The material taught in most High Schools could be learned by a student in 1/4 the time if the student is remotely intelligent.
totally true. and totally irrelevant. when i was in high school, the math department had a policy: if you failed to complete 0 or 1 homework assignments in any marking period, your grade was raised 1/3 (A to A+, for example); 2-3 and it was left alone; 4-6 it was dropped 1/3, 7-9, dropped 2/3, and so on. i routinely declined to do my homework. despite a test+quiz average of ~90%, i ended most marking periods with a grade of a D+ or C-. i didn't care; the test showed i learned the material, right? they just weren't giving me anything hard; i could've learned it all in 1/4 the time, for sure. but then i went off and graduated. and got a job. and had to learn to do things that actually weren't easy. and that's when i discovered that i had totally missed the point of my math homework. it had nothing to do with learning the particular formulas; it was about learning how to learn. study habits and work ethic. starting good study habits on easy material is smarter than starting it on hard material, because it makes it easier to tell where the problem is when you don't get it. it took me a little over a year of slogging through things and not understanding why i couldn't get it ("but i'm smart!") before i realized what was going on. and i've still not corrected the damage i caused myself because i thought i was smarter - and, more egregiously, knew more about education - than the professional educators charged with teaching me.
if i could change any set of things from my high school career, i'd have done my math homework ("oh, it's too easy!") and paid more attention to my spanish classes ("what will i need that for? everyone i need to talk to speaks english." - god, could i really have been that stupid? yes, yes i could have. we were in high school. we were all stupid). that's it.
as such, the stated policy of totally overwriting your homework grade sounds awful. i'm sure you like it - i know i would have, at the time and for a few years afterwards - but it totally negates the most important purpose of homework assignments beyond simple reading selections.
I agree that public schools hinder society more than they assist it.
oh, come off it. you really think the country would be better off with no public education system? because that's what you're asserting there. questions of whether the existing system's got problems or not (of course it does) are secondary to that. please explain how the dissolution of modern public education would benefit society today.
Considering the current public school system was developed for the 70s, it is definitely time to scrap it and start fresh.
er, why, because it was designed in the '70s? my house was designed in the '40s, does that mean i should tear it down and replace it? simply because they're "old"? (and only someone young enough to be involved in "No Child Left Behind" could think coming from the '70s is "old") this is such a phenomenally immature attitude; simply amazing, really. no indication of any depth of understanding of the problems ("some students don't care"? that's different from when, exactly?), no suggestions for an alternative system, no explanation of how the alternative would better address the observed failings, and certainly no evidential support. just "thing X has a flaw; let's tear it down and start over".
i think you might be missing one tiny difference here. let me see if i can try to clarify this subtle point:
muslims are people. batteries are inatimate objects.
people, which we've established muslims are a subset of, have rights, including the right of religious freedom and freedom from discrimination based on said religion. there are other, differences, too. one can check to see if a battery is the affected model by simple inspection of its serial number. humans don't come with easy ways to check if they're terrorists. and, of course, before that one can even check to see that the thing in question is, in fact, a battery quite easily; there isn't a currently extant test to determine if someone's a muslim. this ban's probably stupid, but not for any of the reasons you say.
okay, good point in that FDR may have been the first to use the commerce clause. but i disagree that the effect is the same. both end up with arguably unconstitutional actions being passed. but FDRs method at least provides for the opportunity of subsequent review. it stretches individual laws past their originally intended effect, but preserves the function of the system as a whole (checks and balances and all that). lincoln just said "screw it", under the logic that actions done to preserve the Union in the face of a threat could plausibly be justified if they were outside the mandate of the document that established said Union.
it doesn't take much to get from lincoln to bush. his concept of the Unitary Executive relies on much the same sort of logic, except now the "threat" is just a general environmental concern, not an actual war. the idea of the federal executive being above/beyond review for the good of the country, though, remains - and is just as invalid under the Constitution today as it was when lincoln did it.
