No, you're forgetting that there are two parties to GPLing, and the GPL depends strongly on the concept of public domain in that the GPL forces the a contributor (i.e. author) to grant certain rights in exchange for being allowed to distribute derivative works.
Uhm, well, since IANAL and my English vocabulary is a bit short in legal matters, I find it very hard to explain this properly. But trust me, we have a really hard problem here, something that will be used in big FUDslinging if we don't fix it.
Yes, I read the Danish version, not the transcript, but the summary by the journalist, and there are some differences, not as much in content but in tone. I think that what he is trying to say is that "huh, no, I don't think it can be possible we stole code. Really. If we did, we'll fix the problem. Give us a break, and we'll see".
Probably, it's a good idea for the community to do just that.
However, he is clearly suggesting that code could have come from KISS to MPlayer, not the other way around, and it is very understandable that the MPlayer folks take that as an insult.
It seems like the evidence is pretty damning, so I think we should wait a few days and see if KISS come up with an apology.
I'm Norwegian, IANAL and AFAIK and all that, but I seriously doubt large portions of the GPL is enforceable outside of the US and in the Nordic Countries and Denmark in particular.
This is a real pending disaster for the whole free software community, and we'd better attend to it now.
It may not be very relevant to the case at hand. If there is MPlayer code in KISS' products, then they should have obtained some kind of license, if they didn't, they're infringing. But the GPL really doesn't do it right.
The reason is that GPL is a hack on the top of US legal traditions, a very cool hack, but it builds on the US concept of a public domain, where no rights are reserved.
But under the legal traditions we have around here, there is no such thing as the public domain, at least not as it is understood in the US. There are certain rights that the author cannot sign away, and doesn't really expire, such as the right to be associated with his work, and influence over what is a legitimate derivative work. That exists mainly to protect authors from exploitation by very powerful corporations.
That's rights you sign away when you GPL something, at least to an extent greater than I think (IANAL again) is allowed by law in the Nordic countries.
Now, you might think that it doesn't mean anything, but imagine what would happen if M$ or SCO-type corporations bring out FUD that rumours have it that for example Trolltech or MySQL AB will revoke the GPL because they were under undue pressure when they GPLed their software. It is not that I think they will ever do it, it is not in their interest, but the FUD would have basis in real legal traditions, so the FUD would be devastating.
I know that Glenn Otis-Brown of Creative Commons have been thinking about this a lot, he makes the analogy that the legal tradition is an operating system, which determines what a license can do. The Bern convention is simply not enough here. What we need are platform-independent licenses, and we may need to change the operating system to do it.
Around here, we have other traditions that may serve as the basis of copyleft and similar ideas. For example, we have what we in Norway call "allemannsretten", that the un-developed land is a common, everyone can walk wherever they like without asking the permission of the land owner.
For that reason, I think the Nordic countries should get together and make laws that can give free software appropriate legislation, and I think the Nordic Council would be the appropriate venue to do it. I have written them a brief e-mail, received no response, but I would encourage others to do it as well.
Douglas Osheroff is a really cool guy, I've met him. Some years ago, people in the Norwegian Association of Physics Students was looking for a lecturer for the annual conference, and so they sent Osheroff an email asking if he would come, and they ended the message with "and we've heard you're a really cool guy". He responded: "how can one possibly say no to someone who thinks one is cool!", so he came along. And he was a really cool guy!
And besides, I agree with him here, there are probably not many science reasons to put people on Mars.
Hm, I must have been living under a rock, because it is the first time I hear about it. However, it sounds like a good idea, I have to contact my upstream ISP to have them add a record for me.
Anyway, it seems SpamAssassin will be adding support for SPF in 2.70, at least according to bug 2143. That's cool!
They're taking some beta software for some serious rides there....
I believe both mod_perl/1.99 and mod_jk/1.2.2-beta-1 are, well, beta software.
I thought I heard mod_perl 2.0 was released, but I haven't heard any great success stories. But that's a really nice test for these modules...
This sort of thing infuriates me. Simply because one onus of proof remains unsatisfied does not absolve the speaker's own.
Hey, this is/.! We don't take a lot of time to write posts here! OK, get your shoulders down, ease up, cool down. Feeling comfy? Good.
See my other reply in this thread.
