I didn't say that the GPL wouldn't be necessary, just that it wouldn't be possible.
But I'd argue that it would still be necessary. After all, anybody can release their software into the public domain. But we don'tâ"we give it away under a license, like the GPL. Why? I'd posit that it's because we like the restrictions that it places on those who use it, and it ensures the existence of a vibrant open source software bazaar. But, no matter the reason, the point is that we have the option to release our work without restrictions now, and yet vanishingly few people do so. I think that demonstrates the necessity of the GPL, even in a world without copyright for software.
You write that Apple "granted permission" to the maker of Franklin and then yanked it. That's simply not true. Not even close.
In Apple Computer, Inc. v. Franklin Computer Corp., the 3rd Circuit found that Franklin did so without any permission from Apple, but Franklin's logic was that you can't copyright something software isn't written down on paper. They copied ROMs that had no equivalent for sale on paper, ergo they didn't need to ask permission and Apple couldn't stop them. The circuit court ruled in favor of Franklin, because there was no legal precedent allowing software to be copyrighted, which is how it got bumped up to the circuit court, who ruled for Apple.
Obviously, Apple was right here. Without copyright for software, we'd have no GPL and the open source movement would still be stuck at the "freeware" stage.
[C]onsider the 19-year old Loula Abboud, a dark curl kissing her forehead and a golden cross around her neck. A Lebanese Christian, she was one of the first women to earn the title of istishhadiyah when she blew herself up in 1985 as Israeli troops moved in to capture her guerilla group near the town of Aoun in southern Lebanon
But that's rather beside the point. Suicide bombings are committed almost exclusively in defense of homeland against occupying forces (or, rather, the belief that such a thing is occurring), especially forces of a different religion, and especially when those doing the defending live in relative poverty. There are very few cases of countries with poor, heavily Christian populations that are occupied by people of other religions. Ergo, hardly any Christian suicide bombings.
Listen, I think black box voting is as bullshit as the next guy, but I'm just not buying the logic here.
In New Hampshire, as in most (all?) states, voting equipment is purchased locally. The richer the locality, the more money they have to spend on voting equipment. So in New Hampshire, the wealthier localities have electronic voting equipment, while the poorer localities vote on paper. So let's try the nut graf again, only replacing the key bits:
In wealthy precincts, Clinton beat Obama by almost 5%. In poor precincts, Obama beat Clinton by over 4%
Does that sound terribly suspicious to you? Or more like a reasonable correlation between voting behavior and socioeconomic status?
I know some of his family members. Not his children, but his his sibling and two of his nieces. One of them, in fact, has downloaded music illegally on my own computer.:)
I installed this as soon as it came out, as did many other Mac users. My Mac (mini DP Intel 1.67GHz, 2GB RAM) slowed to a crawl as soon as I launched it. I had to yank the power cable. I uninstalled it and all was well. This is a common experience. If you're just going to try out a new version, cool, go for it, maybe it'll go well. But please understand that it's a beta -- don't plan on getting any work done with this.
The Dutch have a more restrained version of this that works quite well, called the "woonerf." (It means "street for living.")
In heavily-trafficked areas where cars will always move slowly and multiple modes of transportation come together (bicyclists, pedestrians, mass transit, scooters, cars, etc.), it seems that it works better if they self-regulate. Woonerven came into being in The Netherlands in the '60s and '70s, and the idea is to have a common space shared by all of these types of transit. Obstacles are placed in the street (planters, trees, parking spaces, etc.) to prevent traffic from moving quickly. This also turns pedestrians into the primary users of the space, making vehicles the intruders. Cars seldom exceed 10mph in woonerven.
Holland and Denmark have converted 6,500 brief stretches of road into woonerven. Traffic fatality rates have dropped to nothing. Intersections were a few annual fatalities were routine haven't seen a single death. That's a) because automobile drivers cannot drive through quickly because they're so varying and b) because 20mph is the cap of speed at which pedestrians can avoid serious injury when being struck by a car.
Happily, 18.5mph is the speed at which urban traffic flows best, many studies have shown. Coincidentally, this is also a speed at which there's no need for traffic control systems.
