Downloading torrents isn't illegal either. At least not here in the Netherlands, and AFAIK it's the same in most European countries. That's because things our copyright laws (or actually author's rights) forbid is publishing and making copies and you aren't doing any of those things when you're downloading. Uploading is the thing that's forbidden here.
As far as I've heard, when you install XP, you need a floppy disk with drivers so windows sees your hard drive. When you run it for the first time, it boots up in 640x800, because it obviously doesn't have a driver yet for the video card yet. And then when you finished installation, you can't use your built-in wifi because windows doesn't have the driver yet. And when you want to work, you don't even have an office suite yet and a countless number of other software packages you want. Oh, you shouldn't forget to install stuff like anti-virus and anti-spyware of course. And you can't install all the software you want in one time and for each piece of software you've to go through all those wizards, clicking "next" 20 times, etc.
Of course, this is really a lot more userfriendly than Ubuntu is. Or is it maybe the case that Joe Sixpack isn't able to install any OS, and that he just uses what came with his computer or his computer savvy nephew installed?
At least here in the EU, governments are finally starting realize that it's bad when all their data is locked up in a proprietary format. So you see it more and more that supporting Open Standards is is a requirement when they are evaluating software.
This means that either Microsoft needs to implement Open Standards, or they aren't even considered anymore. Maybe it's not that black and white as I write here, but at least there is real pressure to implement Open Standards.
You are confusing Shared Source with Open Source. Shared Source means that you can peek at the source, if Microsoft likes you, you are willing to sign a NDA, etc.
Open Source also means that you can look at the source, but much more than that. You are also allowed to run the program for every purpose, modify it the way you want, and distribute the program and modified versions of the program. See the Open Source definition: http://www.opensource.org/docs/definition.php
Term "Open Source" is confusing, and Microsoft only adds to that confusing with their "Shared Source" (that wasn't on purpose of course). That's why I prefer talking about Free Software, which has a very nice definition at http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html and doesn't give the impression that being able to look at the source code would be enough.
The difference between Free Software and Open Source is of political nature and the question of what you want to emphasize (a good development model versus freedom). But if you talk about the licenses, they are very similar. I only know of 2 or 3 licenses which qualify as Open Source but not as Free Software.
No, the FSF can't modify the GPL whatever way it wants. Read the GPL:
9. The Free Software Foundation may publish revised and/or new versions of the General Public License from time to time. Such new versions will be similar in spirit to the present version, but may differ in detail to address new problems or concerns.
Can you point me to the difference between the current codecision procedure and the one in the so-called "Constitution"? AFAIK it stays just the same.
Don't trust the things your government says about this. Although the Parliament gets a little bit more power with the "constitution", the Council and Commission still have way more power than the EP has.
This is actually what the EU commission thinks is an open standard:
The following are the minimal characteristics that a specification and its attendant documents must have in order to be considered an open standard:
The standard is adopted and will be maintained by a not-for-profit organisation, and its ongoing development occurs on the basis of an open decision-making procedure available to all interested parties (consensus or majority decision etc.).
The standard has been published and the standard specification document is available either freely or at a nominal charge. It must be permissible to all to copy, distribute and use it for no fee or at a nominal fee.
The intellectual property - i.e. patents possibly present - of (parts of) the standard is made irrevocably available on a royalty-free basis.
There are no constraints on the re-use of the standard.
It's a very strict definition. For example, PDF doesn't qualify as an Open Standards, because it's controlled by Adobe and doesn't have an open decision-making procedure
I think Microsoft is pretty scared about this, because most EU member states are going to use this definition, together with previous or future decisions to move to Open Standards. That would mean that MS Office either has to support these Open Standards or it will just be replaced by software that does.
NOSOFTWAREPATENTS.COM CRITICIZES IBM FOR "DIVERSIONARY TACTICS", "AGGRESSIVE PATENT LOBBYING" AND "SQUEEZING" IN CONNECTION WITH IBM's REPORTED RELEASE OF 500 PATENTS FOR OPEN-SOURCE USE
Munich (11 January 2005). Media reports appeared last night acording to which IBM now allows open-source software developers to use 500 of its approximately 40,000 patents. Florian Mueller, campaign manager of NoSoftwarePatents.com, commented on IBM's move: "Recently IBM made an unsubstantial non-aggression promise with respect to Linux, and now they show off again. It's just diversionary tactics. Let's put this into perspective: We're talking about roughly 1% of IBM's worldwide patent portfolio. They file that number of patents in about a month's time.
