Slashdot is just as likely to make good posting invisible at -1 or 0 as happened to a very good reply of mine to a dimwit, but that dimwit was one that spouted pro-GPL nonsense claiming that people who want the BSD licence want to take advantage of others etc. Complete BS! But as there is a pro-Linux/GPL attitude here, those who are pro-GPL come in and downmod anything they don't like. Whether it's true or insightful doesn't matter. This is bullying, not really different than making nasty comments and chasing people away from newsgroups.

You might want to read this about this problem:

http://swhs.home.xs4all.nl/kritiek/linux/

And for more about the problems on forums and newsgroups (which are autists, bullshit artists, zealots, people who feel the need to defend and expensive purchase and do so in a stupid way, ditto for viewpoints, and more), see this page:

http://swhs.home.xs4all.nl/kritiek/discussies/index.html

I find most postings to be really poor on slashdot, very little information content and the nutters who come up with silly stuff that it essentially made up (be it about global warming or about BSD people wanting to take advantage of other people's work), keep posting the same shit over and over again.

This guy 'causality' also mentions the LGPL as if that solves it completely.

His whole response was a typical response of someone who doesn't understand the issues. Linking may still be a derivative work despite what the intention of the licence is. The FSF has been unwilling to clarify that this does not make a derivative work, and that it will take no legal action in such cases, last I heard. So this means that, no, the LGPL is not enough, if you want to absolutely sure. There's also the issue of bits of compilers and parts of headers getting compiled into the program.

And there we go again with GPL zealots:

The sad part is that the reply, while snarky, was correct. You seem to be stuck in "victim-mode" where you can't do what you want to do and refuse to look at alternatives.

Seriously, whining because you can't have your cake and eat it too is tiring.

It's really tiring those GPL advocates whining about supposed whining from others who just ask a question or don't think their preferred way of doing business can be done via GPL, no then they get accused of wanting to take other software for free and profiting from it, or that they are whining.

The rest of your comment was ok, but of course it has to be whiny and accusing again, as all GPL advocates seem to like doing.

A few months ago I made a good reply to a particularly inane posting by someone who didn't understand, but even worse, lied about various businesses don't use/don't want to use GPL software.

It's http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2618678&cid=38680252) where I replied to a nonsensical posting by 'causality (777677' which is full of disinformation and the response to my posting shows nothing but ignorance and distortion of the facts. That he gets modded to +5 twice shows the fanboys are at work.

So I will explain here in more detail, as this is the crap that GPL lovers do all the time. It explains also why my original response talked about enforcability of the GPL licence, but also to see how such a zealot distorts and/or just makes things up. Of course, not all of them are like that, but a lot of them...

It annoys the minority of businesses who feel entitled to the free labor of strangers and don't want to give anything back.

A lie, it's about using your software without having to give it all up for free and/or about not getting sued...

You see, some people are childish and the most visible mark of childishness is a sense of entitlement. This causes them to feel somehow cheated if you place a few conditions on code that is otherwise free, that no one is forcing them to use if the conditions don't suit them.

They are not complaining about free code, but that their code that cannot be used freely (on a given system) without having to rewrite more... This is why I gave my argument of the GPL becoming unenforcable once it gets over a certain threshold. But that obviously flies high above his head!

I think phrases like "you mean I have to actually HIRE my OWN PROGRAMMERS if I really must insist that everything be done exactly the way I want?!" are often uttered with outrage during their corporate meetings.

This is just childish nonsense, made up by him.

I mean hey, launching a commercial product with most of the work already done for you, for free, is a nice racket if you can get it.

That's not it and either he knows it, in which case he's a liar, or he hasn't even bothered to look up the reason why GPL software is not acceptable in various cases, in which case he is again making things up.

But if the developers intend to allow this, they wouldn't use GPL, they would use a BSD-type license.

By virtue of the previous sentence he implies the view that BSD licence is good to make a product ' with most of the work already done for you, for free' and ready to be exploited. This proves he is a Linux/GPL zealot.

For reasonable people, this is not a problem. Reasonable people think either "hey, this code is available for free and we have no problem complying with the license, so we can enjoy all the effort that has already been done for us and build on that", or they think "the terms of that license aren't compatible with our business model, or we're afraid of how a court may interpret them, so we can't use that code, oh well, this has not harmed us in any way so we really have no complaint".

