GPL: Not going anywhere near commercial code. If you want to use it, either GPL or don't.
What do you mean by "Going anywhere near commercial code"? Sure, you're limited if you COPY GPL'd code into your own project, but just try copying Microsoft code into your project and see what happens. From a user's standpoint, you're free to do whatever you want. For example, Microsoft is quietly distributing GNU software for Windows 2000 "UNIX interoperability". They're not violating the GPL, the source is on ftp.microsoft.com.
The GPL may limit it's audience, but does it limit it's audience more, or less, than a typical commercial liscence?
I don't think Microsoft would be very nice if I made their software available for download from my web site.
I like VirusScan's functionality, but their application security REALLY sucks. During our evaluation of the product, I forgot the admin password I had assigned, and I was able to get around it really easily. Also, it has a history of remote-root buffer overflow vulnerabilities. If you use this product, make damn sure it's behind a firewall that blocks direct access from the internet. Set up a plain-jane mail relay between the internet and the machine you've installed VirusScan on. Keep up to date with their patches.
Maybe this will finally convince the courts that people should not be legally responsible for policing the content of sites they link to, now that web site owners are not the only ones who can create links on their web sites.
GPL'd code is not accessable to everybody. It is only accessable to developers who are willing to release their code under the GPL license which excludes large portions of the community. Government-funded GPL code is inaccessable to the Apache Foundation, it's inaccessable to the OpenBSD developers, and it's inaccessable to any commercial developers who are working on closed-source products.
What do you mean by inaccessable? There's nothing preventing any of these people from looking at GPL'd code, changing it if they want to use it differently, etc... Now, if they want to *copy* GPL'd code into their own products, the GPL places some restrictions on how they license those products. But, if they want total control over how they license their products, they'll just have to write the whole thing themselves. Big deal!
I don't see any problem with the government funding GPL'd software. I think it would be a waste of public resources to develop some product with no licensing restrictions. Some juggernaut such as Microsoft could easily come along, embrace and extend it, releasing only binaries until the original becomes obsolete & nobody's using it, and then put more restrictive licensing on it, limiting the public's rights.
If public money is spent developing GPL'd software, that investment is protected and will continue to benefit society indefinitely.
If they could get an injunction to shut down the Internet, they would do it. Just because it's easier to go after a company than the people who are actually making illegal exchanges of copyrighted material doesn't make it right.
ISP's also help to make illegal exchanges of copyrighted material possible. Maybe the RIAA should go after them. Heck, people couldn't trade MP3's without computers. Watch out Dell & Compaq!
Whether or not the RIAA can make a case against any individuals who are copying MP3's illegally, they shouldn't be able to go after anyone else. There are enough valid, legal ways to use Napster in compliance with fair use and copyright law that Napster should be allowed to go about their business without all this legal entanglement.
You forgot one little thing: copyrights. We don't need patents for software at all. Copyright is all companies need to protect their software R&D investments. Of course, copyright law needs re-examination as well, but that's another topic.
Actually, the translation is very good. The only error I remember seeing was "adaptate". I was just taking advantage of an easy opportunity to make a joke. US President Bush has a habit of using words that don't exist in English, and "adaptate" is exactly the kind of error he keeps making. The difference is that English is his mother tongue, and he should know better.
Umm... I don't think you can call a parabolic or hyperbolic trajectory an orbit. You can call it a near miss, but it's not an orbit unless the trajectory is circular or elliptical.
Some of these enhancements were based on other standards but often these features were
proprietary code that they did not share with the rest of the world. Why? Because they wanted to have features
that they felt were compelling to customers and gave them an edge over their competitors. Extending
standards beyond a given specification is a way of life for all software vendors. Show me one product that is
built exclusively on a standard specification that does not include code beyond the standard. It doesn't exist.
It looks like both Microsoft and Stallman agree that a cooperative, highly interoperable computing environment can't exist with proprietary software unless the entire environment is proprietary to a single vendor. Or until GPL'd software becomes the de-facto standard and proprietary software must interoperate with it to survive.
If you adopt that attitude, you're sure not going to be making any discoveries. Sure, genetic engineering is a fascinating new field, and it doesn't take much imagination to see that there will be lots of incredible things happening in that area soon. You, sir, are suffering from a lack of imagination. Get thee to a science fiction convention, or something. Computer science has a LONG way to go, and incredible things will be happening in the area for a good long time to come.
Tip: Larry Ellison is always spouting stupidities that superficially "ring true", trying to paint himself as a visionary. Do not listen to the man, he's more interested in looking like a visionary than in what will really happen in the future.
