While the Catholic Church has never been literal about following the Bible, it has always been the primary input into any choice. This is especially true of the Old Testament as it was pretty much stablished by the time the Church was founded. Since the Church predates the Council of Nicea by about three centuries, things aren't as black-and-white with the New Testament.
But tithing is Old Testament, and Jesus said "Give unto Ceaser...", so I don't see much wiggle room here. It is very Biblical, in addition to being part of culture and tradition of the Roman Church. Theoretically both are supposed to reflect the Will of God, which is the ultimate goal. How you get there is a detail.
As for your quit about the early Church being "truly catholic" implying that the modern Church isn't: Are you restricting your view to the Roman Church? The Catholic Church is an umbrella group, not the monolithic organization most people imagine. http://www.cwnews.com/news/viewstory.cfm?recnum=53 183 has an article about growth in a non-Latin tradition Church. Just FYI.
personal comment While the Popes have been involved in all sorts of social issues since the early days of the Church, I'm not sure that I see tax evasion as being important enough to get this much attention: Encyclicals are big deals. But maybe the Pope has a streak of anti-corporatism in him which should sit will with many/.ers. In addition to being an old man who has lived a fairly cloistered life, he still has his pet issues too.
But really, Create Time would be nice... even if they call it Summoning Time or Ethereal Conjuring Time. I agree that there are times when it would really be nice to know how long a file has existed, but it is pretty much impossible to implement without better AI, or user space giving the kernel extra info.
Imagine something simple like
sort foo >bar
mv bar foo
I bet you want the second foo to have the same ECtime as the first. Well, to the file system, those are two different files that happen to have the same filename. And even if you did something like
munge_file foo
The binding between input inode and output inode is done in user space. Even if the kernel figured that out and preserved (copied, really) the ECtime, then the times that you wanted a new ECtime, it would be wrong. Something dumb like
echo $something >foo
might imply that you want a new ECtime because you are intentionally clobbering foo.
The only way I can think of to get this to work is to have your application read() file foo, rewind() to the beginning, and overwrite the file in place. Most applications don't do that today, the simply read() into memory, and later write over the file (not append). Obviously log files are an append only special case, and that class of file could preserve this ECtime info.
- doug
PS: This reminds me of ClearCase evil twins. Ungh.
A license is not a type of contract, at least not in the USA. I'm not sure where you've gotten your legal training, but it doesn't apply here. If you live in a different country with a different legal tradition, you statement might be correct. I can't comment on that.
Here in the US, if you don't sign something, it isn't a contract (yes, dramatically simplified). A contract is a legal agreement between two or more parties. Each side agrees to do (or not do) certain things and legally bind themselves to fulfill those obligations. Usually one side agrees to perform some action, and the other agrees to transfer money, but the actual mechanism is far more general than that. But the key thing is that multiple parties agree, and sign something that is binding to them. Note that no one else is bound to it, just the signatories (and successors as appropriate).
A license which is one party holds all the cards an unilaterally allows deviations from the norm for use of something. A license cannot be used to restrict actions, that is what a contract is for, but many licenses have gotchas where you gotta do X if you want to do Y. No obligation, but if you don't meet the letter of X, Y is off limits to you.
In this case the GNU General Public License (note - not contract) allows copying and use of software that normal copyright law does not. You have to follow the rules of the GPL if you want to use/modify/whatever the covered software. Without the license the use of the software falls under normal copyright laws, which say you can't touch it without the owner's OK.
Microsoft is completely correct to say that it never agreed to anything GPL. It doesn't matter what they agree to. They are powerless and have no rights what so ever. At square one they cannot touch someone else's software. The only way to move beyond square one is to a) accept the GPL, no matter how distasteful, or b) steal it via copyright violation. They can bitch and moan as much as they like, but the choice is black and white.
Go visit http://www.groklaw.net/ if you want to research the differences between contracts and licenses. It has lots of the basics, and targets the geek community.