We have woonerf-like traffic patterns (and self-regulating patterns, as in the article) throughout the world now. Look at rush hour on Paris' Avenue de la Grande Armee: it's got four lanes of traffic at noon on a Sunday, but come rush hour people up and decide that maybe six is better. Look at Beijing during rush hour -- hordes of bicyclists mingling with packed autos, scooters weaving through the chaos.
England's got them, too. They call them "home zones." They're in a few dozen places now. They can't be more than a third of a mile long, and can't be used by more than 100 vehicles per hour. More traffic means that it's just not a viable home zone.
Even in the latest issue (September 2006), they persist in assessing the rate of Mac OS X spyware and virus infections by conducting a survey, an annual gaffe on their part. Rather than checking around and discovering that no such malware exists in the wild, they assume that computer users are able to judge for themselves the cause of computer difficulties.
This would be like studying the mechanisms of natural selection by way of a survey. Hey, whaddyaknow, turns out there's no such thing as evolution, a survey of Americans would have to conclude.
Consumers Union knows better. I don't know why they keep repeating this mistake.
I ignored posts like this for years, figuring it was like the Linux vs. BSD debates -- just a bunch of zealots. I was wrong.
Years after I mastered mc files and learned the magic of m4, back around 2002, I succumbed to/. peer pressure and switched to Postfix. It's just like Sendmail, only it doesn't suck. I didn't know Sendmail sucked until I used Postfix. It's easy, it's secure, and my servers haven't once been 0wn3d because of the ubiquitous MTA flaws of Sendmail.
Here in Charlottesville, home of the National Ground Intelligence Center (you might know them for a little kerfuffle involving their providing bad intelligence about nuclear weapons to some president...something about a war?), they've long had a thick wire mesh covering all of their windows. A former employee told me, when I was a kid, that it was designed to reflect microwaves for this very reason.
TEI is rather an old standard, as I understand it, that serves as an markup standard for the sort of documents that you might find in a library -- books, articles, letters, etc. Rather than using full-on SGML, or an invented XML standard, TEI exists for marking up documents and describing how its different parts relate to each other and how different documents relate to one another. It's delightfully simple, and very much like HTML, only richer. I gather it's the primary standard for such things.
Some may be interested in this -- the first-ever issue of the Google-Friends newsletter. I'd exchanged e-mails with Craig Silverstein a few days beforehand, about some code changes to the front page of their site, and I was happy to find myself on this list.
I've had to alter the formatting slightly to get it past Slashdot's spam filter.
From: larry@google.com Subject: [google-friends] revised google-friends Date: February 25, 1999 9:50:19 PM EST To: google-friends@makelist.com X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Pro Version 4.1
Dear Google Friends!
Welcome to Vol. I Issue 1 of the Google Friends newsletter, news about the engine behind the search. Thank you for using Google!
IN THIS ISSUE
1) Introduction 2) Google graduates 3) Google gets great press 4) New search operators 5) Google gets a facelift 6) Growing pains 7) Want a job?
1) Introduction
Welcome to the first in a long line of Google Friends installments! It's taken a while, but we've been using the time to make Google even better. With new features, glowing press, and tremendous word-of-mouth, Google has been growing by leaps and bounds.
We plan to make this newsletter a monthly, so don't worry about us flooding your mailbox. If you're worried anyway, see the end of this letter if you want to remove yourself from the mailing list.
2) Google graduates
Many of you have been with us while we were still at Stanford. As you've probably noticed, Google the research project has become Google.com. We want to bring higher quality and greatly improved search to the world, and a company seems to be the best vehicle for accomplishing that goal. There is a great deal that can be done to improve searching on the web, and Google.com will spend a majority of its effort developing new technologies to make your life easier.
Google.com was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, both Ph.D. students in Computer Science at Stanford University. Google received seed funding from a number of angel investors, including Andy Bechtolsheim, one of the founders of Sun. Google recently moved from its first "world headquarters" (a house with a hot tub in Menlo Park), to the new "Google-Plex," a prime office on University Ave. in downtown Palo Alto.
3) Google gets great press
In the February 22, 1999 issue of Newsweek, Steven Levy touts Google as "the Net's hottest new search engine, [which] draws on feedback from the Web itself to deliver more relevant answers to customer queries." In the December 1998 PC Magazine review of Google, Breck White says, "Yahoo! and newcomer Google! were the only sites in our roundup to return highly relevant hits consistently, even on searches for very general or common terms such as Internet standards."
