Have you ever seen a house burn down after the residents called 911 on a ground line (as in, before VOIP was even available)?
I thougt so.
Blaming vonage for the fact that they guy was too stupid to just sit back and wait for the firefighters to extinguish the blaze before going in to recover his hard drive seems a bit excessive.
I'd still recommend a basic ground line for emergencies, but I'd be slow to put full blame on vonage.
I've seen a 2 alarm fire. They were hosing down the house next door Trying to keep it from bursting into flames, and evacuating the residents. They were also evacuating the next two houses over, just in case, Two cars parked out on the street were, well, toasted.
I agree that, if this guy was bouncing around the house, grabbing computers, it was no 5-alarm fire at that time (or any other time), and he was probably wasting precious time that could have helped save part of the house.
And if his music was important enough to risk his life on, he would have been better off making backups and sticking it in a safety deposit box. An external drive and a safety deposit box are far cheaper than 2 days in hospital for smoke inhalation or the fines he probably received for risking the lives of the officials who chased him thru the house. That should have been the lesson for him to take away from this fiasco. Precisely what happened with Vonage putting him on hold is a bit of a side show compared to that.
I've always said that Microsoft is run by their marketing department, not their engineering department. The thing is that, now it's starting to show. And, now that people are starting to get exposed to what they can get for free, some of them are starting to wonder why they're paying hundreds or dollars a pop for useless eye candy.
The GPL doesn't force you to do anything. The only time you're 'forced' to do anything is if you consciously decide to do some things with it that you are almost never allowed to do with Proprietary code (almost by definition), -- i.e. modify the code, and then give the modified code to people outside of your 'organization' (where your organication cound vary from your household for a home user to your company in the case of a corporate user).
Let's see you get the rights to modify and redistribue MS Windows for less than an arm and a leg, and without having to pay thousands of dollars and possibly also forced to give the rights to your new code to a third party (i.e. Microsoft) -- In some cases, even including the stuff that you don't release to others.
Under the GPL, you continue to own the code you contbuted and, if you can extract the GPL code from it, you can even release a fully proprietary version of it. (Both Rieserfs and MySQL, for example distribute their products under both BPL and proprietary licenses).
RMS has no problems with this because what he finds immoral about purely propriet6ary code is that it leaves users (and their data) at the mercy of some company's business plan (and even it's liquidity). With MySQL having a GPL version, users know that, if they need to, they can fix ay problem that they have with the prprietary version, even if they have a Proprietary copy and the MySQL refuse to fix it (or go bankrupt).
At the risk of invoking Godwin 2001(tm), Osama bin Laden has strong moral beliefs and stands up for them pretty strongly. Simply calling a set of beliefs "moral" does not make them moral.
The available evidence points to that Bin Ladin is more of a psychopath than religious. From what little I know of islam, terrorism is (almost) as much a violation of Islam as it is a violation of Christianity. Obviously, that has stopped neither Hitler nor Bin Ladin (who have both used their religions to justify their excesses).
In any case, you should look to RMS' specific morals before you try to decry morality, generally. RMS's morals are to provide maximum value to society as a whole. Period. He has striven to do so by giving people rights, and taking steps to protect those rights. (( The GPL gives you rights. It does not take away from you any of the rights that would have been yours under bare copyright(*) )).
He does absolutely nothing (that I can see) to take away the rights of others. He simply strives to have Fre software be a viable alternative to the proprietary model -- and for the first decade or so of that crusade he got precious little in return.
(( The GPL's granting of rights should be contrasted with things like the MS EULA which is clearly designed to convince you (and a court) that, beyond giving MS hundreds of dollars for a useless $0.35 piece of plastic (which is all that the EULA claims that you've actually bought) you've also given Microsoft a whole boatload of your legal rights (including control of your computer)))
____
(*) The one arguable exception to this would be where you wanted to give/sell your only copy of a GPL program to someone else (and did not intend to create another copy for yourself). Copyright would allow this, but the GPL would seem to require you to also ensure that the recipient had a copy of the GPL and access to the source code.. In such a case, you could (probaboy) get around this problem by simply not accepting the GPL. -- in other words, if the GPL attempts to take away a right from you, and you're not doing anything else with that GPL code which (in the absense of the GPL) would have been a copyright violation, then all you have to do is not accept the GPL and stay within copyright rules.
That last paragraph should have read:
To that, you need to add the increased Mac sales that have been the 'fallout' from ipod sales, and you'll see why ipod sales are at least as important as itunes sales for apple.
Let's presume, that Apple takes $.25 per itunes sale (I think that the proper number is $.10, but let's be generous). They've just passed 1billion in sales, so we're looking at $250Million in gross profits... not bad.
