It'd be extremely weird for your Option 3 to apply. The GNU GPL is structured in such a way that clauses concerning distribution of the work in question are separate from the clauses concerning licensing of derived works.
It's sort of like this: 1) thou shalt make source (and build files, certification keys etc) available at non-prohibitive cost if thou doth release binaries, and 2) if thou makest a derived work, then the derived work shall also be licensed under the GNU GPL. Striking down parts of both in such a way as to turn the GPL into the LGPL would, in my non-lawyer opinion, require nothing short of incredible corruption on the judge's part, or incredible incompetence on Mr. Welte's part. (look him up. this latter one definitely doesn't apply.)
If that is the case, then perhaps they should have considered their market strategy in depth before electing to go with GNU/Linux. What is done is done however; now it is time to pay the price.
If anything, Skype should consider themselves lucky at being faced only with a single person rather than a corporation: a corporation would have no qualms against demanding things like punitive damages. Even the FSF generally requires a substantial donation in the event of a violation of the GNU GPL, as part of the settlement. (Yes, you never hear about these cases. This is because Mr. Moglen and whomever else make up FSF's general counsel have a knack at instilling despair in their opponents. Reputedly it has something to do with their being very right indeed.)
Also, the Artistic License has a deserved reputation for not being as solid a license as the GNU GPL. One of the reasons for this is precisely because it is not formulated as an "according to the Bern treaty [etc etc] all rights are reserved by default, but if you accept the terms of this license then you will be granted these specific new rights" type affair.
It would not be far-fetched for a judge to read the Artistic License as an "intent" rather than a "code".
In any case, Skype seem to be arguing against the validity of the GNU GPL as a whole. This puts them in a very, very uncomfortable place as far as international copyright treaties are concerned.
The GNU GPL has been repeatedly upheld by a number of courts in Germany. And not only in cases brought by Mr. Welte (i.e. the Linux netfilter & iptables guy). He's a long-time activist in this kind of stuff, even got himself the FSF award for his seminal gpl-violations.org project, which is where this case stems from.
Not quite sure, but I seem to recall that this is in fact an appeals trial. The "high district court of München" would seem to suggest as much; higher courts only process cases appealed up from a court.
In short, Skype is about to get reamed, in a bad way. I don't expect Mr. Welte will be too pleased about having to go to appeals, either. Personally, I'd be going for the jugular after such provocation.
It does make me wonder though. If Skype feels that they have a case here, despite the law and all precedent to the contrary, what ace do they believe they have up their sleeves? Corruption? I find that hard to believe in a country with low corruption levels and lacking a "left hand washes the right hand" system as Germany is.
Even more interesting would be to see whom they claim is the corporate entity that has a monopoly which they are abusing, seeing as Harald Welte is a private individual and the Free Software Foundation is a registered and certified and whatnot not-for-profit organization. Unless this goes where Jeff Merkey went, i.e. claiming that copyright is in itself a form of monopoly in the context of, uh, some market that I think he failed to define.
Really, any judgement except one against Skype in this case would have enormous knock-on effects with regard to monopoly status. Symbian, for instance, would be forced into public domain, as would any number of other significant copyrighted works.
(Also, IANAL, but fortunately such a thing is not required in my country. The things that a novice can learn with some humility, eh?)
And besides this, the GNU GPL specifically states that no other license may take away or restrict in any way the rights granted by the GNU GPL. This applied to version 2, and I would be a very very surprised man indeed if it did not apply to version 3 also.
We'll send unmanned missions first. Robots and shit, to build either a reserve of useful stuff or a self-constructing outpost. Hey, we ought to have that by 2050, right?
Then when either the epic stockpile or the foldout Martian resort is complete, send a bunch of humans. See how they do. It's definitely one way only, since there's no way for a lander to have enough fuel to blast off from Mars, let alone bring the requisite infrastructure with it.
Then prepare to send more infrastructure and more people. Keep the colony growing. Only if the first children to be born on Mars fail, for lack of better word, is the project cancelled. A rescue mission should take place then, since it'll have been enough years to reach 2100 or something like that and we'll doubtlessly have better materials, science etc. to pull off a rescue mission from the surface of Mars.
