BSD is actually less restrictive. While it requires attribution, it doesn't require that derivative work be released under BSD, while GPL requires that derivative work maintain the GPL license.
This allows entities to make non-free software based on WebM, which GPL would not allow. I'm not sure why you're stating it as obvious fact that BSD isn't "good enough", though.
This has always been the primary issue with microtransactions, and I've personally never been a fan of them either. The problem is that the investment required to develop, and more importantly maintain, quality MMOs necessitates making some money off them. Unless your game is out-of-the-box good enough to warrant thousands or millions of players paying subscription fees, microtansactions are the best known alternative as a profitable business model.
The problem is that the constant barrage of information is, a huge majority of the time, given in a biased format and specifically designed to sway opinion. What slanted reporting does (from every "real" news source as well as every independant blogger) is actually to reinforce, dramatize, and expand partisan political views, which in turn grinds our democracy to a halt. Republicans will deny facts presented by Democrats specifically because of who presents them. The opposite is equally true.
Political hatred in the U.S. is such that major issues that should be agreed upon aren't. Global Warming, for instance, was more widely accepted in the U.S. BEFORE Al Gore brought into the political arena, at which point Republican automatically disagreed with him, regardless of what he said. The internet, as well as cable news networks and radio shows, only serve to spark more and more political hate. It doesn't convince anyone.
There was a/. story very recently about a study that concluded that after viewing biased material, subjects views' strengthen regardless of whether the material was accepting or rejecting of those views.
Huh? I'm not exactly sure what you're saying here. Have you been to SC? I live here. Liquer Stores close at 7 (I think). Grocery stores and Wal-Mart still sell beer, all night long.
I'm surprised at not seeing Verizon mentioned in the summary, as I've heard pretty much everywhere that they have the best network. Perhaps Verizon focuses more on phone service than data?
While I'm sure some(most) of this sentiment is created by media exaggeration and selective reporting, cops have the persona of themselves being above the law.
A movement to remove recording them will only serve to propagate that idea, and remove one of the only tools that civilians have to combat any police abuse.
There is extremely low opportunity cost of being able to spell words that you actually use. If you don't know how to spell a word you wish to write, you look it up, memorize it, and write it. This should take about 3 minutes, tops.
note: I typed up a convincing rebuttal to your "get laid" troll, but I caught myself before I submitted it. Suffice it to say that you are fairly ignorant in this regard.
So they put a transister inside a cell membrane. How exactly does that make it part human? Every living creature has cells that have phospholipid bilayers.
"Immaculate" spelling isn't necessary, but spelling well is useful. Language functions as more than simply a way to communicate ideas. The way we write and the correctness of our writing confers to readers the care with which we approach our endeavors. This is particularly important in business, where mispelling word can make one appear incompetent.
Kids who win spelling bees are better at spelling than will ever useful to them. However, even with spell-checking, being able to spell the entirety of your working vocabulary has real benefits and no disadvantages.
I never implied Monsanto had a good rep. What I said is that there can be both benefits and consequences of genetic modification, as exemplified in a single company which does a ton of bad things and even a couple of good ones (like providing royalty-free licenses for golden rice). The issue is more complicated than "frankenfood will either save us all or spell our doom"
Negative Source (Denounces Monsanto):
http://www.purefood.org/corp/gericetoofar.cfm
Note that in the above, the benefits of the rice are marginalized, but it doesn't dispute that Monsanto is freely licensing the product.
Relatedly:
Monsantomakes both Agent Orange and the Vitamin-A enriched rice (needs citation) that allows a huge segment of the world's poorest people to feed their children.
As innovative and helpful as new developments could possily be, food alteration is already a "political" issue. Even though politics should have no active role to play in the reception of innovations that will probably improve lives, people will disagree with each other about based purely on political dogma.
Our best hope for allowing innovation like this without a knee-jerk, partisan backlash is for the mainstream media to ignore it completely: to let those who are actually vested in the technology and its consequences have the final say about what innovations can bring to the table, in agriculture or any field.
Your argument, then, is essentially the best example of a slippery slope fallacy I've ever encountered.
You're also implying that I support censorship, which I never claimed. Censoring CP will do nothing to help its victims, and therefore isn't worth the effort.
Remove please
on
Iron Baby
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Idle or not, this is a waste of electrons to include on/.
