That we do not get changes from proprietary derivates is a common belief. It's also dead wrong. The BSDs get a LOT of changes back from the proprietary derivates; the SCSI stack of FreeBSD and the Netgraph subsystem would be two large examples. From my own work I could mention NAT daemon firewall passthrough as a simple feature.
Interesting, I didn't know that (as you correctly deduced.) However, the fact that some proprietary users of your code may choose to feed back changes and improvements to the upstream maintainer is missing the point. There is no compulsion on them to do so. Indeed that's the fundamental difference between the licenses, it seems to me: developers using the BSD license do not mind, in principle, someone cutting their own private fork and redistributing it under, say, the MS EULA. That is also the precise difference with the GPL. Programmers who/don't/ want anyone redistributing their code with fewer rights than they received from the original author use the GPL, as it insists all redistribution take place on the same terms as the original distribution.
Thus there is no fundamental difference between Microsoft and a GPL freetard like me:) taking BSD'd code. Either party/may/ contribute changes back upstream, but the original author waives any right to complain if the recipient does not do so, as the license does not compel them to do so.
It's a bit rich to deny people to keep their own changes proprietary, wouldn't you say?
Except that's what the GPL tries to do. It's removing freedom.
Sorry, I think your logic is broken here. If you (as a BSD developer) wish to grant complete freedom to all users of your code, including the right to cut a closed proprietary branch or fork - which is my fag-packet understanding of the BSD license - then isn't the GPL simply a special case of "proprietary"? It's someone taking a copy of your code over to their side of the fence and doing with it as they wish. You can't later port new features added under the GPL back into your BSD-licensed system under a BSD license, which is exactly the same result as happens when someone cuts a closed, proprietary branch like MS with the IP stack.
That said I have no idea whether this really is a breach of the license or not; I'm sure the developers want to do the right thing and will respect the wishes of the copyright owner.
No, the moral of the story is to ignore Theo and rest of his merry bunch of clowns.
So, you use lsh rather than OpenSSH, then? What, you've never heard of it? Hmmm, I wonder why that might be...
Disclaimer - I'm a paid-up member of the FSF (number 3000-and-something) but also have half a dozen OpenBSD CDs on the shelf, partly because I use OpenSSH and other of their code all the time, and partly because it's Free and Free is Good, and partly because I want to support a security-focussed software distribution.
Absolutely. Enormous fuck-ups happen in the public sector, the private sector, and all points in between (apart from UK government IT projects, which are mandatory disasters by virtue of the Tony Collins Act of 1972.)
Without real number crunching research on comparative success/failures, I'm afraid anecdotal evidence pulled off wikipedia isn't work jack.
Incidentally the interstate system is collapsing en masse (read up on the US civil engineering industry's view of the state of it!); there were a lot of disasters within D-Day; and still, more Mars missions fail than succeed.
Whilst I'm not quite so cynical about the value of such exercises (they will tend to bring SOME unexpected problems to light; it's just that you can't guarantee that they'll find all the bugs in the process) the major problem is with the realism of what they're simulating. I did a lot of research into this a couple of years back (our then head of security said "We don't need to worry -- we have a stock of Tamiflu", and I ended up reading the clinical trial results and the datasheets for the stuff, as well as the major respectable papers on the topic. The was a dedicated issue in, I think, Nature (or it may have be> Oh BTW: the mortality rate
en Science, or the BMJ - I forget), and another which was genuinely frightening (without trying to be) in the New England Journal of Medicine. (Note to the cynics -- these are about the most respected non-specialist journals of record in the relevant fields. If you're one of those "Avian flu? Pffft, Duke Nukem will arrive first" types, I advise you to go and talk to virologists and epidemiologists before talking crap about a subject you know nothing about) - Suffice to say Tamiflu increases the survival rate to about 45% -- from 35-40% when untreated. So more than half the people who get infected will die. )
Where was I?
Oh yes - right - 12 weeks. 12 weeks is a reasonable time frame for a single epidemic wave to cover the nation and then subside again. However the duration of the emergency is unlikely to be less than a year (the 1918 pandemic lasted a couple of years), during which time there will be multiple waves of infection in a localised population. Bear in mind that when the second wave arrives, you have n-(i*m) staff at the start of the wave (n = number of staff, i = infection rate, m=mortality rate.) And as seeing 10-20% of one's colleagues dying unpleasantly from a highly contagious disease is unlikely to increase people's enthusiasm for coming to work in an office, it's likely there'd be a huge economic hit that would take years to work it's way through - even after a free vaccine's being distributed by the U.N.
