No - Google's is, and can only be, a license violation. It cannot be a copyright violation, because the application is not serving up copyrighted data - maps are factual data, like equations, tables of elements, etcetera.
I honestly don't agree with it as a licensing issue either, but yeah, it does make a difference when someone is polite about it - it also gives the author a chance to address this with google and possibly work out a compromise with them. Even if unsuccessful, he doesn't *feel* like he was stomped on -.
Why is it that whenever you see Richard Stallman working out a compromise with some group regarding OSS, you always get the impression he'd have been happier if no compromise had been possible?
Almost a "Dammit, they suggested a reasonable compromise - I wanted to fight" feel to it.
I consider myself decently competent - Dual-boot XP and Slackware 10, but tend to use XP with GPL'd stuff that I found out about from slackware - Gimp, OpenOffice, etc.
So it's kinda disheartening to read an article like this and realize that I already do all the 'advanced' stuff this 'expert' writes up as if it were new and advanced voodoo. Actually, I'm pretty sure he misses a few tricks.
Maybe I'm just far more 'l337' than I thought I was -.
So - If you have a hawking black hole of sufficiently small size, it can effectively convert matter to energy at a predetermined rate for no cost, based on the size of the black hole.
To keep it stable, you need to add matter at the same rate that it's radiating Hawking radiation. Rather counterintuitively, to lower the energy output, you feed it more matter, to raise it you choke the matter back a bit, let the black hole shrink a bit, and then feed it matter sufficient to stabilize it at the new enrgy output. And of course, if you run out of matter entirely it'll create a runaway reaction as the the black hole evaporates entirely.
Doesn't this in some way violate thermodynamics? You're turning useless energy removed from the system via entropy into useful energy you can work with again. Given the correctly chosen size for a black hole at the core, you can pick one that produces energy at the same rate as the core feeds it, it heats the core, and you make sure to convert that energy to matter sufficiently to keep it fed.
Odd thought - Avida found that evolving programs, given limitless resources to reproduce, would evolve the capabilities wanted aproximately 50% of the time.
Given insufficient resources of course, they never evolved the necessary capabilties, however bewtween these two extremes they found that, with limited resources, they achieved a 100% success rate - that limiting the resources was more efficient than practically infinite resources.
QED - Spam is an ineffective advertising medium because it has efefctively infinite resources, and no pressure to evolve actual efficiency. In order to make spam more effective (And less annoying to *us* - receiving an ad we might be interested in being less annoying than receiving an ad for generic viagra), required making the resources for reproducing spam less efficient, creating competition for survival.
Email is too easy - thus does spam evolve. Email must be made difficult.
I've also watched aspergers used to denigrate someone's talents by those that have to work harder to maintain competence.
A friend of mine is a brilliant music therapist that went on to get her Masters. Her fellow therapists, a bunch of young women have concluded that it's not because she's smart, talented, or put more work into it - it's because she has Asbergers.
Yeah - that has to be it. Having different priorities than looking sharp must be some kind of mental illness, right!
I note you referenced the one, but not the other, from the very same site.
Yes, 48% of discretionary spending is a [i]colossal military budget[/i]. I don't question that our GDP can support it, but let's not pretend it's not frickin' huge, nor that it doesn't indicate where our governments priorities lay.
Google may or may not be guilty of hypocrisy in other areas - I don't know.
But this complaint is about google setting the title in the CACHED copy to the keywords?!?
That is to say, they're manipulating keywords in a system that no one spiders for keywords. Basically an internal system that they incidentally let the public use as well.
Even for/., there is very little point to the amount of ranting this has generated - the whole article should be mark -5; Troll.
I keep looking at this architecture, and although I have absolutely no real qualifications to say why, it keeps jumping out at me.
This thing looks like the architecture is designed with a jump to quantum computing in mind. The methods just . . . bring that to mind.
Which doesn't particularly make sense. Quantum computing is massively efficient at certain specialized problems like searches and of course encryption. I suppose a pathfinding engine with that capability would be extraordinary too, but by and large gaming doesn't have a lot that quantum computing would help all that much with. Perhaps someone smarter than I can explain why this is a spectacularly stupid.
Because it *looks* like something that's designed with that capability in mind. A least to me.
