To my knowledge nobody called him Tepes in Wallachia or Transylvania until after his death.
In the regions where he was Voivode, he was called Dracula (as you pointed out) which means son of the dragon (or son of the devil. the dragon was a symbol to represent the devil). His father spent a large amount of time in Germany during his (the father's) adolescence and had joined a holy order of knights called the Order of the Dragon. Their symbol was a dragon broken over a cross, which they wore on a pendant. When he returned to Wallachia, he wore the pendant and it was the source of the name Dracul. The order of knights were created to fight against the insurgence of the Turkish armies into Christendom.
Vlad Dracula is mentioned in Pope Pius' (i think. i might have the wrong pope on this) memoirs as being one of the greatest defenders of Christendom in his time.
During his reign, Dracula had an ambivalent relationship with the German merchants who would come trade with his citizens. He felt they were ripping off the peasants and threw many of them out of the country. They, in turn, created a smear campaign to try to get him removed from rulership. All the woodcuts depicting Vlad eating lunch in a field of impaled corpses and many of the stories that paint him as a raving, impaling lunatic originated in Germany.
He did impale many people, which lent the stories an air of truth, though. (impalement was a form of punishment that he learned from the turks when he was imprisoned by them as a child/young adult).
These restrictions are trivial compared to others in the area: You may use the Software to conduct internal performance testing and benchmarking studies, the results of which you (and not unauthorized third parties) may publish or publicly disseminate; provided that VMware has reviewed and approved of the methodology, assumptions and other parameters of the study. Please contact VMware at benchmark@vmware.com to request such review.
..."You can publish it only if we give you permission after seeing your results."
The methodology, assumptions, and other parameters should be defined prior to performing the benchmarking. Submit them and get them approved, then do the benchmarking and publish the results. If they refuse to approve them prior to the benchmarking, or don't approve them without a good reason for what is wrong with them, publish that fact (and the methodology, assumptions, and paramters) instead of the benchmarks.
Certainly you can. The potential punishment allowed by these false scarcity laws makes any "I did it" declaration suspect as being in exchange for lenient punishment. That is, guilt established under duress is no guilt at all. It is a shame the legal system allows and even encourages "plea bargaining" and thus sells the justice out from under us.
I disagree. If the judge thought the defendant was making the plea under duress, he has an obligation to not accept the plea bargain. (judges can do that)
As far as i know, the judge is under no legal obligation to sentence according to the agreement between the attorneys anyway. He could have given the guy 5 months probation if he wanted. (actually, i dont remember if there was a minimum sentence required so that might not be entirely true).
Good point. One might think this law is not really appropriate, seeing as it passed to appease distribution companies that did not like consumers buying videocassette tape players with copying capabilities.
I don't understand why you think the law wouldnt be appropriate since it predates the public awareness of the internet. There is nothing in the law that limits it to just infringements that were possible at time of its passing.
Personally, i think one of the most ridiculous things to come out of the popularity of the internet is the rush to create new laws to do that same thing existing laws do, but for the internet. The old laws still apply and the only reason they are trying to pass new ones is to make them more restrictive than the old ones.
Also, i disagree with your assertion that it was passed as a response to vcrs. If you have any corroborating evidence for that assertion, I would be interested to see it.
How many months would be spend in prison before he was convicted if he decided to fight it?
Well, assuming he isnt considered a flight risk, he should be able to make bail and be released until his trial. Also, it isn't unheard of for judges to sentence people to jail terms and give them credit against that sentence for time served during the trial.
How many of those 5 months will actually be served (or what has been told to him about that?).
considering it's only 5 months, i suspect he'll have to serve it all. If they were going to grant him probation before the 5 months was up, they'd have just sentenced him to 5 months probation in the first place.
Would they really charge him for 5 years if he had decided to fight it?
5 years is the maximum sentence. Pleading not guilty and losing doesn't mean you will get the maximum. Sentencing is determined separately.
How much would legal representation have cost him?
