Right now they are breaking every copyright law in the book by allowing those posts to stay up. This is NOT a free speech issue. The content of many of those posts is copyrighted. What is someone posted an entire novel? It would be removed in a second. These posts aren't being removed because slashdot wants to drag this out and throw some mud on Microsoft. All MS is asking is for you guys to respect their copyrights. Is that so hard?
I know copyright laws go against your Linux/communist agenda, but these laws are what America was built upon. Without them, many great products would never have been created such as the car, light bulb, telephone...and Windows 98. That's right, Windows 98 is a great product. Anyone who says otherwise is a pro-Linux zealot or a fool.
You obviously are unfamiliar with how copyright (or most other law) actually works. Microsoft has informed Andover that MS believes Andover to be infringing its copyright. The response by Andover's lawyers is requesting clarification of MS's claims, while challenging MS's assertions. Just because a lawyer (MS's) says something, doesn't mean it is true. So Andover asks questions about the finer points of copyright law in an attempt to determine if the posts really are copyright material, and whether the posts actually infringe copyright law. Yes and No is a possible combination of answers to those two questions.
Part of what you don't understand is that Intellectual Property has limits, just as real property does. Andover is asserting (in the subtext of its questions) that the posts fall outside those limits, and are not subject to action.
Anthony Argyriou
Capitalist for Linux
ps: I quoted the entire post, because it isn't really a troll
This is just the sort of thing lawyers are for: Telling some bully to put up or shut up.
3. How can Microsoft claim trade secrecy for a protocol that is distributed over the Internet? 4. What measures has Microsoft taken to protect the trade secrecy of its Kerberos specification beyond the use of a click-wrap license agreement? 5. What measures has Microsoft taken to ensure that its Kerberos specification is only distributed to persons who are capable of entering into a binding contract in jurisdictions where such an agreement would be enforceable? 6. How could posting of the Microsoft Kerberos specification on Slashdot have any detrimental impact on the market for authorized distribution of Microsoft's version of Kerberos?
These are the crucial questions that a judge will have to decide in this sort of a case, and they all reflect precedents that other corporations have set, even if not tried in court. (Remember the Corel beta license flap about prohibiting minors? Microsoft didn't even bother to specify no minors.) And they're all framed in a way to put Microsoft on the defensive. Cool.
I do wish that something had been said about fair use, but IANAL, and wouldn't know how to frame that question, nor whether it's useable.
It's real good to see that Andover has lawyers who earn their pay, since so many don't.
Aside from the target market, ISPs, not many folks will have a financial or work-related interest. I certainly won't. I've only worked at one company that even had a mainframe, and I was a user, not an admin at all. I'm still not an admin, and it's just not that likely I'll ever work with an S/390 or its successors.
However, I still care. This is really neat stuff. It tells me stuff about Linux, Linux kernel hackers, and IBM that are all good to hear. Just knowing that people are using Linux in this way, and that it works, is something I care about.
There are plenty of things which I care about that have little or no practical use to me. I'm probably never going to go to Mars, or other planetary systems. I still care about the research being done on them. I may never visit South Africa, or buy anything made there, or know anyone who lives there. But I'm still glad that the ANC won without a bloodbath. Only someone with no empathy or imagination would think that only those directly affected can care about something.
Frequently asked questions regarding this vulnerability and the patch can be found at
http://www.microsof t.com/technet/security/bulletin/fq00-034.asp Issue An ActiveX control that ships as part of Office 2000 is incorrectly marked as "safe for scripting". This control, the Office 2000 UA Control, is used by the "Show Me" function in Office Help, and allows Office functions to be scripted. A malicious web site operator could use the control to carry out Office functions on the machine of a user who visited his site. The control ships only as part of Office 2000 (and Office 2000 family members, as listed below). The patch removes all unsafe functionality, with the result that the "Show Me" function will be disabled in Office 2000.
Is this a vulnerability in the ActiveX technology? No. This vulnerability results because of a manual error in marking the particular control at issue.
Sure. This time it's a simple error in labelling. What will it be next time? How many more simple marking errors lurk in Office or IE?
