How many cars (especially if there's more than 1 person in your family)?
One.
How many computers?
One. Maybe two, if I put together all the spare parts in my closet.
How many pairs of shoes do you have?
Well, you got me there. Three.
I use a black-and-white laser printer myself, but if I frequently needed to print in color I certainly wouldn't want to mess around with having to deal with two separate printers. One is aggravation enough.
OK, do you think that kdawson refers to it as "stealing ideas" in order to try start yet another flamewar about whether you can steal an idea or not, or is he just oblivious?
And while we're at it, could we get an editor who doesn't treat punctuation like a game of Pin-the-Tail-on-the-Donkey?
That quote doesn't say what you think it says, because it's not talking about the overall "unemployment rate." Read it again:
"Statistics on insured unemployment in the United States are collected as a byproduct of unemployment insurance (UI) programs.
This is talking about statistics gathered about people collecting unemployment benefits. How many of them there are and so forth. Of course they get statistics on who is collecting unemployment from the people who are getting the benefits.
The part you want to look at is under the "Where do the statistics come from?" section above that, where there is a fairly detailed explanation of how the unemployment figures are actually determined. If you'll read it, you'll find that the number of people collecting benefits does not determine what is reported as the unemployment rate.
I believe that the unemployment numbers are related to the number of people collecting unemployment benefits.
You believe wrong, but whenever unemployment comes up on slashdot somebody has to bring up this myth. Read the bureau of labor statistics information on the subject here: http://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.htm
Look at the Slashdot banner at the top of the page. What do you see? Kerning. And if it wasn't kerned, it would look like crap.
On the other hand, look at the Wired logo in the article, in which they brag about how it follows their law of readability. It looks like unreadable crap.
And if a name appears on a website (or anywhere publicly) that can be construed as endorsement of the named developer/company.
The license also requires the copyright notice to be retained when distributing the software, which will include the name of the developer or company -- so yes, they are required to include your name.
There is of course the argument that the developer just shouldn't use your work.
The thing is that this isn't so much an argument as it is a point of view. If you think that it should be the right of the developer to place limits on how it's used, then it should be their right to choose whether their code can be integrated into closed-source software or not. Some people (like RMS) consider allowing their code to be used that way as morally wrong; others simply don't want to be contributing to the bottom line of corporations that they don't like; others believe that having such a restriction encourages sharing. You don't have to buy into any of those reasons, but they are certainly valid opinions.
To be honest, I think that my opinion of the GPL is much the same as yours -- at least, when working on my own projects, I prefer BSD-style licenses to GPL-style, though I've done work with both. My viewpoint is that I'd like my code to help as many people as possible, whether or not they're working on closed-source software, and if they can make money off of it -- good for them. But I respect the view of other people who don't like their code being used in closed-source software, and the GPL is probably a better choice from them.
This AC post is right -- you are going about this backwards. Your first question should not be "what license do I use?", it should be "what do I want to happen to my code?" Sit down and decide whether you want to give away the source code or not, whether you want to allow others to modify the code, whether you want to require modifications to be released to the public, and anything else that you think is important.
Once you've done that, picking a license is pretty straightforward. People have already posted links to a bunch of different places that compare licenses. Unless your requirements are pretty unusual, you should be able to find a license that matches them.
If artists who are out to make money stop producing due to copyright reform -- good riddance. There'll still be plenty of music and culture left, just as there has always been.
It's funny how this "point" is always bandied about by those who want to abolish copyright protections, and yet the vast majority of of music (/movies/books/whatever) that are being pirated are created by artists who are out to make money.
Seems to me that artists who aren't out to make money could already freely distribute their work or allow it to be copied for free. In fact, I'd think that they would have a better shot at it now than if we got rid of copyright protection, since they wouldn't have to compete in that arena with the money-loving artists that you look down on. Strange how it doesn't seem to work that way...
As the other reply said, the chances of two chunks, even ones that are relatively small (like 16kb) being identical are very, very small, unless the source data was similar in the first place. So you're not going to be able to download your top 40 CD from all-free sources using that method.
You could do something like reducing the chunk size to 10 bytes or something else really small, and probably be able to find chunks from non-copyrighted sources. (Disregard for the moment the fact that the overhead would be ridiculous). But at that point, a good argument could be made that the addresses that the tracker is giving you is really just an encoding of those 10 bytes, and so they're committing the copyright violation.
A similar suggestion has been made using streams of "random" numbers, such as the digits of pi: if the digits of pi are truly random, then any stream of data can be found somewhere within its digits. Some people immediately think that they can get around copyright laws if they say that "an MP3 of song AAA starts at digit 651923471 of pi, and continues for 771564 digits." But there are a couple of problems with this: first off, the offset of the data you want will often take more bits to express than the data that you're trying to find. (So to find that 5MB MP3, you first need to download a 5MB number that tells you where to find it.) The other problem is similar to the above: what you really have is just a clever way of encoding the data. You don't get off the hook for a copyright violation if you rot13 your data, and I doubt that this one would fly either.
