I wasn't responding to the article's use of the word "use", but to the prior poster's. But about the article: Since he starts off with a factual inaccuracy about SCO owning Unix and ends with the ad hominem attack inherent in the word "comrade" I consider it to be exceptionally poor journalism. I think Lyons' implied assertion that flagrantly violating the copyright law is okay as long as the perpetrator is willing to pay some royalties after getting caught inidicates that the only place Lyons is more challenged than he is in the facts department is in the ethics department.
The article is unforgivably biased, but your summary is a bit off (and yes, I'm being picky because it's a subtle but important distinction). There is no license required to use Free Software. None.
The GPL only affects those things that would normally be infringing acts under copyright law: copying, distribution, and derivation. The GPL does not fall under the same rubric as the ubiquitous and offensive EULA of commercial software fame. The difference is significant because these companies are looking to commit otherwise illegal actions (creating and distributing derived works from someone else's copyrighted software) in order to make a profit.
Yes, an anti-spam law will do me a lot of good, since the gods know I have all kinds of time and money with which to mount a legal attack on spammers. That is, if I can figure out who jason1234@yahoo.com really is in the first place.
So what you're saying is that wasting screen real estate because there is a potential market for larger screens being more popular in the future is a good plan? You're daft. First of all, waste is waste. The only reason decorative features of a GUI environment would need to get larger is if resolutions were going to take a massive leap for the better. And you dope: both GNOME and KDE are themeable and already have full capabilities for variable sizing of just about every component of the windowing environment. Second, the open source community would probably be all over "future hardware" capabilities, if hardware manufacturers would actually tell developers what they were. Imagine if Microsoft had to reverse engineer device drivers because device makers were only releasing drivers for Mac OS X.
Well, I'd be glad to boycott all of the companies listed on that page, but the only one I even remotely could be considered a customer of is TrollTech, and in their case I get all of the source code to the software I get from them under the GPL-- and I wouldn't even need that stuff except that I haven't found a decent replacement for KMail yet (and if it were important to me, I'm sure I could, but like I said, it's free-- beer-wise and speech-wise). I have never given them any money, nor do I plan to.
Are any of those other companies "stealth" big deals? Does one or more of them do something important, or are they all essentially SCOs and TrollTechs?
You're amusing. Those "artists" you're so concerned about giving money to are the same fools who signed up for the RIAA's "Get Rock Star Rich" lottery in the first place.
All that said, I wouldn't pay one red cent for a P2P service... how do they plan to implement quality controls, enforce bandwidth minimums, guarantee completion, etc etc? Not only that, since I am already paying for my bandwidth, why should I donate the upstream to anyone involved, except the peers I am sharing files with. Or did the article mention credits for hosting popular files?
That sort of random chatter probably won't affect the Bayesian filters much. Those filters work on a fairly well tuned set of probabilities and only look at the most highly rated words, so the random words probably won't ever get a very high or low probability-- thus they'll never be used in scoring the email. What those words will do is make it harder to write a good regular expression to match a subject line. Same thing happens in the email body a lot, too. Where random words are thrown into phrases, often inside html tags that will interfere with phrase matching algorithms.
What gets me are the emails that appear to be NOTHING BUT random crud. Huh?
Maybe you should read the article before you post, since he clearly lays out that not only is this triggered by a spam email but requires a human-maintained "blacklist" of known spam sites.
So let's see. You bought a piece of technology and you're hopping mad that someone came out with a very similar technology that never even came close to accomplishing the thing you feared the most?
I can only plead ignorance there-- I am a US citizen, after all.:)
The part I was referring to was the section where it discusses the relative amounts of various constituents. Everything is in grams or milligrams. In any case, my research indicates that a calorie is the amount of heat needed to raise one gram of water one degree celsius-- and that what is shown on U.S. food is actually kilocalories (or the capitalized Calories you usually see). That all sounds very much like the Metric system to me. And it is. A joule is a slightly different measurement: the amount of energy required each second to push an ampere of current through an ohm of resistance. There are approximately 4.19 joules in a calorie. My reference materials for this.
