Boycotting the Israeli Universities since you get funds from Palestinians means that you accepted the Palestinians proprietary license. Neither you nor them want to help their neighbor.
I agree, and my respect for RMS' idealism is lessened.
And I would agree if it was an actual boycott. But it's not. At least, I've seen no mention that RMS will *never* go to Israel, or is prohibited from going there.
Alternatively, you are boycotting all other companies besides your employer since you don't do work for them. Shame on you.
The obvious thing would be for Israel to pay for the entire trip, including the trip to the Palestinian territories
Hell, go half-and-half. Call up whoever the coordinator is on the Palestinian side is, say "hey, I hear you got Stallman coming, and we'd like him to do some talks over here too. Can we cover half the travel costs?"
Of course, the whole thing is so obviously a political football, that it'll never happen.
Let's move the setting - say the University of Alberta (in Edmonton) was the one paying the trip. Stallman decides, hey, I'm in Canada - I'm going to drive down the highway to U Calgary while I'm here and do a few speeches there as well.
Calgary is happy with this - they get Stallman without having to pay to get him there. U of A is a little miffed - they're paying all the bills, but they're losing out on value. They call up Stallman and say "hey, we're not really thrilled with paying for you to come and give speeches to our rival school as well - if we're paying the bill, we don't want you going there".
What do you do?
(In either case, I don't think you can peg this on Stallman - if anything, he's in a better place now because he's not trying to get extra cash on PA's dime.)
Corn? Corn didn't even exist in its current form a thousand years ago, yet it was in its current form before the GMO corps were even founded. I'll bet dollars to doughnuts you eat corn or corn products on a regular basis though don't you?
This is a bit of obfuscation, though - by that logic all lifestock are GMO. Heck, you're GMO - you're the product of highly specific selective breeding yourself.
Here's the difference - I can go to the store, buy a potato, let it go to seed and plant it. And in a few months, I'll have my own potatoes. GMO crops are built specifically to prevent people from growing their own food. Heck, they're designed to prevent the *growers* from growing their own food.
In a GMO world, we'll see small farms go extinct, and then eventually gardens - there's no profit in letting people grow their own veggies, after all.
You can't just "not buy it", or "not grow it". There's a big issue here in the states with Monsanto and their GM crops being cross pollinated into smaller, local farmers fields. Monsanto can go to court, then force the farmers to pay for the right to grow those crops that now contain their gene.
The punchline is that you're starting to see the Monsanto seeds growing in the ditches on the side of the road. I'm waiting for an enterprising village or town to call Monsanto up and demand that they remove their "property" from the roads or they'll be charged with littering.
And to all the folks saying "what's the problem?", it's not that Monsanto has made a better plant. It's that by making it a sterile plant, they're trying to corner the market on farming. The way it's always been done is this - farmer plants the field. Harvests. Keeps a portion of the seed, sells the rest. Next season, he plants (or if you prefer, "reinvests") the seed he kept to plant the next crop. Monsanto seed is made so that you have to rebuy it from them, every year, forever.
I'm in Australia. Every time I fly to Canada, I cross US air space, so I'm forced to undergo a US groping, fingerprints, retina scan etc. just to enter Canada.
Once we were made to exit the plane, immigrate to the US, go round the corner (queue up) and depart again because our plane made a stopover in Hawaii on the way to Vancouver. Nobody remembers the term 'In Transit' any more?
You might have to dig a bit, but there's a trend towards avoiding the US entirely while flying, for those of us who don't see the need to be groped by the country we didn't want to visit in the first place.
My last trip to the US was about five years ago (we arrived the night before The Bathroom Chemistry Incident), and while there are some reasons I'd like to travel there again in the future, none of them warrant the expected treatment we would endure (much less what *might* happen if we're unlucky and get a TSA agent with a chip on their shoulder)
When the US wants tourism again, they'll get their ducks in a row.
doctors are legally forbidden from disputing bad reviews. HIPPA (U.S. patient privacy law) doesn't even allow doctors to acknowledge that a particular person was in fact a patient
So what you're saying is that HIPPA prevents a doctor from even attempting to enforce this contract because by doing so he will have acknowledged a person as his patient and deprived them of doctor/patient confidentiality. A better way to argue it methinks.