If he couldn't afford a lawyer, one would be appointed to him by the court for free.
I am not a person who keeps track of this kind of thing, though.
For anyone that makes it this far, theft is legally defined as "the dishonest appropriation of property belonging to another with the intention of permanently depriving that person of it." Until recently, copyright infringment was a civil matter. That means that you couldn't be brought to court by the state, and you couldn't serve jail time. You could be made to pay reparations to the party or parties whose copyrights you infringe, though
that kinda of depends on what you think is recent.
The willful infringement clause that establishes criminal liability for willful copyright violation was added to section 506(a) of title 17 of the u.s. code on May 24, 1982. So you've been able to serve jail time for copyright infringement for over 24 years.
(This addition had nothing to do with the internet. Name servers and the use of TCP/IP as the standard protocol for the internet didnt happen until 1983. DNS was introduced in 1984.)
5 months in prison is a pretty light sentence compared to what he could have gotten. the maximum prison sentence for willful infringement is 5 years (depending on the type of infringement. that's the worst possible case).
That isn't to say that i agree with the charges against him.. The actual infringement of the copyright is done by the seeders. The tracker maintainer seems like he would be the person in the chain who is clearly not guilty of actual infringement since all he is doing is saying "hey, that guy is giving away free copies of Memento, Microsoft Word, and Half-Life 2".
However, he did plead guilty. I cannot fault the judge for finding him guilty when he pleads guilty...and in light of the possible sentence he could have received, he got off pretty light. Given what i know of the case, i think he could have fought it, but he (and his lawyer) might have been privy to more damning evidence against him.
Surly killing someone is depriving them of the right to free speech.
you're walking a long way to make that statement relevent.
They can't send out a warrent for rs232, can't they?
they absolutely can. Lots of people get subpoenaed as "John Doe". It gives the police the ability to put pressure on the forum owner to turn over personally identifying information about you so that they can identify you.
For a new article on slashdot how about posting on how many people have been fired/jailed for posting on a blog/website.
well, fired is not really relevent to wether your right to free speech is abridged. As for jailed, i cannot think of any in the United States. If you are really interested in doing the research on that, i'd be interested in knowing what the results were.
re: the joke. That's fair enough. i missed that it was intended as a joke so it didnt make a lot of sense why it was there to me. As a joke, I understand why you had it there now.
"It's like those animal rights activists who want peacefull coexistance with small furry creatures only to threaten anyone who don't agree with violence."
yeah. it's amusing and sad how oblivious they are to the hypocrisy of their methods of promoting their position.
Oh s***, I just read up on this and the fella who shot Pim Fortuyn is a Fundementalist Islamist Animal Rights Activist. When's the next shuttle going to take off as I don't think this planet is safe anymore.
I just read about this guy. He was a rabid environmentalist and aniimal rights activist, but i didnt see anything that suggested he was Islamic. I can certainly see why an Islamic person might want to shoot Pim Fortuyn (although doing so would just reinforce Pim's argument against Islam), but I didnt see anything that suggested the shooter actually was Islamic. It seems like he considered the Muslim population a group that needed protection from Pim and took it upon himself do provide it because nobody else had done so, as opposed to feeling personally threatened by Pim.
But you are allowed to shoot someone as long as the gun manufacturers get imdemnified againsd being sued by the surviving relatives.
this is completely irrelevent to a discussion of free speech.
You do have freedom of speech, just as long as you don't exercise it. Now that the commie label can't be used to demonize whole groups, it's saving us from the terr'rists that's the pretext. Now y'all don't go accusing me of being in cahoots with people who think like the following.
? you are exercising the right to free speech by posting this.
'you accuse us of being warlike, intolerant and un-peacefull, in that case we must kill you', signed Abd-AL-Latif
i'm not sure how this is relevent either.
Lawyer gets locked up for defending client.
the lawyer became a party to the activities of her client. If those activities are illegal, the attorney/client privilege will not protect her from being charged with a crime. The client was also already in jail. The actions she got arrested for had nothing to do with his defense.
