Well, as the article points out, what's interesting is the change of tone. While he was a Microsoftie, he was downplaying the impact of viruses & worms.
Now that he's in the government, these things are apparently more important.
Hmm. I wouldn't be too certain there isn't a Microsoft agenda behind this ('Once you work for [ the CIA | Microsoft ], you always work for [ the CIA | Microsoft ]').
With our elected leaders deep within Hollywood's pockets, and the confluence of Microsoft's Palladium agenda to extend and encode their software monopoly into the hardware itself with the media cartels' Digital Rights Management agenda, this is exactly the kind of rhetoric I would expect from someone pusing either, or both, of those agendas.
The Digital Sky is falling, but not because of any foreign terrorists or script kiddiez. It is falling because several powerful cartels, a software monopolist, and our government are joining forces to eradicate the free wheeling internet as we know it in order to replace it with a medium they can better control, something that will resemble Just Another Media Outlet far more than it will the internet as we know it today.
If this steamroller isn't stopped it will be the end of Free Software, the end of the peer-to-peer nature that is inherent in the design of today's internet, and the end to free exchange of information via digital media. In short, it will be the end of freedom as we have come to know it.
And you know what. By the time anyone notices, much less cares, it will be far too late. We are the most affected here on/., and even we cannot be bothered to get off our asses and become politically involved. How can we expect those whose livlihoods are less directly affected to cast aside their apathy and conditioned reluctance to get actively involved when we can't be bothered to do it ourselves?
The change of perspective and its timing is....interesting.
You said it! Interesting... and profoundly depressing.
It honestly wasn't intended as a spelling flame - it's just that my tolerance for the continual misspelling of the word in recent posts had finally reached a limit, and I felt the need to vent.
That is fine (and frankly I ignored your post until I saw the followups), but until slashdot impliments a spell checker in their web interface you are simply going to have to live with it.
A lot of articulate people, myself included, can't spell worth shit. For most of us the extra work of typing something into emacs, openoffice, kedit, or whatever and running it through (i|a)spell, then cutting and pasting the result into a web forum's involves a reduculous amount of hassle (*duck*), so we don't bother.
Sorry, but send your complaints to slashdot... the rest of us do not take spelling or grammar criticisms very seriously at all.
Let's change the data in the scenerio. Let's say that the files in question belonged to a company, or even a political group. Would it be legal for the Italian Police to change/move/delete files from another organization, because they consider it a violation of their laws?
Let's make it even more interesting.
The Vatican is recognized by the UN as its own country, has its own police force, etc.
If I put up a site detailing the sex crimes of Catholic priests, along with pictures, name, and addresses of the perpetrators (and their governing Bishops who are covering up these crimes), and the Vatican decides doing such is against their law, can they break into my machine (hosted in the United States) and vandalize my content?
How about if, instead of an American citizen, I'm a catholic priest with Vatican 'citizenship', with the content hosted on the exact same machine (in America). Does an illegal break-in become legal simply because the citizenship of the data's owner happens to be non-American. Somehow, I think not.
I suspect the decision not to extradite the Italian police officer in question will have for more to do with politics (and favor-trading in this 'war against terror' hysteria we're in) than it will any points of law, fine or otherwise.
If I remember correctly, though, Microsoft has a patent on the ASF format scheme itself. The granting of this patent in the first place was ridiculous - (thought sadly commonplace these days) - ASF is a very simple format for multiplexing video/audio/whatever over a single stream. There's nothing innovative about it.
Very true, Microsoft owns this and numerous other rediculous patents, and, to be fair, plenty of other companies own software patents of varying stupidity as well.
But this only matters to the United States, which seems to be doing all it can to make itself the technological backwater of the world, hamstringing itself with software (and business-method) patents, criminalizing reverse-engineering (DMCA), and now attempting to criminalize general computing itself through government mandated DRM (SSSCA/CBDTPA/BPDG) [the latter of which may happen through the back-door via the FCC, with no new legislation debated or passed, if Senator "Disney" Hollings has his way].
Once this source has been released (assuming it has been released under a free license) it will be in the wild, so to speak, and remain free in the rest of the world even if those of us unfortunate enough to be living under the American Regime are not permitted to use it.
Either way, releasing this under a free license would be a good thing. It remains to be seen, however, just how free Real's license turns out to be.
As usual, an open source drone has spouted business advice that has no relationship to the real world.
This guy isn't any more representative of Open Source or Free Software than John Walker "Taliban" Lindh is of America.
Using your disagreement with him to paint all free software and open source enthusiasts with the same broad brush is disingenious and inaccurate.
I for one donated $100 to Blender because (a) I use the program and would have paid that for a commercial product (except that I will never again store data in a proprietary format beholden to a closed source product because my data is what is really valuable, much more so than the software I'm running) and (b) it is a fair deal: the investors get some of their money back (or perhaps make some money... I have no idea how 100k euro stacks up against their initial investment) and the community benefits from one of the finest 3d animation products becoming Free Software.
My problem with proprietary software isn't that they make money on it. Hell, I've bought 8 or 9 ports of various Wintel games for GNU/Linux, I paid for a MainActor license back before kino did the job I needed, and I even antied up for Applix back in the pre Open Office days. My problem is the vulnerability of having a vendor stand between me and my valuable data, leaving me vulnerable to orphanage (as happened with Blender initially), forced updates (Windows Word, and other programs too numerous to mention), or insurmountable incompatabilities that make using my data on the hardware and software of my choice difficult or perhaps even impossible.
Business models that do not affect me in this manner, such as Red Hat's approach, are very compatible with my software requirements (both at home and at work). Those that leave me (or my employer) vulnerable are, at most, stopgap measures until I find something more free (as in freedom) that doesn't leave me so vulnerable.
The thing is, there are viable business models that are compatible with Free Software and do not require leaving the customer in the awkward situation I described (and most Blender folks find themselves at the moment). Ghostscript, among others, use one approach (there are others): namely to release a product in a non-free manner and charge for it (sometimes for just commercial use, sometimes in general), but with a clause that releases the code under a Free License (like the GPL, if they don't want their competitors to use it against them, or BSD if they don't care and just want it to be free) after a period of time (say, a year or so).
Most people will gladly pay a little money to have the current version of something, rather than waiting 6 months or a year, but no one likes buying something only to have its value go to zero as bitrot sets in. Knowing the source to today's version of SomeCommericalApp is available, and will be legally freed under a free license a year from now, protects me as the customer against nearly every vulnerability a proprietary product imposes, without costing the software manufacturer their edge in marketing and selling the product today.
Especially with today's software, where something a year out of date is selling for $5 in the bargain bins anyway, this is really a reasonable approach.
I probably qualify as a more ardent advocate of Free Software than most, and even I fall far short of the ad homonim brush you paint Open Source and Free Software advocates with... so while I agree with much of your critique of the original post (and have my own disagreements with the premise that great success in this funding drive would somehow harm the future of free software...quite the contrary I think), I would ask you to be careful in painting such broad, and inaccurate, stereotypes.
If you see what I am saying. The emphasis established by putting the phrase "feature freeze" in quotes is suggestive of that particular practice being unusual.
Which, historically, has been the case. Linus admits he isn't very good about things like that... anyone else remember the "Give Linus a Backbone" website shortly before the release of 2.4?
In any event, it is really unconscionable that XFS isn't being integrated into 2.5. It is hands down the best, most reliable filesystem under Linux bar none, and the only filesystem I will use on mission critical servers running Linux.
This politicking about kernel patch sizes and "I don't like the way you tweaked [whatever]" has really gotten out of hand, and the result is that we have subpar filesystems integrated into the default kernel while the best of the breed remains an external patch.
Maybe we'll get lucky and Linus will cave once again and let XFS through, but my money is on something a lot less innocuous, like another VM revamp in the middle of a "stable" series a la 2.4.
But with non-functional works, the same arguments become difficult to defend. Because while we all enjoyed "A Beautiful Mind" in the movie theatres, we don't have any real need to be allowed to modify the movie itself. However, I agree with the EFF's position that we should be allowed to time-shift and space-shift all works.
First, I think this distinction between functional and non-functional works is mistaken, and I disagree with RMS on that point.
Second, I am not advocating no protections for artists. It is a false dichotomy that we must either live with draconian copyright monopolies (of whatever length), or everything must be in the public domain. There is a huge swath of middle ground that remains largely unexplored.
Indeed, what I am pointing out is:
1. The historical context of copyright, which was designed to facilitate censorship, keep the pringting press out of the hands of the common man, and benefit a select group of "chosen" publishers.
2. That, because of the desing of copyright it is not only sub-optimal in its benefit to society and culture as a whole, but is very suboptimal for artists.
3. That we as a society pay an unacceptably high price as a result of the monopolies copyright (and patents, for that matter) grant, regardless of their benefits to publishers (and, secondarilly, to artists)
4. There are better ways to compensate artists
Example: Get rid of monopolies altogether. Have no copy restrictions on copying or publishing.
Balance that with a tax benefit for the artist, i.e. an artist (or his/her duly appointed publisher) sells a book they wrote, they are not taxed on it. Anyone else can publish the work as well, but must pay a hefty tax on each copy sold, a portion of which optionally could go back to the original artist.
