I am sorry that you discovered the fact that Hemos is a hamster. He was my test subject for the top secret successor to project MouseIsHouse, which is under a BSD license. This new project, HamsterIsHemos, is under a GPL license. With this new device, Hemos's will be raised on large free range farms. These animals will have built in biological web servers. Hemos's antlers are actually antennas, for wirelessly mirroring slashdot constantly. Only With project HamsterIsHemos can slashdot finally have enough mirrors and bandwidth to not die under the slashdot effect. Please support the GPL, old books, and project MouseIsHouse:HamsterIsHemos
You are a misconception spreading fool. The GPl is like some sort of magical antibiodic; it PREVENTS future leech-like scum from infecting perfectly good software with evil restrictions. Calling the GPL's descendants 'infected' is like calling your children 'infected' because they look a lot like you. Pure bull honkey.
You wouldn't believe how much laughing your post has caused me. I read your comment in the middle of a large computer lab full of people, and i laughed so hard i cried. I am increasing observing reactions such as yours to my ideas. Are you yourself joking? Or are you merely completely unable to take a joke? More and more i believe that the world is throughoughly insane. Duplication is theft, exploitation is noble, private individuals are incapable of doing bad things, only the government can do that, freedom is slavery, slavery is freedom, these things and more are accepted by the vast majority, yet make absolutely no sense . The MouseIsHouse was not supposed to make sense, it is a joke, pure and simple. I'm not sure which of my other comments you looked at, but most of those were quit serious, and the fact that they disagree with the traditional view is simply proof that the traditional view is fully irrational. I have been called 'the most extreme person i have ever met', 'brain fried', and now 'stark raving mad'. These comments only go to prove that my views are correct.
With this kind of computing power available, perhaps project MouseIsHouse can be completed. This project, started 30 years ago, has the potential to revolutionize housing, while literally ending world hunger. Essentially, the idea is to, through genetic engineering, create a mouse who can function as a house. The mouse would be roughly a 300 foot diameter sphere, with a large central cavity, kept clean and dry through a biological moisture evacuation system. We could breed houses, much like we breed cows today. Once grown, the MouseIsHouse will be sulf sustaining, living off photosynthesis and liquid nitrogen. The trick is merging the sequoia tree DNA with the mouse DNA. Doing this requires more processing power than researches have had access to. A 512 node beowulf cluster is perhaps one step closer to free, clean housing and food. On the ceiling of the living chambers grow an edible sludge. While not supremely delicious, it is nutritious, and due to cheapness can wipe out hunger in third world countries. I know this sounds too good to be true, but as anyone involved in the field of animalHousing is well aware of the importance of our work.
How is LINE-ucks way out there? It is just a change in accent, like lin-ucks instead of lee-nooks. In fact, though it seems to be very popular, how in fact is lin-ucks a correct pronounciation? in the.au file, linus pronounces his name leenoos, and the OS lee-nooks. In the unitd states, people with the name Linus are called Lie-nus. So it would be correct to say lee-nooks, or Line-ux if you feel like americanizing it. Lin-ucks is just lazy pronounciation. (not that it matters)
What the hell are you talking about? Of course you can throw it in the trash, what you cannot do, under any circumstances, is read your poem to someone, then demand that person never repeat it to anyone. Unless, of course, that person signed a written contract, with the terms clearly spelled out before hand.
You make good sense. It is fine and dandy to say that copyright is useful for providing incentive to produce new works. This does not make copyright violation theft, it makes it copyright violation. Many people have the mistaken belief that IP is some kind of natural right. It is merely a tool, one whose usefulness is quickly running out. It bugs the hell out of me to hear claims I am stealing by downloading an asf of the southpark movie.
Those who believe in "intellectual property", will whither and die over time, as they apparently are incapable of applying common sense. "I create it so i own it?" wtf is that? Own is a word that can only be applied to physical objects.
