the ones that I would consider to be casual gamers are the ones that seem pretty appathetic about it reguardless of how much I rave about it.
You have to realize, that from the perspective of someone who would rave about any game console, pretty much everyone is apathetic. You have to be pretty far beyond casual to care that strongly about hardware that is still several months out and that nobody really knows what it's like.
For the record, I'm in the casual category. I have a gamecube, but I can't imagine myself buying a next-gen console any time in the next three or four years.
What makes you think it's a problem? The entire purpose of any software license (or really any written legal document) is to ensure that the courts will know what was meant. No matter what is written on paper, the license is nothing more than words on paper until one party sues another for copyright infringement, and the other party uses the license as a defence.
Well, for starters: while it's the courts and the lawyers who will have to figure things out when there is a lawsuit for copyright infringement (which may never happen -- has there ever been a lawsuit taken to completion over infringement of the GPL?), the vast majority of users of the license are programmers who are not lawyers and won't be able to have one advising them. I, for one, would not be comfortable using a license when nobody can seem to satisfactorily explain what can or can't be done with the code, and I certainly would not cross my fingers and hope that the courts happen to see things the way I think they should.
The big problem is that there are "good" reasons (security, reliability), and "bad" reasons (DRM) to sign code.* From a technical standpoint, the process for either is exactly the same. The FSF would have us believe that their license allows the former and bans the latter, but ignores the fact that there is a huge gray area in the middle of the spectrum.
* That is, from the FSF perspective. I don't really believe that DRM is inherently good or bad.
Also, as far as I know, Linus doesn't distribute or sign Linux binaries. It's hard to violate the terms of the GPL when you're only distributing source code.
Not really. Maybe C code will usually be turned into binaries before signing it for the purposes of DRM, but that's not the case for, say, Perl code. And in any case, nobody really thinks that Linus would get slapped down by the GPLv3, regardless of what happens. He's taking a stand on principles, and as long as there are people with good reasons to sign binaries, his points are valid whether he personally does it or not.
"keys necessary to install and/or execute modified versions from source code in the recommended or principal context of use"
Personally, if we're already saying that the courts will know what was meant, and doing handwaving that it only counts if it is in some vague "principal context of use," it doesn't seem to me that the GPLv3 is off to a very auspicious start. Wasn't a large part of the point of this new license to try to tighten down the languange so we didn't have these problems?
But they did- in your example someone made the hardware that only works with a certain signed versionof linux and sold the hardware and software together. If they sold the hardware to someone else who sold the hardware and software together, that person is guilty.
First off, it wasn't my example.
In the example, they made a piece of hardware that will run some software only if signed by a certain person. A perfectly plausible scenario in the future is that you buy a piece of hardware that has built-in DRM protection that will only run kernels signed by a specific person or group of people. It might come with, for instance, a signed Microsoft kernel and run a variant of Windows. The user might want to run Linux, and so he downloads and installs a Linus-signed Linux kernel, which is also on the approved list.
So who was guilty of breaking the GPL here? The hardware manufacturer didn't distribute any GPL'd code, so they cannot have possibly have broken it. Neither did the user, so he didn't either. Did Linus? He seems to think so, which is (one of the reasons) why he is opposed to the GPLv3. On the other hand, the FSF has been claiming that just signing something will not constitute breaking the GPL -- in which case, nobody broke the license, and the GPLv3 just doesn't do squat to stop DRM.
In that case it would be the person making the hardware who violated the GPL, and they would have to change their hardware (or get Linux to give out his key, but most likely change their hardware).
How could the person making the hardware violate the GPL without even distributing GPL'd software?
That advice is not only extremely stupid, it's probably criminal as well. There are reasonable document retention policies one could imagine, but her advice is certainly not one of them.
There's nothing criminal about deleting your old e-mail whenever you feel like it to free up space or clean things up. It may be criminal to hide evidence of wrongdoing by deleting your mail, and you might get into hot water if it looks like you were trying to cover something up by your "housekeeping," but a blanket statement of calling deleting email "probably criminal" is ridiculous.
