Oh, okay. So I suppose they were expected to through every one of those 2000 URLs, download the contents, examine it and determine for themselves whether or not it was CP, in full violation of the law.
Not at all. Most of the URIs indicate pretty well what's behind them. The only value in posting links that are child porn is that someone can click on it to see if it really is child porn: Why is wikileaks any less responsible for that if they've actively made it possible than if they'd done it themselves? I don't see a problem with investigating Wikileaks for having done this.
And if we're reached the point where posting non-libelous text can be a crime, then the situation in Australia is the least of our worries; it puts this country back on the level of totalitarian regimes which censor and outlaw the possession of certain books (and even those countries generally allow people to access the list of banned books).
Libel isn't a crime as far as I know in western country; it's a civil matter. But many countries do outlaw certain sorts of speech: Germany, for instance, you can't deny the holocaust; most countries will forbid you from advocating the violent overthrow of the country; or it might be illegal to provide information about how to commit suicide to someone you could tell was suicidal. Certain books are banned in Australia. Certain videos and computer games are refused classification or rated X18+ and therefore banned from all or "merely" most of the country. Courts can forbid you from distributing material that's true.
And this has always been the case. What's new is they're just trying to apply the same standards to the internet as there've always been in physical media.
There is, but responsible media says "look, in addition to child porn, these guys are censoring a, c and d. they said they were only censoring child porn". The child porn links were completely unnecessary.
He posted links to child porn. That's not "doing something right". That's disgusting. Uncovering links to sites that shouldn't've been censored is good; I'm all for saying "hey look the Australian government's censoring us and these pro-lifers". Uncovering links to sites that should never have existed and whose owners should be, at least, jailed for the rest of their life, is bad. Knee-jerk reactions of either kind are completely unnecessary.
Screenshots of Debian? I can't think of anything more useless. You might as well try taking photos of life-forms there's such a huge range. No-one but me has a computer that looks+works the way mine does. (Albeit I've changed the feel more than the look, so any non-Gnome Crux screenshot will be reasonably close.)
When talking to the Queen, you would ask "Is Your Majesty satisfied?" If you said "Is Her Majesty satisfied?", you would be asking a third person to report on the state of Her Majesty.
Commonwealth countries such as South Africa and India are republics. No oaths of fealty to Elizabeth II are necessary. All they need to do is recognise that she's the Head of the Commonwealth (which is not a position anyone will automatically inherit upon her death; it could just as easily go to me as to King George VII).
I come from Australia, we uses both the single-transferrable vote (we call it proportional voting) and instant run-off (we call it preferential voting), and I can tell you, they both suck. STV in its purest form is hard to game, but it leads to massively complicated ballots which then require some form of simplification, which make it much easier to game (in Australian elections we regularly get unknown candidates finding themselves elected by surprise.
Instant run-off retains the two-party system (Greens get no seats off eight per cent of the vote; the Nationals, in a basically permanent coalition with the Liberals, get 10 seats off six per cent). In fact, I gather that it actually slows down the electoral success of third parties when compared with first past the post. But it does mean third parties might find it easier to be visible, because although they have no electoral success they might be polling high enough to at least cause a little concern.
They're also both surprisingly difficult, especially for immigrants, because you have to number your candidates. Condorcet would suffer from that problem to.
How a country was created is irrelevant to whether or not a state is a federation, or how elections should be conducted. Australia, for instance, is a federation with (at present) a federal election law for federal elections. Seven colonies were created over a period of some hundred years (chronologically, New South Wales, Tasmania as Van Diemen's Land, Western Australia as the Swan River Colony, South Australia, New Zealand, Victoria and Queensland). At the end of this process, an extra colony was created (called the Commonwealth of Australia) with some powers transferred from six of the seven colonies, and other powers transferred from London. The first election in this new colony was done using state electoral laws, but one of the first laws passed was an electoral law. Over the next fifty to ninety years, the Commonwealth of Australia, New Zealand, and the other colonies became increasingly independent of London. Into which category does Australia fall?
