And what did I say about women's voting did you disagree with? You can't just call it "crack". That's not a fair criticism. I could just as well call everything you write "crack". But where would that get me?
crack: (n): a joke. (colloquial.)
Women do not vote as a bloc, men do wave the "what about the children" line around, and women certainly don't all vote for "increased security" at the expense of liberty (and liberty and freedom are not synonyms.)
You're either an idiot or a troll. I really don't care which. And you're right--I can't resist replying.
Tell you what. Feel free to get in the last word. I'll read it, delete the comment, and we'll never have to speak again.
I want to hear what they are going to do next time. I sure as hell don't want to hear that they could have done it this time, but didn't.
What do you think that they're going to do next time a shuttle is up in space and has possible damage?
Just about everything that they could have done for Columbia, plus whatever new stuff they change on account of looking at what NASA could have done for Columbia.
Any publicly listed company has a DUTY to their shareholders to increase the shareholders investments as rapidly as possible.
(IANAL-RU?)
CEOs don't have a duty to increase the stock's value as quickly as possible. They just have a fiduciary duty to provide a reasonable ROI. This can take the form of increased stock price or healthy dividends, or even simply preserving the stock price in a downward economy.
While a CEO needs to be compelled to act in the interest of all stockholders, there is no reason to add qualifiers to that.
We have freedom because of the government? I'm afraid not! Government always takes away freedom. Government always gets bigger.
Yeah, I mean, that bureau of anti-slavery sure as heck took away freedom...
I didn't say that "government" gives freedom. Government's a given for any civilized society, and the more we do "as a society", the bigger our government gets.
My point was, it doesn't matter if our government is the guys who sit around and decide who gets to hunt in what forest, or if our government's a huge industrial/public works/military/police force.
The important part is that our government is fragmented into two or more blocs, often far more, and these blocs then compete against each other, thus preserving freedom.
You don't have to believe me--and, after that crack about women voting, I'd really prefer that you just shut the fuck up and leave me alone.
And then, I can walk out clear and clean as a Saint? Of course, not. I am legally responsible for my actions. And so should Sen. Starr with his actions.
There's no law regulating what a legislator can propose as a bill, and neither should their be. To paraphrase MS, if they wanted to propose a bill requiring that all sales of operating systems involve a bologna sandwich, they should be free to do that.
Or, if you think otherwise, please explain to me how it is that noone is supposed to ignore the Law, but you consider acceptable that politicians whose job is to create new laws can ignore what they contain?
Politics. Both internal to a legislature and external to the legislature, a legislator must play the political game to keep and perform their job.
If this were a case of fundamental rights, or heavy modification, Sen. Starr's actions would be abhorent. But it's about strengthening or not-strengthening copyright law--this is about as vital as a speed limit.
The anti-tracking arguments that are plausible tend to be the government tracking legal behavior (donations to a political party) and ineffectiveness of the tracking (illegal transactions will simply move to non-traceable mediums--precious metals, dry goods, etc. This will slow down, but not stop, the black market.)
We are entering a prison like no other in history, for it will be the entire world.
Yeah. And giving women the vote will lead to an amazonian-like society where we're all socalist democrats who don't drink booze...
We don't have freedom and choice because of privacy or cash or rifles. We have it because we have multiple parties in power that know that the best way to keep themselves in power is to keep the other guy out of power--which is best done by fragmenting the populace, which gives us freedom and choice.
Don't think of Linux as a business product. If we fall into that trap, they've won.
What are you fighting for, anyway?
Everyone having Free Software / All Software being Free (GNU)? Then you want to be a business product.
Better Linux? Then you want the resources that being a business product will give you.
Support for Linux from the hardware world? Then you want as large a market as possible, and being in the business world will help that.
As many people using Linux as possible? Again, business world.
Of course the IT managers, as a group, aren't more important than the Linux programers, as a group, to Linux--but when it comes to hackers actually using it, a goodly portion of potential Linux hackers won't be able to if their IT Managers are scared of it.
They're pretty much the only people left in the world who make battle-quality chain mail, scale mail, and plate mail in the medieval style.
