One of the primary goals of computer-controlled cars that communicate with each other will be to reduce the distance between cars so that more cars can fit on the highway at once and they can maintain a much higher rate of travel. Imagine if the lead car has sensors and a high-speed network connects all the cars - if the lead car has to brake, it can instantly tell all the cars behind it to brake too, like a long train in which the care are connected virtually instead of mechanically.
You're right though, we do need lots of distance between human-driven cars because the time delay for your eyes to see something and your foot to react and hit the brake pedal is on the order of 0.5 to 1.0 seconds instead of on the order of microseconds. Add the time delay per driver up for a chain of 20 cars travelling at 100+ kph and it can spell disaster if there's not a lot of slack distance in front of each car.
We absolutely need transparency in the election process so that the electorate will have faith in the election process. And we all need to raise the issue about these Diebold machines and any others that don't leave a paper trail as being unverifiable, un-recountable, and subject to manipulation. So I think what BlackBox is doing is fantastic.
BUT... If this inquiry is tied to partisan bickering and whining by deluded Kerry-supporters who loudly proclaim their belief that somehow this information will reveal some sort of conspiracy that will reverse the recent 100,000+ vote victory margin for Bush in Ohio, then it will actually be counter-productive. Tranparency in elections and election equipment will become a partisan issue pitting Democrats against Republicans instead of being a non-partisan call for transparency that the enter population should be willing to support.
I'm not a huge GW fan but I certainly agree with him about the problems of activist judges. Read the constitution and you'll see a very long and detailed section about the congress, a shorter section about the president, and then this tiny section about the supreme court. These were never intended to be three equal branches of government with overlapping roles despite whatever one's 8th-grade social studies teacher might have said. In fact the major "checks and balances" were all accomplished simply by having two separate houses within the legislative branch.
The constitution says that congress legislates, the president executes and implements the laws passed by congress, and the courts settle disputes about who has or hasn't violated the law. But these days we've totally screwed all that up. Congress has in many cases ceded its legislative authority to the president by allowing executive agencies to issue regulations that have the same force as law. Courts strike down laws or even virtually write their own laws just because they disagree with the laws that congress and the president passed, not because the law violates the consitution. They've invented their own utterly complex system of extra-constitutional precedents and implicit "weighing of interests" guidelines that are buried in case law and have no provisions for being repealed or amended. Congress and the president ignore their oaths of office to uphold and defend the constitution by passing laws that they know to be unconstitutional just by figuring, well, they'll let the courts decide if its ok or not.
So our three branches of government are hopelessly out of whack, the courts have grabbed for themselves way too much power and congress has let its power be whittled away.
Are you joking, is this like the first time you've ever heard about the benefits of freedom? Read Milton Friedman's "Capitalism and Freedom" if you need a refresher course.
If you'd like to see how your post might sound to a libertarian please read the following:
There is no "interest of society" and "society" is a non-entity. It's composed of essentially psychopathic entities (people) who cannot, by their very definition, take the interests of the market in consideration...
If that sounds like gibberish to you, then you get a feeling as to how your post sounded to people who understand the benefits of freedom and liberty.
Lesson #1: in voluntary, informed transactions, both the seller and the buyer end up with more than they started with, because each gave up something of lesser value to them in order to get something else that had greater value to them. Think about that.
There is a role for government, and that is to ensure that transactions are voluntary and informed rather than being imposed by physical force or the threat of force.
Do you believe that transistors are "magic" and that the idea that they can somehow correct things by themselves is wishful thinking?
Not quite, just to answer your specific question Bush has said he supported such a constitutional amendment but he has done no lobbying and knows that it will never pass. It's just like the "anti flag burning" constitutional amendment that was proposed several years back, nothing but patriotism and pandering and posturing to shore up his base.
Great. Just what I want. Greater dependence on big oil companies. It isn't enough that they're screwing me on fuel prices for my car, now they want to have a cut in providing power for my laptop and/or cell phone, too. This technology is not the answer. It's the question. "HELL NO" is the answer.
