> The "classified information" you refer to was no such thing
Uh huh. Lets recap shall we? Press (can't remember if the NYT was first of an early pile on) leaks about the prison thing and we get a very visible hit to national security when our new allies in Poland and other eastern european countries get a hard lesson in how the US can't keep a secret. i.e. it will be a cold day in Hell when they trust us again. NYT breaks the NSA tempest in a teapot to help one of their reporters hawk a book with even more disclosures of classified information.
Lets skip the rest though and move on to the hyprocrisy. In all of the above, which are all about "get that fucker Bush and to hell with national security" they are all hailed as essential to maintaining a Free society. Joe "media whore" Wilson lies through his teeth about who sent him and why (namely he was sent by his wife in an attempt by a faction in the CIA to discredit the Bush administration) and someone calls him on it. Your side throws tantrums and tosses food from their highchairs until an Inquisitor is appointed. But I'm sure the irony totally escapes you.
And yes I do call for NYT reporters to be charged, tried, convicted and executed for treason. They released classified information, in the sure knowledge it would lend aid and comfort to our enemies in a time of active combat against them. They knew (or should have known) that releasing details on intelligence gathering would a) aid our enemies in evading our taps in teh same way that revealing we knew about UBL's sat phone caused him to stop using it and would b) contribute to the fifth collumn effort here trying to undermine US will to continue the fight.
> We aren't at war.
Congress will never declare a proper "War" again, but by their resolutions they have certainly endorsed "warlike actions" against foreign nations and terrorist organizations. Now you are certainly entitled to your view and should your side ever prevail at the ballot box you will be entitled to implement your policy positon. Which is of course WHY you aren't likely to be trusted with political power so long as national security is a major issue.
> Not quite sure if this is yet more delusional ranting about the NSA program or if you have swerved back ontopic and are > discussing the topic for this thread. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you actually managed to get > back ontopic.
Ok, see what I get for trying to reply in your angry moonbat mode? I end up flaming you for being offtopic and then replying to your ambigious posting as if it were still offtopic. Argh! Anyway, back to the flames.
Ok, now ON TOPIC. Dude, if you are going to freak about the government searching and indexing the whole Internet then I have terrible news for you. There is something far worse, in your diseased worldview at least, than the Government indexing the whole Internet and that is an evil corporation doin it! And just to prove how evil they are they flaunt it with a corporate slogan of "Don't be evil" no less. Hurry, your tinfoil hat is up there in your bedroom stuffed in a corner with your Winnie the Pooh underoos and your Dean for President t-shirt, better run or they are gonna get you.
Please allow me to apologize to the rest of Slashdot for the crude way I'm about to flame this moron. Figure I'd use the sort of partisan and incendiary language he obviously understands.
> Do I get called a terrorist if I say I FUCKING HATE BUSH for abrogating the 4th amendment to the bill of rights?
No, you get called a fucking idiot for regurgitating DailyKos talking points; because you don't appear intelligent enough to be a traitor like Howard Dean, the ACLU, Sen. Kennedy and most the leadership of your party. They ARE smart enough to understand the difference between illegally searching your home or taping phone calls with both ends in the US and tapping international calls, some of which happen to be dialing into the US. By knowing and lying about it in an attempt to trade national security for the hope of a fleeting partisan advantage they cross the line from 'patriotic but wrong' to 'traitor'.
> I assure you if the British had such a system for sifting all communications for treasonous intent we would still > be the British commonwealth of the Americas.
Not quite sure if this is yet more delusional ranting about the NSA program or if you have swerved back ontopic and are discussing the topic for this thread. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you actually managed to get back ontopic.
And I'll just say you are probably correct. Welcome to the real world where soverign nation states play hard and play for keepsies. Like we damned well better be. And just for the record let me state that if we don't start standing New York Times reporters against the nearest wall for disclosing classified information useful to our enemies in time of War we are going to lose. We have intercepted international mail and telephone traffic in every war we have ever fought. Spying is a very messy business normally carried out in darkness, but it is vital to winning a War. I want the NSA to spy just as hard as they possibly can and stay legal. So yes, they can and should be tapping known Al Qaeda telephones abroad. Tap em here too, but get a warrant. Yes we can fight a war and still be legal. I donated to the Bush Campaign both times and I'd be just as mad as you are if it were revealed he tapped a phone HERE without a warrant, but overseas it is spy hard time.
> I am not sure how well I am making my point, but I guess the bottom line is if you look at the victim impact, the > impact of a hate crime on the victim (including their family and community) is far greater than than a non-hate crime. > There is little a victim of a hate crime can do to prevent it. As well as the perpetrator of a hate crime is much more > likely to repeat it.
I'd say you did a pretty good job. Too bad the politicos pushing for it aren't pushing it for the reasons you give, as I could support yours. However I'm a bit more cynical that thee.
Unfortunatly the reality is 'hates crimes' laws are a product of the modern 'civil rights' movement and just as much of a sham of doublespeak and deceit hatched by Democrats. First off I don't think I'm saying anything controversial when I say that those on the books already are applied in a totally bigoted fashion and will only get worse as more are passed Imagine for a moment "hate crimes' laws are on the books in CA and a repeat of the LA Riots happen. Who gets charged with hate crimes, the crazed rioters or the peaceful asian shopkeepers defending their property? Obviously it is the shopkeepers who get sacrificed, lest the 'oppressed' begin rioting anew. The "Cartoon War" reaches our shores, who thinks a single member of the Religion of Peace would be worried about being charged with a 'hate crime' for prancing around and shreiking while carrying a sign calling for beheadings while getting worked up into a rioting frenzy.
