I wouldn't. Corley/2600 were just denied their appeal by the NY Supreme Court on Wednesday (?). See http://www.eff.org/effector/HTML/effect14.37.html# III for more (or not so much more) information. But none of this bodes well for any sort of speech that relates to cracking.
It would be difficult to claim that you wrote emacs without violating the GPL by removing the copyright notices which state that it is copyright restricted by the Free Software Foundation. And if you do not adhere to the GPL, you have no basis upon which to distribute emacs legally.
However, for public domain works, you may be correct, there may no direct legal prohibitions, except that in many cases you will be committing some sort of fraud or contract violation. Examples would include: submitting a government report as an original article (USA federal gov't works are not copyrightable) to a magazine who paid you for the work and schoolwork where you have an agreement with the school that your work is your own original creation. I think plagiarism is therefore legally difficult to do and not have broken some law or contract and I would advise against it on those grounds alone.:)
But I want to also chime in on the "this ain't no piracy" side of this semantic squabble. This would be a case of unauthorized duplication and distribution. It does not constitute "theft of intellectual property" or "piracy". It constitutes a violation of a shared ethical belief that the creator of a work is the one who gets to decide how and when a work will be distributed and under what terms for a set period of time-- as set forth in law, and probably "right" in the minds of most Americans.
Okay, so you didn't cry at the end of Bambi? Are you some sort of monster? *wink*
Seriously, though... I don't think it's any harder to get worked up about animated characters (human or not) than it is live actors. Many people are quite moved by books, and those characters only exist in your imagination (which arguably is a lot richer than much of the animated work being done).
One of the strengths of, for example, a Pixar movie is that the animation does just enough work to get you to suspend disbelief by providing visual hooks to real life, but the strength of the films is in the writing and in the voice acting. A good example would be a film like 'Toy Story'. Without Tom Hanks and Tim Allen doing voices, and without the realistic drama that comprised the story (remember we're suspending our disbelief that toys secretly come alive when we're not looking), the movie would just be a bunch of pretty pictures.
And that's the problem. No virtual celebrity is really anything right now without a well-acted voice. And yes, voice acting could change from real human to another real human, but would still require real humans-- a major drawback. Even so, animators will often take visual clues from the people doing the voice acting. We've got some way to go yet, but Disney has been getting us excited about (often non-human) animated characters for years and some of them are quite celebrities.
I do not. I have all of my software purchased and installed by minor third parties for exactly this reason. The law clearly states that any contract entered into by such persons is invalid.
The people Apple threatened in this case were not violating Apple's copyrights by distributing unauthorized duplications of Apple software, nor were they violating Apple's trademarks by pretending to be Apple, nor were they violating an Apple patent by making devices using designs invented by Apple, and finally they were not violating an Apple trade secret because they did nothing other than *use* the software that Apple sold them in a novel way.
Imagine if I sold you a five-drawer dresser for $20 as an upgrade on the four-drawer dresser I had previously sold you for $100. Now imagine the dresser was complete except that four of the drawers had no handles because you were supposed to use an included screwdriver to remove the handles from the previous dresser and attach them to the new one.
Now imagine that dresserlovers.com ran an article stating that any set of handles would do and pointed out that you could buy an "upgrade" dresser from me for $20 and a set of handles at the hardware store for $10, thus avoiding the need to buy the original four-drawer dresser for $100.
How insane would I have to be (as the dresser maker) to sell you a $20 five-drawer dresser without verifying carefully that you had actually paid for a four-drawer dresser? And what possible recourse would I have against dresserlovers.com for their article pointing out how careless I was in my sales practices?
If RedHat has a fix out before the other guys, the GPL allows the other guys to simply use RedHat's code and recompile/repackage for their distro. The important thing is to get the security patches back into the official source tree for the software in question. We can draw no conclusions from this event as to the lack or existence of cooperation between Linux vendors-- although the fact that they had all agreed on a date to release the updates indicates some level of communication.
I'm sorry. What part of "packets sent over the net are basically plain text" did you miss? Using the internet without encrypting the data before it leaves your client is like sending a postcard. Sure, the postman is not likely to read many postcards, but everyone knows quite well that he could if he wanted to.
Unless you are actively encrypting all of your not-for-public-consumption net traffic you just aren't trying very hard to keep people from seeing what you're up to. Even so, the packets themselves, where they came from, where they're headed (you know, header information) is *still* essentially public-- no different than me standing on the sidewalk and watching where people go.
But I agree. We don't need to pay federal snoops to watch this stuff. It's not making us more secure, and many of things they are doing "for the good of the public" are actually contrary to what I consider to be likely to benefit public security in the long term.
No seriously good question/point. But the answers are simple.
To do that they'd have to cycle my machine (all of them) while making it look like a power outage (which means they'd have to make sure to hit the VCR, the microwave, and any other device that might indicate that there really *wasn't* an outage). Because except in the event of an outage my machines would be powered up and I think I'd notice if someone cycled them.
Two, because they would have to install corrupted system binaries in order to get their software to do anything when I boot the machine back up (because so far they've fooled me into thinking it was an outage, right?). But so sad for them when the system detects altered binaries because I'm using any number of integrity verification packages (that check my current binaries to make sure they match against signature information I've stored on read-only media).
