What the fuck is this different than the subject that showed up two days ago (RE:Censorware...)??? Ya'll complain when someone censors your account for no apparent reason, threating to take action and use the law, but when you want to do this, its perfectly legitimate.
You're absolutely right. There's nothing illegitimate about my using censorware to filter out some piece of the Internet. Though most people I know wouldn't use the stuff, since the particular sort of filtering it does seems unnecessary and amusingly inept.
This is no different than any other self-regulation. Either ya allow the censorware morons out there censor any page with a naughty wordy-word or ya don't censor anyone that spams you. They are both opt-in agreements.
It's different for those people who have not opted in. If I am an ISP user and my ISP is performing some sort of filtering with which I disagree, why, I can change ISP's. If I am a 13-year-old trying to get information at a library and I have no other access to the Internet, I have not opted into whatever inept filtering scheme is used, and yet I am stuck with its effects.
This is more of a problem with censorware, because it often blocks useful information people are actively trying to get, and rarely a problem with spam email, since it is unsolicited.
No one has to be apart of that arrangement if they do not wish to be.
This is clearly untrue in the cases cited.
I am opposed to both spam and censorship, but unless we pass laws, then there is no way to deal with both...
There's no need to pass laws to prevent either spam or censorship. To prevent spam, clearly the RBL works nicely. One good way to prevent censorship is to keep the government from passing laws requiring it in the first place.
...oh yeah, I forgot, geeks don't get involved with politics unless cryptography is involved.
Cryptography is another case where there would be no problem if government hadn't gotten involved in the first place.;)
Clearly this is a no-brainer. This is what MAPS exists for. NSI not only refuses to change their policy on spam, they are threatening MAPS with what will happen if it does its job for its subscribers.
Black hole them, MAPS. I'm sure if you are worried about legal fees, plenty of us will be glad to chip in for your defense. Set up a web page for that now if you haven't already.
Most of the comments I see here are completely juvenile. "It's not FAIR that George Lucas not just give away the movie he spent millions of dollars making! He is a jerk! He should just give it to me!"
Hehe. And here you are, whining, "It's not FAIR that warez puppies can rip movies. It's THEFT. It's George Lucas' decision whether the movie will be distributed on the internet [sic]."
Actually, if it were George Lucas' decision, the movie wouldn't be getting distributed on the Internet. I guess we'll all have to live with that.;)
I'm not an entertainment ripper myself; I don't like the (admittedly unlikely) downside of possibly getting caught by lawyers with an axe to grind. But I'm not sure there is any significant ethical content to the assertion that our bloated intellectual property system deserves a groundswell of support.
The problem with the various provisions of the amendment is that they take us right back to where we started. A centralized body with no incentive to allow free exchange of ideas decides whether US citizens can export any given piece of encryption software.
Clearly they're not doing this to prevent strong encryption from exiting the US, since it exists in quite usable forms elsewhere. They're doing it to advance an agenda that links privacy with illegality.
It's worth remembering that even representative governments are not reliable defenders of civil liberties....
I continue to be impressed with the degree to which people feel compelled to complain about Red Hat. Yes, they're making money off the IPO (I mean really, that's what IPO's do). No, they are not especially making money off providing developers allocations of their stock. If they didn't use those allocations, institutions and random investors would eat them up and they would make exactly the same amount of money. The entire IPO is going to be sold.
Did it make sense to offer various people in the community free shares? Probably, since they sell open source software and those people are involved with development. Did they do a perfect job of selecting all the developers they should have? Probably not. I doubt they had time to develop dossiers on everyone they wanted to send an email to. Was it spam? Only in the sense that someone who sent a voucher for $1,000 to 1,000 people would be sending out spam. It's found money, people. If you can open an account with eTrade and want to, do it; otherwise, dismiss the whole thing out of hand. Either way, there's no call to be angry.
Did I get the offer? No. Am I paid in any way by Red Hat? No. But it doesn't seem especially reasonable to yell at them for trying to spread the wealth a bit. Their privilege to offer, yours to decline.
This article initially impressed me as conservative claptrap, yearning for a day when the traditional media was less liberal and more representative. The hapless Matthew Priestley guises this fundamental complaint in a haphazard analysis of Slashdot.