We've also had great mentions in recent issues of the Washington Post, the Seattle Times, TechWeb, Release 1.0, Voir, Le Monde, Konrad, Salon Magazine, and many others. Check out our always-changing press page at http://google.com/press.html for updates and links to the stories. Also, if you see us in the press, email mentions@google.com so we can add it to our press page.
4) Google gets a facelift
Many of you may have noticed that we've updated our website. We decided it was time to do a little Pre-Spring cleaning and give the site a face lift. Now the front page is cleaner and less cluttered, in line with our philosophy that as little as possible should get in the way of letting you search.
You'll also notice we've changed the logo. We think we've entered the beta stages of our search engine, and thought that others should know. We can't wait until we make an official release!
5) Growing pains
Our capacity is going up (thanks to all you users!), and we've been expanding to meet the demand. We've been hiring more staff and putting up more servers to scale the system (we've started ordering our computers in 21-packs). We've also beg
"Carrot and stick" refers to putting a carrot at the end of a stick, which is held above the head of a reluctant mule by its passenger. The mule walks forward to get the carrot, which it can never quite reach, at least until it arrives at its destination, when it's given the carrot. "Carrot and stick" means "incentive." It does not mean "alternately rewarding and beating." Anybody who's beaten a mule knows full well that the damned thing will just kick you in the head.
In July of 2000, IIRC, Orrin Hatch provided a moment of political awakening for many Slashdotters. During the Napster hearings, ol' Orrin stood up and asked if Napster couldn't just "track people by their intellectual property address"?
I think of it as "the collective face-slap heard round the world."
If Windows has 90% of the market share and Windows uses two mouse buttons, then at the very least having two mouse buttons is not an impediment to computer usability.
If Windows has 90% of the market share and Windows crashes a lot, then at the very least crashing a lot is not an impediment to computer usability.
If Windows has 90% of the market share and Windows is prone to viruses and spyware, then at the very least being prone to viruses and spyware is not an impediment to computer usability.
If Windows has 90% of the market share and Windows applications' user interface standards vary wildly, then at the very least user interface is not an impediment to computer usability.
If Windows has 90% of the market share and Windows only works when you stuff carrots up your nose, then at the very least the carrot-stuffing requirement is not an impediment to computer usability.
But it's kind of embarrassing that a Web site that purports to carry "news for nerds" should just parrot the misinformation carried in the wire service report.
How ridiculous that Slashdot should believe the media coverage about a secret event held in a highly-controlled military zone off the coast of Alaska! Why, Rob or Jamie or somebody should have been in a little rowboat, monitoring the whole thing themselves.
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't say that the GPL wouldn't be necessary, just that it wouldn't be possible.
But I'd argue that it would still be necessary. After all, anybody can release their software into the public domain. But we don'tâ"we give it away under a license, like the GPL. Why? I'd posit that it's because we like the restrictions that it places on those who use it, and it ensures the existence of a vibrant open source software bazaar. But, no matter the reason, the point is that we have the option to release our work without restrictions now, and yet vanishingly few people do so. I think that demonstrates the necessity of the GPL, even in a world without copyright for software.
You write that Apple "granted permission" to the maker of Franklin and then yanked it. That's simply not true. Not even close.
In Apple Computer, Inc. v. Franklin Computer Corp., the 3rd Circuit found that Franklin did so without any permission from Apple, but Franklin's logic was that you can't copyright something software isn't written down on paper. They copied ROMs that had no equivalent for sale on paper, ergo they didn't need to ask permission and Apple couldn't stop them. The circuit court ruled in favor of Franklin, because there was no legal precedent allowing software to be copyrighted, which is how it got bumped up to the circuit court, who ruled for Apple.
Obviously, Apple was right here. Without copyright for software, we'd have no GPL and the open source movement would still be stuck at the "freeware" stage.
Eponysterical!
