This'd be a lot more useful if they weren't outfitting guitars with it. Amps, on the other hand, would be a nice place to be able to go straight to the board with something that ID's who it is etc. Bypass the mic by giving me a digital out that is the same sound being fed to the speaker, and I'll be pretty happy.
So tell me: how will I guarantee that the device (which we've already established is directly imprinted to recognize and confirm to a legal degree who I am, and with trivial GPS probably also where I am) is not on when I don't want it to be on?
Without that guarantee, it's a tool of big brother, because I can be snooped on whenever the listeners wish. And don't give me some hogwash about taking out the batteries; if it were that easy, someone would take out my batteries before they took me out.
A reliable DSL provider (and they exist) is just as good as AT&T. I haven't had a real network outage in months and months with my DSL (of course now you just jinxed me:-).
Re:Innovation? Yes. Better than a scooter? No.
on
This is IT?
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· Score: 2
My Mother springs immediately to mind.
And she can't stand for any extended period of time without serious leaning (on cane or walker). If this thing responds to subtle shifts in body weight to determine where it's going, it's going to take her in one direction only. And I'm betting even at that she'd be tired before she got any real distance.
That argument is ridiculous. I'm sure people (at Microsoft, at other places) "steal" from GPL'd code all the time, and I don't hear any alarms going off. It's just those of us with ethics deeper than our wallets who are concerned about this. The people who really want to steal the code already have.
My neighbor has (had) @home service here in Oak Park IL, and he said that while they didn't get shut off last night, they are off now. Of course that was a few hours ago, if AT&T is doing some magic trick to turn people back on, I wouldn't know about it.
"The majority of people who buy CDs aren't these highly technical people," Black said.
"If you want to get MP3s, you'd probably just download them somewhere else."
This guy obviously has no pre-teen or teenage children. Everyone I know at work who has kids that age talk about their kids downloading MP3's. We're not talking about rocket scientist kids only here. Everyone.
Beyond that, I'll echo the sentiments of the person who got the last quote in the article; I have 1500 CDs, and while I don't buy a lot these days, it's because music has moved on beyond my tastes for the most part, and because I have a house to support now, not because I'm downloading the same volume of music I used to get on CD.
We don't need to reverse engineer the virus itself so much as we need to reverse engineer the virus definition files, and enough of the magic lantern to be able to add our own definition for it.
Suddenly, my virus detection software is doing it's job again....
And I'm free to take what I like onto the commons, and save what I don't want on the commons for other uses. Again, unless I misunderstand, the FSF position is that everything should be a commons, which is as ridiculous as nothing should be a commons.
Since when does that "seem fair" to anyone? People use cable splitters all the time without cable company approval or charges, typically because they think it's unfair to charge per device, why would they believe or behave any differently on network bandwidth? At least in the cable world, there IS some signal attenuation involved in excessive splitting....
Again, perhaps I misunderstand, but RMS and his supporters appear to me to be arguing that all software should be GPL, not voluntarily, but by default. I'm arguing against that. I can't very well argue against it if I don't listen first.
I think the goals are noble, but the means you (and the FSF) argue in favor of are untenable, unacceptable, and won't work even if you succeed in implementing them. I would say the same thing about communism, which sounded wonderful in theory but doesn't work worth a damn in any practice I've seen outside of slightly larger than family groupings.
The fact remains that things I've created are the things I've created, and I can give them away or sell them under whatever terms I like. And if I don't like the terms of the GPL, but it's all that's available, I won't release them. How does that benefit anyone?
The comparison to theorems in math is specious. It might have been nice if things had turned out that software was treated like theorems, but the fact is that's not the world we live in. You can't change that by decreeing it to be so, and attempts in spite of that will fail.
So Richard Stallman is Free to use only Free software. Nothing is stopping him from exercising that freedom right here and now.
I however, wish to be Free to use whatever software I wish to use, without having someone tell me I have to be able to fix it myself even if I don't give a damn about fixing it myself, or even if I don't know HOW to fix it myself.
When Richard Stallman and his supporters realize that his view of the Universe is not the Only Truly Correct view of the Universe, we will be able to move on from this pointless argument. Until then, I will be here with many others pointing out the contradictions in their claims, which seem to me to boil down to "it's not power when we exercise it for the common good." (Here, let me give you this lovely ring of power, I know you'll never harm anyone with it).
