What he IS trying to do is make sure that the board doesn't look at this document and treat it like an official engineering document -- signed off by a professional engineer.
Then he should simply point out to the board that the document is not authored by a professional engineer (seeing as it was not signed by one). Instead, he is officially accusing the guy for breaking the law, because his arguments are too cogent.
If I read a report written by Joe Nurse that "looks" like a professional medical report -- I might make a mistake and be misled.
You are being misled because you don't read the signature?
This has nothing to do with you "being represented fairly". It was not your government's assessment, it was the assessment a government employee sent to his superiors. Even if it *was* the government's assessment, it should still not be public knowledge. Hell, most people don't want their assessment of their in-laws to be public knowledge, and you think this is a good idea for foreign policy?
That said, I am glad this stuff came out. Governments should conduct their business assuming the public may find out at any moment what they're up to.
You gotta find something that definitely needs focus to succeed, is annoying (to you) in the process so you keep being tempted to lose focus, but is rewarding in the result so you have enough motivation to stick with it.
Playing piano music on sight is the perfect example. It is a tremendously computationally intensive task and requires a very high degree of parallel processing. However, while one will definitely improve with arduous practice, it is unlikely it will translate into increased multitasking ability in other situations.
No. Instead it is because, as he said, that is the same situation [Jobs] imposes on all [d]evelopers. Jobs' own behaviour doesn't meet his proclaimed standards. Pretty much the definition of hypocrisy.
To quote I-don't-remember-who (maybe Hunter Thompson?) "Communism has not been tried and failed, Communism has not been tried."
That's like saying true perpetuum mobile machines have never been tried, only bad implementations have been.
Ok, then: countries tried to try it, and failed. Every single time, soon after embarking on the road towards it, it always devolved into dictatorship. True communism cannot properly be tried on a society scale, because it's fundamentally against human nature.
Name some legal, logical uses for a VPN connection to Pirate Bay, with current, valid examples.
The grandparent post listed such examples.
Your arguments are specious because this VPN is not for browsing but "for users looking to cover their tracks when torrenting". Browsing does not enter into the picture because of the stated use of the VPN.
No, rather your argument is non-sequitur, because no matter what Pirate Bay says it is for, the listed uses are still legal.
So you have no objections if foreigners from the United States lobby for passage of a Digital Millenium Copyright Act (or clone thereof).
They already do that here in Canada, through their corporate subsidiaries. Trying to shut them up has as much chance of succeeding as the censorship laws; it's better to speak up against the ideas. What I object to are the DMCA-like laws themselves, which is why I support both local and U.S.-based groups like the EFF.
I understand and generally agree with your point regarding self-determination. At the same time, I recognize that borders lose their relevance with every passing day when it comes to laws of a certain authoritarian flavour. The market of ideas is just as globalized as the other kind, as this very forum demonstrates.
The principle of self-determination holds that only citizens directly affected by a government should be allowed to influence its policies.
I would agree that foreigners shouldn't vote in the elections and shouldn't be allowed to contribute to candidates. Other than that, they are well within their rights to express their opinions, and also to support groups opposing or favouring policies that may end up affecting them. This is how various NGO's work, and it's a good thing.
So why in the hell would you spend money to meddle in foreign politics that don't affect you in any way?
Because people outside Australia may very well end up being affected by it. Western governments have a habit of citing other governments' policies as a way to make those policies more palatable to their own citizens. The British have CCTV cameras at every street corner, let's also put them on our streets. Software patents are allowed in the U.S., let's harmonize the legislation. Australia thinks of the children and censors the Net, we should do the same!
For instance, even though I'm not in the U.S., I donate to the EFF. It's a global world. We're running out of places where we can hide from these things.
That makes you just as bad as the us in the US, always wanting to tell other nations what they can and can't do with their sovereignty.
Yeah, it's exactly like that. Only completely different.
Thanks for your reply. Again, what you are saying seems to make sense to my non-expert eyes.
