I've said before on Slashdot and in other venues that the Intellectual Property system in the United States is cracking. With the advent of distributed internet Piracy of the type Napster made popular, it is completely inevitable that the system mutate to account for the fact that the primary source of IP theft is no longer commercial bandits, but rather the users themselves.
What this ultimately means is more of what you've seen. You'll see Federal agents descending on ordinary users, people who are just "innocently" making copies of software and music and sharing it with their friends. This activity has been illegal forever, but for the most part readily overlooked by the glaring eye of justice, largely because justice had bigger fish to fry.
But that's changing. The distributed and widely connected nature of the internet is enabling ordinary users to become first class pirates, with the push of a button distributing many thousands of illegal copies to any and all takers. This is turning those users into IP public enemy number one.
There is simply no alternative. The law is going to CRUSH the violators, with a variety of test cases being used to set harsh examples.
From past reactions here on Slashdot, I know that the Slashdot community is not ready to hear this message. Please don't forget, I'm only a messenger. The outcome I'm seeing is easily forseeable. Consider it yourselves: will the government sit idly by and allow the intellectual property system in the U.S. to go titsup.com? Hell, no. It's not going to happen.
You are changing the argument. The subject was ENERGY, not oil. Reneweble energy sources are legion, and will replace fossil fuels the moment that they become expensive enough to justify the investment in infrastructure.
>Energy will NEVER be cheap again except for short durations
Predicitions of "never" are made to be broken. What intrinsic property does this energy-thingy have that there can't be a larger supply versus demand? Your statement is simply silly.
While you are quite right about the situation, that really emphasizes my point: adopting a BSD-style piece of software doesn't require me to consult with a corportate attorney, and if no "acceptible use policy" is present, no problem.
GPL introduces a great deal of difficulty for commercial workers.
>Lisp is probably more widely used today than Python or...
I highly doubt this. A perusal of the traffic of the python verson lisp newsgroups tells tales as does the paucity of available libraries for lisp when compared to those of python. I would hazard a guess that Lisp is used quite a bit less than Python.
When you consider for a moment how much less harsh American plantations were when compared to thousands of years of conditions in wild africa, and you'll understand completely that a century of breeding in America wouldn't accomplish a thing. Drop this old meme. It's not based on any good facts.
It's not as simple as you make it out to be. If I decide to incorporate a GPL product into an internal effort, I've unilaterally made the decision for all other members of my company when they wish to adopt my product. They have no real choice but to use the GPL as well.
It's the bus from the chipset to the CPU that's the problem; Nvidia's 128 bit memory interface is cool and all, but the CPU can't really use it. If it could, the system would simply scream. But it can't,
This results in a situation where the chipset can get more bandwidth from memory than it can deliver to the CPU. Nforce has a lot of potential that will only be realized as soon as the CPU can actually consume the bandwidth.
Nah. MacOSX's use of alpha blending is as personally annoying as any other alphablending I've ever seen. I think that blended desktop windows won't turn out to be super popular in the long run. Seeing faint text behind your current text and so forth either makes you think you're seeing double or that your monitor is tweaked.
Well, I exaggerate.
But there's a fair to midlun chance that a whole flurry of folks agree with me.
You're quite right. People just don't get it. They simply don't understand that a graphics card could literally be 1000 times faster, and that still wouldn't be enough.
"Either it is, or it isn't" is a bifurcated argument. It's a fallacy. Look it up.
As for the issue, one can argue that the behavior of acquiring a legitimate license and then putting it to legitimate -- albeit altered use -- is fair use and protected under very old precepts of common law, such as doctrine of first sale and so forth.
I'm seeing through your argument again, by the way. You're claim of "punishment" is another lie. You could just as easily (and ethically) "punish" by simply not using Windows at all.
Curious how your "stand" also happens to fulfill your self-interest.
Somtetimes by grand juries, particularly if you sue the grand jury, whereupon they are more or less forced to action. It would, of course, require a complaintant. Many would be present.
You're a pirate and a bald-faced thief. You could very well have bought Win XP and THEN pirated it, fulfilling some minimum standard of ethics, but no. I see right through you. Your excuses are paper thin.
Surely they couldn't be planning on replicating it like a virus. Striking out a random and invading the computers of people they don't have authorization isn't just ethically suspect, it's a federal crime under current and highly visible law.
