It is the opinion of the aforementioned FSF acquainted individual that these citations are insufficient to conclude that the FSF sympathizes with the warez people.
He has asked me to withdraw my original statement. I will not do that, however I agree with his contention that fellow Slashdotters should form their own conclusions based on the facts presented. I trust they will.
Like I said, they walk a fine line, stopping short of actually advocating
warez. Their intent seems pretty clear to me though.
Here's another one grepped from:
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-free.html
"And above all society needs to encourage the spirit of voluntary
cooperation in its citizens. When software owners tell us that helping our
neighbors in a natural way is ``piracy'', they pollute our society's civic
spirit"
And the obvious rebuttal-rebuttal is that the FSF is attempting to subvert the capitalist system. Upon explanation of the GPL to certain individuals on the right, their moral mandate to violate it is just as strong as the FSF's moral mandate to promote it!
For the time being, wheneve I mention GPL to certain Republicans I know, their reaction is mostly one of incomprehension (like most people, you first have to explain what "source code" is, and by the time you finish with that, the conversation has turned elsewhere). Because it is shrounded in the mystique of technology, the GPL has evaded much scrutiny from mainstream politicians. When the veil is lifted, we find nothing more than the same old left vs. right debates.
Remember when warez was cool? The FSF has always been an apologist for warezing. They come oh so close to advocating piracy on their website, without actually crossing over that fine line of advocating breaking the law.
When IP is a burden to the left, they are willing to circumvent it via warez. When anti-IP is a burden to the right, they ware willing to circumvent it via GPL violation.
These types of incidents may or may not accelerate if the economy heads into a recession. On one hand, socialism is one of the answers people grope for when the economy heads south. Socialism tends to level the playing field. Thus, the more people below the economic mean, the greater mass appeal of socialism. In a bad economy, you might imagine that the GPL would fare better.
On the other hand, software is not rice or heating oil. The only people that really need software are people in the IT industry. Socialism's tendency to regress all players to the mean is actually bad news for these guys, because they were on top before. They were willing to bear the cost of socialism when they were flying high, but when times are tight they are going to look for ways to cut costs, and releasing code is a cost.
IANAEconomist, but this is all very interesting. I guess I'm somewhat of an "armchair economist". Another way to view the GPL is as a price ceiling of zero (the bit about selling free software trumpted by Free Software adovocates is utter bollix to an economist). Now, what would happen if the government set a price ceiling of zero on wheat? You can bet your sweet bippy there would be plenty of guys with trucks on the corner going psst--, hey buddy, wanna buy some? Same thing goes here. If the legitimate channel won't put out, the black market will.
Re:1000 trillion is the equivalent of one quadrill
on
The Quest For Fusion
·
· Score: 2
No matter how you slice it, 1000 trillion is 1.0e15. There! no more need to argue about how to say it. Isn't scientific notation great?
...Like an MIS SWAT team, the kids set up machines, got e-mail working so they could stay in touch with their pals back home, and hacked at ways to transmit Khmer...
But when these kids can't figure something out, there is a fetus in a tank full of amniotic fluid. He's the real wiz.
Desert Island Shipbuilder's OS v1.02. Includes special software to calculate planking requirements, determine hull stresses, and provide instruction for fabrication of naval hardware from primitive components such as vines, palm fronds, and coconuts.
This is the/. version of the guy who was asked "what book would you like to have on the island" and the response was "Smith's practical guide to shipbuilding" or something like that.
1. Power tends to corrupt, and information power is no exception
So, should we eliminate power, or should we eliminate corruption. Which is more practical? Which is more beneficial?
2. Mass media are inherently corrupting
So, you published a BOOK and posted this on the INTERNET. Irony anyone?
3. Strategies against intellectual property include civil disobedience
Yeah!!! You gotta fight for your right to party. Give me MP3s or give me death?
4. Surveillance and 5. beurocracy
OK, I'll give you that. Nobody likes beurocracy or invasion of privacy. OTOH, what are you going to do with middle managers after they are let go? Put them on welfare? But wait... welfare is a... well, you know.
6. Defamation law and free speech
Certainly he can't be defending those who *lie* about other people. How can you defend a lie? The issue of defamation where the facts are murky, OTOH, is also likely to be murky. This one is a judgement call. Throwing all defamation laws out doesn't seem like a well balanced solution.
7. The work of professional researchers is strongly influenced by funding, disciplines, hierarchy and competition
No argument here.
8. Simple ideas have a bad reputation. People often think simple ideas are simplistic: wrong, incomplete, inaccurate, misleading. I agree that many simple ideas are no good, but many are quite useful...