Nurse gets fined for bumper sticker.
The fine was overturned by a judge for being unconstitutional. Her speech rights were protected by the legal system.
Librarian served with lifetime gag order.
The gag order was overturned by a judge for being unconstitutional. The librarian's speech rights were protected by the legal system.
Considering the last two items were linked to articles that demonstrate the legal system protecting the speech of the people involved and the last article's title even said the gag orders were lifted, I suspect you are trolling.
When I was required to use windows for work, i used lightstep as my shell also. It had the additional benefit of everybody leaving my computer alone because they had no idea how to do anything on it. In my experience, lightstep would periodically crash. This was a long time ago(like Oct. 2000) so i expect most of those issues have been resolved by now.
Oh, I didnt know that. Do you have a source for that information?
No, I don't. sorry.
I remember when it happened, but there are so many pages about windows and viruses that searching for a corroborating source for an event that happened 10 years ago turned out to be futile.
If i find one, i'll add it as a reply to your request.
actually, Microsoft shipped a run of windows 95 cds with a virus on them. When it comes to virus infections, Microsoft is truly an innovative industry leader.
Well, the term "cat" would also include bobcats (they weigh up to 30 lbs), clouded leopards (weigh up to 44lb) and leopards (adults can weigh as little as 65 lbs). I'm pretty sure a 65lb leopard would have no problem killing a 150lb man (or a 200lb man for that matter)
Leopards weigh up to 155lbs and gorillas are on their prey list. Gorillas normally weigh between 300 and 440 lbs. So yeah, a 300 lb cat could kill an 800 lb gorilla.
tigers (which can weigh up to 700 lbs) have been known to take out Gaur and water buffalo (which can weigh over 1500 lbs).
That is YOUR morality. How dare you impose your morality on someone else?
uh...he dares because you are distributing a derivative work based off of his code.
There is no reason why someone else can't use GPL'd software to do DRM. If they are using their own time and their own talents and the coder of the upstream software is OK with it - what is the problem?
If the upstream coder is ok with it, he won't release his code under the GPLv3. Alternately, he will give you a separate license to use his code that explicitly allows you to do this.
The GPL is only meant to cover redistribution of software (it is a licensing agreement not a terms-of-use).
true. if you want to build a huge DRM'd application and not distribute it, you can do so without violating the GPLv3. If you want to distribute it, you cannot use his code in your project.
My problem is all you people who want to impose your morality on others in a flurry of holier-than-thou richeousness. Once you take a freedom away, which freedom goes next?
Uh...nobody has taken a freedom away from you to begin with.
Taking away the ability to experiment with DRM is a freedom, I don't care if you agree with it or not.
Nobody is taking away your ability to experiment with DRM. Feel free to build any drm systems you want at any time. What they are doing is not granting you permission to use their code in your DRM system. Since you have NO natural rights to use their code in the first place, not extending to you the right to use their code cannot be "taking away" anything from you.
"preserving freedom" by removing freedom is hypocritical of the FSF. What freedom goes next?
They arent removing any freedom. They are extending the option to distribute their code to anybody in the world who also wishes to preserve the user's freedom. If you don't want to do that, you can still build a DRM system, you're just gonna have to do it without their help.
Three guys on slashdot maybe not, but you don't need many. Sampling size for national opion polls in the US is typically only 1,500.
I agree that if you build a truly random sample and construct your opinion poll properly, you can determine trends using a surprisingly small sample size. There's a whole industry built around those polls. I imagine Sony has probably availed themselves of that industry when trying to figure out how much they could get away with.
I think we could also agree that the original poster's statistical sample is too small and not sufficiently random to be meaningful in any way. I also suspect that the way the people involved were polled was probably not impartial.
Lets say each of we three have discussed the matter with 10 people, now clearly that's not a really good sample size, so our margin for error is quite high, but it is fairly random, so that helps.
it's an insignificant sample size. the margin for error is so high it makes the results meaningless. A sample built from the friends of people who read slashdot is not fairly random.
