If A = [Some Muscian] and B = [ Some coporation ].
"We ask you to enact sensible reform that balances the interests of creators with the interests of the companies who exploit music for their financial enrichment" can can be reworded as as "We ask you to enact sensible reform that balances the interests of 'A' with the interests of 'B' who exploit music for their financial enrichment. Or do I have that backwards? "We ask you to enact sensible reform that balances the interests of 'B' with the interests of 'A who exploit music for their financial enrichment.
I'm a little confused who the "bad guy" is intended to be here.
I remember a parable story about how a dev team lamented about the 20 standards there were for XXXXX. So they decided to merge all the standards into one comprehensive standard. They worked long and hard and finally completed the mammoth task and released it to the public. Now there were 21 standards.
This story about "pop computing" seems similar for some reason.
If the FBI does not reveal the hack so they can hack other phones, well that means the bad guys can also continue using that hack. After all we know that there are now at least 3 organizations who can access a locked iPhone 5c without the owner's password.
John Oliver famously coined the "dick-pic" angle of looking at the surveillance programs Snowden helped reveal. The resulting understanding in the masses when you boiled down the question to "can the government see my dic pics" showed a massive reversal of general opinion (IMO).
Something similar is needed here. Perhaps the question should be reworded to "Should the FBI be able to force Apple to rewrite their systems so that an Apple phone will unzip your pants to see if you have a penis or not?" Because at this point there is no evidence (that I've heard) that there is anything pertinent on the phone. Only the possibility that there *might* be. Much the same as there is a 50/50 chance that any particular person may have male genitalia under their pants. Hmm.. Schrodinger's Dick Pic???
So my simple web server, serving up some basic info - like maybe my most recent cat photos.. Are you saying that I *must* use SSL to do this? And to make SSL work I have to pay to get a certificate (cuz I don't really trust the freebie options yet). All so that visitors to my site will *know* that they are looking at cat pictures securely? That doesn't really make too much sense, and seems to suggest a broad assumption about the main purpose of web sites. Not everything requires an encrypted channel. Won't someone think of the kitties? All this hype about safeguarding the Internet for the kids, and not enough to remember that kitties need love too.
Your rights to publish revenue generating advertisements stops the moment that ad attempts to appear on my screen. The screen belongs to me. The hardware that runs it belongs to me. The bandwidth to retrieve your ad belongs to me (by virtue of the fact I am paying for it). What I choose to have appear on my screen is MY choice - not yours. If I choose to replace all advertisements of one-eyed midget Unicorns, that is up to me. If I choose to utilize a tool to prevent the ads from using my bandwidth in the first place, that is up to me. If I choose to blacklist all the IPs that your ads appear on, that is also up to me. You have every right to publish your ad. You do NOT have the right to force me to look at it.
I haven't seen it in the comments yet, but by seizing the site and NOT shutting it down, the government chose to run a child porn server. Does that not then put them under the same legal scrutiny as those they were investigating? Of course I did not read the article and may be missing a bunch of detail, but if the gov was actively serving child porn, then THAT is a crime in my eyes - regardless if it was a honeypot or not.
putting on my skeptical hat here to consider alternate views. One could easily wonder about the "anonymous" nature of this disclosure and how the message is about instilling fear. Who profits? It would be easy to conclude that this is a propaganda release with the aim of softening up the sheeple's perspective to allow for increased budget expenses, or even direct action at the supposed culprits. Blaming a nation-state on flimsy evidence such as what language was used suggests a preconception being reinforced by circumstancial tidbits. Afterall, there can't ever be anyone else in the world that speaks that language, perhaps even within one of the superpowers known to be fairly multicultural. Or those who hirer foreign workers. Yep, a sceptic would be wary of reports like this - even if the infiltration is 100% true.
Between keeping the core WP system up to date, and keeping all the plugins up to date, the maintenance needs for a WP system discounts it for most of my customers. If you fail to keep the updates in place - almost daily, then your site quickly becomes owned and requires even more maintenance to fix. There are times and places for WP, but if all "fixes" and content updates are going to the consultants and tech team anyway, then why not just use static HTML?
Run your own server? You got to be kidding with advice like this. It is simple enough to get such a server up and operational. But, the maintenance effort needed on that server quickly outweighs any benefits. Ensuring the server has appropriate spam / virus protections, keeping these up to date, dealing with blacklistings, etc. It just is not worth it unless it is your job to maintain a server like this. If this is NOT your job, that job will suffer due to less time being available while you deal with email server maintenance.
