I am not the one who asked the original question, but I note that the Warzone 2100 Project, a free and open-source real-time strategy game written mostly in C, always welcomes new developers (and players!)
In particular, we'd like a new Windows developer - we currently have exactly zero.:(
Well that would be their own fault for not using an address like 10.0.0.0/8 which was designed and documented for that purpose.
You know, it really wouldn't hurt to read a post before you reply to it...
To avoid addressing conflict with the internet itself, the range 1.0.0.0/8 is used. This is to avoid conflicting with internal networks such as 10/8, 172.16/12 and 192.168/16, as well as assigned Internet ranges. As of January 2010 IANA has allocated 1/8 to APNIC.[1] If the service does not switch to another address range then Internet hosts using 1.0.0.0/8 will be inaccessible to AnoNet users.
Comparing jailing political dissidents to Guantanamo Bay is comparing apples and oranges. China jails internal dissidents, Gitmo is for enemy combatants who are necessarily foreign to the U.S. There are no American citizens in Gitmo, their lawyers would have a field day.
As another poster asks, are non-American citizens nonhuman, then? Do human rights no longer apply to them? Then surely you have no objection to China jailing internal dissidents - they aren't American, either!
And equating DMCA with political censorship is plain silly. Sure, some lawyers may try to pervert DMCA, but that isn't the law's intent.
And what makes you think China's applying laws intended for political censorship? Those laws are intended to promote a more harmonious society! I'll have you know that China's constitution guarantees freedom of speech.
The biggest problem with America's legal system is that laws are passed under the assumption that it'll never be enforced in some theoretical unjust way, because it would violate the spirit of the law. And then when they're enforced in that unjust way, they bring up that the letter of the law allows it, so they're doing nothing wrong. One or both of those really needs to change.
Anyway, what does it matter what the law's intent is? I'm sure all those websites being censored by the US feel much better because the laws weren't intended to do that.
I get furious with the DMCA, especially when it is abused for censorship purposes. I also have some very serious issues with the US government and what it is/has been doing. I have two short points to make though:
1) Actions taken by the US government do not excuse actions taken by the Chinese government.
I agree with you there. But that's not the point.
The point is that Google is refusing to censor its search results in China, while turning a blind eye to its censorship elsewhere, such as in the US and Germany. So I repeat: There's no fallacy of scale here, unless you wish to argue that the US is more deserving of censorship since they commit fewer human rights violations?
2) You either have an incredibly warped sense of scale, or you are not very familar with the Chinese censorship program.
I'm a Chinese citizen. I have plenty of experience with the Great Firewall. There's currently a MUD that's blocked from it because I convinced one of its coders to install a proxy on it for me. The Great Firewall has caused tons of problems for me - not having Wikipedia access was probably the worst (and why I set up that proxy in the first place).
I won't argue with you here - China is indeed worse in some aspects. But what's your point? That it's okay for the US to commit human rights violations because they aren't as bad as China?
Sadly, these recent Google actions will do nothing useful. The Chinese government has wanted Google to leave for ages; the more people who use domestic search engines like Baidu, the easier those searches are to censor, and without the censorship warning Google insisted on. The Americans who support the decision - virtually all of whom are completely unaffected by the change - are patting their backs right now. Meanwhile, we - the Chinese citizens - will soon lose access to Google (at least Gmail offers forwarding - I'll have to forward my e-mails to a different off-shore mailserver that hasn't been blocked yet).
This is why I don't understand why some people can't accept the lesser of two evils. Would you prefer the greater of two evils? Well, here we are, at the greater of two evils. Were you expecting anything else? A mythical third option - a revolt, perhaps? The majority of China don't use Google and won't care - and plenty are nationalistic enough to applaud the withdrawal of Google as the triumph of Baidu.
The GP accuses you of commiting a fallacy of scale, and I must say I agree.
Sure you can logically draw comparisons between the DMCA and chinese censorship laws, it's not particularly hard or imaginative. The problem is when you compare the two on equal grounds. One involves gross violations of basic human rights, the other involves less Brittany Spears remixes on youtube.
I'd argue that freedom of speech counts as a basic human right.
