In a society where firearms are nearly nonexistant, there are not as many killings as in a society which poses as an armed camp. Maybe you gun-fuckers will never learn this.
Ever been to Switzerland, you butt weasel? It's practically an armed camp and there is very little gun violence there. Yes, I've been to Switzerland.
The trouble with guns in America isn't the existence of the guns. It's the ignorance and mystification that surrounds the machoistic and unrealist attitudes portrayed in the popular media about firearms. From whining reporters and pseudo-intellectuals proclaiming that all guns must be banned after an aberrant episode of gun violence (such as Columbine) to the equally ignorant portrayals of firearms in actions films where they are used to solve all disputes, the prevailing attitude toward firearms in this country is way out of whack with any sort of realistic assessment of the situation. The trouble is that infantile Americans want to see everything in terms of black and white and they leave no room for discourse in the middle.
Firearms are not the problem in America. The problem in America is that no one is willing to compromise and no one is willing to view this issue with dispassionate reason and clarity.
Fact is, more people die in automobile accidents than are injured by firearms in this country. Is anyone calling for a ban on automobiles? If Americans were anywhere near being rational, they would.
The trouble in the U.S. is that everyone is more ready to start calling names and labelling everyone (liberal, conservative, commie, gun-nut, tree-hugger, you name it). I've even done it above in this post to make a point. When you fall back to playground tactics, you close the door on rational discussion and you leave yourself no room to escape, no room to actually reach a resolution of issues with those with whom you disagree. There must be dialogue and compromise for a community to exist. When there is no dialogue, no compromise, there is only oppression.
This means that there should be no censorship of any individual's or group's views on any facet of an issue. There should be no state or corporate censorship. Filtering when imposed in such a manner is just wrong. If you feel strongly that you don't want your children to have access to certain information while online or in school or anywhere, then you must take the initiative and provide your children with the guidance that you feel is appropriate. Hopefully, you will teach your children to be open-minded and to listen to other points of view and to consider the merit of other people's ideas. You do not foster those attitudes by outright filtering and denial of access or other heavy-handed tactics. At what age do you allow them to grow up? At what age, at what time, will America at large grow up?
I hope the game is more "Massively Multiplayer" than the web site. I got in this morning when the article was first posted here, but every time since that I've tried to go back, the page is unavailable. Talk about being/.'d!
I sure do wish I had taken a look at the screen shots the first time.
Hardcorebit, you appear to have done a good bit of research on the matter, and know a lot of the questions that need answering. All you have to do now is find the answers and write out explanations of the answers.
RJH, since you'e an INFOSEC professional, you have field experience in implementing these protocols and desinging systems for security. You must have tales to tell about design and implementation decisions that were made, which ones failed and which ones haven't failed, yet.
I say you two ought to get together and write this book that you're wishing was written. After all, "scratching your own itch" is the Free Software way.
Not sure about the Newton part, but there was some work done with wearables and HUDs, and the USMC was doing some testing.
I also recall some work done with Linux by the USMC in testing various computing platforms for possible future deployment. Seems to me there was a Colonel who was in charge of the operation (forgot his name) and he had good things to say about Linux and that they planned to use it for simulation and other things.
I'm pretty sure that was the USMC, but this was like, four years ago and I could be remembering incorrectly.
I know that the PPC is big-endian and x86 is little endian (unless I got that backwards AGAIN). How much of a pain in the ass is this as far as porting code goes?
Well, technically, the PPCs have the ability to run either big endian or little endian code. Normally, they are big endian. IIRC, there's an asm mnemonic that allows you to switch the endianness when in supervisor mode.
As for porting code that relies on a given processors endianness, it isn't that hard in a language like C, which the majority of software is written in. In fact, you need to do this sometimes in software anyway, since some file formats for sounds and graphics (among other things) specify the endianness and other byte order issues for storing larger than 8-bit values. (The whole world is not like UNIX and they don't all treat files as streams of bytes.)
To convert the data, you write a cracking macro to swap the bytes. While it is trivial, I leave it as an exercise for the reader. A couple of other macros come in handy when dealing with binary data larger than 8 bits, such as macros to get the high order byte and low byte from a 16-bit value, and others for doing various manipulations on 32-bit values. It should be noted, too, that some architectures do rather bizarre things with bit orders, other than just the byte order of larger values. These, however, a not a concern when porting x86 code to the PPC.
Low cost, not always better
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WinDSL Coming?
