As we recall from the anti-trust court transcripts
on
Microsoft Loses Passport
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· Score: 2, Interesting
"would stop trying to persuade Web sites"
Perhaps if they did this mafia style with a hammer and some other blunt objects they would have better sucess
You mean like they did when they threatened some of their largest customers with much higher licensing costs when they were considering deploying Netscape instead of Internet Exploder (as detailed in the anti-trust court records)?
I don't consider yet another worm 0wning my box and handing it over to a spammer, a little thing. But okay, YMMV.
But to Windows users and Microsoftie trolls, apologists, and astroturfers, having your system 0wned by a sp@mmer and infecting 10,000 other computers with the latest Microsoft Worm, Virus, or Trojan is just a little thing. Hardly worth mentioning, often beneath their notice.
No one likes having their stupidity pointed out to them... least of all when they really are that stupid.
Go to the back of the class, slave^H^H^H^H^H^ consumer.
TV is socializing. We told you so, last night on TV and this morning on the Radio (another important social activity).
Most people watch TV with their freinds and family, right? And if not, they're less alone watching and listening to other people on TV (or the radio) than sitting in front of a silent computer, listening to their ogg or mp3 files. Indeed, they are far more social accepting our dogma and messages passively like good little cattle than persuing their own selfish thoughts and desires interactively, on-line.
Seriously, though, TV (and radio) are social engineering. Culture, opinion, taste, desire, even thoughts are cultivated and implanted through television... which is really the biggest reason congress and the president are so eager to cooperate with the media cartels in weakening, and ultimately gutting, the Internet through copyright law, or at least changing it into just another medium for them to push their agenda down our throats, willing or no.
And I don't mean just the jackass who has been usurping the presidency since 2000, I mean every congress, and every president, since at least the founding of the FCC if not earlier, and most especially the republican congress and democratic president that signed the Sony Bono Copyright Extention Act and the Ditial Millennium Copyright Act, and the current republican president that has made hunting down filesharers a priority that takes precidence over searching the contents of containers and freight flights coming into the country, and a dozen other belated and long-needed countermeasures to terrorism and sabatage (not that terrorism is much of a threat compared to something that kills 50,000-plus people in the USA alone each year, such as automobiles, but they CLAIM it to be their #1 priority, so it deserves mention that they put the interests of the old media cartels ahead of that alleged priority). The reason is pretty clear IMHO... the old guard media are a tool of control and coercion, and it coupled with the architectures of control in the form of copyright and patent law, are a tried and true means of enhancing and leveraging this control. They aren't about to let a disruptive technology like the Internet and P2P data sharing change that. If they could tame the printing press through copyright law, they can tame the Internet through modern extentiosn of that regime... and get us uppity tech-savvy malcontents back on the couch where we belong in the process.
I could be wrong, but IMO, they aren't the same licenses. The GPL and BSD licenses differ quite a bit.
Both the BSD licenses and the GPL are free and open source licenses. That even includes the old BSD license with the advertising clause that was incompatible with the GPL.
But your thought is a good one (and correct) even if your example is flawed. A better example would be Apple's AAPL, which is an open source license that is neither free nor compatible with the GPL.
Many Open Source licenses are not free (by either the FSF/GNU definition or the BSD Folks' definition), and clearly a distinction is both necessary and important. Anyone claiming otherwise quite obviously has an ulterior motive and agenda which they feel is furthered by obfuscating what is implied by a Free License and what is implied by an Open Source License, and that agenda certainly appears to be at odds with the free software community and a large part of the open source community.
You know, last week I was mugged. I was beaten about the head pretty good and had a $300+ item stolen from me at a gas station near my home. According to the Sheriff, "strong-armed robbery" is a misdemeanor. They didn't even want the security camera footage. Now if that same asshole had "stolen" a song, game or movie via file sharing he would have gotten an investigation, time, fines...
So what happens when the Lvl20 guy takes on the lvl30 and loses?
Have the penalty affect only the *aggressor,* defined as he who throws the first (punch/knife/grenade/bullet/spell). In fact, I'd say a lvl30 character who kills a lvl20 character that attacked him in hopes of winning the lottery ought to be awarded extra points, for actions amounting to a community service in killing the uppity lvl20.
OTOH, if the lvl30 attacks the lvl20, I'd say he deserves to be demoted to lvl20 upon attacking, where he will stay whether he wins or dies. This makes the combat fair, and the punishment built in to the combat scenerio itself. (i.e. he wins and is level 20 plus plunder, down 10 levels, or he loses and is level 20, down 10 levels, and needs a good resurrection spell).
Granted the requirement of the.Net platform could be a problem but how is a BSD style license (which is what Paint.Net uses) more restrictive than the GIMP which uses the GPL?
Mae culpa. I missed that...not sure what I read yesterday thinking it was the license, but it wasn't the BSD license, whcih is of course no more restrictive than the GPL, indeed it is less so in some respects, with the caveate that it also offers no protection to the community from someone else locking up an improvement down the road.
It was probably posted AC because discussions with creationists tend to be so tedious. Why can't they just accept that they are wrong?
Because accepting one has been wrong means admitting one has been something of an ass.