So, some simple ideas are good and some aren't. What does this tell us? Not a whole lot. A brick is a simple idea. So is a lump of s%@#. A computer is a complicated idea. So is an H-bomb. So, by defending simple ideas, what is he defending here? It would appear to be nothing.
9. It's better to think for oneself and to assess ideas on their own merits than to worry about whether they came from a famous intellectual or an unknown.
Good in theory, but in practice who has time to sift through all the ideas? Fame exists in part because it's a convenient filter. Or, fame wouldn't exist if it didn't have some value.
10. Information seems like the ideal basis for a cooperative society. It can be made available to everyone at low cost, and a person can give away information and still retain use of it.
If you only made the information for your own consumption, then this is a valid statement. It's a pity to think that future information output might slide down to the level of production motivated only by personal need. After all, how many people have a personal need for a movie, play, or computer program and are able to devote sufficient resources just to satisfy their personal need?
Repeat ad infinitum: Educate the consumers, educate the consumers...
Let people know the following: 1. These new hard drives may break their old software and data. 2. The new drives will not be defragable and will degrade in performance over time. 3. The new drives will be inherently more prone to become corrupted and/or require expensive repairs. 4. They are being presumed dihonest and are being asked to pay the freight for piracy in a way that will inconvenience them far more than a hard drive tax would.
Consumers will say "NO" in the market place and the tech will be DOA. Remember too, a "consumer" is not just joe sixpack shopping at Best Buy. Consumers are: RAID solution providers, OEMs, IT departments who might have to buy all new equipment and software.
If enough large corporate consumers sign some sort of statement to the effect that they won't tolerate this, they can kill it.
Even as a long time defender of intellectual property rights, I am firmly opposed to this technology. It places an undue burden on the innocent in order to punish the guilty (already a disturbing trend in other aspects of society). It will create a lot of uneccessary problems for a lot of people. Efforts can be (and are) better spent going after people in Asia who illegally mass produce copyrighted materials. Don't make my life inconvenient just because of what some overseas criminals and teenagers are doing.
It's not just Linux either. It's the whole 'net. A few years ago, I'd type stuff into Yahoo! (the only decent search engine back then) and each search seemed like a fantastic journey into some unknown land. Sometimes the stuff on the other end truly was fantastic.
Now it seems like I've seen everything on the 'net, even though I know that's not possible. That Springsteen song keeps coming into my head, except this time it's 57 million channels and nothing on.
OK, I'll do the math. $400,000 in 15 years? That's $26,667 a year on averge. Whoop-de-do. Not only that but he gets to room with Bubba and have a permanent mark on his... um.. record.
You should be able to find out at: http://www.nic.cx/whois.cfm but there appears to be a problem on their backend right now, because when I hit query it says "connect error". Hmmm... a problem on the backend when I query. Somehow, that seems appropriate.
Regardless of who he is, he's missing out on a lot of ad revenue. If you're gonna be a pornographer, you might as well make money.
If I create a great codec and sell it, I make money but Slashdot wants to condemn me to Hell. If I create a great codec and give it away I'm dirt poor but Slashdot wants to send me to Heaven.
I wonder what St. Peter thinks of all this.
Me personally, I seem to recall that at the beginning of all this, there was a certain other famous guy who's name also began with an S, and wanted to send people to Hell.
"Come", he said "eat of the CVS tree, and in the day that you eat therof, you will become an Open Source God". So the coders did eat, and their eyes were opened, and they received stock options...
They have some nice graphs of user statistics. What I would like to see is average time per work unit vs. time. This would provide empirical evidence of Moore's "law".
The number of units can be determined by multiplying this figure by the average time per unit.
Yes, a "number of units" milestone is more meaningful in terms of data processed. The number of years figure is a better measure of participation, which is also an important statistic.
On some level I agree. I'm not sure how things are in Ghana, but if people are starving and dying of cureable diseases at a high rate, that should certainly have a high priority.
OTOH, holding the high end down generally *doesn't* pull the low end up. Many people made arguments similar to yours during the Apollo Moon missions. I dare say that if it weren't for the tremendous ammount of "spinoff" research associated with the space race, we might not be surfing Slashdot and having this discussion today and the economy might be a lot worse.
Also, there is no need for 3rd world development to parallel the development of the west by evolving through the industrial revolution to the technical. This has been demonstrated by the quick adoption of wireless technology in some countries--bypassing the copper stage of the communications industry.
The problem with that is that the IP might be dynamicly assigned from an ISP. OTOH, reporting the IP and the time to the ISP is a good idea, so that they can check logs and LART 'em.
