Denying the Holocaust isn't "freedom of speech", it's a hateful lie, and you are a hateful liar. Not necessarily. Lying is when you say something that you know is untrue. If you sincerely believe in what you're saying, it's not a lie.
This is best illustrated in the online debates before the Iraq war. The Americans who parroted their government and media propaganda were not lying, because they sincerely believed in the propaganda. However the US government and media were obviously lying -- the whole world outside the US knew about the catastrophic chaos that would inevitably follow, the skyrocketing terrorist recruitment, the very high probability of civil war, and so on. The US government and media couldn't avoid knowing about this since it was everywhere, so there's no doubt that they were lying.
Similarly, Americans who parrot their government and media propaganda about global warming are not lying. Strange as it may seem they sincerely believe in what they're saying. Of course their embarrassment will be much greater than the Iraq war embarrassment, since the catastrophe will be much greater. They shouldn't be accused of lying, they should be pitied.
Only months after suffering a horrible terrorist attack, the Spaniards elected a leftist terrorist appeaser For several months before the Iraq war, Europe was horrified by the catastrophic chaos in Iraq that would inevitably follow, the vastly increased terrorist recruitment opportunity, the risk of civil war, and the total lack of discernible exit strategy and other specific plans. Only the US remained unaware of all this, its media in a blind frenzy of "rallying around the flag", its government giving childish replies of "Either you're with us or you're against us".
The descriptions in our debates turned out to be horrifyingly, nightmarishly accurate. The nightmare still plays out, just as horribly and just as devoid of solution.
Europeans are cowards, trolls, No, we're simply less blind and stupid.
The reason may be that we never can work up a rally-round-the-flag frenzy. There is no such nationalism in Europe.
(Moderators who feel that this is off-topic, it's not, wait and see.)
I think most of us Europeans see it more or less as you described. Except we get the impression that not only your politicians but also your media lie, persistently and to a disastrous extent. This is extremely worrying, since you democracy can't exist without calm debate based on truth.
We certainly don't hate or despise Americans, on the contrary, we tend to see you as respected friends and allies. I get the impression that some of your media make it look like we hate you, by holding forth fringe Europeans who do, but the mainstream people certainly don't. Your shocking re-election of Bush did make quite a dent in our confidence, but that dent is very, very far from hatred or despise. (Most assume that he was re-elected by the American people and not by Diebold.)
However, I must mention -- and I mention this only to ward off the dreaded off-topic mod -- I must mention that we feel that your extreme use of private cars wouldn't be this extreme were it not for the above-mentioned media lies, in this case lies about climate change; and that because of this extreme usage, any parking problems that you may have are self-inflicted and well-deserved. With this masterly twist at the very end, this entire rant becomes nicely on-topic.
the land required for a simpler conventional carpark. Carpark? It's the penchant for war that is embarrassing, not the parking arrangements. And my comment wasn't meant to be taken seriously, even though there's truth in it. It's a bitter joke.
I put my email address in, and up came a listing of my full name and personal information Of course it did. What did you expect? In these times of government and authorities spreading terrorist scares, terrorist hysteria and terrorist fear, do you still have illusions of privacy?
I remember using one in Nagoya in 1989. They are not new technology at all. Come on, we're dealing with Americans here, people who believe war is a solution to everything, even to terrorism. No need to embarrass them further by rubbing their nose in how backward they are.
The school purchased computers from local wendor with Windows pre-installed. How weird that they prosecute the schoolmaster, who only bought computers, and not the vendor, who did the crime.
but how to prove my innocence? You don't have to prove your innocence. It's the prosecution that has to prove your guilt. If they can't, you're innocent.
Everybody should know this, because it's a very important principle in all democracies. It's part of the principle of rule of law.
In fact rule of law is so important that there's only a single exception among all the democratic countries. This exception is when the United States accuses you of terrorism. Then you become so extraordinarily scary that proof and rule of law no longer apply. When you commit the heinous act of getting accused by somebody, you automatically become guilty.