Perhaps you're unaware that, for example, the Hindus taught the world as a platform supported on the backs of elephants,
Yes, there are myths like that around. I specifically mentioned scientists.
Vikings quested for the edge of the world to find the roots of Yggdrasil,
Bullshit. They did have a few creation myths you could easily interprete that way yes, but once you read later manuscripts more thoroughly, it is quite clear that they realized the shape of the earth. I'm able to read some old Norse, my mother reads it well, it's not so hard.
What you're missing is that in the day and age where Columbus was getting laughed out of the courts of kings over the round earth, the common man already knew to be true.
Quite the contrary. The royalty consulted the people with the correct numbers. Among the commons, it was however quite common to not realize the shape of the earth. I'm really sorry if you can't read it, but I'd recommend researching the background of the play "Erasmus Montanus" by Ludvig Holberg.
The thing that kills me is that from a few of the palaces that Columbus was laughed out of, you can *see* the curvature of the planet.
Yup, but what should this mean to you? It should mean to you that they knew it, but you refuse to realize it.
Through Augustin, every leading authority accepted the idea of a spherical earth.
I'd love some reference for this.
Hm, I don't have the bibliography with me right now. A really good source is Gingerich, Owen: "Astronomy in the Age of Columbus", Scientific American, November 1992., but I do not remember if he actually mentions this, and I do not remember if he has an extensive list of references. But the writings of Owen Gingerich are generally very good, I'd recommend many days in a dusty library reading his stuff and references therein...:-)
Then, of course, there's Dreyer, J. L. E.: "A history of astronomy from Thales to Kepler", Dover pubications, Inc. (1953), which I'd recommend you read all of. Unfortunately, again, I don't remember if he specifically deals with it.
Then, an author that discuss this point at some length is Koestler, Arthur: "The Sleepwalkers, a history of man's changing vision of the Universe", Hutchinson et CO, LTD (1959). The problem with Koestler is that he isn't actually doing research, and that book is very badly written. His agenda is pretty much to portray Copernicus as some kind of misunderstood genius that nobody read. He fails miserably, Copernicus was an over-cautious man that many read, but few understood. Also, Koestler tries very, very hard to make the earth flat is far as possible, but carefully selecting sources, and by doing that, he manages to maintain a flat earth to about 900 AD, at which point there are no sources left to claim that anyone in authority thought the earth was flat. For that reason, you should read it: It shows how someone desparate enough can make the earth flat up to about 900 AD, but not longer.
Uhm, but well, yeah, that Augustin specifically adopted the shape of the earth... Hm, I must admit that I have thought this to be general knowledge that I really don't remember where I read it. I realize that's a bad argument. But try Dreyer, it should be at least mentioned there, IIRC.
A shallow inspection of Columbus reveals that he knew he wasn't sailing for India,
Funny, well, being Norwegian, that's one of Norway's favorite myths too. "He did it because he knew Leiv Erikson's journey". I personally held it up to five years a
OK, my post was somewhat hasty and not very well written. Indeed, Occam's Razor is a heuristic that doesn't prove anything. Indeed, if someone proposes that "X is a hoax", the burden of proof for that proposition rests with him. In this case, he might give sufficient evidence by actually deciphering the code.
However, that's not what I meant to say (in fact it is the first time I hear about the Voynich manuscript, I'm not even trying to judge its genuinity), and I believe it is not what the researcher whose work we are discussing is proposing either.
The point is, given a description of how it could be done, is it even worth actually deciphering it, which may be a long fruitless excercise, or should one go on researching other subjects?
You are of course free to research anything you find interesting, but if we're competing for the same grants, you shouldn't be getting the money...;-)
Actually, it is a harder question, and no, the burden of the proof rests with NASA. Do you think they haven't taken this burden seriously enough? YMMV, but I think they have...
I'm from the UK, and have had a fairly extensive mathematical training, including dedicated theoretical statistics classes. This was never even mentioned.
Hm, I'm from Norway, and this was mentioned both in history classes as well as a brief mention in a statistics course on the university level.
I guess being a small country means that you have to find interesting things to mention elsewhere...
Anyone can say anything is a hoax but it takes scientific evidence - actual empirical data - to prove such a claim.