If the honeypot is intentionally more vulnerable than the real server, then you are just demonstrating known exploits.
If the honeypot is *more* secure than the real server, why did you waste time securing the honeypot that could have been spent securing the real server?
Finally, if the honeypot is equal in security to the real server, you are cutting the odds of a real server being hacked to:
reals/(honeypots+reals)
In most large organizations honeypots will be a very small number compared to reals. In small organizations you could make a difference, but how many small orgs can afford an extra server or two?
The idea that you can learn about the attacker while watching him closely is intriguing, but while you're watching the honeypot, who's watching the reals?
My gut tells me that money would be better spent helping NetBSD and others with code audits. Of course IANASecurity Expert, so what do I know...
You guys had to keep asking... sooner or later someone was bound to "imagine a Beowulf cluster of those". Now you know why you get moderated down all the time.
Anyhow, I think we should lift sanctions on Iraq. We've been sanctioning *way* too long. Sadam is not the worry. It's some bitter corporal in the Iraqi army who's the worry. Anybody remember the treaty of Versailles? Those who fail to learn from history...
Actually, if we had taken him all the way out to begin with, this might not be a problem.
High school students shouldn't have C++ imposed upon them
Yeah. While we're at it, let's not impose Latin, French, difficult sheet music, The President's physical fitness test, or calculus on them either. God forbid anybody should be challenged by an AP exam.
That makes sense. Let's assume that both media have the same surface information density (minutes per square inch would be appropriate units).
Then the duration is proportional to the surface area of the medium. The cyliders, IIRC, were about 6 inches long and 2 inches in diameter: 6*(pi) in^2.
An LP is what... 6 inch radius roughly? That's 2*6*6*(pi) in^2. (a factor of 2 because the LP has 2 sides). Even if only half of it is useable, it's still 6 times better than the cylinder.
Now, combine this with the fact that each LP comes in a package about an 8th of an inch thick. In a 12" by 12" by 6" box you can fit 48 LPs. In the same box you can fit 36 cylinders as described above.
In terms of minutes per unite volume, LPs beat cylinders hands down.
Slashdot Mirror
It is the opinion of the aforementioned FSF acquainted individual that these citations are insufficient to conclude that the FSF sympathizes with the warez people.
He has asked me to withdraw my original statement. I will not do that, however I agree with his contention that fellow Slashdotters should form their own conclusions based on the facts presented. I trust they will.
At the request (via e-mail) of an upset (but very cordial) FSF volunteer, here are some citations where FSF apologizes for warez:
m l# Piracy
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.ht
The gnu.org website links to:
http://www.maui.net/~zen_gtr/zgzinepg4.html
Like I said, they walk a fine line, stopping short of actually advocating
warez. Their intent seems pretty clear to me though.
Here's another one grepped from:
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-free.html
"And above all society needs to encourage the spirit of voluntary
cooperation in its citizens. When software owners tell us that helping our
neighbors in a natural way is ``piracy'', they pollute our society's civic
spirit"
--Steve
And the obvious rebuttal-rebuttal is that the FSF is attempting to subvert the capitalist system. Upon explanation of the GPL to certain individuals on the right, their moral mandate to violate it is just as strong as the FSF's moral mandate to promote it!
For the time being, wheneve I mention GPL to certain Republicans I know, their reaction is mostly one of incomprehension (like most people, you first have to explain what "source code" is, and by the time you finish with that, the conversation has turned elsewhere). Because it is shrounded in the mystique of technology, the GPL has evaded much scrutiny from mainstream politicians. When the veil is lifted, we find nothing more than the same old left vs. right debates.
Remember when warez was cool? The FSF has always been an apologist for warezing. They come oh so close to advocating piracy on their website, without actually crossing over that fine line of advocating breaking the law.
When IP is a burden to the left, they are willing to circumvent it via warez. When anti-IP is a burden to the right, they ware willing to circumvent it via GPL violation.
These types of incidents may or may not accelerate if the economy heads into a recession. On one hand, socialism is one of the answers people grope for when the economy heads south. Socialism tends to level the playing field. Thus, the more people below the economic mean, the greater mass appeal of socialism. In a bad economy, you might imagine that the GPL would fare better.
On the other hand, software is not rice or heating oil. The only people that really need software are people in the IT industry. Socialism's tendency to regress all players to the mean is actually bad news for these guys, because they were on top before. They were willing to bear the cost of socialism when they were flying high, but when times are tight they are going to look for ways to cut costs, and releasing code is a cost.