Even if you accept copyright, that does not mean the majority of EULA's are even remotely legal. Copyright gives the author a monopoly on duplication, it does not give the author control over non-duplicating uses! If a licensed distributor legally pressed a DVD, and I bought it, I can do whatever I want with it short of public display or copying, at least under copyright law. The GPL is valid, however, because it only controls distribution. You can do whatever you want with GPL software, the requirements for keeping it free only apply when you start distributing it.
I don't know about you, but I came to my own conclusions regarding copyright long before I even had my first computer. Later, when I discovered RMS, I was amazed to find someone whose ideas correspond directly to my own. This is irrelevant to the discussion, however. We are not arguing about morals, you are just playing with semantics. Proprietary is when something is being treated like property. Standard pay-licenses are most certainly proprietary, even if you pay for them, you only have extremely limited rights to use them, the authors maintain full ownership over the software, and in turn, the user. Public domain software, on the other hand, is still proprietary, in that it is being treated like property. The owner merely gives it up to the public. This way, anybody can come along and claim it, make a change, slap a copyright on, and it is just as bad as an unfavorable license on the other hand. A GPL-like license is the only kind that is truly free and non-proprietary. Licensing software under the GPL is akin to releasing a slave under the condition that he may never be a slave again. If the software is under a BSD license or is public domain, it is only non-proprietary until someone else claims it. GPL uses the copyright powers granted by the government to ensure that a particular piece of software will never fall under a tyranical ownership, by keeping the ownership with the creator, BUT WITH THE CONTRACT THAT THIS OWNERSHIP WILL NEVER BE EXERTED SAVE TO PROTECT THE SOFTWARE FROM FUTURE OWNERSHIP. The GPL is a very complex issue, and there surely are a great many people who don't understand it, yet are proponents anyway. Your comments, however, deeply offend those of us who truly understand and believe in the ideals of freedom.
I don't know what definition of proprietary you are using, but according to the language of the FSF, software placed under the GPL is Free Software, which is the opposite of proprietary software. What definition of propietary with respect to software could you possibly mean without talking about copyrights?
The only thing I can't do is slap my own copyright on it. I do for all intents and purposes own it, as copyright is not a 'right' that you can morally apply to even your own property. It is unfortunate that we have the capability to distribute software in other than the most easily modifyable form. But really the GPL just tries to nullify copyright.
What are you talking about? With Linux, you are free to do whatever you want with the software, so long as you don't try to place a restrictive copyright on someone elses work. Reglardless of what the law says, I am free to fiddle with my cars engine, build my own, or whatever. I don't know what you are smoking, but software most certainly is a way of life for certain people.
I would think this goes without saying. BeOS is proprietary. Therefore it is NO BETTER THAN WINDOWS. The technical crapulence of windows is negligeable when compared to the true atrocity: we are forced to use a product that we don't own, just to use our computers! We must not accept anything that is not under a free license, preferably GPL. If we accept BeOS, or even Sun, we could very well end up with different masters, though we remain slaves.
You are missing a very important point. In real life, you cannot verbally harrass people due to lack of anonymity. On irc and muds, little action can be taken in response to messages of any kind. This is just one example of the numerous freedoms granted us by the internet. If you don't want to be harrassed, use the ignore feature of whatever software you are using. If you feel you shouldn't be harrassed in the first, then maybe you ought to write a highly complex perl script to filter out horrific messages. If it is too hard in perl, you can always use Gnu SmallTalk. While you may not make many friends hurling vicious, molesting-insults, it sure can be a lot of fun.
First of all, theft is the wrong word. It is invasion of privacy, not stealing.
But i definitely agree, no software, of for that matter hardware, has any right to send information to anybody or anything without your knowledge. If it said that it does this up front, then we have the ability to choose not to use it. With this bullcrap, we are unknowingly giving away vital bodily secrets.
