First, I agree with what the sibling said. Don't overestimate your own intelligence. These guys don't get where they are by being stupid about something that an 8th grader would think of.
Second, if you'd bothered to RTFA, you'd realize that they're using a special pure crystal in Russia was grown for exactly this purpose. Another moment of googling would have revealed the following, with emphasis added by me for your convenience, and small edits made because Slashcode doesn't support the <sup> and <sub> tags:
One goal of the Avogadro Project, is to determine the quantity of the Avogadro constant with unprecedented accuracy. This would also give rise to a definition of the kilogramme, which is still embodied by a prototype, referenced to a fundamental constant. Measurements performed on silicon spheres with a natural isotopic composition did not allow relative uncertainties of less than 3 10^-7 to be achieved for the Avogadro constant. Therefore, it was decided to repeat the measurements with isotopically pure silicon. For this purpose, PTB coordinated a cooperation agreement between eight national metrology institutes, international research laboratories and Russian research institutions and industrial firms. The first result of this cooperation is the single-crystal now available. The crystal was a joint-production of the Central Office for Centrifuge Development of the Russian Nuclear Ministry in St. Petersburg (production and enrichment of SiF_4 gas), the Institute for Ultrapure Materials in Nishni-Novgorod (converting SiF_4 gas into SiH_4 gas, chemical purification and separation of a poly-crystal) and the Institute for Crystal Growth in Berlin (growing the Si single-crystal by means of zone purification procedures). The chemical purity required for further use of the material in producing the sphere was achieved after several float zone melting processes. At PTB, the impurity concentrations were determined by infrared spectrometry: carbon 3 10^15 cm^-3, oxygen 4 10^15 cm^-3 and boron 3 10^13 cm^-3. The content of more than 99.99% 28-Si in the crystal, determined at the Institute for Reference Materials and Measurements of the EU in Geel, was maintained through out the entire production process. This is an important prerequisite for successful measurements on a 28-Si sphere. The material required, a 5 kg crystal, will be delivered within schedule in 2006.
That's true, but the very first paragraph of the register does have this interesting gem:
Steve Jobs has re-kindled the browser wars - only this time Firefox is in the firing line, as well as Microsoft. Apple's CEO today opened his company's developer conference in San Francisco, where he outlined an ambitious target to take over Firefox's 15 per cent market share. How? By releasing a Windows version of Apple's less-than-stellar Safari browser.
(Emphasis mine). The GP exaggerated when he said that Safari was aiming for market dominance, but it is clear that Jobs wants Safari to become the dominant "alternative" browser, as it were (there's nothing wrong with this IMHO). But in all these "Safari on Windows" threads there have been countless fanboys claiming that the only reason Jobs released Safari on Windows was to provide an "SDK" for the iPhone, and the article the GP linked clearly refutes that notion.
Personally, I'm not a big fan of Safari or Macs in general (I use Linux) but I do admit that there are times on the Mac that I'm forced to fire up Safari to view a webpage properly -- Firefox on the Mac tends to have very poor rendering of Chinese characters, making viewing Chinese websites difficult (it randomly replaces characters that exist in the font with '?' and often doesn't display characters you type in search fields and similar, for no reason I can figure -- it works fine on Linux). Safari, on the other hand, has no such problems, but using Safari when you're used to FF with Adblock is torture. I can't believe how ad-ridden the web has become! But at least on the internationalization front, Firefox on Mac could definitely benefit from some competition.
Are you serious? The number of people in the world who can afford such a flight number in the hundreds, maybe. If prices were to fall to such a point where the average SUV-driving joe could afford it, then you might have a point. As is, you're completely disregarding scale: even if taking a flight up to space were 100 times more polluting than a conventional airplane flight, heck, even if it were 1000 times more polluting, the actual carbon footprint left by these flights would be miniscule compared to the one left by conventional air travel.
Of course, if this were all to become extremely affordable and everyone were doing it, then the industry would need stiff environmental regulation, like any polluting industry does. But regulation right now would simply stifle a growing industry, one that people are unsure can survive in the first place. There's no reason to kill it just because the pollution per head is high, if you're certain the number of heads is exceedingly low. Think of it this way: would air travel have ever gotten off the ground in the first place if today's emissions standards had been in force back then? They were having enough trouble just making planes fly reliably, the burden of making them do it cleanly would have been pretty insurmountable.
I don't get what you're arguing here. That piracy is wrong? Ok, it's wrong. So?
I mean, what's your point? If you think not pirating music and making a big fuss about it on public forums is going to help matters, by all means, go ahead.
I deliberately didn't take a stance on the right or wrong aspect of it because I don't think it makes one lick of difference. Even if you managed to convince every person you ever spoke to (you won't), you'll hardly make a dent in the "culture of piracy". It's already so pervasive that it's useless.
The war has been lost. Perhaps that means no music and no movies. If so, that's the price consumers are going to pay. But if you think that you can stop it, if you think that it ever will stop, you're honestly deluding yourself. It's not going to stop.
But please, by all means, go on fighting for what you believe in. I respect that.
I think it may be time, seriously, to step away from this argument, because who is right and who is wrong is quickly becoming irrelevant. File sharing -- yes, of copyrighted material -- is on the increase, despite all the attempts of various concerned bodies to curtail the practice. Copyright infringement is illegal -- whether it's wrong or not is an entirely different question, which I won't go into, but suffice to say that both sides have good arguments to support their side.
But I advance that it's all irrelevant, because regardless of whether it's illegal, regardless of whether it's wrong, it has become so commonplace and so completely defies any attempt to control it that there arguably not much that can be done about it, anymore. So TorrentSpy is ordered to spy on its users -- so what? They'll probably comply and say as much on their website, and people will use some other torrent service instead, stopping exactly no one from file swapping. Or maybe the RIAA/MPAA will find some way to kill BitTorrent entirely, which would be a shame. But as Napster showed, this will not stop p2p -- even if it is completely illegal, it will persist. In fact, one could argue that the technology has actually gotten better over the years thanks to the RIAA and MPAA's meddling. Sort of like the hydra -- cut off one head and it grows back two.
At some point, when you're a business, you need to be pragmatic. The law protects you only when relatively few people break it and you can litigate the hell out of those that do, scaring the remaining would-be-ne're-do-wells into compliance. But when 60% (I don't know the actual numbers, but substitute any substantial percentage and the fact remains) of the population is breaking the law, well, you're basically fucked.
All this arguing about whether file sharing is right or wrong -- it's a bit like arguing about whether premarital sex is right or wrong. Many people in the US feel strongly that premarital sex is deeply wrong, not just for them, but for everyone. Ok, it's not illegal -- I'll address legality with another example in a bit -- but the point is: it's not going stop. No matter how you feel about premarital sex, it isn't going to stop, and there's no way -- none -- that you can make it stop. Heck, if premarital sex is alive and well in Saudi Arabia, there's no way that you'd ever have any hope of killing it in the USA.