No. It is the proponents of the idea that the book is genuine's job to prove that it is indeed that. One doesn't need to prove that something is a hoax if it is, Occam's Razor does that job. What explanation is contains the fewest ubstantiated assumptions: That something was written a language nobody knows, containing valuable information nobody has any idea about, or that it was produced using a simple encryption technique to fool somebody to pay loads of shiny ducats?
For example, people once believed that the Earth was flat (some people still do) but the circumnavigation of the globe by explorers such as Magellan, lunar exclipses, etc provide evidence to the contrary.
I find it amazing that some people still hold this myth as true! What kind of history education have you had!?!
Look, no scientist have never claimed the earth was flat. For one thing, in every other culture than the western, it has never been claimed otherwise ("they even knew the earth was spherical"), but some has got the weird notion that Columbus had to argue that the earth wasn't flat.
He didn't. The moron had the wrong numbers, and would have gotten killed if America didn't happen to be there.
Allready the pupils of Thales claimed their master knew the earth was round. Erastostenes, measured the circumference of the earth with an error of 3%! The true circumference of the earth was known to the greeks in antiquity! Plato and his pupil Aristotle himself knew many arguments for the spherical shape of the earth, and why is this important? Because though some Christian scholars around 300 AD didn't like the idea of a spherical earth, St. Augustin adopted much of Plato's philosophy and made it an important part of christianity in the same century, and they adopted the ideas of a spherical earth as well. Through Augustin, every leading authority accepted the idea of a spherical earth.
Eventually, Erastostenes numbers was also accepted , but Columbus didn't like them, because it meant that going the other way to India was infeasible. So, he used some other numbers, and he used Marco Polo's exaggerated estimates of the distance he had travelled, and so he made it quite feasible. But it wasn't, he was wrong.
Columbus thought the distance to Asia was 4000 km, his contemporary scientists 16000 km, the real distance is 23000 km, while Columbus eventually travelled 6500 km.
So, why is this important? Because people who hold this belief often have many other misunderstandings about science. Indeed, you can't prove that the book is a hoax, but for that reason, the burden of the proof rests with the proponents of the idea that it is genuine. Who, of course, might cling to the idea that it is, long after the world has moved on to greener pastures. That's how it usually works anyway.
Because counting correctly is hard. Either you spend many weeks doing it, verifying with a number of independent counters, or you do it in one night, and you have a few percent errors. Like:
Mr. Tallyman: 345, 346, 347, 348,...
Supervisor: Mr. Tallyman, what's your count?
Mr. Tallyman: damn, where was I? Uhm, it was 384, yeah, that was it! 385, 386, 387,...
Seriously, there are a whole bunch of errors that could be made, verification is not so strong that fraud is very hard.
As one of the Diebold memos said, it's not rocket science, tallying votes in a machine is easy and can be extremely accurate. But people have to let go of the notion that you can have corporations (whose primary responsibility is value for their stock holders, not the quality of the voting procedure), doing it an make money from it.
With machines doing it right, following the basic requirements of democratic voting, full disclosure, and proper oversight of every step in the process by elected and highly qualified officials, and the possibility for every voter to verify for example a checksum of the software to see if the it is the same as he inspected himself, I would see no reason why one wouldn't go for voting machines.
Well, RMS' approach to the issue is to write software that effectively obsoletes proprietary software by being better in every respect.
I suppose you're Swedish (I'm Norwegian), and we have a far greater problem in our hands than the possible lack of copyright in Iran. Copyleft is a legal hack on US copyright traditions, but licenses such as GPL is meaningless under Norwegian and Swedish traditions. For example, you can't sign away ideal rights under our copyright traditions, and that is contrary to the GPL. Now, you might think that it doesn't mean anything, but imagine what would happen if M$ or SCO-type corporations bring out FUD that rumours have it that for example Trolltech or MySQL AB will revoke the GPL because they were under undue pressure when they GPLed their software. It is not that I think they will ever do it, it is not in their interest, but the FUD would have basis in real legal traditions, so the FUD would be devastating.
I don't think many hackers realize the potential disaster that lies in free software licenses not being enforceable worldwide.
I know that Glenn Otis-Brown of Creative Commons have been thinking about this a lot, he makes the analogy that the legal tradition is an operating system, which determines what a license can do. What we need are platform-independent licenses, and we may need to change the operating system to do it.
