Inherent in the making of my chair is my exclusive and natural right to benefit from it. That includes making copies and selling them, or making copies and giving them away, or not making any copies of it at all.
You have every right to make a chair. If I take legal steps to protect my interests in my chair, you have no right to make a duplicate of my chair until I transfer that right to you.
When you bring up the notion of stealing ideas, you are, once again, going down the wrong path and, perhaps deliberately, obscuring the issue. It is fundamentally impossible for anyone to possess, or own, an idea. If an idea cannot be owned, it cannot be stolen. It is the symbolic expression of ideas that can be owned.
Here is an example: If I author a book that consists of nothing else but this statement "2 plus 2 is 4" repeated on 100 pages that are illustrated by random pencil scratching, I own that book. At first, it exists in only one copy, regardless of medium. The content of my book is not an idea. It is a bunch of symbols and drawings. It is not the "idea" that 2 plus 2 is 4. The only way for anyone else to acquire ownership of that single copy, or to acquire rights to copy it, is if I transfer those rights to them.
The same applies to your tuxedo jacket. If you take the legal steps necessary to protect your design, anyone who copies it is infringing on your rights.
None of this is a moral or ethical question. Someone who makes something owns that thing as well as all rights to make copies of it. No one else can acquire those rights unless the person who made it transfers them.
That seems obvious to me. How could it be possible for anyone other than the creator of a work to own it?
If I bake a pie and you bake a pie, they are two different pies.
If I make a chair and you make a chair, they are two different chairs.
If I write a book and you write a book they are two different books.
If I make a particular kind of pie or chair and market that product with a specific brand name, and you make an exact duplicate of that pie or chair and market it with a similar brand name, I will sue you for infringement.
If I publish a book and you publish a book with the same title and the same content, I will sue you for copyright violation.
It isn't the government that prohibits you from copying a book or a song. The person who made the book or song is prohibiting you from making and distributing copies. That's entirely logical. If I make something, there is only a single copy and I own it. No one else has any right to own, use or copy it unless I grant them those rights. If I choose to grant those rights, I can, obviously, determine the nature and extent of the rights I grant. That occurs when an author sells a work to a publisher: The author is granting the publisher permission to make copies and distribute them. Copyright is the legal codification of that natural and logical process. Under copyright law, the author could, if he or she wished, allow anyone to make and distribute unlimited copies of the work. (It is the publisher's need to return a profit on sales, not copyright law, that would be the sticking point if an author actually wished to do that.)
You're still confusing -- perhaps deliberately -- the concept of information with property that conveys the symbolic representation of that information.
When I make something -- a book, a song, a chair, a pie -- I owned that thing. No one else has any right to own or use any property that I make unless, and until, I give them that right.
The medium -- the property -- that carries the symbolic representation of information -- paper, wires, silcon, etc. -- is not relevant to this issue. In all cases, a medium is used to contain the symbolic representation of information. That symbolic representation on that medium -- that porperty -- is owned by the person who made it. Copyright serves to protect that ownership.
People who don't "believe" in copyright need to demonstrate how the original creator of a work does not own that work, and they need to demonstrate that information and its symbolic representation in a medium are identical.
I don't disagree with the piece, but it makes the mistake of viewing OSS from a developer's point of view. Almost by definition, access to source is an irrelevancy to users. If software has bugs, they want its developers to fix the bugs, and make the rational assumption that developers -- open or closed -- will have access to the code they wrote.
The piece also highlights the innately conservative and non-innovative nature of all software development, including open source. By focusing on fixing bugs, developers make the assumption that existing software is sufficient to meet consumer desires. This is far from the case. The presence of bugs will repel users, but the absence of bugs will not attract users.
The OSS source world needs to make a concerted effort to actively involve ordinary users in the design and creation of new software. It's a bad analogy, perhaps, but the auto industry does not let mechanics design new cars. The software industry should pay attention.
Most of the anti-copyright posters here always roll out the candard that they don't "believe" that people should be granted a monopoly of ideas. By presenting this issue as one of personal belief, they try to transform any discussion of it into an attack on their own personal beliefs (as if we are not allowed to do that.)
