Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television, choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol, and dental insurance. Choose fixed interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisurewear and matching luggage. Choose a three-piece suite on hire purchase in a range of fucking fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who the fuck you are on a Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing, spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pishing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked up brats you spawned to replace yourself. Choose your future. Choose life... But why would I want to do a thing like that? I chose not to choose life. I chose somethin' else. And the reasons? There are no reasons. Who needs reasons when you've got blogs?
This looks like an extension of existing "brand watching" programs that have been around for a year or two. The main difference appears to be automation. AFAIK, existing programs have used some sort of search to find references to a brand, and then humans have looked at the newsgroup/forum/blog/whatever posts to determine the level of positive/negative commentary, look for useful information (or for potential defamation), etc. IBM's main addition seems to be the software to analyze it all.
Actually, this is probably a lot easier with blogs than with forums, since so many blogs provide RSS or ATOM feeds and there's a huge feed ping/search/index infrastructure in place with sites ranging from Ping-o-Matic to Syndic8 to Feedster and Technorati. So the search part is practically off-the-shelf.
Hey, I remember the days when I had to keep explaining to people that you couldn't get a virus just by reading an email, that you *had* to open an attachment to get infected. How times change...
And how would this have been any easier if the driver were closed source?
Did I ask for closed source? Go ahead, re-read my post. I'll wait.
No, I didn't ask for a closed source driver. But a stable binary API would allow the vendor to provide a single forward-compatible driver disk image instead of a bunch of disk images tied to precise kernel versions. And if they don't feel like keeping up with every new version of SuSE, Mandriva, Fedora, Slackware, etc. that comes along, I don't have to install a 2-year-old version.
Think of it this way: Let's say you have Apache and PHP, which you're running as mod_php. If you have to do a minor upgrade to Apache, you usually will not have to recompile PHP. When Apache does change thir ABI, they tell you in the release notes. That's a stable ABI, and open/closed source has nothing to do with it.
With Apache and PHP it's a convenience, but with the Linux kernel and drivers, you can run into situations where you could easily *run* a system using a custom kernel, but it's damn near impossible to *install* it.
As someone who has tried to install various Linux distributions on RAID cards, and has had difficulty getting installers to use even third-party open-source drivers*, I'd love a binary driver API.
As someone who supports free software, and has struggled with NVIDIA's video drivers (and they're at least trying to meet us halfway by making it as easy as possible to install their closed-source driver under the current system) I can see the negative consequences of encouraging binary-only drivers.
*Example: Promise SX6000. Old cards work with I20, newer ones use their own interface. An open source driver is available, at least for the 2.4 kernel, but good luck if you want to get your installer's kernel to use it. Unless you can create a driver disk, a byzantine task in itself, you're stuck with a few outdated versions of Red Hat, SuSE, and I think TurboLinux.
The LRAD's shrill tone can be as loud as about 150 decibels well beyond the threshold of pain.
Heck, just the article's description of "like a smoke detector, but louder" made me wince. That'll be effective enough on its own, even without reaching 150 db.
It also appears to target Wordpress, B2, and B2Evolution. Wordpress has been patched for months. I'd assume B2Evo has as well. B2, however, ceased development something like two years ago, after which WP and B2Evo forked from it. I'm surprised they bothered with B2 itself -- are there really that many unattended B2 blogs still out there?
When I went through college, the computer science program had a required course on the "Social Impacts of Computing" -- everything from the privacy implications of data mining to deaths. The Therac-25 case was required reading.
One thing that stuck in my mind was a point that it takes decades to see the true impact of any new technology. The telephone, the automobile, the airplane. Look at the US highway system and suburbia for impacts of cars that took 50 years to really hit. We're just beginning to see the wider impacts of computers.
I was wondering about that one. I suspect Paramount wants to pretend the cartoon never existed, but there were a couple of -- well, yeah, maybe only two -- good episodes in there. The Larry Niven one was good (even if it mashes the Trek and Known Space universes together), and so was the one in which Spock travels back to his childhood on Vulcan.
