"I view application installation as a 2-minute job to be done once..."
Me too!
And that's the niceness about going for source compatibility instead of binary compatibility. Any knowledgeable person can tell you what a deterrent to innovation the "wintel" backwards binary compatibility has meant to computer advancement of the last decade. Why I should want to make sure new libraries are binary compatible with old ones when most problems can be resolved just recompiling old programs to link with new versions (be it me or my distribution-of-choice builders the ones that recompile), maybe with minor source changes, when I (and everybody else) know assuring binary compatibility is just a PITA?
I have sucessfully recompiled software from late 80's I used on HP-Ux on modern linux distributions with no (or minor) problems. Only problems arrived from software I couldn't access the source code. From my experience the answer is clear: to hell with binary compatibility and to hell with binary-only programs: "show me the source" is the right answer.
"IMO it is near-unacceptable that any two distributions of Linux on the same processor-platform should be binary-incompatible."
Why is it?
Binary compatibility is almost completly irrelevant. Source compatibility *is* relevant.
Talking about RPM, for instance, I don't give a damn about binary compatibility as long as I can do `rpm -tb givenprogram.srpm` and go with it.
Or is it that you distribute some binary-only programs you don't want to share their source with me?
Then it is your problem, not mine, and I don't give a damn about you!
"The level of binary compatibility between any 2 same-platform linux distros should be at the very least equal to the level of compatibility between Win 2000 and Win XP"
Just for your interest. Win 2000 and Win XP come from the same Redmon-based company that won't let you access to its source code, so you can't achieve source compatibility no matter what; all you can have is binary compatibility.
Now, from the purely commercial point of view, SuSE is an operative system coming from Novell; Red Hat is an operative system coming from Red Hat Inc. Why the hell do you expect better compatibility between these two competing products than that from say, Win 2000 and Mac OS/X?
On the other hand, if you *really* expect binary compatibility between SuSE's and Red Hat's products, why is it that you don't expect just the same between Microsoft's and Apple's?
"Work is not proceeding on kde libraries, which are blocked by the license choices made by the vendor of qt"
And what are those choices that preclude KDE to be currently there?
Oh, yes, I see! Gtk+ is LGPL while Qt is either GPL.
Well, you just need to have a look at Linux kernel and Linux distributions history to see it is all about... er... Open Source/Free Software (I won't go into that war now) while the choice of Gtk+ has no sense unless we understand it benefits some privative licensed software sellers while it has no advantage to anyone else.
That kind of mentality is percolated all the LSB stuff along, and that's the very reason why LSB will never be but of secondary interest.
"What has changed? The foam never fell off and damaged the orbiter until the last few years! "
Wrong! Foam always fell off. It is just last but one trip it damaged the orbiter beyond salvation.
One of the things that changed for the last trip is you have now a lot of cameras explicitly looking for that falling foam, and we saw a piece more or less like the one of the last but one trip did falled... but missed the target. For all that we know that can be exactly what has happen in each and every previous mission. I can bet aerodinamyc high pressured fluxes around the wing make difficult (but not impossible) for a debriss piece to splash the wing, quite a lot like mosquitoes over your windshield. It seems quite a lot impact on it when on the highway, but the thing is most of them are "pressed over" the air flux and doesn't impact the windshield when they should based only on trajectory.
Last but one trip was a case of bad luck (or, if you want to look at it the other way, the previous missions were cases of good luck). After all, sending rockets to space is still, well... rocket science!
"Excluding a significant portion of your target audience is unacceptable in business"
Then again, I must recall that on Intranet apps you can develop specifically for IE (or for Gecko, for that matter) without loosing not even the sligthest fraction of 1 percent of target audience.
"f you want your applications to be portable, you have to write them to the least common acceptable denominator."
True. But if you want your applications to be useful, you have to choose the most suitable platform and develop for it. You don't want a shitty "least common denominator" at any rate.
"...when I know all my users are using Internet Explorer 5.5 service pack 2"
You're right, only to a point.
If you are a developer, then you do whatever you are said to do. If you are a technical project manager, then you will think about requirements, how best achieve your client goals, etc.
