Actually, abortions are not legal after 'viability'--which the courts leave to physicians to determine. No one can abort a fetus in the 8th month of pregnancy. In fact, no rational abortion rights advocate argues that 3rd trimester abortions are okay, or wants to legalize them. So this stuff about leaving the womb is nonsense, as it has nothing to do with the real issue.
Of course, without government funding, the Internet wouldn't exist at all, as no corporations saw a profit in wacky networking technology, and left it to the government (in the form of DARPA) to develop it.
In fact, not only was the TCP/IP developed by the government, so was Mosaic (at the NCSA - aka National Center for Supercomputing Applications - who do you think funds a national center?), as was Apache. Sure, private enterprise made it profitable and useful, but no one is arguing that the government is great at applied research. What the government excels at is figuring out things like how to make internetworking work, and then corporations (like Microsoft, AOL, Sun, etc) figure out how to take those basic ideas and make a profit.
This is even more prevalent basic research into physics and chemistry. I would guess that without government funded research fiber optics and satelites wouldn't exist.
So if "you" hadn't spend your tax dollars over the last fifty years funding basic research, you shouldn't be allowed to watch any TV that uses a satelite, use a cell phone, or use the Internet.
Even the most ridiculously extreme copyright law doesn't protect any works from the 1800's, much less works from the 1500's (Luther), 1400's (Michangelo- I think?), 300's (Augustine), etc.
The Vatican has never attempted to copyright the Bible, for example.
Now if any material that they are going to release is going to be translated and edited, they will probably copyright the translations. But I majored in history in college and have idly studied it since, and I've never ever ever ever heard of anyone attempting to copyright original source material simply do to having possession of a (or even the only) physical copy of it. That's like saying I could copyright one of George Washington's letters if I happened to find one in my attic.
Um, sorry for the rant, but too often people just completely don't think about what copyright means when the discuss it.
(BTW, the reason the Scientologists have copyrights on their works is because they were all written in the last 50-60 years)
>NDAs won't happen as long as the GPL stands up in court. If it doesn't then saying GNU a million times before you say Linux isn't going to stop >companies from taking the code
Why is it that no one understands that there is no way that an invalidation of the GPL would allow anyone to steal any code? The GPL is *less* restrictive than copyright law. If it didn't exist, copyright law would hold sway. Copyright law (as we all know) does not allow copying and redistribution or modification of other people's stuff.
First of all, many people have computers. I don't know numbers for sure, but the prevalence of websites in advertising suggests, for example, that the advertisers believe that most people who would buy there products have computers. Based on Nielson's NetRatings between a third and a half of the population of the US uses the internet. The number of computer users is higher, certainly much higher than 1 in a thousand.
Secondly, many cable companies are aggressively promoting digital cable. Primarily, customers adopt it for better onscreen guides of what is playing, and for more channels. Digital cable gives you 6 HBO channels, rather than just 1. Same for all of the other premium channels. Plus there are lots of random channels only avaible digitally. Both RCN and Comcast (the two cable companies I've had cable from) aggressively promote digital cable and seem to be doing pretty well with it. I'd hardly call that failure in the marketplace.
And the digital cable functions talked about in the article provide value to the cable companies, not to the viewer. The cable companies then have motivation to upgrade the current settop boxes to support this. Given that all of the digital settop boxes are leased these days, that isn't that hard. They can just show up and replace it if they want. Or offer some new features on the new box and ask people to come to the cable office and switch. A lot of people would if it didn't cost any more.
Finally, Comcast in Philadelphia is planning on rolling out a video-on-demand feature like Pay-Per-View, but with a 24 hour lease and pause, rewind, and fast forward. For 3.99 a movie, if they have the movie I want to watch, why not just watch it rather than go to the video store? It's failed in the past, but Pay-Per-View works well enough, and even if they just implemented pay-per-view with pause/rewind/fastforward and a 24 hour lease (same selection of movies) I'd watch pay-per-view for many new releases (assuming it was the same price as Blockbuster).
Not only is there no mandate forcing anyone to watch advertising (as a previous poster mentioned), but NPR is a non-profit organization that doesn't even have any advertising. If you go to their front page, you can click on the content without seeing a single ad or registering or jumping through any of the standard hoops.
