Well, having something on the market , even without any chance of other people learning about inner-workings of this product, is already a contribution for you and millions of other people are able to enjoy benefits of using it.
Pointing out that the public gets something out of the deal is not the same thing as proving that the deal is fair, or the deal that was agreed to. In particular, we the public are not getting from the deal the eventual return to the
public intellectual commons of more than was taken from it. That is not, as you seem to suggest, an element of the equation which we should just shrug and forget about, since companies seem disinclined to honor it; it is highly likely that had that provision not been part of the patent and copyright laws the Founding Fathers instituted, that the US would have had no intellectual property laws.
Unfortunately, it so often happens that what was once accepted grudgingly, as a necessary evil, is with the passage of time mistaken for the point of the enterprise. The notion that it is still allowable for companies to fence off the intellectual commons because at least we have the opportunity to buy it back is... let's just call it an exercise in Advanced Point-Missing.
Why this suspicion and negativity about private enterprise?
Because experience has so often justified it.
Demanding proof that private enterprise has abused the law and the public for its own benefit is like proving that you're surrounded by air: if you can't notice it for yourself, I'm not sure what I could possibly do to make it clearer.
Remember, so far all other attempts at implementing social and economical system different than capitalism failed rather terribly (or in this context, they all turned out to be much less effective at stimulating progress.)
It is simply silly to allow people to sell software but prohibit them from trying to enforce payment for that software. However you look
at it simply doesn't make sense.
Yes, it does, but it doesn't if you can't let go of the cathedral model.
What you're implying is that an honor system, where people take free software and understand their obligations to repay with money, is doomed to failure.
If this is so, then what chance does the other honor system, where enterprises make improvements to the intellectual commons but then contribute back to it, have? At least our culture is such that people thoroughly understand the idea that goods and services are exchanged for money, and that an obligation exists whether or not it's enforced.
But between ridiculously incompetent and venal administration of the patent system and constant overhaul of the copyright system at the direction of moneyed interests, the companies are not only successfully crippling enforcement of their obligation, they're managing to sell the Big Lie that such an obligation never existed.
And that is why the GPL is necessary in the first place: if you claim individual consumers cannot be trusted under an honor system to pay a price they know they owe, how can conglomerates trying to steal a march on their competitors be trusted with a more abstract obligation to contribute to the intellectual commons?
My apologies to all. As many have pointed out, the article did not say that the student had been punished under a "zero-tolerance" policy, but rather the opposite. I misread that section of the article.
I still stand by my comments on "zero-tolerance", even if they are less applicable to this incident than my misreading of the article suggested.
Let's face it. Good kids are going to screw up. What these zero-tolerance policies do is to remove from the authorities any power, responsibility, or incentive to distinguish between the hopeless, incorrigible fuck-up and the kid who stumbles.
The kid committed suicide because he didn't want to go to jail. Does anyone doubt that there are school districts where he would have gone? I don't; not in the least. It's probably part of some district's "zero-tolerance" policy that was oh-so-popular with the voters, and it's still popular until some poor kid gets in trouble and kills themselves -- and even then, not a single person stops to think, "Gee, hey, maybe sometimes tolerance is a good thing."
O'Reilly used to SELL their web server software while paying lip service to open source software and all. I don't understand how a bunch of smart people like you don't see the hypocrisy of the situation??
Perhaps because we know the difference between Tim O'Reilly and Richard M. Stallman?
"Open source" means just that: source code that is open for inspection and for peer review. It does not mean "as free as free speech"; that is Richard M. Stallman's "free software", which he takes great care to distinguish from "open source". Neither does it mean "as free as free beer", which is what you seem to think it means but which is not part of the ideals of "open source" or or "free software".
In short, in the unlikely event that you are not a deliberate troll, your comments are still not relevant, as you have nothing to offer except accusations that people achieving more than you betrayed principles which you only assumed, confusedly and in ignorance, that they must profess.
I think there's an important difference between Napster and Fairtunes -- I've heard of Napster.
It would be a shame if the failure of an unadvertised and unpromoted venture was held to be "proof" of the failure of its core principle. The majority of real-world retail operations fail within two to three years, but is this taken as proof that the concept of a real-world retail operation is flawed and cannot work? There are too many other explanations, including just that no one knew it was there.
A fairer comparison might be MP3.com, which has had all the publicity that Fairtunes does not appear to have. There, you can stream an artist's song for free, or you can pay to have that song and others shipped to you on a DAM CD in CD audio and MP3 format.
The theory that people will never pay for what they can get for free should mean that no one buys MP3.com CDs. Instead, I've probably spent 500% to 1000% more on MP3.com CDs than on CDs from the RIAA companies in the past year, and my only criteria has been "is this a fair price for this music?", not any sort of ideological "screw the RIAA!" position.
We should be careful to take from an experience only that wisdom which is in it, and not more. - Mark Twain
This is as sexy as goats get, but...
on
Spidergoats
·
· Score: 3
What are the implications of creating new transgenic species as biological manufacturing machines for products that aren't throw-away?
