True. "Public good" is not profit, but the price you pay for incorporating someone else's GPLed software into your product. (You know, the "free as in freedom, not price" thing.) If Skype is not willing to pay that price, they should not have used the software.
Wow. I have never seen someone so utterly miss the point of a message. Try reading what I actually wrote instead of what you think my message should have said.
LaTeX makes brilliant looking documents, but Jesus wept, it's hard to make your documents look like YOU want, as opposed to how it thinks they should look.
That's because the whole point of LaTeX is not having to design the look of your document. The underlying assumption is that scientists aren't graphic designers and they're better off having their papers and books automatically designed for them. If you want to control the look of your document yourself, you're simply using the wrong tool for the job.
Look at Macintosh. It is unix based, has a better user interface than Linux, more informal support, a major consumer brand name behind it, MS Office is natively available,... and it is around 5-6%. [...] Even if Linux were more competitive with Mac OS X, Apple's market share suggests that Linux can not really improve it's share much.
You forgot that Mac OS X only works legally on Apple's own hardware (no, illegal hacks don't count). Having to buy new hardware is a gigantic hurdle to take just to switch to another operating system. You can try out any flavour of Linux on your existing hardware. If you could do this with Mac OS X, its market share would be far higher.
Interestingly, this study notes that suicide rates actually decreased with increased Web usage in England, perhaps because support is readily available to anyone who wants it."
The desire for suicide stems from desperation, from having no way out, from not being heard or understood by anyone. The "support" of suicide provides those with suicidal tendencies with a way out, and gives them the feeling that they are heard and understood. This then decreases the actual risk of suicide.
Did anyone attempt to actually verify the veracity of this story? Or was it simply fixed just minutes or hours ago? I just did a manual SMTP session to all of gmail.com's listed and reachable Mail eXchange (MX) servers, and RCPT TO to a bogus address gets immediately rejected every time. No backscatter is generated by any of the MX servers.
Here is the proof. (I tried to include it in the comment, but couldn't get past the lameness filter.)
I have been noticing one thing over many years now:
EU seems to protect its citizens and consumers from the rapacious hungry corporates more than US, as beacon of freedom, does.
Not true, you are just as free to choose a different ISP as you are to choose a different email provider. The most that can be said is that switching ISPs is more hassle.
and our ISP is a constent they are ALWAYS there with everything you do Google is only there when you use their service.
That's true, but I don't see how that changes the principle of the matter.
BTW, the "Troll" moderation should be renamed "Unpopular Opinion" as that seems to be how it's often used.
The Microsoft Windows OS is not the property of the consumer using it. It is the property of Microsoft used under a license from Microsoft. If the usage of the OS complies with the license then surely any inadvertent behavior on the part of the OS is the responsibility of the owner (Microsoft) and not the license holder (the end user).
What would that mean for Free and Open Source software, which is just as well the property of its respective authors and used under license?
So, it's bad and evil and wrong if a computer at your ISP reads all your packets for marketing research purposes, but when Slashdot's favourite pet company Google does the exact same thing with all your messages in Gmail, it's perfectly fine and justified? I think Slashbots need to get their kneejerks straight.
In such a case, I would prefer to be armed optimally, so as to ensure that my enemy (for now I know him to be such) is completely neutralized. That means dead.
Um... no. It doesn't necessarily mean dead. It might just as well mean unconscious, and/or physically incapacitated.
If they are a derivative work of the original drivers, which they probably are, the answer to that question is that he probably doesn't have any because such derivative works are prohibited by the license "agreement". (IANAL. TINLA.)
He wasn't working for the company, he was working for the victims of the company's shoddy behaviour....
That's probably what he believes, but the effect of his work is that the victims of Creative's shoddy behavior can continue to use and buy Creative's shoddy products. So working for free to fix the problems of Creative's victims is in effect tantamount to working for Creative for free.
I can only assume either they had a sufficient way to break these codes in 1997 or there was too much critical mass to change clear text systems to encryption. Maybe both.
