what bollocks. how can you disrespect something that doesn't exist?
it goes something like thius:
the body is a fleshy mantle which (among other things) supports the brain. The brain in turn appears to hold the mind. when the body dies, the brain dies, and the mind is not present in the collection of non-snetient, non living protien strings, corpuscles, carbohydrates and what not.
so chopping the body that, whe alive, formed a large component of a manb we call einstein is no more disrespectful than shovelling horse shit onto your roses.
Excuse me if I seem ignorant, but how does the GPL prevent software authors from indemnifying themselves from legal woe if something goes wrong when the software is used?
good respect for the rule of law eh? Laws are not always appropriate for the areas they giovern. this is why governments have in place mechanisms for changin laws when they are no longer appropriate, are were insituted on bad data. The law should not be respected merely becasue it is the law, much the same as the President shouldn't be respected merely for being the president. They should be respected on their individual merits, and appropriateness for the situation they are trying to have mandate over.
You'll note that what you are referring to is NOT law at this time. You statement seems to indicate that you believe it is.
Also, I question the motive of "petty convenience". the open source movement has a very important role in ensuring that software companies don't let their standards slip too far. This, i feel, is a little more important than petty convenience. I do not condine the wholesale ripping off of software, but if a person can write software that peforms the same function as software written by someone else, then so be it. Having been through software IP battles, I know it is not illegal to write software that has the same function as somebody else's existing product.
The article states "But amateurs, and self-employed contractors who develop software for others, will be often be shafted because they didn't know about this problem. And we free software developers won't have any reliable way to avoid the problem. Ignorance is not really any defence. Just because I don't know it is illegal to kill people, does not mean that I shouldn't be held accountable for my actions. There appears to be nothing stopping the addition of a licensing agreement to new releases of software, indemnifying the author against any liability as a condition of use. Article goes on to state: "But we can't do this retroactively for software we have already released. Those versions are already available, people are already licensed to distribute them in these states--and when they do so, under UCITA, they would make us liable. We are powerless to change this situation by changing our licenses now; we will have to make complex legal arguments that may or may not work. " What, prey tell, indicates thet the new UCITA would be retroactive? I don't see how it could apply to software released before its inception, which would indemnify authors of previously released software to the extent that they had benn indemnified previously.
This discussion isn't about C being a good or bad language. The building blocks that make up the technology you used to post your message are based on stuff a hell of a lot earlier than the 1980s. You sound, to me, like a thwarted Visual basic programmer who could not come to terms with low level programming (not that C is low level: its a 3GL). However your point was very well made, with reference to the topic of this thread: you made an obnoxious, offensive reply to somebody's polite opinion. So while you missed the point, you demonstrated the premiies on which the original article is based. well done.
Many companies sell products that they do not use. The job of the company in these cases is to sell the product to other people, not consume it themselves. please use intelligent debate rather than flame, as flame just attracts negative attention.
Yes, yes! This sounds like a viable approach to countering commercially non-viable typically uninformed rule passing by technophobic politicians. (should we really have technophobes in positions of power given that the world is becoming tech-full?) This could be run like the SETI@home project: a distributed processing arrangement where ppl's machines only try to hit Ip addresses whilst in screensaver mode. I would be interested in receiving correspondence regrarding the production of such a system. matt dot miller at parliamentDOTsaDOTgovDOTau
i think the point is that not everbody thinx of Kimberly Clark when they say the word Kleenex, and even though some ppl still call a photocopier a "Xerox" machine, few ppl consider that they owe the Sharp AR5132 in their office to Xerox. Its a bit like the rollerblades debate. Rollerblades is a trademark, but was very close to becoming a generic term for the description of inline skates.
surely purchase of domain names with the intention of selling them to the highest bidder is a bona fide revenue making exercise. The practice does not appear to be forbidden by law (however, I am from Australia, and so am not that crash hot on us commercial law). There are many businesses selling products, items, or services they themselves would not use. is this any different?
How does the registration process for.com work anyway? for.com.au, the registry is maintained by Internet Names Australia, whose rules of cinduct indicate that they will allow registration of a given domain name on a first come, first serve basis, provided the applicant meets their requirements for claim to the domain. If.com is done on the same first come, fisrt served basis, then surely this move is a bullying tactic used by ppl with lawyers to frighten ppl without lawyers away from their rightto a domain name of their choice.
I thought it was an interesting thing to say. However my major gripes with the article in question are the author's grouping of NT, 98 and 95 into the same category, when one category is an enterprise solution, and the other is a home user desktop solution. Can these really be compared? The author also claims that NT has a better security model than 9x, but states that it suffers from too many bluescreens. I've been involved in some NT heavy scenarios over the last three years, and the only times I have seen bluescreens are on servers that have either been poorly installed/configured, or have badly written 3rd party crap installed on them.
I think you'll find that 2d grpahics suck by default on PPros. Remeber the big bitchfest that happened when ppl tried to run Quake on their pentium pro machines, only to find that pentiums of the same CPU speed produced better graphics? There are workarounds. The big question is, why are you running games on an operating system that cannot, in our wildest fantasies, be called a desktop OS?
