And then Apple would not be able to provide features like visual voice mail which require changes to the carrier network.
Of course Apple can support it on an unlocked phone.
Believe it or not, there are many de-facto standards in the mobile phone industry. One of the most famous is the voice mail icon. GSM doesn't really standardize it. There are multiple ways to implement it. Most cellphones support most ways of implementing the VM icon. On some, if you buy an unlocked phone, you have to configure a hack or two to get it to work with some networks (I had to use a SEEM editor with my Motorola V635 to get voicemail icons working on T-Mobile USA.)
Making an unlocked phone doesn't mean being forced to limit yourself to the documented features of GSM. You can implement whatever the hell you want, and let the carriers decide what they're going to implement.
I'm fed up of hearing this bullshit argument. As if "Visual Voicemail" is worth the pain of locked phones in the first place. I'm not seeing how it's so "must have" that I'd be willing to buy a phone for $500 I'd have to throw away when I switch carrier.
I'm sure a locked down phone that only runs Apple's software and is only available on Cingular, with Apple claiming that it's morally wrong to unlock a phone (such people are "bad guys") to run on other networks, is going to do that.
Anyone who thinks Apple is trying to do anything but shift power from one proprietary group to another is delusional.
Worse still, Cingular is one of the only two major GSM/UMTS carriers in the US. So it was one of the few that was truly open and non-proprietary, compared to the likes of Verizon.
I'm hoping some of Apple's innovations in the UI realm will make their way to competing phones, but right now the Apple phone itself is bad news from the point of view of opening up the industry. It represents everything that's bad about the US mobile phone industry, it's expensive, locked down, and treated by its maker as little more than a weapon to play in some insane power wars in which the end user will always be the victim.
If you could just update this site (or any of the others that come up when you Google for Wii Tracker, with the names and locations of all these stores with piles of unsold Wiis, that'd be great. You'd be helping the rest of us out tremendously.
I don't mind you doing the anonymous trolling for Sony, but it would be tremendously useful to us all if you backed up your claims with facts. I don't mean from a taking-you-seriously point of view, I just mean I, for one, would like to buy a ($250) Wii, and I'd love to know where to get one. And I think a lot of people on Slashdot would too.
I grew up copying my friends albums on tapes. We all bought stuff, but no one bleated then about stealing. We called it sharing.
No, you didn't.
The term "sharing" as applied to copyright infringement came out of computer networking terminology. Originally shared network resources (such as hard drives) were referred to as "Shares". When P2P software, originally in the form of bots on IRC, came about, they borrowed and twisted that terminology a little to refer to the content of the drive (in addition to the drive itself) as "shared files". This usage has stuck since.
Copyright infringement never has had any resemblance to "sharing", sharing a {record|tape|CD} in the past meant two or more groups alternating ownership of the media, during which time the other parties wouldn't have it physically in their hards. What you're referring to would have been referred to as "copying" by the people who did it. They never called it sharing. It wasn't sharing, it didn't resemble sharing, and that term came about via a different route.
They've actually had about 50,000 years to visit us, less if you only want to count "recorded history".
Indeed, any visits done 50,000 years ago would have been to a group of "intelligent" primates who, in all probability, would have had great difficulty in having the contextual skills needed to show intelligence to the visitors.
So, Fermi's paradox is that something impossible is expected of aliens civilizations, that we have no way to tell has happened. And this is taken seriously, why?
If it does, I can't see how it'd ever be right, given the fact the universe is still expanding. No civilization can ever populate the entire universe with slower than light travel.
There are an awful lot of hidden assumptions in your bald statement that the speed of light automatically limits travel to a range of 4 or 5 ly.
Could be that more than 4-5 light years makes travel a little... hairy. I mean, people start to...wig-out at those kinds of distances. There's a lot of distance to cover, with a lot of dangerous particles flying in the same space, so it's safe to say the further you go the more... close shaves you'll have!
The underlying story actually makes more sense if you understand that the RIAA is not the recording industry, but a group that represents them, and that in all likelihood the probability that the story's claim that the RIAA "hired" any hip-hop artists to do anything at all is pretty close to zero.
This is more like Microsoft hiring some programmers to produce some kind of installation CD with a variety of applications, much of which is not from Microsoft, and then the BSA busting them for piracy. Yes, Microsoft is a member of the BSA, but that doesn't mean the BSA has much to do with the day-to-day decision making processes at Microsoft or vice-versa.