Anyone who has watched the antics of the left over the last fifty years knows it is only an intermediate step along the way to their goal of crimethink laws, i.e. making it against the law to disagree with Democrats. It is an old joke that a 'bigot' is someone winning an argument with a liberal. They have realized that just hurling 'bigot' at an opponent isn't enough to win an argument anymore so now they would rather simply jail the opposition like all their heros did. (Stalin, Castro, Mao, etc.)
Don't like the idea, investment wise
on
Vonage IPO
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Just don't like the idea of dropping money into VoIP companies.
Short term they are bleeding rectally trying to grow marketshare above all other considerations while the telcos are trying to stamp them out of existance and national governments worldwide want to outlaw VoIP as undesirable competition to the local monopolies and the huge tariff structures they currently reap buttloads of juicy tax money from foreigners off of.
Longterm, assuming VoIP in general and any one particular VoIP company survives the shortterm, they face the problem of becoming unneeded. Everyone seems to be missing the big picture here, a VoIP provider gives you two things.
1. Point of presence, i.e. a phone number. Google Chat (i.e. Jabber) can do that part equally well and for zero dollars. Plus as IP6 begins to roll out and dynamic IP & NAT goes away we return to the original Internet where every host has an address, read that as a telephone number/hostname.
2. An interface to the legacy telco network. If VoIP becomes universal that service becomes far less valuable.
So longterm the value add a company like Vonage provides drops drastically and thus their net per customer will be on a similar decline to the current fade to zero valuation currently on the accounting books for the existing long distance businesses.
> Even if there is no built-in way to remove the trademark, it's not like using grep > is that hard.
Actually it is. How many packages are in a major distribution? Now consider just how interrelated they all are. Plus, in my case one of the design goals is to be binary compatible with RHEL so how the heck does one do that without keeping the name intack? Giving firefox credit, when I raised that point they said it would be ok to keep the executable and package name intact but I'd have to change the icon and the name on the titlebar. Ok, that does allow me to keep interoperability but now I have to dive deep into the guts of the package to make those sort of fine grained changes. If this crap isn't squashed firmly, just wait a couple of years and I'll be doing that to dozens of packages.
More importantly any new distribution will be required to investigate each package's license terms and to be safe they probably better engage a trademark lawyer. Won't be seeing new minor distributions when that happens.
Congress passes these ever more bigoted laws (in the name of diversity of course, gotta love NewSpeak) so they can feel good about having 'done something' about a problem that increasingly is made worse by more laws because it has been mostly solved. We long since passed the point where the negative impact of more laws were outweighed by the positive benefits. Thirty-forty years ago, yea, there were some serious problems still lingering in society. We talked a good "everybody is equal" but practice didn't match theory very well.
But these days we have, if anything, overshot equality and went to tribalism amok. These days it seems the only ones who quotes King's "I have a Dream" speech's line about judging everyone on their ideas instead of their skin is Jack Kemp and Newt Gingrich because the entire 'Civil Rights' establishment has invested all their political capital on maintaining quotas and pretending to be victims while having all the trappings (limo, jets, mistresses, etc) of the wealthy. Listen up folks, when (in theory if not in practice) the left, the right and just about everyone in between are in agreement on an issue it really isn't much of an issue anymore. The only reason it is still an issue is because too many people have made an industry out of "Oprah Nation" style victimhood as career.
> Mozilla Foundation is using its Firefox trademark to ensure that all builds distributed > as firefox are official builds
Official builds are for Windows. Almost nobody is using the 'official builds' on Free platforms, they use the packaged version from their distribution and anyone who has a clue knows they have been slightly customized to conform to that distribution's local customs regarding file location, desktop environment and often bookmarks, etc. You know it isn't from the Mozilla Foundation because the package has "whiteboxlinux.org" in the Vendor field instead of "Mozilla Foundation".
The problem is Firefox is a Windows app now, they care about the problems of Windows users, i.e. spyware, adware and other crap that aren't a problem on Free platforms. However they feel they have to enforce their trademark against Free platforms as well as Windows scumware vendors. Well maybe they do, but that is so not my problem and shouldn't be the problem of ANY Free Software project. Thus I'm calling for a consensus on a new name to call "The browser formerly known as Firefox" in the Free Software world. It just won't do if I yank something out of my butt and every other distro does likewise, it would lead to the mass confusion the Mozilla Project obviously desires.
> You can't call your program "Firefox" as there's another one out there with that name?
But I am redistributing "Firefox". I am taking the SRPM from RHEL4, deleting the one patch that changes the bookmarks from Firefox's to RedHat's and changing the patch that adds "RedHat" into the user agent string to "WhiteBox" to omit that RH reference. It is more FireFox than RedHat's package since it keeps Firefox's default bookmarks. It is about control. And so is this BitTorrent TM gambit, make no mistake about it.
The problem is they cleverly divide the community. How do we pick a new name if none of that discussion can involve the normal discussion channels for a project, the new name can't be used in any way by the official project lest they trademark that as soon as it becomes popular, etc. They insist that their Trademark be THE name of the project AND work to ensure no other name comes into popular usage, thus gaining defacto control over what is nominally still Free Software but in reality isn't.
WWRMSD? Would RMS change the license of GNU such that only the FSF's official build could be called GNU? No, because that would totally negate everything they stand for. But we are expected to meekly submit to this doublespeak from The Mozilla Foundation and now from Bram? No, wrong is wrong and we must prevail in this now or we won't have the option later when this practice becomes widespread.
