Christmas Eve: Happily caroling along, the group of children and adults knocks on the door of an ASCAP-employed music licensing lawyer. The lawyer cuts them off in mid song and asks them for their names, also telling his wife to get a camera. He informs them that the company is willing to negotiate a reasonable licensing fee for the public performance of copyrighted Christmas Carols, in lieu of taking legal action against the group. Someone starts to laugh but stops short. The group is quiet for a moment. One of the children in the back says "Bah Humbug!" and they all start walking away, while the lawyer runs back inside to see what's taking his wife so long to get a picture of these music pirates.
At least in this case, there would probably be some psuedo-justice as, later that night, an overly hormonal teenager from the group throws a huge plastic Santa Claus through the damned snake's picture window (laughing all the way, ho ho ho).
IMHO, it's irresponsible to create a parody-in-bad-taste of a person or group you don't like, and associate it with a legitimate "hacker" security tools site. It's just as likely to sabotage your own reputation. as that of the target.
In another thread above, someone posted the url of an alleged copy of the data that was in the disputed directory. I don't know whether this is the actual content from the page but it seems likely.
Okay. Antialiasing looks nice until you actually decide to sit around doing development work all day. Anti-aliased fonts cause eye strain, because the fuzzies (instead of jaggies) make them look out of focus. Your eyes continuously try to compensate for by refocusing, ergo, increased eyestrain. And all the time you don't really notice -- who focuses their eyes consciously, really? -- and just think it looks better.
Anti-aliasing is appropriate for logos, low resolution rendering, graphics, etc. It is NOT appropriate for reading text from a screen. If your fonts are looking too jaggy, just go to a higher resolution. At 1680x1024, I can't see the pixels at all any more.
Communicator 4.51 crashes itself once every one or two days on my glibc Linux box. But it has taken down my computer twice. It somehow managed to effectively disable the keyboard and mouse, and take so many CPU cycles that the login prompt would time out before letting me enter my password through telnet or even a direct serial port console -- thus the machine was unable to be shut down properly, hence a crash. (why was it Communicator's fault? because it was in the middle of loading a page and it's the only application I've ever had this type of problem with)
Sometimes I don't know why I put up with it, espescially since it's the "least free" app I use on top of being unreliable. But SlashDot doesn't look as spiffy in Lynx.
NOT doubtful, totally true. You can't give anyone unlimited sublicensible rights to GPL'd software, unless you hold the copyright on 100 percent of its code. So, agreeing to the Yahoo agreement and posting GPL'd code on their servers would violate the GPL in most cases. The exception would be if you had written all of the code, in which case it would be legal, but Yahoo could also sell your work as proprietary while you were distributing it as GPL.
It is also true that you wouldn't be able to post another person's copyrighted material on their servers unless you had the same perpetual sublicensable modification and distribution rights as Yahoo is asking for (same issue, really.. because GPL only allows sublicensing under the terms of the GPL, which are more restrictive than Yahoo's agreement)
The issue here is NSI jerking someone around, which we're going to see a lot more of unless someone puts a stop to it. Publicizing a clear cut case of abuse of power, like this one, is a good start.
> Most Christians serve political Ayatollahs like > Pat Buchanan... > "Christians" don't want to "help" gays
Hmm. This is interesting, because you are talking about hundreds of millions of individuals with these blanket statements. Probably a million of them are openly gay and a few thousand march in gay rights parades. Several million of them have never heard of Pat Buchanan, because millions of them don't even speak any of the same languages as he does. Your definition of Christianity may exclude those non-US-non-right-wing-non-homophobic types, but don't go forcing your religionist views on... oh, nevermind.:)
> I've seen enough "Christian" literature to know > the truth: You people are bigots.
hehe... I was going to say something witty re: that quote, but it's not even necessary.
