I've been doing a variation this for quite a while now on my phpBB forum. There are bots which identify a phpBB forum and simply POST a user-account creation to the relevant page. This then adds their URL to the forum's memberlist page, improving their Google ranking.
I won't stand for that, so the simple fix is to remove the "WEBSITE" input from the form. If "WEBSITE" gets POSTed along with the other data, I know it's a robot and post a message to kindly go away. Genuine users can edit their profile once the account is activated, if they want to plug their website.
One person, one vote must inevitably lead to a 2-party system. Why did I not realise this truth earlier?
Maybe because I live in the UK, where we have three mainstream parties, plus the greens, the racists, all with parliamentary seats.
Currently there are only two parties with a hope of power, but this has not always been the case; the "third party", the Liberal Democrats, have a history longer than the current power-holders, and all three of the major parties have held power for significant periods of the past century.
Oh, wait. I get it. "This is what I see in the USA -> This is inevitable". Sorry, I forgot about that aspect of your argument.
Nice try, but you didn't quite manage to contrive the mis-spellings and grammatical flaws of the original troll.
I would "correct" (de-correct?) your post, but I don't think that I am up to the level of the original poster's dexterity.
I find these statements about reliability really disturbing - "I've used it for a few weeks and it's more reliable" - Does this mean that you would have expected 1.5.0.x to have failed within such a short timeframe?
I admit that I share my desktop PC with the rest of the family, so I tend to log out after I'm done (though GNOME's "Switch User" feature is useful), and my work laptop is, well, let's face it, it runs Windows, so I don't even attempt multi-week runs.
For those of you who do keep a browser instance open for (let's say) over 1 month at a time, what benefits / issues / etc do you percieve with FF2, IE7, etc, as well as the previous versions?
Whereas "Post Eolas Internet Explorer" is perfectly clear English.
I guess that the "rare words" are "antagonism", "aficionados", "prosaic" and "imbroglio"? Whilst they might not be words you would use every day, I would expect any adult native (or fluent) English speaker (and, in these cases, speakers of many other Latin-derived languages) to be comfortable with these words and their meanings. I agree completely that (from a quick look, no I didn't RTFA) the article is very badly written. These words should not be beyond the vocabulary of the average fluent/native English speaker, though.
http://www.google.com/search?q=define%3Aword can always be used to find definitions, you know:-)
There is some common ground, but I still contend that the major benefactor of the concept of "IP" is corporate America.
Whether or not (see an earlier post in this thread) the same part of the US Constitution applies to (TM) and to (C) is irrelevant to me in the UK - (TM) and (C) laws are international (or at least multinational:~])
trademarks and copyrights are powers assigned to congress by the same clause of the constitution (the copyright clause)
That is not true. That is exactly the confusion (FUD) that I was referring to. Copyright and Trademark are entirely separate. "Intellectual Property" is a fiction, or - more accurately - a theoretical combination of (C) and (TM). In this instance, Mozilla aren't disputing (C), but are disputing (TM).
If you want a full description, feel free to get yourself a lawyer;-)
This instance should make it obvious to you that (C) and (TM) are different issues; Mozilla are disputing Debian's rights over the Mozilla Trademark, not at all over the Copyright.
I refer you back to my original point, that it is convenient for certain (particularly large, USAian and/or Multinational, as it happens) corporations to confuse copyright and trademark law into some mush of "Intellectual Property".
The better the general public understand the difference, the better off society will be.
I can understand that you might not agree with the way a lot of companies use IP law, but that doesn't justify mischaracterizations and bending reality to fit your own preconcieved notions of what is and what isn't.
I am doing nothing of the kind. There is no "IP Law". You appear to have fallen victim to the myth that there is such a thing. An issue like this makes the difference between copyright and trademark quite clear, surely? What part of it do you not understand?
Outlook is the only e-mail client left in wide use by the general public
I use MS Outlook for my work email (a year ago, I started using Windows for the first time since 1997), and it's a dog. For personal use, I (and my family, and most of my extended family) use Thunderbird, because it lacks one "key" feature (integrated calendar - see SunBird) but other than that, handles email quite happily at a fraction of the resource usage of Outlook.
