If you couldn't snipe, couldn't you still place a maximum bid? You know, decide on what you'd be willing to pay and enter the number? Then be told if you win, like everyone else? The software already has a feature for this.
What you want is to trick people who don't know about sniping and who treat eBay like a meatspace auction. As everyone else sees it, if people get "carried away", that's not "too high", it's "what the market will bear".
You say that you wouldn't bid if you couldn't snipe because prices would go too high, but you somehow think that you're helping people by staying and keeping them low (and winning them yourself.)
You've "helped" nobody except yourself. The seller would have gotten more if people had bid the item up. The buyers would have gotten more if they'd had a chance to win.
If you left eBay what would happen? People would still buy things, as people have got to have their crappy collectibles. Regular buyers would have a chance of winning, so they'd stay. Sellers would get higher prices, so they'd stay.
Maybe there'd be a problem with people skipping out, but then there'd be a way to put down a deposit, or people would really use escrow services, or you know, solve the problem without your help.
Meh, if eBay didn't suck it wouldn't be phasing out negative comments, they'd give you more ways to spot people who always reply negatively to any criticism. Frankly, they deserve people like you.
Feedback is supposed to be used on people who don't pay. Just leave negative feedback...
Why should it matter if prices stay low during an auction if everyone knows that all the real bids are going to come in the last few seconds? Why not leave that out altogether and simply take the highest 'sealed' bid at the end of the auction?
Just stop trying to spin it as helping people, it's clearly for your benefit alone.
If you couldn't get your negative feedback removed, it would quickly balance out. Any negative feedback received in retaliation doesn't count. Any negative feedback from someone with low feedback doesn't count...
It'd quickly become obvious who was really a jerk. It's only because of the white washing possible that it's a problem.
That, and now the expectation that a 99.5% rating isn't good. (But complete lack of concern for the craptastic sellers who blackmail their way to perfect feedback.)
Meh. Everyone who uses EBay gets exactly what they deserve. Everyone else.
A workstation is the station at which you work, it includes desk/bench, tools, etc.
Using the word as if it's a definitive description of a class of computer is silly.
Who says Workstations have OpenGL favoring cards vs DirectX favoring cards, or decent monitors, instead of having a high-end audio card and good headphones? Just convention. Which differs from person to person and place to place. If you want a computer that handles a specific workload, describe the workload. ex. "A computer capable of running 3DSMax well and a large high-res display"
If there were only nine different characters to stay within.
Besides, someone's character isn't a statement they set out at the beginning of play, it's a function of what they've done.
If someone isn't playing their character consistently, just tell them that their flip-flopping between personalities makes the story less believable.
But perhaps their character concept is someone who acts impulsively, or who dislikes their weaknesses, or who acts nice most of the time but flies into blind rage every now and then...
My laptop is three years old, the HD died and I haven't replaced it... I've been running Knoppix off the DVD drive with a flash card for persistence. Windows can't do that (not legally for sure, but not without a bunch of hacks that make it unusable).
A mac would be lighter and cuter, but all I do is open up a shell and sit in irb (Ruby) and a few firefox windows, play a few games. Nothing I need a mac for. The finder would be cuter...
Also, MacOS and Windows Vista have these stupid limitations against virtualization. Normally I don't care about EULAs at all and would just download a crack, but I figure these fine companies are trying to say that they don't want my business, nor that of my customers.
To digress, I've had Linux machines die, swapped the HD into a totally different computer, and had the server up and running in minutes. Try that with Vista - then spend half an hour on the phone with MS begging them to reactivate your key because your hardware changed. What a joke!
Calling an M1 a sniper rifle is disingenuous. It may have been a sniper rifle in 1945 but it wouldn't be considered one today unless it was heavily modified.
Well, if you'd notice, I did say 'sniper' in quotes before. I was meaning for urban settings. You don't need to be 1200m away to remain unseen. Nor do you need a.50cal round.
Shooting at you with the main gun of a tank is much, much easier than hitting you with a car. I don't even have to hit you or see you with a tank, a phosphorous round into your house will virtually guarantee your death...
Yes, but you'd be caught in an instant. And unlikely to use a million-dollar tank as a murder weapon.
We have guns now, but people still use knives to kill, when they don't want the loud noise...
Gasoline tankers are also not available to common citizens.
Offered to the public, no. But guarded? Not at all. They park at a gas station and walk inside to do paperwork, etc. Opportunities for mass indiscriminate killings exist everywhere, from big weapons to chemical plants, and for the most part people don't take any opportunity to kill thousands of others.
Yeah, I am saying that weapons don't kill people.
The evidence for the statements being untrue was not available in the beginning. If you thought they were lying from the start, then either you work for the CIA or it was an unfounded kneejerk reaction. Yeah, it was pretty clear fairly early on and a lot of tunes changed, but not at the beginning when decisions were made. The only people who knew it was a lie then were the liars.
He said that the CIA had said so, and I don't remember any doubt about it until later.
It was obviously a lie because you wouldn't play the truth that way, and if you were president you wouldn't go to war without seeing the evidence yourself, and if it was conclusive you'd have something better to say than "Trust me!"
