That's very naive. The company may theoretically work like that, but most middle managers have a different and much more complex set of metrics. Like avoiding blame for failures, taking credit for successes and trying to increase the size of the empire by hiring more people and keeping the important people in their team happy. Or trying to get promoted, or a whole variety of things.
Of course they can't disagree with the making money metric, but if you look at their behavior it isn't something they value very highly most of the time.
Those are all goals built around improving the middle manager's career prospects and, thus, increased personal wealth; precisely the point you were replying to.
What is notably absent from consideration for most middle managers is "increasing the wealth of the company".
Despite the fact that this is a link to a non-technical publication's website, the Farnsworth Fusor is a real fusion device and works basically how they describe it. What it is not, however, is anticipated to ever be a viable power source, and there are significant theoretical hurdles to prevent it from being viable relative to other approaches (and when you make any kind of fusion reactor seem plausible in comparison, you're probably not going anywhere). In my experience, most hobbyists are well aware of this and just enjoy the tinkering.
The primary functions of a fusor are 1) Generate neutrons 2) Look really cool 3) Kill you with extremely high voltages if you screw up.
No, thousand should be a lowercase 'k', and should be attached to the following word, not the number. e.g., "240 kiloKindles".
Really, SI prefixes aren't that complicated... If people would just take a hectosecond or two to think about what they're saying, it'd make things less confusing for everybody.
But back to your point about how they knew what it was called, I have a related question. How do they know that Eastern Laurentia had crinkle cut coastlines like Canada? Weren't they formed by glacial activity? How does that happen at the equator?
Most likely, they don't know that, or even think that it did. Continental drift maps are usually drawn by moving around the outlines of the modern continents for the most part, probably because that best communicates which parts went where, rather than amorphous blobs labeled things like "p.s. this is actually Canada".
My understanding would be that the actual outline of the old continents looked nothing like that and we have no way to figure out what they actually did look like.
This doesn't seem to have been a particularly well-handled, or deeply-sincere, attempt by Microsoft... so what were they really doing?
This is a sincere question; I've seen a lot of acquisitions (and even hostile takeovers) happen, and this seemed lacking in many ways. Maybe I've missed some of the machinations; maybe not.
From appearances Yahoo seems to be a terrible acquisition target; it is large and healthy enough to be very expensive and burdensome, but not growing rapidly or successful enough to be a major asset to someone like Microsoft.
One theory I've heard floated is that they didn't actually want Yahoo, but by making a show of trying to acquire it hoped to bait Google into buying Yahoo on the basis of denying it to Microsoft, with the net result of burning a chunk of Google's resources and bogging them down with the process of absorbing something that large. I don't know how credible that theory is, though.
Getting offtopic, but where did the term "activist judges" come from? It's a derogatory term meaning something like "judge who interprets the law in a way that disagrees with my political biases." The term was popularized by, and is most frequently used by, extreme right wingers, often in reference to the 9th Circuit, usually accompanied by the same disingenuous talking points about how much more frequently overturned their decisions supposedly are (see also: lies, damn lies, and statistics). Any political opinion that complains about "activist" judges is probably safely disregarded as specious.
So, let me get this straight: you (mySQL) use a dolphin to fetch data while PostgreSQL uses an elephant to fetch data. Would that explain why PostgreSQL is better at fetching large datasets? Like, the elephant can haul more, but is slower while the dolphin is faster, but can't carry as well? Have you thought about using a non-animal to fetch your data? Maybe a racecar? Those are fast and could probably haul as much as an elephant. Plus, then I wouldn't need to have fish or peanuts in my server room.
Of course, they say an elephant never forgets.
On the other hand dolphins probably get more sex. Hm.
Also, why do you select the nickname "Krow" for both Slashdot & your blog?
I'm going to take a blind stab and guess that the reason is because blogging or posting on slashdot is precisely the opposite of "work". Probably wrong, though.
With the reversed spelling there's got to be a Soviet Russia joke in here somewhere but I can't find it.
I'm not sure I understand the later concept -- how can organizational productivity be maximized if individual productivity is compromised?
Even if individual productivity per hour is lower, people are working more hours. Let's say that, on average, the individual does 5 units of work per hour with a 35hr week, but only 4.5 units/hr with a 45 hour week. In the first case, the worker is more efficient and accomplishes 175 total units. In the second case, his average productivity is lower, but the total is 202.5. As the hours per week increase, each additional hour adds progressively less to the final total--perhaps at a 60 hour week, he gets only 3 units per hour done, making the week's total only 180, less than if he'd worked only 45 hours.
