The GPL gives you distribution rights provided you pass on those same distribution rights. The GPL does not give absolute irrevocable distribution rights. As soon as you violate the terms of the license, you lose those conditionally-granted distribution rights yourself, and it devolves back into a normal copyright case.
What the heck is so hard to understand about that?
Its easy to understand, the problem is that while it may be the way the Free Software Foundation would like copyright and contract law to work, it is not generally the way copyright and contract law actually is applied by the courts. A copyright license is governed by contract law, and the remedy available for its breach is generally one for breach of contract, not for copyright violation; a copyright license will act as a covenant not to sue for copyright violation by the copyright holder that the courts will enforce.
The beauty of the GPL lies in its supremely elegant hack of using copyright to fight copyright. The ONLY way the GPL can fail is if copyright itself is declared null and void.
Well, no, that's not true, either.
If there are ANY flaws in the GPL, those EXTRA redistribution rights would automatically be cancelled.
False; flaws in a contract do not necessarily render the contract void, they may render some part of it unenforceable while the contract remains, may justify one party seeking reformation of the contract in court, and even if they do make the contract unenforceable in its entirety as a contract, the fact that promises were made in an instrument that was not valid as a contract does not mean that those promises cannot be enforced under, for instance, the legal doctrine of promissory estoppel.
The GPL grants EXTRA rights, and if it fails, those extra rights die with it.
That's a nice theory, but one completely out of touch with the way the applicable law actually works.
But the counterargument is that since they're self-evidently not following the terms of the license, then they don't have a binding contract, hence we're back to a copyright violation.
No, not following the terms of a contract doesn't mean that you don't have the contract, it means you are breaking it. This is, at least the weight of authority seems to be, true even for gratuitous copyright licenses (which otherwise might fail as contracts generally for want of mutual consideration.)
Of course, since the GPL is phrased as an offer that must be accepted without specifying a method of acceptance, its an interesting question whether someone who silently redistributes GPL software without following the requirements of the GPL has "accepted" the license, forming a contract, and then broken it, or is simply violating copyright. I don't know that there is direct authority on point, but the apparent tendency to find contract even in gratuitous nonexclusive copyright licenses and in various other areas (for instance, the UCC approach of viewing shipment of nonconforming goods in response to an order as both acceptance, forming contract, and breach of that contract), combined with the ambiguity in acceptance of the GPL and the tendency to construe ambiguities against the party with the greater control over the contract terms, all seem to weigh in favor of finding that the appropriate remedy is for breach of contract not for copyright violation.
I wonder how the airlines are going to keep inappropriate video (i.e. porn or even just movies like "Snakes on a Plane" or "Alive") from appearing on the seat-back displays.
Probably, the same way they keep "inappropriate content" in other media (say, porn in dead-tree form) from "appearing" in the passenger compartment.
I think corruption is a bigger problem. Without good governance, change is hard. How soon until one laptop per child becomes one warlord with all the laptops?
Probably until, e.g., Brazil goes through a radical collapse and turns into Somalia.
Laptops aren't the same as education, anyway.
No one said they are. They are a tool for education, nothing more. OLPC doesn't pretend that laptops replace education, they suggest that investing in the laptops and associated infrastructure (like the satellite downlink station being developed specifically for rural villages to provide network access; free satellite time is also being donated) will be a cost effective investment in tools to improve the quality of education and the ability to deliver educational materials.
Africa needs clean government to have a chance as much as it needs clean water. I can't see the laptop as part of the solution.
I can't imagine many more powerful parts of the solution to bad government than a distributed medium for information sharing and storage that is widely distributed in the population.
You could argue that laptops make education easier, and that education drives economic growth.
You could, and you'd be right, but the laptops have the potential to affect bad government other than through economic development.
In the absence of these things, what will stop the newly educated adults from leaving for the US, the EU, India, or China?
The immigration policies of the target countries, for one thing; the fact that many of the OLPC countries already are offer as good or better economic opportunities for educated natives than they would have in India or China is also a factor, though.
I think someone decided free laptop was easier than basic schooling.
