You poo-poo the lives lost as irrelevant, but that is clearly not the case. The Red Army continued to advance, fighting with whatever they could find, and incurring tremendous losses.
I'm not discounting them at all. It's just dishonest to say that (eg.) 10X more lives lost means the USSR was therefore more important to the defeat of Germany, when it's quite likely that if the US/UK found themselves in the same situation, could have fought the battle with a fraction as many lives lost. I also have to seriously doubt claims that the USSR would have prevailed, without the help of the UK/US.
but comparatively speaking, the WF was nothing compared to the fighting that was being done in the East.
To be fair, the reason for the fierceness of fighting is because neither of the two was significantly superior to the other. That was more the situation with the west, so it rarely came down to hand-to-high combat, as it regularly did in the east.
Disclaimer: my grandfather was a German soldier on the eastern front.
Perhaps that's why the eastern front is the only part you seem to know about.
France was occupied, Spain was neutral, Italy was one of the Axis powers -- who exactly was fighting? The French resistance? The UK was sitting on their island, getting shelled by Germany
You have an incredibly screwy view of war. Soldiers on the ground are far from the only weapon of war, in modern times.
The UK definitely wasn't "sitting on their island". They were fighting at sea, preventing supply lines (including the USSR's) from being cut. They were busy defeating the Italian navy. They were fighting across Africa. They were fighting in the Mediterranean. They were conducting air strikes on Germany. etc. All while "getting shelled".
Invading a country doesn't really end the war, when the army is elsewhere, occupying the rest of Europe, much of Africa, parts of Asia, etc. If not for the Allies, the full force of the entire German army would have been focused on the USSR. Things would have been far, far worse for them.
The USSR, on the other hand, turned the tide against the Wehrmacht in the Battle of Stalingrad, which was -- wait for it -- in late 1942.
The war wasn't over in '42. The German military certainly wasn't broken even in '44 when D-Day came around. There was a huge amount of fighting left to do. They absolutely did not "encounter relatively little resistance." The fact that the US and UK sacrificed fewer lives says nothing about how much resistance their soldiers faced. Things were only starting to turn, and the German army was still an extremely strong fighting force.
Small wonder -- the life expectancy of a Russian soldier at the Battle of Stalingrad was less than a day, can you really blame them for hating the Germans?
Understandable, but the anger would have been more appropriately directed at Stalin, who may have been the worst military leader in history.
if they are going to be dragged back to the border as you put it, it would probably be, because the broke the law (maybe, just maybe??)
The ignorance is overwhelming...
The guest worker program ties a person to a company willing to hire them. The company has all the power, and the individual has NONE. If the person so much as complains about the 100 hour work week, disgusting water, lack of facilities, etc., etc., the company dumps them, they get sent back to Mexico, and get nothing. The next desperate person, willing to put up with that, gets the job.
Living in Arizona I have seen construction, fast food, hotels, etc.. get over run by illegals and the wages are in the toilet.
The existing situation is NOTHING compared to what a guest worker program would do. Right now, it's illegal, so many employers won't risk hiring them. They also have some freedom to look around for better and higher paying jobs, unlike "guest workers", who would have no such rights or options. Also, the number of workers available, and to a much wider range of industries, would explode. It would be open season on replacing Americans with "guest workers".
BTW please inform me how it will further increase our national debt oh wise one.
Money from US jobs/services is being sent to Mexico, instead of being spent inside the US. Economics 101.
Mexicans sending money back home is not illegal,
Buying cheap junk from China isn't illegal either, but it certainly does increase the national debt.
if you had a choice between "Microsoft Windows" and "Fred Windows" which would you trust (forgetting MS's practices)?
Fred Windows, no question. I find random 3rd parties do a far better job than Microsoft ever has.
No "Fred Windows" that I know of, but I use a BartPE Windows on a regular basis.
Additionally, as long as they support the software, copyright should last. When it is officially unsupported, it goes PD. With this idea, you have a reason to keep code working (you keep the rights) but when those rights die, the public can actually USE them.
The devil is in the details. Microsoft would do the absolute bare minimum to be considered "supported" for centuries, if necessary...