Yeah, arguing that evolution can't explain the start of life is kind of like arguing that molecular chemistry can't explain nuclear physics. They're related issues, but the focus is different, and the fact that we're still trying to figure out exactly how life started doesn't invalidate our theories on how and why it changes.
Somehow I expect it would end up looking like this:
GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE VERSION 3.14159
You may reuse this source code for any purpose, as long as you don't work for Microsoft or let it run on Windows. Each and every modification must be published, with full commentary, on Slashdot at the earliest possible convenience. If I want to use your code, I'm free to do so, and I don't owe you anything, but if you want to use my code, well if you can read this you've found the hidden message and you must provide documentation. SCO sux. This license shipped by weight, not by volume. Some settlement of terms have have occurred during development.
If you're the only copyright holder, or you can get agreement from the other holders, you can relicense your next version under a modified license without that clause.
You can't stop people from forking the older versions and using the code under GPL3 terms -- you already released it under conditions allowing that -- but you can lock future versions to the GPL v.2.
As I understand it, it should be kind of like incorporating BSD code in a GPL project.
The original BSD code can be used under either the BSD or GPL licenses, but the combined code can only be used under the GPL. If the pieces are kept distinct, you should theoretically be able to extract only the BSD-licensed sections and use them under BSD terms, but you have to be absolutely certain you haven't grabbed a mix of BSD and GPL code. Of course, if you have access to a copy of the original codebase, you can just work from that under the original terms.
Substitute GPL v.2 for BSD and GPL v.3 for GPL and I think it'll be about right.
Yep. What matters most about democracy is that it makes explicit the tenet that the state governs by the consent of the governed. Either you make decisions as a group, or you collectively choose someone qualified to make decisions on your behalf.
When it comes to societal issues, it makes sense for the society as a whole to come to a consensus. When it comes to something specific, like surgery or legal advice, you go find an expert. Anyone who expects the open source community to be able to vote on GPL provisions is overlooking some important issues:
1. Who is eligible to vote? Everyone who has ever written an OSS program? Everyone who has ever used one? Everyone with an internet connection? Everyone on the planet? 2. Software expertise does not translate into legal expertise.
A smart client doesn't overrule his lawyer. If they disagree, he might discuss the issue. But he recognizes that his lawyer knows more about the law, or at least that field of law, than he does. And if the lawyer doesn't? Time to get another lawyer.
The default wording is "Under the terms of the GPL version X or later." So the author or a fork can keep using GPL2 or switch to GPL3 with no fuss. (One exception, IIRC, is the Linux kernel, in which Linus removed the "or later" text way back in the beginning, so it's perpetually GPL2 unless everyone with a copyright stake can agree to relicense.)
Most software I've seen includes a copy of the license with the source, often in a file called COPYING, so you have the exact text of the GPL version that they used.
Good point about limited vs. unlimited resources. If we're just talking about blogs, or individual websites, it comes down to the poster's honesty. ("I'm saying X because I believe it" vs. "I'm saying X because the campaign paid me to say it.")
But we're not just talking about blogs and individual sites.
This bill would have made it perfectly legal for the Democratic party to buy every single ad space on CNN. Obviously this is an extreme case -- it would be too expensive and wouldn't return on the investment -- but it should illustrate the point that any regulation that affects print, television, etc. would have been circumvented simply by distributing something over the net. And we're moving toward distributing everything over the net.
Radio? Broadcast over the web instead of the air, and your restrictions are gone. Newspapers? Switch from paper to the web. Same thing. TV? We keep hearing about broadband becoming the new method of distribution, and we're starting to see it with ITMS. Movies? Same as TV. Phones? VOIP.
Think of anything that campaign finance laws limit. Now, pretend you want an IT patent and add the words "on the Internet."
As I recall, MoveOn is an organization like, say, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth which has an agenda that aligns with a political party but (theoretically) isn't officially tied to that party's fundraising machine. If either group got money from the Bush or Kerry campaign, that's a violation, but as long as they do their own fundraising, they're already exempt -- whether they're on the Internet or not.