They'd be better off copying my secret keys-- assuming they can find them. And then running an intensive dictionary crack against my pass phrase.
The trick is that they have to know either my root or user passwords to install software that would have any chance of evading detection for more than the span of a single 'ps'. In fact, they're going to need to need one of the above just to access the machine!
Their only other solution is to go to straight hardware tampering, which is what they've done in the past. The trick here is having physical security against home invasion. Even the FBI can't evade minimal home security without leaving some tell-tale tracks... a couple of X10's, a small backup battery... their only hope is to disguise their break-in as some other sort of break-in. And I think if I were a criminal, I would be highly suspicious of any break-in like that which didn't result in my computer equipment being stolen.
I cannot find any licenses on that list that are not listed on the free software licenses page at www.gnu.org, but *many* of them are listed as GPL-incompatible. Especially I would point to licenses like the QPL which requires that you distribute the original source and patches if you want to distribute a modified package.
And yes, you caught me. If we're going to be picky about the definition of free software we may as well be picky about the definition of open source. But I prefer to use open source to refer to the large body of non-free software for which there is source code available-- as there is no better term for it. The source is there. It's open. But beyond that there is no guarantee.
The words open source seem to hold as their priority the fact that I can look at the source code, not that I can use the package however I want, change it, distribute it, etc.
And yes, I realize that free software could also mean no cost (and not free-dom), but because it doesn't require any additional explanation beyond "free as in speech" to define which sort of "free" we're talking about, this seems much more exact when talking about software that is not only "open source" but also "free" (as in speech).
Numerous examples of open source but non-free software exist or have existed until the FSF or other Free Software zealots hounded those with the ability to do so to license the software under the GPL or some other other GPL-compatible license. And when I use the phrase non-free, I mean that the software is somehow incompatible with the GPL, in that it has special requirements beyond the sharing of the freedom (things like: can only be re-distributed as-is, all changes must be distributed as patches, no redistribution as part of a commercial distribution, free for student, research, and non-profit, but corporations must pay a fee, etc).
A not-exhaustive list: Qt (at one time), mpg123 (without which the program XMMS may not be so popular), qmail, Mozilla... or go to http://freshmeat.net/browse/13/ and look at the packages you get with 'Free for educational use', 'Free for non-commercial use', and 'Free to Use but Restricted'. Those categories include links to plenty of binary distributions, but also to plenty of source code distributions.
Except that their solution, like CSS or any other "anti-piracy" solution, is not going to punish merely the offenders. It is also quite likely to catch a lot of innocent people in its claws. The article itself seems to have a very negative view on NAT, which indicates to me that they think plain-old-honest-sensible address translation is a criminal behavior if it deprives them of revenue. Serious questions need to be asked and answered before we who are technologically savvy allow this sort of thing to become widespread (if we even have a say in the matter).
Most importantly, does this portend a future in which NAT or ip chains are deemed a violation of our user agreements? If so, I would have never signed up (well, maybe I would have, but given the criminal penalties provisioned in the DMCA and that NAT could be deemed a circumvention device if the cable company only approves this proposed CAT nonsense...). So the real question is, would you like to occupy the cell next to Dmitry simply for having a firewall and a class C network?
Considering the incredible capital investment required in this process, I find it implausible that major development activity would succeed. There is also the question of marketplace competition. What if I think my team and I can program this game as well as Carmack and Co? Do we also get to race to the finish line for the $1 million? Or do we have to set up an entirely separate escrow arrangement? Who earns the interest on the money in escrow? The agent? The "customers"? The developers?
Under the free market, both companies might not make the $1 million sales mark, but both have the opportunity to release the game and attempt to recoup costs by attracting customers.
Of course, I love this sort of creative thinking about the problem... and I would propose something very similar to it, following the foundation of the capitalistic public ownership model.
There is no reason that gamers couldn't found a corporation with a board of directors, sell themselves all a bunch of shares (40,000 gamers purchasing one share each at $25 raises the initial $1 million in your example). The gamers elect board members who direct the development of the initial game and future games (revenue from sales of the games is entirely directed at future development efforts-- shareholders, of course, get the games at no charge as their dividend). Shares may not be transferred except at the $25 cost. The company as part of their bylaws has a policy of GPL'ing all games one year after release. The board of directors stands for re-election every year (and maybe only consists of three people)... new game proposals are voted on by all shareholders, so that the most popular games are the ones developed.
So now we have to ask, whose idea is crazier?:)
Re:O'Reilley : RMS :: Libertarianism : Socialism
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Freedom or Power Redux
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· Score: 5, Insightful
They might at least consider arguing something a little farther back on each of their logic chains then, since bickering over licensing is silly. They are both sides starting from completely different assumptions and have done nothing to reconcile those assumptions before racing off to debate the merits of their conclusions.
Here is a symbolized version of this debate and why it is pointless. Tim says: x=1, y=2, therefore x+y = 3. FSF says: x=5, y=5, therefore x+y = 10. Instead of discussing the original assumptions about the values of x and y, this debate is over the value of x+y where each side has chosen its own values for x and y.
Tim says in this log: "My goal is to see as much good software created as possible."
RMS/FSF says: "You deserve to be able to cooperate openly and freely with other people who use software. You deserve to be able to learn how the software works, and to teach your students with it. You deserve to be able to hire your favorite programmer to fix it when it breaks." Note: they do not say "Software deserves to be good no matter what."