Include in that a requirement of Citation, essentially encoding the common academic standards for avoiding plagerism into law (credit where credit is due), and a requirement that non-authorized publishers place prominently on the material (cover of a book, opening credits of a movie, cover of a CD, etc.) that they are NOT the authorized publisher if that is the case.
No monopoly needed, and the artist is protected very well. Make the Authorship Grant non-transferable, and the artist is even better protected (they cannot unwittingly sell their rights to their work, they can only authorize a publisher to publish, in exchange for a royalty, thereby relieving that publisher of a tax burden).
Regardless of the specifics, a regime designed to protect the artists and benefit society, rather than to protect and benefit the publishers would be a remarkable improvement over the status quo, without causing undue harm to the creators of the artistic works we so enjoy.
Do you remember all the buildings being totally destroyed? hangars simply vanishing in explosions? Those where 500, 1,000 and 2,000 pound bombs. Are you seriously telling me that you think 10 such equivelent explosions would not cause mass damage and a sky scraper's collapse?
Ten such bombs? What, are you talking about a fleet of small aircraft? To do the same thing McVeigh did with a single truck?
Sure, if you fly 10 planes, one after another, into a building, each loaded to the gills with explosives, you might achieve the desired result, but it is costly both in terms of manpower (10 dead terrorist vs. 1) and exposives.
The reason we like to use aircraft in our military operations is that delivery is quick and none of our people are at as great a risk as a similar ground attack would be. But we have had to design our armaments around the limitations of air attacks... missles that punch deep into a building before igniting, etc. A light aircraft isn't going to puncture deep into a building no matter what you do (no speed and a flimsy fuselage), so unless you line several of 'em up and they somehow manage to survive the shock of their predicessor's explosion (unlikely) and deliver their payload to the same location, but deeper into the structure with each iteration, then unlike most of our missles most of the terrorists' bombs explosive force is going to be wasted on thin, unoccupied air.
A Citation CJ1 has a useful payload of 1,550 lbs, it can cruise at about 92kts min. A Piper Seneca V has a useful payload of 1,337 lbs, it can cruise at about 65kts min.
Even with minimum fuel and maximum explosives, the damage will be far less effective than a ground based delivery.
The explosion will radiate outward from the point of detonation in a sphere, rather than a hemisphere, diluting the destructive force immensely (the energy has twice as much volume to dissapate in, no reflection of the force off the ground (or surrounding structures) means something like only 1/3 - 1/4 of the energy would affect the target vs. the same delivery on the ground). Even assuming the explosion went off at the edge of the building (e.g. detoniation with a deadman switch, and a device that would withstand the killing impact that would trigger it by killing the pilot), vastly more energy will go out harmlessly into the air than will damage the building, much less anything else around it.
The only thing this would be effective for would be a thermonuclear bomb... which the terrorists likely do not have. Radiological, biological, chemical, and conventional explosive weapons will be much less effective, as the concentration of poisons will be reduced... quite possibly below lethal levels even at street level right below the attack.
Jumbo jets were an effective weapon because of their size, the amount (and flammability) of the fuel they carry, and the speed with which they can fly. Light aircraft offer none of these things... in every measurable sense they make about the worst delivery mechanism you can come up with for attacks of these kinds.
I'd be surprised if you could kill more than twenty people with a light aircraft packed with explosives, and they would have to be pretty damn close to the impact site to be affected. Maybe a few more injuries, even a death or two on the ground from falling glass or debris if "Allah" (aka Dumb Luck) is really with you... but chances are, if a terrorist is stupid enough to use a light airplane as a delivery mechanism they'll be in the same boat as that idiot in Florida, or the other idiot in Italy. They'll break a few windows, cause a handfull of deaths (including their own) if they're lucky enough to hit an office that is occupied, and reconfirm to everyone in the process that small aircraft simply don't make very good weapons.
The only thing this has going for it is the fear factor, and a couple of piddly attacks like that, or like the ones we've already seen in Italy and Florida, are enough for people to get the idea of just how stupid these people really are, which of course eliminates the fear factor pretty much altogether.
Unfortunately, the Open Source community depends on a number of licenses that completely prevents this. If I actually buy a copy of Linux I can tear it apart and modify it, but I don't have the rights to simply resell my new creation. There are a number of requirements I have to meet before I can do that. I have to essentially provide a free copy of my changes in raw form to Big Brother and everyone else in order to do that.
This is a strawman, and a rather silly one at that.
First, you can sell derivative GPLed works. You simply have to make the source code available to any of your customers who request it. This is really not much different than being required to make a registration certificate available to the purchaser of your car (so they can license it and own it legally), or for that matter, being required to sign an agreement restricting you to neighborhood building or aesthetic standards when purchasing a piece of property in an exclusive neighborhood.
The GPL exists because the government has, in a fit of profoundly illadvised stupidity, created a regime of government enforced monopolies designed to empower publishers while disempowering artists and consumers. As such, being an artificially maintained monopoly marketplace, the realm of copyright (and patents) is not something you can shrug off with physical, competetive market equivelents.
Were there no forced monopoly on copyrights, i.e. if no one had the power to take something in the public domain, modify it slightly, and make the result unavailable to you in any meaningful sense, the GPL would be unnecessary. Unfortunately, as we all know, this isn't the case at all.
The GPL protects everyone's freedom. It doesn't give you the 'freedom' to incarcerate another (i.e. taking someone else's work, modifying it, and locking the results away from them), but in so doing it protects you from being 'incarcerated' (having the same done to your code) in turn.
It is, in this increasingly hostile world of privately owned ideas and fenced off areas of scientific and intellectual endeavor, probably one of the few, and arguably most important, contracts actively designed to protect your freedom from an increasingly irresponsible and predatory cultural and legal climate. The fact that it doesn't allow you to exploit us without mercy is something the rest of us are quite greatful for, even if it does irk you some.
Now, if you want to do away with the GPL, do away with copyright law altogether. When we stop granting artificial, government enforced monopolies, then the GPL, along with a whole bunch of far more offensive licenses than that, will go away, and none of us will have to lose our freedom in the process. In the meantime we need licenses like the GPL, as an innoculation against the sort of diseased, rights-restricting EULA's and licenses purpetrated by Microsoft, the copyright cartels of hollywood, and others too numerous to count.
And this all, of course, has absolutely nothing to do with ownership of physical goods in your home, and the copyright cartel's current efforts to take even that right of ownership away from us in order to shore up their own monopoly regimes.
Actually, you're wrong. Palladium gives a corporation the ability to whitelist executables within their organization, blocking all but the ones they have personally inspected. You refer only to the default configuration.
Ever here of Microsoft Word & Excel Macro Viruses?
Trusted, signed software doesn't mean you aren't vulnerable. Just because the command reformating your hard drive was signed by Microsoft doesn't meet you're going to lose any less data.
The only way to fix these vulnerabilities is to remove the indredibly stupid "features" like having a mail reader be able to execute any program (signed or not), and remove javascript, ActiveX, and whatever other stupid 'extended scritping' nonsense IE is putting in their browser these days.
Palladium does nothing to secure the computer, all it does is insure the computer can only be used the way [insert authority figure here] deigns to allow you. Whether that authority figure is the Government, Microsoft, Apple (who would presumably be on board in a DRM world), the RIAA, the MPAA, or my local ISP makes little difference... the notion is repugnant, and should be to anyone over the age of four who has any shred of dignity or desire for self-determination.
Or perhaps this... You can learn to fly a small plane like a Cessna, Beechcraft, Piper, etc in a matter of days. At least well enough for a suicide run. These planes have a usable cargo load of above 1500lbs in most cases (that's a LOT of bomb)
First, most GA Cessna's, Pipers, and Beechcraft (I own one of the latter) have a usable load of only between 800 - 1100 lbs. By the time you have a 200 lb adult male, that amount is reduced to 600 lbs. The number you cited includes fuel, which weighs a significant amount.
Even if you loaded up with 600 lbs of c4 in an aircraft, especially a light aircraft with neither the speed, fuel capacity, or mass needed to do anything remotely like 9/11, you would pretty ineffective. Indeed, from the terrorist's point of view it would be a collasal waste... most of the energy would go away from the building, harmlessly out into the air. Unlike on the ground, where the energy would eminate outward in a hemisphere (instead of a sphere), most of it doing damage to the target area.
As has been demonstrated in Florida and Italy, there isn't a whole lot of damage you can do with a light aircraft, even one full of fuel. The things are flimsly and light, don't carry all much fuel to begin with (my Beechcraft carries 60 gallons), and don't have much usable cargo weight. The kid in Florida managed to break a window in his suicide run... he could have done more damange with an armload of bricks and lived to brag about it.
Your scenerio with the charter of a large aircraft is more realistic, but light aircraft on the other hand are about the least effective delivery method you can use, unless of course you have a dirty, or atomic, bomb and just need altitude for maximum dispersal...maybe you'll irradiate an extra mile or so, but of course, there again, concentration will be reduced, making the overall toxicity of the event signficantly lower than a ground attack.
