The government of the State of California does not provide all those things you mentioned
California doesn't have police or a legal system? News to me! (Those are precisely the things he mentioned.)
Also I don't see how it hurts Amazon to collect extra money from its California customers to pass along to the state. They're already set up to add taxes to their bills. I admit that Amazon does get a bit of a competitive edge from the fact that, as it now stands, CA residents can break the law by not paying taxes on items they buy from Amazon, but they seem to do ok in states where they already collect taxes.
And what's this crap about "big box" retailers? Is there a bigger "big box" retailer than Amazon that I'm unaware of? Frankly, I'd like to see them have some competition from local stores that employ local people.
Why it's not Ok to show sexual images (people loving each other) but it's alright to show people killing each other to kids.
That's a separate matter. This law was struck down because it singled out video games, not because it tried to ban showing violence to kids. A similar law which applied equally to all media might well have passed muster. But of course, that would be a threat to Hollywood, which happens to be located in California, so....
I would actually have liked to see certain computer games restricted to adult sale only.
There are, but the rules apply to media in general, not specifically to video games. You can't sell hard-core sexual or torture porn to kids even if you try to disguise it as a video game. The problem with the Cal law was that it singled out video games for particular restrictions, and the SCOTUS ruled that the medium shouldn't matter. As it shouldn't.
The US, it's true, uses voluntary, industry-created ratings for both movies and video games, but there's no evidence that this system isn't working. (If anything, it's working too well, as there's no legal way to appeal a rating.) The only possible loophole this opens is that a game seller (or theater owner*) taken to court might try to argue that the rating for a specific work was too high, and the specific work should have been made available to children, and that's going to be tough to prove in most cases. I don't know of a single instance where this was tried.
The real problem is that some crazies still think video games are for kids, and logically infer that all mature video games must therefore be an attempt to sell age-inappropriate material to kids. No rating system will satisfy these loonies. If you've got a suggestion for something that will, I'm sure we'd be happy to hear it.
That's pretty impressive, but Deneb is estimated to be two to three times as far away as Betelgeuse, and the margin of error in that estimate is a smaller percentage of the total distance (just over 1/3 rather than just under 1/2). Still a good example, though. Thanks!
You'd think that kind of information would be in TFS so we know WTF they're talking about. OMGWTFBBQ.
I'd say something about how you must be new here, but I think that a six-digit ID indicates otherwise (even if it's hardly something to brag about).
Merely leaving out critical information is pretty good for a slashdot summary. I've given up complaining unless the summary actively lies or misleads. (This still leaves me plenty of opportunities to complain!)
I'm just glad the Long Now Foundation is getting some publicity! Too many people in the industry have a hard time thinking past the next couple of years. 10k years may seem like a lot when you're dealing with human history, but in other fields (astronomy, geology, archeology), it's an eyeblink. I'm glad that a time_t on 64-bit Linux handles such date ranges, but a lot of UIs still assume that years have four digits.
Plus or minus 150 years! I know you were joking, but this seems like an opportune moment to point out that Betelgeuse's size and associated blobbiness has made it extremely hard to get an accurate parallax. Note that the margin of error (300 ly) is nearly half the estimated distance! I don't believe that there's another star anywhere near as close which has as much uncertainty about its distance. Also note that it's only in the last couple of decades that we've even been able to pin it down this closely! Estimates during most of the 20c. ranged from 120 ly to 1300! The Gaia mission in 2013 should finally resolve most of the remaining uncertainty.
I was with you till your penultimate sentence. The prhase doesn't modify astronomers. English tolerates a certain amount of danglingness, though it severely lowers the register. You wouldn't use that ordering in formal writing, and it's awkward even in casual, but its meaning is clear from context. Of course, relying on context to disambiguate your modifiers is a serious disservice to your readers, and most grade school teachers (who believe in a far more rigid and Platonic version of English than the one that actually exists) would call it wrong, but, in fact, it's merely lame.
