I think the point of my comment was that copyright, when correctly used, is good everywhere. The same logic does actually apply. The difference is in the practical application, for example you probably can't buy music ready to play on one of these portable mpeg players (which I don't have, or want - I think compressed audio is fairly grim), but you can buy a CD. So making a copy for your own use only should constitute "fair use". But, apparently it does not. The same argument goes for playing DVDs on a Linux system (which BTW is legal practically everywhere except the US), you have paid for the right to use the thing in one place at a time, for your personal enjoyment, so it would be perfectly fair to be allowed to have software which allowed you to do so. The problem is not with the existence of copyright, which necessarily exists, the problem is the license to use the product. The music industry has not applied logic, they have simply seen one side of the problen, and equated what should be legitimate use to piracy.
That is also true, perhaps I should have made it more obvious. A license is simply a particular type of contract, in return for doing some things you get to do others. If you break its terms several things may happen, according to how it is written, indeed all sorts of penalties and remedies could be included. The GPL simply terminates your rights if you don't comply. With no valid licence to copy, as you say, you would be breaking copyright law to continue doing so.
Strangely enough, I have every mainstream brand of Linux, not to mention two BSDs, at home (admittedly not all up to date, Slackware is very old, then there is Yggdrasil....) but amongst SuSE 9.0, Xandros 2.0, Debian, Fedora Core 1, quite old Corel, and even an old SCOundrel, when it was still called Caldera, but I never even thought about acquiring a copy of L-----s. It always seemed to be going against the spirit of free software in some undefinable way.
When I heard that it ran as root, that may well have been the deciding factor, I can't remember, but it certainly seemed most unattractive overall. All of the others had something tangible going for them at the time, sometimes it was just because they were free, but others I paid for. Most of them did in fact have some advantage at the time, but they get overtaken quickly by others, such is the pace of progress.
I still see no reason to acquire L-----s, you might as well get Debian. The only problem is, well, getting Debian, because you usually can't buy it in the local store, even large bookshops in the UK have SuSE, and who wants to download a full distro? And, Xandros does much of what L-----s claims, with a lot less fuss and bother.
Yes, and that is how copyright law works in most other countries too. An Australian once told me that it was called "implied copyright" and it exists, in favour of the author, simply by creating a work. I looked it up in the UK, the same holds here too. However, the courts seem to prefer that a clear statement has been made, it is then quicker and easier to enforce, in fact if it says "(C) Me April 2004" (substitute correct name and date), and if a copy is filed securely where its date can be established later, it is trivially simple to enforce in a court of law. But even without any of that, any country signatory to the Berne convention and its successors would uphold copyright if the author and date were proved.
The GPL does not take away any rights, it in fact is a licence (contract) which gives you the right, subject to certain non-onerous conditions such as abstaining from restricting other people's rights, to do certain things, including copying and modifying, both of which would be illegal if the GPL was not applied. That is why, if the GPL were to be declared invalid, it would not result in a certain Convicted Monopolist being able to use ex-GPL code as part of his latest buggy OS, it would simply result in the situation where common copyright law prevented any copying until a new license was devised and applied.
IANAL, which is probably why I find it simple and logical.
Precisely, and if you don't explicitly put something into the public domain, or allow it to be licensed under the GPL, Creative Commons, or whatever licence you want to use, it remains copyright. The fact that many people put their stuff under GPL does not mean that everyone must. The original author is free to chose what he or she does. Particularly in the case of logos and things which might be used as trademarks, or have other meaning, it can sometimes be a very bad idea to let them be used indiscriminately. Otherwise, you could get the Convicted Monopolist putting a FSF logo or a penguin on their products! Would we want that to be allowed?
I think you have misunderstood. The GPL is a Licence Agreement, not a copyright. The copyright is the statement, usually at the top of each source file, or shown on the screen when the program starts, or printed in the manual, or in some other conspicuous place, that it is copyrighted by some real person, on some date (year at least) and it may, or may not, assign the copyright to someone such as the FSF, or say what you can and can not do. It may even say that you can make copies as long as you comply with the GPL, but it does not have to, it may instead attempt to take away all your legal rights to do anything at all, or it may say nothing, in which case you can not make copies.
Copyright is neither good nor bad, it is simply a legal way of protecting anything from illegal copying, for a very long, arguably far too long, period of time. Amongst other things, it makes a claim that you made that thing on that date, so that it can be enforced from a time period starting from then, or a different period from the date of you, the author's death. Copyright does not protect the GPL, it is enforceable as a licence agreement (i.e. a Contract) which you accept when you use the software, and has recently been upheld in a German court. (Copyright laws internationally make more or less teh same set of provisions, as they are based on the Berne convention, the US also being a signatory, so it would most probably also he upheld by a US court if someone such as Darl McBride was stupid enough to challenge it, as we may soon see....) With no GPL, the copyright would in fact prevent you from making copies (everything which is created is copyright unless explicitly stated otherwise, although it is best to make the satement), but the GPL, like all contracts, gives you some, in fact lots of, rights, in return from you accepting that you will not limit anyone else's righs as far as that piece of software is concerned.
