Its: this is the possessive, since possessive do not have apostrophes: his, her(s), its.
Daves, Mikes, Bobs, Sues, Chriss, Alices, etc. Why don't you do something useful with your education rather than mocking those who aren't as god-like as yourself? http://youtube.com/watch?v=lm2OzAX86JU
There's a simple counter-argument for this: Just tell the companies trying to charge you more for 'better quality' recordings that you are willing to pay the extra because when you start messing with it in your audio editor, the missing data in the lower bitrate files ends up in areas which should be audible, and that makes your remixes sound awful.
"The BBC pay for their bandwidth usage. I pay for mine. At what point are the ISPs getting short-changed in this equation?"
Your comment is very naiive. You don't pay for your bandwidth. You pay for a connection to the Internet, which although it is advertised as having a certain bandwidth it does in fact share that bandwidth with an unknown number of other customers (depending on the provider), so the connection can run at high speed when nobody else is using it, but during peak usage time it can slow down, and the ISP's servers get under heavy load. The two ways of dealing with this are capped connections (charging extortionate prices for data transferred above a certin value to try and discourage Internet use) or "unlimited" connections with "fair usage" policies, which throttle the bandwidth for people who use the Internet.
The ISPs would be getting 'short changed' if the iPlayer encourages people to use the Internet connections they are being discouraged from doing, since at the moment ISPs can get a nice income stream from advertising "super fast" connections, then serving up a few emails and fake online banking sites every day.
The fact that they are complaining about having to actually provide what their customers are paying them for is insulting, I think.
(I understand that the current system keeps costs down, but the fact that nobody is actually selling what they advertise is terrible. If the iPlayer makes the demand go up for decent connections a geek would be proud of and makes average people know that the ISPs are selling their payed-for connections to other people over and over again then at least it won't be quite as evil as it is at the moment)
"If Microsoft releases Windows for free we've lost. If Microsoft releases Windows as Free Software we've won." I think that was Stallman.
Re:Kicking their own asses...
on
SCO Loses
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· Score: 1
"Could those companies not argue that Microsoft engaged in fraud by claiming patents and selling protection for something they did not technically own? If I claimed that I owned the patents to Linux and told people they had to give me $100 per copy of Linux they used or I would sue them, and people complied, I can't imagine them NOT getting their money back. Now the Microsoft Linux situation is probably not nearly as clearcut as that, but if indeed the ruling is that Microsoft does not own the patents on materials they sold protection for then it seems pretty open and shut to me."
The number of times I've had to remind my fellow University students that 1) we are paying for lectures, 2) we have exams to sit which decide who passes and who doesn't and 3) we are not obligated to attend anything, is frightening. "Yay, cancelled!" is such a stupid ass position to take. Don't want to go to the lectures? Then don't go, nothing's stopping you. Wonder why you spent the exam staring at a page of unintelligible gibberish? Maybe because you didn't go to the lectures.
"Yay, cancelled!" is in the same catagory as "Well nobody else did it either". People who think that is OK will be happy when they are talking about passing their course, which to them means 'getting a high paying job'.
I know another way to screw up the readers. Smile: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/3541444.stm (of course the government is working on this as it is a very serious problem. Yep, in a few years time they'll manage to piss off everyone enough that nobody will be smiling, thus fixing the bug)
"Communism != socialism. Sweden, denmark, Canada etc.. are welfare states. USSR, China and Cuba are Socialist. I should Stop it with the confused drivel."
Fixed. Patch released.
(The only Communist system I can think of is the Paris Commune. Didn't turn out too well, but considering they had eff all to work with I don't think any other system would have done any better. The Imperialists soon quashed it though.)
Here's an idea: Maybe they should look at how it affects sales and profits rather than copyright infringement, since those are the important parts from their perspective.
I have one of those cards and actually found that Mandriva a fix for it when I went to GUADEC and was given a free Mandriva-loaded USB stick (I was so pleased I wrote this on the GNOME Love Wall http://flickr.com/photos/pvillavi/899547399/ ). I've filed a bug on Ubuntu here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/restrict ed-manager/+bug/130025 which should contain the options you need to put into xorg.conf on whatever distro you're on (most of them are probably redundant, but I don't have to time to go through disabling each line to see what is needed and what isn't).