Or what about prohibition? Drinking is most certainly bad for you -- many people don't realize just how bad it is for you. Alcoholism destroys families, the substance is addictive and harmful, and polite society just shouldn't put up with it, or so the teetotalers said. You know what? They're right. But you'll notice that it didn't make a lick of difference that they were right, nor did it make a lick of difference that the law agreed with them. People didn't stop drinking.
There are lots of examples like this, and I fear that file sharing is just the latest. No matter how you feel about it, understand: it's not going to stop. The RIAA and MPAA are yelling into the wind, and it's time they saw the writing on the wall. As it stands, their business model -- at least with the margins it has historically enjoyed -- is doomed.
What does this mean for the artists? Good question. Like many others, I don't think people are going to stop making music, for the simple reason that people were making music before there was a recording industry and will continue making music if said industry collapsed tomorrow. Movies are a more difficult question -- it costs an arm and a leg to make even a low-budget indie movie, requires the hard work of many people, and the institution of copyright is what makes most of the films we see possible. With music, you can make an argument about people making it in their garages and using the internet to distribute it -- fine. But with film, well, that's a much tougher sell, because so many more people are involved. Perhaps we'll see a resurgenc
The GP's point is that the EULA is available in print form as well as on the computer. Whether this is true or not I cannot verify, as I have never had the misfortune of buying Gateway products.
That's what you would think, but historically, that hasn't been the case. It depends a lot on what said companies want to do with the code. Obviously, if it's code that they intend to distribute as a key component of their main product, then they probably won't GPL it. But in those cases, they wouldn't provide it under the BSD license, either, for the same reason.
No, the interesting situations happen when, as you said, they don't really want the burden of maintaining a fork. In those situations, they are more likely to contribute code under the GPL because they know that their competitors cannot benefit from their improvements without likewise contributing. This is not me hazarding a guess, either: there is unprecedented corporate involvement in free software development these days, and almost exclusively on GPL'd projects. There are more corporate developers working on the Linux kernel now than there are hobbyists, apparently, and that's just one example. FreeBSD, on the other hand, despite having an arguably technically superior kernel, benefits from very little corporate support, and is written mainly by hobbyists (there is nothing wrong with this, it's not a value judgement -- corporate involvement is a double edged sword, and I'm wary of it).
But the concern that we outlined earlier -- that my competitor stands to benefit from my improvements to a BSD project without any sort of guarantee that I'll benefit in turn -- is mitigated by the GPL, which is why companies seem so much more willing to contribute to GPL'd projects. Sure, my competitor can use my improvements, but if he improves on my improvements, he cannot keep them from me. So in a sense, everyone pays, and no one gets to leech.
Don't get me wrong, though: I'm not advocating the GPL over the BSD license. I completely respect your right to use that license, and I very much respect the spirit of the license. However, because altruism cannot be guaranteed, companies are wary of contributing to BSD-licensed projects (even if they are not wary of using code provided under that license). It's important to understand that, going in to the licensing decision, and it's important to carefully examine your own goals for your project. If your goal is to encourage hobbyist and corporate collaboration, the BSD license will probably not have the desired effect, unfortunately.
If your goal is to "raise the bar" as it were on code quality over all, releasing high quality libraries and applications under the BSD license is the way to do it. But you must be a realist and understand that people are probably not going to give back to your project. If you truly don't expect that, you have my unwaivering support. Just don't complain when no one gives back, because experience has shown that they won't.
I think we basically agree. I don't really think its fair, though, to explicitly emphasize how users of your license are under no obligation to thank you, and then turn around and complain when they don't.
Of course I agree that they should thank you, though.
That would be true if we were discussing law, but we're not (or at least, I wasn't.) I was discussing the attitudes of BSD fans versus the attitudes of GPL fans, and I was pointing out an apparent hypocrisy in the attitudes of some members of the former group when a freedom they consider key is actually exercised. Turning this into an argument about legal terminology -- especially when my meaning was completely clear -- is not productive at all.
To respond to your sibling post, copyright (as far as I know, but I am not a lawyer) covers the right to copy (ie, distribute), hence its name. A copyright license outlines under what circumstances a licensee may distribute a work, either in its entirety, or in part. Fair use notwithstanding, this includes the right to include a work in another, derivative work.
So let me ask you again: what meaningful rights (and by meaningful, I mean allow you to do something that a licensee cannot do) does the BSD license reserve?
Because otherwise, it sure seems like it waives all rights. All meaningful ones, anyway.
I am commenting on a broader theme; a straw man is when you decline to argue with what a person has actually stated and instead argue with what you wish they had stated. I think I was pretty clear about that. The LGPL differs from the GPL in precisely one respect: the LGPL explicitly allows other programs to link with it, either statically or dynamically, without requiring that this new, arguably "derivative" work, also be licensed under the GPL. This is completely different than the BSD license, which I know full-well. (Given this, one wonders what the point of releasing an application under the LGPL is.)
However, in this context, the overall situation is similar, because it happens frequently that people who are not fond of the GPL's "viral" nature advocate the use of BSD or LGPL (in the case of libraries) instead. Both of these do not prohibit an author of a GPL'd application from incorporating code into his GPL-licensed work. Of course said code does not magically get a new license, nor do the copyrights get magically transfered to the author of the derivative work -- when I used the term relicense, this is not what I was claiming. It was, perhaps, a poor choice of words, but its a common idiom in these sorts of discussions precisely because the effect is the same as relicensing in practice: sure, you can still obtain your own code under your own license from me if I distribute it, but why would you want to? You already have your own code under your own license. What you want is my code, but you don't want it under the GPL. I can use your BSD or LGPLd licensed code in a derivative work, and release my modifications under the full GPL -- but you cannot do the same with my work (take my modifications and redistribute them as part of a derivative work that is not licensed under the GPL).
Claiming that I don't know what I'm talking about because you've parsed the word "relicense" in a needlessly pedantic way is silly and makes me wonder if you have any truly meaningful arguments to bring to the table. You know, the kind that address my point, and not just a footnote.
You're being needlessly pedantic, and quoting me out of context. When I say "release the code under a new licence", what I mean (and that's why I prefaced my post with "In practice") is that you redistribute some portion of the BSD licensed code (under the BSD license, of course) along with key modifications under your own, more restrictive license. Certainly, the portions that were previously under the BSD license remain so, but in practice this is an irrelevant point because even if that weren't the case, you could still get the original from the original BSD developers under the BSD license.
So, it stands to reason that if you are getting my code from me and not from them, you are interested in my modifications, which you cannot use without accepting my more restrictive license (only on my code, sure, but my code is useless without the BSD code that accompanies it). Technically you must accept both licenses, but since the BSD license places no restrictions on you and allows me to redistribute the BSD-licensed code along with my more restrictive non-BSD licensed modifications, it is as though the entire package were under my more restrictive license. In practice.
