Free Republic

MINNETONKA, MN — Local boy Linus Van Pelt has been permanently banned from the local community theater, after an episode in which he commandeered a play rehearsal and began reciting from the Bible. "It's a classic case that shows the dangers of Christian Nationalism," said FBI Agent Peter Corrum. "You let one little twerp with a blanket use public property to quote from the Bible, next thing you know, they'll be throwing Buddhists off the roof and birth control will be illegal. Tale as old as time." The incident happened during a rehearsal for a Christmas play, under the direction...

`Linus and Lucy’ and other music he created for the Charlie Brown TV Specials reverberate forever in the American heart It’s great music to hear anytime, but especially this time of year. It’s the late jazz composer Vince Guaraldi’s joyful music for the Charlie Brown TV specials. His song, “Linus and Lucy” has become the main theme of all the Charlie Brown specials, though it was first used in the Charlie Brown Christmas special. Nobody had ever used a soundtrack of hip piano jazz for an animated feature before this. Composers such as the great Carl Stalling did compose tremendously...

This week A Charlie Brown Christmas aired on national prime time television for the 50th time. In a world where the latest greatest technology is outdated in a matter of months, and social media trends come and go in a matter of days, 50 years of anything becomes quite meaningful. SnipSince I was kind of a bookworm and already had a blue blanket, I was chosen to play the part of Linus. As Linus, I memorized Luke 2:8-14, and that Scripture has been hidden in my heart ever since. But while working so diligently to learn those lines, there is...

Red Semidouble THE LIVES OF THE FIRST VICARS OF CHRIST are buried in a mysterious obscurity; just as the foundations of a monument built to defy the ravages of time are concealed from view. To be the supports of the everlasting Church is a sufficient glory: sufficient to justify our confidence in them, and to awaken our gratitude. Let us leave the learned to discuss certain points in the following short Legend; as for ourselves, we will rejoice with the Church on this feast, and pay our loving veneration to the humble and gentle Pontiff, who was the first...

All 500 machines on the TOP500 supercomputer list run Linux. Here’s how the little OS that could, did.After years of pushing toward total domination, Linux finally did it. It is running on all 500 of the TOP500 supercomputers in the world, and who knows how many more after that. That’s even more impressive than Intel’s domination of the list, with 92 percent of the processors in the top 500. So, how did Linux get here? How did this upstart operating system created by a college student from Finland 26 years ago steamroll Unix, a creation of Bell Labs and supported...

Red Semidouble THE lives of the first Vicars of Christ are buried in a mysterious obscurity; just as the foundations of a monument built to defy the ravages of time are concealed from view. To be the supports of the everlasting Church is a sufficient glory: sufficient to justify our confidence in them, and to awaken our gratitude. Let us leave the learned to discuss certain points in the following short Legend; as for ourselves, we will rejoice with the Church on this feast, and pay our loving veneration to the humble and gentle Pontiff, who was the first...

A Texas judge has ordered a school district to restore a decoration that included a biblical verse recited by Linus in the 1960s TV special “A Charlie Brown Christmas.” Officials in the Killeen school district north of Austin ordered a nurse’s aide, Dedra Shannon, to remove a handmade decoration featuring a Bible verse from the special, fearing it violated prohibitions on religion in classrooms. …

Quickly becoming one of my favorite Christmas specials. A fast moving 17 minutes literally based upon Charles Schultz's comic strips. My favorite part is Sally's "today, I'm going to fall down a Christmas tree" adventures.

Every year at this time, the topic comes up around our house: "What is your favorite Christmas show?" Every year I give the same answer. That little ol' half hour special that first aired in 1965, A Charlie Brown Christmas.Oh, the scene with the sad looking Christmas tree is nice, the kids singing "Hark, the Herald Angels Sing" is touching, but the most daring moment of any Christmas special is when Linus teaches Charlie Brown the real meaning of Christmas and he recites Luke Chapter 2 from the King James Version of the Bible.The Linus monologue lasts about a minute,...

