There are about 50 million people in the uk, so it only takes a *tiny* fraction of the population to have enough idiots to write this rubbish and the remainder to buy newspapers printing it..
How is it we have 300+ million people in the US, and we rarely see crazy news like this from US papers?
First of all, stop foaming at the mouth. It's just a fucking software license, relax! There's no need for randomly-placed boldface and italics.
Secondly, the GPL only covers the release of the source code for the program itself, not the tools used to create it. i.e. if I write an open source.net app, I don't need to distribute the.net source code-- that wouldn't even make sense.
All of that is beside the point. The software currently has a license that permits it to be sold. If the original authors of the software didn't ever want it to be sold, then they should have picked a different license. He didn't; so tough shit.
Period. End of story. Technicalities like how hard it is to compile and/or use have absolutely *nothing* to do with *anything* relating to the licensing issue.
Yes, but they aren't the same people who wrote it. People's opinions and ideals change over time, the document doesn't.
If I picked the GPL license based on what they *thought* should go into it in 1991, it doesn't follow that I necessarily agree with what they put in it in 2007. And, in reality, that is exactly what happened with the GPL.
Remember when TiVo went by the letter of the GPL (v2) but not the apparent spirit? A new section of GPL v3 was born.
And do you remember the huge, long, debate over whether what Tivo did really *did* violate the "spirit"? I don't think it did, and I think the GPLv3 is an overreaction to a complete non-issue. Even if you do acknowledge there is such a thing as a "spirit" to the contract, you still have to recognize that there are as many different interpretations of that "spirit" as their are users of it.
You're not doing anything wrong. You've not in violation of any licenses. By choosing the GPL, the pissy developer: 1) Already answered the question of whether people can charge for it (the answer: yes) 2) Gave up control of the project; you could just call yours a "fork" and he'd have to shut up anyway
Uh, Alien came out *before* all the movies you're trying to imply they ripped-off.
You seriously don't think it's one of the greatest horror movies of all times? You can honestly watch it in a darkened room and never once feel a twinge of suspense?
I wanted to be a sniveling weasel working for a gigantic corporation and doing anything, including murder, to get ahead at my career. Then to star in a boring sitcom with Helen Hunt.
One: the company didn't know about the alien beacon in advance, and the whole android with recovery orders and crew expendable stuff was just standing standard procedure, in case they got lucky. Its plausible I think, but means there can be no prequel.
That was the cover story that Ripley and the others were told, "standard operating procedure", but Ash was part of the crew specifically for this purpose, being (theoretically) immune to bio-weapons. IIRC he says as much in the movie when his head is detached; he also has some sense of how dangerous the aliens are.
Two: The company knew the aliens existed by previously merely detecting/analyzing the beacon, then they might divert the Nostromo with the intention of picking whatever they find up. It would make sense, even to the subterfuge of planting Ash with extra orders to recover it, and diverting the ship so it picks up the beacon forcing the crew to respond (per their contract to respond to distress calls) allowing the company to get a 'free expedition' out the crew.
This seems most likely to me.
Three: The company knew the aliens existed, previously investigated, and had already lost an expedition trying to recover it, perhaps they got some reports and know something about the aliens, perhaps they got nothing at all... the expedition just vanished without a trace. Either way it doesn't follow that they'd divert a fully loaded and ridiculously expensive refinery ship to the planet for a 2nd attempt.
It seems extremely unlikely that the Nostromo could possibly land and survey the area without seeing any sign whatsoever of the previous ship/expedition. Aliens are mean bastards, but they can't vaporize spaceships.
That just reminded me of the MST3K episode where the bots are listening to a movie character slooowly dialing a rotary phone. The riff goes something like:
Crow: "Not only is it a phone dialing scene, but the person dialing it isn't even on-screen!" Servo: "How many collective hours do you think rotary phones have added to movies over the years?"
The problem isn't necessarily that their heuristic engine sucks (although it does), the problem is that when you run into an error, the system tells you NOTHING about which part of the query it doesn't understand, and therefore there's no way to tweak the query to work without just random guessing.
There's also no way of telling if WA even *has* the dataset you're looking for. There's no difference between the "I don't understand your request" error and the "I don't have that data" error.
This is stuff any first-year computer interaction design could have told them. Error messages that don't include an explanation of how to fix the error are beyond useless.
It tastes better because it's fresher, not because it's organic. Control for all factors, or you're just spouting crap.