Honestly, this sounds like a political problem, not a coding or ethical problem. Going by the description here (and I'm only a so-so programmer, and don't know the community in question, so I'm assuming the description here is accurate) someone didn't like the way things were run and the amount of emphasis on the features *he* wanted, and decided to fork the code. Even got enough people who agreed with him (or were malleable) to support his side of the project.
Good - evolution comes from competition, both sides of the fork are stronger thereby - it's one of the several reasons open source produces better code.
But he left the main fork because he didn't *like* the way they were running things, and then they have the sheer temerity to use *his* code. Them B@st@rds!
Which leaves you in the position of having to choose whether or not to ignore the spirit and letter of the GPL, leaving him his exclusive code, but preserve peace between the forks, or respectfully disagree, point out that he has the same option available to him, and use what you find useful, or even get nasty and tell him that he can keep his source secret, but needs to remove the GPL'd code from his project.
Those are the options I see for you. Unfortunately, which of those you pursue is a poltical decision you need to make, not an ethical or legal one, so you need to talk to your base, not slashdot.
That said - I would go to option two - respectfully disagree and exercise your rights, going to option three if he tries to make it difficult to do so, but I'm a very polite hardass when it comes to someone trying to infringe my rights. Your political situation may not have the stability to do so.
But it doesn't really sound like the open source community is ready to tale up arms on his behalf, so at least that part of your equation is answered -
Mmmm - but what *is* a windows bug is that the windows environment is so culturally single user that attempts to install software for a single user invariably fail.
I've tried to run a Windows system in a 'secure' fashion - users, power users, an admin, etcetera. Fine
Now load a program as a user, and find out you can't - at all. Realize that Quicktime requires admin access - to read a.mov file. Real player needs power user access, but not admin.
If you're not running a corporate system - you give everyone admin rights. It's the only practical solution - I'm not getting paid per hour to keep my moms system up, and she *should* be able to load quicktime for herself without needing admin rights, but she can't.
I don't know whether it's bad coding from Microsoft, or bad culture from people who program for windows, but if you're *not* being paid a salary for keeping a windows system secure while making sure people can load the tools they need - It's not worth it. I'm just going to reload windows in six months anyway when it slows down to a crawl for *no* particular reason, why would I worry about it.
Linux - I can run my life from linux, load whatever programs I need for everybody as admin, and run whatever I need for just me. I never had any experience as an admin before I loaded slackware (Hardlythe 'user friendly' version of linux), and it's no big deal.
I'm sure someone smarter than me *could* secure windows for their mom and still get everything tweaked with no unexpected interactions and get the permissions done 'just' right.
Or just set firefox to always show the URL// Always display the Navigation Toolbar in pop-up windows: user_pref("dom.disable_window_open_featu re.locatio n", true);
As a helpdesk techie, I think Thunderbird is going to have a rougher ride than Firefox.
The problem strangely enough, is that Outlook Express was so much worse than Internet Explorer. IE isn't a great browser, but for most people until this last set of security flaws (Infection via Jpg? Yeah, that's tied too bloody close), it's "Good Enuff" - they could work around it. the only other browsers out their had fanbases, but weren't so head and shoulders above to be worth dealing with. I never cared for netscape, didn't like the packaging of mozilla, and didn't wan't to pay for opera - So I tweaked IE's security and stayed with the one that was "Good Enuff".
So when Firefox came to maturity just as the last set of flaws finally did things even my ultra paranoid security settings (Never had an adware get through) couldn't compensate for, people were primed to leave en masse. And it's great - I can tweak it, it's portable, and it does stand head and shoulders over IE.
Outlook express on the other hand never was "Good Enuff", for anything besides simple Email. It's really only used by people that have never bothered to try anything else. Pine and Elm have more capabilities. Everybody else moved, and has gotten to using something else that *is* good enough, and doesn't have the security holes IE had to jolt them. I have fifty+ filters I'd have to port from Eudora, others use Pegasus, or elm, webmail, or whatever.
So the people who wanted to move, have. The people who haven't moved yet aren't just waiting on Thunderbird the way I was waiting for a browser I *liked*.
So it's not going to hit OE as hard as Firefox hit IE.
