The distinction I'm making is that the MPAA will gladly share their movies with any member of the public who will pay their price. In that sense, they are intended for public distribution.
That is materially different from, for example, my social security number. Yeah, if you go through my records and publish this, I still have my copy of that number so you haven't taken anything away. You have, however, violated my privacy and potentially caused me great harm.
This is a much deeper distinction than just definition.
True, but the purpose of testing is to convert unknown bugs into known bugs. The longer you test a system, the more bugs will be found. If you make a change, you may have added more unknown bugs. You then need to reset the testing clock to shake out these new unknown bugs.
If the bug you fixed was minor, it may not be worth the cost of the additional testing to be sure you didn't accidentally introduce a show-stopper bug.
It was a "bug" in the sense that the design specification was insufficient. After the bombing, it was determined that they were sufficiently engineered to withstand expected stresses. The stresses they encountered were greater and they collapsed.
This is directly analogous to the discussion of bug severity in the article. The engineers decided that the severity / frequency of risk coupled with the cost of further upgrades did not warrant the improvements. Either they underestimated the severity/frequency and should have done further upgrades or they made the right call and we just have to live with the fact that we can't fix every "bug" in every design. If you don't like to think of it as a "bug," think of it as a shortcoming or limitation.
I'm sorry for your loss, but there are still lessons in engineering that can come from it. It does no service to the memories of those lost to ignore those lessons. That this event was caused by people with ill intent rather than natural randomness is utterly irrelevant. The fact is that every system has limits beyond which it will fail.
There's a pretty substantial difference in the type of information being "stolen." (I use quotes because I am not trying to make a judgement about whether "stealing" info is the same as stealing a car.) What is "stolen" from the RIAA/MPAA is entertainment material intended for distribution to the public. What is "stolen" from Torrentspy is private, personal communications and business numbers.
There is absolutely no inconsistency in a position that only one of these is wrong. The issue Torrentspy is raising has nothing to do with the ethics of duplicating information, it's about privacy.
Because the license will be non-transferable. There's little question that non-transferable licenses are legal. The question is whether that license can contain an enforceable term that bars the licensee from re-selling the medium that it came on.
That's true -- and perhaps education will help curb their risky behavior as well. If a husband infects his faithful wife with AIDS, he got it first. It's in HIS interest not to engage in that behavior just as much as it's in hers.
I'd say RMS has a pretty good reason to single out this issue to focus his attention on. You know, considering that he is a big part of the reason that anyone ever talks about free software at all. Perhaps he (rightly) thinks people might be more interested in his opinion on this topic than on any of the other things the media misrepresents.
Years ago with some old version of Office (maybe 98 or so), I suffered from that problem. I was able to reconfigure most of the important keyboard shortcuts so Word actually felt like Emacs. As I recall, the multi-key commands (C-x C-s, etc) didn't work, but the major editing/navigation did. It worked pretty well, though some of the shortcut collisions got annoying (e.g., the default Word setting of C-b for 'bold' conflicts with navigating the cursor back one char). Overall, it was a pain to set up and ultimately not worth it...
I think you're missing the point. This is clearly not illegally anticompetitive. I am free to do anything I want and give it away or sell it for any price I want to set. It doesn't matter what it cost me -- if I want to lose money on the transaction, I am free to do so. No one can tell me my price is too low. If I'm "stealing from my own retirement," that's my own business.
As the judge points out, laws against price fixing are in place to protect the consumer from artificially high prices due to the absence of competition. They aren't there to ensure that competitors can make money.
Furthermore, I think you'd be hard pressed to show that it's truly anticompetitive in any sense of the word, not just legally. As the non-free OS vendors like to point out, an OS ends up costing a lot more than the price of its license. Making that license free lowers the cost, but does not make it zero. There is still business opportunity.
Don't believe me? Then just ask how there are Linux companies still in business? Yeah, they're giving away their OS license for free, but they're still generating revenue. Further, the fact that they're giving it away for free is not pricing anyone out of the market -- Windows and OSX seem to be selling just fine.
Ok, that's fine. Parents of my original post seemed to be making such an argument (not sure if they were the ones I responded to directly or not), so I misunderstood.