New kind of memory chips. DDR3 is apparently expensive to manufacture and the newer, greater densities are presumably more expensive.
Anyway, I meant that regardless of amount and year (since 2000), a new computer's memory will cost about 200 euros. The amount is not necessarily 4 gigabytes.
When can we expect this new architecture? 2011? Ok, maybe I can deal with that.
What will I need to upgrade? A new motherboard, since surely the northbridge-less model will not appreciate the northbridge currently present. Ok, a new morbo is like, 90 euros, I can handle that.
Can I upgrade the motherboard only, so that I could use my old Core2 chip in it? No, there's no northbridge. And the socket is likely incompatible since the processor is now directly connected (well with some mild glue for voltages etc.) to the memory chips. Guess I'll have to suck it up.
With a new motherboard comes new memory modules. Let's be realistic and assume that the minimum amount of memory in a new computer in 2011 is going to be at least 4 gigabytes. Anyway, regardless of the year, a new computer's new memory modules cost some 200 euros total.
This is starting to look kind of expensive! Guess I salivated early. I suppose my next upgrade will be to an AM3 motherboard and then to a Barcelona chip. I mean, those are here this year, not in three years, right?
Jeez, Intel, please provide something more quickly than just promises of Nehalem (I mean, we've been hearing about it for _years_ now) and son-of-Nehalem. Pony the fuck up! I mean, at least AMD's got _something_ out besides vapour.
How is this? Last I checked, the main terrorist group of today has like, half the world's military expenditure and all the technology they can muster at their disposal. Shock and awe, remember?
Note though, that the sociologist's observation is valuable in stating something that is previously held obvious in terms that facilitate that same observation's use in reasoning. Much as Archimedes observed about water displacement. It's science, dude, about as much as medicine is science; it mightn't satisfy a hardline positivist, but as science it does count.
It's depressing how common it is to see opinions about sociology (even amonst sociologists themselves!) that are coloured by a preexisting perception along the lines that "sociology is shit (ducks, too)". A meaner me might suggest that this is a defense mechanism to avoid excess thought about reality, instead relying by heart on knee-jerk responses.
All this said, there is plenty of stuff under the umbrella of sociology that is genuinely crap. That is byproduct of an environment where the sociologists don't even take themselves seriously or have become isolated, having found the environment hostile to their studies. (Also there's quite a few limp-wristed types around.)
Yes, yes. The point is that the developers of this new strain have found a method to dial down the infectiousness of this virus. Where necessary they can also start with the original bug and dial its infectiousness down a little less. Where do you think the funding for this research comes from, anyway?
Remember how the US was said to only use white phosphorous munitions to "light the battlefield" too? Except then reports came out about bodies in these battlefields that had been stripped of all flesh, literally just clothed skeletons, consistent with WP exposure. But of course by definition the US doesn't use chemical weapons, so...
See, biological weapons in the trivial sense aren't very useful. It's no good if your troops catch the superflu or megagonorrhea too, you know?
Therefore in order for a strain to be adequately weaponized, it needs to be developed into something that 1) takes effect [i.e. incapacitates] very quickly after exposure, 2) doesn't linger [unless an area denial weapon is sought] and 3) doesn't spread too far outside those affected by the original deployment. This is why anthrax is close to an ideal biological weapon in its base form already: its spores carry a far greater risk of catching the actual bug than exposure to someone already affected, unless you're literally a cow that is.
So now we have an Ebola variant that doesn't spread. That's one out of three aspects done, and all under the guise of medical research. Were it Iran or North Korea or Pakistan doing this sort of research, they'd have US nukes up their bums in no time flat.
Don't be surprised that when the US invades Iran during the next prez's term, there will be reports of "enemy combatants" mysteriously discharging blood from every bodily orifice upon coming into weapons range from Coalition Troops. These will be hushed up and termed conspiracy theories, because by definition the US doesn't engage in biological warfare...