And *then* saying you will bring out your solution taking into account all users are using IE 5.5 SP2, so no further testing is needed, is most probably making your client a disservice, since you know (you should know, at least) that will be true no more in six months, when the browser and even the whole platform will be upgraded.
"This is why there are W3C standards. If you build to the W3C standards, the browser the client uses should be immaterial."
Except when said browser is IE, it is the requested browser for the project, and it is used by no less than 80% of all users anyway.
You seem to think that browser app equals to Internet site, which is far away from true. An incredible high number of browser-related projects, and certainly the most complex of them, are deployed on intranets where brand and model of browser is a requirement (last one I saw, just few hours ago was a web-based POS on the train station).
"Just because the "majority" uses IE doesn't mean it's right to exclude the minority"
True. But you thinking bussiness has something to do about social justice doesn't mean it will change from its current reality where it is all about money.
"Some of us young folk will probably be able to take some "tours" for around 1 million or so within 20-30 years I assume (and hope)."
Why do you assume that?
35 years ago, youngsters of that time DID see some of his mates going to the moon. I bet they assumed in 25 years they could go to the moon on an (relatively) affordable basis, like your one million bet -hell, most of them probably belived on some supersonic family-like moonbase. Still, you see, nothing of the like became reality.
If you are younger than mid-therties, nobody, like in NOBODY, has gone to the moon in your life-time, NOONE. Still, you really think is more probable having private trips to the moon on a 25 year time-frame now than 25 years ago? Why!!??
...and what about poking those assembler code lists on such an awful keyboard trying to understand them, and then, on proper time, *actually* understanding them?
I am not so old as to remember PDP's (specially not being from the USA), nor stoping hardisks by hand (those plates about two feet in diameter you can only find at er... museums now), but yet I think we still saw the end of the last glory days (before IBM PC made its way and killed [almost] everything else helped by Microsoft).
"An upstream provider should have been configured as host to never be blocked"
So any attack shown as coming from your upstream provider is going to be passed through, isnt' it?
Of course, that very same rule (don't stop your upstream provider) is valid for whatever other "valuable" connections you may have opened (you don't want your IDS to be fooled into droping connections to your e-commerce database server, do you?).
But then, if any "higher privilege" connection is to be opened, probability is that it will be against some of those "high profile" servers (it has no sense allow say, wide access from a random IP to your Ms SQL Server , ha!-, but it does have it from your management console, and then you won't want your IDS to block connections from you management console just because the bad guys threw some IP-spoofed packets, will you?), and if ever spoofed a connection, chances are they will look as if coming from one of those IPs.
Dinamyc firewall ruling as an attack response is a terribly dumb choice on most circumnstances, still, it has everything needed to be accepted by PHBs when shown on glossy paper on ultrabuzzy products like UltraFireBlade MegaDynSec Pro and such.
"But there are huge benefits to be gained in usability with a consolidated packaging system."
Yes. You are completly true.
So that's why I say to the masses: let's consolidate on a single packaging system. Let's use My Favorite One (TM). All everybody else needs to do is forget about Their Favorite One (TM) and just support MFO(TM).
You can talk all you want. Talk won't change the facts.
You don't want to use GPLed software? Well, you are quite free on that: don't use it. You prefer writing software from scratch better than using GPL software? Again, you are free. But please note that other bussiness you compete against with will use that GPL software and so will have lower operation costs than you.
"With BSD, you contribute your improvements back to the community, because if you don't, others will and eventually your code base and the community code base will be different. Keeping them in sync lets you benefit from others work, and ensures that new features work with the changes you've made."
That's absurdly moronic. If you take BSD code and make it part of the privatively-licensed derived work you sell, then you choose BSD because you specifically want the community code base to stay OUT of sync with yours. If your interest on any given "public" piece of software was of such a nature that you really were interested about insuring your code-base to stay in sync with the public code-base, then you'd choose a GPL variant ten times out of ten, since that way your codebase and the public codebase could do nothing but stay in sync, for now they both would just be the same!