He was making a case for going to war. If we had any evidence of WMDs we'd have shown it. Had there been a reason we couldn't (spy still in the country) we'd simply have sat on it a bit longer first. It's not like we rushed into Iraq on a schedule or anything. Bush made too much of a case out of the slam-dunk evidence but wouldn't show it to anyone.
Watch the Southpark episode on Mormons. Joseph Smith has these special stones that show him new bible passages, but they only work for him and while it's all miraculous and wonderful, you'll just have to take his word. It was quite funny, except for the disquieting feeling of knowing that some people believed it. That was Bush. He was trying to distract people. If there was proof, there are many trustworthy agencies/countries he could have shown it to for a second opinion. But he didn't want to do that.
It's a nearly foolproof way to detect a lie - if they don't want to help you ascertain the truth, they're lying.
Even still, I knew that just going in there for six months of shooting, even if the "war" was finished then, would take years before we could pull our troops out.
It didn't in 1992.
Predictably, when the power-structure collapsed a civil war broke out.
Again, we collapsed it!... Until we did this, it was not inevitable. I am calling bullshit that you saw it coming. there's no way you knew we'd act like that beforehand
Nope. In '92 General Powell was very clear about the limited objectives. Push Iraq out of Kuwait and leave. That was the mandate, that was as far as he was willing to go. Saddam needed killin' even back then, but that wasn't Powell's mandate and he had to push very hard to keep the war limited.
This time around, Powell is gone because he doesn't agree with the president. That bodes badly for Bush right there, because Powell is respectable.
Then Bush doesn't give any of the right kind of assurances of a limited war. He'
"You have two choices. Either accept everything as it is, with no variation. Make no suggestions, no changes will be made. Or, leave. Cut off all contact forever."
That's fair, right? Give them a choice.
Bullshit. The 'choice' to leave isn't equivalent to the choice to read an unpopular book, or hold a different opinion.
Slave cultures have no value. As long as that's their answer, the real answer is to abolish the culture and let the people it was oppressing do as they wish.
Regardless of who it is, the party that takes undue offense and tries to censor or fight true and fair words is the villain. From RTing the FA it appears the blogger is justified, in pointing out the abusive business practices of this lawyer. It doesn't matter if there's anyone financially behind it, those are fair things to say if they're true.
I'd advocate collecting as much information on them as they seek on you, and threaten to be as disruptive with it (harassing business partners) as they intend to do to you (out your identity to get you fired, to sue you, etc). Here they intend to use economic threats on third parties (your employer, etc) so I feel you'd be justified in boycotting anyone who supports them and making your views known.
The social institutions have been corrupted though, if you haven't noticed. There's nothing just in someone having the ability to forbid others from serving compressed data in reply to a web-page. People are fighting this nonsense as best they can and this kind of corruption of our intent is still going on.
There are many steps between publicly expressing scorn for their actions (as discussed above) and shooting someone. Our system is only a little corrupt.
We should acknowledge though, that this kind of behavior - perverting the intent of the law to gain from nothing - is anti-social and we encourage it to happen with our society's unwillingness to connect someone's hideous personal actions (in the name of business) with their non-business dealings with this person.
It would be best for the world if the lawyer in question dropped dead, and everyone else gaming the system like him. Wishing might not make it happen, but that doesn't mean we have to be nice to these people. We need to follow them with signs, threaten on-the-spot boycotts of stores and people they deal with if they continue to deal with them, etc. That we aren't out to kill the fellow doesn't mean we shouldn't be as ruthless as possible in ensuring his absolute financial ruin and destroy any good name he may have. He's a parasite, who knowingly screws everyone to further enrich himself.
Yes, because they sure don't have a right to an opinion as to what their culture is, only these other people over here have that that right.
Cultures that don't allow individual choices are slave cultures. Just because they've got tradition and superstition wrapped around it, that doesn't mean it's right in any way.
The war is very expensive but it's nowhere close to half the net worth of America.
I found a couple studies placing the net worth of an average renter at $4-5k (inc. debt)... Home-owners are in the same place, but with a mortgage and a house. At $1T that's $3k per person. Estimates are that the cost will at least double before we're truly finished (pensions, etc) if we stop now. Half their possessions... I'm not saying half the country, just that if people looked around at what they owned and pictures the tax man walking off with half of it, they'd feel differently than if it comes out slowly. Of course, they don't feel that cost directly, only some is taxed from their bracket, but in the end they pay it by paying the corporations and wealthier people who are directly taxed to pay for this. And with the tanking dollar, there goes more again. Printing money is roughly equivalent to taxing the same, but also inflationary.
I've always lived in a society where nearly everyone had a 'sniper rifle'
The ignorance in this paragraph is painful. Please read a book. Hunter rifles are not sniper rifles
... you know that legal hunting rifles are essentially sniper rifles?
Yeah, except they aren't. Ever fired a sniper rifle? Don't bother to reply - you haven't. Hunters aren't the same as snipers either. There is no comparison here at all.
I'm not referring to a modern.50 with gyroscopic stabilization. Even an old 30-06 with hunting scope would qualify. Are you trying to make some special distinction? I found a few sites and a Wikipedia article on sniper rifles that say an M1 Garand (common as a hunting rifle) qualified. Are people invincible to bullets from old guns? Anyways, I'm just saying that a good hunter could hunt people from a distance well beyond the victim's view.
