For those that don't RTFA, the burgler broke into his flat on Feb 4th, 2005... and was sentenced 11 days later on Feb 15; the Brit's don't mess around!
The guy plead guilty, so the whole thing would have been shoved through fast by agreement with both sides.
It's not so much about bringing other code under GPL as preventing GPL code being distributed under a different license.
No.
You do that by just saying ``this code can only be distributed under the GPL''.
Without that sort of clause, as happens with BSD code, I can copy the code add a bit of my own, and then redistribute the whole under a proprietary license.
No. The reason you can include BSD licenced code in a restrictively licenced package is that the BSD licence clearly says you can do that (indeed that you can do more or less anything with the licenced code). You don't need a licence infection clause to prevent it, it would be prevented by default if the licence didn't go out of it's way to allow it.
Ensuring the code is licensed under the GPL is about keeping it free, yes
No. You can do that by just saying that GPLd code must stay under the GPL, which would in any case bey the default. Clause 2b is about forcing non GPL code to be GPLd.
The FSF disagrees with you and maintains a list of licenses which includes a division by GPL compatability.
The FSF notion of `compatibility' is simply that the code could be GPLd, not that the two licences could be in use at the same time for different parts of a project.
The reason I suspect you're saying this is because someone who licenses their project under, say, the X11 license would find a modified version that includes code from Linux upgraded to the GPL.
This is, in general, impossible since it involves changing the licence on existing work to a more restrictive one, and for any non-trivial project that will probably be impossible because you will never be able to find everyone who contributed to get their permission.
Even if it were possible, there will be reasons why a project chose a freeer than GPL licence, and so changing to the more restrictive licence would not make sense.
All of which would go away if the GPL clause 2b allowed the use of GPLed code inside a project which was released under any free software licence (say using the OSI definition of a free software licence). The GPL'd code would retain it's full GPL protection, and people whose use complied withe GPL would be able to use that functonality, giving them an advantage and so promoting GPL complient behaviour.
The current clause 2b instead encourages people to re-implement the GPL'd code and licence the reinvented wheel under a freeer licence, resulting in a way for those who wish to to avoid GPL complient behaviour.
This isn't theory, I have been in that position, implementing a freeer alternative to a GPLd library so that the functionality would be available to a free project. It is not sane from any point of view that this situation can arise.
I think that from a legal standpoint it is slightly harder to abuse analog copying, since you inherently lose quality, bolstering your fair-use defense.
Unless you want to keep uncompressed audio, you will lose quality using this hack.
You should look up fair use, it is much more restrictive than you seem to think it is.
The GPL was one of the original Free Software licenses and contains very little "baggage" other than an attempt to keep anything licensed under it free.
Clause 2b. You can't combine GPL code with non GPL code (except by getting a separate agreement from all contributors of course).
That is not about keeping the GPL'd code free, but about bringing other code under GPL. Stallman is very open about the politics behind it. It's a lever to try and get his prefered model of open source more widely adopted.
[...]explicitly making a license GPL compatable, or dual licensing
No other licence can be GPL compatable. The GPL expicitly says that everything must be licenced under `this' licence (ie the GPL).
Dual licences only help by allowing freer code to be used in GPLd projects. They don't help use GPLd code in freeer projects.
GNU/Linux works as well as it does because developers can freely share code amongst one another. Incompatable licenses impede this.
That was an explicit choice by RMS in creating the GPL, and an explicit choice by Linus in adopting it. There are, as you point out, other problematic licences, but the big one is the GPL and it's insistance that GPL'd and other free software can not play nice.
Ie. it's not that we need fewer licences, but that we need licences without the political baggage.
when people attack freedom, they always start with the weakest elements of society: in this case, children & prisoners.
(I think the RFID thing is just bad technology for the application, so I'm just addressing the moral issue here)
But this can not lead to a slippery slope. Children are not full members of society, they are denied lots of the rights of a citizen because they are presumed not to be able to be trusted with them due to their immaturity.