This is simplified for the sake of example, of course. Obviously this only applies to salaried workers, as well. For workers paid hourly, the company benefits more by LIMITING the hours worked to the personal productivity peak, because it means they get more value for the money spent.
This is really pretty interesting, though. It might also speak to what I've always thought was a paradox regarding European unemployment. Theoretically, because of the increased vacation time and less demanding schedules, an organization might need to hire more workers to keep the number of man-hours the same. But if the workers are actually more productive per hour of work with a lighter schedule, an organization might neither need more workers or more worker time....
They'll still get less done overall than people on a typical American schedule, of course, but not as much less as one would at first think.
Also, communication and organizational overhead often makes adding more staff less helpful than one would think. For details, read The Mythical Man-Month, something else that foolish management often ignores.
Is that like a PC, Christian American way of saying "crap"?
Why not just say crap?
(or "stuff" for that matter)
The watered-down word you're thinking of would be "crud", not "cruft". Cruft has other connotations that are not synonymous with other words.
By the way, in most uses "crap" is already a watered-down version of "shit". If you're going to complain about "PC, Christian" language, why not use the real fucking profanity yourself, not this damn pussy shit like "crap"? What the hell, man.
In France, we often do work less than 40 hours a week. Less work also means better productivity. There surely is a "balancing point", but if it exist, it is different for every person, and is not constant with the time.
Believe it or not, there is actual research done on this--not that anyone ever pays attention to the results. If I recall correctly, it boils down to something like this:
- Productivity is low for the first 1-3 hours of a day as people get into the swing of things
- Daily productivity mostly goes up, but drops toward the end of the day (possibly because people are consciously "winding down")
- Productivity per worker hour peaks somewhere around a 30-hour week.
- Total sustainable productivity per week peaks at around a 45-hour week.
- Around 50 hours and up, fatigue builds up over time until burnout kicks in. Sustained work weeks of 50 hours are likely to be getting less TOTAL WORK done than sustained 35-hour weeks.
- Work weeks of around 80 hours are sustainable for maybe a week or so before catastrophic loss of total productivity occurs
- Anything much more than 80 hours likely results in immediately LOWER productivity, as fatigued workers make mistakes that take more time to fix than the extra hours provide.
From this, one can conclude that European schedules are more likely to maximize individual productivity (more work per hour), while American schedules are more likely to maximize organizational productivity (more work per person). One can also conclude that any manager who demands sustained work weeks of 50 hours or more is incompetent and a fool; the management equivalent of the kind of programmer who creates so many bugs he provides a net negative productivity to the team.
In practice, actual work hours are lower than they appear; most salaried workers are prone to finding numerous ways to not work while at work, largely because in many office environments physical presence is seen as more important than actual productivity.
I suspect the best balancing point would be something like four 9-hour workdays per week. Longer days to minimize the productivity drain of mornings, but a shorter total work week to allow occasional bursts of extra effort without creating long-term burnout.
My theory is that the 'raptor wasn't a dinosaur at all. It was just a really big ostrich. OK... a really big, really smart ostrich.
Your theory is almost correct, in that one could probably say the ostrich is just a small, stupid dinosaur.
If you want something a little more convincing than an ostrich, consider the cassowary; a six-foot tall bird that can run at 30 mph, jump 5 feet high, and swim well, with a 5-inch middle claw on each foot that the bird can and will use as a weapon, disemboweling a human with a single kick. They are intelligent, vicious when threatened, and cunning enough to outflank organized groups of humans they perceive as a threat.
Finding the center of the universe would be like looking for a point on the surface of a balloon that's the center. Things don't work that way.
If you want to know what direction the center of the universe is, it's either backwards on the time axis, or outside the universe in a direction perpendicular to all three spatial dimensions, depending on how you look at it. It certainly isn't a point in space.
A large portion of your complaint seems to stem from the FSF's philosophical views, for which I can't blame you. The GPL has always been explicitly political and constructed with intent to promote the FSF's ideals. RMS and his colleagues are very much pragmatic idealists, however, and so the license carefully balances long-term goals with short-term convenience. The restrictions you chafe at are in place because the FSF feels (rightly or not) that making those exceptions would compromise the long-term goals. Conversely, despite their notoriously ideological stance, they will sacrifice short-term freedoms if they think it will provide more freedom down the line.