This was my point about how I grew up. Most households had guns. They aren't really that dangerous to have around, most people aren't psycho-killers just waiting for that one specific weapon to start their spree. Even dynamite, which was bought from any friend in the mining industry (legally) and used by many homeowners for landscaping-related issues. It's just a tool. Coincidentally, the road crews used diesel and fertilized, just like McVeigh did. These things weren't secrets.
Forensics are pretty good nowadays.
You are right that forensics can catch arsonists, but forensics *always* catches people driving tanks. If you wanted to kill me you could find many ways that would be just as effective as driving a tank over and blowing my house away, but with far less work or risk. Hell, just drive a (stolen) car over to my house and run me over in the driveway, claim you couldn't get the car into park if caught. Using tanks for crimes wouldn't be worth it. It'd be slow, and likely to get you caught. I'm still not seeing the motivation to balance the extra risk. It's not like tanks are invulnerable even, far from it, if we had tanks we'd also have RPGs capable of destroying tanks.
A far bigger risk to the neighborhood would be blowing up a gasoline tanker to kill someone. They've been stolen before, and are not as noticeable as tanks.
As for the war, the only people screaming for it were idiots too stupid to consider that the evidence they were being given was likely untrue.
I do remember people opposing the war but it was always on moral grounds, that Iraq hadn't actually done anything so how could we invade them? That made sense to me.
Glad to hear it. Did it occur to you that if you opposed it, you might not be in the group I was talking about?
I find this revisionist. The initial reasoning given for the attack on Iraq had nothing to do with Osama
Pft. The reason given had nothing to do with the reasons used. It was clear beforehand th
I've just seen people trying to collect his information (and related) as an intimidation tactic. Collect ours, we'll collect yours.
Now, he should consider death threats, because if you ruin someone's life they'll have little to live for, but I don't see this as related. Sure, you'd have to know who he is to kill him, but it's not like that'd be hard, or that people are going to go shoot his family because he's an ass. We'll tear him down to his business partners, make sure clients know that hiring him comes with a lot of baggage... Ruin his cushy little setup. Exactly what he's trying to do to the blogger.
No, this is making the same lack of threat that Niro did. I'm powerful, look at me, I'll know all about you and will make you miserable unless you do what I want.
He's doing it because it's an intimidating thing. He wants the blogger to be quiet or face losing employment unreasonably (they're not affiliating themselves with their job). If he likes intimidation, let him face the wrath of his partners for subjecting them to public scorn.
He should feel a taste of the fear and discomfort he's inflicting on others.
He could file a lawsuit and get the blogger's hosting provider to ID them if the court agreed. He's trying to do this just to apply extra pressure.
If it's fair to call my employer to complain about something I did when not acting in their name, it's fair to call everyone you know and complain about you and how your association is making them look. If seeking my information for unknown but implied unpleasant things is fair, so is seeking yours, just 'cause.
If he doesn't like people snooping in his life for perhaps malicious reasons, perhaps he'll make the connection with doing it to others. If not, maybe one of his family will explain it.
The problem is not that you can contract away first sale, it's that you may be able to do so without seeing a contract...
And yeah, I misspoke when I said 'overturn', but 'blocked because of people's resistance to flying in the face of reasonable traditions' seemed awkward.
There are no 'preexisting duties' under copyright law - it's assumed that you can not copy the work, so you have no obligations to fulfill. For public domain works there are no obligations either.
Therefore, any obligations there are, are above and beyond any 'default'. An obligation to put your derived code (if any - futures are a risky investment), an obligation to pay $60, or an obligation to paint yourself blue and cluck like a chicken, are all valid consideration if the license-holder wants them. Anything anyone has ever paid anyone else to do, could be consideration. Think of how varied that list is.
If the license-holder did not want anything, they would not have used the GPL license. Releasing a work into the public domain is simpler, as are the CC and BSD licenses, or simply saying 'use this' without any concern for licenses. Using a specific license is a sign of intent.
The offer and contract don't require the actions of both parties either. If I have a roadside fruit-stand and have a sign by the till 'serve yourself, leave payment in the bowl' people could legally transact business without my presence. This is obviously valid for copyright licenses as well - if I took a picture of something I could leave a memory card with a sign - 'save yourself the time, download great photos of X - paypal $5 to... or delete within 5 days' there'd be no question of the validity. The GPL is an offer, waiting to become a contract, for a copyright license in trade for specific consideration.
When you release something under the GPL you make an offer of a valid contract. You can rescind the offer, but not the contract once accepted. For all that you talk about expiring licenses, a license isn't a contract. Contracts have no such limits.
The author got the benefit from increased visibility, testers and bug reports, etc. You state that he didn't accept patches or use GPLed code, but that's not relevant. If you buy fruit from me you've still received something of value even if you didn't eat it before it spoiled - you gained the right to exercise an option to eat fruit at no cost, for a limited time.
Also, there's no general requirement that a work be relicensed only under the same license, only that you do not license rights you do not hold. By default you may legally assign any rights you have.
