I think a lot of people just reflexively tack the "noncommercial" clause on there without thinking about it, because exactly as you say, they figure "nobody will make money off my work this way".
The "Share Alike" clause all by itself should prevent any profit abuse, while allowing (for example) someone to charge $0.10 to cover the cost of burning the CD with the creative-commons work on it, or in the case of music it would allow a restaurant to play the work as background music for their guests (but require them to share it if the guests ask for it!).
(To be fair - those cases are arguably not "primarily" about making money and therefore are arguably okay within the scope of the "Non-Commercial" license clause, but that "arguably" part is a big problem in an era with so much litigiousness going on over people's and corporation's Intellectual Precious, so I think most potential users - like Debian - will just stay away anyway because it says "non-commercial".)
If some dork wants to take the game, make fancy new labels, and "sell" copies commercially for $60US each as though they'd written it, the Share-Alike clause still means that anyone who "buys" a copy can legally give out free copies to their friends and everyone else anyway. If they're worried that EA or somebody will trespass on the artwork and they'll find one of the character models wandering around in some unrelated blockbuster game at GameStop(tm) someday, consider that the Share-Alike clause would almost certainly stop a company like EA from doing that, since they hate to share.
And if you figure "but they'll just ignore the Share-Alike clause and make a fortune from my work!", consider that if they're willing to ignore "Share-Alike", why wouldn't they also be willing to ignore "Non-Commercial" anyway?
(In a lot of cases, the "No Derivatives" clause would be a better substitute for "Non-Commercial" with the share-alike clause, I think (i.e. "You can distribute my amazing genius musical works but you cannot incorporate them into the soundtrack for your $500,000,000 blockbuster Hollywood movie"), but that's probably not appropriate here since I assume The Dark Mod developers intend for people to be able to remix and add to it.)
Obligatory Disclaimer: IAm Not ALawyer, so if anyone reading this is unsure about whether their intended use of a CC-BY-NC-SA work counts as "non-commercial", go find a professional to pay a few hundred dollars an hour to figure it out for you (which is why don't really like the Non-Commercial clause for most uses at the moment...)
If I remember correctly, denyhosts relies on the old/etc/hosts.deny tcpwrappers functionality, which I thought had been deprecated for years now. (Still works in ancient "enterprise" distributions of course, up to at least RHEL5.x though).
I see a few other mentions of fail2ban, which in my mind is the successor to denyhosts - it uses iptables directly to accomplish the same thing.
It amuses me that the collective noun (you know, like a "pack" of dogs or a "flock" of birds or a "tantrum" of Representatives) for jellyfish is a "smack".
It's like you can just hear them smashing themselves into water intakes. "SMACK!".
We now return this thread to people with more directly relevant things to write.
I keep seeing this thing pop up in various "news story" postings online all at once. Looks like an astroturf/marketing campaign to me.
As many other people have been posting - "Low cost"? Really?
It "only" costs 6 RaspberryPi's or 4 BeagleBoards. I think the marketing people have badly failed to understand why most people are buying the $35-50 ARM boards ("It's only $35 - I can afford to [try to power it by induction by putting it in my microwave|use it to make an outdoor webcam in areas where bears are known to eat them|attach it to a weather balloon and try to use it as a flying wifi node|etc.] and if I break and/or lose it, oh well, I can just buy another." $200US is a bit high for that kind of thing.)
I had to buy none of that, but then, I wasn't trying to turn it into a "desktop" computer. I didn't even have to buy an SD card as I was able to scrounge an old 2GB one (a bit constrained, but plenty of room for basic headless use I find. I get the feeling that if I HAD needed to buy one, I could have found one big enough for ~$5).
I did have to configure the boot image myself (i.e. mount the image on my computer and adjust the starting services, IP address settings, etc.) but from that point on it was just a matter of plugging it in and using SSH to operate it. I haven't tested it, but I suspect x2go or freenx might work on it as well if you need remote GUI.
I played with it as a webcam server for a little while, now my project is to turn it into a low-power (legal unlicensed) FM transmitter to rebroadcast streaming audio to the clock-radios in my house.
There's quite a bit one can do with just the basic RaspberryPi, an SD card, and a network connection without any additional hardware.
"For one thing, not all car stereos have an aux input."
Agreed here - and I hate it. Thankfully, there are workarounds far less expensive than replacing the car stereo.