Of course, I think you understand exactly what I'm saying, but are harping on details because you think it makes a difference. Because the BSD license (sans advertising clause, of course) does not restrict my redistribution of the code or of derivative works in any way whatsoever and only requires that I waive some implied warranties as a prerequisite, combined with the fact that in the US at least a copyright license cannot be retroactively revoked by the copyright holder unless the right to revoke said license is explicitly outlined in the license (which is not the case in the BSD license, which explicitly waives all rights), the fact that the code "cannot be relicensed" is, in practice, completely irrelevant.
Well, that really depends on how much control you want over the code you've appropriated and how much you fear your competitors will benefit from your (possibly substantial) modifications. There are certainly cases where proprietary vendors have voluntarily released some of their modifications back to the community for (probably) precisely that reason. Apple's relatively synergistic relationship with the Darwin/FreeBSD community might be a good example, although I've heard a lot of complaints there, too.
Otherwise, though, you have to admit that this so-called "burden" of maintaining a fork has not historically been enough of a burden to coerce vendors into releasing modifications back to the community -- generally they just quietly incorporate the BSD code into their products. Look at the splintering of UNIX back in the 80s and 90s, with every vendor offering his or her own incompatible version, often based on BSD code. Look at Microsoft's use of the BSD TCP stack. I mean, really, examples abound, and these are only ones we know about. There's very little "giving back", and BSD development has historically been in spite of companies, not thanks to them.
In practice there is no difference. From the perspective of a user, the BSD is essentially the same as public domain with the added statement that the code comes with no warranty, not even the implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. I can take the code and release it under a new license. This does not prevent you from getting it under the terms of the BSD license, so if I have made no changes there's really no point -- but if I do make changes, add functionality, etc, and license those changes under a different, more restrictive license, you cannot benefit unless you accept the terms of that new, more restrictive license. The result is therefore the same.
I think you're missing what I'm saying, which is not that Theo is in the wrong (he's not). I personally find Sun's attitude reprehensible; I think you'll find that most free software advocates feel exactly the same way, which is why most of them opt to license their code under the GPL: it makes the "I'll scratch your back and then you'll scratch mine" expectation explicit. In this particular case, licensing OpenSSH under the GPL may not have been advisable, because the stated goal of the OpenBSD team was to have ssh replace telnet and rsh as standard, and as even RMS admits, the BSD license is superior to the GPL and friends when this is your goal. But this is not the only example of BSD types complaining when their code is relicensed, it's just a recent one I was able to find easily. Others abound.
The thing that I was commenting on was that this expectation that people who use our code do right by the community is exactly what BSD proponents routinely lambaste us for. "It's not true freedom to force people to give back to the community," they say. "People should be able to do whatever they want with the code," they say. All good and noble, except that, as I pointed out, that's often not how they really feel. They go out of their way to guarantee this completely antisocial freedom to the users of their code, and then complain when that freedom gets exercised.
I'm not demanding that BSDers move to the GPL; I understand the philosophy of the two movements are different. But I think that many people who describe themselves as BSD fans are doing so out of a sort of misguided libertarian ideal rather than a true deep-seated alignment with the BSD license's philosophy of freedom. They think to themselves: the BSD license has less restrictions than the GPL, ergo it is more free! I am a friend of freedom, so I will support BSD! But freedom is not so easily quantifiable: the question of which society is more free, a society which condones murder or one which prohibits it is applicable here. It comes down to a fundamental question which cannot easily be answered: which is more fundamental, the freedom to murder or the freedom not to be murdered? Admittedly, murder is an extreme example (slavery is another common one used to illustrate this point that is no less divisive) but the underlying philosophical quandary is important: the freedom to do something that affects someone else is intrinsically inversely related to the freedom not to be affected by that act. The freedom to follow me home is related to my freedom not to be stalked by strangers -- if society guarantees your freedom to stalk me, you are more free but I am less free. It is clear, then, that a balance must be reached.
BSD and GPL take different stances; neither is objectively right. It depends on your personal convictions.
My observation, though, is that many people in the BSD crowd do not seem to actually truly believe in the BSD's ideals. Or, put another way, they are opportunistic in their beliefs. It's like loudly advocating the right to murder and then condemning the actions of a man who murders your son. I have no problem with the condemning of the man who murders your son, as I do not condone murder; but it seems hypocritical for you to take the same stance, if you have been going on and on about how murder should be acceptable.
In this case, not giving back to the community is the "murder" in question, Theo is the man who has vocally advocated the right to "murder" (not give back to the community), and he is the one complaining when his son (OpenSSH) is murdered by Sun (used without compensation). I (who do not condone "murder") empathize completely with Theo's predicament and think it is horrible that Sun acts the way they do. At the same time, however, I cannot help but notice the hypocrisy of his stance, which seems to condemn murder only when it affects him.
As an aside, you said "BSD is like: here you are, do what you want, as long as you give credit." This is not in fact the case and hasn'
That's certainly true, but in the real world, it's never as simple as that. To extend your analogy somewhat: suppose that you were sitting on the bus and noticed a poor, elderly lady who can barely stand up without a seat. It occurs to you that the right thing to do would be to get up and give her your seat. The problem is, right next to you a large, tattooed gentleman who benches 400 is eagerly waiting for you to give up your seat. Unlike you, he has no sense of decency and will not hesitate to push the old lady out of the way to take your seat as you leave it. Do you still stand, knowing that the old lady will not get the seat in any case?
See, companies compete with each other by their very nature. If a selfless BSD developer makes a useful piece of software, and company A decided to use it in their own product, they are faced with a choice: release the improvements they made back to the BSD developers, thus allowing their competitors to benefit from their hard work without any guarantee that their competitors will likewise make their changes available, or keep their improvements proprietary?
It's not that the company doesn't want to give back to the community, it's that they don't want to benefit their competitors unless they know with certainty that their competitors will return the favor. Unless everyone is an altruist -- and when there's strong financial incentive to not be altruistic, the likelihood of that is slim -- the "trust people to do the right thing" attitude is not going to get you very far, because it's not simply a question of doing the right thing, it's also a question of whether or not doing the right thing will hurt you (by giving your competitors an advantage).
In case my original post didn't emphasize it enough, I see nothing wrong with the BSD license, and I think that if you're truly not bothered by people using your code and not giving back, then it may be the license for you. My point (and it stands) is that most people are not "truly not bothered" by such behavior. For companies, releasing code under the BSD license is a gift not just to the community, but to their competitors. Even if they were happy to give code back to free software developers, they'd be stupid to give code to their competitors, who more likely than not never do the same.
That seems distinctly unfair. Don't the BSD and LGPL people always say that they don't care if people "take their code proprietary" as it were, and that "the code is still there even if someone else improves it and doesn't share back?" Why, just yesterday there were hundreds of comments to that effect on the GPL2 vs GPL3 story!