Here's one:
But that's rather beside the point. Suicide bombings are committed almost exclusively in defense of homeland against occupying forces (or, rather, the belief that such a thing is occurring), especially forces of a different religion, and especially when those doing the defending live in relative poverty. There are very few cases of countries with poor, heavily Christian populations that are occupied by people of other religions. Ergo, hardly any Christian suicide bombings.
Hey, here in Virginia the state charges for a "WTF" license plate. Now that's good governance.
In New Hampshire, as in most (all?) states, voting equipment is purchased locally. The richer the locality, the more money they have to spend on voting equipment. So in New Hampshire, the wealthier localities have electronic voting equipment, while the poorer localities vote on paper. So let's try the nut graf again, only replacing the key bits:Does that sound terribly suspicious to you? Or more like a reasonable correlation between voting behavior and socioeconomic status?
-Waldo Jaquith
We grew up. :) Few of us have the time that we did then. We're married, we have kids, mortgages, etc.
You most certainly did not.
I know some of his family members. Not his children, but his his sibling and two of his nieces. One of them, in fact, has downloaded music illegally on my own computer. :)
I installed this as soon as it came out, as did many other Mac users. My Mac (mini DP Intel 1.67GHz, 2GB RAM) slowed to a crawl as soon as I launched it. I had to yank the power cable. I uninstalled it and all was well. This is a common experience. If you're just going to try out a new version, cool, go for it, maybe it'll go well. But please understand that it's a beta -- don't plan on getting any work done with this.
The Dutch have a more restrained version of this that works quite well, called the "woonerf." (It means "street for living.")
In heavily-trafficked areas where cars will always move slowly and multiple modes of transportation come together (bicyclists, pedestrians, mass transit, scooters, cars, etc.), it seems that it works better if they self-regulate. Woonerven came into being in The Netherlands in the '60s and '70s, and the idea is to have a common space shared by all of these types of transit. Obstacles are placed in the street (planters, trees, parking spaces, etc.) to prevent traffic from moving quickly. This also turns pedestrians into the primary users of the space, making vehicles the intruders. Cars seldom exceed 10mph in woonerven.
Holland and Denmark have converted 6,500 brief stretches of road into woonerven. Traffic fatality rates have dropped to nothing. Intersections were a few annual fatalities were routine haven't seen a single death. That's a) because automobile drivers cannot drive through quickly because they're so varying and b) because 20mph is the cap of speed at which pedestrians can avoid serious injury when being struck by a car.
Happily, 18.5mph is the speed at which urban traffic flows best, many studies have shown. Coincidentally, this is also a speed at which there's no need for traffic control systems.
We have woonerf-like traffic patterns (and self-regulating patterns, as in the article) throughout the world now. Look at rush hour on Paris' Avenue de la Grande Armee: it's got four lanes of traffic at noon on a Sunday, but come rush hour people up and decide that maybe six is better. Look at Beijing during rush hour -- hordes of bicyclists mingling with packed autos, scooters weaving through the chaos.
England's got them, too. They call them "home zones." They're in a few dozen places now. They can't be more than a third of a mile long, and can't be used by more than 100 vehicles per hour. More traffic means that it's just not a viable home zone.
For more on this see Linda Baker's 2004 article for Salon, Anthony Flint's 2004 Boston Globe article, and walkinginfo.org's page about woonerven.
Even in the latest issue (September 2006), they persist in assessing the rate of Mac OS X spyware and virus infections by conducting a survey, an annual gaffe on their part. Rather than checking around and discovering that no such malware exists in the wild, they assume that computer users are able to judge for themselves the cause of computer difficulties.
This would be like studying the mechanisms of natural selection by way of a survey. Hey, whaddyaknow, turns out there's no such thing as evolution, a survey of Americans would have to conclude.
Consumers Union knows better. I don't know why they keep repeating this mistake.
-Waldo Jaquith
Richmond, VA provides this service on many meters. I've never used it, but I couldn't help but notice 'em last time I was walking around downtown.
-Waldo Jaquith
He promptly received this reply:
Presumably the two-headed cat is forthcoming.
-Waldo Jaquith
I ignored posts like this for years, figuring it was like the Linux vs. BSD debates -- just a bunch of zealots. I was wrong.
