You're talking about the rationalization for taxation, not the why of taxation. The why of taxation is, however, also simple: They've got the guns and troops to be able to take your house away from you if you don't pay their protection money.
The other part is just stuff to keep it worth your while to live there rather than somewhere else. If they can keep you from leaving, they don't need to worry that much about it. (There can be more complex justifications also...and to some extent they apply, but when you get to analysis from basics they can be ignored in a quest for short term profits.)
No. It had to do with (I think) the DVD encryption program...or decryption. (As you can see I'm not certain about the details...but it did find that linking counted as distribution, at least in that context.)
I don't have the figures either, but a report I saw recently said that FOSS adoption in the EU was running significantly ahead of FOSS adoption in the US. OTOH, figures from Asia appeared to show that pirated MSWind was generally preferred. Didn't see any reports on genuine MSWind for some reason. (I sort of doubt that those reports from Asia should be believed. Probably someone was reporting "What I see from right around where I live", as the specific comments in the text were all "street scene" reports.)
Well, if you get a copy from someone who got a copy via MS, then you're still in the clear. And under the GPL, they're allowed to make that copy if they got it legally...and the patent rights necessary to use the code transfer with the copy.
Proving the chain of connection, however, could be quite sticky.
Caution: IANAL. This could all be quite wrong. Etc.
And if you download software based on an official MS web page...are you implying that the person who clicks on the link is supposed to be able to verify who put the link on the web page?
There's been at least one court case that decided that linking to a download of software counted as distributing it. Don't know the details...something about dsss.
WRT "who's we?": Those are good points. Things may well develop that way. But those were alluded to in the "magic wand" comments from the original article. (For details about "star wisp" see the author's Accelerado. The section about a space ship the size of a beer can. [Technical resources are elsewhere, but I don't remember just where. The idea has been used several times in different ways by different authors.])
WRT "generation ship": You go because of a political or economic disagreement with the local powers that be.
Why do you head for another star? Because that's where resources are dense.
Which way the future developes depends on which magic wands appear in what order. There have been NUMEROUS magic wands postulated. Some of them don't appear to violate any know physical law. Those that do...well, if they happen to appear, the physicists will have an interesting job re-creating physics. Just imagine what a "Bergenholm effect" space ship would do to physics. A total rewrite would be needed. This doesn't prove that it's impossible, but it does make it rather unlikely apriori. Aposteriori it would mean there were blind spots that we had overlooked. Which has happened before.
What do you do when you get there? The colony reproduces. It's quite likely that by this time the idea of living on a planet will seem strange to most people, so it doesn't much matter if the planets are non-teraformable.
I don't know how long the "sun centered" stage would last, but eventually some or all of the new colonies, and possibly the old one too, would head off for other skies. Perhaps they would keep (l/m)aser contact with home periodically, for awhile. Trading information might be profitable. Perhaps not, too. It might depend on the nature and degree of the original disagreement.
To pick some particular "this is what will be the new scientific principle" would be wishfull thinking. To say that there is likely to be one is reasoned prediction. (Not guaranteed, but plausible.)
OTOH, so say that the new knowledge will allow us to do a particular thing (e.g., travel to the stars cheaply and quickly) is wishful thinking. Not guaranteed false, but certainly not guaranteed true.
OTOH, there's nothing wrong with wishful thinking, as long as you don't mistake it for reality. Don't let what you hope will happen a century from now divert you from what needs doing today.
He said "without a magic wand". Then he listed a couple of possible magic wands.
FWIW, he neglected (not missed, merely skimmed over) "MacroLife", which would allow glactic colonization without magic beyond nuclear fusion...but *wouldn't* be particularly economic. Perhaps.
Since the MacroLife concept isn't widely spoken of, let me elucidate: 1) You build a space-based factory. 2) You build a colony nearby to manage it. 3) People get comfortable living in the colony, and enlarge it, and make it self-sufficient. 4) There's a political dispute. 5) People living in the colony attach an engine, and depart slowly for "elsewhere". 6) You don't want a tremendously high speed, because you collect materials along the way.
This will require large numbers of technical advances. Closed cycle life support systems are only one of many, but the only one that approaches "magic wand" status is controlled fusion. (I don't think that fission would suffice. Refueling would be too difficult.)