On the face of it, an article about the BSA raiding a company started by Microsoft wouldn't generate the same kind of Slashdot reactions. We might be amazed Microsoft ever started such a company, but we wouldn't think this was some kind of wierd "entrapment" thing.
Unfortunately, it remains the case that Slashdot seriously believes that the RIAA is a massive, monopolistic, music publisher as opposed to an industry group that represents publishers. Slashdot has, judging from the headline, gone beyond merely repeating this nonsense and now actually believes it.
So please Gnome people start behaving, be humble, accept the patches and do not upset Linus, we really need him, even if he isn't always the nicest person around;)
One of the more positive things about GNOME over the last two to three years is that it's seen direction, it's seen some semblance of design, and it's clear it's being put together by people who are thinking about the issues involved, not just accepting hacks from all-comers.
If Linus's patches implement functionality (properly) that is right to have, then they should be accepted. But no, they shouldn't be blindly accepted just to pacify Linus and give a pretence of being "humble". GNOME should do what's right for the end result, not what's diplomatically best.
I think the GNOME developers are idiots for reinvernting one of the worst features of Windows, the registry.
In fairness, that was back in the Miguel days. The current GNOME developers aren't really the same bunch (or at least, of the same mindset) as the bulk of the developers were back in those dark times.
Miguel really seemed, to me, to resent not getting the job at Microsoft, and chose to make working on GNOME the "next best thing" by chosing Windows as a model for GUIs and building an infrastructure around the Windows design. There was very much a "WWWD?" mentality.
Current iterations of GNOME are far removed from that, are designed around different mentalities, and for the most part the only relationship with "old GNOME" have to do with legacy technology decisions, from GTK to gconf. It would be nice to see the GNOME people deprecate gconf, but I doubt it'll happen any time soon because it's stuck too far into the GNOME system.
If you know it by heart, why did you write what you did originally and what you've written above? Does the fact that copyright is a "man made" right change the fact that a license loosens the restrictions copyright introduces?
At the end of the day, you live in the real world, not some theoretical libertarian anti-utopia. The real world has laws preventing you from copying, say, the BSD operating system without permission. The real world also has the BSD license that gives you that permission. You are given rights by licenses, you do not have them taken away.
Arguing whether copyrights are "God given" or not is entirey irrelevent to that issue. Licenses at best give you more rights than you had without them. At worst, licenses have no effect. Your original statement was incorrect.
I'm not sure that's relevent. I can't speak for Danish law, but there are a lot of laws in Britain you can break with no ill-intent or action on your part. As a general rule, you are responsible for your Internet connection there and the laws are worded such that you're responsible on the basis of the end result and chain of responsibility, not bad faith actions on your part.
I've heard of people (as in my mother is a lawyer and has assisted them, this is not friend-of-a-friend stuff) being arrested after complaining to the police that someone has emailed them child pornography. They were, technically, bang to rights. The laws concerning the issue were not concerned with whether he solicited that content, merely whether he possessed it. Did he possess it? Yes, the content was on his computer, he admitted it, therefore as the law was written he was 100% guilty. Beyond a reasonable doubt.
(FWIW, before anyone thinks a massive injustice was done, it was more a minor injustice - they dropped the charges. Britain's legal authorities tend to recognise that many of the laws they enforce are deliberately over the top to reduce the number of "loopholes" that a truly guilty person could wiggle out of; and as such tend, though not always, to use their discretion when enforcing them. That is, of course, a dangerous situation, and in many cases entirely innocent people do get caught up in draconian laws that should never have applied to them. Britain's judges also seem less willing as a matter of principle than American ones to refuse to find fault with someone who has caused no harm and didn't intend to in the first place, though there are occasional exceptions, some of which are hilarious.)
Oh, and this situation gets worse when it comes to civil law.
Then they'd give the code away with no license, as the purpose of a license is to restrict the 'freedom' of someone else.
You have that backwards. Copyright is automatic, so the purpose of a license is to give you a freedom you otherwise wouldn't have had. If you distribute something without providing a license, then those that receive the material have no rights to distribute it themselves.
(A license should not be confused with an EULA which very often does prevent you from having even the rights implied by copyright law.)
Things like the whole "Freedom Fries" incident, may have been cute over in America, but was treated with disbelief over here in the UK.
I get your point (and agree with it, being an ex-pat Briton living in the US), but FWIW, just as a piece of trivia, it was treated with disbelief here in the states too.