Where do you think the power that charges your batteries comes from now? According to this, 64% of generated electricity comes from fossil fuels, with hydroelectric and nuclear making up another 34%. So basically you're currently powering your laptop and PDA with mainly fossil fuels anyway.
Leave to an election year for every discussion to digress into a Bush-vs-Kerry thread or a War on Terror critique.
To me, this post is yet another example of the depths of mediocrity to which Slashdot has sunk. Like all vigilant citizens we love to read up on stories of real censorship, and this topic is "Top 25 Censored Media Stories of 2003-2004" and we get the little face with a black bar over it, so I clicked on the article expectantly.
But neither the original post nor the linked article ever say a word about censorship. Instead we get an assorted and random diatribe of 25 leftist topics. Where's even a discussion of any involvement of censorship? Where's even the attempt to describe how this is censorship? Sure, we all know that generally censorship refers to government prohibitions, but where's at least a lame insinuation about big evil media corporations spiking these stories? The article gives us nothing.
No, you'll probably be modded down by people who think that any analogy that requires a lengthy explanation is a crappy analogy.
Your first sentence was clever, and your second sentence was enough of an "explanation" for all but the most analogy-impaired.
Criticism of your analogy explained -- I can see why you felt it necessary to offer a lengthy explanation that went into more detail than your first explanation of your analogy. It was to pander to both the "Slashdot crowd" and the "Slashdot backlash" crowd simultaneously and thus indirectly beg for mod points. I will now see how well your approach works as I have mimicked it.
Maybe we can all slashdot the prosecutor's office or something. I can see it now: "Judge, we're dropping all charges against Mr. Bastard, we just want our website back."
Have fun in New York, and don't cross any yellow tape!
I'd first like to point out that an anarchist is not automatically a violent person
A good point, anarchy is basically a system of government in which there is no government. In theory, it is not necessarily the case that anarchy results in violence, you could certainly have peaceful communities of helpful neighbors living side-by-side without violence even in the absense of a government. In practice... Well, I'd have to see it to believe it.
Civil disobedience has a rightful place in getting a message across.
I agree that sometimes peaceful civil disobedience is a valid last-straw approach to making a political point, but you have to keep in mind that while free speech and free association are legally and constitutionally protected, "civil disobedience", which by definition involves breaking the law, is not. So don't come complaining to Slashdot when you get arrested and get sentenced to a couple years in federal "pound-me-in-the-@ss prison" for violating the law - I just hope you feel that the increased political awareness caused by your acts of "civil disobedience" was well worth it.
Yeah, nothing says FREEDOM like shooting unarmed students at Kent State, urk, I mean, ummm, Tiananmen Square.
I've intentionally brought up the Kent State-Tiananmen Square comparison myself when discussing the benefits of freedom and democracy with friends in China, since it offers a good chance for Americans to say "we know that our government sometimes behaves badly and we certianly don't think we're perfect." However, just for the record, here are some pertinent aspects of the comparison:
At Kent State, protesters had burned down a building and were pelting national guardsmen with rocks; the poorly-trained troops eventually panicked and began firing at the crowd of protesters and bystanders alike.
In Tiananmen Square, when local troops showed reluctance to start shooting the peaceful protestors, the government called in special out-of-town troops and ordered them to attack on the unarmed students.
At Kent State, 4 students were killed and 9 injured.
At Tiananmen Square, more than 300 were killed and countless injured.
In the U.S., students learn about Kent State in schools and analyze what the government did right and what it did wrong. By having a free press and freedom of speech, people can offer a variety of opinions on who was at fault and what went wrong. The government has learned from this and similar mistakes that poorly-trained soldiers with guns shouldn't be given riot control duties.
In China, it's hard to find official mention of the Tiananmen Square massacre, and when there is it's only the official government position - there's no opportunity for a free press to present opposing views. You get the feeling that, rather than "learning from its mistakes", the Chinese government actually enjoys the fact that most people believe the government would do the same thing again if faced with the same situation - that's why we don't see big protests about anything in China these days.
