It's not like they've determined there's some fundimental legal principle which brings the whole thing crashing down, as you see in EULAs for example.
Right. Which strikes me as interesting that they'd suggest "upgrading" from a distribution license (GPLv2) to a EULA (AGPLv3). Remember, if you have an in-house branch of an AGPLv3 package, and you let a customer SSH in to run it, then you have to grant them full rights to your changes (even though you haven't distributed it). I dig RMS and I love the GPL, but I hate that derivative abomination.
Sot that's 2.5M people that didn't pay ME for MY work.
5,999,999,999 people didn't pay ME for MY work last week. In the entire world, my boss is the only one who saw fit to cut me a paycheck. The rest of y'all are just leeches.
How do you like it when your boss shorts your paycheck a day's Overtime pay or makes you work 20 hours extra "salary".
If a friend gives me an MP3, the artist did no extra work to produce that copy. Now, convince me that this is inherently worse than when we used to all pass around mix tapes.
Most Pop songs are given away "freely" on the radio and one could make personal "fair use" recordings if they really wanted to and not break the law.
So your position is that a song acquired via source A is fine, but the same song acquired via source B is evil and the ruination of western civilization. That doesn't strike you as absurd?
But, if someone with a name like Cindy or Susan tries to contribute to a program and they're met with responses that treat them differently because of their gender, FOSS is going to run into problems.
True, but Cindy and Susan need to understand that guys don't get a free pass because they're part of an ol' boys network. If I tried to submit a crappy patch, I'd expect to get flamed because my code was bad. If Cindy or Susan tried the same and get flamed, then it might very well be because their code was bad and not because they're women.
For example, I'm having difficulty finding apologies for the examples of sexism people are linking to.
You're not likely to, for the reason that the people likely to appear in your examples are the ones likely to make lame-ass apologies like "I'm sorry you took that wrong". Do you want something from the rest of us? OK, then:
I'm sorry those guys acted like asses. They only speak for themselves, though. My mom is one of the smartest people I've ever known. My wife's a surgeon. My daughters are teaching themselves to program (without me even bringing it up). I have the same expectations for my girls as for my boys, and won't put up with less "because they're girls" (or vice versa for that matter). Furthermore, I think people like me outnumber the jerks who think it's funny to put hard-core porn in presentations.
So what do you want from me, personally? I tried the women around me as equals, because they are. I'm raising smart and confident kids. I don't tolerate sexism around me (even if I laugh at the occasional "dumb woman" or "dumb man" jokes (and if you don't believe the latter exist, hang out in a mostly-woman break room some time)). Short of apologizing for something I haven't done, which isn't going to happen, there's not a lot more I think I can do about it.
I think it is functionally equivalent to allowing them to use the software on your timesharing system via Telnet (something the FSF never objected to) but it is a point on which people can honestly disagree.
That's precisely my position. The AGPL proponents' ideas are ones that I hadn't heard before: I have to share code that never physically leaves my control? And that a I can run an AGPLed GUI application internally without obligation, but if someone access it via Citrix or VNC or Remote Desktop then I have to release the changes? That's pretty bizarre to me.
This is an unforeseen hole in the bulletproof Gandhi mechanism, so I foresee a quick "GPL V3.1" to close this. And then all is well.
How is it a hole when people who don't redistribute code aren't required to redistribute the source that created it? If you maintain a local branch of my code and use it to process your data, more power to you. It'd be nice if you did give back your changes, but that wasn't the offer I made to you and I don't have any right to expect it of you. End-user licenses like the AGPL are dangerous hacks that'll get more bad press than they'll make up for with the minor community good they do.
freakishly expensive computing horsepower? Sometimes I think I'm the only person who has noticed that computers are getting freakishly fast, and that what was once a multi-million-dollar supercomputer, now comes as a free toy in a box of Cap'n Crunch.
True. Now multiply by the requirements of a few tens of thousands of concurrent SSL connections and we're back to the good ol' days.
So it is hurting the industry, but not as much as the industry claims.
Suppose a record sells 1,000,000 copies. In order for that to drop to 999,000 copies, there would have to be about 2,500,000 unauthorized downloads (by the worst estimate offered). So, record companies still make 99.9% of their "owed" income as long as downloaders only outnumber purchasers by a factor of 2.5:1.
The RIAA member corporations want to assrape the constitution for this? To hell with 'em.
Now, that's a valid and appropriate use. It doesn't buy you much over digest authentication, though, and that's supported by almost everything but IE5.