There's enough dumb laws without people dreaming up imaginary ones.
I know that the planets don't orbit exactly on a flat plane, and their inclinations vary slightly, but is there any known reason why we don't have planets orbiting with a degree of inclination greater than say >30 degress?
My understanding is that it is due to the manner in which the solar system was formed. A cloud of gas and dust contracted under the force of gravity to form a rotating disk, and then the matter in that disk collected together to form the Sun and the planets. Since they were all formed out of matter contained in the disk, their orbits are all within the plane of that disk (conservation of momentum and alll that jazz.)
Or, of course, maybe God made it that way because it makes the maps easier to draw.
It all sounds so nice and efficient, but I can see so many things were this could go horribly wrong. I for one will be sticking with the over-worked, stim-taking resident who will be standing by my body. I don't feel comfortable with the medical industry moving in the same direction as the car manufacturing industry.
That's one way to look at it. But on the other hand, I doubt that the car manufacturing industry makes mistakes half as often as the medical industry does.
I don't know what the average movie budget was back then, but it looks like $11 million then, adjusted for inflation, would be equivalent to about $35 million today. So Lucas had somewhere in the neighborhood of 500-600 times the budget that this film has.
If I were evil and designing it, I'd apply some of the Xbox 360's security provisions into the machine to ensure that no OS other than a trusted MS OS with TCPA protections was running on the system.
Why would it be evil to lock down a system that you're giving away? Richard, is that you?
"At 9:05 AM local time (06:05 CET), on 12 July 2006, Hezbollah initiated a Katyusha rocket and mortar attack on Israeli military positions and villages of northern Israel, injuring at least 8 Israelis[18]. Afterwards, a ground contingent of Hezbollah militants attacked two Israeli armored Humvees on a routine patrol along the Israel-Lebanon border near the Israeli village of Zar'it with anti-tank rockets, capturing two Israeli soldiers, and killing eight." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_Israel-Lebanon_ conflict)
But it supports your position a lot better to pretend that all they did was capture a couple soldiers, and Israel started the whole thing, right?
On a related note, the GPLv3 drafts Section 7b contains a list of optional license restrictions (including the above mentioned restriction) that are permissible. All of these restrictions are things that the FSF does not believe are necessary to maintain a Free program, but that the FSF acknowledges won't seriously harm user freedom if individual projects choose to activate them.
Oh, joy. Now, when trying to use multiple open source projects, we can't even assume that two GPLv3 projects have compatible licenses. "libAardvark is GPLv3 with restrictions 4, 7, and 19, and gLlamaBoy is GPLv3 with restrictions 1, 8, and 21-36. We'll have to rewrite one of them."
I'm sure the GP was saying in addition to current voting method, not instead of.
Unfortunately, there is a particular political party in the US that kills attempts to use internet voting, because they're afraid that citizens with access to the internet will be more likely to vote, and they believe that members of the competing party are more likely to use it.
Welcome to the wonderful world of making sure that things are fair by ensuring that they're equally painful for everyone.
You obviously didn't read what that link said. It wasn't that 12.5% of the plates that were read were incorrectly flagged; it was that one out of the eight that were flagged as stolen was incorrect. Even if we assume the worst -- that the motorist driving that car was stopped -- we're still talking about one extra stop in exchange for finding seven stolen vehicles. That's not "horrendous" by any reasonable standard.
Aren't most of the viruses and worms that are out there just variants of other viruses? It seems like most of the time that I hear about a "new" terrible virus, it's really a slightly modified version of one that's been around for awhile, and usually if you're up to date on your antivirus and security patches the new virus won't do anything anyway. And let's not forget that there are still plenty of old viruses on non-secured machines that an antivirus application will protect you from.
I can see their point where people developing a new virus are concerned, but as the lifecycle of a virus is often longer than the time it takes to update the signatures, I think that they are overstating their case by saying that the AV apps "don't work."
Please note also that boycotting music (or movies for that matter) is not easy for everyone. I love my music, and I couldn't imagine my life without it. Right now, the RIAA could boycott me and I'd come crawling back, humble and submissive, within weeks.