on lincoln and slavery: he purportedly said "If I can save the Union by freeing none of the slaves, I will do it. If I can save the Union by freeing some of the slaves, I will do it. And if I must saved the Union by freeing all of the slaves, I will do it." he clearly had his priorities. that's not incompatible with his publicly stated believe that slavery should be ended, and that he'd work towards doing so. but his priority was the preservation of the Union (explicitly; implicitly, also the establishment of the supremacy of the federal government over that of the states). still, it's difficult to say he was our worst president, even if he was only good accidentally or incidentally. he's also got some pretty stiff competition: Grant for totally buggering reconstruction, for example, and a few contend based solely on their treatment of the continent's native population. oh, and then there's the current idiot who might've done more to undermine the foundations of the country than anyone else. none of this is to defend lincoln, just point out he's got some pretty stiff competition.
in the sense that this will apply to them, as well, sure. the law applies equally. but did you get the part about what this really means? yeah, amazon, just like target, will have to make information on their site about their physical sales locations accessible. so next time i need the store hours for my local amazon brick-and-mortor shop...
i'm certainly not going to argue that the commerce clause isn't [mis|over]-used, but you don't really think any of that started with FDR, do you? at the absolute latest, Lincoln was pretty clearly ignoring the constitutional balance between state and federal rights for his entire term, and it all just fell apart during and shortly after reconstruction. while the issue of slavery tends to overshadow what the war was really about in nearly every debate (and not without reason), it's entirely probably that, as far as the constitution's concerned, the wrong side won that one.
the administrative circle thing and restrictions on operators in multiple states are pretty bizarre, though. there really is a lot of unnecessary bureaucracy in the system there (or "here", as that's where i am right now).
i hate the guy too, but he won the election. he lost the vote. it's sad/tragic that the rules for elections in the US aren't just "whoever wins the vote wins", but they're not. by the currently-standing rules, bush did, in fact, win the election.
in addition to the other (entirely valid) reasons noted by folks for wanting to get around the horridly flawed idea of WGA authentication: i run windows inside emulation, generally without a direct real-world network connection. it's much nicer to be able to download bits in my native environment and move them over at my leisure.
Do they understand the destructive power of America's nuclear arsenal?
just so i'm clear: the fact that we don't kill everyone - just, say, one or two hundred thousand in the past few years, destabilize regional politics in asia and the part of the americas that doesn't border us, are the only folks to have actually used a nuke and did it on civilian targets, and provide direct military support to one of the most repressive, aggressive regimes in the world (outside our own, of course) - makes us pretty much okay?
your second paragraph is one of the stupidest things i've heard in years. these folks "following......a path of good" are doing no such thing, and you have to be either willfully ignorant or just plain mentally incapacitated to believe they are. bush just knows what the consequences would be for his and his buddies' comfortable little lives.
and of course the 9/11 coverage is farcical. yeah, murder's wrong. congratulations on that one; good catch. but 9/11 was hardly unique, in either scale or scope. it was just the first time americans were the targets of something this significant, rather than the perpetrators (which was common). while it's by no means exhaustive, check out Power and Terror for an introduction. the farce - the tragedy - of the 9/11 coverage is that we can pretend that it was some unprecedented display of hate when the reality is that we've been complicit in bigger atrocities for half a century.
close: it's not "a device capable of handling video", but "a device capable of receiving television transmissions." your computer doesn't normally qualify, despite the fact that it can handle a wide variety of video no problem; a television tuner card in said television would qualify. there's cases of folks with actual televisions getting off unlicensed if they can convince the inspectors it's never used for actual television (typically, if it has no antenna of its own), but i don't know the details of that portion of the law. (i lived in london, owned no television, and was constantly being told the inspectors would be by "any day now" and that i'd better get my license now. never saw 'em.)
...the fact that from a hardware perspective, a Mac and a PC are now pretty much the same, except in design, OS, name and - most importantly for Apple - price. I mean what makes a Mac a Mac? The OS, plain and simple.
nope. the OS is the most important single aspect, i'll grant that. but the fact that you can say things like "a Mac and a PC are now pretty much the same, except in design..." with a straight face is highly amusing. you act like design is a triviality. Apple excels at design both from an aesthetics perspective (Sony's the only other major vendor that seems to care about this) and from a functionality perspective (integrated iSight, MagSafe, placement of ports, slots, speakers...). this is a Big Deal. even if i had to run something other than OS X all the time, i'd much rather do it on Apple hardware than anything else.
