Katz, this is really stupid. You're trying to defend kids' inalienable rights to see crappy movies?
I think American Pie is a bad example to use here, because the crappiness of the movie gets in the way of a more important point. Remember, these restrictions prevent kids from seeing any R-rated movie by themselves.
Any R-rated movie.
What does that include? An awful lot. I pulled some videos from my shelf and came up with a short list of thoughtful and well-made movies that earned an R rating:
The Color of Money. This movie contains strong language and very brief situations with drugs and nudity (probably ten or fifteen seconds total).
Bull Durham. This movie contains strong language and quite a lot of "sexual situations" (usually defined as frank discussions of sex, or implied sex onscreen without nudity, such as sex under the covers). No nudity except for Tim Robbins' butt.
Boogie Nights. The movie is all about sex, but the only nudity are a few nipples and one incredibly fake penis. A lot of strong language, some violence.
The Big Lebowski. This movie contains strong language and one or two very brief "sexual situations," but no nudity.
The Fabulous Baker Boys. A lot of strong language and sexual situations, no nudity.
Witness. No strong language; some violence, very brief nudity.
Rain Man. Some strong language, one or two sexual situations, no nudity, no violence.
Secrets and Lies. I cannot possibly fathom how this movie earned an R rating. It contains nothing that is traditionally found objectionable by the morality police. I don't think anyone even says "fuck."
Drugstore Cowboy. Strong language, a lot of drug use, a little violence.
To Die For. Strong language, some sexual situations, a little violence, no nudity.
Kiss of the Spider Woman. Strong language and violence, one sexual situation, though it is between two men, which is probably the chief reason this got an R.
Wag the Dog. This movie contains strong language, a few sexual situations (people discussing the President's molestation of an underage girl), a little implied violence.
Network. Strong language, one or two sexual situations, a little violence.
The point is that while these movies are not exactly children's fare, neither are they slasherfests, pornos or aimless sex comedies. None of them use violence, sex or language to be gratuitous; without exception they are thoughtful, well-crafted and provoking.
The problem is not that kids are being prevented from seeing crappy movies. The problem is that almost no films worth seeing receive a rating less than an R. Any movie which is sufficiently mature to be interesting winds up getting an R rating. A policy which refuses to allow children under 17 to see movies like these (is it really 18 now?) is a policy which declares children only fit for pabulum. I'm not surprised that kids resent being treated this way.
What's the big deal here? Women are constantly trying to negotiate more relaxed policies about onsite breastfeeding. Nursing facilities for nursing mothers is about as much of a "perk" as are parking lots, elevators or water fountains -- you just plain need them in order to work at all.
Onsite oil changes, floral service and photo development are extravagant. Lactation facilities are not. Maybe the boys down at Wired just don't see many tits.
He's currently using RCS, right? How on earth can he believe that RCS is better than CVS for what he's doing?
CVS might not have much to offer Linus. Its most significant advantages over RCS are that it's network-aware, and it has a superior conflict resolution system. These are advantages that appeal to distributed development environments or large development teams. Linus is famous for allowing almost nobody in the world to touch his repository. These features wouldn't particularly benefit him.
I don't think I can understand why someone would find RCS better than CVS, either. But I can understand why they might not find CVS to be a big improvement.
The EFF does not have a good point here. intel.com is a corporate network. They're not public property in any way. There is no fundamental right to send e-mail to intel.com, microsoft.com, slashdot.org, or any other privately-owned network. It couldn't be simpler than that: the right of free speech does not trump the right to private property.
If intel.com is a public park, then I'm the Statue of Liberty.
It would be nice if this meant that the government was requiring suppliers to honor W3C accessibility recommendations, but the article says that they're actually going to set their own standards. If Federal suppliers are required to adhere to the government's standard, it's likely to make any competing W3C recommendation irrelevant.
It would also be nice if they decided to coordinate with W3C on these issues, or adopt the W3C accessibility recommendations, but I'm not holding my breath.
Read the "About" link and the "re-packaging" link. He maintains the master document in Texinfo, and may release the masters if he can convert them to a more sane cross-platform markup language. In the meantime, if you want to write your own HTML converter, he'll link to it.
I suspect that not releasing the Texinfo masters is mostly about preventing people from republishing the document and therefore cutting into his sales, not about the lack of development tools.