Ditto for biological or chemical agents.
Frankly, terrorists chances of success are a lot higher if they just rent a large truck and drive it up next to the target... which frankly makes me more than a little nervious as I work across the street from one of the primary 'targets' the pundits always like to talk about when exploring such scenerios.
What is the irony of encryption being allowed in the US? After all, the US is a free country.
It may not be free beer (no EU-style social safety net),
I agree with you (mostly, modulo a couple of caveates WRT well known violations of the constitution and social repression, e.g. the War on Drugs, illegality of prostitution, and the recent empowerment of the FBI to unprecendented levels). Overall the US is, still, a very free country, though trends are NOT in the right direction and that could change.
Where you lost me was...
but you have all the opportunity that you can make for yourself.
...opportunity != freedom. Money != freedom (that has to be the most common myth in the US there is). Civil liberties, civil rights, and civil protections under the law = a very important part of freedom (but not the entirety).
Even if the United States entered a terrible depression, our "opportunity" went to near zero for the next ten years, and America's new main social context was the soup line, assuming no further erosions of our rights (or better yet, the return of those rights stolen from us over the last 20-30 years), we would still be a pretty free country. Not a prosperous one, but nevertheless free.
It is important we remember this, as sooner or later (perhaps sooner if all the doom sayers are right...something I'm inclined to doubt) we will be in an economic depression, our lives will be turned upside down, and we'd be very wise to remember the fundamentals of what is important to us as a people: our friendships, our families, and our freedoms. So long as we are not starving, money comes in a distant forth.
Eh, what's the point of having that much storage space? Computer technology has pretty much advanced about as far as is necessary.
Nice to see you joining us on slashdot, Bill.
I still remember when you told us all we'd never need more than 640k of RAM. Still trying to live that one down, aren't you?:-)
On a more serious note, until I can render my entire featurelength movie with full 3d animation effects in realtime I won't be satisfied.
Indeed, that is only equivelent to a 1x CD-RW or DVD-RW, so even real time won't be acceptable.
Which means, until I can render my entire featurlength movie in 1 second and ship it out to all my friends and relatives in another second, I won't be satisfied.
But wait! I want to do that featurelength movie in HDTV 1080p format. Actually, since most of my friends have 1200p capability, I'd like to be able to render in 1920x1200 30 fps, 48bit color in under a second.
Well, movie making was fun, but now I prefer fully immersive virtual reality, at resolutions sufficient that the human eye can't tell the images aren't real. While realtime was initially fast enough for this rendering (no matter how fast I turn my head!), I find I want to render my worlds much more quickly than that to support multiple presences, so I can meet friends in my virtual world. So, until I can render all 3-d objects down to the molecular level in my entire, vast virtual world, in under a second, I won't be satisfied.
But wait! I'd like to...
1 Terabyte sounds like a lot now, but I suspect we will find it to be very limited a few short years after it comes out. Human creativity is an amazing thing, and tends to push the boundries of whatever technical limits are placed upon it. I see no sign of this changing anytime soon, or of human creativity having come close to reaching some ephemeral "limit."
We won't be using the same computers in 20 years that we are today. Well, maybe some of the less flexible of us will be, but our children certainly won't be, and those of us more willing to keep up with a changing world likely won't be either.
Unless, of course, Hollywood is given veto power over all new technologies, in which case our children will be using computers more akin to the old IBM PC/XT my parents used back in the 80's, rather than what we're using today, but that is a tangent for another day.
Perhaps we should get our own house in order before we start lecturing the Chinese government?
This is a logical fallacy, and a road down which only complete silence and lack of any criticism of anything if it is taken to its logical conclusion.
Yes, American and the West should get its house in order. We should stop funding 'friendly' dictatorships (that almost universally end up being NOT friendly), whether they are in central America, Asia, or the Middle East, we should stop the erosion of our civil liberties and rights, we should repeal our intellectual property laws and the government mandated monopolies they grant and replace it with a regime of laws fit for the 21st century, etc. etc.
But that in no way means, implies, or defends the notion that we should remain silent when we see injustice abroad, any more than we should when we see it in our home countries.
In this case, as an American criticizing an American company for collaborating with a tyranny abroad I feel perfectly justified. If that company will collaborate with a foreign tyranny, how do you expect it will behave if and when there is ever a tyranny in your country, or here at home in the US for that matter?
I was living in Germany at the time of Tiannamin square, and I remember a very insightful comment a friend of mine (who was leftist, while back then I was much farther to the right) made when, a week after the massacre, a fat American businessman was shown on TV sitting across from a fat Chinese politician, with American and Chinese flags between them, shaking hands on a new business deal they'd closed while the bodies were still warm (paraphrased from memory and translated into English).
"This hypocracy and ethical degeneracy is why the West is going to fall just as the East did. The only difference is we have a little more money to squander first, so it will take us a little longer to become aware of our own destruction."
A scathing, and IMHO very accurate, criticism not just of China's Government's viciousness against its own people, but against the moral and ethical bankrupcy of both the Chinese and the West in handling this entire affair.
How prophetic and true. This sort of anti-ethic doesn't just destroy companies fiscally and wreck havoc on stock markets, it destroys the fundamental foundation of democracy and civil rule of law. In short, it wrecks entire countries and civilizations, and we'd better grow up and out of this "money is the only real ethic" nonsense before it runs its natural course and takes us all out with it.
Some big names sure.. but in reality these companies are just as money hungry as Microsoft..
Yup, they're money hungry allright. And they've found a big, and likely to grow, niche, namely people who do not want to do business with companies that share and sell their private information, as if their customers were little more than product themselves, objects to be owned, ie. slaves.
They've bet that, by offering a service that provides the same convinience Passport claims to provide, while maintaining the integrity of their customer's privacy, that they will gain market share in so doing, at the expense of those who use passport and pass around their customer's private data like some cheap sexually transmitted disease.
And they are probably right, which means that by protecting our privacy from the likes of telemarketers and Microsoft, those money hungry companies are going to make even more money.
I'm the first to criticize the idiotic notion that capitalism is somehow a panacea for all our ills... as often as not it isn't... but it should also be pointed out that the profit motive doesn't assure unethical behavior, and this looks like a clear case where ethical behavior actually offers a competetive advantage.
is entrusting your purchasing habits to these guys really a good idea?
No, which is why you do not want to use Passport, and why the design of the Liberty Alliance scheme, which does not share or even link to personal information, is so much superior and preferable to Microsoft passport.
Interesting how here on/., when discussing an alternative to MS, the first (and usually only) alternative to be discussed is Linux. As far as a desktop OS is concerned, Apple's Mac OS X may be far better suited to the task.
This is not meant as a personal attack, nor is it meant to imply that you personally belong to what appears to have become the Slashdot Division of Apple. It is intended to point out what appears to be a recent trend of Apple astroturfing, consisting of numerous posts which yours resembles to some degree. You are by no means the worst offendor in this regards... you simply had the good luck to be the straw that broke the camel's back, so to speak.
This is a free software/open source forum. Why on earth would you expect people who are concerned not only with technical superiority, but also freedom to advocate the substitution of one master (Apple) for another (Microsoft), when their are alternatives like FreeBSD and GNU/Linux that offer both freedom and technical superiority?
With all these "don't talk about Linux, talk about Apple OS X" posts I've seen recently I'm beginning to suspect that the Microsoft Slashdot Division another post alluded to has been joined by the Apple Slashdot Division. Frankly, astroturfing by both sides is insulting to the intelligence of any critical thinking mind, not to mention irritating as hell. And I say that as someone who will recommend Apple over Microsoft to those of my friends who are really technically illiterate (to the semi-literate I will recommend GNU/Linux... usually in its easy-to-install Mandrake incarnation).
"In this era of corporate misbehavior and overstatement of results who can you trust? Scientific sources, of course. Well, turns out people at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory lied about their discovery of elements 116 and 118."
In this particular case, one person lied. Not people, one person, and there was no coverup. Quite the contrary. Despite the fact that some basic check-and-balance procedures were not followed (designed to avoid emberrassment, as there will always be external peer review on this sort of thing as a matter of course), the standard peer review uncovered the fraud when other scientists couldn't duplicate the findings.
At a speech to employees last month, the lab's director, Charles Shank, said the supposedly landmark discovery of elements 118 and 116 was the result of scientific misconduct by one individual of a 15-member team at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Lab officials last year retracted the announcement of the discovery after the research team and other scientists were unable to duplicate the results,
[...]
Shank lauded his own department for ferreting out the fraud.
"There is nothing more important for a laboratory than scientific integrity," Shank told lab employees. "Only with such integrity will the public, which funds our work, have confidence in us."
The heavy element research fraud is a stinging embarrassment for the lab. Shank admitted that basic verifications necessary for such lofty scientific proclamations were not followed.
It is all about checks and balances, whether you are talking about science, politics, engineering, or jurisprudence. Take away your checks and balances and things will go awry... keep them firmly in mind, and firmly in place, and when aberrations like this occur they will be spotted quickly and dealt with.
