Well heck, let's just get rid of the Internet altogether. Just unplug from the Net, and you don't have to worry about spam, malware, or any of the other annoyances and dangers of having your computer connected to the world. People lived and worked before there was an Internet, after all. Olden days of 1995? Why not the olden days of 1985? Or 1905?
Your suggestion, while factually accurate, is more or less impractical in the real world. Social networking is here to stay.
I have FC4 at work; FF3 will not run on FC4 (at least I haven't seen an RPM for it) and I'm not going to be upgrading a workstation that is working just fine, risking all the instability that upgrades bring, just so I can use shiny new improved FF3 (now with more useless junk!).
Being nagged to upgrade to something I cannot upgrade to is going to be damned annoying.
James Kirk had "history" before becoming captain of the Enterprise.
Also Kirk was a prodigy among prodigies. No one in the history of Starfleet Academy up to that point thought of rigging the Kobayashi Maru simulator until he did it. And people accepted to the Academy were not dimwits.
Jill also wrote (writes) her own book, Scary Godmother.
Colleen Doran has for years written an excellent Science Fiction book, A Distant Soil.
Donna Barr has written scads of books, my favorites being the Stinz series.
Marvel has had a number of female editors step into writing from time to time.
And there are lots of female writers of "independent"/"alternative" comics. The Comics Journal occasionally has articles devoted to them. I don't really like the genre much, so can't name them offhand (except for Julie Doucet and Dori Seda) but I know they're out there.
The concern is that n days down the road, MS sues and shuts down OpenOffice due to patent infringement that Sun could even know about right now, while Sun remains free and clear to continue with StarOffice. Thus all the work that was GPLed is lost to the community but remains the property of Sun.
Bah, this is all irrelevant navel-gazing. MS can sue in the U.S. all they want, but even they don't have the resources to sue in every jurisdiction in the world where OpenOffice can be developed. As the U.S. closes down FOSS development, it will move to other countries. It will continue, and the U.S. will continue its decline from technological leader (which it has already largely lost) to insular, xenophobic irrelevancy.
Wonder what this means to old-style baseball simulation game companies who happen to put out a computer version of their cards-and-dice games...all the talk here is about console games (which I guess is only to be expected from you whipper-snappers) but there's other companies out there that might be affected by this deal.
B5 was better because it got to tell its entire story and spawned two spin-off series (admittedly one only went one episode). SG1 is better because it's on what, season 7 now (?), plus it has a spin-off of its own. Firefly was off to a glorious start, and was cut down in its youth by rapacious suits who judge the quality of TV by demographics and ratings, not by production quality or artistic merit. I have no problem putting Joss Whedon up there with JMStraczinsky or the guy who created SG1 (can't remember his name!) as excellent storytellers. But "THE new voice"? Whedon was around for years before Firefly!
I just hope the movie (or movies) does well enough to give Firefly a second chance as a series.
Or to sum it up briefly, the US would like to continue to be the world's only superpower.
Not only would we *like* to remain the world's only superpower, it is the avowed policy of our government to ENSURE that that remains the case.
I don't like what my country is becoming. I hope the people will wake up soon and see that it's foolish for us to elect governments that have these ultranationalist (we're #1 and by all that's holy we'll never be threatened again!), evangelical (the world will be saved by democracy NOW!) messianic (the United States has an obligation to bring freedom and democracy to the world!) policies.
only if the resulting application has been distributed.
I think we can safely assume that there are no copyright implications for programs that are totally in-house and are not distributed or sold. At least I hope we can (can't we assume at least BASIC common sense? Perhaps not...).
the GPL may require your source code to be made available even if zero changes were made to previously GPL'd code (for instance, if you merely linked them on the command line and distributed the result).
This caused me to go back and re-read the GPL FAQ. Apparently I was mistaken on this point:
Q: You have a GPL'ed program that I'd like to link with my code to build a proprietary program. Does the fact that I link with your program mean I have to GPL my program?
A: Yes.
You learn something new every day. I think this is the genesis of the "viral nature" argument about the GPL. Since it's inconceivable to a commercial proprietary software company that anyone would actually create a module that they would distribute for no compensation under the GPL (which only allows charging for distribution of copies which obviously only one person in the world would ever pay), they claim (perhaps rightly if inelegantly) that the GPL is "viral" and (wrongly) that it therefore must be destroyed like any other virus. Their real goal, however, is to maintain their monopoly on software.
7. Open Source does NOT mean Free (as in costing no money) Software; this is a common misunderstanding and misrepresentation. Open Source means your source code is freely available to be viewed and critiqued, but you still own it under the copyright laws and have full rights to profit from your work.
