Technically, he only has to address the concerns of his district and constituents. The fact that he was willing to take the time to express his viewpoints for a forum which is primarily not composed of his constituents demonstrates that he went above-and-beyond, and I applaud him for it. Not to mention actually admitting that he didn't have enough info to have a position on something - a pretty rare trait in any public figure. Bravo!
I find it disturbing that so many software companies think the generosity of GPL software authors is an invitation to theft, especially
when those same companies would not hesitate to sue anyone who blithely disregarded their licenses.
Bottom line: if you don't want people redistributing your code, then use a different license for it. The GPL doesn't prohibit charging for free software, and in fact a previous post had a link to a page written by RMS encouraging people to charge for it.
The code I write on my own time and
release under the GPL is another matter altogether -- it's about freedom for its users.
I could also argue that Linux distributors have made your code accessible to many more users than you would have been able to do yourself, and so in a sense they have contributed something even if it's not code, and have some claim to remuneration for their services.
Or at least just preserve the orbit, and add on the pieces to the ISS instead. Launch costs being so high it seems almost criminal to just destroy such a costly investment. Sure, the parts of Mir may not be exactly right for the ISS, but at least you could keep them as unpressurized storage compartments. That's got to be cheaper than re-launching equivalent hardware from Earth.
That
information should have been given out, piss on AOL's policy. Not saying give that info out to every Tom, Dick, and Harry...but come
one now.
Have you considered that the person calling claiming to be "Mom" may have really been "Tom, Dick, and/or Harry"? If (as other posters have made abundantly clear) I really wanted to find out someone's real address, that's exactly the story I'd lay on the most gullible call center employee I could find.
AOL has rules for a reason - because most of the time, they are the right thing to do (OK, limiting legal liability is probably a priority too, but in the long run legal liability is mostly based on what we consider the "right thing to do"), and it's very difficult for your $7/hour employee to tell on the basis of one phone call when it's OK to break those rules. Heck, it would be tough for anyone at any salary to determine that sort of thing, which is why Mom should have gone right to the police, gotten the subpoena to give to AOL, and so forth.
It's true that you can't watch the kids every minute. But you can make it clear before letting your kids on the Internet that basically everyone is a "stranger", and you don't get in cars or accept candy from strangers. I still say there's some parental responsibility if your kids would countenance doing anything just because someone on AOL talked them into it.
Perhaps if you didn't WRITE in a collection of words that ARE randomly all caps or ALL LOWERCASE, and avoided THE ad hominem attacks, YOU would be more likely to not appear to be a TROLL.
Thanks! (p.s. damning the Bible probably isn't scriptural either, george:)
I don't know how Debian works or even if there is a company based around it. Nor do I
really care, since I don't use it, never have, and never thought about it. So it simply
does *not* fit in my "world view".
Well, that much was evident from your previous post:) Maybe you should check it out and discover why big software doesn't have to cost $millions?
It's amazing how a while back Linux proponents would argue that Big Business could make great use out of Linux if they'd just have an open mind about it, and today now that Big Business has started to figure it out, you're a Linux proponent without an open mind about different distros!
I agree with you that RH should charge whatever they want for their services and software, but you do yourself a disservice to not understand the alternatives to RH that exit.
Well, first off the CDDB went "closed" long before Napster came to them. I'm not sure when it was, but it was a while ago.
You have a good point about Deja - if CDDB took the whole thing offline because they had no money for storage space or bandwidth, I wouldn't complain (maybe other people would, as occurred in the Deja case). But when they take stuff that I've contributed with the intent that it will be available to all, and then charge me and others to use it, without providing me the opportunity to get my stuff back out of their database, they've gone too far. I have no problems with people selling freely available software or databases that I've contributed to, since I know I can also get it for free. But I can no longer get to my freely-submitted CDDB data (or at least I can't get it en masse, and I'm pretty sure they don't let you just siphon all of the entries right off into a competing database), and that's a problem.