Slashdot is anything but traditional--something that should be apparent to everyone reading it. Making comparisons between the New York Times and Slashdot turn Priestley's criticisms to non sequtors. Slashdot is not the New York Times. It does not suffer from "rogue" reporters in the same sense. Further, it does not claim to be a heterogenous group. Slashdot's homogeniality is emblazoned for all to see on the top of the page, "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters."
I have to suspect that your response has more to do with the fact that the other example Priestly cited happened to be a conservative news filter site.
Since both/. and the New York Times are news sites, it's perfectly legitimate to compare them. And the bias in the New York Times, like that in the Wall Street Journal or any of the major media, is unlikely to be primarily due to rogue reporters. It's clearly systematic. If one is not willing to see that in the cases where the systematic bias favors one's personal political views, it's unfortunate.
I'm also not clear that your contrast between "liberal" and "representative" media is a useful one. It hardly seems more "liberal" to be willing to slant the news in order to push your personal agenda, which is certainly a very prevalent problem in the mainstream media. I would love to see more "liberal" (i.e., more free) mainstream media. I hardly think it matters if the media is more "representative", a word that, in context, seems to imply that we will get better news if we get it slanted by the viewpoint we ask for. News should represent reality, not the readership, if it's going to be useful to that self-same readership.
Red Hat isn't Microsoft. LinuxCare isn't Microsoft. The XFree project isn't Microsoft. SuSE isn't Microsoft. Debian GNU/Linux isn't Microsoft. Heck, if Microsoft GPL'ed their code, they wouldn't be Microsoft.;)
Government officials, and in particular, law-enforcement officials, are not the people you want to turn to in order to preserve personal freedoms. Such freedoms tend to be an inconvenience to these people.
Freedoms are preserved by institutions that help prevent their encroachment. The Internet can certainly be such an institution. Democratic government might not be such an institution, in that anyone can vote to have their own freedom or someone else's impaired.
Well, thank goodness Janet Reno is out there to keep us from hurting ourselves. After all, freedom doesn't mean that you can just do anything you want to. Uh, does it...?:)
Oops. My bad. Apparently (if the author is correct) it could be applied to anybody who doesn't have advanced degrees under various circumstances, whether in or out of California. Pretty interesting. The author is right though, the culture of start-ups tends to favor people not really being that worried about overtime.
If you look carefully, professional people and executives are still exempt; they just need to be making twice minimum wage. So it's really not all that meaningful; Silicon valley firms tend to be heavy on professional and executive and light on clerical anyway....
Erm, my heart bleeds for all the poor flame artists who will find it marginally harder to throw personal insults at someone because they disagree with his politics. Um, not.;)
I'd have to say that buying domains instead of sending threatening letters is a definite improvement.
I expect to enjoy the Phantom Menace as just another Star Wars movie. I'm not worried about the reviews or the awards; in particular, I will see an award-winning film if I want to have a particular sort of predictable experience. There's variety there but it's a very constrained sort of variety.
Loved The Matrix, it had some good depth as well as being an enjoyable story. I'm sure I'll have fun at The Phantom Menace.
Bollocks. I've already spent many thousands of dollars attaining my degree, and have no problem writing free software. It's the prinicipal and spirit of the GPL that matters, in the same vein as volunteer work to benefit the community. Otherwise you may as well work for Microslut.
You're missing the point I think. People will spend thousands of dollars to attain a degree so that they can make a nice high return on investment. Having done so, will they write free software? Quite possibly. But people who can't afford to spend the money or don't especially want to make the money coding are an extremely valuable source of free software coding talent, and with mandatory certification we can simply write them off.
Certification is probably not a great idea, especially as regards open source. Why should someone have to pay money to be certified to write free software? That's what it comes down to.
If quality control is what you're after, open, peer-reviewed source does the job a lot more efficiently.
Jon, very thought provoking stuff. Enjoyed it immensely.
But I'm particularly amused by the number of people who apparently have not bothered to filter Jon's articles out just because of the joy they get flaming him. Flames are noise, people. Please get the message. Anyone can flame anything, from ham sandwiches to the Taj Mahal. Being infantile is not hard. It's a lot more difficult to deal constructively with people and situations.
My first reaction is that turning Java standards over to the development community will do more to standardize it than ISO certification could. Let it run loose in public for a while then let ISO come along later and rubber-stamp the de facto standard.
I'm not sure it's even necessary to GPL Sun's code. But I agree, turning "Java the Standard" over to the community makes a lot of sense.