True enough. I think I put my point better in a different post -- the interesting question is whether or not the US government was involved in the conspiracy, not whether there was some sort of conspiracy at all.
Um, they are both conspiracies, but they are not at all the same. If 9/11 were shown to be one type of these conspiracies, that would be HUGE news and would have inestimable world-wide political repercussions. If it were the other, there would be no surprise at all.
No one questions whether there was a terrorist conspiracy to hijack planes and knock down the WTC. That's why no one is referring to the Al Qaeda "conspiracy" when they talk about 9/11 conspiracy theories. They're talking about whether that conspiracy (or some part of it) involves our own government.
Yes, the word "conspiracy" describes either case, but the implications are very different. Arguing that 9/11 must have been a conspiracy because of this is a silly rhetorical game. No one was arguing that there wasn't some kind of conspiracy, they're arguing whether or not the government was involved in it.
No, tin foil never, ever protects against government conspiracies. At least, not any more. The governments all have tin-foil piercing rounds now. Kevlar may protect you, but only against the smaller local governments who can't afford higher power ammo.
Yes, there are many examples of governments being parts of conspiracies. I didn't argue that there weren't.
However, it's one thing to argue that the events of 9/11 were part of a conspiracy involving the US government and a very different thing to argue that it was a conspiracy involving terrorists. The former is huge news, the latter is blindingly obvious. When someone talks about 9/11 being a conspiracy, they mean the former, not the latter.
That simple observation was really my point -- the bit about tin foil was intended as a good-natured ribbing of those who take seriously the possibility that this is a case of a conspiracy in the interesting sense. It evidently wasn't interpreted this way by some folks and blurred my meaning. Oops.
You're reading too much in to my statement. I didn't mean to say anything at all about whether I think the government is actually responsible (directly or through negligence) for the 9/11 events..
My point is just that there are two very different kinds of conspiracies and that the parent posts claiming that "conspiracy theories must be correct, since if it wasn't a conspiracy within our government, then it was a conspiracy of terrorists" are playing a silly word game. No one is arguing that there wasn't a "conspiracy" on some level because that would be an obviously ridiculous position. The people who are worried about conspiracies (and are described as "conspiracy theorists" and as wearing tin-foil hats) are exclusively those worried about the kind of conspiracy that involves our government. Simply, there's nothing interesting or controversial about terrorists being involved in a conspiracy, since that's blindingly obvious -- that being what makes them terrorists and not just run-of-the-mill murderous nut-jobs.
A lot of people seem to have misunderstood my meaning, probably because the statement about "tin foil" didn't come through clearly. I don't mean to discredit the possibility that blame falls on those in our own government.
Yeah, but there's a big difference between a conspiracy between religious extremists to hijack planes and crash them into the buildings of their enemy and a conspiracy of a government to arrange for an attack on its own people. The latter is what people mean when they talk about a conspiracy in this context. The former, yeah, it's technically and legally a conspiracy, but it's not the kind of thing that you can protect against with tin foil.
That's an interesting observation, but I don't know that it really implies as much about the debate as it appears to at first blush. I believe it says more about the history of general purpose computing (i.e., more development has been done on monolithic systems, so it's easier to continue doing more monolithic development). Also, users have learned to accept failures and crashes since these are commonplace with every major OS [*], so there's just not much economic pressure to invest much in true reliability for the general purpose market.
It's a lot easier to convince an embedded system architect to buy hardware compatible with a specific OS (even if that hardware is more expensive) in order to increase reliability than it is to ask a home user to do the same thing. That's why OSes like this pop up in the special purpose embedded markets first.
Tanenbaum is really interested in changing computing in a much more fundamental way than most operating system vendors. He's saying that we should all be able to ask for the kind of reliability that is currently only found in specialized embedded systems. He's saying that a microkernel is the way to achieve this. Whether or not you agree with this in a predictive way, there's a lot of development left on this track before the systems can be fairly compared to the monolithic systems that have had literally hundreds of thousands of programmer-hours poured into them.
I agree -- I thought the same thing. A million in hundreds would fit comfortably in a briefcase without arousing suspicion. In twenties, it'd still fit in a carry-on suitcase.
