No, that's not necessary, and the claim holds for Kazaa too.
Just do the math/thinking yourself. Since there's no multicast, clearly exactly N bytes are uploaded for every N bytes downloaded. That means that for a group of M sharers who downloaded a file, it was also uploaded exactly as many times.
You might want to consider that the US occupiers in Germany put very tight limits on Nazi propaganda after World War II. Actually I believe most of the anti-Nazi legislation there was implemented pretty much by a decree of the Allies. Speaking of hypocrisy... Naah, actually just naÃvete of the current US population, thinking that their model on freedom of speech is absolutely the best one, when they like to ban free speech themselves when it's convenient:-)
Wow. Naming. I'm a long time Debian and KDE user, and I'm surprised that I don't recognize any one of those names. Not that all KDE program names are so much better. But I can't even guess with any certainty what those do, save for gTwitter. I can try: Graphmonkey is graphing software (like gnuplot). Tomboy I'm sure I've heard of (probably many times), and I assume it's something quite hyped, but still no idea what it does:-) (unless I'm confusing it with Tomcat). gBrainy, I'd expect that to be some "brain training" puzzle.
Just get a USB bluetooth dongle, they cost at most $20 and are so small that you won't notice them (in mine the USB plug is about two thirds of its length).
While I'm a donating EFF member, that reflects my experience with their press releases. Often reading the legal papers themselves (which admittedly are linked from EFF press releases) gives a bit different picture of the situation.
I don't remember many examples now, but one recent one I do. The case where a university student got his computer hardware confiscated allegedly for sending mail to a university mailing list, alleging that his (ex-?)roommate is gay, and posting link to a profile he had allegedly made in some gay site.
I do think that EFF has a case there, demanding that the search warrant be struck retroactively, but please do read the papers and the evidence posted by the authorities. It's not that EFF lies, but the picture it paints by omitting some facts is quite different from the one given even in its own papers, let alone those of the authorities.
I noticed this many times in the DeCSS case years ago too. Admittedly I did think that many of the rulings were quite favorable to EFF (before they to everyone's surprise lost the case), but the press releases painted them in way too rosy terms, relying on carefully selected sentences from the court's orders to paint a picture not really given by the orders themselves.
Groklaw is different. I find PJ's analysis of issues (or at least the rulings) quite balanced. She doesn't try to explain them so it seems the judge agreed with the "good guys" 100%, like the EFF.
That's just presumptuous. There are different levels of physical access. I could insert a pen drive on a computer on my university. I hardly could boot from it (need bios password), but I certainly could not take out the hard drive without using a crowbar and getting caught in a security camera.
Not that I think this vulnerability is that big an issue, except for the virtualization part. If your machine is rooted, it's rooted. Don't pretend you can fix it by running some antivirus stuff.
Why don't you start trying to list a few ways YOU'VE find GNU utilities to be any better than their BSD counterparts?
I'm not the parent, but here you go:
- The BSD -h (--help) is a joke for almost every command. It gives you something like "usage: cat [-benstuv] [file...]" with zero explanation what each of the switches do. Or "usage: ls [-ABCFGHILPRSTUWZabcdfghiklmnopqrstuwx1] [file...]". Very helpful.
- GNU userland supports the things one might want to do. The BSD tools just don't have the features. Like, last time I wanted to teach my students to use apropos to find system calls, I told them to use apropos -s 2. Well, turned out some of them decided to use the BSD machines here, and apparently there's no such thing on the BSD apropos. Not only that but it doesn't have a --help or a -h at all. Missing features like this are truly pervasive in the BSD land. I hit them nearly every time I want to do something more exotic on a BSD.
Small things like
- BSD tar lacks the jz switches. Seriously. I want them.
- And for that matter, bash is the best shell I've seen. Yes, I've tried ksh.
The BSD kernel I can take (although I don't see the advantage compared to Linux), but I do want the GNU userland to consider the system even half-usable.
What do you mean? Every GNU tool I've used is far better than its BSD counterpart (if it exists). Some manpages do suck, but I've never failed to find the information I need for any command that is remotely complicated.
In any case, if the Debian maintainers shared your opinion of the BSD userland, they would try to get that into their standard Linux-based distribution, rather than wait to have the FreeBSD kernel to do that there.
Indeed. We have Solaris and *BSD machines at our university (in addition to the Linux ones), and yeah, give me the GNU userland and I'll consider them usable. It seems to me that the BSD userland hasn't been touched for like 15 years to support any new ideas, and still they keep up the propaganda about a better userland.