Specifically, we allow, indeed expect, parents to keep track of their children, to prevent them from doing some things and coerce them into doing others. When the parent puts the school in loco parentis we transfer that expectation to the teachers. There is no more moral problem with the school using RFIDs to do that than there is when parents use a baby monitor. Technology is just helping with what they should be doing anyway.
Prisoners are more problematic, because we recognise them as full human beings and collectively decide to violate their rights as punishment. There is always the worry that `we' might decide to extend the range of people we class as `prisoners'. The US government is doing this in Cuba, the UK government has been doing it in Belmarsh, and is looking for another loophole to do it some more.
We really don't have that problem with children, there is a natural control on the definition being extended since there comes a point when we want to stop coddling the little buggers and start exploiting them, that means allowing them the right to make their own decisions so that we can trick them into, for instance, going massively into debt on a credit card. At that point we have recognised them as suck^H^H^H^Hadults.
but I'd be disgusted if I had a child that a school wanted to monitor in this way.
Why?
Surely the school is supposd to know where you kid is. If you phoned up and asked to speak to them and they said ``sorry, we haven't a clue where they might be, it's not our job to take any notice of them'' wouldn't you be upset?
If this kind of technology allowed staff time to be transfered from beurocracy to teaching, everyone wins.
It's a second hand report, and although they have included a heading `uninhabitable earth' the text underneath does not say anything related to that. Old journalist's trick to make a report seem more dramatic than it is.
If you read that section you will see that it says what I said in another comment, that positive feedbacks could flip the earth's climate into a different stable state.
The earth is unusually cold at the moment. The danger is that we could cause it to go back to a more usual state -- no ice caps etc. The reason that this is a problem s not that such an earth is uninhabitable, there was lots fo life when the earth was like that, but that we have built a civilisation based on the current state, and a relatively rapid switch would crash the whole thing. The problem is not that we would need hazmat suits, but that we would need a new agricultural base etc.
If you really want something to worry about, consider what the countries with nukes willbe doing when their agriculture fails.
If you really, really want something to worry about, do a google search for H5N1.
All too often did I see them go from no damage to tons in one shot. Makes shields kind of pointless.
Well, that depends. If without shields it would be one shot and you are a cloud of vapour.
From a narative POV, given that in the Trek universe there are no tactics to a spaceship fight, they just fly at each other and blast, there is no point in stretching things out. Get everybody to whatever level of peril is needed in one shot and get on with the story.
If you need to think of it in it's own terms, compare it with the situation of modern ships. One anti ship missile, or one bomb, or a torpedo and you are crippled or sunk. Good tactics is preventing them from ever getting a shot in.
There are many more serious problems associated with global warming that just rising sea levels, believe me!
Why would anyone believe the unsupported assertions of an AC?
Feel free to cite one reputable source predicting human life will become impossible without hazmat suits due to global warming.
The most extreme possibility I know of which has been suggested is that warming may cause increased ozone decay resulting in a significant northern hole. That would make the required protective equipment a snorkel and a tube of sunblock.
The important issues related to Kyoto are the economic and biodiversity ones, not silly fantasies about human life becoming impossible.
It's no use being content that there will be an environment of some sort, if in a hundred years time we can't step outside without something resembling a half-life HEV suit.
And exactly what relevent to the Kyoto treaty is going to cause such an environment?
Kyoto is about warming and hence possibly sea level. The most you might need in terms of protective equipment is a snorkel.
I think what he meant was, "the safety of an Environment that we can live in is more important than the economy of a country."
I know of no prediction that CO2 emissions may result in an earth which is not suitable for human life.
The worst predictions are that there may be a positive feedback resulting in the Earth going back to a more normal state (rememberring that we are currently in an interglacial in an ice age), which would screw up current human societies massively.
I.e. it is a matter of economics on both sides -- is the expected economic damage of acting greater or less than the expected economic damage of not acting.
Consider the first 15 episodes of B5 and remember how the focus was Jeffery Sinclair's missing 24 hours and the reason the Minbari surrendered during the Battle of the Line? How much of that was really relevant to the subsequent years with the Shadow war?
Rather less than perhaps would have been if they hadn't lost Michael O'Hare. They had to try and give Sheridan's background with the Minbari some depth with the Black Star incident, but it could never have the same edge.