Exactly, this is what developers do. Developers don't go complaining about GPL software because 'they have to write software themselves', but that they cannot use what they write themselves without undue burdens. So he is stating what is happening yet writing it in a way as if to imply that only reasonable people do that, and the people who prefer BSD software or require BSD software as they want to be absolutely sure there is not going to be an 'infection' from the GPL licence, are not reasonable. Nice twisting of words.

For everyone else, there is a need to demonize whatever it is that doesn't perfectly suit them even though they are under no obligation to use it. Sort of like the Puritannical types who want to shut down "offensive" shows that no one is making them watch and criminalize victimless behaviors among consenting adults that no one is forcing them to participate in. The mentality is never this direct and honest, and always covers itself up with a phony excuse, but if not for that its motto would be "it's not good enough that *I* don't do something I don't like, oh no, I have to make certain no one else can do it either!"

Here we come to something extremely funny: He rants about wanting to make sure others do as you do, but making sure others do as you do is exactly what the GPL does, and what the GPL was meant to do! This is another projection. Or actually a reversing of a perceived argument. Reversing arguments, accusing someone of doing something he/she does not do but which the accuser himself/herself does is what I found to be a typical trait of a sociopath. Therefore it would not surprise me in the least if this guy is a sociopath.

If you're going to be childish and call me names like "moron" and "zealot", you should least demonstrate a basic familiarity with the facts.

Funny, because I know the facts and he does not, he makes up false-facts. His original posting is full of them! Calling someone a moron or zealot (which I proved he is) is not childish, but then I suspect he barely has other words in his vocabulary than 'childish' to describe someone who disagrees with him.

If you feel a need to deal with things that way, it is a sure sign you are reacting emotionally and not proactively evaluating anything reasonably.

Ah yes, my response was a proper (and very deep, but he just didn't understand it) response to someone who lies, makes up facts, twists arguments, and he dares say my very well argued response is emotional? Hmm, very funny again!

Against anyone who remains reasonable, you are going to make yourself look foolish. Just for your future reference.

Funny, advice from someone who lies and makes up stuff about how not to look foolish!

and using less RAM

Who gives a shit if it uses a little bit more memory. I just bought 16GB of RAM for $75. It isn't 1991 anymore.

I don't like the bullshit upgrade schedule where they make a few minor improvements and call it a major new release. That's why I'll probably stay with 9 for a while. But there is no reason to stay with 3.6.

You have a very poor memory as in 1991 memory usage was not 300-500 MB just for a silly webbrowser.

And your argument that memory is cheap is true for DDR3, but if you've got a bit older machine like I have that's perefctly fine for everything I use it, using DDR2, it's a lot more expensive.

Memory use of applications and Xorg too is just insane these days. Even Xemacs that I often use, I've got one editing a html file and it uses 32 MB (and that's a low value, it's often 100MB). Why? What the hell does it all load and do compared to the mid-late 1990s where you could use it without hogging all RAM on a 32MB machine?

Always the arguments by people like you is 'memory is cheap', but it's not really. Not needing new memory is cheaper than new memory. Not needing to waste time on 'why the hell is my memory not enough any more' is better than wasting time on it. Sometimes you even need to upgrade your PC to get affordable new memory. That's the case esp. for a slightly older PC of my niece. Your argument is also the reason why developers don't seem to give a shit about memory footprint, whatever they claim. 300MB for browsing some webpages? Absolutely ludicrous. Thunderbird seems to have a complete built in webbrowser in it to display HTML stuff. Nuke all that crap and let it do emails! Then it wouldn't need 200-300MB.

It's a vicious circle of upgrades that are not really necessary as quickly as they would be if applications didn't load so much useless crap and do so much useless crap.

Those of you wondering, this article offers some answers to the question of why so many of these scams originate from this area."

No actually, it doesn't. Poverty is not a reason for scamming. It might be a reason for stealing food or other things. Scams show a particular mindset, and that the most common type of Nigerian scam has originated elsewhere is irrelevant. What matters is how many people do it, and the information I have is that scamming is commonplace in Nigerian culture, so they do it to themselves, not just to others with a 'lot' of money outside Nigeria. This means poverty has nothing to do with why they all seem to be Nigerians. Though I suppose, being a Nigerian, seeing some scammer from your country make a lot of money, might influence you to do the same thus giving a flood of such people, but as I said, it seems to be commonplace behaviour in Nigeria itself.