Okay, so CDDB is no longer "free" in the GNU sense. That's beside the point.
But that's exactly the point - people submitted information on the understanding that it would continue to be freely available to all, and now it's not. I don't think many people would have a problem with Gracenote operating under the same terms as Red Hat, for example - anybody can grab RH Linux and sell it. But even though I submitted info to CDDB on the understanding that it was a free, open, and redistributable database, now I can't grab my own copy and distribute it. It's the change from "free" to "non-free" that is the big issue. The fact that the information is available for use by everyone, including the RIAA, doesn't come as a surprise and is really a logical next step.
I'll betcha a dollar, though, that they also have their
hooks into FreeDB and any other GPL'd free-as-in-liberty databases out there.
Good point - I hadn't thought of that but it isn't really surprising. I suppose their welcome to it - I'm willing to accept the consequences of a truly free database.
ObModComment: I found that interesting and as on-topic as my original post, but there's no accounting for taste, I guess.
I guess the important question to me is: does the increased likelihood of a potential victim being a gun owner significantly decrease the perceived benefit of committing a crime against that person, or against society in general when you can't tell whether a person has a gun or not? This is the statistic that the NRA (which I mostly disagree with, btw) should compile to really make their case. I don't have a good feel for this, but then again I don't normally frequent particularly dangerous neighborhoods. I imagine if I lived in a bad part of the city, where police protection was spread a little more thinly, I might be more inclined to be a gun owner. I would argue that unless the laws in Australia make it just as impossible for criminals to get guns as it is for average citizens, then the balance of power has still shifted toward the criminal element.
Here, we take it easy. Life is more important than what the "founding fathers" believed in. Who cares, just give up your wallet and
get back to watching TV. Better than fighting it out and dying. I only have a credit card and a few bills in there.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor
safety." -Benjamin Franklin, 1759. (c/o everything2, so don't blame me if this is a misquote.)
It doesn't have to be truly random, it just has to be random enough to provide the required level of unpredictability. As long as the TCP numbers are random enough that this attack is no longer the easiest attack to make, or else that an attack on the randomness carries X level of difficulty (time, space, etc.), then your numbers are good enough in the real world. This is probably doable on a router, especially if you add custom HW to sample entropy from the environment.
You gotta read the fucking licenses. The license is everything, that's how you know
what you're donating your effort to. You think just because they give you shit without
paying for it it's a "free effort"?
Was this the original license? IIRC CDDB was originally a separate, free online database and only got all pushy after having been acquired by someone else.
Oh well, if you're not using FreeDB by now, consider this your golden opportunity. We'll see how CDDB likes it now that no one enters any new songs into it. The public made them what they are, and the public can tear them down just as quickly.
OK, good point, but I don't see that that makes too much difference in this particular case, since most citizens are consumers of media to which fair use can be applied. Many of the proposed changes to the law from the speech would affect all purchasers of media, whether they are U.S. citizens or not.
I guess I don't see the point of saying "citizens" in this case; it's like saying "what about the effects of new airline safety laws on people" - you really only care about the effects on airline passengers and crew, so why bring a more general class into the debate when you don't have to?
The fact is, intellectual property is a form of property, and any law that
gives strangers usage rights to one's property over-extend legitimate government authority.
That is incorrect. IP is actually not property at all; it is only afforded limited protection under the law by the good graces of the government. If there has been an overextension of government authority, it is more likely in the direction of too much protection for IP, rather than too little.
So you missed the whole rest of the speech, where he was talking about how important fair use was to consumers? Even the proposal that you mention above is ultimately to the benefit of consumers, not big industry.
The only intellectual property law in Sealand is that child pornography is illegal.
Just a quibble: that's not really an IP law, that's a moral issue. An IP law would be: unauthorized reproduction of child pornography in Sealand is illegal.
Yebbut, the UK and the US do not recognise Taiwan (although the US did till 1971). Anyone who
believes the Chinese Government that Taiwan is just a "renegade province" is crazy.