Regardless, the DMCA has been used to censor material critical of the Church of Scientology from appearing on Google search results. Is that political speech, to you? Google also censors Nazi-related materials in Germany. Is that political speech, to you? Sure, perhaps the US doesn't jail political dissidents quite the same way China does, but what's Guantanamo Bay? Sure, there's a difference in scale, but the difference isn't as great as many people think.
The original point is that Google is demanding uncensored search results in China, but not in the US or Germany. There's no fallacy of scale here, unless you wish to argue that the US is more deserving of censorship since they commit fewer human rights violations?
It doesn't even make sense. Changing your app install behavior to work the same way as other distros is assuming your users are wiser than average?
And, Fedora's designers have assumed that its users are wiser than the general run of users. 'For example, in earlier versions, ordinary (non-admin) users could install software on Fedora without access to the root password. As of this version, however, local users will need to enter the root password before they can install software (as they do on almost all other Linux distributions).'"
Or is that "More than Free"? I'd consider getting a free operating system AND revenue to be MORE, not less... but perhaps that's semantics.
Another poster suggests "better than free", which I think is the least ambiguous way of phrasing it.
It seems like somebody was desperate to write an anti-google story. He seem to be highly suspicious of the carriers for daring to want to compete with the iPod and the Blackberry; than, he seems to be surprised that Google PAYS people to use the version of the Android OS that Google actually PROFITS from.
The story doesn't seem very anti-Google at all; in fact, reading TFA (omg shock people do that? etc), it seems that he's praising Google for their ability to disrupt (i.e. out-compete) their competitors. I mean "Google’s brilliance doesn’t stop there" doesn't sound very anti-Google at all.
No, Konqueror still uses KHTML, which WebKit was based on, but is inferior in many ways. There was some talk about switching it over to WebKit a while ago, but they eventually decided it was infeasible.
I was surprised Konq and iCab weren't in the list, though; they're pretty important browsers. And I didn't really understand why they published things like Acid3 scores, considering the majority of the browsers on the list used rendering engines from the four major browsers (two Gecko and two WebKit browsers).
By the way, I wouldn't recommend using Konqueror. As a Web developer, I consider KHTML one of the worst major rendering engines to support (yes, even worse than Trident from IE7+).
A bug causing a game to not render the background correctly is "important", but security fixes et al are not?
Well, I was exaggerating a bit. Of course security fixes are important. But as a developer of the aforementioned game, I'm kind of more affected by the rendering bug. I mean, when's the last time an OS X security bug has had an exploit in the wild? Compare that to not insignificant number of Warzone players (Windows and Linux are supported, too! Come try one of the most popular FOSS RTSes today!)
Have you heard of iCab? It's the only Acid2-compliant browser that runs on Mac OS 9, and is much more standards compliant than Gecko 1.3 (the version used in Classilla).
Although iCab is no longer maintained for Mac OS 9, its last release for Mac OS 9 was in 2008, far more recently than Gecko 1.3 (2002), and the Mac OS 9 version is still a full-featured modern browser with tabbed browsing, built-in AdBlock, excellent standards compliance (iCab was the first browser with an Acid2-compliant public build) - the only thing it's really missing is CSS3 opacity, and all that good stuff.
Did you check "Enable pre-release features" or "Next generation" in the Google Apps domain settings? It's my impression that only explicitly enabling beta features like that would cause the "beta" label to appear. If those are unchecked, you should see no "beta" label.
To be fair, Chrome is from Google. It's going to be beta for another three years.
What are you talking about? Google Chrome has been stable since December 2008, and Chrome 2 has been stable since mid-May (and scores 100/100 on Acid3).
Sigh, I guess this is the price we all pay for being reliant on a company which I suspect is past it's peak.
What?
Microsoft is doing exactly what any other software company in their position has done, and would do. You have GenericSoftware 3.0. Then, GenericSoftware 4.0 is released. You either you have to deal with a mixed software environment, or you have to upgrade everyone to GenericSoftware 4.0. How is what Microsoft's doing different from what every other company is doing?
And don't tell me open-source doesn't have this problem. Windows XP was released in 2001. If you asked for support and patches for, say, Mozilla Phoenix 0.3 (released 2002), you'd get laughed out of pretty much everywhere. And if you actually cared about using open-source, you'd be using Linux and you wouldn't have this problem in the first place.
