You're saying that RMS wrote the GPL, thus the GPL stands for everything RMS does. That's wrong: you can use GPLed software, and even develop GPLed software without sharing all of RMSes goals and ideals. What you first said was:
The BitKeeper license is simply the logical extension of the GPL viral clause. Instead of coercing people to only use free software bitkeeper forces you to only use their software.
GigsVT answered: "The GPL only comes into play if you want to distribute a work based from the source code of a GPL program." This is correct.
You then carried on your argument as if you'd been talking about RMS:
Go talk to Stallman and he will make it absolutely clear that his real aim is to eliminate non-free software. It will be just about the only thing that is absolutely clear...
For RMS the GPL is simply a means to an end that is beyond the GPL.
This doesn't support your earlier argument at all. RMS is a thoughtful person, and doesn't force his ideals on anyone. First of all, nobody would use GPLed software if it forced you to act like RMS wishes everyone would. Software with such restrictions would be the opposite of what RMS is trying to accomplish. If the GPL worked the way you first said, GPLed software would be non-free! (and since it would require you to only use Free software, nobody could use it because using it would require you to not use it. Duh.)
If all you know of RMS is the GPL then you don't know him. Hero worship is never a particularly good idea, if you are going to choose a hero to worship, please at least choose one that is not afraid of water.
I don't worship him at all. I respect him, but that's about it as far as what I think of him personally. I really like some of his ideas and philosophical arguments. For any given piece of software I can think of, I think it would be a Good Thing if it was Free. Unless the mindset of the world changes, I suppose proprietary software will keep getting developed, esp. for specialized applications, like controlling lab equipment. Proprietary software is better than nothing, but should be avoided as much as possible as a building block for other software. If a computer running the company's software is an integral part of an atomic force microscope setup, you can use it without worrying too much that it will bite you. The software is totally specific to that one application, so if there's a problem, you need a new AFM, but you don't need to change anything else. (proprietary data formats are another story. They are _always_ a Bad Thing).
From the Nature article: Even if one were to use laborious analytical and microscopic techniques to find the positions of every sphere in a resin slab, say Ravikanth Pappu and colleagues, who developed the new material, current microfabrication techniques are very far from being able to reproduce such a structure.
Fox News is not a source I would trust at all. They have a history of
distorting things in favour of big business (and the Republican party). (This edition of Counterspin describes some Fox bullshit about 9 minutes into the program.)
As much as I think it's unlikely that low power non-ionizing EM radiation is harmful, I wouldn't ask anyone to take Fox's word for it. The article provides enough information to do some digging and maybe come up with a journal article, but I wouldn't trust Fox's reporting on anything besides sports results.
I realized that the best way to learn a task was to ask myself "if I had designed this system, how would I implement it?" - and all of a sudden, everything became easy.
That's exactly how I found the learning curve with Linux. (except that I was just learning comp. sci. when I started with Linux, so as well as being used to Atari ST, my problem was that I didn't know enough at first to be able to think of how to implement things.) People don't usually mention that strategy for understanding things when using Linux, but I find it very useful. I find it interesting that I'm not the only person who's come to that realization.
>Dont' get me wrong, this is a nifty tool, looks neat, etc. But if someone wants to use it to claim uniqueness for Linux, they're barking up the wrong source tree.
The claim is that Linux is good in this respect, not that anybody else isn't. This isn't another one of those articles proclaiming the superiority of Linux.
My point was simply that it was ridiculous to expect him to give up his rights "for the greater good" and that he was perfectly entitled to a share of eBays profits if they did have an infringing patent that they couldn't move away from.
Yes, I understood that from your post. (I assume Nathan did too.) I don't agree with you, though. First of all, remember that the rights in question are _not_ basic or fundamental rights. They are the result of the way the patent system was designed. Usually, (esp. these days) the phrase "give up your rights" refers to rights to free speech, privacy and/or anonymity, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures, and things like that. Those are obviously deserving of protection, and should be though of as intrinsic for sentient life. The right we are talking about here is the right to collect money from people who independently came up with your idea.
It isn't possible to prove a negative, so someone can't prove they didn't see a patent (or the actual invention, before or after the patent filing). Since there is no way (that I've thought of) to distinguish someone who copied the invention from someone who came up with it independently, the only way to stop an invention from being copied is to treat independent inventors as infringers. The western-capitalist patent system works that way, and so grants the right to collect money from independent inventors. I see that right as a bad side-effect of the system. The system was designed to benefit inventors, but I don't they that is a fair benefit.