E-mail without attachments? I don't think so. It said *certain* file types. If somebody wrote a program for linux that allowed shell scripts to run when you double-click 'em, do you really think it would be any more secure? MS e-mail has been insecure because it has been customary to allow users to easily open attachments of any type. Period.
I would expect that most Linux users wouldn't double-click an attached shell-script without at least reading it first, and trying to figure out what it is. That's one of the benefits of Linux being "hard" - people using it tend to be "power users" at a minimum.
This is something that people developing "easy" distributions of Linux will have to work on and watch out for. If Linux really does become available for the masses, some of those masses will do some pretty stupid things. Imagine a DDOS setup distributed as an e-mail attachment!
One thing which makes Windows and Outlook particularly vulnerable is the relentless drive by MS to hide anything resembling a technical detail. In the default setup in Windows, file extensions aren't visible. So when the e-mail has an attachment "I Love You.txt.vbs", Windows (and outlook) hide the.vbs extension, and the user sees "I love you.txt". A plain text file is safe, as long as that's what the shell thinks it is. I hope Corel and others look hard at some of the MS Windows defaults, and the potential implications of them. Ease of use doesn't have to compromise security.
After Lenin, Moscow gave up the quest for a communist world domination. They were much more interested in protecting their own borders.
This is so wrong, it's almost funny. Lenin gave up the quest for world domination, because he did not have the ability. Stalin resumed the attempt once the Soviet Union was strong enough to try. Lenin was too busy consolidating his rule, and ensuring Communist domination of Russia, to be expansionist. Once Stalin had secured his rule within the USSR, he began efforts to destabilize countries across the globe, and took advantage of Hitler's aggresive designs on France to conquer the Baltic states and part of Poland.
From 1945, US policy was containment, preventing the spread of Communism and Russian/Soviet influence. It wasn't until 1981 that the United States began to actively attempt to roll back Communism and cause the downfall of the Soviet Empire.
Plans to explode nukes on the moon were part of our contianment policy - let the Soviets (and others) know that we had the ability to strike our enemies anywhere they might be. It seems like a pretty silly idea now, and even then, it must have seemed to be not a very good idea. After all, we didn't do it, did we?
It's the responsibility of military planners to explore all possible avenues and contingencies, even ones that do end up being dumb ideas. The ability to explode nuclear weapons on the moon would be useful if an enemy were to set up a military base on the moon. Demonstrating that ability was a proper subject for discussion by US military planners.
Do these two groups really need to merge to make decent internationalization a "fundamental" part of Linux? What is gained by a merger, rather than having the Standard Base folks read the I18N folks papers and incorporate them? I'm not implying that either group is unimportant, but merely that I don't see a significant change offered by an actual merger.
An announcement that there was a draft standard for implementing multi-language or unicode support in Linux distributions would be important. This isn't.
Therefore linking to a site that links to a site containing illegal material is also illegal. And since we all know you can reach anywhere on the web with 9 hops, the whole WWW is now illegal in Japan.
Hmm. The way the decision was worded makes that unclear - strictly speaking the links site _owner_ was committing a crime, but the website itself isn't necessarily illegal. However, the reason the judge gave for convicting makes it likely that any site with external links will be illegal.
The worst part is that the person putting up the link doesn't have to be aware of the illegal nature of the material to be committing a crime. This creates two problems
material that is not inherently illegal: Porn meeting certain standards is always illegal in Japan. However, a piece of music, a non-pornographic image, a text article, or a piece of software may be legal or illegal depending on the circumstances (copyright and license status). If I link to an on-line art gallery, and the owner is later busted for violating copyright, I'm in trouble, even though I did not know that the gallery was illegal.
Changes at the linked site: If I have a link to a risque, but not illegal-in-Japan site, and the owner changes his content so the site becomes illegal-in-Japan, I'm again in trouble, even though the site was legal when I created the link.
Expect some changes to this ruling, to address these issues, if the Japanese legal system has any concept of justice or fairness.
I perfer Open Source Software because it is the only form of software licensing and design which truly conforms to Marx's ideals: there is no special class of "developers" who weild power over users. Rather, everyone involved in the end product, programmers, users, documentation writers, even lawyers, can have a say. Further, it is the only system based on the socialist ideas of equality and egalitarianism. All people, no matter what financial status, have access. Improvments in so-called "intellectual" property can be shared easily among many people without the interference of those in power who would profit by restraining new ideas.