I actually LIKE when I'm in a vehicle with a cassette player, because those cassette adapters seem to work quite well. Short range FM transmitters are okay as a last resort, too.
" it would cost hundreds of dollars more per year for a dumbphone user to switch to a phone that plays MP3s."
True, but only if you assume that your choice is "smartphone or nothing". You can get a kick-butt media player that you can stick Rockbox onto for $50 or less if you shop around, and end up with something as versatile as any high-end audio player or smartphone. (Heck, the current builds of Rockbox even have Opus support.)
Failing that, Android-based phones, at least, can actually be used for everything but phone calls even without any voice or data plan. I've found even ancient Android phones make decent mapping and media-playing devices. Pick up a discarded one from a friend or Ebay cheaply and away you go.
For the parent post: "Radio" is that thing that you can sometimes use to pick up news and weather reports while in the car when your data connection on your phone isn't working, assuming you can find news or weather between the frequency bands being used to push a handful of entertainment-media audio products.
I'm not sure finding a way to shoehorn a relatively expensive SSD into my laptop to decrease my boot time from 10-15 seconds down to 5-10 seconds is really going to be worth the cost and effort, personally.
One thing I've noticed is that what seems to eat the most power on my phones is the "display" (it's never been clear to me how much of that battery-usage figure represents the actual screen and how much of that is the GPU, but whatever). This appears to have a comparatively tiny, relatively low-resolution display, which I'm guessing will limit how much power it can eat up (and as a result how much heat it will generate).
Like you said, this doesn't seem like a device that's going to be tasked with really heavy workloads anyway, so heat generation ought not to be a major issue.
Support for.opus files in HTML5 <audio> tags has been in chrome for a few versions now (finally - Firefox has had it for about a year now), but they've kept it disabled by default (and you've had to manually enable "playback of opus in video[sic]" in the switches to use it).
Have they enabled that by default yet, or do we have to continue waiting for the glacial pace of webm-with-vp9-and-opus support to work its way through for them to allow it by default?
"his colleagues genetically modified the cultivated rice species to overexpress its own EPSP synthase[...] genetically identical to one another except in the number of copies of the gene encoding EPSP synthase."
Whoa, I missed that from the summary initially - this is NOT the foreign "glyphosphate resistant" bacterial version of the gene they're talking about here.
This sort of thing ("gene duplication" mutations) can happen naturally - it sounds like this exact variety of "GM Rice" COULD have been produced by natural "traditional" methods (it would have taken much longer and been much more expensive in labor, of course). This says more about the potential for "weed" varieties of Oryzae sativa to mutate to be more prolific than anything to do with glyphosphate resistance being beneficial to weeds outside of cultivated fields.
(Also, as stenvar pointed out in another comment, having "higher rates of photosynthesis, [growing] more shoots and flowers and producing 48-125% more seeds per plant" is not necessarily an evolutionary benefit if the resulting increased growth, for example, made the weeds more sensitive to drought or more attractive to herbivorous insects or something of the sort)
Not that it's unreasonable to hypothesize that "weedy" varieties of the rice plant would get a similar boost from having more EPSP Synthase expressed regardless of the reason, but there's also no guarantee that the result will hold when the "extra" enzyme is a version from a different species (as happens with "Roundup-Ready" plants)
I would be interested in seeing this experiment repeated for other common crops that have glyphosphate-resistant versions, it could be useful to know if this affects anything besides rice (and whether this effect could be useful if intentionally added to crop varieties, for that matter.)
" I'm not a biologists, not sure how the resistance works"
You got the explanation right, maybe you should take up biology:-)
Glyphosphate resistance is actually relatively subtle - the "foreign" gene that's been inserted is one for a protein that serves the same function as one of the plant's "natural" genes that is inhibited by glyposphate, but this version comes from a bacterium. It's different enough that glyphosphate doesn't bother it, so while the plant's "natural" version of the gene is affected by the herbicide just as unmodified plants are, the bacterial version of the gene keeps chugging along and producing the vital protein for the plant anyway.
The possibility that the "weedy version" of the same species (Oryza sativa) expresses less of this protein that it would be able to make use of in a cultivated field, or perhaps in rice, the bacterial version of the gene functions more efficiently than the "native" protein, or something of the sort.
(I'm hoping there are followup studies investigating this, it's very interesting to me, and I'm not even into plant biology...)
I'm having no trouble with KDE, but I am keeping an eye on RazorQT/LXDE-QT, which will likely be my preferred "alternative" DE for constrained-resource systems.