Linux is popular, Solaris is well-known but inferior, *BSD is still good, but generally works and rots in a corner. Why? Maybe their development model doesn't work as well with a free community. Maybe if the kernel development were less tight-knit, you'd see more interest...
Just for the record, the BSD development model is demonstrably more open than the Linux kernel. When I last checked, the FreeBSD team includes 50 people with permission to commit changes directly to the source tree. Linux has exactly one. (There's also Alan Cox, but if I understand the power structure correctly, Alan's development is technically forked from Linus's.)
I also doubt that the Berkeley license hurts BSD. Perl's Artistic License, which is basically BSD with a happy name, hasn't visibly discouraged people from contributing to Perl.
At any rate, you're generally right that infighting like DrZiplok's is not going to get us anywhere. I personally prefer BSD as a development platform; however, we use Red Hat on some of the servers at work, and I'm impressed with how far they've come in the last couple of years.
If it comes to a point where Linux v. BSD is the most important political issue in the community, I'd say we've all won.
Reading the CNN piece made me very hostile to this idea. Reading some of the documents on www.pwg.org made me less so. These guys are doing some genuinely clueful stuff in this protocol, and it's worth reading.
I do find some of their choices puzzling. For example, the FAQ dismisses the BSD LPR protocol as ``proprietary'' and therefore unusable. (Hello? By what bizarro definition of ``proprietary'' does 4.4BSD qualify?) They reject RFC 1179 because it's not an Internet standard, and then adopt SSL3 for security, even though it does not seem to be any more official in the IETF sense. A lot of the work seems to be more ad-hoc than they're willing to let on.
Other posters have noted that complex protocols are difficult to do right, and especially difficult to do securely. That's going to be a major problem right there. But overall, an IETF-blessed effort toward an open standard for network printing that includes participation from hardware vendors is probably going to be a good thing in the long run.
RMS missed the boat on copyright
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RMS on APSL
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· Score: 1
Copyright is not relevant to the APSL.
The APSL is a shrinkwrap, er, clickwrap contract.
It seems to me that a clickwrap license is based in copyright. Downloading is just another word for copying, after all. What's the difference between a clickwrap license and a copyright license?
Please correct me if I am wrong, but a glance at this code seems to look like a simple Xor.
It's not a simple XOR -- there's a lot of byte-swapping going on, too. Note how the algorithm chooses swap_index and exchanges it with index at each step. I don't know if Schneier's algorithm can accommodate that.
My point is that linux can run without GNU software...
It could.
But it doesn't.
That's why it's appropriate to call it GNU/Linux.
The fact that it would take so much work to put together this mythical "Linux operating system that doesn't include any GNU tools" is precisely why the name "GNU/Linux" is justified.
I don't know why he has such a problem with GNU being associated with UNIX, and no problem with GNU being assocaited with Linux.
Because "UNIX is a trademark of AT&T Bell Laboratories."
Remember that when RMS started the GNU Project, in the early 80s, free software had been going proprietary at an alarming rate for several years. The whole point of GNU was that it wasn't UNIX -- it didn't have AT&T's cutthroat licensing policy behind it. This obviously is not true of the Linux kernel, which is free software.
RMS should not complain. One cannot ask for better publicity than Linux.
Sure you could. You could get a marketing program that identifies the system as the GNU software system running on the Linux kernel. Believe it or not, Linux fans really do tend to forget where their software came from -- just consider the questions in Linux newsgroups about "Linux's GCC" and "the Linux Emacs editor." I'm not surprised that RMS feels slighted by the Linux community.
I switched from Linux to FreeBSD several years ago, when it became clear that the Linux community were by and large MS-DOS refugees who were more interested in software they didn't have to pay for than software they could hack on. Things seem to be changing these days, which is nice to see. But I don't blame RMS for his frustration with the changing face of the "free" software movement.
I do think his criticism of Linus is strange. Linus has always made it clear that putting Linux under the GPL was the smartest decision he ever made with the software, because it meant that no one could ever steal his work from him or from the people. Whether Linus does not personally trumpet FSF or Project GNU, it seems clear that he understands and pursues the goals of free software. RMS may be unhappy because of his employment at the CIA^H^H^H^H^H^H^HTransmeta.
