Add a provision to the GPL that says that the Czech Republic or anyone subject to their laws is NOT allowed to use any GPL software. Specifically revoke their license to use or modify or distribute GPL programs. Obviously this could also be added to other open source licenses.
I suspect that this addition to the GPL could be generalized and not use the Czech Republic or any specific country name by describing the type of law that would trigger this provision. However, it might be quicker to add a list of countries forbidden to use GPL programs. This should begin to get the idea across that there is no back door to gutting the GPL.
Also trying to make this provision generic could lead to that countries lawyers trying to find loopholes in the description. It shouldn't be too hard to create a procedure to allow adding or removing a country from a "pariah" list when countries do this sort of crap.
Verizon has the following at the bottom of the referenced whitelist page:
"*Verizon Online reserves the right to restrict access to or from any domain provided at its sole discretion. The information provided to Verizon Online must be wholly correct or the request may be rejected. We cannot guarantee that we will be able to provide a solution that enables you to send or receive e-mail from a restricted source."
What the hell!!!
I thought in order to protect ISP's "not responsible for content" legal stance, they had to be a utility pipe. Sound like they're in the business of value judgements as to which domains they accept email from....
Anybody have any idea how to get Verizon to just put anybody on our manually maintained whitelist we want? Why should Verizon get a say?
Interesting. Now that you're no longer a broke college student, why not find a shark of a lawyer and sue the judge and police for the massive "pain and suffering" you've endured because of them? On a contingency basis of course (assuming you still have the photographic evidence). And while the lawyer is at it, file complaints of misconduct with the appropriate authorities (or even do this without the lawyer). The judge and police are probably still impacting peoples lives (I'm leaving the prosecutor out on the theory that the prosecutor is _supposed_ to be biased if they believe the case against you).
Why not make use of the other side of our bloated legal system? (I've only seen our legal system from the point of view a juror on about 15 or so cases from civil to drunk driving to 1st degree murder... mostly well argued by average to very good lawyers in front of reasonably fair judges and heard by juries who really worked hard to try to find the truth).
I do agree with the point of the parent post in that any legal system with so many badly written laws that the average citizen can't understand all of the laws, let alone defend themselves in minor scrapes, is broken and needs a major overhaul.
Perhaps a better link is to the OpenAFS (Open Andrew File System) implemenation: another IBM contribution to Open source. It is continuing to make available current releases. They're working right now on a new stable release.
So what if Roland Piquepaille's web site get's a lot of Slashdot references. I'm glad it does. I started to notice that nearly all of the Slashdot references to his site were for very interesting articles or technologies.
Now I read Roland's site before I read Slashdot because some articles he publishes don't make it into Slashdot. I don't know Roland personally, but from his resume and what he publishes he seems to me to be a very good technologist. His pointers to changes in technology and new breakthroughs in many fields are more carefully selected from a wider field than many other magazines and web sites, and he publishes them at a summary level that's perfect for me.
I don't know if my Slashdot userid (30,377) makes me a real old timer or not, but I've been on Slashdot for quite a long time, and I have to say I read and get something useful from a much higher percentage of Roland's articles than from the average Slashdot submission.
Steve
P.S. Roland is French and his English is one hell of a lot better than my non-existant French, so I'd hope that whoever was complaining about the grammar on his site would give him a break. I appreciate his making the site available in English, and I've never had a single problem understanding what he was saying.
Why would you recommend training from a company that runs its web site (slowly) on Microsoft-IIS/6.0? Maybe that's part of why only 2 of 6 people passed.
Sadly, this idea was already presented in Eldred v. Ashcroft, but the Supreme Court seems to have decided that interminable copyright extensions are OK as long as they are done piecemeal.
I'm hoping that this might be a better test case than Eldred, but I suspect you're right and the supremes will ignore common sense once again....
I hope the EFF takes this opportunity to challenge the constitutionality of the copyright law as "amended" by Disney, et. al.