In fact, it's the other way around entirely: the People's Republic of China is an assemblage of provinces which broke away from the national government, now in exile in Taiwan. Not that many world leaders will actually espouse this viewpoint any more, but technically it is true, or at least was until the PRC finally became recognized by enough nations and the U.N. to be a "real" country.
Not that I would support Taiwan retaking China - I'm happy that the Chinese had their entirely justified revolution, I just think they might need another one to really finish the job off right.
Since the 1987 expansion of Britain's territorial limits, Sealand has been within the
our sea boundaries.
Yebbut at the same time as that happened, Sealand expanded its sea boundaries. If you don't think
that is valid per se, then Dover belongs to France.
I don't see how you can expand your territorial waters over another sovereign nation and automatically retake it; the U.K. would have to actually conquer the island to effectively reassert control of it. If the territorial waters trick worked, don't you think the U.S. would own Cuba by now:)
"this is the president of the independant nation of Texas! We are under attack
by a forgien power and seeking international aid!" guess how many nations
stepped in?
Well, only one nation, but on the other hand there were really only two countries bordering Texas, and Mexico sure wasn't going to help out.
Of course it helped that Texas had something that the U.S. wanted; Sealand does not. Unfortunately, when it comes to international law there isn't really a higher power; even treaties get broken with relative impunity. If you want to have your own country, you'd better have some powerful friends. Sealand is toast once the U.K. can find or fabricate an excuse to re-occupy it.
Because of the whole reason there is an estate tax in the first place: the people (through their government) decided that allowing an individual or family to freely pass on great fortunes would quickly lead to the rise of a noble class here, and that's something to avoid. It may be the case that currently the cutoff point for "great fortune" is a little low, but that can be adjusted. Just removing the tax isn't the answer.
The reason that incorporation allows you to get around this is that (theoretically at least) corporations are more accountable to the people than an ordinary citizen, since they have charters that can be yanked, and since the government can destroy a corporation with less compunction than it would have for killing a man. In return for this greater governmental oversight, corporations gain effective immortality if they manage it right. So if you want the business to outlast you, incorporate it. If you want to use it as your personal fortune, don't act too surprised when the government comes for some of it.
This doesn't seem to have quite worked out in practice; it's turned out that giant corporations ended up having more power than the governments that created them, and so the world has passed from a noble ruling class of people to a noble ruling class of megacorps. I don't have a great answer for that problem, although a very progressive tax on corporate incomes (combined with stricter rules on what must be reported as income and expenses) might prevent these vast accumulations of wealth. But that's another argument for another day.
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Technically, he only has to address the concerns of his district and constituents. The fact that he was willing to take the time to express his viewpoints for a forum which is primarily not composed of his constituents demonstrates that he went above-and-beyond, and I applaud him for it. Not to mention actually admitting that he didn't have enough info to have a position on something - a pretty rare trait in any public figure. Bravo!
Bottom line: if you don't want people redistributing your code, then use a different license for it. The GPL doesn't prohibit charging for free software, and in fact a previous post had a link to a page written by RMS encouraging people to charge for it.
I could also argue that Linux distributors have made your code accessible to many more users than you would have been able to do yourself, and so in a sense they have contributed something even if it's not code, and have some claim to remuneration for their services.
Or at least just preserve the orbit, and add on the pieces to the ISS instead. Launch costs being so high it seems almost criminal to just destroy such a costly investment. Sure, the parts of Mir may not be exactly right for the ISS, but at least you could keep them as unpressurized storage compartments. That's got to be cheaper than re-launching equivalent hardware from Earth.
Have you considered that the person calling claiming to be "Mom" may have really been "Tom, Dick, and/or Harry"? If (as other posters have made abundantly clear) I really wanted to find out someone's real address, that's exactly the story I'd lay on the most gullible call center employee I could find.
