If the music industry thinks that people are violating their copyrights, then I really think they should go after those people. Napster just stores file names and lets people search. They aren't the ones who are copying files. Granted, Napster hasn't done much to police their site and may be partially responsible, but they don't get the full blame.
The problem with the MAPS RBL is that it is not Opt-In. When I had a machine at Above.net, there was a time when I wished to communicate with someone at whowhere.com, but, unfortunatly, whowhere.com was on the MAPS RBL that particular day. Above.net was unwilling (or unable) to take my machine off of the RBL so I could communicate with my friend.
In this situation, there were a lot of people with a lot of choices. These choices have costs and benefits.
The people at Above.net chose to use MAPS. They probably feel that the people who will not use their services because they filter out "spam" will be less than the number of people who object to getting spam. It is their choice to use the RBL.
You have the choice of which ISP to use. Initially, you chose to use Above.net, which uses MAPS, you then changed your mind. You appear to think that receiving spam is less of a problem than not receiving email from everyone.
Your friend chose to use whowhere.com for their email. They appear to think it is, for some reason, better to use them and risk not being able to send email to everyone rather than switching to an ISP that isn't on the RBL.
Whowhere.com's administrators have choosen, for some reason, to be associated in some way with spam and to not change their ways.
Personally, I would have told my friend to stop using whowhere.com. I would consider it rude of them to try and make me not filter out spam just because they don't want to switch from a spam friendly ISP.
The only people who are trying to keep people from choosing here are the spammers. They try to force ISPs to let them use the ISPs resources to deliver unwanted mail to the ISPs customers.
MAPS is free speech, SPAM is not
on
MAPS Sued Again
·
· Score: 2
MAPS is free speech.
Why? Well, because they voice their opinions, and I, as a mail admin, can decide to use my resources to listen to them. Or, I can choose not to. MAPS's free speech doesn't cost me time and money.
SPAM is not free speech.
Why? Well, because they voice their opinions and force me, as a mail admin, to use expend my time and money to listen to them. SPAM'ers try very very hard to keep me from even trying to choose to hear their opinions or not.
Just the spending on phone services is higher than all advertising outlays. So say good-bye to all those plans for financing the Internet through
advertising! Yes, advertising can help fund some services, but it will not provide the generous revenue streams that are needed to support a communications infrastructure as large as the phone system.
Are you saying that a 8-way Intel box with Win2k ran that job nearly twice as fast as
a Sparc E-10k w/24 processors?!
Sure. He only ran 8 jobs, so 16 of the sparc processors were just sitting there. However, that's not the key point. The E10000 is designed to be able to handle massive I/O, which is very expensive and hard to do well. His jobs were all CPU bound, so he was wasting most of the resources that the E10000 has.
Actually, even using an 8-way multi-processor for W2K is probably a waste. There are no interactions between the processors, so having all 8 processors in the same box just leads to memory contention and such. Again, a waste of resources.
I almost hate to say this, but the "right" solution would be a beowolf cluster of maybe dual processors machines.
Back in the very early 80's, a friend and I put a bid in on an IBM 370 mainframe that the local public schools was getting rid of. After we won the bid for cheap, we started doing the design for the three-phased power supply that it would need and we studied the schematics. About a week later, we found out that someone else wanted the mainframe and was willing to pay use 10 times our purchase price for it.
I've been informed of some brain farts in my post (thanks Clem!).
First, I don't know why I said MVT stood for "Mutliple Virtual Tasks" instead of "Multiple *Variable* Tasks". I guess my mind was running faster than my fingers and I was already thinking about SVS. MVT didn't have virtual memory.
Also, Clem reminded me that the second "S"s in SVS and MVS stood for "storage" not "system". My mind is going, I guess, I should have remembered that.
Finally, Clem mentioned that there was an OS called PCP (Primary Control Program) that came between DOS and MFT.
If I recall correctly, the order that the operating systems that were created for the IBM 360/370/390 were as follows:
DOS -- This was a quick and dirty operating system that was created only because the "real" operating system was way behind schedule and they need something for their new hardware. It was expected to disappear soon after OS/MFT was released, but survived at least into the 80's, 20 years longer than expected. Even in the 80's, you had to figure out where to place your files by hand, by specifying the cylinder/track/block address and length in your job specification. The IBM "DOS" was much more primative than the MS "DOS" available at the same time.