If you don't feel strongly enough about the RIAA's policy to make any sacrifices in order to change them, then it's really not as important as you're making it out to be.
It's rather frustrating when you need to search for terms like <<model>> and all search engines direct you to modelling tutorials, modeling agencies and underage "this is not soft pr0n" "model" websites.
How, exactly, do you expect a search engine to guess what you mean by "model" without the extra context? Maybe there are some cases where it fails, but it seems to me that searching for "model" does exactly what it should -- it's not a very good example.
Although that does give me an idea -- it would be nice if the search engine could suggest ways to refine a search in order to find pages for the meaning you want. For instance, in the example of "model," it might give a list of choices that you might be interested in: "Did you want to search for modeling agencies? modeling tutorials? modeling clay? model rockets? UML?" etc. That would help in cases where it can be a little difficult to figure out the magic words you need to get the right set of results.
Anyone know if there are any search engines that do that already?
You dont have the right to be provided with absolute guaranteed security.
Disregarding that a right to "guaranteed security" is very different than the right to live, you don't have the right to complete, absolute freedom of speech either. My objection was to the absolutely idiotic statement that we don't have any right to live. We do, and it is every bit as fundamental as our other rights.
I'm sorry, but you are wrong. We all have the right of freedom, but no right for security.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
Sure sounds like we have the right to not be blown up to me.
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You have to realize, that from the perspective of someone who would rave about any game console, pretty much everyone is apathetic. You have to be pretty far beyond casual to care that strongly about hardware that is still several months out and that nobody really knows what it's like.
For the record, I'm in the casual category. I have a gamecube, but I can't imagine myself buying a next-gen console any time in the next three or four years.
Well, for starters: while it's the courts and the lawyers who will have to figure things out when there is a lawsuit for copyright infringement (which may never happen -- has there ever been a lawsuit taken to completion over infringement of the GPL?), the vast majority of users of the license are programmers who are not lawyers and won't be able to have one advising them. I, for one, would not be comfortable using a license when nobody can seem to satisfactorily explain what can or can't be done with the code, and I certainly would not cross my fingers and hope that the courts happen to see things the way I think they should.
The big problem is that there are "good" reasons (security, reliability), and "bad" reasons (DRM) to sign code.* From a technical standpoint, the process for either is exactly the same. The FSF would have us believe that their license allows the former and bans the latter, but ignores the fact that there is a huge gray area in the middle of the spectrum.
* That is, from the FSF perspective. I don't really believe that DRM is inherently good or bad.
Not really. Maybe C code will usually be turned into binaries before signing it for the purposes of DRM, but that's not the case for, say, Perl code. And in any case, nobody really thinks that Linus would get slapped down by the GPLv3, regardless of what happens. He's taking a stand on principles, and as long as there are people with good reasons to sign binaries, his points are valid whether he personally does it or not.
Personally, if we're already saying that the courts will know what was meant, and doing handwaving that it only counts if it is in some vague "principal context of use," it doesn't seem to me that the GPLv3 is off to a very auspicious start. Wasn't a large part of the point of this new license to try to tighten down the languange so we didn't have these problems?
First off, it wasn't my example.
In the example, they made a piece of hardware that will run some software only if signed by a certain person. A perfectly plausible scenario in the future is that you buy a piece of hardware that has built-in DRM protection that will only run kernels signed by a specific person or group of people. It might come with, for instance, a signed Microsoft kernel and run a variant of Windows. The user might want to run Linux, and so he downloads and installs a Linus-signed Linux kernel, which is also on the approved list.
So who was guilty of breaking the GPL here? The hardware manufacturer didn't distribute any GPL'd code, so they cannot have possibly have broken it. Neither did the user, so he didn't either. Did Linus? He seems to think so, which is (one of the reasons) why he is opposed to the GPLv3. On the other hand, the FSF has been claiming that just signing something will not constitute breaking the GPL -- in which case, nobody broke the license, and the GPLv3 just doesn't do squat to stop DRM.There's nothing criminal about deleting your old e-mail whenever you feel like it to free up space or clean things up. It may be criminal to hide evidence of wrongdoing by deleting your mail, and you might get into hot water if it looks like you were trying to cover something up by your "housekeeping," but a blanket statement of calling deleting email "probably criminal" is ridiculous.