I think its rather clear that "someone" (i.e., the ministries of education that provide basic schooling in the countries that have elected to participated) decided that buying laptops was a useful and productive way to improve the provision of basic schooling.
High GDP per person doesn't imply that the high GDP is actually distributed per person.
So? How the GDP is distributed would only matter to affordability if these were being sold to individuals. But they aren't, they are being sold to government ministries of education, who then distribute them free of charge to individuals.
Do they really think prople in Libya and Brazil can afford a $100 laptop, regardless of whether it is for their kids or themselves?
OLPC doesn't sell to individuals.
OLPC sells to government ministries of education. Several nations have already committed to large buys, I think Libya is the only one who has committed to enough to meet the goal of one laptop per schoolchild though, and Libya has apparently also been discussing the possibility of subsidizing purchases for poorer African nations.
Is it, at $100 per recipient, expensive for developing nations? Probably. Those that are willing to spend the money are willing to do so because they see it as an investment in education that will pay off in a combination of savings in other expenses and long-term economic performance.
You point out something I have always found amusing. Let's say someone breaks into your home, in most states you are within your legal rights to kill them.
In most states, you are only within your legal rights to kill someone if you have an actual and reasonable apprehension that they are going to kill you or inflict serious bodily harm and the force you use to defend yourself is reasonably necessary to prevent that. The effect of being in your house is that, in many jurisdictions, the obligation you would otherwise have to retreat if possible in preference to using deadly force in self-defense does not apply.
Maybe the real question is this: why hasn't Dvorak caught on? Is change really that hard?
Most people who are particularly concerned with typing efficiency are people with years of experience and very good efficiency on QWERTY keyboards; while Dvorak may be easier to develop efficiency with from the ground up, you'll take a proficiency hit if you are an excellent typist with years of experience with QWERTY. Plus, lots of people concerned with typing efficiency can't control the layout of every keyboard they might need to use, so switching layouts for their main use would require maintaining proficiency in both.
And, of course, schools are going to keep teaching people on whatever is most common, so QWERTY has a pretty solid lock.
I seem to have heard that GNU/Hurd development was moving from L4 to something else...(checks)...Wikipedia seems to be confused as to whether its moving to "Coyotos" or whether there is only some talk about that, and of course the GNU/Hurd pages don't prominently refer to anything but Mach...
A company the size of Sun does not move that quickly, especially so far as legal matters go. Besides, there has been talk of GPLing Java before Christmas for months.
There's been talk of open sourcing it by Christmas, and reports that it might be under the GPL (and reports that it might be under a different license.)
That does not prove, however, that the Novell/MS deal didn't prompt the final decision for Sun. Certainly, they'd already done the analysis and had a pretty good idea of the pluses and minuses of the various options. But certainly the Novell/MS deal remixed those slightly, and might have tipped things in the GPL.
I guess it's possible that Section 0. applies, since "The act of running the Program is not restricted" could be interpreted as a patent license.. but on the other hand the preceding sentence is "Activities other than copying, distribution and modification are not covered by this License; they are outside its scope.", and patents definitely cover more than copying, distribution, and modification.
Insofar as the GPL is enforceable by the user, the language stating that the act of running the program is not restricted almost certainly would be held to mean that the user has a license to use the program from whoever distributed it under the GPL (Sun, here) regardless of the theory under which that licensor might deny such permissions. Similarly, the provisions applying to copying, distributing, and modifying the program, which do not specify they are limited to being copyright licenses, would act as licenses to copy, distribute, and modify under the conditions offered regardless of the theory under which the licensor might be permitted to withold such permission (patent and copyright both could apply to these, as well.)
Section 7 really is most relevant when someone who themselves is modifying relying on permissions in the GPL, and adding functionality to which is licensed from a third-party patent holder (or in the case where there is a patent dispute over material already distributed under the GPL, and someone redistributing it seeks a license to remove any cloud.) It's probably not applicable to Sun at least until they redistribute code under the GPL (such as if, after the release of GPL Java, they incorporate material from the community into it.)
Microsoft FUD aside, the GPL is not a virus: it can't take away any of your IP that you don't explicitly agree to give away. Sun is agreeing explicitly to release their copyrights by licensing them under the GPL, but I don't see any explicit about their patents yet.
