Being forced to enter "Ajkdua9uMNDiau9dfuJdjA(D82*27UAd89Z&DADAUIdjk" as your pet's name is certainly an inconvenience. At many sites you must actually enter it twice.
Seriously. Look at that video. It's the most beautiful vapourware I've ever seen. The leaked footage has the atmosphere that made Duke Nukem 3D so great, and I can see only improvements there. I haven't played games for about a while now, but this looks like a game I would have killed to play.
They might have failed spectacularly, and deserve being laughed for that over-than-a-decade vapourware inanity, but this shows that they had something. And should be applauded for the quality what they were attempting.
Really, this must get in the hands of someone who is capable of completing it. Killing what I just saw doesn't serve it justice, really. It deserves to see the light of day. They should make it FOSS... Or at least sell it to someone who has shown that can complete the game.
Trademarks are a way to protect the brands of an organization and products. And to help the customers from being deceived. Open source is a tool that you use in creating your product or program, and free software is a way you treat your customers. How would trademarks hurt any of these is beyond me. Really.
Copyright and patent law might need a reform, and workarounds like we do with FOSS, but trademark doesn't. It's arguably doing it's job. When I get get X by company Y I'm given some assurance that this is indeed X by company Y, and not something else someone decided to call that way. I don't see any reason that one should want CentOS to call themselves "Red Hat Enterprise Linux". I would be very happy if they don't.
Nobody restricts distribution or anything. You were allowed to use and improve the technology, but there is no reason you should expect to use the name. Does anybody really want people using FOSS code to create malicious programs and then name them "Linux" and "Firefox"? If somebody wrote a book and put it under Creative Commons license he didn't give you the right to change the content of the book and claim that it is still written entirely by you.
Even if trademarks did hurt (and at worst they cause minor inconveniences), they play an important role which is a bit more important than someone's ability to "compile software and still be able to call it by its proper name". Sorry.
uClibc is created for embedded systems, meaning that it might lack some of the features that glibc has. Debian doesn't work only on embedded systems, and therefore it needs a full libc with all bells and whistles. eglibc is a glibc fork, which might be targetting embedded systems, but retains full source and binary compatibility with glibc, and I would assume that any useful feature would still be there, possibly optional.
And they switch not because they want lightweight libc, but because they want more friendly upstream. uClibc doesn't seem to be a good choice if that is the reason.
I just skimmed through the ODF 1.1 specs and couldn't find anything about specifying formulas, besides the XML attributes that should be used. Nothing about the formula syntax. Can you be more specific what "general syntax" means and give a pointer to a page in the specs to support your claim?
The specs don't tell me how I should implement a formula. I need to look at OpenOffice.org to make my hypothetical ODF 1.1 compliant application interoperable. The problem is that Microsoft don't care about interoperability, they simply want to support the standard. They have absolutely no incentive to make things any better than they're currently in the specifications.
The standard should be written in such way that you have to "play nice" to be compliant. If it is not, someone known to avoid interoperability will continue to do so, until forced by the standard.
Of course, you can never create perfects specs that can't be purposefully misinterpretted in ways that break everything they intended, but at least if the specs are good enough the malice will be obvious to everyone.
Now even if ODF 1.2 comes out of the draft stage, Microsoft will probably continue to support the "broken" ODF 1.1 as long as possible.
What we have currently failed to force Microsoft adopt anything aimed at interoperability. That's a bad thing, but at least all other office applications are slowly adopting ODF in the place of the gazillion formats we had --.wpd,.sxw,.kwd,.abw and what not. At least this mess is going away and there is a standard format for everyone (but Microsoft). And even with the incomplete specs, everyone else seems to be getting it right. That speaks for itself.
If it achieves 100% technical compliance with the standard, but zero interoperability, this is certainly a problem with the standard itself.
And the problem in this case is the missing formula specification. It's not in ODF 1.1, and ODF 1.2 is still a draft. While this is Microsoft and we all "know" that this was intentional, ODF is what should be fixed first. We were all bashing OOXML specifications, but ODF 1.1's far from perfect, as we can see.