I freely admit I haven't thought about it that much, but silk is at the very least, *less* disposable that the products that are usually created by biologicals. Most everything else is food, so that what gets produced goes back into the ecosystem... If the average food product lasts three months before it's consumed, and these spidersilk products last for seven years, say, before wearing out... I wonder what the effect of introducing that lag time into the system will be.
"Alternative" in this case meaning "fallaciously hoisting up a straw man, giving it a famous nametag, and then beating it down again", right? Bezroukov might do for the poster's purposes, if he simply needs to show the existence of papers that are at least nominally academic on Open Source, but Bezroukov is an embarrassment.
Yes, the charge reads misuse of computer system information. But what information? How did he illegally misuse it? The only clue given is that the Salem police said he created "several obscene Web sites that mocked the Salem police department" (quoting the AP's paraphrase, not the Salem police directly.)
Admittedly, we cannot assume that the AP reported this story perfectly; it is possible that they left out vital information such as that he cracked the police department's computers and stole information.
But we must not assume that the Salem police must have had some real justification for arresting him, simply because they did it. Why?? Because that's exactly what police departments everywhere are prone to believing, that they as professionals know who the law-abiders are and who the criminals are -- and that to arrest an 'obvious' wrong-doer like this kid, they shouldn't have to wait for a technicality such as him actually committing an arrestable offense.
Don't think, in a nation where police officers regularly perjure themselves in court to make charges stick, in a nation where police scientists falsify lab tests, reporting impossible results from the lab to win court cases, don't think that a police department must have evidence of actual illegal computer activity when all they're showing that they have is a disliked use of the First Amendment.
Namely, that this development should follow so closely on the long-awaited shutdown of the Chernobyl reactor.
Why is it ironic? Because Chernobyl wasn't the first Soviet reactor to experience a serious accident; the Soviets had an even worse reactor accident more than a decade earlier, and they successfully covered it up. But by the time the Chernobyl incident occurred, spy satellites made that sort of cover-up impossible.
joke: Now if only we could have had them overseeing the ballot-counting in Florida...
It is
not illegal as long as the thing being copied is not a trademark
Hmmm, what do you think a trademark is? It's the mark by with one identifies one's goods for trade. If someone else marks their goods with your mark of trade, for whatever reason, they're not just exercising their own right of free expression. They're confusing consumers as to which entity is actually standing behind which products.
Look at the names of the removed themes: Aqua, AquaX, eMac and eMac-GTK. Not "Aqua-clone", or "eMac-Lookalike", names which would clearly distinguish themselves from the names of Apple's own trade goods. Do you understand that these are not official products of Apple, just because they imitate Apple's official products and may use Apple's exact names for those official products? Yes, of course you do -- but you and I are not all consumers, are we?
Tell me how happy you'd be if Bill Gates named some part of the next release of Windows "Linux". And all the customers who have vaguely heard that this "Linux" thing is a good thing say, "Oh! I really should upgrade to Windows X-TreeME! It's got that 'Linux' thing, which means it must be good!... it says here it's some sort of screensaver, but it must be a really good screensaver; everyone's talking about it."
Tell me how happy you are when companies call themselves "open source" because that's a popular label and then continue the exact same closed-source practices as before. Now you'll understand how Apple feels about people taking an OS other than their own, building a "theme" to make the very outer layer of this OS imitate the look of the one they're standing behind, and calling it "Aqua".
I don't pretend to know how the cracker got the credit card numbers from CreditCards.com. But judging from the way they've chosen to handle the problem, I'm not surprised they could be ripped off in the first place; they have all the earmarks of a company that still believes security through obscurity is their best approach.
In all honesty, this is a disturbing attitude that we seem to be seeing more and more from companies: the customer is no longer regarded as someone to be served with enlightened self-interest, so as to reap rewards. It's much easier instead to enter into near-conspiratorial relations with other companies; to regard the other company, the one with the large pre-existing legal team, as the entity who has to be kept happy -- and regard the customer with ill-concealed loathing, as the one who makes your 'job' of pleasing your partner company that much harder.
From this perspective, it seems downright logical to let people's credit cards be compromised and not tell them -- it's only important to please the merchants who want to take credit cards, not the people whose credit cards they are! And what are the chances that poor service to cardholders would ever result in them losing those merchant contracts? Not good enough to make them really care, it seems.
I recently walked away from an assignment that was paying a pretty good rate in my current field, because I'd spent about two weeks doing the fairly difficult work I was hired for, that demanded a level of skill, and three weeks after that doing insultingly mindless work, trivial errands that could have been done by any high-school drop-out just trying to make money to buy pot. Like being called out of the office and driven downtown just so that I could run up to his accountant's office while he live-parked; an hour of my time taken just so that he didn't have to park his car.
Maybe there are some people for whom the money is everything. But by no means is it everybody; if it was, it'd be hard to explain the rich and famous celebrities who commit suicide. They've got it all, right? In all likelihood, no: they're committing suicide because they haven't found the reason to live they thought being rich and famous would give them.
I realize that Slashdot is not a traditional journalism site, and it doesn't have the resources to go out and verify every single story submitted to it.
But still, it's a disquieting thing when a story like this comes out, saying "Hey, looks like those rumors weren't true!" about something which we had been told was fact and not rumor.