Also, if a website wants to make impossible to deep link, well, its practically trival to check referrer headers to deny access to a URL if someone isn't following one of your links. And that is only the most basic of a fairly large number of technical solutions to this "problem".
Mike
Why is everyone so quick to assume this will pass?
on
SSSCA Hearing
·
· Score: 1
And if you are, why don't you write your Senator and explain your concerns?
Remember, this bill is in committee in the Senate. Its a long way between committee hearings and an actual bill passing. And for everyone who writes a letter (especially to people on the Commerce committee) the way gets longer. So don't just bitch, write! Or if that's too hard, at least send an email. Generally yoursenatorsname@senate.gov.
For more info on contacting your representatives, check out www.senate.gov. Also thomas.loc.gov has a lot of legislative information.
But if the license is proven invalid, BigSoftCorp loses *all* rights to your work. Copyright withholds most rights (I forget all the details, but I'm sure google and/or openlaw would find them) to the copyright holder. Licenses are designed to change that fact. So, for example, the GPL allows the redistribution of a copyrighted work, given certain restrictions. If the GPL were found invalid, then redistrubtion of a GPL'd work would become illegal. The GPL'd work would not suddenly become public domain. Same would be true for these licenses.
All of the Baen reprints of Bujold's stuff (there are three: _Miles, Mystery, and Mayhem_, _Young Miles_, and _Coredila's Honor_) are clearly marked in big letters on the back cover that they are compiliations. In fact, Baen has lots and lots of compiliations like this, and they do a good job of marking them as such. Admittedly, its not on the front cover, but anyone who buys a book without even _glancing_ at the back deserves to get the wrong book:). So anyone buying books as they were meant to be bought, in bookstores, would have noticed this:).
Despite that, Amazon.com also had quite an obvious note that it was a compiliation (under Book Information, right before the reviews). Baen's website had a similar note, as does Bujold's website. Just because fatbrain.com didn't happen to mention it doesn't mean you should blame the publisher or the author.
Within minutes after the crash the media machinery puts the video images in an infinite loop feeding them to their public, of course commercial breaks are inserted at regular intervals and CNN is likely to make significant profits in the next few weeks.
Actually, CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, and several of the other news organizations ran commericial free for several *days*, and are looking at losses in profit because of that. Rather than pander to commericialism, they actually decided that the point of the TV news was to report the news, and did so at a loss their bottom lines.
...[Bush] appears to make what can only be explained as a christian fundamentalist statement by calling for a prayer. The worst part is that this statement is fueled by opportunism (gotto keep the christian right wing people happy otherwise gore takes over in a few years) rather than true belief
Well, prayer isn't so much a Christian fundamentalist statement as a religious one. He didn't call for a Christian prayer, he didn't call out to Jesus & Mary to save the country, he just called for a prayer, in whatever manner people saw fit. And I think he did that because of honest horror and shock at what had happened.
Now further opportunism dictates to nuke those damn arabs. Never mind the millions of refugees, never mind that the amount of innocent people who will die as a direct consequence of the media show the US army is about to give in the middle east will vastly outnumber the poor souls who lost their lives in new york (btw. a substantial amount of those people were muslim). And never mind that the short attention span of the US media and its audience is never going to outlive the chain of events about to be triggered in the middle east.
If you had listened to Bush's speech last night, you would have seen that he was attempting to reach out to the Muslim community and keep people from blindly hating them, and that he was also attempting to prevent harm to the Afghan people. It seems to me that what he wants to do is install a friendly government in Afghanistan. That may be impossible. But he is clearly trying to make the Taliban the enemy, not Muslims or the Afghan people. And you never know, military action may not come as soon or as drastically as you think.
>And before anyone brings up Gore's (narrow) win >of the popular vote, the Electoral College exists >for a very important purpose: to prevent small >areas with dense populations to be able to run a >tyranny over the rest of the people.
Huh? That doesn't make any sense. First of all, the Electoral College gives disproportially high representation to the very small, sparesly populated votes. States like North & South Dakota have the (minimum) 3 electoral votes, but somewhat less than the population that should be supporting those votes.
