I can't help it if you insist on not reading the comment you respond to. I'm sorry, but I clearly did state that while the amount of water, as in number of liters, by itself is (nearly) irrelevant, what contamination ends up being released in the wayer *is* relevant.
My point is that releasing 1000 liters of water containing 1% mercury, ain't really very different from releasing 10000 liters of water containing 0.1%.
Read what I'm saying. I'm not saying pollution is no issue. I'm saying that purely measuring how much water goes trough a plant is a pretty useless way of quantifying pollution.
But not everyone is either an "average user" or a "programmer", there's all levels between too.
And even those of us that are "programmers" in some settings, migth be "users" in others. Infact there's thousands of people *using* Linux and KDE and the various other Open Source stuff that know atleast a bit about programming, but still never contributed directly to Open Source themselves.
While I personally, for example, don't know how to use qt for more than "hello worl", and indeed dislike C++ in general with a passion, that doesn't stop me from being able to report a bug in a more useful manner (i.e. complete version-info, how to reproduce, back-trace from version compiled with debug-info.)
It'd take me more time than I care to use to learn say qt, kde and kmail to the point where I could fix the bug myself though.
Plus, you're ignoring the bug-reports that don't need a technical explanation to make sense. There's tons of bug of the type: "When I close X, and restarts it, it forgets Y, forcing me to tell it again." in many cases that's a perfectly usable bug-report rigth there, even in the complete absence of version, os, compiler-info, and so on.
I gave an example that perfectly illustrated what I meant. If you failed to read it, or failed to comprehend it, it's not my damn fault.
Point is, contaminating water *is* a problem, simply "using" it in some sense or other, normally isn't. Every time I take a swim in the local lake you could argue that I "use" thousands of cubic meter. That doesn't imply the ecological impact is much above zero.
That always amased me about the US: How manufacturers and sellers don't have to take responsibility for the stuff they sell.
Making people pay to get rid of the hazardous waste is the wrong aproach, because guess what, lots of people will opt for the free aproach of dumping the stuff somewhere.
Much better is the model used for example in Scandinavia. If you sell a certain type of electric thingie, you have to be willing to take it back, at no cost, and dispose of it properly.
This means, if you've got an old computer you want to get rid of, you can deliver it, without paying, to any shop that sells computers. No it doesn't matter if they didn't sell *this*spesific* computer.
The practical offshot is offcourse that the sellers bake the cost of this into the cost of a new computer, I've seen calculations that say these rules makes new computers $5-$10 more expensive than they'd otherwise be. I think that's a acceptable trade-off.
That is true. Saying that 1500 liters of water gets "used" in the process of making a PC is pretty useless as an indicator of ecological impact.
To be able to say something about that, you'd have to quantify how much that water got contaminated, and with what substances, what treatment it gets before it again gets released somewhere, and how and when it eventually gets re-released.
If I start cutting granite using diamond-blades, and cools them by flushing with water from the nearby river, I'll probably "consume" enormous amounts of water, but if I let the water go into a pool where most of the dust will settle, and then back in the river, the negative ecological impact will be truly minimal.
Much more interesting than how many liters of waters go trough my plant is instead what contamination, if any, goes into the water before it's again released. In my example that amounts to "some amount of granite-dust which mostly settles in the pool before release, and ain't *that* dangerous to begin with".
In the case of PC-manufacture, there's obviously some amount of more harmful chemical also being released. That is something we should look at, and do our very best at minimizing.
I just don't see how this "1800kg" metric is useful for anything at all, least of all for measuring environmental impact.
It's completely fucked to have laws that allow, or people who actually do, sue anyone who does their honest best in helping a person in a accident or sudden illness.
Sure, under such situations (=high stress, poor working condition, no proper equipment, no preparations, no knowledge of the patients medical history and so on) the treatment you'll get is probably not going to be optimal.
But, and that's the point, the treatment is still, in basically all cases a hundred times better than no help at all. The odd freak case where the "help" actually ends up hurting not withstanding.
In general, when people are in emergencies, trying to help is the *rigth* thing to do. A juridical system that punishes, or atleast potentially punishes, someone who does their honest best to try to help a person that obviously needs the help is fucked beyond repair.
