Any socialist who says that a market economy can be controlled has been corrupted by corporations. Go back and read what socialists originally wrote. Go read what the opponents to socialism wrote.
I stand by my charge that free markets have corrupted socialism. -russ
That's why a vote for a Democrat or a Republican is a vote for restricting your freedom. If you don't vote Libertarian, then you're voting to have your freedom taken away from you. And THAT is a wasted vote. -russ
What a load of tripe. How can the US be a mix between a socialist society (which doesn't have a marketplace, because everything is provided and you don't need money), and a democracy (the US is a republic). Companies don't take away freedoms, they persuade you to buy their product. If you don't like the deal they offer, you turn around and walk out. Only in the minds of regulators can a company monopolize an entire market. -russ
The Public Software Fund already has tax exempt status. As long as you assign the copyright to the funded improvements to a non-profit, the donor can get a break on their US federal taxes. -russ
The current set of rules are just rules. The government agency (whatever it's called) can change those rules any time it wants. The NSA (or whoever) cleverly ensured that the Bernstein case didn't set a precedent, so a crypto project basically has no legal protection whatsoever. -russ
He's talking about recoding a Python program in Perl?? And then in C?? Why stop there? Why not continue on to assembly language? And then machine language?
Sigh. And zynot was starting to look pretty good, up to that point. Anybody who 1) didn't realize that Gentoo was a for-profit (not your profit) Linux distribution, and 2) doesn't like Python, obviously lacks good judgement. -russ
The problem is that copyright is essentially unenforcible. Unless the people enforce copyright on themselves, you can't do it for them. Why do people enforce copyright? Because it's seen to be *fair*. You make something, you get to own it for a while, after that it goes into the public domain.
That's what's missing here. There is no "goes into the public domain." People are individually and unilaterally repealing copyright law, because it's not a fair law anymore. The people who make something never have to share it. That's not fair, because so much of what the creators do is stolen from the public domain (like all of Disney's plots), and just about every jazz riff.
If you're interested in the law, go read Bastiat's _The Law_. It will explain how a law is seen to be fair. -russ
Yeah, I can't stand listening to him. All these RIAA-defenders sound like a broken record, repeating the same tired arguments over and over again. Like "intellectual property should be treated like any other property." -russ
Well, that's sort-of what it was in the first place: just a file on an ITS filesystem that anybody could access and change. The problem was that back then, there was only a few thousand people on the net. Only one of them was a kook, and everybody just kept him away from anything fragile and/or valuable. Now, with over a billion people on the Internet (if you believe the spam I got this morning from someone trying to sell email address lists), there's like a million kooks, and well, you don't WANT to know what I found on the gnuradio wiki page yesterday. I mean, you really DON'T want to know. -russ
Okay, Eric *might* have coined the term GandhiCon, but I've heard quite a number of other people cite the Gandhi quote as an explanation for the Linux adoption process. -russ
No, it wasn't "in the common vernacular". It was considered to be too descriptive. However, given that everybody associates "Open Source" with open source programs these days, it might actually be a defensible trademark. In any case, the Open Source Initiative has been using and defending the name for years now. -russ
Aside from the fact that you aren't Brett Glass (he has a slashdot login, thankyouverymuch), Eric doesn't drink. For that matter, he doesn't even call himself ESR. -russ
Actually, the fellow who was giving space on tuxedo.org for Eric kicked him off in the obviously impolite manner that you can see from your link. Rather than insert a redirect to catb.org, or put in his own explanation for why he broke all of Eric's URLs, he's just redirecting to J. Random pages. Jerk. Eric is in fact still hosting the definitive version.
Hahahahaha! You stupid Anonymous Coward, *everyone* should *always* fork *every* project *now*. Or didn't you realize that? -russ p.s. No, seriously, there are always good reasons to fork each and every open source project. The question is: who's gonna do it? Obviously you aren't, because you're too stupid and lazy (irrefutable evidence: your unwillingness to create a user and log in). You're too stupid and lazy to find someone else to do it, so guess what? This fork isn't going to happen.