Microsoft applied pressure behind the scenes and got ISO to change the rules for PAS submitters so that once the technology had been submitted and approved, all control would be handed over to the ISO subcommittee. Sun, of course, has said from the beginning that they would always maintain control of Java(TM) and would vigorously defend it against all who would try to wrest control from them. As indeed they have.
I'm no fan of Microsoft, but it seems to me that all they had to do in order to kill this deal is to require Sun to give up their total control of Java. So then, the question would be, is Java an international standard or Sun's private bailwick? If the former, Sun does have to give up control. If the latter, Java is not a standard at all.
Sun needs to understand the difference between 'open' and 'closed.' I think they're still having trouble with this. Between the overzealous activity of their legal staff in pursuing possible trademark infringements, their tendency to write somewhat draconian license documents, their semi-open "open source" licensing and this latest business with ISO, it seems to me that Sun just doesn't "get it." Surely they can get past their "control" issues if they're really interested in promulgating Java.
In this case, it looks like even MS was suspicious of how poorly Linux fared. My guess is that MS knows that even a well-tuned Linux will lose this particular test, otherwise they wouldn't have hired Mindcraft to run it in the first place.
That's very easy to say, particularly from your anonymous vantage point. I don't see any reason to suppose, when you add up all the positive tweaks that were done to NT and the negative tweaks that were done to Linux, that the result has any connection with reality.
If MS really thought Linux would lose a fair test, we'd now be seeing the test results with a detailed, reproducible description of what was done and it would clearly indicate NT the victor, comparing apples to apples.
Instead, we have an extremely flawed study which Microsoft paid for, which looks to exhibit systematic bias. Coincidence? Could be.;)
It bothers me a bit that a lot of people who have contributed code to the Linux kernel, or to the nuts and bolts that makes a Linux operating system work (silly little things like command line utilities, compilers, windowing systems) don't get beans. It's almost like the distribution and support is valued over writing code.
While I understand the sentiment, you're missing a point and it's a very important point. RH makes money from Linux because they try to. Those people contributing all that work "for free" may or may not be trying to make money. But that better not be their primary motivation, because if they don't enjoy what they do for its own sake, the quality is going to go down.
And a lot of them are making money. They put their not-insignificant free software work on their resumes, and they use it to get hired into full-time jobs that pay the rent. Some of them are even working for people like Red Hat, SuSE and Cygnus. So believe me, their work is appreciated, and the only reason they aren't paid directly for it is that they are doing their job, which is to work on stuff they enjoy working on....;)
It wouldn't take an expensive lawyer to defend linux.de; in fact, if they hadn't backed down, M$ probably wouldn't have the balls to sue anyway--they'd lose.
Actually, no, MS wouldn't lose. This is in fact trademark infringment. Also, that company in Michigan is using the trademark in a different field...
Parody is a form of protected speech, so MS have no legal leg to stand on. By the way, the people who are trademarking the phrase put out a Linux distribution---they posted on this thread in fact. So they are not using the trademark in a different field; the field is operating systems distributions....;)
And legal issues are sort of irrelevant. Post the slogan to your heart's content and watch MS look extremely foolish trying to send people legal threats, which they then post to their web pages....;)
This is silly. Law notwithstanding, nobody owns the sentence, "Where do you want to go tomorrow?" Certainly it's been in use commonly on the net for well over a year in reference to Linux, and Microsoft intimidation is sort of irrelevant.;)
Slashdot Mirror
clifyt wrote: You're absolutely right. There's nothing illegitimate about my using censorware to filter out some piece of the Internet. Though most people I know wouldn't use the stuff, since the particular sort of filtering it does seems unnecessary and amusingly inept. It's different for those people who have not opted in. If I am an ISP user and my ISP is performing some sort of filtering with which I disagree, why, I can change ISP's. If I am a 13-year-old trying to get information at a library and I have no other access to the Internet, I have not opted into whatever inept filtering scheme is used, and yet I am stuck with its effects.
This is more of a problem with censorware, because it often blocks useful information people are actively trying to get, and rarely a problem with spam email, since it is unsolicited.
This is clearly untrue in the cases cited. There's no need to pass laws to prevent either spam or censorship. To prevent spam, clearly the RBL works nicely. One good way to prevent censorship is to keep the government from passing laws requiring it in the first place. Cryptography is another case where there would be no problem if government hadn't gotten involved in the first place.Clearly this is a no-brainer. This is what MAPS exists for. NSI not only refuses to change their policy on spam, they are threatening MAPS with what will happen if it does its job for its subscribers.
