BSD, generally speaking, is a gift to the world. BSD makes the creation of all software, including GPL software, easier. BSD also 'occupies the field' so that a profit-oriented developer cannot assert copyright over subject matter already developed by BSD developers.
GPL is a gift to the user. However, GPL is a bargain between developers: You can use my stuff if the world can use your stuff. The GPL is oriented toward creating a community of GPL developers who can create useful code that all can share and maintain.
It seems absurd to me that a GPL advocate would flame a BSD advocate. That's like flaming Santa Claus. It also seems absurd that a BSD advocate would flame a GPL advocate. That's like flaming Mahatma Gandhi.
Why should Mahatma Gandhi and Santa Claus fight it out while the Evil Empire looks on menacingly?
Murder is a relatively standard social taboo that applies to both programmers and "nothing hounds who never wrote a line of code." It is a strongly disfavored response even when the victim "hound[s] someone through the courts, [****]'s his best friend, and tr[ies] to deny him access to his kids by moving them to [R]ussia."
The woman whom you state was "only alive because it would be illegal to kill" her, left behind devastated kids and family. That alone is a good reason for the taboo. However, another reason for the taboo against murder is to discourage people (like Nina's family) from seeking vengeance against those who kill people close to them. Society can unravel very quickly should things like that happen.
As a programmer, you should realize that you (and Hans) represent a VERY high level abstraction supported by a whole lot of people working cooperatively together to provide you with all the necessaries that enable you to sit at your monitor and type. We all need the social norms and taboos that foster that cooperative effort. Can't you see the irony in your "raw male" argument? Hans did the crime. Hans should do the time. The important taboo against murder should be enforced.
As an aside, I do not think that you are being rigorously honest with yourself when you say that Hans "just let it off the leash for a few minutes." Do your really believe that he didn't think, obsess, and dwell on about killing his wife before he actually did it? Come on. He stoked his rage, stoked it some more, then acted on it. This is Murder 1, not Murder 2.
Your intent to support Hans is noble. A healthy support network around him would be a good thing. Just abandon the justification/explanation nonsense. It won't help Hans reintegrate into society and it won't help Society.
I've been thinking along similar lines and I'm starting to think that VIACOM should be entitled to play around with the data. After all, that data collection was amassed in part because of VIACOM's product. Why should Google be the only one that gets to mine the data?
The creation and release of good public domain material will keep the internet open. U.S. state and local governments are opening up to the internet at an ever increasing rate, for example and sites like archive.org are absolutely awesome. I don't think that the Sonys and the VIACOMs of the world can hobble the internet. They can deprive it of content owned by them, but who cares about that content--it's generally just pop trash, same with the Hollywood movies.
Expend your own time and creative energy (lots of it) to make a wonderful valuable product--then put it on the internet and give it to me for free! I'll appreciate it!
Thank you for the insane comment. If you have a firearm, the jack-booted thugs will have a machine gun. If you have a machine gun, the jack-booted thugs will have a grenade launcher. If you have a grenade launcher, the jack-booted thugs will call in an airstrike.
While you can "challenge" the jack-booted thugs with your puny little firearm, you won't be able to stop them.
It isn't your little gun, dummy, that protects you--it's the respect that we citizens give the Constitution. When that's gone, your puny little gun will be gone too. . .
The States probably won't fold. They can't just walk away from collecting taxes. They have a duty to administer the tax laws equally. To just let one business walk would be to openly invite claims of unequal administration. That would be a bad thing. The cavalier nature of the question does not invite further response.
Better communications has the wonderful potential of empowering better command and control. It also has the awful potential of magnifying command mistakes.
Let's hope that the interfering general's own commanding general had the opportunity to review the log of the interfering general's micromanagement--and then chewed that general's *** inside out. That's a pretty unrealistic hope, though . . .
Occupation of a conquered country is usually a job for second-line troops. I suspect that using American first-line troops as an occupation force simply wastes them and blunts their effectiveness.
What do we get out of Iraq? We're not plundering and Iraq is not necessary to our self-defense. Why are we there? Is it simply about giving jobs to Halliburton? Why are we wasting such extremely expensive high-tech troops and weapons? The only stable peace that will keep Iraq from tearing itself apart is a peace that is based on inexpensive relatively low-tech tools that the Iraquis can use to police themselves.
