They also have a tour you can take of the off-site facilities where they store exhbitis they don't have room for in the main facilitiy. There's some really cool stuff there. When I was there (at least a decade ago), they had a lot of the experimental WW2 Axis planes.
The hilight was a one-man japanese bomber. To allow the pilot to protect his tail, they had a gun mounted in back. He would look through a periscope that pointed backwards to see what he was shooting at. To steer the gun he would wiggle his butt.
See the question becomes whether corporations benefit more from unregulated wi-fi or from regulated wi-fi. Think about how much money all the telecom carriers sunk into 3G cellular network spectrum. That's what you get from regulated airwaves. I think you'd be hard pressed to argue that all that money blown on the spectrum was beneficial to corporations.
I suspect that all of these things will get resolved by people coordinating their networks with eachother in an effort to avoid mutually assured destruction. If a McDonalds and a Startbucks are right next to eachother and have wireless, it's not to the advantage of either for their to be interference, etc.
I posted about this in my blog the other day. I made some quick and dirty estimates about how competitive we can conceivably be. The minimum a family of 4 needs is in the neighborhood of $50K a year to have tansportation, a house, food, clothing, insurance, etc, and that is a fairly conservative estimate. That price is for a modest house, a pair of mid 90's used toyotas, etc. It might be possible to live on less, but you certainly aren't going to be saving money for college, retirement, etc.
Now, a well paid programmer in India makes $8000/year and lives well on that. So, if both parents were working in a family of 4 it's $16K vs. $50K. Even if you assume that they'd be willing to pay twice as much to have a local worker, that's only $32K, still way below muster.
For some perspective, $50K a year would be roughly $12/hr for each of the workers. I'm not totally familiar with the wages of union plumbers but dug up a $25/hr wage when I asked google. So, do you want to be a union plumber, a job than cannot possibly be moved overseas, or a coder? Why go to college and collect a huge debt when you can go to a trade school and make far better money?
See here's the thing that gets interesting. There are two pieces of the Linux defense that could cause this thing to fall apart:
1) A judge could rule the viral implications of the GPL to be invalid. Certainly copyright gives them exclusive rights over things and they can license it under terms, it's a grey area that their license can compel you to change the license of your software.
2) The judge could rule that, though individuals at SCO contributed, that overall SCO is not liable for the actions of those individuals. Essentially this defense would be the "left hand didn't know what the right hand was doing" principle. That SCO never conciously chose to distribute their IP inside of Linux.
It still won't effect the state of Linux because the code, once revealed in court, can be eliminated if it is a violation.
See the thing is, attorneys cost money. May as well use the licensing to get your money. Also it makes you look confident that you will win which doesn't hurt the stock price.
My thought, is that if SCO starts going to companies using Linux and threatening them saying they will sue if they don't license their code, the correct response is, "show me the code." If I'm not mistaken they have to proove you KNOWINGLY violated their copyright, and given the legally indeterminate nature of this case right now, that doesn't seem plausible.
Maybe I should go and claim that my IP is in Linux too. It's not, but as long as nobody else knows that for certain, maybe I can get a few litigously nervous companies to write me nice checks.
Remember how long it took to get Microsoft into court, let alone get something vaguely resembling a ruling? Courts are slow. We'll be lucky if this is resolved in 5 years. In the mean time SCO can make a pretty penny on FUD and legal threats to companies. It sucks, but that's the legal system for ya.
album sales are time tested, you can't even give one example of someone who has had success with this business model you have more or less dreamed up
A business model isn't a failure if nobody's tried it. People have only begun to experiment with this sort of thing because they are afraid to risk losing what little bit of a shirt they have on Sure, album sales have been a time tested success, but whether they can continue to be in this age, is very questionable.
Yes, the guys numbers have been pulled out of someplace I don't want to contemplate, but the notion of a subscription music service isn't a bad one. Though I'd suggest the better way to do this is to consolidate resources under a music label. Essentially I subscribe to this already as I have an emusic subscription, mostly for my interest in bands under the Metropolis label.
They are zealots but I don't think you can say that their promises were faulty. Remember to distinguish between the Open Source folks and the Free Software folks. Free Software is all about making sure that the code is always free as in liberty. They don't care about making money, or code quality, etc, it's about their vision of software freedom. It tries to create a level playing field for all people who use a certain code base, insuring that nobody can make it proprietary. This isn't about free as in beer software, that just tends to be the way it happens.