Black hole them, MAPS. I'm sure if you are worried about legal fees, plenty of us will be glad to chip in for your defense. Set up a web page for that now if you haven't already.
An anonymous user wrote: Hehe. And here you are, whining, "It's not FAIR that warez puppies can rip movies. It's THEFT. It's George Lucas' decision whether the movie will be distributed on the internet [sic]."
Actually, if it were George Lucas' decision, the movie wouldn't be getting distributed on the Internet. I guess we'll all have to live with that. ;)
I'm not an entertainment ripper myself; I don't like the (admittedly unlikely) downside of possibly getting caught by lawyers with an axe to grind. But I'm not sure there is any significant ethical content to the assertion that our bloated intellectual property system deserves a groundswell of support.
bugbear 3001 wrote: 111?
I don't understand.
The problem with the various provisions of the amendment is that they take us right back to where we started. A centralized body with no incentive to allow free exchange of ideas decides whether US citizens can export any given piece of encryption software.
Clearly they're not doing this to prevent strong encryption from exiting the US, since it exists in quite usable forms elsewhere. They're doing it to advance an agenda that links privacy with illegality.
It's worth remembering that even representative governments are not reliable defenders of civil liberties....
I continue to be impressed with the degree to which people feel compelled to complain about Red Hat. Yes, they're making money off the IPO (I mean really, that's what IPO's do). No, they are not especially making money off providing developers allocations of their stock. If they didn't use those allocations, institutions and random investors would eat them up and they would make exactly the same amount of money. The entire IPO is going to be sold.
Did it make sense to offer various people in the community free shares? Probably, since they sell open source software and those people are involved with development. Did they do a perfect job of selecting all the developers they should have? Probably not. I doubt they had time to develop dossiers on everyone they wanted to send an email to. Was it spam? Only in the sense that someone who sent a voucher for $1,000 to 1,000 people would be sending out spam. It's found money, people. If you can open an account with eTrade and want to, do it; otherwise, dismiss the whole thing out of hand. Either way, there's no call to be angry.
Did I get the offer? No. Am I paid in any way by Red Hat? No. But it doesn't seem especially reasonable to yell at them for trying to spread the wealth a bit. Their privilege to offer, yours to decline.
Rob Levin
Since both /. and the New York Times are news sites, it's perfectly legitimate to compare them. And the bias in the New York Times, like that in the Wall Street Journal or any of the major media, is unlikely to be primarily due to rogue reporters. It's clearly systematic. If one is not willing to see that in the cases where the systematic bias favors one's personal political views, it's unfortunate.
I'm also not clear that your contrast between "liberal" and "representative" media is a useful one. It hardly seems more "liberal" to be willing to slant the news in order to push your personal agenda, which is certainly a very prevalent problem in the mainstream media. I would love to see more "liberal" (i.e., more free) mainstream media. I hardly think it matters if the media is more "representative", a word that, in context, seems to imply that we will get better news if we get it slanted by the viewpoint we ask for. News should represent reality, not the readership, if it's going to be useful to that self-same readership.
Red Hat isn't Microsoft. LinuxCare isn't Microsoft. The XFree project isn't Microsoft. SuSE isn't Microsoft. Debian GNU/Linux isn't Microsoft. Heck, if Microsoft GPL'ed their code, they wouldn't be Microsoft.
Let's get on with it, folks. :)
Government officials, and in particular, law-enforcement officials, are not the people you want to turn to in order to preserve personal freedoms. Such freedoms tend to be an inconvenience to these people.
Freedoms are preserved by institutions that help prevent their encroachment. The Internet can certainly be such an institution. Democratic government might not be such an institution, in that anyone can vote to have their own freedom or someone else's impaired.
Well, thank goodness Janet Reno is out there to keep us from hurting ourselves. After all, freedom doesn't mean that you can just do anything you want to. Uh, does it...?
Oops. My bad. Apparently (if the author is correct) it could be applied to anybody who doesn't have advanced degrees under various circumstances, whether in or out of California. Pretty interesting. The author is right though, the culture of start-ups tends to favor people not really being that worried about overtime.