So go ahead and make that comparison, I'll take Kent State and the lessons learned from it over Tiananmen Square any day.
Firstly, certainly all previous versions of the software licensed under the GPL can continue to be used under the GPL.
Secondly, if the copyrights to the software are all solely owned by one company or by a small group of people then they can re-release the software under as many different licensing schemes as they want. They own the copyrights to the code, so they could decide to make all future versions of the code closed-source, or whatever. Anyone in the free software community would be free to create a "forked" version of the software based on the last GPL version and continue to develop it independently and release it under the GPL.
Thirdly, if the developers have accepted contributions from GPL folks without also getting ownership of the copyrights to the contributed code, then they probably are not allowed to take the current code based and make a version of it with any license that's more restrictive than the GPL, since the only license they have to the other people's code is the GPL itself, which forbids adding restrictions.
Finally, this is all a red herring in this particular case because the MySQL folks are just publishing their take on what the GPL means on their web site - they're not actually adding any restrictions. Of course, any company that sells software for a living will bias the explanations of the GPL on their web site as far as they can towards making you think that you have to buy their software, but the real license is still the GPL, and their "interpretation" of the GPL holds little or no legal standing.
I don't really get the whole "kerry == bush" thing that's being pushed around by socialists right now. Reproductive rights, stem cell research and the acceptable amount of mercury in your drinking water are just a FEW of the points that they disagree on.
I don't blame you for thinking that since if you read each one of their campaign propaganda you'd think the other was the devil incarnate so their positions must be miles apart. But when it comes right down to what their policies would be, on stem cell research they really aren't that different:
Kerry: private researchers can do whatever they want, public researchers can do whatever they want.
Bush: private researchers can do whatever they want, federally funded researchers can do whatever they want with all the stem cell lines that existed as of 2001 and can continue to do whatever they want with stem cells that come from various parts of adults, but federally funded researchers just can't make more stem cell lines from aborted fetuses.
On mercury levels the Bush administration is enforcing limits on mercury emissions for the first time ever (no one mentions that under Clinton you could spew as much mercury as you wanted to), Kerry says nothing specific but only that he'd "do more to strengthen the clean air act", whatever that means. You somehow see this as a huge difference?
Remember, the only reason the public Internet exists is because the FCC, over the *strenuous* objections of the Bell System, overrode restrictions on "sharing" of leased lines.
This is absurd, trying to justify the FCC's existence by pointing out that at one point it did not yield to industry pressure and rolled back some of its own regulations. Hooray, we're all glad they did the right thing in that case, but who do you think made those absurd rules restricting "sharing" of leased lines in the first place? Who do you think enforced the Bells' monopoly? According to this website, up until 1968:
Backed by Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regulations, AT&T did not allow users to attach devices to connect their telephones to two-way radios or computers and it did its best to block competition into the long-distance telephone market.
So the FCC regulations, and the FCC being "in bed" with AT&T, were the root causes of the problem in the first place! It was absurd that those regulations existed in the first place, and without them the Bells would have had no say and no one would have needed to wait for the FCC to repeal its rules to start building the internet.
This is like saying, after the mob halves the amount that it extorts from you for "protection" money: "well without the mob, we'd still be paying *twice* as much for 'protection'!"
And to all those people who think we just need to "clean house" at the FCC and put good people in charge, please wake up: the FCC has been in bed with industry for years and will continue to do so for as long as it exists, because joe cell phone or internet user doesn't hire lobbyists.
Eliminate the FCC, and start over with a tiny organization that just allocates spectrum.
Deregulation gave us the horrible consolidation that has six or seven companies owning all media.
In fact the exact opposite of this is true, all of the ills that you mention are happenning right now under current FCC regulation! In fact current FCC regulation is giving us this horrible consolidation that has six or seven comparies owning all the media. As the famous P. J. O'Rourke quote goes,
"When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators."
