He's a danger to their network only if no one has yet changed the passwords on the routers and other equipment.
Which requires them to know what all of the equipment is, and potentially all of the software installed in all of it. Information for which Childs was supposed to be the source.
I'm not saying that the $5 million bail is right, but it's not at all inconceivable that Childs could cause damage to that network if he chose to do so.
The 26,000-some bit virus only exists in the context of a host that contains considerably more DNA information than that. To use the awful computer analogies, it's like running a 26K program on a 300MB interpreter system; the small program just calls some combination of really complex, pre-built functions that shouldn't be called in that combination.
And keep in mind that the 300MB interpreter is meaningless without the context in which it executes: some physical machine.
But here's a tip: Apple concedes that the $29 Snow Leopard upgrade will work properly on these Tiger-equipped Macs, so you can save the extra $140.
Apple has said it would install; they have not sanctioned doing so. If you don't care for this distinction, I suggest you head to your friendly neighborhood torrent tracker.
The big issue that descriptive approaches to language always try to correct is that the prescriptivists are always falsely cloaking themselves in the mantle of "logic." Prescriptivists will demand that you submit your writing to absurd rules ("never end a sentence with a preposition," "never split an infiniive") that they claim are "logical"; and therefore, they insist that if others' writing doesn't meet their own pet rules, the writer is illogical, ignorant or worse. These folks, however, almost always got off the grammar train back about 1850, and really don't know anything about grammar properly said.
Banishing prescriptivism from grammar doesn't mean that anybody is entitled to talk write however the hell they want in every context. How people talk and write is still subject to all forms of social approval, and people constantly attempt choose a way of writing and talking that is appropriate for presenting a certain image of themselves to their audiences. I.e., a lot of what people ordinarily call "grammar" is really style, a way of choosing linguistic variants to convey implicit messages about oneself and one's social standing.
The thing is that "good grammar" in the prescriptivist sense is just one more style among others in our society. It's a style that is associated with educated upper-middle class white-collar professionals, especially those whose professions most heavily involve writing (journalists, marketers, writers). "Good grammar" is thus, really, an in-group marker, just like business suits or low baggy jeans. Criticizing another person's "bad grammar" is an indirect way of portraying that person as an outsider to the group.
Now, having laid the ground, let me respond more specifically:
Language changes. Spelling changes. That does not mean you can spelling anything you like however you like and it's never wrong. That is all.
What this amounts to is that there should be one and only one linguistic style that everybody should conform to, which spells words in one particular way. Why?
The best answer is probably along the lines of this: "because people who have power over you will tend to discount you if you do not"; people who are looking for an educated, intelligent employee, for example, will not hire you if you fail too crassly to display the linguistic marks of one, just like they might not hire you if you come to your job interview wearing shorts and a wife-beater. There's no more to it.
Homophones are really not a big deal. Language is always rife with potential ambiguity that gets resolved in context. If we wrote "affect" and "effect" in the same way, that would be no worse than writing "bank" and "bank" the same way--which we already do.
Or, since you speak Spanish, here's an amusing example: due to the fact that words in Spanish cannot start with sc- Spanish, the Spanish word escatológico corresponds to two distinct words in English: eschatological and scatological, which have very different meanings. Somehow, Spanish speakers manage to distinguish nearly all the time when the word is being used to refer to the afterlife, and when it is used to refer to excrement.
I've also noticed people struggle with "attuned" vs. "attenuate" and "intonate" vs. "intimate". I'm no linguist, but my experience having spoken Spanish from a pretty early age is that Standard English has a lot of words, with differences in them being intended to express things very precisely. By contrast, Spanish, at least as it's spoken in most of Latin America, has fewer words, and concepts are expressed more generally, leaving more room for meaning between the words.
No, I just don't agree. Armonizado vs. atenuado, entonar vs. intimar. Your English examples are all Latinate, you know, and most English speakers would not use most of them in ordinary conversation (except perhaps "attuned").