These assumptions may spring a priori from the moral and aesthetic convictions held by each side in this debate, but until they agree on assumptions, arguing the consequents is fruitless.
AC, I'm with you on this one. My point is that the right to smoke weed can be made into a serious human rights issue when linked to religion and medicine. So to blow it off as unimportant because of religious oppression elsewhere and the fact that kids are starving in the world, doesn't really show an appreciation for the complexity of the freedom issue as a whole. Once you start to get into "prioritizing" freedoms, you start down a path where you also say stuff like "Hey, we have a security incident. Let's solve it by eliminating important human rights!"
That code has a copyright is fundamentally irrelevant to the debate over Free Software versus proprietary software-- code is almost never released in the proprietary software model. Most consumer-grade and much business-grade proprietary software is not distributed as code but as precompiled binary executables. Because of this, many of the benefits of a shortened copyright restriction span do not pertain. The number of people who can alter a program given the source code is rather large compared to the number of people who can alter a program given the executable.
Generally I agree with your sentiment though. The chief problem is not the restriction of copying, but the lack of a reasonable time frame for copying. I also agree strongly with your statement regarding patents-- as is, they are too broadly applied to things like game play, math, logic, etc. They are appropriate for machines and inventions of a physical nature.
The big difference would be that the US has a particapatory government where the rulers are nominally elected by a popular vote (except in the odd case of the Electoral College). Those elected leaders directly influence the behavior of the FCC and set legal bounds by which the FCC can/must act.
If the FCC goes against the will of the American people, we have an easy way to change this. We elect new leaders. Therefore it follows (disregarding the complexities of the influence of censorship, lobbyists, etc, on the electoral process) that the American people *chose* the FCC as it exists, or at the very least have no major objection to it.
Americans have generally favored keeping TV "clean" because the television is a passively receptive device (or at least was primarily until the advent of widespread cable, satellite, and the V-chip). This means that any child could turn on the TV and get full access. Now that we have cable, with its control boxes, and the V-chip, televisions can be set up to filter content-- so the passivity of the device has been done. We are seeing a rise in what is available on cable (Pay per view porn, etc) and even what is available on broadcast-- again, with no major outcry or ill effects.
But in Saudi Arabia the rulers are not chosen, and even if they were, a significant number of people in that country would likely be disallowed from the voting process (i.e. women). These same rulers who were not elected are also taking it on themselves to protect their population from ideas from elsewhere that would undermine their regime (and truly, if the population there had a culture that felt this was all appropriate there would be no need to censor it, the people would shun it of their own volition). Personally I think they must find a compromise at some point or be doomed to fail, but the real oddity here is that the American government completely ignores this stuff as a significant factor in foreign policy. And that American businesses are allowed to assist in oppression? I don't know. I consider it treason, but I'm a bit of a loon that way.
While I agree that Americans have it pretty good, I have to say I don't think it's a case of misguided priorities to consider the freedom to smoke weed an important barometer of freedom in general (and therefore indicative that Americans are less free than they ideally could be).
In fact, smoking weed is a religious and perhaps a medical freedom that we should all have-- there are religions in which smoking weed is as important as wine and bread are to most forms of Christianity (and quite frankly, as an atheist, I'm hardly interested in trying to decide which religious sacraments are valid based on the underlying religion and which aren't-- I consider them equals no matter what the derivation, as long as the adherents are sincere). And there is a growing body of evidence that, while marijuana may not be curative, restorative, or preventative, it is a source of relief-- and winning the mental battle is an important part of recovering from any illness or medical event.
But more importantly to the topic at hand, Jon Katz has asserted that Harry Potter is the most banned book in America! Prove it Jon!
The article at Wired clearly uses the words "fossil fuel" in connection with the word "gas". The Popular Science article is more clear insofar that it does not mention fossil fuels.
Huh? I can use Illustrator and the *real* emacs at the same time using technology that was in the wild several years ago. Even so, there is a version of emacs available for the pre-X Mac OS. But why run that when I can run emacs natively on my Linux Apache server in one window of Mac OS and Illstrator in another? Using a Mac program like Fetch or SCP in SSH, I can transfer my images quickly. But I don't even need to work that hard-- I could just set up an AppleTalk server on my Apache machine and mount/var/www/images as a share under Mac OS.
Of course, I get the sense that you're talking about doing web development under Windows, which is just plain unacceptable *grin*. But even if it were tolerable, what's to stop the use of the Win32 emacs (which I use daily and enjoy) and Samba on the Apache server, while running Illustrator in Windows?
A big part of why this is a problem is the fact that many web servers are, by default, set up to display file listings for directories if there is no "index.html" file in the directory and the user requests a URL corresponding to that directory.
Personally I like to make sure that there is an.htaccess file that prevents this (on Apache-- I'm sure IIS and others have similar config options). I like to turn off the directory listing capability if possible, and certainly assign a valid default page, even if index.html is not present.