I have a crappy little website where I do the typical rant and rave thing on any subject that I fancy to. During election times I like to call all of the canidates idiots and such and point out their shortcomings.
It shouldn't affect you at all. As long as you're not getting money from the official campaigns, you can rant all you want -- with or without this legislation.
My attitude is that it`s the browser that`s broken, not my site, and i won`t modify my site to cater to buggy browsers.
Yes, it's the browser that's broken... but it's still the most-used browser out there, and most people aren't going to switch to a new one just to visit your site. They'll just go somewhere else.
If you want the visitors, you're better off spending the time to put in workarounds for that buggy browser. Eventually few enough people will be using IE6 that you can just write them off (like most sites can write off Netscape 4 today), but we're not there yet.
In general, Mozilla, Opera and Safari handle a large number of features in a similar manner, and they're working to become more similar. IE7 will go a long way toward catching up.
What makes this different from 1998 is that back then, each major browser was working to implement different features, diverging the capabilities. After the dust settled, a number of features were codified into the newest versions of the CSS, HTML and JavaScript standards, and since that time web browsers have been filling in their support for those specs. Functionality is actually converging now. Even the new features being developed through WHATWG are being done so in a cooperative way -- the <canvas> element is a good example of something that was implemented in Safari, codified in a spec, and is now implemented in the Firefox 1.5 betas and the Opera 9 beta. And if IE wants to join in, they have an actual specification to work from, and can easily implement it in a compatible way.
So the differences shoudl decrease over time. Additionally, another poster suggested that you do object detection. This is definitely the way to go, because you never know when a new version of some browser is going to come out, or when someone will release a new browser based on an existing codebase. If your JS code looks for Firefox, and someone visits your site in Camino or Flock, you might run into problems, but if you look for Feature X, your site automatically works in all gecko browsers.
Slashdot Mirror
This reminds me of something...
This looks like an extension of existing "brand watching" programs that have been around for a year or two. The main difference appears to be automation. AFAIK, existing programs have used some sort of search to find references to a brand, and then humans have looked at the newsgroup/forum/blog/whatever posts to determine the level of positive/negative commentary, look for useful information (or for potential defamation), etc. IBM's main addition seems to be the software to analyze it all.
Actually, this is probably a lot easier with blogs than with forums, since so many blogs provide RSS or ATOM feeds and there's a huge feed ping/search/index infrastructure in place with sites ranging from Ping-o-Matic to Syndic8 to Feedster and Technorati. So the search part is practically off-the-shelf.
Hey, I remember the days when I had to keep explaining to people that you couldn't get a virus just by reading an email, that you *had* to open an attachment to get infected. How times change...
And how would this have been any easier if the driver were closed source?
Did I ask for closed source? Go ahead, re-read my post. I'll wait.
No, I didn't ask for a closed source driver. But a stable binary API would allow the vendor to provide a single forward-compatible driver disk image instead of a bunch of disk images tied to precise kernel versions. And if they don't feel like keeping up with every new version of SuSE, Mandriva, Fedora, Slackware, etc. that comes along, I don't have to install a 2-year-old version.
Think of it this way: Let's say you have Apache and PHP, which you're running as mod_php. If you have to do a minor upgrade to Apache, you usually will not have to recompile PHP. When Apache does change thir ABI, they tell you in the release notes. That's a stable ABI, and open/closed source has nothing to do with it.
With Apache and PHP it's a convenience, but with the Linux kernel and drivers, you can run into situations where you could easily *run* a system using a custom kernel, but it's damn near impossible to *install* it.
Yep, 'cause raster images like JPEG and PNG *never* have this problem!
(Oh, wait...)
Would you expect the same to apply to the authors of, say, libpng? Or libungif?
As someone who has tried to install various Linux distributions on RAID cards, and has had difficulty getting installers to use even third-party open-source drivers*, I'd love a binary driver API.
