Only 1 point awarded for being a Debian Developer? You've badly misjudged. Our next release will include a click-through license that requires all you idiot men's rights activists to marry your dogs as a condition of using the software.
Can't handle codes of conduct that obligate you to behave like a decent human being? Suck it up, snowflake.
Even a wacky conspiracy theorist starts to look credible when some one trys to assasinate him.
Err... what part of suggesting that people tried to assassinate Ted is not a wacky conspiracy theory in its own right?
They invited him there! He went there at great expense with the sole intention of trying to make peace and mend relationships. It seems as though the intention was to lure him there and beat him senseless in the middle of some forign country!
Who are you claiming invited Ted to DebConf? The conference was widely announced in the Debian developer community, with information on how to register and apply for travel sponsorship; obviously these announcements didn't claim "Ted need not apply", but did he receive a personal invitation from the organizing committee that none of the rest of us did? If not, in what sense was he being "lured" to Mexico? It would require a remarkable degree of naivete for him to believe he would be welcomed warmly by everyone on the organizing committee, after making unsubstantiated claims of sponsorship favoritism based on fabricated details, accusing the organizers of religious discrimination for being unable to accomodate his singular dietary requirements, and describing the venue as a "second-rate hotel in a third world country."
While some of the behavior I witnessed at the formal dinner was disappointingly uncivilized, it does say something about how much he actually "mended relationships" there that people found the rumors credible enough to warrant attempting to eject him from the dinner. (No, not "assassinating" him, not "beating him senseless" -- generally if you're trying to injure someone you don't do so by pushing them towards the door on the far side of the building...) I don't know if someone in Ted's company thought it would be funny to let people think he had brought a prostitute, but evidently others at the event didn't find this idea humorous at all.
Oh, I figured that as a resident of Beaverton, it would be ok for me to ask the governor to float me some of that 1.2 mil to help relocate the entire Debian development team to Oregon. Hmm, maybe not.
Um. Whoo? VoIP usage for long-distance is completely uninteresting. I know Canadians have a cultural superiority complex where their southerly neighbors are concerned, but geez, most of the major providers in the US are also using VoIP for their long-distance traffic. So what?
VoIP to the end-user is much more interesting, because it has a direct impact on the consumer market. Using VoIP instead of ATM for telco long distance just reduces the carrier's overhead; replacing POTS lines with QoS-enabled broadband, OTOH, has real potential to shake up the playing field where telecommunications are concerned.
That still doesn't get you anywhere unless you manage to subvert the host key of some machine that's a member of the Kerberos realm. Once an attacker has managed to compromise both a host key and the DNS, yes, it's possible to fool a client; but an almost equivalent exploit is possible with non-Kerberized ssh as well.
If you're deploying SSH in an environment that already uses Kerberos, there absolutely is an advantage. GSSAPI external key exchange means that, if you're authenticated to the Kerberos realm, you have tickets that will let you connect to any other machine in the realm (or in a trusted realm) without having to do out-of-band verification of the RSA key's fingerprint.
With traditional RSA key authentication in SSH, the security of the SSH connection requires that either the user is diligent enough to check every new RSA fingerprint when it pops up, or that the site admin has stored all of the machine fingerprints in/etc/ssh/ssh_known_hosts. With Kerberos, mutual authentication is done for you. This is a very big advantage for anyone with a lot of machines, particularly if Kerberos is in use anyway.
Basicly the debian developers want the right to steal your GFLD'd documents and strip you out of the credits/biblography so they can claim THEY wrote it.
And this was modded to 'interesting'? Morons.
First, Wikipedia is not a canonical source for the definition of an Invariant Section, as the term is used in the GFDL. If you want to know how the term is legally defined in the context of the license, get off your ass and go read the license.