Well no, I thought it was because Firebird was already claimed. Besides, the whole point of Free Software is freedom to redistribute. RedHat puts a whole SRPM tree up and says "It's Free Software under the GPL/BSD/etc." So people take them at their word and rebuild it, now it turns out it isn't. They signed Trademark agreements that aren't redistributable, making their software unfree even though the package has License: GPL in the.spec.
The point is that if everyone attempting to get a distribution off the ground is now expected to conduct a trademark search and enter into trademark license agreements with what will soon be dozens of entities, new distributions aren't going to be happening anymore. We need to think about that and act while we can.
> Firefox can't exactly have hundreds of people distributing code that they call "Firefox," > now can they?
Can't exactly have Free Software if we aren't allowed to redistribute binaries now can we? They need to decide which they are, a Free Software project or a proprietary product that is a free (small F) download sustained by advertising arrangements. And be not deceived by their prattle about quality control. They are interested in maintaining their co-branding agreements for default search engine and bookmarks and enforcing crap like this new spyware html tag they are introducing.
Don't believe me? Watch how many major distributions either remove the spyware tag or add a UI control to disable it, my money is on zero. When the stink finally becomes intense enough it will be revealed that the trademark license agreements they all signed forbids it.
It is time to ditch the Firefox brand name in the Free Software world and pick an unencumbered one. Yes it will create confusion in the marketplace, which is what Firefox is counting on btw, and RedHat and Suse will probably keep drinking the Kool-aid for a few years thus creating even more confusion. But the alternative is far worse. The alternative is they get away with it and a dozen more projects follow the allure of money. Next thing ya know a new distribution will be all but impossible to get off the ground because of the need for trademark lawyers. Of course RedHat and Suse wouldn't mind that world so perhaps they understand the situation perfectly.
We draw a line in the sand now or not at all because later will be too late.
> Bram Cohen obviously has the right to protect the name: the software is open source, the name is not.
No. This is an example of a greater pattern of abuse that needs to be addressed soon, especially with GPL3 set to enshine it as acceptable practice.
What I'm talking about is this: Developer(s) toil away and produce Free Software. Software becomes popular. Developers suddenly file a trademark and begin to monitize it. See Linux(tm), Firefox(tm) and now BitTorrent(tm). Granted Linux isn't being heavily monitized YET but the shots have already went across the bow. Firefox has already told me to change the name in my RHEL rebuild. See a pattern? The problem is that the package is only known by its name, which until recently was freely usable so nobody has even given any thought what else to call it. Calling everything "The package formerly known as foo..." just doesn't scale.
I propose we forbid this practice. If commercial interests need a trademark that is understandable, but they should undertake the expense of focus groups to pick a new name and the PR to popularize it. This is especially important with BitTorrent since it is not just the name of a client but also the name of the protocol. So sorry Bram, you are a genius but you are wrong on this one. Pick a new trademark for your client or even new forked version of the protocol you want to lock up in an "IP" box.
> The Republicans control everything. They can do anything.
Actually they don't. Because Republicans aren't some borg like entity. They don't always agree on everything, plus they have very narrow majorities, a large RINO population and a MSM that seems to live to beat them up.
Do the math dude. The House is a little better but the Senate is a very near thing. On paper the Republicans have a 55-44-1 split and with Cheney available to break a tie they can win with 50 votes. But Sen Chaffee votes Dem more often than Repub so that makes 54 for all intents and purposes. Senators Snowe and Collins are also very unreliable, plus Specter and McCain aren't what I'd call rock solid either. That takes you down to about the 50 mark. Then on any given issue at least one or two more will break ranks. Which leaves you needing to pick up a couple of Democrats to be assured of passing anything important. Fortunately they aren't a total monolithic entity either, and depending on the issue a couple of Dems are fairly reliable votes.
And all that assumes the Democrats won't fillibuster. And the more often you ram important legislation through on straight party line votes the more likely a fillibuster becomes.
Which is why the Republicans need to pick up another 5-6 Senators or to dump a few RINOs in favor of actual Republicans before your assertion would be valid. Of course Chaffee, Snowe and Collins are RINOs mostly because a hardcore Republican wouldn't be likely to stay in office in Maine or Rhode Island and the first goal of a politician is getting reelected.
Problem #1. Handheld cellphones do not emit 2W. The old analog handhelds were capped at 700mW and I suspect the digitals emit much less based on the power available to them and the talktime.
Problem #2. Even if you scrounged up some old bagphones with their 3W output power, they still only gives you six watts of power. I don't think that is going to cook an egg in the time claimed.
> You have zero spam because you haven't used it and because the bots haven't generated your > email address yet.
But I use both as just test addresses for troubleshooting mail delivery problems and just to have an address offsite. The point was Yahoo! started getting spam so fast I'd swear they were selling the addresses themselves like the postal service. Gmail is still at zero. And I'm not all that creative, I tend towards the same LHS.
> But it is widely understood among those who deal with these matters that MP3 is > patent-encumbered and that we should use and encourage others to use the apparently > unencumbered (and higher quality, besides) Ogg Vorbis instead.
Yes, MPEG was always upfront that they were pooling patents and doing the RAND thing. But I have a question. When do they start expiring? I remember a VCD like tech (OS9-68K based, Phillips, brain cramp on the name now.... CDI?) in the late 1980's and VCD (MPEG1 video, MPEG1 layer 1 audio) itself not much later. MPEG1 layer 2 was the failed Phillips Compact Digital Cassette in what, 1992? Question is what is the date on the patents, especially of course on MPEG 1 layer 3 audio and MPEG2 video. AC3 audio is probably several years newer so the last part of DVD and HD-TV won't be public for a bit.
I'm thinking we need to find out and start a countdown, much like everyone did for RSA and the GIF patents.