No, he's advocating using the same tactic as is used on us. Law-abiding people don't feel the need to out anonymous people for legal statements. Crooks and killers try to out those they disagree with so that 'random' violence can fall upon them.
They just need to understand that it works both ways. We see that $20k reward for the blogger and know that they are us, but for the grace of not having as interesting gossip. If we'd said something that lawyer wanted to know about, he'd be offering a bounty on us.
There are two ways this can end. Either someone IDs the lawyer and turns the tables on him and he decides this isn't a good idea and he and maybe others learn from this. Or, he IDs the blogger, we sit back and do nothing, and the blogger 'accidently' comes to harm or gets scared of this possibility and shuts up.
In theory (his defense) he's not asking anyone to hurt the blogger, he's just curious... That's bullshit, if he had a real problem he'd sue. He just wants to muzzle anyone saying anything he doesn't like. And he's willing to use implied threats to do it.
The way to properly combat this is let him know that it's a two-way street. If anything happens to the blogger, something will happen to him. If he doesn't like feeling the way the blogger now does, he may stop his vigilante justice. If not, he'll live in fear, like his victims, that someone will stop it for him.
Here's the scorecard. If you decide out of the blue to try to ID someone you don't like, you're an ass. If it gets done to you in return, it's a good old-fashioned payback which is the best way to convince people of the pain they cause. Chances are these evil white supremacists choose this as a first course of action against innocents, not as a deterrent to keep people from trying to tactic again.
btw, fuck you and the people who don't understand context.
Users can use GPLed software without accepting it, yes. But many people use software because it's GPLed. Or appropriately open-sourced in their eyes. The GPL is a direct promise to not play games like this with the code, and that's why many people might consider contributing to the project.
However, if the author didn't want anything back they wouldn't GPL their code. The BSD people are right, the BSDL (CC, even public domain) are easier than the GPL. You release your work under the GPL for the social benefits. Users and developers. Eyeballs. To encourage the release of more open source projects. If you didn't have at least one of these goals you wouldn't jump through the hoops. There's also the using GPLed code angle, but I'm assuming the developer isn't using any from reading his announcement.
The author knowingly picked a license which required consideration (continue to redistribute, this license trumps yours, etc, etc). People agreed, in trade for the explicit promise of the right to use the software/source code more permissively under the GPL. These people are providing the consideration asked for - pass on my software, share source code, keep changes free. It plainly has value, and many people have stated that they GPL their software precisely for these reasons. These people see consideration flowing both ways. Consideration is always in the eye of the beholder anyways.
Well, the UCC is written to trump first-sale rights and such, partly based on their success with EULAs to date. That in mind, it is the only issue.
But I expect the EULA provisions of the UCC(UCITA?) are going to be struck down because it flies in the face of hundreds of years of the most fundamental precedent - that contracts must be up front, fully visible, understood, and agreed on by both parties to be binding.
Not that it's gone far recently, but even that's because there's an industry lobby for it, and there aren't people lobbying for the common sense solution, yet. Eventually other businesses, bigger even than Microsoft, Adobe, and other EULA supporters, are going to take note of the horrible legal liability a EULA really would be, if your organization actually did accept one. They'll squash this because they're afraid of the consequences of a low-level employee unintentionally entering binding contracts in their names.
Software isn't licensed, or rather, doesn't require licenses. Retail software is sold with a license you have no legal obligation to accept, which may or may not be binding depending on your ability to use the product without agreeing to the license. Certainly, you have the right to bypass the EULA, even under the DMCA, as it is not an access-control measure.
Copyright law specifically allows ephemeral duplication as required for proper use (what it was advertised as doing, at a minimum) without a license.
Consideration is what must be given up by each party when making an agreement; this may be by means of doing or not doing an act or just promising to do or not do an act. By agreeing to download, test, and possibly comment on the quality of the software, as well as advertise it as appropriate by word of mouth and perhaps use it as the basis of your future software, you provide value to the author.
From the quote above, consideration need not be tangible, or directly 'given', or worth anything to both parties, as a promise not to do something you haven't been doing isn't very limiting.
If you could pay to reach people, obviously that person's attention has a very real value. You'd pay an advertiser to reach many people, or pay individuals for their specific attention. (Surveys, etc). It seems that by stopping and listening to you, the person has already started to provide their end of the deal. Similarly, using your software has immediate and undeniable benefits from individual users. That not every user is profitable is of no consequence.
In the copyright license itself, sure, there is no consideration. But the author agreed to offer this license in trade for your actions (testing the software, agreeing to keep it GPLed, etc). The author can stop his offer, yes, but he can't escape from his contractual obligations to provide the license he claimed to be providing.
Most people pay for testers and advertising with cash, people who release GPLed software get both for free, as a direct consequence of their GPLing the software and each individual user accepting it. That's consideration. Simply downloading their software is something people pay to have done, to inflate statistics. That alone should be of value. Then each use is testing, and many users of GPL software file bug reports, far more than users of non-free software.
Whatever I think is of value is something I can contract for, regardless of what anyone else thinks of the value of that. Some people contract to be beaten for sexual release - to me this wouldn't be value, but that doesn't negate their contract.