It's funny though, because it seems that for all their rhetoric about how using BSD and similarly "non-viral" free software licenses is somehow "more free", BSD/LGPL people generally aren't happy at all when people relicense their code. BSD people hate it when their code gets relicensed, ironically especially when that license is the GPL (for some reason, having their code co-opted by Microsoft or Sun bothers them less -- how does that work?) The LGPL is just like BSD, except that it is exclusively GPL-compatible by design. If it bothers you that someone is releasing mods to your LGPL-licensed program under the GPL, why on earth are you even using the LGPL?
Host and parasite -- god, I love it. Talk about double-speak! It reminds me of this great exchange between an interviewer and Theo de Raadt (whom I have the utmost respect for, as it happens, but this attitude is typical of BSD types):
NF: Lots of hardware vendors use OpenSSH. Have you got anything back from them?
TdR: If I add up everything we have ever gotten in exchange for our efforts with OpenSSH, it might amount to $1,000. This all came from individuals. For our work on OpenSSH, companies using OpenSSH have never given us a cent. What about companies that incorporate OpenSSH directly into their products, saving themselves millions of dollars? Companies such as Cisco, Sun, SGI, HP, IBM, Siemens, a raft of medium-sized firewall companies -- we have not received a cent. Or from Linux vendors? Not a cent.
Of course we did not set out to create OpenSSH for the money -- we purposely made it completely free so that the "telnet infrastructure" of the 1980s would die. But it sure is sad that none of these companies return even a fraction of value in kind.
If you want to judge any entity particularly harshly, judge Sun. Yearly they hold interoperability events, for NFS and other protocols, and they include SSH implementation tests as well. Twice we asked them to cover the travel and accommodation costs for a developer to come to their event, and they refused. Considering that their SunSSH is directly based on our code, that is just flat out insulting. Shame on you Sun, shame, shame, shame.
I will say it here -- if an OpenSSH hole is found that applies to SunSSH, Sun will not be informed. Or maybe that has happened already.
That's from this interview with Theo at NewsForge if you want to read the whole thing. But basically, there's this tremendously hypocritical attitude among the most ardent supporters of licenses that are presumably "freer than the GPL". I see nothing wrong with the classic BSD/PD stance: "We don't care what you do with it, no matter what we still have the original copy". I think that's a noble way to look at things. It just seems that in practice, that's almost never how it is. Someone turns around and creates something useful from your code and relicenses it in a way that prevents you from benefiting, and suddenly they're evil, even though that's supposedly a right that you expressly wanted to guarantee to them in the first place!
Hm, I thought I'd responded to you earlier this morning. I guess Slashdot ate my comment. Yours is a good point, one I'll admit that I hadn't considered -- but as you said yourself, if it's always down or always up, then you know right where it is and don't need to search. It stands to reason, then, that agreeing to leave the toilet seat up all the time would be just as good a choice from this perspective as leaving it down all the time.
This would likely not make your girlfriend or wife happy, for exactly the same reason that my girlfriend insisting that I always leave the seat down would not make me happy. It unfairly distributes the burden of setting the toilet up for personal use to one and only one of the two people in the relationship.
The thing is, I actually have no problem putting the seat down. What I object to is the argument that some women seem to think is their right to start over the issue -- the notion that it's somehow my responsibility to leave the toilet in a state that minimizes work for her and maximizes it for me. If she would prefer to have the toilet seat down, then because I presumably care for her I'll try my best to accommodate her -- but if I forget to put it down (and I will) and she decides that something as stupid and inconsequential as that is grounds for a fight, well, she's got another thing coming if she thinks I'll take her lip.
Or, put another way, Marsha will willingly cause strife in her relationship with John on a daily basis to avoid something that could easily be avoided by simply looking before she sits.
I used to sit down to pee a lot, back before I went through puberty, for exactly the reasons that you described. I no longer do, and it's not just about convenience. The main reason that I don't anymore is because I have a dick, and I don't mean that in a machismo way. I'm 196cm tall (6'4") and the one-size-fits-all toilet seat is small to begin with -- even if I had a tiny little dick shoving it between my legs and pointing it downward while sitting on a seat that's too small for me would be uncomfortable and restrictive. And that completely ignores the very real problem of morning wood, which a sibling poster hinted at. It's hard enough (no pun intended) to piss sitting down when you're flaccid, but doing it when you have an erection is just impossible without great discomfort.
Then there's the question of orientation. Unless you're a virgin who failed anatomy, you'll no that the vagina is situated between the legs, whereas the penis juts out from the front of of a man's body. As such, when a woman sits, her urethra is conveniently oriented downwards, making urination convenient and dare-I-say-it pleasurable, but when a man sits, he finds his penis uncomfortably wedged between his legs.
Many modern toilet seats are not closed at the front, presumably because some neanderthals can't remember to put the toilet seat up before they piss. I cannot stand these seats -- when it's time to "take the browns to the superbowl" as it were, I find myself sitting, squeezing my penis as best I can against my body so as to prevent it from touching the exposed toilet rim.
"Why don't you just sit?" is one of the most ridiculous questions I've ever heard.
No, I don't agree with your assessment at all. Despite what many men seem to think, pissing into a toilet with the seat down nearly always results in urine on the seat. This is all the more true if the man is groggy or if it is dark. If a habit were made of this, the woman (and the man, but more often the woman) would find herself constantly sitting down on a dirty and possibly wet toilet seat. She demands, and rightfully so, that the man have the courtesy to lift the toilet seat before he pees for exactly this reason.
Furthermore, lest you forget, men also need to sit on the toilet, and so we also can accidentally sit down on the rim, thereby dumping our asses in the water, etc. Despite this "equation unbalancing" risk, I think I've done this maybe once in my entire life, and I'm reasonably sure that I was drunk at the time. This may have something to do with the fact that I'm in the habit of putting the seat down before I sit, because I know I have no reasonable expectation that the seat will be down when I go to sit on it. By the same token, I am in the habit of putting the seat up before I urinate, because I know I have no reasonable expectation that the seat will be up when I go to take a piss.
It is not unfair to ask that women develop similar habits. Besides, look at it this way: we sometimes have to use other people's toilets, or sometimes other people (like our children, for example, or our dinner guests) use ours. It is therefore in our best interest to be vigilant about the toilet seat -- if a woman is in the habit of simply sitting and assuming that the seat is down, she's going to be dumping her ass in the water an awful lot, and it won't be anyone's fault but her own.
There's no socialism here, though. Nor was there any bait-and-switch -- most people who know, including Bruce Perens, have been saying for a long time that what Tivo is doing is probably not compliant with even the GPL2. It's certainly not compliant with the spirit of the license. Whether or not Tivoization would be found to be violating the GPL2 is not completely clear and a matter for the courts to decide, but it's by no means clear legal ground. The GPL3 takes out the gray area and makes it explicit.
