...but in the end the politicians, even though they agreed it was a bad law, did not dare go up against EU. The law was toned down slightly, and the notes to the law (which have a semi-legal status) explicitly says that you are allowed to break encryption in order to access the material from Linux (they explicitly mention Linux, but I hope that will be interpreted as an example).
Precompiled headers aren't much use with C, but for any C++ program that uses iostreams or STL it is godsend.
I have no idea whether those libraries could be rewritten to have small headers, it would probably require a working version of the "export" keyword at least, but I don't know if that is enough.
Like everyone else in Denmark, I use SMS and haven't experienced failures or heard others complain about them.
My phone also have WAP. I have yet to successfully extract any kjind of information from that, and I don't know anyone else around here who even claim to be able to use WAP.
All it would take is hiring a stupid CEO who would turn Google into a portal, or some future buzzword equivalent.
Google is cool because their management have understood what the users wanted, and provided it, in spite of whatever was the "common wisom" among managers at the time.
"Muad'Dave" is just demonstrating Alan Alda's claim that the american public has started thinking of science as "just another religion" which SOME "believe" in and some don't.
Robotic exploration seems to make much more sense, but in terms of scientific results (you can explore more with robots because it is cheaper), with regard to commercial potential (again, robots are cheaper, thus likely to be useful for later profitable space enterprises), and with regard to generally useful technological development.
Eventually humans should return to the Moon and reach Mars, but let the robots pawe the road for us first.
and US would lose its edge fast. The best minds of the world are immigrating to the US, and that means the US is dominating in most fields of science and technology.
If the unions succeed in stopping this immigration, it would mean a huge setback for the industry, and would cause large unemployment among the members of the same unions.
However, it might help the rest of the world, as we might be able to keep more of our brightest minds at home.
It was a program for file transfer over a modem, and rather important for it s time. It was free software before the term was defined, and had an restriction on use: "may not be used for military purposes". Real anti-militaristic software of the hippie area.
The "not for commercial purposes" wasn't just a hope that someone would bue a commercial license back then, as it usually is today. It was an anti-capitalistic message.
So this kind of politics through software is not new, I actually suspect that we have much less of it these days with the attempt to put more formal requirements on free (open source) software.
It is important to notice that the light cones for all humans being (dead, living, and in all probability those not yet born), are not just ovrlapping, they are for all practical purposes identical, because we all live so close together (cosmologically speaking) in both time and space.
There is a sad tendency of some less honrable people at humaniora to try to tie their pet models of the weak (consensus reality, social consructionism, cultural relativism, whatever it is called this month) to physical theories like quantum physics and even Einsteins relativity theory, apparently to give them some extra credibility.
Apart from it being bad science to apply models outside their domain, these attempt are never really based on more than some shared terms, even if this usually is hidden by a flood of words.
The models humaniora are actually pretty good in their own domain, as long as one remember they are models useful for dealing with a limited range of problems, and does not attempt to interpret them as metaphysical truths.
Thanks to a recent change in law, these people can enter my house and confiscate my computer "for examination" on suspision alone. They still need a foged (kind of minor judge) to give permission, but before only the policy could do the above, now private organizations have that power.
They also try to pressure ISP's and lawmakers to ban technologies that *can* be used for illegal purposes, like bloking mp3 files.
And with the DMCA becomming adopted to EU law next year, I *will* be doing something illegal when I watch my own legit DVD's under Linux.
I'm a bit surprised this is news, as it has been going on for a couple of years. APG *is* representying a specific set of companies (or rather branche organisations), and they do not care about content not originating from one of the members.
They are evil though, they systematically lies to the public about technical matters (like claiming MP3 files are illegal), try to pressure ISP's to block them, run scary campaignis in TV spots, show no mercy to kids, claim ridiculous damages,confiscate hardware even when they have found no unautorized material on site "to search further". They did successfully lobby a change in the law so they can confiscate private property on "reasonable suspicion", something only the police could do before.
They would fell quite at homne at Wolfram & Hart.
We totally lack an efficient civil liberties organization to stand up aginst these guys.
It is not fun watching my country dissolve into a police state, and it is getting a lot worse now than Denmark (thanks to the EU) is adopting the DMCA almost litteraly, which mean even "common sense" usage like playing a "protected CD" you paid for under Linux is going to be illegal.
Oh, and selling Region 1 DVD's will soon be illegal as well. We can still import them privately, but many small shops selling imported R1 DVD's are going down. It is even going to be illegal to resell American comic books, but at least the national comic book publishers are not planning to enforce that part of the law.
So, no, it is not strange. You are just an example of what has happened to email, it has become a communication media for people who already have contact, thanks to spam.
Even when I lived in the US, I got at most one per day. Today where I live in a country where such calls are illegal, I get one a year at most. The difference is of course that phone calls are expensive, especially from other countries (where such calls may be legal).
