You ever wonder what that DISPLAY environment variable means?:.? It's for having a single source of computing power with multiple displays used by multiple users. Back in the 80s when this stuff was being developed fast systems were still quite spendy. It made sense to spend half a million on CPU and RAM then stick six or twenty users on it. Now days it's mainly niche applications that take this approach.
Go enroll at OU, then sue them for violating your free speech because they won't allow p2p traffic on the network.
Why don't you just ask me to move to China? I'd rather you do that than continue to advocate censorship in the US.
Right. So go sue OU.
There are two problems with your reasoning. The first is you are wrong about the strength of these cases. Despite the tremendous threats to everything they own, people have fought them and won. The second problem is that copyright violations are a poor reason to ban publications. If you applied the same reasoning to the world of print, you end up with a few state approved publishers... much like the world of broadcast media, and everyone else is out of luck. That's unAmerican.
Of the reported thousands of people who the RIAA has filed against, none have fought and won on the principle that they can distribute music. A small handful, less than ten, have blamed someone else and the RIAA decided to walk away from it. The most frequent case mentioned here is the Debbie Foster case where it was her daughter. Who settled because she knew she was guilty.
I'm curious, do you conflate killing in self defense with home invasion murder? It sounds like you would. Claiming a blockage of p2p traffic as the equivalent of requiring a license to publish is absurd.
You know, I can go backwards and forwards with this. If you take your goofey reasoning to meat space your soap box includes the very air between us. Our freedoms have been won and preserved through force of arms. We pay for those arms all the time, some more than others. No one is asking for a soap box, they are asking to use what they have bought and paid for. What you are trying to justify is limiting how people are able to publish and you are willing to bring the whole force of law down on those who would defy you. It's wrong and no amount of name calling will make it right.
Not sensibly, you can't. Air is there. A network was built. If you want to make a coherent analogy you would have to pick some other man-made structure, like an auditorium. And nobody is required to provide you with an auditorium and audience.
No they don't. They have an IP address and an accusation, many of which have been proved false. What they have is the strength of bad laws that allow them to take everything you own or waste it all with court motions, both of which are better called "judicial extortion" than justice.
Yeah. That's where it starts. They see that some IP address is serving up three thousand songs to all comers. Then they contact the owner of the netblock who points them at the person responsible for that IP address. Then they submit a subpoena. Then they can move on to discovery. And in all this process they find out that, indeed, some bonehead actually is distributing thousands of songs that he or she has no right to distribute. I'm failing to see how that isn't a strong case.
The fact that there has been perhaps ten people that they track down who have made the argument "it wasn't me, it was my daughter" or "the person who subscribed to the service has died and we've been using it illegally (ie. without a valid contract with the service provider) to distribute copyrighted content" or "I'm a paraplegic, poor me, don't sue me, I've just been distributing thousands of songs, poor me" doesn't change the fact that people are breaking the law.
Keeping me from publishing my own work on the network I pay for is a violation of free speech.
So why don't you try that. Go enroll at OU, then sue them for violating your free speech because they won't allow p2p traffic on the network. I expect to see regular reports here on slashdot since I'm sure everybody here will be interested in your fighting for all our civil rights. Oh wait, I bet you totally don't have the spine to do that. You just like to talk and talk but you'll never go out there and actually fight the fight. Maybe because you realize that at the root of it, you're totally full of bullshit. (Btw, it's been long established that nobody has to provide you with a soapbox to preach from. So that might be a bit of a problem with your fantasy as well.)
First, because the networks are highly regulated all of them are publically subsidized. The network operators may not be living up to their obligations and might have wasted two hundred billion of your dollars, but they are ultimately yours and can be ordered to perform.
Second, how can I share by P2P when idiot operators block my traffic? I can buy all the hardware and service I want, but I won't be able to use it if it's censored at the receiving end.
Blah blah blah. Put up or shut up. Go out there and order them to perform. Sue them. Show the world you're right. Otherwise you sound like a child crying that you're not getting your way. Wah wah wah. I bet for your next tantrum you're going to tell us how Google is required to list your rants as top results for all searches because they got a tax break to build a data center in North Carolina and if they don't they'll be violating your free speech and perhaps your seventeenth amendment right to popularly elect your state's senators.