The only way that copyright would support the GPL in any way is that the GPL is a document. It gives you rights to make verbatim copies, so no problem there, but copyright law would disallow making, for example, perverted versions of the GPL, containing a clause which assigned all rights to Sir Bill Gates, and passing the copies off as real.
BTW I have rerely if ever seen anyone here say that music should not be subject to copyright protection. It is fair that the artists should earn a living. What is usually debated is that most of us think that you should be free to play your DVD anywhere, on any equipment, so pernicious laws such as DECSS are very wrong indeed. Copying the DVD is an offence under copyright law, it does not need encryption to be enforceable, and why should someone with a room full of Linux computers have to buy a Windoze box or a DVD player, just to play the thing, which he has paid for? The music and cinema industries are very wrong on that point, the RIAA are clearly fascist, and the law is an ass.
Likewise if you own a piece of music, it might even be an old, delicate and valuable LP, you ought to be allowed to make a copy so you can enjoy it in the car, or on a portable player. Again the fascists say no, you can't, but you are not making a copy for anyone's use but yourself, and not depriving the artist of income. Hence the frequent debate about music, it is about not being able to make copies for legitimate use, or even for backup.
As to linux art, I have not seen the items in question, but if they were not put in the public domain, any use contrary to copyright law, or as allowed by a licence such as the GPL,is quite wrong.
IMHO most people here will want copyright to be applied fairly, sensibly and reasonably.
Re:Cross Platform Editors
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If pico can go anywhere, it will fit exactly the same requirement as why people at present need to use vi. I certainly never intended to suggest that vi was the only tool that was useful without a GUI. It is the most ported as of now, but if people want to port pico to MessyDOS, MAC, etc, that is fine by me. The point is not that vi is wonderful (it isn't by todays standards) but that it is universal. I suspect that pico will indeed be a far better, but still small, editor, but as it happens I don't have pico on all of my systems, but I do have vi. That may change, although someone else has recommended vim..... Free choice is a wonderful thing.
I think that the point originally was that those who can only use fancy GUI editors will not have any means of disaster recovery if the GUI gets messed up, and so need to have, and be able to use (to a basic level) a plain text editor. The fact that it is usually vi should not be seen as suggesting that it must be vi, but it ought to be something that everyone who might do maintenance on the system is able to use.
Fortunately it was vi that got ported everywhere, not the abomination edlin!
For many years I have found it to be pointless to try to confine people to any one editor for their normal work, they will be happier, and faster, using whatever they like best for programming, but that is entirely different to the emergency tools.
I don't think that I intended to compare vim and vi. I have no experience of vim, but it is installed on my systems, and I know it is fairly popular. Maybe I should try it, time permitting. My only point is that we, on occasions, need a basic editor that can go anywhere, if people use much better tools for programming, that is their choice, and it is a sensible thing to use the tool that you are most comfortable with. I would not use vi as a programmers editor now, nor would I, depending on the resources it might need, probably be able to use vim in an emergency.
....or his next Illegal Monopoly will be the world's supply of palladium.
Seriously though, this issue needs to be settled one way or the other, and I am inclined to believe that something is happening. But, it will change physics for ever if it is true.
As things stand, the palladium migt hold the odd atom of deuterium quite rigidly on its surface, but that is only a weak chemical bond and ought to break if you then try to force another atom into the same space to get the nucleii to fuse, because the potential barrier in the nuclues is many orders of magnitude bigger than any possible chemical bond. But, evidence is evidence.....
If this works, I wonder if it might be possible also to make a small fission device using a very sub-critical mass of, say, U235, and a catalyst? If things that we thought were chemical, i.e. limited to affecting the outer electron shell only, can really affect the nucleus, a whole range of new possibilities could arise. The controlled transmutation of fission byproducts to lead, preferably with the output of heat energy for good measure, would be one very useful outcome, if it could be achieved.
The truth of the original hypothesis, or otherwise, should only take a few years to establish, other developments will need to await a whole new theory being developed.
I think that unstable simply means, in this case, liable to change. Some "unstable" packages have been absolutely rock solid, conversely some "stable" packages have been buggy. With Debian, most "stable" packages are fairly good. The common meaning of "unstable" suggests that it may well perform about as reliably as Windoze ME on a bad day, however here it only reflects the developers intentions, and experience in testing at that point in time, rather than being a real expression of the quality of the software.
Gentoo has a particular niche application which most likely will increase rather than decrease. And I can say that, although so far I have not used Gentoo.
