For U.S. Federal income taxes, at least, providing tax preparation features shouldn't pose much risk to the GnuCash developers.
That wasn't really my concern. My concern was mainly for the damage to GnuCash's and LDG's reputation that could ensue if a bug led to incorrect tax returns being submitted - not to mention the damage it could do to the unfortunate souls who got caught by the bug.
Correct me if I'm wrong here, but while the porn industry is huge, each individual porn flick is made with a very small budget, aren't they? Or are their 50 million dollar porn "blockbusters" out there (because presumably you'd need at least that much to film in space)?
I don't think we're opposed to the concept of Windows binaries (which implies release of Windows source code - GPL and all), but it's a big job to do the port, and our resources are directed elsewhere at this point.
If somebody ported the GNOME libraries to Cygwin, I think you'd see a GnuCash port in fairly short order. Somebody already did this, but used a non-free compatibility library rather than Cygwin, so it wasn't any use to us anyway.
P.S. Re: the hub-bub about 60+ add-on libraries: add-on libraries could be statically linked in or included in the GNUCash source tree for everything except the service providers (ie CORBA service providers). Example: many image tools include a release of libjpeg and libtiff which are then statically compiled into the executable.
They're not the ones that have caused trouble. The actual libraries that people haven't had are mostly guppi and gtkhtml, and there's been a few problems with incompatible guile versions.
There are also more issues than you might think with statically-linked libraries - for instance some of those libraries have associated data files which obviously *can't* be statically linked in.
Now, if only the US Fed (or whomever is responsible for actually issuing US currency) can start printing different denominations in different colors we'll *really* be happy . . .
Seriously, how in the heck do you Americans keep track of how much paper money they have in your wallet? It's damn near impossible when all you've got there is this undifferentiated wad of screwed-up flimsy bits of paper.
Well, we'll find out just how evil. Australians have had a serious espresso culture for quite a few years now, well before any American franchises got into the act. (I gotta say it was a shock to get to the US and find that we were well ahead of a cultural trend:) ).Starbucks, however, has just opened its first Australian store. Moreover, they've stuck their head straight into the lion's mouth, as they've chosen Lygon Street in inner Melbourne, arguably the place where Australians first discovered proper coffee, as the place to open their first store. Bring on the challenger . ..
If I read the GPL correctly, it's not that either. the relevant section, 3b, says the following with regards to what you must do when distributing binaries if you don't provide the source code with the binary:
Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code.
However, you should probably read it in view of section 3c, which says if distributing a binary, you can
Accompany it with the information you received as to the offer
to distribute corresponding source code. (This alternative is
allowed only for noncommercial distribution and only if you
received the program in object code or executable form with such
an offer, in accord with Subsection b above.)
Now, it all hangs on how you define "any third party". Given the presence of 3 c), I would assume that it would include any subsequent recipients of the binary, but I'm not convinced it extends to "anybody who wants it".
I have a friend who has lived in Japan on and off for the past five years, and according to her it's not quite as simple as that. The successful multinational companies (Honda and Sony, for example) have a much less hierachical and seniority-oriented corporate culture - and, funnily enough, they produce funky innovative products. However, Japan's domestically-oriented companies, such as banks and retailing, live up to every bad stereotype you have of conservative, addled mandarins stifling innovation and creativity.
The situation is a little bit more complex than that. Yes, politicians are being hypocritical here, but not as much as you think.
In Australia, gambling is controlled by the various state governments, who receive a significant fraction of their tax revenue from it - I think the figure in my home state is approximately 10% of state tax collected - that's about 170 AUD (85 USD) per person per year. Faced with the demands of funding stuff while keeping taxes low, raising money by tacitly encouraging gambling by increasing the opportunities to do so has been an easy option. Hence, we have massive mini-casinos full of one-armed bandits scattered throughout our suburbs and towns, horse racing, which you can bet on by phone or in virtually every pub in Australia, and massive casinos in all our major cities, which get most of their revenue from locals rather than tourists.
The federal government, however, has the power to regulate telecommunications, so internet gambling is in their bailiwick. As regular/. readers will know, the current federal government is run by a bunch of wowsers (they brought in the net censorship regs, for instance, and have tried to stack the film classification board with fundamentalist nutballs), and so it's unsurprising that they have tried this ban. If the federal government is being hypocritical, it is doing so only in that states who fund a significant part of their budgets from gambling taxes aren't going to be quite so dependent on the federal government for funds.