Second, even a cursory examination of any one of the licenses that are recognized as free under the DFSG would show you that Debian does NOT require authors to waive the right to be acknowledged for their work in order to have their software (or documentation) included. If you're having trouble figuring out what license to look at, try the BSD license or the GNU GPL, both of which are widely used and both of which require recognition of the authors. The suggestion that Debian is opposed to the license because it prevents plagiarism is ludicrous, and I'm appalled that such a notion even has to be rebutted.
Why is ignorance considered interesting here these days?
Oh, get over yourself. At least Red Hat *tells* you that there are security issues with older versions of MySQL. You really think going back to Access gives you better security than using OOo with an "insecure" version of MyODBC?
And "insecure" is in quotes because... out of the security issues Red Hat lists in their errata, I see only one that's client-side, and it's only exploitable if you're talking to a hostile server. The window of opportunity is very small there; almost certainly smaller than what you're exposing yourself to by running MS products, "now with true-color scripting enabled for brighter databases than ever!".
note you could skip that 'cp' command and config the whole thing here, but that seems like extra effort to me when a perfectly good MySQL config exists already:)
<sigh> I guess I need to tweak the libmyodbc package a little bit, since you shouldn't need to copy anything at all -- if you run 'dpkg-reconfigure libmyodbc', you'll see that debconf will ask you if you want to have the driver installed for you. But users who have debconf set to only show high-priority questions won't get that, and they should... That 'cp' command you ran is one step more than anyone should ever have to type to get ODBC support. >;)
That's right, exercise your First-World sense of righteous indignation. Thank goodness we Americans are above this sort of bribery. And if by some chance it did happen to us, I'm sure our system would correct for the insanity even quicker than those back-water Panamanians...
substitute U.S. 110 volts for Australian 220?
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You mean even the volts have a poor exchange rate in Australia?
I've heard of weak currencies, but never of weak electrical potentialcies.
...lobby your senators and representatives! If it's left up to the FCC, it's too late, because the FCC is not directly accountable to the public. The popular thing in Congress these days seems to be trying to lift the restrictions imposed by the 1996 Telecommunications Act and screw over the CLECs (including those providing DSL). The telcos justify this saying that they have to be able to compete with the cable companies.
Well, why is it so hard to compete with the cable companies? Because the cable industry isn't being regulated as tightly as it should be! And as long as it isn't, the only competition you'll see in cable internet are the bones they're throwing to the FTC while they're trying to get approval for another megamerger.
In other words, OpenDivX is Open Source if we choose random definitions of the words "Open" and "Source". Well, that's good to know.
I have a hard time feeling sympathy for anyone who wasted time hacking on the OpenDivX project and was then surprised when the DivX people locked it up; just as I have a hard time feeling sympathy for anyone else who starts hacking on a project with the expectation that it will remain open, without actually bothering to do some fact-checking first. Or people who choose the BSD license for their projects because they like BSD, and then whine afterwards when others take their code and incorporate it into closed projects.
Well, duh. If the OSI hasn't approved their license, there's a reason for that; and anybody who's so gung-ho about coding video players that they don't bother to do some research first, or to even read the license first, then the nicest thing I can say about them is "hopefully they've learned their lesson". Even if you like the people that are developing it, copyrights and patents can be bought and sold, and if you don't have an explicit license, you've got nothing.
I'm going to say it because there are people out there who need to hear it, because they weren't listening the first 100 times. The provisions included in the GPL are there for a reason. If you care about keeping code free, then contribute to projects that use licenses which guarantee it. If you submit code under a license that allows someone else to lock it up, then sooner or later someone will lock it up.
This seems to fall under the category of "Ha ha, only serious": there/was/ some talk a while back of compiling Wine under cygwin, for use as a debugging tool (comparing the behavior of apps running under the native OS to their behavior under Wine). I think someone even got it to work...
It shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone that the Debian community is not "OS-neutral". While there are many pragmatists who believe in using "the right tool for the right job", Debian is founded on the principle that freedom is as important as software quality, and that any tool which results in a net loss of freedom for the individual (as is the case with MS Windows) is always the wrong tool even though it may sometimes be the only reasonable option.