Just as with Richard Dawkins and the evolution vs creationism debate, there is no debate allowed. Either you accept the truths from the Scientific gods (Gleick and Dawkins) or you are exiled.

Somewhat agree with this.

Half the English academics involved in global warming have been found to be fudging the facts,

Bullshit. But you know what is a fact: All the global warming deniers are people who cannot reason, give bogus arguments and are usually paid for by groups who have an interest in keeping going on polluting.

We have a group here in the Netherlands called 'Groene rekenkamer' for example who provide a bunch of bullshit material so moronic, that the inhabitants of a mental asylum could not compete against them!

Slashdot is getting more and more such that the postings resemble those of a bunch of demented 5 year olds...

With the deniers here like Jane Q Public repeating their moronic crap over an over again, and learning nothing, it seems it's time for meta meta moderation: Keep repeating the same crap argument and your initial posts are valued at -1 lower each time. No lower limit! One of 'Jane Q Public's latest pieces of 'insight':

Nobody on the "skeptical" side has been doing any "suppressing". I repeat: it has been the skeptics who have kept calling for open debate. It is the AGW proponents who claim "consensus" and that "the science is settled."

His so called skeptics aren't skeptics but deniers. They aren't interested in science and never give real arguments. They are the ones not interested in debate, or if they do debate give moronic arguments that no scientist is interested in. Debating with a moron isn't helping science therefore scientists are not interested in most of these 'skeptics'. The fact that the real scientists have a concensus doesn't mean there is no interest in discussions or new ideas or new viewpoints or new interpretations, not at all, it just means there is a concensus, and you better have damn good arguments if you are to convince them. Not the garbage quality arguments of 'skeptics'/deniers.

Because only one document is scanned. And the one document that's scanned is scanned almost a month after everything else. And the one document that's scanned a month after everything else is the only one that uses inflammatory language like preventing people from "teaching science". It looks fake to me. There's plenty of stuff in the documents that are basically acknowledged as real to let people know how they work, and who they support, and where their money comes from... but the hot, sexy stuff just isn't there. Does your organization work like this? Unsigned, undated memos to people who aren't listed are scanned in from printouts to be put in the corporate file even though everything else you generate goes direct to PDF?

If I were an dishonest organisation out to influence an manipulate then yes of course, all the saucy stuff would never be kept as PDFs only as hardcopy/eyes only.

So these arguments that it's a PDF from scans in my view make it not less real. Specific type of language is also meaningless because esp. in such documents which are 'inflammatory', people (the one/ones writing it) tend to write in their own style, not a 'house style'. Therefore the argument that this Megan McArdle gave is not an argument at all.

Unless you count a 90% reduction in trading costs as âoenothingâ.

Back in the day Market Makers would take $.125 to $.25 for every share traded. And woe to you if you were trying to sell more than 10k because then you would really be scalped. And then you had to add broker commissions on top of that.

I would rather pay high frequency traders $.01 a share and have a deep liquid market then go back to the good old days

(- infinite, moronic)

Who gives a damn what percentage some trader wanted? For one it's all mostly automated so fees should be very low now, and for another, if you don't need to/want to buy/sell frequently then the small charges are a non issue. They are only an issue if you want to trade a lot because you want to gamble on changes in values of stock. So the original poster was right, high freqeuncy trading is valueless and should be disallowed. It's gambling, and not just simple gambling, but gambling that destabilizes economies.

They are just getting their comeuppance and they rightfully deserve it.

'They' (Kodak) are not getting their comeuppance.

What's important is whether the Kodak lawsuit was justified or not, and this one as well, although it seems Apple just acts more like its name was Wankle (pronounced by someone from China).

When a company goes bankrupt the money goes to creditors and this lawsuit will eat into that money, effectively fooking everyone over, who may depend on that (I don't know the situation precisely).

If you are talking about comeuppance, then you should talk about the people going for frivolous lawsuits and the direction companies take. This is always the board of directors etc. Perhaps the people in the legal department too. Have you ever seen such people getting thrown in jail and taken all their stuff away to (partly) pay for damage they did by wasting money (their company, the other and more) or even destroying the economy (esp. banks). No? I haven't either.

