If this encourages companies to move away from Microsoft's office organiser software, it could make it easier for them to migrate to Linux. Interesting.
Remember that Huygens was to sink beneath the waves rapidly, but as it sank, it would take pictures of the ocean? So much for the wisdom of the scientists!
If Martians lobbed a probe at the Earth, they should also expect it to hit sea, considering that it covers 3/4 of the planet's surface. That doesn't stop some meteorites from landing on, er, land.
Perhaps the new FOIA can help here. If people start demanding to know what is within these documents, it might prove cheaper for them to publish as PDFs rather than mailing out paper versions. Remember, they don't charge you for information unless it requires significant resources to collect.
Plus there's not really enough statisitcal evidence to draw a definite conclusion about the cause of CJD. I think the government might have had a point.
The scare started long before anyone was considering vCJD. British cows were going mad. Even if there had been no statistical evidence to support the conclusion that feeding meat to herbivores is stupid, the government was very, very wrong to try to reassure the public in the way that they did.
They weren't saying that there was no statistical evidence to prove any causal links; they were saying that the meat was safe. That is not the same thing at all.
The former could imply that no research has been conducted, or that research has not found any evidence of a link. The second implies that research has been conducted, the results are in and there is nothing to worry about.
The government lied. They said that the beef was safe. They said this because the ministry of agriculture, fisheries and food was more concerned with industrial profits than consumer protection. They had no evidence to back up their assertions and their assertions were wrong.
If they can engineer a seed to resist Roundup, why can't they also engineer a seed that has a lower shelf life not allowing them to be saved for another planting season?
That is *just* what the world needs - to be planting crops that aren't sustainable without the support of corporate America.
I admire Lawrence Lessig. He has a lot of very good stuff to say about intellectual property law. But it isn't really relevant to food production. The idea that companies could use the law to prevent farmers from growing food is utterly ridiculous. There was outcry in Europe when Monsanto tried to introduce the terminator gene. IP law is not the problem in this instance. The problem is companies trying to get a monopoly on food production. It is such an obscene idea, that IP law doesn't really enter into the equation - at least in Europe.
What does Genetic Modification have to do with BSE?
When the BSE story first broke, the UK government tried to convince the British public that British beef was safe (there is wonderful video footage of the environment minister of the time (John Gummer) publically feeding his daughter a beef burger - but she refused to eat it!). Anyway, the whole sorry saga led to two things. Firstly, the British people stopped trusting the government when they said that things were safe. Secondly, people became a lot more aware of what they were eating and sensitive to production methods. Remember, BSE came about because of greedy farmers, with the encouragement of the Thatcher government, feeding dead cows (meat) to living cows (herbivores).
So, sensitised to farming methods, the British public questioned the wisdom of genetically modifying food. Most of the concern was centred around the impossibility of undoing any genetic pollution that would result. The UK government (Blair in particular) have tried to tell everyone that GM is safe - but thanks to BSE, no-one believes them.
Our government has passed laws making GM crops legal, but fortunately, there has been such a strong anti-GM movement here, that supermarkets don't dare stock GM food. Since BSE, the British public have become slightly more aware of the way that food is produced.
This means that there is no profit to be made from GM crops and so no companies are even bothering to apply for licenses to grow them.
This is one of the reasons that Europe became so anti-GM a few years ago (BSE being another major factor). The idea of large companies holding the world to ransom, trying to enforce their IP with 'terminator' genes and the formation of a global monoculture of stable crops do not go down well with most people.
Complete nonsense. Reading this from a European perspective, the fact that it was written by Americans jumps out from every sentence. Their notion of attitudes within the EU is way off, as is their idea that Europe has not yet had to deal with terrorism. There is a subtext of religious intolerance within the document. The fact that Europe is close to Muslim nations seems to feature very prominently. Yes, it will be difficult to integrate Turkey into the EU, but that has more to do with its size than its religious majority.
The idea that Europe will stop caring about the environment because of economic competition from developing nations is very laughable and clearly demonstrates how the authors are trying to suck up to the current US administration. There is very real concern about the environment and climate change here. Regardless of the economic priorities of politicians, there is no way that the youth of today, who will be voting in 15 years, would allow such a move.