I've had this occasional idea, with an implementation for it. Obviously, Spam depends on two things, getting a message out to everyone, whether they care or not, and getting response from that 1/1000000 person foolish enough to want generic viagra (or whatever).
Is it possible to automatically set up systems that insure that the place which gets the response are added to the spammers list? If they get on each others queue's they drown out their own servers and the cost to benefit ration goes up sharply.
That is to say, assuming no contract limiting my rights exists (Note - an EULA fails basic requirements to be a contract), when I buy a CD I buy certain rights to that CD, including the right to play it privately or publically, the right to make a back-up copy, etcetera.
What enforceable rights does the user have today to digital media they have bought. If I bought a CD, and it was stolen, do I still have a license to the IP contained on that CD, or does that transfer with the physical object.
What rights are in fact left to the consumer, explicitly or implicitly?
"We wanted to be as open as possible about this," he said. "In the United States, customers have been contacted directly via e-mail, and we've notified the reseller channel."
I can see the email now -
"Due to an error in our most recent update, e-mails containing a certain letter are now blocked. We can't tell you which one. Really. But make sure you u . . . reset your security setting ASA . . err really quickly.
Listen - just do it right now - this is embarrassing. Thank you - Trend Micro"
But if SCO is/was selling a Linux product, licensed under the GPL (An irrevocable license), and SCO, the licensed holder of these various Unix products and patents is authorized to license their products any way they wish,...
Then SCO has in fact ALREADY released these copyrights as a GPL'D product.
Oh YEAH, I'll bet they want to quit selling it - they never checked the source code themselves, and even if the source that they received contained patents that were exclusive SCO IP, by releasing it they have in fact relicensed it. The only (very thin) leg they have to stand on is to say "We were unaware that we were licensing intellectual property that we intended to maintain exclusive rights to. We are no longer selling that property under that license, and ask that the court allow us to remove that license from our intellectual property"
If the court allows this, it will break the GPL as a license - period. It works now because it is irrevocable and the customer has no risk. If the court lets SCO invalidate the GPL on the IP they released, it's going to be a precedent that anyone else can as well.
American Greetings, it seems to me, is in fact one of the few companies that can be successfully slapped down on this, and may in fact make a good model to make a point to other companies. Not because *I* boycott, but because I can legitimately ask my friends and family not to buy their cards when buying for me.
Accordingly that is exactly what I have asked of my friends and family - that they avoid this company when buying my cards. I have also sent the following to American Greetings to make them aware of it.
--------------- In recent news, it appears that American Greetings sent a cease and desist order to the creators of the Web Comic Penny Arcade, requiring the artists to remove a comic strip or deal with the threat of a civil suit.
As the strip in question was an obvious parody which had no chance of confusion with the Strawberry Shortcake trademark, it easily passes both the copyright fair use test, and the trademark infringement tests, a fact that the lawyers at American Greetings were fully aware of when they sent the Cease and Desist order. American Greetings chose to continue with the order in the knowledge that it was merely suppressing a lawful parody, not execising its trademark or copyright rights.
Therefore I am no longer doing business with American Greetings, either as a buyer of cards for others, or as a recipient of those cards for my own special occasions. I have requested from my friends and family that, should such an occasion come, they are not to buy a card from your company.
As it happens, some of my friends have asked me why I have this sudden distaste for your line of merchandise. Upon being informed of the reasons for my choice, they have also requested the same of their friends and family.
It may be worth noting that if the standard cliche that only six-degrees of separation intercede between any two people is true, American greetings now stands only 4 degrees of separation away from a complete loss of market share.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually the universe was created ten minutes ago, by a guy named Louie. All our memories and such were created intact.
He's laughing his ass off about this right now.
He's an ass, but he's omnipotent - what'cha ya gonna do?
but I haven't seen Gimp mentioned yet - it'll do basic svg stuff
No - Google's is, and can only be, a license violation. It cannot be a copyright violation, because the application is not serving up copyrighted data - maps are factual data, like equations, tables of elements, etcetera.
.
I honestly don't agree with it as a licensing issue either, but yeah, it does make a difference when someone is polite about it - it also gives the author a chance to address this with google and possibly work out a compromise with them. Even if unsuccessful, he doesn't *feel* like he was stomped on -
But that's between the author and Google.