The US military are scum and soldiers are criminals. There was no reason for this war and yet the US won't take responsibility for the consequences. Fuck the US military and those who support it. Scumbags.

And that's all very true - but it still has jack shit to do with Iraqi's looting their own universities,

Of course it does. Take away the system that keeps the a-holes doing what they would really want to do, i.e. they don't give a damn about others, take want to take what they want but normally can't because they'd get caught quickly by the police.

Looting is what will happen, everywhere, in the USA. or Europe, or wherever. Just look at what happens with floods for example.

So the USA destroyed the infrastructure of power, thereby they enabled the looting. The USA is responsible.

Btw. this reminded me of something I wanted to say about a story, not long ago on slashdot, about being able to recognize serial killers. I didn't get round to writing it down then, so I will do it now: When I read that, I thought how pathetic this research was, because there are so much bigger problems that these people don't analyse at all. Esp. that a sociopath like George Wanker Bush, who was unbelievably actually elected to power by people in the USA (really? Why did anyone vote for this a-hole? I knew he was scum the first time I saw him talk on TV), and did thousands of times more damage and caused thousands of times more deaths (together with his sociapath cronies, but as the president has so much power in the US, he is responsible).

Why don't psychologists go analysing people in politics and say 'he is a sociopath and should be barred from being in any position in power'?

In the real world, a contractor damages $244,000,000.00 of someone's shit, the contractor is paying $244,000,000.00 plus loss of use costs until replacement. In the government run world, everyone will have a laugh and the taxpayers will pick up the tab.

In the real world, faced with $244,000,000 in lawsuits, the contractor folds up and declares bankruptcy. Then everyone will have a laugh and the taxpayers will pick up the tab.

In the real world, whatever happens, everyone will pay for this. What do you think happens if that firm is properly insured? The insurance company pays and will increase rates for everyone, not just that firm that made the mistake (you can't do stats on a single mistake anyway, and the insurance firm needs to get that money from somewhere if they are to remain as profitable).

So everyone pays more insurance, this means the companies who pay more insurance have more costs and increase their rates etc. This is not something insulated. Ditto for bankruptcies, not everyone pays as much everyone pays for it in the end.

Or to paraphrase "Family Guy", anything Rush Limbaugh says must be untrue and even if he says something that is true it becomes untrue because Rush Limbaugh says it. Oh, and insulting my intelligence while accusing me of ad hominems? Really? I wasn't making an ad hominem accusation. I was showing a flaw in the actual logic of the argument presented. While you decided to conclude that I didn't have a "brain capable of understanding skepticism expressed as a joke." That's not an ad hominem? Or is guilt by association not an ad hominem?

He didn't have a flaw in his logic. If a paper repeatedly writes untrustworthy stuff, the only logical thing to do is not pay attention to it. This is how everything works. Do you think mathematicians go through papers by amateurs 'proving' a as yet unproven theorem? In the beginning they may find it amusing and work through a few, then they get tired and don't waste their time. It could be one contains a proof, but the probability is near zero. And mathematicions do get such 'proofs', a lot...

So what you've shown is your ignorance of how things really work, this is NOT about some simplistic logic argument that "he says it therefore it's not true", not it's "he says it therefore it's almost certainly worthless and not worth spending time on".

Oh and this argument those 16 nutters in WSJ gave is old hat. Here in NL this has been used for many years by crackpot groups (which are paid by airtravel industry, oil industry etc.).

The only logical thing to do if there could be a problem with man made changes to the environment that are deemed 'not desireable' is to take action. This isn't about some stupid short term ecenomic thing, this is about long term, about all life on this planet.

It annoys the minority of businesses who feel entitled to the free labor of strangers and don't want to give anything back. You see, some people are childish and the most visible mark of childishness is a sense of entitlement. This causes them to feel somehow cheated if you place a few conditions on code that is otherwise free, that no one is forcing them to use if the conditions don't suit them. I think phrases like "you mean I have to actually HIRE my OWN PROGRAMMERS if I really must insist that everything be done exactly the way I want?!" are often uttered with outrage during their corporate meetings.