It's so easy; just a "May Be" or "Rumored To" in the headline. And not using it makes one wonder whether someone's going the way of Harry Knowles and Matt Drudge* and enjoying their role as purveyor of information so much that they lose the intelligent selectivity that made people choose them as an information source in the first place.
* (ok, Drudge was sludge from Day One. Drudge has always been a sleazy little rumor-monger wet-dreaming that his ability to regurgitate steaming clumps of fact and fiction faster puts him in the company of real journalists. The point is, I don't want to see Slashdot go that way, do you?
Now, I'm no fan of the tenets of CoS. But things like this coming from the German government also give me pause. I
mentally replace "Scientologist" with "Jew" and I see something that could have happened 50 years ago if we had a
software industry... "We won't use software tools made by the Jews, you can't trust them or their software".
And of course, it's because this is coming from the German government that this is an issue, correct? It's just like them Germans to discriminate!
Seriously, I think your analogy is highly flawed. The difference is that being Jewish is a matter of birth (the Jewishness that the Nazis targeted was racial, not religious) but to be a Scientologist, you make a conscious, willed decision to sign contracts fully turning over your assets and your labor to an international organization whose stated goal is to subvert world governments to itself and has already been caught in criminal acts, ordered at the highest levels, towards that goal -- including forging correspondence from the Minister of Defense of Norway; espionage against the Ontario Attorney-General's Ministry, the Ontario Provincial Police and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police; and breaking and entering and theft of documents against the U.S. Department of Justice, Department of Defense, and Internal Revenue Service. Were these acts of the individuals involved (which is what the CoS claims) or of Scientology? I think the fact that Mary Sue Hubbard -- wife of L. Ron Hubbard, Scientology's founder -- was among the 11 Scientologists sent to prison for the infiltration of U.S. government agencies really answers that question sufficiently.
I'm sorry, but it really makes no sense to say, "These people are members of a criminal cult which is willing to burglarize the premises of government agencies around the globe in order to get its way -- but you'd have to be paranoid to think that software written by them could be a security problem!" It's even more ludicrous -- and offensive -- to suggest that the government of Germany cannot take any action against the criminal organization of Scientology because Scientology is pretending to be a religion; that taking protective action against a so-called religion whose stated goal is to subvert your nation is too much like persecuting people on the basis of their race.
... one of the safest and most productive forms of government.
They are not democracies. Democracy doesn't work for this sort of thing.
Ah, but an important point (missed by the author of the original article) is that these are the first benign monarchies to have revolution built directly into the system.
Most people have pointed out the significant difference between having centralized control that is assigned (as in the cathedral model) and centralized control that emerges (as in the working of most successful Open Source projects, whether or not this is truly the 'bazaar' that Raymond describes.) But the Open Source model has another safeguard, should the existing 'monarchy' cease functioning effectively, and that is the freedom of anyone to emerge as a new center of control, by taking the source and starting in a new direction.
Whether such an attempt succeeds is a different story. Quite naturally, it faces all the same obstacles that the current "monarch" faced to rise to their position (Do they know their technical stuff? Do they have the organizational and people skills to coordinate volunteers? Do they have a vision which they can communicate to enroll others?) and a few more besides (Can they convince others that they represent a change for the better, rather than just 'a change'? Have the circumstances that caused the split also caused hard feelings, and if so, can they be overcome?) But the fact that it always exists in potentia heads off the classic dilemma of centralization, that the whole system could be paralyzed by neutralizing the center.
It's almost certainly true that Open Source projects do not 'manage themselves' but they redefine 'manage' itself from "tell everybody What Needs To Be Done and Who Will Do It, and Lean On Everyone To Get Their Part Done" to "toss out good ideas to people you encourage, and coordinate what comes back to you as a result." And... not to belabor a point that's already been made, but unlike the business world, no one will ever, ever be made the manager of a crucially important project just because he's the one with the nicest hair. ^_^
While the original poster may be overly cynical he hits a very valid mark. Enlisting the "zealotry" of/.ers without full
disclosure is _not_ very cool. I think it is very rude to ask someone to do something and not tell them why or who for.
In my opinion, it isn't about paranoia, but common courtesy.
Then again, maybe I just like to know who I'm about to screw/help.
I strongly suspect that had the story's poster not been so forthright about which details she could not legally divulge, it never would have occurred to you to question what she did tell you.
I know there have been FBI sting operations for piracy and stuff like that, but being that the Internet is so uncontrollable, and we know the proliferation of illegal activities such as MP3 swapping, software piracy and porn is so rampant, I'd think that a large part of law enforcement's plans are to setup such honeypots to just keep track of demographic information on individuals who are prone to participate in certain kinds of illicit activities. I could imagine that the government could run some of the most successful porn sites, etc. to keep tabs on would be offenders.
Unless I'm very much mistaken, that would be entrapment, which is a major no-no for law enforcement. The FBI and the police are supposed to investigate crimes so they can be prosecuted; they are not supposed to create crimes so that they'll have crimes to investigate. Even if they think it would give them a lead on who is 'prone' to these activities... it wouldn't do them much good, and it would do them a lot of harm.