I don't know about Viol8, but I've got my own herd of kids, and I certainly don't spend every free moment with them. That's not saying that I ignore them, but I have no problem reading a book or playing my DS or hacking code in the living room while they're doing their own thing. Be honest: when you were a kid, did you want your parents playing with you at all times? Hell, no! You wanted to do kid stuff, half of which you knew your parents would skin you alive for doing.
Playing with the Speak and Spell doesn't qualify as "coding".
My daughter's been writing programs in Squeak since she was 5. It's nothing like my first contact with computer languages, but it's definitely programming.
I've installed exactly two non-freeware, non-FOSS programs in the last few years: purchased copies of Quickbooks and Portal. Now, it's very possible that I have expired trial versions of software lurking around that I never bothered uninstalling, and the BSA would almost certainly count that as piracy, but screw 'em. The fact is that I'd trust "Iceland Hacking Team #87" more than I trust most BSA members when it comes to giving clean, malware-free installations. When was the last time a Pirate Bay crack installed something worse that Starforce?
Honestly, many commercial apps are so laden with crap specifically designed to break parts of my computer that I just don't trust off-the-shelf software anymore. I think the BSA and their scummy members need to get their own houses in order before they start throwing accusations.
why doesn't Slashdot offer THEIR content over a secure HTTPS connection?
Probably because it'd be freakishly expensive to pay for that much computing horsepower for something that just doesn't matter. Don't want people to know you read idle? Then don't read idle from places where you don't want to be monitored. Honestly, it's not like someone's snooping your online banking.
The publisher puts the books into boxes and ships the box full of books (maybe 25 of them) for $10. That works out to be around $0.40 per book, delivered to the store.
This is especially true since Barnes & Noble perfected the Alternate Reality Warehouse that occupies no taxable real estate, costs nothing to heat and cool, and is staffed by Oompa Loompas.
People who post on wikileaks tend to be smart enough to post from something like tor or a public terminal.
<paranoid>That does nothing against watermarks. Suppose you're a suspected leak, and your boss "accidentally" gives you access to a doctored financial spreadsheet with a specific value in a specific cell. If it shows up on Wikileaks a week later, you've got some splainin' to do, regardless of how you posted it. If you work for Amalgamated Widgets, you're probably fired (at best). If you work for a TLA, it could get ugly.</paranoid>
If I were in charge of the Ministry of Truth, I'd give a promotion to the guy who developed a central system for detecting whistleblowers and spreading misinformation. Throw enough plausible information up there to buy the confidence of readers and would-be contributors, then sit back and wait for the benefits to roll in.
Having chairs and desks are necessary to make money. Paying artists, and otherwise acting in a moral fashion is obviously not. I never said that corporations have to make the most money they can, this week, at the expense of long term profitability.
But doing those things is increasingly important to continue making money. The RIAA members are fighting on at least three fronts: trying to prevent copyright infringement, trying to compete with indies and new venues like MySpace, and trying not to totally screw artists to the point that signing with a major will come to be seen as riskier than staying indie.
Until very recently, they could make a pretty good business out of screwing artists. In a day of instant global communication and increasingly viable alternatives, they'd be well advised to rethink their short-term priorities - much like buying desks for office workers and restocking warehouses is a good idea for regular retailers.
If they use shareholder money to promote art, make music, and support artists without making money for said shareholders, they are breaching that fiduciary responsibility.
And that's why most corporate employees sit on folding chairs (when they're allowed to sit), and take turns being the desk. And also why all major publicly traded retailers have stopped buying new wholesale goods, because short-term profit (read: this week) is always the most important thing.
A board of humans could make the case that promoting art, making music, and supporting artists is making money for their stockholders. I am unsurprised that the boards of RIAA member corporations, by contrast, do not make such a case.
I'm looking forward to languages that integrate completely with an IDE, and leave simple character representation (ASCII e.a.) behind.
Oh, me too! I can't wait until diff and patch no longer work, and every version control system has to explicitly support every distinct language, and examples on Stack Overflow are files you have to download and open in an IDE before you can examine them, and Google has to learn each language's binary serialization so that it can search code snippets.
In a time when every other type of file is moving to standardized formats, I just love the idea of my industry balkanizing into a million crap representations. That is certain to make us all more productive.
Slashdot Mirror
If Richard Stallman wanted to help open source, he would resign from the FSF.
RMS doesn't give a crap about open source. He advocates Free Software.
It's not like they've determined there's some fundimental legal principle which brings the whole thing crashing down, as you see in EULAs for example.
Right. Which strikes me as interesting that they'd suggest "upgrading" from a distribution license (GPLv2) to a EULA (AGPLv3). Remember, if you have an in-house branch of an AGPLv3 package, and you let a customer SSH in to run it, then you have to grant them full rights to your changes (even though you haven't distributed it). I dig RMS and I love the GPL, but I hate that derivative abomination.