One patch a year... One guy on the telephone support line, who's only there 1 day a week... A handful of copies of the old software available in various stores for a sticker price of $100,000... etc.
If you only fly half as much, you have half the chance of experiencing a crash. An airline with just 1 flight, that didn't crash, isn't incredibly safe... The only fair measure of safety is how many flights have been flown, with the fewest accidents.
Qantas has flown less than 1/6th as much as Southwest, who also hasn't had any fatal crashes, ever. Delta is #1 on the list, because they've flown still more flights than Southwest, so the few fatal crashes Delta has had, puts their statistics very, very high as well.
In other words, Qantas hasn't proven they are as safe as the other, higher-rated airlines. Maybe it will turn out that way, but to assume that to be the case is terribly biased, and not based on any facts.
USSR had broken the wehrmacht's steel backbone before US stepped in.
Except for the fact that you're completely wrong...
The USSR certainly put more pressure on the German army, but they wouldn't have stood a chance if the other Allies weren't there, also fighting.
Incidentally... Do you happen to know what country was surreptitiously sending massive amounts of military supplies and equipment to the USSR to support their fight against Germany, from very early on?
And USSR had to send in every man, child because their homeland was invaded and occupied, you mor*n !
Yeah, they had to send wave after wave of people, practically unarmed, right in-front of the strongest and most well-armed German positions, to be gunned down immediately... Now THAT'S how you defend your homeland!
As I said... Casualties do not even remotely equate to military success. It is, in fact, almost always the exact opposite.
Second, conservatives in America are opposed to illegal immigration and want to build a big wall,
No, conservatives in the US want a "guest worker program" where Mexicans are indentured servants, paid less than minimum wage, live in whatever horrible conditions the company choses to supply, and have just exactly one human right... the right to be dragged back over the Mexican border if they don't like it.
That will indeed be a very effective way to drive down the wages of American workers. What's more, it will further increase the national debt, as more and more money is sent straight out of the US, to be spent in Mexico.
The democrats, at least, want to legalize immigrants, therefore giving them the right to minimum wage, unionize, complain, protest, boycott, strike, search for alternative employment, relocate as needed, spend their wages in the US, etc., etc.
A girl doesn't just "get pregnant" out of thin air. The man is absolutely responsible as well and should pay his share.
Unfortunately, "his share" is considered absolutely everything. Divorce law is so insane that men have absolutely no rights, what-so-ever. You will pay every cent you have in child support, and after that, will continue to pay alimony until such time that your wife choses to get a job or remarry... or not. Such is the situation even if the woman was a drug addict, and completely unfit to be a parent. Unless there is overwhelming hard evidence that the woman is a horrible parent, and the man would be an ideal parent, the woman automatically gets sole custody of the children.
What's more, the man doesn't even have to impregnate the woman... Even when paternity tests have shown the child to have been conceived with another man, the ex-husband will still have to pay child support for the children his wife got through her extra-marital affair. In an even more unbelievable case, a woman was able to discover the well-hidden identity of a sperm donor, and have him ordered to pay child support.
The USA has its faults, but if you think you'd rather live in Saudi because women in the USA actually have some rights and men are expected to pay up for things they were personally responsible for, then you've got some issues.
Saudi Arabia is merely another extreme. The US is almost as extreme of an example in the opposite direction, horribly biased against men. Yes, in the US, wives can (practically) beat their husbands with impunity, while any man doing the same, or even just defending himself sometimes, can be locked away for an very long time, and if the wife choses to file for divorce, will be able to use that as grounds to get everything from him that should could possibly want, without question.
I have no desire to move to Saudi Arabia... But this is a huge problem, hanging over the head of every man in the country. Does anyone wonder why the marriage rate has fallen through the floor?
We can't handily win a war of bullets and lives against them, because they are willing to lose far more than we are.
That's horrible logic.
First, thanks to training and technology, we can impose unbelievably high casualties on our enemies, while suffering minimal casualties ourselves. That should have been clear from Desert Storm.