When I first floated this idea with a co-worker several months ago I made it more complex. US Citizens would get the first interval for free, and always be one multiple of $10 behind non-citizens which includes corporations. And I think any fee less than $100 should be waved as it is not worth the effort to collect it. But these are just minor details, and I'll be glad to tweak them however you like if it will get your vote:-)
I would like to see something like a monotonically increasing (progressive) renewal/filing-fee every five years, where the first five years would cost $1, the second $10, the third $100, and so forth. To get 15 years (pretty close to 14), the cumulative cost is on $111 which most will agree isn't much money. To increase that to 30 years, three more chunks would cost $111,000, which would be more than the marginal value of almost all works. Another four renewals to bring it up 50 years is going to cost $1,111,000,000, which is absolutely insane. No work would be kept out of the public domain that long.
The advantage of this system is that the copyright owner has some choice as to how long to keep it protected/monopolized. If a work is profitable, then the owner can decided to invest in it and extend the copyright for a while. Due to the ever increasing cost, sooner or later extending the copyright will be a bad investment and then it goes into the public domain.
A pet peeve of mine is non-original ownership of copyrights. I can see where Walt Disney (the individual) wanted exclusive rights for his work with Mickey Mouse, but since he is dead, any new Mickey Mouse material is made by someone else. I don't see why the Walt Disney corporation should have any more rights than anyone else. I understand that companies might own the rights, but that should be to shelter/protect the individual creator so he can milk that cow a bit longer. But once anyone else gets involved in the creativity process, is should be fair game for everyone. Too bad that isn't how the modern world works.
Everyone knows that it comes from printers, but few seem to know more than that. The printers get the standard from typewriters. A standard sheet of paper is 8.5" x 11", but if you put a small 1/4" margin on both sides, that leaves 8" of usable space. The standard "pica" font was 1/10" and "elite" was 1/12". 8 inches with 10 characters/inch means 80 characters per line for "pica", and 96 for "elite". I believe that the font was 1/6" high, so 11" would have 66 rows. That is the origin of the 80x66 standard. And tabs were 1/10th of the line (5 tab stops would put you at the center point of the page), which is why the tab is every 8th column (and not a fixed number of spaces).
Yes, this is pointless in the modern world. Only old farts with a good memory for pointless trivia like myself can remember those days. When I took typing back in high school we still had manual typewriters, and I don't mean IBM Selectrics. The joy of being graded on 40 wpm when jams were a serious possibility. Maybe someone here who was doing office work through the early 90s would have bumped into that, but the typewrite has gone the way of the dodo.
As to the original question, 80 sucks but it is a standard and everyone knows it. Getting everyone to agree on something new and then switch over en masse is going to be impossible. I don't like being a fatalist, but I'm fine with being cynical. Feel free to muck with whatever standards you like, and I, along with almost everyone else, will ignore you and stick to what has been working well enough.
- doug
PS: Yes, this is US-centric. Since we led the transformation from typewriters to printers, we got to call the shots, and you got stuck with "but this doesn't make any sense with my A4 paper." Tant pis.
It is a shame that CYA is such an entrenched part of our society. I'm not faulting you for your attitude. I just can't help thinking that as a people we'd be better off without all the double speak, legal loopholes, and so forth.
I'm a clearcase admin by day, so I think I have some first hand experience in this area. A single branch means a single development thread, which is not a real world scenario. For the project that I'm working on there is one release in long term maintenance, a second going from development to maintenance (GA release just happened), a third under development (will GA at the end of this year, or early next), and early prototyping for a fourth. How again is this all supposed to work on a single branch?
Each of these four releases has its own branch, with sub-branches for development/fixes. How would your system of a single branch handle merging fixes from maintenance releases to in-development releases? And when fixes get back ported, can a single branch handle backwards merge. Does that concept even exist? This is ugly, but it is real-world.
Please don't tell me that each and every release would be modeled as a different project. That would be the cure being worse than the disease.
