It's hard to go an entire day without seeing some Slashdotter raging at the RIAA for trying to protect their investments. For people here to question any other company ripping off GPL'd code is more than a little hypocritical. The typical Slashdotter is far from having the moral high ground on any IP issues.
Excuse me? Are you simply ignorant of what the word hypocritical means, or are you just too stupid to apply the concept properly?
The fact that you can't go a day without seeing some Slashdotter say something anti-IP does not may ones saying pro-IP things hypocrits unless it's the same person! The fact that some Slashdotters disagree with other Slashdotters is not hypocracy. And frankly, it irks me that there are so many idiots reading Slashdot that think all Slashdotters have one opinion on any issue -- we see far too many comments like the one above pointing out that some Slashdotters have opinions that are inconsistant with the opinions of other Slashdotters, and that therefore there's something hypocritical about the fact that we don't always agree on everything. And last but not least, even if you can name some individuals who have been anti-RIAA but pro-GPL, how is that hypocritical? If you think all of us who dislike the RIAA don't think they have the right and responsibility to defend their IP rights, you'd badly misunderstood what those of us who are critical of the RIAA are complaining about. It is not at all inconsistent to both acknowledge that piracy is wrong and believe that the RIAA is wrong to step on the rights of law-abiding consumers. Get a clue. If you actually bother to try to understand what the issues are, you won't be so surprised when some Slashdotters consistently defend people's rights, and thus rage about the RIAA and rage about ripping of GPL'd code. That's consistency, not hypocracy.
The problem is, using the current version numbering scheme, it'll take forever to get to Linux 1776.0, which of course is when the revolution really begins.:) (Yes, I realize that was extremely US-centric, not to mention historically inaccurate...)
...not to mention the inaccurate crap that was going on on mars. I went to the mars/moon breifing a year ago and they said that the temperature varies greatly between groundlevel and where your head would be, yet it did not bother them when they were in a tent on the martian surface.
Did they all die from the incredibly thin, oxygen poor Martian atmosphere? If not, then I suspect they pumped their own atmosphere into the tent, in which case the fact that the Martian atmosphere has greatly different temperature between foot and head level is irrelevant -- the atmosphere in the tent will be more or less uniformly the temperature they heated it to.
Umm, I think the point is, if you find life (still alive or the remains of, it matters not) on another planet, it'd be incredibly significant to discover it has DNA at all, rather than some completely different molecule on which genetic information is encoded. So yah, any DNA you find at all on another planet "looks human" (as opposed to what you'd expect -- not being the same molecule at all).
Patent laws need to be fixed, but that doesn't mean all patents are bad.
But all patents are bad! Copyrights protect specific expressions of an idea, and that's a good thing. Patents protect an idea itself, and this takes the idea of intellectual property way too far. Nobody should own an idea, at best you should own your expression of it. I do not believe there is such thing as a proper use of patent law -- the idea is flawed to begin with. Software patents are not a special case, requiring patent law to be fixed. They simply make more glaringly obvious the flaws that have always existed in patent law. It's a bad idea from the start. It shouldn't be fixed, it should be dropped...
But you've got one point wrong - it doesn't mean that people on uncommon hardware will be left out in the cold. Didn't you know that the XFree86 driver loader loads a single binary driver no matter what platform you're on?
No, I'm afraid he's got it right and you've a bit confused about XF86 4.0's new binary module loading facility. The new XF86's common binary driver module format allows people running uncommon operating systems to not be left out in the cold. The same binary driver will work on any OS running XF86, be it Linux, BSD, or whatever. This prevents alternate operating systems from being left out in the cold, but it does nothing to prevent alternate hardware from being left out in the cold. Your i386 driver is not going to run on my SPARCstation or my Mac. If manufacturers begin releasing binary-only drivers, and they follow the usual procedure of ignoring anyone not running Intel processors, then indeed people on uncommon hardware are going to be left out in the cold.
Well, actually, the post is both offtopic and flamebait, but having read it, I'd say flamebait is more appropriate. Yes, Macs kicked ass all over PC's during the 80's and early 90's, where any "new" feature your PC friends would brag about would cause a tremendous yawn since you'd been using it for over 5 years (more than 640K memory, more than 16 million color graphics, etc. just two of many features that were available on Macs more than half a decade earlier than PC compats). Displaying the desktop across multiple monitors has been an option for at least as long as I've used Macs, and I purchased mine in '89. But what does this have to do with XFree86? Absolutely nothing...