But the thing to notice is that the first series of B5 had plots we remember and characters which on first introduction were wonderful. By a few programmes in I wanted to see the 5 years. By a few programmes into Crusade I could happily have never seen another.
The evil network executives sometimes kill a series because they are evil, but sometimes because it is clearly in dying in pain and deserves a humane death, and I think Crusade, like Enterprise, is in the latter category.
Why is it that from ther tail end of TNG onward the Federation routinely got thier asses handed to them?
Because they were trying to create plots?
The power of the ship has always been a weakness in ST, almost any conflict situation could be solved by that much technology and power. So, the main requirement for the early part of an action-oriented ST plot, for any series, has always been to get the ship out of the way so some dramatic tension can happen. So, Kirk always has to end up stranded on the surface with communicators out, or Pickard has to go on holliday, or Janeway is off in a shuttle craft, or we just wheel in some ridiculous god-like entity who can negate the power of the ship.
Enterprise was at it's best when they didn't need to do that. When everyone outgunned them and their ship was in any case held together with gaffer tape. If they had held to that line they might have had something. But the writers were not up to it, so they had to introduce more and more magic technology to allow all problems to be solved by reruting secondary power through the balonium couplings, or just finding magic from the future.
Of course, the original Enterprise was so powerful because Rodenberry was interested in things other than conflict. TNG at it's best also went down that line -- situations where the power of the ship was irrelevent.
Crusade was quite good. It just never got network support.
To be fir, what we saw was the result of such a complete political dogfight that it's hard to judge what it would have been. However, I never saw anything in it worth my time watching, and I gave it quite a try, being a B5 fan. Not one episode sticks in my mind, and not one character. I vaguely remember Edward Woodward as a guest star struggling like the professional he is with a leaden sub-Trek save-the-peasents-from-the-evil-corporation story line.
Given JMS's sucess in creating followups to B5, I think I'd be happier to hear he was working on something new.
Re:Not a problem (yet)
on
SHA-1 Broken
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· Score: 1
The chances that two colliding plaintexts would both be intelligible seems vanishingly small;
That depends on the format. I bet many suis would write their contracts in Word or at best PDF, and expect you to do the same.
Such formats have a lot of space for hidden information which has no effect on the human readable result. That should make it easier to create a human-sane pair of contracts.
So, that adds a third rule:
3. All signed texts should be plain ascii (or local equivalent)
Slashdot Mirror
Breaking the law is not wrong.
In an ideal world only wrong things would be against the law, but the wrongness does not come from the law, the law is a recognition of the wrongness.
It's rather amusing to see you complain about moral relativism just after making such a purely morally-relative comment.
The guy plead guilty, so the whole thing would have been shoved through fast by agreement with both sides.
For stats nerds: the average is 66 days, 57 for non-jury cases.
No. You do that by just saying ``this code can only be distributed under the GPL''.
Without that sort of clause, as happens with BSD code, I can copy the code add a bit of my own, and then redistribute the whole under a proprietary license.
No. The reason you can include BSD licenced code in a restrictively licenced package is that the BSD licence clearly says you can do that (indeed that you can do more or less anything with the licenced code). You don't need a licence infection clause to prevent it, it would be prevented by default if the licence didn't go out of it's way to allow it.
No. You can do that by just saying that GPLd code must stay under the GPL, which would in any case bey the default. Clause 2b is about forcing non GPL code to be GPLd.
The FSF disagrees with you and maintains a list of licenses which includes a division by GPL compatability.
The FSF notion of `compatibility' is simply that the code could be GPLd, not that the two licences could be in use at the same time for different parts of a project.
The reason I suspect you're saying this is because someone who licenses their project under, say, the X11 license would find a modified version that includes code from Linux upgraded to the GPL.
This is, in general, impossible since it involves changing the licence on existing work to a more restrictive one, and for any non-trivial project that will probably be impossible because you will never be able to find everyone who contributed to get their permission.
Even if it were possible, there will be reasons why a project chose a freeer than GPL licence, and so changing to the more restrictive licence would not make sense.
