I can produce a license that the OSI would approve that does not allow for the immediate action that I objected to right here: buying the original, taking the source code, and redistributing it singularly... without any modification or derivative work.
I don't think you can. Feel free to try though. OSI is not bound to your reading of their definition - or any other outsider's reading of it for that matter, and they can ignore obviously unintentional loopholes, or amend the definition to close them if they choose.
No, Snowgirl is right. [...] Open Source does not mean anything other than you have the source available. For example, so you can inspect it for security reasons, so you can make in-house only changes
No.
It used to be fairly common to sell software with source code, with explicit restriction that it may not be redistributed: source was only provided for in-house use. That is certainly not open source.
Open Source does imply the right to redistribute, and that's explicitly allowed in every OSI license, snowgirl's legalistic quibbling notwithstanding: the definition referred is not a license or any other legally binding document, and if someone really tried to make a license that explicitly forbids redistribution of the program in unmodified and non-aggregated form, I'm sure ISO would reject it - possibly clarifying their definition, if they thought it was necessary - but the intent of the definition is clear enough, whether or not it appears legally watertight.
Most countries have the power of the courts strictly limited to crimes committed within their own country. Other countries limit their jurisdiction to crimes committed within their borders, and crimes committed outside those borders by their own citizens.
Actually quite a few, if not indeed most countries have provisions in their laws to prosecute for crimes committed outside their territory, in particular crimes committed not only by but also against their citizens (although typically with caveat that the it must be criminal also in the country where it occurred), some crimes are often prosecutable no matter what (genocide, airplane hijackings, child abuse being common). And often there's a proviso that prosecution is possible in any case if decided high enough (state attorney or similar).
I'm not aware of any comprehensive survey of this around the world, I know only of a rather random sample of countries - if anyone knows of such a study, I'd be very interested.
I'd not heard of such abductions, but if there is any truth in this, it is indeed scary.
There is some truth in it, certainly. One glaring example is Manuel Noriega: he was not only foreign citizen but head of state, abducted by force by the US and flown to USA for trial. (Yeah, he was a thug and deserved what he got, but that's beside the point here.)
One has to wonder then, what is it about the U.S. that the feel they have the right to effectively violate the sovereignty of another nation to protect their own interests?
Because they're powerful enough to get away with it. I suspect everybody else would do it, too, if they could,
and sometimes do.
Israeli abduction of Eichmann is a good example: they got away with it not because of their military power
but because those more powerful supported them, Eichmann being rather deserving of punishment, too.
Most countries prefer to do such things less openly, resorting to assassination rather than claiming
any legality to their actions - a bit further back in history, Trotsky is a prime example.
How would they react if such a crime, (I would consider this a crime), were perpetrated against one of their own citizens?
It would depend on how it'd suit the politics of the day. If the abductee was someone they wanted to get rid of, perhaps nothing but indignant speeches; if an American hero, anything up to full-scale war.
did you figure in the cost of air-con in the summer time (and possibly winter depending on where you live)?
That's a good point. Where I live (about 62 degrees North) air conditioning isn't much of an issue, but heating is, and I've always tried to take that into account when doing power savings calculations and measurements. Hatta is right that surprisingly often old boxes turn out to be more efficient in the end - but not always. You really need to do the measurements and calculations to know, and sometimes results may be surprising.
my experience says that most people -even those in the lower income bracket- don't want the old gear.
There are people who like old gear for philosophical reasons, even when money isn't really an issue. I recently found a good home for an Athlon XP 1500+ (1.3GHz) -based box as an email/www terminal in a used car parts shop (put in a 40GB disk and two 512MB DIMMs scavenged elsewhere and installed Ubuntu in it), and they've been happy with it - suits their business idea of recycling old stuff, they told me.
I can remember many other amazingly old and slow machines that have found happy owners in people who could easily have bought new stuff if they wanted to.
In general, though, I'd discard (= recycle properly) stuff that's been significantly superseded in terms of electricity consumption - if a new one saves its price in one year's electricity bill, there's no point in keeping the old one. But stuff that's just slow by modern standards, like 802.11b gear, may well find a happy owner in someone who ideologically likes recycling and doesn't need more speed (and quite a few people don't). But people in low income brackets are more likely to feel using old stuff is somehow demeaning and reject it for that reason, even if it'd be perfectly usable.
a long time ago [...] I was under the impression that IpCop was based off of smoothwall and (IpCop) was pretty much a dead project.
IpCop was indeed originally forked off smoothwall, but it's not a dead project yet - indeed, it looks like the next major release (2.0) is going to materialize after all.
