There is an upcoming North Kentucky Law Journal article which closely examines potential legal attacks on various P2P architectures. The conclusion for Freenet was that it is certainly possible to curtail use of the system, perhaps by shutting down the Internet, but it is unlikely that it would be politically realistic.
Also note that some ISPs, including Earthlink, are refusing to cave to pressure from these self-appointed IP police. In fact, many of these companies are going out of business.
This is a voluntary project paid for by donations. I don't know how much voluntary work you have done, but the general idea is that you are paid whatever you need to survive, and not much more. Oskar is willing to work for so little because he believes in the project, not because he wants to get rich.
Actually I have never submitted a significant bug to Bugzilla that wasn't addressed within days, sometimes even hours. I am simply pointing out that if, rather than "reporting" the bugs to slashdot, it would be much more constructive to spend your time reporting them to the Mozilla developers.
You have no choice but to plug it in to the phone line, since (according to this guy's website) there is no other way to set the clock, and a Tivo with the incorrect time is next to useless.
So you're trading one set of groupthink for another? How open of you
I am trading a site which moderates up views which I find laughable, for a site that doesn't. I don't think that open-mindedness has anything to do with it.
Hold on here. If you look at economical stats you can find something very peculiar. It seems countries with biggest economy (corporations and industry) have on average the highest standard of living for all its citizens.
Beware assuming a causal link where there is none. Note that the disparity I describe also takes place at an international level, with wealthy countries like the US getting wealthier, and poor countries like many of those in Africa, getting poorer.
The opinion that all property is a lie is not a logical consequence of the view that information cannot be treated as property, and the claim to the contrary is little more than a transparent attempt to set up a strawman*.
What is property, and why is it important? Property is important because if you have some property, and someone else takes it from you, then you can no-longer benefit from it. Yet information doesn't work like that. I can give a piece of information to someone else without taking that information away from anyone. Perhaps Thomas Jefferson said it better:
"He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement, or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property."
Letter to Isaac McPherson, August 13, 1813.
* A "strawman argument" is advancing your opinion by arguing against a false definition of your opponent's view in the hope that nobody will recognise the difference.
Open Source advocates have been heard to mutter that people like Stallman and his FSF are an embarrassment, yet IMO it is the Open Source people who are the real embarrassment. They claim that giving away software and source code is a good business model. Now that argument may have briefly held water in the heady anything-goes Internet boom of 1999, but now people are more sensible, and most companies built on Open Source are in-trouble. Why? Because you can't really sell something that you are also giving away for free.
However, the Free Software argument is much more persuasive, this isn't about money, we don't give a shit if it makes a good business model, this is about freedom, let Microsoft argue with that.
Microsoft is not "above the law". How foolish. They're nothing more than one of our great success stories, a hugely visible embodiment of the American Dream.
I remember the days when the idea that a company whose greatest coup was repackaging the "Quick and Dirty Operating System", whose success was basically off the back of another huge monopoly's (IBM) miscalculation, was the embodiment of the American dream, would have been modded down as flamebait.
Corporations making money is not good for everyone, corporations making money is good for the corporations and their shareholders. This kind of "trickle down" economics is a lie perpetrated by the wealthy to justify them getting more wealthy while the poor get poorer. And it is the power of corporations which make the US the Corporate controlled laughing stock its political system has become. Not the American dream, but quite possibly the American nightmare.
Tying a web-browser to their operating system may make a better product for their users, but it is also leveraging a monopoly to extinguish competition in a different area, and that is illegal under US antitrust laws. They broke the law.
Every day I see a new reason to wave goodbye to/. and say hello to Kuro5hin.
Starting over from scratch isn't necessarily a bad thing. bladeenc was built "from scratch" using the iso specification of an mp3. This didn't stop the Fwhatever institute from threatening them, and for many applications (higher bitrate), it was a better encoder.
Are you arguing for or against patents - this makes for a good argument against them, which puts you on my side of the debate.
If it weren't for those patents then the creators of PNG and OGG could have spent their time improving GIF and MP3 rather than having to start again from scratch.
It doesn't prevent someone from using it, it prevents someone other than the patent holder from selling it.
Not true, do you suppose that the creator of an Open Source implementation of this codec which was not sold, but given away, would be open to legal action?
Allowing the scientist to recoup the investment made in his research is how patents advance the sciences (or, at least, how they are supposed to).
The operative words here are supposed to. My point is that they don't.
It's not a government-enforced monopoly guaranteeing a profit, it's discouraging theft.
Ah theft, only property can be stolen. It is the coopting of the ideal of property to cover intangable things such as a "design" or a piece of information that is at issue here. Perhaps Thomas Jefferson said it better:
"He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement, or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property."
Letter to Isaac McPherson, August 13, 1813.
Simply spending money doesn't mean that IBM (or anyone else) should be guaranteed a profit through a government enforced monopoly. The purpose of patent (and copyright) law is not to make profit for corporations, but to advance the sciences and useful arts. How does preventing other people from using this codec advance the sciences and useful arts?
It is clear that codecs can be written without the incentive provided by patent law (just look at ogg vorbis), and so patent law doesn't actually benefit the sciences and useful arts in this case (nor does it do so in the vast majority of other cases where they are applied - particularly in the software industry).
I don't think that the claim that a computer program could be used to convey an idea from one person to another, and therefore must be protected, is getting to the core of the issue. The core of the issue is that to prevent people from sharing information is a big deal, not just in terms of restricting people's freedom, but simply in-terms of the impossibility of enforcement.
I think, listening to comments made by the appeals court judges, that they are more reasonable. I didn't hear any sign of Kaplan's anti-"hacker" bias during their questioning.