Did the author of the article test with anything else than a spreadsheet with formulas? Formula breakage was expected and mentioned in the comments to the previous article. The interesting part is are there other flaws with ODF 1.1, are they addressed by 1.2?
I would say this is much significant. Two cents an hour per government employee is less than a cent an hour for each taxpayer. Looking at the final figure he saved each taxpayer one dollar a year. Not that much.
But it is still a cool story, though. It should be a pleasant feeling to be responsible for the saving of $270M a year. And certainly something to brag about.
However, did he save the taxpayers $270M, or did he cost the employees $270M? And are his fellow workers happy about this?
And in rare cases when you need a rare obscure feature, it will not be compiled in, leaving you to play a bit with debuild and stuff. That sucks, too.
However, binary packages are much convinient in many cases. I've been using FreeBSD with ports before, and now I'm using Gentoo with portage (which is inspired by FreeBSD's ports) and I'm happy to turn optional features as I like, but I miss a lot of things from binary distros like Debian -- speed of installation, some assurance that the package will work, less work on my part to get it working, etc. To get the source, change a few switches and create your own deb isn't such a deal if you have to do it for only several packages. I did this on Nexenta OpenSolaris installation recently, and I say it's easier than maintaining a Gentoo installation.
And the unneeded features aren't such a big deal, really. I've run Debian on slow low-end devices, and it runs fine, they take a bit more space and the memory usage somewhat grows, but on a modern system that shouldn't be a problem at all -- it is offset by the lack of ports tree, the need for installed compiler and headers, and the faster installation. Debian developers also splits some optional features as seperate packages, where it is possible. And you never know when you actually might need these optional features.
So ports have their pros and cons, I really liked them when I had to play with them, but as I'm lazy I would choose something apt-get-style now. Debian GNU/kFreeBSD is a nice choice if you want apt-get, FreeBSD kernel. I'm not sure if they have working ZFS and DTrace support at the moment, but it's still worth checking out.
One of the main reasons I would choose FreeBSD at the moment is ZFS. And there is very low probability that we'll see this in Linux.
I never understood why did they include speed in a browser test? OK, a browser should perform rendering as fast as possible, because the web is starting to demand it, and web developers are abusing scripting a lot, but it would mean that the best browsers would fail on a slower computer, and the worst would pass on a faster one. This is not objective.
Not to mention that setting a threshold for speed is impossible. Who says how fast is fast? If the web developers have use decent and modest scripting, it will go faster, if they created inefficient monsters, it is going to crawl. You might say how much fast is fine, but then a task might turn out to be more demaning and the current threshold not enough for it.
In related news, I've run Midori on a slow Neo 1973, and it passes ACID 3. I found that surprising.
And you would miss all that fun? It would certainly make your life worth, I mean, who doesn't like monsters? And no need to worry about getting hit by a car, catching swine flu or getting raped by some desperate pretty blonde girl on the street...
Come on man, you've that ultimate chance, would you go for it or just let it slip?
You all seem to be missing more immediate worries. You forgot to include women. I thought an average slashdotter wouldn't leave out such a major treat.
First of all, you can't fix a technical problem with legislation. The law can't stop your private information from leaking or going in the wrong hands.
Also, there are many things you can do to fix some of the problems with software services. But when was the last time you encrypted your mail with GPG before sending it through gmail? A huge part of the point is to understand that you can't trust it, and you should not treat it as software running on your computer. Barring all this, I agree with you -- everyone would welcome you very much if you'd develop a web-based spreadsheet that encrypts your data in your browser before sending it to the server.
And last but not least, why should we rush and embrace something that, at its current state, takes our privacy and control away, without giving us any particular benefit? I understand that software-as-a-service gives us benefits that we should look forward to, but rushing and giving up our privacy and control just so that we embrace them is not the right thing to do.
Take collaborative editing as an example. This can be accomplished without the need for using software-as-a-service. And it's something I would like to use. Then we should start implementing such solutions, instead of rushing to embrace Google Docs. AbiWord already has such features, and there is ACE and Gobby. Though I think we should focus on creating collaborative tools based on XMPP supporting end-to-end encryption.
I agree that there are use-cases for which software as a service is very useful or irreplacable, but there is no need to embrace it for the rest, and we should take the risks into account when doing so.