That's great, as long as morons don't take that to mean "... and therefore your horrible grammar and spelling errors aren't actually errors, but the natural evolution of language." I've seen a lot of people who seem to think the fact that language evolves means that they are the instruments of said evolution, rather than semi-literate tards.
So what's the big fucking deal? A lot of "grammar rules" are arrogant, ignorant bullshit, so if most people just ignore most of that stuff it's really no loss. And a lot of otherwise smart people just can't spell very well. But if they had to improve at only one thing, which of these would you prefer?
Spelling
Using paragraphs
There are writing skills that are a lot more important than spelling and your so-called prescriptive "grammar," period.
Except it's not profitable, because there's no profit. It's a donation, they're not making a profit in transferring them to people who need it. This is probably why they put "profit" instead of profit in the summary.
You are not wrong, but economically speaking, the difference is smaller than you make it out. Killing an uproductive person to save the life of a highly productive one probably creates wealth that wouldn't be created otherwise.
Or are you suggesting that judges will find perfectly innocent and healthy people guilty of crimes that warranty execution, in order to transfer their organs to people are similarly innocent but are not in top physical condition, in an extremely risky operation with a decent chance of rejection (and even without rejection, the post transplant patient usually has a reduced quality of life since they have to keep taking medication to keep their immune system from destroying the foreign body...).
We don't have to assume that the courts will find innocent people guilty. It's much simpler: courts usually have some discretion during sentencing whether to apply the death penalty or not. Harvesting the organs of executed convicts provides an incentive for the courts to use the death penalty on convicts that would otherwise not receive it. Also, lawmakers would have an incentive to extend capital punishment to more crimes than it applies to today, or to pass laws restricting court discretion in sentencing.
Southern England isn't on the Scottish border, is it?
The fact that grapes aren't grown in northern England today doesn't entail that they can't be grown there today, because people may not choose to grow them. Britain is the world's greatest wine importer, so they certainly have no difficulty obtaining wine from elsewhere.
The Romans might have produced wine in northern England simply because many of them were unable to obtain wine otherwise. The wines might have been pretty bad. In any case, it's hard to draw conclusions from the existence or absence of vinyards alone.
If the efficiency gains of "green" tech were sufficient to justify the costs (in the opinions of those paying for them) then there would be no need to encourage their adoption by force.
Unless the green tech does away with externalities inherent to the technology it replaces. And pollution is the textbook example of an externality, which is precisely why governments have to regulate pollution. Without such regulation, producers will not replace their technology with green alternatives because the costs of the non-green ones will be borne by somebody else. Mandating green technologies doesn't necessarily increase the costs to society at large, it just makes the correct parties bear the costs.
The most you can say is that the lawsuit is an attempt to get a court to judge that CO2 emissions are not pollution.
For the court to be able to act on this assumption, it needs to make a finding of fact to that effect. Before such a finding of fact can be made, other aspects of the complaint must be evaluated. For example, the plaintiff needs to actually be entitled to pursue the complaint they are making.
So basically, in this case, the law says that to pursue a case against a spammer, the plaintiff must be an ISP. Before the court can decide whether the party being accused is actually spamming, it must determine whether the plaintiff is an ISP. The plaintiff failed that requirement, according to the court, case closed.
This may sound annoying to you in this one case, but really, this needs to be the case, in order for the legal system to throw out bad cases quickly. Read up on standing.
There's a bunch of features in this update, though most of them are minor. And nobody's holding a gun to your head to get this--hell, I've skipped all of Leopard and am going straight from Tiger to Snow.
Just to list a handful of features that SL brings in:
Exchange support
New Quicktime Player
Chinese character input by drawing it with your finger on the touchpad
Some pretty big accessibility features, like a mode for blind users that allows them to touch the touchpad and have the computer's voice describe the screen elements.
New features for Exposé.
I know several of these features are not relevant to everybody, but no, this isn't just bug patches and performance optimizations.