At the very end Linus explains that branches aren't the issue, it is merging. In this he is "spot on". I don't think clearcase got everything right (I've spent too much time with "merge hell" to think that), but at least it is possible. His style is vitriolic at times, but if you look past it, he makes some very valid points. I have no first hand experience with git, so I don't know if his solutions work well enough for me or not, so I have to take his "solutions" part of the presentation with a grain of salt. But I don't remember any problems with the "problem identification" bits.
As a CC admin, I appreciate your comments. But I do have to say that CC is no where near as fast as what Linus reports git to be. I've never used git myself, but when we import an update from montavista, it is going to take a while. It happens to run on its own without human interaction, but it is going to chug for a while.
If we could check out lines of code, there would be no need for merging. What complete nonsense. The merge process would be different, but something is going to have to order these lines serially. When a new line is added, exactly where does it get injected? Well, that sounds like a merge to me.
My day job is a clearcase administrator, so I have seen more than my fair share of merges. I'd love to get rid of them, but this isn't going to do it. Not even close.
The "Clinton Years" actually started under Bush 41. And then Clinton got to ride the boom of the 90s. He was lucky to be at the right place at the right time. Reagan had the same sort of thing coming after the stagflation of the Carter era. Please be realistic here: The President has a lot of influence on the economy, but it isn't like he directly controls it. Mostly it is luck and timing. And whomever is in the white house gets the credit or the blame. Did Hoover really do all that much to cause the Great Depression, or was he just the one in office when the house of cards came tumbling down? It sucks, but that is how it works.
That said, as much as I dislike Clinton, for better or worse, the economy was good during his tenure. He didn't upset the apple cart (although he did try with pharmaceuticals), and the rising tide lifted all boats. Since he happened to be in office at the time, he gets the credit. Since prolonged growth like in the 90s is unreasonable, his successor (GW) was left in a difficult position. GW's idealism led to his budget cuts, which left the Feds short on cash. This coupled with wars in Iraq and Afghanistan hurt. Decreased income while incurring major expenses is never a good thing.
Cool. Yet another good reason for living in NC. I'm just surprised that VA isn't on that list. It is rare that VA isn't neck-and-neck with TX for "red state mindset".
I like that you're thinking outside of box. Every post I've read has tied replication with revision control. You're right that cfengine would do a great job of replicating the config files, but that doesn't remove the need for source management. At least one machine will still need rcs/svn/clearcase track the originals.
So we're getting Caprica because BSG is so popular, but we're losing BSG because it's too expensive? That's confusing to me.
As long as Caprica is cheaper than Galactica, it works out. I take it that they will be reducing the amount of expensive special effects. I'm not really optimistic about Caprica, but that is a different issue.
Apparently if you are in Washington, all you have to do is sue yourself for being a spammer. The judge will chew you out for wasting the court's time, and then drop the charges without even opening the documents. Once the court has vindicated you, you can demonstrate to everyone how non-spammy you are. I don't think you'll even need a lawyer, although you may need some antacid after seeing the US judicial process up close and personal.
If you don't live in Washington, I think you'll need to move there first.
In your day? Don't you have a 6 digit id? How far back was "your day", really?
I had a high school teacher explain to the class why we were supposed to use edlin for assembly instead of the nice wordstar-like editor that came with turbo pascal 2.0.
the reason for its popularity was billing users
on
The End of Minitel
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The reason it was popular was that the users will billed per minute and some of that money went to the content provider, with the rest going to France Telecom. French business didn't like switching to web pages because they are a pure expense, while minitel pages generated some revenue. When I lived in France (mid to late 90s) my friends preferred web pages, but that simply wasn't an option in many cases.
I'm not saying that minitel doesn't have security mechanisms, I'm just saying that its popularity was due to economics.
Personally, I'm glad it is gone. I thought it was slow and clunky a decade ago, and I can't imagine that I would like it any more today.
For most of the Earth's history there has been no year-round polar ice like there is now. Until the ice caps melt we're still in an ice age. Read this article for more details.
But that would ruin the new Battlestar Galactica. Not knowing who is a cylon spy is half the tension in that show. For my entertainment's sake, it is best that we keep this "law" off the books.