Close, but not quite. Assuming that the legal company did their jobs correctly (and reading TFA, that's admittedly a stretch), the contract would be a separate document giving Joe Doctor the rights to all writings from Bob Person regarding Doctor's Company ABC, with no mention that Bob is a patient.
Then Dr. Joe has the documentation to show that he holds copyright, with nothing implicating that Bob is or was a patient. (Yes, you can easily infer the connection, but it's a tougher row to hoe legallly).
A World Heritage site should be something that exists in the world; something we interact with and can learn from.
Well, that *certainly* disqualifies wikipedia. It's not in this world (I strongly suspect it lives in a demon dimension, byeond the singularity, in hyperspace or possible outside of the luminiferous aether). And there is no way at all of learning from it, let alone interacting with it.
All sarcasm aside, this does illustrate the biggest hurdle for Wikipedia.
It's a World Heritage Site - the intention is a physical place that is important for cultural or historical reasons. Suppose they say "Yep, Mr. Wales - Wikipedia is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Here's your plaque."
AND I'd like to add that it is also resistance from the population in general. Many people don't want to give up their internal combustion engines - that's what it's going to take to clean up the air, solve our oil dependency problems and pretty much do nothing about Global Warming because everything we do will be more than nullified by China, India, Indonesia, and all of the billions of people who are going to burn their coal, petroleum, and everything else they can.
We're pretty much fucked.
No, we just need a reasonable alternative to internal combustion engines. And by "reasonable", I mean "doesn't require people to completely rework their lifestyle into an inferior version".
I can't get to my place of employment without an internal combustion engine. There's no public transit to the area. It's in the middle of an industrial park filled with semis and heavy equipment, so riding a bike would be suicidal (not to mention a three-hour trip one-way, according to Google). Give me a way to do that without an IC engine, and I will happily take you up on it.
Calculator apps can be had for Androids, tablets, *and* netbooks.
And they are less capable at that specialized role.
Technically true, but getting less so all the time. And if you don't need the extra tools, there is a benefit to using your android/tablet/netbook - namely, you're using the tool you already carry with you.
Kid might forget his calculator at home, but he's less likely to forget his iPod.
While I would agree with that if you wrote it, it also seems obvious that you could download answers and programs to deal with this sort of thing.
Changing times, I suspect - my teachers generally had the same reaction, but at the time (mid-90s) you didn't have the easy search capabilities that we do today. I would expect a teacher today to ask for a bit more in that regard (and it can be as little as spending five minutes asking a few pointed questions to make sure the kid actually knows the details of the software)
I don't think it's a question of "does TI care about hobbyists", but a question of protecting their position as the default calculator for education.
I did my high school math in the mid-90s (when graphing calculators were just starting to show up), and I wasn't allowed to use a calculator in class at all until we started Trig (and one teacher made us use the lookup tables in the back of the book instead!). Once you were deep into exponents, roots, squares, and so on, then we got to use the calculator (and depending on the class, graphing calcs still weren't allowed).
When I helped my friend's kid with math a few years back, I was appalled to see that the examples in the textbook actually *assume* you have a particular model of TI calculator: the how-to was literally "enter this number; now hit the [picture] key" and so on.
Having textbooks assume that you're using a TI brand calculator means tons of extra business - I'm not surprised that they'll do anything required to ensure they don't lose that business.
I also won't be in the least surprised when hackers figure out how to either spoof the software, or just figure out how to put the guts of one model inside an "approved" model casing.
In his software class, Dan had learned that each
book had a copyright monitor that reported when and where it was read, and by whom, to Central Licensing.
While it makes a good dystopian scare-story, if we're at the point where your computer is watching you to see who's looking at the screen (which is what would be required to do this), Dan's got much bigger problems on his hands - namely, what "Central Licensing" is going to do with all that video of him fapping.
Also, it suffers an Idiot Ball moment - Lissa needs to write an essay. Dan can't (or won't) let Lissa touch the computer because Evil Things Will Happen. Solution: Let Lissa dictate the essay, Dan types it. Lissa has never seen anything on the computer.
Alternate Idiot Ball moment - we're in the Scary Future, where the system reports who logged in and who looked at what (and will punish you for letting people look at the wrong files), but we've apparently lost the ability to use the chmod command.
Music departments have to pay for EVERY copy of music.