Since freedom to recompile source code on the platform of your choice is among the cherished freedoms of Debian, no one among us would ever dare to stop someone who wanted to work on such a port. But that doesn't mean everyone believes porting Debian to cygwin is a net win for Free Software.
Please read up on licenses before pretending to be an expert on them in a public forum. The current BSD license *allows* consumers of the code to re-license it under any license they choose, so long as they comply with the rather narrow requirements spelled out in the BSD license.
The only thing the BSD license doesn't allow -- literally, one of only three things disallowed by the license -- is to take BSD code and redistribute it without giving proper credit to the original author (by means of copyright statements). It's rather sad to see employees of such a prominent Open Source vendor failing to comply even with this simple requirement. Unfortunately, as repeatedly evidenced by discussions on Slashdot, most programmers never bother to read the licenses on the code they're using.
I don't know where all this nonsense about not being able to have a static IP if you're connecting via PPPoE is coming from. ISPs have been serving static IPs over PPP for years. If your ISP only knows how to serve static IPs over DHCP, well, that sucks -- but it's the ISP's fault. Find yourself an ISP that's ever heard of RADIUS before, and you won't have that problem.
Competition? There are ILECs in this market?
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As an employee of an ISP (another Internet Express) who has partnered with a CLEC to provide SDSL/IDSL to our customers, I'm amused by the thought of an ILEC 'squashing competition'. We're located on the border between Ameritech (now owned by SBC) territory and Qwest (USWest is now Qwest:) territory. To date, neither ILEC has been very competitive in terms of their DSL service. Ameritech is finally *beginning* to deploy DSL service (some two years late), but they're starting in Chicago and working their way out, so it looks they/still/ won't be in our home territory for another year.
On the other side of the river we have Qwest, who is nominally an ILEC and and ISP; but they're still not able to provide the ISP portion of the service in our area, so any ADSL customers they sign up have to be referred to one of the regional ISPs, like us.
So all in all, the ILECs really haven't posed much competition to us as of yet. I'm sure the situation is different elsewhere.
I have to disagree with the assertion that suppressing DeCSS is morally equivalent to suppressing address-harvesting software. Crowbars are legal, but weapons of mass destruction are not. Why? Because although crowbars/can/ be used illegally, they also have uses which are legal, whereas land mines and biological weapons can only be used for nefarious purposes. DeCSS has a legitimate use: allowing DVD owners to watch their disks under Linux. What are the legitimate uses of email-harvesting software?
Why would it not be ok to put this kind of pressure on Media3?
ISPs are driven by economics, just like any other business. A lot of people like to think the Internet is as yet untainted by money, but the truth is that if you see ISPs doing something that you find morally objectionable, appealing to their conscience isn't nearly as effective as appealing to their wallet. If we want Spam to stop, we'd damn well better be prepared to put financial pressure on the people who are currently making money off of it. Media3 is not exactly without recourse here, you know. If they don't want to be on the RBL, the solution is simple -- get rid of the customer that's selling spamware. But they'd rather sue MAPS than work with them, so tough cookies to them.
Should their customers be caught in the crossfire? Well, don't the customers have options, too? I haven't seen anything in this discussion to suggest that the poor customers are tied into service contracts, and even contracts can be broken.
And don't forget that the RBL only affects communication with sites that have CHOSEN to subscribe to the list. Do you believe it's wrong for individuals and ISPs to CHOOSE not to deal with those who make their money from Spam?
Quick refresher on United States law: when accused of a crime, the prosecution must convict *beyond a reasonable doubt*. Taking one person's word over another as the only basis for the conviction leaves a lot of reasonable doubt. Could the police officer have been paid or coerced to lie in court? Could there have been some confusion about just who was pointing where? Could the officer have misinterpreted the actions of the suspect?
I think all of these questions introduce *reasonable* doubts. Were these questions considered in the court case? If they were dismissed by the jury, why?