And don't forget "index of/cgi-bin" for some real fun.;)
Well, since the speech in question (I don't read German so well-- so I'll assume this is mostly about Nazi propaganda, which is the main free speech issue I've seen talked about in Germany) is essentially anti-democratic and seeks to deprive others of their human rights, I don't see how it can be considered anything less than treasonous. I think the German government are taking this too far, though. By going to this sort of extreme, they are only feeding an us versus them situation, where what is needed is a shrug, a "huh. that sure is some stupid racist nonsense", and an effort to address any real issues that are causing the racists to think their problems are somehow going to be solved by scapegoating jews, blacks, Elbonians, whoever.
Of course, I'm an American who could care less about being able to advocate racist totalitarian governments, but I'm concerned that in their zeal to prevent further atrocities, the German and French (and others?) governments are likely to wipe out honest assessments and careful historical discourse. There is some real danger to whitewashing the problem, and in so doing allowing some deeper issues to go undiscussed and unsolved. This sort of repression (whether in individuals or in societies) seems to be linked to uncontrolled outbursts of bad behavior.
But in general the German government is doing at least as well as the USA in giving its citizens a land where liberty, freedom, and happiness are available to all on an equal basis. The German people affected by this elected their leaders in fair elections (as far as I know), so I assume if this really is against the will of the German people that they will vote their current government out in favor of one that will rewrite these laws.
I believe I was pretty clear that basic human rights basically consist of being able to make your own choices for yourself-- insofar as the effect of those decisions is not the deprivation of that choice for others. I think some other guys said it well with "Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness". Obviously if it makes you happy to swing your fists in the air, your right to do so ends at my nose.
I'm sorry you're having a hard time debating rationally, but please "I have a right to a Ferrari" is the cry of either a troll or someone who just wants to be difficult. It does nothing to address the shades of grey that will naturally require further examination and human judgement. That's what the elected officials are for. They pass finer grade laws, enforce them, and properly adjudge them. You do remember these simple principles from civics class don't you?
And so you hear that Americans think Europe is non-democratic? What Americans are these? Quit playing games. If there are Americans that think that they are an extremely ignorant minority. Even the Russians have a democratically elected President now.
I don't think "we" need any thing specific out of China. I certainly would hate to see them mimic western culture any more than they want to. But I've never suggested we force anything other than the issue of whether or not the people there truly *want* the government they have-- as determined by voting.
Frankly, if elder Japanese cannot get their young people interested in traditional Japanese culture that's not my fucking problem and it is a problem completely separate from human rights and democracy. Each generation has a *right* to live how they see fit, in terms of ceremonies they care about, what they believe about the gods, what clothes they will wear, what foods they will eat, who they will fall in love with and marry, and what they will read in books or watch on TV.
If the Chinese people truly don't want to look at CNN or western pornography, they don't need a non-democratic government taking it away. They will simply avoid it. Otherwise we must assume that at least some of them really do want that stuff, and what right does their government have to limit their freedom in this way?
Just because I have the freedom to assemble peaceably on the street in America and chant with friends "ooga ooga", doesn't mean I'm automatically going to do it. Neither does the right to free speech or to self-determination or to religious freedom mean that people (even in Japan) automatically have to assume someone else's value system and eat at McDonald's or wear Levi's. There are lots of people living right here in America who have very distinct cultures that forbid them things that are otherwise acceptable in other parts of the country. But the beauty of the system is that they are free to make those choices about what is acceptable for themselves.
Huh. In your government apparently the basic human rights charter and the right to vote are completely ignored. A basic human rights charter would include the right to choose one's own religion or none at all. So I sure hope you don't run for office, because you apparently would undermine the very constitution that such a democratic government would be predicated upon! (Maximization of individual liberty where such liberty does not impede the liberty of others, and the right to an equal voice in decision making, those are the basic assumptions, since you seem to have missed them)
And fine, if you don't want to verify that the people of China would actually choose their government given the choice, then I guess we won't do that. But let's take another example where a sizable citizen population is screaming for our help and we've been ignoring them for years. In fact we helped arm and train their military overlords. Can you spell "Afghanistan"?
Although I suppose some Bible-thumper like yourself doesn't care about the plight of women being oppressed by religious extremists, please go read www.rawa.org, and see what you get when you assume that whoever is in charge in a non-democratic country has popular support. I don't think those Afghani women are looking forward to their new government either *unless* it's democratic in nature.
But are we going to help them? Of course not, we're just going to bomb the one group of warlords until the other can take over. And really, how long do you think the next batch will last before they come looking for some external threat like western culture to help them justify (if only in their own minds) their likely brand of savagery?
So yeah, I have a problem with any non-democratic, non-free governmental system. Since you seem to think totalitarianism is cool, why don't you leave (assuming you've had the privilege to be a US citizen to this point so far)? I'm sure China would love to have you.
Of course, check your religion at the Chinese border. China's rich history of great thinking has apparently concluded that Christianity should be illegal. Personally, I don't care what you want to believe about the supernatural or what moral systems you set for yourself... all I want is some basic human freedoms and an equal vote. If you want to go to church every Sunday and worship a God I don't believe that doesn't bother me. That's your choice. As long as you don't try to make my choices for me (i.e. make your religion one of the rules for everyone), we'll get along.
Without democracy, though, countries like China don't guarantee their citizens the rights to make those choices, in fact they don't guarantee their citizens the right to make any choices, including what the rules for everyone will be.
