Why are jewel cases so prone to cracking? For many people jewel cases would probably be just fine if not for the fact that they are so prone to cracking. Couldn't they be made of a more flexible plastic?
You may be right about the suit, but what's with your insistence on shaving? Lots of people in lots of countries have beards - it isn't a sign of lack of personal hygiene.
I don't know where people get this nonsense about RMS being unbathed and smelling bad. I've spoken with him face-to-face and he didn't stink or seem unwashed.
Incidentally, one thing you can say for the Prime Minister of France is that he knows how to speak French. He would have said: "Allez-vous en!", or, less politely, "va-t'en".
Even if you take the Wikipedia figure for all of France (not just metropolitan France) and don't exclude children, the petition's 165,000 signatures constitute (100*165000)/63588000 = 0.25948%, which rounds to 0.3%, not 0.3%. Not a huge difference, but if we geeks don't get this stuff right, who will?
According to the CIA World Factbook, the population of France is 61,000,000, of which 18.3% are
14 or under, so the over-14 population is about 50,020,000. 165,000 is 0.33% of this. A petition signed by 0.33% of the population probably "represents" a significantly larger fraction of the population if you consider the difficulties of getting people to sign things and the fact that this is not the kind of issue that is constantly on most people's minds.
I find it ironic that the Stanford course requires the use of IE on Windows, the least secure possible combination, as well as one that will exclude quite a few potential students.
Twenty-five years ago I lived in Plainfield for a year. It was curiously
mixed. One part was upper middle class, mostly Jewish professionals. The other part was poor, mostly Puerto Rican. I lived right on the boundary: in an apartment building occupied mostly by black people. The local newstand carried both El Diario and the Daily Forward.
I've got two problems with Google's censorship here. The first is that people don't just use Google for "news", but for research of various kinds. That means that they need to find whatever is out there. If you want to understand political attitudes, for example, you certainly need to know the positions and arguments of those with whom you may disagree violently. As a left-wing secular Jew I have not the slightest sympathy for Nazism, but I have read Mein Kampf and think that it should be widely available, precisely so that people can understand the evil of Nazism and how the Nazis rose to power. Similarly, anyone trying to understand such topics as the relationship between the West and the Muslim world or American views on foreign policy needs to look at web sites offering the full range of views, even if some of them are considered by most people to be vile.
The second problem is that Google evidently has an overly broad notion of hate speech, as do many/-ers. True hate speech falsely vilifies a group of people and urges violence or discrimination against them. Criticism of a movement or ideology is not hate speech. Islam is an ideology with both religious and political elements, and it is also a movement (or if you like collection of movements), and it is legitimately subject to criticism just like any other religion or political movement. If it is legitimate to condemn Communism, Neo-Conservatism, Nazism, or right-wing Christian fundamentalism, why is not legitimate to condemn Islam?
One can argue about the accuracy of some of the material in the allegedly objectionable posts - I, for example, wonder about the accuracy of the claims that Mohammed slept with nine=year old girls and had 20 wives - but much of what they say is quite true. In its mainstream forms, Islam is an expansionist movement, it is intolerant of other religions and atheism, it is exclusive, it does advocate theocracy, it does consider the use of force to conquer territory for Islam justifiable, it is oppressive of women, etc. It is by no means the only religion with such properties (Christianity in the forms dominant in the 15th century, for example, had very similar faults), but it is not false and defamatory to raise these issues. We need to distinguish between legitimate criticism of Islam and other ideologies and movements, and deliberate or reckless demonization of particular ethnic groups or followers of an ideology and advocacy of violence against them.
The interesting thing about this discussion to me is what it shows about what is taught in schools about ethics. We hear all sorts of reports of problems with cheating and copying in schools and how schools are trying to teach students not to do it. The discussion here shows that a large percentage of posters, who presumably are fairly well educated, do not understand the difference between plagiarism and copyright infringement. That shows that the schools are not doing a very good job. I don't find that surprising since not a single one of the school policy statements that I have seen has been correct. The teachers can't teach what they themselves don't understand.
If you would RTFA you would discover that Wired covers this issue quite explicitly. They point out that the court order sealing the documents applies ONLY to the parties and that the court explicitly refused to order the EFF to return the documents to AT&T or to impose a gag order on Klein. Thus, WIRED IS NOT IN VIOLATION OF ANY COURT ORDER in posting the documents.