It isn't the fact that they are making a profit that is a bad thing, it is the way in which they are going about it. Making everything unnecessarily expensive and unfree. make your damned money back selling dvd hardware. no need for stupid encryption schemes to guarantee inflated prices.
Whether or not proprietary software is a crime against humanity or not is a very complicated issue. On the one hand, you can just not use the program, and not be bound by the license if you don't like it. On the other hand, (not that i would ever pirate, i use Free Software), if making software proprietary is not a crime, then by the same reasoning isn't pirating not a crime? Proprietary software is viewed as ok because it doesn't affect you if you care to avoid it. Well, copying software you wouldn't have bought anyway doesn't affect anyone in anyway whatsoever, except it helps you. It seems that this whole area is chock full of hypocrisy and contradictions.
The word professional implies that you are doing it for money. Most of the software written for money is proprietary. As we all are well aware of, proprietary software is a crime against humanity. Would you like to associate yourself with a criminal of the worst order? I don't think so. Though I hate the word geek, it implies that you do something because you love it and are good at. Professional just means you can commit extortion and call it business.
Pardon me for my ignorance, but how does a blind person use an ATM, without being able to read the screen? What good are braille keys if you don't know which key to push because you cannot read the on-screen menus?
I believe there is a misunderstanding. Yes it is a home, but it is also an airplane. Kind of like the austin powers private jet. A comfortable place to live on the one hand, a transportation device on the other. If the airplane was taken apart to just be a house, it would no longer be an airplane, just an empty airplane shell with a house inside. Even if it is on the ground for the night, there are surely still fumes in the tank, even if you empty them. So while you are playing around with your new X.10 system, you hit the wrong key and the fireplace goes on, but faulty wiring makes the gas tank explode, sending shards of senility through your brain. Please refrain from insulting ingenious posts.
Wouldn't it be great to an awesome trippy clock that plays pink floyd music? I would run it in the root window, so it would be a beautiful background to my malevolent slash dotting.
I know this house in an airplane idea isn't anything new, but it is still is exciting. With a little bit of innovation here there could be some truly magnificent uses of this kind of living space. Take the cockpit for example. Imagine having projection screens where the windows used to be, and high quality flight simulator controls where the real ones used to be. There you go, an awesome flight simulator environment, right in your own house. Also, don't discount the number of hamsters that could fit in those small storage closets where they keep the airplane food. I can see it now, a HamsterHavoc style hamster-in-a-ball rolling around an airplane. The hamster, being unsophisticated, thinks it is on a real airplane, so starts bouncing around, hoping to use its extreme weight to make the plane experience turbulence. Man i wish i lived in a giant mouse inflated into a house. The house-is-mouse. Err.. i'll stop now before i get severely off topic.
That is the beauty of the internet. All ideas, whether horrificly crackpot, such as 'all children need to be vulgarly raped by age 3', or good ideas like 'lets torch microsoft' are available. As the human population continues to grow, these monkeys will rapidly approach infinity. We will then see an incredible increase in the number of horrendous ideas, and zero increase in good ideas. We can see this happening even today. I firmly believe that the number of good ideas at a given time is a constant. The only question is, how many of these will be recognized and put to use. That is why we must have systems like slashdot whereby excellent ideas can be seperated from the vast sea of gibberish ideas, via appropriate moderation systems. Everybody writes ideas, all of these ideas get read. That way all the good ideas get identified, and scientific progress goes up and up. Of course, the idea that subterraneon microscopic oil generating hamsters do indeed exist may or may not be true, but surely the we will know by looking at how the moderators rate the posts in support of his theory, and how the moderators react by screaming and shouting and moderating down.
If only we could eliminate the need for secrecy induced by competition, intellectual property, and so forth, could this 'good-idea-mining' be implemented in the world at large.