Now the fact that apparently not a single one of those 30 people can be said to be happy about the price means that even with a huge error rate, the original quote is still questionable.
No, it doesn't. It means that people with similar interests to people who read slashdot might not be happy with the price point. Considering there's a million slashdot user accounts, 30 people is probably not a big enough sample size to reliably make assertions about how slashdot readers and their friends in general feel.
But really, the argument is irrelivant.
I disagree. You are supporting your position with statistically meaningless evidence. I think that is relevant.
You've got to have your head in the sand to think that in general, people are very happy with the PS3 price point.
I know there are some people who do not have a particular problem with the price because they've posted in this story. I suspect that everyone, regardless of how they feel about the price point, would be happy for the price point to be lower. I recognise that the population of the country contains vastly different opinions than I do on a number of subjects. I am unwilling to make sweeping definitive statements about the entire population of a country based on, effectively, no data.
Do you know anyone who is really happy with the price? Because if you don't, and I don't, and GP doesn't, sure that's not market research, but it's pretty strong anecdotal evidence, and makes Phil's quote worth questioning.
In a country with 190 million people, i can determine market trends by asking 3 guys on slashdot what their friends think about something? Wow. That's gonna save companies a fortune.
I got no reference on this, but I think that I've heard somewhere that FPS and similar games are actually used in training soldiers. First comes to mind the game... was it called U.S. Army that was made by the army ?
The military in the United States uses first person shooters to teach small unit tactics, leadership, and teamwork skills. The goal is for the team to assess the situation, make the right tactical decisions, and then execute the plan in a coordinated fashion. The part where they shoot people is incidental to the purpose of the training.
I don't know. Even if it isn't, not being superior is no reason to doubt the obvious: we are the most adaptable species on the planet to different environments.
we are not close to the most adaptable species on the planet to different environments.
All of the situations you describe are situations where we do the same thing. We take the narrow environment we can survive in with us into inhospitable environments. We aren't adapting to that environment at all. We're building tools to protect us from an environment we cannot survive in.
We are the most creative at adapting environments to us. And we are the best at building tools to protect us from inhospitable environments. But we're still constrained to a narrow range of environments we can live in.
>I personally believe that if a person has difficulty understanding the basic mathematics or problem-solving that a Computer Science / Engineering degree requires they will have a great deal of difficulty designing a robust system of any reasonable complexity.
LOL...at my shop, one of our Senior Engineers doesn't even have a college degree.
That doesn't mean he doesn't understand the basic mathematics or problem-solving that the degree requires. I know plenty of people who do not have degrees in Computer Science who are perfectly capable programmers and architects. The difference between them and me is that I took classes that helped introduce me to the information i needed and did additional work on my own; they had to learn it all on their own.
That doesn't make them better or worse than me. They just chose a potentially more difficult path to get to the same place.
You have to have the source packages available upon request for the next 3 years. Nothing requires you to make them available for download from your distribution site.
archive them and provide the source on cd for the cost of the cd + the cost of mailing it out for older versions of the distro.
Since you are allowed to pass along the physical costs of providing the source code to the person requesting it, the costs to the maintainer are insignificant.
Where are the smart terrorists? That's what bothers me.
the smart terrorists are recruiting morons to blow themselves up in the name of god. Smart terrorists are organizers and agitators. Idiots are foot soldiers.
Slashdot Mirror
To my knowledge nobody called him Tepes in Wallachia or Transylvania until after his death.
In the regions where he was Voivode, he was called Dracula (as you pointed out) which means son of the dragon (or son of the devil. the dragon was a symbol to represent the devil).
His father spent a large amount of time in Germany during his (the father's) adolescence and had joined a holy order of knights called the Order of the Dragon. Their symbol was a dragon broken over a cross, which they wore on a pendant. When he returned to Wallachia, he wore the pendant and it was the source of the name Dracul.
The order of knights were created to fight against the insurgence of the Turkish armies into Christendom.