Atheists cry foul over ‘A Charlie Brown Christmas’ 12:01 PM 11/21/2012 Caroline May Political Reporter Charlie Brown’s Christmas is on the outs at an elementary school in Little Rock, Ark. — at least among atheists who are calling foul over a planned student trip to see a stage production of the beloved Peanuts story. The trouble began when students at Terry Elementary School brought home letters detailing the trip to see “A Charlie Brown Christmas” at a local church, according to a report from Arkansas’ KARK. A parent who had a problem with the play’s content notified the local atheist...

Apparently, Torvalds stepped into the arena and helped convince an ITC Administrative LAW Judge named Theodore R. Essex that Microsoft’s patent in question was invalid. The same judge who determined that Motorola had violated four Microsoft patents, including one known simply as the 352 patent. That particular patent has to do with storing filenames with a lot of characters in old file systems like Windows FAT. Torvalds told the judge that Motorola had found the posting he had made about long filenames used in a compatible manner with short filenames, and that post predated the Microsoft patent by three years....

How A Charlie Brown Christmas almost didn’t happen Few headlines about network television make me giddy. Fewer still make me hopeful that all is good in the world. But back in August of 2010, I read the following headline from the media pages with great excitement: “Charlie Brown Is Here to Stay: ABC Picks Up ‘Peanuts’ Specials Through 2015.” The first of these to be made, the famous Christmas special, was an instant classic when it was created by Charles Schulz on a shoestring budget back in 1965, and thanks to some smart television executives, it will be around for...

Long before the leading Linux desktop environment GNOME arrived in a 3.0 version in April, long-time GNOME users have been grumbling about the radical changes. The dissatisfaction only increased since GNOME 3.0's debut in the beta of Fedora 15 and continued with the Fedora 15 final. We mention Fedora because no other major Linux distro has yet to make the switch. To avoid it, Canonical gambled on its own controversial Unity UI layer in Ubuntu 11.04, and the Ubuntu-flavored Linux Mint 11 opted for the earlier GNOME 2.32.1. Now Linux creator and kernel overseer Linus Torvalds (pictured), has stepped in...

I post this thread to start an FR 'snow fort' against the next TWAP speech that pre-empts Charlie, Linus & Snoopy. Original thread: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/2398030/posts

So, Microsoft submits 20000 lines of code to the Linux kernel, all licensed under the GPL. Microsoft, who considers Linux a great threat, and once called the GPL a "cancer". Opinions on this one are flying all around us, but what does Linus Torvalds, Linux' benevolent dictator, think about all this?

Stallman: The fact that Torvalds says "open source" instead of "free software" shows where he is coming from. I wrote the GNU GPL to defend freedom for all users of all versions of a program. I developed version 3 to do that job better and protect against new threats. Torvalds says he rejects this goal; that's probably why he doesn't appreciate GPL version 3. I respect his right to express his views, even though I think they are foolish. However, if you don't want to lose your freedom, you had better not follow him.

The father of Linux has replied to the questions you always wanted to ask. Swapnil Bhartiya, EFY News Network  (15 Votes) Monday, August 20, 2007:  Did Microsoft’s Men In Black ever met Linus Torvalds? But why is he so critical of GPLv3? Did he ever slam Subversion? What would happen to the kernel development if he chooses to do something else more important? These are some of the questions Linux/open source community from around the globe wanted to ask Linus. And, here is Linus candid and blunt, and at times diplomatic, answering your questions. Check if the question you wanted...

That Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux operating system, prefers the current version of the General Public License, GPLv2, over the version in development, GPLv3, is no secret. But in a lengthy E-mail response to questions from InformationWeek, he offers a full explanation of what he thinks is superior about GPLv2. Torvalds says he regrets that the authors of GPLv3 have decided to take aim at political opponents. He has little patience for statements about the "evil and immoral" nature of proprietary code or the "TiVo-ization" of Linux (a reference to set-top box producer TiVo producing a device that runs...

Give people 12 months warning (time to work out what they're going to do, talk with the legal dept, etc) then make the kernel load only GPL-tagged modules. I think I'd favour that. It would aid those people who are trying to obtain device specs, and who are persuading organisations to GPL their drivers.

On August 4th, we found out that Lenovo Group, the company that has taken over IBM's Personal Computing Division, had made a deal with Novell Inc. to preload SLED 10 (SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop) on its ThinkPad T60p mobile workstation. For the first time, a major OEM (original equipment manufacturer) has committed to preloading a Linux desktop.