Wow, tech support on/., who woulda thunk it?
The Ubuntu developers are well aware of Automatix and the less-popular-but-less-damaging EasyUbuntu, and even Mark Shuttleworth has said that he wants to see them gone. Not because he is against them, but because they are obviously trying to fix a bug, and if that bug wasn't there then they wouldn't be needed. Similar to how I'd like to see health insurance companies disappear in Britain, not because I'm against healthcare but because the NHS should be at a standard that makes separate health insurance unneeded. I personally think Ubuntu is at such a point or at least acceptably close, but Automatix seems to have mindshare among many users and the developer/s aren't leaving it to stagnate, so it'll probably be with us for a while yet. I'd like to see it cleaned up anyway, since if some people are still going to use it regardless there is no reason to let their systems get messed up, but there seems to be too much conflict between Ubuntu devs and Automatix devs to work together on sorting it out.
The point behind legal tender is that it can be used to pay off any debt. If some people started using Pokemon cards as money then nobody has to accept Pokemon cards in exchange for anything because they are not legal tender (I wouldn't give someone a car in exchange for Pokemon cards for example, but even if I only decided to accept gold in exchange for a car I would also have to accept legal tender since I can't legally force people to pay me, I have to go through the courts to do that and if someone offers to pay in legal tender then the court will consider the debt payed). So nobody has to accept Pokemon cards but everyone has to accept legal tender, it's the law. It is also illegal to demand Pokemon cards from anyone instead of legal tender. If you go to work for an employer who promised to pay you in Pokemon cards then that employer can instead pay you in legal tender, because the law says that you have to accept it.
Since Pokemon cards have no value anyway then such an attempt at establishing a new currency would fail, not because it is illegal but because nobody would have faith in it and would go back to using legal tender for everything, even things 'supposed' to be payed for with Pokemon cards. A backed currency would fare better (there are a few), since the currency actually has a value, but my argument is that the only people who would actively use such a currency would do so because they want to stop using the current (legal tender) currency, but since every debt is legally payable in legal tender, including the debt backing new currencies ('This is worth 1 pound of gold' is a debt, which can legally be payed with legal tender instead of gold) then using such a currency would not help anyone to get away from the current, unbacked currency. (I could make my own currency right now backed by gold, even though I don't have any gold, since I can use an equivalent amount of pound sterling instead. Since sterling can be printed and printed without anything to back it up (the only limit is the common sense of the regulators) thus my new 'gold backed' currency can also be printed and printed, backed by sterling which is backed by nothing (other than debt). If anyone demands the gold from me I can pay them in pound sterling and there is nothing they can do to stop it.)
I agree. So many people think of space as the zooming-around-faster-than-light computer graphics they see on TV, because if they look upwards during the night then they can't see any of this exciting stuff and wouldn't know if it is going on at all. The big problem with this is that all of this stuff HAS been worked out by people looking upwards at night (although admittedly not always using their own eyes), so when people say 'Milky Way' the mental image forms of a whirling mass of stars with spiralling arms around it, whereas in reality the only thing we know about the Milky Way is that it is a rather large band of dots in the sky. Similarly extrasolar planets are not huge balls of swirling CGI gas orbiting every few seconds around a star which is incredibly close, they are extrapolated from tiny dimming, wobbling and missing areas of electromagnetic spectrum of the little dots in the sky. The idea of rethinking an accepted physical constant because a wobble or a dimming is too big to be a planet, or a missing area of electromagnetic spectrum doesn't correspond to the chemicals expected in such areas, seems rather over-the-top. In fact, the building up of ideas and theories being assumed as correct by those that come after can lead to areas of science which can seem rather ridiculous to non-scientists not because they don't understand it properly, but because they haven't spent large amounts of their lives assuming the various parts to be true. Of course here I'm talking about cold dark matter/dark energy (hmm... the limited observations we have been able to make don't fit the ideas we have been using to explain them, therefore the observations are wrong because most of the universe is invisible! LA LA LA! *sticks fingers in ears and engages in complex mathematical analysis to try and see the stuff he made up for which the only fact known about it is that it can't be seen*) and parallel universes (hmm... we can predict the probability of things happening at a quantum level but not the exact outcome, it seems the universe may be random... or maybe all of the outcomes are happening but they are invisible! LA LA LA! *sticks fingers in ears and engages in complex mathematical analysis to try and see the things he made up for hich the only fact known about them is that they can't be seen*).
