Oh, obviously FSF could only sue regarding software they are the copyright holders to. So not the drivers (that'd require Linux copyright holders to sue), not Busybox, etc.
I wonder if the FSF's settlement was restricted in the same way. I suspect it was, in which case this settlement does not mean LinkSys have or will cease breaching the GPL with their products shipments..
Interesting. It seems though those crimes were defined post-facto, by the Allied war-crime tribunals. They did not exist when Germany instigated the war. It seems that Germany had not bound itself to the pre-war, multi-lateral Kellog-Briand treaty, which it seems was the pre-cursor to the UN charter's anti-aggresive-war clause. Even if Germany had, Kellog-Briand did not make it a charge that could be brought against an individual, apparently.
Urm.. many german soldiers and officers *were* charged and tried for their involvement in war crimes (retributional executions of civilians, being a guard at a concentration camp, etc..). That's in addition to the trials of the Wehrmacht and Nazi high-command who ordered these things. The search for Nazi war criminals continued after the war, to bring them to trial, and still continues to this day (though, most suspects are obviously now dead, or near the end of their lives).
I'm just amazed that you could post your comment when, for the last few months, the case of John Demanjuk's extradition from the USA to Germany has been in the news, to be prosecuted for his alleged actions as a guard at a german concentration camp in WWII.
It's not a war-crime for a soldier to fight other soldiers, in accordance with the normal laws of war, even if the war itself is illegal. So being a soldier in the Wehrmacht or Waffen-SS, involved in ordinary combat operations, was not of itself a crime, and so not a cause to be charged with anything.
Further, Germany's wars, though certainly aggresive and immoral, were at that time in keeping with the practices of the times and not, AFAIK, illegal (in the sense of how the nation-state wars were initiated - distinct from Germany's treatment of civilians under their power, and war-crimes commited). It was only with the founding of the UN that war was made generally unacceptable (if not illegal - I'm not quite sure what status the UN charter has in international law), other than in self-defensive. Several nations, USA and GB among them, have unfortunately made a mockery of this principle by adopting doctrines of pre-emptively defensive warfare.
You're talking to CTS, who has a long-history of spouting insubstantive and rarely substantiated opinion, intermingled with ad-hominem insults, with anyone who will engage him in his pursuit of endless argument. I encountered him first on Kuro5shin, but he's seems ever more active on/. since the former's decline.
I respect your eloquence, and I appreciate you responding but, in the nicest way possible: What waffle. There's not one rational argument in there.
- science does not dictate reality but models it
Well duh, yes.;)
- any suggestion that there are domains not covered by science is seen as a failure of weak minds instead of a respect for the limits of science.
You're trying to imply there are limits to what understandings can be reached through the scientific method and hence (presumably) that there is certain understanding which can only come to us via belief in a divinity. That's an extra-ordinary claim, and requires some kind of rational argument for why a divinity is needed to explain things, if you wish it to be accepted scientifically.
Otherwise you're just complaining that "wah wah, those annoying scientist and their need for proof, why can't they just accept the Great Sky Fairy?". Accepting things without proof, of course, goes against the scientific method. That said, some scientists do accept religious-faith on such a basis for whatever internal reasons.
politics, art, history--are not scientific pursuits nor can they be studied in a scientific manner, and their value is disputed only by extremists of one stripe
This is definitely a straw-man. Where exactly do you see scientists arguing against any of the above endeavours? (Which presumably is what you're trying to imply, given the context).
Sure, but a spheroid earth fits with other observations (e.g. that we can observe heavenly bodies that are round, which fits with spherical), etc.. There's a great essay by Isaac Asimov, "The Relativity of Wrong", which uses this topic as its main example.
The fallacy in your argument is, if your "scientism" refers to a 'belief' in the scientific method and rationalism, that "scientism" is inherently anti-extreme. Instead it is healthy scepticism that (in general) *refuses* to 'believe' or put 'faith' in any claim, beyond any such faith allowed by a consensus of rational consideration of physical evidence.
The only way you could consider that kind of world-view to be "extreme" is if you inhabit a world where truth is handed down to you, not to be questioned, and your "truth" is so insubstantial that you feel threatened by the above, contrasting view...
DPI would require more complicated, slightly more expensive equipment. So there'd be an anti-incentive for ISPs to deploy it, relative to the situation today - i.e. they might, possibly, be at a slight competitive disadvantage compared to ISPs that didn't deploy DPI.
