Ah, but you're forgetting a crucial data point -- that the vast majorities of suits that the RIAA brings are settled quickly, without the defendant hiring a lawyer. So, the RIAA can keep raking in that dough.
But that only continues to work as long as they show that they're willing to take the matters to court, even if they get reamed on legal fees. If they back down because it's not worth it, the RIAA letters lose their teeth. So, they are being rational actors to spend $40,000 to recover $4,000 -- provided that they're bringing less than a tenth of the cases to court.
So the real question is, does Viacom get this[...]?
Considering that they just entered a deal with Joost for online content, and this lawsuit is probably a means to remove their most likely back-channel competitor? Yeah, I'd say they get it.
How about when Hillary, an unelected non-representative person with 0 government power, as first lady requested Craig Livingstone to obtain the FBI records of 707 political enemies?
So, you're perfectly free to believe that she was involved, but you should be aware that there's no evidence that it's true -- and accusing people without evidence is my pet peeve against the current administration.
He's not talking about the braces construct, he's talking about the -p option to mkdir. Just because you can't read doesn't mean the article is factually incorrect.
It's because they don't just describe a grammar. They also define a conceptual arrangement for the data, and can be used to express what the common types of the document are. If all they cared about was syntactic grammar, BNF forms would be absolutely fine -- and indeed you can find references to arguments about whether to use DTDs or BNFs for some internet XML structures where syntax was the main concern.
But BNFs by their nature don't have a formal means to differentiate between syntactic rules that define a major structural component of the document, and rules which are present simply to encode a restriction on the data format. Schema structures were designed to formally encode the structural information as well.
If a software developer wants to release his code under the GPLv3, that's the developer's choice, not Stallman's.
Well, yes and no. The problem here is that Stallman and the FSF have argued for quite some time that developers who wish to use GPLv2 should use a license that allows the software to be released under "either version 2 of the License, or any later version," using the argument that any later version will be similar in spirit to GPLv2.
If a developer follows this good-faith argument, but decides after GPLv3 is released that the new version is not, in fact, similar in spirit (and this ongoing argument kind of indicates that there is some question on that point), they're kind of SOL now -- someone (perhaps even Stallman) can take the code and relicense under v3 against the authors' wishes.
I think that's a problem; by trying to get people to release under "any later version", Stallman has implied that he will make a good-faith effort to ensure that the majority of developers will see v3 as not substantially different than v2. I don't think he's done that, and I don't think he has any interest in doing so.
A very reputable pollster recently showed with (according to him) 95% certainty that up to 650,000 Iraqi civilians have died since the war began, far exceeding the "official" body count. So I include myself among those people who believe that the real body count far exceeds the official one, which stands right now at 48,000 - a lower number indeed, but one that should still offend you.
Ugh. I can't believe I'm putting myself in the position of arguing for this bloodthirsty administration. But that number of 650,000 makes me think that they're counting vastly different things. I suspect that that number is actually counting the total number of people who've died in Iraq -- even from natural processes -- in the last four years.
Think about it -- what was the death rate in pre-war Iraq? Data from the World Book shows it was around 6 per 1000 people in 2002. In a country with 29 million people, that works out to 174,000 a year. Multiply that by the three-and-a-half years of war, and you come up with 609,000. Add in the US casualty figures, and you're roughly at the same number that Zogby's coming up with.
The casualty numbers out of Iraq are, as you point out, offensive. But let's not make it worse by clouding the statistics with non-war-related deaths.
I don't think people forget that at all. The problem is that the GPLv2 was appropriate not just to the realm of free software, but to the intent of open source as well, and as such people were able to appreciate and use GPLv2 without buying into the Four Freedoms.
In essence, the implementation was appropriate not just to one algorithm but two, and the revised implementation is more suitable to one algorithm but is less suitable to the other. It's hardly surprising that programmers would claim that this makes the revised implementation less suitable in general.
Sadly, the outcome, as in software, will be to fork the project. Developers who are more in the free software camp will switch readily to GPLv3; those who are more in the open source camp will use GPLv2. The result will be license proliferation, and a serious confusion about what "GPL" means. In the long run, I think it's going to be a real problem for the FSF.
You can do this yourself by charting (by your best estimate) the explosion of piracy since the advent of P2P and comparing it to the (largely flat) sales figures. Even if half of the people who use P2P end up buying the material, it would have caused a drastic rise in legitimate sales that just isn't there.