You, sir, need to look both deeper. SCA goods that I've seen are hardly "medieval," and the "period" items that I do run across are as often as not made by someone who does the work professionally.
'course, for other lost skills beyond dressmaking, calligrophy, and hotly debated swordplay, there's the various American re-enactment organizations that crisscross the country. (They tend to be organized around wars.)
If your peripheral vision is so bad that you have to look down to see your speedometer, you shouldn't really be driving anyway.
Perpheral vision won't cut it for spedometers and other guages. You can get far more detail--a total instrument panel check--with a glance than you can with your peripheral vision. (Heck, I can tell more by watching the road pass than relying on my peripheral vision to read my spedometer.)
IME, you get better data reception if you shift focus frequently and quickly than if you rely on your peripheral vision. And if you're driving so fast that you can't look away from the road to glance at your mirrors & spedometer, then you shouldn't be driving on public roads.
As technology advances, it must always be retroactively effective against previous applications. Just imagine the beautiful irony though, if a helicopter's armor was immune to a laser, but a rock hurled from a sling knock it out of the sky?
You don't think that they consider hurling rocks?
What, exactly, do you think small arms fire is? Don't expect firearms to go away any sooner than the sword did--and, remember that, in essential fashion, the sword is still a standard piece of equipment in many military units.
The military better watch itself -- if they start relying too heavily on technology, soldiers will lose the fundamental skills that make them unique.
Yeah, like swordfighting--er...
I mean, yeah, like how to fire a musket line--no, wait...
Trenches! Must not forget trenches!
The history of war is a history of technology progressing, progressing, and progressing. The "war-fighter" (i.e., "solider, salior, marine, or pilot") doesn't have a job of reading maps and following trails--their job is to fight and win.
Sure, your networked rifle squad could lose its GPS uplink--but that's no different than having your map burnt away from you.
Oh, you mean done well? Maybe with a plot and character development? When was the last big-budget movie with all that?
Spider-Man and The Matrix Reloaded both had a plot, and character development. (Ok, maybe TMR had more of character exploration than development--but it's a movie, for christ's sake!)
If you disagree, please provide a rational argument.
Think really hard--the robots, unless perpetuating the fraud of the matrix, don't lie. And the oracle is, believe it or not, still on the side of the angels.
This restricts the sale of these games to minors. Their parents can still buy them, their older brothers can still buy them. Adults can still buy them for themselves.
The state regulates tobacco, alcohol, firearm, pornographic material, and automobile sales. Regulating video game sales is certainly well within their constitutional power.
Why don't you all watch that piece of crap daytime soap that centers around the "vampire mythos"? My mother watches it all the time, and she's facinated by it. She friggin time-shifts the thing (makes me sick, really). I find it hard to believe that the writing in Port Charles is any less believeable or fun, or "out there" as Buffy, which leads me to believe the one thing it's lacking truely is Sarah Michelle Gellar.
Because I don't know what it is?
Plus, daytime TV tends to be, well, mushy. But give me a name, and I'll take a look at it.
SMG has, really, be the worst part of Buffy this past season, IMO.
Neo never left the Matrix. Not even in the first movie. Everyone, including Zion, is still inside.
While this is possible, it's no more supported than a "this is just Neo having a really bad drug trip" interpretation, or a "the Empire was good and the Rebels are evil terrorists" interpretation of Star Wars.
If the robots were going to build a seperate Matrix, you'd think that they'd simply have individual programs, like what the rebels use to control Zion or train operatives, and leave them there.
Remember: the robots don't lie as a rule, and the genesis of the design of the Matrix is a program who believes that humans and machines need to live together--and who was and is mistrusted by her peers inside and outside of the Matrix.
It's as if I give you an old table I found in my basement, and you find a gold bar in one of the legs. Can I sue you to get it back because I didn't know that it was there? No, because it's yours and myfault for not inspecting the table beforehand to ensure I was only giving away the table. You came over, and I gave you the table, end of discussion.