Specially your last sentence "...keeping them in sync lets you benefit from others work, and ensures that new features work with the changes you've made" follows so exactly what GPL is about that I am now suspecting you really are not in favour of the BSD license but are the cleverest pro-GPL troll one could think about instead.
"That's the best functional definition I've seen yet, and I think closest to the reality envisioned by those who wrote the license terms. You oughta put it in the public domain!:)"
Still, it is wrong.
I won't enter about the BSD part, but surely the GPL part is wrong. GPL is not about "trying to make other people develop useful code to help us" it is about "trying to have more and more useful code for everybody to freely use"
GPL is certainly not about "make other people doing anything", since noone is *obligued* to use GPL code (either as an end-user or as a developer). It is certainly not about making them develop code to help *us*, since GPL says anything about giving your code specifically to "us" (the developers of the original software).
You can read the GPL yourself, and you can ask the biggest and most famous GPL "zealots" and they will tell exactly the same: it is not about "us", it is about "everybody". And, please, avoid the fascism asumption: while they think it is about "everybody" they don't try to force anyone into nothing.
Of course this is quite stupid: are you the original writer of a given piece of enterily functional software? Then you use the damn license you exactly want to use, up to legal bounds. Are you reusing someone else's software for your project? Then you use whatever license you exactly want to use, up to legal bounds. See? No difference.
Of course people that develop BSD software won't moan if their code is used on a privative-licensed project. They KNOW and EXPECT it to go that way. Of course people that develop GPL code do prefer that license over others: that's why they chose it! Of course that said people wants more people using the GPL for software those others develop: that's implicit on why they prefer the GPL.
"The only reason to run Debian is if you believe in the politics behind the distro"
Not at all. I do run extensively Debian both on servers and desktops, and I do it because Debian is, as far as my knowledge reaches, technically-wise the best distribution over there.
"What if God is faking the results of all the experiments?"
You still have a distinctive element in your theory, so we could eventually separate "yours" from "mine".
As an example: God is almighty, so He could fake each and every experiment, true, but God (christian's) is Personalist too, so you maybe will be able to build a "Praying Machine" that makes God telling you "Yes, I Am the Universal Faker", or maybe your machine is able to convince God about faking the experiments on predictable distinctive ways (something like this is a "miracle": faking reality on interesting ways through praying).
So, again, even if we can accept that making use of God in a scientific theory is a bit... hummm... "strange", the general issue stands: when you have two theories you are open to find the refutative experiment that makes us reject one and use the other... eventually.
"So when you push a block along the floor, at the same speed, it gets smaller if you are pushing over a rough surface than over a smooth one?"
The proper analogy would be when you move a solid in water. And of course, yes, it is compressed in the direction of the movement (how much depends on the compresibility of the object itself).
"If you say "oh, only for ether", then why? What's special about it?"
It's able to transmit electromagnetic waves, which no other support can do. In doing so it affects essentially all matter, since, as de Broglie states, every mass "possess" an equivalent associated wavelength. Since ether is what allows transmistion of electromagnetic fields, Newton's speed sum make us expect measure deviations for any mass body running through ether.
"If you say "oh, only for ether", then why?"
It's not only for ether: if you try to obtain measures about a mass body moving through a water mass using sound (think of a sonar), then your measures will be tainted by such "absolute" movement of that body within the water which sustains the sound waves (you will find doppler effects and "false" length and time measures: Doppler-Fizeau effect has been clearly demonstrated to affect ligth too, so why wouldn't we expect length measures "errors" too?), so electromagnetic (or ligth) measures are expected to give the same results about bodies moving through the ether.
Well, returning to theme, which is obviously not playing fools about an historic today forgotten Science "error": the question is that scientific theories are not Reality, but Explanations About Reality, and thus, constructs from a theory (like ether, or quarks) only make sense *within* the theory itself. It is a metaphysic act saying that those constructs from the theory have any kind of *real* existence. I do believe that there is a Universe out there, and I do believe it has an ordered nature and that our mind is able to penetrate that order to extract Laws, so I am not a relativist, but still and because of that, facts are facts, and facts show us that "objects" and "concepts" are not automagically created and destroyed when our knowledge of Universe changes.