As someone who supports free software, and has struggled with NVIDIA's video drivers (and they're at least trying to meet us halfway by making it as easy as possible to install their closed-source driver under the current system) I can see the negative consequences of encouraging binary-only drivers.
*Example: Promise SX6000. Old cards work with I20, newer ones use their own interface. An open source driver is available, at least for the 2.4 kernel, but good luck if you want to get your installer's kernel to use it. Unless you can create a driver disk, a byzantine task in itself, you're stuck with a few outdated versions of Red Hat, SuSE, and I think TurboLinux.
The LRAD's shrill tone can be as loud as about 150 decibels well beyond the threshold of pain.
Heck, just the article's description of "like a smoke detector, but louder" made me wince. That'll be effective enough on its own, even without reaching 150 db.
It also appears to target Wordpress, B2, and B2Evolution. Wordpress has been patched for months. I'd assume B2Evo has as well. B2, however, ceased development something like two years ago, after which WP and B2Evo forked from it. I'm surprised they bothered with B2 itself -- are there really that many unattended B2 blogs still out there?
When I went through college, the computer science program had a required course on the "Social Impacts of Computing" -- everything from the privacy implications of data mining to deaths. The Therac-25 case was required reading.
One thing that stuck in my mind was a point that it takes decades to see the true impact of any new technology. The telephone, the automobile, the airplane. Look at the US highway system and suburbia for impacts of cars that took 50 years to really hit. We're just beginning to see the wider impacts of computers.
...until morale improves.
I was wondering about that one. I suspect Paramount wants to pretend the cartoon never existed, but there were a couple of -- well, yeah, maybe only two -- good episodes in there. The Larry Niven one was good (even if it mashes the Trek and Known Space universes together), and so was the one in which Spock travels back to his childhood on Vulcan.
Yeah, arguing that evolution can't explain the start of life is kind of like arguing that molecular chemistry can't explain nuclear physics. They're related issues, but the focus is different, and the fact that we're still trying to figure out exactly how life started doesn't invalidate our theories on how and why it changes.
Somehow I expect it would end up looking like this:
GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE VERSION 3.14159
You may reuse this source code for any purpose, as long as you don't work for Microsoft or let it run on Windows. Each and every modification must be published, with full commentary, on Slashdot at the earliest possible convenience. If I want to use your code, I'm free to do so, and I don't owe you anything, but if you want to use my code, well if you can read this you've found the hidden message and you must provide documentation. SCO sux. This license shipped by weight, not by volume. Some settlement of terms have have occurred during development.
If you're the only copyright holder, or you can get agreement from the other holders, you can relicense your next version under a modified license without that clause.
You can't stop people from forking the older versions and using the code under GPL3 terms -- you already released it under conditions allowing that -- but you can lock future versions to the GPL v.2.
As I understand it, it should be kind of like incorporating BSD code in a GPL project.
The original BSD code can be used under either the BSD or GPL licenses, but the combined code can only be used under the GPL. If the pieces are kept distinct, you should theoretically be able to extract only the BSD-licensed sections and use them under BSD terms, but you have to be absolutely certain you haven't grabbed a mix of BSD and GPL code. Of course, if you have access to a copy of the original codebase, you can just work from that under the original terms.
Substitute GPL v.2 for BSD and GPL v.3 for GPL and I think it'll be about right.
Yep. What matters most about democracy is that it makes explicit the tenet that the state governs by the consent of the governed. Either you make decisions as a group, or you collectively choose someone qualified to make decisions on your behalf.
When it comes to societal issues, it makes sense for the society as a whole to come to a consensus. When it comes to something specific, like surgery or legal advice, you go find an expert. Anyone who expects the open source community to be able to vote on GPL provisions is overlooking some important issues:
1. Who is eligible to vote? Everyone who has ever written an OSS program? Everyone who has ever used one? Everyone with an internet connection? Everyone on the planet?
