Weren't there people that weren't social deviants that they could have defended, and made the same point? I have a hard time believing that they couldn't have.
People who arn't "social deviants" and who don't express ideas which are "politically incorrect" are less likely to get their rights trampled in the first place. Even if their positions are objectivly highly questionable.
Maybe they are believers in the oft-quoted axiom that 'any publicity is good publicity'.
Another one is "I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend your right to say it. (Even if the result is I call you a fool after you have said it.)"...
Actually, that kind of piracy still is a huge problem. It also involves loss of life, but does congress do anything about it?
Given how many "terrorists" turn out of be either US government trained or funded. It's quite possible that the US Congress does quite a bit about piracy... Just not the sort of things which would result in fewer pirates.
Actual, genuine high seas piracy is still a very serious problem in many parts of the world, particuarly the Persian gulf, SE Asia, and thanks the the drug trade, parts of the Caribbean.
You can see how effective the US government is at doing anything to stop this in either the Persian Gulf with plenty of US warships and the Caribbean there was a "War on Drugs" long before the "War on Terror".
There's no more "virality" caused by the GPL than there's "virality" if Coca Cola chooses to publish its secret formula in the newspaper, then tries after publication to make the formula secret again. It's irrelevant whether the executive who signed off on the publishing order somehow didn't know the formula was supposed to be secret.
In which case the Coca Cola corporation could only go after that executive. They couldn't go after the newspaper and certainly couldn't go after newspaper readers or other newspapers which picked up the same story.
Re:Slightly OT: Linking static libs w/GPL'd code?
on
What if SCO is Right?
·
· Score: 1
What happens if you're a software company that buys some closed source static libraries from another company and link them to your proprietary product and sell the result to customers and later discover the library company included GPL'd code without telling you?
What if the second company was selling them in violation of someone elses licence or patent? What if you broke the licence with your supplier by distributing the libraries without their permission?
The GPL seems like a nasty can of worms...
Selling proprietary software appears to be a big can of worms, unless you write the entire thing from scratch yourself. The momemt you include anyone elses's code (N.B. with certain platform/development tool combinations it is impossible to not do this) or want to bundle someone else's library you need to talk to your lawyer.
Legally, this one little mistake could have been used in court to try to claim the proprietary product was now entirely GPLed and must be given away, destroying the company. Needless to say, we kept this extremely quiet instead, replaced the offending section of code, and hoped that no one ever found out.
If the company was so dependent on selling one piece of proprietary software then it could hardly have been considered robust in the first place. Exactly the same would have happened had a competitor come out with a better product.
Thank RMS for making the whole thing sound like a Marxist movement.
Reminds me of a story about someone questioning Americans about what they feel about a document and if they approve of it. With apparently quite a few thinking it was some kind of Communist manifesto. The document in question being the US Constitution.
Here's the scenario: your company, a medium-sized software business, has a few commercial projects underway. One of your employees naughitly includes some of the code from the commercial project into some GPL'd project, which later makes its way into RedHat. Let's say over a few years she steals quite some bucketful of code. You don't notice, of course, because checking all your code against all of RedHat's source would be kinda onerous and not something that would occur to most people.
Well you could do that. Since the other pieces of code are proprietary software no-one else could check anything at all. There would also be the issue of proving that you wern't pirating GPL software.
Then your company starts distributing RedHat. Then you discover that you've been distributing your own code, inadvertantly, under the GPL, so there's nothing that you can do except fire and sue your employee.
'Tough Cheese', you may respond. But if this is right, then it's going to make many companies quite wary about having anything to do with the GPL.
Or they'll want to avoid proprietary software. Anyway, as some people need to keep being reminded, the vast majority of companies are not in the software distribution business in the first place.
I lived in Chicago. I am not an American citizen. (rest assured, I was there legally) When getting my drivers license I was asked if I wanted to register to vote. I pointed out to the woman that I was not a citizen and couldn't. She told me she could see that and asked if I wanted to anyway.
Why should a document who's supposed purpose is to enable someone to drive on the public roads have anything to do with voting in the first place?
How relevant is speed in counting ? One day or one week is irrilevant, given that the old governemt/old president remains in charge until the count is done.
Quite often in the US the new President/Congressman/Mayor dosn't take office until several months after they election. In other places elections can take effect straight away.
How relevant is potential for fraud ? Enormous, obviously. A machine can be hacked/modified in a thousand different ways to produce the desidered results.
Not only that, the fraud can be difficult for a non expert to identify. Even someone who is illiterate can identify when a counter places a paper ballot in the wrong pile.
Limited use of electronics could do wonders for stopping problems in the recording of choices by voters and the counting of the results. Instead of using pencil and paper, or especially punch cards, electronic machines should be used to create a ballot that is then printed out for the voter to inspect and drop in a ballot box.