Man, you freakin' me out! You say: " . . . even if the greater good won out through a horrible perversion of due process." Do you really mean to imply that a disconnect between the "greater good" and "due process" is a desirable thing?
Looks to me like the jurors were smart and worthy of the public's trust. There was TONS of evidence presented to convince a REASONABLE person beyond a REASONABLE doubt that the man killed his wife.
Comcast is ATT. Remember what ATT did when it had the telephone monopoly? They extracted maximum dollars from YOU!
Support local providers. Support the establishment of local providers. Support municipal cable providers, especially!!!
In the long run, we'll all be better off.
If artificial images cannot be distinguished from real images then it can be extremely difficult to prosecute child pornography crimes beyond a reasonable doubt unless the government can establish the provenance of the porn. That's a major prosecutorial burden.
So, law enforcement really wants to stop the real porn, but is roadblocked by the "phony" porn. However, if you make the "phony" porn as illegal as the real porn, then the prosecution problem goes away and the difficulties of prosecuting the real porn lessen.
So many people on this post are whining about the collateral damage to "innocent" traffickers in the "phony" child porn. Examine for a moment what those people are doing. Aren't they facilitating the marketing and distribution of "real" porn by stimulating demand? Remember, if you can't tell the two apart you never know if you're getting "real" or "phony." If you want to shut down (or lessen) the child porn industry, you must attack demand. Attacking phony child porn is a valid way to do that.
The idea that a person has a right to sexualized images of a child is absurd. The drafters of the U.S. Constitution wouldn't have ever bought into that and modern mainstream legal thought also abhors such a concept. In other words, the majority should have the right to legislate phony child porn if it so decides, and the minority who like such obscenity must simply adapt to the law. That's life in a republic.
Nah. Don't exclude countries because they can't or won't stop internet evildoers.
First:
Malware vulnerability is largly a function of the kind of standardization that Microsoft represents. In the future, the internet protocols will be standard, but the target systems will be less and less standard. It will be more and more difficult as the years and decades roll by for any kind of broad-spectrum attack to succeed.
Second:
This is sort of a survival of the fittest kind of idea. Computer security and law enforcement will evolve as they are tested. The more jerks that are confronted and defeated, the more effective and less costly the counter-responses will become.
Third:
I can imagine two complementary, but separate, networks: (1) the wild west net-neutral internet where anything goes; and (2) a polite non-neutral internet where everybody plays nice (and gets kicked if they don't). Right now, the one internet is pretty much the only game in town. It doesn't have to be that way. If it gets too dangerous, people will play elsewhere.
You be wrong.
If you not be telling the judge that he not be having the authority, then (in some but not all circumstances), you be waiving your objection.
The key is to speak softly and carry a really big stick.
If I had mod points to give, you would get them. Windows provides a standard and the market craves standards--especially when it comes to high end products with really long development cycles.
Developing for one standard operating system is a lot easier than developing for multiple operating systems.
People may not spend big bucks for an OS to run an expensive word processor, but they would spend the money to edit graphics and multimedia. I think that is the last frontier. Windows is over when you can use first class software to make movies/audio/photos in LINUX. Until then, all this LINUX RULES stuff is just BLAH, BLAH, BLAH . ...
P
Do you really think so?
I accept your time frame point, but I think that some products can only be refined so far (like wordprocessors and personal use spreadsheets/databases, for example). In the future people will be claiming novel ideas when in fact they are really just reinventing the wheel.
Yeah, think about seeding planets with custom-coded biomechanical stuff! Or . . . being able to build and control a structure bigger than universes so that we can perceive things on an infinitely larger scale!
Ahhhh . . . if we only can avoid extinction. . .
Sooner or later all software goes into the public domain--even Microsoft software and GPL licensed software.
All good software should be archived, so that future software vendors can be defeated when they assert that their functionally identical software deserves copyright protection.
So, be mellow. Archive software. Wait. Time will cure your problem. No need to get agitated and unduly spastic. Listen to the lawyer-man. Be cool. Comply with the terms of the copyrighted software you incorporate into your program. All is good. Nobody is trying to hurt you . ...
MediaDefender's computer trespass and DoS attacks were directed at the "BAD" BitTorrent providers. Had they hit their intended target, they would obviously have committed computer trespass and DoS offenses. Just because they hit the wrong target won't excuse them.