And it's not compatibility, either: Windows 7 is coming with Windows XP Mode, which will give you all the IE6 you'll need for your buggy ActiveX webapps.
So tell me: What's wrong with what Microsoft is doing with Windows XP?
They always release their software for Windows first. Will this be the same? I wonder...
Considering Wave is an online service, it would be pretty difficult for them to make it Windows-only. None of Google's other Web pages are Windows-only.
For a more well-known example of a localized programming language: TI-BASIC 68k (the variant used on TI-89, TI-92, and Voyage 200 calculators).
This causes many problems, since it means source code written in one language will not run in a calculator set to another language. As Wikipedia notes, various configuration strings are also localized, so even binaries can be incompatible.
Exactly. It's like certain rights under labor law: making them inviolable, impossible even willingly to give away, precludes certain abuses. Just as I can't give up my basic human rights in a contract (e.g., selling myself into indentured servitude), I shouldn't be able to give up certain rights over work I produce. For example, in France "moral rights" include the right of an artist to claim to have produced a certain work of art (which is distinct from ownership of the physical work or of rights to copy it). The artist retains the right to "disown" a work or to claim authorship of it. That could matter, for example, in the attribution of a literary prize, which depends on the authorship of a work but not on its copyright status. And it makes perfect sense that one not be allowed to sign away that basic right.
IANAL, but what does this have to do with copyright law? Of course the author of a work can claim to have created it: that's covered by freedom of speech. And the author of a work can prevent others from claiming to have created it: that's covered by slander and libel laws. Even if you give up your copyright completely, to another party or to the public domain, you still retain these rights.
Going through the other "moral rights":
- The right to claim authorship is intrinsic of free speech, and is not separately guaranteed by moral rights. Perhaps you were thinking of the right of attribution, which is something else entirely.
- The right of attribution basically says that someone can't say you created a work if you didn't, and they can't say you didn't create a work if you did. This is, of course, covered by defamation (i.e. slander/libel) law, not copyright law.
- The right to publish a work anonymously should also be guaranteed by freedom of speech. If, by "disown", you include preventing others from saying you created the work, I don't think it should, because that would infringe on their freedom of speech.
- The right to integrity of the work shouldn't be a moral right. I want to be able to give up this right - free software licenses would be useless otherwise. As a user, I want to be guaranteed access to a work as long as I abide by the terms of the GPL, and as a content creator, I want to guarantee my users that they won't be sued as long as they abide by the GPL, but this is impossible under the right to integrity: It would be impossible to waive the right to say "I want you to stop using my work."
In short, "moral rights" don't give any reason why someone shouldn't be able to waive a copyright completely: They're either already covered by other laws, or completely inane.
To extend your argument, "Chinese" is not really a language. The people of China speak several different non-mutually intelligible variants. Linguistically these are more separate languages than dialects, although they are often lumped under "Chinese" for cultural and political reasons.
No, they are often lumped together because they are only slightly more separate than dialects. Sure, they're not mutually intelligible, but neither are English and Pig Latin. In particular, they're written effectively exactly the same way (barring differences in dialects), so they're even closer to each other than Pig Latin is to English (again, barring dialectical differences).
For example:
(/. doesn't allow Unicode, nor does it allow HTML entities for Chinese characters, so I can't insert Chinese characters. Mouse over these links and some browsers [Firefox] will show you the character, though)
[long] can be pronounced either 'chang2' (meaning "long") or 'zhang3' (meaning "grow") in Mandarin. [long] can be pronounced either 'coeng4' (meaning "long") or 'zoeng2' (meaning "grow") in Cantonese.
[without] is pronounced 'fei1' (meaning "without") in Mandarin [without] is pronounced 'fei1' (meaning "without") in Cantonese
[fly] is pronounced 'fei1' (meaning "fly") in Mandarin [fly] is pronounced 'fei1' (meaning "fly") in Cantonese
[quick] is pronounced 'kuai4' (meaning "quick") in Mandarin [quick] is pronounced 'faai3' (meaning "quick") in Cantonese
[piece] is pronounced 'kuai4' (meaning "piece") in Mandarin [piece] is pronounced 'faai3' (meaning "piece") in Cantonese
(In other words, homophones in Mandarin are homophones in Cantonese; homographs in Mandarin are homographs in Cantonese.)