If you really want to encourage free software development, one of the best things you can do is to use it. It's not always easy to find the stumbling blocks until you actually try to use the software end-to-end. There aren't many hacker types who actually work in the publishing industry, so having a publisher who is interested in feeding back his needs to the hacking community is invaluable.
It's even better that he was willing to play trial-and-error because that helps the software to improve to meet his needs, but also allows him to adjust his workflow to meet the needs of the software. This allows the possibility of actually improving the workflow compared to proprietary solutions. At the least, it means that perhaps the free software solution doesn't have to implement absolutely every feature of the proprietary software, since a change in the workflow can obviate the need for some of them.
So now, thanks to this guy, we have an example of a real-world publisher who has actually shown that you can do everything you need using these tools. If he's willing to share his methods, then that makes it easier for others to do the same. That's awesome.
So no, it's not absolutely necessary to commit yourself fully to free software just because you think it's better. However, I think you can make a pretty strong argument that you do much more for the community by doing so. It's not an all-or-nothing proposition, though, so each can give according to his ability/willingness.
It doesn't need to be long to be an essay. I had a course that required two one-page long essays per week. It shouldn't take more than an hour or two to put together an essay of that length. Once you're in the habit of doing this, you can churn them out quickly. That doesn't mean the quality is poor, just that you're very comfortable with the format and the process of sitting down, organizing a few simple ideas, and writing them up. I think large numbers of short assignments are much better for this than fewer larger assignments.
You're trying to get comfortable with the process, and if you're only actually writing something every other week, you just don't spend enough time to get comfortable. Perhaps it would make sense to start off with one a week for a couple weeks just to get people rolling, but I don't think that asking for a couple short essays every week is at all excessive.
I always set my mail reader to ignore all return receipt requests. If I want someone to know I read their message, then I'll reply to the email myself. I find them to be intrusive and impolite.
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The distinction I'm making is that the MPAA will gladly share their movies with any member of the public who will pay their price. In that sense, they are intended for public distribution.
That is materially different from, for example, my social security number. Yeah, if you go through my records and publish this, I still have my copy of that number so you haven't taken anything away. You have, however, violated my privacy and potentially caused me great harm.
This is a much deeper distinction than just definition.
True, but the purpose of testing is to convert unknown bugs into known bugs. The longer you test a system, the more bugs will be found. If you make a change, you may have added more unknown bugs. You then need to reset the testing clock to shake out these new unknown bugs.
If the bug you fixed was minor, it may not be worth the cost of the additional testing to be sure you didn't accidentally introduce a show-stopper bug.
It was a "bug" in the sense that the design specification was insufficient. After the bombing, it was determined that they were sufficiently engineered to withstand expected stresses. The stresses they encountered were greater and they collapsed.
This is directly analogous to the discussion of bug severity in the article. The engineers decided that the severity / frequency of risk coupled with the cost of further upgrades did not warrant the improvements. Either they underestimated the severity/frequency and should have done further upgrades or they made the right call and we just have to live with the fact that we can't fix every "bug" in every design. If you don't like to think of it as a "bug," think of it as a shortcoming or limitation.
I'm sorry for your loss, but there are still lessons in engineering that can come from it. It does no service to the memories of those lost to ignore those lessons. That this event was caused by people with ill intent rather than natural randomness is utterly irrelevant. The fact is that every system has limits beyond which it will fail.
There's a pretty substantial difference in the type of information being "stolen." (I use quotes because I am not trying to make a judgement about whether "stealing" info is the same as stealing a car.) What is "stolen" from the RIAA/MPAA is entertainment material intended for distribution to the public. What is "stolen" from Torrentspy is private, personal communications and business numbers.
There is absolutely no inconsistency in a position that only one of these is wrong. The issue Torrentspy is raising has nothing to do with the ethics of duplicating information, it's about privacy.
Because the license will be non-transferable. There's little question that non-transferable licenses are legal. The question is whether that license can contain an enforceable term that bars the licensee from re-selling the medium that it came on.
That's true -- and perhaps education will help curb their risky behavior as well. If a husband infects his faithful wife with AIDS, he got it first. It's in HIS interest not to engage in that behavior just as much as it's in hers.