I still prefer this sort of dangling modifier to the awkwardness that results from using ambiguous verbs in sentences like "BP caps ruptured well, but more hurdles remain" or "May axes labour police beat pledge", even though Miss Thistlebottom would be hard-pressed to find a rules-based objection to these.
That said, I agree with everything else you said. The person who tried to claim that "astronomers" was the indirect object must have been on drugs. But faced with the imminent loss of a prominent and beautiful star from our sky, I find it hard to get too worked up about language nits. I spent the winter and spring checking Betelgeuse every night too see if it was still there, till it disappeared behind the sun. I'm excited at the prospect (however remote) of seeing a supernova that's visible with the naked eye, but saddened that it has to be this star which offers the prospect.
According to one poster on Groklaw, no dependent claims remain. The surviving claims are 8, 9, 17, and 18, which depend on 7, 8, 15, and 16 respectively. I haven't verified this.
The term was introduced before it became a standard. To be specific, Sprint started advertising 4G systems in late 2008, and other vendors soon followed, but the standard itself wasn't settled till 2009/2010. Yes, everyone knew approximately what the standard would be (and the vendors knew their systems wouldn't meet the standard once it was finalized), but that doesn't change the fact that 4G was a marketing term before it was a standard.
You seem to be suggesting that what eventually became the standard was changed because of the vendors' pre-emptive actions. That's quite possibly true, although I missed it, but the standard didn't actually exist at that time, and a standard that isn't a standard...isn't a standard. Even if it's a widely-agreed-upon draft.
Do they even have a definition for 4G yet? Er, one that anyone implements, that is? Certainly the term was introduced before it had any meaning, so if the government tries to regulate the term, I can only assume that we'd see the introduction of newer, vaguer-but-cooler-sounding terms the next day. 5G would be the obvious choice. What is 5G? A lot like 4G, but without those pesky speed guarantees, and with more shiny, happy advertisements attached. Look, shiny!
Technically, stating that other people are comparing something to the Nazis is not the same as comparing something to Nazis. In fact, it sounded more like he was invoking Godwin's law on the Bitcoin defenders* rather than taking an action that would justify calling it on him.
* I would have preferred to see some evidence to back up his claim; without that, it seems like a bit of an ad hominem. Unfortunately, there's enough crazies on both sides of the debate that Godwin's law is likely to come up somehow even sooner than usual.
It didn't work basically because they tried to argue that the copyright for the compilation overrode the license for the components, but the GPL doesn't allow sublicensing in any form, so that doesn't work. However, they can still claim a copyright over the compilation, as long as they don't change the licensing for the GPL'd parts. So it wasn't that their argument was wrong, it was simply that it did nothing to further their goals.
Compilation copyrights tend to be very weak in any case.
So their main goal is not to make money but to produce innovations and advancements?
IN THE BROWSER MARKET, yes! Their shareholders will be perfectly satisfied that they're encouraging people to use the world wide web more, where Google has a near monopoly on advertising, and makes money hand-over-fist. As far as Google is concerned, it doesn't matter whether you use Chrome or Firefox or even IE, as long as you continue to browse the web where all their advertisements live. So their main goal with Chrome is exactly what RoFLKOPTr stated.
Promoting their brand is probably a secondary goal, but it's secondary enough that they're still going to be perfectly happy to help Firefox (or Safari or Opera or even IE) improve as well. Anything to get eyes on ads.
IANAL either, but I think you basically got it right. The one detail you might have overlooked, which may be relevant, is that the GPL explicitly forbids sublicensing! So they can't apply a separate license (even the null license) to the compilation; only to its individual parts. This is why there is no overall license for, e.g., Red Hat or Debian. Red Hat has a license for its trademarks, but if you strip those (as with CentOS), everything else is freely distributable and modifiable.
Re:In addition, the compilation is under the GPL
on
Court Case To Test GNU GPL
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· Score: 4, Informative
In addition, a compilation is a derived work
Not legally, no. To create a compilation, you do need rights to publish each part, but you do not need permission to modify or prepare derivative works. And even if that weren't the case, the GPL explicitly has an exception.