All of which would go away if the GPL clause 2b allowed the use of GPLed code inside a project which was released under any free software licence (say using the OSI definition of a free software licence). The GPL'd code would retain it's full GPL protection, and people whose use complied withe GPL would be able to use that functonality, giving them an advantage and so promoting GPL complient behaviour.
The current clause 2b instead encourages people to re-implement the GPL'd code and licence the reinvented wheel under a freeer licence, resulting in a way for those who wish to to avoid GPL complient behaviour.
This isn't theory, I have been in that position, implementing a freeer alternative to a GPLd library so that the functionality would be available to a free project. It is not sane from any point of view that this situation can arise.
Unless you want to keep uncompressed audio, you will lose quality using this hack.
You should look up fair use, it is much more restrictive than you seem to think it is.
Clause 2b. You can't combine GPL code with non GPL code (except by getting a separate agreement from all contributors of course).
That is not about keeping the GPL'd code free, but about bringing other code under GPL. Stallman is very open about the politics behind it. It's a lever to try and get his prefered model of open source more widely adopted.
[...]explicitly making a license GPL compatable, or dual licensing
No other licence can be GPL compatable. The GPL expicitly says that everything must be licenced under `this' licence (ie the GPL).
Dual licences only help by allowing freer code to be used in GPLd projects. They don't help use GPLd code in freeer projects.
That was an explicit choice by RMS in creating the GPL, and an explicit choice by Linus in adopting it. There are, as you point out, other problematic licences, but the big one is the GPL and it's insistance that GPL'd and other free software can not play nice.
Ie. it's not that we need fewer licences, but that we need licences without the political baggage.
I hate and despise you all. I now declare this hapless cyberstructure open to the unthinkable abuse of all who wantonly moderate her.
(I think the RFID thing is just bad technology for the application, so I'm just addressing the moral issue here)
But this can not lead to a slippery slope. Children are not full members of society, they are denied lots of the rights of a citizen because they are presumed not to be able to be trusted with them due to their immaturity.
Specifically, we allow, indeed expect, parents to keep track of their children, to prevent them from doing some things and coerce them into doing others. When the parent puts the school in loco parentis we transfer that expectation to the teachers. There is no more moral problem with the school using RFIDs to do that than there is when parents use a baby monitor. Technology is just helping with what they should be doing anyway.
Prisoners are more problematic, because we recognise them as full human beings and collectively decide to violate their rights as punishment. There is always the worry that `we' might decide to extend the range of people we class as `prisoners'. The US government is doing this in Cuba, the UK government has been doing it in Belmarsh, and is looking for another loophole to do it some more.
We really don't have that problem with children, there is a natural control on the definition being extended since there comes a point when we want to stop coddling the little buggers and start exploiting them, that means allowing them the right to make their own decisions so that we can trick them into, for instance, going massively into debt on a credit card. At that point we have recognised them as suck^H^H^H^Hadults.
Why?
Surely the school is supposd to know where you kid is. If you phoned up and asked to speak to them and they said ``sorry, we haven't a clue where they might be, it's not our job to take any notice of them'' wouldn't you be upset?
If this kind of technology allowed staff time to be transfered from beurocracy to teaching, everyone wins.
Gee, you guys a re so unhip it's a wonder your bums don't fall off.
It's a second hand report, and although they have included a heading `uninhabitable earth' the text underneath does not say anything related to that. Old journalist's trick to make a report seem more dramatic than it is.
If you read that section you will see that it says what I said in another comment, that positive feedbacks could flip the earth's climate into a different stable state.
The earth is unusually cold at the moment. The danger is that we could cause it to go back to a more usual state -- no ice caps etc. The reason that this is a problem s not that such an earth is uninhabitable, there was lots fo life when the earth was like that, but that we have built a civilisation based on the current state, and a relatively rapid switch would crash the whole thing. The problem is not that we would need hazmat suits, but that we would need a new agricultural base etc.
If you really want something to worry about, consider what the countries with nukes willbe doing when their agriculture fails.
If you really, really want something to worry about, do a google search for H5N1.
you wouldn't keep trying to engage my enthusiasm, because I haven't got one.