I find the grandparent's bitching about man pages especially funny considering that 1) I think the GNU manpages are way better than the BSD ones; 2) even more importantly, the BSD tools lack decent --help, often that tells you exactly what you want to use.
Compare the --help of a simple tool like GNU cat: $ cat --help Usage: cat [OPTION]... [FILE]... Concatenate FILE(s), or standard input, to standard output.
-A, --show-all equivalent to -vET
-b, --number-nonblank number nonempty output lines
-e equivalent to -vE
-E, --show-ends display $ at end of each line
-n, --number number all output lines
-s, --squeeze-blank suppress repeated empty output lines
-t equivalent to -vT
-T, --show-tabs display TAB characters as ^I
-u (ignored)
-v, --show-nonprinting use ^ and M- notation, except for LFD and TAB
--help display this help and exit
--version output version information and exit
With no FILE, or when FILE is -, read standard input.
Examples:
cat f - g Output f's contents, then standard input, then g's contents.
cat Copy standard input to standard output.
to that of the BSD one: $ cat -h cat: illegal option -- h usage: cat [ -usvtebn ] [-|file]...
How free is Android? I somehow was under the impression that it has closed parts. But perhaps I'm just confusing this issue with the locked-down phone issue (which, while arguably obnoxious, can be circumvented by making your own phone).
But yes, I must say that to me too Android seems much more promising merely because it has a stable company like Google behind it and other commercial adopters. Hope there will be an effort to develop a truly free and open hardware for it (although personally I would be quite happy with (and pay a premium for) proprietary hardware with open specs so that a totally unlocked and free installation of Android is possible).
How do you defend against a cruise missile, except by preventing it from being launched at all? I thought one of the real point of cruise missiles were that they are hard to defend against.
Well, you can't also hold an election in your household about paying taxes and expect the government to honor it when you say that 0 % here wants to pay taxes.
The problem with Sipoo was that they were total asses, not accepting that people who work in the neighboring big city may actually have the right to housing there. No, if they had it their way, they wanted to be a plot of wheat fields inside a metropolis or something. It doesn't take a genius to see that won't work.
Really, the municipal borders are human-drawn. There's no special reason to respect them. They are there for convenience of everybody. Perhaps in the perfect system you would have more say to things that happen closer to where you live. In that case I'm sure the result would have been the same. But if you start to act in ways that make the life for everybody around you inconvenient, you really have no right to expect them to treat you kindly.
The Finnish system is so simple that you can't really make it any better. You get a piece of paper, with a circle designating where to write your number. A line shows which way is down.
Heh. Now that's an interesting little cultural difference. As an Australian I would expect an arrow like that to be showing which way is up.:)
Well, that's not surprising, because you live down there and there's really nothing that is more down except penguins:)
We can never have a 100% perfect system. Paper ballots lose about 0.5% of votes in Finland. But 2% is way too much. We spent a lot of money on that system, and it gives worse results than the almost free paper ballot system (the votes are counted by volunteers).
Volunteers?
I assure you I got paid in the order of 300 euros for essentially the single voting day. Ok, only 92 (IIRC) euros of that were for the counting itself.
Yes. There are antitrust concerns only if you actually can be considered substantially a monopoly. Basically what's illegal is using your significant monopoly power in one market (operating systems) to win market share against possibly better competing products in another market (web browsers).
Argh, can't you get your facts straight even in the summary?
A name cannot be copyrighted. It's a trademark. It doesn't expire after a number of years, like a copyright. A copyright is not a trademark, and a trademark is not a patent. Neither is copyright a patent.
Copyright protects certain expression (or a picture). A trademark protects the name it's sold under. A patent protects the idea of a technical solution to some problem.
And now that I'm ranting, there's no such thing as "copywritten" which is seen often. A copywriter does something entirely unrelated to copyright.
A trademark has to be actively protected to prevent the trademark from becoming common language (like using "googling" to mean searching the web or "xeroxing" to mean copying). Neither a copyright or a patent becomes invalid by failure to enforce.
Patenting is always an active act, i.e. you don't get a patent for something just by inventing it. And it's expensive in general. Copyright comes automatically, so there cannot be such a thing as "failure to copyright" (nowadays anyway, it was different decades ago). A trademark can either be registered (which is inexpensive) or obtained by becoming well established (registering it is a safe bet).
Yes. Either that or there must be some truth to the beliefs.