Belgium is a federation of sorts, and one I don't fully understand. The federation is a relatively recent creation, but Flanders and Wallonia are powerful today, and very much culturally (and linguistically) different. But would you accept it as comparable?
Switzerland is probably another good example that you'd accept; their cantons come from relatively independent states in days when travel was a lot slower than it is today. I have no idea about their electoral law, aside from the fact that they have a massive number of referenda.
If you're not going to accept standard definitions, that's your prerogative, but you should point it out before making statements that depend on it. And I still think you have a false premise.
Firstly, and perhaps trivially, people don't complain about RHEL because Red Hat hasn't changed the redistribution terms without warning. Debian had had permission to distribute a DFSG free version of Mozilla Firefox, and then Mozilla unilaterally revoked that permission without warning during the late stages of the release cycle. Ubuntu had had permission to distribute a version of Mozilla Firefox without an EULA, and now Mozilla has unilaterally revoked that permission during the late stages of the release cycle.
More significantly, "Firefox" clearly refers to a piece of software only available in binary form, making it non-free by (standard) definition — and I think any definition that approximates the understanding on this site. The (free) source code that can generate Firefox is evidently not Firefox; this is the core reason Mozilla have caused such difficulties firstly for Debian and now for Ubuntu.
On the other hand, because Red Hat Enterprise Linux is not a piece of software, it's not correct to say it's "free software"; instead, it consists of free software. RHEL includes such matters as support.
Firefox's is as free as any other open-source project
False. The artwork distributed with Firefox is non-free. The source code from which Firefox is distributed is free, but that's not the same as Firefox being free.
"of late"? Mozilla has been user-hostile since around the time of Firefox, and they were never all that great before then. Firefox should be the last example of free software anyone ever uses.
"Debian includes a Firefox-based browser." Is that against trademark law to say? It seems to adequately respect Mozilla's trademark rights as well as satisfying brand-name concious people.
That's not entirely true. As market share's increased, more flexible software has decreased. At the moment, you essentially have two complete desktop environments which make it hard to "mix and match" to get the desired outcome. This makes Linux less like the system I want to run. Sawfish, the only window manager I have found which correctly supports focus follows mouse[*], spent over four years without a release until last year, and has only had relatively minor updates since. This wasn't of course the end of the world; Sawfish was and remains an excellent window manager — better than any of the more actively maintained ones, for my purposes. This example is not unusual. If you don't use Gnome or KDE nowadays, you aren't benefiting from the increased usership.
I recognise that there is an advantage to other people using different software. The Windows/IE/Office monoculture made it hard for me to view certain websites or open certain documents. But there is no particular advantage to me of a Linux/Gecko/OpenOffice.org option over a Windows/Gecko/OpenOffice.org option.
[*] Many window managers purport to support this feature, but it is easy to have the mouse over a window without it having the current focus, for instance, by using Alt-Tab style switching, using drag-and-drop, or by right-clicking to open a context menu, and then closing it while the mouse is over another window.
Describing Qt or XUL as "X11 toolkits" and saying that because their different, then theres no compatibility on X11 is unfair. XUL/Mozilla/Firefox have for a long time been developing for Windows first and then adapting to Linux. Its cross-platform only in a very poor sense. Qt is much the same; and youre clearly aware that its different on Mac OS from the native systems, so its again a poor comparison.
Lastly, considering you can run X11 and Windows apps on Mac OS X, but youre only comparing native apps, its not really fair to do something different on "X11" Its very much possible to only use Gtk+ apps, so you should be comparing Gnome to Mac OS X to Linux --- maybe you dont get the "best" apps thatll run on your computer then (according to some standard), but then youre not getting the "best" apps thatll run on your compter either, if youre only looking at Carbon/Cocoa apps.
Surprisingly, that's actually a remarkably bad idea. Users are not usability experts. They're also really really nice people. Once they've found out how to do something (on their own or aided), they'll think its their fault and they'll tell you want a nice system you've really got and how they'd be quite happy to use it. That is, unless you're unfortunate enough to get a bunch of geeks to be your participants. Not because there's anything wrong with geeks, but because geeks aren't the target of (Ubuntu/Gnome's) usability studies.