Both. Besides, even ten minutes of googling would have revealed that SCO is not, infact a thug. They only play one in the media. To be more precise, they haven't *actually* been able to beat up anyone. They only constantly and repeatedly assert that they will *soon* beat up anyone and everyone.
You misunderstood. It's "audio only" on some of the clients, while the other ones in general lets you select what to do. The selection is typically to zero or more of popup, system-tray-notification, play a sound, or run an arbitrary program. The last could be a script you wrote yourself if you fancied some particular notificatio.
They're a poor buy at any price. We should want this case won in court, and not in the public opinion or stock-price.
The best discouragement we can hope for to other companies that would doubtfully want to follow similar routes should they feel they have *any* hope of success is to show that there is none.
SCO should finish the trial, loose, and liquidate, unable to pay the fines they'll get in all the other cases from RedHat aswell as IBMs counterclaim.
"They lost" is a much beter message to send than "They didn't have enough money to push trough to the end and possibly win."
I agree with you it's a fine thing to see SCOx stock falling. Especially for those of us who are holding the stock short, and earn an additional $500 for every dollar under $15 the stock falls. Personally I'm thinking that'll end up being something close to $7500, as the price falls to near-null.
You missed the point. Contrary to belief, not all advertising is good advertising.
If you go from "unknown" to "heard that somewhere" it's probably good. If you instead go from "unknown" to "oh yeah, anything but *THEM* please" it's not gonna help you.
If they got a huge discount or not (I'm sure they did, I wouldn't even be surprised if they got the "licenses" simply for allowing their name to be used, actually monetary cost $0.) is sort of besides the point. For what they got, even $0 is too much. It's a loosing proposition.
My position is that if you write/own the code you get to say how it's used. I don't think there's *any* argument against that,
CERTAINLY there are argument against that.
Copyrigth-law gives you, as creator, the rigth to decide under what conditions copies can be made and distributed. (that is why it's called *copy*right afterall.) It does not, should not and MUST not give you ANY say in "how it's used".
There are strong forces that are figthing to change this, to give creators a rigth to control how something is used. Luckily for the free world they have yet to suceed. I for one will figth tooth and nail to keep them from suceeding.
It's rather shocking to see, on Slashdot of all places, a person who doesn't only think that such ideas *should* suceed, but even seems to think that they *have* suceeded, to the point where there's "no argument with that".
As a content-creator, I respect your rigth to refuse to give me your copy. I accept your rigth to stipulate rules I must follow if I wish to distribute or copy your work further. I do *not* accept that you have *ANY* say in what I do with a legally acquired copy.
I realize it's possible you where just formulating yourself sloppily, and that you don't really mean that creators should control use. But it's such a dangerous notion that I felt I had to respond anyway.
Perhaps "forced" is the wrong word, but including GPLed code in your software certainly does limit your options. I don't think this is even a bad thing, just a true one.
You are correct BUT you are also completely missing my point.
Including GPLed code in your software limits your options. True. But this has precisely *nothing* to do with the GPL. Try the following sentence: "Including someone elses copyrigthed code in your software limits your options."
See ? The sentence is equally true if you remove the word GPL. That is so because the limits are not placed by GPL. They are placed by copyrigth-law.
The *only* way you could include someone elses copyrigthed code in your own without "limiting your options", would be if copyrigth-law was changed to allow this.
Thing is, in my jurisdiction, that is Germany, there is a court-order in place preventing SCO from making claims that a) Linux is unlawful and b) Linux contains any IP that they have rigths to. Aslong as they're not prepared to offer evidence that the claims are true.
Sending an invoice *must* nessecarily involve either claiming that you own the stuff you're selling (violating the courts order), or trying to sell something you do not, infact, own, which is fraud plain and simple.
In either case they're screwed. The judge has already demonstrated that he means bussiness, SCO "forgot" to remove a few claims from their.de website, and got slapped with a 10000 euro fine. If they try it again, they get fined again, if they cannot, or will not pay the fine the court-ruling says that in this case the german courts will settle for imprisoning the boss instead. That'd be the day !
Plus, I can't imagine it looks good to the press (and SCO cares about the press it seems, must have something to do with stock-prices...) to be repeatedly fined for violating court-orders. Nor, for that matter, do they like to be reminded of the german situation at all. Fact is, they where faced with "Put up, or shut up", and they responded with "Ok, we'll shut up then.", which they'd be pretty unlikely to do if they tougth they could put up. So, evidence is, SCO doesn't even *themselves* believe that they have any evidence.