I believe he uses the word "must" as in "you must not try to check if your gas tank with a lighter". You are free to do so, but he wants to tell you that it is a bad idea. And in his opinion, it is a ridiculously bad idea. It is certainly worse than proprietary software, and we all know what he thinks of that.
I would have to agree with him. Preferring software as a service vs. software running on your machine is a bad idea. It might be convinient in many cases, but you shouldn't trust a third party with your data and your work, especially when you can avoid it. It might not look that bad, but as you already have the tools on your computer, it's not worth it even if the issues don't look like a big deal to you.
This does not apply in each case you use 'software as a service'. Examples of acceptable use of software running on someone else's server would include using Slashdot for news discussion, using web hosting services and using GNU Savannah for your software project. His point is not to use Google Docs to edit your private documents, and not to use Gmail to send your private mails, or to be more specific - not to let them become a replacement for your office suite and mail client/server.
Of course, avoiding any software services is nuts, it is not needed, and it is not even possible. And running a program on your friend's server doesn't hurt, either. You should, however, be well aware of the risks. Unfortunately, in many cases you have to trust your data to a third party. Read stories about leaked private information here lately? Then I say you shouldn't let your word processing and spreadsheet needs become a part of those cases. Simply don't do it.
"Coronal Mass Ejections range in speed from about 20 km/s to 2,700 km/s with an average speed (based on SOHO/LASCO measurements between 1996 and 2003) of 489 km/s."
From the "1859 Solar Superstorm" article you've linked:
"[...] a massive coronal mass ejection (CME) [...] taking eighteen hours. This is remarkable because such a journey normally takes three to four days."
So you can fairly easy detect it and have enough time to calculate when and if it will hit. We managed to detect and predict one in 1859, why would we have trouble now? You don't have time to do much about it, though.
You are really confusing them with solar flares, which move at extreme speeds. We can also detect them without, too, but have 15-30 minutes to react. Much less than with a CME.
A work needs to meet certain standards for originality to be under copyright. It merely contains some data, the data itself is not copyrightable, and the representation of that data was neither created directly or indirectly by a person, nor does carry any originality whatsoever.
At best you could try to argue that you created an original collection of files and the database of the hashes of these files is copyrighted by you, but you'd have to work hard to get there. That won't work for most torrents -- a hash of Linux ISO is merely data, not copyrightable; the list of files contained in a illegally distributed program and their hashes would fail to manifest any originality, at least on your part; a big asorted collection of files of interest created by you might have some chance, but the torrents containing a dozen of random files I've seen have a fairly low chance here, in my opinion.
Many bands do, but most don't. You could have said that many bands release free as in speech and as in beer music, too. Most of those that I like, however, don't.
As, unfortunately, musical tastes don't work like software, nobody chooses the music they like based on the respect they get from the artist and/or distributor. So most people can't "try before buy" unless they change or limit their musical tastes. And this doesn't sound reasonable to me.
It might not last, but it shows that the scare tactics are working to a certain extent, and gives the recording industry more incentive to use them, not to mention that it enables them to get more support for similar legislation.
I strongly disagree. (Ignoring the semantics about the private property and theft, which you got incorrectly.)
Stop treating a company like a human being. Unlike a human being, whose personal liberties the government should protect, a company is a special entity, which gets special treating, and has no human rights, and exists merely for the purpose of our benefit. As such, a regulation such as this might be justified, because when you're dealing with a company, the actual benefit for the people might be important than what the company "should" be allowed to do. (Of course, you should still respect the liberties of the owners, employees and contractors.)
There is a strong indication that this might be true in this case, because the benefit for everyone with a computer would be tremendous.
There is one problem, though. Forcing such thing is like opening a huge can of worms. Who should be in charge of deciding whether such thing is OK, or not? While it might be "obviously OK" in this case, in general it is not, so I would prefer that the government doesn't go as far as this in the regulation.