Braindead /. responses to article
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Unix in Perl
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· Score: 1
AC is correct to point out that programmer time is more valuable than processor time.
However, that doesn't mean that it's either smart or useful to reimplement the Unix command toolset in Perl. On a busy server, Perl's resource footprint will still trip you up. We have had to reimplement a number of small Perl tools in sh, awk or C by virtue of the fact that even with a half-gig of RAM, we cannot afford to spawn fifty Perl processes every second.
Perl is still a great tool for a lot of our applications. Just not all of them. It might be fun to rewrite zork in Perl, but we're still going to be using good old-fashioned egregious GNU tools for getting real work done.
Slashdot Mirror
Since when do we change the English language?
The last time I checked, most dictionaries had accepted ``her'' as a legal word in English.
Relax. It is becoming common practice to use ``her'' as the routine third-person pronoun in examples.
I think American Pie is a bad example to use here, because the crappiness of the movie gets in the way of a more important point. Remember, these restrictions prevent kids from seeing any R-rated movie by themselves.
Any R-rated movie.
What does that include? An awful lot. I pulled some videos from my shelf and came up with a short list of thoughtful and well-made movies that earned an R rating:
The point is that while these movies are not exactly children's fare, neither are they slasherfests, pornos or aimless sex comedies. None of them use violence, sex or language to be gratuitous; without exception they are thoughtful, well-crafted and provoking.
The problem is not that kids are being prevented from seeing crappy movies. The problem is that almost no films worth seeing receive a rating less than an R. Any movie which is sufficiently mature to be interesting winds up getting an R rating. A policy which refuses to allow children under 17 to see movies like these (is it really 18 now?) is a policy which declares children only fit for pabulum. I'm not surprised that kids resent being treated this way.
What's the big deal here? Women are constantly trying to negotiate more relaxed policies about onsite breastfeeding. Nursing facilities for nursing mothers is about as much of a "perk" as are parking lots, elevators or water fountains -- you just plain need them in order to work at all.
Onsite oil changes, floral service and photo development are extravagant. Lactation facilities are not. Maybe the boys down at Wired just don't see many tits.
Since this is Slashdot, I would assume that he's talking about Perl, which of course is famous for its straightforward syntax and elegant readability.
He's currently using RCS, right? How on earth can he believe that RCS is better than CVS for what he's doing?
CVS might not have much to offer Linus. Its most significant advantages over RCS are that it's network-aware, and it has a superior conflict resolution system. These are advantages that appeal to distributed development environments or large development teams. Linus is famous for allowing almost nobody in the world to touch his repository. These features wouldn't particularly benefit him.
I don't think I can understand why someone would find RCS better than CVS, either. But I can understand why they might not find CVS to be a big improvement.
The EFF does not have a good point here. intel.com is a corporate network. They're not public property in any way. There is no fundamental right to send e-mail to intel.com, microsoft.com, slashdot.org, or any other privately-owned network. It couldn't be simpler than that: the right of free speech does not trump the right to private property.
If intel.com is a public park, then I'm the Statue of Liberty.
It would be nice if this meant that the government was requiring suppliers to honor W3C accessibility recommendations, but the article says that they're actually going to set their own standards. If Federal suppliers are required to adhere to the government's standard, it's likely to make any competing W3C recommendation irrelevant.
It would also be nice if they decided to coordinate with W3C on these issues, or adopt the W3C accessibility recommendations, but I'm not holding my breath.
Read the "About" link and the "re-packaging" link. He maintains the master document in Texinfo, and may release the masters if he can convert them to a more sane cross-platform markup language. In the meantime, if you want to write your own HTML converter, he'll link to it.
I suspect that not releasing the Texinfo masters is mostly about preventing people from republishing the document and therefore cutting into his sales, not about the lack of development tools.
Linux is popular, Solaris is well-known but inferior, *BSD is still good, but generally works and rots in a corner. Why? Maybe their development model doesn't work as well with a free community. Maybe if the kernel development were less tight-knit, you'd see more interest...
Just for the record, the BSD development model is demonstrably more open than the Linux kernel. When I last checked, the FreeBSD team includes 50 people with permission to commit changes directly to the source tree. Linux has exactly one. (There's also Alan Cox, but if I understand the power structure correctly, Alan's development is technically forked from Linus's.)