why Apple, won't you let me run your OS on other Intel hardware?
this, again? look, Apple is a systems vendor. complete, integrated systems. it's really difficult to figure out how to make a software vending business work, especially on the scale Apple does it, and especially an operating systems software business (hint: name two that are actually successful). hardware's easier to turn a profit on, but the margins are tiny. selling integrated systems, engineered as a whole, they get to leverage one to the benefit of the other and produce both hardware and software that's better than their competitors nearest parallels.
you claim to want a phone focused only on remote communication. yet you're stripping out the camera and video capabilities. those are forms of communication, for certain. and you want a biometric scanner? that's not communication (which isn't to say it's not a good idea, but be aware of what your goals are versus what you think they are). your phone book features also aren't directly related to "communication", really, but rather addressing. i want bluetooth and/or USB, which is data networking, locally; i want data communications capabilities generally, but i'm willing to get more radical about "only communications" - dump the address book, give me two(-ish) programmable buttons.
the problem is that all these folks say "i just want a phone that does X, Y, and Z, and i don't care about A-W", but everybody's X, Y, and Z is different. the phone manufacturers can only produce so many models, and the stores can only stock so many; the market drives them to hit averages and exclude the peripheral. for example, the grandparent wanted a USB modem. well, that's not on most peoples XYZ list; most folks who want a USB modem also want a camera phone, so they only (not literally "only", but the focus, still) build ones that bundle the two. there's no build-to-order market, clearly. i have a very small set of features i want, but i'm well outside the curve. actually what i want is very close to the firefly, except some form of data service (preferably bluetooth) is a must and it clearly should have some form of address book syncing via USB/bluetooth (programming it on that 5-key pad is stupid).
...it's generally quite easy to execute stack-based code efficiently on a register-based CPU.
i don't think this is true. it's easy to write the code to do it, but the translation between a stack-based system and a more traditional system remains an expensive operation in most cases. take a look at The design of the Inferno virtual machine for a description of the Dis virtual machine and a discussion of the comparative benefits of stack and memory transfer virtual machines.
of course, this discussion is somewhat removed from the article topic, which is the implementation of a real stack-based processor. this sounds promising, as long as it's not designed to be a "java processor" or a "CLI processor" - those always fail. there's another really good Bell Labs paper talking about their experiences with the hobbit/crisp chip, designed to be a "C processor", and why that's a fundamentally flawed idea. lacking that, see the wikipedia article on the Hobbit, particularly the last paragraph.
you mean "its GUI sucks." or perhaps "its GUIs suck." you need to make the number match. and BeOS should be possessive. the final sentence fragment has a significant parse error. also, your comments are totally irrelevant, and presumes much.
if this is what you learned from Software Engineering 101, you should go demand your money back for your entire education. you've learned all the wrong lessons.
yes, most software is complex, but it doesn't have to be. the complexity generally comes from a few areas, like legacy support and poorly thought out design compromises. compare, for example, the Plan 9 kernel, which is ~180k lines of code for about a half dozen architectures, to linux, which is... well, an order of magnitude more than that, at least, even stripping out the vast driver support. it's also better structured and more readable. then compare other components: plan 9's ndb with Unix's whole host of files in/etc (how many files contain some combination of hostname, ether addr, IP addr, and so on?). and that's just low-level stuff. move up the stack towards the user and it gets more and more true. Apple's Safari is such a great experience for most people who use it because it's much simpler than most of the alternatives, say IE 7. the land-line telephone world retains many of its customers because mobile phones are more complex to use. software doesn't have to be complex, and folks like you who assume it does produce most of the complex code, because you've given up. and once you give up on trying, sure, it all looks like it has to be complex. it's a nice self-reinforcing fatalist outlook.
sure, sometimes complexity is unavoidable. but we should strive to make that the exception rather than the rule. and it can be, if we put the effort into it.
no, it wasn't. see your sibling for a slightly more detailed response, but basically they wanted it to be able to run unix programs (in some undefined way), but did not intend for it to be a unix system. i'm not sure "unix-like" is defined enough to be useful in discussion.