This is generally OK for most people... if you reach a wrong conclusiong because your missing some facts or make a mistake in reasoning, its not a big deal to admit your failing and move on.
If, however, you insist on an ever more unlikely scenerio (like, say, a belief in a bearded pedophile who lives at the North Pole, climbs down chimneys delivering presents, or lumps of coal, to small children, travels via a flying sled pulled by eight small reindeer, and cavorts with elves) despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, as Creationists by definition are doing (the earth is only a few thousand years old but "created old" to get us sinners, evolution either doesn't exist, exists only in animals, or is somehow directed, "intelligent design" nonsense, and a dozen other non-scientific "theories" that either deny a mountain of evidence to the contrary, violate occams razer, or assert unfalsifiable, unprovable notions that stretch credulity beyond the breaking point), then admitting one was such a ginormous, collassal ass of such epic proportions is understandably difficult.
Of course, continuing to be such an ass is even worse, but I'm afraid that point is lost on most creationists...which is why they continue to provide the rest of us with such amusement.
You make an insightful point and I sure hope you are right, but the EU never had software patents, so surely this pressure existed before as well? If so, it doesn't seem to have had any success...
Software patents have indeed existed for quite some time in the US. However, they have only been actively used in litigation recently (though they have had chilling effects via the threat of litigation for much longer... recall the graphcal story earlier today).
However, I can think of at least one instance where the lack of software patents abroad changed the political and corporate landscape in America: PGP Encryption. PGP was written at a time when the export of basic encryption software was banned in the US (it had to be printed in book form, then shipped overseas, and typed into a computer by volunteers over there). To make matters worse, the RSA algorithm was patented in the United States (but nowhere else). The software was exported in book form, made available on the net, and used widely both inside and outside the US. Had software patents existed in Europe at the time, it is likely that those making PGP available in Europe would have been sued, not so much as a means of stopping the patent violation, but as a means of enforcing America's "no encryption for them damn foreigners" policy through the back door of patent litigation...with the result that we'd all probably still be browsing with trivially crackable 40-bit encryption today.
Instead, PGP being loose in the world, and a dozen non-American encryption companies taking advantage of the lack of patents on RSA outside of the US, and the lack of competititon from US companies hamstrung by both the software patent on RSA and the governments "don't export encryption on pain of FBI interrogation" policy, led to the collapse of said policy.
The patent expired a few years later, but by then the point was largely moot, as a number of better algorithms had been developed in Europe and, as Europe had no software patents, were available for all to use freely.
Software patents, and the lack of them, played an important, if not dominant, part in these events, and as a result we no longer have dumbed-down "international" versions of our browsers, and gnuPG is available to everyone all over the world.
Now software patents are being used more and more in litigation, and the pressures the grandparent describes are beginning to be felt by American companies. The pro-patent lobby knows this, and they know they only have a limited amount of time to get software patents imposed on Europe, or these pressures will reach a sufficient point to wake up American corporations to the fact that patents, and software patents in particular, are not in their best interests.
I suspect 5 years will be enough for this to run its course... if Europe, Japan, China, and India can hold out against US pressure that long.
especially what with its association with MS and the sometimes irrational dislike this inspires in some of us.
Based on Microsoft's behavior past and present, its effect on the industry and emergence of technology in general (quite negative), and their publicly stated intentions with respect to Linux, software freedon in general, and freedom to innovate vis-a-vis software patents and ligitagion in general (of which their funding of the SCO debacle is but a precursor), I'd say there is absolutely nothing whatsoever "irrational" about the dislike an association with Microsoft inspires in any of us.
Now, the expression of that dislike can sometimes take irrational forms, just as the expression of anger can on any subject, but that by no means belies the entirely rational, indeed very justified, anger and dislike being felt.
Finally, given Microsoft's long history and ongoing policy of customer lock-in, and their stated strategy of leveraging.net towards those ends, avoiding any.net project like the proverbial plague is not only wise, it is critical to the self-preservation of any software developer wishing to work in an environment free of Microsoft's coercive control, be it Apple OS X, FreeBSD, GNU/Linux, Palm OS, Solaris, or anything else.
I do agree that this program is no threat to the GIMP. Its licensing is more restrictive, it requires.NET, and, as you say, it addresses a different niche of users.
The "greed and deceit" of microsoft pales in comparison to the issues governments on both sides of the pond should be attacking.
Not if you're one of the tens of thousands Microsoft's greed and deceit has harmed financially.
I'm so sick of the fallacy that because there is [insert some terrible world problem here], we should turn a blind eye to [insert lessor injustice here]. I'm even more sick of the ugly (all too American, these days) mentality that if an injustice doesn't affect you, you shouldn't worry about it or care (and indeed, if an injustice benefits you, however indirectly, you should somehow support it). Enough of that nonsense already!
Injustice is injustice, whether it affects Linux or not. Harm is harm, and it should be fought everywhere. Yes, software patents need to be stopped in Europe and overturned in the US. Yes, SCO's executives should be in prison. And yes, Microsoft should pay the piper for their years of anti-competative, greedy and deceitful behavior, irrespective of what the market has done to try and mitigate the consiquences of said behavior. "The market" may or may not have adapted (it is highly debatable that there's much of a free market at all when it comes to PC desktops), but certainly those who were run out of business and had their livelihoods ruined by Microsoft's illegal activities didn't have that option, and Microsoft owes society, and arguably those individuals, some reparations in addition to ceasing and desisting in their behavior.