From v3: "Inclusion of a covered work in an aggregate does not cause this License to apply to the other parts of the aggregate."
From v2: "In addition, mere aggregation of another work not based on the Program with the Program (or with a work based on the Program) on a volume of a storage or distribution medium does not bring the other work under the scope of this License."
This is not a test of the GPL! It's simply a test of copyright law, and, in particular, the boundaries of the definition of "derivative work".
If I were an author, and gave a publisher permission to publish a story I wrote, unmodified, they would be free to publish it in a collection with other stories by other authors, but not free to modify huge chunks of it. But, what if they got another author to write stuff that was inserted between key paragraphs of my story? My story is unmodified, in the sense that every word appears unchanged and in the correct order, but the result is still clearly not my story. So, the issue is: where is the boundary between compilation and derivative? The question here is not "are they violating the GPL?", but "are they violating copyright law?"
Ah, urban etymology at its finest! Having just checked several references, I'm reasonably confident in stating that you have this exactly backwards. It originally meant "fool or crazy" (late 19th c.) and then was adopted by circuses (early 20th c.), where it entered the popular consciousness.
If "people" were stupid our species would have been wiped out long ago.
The same way oysters, potatoes, slime molds and lichen have all been wiped out? I mean it's clear that intelligence is the only way for a species to survive. That's why the cockroaches went extinct 200 million years ago.
Honestly, I think the jury's still out on whether intelligence is a survival trait or not, in the long run.:)
The Internet Archive is funded in part by the Smithsonian. It is, essentially, part of the National Library system. More than that, though, it's international in scope. Believe it or not (and I know that this is hard for some people to grasp), the world does not begin and end at the borders to the US. The IA's main backup is (appropriately enough) located in Alexandria, Egypt.
Patents legally make you not a "nothing" company. The legal rules surrounding patents are horrible, but that's why your analogy is a poor one. You're almost right that anyone can sue anyone for just about anything (the notable exception is "vexatious litigants"), but cases can be, and frequently are, thrown out upon arrival. But if you have a patent to wield, the court, unfortunately, is almost forced to treat your claims with some respect. Microsoft (of all people) tried to get this changed in the direction of common sense in the recent i4i vs. MS case, but failed.
"Everyone"? What about the people who don't use FB or iPhone? Frankly, while I trust Apple 1k x more than FB, neither company is exactly known for being an advocate of either privacy or freedom. Frankly, any iOS users who would be surprised to end up with less privacy and less freedom were probably not all that smart to begin with (though they would have my sympathy, especially if FB turns this into a serious mess sooner than might otherwise be expected).
It's not merely one more version control system. It made branching, merging and atomic commits so acessible that it changed the way people code.
Are you sure? I never used Bitkeeper, but I know that Git was heavily inspired by it. Also, while I admit that Git is an incomparable improvement over SVN, I'm not convinced its as much of an improvement over other DVCSes like Arch, Bzr or Mercurial. Mercurial in particular is a very close match in features and flexibility (though I admit to a mild preference for Git myself), and is arguably more accessible (in the sense of easy to learn and get up-to-speed with) than Git.
Not just RMS (and the GNU project), but to some extent, the BSD, X11, TeX and Perl projects as well, as long as we're talking historically. As for implementation, Linus is a clean coder and good at organizing people, and I admire him for both attributes, but the overall implementation of the Linux kernel has a lot of warts, IMO. Regressions are far too common. If it weren't for the much broader hardware support in Linux, I would probably prefer to run a GNU/BSD system. (I may still if Debian GNU/kFreeBSD progresses well.)
I think it's quite possible that if not for the legal battles back when Linux was still little more than an interesting toy, BSD would be the dominant free OS today.
I don't use Perl much any more, but in its day, it was amazingly innovative and was used in a boggling variety of places. It was often described as "the duct tape that holds the Internet together" for good reason.
If we take a loose definition of "open" (as distinct from Free/Libre), I might have to throw James Gosling (xemacs, Java, and much more) on the list as well.
Slashdot Mirror
The government of the State of California does not provide all those things you mentioned
California doesn't have police or a legal system? News to me! (Those are precisely the things he mentioned.)