In the end, it is much better to ask yourself two simple questions - How many mail boxes do I need? and How much storage is needed for each mail box? Using that information you can shop around and find a suitable solution where it is someone else's business to do that server maintenance. Prices and capabilities vary. Places like Rackspace offers an email services only option that costs much less than the time needed to host your own server. Gmail and the ilk become options as well. I hesitate to use the "free" services from companies like Google though - it is bad enough that I am relinquishing control of an essential service, I want to know that I am getting what I pay for. The contracts for free services are rather one sided with limited liabilities, IMO.
... "attributable to the inaccurate data Spokeo collected on him." If a company is in the clear for publishing inaccurate data about an individual, are they also in the clear for just fabricating data? What's to say that any of the names in their lists represent real and physical people with the same name? In theory the users entered the data at one point or another and that should be enough to tie the data to a real human. BUT any coder knows it's not rocket science to write a script to fill in a form and submit it. Consider tools like Faker https://github.com/fzaninotto/....
I'm fully aware of this phenomenon myself. However, I'm seeing a consistency to the wrongs. One would think the models would be altered to reflect real data, instead of ignoring "anomalies" on a regular basis. (of course, climate models are not very simple either...)
From the NASA website (http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/noaa-n/climate/climate_weather.html#.VPqNHJ_08WM) "The difference between weather and climate is a measure of time. Weather is what conditions of the atmosphere are over a short period of time, and climate is how the atmosphere "behaves" over relatively long periods of time." So weather IS climate, just on a much shorter scale. Weather is TODAY's climate, and the collective weather over the past XX years defines a generic "climate" statement. With that in mind, predictions of Climate change should be relatively reliably reflected in current weather patterns. I would fully expect the predictions to be wrong occasionally, but there seems to be a growing trend of glaring wrongs with the current state of climate predictions. Therefore I submit that the current climate models are not yet good enough to be the defining factor in public policy, as many would have us believe they should be now.
So these awesome weather models that have been driving so much controversy over global warming and everything else are not quite right? Hmm, soo let me get this straight. They can't predict the weather next week very accurately, but we are supposed to "trust" the experts when they tell us what is going to happen in the next few years or longer? And we are seeing constant reminders like this that their models are broken and prone to human error. Forgive me if I take ALL weather predictions with a degree of doubt, like I have for almost all my life.
Not sure how current it is, but when I was looking for the same a few years back all that was really available for PHP was HTML->PDF libraries which were not sufficient for anything but the most basic forms. A decent invoice form was hard to get right with these tools. Then I came across FOP. Or more specifically XML-FOP. Combine that with a little XSL and the output was amazing, and could do more than the HTML converters. The only problem is that the FOP tool was a Java based program so PHP would need to execute a shell command to call it. With tight control of what info was passed to that shell command, it seemed an appropriate trade-off for the job at hand. You can still get FOP in the ubuntu repos - apt-get install fop. The learning curve for FOP is a little steep to begin, but no more than any other XML dialect. And being XML, you have a lot of options in building the required FOP file. I opted to put my data into my own XML file, then utilize an XSL file to convert it if/when needed. More details here: http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/...
I was told something similar about Ford/Mercury Sables a few years back. I think it has a lot to do with how many of the cars were sold in a given year, and how long that model can expect before a break down. If there were a LOT of PT Cruisers sold in a given year, and we could expect a 5 year average (for example) before a significant malfunction, then in that 5th year tow truck drivers would see a significant number of PT Cruisers on their hoists - regardless of the quality of the vehicle.
Back when location services were just ramping up, I was interviewed for a position on a team building such services. By the WHOLE 15 person team (warning #1). After a few rapid fire questions they hit me out of the blue with "What kind of tree would you be, if you could be a tree?". My response was "Who'd the fuck want to be a TREE!!??!!" Needless to say I didn't get the job. Been thankful ever since - that company was not there less than a year later.
Some of your premise is correct - charging for "copyrighted works" is perfectly fine, and even supported by the idea of Open Source. But, your GPL Violations list and general dis'ing of GPL is BS, IMO.
1. GPL does not prohibit commercial use of software. GPL simply states "respect the applicable licenses". 2. Making use of a GPL library does NOT automatically make my code assume a GPL license. If I use libraryX that is GPL'd, then yes, I need to respect the license for that library and ensure I include the source code for that library with my package. Any changes I may feel I need to make to that library fall under the license for the library and needs to be included in the source code. However, the rest of MY code get's whatever license I want to give it - I just can't override the license for the library itself. 3. Given point 2, then your point three is utterly wrong. If I can set the license for my app as I choose, while respecting the licenses of any sub-systems I may use, I can still charge what I want for my app. 4. Apply your point 4 to Microsoft. After all, you can't say they don't keep the license gun to your head and they clearly benefit nicely. But then apply the same to Red Hat, who is a billion dollar company built using GPL based software. Nobody benefits - yeah right.