As far as p2p being blocked internet wide, I guess you've never taken the time to look at any of the studies that show bit torrent traffic represents some ridiculous percentage of all traffic on the net.
The amazing thing about your posts is how ballistic you are. The second someone somewhere steps in to cut down on illegal file sharing you suddenly launch like a spastic six year old with completely irrelevant, unrealistic spew about your civil rights being violated. Get some perspective and grow up, universities aren't there to give you freebies and let you put off taking responsibility for your life.
It's also a fundamental failure of painting my car black. Has the same relevance too. Libertarianism is a political platform, it's not the law.
If someone is violating your rights, you have the legal authority to ask people who have relevant information to provide it. That's all that is happening here. The fact that there are so many, apparently, requests being submitted for activity on the OU network lead to the decision of the OU administration to take action to limit their liability, that is to limit the costs they will incur in responding about the illegitimate activity on their network.
You make no sense. Obeying the law is not caving to extortion. Secondly do you really believe that nobody on the OU campus is violating copyright? The RIAA almost always has a very strong case. Almost all of the hulla-bulloo here is because some ambulance chaser is hoping for a class action lawsuit and continually submits every motion and counter motion in a couple of cases as news stories for slashdot. If you believe that copyright is bullshit, then fine. Start a letter writing campaign to get the law changed. Until then it's illegal in Ohio for people to distribute other people's protected works. It's a gross misuse of university resources to be pouring copyrighted song after copyrighted song across the school's network.
Your own post that you linked to fails the sniff test. 1) Sending someone else's creative work to ten thousand of your best friends is not speech. So no first amendment issue. 2) You are sending data out over many people's different networks. When they start breaking into your house you might have an argument. No fourth amendment violation. 3) (and this is the most laughable) Being sued by a private corporation is not criminal, it's civil. No fifth amendment issue. Being sued is due process. So again, no fifth amendment violation.
If you want to publish your own content via p2p, go ahead and do so on a network that isn't subsidized by the rest of your community. Buy hosting space, pay network charges. Publish away. Enjoy.
They can price it the way they want, market rate or not. It's part and parcel of the whole "experience". It's a trade off. Having 10Mb up and 10 Mb down with restrictions on use for the same rate as 8 Mb down and 384 Kb up with different restrictions... sounds like sixes to me.
...but don't block stuff by default even for those who are using those technologies for constructive purposes when those people are paying for the privilege.
You'd have a hard time winning that argument. I don't think there is anything legitimate available on the public p2p networks that can't be gotten with roughly the same convenience via other means. And for research purposes, that's what controlled environments in laboratories are for.
and both isp subscribers and students pay big bucks, or is 5 figures a year not enough for them?
Students are not paying five figures a year for bandwidth.
its one thing to apply qos to manage bandwidth, its quite another to start making student's choices for them and refusing to provide "internet" service.
It's perfectly legitimate for a school to stop providing a particular service. However much you want to think students are paying for the costs of their education, the reality is is that public schools are heavily subsidized by tax payers and private schools are heavily subsidized by private donors. Neither one of which has an interest in providing "unlimited" bandwidth for purposes outside the charter of the school.
Why would you say the second isn't a good reason? Responding to properly submitted legal papers is a requirement of such an organization. Even if it turns out that the RIAA ends up unable to make their case, the university still has to bear the cost of responding to subpoenas.
No, they operate on the "guilty until proven innocent" due to the fact that I can let someone else drive my car. In the aforementioned Iowa the system has been shut down because it required that you prove you weren't the driver of the car rather than the state proving that you were.
Those are all semi-valid points. So I propose the following:
In addition to the green, for go, lights and the red, for stop, lights why don't we put another colored light on there to indicate that the signal is going to change to red in moments. Maybe something between green and red.... like yellow. Then when the light is yellow you'll know that it's about to be red. As such you'll be able to do all your decision making before cross traffic starts into the intersection.
In case you just don't get it, the yellow light means stop if it is possible to do safely. The only way any of the situations you describe will ever come up is if you aren't obeying traffic laws in the first place.