Yep... E.g. "The Catholic Orangemen of Togo" by Craig Murray, which he made available for online distribution after his publisher caved to threats of a libel lawsuit by the notorious mercenary Tim Spicer.
Actually, it'd be a *good* thing if everything just used port 80 (for TCP) and whatever-popular-UDP-port (SIP, Skype?). Having application layer identifiers be part of the transport (TCP/UDP) specification just makes it too easy for the ISPs to discriminate between such applications.
Hard-coded destination ports are an anachronism, the sooner they die and the application-identifier becomes opaque to ISPs, the better.
(yes, we'd need some kind of connectionservice/process demultiplexer behind port 80 then; HTTP servers already can do this though. We can continue to use ephemereal ports for the sender side mapping).
Note though that "The ones left will tend to be the good engineers" does not, per se, imply "all the ones who leave are not good engineers". Least, it wasn't meant to.
Some of the best software engineers I know are in their late-30s / mid-40s. Now, perhaps, they're slightly less sharp than compared against their younger selves, however they are, without a doubt, better than 99.9% of 20-something engineers.
Something worth considering is that any such age-sharpness effect, rather than simply dulling the 20-something engineers, will actually have the effect of weeding out the less-good engineers, causing them to turn to management (or whatever). The engineers who become old engineers will be the better ones, and age will additionally equip them with much experience.
Do not underestimate just how brilliant the slightly dulled-by-age, but highly-experienced top engineers are when stood next to top-quartile, 20-something, inexperienced engineers (never mind average 20-something engineers)..
The ACPO, though a private limited company, are part-funded by the Home Office. They also have had some policing functions explicitely delegated to them by the Home Office. Finally, they represent the executive leadership of the police. They are hardly toothless. The CPS definitely are not toothless, given that they decide whether or not cases should be prosecuted.
"There is no agreement from the CPS" - uhm, did you read the MoU? It's signed by the Director of Public Prosecutions.
As for the "We encourage..." line, I suspect you must not be british or else you would recognise that this is a typically British form of understatement.;)
For the avoidance of doubt: the quasi-statutory NGOs I refer to are ACPO and IWF, and so (I believe) are immune to FoI requests. These are ostensibly private organisations which never the less effectively have had statutory/typically-governmental functions delegated to them.
Some functions have been delegated in a very indirect, even underhand way. E.g. the UK government has leaned heavily on ISPs to sign up to the IWFs' blacklist - there is no statutory requirement, just the threat of future statutory requirements. Personally, I believe this undermines democracy.
The CPS directly represent the state (or "the Crown" in UK speak).
The Crown Prosecution service (i.e. the state prosecutor) and the body that effectively decides policing policy have basically agreed they wouldn't prosecute the IWF. Also the CPS have the power to take over (and hence drop) any private prosecutions.
It's a bit more than a mere reccomendation when the entire enforcement side of the criminal justice system says "Ok by us"...
Computer Shopper are misinformed in their claim that IWF have no licence to contravene the law to view child pornography. In actual fact, there is a published CPS Memorandum of Understanding between the CPS (Crown Prosecution Service) and ACPO (Association of Chief Police Officers - another conveniently non-governmental body that still manages to assume magical quasi-statutory powers).
These bodies are, of course, not subject to the Freedom of Information Act. Which no doubt at least partly explains the ever-increasing reliance on such quasi-statutory quangos...
That's not quite right. When Intel were *much* smaller, big customers (IBM particularly, but I think some US government dept also forced their hand), wanted second-source suppliers in place as a condition to Intel getting contracts. Intel cross-licensed with AMD in order to secure such contracts. Here's AMDs' version.
On balance I think we've done more good than harm.
I never said otherwise. The balance of deeds generally probably should not, however, affect your critical examination of any specific deeds, as such.
It's relevant because that coup that everybody likes to blame on the United States was actually instigated by the British
By British *and* the CIA (google for "Monty Woodhouse", e.g.: Fisk interviewed him not long before his death). Unfortunately, we're unlikely to find out much more as those involved are all dead now and the CIA somehow managed to destroy all its files on the matter.
It's relevant because the leader that everybody blames on the United States was actually installed by the Soviet Union and Great Britain.
You mean they installed another, more pliant member of the already long-ruling dynasty. That's beside the point though, I'm certainly not trying to defend British or Soviet actions, nor trying to shift blame from them onto the USA.