Er, no, Sun isn't explicitly licensing either "copyrights" or "patents". They are explicitly allowing certain actions (use in any case; distribution, modification, and copying under given restrictions) with their software under the GPL. Those actions are actions they could prohibit, in the latter three cases, under either copyright or patent law, and in the former case can't restrict under copyright law in the first place. Nothing in the GPL restricts the actions it licenses to only being licensed against copyright claims, not claims based on other legal premises arising out of the same (use, distribution, copying, modification) actions with the software.
Why aren't we simply fighting for a permanent voter-verified paper trail, instead of always saddling every e-voting initiative with demands that EVERYTHING, hardware and software, be open source?
Instead implies that the people seeking open solutions are not seeking voter verified trails. While I've met people concerned about voter-verified paper trails that are not concerned with open solutions, I've never met anyone who goes the other way, so I think you are misunderstanding the problem.
We're seeking "reliable, trustworthy elections".
Voter verified paper trails are an essential component of that.
Open hardware specifications and open (in the publicly disclosed sense, at least) source code are also an essential component of that.
What I'm saying is this: since, even if recounts must be requested every time, a permanent voter-verified paper trail (and a true comprehensive system with regular audits and comparisons between paper vote counts and tabulations) solves almost everything, why are we instead trying to essentially unseat established, commercial enterprise e-voting vendors?
Recounts generally aren't authorized in all cases, but only in cases that are extremely close or specified partial verification procedures suggest problems. And recounts are expensive. Voter verified paper trails do not, in and of themselves, solve all problems.
Even though the commercial products aren't "open source", the certification process allows for the necessary level of inspections by election agencies and external entities.
That's disputable, but in part irrelevant. The point is not to have an election that the secretary of state can trust, but one that is to the greatest extent possible independently verifiable and can be held to be trustworthy with justification by the public at large. The certification procedures did not, in many cases, check the kind of security they should have, an open solutions rather than secret ones could not have concealed many of the flaws that survived through certification.
The problem was the certification procedures being routinely ignored or bypassed for convenience, something that can just as easily happen with an "open source" solution.
That's part of the problem, of course, and isn't solved by open source (although the financial incentive to let it slide because agencies have sunk millions into machines that no other vendor can support, OTOH, is removed by open solutions, if the policy is done right.)
I'm curious about this, and I hope someone can fill me in on it.... why 7? Why not 8?
My entirely-in-the-dark guess would be that somewhere in the support for wireless controller there is a byte used to identify a group of controllers that are being addressed, and that one bit is used for some special related purpose, so that there are only seven bits available to identify whether a particular controller is or is not included in the set, and therefore it supports up to seven controllers.
Liking art is a matter of taste. If you need to view "not getting" something other people like as a matter of doing something wrong, I suppose I could suggest that you may be getting "too close" to the material: viewing its descriptions as straightforward advocacy. At least, that may be why you are offended. I can't talk about the ridiculousness part: that's really a matter of where your personal suspension of disbelief gets thrown off, and there's not much I can say about that.
Does anybody else agree with me or am I the lone voice of geek dissent out here?
Hating Heinlein, especially (IME) among liberal geekdom, is fairly popular, so I doubt you are the only one.
I read "Troopers" right before seeing the movie. I found that it was a rather close adaptation: true to much of the detail and the spirit of the book.
Sure it kept to the detail and spirit of the book, aside from changing all the details (from the micro-level details like the sex of characters, their relations with each other, the capacities of the troopers, their tactics and employment, etc., to macro-level 'details' like, say, the entire large-scale plot of the movie, the society it took place in, etc.) and radically reorienting the spirit of the book from a serious, decidedly gray, thought provoking look at an alternative society through the lens of the war to a shoddy "cautionary tale" about totalitarianism.
If so, why isn't Sun coming down hard on projects like Kaffe and GCJ, if for nothing else than brand infringement?
Probably because their only use of the word "java" is protected as nominative fair use, Sun wouldn't have a legal leg to stand on, and they aren't actually hurting Sun or Java.
Isn't that damage to the Java brand just as bad as anything MS could have done?