Things like the anti-Tivo clause are somewhat borderline, but I can at least sympathize with the FSF's views even if I think it might not belong in the license. I also think compatibility could have been better; being able to absorb code under more permissive licenses into GPL code is useful. I'm not sure which clauses create your concerns about freedoms 1 and 3, but I'm guessing it involved relaxing the requirements on source distribution in ways that basically let end-users redistribute without source in certain circumstances, or something along those lines?
I was under the impression that a lot of work in GPLv3 was in fact to tighten up the range of potential legal interpretations--it's certainly less human-readable than the GPLv2 was. On the other hand, the jurisdiction clause you propose would put the license heavily at the mercy of local interpretation, a result that I think would be unacceptable to the FSF; it opens the door to locales with unusual or lax copyright laws allowing people to flout the GPL with impunity.
In the end, the FSF does what it does because they think a world dominated by open-source software would be better for everyone, a point on which I tend to agree with them. Speaking in terms of crude game theory, the issue is akin to the prisoner's dilemma, where open-source is cooperative and proprietary is the defection choice. The highest payout would be if all code was licensed under, say, the WTFPL. The GPL is constructed as a subversion of the payoff matrix to provide a slightly lower payout than mutual cooperation, but create an equilibrium point that has a higher payoff than the defect/defect equilibrium.
I know this was an AC comment so the poster probably won't read it, but it's actually a valid question.
Are you saying that you, yourself, don't have the patience? Or the guy across the street from you? Or are you simply lumping an entire society together in one borg-like collective, implying that "it" thinks for itself despite the individual thoughts of each member of that society?
No, I'm speaking of broad tendencies of opinion in the country as a whole. Society may not be a borg-like collective but prevailing opinions can be observed. (On/., we call this "groupthink") Measuring these collective opinions is what polling is for. The basis for my assertion is the public dissatisfaction with the costs, in time, lives, and money, of the efforts in Iraq as measured by numerous opinion polls.
The current administration has fouled up in Iraq, but fixing the mess would be even more expensive than getting us into it was, and improvement in the situation would not be immediately evident. None of the likely candidates for the next presidential election supports the war (the most visible supporter, McCain, has been going steadily down in the polls). Staying in Iraq for the decade or so it would take to rebuild the country properly would be so politically unpopular that no viable candidate will support it.
I personally would support such an effort if I had any confidence in the ability of the administration to do it successfully. None of the current candidates inspire that confidence, however.
I shouldn't even bother responding to AC trolls, but here goes anyway. No, that's not what will happen. If no terrorist attack occurs, we'll count ourselves lucky. If one does occur, we'll still lament all the money we spent on Iraq and the "War on Terror" because, in all honesty, all that money spent (and liberties lost) *isn't going to stop someone from attacking us if they truly want to*.
Frankly the only thing that seems to be protecting us right now is that the terrorists that do exist appear to be even more incompetent than our efforts at security.
We should consider ourselves lucky that most people who are sane and resourceful enough to spread abject terror are probably more motivated by material greed than lunatic religious ideology.
I count 60 licenses. Qmail is NOT OSI certified. Affero is not approved either, or at least I can't find a single reference claiming it to be. So out of the 60 OSI-certified licenses, GPL stands to be the worst, you agree with me?
I think I missed the part where you demonstrated that "least restrictive" equals "best". Could you back up and go over that again, please?
Of course arguments over open-source licenses tend to be silly. It comes with the territory. I'm not a fanatic for any one license myself, I just get annoyed by anti-GPL trolls. I'm generally sympathetic to the goals of the GPL but it isn't always the best choice--for instance, putting libraries and reference implementations under the GPL seems annoying and stupid, and dual licensing schemes for libraries (i.e., either paid license for non-GPL use or full GPL) leaves a bad taste in my mouth for some reason.
Out of curiousity, what problems do you have with the GPL?
I would go so far as to say Bush's low popularity numbers reflect on how much conviction he has. He operates under beliefs, not by raising his finger in the air and seeing which way the wind is blowing (IE Dems on Iraq).
Sticking to one's "convictions" when reality has proven them wrong is not an admirable trait. When you find you are digging yourself into a hole, you stop digging, not "stay the course" and dig faster.