It's called transferred intent. In other words, if I mean to shoot and murder you and in the course of meaning to shoot you I shoot your brother instead, then my intent to shoot you will be transferred to my shooting of your brother. This is pretty basic (although criminals often don't get it).
From a legal perspective, I think that it is an absolutely wonderful idea to publish the best fully-free operating system that can be published, on a regular basis. Such publishing tells the world: This operating system is fully free--deal with it. Anybody who wants to claim an ownership interest in the asserted free code had better make their move before the appropriate statute of limitations expires or they will just have to accept the fact that the code is free. Not just the code in that free os, but the identical code contained in all open source operating systems.
As time goes by, all software goes into the public domain. Archived software in the public domain stands as a monument that can be used to attack future software developers who wrongfully claim intellectual property rights in property that has really gone into the public domain.
People in this thread have argued that this free OS somehow dilutes the chances of Linux reaching 'critical mass.' No amount of operational system elegance or stalinist-type thinking is going to get Linux to critical mass. Cool applications, and only cool applications, will get Linux to critical mass. I'm switching when I can use the Adobe tools (or a functional equivalent) to edit multimedia stuff on Linux. Others have happily switched already.
While I dislike the Stallmanites who attack intellectual property that others have created, I dearly love the Stallmanites who subvert the proprietary intellectual property of others by creating their own, better and free, intellectual property. Those free software people make this world more beautiful, and I thank them.
The judge can take your stuff if you do bad things. I suspect that MediaDefender has stuff that they don't want the judge to take. That's why they probably won't retaliate with a DoS attack.
But more interestingly, this kind of controversy is going to give the victim (and maybe the FBI/DOJ) an enormous, supergigundous, maximo-stupendous opportunity to discover every last little method that MediaDefender uses to do business. MediaDefender will probably not relish the exposure of its business practices.
Slashdot Mirror
BSD, generally speaking, is a gift to the world. BSD makes the creation of all software, including GPL software, easier. BSD also 'occupies the field' so that a profit-oriented developer cannot assert copyright over subject matter already developed by BSD developers.
GPL is a gift to the user. However, GPL is a bargain between developers: You can use my stuff if the world can use your stuff. The GPL is oriented toward creating a community of GPL developers who can create useful code that all can share and maintain.
It seems absurd to me that a GPL advocate would flame a BSD advocate. That's like flaming Santa Claus. It also seems absurd that a BSD advocate would flame a GPL advocate. That's like flaming Mahatma Gandhi.
Why should Mahatma Gandhi and Santa Claus fight it out while the Evil Empire looks on menacingly?
Murder is a relatively standard social taboo that applies to both programmers and "nothing hounds who never wrote a line of code." It is a strongly disfavored response even when the victim "hound[s] someone through the courts, [****]'s his best friend, and tr[ies] to deny him access to his kids by moving them to [R]ussia."
The woman whom you state was "only alive because it would be illegal to kill" her, left behind devastated kids and family. That alone is a good reason for the taboo. However, another reason for the taboo against murder is to discourage people (like Nina's family) from seeking vengeance against those who kill people close to them. Society can unravel very quickly should things like that happen.
As a programmer, you should realize that you (and Hans) represent a VERY high level abstraction supported by a whole lot of people working cooperatively together to provide you with all the necessaries that enable you to sit at your monitor and type. We all need the social norms and taboos that foster that cooperative effort. Can't you see the irony in your "raw male" argument? Hans did the crime. Hans should do the time. The important taboo against murder should be enforced.
As an aside, I do not think that you are being rigorously honest with yourself when you say that Hans "just let it off the leash for a few minutes." Do your really believe that he didn't think, obsess, and dwell on about killing his wife before he actually did it? Come on. He stoked his rage, stoked it some more, then acted on it. This is Murder 1, not Murder 2.
Your intent to support Hans is noble. A healthy support network around him would be a good thing. Just abandon the justification/explanation nonsense. It won't help Hans reintegrate into society and it won't help Society.
I've been thinking along similar lines and I'm starting to think that VIACOM should be entitled to play around with the data. After all, that data collection was amassed in part because of VIACOM's product. Why should Google be the only one that gets to mine the data?