This seems to imply that all GPLv3 would need to do is to forbid the transfer of GPL software onto any device that doesn't allow running modified versions of the software . Since such a transfer amounts to copying, it would fall under copyright law. It could also offer an exemption for personal use. Such a license would prevent your original scenario, since someone must transfer that software into the device before it is sold to users.
Unless, of course, the vendor gives its users the box and the CD and tells them to load the software themselves. Then, a vendor could not enforce the signature requirement on users, but users would be free to accept that restriction explicitly.
Of course, in the end this may result in more inconvenience for, say, TiVo users. But at least it would allow the GPL to avoid contract-like clauses and stay within the copyright law, and it would avoid surprised users ("I thought I can run anything I wanted on my GPL-powered box").
Almost surely I am only talking to myself by now, seeing that the topic will soon drop off the front page, but just for the record, I may have conceded a bit too early. The GPLv2 says (emphasis mine):
5. You are not required to accept this License, since you have not signed it. However, nothing else grants you permission to modify or distribute the Program or its derivative works. These actions are prohibited by law if you do not accept this License.
This is in direct contradiction to your interpretation, since it expressly specifies that in order to distribute you need a license. Either the GPL is flat wrong when it says that those actions are prohibited by law, or your interpretation of what copyright means is wrong. Right now, I tend to believe the latter.
Yes, you can, and there is nothing the GPLv3, as a non-contract copyright license could do to stop you from doing so. You can't make copies and then distribute them with such a device, but nothing stops you from incorporating such copies that you receive from some third party into such a device.
This doesn't make any sense to me. If this were the case, nothing could stop me from taking copies of GPL'ed code from a third party, and then simply distribute closed binaries, claiming, as you say, that I am not the one having made the copies. Throwing in hardware in the same distribution act doesn't change the fact that this is not allowed.
If you are a user who is also a hardware developer, your rights become more limited than the user who is not a hardware developer.
But that happens only when the rights of those two classes of users start conflicting with each other. That conflict is created by the decision of the hardware developer to distribute the source in a non-usable form. It allows that hardware developer to deny the rights of the other class of users, even though he got those very rights from the original developer.
I understand why a hardware manufacturer would want that, and I don't think there's anything wrong with it. However, if I release code under the GPL, I want to be able to ask any manufacturer who choses to rely on that code to pass along the rights he received from me to the users to whom he distributes the source. Manufacturers who don't like that are free to use code released under a different license, or write their own.
This is the same argument that people make about GPL vs. BSD. GPL is "less free" because it doesn't allow some developer to lock down the code and distribute it to users. But that is only limiting the freedom of taking the way the freedom of the downstream receivers of that code. If this doesn't matter to you as a developer, you can use the BSD license. But if it does, you use the GPL.
Please note I am not trying to argue that one type of license is better over another. I am just arguing that the spirit of the GPL is intact in version 3 of the license.
GPLv3, unlike GPLv2, attempts to dictate what you're allowed to *do* with the code.
GPL3 does no such thing.
You can use the code however you like. You cannot distribute the code with a device that will not accept modified versions of that code to run on it. This is a restriction for distributors, in order to protect the rights of the users.
Linus is a brilliant individual, which is why I cannot help but think that he is purposefully disingenuous when he frames GPL3 in the terms you described. The GPL was always about protecting the rights of the end users to take the code, inspect it, change it, and give the (hopefully) improved versions to others, if they so please. Among other things, that allows people to continue to use their software even when the vendor refuses to fix it, or when the vendor goes out of business. (One primary motivator for creating the GPL was a stupid printer driver whose code had to be kept "secret".)
The confusion starts when certain users are also developers, and further, when some of those developers also want to become distributors. Now, Linus would like to "protect" the rights of these developers to "use the code however they please", meaning in this context that they should be able to distribute it with a device that only runs signed versions of the code. But this "usage" is simply distribution that takes away the rights of a much larger constituency: the many users out there, who now just lost, for any practical purpose, their original right to modify the software and run that instead of the original software (and give it to others, if they so please.)