Around here, we have other traditions that may serve as the basis of copyleft and similar ideas. For example, we have what we in Norway call "allemannsretten", that the un-developed land is a common, everyone can walk wherever they like without asking the permission of the land owner.
For that reason, I think the Nordic countries should get together and make laws that can give free software appropriate legislation, and I think the Nordic Council would be the appropriate venue to do it. I have written them a brief e-mail, received no response, but I would encourage others to do it as well.
I wouldn't worry. Stealing your software would imply that they close the source and sell it as theirs. But, you can't do that in Iran, according to the article, because nobody is willing to pay more than the prize of the CD anyway. Which is exactly permitted by all free software licenses.
In fact, this sounds like RMS' dream, all software is in the public domain and there is no incentive for proprietary software.
I'd argue that 100% of recipients hate spam, but that there are enough biznissmen who think that spamming is profitable and can't be bothered about the fact that they're hated, to make spammers very wealthy. Spammers are making money not by selling the products that they spam for, but by selling spamming itself.
But of course, I could be wrong, it's just that every time I have actually gotten in contact with those who bought spam services, they had actually been ripped off by the spammer, and they sold nothing.
I think it's something quite cool! Really, I want a computer in my house to know exactly what food I've got in my fridge, and whereever I store that stuff. I want it to know what I need to buy, and what is about to get too old to be eaten. Why should I spend my time looking after these things, when it could be done well by a computerized system?
OK, so on my way home from work, I tell my PDA-like gadget what I want for dinner. It connects to my home system, which contains the database of what I have in my house, and compares that with the recipe of my desired dinner, then decides what I need.
Then it runs out on the web (or rather some future Semantic Web, it shouldn't be that hard to create, really), and collects today's prices, compares my position with the position of the shops, and reports back to me where I should go to get what I need for today's dinner.
The machines did most of the job. I just told it what I wanted, and it, after checking it out, reported back what I needed to shop and where to get it at the best price. Who wouldn't want a system like that?
So, the problem is: You don't want a bunch of big companies sneaking into your private life and know all your purchasing habits, as well as controlling the information flow in this process.
If we leave this to a bunch of industry giants, guess what's going to happen? Joe Sixpack won't care anyway. But if we design it, base it on free software with full disclosure of how the data is used, we protect our privacy with cryptography and make sure we control our own data, then, this is no future I would fear.
RFID tags would be a part of this, and it's a part of the same problem complex: If the data gained from RFID tags is mine, then I see little problems with it, but if I can't control it, then it's Bad[tm]. RFID-tags are not evil by default, it is what we make out of it.
I haven't yet read the verdict, but some details seems to come out now. From the largish norwegian paper VG, I'm trying a translation:
DVD-films are stored on a medium which is prone become damaged. For that reason, it is very different to copy a movie from a book or a periodical, it says in the verdict.
The court also makes clear that a prohibition against copying as printed on the film cover will limit consumer's legitimate rights as granted by
section 12 of the copyright code.
"This practice can be compared to private legislation, and can disturb the balance between interests that the law builds upon," said the judge.
This is good, especially the last paragraph. Apparently, the verdict makes it clear that the film industry is infringing on people's rights, not the other way around. It also makes it clear that any "you owe us your first-born" licenses or restrictions is null and void, and even ought to raise some eyebrows with legislators. It makes it clear that the entertainment industry is trying to take legislator's jobs away from them, by themselves setting all the rules. That ought to make legislators slightly upset, I would assume...
I've not read the verdict, but according the news reports, that is exactly what the court thinks. If it is yours, any obstacle towards using it is illegitimate and may be circumvented. It sounds quite good. But it may only last untill EUCD is implemented...
It's not really a retrial. IANAL (but I am Norwegian), but I think retrials happen when the Supreme Court finds that a lower court has messed up badly. This was an ordinary appeal process. In Norwegian courts, both parties can appeal, and the police appealed the previous acquittal, so it was sent to a higher court, which rejected the appeal.
It's not quite over yet, the police can appeal to the Supreme Court, which may or may not decide to hear it. The ultimate humiliation for the police would be if it was appealed but the Supreme Court decided not to hear it. But given the amount of beating the police has had in this case, they would be pretty fanatical to even think about appealing.
