I am not an American; however, I have a pretty good knowledge of my history, and my own country's partitioned government structure and laws (include our Charter right to free speech), as a close (even a blurry) examination of my past posts would show.
That aside: The government is all of the government. It's the legislature, the executive, and the judicial branch.
The rights in your Bill of Rights are empowering rights because they are recognized by at least one branch of the American government: the judiciary.
Judicial action is government action. This is elementary.
Re: your earlier statement on your house. You're continuing to fail to apply RMS' definitions, and criticizing his conclusions as a result. While you're free (as am I) to complain that he's not using the words in their ordinary meaning, that's not an argument against the logical structure of his argument, merely his form of presentation. If you change the word "freedom" into "foo" and "power" into "bar", then reread him as arguing for foo over bar, perhaps you will understand.
The demarcation is because we've erected an artificial barrier between programmers and non-programmers.
Programming isn't hard. Nearly any reasonably bright person can learn some simple programming skills. Sure, the Elite Coder will still be a rare thing, but I don't think the current setup where we have a wall between coders and non-coders is a good idea.
And, to some extent, user interface developments have been in agreement with me. The typical desktop is now much more customizable by the end-user than its equivalent of the mid-80s. Why did disk-loading operating systems take over? ROMs boot much, much faster; disk-loading systems are more customizable.
Most of the research for scientific programs is government-funded, and most of those aforementioned programs are released under OSS licenses anyway.
Movies and music are not what RMS is talking about. He's interested in computer programs.
Modern commercial games are an interesting problem. Many of them can be dismissed, as they contain significant copyrightable non-program elements: for example, artwork.
However, there are games like Quake and Unreal where realy the engine is the game; there's nothing else important.
My argument is that games like Quake should be able to get patent protection, and rely on patents for all of their intellectual property protection.
Yes, I actually think that the binary code of computer programs should not be considered subject matter of copyright, and this is where I diverge pretty radically from RMS. He's against patents; I see room for them. They're only 20 years and they require public documentation of the algorithms used.
Sure, the Patent Office screws up pretty often, but that's a separate issue. With copyrights, you're stuck with the things practically forever, and there's no disclosure.
The guy's famous. It's like saying Richard M. Stallman, of the Free Software Foundation.
Re:Strange distinction.
on
Freedom or Power?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
RMS is using an unusual set of terms in this essay. He's using "power" and "freedom" in ways that they are not normally used.
Fortunately, he has the good sense to define his terms.
He defines freedom as:
being able to make decisions that affect mainly you
Conversely, he defines power as:
being able to make decisions that affect others more than you
Under this definition, the first freedom you mention is actually a freedom, not power. The ability to make decisions about who can enter the home where you live is an ability to make decisions that affect mainly you. Most people do not want to enter your home (even if you're Mr. Popular, there are billions of people on the earth:) and are not affected at all; even the ones who do want to visit you, most do not want to force themselves upon you, and the burglars and so on who might want to visit you despite your not welcoming them are not affected nearly as much by your refusal to grant them entry as you would be affected by their entry.
I won't deal with the free-speech example, because it's empty. There is never power to prevent government censorship; the government is the agent of power - when it is powerless, it is not a government.
And, lastly, RMS defends the GPL as being a necessary evil. In a more logical world, the GPL would not have to exist.
I don't know if I agree with RMS, but it's clear you didn't understand him.
Re:Yeah, everyone must do it their way
on
Freedom or Power?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
So we have no rights to decide over the fruits of our own labor? What are we, slaves?
Fascinating. I was unaware of any society where people were granted total freedom to decide how the fruits of their labour are used.
For an example, I suggest the razor blade. Many people (mostly men) use this device to remove facial hair, and many other people (mostly women) use it to remove leg hair. Some other people use it to remove hair in... other places.
Do you see the razor companies trying to tell you where to put your razor?
Huh.
And that's not even getting into the fact that the razors are actually being made by people (well, ok, by machines controlled by people); these people, somehow, do not seem to mind the idea that porn stars might use the fruits of their labour in an unusual way.
This is capitalism, folks. You just don't get to decide what other people do with the things you make, once you've sold those things to them.
It's the copyright control freaks who want to setup a non-capitalist state, IMO; if you look back in time, to a time when there were large organizations which held state-sponsored monopolies over certain industries, we called that system of economics feudalism.