I only wish more people in our society were aware of this basic and very important fact. It is what allows science to function and progress, and it is what allows our democracy to function despite personal corruption. Anytime anyone suggests a "reform" or change, in policy or procedure, that in some way diminishes the checks and balances that are in place *cough* ceeding unprecendented powers to the FBI *cough*, like not doing "the most elemenary checks and data archiving" suspicions should be raised, significantly.
However, in this case peer review and the usual checks and balances did in fact ferret out the fraud and make it known rather quickly. I think this demonstrates that, while individual scientists are certainly capable of misconduct, the scientific method and peer review regime we have works pretty well, and is quite trustworthy.
Now, of course they want to hook up their digital camera and an all-in-one scanner/printer, so there could be some challenges ahead.
Their scanner may or may not work, but their digital camera should be just fine. It is important that they know not to go buying hardware until they are certain it works with Linux...they wouldn't buy a Mac scanner and expect it to work with windows (indeed, they wouldn't by an older, used scanner and expect it to work with the current crop of windows XP would they... one thing about Free Software is that 5 year old peripheral will still be supported, years after Microsoft has dumped all support of it on their OS).
gphoto2
Also, if you find they want to hook up an ieee1394 video camera, that will work as well (ieee1384 drivers, dvgrab or, better yet, kino).
My mom is also running GNU/Linux (and loves it... in fact she has come to detest her Windows box at work). She uses openoffice, mozilla, kmail, xmms, and isn't afraind to type a few commands I wrote down for her at the command line when she wants to watch a movie using mplayer.
Most of our parents who dealt with computers at all prior to 1995 had to contend with DOS at one time or another, so if they are made aware that the occasional criptic command is available if they need it (but not required if they prefer using a GUI), and you're willing to sit down with them, show them how it works, and write down the command they need to use, all but the illiterate of the illiterate will be fairly comfortable with that.
Add to that the lack of worms, viruses, crashes, and unpredictable, erratic behavior that so plagues microsoft platforms and you end up with a very happy camper indeed.
Being able to fix any issues in 5 minutes via an ssh link, rather than spending an hour on the phone talking them through a cranky winddows gui to fix their video (or whatever) doesn't hurt either. In fact, I haven't had a call for help in almost a year...because her system just plains works, day in and day out.
I always wonder why all the people who talk about the new age of media always forget the typewriter. The typewriter has at least as much to do with the dissemination of information as the press. Afterall presses are expensive, complicated and controlled by restrictive governments. Typewriters and for that matter fax machines are not.
Typwriters however do not change the publishing landscape appreciably. That is why they are seldom brought up.
The printing press fundamentally changed how information flows. The British Crown, in response, developed the concept of copyright, which created controllable publishing monopolies upon which the crown could excersize whatever pressures it needed to insure only "approved" texts were published, and any unapproved publishers were dealt with harshly (even drawn and quartered in one instance).
Artists "rights" were not any part of the creation of copyright, contrary to popular myth which modern publishers continue to propogate rather shamelessly.
This is why modern copyright favors publishers so much, at the direct expense of artists and at an even greater expense to consumers. Copyright was designed to facilitate censorship and to benefit publishers who played the game, while eradicating those who did not. Authors, and whatever "rights" to their work they might have been entitled to, were not even a consideration.
Artists intellectual property "rights" were appended later, as an afterthought, in order to deflect growing criticism of the copyright monopolies of the day. It succeeded brilliantly, so much so that publishers kept their advantages, the crown kept its ability to excersize censorship pretty much at will, and artists were thrown a meager bone that, history has shown, really didn't protect them all that much. Even America's founding fathers, who in many respects were quite wise, bought this deception hook, line, and sinker, and enshrined it into the American consitution.
Still, even a little of something was better than nothing, so we have the ironic situation in which an entire legal regime is designed to exploit artists and their fans, while empowering middlemen such as publishers and facilitate methods by which governments (and today large corporations) can excersize editorial pressures often resulting in what amounts to censorship, and many artists foolishly support such a system because they can't think of anything better. Their publishers (the recording industry, movie studios, etc. are delighted with the state of affairs, or at least were, until the internet made publishing a quantum leap easier and some artists started discovering that they no longer needed the middlemen.
Enter the current efforts to force creative people back onto the couch by turning the internet into just another cable channel.
Typewriters didn't empower authors into becoming their own publishers, indeed they didn't impact publishing signficantly at all. The Internet did, which is why government and old guard publishers like the MPAA and RIAA are conspiring to neuter it, perminantly.
Unfortunately it isn't at all paranoid to fear these efforts, much less to point them out and publicize them as widely as possible... because the ramifications to all of us who use and enjoy the internet are profound, and in some ways (in a rhetorical sense) quite apocolyptic.
Pirated software is an alternate supply for the software in question. Supply and demand being what they are, that means the optimal price for legitimate copies of the software goes down. IOW, the real cost of pirating isn't just how many copies weren't sold, but how much less money was made on legal copies.
Interesting hypothesis. However, given that 'copyright' is a government granted monopoly (that at one time had a limited length, but now for all intents and purposes, at least from a mortal human's point of view, is unlimited), one could argue that copyright violations are not distorting this particular less-than-free marketplace, they are an inherent part and a natural manifestation of that marketplace. Indeed, although I do not ethically agree with violating copyrights (despite my contention that copyright law should be replaced with a less draconian regime for protecting artists' credit and even profit for their creations), I would argue that it underscores the profound absurdity of a government granting artificial monopolies to publishers and thereby trying to dictate what would otherwise be a free market.
Particilarly when something less draconian (like a tax benefit to the creator and/or his duly authorized publisher) would allow a free market to flourish, even for so-called intellectual property, without sacrificing the free market altogether as we have done with copyright (and with patents BTW, though that is a discussion for another day).
I must have missed that post. I remember him saying that nobody lost anything when things were copied and making false assertions about the law.
OK, this is my last post on the subject. You'll have the last deceitful word I'm sure, but anyone perusing your posting history and this thread will not be mislead by your nonsense.
I do find it irritating how you do put words in my mouth which I never wrote, which of course is your intent as a troll (I refer anyone to your posting history if they are in any doubt).
I never made any assertions about copyright violations not being illegal. Quite the contrary. I stated that copyright violation is not the same as theft, and as the AC poster noted, I have backed that up factually. Both the law, and every publicly available online dictionary, corroborate that fact which you seem unable or unwilling to grasp: copyright violation may be wrong, but it is not theft. Why. Because nothing is taken.
Potential profits are not "something", they are a nebulous, theoretical value which in at least one case can be pretty firmly shown to be $0.00 (the $18,000 program that almost certainly none of the copyright violators would have ever paid for, regardless), though as a theoretical value its size is irrelevant.
If you equate the taking of theoretical, or potential profit with theft, then you have by definition redefined every act of competition, legal or illegal, as theft, which is demonstrably nonsense.
End of story.
You've now had three different people point out the error of your assumptions, your fallacious arguments, and your conclusions. You have been led to water and clearly chosen not to drink.
Your perogative, but don't be surprised at the disdain you earn from critically thinking people as a result.
Oh, and by the way, identifying you as a troll isn't name calling. It is a value judgement on the quality of your posts... one which seems to be rather unanimous, by the way.
Hard to argue against that. Until, that is, you remember that John's definition of freedom of speech extends to running an open mail relay [slashdot.org] that he knows is being used by spammers. The tacitly admitted reason is that securing it might inconvenience his friends (to the extend that they'd have to remember a password), but the touted reason is that it's a freedom of speech issue. Sure, whatever.
John Gilmore doesn't necessarily represent my ideas about what constitutes freedom of speech
You make an interesting point, but it should be pointed out that, in any large group, there are signficant differences of opinion on issues such as what constitutes freedom of speech, the right to bear arms (or not), and so on. It would be a mistake to allow these differences, or your personal disagreements with Gilmore on his open mail server (I agree with you on that one BTW) to cloud his very correct statement that a body like ICANN needs to be a constitutional body with such rights built in at the foundation.
We can argue on exactly what constitutes freedom of speech later (we've been doing that in the USA for 215 years or so), but without at least a basis for protection we have something far worse than minor disagreements on where the line should be drawn: we have nothing.
The only real problem is the ".biz" namespace collision. When ICANN requested suggestions for new gTLDs, the OSRC sumbitted their application, stating that they had been running a functioning.biz TLD for years. However, ICANN selected someone else [neulevel.biz] to run the.biz gTLD.
OpenNic voted not to recognized ICANN's.biz, and instead to respect the preexisting domain(s).
Opennic, youcann, etc. are a good start, but what really needs to happen is grassroots takeover of the.com,.net, and.org domains. In other words, the disempowerment of ICANN from the grass roots. But this cannot happen overnight, and it cannot happen at all unless there is a way for someone to say "wait a minute, I need to go the icann's blah.com to do this one thing." Without that capability, this sort of popular uprising against these tyrants (and yes, in light of their recent actions I do not think there is any other adequate word to describe them) isn't feasable.
As for who decides what root authority is called what, I would suggest the same democratic, constitutional based organization that comes up with the alternative domain names.