Mega companies like Clear Channel own so many stations precisely because they can wine and dine the FCC whereas small companies can't. Cleaning out the commissioners as you suggest is a short-term solution, the real solution is to eliminate the positions of power that are being wined and dined in the first place. Eliminate the FCC and their myriad of regulations and companies like Clear Channel with have to compete in the marketplace with other companies large and small, instead of buying rulings from the FCC.
In addition, the FCC helped fuel DBS satellite TV adoption by pre-empting local laws, and codes, covenants, and restrictions (all those long restrictions on land's use generally put in place by the original developer) from prohibiting satellite dishes/antennas smaller than 1m. Prior to that, most developments and tract houses (and some entire cities) were banning their use. This is another thing that the FCC did that helped make DBS worthwhile.
That's an excellent point, I had forgotten about that. It's funny that this one example of the FCC doing something good is actually a case where they acted to prevent regulation; that is, the FCC passed rules prohibiting local governments from banning small satellite dishes. Moreover, the FCC didn't do this of their own accord; according to this, Congress passed a law explicitly requiring the FCC to create this rule.
If the FCC did not exist, surely Congress could have just passed this "local governments can't ban small satellite dishes" law themselves directly. Again, no need for the FCC.
The fcc exists primary to ensure radio waves continue to exist and companies are protected from each other. Without proper regulation, and I highly doubt the industry can do this alone, things like satelite tv would be irredic at best. Things like computer monitors, cordless phones, stereos would not have regulations on the interference they put out and cause lots of havoc.
This is absurd, a bunch of computer geeks ought to know better than this. Satellite TV exists *in spite* of the FCC, why you think your satellite dish wouldn't work without the FCC, I have no idea.
It's not the FCC that keeps motherboards compatible with memory and processors.
It's not the FCC that keeps monitors compatible with video cards.
Private industry makes those things compatible voluntarily. Just as no one wants to buy a monitor that won't plug into your video card, similarly no one will want to buy a cordless phone that that interferes with your TV reception. We don't need big brother to take care of us.
If this tiny smidgen of what the FCC does is so important, Congress can always pass laws mimicking the current FCC regulations that prohibit devices from outputting enough power to interfere with other devices. The problem with the FCC is that this tiny 5% of what they do that might be useful gives them cover for the other 95% of what they do that actually restricts progress.
The FCC only has the powers Congress gives it. If you don't like what they're doing with it, tell Congress to change the law to override their mistake.
And that's exactly what we're doing here, expressing our opinion that Congress should change the law to override the mistake of creating an FCC. Or at least to correct the anachronism that is the FCC.
It doesn't take $300 million a year to allocate spectrum, the current activities of the FCC go way beyond that; like any bureaucracy, it's main interest lies in expanding its power.
Sure, until frequency-hopping radios and TVs are perfected and commonplace, we probably still need someone to decide what transmission frequencies to use for what purposes.
But the FCC is an overgrown bureaucracy that does much, much more than that. Better to ditch the FCC and establish a new, small body to allocate spectrum than to continue to feed this enormous beast that by-and-large does more harm than good.
Trademark law does not explicitly prohibit "purposeful ripoffs." Also "as close as possible to a blatant trademark infringement" does not equal "trademark infringement." The rules for determining whether a trademark has been infringed is "likelihood of confusion", according to Harvard Law.
So even if the court rules that Microsoft can keep its "Windows" trademark, in order to prohibit their competitors from using "Lindows" they have to show not just that it's a blatant rip-off of their name, but that consumers will be confused by the similarity. If Lindows markets itself clearly as "based on Linux but as easy to use as Windows(R)" then they might still be able to make the case that no consumer would accidentally buy Lindows thinking that they were getting Windows; rather the name was explicitly chosen in order to compare and contrast their product with the popular Windows product.
The belief that race accounts for differences in human character or ability and that a particular race is superior to others.