Actually, Open Source and the GPL are anti-Marxist based on your comments. Marx wanted a dictatorship of those who actually (in his view) did the productive work - that would lead to a dictatorship of coders in the software world. The ideals you're holding are much better than Marx's ideals.
The advantage that OSS and the GPL have over political socialism is that OSS doesn't become compulsory. If I don't like emacs' licensing terms, no one is forcing me to use it. In a socialist state, I can not choose to perform capitalist acts with consenting adults. In a capitalist society, I can choose to engage in a socialist-style project like OSS.
Among their somewhat-obvious insights is the somewhat-obvious comment that some folks work on open-source as a way to gain professional prestige.
Business schools and economists have a reputation for having a firm grasp upon the obvious. However, the reason they stay in business, and aren't laughed out of intelligent company, is that so many people, especially other academics, don't.
People don't work for free. Sometimes, though, they are willing to take their rewards in a purely non-monetary fashion. In the case of politics, power is the reward. For many other people, the sense of satisfaction they receive from doing something useful is sufficient reward for lots of hard work. Ask any insightful volunteer coordinator at the Red Cross or other charity. Open source software is a form of charity - one is providing a "benefit to humanity" or other warm-fuzzy, while doing something which is interesting and challenging, and not receiving money for it. I hope the biz school professors who wrote the report are familiar with the literature on charity and non-economic motivation.
Of course, sometimes working on open-source can have economic motives. If I'm looking for a job, and I can point to my work on hWidgetFoo, I'll likely get a better(-paying) job than if I can't point to it. If I've been working on software for internal consumption, like at a manufacturer, there may not be a directly work-related product I can point to and say "Here's what I can do".
Both points are addressed in the paper, but most of it can be summed up by a quote from ESR near the beginning:
The "utility function" Linux hackers is maximizing is not classically economic, but is the intangible of their own ego satisfaction and reputation among other hackers.
Good economists recognize that non-economic incentives exist, but many economists ignore them because they're too hard to quantify.
The original paper is at http://www.people.hbs.edu/jlerner/simple.pdfAmong their somewhat-obvious insights is the somewhat-obvious comment that some folks work on open-source as a way to gain professional prestige.Business schools and economists have a reputation for having a firm grasp upon the obvious. However, the reason they stay in business, and aren't laughed out of intelligent company, is that so many people, especially other academics, don't.People don't work for free. Sometimes, though, they are willing to take their rewards in a purely non-monetary fashion. In the case of politics, power is the reward. For many other people, the sense of satisfaction they receive from doing something useful is sufficient reward for lots of hard work. Ask any insightful volunteer coordinator at the Red Cross or other charity. Open source software is a form of charity - one is providing a "benefit to humanity" or other warm-fuzzy, while doing something which is interesting and challenging, and not receiving money for it. I hope the biz school professors who wrote the report are familiar with the literature on charity and non-economic motivation.Of course, sometimes working on open-source can have economic motives. If I'm looking for a job, and I can point to my work on hWidgetFoo, I'll likely get a better(-paying) job than if I can't point to it. If I've been working on software for internal consumption, like at a manufacturer, there may not be a directly work-related product I can point to and say "Here's what I can do".Both points are addressed in the paper, but most of it can be summed up by a quote from ESR near the beginning:The "utility function" Linux hackers is maximizing is not classically economic, but is the intangible of their own ego satisfaction and reputation among other hackers.Good economists recognize that non-economic incentives exist, but many economists ignore them because they're too hard to quantify.
That's a fine and dandy little law for you American folk to have to deal with... but what about us foreigners? I suppose that if you had a.com.net or.org address they might have some jurisdiction (as those domains are managed from the USA)... but the worst they could do there is take away your domain name.
If you're collecting demographic information on kids, you're probably trying to sell to them. If you're capable of selling to kids (actually, their parents) in the US, you have enough presence in the US for the US law to get at you. If you're in Europe, you're worse off, since the US will call your jurisdiction's cops, and say "these guys are violating even our extremely lax standards - they're probably violating yours, too". I don't know this will work in the rest of the world, but the real kicker is the money. If you're not making money from collecting consumer data, why bother?