I don't know about added substance, but apparently you won't need to beat your mouse to Hell. You'll be able to simply hold down the mouse button and your character will continue attacking as long as the mouse is held down.
I've read Mr. Bertrand's letter several times, and he's not accused of anything
A clarification: the "he" here refers to Mr. de Joode, not Mr. Bertrand as it may at first seem. Sloppy use of pronouns on my part; I apologize.
One more thing, I simply don't have time to reply to the message in its entirety, so I picked this as the most obvious example of what's wrong with this "Proper Analysis", to illustrate it's nothing of the sort. The rest of it works the same way: straw-man tactics. First the author distorts what Mr. Bertrand says, then argues against the fabricated point Mr. Bertrand never said to begin with. It's easy to win an argument against a straw-man. But it's the furthest thing in the world away from "A Proper Analysis."
Those are pretty brutal accusations which you seemed not willing to react to.
Reread the quoted text:
Please do not visit the.ORG site, nor send email to anybody at the.ORG address.
That's a couple of requests. No accusations there.
This is more than just a request to boycott: there could be privacy issues, possibly data mining or building a mailing list of security conscious users.
This is an observation. Note particularly that it discusses in the hypothetical mode (note the words "possibly" and "could be") what could be done with such a domain, and as a webadmin, I can assure you that the observation is absolutely true. But note that at no point is any accusation made that this is or ever will be done.
We simply don't know Mr. de Joode's motives,
Another observation. No accusation here. In fact, this admission precludes the author from making any accusations. If the author wished to make any accusations, he would have to deny what he's just admitted.
and we recommend caution.
And finally, we have a recommendation. No accusation here either.
I'd sure love to know where these "brutal accusations" of which you speak are.
I would like to know why you claim this.
What pray tell did you think the author was claiming? That there exists the possibility that this could be used for data mining? I assume the author claims this because it's absolutely true. That the site is for this purpose? The author does not claim this at all, in fact he points out that he doesn't know Mr. de Joode's motives at all! I assume that this too is a true statement. Since the author has made nothing but obviously true statements, I'm curious about what potentially false accusations you believe are in the letter? I can't find any...
Finally, Mr. Bertrand pushes one of the hottest buttons in the community, privacy. "This is more than just a request to boycott: there could be privacy issues, possibly data mining or building a mailing list of security conscious users. We simply don't know Mr. de Joode's motives, and we recommend caution." Hmm, a very strong accusation.
WTF?!? Did you read the text you just quoted? Where's the accusation? You do know what the word means, don't you? Where in the letter does it say Mr. de Joode is doing anything? Saying he could use the domain for data mining is not an accusation, it's an observation. You do understand the difference between these two words, right? I've read Mr. Bertrand's letter several times, and he's not accused of anything (other than not selling his domain, and I don't believe that fact is in dispute).
None of us like being spammed, tracked where we go, etc. So, I asked myself, "What data mining is openssh.org doing?"
If you'd actually read and understood the original letter, you'd have realized that question is irrelevant. openssh.org was not accused of engaging in that activity in that letter. I suggest learning some basic reading skills before attempting "A Proper Analysis" of anything -- how can you analyze a letter when you obviously didn't read and understand it to begin with?
They also fail to give any rationale for their accusations other than that de Joode refused to sell them his property, which is meaningless.
Well, seeing as how they haven't made any accussations, it'd be kind of hard for them to give any rationale for them.
...but have a little think: Why would the OpenSSH group want you to think that openssh.org, who points to openssh.com and to one other site, is evil?
First of all, they didn't say it was evil, they quite specifically said they don't know the motivations behind it. So, maybe it's evil, maybe it's not. They have made no accusations nor any statements at all to the effect that the motives are bad. Secondly, ignoring your question but asking the relevant one I think you may have been alluding to: Why would the OpenSSH group recommend not trusting openssh.org? Is there some reason we need to speculate about this question? They answer it in their own letter (you did read it, didn't you? You seem to be replying to/. comments instead of the letter, since you've already said twice it says things it doesn't say) when they point out that the motives of openssh.org are unclear at present.