Now, let's look at ipod sales....
Let's presume that the 1GB shuffle is the 'average' purchase at $120. I have a hard time believing that it cost them more than $60 to make that thing at the volume they're being produced, so that would come to $60 gross profit per ipod (not to mention $95 profit on their $99 leather holders!).
Now, I'm looking at two MacNN reports that Apple will sell
8million ipods this quarter, and another 12 million ipods in the last half of 2005. That would give a total of over 20 million ipods in the last 9 months. [[ Hmm.. this would give an average of about 50 itunes per ipod.... ]]
So, 20million ipods times $60 profit per pod, and you have about $1billion gross profit in ipod sales (I doubt my estimates are any better than one digit's significance).
And the amazing things is, the programmer and the MBA type were able to remain friends.
No necessarily.. The Firing may have been more friendly than it looked like on the surface. Perhaps the Programmer guy had done all the programming he wanted to do and wasn't that interested in being a manager.
He might have also been able to see that the company was headed for the big red ink pool sooner or later. (despite what MBA types may thinks, most programmers can spin circles around them when it comes to crunching the numbers -- especially if they have the necessary inside data).
If the MBA type gave the programmer a golden enough handshake with the 'firing', I can see the programmer being very happy about being 'fired', and then being able to sit back and watch the MBA captain the ship into Davy Jones' locker.
I pay for University and I'll be damned if a Professor will tell me how I'm going to learn
If I'm paid to teach you, I'm paid to teach you, not your $4000 lattop.
If I think that you teaching your laptop what I'm saying is getting in the way of you teaching yourself what I'm teaching, then I'm gonna have you get switch off your lattop.
You really will have to trust my ability to teach and my reasons for asking you to put away the laptop.
If you don't like that, you're always free to take your tuition to another instructor -- or even another school, if it comes to that.
I'd not be asking you to burn your laptop. I'd simply be asking you to not use it in my classroom. There's a big difference between the two.
Just as you are not your car, you are not your laptop.
A copy of the paper (or, at least, something very closely resembling what was printed in nature) can be found here.
Re:Slashdot gets the scoop again!
on
DNA Origami
·
· Score: -1, Offtopic
I read it four days ago on CBC, found more links and decided to wait until the article was available on Nature.... Then forgot about submitting it. (( I coulda been a contender!!! ))
And stop modding the parent troll! sarcastic, maybe, but it's really not a troll.
Two other links.
on
DNA Origami
·
· Score: 3, Informative
His personal page is promising more details by last thursday... (oops). He's out to lunch right now (OK: Supper), so It'll be at least a couple of hours before he gets the update installed (he has been given the heads up).
Hopefully the SCOTUS has chosen this as a poster boy for the inanity of the current Patent system... The first thin wedge of peeling back the move to patent any and everything including software.
Website activity jumps 3000% on the news, mainly from a nerd news site reporting the lawsuit.
Of course, once their lawsuit drops off the front page of Slashdot, their traffic is going to drop to 3% of what it was at it's height, then they'll file a class action lawsuit against Slashdot asking for the documentation on how Slashdot decides what submissions make it onto the front page.
Their action class will be the millions of slashdot readers who have had perfectly (un)reasonable submissions rejected in favor of 3rd generation dupes of lame stories.
Cmdr. Taco will give them a cockroach eaten restaurant napkin with the notes from the latest editor brainstorming session and Kinderstart will respond by hiring Boies, Schiller & Flexner to "suck them dry in disclosure.".
[[ Microsoft, realizing that this is a good opportunity to silence a hot-bed of anti-Microsoft activity will buy a copy of Kinderstart's software for every one of their employees and contractors. ("or whatever it is that they sell"). ]]
how about angles to force ODF support in MS Office in the meantime?
The blind may not, but the state should... Given how many millions of dollars MS makes off of MA, there should be a way to force them to provide what their (large) customer with what they need.
The reaction that I'm seeing from the Disabled community is similar to that of sighted people who use MS products....
Getting to learn how to use this was so horrid, I don't want to go through that again!
Open Source may, ultimately, provide more freedom for disabled users, but in the meantime they've been scarred by how horrid the Microsoft solution has been.
The Open Source solution framework is, by all appearances, going to be a far better, overall, experience for blind users -- but it's going to take some time to ramp up to the point where it's operationally better than (or even equivalent to), the current solution that third-party providers have managed to back-hack onto Office.
In the meantime, it's going to take some work to convince these people that there's some long term value to helping the FOSS community get up to speed.
I consider myself to be caretaker for 1.5 cats. I have my official cat, which is an indoor/outdoor cat. The 1/2 cat is a semi-ferral that lives under the back stairs. It will almost never come inside, but it'll sit just outside the back door and wait until I get around to feeding her.