Unfortunately, filtering software is only as good as the broad category definitions it uses, and the people employed to apply those definitions and categorize the Internet. No matter how "precise" the definitions are, it's not clear what is porn and what is not. Most professional filtering software companies don't even try. They'll have a category for web sites that are "related to sex" or that "show nudity or explicit speech". But there are lots of sites related to sex education that might fall into these categories, or famous literature, or other types of information. The filtering companies sometimes attempt to make exceptions (like sex ed sites) but the software can never be perfect because the decisions are so subjective. IMHO they are only truly useful for companies who wish to monitor Internet-related nonproductivity and they have no place in a public instititution such as a library.
But to be fair and democratic about it, I think individual communities should decide whether they want their libraries to be "filtered" if they feel it's necessary. Perhaps federal funds could even help libraries implement filters if the citizens want that. But it is bullsh** for the federal government to quietly usurp that decision-making power by withholding needed technology funds to communities with different values.
Sorry, no person, company or software can answer these questions. The "protect the children" legislative push is just political posturing to get votes from the seemingly uneducated masses.
RMS is probably proud of them -- they're making money and the source code is still free (even if it hasn't been released in a bit too long)
Re:Debian and KDE, the current situation (IIRC)
on
qt 2.0 released
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· Score: 1
hmm. well of course I was a little bit inaccurate with that statement, too vague. Of course, X11 being a "standard system library" on most any UNIX distribution, is an exception. Regardless, you could apply the GPL to XFree86 any time you like under its current license.
If a GPL licensed product is not complete without including a non-free component (not including basic system libraries) it cannot be distributed. That's what I should have said.
RMS is neither hostile nor disagreeable. I have had a few short discussions with the man and I found him calm, extremely rational, and prone to rant (only about as often as I do). He has some interesting and somewhat revolutionary ideas about the nature of intellectual property and copyrights, and some very down to earth ideas about practicality and doing the right thing.
He's not in it for popularity or obscurity, or to make more people use free software. His goals are clear and obvious after hearing him and speaking with him: to promote personal freedom and mutually beneficial sharing among people who develop and use software (please note that sharing!=communism, no matter how you look at it). He tends to mostly ignore (sometimes alienate) people who don't seem to believe in sharing and freedom, presumably because he's found that it does little good to argue with them about such basic concepts.
If "his movement suddenly became successful and everybody adopted his principles," we would operate in an intellectual near-utopia of cooperative advancement. It might take a long time or might (due to the greedy selfish nature of so many humans who need to maximize their profits by putting their whole community at a disadvantage) never happen, but the more people who do understand RMS's beliefs and the base goals of the FSF, the closer we are.
Re:You have to admire this guy...
on
RMS Responds
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· Score: 1
RMS is not "insisting on having some say in the naming of the Linux OS [sic]".
With widespread adoption of Linux-based systems, corporations (SUSE, RedHat) and hence individual users (You) are seemingly forgetting the roots of what brought us this great operating system. Giving the GNU project credit for making this possible is necessary and appropriate. Nobody ever said that RMS was Mr. Humility, and I don't think he should be. Maybe you'd rather hear, "oh, that compiler and complete set of system utilities, that was nothing, you don't need to give GNU credit, I just did it to have something to give away to y'all". But if that was the kind of guy RMS was, the Free Software movement might never have existed at all. It's not just about the FSF writing software to give it away, it's about WHY they do it.
And Linux is very nice, but it's NOT an operating system. RMS isn't trying to change the name of Linux. He does consistantly correct people when they inaccurately state or imply that Linux is an OS. He does correctly realize that the GNU project is undercredited for its contributions to commercial "Linux distributions" such as RedHat. Anyone who knows about Linux and Linus Torvalds should also know about GNU/FSF and RMS. Linus is very media friendly, but GNU contributed a lot more to that free operating system you're using than he did.
RedHat and SUSE probably won't change their name to GNU/Linux. In fact, I looked through the CD booklet that came with a SUSE distribution and couldn't even find one mention of GNU or the FSF! (RedHat had one, at least) I trashed it because I don't like people who are ungrateful. I heard it's a nice operating system, but I have some standards, like don't exploit other peoples work and not give them credit. Who cares that the GPL doesn't oblige them to pay or mention the FSF? If they're selling GNU software, they should say so and donate a portion of the profits to the FSF. But some companies demonstratably don't care about being fair and doing the right thing if it's not in a contract, and some people don't mind supporting those companies with their money. Ridiculous.