Umm, if 3 TLDs are too many, would you recommend just one? If everything ended in, say, ".com", we could just leave off the ".com" on all domain name names. Then we wouldn't have 1 TLD, we'd have millions!
Paradoxical as it may sound, an argument that 3 TLDs is too many is an argument that there should be more TLDs!
Not that hypocricy is at all uncommon in the world, but I have noticed that when someone notes someone else exhibiting different behavior in case A than case B and calls that person a hypocrite, 95% of the time it's because the person doing the accusing is too clueless to understand that case A and B are two different cases, and are unable to identify the relevant differences between the two.
The other thing I've noted is that since in the responses to any Slashdot article are all over the map, anyone stupid enough to believe there's any such thing as "the opinion (note the singular) of Slashdotters" can easily "identify" (that is, manufacture in their own minds) instances of hypocricy. It becomes much more difficult if they're asked to provide evidence (i.e. which specific poster said it was wrong for X but right for Y -- it's no good to say "someone said X before but you're saying Y now").
Did you have anything real to say here, or do you just like to complain without having any real point or substance?
Harsh? Harsh?! WTF?!? The OpenSSH people have done, what? They've issued an advisory that essentially says, "Hey, it ain't us, so if you want to see or talk to us, don't visit or send email there!" In what way is this harsh?
Why do we trust that they haven't inserted bogus code in the OpenSSH source? When is the last time you looked at the code, and compiled it yourself, rather than downloading the precompiled packages?
Open Source doesn't require everyone to look at the source in order to prevent that, it just requires that enough people do it so that the word gets out of there is something like that going on. What are the odds that no one has looked at the OpenSSH source? Let 99% of the people download and install precompiled packages if they want. This doesn't hurt reliability or security in the slightest. Preventing the other 1% from seeing the source is what hurts.
In short, the principle is "many eyeballs", not "every eyeball".
Unfortunately, if he intends ill with "openssh.org" based on its similarity to the official site's name, making the official site "open-ssh.org" actually plays into his hand. It's probably best not to make the official site differ from his by a simple and easily forgettable bit of punctuation.
I'm not sure how to feel on this to be quite honest. From a business persons viewpoint, what they are doing is in the best interest of the company; and that's what companies are meant to do.
I get tired of seeing this point. It's probably in the best interest of my company to murder my competitors. That doesn't mean I should. The fact that it increases share value does not justify any action, not even for a business. This is most definately not "what companies are meant to do". Unfair and wrong business practices do not become alright because our profit margin is increased. What companies are meant to do is compete for consumers' business. They are not meant to do anything at all that increases profit.
Anyway, what new ideas has B&N come up with lately? Please, tell me what unique and ingenius marvels of engineering they have on their site, for I am too lazy to go find out myself.
Why? It's not relevant to anything being discussed here.
If Red Hat pulled this kind of shit on Microsoft, only Microsoft, and no one else, I have a feeling that there would be fewer complaints than there are. Haha! Either you haven't been on/. long or you're pretty clueless...
The only company Amazon has sued for patent infringement is Barnes & Noble (who as far as I'm concerned deserve whatever they get and then some, for filing a cynical lawsuit against Amazon at a time when Amazon was vulnerable, strictly as a crush-the-competitor business strategy).
This strikes me as a bad idea, unless what Amazon wanted was to prove they're every bit as evil as B&N and that I should reconsider my decision to buy from them rather than B&N (which, incidently, is exactly what I've done -- I used to buy from Amazon exclusively, but now than Amazon has proven to me that they're no better and no longer hold the moral high ground, B&N is getting my business again -- what B&N did was obviously wrong, but I was gravely mistaken to think Amazon was any better).
Actually, Emacs is the OS, but it can be used with a number of different bootloaders. If you want a free Emacs bootloader, Linux and BSD do very well. I've also had good luck with a commercial Emacs bootloader called Solaris.:)
Why not just run it under Emacs? I know most of you guys are Linux fans, but really, Emacs is the best operating system available. You should try it! It even runs under Linux without requiring VMware or anything like that. What other operating system has that feature? Both Linux and Windows have a way to go before they're a serious challenge to the Emacs operating system!
Slashdot Mirror
It's hard to go an entire day without seeing some Slashdotter raging at the RIAA for trying to protect their investments. For people here to question any other company ripping off GPL'd code is more than a little hypocritical. The typical Slashdotter is far from having the moral high ground on any IP issues.