AOL has rules for a reason - because most of the time, they are the right thing to do (OK, limiting legal liability is probably a priority too, but in the long run legal liability is mostly based on what we consider the "right thing to do"), and it's very difficult for your $7/hour employee to tell on the basis of one phone call when it's OK to break those rules. Heck, it would be tough for anyone at any salary to determine that sort of thing, which is why Mom should have gone right to the police, gotten the subpoena to give to AOL, and so forth.
It's true that you can't watch the kids every minute. But you can make it clear before letting your kids on the Internet that basically everyone is a "stranger", and you don't get in cars or accept candy from strangers. I still say there's some parental responsibility if your kids would countenance doing anything just because someone on AOL talked them into it.
Hi yourself, george, ethereal here.
Perhaps if you didn't WRITE in a collection of words that ARE randomly all caps or ALL LOWERCASE, and avoided THE ad hominem attacks, YOU would be more likely to not appear to be a TROLL.
Thanks! (p.s. damning the Bible probably isn't scriptural either, george :)
Bienvenue a France, vive le thoughtcrime :)
Well, that much was evident from your previous post :) Maybe you should check it out and discover why big software doesn't have to cost $millions?
It's amazing how a while back Linux proponents would argue that Big Business could make great use out of Linux if they'd just have an open mind about it, and today now that Big Business has started to figure it out, you're a Linux proponent without an open mind about different distros!
I agree with you that RH should charge whatever they want for their services and software, but you do yourself a disservice to not understand the alternatives to RH that exit.
I must say that your explanation rocks, but judging from the other stuff going on, the good Cmdr. hasn't ready /. in a while...
Well, first off the CDDB went "closed" long before Napster came to them. I'm not sure when it was, but it was a while ago.
You have a good point about Deja - if CDDB took the whole thing offline because they had no money for storage space or bandwidth, I wouldn't complain (maybe other people would, as occurred in the Deja case). But when they take stuff that I've contributed with the intent that it will be available to all, and then charge me and others to use it, without providing me the opportunity to get my stuff back out of their database, they've gone too far. I have no problems with people selling freely available software or databases that I've contributed to, since I know I can also get it for free. But I can no longer get to my freely-submitted CDDB data (or at least I can't get it en masse, and I'm pretty sure they don't let you just siphon all of the entries right off into a competing database), and that's a problem.
But that's exactly the point - people submitted information on the understanding that it would continue to be freely available to all, and now it's not. I don't think many people would have a problem with Gracenote operating under the same terms as Red Hat, for example - anybody can grab RH Linux and sell it. But even though I submitted info to CDDB on the understanding that it was a free, open, and redistributable database, now I can't grab my own copy and distribute it. It's the change from "free" to "non-free" that is the big issue. The fact that the information is available for use by everyone, including the RIAA, doesn't come as a surprise and is really a logical next step.
Good point - I hadn't thought of that but it isn't really surprising. I suppose their welcome to it - I'm willing to accept the consequences of a truly free database.
ObModComment: I found that interesting and as on-topic as my original post, but there's no accounting for taste, I guess.
I guess the important question to me is: does the increased likelihood of a potential victim being a gun owner significantly decrease the perceived benefit of committing a crime against that person, or against society in general when you can't tell whether a person has a gun or not? This is the statistic that the NRA (which I mostly disagree with, btw) should compile to really make their case. I don't have a good feel for this, but then again I don't normally frequent particularly dangerous neighborhoods. I imagine if I lived in a bad part of the city, where police protection was spread a little more thinly, I might be more inclined to be a gun owner. I would argue that unless the laws in Australia make it just as impossible for criminals to get guns as it is for average citizens, then the balance of power has still shifted toward the criminal element.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." -Benjamin Franklin, 1759. (c/o everything2, so don't blame me if this is a misquote.)
"Guns don't kill people - the government does."
Well, except for the odd criminal or two, right?