Second, thanks to extremely large bombs, we can kill everyone, everywhere, without suffering a single American casualty. Collateral damage is high, in such a situation, which we will not accept... But on the other side, the terrorist are exactly the opposite, looking for the maximum collateral damage they can inflict.
Third, you're mistaken, and the parent is exactly right. Until the entire world is free of every last terrorist, we can't be said to have won any wars fought in the name of terrorism... Kill millions upon millions of terrorists, every single one in the country, and when you're done and leave, more will come into the country, and continue the havoc. Even if you spend years to start developing such a reformation process as you describe, it will still be viewed as a (immediate) failure.
300 thousand. That's it. And we lost most of our people fighting Japan, not the Germans. Do you know how many people the USSR lost? 27 million. By the time we invaded Normandy, Germany was already collapsing.
It's pure and complete bullshit to claim that lost lives equates with military progress. Yes, the Russians lost far more people. No, they didn't play a bigger role in defeating the Axis than the Americans and British.
the harsh truth is that the USSR sacrificed nearly 1 in 10 of its people to save Europe.
The USSR sacrificed nearly 1 in 10 of its people to save itself from the invading German army. Also because life in the USSR was cheap, and Stalin has no compunction about under-equipping soldiers, and sending hordes to sacrifice themselves. With better military leadership, most of those deaths need not have occurred.
You could at least have PRETENDED to be fair, by comparing American casualties to British military casualties. Inequitable casualties are extremely normal in east-west conflicts, as well as clashes between developed/non-developed countries. Examples like the Vietnam war have over a million North Vietnamese dead, with only 60,000 Americans. (There were many South Vietnamese dead, but this is just an example, and the disparity is still very high.)
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Your comments here are just as propaganda-based, and historically inaccurate as the others you pretend to criticize...
You are get modded up only because what you're saying is overwhelmingly anti-American, which is always a popular opinion, even if completely unsupported by any evidence.
When the Shroud of Turin was shown to be fake the nuns didn't commit mass suicide;
Actually, there is significant evidence that the old test results (carbon dating and blood analysis) may be inaccurate. Additionally, other significant evidence strongly suggests that the shroud does, indeed, date from the first century.
For the purpose of software only, what about limiting copyright for a period of no more than seven years?
Okay, so the Linux kernel from 2000 is now public domain, and can be locked-up in closed-source, modified however desired, etc., etc.
IIRC, early 2.4-test kernels were being released around then, and so would not be free for ANY use at all, no matter how restrictive.
(Note: I don't actually disagree with you, but people seem to quite easily lose context when talking about copyrights and patents. Not quite so much fun when it hits close to home, is it?)
His argument is putting up a straw man that doesn't really represent what RMS and FSF think, and then knocking it down.
I started off with the same opinion, but then I started reading the (highly rated) comments in this thread.
While the FSF is no doubt sane, it seems there are indeed many people, completely ignorant of copyright and the GPL, who are repeatedly making the very same idiotic arguments he's arguing with... In response to his blog, people are repeating the same idiotic claims.
Obvious as it is... I guess it really DID need to be said after all.
The owner of the rights could have released it under a free license, or gave it to the public domain.
The owner wanted to make a reasonable profit on it, no doubt.
Get angry at the authors/publishers for abusing copyright terms. Not the law.
Quite the opposite. According to the constitution, copyright is for the benefit of the public, not the copyright holder. The fact that it automatically locks-up everyone's work, in perpetuity, is a clear flaw of the law, not the individual (automatically) utilizing the law.
Let's make-up a hypothetical scenario. Let's say shortly after you die, someone wants to public a book, filled with all your slashdot comments... You, however, are dead, and didn't bother to disclaim your copyright in life. Unless someone is willing to go to great lengths to find the new copyright holder, and perhaps negotiate royalties to some organization holding your copyright, on a project that is nearly worthless, then they simply can't do it. Everything you created, remains locked-up under copyright law, essentially forever, so that no one can ever use it, for anything. It benefits no-one, and puts anyone who risks violating the law at tremendous legal risk. The law is clearly wrong.
If, instead, the law gave everyone an automatic 20-year copyright on all material, and only extended it with the payment of a fee to a copyright authority, then all the material that isn't very worthwhile is free for public use in 20 years. Each extension should be perhaps 10 years, and the fee should exponentially increase, each term.