One thing to remember is that a machine to print out ballots can go wrong in a lot more ways that a pencil and paper can. It's a lot easier to have some extra pencils than some extra machines and a generator.
The best idea is not electronic vote casting, it's electronic counting. The most recent Toronto mayoral election used a ballot similar to those used in electronic test-scoring, where you use your HB pencil to fill in a blank. The votes were all counted within a couple of hours after the polls closed.
Since there are actual ballot papers involved here a manual recount is perfectly possible. e.g. if any of the candidates contests the results of the machine. Anyway there is less scope for the machine to be rigged, because it need have no "knowlage" of what a paper means.
I don't know what it looks like from the inside, but those of us who don't live in the US look across the Atlantic
Not just across the Atlantic, also plenty of people looking in across the Pacific and North of the US/Canada border.
and see a country where the head of state got in as a result of a fraudulent election
Even if not actually fraudulent the whole thing cam over as farce. Especially given that since the US president dosn't take office for several months there hardly seemed to be any reason to hurry about anything. Nor did anyone in the US apparently even consider the idea of voiding the election and re-balloting.
The fact that when someone points out that political involvement in the electoral process is a bad thing, you immediately shoot back 'another system does not exist' (paraphrased obviously) shows the immensity of the corruption in your system. Have you not heard of the idea that the public service is not political?
Also having people who might be seen as having a conflict of interest, e.g. close relations of a candidate, being excluded from making any descisions about an election.
The government can fund a body without influencing it politically. Transparancy and appropriate checks and balances are required to maintain this independance. To see how it's done have a look here.
Not just the case in Australia. The norm in many parts of the world is elections are operated by public officials, but that as much of the process as possible is open to inspection by interested parties.
The best hope is a user interface that clearly distinguishes between *running a program* and *opening a document*. Windows over the years has deliberately blurred this - even in Win3.x Program Manager the command to run an application was called 'Open'.
There is also a more subtle problem. Windows has a tendency to use the file extension to work out what icon it should display and if a file should be considered executable. But when it comes to trying to execute the file it can look in the file to work out how to execute it. Hence tricks like renaming a.EXE attachment as.WAV work. As opposed to resulting in an audio player saying "I can't play this!"
In my book, it's the classic NSA security problem: how you do make a code that is strong enough that most people can't decrypt it, but weak enough that they can? (I hope that's somewhat relevent...)
Actually the way DRM works is more along the lines of attempting to distribute the work as a "cypher text". Which people then put into a "black box" which will control how they are able to access the "plain text". Which will just never actually "work". Once people have the plain text they can do with it what they like.
The best (or worst, depending of if you are an exec of a user) the record companies can do is to make their products a little bit more inconvenient to make copies of. They do this by making it more difficult (but never ever impossible) or time consuming to make copies. That is all.
It's possible that it may well make no difference at all to professional pirates. If you've got the money what is less hassle, messing around burning writable CDs or bribing a factory to produce a few (thousand) extra copies?
If Iraq fires at US airplanes, US airplanes should disable those installments that are firing missiles. Or ask for a UN resolution to get those installments disabled.
At which point the UN is likely to laugh at the US as remind them that they shouldn't be flying the planes in Iraqi airspace in the first place.
Or ask the UN to find somebody else to patrol that air space.
Assuming the UN believes that the airspace needs patroling in the first place. Which was never discussed by the UN and several times got in the way of the weapons inspectors, who were acting with UN authority, being able to do their jobs.
It is my understanding that British currency and presumably most other countries is legal tender forever. Possibly not the coins, but notes can be exchanged at the Bank of England or wherever at face value for new ones even twenty years on.
But you can't use old currenct for any transactions. You have to exchange it for new with the issuing bank. Whereas old US paper money can be used anywhere which accepts US dollers.
Now, if they had the tablet thing where they could write it into the computer, then that would be different. But how much different from just plain having paper and pencil?
It's heavier, needs to be recharged and if you drop it it could easily break. It's also an expensive thing to buy and maintain.
Maybe one could set up a bell, flashing light, and loudspeaker for each printer. When someone prints, the bell would sound, the light would flash, and the speaker would declare "Joe Smith is now printing 150 pages. The file name is Kama_Sutra.doc"
Maybe more usefully would be to print username, filename, file owner, time, workstaion, etc on every page as a "watermark". Since banner pages only work with fanfold paper.
And more importantly, the driver takes full advantage of the hardware; for example, does the Open Source Linux driver for the Sound Blaster Audigy sound card take full advantage of all of the card's hardware features?
Because the capabilities of the sound card are so importent to the secretary typing a letter...
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Weren't there people that weren't social deviants that they could have defended, and made the same point? I have a hard time believing that they couldn't have.