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This is just another scrap of evidence in my argument that cheaper is not always better. Most of the time, cheaper is just cheap.
Let's face it. Love is just a Bill Gates wannabe, and he's sore that Caldera doesn't have the market share of Red Hat. It's clear to me that he wants to "embrace and extend" Linux so that folks who use Caldera will be incompatible with other distros. He doesn't want to give those changes back to the community because he wants to keep them proprietary to Caldera.
His calling some unspecified license proprietary because it requires changes to be released if those changes are distributed is totally bogus. That's the most non-proprietary thing I can think of.
He's just ticked that Linux and the GNU software aren't under a BSD-style license that allows him to make his own proprietary changes and keep 'em that way.
Ah yes, but here's the deal. Perhaps I misspoke above. What I meant was the First Amendment of the Constitution is meant to prevent religious persecution more than anything else. I know the Puritans were NOT behind it, but you can't tell me that Madison (the primary author of the Bill of Rights) wanted everyone to be forced into practicing the same, state-sanctioned religion. He wanted to avoid situations like the wars of religion in England and France. (NOTE: The previous two sentences are my interpretations of historical facts and are not to be taken as historical facts in themselves. This disclaimer appears for the intelligence-impaired.) Madison is quite a fascinating historical figure.
The Freedom of Assembly and of the Press are also tacked on because they are vaguely related. Madison also greatly opposed the Alien and Sedition acts under President Adams.
Don't talk to me about historical misinformation. What you learned in public school in the U.S. is all bullshit and lies anyway. If you want to learn anything, you have to read many different sources sift through the propaganda and figure it out for yourself. That is a task for which the current system of "miseducation" in the US does not prepare its students.
Without your free speech rights, your property rights are up for grabs and there's nothing you can say about it. There's a solid reason why the First Amendment is the FIRST amendment.
Yeah, its because the Puritans and others who came to "The New World" to escape religious persecution felt it was extremely important to keep the government out of the religion business. They saw the trouble that comes from having the Church and State be one with the religious wars in France and England.
THAT is why the First Amendment is the First Amendment.
There's a reason for the Second Amendment being the Second Amendment: because force of arms is the only way to guarantee the rights granted under the First Amendment.
How right you are, Streetlawyer! When I saw what had been done to your previous post, it made me wish that I hadn't used all my moderator points yesterday.
The moderation system on Slashdot is often abused, in much the same way that a legal system was abused in the AOL Germany case at hand. Just because you say something that some Slashbot (I like that phrase) who happens to have moderator points disagrees with, you get moderated down. You are not moderated here for how well you frame your argument, nor for your persuasiveness, nor for any evidence that you might bring to support your argument. If you do not toe the party line, you are moderated down. This is, in fact, a form of censorship because many folks do not read Slashdot at a -1 threshold. So, beware and be warned, karma whore that you are, you will be moderated down for not speaking the gospel according to Slashdot. You will be censored. You will be silenced. It is a fact of posting on Slashdot.
Steve Gilliard has a piece over at Net Slaves, called "Who watches the Guardians." It is about Esther D. and paints an unlovely portrait. I suggest you all read it before your boners get too hard for her.
I, for one, agree with Steve G. She's the last person I want running the ICANN. In fact, I want no one running it, 'cause you can't really trust anyone with that much power. Well, I might trust myself, but you probably wouldn't.:-)
Esther has too much money involved and she's too cozy with Technology CEOs to be trusted with this position. Just read her book, RELEASE 2.0, and you'll read what I'm talking about. It's just filled with all the names of all these companies and CEOs that she's involved in. She's also not a very technical person, and you get that from her book, not just 'casue Steve G. says so.
Ah, I see. I hadn't read it as carefully, but I had read it.
What I don't like about their "license" is that it is so confusing full of exceptions, definitions, etc. Compared to the language in the APSL, the GPL looks downright simple.
Have to admit that I like the APSL a bit better than the Sun Community Source License or whatever it is called. I still don't like (though I forgot to mention it before) that you have to register on the Apple site before you can get the Darwin code from them. I didn't notice anything in the license restricting someone else from posting a copy and allowing others to download it.
I'm a registered Apple Developer. I signed up for the ADC site as a student. I've lost my user id and password, but I still get the email newsletter every week. Maybe, I'll download the Darwin code and give it the once over.
So why don't the crackers and script kiddies band together and knock the UK off the 'Net?
Why not shut down the ISPs that are shutting down these sites?