Debian is the basis of other distros, Xandros, which I do use, Lindows, which I have no need of, and the one Corel used to supply, maybe more. It is a good place to start, if you want to construct a distro, the package management is better than the grotesque RPM system, but I do wish they would fix it so those of us with modems and time limits can actually download the larger packages.
Fedora is going nowhere as far as I can see, it may be better with the next release, but the first one was a strange mixture of manual (editing files) and automatic (using moderately nice tools) configuration, which is primitive compared to SuSE, Mandrake or Xandros. SuSE has the backing of their new owners Novell, and Novell has the backing of IBM, so it is clear where many users will go in the end.
But some will insist on using BSD. Diversity is a very good thing.
Re:Cross Platform Editors
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a truly unique approach to manipulating text
Now there is an interesting thought......
Some supergenius with an imagination may devise something, I wonder what it will look like? Would it not need all the basic functions of an editor as we know it now, or is there indeed a better way?
But for now you are right, creeping featurism is not needed. The reason I don't use emacs is that it tries, probably very successfully, to do far more than be an editor, but it is too complex to learn for someone in a hurry. If I needed to use it every day, it would certainly be worth learning, but once a month or so, vi is fine, KEdit and similar are used for serious work when the PCs are running OK and the GUI is available.
The choice of editor for regular work ought to be a personal thing, if people want to use vi, or vim, of JOE, or Emacs, KEdit or for that matter OpenOffice.org, so what? But I predict that they will all need vi in an emergency, better to know the basic minimum now.....
Re:Cross Platform Editors
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Maybe so, but for system maintenance you can't guarantee that a GUI will be available, which is what most of this discussion is about. vi is a good thing to get you out of trouble when you really need it. A lot of things have to be working correctly to be able to use KEdit, nice though it is. With vi, if you can run a shell, or MessyDOS in a M$ box, you can run vi.
SuSE users should note that when you have an Nvidia card and Sax trashes XF86Config (a regular occurrence, I do wish they would fix it, meanwhile don't run Sax!), you will be able to fix XF86Config in a shell quite easily. Same for lots of other emergencies.
The basics of vi can be learned in less than 10 minutes, you only need to know how to insert/append, move the cursor, delete characters or lines, save and exit, to be fully equipped for emergencies. But you are unlikely to use it every day.
What would you do if you could not boot a GUI? Depending on the OS, it might be something like Edlin, or worse, or a complete reinstall jsut to get working again. With vi, no problem, if you have a basic command shell. That is the point, and I am sorry if I seem to be labouring it, but you and I and everyone else do need basic rescue tools on our PC, one of which must be a text editor.
Well said! I don't have any moderator points at the moment, but you should be modded up.
I don't think that anyone is praising vi as a wonderful, modern, efficient editor, what we seem to be agreeing on it that it will be there, can be relied on to work, and will at least follow a common subset of commands, which don't need fancy keyboards. Therefore it is the perfect tool for use in system maintenance, disaster recovery, and lots of places where you will not have a nice Kedit or the Gnome equivalent.
vi is of roughly similar vintage to the pathetic abomination known as edlin. Strange how Unix tools are always way ahead of their M$ counterparts! With vi I have written 2500 line C programs, with no real problems, cursor control by hjkl,admittedly that was years ago, if I was progarmming now I would use something different, but I still use vi regularly for maintenance on Linux and BSD, because it only needs a shell. Try fixing a dodgy XF86Config with a GUI editor, when X will not start......
Re:Windows is everywhere.
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Unfortunately when you "learn" Windoze, you really learn very little, which makes it of no use at all for serious purposes.
Even so, vi is available on Windoze or even MessyDOS, AFAIK Ataris, Amigas, MACs, maybe even CP/M?, and although not usually installed, it is really the only universal editor.
Yes, I agree, and the basics of vi are much quicker to pick up than emacs. It is the only editor that can be found everywhere, on any Unix since Sys III (it was not on V7, being of BSD origin). I must be showing my age here....
vi is also available, but not guaranteed to be there of course, on MessyDOS and Windoze, in fact it is the only really universal editor.
Despite that, I will be having a serious look at JOE, because vi is not ideal, especially in a console window under X, where it is a real nuisance, as you tend to forget that it is not an X application, and try to do things with the mouse, if you are an occasional user, and emacs is simply terrible. (The learning curve is the problem, its capabilities are not in doubt).
It was Boeing who were hypocrites in going for FBW after condemning the Airbus. The FAA are simply understaffed and under-funded, they can't do everything that they should. They are also not truly independent, much of their work is actually done by people paid by the manufacturers, but that is not as bad as it seems, although not ideal.
The fact is that their budget should be immediately doubled, with more to follow if needed. Same for the British CAA, they try very hard to do a good job with far too few people. The competence is there in abundance, it is just overloaded.