All the constitution says about what we call copyright and patents is: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;"
Seems to me that "limited Times" has been greatly exceeded and thus the current law is unconstitutional because "To promote the Progress of Science and the useful Arts" has effectively become to "promote the profits of large corporate copyright holders forever", which is certainly not what the founding fathers had in mind.
It also seems the current asymmetry of the law between what constitutes "limited Times" for a patent vs. a copyright make one or the other invalid. Either patents should last 100+ years or copyrights should go back to a term closer to patents (about one human "generation" (roughly 20 years) which seems more like the balance the founding fathers sought to strike between freedom to build on others works, and allowing the author/inventor to make a living and thus encourage people to write and invent).
It would be nice if the courts would quit reading their own precedents for a while and go back and read the straightforward language of the constitution. I don't think any of the judges or lawmakers that have created the current IP mess are in the same league as our founding fathers who worked hard to strike a balance that made sense and worked well for over 150 years. (... sorry... end of rant...)
Kare, who's been plugging this idea for decades, writes "A rule of thumb for laser launchers is that the unit payload is 1 kg per MW of laser power." The Apollo lunar module (all the stuff that went to the moon) massed about 6500 Kg, of which 2500Kg made the round trip. So we're going to need several gigawatts of laser power for a moon shot.... Launching something the size of the Apollo lunar module would take six million such units, and about 12 gigawatts of electrical power for several minutes. This is twice the power output of Grand Coulee Dam, the biggest single power source in the US.
I think you're mixing apples and oranges. I doubt he'd propose to do a moon mission in a single launch. One of the key advantages of laser launch is that you can launch a payload several times an hour. I suspect he'd propose to launch a moon mission with a lot of subcomponents launched into LEO over a number of days / weeks which are then assembled and which then use more "conventional" power to go the rest of the way. This could reduce the power requirement by an order of magnitude or two (tradeoff becomes how many launches and how much assembly do you want to do in LEO).
I agree with your main point (that Rutan and company are to be commended for letting us know what happened ASAP).
But your Columbia example is a little unfair to NASA because Rutan had a live pilot and an intact aircraft to examine.
NASA had pieces of debris scattered everywhere and no survivors to talk to. The day after it happened NASA didn't really "know" much about what happened to Columbia.
Not a chance, go read up how cellphone networks operate and you will see why this will not work.
You must be a city slicker. There are people who live outside urban areas where the # of people per cell is not the limiting factor, but having a "cell" you can reach at all. These blimps could be very useful for cell phone users in sparsely populated areas.
Re:"Original" Copyright law and Patent law
on
Fair IP Laws?
·
· Score: 1
I've been writing software for over 30 years, so I have a high regard for the art and craft and science of software.
"Soft" patents by my definition are those which did not exist until about the last 20 years, when a series of court rulings started to allow "patents on software"... In fact the first of those rulings (Diamond v. Diehr - 1981) allowed the software to be patented only because it was a part of a larger process control machine. My "soft" was in quotes because you used to have to a tangible machine to get a patent.
I believe you're being "loose" in your reading of the constitution.
Authors produce writings which for 150+ years were only covered by copyright law.
Inventors make "discoveries" which as long as they were non-obvious and tangible could be patented.
The framers of the constitution specifically discussed and rejected the notion of "exclusive" rights over mathematical formulae or scientific truths, because they believed it would not work, etc. As I'm sure you know, any program can be represented as a mathematical formula and so was not considered patentable.
Because of the over-reaching of a bunch of lawyers and greedy companies, software is the only "writing" that can also be patented... This is overkill because copyright alone is sufficient to give a software developer "exclusive rights" to his/her writing.
Because patents have far greater exclusionary power than copyright, they are overkill and are destroying software innovation. Patents are being granted for techniques that have been in use for many years. Patents are being granted for using old techniques in trivial new applications which patents are then being abused by lawyers and companies who build up portfolios of these non-innovative "patents" and then use them to extort money out of legitimate companies and developers who are in fact using the same techniques that have been around for decades.