In that way, at least material that is 100 years old, would not continue to be locked-up, just because your great grandkids are making $10/year in royalties, but valuable copyright could continue as long as they remain valuable... and what's even more important, the public benefits greatly from them, as substantial copyright extension fees are being paid to the government, in the form of a progressive tax on lengthy copyrights.
(Of course, I'd also support just making copyright 20 years, and being done with it, but I know Disney would fight tooth and nail against it.)
How much content is out there, that is worth nominally more than the cost of distribution, but is locked away forever, to the detriment of the public, for approximately no benefit to the copyright holder?
If there was no copyright there would not be a need for the GPL because there would not be a restriction on copying, modifying and redistributing the source.
Closed-source programs are protected by trade secret, NOT by copyright, AT ALL.
Even if copyright is abolished today, you still can't change that binary you downloaded, back into the source code it was derived from. Disassemblers can put it in a slightly easier to read, format, but that's about it. With 50MBs of machine code, it's certainly not going to be easy to understand, let alone modify it, as you need to. And you can bet, as soon as that happened, automatic code obfusticators would spring up everywhere, to further frustrate attempts to modify closed source binaries.
the 'R' in DRM would not be there if there was no copyright. They had no legal basis of using any measure to stop you to copy the program. They can use technical measures, but if you defeat them, they're out of luck.
There is no legal basis for the use of DRM today. In fact it is just the opposite, and as things are slowly worked out through the courts, it will probably be found to be illegal.
And don't underestimate DRM. There are, indeed, 100% theoretically secure methods for restricting access. Right now, simpler methods are used, because copyright is the REAL protection against redistribution, and DRM is merely being used as a speed-bump.
As soon as copyright is thrown out, every piece of software you purchase is going to come with a USB dongle, that performs strong encryption and authentication, and it will take years, for each piece of software, before any workaround is found.
But the GPL is only good because it undoes the restrictions that the copyright places on you (by ingeniously using the very law that protects the copyright industry's content) to provide you the freedom the industry wants to deny.
That shows a horrendous misunderstanding of the purpose of the GPL.
If they just wanted no copyrights, they would put software in the public domain. If they wanted to prevent integrating open source software with closed binaries, they would simply put such a clause in the license. But they do not.
The purpose of the GPL is to ensure that any changes to GPL'd software, have to be available to everyone, in SOURCE form. Copyright doesn't do that, and lack of a copyright would never do that... quite the opposite really.
use two independent providers [DSL and Cable for instance] and combine them with a box. [I can't remember the name off hand, but they are available, or you can build one with a linux box.]
The "box" in question is simply called a router. Any PC can do it, quite easily.
The only hard part would be figuring out how to have 3) come online only in the unlikely case both 1 and 2 were down,
That's not hard at all. Any remotely advanced routing protocol has metrics that are user-defined. OSPF is quite common, and there are several open source implementations. Tell it that the satellite link is astronomically expensive, and it won't ever use it, unless there is no other route. Additionally, OSPF periodically checks delay, and when it sees the satellite link is hundreds of ms, it will automatically (further) discourage the use of that link, when any others are available.
You can even get around the lack of static ip addresses with dynamic dns services
That is a very bad idea. DNS likes to cache look-ups, rather than contacting every server, down the line, for every request. With dynamic IPs, you could potentially have your domain caches, pointing to the old IP address. And so, you may have people unable to get through to your server, on a regular basis.
For smaller companies, that probably wouldn't be much of a concern, but for anyone with a rather important website, it would be absolutely unacceptable.
yes they both offer (at least) 1.5 mbit downstream (and the DSL line may give you more). However, the DSL line is asynchronous, and may only give you 128 or 256 kbit upstream.
There's nothing about upstream bandwidth that makes it cost more than downstream, and nothing about DSL that makes it asynchronous. It's simply an artificial limitation by ISPs... because they can.
They are just now offering DSL with static IP
"Just now" must mean "from the very first DSL installation".