In Europe, IBM is a driving force behind the extension of the scope of patentability with respect to software. If IBM wants to assume the role of a post-Christmas benefactor, they'd better stop their aggressive patent lobbying in the EU and their shameless squeezing of small and medium-sized companies with that IBM "patent tax". Let's take it from there. We can still talk about some kind of patent pittance after that."
Who are those "reputable organisations" and why is something not true when there aren't any "reputable organisations" claiming it? Are they better than online resources? Do you mean reputable organisations like television, which is of course totally unbiased?
And what about those photos at http://www.aztlan.net/iraqi_women_raped.htm ? Oh, of course those are just faked by organisations full of entrenched fanatics...
Is Amnesty International reputable enough for you? http://www.amnesty.org/resources/videostory/ irq-08 1204/eng/
The indymedia article has even links to photos. So instead of accusing people of lying, you could have done some 1 minute research yourself and find that it does happen.
NAT doesn't solve all IPv4 related problems. It makes is possible that your second computer doesn't need another IP address and for that we don't really need IPv6.
But IPv6 solves a bigger problem, namely that routing tables of the core internet routers (those which don't have a default route) are really getting too big with IPv4. With IPv6 the number of routes can be an order of mangitude smaller.
No, people often use "Holland" when they actually mean "the Netherlands". Holland is only the western part of the Netherlands, nowadays split it up in two provinces: South-Holland and North-Holland. The Netherlands has 10 other provinces however.
Eh? Who defines this stuff. BSDI? SCO? Novell? One of the perennial curses of what constitutes UNIX was the bitching betweeen the big guys.
Nowadays everybody can take part in the process of making the next revision of POSIX, see http://www.opengroup.org/austin/ for more details. From my own experience I can say that getting bugfixes in the standard isn't really that hard.
It's actually funny that you say this in a thread which started with an essay from Paul Graham. On the bottom of his article "revenge of the nerds" (linked from "the python paradox"), there is this note:
"Peter Norvig found that 16 of the 23 patterns in Design Patterns were "invisible or simpler" in Lisp."
Slashdot Mirror
Are you sure? According to Microsoft, RMS is a DRM system.
Cryptophone (URL:http://www.cryptophone.de/) has been around for some time.
Downloading torrents isn't illegal either. At least not here in the Netherlands, and AFAIK it's the same in most European countries. That's because things our copyright laws (or actually author's rights) forbid is publishing and making copies and you aren't doing any of those things when you're downloading. Uploading is the thing that's forbidden here.
As far as I've heard, when you install XP, you need a floppy disk with drivers so windows sees your hard drive. When you run it for the first time, it boots up in 640x800, because it obviously doesn't have a driver yet for the video card yet. And then when you finished installation, you can't use your built-in wifi because windows doesn't have the driver yet. And when you want to work, you don't even have an office suite yet and a countless number of other software packages you want. Oh, you shouldn't forget to install stuff like anti-virus and anti-spyware of course. And you can't install all the software you want in one time and for each piece of software you've to go through all those wizards, clicking "next" 20 times, etc.
Of course, this is really a lot more userfriendly than Ubuntu is. Or is it maybe the case that Joe Sixpack isn't able to install any OS, and that he just uses what came with his computer or his computer savvy nephew installed?
At least here in the EU, governments are finally starting realize that it's bad when all their data is locked up in a proprietary format. So you see it more and more that supporting Open Standards is is a requirement when they are evaluating software.
This means that either Microsoft needs to implement Open Standards, or they aren't even considered anymore. Maybe it's not that black and white as I write here, but at least there is real pressure to implement Open Standards.
You are confusing Shared Source with Open Source. Shared Source means that you can peek at the source, if Microsoft likes you, you are willing to sign a NDA, etc.
Open Source also means that you can look at the source, but much more than that. You are also allowed to run the program for every purpose, modify it the way you want, and distribute the program and modified versions of the program. See the Open Source definition: http://www.opensource.org/docs/definition.php
Term "Open Source" is confusing, and Microsoft only adds to that confusing with their "Shared Source" (that wasn't on purpose of course). That's why I prefer talking about Free Software, which has a very nice definition at http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html and doesn't give the impression that being able to look at the source code would be enough.
The difference between Free Software and Open Source is of political nature and the question of what you want to emphasize (a good development model versus freedom). But if you talk about the licenses, they are very similar. I only know of 2 or 3 licenses which qualify as Open Source but not as Free Software.