About the only surprise is that they have done so in such a clueful way - this stands a chance of actually working.
Go you big red fire engine!
Re:Make a decision, folks
on
ORBS Forks
·
· Score: 2
Sex is either good or bad. Pick one.
Go you big red fire engine!
Re:2001 Excursion, 1997 Accord, which pollutes mor
on
Eco-Terrorism
·
· Score: 2
Yes, a 1997 Honda Accord pollutes more than a 2001 Ford Excursion. The Accord first met LEV requirements in 1998, and the 2001 Exursion is LEV certified.
Maybe that's true if you're talking about carbon monoxide, ozone, nitrous oxide, and so on. It's totally untrue if you're talking about carbon dioxide, the primary greenhouse gas. But, of course, that's all BS some whacked-out pot-smoking European tree-huggin' hippies thought up to threaten the freedom of all patriotic 'mericans to do anything they want, screw the rest of the world . . .
And as for having your life saved, I gotta ask - what if the drunk was driving a Suburban as well, as he should have been by your logic?
Starship Troopers - Almost nothing remains true to the Grand Master's plotline. The characters are switched around, one even has a sex change from the book to the story so (s)he can be a love interest. The original POINT of the book, to be R.A.H.'s dissertation on war and government, is completely ignored in favor of changing it into gore-splattering CGI fest. An utter disappointment, in every conceivable way.
I gotta say that you missed the entire point of Starship Troopers (the movie) - as I viewed it anyway. It's not a retelling of the book, it's a parody of it. Heinlein's book, at one level anyway, is an advertisement for an anti-democratic, military dominated state, and the film neatly skewers this with such deadpan subtlety that I'm still not convinced that the actors were in on the joke, let alone the studio execs that funded the film.
I found Heinlein's book repulsive, myself, but I'm aware that this isn't a universally held opinion. Paul Verhoeven, the movie's director, certainly seemed to think so.
Aside from the download time (which, I'll grant you, might be a PITA on a 56k modem, but takes very little time on a DSL or cable connection) what's the problem with that?
Come on. I'm sure they could have done better. Installing gnucash on my system, not counting the libraries I already have installed, would take 35332k! (yes I actually checked).
Sure. You can then install Abiword, Gnumeric, Nautilus, Evolution, and Dia in another few megabytes. That's the point of shared libraries.
Oh, and by the way, have you checked just how much screenshot-heavy documentation gnucash provides?
Instead, I have to ask, did they return that code to the community?
Yes, they did - which is pretty remarkable for an incredibly secretive organisation like the NSA.
Did they attempt to prevent forking the kernel by offering the improvement for inclusion in the "standard" kernel?
By putting it out there under the GPL, they have. I don't know whether it's planned to integrate with the main tree or not - it may be that the features the NSA require interfere with other things more important for maintream use.
One thing that others have touched on is that the room that you place your sound system in makes a massive difference to the quality of the sound. In fact, if you're serious enough to spend $BIGNUM on a stereo, I'd reckon you'd really want to invest large amounts of money setting up the room for ideal sound.
I have a townhouse with a window directly behind the stereo (there's nowhere else to put it), and tile floors, and it makes a stereo that sounded excellent in my last house sound like crap. Spending extra money on a stereo in this situation, without fixing up the acoustical environment, would almost certainly be a waste of time.
Even within the Melbourne University CS department where he works (as a sysadmin, not an academic) he's legendary for his reclusiveness and the fear he strikes into academics afraid of losing their disk quota . . .
I only ever met him once - to ask him about monitoring the departmental network for faults. He's actually quite friendly and answered my dumb questions with a good deal of patience, once I had spent a week tracking him down. However, I have no doubt that he is impossible for non-technical people to deal with, because he appears to have had the part of the brain that deals with political matters removed at birth. He just doesn't care.
The man has had his day in the sun. Now it's time for the younger generation of AI researchers to come in and say "hold it! we're taking a different approach from now on. The unkept promises of AI were made by the old symbolic AI crowd. There is a new school in town. The new AI neural, it's emergent, and it's gonna to kick ass!"