Vlad Dracula is mentioned in Pope Pius' (i think. i might have the wrong pope on this) memoirs as being one of the greatest defenders of Christendom in his time.
During his reign, Dracula had an ambivalent relationship with the German merchants who would come trade with his citizens. He felt they were ripping off the peasants and threw many of them out of the country. They, in turn, created a smear campaign to try to get him removed from rulership. All the woodcuts depicting Vlad eating lunch in a field of impaled corpses and many of the stories that paint him as a raving, impaling lunatic originated in Germany.
He did impale many people, which lent the stories an air of truth, though. (impalement was a form of punishment that he learned from the turks when he was imprisoned by them as a child/young adult).
These restrictions are trivial compared to others in the area:
..."You can publish it only if we give you permission after seeing your results."
You may use the Software to conduct internal performance testing and benchmarking studies, the results of which you (and not unauthorized third parties) may publish or publicly disseminate; provided that VMware has reviewed and approved of the methodology, assumptions and other parameters of the study. Please contact VMware at benchmark@vmware.com to request such review.
The methodology, assumptions, and other parameters should be defined prior to performing the benchmarking. Submit them and get them approved, then do the benchmarking and publish the results. If they refuse to approve them prior to the benchmarking, or don't approve them without a good reason for what is wrong with them, publish that fact (and the methodology, assumptions, and paramters) instead of the benchmarks.
Certainly you can. The potential punishment allowed by these false scarcity laws makes any "I did it" declaration suspect as being in exchange for lenient punishment. That is, guilt established under duress is no guilt at all. It is a shame the legal system allows and even encourages "plea bargaining" and thus sells the justice out from under us.
I disagree. If the judge thought the defendant was making the plea under duress, he has an obligation to not accept the plea bargain. (judges can do that)
As far as i know, the judge is under no legal obligation to sentence according to the agreement between the attorneys anyway. He could have given the guy 5 months probation if he wanted. (actually, i dont remember if there was a minimum sentence required so that might not be entirely true).
Good point. One might think this law is not really appropriate, seeing as it passed to appease distribution companies that did not like consumers buying videocassette tape players with copying capabilities.
I don't understand why you think the law wouldnt be appropriate since it predates the public awareness of the internet. There is nothing in the law that limits it to just infringements that were possible at time of its passing.
Personally, i think one of the most ridiculous things to come out of the popularity of the internet is the rush to create new laws to do that same thing existing laws do, but for the internet. The old laws still apply and the only reason they are trying to pass new ones is to make them more restrictive than the old ones.
Also, i disagree with your assertion that it was passed as a response to vcrs. If you have any corroborating evidence for that assertion, I would be interested to see it.
How many months would be spend in prison before he was convicted if he decided to fight it?
Well, assuming he isnt considered a flight risk, he should be able to make bail and be released until his trial. Also, it isn't unheard of for judges to sentence people to jail terms and give them credit against that sentence for time served during the trial.
How many of those 5 months will actually be served (or what has been told to him about that?).
considering it's only 5 months, i suspect he'll have to serve it all. If they were going to grant him probation before the 5 months was up, they'd have just sentenced him to 5 months probation in the first place.
Would they really charge him for 5 years if he had decided to fight it?
5 years is the maximum sentence. Pleading not guilty and losing doesn't mean you will get the maximum. Sentencing is determined separately.
How much would legal representation have cost him?
If he couldn't afford a lawyer, one would be appointed to him by the court for free.
I am not a person who keeps track of this kind of thing, though.
For anyone that makes it this far, theft is legally defined as "the dishonest appropriation of property belonging to another with the intention of permanently depriving that person of it." Until recently, copyright infringment was a civil matter. That means that you couldn't be brought to court by the state, and you couldn't serve jail time. You could be made to pay reparations to the party or parties whose copyrights you infringe, though
that kinda of depends on what you think is recent.