A child misbehaves, and a decent parent won't just require the child stops, they'll punish the child in some way as a disincentive for the child starting up again the moment the parent's back is turned.
Microsoft is one big ugly ill-behaved child that needs a good, hard spanking and a great deal of corrective behavior.
More to the point is that if TerroristMage1 is a known lead, you can tap all the communications of said person on the MUD, figure out whom they are talking to, and get IPs there, which might lead to more information. If TerroristMage2 were unknown to your choice of TLA, this would be a big find, and they could be monitored as well.
Yes, but for every "terrorist" that person is talking to, he or she is probably talking to dozens if not hundreds of uninvolved people. Are you going to sift through all of their communications too... and all of their contacts, ad infinatum?
Ubiquitious Communications Monitoring isn't going to be very effective against terrorism. First of all, its never truly "ubiquitious", nor will it be anytime soon even at current technological levels, so there will always be groups small enough to stay under the radar and not be noticed.
A Terrorist cell of three or four people is too small to pick up this way except through random dumb luck (which can't be counted on), yet they could potentially destroy an entire city.
On the other hand, no political movement of three or four has the power to do much of anything (it must grow far larger than that). This sort of surveillance and control of communication is very effective at tracking nascient political movements as they become widespread, like, say, the civil rights movement of the 1960s, the conservative movement of the 1980s, and the anti-monopoly movement (for example, the anti-patent, anti-copyright, anti-trust movements) of this decade.
This isn't about stopping terrorists or protecting the little guy against some random meyhem or atrocity. Its about preventing the birth of new political movements unappetizing to the current administration. The former is no threat to the Bush family et. al. (though it is to the rest of us to a small degree), but the latter, which would empower the rest of us, is a certain threat to the ruling cartels, sooner or later. That is what they are interested in stopping, and that is what this sort of ubiquitious monitoring CAN stop.
So, while terrorism won't be stopped this way, political reform probably will be stopped, and our ability to organize and disseminate information that runs counter to whomever is ruling at that time (probably the current bunch, since it is under their watch that this nonsense is being deployed) will be very effectively neutered.
Most of the MUD codebases I have looked into have all had this nifty feature to log what players do, should the admins start suspecting foul play. It'll keep track of where the players go, what they say, emote, do, pretty much everything.
Sniffing MUD logs and trying to stifle communication is a losing proposition and a terrible waste of valuable resources that would be better spent doing other things to secure us against terrorism, such as enforcing boarder controls and checking the contents of shipping containers, not to mention airline freight.
$ show log
> TerroristMage1 grins wickedly > TerroristMage1 "The chair is against the wall." > TerroristMage2 smiles broadly > TerroristMage2 "What color is the wall?" > TerroristMage1 "Brown"
TerroristMage1 looks at the physical list in front of him. It just so happens item "chair" on the "brown" list maps to "Detonate Dirty Bomb in Ashcroft's Front Yard."
Fat lot of good having the MUD logs would do anyone.
Open Source is great for games. Many people get confused and think that because you have an open source game, people can get it for free. You don't have to use the GPL to be open source.
This is true.
If they would just include the source with your game, and allow you to edit it for your own purposes, but not redistribute it, it would still be open source, by definition.
I'd check the definition of open source again. Certainly this would not be software libre (free as in freedom software), and I believe restricting redistribution disqualifies a license from meeting the open source definition as well (though I haven't kept up on the open source folks current guidelines, so I could be wrong).
The GPL'ing of game engines on the other hand is a great idea.
I think you could achieve what you're suggesting by GPLing the game source (engine) and the game logic perhaps, but retaining all of your rights to the ARTWORK (which would arguably include not just sprites and sets, but also level maps, etc.). In this way you gain all of the advantages of free software with respect to debugging the gaming software, but retain a branded product you can sell. You could even release for free the first 25% of the game to hook folks a la Id (they did this with doom, quake et al very successfully).
Of course, you may find yourself competing with folks who make 3rd party knockoffs that run on your game engine and with your game logic... that is a downside, although if your artwork and level design is superior, that may not be a big issue.
Certainly artwork is a labor intensive part of designing games (perhaps THE labor intensive part these days), and while a Creative Commons approach to artwork (and film, for that matter) is likely to emerge in the future, certainly in today's environment you could do something like the above quite successfully I suspect.
This is making the assumption that everyone goal is to move everyone to Linux. Maybe some people's goal is to have the best tools available to everyone, regardless of their platform. I don't see it as any sort of problem that people are downloading FireFox for Windows and OS X.
Firefox is one thing.
The entire KDE desktop is arguably another. I read the guy's blog and am not conviced he is correct, but his point is worth considering.
We are not dealing with platforms competing on a level playing field. We are dealing with a convicted monopolist that currently controls around 90% of the desktop computers in the world, who does have as a stated goal the eradication of GPLed software. The question isn't "will Microsoft leverage our own work against us, to keep the majority of mind-share trapped on their platform irrespective of quality or usability?" the question is "how much of their doing so is offset by the advantages of exposing more people to free software and perhaps opening their minds to an upgrade to GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, or OS X?" (the latter, while proprietary, is not a monopolist).