And, if the Internet is "largely amplifying the worst features of television's preoccupation with sex and violence, semi-literate chatter, shortened attention spans, and near-total subservience to commercial marketing," as he says, then why doesn't he want to change all that by digitizing the Library's holdings???
There's plenty of sex on the internet, but TV is still the best place for violence. The semi-literate chatter on usenet is better than the near-illiterate chatter on TV talk shows and some radio talk shows, and the internet is thin on ads compared to TV, where 25% of all content is ads. Or maybe Billington only listens to National Elitist Radio?
is he a hypocrit, or just plain stupid??
or, maybe he realized what a pain in the ass digitizing the entire Library would be?
In which case he's worse - he's an arrogant ass for covering up his lack of capability with a veneer of intellectual snobbery. Unfortunately, Congressional attitudes towards the internet aren't good, with the liberals running scared of its ability to inform and empower actual people, and conservatives running scared of its ability to spread pornography. Otherwise, we could expect someone in Congress to slap Billington down for his snobbery.
Is it possible that the demand for open source code is to strong at times? Personally, I don't think so. What makes Linux wonderful is that if you want to change something, you just dig in and do it. I disagree with Love on this particular point.
The demand for open source code from the GPL isn't too strong. It's saying "here's our conditions for use", just like Adobe says "here's our condition$ for use". The terms are different, but you can always choose to not use the code/program if you don't like the terms. The demand for open source code from GPL advocates can get too strong, though. The GPL has its benefits, and Linux probably wouldn't have come as far as it has under a BSD license. However, GPL zealots, including RMS, seem intent on stamping out all closed-source software just as fervently as the RIAA wants to stamp out MP3.
As for PNG graphics, the issue up till now is that older web browsers will not display them. Fortunately, Netscape Communicator 4.05 and later, Internet Explorer 4.0 and later, and the upcoming Opera 4.0 will display PNG graphics files with no problems.
Opera has had PNG support since about version 3.50. The current stable version is 3.62, which has decent PNG support, and better CSS than Netscape 4.72.
The Gimp has the most goddammed awful GUI in the world, very illogical and poorly laid out.
A poor workman always blames his tools. GIMPs user interface is very simple to use, if you take the trouble to get used to it.
gimp's UI doesn't suck too badly, but it annoys me at times. The basic design philosophy isn't bad, but the choices of menu item placement aren't the best. While I'm not a great, or even good, computer graphic artist, I find Paint Shop Pro's UI easier to use most of the time. A menu bar that was always on (or could be set to always on) would be a big improvement fot gimp.
Gimp will never evolve to be a truly usable program for the end user.
GIMP already is a truly usable program for the end user. Many people already use it, and love it. It is one of the killer apps of the GNU system.
You're both wrong. There isn't a lot that is truly awful about gimp's UI, and almost everything can be fixed. Progress is slow, because new effects are sexier than UI improvements. gimp does have functions which are easier or work better than Paint Shop Pro, but the reverse is still very true.
Otherwise, Microsoft could have argued, "We are required by law to do things that cause the government to prosecute us for breaking anti-trust law or risk being sued by our shareholders."
Doing something illegal is never required by the duty to maximize shareholder value, because getting caught has a big negative impact on shareholder value.
Until Linux has a consistent system wide OS appearence for all software apps, better postscript support, 72dpi screen resolution, consistent color support across a wide variety of hardware (scanner/monitor/printer), and support at the service bureau I doubt you'll see Linux in the hands of graphic designers/artists anytime soon.
Most of these complaints are valid, though I'm not so sure about the postscript one. However, 72 dpi screen resolution is a historical anomaly. A modern monitor with.25mm to.28mm dot pitch is showing between 90.7 and 101.6 dots per inch. Forcing one's monitor to display at 72 dpi means using dots which are 0.35mm across, which looks pretty ugly once the anti-aliasing happens, unless your monitor's dot-pitch is 0.35mm (or 0.175mm). 72 dpi is a leftover from the Mac which displays text at one pixel per point so that 12 point type is 12 pixels high. However, this will not necessarily display the correct size on any monitor.
