Although there are quite a few languages in India with small numbers of speakers,
the major languages have considerable numbers of speakers. Bengali is one of the
largest, with 200 million speakers split between India and Bangladesh.
The largest is Hindi, with 180 million first language speakers in India but
an estimated 487 million first and second language speakers worldwide.
Here are the numbers of first language speakers in India for the other major languages:
Telugu70 million
Marathi68 million
Tamil62 million
Gujarati45 million
Kannada35 million
Malayalam35 million
Oriya32 million
Panjabi27 million
Assamese15 million
(Sorry about the formatting./. doesn't seem to be able to handle HTML tables.)
The figures above are from the Ethnologue.
The figures from the 1991 Indian census can be found here.
'And we won't force people to upgrade computers and technology on a 2-3 year cycle either. Customers can upgrade when they need to,' he said.
Not a troll, but Linux is immune from upgrades?
Linux doesn't force computer upgrades
the way Microsoft software does. It isn't as demanding of the hardware, so you can keep using machines longer. And it is designed to run on a wide range of hardware rather than to become obsolete rapidly.
For software this is perhaps less true than for
hardware, but at least there isn't the planned
obsolence of MS software.
The problem is that the jobs in the software industry that are truly comparable to those on the automobile assembly line are burning the CDs, putting them in boxes, and so forth. A programming job that was as well-defined and repetitious as an auto assembly job would be something like "change all the calls to index() in this program to strchr()". Even rather simple programming jobs are less well-defined than this and require more creativity. That's why the production of software isn't comparable to building cars.
The language of the contract between an outfit
like Municode and a government entity is not what controls; its the actual situation. If Municode
is acting on behalf of the government entity, it is its agent. So, if publication of the information is construed as a service provided by the government, which it contracts with an outfit like Municode to perform, Municode is an agent of the government and the exclusion applies. In the case of information that it is the role of the government entity to provide, publication is a government service. This contrasts with information that somebody might want but that from the point of view of the government is incidental.
For example, it is not part of the function of municipal governments to supply lunch recipes. If a business wants to compile a collection of municipal cafeteria recipes, it isn't acting as an agent of any municipal government in publishing that information.
For the first example consider public records. Yes another database provider may manually reconstruct the entire set of public records each government entitiy creates. What happens when the government entity then enters into contract with the database provider to submit an electronic dataset. For example check out MuniCode . I could go down to my local city hall and get an entire copy of the municipal codes and manually type them and post them. However, this places me at a severe disadvantage over MuniCode. In fact this bill could prevent government agencies from selling electronic data submissions to multiple vendors since once the first vendor receives the data he may claim copyright on the collection and sue the government agency.
No. This case falls squarely within the public records exclusion of the bill:
(A) a database generated, gathered, organized, or maintained by a Federal, State, or local governmental entity, or by an employee or agent of such an entity, acting within the scope of such employment or agency;
Your second case, telephone directories, is valid if it is a matter of distributing the same information in essentially the same format. However, as I pointed out in my original post, the
requirement that the infringing distribution be a functional equivalent of the original arguably permits derivative works, insofar as they are not functionally equivalent to the original. Your example of a rearranged, value-added telephone directory would seem to fall into this category.
While I am still concerned to some extent about this bill, as I read it the situation is not nearly as dire as the posting suggests. To begin with, the claim that the bill
...allows treble damages to be levied against anyone who uses information that's in a database that a corporation asserts it owns.
is untrue. It imposes no liability on users of a database. It deals only with people who
...make[s] available in commerce to others a quantitatively substantial part of the information in a database...
Unless I have missed something, you can make use of any data you can get your hands on. What you can't do is distribute to others the whole database or substantial chunks of it. Furthermore,
the owner of the database can't just claim to own it; it has the burden of showing that it generated the database through a substantial investment of money or time.
The bill is fairly restrictive. It exempts government databases, explicitly permits hyperlinking, and contains exceptions for news reporting and educational and research uses.