What's going to happen when we beat the terrorists in Iraq? What are the cowering, wimpering, cut and run democrats going to do then?
If they have any sense they'll cut our losses and write off Iraq. The American people, unfortunately, probably don't have the patience for the time and effort it would take to clean up the huge mess Bush has made.
And hopefully after a few years of no major terrorist activity the cowardly conservatives crying like children about monsters under their beds will grow up and grow some balls.
Yes, one of the most restrictive OS Licenses will keep us 'free'./laugh.
Yes, if by "restrictive" you mean "does not grant the freedom to deny other people the same freedom". Which is, you know, how most sensible definitions of freedom work out. Or do you think slavery should be legalized in the name of "freedom"?
I'm in the process of looking at eMusic too, but they won't show you their whole catalog unless you sign up (ie. give them a credit card number) for their free trial. I'm guessing their catalog is, uh, limited since they don't want you to see it before you sign up.
I could be wrong here, but I think that may have more to do with crappy website design than actively preventing you from looking at their selection. Try using Google searches with site:emusic.com to turn up the normal pages instead of the "SIGN UP NOW LOLZ" pages. Although, they may have changed that more recently. I'm a happily paying customer of eMusic now, so I haven't tried it lately...
That said, their selection largely amounts to 1) Classical 2) Assorted ethnic and non-English stuff 3) Non-RIAA indie labels. I'm currently listening to some Pixies and White Stripes music I got from eMusic. Anyhow, if any of those three types appeal to you, I encourage you to sign up; it's certainly worth it. If you want popular music, stick with more mainstream online music stores, like, er, BitTorrent.;)
Have you ever used XP or 2000? It's not "shitty". It's certainly not the best thing ever, but it sure as fuck beats using Linux for a desktop machine. Please note that I ran Linux as my only OS from 1997 through 2002 and then went back and haven't returned.
Myself, I use XP at my day job and Linux at home. The home computer has been a Linux desktop for the last 2-3 years. Overall I find Linux to be a more pleasant experience for my purposes; it's less prone to mystery errors, the documentation is better, and the system is often more responsive even on slower hardware than my work machine.
That's not to say that XP isn't a fine, decent piece of software, but it hardly blows Linux out of the water. It may be better depending on what you want to use the machine for, but it's not a clear victory. I use VS.NET at my day job also, and it's hardly crap software either. Even the much-maligned IE won the browser wars on its own merits, back in the day.
The problem I have with Microsoft is not that their software sucks, it's that they consistently provide products that are merely acceptable, only barely beating out equivalent open-source software, and any "innovation" usually has more to do with copying other people than breaking new ground. They do okay, but they really ought to be capable of doing better than just "good enough". Especially if you look at the amazing stuff that comes out of Microsoft Research, then compare it to the "copy Apple's ideas, slowly and at much greater expense" that is Vista. They're clearly capable of making better software--just look at the huge improvement that IE7 is over IE6, but why on earth did it take them so long?
I just don't get it. How do you take a company that employs huge numbers of very smart people, has ungodly amounts of money, dominates multiple markets, and then manage to produce only mediocre software, very slowly and at great expense? What are they doing all day in there?
Bloody right. I've always wondered what the Dow goes up to, as well. While you're at it, clue me in on the maximum limits of Moh's scale, Scovilles, pH and Degrees Celsius too.
I think pH is defined experimentally, not theoretically, so you'd have to find the strongest known acid and base to get the rough limits of that scale. Not sure though.
The Mohs scale is defined as going from 1 (Talc) to 10 (Diamond), but likely there are possible materials with Mohs hardnesses outside that range, such as weird synthetic carbon structures harder than diamond.
Scovilles go up to 16 million or so, which is the heat level of pure capsaicin. For comparison, tabasco sauce is only a few thousand Scovilles and pepper spray is maybe 4 million or so.
Degrees celsius range from -273.15C (absolute zero temperature) to somewhere around 10^32 C, the Planck temperature above which energy levels are so high that temperature ceases to be a meaningful quality.
What about one position voters, like me?
I will vote for whoever is against gun control that has a good chance of winning, or against which ever candidate supports gun control and looks like they are probably going to win, which ever lets me vote for the least Evil Candidate.
The solution to your problem is easy--forget about the gun control issue and vote for whoever you otherwise agree with more.