Slashdot Mirror
phear you'sel' nah nah nah nanah phear you'sel', hey hey hey hey.
was slashdot down, or was it a pice of network somewhere? "...jumping to conclusions often lands you with shit on your face."
what bollocks. how can you disrespect something that doesn't exist? it goes something like thius: the body is a fleshy mantle which (among other things) supports the brain. The brain in turn appears to hold the mind. when the body dies, the brain dies, and the mind is not present in the collection of non-snetient, non living protien strings, corpuscles, carbohydrates and what not. so chopping the body that, whe alive, formed a large component of a manb we call einstein is no more disrespectful than shovelling horse shit onto your roses.
Excuse me if I seem ignorant, but how does the GPL prevent software authors from indemnifying themselves from legal woe if something goes wrong when the software is used?
good respect for the rule of law eh? Laws are not always appropriate for the areas they giovern. this is why governments have in place mechanisms for changin laws when they are no longer appropriate, are were insituted on bad data. The law should not be respected merely becasue it is the law, much the same as the President shouldn't be respected merely for being the president.
They should be respected on their individual merits, and appropriateness for the situation they are trying to have mandate over.
You'll note that what you are referring to is NOT law at this time. You statement seems to indicate that you believe it is.
Also, I question the motive of "petty convenience". the open source movement has a very important role in ensuring that software companies don't let their standards slip too far. This, i feel, is a little more important than petty convenience.
I do not condine the wholesale ripping off of software, but if a person can write software that peforms the same function as software written by someone else, then so be it.
Having been through software IP battles, I know it is not illegal to write software that has the same function as somebody else's existing product.
The article states
"But amateurs, and self-employed contractors who develop software for others, will be often be shafted because they didn't know about this problem. And we free software developers won't have any reliable way to avoid the problem.
Ignorance is not really any defence. Just because I don't know it is illegal to kill people, does not mean that I shouldn't be held accountable for my actions. There appears to be nothing stopping the addition of a licensing agreement to new releases of software, indemnifying the author against any liability as a condition of use.
Article goes on to state: "But we can't do this retroactively for software we have already released. Those versions are already available, people are already licensed to distribute them in these states--and when they do so, under UCITA, they would make us liable. We are powerless to change this situation by changing our licenses now; we will have to make complex legal arguments that may or may not work. "
What, prey tell, indicates thet the new UCITA would be retroactive? I don't see how it could apply to software released before its inception, which would indemnify authors of previously released software to the extent that they had benn indemnified previously.
This discussion isn't about C being a good or bad language. The building blocks that make up the technology you used to post your message are based on stuff a hell of a lot earlier than the 1980s. You sound, to me, like a thwarted Visual basic programmer who could not come to terms with low level programming (not that C is low level: its a 3GL). However your point was very well made, with reference to the topic of this thread: you made an obnoxious, offensive reply to somebody's polite opinion. So while you missed the point, you demonstrated the premiies on which the original article is based. well done.
Many companies sell products that they do not use. The job of the company in these cases is to sell the product to other people, not consume it themselves. please use intelligent debate rather than flame, as flame just attracts negative attention.
Yes, yes! This sounds like a viable approach to countering commercially non-viable typically uninformed rule passing by technophobic politicians. (should we really have technophobes in positions of power given that the world is becoming tech-full?) This could be run like the SETI@home project: a distributed processing arrangement where ppl's machines only try to hit Ip addresses whilst in screensaver mode. I would be interested in receiving correspondence regrarding the production of such a system. matt dot miller at parliamentDOTsaDOTgovDOTau
i think the point is that not everbody thinx of Kimberly Clark when they say the word Kleenex, and even though some ppl still call a photocopier a "Xerox" machine, few ppl consider that they owe the Sharp AR5132 in their office to Xerox. Its a bit like the rollerblades debate. Rollerblades is a trademark, but was very close to becoming a generic term for the description of inline skates.
surely purchase of domain names with the intention of selling them to the highest bidder is a bona fide revenue making exercise. The practice does not appear to be forbidden by law (however, I am from Australia, and so am not that crash hot on us commercial law). There are many businesses selling products, items, or services they themselves would not use. is this any different?
How does the registration process for .com work anyway? for .com.au, the registry is maintained by Internet Names Australia, whose rules of cinduct indicate that they will allow registration of a given domain name on a first come, first serve basis, provided the applicant meets their requirements for claim to the domain. If .com is done on the same first come, fisrt served basis, then surely this move is a bullying tactic used by ppl with lawyers to frighten ppl without lawyers away from their rightto a domain name of their choice.
I thought it was an interesting thing to say. However my major gripes with the article in question are the author's grouping of NT, 98 and 95 into the same category, when one category is an enterprise solution, and the other is a home user desktop solution. Can these really be compared? The author also claims that NT has a better security model than 9x, but states that it suffers from too many bluescreens. I've been involved in some NT heavy scenarios over the last three years, and the only times I have seen bluescreens are on servers that have either been poorly installed/configured, or have badly written 3rd party crap installed on them.
I think you'll find that 2d grpahics suck by default on PPros. Remeber the big bitchfest that happened when ppl tried to run Quake on their pentium pro machines, only to find that pentiums of the same CPU speed produced better graphics? There are workarounds. The big question is, why are you running games on an operating system that cannot, in our wildest fantasies, be called a desktop OS?