Because, at it has been said from the very Fedora's constitution day, FEDORA IS THE TESTBED FOR RED HAT. So Fedora's users are either: 1/ Red Hat enthusiasts that want their hands dirty to help build their distribution of choice, and know in advance what will it bring to them 2/ Ignorants abused by Red Hat's management in their role of beta-testers.
For Red Hat policies both are equally useful. 1/ will help them to make a trustworthy product that will fill up their moneybag; cries from 2/ will tell them which novelties are ready to be passed to their paying clients and which are not.
Now, ask yourself which subset you belong to, and if you want to stay there.
"By the way, I'd love to see a reference for an experiment that indicated ether existed."
Michelson-Morley's for one.
What else but the "friction" against ether could press over the Earth to an extent as to make all length measures be shorter on Earth's absolute movement direction, thus making the light appear to travel at the same speed on every direction?
"It is a perfect situation. Why should the EU decide local patent law? The federal government should not meddle in such minor details and concentrate on beeing a free trade union. I could not be happier!"
You must be joking. How can you expect a "free trade union" when you can have different policies regarding what you can sell and how in different countries of the EU? Different patent laws means different policies regarding what you can sell and how.
"If every experiment returns results that indicate quarks exist, then they exist. What meaning would there be in saying they don't?"
The very basic notion that Science is not there to seek The Truth, but Operational Certainties.
You just need to go backwards in Science History to see what an absurd position derives from telling "experiments say that Quarks Do Exist". Experiments did say that Ether existed too. What happens now? Did Ether exist, but just between 1895 and 1905? Absolute space did exist between 1687 and 1905 either? At most you can say, well, prior to 1687 (date of publication of Sir Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica Phylosphia Naturalis) absolute space and Universal Gravitation (as exposed by Newton's Laws) did exist, it's only Man hadn't had discovered them, but then what happened in 1905? Did the Universe physically changed its nature due to the publication of Einstein's works regarding Special Relativity? And then, since his works wasn't immediatly accepted by every physic, did the universe change in a moment, or did it change part by part?
And what to say about Copernico? Wow, what a drastical change! One they Sun was orbiting around Earth, the next the Sun stops and the Earth starts moving!
No: Science theories try to explain the Universe but are NOT the Universe themselves. That means that "Qarks Exist" is only an "abreviation". "Quarks exist within Quantum Theory, and Quantum Theory is the best we have to explain Reality" is the proper way to tell the fact.
"Now, the experiments don't prove that God's Perverse Humor doesn't exist, as well. Indeed, the two are experimentally indistinguishable and therefore the same."
No. They are "experimentally" the same, but obviously two theories are two theories, not one. It's only they both explain the same collection of measures. The fact they are two theories, not one, allows the expectation of finding tomorrow the refutative experiment that will make us prefer one over the other.
"The universe follows structured rules and laws which are repeatable, predictable, and disprovable"
I challenge you to offer the slightest demonstration to that quite gasping assertion.
And no, statistics doesn't demonstrates anything.
"There is zero evidence to the contrary"
So what? It is YOU the one that makes an assertion, so it is YOU the one that must bring probes for it. I don't have to bring evidence for a shit!
"Whether you wish to believe otherwise is your progrative, but no matter how hard you try, the universe will continue to exist forever exactly as it is."
Yes, but just telling that haven't made us to be the minimal part of a milimeter from a demonstration.
I can accept that "The Universe Is The Way That It Is", but obviously that says nothing about "The Universe Being The Way You Say It Is"....And I still waiting for your probes about the Universe "following structured rules and laws which are repeatable, predictable, and disprovable" appart from your stubborn believe on such assertion.
Slashdot Mirror
"I view application installation as a 2-minute job to be done once..."
Me too!
And that's the niceness about going for source compatibility instead of binary compatibility. Any knowledgeable person can tell you what a deterrent to innovation the "wintel" backwards binary compatibility has meant to computer advancement of the last decade. Why I should want to make sure new libraries are binary compatible with old ones when most problems can be resolved just recompiling old programs to link with new versions (be it me or my distribution-of-choice builders the ones that recompile), maybe with minor source changes, when I (and everybody else) know assuring binary compatibility is just a PITA?