One of the reasons that things like this concern civil libertarians is that its really not a very big step from hate speech to politically unpopular speech. In the United States, jurisprudence is such that many forms of speech and expression, including things both hateful or vulgar, can quite easily also be considered statments of political content, and therefor protected on general principle.
That's not a good reason for going into C.S. It reminds me of a trend in medicine, where folks want to become doctors because of the money. Only, somewhere along the line they figure out that they really don't like medicine; this is often after a substantial investment in medschool, which can leave crushing, mortgage-sized debts. Careers should be selected for love of the art, not love of money.
All that said, you're making a decision too early. You're in SCHOOL; the challenges you're facing there are nothing like what you'll be facing on the job. You'll learn more in your first year on the job than you did during the entire time you were in school. You'll face programming efforts with 50,000 lines of code or more in some cases. College C.S. is a good theoretical basis, but it really doesn't show you what you're going to face at work.
You don't have enough experience yet to be jaded, so stop puttin' on those jaded airs.:)
This whole thing with "you'll pay in the long run" is ridiculous
No, it's not ridiculous; they are suggesting that while the operating system may be freee to purchase, infrastructure and maintenance costs will be higher. This is wrong, but it's not ridiculous.
C//
How about going over the ups and downs of cookies?
on
EU May Outlaw Cookies
·
· Score: 1
How about revisiting the issue of cookies and listing the various ways they can be properly used as well as abused? I'm personally not really up on cookies; I know that's ignorant, but it's true. I can't be the only cookie dummy on slashdot.:)
Lisp isn't just a programming language. It's a programming language written using a universal representation that is always parsed the same way. As the other poster pointed out, this is called the "sexp" or "s-expression". It's of the form (something [possible various kinds of optional somethings]). The O.P. was quite correct. Lisp solved the "XML problem" 40 years ago.
Slashdot Mirror
Creating an opportunity does not constitute "entrapment". For "entrapment" to occur, one has to actually talk the victim into it.
C//
I've said before on Slashdot and in other venues that the Intellectual Property system in the United States is cracking. With the advent of distributed internet Piracy of the type Napster made popular, it is completely inevitable that the system mutate to account for the fact that the primary source of IP theft is no longer commercial bandits, but rather the users themselves.
What this ultimately means is more of what you've seen. You'll see Federal agents descending on ordinary users, people who are just "innocently" making copies of software and music and sharing it with their friends. This activity has been illegal forever, but for the most part readily overlooked by the glaring eye of justice, largely because justice had bigger fish to fry.
But that's changing. The distributed and widely connected nature of the internet is enabling ordinary users to become first class pirates, with the push of a button distributing many thousands of illegal copies to any and all takers. This is turning those users into IP public enemy number one.
There is simply no alternative. The law is going to CRUSH the violators, with a variety of test cases being used to set harsh examples.
From past reactions here on Slashdot, I know that the Slashdot community is not ready to hear this message. Please don't forget, I'm only a messenger. The outcome I'm seeing is easily forseeable. Consider it yourselves: will the government sit idly by and allow the intellectual property system in the U.S. to go titsup.com? Hell, no. It's not going to happen.
That being the case, what's going to happen:
Examples will be made.
C//
You are changing the argument. The subject was ENERGY, not oil. Reneweble energy sources are legion, and will replace fossil fuels the moment that they become expensive enough to justify the investment in infrastructure.
This Armageddon stuff is so tiring.
C//
>I read a while back about how the Earth is supposed to be moving on it's axis.
Homework assigment for the day: read about "angular momentum" and report.
C//
>Energy will NEVER be cheap again except for short durations
Predicitions of "never" are made to be broken. What intrinsic property does this energy-thingy have that there can't be a larger supply versus demand? Your statement is simply silly.
C//
While you are quite right about the situation, that really emphasizes my point: adopting a BSD-style piece of software doesn't require me to consult with a corportate attorney, and if no "acceptible use policy" is present, no problem.
GPL introduces a great deal of difficulty for commercial workers.
C//
>Lisp is probably more widely used today than Python or
I highly doubt this. A perusal of the traffic of the python verson lisp newsgroups tells tales as does the paucity of available libraries for lisp when compared to those of python. I would hazard a guess that Lisp is used quite a bit less than Python.
C//
When you consider for a moment how much less harsh American plantations were when compared to thousands of years of conditions in wild africa, and you'll understand completely that a century of breeding in America wouldn't accomplish a thing. Drop this old meme. It's not based on any good facts.