I know this will be seen by many as flamebait, and I don't have any BETTER ideas for explaining the observational data, but as a Physicist I often get annoyed at people who try to overcome glaring omissions in theories by doing the mathematical equivalent of playing Jenga with jigsaw puzzle pieces. Yes intricately fitting new observations into the tower via roundabout maths might make it a bit taller, but after a certain point it should become obvious that the wrong approach is being taken, and using the bigger pool of observations to start again with what is KNOWN might make it clearer this time that the pieces are not meant to be stacked.
Basically you're describing legal tender (if someone attempts to pay any debt in legal tender then they cannot be sued). The problem (unless you're a banker) with legal tender is that it makes the bank's debt (the "I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of " bit on bank notes) payable in legal tender, ie. a bank note is only worth another bank note. This makes attempts at establishing alternative currencies (usually backed by something) very difficult, since legally the stuff backing it can be interchanged with the current legal tender, thus destroying the point of the backed system. For example if I had a 10 NewDollar note, and each NewDollar is backed by X amount of gold, then if I try and get at the gold (the only safeguard I have in using this new, not widely accepted currency) I can legally be given the current market value's worth of dollars (or whatever the legal tender is, in my case pound sterling) and can't do anything about that. This means that new currency systems for those who are against the current one are actually backed by the current one (although there may be a slight buffer against massive, sudden changes like market crashes, but after such events how many people would be buying such things as gold, thus what would the value be? Relatively low I suspect).
Just curious, are there any figures which compare security issues for KHTML, Webkit, Gecko, Opera, etc.? I am guessing that bug trackers alone would be incredibly skewed towards the most-used engines, and statistical methods tend to own me.
Linux is the kernel. It is the thing that makes a Linux distribution a Linux distribution. If they write a driver for Linux then it will work on any Linux distro (as long as they do a decent job of it, so that it isn't specifically targetted at a certain release. The best thing to do would be to get it included in Linux, but that requires making it GPL which some companies wouldn't like)
"WTF? Part of the appeal of many of these sites is that it is restricted in some manner that that current users enjoy.
'Open social networks' is greed-speak for 'easier SPAM access' AFAIAC."
The point is that the information is out there, if an API isn't available to get it then a screen scraping application (a program which pretends to be a web browser and then 'reads' certain areas of pages and dumps the information somewhere else) can be used to get it into a spam database (which is then copied countless times across the world). If this terrible 'security' means that EVERY legitimate application and website has to go through this crap just to get the info I tell it to then that is stupid, plus the info has to be taken out ONCE to enter a database whereas dynamic applications and services need to access the site at any time, which means the 'foiling' of screen scrapers by changing the HTML is only stopping legitimate applications which need to access it, not the spammers who have their nice little databases full of the info they want. Also, spammers don't give a crap about terms and conditions, however if I want to make an application which, for example, ties into MySpace, then restrictive terms and conditions on their behalf could make my application illegal while doing nothing to stop spammers.
For it to be open means that the information ALREADY available to anyone is accessible by applications and services through an API, that API doesn't change arbitrarily and that people are ALLOWED to do this without extra permission needed or notification made.
You can't say 'GPL violations aside' and then attack the other half of the dual argument. The point is that the GPL's terms were not being followed, but this would be fine if Valve had licensed it from the developers under different terms. Since the developers were not contacted then they couldn't have done that, thus they must have been using it under the GPL, and therefore they were in the wrong.
We've had radio technology for around 100 years, but these days we don't just blast radio waves all over the place when we communicate, instead we have more directed signals which bounce off satellites back to the planet, and thus give hardly any radiation out to the cosmos. If the timespan for detecting intelligent lifeforms based on their stray communication is about 100 years then the odds of us having the technology to find such signals within such a short timeframe is stupidly low. Therefore the only meaningful thing to do is to look for purposeful signals, sent out precisely to say "We are here", or perhaps "We were here" since by the time we get them the originators could be long gone.