Also I don't see how it hurts Amazon to collect extra money from its California customers to pass along to the state. They're already set up to add taxes to their bills. I admit that Amazon does get a bit of a competitive edge from the fact that, as it now stands, CA residents can break the law by not paying taxes on items they buy from Amazon, but they seem to do ok in states where they already collect taxes.
And what's this crap about "big box" retailers? Is there a bigger "big box" retailer than Amazon that I'm unaware of? Frankly, I'd like to see them have some competition from local stores that employ local people.
Why it's not Ok to show sexual images (people loving each other) but it's alright to show people killing each other to kids.
That's a separate matter. This law was struck down because it singled out video games, not because it tried to ban showing violence to kids. A similar law which applied equally to all media might well have passed muster. But of course, that would be a threat to Hollywood, which happens to be located in California, so....
I would actually have liked to see certain computer games restricted to adult sale only.
There are, but the rules apply to media in general, not specifically to video games. You can't sell hard-core sexual or torture porn to kids even if you try to disguise it as a video game. The problem with the Cal law was that it singled out video games for particular restrictions, and the SCOTUS ruled that the medium shouldn't matter. As it shouldn't.
The US, it's true, uses voluntary, industry-created ratings for both movies and video games, but there's no evidence that this system isn't working. (If anything, it's working too well, as there's no legal way to appeal a rating.) The only possible loophole this opens is that a game seller (or theater owner*) taken to court might try to argue that the rating for a specific work was too high, and the specific work should have been made available to children, and that's going to be tough to prove in most cases. I don't know of a single instance where this was tried.
The real problem is that some crazies still think video games are for kids, and logically infer that all mature video games must therefore be an attempt to sell age-inappropriate material to kids. No rating system will satisfy these loonies. If you've got a suggestion for something that will, I'm sure we'd be happy to hear it.
* The US version of a theatre owner. :)
That's pretty impressive, but Deneb is estimated to be two to three times as far away as Betelgeuse, and the margin of error in that estimate is a smaller percentage of the total distance (just over 1/3 rather than just under 1/2). Still a good example, though. Thanks!
You'd think that kind of information would be in TFS so we know WTF they're talking about. OMGWTFBBQ.
I'd say something about how you must be new here, but I think that a six-digit ID indicates otherwise (even if it's hardly something to brag about).
Merely leaving out critical information is pretty good for a slashdot summary. I've given up complaining unless the summary actively lies or misleads. (This still leaves me plenty of opportunities to complain!)
I'm just glad the Long Now Foundation is getting some publicity! Too many people in the industry have a hard time thinking past the next couple of years. 10k years may seem like a lot when you're dealing with human history, but in other fields (astronomy, geology, archeology), it's an eyeblink. I'm glad that a time_t on 64-bit Linux handles such date ranges, but a lot of UIs still assume that years have four digits.
This happened 640 years ago.
Plus or minus 150 years! I know you were joking, but this seems like an opportune moment to point out that Betelgeuse's size and associated blobbiness has made it extremely hard to get an accurate parallax. Note that the margin of error (300 ly) is nearly half the estimated distance! I don't believe that there's another star anywhere near as close which has as much uncertainty about its distance. Also note that it's only in the last couple of decades that we've even been able to pin it down this closely! Estimates during most of the 20c. ranged from 120 ly to 1300! The Gaia mission in 2013 should finally resolve most of the remaining uncertainty.
I was with you till your penultimate sentence. The prhase doesn't modify astronomers. English tolerates a certain amount of danglingness, though it severely lowers the register. You wouldn't use that ordering in formal writing, and it's awkward even in casual, but its meaning is clear from context. Of course, relying on context to disambiguate your modifiers is a serious disservice to your readers, and most grade school teachers (who believe in a far more rigid and Platonic version of English than the one that actually exists) would call it wrong, but, in fact, it's merely lame.