Slashdot Mirror
I am sorry that you discovered the fact that Hemos is a hamster. He was my test subject for the top secret successor to project MouseIsHouse, which is under a BSD license. This new project, HamsterIsHemos, is under a GPL license. With this new device, Hemos's will be raised on large free range farms. These animals will have built in biological web servers. Hemos's antlers are actually antennas, for wirelessly mirroring slashdot constantly. Only With project HamsterIsHemos can slashdot finally have enough mirrors and bandwidth to not die under the slashdot effect. Please support the GPL, old books, and project MouseIsHouse:HamsterIsHemos
You are a misconception spreading fool. The GPl is like some sort of magical antibiodic; it PREVENTS future leech-like scum from infecting perfectly good software with evil restrictions. Calling the GPL's descendants 'infected' is like calling your children 'infected' because they look a lot like you. Pure bull honkey.
Project mOUSEIShOUSE: the future is here
You wouldn't believe how much laughing your post has caused me. I read your comment in the middle of a large computer lab full of people, and i laughed so hard i cried. I am increasing observing reactions such as yours to my ideas. Are you yourself joking? Or are you merely completely unable to take a joke? More and more i believe that the world is throughoughly insane. Duplication is theft, exploitation is noble, private individuals are incapable of doing bad things, only the government can do that, freedom is slavery, slavery is freedom, these things and more are accepted by the vast majority, yet make absolutely no sense . The MouseIsHouse was not supposed to make sense, it is a joke, pure and simple. I'm not sure which of my other comments you looked at, but most of those were quit serious, and the fact that they disagree with the traditional view is simply proof that the traditional view is fully irrational. I have been called 'the most extreme person i have ever met', 'brain fried', and now 'stark raving mad'. These comments only go to prove that my views are correct.
With this kind of computing power available, perhaps project MouseIsHouse can be completed. This project, started 30 years ago, has the potential to revolutionize housing, while literally ending world hunger. Essentially, the idea is to, through genetic engineering, create a mouse who can function as a house. The mouse would be roughly a 300 foot diameter sphere, with a large central cavity, kept clean and dry through a biological moisture evacuation system. We could breed houses, much like we breed cows today. Once grown, the MouseIsHouse will be sulf sustaining, living off photosynthesis and liquid nitrogen. The trick is merging the sequoia tree DNA with the mouse DNA. Doing this requires more processing power than researches have had access to. A 512 node beowulf cluster is perhaps one step closer to free, clean housing and food. On the ceiling of the living chambers grow an edible sludge. While not supremely delicious, it is nutritious, and due to cheapness can wipe out hunger in third world countries. I know this sounds too good to be true, but as anyone involved in the field of animalHousing is well aware of the importance of our work.
So you feel that ending human slavery meant turning former slave owners into slaves and expropriating their valuable field-working property?
IP makes me sick.
But according to the sound file he pronounces it lee-noos.
How is LINE-ucks way out there? It is just a change in accent, like lin-ucks instead of lee-nooks. In fact, though it seems to be very popular, how in fact is lin-ucks a correct pronounciation? in the .au file, linus pronounces his name leenoos, and the OS lee-nooks. In the unitd states, people with the name Linus are called Lie-nus. So it would be correct to say lee-nooks, or Line-ux if you feel like americanizing it. Lin-ucks is just lazy pronounciation. (not that it matters)
it doesn't make any sense at all to say that copying is stealing, so stop it.
What the hell are you talking about? Of course you can throw it in the trash, what you cannot do, under any circumstances, is read your poem to someone, then demand that person never repeat it to anyone. Unless, of course, that person signed a written contract, with the terms clearly spelled out before hand.
You make good sense. It is fine and dandy to say that copyright is useful for providing incentive to produce new works. This does not make copyright violation theft, it makes it copyright violation. Many people have the mistaken belief that IP is some kind of natural right. It is merely a tool, one whose usefulness is quickly running out. It bugs the hell out of me to hear claims I am stealing by downloading an asf of the southpark movie.
