But why? Living near you doesn't seem any more relevant to who you should help than choosing people of your own gender or race would be; it's a morally irrelevant fact. I'd rather choose who to help based on *who needs the most help* and *which help is the most effective per dollar*. Unsurprisingly, this doesn't involve donating to my local area -- everyone there is not starving or dying for silly reasons that could be easily solved with small amounts of money.
As has already been argued, this is not a good idea if you're trying to maximize impact, as the OP is.
This is because the kinds of tasks that dramatically improve quality of life are tasks that you could pay people significantly less (than you earn at your job) to do better at than you would. It follows that it would be better to work an extra hour, and then pay ten people to do the hour of work that you would otherwise volunteer instead.
Charity Navigator doesn't actually address the OP's question. They rate charities based on *efficiency*, but not based on *impact*. You can do a lot of things that have little impact but high "efficiency", and a lot of things with huge impact but high overhead. Efficiency is simply the wrong quantity.
GiveWell (GiveWell.org) measures impact and effectiveness directly, and just put out their new list of recommended charities.
There have been many reports of sexism recently; see http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Timeline_of_incidents for an attempt at listing some of them.
The most obvious example to me is the fact that death threats are being e-mailed to female FOSS contributors -- see http://geekfeminism.org/2009/10/08/psa-mikeeusas-hate-speech-and-harassment/
This isn't anything new; it's been happening since 2005. I hope you'll agree that it's totally horrifically unacceptable, and understandable that women would go and find somewhere less hostile to them to spend their time after receiving these. Yet, apparently you didn't know about it: please consider becoming more informed about these issues before having such a strong opinion of denial that there's a problem.
As stated too many times to count, the GPL is fine with this. It is nonsense to say that something that the GPL text specifically allows, and something that the authors of the license have been doing since day one, could be against the spirit of the license.
So, that's not your question. Your question is, "if one of the authors of a piece of software chose an inappropriate license, and then after I'd done a bunch of development work based on their code, told me that they wished they'd chosen the 'you may not sell modifications based on this code' non-free license, what should I do?"
In my case, I think that the GPL is a more ethical license than the one he's describing, so I would point out how vastly different this no-selling license would be, and point out that it would not be considered a free software license by anyone (DFSG, FSF, OSI). It can hardly be unfair of you to have thought that, by using a free software license, he meant for you to enjoy the freedoms provided by free software!
In summary:
if you hadn't done any development yet, I think I would probably respect their wishes, and think poorly of them for choosing such an inappropriate license (without, apparaently, reading it first).
since you have, I don't think there can be anything unethical about using the license you have, given that you are following both its text and its spirit.
> If I can read and compile the O/S, who's to say I can't just remove the kill daemon from my build and then install it?
Nothing at all. The article is misleading -- if you want to remove the anti-theft daemon you can, by clicking a button to request a developer key that gives you full access to the machine and its BIOS. Then you can run whatever you like.
If your machine has been reported stolen, though, the developer key won't be issued. So, it's a sensible tradeoff between restricting people from experimenting on their machine (which they should be able to) and stopping laptop theft from being such a worry.
I wonder if anyone's ever considered Dasher as a viable means of text input on an iPod?
The colour iPod would be a *perfect* device to run Dasher on -- we have a one-dimensional mode that means the scroll wheel would be giving us entirely enough movement information. The problem for us is that it's a completely closed development environment, though.:(
Last time I checked, there wasn't a Linux port for the colour iPod. As soon as one shows up with reasonable C library/graphics toolkit support, I'll look into making a Dasher port to it.
Oh, you're a finance company that has mission-critical applications that can't go down? Too bad, it goes down.
If you're a company that trades, and you lose the ability to -- and your competitors know that you've lost the ability to -- it's entirely plausible that they can leverage it and have you losing millions within hours. Financial companies have gone bankrupt for less, which is why they tend to keep duplicates of entire sites on stanby, ready to have workers moved into in emergencies.