the fact that they intended HURD to be able to run unix programs does not make it Unix; hell, it doesn't even make it unix-like. Plan 9 can run unix programs; with the right intermediaries, Windows can run unix programs. are either of these systems unix systems? of course not. it's about the system design, and GNU had something very different from Unix in mind for HURD.
i can't really speak directly to linus' motivations for using the GNU stuff instead of the BSD stuff, but i imagine the cloud cast by the AT&T lawsuit was a significant factor; it certainly was for others around the same time, including some of the big iron and commercial unix vendors. that hesitation cost BSD a lot of traction and gave linux and GNU a chance to catch up. but it's downright silly to claim that GNU's toolset in 1991 was as complete or as correct as BSD's at the same time.
the statement wasn't mine, i was just reacting to an intentional mis-characterization of an ancestor post. but regardless, it certainly does make sense (regardless of correctness): the claim is that people like Linus will have more of an impact on and more control over the future than people like RMS.
please read before responding to things. note, in particular, the "initially" in the text you've quoted. IBM and others didn't start investing in Linux for nearly a decade after the initial announcement; that doesn't qualify as "initially". so your speculation on IBM's decision making may well be correct (who's to say they just wouldn't create an internal fork?), but is totally irrelevant regardless.
well.. yeah! and the alternative is what, having provisional patents - which don't have nearly the burden of details and have no examination or challenging procedure - stick around forever? having them expire in short order and then turn into public information is exactly as it should be.
A) You're confusing Open Source with Free Software, and probably also with "GPL-compatible". BSD licenses are not Free Software because they do not "preserve freedom" (sic) in the way GPL does. i think i agree that it's a stupid distinction, but the FSF has fought hard to promote a given definition of "Free Software", and as a trademark-like name, it's got different meaning from "free software", using the common english definitions of those words. besides, if you use the broader definition (which i'm certainly not going to try to talk you out of, since i think it's the better one), the point in the grandparent post is even less defensible. i was trying to be charitable.
B) BSDs do not generally use glibc. there have been individual projects to do so, but they are not the default configuration (and the projects never get very far). gcc is used regularly, it's true, but it's not the only option. replacing that would probably require the most work, but only in the sense of finding the suitable replacement. i'm not sure which compilers have been used with which kernels, but there's plenty of other free compilers out there which will work. BSDs, unlike Linux, don't rely on the gcc "extensions" to C. also, even if that were true (it isn't), it still doesn't help the point i was replying to: there's plenty of other systems which are free (and Free, to the extent there's a difference) which incorporate 0 lines of GNU code.
you may be right about the fee, i don't know. but especially at $100, that seems entirely reasonable. and you certainly do not need an attorney. your statement that it'll cost more if you don't want to do the leg work yourself is kinda silly: well, yeah! the provisional patent application is exactly what you're saying: a description of the invention which doesn't grant any patent rights but provides a stake in the ground for a future formal filing. the difference seems to be that you want simpler forms and lower cost, which i guess is a fine thing to argue for, but don't act like we need a whole new class of thing.
Trying to build Free Software system without any GNU code is almost impossible.
that's only true depending on how you define "Free Software". given that you're using the capital F and S, you seem to imply GNU's definition of "Free", as embodied in the GPL. in which case, sure, you can't build a system which is based on GNU's philosophy without a good chunk of GNU's code. but is that surprising? it's practically a tautology.
not everybody cares about GNU's philosophy, and they certainly didn't invent the idea of open source or free (little-f) software. using the broader definition of "free software", you can do exactly what you're asking with BSDs with not too much work at all, and there's plenty of free (even OSI-approved) systems out there which contain no GPL code at all (see Plan 9 for an example). you have a very narrow view of the world is all.