It's only really messy in other parts of the world (In this case, Switzerland.) In the United States the courts have long ruled, and it is well established that pretty much anyone can take pictures of your home if they want as long as they're on public property (sidewalk, street, park, etc...) They can also take pictures of YOU if you are in public. Shock! Horror!
But the thing is that those court rulings happened long before Google Street View existed. Legislatures and courts are not prescient; they cannot anticipate the future, and the law changes over time to adapt to new, unforeseen circumstances.
The biggest problem I have with your posting (and the countless others that make the same argument as you do) is that it just assumes that those of us who object to Street View are simply ignorant about the law. Well, that's not the case; we're not ignorant about the law, we think the law is wrong. The constant reply that "what Google is doing is legal" misses the point by a mile: it shouldn't be.
And to be utterly clear about this, what Street View is doing can be analyzed into three parts: (a) taking photos of thing seen from public spaces (b) systematically so as to blanket a geographical area, (c) correlating the photos to a searchable geographical information system, and (d) making it available to the public. The argument is that the court precedents you allude to are really about (a), and not about (b), (c) or (d). I don't think you'll find anybody who disagrees that as a general rule, it's ok to take photos of things and persons that can be seen from public spaces. You'll find people who think that right doesn't translate into the right to run a private systematic surveilance operation, though.
If you compare a Timex and a Patek Philippe, they probably show the time equally well.
Actually, a cheap quartz Timex is more accurate than a Patek Philippe, or any other mechanical watch. People don't buy mechanical watches for accuracy.
So the argument you are offering is "everyone else does it"?
No, that is not the argument, that is the consequence of the argument.
Public utilities of all kinds oversell their capacity: telephone companies, ISPs, the power company, the roads, water service, etc. Why? Because, as GP said, given that most people aren't using it all the time, the most efficient use of resources is to build just enough infrastructure to provide decent service most of the time.
To be truly evil, someone must have sought to do harm by planning to commit some morally wrong action with no prompting from others (whether this person successfully executes his or her plan is beside the point). The evil person must have tried to carry out this plan with the hope of "causing considerable harm to others," Bringsjord says. Finally, "and most importantly," he adds, if this evil person were willing to analyze his or her reasons for wanting to commit this morally wrong action, these reasons would either prove to be incoherent, or they would reveal that the evil person knew he or she was doing something wrong and regarded the harm caused as a good thing.
So I guess all they have to be is a religious nutjob who thinks killing heathens/infadels/etc etc is alright.
If they think that killing heathens or infidels is right, they arguably don't meet the third requirement of the definition, because they don't believe that they are doing wrong; they believe they are doing good by ridding the world of heathens, and probably can cite a number of prima facie coherent reasons (which you might not agree with, but "incoherent" here can't mean "stuff I disagree with").
Frankly I think the definition is bullshit, precisely for reasons like this. It comes closer to describing something like psychopathy, and not "evil" broadly speaking. People who commit harm to others don't normally do it because they think doing harm is a good end in itself; rather, they engage in extensive rationalization and justification of their actions.
I would argue that having your body penetrated against your will is an inherently violent act.
I would argue that this argument is sexist. Since when does your body have to be penetrated? The above assumes that it is a man raping a woman and not the other way around. While I would agree that the vast majority of cases are the opposite, it doesn't mean every case is.
Are you assuming that GP proposed penetration as a necessary condition for rape? I read it as a sufficient condition. And what you call the "assumption that it is a man raping a woman" I call "the use of the kind of rape that's by far most common."
So we can only call a crime violent if the victim is willing to resist in same[sic] manner?
Uh, yes. At least in the US; I don't have enough knowledge about other jurisdictions to comment on them. If the victim makes absolutely no effort to resist, to include verbal refusal, then forcible rape cannot be proven. If I had any of my law books in my backpack, I'd cite them, but the bottom line here is that in order to charge someone with forcible rape, the victim has to offer some kind of resistance.