Even if what you describe in Linux damages the Java brand at all, it certainly is nowhere near what Microsoft can, and in fact did do, with its own broken Java in Windows.
I believe it's worse now and has steadily been getting worse.
Well, certainly the short-run trend may be worse, though historically large swaths of the country were often, for long periods, one-party zones far worse than today; even with the use of modern analysis to fine-tune gerrymandering and other techniques of locking in partisan advantage, there's more competition in modern elections than in much of the past.
As recently as Eisenhower we had a president who wasn't strongly affiliated with either party
Eisenhower was rather exceptional for his time, not typical of a bygone era of purer politics; he avoided coming up through the machine politics of the day because he was catapulted to prominence by WWII.
You are explicitly allowed to modify GPL software with no obligations incurred until you decide to distribute.
Well, its unlikely that anyone is going to know or take any action if you modify a copy without distributing it, but see paragraph 4 & 5 of the GPL:
4. You may not copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute the Program except as expressly provided under this License. Any attempt otherwise to copy, modify, sublicense or distribute the Program is void, and will automatically terminate your rights under this License. However, parties who have received copies, or rights, from you under this License will not have their licenses terminated so long as such parties remain in full compliance.
5. You are not required to accept this License, since you have not signed it. However, nothing else grants you permission to modify or distribute the Program or its derivative works. These actions are prohibited by law if you do not accept this License. Therefore, by modifying or distributing the Program (or any work based on the Program), you indicate your acceptance of this License to do so, and all its terms and conditions for copying, distributing or modifying the Program or works based on it.
Also, note that even if you accept the GPL, it doesn't impose any conditions on modification that aren't distributed except (and this even may be arguable) the 2(a) requirement of prominent notice of modification in the changed files, so its not like its a big deal in any case if you aren't distributing, to be sure.
The issue was actually that I had never heard of IRV/STV without loser elimination.
Its IRV/STV without loser elimination; you use the same winning threshold, but when you go to the next round if you fail to get a winner, you don't eliminate the bottom-ranked candidate, you just add the votes at the next preference ranks to all candidates. In the single-winner case, this is identical to the Bucklin system, though the multiwinner case is slightly different since it abandons multiwinner Bucklin's restriction fixed-number-at-each-preference-rank rule.
Wikipedia seems not to mention it in the article Instant runoff voting.
Since its a different voting system where the relation to IRV/STV is used as a descriptive convenience, I don't see why it would.
In the single winner case, I'm pretty sure IRV without loser elimination is O(n^2)
So is Condorcet (pairwise) counting.
Many things are O(n^2), but since you had misconstrued what I was talking about as simple IRV which is O(n!), I thought I should discuss the complexity of what I was actually talking about.
unlike plain IRV, its summable,
So is Condorcet counting. I have the feeling that you're actually talking about something closer to Condorcet counting.
Yes, lots of election methods are summable, at least in single-winner cases (I suspect that any single-winner preference-ballot method that is countable in O(n^2) time must also be summable); IRV's lack of summability is one of its particular defects. But, no, I'm talking about exactly what I described, not a Condorcet method.
That being said, Condorcet methods are often good methods, the main problem I see with them is that pairwise tallies are more practically difficult to count than per-candidate tallies (which becomes an issue when you need to have provision for manual verification), and that the methods are more descriptively complex, which is a barrier to popular acceptance of the methods and their results (this is enhanced because most Condorcet methods have considerable additional complexity beyond that needed to determine the Condorcet winner so that they will find a winner where there is no Condorcet winner.)
I would contend that OSS released under GPL does have a price.. that is, accepting of the GPL itself.
And you would be wrong, since accepting the GPL is not required to receive or use GPL'd software, by the terms of the GPL itself. It is only required to have the privilege of modifying or distributing software distributed under the GPL. Its not an EULA. You lose no right that you had without the GPL when you accept the GPL, you simply gain limited privileges that you did not have before.
If this assertion is correct, it implies that as an organism is developing, its evolution is not only based on its perception of the environment, but on the exact biological constitution of it.