There seems to be an attitude among certain segments of the Slashdot population that just because something is offered at no-cost, that its copyright license is somehow less worthy of compliance than the licenses of proprietary software. Tivo decided to use Linux in a way that was clearly in violation of the spirit of the license it was released under, if not the actual letter, and you're calling the authorship of a new license that brings the spirit and letter of the original closer together bait-and-switch?
In the still extremely unlikely event that the Linux kernel is some day released under the GPL3, Tivo cannot be retroactively prohibited from using the software they use today. Which means, assuming (and it's a big assumption) that their current use of the Linux kernel is not already in violation of its current license, they can continue to use their GPL2-licensed kernel for as long as they want. They will simply be unable to benefit from the kernel's continued development.
Obviously, businesses that use free software aren't necessarily supporters of free software, but they use the software because they benefit tremendously from it. You'll forgive me if I don't shed a tear for their plight.
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Pluto is not a planet.
First, I agree with what the sibling said. Don't overestimate your own intelligence. These guys don't get where they are by being stupid about something that an 8th grader would think of.
Second, if you'd bothered to RTFA, you'd realize that they're using a special pure crystal in Russia was grown for exactly this purpose. Another moment of googling would have revealed the following, with emphasis added by me for your convenience, and small edits made because Slashcode doesn't support the <sup> and <sub> tags:
That's true, but the very first paragraph of the register does have this interesting gem:
(Emphasis mine). The GP exaggerated when he said that Safari was aiming for market dominance, but it is clear that Jobs wants Safari to become the dominant "alternative" browser, as it were (there's nothing wrong with this IMHO). But in all these "Safari on Windows" threads there have been countless fanboys claiming that the only reason Jobs released Safari on Windows was to provide an "SDK" for the iPhone, and the article the GP linked clearly refutes that notion.
Personally, I'm not a big fan of Safari or Macs in general (I use Linux) but I do admit that there are times on the Mac that I'm forced to fire up Safari to view a webpage properly -- Firefox on the Mac tends to have very poor rendering of Chinese characters, making viewing Chinese websites difficult (it randomly replaces characters that exist in the font with '?' and often doesn't display characters you type in search fields and similar, for no reason I can figure -- it works fine on Linux). Safari, on the other hand, has no such problems, but using Safari when you're used to FF with Adblock is torture. I can't believe how ad-ridden the web has become! But at least on the internationalization front, Firefox on Mac could definitely benefit from some competition.
Are you serious? The number of people in the world who can afford such a flight number in the hundreds, maybe. If prices were to fall to such a point where the average SUV-driving joe could afford it, then you might have a point. As is, you're completely disregarding scale: even if taking a flight up to space were 100 times more polluting than a conventional airplane flight, heck, even if it were 1000 times more polluting, the actual carbon footprint left by these flights would be miniscule compared to the one left by conventional air travel.
Of course, if this were all to become extremely affordable and everyone were doing it, then the industry would need stiff environmental regulation, like any polluting industry does. But regulation right now would simply stifle a growing industry, one that people are unsure can survive in the first place. There's no reason to kill it just because the pollution per head is high, if you're certain the number of heads is exceedingly low. Think of it this way: would air travel have ever gotten off the ground in the first place if today's emissions standards had been in force back then? They were having enough trouble just making planes fly reliably, the burden of making them do it cleanly would have been pretty insurmountable.
Hm... I guess my new IQ-test program will need to store IQ scores as a signed integer, after all.
I don't get what you're arguing here. That piracy is wrong? Ok, it's wrong. So?
I mean, what's your point? If you think not pirating music and making a big fuss about it on public forums is going to help matters, by all means, go ahead.
I deliberately didn't take a stance on the right or wrong aspect of it because I don't think it makes one lick of difference. Even if you managed to convince every person you ever spoke to (you won't), you'll hardly make a dent in the "culture of piracy". It's already so pervasive that it's useless.
The war has been lost. Perhaps that means no music and no movies. If so, that's the price consumers are going to pay. But if you think that you can stop it, if you think that it ever will stop, you're honestly deluding yourself. It's not going to stop.
But please, by all means, go on fighting for what you believe in. I respect that.
I think it may be time, seriously, to step away from this argument, because who is right and who is wrong is quickly becoming irrelevant. File sharing -- yes, of copyrighted material -- is on the increase, despite all the attempts of various concerned bodies to curtail the practice. Copyright infringement is illegal -- whether it's wrong or not is an entirely different question, which I won't go into, but suffice to say that both sides have good arguments to support their side.
But I advance that it's all irrelevant, because regardless of whether it's illegal, regardless of whether it's wrong, it has become so commonplace and so completely defies any attempt to control it that there arguably not much that can be done about it, anymore. So TorrentSpy is ordered to spy on its users -- so what? They'll probably comply and say as much on their website, and people will use some other torrent service instead, stopping exactly no one from file swapping. Or maybe the RIAA/MPAA will find some way to kill BitTorrent entirely, which would be a shame. But as Napster showed, this will not stop p2p -- even if it is completely illegal, it will persist. In fact, one could argue that the technology has actually gotten better over the years thanks to the RIAA and MPAA's meddling. Sort of like the hydra -- cut off one head and it grows back two.
At some point, when you're a business, you need to be pragmatic. The law protects you only when relatively few people break it and you can litigate the hell out of those that do, scaring the remaining would-be-ne're-do-wells into compliance. But when 60% (I don't know the actual numbers, but substitute any substantial percentage and the fact remains) of the population is breaking the law, well, you're basically fucked.
All this arguing about whether file sharing is right or wrong -- it's a bit like arguing about whether premarital sex is right or wrong. Many people in the US feel strongly that premarital sex is deeply wrong, not just for them, but for everyone. Ok, it's not illegal -- I'll address legality with another example in a bit -- but the point is: it's not going stop. No matter how you feel about premarital sex, it isn't going to stop, and there's no way -- none -- that you can make it stop. Heck, if premarital sex is alive and well in Saudi Arabia, there's no way that you'd ever have any hope of killing it in the USA.
Or what about prohibition? Drinking is most certainly bad for you -- many people don't realize just how bad it is for you. Alcoholism destroys families, the substance is addictive and harmful, and polite society just shouldn't put up with it, or so the teetotalers said. You know what? They're right. But you'll notice that it didn't make a lick of difference that they were right, nor did it make a lick of difference that the law agreed with them. People didn't stop drinking.
There are lots of examples like this, and I fear that file sharing is just the latest. No matter how you feel about it, understand: it's not going to stop. The RIAA and MPAA are yelling into the wind, and it's time they saw the writing on the wall. As it stands, their business model -- at least with the margins it has historically enjoyed -- is doomed.
