Grr... Okay, the lameness filter has forced
me to say more. Fine.
I receive roughly one thousand spam messages
per day.
Since the passage of the CAN SPAM act, that has not
decreased in the slightest. I have noticed only
a single difference, which actually has benefitted
me, but won't work for everyone - The proportion of
messages coming from "suspicious" foreign domains,
like.il,.cz..ru,.tw, etc, has increased quite a
bit. So, since I block all of them, the amount of
spam I actually see has dropped. Otherwise,
no change in the total volume.
This is slashdot.
You can break the law if it's disobedience
against Microsoft, RIAA labels, Disney or
any other mean big business.
Thanks to precisely the "big business" you refer
to, the idea of "do it because the law says so"
has lost any meaning. Once upon a time, people
respected the law, and usually obeyed it. They
respected police, and thanked them for doing a
hard job and protecting the community.
Now, people look at the law as a neverending
set of snares that can catch even the most
"upright" among us, for things that no one
in their right mind considers an actual crime;
at the same time, big business routinely engages
in activities that even the most "ethically challenege"
among us considers an abominable abuse of people and
"the system", without committing the least misdemeanor.
People consider police mere thugs, officially
carrying out the whims of our megalomaniacal
AG, and unofficially engaging in far more
nefarious activity (rape, torture, extortion,
"abuse of position", etc), which their "Policeman's
Bill of Rights" makes exceedingly difficult
to catch them at, let alone punish them for.
Possession of a joint will get you a heavier
sentence than DUI, yet the government responds
by requiring breathalizers in new cars.
Downloading a song worth less than $5 leads
to a $150,000 fine (payable via bankruptcy
or a "mere" $3k extortion rackett that even
several of our corrupt state SCs have called
fradulently misleading, since it doesn't
prevent later suit by the actual
copyright holders).
I could go on, but I don't want to start
ranting, and those two seem the most relevant
to recent Slashdot posts.
Basically, society no longer cares what the
"law" says, because more and more people realize
that the "law" says whatever the Honorable
Senator from Disney wants it to say. Using it
to defend your position compares well to using
a pool of sewage runoff to take a bath in - You
don't actually accomplish your goal, and you
come out smelling like shit.
Mr. Bad Man with a Big Knife, can you wait 30
seconds before you kill me while I blow into this
tube to start my car so I can flee?
Though meant in jest, I see your point as
the most serious a problem with laws
such as this.
What happens when you absolutely need,
in your example to save your life, to get into
your car and have it move immediately?
What about driving, in an emergency (ie, to
bring someone to the hospital if the phone goes
out and you can't call 911), yet you've had two
beers? Does "don't drive slightly impaired"
matter more than "guaranteed death without
medical treatment"?
On a more legal note (though IANAL), how does
this not count as an illegal search? Yet
another law that completely circumvents
that whole sticky 4th amendment mess...
The right of the people to be secure in their
persons, houses, papers, and effects, against
unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not
be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but
upon probable cause, supported by Oath or
affirmation, and particularly describing the
place to be searched, and the persons or things
to be seized.
When the cops pull you over for swerving, they
satisfy the "probably cause" part. How does
having to blow into a tube every time you
start the car fit into that? Simple - It
does not.
Ok fine, but you haven't said which laws (in
general or specific) the RIAA has imposed upon
the populace that are so detrimental. I
personally like property rights.
Simple example...
How much does it save you to download a song from
Kazaa, compared with buying the song? $5 for a
single? $20 for an exceedingly rare import?
Now, for that generous estimate of $20, the RIAA
can sue for $150,000 dollars. You have "hurt"
them in a way that wouldn't even pay the bar
tab for one executive's lunch, and they can
win so much from you that you will literally
never recover. They can completely
deprive you of any semblance of a life, even
any hope for the future, in exchage for $20
in arguable damages.
Think about that, as "reasonable" damages...
Life vs $20? Would you say that your
life has a value of only $20?, even with
some allowance for "punative" fines? Hell,
I'd say even $10k would ruin most people's
5-year plan. For reference, at minimum wage,
the $150k violation for a single song would,
even assuming no other expenses (like food
and shelter), take over 10 years to
pay off.
THAT, we see, as so amazingly unfair
and biased toward copyright owners, as to
justify saying "screw them, if they can do
this and not break the law, the law
has it wrong".
Perhaps our different POVs are due to the
term restricting?
Perhaps. When I say that the GPL should
allow some additional constraints,
I mean that the GPL's authors should
carefully consider what sort of
restrictions to allow.
Disallowing patented code I see as reasonable,
since I see that as one of the biggest potential
future challenges the GPL will face - What happens
when something like the Unisys mess happens, with
code that has used the GPL for 10 years?
Substantially violating the spirit of the GPL,
I do not see as acceptible. Something like
restricting it to non-commercial or non-military
use gets a bit more messy, but the way I
see it, letting someone use the GPL as
the core of their license at least
allows a stable underlying framework, and
reduces the potential for having a hellish
tangle of conflicting licenses (ie, would
you rather read 27 pages of "Fred's semi-open
license V3.1", or "GPL, with the exception
that you can't use it for blah"?).