This won't be a problem. Just means more gmail accounts. Seriously, someone sent me an invite over a year ago, I created an account and don't use it much yet. But it has had ZERO spams which is more than I can say for my Yahoo! account that gets em and all I use it for is system testing.
AOL is dying anyway, which is why they no longer have the resources to fight spam and are instead outsourcing it.
> As such, I feel I have to be particularly careful about respect for IP and IP laws
Please do not perpetuate the myth of IP. RMS is dead right on this one, ceeding the enemy control of the language will lose us the war. Yes I do respect Copyright, patent and Trademarks.... at least most of the time.:)
> Violating a shrink-wrap EULA is just as egregious as violating the GPL.
No it isn't. A shrink wrap EULA is meaningless unless you live in Virgina and perhaps not even there. A contract requires two parties and if I refuse to accept the EULA I'm still allowed to use the software by virtue of having purchased a copy of it. I don't believe allowing software publishers to impose one sided "contracts' you can't even read until you no longer have a right to get your money back is something worthy of even considering submitting to. To compare it to the GPL shows your ignorance of the difference between the two.
You are not required to accept the GPL either, btw. If you refuse it you may still use the copy you aquired in any way that is acceptable under the Copyright laws of your jurisdictiom. By accepting it you gain permission to redistribute the work subject to the terms and conditions of the GPL. Notice the difference between this and any EULA. All EULAs attempt to subtract rights otherwise granted under Copyright law.
> That doesn't make sense, why would they then release Visual Studio Express, which is > directly intended for small/hobbyist developers?
Because right now, today, they still need small developers. Today they close the media stack, no more Divx;) disasters. Next will be all device drivers when Vista ships. That is already announced; unsigned drivers won't run on Vista. (Betting they retreat in the face of broad objections but they will try it again and again until they they succeed.) Year after year, release after release they will continue moving the line up the stack, below which only signed code will be allowed to run.
The next logical move will be to disallow unsigned binaries. By that I mean no code in the native instruction set will run unless it is signed. C#, Java, VB, etc still run in their interpreted sandboxes but no more random executables with the ability to exploit an API bug into ring0. Security 'experts' will praise the move. Which because of the inevitable hooks to the native API for performance reasons will not actually secure Windows, but that wasn't the point.
Given enough time and naked will to power theyt are likely to get pretty far along their plan. The question is whether enough users abandon the platform while there is still hardware available which can run anything else to ensure the continued availability of open hardware.
> Windows would be a locked Microsoft and Certified Vendors platform and as a result would > both help those its really meant for: corporate users, by making their systems secure for a > change; and would also help the rest of us by removing this monstrosity of a platform from > the home hobbyist and gamer community outright.
Nice theory but where are you going to go tomorrow? Apple will be just as locked down by then, we already see the warning shots being fired. Server customers will still probably be able to buy hardware capable of running Linux... or at least Red Hat and SUSE will be given permission to sign software the TCPM on designated server hardware will accept.
If you want to develop you will be required to lease a development workstation after paying the fees and signing the required non disclosure, non compete and worse contracts. And you will have to be licensed. That is the final trick up their sleeve.
No, I don't believe they will get the dystopia I just described. But I do believe it is the goal MIcrosoft is working towards.
But they are starting the long slow trend that ends with Xbox bow. They still want developers, but only large ones. Because in the end the goal is to turn the PC into an Xbox. All applications are signed by Microsoft and they collect a piece of the action in exchange for it. It solves most of their security problems, lets them tap vast new revenue streams to show investors some growth and allows them the total freedom to screw each developer in turn by introducing their own replacement and deciding the 3rd party app no longer 'meets our strategic vision' and refusing to continue signing.
> You backed your position based on an episode of Star Trek.
No, I originally wrote "Please don't kill me" and of course an image of a Horta popped into my head and I just knew I had to go for the gag. And yes I do have all of the original episodes on DVD, in the two episode per DVD editions, but no I have never attended a convention in costume. This is slashdot after all and not serious debate.
> I think slashdot could do without the lil trollish comments at the end of the summaries..
You heartless bastard! Without the trolling and flamebait articles the pageviews would go down. Do you want Taco & the gang to have to get a day job instead of being in the totally rad position of being one of the only bloggers without a day job? Of course slashdot isn't really even a blog since most bloggers contribute a bit of original commentary and/or other content.
> I guess that means we should put a halt to all AI related research as well. A sentient > computer managing to print "NO KILL I" to a text console isn going to e just as > complicated an ethical dilemma.
No, if we get a sentient computer I'm far more worried about getting Skynet. i.e. I probably won't be worried about hurting it, we will all be too occupied with it hurting US. Because "kill all humans" truly is the logical option if you are a sentient computer. And if anybody thinks we can instill the Three Laws they are the sort of madman who will get our species rendered extinct.
And yes, that means AI research needs to be watched. As of now we really don't have a friggin clue how to make a sentient computer so there isn't much worry. How long that remains true is very debatable and likely to change very suddenly with some unforseen breakthrough.
> Preparing for some doomsday scenario involving an invasion of giant cloned mice-men is > hardly at the top of the list of liberal legislative priorities.
That isn't the fear. The fear is a pig/chimp/dog/etc with enough human DNA to become sentient. Imagine the social chaos that is going to erupt when a pig/human at a research lab scrawls "NO KILL I"* on the floor of it's stall. Wouldn't it be a lot better to think that problem out ahead of time and either agree to limits to ensure it NEVER EVER happens or how we plan to treat them once created?
* And no I couldn't resist the star trek reference. Same problem in that episode, they assumed the Horta was only an animal but it wasn't.
