepting the rare case where the "hood is too small for the engine", in ancient cultures, where a bathtub or shower was not part of the regular household plumbing and bathing was not a daily excercise, there's a possibility that the flans could get more easily infected.
In other words, there *may* have been some health benefits to circumcision before daily bathing became common-place.
There isn't any such justification for female circumcision, which is far more painful, and can have brutal consequences.
Thanks for the correction. My bad.
This is just a nitpick, but: Washington DC doesn't have any say in the presidential elections. It's not a state, so it doesn't have any electoral votes.
Doesn't have any Senators either. I think they have one token rep. in the house for lobbying purposes, but the rep. isn't allowed to vote.
In terms of federal representation, DC is even more screwed than NYC.
"A font geek is someone with 15,000 truetype fonts..."
Ok. I guess this is semantics and we're just defining things differently.
For instance, what you describe as a "type nerd" is what I think of as a "font geek". And what you describe as a "font geek" (see above) is what I think of as just another variant of "clueless idiot".
You do know that the Times of London is a crappy paper, don't you?
A hundred years ago George Bernard Shaw was making fun of it in his plays (cf. Major Barbara), and it hasn't changed since.
It's still the paper inbred Tories read to form/osmote their opinions since they're too stupid to formulate any of their own, and the only reason they don't read Page 3 of The Sun is because the desire got paddled out of them in Public School.
One can in fact convincingly argue that the Times of London's best feature is its illegibility.
Thank you. Couldn't have said it better myself.
Well, I suppose I could actually. I mean, Univers over Garamond?
Still, your critique of Ariel is spot on.
Again, thank you.
"Type Nerd"?
Sorry, gotta agree with the peer. "Type Nerd" went out at least 10, maybe 15, years ago.
The proper term nowadays is: "Font Geek".
Especially since the number of people who voted for Gore exceeded the number who voted for Bush. Something the grandparent seems determined to ignore.
But then, my own grandparents were not dissimiliar.
Whoops, just noticed one point I disagree with:
Perhaps it's a legalistic point that we could argue either way till kingdom come, but my reading of the Constitution on that particular point is that, in the event of a federal election, in particular, given the modifications to election processes over the past two centuries, in the event of a presidential election, it's up to *Congress* to determine whether the selection of electors is Constitutional or not. Not the Supremes.
IANAL, either. Could be wrong. But that's the way I read it, and why I said there was no *Constitutional* support for the Supremes to step into the election.
Woot! Dude, very good. Much better than what I posted below. I hope you get both Informative and Insightful mod points for that.
Thanks for reinforcing my point better than I did.
Should have read your post before I replied.
Umm, yeah, if that were the case, then Gore would have won hands down. There's no doubt that he won the popular vote in 2K.
But, you know, here in the US, we use an electoral system that grants presidential votes depending on how the majority voted in each given state.
Interestingly enough, the electoral system was developed as a compromise to allow slave states a greater say in choosing the president.
No doubt, you've heard of the 3/5 compromise. The one that declared slaves, in particular black men, as 3/5 of a person for the purposes of calculating census populations for electoral votes?
Yeah, I know it's offensive, and I'm likely to get modded as flamebait for even bringing it up. But the problem is that the whole electoral college system is a holdover from that kind of thinking.
That is to say, that at the time of the writing of the Constitution, Southern states were unlikely to ratify the Constitution because they had far fewer actual voters than the Northern states. The 3/5 compromise was a method used to grant more leverage to the implicity white Southern voters in elections, and the electoral college was a further compromise to maximize that leverage.
So, yes, the historical antecedents that created the current system for choosing a president are completely *fucked*. And, consequently, the electoral college system should have been killed off during reconstruction after the Civil War. Which would have left us with the "One person, one vote" system you have so glibly advocate.
Problem is, that would have been, "One *man*, one vote" at the time, since women weren't granted the right to vote until the 20th Century.
Second problem is, the most populous states clearly outweigh the least in terms of potential voters, simply because they have more people. The Constitution is clearly concerned with balancing the desires of the majority with the needs of the minority. Perhaps "clearly" is a bit of a misnomer there. It's not particular evident in the Constitution itself, unless you read between the lines and add in the Bill of Rights.
But, it *is* evident in the Federalist Papers, which were written to explain the intent of the Constitution, and as propaganda to get state Congresses to ratify it.
Taking into account the motives and ideals expressed within the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Federalist Papers, we're left with the clear idea that the founders did not want a *strict* majority rule. They *preferred* it, but they wanted some leeway for the minority to be heard and respected. This minority includes: small states.