As a non-lawyer, I don't quite know how they
should phrase this. But I can think of quite
a few additional terms that would not present
a problem - Such as credit for the original
author's work, preventing patent encumbrance,
recognition for the author's work (perhaps even
to the point of requiring a purely token form of
"payment", such as an email to the author). As
a programmer, I personally would like a "no
commercial or military use" clause, since although
I want to share with the community, I have very
little desire to see Microsoft make another billion
off work I did for the love of it, or for the Air
Force to use my code to help guide a missile to
its target.
I do agree with you, though, after your
clarification, that allowing any and all
additional limitations could cause serious
problems. Perhaps simply limiting future
use to the same exact terms, unless every
contributing author agrees otherwise, would
work? But in general, I didn't mean my
original point so broadly as I think you
took it.
If free use for a patent is given, why
would that have to be a bad thing? A
patent says I own it.
Precisely because of what I quoted in
bold. You own it. For the duration of
the patent, you can do whatever you want
with it.
Including, unfortunately, letting everyone
use if for free for the first 15 years, then
charging once it becomes a ubiquitous standard,
such as happened with GIFs.
You can also impose any terms of distribution
you want, which IMO causes a serious legal
dilemma in this case - Once you release code under
the GPL, it stays that way. You can "undo" it for
future releases, but whatever you already GPL'd
stays that way forever. However... If you
release a program under the GPL, which makes use of
a patented techniques, you also have the right, at
any time, to say "oh, just kidding, you can't use
that without paying me royalties". Such an action
effectively gives people an "out" even long after
they've committed themselves (and possibly millions
of others have as well) to using that code in a
GPL'd project.
IMO, that would effectively mean the end of the
GPL. People use it because it lets them feel
reasonably safe about using GPL'd code, as long
as they also want to share their results with the
world. If, suddenly, the GPL status of any given
blob of code could vanish overnight... Well, even
if the open source community chose to ignore the
law, not a company on the planet would ever touch
anything GPL'd again.
Sure, we can still get Apache for free...
but what happens when we want to make a few
modifications and such? We get canned.
No. If you want to make modifications in
violation of the non-GPL portion of Apache's
license, you have every right (since they do
base 99% of the license on the GPL) to release
your changes under the pure GPL. You just can't
contribute it back to Apache unless you agree to
their additional terms. Nothing more, nothing
less. They have even publically stated as much.
So, you are suggesting that you be able to
place restrictions on code that the original
author did not place on the code?
I said nothing of the sort.
If you contribute to a "pure" GPL project,
you agree to release your code under the
terms of the GPL.
Similarly, if you contribute to Apache, you
agree to release your code under the Apache
(2.0?) license.
If, however, you release code to a GPL
project which later adopts a different
license, than, by the GPL, you have every
right to demand either the removal of your
code, or that the project remain GPL.
This doesn't seem all that complicated,
IMO; I wonder what I said that gave you
the wrong idea...
Even assuming, for whatever reason, you cannot
withdraw your code, by someone releasing it
against your will under a more restrictive
license, you haven't lost anything at all - You
can still release it on your own under the raw
GPL, with no such restrictions. But offhand, I
can't think of any scenarios where that would
even apply, since my fourth paragraph pretty
much covers the precursor to such a situation.
You can't say that you are "pro-OpenSource"
and then say "Well, unless it's an important
piece of software. We can always make
exceptions."
True, but we don't need to...
Both the change in the X license, and now this
from Apache, do not in any way violate the
spirit of the free/open source movement. X
simply wanted a bit of credit (not unreasonable,
considering that I've actually had people
familiar with RedHat ask me what OS I used, on
seeing my Slackware fileserver on which I never
even installed X... People associate X as a
critical part of Linux). And Apache... Well,
I think most of us would agree that rejecting
patented contributions seems more in
keeping with the spirit of free software than
allowing them.
Basically, we as a community need to come up
with a bit of a modification to section 6 of
the GPL, the part that prevents additional
restrictions as terms of the license. These
"problems" will only cause a real schism if
we sphexishly stand by that clause.
Not that section 6 doesn't have merit - But
allowing certain categories of additional
requirements would not in any way hurt us, and
may well benefit us in the long run (ie, this
addition by Apache strikes me as so obviously
good that it surprises me to realize that the
GPL doesn't already mention it, since how can
code under a nonexpired patent ever
count as "free"?)
But how many of these pieces of software named/.*w?in(dows)?.*/ are operating systems?
Just one - "Windows".
Lindows just makes Linux simple enough to use
for your typical Grandmother, mostly through GUI
tweaks. If that provides sufficient
basis for infringement, why hasn't MS shut down
X-Windows yet?
Oh, yeah - Because X existed first,
providing yet another reason why MS should
have no power whatsoever to enforce their
so-called "trademark".
Does the failure of SCO to sue Google (or
any major corporate Linux user) really
surprise anyone?
First of all, SCO most likely chose that "90 days"
to fall after the deadline to come up with
some evidence in the IBM case. Darl et al
no doubt figured that they'd either have an
airtight case against Google, or have found
new jobs by this point.