I read this as a "spying exchange agreement". The US promises not to spy on Germans, and the Germans agree not to spy on Americans.
Instead, if the NSA wants spy data on German citizens, they'll metaphorically "extradite" data that the German government has collected on its citizens (and vice versa).
"Try to also remember many consumers are producers too."
It's gotten to the point that I feel offended when someone implies I am a "consumer", as though I were a baby bird waiting, mouth agape, for some mama-bird "provider" to cough up some "product" for me to consume.
As a participant, not a mere "consumer", the extremism in the defense of international conglomerates' Intellectual Precious is a plague.
Well, obviously the problem is that people using their smartphones are too quiet and unobtrusive. We need to fix it so that smartphone users are much more annoying and distracting for everyone around them.
Rumor has it they were originally going to make it gesture-based and instead of saying "Google" you'd jump up and do the "Macarena" for the phone's camera, but there was some kind of "Kinect"-related patent on "System and method for inducing users to make an ass of themselves in view of a camera to avoid using a keyboard or touchscreen" that was in play, so they reverted back to making the users talk incessantly to the phone instead.
I think the only "debacle" about Theora/VP3 was that it ended up languishing for half a decade with an "alpha" label after it was actually done (in the "1.0" sense). It wasn't bad at all for the time it was initially created, and if it had gotten formally finalized so people didn't think it "still wasn't ready" it would have had a much better chance of catching on.
It would still be a "second rate" video codec by TODAY's standards, but being plenty good enough for most purposes (you can't tell me top quality is incredibly important for short video clips while the internet is still being choked by clips being distributed as crappy animated GIFs...) it would probably at least be something with wide enough support for regular use even now.
Last time I looked, you could enable playback of opus audio by starting chrom(e|ium) with a special command-line switch, but they were refusing to enable it by default until there was opus-in-webm support (a format that as far as I know still doesn't even exist).
Meanwhile, Firefox has played.opus for about a year now...
Slashdot Mirror
I think a lot of people just reflexively tack the "noncommercial" clause on there without thinking about it, because exactly as you say, they figure "nobody will make money off my work this way".
The "Share Alike" clause all by itself should prevent any profit abuse, while allowing (for example) someone to charge $0.10 to cover the cost of burning the CD with the creative-commons work on it, or in the case of music it would allow a restaurant to play the work as background music for their guests (but require them to share it if the guests ask for it!).
(To be fair - those cases are arguably not "primarily" about making money and therefore are arguably okay within the scope of the "Non-Commercial" license clause, but that "arguably" part is a big problem in an era with so much litigiousness going on over people's and corporation's Intellectual Precious, so I think most potential users - like Debian - will just stay away anyway because it says "non-commercial".)
If some dork wants to take the game, make fancy new labels, and "sell" copies commercially for $60US each as though they'd written it, the Share-Alike clause still means that anyone who "buys" a copy can legally give out free copies to their friends and everyone else anyway. If they're worried that EA or somebody will trespass on the artwork and they'll find one of the character models wandering around in some unrelated blockbuster game at GameStop(tm) someday, consider that the Share-Alike clause would almost certainly stop a company like EA from doing that, since they hate to share.
And if you figure "but they'll just ignore the Share-Alike clause and make a fortune from my work!", consider that if they're willing to ignore "Share-Alike", why wouldn't they also be willing to ignore "Non-Commercial" anyway?
(In a lot of cases, the "No Derivatives" clause would be a better substitute for "Non-Commercial" with the share-alike clause, I think (i.e. "You can distribute my amazing genius musical works but you cannot incorporate them into the soundtrack for your $500,000,000 blockbuster Hollywood movie"), but that's probably not appropriate here since I assume The Dark Mod developers intend for people to be able to remix and add to it.)
Obligatory Disclaimer: I Am Not A Lawyer, so if anyone reading this is unsure about whether their intended use of a CC-BY-NC-SA work counts as "non-commercial", go find a professional to pay a few hundred dollars an hour to figure it out for you (which is why don't really like the Non-Commercial clause for most uses at the moment...)
If I remember correctly, denyhosts relies on the old /etc/hosts.deny tcpwrappers functionality, which I thought had been deprecated for years now. (Still works in ancient "enterprise" distributions of course, up to at least RHEL5.x though).