What does this mean for the artists? Good question. Like many others, I don't think people are going to stop making music, for the simple reason that people were making music before there was a recording industry and will continue making music if said industry collapsed tomorrow. Movies are a more difficult question -- it costs an arm and a leg to make even a low-budget indie movie, requires the hard work of many people, and the institution of copyright is what makes most of the films we see possible. With music, you can make an argument about people making it in their garages and using the internet to distribute it -- fine. But with film, well, that's a much tougher sell, because so many more people are involved. Perhaps we'll see a resurgenc
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The GP's point is that the EULA is available in print form as well as on the computer. Whether this is true or not I cannot verify, as I have never had the misfortune of buying Gateway products.
That's what you would think, but historically, that hasn't been the case. It depends a lot on what said companies want to do with the code. Obviously, if it's code that they intend to distribute as a key component of their main product, then they probably won't GPL it. But in those cases, they wouldn't provide it under the BSD license, either, for the same reason.
No, the interesting situations happen when, as you said, they don't really want the burden of maintaining a fork. In those situations, they are more likely to contribute code under the GPL because they know that their competitors cannot benefit from their improvements without likewise contributing. This is not me hazarding a guess, either: there is unprecedented corporate involvement in free software development these days, and almost exclusively on GPL'd projects. There are more corporate developers working on the Linux kernel now than there are hobbyists, apparently, and that's just one example. FreeBSD, on the other hand, despite having an arguably technically superior kernel, benefits from very little corporate support, and is written mainly by hobbyists (there is nothing wrong with this, it's not a value judgement -- corporate involvement is a double edged sword, and I'm wary of it).
But the concern that we outlined earlier -- that my competitor stands to benefit from my improvements to a BSD project without any sort of guarantee that I'll benefit in turn -- is mitigated by the GPL, which is why companies seem so much more willing to contribute to GPL'd projects. Sure, my competitor can use my improvements, but if he improves on my improvements, he cannot keep them from me. So in a sense, everyone pays, and no one gets to leech.
Don't get me wrong, though: I'm not advocating the GPL over the BSD license. I completely respect your right to use that license, and I very much respect the spirit of the license. However, because altruism cannot be guaranteed, companies are wary of contributing to BSD-licensed projects (even if they are not wary of using code provided under that license). It's important to understand that, going in to the licensing decision, and it's important to carefully examine your own goals for your project. If your goal is to encourage hobbyist and corporate collaboration, the BSD license will probably not have the desired effect, unfortunately.
If your goal is to "raise the bar" as it were on code quality over all, releasing high quality libraries and applications under the BSD license is the way to do it. But you must be a realist and understand that people are probably not going to give back to your project. If you truly don't expect that, you have my unwaivering support. Just don't complain when no one gives back, because experience has shown that they won't.
I think we basically agree. I don't really think its fair, though, to explicitly emphasize how users of your license are under no obligation to thank you, and then turn around and complain when they don't.
Of course I agree that they should thank you, though.
That would be true if we were discussing law, but we're not (or at least, I wasn't.) I was discussing the attitudes of BSD fans versus the attitudes of GPL fans, and I was pointing out an apparent hypocrisy in the attitudes of some members of the former group when a freedom they consider key is actually exercised. Turning this into an argument about legal terminology -- especially when my meaning was completely clear -- is not productive at all.
To respond to your sibling post, copyright (as far as I know, but I am not a lawyer) covers the right to copy (ie, distribute), hence its name. A copyright license outlines under what circumstances a licensee may distribute a work, either in its entirety, or in part. Fair use notwithstanding, this includes the right to include a work in another, derivative work.
The BSD license explicitly grants you an irrevocable right to redistribute the work, under any circumstance, whether in whole or in part, whether independently or as part of a derivative work. The rights normally associated with the copyright holder -- the right to control distribution, etc -- have all been passed to the licensee, with the exception of the right to transfer copyright or relicense the work. But neither of those matter in practice, as I said, because all the rights normally associated with the copyright holder are guaranteed by the BSD license to the licensee! So what if you get to put © 2007 Trifish by the code? What rights does that give you in practice? And what about the right to relicense? So you have the exclusive right to actually change the licensing terms on your code, but how is that worth anything? Anyone can redistribute the code you previously released under the BSD license along with their (proprietary) modifications, and you can't revoke that right from them, so all you can really do (in practice) is change the license on your own modifications! Sure, you've relicensed all the code, but modulo the modifications, all that code is also available under the BSD license because you released it under that license already and cannot revoke it!
So let me ask you again: what meaningful rights (and by meaningful, I mean allow you to do something that a licensee cannot do) does the BSD license reserve?
Because otherwise, it sure seems like it waives all rights. All meaningful ones, anyway.
I am commenting on a broader theme; a straw man is when you decline to argue with what a person has actually stated and instead argue with what you wish they had stated. I think I was pretty clear about that. The LGPL differs from the GPL in precisely one respect: the LGPL explicitly allows other programs to link with it, either statically or dynamically, without requiring that this new, arguably "derivative" work, also be licensed under the GPL. This is completely different than the BSD license, which I know full-well. (Given this, one wonders what the point of releasing an application under the LGPL is.)
However, in this context, the overall situation is similar, because it happens frequently that people who are not fond of the GPL's "viral" nature advocate the use of BSD or LGPL (in the case of libraries) instead. Both of these do not prohibit an author of a GPL'd application from incorporating code into his GPL-licensed work. Of course said code does not magically get a new license, nor do the copyrights get magically transfered to the author of the derivative work -- when I used the term relicense, this is not what I was claiming. It was, perhaps, a poor choice of words, but its a common idiom in these sorts of discussions precisely because the effect is the same as relicensing in practice: sure, you can still obtain your own code under your own license from me if I distribute it, but why would you want to? You already have your own code under your own license. What you want is my code, but you don't want it under the GPL. I can use your BSD or LGPLd licensed code in a derivative work, and release my modifications under the full GPL -- but you cannot do the same with my work (take my modifications and redistribute them as part of a derivative work that is not licensed under the GPL).
Claiming that I don't know what I'm talking about because you've parsed the word "relicense" in a needlessly pedantic way is silly and makes me wonder if you have any truly meaningful arguments to bring to the table. You know, the kind that address my point, and not just a footnote.
You're being needlessly pedantic, and quoting me out of context. When I say "release the code under a new licence", what I mean (and that's why I prefaced my post with "In practice") is that you redistribute some portion of the BSD licensed code (under the BSD license, of course) along with key modifications under your own, more restrictive license. Certainly, the portions that were previously under the BSD license remain so, but in practice this is an irrelevant point because even if that weren't the case, you could still get the original from the original BSD developers under the BSD license.
