Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: IceWeasel, Online Gambling, GPU Folding, Evolution
The facts about Debian Iceweasel. john-da-luthrun writes, "Debian Firefox/XULrunner maintainer Mike Hommey reports on the Firefox/Iceweasel wrangle, correcting various assertions that have been made in the assorted trollfests/flamewars currently raging over the proposed Firefox rename. Hommey confirms that Firefox in Etch will be renamed 'Iceweasel,' but this will only be a renamed version of the vanilla Firefox, not the GNU Iceweasel fork — though the Debian and GNU Iceweasel teams may work together in future."
A closer look at Folding@home's GPU client. TheRaindog writes, "Slashdot recently covered some impressive client statistics for Stanford's Folding@home project, but they don't tell the whole story. The Tech Report has taken a closer look at the GPU client, running it on a Radeon X1900 XTX against the CPU client on a dual-core Opteron. The results are enlightening, especially considering how Stanford has chosen to award points GPU client work units. Power consumption is more interesting, with the GPU client apparently far more power-efficient than folding with a CPU."
David Brin need not lament — KidBasic. sproketboy writes, "I was thinking about the recent slashdot story David Brin Laments Absence of Programming For Kids, and after looking around I found KidBasic. KidBasic is quite good and teaches all the basics of programming. My 4 year old nephew and I have been able to get a few simple games programmed with it."
Online gambling ban may violate international law. An anonymous reader writes, "As Slashdot noted earlier, Congress has passed an effective ban on online gambling in the U.S. This may not be the end of the story, however. The law may be struck down by the World Trade Organization on the grounds that it violates the United States' international obligation not to discriminate in favor of domestic casinos. If the WTO strikes down this U.S. gambling ban, it would not be the first time. In November of 2004, the WTO struck down a U.S. anti-gambling law as illegally discriminating against the nation of Antigua."
Human species may do whatnow?. jamie writes, "'I might have believed this nonsense could come from some late 19th century eugenicist, but now? Is there any evidence...?' That's biologist PZ Myers's comment on the BBC story that claims the human species may split in two. It was posted on Slashdot as humor, but Myers's comments are a much-needed sober appraisal of this kind of pseudoscientific claim."
Another RIAA lawsuit dropped. skelator2821 writes, "Another RIAA lawsuit has been dropped against a defendant who had been accused of illegally sharing songs online, according to Ars Technica. Looks like the Mob tactics are not paying off for our good friends at the RIAA anymore."
I hope they make it run on other GPUs. Maybe, this will pressure gfx card manufacturers to make some sort of cross-compatible powerful scripting language to run any other embarrassingly parallel calculations... it would certainly be benificial
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
Since when does US care about international law?
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If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
> The law may be struck down by the World Trade Organization...
The WTO does not have the power to strike down any US law.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Unauthorized copying is not theft, nor is it even always illegal.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Debian is being stupid if they use the Iceweasel name knowing the it will be confused with a current, ongoing project.
And you wonder why Mozilla doesn't want them abusing their trademark...
When are we going to see the tag cloud that stories are tagged with? Is it possible to make sure that some words are not used when tagging stories? I would bet that the current tag cloud has the words yes, no, fud, notfud, notnotfud as the largest taxonomies. Whilst I'm sure some /.'ers couldn't care about those words being the dominant words they really don't add any substance to a tagged story. How about tagging stories with useful concept-oriented tags and blocking non-substance words like 'no' or 'yes'? Those words should be elaborated on in the comments not as a tag.
O RLY? The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that Congress can regulate wheat and marijuana production that does not cross state lines because they compete with products that do cross state lines. Wickard v. Filburn ; Gonzales v. Raich .
Do you even use Debian? When was the last time you contributed? What business should it be of yours that a group of volunteers choose to work together under a shared set of values? None of it, that's what.
If you don't want to allow distributions to make changes to software they redistribute to enhance system integration, user experience, and conform to distribution policies, perhaps you should instead spend your time petitioning the Mozilla project to consider going closed source.
And what is your problem with the DFSGs? They were influential in shaping what the very term Open Source means today.
Let's say I have a paper origami crane. My friend has a piece of paper and proceeds to make a paper origami crane with his piece of paper. The end result looks exactly like mine. Did my friend just steal something? If not, then why is it considered "stealing" when magnetic bits are manipulated to the same state on hard drives?