Personally I've always found their quality satisfactory. But then my idea of improving sound quality involves cranking the volume. To me the mp3 is an awesome format, but I've heard whining from audiophiles that it's less than adequate-- and it is a lossy format, so I give the benefit of the doubt to people who say they can hear the difference.
Really? So, just like for most consumer products where size, mass or volume are at issue, we'll soon be seeing dual price tages with the Euro equivalent of prices? Seriously, look at just about any type of food item you buy. All of the measurements are in both Imperial and Metric. In fact, nutrition information is only available in Metric. Obviously most of the sizes are set to be "round" in the Imperial system (example: I have a 10 oz bottle of OJ here that contains 296 mL of juice), but the Metric system is already fairly prevalent in the U.S..
You're really going out and buying all kinds of CDs in an attempt to legitimize the illegal distribution of music contained on those CDs? Are you daft? If you are sharing the files, you are violating a copyright... and no amount of buying CDs will help. If you have downloaded the files, you may still be violating a copyright (personally I don't think this meets the technical definition), but wouldn't it be easier to delete the file(s) than go on a buying spree?
Little do they know that the money that they save from me not having to click around and precisely resize windows has paid for this other monitor many times over.
This is only true under one of two conditions: 1) you are paid by the hour and this extra monitor costs less than the sum of your hourly wage for all the time you have supposedly "wasted" flipping windows, or 2) you are a salaried worker but the software/whatever you've produced have either increased revenue or decreased other expenses in proportion to the expense of the monitor.
For me I don't think a second monitor would help nearly as much as getting an entire second computer... or a massive upgrade to my existing desktop prior to going dual head. Doesn't matter how many screens you've got when your CPU, RAM, and disk I/O are maxed out.
Track for track this is still a much better deal than iTunes Store. Compare $0.99 to $0.25. However, the extremely limited catalog available at eMusic is a mitigating factor. But then again, eMusic gives you mp3s-- which some will say is a quality problem, and others will say is a very nice non-DRMed format.
If you bought a car or house and didn't take the time to learn how to lock the doors, everyone would laugh at you when you got robbed.
Bad analogy. Most robbed homes and stolen/robbed cars are locked, I'm guessing. In fact, I used to know a guy who stopped locking his car because his windows got broken so manny times.
However, I agree completely with your point. If someone is going to spend serious ching on a system, they ought to ask themself: why am I paying all this money for a computer and do I know fuckall about computers in the first place to where I think it will be money well spent? Then, because poor usage can sometimes impact others on the internet, there probably should be some sort of hurdle to jump other than installing an AOL CD and double-clicking before you get to have a machine connected to the network. At least there should be some sense that negligence leads to liability-- which might inspire a little more diligence in understanding and properly maintaining one's system.
Obviously "From:" shouldn't be legislated into perfection, but the big difference between what you're talking about and what this guy did is intent-- which could be tough to determine, but in cases such as this I think it is clear beyond a reasonable doubt that he did this on purpose and with malicious intent.
None of those things require commercialization. Fine. My point is that the funding for the improvements and the general level of usefulness have directly resulted from what you call the "commercialization" of the net. This wisftfulness for the net of yore is like trying to pretend life was somehow better back in the 50s or the 20s or the Middle Ages or whatever. There were no good old days. They were just the old days, and they weren't better or worse, they just were... different. I remember the net in 1994. It was pretty lame. I like the new commercial net much better.
You can't just "estimate" a fact. You either have evidence to support your claim or you do not. In addition 30% of the "economy" is meaningless. What exactly do you mean by economy? I seriously doubt that 30% of GDP is a direct result of copyright. I seriously doubt that 30% of income reported on tax statements is a direct result of copyright. I seriously doubt that 30% of sales tax or value added taxes result from copyrights. I very very very seriously doubt that 30% of all household expenses in the US directly result from copyrights. The only fact here is that you are so clueless it's not even funny.
You sound very confused. Patents have more in common with copyrights than trademarks. In fact, the constitutional basis for copyrights and patents does not seem to be related to trademarks at all (but I haven't studied it to say for sure).
You have pulled that 30% number straight from the air.