While technically true, I've yet to meet a music teacher or prof who handed out the original sheet music - he has an original for each student, but the students were getting photocopies. Why? Because it's too damned expensive to buy replacements.
That's OK. We can then go back to writing in ancient Hebrew (or any other writing system that doesn't have vowels).
Of course, then you'll have to pay consonant licence fees, not to mention paying extra to speak. (Since any word you're using has certainly been used in a film, and thus subject to that copyright as well).
The local university here had an uproar a few years back when it was discovered that it was cheaper to order the textbooks from the chain store than it was to buy it from the university bookstore. (And this was paying "special order" pricing from the chain store).
The student's union (which runs the bookstore) tried to add rules requiring students to use the bookstore (to preserve the income stream), but that was roundly shot down by anyone with an ounce of common sense. I believe they were going back to the publishers to get better prices, but I was gone before anything came out of that.
Not disagreeing on any given point (I was just making the argument that Nintendo has probably covered themselves legally, if not ethically).
I think the big reason I'm not in NERDRAGE over the hardware is that for small scale devices (like an iPhone or DS), the default historically *is* a manufacturer-controlled ecosystem. If you wanted to make a game for the Sega (just to pick a third-party here), you needed their permission (and to pay their licensing fees). So I don't feel particularly wronged when Apple or Nintendo says "only licensed software on our device, kthx".
I'm personally far more concerned about the "we'll send all your information and images and sell them for a quick buck" angle, which is certainly not part of the implied purpose of these widgets.
Well, the FSF are neither hip nor slick, and I guess politics is at the point where no-one really engages in straight-talking rhetoric - so those who try to "say it like it is" in the style of mainstream politicians even three decades ago are now dismissed as "kind of lunatic". I'm not sure how to solve this problem, but I don't know that being as bad as the rest of them is the solution either.
But certainly a campaign like this needs to illustrate viable alternatives. The FSF has, of course, had a big hand in the "make viable alternative" goal, but
in this particular case it does seem to be telling you what's bad rather than what's better.
The problem I see with the FSF is that it makes big bones about the legalities, but doesn't really bring home what that means
Telling folks that Nintendo get a non-exclusive license to their User Content and can modify the firmware is going to get yawns (or worse, jeers because they're sounding so shrill about it).
Instead, put it in real world terms - are you buying Timmy a 3DS? Nintendo wants to be able to sell all the information he puts into that device. They want to be able to sell the pictures of your family he takes with it to stock photo sites. They want the ability to break it if Timmy does anything they don't like, and they can decide that they don't like something at any time.
Short Version - a Nintendo 3DS lets a multinational company spy on you, use your life for profit, and charges you for the privilege.
The problem is that this is a "license" not a contract which brings up the thorny issue of enforcement.
That's not a problem for Nintendo - since all the files are being sent automagically to Nintendo, the enforcement is built in to the device - it would be up to you to contest the deal.
You would be on good, or at least interesting, legal grounds by saying that you did not agree to the terms provided. The "contract" provided by Nintendo, at least in UK terms, could be seen as abusive as it can not be terminated (unlike my employment contract)
Ob.answer: Since this is a license for the use of the software, you can simply choose not to use the software. Thus, it can be terminated.
I have no idea why Nintendo have produced such a draconian license for, what is essentially, a toy.
That's easy - as written, it's free content for them. They don't even have to curate - I'm sure some stock photo sites will pay for the entire collection.
If memory serves, didn't one of the online word processors try this trick a year or two back? (The "we get to use everything you create with our software" stunt). I can't see it surviving any serious court challenge - not because a judge would rule against it, but because the publicity would force the company to back down before the politicians get involved and really screw things up. But in the meantime, I think I'll stick to my older forms of entertainment.
Slashdot Mirror
Elsewhere in the response he gives the details
Boycotting the Israeli Universities since you get funds from Palestinians means that you accepted the Palestinians proprietary license. Neither you nor them want to help their neighbor.
I agree, and my respect for RMS' idealism is lessened.
And I would agree if it was an actual boycott. But it's not. At least, I've seen no mention that RMS will *never* go to Israel, or is prohibited from going there.
Alternatively, you are boycotting all other companies besides your employer since you don't do work for them. Shame on you.
It's supposed to be sterile, but it's not 100% sterile - a small percentage can still reproduce.