Yes, but if these rulings stand (through the appeal process,) you can bet that EVERY news aggregator / search engine will ALSO have to remove content / links to the pages, therefore no competitive disadvantage.
The thing Google is being told not to do is cache content or do deep linking. The thing every pro-Google "Fight teh man" Slashhead is demanding is Google remove links to the newspapers completely.
If people are just trying to find a newspaper's home page, then Google removing their ability to do that via Google would, certainly, undermine Google's credibility with end users. If I search for "New York Times", I expect to find the NYT's website. If Google doesn't give that to me, I'm not going to use Google. I wasn't searching for New York Times as a gag, or on a whim, that's what I wanted, and a search engine that can't give that to me isn't a search engine I'd subscribe to.
So yes, Yahoo would gain a competitive advantage if Google stopped linking to particular newspapers completely. Google doesn't have to do that, and an act on its part to do that wouldn't do anyone any favours, neither itself, nor its users.
Sun sells computers that use a GPL'd CPU, and run a SDDL'd operating system (which will probably move to GPLv3 when that's released.) What's proprietary about it again?
Your point is noted, and I'm sure huge volumes of Kazaa-using freeloaders will pretend your point about caching being a form of advertising has some validity.
That said, I am not a Kazaa using freeloader, and as such I think your point is retarded.
I have reconfigured my web browser to automatically download all pages from any pay website I subscribe to, and immediately post them on Usenet.
To opt-out of this service, please insert the header line <META HTTP-EQUIV="SQUIGGLESLASH-CONTROL" CONTENT="PLEASE-DON'T-COPY-THIS-TO-USENET"> in the HEAD block of your HTML.
This is, of course, an entirely optional service, and completely free too!
It's a lousy analogy because it offers no solutions and it also doesn't represent the actual dynamics of the industry.
The railroads made horseshoes obsolete, but did so without relying upon the horseshoes to be made anyway. The situation here is that we have something to copy, and copying is getting easier. The more copying we do outside of the wishes of the content creators, the harder it is for the content creators to make a living making the content in the first place. Which means they'll stop. Which means there's nothing to copy.
Railroads didn't become obsolete thanks to an absense of horseshoes.
Which could be a good thing. After all, if someone looks at the Linux kernel, and decides to sue one of the people who has a copyright on a core component of, say, the memory manager, then Linux is similarly screwed. In this instance, you have hundreds of people you can sue, any one of whom will cause chaos if their contribution to the code is no longer redistributable. Depending on how embedded the code is, and the degree to which changes made since are derivations, it may be a serious problem to remove the contributions.
Yes, he's whining. He has no legitimate arguments, he's coming up with sour grapes arguments (and rejecting getting involved in the community process) because he doesn't have any options.
And no, nobody's suggesting he had to go for a blanket "I'll do whatever the FSF say" "version 2 or later" clause. The fact is though that Torvalds has left himself no options for upgrading the license. There were many options available to him: copyright assignment, more complex versions of the "version 2 or later" clause, or many other routes. But he didn't take them. He just can't do it.
The rest of the free software community is going to try to put together a license that pleases everyone, be they those who felt it necessary to go the MPL route, those who felt it necessary to go the Apache license route, or many other directions, all of whom produced incompatable forks because the GPL just didn't cut it. That's what this process is about. And Torvalds, rather than being big about the screw up he made that'll leave Linux out of this process, and trying to work on a process to fix it, is instead whining about it.
I said he was whining, not that he merely had an opinion and that any opinion constitutes whining. There is nothing in my comment that constitutes calling "having an opinion" whining, and if you read that, then you need glasses.
As for whining, that's what he's doing. He's making up excuse after excuse, complaining that GPLv3 is somehow overbearing compared to its predecessor when, in reality, it is cut from exactly the same cloth and merely closes a few loopholes. His complaint that, in some way, TiVo using signatures to close its hardware and its code is in some way what he wanted all along is a completely ridiculous position - if you want that, you don't make your code copyleft. His complaints about DRM have no basis in anything the draft license says.
Torvald's inability to posit a position consistant with the aims and effects of the license he chose, claiming GPL2 is somehow not the copyleft license it is intended to be, shows me that his positions are completely insincere, and this realistically is more excuse making, presumably because of his shortsighted decision not to ensure there was a process for upgrading the license in the future.