...much like Ike loved Tina (or Chris loved Rhianna for our newer readers).
Sot that's 2.5M people that didn't pay ME for MY work.
5,999,999,999 people didn't pay ME for MY work last week. In the entire world, my boss is the only one who saw fit to cut me a paycheck. The rest of y'all are just leeches.
How do you like it when your boss shorts your paycheck a day's Overtime pay or makes you work 20 hours extra "salary".
If a friend gives me an MP3, the artist did no extra work to produce that copy. Now, convince me that this is inherently worse than when we used to all pass around mix tapes.
Most Pop songs are given away "freely" on the radio and one could make personal "fair use" recordings if they really wanted to and not break the law.
So your position is that a song acquired via source A is fine, but the same song acquired via source B is evil and the ruination of western civilization. That doesn't strike you as absurd?
But, if someone with a name like Cindy or Susan tries to contribute to a program and they're met with responses that treat them differently because of their gender, FOSS is going to run into problems.
True, but Cindy and Susan need to understand that guys don't get a free pass because they're part of an ol' boys network. If I tried to submit a crappy patch, I'd expect to get flamed because my code was bad. If Cindy or Susan tried the same and get flamed, then it might very well be because their code was bad and not because they're women.
For example, I'm having difficulty finding apologies for the examples of sexism people are linking to.
You're not likely to, for the reason that the people likely to appear in your examples are the ones likely to make lame-ass apologies like "I'm sorry you took that wrong". Do you want something from the rest of us? OK, then:
I'm sorry those guys acted like asses. They only speak for themselves, though. My mom is one of the smartest people I've ever known. My wife's a surgeon. My daughters are teaching themselves to program (without me even bringing it up). I have the same expectations for my girls as for my boys, and won't put up with less "because they're girls" (or vice versa for that matter). Furthermore, I think people like me outnumber the jerks who think it's funny to put hard-core porn in presentations.
So what do you want from me, personally? I tried the women around me as equals, because they are. I'm raising smart and confident kids. I don't tolerate sexism around me (even if I laugh at the occasional "dumb woman" or "dumb man" jokes (and if you don't believe the latter exist, hang out in a mostly-woman break room some time)). Short of apologizing for something I haven't done, which isn't going to happen, there's not a lot more I think I can do about it.
I think it is functionally equivalent to allowing them to use the software on your timesharing system via Telnet (something the FSF never objected to) but it is a point on which people can honestly disagree.
That's precisely my position. The AGPL proponents' ideas are ones that I hadn't heard before: I have to share code that never physically leaves my control? And that a I can run an AGPLed GUI application internally without obligation, but if someone access it via Citrix or VNC or Remote Desktop then I have to release the changes? That's pretty bizarre to me.
This is an unforeseen hole in the bulletproof Gandhi mechanism, so I foresee a quick "GPL V3.1" to close this. And then all is well.
How is it a hole when people who don't redistribute code aren't required to redistribute the source that created it? If you maintain a local branch of my code and use it to process your data, more power to you. It'd be nice if you did give back your changes, but that wasn't the offer I made to you and I don't have any right to expect it of you. End-user licenses like the AGPL are dangerous hacks that'll get more bad press than they'll make up for with the minor community good they do.
freakishly expensive computing horsepower? Sometimes I think I'm the only person who has noticed that computers are getting freakishly fast, and that what was once a multi-million-dollar supercomputer, now comes as a free toy in a box of Cap'n Crunch.
True. Now multiply by the requirements of a few tens of thousands of concurrent SSL connections and we're back to the good ol' days.
Because those patents are violated routinely by Ubuntu users.
Patents aren't copyrights.
So it is hurting the industry, but not as much as the industry claims.
Suppose a record sells 1,000,000 copies. In order for that to drop to 999,000 copies, there would have to be about 2,500,000 unauthorized downloads (by the worst estimate offered). So, record companies still make 99.9% of their "owed" income as long as downloaders only outnumber purchasers by a factor of 2.5:1.
The RIAA member corporations want to assrape the constitution for this? To hell with 'em.
So what about the login/password?
Now, that's a valid and appropriate use. It doesn't buy you much over digest authentication, though, and that's supported by almost everything but IE5.
It's ok for slashdot to inflict painful javascript [...] on us but if THEY have to implement a fairly light security system it's too much !
In other news, it's easier to distribute work across a million clients than to build one server to do the same amount of work.
[...] and useless CSS [...]
Oh, you're one of those table-layouters. I apologize for wasting your time with references to modern technology.