Ah, one more thing. You _can_ make a good argument that (some of) FSF's ideas should be enforced by law, in general. Both for ethical and practical purposes. And at first it seems that this would benefit the computer world a lot. I personally wouldn't agree, mostly because I'm liberty loving and believe that I should be allowed not to release the source code of the program I wrote, and anyone forcing me to would undermine my personal liberties. However, if someone came and made that argument to me, I would respect it and I wouldn't use the word "must" in caps, and even consider that they might be actually right.
I don't say that removing some cameas is ineffective. It is indeed the only way. However, you should start from those that haven't been shown to be beneficial and contribute most to the invasion of privacy. If you remove those first, things would have changed for better. I'm not saying that you shouldn't make the first step if it is enough, I'm saying that you should make the right first step to begin with. That said, I have no idea how much cameras are there in Mississippi -- if there are only traffic light cameras then I'm obviosly wrong here... at least if we assume that traffic cameras are "bad".
For the slippery slope to be correct, there should be at least some indication that the "first step" increases the likelihood of the "second step" significantly. While not required for correctness, I think that it should be at least more significant than the benefit from the actual first step. So, if the traffic cameras are shown to be beneficial (accounting for privacy issues), the possibility for such a side effect _is_ negligable. And you sound like you mean that one causes the other, which is certainly not the case:) If cameras appear everywhere, I would suggest a common cause, rather than blame traffic cameras, you know.:)
The slippery slope argument doesn't apply here, because it is a falacy. While what you say might be true, and there is such tendency which I don't like, it doesn't mean that red light cameras themselves are bad. Just that one step further would be bad, doesn't mean that the previous one would also be. Just think for a second - if that was true, everything in the world would be bad.
And, about the traffic light cameras, I'm not really concerned about them. They might be an invasion of privacy, they might be not, but with the cameras springing up on the streets and everywhere I already lost that privacy. Removing the cameras that are actually _beneficial_ would be the *last* thing I would do. Not to mention that removing them first wouldn't help my privacy at all, unlike removing some of the rest.
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Why stickers when you can simply break the fucking camera? Cause damage. That's the right way to do it.
Being forced to enter "Ajkdua9uMNDiau9dfuJdjA(D82*27UAd89Z&DADAUIdjk" as your pet's name is certainly an inconvenience. At many sites you must actually enter it twice.
Seriously. Look at that video. It's the most beautiful vapourware I've ever seen. The leaked footage has the atmosphere that made Duke Nukem 3D so great, and I can see only improvements there. I haven't played games for about a while now, but this looks like a game I would have killed to play.
They might have failed spectacularly, and deserve being laughed for that over-than-a-decade vapourware inanity, but this shows that they had something. And should be applauded for the quality what they were attempting.
Really, this must get in the hands of someone who is capable of completing it. Killing what I just saw doesn't serve it justice, really. It deserves to see the light of day. They should make it FOSS... Or at least sell it to someone who has shown that can complete the game.
Trademarks are a way to protect the brands of an organization and products. And to help the customers from being deceived. Open source is a tool that you use in creating your product or program, and free software is a way you treat your customers. How would trademarks hurt any of these is beyond me. Really.
Copyright and patent law might need a reform, and workarounds like we do with FOSS, but trademark doesn't. It's arguably doing it's job. When I get get X by company Y I'm given some assurance that this is indeed X by company Y, and not something else someone decided to call that way. I don't see any reason that one should want CentOS to call themselves "Red Hat Enterprise Linux". I would be very happy if they don't.
Nobody restricts distribution or anything. You were allowed to use and improve the technology, but there is no reason you should expect to use the name. Does anybody really want people using FOSS code to create malicious programs and then name them "Linux" and "Firefox"? If somebody wrote a book and put it under Creative Commons license he didn't give you the right to change the content of the book and claim that it is still written entirely by you.
Even if trademarks did hurt (and at worst they cause minor inconveniences), they play an important role which is a bit more important than someone's ability to "compile software and still be able to call it by its proper name". Sorry.
uClibc is created for embedded systems, meaning that it might lack some of the features that glibc has. Debian doesn't work only on embedded systems, and therefore it needs a full libc with all bells and whistles. eglibc is a glibc fork, which might be targetting embedded systems, but retains full source and binary compatibility with glibc, and I would assume that any useful feature would still be there, possibly optional.