All I can say, is that if you're going to go for interstellar travel with a cat, it had better be an indoor-only variety, or you're gonna be very unhappy.
Well, first you have to arrange for an international conference of lawyers, then you have to modify the path of a big orbiting rock so that it lands with pinpoint accuracy......
Of course, there's the problem that there are a couple of lawyers that I actually like.
I think that it's misleading to say that the license is binding on recipients despite the fact that they didn't know about it.. The better way to put it is to say that, without the license they don't have any rights to use the picture beyond what Copyright rules equivalent to 'fair use' would allow.
To say that this (true, permissive) license is 'binding' could create false 'precedents' about restrictive contractual pseudo-'licenses' that companies like Microsoft purport to hoist on people after they've paid hundreds (or thousands) of dollars for what the vendors now claim to be nothing more than permission to beg for the ability to use their computer.
Slashdot Mirror
Have you ever seen a house burn down after the residents called 911 on a ground line (as in, before VOIP was even available)?
I thougt so.
Blaming vonage for the fact that they guy was too stupid to just sit back and wait for the firefighters to extinguish the blaze before going in to recover his hard drive seems a bit excessive.
I'd still recommend a basic ground line for emergencies, but I'd be slow to put full blame on vonage.
I agree that, if this guy was bouncing around the house, grabbing computers, it was no 5-alarm fire at that time (or any other time), and he was probably wasting precious time that could have helped save part of the house.
And if his music was important enough to risk his life on, he would have been better off making backups and sticking it in a safety deposit box. An external drive and a safety deposit box are far cheaper than 2 days in hospital for smoke inhalation or the fines he probably received for risking the lives of the officials who chased him thru the house. That should have been the lesson for him to take away from this fiasco. Precisely what happened with Vonage putting him on hold is a bit of a side show compared to that.
It's a good sign, I think.
Well, if you're too stupid to read through an obvious typoo, you're too stupid to argue with... (and possibly too stupid to teach).
The GPL doesn't force you to do anything. The only time you're 'forced' to do anything is if you consciously decide to do some things with it that you are almost never allowed to do with Proprietary code (almost by definition), -- i.e. modify the code, and then give the modified code to people outside of your 'organization' (where your organication cound vary from your household for a home user to your company in the case of a corporate user).
Let's see you get the rights to modify and redistribue MS Windows for less than an arm and a leg, and without having to pay thousands of dollars and possibly also forced to give the rights to your new code to a third party (i.e. Microsoft) -- In some cases, even including the stuff that you don't release to others.
Under the GPL, you continue to own the code you contbuted and, if you can extract the GPL code from it, you can even release a fully proprietary version of it. (Both Rieserfs and MySQL, for example distribute their products under both BPL and proprietary licenses).
RMS has no problems with this because what he finds immoral about purely propriet6ary code is that it leaves users (and their data) at the mercy of some company's business plan (and even it's liquidity). With MySQL having a GPL version, users know that, if they need to, they can fix ay problem that they have with the prprietary version, even if they have a Proprietary copy and the MySQL refuse to fix it (or go bankrupt).
The available evidence points to that Bin Ladin is more of a psychopath than religious. From what little I know of islam, terrorism is (almost) as much a violation of Islam as it is a violation of Christianity. Obviously, that has stopped neither Hitler nor Bin Ladin (who have both used their religions to justify their excesses).
In any case, you should look to RMS' specific morals before you try to decry morality, generally. RMS's morals are to provide maximum value to society as a whole. Period. He has striven to do so by giving people rights, and taking steps to protect those rights. (( The GPL gives you rights. It does not take away from you any of the rights that would have been yours under bare copyright(*) )).
He does absolutely nothing (that I can see) to take away the rights of others. He simply strives to have Fre software be a viable alternative to the proprietary model -- and for the first decade or so of that crusade he got precious little in return.
(( The GPL's granting of rights should be contrasted with things like the MS EULA which is clearly designed to convince you (and a court) that, beyond giving MS hundreds of dollars for a useless $0.35 piece of plastic (which is all that the EULA claims that you've actually bought) you've also given Microsoft a whole boatload of your legal rights (including control of your computer)))
____
(*) The one arguable exception to this would be where you wanted to give/sell your only copy of a GPL program to someone else (and did not intend to create another copy for yourself). Copyright would allow this, but the GPL would seem to require you to also ensure that the recipient had a copy of the GPL and access to the source code .. In such a case, you could (probaboy) get around this problem by simply not accepting the GPL. -- in other words, if the GPL attempts to take away a right from you, and you're not doing anything else with that GPL code which (in the absense of the GPL) would have been a copyright violation, then all you have to do is not accept the GPL and stay within copyright rules.