Either that, or Monsanto is seeding this stuff in ditches around Alberta.
The obvious thing would be for Israel to pay for the entire trip, including the trip to the Palestinian territories
Hell, go half-and-half. Call up whoever the coordinator is on the Palestinian side is, say "hey, I hear you got Stallman coming, and we'd like him to do some talks over here too. Can we cover half the travel costs?"
Of course, the whole thing is so obviously a political football, that it'll never happen.
I think you would be pissed off if they used the trip you payed for to get an adjoining gig on the island.
And just to be clear, that they're doing another wedding gig for that couple you can't stand that lives across the street.
It means that even Stallman can be bought.
Only if you really try to twist the meaning.
Let's move the setting - say the University of Alberta (in Edmonton) was the one paying the trip. Stallman decides, hey, I'm in Canada - I'm going to drive down the highway to U Calgary while I'm here and do a few speeches there as well.
Calgary is happy with this - they get Stallman without having to pay to get him there. U of A is a little miffed - they're paying all the bills, but they're losing out on value. They call up Stallman and say "hey, we're not really thrilled with paying for you to come and give speeches to our rival school as well - if we're paying the bill, we don't want you going there".
What do you do?
(In either case, I don't think you can peg this on Stallman - if anything, he's in a better place now because he's not trying to get extra cash on PA's dime.)
Agreed that Stallman made the right call (I'm presuming that he doesn't feel like paying for his own trip).
Sadly, the whole exchange reminds of the two kids in the playground trying to make everyone else pick a side - "you're with us or against us" crap.
Corn? Corn didn't even exist in its current form a thousand years ago, yet it was in its current form before the GMO corps were even founded. I'll bet dollars to doughnuts you eat corn or corn products on a regular basis though don't you?
This is a bit of obfuscation, though - by that logic all lifestock are GMO. Heck, you're GMO - you're the product of highly specific selective breeding yourself.
Here's the difference - I can go to the store, buy a potato, let it go to seed and plant it. And in a few months, I'll have my own potatoes. GMO crops are built specifically to prevent people from growing their own food. Heck, they're designed to prevent the *growers* from growing their own food.
In a GMO world, we'll see small farms go extinct, and then eventually gardens - there's no profit in letting people grow their own veggies, after all.
You can't just "not buy it", or "not grow it". There's a big issue here in the states with Monsanto and their GM crops being cross pollinated into smaller, local farmers fields. Monsanto can go to court, then force the farmers to pay for the right to grow those crops that now contain their gene.
The punchline is that you're starting to see the Monsanto seeds growing in the ditches on the side of the road. I'm waiting for an enterprising village or town to call Monsanto up and demand that they remove their "property" from the roads or they'll be charged with littering.
And to all the folks saying "what's the problem?", it's not that Monsanto has made a better plant. It's that by making it a sterile plant, they're trying to corner the market on farming. The way it's always been done is this - farmer plants the field. Harvests. Keeps a portion of the seed, sells the rest. Next season, he plants (or if you prefer, "reinvests") the seed he kept to plant the next crop. Monsanto seed is made so that you have to rebuy it from them, every year, forever.
I'm in Australia. Every time I fly to Canada, I cross US air space, so I'm forced to undergo a US groping, fingerprints, retina scan etc. just to enter Canada.
Once we were made to exit the plane, immigrate to the US, go round the corner (queue up) and depart again because our plane made a stopover in Hawaii on the way to Vancouver. Nobody remembers the term 'In Transit' any more?
You might have to dig a bit, but there's a trend towards avoiding the US entirely while flying, for those of us who don't see the need to be groped by the country we didn't want to visit in the first place.
My last trip to the US was about five years ago (we arrived the night before The Bathroom Chemistry Incident), and while there are some reasons I'd like to travel there again in the future, none of them warrant the expected treatment we would endure (much less what *might* happen if we're unlucky and get a TSA agent with a chip on their shoulder)
When the US wants tourism again, they'll get their ducks in a row.
doctors are legally forbidden from disputing bad reviews. HIPPA (U.S. patient privacy law) doesn't even allow doctors to acknowledge that a particular person was in fact a patient
So what you're saying is that HIPPA prevents a doctor from even attempting to enforce this contract because by doing so he will have acknowledged a person as his patient and deprived them of doctor/patient confidentiality. A better way to argue it methinks.