Second, how would such a suit proceed? I'd
imagine Google's lawyers would start off by
requesting a dismissal with prejudice, on the
grounds that SCO can't sue for infringement on
something they have no rights to. Failing in
that, they'd just request putting off the case
until a resolution of SCO vs IBM, which means
basically the same thing, they'd just have
to wait a bit longer.
Finally, assuming SCO did choose Google
as their primary target, the fact that Google
has put off its IPO no doubt weighs heavily in
SCO's inaction - The deeper the pockets, the
more you can get. With $25bn, Google would
have some pretty deep pockets, on the
short-term. With only a few tens of million
above operating expenses, OTOH, SCO would have to
consider itself lucky just to win the cost of
their licenses, nevermind any penalties...
This is infantile. If you are being
forced to change your name, just do it.
No, this pokes fun at MS's insanity.
This seems completely asinine. How many hundreds
of products out there call themselves "win"foo,
or foo"indows"-bar? Yet who does MS go after?
a Linux company.
Microsoft arguably has to protect their
trademarks to keep them valid, but the existance
of exactly the examples I gave demonstrate that
they have already given up their
trademark. And that doesn't even take into
consideration the outright absurdity of trying
to consider a common English word as a trademark
in the first place.
So, a jab at MS? Yup. Infantile? Hey,
personally I would have gone even further,
changing it to something like "Nanosuck
Lindoors YQ", with a slogan like "what it takes
them a millionth of a second to do, we
do in a billionth", or "Bo and Luke may
have used windows, but the rest of us prefer
doors", or "A full letter ahead of the competition"
(okay, those all sound really stupid, but you get
the idea - Push the limits of trademarkability
to their idiotic extremes).
Earlier today, I thouht the EU came down a bit
hard on MS, rejecting the very settlement they
(the EU) themselves had proposed. But now?
Crap like this makes me long for the revocation
of a company's (not just MS's) corporate charter.
If they can't all play nice, take 'em out back
and put 'em all against the wall.
The Great Inuit Vocabulary Hoax is
anthropology's contribution to urban
legends. It apparently started in 1911
when anthropologist Franz Boaz casually
mentioned that the Inuit--he called them
"Eskimos," using the derogatory term of
a tribe to the south of them for eaters
of raw meat--had four different words for
snow. With each succeeding reference in
textbooks and the popular press the number
grew to sometimes as many as 400 words.
As an aside, more modern surveys of various
"Eskimo" languages have found as many as 30
words for snow, but this doesn't differ all
that much from English, where if you tally all
the various slang terms from, for example,
skiers and snowboarders, you can get a few
dozen as well.
Furthermore, when you do have a
language with literally hundreds of "words" for
variations on a similar concept, such as the
(partially humorous) list from the above link,
they result from what in English we would consider
compound words... For example, such counts consider
"words" like wetsnow and
crunchysnow as distinct.
Finally, the hologram is recorded as a
sub-micron concave-convex pattern in each
waveguide layer of the media. For data
retrieval, a laser beam is focused at the
end of a waveguide layer, then the light
propagates in the waveguide and is scattered
by the concave-convex pattern.
Correct me if I misunderstood the description,
but why does this count as a hologram? It
sounds more like a multi-layer microfilm, with
each layer independantly addressable. Nothing
"holographic" about that, any more than a dual
layer DVD could also count as "holographic"...
I also have to take issue with the idea of
"Copying of the media is very difficult"...
Do they just mean an exact reproduction (in the
sense that you cannot physically make a bitwise
exact copy of a pressed DVD due to the lack of a
writeable CSS ring on writeable media), or does
something about this technology make it hard to
read in general? If the former, no biggie,
I expect we'll see something like Daemon Tools
for it within a few weeks of release. If the
latter - Well, we have all heard jokes about
the military using write-only media, but what
good would that do anyone, outside a
joke?
However, I do look forward to seeing this
hit the market - Not so much for the potential
of its initial form factor (which, if cheap,
would take the embedded world by storm), but
rather, for its future storage density potential.
If the first run can fit 1gb/in^2 in a solid
state device, how about the third generation,
holding 100x the density, with media the size
of a CD? We'd realistically have portable and
cheap terabyte media!
Re:What a bunch of assholes.
on
Cell-Phone Wars
·
· Score: 1
does it hurt being so self important?
Does it hurt, so fearing to express your opinion
that you have to post as AC?
Having so little to say, that you resort to
one-line taunts that not even an insecure
8YO would feel "hurt" by?
Having so little to do, that you've decided to
play "Virtual stalker" of someone who, if
sometimes infuriating, actually posts comments
that get good ratings and meaninful rebuttals,
while you can't master the argumentative skills
or social graces needed to fake your way through
a basic online discussion?
Or have I just hit a nerve, and like so many
of the world's sad adolescents, you simply can't
live without your cell phone? Can't stand the
thought of missing that never-forthcoming SMS
from any girl other than your mother or
sister? Actively enjoy using your little
toy in a way that pisses people off, because you
haven't yet learned that soliciting a negative
response doesn't mean people "like" you?
Grow up.
I stand by my posts, and attach my handle
to them because I believe what I say. You, on
the other hand, seem to have nothing better to
say than random insults, Stalker-boy.
You flatter me, but really, piss off. Feel free
to respond to me from a named account, with some
insightful commentary. Until then, consider
yourself ignored.