Absolutely. And the comments about "hard time" for spammers are insane. Per capita, the US imprisons twice as many people for non-violent crimes alone as any country in europe imprisons for ALL crimes. We have over half a million people in prison who have NEVER been convicted of a violent crime.
We need to get a more balanced look at how we think of "hard time". When a judge is sentencing, they should consider whether the crime is heinous enough that we need to get this person off the street. Is it worth these costs to our society: the person will no longer be contributing to the economy, and taxpayers will be paying their rent, food, basic clothing needs, hiring guards, and buying security equipment.
I would rather just delete the spam than pay the spammers' rent for any length of time. Spamming should never incur more than a fine. The fine should be proportional to the offense.
5) Even if none of the above are true, freedom of speech goes both ways. If he's within his rights to post such things
publicly, then the company is within their rights to pass the information on to whoever they want, including the new
employer.
I disagree. I don't think the former employer can contact his new employer, although they have the right to respond in a public forum. Of course, the other caveats you listed apply - there may be legal probems if the information he posted wasn't true or if he was otherwise legally bound in some way.
Are you trying to claim that it's the half of the web which isn't running on asp that is insecure;-)
No, all I'm saying that of the insecure scripts that are out there, lots of them are written in Perl, because Perl is so nice and easy to use. Not so long ago a lot of people were saying that writing scripts in Perl was a bad idea because it's easy to leave security holes in Perl CGI scripts. I don't agree with those people, I'm just trying to figure out where the original poster got the idea that Perl is insecure.
Uh... you miss the point. You run the script (root 'sploit, not cgi) on the perl interptreter on your local machine
No. My point was that the original poster probably wasn't talking about exploits written in Perl, I think he was talking about CGI programs written in Perl. All he said was "perl is insecure" and you started talking about exploits written in Perl. How do exploits written in Perl make Perl insecure? I think you misunderstood what he meant.
As you said, "if the software that you write is insecure, then that is not a bug in perl, it's yer own damn fault." I couldn't have said it better myself.
Is this realy a good idea? Especialy since there is a root exploit for every known version of perl in existance? Perl doesnt and will never run on my machine.
I think he is refering to the fact that perl is a language commonly used for writing root exploit scripts - perl is very powerful in terms of the fact that you can do a lot in a few lines of code (hence obfuscated perl contests).
His mistake (or probably troll) is in the fact that the waekness is not in perl - perl is just usefull in expoilting the weaknesses in other software.
Actually, I think he was referring to the fact that web sites running Perl are notoriously insecure. However, he doesn't seem to understand why. Maybe he spent some time on the h4x0r channels listening to what's going on without fully understanding it.
It's not because Perl is insecure, it's because Perl makes it so damn easy to just "get something working", and clueless people are writing insecure scripts all over the place.
You could have the same problem with any technology, but not so many clueless people are cabable of writing swiss-cheese-security programs in C. Besides, by now there has been enough yammering about input validation that most of the "CGI for Dummies" books cover security a little better than they used to.
PS: by "buy out", I mean FAIRLY buy out, some way to establish a price which covers all the research and costs of developing the product, plus some to cover research in other unprofitable areas (dead-end research), plus a healthy profit for the company. Just not a ridiculous profit for the company.
This is a pretty polarized argument, as would be expected from a discussion which basically divides the capitalists from the communists. The truth is that neither abolishing intellectual property nor 100% free markets are good solutions, whether the topic of discussion is software or AIDS medicines.
What we need are more flexible intellectual property laws. We need to find a better way of balancing the interests of humanity with the interests of the individual. Our old, stiff IP laws are just not keeping up with the dynamic modern world.
People who are infected with AIDS should be able to get medicine at the cost of manufacturing the medicine, at most, if only because those drugs reduce contagion and help prevent spread of the disease. It is in the best interest of humanity to contain the worst epidemic since the Bubonic Plague.
However, drug companies need to be assured that they can recoup their investments, and should be able to make a healthy profit. We need to keep motivating them to do new research in productive areas of exploration. That's also in the best interest of humanity.
The real problem is that there is no mechanism for balancing the two interests. In the United States, the result of this imbalance is that huge corporations make millions of dollars on intellectual property, recouping far, far more than their investment. Look at Microsoft. They are pulling in more money than their actual contribution to society should justify. But businesses need the software to survive, so they pay the outrageously high fees.