All of that is correct, more or less, with the exception that you can't reduce CO2 emissions, the amount of both CO2 and H2O is proportional to the amount of fuel burnt. CO2 is allegedly a problem.
But, as the sonic boom problem will not be solved (it can, and will, be reduced, but not by nearly enough to allow unrestricted flight over land), I think that sub-orbital (no atmosphere to speak of, so no boom) is the better option for long-distance flights. Your observations about the thermal problems are entirely correct, but technology is progressing in that area, as in engines. IIRC the heating becomes insignificant above 65Km, the actual apogee might be 200Km. Re-entry is the only phase where major difficulties would be experienced. I think that if they can make the engines work, they will solve that one also. Heat production is necessary to slow the thing down.
The next 20 years may be an interseting time for developments in flight, if the politicians will keep out of it.
No, the Airbus problem is far from being corrected. it is a fundamental problem because the controls which remain following shutdown of the FBW are less than the normal set, nothing can be done about that short of introducing mechanical backups. Then the FBW is seen to be the irrelevance which it really is.
Smoother ride - no way! The cabin crew of a certain airline which used to fly Tristars and now has A330 junk HATE it because it "wags its tail".
FBW when examined closely has no advantages whatsoever. In normal flying, an autostabiliser, which can inject limited-authority control movements in series with the pilot's input, can be used to modify the handling characteristics to make the aircraft seem more, or less, stable than it really is. That is how most helicopters are made to be flyable. It requires much less in the way or hardware than FBW, and having limited control authority, is much safer and needs very little redundancy. Think of a yaw damper in each axis, to understand the concept. Cheap and simple, and safe, and it might as well be analogue in most cases.I agree with your assessment of the politics, in the UK we do some things very badly due to constant changes in policy. Not so sure about Concord though, many of th eworkers lived in the constituency of a certain Anthony Wedgewood Benn, so while Labour was in power and hee needed votes, it would have been quite safe. He was the only government minister, AFAIK, to hold office for some years without making a single decision, so he was never wrong.... I think that cancelling it would have been a decision, and would have cost him his seat.
The TSR-2 had two problems, one technical which could be solved, concerning the landing gear, the other that overall it worked too well and was too far ahead of its time. A bit like the Fairey Rotodyne (VTOL with short wings and twin turboprops for decent speed), long before tilt-wing and tilt-rotor concepts (rejected because it was supposedly too noisy for ciy-centre use, although in test flying from rooftops no complaints were received!), the Bristol Belvedere (early Chinook-like helicopter, really needed powered flying controls), and lots more. Sadly the long-obsolete piece of junk known as Eurofighter was the one that survived, and is only about 15 years late.
I think the Rafale, and the JAS39 Grippen, varios SAABs, and several others, prove the point about the efficiency of single-nation programes, where the appropriate government has the will. That is one thing the Frogs are extremenly good at, their sense of national pride is well developed. In the UK it is sadly lacking, our so-called leaders take great pleasure in presenting us as incapable of doing anything by ourselves.
I think you are right. The time before Longhorn becomes available, or even the time till it attains credibility (i.e. after at least the first Service Pack) is time that Linux should exploit to the full.
Now is the time to get all the bugs out of the configuration and installation tools, fix the man pages, sort out the XF86Config once and for all, and maybe simply set things up, where possible, by reading settings from previously installed Windoze, amongst other things. Configuration and installation tools are the weakest area of Linux, they don't seem to attract sufficient first-class developers, maybe because they seem to be boring, but that is the area which must get attention, and quickly.
And, my favourite complaint about every distro I have seen, uodates to the software must work on a dialup line with frequent interruptions. Every distro I have tried fails abysmally on this, some of the updates are very large, and if you can't get your security updates it is very serious indeed. By the time Longhorn appears, most of the world will still be on dialup, evidently all the developers and testers are on broadband and have not noticed the problem.
Fix these things and the rate of uptake of Linux will accelerate, don't fix them and it will fail, which will be a great tragedy for mankind.
The reduction in sonic boom will only be a small amount. It will still be a problem, and in some directions it will be hardly reduced at all, regardless of how complex the shape. If there are no pressure waves, it will not actually be capable of flying. And the engines will still be a serious environmental hazard, to the ozone layer. There may be less visible smoke, or unburnt hydrocarbons, particulates, and even oxides of nitrogen, but that is not the full story. And there is nothing magic about Mach 1.7, it actually sounds like defeatism by the country who abandoned the SST last time....
But, there will be gains in engine noise on takeoff and landing, and also in fuel efficiency. Sadly, you can't use hydrogen as the fuel in an SST because, even in liquid form, it is not very dense, and so takes up a large volume, so you need a fat fuselage or thick wings, or both. It is really only suited to low speed flight for that reason.