So, you'd consider it appropos to block
someone's right to an emergency communication
simply because you don't like the method of
transmission?
Yawn.
As I pointed out, we survived for hundreds of
thousands of years before even the telephone,
nevermind cell phones, came into existance.
If the problem occurs in a random location,
you won't find me there to bother you (I tend
to avoid commotions in random places,
rather than gawk like most people).
If the problem occurs in a car, pull over,
and I'll have driven past so quickly that
you won't even notice the disruption in your
signal.
If the problem occurs in a theatre, leave.
Problem solved. Can't leave? Then you
probably can't dial a phone, either.
You still have every "right" (though I don't
think we do actually have any sort of
"rights" with regard to using a cell phone)
to make an emergency call. You do not
have the right to sit near me and disrupt my
meal/movie for which I paid. You want to chat?
Go outside. Simple as that.
I will repeat, for the third time
in this thread, that cell phone jammers would
not exist if the majority of people didn't
consider cell phone users as intolerably
rude. Whatever you may say about the public
backlash to that rudeness, "they started it".
Unfortunately for the "good" cell users (No
doubt all of them, since despite us all
knowing the annoyance of a phone ringing
during a movie, "everyone" always turns
them off like good little doobies), a
technological solution exists, which more
and more people have learned of.
Everyone claims to behave, and points out the
"emergency" uses of a cell phone. I call shenanigans.
Out of the uncountable times I have wanted to rip a
phone out of someone's hand and slam it against a
wall, not once have I actually heard a call
for help. Sure, they exist - I have no doubt of that.
But to defend the majority of use by that? Yeah,
whatever... And most people use Kazaa for trading
legal files, too.
If it makes you feel better, go ahead and call
me an asshole. Flip me the bird, rant and rave,
have a ball. Just hang up and drive (or eat, or
watch the movie).
Re:What a bunch of assholes.
on
Cell-Phone Wars
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
When you go out in public, you are subject
to the social norms of the area you live in.
Yet another hypocrit. I could respond to you guys
all day, and barely scratch the surface...
Tell me, why do you think some people have
resorted to carrying around cell phone jammers?
For the extra dose of radiation to the 'nads? To
deliberately block the <0.01% of true emergency calls
people make?
No.
People have resorted to jamming cell frequencies because
far too many cell users have no concept of the very
"social norms" you refer to. Not that all people abuse
their right to a cell phone - I know quite a few people who
use them politely and never in a rude or dangerous situation.
Yet, I haven't gone to a movie in over a year where no
idiot forgot to turn off his phone (I use "forgot" generously,
I have little doubt many such people have no intention of
turning off their phones). I can't go shopping without
another such moron holding up the line by refusing to hang
up so he can quickly pay the cashier. You can't walk down
most city streets without carefully dodging these potential
Darwin-award recipients, blissfully unaware of their busy
surroundings.
So you want to talk about manners? Fine. I'll
tolerate rude cell phone users as soon as you teach every
last one of them to switch the damned things off.
Yes, but try to explain that to these people
who think their temporary comfort is more
important than the possible needs of anyone
else around them.
Curious... I thought humans only came up with the
telephone a mere century ago. How ever
did we survive for all those millenia before
then? No doubt a mystery for the archaeologists.
people that just carry around jammers so
they don't have to listen to others talking
on the phone while they ride the train need
to be shot. The world does not revolve around
you!
Funny, most of us feel the same way about all
the asshats who can't even get off the damned
phone to, for example, pay a cashier, place an
order at a restaurant, or just plain drive.
Personally, I would carry a cell jammer, have
one at my house, and in both vehicles, regardless
of legality, if they didn't cost a few hundred
bucks. You can call me "inconsiderate" or
"self-centered" all you want, but I have
NEVER interrupted a play, or movie, or
other public event, merely because I consider
myself too important to miss a call.
Phones have an "off" switch for a reason. If
you don't consider that its default state, I
guarantee that you annoy those around you.
Personally, i think this is why "Pirating"
a game to just try it out is a good thing. If
you had "tried" it out first, you would have
realized how flawed the game was, and not had
to go through this hassle.
True indeed... Except, you've also just described
the very reason companies (game, software, music,
whatever) hate piracy so much. In any
other setting, they'd consider it "free
advertising", since those who would buy it
still will, and those who will never buy
don't actually count as a lost sale. But
in the "mass consumer content" style
industries, "try before you buy" often means
"learn how much our product sucks before
we have your cash in hand".
When you consider "piracy" in those terms, it
all starts to make sense. It allows small players
with good products to displace "the big boys" who
consistently produce utter crap (or their one hit
repackaged under yet another name). Totally
intolerable, to those currently leading the
market. Solution? Crack down on all this
damned free advertising. Simple as that.
Not that such an approach can ever actually
work, but on paper, I suppose it looks
good to the top-level management.
Wouldn't it make more sense to use the solar
energy for electrolysis to break hydrogen
molecules apart from plain old water? Much
faster too.
I agree 100%, and I do indeed hope that hydrogen
produced by photolytic hydrolysis eventually
comes to dominate our energy supply.