Most paid coders spend their time working on projects which could be nearly as profitable if they were open sourced. The coders who work for OS and application software vendors would still get paid, as long as the company could switch to a service and support based model instead of IP-value model. That's what these companies are doing anyhow, but they charge for the service and support by incrementing the version number and making you purchase some secret bits on a CD.
The majority of programmers make money on custom/inhouse projects, database interfaces and the like. The only disadvantage of open sourcing and releasing this type of project is that you lose a possible technological advantage over a competitor. But you may also gain efficiency and free bug fixes from the community they will have created. Let's say you run a dry cleaning chain... doesn't it make more sense to compete on the basis of cleaning quality and turnaround time instead of secret computer technology?
Re:Debian and KDE, the current situation (IIRC)
on
qt 2.0 released
·
· Score: 1
... but KDE is not a 'product' without the QT library, so you can't just say that they're seperate because functionally, they aren't.
GPL essentially says that GPL'd code can not be made to be reliant on non-GPL'd code. If it's not a product until you add non-GPL stuff, it can't be distributed.
As a programmer, I rather like depositing "recognition" in my bank account. But working on something which helps people is good, too -- as long as the bills are paid. The best thing to do is both. Obviously.
An automobile can not readily be placed in my computer and copied, whereas a software program can. And I can't really buy a CD-ROM of software for $99 and own it like a car -- I can just buy a license which allows me to use it.
who said anything against getting paid to write useful commercial software? we're talking whether or not it's free/open source, not whether someone gets paid for it.
This is really ridiculous. I don't understand why the parents and administrators aren't outraged that MS is using programs like this to ensure their monopoly -- by keeping kids from learning about "computers" in favor of learning about "Windows". And they get a tax cut for the SOFTWARE LICENSES they donated, too, I bet.
Don't get me wrong, I think corporations like MS supporting education is great. But MS assisting with rollouts of Microsoft-product-only facilities is not the right way to teach our children about computer technology. Microsoft products do as much as they can to hide the underlying technology, and almost all of them run on only Microsoft operating systems. I'm in favor of kids being able to learn about Microsoft products in schools -- they may need that knowledge! But they shouldn't be taught that Microsoft=computing.
"Fair use" restrictions have been modified a bit over the last 20 years. Used to be you couldn't really get busted for piracy unless you made money off of it. Nowadays it's fully illegal, for instance, to make a "mix tape" from your legal recordings and give it to a friend.
I hope Rob is getting paid for it, although at best he's probably getting pennies per order. He deserves to be paid for the services he provides to this community -- such as finding cool deals like this one. Here's a news item for you: "Slashdot users make noise about Rob profiting by referring thousands of people to a cool gizmo on his own (free) News for Nerds site".
Everyone should understand, it's in our best interests that the makers of Slashdot get paid for what they're doing. If they weren't getting paid, my guess is that they'd only do it until the novelty wore off. But if it's a JOB for them, they can continue to provide us with a high quality service and devote lots of time to it.
And what a convenient way to get paid -- only the people who were interested in the item and grateful for Slashdot's referral provided the meager pennies per order that Rob *might* be getting. And with the amount of comments and interest that this article generated, I'd say it qualifies itself as News for Nerds.
I always wondered that. I asked one of the people who assigns SKU numbers for a corporation and they didn't know either -- they just said that it's pronounced "skew".
Relax. You had a hard time finding it or something? I hadn't even read that far into the paragraph before I clicked the link, and the very first thing I saw on the page was the Linux software links.
There's lots of better stuff to rant about. Try GPL vs BSD, or Cyrix vs AMD vs Intel, or MEEPT!!! vs DAVE-O. Even PC vs Mac (oranges and Apples) is more fun than Non-Paying Users vs Minor Editorial Mistakes -- espescially mistakes that matter so little, they're not even worth the keystrokes it would take for the operator to change them.