I challenge you to think which one you consider more likely, a billion delusional Christians (and many others who have experienced the supernatural) or that supernatural things actually do happen.
To me it's a sign of hope that some people living in the US question some of the things written in the Constitution.
While I agree that in this case the law is bad, I very much despise blind trust in any document (a piece of paper if you will) written by humans. The Founding Fathers were exceptionally wise men, but far from the gods many Americans make them.
Besides, you know, the Constitution has been amended a large number of times too.
Please, just stop worshipping the Constitution blindly. I guess it comes from the American education. Don't they teach critical thinking there at all?
Of course it's true the UN wastes money like all other governments, I don't dispute that. It's far from perfect, but it's been pretty good. And just as in all governments of that size, it's always possible to find corruption and fraud.
Also if you read the article about speech you referred to, it explicitly states the council that voted on the issue has no real power but "acts as a kind of moral conscience". I doubt it's hard to find examples of committees composed in some arbitrary way making bad decisions in your government either.
Also, when it comes to free speech, while I agree with you that it's very important, you should realize that emphasising it over privacy and right to not be defamed is a pretty western (and US-centric) value. The UN tries to be democratic. If more than half of all the people think that defamation is worth protecting against even to the extent of limiting free speech, who are you to say they are wrong? Luckily they don't have any real power to enforce here.
Many people from the US seem to irrationally see the constitution, especially the first amendment, as nearly God-given. But they were approved democratically too. You can't have it both ways, democracy and your way.
Intervened? What? The UN was created to prevent war, not wage it.
Also, the "twice in our lifetime" text makes it obvious that it referred to the two world wars. There hasn't been a third yet, which I consider quite an impressive achievement given the threat in Cold War. Not all of it is due to the UN of course, but I do believe quite a big portion of it is.
Slashdot Mirror
No, that's not necessary, and the claim holds for Kazaa too.
Just do the math/thinking yourself. Since there's no multicast, clearly exactly N bytes are uploaded for every N bytes downloaded. That means that for a group of M sharers who downloaded a file, it was also uploaded exactly as many times.
That's also pretty much in the definition of P2P.
You might want to consider that the US occupiers in Germany put very tight limits on Nazi propaganda after World War II. Actually I believe most of the anti-Nazi legislation there was implemented pretty much by a decree of the Allies. Speaking of hypocrisy... Naah, actually just naÃvete of the current US population, thinking that their model on freedom of speech is absolutely the best one, when they like to ban free speech themselves when it's convenient :-)
No, you are wrong. Copyright does not cover algorithms. Copyright covers only expression.
Copyright covers a specific program implementing an algorithm; however others are free to use the same algorithm.
Wow. Naming. I'm a long time Debian and KDE user, and I'm surprised that I don't recognize any one of those names. Not that all KDE program names are so much better. But I can't even guess with any certainty what those do, save for gTwitter. I can try: Graphmonkey is graphing software (like gnuplot). Tomboy I'm sure I've heard of (probably many times), and I assume it's something quite hyped, but still no idea what it does :-) (unless I'm confusing it with Tomcat). gBrainy, I'd expect that to be some "brain training" puzzle.
Just get a USB bluetooth dongle, they cost at most $20 and are so small that you won't notice them (in mine the USB plug is about two thirds of its length).
While I'm a donating EFF member, that reflects my experience with their press releases. Often reading the legal papers themselves (which admittedly are linked from EFF press releases) gives a bit different picture of the situation.
I don't remember many examples now, but one recent one I do. The case where a university student got his computer hardware confiscated allegedly for sending mail to a university mailing list, alleging that his (ex-?)roommate is gay, and posting link to a profile he had allegedly made in some gay site.
I do think that EFF has a case there, demanding that the search warrant be struck retroactively, but please do read the papers and the evidence posted by the authorities. It's not that EFF lies, but the picture it paints by omitting some facts is quite different from the one given even in its own papers, let alone those of the authorities.
I noticed this many times in the DeCSS case years ago too. Admittedly I did think that many of the rulings were quite favorable to EFF (before they to everyone's surprise lost the case), but the press releases painted them in way too rosy terms, relying on carefully selected sentences from the court's orders to paint a picture not really given by the orders themselves.
Groklaw is different. I find PJ's analysis of issues (or at least the rulings) quite balanced. She doesn't try to explain them so it seems the judge agreed with the "good guys" 100%, like the EFF.
That's just presumptuous. There are different levels of physical access. I could insert a pen drive on a computer on my university. I hardly could boot from it (need bios password), but I certainly could not take out the hard drive without using a crowbar and getting caught in a security camera.