There's enough dumb laws without people dreaming up imaginary ones.
And what do we learn from this whole thing?
That argument via analogy is utterly pointless.
My understanding is that it is due to the manner in which the solar system was formed. A cloud of gas and dust contracted under the force of gravity to form a rotating disk, and then the matter in that disk collected together to form the Sun and the planets. Since they were all formed out of matter contained in the disk, their orbits are all within the plane of that disk (conservation of momentum and alll that jazz.)
Or, of course, maybe God made it that way because it makes the maps easier to draw.
Really?
I don't know what the average movie budget was back then, but it looks like $11 million then, adjusted for inflation, would be equivalent to about $35 million today. So Lucas had somewhere in the neighborhood of 500-600 times the budget that this film has.
"At 9:05 AM local time (06:05 CET), on 12 July 2006, Hezbollah initiated a Katyusha rocket and mortar attack on Israeli military positions and villages of northern Israel, injuring at least 8 Israelis[18]. Afterwards, a ground contingent of Hezbollah militants attacked two Israeli armored Humvees on a routine patrol along the Israel-Lebanon border near the Israeli village of Zar'it with anti-tank rockets, capturing two Israeli soldiers, and killing eight." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_Israel-Lebanon_ conflict)
But it supports your position a lot better to pretend that all they did was capture a couple soldiers, and Israel started the whole thing, right?
Oh, joy. Now, when trying to use multiple open source projects, we can't even assume that two GPLv3 projects have compatible licenses. "libAardvark is GPLv3 with restrictions 4, 7, and 19, and gLlamaBoy is GPLv3 with restrictions 1, 8, and 21-36. We'll have to rewrite one of them."
"The troll zaps a marble wand! The death ray hits you! You die..."
Unfortunately, there is a particular political party in the US that kills attempts to use internet voting, because they're afraid that citizens with access to the internet will be more likely to vote, and they believe that members of the competing party are more likely to use it.
Welcome to the wonderful world of making sure that things are fair by ensuring that they're equally painful for everyone.
You obviously didn't read what that link said. It wasn't that 12.5% of the plates that were read were incorrectly flagged; it was that one out of the eight that were flagged as stolen was incorrect. Even if we assume the worst -- that the motorist driving that car was stopped -- we're still talking about one extra stop in exchange for finding seven stolen vehicles. That's not "horrendous" by any reasonable standard.
Aren't most of the viruses and worms that are out there just variants of other viruses? It seems like most of the time that I hear about a "new" terrible virus, it's really a slightly modified version of one that's been around for awhile, and usually if you're up to date on your antivirus and security patches the new virus won't do anything anyway. And let's not forget that there are still plenty of old viruses on non-secured machines that an antivirus application will protect you from.
I can see their point where people developing a new virus are concerned, but as the lifecycle of a virus is often longer than the time it takes to update the signatures, I think that they are overstating their case by saying that the AV apps "don't work."
If you don't feel strongly enough about the RIAA's policy to make any sacrifices in order to change them, then it's really not as important as you're making it out to be.
OK, that makes sense, then. Chalk it up to me not knowing anything about UML.
How, exactly, do you expect a search engine to guess what you mean by "model" without the extra context? Maybe there are some cases where it fails, but it seems to me that searching for "model" does exactly what it should -- it's not a very good example.
Although that does give me an idea -- it would be nice if the search engine could suggest ways to refine a search in order to find pages for the meaning you want. For instance, in the example of "model," it might give a list of choices that you might be interested in: "Did you want to search for modeling agencies? modeling tutorials? modeling clay? model rockets? UML?" etc. That would help in cases where it can be a little difficult to figure out the magic words you need to get the right set of results.
Anyone know if there are any search engines that do that already?
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
Sure sounds like we have the right to not be blown up to me.