Slashdot Mirror
Huh?
While the Catholic Church has never been literal about following the Bible, it has always been the primary input into any choice. This is especially true of the Old Testament as it was pretty much stablished by the time the Church was founded. Since the Church predates the Council of Nicea by about three centuries, things aren't as black-and-white with the New Testament.
But tithing is Old Testament, and Jesus said "Give unto Ceaser...", so I don't see much wiggle room here. It is very Biblical, in addition to being part of culture and tradition of the Roman Church. Theoretically both are supposed to reflect the Will of God, which is the ultimate goal. How you get there is a detail.
As for your quit about the early Church being "truly catholic" implying that the modern Church isn't: Are you restricting your view to the Roman Church? The Catholic Church is an umbrella group, not the monolithic organization most people imagine. http://www.cwnews.com/news/viewstory.cfm?recnum=53 183 has an article about growth in a non-Latin tradition Church. Just FYI.
personal comment /.ers. In addition to being an old man who has lived a fairly cloistered life, he still has his pet issues too.
- dougWhile the Popes have been involved in all sorts of social issues since the early days of the Church, I'm not sure that I see tax evasion as being important enough to get this much attention: Encyclicals are big deals. But maybe the Pope has a streak of anti-corporatism in him which should sit will with many
Imagine something simple like
sort foo >bar
mv bar foo
I bet you want the second foo to have the same ECtime as the first. Well, to the file system, those are two different files that happen to have the same filename. And even if you did something like
munge_file foo
The binding between input inode and output inode is done in user space. Even if the kernel figured that out and preserved (copied, really) the ECtime, then the times that you wanted a new ECtime, it would be wrong. Something dumb like
echo $something >foo
might imply that you want a new ECtime because you are intentionally clobbering foo.
The only way I can think of to get this to work is to have your application read() file foo, rewind() to the beginning, and overwrite the file in place. Most applications don't do that today, the simply read() into memory, and later write over the file (not append). Obviously log files are an append only special case, and that class of file could preserve this ECtime info.
- doug
PS: This reminds me of ClearCase evil twins. Ungh.
A license is not a type of contract, at least not in the USA. I'm not sure where you've gotten your legal training, but it doesn't apply here. If you live in a different country with a different legal tradition, you statement might be correct. I can't comment on that.
Here in the US, if you don't sign something, it isn't a contract (yes, dramatically simplified). A contract is a legal agreement between two or more parties. Each side agrees to do (or not do) certain things and legally bind themselves to fulfill those obligations. Usually one side agrees to perform some action, and the other agrees to transfer money, but the actual mechanism is far more general than that. But the key thing is that multiple parties agree, and sign something that is binding to them. Note that no one else is bound to it, just the signatories (and successors as appropriate).
A license which is one party holds all the cards an unilaterally allows deviations from the norm for use of something. A license cannot be used to restrict actions, that is what a contract is for, but many licenses have gotchas where you gotta do X if you want to do Y. No obligation, but if you don't meet the letter of X, Y is off limits to you.
In this case the GNU General Public License (note - not contract) allows copying and use of software that normal copyright law does not. You have to follow the rules of the GPL if you want to use/modify/whatever the covered software. Without the license the use of the software falls under normal copyright laws, which say you can't touch it without the owner's OK.
Microsoft is completely correct to say that it never agreed to anything GPL. It doesn't matter what they agree to. They are powerless and have no rights what so ever. At square one they cannot touch someone else's software. The only way to move beyond square one is to a) accept the GPL, no matter how distasteful, or b) steal it via copyright violation. They can bitch and moan as much as they like, but the choice is black and white.
Go visit http://www.groklaw.net/ if you want to research the differences between contracts and licenses. It has lots of the basics, and targets the geek community.
- doug
EU citizenship is meaningless to the USPTO.
But realistically it isn't gonna happen on either side of the pond in the near future.