You need to understand the licensing quagmire better rather than just spewing out someone else's story. Yes, that is someone else's story - I've heard this one too many times over the past 20 years and every instance has proven to be crappy propaganda put out by those whose bottom line is threatened by Open Source and Free software.
That's a pretty one sided summary. Where's the comments that the auto-deleting emails was done by apple as well? Where's the comments that apple was investigated for price fixing wrt ebooks? Or the details that the jury that awarded billions to Apple is under scrutiny for improprieties. This response is so one sided it has to be an Apple fanboi (at best) or an outright shill that wrote that article. BTW, if it is Florian Muller, then yes a known and outright shill for the anti-open source agenda. The truth is not found at the extremes of a topic like this.
Why does this read like a PR document written by Apple to sway public opinion? Both parties have come close or outright crossed the ethical lines in their various legal battles. Finger waving or sanctioning a lawyer here or there does not change the core issues. Rather is distracts from the core issues and gains sentiment (or attempts to).
So, if a laser is used to send pulses of light that represents data, and they have developed a method to create "periods of zero light intensity" that hides data and *may* help prevent noise corruption... Does that mean they have figured out how to turn the laser off? Maybe I should go RTFA...
If you follow that logic, then simple milling machines would be outlawed too. After all, with a milling machine one could make a gun from plastic just as easily as metal. The genie is out of the bottle and there is no way to put it back in with regards to 3D Printing, and even printing a gun. But, personal responsibility still applies - if you actually print a gun and then use it illicitly, you are still subject to all the laws involved. While you are doing that, 99.9% of the others who own 3D Printers will continue their lives and likely never have a need to print a gun.
Every 3 to 5 years this topic comes up. It's almost like some new batch of CompSci graduates start to evaluate the state of the industry, and share their "discoveries" with the world. Except it is the same old discoveries couched in modern terms.
Slashdot Mirror
If A = [Some Muscian]
and B = [ Some coporation ].
"We ask you to enact sensible reform that balances the interests of creators with the interests of the companies who exploit music for their financial enrichment" can can be reworded as as
"We ask you to enact sensible reform that balances the interests of 'A' with the interests of 'B' who exploit music for their financial enrichment.
Or do I have that backwards?
"We ask you to enact sensible reform that balances the interests of 'B' with the interests of 'A who exploit music for their financial enrichment.
I'm a little confused who the "bad guy" is intended to be here.
I remember a parable story about how a dev team lamented about the 20 standards there were for XXXXX. So they decided to merge all the standards into one comprehensive standard. They worked long and hard and finally completed the mammoth task and released it to the public. Now there were 21 standards.
This story about "pop computing" seems similar for some reason.
If the FBI does not reveal the hack so they can hack other phones, well that means the bad guys can also continue using that hack. After all we know that there are now at least 3 organizations who can access a locked iPhone 5c without the owner's password.
John Oliver famously coined the "dick-pic" angle of looking at the surveillance programs Snowden helped reveal. The resulting understanding in the masses when you boiled down the question to "can the government see my dic pics" showed a massive reversal of general opinion (IMO).
Something similar is needed here. Perhaps the question should be reworded to "Should the FBI be able to force Apple to rewrite their systems so that an Apple phone will unzip your pants to see if you have a penis or not?" Because at this point there is no evidence (that I've heard) that there is anything pertinent on the phone. Only the possibility that there *might* be. Much the same as there is a 50/50 chance that any particular person may have male genitalia under their pants. Hmm.. Schrodinger's Dick Pic???
So my simple web server, serving up some basic info - like maybe my most recent cat photos.. Are you saying that I *must* use SSL to do this? And to make SSL work I have to pay to get a certificate (cuz I don't really trust the freebie options yet). All so that visitors to my site will *know* that they are looking at cat pictures securely? That doesn't really make too much sense, and seems to suggest a broad assumption about the main purpose of web sites. Not everything requires an encrypted channel. Won't someone think of the kitties? All this hype about safeguarding the Internet for the kids, and not enough to remember that kitties need love too.