The first problem with your claim is that the US has dozens of jurisdictions, with different rape/sexual assault laws. You can't flat out assert that that utmost resistance is a requirement for a rape accusation in the USA; you have to name jurisdictions. I can tell you for sure that there is no such provision in California, the most populous of the states. Hell, read the link and see to what lengths they go to make it clear that the threat must not even be violent (many bits omitted):
261. (a) Rape is an act of sexual intercourse accomplished with a person not the spouse of the perpetrator, under any of the following circumstances:
(2) Where it is accomplished against a person's will by means of force, violence, duress, menace, or fear of immediate and unlawful bodily injury on the person or another.
(5) Where a person submits under the belief that the person committing the act is the victim's spouse, and this belief is induced by any artifice, pretense, or concealment practiced by the accused, with intent to induce the belief.
(6) Where the act is accomplished against the victim's will by threatening to retaliate in the future against the victim or any other person, and there is a reasonable possibility that the perpetrator will execute the threat. As used in this paragraph, "threatening to retaliate" means a threat to kidnap or falsely imprison, or to inflict extreme pain, serious bodily injury, or death.
(7) Where the act is accomplished against the victim's will by threatening to use the authority of a public official to incarcerate, arrest, or deport the victim or another, and the victim has a reasonable belief that the perpetrator is a public official. As used in this paragraph, "public official" means a person employed by a governmental agency who has the authority, as part of that position, to incarcerate, arrest, or deport another. The perpetrator does not actually have to be a public official.
What is indeed the case is that historically, in many countries' traditional legal system, an utmost resistance standard has existed along the lines that you have mentioned. These requirements have mostly gone away in Western countries, however, along with other sexist requirements such as (a) the victim must not be the wife of the accused (e.g., California has a crime of spousal rape), and (b) the requirement that the alleged rape victim be an "honest" woman (e.g., the "no harm in raping a slut" defense).
OK this means that in order for a new work to be affected by the copyright on an earlier work, the new work must actually **INCLUDE** "major copyright-protected elements of the earlier work". So, if you statically link to a GPL library, then you include that library's code in your own work. If you dynamically link to a library, you don't include the library's code in your own work. It would seem then that the "GPL inheritance" would ONLY apply in the case of a statically linked library, according to copyright law.
This is, at the very least, not the position that the FSF takes. And I agree with them.
It comes down to how you interpret the part that says "major copyright-protected elements of the earlier work." You're reading "elements" as actual pieces of code. Copyright law in general, IMO, doesn't read the term "elements" as narrowly as you're doing. For example, the elements of a novel isn't just the words and their arrangement; it also includes the characters and the plot. You can't publish your own Harry Potter novels commercially without permission because the character and tons of background plot elements are protected by copyright. That your novel shares no substantial amount of text with the originals doesn't come into the argument.
So for example, the FSF can take the position that the call interface of a GPL-licensed library is a major copyright-protected element of the library itself, and that by using the library in your application, you're incorporating that element of the library into your work. Or more generally, if your application was written to use the GPL-licensed library, and cannot work unless linked with that library, then your application incorporates the functionality of that GPL-licensed library, and that therefore to distribute it, you must license it under the terms of the GPL.
The whole idea of "linking" is too specific to a technology or architecture.
Well, maybe that's why the term is never actually used in the license text...
Indeed. Somebody's failing to distinguish between two things:
The terms of the license itself;
The licensor's legal positions about what those terms mean in specific cases.
The terms of the GPL say that derived works must be licensed under the GPL. The FSF takes the position that a program that links to a GPL-licensed library is a derived work of that library. This doesn't preclude them from taking the position that, say, an application that calls a GPL-licensed service through SOAP isn't a derived work of the SOAP service. (In practice, I'd expect them to take positions that depend on the details of the application and the SOAP service.)
It is worth citing the key quote by RMS in that thread:
The FSF position would be that this is still one program, which has only been disguised as two. The reason it is still one program is that the one part clearly shows the intention for incorporation of the other part.