I also doubt that the Berkeley license hurts BSD. Perl's Artistic License, which is basically BSD with a happy name, hasn't visibly discouraged people from contributing to Perl.
At any rate, you're generally right that infighting like DrZiplok's is not going to get us anywhere. I personally prefer BSD as a development platform; however, we use Red Hat on some of the servers at work, and I'm impressed with how far they've come in the last couple of years.
If it comes to a point where Linux v. BSD is the most important political issue in the community, I'd say we've all won.
Reading the CNN piece made me very hostile to this idea. Reading some of the documents on www.pwg.org made me less so. These guys are doing some genuinely clueful stuff in this protocol, and it's worth reading.
I do find some of their choices puzzling. For example, the FAQ dismisses the BSD LPR protocol as ``proprietary'' and therefore unusable. (Hello? By what bizarro definition of ``proprietary'' does 4.4BSD qualify?) They reject RFC 1179 because it's not an Internet standard, and then adopt SSL3 for security, even though it does not seem to be any more official in the IETF sense. A lot of the work seems to be more ad-hoc than they're willing to let on.
Other posters have noted that complex protocols are difficult to do right, and especially difficult to do securely. That's going to be a major problem right there. But overall, an IETF-blessed effort toward an open standard for network printing that includes participation from hardware vendors is probably going to be a good thing in the long run.
Copyright is not relevant to the APSL.
The APSL is a shrinkwrap, er, clickwrap contract.
It seems to me that a clickwrap license is based in copyright. Downloading is just another word for copying, after all. What's the difference between a clickwrap license and a copyright license?
Please correct me if I am wrong, but a glance at this code seems to look like a simple Xor.
It's not a simple XOR -- there's a lot of byte-swapping going on, too. Note how the algorithm chooses swap_index and exchanges it with index at each step. I don't know if Schneier's algorithm can accommodate that.
"hackercollection" just happens to be 16 characters long.
My point is that linux can run without GNU software...
It could.
But it doesn't.
That's why it's appropriate to call it GNU/Linux.
The fact that it would take so much work to put together this mythical "Linux operating system that doesn't include any GNU tools" is precisely why the name "GNU/Linux" is justified.
I don't know why he has such a problem with GNU being associated with UNIX, and no problem with GNU being assocaited with Linux.
Because "UNIX is a trademark of AT&T Bell Laboratories."
Remember that when RMS started the GNU Project, in the early 80s, free software had been going proprietary at an alarming rate for several years. The whole point of GNU was that it wasn't UNIX -- it didn't have AT&T's cutthroat licensing policy behind it. This obviously is not true of the Linux kernel, which is free software.
RMS should not complain. One cannot ask for better publicity than Linux.
Sure you could. You could get a marketing program that identifies the system as the GNU software system running on the Linux kernel. Believe it or not, Linux fans really do tend to forget where their software came from -- just consider the questions in Linux newsgroups about "Linux's GCC" and "the Linux Emacs editor." I'm not surprised that RMS feels slighted by the Linux community.
I switched from Linux to FreeBSD several years ago, when it became clear that the Linux community were by and large MS-DOS refugees who were more interested in software they didn't have to pay for than software they could hack on. Things seem to be changing these days, which is nice to see. But I don't blame RMS for his frustration with the changing face of the "free" software movement.
I do think his criticism of Linus is strange. Linus has always made it clear that putting Linux under the GPL was the smartest decision he ever made with the software, because it meant that no one could ever steal his work from him or from the people. Whether Linus does not personally trumpet FSF or Project GNU, it seems clear that he understands and pursues the goals of free software. RMS may be unhappy because of his employment at the CIA^H^H^H^H^H^H^HTransmeta.
However, that doesn't mean that it's either smart or useful to reimplement the Unix command toolset in Perl. On a busy server, Perl's resource footprint will still trip you up. We have had to reimplement a number of small Perl tools in sh, awk or C by virtue of the fact that even with a half-gig of RAM, we cannot afford to spawn fifty Perl processes every second.
Perl is still a great tool for a lot of our applications. Just not all of them. It might be fun to rewrite zork in Perl, but we're still going to be using good old-fashioned egregious GNU tools for getting real work done.