You can't look at these and tell me these "variants" aren't as close to each other as most dialects are.
Slashdot uses HTML, not BBcode (which is what you're probably referring to by "bulletin boards syntax").
This:
<quote>hello</quote>
becomes this:
hello
In addition, clicking "Quote Parent" in the comment box would add the quote automatically (at least in Discussion2 mode, which I believe is default nowadays). Plus, it forces you to preview before you submit your comment, so you should have caught the syntax error then.
So your cat agreed to the EULA, and by doing so, gained a license to use the software, for themselves.
So you still have no license to use it...
The fact that the software is now installed on your PC, does not mean it is yours. You might as well torrent it.
Where's the big news?
If you've installed Firefox, you'll notice you never agreed to an EULA. Firefox is copyrighted software; by your logic, you would be unable to use Firefox.
IANAL, but the general consensus is that you don't need a license to use software, only to redistribute it. That's what they explain as the difference between an EULA and a distribution license like the GPL - the EULA takes away rights you have (which is why you have to agree to it for it to be valid), but the GPL gives you more rights than you would otherwise have (which is why you don't have to agree to it for it to be valid).
I'd be pretty surprised if this latest leaked build ends up giving us a sneak peak at what Microsoft's plans to butcher up Windows 7 into 5+ "versions" is. I'd like to try to use my computer with a 2-process limit, just to see how stupid that would be!
So would I, considering every non-final build of Vista and 7 so far have been "Ultimate". There's not really all that much point in artificially limiting versions of your software that aren't meant to be public in the first place.
Unless you've plugged in your Vista Business Keyboard becaue the apple supplied one was crap. Than it's 'alt.'
Unless you've reconfigured your keyboard in OSX, it should be WLK, not alt. OSX maps WLK to Cmd. Alt gets mapped to Alt/Option, and Ctrl gets mapped to Ctrl. Although this rearranges the positions a bit, it makes it easier to remember that Alt=Alt and Ctrl=Ctrl.
Slashdot Mirror
Example: a watch can keep time therefore a cog can keep time.
That's not a proper application of the composition fallacy. An applicable statement would be "If a cog can't keep time, then a watch can't keep time".
Have you ever heard of a contrapositive?
If his example isn't a proper application, then neither is yours.
I am not the one who asked the original question, but I note that the Warzone 2100 Project, a free and open-source real-time strategy game written mostly in C, always welcomes new developers (and players!)
In particular, we'd like a new Windows developer - we currently have exactly zero. :(
Well that would be their own fault for not using an address like 10.0.0.0/8 which was designed and documented for that purpose.
You know, it really wouldn't hurt to read a post before you reply to it...
To avoid addressing conflict with the internet itself, the range 1.0.0.0/8 is used. This is to avoid conflicting with internal networks such as 10/8, 172.16/12 and 192.168/16, as well as assigned Internet ranges. As of January 2010 IANA has allocated 1/8 to APNIC.[1] If the service does not switch to another address range then Internet hosts using 1.0.0.0/8 will be inaccessible to AnoNet users.
Comparing jailing political dissidents to Guantanamo Bay is comparing apples and oranges. China jails internal dissidents, Gitmo is for enemy combatants who are necessarily foreign to the U.S. There are no American citizens in Gitmo, their lawyers would have a field day.
As another poster asks, are non-American citizens nonhuman, then? Do human rights no longer apply to them? Then surely you have no objection to China jailing internal dissidents - they aren't American, either!
And equating DMCA with political censorship is plain silly. Sure, some lawyers may try to pervert DMCA, but that isn't the law's intent.
And what makes you think China's applying laws intended for political censorship? Those laws are intended to promote a more harmonious society! I'll have you know that China's constitution guarantees freedom of speech.
The biggest problem with America's legal system is that laws are passed under the assumption that it'll never be enforced in some theoretical unjust way, because it would violate the spirit of the law. And then when they're enforced in that unjust way, they bring up that the letter of the law allows it, so they're doing nothing wrong. One or both of those really needs to change.
Anyway, what does it matter what the law's intent is? I'm sure all those websites being censored by the US feel much better because the laws weren't intended to do that.
I get furious with the DMCA, especially when it is abused for censorship purposes. I also have some very serious issues with the US government and what it is/has been doing. I have two short points to make though:
1) Actions taken by the US government do not excuse actions taken by the Chinese government.