Note: 1) This is slow. 2) This isn't something that one intentionally creates. 3) Most of the colonies will probably decide to stay put. That's fine, while in situ they provide a net economic gain. 4) Espect to have, perhaps, 5 colonies departing / century on an average, with a fairly large population of colonies. 5) The motives will be political or religious rather than economic. Those who leave must be prepared to suffer a considerable economic hardship. 6) The colonies need to contain a viable population. This probably means 5,000 people and a staic population...though various work-arounds are possible.
Conterindicators: Advanced robotics would probably mean that the space colony wouldn't be overseeing the running of the space factory, but it might be a way for an initially wealthy group to excape overpopulation, and the associated governmental restraints. Or there might be other motives. Or there might not. This whole thing could be a "could have happened, but didn't".
1. Can I do it with Linux today (GPL2) and tomorrow (GPL3)? Yes
2. Can I statically link the code with Linux libraries? (My own experience shows that dynamic linking is too much to bear.) That's what you get for using Windows.
3. Can I obfuscate my code (e.g. encode it)? Not if you're GPL, but you don't show any signs of wanting to.
4. Could I be forced to publish this code by some 3-d party? No. At most you could be forced to stop distribution and pay copyright damages. And that's only if you violate the GPL or similar license. (I.e., write your own code and you're safe.)
5. Am I correct that programming in and selling BSD-based boxes won't raise any of the above problems? What problems? a) None of the questions that you have raised appear to me to be a problem. b) The base of the OS is almost irrelevant to every question that you have posed.
Do you believe that the RIAA pays (i.e., their members pay) the contractually agreed upon monies to the artists that they claim to represent? Every time that I can recall when an accounting has been forced upon them they've been found derelict.
The RIAA and their member companies are great at claiming to stand for the law. They aren't so good at following it themselves.
Yeah, he did say that. He was also repeating the words of the question, and chosing between two answers. I don't think either choice was correct, so I don't give his words too much weight. I think that what he meant was something like: "Well, they aren't exactly lined up...and I've only got 500 words to explain this."
If you'll note what I mentioned about "star streams" you'll notice that some of the stars have orbits vastly away from the plane of the galaxy's spiral. That's because as the Milky Way swallows smaller galaxies, it's beginning a transition to being an eliptical galaxy. These "incoming" solar systems have inclinations that are almost independant of the plane of the main galaxy, though they do adjust over time to "more or less" orbit in the plane of the spiral, this doesn't affect their rotation.
Also, there are the globular clusters, which are relatively independant. I have a suspicion that they originally started out along the path to being a galaxy of their very own, but were captured by the Milky Way too early in their life, but it's also possible that they just didn't start around a black hole, and that's the major difference. Whatever, they're close enough that if they HAD turned into normal galaxies, they would have been eaten long ago. (I'm a bit vague on the details here, sorry.)
So. I may well be wrong, but that article isn't enough to convince me. It's too nebulous (if you'll forgive the pun). And it's written as if it were directed at middle school children. At such an age, except in unusual cases, you DON'T go into fine details about the theory. You give a broad overview which is "sort of right", but which is easy to understand.
OTOH, I don't know more about astronmy than I can pick up from the Scientific American (and a few similar magazines), so I would be easily convined by someone who not only knew what they were talking about, but wasn't presumably "oversimplifying". (In this case "oversimplifying" means addressed to a college level science major who wasn't specializing in astronomy or physics. And not too much math please. Like the Scientific American.)
But it's because of this that I feel that the gas clouds from which the solar systems of the galaxy were produced probably usually rotated in the orbital plane of the galaxy, and usually produced solar systems with similar rotational momenta. Note the usually. There WILL be exceptions, possibly lots of them. Still, I would expect the law of conservation of momentum to be obeyed, so for every variation in the "up" direction, there should be a counterbalancing variation in the "down" direction.
FWIW, it isn't even happenstance. It tends to be caused thusly: 1) A cloud of gas is in orbit around the galaxy center, in it's orbital plane, as most things are. 2) The cloud is large, being dispersed across hundreds or thousands of light years. As it rotates, the trailing elements are attracted towards the center, speeding them up, and the leading elements are attracted toward the center slowing them down. 3) Things that speed up tend to move to a higher orbit, and things that slow down tend to move to a lower orbit. 4) The cloud is dense enough that it's contracting under self-gravitation. 5) You now have rotation of the cloud in the plane of it's orbital rotation around the galaxy center.