I appreciate your analogy, but I don't agree. One reason, as dopey as it sounds, is that your paper crane is not copyrighted, that music is.
Or I can go a different route and argue that you're not stealing something tangible such as a pattern of bits that is a song, but you are stealing a potential customer from the artist to whom they'd be able to sell their song. Let's go to the extreme.
If we decided to pass a law that it is not a crime to copy songs if you haven't bought them, and I can copy music without any worry of violating the law, I can't in good conscience convince myself that selling music would be profitable. Even with scarcity of artists following this crash, you can't really argue that the good old law of supply-demand will keep the music going in this case.
However, I do agree that there needs to be a balance of fair use such as being able to play music at a block party or make as many copies as I want on different mediums so that I can play my favorite music on my ipod, in my car, etc.
why run from Vincenzo?
Not really. Trademark enforcement is separate issue than whether something is open-sourced. See, many open-sourced products have trademarks that they don't want other people using. You think the Debian people would like it if someone else put out something called "Debian Linux" that was not made from the real/authorized Debian packages or codebase? Really, think about it. If I started distributing my own version of "Debian Linux", which was really a rebranded copy of Redhat with spyware installed, don't you think the Debian people would want me to stop using that name?
But if it's open-sourced, no matter what trademark issues there are, you can always take the code and rebrand it. You rebrand it with your own trademarks, which you can then protect or not. But keep in mind that if you don't protect your trademarks, you lose rights to them.
If they are developing on an older version it sounds like they have already forked and a dummy spit over a logo has just brought it to a head. Emacs forked over a trivial reason as well - although it took many months to find a new developer to actually do anything with the RMS fork when the existing developer starting including support for stuff like X windows which didn't benefit hurd in any way. Has RMS joined the debian board recently? What changes have their been recently which would make them more into a no compromise position? Remember here that firefox is not a Debian project and I think the mozilla conditions listed above are fine - although it would be nice to be allowed to backport patches I can see why they don't want it done. The above bold type "com" bit above by the previous poster I see as the sort of childish attitude we saw with the emacs split - the impurity of people getting paid to write software that is available to all under the GPL!
The problem we have here is an issue of semantics. Here's the crux of the problem: my origami crane is implicitly copyrighted. Thus my friend would be guilty of copyright infringement. If my friend took away my origami crane, that would be stealing because I no longer have the physical object. However, since he just made his own origami crane to look like mine, he's only infringing on my copyright of the crane. I still have my origami crane in my possession.
The issue here is that the RIAA/MPAA would like to have you believe that copyright infringement and stealing are the same thing when they are not. What they're trying to do is pound into the public that copyright infringement is stealing because, quite frankly, which term sounds worse? Stealing or copyright infringement?
If you're going to extrapolate, you can't just stop at an arbitrary point.
Ok, so the abolition of copyright has lead to destruction of the music industry. Only the very few art-for-art's sake type musicians still release music.
Is there still a demand for music? Yes? Then there is the potential for a market. Obviously the market won't operate on the basis of selling a single song many times cheaply due to copyright. What would the artist do? Demand money up-front. Instead of working "on-spec", the artist works on commission. Either a rich guy commissions a song/album, or a coalition of moderately wealthy people (fans) pool their money to commission an album. End result: artist gets paid, music gets made.
Such a scheme wouldn't work know - why would any consumer go to that length of trouble when they can go to the CD store and just buy an album for $25? But if the current distribution method died, the commission-based system would become attractive as the only way to get new music. That sort of shift would also have a noticable effect on the end product. In the current model, artists must write to please studios, so they can get in to the global distribution and publicity network the studios offer. In the commission-based model, artists must write to please their fans, or they're not going to get another commission after the first. It would probably also put commercial radio out of business.
As long as there is significant demand for music - and there has been throughout all recorded history - then music will be made. What changes is how, why and how much.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
This is true, and no offense, but frankly I'm impressed that you are aware of this. It's a welcome relief from the overwhelmingly ignorant "globalization this" and "free trade that" rants that I often read on Slashdot. What you might not know, however, is that allowing the nation who petitioned the Dispute Settlement Body to choose the way in which they are to be compensated has had an unexpected political side-effect, at least in the U.S. It turns out that one of the best ways of putting pressure on lawmakers and even the President of the United States is to impose tariffs on goods that are made in certain politically volatile states.