If there are no other factors affecting sales, yes. Unfortunately, the years where P2P usage has been significant have also seen:
ClearChannel's domination of the radio markets, resulting in considerably less variety of artists in airplay; as has been pointed out before, there's only so many times a teenager will buy the same album.
An explosion of DVD purchasing, resulting in a larger proportion of a person's entertainment budget going to movies as opposed to music.
The rise of devices which make it much easier to carry around your entire music library, resulting in more time spent listening to the music you already own and less time spent listening to new artists on the radio.
Imagine that P2P didn't exist. In what direction would sales be affected simply by the above three factors?
That's not to say that P2P hasn't affected the music market adversely, but the argument that slumping sales must be attributed to P2P is largely posturing by the RIAA, and not something that can easily bear close scrutiny.
The promise that a product is defect-free or suited to a specific purpose is called a warranty. The EULA you clicked through when installing, like nearly all software, limits any warranty rather severely. You can't get something for nothing, because you expressly agreed that you wouldn't get something for nothing.
The last flight I took was from South Africa to Boston, with a few hours layover in Amsterdam. The thought of flying for two days without toothpaste leaves a pasty film in my mouth.
It can happen through a few avenues; one possibility is that the plaintiff failed to show up for his court hearing to plead his case. Another possibility is that the judge decided that it would be impossible for the plaintiff to fix the problems with pleading his case; that there is no possible way to make an argument which would actually be correct under the law.
One recent example of the latter is Daniel Wallace's suit against the FSF, Red Hat, and IBM, arguing that the GPL was creating a price-fixing conspiracy, and hence was hindering competition in the operating system market. After Wallace had made a number of attempts to reword his argument to address the court's concerns, the case was finally dismissed with prejudice. The judge noted that Wallace had failed to make an argument that the GPL actually caused injury, and went on to say that the GPL encouraged competition by lowering the barriers to entry, and it would thus be impossible for the plaintiff to make a case that the GPL was discouraging competition.
That article is your exemplar for Daniel Lyons' "bashing Microsoft and promoting Apple"? Really? The one where he spends most of the time critiquing open-source software, and the only Apple-related line is "But for whatever reason, most customers will continue paying for Windows, or switch to Apple Computer's Mac OS."?
Well, then we should recognize that Groklaw isn't really a lay blog either. It's a blog focused on legal issues related to open source, and in particular the SCO-IBM case. As such, there's going to be legal jargon that the authors expect people know (or at least recognize), just as Slashdot features technical jargon that the authors expect the readership to be able to handle.
Blindly quoting from a legal blog and slam it here for being jargon makes as much sense as slamming a Slashdot article for being jargon-y on a political website.
I don't think so. Movies used to make most of their cash at the box office, but now most don't break even until you add in DVDs and TV licensing. A recent Slate article did an analysis of the numbers.
...visit http://www.starwarsmusicaledition.com/ This group has performed a one-episode version (just A New Hope) both at MIT and at the Celebration III convention this last April.
Let's not engage in hyperbole here. You only need the information to get to the new airport in time for the next time you go through security. I, for one, rarely go through security twice in a day. In practice, if the updates take about four hours to propogate, all will be well. Hardly "instantaneous".
And if they don't get there in time, the worst-case scenario should be that you end up going through the same security rundown everyone else goes through.
Labs, of course, generally require a key or an ID with clearance for the newer ones, but the buildings that they're in are open access, at least during the day, and because everything's connected, it's definitely not hard to get inside most of main campus.
What makes you think the Stata Center is any different? During the day, the doors are unlocked, and anyone can wander in and look around the large open common areas, all the way up to the pub on the fourth floor. During the night, the outside doors are locked just like all the other doors on the eastern side of campus, but if you have an MIT Card you can get inside. Plus, there's no card access needed when entering from the connected buildings like 36 or the basement of 26. The only time special (RFID) access is needed is to get into the lab areas.
RMS's complaints aren't really of the level of security, it's the use of RFID to enforce it.
I think the broadcast episodes were ineligible -- for example, "Serenity" was nom'd for the 2003 Hugos.
So, out of just 14 filmed episodes of Firefly, three have been nominated for Hugo awards. I think that says something, but I doubt Fox is listening.:-)
You do know that South Carolina seceded in response to Lincoln's election, before he was even sworn in, right?