When I first floated this idea with a co-worker several months ago I made it more complex. US Citizens would get the first interval for free, and always be one multiple of $10 behind non-citizens which includes corporations. And I think any fee less than $100 should be waved as it is not worth the effort to collect it. But these are just minor details, and I'll be glad to tweak them however you like if it will get your vote :-)
I would like to see something like a monotonically increasing (progressive) renewal/filing-fee every five years, where the first five years would cost $1, the second $10, the third $100, and so forth. To get 15 years (pretty close to 14), the cumulative cost is on $111 which most will agree isn't much money. To increase that to 30 years, three more chunks would cost $111,000, which would be more than the marginal value of almost all works. Another four renewals to bring it up 50 years is going to cost $1,111,000,000, which is absolutely insane. No work would be kept out of the public domain that long.
The advantage of this system is that the copyright owner has some choice as to how long to keep it protected/monopolized. If a work is profitable, then the owner can decided to invest in it and extend the copyright for a while. Due to the ever increasing cost, sooner or later extending the copyright will be a bad investment and then it goes into the public domain.
A pet peeve of mine is non-original ownership of copyrights. I can see where Walt Disney (the individual) wanted exclusive rights for his work with Mickey Mouse, but since he is dead, any new Mickey Mouse material is made by someone else. I don't see why the Walt Disney corporation should have any more rights than anyone else. I understand that companies might own the rights, but that should be to shelter/protect the individual creator so he can milk that cow a bit longer. But once anyone else gets involved in the creativity process, is should be fair game for everyone. Too bad that isn't how the modern world works.
- doug
Everyone knows that it comes from printers, but few seem to know more than that. The printers get the standard from typewriters. A standard sheet of paper is 8.5" x 11", but if you put a small 1/4" margin on both sides, that leaves 8" of usable space. The standard "pica" font was 1/10" and "elite" was 1/12". 8 inches with 10 characters/inch means 80 characters per line for "pica", and 96 for "elite". I believe that the font was 1/6" high, so 11" would have 66 rows. That is the origin of the 80x66 standard. And tabs were 1/10th of the line (5 tab stops would put you at the center point of the page), which is why the tab is every 8th column (and not a fixed number of spaces).
Yes, this is pointless in the modern world. Only old farts with a good memory for pointless trivia like myself can remember those days. When I took typing back in high school we still had manual typewriters, and I don't mean IBM Selectrics. The joy of being graded on 40 wpm when jams were a serious possibility. Maybe someone here who was doing office work through the early 90s would have bumped into that, but the typewrite has gone the way of the dodo.
As to the original question, 80 sucks but it is a standard and everyone knows it. Getting everyone to agree on something new and then switch over en masse is going to be impossible. I don't like being a fatalist, but I'm fine with being cynical. Feel free to muck with whatever standards you like, and I, along with almost everyone else, will ignore you and stick to what has been working well enough.
- doug
PS: Yes, this is US-centric. Since we led the transformation from typewriters to printers, we got to call the shots, and you got stuck with "but this doesn't make any sense with my A4 paper." Tant pis.
It is a shame that CYA is such an entrenched part of our society. I'm not faulting you for your attitude. I just can't help thinking that as a people we'd be better off without all the double speak, legal loopholes, and so forth.
I'm a clearcase admin by day, so I think I have some first hand experience in this area. A single branch means a single development thread, which is not a real world scenario. For the project that I'm working on there is one release in long term maintenance, a second going from development to maintenance (GA release just happened), a third under development (will GA at the end of this year, or early next), and early prototyping for a fourth. How again is this all supposed to work on a single branch?
Each of these four releases has its own branch, with sub-branches for development/fixes. How would your system of a single branch handle merging fixes from maintenance releases to in-development releases? And when fixes get back ported, can a single branch handle backwards merge. Does that concept even exist? This is ugly, but it is real-world.
Please don't tell me that each and every release would be modeled as a different project. That would be the cure being worse than the disease.