Except that then it wouldn't be GPL and would be 1) impossible to migrate existing GPL code to, and 2) subject to the slings and arrows of outrageous rhetoric that Software Must Be Free socialists (in deed even if they don't claim the name) would throw claiming that the license is not good enough or erodes the focus of the GPL or whatever.
Do you really think that the FSF would ever use or even coutenance a competing license that was very similar but didn't include the most outrageous bits?
Re:O'Reilley : RMS :: Libertarianism : Socialism
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Freedom or Power Redux
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· Score: 3, Insightful
(Shoulda read the whole thing once before responding to pieces, there you go).
Remember, it's the beneficiaries of copyright and patent law who are asking for state-sponsored support
And while the current law, thanks to a corrupt congress, equates "beneficiaries of copyright law" with "corporate interests", the fact is that EVERY INDIVIDUAL is intended to be a potential benficiary of copyright law. If you are a creator of potentially copyrighted material, you are one of these benficiaries.
Again the comparison to capitalism vs. communism--each of us is a potential entrepeneur (which of course I can't spell off the cuff). At which point the protections of business are suddenly the protections of the individual too.
Certainly there are avenues for abuse, and the way our system lets money unduly influence it today is a really big problem. But the solution isn't to ban money, nor to take all protections (including the reasonable ones) away from business. It's to fix the system so money can't be the corrupting influence.
To mandate GPL as the only valid license would take away my individual rights as an author of software. And this is exactly the same place that communism has largely failed in any major attempt to implement it--attempts to dictate the good of the many at the expense of the few are doomed to failure on the rocks of human nature. You cannot legislate or impose by any power (including the power to force me to use GPL for my work) individual good behavior before the fact.
Re:O'Reilley : RMS :: Libertarianism : Socialism
on
Freedom or Power Redux
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· Score: 3, Insightful
The goal of the FSF is very much to increase individual rights, by calling into question the validity of a system that allows a few individuals to limit the rights of many individuals.
So why do you support capitalism again? Or do you?
And before I get modded down as a troll (whoopty), I do mean this as a serious question. You are using the same rhetoric that communists have used against capitalism since communism was born.
As far as it goes, anything short of a fully participatory democracy is a case of a few individuals limiting the rights of many individuals (because, despite the ideal of my representative being beholden to me the constituent, s/he isn't really). So why are you wasting your time in the small backwater of software development and licensing, when you could be out advocating revolution to TRULY free us all?
"Fair Use" in the context of copyright has a pretty specific meaning. It has to do with use of sections of a copyrighted work for review purposes and for educational purposes (among others, I make no claim to being complete in my description). But it has nothing to do with "that's not fair" as both the poster and the editor seem to believe.
C'mon people, we won't be taken seriously if we can't even learn the jargon.
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This'd be a lot more useful if they weren't outfitting guitars with it. Amps, on the other hand, would be a nice place to be able to go straight to the board with something that ID's who it is etc. Bypass the mic by giving me a digital out that is the same sound being fed to the speaker, and I'll be pretty happy.
The problem is then MIDI's serial throughput limitation, not it's latency.
You can't walk a mile to go do kung fu? What exactly is the point then?
Ok, so it doesn't know where I am, but it can still hear me any time they want to listen. So how is that not "big brother"?
Without that guarantee, it's a tool of big brother, because I can be snooped on whenever the listeners wish. And don't give me some hogwash about taking out the batteries; if it were that easy, someone would take out my batteries before they took me out.
When was the last time you used StarOffice for office compatability? Last time I needed to look at a PowerPoint presentation it did just fine.
A reliable DSL provider (and they exist) is just as good as AT&T. I haven't had a real network outage in months and months with my DSL (of course now you just jinxed me :-).
And she can't stand for any extended period of time without serious leaning (on cane or walker). If this thing responds to subtle shifts in body weight to determine where it's going, it's going to take her in one direction only. And I'm betting even at that she'd be tired before she got any real distance.
It's a toy, get over it.
That argument is ridiculous. I'm sure people (at Microsoft, at other places) "steal" from GPL'd code all the time, and I don't hear any alarms going off. It's just those of us with ethics deeper than our wallets who are concerned about this. The people who really want to steal the code already have.