And they switch not because they want lightweight libc, but because they want more friendly upstream. uClibc doesn't seem to be a good choice if that is the reason.
I just skimmed through the ODF 1.1 specs and couldn't find anything about specifying formulas, besides the XML attributes that should be used. Nothing about the formula syntax. Can you be more specific what "general syntax" means and give a pointer to a page in the specs to support your claim?
The specs don't tell me how I should implement a formula. I need to look at OpenOffice.org to make my hypothetical ODF 1.1 compliant application interoperable. The problem is that Microsoft don't care about interoperability, they simply want to support the standard. They have absolutely no incentive to make things any better than they're currently in the specifications.
The standard should be written in such way that you have to "play nice" to be compliant. If it is not, someone known to avoid interoperability will continue to do so, until forced by the standard.
Of course, you can never create perfects specs that can't be purposefully misinterpretted in ways that break everything they intended, but at least if the specs are good enough the malice will be obvious to everyone.
Now even if ODF 1.2 comes out of the draft stage, Microsoft will probably continue to support the "broken" ODF 1.1 as long as possible.
What we have currently failed to force Microsoft adopt anything aimed at interoperability. That's a bad thing, but at least all other office applications are slowly adopting ODF in the place of the gazillion formats we had -- .wpd, .sxw, .kwd, .abw and what not. At least this mess is going away and there is a standard format for everyone (but Microsoft). And even with the incomplete specs, everyone else seems to be getting it right. That speaks for itself.
If it achieves 100% technical compliance with the standard, but zero interoperability, this is certainly a problem with the standard itself.
And the problem in this case is the missing formula specification. It's not in ODF 1.1, and ODF 1.2 is still a draft. While this is Microsoft and we all "know" that this was intentional, ODF is what should be fixed first. We were all bashing OOXML specifications, but ODF 1.1's far from perfect, as we can see.
Did the author of the article test with anything else than a spreadsheet with formulas? Formula breakage was expected and mentioned in the comments to the previous article. The interesting part is are there other flaws with ODF 1.1, are they addressed by 1.2?
I would say this is much significant. Two cents an hour per government employee is less than a cent an hour for each taxpayer. Looking at the final figure he saved each taxpayer one dollar a year. Not that much.
But it is still a cool story, though. It should be a pleasant feeling to be responsible for the saving of $270M a year. And certainly something to brag about.
However, did he save the taxpayers $270M, or did he cost the employees $270M? And are his fellow workers happy about this?
And in rare cases when you need a rare obscure feature, it will not be compiled in, leaving you to play a bit with debuild and stuff. That sucks, too.
However, binary packages are much convinient in many cases. I've been using FreeBSD with ports before, and now I'm using Gentoo with portage (which is inspired by FreeBSD's ports) and I'm happy to turn optional features as I like, but I miss a lot of things from binary distros like Debian -- speed of installation, some assurance that the package will work, less work on my part to get it working, etc. To get the source, change a few switches and create your own deb isn't such a deal if you have to do it for only several packages. I did this on Nexenta OpenSolaris installation recently, and I say it's easier than maintaining a Gentoo installation.
And the unneeded features aren't such a big deal, really. I've run Debian on slow low-end devices, and it runs fine, they take a bit more space and the memory usage somewhat grows, but on a modern system that shouldn't be a problem at all -- it is offset by the lack of ports tree, the need for installed compiler and headers, and the faster installation. Debian developers also splits some optional features as seperate packages, where it is possible. And you never know when you actually might need these optional features.
So ports have their pros and cons, I really liked them when I had to play with them, but as I'm lazy I would choose something apt-get-style now. Debian GNU/kFreeBSD is a nice choice if you want apt-get, FreeBSD kernel. I'm not sure if they have working ZFS and DTrace support at the moment, but it's still worth checking out.
One of the main reasons I would choose FreeBSD at the moment is ZFS. And there is very low probability that we'll see this in Linux.
Call me when they pay me to view porn _and_ read Slashdot.
I heard that NASA's eNose is so sensitive it could tell a homeopathic preparation from pure water.