It is an interesting question. Mozilla Firefox certainly HELPS free software in general ("you can run Linux and still use your favorite browser" something that wasn't true for most people in the glory days of IE).
On the other hand, Firefox is arguably a PLATFORM more than an application, so the dynamics surrounding it do not necessarilly correlate with those surrounding the KDE desktop.
It is an interesting argument, and one we dismiss offhand only at our own peril. I have not formed an opinion as to whether this guy is right or not, but I do think he makes a point that may well be true, from a strategic point of view vis-a-vis Free and Open Source Software vs. a Monopolist.
You may be looking for allofmp3.com, a perfectly legal digital music seller (RIAA propoganda notwithstanding), accepts paypal and will sell music to anyone, in any country, in just about any format you care for (including unencumbered versions of Apple aac if that's your thing).
They are located in Russia, licensed by the Russian eqiuvelent of the RIAA, and with current favorable exchange rates the music costs pennies on the dollar compared to iTunes or other western resellers. What's more, they have a better selection of music one cannot find at iTunes.
The year is 2678, and I am using the greatest invention of the millenium to post to slashdot from the future!
HAHAHA!
And I *still* can only get a damn ~500,000 uid. Must be something with slashdot.org rejecting my 512bit IPv19 address...
Nope, sorry. There's nothing wrong with your ipv19 to ipv4 gateway. At the request of several prestigious software archaeological societies and organizations, we in the 37th century set up a temporal filter rejecting all registration requests to slashdot from the 27th century prior to the issuance of slashdot id 516229, ipv19 or otherwise.
Of course, I would have had a slashdot ID of #1, but those rat bastards in the 43rd are blocking all packets temporally synced to all timeframes prior to slashdot ID #11483.
You may be looking for allofmp3.com, a perfectly legal digital music seller (RIAA propoganda notwithstanding), accepts paypal and will sell music to anyone, in any country, in just about any format you care for (including unencumbered versions of Apple aac if that's your thing).
They are located in Russia, licensed by the Russian eqiuvelent of the RIAA, and with current favorable exchange rates the music costs pennies on the dollar compared to iTunes or other western resellers. What's more, they have a better selection of music one cannot find at iTunes.
If the required dongle is a note under your kb...
on
Password Security Not Easy
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· Score: 4, Insightful
... then at least a person has to gain physical access to the machine before they can compromise your account. Of course, we all know that once a person has physical access to the machine, all bets are off anyway.
It isn't as good as memorizing the password, but it's a hell of a lot better than having a weak password that is trivial to guess and compromise via the Internet.
Atheism denotes a person believes there is no God. In other words, this person has "faith" that there is no God. "Agnosticism" is more the "non-religious", "nothing to do with faith" thing...
Wrong. Athiesm denotes a person who LACKS a belief in god. It is an absence of a belief, not a "faith." You are spewing typical religious (not to mention logical fallacy) designed to dismiss a point of view you don't agree with. It is not only disingenuous, it is infantile.
Or does your disbelief in Santa Clause living at the North Pole imply "faith" or make you a child?
Soon there will be a "Programmer made up fraud story" headline and the public will go Ahhh...see...it wasn't any vote fraud going on...just some wacko guy and a bunch of tin foil hats
Cred poisoning has been used for ages all around the world with great success.
This smacks of classic Carl Rove tactics, similiar to the planted story that drummed Dan Rather out of the news business. While these two examples may or may not be examples of Carl Rove's poisonous politics, there are numerous, documented examples of similiar Credibility Poisioning initiatives that he has engaged in to great success. It is quite possible we are witnessing yet another.
How better to steal an election that to create a climate where those presenting evidence of election fraud will not be believed, no matter how telling the evidence.
There is a reason for people dying when they do. There would be major overpopulation if people were to live that long...
Use a condom.
Take the pill.
There are preventative measures, if you're intelligent enough to use them and not to subscribe to toxic religions that ban them (and other forms of medicine... usually for women).
Other people's stupidity, lack of control, or religion (the third I suppose implies the first) is no reason I shouldn't live to be 1000, or 10e29 for that matter.
Thunderbird is missing sensible browser support, at least under GNU/Linux.
It defaults to the gnome browser for some reason, and short of hand editing user.js files, doesn't seem to let you define something sensible (like, say, firefox... now there's a novel idea: have the mozilla mail reader default to a mozilla browser).
This is beyond irritating, and I hope they've fixed it for version 1.0.
Slashdot Mirror
"would stop trying to persuade Web sites"
Perhaps if they did this mafia style with a hammer and some other blunt objects they would have better sucess
You mean like they did when they threatened some of their largest customers with much higher licensing costs when they were considering deploying Netscape instead of Internet Exploder (as detailed in the anti-trust court records)?
I don't consider yet another worm 0wning my box and handing it over to a spammer, a little thing. But okay, YMMV.
But to Windows users and Microsoftie trolls, apologists, and astroturfers, having your system 0wned by a sp@mmer and infecting 10,000 other computers with the latest Microsoft Worm, Virus, or Trojan is just a little thing. Hardly worth mentioning, often beneath their notice.