Infact, the entire "GPL can force you to open your code" argument is 100% pure bullshit.
Fact is, if you include code under *ANY* license in your own software without permission, then you're (likely) creating a derived work, and distributing such without permission from the copyrigth-holder is forbidden under copyrigth-law.
The license of the code in question is irrelevant (aslong as it doesn't allow the inclusion), what amtters is copyrigth-law. You could get fined. And naturally your distribution would be stopped until you reach an agreement with the copyrigth-holder.
What agreement you reach, if any, is purely up to you and the copyrigth-holder. Perhaps he'll let you distribute if you give him money. Perhaps he'll let you distribute if you wash his car weekly for a year. Perhaps, if he likes the GPL, he will let you distribute if you release your code too under the GPL. But the point is, this is an agreement between you, the infringer, and the copyrigth-holder. It's got precisely NOTHING to do with the gpl.
Under no legal theory whatsoever could anyone be *forced* to enter into any particular agreement with the copyrigth-holder. The only two things you can and will be forced (by a court) to do is a) stop infringement and b) very likely pay a fine.
Mandrake 10.0 does it too, I see nothing wrong with it whatsoever so long as it's done openly, in plain view of the user, transmits no information without the users knowledge, and allows the user to say "no thanks" with no negative consequences.
Mandrake 10, presents (well, atleast the current release-candidate) you, on first login, with a form with around 10 simple questions, "Is this your first Linux ?", "How many computers are you planning to install Mandrake on ?". The bottom of the form has three buttons: "Send answers to Mandrakesoft", "Fill out form later", "Don't send any info."
I don't think anyone really objects aslong as stuff is done like that.
They've been touted as just around the corner for atleast half a decade now, and in the real world, they're just as far away as ever. Thing is, they are fundamentally dumb. And I don't think they can easily be fixed. Here's a small sampling of problems I've not seen solutions to;
Either, the cost is *very* low, so that I can ignore it, *or* it forces me to make a consient decision for every 5-minute game or every newspaper-article or whatever if this item is really worth the price. People don't like to be nickled and dimed. Witness the popularity of flatrate over pricing pr GB for dsl, even for people and usage patterns where the pr. GB pricing would be cheaper. Predictability itself has a value. Loosing the stress of managing your spendings (or you monthly GB-quota or whatever) itself has a value.
In most proposed solutions you need an "aggregator", the way it'd work is something like I owe hundred different online vendors 10 cents each, but that's impractical to transfer, so instead I'd pay $10 to the aggregator, and the vendors would get one large transfer from the aggregator instead of thousands of tiny ones from individual users.
Thing is, I don't nessecarily *want* some "aggregator" sitting in a controlling position, and compiling enourmous amounts of infor about my spending-habits online. You can see everyone from Visa to MS positively drooling over getting themselves into this role. All of them prefer systems where they alone control it offcourse, a more open system with competition between different aggregators migth be better for consumers, but none of the financial powerhouses want it.
It creates barriers. Some clever person said that the value of information and services increase with the number of interconnects. Demanding money, even a single cent, is going to cut the number of interconnects *dramatically* and thus destroy value.
It's also typically poor value. Look, I'm sorry to say so, but $1 a track for music, for example, is not very impressive in a world where I can in most cases buy the CD used on ebay for less than what it'd cost me online. I realize that's not micropayments fault, but thing is, when distributors save money, I as consumer expect to save money too.
A copy of Jak-II on Ebay is $30 or something, I can play it for a month, until I'm tired of it, and probably resell it for similar price, let's say $25. So, I'm out $5 + porto. $15 a month for access to a online game is simply not good value.
I realize that companies providing "content" is drooling all over themselves at the prospect of having consumers pay for items with every use, rather than buy them once and own them, with all rigths that confer, such as the rigth to re-sell stuff you're tired of. But unless the price under such a pay-per-use is orders of magnitude lower than what is today being offered, it's simply a shitty deal for the consumer.
But you'd have tons of the same problems jumping from Gimp to Photoshop, I know, because I'd been using Gimp pretty regularily for atleast a couple of years the first time I tried Photoshop.