As with the eternal hacker v. cracker argument, the fact that most of the population gets it wrong doesn't mean we should just accept this as The Way Things Have to Be.
Honestly, scientific accuracy (or any sort of realism in story telling) is orthogonal to having a good story. To the average moviegoer, the only thing that matters is that there be a story they like. Well, sure, if you don't know the difference between good science and bad science, then it's easy to accept inaccuracies; but some of us who *do* know bad science when they see it wouldn't mind, once in a while, having a movie that has a good story that doesn't fall apart when you aim a telescope at it. And why should we settle for less?
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Only 1 point awarded for being a Debian Developer? You've badly misjudged. Our next release will include a click-through license that requires all you idiot men's rights activists to marry your dogs as a condition of using the software.
Can't handle codes of conduct that obligate you to behave like a decent human being? Suck it up, snowflake.
Err... what part of suggesting that people tried to assassinate Ted is not a wacky conspiracy theory in its own right?
Who are you claiming invited Ted to DebConf? The conference was widely announced in the Debian developer community, with information on how to register and apply for travel sponsorship; obviously these announcements didn't claim "Ted need not apply", but did he receive a personal invitation from the organizing committee that none of the rest of us did? If not, in what sense was he being "lured" to Mexico? It would require a remarkable degree of naivete for him to believe he would be welcomed warmly by everyone on the organizing committee, after making unsubstantiated claims of sponsorship favoritism based on fabricated details, accusing the organizers of religious discrimination for being unable to accomodate his singular dietary requirements, and describing the venue as a "second-rate hotel in a third world country."
While some of the behavior I witnessed at the formal dinner was disappointingly uncivilized, it does say something about how much he actually "mended relationships" there that people found the rumors credible enough to warrant attempting to eject him from the dinner. (No, not "assassinating" him, not "beating him senseless" -- generally if you're trying to injure someone you don't do so by pushing them towards the door on the far side of the building...) I don't know if someone in Ted's company thought it would be funny to let people think he had brought a prostitute, but evidently others at the event didn't find this idea humorous at all.
- Where did you report this?
- How is an upgrade responsible for zombie processes on your system? These are almost always a kernel problem.
Hmm, so, how many famous Open Source developers of Linus' stature do you know who don't live in Portland? :)
:)
There seem to be a fair number of us less-famous folk living here already.
Oh, I figured that as a resident of Beaverton, it would be ok for me to ask the governor to float me some of that 1.2 mil to help relocate the entire Debian development team to Oregon. Hmm, maybe not.
Um. Whoo? VoIP usage for long-distance is completely uninteresting. I know Canadians have a cultural superiority complex where their southerly neighbors are concerned, but geez, most of the major providers in the US are also using VoIP for their long-distance traffic. So what?
VoIP to the end-user is much more interesting, because it has a direct impact on the consumer market. Using VoIP instead of ATM for telco long distance just reduces the carrier's overhead; replacing POTS lines with QoS-enabled broadband, OTOH, has real potential to shake up the playing field where telecommunications are concerned.
That still doesn't get you anywhere unless you manage to subvert the host key of some machine that's a member of the Kerberos realm. Once an attacker has managed to compromise both a host key and the DNS, yes, it's possible to fool a client; but an almost equivalent exploit is possible with non-Kerberized ssh as well.
If you're deploying SSH in an environment that already uses Kerberos, there absolutely is an advantage. GSSAPI external key exchange means that, if you're authenticated to the Kerberos realm, you have tickets that will let you connect to any other machine in the realm (or in a trusted realm) without having to do out-of-band verification of the RSA key's fingerprint.
With traditional RSA key authentication in SSH, the security of the SSH connection requires that either the user is diligent enough to check every new RSA fingerprint when it pops up, or that the site admin has stored all of the machine fingerprints in /etc/ssh/ssh_known_hosts. With Kerberos, mutual authentication is done for you. This is a very big advantage for anyone with a lot of machines, particularly if Kerberos is in use anyway.