I still prefer this sort of dangling modifier to the awkwardness that results from using ambiguous verbs in sentences like "BP caps ruptured well, but more hurdles remain" or "May axes labour police beat pledge", even though Miss Thistlebottom would be hard-pressed to find a rules-based objection to these.
That said, I agree with everything else you said. The person who tried to claim that "astronomers" was the indirect object must have been on drugs. But faced with the imminent loss of a prominent and beautiful star from our sky, I find it hard to get too worked up about language nits. I spent the winter and spring checking Betelgeuse every night too see if it was still there, till it disappeared behind the sun. I'm excited at the prospect (however remote) of seeing a supernova that's visible with the naked eye, but saddened that it has to be this star which offers the prospect.
According to one poster on Groklaw, no dependent claims remain. The surviving claims are 8, 9, 17, and 18, which depend on 7, 8, 15, and 16 respectively. I haven't verified this.
The term was introduced before it became a standard. To be specific, Sprint started advertising 4G systems in late 2008, and other vendors soon followed, but the standard itself wasn't settled till 2009/2010. Yes, everyone knew approximately what the standard would be (and the vendors knew their systems wouldn't meet the standard once it was finalized), but that doesn't change the fact that 4G was a marketing term before it was a standard.
You seem to be suggesting that what eventually became the standard was changed because of the vendors' pre-emptive actions. That's quite possibly true, although I missed it, but the standard didn't actually exist at that time, and a standard that isn't a standard...isn't a standard. Even if it's a widely-agreed-upon draft.
Do they even have a definition for 4G yet? Er, one that anyone implements, that is? Certainly the term was introduced before it had any meaning, so if the government tries to regulate the term, I can only assume that we'd see the introduction of newer, vaguer-but-cooler-sounding terms the next day. 5G would be the obvious choice. What is 5G? A lot like 4G, but without those pesky speed guarantees, and with more shiny, happy advertisements attached. Look, shiny!
Technically, stating that other people are comparing something to the Nazis is not the same as comparing something to Nazis. In fact, it sounded more like he was invoking Godwin's law on the Bitcoin defenders* rather than taking an action that would justify calling it on him.
* I would have preferred to see some evidence to back up his claim; without that, it seems like a bit of an ad hominem. Unfortunately, there's enough crazies on both sides of the debate that Godwin's law is likely to come up somehow even sooner than usual.
It didn't work basically because they tried to argue that the copyright for the compilation overrode the license for the components, but the GPL doesn't allow sublicensing in any form, so that doesn't work. However, they can still claim a copyright over the compilation, as long as they don't change the licensing for the GPL'd parts. So it wasn't that their argument was wrong, it was simply that it did nothing to further their goals.
Compilation copyrights tend to be very weak in any case.
So their main goal is not to make money but to produce innovations and advancements?
IN THE BROWSER MARKET, yes! Their shareholders will be perfectly satisfied that they're encouraging people to use the world wide web more, where Google has a near monopoly on advertising, and makes money hand-over-fist. As far as Google is concerned, it doesn't matter whether you use Chrome or Firefox or even IE, as long as you continue to browse the web where all their advertisements live. So their main goal with Chrome is exactly what RoFLKOPTr stated.
Promoting their brand is probably a secondary goal, but it's secondary enough that they're still going to be perfectly happy to help Firefox (or Safari or Opera or even IE) improve as well. Anything to get eyes on ads.
Yup, not a GPL test at all. Simply a copyright case.
IANAL either, but I think you basically got it right. The one detail you might have overlooked, which may be relevant, is that the GPL explicitly forbids sublicensing! So they can't apply a separate license (even the null license) to the compilation; only to its individual parts. This is why there is no overall license for, e.g., Red Hat or Debian. Red Hat has a license for its trademarks, but if you strip those (as with CentOS), everything else is freely distributable and modifiable.
In addition, a compilation is a derived work
Not legally, no. To create a compilation, you do need rights to publish each part, but you do not need permission to modify or prepare derivative works. And even if that weren't the case, the GPL explicitly has an exception.
From v3: "Inclusion of a covered work in an aggregate does not cause this License to apply to the other parts of the aggregate."