If you do not give away your email address except to "trusted" people, you are basically implementing a whitelist by hand.
I find this to be a perfectly valid spam defence, just like a tmda whitelist, and one I believe more in that increasingly sofisticated blacklist filtering.
However, it does not change the fact that email has changed character, from a method to inititate contact with people, into a method which people who already have contact can communicate.
At least tmda based whitelists will still allow strangers to contact you, even if it is slightly more work than it used to be. With manual whitelisting, that option is out.
If I was charged for the mails send by these mailing lists, I'd probably have to close them down. Or rather, the nice site hosting the lists would probably stop that service.
You cannot get the source, which basically makes the game uninteresting.
I gave up on non-free roguelikes after getting killed by a bus error just before escaping urogue. If I'm going to get my character killed by bugs, I want to be able to take revenge and kill the bugs in return.
unless you have gotten permission to do so. It is very distracting and in my opinion rude. Feel free to email him. It may not be as efficient (an email is easy to ignore), but it is a lot more considerate because it is easy to ignore, or postpone until he has time. The developer may _choose_ to provide free support, in addition to providing the free software, but he has no obligation to do so.
If you bought the distribution, the people who sold it to you is as accountable as people who sell non-free software. But please use common sense, if you bought a Red Hat distribution from CheapBytes for US$ 1.99, neither Red Hat nor CheapBytes have much moral obligation to provide support.
It is far more profitable to either kill or join with your competitors, than to compete with them by offering better products at lower prices. This is why a strong government is needed to ensure a working market, based a continues struggle to provide better goods at lower prices than your compatitors.
Without such a strong government, producents will join force in guilds, who keep the market closed to outsiders, by force if necessary. This was the situation until the development of nation states with a strong King as the leader.
Unfortunately, this violates the foundation for the Libertarian belief, namely that all evil is created by government and all good come from the market. And as always when belief and reality slashes, the believers are unable to see the reality.
Of course, this isn't an excuse for the government to take up other tasks than ensuring that players on the market follow the rules.
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...but in the end the politicians, even though they agreed it was a bad law, did not dare go up against EU. The law was toned down slightly, and the notes to the law (which have a semi-legal status) explicitly says that you are allowed to break encryption in order to access the material from Linux (they explicitly mention Linux, but I hope that will be interpreted as an example).
Precompiled headers aren't much use with C, but for any C++ program that uses iostreams or STL it is godsend.
I have no idea whether those libraries could be rewritten to have small headers, it would probably require a working version of the "export" keyword at least, but I don't know if that is enough.
EU has already adopted the DMCA (under a different name, InfoSoc).
It still needs to be made into law in the individual member nations, so far only Denmark and Greece have implemented it.
Have they anything to do with each other?
Like everyone else in Denmark, I use SMS and haven't experienced failures or heard others complain about them.
My phone also have WAP. I have yet to successfully extract any kjind of information from that, and I don't know anyone else around here who even claim to be able to use WAP.
All it would take is hiring a stupid CEO who would turn Google into a portal, or some future buzzword equivalent.
Google is cool because their management have understood what the users wanted, and provided it, in spite of whatever was the "common wisom" among managers at the time.
"Muad'Dave" is just demonstrating Alan Alda's claim that the american public has started thinking of science as "just another religion" which SOME "believe" in and some don't.
Robotic exploration seems to make much more sense, but in terms of scientific results (you can explore more with robots because it is cheaper), with regard to commercial potential (again, robots are cheaper, thus likely to be useful for later profitable space enterprises), and with regard to generally useful technological development.
Eventually humans should return to the Moon and reach Mars, but let the robots pawe the road for us first.
and US would lose its edge fast. The best minds of the world are immigrating to the US, and that means the US is dominating in most fields of science and technology.
If the unions succeed in stopping this immigration, it would mean a huge setback for the industry, and would cause large unemployment among the members of the same unions.
However, it might help the rest of the world, as we might be able to keep more of our brightest minds at home.
It has traditionally been a selling point for Sun that there technologies are based on open specifications, reducing the risk of a vendor lock-in.
It was a program for file transfer over a modem, and rather important for it s time. It was free software before the term was defined, and had an restriction on use: "may not be used for military purposes". Real anti-militaristic software of the hippie area.
The "not for commercial purposes" wasn't just a hope that someone would bue a commercial license back then, as it usually is today. It was an anti-capitalistic message.
So this kind of politics through software is not new, I actually suspect that we have much less of it these days with the attempt to put more formal requirements on free (open source) software.
It is important to notice that the light cones for all humans being (dead, living, and in all probability those not yet born), are not just ovrlapping, they are for all practical purposes identical, because we all live so close together (cosmologically speaking) in both time and space.
There is a sad tendency of some less honrable people at humaniora to try to tie their pet models of the weak (consensus reality, social consructionism, cultural relativism, whatever it is called this month) to physical theories like quantum physics and even Einsteins relativity theory, apparently to give them some extra credibility.
