If the source were included (or included as an option) in the download,

That's exactly how id does it for instance, pop open the Wolf3D.ipa iTunes installed and hey presto there it is.

> would that resolve the issue?

No, the alleged issue -- the biggest, anyways, there's a few more -- is that you can't redistribute the binary (well, you can to jailbroken devices or developers who can run codesign themselves, but in the general case you can't). Source doesn't come into it at all; anyone who claims source distribution is an issue should be gently corrected that there is no impediment to including all GPL-required assets in the .ipa iTunes provides, and pointed at the live example of Wolf3D should they need to prove so to themselves.

Since there is no way in hell ... and nor should there be, anyone who is sane enough to recognize security concerns attendant on any responsible smartphone provider will accept ... that Apple will ever allow unsigned binaries access to their devices, this issue is effectively unresolvable until the FSF pulls its head out and accepts that the general public really, truly, should have code signing protection, remote malware killswitch, etc. for their smartphone devices; there's just too much personal and financial information available there for any responsible company to not do their best to lock down the platform.

And if you're not the general public, you can go right ahead and take the developer option mentioned above, and for the foreseeable future you'll probably be able to take advantage of the jailbreak option too. So there really is no issue here, to people who are reasonable enough to consider the user instead of just their rabid Apple-hating zealotry. 'Tis strange indeed that whilst the TOS of Android Market are similarly infringing in all the ways that are alleged to matter wrt remote kill and so forth, the Apple-bad crowd never seem to notice...

It's more like there's a whole host of genetic elements affecting what's a proper diet for you, and you've got to figure out which ones apply.

Dairy, starches, grains, and fructose are four of the most important. For my extreme northern European/Mongol ancestry, lots of the first and none of the last three is best. Take someone whose ancestry is 50 degrees of latitude south of mine, and the chances are pretty good that the exact opposite would be a good diet for them.

There have been experiments trying that diet for over 8,000 years at least, resulting in the healthiest population on the planet; archaeologists routinely find skeletons of 70+ year olds with all their original teeth, the only population on Earth to produce those.

Said population being Canada's Inuit. Zero carb birth to death except for partially digested stomach contents of prey animals. As there is no edible plant matter whatsoever in the traditional Inuit habitat.

In what is no doubt a complete coincidence, since a modern "healthy" diet with plenty of vegetables was introduced to the Inuit after World War II, obesity, diabetes, and cancer have gone from nothing to epidemic proportions and lifespan is plummeting.

"Sure, the source is distributed, but it is inaccessible."

Only if you're too stupid to find your "Mobile Applications" folder, unzip the .ipa, and "Show Package Contents". id software figures that's adequate for distributing the wolf3d source, as I noted, so it's good enough for me too.

"anyone who downloads GPL'd apps from the app store is not free to modify and distribute usable binaries."

Yes they are. The binary just needs to be signed before installation on a device (and does not need to be signed to be runnable in the simulator). The distributor can do that either with an ad hoc certificate or with a distribution certificate for distribution to be done through the App Store; or the recipient can do that with the codesign command line tool.

Seems to me that requiring the recipient be able to sign the binary to install on a device is not qualitatively different than requiring the recipient to have a compiler to compile the source in the first place.

" I am also free to distribute my modified work so others can use it; This I cannot do on iOS without paying Apple $100 for the privilege..."

Not true. Even if you don't have a cert for your own devices, you can throw a binary compiled with the free(gratis) Xcode download up wherever you want, and the recipient can run codesign on it with their cert. Is that a GPL violation? I say it's no more a violation than requiring a compiler to compile the source, or a 3D card to run an OpenGL program, or enough memory to load the program, or any other restriction that makes a particular set of source not runnable on a particular device. Is it a GPL violation that I can't run a piece of GPL'd Windows source on my Mac? Well, how exactly do you distinguish "not having a device certificate available to sign the binary" from "not having the Windows OS available to link the binary to" as a restriction on your alleged user rights? I see no point of legal difference.