People who arn't "social deviants" and who don't express ideas which are "politically incorrect" are less likely to get their rights trampled in the first place. Even if their positions are objectivly highly questionable.
Maybe they are believers in the oft-quoted axiom that 'any publicity is good publicity'.
Another one is "I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend your right to say it. (Even if the result is I call you a fool after you have said it.)"...
Actually, that kind of piracy still is a huge problem. It also involves loss of life, but does congress do anything about it?
Given how many "terrorists" turn out of be either US government trained or funded. It's quite possible that the US Congress does quite a bit about piracy... Just not the sort of things which would result in fewer pirates.
Actual, genuine high seas piracy is still a very serious problem in many parts of the world, particuarly the Persian gulf, SE Asia, and thanks the the drug trade, parts of the Caribbean.
You can see how effective the US government is at doing anything to stop this in either the Persian Gulf with plenty of US warships and the Caribbean there was a "War on Drugs" long before the "War on Terror".
There's no more "virality" caused by the GPL than there's "virality" if Coca Cola chooses to publish its secret formula in the newspaper, then tries after publication to make the formula secret again. It's irrelevant whether the executive who signed off on the publishing order somehow didn't know the formula was supposed to be secret.
In which case the Coca Cola corporation could only go after that executive. They couldn't go after the newspaper and certainly couldn't go after newspaper readers or other newspapers which picked up the same story.
What happens if you're a software company that buys some closed source static libraries from another company and link them to your proprietary product and sell the result to customers and later discover the library company included GPL'd code without telling you?
What if the second company was selling them in violation of someone elses licence or patent? What if you broke the licence with your supplier by distributing the libraries without their permission?
The GPL seems like a nasty can of worms...
Selling proprietary software appears to be a big can of worms, unless you write the entire thing from scratch yourself. The momemt you include anyone elses's code (N.B. with certain platform/development tool combinations it is impossible to not do this) or want to bundle someone else's library you need to talk to your lawyer.
If you incorportate GPL code into a commercial product and someone finds out, you are only liable for copyright infringement
You make it sound as though this would be minor. Copyright holders have plenty of "big sticks" to wield.
Legally, this one little mistake could have been used in court to try to claim the proprietary product was now entirely GPLed and must be given away, destroying the company. Needless to say, we kept this extremely quiet instead, replaced the offending section of code, and hoped that no one ever found out.
If the company was so dependent on selling one piece of proprietary software then it could hardly have been considered robust in the first place. Exactly the same would have happened had a competitor come out with a better product.
Thank RMS for making the whole thing sound like a Marxist movement.
Reminds me of a story about someone questioning Americans about what they feel about a document and if they approve of it. With apparently quite a few thinking it was some kind of Communist manifesto. The document in question being the US Constitution.
Here's the scenario: your company, a medium-sized software business, has a few commercial projects underway. One of your employees naughitly includes some of the code from the commercial project into some GPL'd project, which later makes its way into RedHat. Let's say over a few years she steals quite some bucketful of code. You don't notice, of course, because checking all your code against all of RedHat's source would be kinda onerous and not something that would occur to most people.
Well you could do that. Since the other pieces of code are proprietary software no-one else could check anything at all.
There would also be the issue of proving that you wern't pirating GPL software.
Then your company starts distributing RedHat. Then you discover that you've been distributing your own code, inadvertantly, under the GPL, so there's nothing that you can do except fire and sue your employee.
'Tough Cheese', you may respond. But if this is right, then it's going to make many companies quite wary about having anything to do with the GPL.
Or they'll want to avoid proprietary software. Anyway, as some people need to keep being reminded, the vast majority of companies are not in the software distribution business in the first place.
I lived in Chicago. I am not an American citizen. (rest assured, I was there legally) When getting my drivers license I was asked if I wanted to register to vote. I pointed out to the woman that I was not a citizen and couldn't. She told me she could see that and asked if I wanted to anyway.
Why should a document who's supposed purpose is to enable someone to drive on the public roads have anything to do with voting in the first place?
How relevant is speed in counting ? One day or one week is irrilevant, given that the old governemt/old president remains in charge until the count is done.
Quite often in the US the new President/Congressman/Mayor dosn't take office until several months after they election. In other places elections can take effect straight away.
How relevant is potential for fraud ? Enormous, obviously. A machine can be hacked/modified in a thousand different ways to produce the desidered results.
Not only that, the fraud can be difficult for a non expert to identify. Even someone who is illiterate can identify when a counter places a paper ballot in the wrong pile.
Limited use of electronics could do wonders for stopping problems in the recording of choices by voters and the counting of the results. Instead of using pencil and paper, or especially punch cards, electronic machines should be used to create a ballot that is then printed out for the voter to inspect and drop in a ballot box.
One thing to remember is that a machine to print out ballots can go wrong in a lot more ways that a pencil and paper can. It's a lot easier to have some extra pencils than some extra machines and a generator.