> Thanks for posting the bittorrent link. I'm beginning to hate hosing sites, especially for a large download like this.
Actually, it wasn't you; most of that area of Cambridge suffered a prolonged power cut today. At the time of the posting, the Computer Lab had connectivity from 1 (one) backup DSL line, and nothing else.
How is white the advantage? I always did a coin toss to see who went first:(
It really doesn't make much of a difference at levels below master. At that level, though, black has the ``disadvantage'' of always being a move (or tempo) behind; needing to respond to white's attacks defensively rather than being able to initiate its own. This makes openings such as The Sicilian Defense popular, as they respond with attack right from the outset.
Against less able players, it really doesn't matter. The white player will make some sort of ineffectual move, and you'll be able to get counterplay on it. It's only when you're playing someone good enough (which, unfortunately, has happened to me a few times:) to not give you any kind of counterplay that it's a disadvantage.
Just an explanatory note. Raja hangs on OPN #slashdot, and he's a Very Cool Guy. But he has cancer, which isn't good. We wish him all the best, so he can get back to enjoying Emmett's Air Canada flames and various degrees of trolldom.
I'd just like to be the first person in the thread to wish Hemos congrats, and all the best for 'married life'. Jeff's being instrumental in getting slashdot going, and by all accounts he's a very cool guy.
Yeah, it does graphics. Special WAP bitmaps. It looks surprisingly good.. you can get 20ish x 4 on the screen at once on most phones, so it isn't pathetic..
From what I know of Emmett, (through interviewing him at http://communities.iuniverse.com/geekinsync (*G*)) he isn't much of a geek himself. He doesn't code in C, for a start - he's a journalist, and he's just trying to link to his target audience. The only reason that the piece is a little hand-holding is that the general media are fixing in on this case as another 'Microsoft Doing Bad Things' story, and they might want to quote from it. While the introduction to the piece is geeky, the parts important to the media or anyone wanting to know more about slashdot aren't. I thought it was a kickass editorial.
Man, roblimo - I knew you had a scoop but I didn't dream of this. I'm incredibly angry. Microsoft are turning into Big Brother... and it's way past 1984. Wow. (ChrisUK/thoric)
Slashdot Mirror
> Charity begins at home.
But why? Living near you doesn't seem any more relevant to who you should help than choosing people of your own gender or race would be; it's a morally irrelevant fact. I'd rather choose who to help based on *who needs the most help* and *which help is the most effective per dollar*. Unsurprisingly, this doesn't involve donating to my local area -- everyone there is not starving or dying for silly reasons that could be easily solved with small amounts of money.
As has already been argued, this is not a good idea if you're trying to maximize impact, as the OP is.
This is because the kinds of tasks that dramatically improve quality of life are tasks that you could pay people significantly less (than you earn at your job) to do better at than you would. It follows that it would be better to work an extra hour, and then pay ten people to do the hour of work that you would otherwise volunteer instead.
Charity Navigator doesn't actually address the OP's question. They rate charities based on *efficiency*, but not based on *impact*. You can do a lot of things that have little impact but high "efficiency", and a lot of things with huge impact but high overhead. Efficiency is simply the wrong quantity.
GiveWell (GiveWell.org) measures impact and effectiveness directly, and just put out their new list of recommended charities.
There have been many reports of sexism recently; see http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Timeline_of_incidents for an attempt at listing some of them.
The most obvious example to me is the fact that death threats are being e-mailed to female FOSS contributors -- see http://geekfeminism.org/2009/10/08/psa-mikeeusas-hate-speech-and-harassment/
This isn't anything new; it's been happening since 2005. I hope you'll agree that it's totally horrifically unacceptable, and understandable that women would go and find somewhere less hostile to them to spend their time after receiving these. Yet, apparently you didn't know about it: please consider becoming more informed about these issues before having such a strong opinion of denial that there's a problem.
As stated too many times to count, the GPL is fine with this. It is nonsense to say that something that the GPL text specifically allows, and something that the authors of the license have been doing since day one, could be against the spirit of the license.