It's been a while since I read about the details of his suit, but as I recall Wallace is not actually in the business of selling software and hasn't written anything that he has tried to sell. He just says that he would like to be, and that the GPL makes it impossible for him.
The legal opinions of the FSF do not come from engineers but from experienced lawyers such as Eben Moglen, whom I trust know far more about it than an AC claiming to be a law student. In any case, what you say does not contradict my post as you seem to think. Notice that what I said would violate the GPL is the DISTRIBUTION of a unitary kernel with the drivers incorporated into it. I explicitly said that runtime linking in the form of dynamic loading of the drivers does not violate the GPL.
As for your point about fair use, that is true, but I have yet to see anyone who maintains that the incorporation of an entire driver into a kernel executable is so trivial as to fall under fair use.
No, you can combine GPL and non-GPL software on the same CD to your heart's content. The restriction only applies when the two are merged into something that is considered a derived work. I was under the impression that this distro distributed a single binary with the drivers linked into. If that is not the case, if they're distributing a kernel and, in separate files, the drivers, and loading the drivers dynamically at run time, then as I understand it there is no problem.
This is an issue that has been discussed before. See this Free Software Foundation FAQ and this Kernaltrap discussion, which includes Linus Torvalds' own statements. As I understand it, the rule is that if you combine GPL code with other code, you must release the result under the GPL. If the other code is proprietary, you can't release it under the GPL, with the result that you can't release the program at all. The issue is what is considered "combination". The crucial thing is that the combination must be such as to create a derivative work. Simply putting the two programs on the same CD does not create a derivative work. Creating a single binary, as when the kernel links to a library or driver, does create a derivative work. There is an exception for libraries that are a normal part of the system, but since the drivers in question are not normally distributed with the OS, I don't think that that exception applies.
The upshot is that the letter-writer appears to be correct. If you distribute a single binary in which the proprietary drivers are linked into the kernel, you are in violation of the GPL. You can work around this by including the drivers in the distribution as separate files and loading them dynamically.
The FSF is probably a good place to ask questions about how the GPL applies in cases like this.
Chinese Scientist Admits To Stealing Chip Research
Hunh?
Nowhere in the linked news article does it say that Chen has admitted anything. To the contrary, it says he could not be reached for comment. A correct headline would be:
Chinese Scientist Accused of Stealing Chip Research
It's bad enough that both the summary and the headline contain such a glaring and defamatory error, but how come none of the more than one hundred previous posters noticed this? Sheesh.
I'm well aware of the system of checks and balances. Nothing in my post suggests otherwise. The fact of the matter is, both as a matter of practice and as a matter of what the Constitution says, Congress has considerable power over the structure of the court system, what the courts have jurisdiction over, and what the possible causes of action are. Nothing in your post addresses what I have said. If you've got a point, make a comprehensible argument instead of ranting.
You've misunderstood. Congress is explicitly empowered with establishing and regulating the court system. In some respects the Supreme Court is on its own, but the Constitution gives Congress a lot of power, perhaps too much, to determine what falls within the jurisdiction of the courts and what the possible causes of action are. The State Secret doctrine arguably falls squarely within these powers. Similarly, the Constitution does not explicitly permit the government to to criminalize bank robbery, but everyone agrees that legislation against bank robbery is constitutional since it falls within the police powers that the Constitution assigns to the federal government. My point is then that although the Constitution does not explicitly contain the State Secrets doctrine, it is arguably constitutional as deducible from powers that are explicitly enumerated. In this sense, there are lots of "unenumerated powers".
From a purely legal point of view, it isn't so clear that the government needs specific authority to quash lawsuits on grounds of national security. That may well fall within its unenumerated powers. Remember that the court system is a creature of the government. Just as it is within the discretion of the government to sanction or not sanction suits on particular grounds, quashing of suits on State Secrets grounds has traditionally been accepted as within its power. I'm not saying I like this - indeed I think that the government should not be given such deference - but just claiming that it is unconstitutional is not going to get you very far.