"I would like to know where you got this number (92%), because I suspect it is much lower. I have no proof of this, though, and I'd like to know what the number actually is."

That was what Flurry pegged it at in their last monthly update I read, sometime around April. Granted that their source pool is only those devices running apps with the Flurry SDK installed, but I'm willing to bet that's acceptably representative of all devices. In any case, there is no publicly available info that's any better than what Flurry (and their competitors like Mobclix) provide.

Unless, of course, you obtained the software through the App Store...

So zip up the source files and drop them in the app package you submit to Apple. That's what id did with the wolf3d sources. Presto, source distributed along with every download from the App Store, now go sit in the corner with a nice big cup of STFU.

Since that alleged objection is so trivially dealt with, the FSF is taking the position that Section 6 of GPLv2 is incompatible with App Store distribution, since Apple limits the distribution of the downloads to the five devices linked to the downloader's Apple ID. In other words, their position is that Apple must remove the signing requirement for device installs before iOS devices can be GPL-compatible at all.

Well, nobody sane thinks that ever might happen.

You have the option to sign yourself whatever code you want on whatever devices you purchase by joining the iOS developer program; and furthermore you can sign it to be ad hoc installed on another couple hundred devices of people who trust you enough to give you their device IDs. If you're not interested in working with either of those options, then that's a pretty clear indication that what you're up on your high horse about has nothing to do with what's actually best for the vast majority (as in the 92% that have not jailbroken their devices) of users.

"No, but we're perfectly capable of building them ... As long as you're not using fossil fuel sources then you're carbon neutral"

OK; you show me a solar panel that came into existence using no fossil fuels to

a) Mine and refine the metals such as cadium telluride needed as inputs

b) Construct the solar cells

c) Transport the panel to the place of installation

d) Distribute the electricity it converts into light, heat, and other such applications of electricity ... and then I will concede that you are not the ignorant buffoon which examination of your expressed opinions leads those possessed of sanity and rationality to conclude.

Absent that evidence, I shall presume you accept that my postulation that sustaining civilization rules out carbon neutrality is, indeed, undeniable.

"WTF, seriously, NOONE, and I mean NOONE is proposing that. The most extreme proposals are more along the lines of planting more trees and building some solar power plants"

Oh, so solar cells, batteries, transmission towers, and a distributed energy grid all grow on trees now do they?

Anybody who thinks that agriculture, let alone civilization, can possibly be made carbon neutral is at least one of a complete fool or sadly ignorant. My statement "hunter-gatherer societies which are the only ones carbon neutral" stands.

Not that I particularly care to argue the point, being in the "By the God of your choice I WISH that the climate alarmists are right so we can eliminate Ice Ages! w00t!" camp myself.

There are (at least) two camps in the global warming skeptics camp

No, there's at least five.

1. those who deny it is happening

As you say. But there's hardly any of those.

2. Those who deny it's unprecedented.

That the remains of 11th C. Viking settlements in Greenland have beech trees frozen in their permafrost is an example of the kind of evidence that people in this camp find compelling.

3. Those who deny the "anthropogenic" part but agree that recent decades are at least unusual, because of the sun or cosmic rays or ocean currents or whatever.

4. those like me who know it's happening but don't think it's worth changing our entire civilization

Indeed, under any even remotely plausible set of assumptions adaption to warmth is a far superior idea to going back to the hunter-gatherer societies which are the only ones carbon neutral.

5. Those of us who think that even if you take all the worst alarmist propaganda at face value, global warming is a FANTASTIC idea and we should be doing EVERYTHING WE CAN to speed it on its way!

Logic here being, I believe the worst possible generally accepted scenario is AGW topping out at around 6C up from now and about 1.4 billion deaths. Bad, that, you think?