I don't know about anyone else, but it sure sounds to me like you fit the bill.
Just because Perens isn't being paid to make this statement (at least directly -- he makes his money largely from his free software advocacy, and this is part of that) doesn't mean that he's not a biased source. He's been one of the core supporters of the GPLv3 from the beginning. His position is just as unsurprising as Microsoft's.
This doesn't seem all that different to me than many of the political free-speech-limiting laws that we have in the US and elsewhere -- campaign finance laws, equal access, and all that jazz. Political speech on other broadcast mediums gets some close scrutiny; it makes sense that we would see the same thing happening on the internet.
Of course, I think it would be an improvement to allow unimpeded free speech on the internet, television, radio, print, and everything else -- but you can't say that these restrictions are much of a surprise.
That's trademarks you're thinking of. This has been explained many, many times on this very site.
The person you're responding to has been a member for years and has made nearly 600 comments. Either he knows that already, and was just trolling, or is a complete idiot, and correcting him again isn't going to help.
"The clock reflects astronomical realities of earth/sun positioning."
Nope, it reflects oscillations of a cesium atom. Far more regular and periodic than, say, the time between two consecutive noons.
This is nonsense. We break our time into units directly related to the resonance frequency of the cesium atom because it's convenient and more accurate than based on astronomy. This has nothing to do with the method that we use for expressing and using time, which is based on the rotation of the earth.
As for the idiocy of changing clocks to match your preferred schedule -- yes, you should be getting up and scheduling your day so that you are able to "use" the daylight in the way you wish. As should the grandparent poster who is complaining about having to get up early due to daylight savings.
Perhaps it's the fact that hydrogen is merely a means of storing energy, not producing it...
Well, when you get right down to it, so are biofuels. They just accomplish the "storing energy" part using photosynthesis rather than extracting the fuel from hydrocarbons, or using electrolysis.
The real problem is that hydrogen has few advantages (mostly environmental) and many disadvantages (mostly technical) over other technologies. Unless those problems are solved, it makes more sense to turn your sunlight into biofuels than hydrogen, because the technical hurdles to using the former are pretty much solved already.
Power shouldn't be much of a hassle, solar panels and maybe a nuclear plant to handle night-time power demands.
Solar panels have problems that are similar in scope to the problems you mention -- and you get to add the complexities of moving to electric-based cars if you want to use them to replace petroleum.
I'm still not entirely sure about GPLv3 myself, and I should probably go back and read a draft.
Last time, he honestly sounded like a Slashdotter who hadn't bothered to RTFA, just repeating the same unfounded arguments, some of which were blatantly wrong to anyone who actually read the license.
How do you know they were "blatantly wrong" if you haven't read it?
In any case, his DRM fears were most certainly reasonable given the early drafts. If you didn't bother to even read the summary, the FSF changed the GPL to improve those parts. I haven't read the the new draft, but I would hope that it was improved.
No, that was the intended purpose of tags. Because of the way that they are implemented, what they are actually used for is to add some extra front-page editorializing. If you want to make them useful for searching purposes, then you'll have to get Slashdot to stop making it worthwhile to add moronic tags.
Basically, technology has rendered musical recordings worthless as a product in and of themselves.
I don't think that this is true today. It may be true if we were to get rid of copyright protection, and it could become true in the future if most artists begin releasing their work for free, but both of those are still hypothetical at the moment.
The only point I was trying to make about this is that the price of that ownership will drop dramatically.
If the price of ownership drops naturally, as people become less willing to pay for music, then I have no problem with the role of recorded music changing to match. It's those that advocate removing copyright protection in order to force the price down that I see as self-serving. (And I don't find the other arguments against copyright to be very convincing, either.)
This is some incredibly forced logic. In the first para you are quoting (I assume) industry stats on sales (which do not benefit artists in any substantial way) with the industry's predilection for DRM which serves only to alienate fans?
You don't understand because those two paragraphs are about completely different things. They were in different posts, and responding to different people's comments. The first was responding to the statement that there is no money in albums, which is demonstrably false. If you look at the replies, when I said that, the argument immediately changed to "there is no money in albums for artists that sign with major labels," which while it isn't completely true, is at least somewhat defensible.
The second paragraph was responding to the statement that artists don't benefit from music sales. It is my opinion that, when there is so obviously ways to benefit from music sales, that there is no reason why the artists should not benefit from music sales. Just because some people make poor decisions is a poor argument for getting rid of copyright protection.
Are you defending the industry's use of DRM, or are you condemning artists for singing with major labels?