MFT - Multiple Fixed Tasks. This was a multi-tasking operating system, although each program was assigned a block of memory that was a fixed size. No virtual memory, but it had most everything else that people think of an OS having.
MVT - Multiple Virtual Tasks. This allowed each program to use up variable amounts of memory, although they got a default region of a certain sized based on the "class" of the job that was submitted. If a program need more memory, but there was already a program running at the end of the current programs region, the first program would have to wait until the other program finished before it would continue.
SVS -- Single Virtual System. Virtual Memory was introduced in this release. All virtual memory was created in a single large address space (16MB virtual on a 1-4MB of physical), and then an MVT type operating system was run in that virtual memory. The advantage was that the initial default memory regions could be "huge", so the chances of a program running out of space was greatly reduced.
MVS -- Multiple Virtual System. Each program was allocated its own address space.
Many of the systems writen for these early (pre-1980) mainframes were incredibly efficient. At the University of Nebraska, we had one of the earliest timeshare systems created called the "Nebraska University Remote Operating System" or NUROS. In 256KB of program storage, it supported around 240 users, each was able to edit files, submit jobs, view the output of the jobs, create/delete files, etc. Yes, that's right, about 1KB of memory per person. Well, sort of, as the 2260 and 3270 terminals contained another 2KB of memory that people edit most of their actual editing on. (24 lines by 80 characters = 1960 bytes)
Oh, it was a state of the art system ca 1970 when it was created, but there is a reason why Unix survived and it didn't.:->
The archiving of posts that they've been doing for years is at the border, but (I think) somewhat within. When posting to usenet, there is an implied consent for usenet distribution. Putting it on a universally readable website pushes this (arguably over the line), but is still at least vaguely consistent with the implied consent.
I disagree that either of these are "over the line", or even close to it.
Expiring news was always up to the control of the local news admin. It was assumed that many newsgroups would never be expired, at least on some sites. For example, consider the comp.sources.* groups, rec.humor.funny, and other moderated groups. Things like the expire: line were hints to the local news admin, never a requirement.
Likewise, public access news sites have always been common, deja.com is just continuing that tradition.
Inserting ads, topically or not, is creating a derived work. There is no argument of which I'm aware that extends the implied permission to display to do this, which leaves them only with what is allowed by copyright law--bringing them back to "derived work."
Well, I have also created a derived work from your posting by including your quotes. This has been accepted since day one also.
So, it comes down to, "by posting, the user has given implied concent to do all sorts of things to the work, including copying, making permanent public displays of the work and making some derived works." You are going to have to argue that this particular type of derived work was *not* implied.
good luck. IANAL, so I have no idea how you would do that.
[note: I just posted the following to a pocketwatch BBS, but gee, untouched it works great here also! The Elgin National Watch Company made high tech watches from 1864 until around 1964. At the time, the watch movements (think CPUs) were made by different companies than the watch cases (think computer cases).]
Well, I think I can shed some light here by quoting/paraphrasing some stuff from "Elgin: An American History" by E. C. Alft. (The book is really about the history of the city of Elgin, but the city and the watch company are very related. A good book even if you don't care too much about the particular company/city because it describes how one, reasonably typical american city grew from 1835 until 1985.)
Anyway, here is the quote:
The Illinois Watch Case Company had been incorporated in 1888 as an outgrowth of a wholesale jewelry firm in Chicago. The president, Max C. Eppenstein, agreed to move to Elgin in return for land and a building [they moved in 1890] [... ]
The Eppenstein firm intended to change its name to the Elgin Watch Case Company. The Elgin National Watch Company, which did not case its movements and was wary of the possible confusion, quickly moved to charter a corporation with that name. Then Eppenstein countered by organiing the National Watch Case Company of Elgin. The dispute was litigated and ultimately appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which in 1901 ruled that "Elgin" was a geographic designation which could not be an exclusive trademark because the city existed before the arrival of the watch factory.