And it's not "we want it for free". The popularity of services like emusic.com and iTunes Store puts the lie to that. Heck, most of the people I know willingly shell out $50 a month for cable television, when they could rent movies and watch broadcast TV for a lot less.
Re:PVRs are already making TV unrecognizable
on
TV's Tipping Point
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It's OK. Most of the good commercials are available as AVIs, MPEGs, or OGMs aren't they? If not from the actual company, then maybe from someone other fan via Bit Torrent or other filesharing system?
Yeah, this "new" internet in 2003 sucks. Especially stuff like OpenCourseware at MIT, babelfish.altavista.com, and the fact that I can import real manga cheaper than buying English translations by going to amazon.co.jp (who accept my American credit card just fine, though). I hate being able to download entire operating systems for free and the ability to play extremely detailed video games against anyone in the world. I still miss the days of doing email in pine and web surfing in Lynx (could never quite get used to Mosaic, especially once they started adding the ability to put "backgrounds" on web pages). I especially hate being able to get some extremely good transfer rates to my house for under $50 a month. Broadband. I can't imagine why I ever wanted it.
IOW: the past was different, not better. And I can remember even in 1994 (maybe it was 1995-- a long time ago anyway) how much trouble we had on IRC with things like chan-splits, takeovers, and bot wars. Oddly, my most recent IRC experiences have been nothing like this, since they required a username and password from a separate paid service for access to the IRC server.
Yeah, he also said not all Linux, so he might have some proprietary Unix systems or whatever going on-- my comment wasn't entirely fair. And really he's looking for a couple things: a central data feed of security/update info, a local database of which machines use what, and a way to relate the two. The first item in the list is the hard part, really, since software isn't all that intelligent yet and sifting through various mailing lists and security web sites to cull both unique items and relevant items is tricky business. He knows this. But my money is on the more efficient path being to minimize the amount of work by moving to operating systems that have auto-update functionality. Not really the answer he wanted, but I think it's the most pragmatic overall. I would guess that by monitoring updates done by the automatic system, he would also have some good ideas about what software on other systems was likely to need attention, as well.
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I wasn't responding to the article's use of the word "use", but to the prior poster's. But about the article: Since he starts off with a factual inaccuracy about SCO owning Unix and ends with the ad hominem attack inherent in the word "comrade" I consider it to be exceptionally poor journalism. I think Lyons' implied assertion that flagrantly violating the copyright law is okay as long as the perpetrator is willing to pay some royalties after getting caught inidicates that the only place Lyons is more challenged than he is in the facts department is in the ethics department.
The article is unforgivably biased, but your summary is a bit off (and yes, I'm being picky because it's a subtle but important distinction). There is no license required to use Free Software. None.
The GPL only affects those things that would normally be infringing acts under copyright law: copying, distribution, and derivation. The GPL does not fall under the same rubric as the ubiquitous and offensive EULA of commercial software fame. The difference is significant because these companies are looking to commit otherwise illegal actions (creating and distributing derived works from someone else's copyrighted software) in order to make a profit.
Yes, an anti-spam law will do me a lot of good, since the gods know I have all kinds of time and money with which to mount a legal attack on spammers. That is, if I can figure out who jason1234@yahoo.com really is in the first place.
Give it up, troll.
So what you're saying is that wasting screen real estate because there is a potential market for larger screens being more popular in the future is a good plan? You're daft. First of all, waste is waste. The only reason decorative features of a GUI environment would need to get larger is if resolutions were going to take a massive leap for the better. And you dope: both GNOME and KDE are themeable and already have full capabilities for variable sizing of just about every component of the windowing environment. Second, the open source community would probably be all over "future hardware" capabilities, if hardware manufacturers would actually tell developers what they were. Imagine if Microsoft had to reverse engineer device drivers because device makers were only releasing drivers for Mac OS X.
Well, I'd be glad to boycott all of the companies listed on that page, but the only one I even remotely could be considered a customer of is TrollTech, and in their case I get all of the source code to the software I get from them under the GPL-- and I wouldn't even need that stuff except that I haven't found a decent replacement for KMail yet (and if it were important to me, I'm sure I could, but like I said, it's free-- beer-wise and speech-wise). I have never given them any money, nor do I plan to.