I agree being more equal means re-training is quicker. However, I don't really see how it's avoidable unless all applications behave identically, which has it's own drawbacks. (impossibility of improvements for starters)
Well, the nice thing about SPF is that it works, and has benefits even if not everyone uses it.
For example, it allows me to tell SpamAssassin that IF a domain has SPF-records, and the email doesn't come from one of the ips that send mail for that domain, then in the spam-bucket it goes.
Thus, for example, all the spam that claims to be from hotmail is gone.
Secondly, I can, by publishing spf-records on my own domain eliminate the problem of spam bouncing back to me because it *claims* to be sent from me.
Third, once a sufficient part of the people I communicate with email from domains that *have* spf-records, I'm free to, for example, implement a challenge-response system for email coming from other domains. Yes, this will mean people using those domains gets some challenges based on spam that only *claimed* to be from their domain, but actually isn't. That migth serve as a good incentive to get them to also publish spf-records. It's not as if it's a huge deal to stick 2-3 extra records in your dns-info.
I never claimed there wasn't. I was only asking where people got the idea that for example, trying to fix a fast-moving object will damage eyesigth. From all I know it won't, and I've also never heard a plausible explanation why it would.
Same for trying to make out an object in low-ligth conditions.
It *is* true that straining your eye-muscles a lot can give you a headache, but even this more commonly occurs in high-ligth conditions where you tend to squint, not when trying to see that hirsh on the other end of the field in the half-darkness.
Sensory overload is obviously damaging to many senses. Looking at the sun can damage your eyes. Listening to very loud noises can damage your hearing. Eating very strong food can make your taste-buds less sensitive.
That would indeed help. Scammer-checks would have to come from random and not known-to-be-google ip-adresses too, to be useful. For obvious reasons I haven't observed this first-hand, but it would surprise me a lot if there aren't similar sites which return one page if your ip-adress is Google, and a completely different page if your ip-adress is anything else.
It's like the difference between engineering and security. Engineering requires that you program murphys computer. (if anything can go wrong - it will.) It requires that you take into account all situations the program will reasonably meet in its lifetime. It is very hard to do well.
Security requires, however, that you take into account not only things that can "go wrong", but even things that go wrong on purpose. That you deal with a world in which you don't only have "bad luck", but rather a world in which someone is doing their damnedest to force you into this particular bad luck.
From an engineering-standpoint, a program that has a race condition if run on february 29th, on a day with full-moon, with the PID 37912, with a certain input that'll never occur in normal data, will probably never expose that race-condition, much less will it be a problem. (it'll still be bad engineering, but it'll probably be without consequences)
In a security-context, however, the fault could be (depending on cicumstances) disastrous. People will spend considerable effort convincing your program that it's february 29th and that the moon is full, they'll feed it only the single bad input, thousands of times over if nessecary,they'll run "echo" to wrap-around the pid so that you'll always have the one single bad pid and they'll have a hundred threads in the background doing their damnedest to take advantage of the race-condition and create that file in that split-second when it must not be created.
And what is even harder, as you sorta hint at, is searching well in a world where thousands of people do their damnedest best to game the system.
Google doesn't only have to make sense of a great big mess.
It has to make sense of a great big mess where a significant part of the pages are made *spesifically* to confuse Google, and where a part of those same pages gets tuned regularily in dedicated attempts at confusing whichever algorithm google use more.
Most of the cases where Google returns poor results these days, it's obvious to a human observer that the bad results on top are *purposely* made to confuse Google. I've even seen pages that return one set of content if your user-agent is "Googlebot", and another, totally different content (dialer, etc) if your user-agent is anything else.
Where does this common, but confused, idea come from ? I mean, the idea that straining your eyes, like trying to look at a fast-moving object, or looking in poor ligth or whatever will damage your eyes ?
It's not like people commonly claim that straining your ears, trying to hear a very very soft noise is damaging to your hearing. Or that trying to taste something that's present in very very low concentration will damage your sense of taste
Now, staring at something very brigth, or hearing a very loud noise can indeed be damaging, but that's sorta in the oposite direction, overload if you like.
Still, people persist in this "trying to see in poor ligth will kill your eyes" thing. I've honestly got no idea where that comes from.
But is that argument valid even in the real world where 10 people die because they drive while intoxicated for every 1 that die because he *couldn't* drive while intoxicated ?