Suppose they put Guy X on their short list of Probable Pedophiles based on the fact that he once downloaded something titled "teen_sex.jpg" (and may I join others in saying that assuming such a title indicates illegal child pornography is utterly stupid; anyone actually competent enough to run such a sting operation would know that 'teen', 'young' and 'lolita' are used with as much precision and accuracy in advertising porn as 'virtual', 'object-oriented' and 'MIPS' are used in marketing computers.)
Now suppose that they catch Guy X downloading child porn that actually exists, i.e., that they didn't invent solely for the purpose of trapping him. Any good defense lawyer would be able to get it surpressed if, for example, he had been previously arrested or convicted on child-porn charges, pointing out rightly that the question is whether he committed this crime. (If not for this, no crime would ever get solved; the police would just look up who was the ex-con with the most convictions for that crime, and pin it on them. If they happened to actually get the right suspect, it would be sheer coincidence.)
So how does it look in a courtroom when they say, "You can be sure that he downloaded this bad stuff because he's done it before... Who did he download this bad stuff from before? Uh, well, it was us, actually..."
It depends what you mean by using application independent formats. XML is not a formatting language: it's a content marking language. Formatting is then left to XSL or some equivalent language.... random users wouldn't [mark up according to content]; they desire a final look, not a semantically consistent document. Someone who wants to indent a paragraph might use the wrong word processor feature; it's an ordered list of one element with no bullets. Put it into another program, and it might look entirely different.
Actually, I fail to see why this would be so terrible.
The first reason for its non-terribleness is that it's what people do now... end users use spreadsheets for databases, databases for mail merges, mailing label files for databases. We can encourage them in better habits, but we would be unwise to declare "Oh, no, we can't give you powerful tools, since you'd just use them wrong."
The second reason actually extends the first reason: sometimes doing it wrong is actually right. Namely, because doing it 'wrong' can produce something acceptable, fast, while doing it 'right' requires more time and care and installed base of expertise, all going into a product that may be used once and thrown away.
The third reason is to correct a strange blind spot that may originate from the perception of what the Microsoft Way is and how the Right Way must be diametrically opposed. Namely -- if the end user is interested in a final look, why is that an inappropriate use of XML?? Isn't the point of XML to be the mark-up language that can be adapted to any domain? I don't see why we should insist that 'the final look' is an exception, for which the only correct answer is XML plus XSL...
What's the best programming language? Trick question; a bondage-and-discipline language may be the best for writing code that someone else will have to maintain, but it's probably not best for a quick-and-dirty one-shot or for prototyping. There's no one right language. And just the same, there's no stone-graven law that says an XML editor will always be better than a word processor (or a word processor than a text editor). Having a choice would be better than what we have now... and having a XML-based word processor format would be better than a proprietary binary word processor format.
"In the revolutionary's mad rush for total upheaval -- the 'out with the old and in with the new' -- many who are conscripted into the revolution are left without a voice, and many are left without a vote on the change," Love said.
Nice sound-bite... but who was ever 'conscripted' into the open-source revolution?
Certainly not the consumer; they can still choose closed-source packages, if they believe that those packages will be stable and secure enough for their purposes and will not need modification. Sometimes that's even the correct choice.
It's certainly not the software companies, either. They have more freedom to build software that works with an open-source operating system (OSOS?) than they ever would building for Windows, MacOS, or any closed-source OS. The GPL even allows companies to create proprietary products that depend on GPL'ed libraries for their function. The only disallowed option is to incorporate someone else's code into your product and then turn around and demand that you be the only one allowed to profit from 'your' labor. Is that what Love is complaining that he doesn't have the freedom to do?
Just as Love seems to use 'proprietary' to mean 'not public domain; with no restrictions or responsibilities attached to its use', he seems to be using 'conscripted' to mean 'unable to compete.' "No one buys our proprietary software any more because our open-source competitors provide the same functionality while using resources more efficiently and crashing less often. Therefore, we have been 'conscripted' into the open source revolution."
You can't use plastic wrap to preserve human heads, but ChunkyGoodness noted that Chet Fleming has US Patent number 4666425 for keeping them alive.
Actually, this particular one is oddly relevant to Slashdot.
I had several opportunities to page through a book Mr. Fleming wrote, titled IIRC 'If We Can Keep A Severed Head Alive...' at the local Savers secondhand store. (Of course, I'm kicking myself now for not getting it; a conversation piece like that doesn't come around too often.)
The thing that is interesting (and perhaps infuriating, depending on how plausible you find the device described by the patent) is that Fleming hates the idea of any such procedure happening. He is quick to point out that the technology to keep a severed head alive may have... abuses (anyone who's seen 'The Head That Wouldn't Die' knows where he's coming from.) That's why he applied for (and received!) a patent so broadly defined that anyone trying to keep a severed head alive would have to get permission to use his patent... permission which he intends to deny. Yes, that's right... he applied for this patent, and had it granted to him, for the purpose of obstructing medical research. (Albeit in a field far more heavily populated by movie scientists than real ones.)
Having not read the article that has caused offence I'm not sure about the full facts..
However, from what I have read about the case this hinges around the fact that Outcast have printed as facts things which aren't true about the Pink Papers editor. If these are harmful then this would account for the threat under the libel law.