No one likes having their stupidity pointed out to them
How is watching TV "socializing"?
... which is really the biggest reason congress and the president are so eager to cooperate with the media cartels in weakening, and ultimately gutting, the Internet through copyright law, or at least changing it into just another medium for them to push their agenda down our throats, willing or no.
... the old guard media are a tool of control and coercion, and it coupled with the architectures of control in the form of copyright and patent law, are a tried and true means of enhancing and leveraging this control. They aren't about to let a disruptive technology like the Internet and P2P data sharing change that. If they could tame the printing press through copyright law, they can tame the Internet through modern extentiosn of that regime ... and get us uppity tech-savvy malcontents back on the couch where we belong in the process.
Go to the back of the class, slave^H^H^H^H^H^ consumer.
TV is socializing. We told you so, last night on TV and this morning on the Radio (another important social activity).
Most people watch TV with their freinds and family, right? And if not, they're less alone watching and listening to other people on TV (or the radio) than sitting in front of a silent computer, listening to their ogg or mp3 files. Indeed, they are far more social accepting our dogma and messages passively like good little cattle than persuing their own selfish thoughts and desires interactively, on-line.
Seriously, though, TV (and radio) are social engineering. Culture, opinion, taste, desire, even thoughts are cultivated and implanted through television
And I don't mean just the jackass who has been usurping the presidency since 2000, I mean every congress, and every president, since at least the founding of the FCC if not earlier, and most especially the republican congress and democratic president that signed the Sony Bono Copyright Extention Act and the Ditial Millennium Copyright Act, and the current republican president that has made hunting down filesharers a priority that takes precidence over searching the contents of containers and freight flights coming into the country, and a dozen other belated and long-needed countermeasures to terrorism and sabatage (not that terrorism is much of a threat compared to something that kills 50,000-plus people in the USA alone each year, such as automobiles, but they CLAIM it to be their #1 priority, so it deserves mention that they put the interests of the old media cartels ahead of that alleged priority). The reason is pretty clear IMHO
Welcome to the future. More of the same.
I could be wrong, but IMO, they aren't the same licenses. The GPL and BSD licenses differ quite a bit.
Both the BSD licenses and the GPL are free and open source licenses. That even includes the old BSD license with the advertising clause that was incompatible with the GPL.
But your thought is a good one (and correct) even if your example is flawed. A better example would be Apple's AAPL, which is an open source license that is neither free nor compatible with the GPL.
See http://www.fsf.org/licenses/license-list.htmlfor an excellent overview of licenses and how they affect your freedom and/or protect you as the author.
Many Open Source licenses are not free (by either the FSF/GNU definition or the BSD Folks' definition), and clearly a distinction is both necessary and important. Anyone claiming otherwise quite obviously has an ulterior motive and agenda which they feel is furthered by obfuscating what is implied by a Free License and what is implied by an Open Source License, and that agenda certainly appears to be at odds with the free software community and a large part of the open source community.
You know, last week I was mugged. I was beaten about the head pretty good and had a $300+ item stolen from me at a gas station near my home. According to the Sheriff, "strong-armed robbery" is a misdemeanor. They didn't even want the security camera footage. Now if that same asshole had "stolen" a song, game or movie via file sharing he would have gotten an investigation, time, fines...
You're not a corporation. You don't count.
Well, assuming you're running a modern operating system (Linux, OS X, FreeBSD) ...
... if this thing hits (and we don't do anything about it in the next 25 years).
...
$ cal 2029
[...]
April
Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
8 9 10 11 12 13 14
15 16 17 18 19 20 21
22 23 24 25 26 27 28
29 30
[...]
So yeah, we're all going to die on Friday the 13th (of April), 2029
All praise superstition
So what happens when the Lvl20 guy takes on the lvl30 and loses?
Have the penalty affect only the *aggressor,* defined as he who throws the first (punch/knife/grenade/bullet/spell). In fact, I'd say a lvl30 character who kills a lvl20 character that attacked him in hopes of winning the lottery ought to be awarded extra points, for actions amounting to a community service in killing the uppity lvl20.
OTOH, if the lvl30 attacks the lvl20, I'd say he deserves to be demoted to lvl20 upon attacking, where he will stay whether he wins or dies. This makes the combat fair, and the punishment built in to the combat scenerio itself. (i.e. he wins and is level 20 plus plunder, down 10 levels, or he loses and is level 20, down 10 levels, and needs a good resurrection spell).
Granted the requirement of the .Net platform could be a problem but how is a BSD style license (which is what Paint.Net uses) more restrictive than the GIMP which uses the GPL?
Mae culpa. I missed that...not sure what I read yesterday thinking it was the license, but it wasn't the BSD license, whcih is of course no more restrictive than the GPL, indeed it is less so in some respects, with the caveate that it also offers no protection to the community from someone else locking up an improvement down the road.
It was probably posted AC because discussions with creationists tend to be so tedious. Why can't they just accept that they are wrong?
... if you reach a wrong conclusiong because your missing some facts or make a mistake in reasoning, its not a big deal to admit your failing and move on.