Gun control, like abortion or gay marriage, is a hot button issue used mostly to motivate voters. Each party will talk loudly about the evil position of the other party as a way to motivate their core voters to get out and vote to protect $foo from the bad guys. If they get elected, they'll rant about it now and then and make half-hearted efforts at legislation, but they won't do anything significant. Why not? Because that would hand the other party a landslide in the next election as their base comes out in force.
Most people don't vote for candidates, they vote against candidates. Any party that does something that even 25% of the nation very strongly opposes will find themselves tossed out next time around.
Look at Bush if you don't believe me. He sent us into a war, which he then proceeded to foul up. Corruption that makes Clinton look like an ethics role model. A rubber-stamping Republican congress for most of his term. In all that, where's the federal ban on gay marriage and abortion? Didn't happen, you say?
If you deeply believe in a hot button issue, like gun rights, forget elections. The only way these issues will shift is from the bottom up. Talk to people, persuade them that gun control is a flawed idea and violates freedoms. Tell people that it isn't only right wing nutjobs who support gun rights. You'll make far more of a difference that way.
Slashdot Mirror
That's very naive. The company may theoretically work like that, but most middle managers have a different and much more complex set of metrics. Like avoiding blame for failures, taking credit for successes and trying to increase the size of the empire by hiring more people and keeping the important people in their team happy. Or trying to get promoted, or a whole variety of things.
Of course they can't disagree with the making money metric, but if you look at their behavior it isn't something they value very highly most of the time.
Those are all goals built around improving the middle manager's career prospects and, thus, increased personal wealth; precisely the point you were replying to.
What is notably absent from consideration for most middle managers is "increasing the wealth of the company".
Despite the fact that this is a link to a non-technical publication's website, the Farnsworth Fusor is a real fusion device and works basically how they describe it. What it is not, however, is anticipated to ever be a viable power source, and there are significant theoretical hurdles to prevent it from being viable relative to other approaches (and when you make any kind of fusion reactor seem plausible in comparison, you're probably not going anywhere). In my experience, most hobbyists are well aware of this and just enjoy the tinkering.
The primary functions of a fusor are 1) Generate neutrons 2) Look really cool 3) Kill you with extremely high voltages if you screw up.
No, thousand should be a lowercase 'k', and should be attached to the following word, not the number. e.g., "240 kiloKindles".
Really, SI prefixes aren't that complicated... If people would just take a hectosecond or two to think about what they're saying, it'd make things less confusing for everybody.
But back to your point about how they knew what it was called, I have a related question. How do they know that Eastern Laurentia had crinkle cut coastlines like Canada? Weren't they formed by glacial activity? How does that happen at the equator?
Most likely, they don't know that, or even think that it did. Continental drift maps are usually drawn by moving around the outlines of the modern continents for the most part, probably because that best communicates which parts went where, rather than amorphous blobs labeled things like "p.s. this is actually Canada".
My understanding would be that the actual outline of the old continents looked nothing like that and we have no way to figure out what they actually did look like.
This doesn't seem to have been a particularly well-handled, or deeply-sincere, attempt by Microsoft... so what were they really doing?
This is a sincere question; I've seen a lot of acquisitions (and even hostile takeovers) happen, and this seemed lacking in many ways. Maybe I've missed some of the machinations; maybe not.
From appearances Yahoo seems to be a terrible acquisition target; it is large and healthy enough to be very expensive and burdensome, but not growing rapidly or successful enough to be a major asset to someone like Microsoft.
One theory I've heard floated is that they didn't actually want Yahoo, but by making a show of trying to acquire it hoped to bait Google into buying Yahoo on the basis of denying it to Microsoft, with the net result of burning a chunk of Google's resources and bogging them down with the process of absorbing something that large. I don't know how credible that theory is, though.
Of course, they say an elephant never forgets.
On the other hand dolphins probably get more sex. Hm.
I'm going to take a blind stab and guess that the reason is because blogging or posting on slashdot is precisely the opposite of "work". Probably wrong, though.
With the reversed spelling there's got to be a Soviet Russia joke in here somewhere but I can't find it.
Even if individual productivity per hour is lower, people are working more hours. Let's say that, on average, the individual does 5 units of work per hour with a 35hr week, but only 4.5 units/hr with a 45 hour week. In the first case, the worker is more efficient and accomplishes 175 total units. In the second case, his average productivity is lower, but the total is 202.5. As the hours per week increase, each additional hour adds progressively less to the final total--perhaps at a 60 hour week, he gets only 3 units per hour done, making the week's total only 180, less than if he'd worked only 45 hours.