You're fighting a bureaucracy. Somebody, somewhere, got the idea that geocaches are buried, and that geocachers, by leaving things behind, are littering. They wrote a memo, it got circulated, some boss got alarmed, and made an official policy banning geocaching from all national parks.
Give it up. Why help them get foot traffic into their park? Put your cache in a state park, or state forest land. -russ
True, there's a whole infrastructure supporting Nigerian scammers. There are Nigerian restaurants, Nigerian stores, Nigerian water plants, and especially corrupt Nigerian government officials who don't enforce the 419 law. -russ p.s. I have a mailbox with at least six hundred unique scam letters from (go ahead, guess) Nigeria. Been saving 'em for posterior, or posterity, or whatever.
I love slashdot. Actually, the good posts are pretty good. And then there's this one. Do you understand ANYTHING about trade secrets? -russ p.s. it's well-known (at least among the non-idiots) that the Unix source code has been claimed to be a unpublished trade secret of AT&T. Anyone (non-idiot, remember) who saw the source code without having to agree to an NDA would know that they're speshal. You, obviously, are not speshal. Too bad for you, but really, it doesn't surprise me at all. -russ
And you think mass transit doesn't need insurance, ROW maintenance, snow removal, over- and under-passes, planning offices, etc.? Nobody forced the trolley lines out of business. People voluntarily switched to automobiles because (and this is the important part) they saved people time. The only thing that is becoming more expensive is people's time. Everything else is getting cheaper, and is likely to continue to get cheaper? You want to take a nice long-term bet? Oh, wait, that's been done already, and the environmentalist lost. -russ
Slashdot Mirror
Any socialist who says that a market economy can be controlled has been corrupted by corporations. Go back and read what socialists originally wrote. Go read what the opponents to socialism wrote.
I stand by my charge that free markets have corrupted socialism.
-russ
That's why a vote for a Democrat or a Republican is a vote for restricting your freedom. If you don't vote Libertarian, then you're voting to have your freedom taken away from you. And THAT is a wasted vote.
-russ
Name some monopolies. Did they get to be monopolies through a market process or through a political process?
-russ
What a load of tripe. How can the US be a mix between a socialist society (which doesn't have a marketplace, because everything is provided and you don't need money), and a democracy (the US is a republic). Companies don't take away freedoms, they persuade you to buy their product. If you don't like the deal they offer, you turn around and walk out. Only in the minds of regulators can a company monopolize an entire market.
-russ
That's latex, dude. Think hot, sweaty, and sticky.
-russ
The Public Software Fund already has tax exempt status. As long as you assign the copyright to the funded improvements to a non-profit, the donor can get a break on their US federal taxes.
-russ
Yes. If you fund your project through the Public Software Fund, anyone who donates money can take a tax writeoff on their US taxes.
-russ
The current set of rules are just rules. The government agency (whatever it's called) can change those rules any time it wants. The NSA (or whoever) cleverly ensured that the Bernstein case didn't set a precedent, so a crypto project basically has no legal protection whatsoever.
-russ
He's talking about recoding a Python program in Perl?? And then in C?? Why stop there? Why not continue on to assembly language? And then machine language?
Sigh. And zynot was starting to look pretty good, up to that point. Anybody who 1) didn't realize that Gentoo was a for-profit (not your profit) Linux distribution, and 2) doesn't like Python, obviously lacks good judgement.
-russ
The problem is that copyright is essentially unenforcible. Unless the people enforce copyright on themselves, you can't do it for them. Why do people enforce copyright? Because it's seen to be *fair*. You make something, you get to own it for a while, after that it goes into the public domain.
That's what's missing here. There is no "goes into the public domain." People are individually and unilaterally repealing copyright law, because it's not a fair law anymore. The people who make something never have to share it. That's not fair, because so much of what the creators do is stolen from the public domain (like all of Disney's plots), and just about every jazz riff.