The creation and release of good public domain material will keep the internet open. U.S. state and local governments are opening up to the internet at an ever increasing rate, for example and sites like archive.org are absolutely awesome. I don't think that the Sonys and the VIACOMs of the world can hobble the internet. They can deprive it of content owned by them, but who cares about that content--it's generally just pop trash, same with the Hollywood movies.
Expend your own time and creative energy (lots of it) to make a wonderful valuable product--then put it on the internet and give it to me for free! I'll appreciate it!
I'll bet VIACOM learns TONS from this data! Not for the lawsuit, of course, but for how to sell its products better. The GOOGLE data is just precious.
Thank you for the insane comment. If you have a firearm, the jack-booted thugs will have a machine gun. If you have a machine gun, the jack-booted thugs will have a grenade launcher. If you have a grenade launcher, the jack-booted thugs will call in an airstrike. While you can "challenge" the jack-booted thugs with your puny little firearm, you won't be able to stop them. It isn't your little gun, dummy, that protects you--it's the respect that we citizens give the Constitution. When that's gone, your puny little gun will be gone too. . .
The States probably won't fold. They can't just walk away from collecting taxes. They have a duty to administer the tax laws equally. To just let one business walk would be to openly invite claims of unequal administration. That would be a bad thing. The cavalier nature of the question does not invite further response.
Bang Bang Shoot 'em up! Yahoo! America!
Better communications has the wonderful potential of empowering better command and control. It also has the awful potential of magnifying command mistakes. Let's hope that the interfering general's own commanding general had the opportunity to review the log of the interfering general's micromanagement--and then chewed that general's *** inside out. That's a pretty unrealistic hope, though . . . Occupation of a conquered country is usually a job for second-line troops. I suspect that using American first-line troops as an occupation force simply wastes them and blunts their effectiveness. What do we get out of Iraq? We're not plundering and Iraq is not necessary to our self-defense. Why are we there? Is it simply about giving jobs to Halliburton? Why are we wasting such extremely expensive high-tech troops and weapons? The only stable peace that will keep Iraq from tearing itself apart is a peace that is based on inexpensive relatively low-tech tools that the Iraquis can use to police themselves.
Beam me up, Scotty!
Aw mon don be hipicrit. Yer poyntles vulgrisms er az awfel ez hiz badd speling. Melo owt.
Man, you freakin' me out! You say: " . . . even if the greater good won out through a horrible perversion of due process." Do you really mean to imply that a disconnect between the "greater good" and "due process" is a desirable thing? Looks to me like the jurors were smart and worthy of the public's trust. There was TONS of evidence presented to convince a REASONABLE person beyond a REASONABLE doubt that the man killed his wife.
Comcast is ATT. Remember what ATT did when it had the telephone monopoly? They extracted maximum dollars from YOU! Support local providers. Support the establishment of local providers. Support municipal cable providers, especially!!! In the long run, we'll all be better off.
If artificial images cannot be distinguished from real images then it can be extremely difficult to prosecute child pornography crimes beyond a reasonable doubt unless the government can establish the provenance of the porn. That's a major prosecutorial burden. So, law enforcement really wants to stop the real porn, but is roadblocked by the "phony" porn. However, if you make the "phony" porn as illegal as the real porn, then the prosecution problem goes away and the difficulties of prosecuting the real porn lessen. So many people on this post are whining about the collateral damage to "innocent" traffickers in the "phony" child porn. Examine for a moment what those people are doing. Aren't they facilitating the marketing and distribution of "real" porn by stimulating demand? Remember, if you can't tell the two apart you never know if you're getting "real" or "phony." If you want to shut down (or lessen) the child porn industry, you must attack demand. Attacking phony child porn is a valid way to do that. The idea that a person has a right to sexualized images of a child is absurd. The drafters of the U.S. Constitution wouldn't have ever bought into that and modern mainstream legal thought also abhors such a concept. In other words, the majority should have the right to legislate phony child porn if it so decides, and the minority who like such obscenity must simply adapt to the law. That's life in a republic.
