the freedom to distribute a modified work in a way that takes away others' freedom.
This gets down to how you define freedom. I've always been leary of
definitions that seem to require freedom to be enforced. As an example,
people might say they deserve to be free from other people's hurtful
remarks, so in the name of freedom they are going to introduce a lot
of restrictions on speech.
Freedom has always been a two-edged sword - it gives you a lot of options,
but be prepared to have to put up with people doing a lot of things you won't like.
The GPL has always been morality first, freedom second.
The terms of GPL are quite stringent, and are designed to encourage/force people to release source code when they might otherwise not. From Stallman's own words, it's clear that this has always been a full frontal attack on the evility (new word) of proprietary code.
The maximum amount of freedom is achieved simply by releasing software into the public domain,
not by licensing through the GPL. That Stallman does not encourage this says much about his
motivation.
Vig is short for vigour. It's the average house take on every dollar gambled.
For blackjack it's about 1.5% if you play correctly, which isn't bad.
Slots are 5% and up (boo!). I think American roulette is about 5%. Craps is as low
as 1% if you play correctly.
No smoking in casinos these days, especially after the MGM fire.
And most people in Vegas casinos are not in a state of despair - rather they
are on holiday and often a bit hammered on the free booze,
particularly at the low-minimum tables where I play.
At a good table the atmosphere is downright festive.
It can actually be a great deal of fun, particularly if you learn how to play
the game beforehand and bet responsibly, which most people do.
Large casinos have an atmosphere you'll find no where else.
The two different versions are a fairly new development in Vegas. I don't know where else
they've adopted the same system.
It's not in Canada yet, and not likely to be since the casinos can't support too many tables.
Card counting is (so far as I can tell) impossible there, since they tend to use six decks and
continuous automatic shufflers (that is, the cards are constantly fed back into the shuffler).
I'm one of the "chumps", by the way.
In my defense, I don't have any delusions about the nature of the game and
where the advantage lies. For me it's pure entertainment, and the vig is the price of admission.
Humans are, after all, a thinking species - we know how to use information, both
for ourselves and against our competitors. By denying information to our
competitors we gain an upper hand, whether it be in war and combat,
social standing, accessing food and water, and so on. How often, for example,
has a social situation felt like a game of poker, with bluffing and deception?
Knowledge is power. By denying information to our competitors we may well improve
our own chances for survival and procreation.
Casinos have likely made far more money from card counting than they have ever lost.
A very few people are good at it and can make money from it. Then there's all the rest who
rush to the one-deck tables (optimum for card counting) with its reduced pay-out for blackjack
(6-5 instead of 3-2, if I remember right), thinking they get some sort of advantage. Casinos ought to
thank the people who invented card counting for greatly increasing the popularity of the game.
Really that's the perfect game - one that is almost impossible to beat the house at, and
yet appears to give an advantage to smart people. In other words, a game that cators to
people's conceit.
Why can't Carmack gamble? Isn't he the video games guy?
In truth, I wouldn't want Geller anywhere near a craps table. Despite his claims to the contrary, he is a talented magician who has some skill at controlling the throw of the dice.
Indeed, one "psychic experiment" had him actually touching and throwing the dice while he predicted the outcome. Of course, they found that he could predict the outcome better than chance would predict. Well, duh! Next they're going to tell us is that he can make
two chrome rings suddenly join together, or make a bird fly out of a hankerchief.
Although utensil abuse is certainly his trademark, Geller's act also includes
mind reading (such as drawing duplication) and psychic viewing. He's even predicted
the outcoming of elections!
Geller, who lives in London, referred calls to his Philadelphia lawyer, Richard Winelander, who conceded that Geller probably didn't foresee the firestorm his lawsuit would inspire.
We're stilling waiting for the headline "Psychic Wins Lottery."
I consider the most important reason for privacy
to be simple human dignity.