An action with negative consequences can still be worth it, aslong as the positive consequences more than outweigh the negative ones. There exist situations where a seat belt is a negative factor. Doesn't change the fact that they save lives overall. Same for airbags, laminated front-windows, ventilated disk-brakes, fire-extinguishers in houses and any other security-measure you can think of.
Fact is, they *ALL* have negative consequences. It's just that their positive contribution is a lot larger than the negative ones.
The overflood of laws is because it's always easier to make your own suggestion rather than removing something people have already voted in favour of. There's prestige attached -- why should we now vote to remove this law that we, ourselves passed ?
An interesting idea is the one used in the fictive government proposed in Heinleins "The moon is a harsh mistress".
The elected lawgivers are divided in two chambers. One of the chambers can create new laws. They require 3/5th majority. So, new laws gets created, only if 60% or more in this chamber are in favour of it.
The other chamber is the interesting idea. Their power is limited to one thing, and one thing only; They can remove existing laws. Doing so requires a pure majority.
The reason this twist is interesting is because it forces half of the elected lawgivers to focus on a question that hardly any politician spends any time on today: what laws are bad ? What laws would we be better of without ?
My guess is that such a system would result in a much more manageable amount of laws. The current situation is becoming ridicolous, we're approaching a situation where you could not, even in principle, know about all laws effecting you, because even if you dedicated 100% of your wake time to reading up on them, you'd not manage it.
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My point is that releasing 1000 liters of water containing 1% mercury, ain't really very different from releasing 10000 liters of water containing 0.1%.
Read what I'm saying. I'm not saying pollution is no issue. I'm saying that purely measuring how much water goes trough a plant is a pretty useless way of quantifying pollution.
And even those of us that are "programmers" in some settings, migth be "users" in others. Infact there's thousands of people *using* Linux and KDE and the various other Open Source stuff that know atleast a bit about programming, but still never contributed directly to Open Source themselves.
While I personally, for example, don't know how to use qt for more than "hello worl", and indeed dislike C++ in general with a passion, that doesn't stop me from being able to report a bug in a more useful manner (i.e. complete version-info, how to reproduce, back-trace from version compiled with debug-info.)
It'd take me more time than I care to use to learn say qt, kde and kmail to the point where I could fix the bug myself though.
Plus, you're ignoring the bug-reports that don't need a technical explanation to make sense. There's tons of bug of the type: "When I close X, and restarts it, it forgets Y, forcing me to tell it again." in many cases that's a perfectly usable bug-report rigth there, even in the complete absence of version, os, compiler-info, and so on.
Point is, contaminating water *is* a problem, simply "using" it in some sense or other, normally isn't. Every time I take a swim in the local lake you could argue that I "use" thousands of cubic meter. That doesn't imply the ecological impact is much above zero.
Making people pay to get rid of the hazardous waste is the wrong aproach, because guess what, lots of people will opt for the free aproach of dumping the stuff somewhere.
Much better is the model used for example in Scandinavia. If you sell a certain type of electric thingie, you have to be willing to take it back, at no cost, and dispose of it properly.
This means, if you've got an old computer you want to get rid of, you can deliver it, without paying, to any shop that sells computers. No it doesn't matter if they didn't sell *this*spesific* computer.
The practical offshot is offcourse that the sellers bake the cost of this into the cost of a new computer, I've seen calculations that say these rules makes new computers $5-$10 more expensive than they'd otherwise be. I think that's a acceptable trade-off.
To be able to say something about that, you'd have to quantify how much that water got contaminated, and with what substances, what treatment it gets before it again gets released somewhere, and how and when it eventually gets re-released.
If I start cutting granite using diamond-blades, and cools them by flushing with water from the nearby river, I'll probably "consume" enormous amounts of water, but if I let the water go into a pool where most of the dust will settle, and then back in the river, the negative ecological impact will be truly minimal.
Much more interesting than how many liters of waters go trough my plant is instead what contamination, if any, goes into the water before it's again released. In my example that amounts to "some amount of granite-dust which mostly settles in the pool before release, and ain't *that* dangerous to begin with".
In the case of PC-manufacture, there's obviously some amount of more harmful chemical also being released. That is something we should look at, and do our very best at minimizing.