Well, that depends. If without shields it would be one shot and you are a cloud of vapour.
From a narative POV, given that in the Trek universe there are no tactics to a spaceship fight, they just fly at each other and blast, there is no point in stretching things out. Get everybody to whatever level of peril is needed in one shot and get on with the story.
If you need to think of it in it's own terms, compare it with the situation of modern ships. One anti ship missile, or one bomb, or a torpedo and you are crippled or sunk. Good tactics is preventing them from ever getting a shot in.
Why would anyone believe the unsupported assertions of an AC?
Feel free to cite one reputable source predicting human life will become impossible without hazmat suits due to global warming.
The most extreme possibility I know of which has been suggested is that warming may cause increased ozone decay resulting in a significant northern hole. That would make the required protective equipment a snorkel and a tube of sunblock.
The important issues related to Kyoto are the economic and biodiversity ones, not silly fantasies about human life becoming impossible.
And exactly what relevent to the Kyoto treaty is going to cause such an environment?
Kyoto is about warming and hence possibly sea level. The most you might need in terms of protective equipment is a snorkel.
Sounds like a perfect description of QL to me. Except I don't think it reached even barely watchable.
I know of no prediction that CO2 emissions may result in an earth which is not suitable for human life.
The worst predictions are that there may be a positive feedback resulting in the Earth going back to a more normal state (rememberring that we are currently in an interglacial in an ice age), which would screw up current human societies massively.
I.e. it is a matter of economics on both sides -- is the expected economic damage of acting greater or less than the expected economic damage of not acting.
Rather less than perhaps would have been if they hadn't lost Michael O'Hare. They had to try and give Sheridan's background with the Minbari some depth with the Black Star incident, but it could never have the same edge.
But the thing to notice is that the first series of B5 had plots we remember and characters which on first introduction were wonderful. By a few programmes in I wanted to see the 5 years. By a few programmes into Crusade I could happily have never seen another.
The evil network executives sometimes kill a series because they are evil, but sometimes because it is clearly in dying in pain and deserves a humane death, and I think Crusade, like Enterprise, is in the latter category.
The environment is perfectly safe. Whatever we do there will always be an environment.
Because they were trying to create plots?
The power of the ship has always been a weakness in ST, almost any conflict situation could be solved by that much technology and power. So, the main requirement for the early part of an action-oriented ST plot, for any series, has always been to get the ship out of the way so some dramatic tension can happen. So, Kirk always has to end up stranded on the surface with communicators out, or Pickard has to go on holliday, or Janeway is off in a shuttle craft, or we just wheel in some ridiculous god-like entity who can negate the power of the ship.
Enterprise was at it's best when they didn't need to do that. When everyone outgunned them and their ship was in any case held together with gaffer tape. If they had held to that line they might have had something. But the writers were not up to it, so they had to introduce more and more magic technology to allow all problems to be solved by reruting secondary power through the balonium couplings, or just finding magic from the future.
Of course, the original Enterprise was so powerful because Rodenberry was interested in things other than conflict. TNG at it's best also went down that line -- situations where the power of the ship was irrelevent.
To be fir, what we saw was the result of such a complete political dogfight that it's hard to judge what it would have been. However, I never saw anything in it worth my time watching, and I gave it quite a try, being a B5 fan. Not one episode sticks in my mind, and not one character. I vaguely remember Edward Woodward as a guest star struggling like the professional he is with a leaden sub-Trek save-the-peasents-from-the-evil-corporation story line.
Well, lets' see... Could the fact that QL was a formulaic remake of Highway to Heaven with smaller hair and some special effects be relevent here?
People involved in one crap series are often a good indicator that another will be crap IME.
Given JMS's sucess in creating followups to B5, I think I'd be happier to hear he was working on something new.
That depends on the format. I bet many suis would write their contracts in Word or at best PDF, and expect you to do the same.
Such formats have a lot of space for hidden information which has no effect on the human readable result. That should make it easier to create a human-sane pair of contracts.
So, that adds a third rule:
3. All signed texts should be plain ascii (or local equivalent)