This is just plain stupid. Everything anyone does affects others in some sense. Who it mainly affects is a matter of opinion.
Let's take this sentiment, and put it into a new context:
This is just plain stupid. Every time somebody kills anyone, then it's deliberate in some sense. Whether it's deliberate or not is a matter of opinion.
And yet, our courts seem to have little trouble with the concept of "murder" as being distinct from "manslaughter." Just because something's hard to figure out, doesn't mean it's not a useful test, in itself.
This is a fundamentally wrong perception, and is at the root of nearly all the current problems in the software industry.
Everyone who uses a computer program works on it. Yes, even the ones who don't code.
Everyone who works on a computer program uses it. I hope this part is obvious.
Everybody who uses a program has something to contribute about it. Talk to a secretary about M$ Office sometime: you'll probably learn some things.
This was the real revolution at Xerox Parc: the idea that ordinary users should be consulted, not just coders.
This is why I'm involved in OSS: I think that we should eliminate the distinction entirely, and ordinary users should be given the power to code. It's also why I like Apple: they, more than anyone else, incorporate the insights of, well, normal people into their interfaces.
Read RMS' article. He defines the two terms, and while I'm not sure he's got his definitions right, they're the ones that are relevant for discussing his arguments.
I worked for a little while in a government research library, and about half the people in the building were both scientists and programmers. They developed a lot of their own tools, and most of them were coding for some *nix, many on Linux.
They didn't care about other people getting their code. I would expect universities to be the same way.
As for bandwidth, that's much less of a problem now with CD burners. I'm assuming your Third World people have CD-ROMs, but given that, if you can talk to some First World scientists & get them to burn and ship, it might well be cheaper.
The Duesseldorfer Internet provider Isis took the blocking back of four on-line supplies
again. " the barrier decreased/went back to the initiative of an individual technician. It corresponded not to the policy of the enterprise ", said Isis speaker Thomas Werz. It concerned itself thereby around four pages with right-wing extremists as well as force-wonderful-ends to contents from the USA, which were attainable for the Isis customers for Monday no longer.
The technician had wanted to demonstrate on own fist that a technical solution for the blocking from Internet pages was possible, in addition, easily to be gone around can, avowed Werz opposite heise on-line. This should not have occurred however in all public; Werz apologized in the name of the company at the customers. Isis aims at a political solution with the Duesseldorfer district government.
From Monday to today one had gone out in the enterprise erroneously with it, the technician in arrangement with the management concerned, stressed Werz. Accordingly a Isis spokeswoman had justified the side blocking yesterday in relation to the public.
During his public demonstration the technician had followed arbitrarily a request of the district government Duesseldorf. This
had before reminded the ACCESS Provider as North-Rhine/Westphalian
supervision of Internet to lock four pages from the USA.
Approximately ten Provider reacted according to specification of the authority country-wide so far to it. The measures are strongly disputed in the Internet municipality. Thus the chaos computer club called the attempts of the district government to let Internet pages lock censorship in the Internet. "this is a crucial step into the false direction."
The district government Duesseldorf tries as country-wide Internet control instance for some time to let pages with illegal contents lock by the ACCESS Provider.
On 13 November a hearing with 90 Internet Providern took place for this reason. At that time the providers referred particularly to technical problems, in order to lock pages from the foreign country. According to estimations of the Federal Criminal Investigation Office
(BKA) approximately 90 per cent of the more than 1000 right-wing extremists German-language Internet supplies from the
foreign country are fed into the network.
This is true, and regrettable; but to say that Communicator doesn't support PNG is akin to saying that Mosaic (before 2.0) didn't support GIF because, well, it didn't support any of the 89a extensions (at least AFAIR; Mosaic 2.0 BTW was the first Mosaic to support JPEG inline too).
Well, think about it. x=any number, including 76:)
For example, my PPPoE gateway runs FreeBSD 3.4. I could say that I'm running 3.x, and it supports PPPoE. However, I'd be wrong to do so, as versions of FreeBSD before 3.4 don't support PPPoE.
But I'd also be wrong to say FreeBSD 3.x doesn't support PPPoE. Tch:)
In my job as a web scripter, we can't use PNG, as policy dictates that we be compatible with as many browsers as possible. Netscape 4.x isn't compatible without a plugin, so it's a no go. That browser has caused more grief than all the others combines.