Obviously if we're the ones implimenting support for http://root-authority//somesite.com, we decide what root-authority string maps to ICANN and what doesn't.
Hell, I'd map http://fascist-thugs//blah.com to ICANN, but I suspect the majority would vote for "icann" as the identifier, rather than "fascist-thugs." Either way, we the community would decide, NOT ICANN (or any of the other competing root authorities).
And yes, it would mean rewriting a sizable bit of software (or at least rewriting parts of glibc and relinking). So what? Rewriting software is a small price to pay for freedom, certainly a much smaller price than many other generations have been forced to pay.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, as the article points out, what's interesting is the change of tone. While he was a Microsoftie, he was downplaying the impact of viruses & worms.
/., and even we cannot be bothered to get off our asses and become politically involved. How can we expect those whose livlihoods are less directly affected to cast aside their apathy and conditioned reluctance to get actively involved when we can't be bothered to do it ourselves?
... and profoundly depressing.
Now that he's in the government, these things are apparently more important.
Hmm. I wouldn't be too certain there isn't a Microsoft agenda behind this ('Once you work for [ the CIA | Microsoft ], you always work for [ the CIA | Microsoft ]').
With our elected leaders deep within Hollywood's pockets, and the confluence of Microsoft's Palladium agenda to extend and encode their software monopoly into the hardware itself with the media cartels' Digital Rights Management agenda, this is exactly the kind of rhetoric I would expect from someone pusing either, or both, of those agendas.
The Digital Sky is falling, but not because of any foreign terrorists or script kiddiez. It is falling because several powerful cartels, a software monopolist, and our government are joining forces to eradicate the free wheeling internet as we know it in order to replace it with a medium they can better control, something that will resemble Just Another Media Outlet far more than it will the internet as we know it today.
If this steamroller isn't stopped it will be the end of Free Software, the end of the peer-to-peer nature that is inherent in the design of today's internet, and the end to free exchange of information via digital media. In short, it will be the end of freedom as we have come to know it.
And you know what. By the time anyone notices, much less cares, it will be far too late. We are the most affected here on
The change of perspective and its timing is....interesting.
You said it! Interesting
It honestly wasn't intended as a spelling flame - it's just that my tolerance for the continual misspelling of the word in recent posts had finally reached a limit, and I felt the need to vent.
... the rest of us do not take spelling or grammar criticisms very seriously at all.
That is fine (and frankly I ignored your post until I saw the followups), but until slashdot impliments a spell checker in their web interface you are simply going to have to live with it.
A lot of articulate people, myself included, can't spell worth shit. For most of us the extra work of typing something into emacs, openoffice, kedit, or whatever and running it through (i|a)spell, then cutting and pasting the result into a web forum's involves a reduculous amount of hassle (*duck*), so we don't bother.
Sorry, but send your complaints to slashdot
Let's change the data in the scenerio. Let's say that the files in question belonged to a company, or even a political group. Would it be legal for the Italian Police to change/move/delete files from another organization, because they consider it a violation of their laws?
Let's make it even more interesting.
The Vatican is recognized by the UN as its own country, has its own police force, etc.
If I put up a site detailing the sex crimes of Catholic priests, along with pictures, name, and addresses of the perpetrators (and their governing Bishops who are covering up these crimes), and the Vatican decides doing such is against their law, can they break into my machine (hosted in the United States) and vandalize my content?
How about if, instead of an American citizen, I'm a catholic priest with Vatican 'citizenship', with the content hosted on the exact same machine (in America). Does an illegal break-in become legal simply because the citizenship of the data's owner happens to be non-American. Somehow, I think not.
I suspect the decision not to extradite the Italian police officer in question will have for more to do with politics (and favor-trading in this 'war against terror' hysteria we're in) than it will any points of law, fine or otherwise.
If I remember correctly, though, Microsoft has a patent on the ASF format scheme itself. The granting of this patent in the first place was ridiculous - (thought sadly commonplace these days) - ASF is a very simple format for multiplexing video/audio/whatever over a single stream. There's nothing innovative about it.
Very true, Microsoft owns this and numerous other rediculous patents, and, to be fair, plenty of other companies own software patents of varying stupidity as well.
But this only matters to the United States, which seems to be doing all it can to make itself the technological backwater of the world, hamstringing itself with software (and business-method) patents, criminalizing reverse-engineering (DMCA), and now attempting to criminalize general computing itself through government mandated DRM (SSSCA/CBDTPA/BPDG) [the latter of which may happen through the back-door via the FCC, with no new legislation debated or passed, if Senator "Disney" Hollings has his way].
Once this source has been released (assuming it has been released under a free license) it will be in the wild, so to speak, and remain free in the rest of the world even if those of us unfortunate enough to be living under the American Regime are not permitted to use it.
Either way, releasing this under a free license would be a good thing. It remains to be seen, however, just how free Real's license turns out to be.
As usual, an open source drone has spouted business advice that has no relationship to the real world.
... I have no idea how 100k euro stacks up against their initial investment) and the community benefits from one of the finest 3d animation products becoming Free Software.
... so while I agree with much of your critique of the original post (and have my own disagreements with the premise that great success in this funding drive would somehow harm the future of free software...quite the contrary I think), I would ask you to be careful in painting such broad, and inaccurate, stereotypes.
This guy isn't any more representative of Open Source or Free Software than John Walker "Taliban" Lindh is of America.
Using your disagreement with him to paint all free software and open source enthusiasts with the same broad brush is disingenious and inaccurate.
I for one donated $100 to Blender because (a) I use the program and would have paid that for a commercial product (except that I will never again store data in a proprietary format beholden to a closed source product because my data is what is really valuable, much more so than the software I'm running) and (b) it is a fair deal: the investors get some of their money back (or perhaps make some money
My problem with proprietary software isn't that they make money on it. Hell, I've bought 8 or 9 ports of various Wintel games for GNU/Linux, I paid for a MainActor license back before kino did the job I needed, and I even antied up for Applix back in the pre Open Office days. My problem is the vulnerability of having a vendor stand between me and my valuable data, leaving me vulnerable to orphanage (as happened with Blender initially), forced updates (Windows Word, and other programs too numerous to mention), or insurmountable incompatabilities that make using my data on the hardware and software of my choice difficult or perhaps even impossible.
Business models that do not affect me in this manner, such as Red Hat's approach, are very compatible with my software requirements (both at home and at work). Those that leave me (or my employer) vulnerable are, at most, stopgap measures until I find something more free (as in freedom) that doesn't leave me so vulnerable.
The thing is, there are viable business models that are compatible with Free Software and do not require leaving the customer in the awkward situation I described (and most Blender folks find themselves at the moment). Ghostscript, among others, use one approach (there are others): namely to release a product in a non-free manner and charge for it (sometimes for just commercial use, sometimes in general), but with a clause that releases the code under a Free License (like the GPL, if they don't want their competitors to use it against them, or BSD if they don't care and just want it to be free) after a period of time (say, a year or so).
Most people will gladly pay a little money to have the current version of something, rather than waiting 6 months or a year, but no one likes buying something only to have its value go to zero as bitrot sets in. Knowing the source to today's version of SomeCommericalApp is available, and will be legally freed under a free license a year from now, protects me as the customer against nearly every vulnerability a proprietary product imposes, without costing the software manufacturer their edge in marketing and selling the product today.
Especially with today's software, where something a year out of date is selling for $5 in the bargain bins anyway, this is really a reasonable approach.
I probably qualify as a more ardent advocate of Free Software than most, and even I fall far short of the ad homonim brush you paint Open Source and Free Software advocates with
If you see what I am saying. The emphasis established by putting the phrase "feature freeze" in quotes is suggestive of that particular practice being unusual.
... anyone else remember the "Give Linus a Backbone" website shortly before the release of 2.4?
Which, historically, has been the case. Linus admits he isn't very good about things like that
In any event, it is really unconscionable that XFS isn't being integrated into 2.5. It is hands down the best, most reliable filesystem under Linux bar none, and the only filesystem I will use on mission critical servers running Linux.
This politicking about kernel patch sizes and "I don't like the way you tweaked [whatever]" has really gotten out of hand, and the result is that we have subpar filesystems integrated into the default kernel while the best of the breed remains an external patch.
Maybe we'll get lucky and Linus will cave once again and let XFS through, but my money is on something a lot less innocuous, like another VM revamp in the middle of a "stable" series a la 2.4.
But with non-functional works, the same arguments become difficult to defend. Because while we all enjoyed "A Beautiful Mind" in the movie theatres, we don't have any real need to be allowed to modify the movie itself. However, I agree with the EFF's position that we should be allowed to time-shift and space-shift all works.
First, I think this distinction between functional and non-functional works is mistaken, and I disagree with RMS on that point.
Second, I am not advocating no protections for artists. It is a false dichotomy that we must either live with draconian copyright monopolies (of whatever length), or everything must be in the public domain. There is a huge swath of middle ground that remains largely unexplored.
Indeed, what I am pointing out is:
1. The historical context of copyright, which was designed to facilitate censorship, keep the pringting press out of the hands of the common man, and benefit a select group of "chosen" publishers.