Please, God, give me anything but Outlook. If I get forwarded an email trail, I can't even find the email addresses of the other participants, just "From: Fred Bloggs". I need "From: Fred Bloggs ", but Outlook doesn't even do that; just getting the full headers is some obscure "Internet Headers" or some such option, hidden away in a tiny textarea in a dialogue box somewhere under Tools.
I use Outlook because people email meetings to me (in itself, a rather bizarre concept). Other than that, I would avoid the horrible, resource-hogging client like the plague.
A lot of American corporate lawyers want to cause confusion between copyright and trademark law, by putting them both under the umbrella of "Intellectual Property", something which does not exist in law.
Copyright and Trademarks are two entirely separate things. Even Stallman and the GPL doesn't get into Trademark issues.
Mozilla have a right to put whatever restrictions they like on the use of their trademarks, whatever license the code is released under. Debian can call it IceWeasel (or even something less derogatory-sounding, if they so choose), but copyright and the MPL license mean that they can still use the code.
The big issue here, is that confusion about copyright vs trademarks is the result of a deliberate ploy by corporate America to confuse the public about "Intellectual Property" (IP) and "IP Rights" (IPR).
My 1999 AJP (Kapok) laptop (http://steve-parker.org/ajp/... once listed on linux-on-laptops.org, but that domain seems to have expired and been hijacked) works constantly as my firewall. Granted, it is connected to the mains, but the juice goes through the laptop (and if the mains is cut, the battery does not last long at all). Still, it's never burned my hair.
It sounds like you know something about the culture... what are the issues? Is this about software, or pattern designs?
Individual designs, if someone feels so inclined, could be licensed under the Creative Commons license.
If it's a software issue, as some posters suggest, what are the requirements? I would have thought that the problem-space of converting a pixellated picture into a set of instructions along the lines of "stitch the red thread from cell C83 to cell K32" should be pretty straight forward; in this case, an open source application should fix your Mum's legal problems, and be quite easy to write/support.
Just my cut $0.02, cross $0.02, pearl $0.02
Re:Content Based Image Retrieval
on
Google Image Labeler
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
At the end, it says "Thanks for your contribution. It will help us improve the relevance of image search results so that you and other Google users can quickly and easily find the results you're looking for."
Which is better at recognising what's in a picture? A human, who can say "oh look, that's Natalie Portman pouring hot grits down her pants", not a computer which will just say "a person" at best.
Frankly, I'd personally like to keep "GNU" and "Linux" seperate as maybe sometime in the future some popular versions of Linux will not make use of any GNU utilities... it could happen.
Which is exactly why you need to refer to your current installation as GNU/Linux... if your 2008 system will be running GNU/Mach, or Something/Linux, then you need to be clear that Ubuntu 6.06 (or whatever) is specifically GNU/Linux.
Many years ago I wrote an article (which I never got around to properly finishing) and RMS was kind enough to reply to my queries about this.
My Question RMS's First Reply RMS's Follow-up
I think that was pretty clear back in early 2001
You can block any adverts you don't like from appearing on your site. Select "Competitive Ad Filter" under "AdSense Setup" and add any domain you don't want to advertise on your site.
But what rational reason would you have for going around such sites?
Why would you click on something you received by email?
Do you wander around the local parks, looking for dirty ponds to drink from?
What do you want - sympathy? !?!
