Word: coding
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...coach. We live in a time and a culture in which vulgarity is so ubiquitous that the word has ceased to carry any hint of opprobrium, and where the concept of civility seems as dated as Ciceronian oratory. Cultural historian Jacques Barzun wrote recently that a 300-year-old "code of civilized manners" came to an end "about halfway into the 20th century." I'd argue that Barzun's dating is off by a couple of decades-otherwise my yellowed copy of a 1967 Playboy would be a lot smuttier than it is-but it's hard to disagree with...
...Sadly, however, civility is a virtue with vices. An established code of behavior to which all are expected to adhere doesn't come out of the clear blue sky. It depends on a sense of social hierarchy that dignifies a particular group or institution-the church, the nobility, whatever-with a degree of authority. Civility is the first cousin to order, deference, conformity. But sometime in the past 40 years, Western society decided that deferential, ordered and conformist societies cramped creativity and personal expression. We shudder at the 1950s, when men and women knew their place, when businessmen wore gray...
...open source software ‘uncopyrighted’ software. This is incorrect. Most open-source software is covered by the GPL or the BSD license (or similar licenses such as Apache and PHP license). If a programmer contributes to Linux she does not revoke her copyright on the code. She simply gives the user a license to use that code and to copy and modify it as she wishes. The copyright holder can still release the same code (hers) under a different license-for example, the MYSQL database is released under both the GPL and a commercial license...
Without copyrights the GPL would not work because any company could hijack the code (like Microsoft), extend it with proprietary code and release it as a binary only without giving others the opportunity to change the code. Eventually such a fork might discourage open source developers to write new code and the code would no longer be freely available after a short while...
This Sunday’s Grammy Awards will add a new stop on the red carpet: a checkpoint which will see that all straps are secure and enforce a new dress code which stipulates that necklines actually reach the neck...