The real way forward is to get out of the atmosphere, i.e. sub-orbital, and that is where development seems to be concentrated, with dual-mode engines that breathe air on takeoff and landing.
But it is all speculation anyway, due to the malign influence of corrupt politics and the growth of over-complex software, legal and economic issues, and many other factors, the worldwide capability of undertaking large projects like this is currently in decline. Dubya's plans for the moon and mars are highly improbable given current state of the art, Kennedy's plan was achieved "within the decade" as I believe he said, in simpler times. sadly he did not live to see it, but that is another issue, which remains controversial.
You need to attack the real puppetmaster, Sir Bill. One way of doing that is to make better products (not difficult!), and to ensure that they get sufficient media attention that the world knows they are better. That part may be more difficult, but not impossible.
SCO want to be purchased by IBM, or someone, which is the only way they can survive. Their plan has gone wrong, they have made many new enemies, and no-one is going to put any money on the table, knowing that they will crush SCO in the end anyway.
Had they taken on some company with about 100M in the bank, instead of IBM, it might have worked, they would not want to spend 50& of their cash on legal fees, but IBM's petty cash is probably bigger than the whole of SCO, and no-one, not even a company as well-provided with accountants as IBM probably is, will think twice about spending 0.1% of their cash to crush a parasite.
You can win a slightly unequal battle by skill, a grossly unequal battle is a lost cause.
Ideally you would be right, but IMHO the police are now a total failure at anything useful. They are very good at setting speed traps where they will actually cause accidents.....
The government, in the form of the Home Office (or has the department been re-named to hide its failure?) is manifestly incapable of deporting these people anyway.
The whole system urgently needs a re-think.
On the other hand, an ID which can be easily verified might save a lot of form-filling and delay if you wanted a loan, for example, and I would be very much in favour of the card not carrying anything except its owner's ID, but being capable of locating, via the ID number, things like medical records in an emergency. Sort of like a label which tells them who you are, if you are incapacitated.
But, I think that all other uses should require the explicit permission of the individual, and the card should simply be a means of proving your ID. There are lots of places where you have to do that anyway, making it easier would not reduce anyone's liberty but might save time.
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I think the point of my comment was that copyright, when correctly used, is good everywhere. The same logic does actually apply. The difference is in the practical application, for example you probably can't buy music ready to play on one of these portable mpeg players (which I don't have, or want - I think compressed audio is fairly grim), but you can buy a CD. So making a copy for your own use only should constitute "fair use". But, apparently it does not. The same argument goes for playing DVDs on a Linux system (which BTW is legal practically everywhere except the US), you have paid for the right to use the thing in one place at a time, for your personal enjoyment, so it would be perfectly fair to be allowed to have software which allowed you to do so. The problem is not with the existence of copyright, which necessarily exists, the problem is the license to use the product. The music industry has not applied logic, they have simply seen one side of the problen, and equated what should be legitimate use to piracy.
That is also true, perhaps I should have made it more obvious. A license is simply a particular type of contract, in return for doing some things you get to do others. If you break its terms several things may happen, according to how it is written, indeed all sorts of penalties and remedies could be included. The GPL simply terminates your rights if you don't comply. With no valid licence to copy, as you say, you would be breaking copyright law to continue doing so.
When I heard that it ran as root, that may well have been the deciding factor, I can't remember, but it certainly seemed most unattractive overall. All of the others had something tangible going for them at the time, sometimes it was just because they were free, but others I paid for. Most of them did in fact have some advantage at the time, but they get overtaken quickly by others, such is the pace of progress.
I still see no reason to acquire L-----s, you might as well get Debian. The only problem is, well, getting Debian, because you usually can't buy it in the local store, even large bookshops in the UK have SuSE, and who wants to download a full distro? And, Xandros does much of what L-----s claims, with a lot less fuss and bother.
The GPL does not take away any rights, it in fact is a licence (contract) which gives you the right, subject to certain non-onerous conditions such as abstaining from restricting other people's rights, to do certain things, including copying and modifying, both of which would be illegal if the GPL was not applied. That is why, if the GPL were to be declared invalid, it would not result in a certain Convicted Monopolist being able to use ex-GPL code as part of his latest buggy OS, it would simply result in the situation where common copyright law prevented any copying until a new license was devised and applied.
IANAL, which is probably why I find it simple and logical.
Precisely, and if you don't explicitly put something into the public domain, or allow it to be licensed under the GPL, Creative Commons, or whatever licence you want to use, it remains copyright. The fact that many people put their stuff under GPL does not mean that everyone must. The original author is free to chose what he or she does. Particularly in the case of logos and things which might be used as trademarks, or have other meaning, it can sometimes be a very bad idea to let them be used indiscriminately. Otherwise, you could get the Convicted Monopolist putting a FSF logo or a penguin on their products! Would we want that to be allowed?