In the introduction, it is stated that the future cannot be known. True, but this document is not even close. It is pure fantasy. US verbal masturbation of the highest order.
You are so wrong and missing the whole point. According to you, i can use your name and identity and send emails to your friends all day long with no retribution. You can have your friends try to figure out what's what. That's just silly and stupid to even argue about.
Your friends should a) know your real e-mail address b) know you well enough to know whether a message from you is genuine. If you don't think they are capable of realising when they get spoof e-mails, digitally sign all of your messages. It is not hard to do and it is very effective. There is absolutely no excuse for complaining that people may be misled into believing that you sent something if you do not take steps to ensure that they can verify real communications.
GPG - free, easy, effective. No excuse.
That's true in the USofA, but not in Great Britian. Truth isn't a defense there, and the wealthy use that to punish the tabloids for printing things all the time.
Truth is a defence against libel in the UK. The only reason that wealthy people like Geoffery Archer beat the tabloids is because they are able to convince a jury that it is them and not the paper that is telling the truth. Then again, the tabloids here tell the truth so rarely that it really isn't much of a challenge to convince the jury...
Sure I post under a pseudonym, but I wouldn't spend $5 to keep you from knowing my real name, let alone thousands in legal costs and many (hundreds?) hours of my time.
What if you live on the same street and are worried that the person trying to identify you is violent? What if you or a member of your family work for the person trying to identify you?
Perhaps John Doe is in a very weak position relative to Mr. Fitch and therefore used an anonymous form of protest because it was the only safe way to so.
I used to. Great place, but I often had cars stolen. I even started leaving all the doors unlocked so that there would be less damage to repair if I got the car back. They still broke the windows to get in! Installing a car alarm only attracted attention to the car and increased the risk of attack.
Removing the HT leads when you park can help, but there are kids who go around with a spare set. The only effective measure was to install a hidden switch in the LT wires to the coil. It made the car seem to have a flat battery when they tried to steal it. That way, I only had to go for a walk around the block when they tried to steal my car - they didn't usually push it far until they gave up.
if I want to create for example a photo sharing website, which involves a lot of custom code, can I still charge for the service (which includes hosting on the server that uses the software)
As the service provider, the FSF philospohy maintains that you should have the four freedoms for the software that you are using. The use of free software doesn't place any obligations on you unless you also distribute the software.
However, your question implies that you haven't really grasped the concept of the freedoms yet:
can I still charge for...?
Of course. You can charge to distribute free software. You can charge to use it. You can charge to create it. "Free" is about freedom, not price.
If you write some good software in-house (for less than it would cost to license commercial software to do the same job) that belongs to your company and your company alone, you have a competitive advantage over your competitors - that is, they either spent MORE money than you did, or they simply do not have the software do carry out the task.
Can someone from the open-source advocacy world please explain to me how this is a good trade-off for a business?
From my experience with defence engineering companies:
If your company can produce appropriate software at lower cost than the existing commercial alternatives, it is often the case that your competitors can do the same thing. Your "competitive advantage" therefore translates into each company doing the same thing.
This results in each company producing different and incompatible tools and having to train its staff to use the custom tools. Each company has saved money compared to the cost of buying the commercial software, but they have no advantage over their major competitors. The high transfer of staff between the companies means that it is not practical to hope that competitors will not know what your software does. Meanwhile, each of the competing companies have to bear significant costs for maintenance and training.
They also have great difficulty when trying to work together on mega-projects.
The alternative approach is standardisation across the industry. This saves the whole industry costs on maintenance and training and makes it much easier to work together. It also allows the companies to compete on their core competencies rather than on things which are only incidental to their areas of expertise.
Uh, where's your financial package? Oh, gnucash you say? Oh, yes, I just installed that on a new Red Hat Enterprise 3ws box at home. Gnome, what? I prefer KDE... Okay then, don't forget these packages - oh, and by the way, these are only available for Fedora core, so please spend hours digging for rhe3.0ws rpms prior to figuring that little aspect out.
You seem to be confusing separate issues here: the benefits of free software and the usability of one particular distribution of GNU/Linux. Doubtless you have your own reasons for using Redhat, but it is unfair to complain that difficulties with your distribution are sacrifices that have to be made to use Free software.