At this point things get fuzzy, and I don't believe that the arguments between the professional astronomers have been resolved. But I haven't heard of anyone claiming that the laws of angular momentum are violated.
I'll admit that I generally loathe counterfieters, but in my book the only thing that they did wrong was *THIS DOESN'T HURT THE RIAA!!".
So, they're stupid, careless, and caught. I only wish they'd gotten away with it because it would have irritated the RIAA. Too bad it wasn't actually something that would hurt them.
It's only less attractive to companies that are receiving the code, not to the ones that are offering it. Unless you are planning a law suit, then donating code under GPL3 is more advantageous than donating it under GPL2. (Well, or planning to release DRM based code...but why would anyone do that? The people who want to include the DRM aren't big on creating code. Only on making small patches. Otherwise they'd chose a different license, but if they want to use prewritten code, then that option is barred to them.)
Sorry, you're arguing from a single case. True, it's the only one we're real certain of, but it's still just a single case.
I think that the presumption is that solar systems do generally basically orbit in the plane of the galaxy. OTOH, there are LOTS of "captive star streams" that one would expect to have different orbital inclinations. (Also, lots of things can perturb an orbit.)
OTOH, look at how thick the "plane of rotation of the galaxy" is. It's not a plane, but rather a wobble. And it's dubious that a sun ever retraces it's "orbital" path around the galaxy. Lots of things push and pull at it. (If nothing else, the magnetic fields of the galaxy, while small, have a very long time to act.) All this contributes to the "orbital plane" having a great deal of wobble. (Well, usually not THAT much...but enough to carry stars across the galaxy's "orbital plane" a few times on an "orbital".
But I'm no astrophysicist (IANAAP?). Think about it your self, do a bit of reading, and make up your own mind. It probably won't affect anything you decide to do. (If it will, you should definitely be studying on your own rather than listening to my opinions.)
I'm no cosmologist or astrophysicist, so take this with a grain of salt, but here goes.
A solar system condenses from a rotating gas cloud. Becuase of this the axii of rotation of the condensates (suns, planets, etc.) tend to line up.
But also the Galaxy (spiral galaxies only!) condensed from a gas cloud. Because of this the nebulae (thicker gas clouds within it) have rotational axii that tend to line up.
So stars within a spiral galaxy will tend to have aligned axii of rotation. And their planets will also typically have aligned rotationals axii.
Note, however, the heavy use of words like "tend to". I'm not sure how dependable such a tendency is (but for just a guess, consider Uranus).
It would be impossible to add more legal verbage to the GPL2. You could add an explanatory wrapper which basically said "This isn't the license, but it's what I think the license should mean".
Also, GPL2 cannot be made compatible with the Apache license. You can't change the license. Part of the reason the GPL3 is as incompatible as it is with the GPL2 is so that it CAN be compatible with the Apache license (and then, at the last minute, they thought they'd blown it...but an emergency conference ironed out the wrinkles).
So you want to trust the government to be honest and fair?
What this is a perfect example of is why centralized control of the internet is a real evil. Mind you, I'm not sure how to get around it, but not being able to get around it doesn't mean it isn't evil.
I have partial answers: 1) Local governments should be allowed to offer utilities, including electricity, water, phone, etc. They should not be granted a monopoly. (I'll grant that a tax subsidy is a real advantage over any competition, but it's of a different order of magnitude than a legally mandated monopoly.)
2) Utilities with more employees than the government of a small town (population say, 5,000-50,000 people) has should be subject to oversight by a Public Utilities Commission, which is appointed by the state governor. Smaller utilities should not be so regulated.
3) Low power transmission should not require a license from the government. (Something around the power of WiFi is what I'm thinking of here.)
4) Beamed, as opposed to broadcast, transmission should only be regulated for safety, honesty (if commercial), etc. NOT for content or connection to large commercial enterprises. (It should be as legal for Alice and Bob to set up their 100Km beamed transmission station as for Lockheed. And they should face the same requirements for safety, interference, etc.)
