I object to this for a different reason: I consider the concept of an organization with world jurisdiction intrinsically dangerous and unacceptable. It's like a monopoly: if you don't like their rules, where else are you going to go?
If the software is proprietary, you don't have the source so your options in terms of fixing it are limited. If the software is open source, there are no such problems. So proprietary software IS more difficult to fix.
If I had my way, documents would be done using plain text and markup languages. Everything is simple and separate, so you don't have many security issues that way.
Very nice letter. For those two lazy to RTFL, here are some key points:
It is also necessary to make it clear that the aim of the Bill we are discussing is not directly related to the amount of direct savings that can by made by using free software in state institutions. That is in any case a marginal aggregate value, but in no way is it the chief focus of the Bill. The basic principles which inspire the Bill are linked to the basic guarantees of a state of law, such as: Free access to public information by the citizen. Permanence of public data. Security of the State and citizens.
The Bill does not introduce any discrimination whatever, since it only establishes *how* the goods have to be provided (which is a state power) and not *who* has to provide them (which would effectively be discriminatory, if restrictions based on national origin, race religion, ideology, sexual preference etc. were imposed). On the contrary, the Bill is decidedly antidiscriminatory. This is so because by defining with no room for doubt the conditions for the provision of software, it prevents state bodies from using software which has a license including discriminatory conditions.
Your letter continues: "4. The bill imposes the use of open source software without considering the dangers that this can bring from the point of view of security, guarantee, and possible violation of the intellectual property rights of third parties."
Alluding in an abstract way to "the dangers this can bring", without specifically mentioning a single one of these supposed dangers, shows at the least some lack of knowledge of the topic.
This observation is wrong; in principle, freedom and lack of cost are orthogonal concepts: there is software which is proprietary and charged for (for example, MS Office), software which is proprietary and free of charge (MS Internet Explorer), software which is free and charged for (RedHat, SuSE etc Gnu/Linux distributions), software which is free and not charged for (Apache, OpenOffice, Mozilla), and even software which can be licensed in a range of combinations (MySQL).
The model of free software in no way implies ignorance of these laws, and in fact the great majority of free software is covered by copyright. In reality, the inclusion of this question in your observations shows your confusion in respect of the legal framework in which free software is developed. The inclusion of the intellectual property of others in works claimed as one's own is not a practice that has been noted in the free software community; whereas, unfortunately, it has been in the area of proprietry software. As an example, the condemnation by the Commercial Court of Nanterre, France, on 27th September 2001 of Microsoft Corp. to a penalty of 3 million francs in damages and interest, for violation of intellectual property (piracy, to use the unfortunate term that your firm commonly uses in its publicity).
I'm very glad that the Peruvian government has individuals as intelligent and well-versed in the issues as he is. If you look at some of Microsoft's arguments, such as that "the bill makes it compulsory for all public bodies to use only free software, that is to say open source software, which breaches the principles of equality before the law, that of non-discrimination and the right of free private enterprise, freedom of industry and of contract, protected by the constitution," it's obvious that they're just grasping for straws and that free software is probably going to win in Peru. Kudos for making it happen.
If we can compromise on putting a warning label in the software (as in "Increasing the volume above 85 DB may be harmful to your health. Change anyway / Cancel volume change / Set volume to 85 DB?"), that would be an adequate solution.
But if Privacy is *that* important, then don't use third party services. Don't use search engines, and don't use anything that connects to another computer.
That's actually a very valid position. I keep most of my private data (except email, I don't have the resources to set up and maintain my own server) on my own machine and most of what's on my machine gets handled by scripts that I wrote myself.
I'm actually not that paranoid. It's just that I get more freedom, customizability and privacy that way for only the one-time cost of 45 minutes of my time.
It's not pedantic. You have something to hide: the fact that you made certain queries about porn, crypto cracking and theory. The point is that there is nothing wrong with wanting to hide that.