No, the FSF can't modify the GPL whatever way it wants. Read the GPL:
9. The Free Software Foundation may publish revised and/or new versions of the General Public License from time to time. Such new versions will be similar in spirit to the present version, but may differ in detail to address new problems or concerns.
Can you point me to the difference between the current codecision procedure and the one in the so-called "Constitution"? AFAIK it stays just the same.
Don't trust the things your government says about this. Although the Parliament gets a little bit more power with the "constitution", the Council and Commission still have way more power than the EP has.
This is actually what the EU commission thinks is an open standard:
It's a very strict definition. For example, PDF doesn't qualify as an Open Standards, because it's controlled by Adobe and doesn't have an open decision-making procedure
I think Microsoft is pretty scared about this, because most EU member states are going to use this definition, together with previous or future decisions to move to Open Standards. That would mean that MS Office either has to support these Open Standards or it will just be replaced by software that does.
They still are lobbying for software patents in the EU, which doesn't qualify a "good guy" action to me. See also the following NoSoftwarePatents.com press release (http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/phpBB2/viewtopic .php?t=288):
NOSOFTWAREPATENTS.COM CRITICIZES IBM FOR "DIVERSIONARY TACTICS", "AGGRESSIVE PATENT LOBBYING" AND "SQUEEZING" IN CONNECTION WITH IBM's REPORTED RELEASE OF 500 PATENTS FOR OPEN-SOURCE USE
Munich (11 January 2005). Media reports appeared last night acording to which IBM now allows open-source software developers to use 500 of its approximately 40,000 patents. Florian Mueller, campaign manager of NoSoftwarePatents.com, commented on IBM's move:
"Recently IBM made an unsubstantial non-aggression promise with respect to Linux, and now they show off again. It's just diversionary tactics. Let's put this into perspective: We're talking about roughly 1% of IBM's worldwide patent portfolio. They file that number of patents in about a month's time.
In Europe, IBM is a driving force behind the extension of the scope of patentability with respect to software. If IBM wants to assume the role of a post-Christmas benefactor, they'd better stop their aggressive patent lobbying in the EU and their shameless squeezing of small and medium-sized companies with that IBM "patent tax". Let's take it from there. We can still talk about some kind of patent pittance after that."
Who are those "reputable organisations" and why is something not true when there aren't any "reputable organisations" claiming it? Are they better than online resources? Do you mean reputable organisations like television, which is of course totally unbiased?
/ irq-08 1204/eng/
And what about those photos at http://www.aztlan.net/iraqi_women_raped.htm ? Oh, of course those are just faked by organisations full of entrenched fanatics...
Is Amnesty International reputable enough for you?
http://www.amnesty.org/resources/videostory
Sorry, but rape does happen in US torture centres. If you had just googled around for a minute, you would have found enough stories about it. Two examples I could find:1 /article06.shtml
http://www.islamonline.net/English/News/2004-07/2
http://qc.indymedia.org/news/2004/08/1303.php
The indymedia article has even links to photos. So instead of accusing people of lying, you could have done some 1 minute research yourself and find that it does happen.
NAT doesn't solve all IPv4 related problems. It makes is possible that your second computer doesn't need another IP address and for that we don't really need IPv6.
But IPv6 solves a bigger problem, namely that routing tables of the core internet routers (those which don't have a default route) are really getting too big with IPv4. With IPv6 the number of routes can be an order of mangitude smaller.
No, people often use "Holland" when they actually mean "the Netherlands". Holland is only the western part of the Netherlands, nowadays split it up in two provinces: South-Holland and North-Holland. The Netherlands has 10 other provinces however.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holland for more information about Holland and compare it with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netherlands. The word "Dutch" refers to Netherlands-related stuff.
Eh? Who defines this stuff. BSDI? SCO? Novell? One of the perennial curses of what constitutes UNIX was the bitching betweeen the big guys.
Nowadays everybody can take part in the process of making the next revision of POSIX, see http://www.opengroup.org/austin/ for more details. From my own experience I can say that getting bugfixes in the standard isn't really that hard.
It's actually funny that you say this in a thread which started with an essay from Paul Graham. On the bottom of his article "revenge of the nerds" (linked from "the python paradox"), there is this note:
:-)
"Peter Norvig found that 16 of the 23 patterns in Design Patterns were "invisible or simpler" in Lisp."
I wonder what a lisp book is worth.