It doesn't have to be truly random, it just has to be random enough to provide the required level of unpredictability. As long as the TCP numbers are random enough that this attack is no longer the easiest attack to make, or else that an attack on the randomness carries X level of difficulty (time, space, etc.), then your numbers are good enough in the real world. This is probably doable on a router, especially if you add custom HW to sample entropy from the environment.
Vizzini: Watershed!
Inigo: You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
And they're doing it with our CDDB entries, don't forget that part. They're not lily-pure by any means.
Was this the original license? IIRC CDDB was originally a separate, free online database and only got all pushy after having been acquired by someone else.
Oh well, if you're not using FreeDB by now, consider this your golden opportunity. We'll see how CDDB likes it now that no one enters any new songs into it. The public made them what they are, and the public can tear them down just as quickly.
OK, good point, but I don't see that that makes too much difference in this particular case, since most citizens are consumers of media to which fair use can be applied. Many of the proposed changes to the law from the speech would affect all purchasers of media, whether they are U.S. citizens or not.
I guess I don't see the point of saying "citizens" in this case; it's like saying "what about the effects of new airline safety laws on people" - you really only care about the effects on airline passengers and crew, so why bring a more general class into the debate when you don't have to?
That is incorrect. IP is actually not property at all; it is only afforded limited protection under the law by the good graces of the government. If there has been an overextension of government authority, it is more likely in the direction of too much protection for IP, rather than too little.
So you missed the whole rest of the speech, where he was talking about how important fair use was to consumers? Even the proposal that you mention above is ultimately to the benefit of consumers, not big industry.
Just a quibble: that's not really an IP law, that's a moral issue. An IP law would be: unauthorized reproduction of child pornography in Sealand is illegal.
In fact, it's the other way around entirely: the People's Republic of China is an assemblage of provinces which broke away from the national government, now in exile in Taiwan. Not that many world leaders will actually espouse this viewpoint any more, but technically it is true, or at least was until the PRC finally became recognized by enough nations and the U.N. to be a "real" country.
Not that I would support Taiwan retaking China - I'm happy that the Chinese had their entirely justified revolution, I just think they might need another one to really finish the job off right.
I don't see how you can expand your territorial waters over another sovereign nation and automatically retake it; the U.K. would have to actually conquer the island to effectively reassert control of it. If the territorial waters trick worked, don't you think the U.S. would own Cuba by now :)
Well, only one nation, but on the other hand there were really only two countries bordering Texas, and Mexico sure wasn't going to help out.
Of course it helped that Texas had something that the U.S. wanted; Sealand does not. Unfortunately, when it comes to international law there isn't really a higher power; even treaties get broken with relative impunity. If you want to have your own country, you'd better have some powerful friends. Sealand is toast once the U.K. can find or fabricate an excuse to re-occupy it.
True, but the GNU toolset wasn't forked from BSD under any stretch of the imagination either.
Because of the whole reason there is an estate tax in the first place: the people (through their government) decided that allowing an individual or family to freely pass on great fortunes would quickly lead to the rise of a noble class here, and that's something to avoid. It may be the case that currently the cutoff point for "great fortune" is a little low, but that can be adjusted. Just removing the tax isn't the answer.
The reason that incorporation allows you to get around this is that (theoretically at least) corporations are more accountable to the people than an ordinary citizen, since they have charters that can be yanked, and since the government can destroy a corporation with less compunction than it would have for killing a man. In return for this greater governmental oversight, corporations gain effective immortality if they manage it right. So if you want the business to outlast you, incorporate it. If you want to use it as your personal fortune, don't act too surprised when the government comes for some of it.
This doesn't seem to have quite worked out in practice; it's turned out that giant corporations ended up having more power than the governments that created them, and so the world has passed from a noble ruling class of people to a noble ruling class of megacorps. I don't have a great answer for that problem, although a very progressive tax on corporate incomes (combined with stricter rules on what must be reported as income and expenses) might prevent these vast accumulations of wealth. But that's another argument for another day.