I think you fail to correctly understand where this is headed. Sites like myspace, youtube, facebook, any site that is a business (ie. every site) will eventually move to requiring confirmed ID of the person establishing the account and pages. As the personal attacks, copyright violations and other acts of total stupidity get worse and worse, the lawsuits against Google, News Corp, and the like will increase. In the end either the law making bodies of the countries where businesses like that are based will pass laws requiring confirmed IDs, or a judge will agree to an injunction or damages that shut down the business until they can fix their problems, which will lead to them "voluntarily" implementing the same thing.
Thinking that people will be able to hide behind network anonymity indefinitely is just the wrong prediction of the future. Society will not stand for the kind of abuses that come from the bottom twenty percent getting away with sociopathic behavior when it can be curbed by normal social pressures if the anonymity is taken away.
And you whole "prepare your child for reality" argument is just as applicable to the dickheads who insult, assault, aggravate, etc. when the "victims" finally get pissed off enough to stab the punks in the eye with a pencil. Having uncontrollable urges to tease and abuse others is as much a sign of an ill prepared human being as someone who over reacts to bullying. Saying the recipient of the taunting, etc. should have better coping mechanisms is a cop out for the pussies who can only support their self esteem by knocking down others.
As long as the license is respected, then usage is no problem. The problem comes with the wankers who think that compatible means they can strip the original copyright notice and license, or just copy out subsets of the original code, and redistribute it with only the GPL license.
I would certainly not call it grand strategy, but come on. He wrote half the messages in the email thread, nearly every one of which ignored the actual copying of code, instead attacking the way the real authors of the code handled the situation. Clearly he wants people to look at how the complaint was made rather than what it is people are complaining about.
The fact that this is childish behavior just confirms it. This is the original "Follow my rules or I'm going to go play by myself." The whole OpenBSD project started when he couldn't get his way with NetBSD.
No, that's not the same thing. That's why I identified it as "sometimes... they rewrite... sometimes... they don't."
I do not understand why you would choose a license that is characterized by allowing everyone to use your code as they want, and then somehow think it is wrong if someone use the code in a GPL project.
Perhaps someone doesn't agree with the goals of the FSF yet still believes in community. Some of their work they have no problem giving away. Other products of their work they may consider quite valuable due to the amount of expertise and time required to develop it and it's uniqueness. There are many pieces of software that would be very valuable to many people, yet no single person could reasonably pay the development cost. As such amortizing the cost across thousand of users makes a lot of sense. The FSF disagrees.
It you do not want people to change the license of your code, you should use a copyleft licence.
What? That is some strange logic that says "if you don't want people us to change your license, you should use our license."
As to why a BSD instead of a GPL license: Maybe someone is just generous enough that they want people to use their software regardless of whether they are paying the original author back. Or maybe they like free software but aren't interested in crazy, meaningless, pseudo-activist, junior-politician software bureaucracy. Or perhaps the development was developed with public tax monies. As such everyone should have the right to use the code in whatever fashion they desire. It would be crazily unfair to force someone to pay for the development of a competing product.
Regardless of how pedantic you want to get, the interaction you described previously as sharing most certainly does not fit any common definition of "share".
As far as why people may choose to "give back" to the community without the coercion of a license like the GPL -- that topic has been covered better than I will ever be able to.
I just looked and it appears that share doesn't mean what you think it means. You are describing trading or exchanging. I can give you some of my candy and regardless of whether you give any back, I have shared with you. Alice has candy corn, Bob has nothing, and Charity has cinnamon bears. Alice gives a candy corn to Bob. Alice has shared. Alice requires Charity to give a cinnamon bear in order to receive a candy corn. Alice has exchanged, purchased, traded, bartered, etc. but she has not shared.
He was very civil. What he was not was quiet or non-embarrassing. Theo's reaction is clearly an attempt to direct attention from the facts of the situation and the poor behavior of a member of the openbsd team.
Starting with a source code A and morphing it into B over time pretty much makes B a derivative work of A. Buesch has a right to be pissed - your defense is that the BSD folks were deriving their driver from GPL code.