C//
Janeway. 7. And a banana. Oh yeah, that does it for me.
Speaking of all that, am I the only one who wouldn't mind putting Janeway over a table. She's all stuffy and needs a real good shelacking.
:)
C//
It's not as simple as you make it out to be. If I decide to incorporate a GPL product into an internal effort, I've unilaterally made the decision for all other members of my company when they wish to adopt my product. They have no real choice but to use the GPL as well.
C//
It's the bus from the chipset to the CPU that's the problem; Nvidia's 128 bit memory interface is cool and all, but the CPU can't really use it. If it could, the system would simply scream. But it can't,
This results in a situation where the chipset can get more bandwidth from memory than it can deliver to the CPU. Nforce has a lot of potential that will only be realized as soon as the CPU can actually consume the bandwidth.
C//
Nah. MacOSX's use of alpha blending is as personally annoying as any other alphablending I've ever seen. I think that blended desktop windows won't turn out to be super popular in the long run. Seeing faint text behind your current text and so forth either makes you think you're seeing double or that your monitor is tweaked.
Well, I exaggerate.
But there's a fair to midlun chance that a whole flurry of folks agree with me.
C//
The Star Trek universe is mostly science fantasy. It's all made-up wizardry cloaked in technical-seaming mumbo-jumbo.
C//
A GeforceXP to go with AthlonXP and WindowsXP? God, what an unholy alliance.
C//
You're quite right. People just don't get it. They simply don't understand that a graphics card could literally be 1000 times faster, and that still wouldn't be enough.
C//
"Either it is, or it isn't" is a bifurcated argument. It's a fallacy. Look it up.
As for the issue, one can argue that the behavior of acquiring a legitimate license and then putting it to legitimate -- albeit altered use -- is fair use and protected under very old precepts of common law, such as doctrine of first sale and so forth.
I'm seeing through your argument again, by the way. You're claim of "punishment" is another lie. You could just as easily (and ethically) "punish" by simply not using Windows at all.
Curious how your "stand" also happens to fulfill your self-interest.
C//
Somtetimes by grand juries, particularly if you sue the grand jury, whereupon they are more or less forced to action. It would, of course, require a complaintant. Many would be present.
C//
You're a pirate and a bald-faced thief. You could very well have bought Win XP and THEN pirated it, fulfilling some minimum standard of ethics, but no. I see right through you. Your excuses are paper thin.
C//
Surely they couldn't be planning on replicating it like a virus. Striking out a random and invading the computers of people they don't have authorization isn't just ethically suspect, it's a federal crime under current and highly visible law.
C//
One of the reasons that things like this concern civil libertarians is that its really not a very big step from hate speech to politically unpopular speech. In the United States, jurisprudence is such that many forms of speech and expression, including things both hateful or vulgar, can quite easily also be considered statments of political content, and therefor protected on general principle.
C//
Will Open Source for Managers and Open Source for Dummies be the same book?
:)
C//
"...at least it pays well..."
:)
That's not a good reason for going into C.S. It reminds me of a trend in medicine, where folks want to become doctors because of the money. Only, somewhere along the line they figure out that they really don't like medicine; this is often after a substantial investment in medschool, which can leave crushing, mortgage-sized debts. Careers should be selected for love of the art, not love of money.
All that said, you're making a decision too early. You're in SCHOOL; the challenges you're facing there are nothing like what you'll be facing on the job. You'll learn more in your first year on the job than you did during the entire time you were in school. You'll face programming efforts with 50,000 lines of code or more in some cases. College C.S. is a good theoretical basis, but it really doesn't show you what you're going to face at work.
You don't have enough experience yet to be jaded, so stop puttin' on those jaded airs.
C//
This whole thing with "you'll pay in the long run" is ridiculous
No, it's not ridiculous; they are suggesting that while the operating system may be freee to purchase, infrastructure and maintenance costs will be higher. This is wrong, but it's not ridiculous.
C//
How about revisiting the issue of cookies and listing the various ways they can be properly used as well as abused? I'm personally not really up on cookies; I know that's ignorant, but it's true. I can't be the only cookie dummy on slashdot.
C//
Lisp isn't just a programming language. It's a programming language written using a universal representation that is always parsed the same way. As the other poster pointed out, this is called the "sexp" or "s-expression". It's of the form (something [possible various kinds of optional somethings]). The O.P. was quite correct. Lisp solved the "XML problem" 40 years ago.
C//