Seriously, though, I was thinking just this morning that the Internet, because of its distributed nature and its international scope poses a very serious threat to territorial gov't as we know it. I was thinking of this specifically in terms of the US and the various States' attempts at taxing Internet sales. What happens when the transactions are interstate, even international? There's a real Constitutional crisis for the US buried in there and when your government is defacto unconstitutional anyway....
This case is another example where gov'ts are trying to impose law and order on something that is, by virtue of its very design, anarchic and chaotic. It just won't work. Politicians can criminalize and regulate all they want, but they won't stop the behavior, because those of us who really understand the nuts and bolts of how this thing works will be able to get around their silly little attempts at control. WE DO HAVE THE POWER over this technology. THEY may have guns, but their armies now depend on our technology and on technologies that we can subvert, take over, and control. We can use their tech (as well as our own) against them. This is precisely why politicians prefer unarmed peasants. Trouble is, everything is a weapon today.
"We cannot let this be covered up. If NetBenefit win this case, the precedent will be set that any ISP can remove an entire website because it might contain something defamatory some time in the future. That means they can close down any website at all. It is a violent attack on free speech."
Fact is, ISPs have that authority now. As the owners of the equipment used to put your website up, they have the right to refuse any content that they deem inappropriate. This is not really censorship in the strictly legal sense because it is not the government that's doing the censoring. An ISP and any other private business basically has the right to say, "I don't like your politics/lifestyle/your hair/whatever, so I'm not doing business with you." I certainly would not host web sites for Neo-Nazis, as an example. It's a free market (in theory) so you can refuse to do business with some people if you choose. Now, your local/national gov't may disagree, as would the FTC in the US, but really there isn't a hell of a lot anyone can do about it. I'm sure an ISP could always come up with some reason or another that they can't host one site or another.
Think about it. If you own the hardware that the site resides on, and you lease the lines from the telco/whoever to pump the data out, then you can shut any site down you want. You could even flip a power switch and shut them all down. I'm not saying this is good policy on the part of an ISP, but it's not censorship and it's certainly within the ISP's right considering it's their equipment and you must agree to their policies in order to use it. You can always go somewhere else if you don't like how one ISP does business.
In this specific case, yeah, they might have overreacted. I'd just get a new ISP (preferably outside of UK) and forget about it. If you get an ISP in a country where ISPs aren't responsible for what their customers post and that is beyond the reach of British law, then you won't have to worry about your ISP being sued, just yourselves.:-)
If you want to fight back. Slap the Pink Paper with a restraint of trade/unfair competition type lawsuit if you have such a thing in the UK. This is an obvious attempt to put you out of business using strongarm tactics and would probably qualify as a restraint of trade in the US. Unless the article in question has something to do with the Pink Paper, then they have no business threatening to sue you if you publish something defamatory. Why would they threaten to sue on behalf of a third party if they didn't want to put you out of business?
Anyway, if you want real legal advice, cough up the bucks and hire a solicitor. Sounds to me like your enterprise has gotten important enough to need one. If you can't afford a solicitor, then too bad. Maybe you could get the Pink Paper to buy your outfit, then hire a solicitor, say they screwed you, and sue to get your business back.:-)
Yes, Apple "grants" you the "right" to distribute your modifications or more specifically to "deploy" modified code. But, they retain the right to use, to modify, and to distribute your modifications as they see fit without royalty. In other words, they can take your changes, make one or two changes, incorporate their hacked up version of your code into commercial OSX without folding that code back into Darwin.
You don't have full rights to any code that you've written.
Thanks to the BSD license, they can get away with this. If their code were based on the Linux kernel rather than Mach and BSD, they couldn't. That's why this puppy's userland is based on FreeBSD rather MkLinux/GNU.
That said, this sounds like a really cool project. I've always been impressed with Mach and microkernels in general. I'd like to get a BSD-lites system up and running or maybe jump in with the HURD.
It might be cool if we could steal the thread model from Mach and somehow make it fit in Linux. Then, we'd have a truly lightweight thread model instead of one based on the Unix process model.
I agree pretty much with everything the above poster said, except that there will be a fee if you intend to distribute your Qt application for money. Qt is only free if you are. If you charge money for a product developed with Qt, then you need to pay the license fee to Troll Tech. This page has all the details.
Looking at today's bottom line for a site valuation just doesn't make sense.
Neither does looking at "future, potential profit" which may never materialize. Let's face it: is Amazon going to be in business in ten years? Will they be making a profit, then? Do you have anyway of knowing? If you're looking to buy a business, is that any way to spend your money? You might as well plunk all that cash down on a roulette wheel!