This is simplified for the sake of example, of course. Obviously this only applies to salaried workers, as well. For workers paid hourly, the company benefits more by LIMITING the hours worked to the personal productivity peak, because it means they get more value for the money spent.
This is really pretty interesting, though. It might also speak to what I've always thought was a paradox regarding European unemployment. Theoretically, because of the increased vacation time and less demanding schedules, an organization might need to hire more workers to keep the number of man-hours the same. But if the workers are actually more productive per hour of work with a lighter schedule, an organization might neither need more workers or more worker time....They'll still get less done overall than people on a typical American schedule, of course, but not as much less as one would at first think.
Also, communication and organizational overhead often makes adding more staff less helpful than one would think. For details, read The Mythical Man-Month, something else that foolish management often ignores.
Why not just say crap?
(or "stuff" for that matter)
The watered-down word you're thinking of would be "crud", not "cruft". Cruft has other connotations that are not synonymous with other words.
By the way, in most uses "crap" is already a watered-down version of "shit". If you're going to complain about "PC, Christian" language, why not use the real fucking profanity yourself, not this damn pussy shit like "crap"? What the hell, man.
Believe it or not, there is actual research done on this--not that anyone ever pays attention to the results. If I recall correctly, it boils down to something like this:
- Productivity is low for the first 1-3 hours of a day as people get into the swing of things- Daily productivity mostly goes up, but drops toward the end of the day (possibly because people are consciously "winding down")
- Productivity per worker hour peaks somewhere around a 30-hour week.
- Total sustainable productivity per week peaks at around a 45-hour week.
- Around 50 hours and up, fatigue builds up over time until burnout kicks in. Sustained work weeks of 50 hours are likely to be getting less TOTAL WORK done than sustained 35-hour weeks.
- Work weeks of around 80 hours are sustainable for maybe a week or so before catastrophic loss of total productivity occurs
- Anything much more than 80 hours likely results in immediately LOWER productivity, as fatigued workers make mistakes that take more time to fix than the extra hours provide.
From this, one can conclude that European schedules are more likely to maximize individual productivity (more work per hour), while American schedules are more likely to maximize organizational productivity (more work per person). One can also conclude that any manager who demands sustained work weeks of 50 hours or more is incompetent and a fool; the management equivalent of the kind of programmer who creates so many bugs he provides a net negative productivity to the team.
In practice, actual work hours are lower than they appear; most salaried workers are prone to finding numerous ways to not work while at work, largely because in many office environments physical presence is seen as more important than actual productivity.
I suspect the best balancing point would be something like four 9-hour workdays per week. Longer days to minimize the productivity drain of mornings, but a shorter total work week to allow occasional bursts of extra effort without creating long-term burnout.
Your theory is almost correct, in that one could probably say the ostrich is just a small, stupid dinosaur.
If you want something a little more convincing than an ostrich, consider the cassowary; a six-foot tall bird that can run at 30 mph, jump 5 feet high, and swim well, with a 5-inch middle claw on each foot that the bird can and will use as a weapon, disemboweling a human with a single kick. They are intelligent, vicious when threatened, and cunning enough to outflank organized groups of humans they perceive as a threat.
Fortunately, they aren't carnivores.
Finding the center of the universe would be like looking for a point on the surface of a balloon that's the center. Things don't work that way.
If you want to know what direction the center of the universe is, it's either backwards on the time axis, or outside the universe in a direction perpendicular to all three spatial dimensions, depending on how you look at it. It certainly isn't a point in space.
Asperger's is a real and fairly uncommon developmental disorder and probably not appreciably more common on slashdot than anywhere else.
You may be confusing it with the similarly-named Assburger's Syndrome, which is indeed rampant on this and many other websites.
A large portion of your complaint seems to stem from the FSF's philosophical views, for which I can't blame you. The GPL has always been explicitly political and constructed with intent to promote the FSF's ideals. RMS and his colleagues are very much pragmatic idealists, however, and so the license carefully balances long-term goals with short-term convenience. The restrictions you chafe at are in place because the FSF feels (rightly or not) that making those exceptions would compromise the long-term goals. Conversely, despite their notoriously ideological stance, they will sacrifice short-term freedoms if they think it will provide more freedom down the line.