Slashdot Mirror
Christmas Eve: Happily caroling along, the group of children and adults knocks on the door of an ASCAP-employed music licensing lawyer. The lawyer cuts them off in mid song and asks them for their names, also telling his wife to get a camera. He informs them that the company is willing to negotiate a reasonable licensing fee for the public performance of copyrighted Christmas Carols, in lieu of taking legal action against the group. Someone starts to laugh but stops short. The group is quiet for a moment. One of the children in the back says "Bah Humbug!" and they all start walking away, while the lawyer runs back inside to see what's taking his wife so long to get a picture of these music pirates.
At least in this case, there would probably be some psuedo-justice as, later that night, an overly hormonal teenager from the group throws a huge plastic Santa Claus through the damned snake's picture window (laughing all the way, ho ho ho).
IMHO, it's irresponsible to create a parody-in-bad-taste of a person or group you don't like, and associate it with a legitimate "hacker" security tools site. It's just as likely to sabotage your own reputation. as that of the target.
In another thread above, someone posted the url of an alleged copy of the data that was in the disputed directory. I don't know whether this is the actual content from the page but it seems likely.
fortune 500 list
Okay. Antialiasing looks nice until you actually decide to sit around doing development work all day. Anti-aliased fonts cause eye strain, because the fuzzies (instead of jaggies) make them look out of focus. Your eyes continuously try to compensate for by refocusing, ergo, increased eyestrain. And all the time you don't really notice -- who focuses their eyes consciously, really? -- and just think it looks better.
Anti-aliasing is appropriate for logos, low resolution rendering, graphics, etc. It is NOT appropriate for reading text from a screen. If your fonts are looking too jaggy, just go to a higher resolution. At 1680x1024, I can't see the pixels at all any more.
Communicator 4.51 crashes itself once every one or two days on my glibc Linux box. But it has taken down my computer twice. It somehow managed to effectively disable the keyboard and mouse, and take so many CPU cycles that the login prompt would time out before letting me enter my password through telnet or even a direct serial port console -- thus the machine was unable to be shut down properly, hence a crash. (why was it Communicator's fault? because it was in the middle of loading a page and it's the only application I've ever had this type of problem with)
Sometimes I don't know why I put up with it, espescially since it's the "least free" app I use on top of being unreliable. But SlashDot doesn't look as spiffy in Lynx.
NOT doubtful, totally true. You can't give anyone unlimited sublicensible rights to GPL'd software, unless you hold the copyright on 100 percent of its code. So, agreeing to the Yahoo agreement and posting GPL'd code on their servers would violate the GPL in most cases. The exception would be if you had written all of the code, in which case it would be legal, but Yahoo could also sell your work as proprietary while you were distributing it as GPL.
It is also true that you wouldn't be able to post another person's copyrighted material on their servers unless you had the same perpetual sublicensable modification and distribution rights as Yahoo is asking for (same issue, really.. because GPL only allows sublicensing under the terms of the GPL, which are more restrictive than Yahoo's agreement)
That site is not supposed to have anything to do with African-American Searching -- it's about AOL stealing a domain name.
But it has at least 5 links to the original AOLSEARCH site which you probably didn't look at.
The issue here is NSI jerking someone around, which we're going to see a lot more of unless someone puts a stop to it. Publicizing a clear cut case of abuse of power, like this one, is a good start.
That's because you're using a Windows character set! To the rest of the world his SmartQuotes show up as "?"'s. MS apparently thinks they own ASCII.
> Most Christians serve political Ayatollahs like ...
:)
> Pat Buchanan
> "Christians" don't want to "help" gays
Hmm. This is interesting, because you are talking about hundreds of millions of individuals with these blanket statements. Probably a million of them are openly gay and a few thousand march in gay rights parades. Several million of them have never heard of Pat Buchanan, because millions of them don't even speak any of the same languages as he does. Your definition of Christianity may exclude those non-US-non-right-wing-non-homophobic types, but don't go forcing your religionist views on... oh, nevermind.
> I've seen enough "Christian" literature to know
> the truth: You people are bigots.
hehe... I was going to say something witty re: that quote, but it's not even necessary.