Furthermore, the restriction only applies if
the unauthorized redistribution "inflicts an injury", where this is defined as follows:
For purposes of subsection (a), the term `inflicts an injury' means serving as a functional equivalent in the same market as the database...
I'm not sure how this is to be interpreted, but it
seems to me that it may permit derivative works insofar as they are not functionally equivalent to the original. In sum, I'm nervous about restrictions on databases too, but this bill seems to be pretty narrow. Its possible it prohibits things I wouldn't want to see prohibited, but it doesn't seem to be nearly as awful as suggested.
I'd like to see a proper analysis of the intent and legal interpretation of this bill.
None of the haikus under the "More Poetry" link have the correct number of syllables.
Properly speaking, that is, in Japanese, haiku
are not specified in terms of syllables. They're
specified in terms of moras (Japanese onsetsu),
the things of which a light syllable has one and
a heavy syllable has two (or occasionally three).
For example, here's a well known classic haiku:
na ra na na e
shi chi doo ga ran
ya e za ku ra
I've broken it down into syllables. As you can
see, there are five in each line. The reason this
is well-formed is that the syllable doo
counts as two moras since it has a long vowel
and the syllable ran counts as two moras
since it has a closing consonant. So the second line contains seven moras even though it only contains five syllables. In sum, a haiku is a poem
whose lines contain 5, 7, and 5 moras. How this should translate into English I don't know. Personally, I think English "haiku" sound funny
and favor sticking to Japanese.
I don't want open source voting machines any more than I want closed-source ones. Okay, we can all see the code and look for trickery, but how do I know that the machine I'm about to vote on is actually using that code?
That's easy. Electronic voting machines should run
NSA's secure version of GNU/Linux. Each voter can recompile the software himself or herself!
"there is no shame in running Mandrake".
I agree. I've used Unix constantly since 1982, GNU/Linux since 1995,
and though I'm no kernel hacker, I remember installing a non-standard device driver in 4.2BSD by manually editing the device switching tables in the kernel and recompiling. The last couple of years I've put Mandrake on my personal machines and
plan to install 9.2 shortly. Why - because it is just about painless and the default set up is pretty close to what I want. (Of course, I get rid of most of the icons on the desktop - they just clutter up space where I want xterms.) We've got Redhat in our lab, and though I don't have any real complaints about it, I find that I have to spend a lot of time tweeking it to get things set up the way I want it. And I don't know why it doesn't come with Galeon (at least in the default install), which I much prefer to Mozilla. I've got plenty to do other than configure machines, and plenty of special-purpose software that I need to download or build from my own sources. I don't want to spend time unnecessarily installing the OS, even if I am perfectly capable of doing it from scratch.
P.S.: One Red Hat feature that I really like is the way the login screen lets you select the language for the session you are about to login to. I don't suppose there's a way to get this in Mandrake that I haven't noticed? Any other distros do this?
Administration of technical aspects of the net by the UN might or might not be a good idea, but the current push at the UN is clearly part of a long-standing effort on the part of oppressive countries to censor what their own people have access to and prevent criticism of themselves elsewhere. It is a continuation of a project initiated 20 years ago called the New World Information and Communication Order. The basic idea was that international action was required to remedy the imbalance in access to and control over communications between the developed and non-developed countries. Some proposals had legitimate goals, such as increasing access to communications in under-developed countries, but it was clear that much of the interest on the part of the states that supported NWICO was in censorship. At the time, this meant censorship of the print media,
TV, and radio. Although the US succeeded in blocking adoption of NWICO by UNESCO, the idea has never died. The current activity at the UN is just the latest attempt at censorship, now aimed at the net as well as the traditional media. Here is a recent report [PDF-958k]
by the World Press Freedom Committee and the New York City Bar. This is a danger that deserves to be taken very seriously.
Strauss isn't a faculty member, he's a bureaucrat. In my experience, university faculty are up-to-date, open to new things, and generally sympathetic to free/open source software. University IT managers, on the other hand, are often authoritarian dinosaurs with more of a corporate mentality than a university worldview.