Copyright is neither good nor bad, it is simply a legal way of protecting anything from illegal copying, for a very long, arguably far too long, period of time. Amongst other things, it makes a claim that you made that thing on that date, so that it can be enforced from a time period starting from then, or a different period from the date of you, the author's death. Copyright does not protect the GPL, it is enforceable as a licence agreement (i.e. a Contract) which you accept when you use the software, and has recently been upheld in a German court. (Copyright laws internationally make more or less teh same set of provisions, as they are based on the Berne convention, the US also being a signatory, so it would most probably also he upheld by a US court if someone such as Darl McBride was stupid enough to challenge it, as we may soon see....) With no GPL, the copyright would in fact prevent you from making copies (everything which is created is copyright unless explicitly stated otherwise, although it is best to make the satement), but the GPL, like all contracts, gives you some, in fact lots of, rights, in return from you accepting that you will not limit anyone else's righs as far as that piece of software is concerned.
The only way that copyright would support the GPL in any way is that the GPL is a document. It gives you rights to make verbatim copies, so no problem there, but copyright law would disallow making, for example, perverted versions of the GPL, containing a clause which assigned all rights to Sir Bill Gates, and passing the copies off as real.
BTW I have rerely if ever seen anyone here say that music should not be subject to copyright protection. It is fair that the artists should earn a living. What is usually debated is that most of us think that you should be free to play your DVD anywhere, on any equipment, so pernicious laws such as DECSS are very wrong indeed. Copying the DVD is an offence under copyright law, it does not need encryption to be enforceable, and why should someone with a room full of Linux computers have to buy a Windoze box or a DVD player, just to play the thing, which he has paid for? The music and cinema industries are very wrong on that point, the RIAA are clearly fascist, and the law is an ass.
Likewise if you own a piece of music, it might even be an old, delicate and valuable LP, you ought to be allowed to make a copy so you can enjoy it in the car, or on a portable player. Again the fascists say no, you can't, but you are not making a copy for anyone's use but yourself, and not depriving the artist of income. Hence the frequent debate about music, it is about not being able to make copies for legitimate use, or even for backup.
As to linux art, I have not seen the items in question, but if they were not put in the public domain, any use contrary to copyright law, or as allowed by a licence such as the GPL,is quite wrong.
IMHO most people here will want copyright to be applied fairly, sensibly and reasonably.
I think that the point originally was that those who can only use fancy GUI editors will not have any means of disaster recovery if the GUI gets messed up, and so need to have, and be able to use (to a basic level) a plain text editor. The fact that it is usually vi should not be seen as suggesting that it must be vi, but it ought to be something that everyone who might do maintenance on the system is able to use.
Fortunately it was vi that got ported everywhere, not the abomination edlin!
For many years I have found it to be pointless to try to confine people to any one editor for their normal work, they will be happier, and faster, using whatever they like best for programming, but that is entirely different to the emergency tools.
I don't think that I intended to compare vim and vi. I have no experience of vim, but it is installed on my systems, and I know it is fairly popular. Maybe I should try it, time permitting. My only point is that we, on occasions, need a basic editor that can go anywhere, if people use much better tools for programming, that is their choice, and it is a sensible thing to use the tool that you are most comfortable with. I would not use vi as a programmers editor now, nor would I, depending on the resources it might need, probably be able to use vim in an emergency.
Seriously though, this issue needs to be settled one way or the other, and I am inclined to believe that something is happening. But, it will change physics for ever if it is true.
As things stand, the palladium migt hold the odd atom of deuterium quite rigidly on its surface, but that is only a weak chemical bond and ought to break if you then try to force another atom into the same space to get the nucleii to fuse, because the potential barrier in the nuclues is many orders of magnitude bigger than any possible chemical bond. But, evidence is evidence.....
If this works, I wonder if it might be possible also to make a small fission device using a very sub-critical mass of, say, U235, and a catalyst? If things that we thought were chemical, i.e. limited to affecting the outer electron shell only, can really affect the nucleus, a whole range of new possibilities could arise. The controlled transmutation of fission byproducts to lead, preferably with the output of heat energy for good measure, would be one very useful outcome, if it could be achieved.
The truth of the original hypothesis, or otherwise, should only take a few years to establish, other developments will need to await a whole new theory being developed.
I think that unstable simply means, in this case, liable to change. Some "unstable" packages have been absolutely rock solid, conversely some "stable" packages have been buggy. With Debian, most "stable" packages are fairly good. The common meaning of "unstable" suggests that it may well perform about as reliably as Windoze ME on a bad day, however here it only reflects the developers intentions, and experience in testing at that point in time, rather than being a real expression of the quality of the software.