Your rights to publish revenue generating advertisements stops the moment that ad attempts to appear on my screen. The screen belongs to me. The hardware that runs it belongs to me. The bandwidth to retrieve your ad belongs to me (by virtue of the fact I am paying for it). What I choose to have appear on my screen is MY choice - not yours. If I choose to replace all advertisements of one-eyed midget Unicorns, that is up to me. If I choose to utilize a tool to prevent the ads from using my bandwidth in the first place, that is up to me. If I choose to blacklist all the IPs that your ads appear on, that is also up to me. You have every right to publish your ad. You do NOT have the right to force me to look at it.
I haven't seen it in the comments yet, but by seizing the site and NOT shutting it down, the government chose to run a child porn server. Does that not then put them under the same legal scrutiny as those they were investigating? Of course I did not read the article and may be missing a bunch of detail, but if the gov was actively serving child porn, then THAT is a crime in my eyes - regardless if it was a honeypot or not.
putting on my skeptical hat here to consider alternate views. One could easily wonder about the "anonymous" nature of this disclosure and how the message is about instilling fear. Who profits? It would be easy to conclude that this is a propaganda release with the aim of softening up the sheeple's perspective to allow for increased budget expenses, or even direct action at the supposed culprits. Blaming a nation-state on flimsy evidence such as what language was used suggests a preconception being reinforced by circumstancial tidbits. Afterall, there can't ever be anyone else in the world that speaks that language, perhaps even within one of the superpowers known to be fairly multicultural. Or those who hirer foreign workers. Yep, a sceptic would be wary of reports like this - even if the infiltration is 100% true.
Between keeping the core WP system up to date, and keeping all the plugins up to date, the maintenance needs for a WP system discounts it for most of my customers. If you fail to keep the updates in place - almost daily, then your site quickly becomes owned and requires even more maintenance to fix. There are times and places for WP, but if all "fixes" and content updates are going to the consultants and tech team anyway, then why not just use static HTML?
And her next bill will be to put a microphone and camera in every house, I'm sure.
Content, or ads pretending to be content. (See previous article about Mozilla's content guidelines...)
Run your own server? You got to be kidding with advice like this. It is simple enough to get such a server up and operational. But, the maintenance effort needed on that server quickly outweighs any benefits. Ensuring the server has appropriate spam / virus protections, keeping these up to date, dealing with blacklistings, etc. It just is not worth it unless it is your job to maintain a server like this. If this is NOT your job, that job will suffer due to less time being available while you deal with email server maintenance.
In the end, it is much better to ask yourself two simple questions - How many mail boxes do I need? and How much storage is needed for each mail box? Using that information you can shop around and find a suitable solution where it is someone else's business to do that server maintenance. Prices and capabilities vary. Places like Rackspace offers an email services only option that costs much less than the time needed to host your own server. Gmail and the ilk become options as well. I hesitate to use the "free" services from companies like Google though - it is bad enough that I am relinquishing control of an essential service, I want to know that I am getting what I pay for. The contracts for free services are rather one sided with limited liabilities, IMO.
... "attributable to the inaccurate data Spokeo collected on him." If a company is in the clear for publishing inaccurate data about an individual, are they also in the clear for just fabricating data? What's to say that any of the names in their lists represent real and physical people with the same name? In theory the users entered the data at one point or another and that should be enough to tie the data to a real human. BUT any coder knows it's not rocket science to write a script to fill in a form and submit it. Consider tools like Faker https://github.com/fzaninotto/....
I'm fully aware of this phenomenon myself. However, I'm seeing a consistency to the wrongs. One would think the models would be altered to reflect real data, instead of ignoring "anomalies" on a regular basis. (of course, climate models are not very simple either...)
From the NASA website (http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/noaa-n/climate/climate_weather.html#.VPqNHJ_08WM) "The difference between weather and climate is a measure of time. Weather is what conditions of the atmosphere are over a short period of time, and climate is how the atmosphere "behaves" over relatively long periods of time." So weather IS climate, just on a much shorter scale. Weather is TODAY's climate, and the collective weather over the past XX years defines a generic "climate" statement. With that in mind, predictions of Climate change should be relatively reliably reflected in current weather patterns. I would fully expect the predictions to be wrong occasionally, but there seems to be a growing trend of glaring wrongs with the current state of climate predictions. Therefore I submit that the current climate models are not yet good enough to be the defining factor in public policy, as many would have us believe they should be now.
So these awesome weather models that have been driving so much controversy over global warming and everything else are not quite right? Hmm, soo let me get this straight. They can't predict the weather next week very accurately, but we are supposed to "trust" the experts when they tell us what is going to happen in the next few years or longer? And we are seeing constant reminders like this that their models are broken and prone to human error. Forgive me if I take ALL weather predictions with a degree of doubt, like I have for almost all my life.