Not that I think this vulnerability is that big an issue, except for the virtualization part. If your machine is rooted, it's rooted. Don't pretend you can fix it by running some antivirus stuff.
MHz, not Mhz.
Why don't you start trying to list a few ways YOU'VE find GNU utilities to be any better than their BSD counterparts?
I'm not the parent, but here you go:
- The BSD -h (--help) is a joke for almost every command. It gives you something like "usage: cat [-benstuv] [file ...]" with zero explanation what each of the switches do. Or "usage: ls [-ABCFGHILPRSTUWZabcdfghiklmnopqrstuwx1] [file ...]". Very helpful.
- GNU userland supports the things one might want to do. The BSD tools just don't have the features. Like, last time I wanted to teach my students to use apropos to find system calls, I told them to use apropos -s 2. Well, turned out some of them decided to use the BSD machines here, and apparently there's no such thing on the BSD apropos. Not only that but it doesn't have a --help or a -h at all. Missing features like this are truly pervasive in the BSD land. I hit them nearly every time I want to do something more exotic on a BSD.
Small things like
- BSD tar lacks the jz switches. Seriously. I want them.
- And for that matter, bash is the best shell I've seen. Yes, I've tried ksh.
The BSD kernel I can take (although I don't see the advantage compared to Linux), but I do want the GNU userland to consider the system even half-usable.
What do you mean? Every GNU tool I've used is far better than its BSD counterpart (if it exists). Some manpages do suck, but I've never failed to find the information I need for any command that is remotely complicated.
In any case, if the Debian maintainers shared your opinion of the BSD userland, they would try to get that into their standard Linux-based distribution, rather than wait to have the FreeBSD kernel to do that there.
Indeed. We have Solaris and *BSD machines at our university (in addition to the Linux ones), and yeah, give me the GNU userland and I'll consider them usable. It seems to me that the BSD userland hasn't been touched for like 15 years to support any new ideas, and still they keep up the propaganda about a better userland.
I find the grandparent's bitching about man pages especially funny considering that 1) I think the GNU manpages are way better than the BSD ones; 2) even more importantly, the BSD tools lack decent --help, often that tells you exactly what you want to use.
Compare the --help of a simple tool like GNU cat:
$ cat --help
Usage: cat [OPTION]... [FILE]...
Concatenate FILE(s), or standard input, to standard output.
-A, --show-all equivalent to -vET
-b, --number-nonblank number nonempty output lines
-e equivalent to -vE
-E, --show-ends display $ at end of each line
-n, --number number all output lines
-s, --squeeze-blank suppress repeated empty output lines
-t equivalent to -vT
-T, --show-tabs display TAB characters as ^I
-u (ignored)
-v, --show-nonprinting use ^ and M- notation, except for LFD and TAB
--help display this help and exit
--version output version information and exit
With no FILE, or when FILE is -, read standard input.
Examples:
cat f - g Output f's contents, then standard input, then g's contents.
cat Copy standard input to standard output.
to that of the BSD one:
...
$ cat -h
cat: illegal option -- h
usage: cat [ -usvtebn ] [-|file]
Sure, that's helpful.
How free is Android? I somehow was under the impression that it has closed parts. But perhaps I'm just confusing this issue with the locked-down phone issue (which, while arguably obnoxious, can be circumvented by making your own phone).
But yes, I must say that to me too Android seems much more promising merely because it has a stable company like Google behind it and other commercial adopters. Hope there will be an effort to develop a truly free and open hardware for it (although personally I would be quite happy with (and pay a premium for) proprietary hardware with open specs so that a totally unlocked and free installation of Android is possible).
Also it doesn't have a keyboard.
Seriously. A phone without keyboard? I have no doubt that iPhone is very good for a phone without a keyboard, but still it's a ridiculous idea.
How do you defend against a cruise missile, except by preventing it from being launched at all? I thought one of the real point of cruise missiles were that they are hard to defend against.
( Tieto was behind this Finnish bank's software transition: http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Sampo-UhOh.aspx )
No it wasn't. TietoEnator was responsible for the old, working system. The new, broken system was Danske Bank's own.
Well, you can't also hold an election in your household about paying taxes and expect the government to honor it when you say that 0 % here wants to pay taxes.
The problem with Sipoo was that they were total asses, not accepting that people who work in the neighboring big city may actually have the right to housing there. No, if they had it their way, they wanted to be a plot of wheat fields inside a metropolis or something. It doesn't take a genius to see that won't work.