I agree with you there. But that's not the point.
The point is that Google is refusing to censor its search results in China, while turning a blind eye to its censorship elsewhere, such as in the US and Germany. So I repeat: There's no fallacy of scale here, unless you wish to argue that the US is more deserving of censorship since they commit fewer human rights violations?
2) You either have an incredibly warped sense of scale, or you are not very familar with the Chinese censorship program.
I'm a Chinese citizen. I have plenty of experience with the Great Firewall. There's currently a MUD that's blocked from it because I convinced one of its coders to install a proxy on it for me. The Great Firewall has caused tons of problems for me - not having Wikipedia access was probably the worst (and why I set up that proxy in the first place).
I won't argue with you here - China is indeed worse in some aspects. But what's your point? That it's okay for the US to commit human rights violations because they aren't as bad as China?
Sadly, these recent Google actions will do nothing useful. The Chinese government has wanted Google to leave for ages; the more people who use domestic search engines like Baidu, the easier those searches are to censor, and without the censorship warning Google insisted on. The Americans who support the decision - virtually all of whom are completely unaffected by the change - are patting their backs right now. Meanwhile, we - the Chinese citizens - will soon lose access to Google (at least Gmail offers forwarding - I'll have to forward my e-mails to a different off-shore mailserver that hasn't been blocked yet).
This is why I don't understand why some people can't accept the lesser of two evils. Would you prefer the greater of two evils? Well, here we are, at the greater of two evils. Were you expecting anything else? A mythical third option - a revolt, perhaps? The majority of China don't use Google and won't care - and plenty are nationalistic enough to applaud the withdrawal of Google as the triumph of Baidu.
The GP accuses you of commiting a fallacy of scale, and I must say I agree.
Sure you can logically draw comparisons between the DMCA and chinese censorship laws, it's not particularly hard or imaginative. The problem is when you compare the two on equal grounds. One involves gross violations of basic human rights, the other involves less Brittany Spears remixes on youtube.
I'd argue that freedom of speech counts as a basic human right.
Regardless, the DMCA has been used to censor material critical of the Church of Scientology from appearing on Google search results. Is that political speech, to you? Google also censors Nazi-related materials in Germany. Is that political speech, to you? Sure, perhaps the US doesn't jail political dissidents quite the same way China does, but what's Guantanamo Bay? Sure, there's a difference in scale, but the difference isn't as great as many people think.
The original point is that Google is demanding uncensored search results in China, but not in the US or Germany. There's no fallacy of scale here, unless you wish to argue that the US is more deserving of censorship since they commit fewer human rights violations?
It doesn't even make sense. Changing your app install behavior to work the same way as other distros is assuming your users are wiser than average?
(Emphasis mine.)
Or is that "More than Free"? I'd consider getting a free operating system AND revenue to be MORE, not less... but perhaps that's semantics.
Another poster suggests "better than free", which I think is the least ambiguous way of phrasing it.
It seems like somebody was desperate to write an anti-google story. He seem to be highly suspicious of the carriers for daring to want to compete with the iPod and the Blackberry; than, he seems to be surprised that Google PAYS people to use the version of the Android OS that Google actually PROFITS from.
The story doesn't seem very anti-Google at all; in fact, reading TFA (omg shock people do that? etc), it seems that he's praising Google for their ability to disrupt (i.e. out-compete) their competitors. I mean "Google’s brilliance doesn’t stop there" doesn't sound very anti-Google at all.
From TFA:
So he'd be right to assume so. ;)
No, Konqueror still uses KHTML, which WebKit was based on, but is inferior in many ways. There was some talk about switching it over to WebKit a while ago, but they eventually decided it was infeasible.
I was surprised Konq and iCab weren't in the list, though; they're pretty important browsers. And I didn't really understand why they published things like Acid3 scores, considering the majority of the browsers on the list used rendering engines from the four major browsers (two Gecko and two WebKit browsers).
By the way, I wouldn't recommend using Konqueror. As a Web developer, I consider KHTML one of the worst major rendering engines to support (yes, even worse than Trident from IE7+).
A bug causing a game to not render the background correctly is "important", but security fixes et al are not?