Ideas are noncorporeal things that cannot be possessed. If something cannot be possessed, it obviously cannot be monopolized. To use a very simplistic example: "2 + 2 = 4" is an idea. Everyone in the world can hold that idea simultaneously, yet no one can possess it. IT cannot be copywritten. A piece of paper printed with symbols understood to read "2 + 2 = 4" is not an idea. It is a symbolic representation of an idea created at a specific point in time. The person who created it owns it and retains absolute rights to it (a monopoly, if you will) until that person decides to transfer some of those rights. Copyright is the legal framework that protects that right in balance with the larger needs of the oublic.
An argument that attempts to make the case that the creator of a work does not own it has to make that case for all works, not just things that can be copywritten.
In truth, most anti-copyright rants here are simply windowdressing used by unprincipled people who want free stuff.
First, I oppose vigilantes everywhere, including the net.
Second, the net is a public place. Anyone who posts any information on any site has no more expectaton of privacy than if they wrote the same information on a 3x5 card and pinned it to a bulletin board at the local mall or library.
You know, there's a book on my shelves that lists the names, addresses and telephone numbers of almost everyone in my city.(Bet you have one, too.) My God, think of the privacy implications....
No, it isn't an easy task. But, as built, the station is essentially purposeless.
Space travel is about travel: going from here to somewhere else. Science, research, exploration, etc., are all secondary tasks that depend on our ability to actually travel in space. ISS does not travel in space and it does not facilitate space travel by any other vehicle.
The situation is rather akin to what might have been faced by early Arctic explorer if they hadlacked the means to travel that far north. They might have chosen to live for months on end in a deep freezer, testing human ability to withstand Arctic conditions, while others squabbled about whether it was necessary to go at all. When they emerged, they still would lack the means to travel to the north and all they would have accomplished was learning how to live in a freezer.
I would enthusiastically support a station purpose-built to a return to the Moon and exploration of the near Solar System.
What have we learned other than how to assemble a small space station?
I believe the only serious purpose for any space station is as the assembly and fueling point for space missions. In other words, a glorified train station. In the case of the ISS, we've got a station but we still have no railroad.
>>... beehive of scientific and commercial research..."
I'm sure the word "beehive" never appeared in any ISS prospectus. It was, and is, a facility that lacks any single compelling reason to exist.
Except for monitoring long-duration human spaceflight (mimicing the Mir experience), little, if any, of the research conducted on ISS will make human space travel easier, safer, or cheaper. Certainly, nothing will contribute to that objective in a way commensurate with the station's outrageous cost. The station itself is only marginally engaged in space travel, since it does not go anywhere.
The ISS is the product of the ill-informed and, simply, bad space policy that began with Nixon's decision to build the compromised and targetless Space Shuttle in lieu of continuing humam space exploration.
The GPL, and any other license, must be enforced to be meaningful. Failure to consistently enforce a license will very likely be seen by the courts as de facto acquiesence to its violation.
People who support the GPL must decide if they want it to be an agreement among like-minded developers, or a true license that is strictly enforced, with legal action when necessary.
Binding decisions on the legality of anyone's use of GPL'd material cannot be determined by discussions among the "community". Suit needs to be brought against every alleged violator.
Viking didn't dig very deep and it couldn't move. Certainly, if Martians sent two probes to Earth and both landed in a golf course, one might report Earth is covered by sand and the other would report Earth is blanketed with lush, neatly trimmed green grass .
No Right To Privacy When You're In Public
on
1984 Comes To Boston
·
· Score: -1, Flamebait
Given the bigoted tone of the headline, I don't need to waste my time reading anything else.
This is just one more addle-headed piece of adolescent nonsense. Both conventions are obvious targets for attack. Are/. readers so fatuously self-centered and so damnably ignorant that they would risk the lives of thousands of their fellow citizens rather than confront their own irrationality and bias?
Would you still object if the cameras were replaced with hundreds of live cops? Or, do you see any cop as an assault on your privacy?
Let's get this straight: When you are out in public, you have no privacy.
Space travel is like any other kind of travel: It is all about going somewhere. The ISS goes nowhere. The money would have been much better spent building infrastructure to make LEO operations as cheap and reliable as possible.