Also, in a democracy, if 2/3rds of the country lives in dense urban settlement, why shouldn't they exercise control over the government? Democracy is essentially the tyranny of the majority. Doesn't make it a perfect system, but it is silly to argue that because the a lot of people believe something, we should reduce their say.
It is very interesting to look at the breakdowns as opposed to the aggregate percentages.
First of all, this survey leaves out.com,.net, and.org (as lots of people have already pointed out), which makes it incredibly inaccurate to model the US, at least.
I'd argue (based soley on the.edu domain, which should have a high linux percentage compared to other predominately US domains), that linux does much better outside the US then within the US. I don't know why this is, exactly, but, for example,.de (Germany) had almost 45% linux. Whereas.edu had only 10% linux, with Solaris and windows neck and neck for the top.
I'd guess that outside of the US (especially a lot of the poorer countries) price is more important than it is for a corporation in the US. Also, linux probably (not sure on this, because I have no experience with Windows) does a better job at internationalization than windows does; at least redhat ships with the howtos in more languages than I imagine Microsoft has translated there documents into.
So, I don't think this survey can accuratly represent US/large corporate data (because I imagine large corporations outside the US also get.com domains), but I think it does show to some degree how strong the international support for linux is, which is something that, I, a US citizen, often forget about, and something a thing the US media is completely ignorant of, but which is an incredibly important part of the linux/open-source movement. It is truely global.
jovoc wrote: "Uh.. it crashes the computer, but only with your consent. There are big bold letters warning you that this will happen if you press "ok". "
Yes; and if I copied the ActiveX control and put it on a webpage saying click here to see my comments on slashdot, then that would also crash your computer. There is a difference between the HTML and the ActiveX control. I'm assuming the Symantic/Intel and co aren't saying that visiting that webpage is bad, just that running that ActiveX control is bad. Good for them. It is bad. And if you want to ignore the warnings of an anti-virus program, go for it. But don't complain when something that you didn't want to happen happens.
jovoc wrote "Heh, under that definition, Windows itself is quite a virus. "
In case it wasn't clear, I meant intentionally crashes your computer. If a bug in the program causes the computer to crash, it's clearly not a virus.
Yeah, I don't really like Microsoft either, but this has gone way to far. Hell, Microsoft even has a pseudo-open source license for there Ipv6 stuff (you get the source, can change and modify it, but have to give all the modifications back to Microsoft and allow them to do as they will with them). And the webserver they are distributing for Ipv6 is called Fnord! If that isn't cool, I don't know what is:-). A lot of good research comes out of Microsoft Research (I could reference some papers, but I'm too lazy to go find them). Just go poke around on research.microsoft.com and ignore the fact that the business parts of the company suck.
And finally, Microsoft isn't going to try to control Internet2. What the hell would be the point? They don't make routers. Cisco, on the other hand, could do very well for themselves by controlling I2 (not that I'm suggesting they will, but . ..)
If Intel really wanted to use the PIII for nefarious purposes, why would they go to all this trouble to stop someone using it for nefarious purposes?? I mean, I enjoy conspirary theories as much as the next person, but they are just a *game*.
I have to say, I fine all the disgust over Intel's PIII id somehow overstated in the linux community and these recent comments seem to be the worse.
Intel has asked that anti-virsus people list as a virus a program that *crashes the users computer without their consent*! What definition of virus are people using such that this doesn't qualify? Not only does it crash the user's computer, it reveals information that the user doesn't want revealed. If instead of revealing the PIII, this program searched for Quicken documents and mailed them to a hotmail account, would be be saying that whoever makes Quicken shouldn't call it a virus?
I agree that on general principle the PIII id isn't a wonderful idea, but I can understand why Intel did it. Most high-end computers (Sun, SGI, Alpha?, etc) ship with some sort of unique id, for licensing purposes. The only reason people don't get upset about that is that they are not person computers, but servers, so they cannot be linked to an identity. Intel wants to enter that market, and CPU ids are needed. But they then anger the consumer market. What should they do? The road they took (disable to PIII id, unless you need it for a server) seems like a air compromise. Why is everyone so upset at them?