Strong open source encryption algorithms such as those used in PGP/GnuPG and OpenSSH are open source and widely available all over the world. Believing that the US government has had some secret way to break them since 1997 would require believing that the US government either is much smarter than all of the world cryptographic community (otherwise the secret would have been independently rediscovered by now), or have all the world's cryptographers under tight control so that the secret is not revealed. I think either scenario is the stuff of paranoid conspiracy theories.
The only thing that amazes me more than Creative's behavior in this sorry affair is daniel_k's naïveté. Why do work for free for a commercial entity with a known track record of psychopathic behavior, especially when it's a job they should have done themselves so he was stepping on their turf? Did he honestly expect not to get screwed over? What's more, did he not realize that he was simply enabling their bad behavior by fixing the consequences of it for them?
Same with technology, I have friends that do everything with PGP, 3DES, AES etc. It will only make them get put under more scrutiny.
This is why it's so essential to get everyone to use strong encryption by default. Philip Zimmermann said it best back in 1991, in the original PGP user's guide:
What if everyone believed that law-abiding citizens should use postcards for their mail? If a nonconformist tried to assert his privacy by using an envelope for his mail, it would draw suspicion. Perhaps the authorities would open his mail to see what he's hiding. Fortunately, we don't live in that kind of world, because everyone protects most of their mail with envelopes. So no one draws suspicion by asserting their privacy with an envelope. There's safety in numbers. Analogously, it would be nice if everyone routinely used encryption for all their email, innocent or not, so that no one drew suspicion by asserting their email privacy with encryption. Think of it as a form of solidarity.
But really, go and read the entire essay, it's important stuff.
That's one thing I have never understood about the OSS movement -- that some people think that everything should be free and that anyone who tries to make a profit from software is somehow "bad".
No one in the Free Software and Open Source movements actually thinks that. Seems like you've fallen into the old Free vs. Free trap. Freedom does not mean free of charge. What F/OSS proponents think is bad is restricting people from modifying the software they use as they see fit and from helping others with their modifications.
No. There is nothing wrong with visiting a publicly available URL. No exceptions.
The URL was not intended to be public and everyone involved knows this. It's like you're saying it's not wrong to burgle someone's house and steal things you don't own because they failed to lock their doors.
Nothing in the GPL says that a licensee has to freely offer the code to absolutely anyone free of charge, to anyone that asks, in the manner the asker chooses. It says that they have to offer the code, in a manner of their choosing to anyone that asks.
That's still not correct. It says that at minimum, they have to offer the code, in a manner that's customarily used for distributing software, to anyone to whom they have already distributed the binaries.
On today's Internet that means they could hide the source behind a password-protected area only accessible to consumers. It would probably also still be quite acceptable to send a CD upon request to customers only. Of course, consumers then have the freedom to pass it on to anyone they choose, so the effect of such restrictions would be limited, but still, in a story like this, this is a very relevant rule.
Slashdot Mirror
It was made in 1976. Pedophilia was quite in fashion back then.
It is a naked child in a sexually suggestive position. That makes it child porn by definition, no matter what American "free speech" cultists say.
True. "Public good" is not profit, but the price you pay for incorporating someone else's GPLed software into your product. (You know, the "free as in freedom, not price" thing.) If Skype is not willing to pay that price, they should not have used the software.
Guess you haven't heard of the longtable package. It comes with LaTeX so it's as basic as anything.
Wow. I have never seen someone so utterly miss the point of a message. Try reading what I actually wrote instead of what you think my message should have said.
That's because the whole point of LaTeX is not having to design the look of your document. The underlying assumption is that scientists aren't graphic designers and they're better off having their papers and books automatically designed for them. If you want to control the look of your document yourself, you're simply using the wrong tool for the job.
The blogger's name is Kathleen Seidel, not Katherine. The previous Slashdot story got this wrong as well.
You forgot that Mac OS X only works legally on Apple's own hardware (no, illegal hacks don't count). Having to buy new hardware is a gigantic hurdle to take just to switch to another operating system. You can try out any flavour of Linux on your existing hardware. If you could do this with Mac OS X, its market share would be far higher.
The desire for suicide stems from desperation, from having no way out, from not being heard or understood by anyone. The "support" of suicide provides those with suicidal tendencies with a way out, and gives them the feeling that they are heard and understood. This then decreases the actual risk of suicide.