However, hydrogen by itself has a fairly low
energy density, not to mention its high
reactivity. Ethanol, though, makes a good
way to store hydrogen, particularly if we
can efficiently (60%, the FP claimed) get it
back.
Yeah, I wonder how they came up with that figure,
the average hairdryer uses over 1000 watts
Do you run a hairdryer all day long?
A 1Kw fuel cell, running 24/7 and charging a
battery array, would almost take care
of a typical home's electricity needs. I agree
only 1Kw seems a tad low, but 2Kw would more than
suffice for most homes.
For comparison, in CA, on-grid "normal" homes (ie,
all the standard electric-sucking toys) with a
supplimentary 3Kw solar array (which only really
helps for less than eight hours per day) can
basically break even on their electic bills.
Slashdot Mirror
Need I say more?
.il, .cz. .ru, .tw, etc, has increased quite a
bit. So, since I block all of them, the amount of
spam I actually see has dropped. Otherwise,
no change in the total volume.
Grr... Okay, the lameness filter has forced me to say more. Fine.
I receive roughly one thousand spam messages per day.
Since the passage of the CAN SPAM act, that has not decreased in the slightest. I have noticed only a single difference, which actually has benefitted me, but won't work for everyone - The proportion of messages coming from "suspicious" foreign domains, like
This is slashdot.
You can break the law if it's disobedience against Microsoft, RIAA labels, Disney or any other mean big business.
Thanks to precisely the "big business" you refer to, the idea of "do it because the law says so" has lost any meaning. Once upon a time, people respected the law, and usually obeyed it. They respected police, and thanked them for doing a hard job and protecting the community.
Now, people look at the law as a neverending set of snares that can catch even the most "upright" among us, for things that no one in their right mind considers an actual crime; at the same time, big business routinely engages in activities that even the most "ethically challenege" among us considers an abominable abuse of people and "the system", without committing the least misdemeanor. People consider police mere thugs, officially carrying out the whims of our megalomaniacal AG, and unofficially engaging in far more nefarious activity (rape, torture, extortion, "abuse of position", etc), which their "Policeman's Bill of Rights" makes exceedingly difficult to catch them at, let alone punish them for.
Possession of a joint will get you a heavier sentence than DUI, yet the government responds by requiring breathalizers in new cars.
Downloading a song worth less than $5 leads to a $150,000 fine (payable via bankruptcy or a "mere" $3k extortion rackett that even several of our corrupt state SCs have called fradulently misleading, since it doesn't prevent later suit by the actual copyright holders).
I could go on, but I don't want to start ranting, and those two seem the most relevant to recent Slashdot posts.
Basically, society no longer cares what the "law" says, because more and more people realize that the "law" says whatever the Honorable Senator from Disney wants it to say. Using it to defend your position compares well to using a pool of sewage runoff to take a bath in - You don't actually accomplish your goal, and you come out smelling like shit.
WOW! Everyone listen to this man! He's very smart! Mod up +5 GENIUS!
Cool...
I didn't know Dubbya himself read Slashdot!
Though meant in jest, I see your point as the most serious a problem with laws such as this.
What happens when you absolutely need, in your example to save your life, to get into your car and have it move immediately?
What about driving, in an emergency (ie, to bring someone to the hospital if the phone goes out and you can't call 911), yet you've had two beers? Does "don't drive slightly impaired" matter more than "guaranteed death without medical treatment"?
On a more legal note (though IANAL), how does this not count as an illegal search? Yet another law that completely circumvents that whole sticky 4th amendment mess...
When the cops pull you over for swerving, they satisfy the "probably cause" part. How does having to blow into a tube every time you start the car fit into that? Simple - It does not.
Ok fine, but you haven't said which laws (in general or specific) the RIAA has imposed upon the populace that are so detrimental. I personally like property rights.
Simple example...
How much does it save you to download a song from Kazaa, compared with buying the song? $5 for a single? $20 for an exceedingly rare import?
Now, for that generous estimate of $20, the RIAA can sue for $150,000 dollars. You have "hurt" them in a way that wouldn't even pay the bar tab for one executive's lunch, and they can win so much from you that you will literally never recover. They can completely deprive you of any semblance of a life, even any hope for the future, in exchage for $20 in arguable damages.
Think about that, as "reasonable" damages... Life vs $20? Would you say that your life has a value of only $20?, even with some allowance for "punative" fines? Hell, I'd say even $10k would ruin most people's 5-year plan. For reference, at minimum wage, the $150k violation for a single song would, even assuming no other expenses (like food and shelter), take over 10 years to pay off.
THAT, we see, as so amazingly unfair and biased toward copyright owners, as to justify saying "screw them, if they can do this and not break the law, the law has it wrong".
Perhaps our different POVs are due to the term restricting?
Perhaps. When I say that the GPL should allow some additional constraints, I mean that the GPL's authors should carefully consider what sort of restrictions to allow.
Disallowing patented code I see as reasonable, since I see that as one of the biggest potential future challenges the GPL will face - What happens when something like the Unisys mess happens, with code that has used the GPL for 10 years? Substantially violating the spirit of the GPL, I do not see as acceptible. Something like restricting it to non-commercial or non-military use gets a bit more messy, but the way I see it, letting someone use the GPL as the core of their license at least allows a stable underlying framework, and reduces the potential for having a hellish tangle of conflicting licenses (ie, would you rather read 27 pages of "Fred's semi-open license V3.1", or "GPL, with the exception that you can't use it for blah"?).