But yeah, it didn't take them too long, the case was apparently quite easy for the judges.
Well, yes, I have been thinking about getting a Wi-Fi access point, and leaving it open on purpose.
But it won't give us a free-for-all access, because of the relatively short range. You would still have to get on the Internet somehow to talk to the guy in the next city, at least where it is relatively far between the cities. Not to speak of across oceans. For those of us living in small countries (I do), many things that are interesting are foreign...
Also, think about all the hops you would have to go through... Your traceroute reaches 30 before you even get out of the neighbourhood...;-) Think about the awful latency!
So, thanks, I would prefer to pay something for a really good and reliable connection.
What it would provide us with, if everybody kept their access points open, is a very failure-resistant network. There will always be a route my packet can go, and it'll be very hard to control that network. A really good vehicle for free speech.
But then, the problem is the long-range transport networks. With the plans to build in "trusted computing" into routers, can we preserve freedom of expression through the rest of the Internet too, that's the question?
Show that it supports and exceeds the standards of all bills concerning verifiability and accountability
???
Profit!
I mean, seriously, with everything that has happened it is about time hackers not only whine about it, but actually steps up and creates a system that does it right. There's nobody more qualified to do it than a bunch of hackers anyway, and it should be an ideal field to show what can be created, and it should be a rock-solid business plan: You sell hardware and open code.
Start with a prototype that does what the proposed bills say, based on a free OS. Then move up to implement the best things out there (there was this crypto proposal here a couple of weeks ago), and then strip down the OS to the bare essentials needed for the operation. That way, conducting an exhaustive review of the complete source becomes managable.
Really, hackers should see this as a great business opportunity!
Slashdot Mirror
Uhm, well, since IANAL and my English vocabulary is a bit short in legal matters, I find it very hard to explain this properly. But trust me, we have a really hard problem here, something that will be used in big FUDslinging if we don't fix it.
Probably, it's a good idea for the community to do just that.
However, he is clearly suggesting that code could have come from KISS to MPlayer, not the other way around, and it is very understandable that the MPlayer folks take that as an insult.
It seems like the evidence is pretty damning, so I think we should wait a few days and see if KISS come up with an apology.
This is a real pending disaster for the whole free software community, and we'd better attend to it now.
It may not be very relevant to the case at hand. If there is MPlayer code in KISS' products, then they should have obtained some kind of license, if they didn't, they're infringing. But the GPL really doesn't do it right.
The reason is that GPL is a hack on the top of US legal traditions, a very cool hack, but it builds on the US concept of a public domain, where no rights are reserved.
But under the legal traditions we have around here, there is no such thing as the public domain, at least not as it is understood in the US. There are certain rights that the author cannot sign away, and doesn't really expire, such as the right to be associated with his work, and influence over what is a legitimate derivative work. That exists mainly to protect authors from exploitation by very powerful corporations.
That's rights you sign away when you GPL something, at least to an extent greater than I think (IANAL again) is allowed by law in the Nordic countries.
Now, you might think that it doesn't mean anything, but imagine what would happen if M$ or SCO-type corporations bring out FUD that rumours have it that for example Trolltech or MySQL AB will revoke the GPL because they were under undue pressure when they GPLed their software. It is not that I think they will ever do it, it is not in their interest, but the FUD would have basis in real legal traditions, so the FUD would be devastating.
I know that Glenn Otis-Brown of Creative Commons have been thinking about this a lot, he makes the analogy that the legal tradition is an operating system, which determines what a license can do. The Bern convention is simply not enough here. What we need are platform-independent licenses, and we may need to change the operating system to do it.
Around here, we have other traditions that may serve as the basis of copyleft and similar ideas. For example, we have what we in Norway call "allemannsretten", that the un-developed land is a common, everyone can walk wherever they like without asking the permission of the land owner.
For that reason, I think the Nordic countries should get together and make laws that can give free software appropriate legislation, and I think the Nordic Council would be the appropriate venue to do it. I have written them a brief e-mail, received no response, but I would encourage others to do it as well.
And besides, I agree with him here, there are probably not many science reasons to put people on Mars.
Anyway, it seems SpamAssassin will be adding support for SPF in 2.70, at least according to bug 2143. That's cool!
They're taking some beta software for some serious rides there....