To be fair, the source code should be modifiable (when that is a customer option) - that is, you can say "A COTS customer could tweak the source by paying the vendor $x for access + paying a developer $y to update it; a FLOSS customer could tweak the source by paying a developer $y to update it"
It may be that $x==infinity in some COTS cases (whilst $x=0 for FLOSS)
As for getting competing teams to test each others' solutions, you will end up going round and round in circles, with no publishable article that everybody will sign up to. Maybe each team should provide a (fully documented) test suite which rates all possible solutions. This should be done "blind" - that is, each team should provide an answer of "Here is my web server; here is my test suite" without having seen any other team's solutions. (This doesn't have to be vendor-vs-vendor, it could be firewalled teams of journalists). Each web server (let's stick with the easy (web server) stuff for now; for real results, you need complex apps, but then the whole benchmarking thing falls apart, so we'll ignore that inconvenient detail completely!) is provided, with its test suite, which matches provided criteria ("do logon", "request search results for x y z", etc)
Even with the above, you could be scuppered from the start, as the journo would have to specify a standard API (eg, "http://example.com/search?q=x+y+z") for equivalent tests to be provided by each team; one team might be able to provide a better solution with another method (maybe Cookies, or whatever - this is too simplistic an example to give real results)
RedHat (as with all distros) are very clear about what they do and do not support; they'll support unmodified binaries distributed by themselves on the (say) RHEL4 CDs; if you build your own kernel, you're on your own. If you build your own Apache and have trouble with it, you're on your own. Come to that, if you misconfigure Apache and have trouble with it, you're pretty much on your own.
I have called RedHat support once, on behalf of a customer who had paid approx £3000 for support (three boxes, IIRC). The RHN download failed to authenticate to the MS IIS proxy server, even though the GUI clearly indicated that it should be able to. The RedHat zonk just said that it was a MS problem. The MS proxy server was working normally, as it had been doing for ages; the RedHat Network GUI had a "MS Proxy Server" option, which took authentication details, but then failed to work properly. (It was a few years ago, I forget the precise details).
I found a small perl script on SourceForge which did the authentication for me, providing a "localhost proxy server" and was able to patch the newly installed server.
As I spent most of my time working with Sun at the time, I was not at all impressed by the slippery-shoulder attitude; the staff just didn't have the in-depth knowledge of the OS, and (even more importantly) there wasn't the infrastructure in place to escalate to those who did know.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh right, I see.
Thank you for the education.
When British democracy has lasted as long as American democracy, maybe I will better understand these things.
I won't stand for that, so the simple fix is to remove the "WEBSITE" input from the form. If "WEBSITE" gets POSTed along with the other data, I know it's a robot and post a message to kindly go away. Genuine users can edit their profile once the account is activated, if they want to plug their website.
One person, one vote must inevitably lead to a 2-party system. Why did I not realise this truth earlier? Maybe because I live in the UK, where we have three mainstream parties, plus the greens, the racists, all with parliamentary seats. Currently there are only two parties with a hope of power, but this has not always been the case; the "third party", the Liberal Democrats, have a history longer than the current power-holders, and all three of the major parties have held power for significant periods of the past century. Oh, wait. I get it. "This is what I see in the USA -> This is inevitable". Sorry, I forgot about that aspect of your argument.
Nice try, but you didn't quite manage to contrive the mis-spellings and grammatical flaws of the original troll. I would "correct" (de-correct?) your post, but I don't think that I am up to the level of the original poster's dexterity.
That must get an award for the greatest number of grammatical and spelling errors in a single post, even on slashdot.
I find these statements about reliability really disturbing - "I've used it for a few weeks and it's more reliable" - Does this mean that you would have expected 1.5.0.x to have failed within such a short timeframe? I admit that I share my desktop PC with the rest of the family, so I tend to log out after I'm done (though GNOME's "Switch User" feature is useful), and my work laptop is, well, let's face it, it runs Windows, so I don't even attempt multi-week runs. For those of you who do keep a browser instance open for (let's say) over 1 month at a time, what benefits / issues / etc do you percieve with FF2, IE7, etc, as well as the previous versions?
So the DMCA is now good ... ?