The cost issue is the same. They charge twice as much, because they can... It's really a trivial cost, under $5. Also, my dynamic IP address hasn't changed in months, and I imagine many others can say the same...
You won't get that [service] for $29 a month.
No, but it isn't worth a $900 mark-up, every single month, either.
I'll take the $100 DSL, and privately HIRE a few professionals to come out and fix the lines immediately, if I ever have such a need.
I generally agree that splitting Bell was pointless, and only the regulations really needed to be changed. That was obvious years ago, and it's brutally obvious now that they've been allowed to merge over the years into the current, non-competitive, duopoly. However...
Well, who's to say that competition would not have come along anyway, especially if "everyone" was so pist off with the old curmudgeon that AT&T was always portrayed as.
Umm... everyone with any sense.
Bell wasn't a natural monopoly, it was a de jury monopoly. You were prevented, by law, from stringing-up your own telephone wires across a city. Bell, and Bell alone, was allowed to do so.
It couldn't have been until modern technology, like cell phones and VoIP, that any competition could possibly exist. And even there, it's likely Bell would have refused to allow anyone to connect to the POTS network, and likely would have gone to congress and been granted a monopoly on cell and VoIP services.
How could competition POSSIBLY have even come exist without deregulation?
Unfortunately, none of the referenced articles/links specifies which of the various Creative Commons licenses will be used to release the debates.
That might be because there's no indication it WILL be CC at all...
If you would have clicked-through to CNN's press release, it simply says: "available without restrictions"
Nobody knows any more than that. Complaining about the different CC licenses, like CNN is trying to use a loophole to keep it restricted, is nonsense, and completely off-topic.
I can't remember one time when they talked to people who knew one of these mass murderers after the fact and they've said anything remotely like "well, he did talk about guns a lot" and "he went to the shooting range every week".
That you didn't hear it, or that you don't remember it, doesn't change the fact that is certainly does happen.
The statistics say the majority of school shooters tell someone about what they are going to do.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not discounting them at all. It's just dishonest to say that (eg.) 10X more lives lost means the USSR was therefore more important to the defeat of Germany, when it's quite likely that if the US/UK found themselves in the same situation, could have fought the battle with a fraction as many lives lost. I also have to seriously doubt claims that the USSR would have prevailed, without the help of the UK/US.
To be fair, the reason for the fierceness of fighting is because neither of the two was significantly superior to the other. That was more the situation with the west, so it rarely came down to hand-to-high combat, as it regularly did in the east.
Perhaps that's why the eastern front is the only part you seem to know about.
You have an incredibly screwy view of war. Soldiers on the ground are far from the only weapon of war, in modern times.
The UK definitely wasn't "sitting on their island". They were fighting at sea, preventing supply lines (including the USSR's) from being cut. They were busy defeating the Italian navy. They were fighting across Africa. They were fighting in the Mediterranean. They were conducting air strikes on Germany. etc. All while "getting shelled".
Invading a country doesn't really end the war, when the army is elsewhere, occupying the rest of Europe, much of Africa, parts of Asia, etc. If not for the Allies, the full force of the entire German army would have been focused on the USSR. Things would have been far, far worse for them.
The war wasn't over in '42. The German military certainly wasn't broken even in '44 when D-Day came around. There was a huge amount of fighting left to do. They absolutely did not "encounter relatively little resistance." The fact that the US and UK sacrificed fewer lives says nothing about how much resistance their soldiers faced. Things were only starting to turn, and the German army was still an extremely strong fighting force.
Understandable, but the anger would have been more appropriately directed at Stalin, who may have been the worst military leader in history.
The ignorance is overwhelming...
The guest worker program ties a person to a company willing to hire them. The company has all the power, and the individual has NONE. If the person so much as complains about the 100 hour work week, disgusting water, lack of facilities, etc., etc., the company dumps them, they get sent back to Mexico, and get nothing. The next desperate person, willing to put up with that, gets the job.
The existing situation is NOTHING compared to what a guest worker program would do. Right now, it's illegal, so many employers won't risk hiring them. They also have some freedom to look around for better and higher paying jobs, unlike "guest workers", who would have no such rights or options. Also, the number of workers available, and to a much wider range of industries, would explode. It would be open season on replacing Americans with "guest workers".