Don't be so sure. What the government is doing is not something that the Bush administration just came up with. It is doctrine with long-standing in Anglo-American law called the State Secrets Doctrine and it has been successfully invoked in the past, including the very recent past. Only a year ago it was successfully invoked to terminate the whistleblower retaliation lawsuit by Sibel Edmonds, the former translator for the FBI who revealed incompetance and security breaches. The way it is supposed to work is that the head of the relevant agency (by law the only person who can invoke the doctrine) certifies to the court that continuation of the case would require the disclosure of information damaging to national security. The courts give great deference to such certification.
Even an advocate of open government such as myself can see reasons for having such a doctrine. Suppose that a deep cover agent of the US, who is providing critical intelligence about a hostile foreign power, cheats somebody in a business transaction. The person cheated sues. It could easily be the case that the information disclosed in the course of the suit would make the agent look suspicious. In a case like this, there would be a legitimate reason for the government to want to put a stop to the lawsuit. (One would of course expect the government to assume the financial burden for its action and compensate the injured party, but that's a different issue.)
The problem is that the doctrine relies on the truthfulness of the certification that national security would be damaged if the suit were to proceed. It assumes that he or she is telling the truth in claiming that the damage would really be to national security rather than embaressment to government officials or disclosure of their criminal activities. It also assumes that there isn't a workaround, e.g. limitations on certain evidence, requirement that evidence be seen only by attorneys with security clearance, in camera review of evidence by the judge, so that the only way to prevent the damage is putting an end to the lawsuit.
Unfortunately, it isn't safe to assume that agency heads will certify truthfully. That is particularly true of this administration. I say that not just on grounds of the unusually high levels of dishonesty and and self-serving hallucination in this administration but because we have strong reasons to believe that they have repeatedly lied about security issues. There are the bald-faced lie that the US does not countenance torture, the lies about the reasons for invading Iraq, and the laughable rationalization for warrantless surveillance. They have repeatedly made the bizarre claim that the disclosure of warrantless surveillance itself damaged national security. How could that POSSIBLY be? It told nobody anything about the US's surveillance capabilities, how it is done, or who is targetted. The only thing that was disclosed was that they are not getting warrants. As far as I can see, the only way in which this could lead to a security problem would be if the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court had a leak, so that terrorist organizations were falsely assumin that they knew when they were under surveillance. The Bush administration hasn't come up with any explanation for how this disclosure could have security implications - they just yammer about it loudly and hope that nobody will notice what a crock this is.
I hope that the EFF and other plaintiffs in these suits will be able to persuade the courts to require an offer of proof from the government. Unfortunately, I am concerned that they will not succeed in this, due to the dangerous and undemocratic, but established tradition of deference the government in such cases.
I mostly use emacs but find Vim useful for a few things. I find its regular expressions easier to use than those of Emacs
if things are complicated. The big thing though is that Vim's Unicode support is much better than that of Emacs.
I don't see any evidence in what you quote that Pullum is being misleading. What he is criticizing is the advice in Strunk and White against using "they" with singular reference, in favor of using "he". That is indeed the advice in the book, is it not? He didn't make it up.
It is not uncommon to find people who arguably know what they are doing citing Strunk and White as a valuable reference. Whether they actually follow its advice is another question. Indeed, Strunk and White don't follow their own advice. In one of his posts Pullum points out that they themselves frequently violate their injunction to eliminate unnecessary words.
Here are some examples of bad advice from Strunk and White:
In formal writing, the future tense requires shall for the first person, will for the second and third.
That is the defining, or restrictive pronoun, which the nondefining, or nonrestrictive.
Write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs.
Neither of the first two accurately describes the usage of people widely considered good writers now or at any stage in the recent history of English, nor has anyone ever offered any reason that observing these would improve the language.
The third is even stupider. Does anyone write without adjectives and adverbs? Of course not. See Pullum's discussion of this bit of nonsense. Among other things, he points out that Strunk and White themselves disobey this injunction.
Pullum probably sounds pretentious because that post is one of many in which he has debunked silly advice in Strunk/White and because he surely does know far more about the subject than either of them. Among other thinks, he is one of the authors of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, which is certainly the best description of English ever written.
Here's his Wikipedia bio.
No! No! A thousand times no! The Elements of Style is awful.
It purveys ignorant advice that no good writer would follow. For an idea of how awful it is, see this discussion by linguist Geoff Pullum.