2. That, because of the desing of copyright it is not only sub-optimal in its benefit to society and culture as a whole, but is very suboptimal for artists.
3. That we as a society pay an unacceptably high price as a result of the monopolies copyright (and patents, for that matter) grant, regardless of their benefits to publishers (and, secondarilly, to artists)
4. There are better ways to compensate artists
Example: Get rid of monopolies altogether. Have no copy restrictions on copying or publishing.
Balance that with a tax benefit for the artist, i.e. an artist (or his/her duly appointed publisher) sells a book they wrote, they are not taxed on it. Anyone else can publish the work as well, but must pay a hefty tax on each copy sold, a portion of which optionally could go back to the original artist.
Include in that a requirement of Citation, essentially encoding the common academic standards for avoiding plagerism into law (credit where credit is due), and a requirement that non-authorized publishers place prominently on the material (cover of a book, opening credits of a movie, cover of a CD, etc.) that they are NOT the authorized publisher if that is the case.
No monopoly needed, and the artist is protected very well. Make the Authorship Grant non-transferable, and the artist is even better protected (they cannot unwittingly sell their rights to their work, they can only authorize a publisher to publish, in exchange for a royalty, thereby relieving that publisher of a tax burden).
Regardless of the specifics, a regime designed to protect the artists and benefit society, rather than to protect and benefit the publishers would be a remarkable improvement over the status quo, without causing undue harm to the creators of the artistic works we so enjoy.
Do you remember all the buildings being totally destroyed? hangars simply vanishing in explosions? Those where 500, 1,000 and 2,000 pound bombs. Are you seriously telling me that you think 10 such equivelent explosions would not cause mass damage and a sky scraper's collapse?
... missles that punch deep into a building before igniting, etc. A light aircraft isn't going to puncture deep into a building no matter what you do (no speed and a flimsy fuselage), so unless you line several of 'em up and they somehow manage to survive the shock of their predicessor's explosion (unlikely) and deliver their payload to the same location, but deeper into the structure with each iteration, then unlike most of our missles most of the terrorists' bombs explosive force is going to be wasted on thin, unoccupied air.
Ten such bombs? What, are you talking about a fleet of small aircraft? To do the same thing McVeigh did with a single truck?
Sure, if you fly 10 planes, one after another, into a building, each loaded to the gills with explosives, you might achieve the desired result, but it is costly both in terms of manpower (10 dead terrorist vs. 1) and exposives.
The reason we like to use aircraft in our military operations is that delivery is quick and none of our people are at as great a risk as a similar ground attack would be. But we have had to design our armaments around the limitations of air attacks
A Citation CJ1 has a useful payload of 1,550 lbs, it can cruise at about 92kts min.
... which the terrorists likely do not have. Radiological, biological, chemical, and conventional explosive weapons will be much less effective, as the concentration of poisons will be reduced ... quite possibly below lethal levels even at street level right below the attack.
... in every measurable sense they make about the worst delivery mechanism you can come up with for attacks of these kinds.
... but chances are, if a terrorist is stupid enough to use a light airplane as a delivery mechanism they'll be in the same boat as that idiot in Florida, or the other idiot in Italy. They'll break a few windows, cause a handfull of deaths (including their own) if they're lucky enough to hit an office that is occupied, and reconfirm to everyone in the process that small aircraft simply don't make very good weapons.
A Piper Seneca V has a useful payload of 1,337 lbs, it can cruise at about 65kts min.
Even with minimum fuel and maximum explosives, the damage will be far less effective than a ground based delivery.
The explosion will radiate outward from the point of detonation in a sphere, rather than a hemisphere, diluting the destructive force immensely (the energy has twice as much volume to dissapate in, no reflection of the force off the ground (or surrounding structures) means something like only 1/3 - 1/4 of the energy would affect the target vs. the same delivery on the ground). Even assuming the explosion went off at the edge of the building (e.g. detoniation with a deadman switch, and a device that would withstand the killing impact that would trigger it by killing the pilot), vastly more energy will go out harmlessly into the air than will damage the building, much less anything else around it.
The only thing this would be effective for would be a thermonuclear bomb
Jumbo jets were an effective weapon because of their size, the amount (and flammability) of the fuel they carry, and the speed with which they can fly. Light aircraft offer none of these things
I'd be surprised if you could kill more than twenty people with a light aircraft packed with explosives, and they would have to be pretty damn close to the impact site to be affected. Maybe a few more injuries, even a death or two on the ground from falling glass or debris if "Allah" (aka Dumb Luck) is really with you
The only thing this has going for it is the fear factor, and a couple of piddly attacks like that, or like the ones we've already seen in Italy and Florida, are enough for people to get the idea of just how stupid these people really are, which of course eliminates the fear factor pretty much altogether.
Unfortunately, the Open Source community depends on a number of licenses that completely prevents this. If I actually buy a copy of Linux I can tear it apart and modify it, but I don't have the rights to simply resell my new creation. There are a number of requirements I have to meet before I can do that. I have to essentially provide a free copy of my changes in raw form to Big Brother and everyone else in order to do that.
This is a strawman, and a rather silly one at that.
First, you can sell derivative GPLed works. You simply have to make the source code available to any of your customers who request it. This is really not much different than being required to make a registration certificate available to the purchaser of your car (so they can license it and own it legally), or for that matter, being required to sign an agreement restricting you to neighborhood building or aesthetic standards when purchasing a piece of property in an exclusive neighborhood.
The GPL exists because the government has, in a fit of profoundly illadvised stupidity, created a regime of government enforced monopolies designed to empower publishers while disempowering artists and consumers. As such, being an artificially maintained monopoly marketplace, the realm of copyright (and patents) is not something you can shrug off with physical, competetive market equivelents.
Were there no forced monopoly on copyrights, i.e. if no one had the power to take something in the public domain, modify it slightly, and make the result unavailable to you in any meaningful sense, the GPL would be unnecessary. Unfortunately, as we all know, this isn't the case at all.
The GPL protects everyone's freedom. It doesn't give you the 'freedom' to incarcerate another (i.e. taking someone else's work, modifying it, and locking the results away from them), but in so doing it protects you from being 'incarcerated' (having the same done to your code) in turn.
It is, in this increasingly hostile world of privately owned ideas and fenced off areas of scientific and intellectual endeavor, probably one of the few, and arguably most important, contracts actively designed to protect your freedom from an increasingly irresponsible and predatory cultural and legal climate. The fact that it doesn't allow you to exploit us without mercy is something the rest of us are quite greatful for, even if it does irk you some.
Now, if you want to do away with the GPL, do away with copyright law altogether. When we stop granting artificial, government enforced monopolies, then the GPL, along with a whole bunch of far more offensive licenses than that, will go away, and none of us will have to lose our freedom in the process. In the meantime we need licenses like the GPL, as an innoculation against the sort of diseased, rights-restricting EULA's and licenses purpetrated by Microsoft, the copyright cartels of hollywood, and others too numerous to count.
And this all, of course, has absolutely nothing to do with ownership of physical goods in your home, and the copyright cartel's current efforts to take even that right of ownership away from us in order to shore up their own monopoly regimes.
Actually, you're wrong. Palladium gives a corporation the ability to whitelist executables within their organization, blocking all but the ones they have personally inspected. You refer only to the default configuration.
... the notion is repugnant, and should be to anyone over the age of four who has any shred of dignity or desire for self-determination.
Ever here of Microsoft Word & Excel Macro Viruses?
Trusted, signed software doesn't mean you aren't vulnerable. Just because the command reformating your hard drive was signed by Microsoft doesn't meet you're going to lose any less data.
The only way to fix these vulnerabilities is to remove the indredibly stupid "features" like having a mail reader be able to execute any program (signed or not), and remove javascript, ActiveX, and whatever other stupid 'extended scritping' nonsense IE is putting in their browser these days.
Palladium does nothing to secure the computer, all it does is insure the computer can only be used the way [insert authority figure here] deigns to allow you. Whether that authority figure is the Government, Microsoft, Apple (who would presumably be on board in a DRM world), the RIAA, the MPAA, or my local ISP makes little difference
Or perhaps this... You can learn to fly a small plane like a Cessna, Beechcraft, Piper, etc in a matter of days. At least well enough for a suicide run. These planes have a usable cargo load of above 1500lbs in most cases (that's a LOT of bomb)
... most of the energy would go away from the building, harmlessly out into the air. Unlike on the ground, where the energy would eminate outward in a hemisphere (instead of a sphere), most of it doing damage to the target area.
... he could have done more damange with an armload of bricks and lived to brag about it.
... which frankly makes me more than a little nervious as I work across the street from one of the primary 'targets' the pundits always like to talk about when exploring such scenerios.
First, most GA Cessna's, Pipers, and Beechcraft (I own one of the latter) have a usable load of only between 800 - 1100 lbs. By the time you have a 200 lb adult male, that amount is reduced to 600 lbs. The number you cited includes fuel, which weighs a significant amount.