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when i was in high school, the math department had a policy: if you failed to complete 0 or 1 homework assignments in any marking period, your grade was raised 1/3 (A to A+, for example); 2-3 and it was left alone; 4-6 it was dropped 1/3, 7-9, dropped 2/3, and so on. i routinely declined to do my homework. despite a test+quiz average of ~90%, i ended most marking periods with a grade of a D+ or C-. i didn't care; the test showed i learned the material, right? they just weren't giving me anything hard; i could've learned it all in 1/4 the time, for sure.
but then i went off and graduated. and got a job. and had to learn to do things that actually weren't easy. and that's when i discovered that i had totally missed the point of my math homework. it had nothing to do with learning the particular formulas; it was about learning how to learn. study habits and work ethic. starting good study habits on easy material is smarter than starting it on hard material, because it makes it easier to tell where the problem is when you don't get it. it took me a little over a year of slogging through things and not understanding why i couldn't get it ("but i'm smart!") before i realized what was going on. and i've still not corrected the damage i caused myself because i thought i was smarter - and, more egregiously, knew more about education - than the professional educators charged with teaching me.
if i could change any set of things from my high school career, i'd have done my math homework ("oh, it's too easy!") and paid more attention to my spanish classes ("what will i need that for? everyone i need to talk to speaks english." - god, could i really have been that stupid? yes, yes i could have. we were in high school. we were all stupid). that's it.
as such, the stated policy of totally overwriting your homework grade sounds awful. i'm sure you like it - i know i would have, at the time and for a few years afterwards - but it totally negates the most important purpose of homework assignments beyond simple reading selections.
i think you might be missing one tiny difference here. let me see if i can try to clarify this subtle point:
muslims are people. batteries are inatimate objects.
people, which we've established muslims are a subset of, have rights, including the right of religious freedom and freedom from discrimination based on said religion. there are other, differences, too. one can check to see if a battery is the affected model by simple inspection of its serial number. humans don't come with easy ways to check if they're terrorists. and, of course, before that one can even check to see that the thing in question is, in fact, a battery quite easily; there isn't a currently extant test to determine if someone's a muslim.
this ban's probably stupid, but not for any of the reasons you say.
okay, good point in that FDR may have been the first to use the commerce clause. but i disagree that the effect is the same. both end up with arguably unconstitutional actions being passed. but FDRs method at least provides for the opportunity of subsequent review. it stretches individual laws past their originally intended effect, but preserves the function of the system as a whole (checks and balances and all that). lincoln just said "screw it", under the logic that actions done to preserve the Union in the face of a threat could plausibly be justified if they were outside the mandate of the document that established said Union.
it doesn't take much to get from lincoln to bush. his concept of the Unitary Executive relies on much the same sort of logic, except now the "threat" is just a general environmental concern, not an actual war. the idea of the federal executive being above/beyond review for the good of the country, though, remains - and is just as invalid under the Constitution today as it was when lincoln did it.
on lincoln and slavery: he purportedly said "If I can save the Union by freeing none of the slaves, I will do it. If I can save the Union by freeing some of the slaves, I will do it. And if I must saved the Union by freeing all of the slaves, I will do it." he clearly had his priorities. that's not incompatible with his publicly stated believe that slavery should be ended, and that he'd work towards doing so. but his priority was the preservation of the Union (explicitly; implicitly, also the establishment of the supremacy of the federal government over that of the states). still, it's difficult to say he was our worst president, even if he was only good accidentally or incidentally. he's also got some pretty stiff competition: Grant for totally buggering reconstruction, for example, and a few contend based solely on their treatment of the continent's native population. oh, and then there's the current idiot who might've done more to undermine the foundations of the country than anyone else. none of this is to defend lincoln, just point out he's got some pretty stiff competition.
in the sense that this will apply to them, as well, sure. the law applies equally. but did you get the part about what this really means? yeah, amazon, just like target, will have to make information on their site about their physical sales locations accessible. so next time i need the store hours for my local amazon brick-and-mortor shop...
oh. wait.
i'm certainly not going to argue that the commerce clause isn't [mis|over]-used, but you don't really think any of that started with FDR, do you? at the absolute latest, Lincoln was pretty clearly ignoring the constitutional balance between state and federal rights for his entire term, and it all just fell apart during and shortly after reconstruction. while the issue of slavery tends to overshadow what the war was really about in nearly every debate (and not without reason), it's entirely probably that, as far as the constitution's concerned, the wrong side won that one.
the administrative circle thing and restrictions on operators in multiple states are pretty bizarre, though. there really is a lot of unnecessary bureaucracy in the system there (or "here", as that's where i am right now).
right now, you've got a 20% Informative mod.
only on slashdot.