Lemmings do NOT follow each other. They move blindly, period.
I guess you've never seen a real lemming. They most certainly are not blind,
nor do they move blindly in a metaphorical sense.
They do not follow each other thoughtlessly either, however,
so that part of your rebuttal was correct.
I have (many) friends who, because they can, allot 0 dollars for entertainment and download every movie, song and game they want from the torrents. They then use that 100-200 dollars that would otherwise have been entertainment funds to buy more pot, better brands of cigarettes or a better brand of beer/beer at a more expensive bar depending on their preferred method of intoxication.
All of those count as entertainment in my book.
The general point remains: most people will not increase their total entertainment expenditure no matter what, and the fight is not really between them and creators/producers but within the latter, not about how to make the cake bigger but how it is shared.
All the work you did for them belongs to them. [...] You have no rights to do whatever you want with the code you wrote for them.
It depends on the jurisdiction, and possibly what kind of employer it is. In particular governmental and some other public employers have restrictions in some countries - e.g., in Finland university teachers and researchers have copyright to what they create in their work. Also, there may be nationally binding agreements with trade unions that have similar effects on some professions.
As a rule, though, with a private employer, and in some countries with all, you are right.
Consider the antiquarian collector. A First Folio Shakespeare might be covered by a copyright issued for a new printing, edition, revised font, scholarly criticism edition of say the Tempest.
No. The new edition has its own copyright, created by the criticism and whatnot, but it has no affect on the original, whose copyright has expired. It does mean you can't copy the Tempest edition because the original's copyright has expired, but if you get your hands on the original you can copy it as much as you want, and of course you can also sell and resell it.
So, if I live in England, legally buy an Omega watch there, then legally immigrate to the US, it is now a copyright violation to resell that watch on eBay?!? This flies in the face of common sense!
If you live in England, remember that the opposite is true as well: if you visit USA, buy a copyrighted item and bring it back home, you can't legally resell it there. The EU Copyright Directive explicitly limits the doctrine of first sale to first sales within EU (or actually within ETA, which includes also Norway &c).
IMHO, it is morally both wrong and evil, and I punish Apple for it by not buying their products.
But it also is and should be legal. Not all wrong and evil things are or should be forbidden by law.
Circulation of papers in Japan has always been ridiculously higher in Japan than in the US. Some of those papers have daily circulations of eight figures---no American paper has ever achieved circulation figures like that, past or present. The local paper that I get (the Shizuoka Shinbun) has a daily circulation of over 700,000 (vs 900,000 for the New York Times), and it's not even read nationally like the Yomiuri, Mainichi, Asahi, Nikkei, etc.
Just an observation: the biggest newspaper in Finland, Helsingin Sanomat, has daily circulation of little over 400,000 copies - and the population of Finland is just over 5 million people. I suspect there aren't many newspapers with higher circulation/population ratios. (Yeah, other papers have high circulation figures here, too, always have.)
And they also have both free and paid content - but no problems against linking to the latter, rather the opposite: they hope links will bring more subscribers.
No one bought a PS3 specifically for the otheros feature. It was a pointless feature which had nothing to do with its basic operation or the reason it was purchased.
I beg to differ. I have installed Linux on 20 PS3s that were purchased for the very purpose of running Linux, and they've never been used for anything else after purchase. (The free games that came with them were given away.)
Why not just set the SSH config to AllowRootLogin = no?
Or, if you need root ssh for things like backup, allow just key authentication, preferably for all users but at least for root:
Match user=root
PasswordAuthentication=no
Also, ssh access for root (at least) should be restricted to known IPs:
Match Address=192.168.0.1/24
PermitRootLogin=yes
If the only places where root password can be used are physical console and su, it is no longer much of a security risk as compared to unlimited sudo in a single-user machine.
That said, leaving root password unset by default may still be a sensible choice.
I would be happier with sudo, however, if it could be configured to use a smartcard or similar
instead of just re-entering same password (indeed in some cases I've used "ssh root@localhost"
with sshd configured to accept only smartcard authentication instead of sudo).
But most people don't have smartcards, all alternatives are compromises.
This goes against all claims that you become addicted very quickly.
Some studies have indicated the tendency to get addicted with nicotine is hereditary (ditto with heroin): some people (around 70% if memory serves) get addicted very easily, others rarely or not at all. Maybe you're one of the latter group.
It's still Google turning round to a country and saying "Your laws are wrong".
