The T-ford was painted black because the black paint dried the quickest. Simple as that. And why yes, Microsoft do spark competition and innovation with their monopolist tactics.
Stallman against copyrighted software? WTF are you talking about? Stallman (and the FSF) likes copyright, but they simply think that copyleft is a superiour buisness model - and copyleft is not a seperate system of protection, it's basically a weakened form of copyright. Copyright gives an author exclusive rights to his or her work, and the right to give others these rights. An artist may say, "Copy this painting all you want, but if anyone asks give me credit." The GPL would not work without copyright. You know the "no further restrictions"-clause, that would not work without copyright. What Stallman and the FSF are against is simply stronger versions of copyright, which they feel infringe freedoms of speech and press.
The parliament, the only elected body, has little to NO power whatsoever. The commision says, "we want to do this." Parliament says, "that's a very stupid idea, no way." Whereupon the commision says: "Oh, fuck you, we'll do it anyway."
An internet protocol is a protocol for communication between networks. The internet is consists of many smaller networks, so if you have only one net, it is not an internet by definiton. And btw, Al Gore did not claim that he invented the internet, only that he took the initiative in creating it. Check snopes.com
Yeah, the Swedish DOJ has considered this. One of our largest ISPs responded by saying that they would have to cover Gotland (Sweden's largest island) with disks to store it. All hail Big Brother!
Well, I was going to post the Java applet that mathematically proves the distance your fingers travel when typing a text, but someone else did it before me. So science, you say. How about mathematics, computer science and biology in one test? Is that scientific enough? Evolutionary algorithm applied to keyboards.
I cannot agree more, about the keycaps that is. I changed to Dvorak six months ago, and moved my keycaps. It helped when I learned the layout, but I was forced to look at my keyboard and it was uneven (and looked ugly). Then I got a new box, first thing I do after setting up it is trying to change the keycaps, guess what, the keys on the top row can't be moved to any other position. But, I changed layout to dvorak, and that forced me to learn touch typing. Touch typing is definitely one of my most useful skills, but it has fucked up my ability to type QWERTY; Whenever I sit at a QWERTY keyboard I look at the screen, not the keyboard... And type complete gibberish. But, dvorak is so much better. Did you know that the 20 most common words of the English language can be typed entirely on the home row?
What I hate about the windows shell is not something that is wrong with it, but something that is in bash. If I want to say, run a python script with bash I type python2.4 script.py in the directory where the script is. Under windows I type: cd../../python24 python script.py
And that forces me to put script.py in the directory python24. If it happens to be on the desktop, or in some folder, well, I can't cd to it, I have to type the entire path. And that's a real pain in the ass considering that the tab-completion sucks. Say my python script is in Python24/project/bin. I can tab-complete project/, but not bin. UNIX shells simply pwn windows shells because they are designed to work, and work well.
Re:the code of conduct for free software distribut
on
Drafting GPL3
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· Score: 0
The freedom to study and modify the program, of course.
Re:the code of conduct for free software distribut
on
Drafting GPL3
·
· Score: -1
Which group do you think is larger, developers or users? What do you think is more important to Joe Average: that his software is free (as in speech, possibly as in beer) and will remain so, or that some skinny geek with acne living in his mother's basement has some freedom to do whatever he wants with something that Joe does not understand or even knows what it is (the source)?
Re:the code of conduct for free software distribut
on
Drafting GPL3
·
· Score: 0, Interesting
No. There is a reason for laws, even in a free society. That reason is that freedom cannot exist without rules. Freedom does not mean you can buy a car and run over some pedestrians. Laws are there to stop people from infringing on other people's freedoms. Theft is infringing on someone's right to own stuff, murder is infringing on someone's right to live. And so on. However, laws like the Patriot act are not there to protect people's freedom from being infringed. If there is freedom, there must be some kind of protection of that freedom. And another reason for the GPL to require you to distribute GPL'd software is that all humans are equal, everyone should have access to free software. To put it plain and simple, the GPL does not infringe on anyone's freedom, it protects freedom from being infringed. And BSD-licensed software can't be distributed as you wish either, the advertising clause.
Yes, standard keyboards for cellular phones suck. I wrote a python script some time ago in the same vein as the program that tested randomly generated layouts against Dvorak. It generates a number of layouts randomly, lets them type a text, and does scoring. The results are intresting. The best layouts are up to 24% better than the current standard layout, the worst some 25% worse. And also, the best layouts all resemble the dvorak keyboard layout. They place the most used letters so that they need only on keypress, and place vowels and consonants on different keys. Some more information
Slashdot Mirror
No, because they would still lead to monopolies and they would still require expensive lawyers to enforce.
The T-ford was painted black because the black paint dried the quickest. Simple as that.
And why yes, Microsoft do spark competition and innovation with their monopolist tactics.
Stallman against copyrighted software? WTF are you talking about?
Stallman (and the FSF) likes copyright, but they simply think that copyleft is a superiour buisness model - and copyleft is not a seperate system of protection, it's basically a weakened form of copyright. Copyright gives an author exclusive rights to his or her work, and the right to give others these rights. An artist may say, "Copy this painting all you want, but if anyone asks give me credit."