Careful there. GPL leaners (ie. developers who prefer the GPL) do that kind of thing all the time. Sometimes they completely rewrite the source material, sometimes they don't. Additionally they take code that they call "compatibly licensed" and appropriate it into their own projects. Then distribute the whole thing with a file called "LICENSE" that says "This is under the GPL." Without ever mentioning that parts of the code are definitely not GPL.
That being said, Theo is a putz. And a wanker. This is the guy who shoots an email to some company and then if the sales team or support division don't mobilize and carry his request and advocate for him with the legal or corporate division, starts with the smear campaigns against the company. If they suggest that he pay a license fee to them he starts with the smear campaigns.
Finally, I'm not entirely sure what he's complaining about here. Somebody got their feelings hurt? Somebody is embarrassed? Maybe somebody shouldn't have stripped licenses from code they didn't write and check it into a publicly accessible, recommended, and advertised CVS repository?
Compare that with the ONLY way to upgrade on the PC side - buy a new machine, and you begin to see the appeal of Vista over OS X when it comes to hardware sales.
Umm, what? That makes no sense at all. PCs have at least as many upgrade options as Macs. I would go so far as to suggest that not only do they have as many, they have five or six times as many options available.
Slashdot Mirror
You ever wonder what that DISPLAY environment variable means? :.? It's for having a single source of computing power with multiple displays used by multiple users. Back in the 80s when this stuff was being developed fast systems were still quite spendy. It made sense to spend half a million on CPU and RAM then stick six or twenty users on it. Now days it's mainly niche applications that take this approach.
Right. So go sue OU.
Of the reported thousands of people who the RIAA has filed against, none have fought and won on the principle that they can distribute music. A small handful, less than ten, have blamed someone else and the RIAA decided to walk away from it. The most frequent case mentioned here is the Debbie Foster case where it was her daughter. Who settled because she knew she was guilty.
I'm curious, do you conflate killing in self defense with home invasion murder? It sounds like you would. Claiming a blockage of p2p traffic as the equivalent of requiring a license to publish is absurd.
Not sensibly, you can't. Air is there. A network was built. If you want to make a coherent analogy you would have to pick some other man-made structure, like an auditorium. And nobody is required to provide you with an auditorium and audience.
You are infantile.
Yeah. That's where it starts. They see that some IP address is serving up three thousand songs to all comers. Then they contact the owner of the netblock who points them at the person responsible for that IP address. Then they submit a subpoena. Then they can move on to discovery. And in all this process they find out that, indeed, some bonehead actually is distributing thousands of songs that he or she has no right to distribute. I'm failing to see how that isn't a strong case.
The fact that there has been perhaps ten people that they track down who have made the argument "it wasn't me, it was my daughter" or "the person who subscribed to the service has died and we've been using it illegally (ie. without a valid contract with the service provider) to distribute copyrighted content" or "I'm a paraplegic, poor me, don't sue me, I've just been distributing thousands of songs, poor me" doesn't change the fact that people are breaking the law.
So why don't you try that. Go enroll at OU, then sue them for violating your free speech because they won't allow p2p traffic on the network. I expect to see regular reports here on slashdot since I'm sure everybody here will be interested in your fighting for all our civil rights. Oh wait, I bet you totally don't have the spine to do that. You just like to talk and talk but you'll never go out there and actually fight the fight. Maybe because you realize that at the root of it, you're totally full of bullshit. (Btw, it's been long established that nobody has to provide you with a soapbox to preach from. So that might be a bit of a problem with your fantasy as well.)
Blah blah blah. Put up or shut up. Go out there and order them to perform. Sue them. Show the world you're right. Otherwise you sound like a child crying that you're not getting your way. Wah wah wah. I bet for your next tantrum you're going to tell us how Google is required to list your rants as top results for all searches because they got a tax break to build a data center in North Carolina and if they don't they'll be violating your free speech and perhaps your seventeenth amendment right to popularly elect your state's senators.
As far as p2p being blocked internet wide, I guess you've never taken the time to look at any of the studies that show bit torrent traffic represents some ridiculous percentage of all traffic on the net.
