How about banning radio stations from broadcasting commercials with car crash sounds, police sirens, and screeching tires
Amen, though I'd like to see this extend to everything, not just commercials. I have no problem hearing police sirens in rap music listening to the album at home, but on the radio (which most people listen to in the car), it's just obnoxious.
The major concern of ADS-B is that is is susceptible to hacking (you can broadcast your own "phantom" aircraft if you know the standard) and reduces the anonymity of private and business aircraft users (every ADS-B transponder broadcasts a code that uniquely identifies an individual aircraft).
Aren't the pilots already doing this with their radio (the code being the flight/tail number)?
The GPL explicitly says you don't have to agree to it to use the software. It only comes into play when you distribute copies of the software, which is something unambiguously covered by copyright law everywhere. The majority of people here arguing that argue EULAs are invalid are not suggesting that they should be able to *distribute copies* of Mac OS X or Windows.
They're saying you can't have a transaction that looks like a sale in every way, but when you open the box, it says you have to agree to another contract (that you can't negotiate or change) which says that your transaction was not a sale and that you agree to all sorts of draconian conditions. Plus, EULAs often purport to apply in such a way that you have to agree to the agreement before you see it. Imagine you buy a car, but the car's key is inside a box with tape that says, "If you break this tape, you agree to be bound by the agreement within." The agreement inside the box says you didn't actually buy the car, you're just leasing it and thus you're not allowed to figure out how the car works, so you must bring it into the dealership for work. This is what (the majority of, as there are always some crazy folks) the "EULAs are not enforceable" comments are about.
If the damages are paid in stock at market value instead of cash, the whole thing is no different than if they had simply paid cash and then the prevailing plaintiffs bought that stock. Alternatively, in practice, wouldn't the plaintiffs most likely end up selling the stock in fairly short order anyway, to get the cash?
In the end, a cash judgment still takes money away from the shareholders. The company has less money available to pay dividends or grow the business.
While I have no idea as to the particulars here, it wouldn't be unreasonable if this was just a bright-line rule (that applied regardless of the type of cabling). That way you don't have to worry about someone putting a cable tray close because it's filled with fiber and then have someone else run a copper cable through it later.
AFAIK, this is what the patent office is supposed to be doing right now. If they're not, how would a second office do any better? If you have an answer to that question, why can't that be applied to the existing patent office?
The distinction there is that the user of the software is the user of the hardware. The GPLv3 seeks to protect the user's right to change the software on their hardware and run the resulting derivative. In the Tivo case, it prohibits the vendor from tying the hands of the user. It doesn't prevent the user from locking down his own machines.
I think it's the first point where you're off... Microsoft gets slammed for having a buggy OS and insecurity software that make virus propegation easy. Adding anti-virus software has never been a good solution... it's just a band-aid.
Well, someone was working on merging the -vv stuff, and Sean was working on Google Talk voice support, but it turned out the toolkit we wanted to use (GStreamer) wasn't ready enough.
As for infrequent news updates, yes, that's been a problem. Hopefully that will be improving very soon.
As for donations... currently we don't accept donations at all. I'd like to see that change in the future so that we could have resources to pay for some development work, but I'm not entirely sure what framework would be appropriate. (Things *can*, but don't always have to, get complex if some people are getting paid and others aren't.)
If you want to argue semantics, you said "current system time zone"; changing TZ in a process doesn't change it for the whole system.
But yes, it is messy with regard to threads. Things are relatively easy in one process if it's single threaded, but I have no idea what happens when you throw intra-process threads into the mix. It's still messy that you have to actually change the "TZ" variable at all, though.
I'm a Gaim developer. This should be taken as my opinion, not as some statement from "the Gaim project". Certainly I don't claim to speak for other developers, though their opinions are likely to be similar.
While I wish 2.0.0 "final" was out, the fact that it's called a "beta" is really irrelevant to everyone except plugin writers. Effectively, it's out, but we're not guaranteeing source/binary compatibility. I realize this is very sub-optimal, and I really want to see a 2.0.0 final soon as well. But, the lack of a 2.0.0 final is completely unrelated to SoC. Hopefully we'll actually have a 2.0.0 final release out soon, but I can't guarantee that.
We've seen a lot of good code from SoC, and some not-quite-perfect code. Having not-quite-perfect code is certainly no worse than having no code at all (as long as one doesn't merge code that's not ready), and the fact that someone took a stab at the problem can provide valuable information.