Crap. The "emergent AI" stuff that's been demonstrated to date has had limitations just as profound and seemingly fundamental (but different) as traditional symbolic AI. Amongst others, it has scaling problems of its own when you try and build more complex emergent system.
Not that it's not useful, and interesting research, will undoubtedly produce some interesting production systems, and might give us some pointers along the road to HAL, but don't claim that the bright new future of is just round the corner as soon as we take off the shackles that the neats are placing on the scruffies.
Hint: I wasn't being entirely serious, but there was a point to my little rant. It's *really difficult* to escape crap American pop culture in Australia, because it's everywhere you look and crowding out our own voice (mainly because it's cheaper to import yours than produce our own), whereas Americans can disappear back into their own comfort zone and ignore the rest of the world any time they feel like it.
As far as Priscilla goes, blame Miramax. The urban legend around here goes that the only reason that was released in the US was that Patrick Swayze had that drag queen movie coming out (if you'll pardon the pun) soon afterwards, so when Miramax saw Priscilla they used it as a low-cost opportunity to discover whether American audiences could cope with drag.
As for being a troll, I dunno. I thought you were funny. Maybe the laugh track went missing and the presumably American moderator didn't recognize it was supposed to be funny.
Oh, and we've got fighter planes ready to destroy any vessel carrying Paul Hogan or Olivia Neutron-Bomb back from LA:)
I don't have a huge problem with a download limit. I don't have a problem with charging a per-megabyte fee for excess use. But 35 cents per megabyte? You've got to be kidding!
Let's do some sums here. Let's assume that 35 cents per megabyte is the actual cost of providing that bandwidth. Furthermore, out of the 60 AUD monthly charge, let's assume $10 of that is spent on the essentially fixed costs of billing, line maintenance, and another $5 is taken out in profit. These are guesses, of course, I don't work in the industry, but they are pretty generous IMHO. Anyway, given that, the $45 of bandwidth charges, at 35 cents per megabyte, means the average user is only using about 129 megabytes per month! Something doesn't add up here, and I'm betting it costs far less than that to provide the international bandwidth.
So, in essence, Telstra is ripping me off. Looks like it's time to investigate the alternatives . . .
I must tell you, whenever the parlous state of the Australian dollar and the fact we have a moron as our leader gets us down, we just pull out a tape of Mr Irwin and realise that there's Americans out there that take him seriously. We also wonder where you lot hide your irony-removal clinics that you pass through soon after birth . .
And, if you lot are complaining about getting our junk culture, let's do a comparative list here:
Junk Culture successfully exported from Australia to America
The Crocodile Hunter
Nicole Kidman (she used to be able to act when
she left Oz, though - check out Dead Calm, and Bangkok Hilton).
Savage Garden
Greg Norman
Junk Culture successfully inflicted on Australia by the US (well, just the highlights, there's too much to list)
N'Sync. Britney. Christina. Mandy Moore. The Gwenyth and Huey duet.
The entire canon of Jerry Bruckheimer movies.
Overdubs of foreign-language films. For fsck's sake, haven't you ever heard of subtitles?
TV ads that are obviously shot-for-shot remakes of US ones.
Touched By An Angel - straight from Utah to us.
Infomercials *on network television*.
Survivor 1 and 2
Oprah Winfrey
Jerry Springer
Dawson's Creek and Party Of Five
All the spinoffs from Law and Order, none of which come close to the (excellent) original show.
Letterman. He knows he's not funny. The audience knows he's not funny. The only reason I could conceive of to watch the show is to stare agape at the utter embarrassment of it all.
Seventh Heaven, which despite its Religious Right friendly themes contains the horniest, most sex-obsessed teens of any show I've ever seen on television.
All-Time most dramatic Amateur Video of Cops beating the Shit out of Some Incompetant and Unresisting Petty Crook Episodes 1 through 107
Studs
Temptation Island
Baywatch
Foreign TV news that's almost entirely clipped from CNN.
And, my pet hate, line dancing! Take it back, now!
Now, if you want to swap, we might just have a deal:)
Slashdot Mirror
Go you big red fire engine!
Correct me if I'm wrong here, but while the porn industry is huge, each individual porn flick is made with a very small budget, aren't they? Or are their 50 million dollar porn "blockbusters" out there (because presumably you'd need at least that much to film in space)?
Go you big red fire engine!