They aren't academics, they're bureaucrats, and they descend institutionally from the people who not very long ago ran accounting systems on mainframes. To be fair, this is sometimes the result of impossible demands combined with underfunding and understaffing, and there are certainly exceptions.
Anyhow, to the extent that his views reflect any sort of culture, its that of IT managers, not academia.
If Australian law is anything like US law, in order to obtain a search warrant the lawyers for the music industry had to provide affidavits to the court giving their reasons to believe that the web site contained infringing material. Since the site in fact contains only links, either they lied in their affidavits, which would be both perjury and a fraud upon the court, or they didn't even bother to look at the site, which would be grossly negligent. Am I missing something, or are they in very deep legal trouble?
I agree that you're entitled to call your business "Mike's woodworking', but that's because there's a difference between your business and the tools you use. Even if you contribute an essential
item, if the the bulk of the toolkit is made by Sears, they'd be legitimately unhappy at not being mentioned in the name of the toolkit. But you're perfectly free to name your woodworking business without reference to the manufacturer of your tools.
It's true that you can construct a system with a Linux kernel and little or no GNU software. In that case, I believe that RMS would say it isn't
GNU/Linux, it's something else. But most systems in use today are heavily based on GNU software, and when Linux first came into existence, the dependence on GNU software was greater.
This makes sense of the fact that RMS doesn't
ask for BSD-based systems to be called GNU/FreeBSD even though GNU software such as bash also runs on
those systems: FreeBSD developed out of the whole BSD system - it didn't arise through the combination of a BSD-derived kernel with GNU software.
Actually, SCO's claims are, so far, based strictly on contract law. Their legal complaint says that IBM had no right to contribute the code without SCO's permission, since it is, SCO alleges, a "derivative work" of Unix.
SCO's case against IBM is a matter of contract
law, but SCO's demand that Linux users obtain licenses is distinct from its suit against IBM.
That has to be the case since Linux users have no
contractual relationship with SCO. SCO's license
demand is based on copyright, and copyright law
provides no basis for this demand.
if you're following the law to the letter, not what your ethical beliefs are, and indeed SCO does own the material, they have every right to compensation.
This is true if the claim is based on patents,
but not if it is based on copyright, and
SCO's claims against Linux users are based on
copyright. Copyright law provides a cause of action against the distributor (e.g. RedHat) but
not against the end user. For example, suppose that, without a license, I copy The Art of Computer Programming and sell you a copy.
Don Knuth or his publisher would then have a cause of action against me, but none against you. You don't need a license to read or own a copyrighted work, and it makes no difference whether your copy was produced under license or not.
1. If I were a carpenter (which I'm not) and all I owned were Sears Craftsman tools, would I be morally obligated to call my services "Sears Craftsman/Mike's Carpentry" and call my products "Sears/Mike the Carpenter's Homes?"
This isn't an appropriate analogy. RMS doesn't
argue that anything that uses GNU software should
be called GNU-X. His argument is that the OS consists of much more than the kernel and that most of the crucial components other than the kernel came from the GNU project. Therefore the
overall system should be called GNU/Linux.
A more appropriate analogy would be this:
Sears sets out to create an integrated woodworking tool kit. They design and produce the chisels,
rasps, handsaws, hammers, clamps, rotary saw,
router, etc. Before their lathe is ready, Mike
produces a lathe. Woodworkers begin to
use the combination of Sears' tools and Mike's
lathe. Wouldn't Sears be justified in objecting
to the tool kit as a whole being called "Mike's
Woodworking Tools"?
What Linus' wife looks like has nothing to do with with the technical or political issues under discussion here. Why be an asshole and gratuitously publicly insult someone you don't even know?
"Quite a few times I crashed prep by using the vt100 on top of it and typing ^P in Unix EMACS..."