I have sucessfully recompiled software from late 80's I used on HP-Ux on modern linux distributions with no (or minor) problems. Only problems arrived from software I couldn't access the source code. From my experience the answer is clear: to hell with binary compatibility and to hell with binary-only programs: "show me the source" is the right answer.
"IMO it is near-unacceptable that any two distributions of Linux on the same processor-platform should be binary-incompatible."
Why is it?
Binary compatibility is almost completly irrelevant. Source compatibility *is* relevant.
Talking about RPM, for instance, I don't give a damn about binary compatibility as long as I can do `rpm -tb givenprogram.srpm` and go with it.
Or is it that you distribute some binary-only programs you don't want to share their source with me?
Then it is your problem, not mine, and I don't give a damn about you!
"The level of binary compatibility between any 2 same-platform linux distros should be at the very least equal to the level of compatibility between Win 2000 and Win XP"
Just for your interest. Win 2000 and Win XP come from the same Redmon-based company that won't let you access to its source code, so you can't achieve source compatibility no matter what; all you can have is binary compatibility.
Now, from the purely commercial point of view, SuSE is an operative system coming from Novell; Red Hat is an operative system coming from Red Hat Inc. Why the hell do you expect better compatibility between these two competing products than that from say, Win 2000 and Mac OS/X?
On the other hand, if you *really* expect binary compatibility between SuSE's and Red Hat's products, why is it that you don't expect just the same between Microsoft's and Apple's?
"Work is not proceeding on kde libraries, which are blocked by the license choices made by the vendor of qt"
And what are those choices that preclude KDE to be currently there?
Oh, yes, I see! Gtk+ is LGPL while Qt is either GPL.
Well, you just need to have a look at Linux kernel and Linux distributions history to see it is all about... er... Open Source/Free Software (I won't go into that war now) while the choice of Gtk+ has no sense unless we understand it benefits some privative licensed software sellers while it has no advantage to anyone else.
That kind of mentality is percolated all the LSB stuff along, and that's the very reason why LSB will never be but of secondary interest.
"What has changed? The foam never fell off and damaged the orbiter until the last few years! "
Wrong! Foam always fell off. It is just last but one trip it damaged the orbiter beyond salvation.
One of the things that changed for the last trip is you have now a lot of cameras explicitly looking for that falling foam, and we saw a piece more or less like the one of the last but one trip did falled... but missed the target. For all that we know that can be exactly what has happen in each and every previous mission. I can bet aerodinamyc high pressured fluxes around the wing make difficult (but not impossible) for a debriss piece to splash the wing, quite a lot like mosquitoes over your windshield. It seems quite a lot impact on it when on the highway, but the thing is most of them are "pressed over" the air flux and doesn't impact the windshield when they should based only on trajectory.
Last but one trip was a case of bad luck (or, if you want to look at it the other way, the previous missions were cases of good luck). After all, sending rockets to space is still, well... rocket science!
"Excluding a significant portion of your target audience is unacceptable in business"
Then again, I must recall that on Intranet apps you can develop specifically for IE (or for Gecko, for that matter) without loosing not even the sligthest fraction of 1 percent of target audience.
"f you want your applications to be portable, you have to write them to the least common acceptable denominator."
True. But if you want your applications to be useful, you have to choose the most suitable platform and develop for it. You don't want a shitty "least common denominator" at any rate.
"So basically you use Konqueror so you can complain about nothing ever working?"
No. I use an W3C compliant browser *and* I complain when things don't work; quite different.
"...when I know all my users are using Internet Explorer 5.5 service pack 2"
You're right, only to a point.
If you are a developer, then you do whatever you are said to do. If you are a technical project manager, then you will think about requirements, how best achieve your client goals, etc.
And *then* saying you will bring out your solution taking into account all users are using IE 5.5 SP2, so no further testing is needed, is most probably making your client a disservice, since you know (you should know, at least) that will be true no more in six months, when the browser and even the whole platform will be upgraded.