Let's say that you're a mover, and Bob is the guy I'm selling the table to. You come in to move the table, steal a gold bar, and put it into the table. LATER, I sell the table to Bob--and shortly after (say, while it's still in your truck) I discover that you put the gold bar there, and I immediatly come to get it back.
Do I get it? I have no idea--but my sense of ethics says that I should, as I knew about the bar, it was my bar, and it was transmitted to you without my knowledge, or your knowledge, by the fraud of another.
Move away from physical goods, throw in copyleft, and I suspect the darn thing just gets more complex.
Re:GPL the best bet
on
OSI vs SCO
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
SCO is a distributor, it's not the user's fault
I didn't say it was the user's fault.
What I said was, SCO either is making a spurious claim (yay for everyone except them), carrying out a 'GIF switch' with the wrong law (yay for everyone except them), or going to court to stop the distribution of their code which they didn't know about, which could suck.
If they go to court, and their claims of fact are found to be true, and no procedural faults stop them (i.e. "you distributed your code for 5 minutes after your CPO knew about it"), OSS winds itself up in quite a pickle.
* If the unwittingly-added code is found to be properly GPL'd, OSS is "viral" and disgruntled employees can wreack havoc with any proprietary software that they want.
* If the unwittingly-added code is removed from the GPL, OSS companies have the hassle of removing all of the effected modules from their systems.
This has the potential to be rather thorny, and FSF zealotry won't help the matter much.
That's the risk you take by owning IP and contributing to open source, it could be SCO employees that put the code in, no one really knows, but since SCO gave it out themselves, it's their fault, regardless of who actually put it in the OS.
If SCO knew that the code was theirs and continued to GPL it, then those GPL's are viable and ironclad. If they made all necessary steps after learning that their code was in Linux, and they didn't put it there, then the status of the "GPL'd" code is in doubt.
This is a murky situation, requiring lawyers and judges and a jury or three. (IANAL, of course--but if you didn't know that already, you're probably delusional.)
Re:GPL the best bet
on
OSI vs SCO
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
"not knowing" is no excuse in court
IANAL(RU), but I was taught (by lawyers) that intent is as improtant as action.
The way I see it, if SCO's code is in fact in Linux, then "Us" would have to prove that it's common practice to examine all of the source code for an OSS distribution (it isn't), that SCO didn't do so (which they obviously didn't), and, probably, that they continued to distribute Linux with their code after knowing that it was "theirs."
They don't belong in the OS industry if they can't even manage their own releases, and/or know what it even does.
OSS is built on trust and re-use. If we (that is, folks who use any OSS at all) had to examine every bit of source code, then OSS would grind to a gut-wrenching hault. At best, we'd have locked-down distrubtions with a small fraction of the software that they have now.
The whole point of politicians is that they represent the people, and that they do so without conflicts of interest.
No. Those are presidents and judges.
"Politicians", by which we really mean "legislators and lobbyists", are supposed to be biased, onery, and one-sided. That's why we have so many of them.
This is how democracy works; those who care more about issues speak more, and are paid attention to more. (The fault, FWIW, lies not in politicians getting money per se, but that the people with money throw it around mostly in an attempt to get more money.)
Thus, we need not worry about the "viral FUD" if the above point is brought to attention.
Actually, by your logic, we ALL would need to worry about it. Does copyleft trump copyright? If so, expect a much harder road for Linux. (Personally, I think it doesn't, but IANAL.)
Re:GPL the best bet
on
OSI vs SCO
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
They distributed the code under the gpl allowing everybody to see it and thus they have no legal base at all with respect to trade secrets.
Their argument for this claim will be "we didn't distribute it; we had no knowledge." Denying them this would do two things.
1: Hackers can now put words in the mouth of corporations. (See? MSDN got hacked and folk downloaded GPL'd Windows, so now it's all free!)
2: Every piece of "FUD" about the GPL will be proven--it IS a viral license, that can irrevocably infect your code without your express wishes.
Slashdot Mirror
And what did I say about women's voting did you disagree with? You can't just call it "crack". That's not a fair criticism. I could just as well call everything you write "crack". But where would that get me?
crack: (n): a joke. (colloquial.)