A few people hit this one pretty well. rsync (and probably rsyncd).
The more complex problem has been thrown at me a few times. What if it's not just one person? How about subversion? Multiple concurrent changes to arbitrary binary files schmoovely merged into one glorious hole.
The freedom we enjoy today is not the result of religion. It is the result of freethinkers and the weakening of religions stranglehold on society. Islam in practice seeks to impose such a stranglehold. I therefore advocate attacking it, relentlessly and without apology. To defend religion is to endorse it. Ridicule is the best weapon against superstition. Is Islam the dominant religion where you live?
Why yes, that's right, only one person needs to review code to be sure that it's secure. That's why Microsoft's extensive and thorough peer review process catches all the security bugs in their code before it's released.
Actually the number of reviews required to be sure that a given program is secure is unbounded. On the contrary, it only takes one attacker spotting an issue everyone else has missed. Now, consider that even code like OpenSSL that has been combed over many times by cleverer people than you or I still occasionally patches security bugs. Hmmmm. Gosh.... that would mean that your machine just might not be entirely secure, even though you're up to date with patches! Gosh, who knew?:) (That was a rhetorical question. Bruce Schneier knew, of course.)
Actually, seeing as you brought it up, there ARE caves on Mars - some of these very large skylights, and the fact that THEMIS can't see the bottom says they're at least as deep as the opening is wide. I find these things absolutely fascinating, especially as we're unlikely to get even a robotic ground-truth from the sites during my lifetime:)
screw that, I've a Dell Dimension 233MHz P2 from manufactured March 1997 (according to the stickers inside) here that I regularly use for web browsing and network tinkering and the like, with music of course, without problems. It's noticeably slower than my brand-new laptop - complex ajax stuff like Google maps (or Slashdot) takes a few seconds longer to render - but that's using the the current 2.0.0.x Firefox on a recent distro (Mandriva 10.1) .
Admittedly the graphics and sound cards are both upgrades but they're both 5 or so years old themselves. Oh yeah and I maxed out the RAM (384 Mb, w00t!!)
Skinner points out in Beyond Freedom and Dignity that biology is the ultimate arbiter. Does the species thrive and prosper? Very well, then, that would be "good". (There's no objective reason why our species is more worthy of success than any others, but we naturally tend to be in favour of our own success as a species.)
well, yes, something that has no effect whatever on the universe can be hard to exist, but I don't think that's really what the theists are banging on about, is it? It's an interventionist god who listens to people's prayers & intervenes to shape events.
It's interesting that when we come to the old science vs religion flamewars, the most militantly bible-thumping Christian types suddenly go all coy and start talking about being able to prove r disprove the existence of *a* god - some theoretical abstract god who exists as a prime cause. No-one (well, no-one apart from people missing their thorazine scrips) argues for the Abrahamic or Christian god in such a context, because the entire concept is a self-evidently a fairy-story derived from oral mythology by a bunch of nomads between 4000 years ago and 1300 years ago.
Interesting, too, that no real mainstream religion has started up since the Enlightenment... gosh, I wonder why that could be. What if Jesus (Abraham, Moses, & dare I say it - Mohammed) were alive today? He'd be debunked by James Randi in five minutes flat, that's what. It's interesting, too, that these three very powerful major world religions all have a core belief in a messiah figure who will return at some unspecified point in the future. Damn, I wish they'd named the date in advance. oh wait, predictions... nah, never gonna happen.
Science simply isn't equipped to answer questions about the supernatural, nor should it be. Oh really? Then what method would you propose we use? Three card brag?
I've never had this problem with Sourceforge and the like. Sometimes you get lame buggy or insecure software, but you can usually get a fairly good idea of the l,b,i rating from the activity stats, a couple of google searches for the name of the project will generally find comments from real end-users.