The willful infringement clause that establishes criminal liability for willful copyright violation was added to section 506(a) of title 17 of the u.s. code on May 24, 1982. So you've been able to serve jail time for copyright infringement for over 24 years.
(This addition had nothing to do with the internet. Name servers and the use of TCP/IP as the standard protocol for the internet didnt happen until 1983. DNS was introduced in 1984.)
5 months in prison is a pretty light sentence compared to what he could have gotten. the maximum prison sentence for willful infringement is 5 years (depending on the type of infringement. that's the worst possible case).
That isn't to say that i agree with the charges against him.. The actual infringement of the copyright is done by the seeders. The tracker maintainer seems like he would be the person in the chain who is clearly not guilty of actual infringement since all he is doing is saying "hey, that guy is giving away free copies of Memento, Microsoft Word, and Half-Life 2".
However, he did plead guilty. I cannot fault the judge for finding him guilty when he pleads guilty...and in light of the possible sentence he could have received, he got off pretty light. Given what i know of the case, i think he could have fought it, but he (and his lawyer) might have been privy to more damning evidence against him.
Surly killing someone is depriving them of the right to free speech.
you're walking a long way to make that statement relevent.
They can't send out a warrent for rs232, can't they?
they absolutely can. Lots of people get subpoenaed as "John Doe". It gives the police the ability to put pressure on the forum owner to turn over personally identifying information about you so that they can identify you.
For a new article on slashdot how about posting on how many people have been fired/jailed for posting on a blog/website.
well, fired is not really relevent to wether your right to free speech is abridged. As for jailed, i cannot think of any in the United States.
If you are really interested in doing the research on that, i'd be interested in knowing what the results were.
re: the joke. That's fair enough. i missed that it was intended as a joke so it didnt make a lot of sense why it was there to me. As a joke, I understand why you had it there now.
"It's like those animal rights activists who want peacefull coexistance with small furry creatures only to threaten anyone who don't agree with violence."
yeah. it's amusing and sad how oblivious they are to the hypocrisy of their methods of promoting their position.
Oh s***, I just read up on this and the fella who shot Pim Fortuyn is a Fundementalist Islamist Animal Rights Activist. When's the next shuttle going to take off as I don't think this planet is safe anymore.
I just read about this guy. He was a rabid environmentalist and aniimal rights activist, but i didnt see anything that suggested he was Islamic. I can certainly see why an Islamic person might want to shoot Pim Fortuyn (although doing so would just reinforce Pim's argument against Islam), but I didnt see anything that suggested the shooter actually was Islamic.
It seems like he considered the Muslim population a group that needed protection from Pim and took it upon himself do provide it because nobody else had done so, as opposed to feeling personally threatened by Pim.
But you are allowed to shoot someone as long as the gun manufacturers get imdemnified againsd being sued by the surviving relatives.
this is completely irrelevent to a discussion of free speech.
You do have freedom of speech, just as long as you don't exercise it. Now that the commie label can't be used to demonize whole groups, it's saving us from the terr'rists that's the pretext. Now y'all don't go accusing me of being in cahoots with people who think like the following.
? you are exercising the right to free speech by posting this.
'you accuse us of being warlike, intolerant and un-peacefull, in that case we must kill you', signed Abd-AL-Latif
i'm not sure how this is relevent either.
Lawyer gets locked up for defending client.
the lawyer became a party to the activities of her client. If those activities are illegal, the attorney/client privilege will not protect her from being charged with a crime.
The client was also already in jail. The actions she got arrested for had nothing to do with his defense.
Nurse gets fined for bumper sticker.
The fine was overturned by a judge for being unconstitutional. Her speech rights were protected by the legal system.
Librarian served with lifetime gag order.
The gag order was overturned by a judge for being unconstitutional. The librarian's speech rights were protected by the legal system.
Considering the last two items were linked to articles that demonstrate the legal system protecting the speech of the people involved and
the last article's title even said the gag orders were lifted, I suspect you are trolling.
you can install x11 in OS X and replace the aqua interface with the X11 interface.
http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/x11/
You can also run them side by side.