Not sure how current it is, but when I was looking for the same a few years back all that was really available for PHP was HTML->PDF libraries which were not sufficient for anything but the most basic forms. A decent invoice form was hard to get right with these tools. Then I came across FOP. Or more specifically XML-FOP. Combine that with a little XSL and the output was amazing, and could do more than the HTML converters. The only problem is that the FOP tool was a Java based program so PHP would need to execute a shell command to call it. With tight control of what info was passed to that shell command, it seemed an appropriate trade-off for the job at hand. You can still get FOP in the ubuntu repos - apt-get install fop. The learning curve for FOP is a little steep to begin, but no more than any other XML dialect. And being XML, you have a lot of options in building the required FOP file. I opted to put my data into my own XML file, then utilize an XSL file to convert it if/when needed. More details here: http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/...
I was told something similar about Ford/Mercury Sables a few years back. I think it has a lot to do with how many of the cars were sold in a given year, and how long that model can expect before a break down. If there were a LOT of PT Cruisers sold in a given year, and we could expect a 5 year average (for example) before a significant malfunction, then in that 5th year tow truck drivers would see a significant number of PT Cruisers on their hoists - regardless of the quality of the vehicle.
Back when location services were just ramping up, I was interviewed for a position on a team building such services. By the WHOLE 15 person team (warning #1). After a few rapid fire questions they hit me out of the blue with "What kind of tree would you be, if you could be a tree?". My response was "Who'd the fuck want to be a TREE!!??!!" Needless to say I didn't get the job. Been thankful ever since - that company was not there less than a year later.
Some of your premise is correct - charging for "copyrighted works" is perfectly fine, and even supported by the idea of Open Source. But, your GPL Violations list and general dis'ing of GPL is BS, IMO.
1. GPL does not prohibit commercial use of software. GPL simply states "respect the applicable licenses".
2. Making use of a GPL library does NOT automatically make my code assume a GPL license. If I use libraryX that is GPL'd, then yes, I need to respect the license for that library and ensure I include the source code for that library with my package. Any changes I may feel I need to make to that library fall under the license for the library and needs to be included in the source code. However, the rest of MY code get's whatever license I want to give it - I just can't override the license for the library itself.
3. Given point 2, then your point three is utterly wrong. If I can set the license for my app as I choose, while respecting the licenses of any sub-systems I may use, I can still charge what I want for my app.
4. Apply your point 4 to Microsoft. After all, you can't say they don't keep the license gun to your head and they clearly benefit nicely. But then apply the same to Red Hat, who is a billion dollar company built using GPL based software. Nobody benefits - yeah right.
You need to understand the licensing quagmire better rather than just spewing out someone else's story. Yes, that is someone else's story - I've heard this one too many times over the past 20 years and every instance has proven to be crappy propaganda put out by those whose bottom line is threatened by Open Source and Free software.
That's a pretty one sided summary. Where's the comments that the auto-deleting emails was done by apple as well? Where's the comments that apple was investigated for price fixing wrt ebooks? Or the details that the jury that awarded billions to Apple is under scrutiny for improprieties. This response is so one sided it has to be an Apple fanboi (at best) or an outright shill that wrote that article. BTW, if it is Florian Muller, then yes a known and outright shill for the anti-open source agenda. The truth is not found at the extremes of a topic like this.
Why does this read like a PR document written by Apple to sway public opinion? Both parties have come close or outright crossed the ethical lines in their various legal battles. Finger waving or sanctioning a lawyer here or there does not change the core issues. Rather is distracts from the core issues and gains sentiment (or attempts to).
So, if a laser is used to send pulses of light that represents data, and they have developed a method to create "periods of zero light intensity" that hides data and *may* help prevent noise corruption... Does that mean they have figured out how to turn the laser off? Maybe I should go RTFA...
If you follow that logic, then simple milling machines would be outlawed too. After all, with a milling machine one could make a gun from plastic just as easily as metal. The genie is out of the bottle and there is no way to put it back in with regards to 3D Printing, and even printing a gun. But, personal responsibility still applies - if you actually print a gun and then use it illicitly, you are still subject to all the laws involved. While you are doing that, 99.9% of the others who own 3D Printers will continue their lives and likely never have a need to print a gun.
Every 3 to 5 years this topic comes up. It's almost like some new batch of CompSci graduates start to evaluate the state of the industry, and share their "discoveries" with the world. Except it is the same old discoveries couched in modern terms.