The only sane way to judge a company's value is to look at what they're doing now and what their plans are for the future. When you have an outfit like Amazon that's losing money now and their plan for the future isn't much different from what they're doing now, you have to wonder. I certainly wouldn't put my money in them, not for the long haul. (Heh. A little day trading with the extra cash is a bit exhilarating now and then.)
I wouldn't give this person $20K for their site, but then, I don't know anything about their site other than what they've so far revealed.
And it's a neat system, so it would be a great pity if it "died."
YOU still have the rules, don't you? You still have the dice? You still have imagination? Then, how can the game die? So, there won't be commercially produced supplements, you can write your own.
Nanotech poses an interesting problem to your argument, though. We will almost be required to create nanotech devices capable of reproducing themselves, since building such machines ourselves is quite difficult. (There was an article posted on here roughly a year ago about someone using molecules to transport other molecules down neural fibers, but I'm too lazy to look up the reference and find it here.) The big breakthrough in nanotech is actually assembling the damned things, so once we've accomplished that we will have "assembler" nanobots which exist only to assemble other nanobots.
There is nothing at that point to stop someone from programming an assembler to make malicious nanobots. For one possible look into such a future, I highly recommend Neal Stephenson's novel, THE DIAMOND AGE.
Once these machines can reproduce themselves, they no longer "need" us.
Anyway, I believe that the title of the original article was a bit disingenuous since the futur doesn't "need" us. The Earth doesn't need us. It existed just fine for a few hundred million (a few billion?) years without us. It will get along just fine after we're gone, until the sun goes Red Giant, anyway.
Technically, we're taxed on Internet purchases already in Kentucky, USA. Our state has a "use tax" which applies to all goods and services bought for use in Kentucky on which sales tax was not paid. So you order something online and don't pay sales tax, you owe the Kentucky Revenue Cabinet 6% of the purchase price when you file your state income tax. Same thing if you order from a catalog. Technically, if you take a trip to New Hampshire, buy something in New Hampshire and bring it back to your home in KY, you still need to pay the use tax because NH doesn't have a state sales tax. I imagine many other states have such a tax on the books.
I pay this silly tax when I file my taxes because I don't want to be prosecuted for tax evasion if I'm every audited. You see they can seize your credit card and bank records in an audit, so the numbers won't lie on where you've spent your dough.
We don't need more taxation in the United States. We need less taxation and less regulation of commerce. Let's face it, if we let politicians continue to tax everything like mad, we'll end up like Europe, with 4 and 5 taxes levied on every purchase, gov't telling business how to operate, reduced individual purchasing power, and double digit unemployment.
People who are trying to decide whether to rely on Linux or BSD should note that the two commercial BSD-based companies are unifying at the same time that the Linux market is being divided up into smaller and smaller fragments. It seems like every few weeks another company announces a Linux distro. I just read that Motorola is producing their own. Now don't get me wrong, I really wish that Linux wasn't so fragmented. In fact, I would like to go back to the good old days when Slackware had a 90% market share;-)
We're not getting you wrong, Mr. Bruce. It's painfully obvious that you don't like the vitality of the competition to BSD from GNU/Linux.
Why is it that everyone just assumes "market fragmentation" is bad? Why do they assume that GNU/Linux is going to follow the same old rules that the UNIX marketplace followed in the late '80s?
Yeah, the UNIX market is fragmented with *BSD, SysV, AIX, IRIX, HP-UX, GNU/Linux, etc. ad infinitum.
And yeah, the GNU/Linux market is fragmented, but so what? When 99% of your software will compile and run on your system regardless of the distro that you use, what does it matter? So PHBs get confused about which distro is "better," so what? PHBs shouldn't be deciding which distro to buy/download, the techies ought to be making those decisions. (Yeah, I know, most corporations don't work that way, neither does the one that currently has me enslaved.) Where is the evidence that a fragmented market is bad? I always thought the mantra was "choice [in the marketplace] is good for consumers?" If not, then why is everyone beating up on Microsoft?
So, when you're consumer/choice oriented you call it "competition." When you're a big company whose competing in that marketplace of choice, you call it "market fragmentation."
Of course, I can't fault Mr. Bruce for wishing Slackware had a 90% market share.
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In a society where firearms are nearly nonexistant, there are not as many killings as in a society which poses as an armed camp. Maybe you gun-fuckers will never learn this.