As a non-lawyer, I don't quite know how they should phrase this. But I can think of quite a few additional terms that would not present a problem - Such as credit for the original author's work, preventing patent encumbrance, recognition for the author's work (perhaps even to the point of requiring a purely token form of "payment", such as an email to the author). As a programmer, I personally would like a "no commercial or military use" clause, since although I want to share with the community, I have very little desire to see Microsoft make another billion off work I did for the love of it, or for the Air Force to use my code to help guide a missile to its target.
I do agree with you, though, after your clarification, that allowing any and all additional limitations could cause serious problems. Perhaps simply limiting future use to the same exact terms, unless every contributing author agrees otherwise, would work? But in general, I didn't mean my original point so broadly as I think you took it.
If free use for a patent is given, why would that have to be a bad thing? A patent says I own it.
Precisely because of what I quoted in bold. You own it. For the duration of the patent, you can do whatever you want with it.
Including, unfortunately, letting everyone use if for free for the first 15 years, then charging once it becomes a ubiquitous standard, such as happened with GIFs.
You can also impose any terms of distribution you want, which IMO causes a serious legal dilemma in this case - Once you release code under the GPL, it stays that way. You can "undo" it for future releases, but whatever you already GPL'd stays that way forever. However... If you release a program under the GPL, which makes use of a patented techniques, you also have the right, at any time, to say "oh, just kidding, you can't use that without paying me royalties". Such an action effectively gives people an "out" even long after they've committed themselves (and possibly millions of others have as well) to using that code in a GPL'd project.
IMO, that would effectively mean the end of the GPL. People use it because it lets them feel reasonably safe about using GPL'd code, as long as they also want to share their results with the world. If, suddenly, the GPL status of any given blob of code could vanish overnight... Well, even if the open source community chose to ignore the law, not a company on the planet would ever touch anything GPL'd again.
Sure, we can still get Apache for free... but what happens when we want to make a few modifications and such? We get canned.
No. If you want to make modifications in violation of the non-GPL portion of Apache's license, you have every right (since they do base 99% of the license on the GPL) to release your changes under the pure GPL. You just can't contribute it back to Apache unless you agree to their additional terms. Nothing more, nothing less. They have even publically stated as much.
So, you are suggesting that you be able to place restrictions on code that the original author did not place on the code?
I said nothing of the sort.
If you contribute to a "pure" GPL project, you agree to release your code under the terms of the GPL.
Similarly, if you contribute to Apache, you agree to release your code under the Apache (2.0?) license.
If, however, you release code to a GPL project which later adopts a different license, than, by the GPL, you have every right to demand either the removal of your code, or that the project remain GPL.
This doesn't seem all that complicated, IMO; I wonder what I said that gave you the wrong idea...
Even assuming, for whatever reason, you cannot withdraw your code, by someone releasing it against your will under a more restrictive license, you haven't lost anything at all - You can still release it on your own under the raw GPL, with no such restrictions. But offhand, I can't think of any scenarios where that would even apply, since my fourth paragraph pretty much covers the precursor to such a situation.
You can't say that you are "pro-OpenSource" and then say "Well, unless it's an important piece of software. We can always make exceptions."
True, but we don't need to...
Both the change in the X license, and now this from Apache, do not in any way violate the spirit of the free/open source movement. X simply wanted a bit of credit (not unreasonable, considering that I've actually had people familiar with RedHat ask me what OS I used, on seeing my Slackware fileserver on which I never even installed X... People associate X as a critical part of Linux). And Apache... Well, I think most of us would agree that rejecting patented contributions seems more in keeping with the spirit of free software than allowing them.
Basically, we as a community need to come up with a bit of a modification to section 6 of the GPL, the part that prevents additional restrictions as terms of the license. These "problems" will only cause a real schism if we sphexishly stand by that clause.
Not that section 6 doesn't have merit - But allowing certain categories of additional requirements would not in any way hurt us, and may well benefit us in the long run (ie, this addition by Apache strikes me as so obviously good that it surprises me to realize that the GPL doesn't already mention it, since how can code under a nonexpired patent ever count as "free"?)
But how many of these pieces of software named /.*w?in(dows)?.*/ are operating systems?
Just one - "Windows".
Lindows just makes Linux simple enough to use for your typical Grandmother, mostly through GUI tweaks. If that provides sufficient basis for infringement, why hasn't MS shut down X-Windows yet?
Oh, yeah - Because X existed first, providing yet another reason why MS should have no power whatsoever to enforce their so-called "trademark".
Does the failure of SCO to sue Google (or any major corporate Linux user) really surprise anyone?
First of all, SCO most likely chose that "90 days" to fall after the deadline to come up with some evidence in the IBM case. Darl et al no doubt figured that they'd either have an airtight case against Google, or have found new jobs by this point.