Besides, X can be configured to believe that 72 dots is one inch, though it is not easy, and the instructions are buried in the documentation.
Well, come on, man. It's more analogous to handing out lockpicking tools to people on the street. The vast majority of whom will use them when they accidentally lock themselves out of their houses, but a predictable and significant minority of whom will use them to break into other peoples' houses.
Actually, it's more like publishing a book on how to pick locks, with a listing of stores which supply the necessary tools. Hosting the DeCSS code itself is closer to handing out the lockpicking tools than is posting a link.
This is an obvious free speech case - telling people where something illegal can be found is protected speech. For example, if I told you that you can buy cocaine at a specific liquor store, using certain passwords, I haven't committed a crime. If you use that knowledge, you have. If I broadcast that knowledge, I've given the police a very useful tip.
2600, by putting up a pointer to the DeCSS source, is aiding law enforcement by letting them know where this supposedly illegal product can be found. Therefore, it is not illegal, it is a public service in aid of law enforcement.
It shouldn't be too hard to design or configure a news reader to automagically filter articles that are crossposted to more than one newsgroup, irrespective of content. I haven't hacked a.kill file in several years, but at one time one could filter out nearly all of the noise in any number of clever ways. Making this feature available in a user-friendly (read: GUI I suppsoe) fashion for an average USENET app shouldn't be all that difficult.
And, in fact, is available in all good Windows GUI newsreaders,and likely most Unix ones as well. I use Agent under Wine at home, and have a good set of filters which take care of most spam, and even most lame spam follow-ups. It's even possible to noticeably reduce the spam in the pr0n groups with a few intelligent filters.
Slashdot Mirror
I know copyright laws go against your Linux/communist agenda, but these laws are what America was built upon. Without them, many great products would never have been created such as the car, light bulb, telephone...and Windows 98. That's right, Windows 98 is a great product. Anyone who says otherwise is a pro-Linux zealot or a fool.
You obviously are unfamiliar with how copyright (or most other law) actually works. Microsoft has informed Andover that MS believes Andover to be infringing its copyright. The response by Andover's lawyers is requesting clarification of MS's claims, while challenging MS's assertions. Just because a lawyer (MS's) says something, doesn't mean it is true. So Andover asks questions about the finer points of copyright law in an attempt to determine if the posts really are copyright material, and whether the posts actually infringe copyright law. Yes and No is a possible combination of answers to those two questions.
Part of what you don't understand is that Intellectual Property has limits, just as real property does. Andover is asserting (in the subtext of its questions) that the posts fall outside those limits, and are not subject to action.
Anthony Argyriou
Capitalist for Linux
ps: I quoted the entire post, because it isn't really a troll
3. How can Microsoft claim trade secrecy for a protocol that is distributed over the Internet?
4. What measures has Microsoft taken to protect the trade secrecy of its Kerberos specification beyond the use of a click-wrap license agreement?
5. What measures has Microsoft taken to ensure that its Kerberos specification is only distributed to persons who are capable of entering into a binding contract in jurisdictions where such an agreement would be enforceable?
6. How could posting of the Microsoft Kerberos specification on Slashdot have any detrimental impact on the market for authorized distribution of Microsoft's version of Kerberos?
These are the crucial questions that a judge will have to decide in this sort of a case, and they all reflect precedents that other corporations have set, even if not tried in court. (Remember the Corel beta license flap about prohibiting minors? Microsoft didn't even bother to specify no minors.) And they're all framed in a way to put Microsoft on the defensive. Cool.
I do wish that something had been said about fair use, but IANAL, and wouldn't know how to frame that question, nor whether it's useable.
It's real good to see that Andover has lawyers who earn their pay, since so many don't.
Aside from the target market, ISPs, not many folks will have a financial or work-related interest. I certainly won't. I've only worked at one company that even had a mainframe, and I was a user, not an admin at all. I'm still not an admin, and it's just not that likely I'll ever work with an S/390 or its successors.
However, I still care. This is really neat stuff. It tells me stuff about Linux, Linux kernel hackers, and IBM that are all good to hear. Just knowing that people are using Linux in this way, and that it works, is something I care about.