...and anyway those "10 hottest years" stats only apply to the US -- the thermal inertia of the global climate is actually significantly larger than that of the surface temps in the continental US. I will refrain from making the usual smart-arse euroweenie smug patronising & infuriating comments about the average American's stunning ignorance of geography and the world beyond the 48 states, because I don't want to be mod'd flamebait;p
You're right about the punch of some of the crap whizzing around up there that could run into orbiting vehicles and/or people. Have you ever seen a really nice shooting star - the sort that makes a big bright multi-coloured streak across the sky and ends with a flash of light? (Bolides aka fireballs.) Those are relatively large specks of ice and/or dust that have come off comets, and are now smeared out in a long trail roughly along the parent comet's orbit. (Comets fall out of the Kuiper Belt and/or Oort Cloud, which are respectively a long, and a long long LONG, way away from the sun. And that they've been roughly free-falling toward the inner solar system for a long long time. Thus meteor particles move very fast relative to the earth. Leonids (very fast) are supposed to be up around 45 km/sec.
Now consider that the long bright streak of light is a tube of superheated plasma, caused by the intense heat as the particle vapourises, which strips electrons off the atoms of atmospheric gas. Those tubes are 20 or 30 miles long and of the order of tens to hundreds of cm in diameter. Now, imagine that energy concentrated into a spot the size of a sandgrain on the side of the ISS or Shuttle.
Sulphate aerosols (smoke particles from heating, power, and industrial smokes -- this is nothing to do with cans of deoderant) do indeed have a significant local cooling effect, as they increase the percentage of incoming power from the sun that reflects back out to space. To some extent, such anthropogenic smokes and smogs *do* mitigate the increased forcing that would otherwise be seen from the increased levels of CO2 and methane.
As the multi-national summertime smogs of south-eastern asia, and the heavy air pollution in china caused by all that dirty coal burning with little filtering are presumably likely to decline in the next few decades - according to one version of the script, anyway -- it will be interesting to see what sort of rebound heating effect is seen in the data. The IPCC did say in the TAR five years ago that aerosols were one area where understanding was poor - I believe that's lead to much improved models .
Re:SPAM - the stupid side of things...
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Interesting, I didn't know that (as you correctly deduced.) However, the fact that some proprietary users of your code may choose to feed back changes and improvements to the upstream maintainer is missing the point. There is no compulsion on them to do so. Indeed that's the fundamental difference between the licenses, it seems to me: developers using the BSD license do not mind, in principle, someone cutting their own private fork and redistributing it under, say, the MS EULA. That is also the precise difference with the GPL. Programmers who /don't/ want anyone redistributing their code with fewer rights than they received from the original author use the GPL, as it insists all redistribution take place on the same terms as the original distribution.
Thus there is no fundamental difference between Microsoft and a GPL freetard like me :) taking BSD'd code. Either party /may/ contribute changes back upstream, but the original author waives any right to complain if the recipient does not do so, as the license does not compel them to do so.
Yes - sorry - I meant to say so but got carried away by my own verbosity ;)
So are you fighting your local god-botherers with the same fervour you maintain against muslims?
Sorry, I think your logic is broken here. If you (as a BSD developer) wish to grant complete freedom to all users of your code, including the right to cut a closed proprietary branch or fork - which is my fag-packet understanding of the BSD license - then isn't the GPL simply a special case of "proprietary"? It's someone taking a copy of your code over to their side of the fence and doing with it as they wish. You can't later port new features added under the GPL back into your BSD-licensed system under a BSD license, which is exactly the same result as happens when someone cuts a closed, proprietary branch like MS with the IP stack.
That said I have no idea whether this really is a breach of the license or not; I'm sure the developers want to do the right thing and will respect the wishes of the copyright owner.
Disclaimer - I'm a paid-up member of the FSF (number 3000-and-something) but also have half a dozen OpenBSD CDs on the shelf, partly because I use OpenSSH and other of their code all the time, and partly because it's Free and Free is Good, and partly because I want to support a security-focussed software distribution.
Without real number crunching research on comparative success/failures, I'm afraid anecdotal evidence pulled off wikipedia isn't work jack.
Incidentally the interstate system is collapsing en masse (read up on the US civil engineering industry's view of the state of it!); there were a lot of disasters within D-Day; and still, more Mars missions fail than succeed.
Where was I?