Unfortunately, filtering software is only as good as the broad category definitions it uses, and the people employed to apply those definitions and categorize the Internet. No matter how "precise" the definitions are, it's not clear what is porn and what is not. Most professional filtering software companies don't even try. They'll have a category for web sites that are "related to sex" or that "show nudity or explicit speech". But there are lots of sites related to sex education that might fall into these categories, or famous literature, or other types of information. The filtering companies sometimes attempt to make exceptions (like sex ed sites) but the software can never be perfect because the decisions are so subjective. IMHO they are only truly useful for companies who wish to monitor Internet-related nonproductivity and they have no place in a public instititution such as a library.
But to be fair and democratic about it, I think individual communities should decide whether they want their libraries to be "filtered" if they feel it's necessary. Perhaps federal funds could even help libraries implement filters if the citizens want that. But it is bullsh** for the federal government to quietly usurp that decision-making power by withholding needed technology funds to communities with different values.
Is this porn?
What about this?
Should children be protected from this?
Sorry, no person, company or software can answer these questions. The "protect the children" legislative push is just political posturing to get votes from the seemingly uneducated masses.
RMS is probably proud of them -- they're making money and the source code is still free (even if it hasn't been released in a bit too long)
hmm. well of course I was a little bit inaccurate with that statement, too vague. Of course, X11 being a "standard system library" on most any UNIX distribution, is an exception. Regardless, you could apply the GPL to XFree86 any time you like under its current license.
If a GPL licensed product is not complete without including a non-free component (not including basic system libraries) it cannot be distributed. That's what I should have said.
RMS is neither hostile nor disagreeable. I have had a few short discussions with the man and I found him calm, extremely rational, and prone to rant (only about as often as I do). He has some interesting and somewhat revolutionary ideas about the nature of intellectual property and copyrights, and some very down to earth ideas about practicality and doing the right thing.
He's not in it for popularity or obscurity, or to make more people use free software. His goals are clear and obvious after hearing him and speaking with him: to promote personal freedom and mutually beneficial sharing among people who develop and use software (please note that sharing!=communism, no matter how you look at it). He tends to mostly ignore (sometimes alienate) people who don't seem to believe in sharing and freedom, presumably because he's found that it does little good to argue with them about such basic concepts.
If "his movement suddenly became successful and everybody adopted his principles," we would operate in an intellectual near-utopia of cooperative advancement. It might take a long time or might (due to the greedy selfish nature of so many humans who need to maximize their profits by putting their whole community at a disadvantage) never happen, but the more people who do understand RMS's beliefs and the base goals of the FSF, the closer we are.
RMS is not "insisting on having some say in the naming of the Linux OS [sic]".
With widespread adoption of Linux-based systems, corporations (SUSE, RedHat) and hence individual users (You) are seemingly forgetting the roots of what brought us this great operating system. Giving the GNU project credit for making this possible is necessary and appropriate. Nobody ever said that RMS was Mr. Humility, and I don't think he should be. Maybe you'd rather hear, "oh, that compiler and complete set of system utilities, that was nothing, you don't need to give GNU credit, I just did it to have something to give away to y'all". But if that was the kind of guy RMS was, the Free Software movement might never have existed at all. It's not just about the FSF writing software to give it away, it's about WHY they do it.
And Linux is very nice, but it's NOT an operating system. RMS isn't trying to change the name of Linux. He does consistantly correct people when they inaccurately state or imply that Linux is an OS. He does correctly realize that the GNU project is undercredited for its contributions to commercial "Linux distributions" such as RedHat. Anyone who knows about Linux and Linus Torvalds should also know about GNU/FSF and RMS. Linus is very media friendly, but GNU contributed a lot more to that free operating system you're using than he did.
RedHat and SUSE probably won't change their name to GNU/Linux. In fact, I looked through the CD booklet that came with a SUSE distribution and couldn't even find one mention of GNU or the FSF! (RedHat had one, at least) I trashed it because I don't like people who are ungrateful. I heard it's a nice operating system, but I have some standards, like don't exploit other peoples work and not give them credit. Who cares that the GPL doesn't oblige them to pay or mention the FSF? If they're selling GNU software, they should say so and donate a portion of the profits to the FSF. But some companies demonstratably don't care about being fair and doing the right thing if it's not in a contract, and some people don't mind supporting those companies with their money. Ridiculous.