So, it stands to reason that if you are getting my code from me and not from them, you are interested in my modifications, which you cannot use without accepting my more restrictive license (only on my code, sure, but my code is useless without the BSD code that accompanies it). Technically you must accept both licenses, but since the BSD license places no restrictions on you and allows me to redistribute the BSD-licensed code along with my more restrictive non-BSD licensed modifications, it is as though the entire package were under my more restrictive license. In practice.
Of course, I think you understand exactly what I'm saying, but are harping on details because you think it makes a difference. Because the BSD license (sans advertising clause, of course) does not restrict my redistribution of the code or of derivative works in any way whatsoever and only requires that I waive some implied warranties as a prerequisite, combined with the fact that in the US at least a copyright license cannot be retroactively revoked by the copyright holder unless the right to revoke said license is explicitly outlined in the license (which is not the case in the BSD license, which explicitly waives all rights), the fact that the code "cannot be relicensed" is, in practice, completely irrelevant.
Well, that really depends on how much control you want over the code you've appropriated and how much you fear your competitors will benefit from your (possibly substantial) modifications. There are certainly cases where proprietary vendors have voluntarily released some of their modifications back to the community for (probably) precisely that reason. Apple's relatively synergistic relationship with the Darwin/FreeBSD community might be a good example, although I've heard a lot of complaints there, too.
Otherwise, though, you have to admit that this so-called "burden" of maintaining a fork has not historically been enough of a burden to coerce vendors into releasing modifications back to the community -- generally they just quietly incorporate the BSD code into their products. Look at the splintering of UNIX back in the 80s and 90s, with every vendor offering his or her own incompatible version, often based on BSD code. Look at Microsoft's use of the BSD TCP stack. I mean, really, examples abound, and these are only ones we know about. There's very little "giving back", and BSD development has historically been in spite of companies, not thanks to them.
In practice there is no difference. From the perspective of a user, the BSD is essentially the same as public domain with the added statement that the code comes with no warranty, not even the implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. I can take the code and release it under a new license. This does not prevent you from getting it under the terms of the BSD license, so if I have made no changes there's really no point -- but if I do make changes, add functionality, etc, and license those changes under a different, more restrictive license, you cannot benefit unless you accept the terms of that new, more restrictive license. The result is therefore the same.
I think you're missing what I'm saying, which is not that Theo is in the wrong (he's not). I personally find Sun's attitude reprehensible; I think you'll find that most free software advocates feel exactly the same way, which is why most of them opt to license their code under the GPL: it makes the "I'll scratch your back and then you'll scratch mine" expectation explicit. In this particular case, licensing OpenSSH under the GPL may not have been advisable, because the stated goal of the OpenBSD team was to have ssh replace telnet and rsh as standard, and as even RMS admits, the BSD license is superior to the GPL and friends when this is your goal. But this is not the only example of BSD types complaining when their code is relicensed, it's just a recent one I was able to find easily. Others abound.
The thing that I was commenting on was that this expectation that people who use our code do right by the community is exactly what BSD proponents routinely lambaste us for. "It's not true freedom to force people to give back to the community," they say. "People should be able to do whatever they want with the code," they say. All good and noble, except that, as I pointed out, that's often not how they really feel. They go out of their way to guarantee this completely antisocial freedom to the users of their code, and then complain when that freedom gets exercised.
I'm not demanding that BSDers move to the GPL; I understand the philosophy of the two movements are different. But I think that many people who describe themselves as BSD fans are doing so out of a sort of misguided libertarian ideal rather than a true deep-seated alignment with the BSD license's philosophy of freedom. They think to themselves: the BSD license has less restrictions than the GPL, ergo it is more free! I am a friend of freedom, so I will support BSD! But freedom is not so easily quantifiable: the question of which society is more free, a society which condones murder or one which prohibits it is applicable here. It comes down to a fundamental question which cannot easily be answered: which is more fundamental, the freedom to murder or the freedom not to be murdered? Admittedly, murder is an extreme example (slavery is another common one used to illustrate this point that is no less divisive) but the underlying philosophical quandary is important: the freedom to do something that affects someone else is intrinsically inversely related to the freedom not to be affected by that act. The freedom to follow me home is related to my freedom not to be stalked by strangers -- if society guarantees your freedom to stalk me, you are more free but I am less free. It is clear, then, that a balance must be reached.
BSD and GPL take different stances; neither is objectively right. It depends on your personal convictions.
My observation, though, is that many people in the BSD crowd do not seem to actually truly believe in the BSD's ideals. Or, put another way, they are opportunistic in their beliefs. It's like loudly advocating the right to murder and then condemning the actions of a man who murders your son. I have no problem with the condemning of the man who murders your son, as I do not condone murder; but it seems hypocritical for you to take the same stance, if you have been going on and on about how murder should be acceptable.
In this case, not giving back to the community is the "murder" in question, Theo is the man who has vocally advocated the right to "murder" (not give back to the community), and he is the one complaining when his son (OpenSSH) is murdered by Sun (used without compensation). I (who do not condone "murder") empathize completely with Theo's predicament and think it is horrible that Sun acts the way they do. At the same time, however, I cannot help but notice the hypocrisy of his stance, which seems to condemn murder only when it affects him.
As an aside, you said "BSD is like: here you are, do what you want, as long as you give credit." This is not in fact the case and hasn'
That's certainly true, but in the real world, it's never as simple as that. To extend your analogy somewhat: suppose that you were sitting on the bus and noticed a poor, elderly lady who can barely stand up without a seat. It occurs to you that the right thing to do would be to get up and give her your seat. The problem is, right next to you a large, tattooed gentleman who benches 400 is eagerly waiting for you to give up your seat. Unlike you, he has no sense of decency and will not hesitate to push the old lady out of the way to take your seat as you leave it. Do you still stand, knowing that the old lady will not get the seat in any case?
See, companies compete with each other by their very nature. If a selfless BSD developer makes a useful piece of software, and company A decided to use it in their own product, they are faced with a choice: release the improvements they made back to the BSD developers, thus allowing their competitors to benefit from their hard work without any guarantee that their competitors will likewise make their changes available, or keep their improvements proprietary?
It's not that the company doesn't want to give back to the community, it's that they don't want to benefit their competitors unless they know with certainty that their competitors will return the favor. Unless everyone is an altruist -- and when there's strong financial incentive to not be altruistic, the likelihood of that is slim -- the "trust people to do the right thing" attitude is not going to get you very far, because it's not simply a question of doing the right thing, it's also a question of whether or not doing the right thing will hurt you (by giving your competitors an advantage).
In case my original post didn't emphasize it enough, I see nothing wrong with the BSD license, and I think that if you're truly not bothered by people using your code and not giving back, then it may be the license for you. My point (and it stands) is that most people are not "truly not bothered" by such behavior. For companies, releasing code under the BSD license is a gift not just to the community, but to their competitors. Even if they were happy to give code back to free software developers, they'd be stupid to give code to their competitors, who more likely than not never do the same.