I'd say RMS has a pretty good reason to single out this issue to focus his attention on. You know, considering that he is a big part of the reason that anyone ever talks about free software at all. Perhaps he (rightly) thinks people might be more interested in his opinion on this topic than on any of the other things the media misrepresents.
You're just confused because real men use even parity with 7 data bits. Extended ASCII is for chumps.
Years ago with some old version of Office (maybe 98 or so), I suffered from that problem. I was able to reconfigure most of the important keyboard shortcuts so Word actually felt like Emacs. As I recall, the multi-key commands (C-x C-s, etc) didn't work, but the major editing/navigation did. It worked pretty well, though some of the shortcut collisions got annoying (e.g., the default Word setting of C-b for 'bold' conflicts with navigating the cursor back one char). Overall, it was a pain to set up and ultimately not worth it...
What happened is that TicketMaster insisted on exclusive ticketing rights so they wouldn't have to compete with the venue's direct ticket sales.
I think you're missing the point. This is clearly not illegally anticompetitive. I am free to do anything I want and give it away or sell it for any price I want to set. It doesn't matter what it cost me -- if I want to lose money on the transaction, I am free to do so. No one can tell me my price is too low. If I'm "stealing from my own retirement," that's my own business.
As the judge points out, laws against price fixing are in place to protect the consumer from artificially high prices due to the absence of competition. They aren't there to ensure that competitors can make money.
Furthermore, I think you'd be hard pressed to show that it's truly anticompetitive in any sense of the word, not just legally. As the non-free OS vendors like to point out, an OS ends up costing a lot more than the price of its license. Making that license free lowers the cost, but does not make it zero. There is still business opportunity.
Don't believe me? Then just ask how there are Linux companies still in business? Yeah, they're giving away their OS license for free, but they're still generating revenue. Further, the fact that they're giving it away for free is not pricing anyone out of the market -- Windows and OSX seem to be selling just fine.
Ok, that's fine. Parents of my original post seemed to be making such an argument (not sure if they were the ones I responded to directly or not), so I misunderstood.
True enough. I think I put my point better in a different post -- the interesting question is whether or not the US government was involved in the conspiracy, not whether there was some sort of conspiracy at all.
Yep. Now get upstairs and take out the trash.
Um, they are both conspiracies, but they are not at all the same. If 9/11 were shown to be one type of these conspiracies, that would be HUGE news and would have inestimable world-wide political repercussions. If it were the other, there would be no surprise at all.
No one questions whether there was a terrorist conspiracy to hijack planes and knock down the WTC. That's why no one is referring to the Al Qaeda "conspiracy" when they talk about 9/11 conspiracy theories. They're talking about whether that conspiracy (or some part of it) involves our own government.
Yes, the word "conspiracy" describes either case, but the implications are very different. Arguing that 9/11 must have been a conspiracy because of this is a silly rhetorical game. No one was arguing that there wasn't some kind of conspiracy, they're arguing whether or not the government was involved in it.
No, tin foil never, ever protects against government conspiracies. At least, not any more. The governments all have tin-foil piercing rounds now. Kevlar may protect you, but only against the smaller local governments who can't afford higher power ammo.
Yes, there are many examples of governments being parts of conspiracies. I didn't argue that there weren't.
However, it's one thing to argue that the events of 9/11 were part of a conspiracy involving the US government and a very different thing to argue that it was a conspiracy involving terrorists. The former is huge news, the latter is blindingly obvious. When someone talks about 9/11 being a conspiracy, they mean the former, not the latter.
That simple observation was really my point -- the bit about tin foil was intended as a good-natured ribbing of those who take seriously the possibility that this is a case of a conspiracy in the interesting sense. It evidently wasn't interpreted this way by some folks and blurred my meaning. Oops.
You're reading too much in to my statement. I didn't mean to say anything at all about whether I think the government is actually responsible (directly or through negligence) for the 9/11 events..