The carrots and tomatos I grow in my garden (which are *more* natural than the "organic" standard, since I just plant the seeds, apply water, and nothing else) taste the same as the ones from my grocery store. I wouldn't be able to tell the difference in a double-blind test.
Thanks for your post. What worries me as much, or more, than the whole misleading aspect of the word "organic", is posters like the grandparent who are extremely smug about their food choices, when they did (apparently) absolutely *no* research on it.
I mean, it's just like the audiophiles we regularly mock on this site, who buy $5000 audio cables and are certain, and smug, about how high the quality of sound they're getting is. Except the organic scam is much more wide-spread.
Yeah, but audiophiles think a $5000 audio cable makes their music sound better. The human mind is unreliable and arbitrary; the placebo effect colors everything you experience.
Give me a *double-blind test*, scientific *proof* that the majority of people think organic produce tastes better, even when they don't know it's organic, then maybe I'll give you some credit.
Until that happens, you're just spouting placebo as far as I'm concerned.
It had some great concepts (I loved the wolf-like alien hive-mind-via-high-pitched-audio things), but, man, what a boring slog of a book. It's exciting at the start, and somewhat exciting at the end (if you can get past the Deus Ex Machina ending), but it has an extremely tedious and longest middle. If the book had been compressed to half its length, I could have tolerated it. Great ideas, terrible story.
Yada yada, it's never Ubuntu's fault. But it's still their problem. Either fix it, or cope with the fact that people don't care about "fault" when they encounter a problem with their computer, and they'll switch.
I'm from Seattle, so that seems normal to me. What drives me nuts is Oregon, which not has polite drivers (like Seattle), but they *always obey the speed limit*. Even wide open freeways with 55 MPH limits, you ain't going faster than 55. I wouldn't mind, except they drive the speed limit when they migrate up here, too.
I don't like Google, its policies etc. but there is a fact that they don't have competitor at all. Not because they send a secret signal to advertiser brains, their advertising system is way better that is all.
It's way better for small sites and blogs.
For larger sites, they had nothing until they bought DoubleClick and DoubleClick is far inferior (IMO at least) to its competitor Atlas. (Which Microsoft now owns.)
The simple fact is that Microsoft isn't doing ad serving for small sites and blogs simply because they haven't wanted to, that's never been part of their target market. It's not like they're lacking in the technology or will.
Oh, and consider this factor: Google's "last action" attribution model combined with their near-monopoly on search enables them to lie about how much search ads are worth. Your typical non-technical user will use a Google search field as a URL bar, thus giving Google Search credit for the "last action", even though it had no part in the customer's purchase decision. I personally think that's just misleading and wrong on Google's part.
It's almost as if MS wasn't taking security seriously and was instead wasting time on search engines, game consoles, media players, picking retail store locations and repackaging Vista as Win 7
Yes, because Microsoft is actually just ONE extremely busy person! Either that, or you believe the guy who publishes Xbox Live games is the same guy who patches security holes in Windows and Visual Studio.
I mean, I agree with your point, it did take too long. But your complaint here is simply retarded. Microsoft has 70,000 employees. They've hired the entire Seattle area dry of good talent; creating security updates and publishing Xbox games are not mutually-exclusive.
Security holes or no, have you tried using Flash lately? (The IDE/Designer, not the player.) Dear God, CS3 and CS4 have AWFUL UIs. It's like they just took Macromedia's already-pretty-goddamned-bad UI and just plastered shit all over the top of it.
Despite many years' warnings that Microsoft regards security as a marketing problem and has only ever done the absolute minimum it can get away with, millions of users who click on any rubbish they see in the hope of pictures of female tennis stars having wardrobe malfunctions still fail to believe that taking Windows out on the Internet is like standing bent over in the street in downtown Gomorrah, naked, arse greased up and carrying a flashing neon sign saying "COME AND GET IT."
I was wondering when someone was going to blame Microsoft for a CROSS-PLATFORM exploit in a ADOBE product. Congratulations; you have increased the amount of bullshit on this website.
The worst was the dark hallways with those little exploding bug bastards down it... you went around a corner, then BLAM half your health was gone. And then Bungie, as if that wasn't bad enough, decided to make *invisible* ones. Bastards.
Slashdot Mirror
There are about 50 million people in the uk, so it only takes a *tiny* fraction of the population to have enough idiots to write this rubbish and the remainder to buy newspapers printing it..
How is it we have 300+ million people in the US, and we rarely see crazy news like this from US papers?
