What the original poster is talking about is the case where Y hires T to send spam advertising X.
I know, but that too has come to be known as a joe job (at least in the news.admin.net-abuse.email newsgroup), since it's done with the same objective: to get X shut down or to harrass them away from the net. It's generally equally ineffective.
... until people start spamming using their competition's address to facilitate them getting thrown off their host?
They have been doing that for years. It's called a joe job, after the first victim of such a scam. These are generally quite easy to detect, though, so they do not generally lead to the victim's website being shut off. The main damage is in the annoyance and the bounces and responses received by the victim, which constitute something akin to a DDoS attack.
In any case, the existence of joe jobs is no reason to penalize actual spammers and stop them from profiting from their spam runs. The only way to do that is shutting off their websites.
Or else the copyright would have been signed over to the Free Software Foundation, and IBM wouldn't be defending it right now.
No, the FSF would be defending it, and given their excellent track record when it comes to defending the GPL I would have more trust in them than in former corporate monopolist IBM, who are in it for their own interests as opposed to those of the free software community.
Because there are websites that won't let you in unless you make it think you are using Internet Explorer. If that website happens to be essential to you, you are left without a choice.
I do think it would be better if it were possible to change the UID string for specific sites, and perhaps even to make it impossible to change it for all sites.
GnuPG, PGP, and the like are only useful for communication between nerds. Mere mortals have no idea what public key encryption is, never mind how to use it. Nor do they want to bother.
As they grow, mature, and become more corporatized, are they on the path to the dark side?
They may not know it yet, but they arrived at that destination when they started answering to stockholders. Now it's just a matter of time before the slashbot fanboys wake up to that fact.
I stopped reading his "articles" years ago, once I realized what he was up to. Among other things, he used to spend a significant amount of time trolling Macintosh-related USENET groups trying to drum up FUD for his "articles". He's one of the reasons I have little respect for "journalists".
Sure enough, we've had a few visits from him in the anti-spam newsgroup also, and it was blatantly clear he had no intention of being informed and/or educated... he was just fishing for sensation.
He's more suited for tabloids than he is for mainstream journalism. Also, he appears to have very little true technical knowledge. Rather than trying to report facts, he tries to write articles that provoke controvercy.
A few months ago, several individuals started complaining about GPL responsibilities and demanded the source-code to the work-in-progress be posted. This despite the fact the work-in-progress wasn't an actual release, but a testing copy.
How do you mean, "despite"? You are describing a blatant GPL violation. The GPL does not distinguish between "testing copies" and "official releases". Any distribution of binaries must be accompanied by the availability of the corresponding source code, period.
No wonder people got pissed. If they can get away with this, anybody can get away with violating the GPL. It's necessary to stand firm on these issues if the GPL is to be worth anything in the future.
Why isn't there an open source attempt to model what the folks in Cuppertino are doing?
ROX may be what you're looking for. While they say it's inspired by RISC OS (which I never used), it reminds me of Mac OS X (which I use) in a number of ways: extensive use of drag and drop, windows don't fill the entire screen, application directories, to name a few.
Not only that, grandparent's claim about "waiting 15 seconds for a page to load" is FUD. I just got done compiling Moz 1.7.1 on an old 300 MHz 586 - it flies!
Not to mention that the installer (as well as the build system) allow you to pick and choose. I skipped the mailer/newsreader - no bloat here.
If he has a social phobia that was severe, why was he in one of the mostly densely populated countries in the world? Just walking in Narita International Airport would have been a major challenge for him.
Well, no... you don't interact with any of those people, nor would any of them be particularly watching you. In fact, being anonymous in a crowd is the easiest way for a socially phobic person to be "among people".
Well, it was fun while it lasted. I'm off to spend the last few weeks of internet existence with the badgers [badgerbadgerbadger.com].
Oh, come on. The Internet survived the US for decades, I doubt the UN (i.e. the good folks that brought us international telecommunications standardization) would kill it any time soon.
He _knows_ it's a browser, his assertion is that HTTP should have been like WebDAV from the beginning, and that instead of writing a browser, they should have written a browser with authoring capabilities.
Mozilla 1.7. But then again, everyone seens to think that's "bloated".
[...]