In fact though, if you license your software under the GPL, you may also license it under a more or less restrictive license. You, as the copyright holder, have the power to release a copyrighted work under multiple licenses. The code you release under GPL will always have the GPL applied to it, but you can alter the direction of your proprietary version and never have to release it to the community.
The GPL's purpose is not to make impossible to make money off of software. I would argue that it, in fact, makes it easier to make money off software than a BSD style license.
Say for example, you write some great code widget and you decide to open source it. You decide to use the GPL. Now, some company comes to you and says, we'd like to use this piece of software, but alas, we can't GPL our software. So, you offer to license them a copy of the software under different terms for a few. They likely get cheap software, and the community benefits from you have a little extra cash to spend time working on your widget.
Now, take this same situation and use a BSD style license. You release your code, that company takes it, and they may or may not contribute it back to the community. The code costs them nothing and you get no financial benefit for your work. It becomes harder for you to spend the time working on the project.
And I suspect most of us feel the same way...
on
LGPL is Viral for Java
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· Score: 4, Insightful
The problem here is that the technicality of this section of the LGPL and the FSF's interpretation of it are not in sync with 98% of the people using and releasing code under the LGPL. I've used LGPL code and seeing as the jars were libraries it didn't even occurr to me that this would be an issue.
This causes uncertainty over the nature of LGPL software right now. Would a court of law agree with this interpretation? Now I'm left with an odd decision. Do I gut my code under the presumption that this FSF lawyer is right, or do I take my chances that a court will interpret this as the vast majority of the community has.
Open source software lives by the certainty of the licensing it uses. If we can't trust the interpretation of the licenses, then we can't feel confident in working with this code. The FSF is risking a serious blow to the open source community.
well, provided you only backup once then the math works. If you continually do backups you have to keep buying new media. Ultimately it depends on what your wanting to do. One time backups make sense on DVD, but incremental routine backups are a pain that way.
Prices for hard drives are so low that it really is cheaper and less hassle to just backup data onto a second hard drive. The only problem you run into is that if you aren't disciplined about it and start putting data on your backup drive it becomes rather worthless in its backup capacity.
Much cheaper than tape, and with incremental backups I can do nightly backups of my whole system.
Yes, copyright law is not vague, but it doesn't say, to my knowledge, that you can't download a song from a P2P network and listen to it without the copyright holder's permission. Can you site the specific part of copyright law that makes this behavior illegal? On the other hand, it does say that the person who gave you that file in the first place could not do so legally providing that he met the qualifications of more than 10 copies or $2500 value.
Is it true that some people no longer pay for their music because they can get it for free? Yes. But there is an inverse trend which the RIAA tries desperately to ignore because it hurts their business. That trend is people who are actually buying more music because of the ease with which they can try out new music through sharing. It is similar to the pseudo-legal trading of tapes that happened before this, but on a much grander scale.
The RIAA's problem though is that if they do not control the distribution of music, they have no more power. They've been able to create contracts that effectively enslave artists because, for the longest time, they were the only show in town for getting your name out there. Now, this is changing with word of mouth becoming more and more powerful as a means of marketing. Why sacrifice your artistic integrity and your wallet when you can produce your own music on your own terms.
Eventually labels will come to realize the power of this new distribution channel and take advantage of it. The profits for the labels will be lower, but it's still likely to be lucrative business, and it's going to improve the average livelihood of musicians at the expense of the megastars and the old style labels.
I mean, if they are only concerned about people doing it for financial gain, then this is a silly law. Why would you pay a pirate for music on-line when you can download it all for free:)
Though it does bring up the interesting question of when trading becomes "public". If I'm trading with a select group of friends of mine, does that cross into the bounds of this law? Perhaps the differentiator is that the public presumes your explicit lack of knowledge of who's accessing your files.
No, you wouldn't technically be in violation. It says you are in trouble if you provide the ability for the public to copy more than 10 copies at a value of more than $2,500. As long as you aren't providing access to this stuff to the public, then it's not effecting you.
My thinking is that you can be considered directly responsible if:
1) you intentionally contribute to an act 2) you knowingly allow an act to help that you could prevent
I don't consider hosting a freenet node to apply in either of these cases. #1 is an obvious close and shut case. You post kiddies you download kiddies, they throw you in a dark prison cell, no problem.