Discrimination or prejudice based on race.
I'm tired of hearing people repeat the blatantly false idea that any race-correlated differences in any area are "by definition" racism. Would you say the fact that blacks are vastly overrepresented in professional athletics is "the very definition of racism"? I didn't think so. You're the one who resorts to a clearly racist explanation for something that has complex societal and historical roots, in your own post:
and the only way you can say it is fair is by taking the position that black people are subhuman (naturally commit more and worse crimes than white people).
If you're going to play the pathetic "racist" card at every opportunity, please at least learn how to argue it intelligently - throwing up an idiotic strawman like "the only way you can say it is fair is by... blah blah blah" only gives the appearance that, despite your urging of the reader to "learn", "follow", and "investigate", you've done none of that.
Slashdot Mirror
One of the primary goals of computer-controlled cars that communicate with each other will be to reduce the distance between cars so that more cars can fit on the highway at once and they can maintain a much higher rate of travel. Imagine if the lead car has sensors and a high-speed network connects all the cars - if the lead car has to brake, it can instantly tell all the cars behind it to brake too, like a long train in which the care are connected virtually instead of mechanically.
You're right though, we do need lots of distance between human-driven cars because the time delay for your eyes to see something and your foot to react and hit the brake pedal is on the order of 0.5 to 1.0 seconds instead of on the order of microseconds. Add the time delay per driver up for a chain of 20 cars travelling at 100+ kph and it can spell disaster if there's not a lot of slack distance in front of each car.
We absolutely need transparency in the election process so that the electorate will have faith in the election process. And we all need to raise the issue about these Diebold machines and any others that don't leave a paper trail as being unverifiable, un-recountable, and subject to manipulation. So I think what BlackBox is doing is fantastic.
BUT... If this inquiry is tied to partisan bickering and whining by deluded Kerry-supporters who loudly proclaim their belief that somehow this information will reveal some sort of conspiracy that will reverse the recent 100,000+ vote victory margin for Bush in Ohio, then it will actually be counter-productive. Tranparency in elections and election equipment will become a partisan issue pitting Democrats against Republicans instead of being a non-partisan call for transparency that the enter population should be willing to support.
I'm not a huge GW fan but I certainly agree with him about the problems of activist judges. Read the constitution and you'll see a very long and detailed section about the congress, a shorter section about the president, and then this tiny section about the supreme court. These were never intended to be three equal branches of government with overlapping roles despite whatever one's 8th-grade social studies teacher might have said. In fact the major "checks and balances" were all accomplished simply by having two separate houses within the legislative branch.
The constitution says that congress legislates, the president executes and implements the laws passed by congress, and the courts settle disputes about who has or hasn't violated the law. But these days we've totally screwed all that up. Congress has in many cases ceded its legislative authority to the president by allowing executive agencies to issue regulations that have the same force as law. Courts strike down laws or even virtually write their own laws just because they disagree with the laws that congress and the president passed, not because the law violates the consitution. They've invented their own utterly complex system of extra-constitutional precedents and implicit "weighing of interests" guidelines that are buried in case law and have no provisions for being repealed or amended. Congress and the president ignore their oaths of office to uphold and defend the constitution by passing laws that they know to be unconstitutional just by figuring, well, they'll let the courts decide if its ok or not.
So our three branches of government are hopelessly out of whack, the courts have grabbed for themselves way too much power and congress has let its power be whittled away.
Are you joking, is this like the first time you've ever heard about the benefits of freedom? Read Milton Friedman's "Capitalism and Freedom" if you need a refresher course.
If you'd like to see how your post might sound to a libertarian please read the following:
There is no "interest of society" and "society" is a non-entity. It's composed of essentially psychopathic entities (people) who cannot, by their very definition, take the interests of the market in consideration...
If that sounds like gibberish to you, then you get a feeling as to how your post sounded to people who understand the benefits of freedom and liberty.