I don't like seeing people quote half of history while ignoring or being ignorant of the other half.
The point is, regardless of the past, when Iran finally had a strong, democratically elected government, certain great powers helped overthrow it, elevating the existing head of state to autocrat. One of those great powers continued to prop up this increasingly despotic ruler for twenty odd years, till finally there was a popular revolution. Have you googled for SAVAK btw?
You are a citizen of that great power, and you're on this forum suggesting Iran is an irresponsible child, and making remarks that suggest you have no appreciation of the history of your nation's involvement in Iran (why do you think they invaded your embassy??!).
I'm not trying to cast blame (there's always plenty of that to throw around - often a pointless exercise), I'm just trying to get people to go find out stuff about their own country and increase understanding generally.
I've no idea whether you're ignorant or not, however there are quite a few ignorant USAsians who hold quite forthright and aggresive views towards the rest of the world, utterly ignorant of the extent to which their idealogical forefathers shaped the world. (I consider myself ignorant too - but I generally don't advocate hostility towards countries I know little about).
So, perhaps you're educated, perhaps not. I see you've at least managed to find Wikipedia. You don't seem have to gotten very far on that article though judging by your reply. I'm not sure how British and USSR influence is relevant, other than to further demonstrate that the Iranian people have fairly good historical evidence of the dangers of interfering great powers.
Keep reading (and not just Wikipedia) and try answer the questions.
Do you know why there was such animosity by the revolutionary Iranians towards all things USAsian? Do you know who Mossadeq was and what happened to him? What about the Shah of Iran, do you know what he did to his people? Do you know how the USA was involved?
You're still bitter about this? Anti-german sentiment was hardly unusual, after/either/ of the 2 world wars. The english royal family also changed their name (at the start of the war - if not before) - was Woodrow responsible for that too?
Slashdot Mirror
So LinkSys are therefore still not in compliance with the GPL?
Oh, obviously FSF could only sue regarding software they are the copyright holders to. So not the drivers (that'd require Linux copyright holders to sue), not Busybox, etc.
I wonder if the FSF's settlement was restricted in the same way. I suspect it was, in which case this settlement does not mean LinkSys have or will cease breaching the GPL with their products shipments..
So are you saying Linksys have started supplying the source for the drivers for the Broadcom wireless in many of their routers?
Interesting. It seems though those crimes were defined post-facto, by the Allied war-crime tribunals. They did not exist when Germany instigated the war. It seems that Germany had not bound itself to the pre-war, multi-lateral Kellog-Briand treaty, which it seems was the pre-cursor to the UN charter's anti-aggresive-war clause. Even if Germany had, Kellog-Briand did not make it a charge that could be brought against an individual, apparently.
Interesting :)
Urm.. many german soldiers and officers *were* charged and tried for their involvement in war crimes (retributional executions of civilians, being a guard at a concentration camp, etc..). That's in addition to the trials of the Wehrmacht and Nazi high-command who ordered these things. The search for Nazi war criminals continued after the war, to bring them to trial, and still continues to this day (though, most suspects are obviously now dead, or near the end of their lives).
I'm just amazed that you could post your comment when, for the last few months, the case of John Demanjuk's extradition from the USA to Germany has been in the news, to be prosecuted for his alleged actions as a guard at a german concentration camp in WWII.
It's not a war-crime for a soldier to fight other soldiers, in accordance with the normal laws of war, even if the war itself is illegal. So being a soldier in the Wehrmacht or Waffen-SS, involved in ordinary combat operations, was not of itself a crime, and so not a cause to be charged with anything.
Further, Germany's wars, though certainly aggresive and immoral, were at that time in keeping with the practices of the times and not, AFAIK, illegal (in the sense of how the nation-state wars were initiated - distinct from Germany's treatment of civilians under their power, and war-crimes commited). It was only with the founding of the UN that war was made generally unacceptable (if not illegal - I'm not quite sure what status the UN charter has in international law), other than in self-defensive. Several nations, USA and GB among them, have unfortunately made a mockery of this principle by adopting doctrines of pre-emptively defensive warfare.
You're talking to CTS, who has a long-history of spouting insubstantive and rarely substantiated opinion, intermingled with ad-hominem insults, with anyone who will engage him in his pursuit of endless argument. I encountered him first on Kuro5shin, but he's seems ever more active on /. since the former's decline.
