Many would dispute GPL's clause that since you can only copy the program under GPL terms, anybody who copies the program is agreeing to GPL terms. That is not correct. If you copy a GPL program in a way not permitted in the GPL, you are violating the copyright. That's it. That's all. You are not agreeing to a contract. The GPL wants you to think that you are, and the statutory penalties for violating copyrights are high enough
One dangerous possibility is for a court to find that indeed someone did violate the GPL by distributing modified executables; but that the remedy for this violation of the copyright law does not include forcing them to comply with the GPL; and that the monatary damages for not complying in the case of GPL'd code is zero, because the copyright holders are freely distributing the source code to anonymous parties without requiring any monatary consideration, and because the copyright holders themselves did not file with the copyright office.
Getting a mailbox full of raw sewage and dirty needles every day would probably be fine if you were an organic farmer into collecting antique medical instruments. If you are an office worker only takes a few seconds to use a fire hose and wash the stink off your desk and inbox at work every morning; that's what storm drains are for. I'm sure the FBI would never arrest your household because of the contents of all those needles you have to throw in the garbage every day. You have to be careful opening packages in order not to get stuck with an infected needle.
Now your mom doesn't want to check her mailbox at all anymore. But many people would just tell mom to call instead, since they no longer want to search for her letter amidst the toxic waste. And they certainly wouldn't send their kids down to stick their hand in the mailbox anymore with all those wrapped and unwrapped filthy needles.
People will stop wasting their time with email (as currently implemented), and thus this new form of communication will be strangled soon after its birth.
I think people are confusing these machines with systems you would have at your house.
On the contrary...
This is a perfect machine for Grandma if you are worried about her clicking on some chain-mailed trojan, or spyware, or otherwise fsck'ing up some setting and then calling you up in the middle of the night to ask for help fixing it. Just tell her the machine needs to "rest" at night; every morning she'll get a squeeky clean reboot.
But not mine. People who want anonymous and spam-like email should invent their own protocol, opt-in, and find a way to pay for the network bandwidth used by it. Maybe you can pay extra for email forwarding to an address with "spamMe" embedded in your user-name. The rest of us (probably 99% of all email users) should get the stuff filtered as close to the senders as possible to help unclog network traffic.
This isn't a real comparison, sure the guy in India might get only $5900/year but that isn't what the company he works for is changing the company he is doing contracts for. Remember the people who own the outsource company are making a lot of money.
And what's to prevent a competitor from undercutting that price? The owners of the outsourcing company can live in India and still be rich in terms of local cost-of-living.
Keystroke loggers are easily defeated by the use of one-time passwords. Just carry an s-key app on your palmpilot. Or even a paper list of encrypted OTP's in your wallet (someone would have to both steal your wallet and keylog your decode key).
Yes, but there is a lot of medical evidence that the type of calories you consume strongly effect how efficiently your body burns them, and also somewhat your desire to consume more. Do a web search on the terms "glycemic index".
There is also some evidence that most of the health benefits of exercise appears at fairly low levels of exercise (e.g. walking briskly), as long as done regularly. So even though running results in increased fitness levels, one has to trade this off with the increased risk of certain types of injuries.
In one large office building where I used to work, I would routinely send my documents to a laser printer on the opposite side of the building (the fact I had to walk by the receptionists desk to get there was purely coincidental:).
There's a flaw in your logic. You cannot retro-actively interpret a license.
You can retro-actively interpret a license any way you want as long as all parties involved (user, distributor and copyright holders) mutually agree to that interpretation and/or settle their issues out of court. Only if if the court goes to trial do the lawyers and judges opinions on the interpretation mean anything.
> At best this will result in a reduction of spam that's too small to measure.
It only takes one snowflake to start an avalanche.