I wasn't arguing for no software protection, just elimination of patent protection for software. Copyright alone was sufficient to protect the legitimate financial interests of software developers from the 1940's through the 1970's and well into the 1980's.
"Original" Copyright law and Patent law
on
Fair IP Laws?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
We'd be fine if we went back to the Patent and Copyright law as it existed before the recent (last 20 years) unwarranted expansion of both.
We'd go back to the 17 year copyright with 17 year renewal, and eliminate "soft" patents including "software" patents, business process patents, etc...
Going back to the basics on both fronts would eliminate most of our current problems.
Our founding fathers had it right in the constitution: "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;"
I think Rob & co. should replace the current "Comments are owned by the Poster." with something like "all Comments are covered by the GNU Free Documentation License". (i.e. by posting here, you are agreeing to have your comments covered by GNU-FDL, if you don't go somewhere else... ) (cool: our very own GNU shrink-wrap EULA).
The GNU-FDL should cover Andover etc. from liability for what others say, while allowing "modifications" or aggregations of comments to be used like in this book...
This would seem more in the spirit of/. than the pissing and moaning that's been going on here, or having Rob add a button on your profile telling them what can be done with your comments. I don't think Rob should bother with that one because there are other enhancements that are more needed, and who would be able to access those flags to know what the author's "permissions" are?.?.?. With the GNU-FDL I'd know that I could copy a few/. messages and put them in a document for tech support purposes without worring about getting into trouble (a much more frequent use of/. comments than writing a book).
One thing I've not seen highlighted is the fact that if the DMCA continues on it's present course, it gives those who decide which Operating Systems to support, the ability to create monopolies beyond Micronsoft's wildest dreams.
After all, Microsoft had to do a lot of work to create it's monopoly! It had to buy or crush its competitors, abuse it's relationships with it's "partners", etc.
The DMCA gives the MPAA the power to create monopolies simply by refusing to license the "copyright protection mechanism" needed to view DVD's on computers and operating systems they don't like.
Since I didn't see any suggestions in the other threads that would make any practical differencereal change in behavior for the better, here are a couple of things "we" (Rob) could do to cut down the number of times Slashdot is made to look stupid by a bunch of immature children:
1) Develop a "complaint" folder that people who've been flamed by/. folk can send copies of the flame mail to for "our" action. (Copies of such flame mail could also be added to such a database by others "observing" the exchange...)
2) Encourage moderators to pick up extra moderator points (or free gifts ) by taking some time and going through the "flame mail folder" and basically voting on whether each piece of mail is so lacking in redeeming social value as to constitute an "offense" against/. (the moderators would get more points/better gifts based on the number of mails they review yea/nay, not how many emails they vote as "guilty")
3) For people guilty of such "offenses" (as "voted" by their "peers"), an escalating set of punishments could include:
A) "flagging" those accounts people on/. which are the source of this stuff with some sort of "banner" that no one would want to have associated with them... Like any time that person posts on/., their posting is bracked with bold letters "A POSTING FROM AN IMMATURE JERK" or ?... This would tend to reduce their participation in/. and hopefully make them think twice before they decide to "punish" someone else...
B) after a certain # of "offenses"... block the offender from/. altogether, and post all known identifying information about them in a "hall of shame" some where...
While there are ways to try to mask your identity when flaming someone to try to avoid punishment on/., that masking can often be penetrated, especially by people and software as powereful as we have here. Besides, forcing "bad"/. "members" to go through the extra work of becoming so annonymous we can't track them, may slow them down enough that they think better of "flaming".
I'm sure that if he's read this, Rob has already got the code written in his head to implement all this ()!
When he implements this, we can continue to become one of the most successful experiments in self moderating, yet remarkably free information flows around. If we don't do something, the "slashdot effect" could become an expletive...
Slashdot Mirror
Or we went into hiding where you can't find us.
It sounds like if this law passes the Czech programmers who use GPL are screwed anyway.
The goal would be to put some pressure on countries not to do this kind of thing.
I didn't see any posts with any suggestions (no matter how odd) trying to prevent this law from being duplicated in other countries.