Those who believe in "intellectual property", will whither and die over time, as they apparently are incapable of applying common sense. "I create it so i own it?" wtf is that? Own is a word that can only be applied to physical objects.
Even if you accept copyright, that does not mean the majority of EULA's are even remotely legal. Copyright gives the author a monopoly on duplication, it does not give the author control over non-duplicating uses! If a licensed distributor legally pressed a DVD, and I bought it, I can do whatever I want with it short of public display or copying, at least under copyright law. The GPL is valid, however, because it only controls distribution. You can do whatever you want with GPL software, the requirements for keeping it free only apply when you start distributing it.
I don't know about you, but I came to my own conclusions regarding copyright long before I even had my first computer. Later, when I discovered RMS, I was amazed to find someone whose ideas correspond directly to my own.
This is irrelevant to the discussion, however. We are not arguing about morals, you are just playing with semantics. Proprietary is when something is being treated like property. Standard pay-licenses are most certainly proprietary, even if you pay for them, you only have extremely limited rights to use them, the authors maintain full ownership over the software, and in turn, the user.
Public domain software, on the other hand, is still proprietary, in that it is being treated like property. The owner merely gives it up to the public. This way, anybody can come along and claim it, make a change, slap a copyright on, and it is just as bad as an unfavorable license on the other hand. A GPL-like license is the only kind that is truly free and non-proprietary. Licensing software under the GPL is akin to releasing a slave under the condition that he may never be a slave again. If the software is under a BSD license or is public domain, it is only non-proprietary until someone else claims it. GPL uses the copyright powers granted by the government to ensure that a particular piece of software will never fall under a tyranical ownership, by keeping the ownership with the creator, BUT WITH THE CONTRACT THAT THIS OWNERSHIP WILL NEVER BE EXERTED SAVE TO PROTECT THE SOFTWARE FROM FUTURE OWNERSHIP.
The GPL is a very complex issue, and there surely are a great many people who don't understand it, yet are proponents anyway. Your comments, however, deeply offend those of us who truly understand and believe in the ideals of freedom.
I don't know what definition of proprietary you are using, but according to the language of the FSF, software placed under the GPL is Free Software, which is the opposite of proprietary software. What definition of propietary with respect to software could you possibly mean without talking about copyrights?
The only thing I can't do is slap my own copyright on it. I do for all intents and purposes own it, as copyright is not a 'right' that you can morally apply to even your own property. It is unfortunate that we have the capability to distribute software in other than the most easily modifyable form. But really the GPL just tries to nullify copyright.
What are you talking about? With Linux, you are free to do whatever you want with the software, so long as you don't try to place a restrictive copyright on someone elses work.
Reglardless of what the law says, I am free to fiddle with my cars engine, build my own, or whatever. I don't know what you are smoking, but software most certainly is a way of life for certain people.
I would think this goes without saying. BeOS is proprietary. Therefore it is NO BETTER THAN WINDOWS. The technical crapulence of windows is negligeable when compared to the true atrocity: we are forced to use a product that we don't own, just to use our computers! We must not accept anything that is not under a free license, preferably GPL. If we accept BeOS, or even Sun, we could very well end up with different masters, though we remain slaves.
You are missing a very important point. In real life, you cannot verbally harrass people due to lack of anonymity. On irc and muds, little action can be taken in response to messages of any kind. This is just one example of the numerous freedoms granted us by the internet. If you don't want to be harrassed, use the ignore feature of whatever software you are using. If you feel you shouldn't be harrassed in the first, then maybe you ought to write a highly complex perl script to filter out horrific messages. If it is too hard in perl, you can always use Gnu SmallTalk. While you may not make many friends hurling vicious, molesting-insults, it sure can be a lot of fun.
First of all, theft is the wrong word. It is invasion of privacy, not stealing.
But i definitely agree, no software, of for that matter hardware, has any right to send information to anybody or anything without your knowledge. If it said that it does this up front, then we have the ability to choose not to use it. With this bullcrap, we are unknowingly giving away vital bodily secrets.