Close, but not quite. Assuming that the legal company did their jobs correctly (and reading TFA, that's admittedly a stretch), the contract would be a separate document giving Joe Doctor the rights to all writings from Bob Person regarding Doctor's Company ABC, with no mention that Bob is a patient.
Then Dr. Joe has the documentation to show that he holds copyright, with nothing implicating that Bob is or was a patient. (Yes, you can easily infer the connection, but it's a tougher row to hoe legallly).
Countermove - pay yourself $50K a year, code in your parent's house for two years, bail at the end and use the money to pay for school. :)
A World Heritage site should be something that exists in the world; something we interact with and can learn from.
Well, that *certainly* disqualifies wikipedia. It's not in this world (I strongly suspect it lives in a demon dimension, byeond the singularity, in hyperspace or possible outside of the luminiferous aether). And there is no way at all of learning from it, let alone interacting with it.
All sarcasm aside, this does illustrate the biggest hurdle for Wikipedia.
It's a World Heritage Site - the intention is a physical place that is important for cultural or historical reasons. Suppose they say "Yep, Mr. Wales - Wikipedia is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Here's your plaque."
Where do you put it? In the server room?
Just remember folks - the Rapture *will* happen Saturday. So any bible-thumpers who are still standing on Sunday have obviously been deemed unworthy.
Slight edit: clicked the wrong button in Google, so my bike time is only one hour (walking is three).
AND I'd like to add that it is also resistance from the population in general. Many people don't want to give up their internal combustion engines - that's what it's going to take to clean up the air, solve our oil dependency problems and pretty much do nothing about Global Warming because everything we do will be more than nullified by China, India, Indonesia, and all of the billions of people who are going to burn their coal, petroleum, and everything else they can.
We're pretty much fucked.
No, we just need a reasonable alternative to internal combustion engines. And by "reasonable", I mean "doesn't require people to completely rework their lifestyle into an inferior version".
I can't get to my place of employment without an internal combustion engine. There's no public transit to the area. It's in the middle of an industrial park filled with semis and heavy equipment, so riding a bike would be suicidal (not to mention a three-hour trip one-way, according to Google). Give me a way to do that without an IC engine, and I will happily take you up on it.
Calculator apps can be had for Androids, tablets, *and* netbooks.
And they are less capable at that specialized role.
Technically true, but getting less so all the time. And if you don't need the extra tools, there is a benefit to using your android/tablet/netbook - namely, you're using the tool you already carry with you.
Kid might forget his calculator at home, but he's less likely to forget his iPod.
While I would agree with that if you wrote it, it also seems obvious that you could download answers and programs to deal with this sort of thing.
Changing times, I suspect - my teachers generally had the same reaction, but at the time (mid-90s) you didn't have the easy search capabilities that we do today. I would expect a teacher today to ask for a bit more in that regard (and it can be as little as spending five minutes asking a few pointed questions to make sure the kid actually knows the details of the software)
I don't think it's a question of "does TI care about hobbyists", but a question of protecting their position as the default calculator for education.
I did my high school math in the mid-90s (when graphing calculators were just starting to show up), and I wasn't allowed to use a calculator in class at all until we started Trig (and one teacher made us use the lookup tables in the back of the book instead!). Once you were deep into exponents, roots, squares, and so on, then we got to use the calculator (and depending on the class, graphing calcs still weren't allowed).
When I helped my friend's kid with math a few years back, I was appalled to see that the examples in the textbook actually *assume* you have a particular model of TI calculator: the how-to was literally "enter this number; now hit the [picture] key" and so on.
Having textbooks assume that you're using a TI brand calculator means tons of extra business - I'm not surprised that they'll do anything required to ensure they don't lose that business.
I also won't be in the least surprised when hackers figure out how to either spoof the software, or just figure out how to put the guts of one model inside an "approved" model casing.
In his software class, Dan had learned that each book had a copyright monitor that reported when and where it was read, and by whom, to Central Licensing.
While it makes a good dystopian scare-story, if we're at the point where your computer is watching you to see who's looking at the screen (which is what would be required to do this), Dan's got much bigger problems on his hands - namely, what "Central Licensing" is going to do with all that video of him fapping.