As far as #2 because of Freenet's intentional design, if you host a node, you cannot possibly choose what content you allow or disallow. If you host it in the interests of giving dissidents a place to post anonymously, you risk kiddie porn and terrorism plans being served as well. It has substantial positive legal benefits even if it does has some potential illegal use.
Okay, I chose a bad example of companies for illustrating my point. I meant for these companies in the role of common carrier. They have huge data networks that are constantly streaming data that originates from thousands of networks. Some of that data, I guarantee, is illicity, but AT&T can't differetiate between what is and what isn't.
The feds: We have reason to believe your service was used to transmit/facillitrate kiddie porn
You: Really? How can you tell?
The feds: ummmm... err...
Given that the data on your machine is encrypted such that not even you can access it, there's only one possible way for them to know you had child porn going through your server, and that is to explicitly request it through your server. This is entrapment because that data may or may not have been there until they requested it from you.
Sure, maybe they could get into your system and decrypt the data, but they'd need a warrant to do so and that can only be achieved on a basis of reasonable suspicion. Why would they suspect you over any of thousands of other nodes?
The Feds: we need a warrant to search Joe's computer
If willfull blindness is not a defense, then how come Sprint, AT&T, etc, haven't been prosecuted for carry child pornography? How is this any different than that?
Also, let's go with your theory that anybody could be charged. So are they going to go prosecute millions of people for what might be on their computers? Seeing as freenet has substantial legal uses, there's no way they are going to make the software itself illegal.
Well let's see, if you distributed the source of the file, you'd be in compliance. If you distributed the binary without the source, you'd be out of compliance, but who would want it? Yeah, I trust some version of software I downloaded over a P2P network that refuses to give me source code.
So what else would you do? Modify it? Okay fine, modify it. Then what? How am I going to know that this file even exists to download?
Ultimately something like Freenet doesn't really do anything to GPL software because the fundamental thing that freenet alters, distribution, is already completely kosher under the GPL.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes. Many of them. MBA's make themselves sound in the know about things by quoting what Gartner says.
I Am Not A Lawyer... You need a lawyer. Hire one and ask him, not Slashdot.
1) You use an internet cafe or wireless hotspot that takes cash payment for the time that you use
2) You use a free wireless access network (you know trading MP3's while at the baseball game mentioned in recent post)
3) You use somebody else's network (An unsecured wireless network, etc)
4) Your ISP doesn't keep good records
I imagine most of these people can eventually be traced to a person, but I'm sure more than a few are getting away with it.
They also have a tour you can take of the off-site facilities where they store exhbitis they don't have room for in the main facilitiy. There's some really cool stuff there. When I was there (at least a decade ago), they had a lot of the experimental WW2 Axis planes.
The hilight was a one-man japanese bomber. To allow the pilot to protect his tail, they had a gun mounted in back. He would look through a periscope that pointed backwards to see what he was shooting at. To steer the gun he would wiggle his butt.
See the question becomes whether corporations benefit more from unregulated wi-fi or from regulated wi-fi. Think about how much money all the telecom carriers sunk into 3G cellular network spectrum. That's what you get from regulated airwaves. I think you'd be hard pressed to argue that all that money blown on the spectrum was beneficial to corporations.
I suspect that all of these things will get resolved by people coordinating their networks with eachother in an effort to avoid mutually assured destruction. If a McDonalds and a Startbucks are right next to eachother and have wireless, it's not to the advantage of either for their to be interference, etc.
I posted about this in my blog the other day. I made some quick and dirty estimates about how competitive we can conceivably be. The minimum a family of 4 needs is in the neighborhood of $50K a year to have tansportation, a house, food, clothing, insurance, etc, and that is a fairly conservative estimate. That price is for a modest house, a pair of mid 90's used toyotas, etc. It might be possible to live on less, but you certainly aren't going to be saving money for college, retirement, etc.
Now, a well paid programmer in India makes $8000/year and lives well on that. So, if both parents were working in a family of 4 it's $16K vs. $50K. Even if you assume that they'd be willing to pay twice as much to have a local worker, that's only $32K, still way below muster.
For some perspective, $50K a year would be roughly $12/hr for each of the workers. I'm not totally familiar with the wages of union plumbers but dug up a $25/hr wage when I asked google. So, do you want to be a union plumber, a job than cannot possibly be moved overseas, or a coder? Why go to college and collect a huge debt when you can go to a trade school and make far better money?