That seems distinctly unfair. Don't the BSD and LGPL people always say that they don't care if people "take their code proprietary" as it were, and that "the code is still there even if someone else improves it and doesn't share back?" Why, just yesterday there were hundreds of comments to that effect on the GPL2 vs GPL3 story!
It's funny though, because it seems that for all their rhetoric about how using BSD and similarly "non-viral" free software licenses is somehow "more free", BSD/LGPL people generally aren't happy at all when people relicense their code. BSD people hate it when their code gets relicensed, ironically especially when that license is the GPL (for some reason, having their code co-opted by Microsoft or Sun bothers them less -- how does that work?) The LGPL is just like BSD, except that it is exclusively GPL-compatible by design. If it bothers you that someone is releasing mods to your LGPL-licensed program under the GPL, why on earth are you even using the LGPL?
Host and parasite -- god, I love it. Talk about double-speak! It reminds me of this great exchange between an interviewer and Theo de Raadt (whom I have the utmost respect for, as it happens, but this attitude is typical of BSD types):
That's from this interview with Theo at NewsForge if you want to read the whole thing. But basically, there's this tremendously hypocritical attitude among the most ardent supporters of licenses that are presumably "freer than the GPL". I see nothing wrong with the classic BSD/PD stance: "We don't care what you do with it, no matter what we still have the original copy". I think that's a noble way to look at things. It just seems that in practice, that's almost never how it is. Someone turns around and creates something useful from your code and relicenses it in a way that prevents you from benefiting, and suddenly they're evil, even though that's supposedly a right that you expressly wanted to guarantee to them in the first place!
Hm, I thought I'd responded to you earlier this morning. I guess Slashdot ate my comment. Yours is a good point, one I'll admit that I hadn't considered -- but as you said yourself, if it's always down or always up, then you know right where it is and don't need to search. It stands to reason, then, that agreeing to leave the toilet seat up all the time would be just as good a choice from this perspective as leaving it down all the time.
This would likely not make your girlfriend or wife happy, for exactly the same reason that my girlfriend insisting that I always leave the seat down would not make me happy. It unfairly distributes the burden of setting the toilet up for personal use to one and only one of the two people in the relationship.
The thing is, I actually have no problem putting the seat down. What I object to is the argument that some women seem to think is their right to start over the issue -- the notion that it's somehow my responsibility to leave the toilet in a state that minimizes work for her and maximizes it for me. If she would prefer to have the toilet seat down, then because I presumably care for her I'll try my best to accommodate her -- but if I forget to put it down (and I will) and she decides that something as stupid and inconsequential as that is grounds for a fight, well, she's got another thing coming if she thinks I'll take her lip.
Or, put another way, Marsha will willingly cause strife in her relationship with John on a daily basis to avoid something that could easily be avoided by simply looking before she sits.
John's a lucky man.
If you're a woman, you're deluded. If you're a man, you're pathetic.
I used to sit down to pee a lot, back before I went through puberty, for exactly the reasons that you described. I no longer do, and it's not just about convenience. The main reason that I don't anymore is because I have a dick, and I don't mean that in a machismo way. I'm 196cm tall (6'4") and the one-size-fits-all toilet seat is small to begin with -- even if I had a tiny little dick shoving it between my legs and pointing it downward while sitting on a seat that's too small for me would be uncomfortable and restrictive. And that completely ignores the very real problem of morning wood, which a sibling poster hinted at. It's hard enough (no pun intended) to piss sitting down when you're flaccid, but doing it when you have an erection is just impossible without great discomfort.
Then there's the question of orientation. Unless you're a virgin who failed anatomy, you'll no that the vagina is situated between the legs, whereas the penis juts out from the front of of a man's body. As such, when a woman sits, her urethra is conveniently oriented downwards, making urination convenient and dare-I-say-it pleasurable, but when a man sits, he finds his penis uncomfortably wedged between his legs.
Many modern toilet seats are not closed at the front, presumably because some neanderthals can't remember to put the toilet seat up before they piss. I cannot stand these seats -- when it's time to "take the browns to the superbowl" as it were, I find myself sitting, squeezing my penis as best I can against my body so as to prevent it from touching the exposed toilet rim.
"Why don't you just sit?" is one of the most ridiculous questions I've ever heard.
No, I don't agree with your assessment at all. Despite what many men seem to think, pissing into a toilet with the seat down nearly always results in urine on the seat. This is all the more true if the man is groggy or if it is dark. If a habit were made of this, the woman (and the man, but more often the woman) would find herself constantly sitting down on a dirty and possibly wet toilet seat. She demands, and rightfully so, that the man have the courtesy to lift the toilet seat before he pees for exactly this reason.
Furthermore, lest you forget, men also need to sit on the toilet, and so we also can accidentally sit down on the rim, thereby dumping our asses in the water, etc. Despite this "equation unbalancing" risk, I think I've done this maybe once in my entire life, and I'm reasonably sure that I was drunk at the time. This may have something to do with the fact that I'm in the habit of putting the seat down before I sit, because I know I have no reasonable expectation that the seat will be down when I go to sit on it. By the same token, I am in the habit of putting the seat up before I urinate, because I know I have no reasonable expectation that the seat will be up when I go to take a piss.
It is not unfair to ask that women develop similar habits. Besides, look at it this way: we sometimes have to use other people's toilets, or sometimes other people (like our children, for example, or our dinner guests) use ours. It is therefore in our best interest to be vigilant about the toilet seat -- if a woman is in the habit of simply sitting and assuming that the seat is down, she's going to be dumping her ass in the water an awful lot, and it won't be anyone's fault but her own.
There's no socialism here, though. Nor was there any bait-and-switch -- most people who know, including Bruce Perens, have been saying for a long time that what Tivo is doing is probably not compliant with even the GPL2. It's certainly not compliant with the spirit of the license. Whether or not Tivoization would be found to be violating the GPL2 is not completely clear and a matter for the courts to decide, but it's by no means clear legal ground. The GPL3 takes out the gray area and makes it explicit.
There seems to be an attitude among certain segments of the Slashdot population that just because something is offered at no-cost, that its copyright license is somehow less worthy of compliance than the licenses of proprietary software. Tivo decided to use Linux in a way that was clearly in violation of the spirit of the license it was released under, if not the actual letter, and you're calling the authorship of a new license that brings the spirit and letter of the original closer together bait-and-switch?
In the still extremely unlikely event that the Linux kernel is some day released under the GPL3, Tivo cannot be retroactively prohibited from using the software they use today. Which means, assuming (and it's a big assumption) that their current use of the Linux kernel is not already in violation of its current license, they can continue to use their GPL2-licensed kernel for as long as they want. They will simply be unable to benefit from the kernel's continued development.
Obviously, businesses that use free software aren't necessarily supporters of free software, but they use the software because they benefit tremendously from it. You'll forgive me if I don't shed a tear for their plight.