Apart from it being bad science to apply models outside their domain, these attempt are never really based on more than some shared terms, even if this usually is hidden by a flood of words.
The models humaniora are actually pretty good in their own domain, as long as one remember they are models useful for dealing with a limited range of problems, and does not attempt to interpret them as metaphysical truths.
And as such, they have the authority to sue on behalf of their clients.
They do not care about material not copyrighted by their clients, but since their clients are branche organizations, that covers a lot of material.
Copyright violation is mostly civil law. There are a couple of areas which kind of cross between civil and criminal law, and that is one of them.
Thanks to a recent change in law, these people can enter my house and confiscate my computer "for examination" on suspision alone. They still need a foged (kind of minor judge) to give permission, but before only the policy could do the above, now private organizations have that power.
They also try to pressure ISP's and lawmakers to ban technologies that *can* be used for illegal purposes, like bloking mp3 files.
And with the DMCA becomming adopted to EU law next year, I *will* be doing something illegal when I watch my own legit DVD's under Linux.
I'm a bit surprised this is news, as it has been going on for a couple of years. APG *is* representying a specific set of companies (or rather branche organisations), and they do not care about content not originating from one of the members.
They are evil though, they systematically lies to the public about technical matters (like claiming MP3 files are illegal), try to pressure ISP's to block them, run scary campaignis in TV spots, show no mercy to kids, claim ridiculous damages,confiscate hardware even when they have found no unautorized material on site "to search further". They did successfully lobby a change in the law so they can confiscate private property on "reasonable suspicion", something only the police could do before.
They would fell quite at homne at Wolfram & Hart.
We totally lack an efficient civil liberties organization to stand up aginst these guys.
It is not fun watching my country dissolve into a police state, and it is getting a lot worse now than Denmark (thanks to the EU) is adopting the DMCA almost litteraly, which mean even "common sense" usage like playing a "protected CD" you paid for under Linux is going to be illegal.
Oh, and selling Region 1 DVD's will soon be illegal as well. We can still import them privately, but many small shops selling imported R1 DVD's are going down. It is even going to be illegal to resell American comic books, but at least the national comic book publishers are not planning to enforce that part of the law.
So, no, it is not strange. You are just an example of what has happened to email, it has become a communication media for people who already have contact, thanks to spam.
Even when I lived in the US, I got at most one per day. Today where I live in a country where such calls are illegal, I get one a year at most. The difference is of course that phone calls are expensive, especially from other countries (where such calls may be legal).
If you do not give away your email address except to "trusted" people, you are basically implementing a whitelist by hand.
I find this to be a perfectly valid spam defence, just like a tmda whitelist, and one I believe more in that increasingly sofisticated blacklist filtering.
However, it does not change the fact that email has changed character, from a method to inititate contact with people, into a method which people who already have contact can communicate.
At least tmda based whitelists will still allow strangers to contact you, even if it is slightly more work than it used to be. With manual whitelisting, that option is out.
If I was charged for the mails send by these mailing lists, I'd probably have to close them down. Or rather, the nice site hosting the lists would probably stop that service.
If Microsoft wins, at least one stuid patent is defeted.
If Eolas wins, the dream scenario is that Microsoft start effective lobbying against software patents, and we get rid of them once and for all.
The nightmare scenario is that Microsoft buys Eolas, and any hope of ever challenging Microsofts browser dominance is gone.
You cannot get the source, which basically makes the game uninteresting.
I gave up on non-free roguelikes after getting killed by a bus error just before escaping urogue. If I'm going to get my character killed by bugs, I want to be able to take revenge and kill the bugs in return.
unless you have gotten permission to do so. It is very distracting and in my opinion rude. Feel free to email him. It may not be as efficient (an email is easy to ignore), but it is a lot more considerate because it is easy to ignore, or postpone until he has time. The developer may _choose_ to provide free support, in addition to providing the free software, but he has no obligation to do so.
If you bought the distribution, the people who sold it to you is as accountable as people who sell non-free software. But please use common sense, if you bought a Red Hat distribution from CheapBytes for US$ 1.99, neither Red Hat nor CheapBytes have much moral obligation to provide support.
It is far more profitable to either kill or join with your competitors, than to compete with them by offering better products at lower prices. This is why a strong government is needed to ensure a working market, based a continues struggle to provide better goods at lower prices than your compatitors.
Without such a strong government, producents will join force in guilds, who keep the market closed to outsiders, by force if necessary. This was the situation until the development of nation states with a strong King as the leader.
Unfortunately, this violates the foundation for the Libertarian belief, namely that all evil is created by government and all good come from the market. And as always when belief and reality slashes, the believers are unable to see the reality.
Of course, this isn't an excuse for the government to take up other tasks than ensuring that players on the market follow the rules.