AT&T developed Unix during the 70's to support their in-house publishing needs and such. (Well, it started out as a way to make a game, but AT&T didn't mean to fund that part.) During the 70's, AT&T still had the monopoly on long distances phone service and a huge chunk of the local phone service. As a result, the government banned them from entering other markets so that AT&T couldn't abuse their monopoly position on on market to take over other markets.
The result was that AT&T gave away copies of Unix to universities for educational purposes, which made it very popular in very important places.
After AT&T was broken up, they were allowed to start selling things, and one of the things they did was sell commercial licenses for Unix. In the late 70's, Microsoft was one of the people who bought the right to distribute Unix, and they modified it to run on the 8086 and 68000 and sold it to folks like Radio Shack and other vars, the largest of which was called SCO.
The first license that AT&T used was *very* cheap, and MS was making a lot of money selling Xenix. AT&T was kind of new at this computer stuff and didn't really know what it was worth. As a result, the next version of Unix that AT&T released, they jacked up the licensing fees to the point that MS said pluck yew to AT&T and sold off their Xenix distrubution to SCO.
Microsoft has never liked Unix since that spat, although they did add many Unix like features to their CP/M clone called "MS-DOS".
If AT&T had been more reasonable with their licensing of Unix back in the late 70's, we would all be running Unix now.
Several years ago, I wrote up a program to play with the n-body problem and I also wrote up an introductory type paper on the subject. The link you posted to Amara's N-body page is a good one, and I used it as one of my sources in my paper. Included in my paper, however, are a bunch of pictures to make some of the concepts clearer.
I think most of the infomation is still fairly accurate. The paper is aimed at semi-techincal people, but not experts in the field of the n-body problem. That is, show some formulas that such that use basic, first year calculus, but you don't need to know how to use a "Hamiltonian Operator".
You can find a copy of XStar program and paper can be found here.
The original document was created in FrameMaker and I have been unable to fully HTML-ize it. To get a copy with pictures, you need to look at the postscript document.
Personally, I don't have any problems with what Penthouse has done. They produce copyrighted material, they think they have found someone who is violating that copyright, and they are going through legal channels to stop them.
If people were violating the copyright on GPL'ed stuff by not following the license, I would support taking legal actions against those people to.
People who don't like the strings attached to someones copyrighted works should go find some other works that don't have those problems. Whether the copyright holder is MicroSoft, the author of a GPL'ed work who won't release it under the BSD license, or Penthouse, it makes no difference. There are always alternatives and by using those alternatives you will send a message that you don't like the strings the other people have attached.
I agree with almost all of your post, except I think you should change one thing:
The more important thing we all seem to miss is that the security of an OS is dependent on two critical features:
How easy is to find exploits?
and
How fast are those exploits fixed in the field?
It makes no difference how quickly the code gets fixed, it is how quickly the sites get fixed that counts. Of course, open source software is a plus here too.
Chanting that it doesn't work doesn't make it so and doesn't help.
There is a whole field of cryptography called "Steganograpy" that studies how to hide messages. Do you put valuables out of sight when you leave your car parked in public? Do you have a hidden key for your house/car, and if you really believe that obscurity doesn't work, why is it hidden? How many times have you heard wisecrackers on/. say that "microsoft will never release their source 'cause think of how many security holes would be immediately found." Look at the rapid increase in problems with Quake bots after source was released.
Obscurity is just one more layer of protection. Hopefully it isn't the only layer nor the strongest layer, but it does help. Obscurity is often a very easy layer to add so the cost/benefit ratio is very good.
Yes, obscurity most keeps out only the least skilled or people who want to spend only a little bit of time breaking something, but that is a huge group.
Ranting that "security through obscurity doesn't work" is a nice bummer-sticker type slogan. Like most other short rants, it is bogus and life is more complicated than that.
Instead, we should be calmly explaining that "open source is more secure despite not being obscure." We can take about how open source can be a plus as well as a minus. We can show emprical evidence, we can talk about how many "white hat" people can fix bugs, we can talk about how "too often closed source developers use obscurity as their only defense".
But, then again, a quick check of gnu.org shows a founding date of 1984 for both Gnu AND the FSF. This is STILL almost a whole decade *AFTER* Woz had started freely giving out the schematics for the Apple I at the homebrew club.