We all deserve a chance to live our lives with self-respect,
and that is impossible when we cannot conduct our personal
affairs with discretion. Being forced to disclose
every detail of one's life is degrading to
almost any human being.
I have no knowledge of the Belgium incident, but I do not ridicule UFO sightings. After all, a UFO is just something up in the sky that you can't identify. Happens all the time, and will continue to happen.
But things must happen all the time that we can't explain. That's because (wait for it) we are not omniscient.
The problem comes when people go from "can't fully explain it" to "space aliens". That's when things go loony. That's when people get dumb.
To buy into the "space aliens" theory requires a truly convincing piece of evidence, not just an inability to explain something. Let's have some appreciation for our own limitations.
Not hiring the people from within the nation you are incorporated in does not increase the general public good.
Let me list some public good regarding hiring of immigrants:
It provides a better or less expensive products for the consumer.
It provides a lucrative job for the immigrant.
It increases company profits, which does the shareholders good.
The increase in profits means an increase in taxes paid,
a definite public good.
Seems to do a least some good. What's more, a profitable company grows,
increasing demand for more employees including non-immigrants. In other words,
a job given to an immigrant does not necessary mean a job lost to a non-immigrant.
Major rule of economics: Very few things are a zero-sum game.
That can be said for any company having trouble finding employees.
Taking things to an extreme, just offer $10 million per year, and competent programmers will be popping out of the wood work.
Your saying that Microsoft can't find employees because they don't pay enough because
salaries are being held artificially low because of the flood of new employees
from other countries.
Something not quite right about that argument. Seems to me that if the programming field
was being flooded with immigrants, Microsoft would not have trouble finding employees.
Searching such a database must be an interesting excercise.
Consider, for example, the singular-value decomposition,
a common tool in mathematical computation. This can go by such names as...
Singular-value decomposition
SVD
Spectral decomposition
Principal component analysis
PCA
Eigen analysis
eigenimage analysis
Karhunen-Loeve transform
KL transform
This is further complicated by the fact that inventors are not always
up on the literature and may not know the proper names for things.
This isn't an insurmountable problem, but it's a big one even when
searching among existing U.S. patents.
Point taken. There is some software (GCC, emacs) written by RMS, who could be said to be the
embodiment of the FSF. My guess is that this is a small fraction of the total code under
the FSF.
Seismic processing. Seismic exploration is where you create a big
noise on the surface of the earth (a "shot"), the sound goes down,
bounces off of geological boundaries, goes back up, and is recorded by
arrays of phones. The number of shots can number from the hundreds to the
hundreds of thousands.
It can be done on both land and marine. The marine one generates massive
amounts of data, because the boat sometimes goes for weeks recording data
around the clock, dragging the phone behind them on long streamers.
The data requires massive statistical and numerical processing to be usable.
And the biggest pig is something called "wave-equation prestack migration", which
sometimes requires hundreds of CPU years to compute (extreme case).
But the client wants the wave-equation migration to be
done in a few calendar weeks. Fortunately, each shot can be processed independently - thus
wave-equation migration has been termed "embarrassingly parallelizable".
I agree. Short of a 5 minute lecture on the topic, it wasn't a terrible precis. If I was to describe the GPL to my parents, I would probably concentrate on its affects rather than its particulars.
Although Christians often say (or assume) that God is omnipotent, I don't recall where that is stated in the Bible. Can you quote scripture for that?
And even if he is all-powerful, that does not make him all-controlling (as another poster has pointed out). I don't recall scripture stating that everything is part of his divine plan. Indeed that would seem to oppose the idea of free will.
What's more, the question of him being all-powerful is quite different from him being infallible.
The ease of learning the basics of C doesn't make it less useful/powerful than more recent languages.
Well, its computationally equivalent to a Turing machine, if that's what you mean. But C++ is far superior even if you don't learn how to write classes, and there's little reason not to use it. The string class alone justifies its use.
I guess it depends on what you mean by "learn". I read K&R in a few days and was writing
production code in C with reasonable fluency in two weeks.