APIs can however be reverse-engineered. You can reverse-engineer an API without any trade-secret knowledge (i.e. 'clean-room') and publish that, that is perfectly legal.
I'm not doubting you, but then how come that closed-source license agreements almost invariably prohibit reverse-engineering? Does this mean those license agreements are unenforcable?
2 - I can save some text in OpenOffice as.DOC and be certain it'll show up in Word as good as I made it.
Given that you can't even save some text in Word as.DOC and be certain it'll show up on somebody else's Word as good as you made it, it'll be a cold day in Hell before that happens.
Slashdot Mirror
The website says the whole network contains about 1 petabyte of data.
Oh yeah?? Well, my editing text files rock! You had better believe it, or they might just edit you!
(Guess that's one way to solve the end user problem...)
I know, but that too has come to be known as a joe job (at least in the news.admin.net-abuse.email newsgroup), since it's done with the same objective: to get X shut down or to harrass them away from the net. It's generally equally ineffective.
This should have been: the existence of joe jobs is no reason not to penalize actual spammers.
They have been doing that for years. It's called a joe job, after the first victim of such a scam. These are generally quite easy to detect, though, so they do not generally lead to the victim's website being shut off. The main damage is in the annoyance and the bounces and responses received by the victim, which constitute something akin to a DDoS attack.
In any case, the existence of joe jobs is no reason to penalize actual spammers and stop them from profiting from their spam runs. The only way to do that is shutting off their websites.
No, the FSF would be defending it, and given their excellent track record when it comes to defending the GPL I would have more trust in them than in former corporate monopolist IBM, who are in it for their own interests as opposed to those of the free software community.
I do think it would be better if it were possible to change the UID string for specific sites, and perhaps even to make it impossible to change it for all sites.
GnuPG, PGP, and the like are only useful for communication between nerds. Mere mortals have no idea what public key encryption is, never mind how to use it. Nor do they want to bother.
For businessess interested in using Linux as opposed to distributing it, the only relevant clause in the GPL is this one:
"The use of the Program is not restricted."
How much simpler can you get?
They may not know it yet, but they arrived at that destination when they started answering to stockholders. Now it's just a matter of time before the slashbot fanboys wake up to that fact.
Sure enough, we've had a few visits from him in the anti-spam newsgroup also, and it was blatantly clear he had no intention of being informed and/or educated... he was just fishing for sensation.
He'd make a pretty good Slashdot editor, then. :-)
How do you mean, "despite"? You are describing a blatant GPL violation. The GPL does not distinguish between "testing copies" and "official releases". Any distribution of binaries must be accompanied by the availability of the corresponding source code, period.
No wonder people got pissed. If they can get away with this, anybody can get away with violating the GPL. It's necessary to stand firm on these issues if the GPL is to be worth anything in the future.
ROX may be what you're looking for. While they say it's inspired by RISC OS (which I never used), it reminds me of Mac OS X (which I use) in a number of ways: extensive use of drag and drop, windows don't fill the entire screen, application directories, to name a few.
My two-year-old daughter needs Flash. Teletubbies games in DHTML would be pretty crappy...
Not to mention that the installer (as well as the build system) allow you to pick and choose. I skipped the mailer/newsreader - no bloat here.
These folks might disagree.
(No, I'm not an Esperantist.)
Well, no... you don't interact with any of those people, nor would any of them be particularly watching you. In fact, being anonymous in a crowd is the easiest way for a socially phobic person to be "among people".
Oh, come on. The Internet survived the US for decades, I doubt the UN (i.e. the good folks that brought us international telecommunications standardization) would kill it any time soon.
...is here (until the real site is back). Have fun.
Mozilla 1.7. But then again, everyone seens to think that's "bloated".
Works for me on Windoze Server 2003 at work... YMMV. Perhaps XP Home or some such won't work.
Right here.
I'm not doubting you, but then how come that closed-source license agreements almost invariably prohibit reverse-engineering? Does this mean those license agreements are unenforcable?
Given that you can't even save some text in Word as .DOC and be certain it'll show up on somebody else's Word as good as you made it, it'll be a cold day in Hell before that happens.
It isn't quite an OS, but GNUStep comes closest to being a FreeNeXTSTEP...