Lesson #1: in voluntary, informed transactions, both the seller and the buyer end up with more than they started with, because each gave up something of lesser value to them in order to get something else that had greater value to them. Think about that.
There is a role for government, and that is to ensure that transactions are voluntary and informed rather than being imposed by physical force or the threat of force.
Do you believe that transistors are "magic" and that the idea that they can somehow correct things by themselves is wishful thinking?
Not quite, just to answer your specific question Bush has said he supported such a constitutional amendment but he has done no lobbying and knows that it will never pass. It's just like the "anti flag burning" constitutional amendment that was proposed several years back, nothing but patriotism and pandering and posturing to shore up his base.
Great. Just what I want. Greater dependence on big oil companies. It isn't enough that they're screwing me on fuel prices for my car, now they want to have a cut in providing power for my laptop and/or cell phone, too. This technology is not the answer. It's the question. "HELL NO" is the answer.
Where do you think the power that charges your batteries comes from now? According to this, 64% of generated electricity comes from fossil fuels, with hydroelectric and nuclear making up another 34%. So basically you're currently powering your laptop and PDA with mainly fossil fuels anyway.
While we're in the business of picking on sigs...
10 out of 10 Fascists agree - Bush in 2004
I assume your list of 10 Fascists does not include Saddam Hussein?
Leave to an election year for every discussion to digress into a Bush-vs-Kerry thread or a War on Terror critique.
To me, this post is yet another example of the depths of mediocrity to which Slashdot has sunk. Like all vigilant citizens we love to read up on stories of real censorship, and this topic is "Top 25 Censored Media Stories of 2003-2004" and we get the little face with a black bar over it, so I clicked on the article expectantly.
But neither the original post nor the linked article ever say a word about censorship. Instead we get an assorted and random diatribe of 25 leftist topics. Where's even a discussion of any involvement of censorship? Where's even the attempt to describe how this is censorship? Sure, we all know that generally censorship refers to government prohibitions, but where's at least a lame insinuation about big evil media corporations spiking these stories? The article gives us nothing.
CmdrTaco might as well have posted this as a link to pictures of barenaked ladies, it would be about as relevant.
No, you'll probably be modded down by people who think that any analogy that requires a lengthy explanation is a crappy analogy.
Your first sentence was clever, and your second sentence was enough of an "explanation" for all but the most analogy-impaired.
Criticism of your analogy explained -- I can see why you felt it necessary to offer a lengthy explanation that went into more detail than your first explanation of your analogy. It was to pander to both the "Slashdot crowd" and the "Slashdot backlash" crowd simultaneously and thus indirectly beg for mod points. I will now see how well your approach works as I have mimicked it.
[Insert obligatory Chevy "No va" story here.]
So what's the difference between George Washington and the non crazy Islamists ?
The primary and indeed only important difference between the two is that George Washington won, but the Islamists will lose.
History is written by the winners.
Maybe we can all slashdot the prosecutor's office or something. I can see it now: "Judge, we're dropping all charges against Mr. Bastard, we just want our website back."
Have fun in New York, and don't cross any yellow tape!
I'd first like to point out that an anarchist is not automatically a violent person
A good point, anarchy is basically a system of government in which there is no government. In theory, it is not necessarily the case that anarchy results in violence, you could certainly have peaceful communities of helpful neighbors living side-by-side without violence even in the absense of a government. In practice... Well, I'd have to see it to believe it.
Civil disobedience has a rightful place in getting a message across.
I agree that sometimes peaceful civil disobedience is a valid last-straw approach to making a political point, but you have to keep in mind that while free speech and free association are legally and constitutionally protected, "civil disobedience", which by definition involves breaking the law, is not. So don't come complaining to Slashdot when you get arrested and get sentenced to a couple years in federal "pound-me-in-the-@ss prison" for violating the law - I just hope you feel that the increased political awareness caused by your acts of "civil disobedience" was well worth it.