Second, how would such a suit proceed? I'd imagine Google's lawyers would start off by requesting a dismissal with prejudice, on the grounds that SCO can't sue for infringement on something they have no rights to. Failing in that, they'd just request putting off the case until a resolution of SCO vs IBM, which means basically the same thing, they'd just have to wait a bit longer.
Finally, assuming SCO did choose Google as their primary target, the fact that Google has put off its IPO no doubt weighs heavily in SCO's inaction - The deeper the pockets, the more you can get. With $25bn, Google would have some pretty deep pockets, on the short-term. With only a few tens of million above operating expenses, OTOH, SCO would have to consider itself lucky just to win the cost of their licenses, nevermind any penalties...
This is infantile. If you are being forced to change your name, just do it.
No, this pokes fun at MS's insanity.
This seems completely asinine. How many hundreds of products out there call themselves "win"foo, or foo"indows"-bar? Yet who does MS go after? a Linux company.
Microsoft arguably has to protect their trademarks to keep them valid, but the existance of exactly the examples I gave demonstrate that they have already given up their trademark. And that doesn't even take into consideration the outright absurdity of trying to consider a common English word as a trademark in the first place.
So, a jab at MS? Yup. Infantile? Hey, personally I would have gone even further, changing it to something like "Nanosuck Lindoors YQ", with a slogan like "what it takes them a millionth of a second to do, we do in a billionth", or "Bo and Luke may have used windows, but the rest of us prefer doors", or "A full letter ahead of the competition" (okay, those all sound really stupid, but you get the idea - Push the limits of trademarkability to their idiotic extremes).
Earlier today, I thouht the EU came down a bit hard on MS, rejecting the very settlement they (the EU) themselves had proposed. But now? Crap like this makes me long for the revocation of a company's (not just MS's) corporate charter. If they can't all play nice, take 'em out back and put 'em all against the wall.
From Rick Mendosa's site:
As an aside, more modern surveys of various "Eskimo" languages have found as many as 30 words for snow, but this doesn't differ all that much from English, where if you tally all the various slang terms from, for example, skiers and snowboarders, you can get a few dozen as well.
Furthermore, when you do have a language with literally hundreds of "words" for variations on a similar concept, such as the (partially humorous) list from the above link, they result from what in English we would consider compound words... For example, such counts consider "words" like wetsnow and crunchysnow as distinct.
Finally, the hologram is recorded as a sub-micron concave-convex pattern in each waveguide layer of the media. For data retrieval, a laser beam is focused at the end of a waveguide layer, then the light propagates in the waveguide and is scattered by the concave-convex pattern.
Correct me if I misunderstood the description, but why does this count as a hologram? It sounds more like a multi-layer microfilm, with each layer independantly addressable. Nothing "holographic" about that, any more than a dual layer DVD could also count as "holographic"...
I also have to take issue with the idea of "Copying of the media is very difficult"... Do they just mean an exact reproduction (in the sense that you cannot physically make a bitwise exact copy of a pressed DVD due to the lack of a writeable CSS ring on writeable media), or does something about this technology make it hard to read in general? If the former, no biggie, I expect we'll see something like Daemon Tools for it within a few weeks of release. If the latter - Well, we have all heard jokes about the military using write-only media, but what good would that do anyone, outside a joke?
However, I do look forward to seeing this hit the market - Not so much for the potential of its initial form factor (which, if cheap, would take the embedded world by storm), but rather, for its future storage density potential. If the first run can fit 1gb/in^2 in a solid state device, how about the third generation, holding 100x the density, with media the size of a CD? We'd realistically have portable and cheap terabyte media!
does it hurt being so self important?
Does it hurt, so fearing to express your opinion that you have to post as AC?
Having so little to say, that you resort to one-line taunts that not even an insecure 8YO would feel "hurt" by?
Having so little to do, that you've decided to play "Virtual stalker" of someone who, if sometimes infuriating, actually posts comments that get good ratings and meaninful rebuttals, while you can't master the argumentative skills or social graces needed to fake your way through a basic online discussion?
Or have I just hit a nerve, and like so many of the world's sad adolescents, you simply can't live without your cell phone? Can't stand the thought of missing that never-forthcoming SMS from any girl other than your mother or sister? Actively enjoy using your little toy in a way that pisses people off, because you haven't yet learned that soliciting a negative response doesn't mean people "like" you?
Grow up.
I stand by my posts, and attach my handle to them because I believe what I say. You, on the other hand, seem to have nothing better to say than random insults, Stalker-boy.
You flatter me, but really, piss off. Feel free to respond to me from a named account, with some insightful commentary. Until then, consider yourself ignored.
So, you'd consider it appropos to block someone's right to an emergency communication simply because you don't like the method of transmission?
Yawn.
As I pointed out, we survived for hundreds of thousands of years before even the telephone, nevermind cell phones, came into existance.
If the problem occurs in a random location, you won't find me there to bother you (I tend to avoid commotions in random places, rather than gawk like most people).
If the problem occurs in a car, pull over, and I'll have driven past so quickly that you won't even notice the disruption in your signal.
If the problem occurs in a theatre, leave. Problem solved. Can't leave? Then you probably can't dial a phone, either.
You still have every "right" (though I don't think we do actually have any sort of "rights" with regard to using a cell phone) to make an emergency call. You do not have the right to sit near me and disrupt my meal/movie for which I paid. You want to chat? Go outside. Simple as that.