GPL3 does not change the spirit of GPL2 one iota. On the contrary, it closes the TiVo-isation loophole that allows certain distributors to nominally comply with the GPL2, while at the same time violating its spirit with impunity: "here is the source, you just can't change it and run it. Look, but don't touch."
GPL protects the rights of users, not just of a small subset who happen to be developers&distributors. When the rights of this small subset start conflicting with those of the much larger set of regular end-users, GPL3 rightly settles it if favour of the users.
Not even close. the JVM does not implement a filesystem, or a network stack, or virtual memory management system, or any device drivers, or threading, or low-level graphics operations, or...
True, but all those things can be done just fine by Linux, Mac OS X, Windows, and all the various BSD's out there. Who needs Solaris?
They can only do that if they are the copyright holders for the entire work.
Or if the copyright holder explicitly allows it:
Alternatively, this software may be distributed under the terms of the
GNU General Public License ("GPL") version 2 as published by the Free
Software Foundation.
Many people relate the ability of mechanically solving specific problems to intelligence. That is simply missing the point.
What Deep Blue proved at the time was that the state-of-the-art in massively parallel computation had advanced to the point where beating a Grand Master in chess became possible. Yet, not a flicker of intelligence was needed. Consider this: Deep Blue was able to evaluate 200 million positions per second, while Kasparov (by his own estimate) could only do about three. Yet, somehow, their playing performance was practically equal. That makes Kasparov about 66 million times smarter.
The amazing thing about human intelligence is that it is able to make sense of insanely complex situations with only a glance. The powers of abstraction, deductive and probabilistic reasoning, and what we simply call "intuition" (because we don't understand it) allow Kasparov to ignore 66 million possitions for every single one he looks at.
An even more important characteristic of human intelligence is that it's universal. A human may be beatable by computer at pretty much any given task in isolation, but even a child crushes a computer when it comes to overall performance. Deep Blue may play chess very well, but it doesn't recognize a smile, it cannot catch a ball, and it cannot tell if that cute little puppy is gonna bite its ass. That takes real intelligence.
Yes, we can build systems with almost unlimited raw power. But comparing the ability of a computer with human intelligence is like comparing a crane to the human hand.
The 14-17 year olds of today are going to be the 19-22 year olds in 2012, when he may be up for re-election. Sour the young minds now, and lose them for the next 10 years.
Admittedly, every implementation so far has been a poor one, overstepping from constricting to legal rights in to outright diminishing those rights. But just because every implementation so far has been bad, that doesn't mean the core concept is exclusively bad.
Riiight. And communism is a brilliant idea, it's just that it was poorly implemented.
I'm tired of companies and individuals of claiming that they'll go "somewhere else" if there's a tax hike in their country. In the US we have a very low tax rate over-all, so I'm not exactly sure where these companies or individuals would go [...] In fact, if a company like Maersk says "Gee - the taxes are so high we'll move elsewhere," say - fine, splash it all over the papers and raise taxes. I'll bet you Maersk will not move one inch.
Why? If companies or individuals, despite all the hassles that come with such a move, consider it to their advantage to go elsewhere, let them. This is how governments can (and must) be pushed to become more efficient. Taxes are what you pay for a package of services from the government. Let the various governments compete for delivering better services at lower costs.
Slashdot Mirror
What kind words? Most of the comments here seem negative.
What he IS trying to do is make sure that the board doesn't look at this document and treat it like an official engineering document -- signed off by a professional engineer.
Then he should simply point out to the board that the document is not authored by a professional engineer (seeing as it was not signed by one). Instead, he is officially accusing the guy for breaking the law, because his arguments are too cogent.
If I read a report written by Joe Nurse that "looks" like a professional medical report -- I might make a mistake and be misled.
You are being misled because you don't read the signature?
That said, I am glad this stuff came out. Governments should conduct their business assuming the public may find out at any moment what they're up to.
You gotta find something that definitely needs focus to succeed, is annoying (to you) in the process so you keep being tempted to lose focus, but is rewarding in the result so you have enough motivation to stick with it.