Things like the anti-Tivo clause are somewhat borderline, but I can at least sympathize with the FSF's views even if I think it might not belong in the license. I also think compatibility could have been better; being able to absorb code under more permissive licenses into GPL code is useful. I'm not sure which clauses create your concerns about freedoms 1 and 3, but I'm guessing it involved relaxing the requirements on source distribution in ways that basically let end-users redistribute without source in certain circumstances, or something along those lines?
I was under the impression that a lot of work in GPLv3 was in fact to tighten up the range of potential legal interpretations--it's certainly less human-readable than the GPLv2 was. On the other hand, the jurisdiction clause you propose would put the license heavily at the mercy of local interpretation, a result that I think would be unacceptable to the FSF; it opens the door to locales with unusual or lax copyright laws allowing people to flout the GPL with impunity.
In the end, the FSF does what it does because they think a world dominated by open-source software would be better for everyone, a point on which I tend to agree with them. Speaking in terms of crude game theory, the issue is akin to the prisoner's dilemma, where open-source is cooperative and proprietary is the defection choice. The highest payout would be if all code was licensed under, say, the WTFPL. The GPL is constructed as a subversion of the payoff matrix to provide a slightly lower payout than mutual cooperation, but create an equilibrium point that has a higher payoff than the defect/defect equilibrium.
I know this was an AC comment so the poster probably won't read it, but it's actually a valid question.
Are you saying that you, yourself, don't have the patience? Or the guy across the street from you? Or are you simply lumping an entire society together in one borg-like collective, implying that "it" thinks for itself despite the individual thoughts of each member of that society?No, I'm speaking of broad tendencies of opinion in the country as a whole. Society may not be a borg-like collective but prevailing opinions can be observed. (On /., we call this "groupthink") Measuring these collective opinions is what polling is for. The basis for my assertion is the public dissatisfaction with the costs, in time, lives, and money, of the efforts in Iraq as measured by numerous opinion polls.
The current administration has fouled up in Iraq, but fixing the mess would be even more expensive than getting us into it was, and improvement in the situation would not be immediately evident. None of the likely candidates for the next presidential election supports the war (the most visible supporter, McCain, has been going steadily down in the polls). Staying in Iraq for the decade or so it would take to rebuild the country properly would be so politically unpopular that no viable candidate will support it.
I personally would support such an effort if I had any confidence in the ability of the administration to do it successfully. None of the current candidates inspire that confidence, however.
Frankly the only thing that seems to be protecting us right now is that the terrorists that do exist appear to be even more incompetent than our efforts at security.
We should consider ourselves lucky that most people who are sane and resourceful enough to spread abject terror are probably more motivated by material greed than lunatic religious ideology.
I think I missed the part where you demonstrated that "least restrictive" equals "best". Could you back up and go over that again, please?
Of course arguments over open-source licenses tend to be silly. It comes with the territory. I'm not a fanatic for any one license myself, I just get annoyed by anti-GPL trolls. I'm generally sympathetic to the goals of the GPL but it isn't always the best choice--for instance, putting libraries and reference implementations under the GPL seems annoying and stupid, and dual licensing schemes for libraries (i.e., either paid license for non-GPL use or full GPL) leaves a bad taste in my mouth for some reason.
Out of curiousity, what problems do you have with the GPL?
I would go so far as to say Bush's low popularity numbers reflect on how much conviction he has. He operates under beliefs, not by raising his finger in the air and seeing which way the wind is blowing (IE Dems on Iraq).
Sticking to one's "convictions" when reality has proven them wrong is not an admirable trait. When you find you are digging yourself into a hole, you stop digging, not "stay the course" and dig faster.
What's going to happen when we beat the terrorists in Iraq? What are the cowering, wimpering, cut and run democrats going to do then?If they have any sense they'll cut our losses and write off Iraq. The American people, unfortunately, probably don't have the patience for the time and effort it would take to clean up the huge mess Bush has made.
And hopefully after a few years of no major terrorist activity the cowardly conservatives crying like children about monsters under their beds will grow up and grow some balls.
Yes, one of the most restrictive OS Licenses will keep us 'free'.
Yes, if by "restrictive" you mean "does not grant the freedom to deny other people the same freedom". Which is, you know, how most sensible definitions of freedom work out. Or do you think slavery should be legalized in the name of "freedom"?