5) Contracts should not be allowed to be changed after they have been agreed to except by negotiation. Especially they should not be dependant on the contents of a web page that is under the control of one of the parties. Including such a specification in a contract should be sufficient to allow the party that did not draw up the contract to void it AT HIS OR HER PLEASURE, and such changes should still have no legal effect.
6) EULAs, including click through license agreements, should be void unless the person accepting the license knew and understood the terms BEFORE he paid money or other advantage to receive the goods.
7) It should always be legal to be anonymous, even by deceit, unless the intention is to fraudulently deprive someone of a valuable commodity. In particular it should always be proper to decline to give personal information that may be used for advertising.
8) It should be considered fraud for a purchased produce to cease working because the hardware on which it is running has been modified, unless such modification caused the hardware to become inoperable. (I'm thinking DRM here.)
Note that this would not be a sufficient answer, only a partial one. Note also just how probable it is that these changes would be enacted. But a strong central government is likely to be worse than a bunch of strong corporations. The solution to a bunch of strong corporations is to strengthen their smaller competition, not to strengthen the central government. Strong local governments are superior to strong central governments because, even if for no other reason, it's easier to move away from a local government that you don't like.
And if your favorite artist doesn't sign with an RIAA group, you should have to pay them anyway? (Forget which court case that was. Don't think its been decided yet.)
And if your favorite artist doesn't sign with an RIAA groups, you shouldn't be able to buy their work? (Just TRY to find a distributor that carries them. Fortunately, for now, then can record their own, and sell it over the web and at concerts. This has been under attack.)
And in several countries you pay a fee to the local equivalent of the RIAA even if what you want to record is a new distro. May they all die of terminal hemroids.
Actually, if they are using non-expiring copy protection, then *I* don't feel they come under the terms of the copyright law as authorized by the constitution. That clearly implies that the material should be accessible to the public after some (unspecifid) period of time.
Now I'll grant that this is not how the law is interpreted, and I wouldn't accept ANY court to accept my reasoning. (I do maintain a connetions to reality.) But if we are talking about "rights" rather than "laws", then I don't accept restrictions on the rights to copy something that isn't being offered to the public. This has several layers. One is that if something is no longer in publication, and hasn't been in publication for some period of time (arguable...but in my mind a couple of years is reasonable), then copyright laws should not apply. And if it is offered only with a non-expiring copy protection or DRM, then copyright laws should not apply.
I'll grant that it's difficult to implement an "expiring" copy protection scheme...but it should be possible with much less work than has been put into the DRM or into other copy protection schemes. And if they aren't really EVER offering the work to the puclic, then they don't deserve copyright protection.
Obviously, IANAL, but you were talking about rights, not laws, so that's how I replied.
Sorry, this doesn't look inadvertent to me. It looks like the people in charge of various systmes don't like being told that they aren't doing their jobs properly, so they are arranging to "shoot the messenger".
In such circumstances, it doesn't pay to be a messenger. If you are one, the only sane thing to do is to lie, and report only good news. Then it comes as a totally unexpected surprise to the ones in power that they have lost whatever they were trying to defend. Totally unexpected. At this point messengers may or may not be blamed for deceiving them, but prudence would suggest that the job of messenger is better avoided.
SURPRISE!!
And it's never the fault of the people who decided to "shoot the messenger" in the first place. It's the fault of someone who doesn't have a strong power base. Facts don't have muct to do with how blame gets passed around.
Well....actually, he can't rejoin the project, or anything similar to anything that he worked on while at MS. It would be too dangerous to accept his contributions. I suppose that he could do documentation...but I don't think it would even be safe to accept his comments on possible improvements to the user interface.
Still, outside of that you're correct. The star system tends to highlight one particular individual out of a large number of nearly equal merit. If the star leaves, an understudy is likely to show up. The partial exceptions are the coders who are excellent and original coders and also good project leaders. There aren't that many of them, so they're harder to replace. Some times no replacement shows up in time, and the project folds. It may be restarted, and it may not.
Slashdot Mirror
You're talking about the rationalization for taxation, not the why of taxation. The why of taxation is, however, also simple: They've got the guns and troops to be able to take your house away from you if you don't pay their protection money.