If you're interested in the law, go read Bastiat's _The Law_. It will explain how a law is seen to be fair.
-russ
He obviously drank the Kool-Aid(tm).
Yeah, I can't stand listening to him. All these RIAA-defenders sound like a broken record, repeating the same tired arguments over and over again. Like "intellectual property should be treated like any other property."
-russ
Well, that's sort-of what it was in the first place: just a file on an ITS filesystem that anybody could access and change. The problem was that back then, there was only a few thousand people on the net. Only one of them was a kook, and everybody just kept him away from anything fragile and/or valuable. Now, with over a billion people on the Internet (if you believe the spam I got this morning from someone trying to sell email address lists), there's like a million kooks, and well, you don't WANT to know what I found on the gnuradio wiki page yesterday. I mean, you really DON'T want to know.
-russ
Okay, Eric *might* have coined the term GandhiCon, but I've heard quite a number of other people cite the Gandhi quote as an explanation for the Linux adoption process.
-russ
No, it wasn't "in the common vernacular". It was considered to be too descriptive. However, given that everybody associates "Open Source" with open source programs these days, it might actually be a defensible trademark. In any case, the Open Source Initiative has been using and defending the name for years now.
-russ
Aside from the fact that you aren't Brett Glass (he has a slashdot login, thankyouverymuch), Eric doesn't drink. For that matter, he doesn't even call himself ESR.
-russ
Actually, the fellow who was giving space on tuxedo.org for Eric kicked him off in the obviously impolite manner that you can see from your link. Rather than insert a redirect to catb.org, or put in his own explanation for why he broke all of Eric's URLs, he's just redirecting to J. Random pages. Jerk. Eric is in fact still hosting the definitive version.
Hahahahaha! You stupid Anonymous Coward, *everyone* should *always* fork *every* project *now*. Or didn't you realize that?
-russ
p.s. No, seriously, there are always good reasons to fork each and every open source project. The question is: who's gonna do it? Obviously you aren't, because you're too stupid and lazy (irrefutable evidence: your unwillingness to create a user and log in). You're too stupid and lazy to find someone else to do it, so guess what? This fork isn't going to happen.
Dare I suggest that this is self-referential hacker humor?
-russ
You're fighting a bureaucracy. Somebody, somewhere, got the idea that geocaches are buried, and that geocachers, by leaving things behind, are littering. They wrote a memo, it got circulated, some boss got alarmed, and made an official policy banning geocaching from all national parks.
Give it up. Why help them get foot traffic into their park? Put your cache in a state park, or state forest land.
-russ
True, there's a whole infrastructure supporting Nigerian scammers. There are Nigerian restaurants, Nigerian stores, Nigerian water plants, and especially corrupt Nigerian government officials who don't enforce the 419 law.
-russ
p.s. I have a mailbox with at least six hundred unique scam letters from (go ahead, guess) Nigeria. Been saving 'em for posterior, or posterity, or whatever.
I love slashdot. Actually, the good posts are pretty good. And then there's this one. Do you understand ANYTHING about trade secrets?
-russ
p.s. it's well-known (at least among the non-idiots) that the Unix source code has been claimed to be a unpublished trade secret of AT&T. Anyone (non-idiot, remember) who saw the source code without having to agree to an NDA would know that they're speshal. You, obviously, are not speshal. Too bad for you, but really, it doesn't surprise me at all.
-russ
Trolleys didn't go out of business because of the Interstates. This is not hard to figure out. Look at the closure dates for various trolleys.
-russ
Thanks!
-russ
And you think mass transit doesn't need insurance, ROW maintenance, snow removal, over- and under-passes, planning offices, etc.? Nobody forced the trolley lines out of business. People voluntarily switched to automobiles because (and this is the important part) they saved people time. The only thing that is becoming more expensive is people's time. Everything else is getting cheaper, and is likely to continue to get cheaper? You want to take a nice long-term bet? Oh, wait, that's been done already, and the environmentalist lost.
-russ
For more information, visit the London Transmit Museum. Way cool!
-russ