Women do not vote as a bloc, men do wave the "what about the children" line around, and women certainly don't all vote for "increased security" at the expense of liberty (and liberty and freedom are not synonyms.)
You're either an idiot or a troll. I really don't care which. And you're right--I can't resist replying.
Tell you what. Feel free to get in the last word. I'll read it, delete the comment, and we'll never have to speak again.
I want to hear what they are going to do next time. I sure as hell don't want to hear that they could have done it this time, but didn't.
What do you think that they're going to do next time a shuttle is up in space and has possible damage?
Just about everything that they could have done for Columbia, plus whatever new stuff they change on account of looking at what NASA could have done for Columbia.
Any publicly listed company has a DUTY to their shareholders to increase the shareholders investments as rapidly as possible.
(IANAL-RU?)
CEOs don't have a duty to increase the stock's value as quickly as possible. They just have a fiduciary duty to provide a reasonable ROI. This can take the form of increased stock price or healthy dividends, or even simply preserving the stock price in a downward economy.
While a CEO needs to be compelled to act in the interest of all stockholders, there is no reason to add qualifiers to that.
We have freedom because of the government? I'm afraid not! Government always takes away freedom. Government always gets bigger.
Yeah, I mean, that bureau of anti-slavery sure as heck took away freedom...
I didn't say that "government" gives freedom. Government's a given for any civilized society, and the more we do "as a society", the bigger our government gets.
My point was, it doesn't matter if our government is the guys who sit around and decide who gets to hunt in what forest, or if our government's a huge industrial/public works/military/police force.
The important part is that our government is fragmented into two or more blocs, often far more, and these blocs then compete against each other, thus preserving freedom.
You don't have to believe me--and, after that crack about women voting, I'd really prefer that you just shut the fuck up and leave me alone.
Bah weep granah, weep ninny bong!
:)
You forgot the second 'n' in "gran'nah"
Oh, and that darn comma's superfluous. Some hyphens may work, though.
And then, I can walk out clear and clean as a Saint? Of course, not. I am legally responsible for my actions. And so should Sen. Starr with his actions.
There's no law regulating what a legislator can propose as a bill, and neither should their be. To paraphrase MS, if they wanted to propose a bill requiring that all sales of operating systems involve a bologna sandwich, they should be free to do that.
Or, if you think otherwise, please explain to me how it is that noone is supposed to ignore the Law, but you consider acceptable that politicians whose job is to create new laws can ignore what they contain?
Politics. Both internal to a legislature and external to the legislature, a legislator must play the political game to keep and perform their job.
If this were a case of fundamental rights, or heavy modification, Sen. Starr's actions would be abhorent. But it's about strengthening or not-strengthening copyright law--this is about as vital as a speed limit.
And why is that a bad thing?
The anti-tracking arguments that are plausible tend to be the government tracking legal behavior (donations to a political party) and ineffectiveness of the tracking (illegal transactions will simply move to non-traceable mediums--precious metals, dry goods, etc. This will slow down, but not stop, the black market.)
We are entering a prison like no other in history, for it will be the entire world.
Yeah. And giving women the vote will lead to an amazonian-like society where we're all socalist democrats who don't drink booze...
We don't have freedom and choice because of privacy or cash or rifles. We have it because we have multiple parties in power that know that the best way to keep themselves in power is to keep the other guy out of power--which is best done by fragmenting the populace, which gives us freedom and choice.
Don't think of Linux as a business product. If we fall into that trap, they've won.
What are you fighting for, anyway?
Everyone having Free Software / All Software being Free (GNU)? Then you want to be a business product.
Better Linux? Then you want the resources that being a business product will give you.
Support for Linux from the hardware world? Then you want as large a market as possible, and being in the business world will help that.
As many people using Linux as possible? Again, business world.
Of course the IT managers, as a group, aren't more important than the Linux programers, as a group, to Linux--but when it comes to hackers actually using it, a goodly portion of potential Linux hackers won't be able to if their IT Managers are scared of it.