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If you couldn't snipe, couldn't you still place a maximum bid? You know, decide on what you'd be willing to pay and enter the number? Then be told if you win, like everyone else? The software already has a feature for this.
What you want is to trick people who don't know about sniping and who treat eBay like a meatspace auction. As everyone else sees it, if people get "carried away", that's not "too high", it's "what the market will bear".
You say that you wouldn't bid if you couldn't snipe because prices would go too high, but you somehow think that you're helping people by staying and keeping them low (and winning them yourself.)
You've "helped" nobody except yourself. The seller would have gotten more if people had bid the item up. The buyers would have gotten more if they'd had a chance to win.
If you left eBay what would happen? People would still buy things, as people have got to have their crappy collectibles. Regular buyers would have a chance of winning, so they'd stay. Sellers would get higher prices, so they'd stay.
Maybe there'd be a problem with people skipping out, but then there'd be a way to put down a deposit, or people would really use escrow services, or you know, solve the problem without your help.
Meh, if eBay didn't suck it wouldn't be phasing out negative comments, they'd give you more ways to spot people who always reply negatively to any criticism. Frankly, they deserve people like you.
Feedback is supposed to be used on people who don't pay. Just leave negative feedback...
Why should it matter if prices stay low during an auction if everyone knows that all the real bids are going to come in the last few seconds? Why not leave that out altogether and simply take the highest 'sealed' bid at the end of the auction?
Just stop trying to spin it as helping people, it's clearly for your benefit alone.
Auctions need to be extended 5 minutes after the last successful bid. Then sniping and snipers go away.
Maximize *this*.
If you couldn't get your negative feedback removed, it would quickly balance out. Any negative feedback received in retaliation doesn't count. Any negative feedback from someone with low feedback doesn't count...
It'd quickly become obvious who was really a jerk. It's only because of the white washing possible that it's a problem.
That, and now the expectation that a 99.5% rating isn't good. (But complete lack of concern for the craptastic sellers who blackmail their way to perfect feedback.)
Meh. Everyone who uses EBay gets exactly what they deserve. Everyone else.
A workstation is the station at which you work, it includes desk/bench, tools, etc.
Using the word as if it's a definitive description of a class of computer is silly.
Who says Workstations have OpenGL favoring cards vs DirectX favoring cards, or decent monitors, instead of having a high-end audio card and good headphones? Just convention. Which differs from person to person and place to place. If you want a computer that handles a specific workload, describe the workload. ex. "A computer capable of running 3DSMax well and a large high-res display"
If there were only nine different characters to stay within.
Besides, someone's character isn't a statement they set out at the beginning of play, it's a function of what they've done.
If someone isn't playing their character consistently, just tell them that their flip-flopping between personalities makes the story less believable.
But perhaps their character concept is someone who acts impulsively, or who dislikes their weaknesses, or who acts nice most of the time but flies into blind rage every now and then...
It wasn't funny though. To the point where it was hard to see what you thought would be funny.
Monopoly, Karl Marx style? She's playing this on the campaign trail?
You just mean she's a socialist? Thanks for the update.
My laptop is three years old, the HD died and I haven't replaced it... I've been running Knoppix off the DVD drive with a flash card for persistence. Windows can't do that (not legally for sure, but not without a bunch of hacks that make it unusable).
A mac would be lighter and cuter, but all I do is open up a shell and sit in irb (Ruby) and a few firefox windows, play a few games. Nothing I need a mac for. The finder would be cuter...
Also, MacOS and Windows Vista have these stupid limitations against virtualization. Normally I don't care about EULAs at all and would just download a crack, but I figure these fine companies are trying to say that they don't want my business, nor that of my customers.
To digress, I've had Linux machines die, swapped the HD into a totally different computer, and had the server up and running in minutes. Try that with Vista - then spend half an hour on the phone with MS begging them to reactivate your key because your hardware changed. What a joke!
Calling an M1 a sniper rifle is disingenuous. It may have been a sniper rifle in 1945 but it wouldn't be considered one today unless it was heavily modified.
Well, if you'd notice, I did say 'sniper' in quotes before. I was meaning for urban settings. You don't need to be 1200m away to remain unseen. Nor do you need a .50cal round.
Shooting at you with the main gun of a tank is much, much easier than hitting you with a car. I don't even have to hit you or see you with a tank, a phosphorous round into your house will virtually guarantee your death...
Yes, but you'd be caught in an instant. And unlikely to use a million-dollar tank as a murder weapon.
We have guns now, but people still use knives to kill, when they don't want the loud noise...
Gasoline tankers are also not available to common citizens.
Offered to the public, no. But guarded? Not at all. They park at a gas station and walk inside to do paperwork, etc. Opportunities for mass indiscriminate killings exist everywhere, from big weapons to chemical plants, and for the most part people don't take any opportunity to kill thousands of others.
Yeah, I am saying that weapons don't kill people.
The evidence for the statements being untrue was not available in the beginning. If you thought they were lying from the start, then either you work for the CIA or it was an unfounded kneejerk reaction. Yeah, it was pretty clear fairly early on and a lot of tunes changed, but not at the beginning when decisions were made. The only people who knew it was a lie then were the liars.
He said that the CIA had said so, and I don't remember any doubt about it until later.