Money from US jobs/services is being sent to Mexico, instead of being spent inside the US. Economics 101.
Buying cheap junk from China isn't illegal either, but it certainly does increase the national debt.
Fred Windows, no question. I find random 3rd parties do a far better job than Microsoft ever has.
No "Fred Windows" that I know of, but I use a BartPE Windows on a regular basis.
The devil is in the details. Microsoft would do the absolute bare minimum to be considered "supported" for centuries, if necessary...
One patch a year... One guy on the telephone support line, who's only there 1 day a week... A handful of copies of the old software available in various stores for a sticker price of $100,000... etc.
If you only fly half as much, you have half the chance of experiencing a crash. An airline with just 1 flight, that didn't crash, isn't incredibly safe... The only fair measure of safety is how many flights have been flown, with the fewest accidents.
Qantas has flown less than 1/6th as much as Southwest, who also hasn't had any fatal crashes, ever. Delta is #1 on the list, because they've flown still more flights than Southwest, so the few fatal crashes Delta has had, puts their statistics very, very high as well.
In other words, Qantas hasn't proven they are as safe as the other, higher-rated airlines. Maybe it will turn out that way, but to assume that to be the case is terribly biased, and not based on any facts.
Except for the fact that you're completely wrong...
The USSR certainly put more pressure on the German army, but they wouldn't have stood a chance if the other Allies weren't there, also fighting.
Incidentally... Do you happen to know what country was surreptitiously sending massive amounts of military supplies and equipment to the USSR to support their fight against Germany, from very early on?
Yeah, they had to send wave after wave of people, practically unarmed, right in-front of the strongest and most well-armed German positions, to be gunned down immediately... Now THAT'S how you defend your homeland!
As I said... Casualties do not even remotely equate to military success. It is, in fact, almost always the exact opposite.
No, conservatives in the US want a "guest worker program" where Mexicans are indentured servants, paid less than minimum wage, live in whatever horrible conditions the company choses to supply, and have just exactly one human right... the right to be dragged back over the Mexican border if they don't like it.
That will indeed be a very effective way to drive down the wages of American workers. What's more, it will further increase the national debt, as more and more money is sent straight out of the US, to be spent in Mexico.
The democrats, at least, want to legalize immigrants, therefore giving them the right to minimum wage, unionize, complain, protest, boycott, strike, search for alternative employment, relocate as needed, spend their wages in the US, etc., etc.
I must submit that the case you witnessed was a (rare) exception to the rule, and not standard fare, in the slightest.
Unfortunately, "his share" is considered absolutely everything. Divorce law is so insane that men have absolutely no rights, what-so-ever. You will pay every cent you have in child support, and after that, will continue to pay alimony until such time that your wife choses to get a job or remarry... or not. Such is the situation even if the woman was a drug addict, and completely unfit to be a parent. Unless there is overwhelming hard evidence that the woman is a horrible parent, and the man would be an ideal parent, the woman automatically gets sole custody of the children.
What's more, the man doesn't even have to impregnate the woman... Even when paternity tests have shown the child to have been conceived with another man, the ex-husband will still have to pay child support for the children his wife got through her extra-marital affair. In an even more unbelievable case, a woman was able to discover the well-hidden identity of a sperm donor, and have him ordered to pay child support.
Saudi Arabia is merely another extreme. The US is almost as extreme of an example in the opposite direction, horribly biased against men. Yes, in the US, wives can (practically) beat their husbands with impunity, while any man doing the same, or even just defending himself sometimes, can be locked away for an very long time, and if the wife choses to file for divorce, will be able to use that as grounds to get everything from him that should could possibly want, without question.
I have no desire to move to Saudi Arabia... But this is a huge problem, hanging over the head of every man in the country. Does anyone wonder why the marriage rate has fallen through the floor?
That's horrible logic.
First, thanks to training and technology, we can impose unbelievably high casualties on our enemies, while suffering minimal casualties ourselves. That should have been clear from Desert Storm.