Your comments are worse than just meaningless and useless; they themselves border on libel. The entire point of the article is that Outcast was deprived of their net access, not over anything they had said, but because of what they might say in future.
You admit that you don't know the facts. Yet because you've created a scenario in which Outcast did something to justify NetBenefit's outrageous unilateral acts of surpression, you assume you know all you need to. This isn't much different from Edwin Meese's infamous "if they weren't guilty, they wouldn't be suspects."
"Geek Pride" my ass. What a ridiculous crock of shit. Thousands of at-least-semi-intelligent young men, most of whom can't get laid, all standing around and telling themselves they're the master race because they know how to configure sendmail.
If geek pride didn't involve inventing bogus excuses to sneer at everybody else, I might be able to take it seriously.
Mr. Kettle? There's a Mr. Pot on line one...
How did this ever get moderated up? It's merely name-calling from someone who doesn't, apparently, understand the concepts of irony or of having a sense of humor. "Geek Pride Festival" is an inherently funnier name than "A Big Party For The Type Of People Commonly Known As 'Geeks' Although We Stress That It Is Also OK Not To Be A Geek And In Fact We Don't Even Like To Admit We Are Geeks In Case Someone Thinks We're Bragging," which is what Venomous seems to think we should be calling it.
Are there perhaps problems with the way the geek community sees itself? Yes, perhaps. And we should take seriously the suggestion of such problems. But when it comes from someone still subscribing to nonsense like "geek == unable to get laid", I think we can safely ignore it.
Slashdot Mirror
Pointing out that the public gets something out of the deal is not the same thing as proving that the deal is fair, or the deal that was agreed to. In particular, we the public are not getting from the deal the eventual return to the public intellectual commons of more than was taken from it. That is not, as you seem to suggest, an element of the equation which we should just shrug and forget about, since companies seem disinclined to honor it; it is highly likely that had that provision not been part of the patent and copyright laws the Founding Fathers instituted, that the US would have had no intellectual property laws.
Unfortunately, it so often happens that what was once accepted grudgingly, as a necessary evil, is with the passage of time mistaken for the point of the enterprise. The notion that it is still allowable for companies to fence off the intellectual commons because at least we have the opportunity to buy it back is ... let's just call it an exercise in Advanced Point-Missing.
Because experience has so often justified it. Demanding proof that private enterprise has abused the law and the public for its own benefit is like proving that you're surrounded by air: if you can't notice it for yourself, I'm not sure what I could possibly do to make it clearer.
Funny, that's exactly what I don't remember.
Yes, it does, but it doesn't if you can't let go of the cathedral model.
What you're implying is that an honor system, where people take free software and understand their obligations to repay with money, is doomed to failure.
If this is so, then what chance does the other honor system, where enterprises make improvements to the intellectual commons but then contribute back to it, have? At least our culture is such that people thoroughly understand the idea that goods and services are exchanged for money, and that an obligation exists whether or not it's enforced.
But between ridiculously incompetent and venal administration of the patent system and constant overhaul of the copyright system at the direction of moneyed interests, the companies are not only successfully crippling enforcement of their obligation, they're managing to sell the Big Lie that such an obligation never existed.
And that is why the GPL is necessary in the first place: if you claim individual consumers cannot be trusted under an honor system to pay a price they know they owe, how can conglomerates trying to steal a march on their competitors be trusted with a more abstract obligation to contribute to the intellectual commons?
My apologies to all. As many have pointed out, the article did not say that the student had been punished under a "zero-tolerance" policy, but rather the opposite. I misread that section of the article.
I still stand by my comments on "zero-tolerance", even if they are less applicable to this incident than my misreading of the article suggested.
Let's face it. Good kids are going to screw up. What these zero-tolerance policies do is to remove from the authorities any power, responsibility, or incentive to distinguish between the hopeless, incorrigible fuck-up and the kid who stumbles.
The kid committed suicide because he didn't want to go to jail. Does anyone doubt that there are school districts where he would have gone? I don't; not in the least. It's probably part of some district's "zero-tolerance" policy that was oh-so-popular with the voters, and it's still popular until some poor kid gets in trouble and kills themselves -- and even then, not a single person stops to think, "Gee, hey, maybe sometimes tolerance is a good thing."
Perhaps because we know the difference between Tim O'Reilly and Richard M. Stallman?
"Open source" means just that: source code that is open for inspection and for peer review. It does not mean "as free as free speech"; that is Richard M. Stallman's "free software", which he takes great care to distinguish from "open source". Neither does it mean "as free as free beer", which is what you seem to think it means but which is not part of the ideals of "open source" or or "free software".
In short, in the unlikely event that you are not a deliberate troll, your comments are still not relevant, as you have nothing to offer except accusations that people achieving more than you betrayed principles which you only assumed, confusedly and in ignorance, that they must profess.
I think there's an important difference between Napster and Fairtunes -- I've heard of Napster.
It would be a shame if the failure of an unadvertised and unpromoted venture was held to be "proof" of the failure of its core principle. The majority of real-world retail operations fail within two to three years, but is this taken as proof that the concept of a real-world retail operation is flawed and cannot work? There are too many other explanations, including just that no one knew it was there.