The best idea is not electronic vote casting, it's electronic counting. The most recent Toronto mayoral election used a ballot similar to those used in electronic test-scoring, where you use your HB pencil to fill in a blank. The votes were all counted within a couple of hours after the polls closed.
Since there are actual ballot papers involved here a manual recount is perfectly possible. e.g. if any of the candidates contests the results of the machine.
Anyway there is less scope for the machine to be rigged, because it need have no "knowlage" of what a paper means.
I don't know what it looks like from the inside, but those of us who don't live in the US look across the Atlantic
Not just across the Atlantic, also plenty of people looking in across the Pacific and North of the US/Canada border.
and see a country where the head of state got in as a result of a fraudulent election
Even if not actually fraudulent the whole thing cam over as farce. Especially given that since the US president dosn't take office for several months there hardly seemed to be any reason to hurry about anything. Nor did anyone in the US apparently even consider the idea of voiding the election and re-balloting.
The fact that when someone points out that political involvement in the electoral process is a bad thing, you immediately shoot back 'another system does not exist' (paraphrased obviously) shows the immensity of the corruption in your system. Have you not heard of the idea that the public service is not political?
Also having people who might be seen as having a conflict of interest, e.g. close relations of a candidate, being excluded from making any descisions about an election.
The government can fund a body without influencing it politically. Transparancy and appropriate checks and balances are required to maintain this independance. To see how it's done have a look here.
Not just the case in Australia. The norm in many parts of the world is elections are operated by public officials, but that as much of the process as possible is open to inspection by interested parties.
The best hope is a user interface that clearly distinguishes between *running a program* and *opening a document*. Windows over the years has deliberately blurred this - even in Win3.x Program Manager the command to run an application was called 'Open'.
.EXE attachment as .WAV work. As opposed to resulting in an audio player saying "I can't play this!"
There is also a more subtle problem. Windows has a tendency to use the file extension to work out what icon it should display and if a file should be considered executable. But when it comes to trying to execute the file it can look in the file to work out how to execute it. Hence tricks like renaming a
In my book, it's the classic NSA security problem: how you do make a code that is strong enough that most people can't decrypt it, but weak enough that they can? (I hope that's somewhat relevent...)
Actually the way DRM works is more along the lines of attempting to distribute the work as a "cypher text". Which people then put into a "black box" which will control how they are able to access the "plain text".
Which will just never actually "work". Once people have the plain text they can do with it what they like.
The best (or worst, depending of if you are an exec of a user) the record companies can do is to make their products a little bit more inconvenient to make copies of. They do this by making it more difficult (but never ever impossible) or time consuming to make copies. That is all.
It's possible that it may well make no difference at all to professional pirates. If you've got the money what is less hassle, messing around burning writable CDs or bribing a factory to produce a few (thousand) extra copies?
If Iraq fires at US airplanes, US airplanes should disable those installments that are firing missiles. Or ask for a UN resolution to get those installments disabled.
At which point the UN is likely to laugh at the US as remind them that they shouldn't be flying the planes in Iraqi airspace in the first place.
Or ask the UN to find somebody else to patrol that air space.
Assuming the UN believes that the airspace needs patroling in the first place. Which was never discussed by the UN and several times got in the way of the weapons inspectors, who were acting with UN authority, being able to do their jobs.
It is my understanding that British currency and presumably most other countries is legal tender forever. Possibly not the coins, but notes can be exchanged at the Bank of England or wherever at face value for new ones even twenty years on.
But you can't use old currenct for any transactions. You have to exchange it for new with the issuing bank. Whereas old US paper money can be used anywhere which accepts US dollers.
Now, if they had the tablet thing where they could write it into the computer, then that would be different. But how much different from just plain having paper and pencil?
It's heavier, needs to be recharged and if you drop it it could easily break.
It's also an expensive thing to buy and maintain.
Moreover, paper doesn't break,
Even when handled by teenage students who don't understand the idea of being gentle with anything.
Maybe one could set up a bell, flashing light, and loudspeaker for each printer. When someone prints, the bell would sound, the light would flash, and the speaker would declare "Joe Smith is now printing 150 pages. The file name is Kama_Sutra.doc"
Maybe more usefully would be to print username, filename, file owner, time, workstaion, etc on every page as a "watermark". Since banner pages only work with fanfold paper.
And don't think that the disk won't get "stuck" in Windows: it just means that the only alternative is to reboot the machine to unstick it
Or cope with the machine constantly switching into a text mode error message as some app tries to access a disk which isn't there any more.
And more importantly, the driver takes full advantage of the hardware; for example, does the Open Source Linux driver for the Sound Blaster Audigy sound card take full advantage of all of the card's hardware features?
Because the capabilities of the sound card are so importent to the secretary typing a letter...