That's a basic feature of evolutionary theory; the actual environment, and what works and doesn't work in it, is what drives evolution, not any organism's perception of the environment.
How can a tarantula, for example, "know" of the existence of such receptors in its predators?
It doesn't, and it doesn't need to. Evolution is driven by changes not driven by perception or design, and if those changes are net beneficial to fitness, they tend to spread in the population and be reinforced, if they are a net harm to fitness, they tend to die out in the population.
The only way you're going to eliminate either "tactical voting" or the advantages of negative campaigning is to have at least three totally equal parties.
Certainly you can greatly reduce both when you understand where they come from.
Tactical voting" exists for the simple reason that voting for one's honest preference in certain systems (like plurality or majority-runoff) often produces less-desirable results than some other votes, and it is clear and reasonably predictable in advance when that will occur, producing a strong disincentive to honest voting. Many reasonable prefernce voting systems do not have this feature and therefore create no incentive for tactical voting.
Similarly, negative campaigning will never be eliminated, but it is strongly encouraged by same features of the election system that produce a two-party system and tactical voting: the fact that people vote for one and only one candidate. People respond negatively to both the user of negative ads and the target, but as long as they react more negatively to the target, they are particularly effective in a two-party system. In a system using any reasonable preference voting system, the benefit to a candidate or party of any action which drives voters opinions of them down and those of one particular opponent down further is greatly reduced, therefore the utility of negative campaigning is reduced.
As long as there are two dominant parties--and it's likely that will often be the case--then it would benefit the "number 2" party to criticize the "number 1" party. Look at the Democratic Primaries for an example. This is sort of the same as multi-party election: it's a NO PARTY election. There are, say, 5 candidates that all have a "party" apparatus that is basically equal. And even then there are always multiple tiers of candidates, and those in the top tier benefit by attacking one another.
Primary elections are generally run under the same voting systems as general elections, plurality or majority-runoff, and thus encourage the same behaviors. Note, I haven't been advocating multiparty elections, but the same electoral systems that encourage multiple viable parties, such as preference voting in general, and some kind of proportional representation.
And while you're certainly right that there are no candidates elected by national popular vote in America, the electoral system can hardly be compared to a parliament voting on a prime minister.
It certainly can be: its a seperately elected body electing the President. How can't the two be compared (and its even more similar to the German system, which uses a special body that is convened only for that purpose that includes, IIRC, one house of the legislature and a separate set of delegates chosen by the state governments.)
And the fact that GB, Germany, Israel, Canada, Australia, etc, have multi-party systems and a parliamentary style of government, I don't think, is a coincidence.
So? Who cares if you think it is coincidence? It certainly doesn't prove anything about the inability of preference voting or proportional representation systems to work in Presidential systems. Do you have a point?
And one final thing: Did you seriously suggest Taiwan as an example of multi-party political systems? Do you realize that until very, very recently there was ONE PARTY RULE in Taiwan?
Yes, so what?
Even today, the Taiwanese system is a lot closer to our current system than it is to true multiparty states like the ones I mentioned.
No, its not. Its closer to our system than the parliamentary systems you mentioned because it is a presidential system. Which is one way in which it demonstrates the compatibility of proportional representation (it uses a mixed single-winner and PR system) systems that support multiple
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Yes, US copyright law does, in fact, give fair use rights, see 17 USC 107.
You may be correct about Canada, but US law is different.
Its easy to understand, the problem is that while it may be the way the Free Software Foundation would like copyright and contract law to work, it is not generally the way copyright and contract law actually is applied by the courts. A copyright license is governed by contract law, and the remedy available for its breach is generally one for breach of contract, not for copyright violation; a copyright license will act as a covenant not to sue for copyright violation by the copyright holder that the courts will enforce.
Well, no, that's not true, either.
False; flaws in a contract do not necessarily render the contract void, they may render some part of it unenforceable while the contract remains, may justify one party seeking reformation of the contract in court, and even if they do make the contract unenforceable in its entirety as a contract, the fact that promises were made in an instrument that was not valid as a contract does not mean that those promises cannot be enforced under, for instance, the legal doctrine of promissory estoppel.
That's a nice theory, but one completely out of touch with the way the applicable law actually works.