Finally, under an real operating system, this sort of exploit would be useless unless it was run as root. And if you go web browsing as root, you deserve what you get:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, abortions are not legal after 'viability'--which the courts leave to physicians to determine. No one can abort a fetus in the 8th month of pregnancy. In fact, no rational abortion rights advocate argues that 3rd trimester abortions are okay, or wants to legalize them. So this stuff about leaving the womb is nonsense, as it has nothing to do with the real issue.
Of course, without government funding, the Internet wouldn't exist at all, as no corporations saw a profit in wacky networking technology, and left it to the government (in the form of DARPA) to develop it.
In fact, not only was the TCP/IP developed by the government, so was Mosaic (at the NCSA - aka National Center for Supercomputing Applications - who do you think funds a national center?), as was Apache. Sure, private enterprise made it profitable and useful, but no one is arguing that the government is great at applied research. What the government excels at is figuring out things like how to make internetworking work, and then corporations (like Microsoft, AOL, Sun, etc) figure out how to take those basic ideas and make a profit.
This is even more prevalent basic research into physics and chemistry. I would guess that without government funded research fiber optics and satelites wouldn't exist.
So if "you" hadn't spend your tax dollars over the last fifty years funding basic research, you shouldn't be allowed to watch any TV that uses a satelite, use a cell phone, or use the Internet.
Mike
Even the most ridiculously extreme copyright law doesn't protect any works from the 1800's, much less works from the 1500's (Luther), 1400's (Michangelo- I think?), 300's (Augustine), etc.
The Vatican has never attempted to copyright the Bible, for example.
Now if any material that they are going to release is going to be translated and edited, they will probably copyright the translations. But I majored in history in college and have idly studied it since, and I've never ever ever ever heard of anyone attempting to copyright original source material simply do to having possession of a (or even the only) physical copy of it. That's like saying I could copyright one of George Washington's letters if I happened to find one in my attic.
Um, sorry for the rant, but too often people just completely don't think about what copyright means when the discuss it.
(BTW, the reason the Scientologists have copyrights on their works is because they were all written in the last 50-60 years)
>NDAs won't happen as long as the GPL stands up in court. If it doesn't then saying GNU a million times before you say Linux isn't going to stop >companies from taking the code
Why is it that no one understands that there is no way that an invalidation of the GPL would allow anyone to steal any code? The GPL is *less* restrictive than copyright law. If it didn't exist, copyright law would hold sway. Copyright law (as we all know) does not allow copying and redistribution or modification of other people's stuff.
Just a few rebuttals of your statements:
First of all, many people have computers. I don't know numbers for sure, but the prevalence of websites in advertising suggests, for example, that the advertisers believe that most people who would buy there products have computers. Based on Nielson's NetRatings between a third and a half of the population of the US uses the internet. The number of computer users is higher, certainly much higher than 1 in a thousand.
Secondly, many cable companies are aggressively promoting digital cable. Primarily, customers adopt it for better onscreen guides of what is playing, and for more channels. Digital cable gives you 6 HBO channels, rather than just 1. Same for all of the other premium channels. Plus there are lots of random channels only avaible digitally. Both RCN and Comcast (the two cable companies I've had cable from) aggressively promote digital cable and seem to be doing pretty well with it. I'd hardly call that failure in the marketplace.
And the digital cable functions talked about in the article provide value to the cable companies, not to the viewer. The cable companies then have motivation to upgrade the current settop boxes to support this. Given that all of the digital settop boxes are leased these days, that isn't that hard. They can just show up and replace it if they want. Or offer some new features on the new box and ask people to come to the cable office and switch. A lot of people would if it didn't cost any more.
Finally, Comcast in Philadelphia is planning on rolling out a video-on-demand feature like Pay-Per-View, but with a 24 hour lease and pause, rewind, and fast forward. For 3.99 a movie, if they have the movie I want to watch, why not just watch it rather than go to the video store? It's failed in the past, but Pay-Per-View works well enough, and even if they just implemented pay-per-view with pause/rewind/fastforward and a 24 hour lease (same selection of movies) I'd watch pay-per-view for many new releases (assuming it was the same price as Blockbuster).
Mike Sackton
Not only is there no mandate forcing anyone to watch advertising (as a previous poster mentioned), but NPR is a non-profit organization that doesn't even have any advertising. If you go to their front page, you can click on the content without seeing a single ad or registering or jumping through any of the standard hoops.