They're pretty much the only people left in the world who make battle-quality chain mail, scale mail, and plate mail in the medieval style.
You, sir, need to look both deeper. SCA goods that I've seen are hardly "medieval," and the "period" items that I do run across are as often as not made by someone who does the work professionally.
'course, for other lost skills beyond dressmaking, calligrophy, and hotly debated swordplay, there's the various American re-enactment organizations that crisscross the country. (They tend to be organized around wars.)
If your peripheral vision is so bad that you have to look down to see your speedometer, you shouldn't really be driving anyway.
Perpheral vision won't cut it for spedometers and other guages. You can get far more detail--a total instrument panel check--with a glance than you can with your peripheral vision. (Heck, I can tell more by watching the road pass than relying on my peripheral vision to read my spedometer.)
IME, you get better data reception if you shift focus frequently and quickly than if you rely on your peripheral vision. And if you're driving so fast that you can't look away from the road to glance at your mirrors & spedometer, then you shouldn't be driving on public roads.
As technology advances, it must always be retroactively effective against previous applications. Just imagine the beautiful irony though, if a helicopter's armor was immune to a laser, but a rock hurled from a sling knock it out of the sky?
You don't think that they consider hurling rocks?
What, exactly, do you think small arms fire is? Don't expect firearms to go away any sooner than the sword did--and, remember that, in essential fashion, the sword is still a standard piece of equipment in many military units.
The military better watch itself -- if they start relying too heavily on technology, soldiers will lose the fundamental skills that make them unique.
Yeah, like swordfighting--er...
I mean, yeah, like how to fire a musket line--no, wait...
Trenches! Must not forget trenches!
The history of war is a history of technology progressing, progressing, and progressing. The "war-fighter" (i.e., "solider, salior, marine, or pilot") doesn't have a job of reading maps and following trails--their job is to fight and win.
Sure, your networked rifle squad could lose its GPS uplink--but that's no different than having your map burnt away from you.
Oh, you mean done well? Maybe with a plot and character development? When was the last big-budget movie with all that?
Spider-Man and The Matrix Reloaded both had a plot, and character development. (Ok, maybe TMR had more of character exploration than development--but it's a movie, for christ's sake!)
If you disagree, please provide a rational argument.
When?
Think really hard--the robots, unless perpetuating the fraud of the matrix, don't lie. And the oracle is, believe it or not, still on the side of the angels.
This restricts the sale of these games to minors. Their parents can still buy them, their older brothers can still buy them. Adults can still buy them for themselves.
The state regulates tobacco, alcohol, firearm, pornographic material, and automobile sales. Regulating video game sales is certainly well within their constitutional power.
Why don't you all watch that piece of crap daytime soap that centers around the "vampire mythos"? My mother watches it all the time, and she's facinated by it. She friggin time-shifts the thing (makes me sick, really). I find it hard to believe that the writing in Port Charles is any less believeable or fun, or "out there" as Buffy, which leads me to believe the one thing it's lacking truely is Sarah Michelle Gellar.
Because I don't know what it is?
Plus, daytime TV tends to be, well, mushy. But give me a name, and I'll take a look at it.
SMG has, really, be the worst part of Buffy this past season, IMO.
Neo never left the Matrix. Not even in the first movie. Everyone, including Zion, is still inside.
While this is possible, it's no more supported than a "this is just Neo having a really bad drug trip" interpretation, or a "the Empire was good and the Rebels are evil terrorists" interpretation of Star Wars.
If the robots were going to build a seperate Matrix, you'd think that they'd simply have individual programs, like what the rebels use to control Zion or train operatives, and leave them there.
Remember: the robots don't lie as a rule, and the genesis of the design of the Matrix is a program who believes that humans and machines need to live together--and who was and is mistrusted by her peers inside and outside of the Matrix.
Why not just add a bit more memory to your phone or Palm Pilot?
Because your phone and PDA can't act as a disk. They're a USB device, not a USB server.
If you don't like the watch, get the keychain. If you don't like the keychain, get the watch.