Usability studies must be monitored by a trained expert, and their review of a user's behavior and recommendations based on that is much more important. If you think I'm wrong, for you and your friends at least, then you might be right, for you and your friends: but you're geeks and you have different priorities.
And as for faster startup times, the last thing you want to do is to frustrate users by making them wait to begin with. Us geeks have worked out methods of getting around this: we leave our computers on or suspend them whenever we can; we go get breakfast or have a shower or perform other aspects of our morning ritual when that's not an option. But for people who the computer isn't an important part of their life, their not going to do these things. The chance of them using their computer is going to be related to the startup speed of their computer,
(I'm also not sure what the "Windows way" of copying a file to another directory is. I can think of at least three, and I don't use Windows that often. Probably there's more.)
Most creationists are to my knowledge quite happy to believe that that's what happens. What they don't believe is that new species can evolve. Seeing as Asian and white people are the same species today, they would claim that there's no possible mechanism for us to evolve into separate species who can't for instance interbreed.
I personally don't understand how the two things are different; their so called "macro-evolution" is surely just the cumulative effect of millenia of "micro-evolution". But I'm neither a creationist nor a geneticist/biologist, so I have no idea about any of that.
If that's all their saying, it's not terribly new --- we already know that if you recall a picture the same neurons in the visual cortex fire as if see a picture. There is presumably something more somewhere else.
I suspect the reporting is at least as bad regular scientific reporting in popular media. Really, Slashdot ought to require that any article on a subject has a link either to the original article (i.e. the ultimate source, not a newspaper approximation) or to its abstract. And the submitter should have to have read the original article. And preferably the editor too.
Also, a fair comparison would consider the massive amounts of tax future Americans will need to pay to service the debt. Unless the US declares itself bankrupt or inflates their currency out of relevance.
But they provide absolutely no guarantees that your app won't break tomorrow with some update they push, and are completely unwilling to make any such guarantees.
They give no guarantee that when they upgrade one pice of software, other software they distribute won't break either. Distributions are pretty dodgy in the best case; the best you can do is use a so-called stable distribution for a months or years in the case of Debian, until it's no longer supported. God help you if the stable distribution doesn't support your hardware, yet.
It was possible it just didn't work. The problem I've had with Linux support for the last few years (five or so by now I guess...) is that if something doesn't work, everyone assumes it's the simple stuff that's not working, and when you tell them it's not you get at best a deafening silence, and at worse an assumption that you're insane and/or you've broken your computer. Which you might've done, but given Linux is Linux you'd think the whole point of the text support would be to fix that sort of a problem.
Less functional software is able to take people's freedom away when compared with more functional software.
If non-free software is not an option and there is a need, free software will necessarily fulfil it. If someone doesn't have the choice of using free software or not, I'm going to assume it's either a personal choice or it's because non-free software is generally not an option. In that context, the free software will be fully functional, if not immediately then very soon, because someone, somewhere will want it. So as I see it, the argument about functionality is irrelevant in this context.
Huh, it took me three or four times to get this. Not sure if it's unclear/confusing, or if I'm just being slow today.
Don't feel bad. I find that when talking about this particular topic lots of people make the same mistake as you. I think it's because of the heated argument syndrome (people are going to assume I'm saying free software is good, because I'm saying they're wrong but they believe free software is bad) and presumably partly because either I'm bad at explaining some things and/or I never learn.
I thought it was "essential liberty" and "temporary safety"
Hm, I guess that depends on what an essential liberty is. If it's essential, then presumably without it you'll die. In that case you can't give it up; without it, you'll die. So it reduces to a matter of opinion, and there I think there will always be occasions when freedom of speech, religion etc. can be exchanged while still "deserving" freedom and safety.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, okay. So I suppose they were expected to through every one of those 2000 URLs, download the contents, examine it and determine for themselves whether or not it was CP, in full violation of the law.