If somebody ported the GNOME libraries to Cygwin, I think you'd see a GnuCash port in fairly short order. Somebody already did this, but used a non-free compatibility library rather than Cygwin, so it wasn't any use to us anyway.
Go you big red fire engine!
They're not the ones that have caused trouble. The actual libraries that people haven't had are mostly guppi and gtkhtml, and there's been a few problems with incompatible guile versions.
There are also more issues than you might think with statically-linked libraries - for instance some of those libraries have associated data files which obviously *can't* be statically linked in.
Go you big red fire engine!
Seriously, how in the heck do you Americans keep track of how much paper money they have in your wallet? It's damn near impossible when all you've got there is this undifferentiated wad of screwed-up flimsy bits of paper.
Go you big red fire engine!
Well, we'll find out just how evil. Australians have had a serious espresso culture for quite a few years now, well before any American franchises got into the act. (I gotta say it was a shock to get to the US and find that we were well ahead of a cultural trend :) ).Starbucks, however, has just opened its first Australian store. Moreover, they've stuck their head straight into the lion's mouth, as they've chosen Lygon Street in inner Melbourne, arguably the place where Australians first discovered proper coffee, as the place to open their first store. Bring on the challenger . . .
Go you big red fire engine!
However, you should probably read it in view of section 3c, which says if distributing a binary, you can
Now, it all hangs on how you define "any third party". Given the presence of 3 c), I would assume that it would include any subsequent recipients of the binary, but I'm not convinced it extends to "anybody who wants it".
Go you big red fire engine!
I have a friend who has lived in Japan on and off for the past five years, and according to her it's not quite as simple as that. The successful multinational companies (Honda and Sony, for example) have a much less hierachical and seniority-oriented corporate culture - and, funnily enough, they produce funky innovative products. However, Japan's domestically-oriented companies, such as banks and retailing, live up to every bad stereotype you have of conservative, addled mandarins stifling innovation and creativity.
Go you big red fire engine!
In Australia, gambling is controlled by the various state governments, who receive a significant fraction of their tax revenue from it - I think the figure in my home state is approximately 10% of state tax collected - that's about 170 AUD (85 USD) per person per year. Faced with the demands of funding stuff while keeping taxes low, raising money by tacitly encouraging gambling by increasing the opportunities to do so has been an easy option. Hence, we have massive mini-casinos full of one-armed bandits scattered throughout our suburbs and towns, horse racing, which you can bet on by phone or in virtually every pub in Australia, and massive casinos in all our major cities, which get most of their revenue from locals rather than tourists.
The federal government, however, has the power to regulate telecommunications, so internet gambling is in their bailiwick. As regular /. readers will know, the current federal government is run by a bunch of wowsers (they brought in the net censorship regs, for instance, and have tried to stack the film classification board with fundamentalist nutballs), and so it's unsurprising that they have tried this ban. If the federal government is being hypocritical, it is doing so only in that states who fund a significant part of their budgets from gambling taxes aren't going to be quite so dependent on the federal government for funds.
About the only surprise is that they have done so in such a clueful way - this stands a chance of actually working.
Go you big red fire engine!
Sex is either good or bad. Pick one.
Go you big red fire engine!
Maybe that's true if you're talking about carbon monoxide, ozone, nitrous oxide, and so on. It's totally untrue if you're talking about carbon dioxide, the primary greenhouse gas. But, of course, that's all BS some whacked-out pot-smoking European tree-huggin' hippies thought up to threaten the freedom of all patriotic 'mericans to do anything they want, screw the rest of the world . . .
And as for having your life saved, I gotta ask - what if the drunk was driving a Suburban as well, as he should have been by your logic?
Go you big red fire engine!
I gotta say that you missed the entire point of Starship Troopers (the movie) - as I viewed it anyway. It's not a retelling of the book, it's a parody of it. Heinlein's book, at one level anyway, is an advertisement for an anti-democratic, military dominated state, and the film neatly skewers this with such deadpan subtlety that I'm still not convinced that the actors were in on the joke, let alone the studio execs that funded the film.
I found Heinlein's book repulsive, myself, but I'm aware that this isn't a universally held opinion. Paul Verhoeven, the movie's director, certainly seemed to think so.
Go you big red fire engine!