Excuse me? Are you simply ignorant of what the word hypocritical means, or are you just too stupid to apply the concept properly?
The fact that you can't go a day without seeing some Slashdotter say something anti-IP does not may ones saying pro-IP things hypocrits unless it's the same person! The fact that some Slashdotters disagree with other Slashdotters is not hypocracy. And frankly, it irks me that there are so many idiots reading Slashdot that think all Slashdotters have one opinion on any issue -- we see far too many comments like the one above pointing out that some Slashdotters have opinions that are inconsistant with the opinions of other Slashdotters, and that therefore there's something hypocritical about the fact that we don't always agree on everything. And last but not least, even if you can name some individuals who have been anti-RIAA but pro-GPL, how is that hypocritical? If you think all of us who dislike the RIAA don't think they have the right and responsibility to defend their IP rights, you'd badly misunderstood what those of us who are critical of the RIAA are complaining about. It is not at all inconsistent to both acknowledge that piracy is wrong and believe that the RIAA is wrong to step on the rights of law-abiding consumers. Get a clue. If you actually bother to try to understand what the issues are, you won't be so surprised when some Slashdotters consistently defend people's rights, and thus rage about the RIAA and rage about ripping of GPL'd code. That's consistency, not hypocracy.
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Did they all die from the incredibly thin, oxygen poor Martian atmosphere? If not, then I suspect they pumped their own atmosphere into the tent, in which case the fact that the Martian atmosphere has greatly different temperature between foot and head level is irrelevant -- the atmosphere in the tent will be more or less uniformly the temperature they heated it to.
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But all patents are bad! Copyrights protect specific expressions of an idea, and that's a good thing. Patents protect an idea itself, and this takes the idea of intellectual property way too far. Nobody should own an idea, at best you should own your expression of it. I do not believe there is such thing as a proper use of patent law -- the idea is flawed to begin with. Software patents are not a special case, requiring patent law to be fixed. They simply make more glaringly obvious the flaws that have always existed in patent law. It's a bad idea from the start. It shouldn't be fixed, it should be dropped...
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No, I'm afraid he's got it right and you've a bit confused about XF86 4.0's new binary module loading facility. The new XF86's common binary driver module format allows people running uncommon operating systems to not be left out in the cold. The same binary driver will work on any OS running XF86, be it Linux, BSD, or whatever. This prevents alternate operating systems from being left out in the cold, but it does nothing to prevent alternate hardware from being left out in the cold. Your i386 driver is not going to run on my SPARCstation or my Mac. If manufacturers begin releasing binary-only drivers, and they follow the usual procedure of ignoring anyone not running Intel processors, then indeed people on uncommon hardware are going to be left out in the cold.
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A clarification: the "he" here refers to Mr. de Joode, not Mr. Bertrand as it may at first seem. Sloppy use of pronouns on my part; I apologize.
One more thing, I simply don't have time to reply to the message in its entirety, so I picked this as the most obvious example of what's wrong with this "Proper Analysis", to illustrate it's nothing of the sort. The rest of it works the same way: straw-man tactics. First the author distorts what Mr. Bertrand says, then argues against the fabricated point Mr. Bertrand never said to begin with. It's easy to win an argument against a straw-man. But it's the furthest thing in the world away from "A Proper Analysis."
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Reread the quoted text:
Please do not visit the .ORG site, nor send email to anybody at the .ORG address.
That's a couple of requests. No accusations there.
This is more than just a request to boycott: there could be privacy issues, possibly data mining or building a mailing list of security conscious users.
This is an observation. Note particularly that it discusses in the hypothetical mode (note the words "possibly" and "could be") what could be done with such a domain, and as a webadmin, I can assure you that the observation is absolutely true. But note that at no point is any accusation made that this is or ever will be done.
We simply don't know Mr. de Joode's motives,
Another observation. No accusation here. In fact, this admission precludes the author from making any accusations. If the author wished to make any accusations, he would have to deny what he's just admitted.
and we recommend caution.
And finally, we have a recommendation. No accusation here either.
I'd sure love to know where these "brutal accusations" of which you speak are.
I would like to know why you claim this.