Ever been to Switzerland, you butt weasel? It's practically an armed camp and there is very little gun violence there. Yes, I've been to Switzerland.
The trouble with guns in America isn't the existence of the guns. It's the ignorance and mystification that surrounds the machoistic and unrealist attitudes portrayed in the popular media about firearms. From whining reporters and pseudo-intellectuals proclaiming that all guns must be banned after an aberrant episode of gun violence (such as Columbine) to the equally ignorant portrayals of firearms in actions films where they are used to solve all disputes, the prevailing attitude toward firearms in this country is way out of whack with any sort of realistic assessment of the situation. The trouble is that infantile Americans want to see everything in terms of black and white and they leave no room for discourse in the middle.
Firearms are not the problem in America. The problem in America is that no one is willing to compromise and no one is willing to view this issue with dispassionate reason and clarity.
Fact is, more people die in automobile accidents than are injured by firearms in this country. Is anyone calling for a ban on automobiles? If Americans were anywhere near being rational, they would.
The trouble in the U.S. is that everyone is more ready to start calling names and labelling everyone (liberal, conservative, commie, gun-nut, tree-hugger, you name it). I've even done it above in this post to make a point. When you fall back to playground tactics, you close the door on rational discussion and you leave yourself no room to escape, no room to actually reach a resolution of issues with those with whom you disagree. There must be dialogue and compromise for a community to exist. When there is no dialogue, no compromise, there is only oppression.
This means that there should be no censorship of any individual's or group's views on any facet of an issue. There should be no state or corporate censorship. Filtering when imposed in such a manner is just wrong. If you feel strongly that you don't want your children to have access to certain information while online or in school or anywhere, then you must take the initiative and provide your children with the guidance that you feel is appropriate. Hopefully, you will teach your children to be open-minded and to listen to other points of view and to consider the merit of other people's ideas. You do not foster those attitudes by outright filtering and denial of access or other heavy-handed tactics. At what age do you allow them to grow up? At what age, at what time, will America at large grow up?
I hope the game is more "Massively Multiplayer" than the web site. I got in this morning when the article was first posted here, but every time since that I've tried to go back, the page is unavailable. Talk about being /.'d!
I sure do wish I had taken a look at the screen shots the first time.
yah, good point.
One could also write all their cgi proggies in a compiled language, and avoid the whole interpreter overhead.
Hardcorebit, you appear to have done a good bit of research on the matter, and know a lot of the questions that need answering. All you have to do now is find the answers and write out explanations of the answers.
RJH, since you'e an INFOSEC professional, you have field experience in implementing these protocols and desinging systems for security. You must have tales to tell about design and implementation decisions that were made, which ones failed and which ones haven't failed, yet.
I say you two ought to get together and write this book that you're wishing was written. After all, "scratching your own itch" is the Free Software way.
Not sure about the Newton part, but there was some work done with wearables and HUDs, and the USMC was doing some testing.
I also recall some work done with Linux by the USMC in testing various computing platforms for possible future deployment. Seems to me there was a Colonel who was in charge of the operation (forgot his name) and he had good things to say about Linux and that they planned to use it for simulation and other things.
I'm pretty sure that was the USMC, but this was like, four years ago and I could be remembering incorrectly.
I know that the PPC is big-endian and x86 is little endian (unless I got that backwards AGAIN). How much of a pain in the ass is this as far as porting code goes?
Well, technically, the PPCs have the ability to run either big endian or little endian code. Normally, they are big endian. IIRC, there's an asm mnemonic that allows you to switch the endianness when in supervisor mode.
As for porting code that relies on a given processors endianness, it isn't that hard in a language like C, which the majority of software is written in. In fact, you need to do this sometimes in software anyway, since some file formats for sounds and graphics (among other things) specify the endianness and other byte order issues for storing larger than 8-bit values. (The whole world is not like UNIX and they don't all treat files as streams of bytes.)
To convert the data, you write a cracking macro to swap the bytes. While it is trivial, I leave it as an exercise for the reader. A couple of other macros come in handy when dealing with binary data larger than 8 bits, such as macros to get the high order byte and low byte from a 16-bit value, and others for doing various manipulations on 32-bit values. It should be noted, too, that some architectures do rather bizarre things with bit orders, other than just the byte order of larger values. These, however, a not a concern when porting x86 code to the PPC.
This is just another scrap of evidence in my argument that cheaper is not always better. Most of the time, cheaper is just cheap.