Playing piano music on sight is the perfect example. It is a tremendously computationally intensive task and requires a very high degree of parallel processing. However, while one will definitely improve with arduous practice, it is unlikely it will translate into increased multitasking ability in other situations.
How? Because you don't agree with it?
No. Instead it is because, as he said, that is the same situation [Jobs] imposes on all [d]evelopers. Jobs' own behaviour doesn't meet his proclaimed standards. Pretty much the definition of hypocrisy.
To quote I-don't-remember-who (maybe Hunter Thompson?) "Communism has not been tried and failed, Communism has not been tried."
That's like saying true perpetuum mobile machines have never been tried, only bad implementations have been.
Ok, then: countries tried to try it, and failed. Every single time, soon after embarking on the road towards it, it always devolved into dictatorship. True communism cannot properly be tried on a society scale, because it's fundamentally against human nature.
Name some legal, logical uses for a VPN connection to Pirate Bay, with current, valid examples.
The grandparent post listed such examples.
Your arguments are specious because this VPN is not for browsing but "for users looking to cover their tracks when torrenting". Browsing does not enter into the picture because of the stated use of the VPN.
No, rather your argument is non-sequitur, because no matter what Pirate Bay says it is for, the listed uses are still legal.
So you have no objections if foreigners from the United States lobby for passage of a Digital Millenium Copyright Act (or clone thereof).
They already do that here in Canada, through their corporate subsidiaries. Trying to shut them up has as much chance of succeeding as the censorship laws; it's better to speak up against the ideas. What I object to are the DMCA-like laws themselves, which is why I support both local and U.S.-based groups like the EFF.
I understand and generally agree with your point regarding self-determination. At the same time, I recognize that borders lose their relevance with every passing day when it comes to laws of a certain authoritarian flavour. The market of ideas is just as globalized as the other kind, as this very forum demonstrates.
The principle of self-determination holds that only citizens directly affected by a government should be allowed to influence its policies.
I would agree that foreigners shouldn't vote in the elections and shouldn't be allowed to contribute to candidates. Other than that, they are well within their rights to express their opinions, and also to support groups opposing or favouring policies that may end up affecting them. This is how various NGO's work, and it's a good thing.
So why in the hell would you spend money to meddle in foreign politics that don't affect you in any way?
Because people outside Australia may very well end up being affected by it. Western governments have a habit of citing other governments' policies as a way to make those policies more palatable to their own citizens. The British have CCTV cameras at every street corner, let's also put them on our streets. Software patents are allowed in the U.S., let's harmonize the legislation. Australia thinks of the children and censors the Net, we should do the same!
For instance, even though I'm not in the U.S., I donate to the EFF. It's a global world. We're running out of places where we can hide from these things.
That makes you just as bad as the us in the US, always wanting to tell other nations what they can and can't do with their sovereignty.
Yeah, it's exactly like that. Only completely different.
A simpler way is to use this device. Best hundred bucks I've ever spent.
This seems to imply that all GPLv3 would need to do is to forbid the transfer of GPL software onto any device that doesn't allow running modified versions of the software . Since such a transfer amounts to copying, it would fall under copyright law. It could also offer an exemption for personal use. Such a license would prevent your original scenario, since someone must transfer that software into the device before it is sold to users.
Unless, of course, the vendor gives its users the box and the CD and tells them to load the software themselves. Then, a vendor could not enforce the signature requirement on users, but users would be free to accept that restriction explicitly.
Of course, in the end this may result in more inconvenience for, say, TiVo users. But at least it would allow the GPL to avoid contract-like clauses and stay within the copyright law, and it would avoid surprised users ("I thought I can run anything I wanted on my GPL-powered box").
Right?
Ok, I understand what you are saying. If there is a counter-argument to yours, I don't see it yet. I guess I've just learned something.
This doesn't make any sense to me. If this were the case, nothing could stop me from taking copies of GPL'ed code from a third party, and then simply distribute closed binaries, claiming, as you say, that I am not the one having made the copies. Throwing in hardware in the same distribution act doesn't change the fact that this is not allowed.