I'm guessing you're not a parent?
I don't know about Viol8, but I've got my own herd of kids, and I certainly don't spend every free moment with them. That's not saying that I ignore them, but I have no problem reading a book or playing my DS or hacking code in the living room while they're doing their own thing. Be honest: when you were a kid, did you want your parents playing with you at all times? Hell, no! You wanted to do kid stuff, half of which you knew your parents would skin you alive for doing.
Playing with the Speak and Spell doesn't qualify as "coding".
My daughter's been writing programs in Squeak since she was 5. It's nothing like my first contact with computer languages, but it's definitely programming.
I've installed exactly two non-freeware, non-FOSS programs in the last few years: purchased copies of Quickbooks and Portal. Now, it's very possible that I have expired trial versions of software lurking around that I never bothered uninstalling, and the BSA would almost certainly count that as piracy, but screw 'em. The fact is that I'd trust "Iceland Hacking Team #87" more than I trust most BSA members when it comes to giving clean, malware-free installations. When was the last time a Pirate Bay crack installed something worse that Starforce?
Honestly, many commercial apps are so laden with crap specifically designed to break parts of my computer that I just don't trust off-the-shelf software anymore. I think the BSA and their scummy members need to get their own houses in order before they start throwing accusations.
why doesn't Slashdot offer THEIR content over a secure HTTPS connection?
Probably because it'd be freakishly expensive to pay for that much computing horsepower for something that just doesn't matter. Don't want people to know you read idle? Then don't read idle from places where you don't want to be monitored. Honestly, it's not like someone's snooping your online banking.
The publisher puts the books into boxes and ships the box full of books (maybe 25 of them) for $10. That works out to be around $0.40 per book, delivered to the store.
This is especially true since Barnes & Noble perfected the Alternate Reality Warehouse that occupies no taxable real estate, costs nothing to heat and cool, and is staffed by Oompa Loompas.
People who post on wikileaks tend to be smart enough to post from something like tor or a public terminal.
<paranoid>That does nothing against watermarks. Suppose you're a suspected leak, and your boss "accidentally" gives you access to a doctored financial spreadsheet with a specific value in a specific cell. If it shows up on Wikileaks a week later, you've got some splainin' to do, regardless of how you posted it. If you work for Amalgamated Widgets, you're probably fired (at best). If you work for a TLA, it could get ugly.</paranoid>
If I were in charge of the Ministry of Truth, I'd give a promotion to the guy who developed a central system for detecting whistleblowers and spreading misinformation. Throw enough plausible information up there to buy the confidence of readers and would-be contributors, then sit back and wait for the benefits to roll in.
Having chairs and desks are necessary to make money. Paying artists, and otherwise acting in a moral fashion is obviously not. I never said that corporations have to make the most money they can, this week, at the expense of long term profitability.
But doing those things is increasingly important to continue making money. The RIAA members are fighting on at least three fronts: trying to prevent copyright infringement, trying to compete with indies and new venues like MySpace, and trying not to totally screw artists to the point that signing with a major will come to be seen as riskier than staying indie.
Until very recently, they could make a pretty good business out of screwing artists. In a day of instant global communication and increasingly viable alternatives, they'd be well advised to rethink their short-term priorities - much like buying desks for office workers and restocking warehouses is a good idea for regular retailers.
Many years ago I had a myspace profile entirely removed for uploading one song that I created using 'cat [textfile] > /dev/audio'.
They probably thought you were ripping Skinny Puppy.
If they use shareholder money to promote art, make music, and support artists without making money for said shareholders, they are breaching that fiduciary responsibility.
And that's why most corporate employees sit on folding chairs (when they're allowed to sit), and take turns being the desk. And also why all major publicly traded retailers have stopped buying new wholesale goods, because short-term profit (read: this week) is always the most important thing.
A board of humans could make the case that promoting art, making music, and supporting artists is making money for their stockholders. I am unsurprised that the boards of RIAA member corporations, by contrast, do not make such a case.
Now, on trying to run Word, Windows would abruptly crash to a DOS prompt, where I could fix a few things.
That's been a standard feature for a while now.
I'm looking forward to languages that integrate completely with an IDE, and leave simple character representation (ASCII e.a.) behind.
Oh, me too! I can't wait until diff and patch no longer work, and every version control system has to explicitly support every distinct language, and examples on Stack Overflow are files you have to download and open in an IDE before you can examine them, and Google has to learn each language's binary serialization so that it can search code snippets.
In a time when every other type of file is moving to standardized formats, I just love the idea of my industry balkanizing into a million crap representations. That is certain to make us all more productive.