i hate the guy too, but he won the election. he lost the vote. it's sad/tragic that the rules for elections in the US aren't just "whoever wins the vote wins", but they're not. by the currently-standing rules, bush did, in fact, win the election.
doesn't make him any less of a disaster, though.
in addition to the other (entirely valid) reasons noted by folks for wanting to get around the horridly flawed idea of WGA authentication: i run windows inside emulation, generally without a direct real-world network connection. it's much nicer to be able to download bits in my native environment and move them over at my leisure.
your second paragraph is one of the stupidest things i've heard in years. these folks "following...
and of course the 9/11 coverage is farcical. yeah, murder's wrong. congratulations on that one; good catch. but 9/11 was hardly unique, in either scale or scope. it was just the first time americans were the targets of something this significant, rather than the perpetrators (which was common). while it's by no means exhaustive, check out Power and Terror for an introduction. the farce - the tragedy - of the 9/11 coverage is that we can pretend that it was some unprecedented display of hate when the reality is that we've been complicit in bigger atrocities for half a century.
close: it's not "a device capable of handling video", but "a device capable of receiving television transmissions." your computer doesn't normally qualify, despite the fact that it can handle a wide variety of video no problem; a television tuner card in said television would qualify. there's cases of folks with actual televisions getting off unlicensed if they can convince the inspectors it's never used for actual television (typically, if it has no antenna of its own), but i don't know the details of that portion of the law.
(i lived in london, owned no television, and was constantly being told the inspectors would be by "any day now" and that i'd better get my license now. never saw 'em.)
you claim to want a phone focused only on remote communication. yet you're stripping out the camera and video capabilities. those are forms of communication, for certain. and you want a biometric scanner? that's not communication (which isn't to say it's not a good idea, but be aware of what your goals are versus what you think they are). your phone book features also aren't directly related to "communication", really, but rather addressing.
;-)
i want bluetooth and/or USB, which is data networking, locally; i want data communications capabilities generally, but i'm willing to get more radical about "only communications" - dump the address book, give me two(-ish) programmable buttons.
but i think we can agree on the ringtones.
the problem is that all these folks say "i just want a phone that does X, Y, and Z, and i don't care about A-W", but everybody's X, Y, and Z is different. the phone manufacturers can only produce so many models, and the stores can only stock so many; the market drives them to hit averages and exclude the peripheral. for example, the grandparent wanted a USB modem. well, that's not on most peoples XYZ list; most folks who want a USB modem also want a camera phone, so they only (not literally "only", but the focus, still) build ones that bundle the two. there's no build-to-order market, clearly.
i have a very small set of features i want, but i'm well outside the curve. actually what i want is very close to the firefly, except some form of data service (preferably bluetooth) is a must and it clearly should have some form of address book syncing via USB/bluetooth (programming it on that 5-key pad is stupid).
i keep asking for a "Tragic" modifier, but i can't decide whether it would be +1 or -1.
of course, this discussion is somewhat removed from the article topic, which is the implementation of a real stack-based processor. this sounds promising, as long as it's not designed to be a "java processor" or a "CLI processor" - those always fail. there's another really good Bell Labs paper talking about their experiences with the hobbit/crisp chip, designed to be a "C processor", and why that's a fundamentally flawed idea. lacking that, see the wikipedia article on the Hobbit, particularly the last paragraph.
you mean "its GUI sucks." or perhaps "its GUIs suck." you need to make the number match. and BeOS should be possessive. the final sentence fragment has a significant parse error. also, your comments are totally irrelevant, and presumes much.
if this is what you learned from Software Engineering 101, you should go demand your money back for your entire education. you've learned all the wrong lessons.