Which shouldn't be that surprising, since Lincoln wasn't even on the election ballot in most of the southern states. As far as the South was concerned, Lincoln only won by courting the votes of a handful of the larger states with more electoral votes, despite getting less than half of the popular vote. Sound familiar?:-)
(Actually, I believe all the southern states had seceded before Lincoln's inauguration.)
Slashdot Mirror
"I was off by more than a factor of three as I was only counting home games."
Odd. Do all the MLB teams play three times as many away games than home ones?
Ah, but you're forgetting a crucial data point -- that the vast majorities of suits that the RIAA brings are settled quickly, without the defendant hiring a lawyer. So, the RIAA can keep raking in that dough.
But that only continues to work as long as they show that they're willing to take the matters to court, even if they get reamed on legal fees. If they back down because it's not worth it, the RIAA letters lose their teeth. So, they are being rational actors to spend $40,000 to recover $4,000 -- provided that they're bringing less than a tenth of the cases to court.
Considering that they just entered a deal with Joost for online content, and this lawsuit is probably a means to remove their most likely back-channel competitor? Yeah, I'd say they get it.
Average corporate phone number.
So, you're perfectly free to believe that she was involved, but you should be aware that there's no evidence that it's true -- and accusing people without evidence is my pet peeve against the current administration.
He's not talking about the braces construct, he's talking about the -p option to mkdir. Just because you can't read doesn't mean the article is factually incorrect.
It's because they don't just describe a grammar. They also define a conceptual arrangement for the data, and can be used to express what the common types of the document are. If all they cared about was syntactic grammar, BNF forms would be absolutely fine -- and indeed you can find references to arguments about whether to use DTDs or BNFs for some internet XML structures where syntax was the main concern.
But BNFs by their nature don't have a formal means to differentiate between syntactic rules that define a major structural component of the document, and rules which are present simply to encode a restriction on the data format. Schema structures were designed to formally encode the structural information as well.
Well, yes and no. The problem here is that Stallman and the FSF have argued for quite some time that developers who wish to use GPLv2 should use a license that allows the software to be released under "either version 2 of the License, or any later version," using the argument that any later version will be similar in spirit to GPLv2.
If a developer follows this good-faith argument, but decides after GPLv3 is released that the new version is not, in fact, similar in spirit (and this ongoing argument kind of indicates that there is some question on that point), they're kind of SOL now -- someone (perhaps even Stallman) can take the code and relicense under v3 against the authors' wishes.
I think that's a problem; by trying to get people to release under "any later version", Stallman has implied that he will make a good-faith effort to ensure that the majority of developers will see v3 as not substantially different than v2. I don't think he's done that, and I don't think he has any interest in doing so.
Ugh. I can't believe I'm putting myself in the position of arguing for this bloodthirsty administration. But that number of 650,000 makes me think that they're counting vastly different things. I suspect that that number is actually counting the total number of people who've died in Iraq -- even from natural processes -- in the last four years.
Think about it -- what was the death rate in pre-war Iraq? Data from the World Book shows it was around 6 per 1000 people in 2002. In a country with 29 million people, that works out to 174,000 a year. Multiply that by the three-and-a-half years of war, and you come up with 609,000. Add in the US casualty figures, and you're roughly at the same number that Zogby's coming up with.
The casualty numbers out of Iraq are, as you point out, offensive. But let's not make it worse by clouding the statistics with non-war-related deaths.
I don't think people forget that at all. The problem is that the GPLv2 was appropriate not just to the realm of free software, but to the intent of open source as well, and as such people were able to appreciate and use GPLv2 without buying into the Four Freedoms.
In essence, the implementation was appropriate not just to one algorithm but two, and the revised implementation is more suitable to one algorithm but is less suitable to the other. It's hardly surprising that programmers would claim that this makes the revised implementation less suitable in general.
Sadly, the outcome, as in software, will be to fork the project. Developers who are more in the free software camp will switch readily to GPLv3; those who are more in the open source camp will use GPLv2. The result will be license proliferation, and a serious confusion about what "GPL" means. In the long run, I think it's going to be a real problem for the FSF.
If there are no other factors affecting sales, yes. Unfortunately, the years where P2P usage has been significant have also seen:
Imagine that P2P didn't exist. In what direction would sales be affected simply by the above three factors?