I admit, thought, that I had previously learned
(to various degrees of skill) Algol, Fortran, PL/C, PL/1, and Lisp. There was almost
no idea in C that I hadn't met before. Just a variation on a theme.
And pointers weren't no big deal. If you can do Lisp, you can do pointers.
Hell, you can do anything.
Slashdot Mirror
I was duly rewarded with not being able to post for a couple of months. Thankfully the term FUD is quickly falling out of vogue. It's so last century.
Freedom has always been a two-edged sword - it gives you a lot of options, but be prepared to have to put up with people doing a lot of things you won't like.
The GPL has always been morality first, freedom second.
The terms of GPL are quite stringent, and are designed to encourage/force people to release source code when they might otherwise not. From Stallman's own words, it's clear that this has always been a full frontal attack on the evility (new word) of proprietary code.
The maximum amount of freedom is achieved simply by releasing software into the public domain, not by licensing through the GPL. That Stallman does not encourage this says much about his motivation.
Vig is short for vigour. It's the average house take on every dollar gambled. For blackjack it's about 1.5% if you play correctly, which isn't bad. Slots are 5% and up (boo!). I think American roulette is about 5%. Craps is as low as 1% if you play correctly.
No smoking in casinos these days, especially after the MGM fire. And most people in Vegas casinos are not in a state of despair - rather they are on holiday and often a bit hammered on the free booze, particularly at the low-minimum tables where I play. At a good table the atmosphere is downright festive.
It can actually be a great deal of fun, particularly if you learn how to play the game beforehand and bet responsibly, which most people do. Large casinos have an atmosphere you'll find no where else.
The two different versions are a fairly new development in Vegas. I don't know where else they've adopted the same system.
It's not in Canada yet, and not likely to be since the casinos can't support too many tables. Card counting is (so far as I can tell) impossible there, since they tend to use six decks and continuous automatic shufflers (that is, the cards are constantly fed back into the shuffler).
I'm one of the "chumps", by the way. In my defense, I don't have any delusions about the nature of the game and where the advantage lies. For me it's pure entertainment, and the vig is the price of admission.
The desire for privacy may be entirely rational.
Humans are, after all, a thinking species - we know how to use information, both for ourselves and against our competitors. By denying information to our competitors we gain an upper hand, whether it be in war and combat, social standing, accessing food and water, and so on. How often, for example, has a social situation felt like a game of poker, with bluffing and deception?
Knowledge is power. By denying information to our competitors we may well improve our own chances for survival and procreation.
Casinos have likely made far more money from card counting than they have ever lost.
A very few people are good at it and can make money from it. Then there's all the rest who rush to the one-deck tables (optimum for card counting) with its reduced pay-out for blackjack (6-5 instead of 3-2, if I remember right), thinking they get some sort of advantage. Casinos ought to thank the people who invented card counting for greatly increasing the popularity of the game.
Really that's the perfect game - one that is almost impossible to beat the house at, and yet appears to give an advantage to smart people. In other words, a game that cators to people's conceit.
Why can't Carmack gamble? Isn't he the video games guy?
In truth, I wouldn't want Geller anywhere near a craps table. Despite his claims to the contrary, he is a talented magician who has some skill at controlling the throw of the dice.
Indeed, one "psychic experiment" had him actually touching and throwing the dice while he predicted the outcome. Of course, they found that he could predict the outcome better than chance would predict. Well, duh! Next they're going to tell us is that he can make two chrome rings suddenly join together, or make a bird fly out of a hankerchief.
For some reason, the casinos continue to allow psychics to gamble on their premises.
Well, we know how gullible the casinos are - a stroll down the Vegas strip is proof of that.
Although utensil abuse is certainly his trademark, Geller's act also includes mind reading (such as drawing duplication) and psychic viewing. He's even predicted the outcoming of elections!
To articulate what you just said...
I consider the most important reason for privacy to be simple human dignity.