The other part is just stuff to keep it worth your while to live there rather than somewhere else. If they can keep you from leaving, they don't need to worry that much about it. (There can be more complex justifications also...and to some extent they apply, but when you get to analysis from basics they can be ignored in a quest for short term profits.)
Too concentrated. (Occasionally is all right, but not frequently. Unless it's a large plant, like, say, a tree.)
No. It had to do with (I think) the DVD encryption program...or decryption. (As you can see I'm not certain about the details...but it did find that linking counted as distribution, at least in that context.)
Don't be silly. Why would I want Windows? I had a copy and reformatted, rather than accept the EULA.
I don't have the figures either, but a report I saw recently said that FOSS adoption in the EU was running significantly ahead of FOSS adoption in the US. OTOH, figures from Asia appeared to show that pirated MSWind was generally preferred. Didn't see any reports on genuine MSWind for some reason. (I sort of doubt that those reports from Asia should be believed. Probably someone was reporting "What I see from right around where I live", as the specific comments in the text were all "street scene" reports.)
Well, if you get a copy from someone who got a copy via MS, then you're still in the clear. And under the GPL, they're allowed to make that copy if they got it legally...and the patent rights necessary to use the code transfer with the copy.
Proving the chain of connection, however, could be quite sticky.
Caution: IANAL. This could all be quite wrong. Etc.
And if you download software based on an official MS web page...are you implying that the person who clicks on the link is supposed to be able to verify who put the link on the web page?
There's been at least one court case that decided that linking to a download of software counted as distributing it. Don't know the details...something about dsss.
WRT "who's we?":
Those are good points. Things may well develop that way. But those were alluded to in the "magic wand" comments from the original article. (For details about "star wisp" see the author's Accelerado. The section about a space ship the size of a beer can. [Technical resources are elsewhere, but I don't remember just where. The idea has been used several times in different ways by different authors.])
WRT "generation ship":
You go because of a political or economic disagreement with the local powers that be.
Why do you head for another star? Because that's where resources are dense.
Which way the future developes depends on which magic wands appear in what order. There have been NUMEROUS magic wands postulated. Some of them don't appear to violate any know physical law. Those that do...well, if they happen to appear, the physicists will have an interesting job re-creating physics. Just imagine what a "Bergenholm effect" space ship would do to physics. A total rewrite would be needed. This doesn't prove that it's impossible, but it does make it rather unlikely apriori. Aposteriori it would mean there were blind spots that we had overlooked. Which has happened before.
What do you do when you get there? The colony reproduces. It's quite likely that by this time the idea of living on a planet will seem strange to most people, so it doesn't much matter if the planets are non-teraformable.
I don't know how long the "sun centered" stage would last, but eventually some or all of the new colonies, and possibly the old one too, would head off for other skies. Perhaps they would keep (l/m)aser contact with home periodically, for awhile. Trading information might be profitable. Perhaps not, too. It might depend on the nature and degree of the original disagreement.
To pick some particular "this is what will be the new scientific principle" would be wishfull thinking. To say that there is likely to be one is reasoned prediction. (Not guaranteed, but plausible.)
OTOH, so say that the new knowledge will allow us to do a particular thing (e.g., travel to the stars cheaply and quickly) is wishful thinking. Not guaranteed false, but certainly not guaranteed true.
OTOH, there's nothing wrong with wishful thinking, as long as you don't mistake it for reality. Don't let what you hope will happen a century from now divert you from what needs doing today.
He said "without a magic wand". Then he listed a couple of possible magic wands.
FWIW, he neglected (not missed, merely skimmed over) "MacroLife", which would allow glactic colonization without magic beyond nuclear fusion...but *wouldn't* be particularly economic. Perhaps.
Since the MacroLife concept isn't widely spoken of, let me elucidate:
1) You build a space-based factory.
2) You build a colony nearby to manage it.
3) People get comfortable living in the colony, and enlarge it, and make it self-sufficient.
4) There's a political dispute.
5) People living in the colony attach an engine, and depart slowly for "elsewhere".
6) You don't want a tremendously high speed, because you collect materials along the way.