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I wouldn't. Corley/2600 were just denied their appeal by the NY Supreme Court on Wednesday (?). See http://www.eff.org/effector/HTML/effect14.37.html# III for more (or not so much more) information. But none of this bodes well for any sort of speech that relates to cracking.
It would be difficult to claim that you wrote emacs without violating the GPL by removing the copyright notices which state that it is copyright restricted by the Free Software Foundation. And if you do not adhere to the GPL, you have no basis upon which to distribute emacs legally.
:)
However, for public domain works, you may be correct, there may no direct legal prohibitions, except that in many cases you will be committing some sort of fraud or contract violation. Examples would include: submitting a government report as an original article (USA federal gov't works are not copyrightable) to a magazine who paid you for the work and schoolwork where you have an agreement with the school that your work is your own original creation. I think plagiarism is therefore legally difficult to do and not have broken some law or contract and I would advise against it on those grounds alone.
But I want to also chime in on the "this ain't no piracy" side of this semantic squabble. This would be a case of unauthorized duplication and distribution. It does not constitute "theft of intellectual property" or "piracy". It constitutes a violation of a shared ethical belief that the creator of a work is the one who gets to decide how and when a work will be distributed and under what terms for a set period of time-- as set forth in law, and probably "right" in the minds of most Americans.
Okay, so you didn't cry at the end of Bambi? Are you some sort of monster? *wink*
Seriously, though... I don't think it's any harder to get worked up about animated characters (human or not) than it is live actors. Many people are quite moved by books, and those characters only exist in your imagination (which arguably is a lot richer than much of the animated work being done).
One of the strengths of, for example, a Pixar movie is that the animation does just enough work to get you to suspend disbelief by providing visual hooks to real life, but the strength of the films is in the writing and in the voice acting. A good example would be a film like 'Toy Story'. Without Tom Hanks and Tim Allen doing voices, and without the realistic drama that comprised the story (remember we're suspending our disbelief that toys secretly come alive when we're not looking), the movie would just be a bunch of pretty pictures.
And that's the problem. No virtual celebrity is really anything right now without a well-acted voice. And yes, voice acting could change from real human to another real human, but would still require real humans-- a major drawback. Even so, animators will often take visual clues from the people doing the voice acting. We've got some way to go yet, but Disney has been getting us excited about (often non-human) animated characters for years and some of them are quite celebrities.
I do not. I have all of my software purchased and installed by minor third parties for exactly this reason. The law clearly states that any contract entered into by such persons is invalid.
The people Apple threatened in this case were not violating Apple's copyrights by distributing unauthorized duplications of Apple software, nor were they violating Apple's trademarks by pretending to be Apple, nor were they violating an Apple patent by making devices using designs invented by Apple, and finally they were not violating an Apple trade secret because they did nothing other than *use* the software that Apple sold them in a novel way.
Imagine if I sold you a five-drawer dresser for $20 as an upgrade on the four-drawer dresser I had previously sold you for $100. Now imagine the dresser was complete except that four of the drawers had no handles because you were supposed to use an included screwdriver to remove the handles from the previous dresser and attach them to the new one.
Now imagine that dresserlovers.com ran an article stating that any set of handles would do and pointed out that you could buy an "upgrade" dresser from me for $20 and a set of handles at the hardware store for $10, thus avoiding the need to buy the original four-drawer dresser for $100.
How insane would I have to be (as the dresser maker) to sell you a $20 five-drawer dresser without verifying carefully that you had actually paid for a four-drawer dresser? And what possible recourse would I have against dresserlovers.com for their article pointing out how careless I was in my sales practices?
If RedHat has a fix out before the other guys, the GPL allows the other guys to simply use RedHat's code and recompile/repackage for their distro. The important thing is to get the security patches back into the official source tree for the software in question. We can draw no conclusions from this event as to the lack or existence of cooperation between Linux vendors-- although the fact that they had all agreed on a date to release the updates indicates some level of communication.
I'm sorry. What part of "packets sent over the net are basically plain text" did you miss? Using the internet without encrypting the data before it leaves your client is like sending a postcard. Sure, the postman is not likely to read many postcards, but everyone knows quite well that he could if he wanted to.
Unless you are actively encrypting all of your not-for-public-consumption net traffic you just aren't trying very hard to keep people from seeing what you're up to. Even so, the packets themselves, where they came from, where they're headed (you know, header information) is *still* essentially public-- no different than me standing on the sidewalk and watching where people go.
But I agree. We don't need to pay federal snoops to watch this stuff. It's not making us more secure, and many of things they are doing "for the good of the public" are actually contrary to what I consider to be likely to benefit public security in the long term.
I had no intention of appearing to disparage the sponsored links. I think they are appropriately and tastefully done.
Because my computers are all iMacs! *grin*
No seriously good question/point. But the answers are simple.
To do that they'd have to cycle my machine (all of them) while making it look like a power outage (which means they'd have to make sure to hit the VCR, the microwave, and any other device that might indicate that there really *wasn't* an outage). Because except in the event of an outage my machines would be powered up and I think I'd notice if someone cycled them.
Two, because they would have to install corrupted system binaries in order to get their software to do anything when I boot the machine back up (because so far they've fooled me into thinking it was an outage, right?). But so sad for them when the system detects altered binaries because I'm using any number of integrity verification packages (that check my current binaries to make sure they match against signature information I've stored on read-only media).