The FSF was founded in part to as a reaction against the proprietarization of software that had happened since the very late 70's. RMS realized that culture alone, wasn't/couldn't keep software "free", that you had to "fight fire with fire" use the proprietary weapon of copyright law.
While some BSD'ers will say that the GPL is too strict, it is clear that RMS and the GNU'ers helped maintain the "culture of openess".
RMS didn't invent free/open software, that concept was created spontaniously everywhere that computers cropped up. RMS just fought back, while most other people just accepted the new restiction with an occational grumble.
If you hit someone with a bat, it becomes assault with a deadly weapon, but possession of a baseball bat is not a legitimate charge. Even possession of deadly weapon shouldn't be a legit charge. I mean, what's the point of making it a separate crime if you can't be prosecuted for it without committing another crime?
Not quite. "Assualt" is when you make a credible threat to someone, "battery" is when you actually hit someone. If I walk into a bar with a baseball bat and say "Danse, I've had it with you, I'm going to pound your head in", even if I don't actually do it, I can be charged with assault with a deadly weapon. Likewise, my right to throw a fist doesn't end where your nose begins, it ends where a reasonable person would consider it to be threatening.
On the other hand, if a 10 year old comes up to a pro football player and says "you lost the game! I'm going to beat you up", and starts hitting him wildly with his fists, chances are neither assualt nor battery could be charged.
Yes, this is a funny story and we aren't supposed to post serious responses to it, but I 100% agree with you. Cars have done more to create the "damage to society" that so many people decry than just about any other technology, including that well flogged "TV" thing.
Before cars, you knew your neighbors, you pretty much had to. You knew the faces of everyone withing a 5 minute walk of your house, and often you knew the history and relationships between them. With cars, 30 seconds after you have left your driveway, you are little better off than if you were in a town 100 miles away.
When a crime happened, the criminal was almost aways someone within an "easy walk" from the victim, which meant that the word would get around and often the criminal would be punished without the police even getting involved. Now, I can easily drive to a town 100 miles from here, kill someone, and drive back. No one would notice that I was gone for the afternoon, no one where the victim lived would notice a stranger from out of town. Solving crimes are much harder now.
Think of all the crimes that are commited directly with cars (road rage, drunk driving, etc.) or would not be easy without them such as most robberies.
With a car, if I have a serious problem, I can just pick up and move across town, or across the country quickly and easily. Instead of working out your problems, you leave your problems behind.
Before there were cars, the church was the focal point of social interaction. It was the only way that you could easily get to see everyone you wanted to see, and you had to see even people you didn't want to.
Before cars, you lived near your extended family, you knew if there were strangers in the neighborhood, you knew your grocer. There was a real "community".
Before cars, we all got a lot more excersize. We consumed a lot less energy and raw materials.
Ok, so do I think cars are evil? No. But I think that TV gets blamed for a lot more problems than it deserves and cars get blamed for far fewer. We like cars. We would have a hard time living without it. OTOH, we can imaging living without a TV.
We had NETHACK, that's what we had, and I'll tell you one more thing, we LIKED it, and we didn't want anything more, that's for sure.
Nethack?!? Well you *are* a young'n. Back in *my* day we had The Mines of Moria on the CDC Plato system. (Late 70's) and it was, uh, well, graphical, multi-user and you played with folks from all over the country. Anyone who plays HoMM would immediately recongize it.
My father back in the 50's, on the other hand, got stuck with this new game called "Adventure". Plugh. (One of his roomates at MIT helped write it.)
Actually, what amazes me is how good games just keep getting reincarnated. Yeah, they are *much* flashier now a days, but the themes are the same.
Slashdot Mirror
After reading the post, there were a couple of followups where teachers asked this question on some tests:
Test Questions 1
Test Questions 2
If the music industry thinks that people are violating their copyrights, then I really think they should go after those people. Napster just stores file names and lets people search. They aren't the ones who are copying files. Granted, Napster hasn't done much to police their site and may be partially responsible, but they don't get the full blame.
I found this site a while back and found it very interesting. Check out Behind Enemy Lines.
Imagine what it would be like for Linus if he got one email per 100-500 donwloads?