I wasn't aware that I had said a thing to do with DRM in the first place. This same argument has been going on since the napster days, before DRM-protected music was at all common. As it happens, though, I'm indifferent on the subject. Some parts of the DMCA are bad, and should be overturned, but the music industry should be allowed to encode their bits in any way they want. If it causes a problem, don't buy it.
And I'm not "condemning" anybody. The artists are adults, and they should be allowed to make their own choices. With all the publicity, nobody can say that they don't understand what the music industry is like. I may think they're making a poor choice, but if they want to go for the 1-in-a-million chance of being wildly rich, that's their business.
Are you implying that artists somehow benefit from music sales?
They would if they would sell their own music, or found distributors that gave them favorable terms. (And don't try the crap about there being no such thing -- there is; you just don't get the marketing muscle that the big names have.) I feel no sympathy for the poor, downtrodden artists who sign away the rights to their music in hopes of becoming multimillionaires. They played the lottery, they lost.
In any case, I was responding to the statement "That's where the money is, anyway. not the Albums," which is obviously false. Many more people buy music than go to concerts, and are willing to pay for it. There's money in both.
Slashdot Mirror
One.
One.
One. Maybe two, if I put together all the spare parts in my closet.
Well, you got me there. Three.
I use a black-and-white laser printer myself, but if I frequently needed to print in color I certainly wouldn't want to mess around with having to deal with two separate printers. One is aggravation enough.
OK, do you think that kdawson refers to it as "stealing ideas" in order to try start yet another flamewar about whether you can steal an idea or not, or is he just oblivious?
And while we're at it, could we get an editor who doesn't treat punctuation like a game of Pin-the-Tail-on-the-Donkey?
That quote doesn't say what you think it says, because it's not talking about the overall "unemployment rate." Read it again:
This is talking about statistics gathered about people collecting unemployment benefits. How many of them there are and so forth. Of course they get statistics on who is collecting unemployment from the people who are getting the benefits.
The part you want to look at is under the "Where do the statistics come from?" section above that, where there is a fairly detailed explanation of how the unemployment figures are actually determined. If you'll read it, you'll find that the number of people collecting benefits does not determine what is reported as the unemployment rate.
On the other hand, look at the Wired logo in the article, in which they brag about how it follows their law of readability. It looks like unreadable crap.
But mostly "yes."
The license also requires the copyright notice to be retained when distributing the software, which will include the name of the developer or company -- so yes, they are required to include your name.
The thing is that this isn't so much an argument as it is a point of view. If you think that it should be the right of the developer to place limits on how it's used, then it should be their right to choose whether their code can be integrated into closed-source software or not. Some people (like RMS) consider allowing their code to be used that way as morally wrong; others simply don't want to be contributing to the bottom line of corporations that they don't like; others believe that having such a restriction encourages sharing. You don't have to buy into any of those reasons, but they are certainly valid opinions.
To be honest, I think that my opinion of the GPL is much the same as yours -- at least, when working on my own projects, I prefer BSD-style licenses to GPL-style, though I've done work with both. My viewpoint is that I'd like my code to help as many people as possible, whether or not they're working on closed-source software, and if they can make money off of it -- good for them. But I respect the view of other people who don't like their code being used in closed-source software, and the GPL is probably a better choice from them.
This AC post is right -- you are going about this backwards. Your first question should not be "what license do I use?", it should be "what do I want to happen to my code?" Sit down and decide whether you want to give away the source code or not, whether you want to allow others to modify the code, whether you want to require modifications to be released to the public, and anything else that you think is important.
Once you've done that, picking a license is pretty straightforward. People have already posted links to a bunch of different places that compare licenses. Unless your requirements are pretty unusual, you should be able to find a license that matches them.
It's funny how this "point" is always bandied about by those who want to abolish copyright protections, and yet the vast majority of of music (/movies/books/whatever) that are being pirated are created by artists who are out to make money.
Seems to me that artists who aren't out to make money could already freely distribute their work or allow it to be copied for free. In fact, I'd think that they would have a better shot at it now than if we got rid of copyright protection, since they wouldn't have to compete in that arena with the money-loving artists that you look down on. Strange how it doesn't seem to work that way...
As the other reply said, the chances of two chunks, even ones that are relatively small (like 16kb) being identical are very, very small, unless the source data was similar in the first place. So you're not going to be able to download your top 40 CD from all-free sources using that method.
You could do something like reducing the chunk size to 10 bytes or something else really small, and probably be able to find chunks from non-copyrighted sources. (Disregard for the moment the fact that the overhead would be ridiculous). But at that point, a good argument could be made that the addresses that the tracker is giving you is really just an encoding of those 10 bytes, and so they're committing the copyright violation.