Well, I was exaggerating a bit. Of course security fixes are important. But as a developer of the aforementioned game, I'm kind of more affected by the rendering bug. I mean, when's the last time an OS X security bug has had an exploit in the wild? Compare that to not insignificant number of Warzone players (Windows and Linux are supported, too! Come try one of the most popular FOSS RTSes today!)
Unfortunately, it looks like nothing important was fixed, either. The OpenGL bug on NVIDIA graphics cards is still there. :/
Have you heard of iCab? It's the only Acid2-compliant browser that runs on Mac OS 9, and is much more standards compliant than Gecko 1.3 (the version used in Classilla).
Although iCab is no longer maintained for Mac OS 9, its last release for Mac OS 9 was in 2008, far more recently than Gecko 1.3 (2002), and the Mac OS 9 version is still a full-featured modern browser with tabbed browsing, built-in AdBlock, excellent standards compliance (iCab was the first browser with an Acid2-compliant public build) - the only thing it's really missing is CSS3 opacity, and all that good stuff.
Did you check "Enable pre-release features" or "Next generation" in the Google Apps domain settings? It's my impression that only explicitly enabling beta features like that would cause the "beta" label to appear. If those are unchecked, you should see no "beta" label.
To be fair, Chrome is from Google. It's going to be beta for another three years.
What are you talking about? Google Chrome has been stable since December 2008, and Chrome 2 has been stable since mid-May (and scores 100/100 on Acid3).
Sigh, I guess this is the price we all pay for being reliant on a company which I suspect is past it's peak.
What?
Microsoft is doing exactly what any other software company in their position has done, and would do. You have GenericSoftware 3.0. Then, GenericSoftware 4.0 is released. You either you have to deal with a mixed software environment, or you have to upgrade everyone to GenericSoftware 4.0. How is what Microsoft's doing different from what every other company is doing?
And don't tell me open-source doesn't have this problem. Windows XP was released in 2001. If you asked for support and patches for, say, Mozilla Phoenix 0.3 (released 2002), you'd get laughed out of pretty much everywhere. And if you actually cared about using open-source, you'd be using Linux and you wouldn't have this problem in the first place.
And it's not compatibility, either: Windows 7 is coming with Windows XP Mode, which will give you all the IE6 you'll need for your buggy ActiveX webapps.
So tell me: What's wrong with what Microsoft is doing with Windows XP?
They always release their software for Windows first. Will this be the same? I wonder...
Considering Wave is an online service, it would be pretty difficult for them to make it Windows-only. None of Google's other Web pages are Windows-only.
For a more well-known example of a localized programming language: TI-BASIC 68k (the variant used on TI-89, TI-92, and Voyage 200 calculators).
This causes many problems, since it means source code written in one language will not run in a calculator set to another language. As Wikipedia notes, various configuration strings are also localized, so even binaries can be incompatible.
...that's the third link in the summary.
Oh! We're attempting to get people to RTFA by reposting it in the commentary and pretending it isn't TFA, are we? ;)
Exactly. It's like certain rights under labor law: making them inviolable, impossible even willingly to give away, precludes certain abuses. Just as I can't give up my basic human rights in a contract (e.g., selling myself into indentured servitude), I shouldn't be able to give up certain rights over work I produce. For example, in France "moral rights" include the right of an artist to claim to have produced a certain work of art (which is distinct from ownership of the physical work or of rights to copy it). The artist retains the right to "disown" a work or to claim authorship of it. That could matter, for example, in the attribution of a literary prize, which depends on the authorship of a work but not on its copyright status. And it makes perfect sense that one not be allowed to sign away that basic right.
IANAL, but what does this have to do with copyright law? Of course the author of a work can claim to have created it: that's covered by freedom of speech. And the author of a work can prevent others from claiming to have created it: that's covered by slander and libel laws. Even if you give up your copyright completely, to another party or to the public domain, you still retain these rights.
Going through the other "moral rights":
- The right to claim authorship is intrinsic of free speech, and is not separately guaranteed by moral rights. Perhaps you were thinking of the right of attribution, which is something else entirely.
- The right of attribution basically says that someone can't say you created a work if you didn't, and they can't say you didn't create a work if you did. This is, of course, covered by defamation (i.e. slander/libel) law, not copyright law.