What pray tell did you think the author was claiming? That there exists the possibility that this could be used for data mining? I assume the author claims this because it's absolutely true. That the site is for this purpose? The author does not claim this at all, in fact he points out that he doesn't know Mr. de Joode's motives at all! I assume that this too is a true statement. Since the author has made nothing but obviously true statements, I'm curious about what potentially false accusations you believe are in the letter? I can't find any...
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WTF?!? Did you read the text you just quoted? Where's the accusation? You do know what the word means, don't you? Where in the letter does it say Mr. de Joode is doing anything? Saying he could use the domain for data mining is not an accusation, it's an observation. You do understand the difference between these two words, right? I've read Mr. Bertrand's letter several times, and he's not accused of anything (other than not selling his domain, and I don't believe that fact is in dispute).
None of us like being spammed, tracked where we go, etc. So, I asked myself, "What data mining is openssh.org doing?"
If you'd actually read and understood the original letter, you'd have realized that question is irrelevant. openssh.org was not accused of engaging in that activity in that letter. I suggest learning some basic reading skills before attempting "A Proper Analysis" of anything -- how can you analyze a letter when you obviously didn't read and understand it to begin with?
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Well, seeing as how they haven't made any accussations, it'd be kind of hard for them to give any rationale for them.
First of all, they didn't say it was evil, they quite specifically said they don't know the motivations behind it. So, maybe it's evil, maybe it's not. They have made no accusations nor any statements at all to the effect that the motives are bad. Secondly, ignoring your question but asking the relevant one I think you may have been alluding to: Why would the OpenSSH group recommend not trusting openssh.org? Is there some reason we need to speculate about this question? They answer it in their own letter (you did read it, didn't you? You seem to be replying to /. comments instead of the letter, since you've already said twice it says things it doesn't say) when they point out that the motives of openssh.org are unclear at present.
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Paradoxical as it may sound, an argument that 3 TLDs is too many is an argument that there should be more TLDs!
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Not that hypocricy is at all uncommon in the world, but I have noticed that when someone notes someone else exhibiting different behavior in case A than case B and calls that person a hypocrite, 95% of the time it's because the person doing the accusing is too clueless to understand that case A and B are two different cases, and are unable to identify the relevant differences between the two.
The other thing I've noted is that since in the responses to any Slashdot article are all over the map, anyone stupid enough to believe there's any such thing as "the opinion (note the singular) of Slashdotters" can easily "identify" (that is, manufacture in their own minds) instances of hypocricy. It becomes much more difficult if they're asked to provide evidence (i.e. which specific poster said it was wrong for X but right for Y -- it's no good to say "someone said X before but you're saying Y now").
Did you have anything real to say here, or do you just like to complain without having any real point or substance?
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Harsh? Harsh?! WTF?!? The OpenSSH people have done, what? They've issued an advisory that essentially says, "Hey, it ain't us, so if you want to see or talk to us, don't visit or send email there!" In what way is this harsh?
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Open Source doesn't require everyone to look at the source in order to prevent that, it just requires that enough people do it so that the word gets out of there is something like that going on. What are the odds that no one has looked at the OpenSSH source? Let 99% of the people download and install precompiled packages if they want. This doesn't hurt reliability or security in the slightest. Preventing the other 1% from seeing the source is what hurts.
In short, the principle is "many eyeballs", not "every eyeball".
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I get tired of seeing this point. It's probably in the best interest of my company to murder my competitors. That doesn't mean I should. The fact that it increases share value does not justify any action, not even for a business. This is most definately not "what companies are meant to do". Unfair and wrong business practices do not become alright because our profit margin is increased. What companies are meant to do is compete for consumers' business. They are not meant to do anything at all that increases profit.
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Why? It's not relevant to anything being discussed here.
If Red Hat pulled this kind of shit on Microsoft, only Microsoft, and no one else, I have a feeling that there would be fewer complaints than there are. Haha! Either you haven't been on /. long or you're pretty clueless...
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This strikes me as a bad idea, unless what Amazon wanted was to prove they're every bit as evil as B&N and that I should reconsider my decision to buy from them rather than B&N (which, incidently, is exactly what I've done -- I used to buy from Amazon exclusively, but now than Amazon has proven to me that they're no better and no longer hold the moral high ground, B&N is getting my business again -- what B&N did was obviously wrong, but I was gravely mistaken to think Amazon was any better).
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