See here's the thing that gets interesting. There are two pieces of the Linux defense that could cause this thing to fall apart:
1) A judge could rule the viral implications of the GPL to be invalid. Certainly copyright gives them exclusive rights over things and they can license it under terms, it's a grey area that their license can compel you to change the license of your software.
2) The judge could rule that, though individuals at SCO contributed, that overall SCO is not liable for the actions of those individuals. Essentially this defense would be the "left hand didn't know what the right hand was doing" principle. That SCO never conciously chose to distribute their IP inside of Linux.
It still won't effect the state of Linux because the code, once revealed in court, can be eliminated if it is a violation.
See the thing is, attorneys cost money. May as well use the licensing to get your money. Also it makes you look confident that you will win which doesn't hurt the stock price.
My thought, is that if SCO starts going to companies using Linux and threatening them saying they will sue if they don't license their code, the correct response is, "show me the code." If I'm not mistaken they have to proove you KNOWINGLY violated their copyright, and given the legally indeterminate nature of this case right now, that doesn't seem plausible.
Maybe I should go and claim that my IP is in Linux too. It's not, but as long as nobody else knows that for certain, maybe I can get a few litigously nervous companies to write me nice checks.
Remember how long it took to get Microsoft into court, let alone get something vaguely resembling a ruling? Courts are slow. We'll be lucky if this is resolved in 5 years. In the mean time SCO can make a pretty penny on FUD and legal threats to companies. It sucks, but that's the legal system for ya.
album sales are time tested, you can't even give one example of someone who has had success with this business model you have more or less dreamed up
A business model isn't a failure if nobody's tried it. People have only begun to experiment with this sort of thing because they are afraid to risk losing what little bit of a shirt they have on Sure, album sales have been a time tested success, but whether they can continue to be in this age, is very questionable.
Yes, the guys numbers have been pulled out of someplace I don't want to contemplate, but the notion of a subscription music service isn't a bad one. Though I'd suggest the better way to do this is to consolidate resources under a music label. Essentially I subscribe to this already as I have an emusic subscription, mostly for my interest in bands under the Metropolis label.
They are zealots but I don't think you can say that their promises were faulty. Remember to distinguish between the Open Source folks and the Free Software folks. Free Software is all about making sure that the code is always free as in liberty. They don't care about making money, or code quality, etc, it's about their vision of software freedom. It tries to create a level playing field for all people who use a certain code base, insuring that nobody can make it proprietary. This isn't about free as in beer software, that just tends to be the way it happens.
In fact though, if you license your software under the GPL, you may also license it under a more or less restrictive license. You, as the copyright holder, have the power to release a copyrighted work under multiple licenses. The code you release under GPL will always have the GPL applied to it, but you can alter the direction of your proprietary version and never have to release it to the community.
The GPL's purpose is not to make impossible to make money off of software. I would argue that it, in fact, makes it easier to make money off software than a BSD style license.
Say for example, you write some great code widget and you decide to open source it. You decide to use the GPL. Now, some company comes to you and says, we'd like to use this piece of software, but alas, we can't GPL our software. So, you offer to license them a copy of the software under different terms for a few. They likely get cheap software, and the community benefits from you have a little extra cash to spend time working on your widget.
Now, take this same situation and use a BSD style license. You release your code, that company takes it, and they may or may not contribute it back to the community. The code costs them nothing and you get no financial benefit for your work. It becomes harder for you to spend the time working on the project.
The problem here is that the technicality of this section of the LGPL and the FSF's interpretation of it are not in sync with 98% of the people using and releasing code under the LGPL. I've used LGPL code and seeing as the jars were libraries it didn't even occurr to me that this would be an issue.
This causes uncertainty over the nature of LGPL software right now. Would a court of law agree with this interpretation? Now I'm left with an odd decision. Do I gut my code under the presumption that this FSF lawyer is right, or do I take my chances that a court will interpret this as the vast majority of the community has.
Open source software lives by the certainty of the licensing it uses. If we can't trust the interpretation of the licenses, then we can't feel confident in working with this code. The FSF is risking a serious blow to the open source community.
well, provided you only backup once then the math works. If you continually do backups you have to keep buying new media. Ultimately it depends on what your wanting to do. One time backups make sense on DVD, but incremental routine backups are a pain that way.
Prices for hard drives are so low that it really is cheaper and less hassle to just backup data onto a second hard drive. The only problem you run into is that if you aren't disciplined about it and start putting data on your backup drive it becomes rather worthless in its backup capacity.