However, in a country without any means of protecting intellectual property, nobody would make the initial investment. The current laws, based on expiration of intellectual property rights after a period of time, are on the right track but are too inflexible. For instance, software should go into the public domain faster than it currently does due to the rate of change in technology. Also, we need to establish a mechanism by which the government can "buy out" a company's IP rights and put them into the public domain. AIDS drugs would be a prime target for this.
If I had it to do all over again, I would have started with a relatively simple language with OO features such as Python or Java, studied OO patterns, data structures and algorithms, and then sharpen the focus and dig into C and assembler later.
IBM recently announced their astonishing, new, unprecedented breakthrough in MAGNETIC memory that ACTUALLY WORKS, (some old industry wags are referring to it as core, for some unknown reason). Shortly afterward, they announced a startling new breakthrough method of storing data by punching holes in cards, a development no doubt inspired by the efficient vote tabulations in Florida.
Washington State's Anti-Spam law says that if you receive spam with either altered headers or misleading subject lines, you can hit the spammer with a suit for $500 per occurrance, whether or not the spammer is located in Washington State.
Since the ISPs are apparently collaborating knowingly, should they be held accountable somehow?
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think Microsoft would be very nice if I made their software available for download from my web site.
I like VirusScan's functionality, but their application security REALLY sucks. During our evaluation of the product, I forgot the admin password I had assigned, and I was able to get around it really easily. Also, it has a history of remote-root buffer overflow vulnerabilities. If you use this product, make damn sure it's behind a firewall that blocks direct access from the internet. Set up a plain-jane mail relay between the internet and the machine you've installed VirusScan on. Keep up to date with their patches.
Maybe this will finally convince the courts that people should not be legally responsible for policing the content of sites they link to, now that web site owners are not the only ones who can create links on their web sites.
I don't see any problem with the government funding GPL'd software. I think it would be a waste of public resources to develop some product with no licensing restrictions. Some juggernaut such as Microsoft could easily come along, embrace and extend it, releasing only binaries until the original becomes obsolete & nobody's using it, and then put more restrictive licensing on it, limiting the public's rights.
If public money is spent developing GPL'd software, that investment is protected and will continue to benefit society indefinitely.
If they could get an injunction to shut down the Internet, they would do it. Just because it's easier to go after a company than the people who are actually making illegal exchanges of copyrighted material doesn't make it right.
ISP's also help to make illegal exchanges of copyrighted material possible. Maybe the RIAA should go after them. Heck, people couldn't trade MP3's without computers. Watch out Dell & Compaq!
Whether or not the RIAA can make a case against any individuals who are copying MP3's illegally, they shouldn't be able to go after anyone else. There are enough valid, legal ways to use Napster in compliance with fair use and copyright law that Napster should be allowed to go about their business without all this legal entanglement.
It's a vary interesting read, and it gives insight into why it's in the vested interest of the organization, not to tolerate descenters.
I think you meant dissenters. The descenters are the ones that are still Scientologists.Start with a large fortune.
You forgot one little thing: copyrights. We don't need patents for software at all. Copyright is all companies need to protect their software R&D investments. Of course, copyright law needs re-examination as well, but that's another topic.
Actually, the translation is very good. The only error I remember seeing was "adaptate". I was just taking advantage of an easy opportunity to make a joke. US President Bush has a habit of using words that don't exist in English, and "adaptate" is exactly the kind of error he keeps making. The difference is that English is his mother tongue, and he should know better.
Use of the internal working, and of arbitrary segments of the program, to adaptate them to user needs
Looks like President Bush was involved in the process.Pipe Zippy the Pinhead quotes into the IDS. Processing time will increase exponentially.
For those of you who don't already know what Bonobo is:
Introduction to Bonobo
Umm... I don't think you can call a parabolic or hyperbolic trajectory an orbit. You can call it a near miss, but it's not an orbit unless the trajectory is circular or elliptical.
Some of these enhancements were based on other standards but often these features were proprietary code that they did not share with the rest of the world. Why? Because they wanted to have features that they felt were compelling to customers and gave them an edge over their competitors. Extending standards beyond a given specification is a way of life for all software vendors. Show me one product that is built exclusively on a standard specification that does not include code beyond the standard. It doesn't exist.
It looks like both Microsoft and Stallman agree that a cooperative, highly interoperable computing environment can't exist with proprietary software unless the entire environment is proprietary to a single vendor. Or until GPL'd software becomes the de-facto standard and proprietary software must interoperate with it to survive.Tip: Larry Ellison is always spouting stupidities that superficially "ring true", trying to paint himself as a visionary. Do not listen to the man, he's more interested in looking like a visionary than in what will really happen in the future.