Let's face it. Love is just a Bill Gates wannabe, and he's sore that Caldera doesn't have the market share of Red Hat. It's clear to me that he wants to "embrace and extend" Linux so that folks who use Caldera will be incompatible with other distros. He doesn't want to give those changes back to the community because he wants to keep them proprietary to Caldera.
His calling some unspecified license proprietary because it requires changes to be released if those changes are distributed is totally bogus. That's the most non-proprietary thing I can think of.
He's just ticked that Linux and the GNU software aren't under a BSD-style license that allows him to make his own proprietary changes and keep 'em that way.
Ah yes, but here's the deal. Perhaps I misspoke above. What I meant was the First Amendment of the Constitution is meant to prevent religious persecution more than anything else. I know the Puritans were NOT behind it, but you can't tell me that Madison (the primary author of the Bill of Rights) wanted everyone to be forced into practicing the same, state-sanctioned religion. He wanted to avoid situations like the wars of religion in England and France. (NOTE: The previous two sentences are my interpretations of historical facts and are not to be taken as historical facts in themselves. This disclaimer appears for the intelligence-impaired.) Madison is quite a fascinating historical figure.
The Freedom of Assembly and of the Press are also tacked on because they are vaguely related. Madison also greatly opposed the Alien and Sedition acts under President Adams.
Don't talk to me about historical misinformation. What you learned in public school in the U.S. is all bullshit and lies anyway. If you want to learn anything, you have to read many different sources sift through the propaganda and figure it out for yourself. That is a task for which the current system of "miseducation" in the US does not prepare its students.
Without your free speech rights, your property rights are up for grabs and there's nothing you can say about it. There's a solid reason why the First Amendment is the FIRST amendment.
Yeah, its because the Puritans and others who came to "The New World" to escape religious persecution felt it was extremely important to keep the government out of the religion business. They saw the trouble that comes from having the Church and State be one with the religious wars in France and England.
THAT is why the First Amendment is the First Amendment.
There's a reason for the Second Amendment being the Second Amendment: because force of arms is the only way to guarantee the rights granted under the First Amendment.
Jeez. I could go on like this all day....
How right you are, Streetlawyer! When I saw what had been done to your previous post, it made me wish that I hadn't used all my moderator points yesterday.
The moderation system on Slashdot is often abused, in much the same way that a legal system was abused in the AOL Germany case at hand. Just because you say something that some Slashbot (I like that phrase) who happens to have moderator points disagrees with, you get moderated down. You are not moderated here for how well you frame your argument, nor for your persuasiveness, nor for any evidence that you might bring to support your argument. If you do not toe the party line, you are moderated down. This is, in fact, a form of censorship because many folks do not read Slashdot at a -1 threshold. So, beware and be warned, karma whore that you are, you will be moderated down for not speaking the gospel according to Slashdot. You will be censored. You will be silenced. It is a fact of posting on Slashdot.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do!
when is the last time either of these two made an impact on anything.
Umm, have you ever heard of Tang? That came straight out of NASA research. So, see, NASA has an impact on the world.
Steve Gilliard has a piece over at Net Slaves, called "Who watches the Guardians." It is about Esther D. and paints an unlovely portrait. I suggest you all read it before your boners get too hard for her.
I, for one, agree with Steve G. She's the last person I want running the ICANN. In fact, I want no one running it, 'cause you can't really trust anyone with that much power. Well, I might trust myself, but you probably wouldn't. :-)
Esther has too much money involved and she's too cozy with Technology CEOs to be trusted with this position. Just read her book, RELEASE 2.0, and you'll read what I'm talking about. It's just filled with all the names of all these companies and CEOs that she's involved in. She's also not a very technical person, and you get that from her book, not just 'casue Steve G. says so.
Ah, I see. I hadn't read it as carefully, but I had read it.
What I don't like about their "license" is that it is so confusing full of exceptions, definitions, etc. Compared to the language in the APSL, the GPL looks downright simple.
Have to admit that I like the APSL a bit better than the Sun Community Source License or whatever it is called. I still don't like (though I forgot to mention it before) that you have to register on the Apple site before you can get the Darwin code from them. I didn't notice anything in the license restricting someone else from posting a copy and allowing others to download it.
I'm a registered Apple Developer. I signed up for the ADC site as a student. I've lost my user id and password, but I still get the email newsletter every week. Maybe, I'll download the Darwin code and give it the once over.
So why don't the crackers and script kiddies band together and knock the UK off the 'Net?
Why not shut down the ISPs that are shutting down these sites?