8. The GPL does NOT in fact mandate that any software released under it or any software incorporating GPLed code must be given away for free. It merely states that the GPLed source code must be available to be seen if any changes are made to the GPLed code. If you made no changes to the GPLed code in your program, you don't have to make ANY source code available.
9. The United States Government is not obligated to protect corporations from competition or ensure their profits. Especially when such competition in large part comes from United States citizens donating their time and effort to projects for the public good, that protection is unnecessary and unwarranted. If for-profit corporations cannot afford to develop products that are superior to those created by hobbyists working on their own time, that's too bad.
10. Similarly, the United States Government is not obligated to secure the global competitive position of domestic companies. The United States cannot legitimately control the development of useful software by foreign hobbyists on their own time any more than it can do so domestically. If for-profit companies cannot afford to develop products that are superior to those available overseas, that's too bad.
11. The United States Government is not obligated to wage a campaign (military or otherwise) against foreign nations to secure a monopoly on multi-processor operating systems for domestic companies. Multi-processor operating systems are not something only capable of being invented in the United States by for-profit companies. If a foreign national reverse-engineers or independently develops such technology, all the export restrictions in the world will not and should not prevent its use. The United States is not the only nation with intelligent and innovative people, and it is ludicrous and paranoid to portray all such people as threats to our national security.
Items 9-11 are my point-by-point counterarguments to the SCO letter.
What the hell were the UNIX companies doing during that time?
Well, let's see. I have a limited perspective and I'm sure someone else will do better, but here's what I remember:
Novell: busy being the #1 networking software company in the world at that time. UNIX was just a sideline, NetWare was their flagship product. In fact I remember UNIXWare always being slammed in technical forums as being (ahem) below par.
AT&T: busy fighting to protect their core business, long-distance telephone service, from competition of MCI and Sprint and all their offspring. AT&T before the breakup was not a computing company, and it certainly wasn't one after it. Remember those AT&T 6300 PCs?
IBM: AIX was a sideline for them as well; it worked better than UNIXWare but still was seen as inferior to SCO UNIX and BSD. IBM was still all about hardware, and big iron didn't run AIX.
Data General: Remember DG/UX? It was just starting to take off, then DEC decided to buy them out and focus on selling Alphas, then DEC ran itself into the ground and was itself acquired by Compaq who thought they might want to sell server-class machines. DG/UX sank beneath the waves then...
HP: HP/UX is still around, but largely static as far as I know. No need to improve it if it's stable and runs whatever the users want to run on their HP hardware.
They could have written the GUI apps that their users wanted.
Their users didn't want GUI apps. You have to understand that UNIX was never seen as a desktop operating system by business; it was and is a server OS. The pathetic initial attempts of grafting a GUI onto UNIX (remember Motif?) never led anywhere except gee-whiz NOC status screens, and those don't justify the expense of upgrading. All the office software development companies were developing primarily for Windows, because that's what everyone was using.
UNIX missed the desktop boat in the early 1980's, when the desktop was still CHUI and the big Apple vs. IBM/MS-DOS fight was still hanging in the balance. If UNIX vendors had made a play for the desktop with office software at that time, they might have stood a chance. But the big UNIX vendors were not in the software business by and large, they just needed something to sell hardware or run legacy systems on, so they sat on the sidelines and watched as the future of the desktop was decided. And they really didn't care, because the desktop wasn't their market.
Linux was developed for almost the same reasons as the PC was developed: to bring the power of the UNIX operating system out of the corporate/campus server room and into reach of the public. It has been and will continue to be successful in this.
Wouldn't the rules for the people be the criminal and civil codes?
Precisely. And those codes are established by the passage of bills through the Legislative branch, approval by the Executive branch, and interpretation by the Judicial branch as laid out in Articles I, II, and III of the Constitution. As the Preamble states, We The People established this Constitution (or more precisely our forefathers did); and by living as a member of this society we tacitly agree to either abide by its rules, change them, or leave the country (which we are free to do). While you may be technically correct that the Constitution is not itself intended to bind you to anything, being instead a blueprint for a system of government, in practice you are bound by what that government that the Constitution describes decides to enact. And since it is a government set up by ourselves and run by ourselves, we have only ourselves to blame when it enacts things we disagree with.
The Constitution is binding to all the states of the Union. It's the whole point of having a Constitution, it is "the supreme law of the land" (Article VI). The 9th and 10th Amendments (link) provide that anything *not* spelled out in the Constitution is left up to the states or the general public, but everything that *is* stated in the Constitution is binding on all the states and all the people.