To that, you need to add the increased Mac sales that have been the 'fallout' from ipod sales, and you'll see why ipod sales are at least as important as itunes sales for apple.
(( I swear I used the preview button! ))
Now, let's look at ipod sales....
Let's presume that the 1GB shuffle is the 'average' purchase at $120. I have a hard time believing that it cost them more than $60 to make that thing at the volume they're being produced, so that would come to $60 gross profit per ipod (not to mention $95 profit on their $99 leather holders!).
Now, I'm looking at two MacNN reports that Apple will sell 8million ipods this quarter, and another 12 million ipods in the last half of 2005. That would give a total of over 20 million ipods in the last 9 months. [[ Hmm.. this would give an average of about 50 itunes per ipod.... ]]
So, 20million ipods times $60 profit per pod, and you have about $1billion gross profit in ipod sales (I doubt my estimates are any better than one digit's significance).
at least as important as itunes sales.
No necessarily.. The Firing may have been more friendly than it looked like on the surface. Perhaps the Programmer guy had done all the programming he wanted to do and wasn't that interested in being a manager.
He might have also been able to see that the company was headed for the big red ink pool sooner or later. (despite what MBA types may thinks, most programmers can spin circles around them when it comes to crunching the numbers -- especially if they have the necessary inside data).
If the MBA type gave the programmer a golden enough handshake with the 'firing', I can see the programmer being very happy about being 'fired', and then being able to sit back and watch the MBA captain the ship into Davy Jones' locker.
If I'm paid to teach you, I'm paid to teach you, not your $4000 lattop.
If I think that you teaching your laptop what I'm saying is getting in the way of you teaching yourself what I'm teaching, then I'm gonna have you get switch off your lattop.
You really will have to trust my ability to teach and my reasons for asking you to put away the laptop. If you don't like that, you're always free to take your tuition to another instructor -- or even another school, if it comes to that.
I'd not be asking you to burn your laptop. I'd simply be asking you to not use it in my classroom. There's a big difference between the two.
Just as you are not your car, you are not your laptop.
A copy of the paper (or, at least, something very closely resembling what was printed in nature) can be found here.
And stop modding the parent troll! sarcastic, maybe, but it's really not a troll.
His personal page is promising more details by last thursday... (oops). He's out to lunch right now (OK: Supper), so It'll be at least a couple of hours before he gets the update installed (he has been given the heads up).
I have a dream .....
Of course, once their lawsuit drops off the front page of Slashdot, their traffic is going to drop to 3% of what it was at it's height, then they'll file a class action lawsuit against Slashdot asking for the documentation on how Slashdot decides what submissions make it onto the front page.
Their action class will be the millions of slashdot readers who have had perfectly (un)reasonable submissions rejected in favor of 3rd generation dupes of lame stories.
Cmdr. Taco will give them a cockroach eaten restaurant napkin with the notes from the latest editor brainstorming session and Kinderstart will respond by hiring Boies, Schiller & Flexner to "suck them dry in disclosure.".
[[ Microsoft, realizing that this is a good opportunity to silence a hot-bed of anti-Microsoft activity will buy a copy of Kinderstart's software for every one of their employees and contractors. ("or whatever it is that they sell"). ]]
The blind may not, but the state should... Given how many millions of dollars MS makes off of MA, there should be a way to force them to provide what their (large) customer with what they need.
The Open Source solution framework is, by all appearances, going to be a far better, overall, experience for blind users -- but it's going to take some time to ramp up to the point where it's operationally better than (or even equivalent to), the current solution that third-party providers have managed to back-hack onto Office.
In the meantime, it's going to take some work to convince these people that there's some long term value to helping the FOSS community get up to speed.
Probably like a sniper with a $4000 telescopic sight.
(Just think about it)
You can feed them to the Arrogant Worms. I'm pretty sure they'll eat anything (( and produce satiric droppings from it )).
It looks like most spyware from larger companies is going to be replaced by DRM that you're not allowed to remove (under the EULA).
All I can say, is that if you're going to go for interstellar travel with a cat, it had better be an indoor-only variety, or you're gonna be very unhappy.
-- darkonc
Just a minute... Let me go get my other gun.
Expending billions of joules of energy just so that your pet could drop a lump on a rock....
You'd think that such an advanced culture would have invented the self-cleaning litter box by now....
Of course, there's the problem that there are a couple of lawyers that I actually like.
To say that this (true, permissive) license is 'binding' could create false 'precedents' about restrictive contractual pseudo-'licenses' that companies like Microsoft purport to hoist on people after they've paid hundreds (or thousands) of dollars for what the vendors now claim to be nothing more than permission to beg for the ability to use their computer.