And this was modded to 'interesting'? Morons.
First, Wikipedia is not a canonical source for the definition of an Invariant Section, as the term is used in the GFDL. If you want to know how the term is legally defined in the context of the license, get off your ass and go read the license.
Second, even a cursory examination of any one of the licenses that are recognized as free under the DFSG would show you that Debian does NOT require authors to waive the right to be acknowledged for their work in order to have their software (or documentation) included. If you're having trouble figuring out what license to look at, try the BSD license or the GNU GPL, both of which are widely used and both of which require recognition of the authors. The suggestion that Debian is opposed to the license because it prevents plagiarism is ludicrous, and I'm appalled that such a notion even has to be rebutted.
Why is ignorance considered interesting here these days?
Oh, get over yourself. At least Red Hat *tells* you that there are security issues with older versions of MySQL. You really think going back to Access gives you better security than using OOo with an "insecure" version of MyODBC?
And "insecure" is in quotes because... out of the security issues Red Hat lists in their errata, I see only one that's client-side, and it's only exploitable if you're talking to a hostile server. The window of opportunity is very small there; almost certainly smaller than what you're exposing yourself to by running MS products, "now with true-color scripting enabled for brighter databases than ever!".
<sigh> I guess I need to tweak the libmyodbc package a little bit, since you shouldn't need to copy anything at all -- if you run 'dpkg-reconfigure libmyodbc', you'll see that debconf will ask you if you want to have the driver installed for you. But users who have debconf set to only show high-priority questions won't get that, and they should... That 'cp' command you ran is one step more than anyone should ever have to type to get ODBC support. >;)
That's right, exercise your First-World sense of righteous indignation. Thank goodness we Americans are above this sort of bribery. And if by some chance it did happen to us, I'm sure our system would correct for the insanity even quicker than those back-water Panamanians...
I've heard of weak currencies, but never of weak electrical potentialcies.
Well, why is it so hard to compete with the cable companies? Because the cable industry isn't being regulated as tightly as it should be! And as long as it isn't, the only competition you'll see in cable internet are the bones they're throwing to the FTC while they're trying to get approval for another megamerger.
In other words, OpenDivX is Open Source if we choose random definitions of the words "Open" and "Source". Well, that's good to know.
I have a hard time feeling sympathy for anyone who wasted time hacking on the OpenDivX project and was then surprised when the DivX people locked it up; just as I have a hard time feeling sympathy for anyone else who starts hacking on a project with the expectation that it will remain open, without actually bothering to do some fact-checking first. Or people who choose the BSD license for their projects because they like BSD, and then whine afterwards when others take their code and incorporate it into closed projects.
Well, duh. If the OSI hasn't approved their license, there's a reason for that; and anybody who's so gung-ho about coding video players that they don't bother to do some research first, or to even read the license first, then the nicest thing I can say about them is "hopefully they've learned their lesson". Even if you like the people that are developing it, copyrights and patents can be bought and sold, and if you don't have an explicit license, you've got nothing.
I'm going to say it because there are people out there who need to hear it, because they weren't listening the first 100 times. The provisions included in the GPL are there for a reason. If you care about keeping code free, then contribute to projects that use licenses which guarantee it. If you submit code under a license that allows someone else to lock it up, then sooner or later someone will lock it up.
Let this be a lesson.This seems to fall under the category of "Ha ha, only serious": there /was/ some talk a while back of compiling Wine under cygwin, for use as a debugging tool (comparing the behavior of apps running under the native OS to their behavior under Wine). I think someone even got it to work...
It shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone that the Debian community is not "OS-neutral". While there are many pragmatists who believe in using "the right tool for the right job", Debian is founded on the principle that freedom is as important as software quality, and that any tool which results in a net loss of freedom for the individual (as is the case with MS Windows) is always the wrong tool even though it may sometimes be the only reasonable option.