But copyright infringement hasn't been equated with terrorism. Not yet.
but there's no motivation for disclosing vulnerabilities. When you see an insecure physical lock, do you pick it and enter the building? After all there's no motivation for disclosing insecure locks. That's why you start breaking and entering in the first place I suppose?
The guy spent far more time and effort bypassing myspace's protections than you'd spend picking a few locks.
I think the better allegory here is that somebody leaves all their savings in a pile in the driveway, Not at all. More like they leave their savings indoors, in their home, and lock the door with several locks. Samy spent considerable time bypassing several different protections of myspace, he spent far more time and ingenuity than you'd need to pick a few locks. It's all documented. If we are to compare with piles of cash, he certainly picked several locks to get at it. With that analogy it's a very clear case of breaking and entering.
He, via his profile, offered everyone the chance of running some code. They accepted that offer, and ran his code. Not at all. He put code in his profile that ran automatically whenever anyone visited his profile. There was no offer and no acceptance. It happened automatically and inevitably to everyone who visited his profile.
When the code ran, it planted a copy of itself in the visitor's profile.
Then when a third party visited the profile with the copy, the copy automatically copied itself to the third party's profile.
Right now link farms are worthless piles of annoying punch-the-monkey ads, spyware infections etc. People who land on them by accident at best have their time wasted, at worst are actually at risk of infection.
By creating AdSense For Link Farms, you could provide a way to "monetize" link farms in a useful and somewhat profitable way by showing ads related to the links themselves and/or keywords provided by the link farmer. The user wins, because link farms become marginally less crap. The link farmer wins because they have a legit/non-annoying way to pay for the domains. And Google wins because it makes a small but non-zero amount of cash.
You don't give up on the link-farm problem and endorse them. The fact that something can't be removed completely is no reason to endorse it.
Domain squatting is spam. Just like e-mail spam and comment spam, domain squatting generates large profits for the spammers/squatters, and large costs that are paid by the rest of the internet community.
One such cost is waste of time. The domains do not become "marginally less crap". Look at www.kresko.com, a domain that I was interested in a few years ago. Kresko is Esperanto for growth. Does that page have anything to do with growth? Is it related to anything at all? The page is pure spam.
Other squatters arrange content for their pages by stealing material from other sites. If you also endorse such squatters you're endorsing this theft. The ad revenues should go to those who invested money, time and effort to create the content, not to the content thieves.
Because of the large profits, the squatters have a strong incentive to keep their domains. This means that useful words, words you remember easily, become unavailable for useful sites and services. Back when I wanted kresko.com there was a message saying that it would cost at least $2,000, and likely much more. Today there's a similar message saying that domain prices range from $688 to $ one million.
The only important difference between squatter pages and link-farm pages is that the squatter pages don't poison search engine algorithms. For a visitor, squatter pages are essentially link farms. Inane, time-wasting pages that occupy spots that should rightfully belong to useful pages. The useful pages are relegated to long and/or cryptic domain names.
please please can we assume intelligence on the internet? Come on, be realistic. This is Slashdot! We're all superintelligent here, but Aspieishly incapable of distinguishing a joke from a serious statement.
Which reminds me, you didn't explain whether it was your Google hit count or your conclusion that was a joke.
Okay, so if commercial company X tries to obstruct its customer Y for a particular move Q that company Y made it's a sign of reliability, while if an open source foundation does the same, it's unreliable? It makes no difference if it's commercial or open source, what matters is predictability. Commercial or not, if a supplier unpredictably denies customers upgrades because of unexpected and far-fetched political interpretations, this will hurt its public image.
It looks like i should have made it clear from the beginning that I don't think Novell have violated the GPL. If indeed they have violated it (or its basic intentions), then certainly FSF should act to stop the abuse. Defending the GPL is very important. However, it seems to me that the FSF is making a far-fetched and strange interpretation of the Novell-Microsoft deal, and striking down out of principled spite, maybe because it's Microsoft.