Pug
Huh - I'm one of the most intelligent people in history, and *I'm* perfectly social. Broke, but social.
Damn - breakin' the rules again.
Pug
Why is it that whenever you see Richard Stallman working out a compromise with some group regarding OSS, you always get the impression he'd have been happier if no compromise had been possible?
Almost a "Dammit, they suggested a reasonable compromise - I wanted to fight" feel to it.
I consider myself decently competent - Dual-boot XP and Slackware 10, but tend to use XP with GPL'd stuff that I found out about from slackware - Gimp, OpenOffice, etc.
.
So it's kinda disheartening to read an article like this and realize that I already do all the 'advanced' stuff this 'expert' writes up as if it were new and advanced voodoo. Actually, I'm pretty sure he misses a few tricks.
Maybe I'm just far more 'l337' than I thought I was -
Pug
So - If you have a hawking black hole of sufficiently small size, it can effectively convert matter to energy at a predetermined rate for no cost, based on the size of the black hole.
To keep it stable, you need to add matter at the same rate that it's radiating Hawking radiation. Rather counterintuitively, to lower the energy output, you feed it more matter, to raise it you choke the matter back a bit, let the black hole shrink a bit, and then feed it matter sufficient to stabilize it at the new enrgy output. And of course, if you run out of matter entirely it'll create a runaway reaction as the the black hole evaporates entirely.
Doesn't this in some way violate thermodynamics? You're turning useless energy removed from the system via entropy into useful energy you can work with again. Given the correctly chosen size for a black hole at the core, you can pick one that produces energy at the same rate as the core feeds it, it heats the core, and you make sure to convert that energy to matter sufficiently to keep it fed.
What obvious physical limitation am I missing?
Odd thought - Avida found that evolving programs, given limitless resources to reproduce, would evolve the capabilities wanted aproximately 50% of the time.
Given insufficient resources of course, they never evolved the necessary capabilties, however bewtween these two extremes they found that, with limited resources, they achieved a 100% success rate - that limiting the resources was more efficient than practically infinite resources.
QED - Spam is an ineffective advertising medium because it has efefctively infinite resources, and no pressure to evolve actual efficiency. In order to make spam more effective (And less annoying to *us* - receiving an ad we might be interested in being less annoying than receiving an ad for generic viagra), required making the resources for reproducing spam less efficient, creating competition for survival.
Email is too easy - thus does spam evolve. Email must be made difficult.
Just an odd thought.
I've also watched aspergers used to denigrate someone's talents by those that have to work harder to maintain competence.
A friend of mine is a brilliant music therapist that went on to get her Masters. Her fellow therapists, a bunch of young women have concluded that it's not because she's smart, talented, or put more work into it - it's because she has Asbergers.
Yeah - that has to be it. Having different priorities than looking sharp must be some kind of mental illness, right!
Glad we got that worked out.
I note you referenced the one, but not the other, from the very same site.
Yes, 48% of discretionary spending is a [i]colossal military budget[/i]. I don't question that our GDP can support it, but let's not pretend it's not frickin' huge, nor that it doesn't indicate where our governments priorities lay.
Pug
Google may or may not be guilty of hypocrisy in other areas - I don't know.
/., there is very little point to the amount of ranting this has generated - the whole article should be mark -5; Troll.
But this complaint is about google setting the title in the CACHED copy to the keywords?!?
That is to say, they're manipulating keywords in a system that no one spiders for keywords. Basically an internal system that they incidentally let the public use as well.
Even for
Pug
Had a call come in *just* as this came up and missed the chance to FP. Auugh!
I keep looking at this architecture, and although I have absolutely no real qualifications to say why, it keeps jumping out at me.
This thing looks like the architecture is designed with a jump to quantum computing in mind. The methods just . . . bring that to mind.
Which doesn't particularly make sense. Quantum computing is massively efficient at certain specialized problems like searches and of course encryption. I suppose a pathfinding engine with that capability would be extraordinary too, but by and large gaming doesn't have a lot that quantum computing would help all that much with. Perhaps someone smarter than I can explain why this is a spectacularly stupid.
Because it *looks* like something that's designed with that capability in mind. A least to me.