Seriously, though, I was thinking just this morning that the Internet, because of its distributed nature and its international scope poses a very serious threat to territorial gov't as we know it. I was thinking of this specifically in terms of the US and the various States' attempts at taxing Internet sales. What happens when the transactions are interstate, even international? There's a real Constitutional crisis for the US buried in there and when your government is defacto unconstitutional anyway....
This case is another example where gov'ts are trying to impose law and order on something that is, by virtue of its very design, anarchic and chaotic. It just won't work. Politicians can criminalize and regulate all they want, but they won't stop the behavior, because those of us who really understand the nuts and bolts of how this thing works will be able to get around their silly little attempts at control. WE DO HAVE THE POWER over this technology. THEY may have guns, but their armies now depend on our technology and on technologies that we can subvert, take over, and control. We can use their tech (as well as our own) against them. This is precisely why politicians prefer unarmed peasants. Trouble is, everything is a weapon today.
"We cannot let this be covered up. If NetBenefit win this case, the precedent will be set that any ISP can remove an entire website because it might contain something defamatory some time in the future. That means they can close down any website at all. It is a violent attack on free speech."
Fact is, ISPs have that authority now. As the owners of the equipment used to put your website up, they have the right to refuse any content that they deem inappropriate. This is not really censorship in the strictly legal sense because it is not the government that's doing the censoring. An ISP and any other private business basically has the right to say, "I don't like your politics/lifestyle/your hair/whatever, so I'm not doing business with you." I certainly would not host web sites for Neo-Nazis, as an example. It's a free market (in theory) so you can refuse to do business with some people if you choose. Now, your local/national gov't may disagree, as would the FTC in the US, but really there isn't a hell of a lot anyone can do about it. I'm sure an ISP could always come up with some reason or another that they can't host one site or another.
Think about it. If you own the hardware that the site resides on, and you lease the lines from the telco/whoever to pump the data out, then you can shut any site down you want. You could even flip a power switch and shut them all down. I'm not saying this is good policy on the part of an ISP, but it's not censorship and it's certainly within the ISP's right considering it's their equipment and you must agree to their policies in order to use it. You can always go somewhere else if you don't like how one ISP does business.
In this specific case, yeah, they might have overreacted. I'd just get a new ISP (preferably outside of UK) and forget about it. If you get an ISP in a country where ISPs aren't responsible for what their customers post and that is beyond the reach of British law, then you won't have to worry about your ISP being sued, just yourselves. :-)
If you want to fight back. Slap the Pink Paper with a restraint of trade/unfair competition type lawsuit if you have such a thing in the UK. This is an obvious attempt to put you out of business using strongarm tactics and would probably qualify as a restraint of trade in the US. Unless the article in question has something to do with the Pink Paper, then they have no business threatening to sue you if you publish something defamatory. Why would they threaten to sue on behalf of a third party if they didn't want to put you out of business?
Anyway, if you want real legal advice, cough up the bucks and hire a solicitor. Sounds to me like your enterprise has gotten important enough to need one. If you can't afford a solicitor, then too bad. Maybe you could get the Pink Paper to buy your outfit, then hire a solicitor, say they screwed you, and sue to get your business back. :-)
You might want to read that license again.
Yes, Apple "grants" you the "right" to distribute your modifications or more specifically to "deploy" modified code. But, they retain the right to use, to modify, and to distribute your modifications as they see fit without royalty. In other words, they can take your changes, make one or two changes, incorporate their hacked up version of your code into commercial OSX without folding that code back into Darwin.
You don't have full rights to any code that you've written.
Thanks to the BSD license, they can get away with this. If their code were based on the Linux kernel rather than Mach and BSD, they couldn't. That's why this puppy's userland is based on FreeBSD rather MkLinux/GNU.
That said, this sounds like a really cool project. I've always been impressed with Mach and microkernels in general. I'd like to get a BSD-lites system up and running or maybe jump in with the HURD.
It might be cool if we could steal the thread model from Mach and somehow make it fit in Linux. Then, we'd have a truly lightweight thread model instead of one based on the Unix process model.
I agree pretty much with everything the above poster said, except that there will be a fee if you intend to distribute your Qt application for money. Qt is only free if you are. If you charge money for a product developed with Qt, then you need to pay the license fee to Troll Tech. This page has all the details.
Looking at today's bottom line for a site valuation just doesn't make sense.