This will require large numbers of technical advances. Closed cycle life support systems are only one of many, but the only one that approaches "magic wand" status is controlled fusion. (I don't think that fission would suffice. Refueling would be too difficult.)
Note:
1) This is slow.
2) This isn't something that one intentionally creates.
3) Most of the colonies will probably decide to stay put. That's fine, while in situ they provide a net economic gain.
4) Espect to have, perhaps, 5 colonies departing / century on an average, with a fairly large population of colonies.
5) The motives will be political or religious rather than economic. Those who leave must be prepared to suffer a considerable economic hardship.
6) The colonies need to contain a viable population. This probably means 5,000 people and a staic population...though various work-arounds are possible.
Conterindicators: Advanced robotics would probably mean that the space colony wouldn't be overseeing the running of the space factory, but it might be a way for an initially wealthy group to excape overpopulation, and the associated governmental restraints. Or there might be other motives. Or there might not. This whole thing could be a "could have happened, but didn't".
1. Can I do it with Linux today (GPL2) and tomorrow (GPL3)?
Yes
2. Can I statically link the code with Linux libraries? (My own experience shows that dynamic linking is too much to bear.)
That's what you get for using Windows.
3. Can I obfuscate my code (e.g. encode it)?
Not if you're GPL, but you don't show any signs of wanting to.
4. Could I be forced to publish this code by some 3-d party?
No. At most you could be forced to stop distribution and pay copyright damages. And that's only if you violate the GPL or similar license. (I.e., write your own code and you're safe.)
5. Am I correct that programming in and selling BSD-based boxes won't raise any of the above problems?
What problems?
a) None of the questions that you have raised appear to me to be a problem.
b) The base of the OS is almost irrelevant to every question that you have posed.
Do you believe that the RIAA pays (i.e., their members pay) the contractually agreed upon monies to the artists that they claim to represent? Every time that I can recall when an accounting has been forced upon them they've been found derelict.
The RIAA and their member companies are great at claiming to stand for the law. They aren't so good at following it themselves.
Yeah, he did say that. He was also repeating the words of the question, and chosing between two answers. I don't think either choice was correct, so I don't give his words too much weight. I think that what he meant was something like:
"Well, they aren't exactly lined up...and I've only got 500 words to explain this."
If you'll note what I mentioned about "star streams" you'll notice that some of the stars have orbits vastly away from the plane of the galaxy's spiral. That's because as the Milky Way swallows smaller galaxies, it's beginning a transition to being an eliptical galaxy. These "incoming" solar systems have inclinations that are almost independant of the plane of the main galaxy, though they do adjust over time to "more or less" orbit in the plane of the spiral, this doesn't affect their rotation.
Also, there are the globular clusters, which are relatively independant. I have a suspicion that they originally started out along the path to being a galaxy of their very own, but were captured by the Milky Way too early in their life, but it's also possible that they just didn't start around a black hole, and that's the major difference. Whatever, they're close enough that if they HAD turned into normal galaxies, they would have been eaten long ago. (I'm a bit vague on the details here, sorry.)
So. I may well be wrong, but that article isn't enough to convince me. It's too nebulous (if you'll forgive the pun). And it's written as if it were directed at middle school children. At such an age, except in unusual cases, you DON'T go into fine details about the theory. You give a broad overview which is "sort of right", but which is easy to understand.
OTOH, I don't know more about astronmy than I can pick up from the Scientific American (and a few similar magazines), so I would be easily convined by someone who not only knew what they were talking about, but wasn't presumably "oversimplifying". (In this case "oversimplifying" means addressed to a college level science major who wasn't specializing in astronomy or physics. And not too much math please. Like the Scientific American.)
But it's because of this that I feel that the gas clouds from which the solar systems of the galaxy were produced probably usually rotated in the orbital plane of the galaxy, and usually produced solar systems with similar rotational momenta. Note the usually. There WILL be exceptions, possibly lots of them. Still, I would expect the law of conservation of momentum to be obeyed, so for every variation in the "up" direction, there should be a counterbalancing variation in the "down" direction.
FWIW, it isn't even happenstance. It tends to be caused thusly:
1) A cloud of gas is in orbit around the galaxy center, in it's orbital plane, as most things are.