IANAEconomist, but this is all very interesting. I guess I'm somewhat of an "armchair economist". Another way to view the GPL is as a price ceiling of zero (the bit about selling free software trumpted by Free Software adovocates is utter bollix to an economist). Now, what would happen if the government set a price ceiling of zero on wheat? You can bet your sweet bippy there would be plenty of guys with trucks on the corner going psst--, hey buddy, wanna buy some? Same thing goes here. If the legitimate channel won't put out, the black market will.
No matter how you slice it, 1000 trillion is 1.0e15. There! no more need to argue about how to say it. Isn't scientific notation great?
But when these kids can't figure something out, there is a fetus in a tank full of amniotic fluid. He's the real wiz.
there may be other ways to thank developers that we haven't thought of
Bill Gates thought of many thousands of really great ways to thank his developers year after year.
Nevermind easter eggs and trinkets. Give me a cut of the gross.
If you rot -1 HAL, you get IBM.
Desert Island Shipbuilder's OS v1.02. Includes special software to calculate planking requirements, determine hull stresses, and provide instruction for fabrication of naval hardware from primitive components such as vines, palm fronds, and coconuts.
This is the /. version of the guy who was asked "what book would you like to have on the island" and the response was "Smith's practical guide to shipbuilding" or something like that.
1. Power tends to corrupt, and information power is no exception
So, should we eliminate power, or should we eliminate corruption. Which is more practical? Which is more beneficial?
2. Mass media are inherently corrupting
So, you published a BOOK and posted this on the INTERNET. Irony anyone?
3. Strategies against intellectual property include civil disobedience
Yeah!!! You gotta fight for your right to party. Give me MP3s or give me death?
4. Surveillance and 5. beurocracy
OK, I'll give you that. Nobody likes beurocracy or invasion of privacy. OTOH, what are you going to do with middle managers after they are let go? Put them on welfare? But wait... welfare is a... well, you know.
6. Defamation law and free speech
Certainly he can't be defending those who *lie* about other people. How can you defend a lie? The issue of defamation where the facts are murky, OTOH, is also likely to be murky. This one is a judgement call. Throwing all defamation laws out doesn't seem like a well balanced solution.
7. The work of professional researchers is strongly influenced by funding, disciplines, hierarchy and competition
No argument here.
8. Simple ideas have a bad reputation. People often think simple ideas are simplistic: wrong, incomplete, inaccurate, misleading. I agree that many simple ideas are no good, but many are quite useful...
So, some simple ideas are good and some aren't. What does this tell us? Not a whole lot. A brick is a simple idea. So is a lump of s%@#. A computer is a complicated idea. So is an H-bomb. So, by defending simple ideas, what is he defending here? It would appear to be nothing.
9. It's better to think for oneself and to assess ideas on their own merits than to worry about whether they came from a famous intellectual or an unknown.
Good in theory, but in practice who has time to sift through all the ideas? Fame exists in part because it's a convenient filter. Or, fame wouldn't exist if it didn't have some value.
10. Information seems like the ideal basis for a cooperative society. It can be made available to everyone at low cost, and a person can give away information and still retain use of it.
If you only made the information for your own consumption, then this is a valid statement. It's a pity to think that future information output might slide down to the level of production motivated only by personal need. After all, how many people have a personal need for a movie, play, or computer program and are able to devote sufficient resources just to satisfy their personal need?
Repeat ad infinitum: Educate the consumers, educate the consumers...
Let people know the following: 1. These new hard drives may break their old software and data. 2. The new drives will not be defragable and will degrade in performance over time. 3. The new drives will be inherently more prone to become corrupted and/or require expensive repairs. 4. They are being presumed dihonest and are being asked to pay the freight for piracy in a way that will inconvenience them far more than a hard drive tax would.
Consumers will say "NO" in the market place and the tech will be DOA. Remember too, a "consumer" is not just joe sixpack shopping at Best Buy. Consumers are: RAID solution providers, OEMs, IT departments who might have to buy all new equipment and software.
If enough large corporate consumers sign some sort of statement to the effect that they won't tolerate this, they can kill it.
Even as a long time defender of intellectual property rights, I am firmly opposed to this technology. It places an undue burden on the innocent in order to punish the guilty (already a disturbing trend in other aspects of society). It will create a lot of uneccessary problems for a lot of people. Efforts can be (and are) better spent going after people in Asia who illegally mass produce copyrighted materials. Don't make my life inconvenient just because of what some overseas criminals and teenagers are doing.
It's not just Linux either. It's the whole 'net. A few years ago, I'd type stuff into Yahoo! (the only decent search engine back then) and each search seemed like a fantastic journey into some unknown land. Sometimes the stuff on the other end truly was fantastic.