They'd be better off copying my secret keys-- assuming they can find them. And then running an intensive dictionary crack against my pass phrase.
Actually they do. The sponsored links show up first and are clearly indicated to be paid for.
Personally I think their system ain't broke, though, so why fix it?
The trick is that they have to know either my root or user passwords to install software that would have any chance of evading detection for more than the span of a single 'ps'. In fact, they're going to need to need one of the above just to access the machine!
Their only other solution is to go to straight hardware tampering, which is what they've done in the past. The trick here is having physical security against home invasion. Even the FBI can't evade minimal home security without leaving some tell-tale tracks... a couple of X10's, a small backup battery... their only hope is to disguise their break-in as some other sort of break-in. And I think if I were a criminal, I would be highly suspicious of any break-in like that which didn't result in my computer equipment being stolen.
I cannot find any licenses on that list that are not listed on the free software licenses page at www.gnu.org, but *many* of them are listed as GPL-incompatible. Especially I would point to licenses like the QPL which requires that you distribute the original source and patches if you want to distribute a modified package.
And yes, you caught me. If we're going to be picky about the definition of free software we may as well be picky about the definition of open source. But I prefer to use open source to refer to the large body of non-free software for which there is source code available-- as there is no better term for it. The source is there. It's open. But beyond that there is no guarantee.
The words open source seem to hold as their priority the fact that I can look at the source code, not that I can use the package however I want, change it, distribute it, etc.
And yes, I realize that free software could also mean no cost (and not free-dom), but because it doesn't require any additional explanation beyond "free as in speech" to define which sort of "free" we're talking about, this seems much more exact when talking about software that is not only "open source" but also "free" (as in speech).
Numerous examples of open source but non-free software exist or have existed until the FSF or other Free Software zealots hounded those with the ability to do so to license the software under the GPL or some other other GPL-compatible license. And when I use the phrase non-free, I mean that the software is somehow incompatible with the GPL, in that it has special requirements beyond the sharing of the freedom (things like: can only be re-distributed as-is, all changes must be distributed as patches, no redistribution as part of a commercial distribution, free for student, research, and non-profit, but corporations must pay a fee, etc).
A not-exhaustive list: Qt (at one time), mpg123 (without which the program XMMS may not be so popular), qmail, Mozilla... or go to http://freshmeat.net/browse/13/ and look at the packages you get with 'Free for educational use', 'Free for non-commercial use', and 'Free to Use but Restricted'. Those categories include links to plenty of binary distributions, but also to plenty of source code distributions.
Except that their solution, like CSS or any other "anti-piracy" solution, is not going to punish merely the offenders. It is also quite likely to catch a lot of innocent people in its claws. The article itself seems to have a very negative view on NAT, which indicates to me that they think plain-old-honest-sensible address translation is a criminal behavior if it deprives them of revenue. Serious questions need to be asked and answered before we who are technologically savvy allow this sort of thing to become widespread (if we even have a say in the matter).
Most importantly, does this portend a future in which NAT or ip chains are deemed a violation of our user agreements? If so, I would have never signed up (well, maybe I would have, but given the criminal penalties provisioned in the DMCA and that NAT could be deemed a circumvention device if the cable company only approves this proposed CAT nonsense...). So the real question is, would you like to occupy the cell next to Dmitry simply for having a firewall and a class C network?
Considering the incredible capital investment required in this process, I find it implausible that major development activity would succeed. There is also the question of marketplace competition. What if I think my team and I can program this game as well as Carmack and Co? Do we also get to race to the finish line for the $1 million? Or do we have to set up an entirely separate escrow arrangement? Who earns the interest on the money in escrow? The agent? The "customers"? The developers?
:)
Under the free market, both companies might not make the $1 million sales mark, but both have the opportunity to release the game and attempt to recoup costs by attracting customers.
Of course, I love this sort of creative thinking about the problem... and I would propose something very similar to it, following the foundation of the capitalistic public ownership model.
There is no reason that gamers couldn't found a corporation with a board of directors, sell themselves all a bunch of shares (40,000 gamers purchasing one share each at $25 raises the initial $1 million in your example). The gamers elect board members who direct the development of the initial game and future games (revenue from sales of the games is entirely directed at future development efforts-- shareholders, of course, get the games at no charge as their dividend). Shares may not be transferred except at the $25 cost. The company as part of their bylaws has a policy of GPL'ing all games one year after release. The board of directors stands for re-election every year (and maybe only consists of three people)... new game proposals are voted on by all shareholders, so that the most popular games are the ones developed.
So now we have to ask, whose idea is crazier?
They might at least consider arguing something a little farther back on each of their logic chains then, since bickering over licensing is silly. They are both sides starting from completely different assumptions and have done nothing to reconcile those assumptions before racing off to debate the merits of their conclusions.
Here is a symbolized version of this debate and why it is pointless. Tim says: x=1, y=2, therefore x+y = 3. FSF says: x=5, y=5, therefore x+y = 10. Instead of discussing the original assumptions about the values of x and y, this debate is over the value of x+y where each side has chosen its own values for x and y.
Tim says in this log: "My goal is to see as much good software created as possible."