Will that boot an Apple computer?
First of all, stop foaming at the mouth. It's just a fucking software license, relax! There's no need for randomly-placed boldface and italics.
Secondly, the GPL only covers the release of the source code for the program itself, not the tools used to create it. i.e. if I write an open source .net app, I don't need to distribute the .net source code-- that wouldn't even make sense.
All of that is beside the point. The software currently has a license that permits it to be sold. If the original authors of the software didn't ever want it to be sold, then they should have picked a different license. He didn't; so tough shit.
Period. End of story. Technicalities like how hard it is to compile and/or use have absolutely *nothing* to do with *anything* relating to the licensing issue.
Yes, but they aren't the same people who wrote it. People's opinions and ideals change over time, the document doesn't.
If I picked the GPL license based on what they *thought* should go into it in 1991, it doesn't follow that I necessarily agree with what they put in it in 2007. And, in reality, that is exactly what happened with the GPL.
Remember when TiVo went by the letter of the GPL (v2) but not the apparent spirit? A new section of GPL v3 was born.
And do you remember the huge, long, debate over whether what Tivo did really *did* violate the "spirit"? I don't think it did, and I think the GPLv3 is an overreaction to a complete non-issue. Even if you do acknowledge there is such a thing as a "spirit" to the contract, you still have to recognize that there are as many different interpretations of that "spirit" as their are users of it.
You're not doing anything wrong. You've not in violation of any licenses. By choosing the GPL, the pissy developer:
1) Already answered the question of whether people can charge for it (the answer: yes)
2) Gave up control of the project; you could just call yours a "fork" and he'd have to shut up anyway
So, in short, go tell him to piss up a rope.
Uh, Alien came out *before* all the movies you're trying to imply they ripped-off.
You seriously don't think it's one of the greatest horror movies of all times? You can honestly watch it in a darkened room and never once feel a twinge of suspense?
You're either a liar or a robot.
Really?
I wanted to be a sniveling weasel working for a gigantic corporation and doing anything, including murder, to get ahead at my career. Then to star in a boring sitcom with Helen Hunt.
One: the company didn't know about the alien beacon in advance, and the whole android with recovery orders and crew expendable stuff was just standing standard procedure, in case they got lucky. Its plausible I think, but means there can be no prequel.
That was the cover story that Ripley and the others were told, "standard operating procedure", but Ash was part of the crew specifically for this purpose, being (theoretically) immune to bio-weapons. IIRC he says as much in the movie when his head is detached; he also has some sense of how dangerous the aliens are.
Two: The company knew the aliens existed by previously merely detecting/analyzing the beacon, then they might divert the Nostromo with the intention of picking whatever they find up. It would make sense, even to the subterfuge of planting Ash with extra orders to recover it, and diverting the ship so it picks up the beacon forcing the crew to respond (per their contract to respond to distress calls) allowing the company to get a 'free expedition' out the crew.
This seems most likely to me.
Three: The company knew the aliens existed, previously investigated, and had already lost an expedition trying to recover it, perhaps they got some reports and know something about the aliens, perhaps they got nothing at all... the expedition just vanished without a trace. Either way it doesn't follow that they'd divert a fully loaded and ridiculously expensive refinery ship to the planet for a 2nd attempt.
It seems extremely unlikely that the Nostromo could possibly land and survey the area without seeing any sign whatsoever of the previous ship/expedition. Aliens are mean bastards, but they can't vaporize spaceships.
That just reminded me of the MST3K episode where the bots are listening to a movie character slooowly dialing a rotary phone. The riff goes something like:
Crow: "Not only is it a phone dialing scene, but the person dialing it isn't even on-screen!"
Servo: "How many collective hours do you think rotary phones have added to movies over the years?"
(From memory; sorry pedantic geeks.)
If you can get them away from the bear, I think you more than deserve them.
The problem isn't necessarily that their heuristic engine sucks (although it does), the problem is that when you run into an error, the system tells you NOTHING about which part of the query it doesn't understand, and therefore there's no way to tweak the query to work without just random guessing.
There's also no way of telling if WA even *has* the dataset you're looking for. There's no difference between the "I don't understand your request" error and the "I don't have that data" error.
This is stuff any first-year computer interaction design could have told them. Error messages that don't include an explanation of how to fix the error are beyond useless.
It tastes better because it's fresher, not because it's organic. Control for all factors, or you're just spouting crap.