The scenario that you describe is very interesting. If indeed Novell has violated the GPL (I don't think they have), then very likely some other company will step in, or new projects will arise, to take care of Novell's customers. That would be a beautiful demonstration of one of the greatest advantages of Open Source and open standards: If your supplier can't supply you any more, someone else will step in to take care of you, and you will still have a supplier.
That would be great, if it worked out that way. I'm just not convinced that the world will see it that way, if Novell's problems are caused by attacks from the Open-Source community, attacks based on far-fetched, strange and unconvincing interpretations of the Novell-Microsoft deal.
Novell appears to be violating the GPL with its limited patent indemnification deal with Microsoft. That's an important and decisive issue. I'm not convinced that Novell has violated the GPL. People argue that the patent indemnification deal means that Novell empowers Microsoft to strike down on other Open Source projects over patent infringement. But Novell can't empower Microsoft to do that. Nobody has licensed such powers to Novell. The GPL does not empower Novell to strike any kind of deals in the name of the rest of the Open Source community, and that means that whatever deals they strike with Microsoft, these deals do not create any obligations or other major consequences for the rest of the Open Source community.
Novell can't have such power. And if I'm wrong and they do have such power, then that would mean that you and I and everybody has that power. In that case the GPL would be extremely brittle. I don't think that's the case.
The worries that the patent indemnification deal will make people think that Open Source infringes on patents is in my opinion exaggerated and strange. The deal gives no grounds for such conclusions.
Neither will the FSF because the GPL is not an end user license. They will stop redistribution of their software for copyright infringement such as occurs when a distributor invalidates their license. If the FSF bans Novell from redistributing Linux, then Novell's customers will feel that the FSF has banned them from receiving the redistributed software. And this for political reasons that they are not interested in, and that don't even relate to them directly. Sure they can look for another distributor, but that doesn't remove the feeling that they've been banned from receiving the software the way they want.
As I said in my reply to muellerr1, I'm not disputing the moral rights of the FSF to do what they're doing. What I'm worried about is the the reputation and public image of Open Source, as seen by companies and the media. When engineers tell their bosses that Open Source is the right solution, the bosses will say "Look what happened to Novell's customers. We can't stake the future of our company on our vendor getting continued political approval from Stallman."
How do you think Microsoft would act if a company began to redistribute MS software without a license? They would screw them as harshly as they could. This is predictable. What companies want is predictability, so this is okay with the companies. Even those that get screwed will feel that they brought it upon themselves.
Contrast with Microsoft dropping support which could top the catastrophe scale. I couldn't agree more. Sadly, companies don't understand this. It's absolutely amazing how deeply entrenched our societies' dependence on Microsoft is, all over the world. I find it hard to understand how so many people fail to see the dangers and risks that this entails. This risk is in fact the main reason that I hope Open Source will gain lots of traction. I believe Open Source is the most promising competitor.
...for Suse users that aren't smart enough to jump ship now. Sadly, seeing how companies tend to reason, I think many of those who jump ship will not say "We tried SuSE and it won't work any longer so let's try Red Hat instead." Instead they'll say "We tried Open Source and it won't work any longer, and this is because of Open-Source politics, so let's use proprietary instead."
But the main problem isn't Novell's customers. Perhaps many of them are clueful. The big problem is all the other companies and the media, who will feel that Open Source is unreliable because of Open-Source politics.
Depends all on how you look at it Indeed. And that in turn depends on who is looking. I'm not worried about how friendly-inclined members of the open-source community view this, I'm worried about how company decision-makers and media view it.
Aren't they just playing the same as ALL OTHER companies/organizations? Most companies act to protect the good name of the company. I'm arguing that these actions of the FSF will (unwittingly of course) destroy the good name of Open Source.
I get the impression that you're defending the moral right of the FSF to take action. But I don't dispute that right. What I'm worried about is something else, it's the consequences for the reputation and acceptance of Open Source software.