Slashdot Mirror
This is true in Canada as well: Office of Consumer Affairs.
Why are jewel cases so prone to cracking? For many people jewel cases would probably be just fine if not for the fact that they are so prone to cracking. Couldn't they be made of a more flexible plastic?
You may be right about the suit, but what's with your insistence on shaving? Lots of people in lots of countries have beards - it isn't a sign of lack of personal hygiene.
I don't know where people get this nonsense about RMS being unbathed and smelling bad. I've spoken with him face-to-face and he didn't stink or seem unwashed.
Incidentally, one thing you can say for the Prime Minister of France is that he knows how to speak French. He would have said: "Allez-vous en!", or, less politely, "va-t'en".
Even if you take the Wikipedia figure for all of France (not just metropolitan France) and don't exclude children, the petition's 165,000 signatures constitute (100*165000)/63588000 = 0.25948%, which rounds to 0.3%, not 0.3%. Not a huge difference, but if we geeks don't get this stuff right, who will?
According to the CIA World Factbook, the population of France is 61,000,000, of which 18.3% are 14 or under, so the over-14 population is about 50,020,000. 165,000 is 0.33% of this. A petition signed by 0.33% of the population probably "represents" a significantly larger fraction of the population if you consider the difficulties of getting people to sign things and the fact that this is not the kind of issue that is constantly on most people's minds.
I find it ironic that the Stanford course requires the use of IE on Windows, the least secure possible combination, as well as one that will exclude quite a few potential students.
Twenty-five years ago I lived in Plainfield for a year. It was curiously mixed. One part was upper middle class, mostly Jewish professionals. The other part was poor, mostly Puerto Rican. I lived right on the boundary: in an apartment building occupied mostly by black people. The local newstand carried both El Diario and the Daily Forward.
I've got two problems with Google's censorship here. The first is that people don't just use Google for "news", but for research of various kinds. That means that they need to find whatever is out there. If you want to understand political attitudes, for example, you certainly need to know the positions and arguments of those with whom you may disagree violently. As a left-wing secular Jew I have not the slightest sympathy for Nazism, but I have read Mein Kampf and think that it should be widely available, precisely so that people can understand the evil of Nazism and how the Nazis rose to power. Similarly, anyone trying to understand such topics as the relationship between the West and the Muslim world or American views on foreign policy needs to look at web sites offering the full range of views, even if some of them are considered by most people to be vile.
The second problem is that Google evidently has an overly broad notion of hate speech, as do many /-ers. True hate speech falsely vilifies a group of people and urges violence or discrimination against them. Criticism of a movement or ideology is not hate speech. Islam is an ideology with both religious and political elements, and it is also a movement (or if you like collection of movements), and it is legitimately subject to criticism just like any other religion or political movement. If it is legitimate to condemn Communism, Neo-Conservatism, Nazism, or right-wing Christian fundamentalism, why is not legitimate to condemn Islam?
One can argue about the accuracy of some of the material in the allegedly objectionable posts - I, for example, wonder about the accuracy of the claims that Mohammed slept with nine=year old girls and had 20 wives - but much of what they say is quite true. In its mainstream forms, Islam is an expansionist movement, it is intolerant of other religions and atheism, it is exclusive, it does advocate theocracy, it does consider the use of force to conquer territory for Islam justifiable, it is oppressive of women, etc. It is by no means the only religion with such properties (Christianity in the forms dominant in the 15th century, for example, had very similar faults), but it is not false and defamatory to raise these issues. We need to distinguish between legitimate criticism of Islam and other ideologies and movements, and deliberate or reckless demonization of particular ethnic groups or followers of an ideology and advocacy of violence against them.
The interesting thing about this discussion to me is what it shows about what is taught in schools about ethics. We hear all sorts of reports of problems with cheating and copying in schools and how schools are trying to teach students not to do it. The discussion here shows that a large percentage of posters, who presumably are fairly well educated, do not understand the difference between plagiarism and copyright infringement. That shows that the schools are not doing a very good job. I don't find that surprising since not a single one of the school policy statements that I have seen has been correct. The teachers can't teach what they themselves don't understand.