I say this based on discussions I had with our lawyer long ago. The issue first arose when NeXT proposed to distribute a modified GCC in
two parts and let the user link them. Jobs asked me whether this was lawful. It seemed to me at the time that it was, following reasoning
like what you are using; but since the result was very undesirable for free software, I said I would have to ask the lawyer.
What the lawyer said surprised me; he said that judges would consider such schemes to be "subterfuges" and would be very harsh toward
them. He said a judge would ask whether it is "really" one program, rather than how it is labeled.
I think the same position applies to the submitter's question in this story. He is writing a piece of software that clearly shows the intention to incorporate the GPL library in question, and using a subterfuge to claim that he is not doing so.
As a few other people have said, the real question here is what counts as a derivative work, and this is a legal, not a technical question.
Since in America you are innocent until proven guilty, and they were not proven guilty...
You're reasoning on the basis of short slogans, and not actually the rules that these slogans imperfectly summarize.
In the USA, the criminal court system operates on a presumption of the innocence of the defendant. This means that the prosecution has the burden of proving that the charges are true; defendants don't have the burden of proving themselves innocent, and have the right to not testify during the process.
A person truly does commit a murder, but is acquitted of the charge for it, is quite simply an acquitted murderer. If you call somebody an "acquitted murderer" there's of course the issue of why do you believe you are justified in believing that person to be a murderer when the court ruled in his favor, but we're all certainly entitled to our own opinions.
If you don't own something you can't license it out, pretty simple.
You can, however, relicense something that's in the public domain. You're not even obliged to tell them it's public domain.
No, you can't "relicense" a public domain work. You can create copies of it and use them for any lawful purpose, and you can incorporate the whole or pieces of it into derivative works of your own. So can anybody else.
Remember that the word "license" is, fundamentally, the a fancy Latinate term for "permission." A public domain work is one nobody needs anybody's permission to use. You can't "relicense" a public domain work, because you can't deny other people permission to use it. You can make your own derived works that draw from it, but your copyright to your derived work only covers the your original contributions.
You do not haveto tell recipients of a public domain work, or derivatives thereof, about the public domain status of parts of the work. You can't prevent them from using the public domain material they got from you, though.
Attacking a cell tower is already illegal. No additional legislation is needed here.
By the same reasoning, terrorism and mass murder are already illegal. Therefore, we do not need additional legislation banning civilian sales of nuclear weapons.
This has got to be about the most disingenious thread I've ever read about file sharing. File-sharing is a technology that's primarily used to obtain commercially available work without paying for it; in practice, the "sharing" part (where downloaders also distribute files to other people) is just about achieving economies of scale. It's done because it makes it possible for the downloader to obtain more files and faster.
In the fantasy world you're painting here, however, this is all inverted so that file-sharing is some sort of supreme form of altruism. Come on, give us a break.
No, it's more like waiting until a cabbie gets out of his car to get some coffee, then "borrowing" his car and using it to give people free rides. You return the car at the end, and then you tell him that he didn't lose any money, because none of those people would have paid for a cab ride. Which is of course true, because you were giving cab rides away for free!
Slashdot Mirror
Which requires them to know what all of the equipment is, and potentially all of the software installed in all of it. Information for which Childs was supposed to be the source.
I'm not saying that the $5 million bail is right, but it's not at all inconceivable that Childs could cause damage to that network if he chose to do so.
The 26,000-some bit virus only exists in the context of a host that contains considerably more DNA information than that. To use the awful computer analogies, it's like running a 26K program on a 300MB interpreter system; the small program just calls some combination of really complex, pre-built functions that shouldn't be called in that combination.
And keep in mind that the 300MB interpreter is meaningless without the context in which it executes: some physical machine.
Relevant quote from the original article:
Apple has said it would install; they have not sanctioned doing so. If you don't care for this distinction, I suggest you head to your friendly neighborhood torrent tracker.
I think you're barking up the wrong tree here.