Because accepting one has been wrong means admitting one has been something of an ass.
This is generally OK for most people
If, however, you insist on an ever more unlikely scenerio (like, say, a belief in a bearded pedophile who lives at the North Pole, climbs down chimneys delivering presents, or lumps of coal, to small children, travels via a flying sled pulled by eight small reindeer, and cavorts with elves) despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, as Creationists by definition are doing (the earth is only a few thousand years old but "created old" to get us sinners, evolution either doesn't exist, exists only in animals, or is somehow directed, "intelligent design" nonsense, and a dozen other non-scientific "theories" that either deny a mountain of evidence to the contrary, violate occams razer, or assert unfalsifiable, unprovable notions that stretch credulity beyond the breaking point), then admitting one was such a ginormous, collassal ass of such epic proportions is understandably difficult.
Of course, continuing to be such an ass is even worse, but I'm afraid that point is lost on most creationists...which is why they continue to provide the rest of us with such amusement.
You make an insightful point and I sure hope you are right, but the EU never had software patents, so surely this pressure existed before as well? If so, it doesn't seem to have had any success...
... recall the graphcal story earlier today).
... if Europe, Japan, China, and India can hold out against US pressure that long.
Software patents have indeed existed for quite some time in the US. However, they have only been actively used in litigation recently (though they have had chilling effects via the threat of litigation for much longer
However, I can think of at least one instance where the lack of software patents abroad changed the political and corporate landscape in America: PGP Encryption. PGP was written at a time when the export of basic encryption software was banned in the US (it had to be printed in book form, then shipped overseas, and typed into a computer by volunteers over there). To make matters worse, the RSA algorithm was patented in the United States (but nowhere else). The software was exported in book form, made available on the net, and used widely both inside and outside the US. Had software patents existed in Europe at the time, it is likely that those making PGP available in Europe would have been sued, not so much as a means of stopping the patent violation, but as a means of enforcing America's "no encryption for them damn foreigners" policy through the back door of patent litigation...with the result that we'd all probably still be browsing with trivially crackable 40-bit encryption today.
Instead, PGP being loose in the world, and a dozen non-American encryption companies taking advantage of the lack of patents on RSA outside of the US, and the lack of competititon from US companies hamstrung by both the software patent on RSA and the governments "don't export encryption on pain of FBI interrogation" policy, led to the collapse of said policy.
The patent expired a few years later, but by then the point was largely moot, as a number of better algorithms had been developed in Europe and, as Europe had no software patents, were available for all to use freely.
Software patents, and the lack of them, played an important, if not dominant, part in these events, and as a result we no longer have dumbed-down "international" versions of our browsers, and gnuPG is available to everyone all over the world.
Now software patents are being used more and more in litigation, and the pressures the grandparent describes are beginning to be felt by American companies. The pro-patent lobby knows this, and they know they only have a limited amount of time to get software patents imposed on Europe, or these pressures will reach a sufficient point to wake up American corporations to the fact that patents, and software patents in particular, are not in their best interests.
I suspect 5 years will be enough for this to run its course
especially what with its association with MS and the sometimes irrational dislike this inspires in some of us.
.net towards those ends, avoiding any .net project like the proverbial plague is not only wise, it is critical to the self-preservation of any software developer wishing to work in an environment free of Microsoft's coercive control, be it Apple OS X, FreeBSD, GNU/Linux, Palm OS, Solaris, or anything else.
.NET, and, as you say, it addresses a different niche of users.
Based on Microsoft's behavior past and present, its effect on the industry and emergence of technology in general (quite negative), and their publicly stated intentions with respect to Linux, software freedon in general, and freedom to innovate vis-a-vis software patents and ligitagion in general (of which their funding of the SCO debacle is but a precursor), I'd say there is absolutely nothing whatsoever "irrational" about the dislike an association with Microsoft inspires in any of us.
Now, the expression of that dislike can sometimes take irrational forms, just as the expression of anger can on any subject, but that by no means belies the entirely rational, indeed very justified, anger and dislike being felt.
Finally, given Microsoft's long history and ongoing policy of customer lock-in, and their stated strategy of leveraging
I do agree that this program is no threat to the GIMP. Its licensing is more restrictive, it requires
The "greed and deceit" of microsoft pales in comparison to the issues governments on both sides of the pond should be attacking.
Not if you're one of the tens of thousands Microsoft's greed and deceit has harmed financially.
I'm so sick of the fallacy that because there is [insert some terrible world problem here], we should turn a blind eye to [insert lessor injustice here]. I'm even more sick of the ugly (all too American, these days) mentality that if an injustice doesn't affect you, you shouldn't worry about it or care (and indeed, if an injustice benefits you, however indirectly, you should somehow support it). Enough of that nonsense already!
Injustice is injustice, whether it affects Linux or not. Harm is harm, and it should be fought everywhere. Yes, software patents need to be stopped in Europe and overturned in the US. Yes, SCO's executives should be in prison. And yes, Microsoft should pay the piper for their years of anti-competative, greedy and deceitful behavior, irrespective of what the market has done to try and mitigate the consiquences of said behavior. "The market" may or may not have adapted (it is highly debatable that there's much of a free market at all when it comes to PC desktops), but certainly those who were run out of business and had their livelihoods ruined by Microsoft's illegal activities didn't have that option, and Microsoft owes society, and arguably those individuals, some reparations in addition to ceasing and desisting in their behavior.