Actually there is such a thing as bird milk. It's not produced by lactation though and definitely not from a nipple, rather some species of bird secrete a fatty substance in their crops that's good for feeding really small chicks. The point being that mommy bird & daddy bird don't have to spend quite as much energy foraging when they can produce some of the sustenance their offspring require more directly. Especially if the chicks require food every two hours or something...
Yeah, it's a bit of a stretch to call it "milk" as such, it's more of a chick feeding supplement or something like that. Most likely it was named for superficial similarity (i.e. offspring sustenance) with mammal milk.
Perhaps the traditional RDBMS experts will return when they can scale their paradigms to datasets that are measured in the tens of terabytes and stored on thousands of computers. Following the airplane rule the solution needs to be able to withstand a crash in a bunch of those hosts without coming unglued.
Now, this is not to say that a more sophisticated approach wouldn't work. It's just that when you have thousands of boxes in a few ethernet segments, communication overhead becomes really quite large, so large in fact that whatever can be saved with brute-force computation it'll usually be worth it. Consider that from what I've heard, at Google these thousands of boxes are mostly containers for RAM modules so there's rather a lot of computation power per gigabyte available to throw away with a brute force system.
Also, I would like to point out that map/reduce is demonstrated to work. Apparently quite well too. Certainly better than any hypothetical "better" massively parallel RDBMS available in a production quality implementation today.
This was clearly an assassination by the JEWS. Think about it: an influential chess player speaks out against JEWS, and soon thereafter finds himself on several US-backed international shitlists (nice going with the 1st amendment, by the way).
Israel's CIA-equivalent, Mossad, even has a proven history of murdering people outside the JEWS' soil. Perhaps there was a bit of kosher-compatible polonium in Fischer's twentieth to last meal?
Fucking JEWS, is what I'm saying. They did 9/11, so why not Fischer too? It's clearly easier than commandeering a couple of poor man's cruise missiles and flying them into tall buildings in JEWS York.
Sadly, this is not the case. Indeed it's more than a little on the idealistic side of things.
In the real world, raises are obtained by switching employers. This is because as long as you are in the previous job still, the next job cannot offer less or equal to what the current one offers. Perhaps this isn't quite so in the realm of "IT" (i.e. user support), but in software development it's the rule.
Think about it. Why wait for the two-year raise cycle where you _might_ get a raise, when you can just get a better offer somewhere else and go to your boss with that? "Hey, I got this offer from somewhere else. Would you like to compete?" It's not like anyone has extra time they can waste not getting paid enough.
The first amendment is afaik only about saying your mind freely. Not that you may do it anonymously.
Speaking as an european, I would point out that your constitution's first amendment does not require that in order for speech to count for freedom of speech that its originator would have to be positively identifiable at all times. I'd like to warn you against taking such fundamental things according to the most restrictive interpretation possible.
Now, freedom of speech as guaranteed by your constitution in the "the state shall make no law (but private parties are exempt because they're not the gub'mint)" sense would be all good and fine... but only if all power resided in the government. As we both well know, there's plenty of power outside the government(s) these days: corporations are the obvious example. Your employer has power to fire you if you e.g. express opinion contrary to that approved by his abstract ass.
Therefore in order to realistically exercise one's right to free speech regardless of circumstance and content, as intended by your constitution's first amendment, one must be able to do so without fear of repercussion. This implies, no, requires anonymity where desired by the speaker. Let the listener beware! Was that not one of the ideals on which your country's liberties are founded upon?
More blithering idiots is just what we need. After all, why should you study basics, then move on to intermediate topics a few years later and finally learn to do things properly from experience? Reading To the Moon in 21 hours is so much simpler!
That's funny. I heard it so that the Austrian was replaced by an Italian (as a reference to Mussolini's fascist rule), and there was a fourth guy, a German, whose system was that if it's allowed, then it's forbidden.
Slashdot Mirror
It'd be extremely weird for your Option 3 to apply. The GNU GPL is structured in such a way that clauses concerning distribution of the work in question are separate from the clauses concerning licensing of derived works.