Absolutely. And the comments about "hard time" for spammers are insane. Per capita, the US imprisons twice as many people for non-violent crimes alone as any country in europe imprisons for ALL crimes. We have over half a million people in prison who have NEVER been convicted of a violent crime.
We need to get a more balanced look at how we think of "hard time". When a judge is sentencing, they should consider whether the crime is heinous enough that we need to get this person off the street. Is it worth these costs to our society: the person will no longer be contributing to the economy, and taxpayers will be paying their rent, food, basic clothing needs, hiring guards, and buying security equipment.
I would rather just delete the spam than pay the spammers' rent for any length of time. Spamming should never incur more than a fine. The fine should be proportional to the offense.
Are you trying to claim that it's the half of the web which isn't running on asp that is insecure ;-)
No, all I'm saying that of the insecure scripts that are out there, lots of them are written in Perl, because Perl is so nice and easy to use. Not so long ago a lot of people were saying that writing scripts in Perl was a bad idea because it's easy to leave security holes in Perl CGI scripts. I don't agree with those people, I'm just trying to figure out where the original poster got the idea that Perl is insecure.
Uh... you miss the point. You run the script (root 'sploit, not cgi) on the perl interptreter on your local machine
No. My point was that the original poster probably wasn't talking about exploits written in Perl, I think he was talking about CGI programs written in Perl. All he said was "perl is insecure" and you started talking about exploits written in Perl. How do exploits written in Perl make Perl insecure? I think you misunderstood what he meant.
As you said, "if the software that you write is insecure, then that is not a bug in perl, it's yer own damn fault." I couldn't have said it better myself.
It's not because Perl is insecure, it's because Perl makes it so damn easy to just "get something working", and clueless people are writing insecure scripts all over the place.
You could have the same problem with any technology, but not so many clueless people are cabable of writing swiss-cheese-security programs in C. Besides, by now there has been enough yammering about input validation that most of the "CGI for Dummies" books cover security a little better than they used to.
PS: by "buy out", I mean FAIRLY buy out, some way to establish a price which covers all the research and costs of developing the product, plus some to cover research in other unprofitable areas (dead-end research), plus a healthy profit for the company. Just not a ridiculous profit for the company.
This is a pretty polarized argument, as would be expected from a discussion which basically divides the capitalists from the communists. The truth is that neither abolishing intellectual property nor 100% free markets are good solutions, whether the topic of discussion is software or AIDS medicines.
What we need are more flexible intellectual property laws. We need to find a better way of balancing the interests of humanity with the interests of the individual. Our old, stiff IP laws are just not keeping up with the dynamic modern world.
People who are infected with AIDS should be able to get medicine at the cost of manufacturing the medicine, at most, if only because those drugs reduce contagion and help prevent spread of the disease. It is in the best interest of humanity to contain the worst epidemic since the Bubonic Plague.
However, drug companies need to be assured that they can recoup their investments, and should be able to make a healthy profit. We need to keep motivating them to do new research in productive areas of exploration. That's also in the best interest of humanity.
The real problem is that there is no mechanism for balancing the two interests. In the United States, the result of this imbalance is that huge corporations make millions of dollars on intellectual property, recouping far, far more than their investment. Look at Microsoft. They are pulling in more money than their actual contribution to society should justify. But businesses need the software to survive, so they pay the outrageously high fees.
However, in a country without any means of protecting intellectual property, nobody would make the initial investment. The current laws, based on expiration of intellectual property rights after a period of time, are on the right track but are too inflexible. For instance, software should go into the public domain faster than it currently does due to the rate of change in technology. Also, we need to establish a mechanism by which the government can "buy out" a company's IP rights and put them into the public domain. AIDS drugs would be a prime target for this.
If I had it to do all over again, I would have started with a relatively simple language with OO features such as Python or Java, studied OO patterns, data structures and algorithms, and then sharpen the focus and dig into C and assembler later.
IBM recently announced their astonishing, new, unprecedented breakthrough in MAGNETIC memory that ACTUALLY WORKS, (some old industry wags are referring to it as core, for some unknown reason). Shortly afterward, they announced a startling new breakthrough method of storing data by punching holes in cards, a development no doubt inspired by the efficient vote tabulations in Florida.
Time to go patent myself, before someone else does.
Washington State's Anti-Spam law says that if you receive spam with either altered headers or misleading subject lines, you can hit the spammer with a suit for $500 per occurrance, whether or not the spammer is located in Washington State.
Since the ISPs are apparently collaborating knowingly, should they be held accountable somehow?