A child misbehaves, and a decent parent won't just require the child stops, they'll punish the child in some way as a disincentive for the child starting up again the moment the parent's back is turned.
Microsoft is one big ugly ill-behaved child that needs a good, hard spanking and a great deal of corrective behavior.
More to the point is that if TerroristMage1 is a known lead, you can tap all the communications of said person on the MUD, figure out whom they are talking to, and get IPs there, which might lead to more information. If TerroristMage2 were unknown to your choice of TLA, this would be a big find, and they could be monitored as well.
... and all of their contacts, ad infinatum?
Yes, but for every "terrorist" that person is talking to, he or she is probably talking to dozens if not hundreds of uninvolved people. Are you going to sift through all of their communications too
Ubiquitious Communications Monitoring isn't going to be very effective against terrorism. First of all, its never truly "ubiquitious", nor will it be anytime soon even at current technological levels, so there will always be groups small enough to stay under the radar and not be noticed.
A Terrorist cell of three or four people is too small to pick up this way except through random dumb luck (which can't be counted on), yet they could potentially destroy an entire city.
On the other hand, no political movement of three or four has the power to do much of anything (it must grow far larger than that). This sort of surveillance and control of communication is very effective at tracking nascient political movements as they become widespread, like, say, the civil rights movement of the 1960s, the conservative movement of the 1980s, and the anti-monopoly movement (for example, the anti-patent, anti-copyright, anti-trust movements) of this decade.
This isn't about stopping terrorists or protecting the little guy against some random meyhem or atrocity. Its about preventing the birth of new political movements unappetizing to the current administration. The former is no threat to the Bush family et. al. (though it is to the rest of us to a small degree), but the latter, which would empower the rest of us, is a certain threat to the ruling cartels, sooner or later. That is what they are interested in stopping, and that is what this sort of ubiquitious monitoring CAN stop.
So, while terrorism won't be stopped this way, political reform probably will be stopped, and our ability to organize and disseminate information that runs counter to whomever is ruling at that time (probably the current bunch, since it is under their watch that this nonsense is being deployed) will be very effectively neutered.
Most of the MUD codebases I have looked into have all had this nifty feature to log what players do, should the admins start suspecting foul play. It'll keep track of where the players go, what they say, emote, do, pretty much everything.
Sniffing MUD logs and trying to stifle communication is a losing proposition and a terrible waste of valuable resources that would be better spent doing other things to secure us against terrorism, such as enforcing boarder controls and checking the contents of shipping containers, not to mention airline freight.
$ show log
> TerroristMage1 grins wickedly
> TerroristMage1 "The chair is against the wall."
> TerroristMage2 smiles broadly
> TerroristMage2 "What color is the wall?"
> TerroristMage1 "Brown"
TerroristMage1 looks at the physical list in front of him. It just so happens item "chair" on the "brown" list maps to "Detonate Dirty Bomb in Ashcroft's Front Yard."
Fat lot of good having the MUD logs would do anyone.
Open Source is great for games. Many people get confused and think that because you have an open source game, people can get it for free. You don't have to use the GPL to be open source.
... that is a downside, although if your artwork and level design is superior, that may not be a big issue.
This is true.
If they would just include the source with your game, and allow you to edit it for your own purposes, but not redistribute it, it would still be open source, by definition.
I'd check the definition of open source again. Certainly this would not be software libre (free as in freedom software), and I believe restricting redistribution disqualifies a license from meeting the open source definition as well (though I haven't kept up on the open source folks current guidelines, so I could be wrong).
The GPL'ing of game engines on the other hand is a great idea.
I think you could achieve what you're suggesting by GPLing the game source (engine) and the game logic perhaps, but retaining all of your rights to the ARTWORK (which would arguably include not just sprites and sets, but also level maps, etc.). In this way you gain all of the advantages of free software with respect to debugging the gaming software, but retain a branded product you can sell. You could even release for free the first 25% of the game to hook folks a la Id (they did this with doom, quake et al very successfully).
Of course, you may find yourself competing with folks who make 3rd party knockoffs that run on your game engine and with your game logic
Certainly artwork is a labor intensive part of designing games (perhaps THE labor intensive part these days), and while a Creative Commons approach to artwork (and film, for that matter) is likely to emerge in the future, certainly in today's environment you could do something like the above quite successfully I suspect.
This is making the assumption that everyone goal is to move everyone to Linux. Maybe some people's goal is to have the best tools available to everyone, regardless of their platform. I don't see it as any sort of problem that people are downloading FireFox for Windows and OS X.
Firefox is one thing.
The entire KDE desktop is arguably another. I read the guy's blog and am not conviced he is correct, but his point is worth considering.
We are not dealing with platforms competing on a level playing field. We are dealing with a convicted monopolist that currently controls around 90% of the desktop computers in the world, who does have as a stated goal the eradication of GPLed software. The question isn't "will Microsoft leverage our own work against us, to keep the majority of mind-share trapped on their platform irrespective of quality or usability?" the question is "how much of their doing so is offset by the advantages of exposing more people to free software and perhaps opening their minds to an upgrade to GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, or OS X?" (the latter, while proprietary, is not a monopolist).