A fairer comparison might be MP3.com, which has had all the publicity that Fairtunes does not appear to have. There, you can stream an artist's song for free, or you can pay to have that song and others shipped to you on a DAM CD in CD audio and MP3 format.
The theory that people will never pay for what they can get for free should mean that no one buys MP3.com CDs. Instead, I've probably spent 500% to 1000% more on MP3.com CDs than on CDs from the RIAA companies in the past year, and my only criteria has been "is this a fair price for this music?", not any sort of ideological "screw the RIAA!" position.
What are the implications of creating new transgenic species as biological manufacturing machines for products that aren't throw-away?
I freely admit I haven't thought about it that much, but silk is at the very least, *less* disposable that the products that are usually created by biologicals. Most everything else is food, so that what gets produced goes back into the ecosystem... If the average food product lasts three months before it's consumed, and these spidersilk products last for seven years, say, before wearing out... I wonder what the effect of introducing that lag time into the system will be.
"Alternative" in this case meaning "fallaciously hoisting up a straw man, giving it a famous nametag, and then beating it down again", right? Bezroukov might do for the poster's purposes, if he simply needs to show the existence of papers that are at least nominally academic on Open Source, but Bezroukov is an embarrassment.
Then what is he charged with?
Yes, the charge reads misuse of computer system information. But what information? How did he illegally misuse it? The only clue given is that the Salem police said he created "several obscene Web sites that mocked the Salem police department" (quoting the AP's paraphrase, not the Salem police directly.)
Admittedly, we cannot assume that the AP reported this story perfectly; it is possible that they left out vital information such as that he cracked the police department's computers and stole information.
But we must not assume that the Salem police must have had some real justification for arresting him, simply because they did it. Why?? Because that's exactly what police departments everywhere are prone to believing, that they as professionals know who the law-abiders are and who the criminals are -- and that to arrest an 'obvious' wrong-doer like this kid, they shouldn't have to wait for a technicality such as him actually committing an arrestable offense.
Don't think, in a nation where police officers regularly perjure themselves in court to make charges stick, in a nation where police scientists falsify lab tests, reporting impossible results from the lab to win court cases, don't think that a police department must have evidence of actual illegal computer activity when all they're showing that they have is a disliked use of the First Amendment.
Namely, that this development should follow so closely on the long-awaited shutdown of the Chernobyl reactor.
Why is it ironic? Because Chernobyl wasn't the first Soviet reactor to experience a serious accident; the Soviets had an even worse reactor accident more than a decade earlier, and they successfully covered it up. But by the time the Chernobyl incident occurred, spy satellites made that sort of cover-up impossible.
joke: Now if only we could have had them overseeing the ballot-counting in Florida...
Hmmm, what do you think a trademark is? It's the mark by with one identifies one's goods for trade. If someone else marks their goods with your mark of trade, for whatever reason, they're not just exercising their own right of free expression. They're confusing consumers as to which entity is actually standing behind which products.
Look at the names of the removed themes: Aqua, AquaX, eMac and eMac-GTK. Not "Aqua-clone", or "eMac-Lookalike", names which would clearly distinguish themselves from the names of Apple's own trade goods. Do you understand that these are not official products of Apple, just because they imitate Apple's official products and may use Apple's exact names for those official products? Yes, of course you do -- but you and I are not all consumers, are we?
Tell me how happy you'd be if Bill Gates named some part of the next release of Windows "Linux". And all the customers who have vaguely heard that this "Linux" thing is a good thing say, "Oh! I really should upgrade to Windows X-TreeME! It's got that 'Linux' thing, which means it must be good! ... it says here it's some sort of screensaver, but it must be a really good screensaver; everyone's talking about it."
Tell me how happy you are when companies call themselves "open source" because that's a popular label and then continue the exact same closed-source practices as before. Now you'll understand how Apple feels about people taking an OS other than their own, building a "theme" to make the very outer layer of this OS imitate the look of the one they're standing behind, and calling it "Aqua".
I don't pretend to know how the cracker got the credit card numbers from CreditCards.com. But judging from the way they've chosen to handle the problem, I'm not surprised they could be ripped off in the first place; they have all the earmarks of a company that still believes security through obscurity is their best approach.
In all honesty, this is a disturbing attitude that we seem to be seeing more and more from companies: the customer is no longer regarded as someone to be served with enlightened self-interest, so as to reap rewards. It's much easier instead to enter into near-conspiratorial relations with other companies; to regard the other company, the one with the large pre-existing legal team, as the entity who has to be kept happy -- and regard the customer with ill-concealed loathing, as the one who makes your 'job' of pleasing your partner company that much harder.
From this perspective, it seems downright logical to let people's credit cards be compromised and not tell them -- it's only important to please the merchants who want to take credit cards, not the people whose credit cards they are! And what are the chances that poor service to cardholders would ever result in them losing those merchant contracts? Not good enough to make them really care, it seems.
Nope.