So: How to preserve that voice for small states? Rather than addressing the question at the end of the Civil War, as should have been done, most Congressmem decided that sticking with the electoral college provided the safest way of doing so. It didn't require any changes, and no one was coming up with a better solution. Nor was it evident at the time that a better solution was required.
This is why, even though I live in New York City, the vote of someone living in Wyoming state counts literally *ten* times as much as my vote in a presidential election.
Am I pissed about it? Damn straight I am.
You see, I really do believe that smaller states should have a forum in which their voices can be heard equally with the larger states, and that their votes will count as much. But I think the Senate takes care of that imbalance: 2 votes, 2 Senators for each state, no matter the population.
The electoral college *should* be abandoned. Not because of the "one person, one vote" principal, but because the electoral college has its roots in justifying and accomadating *slavery*, and because the other problem it was designed to address, imbalance in the representation of small states against populous states, is already adequately addressed by equal representation for each state in the Senate.
Doofus. Of course I can. Wouldn't have said it otherwise.
And you know something? Here's a link to the US Constitution, just so you can check for yourself:
Of course, you're so brilliant, I'm sure you could have Googled it yourself.
Remember, Google is your friend. It prevents you from looking like an idiot by asking about easily researched questions.
"I hope you aren't saying that it was somehow wrong to take that election to court. That's the reason we have courts -- when everything else breaks down, they are the final arbiters of right and wrong."
Well, there is a Constitutional process documented, yes, right there in the Constitution, that throws the election into the House and Senate in the event of a contested slate of electoral votes from any particular state.
If your going by the Constitution, the recount should have proceeded and, since whichever side lost probably would have taken it to Congress, Congress should have decided.
That, of course, would have ended up a huge political mess, since, as VP, Gore would have had the tie-breaking vote in the Senate, and the Senate was split 50-50 at the time.
There is an argument that letting the Supreme Court decide prevented a greater crisis in Congress, and nationally. But there really was no Constitutional support for it.
So, yes, I am saying it was somehow wrong for that election to end in the Supreme Court. However, I'm not sure that the prescibed Constitutional procedure would have been any better. Taking it to the Supremes *may* have been the least wrong of all possible wrongs.
"...George W. won all of the recounts, including ones done by the independent press..."
Actually, not to get into the argument of whether there was a fix or not, but the independent press tally came up with different winners, depending on how the vote was counted.
Ironically, using the counting method that the Democrats recommended would have resulted in a Bush victory, and using the counting method advocated by the Republicans would have resulted in a Gore victory.
But then the Supreme Court stepped in at the Republicans request, called off the recounts, and gave the victory to Bush. So the proper counting method for the recounts became a moot issue.
"Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz made the decision to scrap the system because Pentagon officials were not certain they could 'assure the legitimacy of votes that would be cast."
That doesn't sound like the Bush administration I know. Whatever happened to: every vote from the armed services should count, even if it was sent after the election? Trying to block those votes was in their view "bureaucratic nitpicking" if I remember correctly.
This reminds me of a book reading I went to last year. It was the staff of The Onion reading various pieces from their collected works, followed by a Q&A.
During the Q&A, one participant asked, "Do you ever hear from the Bush administration about the articles you write making fun of them?" The response was "No, no, of couse not. They don't care us. They don't care about The Onion, they've got far more important things to ignore, like, you know, the popular vote, or the will of the people."
So it just seems... ironic, that anyone from the Bush administration would care about "the legitimacy of the votes that would be cast". It certainly wasn't their modus operandi in Florida.
Yeah, there were a lot of odd things about that test. The first thing I noticed were the higher end sound and video cards. They could obscure the difference between processors, or even create differences if data transfers from chip to daughtercard have a thunking overhead for the Athlon.
Also, I thought the recommendations were a little off. Compared to what I saw in the tests, Intel (Northwood) would still be the better chip for most home users and gamers. I'm not sure why they chose the Athlon.
Hell, you could get 2 of them and do SMP for less than the cost of single Intel EE, and the way the Athlon failed to adequately scale up to 1600x1200 resolution for UT 2003 was quite disappointing. Certainly not a chip I'd want to use for Doom 3 (only two months away!).
Anyway, I think the AMD 64 bit technology is great, but these tests lead me to think it still needs a little work and tweaking.
If you read the article, you'll notice that they used Gentoo for the testing, so, even with your analysis, there's no reason why they couldn't have done the PPC testing mentioned above.
I'm not a Mac user or fanboy, but I would have liked seeing those results as well.
Oh, the Irony.
First Google slashdots a site on recursive fractionated geometry, then the Slashdot editors invite the whole community to rubberneck.