I believe both mod_perl/1.99 and mod_jk/1.2.2-beta-1 are, well, beta software. I thought I heard mod_perl 2.0 was released, but I haven't heard any great success stories. But that's a really nice test for these modules...
Hey, this is /.! We don't take a lot of time to write posts here! OK, get your shoulders down, ease up, cool down. Feeling comfy? Good.
See my other reply in this thread.
Perhaps you're unaware that, for example, the Hindus taught the world as a platform supported on the backs of elephants,
Yes, there are myths like that around. I specifically mentioned scientists.
Vikings quested for the edge of the world to find the roots of Yggdrasil,
Bullshit. They did have a few creation myths you could easily interprete that way yes, but once you read later manuscripts more thoroughly, it is quite clear that they realized the shape of the earth. I'm able to read some old Norse, my mother reads it well, it's not so hard.
What you're missing is that in the day and age where Columbus was getting laughed out of the courts of kings over the round earth, the common man already knew to be true.
Quite the contrary. The royalty consulted the people with the correct numbers. Among the commons, it was however quite common to not realize the shape of the earth. I'm really sorry if you can't read it, but I'd recommend researching the background of the play "Erasmus Montanus" by Ludvig Holberg.
The thing that kills me is that from a few of the palaces that Columbus was laughed out of, you can *see* the curvature of the planet.
Yup, but what should this mean to you? It should mean to you that they knew it, but you refuse to realize it.
Through Augustin, every leading authority accepted the idea of a spherical earth.
I'd love some reference for this.
Hm, I don't have the bibliography with me right now. A really good source is Gingerich, Owen: "Astronomy in the Age of Columbus", Scientific American, November 1992., but I do not remember if he actually mentions this, and I do not remember if he has an extensive list of references. But the writings of Owen Gingerich are generally very good, I'd recommend many days in a dusty library reading his stuff and references therein... :-)
Then, of course, there's Dreyer, J. L. E.: "A history of astronomy from Thales to Kepler", Dover pubications, Inc. (1953), which I'd recommend you read all of. Unfortunately, again, I don't remember if he specifically deals with it.
Then, an author that discuss this point at some length is Koestler, Arthur: "The Sleepwalkers, a history of man's changing vision of the Universe", Hutchinson et CO, LTD (1959). The problem with Koestler is that he isn't actually doing research, and that book is very badly written. His agenda is pretty much to portray Copernicus as some kind of misunderstood genius that nobody read. He fails miserably, Copernicus was an over-cautious man that many read, but few understood. Also, Koestler tries very, very hard to make the earth flat is far as possible, but carefully selecting sources, and by doing that, he manages to maintain a flat earth to about 900 AD, at which point there are no sources left to claim that anyone in authority thought the earth was flat. For that reason, you should read it: It shows how someone desparate enough can make the earth flat up to about 900 AD, but not longer.
Uhm, but well, yeah, that Augustin specifically adopted the shape of the earth... Hm, I must admit that I have thought this to be general knowledge that I really don't remember where I read it. I realize that's a bad argument. But try Dreyer, it should be at least mentioned there, IIRC.
A shallow inspection of Columbus reveals that he knew he wasn't sailing for India,
Funny, well, being Norwegian, that's one of Norway's favorite myths too. "He did it because he knew Leiv Erikson's journey". I personally held it up to five years a
However, that's not what I meant to say (in fact it is the first time I hear about the Voynich manuscript, I'm not even trying to judge its genuinity), and I believe it is not what the researcher whose work we are discussing is proposing either.
The point is, given a description of how it could be done, is it even worth actually deciphering it, which may be a long fruitless excercise, or should one go on researching other subjects?
You are of course free to research anything you find interesting, but if we're competing for the same grants, you shouldn't be getting the money... ;-)
Actually, it is a harder question, and no, the burden of the proof rests with NASA. Do you think they haven't taken this burden seriously enough? YMMV, but I think they have...
Hm, I'm from Norway, and this was mentioned both in history classes as well as a brief mention in a statistics course on the university level.
I guess being a small country means that you have to find interesting things to mention elsewhere...
No. It is the proponents of the idea that the book is genuine's job to prove that it is indeed that. One doesn't need to prove that something is a hoax if it is, Occam's Razor does that job. What explanation is contains the fewest ubstantiated assumptions: That something was written a language nobody knows, containing valuable information nobody has any idea about, or that it was produced using a simple encryption technique to fool somebody to pay loads of shiny ducats?