When I was required to use windows for work, i used lightstep as my shell also. It had the additional benefit of everybody leaving my computer alone because they had no idea how to do anything on it. In my experience, lightstep would periodically crash. This was a long time ago(like Oct. 2000) so i expect most of those issues have been resolved by now.
It is the difference between first degree murder and involuntary manslaughter, for example, if you're firing a gun in the woods.
In Texas, at least, there is a lesser charge than manslaughter, called Deadly Action, that could apply in that situation.
Oh, I didnt know that. Do you have a source for that information?
No, I don't. sorry.
I remember when it happened, but there are so many pages about windows and viruses that searching for a corroborating source for an event that happened 10 years ago turned out to be futile.
If i find one, i'll add it as a reply to your request.
actually, Microsoft shipped a run of windows 95 cds with a virus on them. When it comes to virus infections, Microsoft is truly an innovative industry leader.
Well, the term "cat" would also include bobcats (they weigh up to 30 lbs), clouded leopards (weigh up to 44lb) and leopards (adults can weigh as little as 65 lbs).
I'm pretty sure a 65lb leopard would have no problem killing a 150lb man (or a 200lb man for that matter)
Leopards weigh up to 155lbs and gorillas are on their prey list. Gorillas normally weigh between 300 and 440 lbs.
So yeah, a 300 lb cat could kill an 800 lb gorilla.
tigers (which can weigh up to 700 lbs) have been known to take out Gaur and water buffalo (which can weigh over 1500 lbs).
That is YOUR morality. How dare you impose your morality on someone else?
uh...he dares because you are distributing a derivative work based off of his code.
There is no reason why someone else can't use GPL'd software to do DRM. If they are using their own time and their own talents and the coder of the upstream software is OK with it - what is the problem?
If the upstream coder is ok with it, he won't release his code under the GPLv3. Alternately, he will give you a separate license to use his code that explicitly allows you to do this.
The GPL is only meant to cover redistribution of software (it is a licensing agreement not a terms-of-use).
true. if you want to build a huge DRM'd application and not distribute it, you can do so without violating the GPLv3. If you want to distribute it, you cannot use his code in your project.
My problem is all you people who want to impose your morality on others in a flurry of holier-than-thou richeousness. Once you take a freedom away, which freedom goes next?
Uh...nobody has taken a freedom away from you to begin with.
Taking away the ability to experiment with DRM is a freedom, I don't care if you agree with it or not.
Nobody is taking away your ability to experiment with DRM. Feel free to build any drm systems you want at any time.
What they are doing is not granting you permission to use their code in your DRM system. Since you have NO natural rights to use their code in the first place, not extending to you the right to use their code cannot be "taking away" anything from you.
"preserving freedom" by removing freedom is hypocritical of the FSF. What freedom goes next?
They arent removing any freedom. They are extending the option to distribute their code to anybody in the world who also wishes to preserve the user's freedom.
If you don't want to do that, you can still build a DRM system, you're just gonna have to do it without their help.
Three guys on slashdot maybe not, but you don't need many. Sampling size for national opion polls in the US is typically only 1,500.
I agree that if you build a truly random sample and construct your opinion poll properly, you can determine trends using a surprisingly small sample size.
There's a whole industry built around those polls. I imagine Sony has probably availed themselves of that industry when trying to figure out how much they could get away with.
I think we could also agree that the original poster's statistical sample is too small and not sufficiently random to be meaningful in any way.
I also suspect that the way the people involved were polled was probably not impartial.
Lets say each of we three have discussed the matter with 10 people, now clearly that's not a really good sample size, so our margin for error is quite high, but it is fairly random, so that helps.
it's an insignificant sample size. the margin for error is so high it makes the results meaningless. A sample built from the friends of people who read slashdot is not fairly random.
Now the fact that apparently not a single one of those 30 people can be said to be happy about the price means that even with a huge error rate, the original quote is still questionable.