Not at all the same thing. The molecules in the rock are making trillions of trillions of computations per second. They're just not in a useful arrangement. As for the molecules in water, you have to introduce an infinite amount of energy from outside to accelerate it to the speed of light.
only people with something to hide would care about privacy
An entirely correct position. The place where the argument breaks down is that there's nothing wrong with having something to hide. For example, I would very much prefer it if my Slashdot password remains a secret, and there's nothing wrong with that.
import random, time, os t = 300 while 1: time.sleep(t) t = random.randrange(800) dictfile = open('dictionary','r') dictlines = d.readlines() line = dl[random.randrange(len(dl))] x = "wget -0 - http://www.google.ca/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=" + line c = os.popen(x) p = c.read()
What exactly are these illegal actions you're talking about? Using other people's WiFi? Sneaking onto other people's computers? I'm honestly curious as to what you meant.
Given that music players are so pervasive, I'll go back to my point that a campaign of education will be much more effective.
Are there scanners that accept a stack of sheets?
on
The DIY Book Scanner
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
If so, wouldn't it be easier to just rip out the binding and put in the pages? The $15 cost of buying another copy is less than all that boring, repetitive manual labor.
When you buy your music player, is the volume preset to maximum? No, chances are it's around half. You have to go out of your way to listen to maximum volume, so people who listen to maximum volume WANT to listen to maximum volume. It's not like being accidentally hurt by a product without the right warning labels. All this would do is inconvenience them.
People don't know what's good for them so we should, instead of a campaign of education, use a legal bludgeon to get our way? Last time I checked that argument stops at age 19.
A rock is a computer 10 billion times more powerful than all of our computers on the planet combined. The hard problem is putting that power to good use,
If we want to retain our hearing we can turn our volume below the maximum. If we want our children to retain their hearing many music players, like the iPod touch, have a parental control feature that limits volume.
Please stop trying to protect people from themselves.
So if you're in the middle of nowhere with no cars in any direction for 500m and you hit a red light, you should wait for 1 full minute rather than going ahead? Sounds a bit wasteful to me.
Slashdot Mirror
I object to this for a different reason: I consider the concept of an organization with world jurisdiction intrinsically dangerous and unacceptable. It's like a monopoly: if you don't like their rules, where else are you going to go?
If the software is proprietary, you don't have the source so your options in terms of fixing it are limited. If the software is open source, there are no such problems. So proprietary software IS more difficult to fix.
If I had my way, documents would be done using plain text and markup languages. Everything is simple and separate, so you don't have many security issues that way.
Very nice letter. For those two lazy to RTFL, here are some key points:
It is also necessary to make it clear that the aim of the Bill we are discussing is not directly related to the amount of direct savings that can by made by using free software in state institutions. That is in any case a marginal aggregate value, but in no way is it the chief focus of the Bill. The basic principles which inspire the Bill are linked to the basic guarantees of a state of law, such as: Free access to public information by the citizen. Permanence of public data. Security of the State and citizens.
The Bill does not introduce any discrimination whatever, since it only establishes *how* the goods have to be provided (which is a state power) and not *who* has to provide them (which would effectively be discriminatory, if restrictions based on national origin, race religion, ideology, sexual preference etc. were imposed). On the contrary, the Bill is decidedly antidiscriminatory. This is so because by defining with no room for doubt the conditions for the provision of software, it prevents state bodies from using software which has a license including discriminatory conditions.
Your letter continues: "4. The bill imposes the use of open source software without considering the dangers that this can bring from the point of view of security, guarantee, and possible violation of the intellectual property rights of third parties."
Alluding in an abstract way to "the dangers this can bring", without specifically mentioning a single one of these supposed dangers, shows at the least some lack of knowledge of the topic.
This observation is wrong; in principle, freedom and lack of cost are orthogonal concepts: there is software which is proprietary and charged for (for example, MS Office), software which is proprietary and free of charge (MS Internet Explorer), software which is free and charged for (RedHat, SuSE etc Gnu/Linux distributions), software which is free and not charged for (Apache, OpenOffice, Mozilla), and even software which can be licensed in a range of combinations (MySQL).