For instance, let's say it's 3 years ago and you're, I dunno...Germany. You just won your DSB case because you successfully demonstrated that you were harmed because of let's say, an economic initiative by George Bush that involved giving domestic steel producers in the northeast an unfair subsidy. As Germany, you turn around and impose a heavy tariff against all oranges coming from the United States, knowing full well many of those oranges come from Florida. Then, the pressure is ramped up on Bush, because he must then explain to Florida orange growers (who have a powerful lobby, by the way) why it is that they're having trouble selling their oranges in certain European markets.
That's the theory, anyway.
I didn't mean to imply that humans are going to hybridize, I meant to point out that things genetic are often even more interesting and mysterious than we think.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
But according to yor logic I didn't do anything wrong. I didn't take any physical object from you. I didn't take away your ability to provide services to others. So you have no reason to be upset, right?
The Mozilla rules on using their tradmarks make a lot of sense (and are probably required legally in order to maintain the trademark). Without it, third parties could make thier own version of Firefox loaded with spyware and crap and distribute it under the Firefox name.
Now Mozilla can grant Debian (and Redhat, Suse, Ubuntu, etc) a license to use their logos and stuff. But they can't give a license to everyone who wants to make their own distro based off Debian. Now, Debian doesn't allow debian derivatives to use the official debian logo, so they could maybe add to that rule that you couldn't use the Firefox logo either. But either that didn't occur to them or they just didn't want to do it.
Sure, go ahead, piss off more people - but don't come crying to other countries.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Mr. Dowling is still guilty of it
Of course. The example would have pointless if he wasn't.
copyright infringment is still wrong
Agreed.
If you had said copyright infringment is rape or copyright infringment is murder, and someone replied saying "no it's not", would you jump to the conclusion that they were somehow saying copyright infringment was ok? Of course not. Or at least I assume not. Infringment is not theft rape or murder, and should not be thought of in terms of theft rape or murder.
Copyright is a good and usefull thing.
Copyright is not the same thing as property rights and it is not supposed to be the same as property rights. Copyright law is not the same as property law and it is not supposed to be the same as property law. You should not assume someone is "anti-copyright" when they object/reject the terms [theft steal property Intellectual_Property].
If someone supports copyright, then why the fuss over that sort of language? Because Copyright industry public relations push those terms on the public to create the impression and assumption that copyright = property and that copyright law = property law and that copyright law should equal property law, when in fact they are different and are supposed to be different for good reason. And more importantly because copyright industry lobbyists push those same terms in all dealings with legislators for the exact same reason... to create the incorrect assumption in their minds that copyright law is already the same as property law, and to create the expectation that the law should be the same as property law... so that when legislators come across the fact that copyright is treated differently than property and that copyright law is different than property law they come to the mistaken conclusion that there is something wrong with the law and that they obviously should "fix" that "problem".
For example DMCA is bad law. It is based on the invalid concepts that copyright is property and that encryption schemes are the owner's lock on his property, and that someone opening that lock is breaking the law and that someone selling a key to open that lock is breaking the law. To the extent we want to go with that property analogy, it is like someone selling me a home which of course includes a lock in the front door. Once I buy the house, I am not commiting a crime if I open that lock. I am not commiting a crime if I PICK that lock. And it is not a crime for someone to sell me a key or a drill to open that lock on my front door. A law prohibiting me from opening the lock on a house I bought is a bad law. A law criminalizing products that help me get into my own house is a bad law.
The copyright conflict is a conflict over the language and the basic public perception and understanding of copyright.
And look at how effective that public relations shaping of the issue has been: I'd be reasonably satisfied with the copyright law we had not ten years ago, defending good old traditional copyright, and you leapt to the conclusion that I think copyright infringment is OK and presumably that I want to abolish all copyright law.
The copyright lobby's agenda is to reshape the public perception of copyright and to push the notion that not passing new law somehow equals eliminating copyright and pushing the notion that anyone who dares object to new law wants to eliminate copyright.
There is almost no one actually arguing to eliminate copyright. Look back through this thread and you'll see that almost every post arguing against the "stealing" language in fact explicitly supports copyright. You (and others in this thread) are clearly arguing from the presumption that you are arguing with copyright opponents, when in fact you are arguing against copyright supporters.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.