- The right to publish a work anonymously should also be guaranteed by freedom of speech. If, by "disown", you include preventing others from saying you created the work, I don't think it should, because that would infringe on their freedom of speech.
- The right to integrity of the work shouldn't be a moral right. I want to be able to give up this right - free software licenses would be useless otherwise. As a user, I want to be guaranteed access to a work as long as I abide by the terms of the GPL, and as a content creator, I want to guarantee my users that they won't be sued as long as they abide by the GPL, but this is impossible under the right to integrity: It would be impossible to waive the right to say "I want you to stop using my work."
In short, "moral rights" don't give any reason why someone shouldn't be able to waive a copyright completely: They're either already covered by other laws, or completely inane.
To extend your argument, "Chinese" is not really a language. The people of China speak several different non-mutually intelligible variants. Linguistically these are more separate languages than dialects, although they are often lumped under "Chinese" for cultural and political reasons.
No, they are often lumped together because they are only slightly more separate than dialects. Sure, they're not mutually intelligible, but neither are English and Pig Latin. In particular, they're written effectively exactly the same way (barring differences in dialects), so they're even closer to each other than Pig Latin is to English (again, barring dialectical differences).
For example:
(/. doesn't allow Unicode, nor does it allow HTML entities for Chinese characters, so I can't insert Chinese characters. Mouse over these links and some browsers [Firefox] will show you the character, though)
[long] can be pronounced either 'chang2' (meaning "long") or 'zhang3' (meaning "grow") in Mandarin.
[long] can be pronounced either 'coeng4' (meaning "long") or 'zoeng2' (meaning "grow") in Cantonese.
[without] is pronounced 'fei1' (meaning "without") in Mandarin
[without] is pronounced 'fei1' (meaning "without") in Cantonese
[fly] is pronounced 'fei1' (meaning "fly") in Mandarin
[fly] is pronounced 'fei1' (meaning "fly") in Cantonese
[quick] is pronounced 'kuai4' (meaning "quick") in Mandarin
[quick] is pronounced 'faai3' (meaning "quick") in Cantonese
[piece] is pronounced 'kuai4' (meaning "piece") in Mandarin
[piece] is pronounced 'faai3' (meaning "piece") in Cantonese
(In other words, homophones in Mandarin are homophones in Cantonese; homographs in Mandarin are homographs in Cantonese.)
You can't look at these and tell me these "variants" aren't as close to each other as most dialects are.
Slashdot uses HTML, not BBcode (which is what you're probably referring to by "bulletin boards syntax").
This:
<quote>hello</quote>
becomes this:
hello
In addition, clicking "Quote Parent" in the comment box would add the quote automatically (at least in Discussion2 mode, which I believe is default nowadays). Plus, it forces you to preview before you submit your comment, so you should have caught the syntax error then.
So your cat agreed to the EULA, and by doing so, gained a license to use the software, for themselves.
So you still have no license to use it...
The fact that the software is now installed on your PC, does not mean it is yours. You might as well torrent it.
Where's the big news?
If you've installed Firefox, you'll notice you never agreed to an EULA. Firefox is copyrighted software; by your logic, you would be unable to use Firefox.
IANAL, but the general consensus is that you don't need a license to use software, only to redistribute it. That's what they explain as the difference between an EULA and a distribution license like the GPL - the EULA takes away rights you have (which is why you have to agree to it for it to be valid), but the GPL gives you more rights than you would otherwise have (which is why you don't have to agree to it for it to be valid).
I'd be pretty surprised if this latest leaked build ends up giving us a sneak peak at what Microsoft's plans to butcher up Windows 7 into 5+ "versions" is. I'd like to try to use my computer with a 2-process limit, just to see how stupid that would be!
So would I, considering every non-final build of Vista and 7 so far have been "Ultimate". There's not really all that much point in artificially limiting versions of your software that aren't meant to be public in the first place.
Unless you've plugged in your Vista Business Keyboard becaue the apple supplied one was crap. Than it's 'alt.'
Unless you've reconfigured your keyboard in OSX, it should be WLK, not alt. OSX maps WLK to Cmd. Alt gets mapped to Alt/Option, and Ctrl gets mapped to Ctrl. Although this rearranges the positions a bit, it makes it easier to remember that Alt=Alt and Ctrl=Ctrl.