Second, thanks to extremely large bombs, we can kill everyone, everywhere, without suffering a single American casualty. Collateral damage is high, in such a situation, which we will not accept... But on the other side, the terrorist are exactly the opposite, looking for the maximum collateral damage they can inflict.
Third, you're mistaken, and the parent is exactly right. Until the entire world is free of every last terrorist, we can't be said to have won any wars fought in the name of terrorism... Kill millions upon millions of terrorists, every single one in the country, and when you're done and leave, more will come into the country, and continue the havoc. Even if you spend years to start developing such a reformation process as you describe, it will still be viewed as a (immediate) failure.
It's pure and complete bullshit to claim that lost lives equates with military progress. Yes, the Russians lost far more people. No, they didn't play a bigger role in defeating the Axis than the Americans and British.
The USSR sacrificed nearly 1 in 10 of its people to save itself from the invading German army. Also because life in the USSR was cheap, and Stalin has no compunction about under-equipping soldiers, and sending hordes to sacrifice themselves. With better military leadership, most of those deaths need not have occurred.
You could at least have PRETENDED to be fair, by comparing American casualties to British military casualties. Inequitable casualties are extremely normal in east-west conflicts, as well as clashes between developed/non-developed countries. Examples like the Vietnam war have over a million North Vietnamese dead, with only 60,000 Americans. (There were many South Vietnamese dead, but this is just an example, and the disparity is still very high.)
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Your comments here are just as propaganda-based, and historically inaccurate as the others you pretend to criticize...
You are get modded up only because what you're saying is overwhelmingly anti-American, which is always a popular opinion, even if completely unsupported by any evidence.
Actually, there is significant evidence that the old test results (carbon dating and blood analysis) may be inaccurate. Additionally, other significant evidence strongly suggests that the shroud does, indeed, date from the first century.
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/secrets/case_shroudchrist
Okay, so the Linux kernel from 2000 is now public domain, and can be locked-up in closed-source, modified however desired, etc., etc.
IIRC, early 2.4-test kernels were being released around then, and so would not be free for ANY use at all, no matter how restrictive.
(Note: I don't actually disagree with you, but people seem to quite easily lose context when talking about copyrights and patents. Not quite so much fun when it hits close to home, is it?)
I started off with the same opinion, but then I started reading the (highly rated) comments in this thread.
While the FSF is no doubt sane, it seems there are indeed many people, completely ignorant of copyright and the GPL, who are repeatedly making the very same idiotic arguments he's arguing with... In response to his blog, people are repeating the same idiotic claims.
Obvious as it is... I guess it really DID need to be said after all.
The owner wanted to make a reasonable profit on it, no doubt.
Quite the opposite. According to the constitution, copyright is for the benefit of the public, not the copyright holder. The fact that it automatically locks-up everyone's work, in perpetuity, is a clear flaw of the law, not the individual (automatically) utilizing the law.
Let's make-up a hypothetical scenario. Let's say shortly after you die, someone wants to public a book, filled with all your slashdot comments... You, however, are dead, and didn't bother to disclaim your copyright in life. Unless someone is willing to go to great lengths to find the new copyright holder, and perhaps negotiate royalties to some organization holding your copyright, on a project that is nearly worthless, then they simply can't do it. Everything you created, remains locked-up under copyright law, essentially forever, so that no one can ever use it, for anything. It benefits no-one, and puts anyone who risks violating the law at tremendous legal risk. The law is clearly wrong.
If, instead, the law gave everyone an automatic 20-year copyright on all material, and only extended it with the payment of a fee to a copyright authority, then all the material that isn't very worthwhile is free for public use in 20 years. Each extension should be perhaps 10 years, and the fee should exponentially increase, each term.
In that way, at least material that is 100 years old, would not continue to be locked-up, just because your great grandkids are making $10/year in royalties, but valuable copyright could continue as long as they remain valuable... and what's even more important, the public benefits greatly from them, as substantial copyright extension fees are being paid to the government, in the form of a progressive tax on lengthy copyrights.
(Of course, I'd also support just making copyright 20 years, and being done with it, but I know Disney would fight tooth and nail against it.)