No, not following the terms of a contract doesn't mean that you don't have the contract, it means you are breaking it. This is, at least the weight of authority seems to be, true even for gratuitous copyright licenses (which otherwise might fail as contracts generally for want of mutual consideration.)
Of course, since the GPL is phrased as an offer that must be accepted without specifying a method of acceptance, its an interesting question whether someone who silently redistributes GPL software without following the requirements of the GPL has "accepted" the license, forming a contract, and then broken it, or is simply violating copyright. I don't know that there is direct authority on point, but the apparent tendency to find contract even in gratuitous nonexclusive copyright licenses and in various other areas (for instance, the UCC approach of viewing shipment of nonconforming goods in response to an order as both acceptance, forming contract, and breach of that contract), combined with the ambiguity in acceptance of the GPL and the tendency to construe ambiguities against the party with the greater control over the contract terms, all seem to weigh in favor of finding that the appropriate remedy is for breach of contract not for copyright violation.
Probably, the same way they keep "inappropriate content" in other media (say, porn in dead-tree form) from "appearing" in the passenger compartment.
Probably until, e.g., Brazil goes through a radical collapse and turns into Somalia.
No one said they are. They are a tool for education, nothing more. OLPC doesn't pretend that laptops replace education, they suggest that investing in the laptops and associated infrastructure (like the satellite downlink station being developed specifically for rural villages to provide network access; free satellite time is also being donated) will be a cost effective investment in tools to improve the quality of education and the ability to deliver educational materials.
I can't imagine many more powerful parts of the solution to bad government than a distributed medium for information sharing and storage that is widely distributed in the population.
You could, and you'd be right, but the laptops have the potential to affect bad government other than through economic development.
The immigration policies of the target countries, for one thing; the fact that many of the OLPC countries already are offer as good or better economic opportunities for educated natives than they would have in India or China is also a factor, though.
I think its rather clear that "someone" (i.e., the ministries of education that provide basic schooling in the countries that have elected to participated) decided that buying laptops was a useful and productive way to improve the provision of basic schooling.
OLPC doesn't sell to individuals.
OLPC sells to government ministries of education. Several nations have already committed to large buys, I think Libya is the only one who has committed to enough to meet the goal of one laptop per schoolchild though, and Libya has apparently also been discussing the possibility of subsidizing purchases for poorer African nations.
Is it, at $100 per recipient, expensive for developing nations? Probably. Those that are willing to spend the money are willing to do so because they see it as an investment in education that will pay off in a combination of savings in other expenses and long-term economic performance.
In most states, you are only within your legal rights to kill someone if you have an actual and reasonable apprehension that they are going to kill you or inflict serious bodily harm and the force you use to defend yourself is reasonably necessary to prevent that. The effect of being in your house is that, in many jurisdictions, the obligation you would otherwise have to retreat if possible in preference to using deadly force in self-defense does not apply.
Most people who are particularly concerned with typing efficiency are people with years of experience and very good efficiency on QWERTY keyboards; while Dvorak may be easier to develop efficiency with from the ground up, you'll take a proficiency hit if you are an excellent typist with years of experience with QWERTY. Plus, lots of people concerned with typing efficiency can't control the layout of every keyboard they might need to use, so switching layouts for their main use would require maintaining proficiency in both.
And, of course, schools are going to keep teaching people on whatever is most common, so QWERTY has a pretty solid lock.
I seem to have heard that GNU/Hurd development was moving from L4 to something else...(checks)...Wikipedia seems to be confused as to whether its moving to "Coyotos" or whether there is only some talk about that, and of course the GNU/Hurd pages don't prominently refer to anything but Mach...
There's been talk of open sourcing it by Christmas, and reports that it might be under the GPL (and reports that it might be under a different license.)
That does not prove, however, that the Novell/MS deal didn't prompt the final decision for Sun. Certainly, they'd already done the analysis and had a pretty good idea of the pluses and minuses of the various options. But certainly the Novell/MS deal remixed those slightly, and might have tipped things in the GPL.