I respect your eloquence, and I appreciate you responding but, in the nicest way possible: What waffle. There's not one rational argument in there.
- science does not dictate reality but models it
Well duh, yes. ;)
- any suggestion that there are domains not covered by science is seen as a failure of weak minds instead of a respect for the limits of science.
You're trying to imply there are limits to what understandings can be reached through the scientific method and hence (presumably) that there is certain understanding which can only come to us via belief in a divinity. That's an extra-ordinary claim, and requires some kind of rational argument for why a divinity is needed to explain things, if you wish it to be accepted scientifically.
Otherwise you're just complaining that "wah wah, those annoying scientist and their need for proof, why can't they just accept the Great Sky Fairy?". Accepting things without proof, of course, goes against the scientific method. That said, some scientists do accept religious-faith on such a basis for whatever internal reasons.
politics, art, history--are not scientific pursuits nor can they be studied in a scientific manner, and their value is disputed only by extremists of one stripe
This is definitely a straw-man. Where exactly do you see scientists arguing against any of the above endeavours? (Which presumably is what you're trying to imply, given the context).
Sure, but a spheroid earth fits with other observations (e.g. that we can observe heavenly bodies that are round, which fits with spherical), etc.. There's a great essay by Isaac Asimov, "The Relativity of Wrong", which uses this topic as its main example.
The fallacy in your argument is, if your "scientism" refers to a 'belief' in the scientific method and rationalism, that "scientism" is inherently anti-extreme. Instead it is healthy scepticism that (in general) *refuses* to 'believe' or put 'faith' in any claim, beyond any such faith allowed by a consensus of rational consideration of physical evidence.
The only way you could consider that kind of world-view to be "extreme" is if you inhabit a world where truth is handed down to you, not to be questioned, and your "truth" is so insubstantial that you feel threatened by the above, contrasting view...
DPI would require more complicated, slightly more expensive equipment. So there'd be an anti-incentive for ISPs to deploy it, relative to the situation today - i.e. they might, possibly, be at a slight competitive disadvantage compared to ISPs that didn't deploy DPI.
Yep... E.g. "The Catholic Orangemen of Togo" by Craig Murray, which he made available for online distribution after his publisher caved to threats of a libel lawsuit by the notorious mercenary Tim Spicer.
Actually, it'd be a *good* thing if everything just used port 80 (for TCP) and whatever-popular-UDP-port (SIP, Skype?). Having application layer identifiers be part of the transport (TCP/UDP) specification just makes it too easy for the ISPs to discriminate between such applications.
Hard-coded destination ports are an anachronism, the sooner they die and the application-identifier becomes opaque to ISPs, the better.
(yes, we'd need some kind of connectionservice/process demultiplexer behind port 80 then; HTTP servers already can do this though. We can continue to use ephemereal ports for the sender side mapping).
Point taken...
Note though that "The ones left will tend to be the good engineers" does not, per se, imply "all the ones who leave are not good engineers". Least, it wasn't meant to.
Some of the best software engineers I know are in their late-30s / mid-40s. Now, perhaps, they're slightly less sharp than compared against their younger selves, however they are, without a doubt, better than 99.9% of 20-something engineers.
Something worth considering is that any such age-sharpness effect, rather than simply dulling the 20-something engineers, will actually have the effect of weeding out the less-good engineers, causing them to turn to management (or whatever). The engineers who become old engineers will be the better ones, and age will additionally equip them with much experience.
Do not underestimate just how brilliant the slightly dulled-by-age, but highly-experienced top engineers are when stood next to top-quartile, 20-something, inexperienced engineers (never mind average 20-something engineers)..
The ACPO, though a private limited company, are part-funded by the Home Office. They also have had some policing functions explicitely delegated to them by the Home Office. Finally, they represent the executive leadership of the police. They are hardly toothless. The CPS definitely are not toothless, given that they decide whether or not cases should be prosecuted.
"There is no agreement from the CPS" - uhm, did you read the MoU? It's signed by the Director of Public Prosecutions.
As for the "We encourage ..." line, I suspect you must not be british or else you would recognise that this is a typically British form of understatement. ;)
For the avoidance of doubt: the quasi-statutory NGOs I refer to are ACPO and IWF, and so (I believe) are immune to FoI requests. These are ostensibly private organisations which never the less effectively have had statutory/typically-governmental functions delegated to them.