Are any of those other companies "stealth" big deals? Does one or more of them do something important, or are they all essentially SCOs and TrollTechs?
You're amusing. Those "artists" you're so concerned about giving money to are the same fools who signed up for the RIAA's "Get Rock Star Rich" lottery in the first place.
All that said, I wouldn't pay one red cent for a P2P service... how do they plan to implement quality controls, enforce bandwidth minimums, guarantee completion, etc etc? Not only that, since I am already paying for my bandwidth, why should I donate the upstream to anyone involved, except the peers I am sharing files with. Or did the article mention credits for hosting popular files?
That sort of random chatter probably won't affect the Bayesian filters much. Those filters work on a fairly well tuned set of probabilities and only look at the most highly rated words, so the random words probably won't ever get a very high or low probability-- thus they'll never be used in scoring the email. What those words will do is make it harder to write a good regular expression to match a subject line. Same thing happens in the email body a lot, too. Where random words are thrown into phrases, often inside html tags that will interfere with phrase matching algorithms.
What gets me are the emails that appear to be NOTHING BUT random crud. Huh?
Maybe you should read the article before you post, since he clearly lays out that not only is this triggered by a spam email but requires a human-maintained "blacklist" of known spam sites.
So let's see. You bought a piece of technology and you're hopping mad that someone came out with a very similar technology that never even came close to accomplishing the thing you feared the most?
I can only plead ignorance there-- I am a US citizen, after all. :)
The part I was referring to was the section where it discusses the relative amounts of various constituents. Everything is in grams or milligrams. In any case, my research indicates that a calorie is the amount of heat needed to raise one gram of water one degree celsius-- and that what is shown on U.S. food is actually kilocalories (or the capitalized Calories you usually see). That all sounds very much like the Metric system to me. And it is. A joule is a slightly different measurement: the amount of energy required each second to push an ampere of current through an ohm of resistance. There are approximately 4.19 joules in a calorie. My reference materials for this.
Personally I've always found their quality satisfactory. But then my idea of improving sound quality involves cranking the volume. To me the mp3 is an awesome format, but I've heard whining from audiophiles that it's less than adequate-- and it is a lossy format, so I give the benefit of the doubt to people who say they can hear the difference.
Really? So, just like for most consumer products where size, mass or volume are at issue, we'll soon be seeing dual price tages with the Euro equivalent of prices? Seriously, look at just about any type of food item you buy. All of the measurements are in both Imperial and Metric. In fact, nutrition information is only available in Metric. Obviously most of the sizes are set to be "round" in the Imperial system (example: I have a 10 oz bottle of OJ here that contains 296 mL of juice), but the Metric system is already fairly prevalent in the U.S..
You're really going out and buying all kinds of CDs in an attempt to legitimize the illegal distribution of music contained on those CDs? Are you daft? If you are sharing the files, you are violating a copyright... and no amount of buying CDs will help. If you have downloaded the files, you may still be violating a copyright (personally I don't think this meets the technical definition), but wouldn't it be easier to delete the file(s) than go on a buying spree?
Little do they know that the money that they save from me not having to click around and precisely resize windows has paid for this other monitor many times over.
This is only true under one of two conditions: 1) you are paid by the hour and this extra monitor costs less than the sum of your hourly wage for all the time you have supposedly "wasted" flipping windows, or 2) you are a salaried worker but the software/whatever you've produced have either increased revenue or decreased other expenses in proportion to the expense of the monitor.
For me I don't think a second monitor would help nearly as much as getting an entire second computer... or a massive upgrade to my existing desktop prior to going dual head. Doesn't matter how many screens you've got when your CPU, RAM, and disk I/O are maxed out.
Track for track this is still a much better deal than iTunes Store. Compare $0.99 to $0.25. However, the extremely limited catalog available at eMusic is a mitigating factor. But then again, eMusic gives you mp3s-- which some will say is a quality problem, and others will say is a very nice non-DRMed format.
If you bought a car or house and didn't take the time to learn how to lock the doors, everyone would laugh at you when you got robbed.