2) The cloud is large, being dispersed across hundreds or thousands of light years. As it rotates, the trailing elements are attracted towards the center, speeding them up, and the leading elements are attracted toward the center slowing them down.
3) Things that speed up tend to move to a higher orbit, and things that slow down tend to move to a lower orbit.
4) The cloud is dense enough that it's contracting under self-gravitation.
5) You now have rotation of the cloud in the plane of it's orbital rotation around the galaxy center.
At this point things get fuzzy, and I don't believe that the arguments between the professional astronomers have been resolved. But I haven't heard of anyone claiming that the laws of angular momentum are violated.
No you don't.
I'll admit that I generally loathe counterfieters, but in my book the only thing that they did wrong was *THIS DOESN'T HURT THE RIAA!!".
So, they're stupid, careless, and caught. I only wish they'd gotten away with it because it would have irritated the RIAA. Too bad it wasn't actually something that would hurt them.
It's only less attractive to companies that are receiving the code, not to the ones that are offering it. Unless you are planning a law suit, then donating code under GPL3 is more advantageous than donating it under GPL2. (Well, or planning to release DRM based code...but why would anyone do that? The people who want to include the DRM aren't big on creating code. Only on making small patches. Otherwise they'd chose a different license, but if they want to use prewritten code, then that option is barred to them.)
Sorry, you're arguing from a single case. True, it's the only one we're real certain of, but it's still just a single case.
I think that the presumption is that solar systems do generally basically orbit in the plane of the galaxy. OTOH, there are LOTS of "captive star streams" that one would expect to have different orbital inclinations. (Also, lots of things can perturb an orbit.)
OTOH, look at how thick the "plane of rotation of the galaxy" is. It's not a plane, but rather a wobble. And it's dubious that a sun ever retraces it's "orbital" path around the galaxy. Lots of things push and pull at it. (If nothing else, the magnetic fields of the galaxy, while small, have a very long time to act.) All this contributes to the "orbital plane" having a great deal of wobble. (Well, usually not THAT much...but enough to carry stars across the galaxy's "orbital plane" a few times on an "orbital".
But I'm no astrophysicist (IANAAP?). Think about it your self, do a bit of reading, and make up your own mind. It probably won't affect anything you decide to do. (If it will, you should definitely be studying on your own rather than listening to my opinions.)
Well....sort of.
I'm no cosmologist or astrophysicist, so take this with a grain of salt, but here goes.
A solar system condenses from a rotating gas cloud. Becuase of this the axii of rotation of the condensates (suns, planets, etc.) tend to line up.
But also the Galaxy (spiral galaxies only!) condensed from a gas cloud. Because of this the nebulae (thicker gas clouds within it) have rotational axii that tend to line up.
So stars within a spiral galaxy will tend to have aligned axii of rotation. And their planets will also typically have aligned rotationals axii.
Note, however, the heavy use of words like "tend to". I'm not sure how dependable such a tendency is (but for just a guess, consider Uranus).
It would be impossible to add more legal verbage to the GPL2. You could add an explanatory wrapper which basically said "This isn't the license, but it's what I think the license should mean".
Also, GPL2 cannot be made compatible with the Apache license. You can't change the license. Part of the reason the GPL3 is as incompatible as it is with the GPL2 is so that it CAN be compatible with the Apache license (and then, at the last minute, they thought they'd blown it...but an emergency conference ironed out the wrinkles).
So you want to trust the government to be honest and fair?
What this is a perfect example of is why centralized control of the internet is a real evil. Mind you, I'm not sure how to get around it, but not being able to get around it doesn't mean it isn't evil.
I have partial answers:
1) Local governments should be allowed to offer utilities, including electricity, water, phone, etc. They should not be granted a monopoly. (I'll grant that a tax subsidy is a real advantage over any competition, but it's of a different order of magnitude than a legally mandated monopoly.)
2) Utilities with more employees than the government of a small town (population say, 5,000-50,000 people) has should be subject to oversight by a Public Utilities Commission, which is appointed by the state governor. Smaller utilities should not be so regulated.
3) Low power transmission should not require a license from the government. (Something around the power of WiFi is what I'm thinking of here.)