The people at Above.net chose to use MAPS. They probably feel that the people who will not use their services because they filter out "spam" will be less than the number of people who object to getting spam. It is their choice to use the RBL.
You have the choice of which ISP to use. Initially, you chose to use Above.net, which uses MAPS, you then changed your mind. You appear to think that receiving spam is less of a problem than not receiving email from everyone.
Your friend chose to use whowhere.com for their email. They appear to think it is, for some reason, better to use them and risk not being able to send email to everyone rather than switching to an ISP that isn't on the RBL.
Whowhere.com's administrators have choosen, for some reason, to be associated in some way with spam and to not change their ways.
Personally, I would have told my friend to stop using whowhere.com. I would consider it rude of them to try and make me not filter out spam just because they don't want to switch from a spam friendly ISP.
The only people who are trying to keep people from choosing here are the spammers. They try to force ISPs to let them use the ISPs resources to deliver unwanted mail to the ISPs customers.
Why? Well, because they voice their opinions, and I, as a mail admin, can decide to use my resources to listen to them. Or, I can choose not to. MAPS's free speech doesn't cost me time and money.
SPAM is not free speech.
Why? Well, because they voice their opinions and force me, as a mail admin, to use expend my time and money to listen to them. SPAM'ers try very very hard to keep me from even trying to choose to hear their opinions or not.
You can view Andrew's paper on his website at www.research.att.com/~amo/doc/ net works.html, where you can find several other interesting papers too.
Direct links the the Content is not king paper are: [Abstract] [PostScript] [PDF] [LaTeX]
One interesting quote in the paper was:
I don't.
Are you saying that a 8-way Intel box with Win2k ran that job nearly twice as fast as a Sparc E-10k w/24 processors?!
Sure. He only ran 8 jobs, so 16 of the sparc processors were just sitting there. However, that's not the key point. The E10000 is designed to be able to handle massive I/O, which is very expensive and hard to do well. His jobs were all CPU bound, so he was wasting most of the resources that the E10000 has.
Actually, even using an 8-way multi-processor for W2K is probably a waste. There are no interactions between the processors, so having all 8 processors in the same box just leads to memory contention and such. Again, a waste of resources.
I almost hate to say this, but the "right" solution would be a beowolf cluster of maybe dual processors machines.
Oh well. It was fun while it lasted.
I've been informed of some brain farts in my post (thanks Clem!).
First, I don't know why I said MVT stood for "Mutliple Virtual Tasks" instead of "Multiple *Variable* Tasks". I guess my mind was running faster than my fingers and I was already thinking about SVS. MVT didn't have virtual memory.
Also, Clem reminded me that the second "S"s in SVS and MVS stood for "storage" not "system". My mind is going, I guess, I should have remembered that.
Finally, Clem mentioned that there was an OS called PCP (Primary Control Program) that came between DOS and MFT.
DOS -- This was a quick and dirty operating system that was created only because the "real" operating system was way behind schedule and they need something for their new hardware. It was expected to disappear soon after OS/MFT was released, but survived at least into the 80's, 20 years longer than expected. Even in the 80's, you had to figure out where to place your files by hand, by specifying the cylinder/track/block address and length in your job specification. The IBM "DOS" was much more primative than the MS "DOS" available at the same time.
MFT - Multiple Fixed Tasks. This was a multi-tasking operating system, although each program was assigned a block of memory that was a fixed size. No virtual memory, but it had most everything else that people think of an OS having.
MVT - Multiple Virtual Tasks. This allowed each program to use up variable amounts of memory, although they got a default region of a certain sized based on the "class" of the job that was submitted. If a program need more memory, but there was already a program running at the end of the current programs region, the first program would have to wait until the other program finished before it would continue.
SVS -- Single Virtual System. Virtual Memory was introduced in this release. All virtual memory was created in a single large address space (16MB virtual on a 1-4MB of physical), and then an MVT type operating system was run in that virtual memory. The advantage was that the initial default memory regions could be "huge", so the chances of a program running out of space was greatly reduced.
MVS -- Multiple Virtual System. Each program was allocated its own address space.