I just don't see how this "1800kg" metric is useful for anything at all, least of all for measuring environmental impact.
Sure, under such situations (=high stress, poor working condition, no proper equipment, no preparations, no knowledge of the patients medical history and so on) the treatment you'll get is probably not going to be optimal.
But, and that's the point, the treatment is still, in basically all cases a hundred times better than no help at all. The odd freak case where the "help" actually ends up hurting not withstanding. In general, when people are in emergencies, trying to help is the *rigth* thing to do. A juridical system that punishes, or atleast potentially punishes, someone who does their honest best to try to help a person that obviously needs the help is fucked beyond repair.
Both. Besides, even ten minutes of googling would have revealed that SCO is not, infact a thug. They only play one in the media. To be more precise, they haven't *actually* been able to beat up anyone. They only constantly and repeatedly assert that they will *soon* beat up anyone and everyone.
You misunderstood. It's "audio only" on some of the clients, while the other ones in general lets you select what to do. The selection is typically to zero or more of popup, system-tray-notification, play a sound, or run an arbitrary program. The last could be a script you wrote yourself if you fancied some particular notificatio.
The best discouragement we can hope for to other companies that would doubtfully want to follow similar routes should they feel they have *any* hope of success is to show that there is none.
SCO should finish the trial, loose, and liquidate, unable to pay the fines they'll get in all the other cases from RedHat aswell as IBMs counterclaim.
"They lost" is a much beter message to send than "They didn't have enough money to push trough to the end and possibly win."
I agree with you it's a fine thing to see SCOx stock falling. Especially for those of us who are holding the stock short, and earn an additional $500 for every dollar under $15 the stock falls. Personally I'm thinking that'll end up being something close to $7500, as the price falls to near-null.
If you go from "unknown" to "heard that somewhere" it's probably good. If you instead go from "unknown" to "oh yeah, anything but *THEM* please" it's not gonna help you.
If they got a huge discount or not (I'm sure they did, I wouldn't even be surprised if they got the "licenses" simply for allowing their name to be used, actually monetary cost $0.) is sort of besides the point. For what they got, even $0 is too much. It's a loosing proposition.
get bittorrent. Seriously. It works well, and in this case it's a tool very well suited for the job.
CERTAINLY there are argument against that.
Copyrigth-law gives you, as creator, the rigth to decide under what conditions copies can be made and distributed. (that is why it's called *copy*right afterall.) It does not, should not and MUST not give you ANY say in "how it's used".
There are strong forces that are figthing to change this, to give creators a rigth to control how something is used. Luckily for the free world they have yet to suceed. I for one will figth tooth and nail to keep them from suceeding.
It's rather shocking to see, on Slashdot of all places, a person who doesn't only think that such ideas *should* suceed, but even seems to think that they *have* suceeded, to the point where there's "no argument with that".
As a content-creator, I respect your rigth to refuse to give me your copy. I accept your rigth to stipulate rules I must follow if I wish to distribute or copy your work further. I do *not* accept that you have *ANY* say in what I do with a legally acquired copy.
I realize it's possible you where just formulating yourself sloppily, and that you don't really mean that creators should control use. But it's such a dangerous notion that I felt I had to respond anyway.
You are correct BUT you are also completely missing my point.
Including GPLed code in your software limits your options. True. But this has precisely *nothing* to do with the GPL. Try the following sentence: "Including someone elses copyrigthed code in your software limits your options."
See ? The sentence is equally true if you remove the word GPL. That is so because the limits are not placed by GPL. They are placed by copyrigth-law.
The *only* way you could include someone elses copyrigthed code in your own without "limiting your options", would be if copyrigth-law was changed to allow this.
Thing is, in my jurisdiction, that is Germany, there is a court-order in place preventing SCO from making claims that a) Linux is unlawful and b) Linux contains any IP that they have rigths to. Aslong as they're not prepared to offer evidence that the claims are true.
Sending an invoice *must* nessecarily involve either claiming that you own the stuff you're selling (violating the courts order), or trying to sell something you do not, infact, own, which is fraud plain and simple.
In either case they're screwed. The judge has already demonstrated that he means bussiness, SCO "forgot" to remove a few claims from their .de website, and got slapped with a 10000 euro fine. If they try it again, they get fined again, if they cannot, or will not pay the fine the court-ruling says that in this case the german courts will settle for imprisoning the boss instead. That'd be the day !