From v2: "In addition, mere aggregation of another work not based on the Program with the Program (or with a work based on the Program) on a volume of a storage or distribution medium does not bring the other work under the scope of this License."
This is not a test of the GPL! It's simply a test of copyright law, and, in particular, the boundaries of the definition of "derivative work".
If I were an author, and gave a publisher permission to publish a story I wrote, unmodified, they would be free to publish it in a collection with other stories by other authors, but not free to modify huge chunks of it. But, what if they got another author to write stuff that was inserted between key paragraphs of my story? My story is unmodified, in the sense that every word appears unchanged and in the correct order, but the result is still clearly not my story. So, the issue is: where is the boundary between compilation and derivative? The question here is not "are they violating the GPL?", but "are they violating copyright law?"
Ah, urban etymology at its finest! Having just checked several references, I'm reasonably confident in stating that you have this exactly backwards. It originally meant "fool or crazy" (late 19th c.) and then was adopted by circuses (early 20th c.), where it entered the popular consciousness.
Was! It was a diss. And it can still be used that way, but if it were merely a diss, Best Buy wouldn't be trying to stake a claim to it!
If "people" were stupid our species would have been wiped out long ago.
The same way oysters, potatoes, slime molds and lichen have all been wiped out? I mean it's clear that intelligence is the only way for a species to survive. That's why the cockroaches went extinct 200 million years ago.
Honestly, I think the jury's still out on whether intelligence is a survival trait or not, in the long run. :)
The Internet Archive is funded in part by the Smithsonian. It is, essentially, part of the National Library system. More than that, though, it's international in scope. Believe it or not (and I know that this is hard for some people to grasp), the world does not begin and end at the borders to the US. The IA's main backup is (appropriately enough) located in Alexandria, Egypt.
Patents legally make you not a "nothing" company. The legal rules surrounding patents are horrible, but that's why your analogy is a poor one. You're almost right that anyone can sue anyone for just about anything (the notable exception is "vexatious litigants"), but cases can be, and frequently are, thrown out upon arrival. But if you have a patent to wield, the court, unfortunately, is almost forced to treat your claims with some respect. Microsoft (of all people) tried to get this changed in the direction of common sense in the recent i4i vs. MS case, but failed.
In the end, everyone will lose.
"Everyone"? What about the people who don't use FB or iPhone? Frankly, while I trust Apple 1k x more than FB, neither company is exactly known for being an advocate of either privacy or freedom. Frankly, any iOS users who would be surprised to end up with less privacy and less freedom were probably not all that smart to begin with (though they would have my sympathy, especially if FB turns this into a serious mess sooner than might otherwise be expected).
It's not merely one more version control system. It made branching, merging and atomic commits so acessible that it changed the way people code.
Are you sure? I never used Bitkeeper, but I know that Git was heavily inspired by it. Also, while I admit that Git is an incomparable improvement over SVN, I'm not convinced its as much of an improvement over other DVCSes like Arch, Bzr or Mercurial. Mercurial in particular is a very close match in features and flexibility (though I admit to a mild preference for Git myself), and is arguably more accessible (in the sense of easy to learn and get up-to-speed with) than Git.
Not just RMS (and the GNU project), but to some extent, the BSD, X11, TeX and Perl projects as well, as long as we're talking historically. As for implementation, Linus is a clean coder and good at organizing people, and I admire him for both attributes, but the overall implementation of the Linux kernel has a lot of warts, IMO. Regressions are far too common. If it weren't for the much broader hardware support in Linux, I would probably prefer to run a GNU/BSD system. (I may still if Debian GNU/kFreeBSD progresses well.)
I think it's quite possible that if not for the legal battles back when Linux was still little more than an interesting toy, BSD would be the dominant free OS today.
I don't use Perl much any more, but in its day, it was amazingly innovative and was used in a boggling variety of places. It was often described as "the duct tape that holds the Internet together" for good reason.
If we take a loose definition of "open" (as distinct from Free/Libre), I might have to throw James Gosling (xemacs, Java, and much more) on the list as well.