Argh. My bad for not reading the freaking summary. Sorry about that.
Did anyone attempt to actually verify the veracity of this story? Or was it simply fixed just minutes or hours ago? I just did a manual SMTP session to all of gmail.com's listed and reachable Mail eXchange (MX) servers, and RCPT TO to a bogus address gets immediately rejected every time. No backscatter is generated by any of the MX servers. Here is the proof. (I tried to include it in the comment, but couldn't get past the lameness filter.)
That's because these corporations are the EU's rivals for that control. The EU prefers to keep that kind of control for itself.
Not true, you are just as free to choose a different ISP as you are to choose a different email provider. The most that can be said is that switching ISPs is more hassle.
That's true, but I don't see how that changes the principle of the matter.
BTW, the "Troll" moderation should be renamed "Unpopular Opinion" as that seems to be how it's often used.
What would that mean for Free and Open Source software, which is just as well the property of its respective authors and used under license?
So, it's bad and evil and wrong if a computer at your ISP reads all your packets for marketing research purposes, but when Slashdot's favourite pet company Google does the exact same thing with all your messages in Gmail, it's perfectly fine and justified? I think Slashbots need to get their kneejerks straight.
Um... no. It doesn't necessarily mean dead. It might just as well mean unconscious, and/or physically incapacitated.
If they are a derivative work of the original drivers, which they probably are, the answer to that question is that he probably doesn't have any because such derivative works are prohibited by the license "agreement". (IANAL. TINLA.)
That's probably what he believes, but the effect of his work is that the victims of Creative's shoddy behavior can continue to use and buy Creative's shoddy products. So working for free to fix the problems of Creative's victims is in effect tantamount to working for Creative for free.
Strong open source encryption algorithms such as those used in PGP/GnuPG and OpenSSH are open source and widely available all over the world. Believing that the US government has had some secret way to break them since 1997 would require believing that the US government either is much smarter than all of the world cryptographic community (otherwise the secret would have been independently rediscovered by now), or have all the world's cryptographers under tight control so that the secret is not revealed. I think either scenario is the stuff of paranoid conspiracy theories.
The only thing that amazes me more than Creative's behavior in this sorry affair is daniel_k's naïveté. Why do work for free for a commercial entity with a known track record of psychopathic behavior, especially when it's a job they should have done themselves so he was stepping on their turf? Did he honestly expect not to get screwed over? What's more, did he not realize that he was simply enabling their bad behavior by fixing the consequences of it for them?
This is why it's so essential to get everyone to use strong encryption by default. Philip Zimmermann said it best back in 1991, in the original PGP user's guide:
What if everyone believed that law-abiding citizens should use postcards for their mail? If a nonconformist tried to assert his privacy by using an envelope for his mail, it would draw suspicion. Perhaps the authorities would open his mail to see what he's hiding. Fortunately, we don't live in that kind of world, because everyone protects most of their mail with envelopes. So no one draws suspicion by asserting their privacy with an envelope. There's safety in numbers. Analogously, it would be nice if everyone routinely used encryption for all their email, innocent or not, so that no one drew suspicion by asserting their email privacy with encryption. Think of it as a form of solidarity.
But really, go and read the entire essay, it's important stuff.
No one in the Free Software and Open Source movements actually thinks that. Seems like you've fallen into the old Free vs. Free trap. Freedom does not mean free of charge. What F/OSS proponents think is bad is restricting people from modifying the software they use as they see fit and from helping others with their modifications.
The URL was not intended to be public and everyone involved knows this. It's like you're saying it's not wrong to burgle someone's house and steal things you don't own because they failed to lock their doors.
That's still not correct. It says that at minimum, they have to offer the code, in a manner that's customarily used for distributing software, to anyone to whom they have already distributed the binaries.
On today's Internet that means they could hide the source behind a password-protected area only accessible to consumers. It would probably also still be quite acceptable to send a CD upon request to customers only. Of course, consumers then have the freedom to pass it on to anyone they choose, so the effect of such restrictions would be limited, but still, in a story like this, this is a very relevant rule.