/etc (how many files contain some combination of hostname, ether addr, IP addr, and so on?). and that's just low-level stuff. move up the stack towards the user and it gets more and more true. Apple's Safari is such a great experience for most people who use it because it's much simpler than most of the alternatives, say IE 7. the land-line telephone world retains many of its customers because mobile phones are more complex to use. software doesn't have to be complex, and folks like you who assume it does produce most of the complex code, because you've given up. and once you give up on trying, sure, it all looks like it has to be complex. it's a nice self-reinforcing fatalist outlook.
yes, most software is complex, but it doesn't have to be. the complexity generally comes from a few areas, like legacy support and poorly thought out design compromises. compare, for example, the Plan 9 kernel, which is ~180k lines of code for about a half dozen architectures, to linux, which is... well, an order of magnitude more than that, at least, even stripping out the vast driver support. it's also better structured and more readable. then compare other components: plan 9's ndb with Unix's whole host of files in
sure, sometimes complexity is unavoidable. but we should strive to make that the exception rather than the rule. and it can be, if we put the effort into it.
no, it wasn't. see your sibling for a slightly more detailed response, but basically they wanted it to be able to run unix programs (in some undefined way), but did not intend for it to be a unix system. i'm not sure "unix-like" is defined enough to be useful in discussion.
- the fact that they intended HURD to be able to run unix programs does not make it Unix; hell, it doesn't even make it unix-like. Plan 9 can run unix programs; with the right intermediaries, Windows can run unix programs. are either of these systems unix systems? of course not. it's about the system design, and GNU had something very different from Unix in mind for HURD.
- i can't really speak directly to linus' motivations for using the GNU stuff instead of the BSD stuff, but i imagine the cloud cast by the AT&T lawsuit was a significant factor; it certainly was for others around the same time, including some of the big iron and commercial unix vendors. that hesitation cost BSD a lot of traction and gave linux and GNU a chance to catch up. but it's downright silly to claim that GNU's toolset in 1991 was as complete or as correct as BSD's at the same time.
- the statement wasn't mine, i was just reacting to an intentional mis-characterization of an ancestor post. but regardless, it certainly does make sense (regardless of correctness): the claim is that people like Linus will have more of an impact on and more control over the future than people like RMS.
- please read before responding to things. note, in particular, the "initially" in the text you've quoted. IBM and others didn't start investing in Linux for nearly a decade after the initial announcement; that doesn't qualify as "initially". so your speculation on IBM's decision making may well be correct (who's to say they just wouldn't create an internal fork?), but is totally irrelevant regardless.
oh, and stop being an ass.well.. yeah! and the alternative is what, having provisional patents - which don't have nearly the burden of details and have no examination or challenging procedure - stick around forever? having them expire in short order and then turn into public information is exactly as it should be.
nope.
A) You're confusing Open Source with Free Software, and probably also with "GPL-compatible". BSD licenses are not Free Software because they do not "preserve freedom" (sic) in the way GPL does. i think i agree that it's a stupid distinction, but the FSF has fought hard to promote a given definition of "Free Software", and as a trademark-like name, it's got different meaning from "free software", using the common english definitions of those words.
besides, if you use the broader definition (which i'm certainly not going to try to talk you out of, since i think it's the better one), the point in the grandparent post is even less defensible. i was trying to be charitable.
B) BSDs do not generally use glibc. there have been individual projects to do so, but they are not the default configuration (and the projects never get very far). gcc is used regularly, it's true, but it's not the only option. replacing that would probably require the most work, but only in the sense of finding the suitable replacement. i'm not sure which compilers have been used with which kernels, but there's plenty of other free compilers out there which will work. BSDs, unlike Linux, don't rely on the gcc "extensions" to C.
also, even if that were true (it isn't), it still doesn't help the point i was replying to: there's plenty of other systems which are free (and Free, to the extent there's a difference) which incorporate 0 lines of GNU code.
you may be right about the fee, i don't know. but especially at $100, that seems entirely reasonable. and you certainly do not need an attorney. your statement that it'll cost more if you don't want to do the leg work yourself is kinda silly: well, yeah! the provisional patent application is exactly what you're saying: a description of the invention which doesn't grant any patent rights but provides a stake in the ground for a future formal filing. the difference seems to be that you want simpler forms and lower cost, which i guess is a fine thing to argue for, but don't act like we need a whole new class of thing.
not everybody cares about GNU's philosophy, and they certainly didn't invent the idea of open source or free (little-f) software. using the broader definition of "free software", you can do exactly what you're asking with BSDs with not too much work at all, and there's plenty of free (even OSI-approved) systems out there which contain no GPL code at all (see Plan 9 for an example). you have a very narrow view of the world is all.