There are plenty of things which I care about that have little or no practical use to me. I'm probably never going to go to Mars, or other planetary systems. I still care about the research being done on them. I may never visit South Africa, or buy anything made there, or know anyone who lives there. But I'm still glad that the ANC won without a bloodbath. Only someone with no empathy or imagination would think that only those directly affected can care about something.
The patch is available at http://download.microsoft.com/download/office2000p ro/Uactlsec/2000/WIN98/EN-US/Ua ctlsec.exe, with instructions avaiable at http://officeup date.microsoft.com/2000/downloadDetails/Uactlsec.h tm
Microsoft states in their FAQ:
Sure. This time it's a simple error in labelling. What will it be next time? How many more simple marking errors lurk in Office or IE?MS e-mail has been insecure because it has been customary to allow users to easily open attachments of any type. Period.
I would expect that most Linux users wouldn't double-click an attached shell-script without at least reading it first, and trying to figure out what it is. That's one of the benefits of Linux being "hard" - people using it tend to be "power users" at a minimum.
This is something that people developing "easy" distributions of Linux will have to work on and watch out for. If Linux really does become available for the masses, some of those masses will do some pretty stupid things. Imagine a DDOS setup distributed as an e-mail attachment!
One thing which makes Windows and Outlook particularly vulnerable is the relentless drive by MS to hide anything resembling a technical detail. In the default setup in Windows, file extensions aren't visible. So when the e-mail has an attachment "I Love You.txt.vbs", Windows (and outlook) hide the .vbs extension, and the user sees "I love you.txt". A plain text file is safe, as long as that's what the shell thinks it is. I hope Corel and others look hard at some of the MS Windows defaults, and the potential implications of them. Ease of use doesn't have to compromise security.
This is so wrong, it's almost funny. Lenin gave up the quest for world domination, because he did not have the ability. Stalin resumed the attempt once the Soviet Union was strong enough to try. Lenin was too busy consolidating his rule, and ensuring Communist domination of Russia, to be expansionist. Once Stalin had secured his rule within the USSR, he began efforts to destabilize countries across the globe, and took advantage of Hitler's aggresive designs on France to conquer the Baltic states and part of Poland.
From 1945, US policy was containment, preventing the spread of Communism and Russian/Soviet influence. It wasn't until 1981 that the United States began to actively attempt to roll back Communism and cause the downfall of the Soviet Empire.
Plans to explode nukes on the moon were part of our contianment policy - let the Soviets (and others) know that we had the ability to strike our enemies anywhere they might be. It seems like a pretty silly idea now, and even then, it must have seemed to be not a very good idea. After all, we didn't do it, did we?
It's the responsibility of military planners to explore all possible avenues and contingencies, even ones that do end up being dumb ideas. The ability to explode nuclear weapons on the moon would be useful if an enemy were to set up a military base on the moon. Demonstrating that ability was a proper subject for discussion by US military planners.
Do these two groups really need to merge to make decent internationalization a "fundamental" part of Linux? What is gained by a merger, rather than having the Standard Base folks read the I18N folks papers and incorporate them? I'm not implying that either group is unimportant, but merely that I don't see a significant change offered by an actual merger.
An announcement that there was a draft standard for implementing multi-language or unicode support in Linux distributions would be important. This isn't.
primeiro borne
primer poste
but would that fall under /dev/firstpost or /dev/first-post?
Hmm. The way the decision was worded makes that unclear - strictly speaking the links site _owner_ was committing a crime, but the website itself isn't necessarily illegal. However, the reason the judge gave for convicting makes it likely that any site with external links will be illegal.
The worst part is that the person putting up the link doesn't have to be aware of the illegal nature of the material to be committing a crime. This creates two problems
Expect some changes to this ruling, to address these issues, if the Japanese legal system has any concept of justice or fairness.
Further, it is the only system based on the socialist ideas of equality and egalitarianism. All people, no matter what financial status, have access. Improvments in so-called "intellectual" property can be shared easily among many people without the interference of those in power who would profit by restraining new ideas.
Actually, Open Source and the GPL are anti-Marxist based on your comments. Marx wanted a dictatorship of those who actually (in his view) did the productive work - that would lead to a dictatorship of coders in the software world. The ideals you're holding are much better than Marx's ideals.