Not at all. Most of the URIs indicate pretty well what's behind them. The only value in posting links that are child porn is that someone can click on it to see if it really is child porn: Why is wikileaks any less responsible for that if they've actively made it possible than if they'd done it themselves? I don't see a problem with investigating Wikileaks for having done this.
And if we're reached the point where posting non-libelous text can be a crime, then the situation in Australia is the least of our worries; it puts this country back on the level of totalitarian regimes which censor and outlaw the possession of certain books (and even those countries generally allow people to access the list of banned books).
Libel isn't a crime as far as I know in western country; it's a civil matter. But many countries do outlaw certain sorts of speech: Germany, for instance, you can't deny the holocaust; most countries will forbid you from advocating the violent overthrow of the country; or it might be illegal to provide information about how to commit suicide to someone you could tell was suicidal. Certain books are banned in Australia. Certain videos and computer games are refused classification or rated X18+ and therefore banned from all or "merely" most of the country. Courts can forbid you from distributing material that's true.
And this has always been the case. What's new is they're just trying to apply the same standards to the internet as there've always been in physical media.
There is, but responsible media says "look, in addition to child porn, these guys are censoring a, c and d. they said they were only censoring child porn". The child porn links were completely unnecessary.
Doesn't slashdot automatically show the domain name of links for you? I thought did that for everyone to help us avoid goatse and similar.
He posted links to child porn. That's not "doing something right". That's disgusting. Uncovering links to sites that shouldn't've been censored is good; I'm all for saying "hey look the Australian government's censoring us and these pro-lifers". Uncovering links to sites that should never have existed and whose owners should be, at least, jailed for the rest of their life, is bad. Knee-jerk reactions of either kind are completely unnecessary.
Screenshots of Debian? I can't think of anything more useless. You might as well try taking photos of life-forms there's such a huge range. No-one but me has a computer that looks+works the way mine does. (Albeit I've changed the feel more than the look, so any non-Gnome Crux screenshot will be reasonably close.)
When talking to the Queen, you would ask "Is Your Majesty satisfied?" If you said "Is Her Majesty satisfied?", you would be asking a third person to report on the state of Her Majesty.
Actually, "he appears the rules of Germglish not to follow", because in main clauses the verb always in the second possition occur should.
Using free software is probably the easiest/safest way for many companies to comply with this ruling. Everyone wins.
Commonwealth countries such as South Africa and India are republics. No oaths of fealty to Elizabeth II are necessary. All they need to do is recognise that she's the Head of the Commonwealth (which is not a position anyone will automatically inherit upon her death; it could just as easily go to me as to King George VII).
I come from Australia, we uses both the single-transferrable vote (we call it proportional voting) and instant run-off (we call it preferential voting), and I can tell you, they both suck. STV in its purest form is hard to game, but it leads to massively complicated ballots which then require some form of simplification, which make it much easier to game (in Australian elections we regularly get unknown candidates finding themselves elected by surprise.
Instant run-off retains the two-party system (Greens get no seats off eight per cent of the vote; the Nationals, in a basically permanent coalition with the Liberals, get 10 seats off six per cent). In fact, I gather that it actually slows down the electoral success of third parties when compared with first past the post. But it does mean third parties might find it easier to be visible, because although they have no electoral success they might be polling high enough to at least cause a little concern.
They're also both surprisingly difficult, especially for immigrants, because you have to number your candidates. Condorcet would suffer from that problem to.
How a country was created is irrelevant to whether or not a state is a federation, or how elections should be conducted. Australia, for instance, is a federation with (at present) a federal election law for federal elections. Seven colonies were created over a period of some hundred years (chronologically, New South Wales, Tasmania as Van Diemen's Land, Western Australia as the Swan River Colony, South Australia, New Zealand, Victoria and Queensland). At the end of this process, an extra colony was created (called the Commonwealth of Australia) with some powers transferred from six of the seven colonies, and other powers transferred from London. The first election in this new colony was done using state electoral laws, but one of the first laws passed was an electoral law. Over the next fifty to ninety years, the Commonwealth of Australia, New Zealand, and the other colonies became increasingly independent of London. Into which category does Australia fall?