Everyone! Download that mp3, reverse the audio and start looking for subliminal messages :)
Go you big red fire engine!
Aside from the download time (which, I'll grant you, might be a PITA on a 56k modem, but takes very little time on a DSL or cable connection) what's the problem with that?
Go you big red fire engine!
Sure. You can then install Abiword, Gnumeric, Nautilus, Evolution, and Dia in another few megabytes. That's the point of shared libraries.
Oh, and by the way, have you checked just how much screenshot-heavy documentation gnucash provides?
Go you big red fire engine!
Indeed. GnuCash 1.6.0 is already in Debian unstable, in fact (thanks to the great work of the Debian maintainer).
Go you big red fire engine!
Lots more opportunities to spend money . . .
Go you big red fire engine!
Yes, they did - which is pretty remarkable for an incredibly secretive organisation like the NSA.
By putting it out there under the GPL, they have. I don't know whether it's planned to integrate with the main tree or not - it may be that the features the NSA require interfere with other things more important for maintream use.
Go you big red fire engine!
Are you still recovering from dealing with that fscking submit program? I know I am. . .
Your fellow honours student, in case you've forgotten . . .
Go you big red fire engine!
I have a townhouse with a window directly behind the stereo (there's nowhere else to put it), and tile floors, and it makes a stereo that sounded excellent in my last house sound like crap. Spending extra money on a stereo in this situation, without fixing up the acoustical environment, would almost certainly be a waste of time.
Go you big red fire engine!
Even within the Melbourne University CS department where he works (as a sysadmin, not an academic) he's legendary for his reclusiveness and the fear he strikes into academics afraid of losing their disk quota . . .
I only ever met him once - to ask him about monitoring the departmental network for faults. He's actually quite friendly and answered my dumb questions with a good deal of patience, once I had spent a week tracking him down. However, I have no doubt that he is impossible for non-technical people to deal with, because he appears to have had the part of the brain that deals with political matters removed at birth. He just doesn't care.
Go you big red fire engine!
Crap. The "emergent AI" stuff that's been demonstrated to date has had limitations just as profound and seemingly fundamental (but different) as traditional symbolic AI. Amongst others, it has scaling problems of its own when you try and build more complex emergent system.
Not that it's not useful, and interesting research, will undoubtedly produce some interesting production systems, and might give us some pointers along the road to HAL, but don't claim that the bright new future of is just round the corner as soon as we take off the shackles that the neats are placing on the scruffies.
Go you big red fire engine!
As far as Priscilla goes, blame Miramax. The urban legend around here goes that the only reason that was released in the US was that Patrick Swayze had that drag queen movie coming out (if you'll pardon the pun) soon afterwards, so when Miramax saw Priscilla they used it as a low-cost opportunity to discover whether American audiences could cope with drag.
As for being a troll, I dunno. I thought you were funny. Maybe the laugh track went missing and the presumably American moderator didn't recognize it was supposed to be funny.
Oh, and we've got fighter planes ready to destroy any vessel carrying Paul Hogan or Olivia Neutron-Bomb back from LA :)
Go you big red fire engine!
Let's do some sums here. Let's assume that 35 cents per megabyte is the actual cost of providing that bandwidth. Furthermore, out of the 60 AUD monthly charge, let's assume $10 of that is spent on the essentially fixed costs of billing, line maintenance, and another $5 is taken out in profit. These are guesses, of course, I don't work in the industry, but they are pretty generous IMHO. Anyway, given that, the $45 of bandwidth charges, at 35 cents per megabyte, means the average user is only using about 129 megabytes per month! Something doesn't add up here, and I'm betting it costs far less than that to provide the international bandwidth.
So, in essence, Telstra is ripping me off. Looks like it's time to investigate the alternatives . . .
Go you big red fire engine!
I must tell you, whenever the parlous state of the Australian dollar and the fact we have a moron as our leader gets us down, we just pull out a tape of Mr Irwin and realise that there's Americans out there that take him seriously. We also wonder where you lot hide your irony-removal clinics that you pass through soon after birth . .
And, if you lot are complaining about getting our junk culture, let's do a comparative list here:
Junk Culture successfully exported from Australia to America
Junk Culture successfully inflicted on Australia by the US (well, just the highlights, there's too much to list)
Now, if you want to swap, we might just have a deal :)
Go you big red fire engine!