What I object to here is someone who didn't contribute anything to Ebay, ever, trying to get money from them. He is legally allowed to do this, but I see it as extortion. No legal system is perfect, and unfortunately the patent system allows this kind of extortion. To take advantage of this characteristic (dare I say flaw or loophole) in the system when it could seriously damage things, is nasty, IMHO. It may be possible to design a system where maximally greedy behaviour by some or all participants leads to optimum levels of happiness (or other form of goodness) for everyone, but the current situation of countries and their laws around the globe is not it. (I think being happy and enjoying life is the most important thing. Further, one of the things that makes me happy is when other people have a fair chance to be happy, which isn't happening in a lot of the third world.)
Additionally, some/.ers claim that this patent was actually filed after Ebay started running. This would be proof that Ebay came up with their ideas without input from this guy. The case where the independent invention was before the patent is one case where the patent system is fair to the independent inventor, as the patent is disallowed because of prior art. If this happens, it will be exactly what the weasel deserves.
Taxes on trucks don't pay for the damage they cause to roads. Trains are at a disadvantage wrt. trucks. AFAIK, trains are "better", but trucks are more widely used because of the way the government deals with roads and leaves train tracks to the rail companies.
Owners of The Club are not responsible for the car theft. However, by using the club, they are paying (for the club) to offload the chance of theft onto other people. The club is no good (you just cut the steering wheel and remove it), but if it did deter thieves somewhat, you could end up with a situation where everybody had to buy the club just to maintain the status quo of which cars got stolen. If it slowed thieves down, they would get caught more, so I guess that would be a good thing.
Hmm, I guess I don't have a useful conclusion on this one.
* Stock x86 PC running Debian GNU/Linux with RTAI real-time system.
* Shadow's own GPL'd robot code will be shipped, permitting initial setup and evaluations. PC will have CAN interface provided.
>The correct way is to check the package against a MD5sum or (preferably) GPG signature - and if possible, these should be at a different machine on a different network from the tarballs.
It doesn't matter where you get the GPG sig, as long as you already have the public key, or you get _it_ from a separate server. (That's one of the benefits of the keyserver network.)
No, silly, what we need is a GPG keyserver, so people can get keys from a separate source to check the sigs on files they download. We already have that, and it works fine. Some people just provide MD5 hashes, instead of actually signing their files, but that's something that may improve.
For an example of what I'm talking about, check out how www.kernel.org signs kernel tarballs and patches.
Thad:
Our charter is to create the sequence that the director of the film wants for his movie; that usually means building things that look and move like things do in real life. Often we would use real-world physics to do this. Typically, though, we take extremely simplified views of the real world to make the computations more simple, and to make them run faster.
Are movie directors and other industry people generally aware of how bad physics in movies often is? If so, why do they allow the nonsense to continue? Who puts the bad physics into movies, and who tries to stop them/fix it?
How often, if ever, do you tell directors "That's not how things work".
The issue is not with possible bugs in the DRM implementation that would allow it to be hacked to do stuff with the data that the MPAA doesn't want you to. The issue is that for the problem that DRM addresses, restricting access to data except under certain conditions, the owner of the computer is the primary threat. DRM needs to defend against the system administrator who installed the software in the first place.
If you had an open source DRM implementation, you could defeat it by changing the code to let you do anything you want, instead of limitting you to only watching a movie once, for example. Since the admin is a threat, you can't make it easy for the admin to modify the code. Even worse for the running-dog capitalists, people could redistribute the new implementation to people who couldn't hack the code themselves.
> Packages should not need to be given loving care and attention to make sure they are integrated.
How on earth would that happen?
> But at the moment, there is no good binary distribution method - which is why distributions have to hand-integrate all their software.
There is no global standard that everybody who writes software makes their work conform to. People who write Free software don't have any obligation to make their software integrate with anything. They may do so, if they want to integrate it into the system they use themselves, but you can't expect them too.
One of the major functions of the way Debian does things is to collect useful software that's out there. Applying Debian's organizational principles (docs in/usr/share/doc, config files in/etc, stuff like that) is Free software at its finest. Only with software that you can freely modify and redistribute can you package that much disparate software and give all parts of the system such a consistent flavour. (Of course, that does nothing for the clashing look&feel of all the kinds of GUIs, and the myriad config file formats, but one thing at a time...)
There was a/. article a few months ago about a linux distro where the packages were just scripts to download and compile the latest version directly from the upstream source. I can't find the name of the distro, but it's package system used magic-related names like "merlin" for things.