Even if you loaded up with 600 lbs of c4 in an aircraft, especially a light aircraft with neither the speed, fuel capacity, or mass needed to do anything remotely like 9/11, you would pretty ineffective. Indeed, from the terrorist's point of view it would be a collasal waste
As has been demonstrated in Florida and Italy, there isn't a whole lot of damage you can do with a light aircraft, even one full of fuel. The things are flimsly and light, don't carry all much fuel to begin with (my Beechcraft carries 60 gallons), and don't have much usable cargo weight. The kid in Florida managed to break a window in his suicide run
Your scenerio with the charter of a large aircraft is more realistic, but light aircraft on the other hand are about the least effective delivery method you can use, unless of course you have a dirty, or atomic, bomb and just need altitude for maximum dispersal...maybe you'll irradiate an extra mile or so, but of course, there again, concentration will be reduced, making the overall toxicity of the event signficantly lower than a ground attack.
Ditto for biological or chemical agents.
Frankly, terrorists chances of success are a lot higher if they just rent a large truck and drive it up next to the target
It may not be free beer (no EU-style social safety net),
I agree with you (mostly, modulo a couple of caveates WRT well known violations of the constitution and social repression, e.g. the War on Drugs, illegality of prostitution, and the recent empowerment of the FBI to unprecendented levels). Overall the US is, still, a very free country, though trends are NOT in the right direction and that could change.
Where you lost me was
but you have all the opportunity that you can make for yourself.
Even if the United States entered a terrible depression, our "opportunity" went to near zero for the next ten years, and America's new main social context was the soup line, assuming no further erosions of our rights (or better yet, the return of those rights stolen from us over the last 20-30 years), we would still be a pretty free country. Not a prosperous one, but nevertheless free.
It is important we remember this, as sooner or later (perhaps sooner if all the doom sayers are right
David Brin's "Startide Rising", then the following bootks in the series, in order. (I'd skipped the one the preceeded Startide Rising).
Space Opera, Space Battles, deep characters (both human and non-), excellent storyline, great drama.
Eh, what's the point of having that much storage space? Computer technology has pretty much advanced about as far as is necessary.
:-)
...
Nice to see you joining us on slashdot, Bill.
I still remember when you told us all we'd never need more than 640k of RAM. Still trying to live that one down, aren't you?
On a more serious note, until I can render my entire featurelength movie with full 3d animation effects in realtime I won't be satisfied.
Indeed, that is only equivelent to a 1x CD-RW or DVD-RW, so even real time won't be acceptable.
Which means, until I can render my entire featurlength movie in 1 second and ship it out to all my friends and relatives in another second, I won't be satisfied.
But wait! I want to do that featurelength movie in HDTV 1080p format. Actually, since most of my friends have 1200p capability, I'd like to be able to render in 1920x1200 30 fps, 48bit color in under a second.
Well, movie making was fun, but now I prefer fully immersive virtual reality, at resolutions sufficient that the human eye can't tell the images aren't real. While realtime was initially fast enough for this rendering (no matter how fast I turn my head!), I find I want to render my worlds much more quickly than that to support multiple presences, so I can meet friends in my virtual world. So, until I can render all 3-d objects down to the molecular level in my entire, vast virtual world, in under a second, I won't be satisfied.
But wait! I'd like to
1 Terabyte sounds like a lot now, but I suspect we will find it to be very limited a few short years after it comes out. Human creativity is an amazing thing, and tends to push the boundries of whatever technical limits are placed upon it. I see no sign of this changing anytime soon, or of human creativity having come close to reaching some ephemeral "limit."
We won't be using the same computers in 20 years that we are today. Well, maybe some of the less flexible of us will be, but our children certainly won't be, and those of us more willing to keep up with a changing world likely won't be either.
Unless, of course, Hollywood is given veto power over all new technologies, in which case our children will be using computers more akin to the old IBM PC/XT my parents used back in the 80's, rather than what we're using today, but that is a tangent for another day.
Perhaps we should get our own house in order before we start lecturing the Chinese government?
This is a logical fallacy, and a road down which only complete silence and lack of any criticism of anything if it is taken to its logical conclusion.
Yes, American and the West should get its house in order. We should stop funding 'friendly' dictatorships (that almost universally end up being NOT friendly), whether they are in central America, Asia, or the Middle East, we should stop the erosion of our civil liberties and rights, we should repeal our intellectual property laws and the government mandated monopolies they grant and replace it with a regime of laws fit for the 21st century, etc. etc.
But that in no way means, implies, or defends the notion that we should remain silent when we see injustice abroad, any more than we should when we see it in our home countries.
In this case, as an American criticizing an American company for collaborating with a tyranny abroad I feel perfectly justified. If that company will collaborate with a foreign tyranny, how do you expect it will behave if and when there is ever a tyranny in your country, or here at home in the US for that matter?
I was living in Germany at the time of Tiannamin square, and I remember a very insightful comment a friend of mine (who was leftist, while back then I was much farther to the right) made when, a week after the massacre, a fat American businessman was shown on TV sitting across from a fat Chinese politician, with American and Chinese flags between them, shaking hands on a new business deal they'd closed while the bodies were still warm (paraphrased from memory and translated into English).
"This hypocracy and ethical degeneracy is why the West is going to fall just as the East did. The only difference is we have a little more money to squander first, so it will take us a little longer to become aware of our own destruction."
A scathing, and IMHO very accurate, criticism not just of China's Government's viciousness against its own people, but against the moral and ethical bankrupcy of both the Chinese and the West in handling this entire affair.
How prophetic and true. This sort of anti-ethic doesn't just destroy companies fiscally and wreck havoc on stock markets, it destroys the fundamental foundation of democracy and civil rule of law. In short, it wrecks entire countries and civilizations, and we'd better grow up and out of this "money is the only real ethic" nonsense before it runs its natural course and takes us all out with it.
Some big names sure .. but in reality these companies are just as money hungry as Microsoft ..
... as often as not it isn't ... but it should also be pointed out that the profit motive doesn't assure unethical behavior, and this looks like a clear case where ethical behavior actually offers a competetive advantage.
Yup, they're money hungry allright. And they've found a big, and likely to grow, niche, namely people who do not want to do business with companies that share and sell their private information, as if their customers were little more than product themselves, objects to be owned, ie. slaves.
They've bet that, by offering a service that provides the same convinience Passport claims to provide, while maintaining the integrity of their customer's privacy, that they will gain market share in so doing, at the expense of those who use passport and pass around their customer's private data like some cheap sexually transmitted disease.
And they are probably right, which means that by protecting our privacy from the likes of telemarketers and Microsoft, those money hungry companies are going to make even more money.
I'm the first to criticize the idiotic notion that capitalism is somehow a panacea for all our ills
is entrusting your purchasing habits to these guys really a good idea?
No, which is why you do not want to use Passport, and why the design of the Liberty Alliance scheme, which does not share or even link to personal information, is so much superior and preferable to Microsoft passport.
Interesting how here on /., when discussing an alternative to MS, the first (and usually only) alternative to be discussed is Linux. As far as a desktop OS is concerned, Apple's Mac OS X may be far better suited to the task.
... you simply had the good luck to be the straw that broke the camel's back, so to speak.
... usually in its easy-to-install Mandrake incarnation).
This is not meant as a personal attack, nor is it meant to imply that you personally belong to what appears to have become the Slashdot Division of Apple. It is intended to point out what appears to be a recent trend of Apple astroturfing, consisting of numerous posts which yours resembles to some degree. You are by no means the worst offendor in this regards
This is a free software/open source forum. Why on earth would you expect people who are concerned not only with technical superiority, but also freedom to advocate the substitution of one master (Apple) for another (Microsoft), when their are alternatives like FreeBSD and GNU/Linux that offer both freedom and technical superiority?
With all these "don't talk about Linux, talk about Apple OS X" posts I've seen recently I'm beginning to suspect that the Microsoft Slashdot Division another post alluded to has been joined by the Apple Slashdot Division. Frankly, astroturfing by both sides is insulting to the intelligence of any critical thinking mind, not to mention irritating as hell. And I say that as someone who will recommend Apple over Microsoft to those of my friends who are really technically illiterate (to the semi-literate I will recommend GNU/Linux
In this particular case, one person lied. Not people, one person, and there was no coverup. Quite the contrary. Despite the fact that some basic check-and-balance procedures were not followed (designed to avoid emberrassment, as there will always be external peer review on this sort of thing as a matter of course), the standard peer review uncovered the fraud when other scientists couldn't duplicate the findings. It is all about checks and balances, whether you are talking about science, politics, engineering, or jurisprudence. Take away your checks and balances and things will go awry
I only wish more people in our society were aware of this basic and very important fact. It is what allows science to function and progress, and it is what allows our democracy to function despite personal corruption. Anytime anyone suggests a "reform" or change, in policy or procedure, that in some way diminishes the checks and balances that are in place *cough* ceeding unprecendented powers to the FBI *cough*, like not doing "the most elemenary checks and data archiving" suspicions should be raised, significantly.
However, in this case peer review and the usual checks and balances did in fact ferret out the fraud and make it known rather quickly. I think this demonstrates that, while individual scientists are certainly capable of misconduct, the scientific method and peer review regime we have works pretty well, and is quite trustworthy.