"This is why there are W3C standards. If you build to the W3C standards, the browser the client uses should be immaterial."
Except when said browser is IE, it is the requested browser for the project, and it is used by no less than 80% of all users anyway.
You seem to think that browser app equals to Internet site, which is far away from true. An incredible high number of browser-related projects, and certainly the most complex of them, are deployed on intranets where brand and model of browser is a requirement (last one I saw, just few hours ago was a web-based POS on the train station).
"Just because the "majority" uses IE doesn't mean it's right to exclude the minority"
True. But you thinking bussiness has something to do about social justice doesn't mean it will change from its current reality where it is all about money.
"Even an all Windows shop might have a few Unix boxes kicking around"
No, it won't. Otherwise it wouldn't be "an all Windows shop" after all.
Yes. It is exactly for this I don't like Google Maps.
At all.
I use Konqueror 3.3.2.
"Some of us young folk will probably be able to take some "tours" for around 1 million or so within 20-30 years I assume (and hope)."
Why do you assume that?
35 years ago, youngsters of that time DID see some of his mates going to the moon. I bet they assumed in 25 years they could go to the moon on an (relatively) affordable basis, like your one million bet -hell, most of them probably belived on some supersonic family-like moonbase. Still, you see, nothing of the like became reality.
If you are younger than mid-therties, nobody, like in NOBODY, has gone to the moon in your life-time, NOONE. Still, you really think is more probable having private trips to the moon on a 25 year time-frame now than 25 years ago? Why!!??
...and what about poking those assembler code lists on such an awful keyboard trying to understand them, and then, on proper time, *actually* understanding them?
I am not so old as to remember PDP's (specially not being from the USA), nor stoping hardisks by hand (those plates about two feet in diameter you can only find at er... museums now), but yet I think we still saw the end of the last glory days (before IBM PC made its way and killed [almost] everything else helped by Microsoft).
"An upstream provider should have been configured as host to never be blocked"
So any attack shown as coming from your upstream provider is going to be passed through, isnt' it?
Of course, that very same rule (don't stop your upstream provider) is valid for whatever other "valuable" connections you may have opened (you don't want your IDS to be fooled into droping connections to your e-commerce database server, do you?).
But then, if any "higher privilege" connection is to be opened, probability is that it will be against some of those "high profile" servers (it has no sense allow say, wide access from a random IP to your Ms SQL Server , ha!-, but it does have it from your management console, and then you won't want your IDS to block connections from you management console just because the bad guys threw some IP-spoofed packets, will you?), and if ever spoofed a connection, chances are they will look as if coming from one of those IPs.
Dinamyc firewall ruling as an attack response is a terribly dumb choice on most circumnstances, still, it has everything needed to be accepted by PHBs when shown on glossy paper on ultrabuzzy products like UltraFireBlade MegaDynSec Pro and such.
Quite a pity.
"But there are huge benefits to be gained in usability with a consolidated packaging system."
Yes. You are completly true.
So that's why I say to the masses: let's consolidate on a single packaging system. Let's use My Favorite One (TM). All everybody else needs to do is forget about Their Favorite One (TM) and just support MFO(TM).
You can talk all you want. Talk won't change the facts.
You don't want to use GPLed software? Well, you are quite free on that: don't use it. You prefer writing software from scratch better than using GPL software? Again, you are free. But please note that other bussiness you compete against with will use that GPL software and so will have lower operation costs than you.
"With BSD, you contribute your improvements back to the community, because if you don't, others will and eventually your code base and the community code base will be different. Keeping them in sync lets you benefit from others work, and ensures that new features work with the changes you've made."
That's absurdly moronic. If you take BSD code and make it part of the privatively-licensed derived work you sell, then you choose BSD because you specifically want the community code base to stay OUT of sync with yours. If your interest on any given "public" piece of software was of such a nature that you really were interested about insuring your code-base to stay in sync with the public code-base, then you'd choose a GPL variant ten times out of ten, since that way your codebase and the public codebase could do nothing but stay in sync, for now they both would just be the same!