/. peer pressure and switched to Postfix. It's just like Sendmail, only it doesn't suck. I didn't know Sendmail sucked until I used Postfix. It's easy, it's secure, and my servers haven't once been 0wn3d because of the ubiquitous MTA flaws of Sendmail.
Years after I mastered mc files and learned the magic of m4, back around 2002, I succumbed to
Some day I'll try Qmail. Baby steps.
-Waldo Jaquith
Here in Charlottesville, home of the National Ground Intelligence Center (you might know them for a little kerfuffle involving their providing bad intelligence about nuclear weapons to some president...something about a war?), they've long had a thick wire mesh covering all of their windows. A former employee told me, when I was a kid, that it was designed to reflect microwaves for this very reason.
-Waldo Jaquith
It's funny -- just as this /. story came up in my newsreader, I was reading through the Text Encoding Initiative's introduction to TEI, trying to learn about it for implementation in the Virginia Quarterly Review's archives.
TEI is rather an old standard, as I understand it, that serves as an markup standard for the sort of documents that you might find in a library -- books, articles, letters, etc. Rather than using full-on SGML, or an invented XML standard, TEI exists for marking up documents and describing how its different parts relate to each other and how different documents relate to one another. It's delightfully simple, and very much like HTML, only richer. I gather it's the primary standard for such things.
Those who wish to find out more can visit the Text Encoding Initiative Consortium's website.
-Waldo Jaquith
I've had to alter the formatting slightly to get it past Slashdot's spam filter.
"Carrot and stick" refers to putting a carrot at the end of a stick, which is held above the head of a reluctant mule by its passenger. The mule walks forward to get the carrot, which it can never quite reach, at least until it arrives at its destination, when it's given the carrot. "Carrot and stick" means "incentive." It does not mean "alternately rewarding and beating." Anybody who's beaten a mule knows full well that the damned thing will just kick you in the head.
-Waldo Jaquith
This story scared the hell out of me at first glance.
"Whaddid I do?!"
-Waldo Jaquith
Human activity, either directly (e.g. the Dodo) or indirectly (e.g. the Amazon rainforests).
Erm. In what way is the destruction of the Amazon indirect? We chopped those down just as surely as we hunted down the dodos.
Let's try an example like global climate change or construction of roadways that severely limit the habitat of migratory mammals. That's indirect.
-Waldo Jaquith
In July of 2000, IIRC, Orrin Hatch provided a moment of political awakening for many Slashdotters. During the Napster hearings, ol' Orrin stood up and asked if Napster couldn't just "track people by their intellectual property address"?
I think of it as "the collective face-slap heard round the world."
-Waldo Jaquith
I, for one, welcome our new monkey overlords.
-Waldo Jaquith
If Windows has 90% of the market share and Windows uses two mouse buttons, then at the very least having two mouse buttons is not an impediment to computer usability.
If Windows has 90% of the market share and Windows crashes a lot, then at the very least crashing a lot is not an impediment to computer usability.
If Windows has 90% of the market share and Windows is prone to viruses and spyware, then at the very least being prone to viruses and spyware is not an impediment to computer usability.
If Windows has 90% of the market share and Windows applications' user interface standards vary wildly, then at the very least user interface is not an impediment to computer usability.
If Windows has 90% of the market share and Windows only works when you stuff carrots up your nose, then at the very least the carrot-stuffing requirement is not an impediment to computer usability.
-Waldo Jaquith
But it's kind of embarrassing that a Web site that purports to carry "news for nerds" should just parrot the misinformation carried in the wire service report.
How ridiculous that Slashdot should believe the media coverage about a secret event held in a highly-controlled military zone off the coast of Alaska! Why, Rob or Jamie or somebody should have been in a little rowboat, monitoring the whole thing themselves.
And they call themselves geeks... Feh!
-Waldo Jaquith
Or, you could have just entered "Wired" in your search terms. :)
Fact is, I've been included in a bunch of media outlets' coverage for various reasons -- CNN, AP, ABC News, Wall Street Journal, MTV, VH1, New York Times, Boston Globe, and, in fact, Slashdot not the least of 'em (including "ACLU Joins Fray Over Cyber Patrol Censorware" and "Artificial Intelligence At The COPA, COPA Commission").
I'm a big goober.
-Waldo Jaquith