I recently walked away from an assignment that was paying a pretty good rate in my current field, because I'd spent about two weeks doing the fairly difficult work I was hired for, that demanded a level of skill, and three weeks after that doing insultingly mindless work, trivial errands that could have been done by any high-school drop-out just trying to make money to buy pot. Like being called out of the office and driven downtown just so that I could run up to his accountant's office while he live-parked; an hour of my time taken just so that he didn't have to park his car.
Maybe there are some people for whom the money is everything. But by no means is it everybody; if it was, it'd be hard to explain the rich and famous celebrities who commit suicide. They've got it all, right? In all likelihood, no: they're committing suicide because they haven't found the reason to live they thought being rich and famous would give them.
I realize that Slashdot is not a traditional journalism site, and it doesn't have the resources to go out and verify every single story submitted to it.
But still, it's a disquieting thing when a story like this comes out, saying "Hey, looks like those rumors weren't true!" about something which we had been told was fact and not rumor.
It's so easy; just a "May Be" or "Rumored To" in the headline. And not using it makes one wonder whether someone's going the way of Harry Knowles and Matt Drudge* and enjoying their role as purveyor of information so much that they lose the intelligent selectivity that made people choose them as an information source in the first place.
* (ok, Drudge was sludge from Day One. Drudge has always been a sleazy little rumor-monger wet-dreaming that his ability to regurgitate steaming clumps of fact and fiction faster puts him in the company of real journalists. The point is, I don't want to see Slashdot go that way, do you?
The public record is there; I notice that you don't name a single point which you think can't be verified.
And of course, it's because this is coming from the German government that this is an issue, correct? It's just like them Germans to discriminate!
Seriously, I think your analogy is highly flawed. The difference is that being Jewish is a matter of birth (the Jewishness that the Nazis targeted was racial, not religious) but to be a Scientologist, you make a conscious, willed decision to sign contracts fully turning over your assets and your labor to an international organization whose stated goal is to subvert world governments to itself and has already been caught in criminal acts, ordered at the highest levels, towards that goal -- including forging correspondence from the Minister of Defense of Norway; espionage against the Ontario Attorney-General's Ministry, the Ontario Provincial Police and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police; and breaking and entering and theft of documents against the U.S. Department of Justice, Department of Defense, and Internal Revenue Service. Were these acts of the individuals involved (which is what the CoS claims) or of Scientology? I think the fact that Mary Sue Hubbard -- wife of L. Ron Hubbard, Scientology's founder -- was among the 11 Scientologists sent to prison for the infiltration of U.S. government agencies really answers that question sufficiently.
I'm sorry, but it really makes no sense to say, "These people are members of a criminal cult which is willing to burglarize the premises of government agencies around the globe in order to get its way -- but you'd have to be paranoid to think that software written by them could be a security problem!" It's even more ludicrous -- and offensive -- to suggest that the government of Germany cannot take any action against the criminal organization of Scientology because Scientology is pretending to be a religion; that taking protective action against a so-called religion whose stated goal is to subvert your nation is too much like persecuting people on the basis of their race.
Ah, but an important point (missed by the author of the original article) is that these are the first benign monarchies to have revolution built directly into the system.
Most people have pointed out the significant difference between having centralized control that is assigned (as in the cathedral model) and centralized control that emerges (as in the working of most successful Open Source projects, whether or not this is truly the 'bazaar' that Raymond describes.) But the Open Source model has another safeguard, should the existing 'monarchy' cease functioning effectively, and that is the freedom of anyone to emerge as a new center of control, by taking the source and starting in a new direction.
Whether such an attempt succeeds is a different story. Quite naturally, it faces all the same obstacles that the current "monarch" faced to rise to their position (Do they know their technical stuff? Do they have the organizational and people skills to coordinate volunteers? Do they have a vision which they can communicate to enroll others?) and a few more besides (Can they convince others that they represent a change for the better, rather than just 'a change'? Have the circumstances that caused the split also caused hard feelings, and if so, can they be overcome?) But the fact that it always exists in potentia heads off the classic dilemma of centralization, that the whole system could be paralyzed by neutralizing the center.
It's almost certainly true that Open Source projects do not 'manage themselves' but they redefine 'manage' itself from "tell everybody What Needs To Be Done and Who Will Do It, and Lean On Everyone To Get Their Part Done" to "toss out good ideas to people you encourage, and coordinate what comes back to you as a result." And ... not to belabor a point that's already been made, but unlike the business world, no one will ever, ever be made the manager of a crucially important project just because he's the one with the nicest hair. ^_^
I strongly suspect that had the story's poster not been so forthright about which details she could not legally divulge, it never would have occurred to you to question what she did tell you.
Unless I'm very much mistaken, that would be entrapment, which is a major no-no for law enforcement. The FBI and the police are supposed to investigate crimes so they can be prosecuted; they are not supposed to create crimes so that they'll have crimes to investigate. Even if they think it would give them a lead on who is 'prone' to these activities... it wouldn't do them much good, and it would do them a lot of harm.
Suppose they put Guy X on their short list of Probable Pedophiles based on the fact that he once downloaded something titled "teen_sex.jpg" (and may I join others in saying that assuming such a title indicates illegal child pornography is utterly stupid; anyone actually competent enough to run such a sting operation would know that 'teen', 'young' and 'lolita' are used with as much precision and accuracy in advertising porn as 'virtual', 'object-oriented' and 'MIPS' are used in marketing computers.)