All I really want is to have a good life; To be able to eat, and to live comfortably, and do things I like. (It makes me happy to know that other people are also having good lives, which is why I dislike exploitation/sweatshops/crap like that). The easiest way to get stuff you want in Canada, where I live, is to make money. There's nothing intrinsically good about money itself. Systems very different from capitalism are possible, and people living under such systems probably still want to have a good life, but they may or may not want to make money, depending on the system.
Note that Western capitalism measures everything in dollar value. The state of the environment and public health have no value to a corporation, except when laws and liability translate actions into dollars taken away from the company. (Corporations are run by people, and some of those people do apply their moral values to things, but the system as a whole measures everything on the same scale: dollar value.)
I never said that
I believe what Gweeds claimed about @Stake or SD. I
reported what he said, and said that I liked it. That's not to say
that I believed it
At the beginning of the piece, he used the phrase "my boy Gweeds". Whether he explicitly said he believed Gweeds claims about l0pht and @stake is more or less irrelevant, since he didn't distance himself from Gweeds' claims at all in any of his articles. He should give up trying to pretend he's being objective, and admit that he's playing Devil's advocate, as he says it's healthy to.
Greene provides, in his articles, supporting evidence for claims that l0pht have "sold out". That pretty much makes it impossible for him to deny any responsibility for anything. Not that that's a bad thing: It's good when media people come up with stuff and stand behind it. If he's misinterpreted stuff, someone will say why and then we'll know what's really going on.
Well, you can find out what it is here. I suppose it comes up in crypto work, but I'm not familiar with the details. The website has some graphs to go with the equations and description, plus hyperlinks to related stuff.
That would be Microsoft's "Windows Media Player" (included with their Windows OS). I had no idea that they had stooped so low as to allow popup adds to be embedded in video files. I would assume that most free software video players don't handle popups in ASF streams.
> I would think that needing to insert some binary-only code into a kernel could significantly decrease their vendor's ability to support their machines.
That's correct. If you report a kernel bug that happened while you had NVidia's drivers loaded, most kernel hackers will tell you to go away.
The NVidia driver source is a few C source files, an object file called something.o (compiled binary), and some shared libraries (libGL.so, or something). The source files have some wrapper functions. They provide a consistent interface for the already-compiled code; They are the interface between NVidia's driver and the Linux kernel.
Slashdot Mirror
You're saying that RMS wrote the GPL, thus the GPL stands for everything RMS does. That's wrong: you can use GPLed software, and even develop GPLed software without sharing all of RMSes goals and ideals. What you first said was:
GigsVT answered: "The GPL only comes into play if you want to distribute a work based from the source code of a GPL program." This is correct.
You then carried on your argument as if you'd been talking about RMS:
This doesn't support your earlier argument at all. RMS is a thoughtful person, and doesn't force his ideals on anyone. First of all, nobody would use GPLed software if it forced you to act like RMS wishes everyone would. Software with such restrictions would be the opposite of what RMS is trying to accomplish. If the GPL worked the way you first said, GPLed software would be non-free! (and since it would require you to only use Free software, nobody could use it because using it would require you to not use it. Duh.)
I don't worship him at all. I respect him, but that's about it as far as what I think of him personally. I really like some of his ideas and philosophical arguments. For any given piece of software I can think of, I think it would be a Good Thing if it was Free. Unless the mindset of the world changes, I suppose proprietary software will keep getting developed, esp. for specialized applications, like controlling lab equipment. Proprietary software is better than nothing, but should be avoided as much as possible as a building block for other software. If a computer running the company's software is an integral part of an atomic force microscope setup, you can use it without worrying too much that it will bite you. The software is totally specific to that one application, so if there's a problem, you need a new AFM, but you don't need to change anything else. (proprietary data formats are another story. They are _always_ a Bad Thing).
From the Nature article:
Even if one were to use laborious analytical and microscopic techniques to find the positions of every sphere in a resin slab, say Ravikanth Pappu and colleagues, who developed the new material, current microfabrication techniques are very far from being able to reproduce such a structure.
Nice OTP idea, though.
As much as I think it's unlikely that low power non-ionizing EM radiation is harmful, I wouldn't ask anyone to take Fox's word for it. The article provides enough information to do some digging and maybe come up with a journal article, but I wouldn't trust Fox's reporting on anything besides sports results.
I realized that the best way to learn a task was to ask myself "if I had designed this system, how would I implement it?" - and all of a sudden, everything became easy.