The semi-serious answer to the Fermi Paradox is that radio and nuclear technology require around the same level of sophistication, so after discovering one you'll soon discover the other, and therefore it could be the case that any intelligent species wipes itself out through nuclear holocaust soon after gaining the ability to send such calling cards.
In one of my computer science lectures the lecturer asked how many people were going through University just to get a high paying job. I didn't notice anyone other than me with their hand down. BTW, the question itself may has well have been rhetorical, since the course is structured to produce code factories.
In answer to the main question, I'd tell him that the makers of Linux care more about good software than money, so they accept contributions of code as payment, but this is only a suggested donation since their definition of good software is a very high barrier. People who care about good software will accept, copy and give away good software, whereas people who care about money will suck as much of it from you as possible, so who would you rather work with?
Instead of camera systems to track eye movements and such, why not make it simpler and use the breathalyser along with a camera to make sure getting in and out of the drivers' seat requires another test, the test is void if someone is leaning across from another seat, etc. Surely that would be an easier and more effective system? But wait, I forgot that buying a car comes with a free Selective Freedom Fighter injection which makes sure that governments can systematically take away rights and privacy from innocent people, but if they dare to even THINK about setting up a speed camera which might save lives......
"illegal software installer" can be interpreted two ways. Either as a software installer which is illegal (which Automatix is not), or as an installer for illegal software (which, in areas like the US, it certainly is (DeCSS, LAME, etc.), and in other areas it probably is too (for instance the Adobe Acrobat issue mentioned in the report)).
It is a shame that those with the ability to make correct, safe software installers and those with the inclination to make souht-after-but-problematic-software installers are two seperate camps.
Personally I do not like Automatix anyway, from experience trying to help those in IRC for whom these problems have surfaced, but for the most part its functionality seems to be that of an extremely limited package installer, ie. a vast amount of the stuff it installs (Java, Flash, MP3/etc. codecs, media player browser plugins, etc.) can be found in Synaptic or the Add/Remove tool along with thousands of other packages, Automatix just limits the selection to the most popular ones, along with some third-party unpackaged software (the installation and removal of which seems to be the main cause of its problems). I can't help feeling, however, that if people actually want to install a Java VM or multimedia codecs then looking for them in Applications>Add/Remove is very straightforward, whereas Automatix gives such a small selection that users of it would end up installing stuff they might not need or want simply because it is there for free so they might as well. If they spent their time in the Add/Remove tool doing this then they might end up finding better quality, better integrated, better supported software for a much broader range of things, but of course that might end up *shock horror* introducing people to new software which doesn't pay whatever company dominates that particular field.
We must crack down on these damned pirates! They have no regard for copyright, intellectual property or the US constitution! They go ahead and download software from the Internets, which is STEALING, and then try and redistribute it to honest, law abiding citizens, turning them into dirty, murdering, rapist pirates too! The only way to stop this vicious cycle of sharing, which loses a thousand billion dollars a year for the content industry, is to vote YES to the Mickey Mouse Protection Act, and to vote YES to the Privacy Equals Terrorism Act (after the latter is passed you can carry on with your impulse buying, TV watching, money spending, iPhone touching little consumer 'lives', since we can then vote on your behalf for the rest of the powers we want). Hurry and tell your friends, family, neighbours, coworkers, pets, etc. Make sure they know!*
* This Information (hereafter referred to as the Information) is protected by international copyright, trademark and patent laws. You are forbidden to tell this Information to anyone, including, but not limited to, friends, family, neighbours, coworkers and pets. This license does not grant you rights to modify, reproduce, remember, read or otherwise know the existance of the Information.**
I am a very eyecandy/look 'n' feel/theming type nut, so I was very interested in E17. The major problem with it, in my opinion, is that it makes so much POSSIBLE, but doesn't actually have enough themes to make use of this possibility at the moment. The main reason for this is that the weird binary formats used by E17 keep changing, and every time new widget-things are added (volume control, battery monitor, etc.) the theme creators are expected to make the graphics for them in their themes (rather than making a wide set of controls like QT or GTK which can be reused again and again for any app). This has put me off making any E17 themes, since the maintainance and reworking involved is ridiculous, and without a theme I like (or me making one) I just don't want to use it.