Typing ^P on an 11/750 only takes you to the boot room if you're on the console, no? From any other terminal it is passed on like any other keyboard input. Why were you using EMACS from the console? In those days, most people had a Decwriter for a console, which meant that editing from the console had to be done in ed.
* Power supply for computer located inside printer
* Being able to boot off tapes, BUT if you boot up
with tapes inside, the magnetic field will
erase them
* Chip degredation temperature lower than unit
operating temperature
* Being unable to save word processor documents.
Sounds like a nice, secure system suitable for
Mission Impossible. It even self-destructs like the tape recorder.
As I understand it, Dell makes it impossible to
use its product without signing an agreement
that no reasonable person would sign without reading, and indeed they demand that one read the agreement. Yet it is not possible to read the agreements since they are not provided. This amounts to knowingly and willfully selling a product that they know cannot be used for its intended purpose. IANAL, but isn't that the definition of commercial fraud? Perhaps a lawyer could explain why the appropriate response is not to file a criminal complaint with the attorney general?
Slashdot Mirror
Although there are quite a few languages in India with small numbers of speakers, the major languages have considerable numbers of speakers. Bengali is one of the largest, with 200 million speakers split between India and Bangladesh. The largest is Hindi, with 180 million first language speakers in India but an estimated 487 million first and second language speakers worldwide. Here are the numbers of first language speakers in India for the other major languages:
/. doesn't seem to be able to handle HTML tables.)
The figures above are from the Ethnologue.
The figures from the 1991 Indian census can be found here.
Telugu70 million
Marathi68 million
Tamil62 million
Gujarati45 million
Kannada35 million
Malayalam35 million
Oriya32 million
Panjabi27 million
Assamese15 million
(Sorry about the formatting.
Linux doesn't force computer upgrades the way Microsoft software does. It isn't as demanding of the hardware, so you can keep using machines longer. And it is designed to run on a wide range of hardware rather than to become obsolete rapidly.
For software this is perhaps less true than for hardware, but at least there isn't the planned obsolence of MS software.
The problem is that the jobs in the software industry that are truly comparable to those on the automobile assembly line are burning the CDs, putting them in boxes, and so forth. A programming job that was as well-defined and repetitious as an auto assembly job would be something like "change all the calls to index() in this program to strchr()". Even rather simple programming jobs are less well-defined than this and require more creativity. That's why the production of software isn't comparable to building cars.
The language of the contract between an outfit like Municode and a government entity is not what controls; its the actual situation. If Municode is acting on behalf of the government entity, it is its agent. So, if publication of the information is construed as a service provided by the government, which it contracts with an outfit like Municode to perform, Municode is an agent of the government and the exclusion applies. In the case of information that it is the role of the government entity to provide, publication is a government service. This contrasts with information that somebody might want but that from the point of view of the government is incidental. For example, it is not part of the function of municipal governments to supply lunch recipes. If a business wants to compile a collection of municipal cafeteria recipes, it isn't acting as an agent of any municipal government in publishing that information.
No. This case falls squarely within the public records exclusion of the bill:
Your second case, telephone directories, is valid if it is a matter of distributing the same information in essentially the same format. However, as I pointed out in my original post, the requirement that the infringing distribution be a functional equivalent of the original arguably permits derivative works, insofar as they are not functionally equivalent to the original. Your example of a rearranged, value-added telephone directory would seem to fall into this category.
While I am still concerned to some extent about this bill, as I read it the situation is not nearly as dire as the posting suggests. To begin with, the claim that the bill
is untrue. It imposes no liability on users of a database. It deals only with people who
Unless I have missed something, you can make use of any data you can get your hands on. What you can't do is distribute to others the whole database or substantial chunks of it. Furthermore, the owner of the database can't just claim to own it; it has the burden of showing that it generated the database through a substantial investment of money or time.