Debian is the basis of other distros, Xandros, which I do use, Lindows, which I have no need of, and the one Corel used to supply, maybe more. It is a good place to start, if you want to construct a distro, the package management is better than the grotesque RPM system, but I do wish they would fix it so those of us with modems and time limits can actually download the larger packages.
Fedora is going nowhere as far as I can see, it may be better with the next release, but the first one was a strange mixture of manual (editing files) and automatic (using moderately nice tools) configuration, which is primitive compared to SuSE, Mandrake or Xandros. SuSE has the backing of their new owners Novell, and Novell has the backing of IBM, so it is clear where many users will go in the end.
But some will insist on using BSD. Diversity is a very good thing.
Now there is an interesting thought......
Some supergenius with an imagination may devise something, I wonder what it will look like? Would it not need all the basic functions of an editor as we know it now, or is there indeed a better way?
But for now you are right, creeping featurism is not needed. The reason I don't use emacs is that it tries, probably very successfully, to do far more than be an editor, but it is too complex to learn for someone in a hurry. If I needed to use it every day, it would certainly be worth learning, but once a month or so, vi is fine, KEdit and similar are used for serious work when the PCs are running OK and the GUI is available.
The choice of editor for regular work ought to be a personal thing, if people want to use vi, or vim, of JOE, or Emacs, KEdit or for that matter OpenOffice.org, so what? But I predict that they will all need vi in an emergency, better to know the basic minimum now.....
SuSE users should note that when you have an Nvidia card and Sax trashes XF86Config (a regular occurrence, I do wish they would fix it, meanwhile don't run Sax!), you will be able to fix XF86Config in a shell quite easily. Same for lots of other emergencies.
The basics of vi can be learned in less than 10 minutes, you only need to know how to insert/append, move the cursor, delete characters or lines, save and exit, to be fully equipped for emergencies. But you are unlikely to use it every day.
What would you do if you could not boot a GUI? Depending on the OS, it might be something like Edlin, or worse, or a complete reinstall jsut to get working again. With vi, no problem, if you have a basic command shell. That is the point, and I am sorry if I seem to be labouring it, but you and I and everyone else do need basic rescue tools on our PC, one of which must be a text editor.
I don't think that anyone is praising vi as a wonderful, modern, efficient editor, what we seem to be agreeing on it that it will be there, can be relied on to work, and will at least follow a common subset of commands, which don't need fancy keyboards. Therefore it is the perfect tool for use in system maintenance, disaster recovery, and lots of places where you will not have a nice Kedit or the Gnome equivalent.
vi is of roughly similar vintage to the pathetic abomination known as edlin. Strange how Unix tools are always way ahead of their M$ counterparts! With vi I have written 2500 line C programs, with no real problems, cursor control by hjkl,admittedly that was years ago, if I was progarmming now I would use something different, but I still use vi regularly for maintenance on Linux and BSD, because it only needs a shell. Try fixing a dodgy XF86Config with a GUI editor, when X will not start......
Even so, vi is available on Windoze or even MessyDOS, AFAIK Ataris, Amigas, MACs, maybe even CP/M?, and although not usually installed, it is really the only universal editor.
vi is also available, but not guaranteed to be there of course, on MessyDOS and Windoze, in fact it is the only really universal editor.
Despite that, I will be having a serious look at JOE, because vi is not ideal, especially in a console window under X, where it is a real nuisance, as you tend to forget that it is not an X application, and try to do things with the mouse, if you are an occasional user, and emacs is simply terrible. (The learning curve is the problem, its capabilities are not in doubt).
The fact is that their budget should be immediately doubled, with more to follow if needed. Same for the British CAA, they try very hard to do a good job with far too few people. The competence is there in abundance, it is just overloaded.
But, as the sonic boom problem will not be solved (it can, and will, be reduced, but not by nearly enough to allow unrestricted flight over land), I think that sub-orbital (no atmosphere to speak of, so no boom) is the better option for long-distance flights. Your observations about the thermal problems are entirely correct, but technology is progressing in that area, as in engines. IIRC the heating becomes insignificant above 65Km, the actual apogee might be 200Km. Re-entry is the only phase where major difficulties would be experienced. I think that if they can make the engines work, they will solve that one also. Heat production is necessary to slow the thing down.
The next 20 years may be an interseting time for developments in flight, if the politicians will keep out of it.
Smoother ride - no way! The cabin crew of a certain airline which used to fly Tristars and now has A330 junk HATE it because it "wags its tail".