It is an interesting question. Mozilla Firefox certainly HELPS free software in general ("you can run Linux and still use your favorite browser" something that wasn't true for most people in the glory days of IE).
On the other hand, Firefox is arguably a PLATFORM more than an application, so the dynamics surrounding it do not necessarilly correlate with those surrounding the KDE desktop.
It is an interesting argument, and one we dismiss offhand only at our own peril. I have not formed an opinion as to whether this guy is right or not, but I do think he makes a point that may well be true, from a strategic point of view vis-a-vis Free and Open Source Software vs. a Monopolist.
You may be looking for allofmp3.com, a perfectly legal digital music seller (RIAA propoganda notwithstanding), accepts paypal and will sell music to anyone, in any country, in just about any format you care for (including unencumbered versions of Apple aac if that's your thing).
They are located in Russia, licensed by the Russian eqiuvelent of the RIAA, and with current favorable exchange rates the music costs pennies on the dollar compared to iTunes or other western resellers. What's more, they have a better selection of music one cannot find at iTunes.
(reposted in defiance of censorship)
The year is 2678, and I am using the greatest invention of the millenium to post to slashdot from the future!
HAHAHA!
And I *still* can only get a damn ~500,000 uid. Must be something with slashdot.org rejecting my 512bit IPv19 address...
Nope, sorry. There's nothing wrong with your ipv19 to ipv4 gateway. At the request of several prestigious software archaeological societies and organizations, we in the 37th century set up a temporal filter rejecting all registration requests to slashdot from the 27th century prior to the issuance of slashdot id 516229, ipv19 or otherwise.
Of course, I would have had a slashdot ID of #1, but those rat bastards in the 43rd are blocking all packets temporally synced to all timeframes prior to slashdot ID #11483.
You may be looking for allofmp3.com, a perfectly legal digital music seller (RIAA propoganda notwithstanding), accepts paypal and will sell music to anyone, in any country, in just about any format you care for (including unencumbered versions of Apple aac if that's your thing).
They are located in Russia, licensed by the Russian eqiuvelent of the RIAA, and with current favorable exchange rates the music costs pennies on the dollar compared to iTunes or other western resellers. What's more, they have a better selection of music one cannot find at iTunes.
... then at least a person has to gain physical access to the machine before they can compromise your account. Of course, we all know that once a person has physical access to the machine, all bets are off anyway.
It isn't as good as memorizing the password, but it's a hell of a lot better than having a weak password that is trivial to guess and compromise via the Internet.
Atheism denotes a person believes there is no God. In other words, this person has "faith" that there is no God. "Agnosticism" is more the "non-religious", "nothing to do with faith" thing...
Wrong. Athiesm denotes a person who LACKS a belief in god. It is an absence of a belief, not a "faith." You are spewing typical religious (not to mention logical fallacy) designed to dismiss a point of view you don't agree with. It is not only disingenuous, it is infantile.
Or does your disbelief in Santa Clause living at the North Pole imply "faith" or make you a child?
Soon there will be a "Programmer made up fraud story" headline and the public will go Ahhh...see...it wasn't any vote fraud going on...just some wacko guy and a bunch of tin foil hats
Cred poisoning has been used for ages all around the world with great success.
This smacks of classic Carl Rove tactics, similiar to the planted story that drummed Dan Rather out of the news business. While these two examples may or may not be examples of Carl Rove's poisonous politics, there are numerous, documented examples of similiar Credibility Poisioning initiatives that he has engaged in to great success. It is quite possible we are witnessing yet another.
How better to steal an election that to create a climate where those presenting evidence of election fraud will not be believed, no matter how telling the evidence.
I've been looking for an ebuild for this(RC) for a few days now. Someone has to have made one by now. Anyone got a link?
/usr/portage/mail-client/mozilla-thunderbird/mozil la-thunderbird-0.9-r3.ebuild /usr/portage/mail-client/mozilla-thunderbird/mozil la-thunderbird-1.0.ebuild
/usr/portage/mail-client/mozilla-thunderbird/mozil la-thunderbird-1.0.ebuild digest
/usr/portage/distfiles first).
Just:
cp
create your own digest
ebuild
and emerge. (I did have to download the tarball manually and put it into
Compiled, installed, and works perfectly on both x86 and amd64 architectures.
There is a reason for people dying when they do. There would be major overpopulation if people were to live that long...
... usually for women).
Use a condom.
Take the pill.
There are preventative measures, if you're intelligent enough to use them and not to subscribe to toxic religions that ban them (and other forms of medicine
Other people's stupidity, lack of control, or religion (the third I suppose implies the first) is no reason I shouldn't live to be 1000, or 10e29 for that matter.
Thunderbird is missing sensible browser support, at least under GNU/Linux.
... now there's a novel idea: have the mozilla mail reader default to a mozilla browser).
It defaults to the gnome browser for some reason, and short of hand editing user.js files, doesn't seem to let you define something sensible (like, say, firefox
This is beyond irritating, and I hope they've fixed it for version 1.0.