RMS/FSF says: "You deserve to be able to cooperate openly and freely with other people who use software. You deserve to be able to learn how the software works, and to teach your students with it. You deserve to be able to hire your favorite programmer to fix it when it breaks." Note: they do not say "Software deserves to be good no matter what."
These assumptions may spring a priori from the moral and aesthetic convictions held by each side in this debate, but until they agree on assumptions, arguing the consequents is fruitless.
AC, I'm with you on this one. My point is that the right to smoke weed can be made into a serious human rights issue when linked to religion and medicine. So to blow it off as unimportant because of religious oppression elsewhere and the fact that kids are starving in the world, doesn't really show an appreciation for the complexity of the freedom issue as a whole. Once you start to get into "prioritizing" freedoms, you start down a path where you also say stuff like "Hey, we have a security incident. Let's solve it by eliminating important human rights!"
That code has a copyright is fundamentally irrelevant to the debate over Free Software versus proprietary software-- code is almost never released in the proprietary software model. Most consumer-grade and much business-grade proprietary software is not distributed as code but as precompiled binary executables. Because of this, many of the benefits of a shortened copyright restriction span do not pertain. The number of people who can alter a program given the source code is rather large compared to the number of people who can alter a program given the executable.
Generally I agree with your sentiment though. The chief problem is not the restriction of copying, but the lack of a reasonable time frame for copying. I also agree strongly with your statement regarding patents-- as is, they are too broadly applied to things like game play, math, logic, etc. They are appropriate for machines and inventions of a physical nature.
The big difference would be that the US has a particapatory government where the rulers are nominally elected by a popular vote (except in the odd case of the Electoral College). Those elected leaders directly influence the behavior of the FCC and set legal bounds by which the FCC can/must act.
If the FCC goes against the will of the American people, we have an easy way to change this. We elect new leaders. Therefore it follows (disregarding the complexities of the influence of censorship, lobbyists, etc, on the electoral process) that the American people *chose* the FCC as it exists, or at the very least have no major objection to it.
Americans have generally favored keeping TV "clean" because the television is a passively receptive device (or at least was primarily until the advent of widespread cable, satellite, and the V-chip). This means that any child could turn on the TV and get full access. Now that we have cable, with its control boxes, and the V-chip, televisions can be set up to filter content-- so the passivity of the device has been done. We are seeing a rise in what is available on cable (Pay per view porn, etc) and even what is available on broadcast-- again, with no major outcry or ill effects.
But in Saudi Arabia the rulers are not chosen, and even if they were, a significant number of people in that country would likely be disallowed from the voting process (i.e. women). These same rulers who were not elected are also taking it on themselves to protect their population from ideas from elsewhere that would undermine their regime (and truly, if the population there had a culture that felt this was all appropriate there would be no need to censor it, the people would shun it of their own volition). Personally I think they must find a compromise at some point or be doomed to fail, but the real oddity here is that the American government completely ignores this stuff as a significant factor in foreign policy. And that American businesses are allowed to assist in oppression? I don't know. I consider it treason, but I'm a bit of a loon that way.
While I agree that Americans have it pretty good, I have to say I don't think it's a case of misguided priorities to consider the freedom to smoke weed an important barometer of freedom in general (and therefore indicative that Americans are less free than they ideally could be).
In fact, smoking weed is a religious and perhaps a medical freedom that we should all have-- there are religions in which smoking weed is as important as wine and bread are to most forms of Christianity (and quite frankly, as an atheist, I'm hardly interested in trying to decide which religious sacraments are valid based on the underlying religion and which aren't-- I consider them equals no matter what the derivation, as long as the adherents are sincere). And there is a growing body of evidence that, while marijuana may not be curative, restorative, or preventative, it is a source of relief-- and winning the mental battle is an important part of recovering from any illness or medical event.
But more importantly to the topic at hand, Jon Katz has asserted that Harry Potter is the most banned book in America! Prove it Jon!
The article at Wired clearly uses the words "fossil fuel" in connection with the word "gas". The Popular Science article is more clear insofar that it does not mention fossil fuels.
Huh? I can use Illustrator and the *real* emacs at the same time using technology that was in the wild several years ago. Even so, there is a version of emacs available for the pre-X Mac OS. But why run that when I can run emacs natively on my Linux Apache server in one window of Mac OS and Illstrator in another? Using a Mac program like Fetch or SCP in SSH, I can transfer my images quickly. But I don't even need to work that hard-- I could just set up an AppleTalk server on my Apache machine and mount /var/www/images as a share under Mac OS.
Of course, I get the sense that you're talking about doing web development under Windows, which is just plain unacceptable *grin*. But even if it were tolerable, what's to stop the use of the Win32 emacs (which I use daily and enjoy) and Samba on the Apache server, while running Illustrator in Windows?
A big part of why this is a problem is the fact that many web servers are, by default, set up to display file listings for directories if there is no "index.html" file in the directory and the user requests a URL corresponding to that directory.
.htaccess file that prevents this (on Apache-- I'm sure IIS and others have similar config options). I like to turn off the directory listing capability if possible, and certainly assign a valid default page, even if index.html is not present.