If you look carefully, professional people and executives are still exempt; they just need to be making twice minimum wage. So it's really not all that meaningful; Silicon valley firms tend to be heavy on professional and executive and light on clerical anyway....
Erm, my heart bleeds for all the poor flame artists who will find it marginally harder to throw personal insults at someone because they disagree with his politics. Um, not.
I'd have to say that buying domains instead of sending threatening letters is a definite improvement.
I expect to enjoy the Phantom Menace as just another Star Wars movie. I'm not worried about the reviews or the awards; in particular, I will see an award-winning film if I want to have a particular sort of predictable experience. There's variety there but it's a very constrained sort of variety.
Loved The Matrix, it had some good depth as well as being an enjoyable story. I'm sure I'll have fun at The Phantom Menace.
Assistant Madman wrote: You're missing the point I think. People will spend thousands of dollars to attain a degree so that they can make a nice high return on investment. Having done so, will they write free software? Quite possibly. But people who can't afford to spend the money or don't especially want to make the money coding are an extremely valuable source of free software coding talent, and with mandatory certification we can simply write them off.
Certification is probably not a great idea, especially as regards open source. Why should someone have to pay money to be certified to write free software? That's what it comes down to.
If quality control is what you're after, open, peer-reviewed source does the job a lot more efficiently.
Jon, very thought provoking stuff. Enjoyed it immensely.
But I'm particularly amused by the number of people who apparently have not bothered to filter Jon's articles out just because of the joy they get flaming him. Flames are noise, people. Please get the message. Anyone can flame anything, from ham sandwiches to the Taj Mahal. Being infantile is not hard. It's a lot more difficult to deal constructively with people and situations.
DonkPunch wrote: I'm not sure it's even necessary to GPL Sun's code. But I agree, turning "Java the Standard" over to the community makes a lot of sense.
Dawn Keyhotie wrote: I'm no fan of Microsoft, but it seems to me that all they had to do in order to kill this deal is to require Sun to give up their total control of Java. So then, the question would be, is Java an international standard or Sun's private bailwick? If the former, Sun does have to give up control. If the latter, Java is not a standard at all.
Sun needs to understand the difference between 'open' and 'closed.' I think they're still having trouble with this. Between the overzealous activity of their legal staff in pursuing possible trademark infringements, their tendency to write somewhat draconian license documents, their semi-open "open source" licensing and this latest business with ISO, it seems to me that Sun just doesn't "get it." Surely they can get past their "control" issues if they're really interested in promulgating Java.
An anonymous user wrote: That's very easy to say, particularly from your anonymous vantage point. I don't see any reason to suppose, when you add up all the positive tweaks that were done to NT and the negative tweaks that were done to Linux, that the result has any connection with reality.
If MS really thought Linux would lose a fair test, we'd now be seeing the test results with a detailed, reproducible description of what was done and it would clearly indicate NT the victor, comparing apples to apples.
Instead, we have an extremely flawed study which Microsoft paid for, which looks to exhibit systematic bias. Coincidence? Could be. ;)
substrate wrote: While I understand the sentiment, you're missing a point and it's a very important point. RH makes money from Linux because they try to. Those people contributing all that work "for free" may or may not be trying to make money. But that better not be their primary motivation, because if they don't enjoy what they do for its own sake, the quality is going to go down.
And a lot of them are making money. They put their not-insignificant free software work on their resumes, and they use it to get hired into full-time jobs that pay the rent. Some of them are even working for people like Red Hat, SuSE and Cygnus. So believe me, their work is appreciated, and the only reason they aren't paid directly for it is that they are doing their job, which is to work on stuff they enjoy working on.... ;)
It's interesting watching dinosaurs fight.
spectrecjr wrote: Parody is a form of protected speech, so MS have no legal leg to stand on. By the way, the people who are trademarking the phrase put out a Linux distribution---they posted on this thread in fact. So they are not using the trademark in a different field; the field is operating systems distributions....
And legal issues are sort of irrelevant. Post the slogan to your heart's content and watch MS look extremely foolish trying to send people legal threats, which they then post to their web pages.... ;)
This is silly. Law notwithstanding, nobody owns the sentence, "Where do you want to go tomorrow?" Certainly it's been in use commonly on the net for well over a year in reference to Linux, and Microsoft intimidation is sort of irrelevant.
Just use the slogan. Don't worry about it. ;)