FBW when examined closely has no advantages whatsoever. In normal flying, an autostabiliser, which can inject limited-authority control movements in series with the pilot's input, can be used to modify the handling characteristics to make the aircraft seem more, or less, stable than it really is. That is how most helicopters are made to be flyable. It requires much less in the way or hardware than FBW, and having limited control authority, is much safer and needs very little redundancy. Think of a yaw damper in each axis, to understand the concept. Cheap and simple, and safe, and it might as well be analogue in most cases.I agree with your assessment of the politics, in the UK we do some things very badly due to constant changes in policy. Not so sure about Concord though, many of th eworkers lived in the constituency of a certain Anthony Wedgewood Benn, so while Labour was in power and hee needed votes, it would have been quite safe. He was the only government minister, AFAIK, to hold office for some years without making a single decision, so he was never wrong.... I think that cancelling it would have been a decision, and would have cost him his seat.
The TSR-2 had two problems, one technical which could be solved, concerning the landing gear, the other that overall it worked too well and was too far ahead of its time. A bit like the Fairey Rotodyne (VTOL with short wings and twin turboprops for decent speed), long before tilt-wing and tilt-rotor concepts (rejected because it was supposedly too noisy for ciy-centre use, although in test flying from rooftops no complaints were received!), the Bristol Belvedere (early Chinook-like helicopter, really needed powered flying controls), and lots more. Sadly the long-obsolete piece of junk known as Eurofighter was the one that survived, and is only about 15 years late.
I think the Rafale, and the JAS39 Grippen, varios SAABs, and several others, prove the point about the efficiency of single-nation programes, where the appropriate government has the will. That is one thing the Frogs are extremenly good at, their sense of national pride is well developed. In the UK it is sadly lacking, our so-called leaders take great pleasure in presenting us as incapable of doing anything by ourselves.
Now is the time to get all the bugs out of the configuration and installation tools, fix the man pages, sort out the XF86Config once and for all, and maybe simply set things up, where possible, by reading settings from previously installed Windoze, amongst other things. Configuration and installation tools are the weakest area of Linux, they don't seem to attract sufficient first-class developers, maybe because they seem to be boring, but that is the area which must get attention, and quickly.
And, my favourite complaint about every distro I have seen, uodates to the software must work on a dialup line with frequent interruptions. Every distro I have tried fails abysmally on this, some of the updates are very large, and if you can't get your security updates it is very serious indeed. By the time Longhorn appears, most of the world will still be on dialup, evidently all the developers and testers are on broadband and have not noticed the problem.
Fix these things and the rate of uptake of Linux will accelerate, don't fix them and it will fail, which will be a great tragedy for mankind.
That must be the one and only thing that M$ have done right!
But, there will be gains in engine noise on takeoff and landing, and also in fuel efficiency. Sadly, you can't use hydrogen as the fuel in an SST because, even in liquid form, it is not very dense, and so takes up a large volume, so you need a fat fuselage or thick wings, or both. It is really only suited to low speed flight for that reason.
The real way forward is to get out of the atmosphere, i.e. sub-orbital, and that is where development seems to be concentrated, with dual-mode engines that breathe air on takeoff and landing.
But it is all speculation anyway, due to the malign influence of corrupt politics and the growth of over-complex software, legal and economic issues, and many other factors, the worldwide capability of undertaking large projects like this is currently in decline. Dubya's plans for the moon and mars are highly improbable given current state of the art, Kennedy's plan was achieved "within the decade" as I believe he said, in simpler times. sadly he did not live to see it, but that is another issue, which remains controversial.
You need to attack the real puppetmaster, Sir Bill. One way of doing that is to make better products (not difficult!), and to ensure that they get sufficient media attention that the world knows they are better. That part may be more difficult, but not impossible.
Goliath was less than twice as tall as David.
SCO want to be purchased by IBM, or someone, which is the only way they can survive. Their plan has gone wrong, they have made many new enemies, and no-one is going to put any money on the table, knowing that they will crush SCO in the end anyway.
Had they taken on some company with about 100M in the bank, instead of IBM, it might have worked, they would not want to spend 50& of their cash on legal fees, but IBM's petty cash is probably bigger than the whole of SCO, and no-one, not even a company as well-provided with accountants as IBM probably is, will think twice about spending 0.1% of their cash to crush a parasite.
You can win a slightly unequal battle by skill, a grossly unequal battle is a lost cause.
The government, in the form of the Home Office (or has the department been re-named to hide its failure?) is manifestly incapable of deporting these people anyway.
The whole system urgently needs a re-think.
On the other hand, an ID which can be easily verified might save a lot of form-filling and delay if you wanted a loan, for example, and I would be very much in favour of the card not carrying anything except its owner's ID, but being capable of locating, via the ID number, things like medical records in an emergency. Sort of like a label which tells them who you are, if you are incapacitated.
But, I think that all other uses should require the explicit permission of the individual, and the card should simply be a means of proving your ID. There are lots of places where you have to do that anyway, making it easier would not reduce anyone's liberty but might save time.