4) Beamed, as opposed to broadcast, transmission should only be regulated for safety, honesty (if commercial), etc. NOT for content or connection to large commercial enterprises. (It should be as legal for Alice and Bob to set up their 100Km beamed transmission station as for Lockheed. And they should face the same requirements for safety, interference, etc.)
5) Contracts should not be allowed to be changed after they have been agreed to except by negotiation. Especially they should not be dependant on the contents of a web page that is under the control of one of the parties. Including such a specification in a contract should be sufficient to allow the party that did not draw up the contract to void it AT HIS OR HER PLEASURE, and such changes should still have no legal effect.
6) EULAs, including click through license agreements, should be void unless the person accepting the license knew and understood the terms BEFORE he paid money or other advantage to receive the goods.
7) It should always be legal to be anonymous, even by deceit, unless the intention is to fraudulently deprive someone of a valuable commodity. In particular it should always be proper to decline to give personal information that may be used for advertising.
8) It should be considered fraud for a purchased produce to cease working because the hardware on which it is running has been modified, unless such modification caused the hardware to become inoperable. (I'm thinking DRM here.)
Note that this would not be a sufficient answer, only a partial one. Note also just how probable it is that these changes would be enacted. But a strong central government is likely to be worse than a bunch of strong corporations. The solution to a bunch of strong corporations is to strengthen their smaller competition, not to strengthen the central government. Strong local governments are superior to strong central governments because, even if for no other reason, it's easier to move away from a local government that you don't like.
And if your favorite artist doesn't sign with an RIAA group, you should have to pay them anyway? (Forget which court case that was. Don't think its been decided yet.)
And if your favorite artist doesn't sign with an RIAA groups, you shouldn't be able to buy their work? (Just TRY to find a distributor that carries them. Fortunately, for now, then can record their own, and sell it over the web and at concerts. This has been under attack.)
And in several countries you pay a fee to the local equivalent of the RIAA even if what you want to record is a new distro. May they all die of terminal hemroids.
Actually, if they are using non-expiring copy protection, then *I* don't feel they come under the terms of the copyright law as authorized by the constitution. That clearly implies that the material should be accessible to the public after some (unspecifid) period of time.
Now I'll grant that this is not how the law is interpreted, and I wouldn't accept ANY court to accept my reasoning. (I do maintain a connetions to reality.) But if we are talking about "rights" rather than "laws", then I don't accept restrictions on the rights to copy something that isn't being offered to the public. This has several layers. One is that if something is no longer in publication, and hasn't been in publication for some period of time (arguable...but in my mind a couple of years is reasonable), then copyright laws should not apply. And if it is offered only with a non-expiring copy protection or DRM, then copyright laws should not apply.
I'll grant that it's difficult to implement an "expiring" copy protection scheme...but it should be possible with much less work than has been put into the DRM or into other copy protection schemes. And if they aren't really EVER offering the work to the puclic, then they don't deserve copyright protection.
Obviously, IANAL, but you were talking about rights, not laws, so that's how I replied.
Sorry, this doesn't look inadvertent to me. It looks like the people in charge of various systmes don't like being told that they aren't doing their jobs properly, so they are arranging to "shoot the messenger".
In such circumstances, it doesn't pay to be a messenger. If you are one, the only sane thing to do is to lie, and report only good news. Then it comes as a totally unexpected surprise to the ones in power that they have lost whatever they were trying to defend. Totally unexpected. At this point messengers may or may not be blamed for deceiving them, but prudence would suggest that the job of messenger is better avoided.
SURPRISE!!
And it's never the fault of the people who decided to "shoot the messenger" in the first place. It's the fault of someone who doesn't have a strong power base. Facts don't have muct to do with how blame gets passed around.
Well....actually, he can't rejoin the project, or anything similar to anything that he worked on while at MS. It would be too dangerous to accept his contributions. I suppose that he could do documentation...but I don't think it would even be safe to accept his comments on possible improvements to the user interface.
Still, outside of that you're correct. The star system tends to highlight one particular individual out of a large number of nearly equal merit. If the star leaves, an understudy is likely to show up. The partial exceptions are the coders who are excellent and original coders and also good project leaders. There aren't that many of them, so they're harder to replace. Some times no replacement shows up in time, and the project folds. It may be restarted, and it may not.
First time I've heard selective enforcement called "follow the law".