Now it seems like I've seen everything on the 'net, even though I know that's not possible. That Springsteen song keeps coming into my head, except this time it's 57 million channels and nothing on.
You're not one of the Jonathans from the floppies, are you?
OK, I'll do the math. $400,000 in 15 years? That's $26,667 a year on averge. Whoop-de-do. Not only that but he gets to room with Bubba and have a permanent mark on his... um.. record.
No thanks.
You should be able to find out at: http://www.nic.cx/whois.cfm but there appears to be a problem on their backend right now, because when I hit query it says "connect error". Hmmm... a problem on the backend when I query. Somehow, that seems appropriate.
Regardless of who he is, he's missing out on a lot of ad revenue. If you're gonna be a pornographer, you might as well make money.
If I create a great codec and sell it, I make money but Slashdot wants to condemn me to Hell. If I create a great codec and give it away I'm dirt poor but Slashdot wants to send me to Heaven.
I wonder what St. Peter thinks of all this.
Me personally, I seem to recall that at the beginning of all this, there was a certain other famous guy who's name also began with an S, and wanted to send people to Hell.
"Come", he said "eat of the CVS tree, and in the day that you eat therof, you will become an Open Source God". So the coders did eat, and their eyes were opened, and they received stock options...
They have some nice graphs of user statistics. What I would like to see is average time per work unit vs. time. This would provide empirical evidence of Moore's "law".
The number of units can be determined by multiplying this figure by the average time per unit.
Yes, a "number of units" milestone is more meaningful in terms of data processed. The number of years figure is a better measure of participation, which is also an important statistic.
On some level I agree. I'm not sure how things are in Ghana, but if people are starving and dying of cureable diseases at a high rate, that should certainly have a high priority.
OTOH, holding the high end down generally *doesn't* pull the low end up. Many people made arguments similar to yours during the Apollo Moon missions. I dare say that if it weren't for the tremendous ammount of "spinoff" research associated with the space race, we might not be surfing Slashdot and having this discussion today and the economy might be a lot worse.
Also, there is no need for 3rd world development to parallel the development of the west by evolving through the industrial revolution to the technical. This has been demonstrated by the quick adoption of wireless technology in some countries--bypassing the copper stage of the communications industry.
The problem with that is that the IP might be dynamicly assigned from an ISP. OTOH, reporting the IP and the time to the ISP is a good idea, so that they can check logs and LART 'em.
If the honeypot is intentionally more vulnerable than the real server, then you are just demonstrating known exploits.
If the honeypot is *more* secure than the real server, why did you waste time securing the honeypot that could have been spent securing the real server?
Finally, if the honeypot is equal in security to the real server, you are cutting the odds of a real server being hacked to:
reals/(honeypots+reals)
In most large organizations honeypots will be a very small number compared to reals. In small organizations you could make a difference, but how many small orgs can afford an extra server or two?
The idea that you can learn about the attacker while watching him closely is intriguing, but while you're watching the honeypot, who's watching the reals?
My gut tells me that money would be better spent helping NetBSD and others with code audits. Of course IANASecurity Expert, so what do I know...
You guys had to keep asking... sooner or later someone was bound to "imagine a Beowulf cluster of those". Now you know why you get moderated down all the time.
Anyhow, I think we should lift sanctions on Iraq. We've been sanctioning *way* too long. Sadam is not the worry. It's some bitter corporal in the Iraqi army who's the worry. Anybody remember the treaty of Versailles? Those who fail to learn from history...
Actually, if we had taken him all the way out to begin with, this might not be a problem.
High school students shouldn't have C++ imposed upon them
Yeah. While we're at it, let's not impose Latin, French, difficult sheet music, The President's physical fitness test, or calculus on them either. God forbid anybody should be challenged by an AP exam.
For a true understanding of how stupid the recursion is, see the previous post and follow all replies.
That makes sense. Let's assume that both media have the same surface information density (minutes per square inch would be appropriate units).
Then the duration is proportional to the surface area of the medium. The cyliders, IIRC, were about 6 inches long and 2 inches in diameter: 6*(pi) in^2.
An LP is what... 6 inch radius roughly? That's 2*6*6*(pi) in^2. (a factor of 2 because the LP has 2 sides). Even if only half of it is useable, it's still 6 times better than the cylinder.
Now, combine this with the fact that each LP comes in a package about an 8th of an inch thick. In a 12" by 12" by 6" box you can fit 48 LPs. In the same box you can fit 36 cylinders as described above.
In terms of minutes per unite volume, LPs beat cylinders hands down.