Ding! Wrong.
Communicator (4.76 anyway) does support PNGs. I know this because I can view my Webalizer output just fine with it.;)
Okay, let's see. There are assembly languages. There's ALGOL-family languages, which include every language I've seen mentioned here except maybe Perl (and it's usually written in an ALGOL kind of style). There's LISP, Forth, Prolog.
Okay, there are five unrelated languages. But C, Java, C++, Pascal, ADA, FORTRAN, COBOL, BASIC, Modula-2, and lots of others are all related, and frankly are pretty easy to learn once you know one of them well.
Voice interaction is a classic example of something that can be thought of as "cool" until you have an open plan office with 30 people talking at their computers.
I don't understand slashdotters sometimes.
Have you ever been in a callcentre? Okay, they're generally not exactly open plan, but they don't give the drones huge walls, and there's way more than 30 of them in there.
What they do give the drones are headset mics.
This isn't rocket science, folks. Kate Bush, not exactly a hardcore techie, came up with wireless mics in the '70s (well okay she forced her engineer boyfriend to come up with them, but you know how it goes:)
Wireless headsets. That's how you do voice recognition in an office.
For caching a whole web site, though, they're taking the content and essentially presenting it as part of their own system. I suspect they're on much less solid territory there; I have content on the web, and haven't given my permission for them to copy it en masse. In fact, my web pages all state explicitly that the material may not be copied without my prior permission. Personally, at this moment, I don't object if they want to cache it. But if I took the site down, in order to publish the articles for profit, for example, then I might have a different opinion at that time.
Googlebot supports metatags that allow you to prevent caching. For more information, read this.
Also, they don't cache pages that have gone down since the last crawl. This isn't like the Usenet archive.
You're right, though, in that they'd have a fight on their hands in court. They've got a much stronger position legally though than the spam harvester bots, because they've made a good-faith effort. I can't see them getting hit with much of anything but an injunction, and maybe not even that; whereas if I was a prosecuting attorney, I'd want to go after the people behind eBay harvester bots with criminal remedies.
Google has an implied license claim that's pretty good, IMO.
Search engines have been indexing the web for quite some time, and there's a file called robots.txt that they use. Perhaps you've heard of it. Search engine spiders that read it use it to decide what they're allowed to index.
If I were a Google lawyer (and I'm not:) I'd use the existence of a robots.txt file on a website as proof of an actual license to index. I'd also suggest that given the fact that robots.txt files are common and well-documented, when a person puts up a website and does not include a robots.txt file, that person is giving an implied license to index the web content.
Think about it: when the Internet was restricted to non-commercial nodes, it was pretty secure. The first major security disaster was the Worm of 1988, which came from a university site.
If you maintained a separate TCP/IP network that only had physical connections on military bases and the like, I'd think it would be pretty secure. It's this business of giving everybody an Internet connection that gets all the script kiddies online.
Granted, in some jurisdictions, the reverse may hold true.
Remember though - the objective when calling the cops is to persuade them to do something; when you're calling the spammer, you're not trying to accomplish anything beyond increasing the spammer's phone bills.
Slashdot Mirror
I am not an American; however, I have a pretty good knowledge of my history, and my own country's partitioned government structure and laws (include our Charter right to free speech), as a close (even a blurry) examination of my past posts would show.
That aside: The government is all of the government. It's the legislature, the executive, and the judicial branch.
The rights in your Bill of Rights are empowering rights because they are recognized by at least one branch of the American government: the judiciary.
Judicial action is government action. This is elementary.
Re: your earlier statement on your house. You're continuing to fail to apply RMS' definitions, and criticizing his conclusions as a result. While you're free (as am I) to complain that he's not using the words in their ordinary meaning, that's not an argument against the logical structure of his argument, merely his form of presentation. If you change the word "freedom" into "foo" and "power" into "bar", then reread him as arguing for foo over bar, perhaps you will understand.
The demarcation is because we've erected an artificial barrier between programmers and non-programmers.
Programming isn't hard. Nearly any reasonably bright person can learn some simple programming skills. Sure, the Elite Coder will still be a rare thing, but I don't think the current setup where we have a wall between coders and non-coders is a good idea.