The big issue that descriptive approaches to language always try to correct is that the prescriptivists are always falsely cloaking themselves in the mantle of "logic." Prescriptivists will demand that you submit your writing to absurd rules ("never end a sentence with a preposition," "never split an infiniive") that they claim are "logical"; and therefore, they insist that if others' writing doesn't meet their own pet rules, the writer is illogical, ignorant or worse. These folks, however, almost always got off the grammar train back about 1850, and really don't know anything about grammar properly said.
Banishing prescriptivism from grammar doesn't mean that anybody is entitled to talk write however the hell they want in every context. How people talk and write is still subject to all forms of social approval, and people constantly attempt choose a way of writing and talking that is appropriate for presenting a certain image of themselves to their audiences. I.e., a lot of what people ordinarily call "grammar" is really style, a way of choosing linguistic variants to convey implicit messages about oneself and one's social standing.
The thing is that "good grammar" in the prescriptivist sense is just one more style among others in our society. It's a style that is associated with educated upper-middle class white-collar professionals, especially those whose professions most heavily involve writing (journalists, marketers, writers). "Good grammar" is thus, really, an in-group marker, just like business suits or low baggy jeans. Criticizing another person's "bad grammar" is an indirect way of portraying that person as an outsider to the group.
Now, having laid the ground, let me respond more specifically:
What this amounts to is that there should be one and only one linguistic style that everybody should conform to, which spells words in one particular way. Why?
The best answer is probably along the lines of this: "because people who have power over you will tend to discount you if you do not"; people who are looking for an educated, intelligent employee, for example, will not hire you if you fail too crassly to display the linguistic marks of one, just like they might not hire you if you come to your job interview wearing shorts and a wife-beater. There's no more to it.
Homophones are really not a big deal. Language is always rife with potential ambiguity that gets resolved in context. If we wrote "affect" and "effect" in the same way, that would be no worse than writing "bank" and "bank" the same way--which we already do.
Or, since you speak Spanish, here's an amusing example: due to the fact that words in Spanish cannot start with sc- Spanish, the Spanish word escatológico corresponds to two distinct words in English: eschatological and scatological, which have very different meanings. Somehow, Spanish speakers manage to distinguish nearly all the time when the word is being used to refer to the afterlife, and when it is used to refer to excrement.
No, I just don't agree. Armonizado vs. atenuado, entonar vs. intimar. Your English examples are all Latinate, you know, and most English speakers would not use most of them in ordinary conversation (except perhaps "attuned").
So what's the big fucking deal? A lot of "grammar rules" are arrogant, ignorant bullshit, so if most people just ignore most of that stuff it's really no loss. And a lot of otherwise smart people just can't spell very well. But if they had to improve at only one thing, which of these would you prefer?
There are writing skills that are a lot more important than spelling and your so-called prescriptive "grammar," period.
You are not wrong, but economically speaking, the difference is smaller than you make it out. Killing an uproductive person to save the life of a highly productive one probably creates wealth that wouldn't be created otherwise.
We don't have to assume that the courts will find innocent people guilty. It's much simpler: courts usually have some discretion during sentencing whether to apply the death penalty or not. Harvesting the organs of executed convicts provides an incentive for the courts to use the death penalty on convicts that would otherwise not receive it. Also, lawmakers would have an incentive to extend capital punishment to more crimes than it applies to today, or to pass laws restricting court discretion in sentencing.
The fact that grapes aren't grown in northern England today doesn't entail that they can't be grown there today, because people may not choose to grow them. Britain is the world's greatest wine importer, so they certainly have no difficulty obtaining wine from elsewhere.
The Romans might have produced wine in northern England simply because many of them were unable to obtain wine otherwise. The wines might have been pretty bad. In any case, it's hard to draw conclusions from the existence or absence of vinyards alone.
Unless the green tech does away with externalities inherent to the technology it replaces. And pollution is the textbook example of an externality, which is precisely why governments have to regulate pollution. Without such regulation, producers will not replace their technology with green alternatives because the costs of the non-green ones will be borne by somebody else. Mandating green technologies doesn't necessarily increase the costs to society at large, it just makes the correct parties bear the costs.