It was obviously a lie because you wouldn't play the truth that way, and if you were president you wouldn't go to war without seeing the evidence yourself, and if it was conclusive you'd have something better to say than "Trust me!"
He was making a case for going to war. If we had any evidence of WMDs we'd have shown it. Had there been a reason we couldn't (spy still in the country) we'd simply have sat on it a bit longer first. It's not like we rushed into Iraq on a schedule or anything. Bush made too much of a case out of the slam-dunk evidence but wouldn't show it to anyone.
Watch the Southpark episode on Mormons. Joseph Smith has these special stones that show him new bible passages, but they only work for him and while it's all miraculous and wonderful, you'll just have to take his word. It was quite funny, except for the disquieting feeling of knowing that some people believed it. That was Bush. He was trying to distract people. If there was proof, there are many trustworthy agencies/countries he could have shown it to for a second opinion. But he didn't want to do that.
It's a nearly foolproof way to detect a lie - if they don't want to help you ascertain the truth, they're lying.
Even still, I knew that just going in there for six months of shooting, even if the "war" was finished then, would take years before we could pull our troops out.
It didn't in 1992.
Predictably, when the power-structure collapsed a civil war broke out.
Again, we collapsed it! ... Until we did this, it was not inevitable. I am calling bullshit that you saw it coming. there's no way you knew we'd act like that beforehand
Nope. In '92 General Powell was very clear about the limited objectives. Push Iraq out of Kuwait and leave. That was the mandate, that was as far as he was willing to go. Saddam needed killin' even back then, but that wasn't Powell's mandate and he had to push very hard to keep the war limited.
This time around, Powell is gone because he doesn't agree with the president. That bodes badly for Bush right there, because Powell is respectable.
Then Bush doesn't give any of the right kind of assurances of a limited war. He'
Yes actually, that's what Bit Torrent does.
"You have two choices. Either accept everything as it is, with no variation. Make no suggestions, no changes will be made. Or, leave. Cut off all contact forever."
That's fair, right? Give them a choice.
Bullshit. The 'choice' to leave isn't equivalent to the choice to read an unpopular book, or hold a different opinion.
Slave cultures have no value. As long as that's their answer, the real answer is to abolish the culture and let the people it was oppressing do as they wish.
Regardless of who it is, the party that takes undue offense and tries to censor or fight true and fair words is the villain. From RTing the FA it appears the blogger is justified, in pointing out the abusive business practices of this lawyer. It doesn't matter if there's anyone financially behind it, those are fair things to say if they're true.
I'd advocate collecting as much information on them as they seek on you, and threaten to be as disruptive with it (harassing business partners) as they intend to do to you (out your identity to get you fired, to sue you, etc). Here they intend to use economic threats on third parties (your employer, etc) so I feel you'd be justified in boycotting anyone who supports them and making your views known.
The social institutions have been corrupted though, if you haven't noticed. There's nothing just in someone having the ability to forbid others from serving compressed data in reply to a web-page. People are fighting this nonsense as best they can and this kind of corruption of our intent is still going on.
There are many steps between publicly expressing scorn for their actions (as discussed above) and shooting someone. Our system is only a little corrupt.
We should acknowledge though, that this kind of behavior - perverting the intent of the law to gain from nothing - is anti-social and we encourage it to happen with our society's unwillingness to connect someone's hideous personal actions (in the name of business) with their non-business dealings with this person.
It would be best for the world if the lawyer in question dropped dead, and everyone else gaming the system like him. Wishing might not make it happen, but that doesn't mean we have to be nice to these people. We need to follow them with signs, threaten on-the-spot boycotts of stores and people they deal with if they continue to deal with them, etc. That we aren't out to kill the fellow doesn't mean we shouldn't be as ruthless as possible in ensuring his absolute financial ruin and destroy any good name he may have. He's a parasite, who knowingly screws everyone to further enrich himself.
Yes, because they sure don't have a right to an opinion as to what their culture is, only these other people over here have that that right.
Cultures that don't allow individual choices are slave cultures. Just because they've got tradition and superstition wrapped around it, that doesn't mean it's right in any way.
The war is very expensive but it's nowhere close to half the net worth of America.
I found a couple studies placing the net worth of an average renter at $4-5k (inc. debt)... Home-owners are in the same place, but with a mortgage and a house. At $1T that's $3k per person. Estimates are that the cost will at least double before we're truly finished (pensions, etc) if we stop now. Half their possessions... I'm not saying half the country, just that if people looked around at what they owned and pictures the tax man walking off with half of it, they'd feel differently than if it comes out slowly. Of course, they don't feel that cost directly, only some is taxed from their bracket, but in the end they pay it by paying the corporations and wealthier people who are directly taxed to pay for this. And with the tanking dollar, there goes more again. Printing money is roughly equivalent to taxing the same, but also inflationary.
I've always lived in a society where nearly everyone had a 'sniper rifle'
The ignorance in this paragraph is painful. Please read a book. Hunter rifles are not sniper rifles
... you know that legal hunting rifles are essentially sniper rifles?
Yeah, except they aren't. Ever fired a sniper rifle? Don't bother to reply - you haven't. Hunters aren't the same as snipers either. There is no comparison here at all.