Slashdot Mirror
This is best illustrated in the online debates before the Iraq war. The Americans who parroted their government and media propaganda were not lying, because they sincerely believed in the propaganda. However the US government and media were obviously lying -- the whole world outside the US knew about the catastrophic chaos that would inevitably follow, the skyrocketing terrorist recruitment, the very high probability of civil war, and so on. The US government and media couldn't avoid knowing about this since it was everywhere, so there's no doubt that they were lying.
Similarly, Americans who parrot their government and media propaganda about global warming are not lying. Strange as it may seem they sincerely believe in what they're saying. Of course their embarrassment will be much greater than the Iraq war embarrassment, since the catastrophe will be much greater. They shouldn't be accused of lying, they should be pitied.
The descriptions in our debates turned out to be horrifyingly, nightmarishly accurate. The nightmare still plays out, just as horribly and just as devoid of solution. Europeans are cowards, trolls, No, we're simply less blind and stupid.
The reason may be that we never can work up a rally-round-the-flag frenzy. There is no such nationalism in Europe.
(Moderators who feel that this is off-topic, it's not, wait and see.)
I think most of us Europeans see it more or less as you described. Except we get the impression that not only your politicians but also your media lie, persistently and to a disastrous extent. This is extremely worrying, since you democracy can't exist without calm debate based on truth.
We certainly don't hate or despise Americans, on the contrary, we tend to see you as respected friends and allies. I get the impression that some of your media make it look like we hate you, by holding forth fringe Europeans who do, but the mainstream people certainly don't. Your shocking re- election of Bush did make quite a dent in our confidence, but that dent is very, very far from hatred or despise. (Most assume that he was re-elected by the American people and not by Diebold.)
However, I must mention -- and I mention this only to ward off the dreaded off-topic mod -- I must mention that we feel that your extreme use of private cars wouldn't be this extreme were it not for the above-mentioned media lies, in this case lies about climate change; and that because of this extreme usage, any parking problems that you may have are self-inflicted and well-deserved. With this masterly twist at the very end, this entire rant becomes nicely on-topic.
Everybody should know this, because it's a very important principle in all democracies. It's part of the principle of rule of law.
In fact rule of law is so important that there's only a single exception among all the democratic countries. This exception is when the United States accuses you of terrorism. Then you become so extraordinarily scary that proof and rule of law no longer apply. When you commit the heinous act of getting accused by somebody, you automatically become guilty.
But copyright infringement hasn't been equated with terrorism. Not yet.
The guy spent far more time and effort bypassing myspace's protections than you'd spend picking a few locks.
They accepted that offer, and ran his code. Not at all. He put code in his profile that ran automatically whenever anyone visited his profile. There was no offer and no acceptance. It happened automatically and inevitably to everyone who visited his profile.
When the code ran, it planted a copy of itself in the visitor's profile.
Then when a third party visited the profile with the copy, the copy automatically copied itself to the third party's profile.
And so on exponentially.
- Link farms will exist no matter what you do
- Right now link farms are worthless piles of annoying punch-the-monkey ads, spyware infections etc. People who land on them by accident at best have their time wasted, at worst are actually at risk of infection.
- By creating AdSense For Link Farms, you could provide a way to "monetize" link farms in a useful and somewhat profitable way by showing ads related to the links themselves and/or keywords provided by the link farmer. The user wins, because link farms become marginally less crap. The link farmer wins because they have a legit/non-annoying way to pay for the domains. And Google wins because it makes a small but non-zero amount of cash.
You don't give up on the link-farm problem and endorse them. The fact that something can't be removed completely is no reason to endorse it.Domain squatting is spam. Just like e-mail spam and comment spam, domain squatting generates large profits for the spammers/squatters, and large costs that are paid by the rest of the internet community.
One such cost is waste of time. The domains do not become "marginally less crap". Look at www.kresko.com, a domain that I was interested in a few years ago. Kresko is Esperanto for growth. Does that page have anything to do with growth? Is it related to anything at all? The page is pure spam.
Other squatters arrange content for their pages by stealing material from other sites. If you also endorse such squatters you're endorsing this theft. The ad revenues should go to those who invested money, time and effort to create the content, not to the content thieves.