Neither does looking at "future, potential profit" which may never materialize. Let's face it: is Amazon going to be in business in ten years? Will they be making a profit, then? Do you have anyway of knowing? If you're looking to buy a business, is that any way to spend your money? You might as well plunk all that cash down on a roulette wheel!
The only sane way to judge a company's value is to look at what they're doing now and what their plans are for the future. When you have an outfit like Amazon that's losing money now and their plan for the future isn't much different from what they're doing now, you have to wonder. I certainly wouldn't put my money in them, not for the long haul. (Heh. A little day trading with the extra cash is a bit exhilarating now and then.)
I wouldn't give this person $20K for their site, but then, I don't know anything about their site other than what they've so far revealed.
And it's a neat system, so it would be a great pity if it "died."
YOU still have the rules, don't you? You still have the dice? You still have imagination? Then, how can the game die? So, there won't be commercially produced supplements, you can write your own.
Nanotech poses an interesting problem to your argument, though. We will almost be required to create nanotech devices capable of reproducing themselves, since building such machines ourselves is quite difficult. (There was an article posted on here roughly a year ago about someone using molecules to transport other molecules down neural fibers, but I'm too lazy to look up the reference and find it here.) The big breakthrough in nanotech is actually assembling the damned things, so once we've accomplished that we will have "assembler" nanobots which exist only to assemble other nanobots.
There is nothing at that point to stop someone from programming an assembler to make malicious nanobots. For one possible look into such a future, I highly recommend Neal Stephenson's novel, THE DIAMOND AGE.
Once these machines can reproduce themselves, they no longer "need" us.
Anyway, I believe that the title of the original article was a bit disingenuous since the futur doesn't "need" us. The Earth doesn't need us. It existed just fine for a few hundred million (a few billion?) years without us. It will get along just fine after we're gone, until the sun goes Red Giant, anyway.
They said LINUX has 29% of all public web servers, not Apache.
Technically, we're taxed on Internet purchases already in Kentucky, USA. Our state has a "use tax" which applies to all goods and services bought for use in Kentucky on which sales tax was not paid. So you order something online and don't pay sales tax, you owe the Kentucky Revenue Cabinet 6% of the purchase price when you file your state income tax. Same thing if you order from a catalog. Technically, if you take a trip to New Hampshire, buy something in New Hampshire and bring it back to your home in KY, you still need to pay the use tax because NH doesn't have a state sales tax. I imagine many other states have such a tax on the books.
I pay this silly tax when I file my taxes because I don't want to be prosecuted for tax evasion if I'm every audited. You see they can seize your credit card and bank records in an audit, so the numbers won't lie on where you've spent your dough.
We don't need more taxation in the United States. We need less taxation and less regulation of commerce. Let's face it, if we let politicians continue to tax everything like mad, we'll end up like Europe, with 4 and 5 taxes levied on every purchase, gov't telling business how to operate, reduced individual purchasing power, and double digit unemployment.
People who are trying to decide whether to rely on Linux or BSD should note that the two commercial BSD-based companies are unifying at the same time that the Linux market is being divided up into smaller and smaller fragments. It seems like every few weeks another company announces a Linux distro. I just read that Motorola is producing their own. Now don't get me wrong, I really wish that Linux wasn't so fragmented. In fact, I would like to go back to the good old days when Slackware had a 90% market share ;-)
We're not getting you wrong, Mr. Bruce. It's painfully obvious that you don't like the vitality of the competition to BSD from GNU/Linux.
Why is it that everyone just assumes "market fragmentation" is bad? Why do they assume that GNU/Linux is going to follow the same old rules that the UNIX marketplace followed in the late '80s?
Yeah, the UNIX market is fragmented with *BSD, SysV, AIX, IRIX, HP-UX, GNU/Linux, etc. ad infinitum.
And yeah, the GNU/Linux market is fragmented, but so what? When 99% of your software will compile and run on your system regardless of the distro that you use, what does it matter? So PHBs get confused about which distro is "better," so what? PHBs shouldn't be deciding which distro to buy/download, the techies ought to be making those decisions. (Yeah, I know, most corporations don't work that way, neither does the one that currently has me enslaved.) Where is the evidence that a fragmented market is bad? I always thought the mantra was "choice [in the marketplace] is good for consumers?" If not, then why is everyone beating up on Microsoft?
So, when you're consumer/choice oriented you call it "competition." When you're a big company whose competing in that marketplace of choice, you call it "market fragmentation."
Of course, I can't fault Mr. Bruce for wishing Slackware had a 90% market share.