Of course. And Google (and everybody else) should do exactly that to every country whose laws are wrong
Now, most laws are really neither right or wrong in this sense, they're just different ways of doing things - but if you believe
in right and wrong in the first place, you cannot avoid considering some laws to be wrong as well (against human rights, say)
and then you should say so and and act accordingly, whoever or whatever you are.
As for child porn, the proper reason for banning it isn't the (admittedly disgusting) nature of the material as such
but the fact that making it is child abuse.
If you think it's just an arbitrary line between what kind of material is and what isn't acceptable as such,
you're already too far down the slippery slope. Remember the Australian MP wanted to ban sex films with small-breasted women
because they'd titillate pedophiles?
Authentication can exist just fine without encryption, but if you want privacy you must have both authentication and encryption.
Encryption without authentication isn't worthless, however: it won't protect you from a targeted attack, but it will help against those throwing their nets far and wide in the hope of seeing something interesting. If all http sessions were encrypted and https differed only by having authentication too, it would make blackhats' lives significantly harder without any obvious downside. In particular it would help also those seriously concerned about privacy by making encrypted communication less conspicuous.
Of course it could cause false sense of security in some - but looking at how the vast majority of people trust even unencrypted communications, indeed many trust http more than https with self-encrypted keys, I can't see how it could get worse. Just show the lock symbol or whatever only with authenticated communications but encrypt everything anyway, and everybody would be better off (except spooks and perhaps certificate sellers).
It's public information [...] And, of course, recording and publishing these things is simply recording and publishing a list of facts; a practice which has long been protected by various laws and rulings.
Not everywhere. In many European jurisdictions at least it is not at all obvious that publishing a list made of publicly available information is legal. In particular, if it is considered
"personal information" about people, creating a new compilation of it falls under various personal data protection laws - even if every individual piece of information in there is publicly available somewhere.
I don't know of any place that'd considered AP SIDs to be personal information in that sense, though - but it wouldn't surprise me either.
Me, I don't care much about the UI - I'll get used to whatever way it goes.
The significant change, to me, is left at the very end of the article: GEGL and proper high-bit-depth color support it brings.
Slashdot Mirror
I can produce a license that the OSI would approve that does not allow for the immediate action that I objected to right here: buying the original, taking the source code, and redistributing it singularly... without any modification or derivative work.
I don't think you can. Feel free to try though. OSI is not bound to your reading of their definition - or any other outsider's reading of it for that matter, and they can ignore obviously unintentional loopholes, or amend the definition to close them if they choose.
No, Snowgirl is right. [...] Open Source does not mean anything other than you have the source available. For example, so you can inspect it for security reasons, so you can make in-house only changes
No. It used to be fairly common to sell software with source code, with explicit restriction that it may not be redistributed: source was only provided for in-house use. That is certainly not open source.
Open Source does imply the right to redistribute, and that's explicitly allowed in every OSI license, snowgirl's legalistic quibbling notwithstanding: the definition referred is not a license or any other legally binding document, and if someone really tried to make a license that explicitly forbids redistribution of the program in unmodified and non-aggregated form, I'm sure ISO would reject it - possibly clarifying their definition, if they thought it was necessary - but the intent of the definition is clear enough, whether or not it appears legally watertight.
Most countries have the power of the courts strictly limited to crimes committed within their own country. Other countries limit their jurisdiction to crimes committed within their borders, and crimes committed outside those borders by their own citizens.
Actually quite a few, if not indeed most countries have provisions in their laws to prosecute for crimes committed outside their territory, in particular crimes committed not only by but also against their citizens (although typically with caveat that the it must be criminal also in the country where it occurred), some crimes are often prosecutable no matter what (genocide, airplane hijackings, child abuse being common). And often there's a proviso that prosecution is possible in any case if decided high enough (state attorney or similar).
I'm not aware of any comprehensive survey of this around the world, I know only of a rather random sample of countries - if anyone knows of such a study, I'd be very interested.
I'd not heard of such abductions, but if there is any truth in this, it is indeed scary.
There is some truth in it, certainly. One glaring example is Manuel Noriega: he was not only foreign citizen but head of state, abducted by force by the US and flown to USA for trial. (Yeah, he was a thug and deserved what he got, but that's beside the point here.)
One has to wonder then, what is it about the U.S. that the feel they have the right to effectively violate the sovereignty of another nation to protect their own interests?
Because they're powerful enough to get away with it. I suspect everybody else would do it, too, if they could, and sometimes do. Israeli abduction of Eichmann is a good example: they got away with it not because of their military power but because those more powerful supported them, Eichmann being rather deserving of punishment, too. Most countries prefer to do such things less openly, resorting to assassination rather than claiming any legality to their actions - a bit further back in history, Trotsky is a prime example.