I see a few other mentions of fail2ban, which in my mind is the successor to denyhosts - it uses iptables directly to accomplish the same thing.
I'm surprised you're the only one saying this. I kind of expected an entire kvetch of slashdotters to make the same complaint.
It amuses me that the collective noun (you know, like a "pack" of dogs or a "flock" of birds or a "tantrum" of Representatives) for jellyfish is a "smack".
It's like you can just hear them smashing themselves into water intakes. "SMACK!".
We now return this thread to people with more directly relevant things to write.
I keep seeing this thing pop up in various "news story" postings online all at once. Looks like an astroturf/marketing campaign to me.
As many other people have been posting - "Low cost"? Really?
It "only" costs 6 RaspberryPi's or 4 BeagleBoards. I think the marketing people have badly failed to understand why most people are buying the $35-50 ARM boards ("It's only $35 - I can afford to [try to power it by induction by putting it in my microwave|use it to make an outdoor webcam in areas where bears are known to eat them|attach it to a weather balloon and try to use it as a flying wifi node|etc.] and if I break and/or lose it, oh well, I can just buy another." $200US is a bit high for that kind of thing.)
I had to buy none of that, but then, I wasn't trying to turn it into a "desktop" computer. I didn't even have to buy an SD card as I was able to scrounge an old 2GB one (a bit constrained, but plenty of room for basic headless use I find. I get the feeling that if I HAD needed to buy one, I could have found one big enough for ~$5).
I did have to configure the boot image myself (i.e. mount the image on my computer and adjust the starting services, IP address settings, etc.) but from that point on it was just a matter of plugging it in and using SSH to operate it. I haven't tested it, but I suspect x2go or freenx might work on it as well if you need remote GUI.
I played with it as a webcam server for a little while, now my project is to turn it into a low-power (legal unlicensed) FM transmitter to rebroadcast streaming audio to the clock-radios in my house.
There's quite a bit one can do with just the basic RaspberryPi, an SD card, and a network connection without any additional hardware.
Agreed here - and I hate it. Thankfully, there are workarounds far less expensive than replacing the car stereo.
I actually LIKE when I'm in a vehicle with a cassette player, because those cassette adapters seem to work quite well. Short range FM transmitters are okay as a last resort, too.
" it would cost hundreds of dollars more per year for a dumbphone user to switch to a phone that plays MP3s."
True, but only if you assume that your choice is "smartphone or nothing". You can get a kick-butt media player that you can stick Rockbox onto for $50 or less if you shop around, and end up with something as versatile as any high-end audio player or smartphone. (Heck, the current builds of Rockbox even have Opus support.)
Failing that, Android-based phones, at least, can actually be used for everything but phone calls even without any voice or data plan. I've found even ancient Android phones make decent mapping and media-playing devices. Pick up a discarded one from a friend or Ebay cheaply and away you go.
For the parent post: "Radio" is that thing that you can sometimes use to pick up news and weather reports while in the car when your data connection on your phone isn't working, assuming you can find news or weather between the frequency bands being used to push a handful of entertainment-media audio products.
Ah, yes, the EMM386.EXE of the 32-bit era... (Dang, I feel old.)
I'm not sure finding a way to shoehorn a relatively expensive SSD into my laptop to decrease my boot time from 10-15 seconds down to 5-10 seconds is really going to be worth the cost and effort, personally.
Being in IT really is already a lot like being a proctologist, except without the high pay and the prestige of being a medical professional.
"Trespassing" is a much better analogy, I think.
One thing I've noticed is that what seems to eat the most power on my phones is the "display" (it's never been clear to me how much of that battery-usage figure represents the actual screen and how much of that is the GPU, but whatever). This appears to have a comparatively tiny, relatively low-resolution display, which I'm guessing will limit how much power it can eat up (and as a result how much heat it will generate). Like you said, this doesn't seem like a device that's going to be tasked with really heavy workloads anyway, so heat generation ought not to be a major issue.
Support for .opus files in HTML5 <audio> tags has been in chrome for a few versions now (finally - Firefox has had it for about a year now), but they've kept it disabled by default (and you've had to manually enable "playback of opus in video[sic]" in the switches to use it).
Have they enabled that by default yet, or do we have to continue waiting for the glacial pace of webm-with-vp9-and-opus support to work its way through for them to allow it by default?
Whoa, I missed that from the summary initially - this is NOT the foreign "glyphosphate resistant" bacterial version of the gene they're talking about here.