My point is just that there are two very different kinds of conspiracies and that the parent posts claiming that "conspiracy theories must be correct, since if it wasn't a conspiracy within our government, then it was a conspiracy of terrorists" are playing a silly word game. No one is arguing that there wasn't a "conspiracy" on some level because that would be an obviously ridiculous position. The people who are worried about conspiracies (and are described as "conspiracy theorists" and as wearing tin-foil hats) are exclusively those worried about the kind of conspiracy that involves our government. Simply, there's nothing interesting or controversial about terrorists being involved in a conspiracy, since that's blindingly obvious -- that being what makes them terrorists and not just run-of-the-mill murderous nut-jobs.
A lot of people seem to have misunderstood my meaning, probably because the statement about "tin foil" didn't come through clearly. I don't mean to discredit the possibility that blame falls on those in our own government.
Yeah, but there's a big difference between a conspiracy between religious extremists to hijack planes and crash them into the buildings of their enemy and a conspiracy of a government to arrange for an attack on its own people. The latter is what people mean when they talk about a conspiracy in this context. The former, yeah, it's technically and legally a conspiracy, but it's not the kind of thing that you can protect against with tin foil.
Then you beat your damn kid for being a greedy little turd and teach him to appreciate the generous parent who gave him anything at all.
That's an interesting observation, but I don't know that it really implies as much about the debate as it appears to at first blush. I believe it says more about the history of general purpose computing (i.e., more development has been done on monolithic systems, so it's easier to continue doing more monolithic development). Also, users have learned to accept failures and crashes since these are commonplace with every major OS [*], so there's just not much economic pressure to invest much in true reliability for the general purpose market.
It's a lot easier to convince an embedded system architect to buy hardware compatible with a specific OS (even if that hardware is more expensive) in order to increase reliability than it is to ask a home user to do the same thing. That's why OSes like this pop up in the special purpose embedded markets first.
Tanenbaum is really interested in changing computing in a much more fundamental way than most operating system vendors. He's saying that we should all be able to ask for the kind of reliability that is currently only found in specialized embedded systems. He's saying that a microkernel is the way to achieve this. Whether or not you agree with this in a predictive way, there's a lot of development left on this track before the systems can be fairly compared to the monolithic systems that have had literally hundreds of thousands of programmer-hours poured into them.
[*] Linux included.
I agree -- I thought the same thing. A million in hundreds would fit comfortably in a briefcase without arousing suspicion. In twenties, it'd still fit in a carry-on suitcase.
If you really want to encourage free software development, one of the best things you can do is to use it. It's not always easy to find the stumbling blocks until you actually try to use the software end-to-end. There aren't many hacker types who actually work in the publishing industry, so having a publisher who is interested in feeding back his needs to the hacking community is invaluable.
It's even better that he was willing to play trial-and-error because that helps the software to improve to meet his needs, but also allows him to adjust his workflow to meet the needs of the software. This allows the possibility of actually improving the workflow compared to proprietary solutions. At the least, it means that perhaps the free software solution doesn't have to implement absolutely every feature of the proprietary software, since a change in the workflow can obviate the need for some of them.
So now, thanks to this guy, we have an example of a real-world publisher who has actually shown that you can do everything you need using these tools. If he's willing to share his methods, then that makes it easier for others to do the same. That's awesome.
So no, it's not absolutely necessary to commit yourself fully to free software just because you think it's better. However, I think you can make a pretty strong argument that you do much more for the community by doing so. It's not an all-or-nothing proposition, though, so each can give according to his ability/willingness.
It doesn't need to be long to be an essay. I had a course that required two one-page long essays per week. It shouldn't take more than an hour or two to put together an essay of that length. Once you're in the habit of doing this, you can churn them out quickly. That doesn't mean the quality is poor, just that you're very comfortable with the format and the process of sitting down, organizing a few simple ideas, and writing them up. I think large numbers of short assignments are much better for this than fewer larger assignments.
You're trying to get comfortable with the process, and if you're only actually writing something every other week, you just don't spend enough time to get comfortable. Perhaps it would make sense to start off with one a week for a couple weeks just to get people rolling, but I don't think that asking for a couple short essays every week is at all excessive.
I always set my mail reader to ignore all return receipt requests. If I want someone to know I read their message, then I'll reply to the email myself. I find them to be intrusive and impolite.