My favourite WM is actually E16, which I have been using instead of Metacity in GNOME for years. I finally got Compiz-Fusion running on my laptop and I admit it is nice, but I will not be happy until I port some nice E16 themes to it (which I am willing to do because they will still work in a month)
This looks like a long-awaited feature to add to the portfolio of Microsoft Works, the oxymoron which many believe to be an office suite when it is in fact a piss you off enough to buy microsoft office suite. It probably only exists to make sure there is a clear "upgrade" path ("If Works doesn't then why not try Office?", rather than letting customers loose into the wild where they might happen upon a competing free product), and to cater to those who think (rightfully so) that word processing is a basic task for a computer to do these days and should come by default for free but without pissing off the OEMs and DoJ with forced Office preinstallation or reducing the cost of Office (which, along with Windows, keeps Microsoft afloat). (Seriously, I went to buy a mouse from a local computer shop recently and the guy running it took an age to explain to the woman in front of me why the computer she just bought can't do word processing, and that if she wanted it to she'd have to fork out a few hundred quid. I would've intervened with OpenOffice but I was with my girlfriend at the time and I try not to be too zealoty around her)
Slashdot Mirror
Daves, Mikes, Bobs, Sues, Chriss, Alices, etc. Why don't you do something useful with your education rather than mocking those who aren't as god-like as yourself? http://youtube.com/watch?v=lm2OzAX86JU
There's a simple counter-argument for this: Just tell the companies trying to charge you more for 'better quality' recordings that you are willing to pay the extra because when you start messing with it in your audio editor, the missing data in the lower bitrate files ends up in areas which should be audible, and that makes your remixes sound awful.
Your comment is very naiive. You don't pay for your bandwidth. You pay for a connection to the Internet, which although it is advertised as having a certain bandwidth it does in fact share that bandwidth with an unknown number of other customers (depending on the provider), so the connection can run at high speed when nobody else is using it, but during peak usage time it can slow down, and the ISP's servers get under heavy load. The two ways of dealing with this are capped connections (charging extortionate prices for data transferred above a certin value to try and discourage Internet use) or "unlimited" connections with "fair usage" policies, which throttle the bandwidth for people who use the Internet.
The ISPs would be getting 'short changed' if the iPlayer encourages people to use the Internet connections they are being discouraged from doing, since at the moment ISPs can get a nice income stream from advertising "super fast" connections, then serving up a few emails and fake online banking sites every day.
The fact that they are complaining about having to actually provide what their customers are paying them for is insulting, I think.
(I understand that the current system keeps costs down, but the fact that nobody is actually selling what they advertise is terrible. If the iPlayer makes the demand go up for decent connections a geek would be proud of and makes average people know that the ISPs are selling their payed-for connections to other people over and over again then at least it won't be quite as evil as it is at the moment)
"If Microsoft releases Windows for free we've lost. If Microsoft releases Windows as Free Software we've won." I think that was Stallman.
Deja vu.....
"Yay, cancelled!" is in the same catagory as "Well nobody else did it either". People who think that is OK will be happy when they are talking about passing their course, which to them means 'getting a high paying job'.
I know another way to screw up the readers. Smile: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/3541444.stm (of course the government is working on this as it is a very serious problem. Yep, in a few years time they'll manage to piss off everyone enough that nobody will be smiling, thus fixing the bug)
Fixed. Patch released.
(The only Communist system I can think of is the Paris Commune. Didn't turn out too well, but considering they had eff all to work with I don't think any other system would have done any better. The Imperialists soon quashed it though.)
Here's an idea: Maybe they should look at how it affects sales and profits rather than copyright infringement, since those are the important parts from their perspective.
I have one of those cards and actually found that Mandriva a fix for it when I went to GUADEC and was given a free Mandriva-loaded USB stick (I was so pleased I wrote this on the GNOME Love Wall http://flickr.com/photos/pvillavi/899547399/ ). I've filed a bug on Ubuntu here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/restrict ed-manager/+bug/130025 which should contain the options you need to put into xorg.conf on whatever distro you're on (most of them are probably redundant, but I don't have to time to go through disabling each line to see what is needed and what isn't).
Wow, tech support on /., who woulda thunk it?