Now, of course they want to hook up their digital camera and an all-in-one scanner/printer, so there could be some challenges ahead.
... one thing about Free Software is that 5 year old peripheral will still be supported, years after Microsoft has dumped all support of it on their OS).
... in fact she has come to detest her Windows box at work). She uses openoffice, mozilla, kmail, xmms, and isn't afraind to type a few commands I wrote down for her at the command line when she wants to watch a movie using mplayer.
Their scanner may or may not work, but their digital camera should be just fine. It is important that they know not to go buying hardware until they are certain it works with Linux...they wouldn't buy a Mac scanner and expect it to work with windows (indeed, they wouldn't by an older, used scanner and expect it to work with the current crop of windows XP would they
gphoto2
Also, if you find they want to hook up an ieee1394 video camera, that will work as well (ieee1384 drivers, dvgrab or, better yet, kino).
My mom is also running GNU/Linux (and loves it
Most of our parents who dealt with computers at all prior to 1995 had to contend with DOS at one time or another, so if they are made aware that the occasional criptic command is available if they need it (but not required if they prefer using a GUI), and you're willing to sit down with them, show them how it works, and write down the command they need to use, all but the illiterate of the illiterate will be fairly comfortable with that.
Add to that the lack of worms, viruses, crashes, and unpredictable, erratic behavior that so plagues microsoft platforms and you end up with a very happy camper indeed.
Being able to fix any issues in 5 minutes via an ssh link, rather than spending an hour on the phone talking them through a cranky winddows gui to fix their video (or whatever) doesn't hurt either. In fact, I haven't had a call for help in almost a year...because her system just plains works, day in and day out.
I always wonder why all the people who talk about the new age of media always forget the typewriter. The typewriter has at least as much to do with the dissemination of information as the press. Afterall presses are expensive, complicated and controlled by restrictive governments. Typewriters and for that matter fax machines are not.
... because the ramifications to all of us who use and enjoy the internet are profound, and in some ways (in a rhetorical sense) quite apocolyptic.
Typwriters however do not change the publishing landscape appreciably. That is why they are seldom brought up.
The printing press fundamentally changed how information flows. The British Crown, in response, developed the concept of copyright, which created controllable publishing monopolies upon which the crown could excersize whatever pressures it needed to insure only "approved" texts were published, and any unapproved publishers were dealt with harshly (even drawn and quartered in one instance).
Artists "rights" were not any part of the creation of copyright, contrary to popular myth which modern publishers continue to propogate rather shamelessly.
This is why modern copyright favors publishers so much, at the direct expense of artists and at an even greater expense to consumers. Copyright was designed to facilitate censorship and to benefit publishers who played the game, while eradicating those who did not. Authors, and whatever "rights" to their work they might have been entitled to, were not even a consideration.
Artists intellectual property "rights" were appended later, as an afterthought, in order to deflect growing criticism of the copyright monopolies of the day. It succeeded brilliantly, so much so that publishers kept their advantages, the crown kept its ability to excersize censorship pretty much at will, and artists were thrown a meager bone that, history has shown, really didn't protect them all that much. Even America's founding fathers, who in many respects were quite wise, bought this deception hook, line, and sinker, and enshrined it into the American consitution.
Still, even a little of something was better than nothing, so we have the ironic situation in which an entire legal regime is designed to exploit artists and their fans, while empowering middlemen such as publishers and facilitate methods by which governments (and today large corporations) can excersize editorial pressures often resulting in what amounts to censorship, and many artists foolishly support such a system because they can't think of anything better. Their publishers (the recording industry, movie studios, etc. are delighted with the state of affairs, or at least were, until the internet made publishing a quantum leap easier and some artists started discovering that they no longer needed the middlemen.
Enter the current efforts to force creative people back onto the couch by turning the internet into just another cable channel.
Typewriters didn't empower authors into becoming their own publishers, indeed they didn't impact publishing signficantly at all. The Internet did, which is why government and old guard publishers like the MPAA and RIAA are conspiring to neuter it, perminantly.
Unfortunately it isn't at all paranoid to fear these efforts, much less to point them out and publicize them as widely as possible
Pirated software is an alternate supply for the software in question.
Supply and demand being what they are, that means the optimal price for legitimate copies of the software goes down.
IOW, the real cost of pirating isn't just how many copies weren't sold, but how much less money was made on legal copies.
Interesting hypothesis. However, given that 'copyright' is a government granted monopoly (that at one time had a limited length, but now for all intents and purposes, at least from a mortal human's point of view, is unlimited), one could argue that copyright violations are not distorting this particular less-than-free marketplace, they are an inherent part and a natural manifestation of that marketplace. Indeed, although I do not ethically agree with violating copyrights (despite my contention that copyright law should be replaced with a less draconian regime for protecting artists' credit and even profit for their creations), I would argue that it underscores the profound absurdity of a government granting artificial monopolies to publishers and thereby trying to dictate what would otherwise be a free market.
Particilarly when something less draconian (like a tax benefit to the creator and/or his duly authorized publisher) would allow a free market to flourish, even for so-called intellectual property, without sacrificing the free market altogether as we have done with copyright (and with patents BTW, though that is a discussion for another day).
I must have missed that post. I remember him saying that nobody lost anything when things were copied and making false assertions about the law.
... one which seems to be rather unanimous, by the way.
OK, this is my last post on the subject. You'll have the last deceitful word I'm sure, but anyone perusing your posting history and this thread will not be mislead by your nonsense.
I do find it irritating how you do put words in my mouth which I never wrote, which of course is your intent as a troll (I refer anyone to your posting history if they are in any doubt).
I never made any assertions about copyright violations not being illegal. Quite the contrary. I stated that copyright violation is not the same as theft, and as the AC poster noted, I have backed that up factually. Both the law, and every publicly available online dictionary, corroborate that fact which you seem unable or unwilling to grasp: copyright violation may be wrong, but it is not theft. Why. Because nothing is taken.
Potential profits are not "something", they are a nebulous, theoretical value which in at least one case can be pretty firmly shown to be $0.00 (the $18,000 program that almost certainly none of the copyright violators would have ever paid for, regardless), though as a theoretical value its size is irrelevant.
If you equate the taking of theoretical, or potential profit with theft, then you have by definition redefined every act of competition, legal or illegal, as theft, which is demonstrably nonsense.
End of story.
You've now had three different people point out the error of your assumptions, your fallacious arguments, and your conclusions. You have been led to water and clearly chosen not to drink.
Your perogative, but don't be surprised at the disdain you earn from critically thinking people as a result.
Oh, and by the way, identifying you as a troll isn't name calling. It is a value judgement on the quality of your posts
Hard to argue against that. Until, that is, you remember that John's definition of freedom of speech extends to running an open mail relay [slashdot.org] that he knows is being used by spammers. The tacitly admitted reason is that securing it might inconvenience his friends (to the extend that they'd have to remember a password), but the touted reason is that it's a freedom of speech issue. Sure, whatever.
John Gilmore doesn't necessarily represent my ideas about what constitutes freedom of speech
You make an interesting point, but it should be pointed out that, in any large group, there are signficant differences of opinion on issues such as what constitutes freedom of speech, the right to bear arms (or not), and so on. It would be a mistake to allow these differences, or your personal disagreements with Gilmore on his open mail server (I agree with you on that one BTW) to cloud his very correct statement that a body like ICANN needs to be a constitutional body with such rights built in at the foundation.
We can argue on exactly what constitutes freedom of speech later (we've been doing that in the USA for 215 years or so), but without at least a basis for protection we have something far worse than minor disagreements on where the line should be drawn: we have nothing.
The only real problem is the ".biz" namespace collision. When ICANN requested suggestions for new gTLDs, the OSRC sumbitted their application, stating that they had been running a functioning .biz TLD for years. However, ICANN selected someone else [neulevel.biz] to run the .biz gTLD.
.biz, and instead to respect the preexisting domain(s).
.com, .net, and .org domains. In other words, the disempowerment of ICANN from the grass roots. But this cannot happen overnight, and it cannot happen at all unless there is a way for someone to say "wait a minute, I need to go the icann's blah.com to do this one thing." Without that capability, this sort of popular uprising against these tyrants (and yes, in light of their recent actions I do not think there is any other adequate word to describe them) isn't feasable.
OpenNic voted not to recognized ICANN's
Opennic, youcann, etc. are a good start, but what really needs to happen is grassroots takeover of the
As for who decides what root authority is called what, I would suggest the same democratic, constitutional based organization that comes up with the alternative domain names.
Obviously if we're the ones implimenting support for http://root-authority//somesite.com, we decide what root-authority string maps to ICANN and what doesn't.
Hell, I'd map http://fascist-thugs//blah.com to ICANN, but I suspect the majority would vote for "icann" as the identifier, rather than "fascist-thugs." Either way, we the community would decide, NOT ICANN (or any of the other competing root authorities).
And yes, it would mean rewriting a sizable bit of software (or at least rewriting parts of glibc and relinking). So what? Rewriting software is a small price to pay for freedom, certainly a much smaller price than many other generations have been forced to pay.