The SoC students are not responsible for Gaim releases. The developers determine which SoC code gets merged into the main line. Please don't blame the SoC students as a group for the failings of others/some. It's true that some SoC students didn't finish their feature, which you could attempt to consider a "product". Sometimes that was their fault and sometimes it wasn't. The important thing is that hopefully most of the students learned something. If the projects get some benefit out of their work, then it's even better. If Google was primarily interested in features being added, etc., they could pay existing developers to do the work and get a lot more "bang for their buck".
With regard to specific features or other work... It's open source. If you want feature X implemented or improved, then do it. That's how I got started with Gaim. I wanted to improve the behavior of the log viewer to make it easier for me to use in a specific case. If you're not a programmer right now, there's no time like the present to learn. If you don't want to program or really just can't (since it does take a certain type of person), then sponsor a bounty on the feature.
Finally, I don't know where you got this "hearsay". The lack of voice and video support is not due to SoC changes. There exists gaim-vv code and gaim-farsight code for some protocols, but not for all. So, depending on which protocol you're talking about, the code simply may not exist. The code that does exist needs to be merged into Gaim in some way that'll allow for voice and video to be added for other protocols later. It's very important that the APIs have a good design, especially since our (non-beta) releases come with API/ABI compatibility guarantees.
In a more general sense, the problem with voice and video is that the intersection of people with desire to have it, people with time to code it, and people with the ability to code it is very small. For instance, I mainly lack the time, but also desire other features above voice and video. Others would like voice and video but aren't coders. I know that at least one Gaim developer has expressed interest in writing some -vv support, but for him it might be a lack of time. Also, at one time, GStreamer didn't have the capabilities we needed, but that is probably not the case any more.
If you have more specific questions, please pop by #gaim on irc.freenode.net, and we'd be glad to answer. I don't want to start a flame war here. I hope my tone comes across properly in this written medium, but in any case, my desire is to inform.
Then there's the fact that the standard C time library does NOT support doing time zone computations with any time zone other than the current system time zone.
This isn't strictly true. You can do it by manipulating the TZ environment variable before you do your computations and then change it back when you're done. It's messy, but it does work.
The paper would be presented to the voter, who would confirm its accuracy. This only leaves the possibility of the machine registering fake votes, but that's something that can be caught by comparing the number of votes cast in the paper trail to the number of approved voters at the ID-checking station.
Assuming that Slashdot was being blocked for some stupid reason... If I hadn't already, I'd lay into them for doing something stupid in the first place, because hopefully they'd think twice before doing it again. Now, if that was the reason they'd unblocked it, then it's probably sufficient to say thanks.
The whole issue of "do it yourself" is very complicated. In many cases, people ask for huge features (say voice/video support) and expect that it's incredibly simple to do. Also, users often think they should still be treated like "customers" when they're not contributing anything to the project. It's not fair to take something for free and then complain that you want it improved to do what you want, but you don't want to help in any way.
The amount of work required to fix a bug or add a new feature is highly dependent on the size of the change, probably even more so than the size of the whole codebase. The Gaim software is pretty compartmentalized. When I started out, I fixed a few bugs without knowing much at all about the general architecture. So, it's not really that hard to fix little things. The problem is, *most* of the little things have been fixed already. Addressing more fundamental issues does take quite a bit of startup time to learn the codebase.
In general, I try to help out anyone who has a legitimate bug report, suggestion, etc. However, the amount of things that the developers can take on is extremely limited. There are a million things on my TODO list, and that's just the top items I'd like to accomplish. So often times, "do it yourself" is the only response.
There is definitely a big opportunity for non-coders to help, though. Graphic design, web design, bug triaging, documentation, etc. are useful to all open source projects.
People who like open source because the product is free need to remember that the product is free. If they expect anything more than zero support, they're going to be disappointed. People that view open source as a community are much better off. Not everyone in the community is a coder, but everyone that contributes is important.
Yes, the paste formatting thing is a known issue. It needs to be fixed at some point, but it's not a huge problem to hit Ctrl-R after a paste with formatting, or to use the Paste as Text feature in the first place. The reason the paste formatting bug hasn't been fixed yet is that it's non-trivial. It's on my TODO list.
Or more importantly, just copy and paste the "encrypted" string right into your own Gaim accounts.xml and have it work. That would work unless we used one key per computer, and we'd never be able to do that, because users love to share their.gaim folder between computers and taking away that ability to protect people who can't manage their own file security is stupid.
As a developer on one of the projects listed, I can say that they have. They released them to the developers first, so that we could fix them. I believe Coverity's intention is to make the results public at some point.
Slashdot Mirror
From the article you linked to:
Lord Judge said: "This trial had nothing to do with the right of the householder to defend themselves or their families or their homes.
"The burglary was over and the burglars had gone. No one was in any further danger from them."
This wouldn't be legal in the U.S. either.