I'd like to see some attempt to push back against this law.
I though I saw somewhere an effort to kill the domains of countries that tried to force RIM to give the government unencrypted traffic.
Maybe something like that would work. If nothing is done, the internet could be gutted quickly by national laws like these.
Add a provision to the GPL that says that the Czech Republic or anyone subject to their laws is NOT allowed to use any GPL software. Specifically revoke their license to use or modify or distribute GPL programs. Obviously this could also be added to other open source licenses.
I suspect that this addition to the GPL could be generalized and not use the Czech Republic or any specific country name by describing the type of law that would trigger this provision. However, it might be quicker to add a list of countries forbidden to use GPL programs. This should begin to get the idea across that there is no back door to gutting the GPL.
Also trying to make this provision generic could lead to that countries lawyers trying to find loopholes in the description. It shouldn't be too hard to create a procedure to allow adding or removing a country from a "pariah" list when countries do this sort of crap.
Does anyone know if the new Chrome with embedded Flash puts "Local Shared Objects" (aka Flash SuperCookies or .SOL files) on your machine?
Or has Google removed this scourge from their flash viewer?
Verizon has the following at the bottom of the referenced whitelist page:
"*Verizon Online reserves the right to restrict access to or from any domain provided at its sole discretion. The information provided to Verizon Online must be wholly correct or the request may be rejected. We cannot guarantee that we will be able to provide a solution that enables you to send or receive e-mail from a restricted source."
What the hell!!!
I thought in order to protect ISP's "not responsible for content" legal stance, they had to be a utility pipe. Sound like they're in the business of value judgements as to which domains they accept email from....
Anybody have any idea how to get Verizon to just put anybody on our manually maintained whitelist we want? Why should Verizon get a say?
Interesting. Now that you're no longer a broke college student, why not find a shark of a lawyer and sue the judge and police for the massive "pain and suffering" you've endured because of them? On a contingency basis of course (assuming you still have the photographic evidence). And while the lawyer is at it, file complaints of misconduct with the appropriate authorities (or even do this without the lawyer). The judge and police are probably still impacting peoples lives (I'm leaving the prosecutor out on the theory that the prosecutor is _supposed_ to be biased if they believe the case against you).
Why not make use of the other side of our bloated legal system? (I've only seen our legal system from the point of view a juror on about 15 or so cases from civil to drunk driving to 1st degree murder... mostly well argued by average to very good lawyers in front of reasonably fair judges and heard by juries who really worked hard to try to find the truth).
I do agree with the point of the parent post in that any legal system with so many badly written laws that the average citizen can't understand all of the laws, let alone defend themselves in minor scrapes, is broken and needs a major overhaul.
Perhaps a better link is to the OpenAFS (Open Andrew File System) implemenation: another IBM contribution to Open source. It is continuing to make available current releases. They're working right now on a new stable release.
The link is http://www.openafs.org/
Steve
So what if Roland Piquepaille's web site get's a lot of Slashdot references. I'm glad it does. I started to notice that nearly all of the Slashdot references to his site were for very interesting articles or technologies.
Now I read Roland's site before I read Slashdot because some articles he publishes don't make it into Slashdot. I don't know Roland personally, but from his resume and what he publishes he seems to me to be a very good technologist. His pointers to changes in technology and new breakthroughs in many fields are more carefully selected from a wider field than many other magazines and web sites, and he publishes them at a summary level that's perfect for me.
I don't know if my Slashdot userid (30,377) makes me a real old timer or not, but I've been on Slashdot for quite a long time, and I have to say I read and get something useful from a much higher percentage of Roland's articles than from the average Slashdot submission.
Steve
P.S. Roland is French and his English is one hell of a lot better than my non-existant French, so I'd hope that whoever was complaining about the grammar on his site would give him a break. I appreciate his making the site available in English, and I've never had a single problem understanding what he was saying.
Why would you recommend training from a company that runs its web site (slowly) on Microsoft-IIS/6.0? Maybe that's part of why only 2 of 6 people passed.