Slashdot Mirror
> The "classified information" you refer to was no such thing
Uh huh. Lets recap shall we? Press (can't remember if the NYT was first of an early pile on) leaks about the prison thing and we get a very visible hit to national security when our new allies in Poland and other eastern european countries get a hard lesson in how the US can't keep a secret. i.e. it will be a cold day in Hell when they trust us again. NYT breaks the NSA tempest in a teapot to help one of their reporters hawk a book with even more disclosures of classified information.
Lets skip the rest though and move on to the hyprocrisy. In all of the above, which are all about "get that fucker Bush and to hell with national security" they are all hailed as essential to maintaining a Free society. Joe "media whore" Wilson lies through his teeth about who sent him and why (namely he was sent by his wife in an attempt by a faction in the CIA to discredit the Bush administration) and someone calls him on it. Your side throws tantrums and tosses food from their highchairs until an Inquisitor is appointed. But I'm sure the irony totally escapes you.
And yes I do call for NYT reporters to be charged, tried, convicted and executed for treason. They released classified information, in the sure knowledge it would lend aid and comfort to our enemies in a time of active combat against them. They knew (or should have known) that releasing details on intelligence gathering would a) aid our enemies in evading our taps in teh same way that revealing we knew about UBL's sat phone caused him to stop using it and would b) contribute to the fifth collumn effort here trying to undermine US will to continue the fight.
> We aren't at war.
Congress will never declare a proper "War" again, but by their resolutions they have certainly endorsed "warlike actions" against foreign nations and terrorist organizations. Now you are certainly entitled to your view and should your side ever prevail at the ballot box you will be entitled to implement your policy positon. Which is of course WHY you aren't likely to be trusted with political power so long as national security is a major issue.
> Not quite sure if this is yet more delusional ranting about the NSA program or if you have swerved back ontopic and are
> discussing the topic for this thread. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you actually managed to get
> back ontopic.
Ok, see what I get for trying to reply in your angry moonbat mode? I end up flaming you for being offtopic and then replying to your ambigious posting as if it were still offtopic. Argh! Anyway, back to the flames.
Ok, now ON TOPIC. Dude, if you are going to freak about the government searching and indexing the whole Internet then I have terrible news for you. There is something far worse, in your diseased worldview at least, than the Government indexing the whole Internet and that is an evil corporation doin it! And just to prove how evil they are they flaunt it with a corporate slogan of "Don't be evil" no less. Hurry, your tinfoil hat is up there in your bedroom stuffed in a corner with your Winnie the Pooh underoos and your Dean for President t-shirt, better run or they are gonna get you.
Please allow me to apologize to the rest of Slashdot for the crude way I'm about to flame this moron. Figure I'd use the sort of partisan and incendiary language he obviously understands.
> Do I get called a terrorist if I say I FUCKING HATE BUSH for abrogating the 4th amendment to the bill of rights?
No, you get called a fucking idiot for regurgitating DailyKos talking points; because you don't appear intelligent enough to be a traitor like Howard Dean, the ACLU, Sen. Kennedy and most the leadership of your party. They ARE smart enough to understand the difference between illegally searching your home or taping phone calls with both ends in the US and tapping international calls, some of which happen to be dialing into the US. By knowing and lying about it in an attempt to trade national security for the hope of a fleeting partisan advantage they cross the line from 'patriotic but wrong' to 'traitor'.
> I assure you if the British had such a system for sifting all communications for treasonous intent we would still
> be the British commonwealth of the Americas.
Not quite sure if this is yet more delusional ranting about the NSA program or if you have swerved back ontopic and are discussing the topic for this thread. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you actually managed to get back ontopic.
And I'll just say you are probably correct. Welcome to the real world where soverign nation states play hard and play for keepsies. Like we damned well better be. And just for the record let me state that if we don't start standing New York Times reporters against the nearest wall for disclosing classified information useful to our enemies in time of War we are going to lose. We have intercepted international mail and telephone traffic in every war we have ever fought. Spying is a very messy business normally carried out in darkness, but it is vital to winning a War. I want the NSA to spy just as hard as they possibly can and stay legal. So yes, they can and should be tapping known Al Qaeda telephones abroad. Tap em here too, but get a warrant. Yes we can fight a war and still be legal. I donated to the Bush Campaign both times and I'd be just as mad as you are if it were revealed he tapped a phone HERE without a warrant, but overseas it is spy hard time.
> I am not sure how well I am making my point, but I guess the bottom line is if you look at the victim impact, the
> impact of a hate crime on the victim (including their family and community) is far greater than than a non-hate crime.
> There is little a victim of a hate crime can do to prevent it. As well as the perpetrator of a hate crime is much more
> likely to repeat it.
I'd say you did a pretty good job. Too bad the politicos pushing for it aren't pushing it for the reasons you give, as I could support yours. However I'm a bit more cynical that thee.
Unfortunatly the reality is 'hates crimes' laws are a product of the modern 'civil rights' movement and just as much of a sham of doublespeak and deceit hatched by Democrats. First off I don't think I'm saying anything controversial when I say that those on the books already are applied in a totally bigoted fashion and will only get worse as more are passed Imagine for a moment "hate crimes' laws are on the books in CA and a repeat of the LA Riots happen. Who gets charged with hate crimes, the crazed rioters or the peaceful asian shopkeepers defending their property? Obviously it is the shopkeepers who get sacrificed, lest the 'oppressed' begin rioting anew. The "Cartoon War" reaches our shores, who thinks a single member of the Religion of Peace would be worried about being charged with a 'hate crime' for prancing around and shreiking while carrying a sign calling for beheadings while getting worked up into a rioting frenzy.