Now suppose that they catch Guy X downloading child porn that actually exists, i.e., that they didn't invent solely for the purpose of trapping him. Any good defense lawyer would be able to get it surpressed if, for example, he had been previously arrested or convicted on child-porn charges, pointing out rightly that the question is whether he committed this crime. (If not for this, no crime would ever get solved; the police would just look up who was the ex-con with the most convictions for that crime, and pin it on them. If they happened to actually get the right suspect, it would be sheer coincidence.)
So how does it look in a courtroom when they say, "You can be sure that he downloaded this bad stuff because he's done it before... Who did he download this bad stuff from before? Uh, well, it was us, actually..."
Actually, I fail to see why this would be so terrible.
The first reason for its non-terribleness is that it's what people do now... end users use spreadsheets for databases, databases for mail merges, mailing label files for databases. We can encourage them in better habits, but we would be unwise to declare "Oh, no, we can't give you powerful tools, since you'd just use them wrong."
The second reason actually extends the first reason: sometimes doing it wrong is actually right. Namely, because doing it 'wrong' can produce something acceptable, fast, while doing it 'right' requires more time and care and installed base of expertise, all going into a product that may be used once and thrown away.
The third reason is to correct a strange blind spot that may originate from the perception of what the Microsoft Way is and how the Right Way must be diametrically opposed. Namely -- if the end user is interested in a final look, why is that an inappropriate use of XML?? Isn't the point of XML to be the mark-up language that can be adapted to any domain? I don't see why we should insist that 'the final look' is an exception, for which the only correct answer is XML plus XSL...
What's the best programming language? Trick question; a bondage-and-discipline language may be the best for writing code that someone else will have to maintain, but it's probably not best for a quick-and-dirty one-shot or for prototyping. There's no one right language. And just the same, there's no stone-graven law that says an XML editor will always be better than a word processor (or a word processor than a text editor). Having a choice would be better than what we have now... and having a XML-based word processor format would be better than a proprietary binary word processor format.
Nice sound-bite... but who was ever 'conscripted' into the open-source revolution?
Certainly not the consumer; they can still choose closed-source packages, if they believe that those packages will be stable and secure enough for their purposes and will not need modification. Sometimes that's even the correct choice.
It's certainly not the software companies, either. They have more freedom to build software that works with an open-source operating system (OSOS?) than they ever would building for Windows, MacOS, or any closed-source OS. The GPL even allows companies to create proprietary products that depend on GPL'ed libraries for their function. The only disallowed option is to incorporate someone else's code into your product and then turn around and demand that you be the only one allowed to profit from 'your' labor. Is that what Love is complaining that he doesn't have the freedom to do?
Just as Love seems to use 'proprietary' to mean 'not public domain; with no restrictions or responsibilities attached to its use', he seems to be using 'conscripted' to mean 'unable to compete.' "No one buys our proprietary software any more because our open-source competitors provide the same functionality while using resources more efficiently and crashing less often. Therefore, we have been 'conscripted' into the open source revolution."
Actually, this particular one is oddly relevant to Slashdot.
I had several opportunities to page through a book Mr. Fleming wrote, titled IIRC 'If We Can Keep A Severed Head Alive...' at the local Savers secondhand store. (Of course, I'm kicking myself now for not getting it; a conversation piece like that doesn't come around too often.)
The thing that is interesting (and perhaps infuriating, depending on how plausible you find the device described by the patent) is that Fleming hates the idea of any such procedure happening. He is quick to point out that the technology to keep a severed head alive may have... abuses (anyone who's seen 'The Head That Wouldn't Die' knows where he's coming from.) That's why he applied for (and received!) a patent so broadly defined that anyone trying to keep a severed head alive would have to get permission to use his patent... permission which he intends to deny. Yes, that's right... he applied for this patent, and had it granted to him, for the purpose of obstructing medical research. (Albeit in a field far more heavily populated by movie scientists than real ones.)
Your comments are worse than just meaningless and useless; they themselves border on libel. The entire point of the article is that Outcast was deprived of their net access, not over anything they had said, but because of what they might say in future.
You admit that you don't know the facts. Yet because you've created a scenario in which Outcast did something to justify NetBenefit's outrageous unilateral acts of surpression, you assume you know all you need to. This isn't much different from Edwin Meese's infamous "if they weren't guilty, they wouldn't be suspects."
Mr. Kettle? There's a Mr. Pot on line one...
How did this ever get moderated up? It's merely name-calling from someone who doesn't, apparently, understand the concepts of irony or of having a sense of humor. "Geek Pride Festival" is an inherently funnier name than "A Big Party For The Type Of People Commonly Known As 'Geeks' Although We Stress That It Is Also OK Not To Be A Geek And In Fact We Don't Even Like To Admit We Are Geeks In Case Someone Thinks We're Bragging," which is what Venomous seems to think we should be calling it.
Are there perhaps problems with the way the geek community sees itself? Yes, perhaps. And we should take seriously the suggestion of such problems. But when it comes from someone still subscribing to nonsense like "geek == unable to get laid", I think we can safely ignore it.