So, that's not your question. Your question is, "if one of the authors of a piece of software chose an inappropriate license, and then after I'd done a bunch of development work based on their code, told me that they wished they'd chosen the 'you may not sell modifications based on this code' non-free license, what should I do?"
In my case, I think that the GPL is a more ethical license than the one he's describing, so I would point out how vastly different this no-selling license would be, and point out that it would not be considered a free software license by anyone (DFSG, FSF, OSI). It can hardly be unfair of you to have thought that, by using a free software license, he meant for you to enjoy the freedoms provided by free software!
In summary:
> If I can read and compile the O/S, who's to say I can't just remove the kill daemon from my build and then install it?
Nothing at all. The article is misleading -- if you want to remove the anti-theft daemon you can, by clicking a button to request a developer key that gives you full access to the machine and its BIOS. Then you can run whatever you like.
If your machine has been reported stolen, though, the developer key won't be issued. So, it's a sensible tradeoff between restricting people from experimenting on their machine (which they should be able to) and stopping laptop theft from being such a worry.
- C.
I tried out their matlab code and put a few example colourings on my web page, for the interested:
http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/cjb/
The colour iPod would be a *perfect* device to run Dasher on -- we have a one-dimensional mode that means the scroll wheel would be giving us entirely enough movement information. The problem for us is that it's a completely closed development environment, though.
Last time I checked, there wasn't a Linux port for the colour iPod. As soon as one shows up with reasonable C library/graphics toolkit support, I'll look into making a Dasher port to it.
- C.
- C.
Anyone know if this is based on 2.6?
- C.
So, that's how.
- Chris. (At the Gnome Summit.)
> Thanks for posting the bittorrent link. I'm beginning to hate hosing sites, especially for a large download like this.
Actually, it wasn't you; most of that area of Cambridge suffered a prolonged power cut today. At the time of the posting, the Computer Lab had connectivity from 1 (one) backup DSL line, and nothing else.
Against less able players, it really doesn't matter. The white player will make some sort of ineffectual move, and you'll be able to get counterplay on it. It's only when you're playing someone good enough (which, unfortunately, has happened to me a few times
Cool.
Just an explanatory note. Raja hangs on OPN #slashdot, and he's a Very Cool Guy. But he has cancer, which isn't good. We wish him all the best, so he can get back to enjoying Emmett's Air Canada flames and various degrees of trolldom.
Get well soon, dude.
Chris / thoric.
If there was more girl geeks, it'd make for interesting mid-coitus arguments about BSD and Linux.
I'd just like to be the first person in the thread to wish Hemos congrats, and all the best for 'married life'. Jeff's being instrumental in getting slashdot going, and by all accounts he's a very cool guy.
:)
Congrats.
Jeff,
Do you think that your job will change as new technology like broadband and WAP come along and are more available to consumers?
Chris. (chris@printf.net)
Yeah, it does graphics. Special WAP bitmaps. It looks surprisingly good.. you can get 20ish x 4 on the screen at once on most phones, so it isn't pathetic..
From what I know of Emmett, (through interviewing him at http://communities.iuniverse.com/geekinsync (*G*)) he isn't much of a geek himself. He doesn't code in C, for a start - he's a journalist, and he's just trying to link to his target audience. The only reason that the piece is a little hand-holding is that the general media are fixing in on this case as another 'Microsoft Doing Bad Things' story, and they might want to quote from it. While the introduction to the piece is geeky, the parts important to the media or anyone wanting to know more about slashdot aren't. I thought it was a kickass editorial.
Chris. http://printf.net/
All good points. Rob, if you're reading this - please let us know how you get on. It's an interesting story..
Man, roblimo - I knew you had a scoop but I didn't dream of this. I'm incredibly angry. Microsoft are turning into Big Brother... and it's way past 1984. Wow. (ChrisUK/thoric)
Brilliant. Slashdot's been really lagged today, so things should be better on this ol' 56K modem. Is WAP going to get sorted now? :)