The whole reason that he dislikes the term "Open Source" is that it glosses over the core philosophical underpinnings of Free Software, and makes the (rather weak) claim that writing Free Software makes good business sense.
Stallman doesn't care about business because his goals are much deeper than merely making money, he is talking about the freedom to create.
While I would hate to put words into Stallman's mouth, my guess is that he would much prefer a world without copyright, but given that we don't live in such a world, he feels justified in using copyright in a manner which prevents others from using it, and which advances his views.
When I heard that Earthlink was standing up to the RIAA's demands to shut down Gnutella servers, and saw their pro-privacy advertising, I really thought they would serve as a good example to other ISPs. Certainly I had heard worrying stories about how Eartlink was run by Scientologists (an organisation not known for its liberal attitude towards free speech on the Internet), but didn't want to base my opinions on rumours.
It is unfortunate to see that Earthlink are now tarnishing an image which could have forced other ISPs to clean up their freedom of communication credentials.
Way back in 1992 I implemented a small piece of software called "Lexicon" which achieved just this on my Atari ST. It was immune to the scale and speed with which the gesture was drawn (I called them doodles), and worked pretty well. I released it as public domain so it may still be floating around.
In 1995 I reimplemented it in Java, and for a while you could navigate my homepage by drawing simple gestures in an applet window. It was really simple and took about 3 hours to implement.
In 1998 I got quite into Window Maker, and started a conversation with Alfredo (Mr W.M) about integrating this functionality into it. I wrote the gesture parsing code, and he wrote a front-end, but it never really got past the experimental stage. I am sure that code is probably floating around somewhere too.
Before long I got bored with it though, it is must faster to hit a key on a keyboard or press a button on a GUI than it is to draw a gesure which is often misinterpreted.
They are great gimmicks, but of limited practical use.
I am amazed that such lame anti-Open Source FUD goes unquestioned. His argument against Open Source seems to be based on the idea that a company cannot privately use a piece of Open Source software. He talks as if the GPL mandates an announcement on Freshmeat and a submission to Slashdot. A company can, of course, use GTK or any other piece of Open Source code without telling anyone if they so-wish, within the constraints of the Open Source license (isn't GTK distributed under the Lesser GPL anyway?).
And he cites the fact that there is no commercial builder for GTK as a disadvantage - what is wrong with Glade? Why does a builder need to be commercial?
There is some other interesting info in there which I am not qualified to dispute, but his anti-Open Source comments sound like something you would expect from Redmond. It is unfortunate that O'Reilly didn't press him on these issues.
But the question is whether customers, knowing that their ISPs were likely to do this, would still be their customers.
If an ISP implements this kind of policy, then those who choose to trust them with their IP packets should know, that is why stealth blocking is dangerous.
Slashdot Mirror
Also note that some ISPs, including Earthlink, are refusing to cave to pressure from these self-appointed IP police. In fact, many of these companies are going out of business.
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I get really sick of people who complain about bugs in Open Source software, yet don't even take the time to report them to the developers.
Grrrr.
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What is property, and why is it important? Property is important because if you have some property, and someone else takes it from you, then you can no-longer benefit from it. Yet information doesn't work like that. I can give a piece of information to someone else without taking that information away from anyone. Perhaps Thomas Jefferson said it better:
* A "strawman argument" is advancing your opinion by arguing against a false definition of your opponent's view in the hope that nobody will recognise the difference.
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However, the Free Software argument is much more persuasive, this isn't about money, we don't give a shit if it makes a good business model, this is about freedom, let Microsoft argue with that.
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Corporations making money is not good for everyone, corporations making money is good for the corporations and their shareholders. This kind of "trickle down" economics is a lie perpetrated by the wealthy to justify them getting more wealthy while the poor get poorer. And it is the power of corporations which make the US the Corporate controlled laughing stock its political system has become. Not the American dream, but quite possibly the American nightmare.
Tying a web-browser to their operating system may make a better product for their users, but it is also leveraging a monopoly to extinguish competition in a different area, and that is illegal under US antitrust laws. They broke the law.
Every day I see a new reason to wave goodbye to /. and say hello to Kuro5hin.
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1980 - The home computer
1995 - The Internet
Not every new technology is a "push" - I think that your claim that P2P is a fad requires somewhat more justification.
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Stallman doesn't care about business because his goals are much deeper than merely making money, he is talking about the freedom to create.
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I see nothing wrong with this.
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It is unfortunate to see that Earthlink are now tarnishing an image which could have forced other ISPs to clean up their freedom of communication credentials.
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In 1995 I reimplemented it in Java, and for a while you could navigate my homepage by drawing simple gestures in an applet window. It was really simple and took about 3 hours to implement.
In 1998 I got quite into Window Maker, and started a conversation with Alfredo (Mr W.M) about integrating this functionality into it. I wrote the gesture parsing code, and he wrote a front-end, but it never really got past the experimental stage. I am sure that code is probably floating around somewhere too.
Before long I got bored with it though, it is must faster to hit a key on a keyboard or press a button on a GUI than it is to draw a gesure which is often misinterpreted.
They are great gimmicks, but of limited practical use.
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And he cites the fact that there is no commercial builder for GTK as a disadvantage - what is wrong with Glade? Why does a builder need to be commercial?
There is some other interesting info in there which I am not qualified to dispute, but his anti-Open Source comments sound like something you would expect from Redmond. It is unfortunate that O'Reilly didn't press him on these issues.
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If an ISP implements this kind of policy, then those who choose to trust them with their IP packets should know, that is why stealth blocking is dangerous.
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