And, to some extent, user interface developments have been in agreement with me. The typical desktop is now much more customizable by the end-user than its equivalent of the mid-80s. Why did disk-loading operating systems take over? ROMs boot much, much faster; disk-loading systems are more customizable.
Most of the research for scientific programs is government-funded, and most of those aforementioned programs are released under OSS licenses anyway.
Movies and music are not what RMS is talking about. He's interested in computer programs.
Modern commercial games are an interesting problem. Many of them can be dismissed, as they contain significant copyrightable non-program elements: for example, artwork.
However, there are games like Quake and Unreal where realy the engine is the game; there's nothing else important.
My argument is that games like Quake should be able to get patent protection, and rely on patents for all of their intellectual property protection.
Yes, I actually think that the binary code of computer programs should not be considered subject matter of copyright, and this is where I diverge pretty radically from RMS. He's against patents; I see room for them. They're only 20 years and they require public documentation of the algorithms used.
Sure, the Patent Office screws up pretty often, but that's a separate issue. With copyrights, you're stuck with the things practically forever, and there's no disclosure.
So that people will know it's that Lessig.
The guy's famous. It's like saying Richard M. Stallman, of the Free Software Foundation.
RMS is using an unusual set of terms in this essay. He's using "power" and "freedom" in ways that they are not normally used.
Fortunately, he has the good sense to define his terms.
He defines freedom as:
Conversely, he defines power as:
Under this definition, the first freedom you mention is actually a freedom, not power. The ability to make decisions about who can enter the home where you live is an ability to make decisions that affect mainly you. Most people do not want to enter your home (even if you're Mr. Popular, there are billions of people on the earth :) and are not affected at all; even the ones who do want to visit you, most do not want to force themselves upon you, and the burglars and so on who might want to visit you despite your not welcoming them are not affected nearly as much by your refusal to grant them entry as you would be affected by their entry.
I won't deal with the free-speech example, because it's empty. There is never power to prevent government censorship; the government is the agent of power - when it is powerless, it is not a government.
And, lastly, RMS defends the GPL as being a necessary evil. In a more logical world, the GPL would not have to exist.
I don't know if I agree with RMS, but it's clear you didn't understand him.
Fascinating. I was unaware of any society where people were granted total freedom to decide how the fruits of their labour are used.
For an example, I suggest the razor blade. Many people (mostly men) use this device to remove facial hair, and many other people (mostly women) use it to remove leg hair. Some other people use it to remove hair in ... other places.
Do you see the razor companies trying to tell you where to put your razor?
Huh.
And that's not even getting into the fact that the razors are actually being made by people (well, ok, by machines controlled by people); these people, somehow, do not seem to mind the idea that porn stars might use the fruits of their labour in an unusual way.
This is capitalism, folks. You just don't get to decide what other people do with the things you make, once you've sold those things to them.
It's the copyright control freaks who want to setup a non-capitalist state, IMO; if you look back in time, to a time when there were large organizations which held state-sponsored monopolies over certain industries, we called that system of economics feudalism.
I doubt any of those three companies would care if it did.
They've got patented technology in their consoles, you know, hardware. :)
M$ might have a problem with the XBox, though.
Oh, how I love reductio ad absurdum... :)
Let's take this sentiment, and put it into a new context:
And yet, our courts seem to have little trouble with the concept of "murder" as being distinct from "manslaughter." Just because something's hard to figure out, doesn't mean it's not a useful test, in itself.
No.
This is a fundamentally wrong perception, and is at the root of nearly all the current problems in the software industry.
Everyone who uses a computer program works on it. Yes, even the ones who don't code.
Everyone who works on a computer program uses it. I hope this part is obvious.
Everybody who uses a program has something to contribute about it. Talk to a secretary about M$ Office sometime: you'll probably learn some things.
This was the real revolution at Xerox Parc: the idea that ordinary users should be consulted, not just coders.
This is why I'm involved in OSS: I think that we should eliminate the distinction entirely, and ordinary users should be given the power to code. It's also why I like Apple: they, more than anyone else, incorporate the insights of, well, normal people into their interfaces.
Read RMS' article. He defines the two terms, and while I'm not sure he's got his definitions right, they're the ones that are relevant for discussing his arguments.
I just can't resist posting this.