Yes, it's whining. If he had a strong legitimate point, I'd say it was merely having an opinion. But he doesn't. He's saying his choice of a strict copyleft was right, yet complaining that the loopholes within it that completely undermine the entire point of making it copyleft are, in some way, desirable. He's full of shit, and not for the first time.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course Apple can support it on an unlocked phone.
Believe it or not, there are many de-facto standards in the mobile phone industry. One of the most famous is the voice mail icon. GSM doesn't really standardize it. There are multiple ways to implement it. Most cellphones support most ways of implementing the VM icon. On some, if you buy an unlocked phone, you have to configure a hack or two to get it to work with some networks (I had to use a SEEM editor with my Motorola V635 to get voicemail icons working on T-Mobile USA.)
Making an unlocked phone doesn't mean being forced to limit yourself to the documented features of GSM. You can implement whatever the hell you want, and let the carriers decide what they're going to implement.
I'm fed up of hearing this bullshit argument. As if "Visual Voicemail" is worth the pain of locked phones in the first place. I'm not seeing how it's so "must have" that I'd be willing to buy a phone for $500 I'd have to throw away when I switch carrier.
I'm sure a locked down phone that only runs Apple's software and is only available on Cingular, with Apple claiming that it's morally wrong to unlock a phone (such people are "bad guys") to run on other networks, is going to do that.
Anyone who thinks Apple is trying to do anything but shift power from one proprietary group to another is delusional.
Worse still, Cingular is one of the only two major GSM/UMTS carriers in the US. So it was one of the few that was truly open and non-proprietary, compared to the likes of Verizon.
I'm hoping some of Apple's innovations in the UI realm will make their way to competing phones, but right now the Apple phone itself is bad news from the point of view of opening up the industry. It represents everything that's bad about the US mobile phone industry, it's expensive, locked down, and treated by its maker as little more than a weapon to play in some insane power wars in which the end user will always be the victim.
If you could just update this site (or any of the others that come up when you Google for Wii Tracker, with the names and locations of all these stores with piles of unsold Wiis, that'd be great. You'd be helping the rest of us out tremendously.
I don't mind you doing the anonymous trolling for Sony, but it would be tremendously useful to us all if you backed up your claims with facts. I don't mean from a taking-you-seriously point of view, I just mean I, for one, would like to buy a ($250) Wii, and I'd love to know where to get one. And I think a lot of people on Slashdot would too.
No, you didn't.
The term "sharing" as applied to copyright infringement came out of computer networking terminology. Originally shared network resources (such as hard drives) were referred to as "Shares". When P2P software, originally in the form of bots on IRC, came about, they borrowed and twisted that terminology a little to refer to the content of the drive (in addition to the drive itself) as "shared files". This usage has stuck since.
Copyright infringement never has had any resemblance to "sharing", sharing a {record|tape|CD} in the past meant two or more groups alternating ownership of the media, during which time the other parties wouldn't have it physically in their hards. What you're referring to would have been referred to as "copying" by the people who did it. They never called it sharing. It wasn't sharing, it didn't resemble sharing, and that term came about via a different route.
They've actually had about 50,000 years to visit us, less if you only want to count "recorded history". Indeed, any visits done 50,000 years ago would have been to a group of "intelligent" primates who, in all probability, would have had great difficulty in having the contextual skills needed to show intelligence to the visitors.
So, Fermi's paradox is that something impossible is expected of aliens civilizations, that we have no way to tell has happened. And this is taken seriously, why?
If it does, I can't see how it'd ever be right, given the fact the universe is still expanding. No civilization can ever populate the entire universe with slower than light travel.
Could be that more than 4-5 light years makes travel a little... hairy. I mean, people start to ...wig-out at those kinds of distances. There's a lot of distance to cover, with a lot of dangerous particles flying in the same space, so it's safe to say the further you go the more... close shaves you'll have!
Har har har I kill myself.
The underlying story actually makes more sense if you understand that the RIAA is not the recording industry, but a group that represents them, and that in all likelihood the probability that the story's claim that the RIAA "hired" any hip-hop artists to do anything at all is pretty close to zero.
This is more like Microsoft hiring some programmers to produce some kind of installation CD with a variety of applications, much of which is not from Microsoft, and then the BSA busting them for piracy. Yes, Microsoft is a member of the BSA, but that doesn't mean the BSA has much to do with the day-to-day decision making processes at Microsoft or vice-versa.
On the face of it, an article about the BSA raiding a company started by Microsoft wouldn't generate the same kind of Slashdot reactions. We might be amazed Microsoft ever started such a company, but we wouldn't think this was some kind of wierd "entrapment" thing.