If you had chosen Debian instead, for example, installation of gnucash would be simple: apt-get install gnucash. Incidentally, it was this kind of thing that led me to choose Debian after getting annoyed with RH6 - I have never looked back.
of course you link in libraries doing lots of work for you. That's what allows modern apps to have many more features.
Quite. But the implication of the article is that the code is trivial because it takes so few lines to write. I could easily write a fast fourier transform program in just a few lines by linking to FFTW, but that doesn't mean that FFT is trivial.
I had to explain "Are you OK?" really means "Do you need more drinks?".:-)
Oh. I always thought they were just taking an inordinate interest in my well-being in the hope of getting a good tip (they do have to try *very* hard to get good tips from Brits).
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It is not necessary to have two parties explicitly agree on something. Have a look at the legal definition of "estoppel".
If this encourages companies to move away from Microsoft's office organiser software, it could make it easier for them to migrate to Linux. Interesting.
If Martians lobbed a probe at the Earth, they should also expect it to hit sea, considering that it covers 3/4 of the planet's surface. That doesn't stop some meteorites from landing on, er, land.
Perhaps the new FOIA can help here. If people start demanding to know what is within these documents, it might prove cheaper for them to publish as PDFs rather than mailing out paper versions. Remember, they don't charge you for information unless it requires significant resources to collect.
The scare started long before anyone was considering vCJD. British cows were going mad. Even if there had been no statistical evidence to support the conclusion that feeding meat to herbivores is stupid, the government was very, very wrong to try to reassure the public in the way that they did.
They weren't saying that there was no statistical evidence to prove any causal links; they were saying that the meat was safe. That is not the same thing at all. The former could imply that no research has been conducted, or that research has not found any evidence of a link. The second implies that research has been conducted, the results are in and there is nothing to worry about.
The government lied. They said that the beef was safe. They said this because the ministry of agriculture, fisheries and food was more concerned with industrial profits than consumer protection. They had no evidence to back up their assertions and their assertions were wrong.
That is *just* what the world needs - to be planting crops that aren't sustainable without the support of corporate America.
In the US, perhaps. This is not the case in most of the rest of the world. Monsanto is engineering a seed that produces better product.
Monsanto is producing genetic pollution.
I admire Lawrence Lessig. He has a lot of very good stuff to say about intellectual property law. But it isn't really relevant to food production. The idea that companies could use the law to prevent farmers from growing food is utterly ridiculous. There was outcry in Europe when Monsanto tried to introduce the terminator gene. IP law is not the problem in this instance. The problem is companies trying to get a monopoly on food production. It is such an obscene idea, that IP law doesn't really enter into the equation - at least in Europe.
When the BSE story first broke, the UK government tried to convince the British public that British beef was safe (there is wonderful video footage of the environment minister of the time (John Gummer) publically feeding his daughter a beef burger - but she refused to eat it!). Anyway, the whole sorry saga led to two things. Firstly, the British people stopped trusting the government when they said that things were safe. Secondly, people became a lot more aware of what they were eating and sensitive to production methods. Remember, BSE came about because of greedy farmers, with the encouragement of the Thatcher government, feeding dead cows (meat) to living cows (herbivores).
So, sensitised to farming methods, the British public questioned the wisdom of genetically modifying food. Most of the concern was centred around the impossibility of undoing any genetic pollution that would result. The UK government (Blair in particular) have tried to tell everyone that GM is safe - but thanks to BSE, no-one believes them.
Our government has passed laws making GM crops legal, but fortunately, there has been such a strong anti-GM movement here, that supermarkets don't dare stock GM food. Since BSE, the British public have become slightly more aware of the way that food is produced.
This means that there is no profit to be made from GM crops and so no companies are even bothering to apply for licenses to grow them.
This is one of the reasons that Europe became so anti-GM a few years ago (BSE being another major factor). The idea of large companies holding the world to ransom, trying to enforce their IP with 'terminator' genes and the formation of a global monoculture of stable crops do not go down well with most people.
The idea that Europe will stop caring about the environment because of economic competition from developing nations is very laughable and clearly demonstrates how the authors are trying to suck up to the current US administration. There is very real concern about the environment and climate change here. Regardless of the economic priorities of politicians, there is no way that the youth of today, who will be voting in 15 years, would allow such a move.