You may not have been smoking too much crack, I can't speak to that. You were however misinformed.
One tiny problem. The independent music I've heard so far is all garage-band crap. There's nothing to compare with Seal, or Juno Reactor, or Pink Floyd. The Doors, Styx, and The Police aren't releasing their material on independent labels.
Independent music is still the minor leagues. I don't want to pay money for it.
My understanding is, if the song is downloadable, then they assume that someone downloaded it regardless of whether anyone actually did or not. The mere fact that you have offered it means you are guilty of unlawful redistribution and they've got you.
Personally I'm loving this. After they prosecute a few thousand teenagers' clueless parents, you will see a massive downturn in Internet access subscriptions as parents "just get rid of the damn things." Then the ISPs will scream about how the RIAA is hurting their business, computer manufacturers and resellers will moan about their sales dropping, and the RIAA members will have to come up with some other explanation of why their sales didn't rebound after they killed off file sharing.
Can't wait for RFID to be deployed (embedded) in everything. Can't wait to walk through my room and take an inventory of what the hell is in there.
Can't wait to grab what I want from a store, walk through a detector, slide in my credit card, and ok the purchase as I walk out.
Can't wait to go to a bar or a strip club, and have that fact noted with time, location, and duration of stay on my permanent police file (or provided to my suspicious wife or SO). Can't wait to go to an antiwar/antigovernment protest and have my presence similarly noted, even if I don't get arrested.
Sure, there are loads of positive uses of RFID. If there weren't, it probably wouldn't have been invented. But not considering all the possible negative effects and trusting to the goodwill of the powers that be is just stupid. The government has already been shown to have bugged private citizens and kept dossiers on them for nebulous reasons, and there's no reason to blithely hand over another means of control to them. You speak of your liberty, well friend your liberty should not be allowed to infringe on my liberty.
There's nothing from stopping you from FTPing the source down, running./configure, and running make install.[...]If you're using OSS, you need to be able to work it
Hey, what a great argument, I'll remember that the next time someone asks me if they should switch to Linux. "No, Linux is only for those who know how to program."
There is a two-hour pilot ("Serenity") according to the websites. It apparently won't be aired until December or so. Just hearsay on my part, take it for what it's worth...
The scene at the end was classic. I also liked the "chain of command" line. Amazingly Adam Baldwin did a good job. Heck, they all did. I am impressed with the acting. Good acting, good writing...could it be a good show?:)
Slashdot Mirror
Well heck, let's just get rid of the Internet altogether. Just unplug from the Net, and you don't have to worry about spam, malware, or any of the other annoyances and dangers of having your computer connected to the world. People lived and worked before there was an Internet, after all. Olden days of 1995? Why not the olden days of 1985? Or 1905?
Your suggestion, while factually accurate, is more or less impractical in the real world. Social networking is here to stay.
My situation exactly.
I have FC4 at work; FF3 will not run on FC4 (at least I haven't seen an RPM for it) and I'm not going to be upgrading a workstation that is working just fine, risking all the instability that upgrades bring, just so I can use shiny new improved FF3 (now with more useless junk!).
Being nagged to upgrade to something I cannot upgrade to is going to be damned annoying.
James Kirk had "history" before becoming captain of the Enterprise.
Also Kirk was a prodigy among prodigies. No one in the history of Starfleet Academy up to that point thought of rigging the Kobayashi Maru simulator until he did it. And people accepted to the Academy were not dimwits.
Jill also wrote (writes) her own book, Scary Godmother.
Colleen Doran has for years written an excellent Science Fiction book, A Distant Soil.
Donna Barr has written scads of books, my favorites being the Stinz series.
Marvel has had a number of female editors step into writing from time to time.
And there are lots of female writers of "independent"/"alternative" comics. The Comics Journal occasionally has articles devoted to them. I don't really like the genre much, so can't name them offhand (except for Julie Doucet and Dori Seda) but I know they're out there.
Communist! :)
Robert Picardo, however, was great.
"Please state the nature of the medical emergency." Cracked me up every time.
Bah, this is all irrelevant navel-gazing. MS can sue in the U.S. all they want, but even they don't have the resources to sue in every jurisdiction in the world where OpenOffice can be developed. As the U.S. closes down FOSS development, it will move to other countries. It will continue, and the U.S. will continue its decline from technological leader (which it has already largely lost) to insular, xenophobic irrelevancy.
Wonder what this means to old-style baseball simulation game companies who happen to put out a computer version of their cards-and-dice games...all the talk here is about console games (which I guess is only to be expected from you whipper-snappers) but there's other companies out there that might be affected by this deal.