The bill is fairly restrictive. It exempts government databases, explicitly permits hyperlinking, and contains exceptions for news reporting and educational and research uses. Furthermore, the restriction only applies if the unauthorized redistribution "inflicts an injury", where this is defined as follows:
I'm not sure how this is to be interpreted, but it seems to me that it may permit derivative works insofar as they are not functionally equivalent to the original. In sum, I'm nervous about restrictions on databases too, but this bill seems to be pretty narrow. Its possible it prohibits things I wouldn't want to see prohibited, but it doesn't seem to be nearly as awful as suggested. I'd like to see a proper analysis of the intent and legal interpretation of this bill.
Properly speaking, that is, in Japanese, haiku are not specified in terms of syllables. They're specified in terms of moras (Japanese onsetsu), the things of which a light syllable has one and a heavy syllable has two (or occasionally three). For example, here's a well known classic haiku:
na ra na na eshi chi doo ga ran
ya e za ku ra
I've broken it down into syllables. As you can see, there are five in each line. The reason this is well-formed is that the syllable doo counts as two moras since it has a long vowel and the syllable ran counts as two moras since it has a closing consonant. So the second line contains seven moras even though it only contains five syllables. In sum, a haiku is a poem whose lines contain 5, 7, and 5 moras. How this should translate into English I don't know. Personally, I think English "haiku" sound funny and favor sticking to Japanese.
That's easy. Electronic voting machines should run NSA's secure version of GNU/Linux. Each voter can recompile the software himself or herself!
When I tried it, http://efpa.com.br was down, but you can also get it for R$12,00 (approx. US$4.00) from http://www.jinkings.com.br.
"there is no shame in running Mandrake". I agree. I've used Unix constantly since 1982, GNU/Linux since 1995, and though I'm no kernel hacker, I remember installing a non-standard device driver in 4.2BSD by manually editing the device switching tables in the kernel and recompiling. The last couple of years I've put Mandrake on my personal machines and plan to install 9.2 shortly. Why - because it is just about painless and the default set up is pretty close to what I want. (Of course, I get rid of most of the icons on the desktop - they just clutter up space where I want xterms.) We've got Redhat in our lab, and though I don't have any real complaints about it, I find that I have to spend a lot of time tweeking it to get things set up the way I want it. And I don't know why it doesn't come with Galeon (at least in the default install), which I much prefer to Mozilla. I've got plenty to do other than configure machines, and plenty of special-purpose software that I need to download or build from my own sources. I don't want to spend time unnecessarily installing the OS, even if I am perfectly capable of doing it from scratch.
P.S.: One Red Hat feature that I really like is the way the login screen lets you select the language for the session you are about to login to. I don't suppose there's a way to get this in Mandrake that I haven't noticed? Any other distros do this?
Administration of technical aspects of the net by the UN might or might not be a good idea, but the current push at the UN is clearly part of a long-standing effort on the part of oppressive countries to censor what their own people have access to and prevent criticism of themselves elsewhere. It is a continuation of a project initiated 20 years ago called the New World Information and Communication Order. The basic idea was that international action was required to remedy the imbalance in access to and control over communications between the developed and non-developed countries. Some proposals had legitimate goals, such as increasing access to communications in under-developed countries, but it was clear that much of the interest on the part of the states that supported NWICO was in censorship. At the time, this meant censorship of the print media, TV, and radio. Although the US succeeded in blocking adoption of NWICO by UNESCO, the idea has never died. The current activity at the UN is just the latest attempt at censorship, now aimed at the net as well as the traditional media. Here is a recent report [PDF-958k] by the World Press Freedom Committee and the New York City Bar. This is a danger that deserves to be taken very seriously.
Strauss isn't a faculty member, he's a bureaucrat. In my experience, university faculty are up-to-date, open to new things, and generally sympathetic to free/open source software. University IT managers, on the other hand, are often authoritarian dinosaurs with more of a corporate mentality than a university worldview. They aren't academics, they're bureaucrats, and they descend institutionally from the people who not very long ago ran accounting systems on mainframes. To be fair, this is sometimes the result of impossible demands combined with underfunding and understaffing, and there are certainly exceptions.
Anyhow, to the extent that his views reflect any sort of culture, its that of IT managers, not academia.