While I'm not sure exactly what your thesis is here, I'll attempt a limited response.
First, you seem to be missing the point of what I said, probably because I didn't add multiple caveats to it.
When I say "obviously child porn is bad", I more accurately mean: "There exists an age at which it is morally wrong to perform sexual acts with that child."
You're welcome to argue the negative. I find this to be an accepted enough truth to not warrant the Google search it would take to find supporting evidence for it. I'll leave that as my response to dogmatic statements.
Second, freedom is a limited concept. It's limited in every culture, government, and moral code in the history of mankind. The only people for whom freedom is not limited are kings, dictators, and others who have complete and total control over the cultural environment that surrounds them; they are those not subject to any moral code above their own. Religions limit freedom in the form a supernaturally-derived moral code. A Christian does not have the freedom to denounce Christ, and a Muslim does not have the freedom to blaspheme Allah. Governments limit freedom in the form of laws. We (the collective culture of all human societies) vary according to what freedoms we consider essential, and those that we consider non-essential or even harmful. For example, under no Government (of which I am aware) can one citizen murder another citizen (the exception being executions performed under order of that Government). Most (if not all) cultures around the world agree that the freedom to murder is not a morally defensible freedom.
The entire argument about which freedoms a culture grants and which it does not is a largely abstract one, involving little formal logic or philosophy. Instead, we draw subjective lines around acceptable behavior, creating abstractions about "right" and "wrong" that allow us to function within that system for the mutual benefit of those who adhere to it. As a culture, we consider those outside of those boundaries harmful to the collective good, and ostracize them, usually in the form of imprisonment.
Because abstractions about acceptable and unacceptable freedoms are the basis for the shared set of acceptable behaviors in all human cultures, and because no alternative has been presented (to my knowledge), I claim that they are necessary to maintain cultural equilibrium: the state in which the most people within a given system can function within the bounds of that system.
To circle back to my earlier claim, specifically about child pornography, I suspect that most cultures agree that there is an age at which it is "wrong" to perform sexual acts with a child. Because that act is deemed an unacceptable freedom, it is necessary, if that act is to be condemned, that it is punished in a way which discourages it.
The claim presented by my original comment is that filtering and censoring digital images and representations of a morally "wrong" act does not punish or discourage the original act, wasting resources and have tangential consequences.
Many of the details can be debated. At what age and under what circumstances is pornographic material harmful to wellbeing of its subject? A large segment of the Feminist movement would argue always, but I won't attempt to fill out that argument in a comment that is already of enormous girth. A 17-year, 11-month topless young woman is probably not harmed by pictures taken of her. A 7-year old brutally raped probably is harmed. It's the job of our collective conscience, of the governments we elect to represent that conscience, and of ourselves define the difference, and to find an appropriate and effective way to protect those who are victimized by heinous crimes. Internet censorship is not that method, but sadly, I don't yet know what is.
Obviously, CP is bad.
However, I personally commend the Japanese for being slow in attempting a censorship sweep that will cost resources and, ultimately, do between little and nothing to actually protect the actual victims.
It would ABSOLUTELY be preferable if Apple actually heeded this request. Slashdot wouldn't know what to do if Apple actually made a decision it agreed with. I simply find that prospect to be pretty unlikely.
Students aren't the only ones who find textbook prices monumentally absurd. Most of my professors no longer require a textbook. However, they are required by the University to specify a textbook, so every student who buys it before the first day of classes gets royally screwed.
There also exist moronic profs who require you to buy the textbook, purchase a code for the online help, AND buy the study guide/homework guide, and then NEVER USE IT. I've found this in the English department more than once. These people need to be burned at the stake.
This is the exact reason television developed a rating system: to give parents a relatively easy way to decide what material is appropriate for their own kids. If parents want to have their children sequestered from the world of human speech, they have that right. However, no group has the right to tell another group what they should or should not say in any medium. It's the entire point of the first amendment.
Your level of privacy doesn't change. A human being walking down the street can see into your window. Keeping the blinds shut maintains the same level of privacy against people walking their dogs as it does against Google's photos.
Slashdot Mirror
You're misrepresenting the "restrictions".
BSD is actually less restrictive. While it requires attribution, it doesn't require that derivative work be released under BSD, while GPL requires that derivative work maintain the GPL license.