Anti-GPL trolls are funny.
I could be wrong here, but I think that may have more to do with crappy website design than actively preventing you from looking at their selection. Try using Google searches with site:emusic.com to turn up the normal pages instead of the "SIGN UP NOW LOLZ" pages. Although, they may have changed that more recently. I'm a happily paying customer of eMusic now, so I haven't tried it lately...
That said, their selection largely amounts to 1) Classical 2) Assorted ethnic and non-English stuff 3) Non-RIAA indie labels. I'm currently listening to some Pixies and White Stripes music I got from eMusic. Anyhow, if any of those three types appeal to you, I encourage you to sign up; it's certainly worth it. If you want popular music, stick with more mainstream online music stores, like, er, BitTorrent. ;)
Myself, I use XP at my day job and Linux at home. The home computer has been a Linux desktop for the last 2-3 years. Overall I find Linux to be a more pleasant experience for my purposes; it's less prone to mystery errors, the documentation is better, and the system is often more responsive even on slower hardware than my work machine.
That's not to say that XP isn't a fine, decent piece of software, but it hardly blows Linux out of the water. It may be better depending on what you want to use the machine for, but it's not a clear victory. I use VS.NET at my day job also, and it's hardly crap software either. Even the much-maligned IE won the browser wars on its own merits, back in the day.
The problem I have with Microsoft is not that their software sucks, it's that they consistently provide products that are merely acceptable, only barely beating out equivalent open-source software, and any "innovation" usually has more to do with copying other people than breaking new ground. They do okay, but they really ought to be capable of doing better than just "good enough". Especially if you look at the amazing stuff that comes out of Microsoft Research, then compare it to the "copy Apple's ideas, slowly and at much greater expense" that is Vista. They're clearly capable of making better software--just look at the huge improvement that IE7 is over IE6, but why on earth did it take them so long?
I just don't get it. How do you take a company that employs huge numbers of very smart people, has ungodly amounts of money, dominates multiple markets, and then manage to produce only mediocre software, very slowly and at great expense? What are they doing all day in there?
Bloody right. I've always wondered what the Dow goes up to, as well. While you're at it, clue me in on the maximum limits of Moh's scale, Scovilles, pH and Degrees Celsius too.
I think pH is defined experimentally, not theoretically, so you'd have to find the strongest known acid and base to get the rough limits of that scale. Not sure though.
The Mohs scale is defined as going from 1 (Talc) to 10 (Diamond), but likely there are possible materials with Mohs hardnesses outside that range, such as weird synthetic carbon structures harder than diamond.
Scovilles go up to 16 million or so, which is the heat level of pure capsaicin. For comparison, tabasco sauce is only a few thousand Scovilles and pepper spray is maybe 4 million or so.
Degrees celsius range from -273.15C (absolute zero temperature) to somewhere around 10^32 C, the Planck temperature above which energy levels are so high that temperature ceases to be a meaningful quality.
I will vote for whoever is against gun control that has a good chance of winning, or against which ever candidate supports gun control and looks like they are probably going to win, which ever lets me vote for the least Evil Candidate.
The solution to your problem is easy--forget about the gun control issue and vote for whoever you otherwise agree with more.
Gun control, like abortion or gay marriage, is a hot button issue used mostly to motivate voters. Each party will talk loudly about the evil position of the other party as a way to motivate their core voters to get out and vote to protect $foo from the bad guys. If they get elected, they'll rant about it now and then and make half-hearted efforts at legislation, but they won't do anything significant. Why not? Because that would hand the other party a landslide in the next election as their base comes out in force.
Most people don't vote for candidates, they vote against candidates. Any party that does something that even 25% of the nation very strongly opposes will find themselves tossed out next time around.
Look at Bush if you don't believe me. He sent us into a war, which he then proceeded to foul up. Corruption that makes Clinton look like an ethics role model. A rubber-stamping Republican congress for most of his term. In all that, where's the federal ban on gay marriage and abortion? Didn't happen, you say?
If you deeply believe in a hot button issue, like gun rights, forget elections. The only way these issues will shift is from the bottom up. Talk to people, persuade them that gun control is a flawed idea and violates freedoms. Tell people that it isn't only right wing nutjobs who support gun rights. You'll make far more of a difference that way.