The most you can say is that the lawsuit is an attempt to get a court to judge that CO2 emissions are not pollution.
For the court to be able to act on this assumption, it needs to make a finding of fact to that effect. Before such a finding of fact can be made, other aspects of the complaint must be evaluated. For example, the plaintiff needs to actually be entitled to pursue the complaint they are making.
So basically, in this case, the law says that to pursue a case against a spammer, the plaintiff must be an ISP. Before the court can decide whether the party being accused is actually spamming, it must determine whether the plaintiff is an ISP. The plaintiff failed that requirement, according to the court, case closed.
This may sound annoying to you in this one case, but really, this needs to be the case, in order for the legal system to throw out bad cases quickly. Read up on standing.
There's a bunch of features in this update, though most of them are minor. And nobody's holding a gun to your head to get this--hell, I've skipped all of Leopard and am going straight from Tiger to Snow.
Just to list a handful of features that SL brings in:
I know several of these features are not relevant to everybody, but no, this isn't just bug patches and performance optimizations.
But the thing is that those court rulings happened long before Google Street View existed. Legislatures and courts are not prescient; they cannot anticipate the future, and the law changes over time to adapt to new, unforeseen circumstances.
The biggest problem I have with your posting (and the countless others that make the same argument as you do) is that it just assumes that those of us who object to Street View are simply ignorant about the law. Well, that's not the case; we're not ignorant about the law, we think the law is wrong. The constant reply that "what Google is doing is legal" misses the point by a mile: it shouldn't be.
And to be utterly clear about this, what Street View is doing can be analyzed into three parts: (a) taking photos of thing seen from public spaces (b) systematically so as to blanket a geographical area, (c) correlating the photos to a searchable geographical information system, and (d) making it available to the public. The argument is that the court precedents you allude to are really about (a), and not about (b), (c) or (d). I don't think you'll find anybody who disagrees that as a general rule, it's ok to take photos of things and persons that can be seen from public spaces. You'll find people who think that right doesn't translate into the right to run a private systematic surveilance operation, though.
Actually, a cheap quartz Timex is more accurate than a Patek Philippe, or any other mechanical watch. People don't buy mechanical watches for accuracy.
No, that is not the argument, that is the consequence of the argument.
Public utilities of all kinds oversell their capacity: telephone companies, ISPs, the power company, the roads, water service, etc. Why? Because, as GP said, given that most people aren't using it all the time, the most efficient use of resources is to build just enough infrastructure to provide decent service most of the time.
If they think that killing heathens or infidels is right, they arguably don't meet the third requirement of the definition, because they don't believe that they are doing wrong; they believe they are doing good by ridding the world of heathens, and probably can cite a number of prima facie coherent reasons (which you might not agree with, but "incoherent" here can't mean "stuff I disagree with").
Frankly I think the definition is bullshit, precisely for reasons like this. It comes closer to describing something like psychopathy, and not "evil" broadly speaking. People who commit harm to others don't normally do it because they think doing harm is a good end in itself; rather, they engage in extensive rationalization and justification of their actions.
Are you assuming that GP proposed penetration as a necessary condition for rape? I read it as a sufficient condition. And what you call the "assumption that it is a man raping a woman" I call "the use of the kind of rape that's by far most common."
The first problem with your claim is that the US has dozens of jurisdictions, with different rape/sexual assault laws. You can't flat out assert that that utmost resistance is a requirement for a rape accusation in the USA; you have to name jurisdictions. I can tell you for sure that there is no such provision in California, the most populous of the states. Hell, read the link and see to what lengths they go to make it clear that the threat must not even be violent (many bits omitted):
What is indeed the case is that historically, in many countries' traditional legal system, an utmost resistance standard has existed along the lines that you have mentioned. These requirements have mostly gone away in Western countries, however, along with other sexist requirements such as (a) the victim must not be the wife of the accused (e.g., California has a crime of spousal rape), and (b) the requirement that the alleged rape victim be an "honest" woman (e.g., the "no harm in raping a slut" defense).