ISS is a multi-billion waste of time. The only thing we've "learned", putting it charitably, is that people will need to exercise a lot during long duration zero-G flights. Of course, we already knew that, thanks to Mir.
Can't speak for anyone else, but it isn't the tampering issue that concerns me. Anything is subject to tampering, including source code.
I've had bad experiences with automatic dependency resolvers, so I don't trust them to always do the right thing.
Plus, they can be flippin' annoying: When a dependency resolver tells me I can't install XYZ because of dependency conflicts or other issues, and I turn around and install XYZ cleanly from source, I lose respect for that dependency resolver.
Re: Firefox -- If you'd been looking at your processes before you would have noticed multiple entries for Firefox (or Mozilla, or whatver) all along. They don't indicated that you are runing multiple instances of the app.
And, anyway, Firefox is not distributed with Slackware.
Of course, you can learn Linux on any distribution. Claims to the contrary are false.
In my experience with other distributions, however, you need to learn enough about their own approach to graphical configuration to, at least, understand how to avoid getting into trouble when you edut config files manually.
For example, I just did a SUSE 9.1 install and everytime I opened a config file it seemed to be prefaced with a statement declaring: "Do Not Edit This File. Generated by XXX_Widget. Manual edits will be overwritten."
Well, you can use a tool like CheckInstall which rolls everything out in a nice Slackware package. Then, you use the Slack package tools and install, upgrade or remove as per usual.
Or, you use locate and find and remove everything manually. Takes a while, but it isn't rocket science.
I've installed X, KDE and Gnome, among others, from source, and updated them.
For that matter. most decent akefiles can be executed in dry run mode so you can get a record of what's being installed where.
Slashdot Mirror
Inherent in the making of my chair is my exclusive and natural right to benefit from it. That includes making copies and selling them, or making copies and giving them away, or not making any copies of it at all.
You have every right to make a chair. If I take legal steps to protect my interests in my chair, you have no right to make a duplicate of my chair until I transfer that right to you.
When you bring up the notion of stealing ideas, you are, once again, going down the wrong path and, perhaps deliberately, obscuring the issue. It is fundamentally impossible for anyone to possess, or own, an idea. If an idea cannot be owned, it cannot be stolen. It is the symbolic expression of ideas that can be owned.
Here is an example: If I author a book that consists of nothing else but this statement "2 plus 2 is 4" repeated on 100 pages that are illustrated by random pencil scratching, I own that book. At first, it exists in only one copy, regardless of medium. The content of my book is not an idea. It is a bunch of symbols and drawings. It is not the "idea" that 2 plus 2 is 4. The only way for anyone else to acquire ownership of that single copy, or to acquire rights to copy it, is if I transfer those rights to them.
The same applies to your tuxedo jacket. If you take the legal steps necessary to protect your design, anyone who copies it is infringing on your rights.
None of this is a moral or ethical question. Someone who makes something owns that thing as well as all rights to make copies of it. No one else can acquire those rights unless the person who made it transfers them.
That seems obvious to me. How could it be possible for anyone other than the creator of a work to own it?
If I bake a pie and you bake a pie, they are two different pies.
If I make a chair and you make a chair, they are two different chairs.
If I write a book and you write a book they are two different books.
If I make a particular kind of pie or chair and market that product with a specific brand name, and you make an exact duplicate of that pie or chair and market it with a similar brand name, I will sue you for infringement.
If I publish a book and you publish a book with the same title and the same content, I will sue you for copyright violation.
It isn't the government that prohibits you from copying a book or a song. The person who made the book or song is prohibiting you from making and distributing copies. That's entirely logical. If I make something, there is only a single copy and I own it. No one else has any right to own, use or copy it unless I grant them those rights. If I choose to grant those rights, I can, obviously, determine the nature and extent of the rights I grant. That occurs when an author sells a work to a publisher: The author is granting the publisher permission to make copies and distribute them. Copyright is the legal codification of that natural and logical process. Under copyright law, the author could, if he or she wished, allow anyone to make and distribute unlimited copies of the work. (It is the publisher's need to return a profit on sales, not copyright law, that would be the sticking point if an author actually wished to do that.)
You're still confusing -- perhaps deliberately -- the concept of information with property that conveys the symbolic representation of that information.