The advantage that OSS and the GPL have over political socialism is that OSS doesn't become compulsory. If I don't like emacs' licensing terms, no one is forcing me to use it. In a socialist state, I can not choose to perform capitalist acts with consenting adults. In a capitalist society, I can choose to engage in a socialist-style project like OSS.
(My original post got the tags stripped by a combination of browser, slashdot, and user error. Here's what it's supposed to look like:)
The original paper is at http://www.people.hbs.edu/jlerner/simple.pdf
Among their somewhat-obvious insights is the somewhat-obvious comment that some folks work on open-source as a way to gain professional prestige.
Business schools and economists have a reputation for having a firm grasp upon the obvious. However, the reason they stay in business, and aren't laughed out of intelligent company, is that so many people, especially other academics, don't.
People don't work for free. Sometimes, though, they are willing to take their rewards in a purely non-monetary fashion. In the case of politics, power is the reward. For many other people, the sense of satisfaction they receive from doing something useful is sufficient reward for lots of hard work. Ask any insightful volunteer coordinator at the Red Cross or other charity. Open source software is a form of charity - one is providing a "benefit to humanity" or other warm-fuzzy, while doing something which is interesting and challenging, and not receiving money for it. I hope the biz school professors who wrote the report are familiar with the literature on charity and non-economic motivation.
Of course, sometimes working on open-source can have economic motives. If I'm looking for a job, and I can point to my work on hWidgetFoo, I'll likely get a better(-paying) job than if I can't point to it. If I've been working on software for internal consumption, like at a manufacturer, there may not be a directly work-related product I can point to and say "Here's what I can do".
Both points are addressed in the paper, but most of it can be summed up by a quote from ESR near the beginning:
Good economists recognize that non-economic incentives exist, but many economists ignore them because they're too hard to quantify.
The original paper is at http://www.people.hbs.edu/jlerner/simple.pdfAmong their somewhat-obvious insights is the somewhat-obvious comment that some folks work on open-source as a way to gain professional prestige.Business schools and economists have a reputation for having a firm grasp upon the obvious. However, the reason they stay in business, and aren't laughed out of intelligent company, is that so many people, especially other academics, don't.People don't work for free. Sometimes, though, they are willing to take their rewards in a purely non-monetary fashion. In the case of politics, power is the reward. For many other people, the sense of satisfaction they receive from doing something useful is sufficient reward for lots of hard work. Ask any insightful volunteer coordinator at the Red Cross or other charity. Open source software is a form of charity - one is providing a "benefit to humanity" or other warm-fuzzy, while doing something which is interesting and challenging, and not receiving money for it. I hope the biz school professors who wrote the report are familiar with the literature on charity and non-economic motivation.Of course, sometimes working on open-source can have economic motives. If I'm looking for a job, and I can point to my work on hWidgetFoo, I'll likely get a better(-paying) job than if I can't point to it. If I've been working on software for internal consumption, like at a manufacturer, there may not be a directly work-related product I can point to and say "Here's what I can do".Both points are addressed in the paper, but most of it can be summed up by a quote from ESR near the beginning:The "utility function" Linux hackers is maximizing is not classically economic, but is the intangible of their own ego satisfaction and reputation among other hackers.Good economists recognize that non-economic incentives exist, but many economists ignore them because they're too hard to quantify.
I suppose that if you had a
If you're collecting demographic information on kids, you're probably trying to sell to them. If you're capable of selling to kids (actually, their parents) in the US, you have enough presence in the US for the US law to get at you. If you're in Europe, you're worse off, since the US will call your jurisdiction's cops, and say "these guys are violating even our extremely lax standards - they're probably violating yours, too". I don't know this will work in the rest of the world, but the real kicker is the money. If you're not making money from collecting consumer data, why bother?
There's plenty of sex on the internet, but TV is still the best place for violence. The semi-literate chatter on usenet is better than the near-illiterate chatter on TV talk shows and some radio talk shows, and the internet is thin on ads compared to TV, where 25% of all content is ads. Or maybe Billington only listens to National Elitist Radio?
is he a hypocrit, or just plain stupid??
or, maybe he realized what a pain in the ass digitizing the entire Library would be?