Sadly, this idea was already presented in Eldred v. Ashcroft, but the Supreme Court seems to have decided that interminable copyright extensions are OK as long as they are done piecemeal.
I'm hoping that this might be a better test case than Eldred, but I suspect you're right and the supremes will ignore common sense once again....
I hope the EFF takes this opportunity to challenge the constitutionality of the copyright law as "amended" by Disney, et. al.
... end of rant ...)
All the constitution says about what we call copyright and patents is: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;"
Seems to me that "limited Times" has been greatly exceeded and thus the current law is unconstitutional because "To promote the Progress of Science and the useful Arts" has effectively become to "promote the profits of large corporate copyright holders forever", which is certainly not what the founding fathers had in mind.
It also seems the current asymmetry of the law between what constitutes "limited Times" for a patent vs. a copyright make one or the other invalid. Either patents should last 100+ years or copyrights should go back to a term closer to patents (about one human "generation" (roughly 20 years) which seems more like the balance the founding fathers sought to strike between freedom to build on others works, and allowing the author/inventor to make a living and thus encourage people to write and invent).
It would be nice if the courts would quit reading their own precedents for a while and go back and read the straightforward language of the constitution. I don't think any of the judges or lawmakers that have created the current IP mess are in the same league as our founding fathers who worked hard to strike a balance that made sense and worked well for over 150 years. (... sorry
Kare, who's been plugging this idea for decades, writes "A rule of thumb for laser launchers is that the unit payload is 1 kg per MW of laser power." The Apollo lunar module (all the stuff that went to the moon) massed about 6500 Kg, of which 2500Kg made the round trip. So we're going to need several gigawatts of laser power for a moon shot. ...
Launching something the size of the Apollo lunar module would take six million such units, and about 12 gigawatts of electrical power for several minutes. This is twice the power output of Grand Coulee Dam, the biggest single power source in the US.
I think you're mixing apples and oranges. I doubt he'd propose to do a moon mission in a single launch. One of the key advantages of laser launch is that you can launch a payload several times an hour. I suspect he'd propose to launch a moon mission with a lot of subcomponents launched into LEO over a number of days / weeks which are then assembled and which then use more "conventional" power to go the rest of the way. This could reduce the power requirement by an order of magnitude or two (tradeoff becomes how many launches and how much assembly do you want to do in LEO).
I agree with your main point (that Rutan and company are to be commended for letting us know what happened ASAP).
But your Columbia example is a little unfair to NASA because Rutan had a live pilot and an intact aircraft to examine.
NASA had pieces of debris scattered everywhere and no survivors to talk to. The day after it happened NASA didn't really "know" much about what happened to Columbia.
You must be a city slicker. There are people who live outside urban areas where the # of people per cell is not the limiting factor, but having a "cell" you can reach at all. These blimps could be very useful for cell phone users in sparsely populated areas.
I've been writing software for over 30 years, so I have a high regard for the art and craft and science of software.
... This is overkill because copyright alone is sufficient to give a software developer "exclusive rights" to his/her writing.
"Soft" patents by my definition are those which did not exist until about the last 20 years, when a series of court rulings started to allow "patents on software"... In fact the first of those rulings (Diamond v. Diehr - 1981) allowed the software to be patented only because it was a part of a larger process control machine. My "soft" was in quotes because you used to have to a tangible machine to get a patent.
I believe you're being "loose" in your reading of the constitution.
Authors produce writings which for 150+ years were only covered by copyright law.
Inventors make "discoveries" which as long as they were non-obvious and tangible could be patented.
The framers of the constitution specifically discussed and rejected the notion of "exclusive" rights over mathematical formulae or scientific truths, because they believed it would not work, etc. As I'm sure you know, any program can be represented as a mathematical formula and so was not considered patentable.