If Australian law is anything like US law, in order to obtain a search warrant the lawyers for the music industry had to provide affidavits to the court giving their reasons to believe that the web site contained infringing material. Since the site in fact contains only links, either they lied in their affidavits, which would be both perjury and a fraud upon the court, or they didn't even bother to look at the site, which would be grossly negligent.
Am I missing something, or are they in very deep legal trouble?
I agree that you're entitled to call your business "Mike's woodworking', but that's because there's a difference between your business and the tools you use. Even if you contribute an essential item, if the the bulk of the toolkit is made by Sears, they'd be legitimately unhappy at not being mentioned in the name of the toolkit. But you're perfectly free to name your woodworking business without reference to the manufacturer of your tools.
It's true that you can construct a system with a Linux kernel and little or no GNU software. In that case, I believe that RMS would say it isn't GNU/Linux, it's something else. But most systems in use today are heavily based on GNU software, and when Linux first came into existence, the dependence on GNU software was greater.
This makes sense of the fact that RMS doesn't ask for BSD-based systems to be called GNU/FreeBSD even though GNU software such as bash also runs on those systems: FreeBSD developed out of the whole BSD system - it didn't arise through the combination of a BSD-derived kernel with GNU software.
SCO's case against IBM is a matter of contract law, but SCO's demand that Linux users obtain licenses is distinct from its suit against IBM. That has to be the case since Linux users have no contractual relationship with SCO. SCO's license demand is based on copyright, and copyright law provides no basis for this demand.
This is true if the claim is based on patents, but not if it is based on copyright, and SCO's claims against Linux users are based on copyright. Copyright law provides a cause of action against the distributor (e.g. RedHat) but not against the end user. For example, suppose that, without a license, I copy The Art of Computer Programming and sell you a copy. Don Knuth or his publisher would then have a cause of action against me, but none against you. You don't need a license to read or own a copyrighted work, and it makes no difference whether your copy was produced under license or not.
I am not a lawyer, but Eben Moglen is. See his discussion of this point.
This isn't an appropriate analogy. RMS doesn't argue that anything that uses GNU software should be called GNU-X. His argument is that the OS consists of much more than the kernel and that most of the crucial components other than the kernel came from the GNU project. Therefore the overall system should be called GNU/Linux. A more appropriate analogy would be this: Sears sets out to create an integrated woodworking tool kit. They design and produce the chisels, rasps, handsaws, hammers, clamps, rotary saw, router, etc. Before their lathe is ready, Mike produces a lathe. Woodworkers begin to use the combination of Sears' tools and Mike's lathe. Wouldn't Sears be justified in objecting to the tool kit as a whole being called "Mike's Woodworking Tools"?
What Linus' wife looks like has nothing to do
with with the technical or political issues
under discussion here. Why be an asshole and
gratuitously publicly insult someone you don't
even know?
"Quite a few times I crashed prep by using the vt100 on top of it and typing ^P in Unix EMACS..."
Typing ^P on an 11/750 only takes you to the boot
room if you're on the console, no? From any other
terminal it is passed on like any other keyboard
input. Why were you using EMACS from the console?
In those days, most people had a Decwriter for a
console, which meant that editing from the console
had to be done in ed.
* Power supply for computer located inside printer * Being able to boot off tapes, BUT if you boot up with tapes inside, the magnetic field will erase them * Chip degredation temperature lower than unit operating temperature * Being unable to save word processor documents. Sounds like a nice, secure system suitable for Mission Impossible. It even self-destructs like the tape recorder.
As I understand it, Dell makes it impossible to use its product without signing an agreement that no reasonable person would sign without reading, and indeed they demand that one read the agreement. Yet it is not possible to read the agreements since they are not provided. This amounts to knowingly and willfully selling a product that they know cannot be used for its intended purpose. IANAL, but isn't that the definition of commercial fraud? Perhaps a lawyer could explain why the appropriate response is not to file a criminal complaint with the attorney general?