This allows entities to make non-free software based on WebM, which GPL would not allow. I'm not sure why you're stating it as obvious fact that BSD isn't "good enough", though.
This has always been the primary issue with microtransactions, and I've personally never been a fan of them either. The problem is that the investment required to develop, and more importantly maintain, quality MMOs necessitates making some money off them. Unless your game is out-of-the-box good enough to warrant thousands or millions of players paying subscription fees, microtansactions are the best known alternative as a profitable business model.
Political hatred in the U.S. is such that major issues that should be agreed upon aren't. Global Warming, for instance, was more widely accepted in the U.S. BEFORE Al Gore brought into the political arena, at which point Republican automatically disagreed with him, regardless of what he said. The internet, as well as cable news networks and radio shows, only serve to spark more and more political hate. It doesn't convince anyone.
There was a /. story very recently about a study that concluded that after viewing biased material, subjects views' strengthen regardless of whether the material was accepting or rejecting of those views.
Huh? I'm not exactly sure what you're saying here. Have you been to SC? I live here. Liquer Stores close at 7 (I think). Grocery stores and Wal-Mart still sell beer, all night long.
I'm surprised at not seeing Verizon mentioned in the summary, as I've heard pretty much everywhere that they have the best network. Perhaps Verizon focuses more on phone service than data?
While I'm sure some(most) of this sentiment is created by media exaggeration and selective reporting, cops have the persona of themselves being above the law.
A movement to remove recording them will only serve to propagate that idea, and remove one of the only tools that civilians have to combat any police abuse.
I actually didn't intentionally mess up that sentence. I felt rather foolish after rereading it.
relatedly, is 'rereading' a word?
There is extremely low opportunity cost of being able to spell words that you actually use. If you don't know how to spell a word you wish to write, you look it up, memorize it, and write it. This should take about 3 minutes, tops.
note: I typed up a convincing rebuttal to your "get laid" troll, but I caught myself before I submitted it. Suffice it to say that you are fairly ignorant in this regard.
So they put a transister inside a cell membrane. How exactly does that make it part human? Every living creature has cells that have phospholipid bilayers.
"Immaculate" spelling isn't necessary, but spelling well is useful. Language functions as more than simply a way to communicate ideas. The way we write and the correctness of our writing confers to readers the care with which we approach our endeavors. This is particularly important in business, where mispelling word can make one appear incompetent.
Kids who win spelling bees are better at spelling than will ever useful to them. However, even with spell-checking, being able to spell the entirety of your working vocabulary has real benefits and no disadvantages.
It's going to compete with Linux.
In other news: 2011. Year of the Chrome Desktop (tm).
I never implied Monsanto had a good rep. What I said is that there can be both benefits and consequences of genetic modification, as exemplified in a single company which does a ton of bad things and even a couple of good ones (like providing royalty-free licenses for golden rice). The issue is more complicated than "frankenfood will either save us all or spell our doom"
sources: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2000/08/04/world/main221973.shtml http://www.monsanto.co.uk/news/2000/august2000/040800monsanto.html http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/865946.stm
Negative Source (Denounces Monsanto): http://www.purefood.org/corp/gericetoofar.cfm
Note that in the above, the benefits of the rice are marginalized, but it doesn't dispute that Monsanto is freely licensing the product.
Relatedly: Monsantomakes both Agent Orange and the Vitamin-A enriched rice (needs citation) that allows a huge segment of the world's poorest people to feed their children.
As innovative and helpful as new developments could possily be, food alteration is already a "political" issue. Even though politics should have no active role to play in the reception of innovations that will probably improve lives, people will disagree with each other about based purely on political dogma.
Our best hope for allowing innovation like this without a knee-jerk, partisan backlash is for the mainstream media to ignore it completely: to let those who are actually vested in the technology and its consequences have the final say about what innovations can bring to the table, in agriculture or any field.
Your argument, then, is essentially the best example of a slippery slope fallacy I've ever encountered. You're also implying that I support censorship, which I never claimed. Censoring CP will do nothing to help its victims, and therefore isn't worth the effort.
Idle or not, this is a waste of electrons to include on /.
While I'm not sure exactly what your thesis is here, I'll attempt a limited response.
First, you seem to be missing the point of what I said, probably because I didn't add multiple caveats to it.