Some functions have been delegated in a very indirect, even underhand way. E.g. the UK government has leaned heavily on ISPs to sign up to the IWFs' blacklist - there is no statutory requirement, just the threat of future statutory requirements. Personally, I believe this undermines democracy.
The CPS directly represent the state (or "the Crown" in UK speak).
I have blogged about IWF filtering, in particular on the general efficacy of the IWF blacklist filtering, and on security issues of IWF-blacklist implementations, particularly the use of Squid, at certain ISPs. May or may not be interesting to some to read, comment on and/or correct.
The Crown Prosecution service (i.e. the state prosecutor) and the body that effectively decides policing policy have basically agreed they wouldn't prosecute the IWF. Also the CPS have the power to take over (and hence drop) any private prosecutions.
It's a bit more than a mere reccomendation when the entire enforcement side of the criminal justice system says "Ok by us"...
Computer Shopper are misinformed in their claim that IWF have no licence to contravene the law to view child pornography. In actual fact, there is a published CPS Memorandum of Understanding between the CPS (Crown Prosecution Service) and ACPO (Association of Chief Police Officers - another conveniently non-governmental body that still manages to assume magical quasi-statutory powers).
These bodies are, of course, not subject to the Freedom of Information Act. Which no doubt at least partly explains the ever-increasing reliance on such quasi-statutory quangos...
That's not quite right. When Intel were *much* smaller, big customers (IBM particularly, but I think some US government dept also forced their hand), wanted second-source suppliers in place as a condition to Intel getting contracts. Intel cross-licensed with AMD in order to secure such contracts. Here's AMDs' version.
They started funding terrorism networks.
You're claiming this is in contrast to the USA?
I'm just sick of hearing us blamed for everything that's gone wrong in Iran
I would refer you back to my early comment, which you seem not to have read, despite replying to it..
On balance I think we've done more good than harm.
I never said otherwise. The balance of deeds generally probably should not, however, affect your critical examination of any specific deeds, as such.
It's relevant because that coup that everybody likes to blame on the United States was actually instigated by the British
By British *and* the CIA (google for "Monty Woodhouse", e.g.: Fisk interviewed him not long before his death). Unfortunately, we're unlikely to find out much more as those involved are all dead now and the CIA somehow managed to destroy all its files on the matter.
It's relevant because the leader that everybody blames on the United States was actually installed by the Soviet Union and Great Britain.
You mean they installed another, more pliant member of the already long-ruling dynasty. That's beside the point though, I'm certainly not trying to defend British or Soviet actions, nor trying to shift blame from them onto the USA.
I don't like seeing people quote half of history while ignoring or being ignorant of the other half.
The point is, regardless of the past, when Iran finally had a strong, democratically elected government, certain great powers helped overthrow it, elevating the existing head of state to autocrat. One of those great powers continued to prop up this increasingly despotic ruler for twenty odd years, till finally there was a popular revolution. Have you googled for SAVAK btw?
You are a citizen of that great power, and you're on this forum suggesting Iran is an irresponsible child, and making remarks that suggest you have no appreciation of the history of your nation's involvement in Iran (why do you think they invaded your embassy??!).
I'm not trying to cast blame (there's always plenty of that to throw around - often a pointless exercise), I'm just trying to get people to go find out stuff about their own country and increase understanding generally.
USAsian is more precise than American.
I've no idea whether you're ignorant or not, however there are quite a few ignorant USAsians who hold quite forthright and aggresive views towards the rest of the world, utterly ignorant of the extent to which their idealogical forefathers shaped the world. (I consider myself ignorant too - but I generally don't advocate hostility towards countries I know little about).
So, perhaps you're educated, perhaps not. I see you've at least managed to find Wikipedia. You don't seem have to gotten very far on that article though judging by your reply. I'm not sure how British and USSR influence is relevant, other than to further demonstrate that the Iranian people have fairly good historical evidence of the dangers of interfering great powers.
Keep reading (and not just Wikipedia) and try answer the questions.
Do you know why there was such animosity by the revolutionary Iranians towards all things USAsian? Do you know who Mossadeq was and what happened to him? What about the Shah of Iran, do you know what he did to his people? Do you know how the USA was involved?
Actually, I think North Korea wasn't ignored - they got extra aid as a result of their successful nuke programme (iirc).
You're still bitter about this? Anti-german sentiment was hardly unusual, after /either/ of the 2 world wars. The english royal family also changed their name (at the start of the war - if not before) - was Woodrow responsible for that too?