If you would RTFA you would discover that Wired covers this issue quite explicitly. They point out that the court order sealing the documents applies ONLY to the parties and that the court explicitly refused to order the EFF to return the documents to AT&T or to impose a gag order on Klein. Thus, WIRED IS NOT IN VIOLATION OF ANY COURT ORDER in posting the documents.
It's been a while since I read about the details of his suit, but as I recall Wallace is not actually in the business of selling software and hasn't written anything that he has tried to sell. He just says that he would like to be, and that the GPL makes it impossible for him.
The legal opinions of the FSF do not come from engineers but from experienced lawyers such as Eben Moglen, whom I trust know far more about it than an AC claiming to be a law student. In any case, what you say does not contradict my post as you seem to think. Notice that what I said would violate the GPL is the DISTRIBUTION of a unitary kernel with the drivers incorporated into it. I explicitly said that runtime linking in the form of dynamic loading of the drivers does not violate the GPL.
As for your point about fair use, that is true, but I have yet to see anyone who maintains that the incorporation of an entire driver into a kernel executable is so trivial as to fall under fair use.
No, you can combine GPL and non-GPL software on the same CD to your heart's content. The restriction only applies when the two are merged into something that is considered a derived work. I was under the impression that this distro distributed a single binary with the drivers linked into. If that is not the case, if they're distributing a kernel and, in separate files, the drivers, and loading the drivers dynamically at run time, then as I understand it there is no problem.
This is an issue that has been discussed before. See this Free Software Foundation FAQ and this Kernaltrap discussion, which includes Linus Torvalds' own statements. As I understand it, the rule is that if you combine GPL code with other code, you must release the result under the GPL. If the other code is proprietary, you can't release it under the GPL, with the result that you can't release the program at all. The issue is what is considered "combination". The crucial thing is that the combination must be such as to create a derivative work. Simply putting the two programs on the same CD does not create a derivative work. Creating a single binary, as when the kernel links to a library or driver, does create a derivative work. There is an exception for libraries that are a normal part of the system, but since the drivers in question are not normally distributed with the OS, I don't think that that exception applies.
The upshot is that the letter-writer appears to be correct. If you distribute a single binary in which the proprietary drivers are linked into the kernel, you are in violation of the GPL. You can work around this by including the drivers in the distribution as separate files and loading them dynamically.
The FSF is probably a good place to ask questions about how the GPL applies in cases like this.
Hunh? Nowhere in the linked news article does it say that Chen has admitted anything. To the contrary, it says he could not be reached for comment. A correct headline would be:
It's bad enough that both the summary and the headline contain such a glaring and defamatory error, but how come none of the more than one hundred previous posters noticed this? Sheesh.
I'm well aware of the system of checks and balances. Nothing in my post suggests otherwise. The fact of the matter is, both as a matter of practice and as a matter of what the Constitution says, Congress has considerable power over the structure of the court system, what the courts have jurisdiction over, and what the possible causes of action are. Nothing in your post addresses what I have said. If you've got a point, make a comprehensible argument instead of ranting.
You've misunderstood. Congress is explicitly empowered with establishing and regulating the court system. In some respects the Supreme Court is on its own, but the Constitution gives Congress a lot of power, perhaps too much, to determine what falls within the jurisdiction of the courts and what the possible causes of action are. The State Secret doctrine arguably falls squarely within these powers. Similarly, the Constitution does not explicitly permit the government to to criminalize bank robbery, but everyone agrees that legislation against bank robbery is constitutional since it falls within the police powers that the Constitution assigns to the federal government. My point is then that although the Constitution does not explicitly contain the State Secrets doctrine, it is arguably constitutional as deducible from powers that are explicitly enumerated. In this sense, there are lots of "unenumerated powers".
From a purely legal point of view, it isn't so clear that the government needs specific authority to quash lawsuits on grounds of national security. That may well fall within its unenumerated powers. Remember that the court system is a creature of the government. Just as it is within the discretion of the government to sanction or not sanction suits on particular grounds, quashing of suits on State Secrets grounds has traditionally been accepted as within its power. I'm not saying I like this - indeed I think that the government should not be given such deference - but just claiming that it is unconstitutional is not going to get you very far.