We all deserve a chance to live our lives with self-respect, and that is impossible when we cannot conduct our personal affairs with discretion. Being forced to disclose every detail of one's life is degrading to almost any human being.
I have no knowledge of the Belgium incident, but I do not ridicule UFO sightings. After all, a UFO is just something up in the sky that you can't identify. Happens all the time, and will continue to happen.
But things must happen all the time that we can't explain. That's because (wait for it) we are not omniscient.
The problem comes when people go from "can't fully explain it" to "space aliens". That's when things go loony. That's when people get dumb.
To buy into the "space aliens" theory requires a truly convincing piece of evidence, not just an inability to explain something. Let's have some appreciation for our own limitations.
-
It provides a better or less expensive products for the consumer.
-
It provides a lucrative job for the immigrant.
-
It increases company profits, which does the shareholders good.
-
The increase in profits means an increase in taxes paid,
a definite public good.
Seems to do a least some good. What's more, a profitable company grows, increasing demand for more employees including non-immigrants. In other words, a job given to an immigrant does not necessary mean a job lost to a non-immigrant.Major rule of economics: Very few things are a zero-sum game.
That can be said for any company having trouble finding employees. Taking things to an extreme, just offer $10 million per year, and competent programmers will be popping out of the wood work.
Let me see if I've got this straight:
Your saying that Microsoft can't find employees because they don't pay enough because salaries are being held artificially low because of the flood of new employees from other countries.
Something not quite right about that argument. Seems to me that if the programming field was being flooded with immigrants, Microsoft would not have trouble finding employees.
- Singular-value decomposition
- SVD
- Spectral decomposition
- Principal component analysis
- PCA
- Eigen analysis
- eigenimage analysis
- Karhunen-Loeve transform
- KL transform
This is further complicated by the fact that inventors are not always up on the literature and may not know the proper names for things.This isn't an insurmountable problem, but it's a big one even when searching among existing U.S. patents.
Point taken. There is some software (GCC, emacs) written by RMS, who could be said to be the embodiment of the FSF. My guess is that this is a small fraction of the total code under the FSF.
If Torvalds were dead he would be rolling in his grave now.
Created the sofware? Not quite. Aggregated it and provided a license for it, sure.
Most of the software would surely exist without the FSF, just under a different license.
Seismic processing. Seismic exploration is where you create a big noise on the surface of the earth (a "shot"), the sound goes down, bounces off of geological boundaries, goes back up, and is recorded by arrays of phones. The number of shots can number from the hundreds to the hundreds of thousands.
It can be done on both land and marine. The marine one generates massive amounts of data, because the boat sometimes goes for weeks recording data around the clock, dragging the phone behind them on long streamers.
The data requires massive statistical and numerical processing to be usable. And the biggest pig is something called "wave-equation prestack migration", which sometimes requires hundreds of CPU years to compute (extreme case). But the client wants the wave-equation migration to be done in a few calendar weeks. Fortunately, each shot can be processed independently - thus wave-equation migration has been termed "embarrassingly parallelizable".
I agree. Short of a 5 minute lecture on the topic, it wasn't a terrible precis. If I was to describe the GPL to my parents, I would probably concentrate on its affects rather than its particulars.
And even if he is all-powerful, that does not make him all-controlling (as another poster has pointed out). I don't recall scripture stating that everything is part of his divine plan. Indeed that would seem to oppose the idea of free will.
What's more, the question of him being all-powerful is quite different from him being infallible.
Oh yeah, and Assembler. We had to do that too.
I guess it depends on what you mean by "learn". I read K&R in a few days and was writing production code in C with reasonable fluency in two weeks.
I admit, thought, that I had previously learned (to various degrees of skill) Algol, Fortran, PL/C, PL/1, and Lisp. There was almost no idea in C that I hadn't met before. Just a variation on a theme.
And pointers weren't no big deal. If you can do Lisp, you can do pointers. Hell, you can do anything.