Oh yes - right - 12 weeks. 12 weeks is a reasonable time frame for a single epidemic wave to cover the nation and then subside again. However the duration of the emergency is unlikely to be less than a year (the 1918 pandemic lasted a couple of years), during which time there will be multiple waves of infection in a localised population. Bear in mind that when the second wave arrives, you have n-(i*m) staff at the start of the wave (n = number of staff, i = infection rate, m=mortality rate.) And as seeing 10-20% of one's colleagues dying unpleasantly from a highly contagious disease is unlikely to increase people's enthusiasm for coming to work in an office, it's likely there'd be a huge economic hit that would take years to work it's way through - even after a free vaccine's being distributed by the U.N.
Actually the number of reviews required to be sure that a given program is secure is unbounded. On the contrary, it only takes one attacker spotting an issue everyone else has missed. Now, consider that even code like OpenSSL that has been combed over many times by cleverer people than you or I still occasionally patches security bugs. Hmmmm. Gosh.... that would mean that your machine just might not be entirely secure, even though you're up to date with patches! Gosh, who knew? :) (That was a rhetorical question. Bruce Schneier knew, of course.)
Another piece: http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/070402_mm_ma rs_caves.html
Gosh, this IS exciting!!! So what's coming through the hole from outside the universe???? I can't wait to find out!!
screw that, I've a Dell Dimension 233MHz P2 from manufactured March 1997 (according to the stickers inside) here that I regularly use for web browsing and network tinkering and the like, with music of course, without problems. It's noticeably slower than my brand-new laptop - complex ajax stuff like Google maps (or Slashdot) takes a few seconds longer to render - but that's using the the current 2.0.0.x Firefox on a recent distro (Mandriva 10.1) . Admittedly the graphics and sound cards are both upgrades but they're both 5 or so years old themselves. Oh yeah and I maxed out the RAM (384 Mb, w00t!!)
Skinner points out in Beyond Freedom and Dignity that biology is the ultimate arbiter. Does the species thrive and prosper? Very well, then, that would be "good". (There's no objective reason why our species is more worthy of success than any others, but we naturally tend to be in favour of our own success as a species.)
well, yes, something that has no effect whatever on the universe can be hard to exist, but I don't think that's really what the theists are banging on about, is it? It's an interventionist god who listens to people's prayers & intervenes to shape events.
Interesting, too, that no real mainstream religion has started up since the Enlightenment... gosh, I wonder why that could be. What if Jesus (Abraham, Moses, & dare I say it - Mohammed) were alive today? He'd be debunked by James Randi in five minutes flat, that's what. It's interesting, too, that these three very powerful major world religions all have a core belief in a messiah figure who will return at some unspecified point in the future. Damn, I wish they'd named the date in advance. oh wait, predictions... nah, never gonna happen.
I've never had this problem with Sourceforge and the like. Sometimes you get lame buggy or insecure software, but you can usually get a fairly good idea of the l,b,i rating from the activity stats, a couple of google searches for the name of the project will generally find comments from real end-users.
...and anyway those "10 hottest years" stats only apply to the US -- the thermal inertia of the global climate is actually significantly larger than that of the surface temps in the continental US. I will refrain from making the usual smart-arse euroweenie smug patronising & infuriating comments about the average American's stunning ignorance of geography and the world beyond the 48 states, because I don't want to be mod'd flamebait ;p
Lawks. Even as a simulation result, this sounds very intriguing. Any testable predictions?
Now consider that the long bright streak of light is a tube of superheated plasma, caused by the intense heat as the particle vapourises, which strips electrons off the atoms of atmospheric gas. Those tubes are 20 or 30 miles long and of the order of tens to hundreds of cm in diameter. Now, imagine that energy concentrated into a spot the size of a sandgrain on the side of the ISS or Shuttle.
Not good.
As the multi-national summertime smogs of south-eastern asia, and the heavy air pollution in china caused by all that dirty coal burning with little filtering are presumably likely to decline in the next few decades - according to one version of the script, anyway -- it will be interesting to see what sort of rebound heating effect is seen in the data. The IPCC did say in the TAR five years ago that aerosols were one area where understanding was poor - I believe that's lead to much improved models .
right. Thanks for putting me straight on that.