That's not to say that P2P hasn't affected the music market adversely, but the argument that slumping sales must be attributed to P2P is largely posturing by the RIAA, and not something that can easily bear close scrutiny.
The promise that a product is defect-free or suited to a specific purpose is called a warranty. The EULA you clicked through when installing, like nearly all software, limits any warranty rather severely. You can't get something for nothing, because you expressly agreed that you wouldn't get something for nothing.
The last flight I took was from South Africa to Boston, with a few hours layover in Amsterdam. The thought of flying for two days without toothpaste leaves a pasty film in my mouth.
It can happen through a few avenues; one possibility is that the plaintiff failed to show up for his court hearing to plead his case. Another possibility is that the judge decided that it would be impossible for the plaintiff to fix the problems with pleading his case; that there is no possible way to make an argument which would actually be correct under the law.
One recent example of the latter is Daniel Wallace's suit against the FSF, Red Hat, and IBM, arguing that the GPL was creating a price-fixing conspiracy, and hence was hindering competition in the operating system market. After Wallace had made a number of attempts to reword his argument to address the court's concerns, the case was finally dismissed with prejudice. The judge noted that Wallace had failed to make an argument that the GPL actually caused injury, and went on to say that the GPL encouraged competition by lowering the barriers to entry, and it would thus be impossible for the plaintiff to make a case that the GPL was discouraging competition.
I can tell you off the top of my head a rough number of Americans dead in Iraq (2200+), can you tell me the count from Bosnia or Mogadishu?
http://www.aiipowmia.com/other/hostilechron.html
Official count for the Mogadishu incursion is 14 KIA, 29 due to non-hostile activity. Bosnia's official count is zero.
That article is your exemplar for Daniel Lyons' "bashing Microsoft and promoting Apple"? Really? The one where he spends most of the time critiquing open-source software, and the only Apple-related line is "But for whatever reason, most customers will continue paying for Windows, or switch to Apple Computer's Mac OS."?
It might be, if it's true. As far as I can tell, the source for that seems to be "some guy on Slashdot".
The word "pro se" wasn't in the Slashdot article; it was in the linked article on Groklaw.
Well, then we should recognize that Groklaw isn't really a lay blog either. It's a blog focused on legal issues related to open source, and in particular the SCO-IBM case. As such, there's going to be legal jargon that the authors expect people know (or at least recognize), just as Slashdot features technical jargon that the authors expect the readership to be able to handle.
Blindly quoting from a legal blog and slam it here for being jargon makes as much sense as slamming a Slashdot article for being jargon-y on a political website.
I don't think so. Movies used to make most of their cash at the box office, but now most don't break even until you add in DVDs and TV licensing. A recent Slate article did an analysis of the numbers.
...visit http://www.starwarsmusicaledition.com/ This group has performed a one-episode version (just A New Hope) both at MIT and at the Celebration III convention this last April.
Let's not engage in hyperbole here. You only need the information to get to the new airport in time for the next time you go through security. I, for one, rarely go through security twice in a day. In practice, if the updates take about four hours to propogate, all will be well. Hardly "instantaneous".
And if they don't get there in time, the worst-case scenario should be that you end up going through the same security rundown everyone else goes through.
What makes you think the Stata Center is any different? During the day, the doors are unlocked, and anyone can wander in and look around the large open common areas, all the way up to the pub on the fourth floor. During the night, the outside doors are locked just like all the other doors on the eastern side of campus, but if you have an MIT Card you can get inside. Plus, there's no card access needed when entering from the connected buildings like 36 or the basement of 26. The only time special (RFID) access is needed is to get into the lab areas.
RMS's complaints aren't really of the level of security, it's the use of RFID to enforce it.
I think the broadcast episodes were ineligible -- for example, "Serenity" was nom'd for the 2003 Hugos.
:-)
So, out of just 14 filmed episodes of Firefly, three have been nominated for Hugo awards. I think that says something, but I doubt Fox is listening.
Which shouldn't be that surprising, since Lincoln wasn't even on the election ballot in most of the southern states. As far as the South was concerned, Lincoln only won by courting the votes of a handful of the larger states with more electoral votes, despite getting less than half of the popular vote. Sound familiar?
(Actually, I believe all the southern states had seceded before Lincoln's inauguration.)