How much content is out there, that is worth nominally more than the cost of distribution, but is locked away forever, to the detriment of the public, for approximately no benefit to the copyright holder?
Closed-source programs are protected by trade secret, NOT by copyright, AT ALL.
Even if copyright is abolished today, you still can't change that binary you downloaded, back into the source code it was derived from. Disassemblers can put it in a slightly easier to read, format, but that's about it. With 50MBs of machine code, it's certainly not going to be easy to understand, let alone modify it, as you need to. And you can bet, as soon as that happened, automatic code obfusticators would spring up everywhere, to further frustrate attempts to modify closed source binaries.
There is no legal basis for the use of DRM today. In fact it is just the opposite, and as things are slowly worked out through the courts, it will probably be found to be illegal.
And don't underestimate DRM. There are, indeed, 100% theoretically secure methods for restricting access. Right now, simpler methods are used, because copyright is the REAL protection against redistribution, and DRM is merely being used as a speed-bump.
As soon as copyright is thrown out, every piece of software you purchase is going to come with a USB dongle, that performs strong encryption and authentication, and it will take years, for each piece of software, before any workaround is found.
That shows a horrendous misunderstanding of the purpose of the GPL.
If they just wanted no copyrights, they would put software in the public domain. If they wanted to prevent integrating open source software with closed binaries, they would simply put such a clause in the license. But they do not.
The purpose of the GPL is to ensure that any changes to GPL'd software, have to be available to everyone, in SOURCE form. Copyright doesn't do that, and lack of a copyright would never do that... quite the opposite really.
The "box" in question is simply called a router. Any PC can do it, quite easily.
That's not hard at all. Any remotely advanced routing protocol has metrics that are user-defined. OSPF is quite common, and there are several open source implementations. Tell it that the satellite link is astronomically expensive, and it won't ever use it, unless there is no other route. Additionally, OSPF periodically checks delay, and when it sees the satellite link is hundreds of ms, it will automatically (further) discourage the use of that link, when any others are available.
That is a very bad idea. DNS likes to cache look-ups, rather than contacting every server, down the line, for every request. With dynamic IPs, you could potentially have your domain caches, pointing to the old IP address. And so, you may have people unable to get through to your server, on a regular basis.
For smaller companies, that probably wouldn't be much of a concern, but for anyone with a rather important website, it would be absolutely unacceptable.
Yes, that could be an issue... But that's absolutely, positively, NOT SCARY, in any way, shape, or form.
There's nothing about upstream bandwidth that makes it cost more than downstream, and nothing about DSL that makes it asynchronous. It's simply an artificial limitation by ISPs... because they can.
"Just now" must mean "from the very first DSL installation".
The cost issue is the same. They charge twice as much, because they can... It's really a trivial cost, under $5. Also, my dynamic IP address hasn't changed in months, and I imagine many others can say the same...
No, but it isn't worth a $900 mark-up, every single month, either.
I'll take the $100 DSL, and privately HIRE a few professionals to come out and fix the lines immediately, if I ever have such a need.
What are you, an economics drop-out? There have been numerous, real-world examples of natural monopolies in the past.
Don't you mean: as easily as any EMAIL? Seems more appropriate, IMHO.
Umm... everyone with any sense.
Bell wasn't a natural monopoly, it was a de jury monopoly. You were prevented, by law, from stringing-up your own telephone wires across a city. Bell, and Bell alone, was allowed to do so.
It couldn't have been until modern technology, like cell phones and VoIP, that any competition could possibly exist. And even there, it's likely Bell would have refused to allow anyone to connect to the POTS network, and likely would have gone to congress and been granted a monopoly on cell and VoIP services.
How could competition POSSIBLY have even come exist without deregulation?
That might be because there's no indication it WILL be CC at all...
If you would have clicked-through to CNN's press release, it simply says: "available without restrictions"
Nobody knows any more than that. Complaining about the different CC licenses, like CNN is trying to use a loophole to keep it restricted, is nonsense, and completely off-topic.
That you didn't hear it, or that you don't remember it, doesn't change the fact that is certainly does happen.
The statistics say the majority of school shooters tell someone about what they are going to do.