Unfortunately, it remains the case that Slashdot seriously believes that the RIAA is a massive, monopolistic, music publisher as opposed to an industry group that represents publishers. Slashdot has, judging from the headline, gone beyond merely repeating this nonsense and now actually believes it.
One of the more positive things about GNOME over the last two to three years is that it's seen direction, it's seen some semblance of design, and it's clear it's being put together by people who are thinking about the issues involved, not just accepting hacks from all-comers.
If Linus's patches implement functionality (properly) that is right to have, then they should be accepted. But no, they shouldn't be blindly accepted just to pacify Linus and give a pretence of being "humble". GNOME should do what's right for the end result, not what's diplomatically best.
In fairness, that was back in the Miguel days. The current GNOME developers aren't really the same bunch (or at least, of the same mindset) as the bulk of the developers were back in those dark times.
Miguel really seemed, to me, to resent not getting the job at Microsoft, and chose to make working on GNOME the "next best thing" by chosing Windows as a model for GUIs and building an infrastructure around the Windows design. There was very much a "WWWD?" mentality.
Current iterations of GNOME are far removed from that, are designed around different mentalities, and for the most part the only relationship with "old GNOME" have to do with legacy technology decisions, from GTK to gconf. It would be nice to see the GNOME people deprecate gconf, but I doubt it'll happen any time soon because it's stuck too far into the GNOME system.
If you know it by heart, why did you write what you did originally and what you've written above? Does the fact that copyright is a "man made" right change the fact that a license loosens the restrictions copyright introduces?
At the end of the day, you live in the real world, not some theoretical libertarian anti-utopia. The real world has laws preventing you from copying, say, the BSD operating system without permission. The real world also has the BSD license that gives you that permission. You are given rights by licenses, you do not have them taken away.
Arguing whether copyrights are "God given" or not is entirey irrelevent to that issue. Licenses at best give you more rights than you had without them. At worst, licenses have no effect. Your original statement was incorrect.
I'm not sure that's relevent. I can't speak for Danish law, but there are a lot of laws in Britain you can break with no ill-intent or action on your part. As a general rule, you are responsible for your Internet connection there and the laws are worded such that you're responsible on the basis of the end result and chain of responsibility, not bad faith actions on your part.
I've heard of people (as in my mother is a lawyer and has assisted them, this is not friend-of-a-friend stuff) being arrested after complaining to the police that someone has emailed them child pornography. They were, technically, bang to rights. The laws concerning the issue were not concerned with whether he solicited that content, merely whether he possessed it. Did he possess it? Yes, the content was on his computer, he admitted it, therefore as the law was written he was 100% guilty. Beyond a reasonable doubt.
(FWIW, before anyone thinks a massive injustice was done, it was more a minor injustice - they dropped the charges. Britain's legal authorities tend to recognise that many of the laws they enforce are deliberately over the top to reduce the number of "loopholes" that a truly guilty person could wiggle out of; and as such tend, though not always, to use their discretion when enforcing them. That is, of course, a dangerous situation, and in many cases entirely innocent people do get caught up in draconian laws that should never have applied to them. Britain's judges also seem less willing as a matter of principle than American ones to refuse to find fault with someone who has caused no harm and didn't intend to in the first place, though there are occasional exceptions, some of which are hilarious.)
Oh, and this situation gets worse when it comes to civil law.
You have that backwards. Copyright is automatic, so the purpose of a license is to give you a freedom you otherwise wouldn't have had. If you distribute something without providing a license, then those that receive the material have no rights to distribute it themselves.
(A license should not be confused with an EULA which very often does prevent you from having even the rights implied by copyright law.)
Yeah, I heard you claim that the first time. However, it remains retarded (indeed, even more so than the first time, given the justification.)
I get your point (and agree with it, being an ex-pat Briton living in the US), but FWIW, just as a piece of trivia, it was treated with disbelief here in the states too.
The thing Google is being told not to do is cache content or do deep linking. The thing every pro-Google "Fight teh man" Slashhead is demanding is Google remove links to the newspapers completely.
If people are just trying to find a newspaper's home page, then Google removing their ability to do that via Google would, certainly, undermine Google's credibility with end users. If I search for "New York Times", I expect to find the NYT's website. If Google doesn't give that to me, I'm not going to use Google. I wasn't searching for New York Times as a gag, or on a whim, that's what I wanted, and a search engine that can't give that to me isn't a search engine I'd subscribe to.