This sort of thing ("gene duplication" mutations) can happen naturally - it sounds like this exact variety of "GM Rice" COULD have been produced by natural "traditional" methods (it would have taken much longer and been much more expensive in labor, of course). This says more about the potential for "weed" varieties of Oryzae sativa to mutate to be more prolific than anything to do with glyphosphate resistance being beneficial to weeds outside of cultivated fields.
(Also, as stenvar pointed out in another comment, having "higher rates of photosynthesis, [growing] more shoots and flowers and producing 48-125% more seeds per plant" is not necessarily an evolutionary benefit if the resulting increased growth, for example, made the weeds more sensitive to drought or more attractive to herbivorous insects or something of the sort)
Not that it's unreasonable to hypothesize that "weedy" varieties of the rice plant would get a similar boost from having more EPSP Synthase expressed regardless of the reason, but there's also no guarantee that the result will hold when the "extra" enzyme is a version from a different species (as happens with "Roundup-Ready" plants)
I would be interested in seeing this experiment repeated for other common crops that have glyphosphate-resistant versions, it could be useful to know if this affects anything besides rice (and whether this effect could be useful if intentionally added to crop varieties, for that matter.)
You got the explanation right, maybe you should take up biology :-)
Glyphosphate resistance is actually relatively subtle - the "foreign" gene that's been inserted is one for a protein that serves the same function as one of the plant's "natural" genes that is inhibited by glyposphate, but this version comes from a bacterium. It's different enough that glyphosphate doesn't bother it, so while the plant's "natural" version of the gene is affected by the herbicide just as unmodified plants are, the bacterial version of the gene keeps chugging along and producing the vital protein for the plant anyway.
The possibility that the "weedy version" of the same species (Oryza sativa) expresses less of this protein that it would be able to make use of in a cultivated field, or perhaps in rice, the bacterial version of the gene functions more efficiently than the "native" protein, or something of the sort.
(I'm hoping there are followup studies investigating this, it's very interesting to me, and I'm not even into plant biology...)
I'm having no trouble with KDE, but I am keeping an eye on RazorQT/LXDE-QT, which will likely be my preferred "alternative" DE for constrained-resource systems.
I read this as a "spying exchange agreement". The US promises not to spy on Germans, and the Germans agree not to spy on Americans.
Instead, if the NSA wants spy data on German citizens, they'll metaphorically "extradite" data that the German government has collected on its citizens (and vice versa).
That would be my guess, anyway.
Ents are not exactly FAST, though. Look what they did to "Duke Nuke'Em Forever"!
He will merely be given "Enhanced Detention".
It's gotten to the point that I feel offended when someone implies I am a "consumer", as though I were a baby bird waiting, mouth agape, for some mama-bird "provider" to cough up some "product" for me to consume.
As a participant, not a mere "consumer", the extremism in the defense of international conglomerates' Intellectual Precious is a plague.
Also, you just KNOW everyone was going to be calling it that anyway, so no point in not getting in on the fun.
Well, obviously the problem is that people using their smartphones are too quiet and unobtrusive. We need to fix it so that smartphone users are much more annoying and distracting for everyone around them.
Rumor has it they were originally going to make it gesture-based and instead of saying "Google" you'd jump up and do the "Macarena" for the phone's camera, but there was some kind of "Kinect"-related patent on "System and method for inducing users to make an ass of themselves in view of a camera to avoid using a keyboard or touchscreen" that was in play, so they reverted back to making the users talk incessantly to the phone instead.
I think the only "debacle" about Theora/VP3 was that it ended up languishing for half a decade with an "alpha" label after it was actually done (in the "1.0" sense). It wasn't bad at all for the time it was initially created, and if it had gotten formally finalized so people didn't think it "still wasn't ready" it would have had a much better chance of catching on.
It would still be a "second rate" video codec by TODAY's standards, but being plenty good enough for most purposes (you can't tell me top quality is incredibly important for short video clips while the internet is still being choked by clips being distributed as crappy animated GIFs...) it would probably at least be something with wide enough support for regular use even now.
Supposedly they're planning to use Opus for the audio in their new version of WebM alongside vp9 video.
Last time I looked, you could enable playback of opus audio by starting chrom(e|ium) with a special command-line switch, but they were refusing to enable it by default until there was opus-in-webm support (a format that as far as I know still doesn't even exist).
Meanwhile, Firefox has played .opus for about a year now...