It's sort of like this: 1) thou shalt make source (and build files, certification keys etc) available at non-prohibitive cost if thou doth release binaries, and 2) if thou makest a derived work, then the derived work shall also be licensed under the GNU GPL. Striking down parts of both in such a way as to turn the GPL into the LGPL would, in my non-lawyer opinion, require nothing short of incredible corruption on the judge's part, or incredible incompetence on Mr. Welte's part. (look him up. this latter one definitely doesn't apply.)
If that is the case, then perhaps they should have considered their market strategy in depth before electing to go with GNU/Linux. What is done is done however; now it is time to pay the price.
If anything, Skype should consider themselves lucky at being faced only with a single person rather than a corporation: a corporation would have no qualms against demanding things like punitive damages. Even the FSF generally requires a substantial donation in the event of a violation of the GNU GPL, as part of the settlement. (Yes, you never hear about these cases. This is because Mr. Moglen and whomever else make up FSF's general counsel have a knack at instilling despair in their opponents. Reputedly it has something to do with their being very right indeed.)
Also, the Artistic License has a deserved reputation for not being as solid a license as the GNU GPL. One of the reasons for this is precisely because it is not formulated as an "according to the Bern treaty [etc etc] all rights are reserved by default, but if you accept the terms of this license then you will be granted these specific new rights" type affair.
It would not be far-fetched for a judge to read the Artistic License as an "intent" rather than a "code".
In any case, Skype seem to be arguing against the validity of the GNU GPL as a whole. This puts them in a very, very uncomfortable place as far as international copyright treaties are concerned.
The GNU GPL has been repeatedly upheld by a number of courts in Germany. And not only in cases brought by Mr. Welte (i.e. the Linux netfilter & iptables guy). He's a long-time activist in this kind of stuff, even got himself the FSF award for his seminal gpl-violations.org project, which is where this case stems from.
Not quite sure, but I seem to recall that this is in fact an appeals trial. The "high district court of München" would seem to suggest as much; higher courts only process cases appealed up from a court.
In short, Skype is about to get reamed, in a bad way. I don't expect Mr. Welte will be too pleased about having to go to appeals, either. Personally, I'd be going for the jugular after such provocation.
It does make me wonder though. If Skype feels that they have a case here, despite the law and all precedent to the contrary, what ace do they believe they have up their sleeves? Corruption? I find that hard to believe in a country with low corruption levels and lacking a "left hand washes the right hand" system as Germany is.
Even more interesting would be to see whom they claim is the corporate entity that has a monopoly which they are abusing, seeing as Harald Welte is a private individual and the Free Software Foundation is a registered and certified and whatnot not-for-profit organization. Unless this goes where Jeff Merkey went, i.e. claiming that copyright is in itself a form of monopoly in the context of, uh, some market that I think he failed to define.
Really, any judgement except one against Skype in this case would have enormous knock-on effects with regard to monopoly status. Symbian, for instance, would be forced into public domain, as would any number of other significant copyrighted works.
(Also, IANAL, but fortunately such a thing is not required in my country. The things that a novice can learn with some humility, eh?)
And besides this, the GNU GPL specifically states that no other license may take away or restrict in any way the rights granted by the GNU GPL. This applied to version 2, and I would be a very very surprised man indeed if it did not apply to version 3 also.
We'll send unmanned missions first. Robots and shit, to build either a reserve of useful stuff or a self-constructing outpost. Hey, we ought to have that by 2050, right?
Then when either the epic stockpile or the foldout Martian resort is complete, send a bunch of humans. See how they do. It's definitely one way only, since there's no way for a lander to have enough fuel to blast off from Mars, let alone bring the requisite infrastructure with it.
Then prepare to send more infrastructure and more people. Keep the colony growing. Only if the first children to be born on Mars fail, for lack of better word, is the project cancelled. A rescue mission should take place then, since it'll have been enough years to reach 2100 or something like that and we'll doubtlessly have better materials, science etc. to pull off a rescue mission from the surface of Mars.