Don't be so sure. What the government is doing is not something that the Bush administration just came up with. It is doctrine with long-standing in Anglo-American law called the State Secrets Doctrine and it has been successfully invoked in the past, including the very recent past. Only a year ago it was successfully invoked to terminate the whistleblower retaliation lawsuit by Sibel Edmonds, the former translator for the FBI who revealed incompetance and security breaches. The way it is supposed to work is that the head of the relevant agency (by law the only person who can invoke the doctrine) certifies to the court that continuation of the case would require the disclosure of information damaging to national security. The courts give great deference to such certification.
Even an advocate of open government such as myself can see reasons for having such a doctrine. Suppose that a deep cover agent of the US, who is providing critical intelligence about a hostile foreign power, cheats somebody in a business transaction. The person cheated sues. It could easily be the case that the information disclosed in the course of the suit would make the agent look suspicious. In a case like this, there would be a legitimate reason for the government to want to put a stop to the lawsuit. (One would of course expect the government to assume the financial burden for its action and compensate the injured party, but that's a different issue.)
The problem is that the doctrine relies on the truthfulness of the certification that national security would be damaged if the suit were to proceed. It assumes that he or she is telling the truth in claiming that the damage would really be to national security rather than embaressment to government officials or disclosure of their criminal activities. It also assumes that there isn't a workaround, e.g. limitations on certain evidence, requirement that evidence be seen only by attorneys with security clearance, in camera review of evidence by the judge, so that the only way to prevent the damage is putting an end to the lawsuit.
Unfortunately, it isn't safe to assume that agency heads will certify truthfully. That is particularly true of this administration. I say that not just on grounds of the unusually high levels of dishonesty and and self-serving hallucination in this administration but because we have strong reasons to believe that they have repeatedly lied about security issues. There are the bald-faced lie that the US does not countenance torture, the lies about the reasons for invading Iraq, and the laughable rationalization for warrantless surveillance. They have repeatedly made the bizarre claim that the disclosure of warrantless surveillance itself damaged national security. How could that POSSIBLY be? It told nobody anything about the US's surveillance capabilities, how it is done, or who is targetted. The only thing that was disclosed was that they are not getting warrants. As far as I can see, the only way in which this could lead to a security problem would be if the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court had a leak, so that terrorist organizations were falsely assumin that they knew when they were under surveillance. The Bush administration hasn't come up with any explanation for how this disclosure could have security implications - they just yammer about it loudly and hope that nobody will notice what a crock this is.
I hope that the EFF and other plaintiffs in these suits will be able to persuade the courts to require an offer of proof from the government. Unfortunately, I am concerned that they will not succeed in this, due to the dangerous and undemocratic, but established tradition of deference the government in such cases.
I mostly use emacs but find Vim useful for a few things. I find its regular expressions easier to use than those of Emacs if things are complicated. The big thing though is that Vim's Unicode support is much better than that of Emacs.
I don't see any evidence in what you quote that Pullum is being misleading. What he is criticizing is the advice in Strunk and White against using "they" with singular reference, in favor of using "he". That is indeed the advice in the book, is it not? He didn't make it up.
It is not uncommon to find people who arguably know what they are doing citing Strunk and White as a valuable reference. Whether they actually follow its advice is another question. Indeed, Strunk and White don't follow their own advice. In one of his posts Pullum points out that they themselves frequently violate their injunction to eliminate unnecessary words.
Here are some examples of bad advice from Strunk and White:
Neither of the first two accurately describes the usage of people widely considered good writers now or at any stage in the recent history of English, nor has anyone ever offered any reason that observing these would improve the language. The third is even stupider. Does anyone write without adjectives and adverbs? Of course not. See Pullum's discussion of this bit of nonsense. Among other things, he points out that Strunk and White themselves disobey this injunction.
Pullum probably sounds pretentious because that post is one of many in which he has debunked silly advice in Strunk/White and because he surely does know far more about the subject than either of them. Among other thinks, he is one of the authors of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, which is certainly the best description of English ever written. Here's his Wikipedia bio.
Another alternative is R, which is much more powerful than anything MS Office has to offer, is Free, and runs on most platforms.
No! No! A thousand times no! The Elements of Style is awful. It purveys ignorant advice that no good writer would follow. For an idea of how awful it is, see this discussion by linguist Geoff Pullum.