Also, if a website wants to make impossible to deep link, well, its practically trival to check referrer headers to deny access to a URL if someone isn't following one of your links. And that is only the most basic of a fairly large number of technical solutions to this "problem".
Mike
And if you are, why don't you write your Senator and explain your concerns?
Remember, this bill is in committee in the Senate. Its a long way between committee hearings and an actual bill passing. And for everyone who writes a letter (especially to people on the Commerce committee) the way gets longer. So don't just bitch, write! Or if that's too hard, at least send an email. Generally yoursenatorsname@senate.gov.
For more info on contacting your representatives, check out www.senate.gov. Also thomas.loc.gov has a lot of legislative information.
Mike
But if the license is proven invalid, BigSoftCorp loses *all* rights to your work. Copyright withholds most rights (I forget all the details, but I'm sure google and/or openlaw would find them) to the copyright holder. Licenses are designed to change that fact. So, for example, the GPL allows the redistribution of a copyrighted work, given certain restrictions. If the GPL were found invalid, then redistrubtion of a GPL'd work would become illegal. The GPL'd work would not suddenly become public domain. Same would be true for these licenses.
All of the Baen reprints of Bujold's stuff (there are three: _Miles, Mystery, and Mayhem_, _Young Miles_, and _Coredila's Honor_) are clearly marked in big letters on the back cover that they are compiliations. In fact, Baen has lots and lots of compiliations like this, and they do a good job of marking them as such. Admittedly, its not on the front cover, but anyone who buys a book without even _glancing_ at the back deserves to get the wrong book :). So anyone buying books as they were meant to be bought, in bookstores, would have noticed this :).
Despite that, Amazon.com also had quite an obvious note that it was a compiliation (under Book Information, right before the reviews). Baen's website had a similar note, as does Bujold's website. Just because fatbrain.com didn't happen to mention it doesn't mean you should blame the publisher or the author.
Within minutes after the crash the media machinery puts the video images in an infinite loop feeding them to their public, of course commercial breaks are inserted at regular intervals and CNN is likely to make significant profits in the next few weeks.
...[Bush] appears to make what can only be explained as a christian fundamentalist statement by calling for a prayer. The worst part is that this statement is fueled by opportunism (gotto keep the christian right wing people happy otherwise gore takes over in a few years) rather than true belief
Actually, CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, and several of the other news organizations ran commericial free for several *days*, and are looking at losses in profit because of that. Rather than pander to commericialism, they actually decided that the point of the TV news was to report the news, and did so at a loss their bottom lines.
Well, prayer isn't so much a Christian fundamentalist statement as a religious one. He didn't call for a Christian prayer, he didn't call out to Jesus & Mary to save the country, he just called for a prayer, in whatever manner people saw fit. And I think he did that because of honest horror and shock at what had happened.
Now further opportunism dictates to nuke those damn arabs. Never mind the millions of refugees, never mind that the amount of innocent people who will die as a direct consequence of the media show the US army is about to give in the middle east will vastly outnumber the poor souls who lost their lives in new york (btw. a substantial amount of those people were muslim). And never mind that the short attention span of the US media and its audience is never going to outlive the chain of events about to be triggered in the middle east.
If you had listened to Bush's speech last night, you would have seen that he was attempting to reach out to the Muslim community and keep people from blindly hating them, and that he was also attempting to prevent harm to the Afghan people. It seems to me that what he wants to do is install a friendly government in Afghanistan. That may be impossible. But he is clearly trying to make the Taliban the enemy, not Muslims or the Afghan people. And you never know, military action may not come as soon or as drastically as you think.
>And before anyone brings up Gore's (narrow) win >of the popular vote, the Electoral College exists >for a very important purpose: to prevent small >areas with dense populations to be able to run a >tyranny over the rest of the people.
Huh? That doesn't make any sense. First of all, the Electoral College gives disproportially high representation to the very small, sparesly populated votes. States like North & South Dakota have the (minimum) 3 electoral votes, but somewhat less than the population that should be supporting those votes.
Also, in a democracy, if 2/3rds of the country lives in dense urban settlement, why shouldn't they exercise control over the government? Democracy is essentially the tyranny of the majority. Doesn't make it a perfect system, but it is silly to argue that because the a lot of people believe something, we should reduce their say.