The amazing thing about your posts is how ballistic you are. The second someone somewhere steps in to cut down on illegal file sharing you suddenly launch like a spastic six year old with completely irrelevant, unrealistic spew about your civil rights being violated. Get some perspective and grow up, universities aren't there to give you freebies and let you put off taking responsibility for your life.
It's also a fundamental failure of painting my car black. Has the same relevance too. Libertarianism is a political platform, it's not the law.
If someone is violating your rights, you have the legal authority to ask people who have relevant information to provide it. That's all that is happening here. The fact that there are so many, apparently, requests being submitted for activity on the OU network lead to the decision of the OU administration to take action to limit their liability, that is to limit the costs they will incur in responding about the illegitimate activity on their network.
You make no sense. Obeying the law is not caving to extortion. Secondly do you really believe that nobody on the OU campus is violating copyright? The RIAA almost always has a very strong case. Almost all of the hulla-bulloo here is because some ambulance chaser is hoping for a class action lawsuit and continually submits every motion and counter motion in a couple of cases as news stories for slashdot. If you believe that copyright is bullshit, then fine. Start a letter writing campaign to get the law changed. Until then it's illegal in Ohio for people to distribute other people's protected works. It's a gross misuse of university resources to be pouring copyrighted song after copyrighted song across the school's network.
Your own post that you linked to fails the sniff test. 1) Sending someone else's creative work to ten thousand of your best friends is not speech. So no first amendment issue. 2) You are sending data out over many people's different networks. When they start breaking into your house you might have an argument. No fourth amendment violation. 3) (and this is the most laughable) Being sued by a private corporation is not criminal, it's civil. No fifth amendment issue. Being sued is due process. So again, no fifth amendment violation.
If you want to publish your own content via p2p, go ahead and do so on a network that isn't subsidized by the rest of your community. Buy hosting space, pay network charges. Publish away. Enjoy.
You'd have a hard time winning that argument. I don't think there is anything legitimate available on the public p2p networks that can't be gotten with roughly the same convenience via other means. And for research purposes, that's what controlled environments in laboratories are for.
Students are not paying five figures a year for bandwidth.
It's perfectly legitimate for a school to stop providing a particular service. However much you want to think students are paying for the costs of their education, the reality is is that public schools are heavily subsidized by tax payers and private schools are heavily subsidized by private donors. Neither one of which has an interest in providing "unlimited" bandwidth for purposes outside the charter of the school.
People need to get off the entitlement train.
Why would you say the second isn't a good reason? Responding to properly submitted legal papers is a requirement of such an organization. Even if it turns out that the RIAA ends up unable to make their case, the university still has to bear the cost of responding to subpoenas.
Sounds about right. Your average semester is three to four months long. $50-$60/mo isn't so bad for the kind of bandwidth most universities have.
No, they operate on the "guilty until proven innocent" due to the fact that I can let someone else drive my car. In the aforementioned Iowa the system has been shut down because it required that you prove you weren't the driver of the car rather than the state proving that you were.
Those are all semi-valid points. So I propose the following:
In addition to the green, for go, lights and the red, for stop, lights why don't we put another colored light on there to indicate that the signal is going to change to red in moments. Maybe something between green and red.... like yellow. Then when the light is yellow you'll know that it's about to be red. As such you'll be able to do all your decision making before cross traffic starts into the intersection.
In case you just don't get it, the yellow light means stop if it is possible to do safely. The only way any of the situations you describe will ever come up is if you aren't obeying traffic laws in the first place.
I think you fail to correctly understand where this is headed. Sites like myspace, youtube, facebook, any site that is a business (ie. every site) will eventually move to requiring confirmed ID of the person establishing the account and pages. As the personal attacks, copyright violations and other acts of total stupidity get worse and worse, the lawsuits against Google, News Corp, and the like will increase. In the end either the law making bodies of the countries where businesses like that are based will pass laws requiring confirmed IDs, or a judge will agree to an injunction or damages that shut down the business until they can fix their problems, which will lead to them "voluntarily" implementing the same thing.
Thinking that people will be able to hide behind network anonymity indefinitely is just the wrong prediction of the future. Society will not stand for the kind of abuses that come from the bottom twenty percent getting away with sociopathic behavior when it can be curbed by normal social pressures if the anonymity is taken away.