I will repeat, for the third time in this thread, that cell phone jammers would not exist if the majority of people didn't consider cell phone users as intolerably rude. Whatever you may say about the public backlash to that rudeness, "they started it". Unfortunately for the "good" cell users (No doubt all of them, since despite us all knowing the annoyance of a phone ringing during a movie, "everyone" always turns them off like good little doobies), a technological solution exists, which more and more people have learned of.
Everyone claims to behave, and points out the "emergency" uses of a cell phone. I call shenanigans. Out of the uncountable times I have wanted to rip a phone out of someone's hand and slam it against a wall, not once have I actually heard a call for help. Sure, they exist - I have no doubt of that. But to defend the majority of use by that? Yeah, whatever... And most people use Kazaa for trading legal files, too.
If it makes you feel better, go ahead and call me an asshole. Flip me the bird, rant and rave, have a ball. Just hang up and drive (or eat, or watch the movie).
When you go out in public, you are subject to the social norms of the area you live in.
Yet another hypocrit. I could respond to you guys all day, and barely scratch the surface...
Tell me, why do you think some people have resorted to carrying around cell phone jammers?
For the extra dose of radiation to the 'nads? To deliberately block the <0.01% of true emergency calls people make?
No.
People have resorted to jamming cell frequencies because far too many cell users have no concept of the very "social norms" you refer to. Not that all people abuse their right to a cell phone - I know quite a few people who use them politely and never in a rude or dangerous situation. Yet, I haven't gone to a movie in over a year where no idiot forgot to turn off his phone (I use "forgot" generously, I have little doubt many such people have no intention of turning off their phones). I can't go shopping without another such moron holding up the line by refusing to hang up so he can quickly pay the cashier. You can't walk down most city streets without carefully dodging these potential Darwin-award recipients, blissfully unaware of their busy surroundings.
So you want to talk about manners? Fine. I'll tolerate rude cell phone users as soon as you teach every last one of them to switch the damned things off.
Yes, but try to explain that to these people who think their temporary comfort is more important than the possible needs of anyone else around them.
Curious... I thought humans only came up with the telephone a mere century ago. How ever did we survive for all those millenia before then? No doubt a mystery for the archaeologists.
people that just carry around jammers so they don't have to listen to others talking on the phone while they ride the train need to be shot. The world does not revolve around you!
Funny, most of us feel the same way about all the asshats who can't even get off the damned phone to, for example, pay a cashier, place an order at a restaurant, or just plain drive.
Personally, I would carry a cell jammer, have one at my house, and in both vehicles, regardless of legality, if they didn't cost a few hundred bucks. You can call me "inconsiderate" or "self-centered" all you want, but I have NEVER interrupted a play, or movie, or other public event, merely because I consider myself too important to miss a call. Phones have an "off" switch for a reason. If you don't consider that its default state, I guarantee that you annoy those around you.
Personally, i think this is why "Pirating" a game to just try it out is a good thing. If you had "tried" it out first, you would have realized how flawed the game was, and not had to go through this hassle.
True indeed... Except, you've also just described the very reason companies (game, software, music, whatever) hate piracy so much. In any other setting, they'd consider it "free advertising", since those who would buy it still will, and those who will never buy don't actually count as a lost sale. But in the "mass consumer content" style industries, "try before you buy" often means "learn how much our product sucks before we have your cash in hand".
When you consider "piracy" in those terms, it all starts to make sense. It allows small players with good products to displace "the big boys" who consistently produce utter crap (or their one hit repackaged under yet another name). Totally intolerable, to those currently leading the market. Solution? Crack down on all this damned free advertising. Simple as that. Not that such an approach can ever actually work, but on paper, I suppose it looks good to the top-level management.
an era where all government documents are tracked and no whistleblowers ever succeed in bringing official misdeeds to light?
RFID'd document + Photocopier = anonymous leak
I kind of doubt you could deactivate them by overloading them, as you can other RFIDs.
I doubt any form of RFID tag will survive 15 seconds in my microwave oven...
Wouldn't it make more sense to use the solar energy for electrolysis to break hydrogen molecules apart from plain old water? Much faster too.
I agree 100%, and I do indeed hope that hydrogen produced by photolytic hydrolysis eventually comes to dominate our energy supply.
However, hydrogen by itself has a fairly low energy density, not to mention its high reactivity. Ethanol, though, makes a good way to store hydrogen, particularly if we can efficiently (60%, the FP claimed) get it back.
I don't no if one can extract the Ethanol from the mixture using only solar power.
A Solar still takes very little knowledge, and no oil to build.
Yeah, I wonder how they came up with that figure, the average hairdryer uses over 1000 watts
Do you run a hairdryer all day long?
A 1Kw fuel cell, running 24/7 and charging a battery array, would almost take care of a typical home's electricity needs. I agree only 1Kw seems a tad low, but 2Kw would more than suffice for most homes.
For comparison, in CA, on-grid "normal" homes (ie, all the standard electric-sucking toys) with a supplimentary 3Kw solar array (which only really helps for less than eight hours per day) can basically break even on their electic bills.