Honestly, this sounds like a political problem, not a coding or ethical problem. Going by the description here (and I'm only a so-so programmer, and don't know the community in question, so I'm assuming the description here is accurate) someone didn't like the way things were run and the amount of emphasis on the features *he* wanted, and decided to fork the code. Even got enough people who agreed with him (or were malleable) to support his side of the project.
Good - evolution comes from competition, both sides of the fork are stronger thereby - it's one of the several reasons open source produces better code.
But he left the main fork because he didn't *like* the way they were running things, and then they have the sheer temerity to use *his* code. Them B@st@rds!
Which leaves you in the position of having to choose whether or not to ignore the spirit and letter of the GPL, leaving him his exclusive code, but preserve peace between the forks, or respectfully disagree, point out that he has the same option available to him, and use what you find useful, or even get nasty and tell him that he can keep his source secret, but needs to remove the GPL'd code from his project.
Those are the options I see for you. Unfortunately, which of those you pursue is a poltical decision you need to make, not an ethical or legal one, so you need to talk to your base, not slashdot.
That said - I would go to option two - respectfully disagree and exercise your rights, going to option three if he tries to make it difficult to do so, but I'm a very polite hardass when it comes to someone trying to infringe my rights. Your political situation may not have the stability to do so.
But it doesn't really sound like the open source community is ready to tale up arms on his behalf, so at least that part of your equation is answered -
Mmmm - but what *is* a windows bug is that the windows environment is so culturally single user that attempts to install software for a single user invariably fail.
.mov file. Real player needs power user access, but not admin.
I've tried to run a Windows system in a 'secure' fashion - users, power users, an admin, etcetera. Fine
Now load a program as a user, and find out you can't - at all. Realize that Quicktime requires admin access - to read a
If you're not running a corporate system - you give everyone admin rights. It's the only practical solution - I'm not getting paid per hour to keep my moms system up, and she *should* be able to load quicktime for herself without needing admin rights, but she can't.
I don't know whether it's bad coding from Microsoft, or bad culture from people who program for windows, but if you're *not* being paid a salary for keeping a windows system secure while making sure people can load the tools they need - It's not worth it. I'm just going to reload windows in six months anyway when it slows down to a crawl for *no* particular reason, why would I worry about it.
Linux - I can run my life from linux, load whatever programs I need for everybody as admin, and run whatever I need for just me. I never had any experience as an admin before I loaded slackware (Hardlythe 'user friendly' version of linux), and it's no big deal.
I'm sure someone smarter than me *could* secure windows for their mom and still get everything tweaked with no unexpected interactions and get the permissions done 'just' right.
Why *would* they?
The ultimate anti-phishing scheme - post every new phishing scheme and URL on Slashdot,
.
wait for 10,304,345 hits in the next five minutes as people post "x" in vulnerable "!X" is clear . .
server goes down
Profit!
Or just set firefox to always show the URL // Always display the Navigation Toolbar in pop-up windows:u re.locatio n", true);
user_pref("dom.disable_window_open_feat
as per the tips and tricks pageg
Just an interesting note - if I left click on secunia's test page, and secunia opens citibank in a new tab, the exploit works.
If I middleclick on the test page and *force* firefox to open the site in a new tab, the exploit fails.
I don't know enough to now if this is a limitation in the exploit or in how they've written the exploit, but it's odd and interesting
As a helpdesk techie, I think Thunderbird is going to have a rougher ride than Firefox.
The problem strangely enough, is that Outlook Express was so much worse than Internet Explorer. IE isn't a great browser, but for most people until this last set of security flaws (Infection via Jpg? Yeah, that's tied too bloody close), it's "Good Enuff" - they could work around it. the only other browsers out their had fanbases, but weren't so head and shoulders above to be worth dealing with. I never cared for netscape, didn't like the packaging of mozilla, and didn't wan't to pay for opera - So I tweaked IE's security and stayed with the one that was "Good Enuff".
So when Firefox came to maturity just as the last set of flaws finally did things even my ultra paranoid security settings (Never had an adware get through) couldn't compensate for, people were primed to leave en masse. And it's great - I can tweak it, it's portable, and it does stand head and shoulders over IE.