The Ubuntu developers are well aware of Automatix and the less-popular-but-less-damaging EasyUbuntu, and even Mark Shuttleworth has said that he wants to see them gone. Not because he is against them, but because they are obviously trying to fix a bug, and if that bug wasn't there then they wouldn't be needed. Similar to how I'd like to see health insurance companies disappear in Britain, not because I'm against healthcare but because the NHS should be at a standard that makes separate health insurance unneeded. I personally think Ubuntu is at such a point or at least acceptably close, but Automatix seems to have mindshare among many users and the developer/s aren't leaving it to stagnate, so it'll probably be with us for a while yet. I'd like to see it cleaned up anyway, since if some people are still going to use it regardless there is no reason to let their systems get messed up, but there seems to be too much conflict between Ubuntu devs and Automatix devs to work together on sorting it out.
Since Pokemon cards have no value anyway then such an attempt at establishing a new currency would fail, not because it is illegal but because nobody would have faith in it and would go back to using legal tender for everything, even things 'supposed' to be payed for with Pokemon cards. A backed currency would fare better (there are a few), since the currency actually has a value, but my argument is that the only people who would actively use such a currency would do so because they want to stop using the current (legal tender) currency, but since every debt is legally payable in legal tender, including the debt backing new currencies ('This is worth 1 pound of gold' is a debt, which can legally be payed with legal tender instead of gold) then using such a currency would not help anyone to get away from the current, unbacked currency. (I could make my own currency right now backed by gold, even though I don't have any gold, since I can use an equivalent amount of pound sterling instead. Since sterling can be printed and printed without anything to back it up (the only limit is the common sense of the regulators) thus my new 'gold backed' currency can also be printed and printed, backed by sterling which is backed by nothing (other than debt). If anyone demands the gold from me I can pay them in pound sterling and there is nothing they can do to stop it.)
I know this will be seen by many as flamebait, and I don't have any BETTER ideas for explaining the observational data, but as a Physicist I often get annoyed at people who try to overcome glaring omissions in theories by doing the mathematical equivalent of playing Jenga with jigsaw puzzle pieces. Yes intricately fitting new observations into the tower via roundabout maths might make it a bit taller, but after a certain point it should become obvious that the wrong approach is being taken, and using the bigger pool of observations to start again with what is KNOWN might make it clearer this time that the pieces are not meant to be stacked.
Basically you're describing legal tender (if someone attempts to pay any debt in legal tender then they cannot be sued). The problem (unless you're a banker) with legal tender is that it makes the bank's debt (the "I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of " bit on bank notes) payable in legal tender, ie. a bank note is only worth another bank note. This makes attempts at establishing alternative currencies (usually backed by something) very difficult, since legally the stuff backing it can be interchanged with the current legal tender, thus destroying the point of the backed system. For example if I had a 10 NewDollar note, and each NewDollar is backed by X amount of gold, then if I try and get at the gold (the only safeguard I have in using this new, not widely accepted currency) I can legally be given the current market value's worth of dollars (or whatever the legal tender is, in my case pound sterling) and can't do anything about that. This means that new currency systems for those who are against the current one are actually backed by the current one (although there may be a slight buffer against massive, sudden changes like market crashes, but after such events how many people would be buying such things as gold, thus what would the value be? Relatively low I suspect).
Just curious, are there any figures which compare security issues for KHTML, Webkit, Gecko, Opera, etc.? I am guessing that bug trackers alone would be incredibly skewed towards the most-used engines, and statistical methods tend to own me.
Linux is the kernel. It is the thing that makes a Linux distribution a Linux distribution. If they write a driver for Linux then it will work on any Linux distro (as long as they do a decent job of it, so that it isn't specifically targetted at a certain release. The best thing to do would be to get it included in Linux, but that requires making it GPL which some companies wouldn't like)
'Open social networks' is greed-speak for 'easier SPAM access' AFAIAC."
The point is that the information is out there, if an API isn't available to get it then a screen scraping application (a program which pretends to be a web browser and then 'reads' certain areas of pages and dumps the information somewhere else) can be used to get it into a spam database (which is then copied countless times across the world). If this terrible 'security' means that EVERY legitimate application and website has to go through this crap just to get the info I tell it to then that is stupid, plus the info has to be taken out ONCE to enter a database whereas dynamic applications and services need to access the site at any time, which means the 'foiling' of screen scrapers by changing the HTML is only stopping legitimate applications which need to access it, not the spammers who have their nice little databases full of the info they want. Also, spammers don't give a crap about terms and conditions, however if I want to make an application which, for example, ties into MySpace, then restrictive terms and conditions on their behalf could make my application illegal while doing nothing to stop spammers.