It isn't the fact that they are making a profit that is a bad thing, it is the way in which they are going about it. Making everything unnecessarily expensive and unfree. make your damned money back selling dvd hardware. no need for stupid encryption schemes to guarantee inflated prices.
Whether or not proprietary software is a crime against humanity or not is a very complicated issue. On the one hand, you can just not use the program, and not be bound by the license if you don't like it. On the other hand, (not that i would ever pirate, i use Free Software), if making software proprietary is not a crime, then by the same reasoning isn't pirating not a crime? Proprietary software is viewed as ok because it doesn't affect you if you care to avoid it. Well, copying software you wouldn't have bought anyway doesn't affect anyone in anyway whatsoever, except it helps you. It seems that this whole area is chock full of hypocrisy and contradictions.
The word professional implies that you are doing it for money. Most of the software written for money is proprietary. As we all are well aware of, proprietary software is a crime against humanity. Would you like to associate yourself with a criminal of the worst order? I don't think so. Though I hate the word geek, it implies that you do something because you love it and are good at. Professional just means you can commit extortion and call it business.
Pardon me for my ignorance, but how does a blind person use an ATM, without being able to read the screen? What good are braille keys if you don't know which key to push because you cannot read the on-screen menus?
I believe there is a misunderstanding. Yes it is a home, but it is also an airplane. Kind of like the austin powers private jet. A comfortable place to live on the one hand, a transportation device on the other. If the airplane was taken apart to just be a house, it would no longer be an airplane, just an empty airplane shell with a house inside. Even if it is on the ground for the night, there are surely still fumes in the tank, even if you empty them. So while you are playing around with your new X.10 system, you hit the wrong key and the fireplace goes on, but faulty wiring makes the gas tank explode, sending shards of senility through your brain. Please refrain from insulting ingenious posts.
Wouldn't it be great to an awesome trippy clock that plays pink floyd music? I would run it in the root window, so it would be a beautiful background to my malevolent slash dotting.
I know this house in an airplane idea isn't anything new, but it is still is exciting. With a little bit of innovation here there could be some truly magnificent uses of this kind of living space. Take the cockpit for example. Imagine having projection screens where the windows used to be, and high quality flight simulator controls where the real ones used to be. There you go, an awesome flight simulator environment, right in your own house. Also, don't discount the number of hamsters that could fit in those small storage closets where they keep the airplane food. I can see it now, a HamsterHavoc style hamster-in-a-ball rolling around an airplane. The hamster, being unsophisticated, thinks it is on a real airplane, so starts bouncing around, hoping to use its extreme weight to make the plane experience turbulence. Man i wish i lived in a giant mouse inflated into a house. The house-is-mouse. Err.. i'll stop now before i get severely off topic.
That is the beauty of the internet. All ideas, whether horrificly crackpot, such as 'all children need to be vulgarly raped by age 3', or good ideas like 'lets torch microsoft' are available. As the human population continues to grow, these monkeys will rapidly approach infinity. We will then see an incredible increase in the number of horrendous ideas, and zero increase in good ideas. We can see this happening even today. I firmly believe that the number of good ideas at a given time is a constant. The only question is, how many of these will be recognized and put to use. That is why we must have systems like slashdot whereby excellent ideas can be seperated from the vast sea of gibberish ideas, via appropriate moderation systems. Everybody writes ideas, all of these ideas get read. That way all the good ideas get identified, and scientific progress goes up and up. Of course, the idea that subterraneon microscopic oil generating hamsters do indeed exist may or may not be true, but surely the we will know by looking at how the moderators rate the posts in support of his theory, and how the moderators react by screaming and shouting and moderating down.
If only we could eliminate the need for secrecy induced by competition, intellectual property, and so forth, could this 'good-idea-mining' be implemented in the world at large.