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The generally-accepted (by insano-Christian types, anyway) date for the creation of the universe is Archbishop James Ussher’s calculation of September 22nd, 4004BC. This makes the universe 6011 years old as of last September.
Assuming a 90-year copyright, the universe would have passed into the public domain in September 3914BC, or 5922 years ago as of last September.
Traditional Hebrew calculations of the age of the universe are slightly more favourable, since they place the Creation at sometime in September/October 3761BC (can’t really be more accurate than that without more research on my part). However, this still would have the universe passing into the public domain in 3671BC.
Of course, this assumes that the copyright period is 90 years; obviously, if it’s 75 years then it’s even less favourable.
This also ignores the fact that the universe was written in Perl and Lisp, which suggests that God is in favour of free software; in fact, since he’s a Lisp hacker with an obvious interest in artificial intelligence, he probably has quite a bit in common with rms.
"the doctrine of opposition to the separation of church and state."
An unfortunately common stance in the US, especially given that many of the early colonies were founded, by various groups, to escape religious persecution.
In case it’s not obvious, by the way, I’m in a political mood today, and I’m sitting on a train bored.
Anyway, my primary reason for being in favour for the total separation of Church and State is that it inevitably leads to discrimination, in several ways.
In the UK, "the Church" is generally the Church of England. Now, if the government allows its policies to be dictated by the Church of England, and if it governs the country in a way that would be appropriate with the CoE as "The Church", it’s going to lead to conflict. There are very few points that every religion with more than a trivial representation in the UK will agree on; making any kind of religious doctrine into law will alienate religions that disagree with that doctrine (for the purposes of this discussion, I’m considering atheism to be a religion, whose supporters disagree with every religious doctrine out of sheer bloodymindedness if nothing else).
The other problem is that many religious doctrines are discriminatory in themselves. The obvious one is the Christian insistence that "I am the Lord your God; you will have no other God before me". Insisting that other religions are inherently sinful tends to piss them off a bit.
Another, which is currently an issue in the US, is the opposition to homosexuality in general, and gay marriage in particular. Basically, the main argument seems to be "it’s un-Christian", which would be a perfectly acceptable argument in a Christian country and is therefore a perfect reason why there should not be such a thing as "a Christian country" (or any other religion, for that matter). It is simply not acceptable to discriminate against any group simply because some other group claims that the first group is sinful, especially based on the frankly pretty shaky evidence that Christianity has. In the UK, it appears that it’s allowable for gay people to have all the benefits of marriage as long as they don’t call it marriage; frankly, if the Church of England are that petty they need to grow up, and they certainly shouldn’t be given any say in national policy.
Apparently, the Italian government recently voted against a law that would make it illegal to discriminate against gay people, under pressure from the Vatican (who presumably didn’t want to get sued). It’s a little worrying that Italy worries so much about what another country thinks.
It occurred to me, sitting on the train to visit my parents, that there’s a major flaw in George Bush’s War on Terror; that is, that it assumes that American intervention around the world will lead to a decrease in terrorism.
Now, cast your mind back to the six years prior to 11th September 2001. How often did terrorism make the news? Compare it with the six years since. I was 9 in 1995, so not particularly politically aware for most of that period, but it seems that prior to 2001, terrorism didn’t make the news anywhere near as often as it does nowadays. There was the IRA and assorted other groups in Ireland, Palestinian and Israeli groups making a nuisance of themselves, occasionally ETA; nothing like the scale that we’ve seen since 2001.
The question is, did the increase in terrorist activity happen before, and lead to, the World Trade Centre attacks, or did the attacks (and more pertinently, the US response) lead to the increase? Another interesting question would be: how much of the purported increase is actually real, and how much of it is media (and government) hyperbole?
The answer to the first question is reasonably simple; from what I can see, there was no increase in terrorist activity until after the World Trade Centre attacks. Strangely, fundamentalist Muslims don’t appreciate having their countries invaded on fairly flimsy pretexts, and others who might otherwise be more moderate in their views may quite easily be driven to fundamentalism by the constant threat to, and defamation of, their religion and way of life.
That’s not to say, of course, that I agree with their religion (or any other religion), or their society (or any other society that has basically non-existent women’s rights and gay rights, and poor separation of church and state–like, for example, the USA [1]). However, the US’s heavy-handed approach has not made them many friends in the Middle East.
| [1] | I feel I should clarify here. Whilst yes, it is legal for women to go out in public without being accompanied by a man, or to show their arms, and yes, homosexuality isn’t punishable by death despite the best efforts of Arnold Schwarzeneggar, US law and society is nowhere near what I’d consider reasonable, simply because race, gender, and sexuality are still issues. For the record, the same applies to the UK. |
It is often claimed that there are no contradictions in the Bible. It is also often claimed that this is a lot of bollocks. Just to add weight to the latter argument, compare Matthew 1:1-16 with Luke 3:23-38. Both passages are accounts of Jesus’ paternal ancestry, and both are different; they can’t even agree on the name of his grandfather. If the Bible can’t agree on something so trivial, how can it be trusted to be correct on anything else?