Because of the large profits, the squatters have a strong incentive to keep their domains. This means that useful words, words you remember easily, become unavailable for useful sites and services. Back when I wanted kresko.com there was a message saying that it would cost at least $2,000, and likely much more. Today there's a similar message saying that domain prices range from $688 to $ one million.
The only important difference between squatter pages and link-farm pages is that the squatter pages don't poison search engine algorithms. For a visitor, squatter pages are essentially link farms. Inane, time-wasting pages that occupy spots that should rightfully belong to useful pages. The useful pages are relegated to long and/or cryptic domain names.
Domain squatting should be fought, not endorsed.
Which reminds me, you didn't explain whether it was your Google hit count or your conclusion that was a joke.
Google has been slipping for a long time. They've been supporting domain squatting forever.
It's sad, really.
Strange, I get 2.92M and 2.93M. But in my home country .se I get 6.21M.
Very interesting idea. Mod parent up.
Of course defending the GPL is right. And important, indeed very important.
To avoid repeating myself I'll point you to this other comment where I answer this.
It looks like i should have made it clear from the beginning that I don't think Novell have violated the GPL. If indeed they have violated it (or its basic intentions), then certainly FSF should act to stop the abuse. Defending the GPL is very important. However, it seems to me that the FSF is making a far-fetched and strange interpretation of the Novell-Microsoft deal, and striking down out of principled spite, maybe because it's Microsoft.
The scenario that you describe is very interesting. If indeed Novell has violated the GPL (I don't think they have), then very likely some other company will step in, or new projects will arise, to take care of Novell's customers. That would be a beautiful demonstration of one of the greatest advantages of Open Source and open standards: If your supplier can't supply you any more, someone else will step in to take care of you, and you will still have a supplier.
That would be great, if it worked out that way. I'm just not convinced that the world will see it that way, if Novell's problems are caused by attacks from the Open-Source community, attacks based on far-fetched, strange and unconvincing interpretations of the Novell-Microsoft deal.
Novell can't have such power. And if I'm wrong and they do have such power, then that would mean that you and I and everybody has that power. In that case the GPL would be extremely brittle. I don't think that's the case.
The worries that the patent indemnification deal will make people think that Open Source infringes on patents is in my opinion exaggerated and strange. The deal gives no grounds for such conclusions.
As I said in my reply to muellerr1, I'm not disputing the moral rights of the FSF to do what they're doing. What I'm worried about is the the reputation and public image of Open Source, as seen by companies and the media. When engineers tell their bosses that Open Source is the right solution, the bosses will say "Look what happened to Novell's customers. We can't stake the future of our company on our vendor getting continued political approval from Stallman." How do you think Microsoft would act if a company began to redistribute MS software without a license? They would screw them as harshly as they could. This is predictable. What companies want is predictability, so this is okay with the companies. Even those that get screwed will feel that they brought it upon themselves. Contrast with Microsoft dropping support which could top the catastrophe scale. I couldn't agree more. Sadly, companies don't understand this. It's absolutely amazing how deeply entrenched our societies' dependence on Microsoft is, all over the world. I find it hard to understand how so many people fail to see the dangers and risks that this entails. This risk is in fact the main reason that I hope Open Source will gain lots of traction. I believe Open Source is the most promising competitor.
...for Suse users that aren't smart enough to jump ship now. Sadly, seeing how companies tend to reason, I think many of those who jump ship will not say "We tried SuSE and it won't work any longer so let's try Red Hat instead." Instead they'll say "We tried Open Source and it won't work any longer, and this is because of Open-Source politics, so let's use proprietary instead."But the main problem isn't Novell's customers. Perhaps many of them are clueful. The big problem is all the other companies and the media, who will feel that Open Source is unreliable because of Open-Source politics.
I get the impression that you're defending the moral right of the FSF to take action. But I don't dispute that right. What I'm worried about is something else, it's the consequences for the reputation and acceptance of Open Source software.