Really, the municipal borders are human-drawn. There's no special reason to respect them. They are there for convenience of everybody. Perhaps in the perfect system you would have more say to things that happen closer to where you live. In that case I'm sure the result would have been the same. But if you start to act in ways that make the life for everybody around you inconvenient, you really have no right to expect them to treat you kindly.
The Finnish system is so simple that you can't really make it any better. You get a piece of paper, with a circle designating where to write your number. A line shows which way is down.
Heh. Now that's an interesting little cultural difference. As an Australian I would expect an arrow like that to be showing which way is up. :)
Well, that's not surprising, because you live down there and there's really nothing that is more down except penguins :)
We can never have a 100% perfect system. Paper ballots lose about 0.5% of votes in Finland. But 2% is way too much. We spent a lot of money on that system, and it gives worse results than the almost free paper ballot system (the votes are counted by volunteers).
Volunteers?
I assure you I got paid in the order of 300 euros for essentially the single voting day. Ok, only 92 (IIRC) euros of that were for the counting itself.
Fix them or close them as "I don't think this is a bug"?
Do you have any clueless users?
Yes. There are antitrust concerns only if you actually can be considered substantially a monopoly. Basically what's illegal is using your significant monopoly power in one market (operating systems) to win market share against possibly better competing products in another market (web browsers).
Apple doesn't quite come close to it yet.
Argh, can't you get your facts straight even in the summary?
A name cannot be copyrighted. It's a trademark. It doesn't expire after a number of years, like a copyright. A copyright is not a trademark, and a trademark is not a patent. Neither is copyright a patent.
Copyright protects certain expression (or a picture). A trademark protects the name it's sold under. A patent protects the idea of a technical solution to some problem.
And now that I'm ranting, there's no such thing as "copywritten" which is seen often. A copywriter does something entirely unrelated to copyright.
A trademark has to be actively protected to prevent the trademark from becoming common language (like using "googling" to mean searching the web or "xeroxing" to mean copying). Neither a copyright or a patent becomes invalid by failure to enforce.
Patenting is always an active act, i.e. you don't get a patent for something just by inventing it. And it's expensive in general. Copyright comes automatically, so there cannot be such a thing as "failure to copyright" (nowadays anyway, it was different decades ago). A trademark can either be registered (which is inexpensive) or obtained by becoming well established (registering it is a safe bet).
My personal experiences. And secondarily those I have heard from others. A _lot_ of christians have supernatural experiences.
How you can expect to deduce anything at all if you can wave anything you personally see and hear happen away as delusion?
Yes. Either that or there must be some truth to the beliefs.
I challenge you to think which one you consider more likely, a billion delusional Christians (and many others who have experienced the supernatural) or that supernatural things actually do happen.
To me it's a sign of hope that some people living in the US question some of the things written in the Constitution.
While I agree that in this case the law is bad, I very much despise blind trust in any document (a piece of paper if you will) written by humans. The Founding Fathers were exceptionally wise men, but far from the gods many Americans make them.
Besides, you know, the Constitution has been amended a large number of times too.
Please, just stop worshipping the Constitution blindly. I guess it comes from the American education. Don't they teach critical thinking there at all?
Of course it's true the UN wastes money like all other governments, I don't dispute that. It's far from perfect, but it's been pretty good. And just as in all governments of that size, it's always possible to find corruption and fraud.
Also if you read the article about speech you referred to, it explicitly states the council that voted on the issue has no real power but "acts as a kind of moral conscience". I doubt it's hard to find examples of committees composed in some arbitrary way making bad decisions in your government either.
Also, when it comes to free speech, while I agree with you that it's very important, you should realize that emphasising it over privacy and right to not be defamed is a pretty western (and US-centric) value. The UN tries to be democratic. If more than half of all the people think that defamation is worth protecting against even to the extent of limiting free speech, who are you to say they are wrong? Luckily they don't have any real power to enforce here.
Many people from the US seem to irrationally see the constitution, especially the first amendment, as nearly God-given. But they were approved democratically too. You can't have it both ways, democracy and your way.
Intervened? What? The UN was created to prevent war, not wage it.
Also, the "twice in our lifetime" text makes it obvious that it referred to the two world wars. There hasn't been a third yet, which I consider quite an impressive achievement given the threat in Cold War. Not all of it is due to the UN of course, but I do believe quite a big portion of it is.