The GPL would not work without copyright. You know the "no further restrictions"-clause, that would not work without copyright.
What Stallman and the FSF are against is simply stronger versions of copyright, which they feel infringe freedoms of speech and press.
The parliament, the only elected body, has little to NO power whatsoever. The commision says, "we want to do this." Parliament says, "that's a very stupid idea, no way." Whereupon the commision says: "Oh, fuck you, we'll do it anyway."
A cheap music store online, selling music in several formats (mp3, ogg, flac) without DRM.
Cheaper CDs. Eliminate middlemen.
If you want to pay Bill, then you should use Windows. ;)
Noooooooooooooooooooooo!
Anti-lameness filter: "Your comment violated the "postercomment" compression filter. Try less whitespace and/or less repetition. Comment aborted."
An internet protocol is a protocol for communication between networks. The internet is consists of many smaller networks, so if you have only one net, it is not an internet by definiton.
And btw, Al Gore did not claim that he invented the internet, only that he took the initiative in creating it. Check snopes.com
Yeah, the Swedish DOJ has considered this. One of our largest ISPs responded by saying that they would have to cover Gotland (Sweden's largest island) with disks to store it. All hail Big Brother!
Because then we can download Linux ISOs faster... Oh wait... FDL'd movies? Yeah! We will only use this to download legal movies.[/sarcasm]
Of course not, it would be an infringement of his inellectual property! Next slashdot headline: Bill Gates to DRM his Body.
Show me said layout. I seriously doubt your claim. -1 Troll, anyone?
Well, I was going to post the Java applet that mathematically proves the distance your fingers travel when typing a text, but someone else did it before me.
So science, you say. How about mathematics, computer science and biology in one test? Is that scientific enough?
Evolutionary algorithm applied to keyboards.
I cannot agree more, about the keycaps that is. I changed to Dvorak six months ago, and moved my keycaps. It helped when I learned the layout, but I was forced to look at my keyboard and it was uneven (and looked ugly). Then I got a new box, first thing I do after setting up it is trying to change the keycaps, guess what, the keys on the top row can't be moved to any other position. But, I changed layout to dvorak, and that forced me to learn touch typing. Touch typing is definitely one of my most useful skills, but it has fucked up my ability to type QWERTY; Whenever I sit at a QWERTY keyboard I look at the screen, not the keyboard... And type complete gibberish.
But, dvorak is so much better. Did you know that the 20 most common words of the English language can be typed entirely on the home row?
Root beer, you do realize that it is horrible from a security point of view? Beer and running as root do not mix!
No, the answer is always, has always been and will always be 42.
And they say Windows is user-friendly, that's eight clicks and some typing for something *nix does automatically. Thanks a lot for the tip!
What I hate about the windows shell is not something that is wrong with it, but something that is in bash. If I want to say, run a python script with bash I type python2.4 script.py in the directory where the script is. Under windows I type: ../../python24
cd
python script.py
And that forces me to put script.py in the directory python24. If it happens to be on the desktop, or in some folder, well, I can't cd to it, I have to type the entire path. And that's a real pain in the ass considering that the tab-completion sucks. Say my python script is in Python24/project/bin. I can tab-complete project/, but not bin.
UNIX shells simply pwn windows shells because they are designed to work, and work well.
The freedom to study and modify the program, of course.
Which group do you think is larger, developers or users? What do you think is more important to Joe Average: that his software is free (as in speech, possibly as in beer) and will remain so, or that some skinny geek with acne living in his mother's basement has some freedom to do whatever he wants with something that Joe does not understand or even knows what it is (the source)?
No. There is a reason for laws, even in a free society. That reason is that freedom cannot exist without rules. Freedom does not mean you can buy a car and run over some pedestrians. Laws are there to stop people from infringing on other people's freedoms.
Theft is infringing on someone's right to own stuff, murder is infringing on someone's right to live. And so on. However, laws like the Patriot act are not there to protect people's freedom from being infringed.
If there is freedom, there must be some kind of protection of that freedom.
And another reason for the GPL to require you to distribute GPL'd software is that all humans are equal, everyone should have access to free software.
To put it plain and simple, the GPL does not infringe on anyone's freedom, it protects freedom from being infringed.
And BSD-licensed software can't be distributed as you wish either, the advertising clause.
Actually, you can patent algorithms, the LZW algorithm for example. At least in the US, but soon in Europe too.
Free/Open Source Software, you insensitive clod!
Yes, standard keyboards for cellular phones suck. I wrote a python script some time ago in the same vein as the program that tested randomly generated layouts against Dvorak. It generates a number of layouts randomly, lets them type a text, and does scoring. The results are intresting. The best layouts are up to 24% better than the current standard layout, the worst some 25% worse. And also, the best layouts all resemble the dvorak keyboard layout. They place the most used letters so that they need only on keypress, and place vowels and consonants on different keys.
Some more information
Hint: It's a joke.