That's exactly how I found the learning curve with Linux. (except that I was just learning comp. sci. when I started with Linux, so as well as being used to Atari ST, my problem was that I didn't know enough at first to be able to think of how to implement things.) People don't usually mention that strategy for understanding things when using Linux, but I find it very useful. I find it interesting that I'm not the only person who's come to that realization.
happy hacking,
>Dont' get me wrong, this is a nifty tool, looks neat, etc. But if someone wants to use it to claim uniqueness for Linux, they're barking up the wrong source tree.
The claim is that Linux is good in this respect, not that anybody else isn't. This isn't another one of those articles proclaiming the superiority of Linux.
Yes, I understood that from your post. (I assume Nathan did too.) I don't agree with you, though. First of all, remember that the rights in question are _not_ basic or fundamental rights. They are the result of the way the patent system was designed. Usually, (esp. these days) the phrase "give up your rights" refers to rights to free speech, privacy and/or anonymity, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures, and things like that. Those are obviously deserving of protection, and should be though of as intrinsic for sentient life. The right we are talking about here is the right to collect money from people who independently came up with your idea.
/.ers claim that this patent was actually filed after Ebay started running. This would be proof that Ebay came up with their ideas without input from this guy. The case where the independent invention was before the patent is one case where the patent system is fair to the independent inventor, as the patent is disallowed because of prior art. If this happens, it will be exactly what the weasel deserves.
It isn't possible to prove a negative, so someone can't prove they didn't see a patent (or the actual invention, before or after the patent filing). Since there is no way (that I've thought of) to distinguish someone who copied the invention from someone who came up with it independently, the only way to stop an invention from being copied is to treat independent inventors as infringers. The western-capitalist patent system works that way, and so grants the right to collect money from independent inventors. I see that right as a bad side-effect of the system. The system was designed to benefit inventors, but I don't they that is a fair benefit.
What I object to here is someone who didn't contribute anything to Ebay, ever, trying to get money from them. He is legally allowed to do this, but I see it as extortion. No legal system is perfect, and unfortunately the patent system allows this kind of extortion. To take advantage of this characteristic (dare I say flaw or loophole) in the system when it could seriously damage things, is nasty, IMHO. It may be possible to design a system where maximally greedy behaviour by some or all participants leads to optimum levels of happiness (or other form of goodness) for everyone, but the current situation of countries and their laws around the globe is not it. (I think being happy and enjoying life is the most important thing. Further, one of the things that makes me happy is when other people have a fair chance to be happy, which isn't happening in a lot of the third world.)
Additionally, some
Woody includes aptitude, which does the same thing as dselect, but is much more obvious. Plus, it has minesweeper built in.
There is also deity (and deity-gtk), which I haven't used.
Taxes on trucks don't pay for the damage they cause to roads. Trains are at a disadvantage wrt. trucks. AFAIK, trains are "better", but trucks are more widely used because of the way the government deals with roads and leaves train tracks to the rail companies.
They won't rake in bazillions from the big names, because they will pay 50 000 $/year instead of 0.75*several*10^6 $/year.
Owners of The Club are not responsible for the car theft. However, by using the club, they are paying (for the club) to offload the chance of theft onto other people. The club is no good (you just cut the steering wheel and remove it), but if it did deter thieves somewhat, you could end up with a situation where everybody had to buy the club just to maintain the status quo of which cars got stolen. If it slowed thieves down, they would get caught more, so I guess that would be a good thing.
Hmm, I guess I don't have a useful conclusion on this one.
I don't think so. My parents are into genealogy, but I don't know how far back they have info on the Cordes side.
Email if you want to talk about it.
from the web page:
:)
Controller:
* Stock x86 PC running Debian GNU/Linux with RTAI real-time system.
* Shadow's own GPL'd robot code will be shipped, permitting initial setup and evaluations. PC will have CAN interface provided.
Hmm, I wonder how well Beowulf works with RTAI
>The correct way is to check the package against a MD5sum or (preferably) GPG signature - and if possible, these should be at a different machine on a different network from the tarballs.
It doesn't matter where you get the GPG sig, as long as you already have the public key, or you get _it_ from a separate server. (That's one of the benefits of the keyserver network.)
No, silly, what we need is a GPG keyserver, so people can get keys from a separate source to check the sigs on files they download. We already have that, and it works fine. Some people just provide MD5 hashes, instead of actually signing their files, but that's something that may improve.