Plus, I can't imagine it looks good to the press (and SCO cares about the press it seems, must have something to do with stock-prices...) to be repeatedly fined for violating court-orders. Nor, for that matter, do they like to be reminded of the german situation at all. Fact is, they where faced with "Put up, or shut up", and they responded with "Ok, we'll shut up then.", which they'd be pretty unlikely to do if they tougth they could put up. So, evidence is, SCO doesn't even *themselves* believe that they have any evidence.
Fact is, if you include code under *ANY* license in your own software without permission, then you're (likely) creating a derived work, and distributing such without permission from the copyrigth-holder is forbidden under copyrigth-law.
The license of the code in question is irrelevant (aslong as it doesn't allow the inclusion), what amtters is copyrigth-law. You could get fined. And naturally your distribution would be stopped until you reach an agreement with the copyrigth-holder.
What agreement you reach, if any, is purely up to you and the copyrigth-holder. Perhaps he'll let you distribute if you give him money. Perhaps he'll let you distribute if you wash his car weekly for a year. Perhaps, if he likes the GPL, he will let you distribute if you release your code too under the GPL. But the point is, this is an agreement between you, the infringer, and the copyrigth-holder. It's got precisely NOTHING to do with the gpl.
Under no legal theory whatsoever could anyone be *forced* to enter into any particular agreement with the copyrigth-holder. The only two things you can and will be forced (by a court) to do is a) stop infringement and b) very likely pay a fine.
Mandrake 10, presents (well, atleast the current release-candidate) you, on first login, with a form with around 10 simple questions, "Is this your first Linux ?", "How many computers are you planning to install Mandrake on ?". The bottom of the form has three buttons: "Send answers to Mandrakesoft", "Fill out form later", "Don't send any info."
I don't think anyone really objects aslong as stuff is done like that.
Either, the cost is *very* low, so that I can ignore it, *or* it forces me to make a consient decision for every 5-minute game or every newspaper-article or whatever if this item is really worth the price. People don't like to be nickled and dimed. Witness the popularity of flatrate over pricing pr GB for dsl, even for people and usage patterns where the pr. GB pricing would be cheaper. Predictability itself has a value. Loosing the stress of managing your spendings (or you monthly GB-quota or whatever) itself has a value.
In most proposed solutions you need an "aggregator", the way it'd work is something like I owe hundred different online vendors 10 cents each, but that's impractical to transfer, so instead I'd pay $10 to the aggregator, and the vendors would get one large transfer from the aggregator instead of thousands of tiny ones from individual users.
Thing is, I don't nessecarily *want* some "aggregator" sitting in a controlling position, and compiling enourmous amounts of infor about my spending-habits online. You can see everyone from Visa to MS positively drooling over getting themselves into this role. All of them prefer systems where they alone control it offcourse, a more open system with competition between different aggregators migth be better for consumers, but none of the financial powerhouses want it.
It creates barriers. Some clever person said that the value of information and services increase with the number of interconnects. Demanding money, even a single cent, is going to cut the number of interconnects *dramatically* and thus destroy value.
It's also typically poor value. Look, I'm sorry to say so, but $1 a track for music, for example, is not very impressive in a world where I can in most cases buy the CD used on ebay for less than what it'd cost me online. I realize that's not micropayments fault, but thing is, when distributors save money, I as consumer expect to save money too.
A copy of Jak-II on Ebay is $30 or something, I can play it for a month, until I'm tired of it, and probably resell it for similar price, let's say $25. So, I'm out $5 + porto. $15 a month for access to a online game is simply not good value.
I realize that companies providing "content" is drooling all over themselves at the prospect of having consumers pay for items with every use, rather than buy them once and own them, with all rigths that confer, such as the rigth to re-sell stuff you're tired of. But unless the price under such a pay-per-use is orders of magnitude lower than what is today being offered, it's simply a shitty deal for the consumer.
I agree being more equal means re-training is quicker. However, I don't really see how it's avoidable unless all applications behave identically, which has it's own drawbacks. (impossibility of improvements for starters)
For example, it allows me to tell SpamAssassin that IF a domain has SPF-records, and the email doesn't come from one of the ips that send mail for that domain, then in the spam-bucket it goes.