Also, it suffers an Idiot Ball moment - Lissa needs to write an essay. Dan can't (or won't) let Lissa touch the computer because Evil Things Will Happen. Solution: Let Lissa dictate the essay, Dan types it. Lissa has never seen anything on the computer.
Alternate Idiot Ball moment - we're in the Scary Future, where the system reports who logged in and who looked at what (and will punish you for letting people look at the wrong files), but we've apparently lost the ability to use the chmod command.
Music departments have to pay for EVERY copy of music.
While technically true, I've yet to meet a music teacher or prof who handed out the original sheet music - he has an original for each student, but the students were getting photocopies. Why? Because it's too damned expensive to buy replacements.
That is...until someone copyrights vowels....
That's OK. We can then go back to writing in ancient Hebrew (or any other writing system that doesn't have vowels).
Of course, then you'll have to pay consonant licence fees, not to mention paying extra to speak. (Since any word you're using has certainly been used in a film, and thus subject to that copyright as well).
+1 Truth
The local university here had an uproar a few years back when it was discovered that it was cheaper to order the textbooks from the chain store than it was to buy it from the university bookstore. (And this was paying "special order" pricing from the chain store).
The student's union (which runs the bookstore) tried to add rules requiring students to use the bookstore (to preserve the income stream), but that was roundly shot down by anyone with an ounce of common sense. I believe they were going back to the publishers to get better prices, but I was gone before anything came out of that.
Not disagreeing on any given point (I was just making the argument that Nintendo has probably covered themselves legally, if not ethically).
I think the big reason I'm not in NERDRAGE over the hardware is that for small scale devices (like an iPhone or DS), the default historically *is* a manufacturer-controlled ecosystem. If you wanted to make a game for the Sega (just to pick a third-party here), you needed their permission (and to pay their licensing fees). So I don't feel particularly wronged when Apple or Nintendo says "only licensed software on our device, kthx".
I'm personally far more concerned about the "we'll send all your information and images and sell them for a quick buck" angle, which is certainly not part of the implied purpose of these widgets.
Well, the FSF are neither hip nor slick, and I guess politics is at the point where no-one really engages in straight-talking rhetoric - so those who try to "say it like it is" in the style of mainstream politicians even three decades ago are now dismissed as "kind of lunatic". I'm not sure how to solve this problem, but I don't know that being as bad as the rest of them is the solution either.
But certainly a campaign like this needs to illustrate viable alternatives. The FSF has, of course, had a big hand in the "make viable alternative" goal, but in this particular case it does seem to be telling you what's bad rather than what's better.
The problem I see with the FSF is that it makes big bones about the legalities, but doesn't really bring home what that means
Telling folks that Nintendo get a non-exclusive license to their User Content and can modify the firmware is going to get yawns (or worse, jeers because they're sounding so shrill about it).
Instead, put it in real world terms - are you buying Timmy a 3DS? Nintendo wants to be able to sell all the information he puts into that device. They want to be able to sell the pictures of your family he takes with it to stock photo sites. They want the ability to break it if Timmy does anything they don't like, and they can decide that they don't like something at any time.
Short Version - a Nintendo 3DS lets a multinational company spy on you, use your life for profit, and charges you for the privilege.
Just a bit of Devil's Advocacy here...
The problem is that this is a "license" not a contract which brings up the thorny issue of enforcement.
That's not a problem for Nintendo - since all the files are being sent automagically to Nintendo, the enforcement is built in to the device - it would be up to you to contest the deal.
You would be on good, or at least interesting, legal grounds by saying that you did not agree to the terms provided. The "contract" provided by Nintendo, at least in UK terms, could be seen as abusive as it can not be terminated (unlike my employment contract)
Ob.answer: Since this is a license for the use of the software, you can simply choose not to use the software. Thus, it can be terminated.
I have no idea why Nintendo have produced such a draconian license for, what is essentially, a toy.
That's easy - as written, it's free content for them. They don't even have to curate - I'm sure some stock photo sites will pay for the entire collection.
If memory serves, didn't one of the online word processors try this trick a year or two back? (The "we get to use everything you create with our software" stunt). I can't see it surviving any serious court challenge - not because a judge would rule against it, but because the publicity would force the company to back down before the politicians get involved and really screw things up. But in the meantime, I think I'll stick to my older forms of entertainment.