Many of the systems writen for these early (pre-1980) mainframes were incredibly efficient. At the University of Nebraska, we had one of the earliest timeshare systems created called the "Nebraska University Remote Operating System" or NUROS. In 256KB of program storage, it supported around 240 users, each was able to edit files, submit jobs, view the output of the jobs, create/delete files, etc. Yes, that's right, about 1KB of memory per person. Well, sort of, as the 2260 and 3270 terminals contained another 2KB of memory that people edit most of their actual editing on. (24 lines by 80 characters = 1960 bytes)
Oh, it was a state of the art system ca 1970 when it was created, but there is a reason why Unix survived and it didn't. :->
I think Nader is much more likely to revise IP law to reduce the power of corporations.
I disagree that either of these are "over the line", or even close to it.
Expiring news was always up to the control of the local news admin. It was assumed that many newsgroups would never be expired, at least on some sites. For example, consider the comp.sources.* groups, rec.humor.funny, and other moderated groups. Things like the expire: line were hints to the local news admin, never a requirement.
Likewise, public access news sites have always been common, deja.com is just continuing that tradition.
Well, I have also created a derived work from your posting by including your quotes. This has been accepted since day one also.
So, it comes down to, "by posting, the user has given implied concent to do all sorts of things to the work, including copying, making permanent public displays of the work and making some derived works." You are going to have to argue that this particular type of derived work was *not* implied.
good luck. IANAL, so I have no idea how you would do that.
The Elgin National Watch Company made high tech watches from 1864 until around 1964. At the time, the watch movements (think CPUs) were made by different companies than the watch cases (think computer cases).]
Well, I think I can shed some light here by quoting/paraphrasing some stuff from "Elgin: An American History" by E. C. Alft. (The book is really about the history of the city of Elgin, but the city and the watch company are very related. A good book even if you don't care too much about the particular company/city because it describes how one, reasonably typical american city grew from 1835 until 1985.)
Anyway, here is the quote:
The result was that AT&T gave away copies of Unix to universities for educational purposes, which made it very popular in very important places.
After AT&T was broken up, they were allowed to start selling things, and one of the things they did was sell commercial licenses for Unix. In the late 70's, Microsoft was one of the people who bought the right to distribute Unix, and they modified it to run on the 8086 and 68000 and sold it to folks like Radio Shack and other vars, the largest of which was called SCO.
The first license that AT&T used was *very* cheap, and MS was making a lot of money selling Xenix. AT&T was kind of new at this computer stuff and didn't really know what it was worth. As a result, the next version of Unix that AT&T released, they jacked up the licensing fees to the point that MS said pluck yew to AT&T and sold off their Xenix distrubution to SCO.
Microsoft has never liked Unix since that spat, although they did add many Unix like features to their CP/M clone called "MS-DOS".
If AT&T had been more reasonable with their licensing of Unix back in the late 70's, we would all be running Unix now.
Günter Bechly posted links to the Debain side of the issue, here is a similar page written by the KDE people...
I think most of the infomation is still fairly accurate. The paper is aimed at semi-techincal people, but not experts in the field of the n-body problem. That is, show some formulas that such that use basic, first year calculus, but you don't need to know how to use a "Hamiltonian Operator".
You can find a copy of XStar program and paper can be found here.
The original document was created in FrameMaker and I have been unable to fully HTML-ize it. To get a copy with pictures, you need to look at the postscript document.
If people were violating the copyright on GPL'ed stuff by not following the license, I would support taking legal actions against those people to.
People who don't like the strings attached to someones copyrighted works should go find some other works that don't have those problems. Whether the copyright holder is MicroSoft, the author of a GPL'ed work who won't release it under the BSD license, or Penthouse, it makes no difference. There are always alternatives and by using those alternatives you will send a message that you don't like the strings the other people have attached.
It makes no difference how quickly the code gets fixed, it is how quickly the sites get fixed that counts. Of course, open source software is a plus here too.
Chanting that it doesn't work doesn't make it so and doesn't help.
There is a whole field of cryptography called "Steganograpy" that studies how to hide messages. Do you put valuables out of sight when you leave your car parked in public? Do you have a hidden key for your house/car, and if you really believe that obscurity doesn't work, why is it hidden? How many times have you heard wisecrackers on /. say that "microsoft will never release their source 'cause think of how many security holes would be immediately found." Look at the rapid increase in problems with Quake bots after source was released.