How about banning radio stations from broadcasting commercials with car crash sounds, police sirens, and screeching tires
Amen, though I'd like to see this extend to everything, not just commercials. I have no problem hearing police sirens in rap music listening to the album at home, but on the radio (which most people listen to in the car), it's just obnoxious.
The major concern of ADS-B is that is is susceptible to hacking (you can broadcast your own "phantom" aircraft if you know the standard) and reduces the anonymity of private and business aircraft users (every ADS-B transponder broadcasts a code that uniquely identifies an individual aircraft).
Aren't the pilots already doing this with their radio (the code being the flight/tail number)?
The GPL explicitly says you don't have to agree to it to use the software. It only comes into play when you distribute copies of the software, which is something unambiguously covered by copyright law everywhere. The majority of people here arguing that argue EULAs are invalid are not suggesting that they should be able to *distribute copies* of Mac OS X or Windows.
They're saying you can't have a transaction that looks like a sale in every way, but when you open the box, it says you have to agree to another contract (that you can't negotiate or change) which says that your transaction was not a sale and that you agree to all sorts of draconian conditions. Plus, EULAs often purport to apply in such a way that you have to agree to the agreement before you see it. Imagine you buy a car, but the car's key is inside a box with tape that says, "If you break this tape, you agree to be bound by the agreement within." The agreement inside the box says you didn't actually buy the car, you're just leasing it and thus you're not allowed to figure out how the car works, so you must bring it into the dealership for work. This is what (the majority of, as there are always some crazy folks) the "EULAs are not enforceable" comments are about.
[citation needed]
If the damages are paid in stock at market value instead of cash, the whole thing is no different than if they had simply paid cash and then the prevailing plaintiffs bought that stock. Alternatively, in practice, wouldn't the plaintiffs most likely end up selling the stock in fairly short order anyway, to get the cash?
In the end, a cash judgment still takes money away from the shareholders. The company has less money available to pay dividends or grow the business.
AFAIK, the merchant agreements prohibit fees for credit card users, but don't prohibit cash discounts.
Of course you can. You can consent to searches.
While I have no idea as to the particulars here, it wouldn't be unreasonable if this was just a bright-line rule (that applied regardless of the type of cabling). That way you don't have to worry about someone putting a cable tray close because it's filled with fiber and then have someone else run a copper cable through it later.
AFAIK, this is what the patent office is supposed to be doing right now. If they're not, how would a second office do any better? If you have an answer to that question, why can't that be applied to the existing patent office?
So I say, Person X was driving my car. Person X says he wasn't. Then what?
The distinction there is that the user of the software is the user of the hardware. The GPLv3 seeks to protect the user's right to change the software on their hardware and run the resulting derivative. In the Tivo case, it prohibits the vendor from tying the hands of the user. It doesn't prevent the user from locking down his own machines.
I think it's the first point where you're off... Microsoft gets slammed for having a buggy OS and insecurity software that make virus propegation easy. Adding anti-virus software has never been a good solution... it's just a band-aid.
Well, someone was working on merging the -vv stuff, and Sean was working on Google Talk voice support, but it turned out the toolkit we wanted to use (GStreamer) wasn't ready enough.
As for infrequent news updates, yes, that's been a problem. Hopefully that will be improving very soon.
As for donations... currently we don't accept donations at all. I'd like to see that change in the future so that we could have resources to pay for some development work, but I'm not entirely sure what framework would be appropriate. (Things *can*, but don't always have to, get complex if some people are getting paid and others aren't.)
If you want to argue semantics, you said "current system time zone"; changing TZ in a process doesn't change it for the whole system.
But yes, it is messy with regard to threads. Things are relatively easy in one process if it's single threaded, but I have no idea what happens when you throw intra-process threads into the mix. It's still messy that you have to actually change the "TZ" variable at all, though.
I'm a Gaim developer. This should be taken as my opinion, not as some statement from "the Gaim project". Certainly I don't claim to speak for other developers, though their opinions are likely to be similar.
While I wish 2.0.0 "final" was out, the fact that it's called a "beta" is really irrelevant to everyone except plugin writers. Effectively, it's out, but we're not guaranteeing source/binary compatibility. I realize this is very sub-optimal, and I really want to see a 2.0.0 final soon as well. But, the lack of a 2.0.0 final is completely unrelated to SoC. Hopefully we'll actually have a 2.0.0 final release out soon, but I can't guarantee that.
We've seen a lot of good code from SoC, and some not-quite-perfect code. Having not-quite-perfect code is certainly no worse than having no code at all (as long as one doesn't merge code that's not ready), and the fact that someone took a stab at the problem can provide valuable information.