Well, from geology we know that ever since C02 dropped below 500 ppm we've been having these Ice Age thingys, and we're pretty much at the peak temperature for recorded interglacials, and their depths are -- coincidentally enough -- just about 6C colder than now. And the estimates of the total human population worldwide that could feed themselves in a full on Ice Age vary wildly, but I haven't seen an estimate over 600 million and they go as low as 20 million. Either way, we're talking seven billion plus people dead at the very least.

The alternative that through AGW we shift that curve up so that world temperatures cycle between 6C warmer than now to current temperatures; hey, that sounds awesome! Let's DO IT!

Adobe isn't exactly known for their open source efforts, but they do a hell of a lot more of it than Apple does

http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/site/Projects

http://www.apple.com/opensource/

That is a very interesting definition of "more" you must be using. It does not appear to correspond in any factual way to the definition of "greater quantity" which a reality-based person would expect.

(Hint: C doesn't have closures,

Apple's version of C does.

http://developer.apple.com/mac/articles/cocoa/introblocksgcd.html

No, they're not released for the iPhone ... in any SDK which is not under NDA currently. If you know what I mean, and I think you do.

How about for "years", we substitute "right now"?

http://www.yourappshop.com/

for instance.

We all know Apple bans Flash because it would allow third party apps that don't have to forfeit 30% of revenue to Apple. Plain and simple. All other explanations are just someone's absurd mental gymnastics to justify Apple's stupid and shortsighted iPhone OS policies.

And how do you reconcile this opinion with all the effort that Apple has put into making it possible for offline HTML5 apps to act indistinguishably from native code apps ... and, indeed, for the first year after the iPhone's unveiling, it being Apple's official line that HTML5 apps would be the *only* third party development route available?

You mean, an overpriced blowjob?

Hmmm ... I suppose that's not too far off the mark, actually.

But fortunately, I can still retreat to ad hominem.

Nicely put. I'll have to remember that one.

You keep re-iterating it. I fail to see it written in law.

You had your head in the sand the last eight years and missed the fuss over the whole White House email thing? Anyone receiving federal funds, as Dr. Mann does, is subject to FOIA laws no less than the President.

I'm not sure if you're aware of what HARRY_READ_ME.txt is

I am indeed. It's something that is of no relevance to what I was saying, since not a single one of my quotes is from that document. The one I repeated is from "mxdgrid2ascii.pro".

So, we've now established that you can't even match a quote to its source, when prompted twice; you go blathering off about some completely different document than what was actually being discussed. Whoo-hoo. There's certainly one of us here lacking in cognitive capacity, indeed.

Perhaps you know what he meant by "facilitate calibration." If so, you're welcome to explain it, but I'm gonna bet that you don't have the first idea.

What did you bet? Because I win it. What he meant is delineated in "maps12.pro":

"these will be artificially adjusted to look closer to the real temperatures."

In fact, I'll bet you don't even know what he meant by artificially removed. Which process did he use? Did he drop all the data, did he introduce a temporary constraint, did he selectively drop data?

I'll take 'None of the Above', either because you're intentionally dissembling or you're too stupid to follow links. And given how you can't even figure out what document a quote is from, as shown above, I'll take it that the you are stupid option is correct. As here is the adjustment:

;
; APPLY ARTIFICIAL CORRECTION
;
yearlyadj=interpol(valadj,yrloc,x)
densall=densall+yearlyadj

The sheer inadequacy of not being able to figure that out on your own pretty much proves the worthlessness of your alleged opinion.

I'll bet you don't know the answers to these questions. And I further bet that you don't care. Because that isn't how you form your opinions, is it? You don't actually dig until you understand the topic -- hell, you obviously don't even have the first idea of what HARRY_READ_ME.txt actually is,

Yes I do; it's something that I didn't quote, has no relevance, and you're either too incoherent to be worth bothering to read because you can't keep your head straight long enough to actually read my very short post; or you're a flat out liar hoping to deceive other people reading this in between your post and when I get back to call you on your lies. Either way, there's certainly no point wasting any further time on whatever flat out lies you post in alleged rebuttal to these facts.