/cgi-bin" for some real fun. ;)
Personally I like to make sure that there is an
And don't forget "index of
Well, since the speech in question (I don't read German so well-- so I'll assume this is mostly about Nazi propaganda, which is the main free speech issue I've seen talked about in Germany) is essentially anti-democratic and seeks to deprive others of their human rights, I don't see how it can be considered anything less than treasonous. I think the German government are taking this too far, though. By going to this sort of extreme, they are only feeding an us versus them situation, where what is needed is a shrug, a "huh. that sure is some stupid racist nonsense", and an effort to address any real issues that are causing the racists to think their problems are somehow going to be solved by scapegoating jews, blacks, Elbonians, whoever.
Of course, I'm an American who could care less about being able to advocate racist totalitarian governments, but I'm concerned that in their zeal to prevent further atrocities, the German and French (and others?) governments are likely to wipe out honest assessments and careful historical discourse. There is some real danger to whitewashing the problem, and in so doing allowing some deeper issues to go undiscussed and unsolved. This sort of repression (whether in individuals or in societies) seems to be linked to uncontrolled outbursts of bad behavior.
But in general the German government is doing at least as well as the USA in giving its citizens a land where liberty, freedom, and happiness are available to all on an equal basis. The German people affected by this elected their leaders in fair elections (as far as I know), so I assume if this really is against the will of the German people that they will vote their current government out in favor of one that will rewrite these laws.
Did you actually read my post, numbskull?
I believe I was pretty clear that basic human rights basically consist of being able to make your own choices for yourself-- insofar as the effect of those decisions is not the deprivation of that choice for others. I think some other guys said it well with "Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness". Obviously if it makes you happy to swing your fists in the air, your right to do so ends at my nose.
I'm sorry you're having a hard time debating rationally, but please "I have a right to a Ferrari" is the cry of either a troll or someone who just wants to be difficult. It does nothing to address the shades of grey that will naturally require further examination and human judgement. That's what the elected officials are for. They pass finer grade laws, enforce them, and properly adjudge them. You do remember these simple principles from civics class don't you?
And so you hear that Americans think Europe is non-democratic? What Americans are these? Quit playing games. If there are Americans that think that they are an extremely ignorant minority. Even the Russians have a democratically elected President now.
I don't think "we" need any thing specific out of China. I certainly would hate to see them mimic western culture any more than they want to. But I've never suggested we force anything other than the issue of whether or not the people there truly *want* the government they have-- as determined by voting.
Frankly, if elder Japanese cannot get their young people interested in traditional Japanese culture that's not my fucking problem and it is a problem completely separate from human rights and democracy. Each generation has a *right* to live how they see fit, in terms of ceremonies they care about, what they believe about the gods, what clothes they will wear, what foods they will eat, who they will fall in love with and marry, and what they will read in books or watch on TV.
If the Chinese people truly don't want to look at CNN or western pornography, they don't need a non-democratic government taking it away. They will simply avoid it. Otherwise we must assume that at least some of them really do want that stuff, and what right does their government have to limit their freedom in this way?
Just because I have the freedom to assemble peaceably on the street in America and chant with friends "ooga ooga", doesn't mean I'm automatically going to do it. Neither does the right to free speech or to self-determination or to religious freedom mean that people (even in Japan) automatically have to assume someone else's value system and eat at McDonald's or wear Levi's. There are lots of people living right here in America who have very distinct cultures that forbid them things that are otherwise acceptable in other parts of the country. But the beauty of the system is that they are free to make those choices about what is acceptable for themselves.
Huh. In your government apparently the basic human rights charter and the right to vote are completely ignored. A basic human rights charter would include the right to choose one's own religion or none at all. So I sure hope you don't run for office, because you apparently would undermine the very constitution that such a democratic government would be predicated upon! (Maximization of individual liberty where such liberty does not impede the liberty of others, and the right to an equal voice in decision making, those are the basic assumptions, since you seem to have missed them)
And fine, if you don't want to verify that the people of China would actually choose their government given the choice, then I guess we won't do that. But let's take another example where a sizable citizen population is screaming for our help and we've been ignoring them for years. In fact we helped arm and train their military overlords. Can you spell "Afghanistan"?
Although I suppose some Bible-thumper like yourself doesn't care about the plight of women being oppressed by religious extremists, please go read www.rawa.org, and see what you get when you assume that whoever is in charge in a non-democratic country has popular support. I don't think those Afghani women are looking forward to their new government either *unless* it's democratic in nature.
But are we going to help them? Of course not, we're just going to bomb the one group of warlords until the other can take over. And really, how long do you think the next batch will last before they come looking for some external threat like western culture to help them justify (if only in their own minds) their likely brand of savagery?
So yeah, I have a problem with any non-democratic, non-free governmental system. Since you seem to think totalitarianism is cool, why don't you leave (assuming you've had the privilege to be a US citizen to this point so far)? I'm sure China would love to have you.
Of course, check your religion at the Chinese border. China's rich history of great thinking has apparently concluded that Christianity should be illegal. Personally, I don't care what you want to believe about the supernatural or what moral systems you set for yourself... all I want is some basic human freedoms and an equal vote. If you want to go to church every Sunday and worship a God I don't believe that doesn't bother me. That's your choice. As long as you don't try to make my choices for me (i.e. make your religion one of the rules for everyone), we'll get along.
Without democracy, though, countries like China don't guarantee their citizens the rights to make those choices, in fact they don't guarantee their citizens the right to make any choices, including what the rules for everyone will be.