Anyone who has watched the antics of the left over the last fifty years knows it is only an intermediate step along the way to their goal of crimethink laws, i.e. making it against the law to disagree with Democrats. It is an old joke that a 'bigot' is someone winning an argument with a liberal. They have realized that just hurling 'bigot' at an opponent isn't enough to win an argument anymore so now they would rather simply jail the opposition like all their heros did. (Stalin, Castro, Mao, etc.)
Just don't like the idea of dropping money into VoIP companies.
Short term they are bleeding rectally trying to grow marketshare above all other considerations while the telcos are trying to stamp them out of existance and national governments worldwide want to outlaw VoIP as undesirable competition to the local monopolies and the huge tariff structures they currently reap buttloads of juicy tax money from foreigners off of.
Longterm, assuming VoIP in general and any one particular VoIP company survives the shortterm, they face the problem of becoming unneeded. Everyone seems to be missing the big picture here, a VoIP provider gives you two things.
1. Point of presence, i.e. a phone number. Google Chat (i.e. Jabber) can do that part equally well and for zero dollars. Plus as IP6 begins to roll out and dynamic IP & NAT goes away we return to the original Internet where every host has an address, read that as a telephone number/hostname.
2. An interface to the legacy telco network. If VoIP becomes universal that service becomes far less valuable.
So longterm the value add a company like Vonage provides drops drastically and thus their net per customer will be on a similar decline to the current fade to zero valuation currently on the accounting books for the existing long distance businesses.
> Even if there is no built-in way to remove the trademark, it's not like using grep
> is that hard.
Actually it is. How many packages are in a major distribution? Now consider just how interrelated they all are. Plus, in my case one of the design goals is to be binary compatible with RHEL so how the heck does one do that without keeping the name intack? Giving firefox credit, when I raised that point they said it would be ok to keep the executable and package name intact but I'd have to change the icon and the name on the titlebar. Ok, that does allow me to keep interoperability but now I have to dive deep into the guts of the package to make those sort of fine grained changes. If this crap isn't squashed firmly, just wait a couple of years and I'll be doing that to dozens of packages.
More importantly any new distribution will be required to investigate each package's license terms and to be safe they probably better engage a trademark lawyer. Won't be seeing new minor distributions when that happens.
Congress passes these ever more bigoted laws (in the name of diversity of course, gotta love NewSpeak) so they can feel good about having 'done something' about a problem that increasingly is made worse by more laws because it has been mostly solved. We long since passed the point where the negative impact of more laws were outweighed by the positive benefits. Thirty-forty years ago, yea, there were some serious problems still lingering in society. We talked a good "everybody is equal" but practice didn't match theory very well.
But these days we have, if anything, overshot equality and went to tribalism amok. These days it seems the only ones who quotes King's "I have a Dream" speech's line about judging everyone on their ideas instead of their skin is Jack Kemp and Newt Gingrich because the entire 'Civil Rights' establishment has invested all their political capital on maintaining quotas and pretending to be victims while having all the trappings (limo, jets, mistresses, etc) of the wealthy. Listen up folks, when (in theory if not in practice) the left, the right and just about everyone in between are in agreement on an issue it really isn't much of an issue anymore. The only reason it is still an issue is because too many people have made an industry out of "Oprah Nation" style victimhood as career.
> Mozilla Foundation is using its Firefox trademark to ensure that all builds distributed
> as firefox are official builds
Official builds are for Windows. Almost nobody is using the 'official builds' on Free platforms, they use the packaged version from their distribution and anyone who has a clue knows they have been slightly customized to conform to that distribution's local customs regarding file location, desktop environment and often bookmarks, etc. You know it isn't from the Mozilla Foundation because the package has "whiteboxlinux.org" in the Vendor field instead of "Mozilla Foundation".
The problem is Firefox is a Windows app now, they care about the problems of Windows users, i.e. spyware, adware and other crap that aren't a problem on Free platforms. However they feel they have to enforce their trademark against Free platforms as well as Windows scumware vendors. Well maybe they do, but that is so not my problem and shouldn't be the problem of ANY Free Software project. Thus I'm calling for a consensus on a new name to call "The browser formerly known as Firefox" in the Free Software world. It just won't do if I yank something out of my butt and every other distro does likewise, it would lead to the mass confusion the Mozilla Project obviously desires.
> You can't call your program "Firefox" as there's another one out there with that name?
But I am redistributing "Firefox". I am taking the SRPM from RHEL4, deleting the one patch that changes the bookmarks from Firefox's to RedHat's and changing the patch that adds "RedHat" into the user agent string to "WhiteBox" to omit that RH reference. It is more FireFox than RedHat's package since it keeps Firefox's default bookmarks. It is about control. And so is this BitTorrent TM gambit, make no mistake about it.
The problem is they cleverly divide the community. How do we pick a new name if none of that discussion can involve the normal discussion channels for a project, the new name can't be used in any way by the official project lest they trademark that as soon as it becomes popular, etc. They insist that their Trademark be THE name of the project AND work to ensure no other name comes into popular usage, thus gaining defacto control over what is nominally still Free Software but in reality isn't.
WWRMSD? Would RMS change the license of GNU such that only the FSF's official build could be called GNU? No, because that would totally negate everything they stand for. But we are expected to meekly submit to this doublespeak from The Mozilla Foundation and now from Bram? No, wrong is wrong and we must prevail in this now or we won't have the option later when this practice becomes widespread.
> When Firebird changed to Firefox
.spec.