For an example of what I'm talking about, check out how www.kernel.org signs kernel tarballs and patches.
However, movies typically include a bunch of made-up bullshit physics: cars explode on contact with anything, lead bullets flash when they hit things, everything in Armageddon, etc..
Are movie directors and other industry people generally aware of how bad physics in movies often is? If so, why do they allow the nonsense to continue? Who puts the bad physics into movies, and who tries to stop them/fix it?
How often, if ever, do you tell directors "That's not how things work".
The issue is not with possible bugs in the DRM implementation that would allow it to be hacked to do stuff with the data that the MPAA doesn't want you to. The issue is that for the problem that DRM addresses, restricting access to data except under certain conditions, the owner of the computer is the primary threat. DRM needs to defend against the system administrator who installed the software in the first place.
If you had an open source DRM implementation, you could defeat it by changing the code to let you do anything you want, instead of limitting you to only watching a movie once, for example. Since the admin is a threat, you can't make it easy for the admin to modify the code. Even worse for the running-dog capitalists, people could redistribute the new implementation to people who couldn't hack the code themselves.
> Packages should not need to be given loving care and attention to make sure they are integrated.
/usr/share/doc, config files in /etc, stuff like that) is Free software at its finest. Only with software that you can freely modify and redistribute can you package that much disparate software and give all parts of the system such a consistent flavour. (Of course, that does nothing for the clashing look&feel of all the kinds of GUIs, and the myriad config file formats, but one thing at a time...)
/. article a few months ago about a linux distro where the packages were just scripts to download and compile the latest version directly from the upstream source. I can't find the name of the distro, but it's package system used magic-related names like "merlin" for things.
How on earth would that happen?
> But at the moment, there is no good binary distribution method - which is why distributions have to hand-integrate all their software.
There is no global standard that everybody who writes software makes their work conform to. People who write Free software don't have any obligation to make their software integrate with anything. They may do so, if they want to integrate it into the system they use themselves, but you can't expect them too.
One of the major functions of the way Debian does things is to collect useful software that's out there. Applying Debian's organizational principles (docs in
There was a
> People like to be able to make money you know.
All I really want is to have a good life; To be able to eat, and to live comfortably, and do things I like. (It makes me happy to know that other people are also having good lives, which is why I dislike exploitation/sweatshops/crap like that). The easiest way to get stuff you want in Canada, where I live, is to make money. There's nothing intrinsically good about money itself. Systems very different from capitalism are possible, and people living under such systems probably still want to have a good life, but they may or may not want to make money, depending on the system.
Note that Western capitalism measures everything in dollar value. The state of the environment and public health have no value to a corporation, except when laws and liability translate actions into dollars taken away from the company. (Corporations are run by people, and some of those people do apply their moral values to things, but the system as a whole measures everything on the same scale: dollar value.)
At the beginning of the piece, he used the phrase "my boy Gweeds". Whether he explicitly said he believed Gweeds claims about l0pht and @stake is more or less irrelevant, since he didn't distance himself from Gweeds' claims at all in any of his articles. He should give up trying to pretend he's being objective, and admit that he's playing Devil's advocate, as he says it's healthy to.
Greene provides, in his articles, supporting evidence for claims that l0pht have "sold out". That pretty much makes it impossible for him to deny any responsibility for anything. Not that that's a bad thing: It's good when media people come up with stuff and stand behind it. If he's misinterpreted stuff, someone will say why and then we'll know what's really going on.
Well, you can find out what it is here. I suppose it comes up in crypto work, but I'm not familiar with the details. The website has some graphs to go with the equations and description, plus hyperlinks to related stuff.
> kind of like insurance.
But in practice, more like a "protection" fee charged by racketeers (due to the way it was sprung on people).
That would be Microsoft's "Windows Media Player" (included with their Windows OS). I had no idea that they had stooped so low as to allow popup adds to be embedded in video files. I would assume that most free software video players don't handle popups in ASF streams.
There is solid evidence for gravity waves. Google for "binary pulsar gravity" if you want to find more about this piece of evidence.
> I would think that needing to insert some binary-only code into a kernel could significantly decrease their vendor's ability to support their machines.
That's correct. If you report a kernel bug that happened while you had NVidia's drivers loaded, most kernel hackers will tell you to go away.
The NVidia driver source is a few C source files, an object file called something.o (compiled binary), and some shared libraries (libGL.so, or something). The source files have some wrapper functions. They provide a consistent interface for the already-compiled code; They are the interface between NVidia's driver and the Linux kernel.