Thus, for example, all the spam that claims to be from hotmail is gone.
Secondly, I can, by publishing spf-records on my own domain eliminate the problem of spam bouncing back to me because it *claims* to be sent from me.
Third, once a sufficient part of the people I communicate with email from domains that *have* spf-records, I'm free to, for example, implement a challenge-response system for email coming from other domains. Yes, this will mean people using those domains gets some challenges based on spam that only *claimed* to be from their domain, but actually isn't. That migth serve as a good incentive to get them to also publish spf-records. It's not as if it's a huge deal to stick 2-3 extra records in your dns-info.
Same for trying to make out an object in low-ligth conditions.
It *is* true that straining your eye-muscles a lot can give you a headache, but even this more commonly occurs in high-ligth conditions where you tend to squint, not when trying to see that hirsh on the other end of the field in the half-darkness.
Sensory overload is obviously damaging to many senses. Looking at the sun can damage your eyes. Listening to very loud noises can damage your hearing. Eating very strong food can make your taste-buds less sensitive.
It's like the difference between engineering and security. Engineering requires that you program murphys computer. (if anything can go wrong - it will.) It requires that you take into account all situations the program will reasonably meet in its lifetime. It is very hard to do well.
Security requires, however, that you take into account not only things that can "go wrong", but even things that go wrong on purpose. That you deal with a world in which you don't only have "bad luck", but rather a world in which someone is doing their damnedest to force you into this particular bad luck.
From an engineering-standpoint, a program that has a race condition if run on february 29th, on a day with full-moon, with the PID 37912, with a certain input that'll never occur in normal data, will probably never expose that race-condition, much less will it be a problem. (it'll still be bad engineering, but it'll probably be without consequences)
In a security-context, however, the fault could be (depending on cicumstances) disastrous. People will spend considerable effort convincing your program that it's february 29th and that the moon is full, they'll feed it only the single bad input, thousands of times over if nessecary,they'll run "echo" to wrap-around the pid so that you'll always have the one single bad pid and they'll have a hundred threads in the background doing their damnedest to take advantage of the race-condition and create that file in that split-second when it must not be created.
Google doesn't only have to make sense of a great big mess.
It has to make sense of a great big mess where a significant part of the pages are made *spesifically* to confuse Google, and where a part of those same pages gets tuned regularily in dedicated attempts at confusing whichever algorithm google use more.
Most of the cases where Google returns poor results these days, it's obvious to a human observer that the bad results on top are *purposely* made to confuse Google. I've even seen pages that return one set of content if your user-agent is "Googlebot", and another, totally different content (dialer, etc) if your user-agent is anything else.
It's not like people commonly claim that straining your ears, trying to hear a very very soft noise is damaging to your hearing. Or that trying to taste something that's present in very very low concentration will damage your sense of taste
Now, staring at something very brigth, or hearing a very loud noise can indeed be damaging, but that's sorta in the oposite direction, overload if you like.
Still, people persist in this "trying to see in poor ligth will kill your eyes" thing. I've honestly got no idea where that comes from.
An action with negative consequences can still be worth it, aslong as the positive consequences more than outweigh the negative ones. There exist situations where a seat belt is a negative factor. Doesn't change the fact that they save lives overall. Same for airbags, laminated front-windows, ventilated disk-brakes, fire-extinguishers in houses and any other security-measure you can think of.
Fact is, they *ALL* have negative consequences. It's just that their positive contribution is a lot larger than the negative ones.
An interesting idea is the one used in the fictive government proposed in Heinleins "The moon is a harsh mistress".
The elected lawgivers are divided in two chambers. One of the chambers can create new laws. They require 3/5th majority. So, new laws gets created, only if 60% or more in this chamber are in favour of it.
The other chamber is the interesting idea. Their power is limited to one thing, and one thing only; They can remove existing laws. Doing so requires a pure majority.
The reason this twist is interesting is because it forces half of the elected lawgivers to focus on a question that hardly any politician spends any time on today: what laws are bad ? What laws would we be better of without ?
My guess is that such a system would result in a much more manageable amount of laws. The current situation is becoming ridicolous, we're approaching a situation where you could not, even in principle, know about all laws effecting you, because even if you dedicated 100% of your wake time to reading up on them, you'd not manage it.