When I make something -- a book, a song, a chair, a pie -- I owned that thing. No one else has any right to own or use any property that I make unless, and until, I give them that right.
The medium -- the property -- that carries the symbolic representation of information -- paper, wires, silcon, etc. -- is not relevant to this issue. In all cases, a medium is used to contain the symbolic representation of information. That symbolic representation on that medium -- that porperty -- is owned by the person who made it. Copyright serves to protect that ownership.
People who don't "believe" in copyright need to demonstrate how the original creator of a work does not own that work, and they need to demonstrate that information and its symbolic representation in a medium are identical.
A written representation of a formula or an algorith m is not an idea.
I don't disagree with the piece, but it makes the mistake of viewing OSS from a developer's point of view. Almost by definition, access to source is an irrelevancy to users. If software has bugs, they want its developers to fix the bugs, and make the rational assumption that developers -- open or closed -- will have access to the code they wrote.
The piece also highlights the innately conservative and non-innovative nature of all software development, including open source. By focusing on fixing bugs, developers make the assumption that existing software is sufficient to meet consumer desires. This is far from the case. The presence of bugs will repel users, but the absence of bugs will not attract users.
The OSS source world needs to make a concerted effort to actively involve ordinary users in the design and creation of new software. It's a bad analogy, perhaps, but the auto industry does not let mechanics design new cars. The software industry should pay attention.
Most of the anti-copyright posters here always roll out the candard that they don't "believe" that people should be granted a monopoly of ideas. By presenting this issue as one of personal belief, they try to transform any discussion of it into an attack on their own personal beliefs (as if we are not allowed to do that.)
Ideas are noncorporeal things that cannot be possessed. If something cannot be possessed, it obviously cannot be monopolized. To use a very simplistic example: "2 + 2 = 4" is an idea. Everyone in the world can hold that idea simultaneously, yet no one can possess it. IT cannot be copywritten. A piece of paper printed with symbols understood to read "2 + 2 = 4" is not an idea. It is a symbolic representation of an idea created at a specific point in time. The person who created it owns it and retains absolute rights to it (a monopoly, if you will) until that person decides to transfer some of those rights. Copyright is the legal framework that protects that right in balance with the larger needs of the oublic.
An argument that attempts to make the case that the creator of a work does not own it has to make that case for all works, not just things that can be copywritten.
In truth, most anti-copyright rants here are simply windowdressing used by unprincipled people who want free stuff.
First, I oppose vigilantes everywhere, including the net.
Second, the net is a public place. Anyone who posts any information on any site has no more expectaton of privacy than if they wrote the same information on a 3x5 card and pinned it to a bulletin board at the local mall or library.
You know, there's a book on my shelves that lists the names, addresses and telephone numbers of almost everyone in my city.(Bet you have one, too.) My God, think of the privacy implications....
No, it isn't an easy task. But, as built, the station is essentially purposeless.
Space travel is about travel: going from here to somewhere else. Science, research, exploration, etc., are all secondary tasks that depend on our ability to actually travel in space. ISS does not travel in space and it does not facilitate space travel by any other vehicle.
The situation is rather akin to what might have been faced by early Arctic explorer if they hadlacked the means to travel that far north. They might have chosen to live for months on end in a deep freezer, testing human ability to withstand Arctic conditions, while others squabbled about whether it was necessary to go at all. When they emerged, they still would lack the means to travel to the north and all they would have accomplished was learning how to live in a freezer.
I would enthusiastically support a station purpose-built to a return to the Moon and exploration of the near Solar System.
What have we learned other than how to assemble a small space station?
I believe the only serious purpose for any space station is as the assembly and fueling point for space missions. In other words, a glorified train station. In the case of the ISS, we've got a station but we still have no railroad.
>> ... beehive of scientific and commercial research ..."
I'm sure the word "beehive" never appeared in any ISS prospectus. It was, and is, a facility that lacks any single compelling reason to exist.
Except for monitoring long-duration human spaceflight (mimicing the Mir experience), little, if any, of the research conducted on ISS will make human space travel easier, safer, or cheaper. Certainly, nothing will contribute to that objective in a way commensurate with the station's outrageous cost. The station itself is only marginally engaged in space travel, since it does not go anywhere.