Because of the over-reaching of a bunch of lawyers and greedy companies, software is the only "writing" that can also be patented
Because patents have far greater exclusionary power than copyright, they are overkill and are destroying software innovation. Patents are being granted for techniques that have been in use for many years. Patents are being granted for using old techniques in trivial new applications which patents are then being abused by lawyers and companies who build up portfolios of these non-innovative "patents" and then use them to extort money out of legitimate companies and developers who are in fact using the same techniques that have been around for decades.
I wasn't arguing for no software protection, just elimination of patent protection for software. Copyright alone was sufficient to protect the legitimate financial interests of software developers from the 1940's through the 1970's and well into the 1980's.
We'd be fine if we went back to the Patent and Copyright law as it existed before the recent (last 20 years) unwarranted expansion of both.
We'd go back to the 17 year copyright with 17 year renewal, and eliminate "soft" patents including "software" patents, business process patents, etc...
Going back to the basics on both fronts would eliminate most of our current problems.
Our founding fathers had it right in the constitution: "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;"
I think Rob & co. should replace the current "Comments are owned by the Poster." with something like "all Comments are covered by the GNU Free Documentation License". (i.e. by posting here, you are agreeing to have your comments covered by GNU-FDL, if you don't go somewhere else... ) (cool: our very own GNU shrink-wrap EULA).
/. than the pissing and moaning that's been going on here, or having Rob add a button on your profile telling them what can be done with your comments. I don't think Rob should bother with that one because there are other enhancements that are more needed, and who would be able to access those flags to know what the author's "permissions" are?.?.?. With the GNU-FDL I'd know that I could copy a few /. messages and put them in a document for tech support purposes without worring about getting into trouble (a much more frequent use of /. comments than writing a book).
The GNU-FDL should cover Andover etc. from liability for what others say, while allowing "modifications" or aggregations of comments to be used like in this book...
This would seem more in the spirit of
Steve
One thing I've not seen highlighted is the fact that if the DMCA continues on it's present course, it gives those who decide which Operating Systems to support, the ability to create monopolies beyond Micronsoft's wildest dreams.
After all, Microsoft had to do a lot of work to create it's monopoly! It had to buy or crush its competitors, abuse it's relationships with it's "partners", etc.
The DMCA gives the MPAA the power to create monopolies simply by refusing to license the "copyright protection mechanism" needed to view DVD's on computers and operating systems they don't like.
Since I didn't see any suggestions in the other threads that would make any practical differencereal change in behavior for the better, here are a couple of things "we" (Rob) could do to cut down the number of times Slashdot is made to look stupid by a bunch of immature children:
/. folk can send copies of the flame mail to for "our" action. (Copies of such flame mail could also be added to such a database by others "observing" the exchange...)
/. (the moderators would get more points/better gifts based on the number of mails they review yea/nay, not how many emails they vote as "guilty")
/. which are the source of this stuff with some sort of "banner" that no one would want to have associated with them ... Like any time that person posts on /., their posting is bracked with bold letters "A POSTING FROM AN IMMATURE JERK" or ? ... This would tend to reduce their participation in /. and hopefully make them think twice before they decide to "punish" someone else...
/. altogether, and post all known identifying information about them in a "hall of shame" some where...
/., that masking can often be penetrated, especially by people and software as powereful as we have here. Besides, forcing "bad" /. "members" to go through the extra work of becoming so annonymous we can't track them, may slow them down enough that they think better of "flaming".
1) Develop a "complaint" folder that people who've been flamed by
2) Encourage moderators to pick up extra moderator points (or free gifts ) by taking some time and going through the "flame mail folder" and basically voting on whether each piece of mail is so lacking in redeeming social value as to constitute an "offense" against
3) For people guilty of such "offenses" (as "voted" by their "peers"), an escalating set of punishments could include:
A) "flagging" those accounts people on
B) after a certain # of "offenses"... block the offender from
While there are ways to try to mask your identity when flaming someone to try to avoid punishment on
I'm sure that if he's read this, Rob has already got the code written in his head to implement all this ()!
When he implements this, we can continue to become one of the most successful experiments in self moderating, yet remarkably free information flows around. If we don't do something, the "slashdot effect" could become an expletive...
Steve