In which case he's worse - he's an arrogant ass for covering up his lack of capability with a veneer of intellectual snobbery. Unfortunately, Congressional attitudes towards the internet aren't good, with the liberals running scared of its ability to inform and empower actual people, and conservatives running scared of its ability to spread pornography. Otherwise, we could expect someone in Congress to slap Billington down for his snobbery.
So is there someone at the FSF working on a truly viral implementation of the GPL for use with DNA computers?
The demand for open source code from the GPL isn't too strong. It's saying "here's our conditions for use", just like Adobe says "here's our condition$ for use". The terms are different, but you can always choose to not use the code/program if you don't like the terms. The demand for open source code from GPL advocates can get too strong, though. The GPL has its benefits, and Linux probably wouldn't have come as far as it has under a BSD license. However, GPL zealots, including RMS, seem intent on stamping out all closed-source software just as fervently as the RIAA wants to stamp out MP3.
Opera has had PNG support since about version 3.50. The current stable version is 3.62, which has decent PNG support, and better CSS than Netscape 4.72.
gimp's UI doesn't suck too badly, but it annoys me at times. The basic design philosophy isn't bad, but the choices of menu item placement aren't the best. While I'm not a great, or even good, computer graphic artist, I find Paint Shop Pro's UI easier to use most of the time. A menu bar that was always on (or could be set to always on) would be a big improvement fot gimp.
Gimp will never evolve to be a truly usable program for the end user.
You're both wrong. There isn't a lot that is truly awful about gimp's UI, and almost everything can be fixed. Progress is slow, because new effects are sexier than UI improvements. gimp does have functions which are easier or work better than Paint Shop Pro, but the reverse is still very true.
Anthony Argyriou
c.g.a.psp faq developer
http://www.alphageo.com/psp/faq.html
Doing something illegal is never required by the duty to maximize shareholder value, because getting caught has a big negative impact on shareholder value.
Most of these complaints are valid, though I'm not so sure about the postscript one. However, 72 dpi screen resolution is a historical anomaly. A modern monitor with .25mm to .28mm dot pitch is showing between 90.7 and 101.6 dots per inch. Forcing one's monitor to display at 72 dpi means using dots which are 0.35mm across, which looks pretty ugly once the anti-aliasing happens, unless your monitor's dot-pitch is 0.35mm (or 0.175mm). 72 dpi is a leftover from the Mac which displays text at one pixel per point so that 12 point type is 12 pixels high. However, this will not necessarily display the correct size on any monitor.
Besides, X can be configured to believe that 72 dots is one inch, though it is not easy, and the instructions are buried in the documentation.
Actually, it's more like publishing a book on how to pick locks, with a listing of stores which supply the necessary tools. Hosting the DeCSS code itself is closer to handing out the lockpicking tools than is posting a link.
This is an obvious free speech case - telling people where something illegal can be found is protected speech. For example, if I told you that you can buy cocaine at a specific liquor store, using certain passwords, I haven't committed a crime. If you use that knowledge, you have. If I broadcast that knowledge, I've given the police a very useful tip.
2600, by putting up a pointer to the DeCSS source, is aiding law enforcement by letting them know where this supposedly illegal product can be found. Therefore, it is not illegal, it is a public service in aid of law enforcement.
San Francisco State University's Physics and Astronomy department is doing a lot of the work on finding extrasolar planets. The lead investigator is Geoff Marcy, who has a page of extrasolar planet news notes and a page of links to other extrasolar planet sites.
There are more given in the LinuxPlanet article (which is where I got the other links).
that are crossposted to more than one newsgroup, irrespective of content. I haven't hacked a
file in several years, but at one time one could filter out nearly all of the noise in any
number of clever ways. Making this feature available in a user-friendly (read: GUI I suppsoe)
fashion for an average USENET app shouldn't be all that difficult.
And, in fact, is available in all good Windows GUI newsreaders,and likely most Unix ones as well. I use Agent under Wine at home, and have a good set of filters which take care of most spam, and even most lame spam follow-ups. It's even possible to noticeably reduce the spam in the pr0n groups with a few intelligent filters.