I mean hey, launching a commercial product with most of the work already done for you, for free, is a nice racket if you can get it. But if the developers intend to allow this, they wouldn't use GPL, they would use a BSD-type license. For reasonable people, this is not a problem. Reasonable people think either "hey, this code is available for free and we have no problem complying with the license, so we can enjoy all the effort that has already been done for us and build on that", or they think "the terms of that license aren't compatible with our business model, or we're afraid of how a court may interpret them, so we can't use that code, oh well, this has not harmed us in any way so we really have no complaint".

For everyone else, there is a need to demonize whatever it is that doesn't perfectly suit them even though they are under no obligation to use it. Sort of like the Puritannical types who want to shut down "offensive" shows that no one is making them watch and criminalize victimless behaviors among consenting adults that no one is forcing them to participate in. The mentality is never this direct and honest, and always covers itself up with a phony excuse, but if not for that its motto would be "it's not good enough that *I* don't do something I don't like, oh no, I have to make certain no one else can do it either!"

You are not +5 insightful but more -1 moron. (or Linux/GPL zealot)

There are reasons not to use GPL not having to do with modifying code, but simply running the code. E.g. GPL'd libraries. I haven't followed what the issue is with GPL v3 as I simply avoid any GPL code due to the zealotry of most of those who advocate it.

In the late 1990s I thought about a 'what if' scenario: Say most people run Linux with a lot of GPL'ed libraries, then I am sure some provisions in the GPL would have to be altered as it would force people to do things in a certain way for which there is no reason. So suppose GPL'd libraries are required because they are used in the system and rewriting it all would be pointless, a waste of time, but especially means having to follow all changes and reimplement them too.

A commercial company is about selling a product for a given system, not reimplementing that system.

I am sure that legal action would take place and rule some parts of the GPL invalid, IN THAT CASE.

For me, I don't care much about interaction issues, because after the late 1990s I had enough of the inane whining about GPL misuse and zealotry of Linux users. I use FreeBSD and am free of all that rubbish, and of all the different versions of lInux with their idiosyncrasies.

FreeBSD has flaws, but I'm not going back to linux...

And about the GPL licence, what annoys me a lot is the lie in the preamble, which btw. should be removed from the licence itself as it is propaganda:

The licenses for most software are designed to take away your freedom to share and change it.

What was not present cannot be taken away. Most commercial software is designed to do something specific, and the license is for that. When you don't get source, you don't get the ability to modify that source and modifying binaries is a lot of work. So, you never really had the freedom to change it, therefore it cannot be taken away. I guess it was meant as 'most licences are not intended to give the freedom to alter the program', but then it should be written in that way. But no, it's written in this adversarial way, and from what I read by Moglun, at least the licence section. Well, he should have objected to this and if it was not changed, not allowed use of the licence text that he used by the FSF. But perhaps he's just happy to go along with this nonsense by the FSF...

I like the idea of the GPL, but not the propaganda in the licence, nor the attitude of the proponents...

It's simple- you have a group of people who say that they've done the science and have the answers. That group then says that noone should ever challenge their science or examine it (the science is settled). And that the only people who can perform the science are people who already agree with the conclusions and who are close friends to the current researchers - and if you come to any other conclusion then will be personally and professionally destroyed.

I deleted the rest from the quote because there's not point. The above already shows you are insane or a paid-for-by-assholes troll.

This is not +4 Interesting but lame. You don't understand the essence of Christianity. And that is what Christ says. And that is in some ways very similar to what Buddha says. It's about a set of rules by which to live to make the world a better place. All the rest is added onto that. Forget the old testament which has for example eye-for-an-eye, as it's incompatible with Christ's 'turn the other cheek'. Also forget about Christ being there to set people against each other, which is in one part of the bible but which is obviously meant to show that he wants each of us to think for ourselves. This can be found elsewhere too IIRC with a saying about slaves where he says that no one should be a slave of anyone else, and implies that that means for him too, i.e. he doesn't want anyone to blindly follow him, but understand the reasoning for 'turn the other cheek' etc. so that they understand why these rules are good ones to live by, and thus they are are not dependant on Christ for giving 'arbitrary' rules...

The bible is a collection of stories from pre-Christ, with a world view from that time, plus a bunch of stories and explanations of what Christ said/did. I was never really interested in Christianity nor any religion, but after reading Christ I saw how what he says makes sense. It's not stuff some drunk or guy using drugs said...