The ISS is the product of the ill-informed and, simply, bad space policy that began with Nixon's decision to build the compromised and targetless Space Shuttle in lieu of continuing humam space exploration.
Well?
The GPL, and any other license, must be enforced to be meaningful. Failure to consistently enforce a license will very likely be seen by the courts as de facto acquiesence to its violation.
People who support the GPL must decide if they want it to be an agreement among like-minded developers, or a true license that is strictly enforced, with legal action when necessary.
Binding decisions on the legality of anyone's use of GPL'd material cannot be determined by discussions among the "community". Suit needs to be brought against every alleged violator.
Viking didn't dig very deep and it couldn't move. Certainly, if Martians sent two probes to Earth and both landed in a golf course, one might report Earth is covered by sand and the other would report Earth is blanketed with lush, neatly trimmed green grass
.
Given the bigoted tone of the headline, I don't need to waste my time reading anything else.
/. readers so fatuously self-centered and so damnably ignorant that they would risk the lives of thousands of their fellow citizens rather than confront their own irrationality and bias?
This is just one more addle-headed piece of adolescent nonsense. Both conventions are obvious targets for attack. Are
Would you still object if the cameras were replaced with hundreds of live cops? Or, do you see any cop as an assault on your privacy?
Let's get this straight: When you are out in public, you have no privacy.
Slackware makes no pretension of being "newbie-friendly".
That said, it tells you how to configure your soundcard at every reboot and it keeps telling you until you do exactly that.
Space travel is like any other kind of travel: It is all about going somewhere. The ISS goes nowhere. The money would have been much better spent building infrastructure to make LEO operations as cheap and reliable as possible.
ISS is a multi-billion waste of time. The only thing we've "learned", putting it charitably, is that people will need to exercise a lot during long duration zero-G flights. Of course, we already knew that, thanks to Mir.
Very true, but in my experience that means you can never go back and use the package manager with confidence.
Can't speak for anyone else, but it isn't the tampering issue that concerns me. Anything is subject to tampering, including source code.
I've had bad experiences with automatic dependency resolvers, so I don't trust them to always do the right thing.
Plus, they can be flippin' annoying: When a dependency resolver tells me I can't install XYZ because of dependency conflicts or other issues, and I turn around and install XYZ cleanly from source, I lose respect for that dependency resolver.
...but Macs are smarter than PC's.
I'm not trying to help you.
The Firefox issue is relevant because you're assuming Slackware is to blame for your problems using it. Maybe, maybe not.
Sometimes Firefox wants to be run as root prior to normal use.
I'd guess you botched the update.
Re: Firefox -- If you'd been looking at your processes before you would have noticed multiple entries for Firefox (or Mozilla, or whatver) all along. They don't indicated that you are runing multiple instances of the app.
And, anyway, Firefox is not distributed with Slackware.
Agree. The newsgroup is littered with obnoxious and arrogant bastards. Even when they deign to answer a question, they're often wrong.
But, then, the newsgroup is not connected in any way to the distribution.
Of course, you can learn Linux on any distribution. Claims to the contrary are false.
In my experience with other distributions, however, you need to learn enough about their own approach to graphical configuration to, at least, understand how to avoid getting into trouble when you edut config files manually.
For example, I just did a SUSE 9.1 install and everytime I opened a config file it seemed to be prefaced with a statement declaring: "Do Not Edit This File. Generated by XXX_Widget. Manual edits will be overwritten."
Slackware doesn't do that.
I see nothing about donations at the Slackware site. Here's the store: http://store.slackware.com
Anyway, why is a "donation" (quotes because it is not a charity) "better" than buying it?
This chatter about people "contributing" to businesses is more than a ittle strange.
Well, you can use a tool like CheckInstall which rolls everything out in a nice Slackware package. Then, you use the Slack package tools and install, upgrade or remove as per usual.
Or, you use locate and find and remove everything manually. Takes a while, but it isn't rocket science.
I've installed X, KDE and Gnome, among others, from source, and updated them.
For that matter. most decent akefiles can be executed in dry run mode so you can get a record of what's being installed where.