But that doesn't fit the Slashdot groupthink
(brain explodes)
Whereas "Post Eolas Internet Explorer" is perfectly clear English. I guess that the "rare words" are "antagonism", "aficionados", "prosaic" and "imbroglio"? Whilst they might not be words you would use every day, I would expect any adult native (or fluent) English speaker (and, in these cases, speakers of many other Latin-derived languages) to be comfortable with these words and their meanings. I agree completely that (from a quick look, no I didn't RTFA) the article is very badly written. These words should not be beyond the vocabulary of the average fluent/native English speaker, though. http://www.google.com/search?q=define%3Aword can always be used to find definitions, you know :-)
There is some common ground, but I still contend that the major benefactor of the concept of "IP" is corporate America. Whether or not (see an earlier post in this thread) the same part of the US Constitution applies to (TM) and to (C) is irrelevant to me in the UK - (TM) and (C) laws are international (or at least multinational :~])
That is not true. That is exactly the confusion (FUD) that I was referring to. Copyright and Trademark are entirely separate. "Intellectual Property" is a fiction, or - more accurately - a theoretical combination of (C) and (TM). In this instance, Mozilla aren't disputing (C), but are disputing (TM).
If you want a full description, feel free to get yourself a lawyer ;-)
This instance should make it obvious to you that (C) and (TM) are different issues; Mozilla are disputing Debian's rights over the Mozilla Trademark, not at all over the Copyright.
I refer you back to my original point, that it is convenient for certain (particularly large, USAian and/or Multinational, as it happens) corporations to confuse copyright and trademark law into some mush of "Intellectual Property".
The better the general public understand the difference, the better off society will be.
I can understand that you might not agree with the way a lot of companies use IP law, but that doesn't justify mischaracterizations and bending reality to fit your own preconcieved notions of what is and what isn't.
I am doing nothing of the kind. There is no "IP Law". You appear to have fallen victim to the myth that there is such a thing. An issue like this makes the difference between copyright and trademark quite clear, surely? What part of it do you not understand?
Outlook is the only e-mail client left in wide use by the general public I use MS Outlook for my work email (a year ago, I started using Windows for the first time since 1997), and it's a dog. For personal use, I (and my family, and most of my extended family) use Thunderbird, because it lacks one "key" feature (integrated calendar - see SunBird) but other than that, handles email quite happily at a fraction of the resource usage of Outlook. Please, God, give me anything but Outlook. If I get forwarded an email trail, I can't even find the email addresses of the other participants, just "From: Fred Bloggs". I need "From: Fred Bloggs ", but Outlook doesn't even do that; just getting the full headers is some obscure "Internet Headers" or some such option, hidden away in a tiny textarea in a dialogue box somewhere under Tools. I use Outlook because people email meetings to me (in itself, a rather bizarre concept). Other than that, I would avoid the horrible, resource-hogging client like the plague.
A lot of American corporate lawyers want to cause confusion between copyright and trademark law, by putting them both under the umbrella of "Intellectual Property", something which does not exist in law. Copyright and Trademarks are two entirely separate things. Even Stallman and the GPL doesn't get into Trademark issues. Mozilla have a right to put whatever restrictions they like on the use of their trademarks, whatever license the code is released under. Debian can call it IceWeasel (or even something less derogatory-sounding, if they so choose), but copyright and the MPL license mean that they can still use the code. The big issue here, is that confusion about copyright vs trademarks is the result of a deliberate ploy by corporate America to confuse the public about "Intellectual Property" (IP) and "IP Rights" (IPR).
Really, it is not that difficult.
Welcome to Meta-Slashdot, aka "slashdot lite". Irrelevant trivia, such as the actual article, are discarded as unnecessary ;-)
My 1999 AJP (Kapok) laptop (http://steve-parker.org/ajp/ ... once listed on linux-on-laptops.org, but that domain seems to have expired and been hijacked) works constantly as my firewall. Granted, it is connected to the mains, but the juice goes through the laptop (and if the mains is cut, the battery does not last long at all). Still, it's never burned my hair.
Exactly. They've got a megacluster of Linux boxes, they now want a megacluster of /. readers.