Nah. Don't exclude countries because they can't or won't stop internet evildoers. First: Malware vulnerability is largly a function of the kind of standardization that Microsoft represents. In the future, the internet protocols will be standard, but the target systems will be less and less standard. It will be more and more difficult as the years and decades roll by for any kind of broad-spectrum attack to succeed. Second: This is sort of a survival of the fittest kind of idea. Computer security and law enforcement will evolve as they are tested. The more jerks that are confronted and defeated, the more effective and less costly the counter-responses will become. Third: I can imagine two complementary, but separate, networks: (1) the wild west net-neutral internet where anything goes; and (2) a polite non-neutral internet where everybody plays nice (and gets kicked if they don't). Right now, the one internet is pretty much the only game in town. It doesn't have to be that way. If it gets too dangerous, people will play elsewhere.
You be wrong. If you not be telling the judge that he not be having the authority, then (in some but not all circumstances), you be waiving your objection. The key is to speak softly and carry a really big stick.
If I had mod points to give, you would get them. Windows provides a standard and the market craves standards--especially when it comes to high end products with really long development cycles. Developing for one standard operating system is a lot easier than developing for multiple operating systems.
People may not spend big bucks for an OS to run an expensive word processor, but they would spend the money to edit graphics and multimedia. I think that is the last frontier. Windows is over when you can use first class software to make movies/audio/photos in LINUX. Until then, all this LINUX RULES stuff is just BLAH, BLAH, BLAH . . ..
P
This is insightful? Come on now! Microsoft is over? Come, let us engage together in GROUPTHINK and wish away all the troubles of the world!
Do you really think so? I accept your time frame point, but I think that some products can only be refined so far (like wordprocessors and personal use spreadsheets/databases, for example). In the future people will be claiming novel ideas when in fact they are really just reinventing the wheel.
Yeah, think about seeding planets with custom-coded biomechanical stuff! Or . . . being able to build and control a structure bigger than universes so that we can perceive things on an infinitely larger scale! Ahhhh . . . if we only can avoid extinction. . .
Sooner or later all software goes into the public domain--even Microsoft software and GPL licensed software. All good software should be archived, so that future software vendors can be defeated when they assert that their functionally identical software deserves copyright protection. So, be mellow. Archive software. Wait. Time will cure your problem. No need to get agitated and unduly spastic. Listen to the lawyer-man. Be cool. Comply with the terms of the copyrighted software you incorporate into your program. All is good. Nobody is trying to hurt you . . ..
Nobody has explained yet how Microsoft is behind all of this. How did Bill Gates cause THIS problem?
MediaDefender's computer trespass and DoS attacks were directed at the "BAD" BitTorrent providers. Had they hit their intended target, they would obviously have committed computer trespass and DoS offenses. Just because they hit the wrong target won't excuse them. It's called transferred intent. In other words, if I mean to shoot and murder you and in the course of meaning to shoot you I shoot your brother instead, then my intent to shoot you will be transferred to my shooting of your brother. This is pretty basic (although criminals often don't get it).
From a legal perspective, I think that it is an absolutely wonderful idea to publish the best fully-free operating system that can be published, on a regular basis. Such publishing tells the world: This operating system is fully free--deal with it. Anybody who wants to claim an ownership interest in the asserted free code had better make their move before the appropriate statute of limitations expires or they will just have to accept the fact that the code is free. Not just the code in that free os, but the identical code contained in all open source operating systems. As time goes by, all software goes into the public domain. Archived software in the public domain stands as a monument that can be used to attack future software developers who wrongfully claim intellectual property rights in property that has really gone into the public domain. People in this thread have argued that this free OS somehow dilutes the chances of Linux reaching 'critical mass.' No amount of operational system elegance or stalinist-type thinking is going to get Linux to critical mass. Cool applications, and only cool applications, will get Linux to critical mass. I'm switching when I can use the Adobe tools (or a functional equivalent) to edit multimedia stuff on Linux. Others have happily switched already. While I dislike the Stallmanites who attack intellectual property that others have created, I dearly love the Stallmanites who subvert the proprietary intellectual property of others by creating their own, better and free, intellectual property. Those free software people make this world more beautiful, and I thank them.
The judge can take your stuff if you do bad things. I suspect that MediaDefender has stuff that they don't want the judge to take. That's why they probably won't retaliate with a DoS attack. But more interestingly, this kind of controversy is going to give the victim (and maybe the FBI/DOJ) an enormous, supergigundous, maximo-stupendous opportunity to discover every last little method that MediaDefender uses to do business. MediaDefender will probably not relish the exposure of its business practices.