I never understood why did they include speed in a browser test? OK, a browser should perform rendering as fast as possible, because the web is starting to demand it, and web developers are abusing scripting a lot, but it would mean that the best browsers would fail on a slower computer, and the worst would pass on a faster one. This is not objective.
Not to mention that setting a threshold for speed is impossible. Who says how fast is fast? If the web developers have use decent and modest scripting, it will go faster, if they created inefficient monsters, it is going to crawl. You might say how much fast is fine, but then a task might turn out to be more demaning and the current threshold not enough for it.
In related news, I've run Midori on a slow Neo 1973, and it passes ACID 3. I found that surprising.
And you would miss all that fun? It would certainly make your life worth, I mean, who doesn't like monsters? And no need to worry about getting hit by a car, catching swine flu or getting raped by some desperate pretty blonde girl on the street...
Come on man, you've that ultimate chance, would you go for it or just let it slip?
You all seem to be missing more immediate worries. You forgot to include women. I thought an average slashdotter wouldn't leave out such a major treat.
A mail client with encryption support looks fine enough for a home user. And companies might run their own mail servers, too.
First of all, you can't fix a technical problem with legislation. The law can't stop your private information from leaking or going in the wrong hands.
Also, there are many things you can do to fix some of the problems with software services. But when was the last time you encrypted your mail with GPG before sending it through gmail? A huge part of the point is to understand that you can't trust it, and you should not treat it as software running on your computer. Barring all this, I agree with you -- everyone would welcome you very much if you'd develop a web-based spreadsheet that encrypts your data in your browser before sending it to the server.
And last but not least, why should we rush and embrace something that, at its current state, takes our privacy and control away, without giving us any particular benefit? I understand that software-as-a-service gives us benefits that we should look forward to, but rushing and giving up our privacy and control just so that we embrace them is not the right thing to do.
Take collaborative editing as an example. This can be accomplished without the need for using software-as-a-service. And it's something I would like to use. Then we should start implementing such solutions, instead of rushing to embrace Google Docs. AbiWord already has such features, and there is ACE and Gobby. Though I think we should focus on creating collaborative tools based on XMPP supporting end-to-end encryption.
I agree that there are use-cases for which software as a service is very useful or irreplacable, but there is no need to embrace it for the rest, and we should take the risks into account when doing so.
I believe he uses the word "must" as in "you must not try to check if your gas tank with a lighter". You are free to do so, but he wants to tell you that it is a bad idea. And in his opinion, it is a ridiculously bad idea. It is certainly worse than proprietary software, and we all know what he thinks of that.
I would have to agree with him. Preferring software as a service vs. software running on your machine is a bad idea. It might be convinient in many cases, but you shouldn't trust a third party with your data and your work, especially when you can avoid it. It might not look that bad, but as you already have the tools on your computer, it's not worth it even if the issues don't look like a big deal to you.
This does not apply in each case you use 'software as a service'. Examples of acceptable use of software running on someone else's server would include using Slashdot for news discussion, using web hosting services and using GNU Savannah for your software project. His point is not to use Google Docs to edit your private documents, and not to use Gmail to send your private mails, or to be more specific - not to let them become a replacement for your office suite and mail client/server.
Of course, avoiding any software services is nuts, it is not needed, and it is not even possible. And running a program on your friend's server doesn't hurt, either. You should, however, be well aware of the risks. Unfortunately, in many cases you have to trust your data to a third party. Read stories about leaked private information here lately? Then I say you shouldn't let your word processing and spreadsheet needs become a part of those cases. Simply don't do it.
From the Wikipedia article you've linked:
"Coronal Mass Ejections range in speed from about 20 km/s to 2,700 km/s with an average speed (based on SOHO/LASCO measurements between 1996 and 2003) of 489 km/s."
From the "1859 Solar Superstorm" article you've linked:
"[...] a massive coronal mass ejection (CME) [...] taking eighteen hours. This is remarkable because such a journey normally takes three to four days."
So you can fairly easy detect it and have enough time to calculate when and if it will hit. We managed to detect and predict one in 1859, why would we have trouble now? You don't have time to do much about it, though.
You are really confusing them with solar flares, which move at extreme speeds. We can also detect them without, too, but have 15-30 minutes to react. Much less than with a CME.