I've intentionally brought up the Kent State-Tiananmen Square comparison myself when discussing the benefits of freedom and democracy with friends in China, since it offers a good chance for Americans to say "we know that our government sometimes behaves badly and we certianly don't think we're perfect." However, just for the record, here are some pertinent aspects of the comparison:
- At Kent State, protesters had burned down a building and were pelting national guardsmen with rocks; the poorly-trained troops eventually panicked and began firing at the crowd of protesters and bystanders alike.
- In Tiananmen Square, when local troops showed reluctance to start shooting the peaceful protestors, the government called in special out-of-town troops and ordered them to attack on the unarmed students.
- At Kent State, 4 students were killed and 9 injured.
- At Tiananmen Square, more than 300 were killed and countless injured.
- In the U.S., students learn about Kent State in schools and analyze what the government did right and what it did wrong. By having a free press and freedom of speech, people can offer a variety of opinions on who was at fault and what went wrong. The government has learned from this and similar mistakes that poorly-trained soldiers with guns shouldn't be given riot control duties.
- In China, it's hard to find official mention of the Tiananmen Square massacre, and when there is it's only the official government position - there's no opportunity for a free press to present opposing views. You get the feeling that, rather than "learning from its mistakes", the Chinese government actually enjoys the fact that most people believe the government would do the same thing again if faced with the same situation - that's why we don't see big protests about anything in China these days.
So go ahead and make that comparison, I'll take Kent State and the lessons learned from it over Tiananmen Square any day.IANAL, but...
Firstly, certainly all previous versions of the software licensed under the GPL can continue to be used under the GPL.
Secondly, if the copyrights to the software are all solely owned by one company or by a small group of people then they can re-release the software under as many different licensing schemes as they want. They own the copyrights to the code, so they could decide to make all future versions of the code closed-source, or whatever. Anyone in the free software community would be free to create a "forked" version of the software based on the last GPL version and continue to develop it independently and release it under the GPL.
Thirdly, if the developers have accepted contributions from GPL folks without also getting ownership of the copyrights to the contributed code, then they probably are not allowed to take the current code based and make a version of it with any license that's more restrictive than the GPL, since the only license they have to the other people's code is the GPL itself, which forbids adding restrictions.
Finally, this is all a red herring in this particular case because the MySQL folks are just publishing their take on what the GPL means on their web site - they're not actually adding any restrictions. Of course, any company that sells software for a living will bias the explanations of the GPL on their web site as far as they can towards making you think that you have to buy their software, but the real license is still the GPL, and their "interpretation" of the GPL holds little or no legal standing.
I don't blame you for thinking that since if you read each one of their campaign propaganda you'd think the other was the devil incarnate so their positions must be miles apart. But when it comes right down to what their policies would be, on stem cell research they really aren't that different:
Kerry: private researchers can do whatever they want, public researchers can do whatever they want.
Bush: private researchers can do whatever they want, federally funded researchers can do whatever they want with all the stem cell lines that existed as of 2001 and can continue to do whatever they want with stem cells that come from various parts of adults, but federally funded researchers just can't make more stem cell lines from aborted fetuses.
On mercury levels the Bush administration is enforcing limits on mercury emissions for the first time ever (no one mentions that under Clinton you could spew as much mercury as you wanted to), Kerry says nothing specific but only that he'd "do more to strengthen the clean air act", whatever that means. You somehow see this as a huge difference?
Don't believe 99% of what you hear.
Ooh, ooh, please pick me, pick me! I'd like to try this out.
Name: Conrad Poelman
I set up an email address just for this:
username is cpgmail, domain is stellarscience.com
Put the two together with '@'. Thanks.
So the FCC regulations, and the FCC being "in bed" with AT&T, were the root causes of the problem in the first place! It was absurd that those regulations existed in the first place, and without them the Bells would have had no say and no one would have needed to wait for the FCC to repeal its rules to start building the internet.
This is like saying, after the mob halves the amount that it extorts from you for "protection" money: "well without the mob, we'd still be paying *twice* as much for 'protection'!"