So don't pay it. TiVo isn't holding a gun to your head.
B5 was better because it got to tell its entire story and spawned two spin-off series (admittedly one only went one episode). SG1 is better because it's on what, season 7 now (?), plus it has a spin-off of its own. Firefly was off to a glorious start, and was cut down in its youth by rapacious suits who judge the quality of TV by demographics and ratings, not by production quality or artistic merit. I have no problem putting Joss Whedon up there with JMStraczinsky or the guy who created SG1 (can't remember his name!) as excellent storytellers. But "THE new voice"? Whedon was around for years before Firefly!
I just hope the movie (or movies) does well enough to give Firefly a second chance as a series.
Not only would we *like* to remain the world's only superpower, it is the avowed policy of our government to ENSURE that that remains the case.
I don't like what my country is becoming. I hope the people will wake up soon and see that it's foolish for us to elect governments that have these ultranationalist (we're #1 and by all that's holy we'll never be threatened again!), evangelical (the world will be saved by democracy NOW!) messianic (the United States has an obligation to bring freedom and democracy to the world!) policies.
I can hardly wait to see and hear Eve again! :)
I think we can safely assume that there are no copyright implications for programs that are totally in-house and are not distributed or sold. At least I hope we can (can't we assume at least BASIC common sense? Perhaps not...).
the GPL may require your source code to be made available even if zero changes were made to previously GPL'd code (for instance, if you merely linked them on the command line and distributed the result).
This caused me to go back and re-read the GPL FAQ. Apparently I was mistaken on this point:
You learn something new every day. I think this is the genesis of the "viral nature" argument about the GPL. Since it's inconceivable to a commercial proprietary software company that anyone would actually create a module that they would distribute for no compensation under the GPL (which only allows charging for distribution of copies which obviously only one person in the world would ever pay), they claim (perhaps rightly if inelegantly) that the GPL is "viral" and (wrongly) that it therefore must be destroyed like any other virus. Their real goal, however, is to maintain their monopoly on software.
7. Open Source does NOT mean Free (as in costing no money) Software; this is a common misunderstanding and misrepresentation. Open Source means your source code is freely available to be viewed and critiqued, but you still own it under the copyright laws and have full rights to profit from your work.
8. The GPL does NOT in fact mandate that any software released under it or any software incorporating GPLed code must be given away for free. It merely states that the GPLed source code must be available to be seen if any changes are made to the GPLed code. If you made no changes to the GPLed code in your program, you don't have to make ANY source code available.
9. The United States Government is not obligated to protect corporations from competition or ensure their profits. Especially when such competition in large part comes from United States citizens donating their time and effort to projects for the public good, that protection is unnecessary and unwarranted. If for-profit corporations cannot afford to develop products that are superior to those created by hobbyists working on their own time, that's too bad.
10. Similarly, the United States Government is not obligated to secure the global competitive position of domestic companies. The United States cannot legitimately control the development of useful software by foreign hobbyists on their own time any more than it can do so domestically. If for-profit companies cannot afford to develop products that are superior to those available overseas, that's too bad.
11. The United States Government is not obligated to wage a campaign (military or otherwise) against foreign nations to secure a monopoly on multi-processor operating systems for domestic companies. Multi-processor operating systems are not something only capable of being invented in the United States by for-profit companies. If a foreign national reverse-engineers or independently develops such technology, all the export restrictions in the world will not and should not prevent its use. The United States is not the only nation with intelligent and innovative people, and it is ludicrous and paranoid to portray all such people as threats to our national security.
Items 9-11 are my point-by-point counterarguments to the SCO letter.
Well, let's see. I have a limited perspective and I'm sure someone else will do better, but here's what I remember:
Novell: busy being the #1 networking software company in the world at that time. UNIX was just a sideline, NetWare was their flagship product. In fact I remember UNIXWare always being slammed in technical forums as being (ahem) below par.
AT&T: busy fighting to protect their core business, long-distance telephone service, from competition of MCI and Sprint and all their offspring. AT&T before the breakup was not a computing company, and it certainly wasn't one after it. Remember those AT&T 6300 PCs?
IBM: AIX was a sideline for them as well; it worked better than UNIXWare but still was seen as inferior to SCO UNIX and BSD. IBM was still all about hardware, and big iron didn't run AIX.
Data General: Remember DG/UX? It was just starting to take off, then DEC decided to buy them out and focus on selling Alphas, then DEC ran itself into the ground and was itself acquired by Compaq who thought they might want to sell server-class machines. DG/UX sank beneath the waves then...