Bad analogy. Most robbed homes and stolen/robbed cars are locked, I'm guessing. In fact, I used to know a guy who stopped locking his car because his windows got broken so manny times.
However, I agree completely with your point. If someone is going to spend serious ching on a system, they ought to ask themself: why am I paying all this money for a computer and do I know fuckall about computers in the first place to where I think it will be money well spent? Then, because poor usage can sometimes impact others on the internet, there probably should be some sort of hurdle to jump other than installing an AOL CD and double-clicking before you get to have a machine connected to the network. At least there should be some sense that negligence leads to liability-- which might inspire a little more diligence in understanding and properly maintaining one's system.
Obviously "From:" shouldn't be legislated into perfection, but the big difference between what you're talking about and what this guy did is intent-- which could be tough to determine, but in cases such as this I think it is clear beyond a reasonable doubt that he did this on purpose and with malicious intent.
So it's not unlike the telegraph, is that what you're saying?
None of those things require commercialization. Fine. My point is that the funding for the improvements and the general level of usefulness have directly resulted from what you call the "commercialization" of the net. This wisftfulness for the net of yore is like trying to pretend life was somehow better back in the 50s or the 20s or the Middle Ages or whatever. There were no good old days. They were just the old days, and they weren't better or worse, they just were... different. I remember the net in 1994. It was pretty lame. I like the new commercial net much better.
You can't just "estimate" a fact. You either have evidence to support your claim or you do not. In addition 30% of the "economy" is meaningless. What exactly do you mean by economy? I seriously doubt that 30% of GDP is a direct result of copyright. I seriously doubt that 30% of income reported on tax statements is a direct result of copyright. I seriously doubt that 30% of sales tax or value added taxes result from copyrights. I very very very seriously doubt that 30% of all household expenses in the US directly result from copyrights. The only fact here is that you are so clueless it's not even funny.
You sound very confused. Patents have more in common with copyrights than trademarks. In fact, the constitutional basis for copyrights and patents does not seem to be related to trademarks at all (but I haven't studied it to say for sure).
You have pulled that 30% number straight from the air.
And it's not "we want it for free". The popularity of services like emusic.com and iTunes Store puts the lie to that. Heck, most of the people I know willingly shell out $50 a month for cable television, when they could rent movies and watch broadcast TV for a lot less.
It's OK. Most of the good commercials are available as AVIs, MPEGs, or OGMs aren't they? If not from the actual company, then maybe from someone other fan via Bit Torrent or other filesharing system?
Yeah, this "new" internet in 2003 sucks. Especially stuff like OpenCourseware at MIT, babelfish.altavista.com, and the fact that I can import real manga cheaper than buying English translations by going to amazon.co.jp (who accept my American credit card just fine, though). I hate being able to download entire operating systems for free and the ability to play extremely detailed video games against anyone in the world. I still miss the days of doing email in pine and web surfing in Lynx (could never quite get used to Mosaic, especially once they started adding the ability to put "backgrounds" on web pages). I especially hate being able to get some extremely good transfer rates to my house for under $50 a month. Broadband. I can't imagine why I ever wanted it.
IOW: the past was different, not better. And I can remember even in 1994 (maybe it was 1995-- a long time ago anyway) how much trouble we had on IRC with things like chan-splits, takeovers, and bot wars. Oddly, my most recent IRC experiences have been nothing like this, since they required a username and password from a separate paid service for access to the IRC server.
Yeah, he also said not all Linux, so he might have some proprietary Unix systems or whatever going on-- my comment wasn't entirely fair. And really he's looking for a couple things: a central data feed of security/update info, a local database of which machines use what, and a way to relate the two. The first item in the list is the hard part, really, since software isn't all that intelligent yet and sifting through various mailing lists and security web sites to cull both unique items and relevant items is tricky business. He knows this. But my money is on the more efficient path being to minimize the amount of work by moving to operating systems that have auto-update functionality. Not really the answer he wanted, but I think it's the most pragmatic overall. I would guess that by monitoring updates done by the automatic system, he would also have some good ideas about what software on other systems was likely to need attention, as well.