No, it doesn't. It means that people with similar interests to people who read slashdot might not be happy with the price point. Considering there's a million slashdot user accounts, 30 people is probably not a big enough sample size to reliably make assertions about how slashdot readers and their friends in general feel.
But really, the argument is irrelivant.
I disagree. You are supporting your position with statistically meaningless evidence. I think that is relevant.
You've got to have your head in the sand to think that in general, people are very happy with the PS3 price point.
I know there are some people who do not have a particular problem with the price because they've posted in this story.
I suspect that everyone, regardless of how they feel about the price point, would be happy for the price point to be lower.
I recognise that the population of the country contains vastly different opinions than I do on a number of subjects.
I am unwilling to make sweeping definitive statements about the entire population of a country based on, effectively, no data.
Do you know anyone who is really happy with the price? Because if you don't, and I don't, and GP doesn't, sure that's not market research, but it's pretty strong anecdotal evidence, and makes Phil's quote worth questioning.
In a country with 190 million people, i can determine market trends by asking 3 guys on slashdot what their friends think about something? Wow. That's gonna save companies a fortune.
I got no reference on this, but I think that I've heard somewhere that FPS and similar games are actually used in training soldiers. First comes to mind the game... was it called U.S. Army that was made by the army ?
The military in the United States uses first person shooters to teach small unit tactics, leadership, and teamwork skills. The goal is for the team to assess the situation, make the right tactical decisions, and then execute the plan in a coordinated fashion. The part where they shoot people is incidental to the purpose of the training.
I don't know. Even if it isn't, not being superior is no reason to doubt the obvious: we are the most adaptable species on the planet to different environments.
we are not close to the most adaptable species on the planet to different environments.
All of the situations you describe are situations where we do the same thing. We take the narrow environment we can survive in with us into inhospitable environments. We aren't adapting to that environment at all. We're building tools to protect us from an environment we cannot survive in.
We are the most creative at adapting environments to us. And we are the best at building tools to protect us from inhospitable environments.
But we're still constrained to a narrow range of environments we can live in.
Oh yeah?
well, if dolphins are so smart, why do they live in igloos?
So which were the advantages of having the intelligence which were bigger than being able to prevent those heavy casualties?
Well, 1200 people died in Coventry.
Historians believe having cracked the enigma code shortened the war by 2 years.
Do you think more than 1200 people would have died if the war had lasted 2 years longer?
There's a quote about liberty, security and such, by some old USanian fart, that might apply here.
The actual author of that quote is in some dispute, actually. (though all the candidates would qualify as "old USanian farts")
The quote, however, talks about giving up essential liberty. I don't think taking toothpaste onto an airplane really constitutes essential liberty.
>I personally believe that if a person has difficulty understanding the basic mathematics or problem-solving that a Computer Science / Engineering degree requires they will have a great deal of difficulty designing a robust system of any reasonable complexity.
LOL...at my shop, one of our Senior Engineers doesn't even have a college degree.
That doesn't mean he doesn't understand the basic mathematics or problem-solving that the degree requires.
I know plenty of people who do not have degrees in Computer Science who are perfectly capable programmers and architects. The difference between them and me is that I took classes that helped introduce me to the information i needed and did additional work on my own; they had to learn it all on their own.
That doesn't make them better or worse than me. They just chose a potentially more difficult path to get to the same place.
You have to have the source packages available upon request for the next 3 years. Nothing requires you to make them available for download from your distribution site.
archive them and provide the source on cd for the cost of the cd + the cost of mailing it out for older versions of the distro.
Since you are allowed to pass along the physical costs of providing the source code to the person requesting it, the costs to the maintainer are insignificant.
Where are the smart terrorists? That's what bothers me.
the smart terrorists are recruiting morons to blow themselves up in the name of god.
Smart terrorists are organizers and agitators. Idiots are foot soldiers.
Hey - I thought you'd been "Window$ free for over 10 years...."!
maybe he meant he's been using windows for free for over 10 years.