I'm not referring to a modern .50 with gyroscopic stabilization. Even an old 30-06 with hunting scope would qualify. Are you trying to make some special distinction? I found a few sites and a Wikipedia article on sniper rifles that say an M1 Garand (common as a hunting rifle) qualified. Are people invincible to bullets from old guns? Anyways, I'm just saying that a good hunter could hunt people from a distance well beyond the victim's view.
This was my point about how I grew up. Most households had guns. They aren't really that dangerous to have around, most people aren't psycho-killers just waiting for that one specific weapon to start their spree. Even dynamite, which was bought from any friend in the mining industry (legally) and used by many homeowners for landscaping-related issues. It's just a tool. Coincidentally, the road crews used diesel and fertilized, just like McVeigh did. These things weren't secrets.
Forensics are pretty good nowadays.
You are right that forensics can catch arsonists, but forensics *always* catches people driving tanks. If you wanted to kill me you could find many ways that would be just as effective as driving a tank over and blowing my house away, but with far less work or risk. Hell, just drive a (stolen) car over to my house and run me over in the driveway, claim you couldn't get the car into park if caught. Using tanks for crimes wouldn't be worth it. It'd be slow, and likely to get you caught. I'm still not seeing the motivation to balance the extra risk. It's not like tanks are invulnerable even, far from it, if we had tanks we'd also have RPGs capable of destroying tanks.
A far bigger risk to the neighborhood would be blowing up a gasoline tanker to kill someone. They've been stolen before, and are not as noticeable as tanks.
As for the war, the only people screaming for it were idiots too stupid to consider that the evidence they were being given was likely untrue.
I do remember people opposing the war but it was always on moral grounds, that Iraq hadn't actually done anything so how could we invade them? That made sense to me.
Glad to hear it. Did it occur to you that if you opposed it, you might not be in the group I was talking about?
I find this revisionist. The initial reasoning given for the attack on Iraq had nothing to do with Osama
Pft. The reason given had nothing to do with the reasons used. It was clear beforehand th
Death threats? That's news.
I've just seen people trying to collect his information (and related) as an intimidation tactic. Collect ours, we'll collect yours.
Now, he should consider death threats, because if you ruin someone's life they'll have little to live for, but I don't see this as related. Sure, you'd have to know who he is to kill him, but it's not like that'd be hard, or that people are going to go shoot his family because he's an ass. We'll tear him down to his business partners, make sure clients know that hiring him comes with a lot of baggage... Ruin his cushy little setup. Exactly what he's trying to do to the blogger.
No, this is making the same lack of threat that Niro did. I'm powerful, look at me, I'll know all about you and will make you miserable unless you do what I want.
He's doing it because it's an intimidating thing. He wants the blogger to be quiet or face losing employment unreasonably (they're not affiliating themselves with their job). If he likes intimidation, let him face the wrath of his partners for subjecting them to public scorn.
He should feel a taste of the fear and discomfort he's inflicting on others.
He could file a lawsuit and get the blogger's hosting provider to ID them if the court agreed. He's trying to do this just to apply extra pressure.
If it's fair to call my employer to complain about something I did when not acting in their name, it's fair to call everyone you know and complain about you and how your association is making them look. If seeking my information for unknown but implied unpleasant things is fair, so is seeking yours, just 'cause.
If he doesn't like people snooping in his life for perhaps malicious reasons, perhaps he'll make the connection with doing it to others. If not, maybe one of his family will explain it.
The problem is not that you can contract away first sale, it's that you may be able to do so without seeing a contract...
And yeah, I misspoke when I said 'overturn', but 'blocked because of people's resistance to flying in the face of reasonable traditions' seemed awkward.
There are no 'preexisting duties' under copyright law - it's assumed that you can not copy the work, so you have no obligations to fulfill. For public domain works there are no obligations either.
... or delete within 5 days' there'd be no question of the validity. The GPL is an offer, waiting to become a contract, for a copyright license in trade for specific consideration.
Therefore, any obligations there are, are above and beyond any 'default'. An obligation to put your derived code (if any - futures are a risky investment), an obligation to pay $60, or an obligation to paint yourself blue and cluck like a chicken, are all valid consideration if the license-holder wants them. Anything anyone has ever paid anyone else to do, could be consideration. Think of how varied that list is.
If the license-holder did not want anything, they would not have used the GPL license. Releasing a work into the public domain is simpler, as are the CC and BSD licenses, or simply saying 'use this' without any concern for licenses. Using a specific license is a sign of intent.
The offer and contract don't require the actions of both parties either. If I have a roadside fruit-stand and have a sign by the till 'serve yourself, leave payment in the bowl' people could legally transact business without my presence. This is obviously valid for copyright licenses as well - if I took a picture of something I could leave a memory card with a sign - 'save yourself the time, download great photos of X - paypal $5 to
When you release something under the GPL you make an offer of a valid contract. You can rescind the offer, but not the contract once accepted. For all that you talk about expiring licenses, a license isn't a contract. Contracts have no such limits.