Most paid coders spend their time working on projects which could be nearly as profitable if they were open sourced. The coders who work for OS and application software vendors would still get paid, as long as the company could switch to a service and support based model instead of IP-value model. That's what these companies are doing anyhow, but they charge for the service and support by incrementing the version number and making you purchase some secret bits on a CD.
The majority of programmers make money on custom/inhouse projects, database interfaces and the like. The only disadvantage of open sourcing and releasing this type of project is that you lose a possible technological advantage over a competitor. But you may also gain efficiency and free bug fixes from the community they will have created. Let's say you run a dry cleaning chain... doesn't it make more sense to compete on the basis of cleaning quality and turnaround time instead of secret computer technology?
... but KDE is not a 'product' without the QT library, so you can't just say that they're seperate because functionally, they aren't.
GPL essentially says that GPL'd code can not be made to be reliant on non-GPL'd code. If it's not a product until you add non-GPL stuff, it can't be distributed.
As a programmer, I rather like depositing "recognition" in my bank account. But working on something which helps people is good, too -- as long as the bills are paid. The best thing to do is both. Obviously.
An automobile can not readily be placed in my computer and copied, whereas a software program can. And I can't really buy a CD-ROM of software for $99 and own it like a car -- I can just buy a license which allows me to use it.
who said anything against getting paid to write useful commercial software? we're talking whether or not it's free/open source, not whether someone gets paid for it.
This is really ridiculous. I don't understand why the parents and administrators aren't outraged that MS is using programs like this to ensure their monopoly -- by keeping kids from learning about "computers" in favor of learning about "Windows". And they get a tax cut for the SOFTWARE LICENSES they donated, too, I bet.
Don't get me wrong, I think corporations like MS supporting education is great. But MS assisting with rollouts of Microsoft-product-only facilities is not the right way to teach our children about computer technology. Microsoft products do as much as they can to hide the underlying technology, and almost all of them run on only Microsoft operating systems. I'm in favor of kids being able to learn about Microsoft products in schools -- they may need that knowledge! But they shouldn't be taught that Microsoft=computing.
"Fair use" restrictions have been modified a bit over the last 20 years. Used to be you couldn't really get busted for piracy unless you made money off of it. Nowadays it's fully illegal, for instance, to make a "mix tape" from your legal recordings and give it to a friend.
s/Rob/Jeff and the rest of SlashDot/g
I hope Rob is getting paid for it, although at best he's probably getting pennies per order. He deserves to be paid for the services he provides to this community -- such as finding cool deals like this one. Here's a news item for you: "Slashdot users make noise about Rob profiting by referring thousands of people to a cool gizmo on his own (free) News for Nerds site".
Everyone should understand, it's in our best interests that the makers of Slashdot get paid for what they're doing. If they weren't getting paid, my guess is that they'd only do it until the novelty wore off. But if it's a JOB for them, they can continue to provide us with a high quality service and devote lots of time to it.
And what a convenient way to get paid -- only the people who were interested in the item and grateful for Slashdot's referral provided the meager pennies per order that Rob *might* be getting. And with the amount of comments and interest that this article generated, I'd say it qualifies itself as News for Nerds.
I always wondered that. I asked one of the people who assigns SKU numbers for a corporation and they didn't know either -- they just said that it's pronounced "skew".
Relax. You had a hard time finding it or something? I hadn't even read that far into the paragraph before I clicked the link, and the very first thing I saw on the page was the Linux software links.
There's lots of better stuff to rant about. Try GPL vs BSD, or Cyrix vs AMD vs Intel, or MEEPT!!! vs DAVE-O. Even PC vs Mac (oranges and Apples) is more fun than Non-Paying Users vs Minor Editorial Mistakes -- espescially mistakes that matter so little, they're not even worth the keystrokes it would take for the operator to change them.
I don't know, I thought it was cute.