HP: HP/UX is still around, but largely static as far as I know. No need to improve it if it's stable and runs whatever the users want to run on their HP hardware.
Their users didn't want GUI apps. You have to understand that UNIX was never seen as a desktop operating system by business; it was and is a server OS. The pathetic initial attempts of grafting a GUI onto UNIX (remember Motif?) never led anywhere except gee-whiz NOC status screens, and those don't justify the expense of upgrading. All the office software development companies were developing primarily for Windows, because that's what everyone was using.
UNIX missed the desktop boat in the early 1980's, when the desktop was still CHUI and the big Apple vs. IBM/MS-DOS fight was still hanging in the balance. If UNIX vendors had made a play for the desktop with office software at that time, they might have stood a chance. But the big UNIX vendors were not in the software business by and large, they just needed something to sell hardware or run legacy systems on, so they sat on the sidelines and watched as the future of the desktop was decided. And they really didn't care, because the desktop wasn't their market.
Linux was developed for almost the same reasons as the PC was developed: to bring the power of the UNIX operating system out of the corporate/campus server room and into reach of the public. It has been and will continue to be successful in this.
Here's the, er, "genuine article".
Apparently you missed this story...
Precisely. And those codes are established by the passage of bills through the Legislative branch, approval by the Executive branch, and interpretation by the Judicial branch as laid out in Articles I, II, and III of the Constitution. As the Preamble states, We The People established this Constitution (or more precisely our forefathers did); and by living as a member of this society we tacitly agree to either abide by its rules, change them, or leave the country (which we are free to do). While you may be technically correct that the Constitution is not itself intended to bind you to anything, being instead a blueprint for a system of government, in practice you are bound by what that government that the Constitution describes decides to enact. And since it is a government set up by ourselves and run by ourselves, we have only ourselves to blame when it enacts things we disagree with.
The Constitution is binding to all the states of the Union. It's the whole point of having a Constitution, it is "the supreme law of the land" (Article VI). The 9th and 10th Amendments (link) provide that anything *not* spelled out in the Constitution is left up to the states or the general public, but everything that *is* stated in the Constitution is binding on all the states and all the people.
You may not have been smoking too much crack, I can't speak to that. You were however misinformed.
One tiny problem. The independent music I've heard so far is all garage-band crap. There's nothing to compare with Seal, or Juno Reactor, or Pink Floyd. The Doors, Styx, and The Police aren't releasing their material on independent labels.
Independent music is still the minor leagues. I don't want to pay money for it.
My understanding is, if the song is downloadable, then they assume that someone downloaded it regardless of whether anyone actually did or not. The mere fact that you have offered it means you are guilty of unlawful redistribution and they've got you.
Personally I'm loving this. After they prosecute a few thousand teenagers' clueless parents, you will see a massive downturn in Internet access subscriptions as parents "just get rid of the damn things." Then the ISPs will scream about how the RIAA is hurting their business, computer manufacturers and resellers will moan about their sales dropping, and the RIAA members will have to come up with some other explanation of why their sales didn't rebound after they killed off file sharing.
Can't wait for RFID to be deployed (embedded) in everything. Can't wait to walk through my room and take an inventory of what the hell is in there.
Can't wait to grab what I want from a store, walk through a detector, slide in my credit card, and ok the purchase as I walk out.
Can't wait to go to a bar or a strip club, and have that fact noted with time, location, and duration of stay on my permanent police file (or provided to my suspicious wife or SO). Can't wait to go to an antiwar/antigovernment protest and have my presence similarly noted, even if I don't get arrested.
Sure, there are loads of positive uses of RFID. If there weren't, it probably wouldn't have been invented. But not considering all the possible negative effects and trusting to the goodwill of the powers that be is just stupid. The government has already been shown to have bugged private citizens and kept dossiers on them for nebulous reasons, and there's no reason to blithely hand over another means of control to them. You speak of your liberty, well friend your liberty should not be allowed to infringe on my liberty.
There's nothing from stopping you from FTPing the source down, running ./configure, and running make install.[...]If you're using OSS, you need to be able to work it
Hey, what a great argument, I'll remember that the next time someone asks me if they should switch to Linux. "No, Linux is only for those who know how to program."
There is a two-hour pilot ("Serenity") according to the websites. It apparently won't be aired until December or so. Just hearsay on my part, take it for what it's worth...
:)
The scene at the end was classic. I also liked the "chain of command" line. Amazingly Adam Baldwin did a good job. Heck, they all did. I am impressed with the acting. Good acting, good writing...could it be a good show?