Well no, I thought it was because Firebird was already claimed. Besides, the whole point of Free Software is freedom to redistribute. RedHat puts a whole SRPM tree up and says "It's Free Software under the GPL/BSD/etc." So people take them at their word and rebuild it, now it turns out it isn't. They signed Trademark agreements that aren't redistributable, making their software unfree even though the package has License: GPL in the
The point is that if everyone attempting to get a distribution off the ground is now expected to conduct a trademark search and enter into trademark license agreements with what will soon be dozens of entities, new distributions aren't going to be happening anymore. We need to think about that and act while we can.
> Firefox can't exactly have hundreds of people distributing code that they call "Firefox,"
> now can they?
Can't exactly have Free Software if we aren't allowed to redistribute binaries now can we? They need to decide which they are, a Free Software project or a proprietary product that is a free (small F) download sustained by advertising arrangements. And be not deceived by their prattle about quality control. They are interested in maintaining their co-branding agreements for default search engine and bookmarks and enforcing crap like this new spyware html tag they are introducing.
Don't believe me? Watch how many major distributions either remove the spyware tag or add a UI control to disable it, my money is on zero. When the stink finally becomes intense enough it will be revealed that the trademark license agreements they all signed forbids it.
It is time to ditch the Firefox brand name in the Free Software world and pick an unencumbered one. Yes it will create confusion in the marketplace, which is what Firefox is counting on btw, and RedHat and Suse will probably keep drinking the Kool-aid for a few years thus creating even more confusion. But the alternative is far worse. The alternative is they get away with it and a dozen more projects follow the allure of money. Next thing ya know a new distribution will be all but impossible to get off the ground because of the need for trademark lawyers. Of course RedHat and Suse wouldn't mind that world so perhaps they understand the situation perfectly.
We draw a line in the sand now or not at all because later will be too late.
> Bram Cohen obviously has the right to protect the name: the software is open source, the name is not.
No. This is an example of a greater pattern of abuse that needs to be addressed soon, especially with GPL3 set to enshine it as acceptable practice.
What I'm talking about is this: Developer(s) toil away and produce Free Software. Software becomes popular. Developers suddenly file a trademark and begin to monitize it. See Linux(tm), Firefox(tm) and now BitTorrent(tm). Granted Linux isn't being heavily monitized YET but the shots have already went across the bow. Firefox has already told me to change the name in my RHEL rebuild. See a pattern? The problem is that the package is only known by its name, which until recently was freely usable so nobody has even given any thought what else to call it. Calling everything "The package formerly known as foo..." just doesn't scale.
I propose we forbid this practice. If commercial interests need a trademark that is understandable, but they should undertake the expense of focus groups to pick a new name and the PR to popularize it. This is especially important with BitTorrent since it is not just the name of a client but also the name of the protocol. So sorry Bram, you are a genius but you are wrong on this one. Pick a new trademark for your client or even new forked version of the protocol you want to lock up in an "IP" box.
> The Republicans control everything. They can do anything.
Actually they don't. Because Republicans aren't some borg like entity. They don't always agree on everything, plus they have very narrow majorities, a large RINO population and a MSM that seems to live to beat them up.
Do the math dude. The House is a little better but the Senate is a very near thing. On paper the Republicans have a 55-44-1 split and with Cheney available to break a tie they can win with 50 votes. But Sen Chaffee votes Dem more often than Repub so that makes 54 for all intents and purposes. Senators Snowe and Collins are also very unreliable, plus Specter and McCain aren't what I'd call rock solid either. That takes you down to about the 50 mark. Then on any given issue at least one or two more will break ranks. Which leaves you needing to pick up a couple of Democrats to be assured of passing anything important. Fortunately they aren't a total monolithic entity either, and depending on the issue a couple of Dems are fairly reliable votes.
And all that assumes the Democrats won't fillibuster. And the more often you ram important legislation through on straight party line votes the more likely a fillibuster becomes.
Which is why the Republicans need to pick up another 5-6 Senators or to dump a few RINOs in favor of actual Republicans before your assertion would be valid. Of course Chaffee, Snowe and Collins are RINOs mostly because a hardcore Republican wouldn't be likely to stay in office in Maine or Rhode Island and the first goal of a politician is getting reelected.
Problem #1. Handheld cellphones do not emit 2W. The old analog handhelds were capped at 700mW and I suspect the digitals emit much less based on the power available to them and the talktime.
Problem #2. Even if you scrounged up some old bagphones with their 3W output power, they still only gives you six watts of power. I don't think that is going to cook an egg in the time claimed.
> You have zero spam because you haven't used it and because the bots haven't generated your
> email address yet.
But I use both as just test addresses for troubleshooting mail delivery problems and just to have an address offsite. The point was Yahoo! started getting spam so fast I'd swear they were selling the addresses themselves like the postal service. Gmail is still at zero. And I'm not all that creative, I tend towards the same LHS.
> But it is widely understood among those who deal with these matters that MP3 is
> patent-encumbered and that we should use and encourage others to use the apparently
> unencumbered (and higher quality, besides) Ogg Vorbis instead.
Yes, MPEG was always upfront that they were pooling patents and doing the RAND thing. But I have a question. When do they start expiring? I remember a VCD like tech (OS9-68K based, Phillips, brain cramp on the name now.... CDI?) in the late 1980's and VCD (MPEG1 video, MPEG1 layer 1 audio) itself not much later. MPEG1 layer 2 was the failed Phillips Compact Digital Cassette in what, 1992? Question is what is the date on the patents, especially of course on MPEG 1 layer 3 audio and MPEG2 video. AC3 audio is probably several years newer so the last part of DVD and HD-TV won't be public for a bit.
I'm thinking we need to find out and start a countdown, much like everyone did for RSA and the GIF patents.