Specially your last sentence "...keeping them in sync lets you benefit from others work, and ensures that new features work with the changes you've made" follows so exactly what GPL is about that I am now suspecting you really are not in favour of the BSD license but are the cleverest pro-GPL troll one could think about instead.
"That's the best functional definition I've seen yet, and I think closest to the reality envisioned by those who wrote the license terms. You oughta put it in the public domain! :)"
Still, it is wrong.
I won't enter about the BSD part, but surely the GPL part is wrong. GPL is not about "trying to make other people develop useful code to help us" it is about "trying to have more and more useful code for everybody to freely use"
GPL is certainly not about "make other people doing anything", since noone is *obligued* to use GPL code (either as an end-user or as a developer). It is certainly not about making them develop code to help *us*, since GPL says anything about giving your code specifically to "us" (the developers of the original software).
You can read the GPL yourself, and you can ask the biggest and most famous GPL "zealots" and they will tell exactly the same: it is not about "us", it is about "everybody". And, please, avoid the fascism asumption: while they think it is about "everybody" they don't try to force anyone into nothing.
Of course this is quite stupid: are you the original writer of a given piece of enterily functional software? Then you use the damn license you exactly want to use, up to legal bounds. Are you reusing someone else's software for your project? Then you use whatever license you exactly want to use, up to legal bounds. See? No difference.
Of course people that develop BSD software won't moan if their code is used on a privative-licensed project. They KNOW and EXPECT it to go that way. Of course people that develop GPL code do prefer that license over others: that's why they chose it! Of course that said people wants more people using the GPL for software those others develop: that's implicit on why they prefer the GPL.
"The only reason to run Debian is if you believe in the politics behind the distro"
Not at all. I do run extensively Debian both on servers and desktops, and I do it because Debian is, as far as my knowledge reaches, technically-wise the best distribution over there.
"What if God is faking the results of all the experiments?"
You still have a distinctive element in your theory, so we could eventually separate "yours" from "mine".
As an example: God is almighty, so He could fake each and every experiment, true, but God (christian's) is Personalist too, so you maybe will be able to build a "Praying Machine" that makes God telling you "Yes, I Am the Universal Faker", or maybe your machine is able to convince God about faking the experiments on predictable distinctive ways (something like this is a "miracle": faking reality on interesting ways through praying).
So, again, even if we can accept that making use of God in a scientific theory is a bit... hummm... "strange", the general issue stands: when you have two theories you are open to find the refutative experiment that makes us reject one and use the other... eventually.
"So when you push a block along the floor, at the same speed, it gets smaller if you are pushing over a rough surface than over a smooth one?"
The proper analogy would be when you move a solid in water. And of course, yes, it is compressed in the direction of the movement (how much depends on the compresibility of the object itself).
"If you say "oh, only for ether", then why? What's special about it?"
It's able to transmit electromagnetic waves, which no other support can do. In doing so it affects essentially all matter, since, as de Broglie states, every mass "possess" an equivalent associated wavelength. Since ether is what allows transmistion of electromagnetic fields, Newton's speed sum make us expect measure deviations for any mass body running through ether.
"If you say "oh, only for ether", then why?"
It's not only for ether: if you try to obtain measures about a mass body moving through a water mass using sound (think of a sonar), then your measures will be tainted by such "absolute" movement of that body within the water which sustains the sound waves (you will find doppler effects and "false" length and time measures: Doppler-Fizeau effect has been clearly demonstrated to affect ligth too, so why wouldn't we expect length measures "errors" too?), so electromagnetic (or ligth) measures are expected to give the same results about bodies moving through the ether.
Well, returning to theme, which is obviously not playing fools about an historic today forgotten Science "error": the question is that scientific theories are not Reality, but Explanations About Reality, and thus, constructs from a theory (like ether, or quarks) only make sense *within* the theory itself. It is a metaphysic act saying that those constructs from the theory have any kind of *real* existence. I do believe that there is a Universe out there, and I do believe it has an ordered nature and that our mind is able to penetrate that order to extract Laws, so I am not a relativist, but still and because of that, facts are facts, and facts show us that "objects" and "concepts" are not automagically created and destroyed when our knowledge of Universe changes.