Insofar as the GPL is enforceable by the user, the language stating that the act of running the program is not restricted almost certainly would be held to mean that the user has a license to use the program from whoever distributed it under the GPL (Sun, here) regardless of the theory under which that licensor might deny such permissions. Similarly, the provisions applying to copying, distributing, and modifying the program, which do not specify they are limited to being copyright licenses, would act as licenses to copy, distribute, and modify under the conditions offered regardless of the theory under which the licensor might be permitted to withold such permission (patent and copyright both could apply to these, as well.)
Section 7 really is most relevant when someone who themselves is modifying relying on permissions in the GPL, and adding functionality to which is licensed from a third-party patent holder (or in the case where there is a patent dispute over material already distributed under the GPL, and someone redistributing it seeks a license to remove any cloud.) It's probably not applicable to Sun at least until they redistribute code under the GPL (such as if, after the release of GPL Java, they incorporate material from the community into it.)
Er, no, Sun isn't explicitly licensing either "copyrights" or "patents". They are explicitly allowing certain actions (use in any case; distribution, modification, and copying under given restrictions) with their software under the GPL. Those actions are actions they could prohibit, in the latter three cases, under either copyright or patent law, and in the former case can't restrict under copyright law in the first place. Nothing in the GPL restricts the actions it licenses to only being licensed against copyright claims, not claims based on other legal premises arising out of the same (use, distribution, copying, modification) actions with the software.
Instead implies that the people seeking open solutions are not seeking voter verified trails. While I've met people concerned about voter-verified paper trails that are not concerned with open solutions, I've never met anyone who goes the other way, so I think you are misunderstanding the problem.
We're seeking "reliable, trustworthy elections".
Voter verified paper trails are an essential component of that.
Open hardware specifications and open (in the publicly disclosed sense, at least) source code are also an essential component of that.
Recounts generally aren't authorized in all cases, but only in cases that are extremely close or specified partial verification procedures suggest problems. And recounts are expensive. Voter verified paper trails do not, in and of themselves, solve all problems.
That's disputable, but in part irrelevant. The point is not to have an election that the secretary of state can trust, but one that is to the greatest extent possible independently verifiable and can be held to be trustworthy with justification by the public at large. The certification procedures did not, in many cases, check the kind of security they should have, an open solutions rather than secret ones could not have concealed many of the flaws that survived through certification.
That's part of the problem, of course, and isn't solved by open source (although the financial incentive to let it slide because agencies have sunk millions into machines that no other vendor can support, OTOH, is removed by open solutions, if the policy is done right.)
Liking art is a matter of taste. If you need to view "not getting" something other people like as a matter of doing something wrong, I suppose I could suggest that you may be getting "too close" to the material: viewing its descriptions as straightforward advocacy. At least, that may be why you are offended. I can't talk about the ridiculousness part: that's really a matter of where your personal suspension of disbelief gets thrown off, and there's not much I can say about that.
Hating Heinlein, especially (IME) among liberal geekdom, is fairly popular, so I doubt you are the only one.
Sure it kept to the detail and spirit of the book, aside from changing all the details (from the micro-level details like the sex of characters, their relations with each other, the capacities of the troopers, their tactics and employment, etc., to macro-level 'details' like, say, the entire large-scale plot of the movie, the society it took place in, etc.) and radically reorienting the spirit of the book from a serious, decidedly gray, thought provoking look at an alternative society through the lens of the war to a shoddy "cautionary tale" about totalitarianism.
Probably because their only use of the word "java" is protected as nominative fair use, Sun wouldn't have a legal leg to stand on, and they aren't actually hurting Sun or Java.
Even if what you describe in Linux damages the Java brand at all, it certainly is nowhere near what Microsoft can, and in fact did do, with its own broken Java in Windows.
Well, certainly the short-run trend may be worse, though historically large swaths of the country were often, for long periods, one-party zones far worse than today; even with the use of modern analysis to fine-tune gerrymandering and other techniques of locking in partisan advantage, there's more competition in modern elections than in much of the past.
Eisenhower was rather exceptional for his time, not typical of a bygone era of purer politics; he avoided coming up through the machine politics of the day because he was catapulted to prominence by WWII.