Since freedom to recompile source code on the platform of your choice is among the cherished freedoms of Debian, no one among us would ever dare to stop someone who wanted to work on such a port. But that doesn't mean everyone believes porting Debian to cygwin is a net win for Free Software.
That's called vocational training. You don't need to go to a university to find that.
Please read up on licenses before pretending to be an expert on them in a public forum. The current BSD license *allows* consumers of the code to re-license it under any license they choose, so long as they comply with the rather narrow requirements spelled out in the BSD license.
The only thing the BSD license doesn't allow -- literally, one of only three things disallowed by the license -- is to take BSD code and redistribute it without giving proper credit to the original author (by means of copyright statements). It's rather sad to see employees of such a prominent Open Source vendor failing to comply even with this simple requirement. Unfortunately, as repeatedly evidenced by discussions on Slashdot, most programmers never bother to read the licenses on the code they're using.
I don't know where all this nonsense about not being able to have a static IP if you're connecting via PPPoE is coming from. ISPs have been serving static IPs over PPP for years. If your ISP only knows how to serve static IPs over DHCP, well, that sucks -- but it's the ISP's fault. Find yourself an ISP that's ever heard of RADIUS before, and you won't have that problem.
On the other side of the river we have Qwest, who is nominally an ILEC and and ISP; but they're still not able to provide the ISP portion of the service in our area, so any ADSL customers they sign up have to be referred to one of the regional ISPs, like us.
So all in all, the ILECs really haven't posed much competition to us as of yet. I'm sure the situation is different elsewhere.
I have to disagree with the assertion that suppressing DeCSS is morally equivalent to suppressing address-harvesting software. Crowbars are legal, but weapons of mass destruction are not. Why? Because although crowbars /can/ be used illegally, they also have uses which are legal, whereas land mines and biological weapons can only be used for nefarious purposes. DeCSS has a legitimate use: allowing DVD owners to watch their disks under Linux. What are the legitimate uses of email-harvesting software?
Why would it not be ok to put this kind of pressure on Media3?
ISPs are driven by economics, just like any other business. A lot of people like to think the Internet is as yet untainted by money, but the truth is that if you see ISPs doing something that you find morally objectionable, appealing to their conscience isn't nearly as effective as appealing to their wallet. If we want Spam to stop, we'd damn well better be prepared to put financial pressure on the people who are currently making money off of it. Media3 is not exactly without recourse here, you know. If they don't want to be on the RBL, the solution is simple -- get rid of the customer that's selling spamware. But they'd rather sue MAPS than work with them, so tough cookies to them.
Should their customers be caught in the crossfire? Well, don't the customers have options, too? I haven't seen anything in this discussion to suggest that the poor customers are tied into service contracts, and even contracts can be broken.
And don't forget that the RBL only affects communication with sites that have CHOSEN to subscribe to the list. Do you believe it's wrong for individuals and ISPs to CHOOSE not to deal with those who make their money from Spam?
Quick refresher on United States law: when accused of a crime, the prosecution must convict *beyond a reasonable doubt*. Taking one person's word over another as the only basis for the conviction leaves a lot of reasonable doubt. Could the police officer have been paid or coerced to lie in court? Could there have been some confusion about just who was pointing where? Could the officer have misinterpreted the actions of the suspect?
I think all of these questions introduce *reasonable* doubts. Were these questions considered in the court case? If they were dismissed by the jury, why?
As with the eternal hacker v. cracker argument, the fact that most of the population gets it wrong doesn't mean we should just accept this as The Way Things Have to Be.
Honestly, scientific accuracy (or any sort of realism in story telling) is orthogonal to having a good story. To the average moviegoer, the only thing that matters is that there be a story they like. Well, sure, if you don't know the difference between good science and bad science, then it's easy to accept inaccuracies; but some of us who *do* know bad science when they see it wouldn't mind, once in a while, having a movie that has a good story that doesn't fall apart when you aim a telescope at it. And why should we settle for less?