At the very end Linus explains that branches aren't the issue, it is merging. In this he is "spot on". I don't think clearcase got everything right (I've spent too much time with "merge hell" to think that), but at least it is possible. His style is vitriolic at times, but if you look past it, he makes some very valid points. I have no first hand experience with git, so I don't know if his solutions work well enough for me or not, so I have to take his "solutions" part of the presentation with a grain of salt. But I don't remember any problems with the "problem identification" bits.
- doug
As a CC admin, I appreciate your comments. But I do have to say that CC is no where near as fast as what Linus reports git to be. I've never used git myself, but when we import an update from montavista, it is going to take a while. It happens to run on its own without human interaction, but it is going to chug for a while.
My day job is a clearcase administrator, so I have seen more than my fair share of merges. I'd love to get rid of them, but this isn't going to do it. Not even close.
- doug
The "Clinton Years" actually started under Bush 41. And then Clinton got to ride the boom of the 90s. He was lucky to be at the right place at the right time. Reagan had the same sort of thing coming after the stagflation of the Carter era. Please be realistic here: The President has a lot of influence on the economy, but it isn't like he directly controls it. Mostly it is luck and timing. And whomever is in the white house gets the credit or the blame. Did Hoover really do all that much to cause the Great Depression, or was he just the one in office when the house of cards came tumbling down? It sucks, but that is how it works.
That said, as much as I dislike Clinton, for better or worse, the economy was good during his tenure. He didn't upset the apple cart (although he did try with pharmaceuticals), and the rising tide lifted all boats. Since he happened to be in office at the time, he gets the credit. Since prolonged growth like in the 90s is unreasonable, his successor (GW) was left in a difficult position. GW's idealism led to his budget cuts, which left the Feds short on cash. This coupled with wars in Iraq and Afghanistan hurt. Decreased income while incurring major expenses is never a good thing.
Cool. Yet another good reason for living in NC. I'm just surprised that VA isn't on that list. It is rare that VA isn't neck-and-neck with TX for "red state mindset".
I like that you're thinking outside of box. Every post I've read has tied replication with revision control. You're right that cfengine would do a great job of replicating the config files, but that doesn't remove the need for source management. At least one machine will still need rcs/svn/clearcase track the originals.
- doug
Congrats! You've done better than most of us in that you've figured out how to get past step #2
1) do something
2) ?
3) profit!
Now that you're in the promised land of profit, you're looking to move on to step #4
4) enjoy life
While I wish you the best, I'm stuck at step #1.
- doug
Dunno. How many years is "new here"?
Apparently if you are in Washington, all you have to do is sue yourself for being a spammer. The judge will chew you out for wasting the court's time, and then drop the charges without even opening the documents. Once the court has vindicated you, you can demonstrate to everyone how non-spammy you are. I don't think you'll even need a lawyer, although you may need some antacid after seeing the US judicial process up close and personal.
If you don't live in Washington, I think you'll need to move there first.
Good luck. Let us know how the trial goes.
- dougI think you've fallen for a hoax.
In your day? Don't you have a 6 digit id? How far back was "your day", really?
I had a high school teacher explain to the class why we were supposed to use edlin for assembly instead of the nice wordstar-like editor that came with turbo pascal 2.0.
The reason it was popular was that the users will billed per minute and some of that money went to the content provider, with the rest going to France Telecom. French business didn't like switching to web pages because they are a pure expense, while minitel pages generated some revenue. When I lived in France (mid to late 90s) my friends preferred web pages, but that simply wasn't an option in many cases.
I'm not saying that minitel doesn't have security mechanisms, I'm just saying that its popularity was due to economics.
Personally, I'm glad it is gone. I thought it was slow and clunky a decade ago, and I can't imagine that I would like it any more today.
- doug
For most of the Earth's history there has been no year-round polar ice like there is now. Until the ice caps melt we're still in an ice age. Read this article for more details.
But that would ruin the new Battlestar Galactica. Not knowing who is a cylon spy is half the tension in that show. For my entertainment's sake, it is best that we keep this "law" off the books.
- doug