New kind of memory chips. DDR3 is apparently expensive to manufacture and the newer, greater densities are presumably more expensive.
Anyway, I meant that regardless of amount and year (since 2000), a new computer's memory will cost about 200 euros. The amount is not necessarily 4 gigabytes.
When can we expect this new architecture? 2011? Ok, maybe I can deal with that.
What will I need to upgrade? A new motherboard, since surely the northbridge-less model will not appreciate the northbridge currently present. Ok, a new morbo is like, 90 euros, I can handle that.
Can I upgrade the motherboard only, so that I could use my old Core2 chip in it? No, there's no northbridge. And the socket is likely incompatible since the processor is now directly connected (well with some mild glue for voltages etc.) to the memory chips. Guess I'll have to suck it up.
With a new motherboard comes new memory modules. Let's be realistic and assume that the minimum amount of memory in a new computer in 2011 is going to be at least 4 gigabytes. Anyway, regardless of the year, a new computer's new memory modules cost some 200 euros total.
This is starting to look kind of expensive! Guess I salivated early. I suppose my next upgrade will be to an AM3 motherboard and then to a Barcelona chip. I mean, those are here this year, not in three years, right?
Jeez, Intel, please provide something more quickly than just promises of Nehalem (I mean, we've been hearing about it for _years_ now) and son-of-Nehalem. Pony the fuck up! I mean, at least AMD's got _something_ out besides vapour.
How is this? Last I checked, the main terrorist group of today has like, half the world's military expenditure and all the technology they can muster at their disposal. Shock and awe, remember?
ah-hA!
Good one!
Mod this one the fuck up. Everyone else replying is a liar.
In recognition, we should tag this article "infinitejustice".
Note though, that the sociologist's observation is valuable in stating something that is previously held obvious in terms that facilitate that same observation's use in reasoning. Much as Archimedes observed about water displacement. It's science, dude, about as much as medicine is science; it mightn't satisfy a hardline positivist, but as science it does count.
It's depressing how common it is to see opinions about sociology (even amonst sociologists themselves!) that are coloured by a preexisting perception along the lines that "sociology is shit (ducks, too)". A meaner me might suggest that this is a defense mechanism to avoid excess thought about reality, instead relying by heart on knee-jerk responses.
All this said, there is plenty of stuff under the umbrella of sociology that is genuinely crap. That is byproduct of an environment where the sociologists don't even take themselves seriously or have become isolated, having found the environment hostile to their studies. (Also there's quite a few limp-wristed types around.)
Yes, yes. The point is that the developers of this new strain have found a method to dial down the infectiousness of this virus. Where necessary they can also start with the original bug and dial its infectiousness down a little less. Where do you think the funding for this research comes from, anyway?
Remember how the US was said to only use white phosphorous munitions to "light the battlefield" too? Except then reports came out about bodies in these battlefields that had been stripped of all flesh, literally just clothed skeletons, consistent with WP exposure. But of course by definition the US doesn't use chemical weapons, so...
See, biological weapons in the trivial sense aren't very useful. It's no good if your troops catch the superflu or megagonorrhea too, you know?
Therefore in order for a strain to be adequately weaponized, it needs to be developed into something that 1) takes effect [i.e. incapacitates] very quickly after exposure, 2) doesn't linger [unless an area denial weapon is sought] and 3) doesn't spread too far outside those affected by the original deployment. This is why anthrax is close to an ideal biological weapon in its base form already: its spores carry a far greater risk of catching the actual bug than exposure to someone already affected, unless you're literally a cow that is.
So now we have an Ebola variant that doesn't spread. That's one out of three aspects done, and all under the guise of medical research. Were it Iran or North Korea or Pakistan doing this sort of research, they'd have US nukes up their bums in no time flat.
Don't be surprised that when the US invades Iran during the next prez's term, there will be reports of "enemy combatants" mysteriously discharging blood from every bodily orifice upon coming into weapons range from Coalition Troops. These will be hushed up and termed conspiracy theories, because by definition the US doesn't engage in biological warfare...