And to all those people who think we just need to "clean house" at the FCC and put good people in charge, please wake up: the FCC has been in bed with industry for years and will continue to do so for as long as it exists, because joe cell phone or internet user doesn't hire lobbyists.
Eliminate the FCC, and start over with a tiny organization that just allocates spectrum.
In fact the exact opposite of this is true, all of the ills that you mention are happenning right now under current FCC regulation! In fact current FCC regulation is giving us this horrible consolidation that has six or seven comparies owning all the media. As the famous P. J. O'Rourke quote goes,
"When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators."
Mega companies like Clear Channel own so many stations precisely because they can wine and dine the FCC whereas small companies can't. Cleaning out the commissioners as you suggest is a short-term solution, the real solution is to eliminate the positions of power that are being wined and dined in the first place. Eliminate the FCC and their myriad of regulations and companies like Clear Channel with have to compete in the marketplace with other companies large and small, instead of buying rulings from the FCC.
That's an excellent point, I had forgotten about that. It's funny that this one example of the FCC doing something good is actually a case where they acted to prevent regulation; that is, the FCC passed rules prohibiting local governments from banning small satellite dishes. Moreover, the FCC didn't do this of their own accord; according to this, Congress passed a law explicitly requiring the FCC to create this rule.
If the FCC did not exist, surely Congress could have just passed this "local governments can't ban small satellite dishes" law themselves directly. Again, no need for the FCC.
This is absurd, a bunch of computer geeks ought to know better than this. Satellite TV exists *in spite* of the FCC, why you think your satellite dish wouldn't work without the FCC, I have no idea.
Private industry makes those things compatible voluntarily. Just as no one wants to buy a monitor that won't plug into your video card, similarly no one will want to buy a cordless phone that that interferes with your TV reception. We don't need big brother to take care of us.
If this tiny smidgen of what the FCC does is so important, Congress can always pass laws mimicking the current FCC regulations that prohibit devices from outputting enough power to interfere with other devices. The problem with the FCC is that this tiny 5% of what they do that might be useful gives them cover for the other 95% of what they do that actually restricts progress.
And that's exactly what we're doing here, expressing our opinion that Congress should change the law to override the mistake of creating an FCC. Or at least to correct the anachronism that is the FCC.
It doesn't take $300 million a year to allocate spectrum, the current activities of the FCC go way beyond that; like any bureaucracy, it's main interest lies in expanding its power.
Sure, until frequency-hopping radios and TVs are perfected and commonplace, we probably still need someone to decide what transmission frequencies to use for what purposes.
But the FCC is an overgrown bureaucracy that does much, much more than that. Better to ditch the FCC and establish a new, small body to allocate spectrum than to continue to feed this enormous beast that by-and-large does more harm than good.
Trademark law does not explicitly prohibit "purposeful ripoffs." Also "as close as possible to a blatant trademark infringement" does not equal "trademark infringement." The rules for determining whether a trademark has been infringed is "likelihood of confusion", according to Harvard Law.
So even if the court rules that Microsoft can keep its "Windows" trademark, in order to prohibit their competitors from using "Lindows" they have to show not just that it's a blatant rip-off of their name, but that consumers will be confused by the similarity. If Lindows markets itself clearly as "based on Linux but as easy to use as Windows(R)" then they might still be able to make the case that no consumer would accidentally buy Lindows thinking that they were getting Windows; rather the name was explicitly chosen in order to compare and contrast their product with the popular Windows product.
No, this is the very definition of racism.
I'm tired of hearing people repeat the blatantly false idea that any race-correlated differences in any area are "by definition" racism. Would you say the fact that blacks are vastly overrepresented in professional athletics is "the very definition of racism"? I didn't think so. You're the one who resorts to a clearly racist explanation for something that has complex societal and historical roots, in your own post:
If you're going to play the pathetic "racist" card at every opportunity, please at least learn how to argue it intelligently - throwing up an idiotic strawman like "the only way you can say it is fair is by