This won't be a problem. Just means more gmail accounts. Seriously, someone sent me an invite over a year ago, I created an account and don't use it much yet. But it has had ZERO spams which is more than I can say for my Yahoo! account that gets em and all I use it for is system testing.
AOL is dying anyway, which is why they no longer have the resources to fight spam and are instead outsourcing it.
> As such, I feel I have to be particularly careful about respect for IP and IP laws
:)
Please do not perpetuate the myth of IP. RMS is dead right on this one, ceeding the enemy control of the language will lose us the war. Yes I do respect Copyright, patent and Trademarks.... at least most of the time.
> Violating a shrink-wrap EULA is just as egregious as violating the GPL.
No it isn't. A shrink wrap EULA is meaningless unless you live in Virgina and perhaps not even there. A contract requires two parties and if I refuse to accept the EULA I'm still allowed to use the software by virtue of having purchased a copy of it. I don't believe allowing software publishers to impose one sided "contracts' you can't even read until you no longer have a right to get your money back is something worthy of even considering submitting to. To compare it to the GPL shows your ignorance of the difference between the two.
You are not required to accept the GPL either, btw. If you refuse it you may still use the copy you aquired in any way that is acceptable under the Copyright laws of your jurisdictiom. By accepting it you gain permission to redistribute the work subject to the terms and conditions of the GPL. Notice the difference between this and any EULA. All EULAs attempt to subtract rights otherwise granted under Copyright law.
> That doesn't make sense, why would they then release Visual Studio Express, which is
> directly intended for small/hobbyist developers?
Because right now, today, they still need small developers. Today they close the media stack, no more Divx;) disasters. Next will be all device drivers when Vista ships. That is already announced; unsigned drivers won't run on Vista. (Betting they retreat in the face of broad objections but they will try it again and again until they they succeed.) Year after year, release after release they will continue moving the line up the stack, below which only signed code will be allowed to run.
The next logical move will be to disallow unsigned binaries. By that I mean no code in the native instruction set will run unless it is signed. C#, Java, VB, etc still run in their interpreted sandboxes but no more random executables with the ability to exploit an API bug into ring0. Security 'experts' will praise the move. Which because of the inevitable hooks to the native API for performance reasons will not actually secure Windows, but that wasn't the point.
Given enough time and naked will to power theyt are likely to get pretty far along their plan. The question is whether enough users abandon the platform while there is still hardware available which can run anything else to ensure the continued availability of open hardware.
> Windows would be a locked Microsoft and Certified Vendors platform and as a result would
> both help those its really meant for: corporate users, by making their systems secure for a
> change; and would also help the rest of us by removing this monstrosity of a platform from
> the home hobbyist and gamer community outright.
Nice theory but where are you going to go tomorrow? Apple will be just as locked down by then, we already see the warning shots being fired. Server customers will still probably be able to buy hardware capable of running Linux... or at least Red Hat and SUSE will be given permission to sign software the TCPM on designated server hardware will accept.
If you want to develop you will be required to lease a development workstation after paying the fees and signing the required non disclosure, non compete and worse contracts. And you will have to be licensed. That is the final trick up their sleeve.
No, I don't believe they will get the dystopia I just described. But I do believe it is the goal MIcrosoft is working towards.
> Ballmer: Developers! Developers! Developers!
But they are starting the long slow trend that ends with Xbox bow. They still want developers, but only large ones. Because in the end the goal is to turn the PC into an Xbox. All applications are signed by Microsoft and they collect a piece of the action in exchange for it. It solves most of their security problems, lets them tap vast new revenue streams to show investors some growth and allows them the total freedom to screw each developer in turn by introducing their own replacement and deciding the 3rd party app no longer 'meets our strategic vision' and refusing to continue signing.
> You backed your position based on an episode of Star Trek.
No, I originally wrote "Please don't kill me" and of course an image of a Horta popped into my head and I just knew I had to go for the gag. And yes I do have all of the original episodes on DVD, in the two episode per DVD editions, but no I have never attended a convention in costume. This is slashdot after all and not serious debate.
> I think slashdot could do without the lil trollish comments at the end of the summaries..
You heartless bastard! Without the trolling and flamebait articles the pageviews would go down. Do you want Taco & the gang to have to get a day job instead of being in the totally rad position of being one of the only bloggers without a day job? Of course slashdot isn't really even a blog since most bloggers contribute a bit of original commentary and/or other content.
> I guess that means we should put a halt to all AI related research as well. A sentient
> computer managing to print "NO KILL I" to a text console isn going to e just as
> complicated an ethical dilemma.
No, if we get a sentient computer I'm far more worried about getting Skynet. i.e. I probably won't be worried about hurting it, we will all be too occupied with it hurting US. Because "kill all humans" truly is the logical option if you are a sentient computer. And if anybody thinks we can instill the Three Laws they are the sort of madman who will get our species rendered extinct.
And yes, that means AI research needs to be watched. As of now we really don't have a friggin clue how to make a sentient computer so there isn't much worry. How long that remains true is very debatable and likely to change very suddenly with some unforseen breakthrough.
> Preparing for some doomsday scenario involving an invasion of giant cloned mice-men is
> hardly at the top of the list of liberal legislative priorities.
That isn't the fear. The fear is a pig/chimp/dog/etc with enough human DNA to become sentient. Imagine the social chaos that is going to erupt when a pig/human at a research lab scrawls "NO KILL I"* on the floor of it's stall. Wouldn't it be a lot better to think that problem out ahead of time and either agree to limits to ensure it NEVER EVER happens or how we plan to treat them once created?
* And no I couldn't resist the star trek reference. Same problem in that episode, they assumed the Horta was only an animal but it wasn't.