How would they react if such a crime, (I would consider this a crime), were perpetrated against one of their own citizens?
It would depend on how it'd suit the politics of the day. If the abductee was someone they wanted to get rid of, perhaps nothing but indignant speeches; if an American hero, anything up to full-scale war.
did you figure in the cost of air-con in the summer time (and possibly winter depending on where you live)?
That's a good point. Where I live (about 62 degrees North) air conditioning isn't much of an issue, but heating is, and I've always tried to take that into account when doing power savings calculations and measurements. Hatta is right that surprisingly often old boxes turn out to be more efficient in the end - but not always. You really need to do the measurements and calculations to know, and sometimes results may be surprising.
my experience says that most people -even those in the lower income bracket- don't want the old gear.
There are people who like old gear for philosophical reasons, even when money isn't really an issue. I recently found a good home for an Athlon XP 1500+ (1.3GHz) -based box as an email/www terminal in a used car parts shop (put in a 40GB disk and two 512MB DIMMs scavenged elsewhere and installed Ubuntu in it), and they've been happy with it - suits their business idea of recycling old stuff, they told me.
I can remember many other amazingly old and slow machines that have found happy owners in people who could easily have bought new stuff if they wanted to.
In general, though, I'd discard (= recycle properly) stuff that's been significantly superseded in terms of electricity consumption - if a new one saves its price in one year's electricity bill, there's no point in keeping the old one. But stuff that's just slow by modern standards, like 802.11b gear, may well find a happy owner in someone who ideologically likes recycling and doesn't need more speed (and quite a few people don't). But people in low income brackets are more likely to feel using old stuff is somehow demeaning and reject it for that reason, even if it'd be perfectly usable.
a long time ago [...] I was under the impression that IpCop was based off of smoothwall and (IpCop) was pretty much a dead project.
IpCop was indeed originally forked off smoothwall, but it's not a dead project yet - indeed, it looks like the next major release (2.0) is going to materialize after all.
pfSense is based on FreeBSD, not Linux.
Yeah. There're several Linux-based firewall distros, though; IpCop is perhaps closest to pfSense.
Lemmings do NOT follow each other. They move blindly, period.
I guess you've never seen a real lemming. They most certainly are not blind, nor do they move blindly in a metaphorical sense. They do not follow each other thoughtlessly either, however, so that part of your rebuttal was correct.
I have (many) friends who, because they can, allot 0 dollars for entertainment and download every movie, song and game they want from the torrents. They then use that 100-200 dollars that would otherwise have been entertainment funds to buy more pot, better brands of cigarettes or a better brand of beer/beer at a more expensive bar depending on their preferred method of intoxication.
All of those count as entertainment in my book. The general point remains: most people will not increase their total entertainment expenditure no matter what, and the fight is not really between them and creators/producers but within the latter, not about how to make the cake bigger but how it is shared.
I thought open WiFi was illegal in the EU?
Certainly not. There are several cities in EU with city-wide open WiFi, including Oulu in Finland (http://www.panoulu.net/).
All the work you did for them belongs to them. [...] You have no rights to do whatever you want with the code you wrote for them.
It depends on the jurisdiction, and possibly what kind of employer it is. In particular governmental and some other public employers have restrictions in some countries - e.g., in Finland university teachers and researchers have copyright to what they create in their work. Also, there may be nationally binding agreements with trade unions that have similar effects on some professions.
As a rule, though, with a private employer, and in some countries with all, you are right.
Consider the antiquarian collector. A First Folio Shakespeare might be covered by a copyright issued for a new printing, edition, revised font, scholarly criticism edition of say the Tempest.
No. The new edition has its own copyright, created by the criticism and whatnot, but it has no affect on the original, whose copyright has expired. It does mean you can't copy the Tempest edition because the original's copyright has expired, but if you get your hands on the original you can copy it as much as you want, and of course you can also sell and resell it.
So, if I live in England, legally buy an Omega watch there, then legally immigrate to the US, it is now a copyright violation to resell that watch on eBay?!? This flies in the face of common sense!
If you live in England, remember that the opposite is true as well: if you visit USA, buy a copyrighted item and bring it back home, you can't legally resell it there. The EU Copyright Directive explicitly limits the doctrine of first sale to first sales within EU (or actually within ETA, which includes also Norway &c).
IMHO, it is morally both wrong and evil, and I punish Apple for it by not buying their products. But it also is and should be legal. Not all wrong and evil things are or should be forbidden by law.