"-Why are all these GODDAMN DAEMONS running?"
Because, at it has been said from the very Fedora's constitution day, FEDORA IS THE TESTBED FOR RED HAT. So Fedora's users are either:
1/ Red Hat enthusiasts that want their hands dirty to help build their distribution of choice, and know in advance what will it bring to them
2/ Ignorants abused by Red Hat's management in their role of beta-testers.
For Red Hat policies both are equally useful. 1/ will help them to make a trustworthy product that will fill up their moneybag; cries from 2/ will tell them which novelties are ready to be passed to their paying clients and which are not.
Now, ask yourself which subset you belong to, and if you want to stay there.
"By the way, I'd love to see a reference for an experiment that indicated ether existed."
Michelson-Morley's for one.
What else but the "friction" against ether could press over the Earth to an extent as to make all length measures be shorter on Earth's absolute movement direction, thus making the light appear to travel at the same speed on every direction?
"It is a perfect situation. Why should the EU decide local patent law? The federal government should not meddle in such minor details and concentrate on beeing a free trade union. I could not be happier!"
You must be joking. How can you expect a "free trade union" when you can have different policies regarding what you can sell and how in different countries of the EU? Different patent laws means different policies regarding what you can sell and how.
"If every experiment returns results that indicate quarks exist, then they exist. What meaning would there be in saying they don't?"
The very basic notion that Science is not there to seek The Truth, but Operational Certainties.
You just need to go backwards in Science History to see what an absurd position derives from telling "experiments say that Quarks Do Exist". Experiments did say that Ether existed too. What happens now? Did Ether exist, but just between 1895 and 1905? Absolute space did exist between 1687 and 1905 either? At most you can say, well, prior to 1687 (date of publication of Sir Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica Phylosphia Naturalis) absolute space and Universal Gravitation (as exposed by Newton's Laws) did exist, it's only Man hadn't had discovered them, but then what happened in 1905? Did the Universe physically changed its nature due to the publication of Einstein's works regarding Special Relativity? And then, since his works wasn't immediatly accepted by every physic, did the universe change in a moment, or did it change part by part?
And what to say about Copernico? Wow, what a drastical change! One they Sun was orbiting around Earth, the next the Sun stops and the Earth starts moving!
No: Science theories try to explain the Universe but are NOT the Universe themselves. That means that "Qarks Exist" is only an "abreviation". "Quarks exist within Quantum Theory, and Quantum Theory is the best we have to explain Reality" is the proper way to tell the fact.
"Now, the experiments don't prove that God's Perverse Humor doesn't exist, as well. Indeed, the two are experimentally indistinguishable and therefore the same."
No. They are "experimentally" the same, but obviously two theories are two theories, not one. It's only they both explain the same collection of measures. The fact they are two theories, not one, allows the expectation of finding tomorrow the refutative experiment that will make us prefer one over the other.
"No, the axioms of logic are chosen so as to correspond to the actual universe or otherwise be useful"
Sorry, but no sir. Maybe Euclydes would say that, but no mathematician born in the last 200 years would accept it.
Axioms are just "tokens to be accepted", an axiom can be "only one straigth line can pass over two points on a plain", or an axiom can be AAX.
"The universe follows structured rules and laws which are repeatable, predictable, and disprovable"
...And I still waiting for your probes about the Universe "following structured rules and laws which are repeatable, predictable, and disprovable" appart from your stubborn believe on such assertion.
I challenge you to offer the slightest demonstration to that quite gasping assertion.
And no, statistics doesn't demonstrates anything.
"There is zero evidence to the contrary"
So what? It is YOU the one that makes an assertion, so it is YOU the one that must bring probes for it. I don't have to bring evidence for a shit!
"Whether you wish to believe otherwise is your progrative, but no matter how hard you try, the universe will continue to exist forever exactly as it is."
Yes, but just telling that haven't made us to be the minimal part of a milimeter from a demonstration.
I can accept that "The Universe Is The Way That It Is", but obviously that says nothing about "The Universe Being The Way You Say It Is".