Mike Sackton
It is very interesting to look at the breakdowns as opposed to the aggregate percentages.
.com, .net, and .org (as lots of people have already pointed out), which makes it incredibly inaccurate to model the US, at least.
.edu domain, which should have a high linux percentage compared to other predominately US domains), that linux does much better outside the US then within the US. I don't know why this is, exactly, but, for example, .de (Germany) had almost 45% linux. Whereas .edu had only 10% linux, with Solaris and windows neck and neck for the top.
.com domains), but I think it does show to some degree how strong the international support for linux is, which is something that, I, a US citizen, often forget about, and something a thing the US media is completely ignorant of, but which is an incredibly important part of the linux/open-source movement. It is truely global.
First of all, this survey leaves out
I'd argue (based soley on the
I'd guess that outside of the US (especially a lot of the poorer countries) price is more important than it is for a corporation in the US. Also, linux probably (not sure on this, because I have no experience with Windows) does a better job at internationalization than windows does; at least redhat ships with the howtos in more languages than I imagine Microsoft has translated there documents into.
So, I don't think this survey can accuratly represent US/large corporate data (because I imagine large corporations outside the US also get
Mike
Mike
jovoc wrote: "Uh.. it crashes the computer, but only with your consent. There are big bold letters warning you that this will happen if you press "ok". "
Yes; and if I copied the ActiveX control and put it on a webpage saying click here to see my comments on slashdot, then that would also crash your computer. There is a difference between the HTML and the ActiveX control. I'm assuming the Symantic/Intel and co aren't saying that visiting that webpage is bad, just that running that ActiveX control is bad. Good for them. It is bad. And if you want to ignore the warnings of an anti-virus program, go for it. But don't complain when something that you didn't want to happen happens.
jovoc wrote "Heh, under that definition, Windows itself is quite a virus. "
In case it wasn't clear, I meant intentionally crashes your computer. If a bug in the program causes the computer to crash, it's clearly not a virus.
Mike
Yeah, I don't really like Microsoft either, but this has gone way to far. Hell, Microsoft even has a pseudo-open source license for there Ipv6 stuff (you get the source, can change and modify it, but have to give all the modifications back to Microsoft and allow them to do as they will with them). And the webserver they are distributing for Ipv6 is called Fnord! If that isn't cool, I don't know what is :-). A lot of good research comes out of Microsoft Research (I could reference some papers, but I'm too lazy to go find them). Just go poke around on research.microsoft.com and ignore the fact that the business parts of the company suck.
.)
And finally, Microsoft isn't going to try to control Internet2. What the hell would be the point? They don't make routers. Cisco, on the other hand, could do very well for themselves by controlling I2 (not that I'm suggesting they will, but . .
Mike
One other thing:
If Intel really wanted to use the PIII for nefarious purposes, why would they go to all this trouble to stop someone using it for nefarious purposes?? I mean, I enjoy conspirary theories as much as the next person, but they are just a *game*.
Mike
I have to say, I fine all the disgust over Intel's PIII id somehow overstated in the linux community and these recent comments seem to be the worse.
:-)
Intel has asked that anti-virsus people list as a virus a program that *crashes the users computer without their consent*! What definition of virus are people using such that this doesn't qualify? Not only does it crash the user's computer, it reveals information that the user doesn't want revealed. If instead of revealing the PIII, this
program searched for Quicken documents and mailed them to a hotmail account, would be be saying that
whoever makes Quicken shouldn't call it a virus?
I agree that on general principle the PIII id isn't a wonderful idea, but I can understand why Intel did it. Most high-end computers (Sun, SGI, Alpha?, etc) ship with some sort of unique id, for licensing purposes. The only reason people don't get upset about that is that they are not person computers, but servers, so they cannot be linked to an identity. Intel wants to enter that market,
and CPU ids are needed. But they then anger the consumer market. What should they do? The road they took (disable to PIII id, unless you need it for a server) seems like a air compromise. Why is everyone so upset at them?
Finally, under an real operating system, this sort of exploit would be useless unless it was run as root. And if you go web browsing as root, you deserve what you get
Mike Sackton