My neighbor has (had) @home service here in Oak Park IL, and he said that while they didn't get shut off last night, they are off now. Of course that was a few hours ago, if AT&T is doing some magic trick to turn people back on, I wouldn't know about it.
This guy obviously has no pre-teen or teenage children. Everyone I know at work who has kids that age talk about their kids downloading MP3's. We're not talking about rocket scientist kids only here. Everyone.
Beyond that, I'll echo the sentiments of the person who got the last quote in the article; I have 1500 CDs, and while I don't buy a lot these days, it's because music has moved on beyond my tastes for the most part, and because I have a house to support now, not because I'm downloading the same volume of music I used to get on CD.
And burning a CD image is definitely copying the Software, and since you've changed it a little bit, it's probably a "derivative work".
Suddenly, my virus detection software is doing it's job again....
And I'm free to take what I like onto the commons, and save what I don't want on the commons for other uses. Again, unless I misunderstand, the FSF position is that everything should be a commons, which is as ridiculous as nothing should be a commons.
Since when does that "seem fair" to anyone? People use cable splitters all the time without cable company approval or charges, typically because they think it's unfair to charge per device, why would they believe or behave any differently on network bandwidth? At least in the cable world, there IS some signal attenuation involved in excessive splitting....
Again, perhaps I misunderstand, but RMS and his supporters appear to me to be arguing that all software should be GPL, not voluntarily, but by default. I'm arguing against that. I can't very well argue against it if I don't listen first.
I said release software, not code.
The fact remains that things I've created are the things I've created, and I can give them away or sell them under whatever terms I like. And if I don't like the terms of the GPL, but it's all that's available, I won't release them. How does that benefit anyone?
The comparison to theorems in math is specious. It might have been nice if things had turned out that software was treated like theorems, but the fact is that's not the world we live in. You can't change that by decreeing it to be so, and attempts in spite of that will fail.
I however, wish to be Free to use whatever software I wish to use, without having someone tell me I have to be able to fix it myself even if I don't give a damn about fixing it myself, or even if I don't know HOW to fix it myself.
When Richard Stallman and his supporters realize that his view of the Universe is not the Only Truly Correct view of the Universe, we will be able to move on from this pointless argument. Until then, I will be here with many others pointing out the contradictions in their claims, which seem to me to boil down to "it's not power when we exercise it for the common good." (Here, let me give you this lovely ring of power, I know you'll never harm anyone with it).
Do you really think that the FSF would ever use or even coutenance a competing license that was very similar but didn't include the most outrageous bits?
hear hear. Mod this up.
Remember, it's the beneficiaries of copyright and patent law who are asking for state-sponsored support
And while the current law, thanks to a corrupt congress, equates "beneficiaries of copyright law" with "corporate interests", the fact is that EVERY INDIVIDUAL is intended to be a potential benficiary of copyright law. If you are a creator of potentially copyrighted material, you are one of these benficiaries.
Again the comparison to capitalism vs. communism--each of us is a potential entrepeneur (which of course I can't spell off the cuff). At which point the protections of business are suddenly the protections of the individual too.
Certainly there are avenues for abuse, and the way our system lets money unduly influence it today is a really big problem. But the solution isn't to ban money, nor to take all protections (including the reasonable ones) away from business. It's to fix the system so money can't be the corrupting influence.
To mandate GPL as the only valid license would take away my individual rights as an author of software. And this is exactly the same place that communism has largely failed in any major attempt to implement it--attempts to dictate the good of the many at the expense of the few are doomed to failure on the rocks of human nature. You cannot legislate or impose by any power (including the power to force me to use GPL for my work) individual good behavior before the fact.
So why do you support capitalism again? Or do you?
And before I get modded down as a troll (whoopty), I do mean this as a serious question. You are using the same rhetoric that communists have used against capitalism since communism was born.
As far as it goes, anything short of a fully participatory democracy is a case of a few individuals limiting the rights of many individuals (because, despite the ideal of my representative being beholden to me the constituent, s/he isn't really). So why are you wasting your time in the small backwater of software development and licensing, when you could be out advocating revolution to TRULY free us all?
C'mon people, we won't be taken seriously if we can't even learn the jargon.
Probably both. But there you have it. The count has been pretty stable for a few years, so one might say that I got better.