I find it amazing that some people still hold this myth as true! What kind of history education have you had!?!
Look, no scientist have never claimed the earth was flat. For one thing, in every other culture than the western, it has never been claimed otherwise ("they even knew the earth was spherical"), but some has got the weird notion that Columbus had to argue that the earth wasn't flat.
He didn't. The moron had the wrong numbers, and would have gotten killed if America didn't happen to be there.
Allready the pupils of Thales claimed their master knew the earth was round. Erastostenes, measured the circumference of the earth with an error of 3%! The true circumference of the earth was known to the greeks in antiquity! Plato and his pupil Aristotle himself knew many arguments for the spherical shape of the earth, and why is this important? Because though some Christian scholars around 300 AD didn't like the idea of a spherical earth, St. Augustin adopted much of Plato's philosophy and made it an important part of christianity in the same century, and they adopted the ideas of a spherical earth as well. Through Augustin, every leading authority accepted the idea of a spherical earth.
Eventually, Erastostenes numbers was also accepted , but Columbus didn't like them, because it meant that going the other way to India was infeasible. So, he used some other numbers, and he used Marco Polo's exaggerated estimates of the distance he had travelled, and so he made it quite feasible. But it wasn't, he was wrong.
Columbus thought the distance to Asia was 4000 km, his contemporary scientists 16000 km, the real distance is 23000 km, while Columbus eventually travelled 6500 km.
So, why is this important? Because people who hold this belief often have many other misunderstandings about science. Indeed, you can't prove that the book is a hoax, but for that reason, the burden of the proof rests with the proponents of the idea that it is genuine. Who, of course, might cling to the idea that it is, long after the world has moved on to greener pastures. That's how it usually works anyway.
Mr. Tallyman: 345, 346, 347, 348, ...
...
Supervisor: Mr. Tallyman, what's your count?
Mr. Tallyman: damn, where was I? Uhm, it was 384, yeah, that was it! 385, 386, 387,
Seriously, there are a whole bunch of errors that could be made, verification is not so strong that fraud is very hard.
As one of the Diebold memos said, it's not rocket science, tallying votes in a machine is easy and can be extremely accurate. But people have to let go of the notion that you can have corporations (whose primary responsibility is value for their stock holders, not the quality of the voting procedure), doing it an make money from it.
With machines doing it right, following the basic requirements of democratic voting, full disclosure, and proper oversight of every step in the process by elected and highly qualified officials, and the possibility for every voter to verify for example a checksum of the software to see if the it is the same as he inspected himself, I would see no reason why one wouldn't go for voting machines.
I suppose you're Swedish (I'm Norwegian), and we have a far greater problem in our hands than the possible lack of copyright in Iran. Copyleft is a legal hack on US copyright traditions, but licenses such as GPL is meaningless under Norwegian and Swedish traditions. For example, you can't sign away ideal rights under our copyright traditions, and that is contrary to the GPL. Now, you might think that it doesn't mean anything, but imagine what would happen if M$ or SCO-type corporations bring out FUD that rumours have it that for example Trolltech or MySQL AB will revoke the GPL because they were under undue pressure when they GPLed their software. It is not that I think they will ever do it, it is not in their interest, but the FUD would have basis in real legal traditions, so the FUD would be devastating.
I don't think many hackers realize the potential disaster that lies in free software licenses not being enforceable worldwide.
I know that Glenn Otis-Brown of Creative Commons have been thinking about this a lot, he makes the analogy that the legal tradition is an operating system, which determines what a license can do. What we need are platform-independent licenses, and we may need to change the operating system to do it.
Around here, we have other traditions that may serve as the basis of copyleft and similar ideas. For example, we have what we in Norway call "allemannsretten", that the un-developed land is a common, everyone can walk wherever they like without asking the permission of the land owner.
For that reason, I think the Nordic countries should get together and make laws that can give free software appropriate legislation, and I think the Nordic Council would be the appropriate venue to do it. I have written them a brief e-mail, received no response, but I would encourage others to do it as well.
Dunno, but I read a lot of blogs by Iranians who write in English, and they seem to use "Farsi"...