I misread the above at first. What I read was:
:)
I worked for a little while in a government research library, and about half the people in the building were both scientists and programmers. They developed a lot of their own tools, and most of them were coding for some *nix, many on Linux.
They didn't care about other people getting their code. I would expect universities to be the same way.
As for bandwidth, that's much less of a problem now with CD burners. I'm assuming your Third World people have CD-ROMs, but given that, if you can talk to some First World scientists & get them to burn and ship, it might well be cheaper.
Results of Babelfish on the Heise article:
Ah, good old machine translation. Yet, it's still Better than Nothing. "force-wonderful-ends" :)
This is true, and regrettable; but to say that Communicator doesn't support PNG is akin to saying that Mosaic (before 2.0) didn't support GIF because, well, it didn't support any of the 89a extensions (at least AFAIR; Mosaic 2.0 BTW was the first Mosaic to support JPEG inline too).
Sure, some bits are hard.
But realistically, a good programmer can learn perl well enough to do useful things with it in a week.
The only basic thing that's hard is regex, and that's not unique to perl.
Well, think about it. x=any number, including 76 :)
For example, my PPPoE gateway runs FreeBSD 3.4. I could say that I'm running 3.x, and it supports PPPoE. However, I'd be wrong to do so, as versions of FreeBSD before 3.4 don't support PPPoE.
But I'd also be wrong to say FreeBSD 3.x doesn't support PPPoE. Tch :)
Ding! Wrong.
Communicator (4.76 anyway) does support PNGs. I know this because I can view my Webalizer output just fine with it. ;)
5 unrelated languages?
Are there 5 unrelated languages?
Okay, let's see. There are assembly languages. There's ALGOL-family languages, which include every language I've seen mentioned here except maybe Perl (and it's usually written in an ALGOL kind of style). There's LISP, Forth, Prolog.
Okay, there are five unrelated languages. But C, Java, C++, Pascal, ADA, FORTRAN, COBOL, BASIC, Modula-2, and lots of others are all related, and frankly are pretty easy to learn once you know one of them well.
This isn't relevant.
While I like, and use DynDNS (note my URL :) they aren't a domain registrar. They supply DNS servers. Not the same thing.
I don't understand slashdotters sometimes.
Have you ever been in a callcentre? Okay, they're generally not exactly open plan, but they don't give the drones huge walls, and there's way more than 30 of them in there.
What they do give the drones are headset mics.
This isn't rocket science, folks. Kate Bush, not exactly a hardcore techie, came up with wireless mics in the '70s (well okay she forced her engineer boyfriend to come up with them, but you know how it goes :)
Wireless headsets. That's how you do voice recognition in an office.
Googlebot supports metatags that allow you to prevent caching. For more information, read this.
Also, they don't cache pages that have gone down since the last crawl. This isn't like the Usenet archive.
You're right, though, in that they'd have a fight on their hands in court. They've got a much stronger position legally though than the spam harvester bots, because they've made a good-faith effort. I can't see them getting hit with much of anything but an injunction, and maybe not even that; whereas if I was a prosecuting attorney, I'd want to go after the people behind eBay harvester bots with criminal remedies.
Probably, in the United States.
Next time, pretend to be French or Canadian and threaten to sue for violation of your moral rights. Heh.
Google has an implied license claim that's pretty good, IMO.
Search engines have been indexing the web for quite some time, and there's a file called robots.txt that they use. Perhaps you've heard of it. Search engine spiders that read it use it to decide what they're allowed to index.
If I were a Google lawyer (and I'm not :) I'd use the existence of a robots.txt file on a website as proof of an actual license to index. I'd also suggest that given the fact that robots.txt files are common and well-documented, when a person puts up a website and does not include a robots.txt file, that person is giving an implied license to index the web content.
Spambots, however, ignore robots.txt files.
Think about it: when the Internet was restricted to non-commercial nodes, it was pretty secure. The first major security disaster was the Worm of 1988, which came from a university site.
If you maintained a separate TCP/IP network that only had physical connections on military bases and the like, I'd think it would be pretty secure. It's this business of giving everybody an Internet connection that gets all the script kiddies online.
Cops are usually brighter than spammers :)
Granted, in some jurisdictions, the reverse may hold true.
Remember though - the objective when calling the cops is to persuade them to do something; when you're calling the spammer, you're not trying to accomplish anything beyond increasing the spammer's phone bills.