In the introduction, it is stated that the future cannot be known. True, but this document is not even close. It is pure fantasy. US verbal masturbation of the highest order.
Your friends should a) know your real e-mail address b) know you well enough to know whether a message from you is genuine. If you don't think they are capable of realising when they get spoof e-mails, digitally sign all of your messages. It is not hard to do and it is very effective. There is absolutely no excuse for complaining that people may be misled into believing that you sent something if you do not take steps to ensure that they can verify real communications. GPG - free, easy, effective. No excuse.
Truth is a defence against libel in the UK. The only reason that wealthy people like Geoffery Archer beat the tabloids is because they are able to convince a jury that it is them and not the paper that is telling the truth. Then again, the tabloids here tell the truth so rarely that it really isn't much of a challenge to convince the jury ...
What if you live on the same street and are worried that the person trying to identify you is violent? What if you or a member of your family work for the person trying to identify you?
Perhaps John Doe is in a very weak position relative to Mr. Fitch and therefore used an anonymous form of protest because it was the only safe way to so.
Well, I actually lived in Salford but my car was stolen from Manchester city centre as often as it was from Salford.
I can't believe that the film about how bad pirates are didn't make it into the list. I see trailers for it on almost every DVD I've ever seen!
I used to. Great place, but I often had cars stolen. I even started leaving all the doors unlocked so that there would be less damage to repair if I got the car back. They still broke the windows to get in! Installing a car alarm only attracted attention to the car and increased the risk of attack.
Removing the HT leads when you park can help, but there are kids who go around with a spare set. The only effective measure was to install a hidden switch in the LT wires to the coil. It made the car seem to have a flat battery when they tried to steal it. That way, I only had to go for a walk around the block when they tried to steal my car - they didn't usually push it far until they gave up.
As the service provider, the FSF philospohy maintains that you should have the four freedoms for the software that you are using. The use of free software doesn't place any obligations on you unless you also distribute the software.
However, your question implies that you haven't really grasped the concept of the freedoms yet:
can I still charge for ...?
Of course. You can charge to distribute free software. You can charge to use it. You can charge to create it. "Free" is about freedom, not price.
Can someone from the open-source advocacy world please explain to me how this is a good trade-off for a business?
From my experience with defence engineering companies:
If your company can produce appropriate software at lower cost than the existing commercial alternatives, it is often the case that your competitors can do the same thing. Your "competitive advantage" therefore translates into each company doing the same thing.
This results in each company producing different and incompatible tools and having to train its staff to use the custom tools. Each company has saved money compared to the cost of buying the commercial software, but they have no advantage over their major competitors. The high transfer of staff between the companies means that it is not practical to hope that competitors will not know what your software does. Meanwhile, each of the competing companies have to bear significant costs for maintenance and training. They also have great difficulty when trying to work together on mega-projects.
The alternative approach is standardisation across the industry. This saves the whole industry costs on maintenance and training and makes it much easier to work together. It also allows the companies to compete on their core competencies rather than on things which are only incidental to their areas of expertise.
You seem to be confusing separate issues here: the benefits of free software and the usability of one particular distribution of GNU/Linux. Doubtless you have your own reasons for using Redhat, but it is unfair to complain that difficulties with your distribution are sacrifices that have to be made to use Free software.
If you had chosen Debian instead, for example, installation of gnucash would be simple: apt-get install gnucash. Incidentally, it was this kind of thing that led me to choose Debian after getting annoyed with RH6 - I have never looked back.
Iron ore? Luxury. When I was a lad, we had to dig t'ore out of t'mines with our bare hands; and pay mine owner t'work there. And when we got home ...
Quite. But the implication of the article is that the code is trivial because it takes so few lines to write. I could easily write a fast fourier transform program in just a few lines by linking to FFTW, but that doesn't mean that FFT is trivial.
15 lines of code, but linking to libraries that do much of the hard work.
Oh. I always thought they were just taking an inordinate interest in my well-being in the hope of getting a good tip (they do have to try *very* hard to get good tips from Brits).
Funny ... but wrong.