This is, at the very least, not the position that the FSF takes. And I agree with them.
It comes down to how you interpret the part that says "major copyright-protected elements of the earlier work." You're reading "elements" as actual pieces of code. Copyright law in general, IMO, doesn't read the term "elements" as narrowly as you're doing. For example, the elements of a novel isn't just the words and their arrangement; it also includes the characters and the plot. You can't publish your own Harry Potter novels commercially without permission because the character and tons of background plot elements are protected by copyright. That your novel shares no substantial amount of text with the originals doesn't come into the argument.
So for example, the FSF can take the position that the call interface of a GPL-licensed library is a major copyright-protected element of the library itself, and that by using the library in your application, you're incorporating that element of the library into your work. Or more generally, if your application was written to use the GPL-licensed library, and cannot work unless linked with that library, then your application incorporates the functionality of that GPL-licensed library, and that therefore to distribute it, you must license it under the terms of the GPL.
Indeed. Somebody's failing to distinguish between two things:
The terms of the GPL say that derived works must be licensed under the GPL. The FSF takes the position that a program that links to a GPL-licensed library is a derived work of that library. This doesn't preclude them from taking the position that, say, an application that calls a GPL-licensed service through SOAP isn't a derived work of the SOAP service. (In practice, I'd expect them to take positions that depend on the details of the application and the SOAP service.)
It is worth citing the key quote by RMS in that thread:
I think the same position applies to the submitter's question in this story. He is writing a piece of software that clearly shows the intention to incorporate the GPL library in question, and using a subterfuge to claim that he is not doing so.
As a few other people have said, the real question here is what counts as a derivative work, and this is a legal, not a technical question.
You're reasoning on the basis of short slogans, and not actually the rules that these slogans imperfectly summarize.
In the USA, the criminal court system operates on a presumption of the innocence of the defendant. This means that the prosecution has the burden of proving that the charges are true; defendants don't have the burden of proving themselves innocent, and have the right to not testify during the process.
A person truly does commit a murder, but is acquitted of the charge for it, is quite simply an acquitted murderer. If you call somebody an "acquitted murderer" there's of course the issue of why do you believe you are justified in believing that person to be a murderer when the court ruled in his favor, but we're all certainly entitled to our own opinions.
No, you can't "relicense" a public domain work. You can create copies of it and use them for any lawful purpose, and you can incorporate the whole or pieces of it into derivative works of your own. So can anybody else.
Remember that the word "license" is, fundamentally, the a fancy Latinate term for "permission." A public domain work is one nobody needs anybody's permission to use. You can't "relicense" a public domain work, because you can't deny other people permission to use it. You can make your own derived works that draw from it, but your copyright to your derived work only covers the your original contributions.
You do not haveto tell recipients of a public domain work, or derivatives thereof, about the public domain status of parts of the work. You can't prevent them from using the public domain material they got from you, though.
By the same reasoning, terrorism and mass murder are already illegal. Therefore, we do not need additional legislation banning civilian sales of nuclear weapons.
This has got to be about the most disingenious thread I've ever read about file sharing. File-sharing is a technology that's primarily used to obtain commercially available work without paying for it; in practice, the "sharing" part (where downloaders also distribute files to other people) is just about achieving economies of scale. It's done because it makes it possible for the downloader to obtain more files and faster.
In the fantasy world you're painting here, however, this is all inverted so that file-sharing is some sort of supreme form of altruism. Come on, give us a break.
No, it's more like waiting until a cabbie gets out of his car to get some coffee, then "borrowing" his car and using it to give people free rides. You return the car at the end, and then you tell him that he didn't lose any money, because none of those people would have paid for a cab ride. Which is of course true, because you were giving cab rides away for free!