The author got the benefit from increased visibility, testers and bug reports, etc. You state that he didn't accept patches or use GPLed code, but that's not relevant. If you buy fruit from me you've still received something of value even if you didn't eat it before it spoiled - you gained the right to exercise an option to eat fruit at no cost, for a limited time.
Also, there's no general requirement that a work be relicensed only under the same license, only that you do not license rights you do not hold. By default you may legally assign any rights you have.
No, he's advocating using the same tactic as is used on us. Law-abiding people don't feel the need to out anonymous people for legal statements. Crooks and killers try to out those they disagree with so that 'random' violence can fall upon them.
They just need to understand that it works both ways. We see that $20k reward for the blogger and know that they are us, but for the grace of not having as interesting gossip. If we'd said something that lawyer wanted to know about, he'd be offering a bounty on us.
There are two ways this can end. Either someone IDs the lawyer and turns the tables on him and he decides this isn't a good idea and he and maybe others learn from this. Or, he IDs the blogger, we sit back and do nothing, and the blogger 'accidently' comes to harm or gets scared of this possibility and shuts up.
In theory (his defense) he's not asking anyone to hurt the blogger, he's just curious... That's bullshit, if he had a real problem he'd sue. He just wants to muzzle anyone saying anything he doesn't like. And he's willing to use implied threats to do it.
The way to properly combat this is let him know that it's a two-way street. If anything happens to the blogger, something will happen to him. If he doesn't like feeling the way the blogger now does, he may stop his vigilante justice. If not, he'll live in fear, like his victims, that someone will stop it for him.
Here's the scorecard. If you decide out of the blue to try to ID someone you don't like, you're an ass. If it gets done to you in return, it's a good old-fashioned payback which is the best way to convince people of the pain they cause. Chances are these evil white supremacists choose this as a first course of action against innocents, not as a deterrent to keep people from trying to tactic again.
btw, fuck you and the people who don't understand context.
Users can use GPLed software without accepting it, yes. But many people use software because it's GPLed. Or appropriately open-sourced in their eyes. The GPL is a direct promise to not play games like this with the code, and that's why many people might consider contributing to the project.
However, if the author didn't want anything back they wouldn't GPL their code. The BSD people are right, the BSDL (CC, even public domain) are easier than the GPL. You release your work under the GPL for the social benefits. Users and developers. Eyeballs. To encourage the release of more open source projects. If you didn't have at least one of these goals you wouldn't jump through the hoops. There's also the using GPLed code angle, but I'm assuming the developer isn't using any from reading his announcement.
The author knowingly picked a license which required consideration (continue to redistribute, this license trumps yours, etc, etc). People agreed, in trade for the explicit promise of the right to use the software/source code more permissively under the GPL. These people are providing the consideration asked for - pass on my software, share source code, keep changes free. It plainly has value, and many people have stated that they GPL their software precisely for these reasons. These people see consideration flowing both ways. Consideration is always in the eye of the beholder anyways.
Well, the UCC is written to trump first-sale rights and such, partly based on their success with EULAs to date. That in mind, it is the only issue.
But I expect the EULA provisions of the UCC(UCITA?) are going to be struck down because it flies in the face of hundreds of years of the most fundamental precedent - that contracts must be up front, fully visible, understood, and agreed on by both parties to be binding.
Not that it's gone far recently, but even that's because there's an industry lobby for it, and there aren't people lobbying for the common sense solution, yet. Eventually other businesses, bigger even than Microsoft, Adobe, and other EULA supporters, are going to take note of the horrible legal liability a EULA really would be, if your organization actually did accept one. They'll squash this because they're afraid of the consequences of a low-level employee unintentionally entering binding contracts in their names.
Software isn't licensed, or rather, doesn't require licenses. Retail software is sold with a license you have no legal obligation to accept, which may or may not be binding depending on your ability to use the product without agreeing to the license. Certainly, you have the right to bypass the EULA, even under the DMCA, as it is not an access-control measure.
Copyright law specifically allows ephemeral duplication as required for proper use (what it was advertised as doing, at a minimum) without a license.
From the quote above, consideration need not be tangible, or directly 'given', or worth anything to both parties, as a promise not to do something you haven't been doing isn't very limiting.
If you could pay to reach people, obviously that person's attention has a very real value. You'd pay an advertiser to reach many people, or pay individuals for their specific attention. (Surveys, etc). It seems that by stopping and listening to you, the person has already started to provide their end of the deal. Similarly, using your software has immediate and undeniable benefits from individual users. That not every user is profitable is of no consequence.
In the copyright license itself, sure, there is no consideration. But the author agreed to offer this license in trade for your actions (testing the software, agreeing to keep it GPLed, etc). The author can stop his offer, yes, but he can't escape from his contractual obligations to provide the license he claimed to be providing.
Most people pay for testers and advertising with cash, people who release GPLed software get both for free, as a direct consequence of their GPLing the software and each individual user accepting it. That's consideration. Simply downloading their software is something people pay to have done, to inflate statistics. That alone should be of value. Then each use is testing, and many users of GPL software file bug reports, far more than users of non-free software.
Whatever I think is of value is something I can contract for, regardless of what anyone else thinks of the value of that. Some people contract to be beaten for sexual release - to me this wouldn't be value, but that doesn't negate their contract.