Belgium is a federation of sorts, and one I don't fully understand. The federation is a relatively recent creation, but Flanders and Wallonia are powerful today, and very much culturally (and linguistically) different. But would you accept it as comparable?
Switzerland is probably another good example that you'd accept; their cantons come from relatively independent states in days when travel was a lot slower than it is today. I have no idea about their electoral law, aside from the fact that they have a massive number of referenda.
If you're not going to accept standard definitions, that's your prerogative, but you should point it out before making statements that depend on it. And I still think you have a false premise.
Firstly, and perhaps trivially, people don't complain about RHEL because Red Hat hasn't changed the redistribution terms without warning. Debian had had permission to distribute a DFSG free version of Mozilla Firefox, and then Mozilla unilaterally revoked that permission without warning during the late stages of the release cycle. Ubuntu had had permission to distribute a version of Mozilla Firefox without an EULA, and now Mozilla has unilaterally revoked that permission during the late stages of the release cycle.
More significantly, "Firefox" clearly refers to a piece of software only available in binary form, making it non-free by (standard) definition — and I think any definition that approximates the understanding on this site. The (free) source code that can generate Firefox is evidently not Firefox; this is the core reason Mozilla have caused such difficulties firstly for Debian and now for Ubuntu.
On the other hand, because Red Hat Enterprise Linux is not a piece of software, it's not correct to say it's "free software"; instead, it consists of free software. RHEL includes such matters as support.
Firefox's is as free as any other open-source project
False. The artwork distributed with Firefox is non-free. The source code from which Firefox is distributed is free, but that's not the same as Firefox being free.
"of late"? Mozilla has been user-hostile since around the time of Firefox, and they were never all that great before then. Firefox should be the last example of free software anyone ever uses.
"Debian includes a Firefox-based browser." Is that against trademark law to say? It seems to adequately respect Mozilla's trademark rights as well as satisfying brand-name concious people.
That's not entirely true. As market share's increased, more flexible software has decreased. At the moment, you essentially have two complete desktop environments which make it hard to "mix and match" to get the desired outcome. This makes Linux less like the system I want to run. Sawfish, the only window manager I have found which correctly supports focus follows mouse[*], spent over four years without a release until last year, and has only had relatively minor updates since. This wasn't of course the end of the world; Sawfish was and remains an excellent window manager — better than any of the more actively maintained ones, for my purposes. This example is not unusual. If you don't use Gnome or KDE nowadays, you aren't benefiting from the increased usership.
I recognise that there is an advantage to other people using different software. The Windows/IE/Office monoculture made it hard for me to view certain websites or open certain documents. But there is no particular advantage to me of a Linux/Gecko/OpenOffice.org option over a Windows/Gecko/OpenOffice.org option.
[*] Many window managers purport to support this feature, but it is easy to have the mouse over a window without it having the current focus, for instance, by using Alt-Tab style switching, using drag-and-drop, or by right-clicking to open a context menu, and then closing it while the mouse is over another window.
Describing Qt or XUL as "X11 toolkits" and saying that because their different, then theres no compatibility on X11 is unfair. XUL/Mozilla/Firefox have for a long time been developing for Windows first and then adapting to Linux. Its cross-platform only in a very poor sense. Qt is much the same; and youre clearly aware that its different on Mac OS from the native systems, so its again a poor comparison.
Lastly, considering you can run X11 and Windows apps on Mac OS X, but youre only comparing native apps, its not really fair to do something different on "X11" Its very much possible to only use Gtk+ apps, so you should be comparing Gnome to Mac OS X to Linux --- maybe you dont get the "best" apps thatll run on your computer then (according to some standard), but then youre not getting the "best" apps thatll run on your compter either, if youre only looking at Carbon/Cocoa apps.