It's as if I give you an old table I found in my basement, and you find a gold bar in one of the legs. Can I sue you to get it back because I didn't know that it was there? No, because it's yours and myfault for not inspecting the table beforehand to ensure I was only giving away the table. You came over, and I gave you the table, end of discussion.
Let's say that you're a mover, and Bob is the guy I'm selling the table to. You come in to move the table, steal a gold bar, and put it into the table. LATER, I sell the table to Bob--and shortly after (say, while it's still in your truck) I discover that you put the gold bar there, and I immediatly come to get it back.
Do I get it? I have no idea--but my sense of ethics says that I should, as I knew about the bar, it was my bar, and it was transmitted to you without my knowledge, or your knowledge, by the fraud of another.
Move away from physical goods, throw in copyleft, and I suspect the darn thing just gets more complex.
SCO is a distributor, it's not the user's fault
I didn't say it was the user's fault.
What I said was, SCO either is making a spurious claim (yay for everyone except them), carrying out a 'GIF switch' with the wrong law (yay for everyone except them), or going to court to stop the distribution of their code which they didn't know about, which could suck.
If they go to court, and their claims of fact are found to be true, and no procedural faults stop them (i.e. "you distributed your code for 5 minutes after your CPO knew about it"), OSS winds itself up in quite a pickle.
* If the unwittingly-added code is found to be properly GPL'd, OSS is "viral" and disgruntled employees can wreack havoc with any proprietary software that they want.
* If the unwittingly-added code is removed from the GPL, OSS companies have the hassle of removing all of the effected modules from their systems.
This has the potential to be rather thorny, and FSF zealotry won't help the matter much.
That's the risk you take by owning IP and contributing to open source, it could be SCO employees that put the code in, no one really knows, but since SCO gave it out themselves, it's their fault, regardless of who actually put it in the OS.
If SCO knew that the code was theirs and continued to GPL it, then those GPL's are viable and ironclad. If they made all necessary steps after learning that their code was in Linux, and they didn't put it there, then the status of the "GPL'd" code is in doubt.
This is a murky situation, requiring lawyers and judges and a jury or three. (IANAL, of course--but if you didn't know that already, you're probably delusional.)
"not knowing" is no excuse in court
IANAL(RU), but I was taught (by lawyers) that intent is as improtant as action.
The way I see it, if SCO's code is in fact in Linux, then "Us" would have to prove that it's common practice to examine all of the source code for an OSS distribution (it isn't), that SCO didn't do so (which they obviously didn't), and, probably, that they continued to distribute Linux with their code after knowing that it was "theirs."
They don't belong in the OS industry if they can't even manage their own releases, and/or know what it even does.
OSS is built on trust and re-use. If we (that is, folks who use any OSS at all) had to examine every bit of source code, then OSS would grind to a gut-wrenching hault. At best, we'd have locked-down distrubtions with a small fraction of the software that they have now.
The whole point of politicians is that they represent the people, and that they do so without conflicts of interest.
No. Those are presidents and judges.
"Politicians", by which we really mean "legislators and lobbyists", are supposed to be biased, onery, and one-sided. That's why we have so many of them.
This is how democracy works; those who care more about issues speak more, and are paid attention to more. (The fault, FWIW, lies not in politicians getting money per se, but that the people with money throw it around mostly in an attempt to get more money.)
Thus, we need not worry about the "viral FUD" if the above point is brought to attention.
Actually, by your logic, we ALL would need to worry about it. Does copyleft trump copyright? If so, expect a much harder road for Linux. (Personally, I think it doesn't, but IANAL.)
They distributed the code under the gpl allowing everybody to see it and thus they have no legal base at all with respect to trade secrets.
Their argument for this claim will be "we didn't distribute it; we had no knowledge." Denying them this would do two things.
1: Hackers can now put words in the mouth of corporations. (See? MSDN got hacked and folk downloaded GPL'd Windows, so now it's all free!)
2: Every piece of "FUD" about the GPL will be proven--it IS a viral license, that can irrevocably infect your code without your express wishes.