For it to be open means that the information ALREADY available to anyone is accessible by applications and services through an API, that API doesn't change arbitrarily and that people are ALLOWED to do this without extra permission needed or notification made.
You can't say 'GPL violations aside' and then attack the other half of the dual argument. The point is that the GPL's terms were not being followed, but this would be fine if Valve had licensed it from the developers under different terms. Since the developers were not contacted then they couldn't have done that, thus they must have been using it under the GPL, and therefore they were in the wrong.
The semi-serious answer to the Fermi Paradox is that radio and nuclear technology require around the same level of sophistication, so after discovering one you'll soon discover the other, and therefore it could be the case that any intelligent species wipes itself out through nuclear holocaust soon after gaining the ability to send such calling cards.
In one of my computer science lectures the lecturer asked how many people were going through University just to get a high paying job. I didn't notice anyone other than me with their hand down. BTW, the question itself may has well have been rhetorical, since the course is structured to produce code factories. In answer to the main question, I'd tell him that the makers of Linux care more about good software than money, so they accept contributions of code as payment, but this is only a suggested donation since their definition of good software is a very high barrier. People who care about good software will accept, copy and give away good software, whereas people who care about money will suck as much of it from you as possible, so who would you rather work with?
Instead of camera systems to track eye movements and such, why not make it simpler and use the breathalyser along with a camera to make sure getting in and out of the drivers' seat requires another test, the test is void if someone is leaning across from another seat, etc. Surely that would be an easier and more effective system? But wait, I forgot that buying a car comes with a free Selective Freedom Fighter injection which makes sure that governments can systematically take away rights and privacy from innocent people, but if they dare to even THINK about setting up a speed camera which might save lives......
It is a shame that those with the ability to make correct, safe software installers and those with the inclination to make souht-after-but-problematic-software installers are two seperate camps.
Personally I do not like Automatix anyway, from experience trying to help those in IRC for whom these problems have surfaced, but for the most part its functionality seems to be that of an extremely limited package installer, ie. a vast amount of the stuff it installs (Java, Flash, MP3/etc. codecs, media player browser plugins, etc.) can be found in Synaptic or the Add/Remove tool along with thousands of other packages, Automatix just limits the selection to the most popular ones, along with some third-party unpackaged software (the installation and removal of which seems to be the main cause of its problems). I can't help feeling, however, that if people actually want to install a Java VM or multimedia codecs then looking for them in Applications>Add/Remove is very straightforward, whereas Automatix gives such a small selection that users of it would end up installing stuff they might not need or want simply because it is there for free so they might as well. If they spent their time in the Add/Remove tool doing this then they might end up finding better quality, better integrated, better supported software for a much broader range of things, but of course that might end up *shock horror* introducing people to new software which doesn't pay whatever company dominates that particular field.
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My favourite WM is actually E16, which I have been using instead of Metacity in GNOME for years. I finally got Compiz-Fusion running on my laptop and I admit it is nice, but I will not be happy until I port some nice E16 themes to it (which I am willing to do because they will still work in a month)
This looks like a long-awaited feature to add to the portfolio of Microsoft Works, the oxymoron which many believe to be an office suite when it is in fact a piss you off enough to buy microsoft office suite. It probably only exists to make sure there is a clear "upgrade" path ("If Works doesn't then why not try Office?", rather than letting customers loose into the wild where they might happen upon a competing free product), and to cater to those who think (rightfully so) that word processing is a basic task for a computer to do these days and should come by default for free but without pissing off the OEMs and DoJ with forced Office preinstallation or reducing the cost of Office (which, along with Windows, keeps Microsoft afloat). (Seriously, I went to buy a mouse from a local computer shop recently and the guy running it took an age to explain to the woman in front of me why the computer she just bought can't do word processing, and that if she wanted it to she'd have to fork out a few hundred quid. I would've intervened with OpenOffice but I was with my girlfriend at the time and I try not to be too zealoty around her)