Well, its unlikely that anyone is going to know or take any action if you modify a copy without distributing it, but see paragraph 4 & 5 of the GPL:
Also, note that even if you accept the GPL, it doesn't impose any conditions on modification that aren't distributed except (and this even may be arguable) the 2(a) requirement of prominent notice of modification in the changed files, so its not like its a big deal in any case if you aren't distributing, to be sure.
Its IRV/STV without loser elimination; you use the same winning threshold, but when you go to the next round if you fail to get a winner, you don't eliminate the bottom-ranked candidate, you just add the votes at the next preference ranks to all candidates. In the single-winner case, this is identical to the Bucklin system, though the multiwinner case is slightly different since it abandons multiwinner Bucklin's restriction fixed-number-at-each-preference-rank rule.
Since its a different voting system where the relation to IRV/STV is used as a descriptive convenience, I don't see why it would.
Many things are O(n^2), but since you had misconstrued what I was talking about as simple IRV which is O(n!), I thought I should discuss the complexity of what I was actually talking about.
Yes, lots of election methods are summable, at least in single-winner cases (I suspect that any single-winner preference-ballot method that is countable in O(n^2) time must also be summable); IRV's lack of summability is one of its particular defects. But, no, I'm talking about exactly what I described, not a Condorcet method.
That being said, Condorcet methods are often good methods, the main problem I see with them is that pairwise tallies are more practically difficult to count than per-candidate tallies (which becomes an issue when you need to have provision for manual verification), and that the methods are more descriptively complex, which is a barrier to popular acceptance of the methods and their results (this is enhanced because most Condorcet methods have considerable additional complexity beyond that needed to determine the Condorcet winner so that they will find a winner where there is no Condorcet winner.)
And you would be wrong, since accepting the GPL is not required to receive or use GPL'd software, by the terms of the GPL itself. It is only required to have the privilege of modifying or distributing software distributed under the GPL. Its not an EULA. You lose no right that you had without the GPL when you accept the GPL, you simply gain limited privileges that you did not have before.
That's a basic feature of evolutionary theory; the actual environment, and what works and doesn't work in it, is what drives evolution, not any organism's perception of the environment.
It doesn't, and it doesn't need to. Evolution is driven by changes not driven by perception or design, and if those changes are net beneficial to fitness, they tend to spread in the population and be reinforced, if they are a net harm to fitness, they tend to die out in the population.
Certainly you can greatly reduce both when you understand where they come from.
Tactical voting" exists for the simple reason that voting for one's honest preference in certain systems (like plurality or majority-runoff) often produces less-desirable results than some other votes, and it is clear and reasonably predictable in advance when that will occur, producing a strong disincentive to honest voting. Many reasonable prefernce voting systems do not have this feature and therefore create no incentive for tactical voting.
Similarly, negative campaigning will never be eliminated, but it is strongly encouraged by same features of the election system that produce a two-party system and tactical voting: the fact that people vote for one and only one candidate. People respond negatively to both the user of negative ads and the target, but as long as they react more negatively to the target, they are particularly effective in a two-party system. In a system using any reasonable preference voting system, the benefit to a candidate or party of any action which drives voters opinions of them down and those of one particular opponent down further is greatly reduced, therefore the utility of negative campaigning is reduced.
Primary elections are generally run under the same voting systems as general elections, plurality or majority-runoff, and thus encourage the same behaviors. Note, I haven't been advocating multiparty elections, but the same electoral systems that encourage multiple viable parties, such as preference voting in general, and some kind of proportional representation.
It certainly can be: its a seperately elected body electing the President. How can't the two be compared (and its even more similar to the German system, which uses a special body that is convened only for that purpose that includes, IIRC, one house of the legislature and a separate set of delegates chosen by the state governments.)
So? Who cares if you think it is coincidence? It certainly doesn't prove anything about the inability of preference voting or proportional representation systems to work in Presidential systems. Do you have a point?
Yes, so what?
No, its not. Its closer to our system than the parliamentary systems you mentioned because it is a presidential system. Which is one way in which it demonstrates the compatibility of proportional representation (it uses a mixed single-winner and PR system) systems that support multiple