It sounds like you know something about the culture... what are the issues? Is this about software, or pattern designs? Individual designs, if someone feels so inclined, could be licensed under the Creative Commons license. If it's a software issue, as some posters suggest, what are the requirements? I would have thought that the problem-space of converting a pixellated picture into a set of instructions along the lines of "stitch the red thread from cell C83 to cell K32" should be pretty straight forward; in this case, an open source application should fix your Mum's legal problems, and be quite easy to write/support. Just my cut $0.02, cross $0.02, pearl $0.02
At the end, it says "Thanks for your contribution. It will help us improve the relevance of image search results so that you and other Google users can quickly and easily find the results you're looking for." Which is better at recognising what's in a picture? A human, who can say "oh look, that's Natalie Portman pouring hot grits down her pants", not a computer which will just say "a person" at best.
Which is exactly why you need to refer to your current installation as GNU/Linux ... if your 2008 system will be running GNU/Mach, or Something/Linux, then you need to be clear that Ubuntu 6.06 (or whatever) is specifically GNU/Linux.
Many years ago I wrote an article (which I never got around to properly finishing) and RMS was kind enough to reply to my queries about this.
My Question
RMS's First Reply
RMS's Follow-up
I think that was pretty clear back in early 2001
You can block any adverts you don't like from appearing on your site. Select "Competitive Ad Filter" under "AdSense Setup" and add any domain you don't want to advertise on your site.
No. Counterfitting is the installation of a counter.
Counterfeiting is "The unauthorized copying or imitating of an item which is later passed on as an original."
But what rational reason would you have for going around such sites? Why would you click on something you received by email? Do you wander around the local parks, looking for dirty ponds to drink from? What do you want - sympathy? !?!
To be fair, the source code should be modifiable (when that is a customer option) - that is, you can say "A COTS customer could tweak the source by paying the vendor $x for access + paying a developer $y to update it; a FLOSS customer could tweak the source by paying a developer $y to update it" It may be that $x==infinity in some COTS cases (whilst $x=0 for FLOSS) As for getting competing teams to test each others' solutions, you will end up going round and round in circles, with no publishable article that everybody will sign up to. Maybe each team should provide a (fully documented) test suite which rates all possible solutions. This should be done "blind" - that is, each team should provide an answer of "Here is my web server; here is my test suite" without having seen any other team's solutions. (This doesn't have to be vendor-vs-vendor, it could be firewalled teams of journalists). Each web server (let's stick with the easy (web server) stuff for now; for real results, you need complex apps, but then the whole benchmarking thing falls apart, so we'll ignore that inconvenient detail completely!) is provided, with its test suite, which matches provided criteria ("do logon", "request search results for x y z", etc) Even with the above, you could be scuppered from the start, as the journo would have to specify a standard API (eg, "http://example.com/search?q=x+y+z") for equivalent tests to be provided by each team; one team might be able to provide a better solution with another method (maybe Cookies, or whatever - this is too simplistic an example to give real results)
RedHat (as with all distros) are very clear about what they do and do not support; they'll support unmodified binaries distributed by themselves on the (say) RHEL4 CDs; if you build your own kernel, you're on your own. If you build your own Apache and have trouble with it, you're on your own. Come to that, if you misconfigure Apache and have trouble with it, you're pretty much on your own. I have called RedHat support once, on behalf of a customer who had paid approx £3000 for support (three boxes, IIRC). The RHN download failed to authenticate to the MS IIS proxy server, even though the GUI clearly indicated that it should be able to. The RedHat zonk just said that it was a MS problem. The MS proxy server was working normally, as it had been doing for ages; the RedHat Network GUI had a "MS Proxy Server" option, which took authentication details, but then failed to work properly. (It was a few years ago, I forget the precise details). I found a small perl script on SourceForge which did the authentication for me, providing a "localhost proxy server" and was able to patch the newly installed server. As I spent most of my time working with Sun at the time, I was not at all impressed by the slippery-shoulder attitude; the staff just didn't have the in-depth knowledge of the OS, and (even more importantly) there wasn't the infrastructure in place to escalate to those who did know.