Circulation of papers in Japan has always been ridiculously higher in Japan than in the US. Some of those papers have daily circulations of eight figures---no American paper has ever achieved circulation figures like that, past or present. The local paper that I get (the Shizuoka Shinbun) has a daily circulation of over 700,000 (vs 900,000 for the New York Times), and it's not even read nationally like the Yomiuri, Mainichi, Asahi, Nikkei, etc.
Just an observation: the biggest newspaper in Finland, Helsingin Sanomat, has daily circulation of little over 400,000 copies - and the population of Finland is just over 5 million people. I suspect there aren't many newspapers with higher circulation/population ratios. (Yeah, other papers have high circulation figures here, too, always have.)
And they also have both free and paid content - but no problems against linking to the latter, rather the opposite: they hope links will bring more subscribers.
No one bought a PS3 specifically for the otheros feature. It was a pointless feature which had nothing to do with its basic operation or the reason it was purchased.
I beg to differ. I have installed Linux on 20 PS3s that were purchased for the very purpose of running Linux, and they've never been used for anything else after purchase. (The free games that came with them were given away.)
Why not just set the SSH config to AllowRootLogin = no?
Or, if you need root ssh for things like backup, allow just key authentication, preferably for all users but at least for root:
Match user=root
PasswordAuthentication=no
Also, ssh access for root (at least) should be restricted to known IPs:
Match Address=192.168.0.1/24
PermitRootLogin=yes
If the only places where root password can be used are physical console and su, it is no longer much of a security risk as compared to unlimited sudo in a single-user machine.
That said, leaving root password unset by default may still be a sensible choice. I would be happier with sudo, however, if it could be configured to use a smartcard or similar instead of just re-entering same password (indeed in some cases I've used "ssh root@localhost" with sshd configured to accept only smartcard authentication instead of sudo). But most people don't have smartcards, all alternatives are compromises.
This goes against all claims that you become addicted very quickly.
Some studies have indicated the tendency to get addicted with nicotine is hereditary (ditto with heroin): some people (around 70% if memory serves) get addicted very easily, others rarely or not at all. Maybe you're one of the latter group.
It's still Google turning round to a country and saying "Your laws are wrong".
Of course. And Google (and everybody else) should do exactly that to every country whose laws are wrong
Now, most laws are really neither right or wrong in this sense, they're just different ways of doing things - but if you believe in right and wrong in the first place, you cannot avoid considering some laws to be wrong as well (against human rights, say) and then you should say so and and act accordingly, whoever or whatever you are.
As for child porn, the proper reason for banning it isn't the (admittedly disgusting) nature of the material as such but the fact that making it is child abuse. If you think it's just an arbitrary line between what kind of material is and what isn't acceptable as such, you're already too far down the slippery slope. Remember the Australian MP wanted to ban sex films with small-breasted women because they'd titillate pedophiles?
Authentication can exist just fine without encryption, but if you want privacy you must have both authentication and encryption.
Encryption without authentication isn't worthless, however: it won't protect you from a targeted attack, but it will help against those throwing their nets far and wide in the hope of seeing something interesting. If all http sessions were encrypted and https differed only by having authentication too, it would make blackhats' lives significantly harder without any obvious downside. In particular it would help also those seriously concerned about privacy by making encrypted communication less conspicuous.
Of course it could cause false sense of security in some - but looking at how the vast majority of people trust even unencrypted communications, indeed many trust http more than https with self-encrypted keys, I can't see how it could get worse. Just show the lock symbol or whatever only with authenticated communications but encrypt everything anyway, and everybody would be better off (except spooks and perhaps certificate sellers).
It's public information [...] And, of course, recording and publishing these things is simply recording and publishing a list of facts; a practice which has long been protected by various laws and rulings.
Not everywhere. In many European jurisdictions at least it is not at all obvious that publishing a list made of publicly available information is legal. In particular, if it is considered "personal information" about people, creating a new compilation of it falls under various personal data protection laws - even if every individual piece of information in there is publicly available somewhere.
I don't know of any place that'd considered AP SIDs to be personal information in that sense, though - but it wouldn't surprise me either.
The signal power will reduce by the cube of distance from the masts
Square of the distance, actually.
it's neighbours
That looks possessive to me, not plural; the grammar is fine (or am I missing something?).
Unlike with nouns, the possessive of "it" is "its", without apostrophe, and "it's" is abbreviation of "it is". Plural is "they".
Me, I don't care much about the UI - I'll get used to whatever way it goes. The significant change, to me, is left at the very end of the article: GEGL and proper high-bit-depth color support it brings.