Outlook express on the other hand never was "Good Enuff", for anything besides simple Email. It's really only used by people that have never bothered to try anything else. Pine and Elm have more capabilities. Everybody else moved, and has gotten to using something else that *is* good enough, and doesn't have the security holes IE had to jolt them. I have fifty+ filters I'd have to port from Eudora, others use Pegasus, or elm, webmail, or whatever.
So the people who wanted to move, have. The people who haven't moved yet aren't just waiting on Thunderbird the way I was waiting for a browser I *liked*.
So it's not going to hit OE as hard as Firefox hit IE.
That's simply not true - a friend of mine developed his very own Batplane
I've had this occasional idea, with an implementation for it. Obviously, Spam depends on two things, getting a message out to everyone, whether they care or not, and getting response from that 1/1000000 person foolish enough to want generic viagra (or whatever).
Is it possible to automatically set up systems that insure that the place which gets the response are added to the spammers list? If they get on each others queue's they drown out their own servers and the cost to benefit ration goes up sharply.
Or so it would seem to me.
That is to say, assuming no contract limiting my rights exists (Note - an EULA fails basic requirements to be a contract), when I buy a CD I buy certain rights to that CD, including the right to play it privately or publically, the right to make a back-up copy, etcetera.
What enforceable rights does the user have today to digital media they have bought. If I bought a CD, and it was stolen, do I still have a license to the IP contained on that CD, or does that transfer with the physical object.
What rights are in fact left to the consumer, explicitly or implicitly?
"We wanted to be as open as possible about this," he said. "In the United States, customers have been contacted directly via e-mail, and we've notified the reseller channel."
I can see the email now -
"Due to an error in our most recent update, e-mails containing a certain letter are now blocked. We can't tell you which one. Really. But make sure you u . . . reset your security setting ASA . . err really quickly.
Listen - just do it right now - this is embarrassing.
Thank you - Trend Micro"
But if SCO is/was selling a Linux product, licensed under the GPL (An irrevocable license), and SCO, the licensed holder of these various Unix products and patents is authorized to license their products any way they wish, ...
Then SCO has in fact ALREADY released these copyrights as a GPL'D product.
Oh YEAH, I'll bet they want to quit selling it - they never checked the source code themselves, and even if the source that they received contained patents that were exclusive SCO IP, by releasing it they have in fact relicensed it. The only (very thin) leg they have to stand on is to say "We were unaware that we were licensing intellectual property that we intended to maintain exclusive rights to. We are no longer selling that property under that license, and ask that the court allow us to remove that license from our intellectual property"
If the court allows this, it will break the GPL as a license - period. It works now because it is irrevocable and the customer has no risk. If the court lets SCO invalidate the GPL on the IP they released, it's going to be a precedent that anyone else can as well.
American Greetings, it seems to me, is in fact one of the few companies that can be successfully slapped down on this, and may in fact make a good model to make a point to other companies. Not because *I* boycott, but because I can legitimately ask my friends and family not to buy their cards when buying for me.
Accordingly that is exactly what I have asked of my friends and family - that they avoid this company when buying my cards. I have also sent the following to American Greetings to make them aware of it.
---------------
In recent news, it appears that American Greetings sent a cease and desist order to the creators of the Web Comic Penny Arcade, requiring the artists to remove a comic strip or deal with the threat of a civil suit.
As the strip in question was an obvious parody which had no chance of confusion with the Strawberry Shortcake trademark, it easily passes both the copyright fair use test, and the trademark infringement tests, a fact that the lawyers at American Greetings were fully aware of when they sent the Cease and Desist order. American Greetings chose to continue with the order in the knowledge that it was merely suppressing a lawful parody, not execising its trademark or copyright rights.
Therefore I am no longer doing business with American Greetings, either as a buyer of cards for others, or as a recipient of those cards for my own special occasions. I have requested from my friends and family that, should such an occasion come, they are not to buy a card from your company.
As it happens, some of my friends have asked me why I have this sudden distaste for your line of merchandise. Upon being informed of the reasons for my choice, they have also requested the same of their friends and family.
It may be worth noting that if the standard cliche that only six-degrees of separation intercede between any two people is true, American greetings now stands only 4 degrees of separation away from a complete loss of market share.
Thank you for your time,
------ ----