Much cheaper than tape, and with incremental backups I can do nightly backups of my whole system.
Yes, copyright law is not vague, but it doesn't say, to my knowledge, that you can't download a song from a P2P network and listen to it without the copyright holder's permission. Can you site the specific part of copyright law that makes this behavior illegal? On the other hand, it does say that the person who gave you that file in the first place could not do so legally providing that he met the qualifications of more than 10 copies or $2500 value.
Is it true that some people no longer pay for their music because they can get it for free? Yes. But there is an inverse trend which the RIAA tries desperately to ignore because it hurts their business. That trend is people who are actually buying more music because of the ease with which they can try out new music through sharing. It is similar to the pseudo-legal trading of tapes that happened before this, but on a much grander scale.
The RIAA's problem though is that if they do not control the distribution of music, they have no more power. They've been able to create contracts that effectively enslave artists because, for the longest time, they were the only show in town for getting your name out there. Now, this is changing with word of mouth becoming more and more powerful as a means of marketing. Why sacrifice your artistic integrity and your wallet when you can produce your own music on your own terms.
Eventually labels will come to realize the power of this new distribution channel and take advantage of it. The profits for the labels will be lower, but it's still likely to be lucrative business, and it's going to improve the average livelihood of musicians at the expense of the megastars and the old style labels.
I mean, if they are only concerned about people doing it for financial gain, then this is a silly law. Why would you pay a pirate for music on-line when you can download it all for free :)
Wow, aren't you quite the socialite :).
Though it does bring up the interesting question of when trading becomes "public". If I'm trading with a select group of friends of mine, does that cross into the bounds of this law? Perhaps the differentiator is that the public presumes your explicit lack of knowledge of who's accessing your files.
Thank you, that's what I get for trying to read legal documents first thing in the morning. Now where did I put my coffee?
But still it holds true that you have to make it accessible to the public.
No, you wouldn't technically be in violation. It says you are in trouble if you provide the ability for the public to copy more than 10 copies at a value of more than $2,500. As long as you aren't providing access to this stuff to the public, then it's not effecting you.
My thinking is that you can be considered directly responsible if:
1) you intentionally contribute to an act
2) you knowingly allow an act to help that you could prevent
I don't consider hosting a freenet node to apply in either of these cases. #1 is an obvious close and shut case. You post kiddies you download kiddies, they throw you in a dark prison cell, no problem.
As far as #2 because of Freenet's intentional design, if you host a node, you cannot possibly choose what content you allow or disallow. If you host it in the interests of giving dissidents a place to post anonymously, you risk kiddie porn and terrorism plans being served as well. It has substantial positive legal benefits even if it does has some potential illegal use.
Okay, I chose a bad example of companies for illustrating my point. I meant for these companies in the role of common carrier. They have huge data networks that are constantly streaming data that originates from thousands of networks. Some of that data, I guarantee, is illicity, but AT&T can't differetiate between what is and what isn't.
The feds: We have reason to believe your service was used to transmit/facillitrate kiddie porn
You: Really? How can you tell?
The feds: ummmm... err...
Given that the data on your machine is encrypted such that not even you can access it, there's only one possible way for them to know you had child porn going through your server, and that is to explicitly request it through your server. This is entrapment because that data may or may not have been there until they requested it from you.
Sure, maybe they could get into your system and decrypt the data, but they'd need a warrant to do so and that can only be achieved on a basis of reasonable suspicion. Why would they suspect you over any of thousands of other nodes?
The Feds: we need a warrant to search Joe's computer
The Judge: what evidence do you have?
The Feds: ummm... errr.
If willfull blindness is not a defense, then how come Sprint, AT&T, etc, haven't been prosecuted for carry child pornography? How is this any different than that?
Also, let's go with your theory that anybody could be charged. So are they going to go prosecute millions of people for what might be on their computers? Seeing as freenet has substantial legal uses, there's no way they are going to make the software itself illegal.
Well let's see, if you distributed the source of the file, you'd be in compliance. If you distributed the binary without the source, you'd be out of compliance, but who would want it? Yeah, I trust some version of software I downloaded over a P2P network that refuses to give me source code.
So what else would you do? Modify it? Okay fine, modify it. Then what? How am I going to know that this file even exists to download?
Ultimately something like Freenet doesn't really do anything to GPL software because the fundamental thing that freenet alters, distribution, is already completely kosher under the GPL.