The carrots and tomatos I grow in my garden (which are *more* natural than the "organic" standard, since I just plant the seeds, apply water, and nothing else) taste the same as the ones from my grocery store. I wouldn't be able to tell the difference in a double-blind test.
Thanks for your post. What worries me as much, or more, than the whole misleading aspect of the word "organic", is posters like the grandparent who are extremely smug about their food choices, when they did (apparently) absolutely *no* research on it.
I mean, it's just like the audiophiles we regularly mock on this site, who buy $5000 audio cables and are certain, and smug, about how high the quality of sound they're getting is. Except the organic scam is much more wide-spread.
Yeah, but audiophiles think a $5000 audio cable makes their music sound better. The human mind is unreliable and arbitrary; the placebo effect colors everything you experience.
Give me a *double-blind test*, scientific *proof* that the majority of people think organic produce tastes better, even when they don't know it's organic, then maybe I'll give you some credit.
Until that happens, you're just spouting placebo as far as I'm concerned.
If the solution requires the majority of the population to change their habits, it's a flawed solution. It'll never happen.
Are you kidding?
It had some great concepts (I loved the wolf-like alien hive-mind-via-high-pitched-audio things), but, man, what a boring slog of a book. It's exciting at the start, and somewhat exciting at the end (if you can get past the Deus Ex Machina ending), but it has an extremely tedious and longest middle. If the book had been compressed to half its length, I could have tolerated it. Great ideas, terrible story.
The book is Vernor Vinge's "A Fire Upon the Deep": http://www.amazon.com/Fire-Upon-Deep-Zones-Thought/dp/0812515285/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1248976673&sr=8-3
Yada yada, it's never Ubuntu's fault. But it's still their problem. Either fix it, or cope with the fact that people don't care about "fault" when they encounter a problem with their computer, and they'll switch.
I'm from Seattle, so that seems normal to me. What drives me nuts is Oregon, which not has polite drivers (like Seattle), but they *always obey the speed limit*. Even wide open freeways with 55 MPH limits, you ain't going faster than 55. I wouldn't mind, except they drive the speed limit when they migrate up here, too.
I don't like Google, its policies etc. but there is a fact that they don't have competitor at all. Not because they send a secret signal to advertiser brains, their advertising system is way better that is all.
It's way better for small sites and blogs.
For larger sites, they had nothing until they bought DoubleClick and DoubleClick is far inferior (IMO at least) to its competitor Atlas. (Which Microsoft now owns.)
The simple fact is that Microsoft isn't doing ad serving for small sites and blogs simply because they haven't wanted to, that's never been part of their target market. It's not like they're lacking in the technology or will.
Oh, and consider this factor: Google's "last action" attribution model combined with their near-monopoly on search enables them to lie about how much search ads are worth. Your typical non-technical user will use a Google search field as a URL bar, thus giving Google Search credit for the "last action", even though it had no part in the customer's purchase decision. I personally think that's just misleading and wrong on Google's part.
It's almost as if MS wasn't taking security seriously and was instead wasting time on search engines, game consoles, media players, picking retail store locations and repackaging Vista as Win 7
Yes, because Microsoft is actually just ONE extremely busy person! Either that, or you believe the guy who publishes Xbox Live games is the same guy who patches security holes in Windows and Visual Studio.
I mean, I agree with your point, it did take too long. But your complaint here is simply retarded. Microsoft has 70,000 employees. They've hired the entire Seattle area dry of good talent; creating security updates and publishing Xbox games are not mutually-exclusive.
Security holes or no, have you tried using Flash lately? (The IDE/Designer, not the player.) Dear God, CS3 and CS4 have AWFUL UIs. It's like they just took Macromedia's already-pretty-goddamned-bad UI and just plastered shit all over the top of it.
Despite many years' warnings that Microsoft regards security as a marketing problem and has only ever done the absolute minimum it can get away with, millions of users who click on any rubbish they see in the hope of pictures of female tennis stars having wardrobe malfunctions still fail to believe that taking Windows out on the Internet is like standing bent over in the street in downtown Gomorrah, naked, arse greased up and carrying a flashing neon sign saying "COME AND GET IT."
I was wondering when someone was going to blame Microsoft for a CROSS-PLATFORM exploit in a ADOBE product. Congratulations; you have increased the amount of bullshit on this website.
The worst was the dark hallways with those little exploding bug bastards down it... you went around a corner, then BLAM half your health was gone. And then Bungie, as if that wasn't bad enough, decided to make *invisible* ones. Bastards.