But that happens only when the rights of those two classes of users start conflicting with each other. That conflict is created by the decision of the hardware developer to distribute the source in a non-usable form. It allows that hardware developer to deny the rights of the other class of users, even though he got those very rights from the original developer.
I understand why a hardware manufacturer would want that, and I don't think there's anything wrong with it. However, if I release code under the GPL, I want to be able to ask any manufacturer who choses to rely on that code to pass along the rights he received from me to the users to whom he distributes the source. Manufacturers who don't like that are free to use code released under a different license, or write their own.
This is the same argument that people make about GPL vs. BSD. GPL is "less free" because it doesn't allow some developer to lock down the code and distribute it to users. But that is only limiting the freedom of taking the way the freedom of the downstream receivers of that code. If this doesn't matter to you as a developer, you can use the BSD license. But if it does, you use the GPL.
Please note I am not trying to argue that one type of license is better over another. I am just arguing that the spirit of the GPL is intact in version 3 of the license.
GPL3 does no such thing.
You can use the code however you like. You cannot distribute the code with a device that will not accept modified versions of that code to run on it. This is a restriction for distributors, in order to protect the rights of the users.
Linus is a brilliant individual, which is why I cannot help but think that he is purposefully disingenuous when he frames GPL3 in the terms you described. The GPL was always about protecting the rights of the end users to take the code, inspect it, change it, and give the (hopefully) improved versions to others, if they so please. Among other things, that allows people to continue to use their software even when the vendor refuses to fix it, or when the vendor goes out of business. (One primary motivator for creating the GPL was a stupid printer driver whose code had to be kept "secret".)
The confusion starts when certain users are also developers, and further, when some of those developers also want to become distributors. Now, Linus would like to "protect" the rights of these developers to "use the code however they please", meaning in this context that they should be able to distribute it with a device that only runs signed versions of the code. But this "usage" is simply distribution that takes away the rights of a much larger constituency: the many users out there, who now just lost, for any practical purpose, their original right to modify the software and run that instead of the original software (and give it to others, if they so please.)
GPL3 does not change the spirit of GPL2 one iota. On the contrary, it closes the TiVo-isation loophole that allows certain distributors to nominally comply with the GPL2, while at the same time violating its spirit with impunity: "here is the source, you just can't change it and run it. Look, but don't touch."
GPL protects the rights of users, not just of a small subset who happen to be developers&distributors. When the rights of this small subset start conflicting with those of the much larger set of regular end-users, GPL3 rightly settles it if favour of the users.
Or if the copyright holder explicitly allows it:
What Deep Blue proved at the time was that the state-of-the-art in massively parallel computation had advanced to the point where beating a Grand Master in chess became possible. Yet, not a flicker of intelligence was needed. Consider this: Deep Blue was able to evaluate 200 million positions per second, while Kasparov (by his own estimate) could only do about three. Yet, somehow, their playing performance was practically equal. That makes Kasparov about 66 million times smarter.
The amazing thing about human intelligence is that it is able to make sense of insanely complex situations with only a glance. The powers of abstraction, deductive and probabilistic reasoning, and what we simply call "intuition" (because we don't understand it) allow Kasparov to ignore 66 million possitions for every single one he looks at.
An even more important characteristic of human intelligence is that it's universal. A human may be beatable by computer at pretty much any given task in isolation, but even a child crushes a computer when it comes to overall performance. Deep Blue may play chess very well, but it doesn't recognize a smile, it cannot catch a ball, and it cannot tell if that cute little puppy is gonna bite its ass. That takes real intelligence.
Yes, we can build systems with almost unlimited raw power. But comparing the ability of a computer with human intelligence is like comparing a crane to the human hand.
"You must make source available" == "You may not distribute this with devices that make the availability of source code irrelevant."
If that source cannot be used, it's cold comfort that vendors distribute it.
The 14-17 year olds of today are going to be the 19-22 year olds in 2012, when he may be up for re-election. Sour the young minds now, and lose them for the next 10 years.
Which is what I meant. I thought the sarcasm was apparent.
Riiight. And communism is a brilliant idea, it's just that it was poorly implemented.