A work needs to meet certain standards for originality to be under copyright. It merely contains some data, the data itself is not copyrightable, and the representation of that data was neither created directly or indirectly by a person, nor does carry any originality whatsoever.
At best you could try to argue that you created an original collection of files and the database of the hashes of these files is copyrighted by you, but you'd have to work hard to get there. That won't work for most torrents -- a hash of Linux ISO is merely data, not copyrightable; the list of files contained in a illegally distributed program and their hashes would fail to manifest any originality, at least on your part; a big asorted collection of files of interest created by you might have some chance, but the torrents containing a dozen of random files I've seen have a fairly low chance here, in my opinion.
Good luck.
Um, no. What you claim is wrong.
Many bands do, but most don't. You could have said that many bands release free as in speech and as in beer music, too. Most of those that I like, however, don't.
As, unfortunately, musical tastes don't work like software, nobody chooses the music they like based on the respect they get from the artist and/or distributor. So most people can't "try before buy" unless they change or limit their musical tastes. And this doesn't sound reasonable to me.
It might not last, but it shows that the scare tactics are working to a certain extent, and gives the recording industry more incentive to use them, not to mention that it enables them to get more support for similar legislation.
I strongly disagree. (Ignoring the semantics about the private property and theft, which you got incorrectly.)
Stop treating a company like a human being. Unlike a human being, whose personal liberties the government should protect, a company is a special entity, which gets special treating, and has no human rights, and exists merely for the purpose of our benefit. As such, a regulation such as this might be justified, because when you're dealing with a company, the actual benefit for the people might be important than what the company "should" be allowed to do. (Of course, you should still respect the liberties of the owners, employees and contractors.)
There is a strong indication that this might be true in this case, because the benefit for everyone with a computer would be tremendous.
There is one problem, though. Forcing such thing is like opening a huge can of worms. Who should be in charge of deciding whether such thing is OK, or not? While it might be "obviously OK" in this case, in general it is not, so I would prefer that the government doesn't go as far as this in the regulation.
Ah, one more thing. You _can_ make a good argument that (some of) FSF's ideas should be enforced by law, in general. Both for ethical and practical purposes. And at first it seems that this would benefit the computer world a lot. I personally wouldn't agree, mostly because I'm liberty loving and believe that I should be allowed not to release the source code of the program I wrote, and anyone forcing me to would undermine my personal liberties. However, if someone came and made that argument to me, I would respect it and I wouldn't use the word "must" in caps, and even consider that they might be actually right.
I don't say that removing some cameas is ineffective. It is indeed the only way. However, you should start from those that haven't been shown to be beneficial and contribute most to the invasion of privacy. If you remove those first, things would have changed for better. I'm not saying that you shouldn't make the first step if it is enough, I'm saying that you should make the right first step to begin with. That said, I have no idea how much cameras are there in Mississippi -- if there are only traffic light cameras then I'm obviosly wrong here... at least if we assume that traffic cameras are "bad".
For the slippery slope to be correct, there should be at least some indication that the "first step" increases the likelihood of the "second step" significantly. While not required for correctness, I think that it should be at least more significant than the benefit from the actual first step. So, if the traffic cameras are shown to be beneficial (accounting for privacy issues), the possibility for such a side effect _is_ negligable. And you sound like you mean that one causes the other, which is certainly not the case :) If cameras appear everywhere, I would suggest a common cause, rather than blame traffic cameras, you know. :)
The slippery slope argument doesn't apply here, because it is a falacy. While what you say might be true, and there is such tendency which I don't like, it doesn't mean that red light cameras themselves are bad. Just that one step further would be bad, doesn't mean that the previous one would also be. Just think for a second - if that was true, everything in the world would be bad.
And, about the traffic light cameras, I'm not really concerned about them. They might be an invasion of privacy, they might be not, but with the cameras springing up on the streets and everywhere I already lost that privacy. Removing the cameras that are actually _beneficial_ would be the *last* thing I would do. Not to mention that removing them first wouldn't help my privacy at all, unlike removing some of the rest.
GPL is certainly not the only free license. And what about people that go the "GPL\0for files in the \"GPL\" directory" way?