When I say "obviously child porn is bad", I more accurately mean: "There exists an age at which it is morally wrong to perform sexual acts with that child."
You're welcome to argue the negative. I find this to be an accepted enough truth to not warrant the Google search it would take to find supporting evidence for it. I'll leave that as my response to dogmatic statements.
Second, freedom is a limited concept. It's limited in every culture, government, and moral code in the history of mankind. The only people for whom freedom is not limited are kings, dictators, and others who have complete and total control over the cultural environment that surrounds them; they are those not subject to any moral code above their own. Religions limit freedom in the form a supernaturally-derived moral code. A Christian does not have the freedom to denounce Christ, and a Muslim does not have the freedom to blaspheme Allah. Governments limit freedom in the form of laws. We (the collective culture of all human societies) vary according to what freedoms we consider essential, and those that we consider non-essential or even harmful. For example, under no Government (of which I am aware) can one citizen murder another citizen (the exception being executions performed under order of that Government). Most (if not all) cultures around the world agree that the freedom to murder is not a morally defensible freedom.
The entire argument about which freedoms a culture grants and which it does not is a largely abstract one, involving little formal logic or philosophy. Instead, we draw subjective lines around acceptable behavior, creating abstractions about "right" and "wrong" that allow us to function within that system for the mutual benefit of those who adhere to it. As a culture, we consider those outside of those boundaries harmful to the collective good, and ostracize them, usually in the form of imprisonment.
Because abstractions about acceptable and unacceptable freedoms are the basis for the shared set of acceptable behaviors in all human cultures, and because no alternative has been presented (to my knowledge), I claim that they are necessary to maintain cultural equilibrium: the state in which the most people within a given system can function within the bounds of that system.
To circle back to my earlier claim, specifically about child pornography, I suspect that most cultures agree that there is an age at which it is "wrong" to perform sexual acts with a child. Because that act is deemed an unacceptable freedom, it is necessary, if that act is to be condemned, that it is punished in a way which discourages it.
The claim presented by my original comment is that filtering and censoring digital images and representations of a morally "wrong" act does not punish or discourage the original act, wasting resources and have tangential consequences.
Many of the details can be debated. At what age and under what circumstances is pornographic material harmful to wellbeing of its subject? A large segment of the Feminist movement would argue always, but I won't attempt to fill out that argument in a comment that is already of enormous girth. A 17-year, 11-month topless young woman is probably not harmed by pictures taken of her. A 7-year old brutally raped probably is harmed. It's the job of our collective conscience, of the governments we elect to represent that conscience, and of ourselves define the difference, and to find an appropriate and effective way to protect those who are victimized by heinous crimes. Internet censorship is not that method, but sadly, I don't yet know what is.
Obviously, CP is bad. However, I personally commend the Japanese for being slow in attempting a censorship sweep that will cost resources and, ultimately, do between little and nothing to actually protect the actual victims.
Wow. Insert witty comments about history and irony.
It would ABSOLUTELY be preferable if Apple actually heeded this request. Slashdot wouldn't know what to do if Apple actually made a decision it agreed with. I simply find that prospect to be pretty unlikely.
Apple will pull the app from the store LONG before they allow actual open software to slip through their stranglehold on content.
The implications of this being that.....what? When The Evil Government (tm) infuses us all with tracking chips, we open up ourselves to being hacked?
I can see it now....
Can new RFID technology lead to making you or your families ZOMBIES of the federal government? TONIGHT on Glenn Beck!
Students aren't the only ones who find textbook prices monumentally absurd. Most of my professors no longer require a textbook. However, they are required by the University to specify a textbook, so every student who buys it before the first day of classes gets royally screwed.
There also exist moronic profs who require you to buy the textbook, purchase a code for the online help, AND buy the study guide/homework guide, and then NEVER USE IT. I've found this in the English department more than once. These people need to be burned at the stake.
This is the exact reason television developed a rating system: to give parents a relatively easy way to decide what material is appropriate for their own kids. If parents want to have their children sequestered from the world of human speech, they have that right. However, no group has the right to tell another group what they should or should not say in any medium. It's the entire point of the first amendment.
Your level of privacy doesn't change. A human being walking down the street can see into your window. Keeping the blinds shut maintains the same level of privacy against people walking their dogs as it does against Google's photos.