And you whole "prepare your child for reality" argument is just as applicable to the dickheads who insult, assault, aggravate, etc. when the "victims" finally get pissed off enough to stab the punks in the eye with a pencil. Having uncontrollable urges to tease and abuse others is as much a sign of an ill prepared human being as someone who over reacts to bullying. Saying the recipient of the taunting, etc. should have better coping mechanisms is a cop out for the pussies who can only support their self esteem by knocking down others.
As long as the license is respected, then usage is no problem. The problem comes with the wankers who think that compatible means they can strip the original copyright notice and license, or just copy out subsets of the original code, and redistribute it with only the GPL license.
I would certainly not call it grand strategy, but come on. He wrote half the messages in the email thread, nearly every one of which ignored the actual copying of code, instead attacking the way the real authors of the code handled the situation. Clearly he wants people to look at how the complaint was made rather than what it is people are complaining about.
The fact that this is childish behavior just confirms it. This is the original "Follow my rules or I'm going to go play by myself." The whole OpenBSD project started when he couldn't get his way with NetBSD.
Perhaps someone doesn't agree with the goals of the FSF yet still believes in community. Some of their work they have no problem giving away. Other products of their work they may consider quite valuable due to the amount of expertise and time required to develop it and it's uniqueness. There are many pieces of software that would be very valuable to many people, yet no single person could reasonably pay the development cost. As such amortizing the cost across thousand of users makes a lot of sense. The FSF disagrees.
What? That is some strange logic that says "if you don't want people us to change your license, you should use our license."
As to why a BSD instead of a GPL license: Maybe someone is just generous enough that they want people to use their software regardless of whether they are paying the original author back. Or maybe they like free software but aren't interested in crazy, meaningless, pseudo-activist, junior-politician software bureaucracy. Or perhaps the development was developed with public tax monies. As such everyone should have the right to use the code in whatever fashion they desire. It would be crazily unfair to force someone to pay for the development of a competing product.
Regardless of how pedantic you want to get, the interaction you described previously as sharing most certainly does not fit any common definition of "share".
As far as why people may choose to "give back" to the community without the coercion of a license like the GPL -- that topic has been covered better than I will ever be able to.
The FSF does it.
I just looked and it appears that share doesn't mean what you think it means. You are describing trading or exchanging. I can give you some of my candy and regardless of whether you give any back, I have shared with you. Alice has candy corn, Bob has nothing, and Charity has cinnamon bears. Alice gives a candy corn to Bob. Alice has shared. Alice requires Charity to give a cinnamon bear in order to receive a candy corn. Alice has exchanged, purchased, traded, bartered, etc. but she has not shared.
He was very civil. What he was not was quiet or non-embarrassing. Theo's reaction is clearly an attempt to direct attention from the facts of the situation and the poor behavior of a member of the openbsd team.
Careful there. GPL leaners (ie. developers who prefer the GPL) do that kind of thing all the time. Sometimes they completely rewrite the source material, sometimes they don't. Additionally they take code that they call "compatibly licensed" and appropriate it into their own projects. Then distribute the whole thing with a file called "LICENSE" that says "This is under the GPL." Without ever mentioning that parts of the code are definitely not GPL.
That being said, Theo is a putz. And a wanker. This is the guy who shoots an email to some company and then if the sales team or support division don't mobilize and carry his request and advocate for him with the legal or corporate division, starts with the smear campaigns against the company. If they suggest that he pay a license fee to them he starts with the smear campaigns.
Finally, I'm not entirely sure what he's complaining about here. Somebody got their feelings hurt? Somebody is embarrassed? Maybe somebody shouldn't have stripped licenses from code they didn't write and check it into a publicly accessible, recommended, and advertised CVS repository?
Umm, what? That makes no sense at all. PCs have at least as many upgrade options as Macs. I would go so far as to suggest that not only do they have as many, they have five or six times as many options available.
I didn't think students had any particular power?
(*FLUSH* goes my karma....)
Last Post!
You have a broken sense of propriety.
Really? Awesome. I guess I never ran seamonkey under XP.