The SoC students are not responsible for Gaim releases. The developers determine which SoC code gets merged into the main line. Please don't blame the SoC students as a group for the failings of others/some. It's true that some SoC students didn't finish their feature, which you could attempt to consider a "product". Sometimes that was their fault and sometimes it wasn't. The important thing is that hopefully most of the students learned something. If the projects get some benefit out of their work, then it's even better. If Google was primarily interested in features being added, etc., they could pay existing developers to do the work and get a lot more "bang for their buck".
With regard to specific features or other work... It's open source. If you want feature X implemented or improved, then do it. That's how I got started with Gaim. I wanted to improve the behavior of the log viewer to make it easier for me to use in a specific case. If you're not a programmer right now, there's no time like the present to learn. If you don't want to program or really just can't (since it does take a certain type of person), then sponsor a bounty on the feature.
Finally, I don't know where you got this "hearsay". The lack of voice and video support is not due to SoC changes. There exists gaim-vv code and gaim-farsight code for some protocols, but not for all. So, depending on which protocol you're talking about, the code simply may not exist. The code that does exist needs to be merged into Gaim in some way that'll allow for voice and video to be added for other protocols later. It's very important that the APIs have a good design, especially since our (non-beta) releases come with API/ABI compatibility guarantees.
In a more general sense, the problem with voice and video is that the intersection of people with desire to have it, people with time to code it, and people with the ability to code it is very small. For instance, I mainly lack the time, but also desire other features above voice and video. Others would like voice and video but aren't coders. I know that at least one Gaim developer has expressed interest in writing some -vv support, but for him it might be a lack of time. Also, at one time, GStreamer didn't have the capabilities we needed, but that is probably not the case any more.
If you have more specific questions, please pop by #gaim on irc.freenode.net, and we'd be glad to answer. I don't want to start a flame war here. I hope my tone comes across properly in this written medium, but in any case, my desire is to inform.
Then there's the fact that the standard C time library does NOT support doing time zone computations with any time zone other than the current system time zone.
This isn't strictly true. You can do it by manipulating the TZ environment variable before you do your computations and then change it back when you're done. It's messy, but it does work.
The paper would be presented to the voter, who would confirm its accuracy. This only leaves the possibility of the machine registering fake votes, but that's something that can be caught by comparing the number of votes cast in the paper trail to the number of approved voters at the ID-checking station.
Assuming that Slashdot was being blocked for some stupid reason... If I hadn't already, I'd lay into them for doing something stupid in the first place, because hopefully they'd think twice before doing it again. Now, if that was the reason they'd unblocked it, then it's probably sufficient to say thanks.
Which particular features are lacking?
The whole issue of "do it yourself" is very complicated. In many cases, people ask for huge features (say voice/video support) and expect that it's incredibly simple to do. Also, users often think they should still be treated like "customers" when they're not contributing anything to the project. It's not fair to take something for free and then complain that you want it improved to do what you want, but you don't want to help in any way.
The amount of work required to fix a bug or add a new feature is highly dependent on the size of the change, probably even more so than the size of the whole codebase. The Gaim software is pretty compartmentalized. When I started out, I fixed a few bugs without knowing much at all about the general architecture. So, it's not really that hard to fix little things. The problem is, *most* of the little things have been fixed already. Addressing more fundamental issues does take quite a bit of startup time to learn the codebase.
In general, I try to help out anyone who has a legitimate bug report, suggestion, etc. However, the amount of things that the developers can take on is extremely limited. There are a million things on my TODO list, and that's just the top items I'd like to accomplish. So often times, "do it yourself" is the only response.
There is definitely a big opportunity for non-coders to help, though. Graphic design, web design, bug triaging, documentation, etc. are useful to all open source projects.
People who like open source because the product is free need to remember that the product is free. If they expect anything more than zero support, they're going to be disappointed. People that view open source as a community are much better off. Not everyone in the community is a coder, but everyone that contributes is important.
Yes, the paste formatting thing is a known issue. It needs to be fixed at some point, but it's not a huge problem to hit Ctrl-R after a paste with formatting, or to use the Paste as Text feature in the first place. The reason the paste formatting bug hasn't been fixed yet is that it's non-trivial. It's on my TODO list.
Use Ctrl-R.
Or more importantly, just copy and paste the "encrypted" string right into your own Gaim accounts.xml and have it work. That would work unless we used one key per computer, and we'd never be able to do that, because users love to share their .gaim folder between computers and taking away that ability to protect people who can't manage their own file security is stupid.
As a developer on one of the projects listed, I can say that they have. They released them to the developers first, so that we could fix them. I believe Coverity's intention is to make the results public at some point.