The model of free software in no way implies ignorance of these laws, and in fact the great majority of free software is covered by copyright. In reality, the inclusion of this question in your observations shows your confusion in respect of the legal framework in which free software is developed. The inclusion of the intellectual property of others in works claimed as one's own is not a practice that has been noted in the free software community; whereas, unfortunately, it has been in the area of proprietry software. As an example, the condemnation by the Commercial Court of Nanterre, France, on 27th September 2001 of Microsoft Corp. to a penalty of 3 million francs in damages and interest, for violation of intellectual property (piracy, to use the unfortunate term that your firm commonly uses in its publicity).
I'm very glad that the Peruvian government has individuals as intelligent and well-versed in the issues as he is. If you look at some of Microsoft's arguments, such as that "the bill makes it compulsory for all public bodies to use only free software, that is to say open source software, which breaches the principles of equality before the law, that of non-discrimination and the right of free private enterprise, freedom of industry and of contract, protected by the constitution," it's obvious that they're just grasping for straws and that free software is probably going to win in Peru. Kudos for making it happen.
Indeed. Everyone knows that being a country requires you to have some non-beaver residents.
So, what's 30 billion minus 20 billion? Uhh...
80 billion! Doubling ticket prices, changing some laws and ripping off customers will make them 80 billion dollars.
If we can compromise on putting a warning label in the software (as in "Increasing the volume above 85 DB may be harmful to your health. Change anyway / Cancel volume change / Set volume to 85 DB?"), that would be an adequate solution.
But if Privacy is *that* important, then don't use third party services. Don't use search engines, and don't use anything that connects to another computer.
That's actually a very valid position. I keep most of my private data (except email, I don't have the resources to set up and maintain my own server) on my own machine and most of what's on my machine gets handled by scripts that I wrote myself.
I'm actually not that paranoid. It's just that I get more freedom, customizability and privacy that way for only the one-time cost of 45 minutes of my time.
It's not pedantic. You have something to hide: the fact that you made certain queries about porn, crypto cracking and theory. The point is that there is nothing wrong with wanting to hide that.
Not at all the same thing. The molecules in the rock are making trillions of trillions of computations per second. They're just not in a useful arrangement. As for the molecules in water, you have to introduce an infinite amount of energy from outside to accelerate it to the speed of light.
only people with something to hide would care about privacy
An entirely correct position. The place where the argument breaks down is that there's nothing wrong with having something to hide. For example, I would very much prefer it if my Slashdot password remains a secret, and there's nothing wrong with that.
Something like:
import random, time, os
t = 300
while 1:
time.sleep(t)
t = random.randrange(800)
dictfile = open('dictionary','r')
dictlines = d.readlines()
line = dl[random.randrange(len(dl))]
x = "wget -0 - http://www.google.ca/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=" + line
c = os.popen(x)
p = c.read()
What exactly are these illegal actions you're talking about? Using other people's WiFi? Sneaking onto other people's computers? I'm honestly curious as to what you meant.
Given that music players are so pervasive, I'll go back to my point that a campaign of education will be much more effective.
If so, wouldn't it be easier to just rip out the binding and put in the pages? The $15 cost of buying another copy is less than all that boring, repetitive manual labor.
When you buy your music player, is the volume preset to maximum? No, chances are it's around half. You have to go out of your way to listen to maximum volume, so people who listen to maximum volume WANT to listen to maximum volume. It's not like being accidentally hurt by a product without the right warning labels. All this would do is inconvenience them.
People don't know what's good for them so we should, instead of a campaign of education, use a legal bludgeon to get our way? Last time I checked that argument stops at age 19.
A rock is a computer 10 billion times more powerful than all of our computers on the planet combined. The hard problem is putting that power to good use,
Can you please elaborate on this? Are you talking about people carelessly using one time pads twice? Or some other vulnerability?
If we want to retain our hearing we can turn our volume below the maximum. If we want our children to retain their hearing many music players, like the iPod touch, have a parental control feature that limits volume.
Please stop trying to protect people from themselves.
Too bad the material that gets removed to make a crater has to go somewhere.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tachyon?
I read that as "AT-AT crappy coverage strikes again". What an AT-AT could be doing throwing cars around, I do not kn
So if you're in the middle of nowhere with no cars in any direction for 500m and you hit a red light, you should wait for 1 full minute rather than going ahead? Sounds a bit wasteful to me.
Now nobody else can do it. Can I have my $150 Photoshop now?