It's really a silly argument. The BSD license does have fewer restrictions, but that doesn't make it better than the other. I think people need to understand that the two licenses have different goals in mind, and developers need to respect the wishes of the rights holder. Likewise, developers should take care in what license they use.

My guess is that the BSD license's intent was to simply give credit where credit was due and to allow researchers to develop code for anyone to use, in proprietary or open source projects, with limited liability. This is a good license to choose if you want to give your code away and only want recognition.

The GPL's intent should be obvious to everyone here: The FSF is after a system entirely composed of open source software, and the GPL is one of their tools to achieve it. If you do not want to be a part of this community, do not license your software as GPL and do not expect to be able to use someone else's GPL code (in your own code). If you don't like it, tough--you may as well be complaining to a car salesman about your car not being free.

But if you hate the GPL and FSF, you might not want to use the BSD license. They can use your code too. ;)

I don't think that's quite a fair assertion to make. Local elected officials' hands are generally tied by policies set at the national and state levels. California is a strong example of this. Someone up above mentioned the extreme imbalance of tax payments made to the federal government vs. returns received. And I have experienced firsthand the enforced impotence of well-meaning school district officials in repairing severely outdated school plants due to positively Byzantine and constantly shifting state funding rules (which are typically rigged to benefit huge districts like Los Angeles). These are but two examples. The social engineering policies that define our society are set at the highest levels, and the power brokers at those levels do indeed come from an elite background or are validated by the elites who control the political and financial machinery. Populists and guys next door can make it to national office, usually in the House of Representatives, but they quickly learn to toe their party's line or be marginalized.

The American republic may have a system vaguely resembling democracy, but it is hardly participatory, and that is where the populist rage you decry comes from. It is especially intensified by the ease of individual interconnectivity that modern information technology enables. As these interconnected individuals come to feel more disempowered, their rhetoric becomes more intense. The same thing happened with liberals under Bush.

Having driven both, I must say that I agree.

Science is all about having replicable results... how could someone replicate your results if you failed to list all the procedures you used?

Part of it is that Next Generation ran longer and thus had a better opportunity to develop all the characters, making it more disappointing when the movies degenerated into Picard/Data stories. Insurrection and Nemesis were Rick Berman's incompetent attempts to balance the desires of both Star Trek fans and general audiences, something that JJ Abrams seems to have done quite deftly.

Competent admins? You've got competent admins?! Lucky... It was a few weeks ago that we let ours know it's a bad idea to make home directories for class accounts world-readable...

I'm not a big fan of computer labs--I prefer the comforts and distractions of my apartment. Sometimes it's nice to hang out with your classmates, though, while you're waiting for that simulation or synthesis to finish. Or when the damn wireless chip doesn't follow the spec and you need to make sure you haven't gone insane...

But yeah, the expensive apps could be a problem. Using an app in the lab or buying your own copy aren't necessarily the only options, though. I wish for more floating license setups, where you run the program on your machine but tunnel through a login server to check out a license.

VLIW and out-of-order superscalars attempt to extract more performance out of the same type of parallelism, actually (instruction-level parallelism). The way I see it, they are just different approaches to the same source of speedup; VLIW just pushes a big chunk of the work from the hardware to the compiler.

Hm, I disagree. Science does not start from evidence. It begins from the irrational, from the formation of the models and language used to describe an observer's sensations. Evidence is used only in a model's falsification, made possible by science's crucial premise--the existence of a predictive, deterministic model. That is a belief, by the way, not something that can be proven (neglecting omniscience).

So it's not that she's discarding evidence or reason. She just may not share the same basic beliefs. Neither side is provably correct; moreover, that foundation confines both your knowledge and hers.

That said, without some of us believing in predictability, I wouldn't have a job! ;-)

In a way, the wormhole aliens were simply a logical extension of the ideas they began exploring with the character of Q. Q chose to present himself as easily relatable, essentially a human with boundless control over space and time. However, it was easy for Picard to dismiss Q as a god due to his human appearance, which included such flaws as hubris and a willingness to pass judgment. The Prophets, on the other hand, had a completely different non-linear perspective that was not friendly to human comprehension (or easy writing). Thus Sisko and co. had a much harder time dismissing them.

The theme of relating to superhuman intelligences is found throughout Star Trek. It's just too bad that later attempts at exploring it failed so miserably, such as the Q episodes of Voyager.

Please elaborate on your metrics of efficiency. I would also like to hear about specific social improvements that are a direct result of the school system.

The front companies provide the illusion of choice, but the American Medical Association holds a monopoly on licensing for conventional care, the drug companies are focused mainly on securing patent monopolies above anything else, and the insurance companies themselves have an army of lobbyists to keep them in their places of privilege.

Note also that neither Clinton nor Obama seriously advocated for a single-payer system during the recent election. Both proposed federal subsidies for existing insurance companies, touting it as the more politically realistic choice. I don't support state-monopolized medicine myself, but I can't see such a proposal as anything other than crackpot realism, which is the first refuge of scoundrels.

Not all sites are like that, though. For example, HardOCP attempts to find the highest settings a card can handle while still achieving some minimum average frame rate. You still can't take the numbers as indicators for your particular system, though, unless all of your other components have comparable performance to their test rig.

Haha, I'm sounding like an asshole, I think. I just mean to say that the class really isn't so advanced that it should be graduate-level (with the assumption that graduates should have already seen Verilog and done hardware design--at Berkeley, we have several undergrad classes with FPGA design projects).

I'd post links to what we've done, but it's not finished yet. It's BSD-licensed but hiding in a repository that doesn't (yet) give access to the public.

Hm... I was probably a little confusing. CS 150 is done over 10 weeks or so with teams of 2 students, but the projects are probably larger. Slapping a NIOS core on an FPGA and having it run C code is hardly much of a hardware project. I will give them credit for having something to show in 4 weeks, but I'd expect graduate students wouldn't have any trouble with that unless this were their first hardware project. (Students always underestimate the integration step)

As far as being busy with other crap, that's the same for every student.

Well, while you go on in fear, I'm going to continue using what I've found to be the most polished distribution for KDE4 users (out of Fedora, openSUSE, Kubuntu, and Debian). Fedora annoyingly included a pre-release version of xorg that didn't have driver support from nvidia or amd. I have no idea what's up with Kubuntu; the maintainers need to work a little harder at making it stable and fast. Debian is just missing some of the nicer GUI tools for system administration.

If you've got a better distribution to try, I'd love to hear it. (I'm really happy we have KVM ^_^)