I’ve started a list of contradictions. Please feel free to contribute.
From http://www.zdnetasia.com/news/software/0,39044164,62035655,00.htm:
Chizen characterized the open-source community as taking its inspiration from commercial companies. "The open-source community takes a lot of the practices and some of the ideas from commercial companies and enhances them," he said. "If we didn’t exist, there would be less to enhance."
So, basically, it’s okay for companies to exploit copyright and patent law, because if they didn’t the free software world wouldn’t know what to do with itself. Or something. What a lot of arse.
Mark Pilgrim writes about the future of reading. Read it, think about it.
Also, read rms’ essay The Right to Read.
There’s been discussion some time back (September or so) about the use of BSD-licenced code (wireless drivers from OpenBSD) in the Linux kernel; specifically, that changes to the drivers were only released under the GPL and therefore unusable by OpenBSD (which won’t accept any licence more restrictive than the original Berkeley licence).
Most of the people appear to be missing the point. Of course, the Linux developers are perfectly entitled to do so–the OpenBSD licence doesn’t require anyone to release any modifications at all, and BSD code is used by, for example, Sun, Apple, and Microsoft for this very reason.
However, that doesn’t mean they should. Just because you don’t need to release your changes doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do so anyway; Apple especially have contributed a fair bit back to FreeBSD despite not being required to. And from free software developers, a refusal to release code under a licence that’s acceptable to the author is a little hypocritical.
It shouldn’t be a case of "do it because you have to". It should be, as I’ve mentioned_before, something you do because it’s the right thing to do. The Linux guys know it’s right, yet still they avoid doing it.
A while back, after all the uproar with Ubuntu including proprietary, binary drivers, Mark Shuttleworth announced that there’d be a version of Ubuntu with nothing but free software. The new version of Ubuntu has been released, along with Gobuntu, a version with “no firmware, drivers, applications, or content included in Gobuntu that does not include the full source or whose license does not provide the right to use, study, modify, and redistribute the body of work”.
Unfortunately, they’ve failed already, since Gobuntu includes the non-free Firefox logo, whose licence does not permit modification or redistribution.
Now, I don’t care whether you think modifying artwork is important–it’s a stated goal of Gobuntu to have no non-free content. The logo is not non-free content, so Ubuntu have failed in their goal.
Likewise, I don’t care if you think that the licence doesn’t matter because the logo is a trademark anyway–as Mark Pilgrim points out, that’s two separate restrictions instead of one, and therefore even harder to justify.
Rich will probably make some comment about Debian developers being idiots for caring too much about freedom. He’s never managed to justify that in the past, so I suggest he doesn’t bother this time. Plenty of free software projects trademark their name and/or logo; nobody but Mozilla feel the need to get arsey about it. If someone chose to create a spyware-filled or trojaned version of Firefox, calling it Firefox and putting the Firefox logo on it, Mozilla could still stop them under trademark law and it’d still be a crime under various Misuse of Computers-type acts. There’s no need for a non-free licence.
If you want a distribution that actually cares about freedom, try Debian, which I’ve always found easier to install and use, and more memory- and space-efficient, than Ubuntu.
Some time ago, Eric Raymond (pioneer of the open source movement, as opposed to the free software movement) wrote a paper in which he, basically, instructed Richard Stallman (pioneer of the free software movement) to "shut up and show them the code".
Well, for a start, this is rather rude, especially since rms has probably written more free software than almost anyone else (he’s spent the last 25 years writing GNU software, plus at least a decade before that working at MIT), and coming from esr, who–well, he hasn’t, put it that way–it’s especially unfounded. You can say a lot of things about Richard Stallman, but accusing him of not writing enough free software is not one of them.
Secondly, esr apparently just doesn’t get it. He claims that rms’ focus on freedom, on the rights of software users, is "bad tactics", when in fact, it’s not a tactic, not a means to an end–it’s the end itself. The goal is not, has never been, to write an operating system for which all the source code is available, as the term "open source" implies–it has always been to write a system which allows its users the freedom to use, study, share, and improve it–of which two of those freedoms require access to the source code. If anything, open-source is the means and freedom is the end, not the other way around as esr would have us believe.
For the majority of computer users, the term "open source" is meaningless; not (necessarily) because they’ve not heard of "open-source software", but because they have no idea what "source" is; a substantial portion of the rest simply don’t care, because they have no interest in seeing the source. Most people care about freedom, though, and would like to be able to download a program and use it without having to worry about how long before the free trial runs out, or whether the program will expect them to fill in all their details to be sent off to the vendor before using it, or be pestered for a licence key every time they start up, or be treated like a criminal until they "prove" that they’re not (we’ve had habeas corpus since 1215, you know? [1]). Why promote open-source, something only of interest to programmers? What about the rest of the world, users who couldn’t care less about modifying a program but still want the freedom to use and distribute it?
| [1] | Update: Simon Waters points out that habeas corpus was abolished by the Prevention Of Terrorism Act 2005, which recieved Royal Assent on 2005-03-11. |