So yes, Yahoo would gain a competitive advantage if Google stopped linking to particular newspapers completely. Google doesn't have to do that, and an act on its part to do that wouldn't do anyone any favours, neither itself, nor its users.
Sun sells computers that use a GPL'd CPU, and run a SDDL'd operating system (which will probably move to GPLv3 when that's released.) What's proprietary about it again?
Your point is noted, and I'm sure huge volumes of Kazaa-using freeloaders will pretend your point about caching being a form of advertising has some validity.
That said, I am not a Kazaa using freeloader, and as such I think your point is retarded.
Like the GP and GGGP said, this is about caching. Your (rather tortured) analogy concerning restaurants does not apply.
Yes, you have an implied right to download and store a copy of a web page for the purposes of reading it in your web browser.
You do not have any other implied rights, such as the right to redistribute copies.
Do you have a sensible, relevent, question that pertains to the issue at hand and doesn't make outrageous stretches of logic?
I have reconfigured my web browser to automatically download all pages from any pay website I subscribe to, and immediately post them on Usenet.
To opt-out of this service, please insert the header line <META HTTP-EQUIV="SQUIGGLESLASH-CONTROL" CONTENT="PLEASE-DON'T-COPY-THIS-TO-USENET"> in the HEAD block of your HTML.
This is, of course, an entirely optional service, and completely free too!
It's a lousy analogy because it offers no solutions and it also doesn't represent the actual dynamics of the industry.
The railroads made horseshoes obsolete, but did so without relying upon the horseshoes to be made anyway. The situation here is that we have something to copy, and copying is getting easier. The more copying we do outside of the wishes of the content creators, the harder it is for the content creators to make a living making the content in the first place. Which means they'll stop. Which means there's nothing to copy.
Railroads didn't become obsolete thanks to an absense of horseshoes.
Like the GP said, this is about caching. Your rather tortured pie analogy doesn't work (if indeed it ever did.)
Which could be a good thing. After all, if someone looks at the Linux kernel, and decides to sue one of the people who has a copyright on a core component of, say, the memory manager, then Linux is similarly screwed. In this instance, you have hundreds of people you can sue, any one of whom will cause chaos if their contribution to the code is no longer redistributable. Depending on how embedded the code is, and the degree to which changes made since are derivations, it may be a serious problem to remove the contributions.
Yes, he's whining. He has no legitimate arguments, he's coming up with sour grapes arguments (and rejecting getting involved in the community process) because he doesn't have any options.
And no, nobody's suggesting he had to go for a blanket "I'll do whatever the FSF say" "version 2 or later" clause. The fact is though that Torvalds has left himself no options for upgrading the license. There were many options available to him: copyright assignment, more complex versions of the "version 2 or later" clause, or many other routes. But he didn't take them. He just can't do it.
The rest of the free software community is going to try to put together a license that pleases everyone, be they those who felt it necessary to go the MPL route, those who felt it necessary to go the Apache license route, or many other directions, all of whom produced incompatable forks because the GPL just didn't cut it. That's what this process is about. And Torvalds, rather than being big about the screw up he made that'll leave Linux out of this process, and trying to work on a process to fix it, is instead whining about it.
I said he was whining, not that he merely had an opinion and that any opinion constitutes whining. There is nothing in my comment that constitutes calling "having an opinion" whining, and if you read that, then you need glasses.
As for whining, that's what he's doing. He's making up excuse after excuse, complaining that GPLv3 is somehow overbearing compared to its predecessor when, in reality, it is cut from exactly the same cloth and merely closes a few loopholes. His complaint that, in some way, TiVo using signatures to close its hardware and its code is in some way what he wanted all along is a completely ridiculous position - if you want that, you don't make your code copyleft. His complaints about DRM have no basis in anything the draft license says.
Torvald's inability to posit a position consistant with the aims and effects of the license he chose, claiming GPL2 is somehow not the copyleft license it is intended to be, shows me that his positions are completely insincere, and this realistically is more excuse making, presumably because of his shortsighted decision not to ensure there was a process for upgrading the license in the future.
Yes, it's whining. If he had a strong legitimate point, I'd say it was merely having an opinion. But he doesn't. He's saying his choice of a strict copyleft was right, yet complaining that the loopholes within it that completely undermine the entire point of making it copyleft are, in some way, desirable. He's full of shit, and not for the first time.