2. Software expertise does not translate into legal expertise.
A smart client doesn't overrule his lawyer. If they disagree, he might discuss the issue. But he recognizes that his lawyer knows more about the law, or at least that field of law, than he does. And if the lawyer doesn't? Time to get another lawyer.
The problem is the zealots are writing the GPL.
Who do you think wrote it in the first place?
The default wording is "Under the terms of the GPL version X or later." So the author or a fork can keep using GPL2 or switch to GPL3 with no fuss. (One exception, IIRC, is the Linux kernel, in which Linus removed the "or later" text way back in the beginning, so it's perpetually GPL2 unless everyone with a copyright stake can agree to relicense.)
Most software I've seen includes a copy of the license with the source, often in a file called COPYING, so you have the exact text of the GPL version that they used.
And that's a pretty big loophole, and only going to get bigger. Consider:
This is the equivalent of, in 1900, creating a loophole in some law for anything produced using electricity.
Good point about limited vs. unlimited resources. If we're just talking about blogs, or individual websites, it comes down to the poster's honesty. ("I'm saying X because I believe it" vs. "I'm saying X because the campaign paid me to say it.")
But we're not just talking about blogs and individual sites.
This bill would have made it perfectly legal for the Democratic party to buy every single ad space on CNN. Obviously this is an extreme case -- it would be too expensive and wouldn't return on the investment -- but it should illustrate the point that any regulation that affects print, television, etc. would have been circumvented simply by distributing something over the net. And we're moving toward distributing everything over the net.
Radio? Broadcast over the web instead of the air, and your restrictions are gone.
Newspapers? Switch from paper to the web. Same thing.
TV? We keep hearing about broadband becoming the new method of distribution, and we're starting to see it with ITMS.
Movies? Same as TV.
Phones? VOIP.
Think of anything that campaign finance laws limit. Now, pretend you want an IT patent and add the words "on the Internet."
As I recall, MoveOn is an organization like, say, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth which has an agenda that aligns with a political party but (theoretically) isn't officially tied to that party's fundraising machine. If either group got money from the Bush or Kerry campaign, that's a violation, but as long as they do their own fundraising, they're already exempt -- whether they're on the Internet or not.
It's all about where the money's coming from.
I have a crappy little website where I do the typical rant and rave thing on any subject that I fancy to. During election times I like to call all of the canidates idiots and such and point out their shortcomings.
It shouldn't affect you at all. As long as you're not getting money from the official campaigns, you can rant all you want -- with or without this legislation.
My attitude is that it`s the browser that`s broken, not my site, and i won`t modify my site to cater to buggy browsers.
Yes, it's the browser that's broken... but it's still the most-used browser out there, and most people aren't going to switch to a new one just to visit your site. They'll just go somewhere else.
If you want the visitors, you're better off spending the time to put in workarounds for that buggy browser. Eventually few enough people will be using IE6 that you can just write them off (like most sites can write off Netscape 4 today), but we're not there yet.
In general, Mozilla, Opera and Safari handle a large number of features in a similar manner, and they're working to become more similar. IE7 will go a long way toward catching up.
What makes this different from 1998 is that back then, each major browser was working to implement different features, diverging the capabilities. After the dust settled, a number of features were codified into the newest versions of the CSS, HTML and JavaScript standards, and since that time web browsers have been filling in their support for those specs. Functionality is actually converging now. Even the new features being developed through WHATWG are being done so in a cooperative way -- the <canvas> element is a good example of something that was implemented in Safari, codified in a spec, and is now implemented in the Firefox 1.5 betas and the Opera 9 beta. And if IE wants to join in, they have an actual specification to work from, and can easily implement it in a compatible way.
So the differences shoudl decrease over time. Additionally, another poster suggested that you do object detection. This is definitely the way to go, because you never know when a new version of some browser is going to come out, or when someone will release a new browser based on an existing codebase. If your JS code looks for Firefox, and someone visits your site in Camino or Flock, you might run into problems, but if you look for Feature X, your site automatically works in all gecko browsers.