Surprisingly, that's actually a remarkably bad idea. Users are not usability experts. They're also really really nice people. Once they've found out how to do something (on their own or aided), they'll think its their fault and they'll tell you want a nice system you've really got and how they'd be quite happy to use it. That is, unless you're unfortunate enough to get a bunch of geeks to be your participants. Not because there's anything wrong with geeks, but because geeks aren't the target of (Ubuntu/Gnome's) usability studies.
Usability studies must be monitored by a trained expert, and their review of a user's behavior and recommendations based on that is much more important. If you think I'm wrong, for you and your friends at least, then you might be right, for you and your friends: but you're geeks and you have different priorities.
And as for faster startup times, the last thing you want to do is to frustrate users by making them wait to begin with. Us geeks have worked out methods of getting around this: we leave our computers on or suspend them whenever we can; we go get breakfast or have a shower or perform other aspects of our morning ritual when that's not an option. But for people who the computer isn't an important part of their life, their not going to do these things. The chance of them using their computer is going to be related to the startup speed of their computer,
(I'm also not sure what the "Windows way" of copying a file to another directory is. I can think of at least three, and I don't use Windows that often. Probably there's more.)
Most creationists are to my knowledge quite happy to believe that that's what happens. What they don't believe is that new species can evolve. Seeing as Asian and white people are the same species today, they would claim that there's no possible mechanism for us to evolve into separate species who can't for instance interbreed.
I personally don't understand how the two things are different; their so called "macro-evolution" is surely just the cumulative effect of millenia of "micro-evolution". But I'm neither a creationist nor a geneticist/biologist, so I have no idea about any of that.
If that's all their saying, it's not terribly new --- we already know that if you recall a picture the same neurons in the visual cortex fire as if see a picture. There is presumably something more somewhere else.
I suspect the reporting is at least as bad regular scientific reporting in popular media. Really, Slashdot ought to require that any article on a subject has a link either to the original article (i.e. the ultimate source, not a newspaper approximation) or to its abstract. And the submitter should have to have read the original article. And preferably the editor too.
Also, a fair comparison would consider the massive amounts of tax future Americans will need to pay to service the debt. Unless the US declares itself bankrupt or inflates their currency out of relevance.
But they provide absolutely no guarantees that your app won't break tomorrow with some update they push, and are completely unwilling to make any such guarantees.
They give no guarantee that when they upgrade one pice of software, other software they distribute won't break either. Distributions are pretty dodgy in the best case; the best you can do is use a so-called stable distribution for a months or years in the case of Debian, until it's no longer supported. God help you if the stable distribution doesn't support your hardware, yet.
It was possible it just didn't work. The problem I've had with Linux support for the last few years (five or so by now I guess ...) is that if something doesn't work, everyone assumes it's the simple stuff that's not working, and when you tell them it's not you get at best a deafening silence, and at worse an assumption that you're insane and/or you've broken your computer. Which you might've done, but given Linux is Linux you'd think the whole point of the text support would be to fix that sort of a problem.
If it's so inconvenient for you already, why don't you just switch to Ubuntu already?
Less functional software is able to take people's freedom away when compared with more functional software.
If non-free software is not an option and there is a need, free software will necessarily fulfil it. If someone doesn't have the choice of using free software or not, I'm going to assume it's either a personal choice or it's because non-free software is generally not an option. In that context, the free software will be fully functional, if not immediately then very soon, because someone, somewhere will want it. So as I see it, the argument about functionality is irrelevant in this context.
Huh, it took me three or four times to get this. Not sure if it's unclear/confusing, or if I'm just being slow today.
Don't feel bad. I find that when talking about this particular topic lots of people make the same mistake as you. I think it's because of the heated argument syndrome (people are going to assume I'm saying free software is good, because I'm saying they're wrong but they believe free software is bad) and presumably partly because either I'm bad at explaining some things and/or I never learn.
I thought it was "essential liberty" and "temporary safety"
Hm, I guess that depends on what an essential liberty is. If it's essential, then presumably without it you'll die. In that case you can't give it up; without it, you'll die. So it reduces to a matter of opinion, and there I think there will always be occasions when freedom of speech, religion etc. can be exchanged while still "deserving" freedom and safety.