In fact, this sounds like RMS' dream, all software is in the public domain and there is no incentive for proprietary software.
But of course, I could be wrong, it's just that every time I have actually gotten in contact with those who bought spam services, they had actually been ripped off by the spammer, and they sold nothing.
I think it's something quite cool! Really, I want a computer in my house to know exactly what food I've got in my fridge, and whereever I store that stuff. I want it to know what I need to buy, and what is about to get too old to be eaten. Why should I spend my time looking after these things, when it could be done well by a computerized system?
OK, so on my way home from work, I tell my PDA-like gadget what I want for dinner. It connects to my home system, which contains the database of what I have in my house, and compares that with the recipe of my desired dinner, then decides what I need.
Then it runs out on the web (or rather some future Semantic Web, it shouldn't be that hard to create, really), and collects today's prices, compares my position with the position of the shops, and reports back to me where I should go to get what I need for today's dinner.
The machines did most of the job. I just told it what I wanted, and it, after checking it out, reported back what I needed to shop and where to get it at the best price. Who wouldn't want a system like that?
So, the problem is: You don't want a bunch of big companies sneaking into your private life and know all your purchasing habits, as well as controlling the information flow in this process.
If we leave this to a bunch of industry giants, guess what's going to happen? Joe Sixpack won't care anyway. But if we design it, base it on free software with full disclosure of how the data is used, we protect our privacy with cryptography and make sure we control our own data, then, this is no future I would fear.
RFID tags would be a part of this, and it's a part of the same problem complex: If the data gained from RFID tags is mine, then I see little problems with it, but if I can't control it, then it's Bad[tm]. RFID-tags are not evil by default, it is what we make out of it.
To follow up on myself, now that I have read the whole verdict, it seems clear that the above report is quite accurate.
Doesn't matter. We have to implement their laws anyway. Trade agreements, you know.
This is good, especially the last paragraph. Apparently, the verdict makes it clear that the film industry is infringing on people's rights, not the other way around. It also makes it clear that any "you owe us your first-born" licenses or restrictions is null and void, and even ought to raise some eyebrows with legislators. It makes it clear that the entertainment industry is trying to take legislator's jobs away from them, by themselves setting all the rules. That ought to make legislators slightly upset, I would assume...
I've not read the verdict, but according the news reports, that is exactly what the court thinks. If it is yours, any obstacle towards using it is illegitimate and may be circumvented. It sounds quite good. But it may only last untill EUCD is implemented...
It's not quite over yet, the police can appeal to the Supreme Court, which may or may not decide to hear it. The ultimate humiliation for the police would be if it was appealed but the Supreme Court decided not to hear it. But given the amount of beating the police has had in this case, they would be pretty fanatical to even think about appealing.
But yeah, it didn't take them too long, the case was apparently quite easy for the judges.
Yeah, but they said they discontinued development... Besides, it is the hardware too!
But it won't give us a free-for-all access, because of the relatively short range. You would still have to get on the Internet somehow to talk to the guy in the next city, at least where it is relatively far between the cities. Not to speak of across oceans. For those of us living in small countries (I do), many things that are interesting are foreign...
Also, think about all the hops you would have to go through... Your traceroute reaches 30 before you even get out of the neighbourhood... ;-) Think about the awful latency!
So, thanks, I would prefer to pay something for a really good and reliable connection.
What it would provide us with, if everybody kept their access points open, is a very failure-resistant network. There will always be a route my packet can go, and it'll be very hard to control that network. A really good vehicle for free speech.
But then, the problem is the long-range transport networks. With the plans to build in "trusted computing" into routers, can we preserve freedom of expression through the rest of the Internet too, that's the question?
I mean, seriously, with everything that has happened it is about time hackers not only whine about it, but actually steps up and creates a system that does it right. There's nobody more qualified to do it than a bunch of hackers anyway, and it should be an ideal field to show what can be created, and it should be a rock-solid business plan: You sell hardware and open code.
Start with a prototype that does what the proposed bills say, based on a free OS. Then move up to implement the best things out there (there was this crypto proposal here a couple of weeks ago), and then strip down the OS to the bare essentials needed for the operation. That way, conducting an exhaustive review of the complete source becomes managable.
Really, hackers should see this as a great business opportunity!