Obscurity is just one more layer of protection. Hopefully it isn't the only layer nor the strongest layer, but it does help. Obscurity is often a very easy layer to add so the cost/benefit ratio is very good.
Yes, obscurity most keeps out only the least skilled or people who want to spend only a little bit of time breaking something, but that is a huge group.
Ranting that "security through obscurity doesn't work" is a nice bummer-sticker type slogan. Like most other short rants, it is bogus and life is more complicated than that.
Instead, we should be calmly explaining that "open source is more secure despite not being obscure." We can take about how open source can be a plus as well as a minus. We can show emprical evidence, we can talk about how many "white hat" people can fix bugs, we can talk about how "too often closed source developers use obscurity as their only defense".
But, then again, a quick check of gnu.org shows a founding date of 1984 for both Gnu AND the FSF. This is STILL almost a whole decade *AFTER* Woz had started freely giving out the schematics for the Apple I at the homebrew club.
The FSF was founded in part to as a reaction against the proprietarization of software that had happened since the very late 70's. RMS realized that culture alone, wasn't/couldn't keep software "free", that you had to "fight fire with fire" use the proprietary weapon of copyright law.
While some BSD'ers will say that the GPL is too strict, it is clear that RMS and the GNU'ers helped maintain the "culture of openess".
RMS didn't invent free/open software, that concept was created spontaniously everywhere that computers cropped up. RMS just fought back, while most other people just accepted the new restiction with an occational grumble.
Not quite. "Assualt" is when you make a credible threat to someone, "battery" is when you actually hit someone. If I walk into a bar with a baseball bat and say "Danse, I've had it with you, I'm going to pound your head in", even if I don't actually do it, I can be charged with assault with a deadly weapon. Likewise, my right to throw a fist doesn't end where your nose begins, it ends where a reasonable person would consider it to be threatening.
On the other hand, if a 10 year old comes up to a pro football player and says "you lost the game! I'm going to beat you up", and starts hitting him wildly with his fists, chances are neither assualt nor battery could be charged.
Before cars, you knew your neighbors, you pretty much had to. You knew the faces of everyone withing a 5 minute walk of your house, and often you knew the history and relationships between them. With cars, 30 seconds after you have left your driveway, you are little better off than if you were in a town 100 miles away.
When a crime happened, the criminal was almost aways someone within an "easy walk" from the victim, which meant that the word would get around and often the criminal would be punished without the police even getting involved. Now, I can easily drive to a town 100 miles from here, kill someone, and drive back. No one would notice that I was gone for the afternoon, no one where the victim lived would notice a stranger from out of town. Solving crimes are much harder now.
Think of all the crimes that are commited directly with cars (road rage, drunk driving, etc.) or would not be easy without them such as most robberies.
With a car, if I have a serious problem, I can just pick up and move across town, or across the country quickly and easily. Instead of working out your problems, you leave your problems behind.
Before there were cars, the church was the focal point of social interaction. It was the only way that you could easily get to see everyone you wanted to see, and you had to see even people you didn't want to.
Before cars, you lived near your extended family, you knew if there were strangers in the neighborhood, you knew your grocer. There was a real "community".
Before cars, we all got a lot more excersize. We consumed a lot less energy and raw materials.
Ok, so do I think cars are evil? No. But I think that TV gets blamed for a lot more problems than it deserves and cars get blamed for far fewer. We like cars. We would have a hard time living without it. OTOH, we can imaging living without a TV.
If this situation had been reversed, I bet it would have been all over /.
Nethack?!? Well you *are* a young'n. Back in *my* day we had The Mines of Moria on the CDC Plato system. (Late 70's) and it was, uh, well, graphical, multi-user and you played with folks from all over the country. Anyone who plays HoMM would immediately recongize it.
My father back in the 50's, on the other hand, got stuck with this new game called "Adventure". Plugh. (One of his roomates at MIT helped write it.)
Actually, what amazes me is how good games just keep getting reincarnated. Yeah, they are *much* flashier now a days, but the themes are the same.