A similar suggestion has been made using streams of "random" numbers, such as the digits of pi: if the digits of pi are truly random, then any stream of data can be found somewhere within its digits. Some people immediately think that they can get around copyright laws if they say that "an MP3 of song AAA starts at digit 651923471 of pi, and continues for 771564 digits." But there are a couple of problems with this: first off, the offset of the data you want will often take more bits to express than the data that you're trying to find. (So to find that 5MB MP3, you first need to download a 5MB number that tells you where to find it.) The other problem is similar to the above: what you really have is just a clever way of encoding the data. You don't get off the hook for a copyright violation if you rot13 your data, and I doubt that this one would fly either.
I don't know about anyone else, but it sure sounds to me like you fit the bill.
Just because Perens isn't being paid to make this statement (at least directly -- he makes his money largely from his free software advocacy, and this is part of that) doesn't mean that he's not a biased source. He's been one of the core supporters of the GPLv3 from the beginning. His position is just as unsurprising as Microsoft's.
Ah, yes, the good old "let's change the subject to something completely unrelated" defense.
This doesn't seem all that different to me than many of the political free-speech-limiting laws that we have in the US and elsewhere -- campaign finance laws, equal access, and all that jazz. Political speech on other broadcast mediums gets some close scrutiny; it makes sense that we would see the same thing happening on the internet.
Of course, I think it would be an improvement to allow unimpeded free speech on the internet, television, radio, print, and everything else -- but you can't say that these restrictions are much of a surprise.
This is nonsense. We break our time into units directly related to the resonance frequency of the cesium atom because it's convenient and more accurate than based on astronomy. This has nothing to do with the method that we use for expressing and using time, which is based on the rotation of the earth.
As for the idiocy of changing clocks to match your preferred schedule -- yes, you should be getting up and scheduling your day so that you are able to "use" the daylight in the way you wish. As should the grandparent poster who is complaining about having to get up early due to daylight savings.
Well, when you get right down to it, so are biofuels. They just accomplish the "storing energy" part using photosynthesis rather than extracting the fuel from hydrocarbons, or using electrolysis.
The real problem is that hydrogen has few advantages (mostly environmental) and many disadvantages (mostly technical) over other technologies. Unless those problems are solved, it makes more sense to turn your sunlight into biofuels than hydrogen, because the technical hurdles to using the former are pretty much solved already.
How do you know they were "blatantly wrong" if you haven't read it?
In any case, his DRM fears were most certainly reasonable given the early drafts. If you didn't bother to even read the summary, the FSF changed the GPL to improve those parts. I haven't read the the new draft, but I would hope that it was improved.
This is at least partly because I tag every question with those three. And I usually paste "stupidquestion" on there too.
Just doing my part to help.
I don't think that this is true today. It may be true if we were to get rid of copyright protection, and it could become true in the future if most artists begin releasing their work for free, but both of those are still hypothetical at the moment.
If the price of ownership drops naturally, as people become less willing to pay for music, then I have no problem with the role of recorded music changing to match. It's those that advocate removing copyright protection in order to force the price down that I see as self-serving. (And I don't find the other arguments against copyright to be very convincing, either.)
You don't understand because those two paragraphs are about completely different things. They were in different posts, and responding to different people's comments. The first was responding to the statement that there is no money in albums, which is demonstrably false. If you look at the replies, when I said that, the argument immediately changed to "there is no money in albums for artists that sign with major labels," which while it isn't completely true, is at least somewhat defensible.
The second paragraph was responding to the statement that artists don't benefit from music sales. It is my opinion that, when there is so obviously ways to benefit from music sales, that there is no reason why the artists should not benefit from music sales. Just because some people make poor decisions is a poor argument for getting rid of copyright protection.
I wasn't aware that I had said a thing to do with DRM in the first place. This same argument has been going on since the napster days, before DRM-protected music was at all common. As it happens, though, I'm indifferent on the subject. Some parts of the DMCA are bad, and should be overturned, but the music industry should be allowed to encode their bits in any way they want. If it causes a problem, don't buy it.
And I'm not "condemning" anybody. The artists are adults, and they should be allowed to make their own choices. With all the publicity, nobody can say that they don't understand what the music industry is like. I may think they're making a poor choice, but if they want to go for the 1-in-a-million chance of being wildly rich, that's their business.
They would if they would sell their own music, or found distributors that gave them favorable terms. (And don't try the crap about there being no such thing -- there is; you just don't get the marketing muscle that the big names have.) I feel no sympathy for the poor, downtrodden artists who sign away the rights to their music in hopes of becoming multimillionaires. They played the lottery, they lost.
In any case, I was responding to the statement "That's where the money is, anyway. not the Albums," which is obviously false. Many more people buy music than go to concerts, and are willing to pay for it. There's money in both.