Actually there is such a thing as bird milk. It's not produced by lactation though and definitely not from a nipple, rather some species of bird secrete a fatty substance in their crops that's good for feeding really small chicks. The point being that mommy bird & daddy bird don't have to spend quite as much energy foraging when they can produce some of the sustenance their offspring require more directly. Especially if the chicks require food every two hours or something...
Yeah, it's a bit of a stretch to call it "milk" as such, it's more of a chick feeding supplement or something like that. Most likely it was named for superficial similarity (i.e. offspring sustenance) with mammal milk.
Perhaps the traditional RDBMS experts will return when they can scale their paradigms to datasets that are measured in the tens of terabytes and stored on thousands of computers. Following the airplane rule the solution needs to be able to withstand a crash in a bunch of those hosts without coming unglued.
Now, this is not to say that a more sophisticated approach wouldn't work. It's just that when you have thousands of boxes in a few ethernet segments, communication overhead becomes really quite large, so large in fact that whatever can be saved with brute-force computation it'll usually be worth it. Consider that from what I've heard, at Google these thousands of boxes are mostly containers for RAM modules so there's rather a lot of computation power per gigabyte available to throw away with a brute force system.
Also, I would like to point out that map/reduce is demonstrated to work. Apparently quite well too. Certainly better than any hypothetical "better" massively parallel RDBMS available in a production quality implementation today.
This was clearly an assassination by the JEWS. Think about it: an influential chess player speaks out against JEWS, and soon thereafter finds himself on several US-backed international shitlists (nice going with the 1st amendment, by the way).
Israel's CIA-equivalent, Mossad, even has a proven history of murdering people outside the JEWS' soil. Perhaps there was a bit of kosher-compatible polonium in Fischer's twentieth to last meal?
Fucking JEWS, is what I'm saying. They did 9/11, so why not Fischer too? It's clearly easier than commandeering a couple of poor man's cruise missiles and flying them into tall buildings in JEWS York.
Sadly, this is not the case. Indeed it's more than a little on the idealistic side of things.
In the real world, raises are obtained by switching employers. This is because as long as you are in the previous job still, the next job cannot offer less or equal to what the current one offers. Perhaps this isn't quite so in the realm of "IT" (i.e. user support), but in software development it's the rule.
Think about it. Why wait for the two-year raise cycle where you _might_ get a raise, when you can just get a better offer somewhere else and go to your boss with that? "Hey, I got this offer from somewhere else. Would you like to compete?" It's not like anyone has extra time they can waste not getting paid enough.
Thing is, that's where your boss came from.
Speaking as an european, I would point out that your constitution's first amendment does not require that in order for speech to count for freedom of speech that its originator would have to be positively identifiable at all times. I'd like to warn you against taking such fundamental things according to the most restrictive interpretation possible.
Now, freedom of speech as guaranteed by your constitution in the "the state shall make no law (but private parties are exempt because they're not the gub'mint)" sense would be all good and fine... but only if all power resided in the government. As we both well know, there's plenty of power outside the government(s) these days: corporations are the obvious example. Your employer has power to fire you if you e.g. express opinion contrary to that approved by his abstract ass.
Therefore in order to realistically exercise one's right to free speech regardless of circumstance and content, as intended by your constitution's first amendment, one must be able to do so without fear of repercussion. This implies, no, requires anonymity where desired by the speaker. Let the listener beware! Was that not one of the ideals on which your country's liberties are founded upon?
Flip-flopping as usual. Nothing to see here, move along now...
No, really. No one's actually interested in an "anecdote used to hopefully demonstrate a trend" fluff piece on some blog.
An attack that requires insider access? Well colour me frightened!
Or don't. That's more accurate anyhow.
More blithering idiots is just what we need. After all, why should you study basics, then move on to intermediate topics a few years later and finally learn to do things properly from experience? Reading To the Moon in 21 hours is so much simpler!
That's funny. I heard it so that the Austrian was replaced by an Italian (as a reference to Mussolini's fascist rule), and there was a fourth guy, a German, whose system was that if it's allowed, then it's forbidden.