Marginally mentally stable religious fanatic gun nut find porn spam in little daughters email. Tech savvey nephew tracks down these spammers for fun, while daughters email account gets even grosser spam. Gun nut whacks-out and goes on multi-state shooting spree with list of addresses which n3ph3w has gleamed, taking out several spammers and one lazy sys-admin who didn't shut down his relay fast enough. Feds catch up in a nationally televised hostage shoot-out.
Spammers breath a sigh of relief... until all the copycat nuts come out of the woodwork. Guido also "visits" a few offshore businesses who have sent his boss unwanted email about competing "services", figuring his visit will get blamed on the copycats.
The procedure is there for a reason, follow it. If the procedure is wrong correct it.
This is religious dogma whose prime assumption is that what humans think is proper procedure actually works. In actuality, proper procedure (as understood before the fact) often fails, and adaptive problem solving often wins in real life and the market. Most of the dominant software and hardware platforms in use today did not start out as elegant ISO design exercises.
Filtering by email clients won't cut down on spam. The 2% of users who can't figure out how to configure their email filters properly are probably a superset of the 0.01% of idiots who respond to spam and make it profitable in the first place. As long as enough suckers respond to spam to make it profitable, the cruft will continue to clog our network bandwidth.
Increasing the costs of spamming (attorney's fees, foreign money laundering costs, replacing confiscated servers, etc.) will take some of the profit out of spamming; and that will reduce the number of people who can afford to stuff this junk down our networks.
anything that forcibly takes control away from the pilot is going to be dangerous.
You are forgeting that humans have a failure rate also. If whatever takes control away from pilots has a lower failure rate than those pilots, then, over a large enough statistical sample, it will kill less people than will the pilot error that will occur over that same time period. Pilots don't like it, because no person thinks they are the one who will make one of those fatal errors. But pilot error, either in flight management or judgement, turns out to be a major cause of aircraft crashes.
One of the distinguishing characteristics of the Internet is that it allows people anonymity.
If a rape crisis center, whistle-blower journalist, police tip hotline, etc. wish to receive anonymous emails and phone calls, they are certainly welcome. People can still use public phone booths and unsigned/unsecured SMTP for this purpose. But (unless employed by one of the above) that doesn't mean I have to read the stuff also.
For the rest of us, this registration system will be great, because spammers must now have a verified mailing address which the postal inspector (or "cousin" Guido ) can visit.
Using the same compiler is like trying to test the 0-60 time of various cars while using the exact same fuel. It's stupid.
The most accurate benchmarks are the ones closest to how you will actually be using your system. If that's the fuel you'll actually be buying for your cars at the local gas station, then that's the most appropriate fuel for comparing cars you might purchase. If gcc is the compiler you'll actually be using to compile your apps, the using gcc will produce the most accurate benchmark comparisons.
How many linux apps which you use were built with the Intel compiler? If the answer approaches zero, then the SPEC numbers using that compiler are useless for a linux user/developer.
What PC and Mac users can't seem to understand is that 64-bit desktops were commonplace in the early 90s among the very large technical computing market
Actually, true 64-bit systems were common in the mid-90's on many TV tops and living rooms among the 12-year old kid market (N64 using MIPS 4300i CPU)
There is no magical waiting period or re-try period that cannot be trivially coded around. And, with good money on the line, will be trivially coded around.
They can code around the retry-period for grey-listing mail agents. By then the honeypot mail agents will already have the email, and during the retry period the FTC can try to find the server for the contact URL or the phone number, and put a wire-tap on it.
Of course you could argue that MS might have made significant improvements, but I don't think that argument holds, because they wouldn't have to make any useful changes to effectively require taxpayers to pay again for what they have already funded. All Microsoft needs to do is to make some subtle and unimportant and secret change to the communication protocol and they've made an instant market for themselves (or, more accurately, they've damaged another market).
I think that this is the key problem with BSD and public domain licensing for taxpayer-funded software.
(1) The GPL wouldn't completely fix this problem. MS could always release the changes to the application's source, and then update the OS API's underneath it to modify the wire protocols or file formats.
(2) If you aren't worries about the above method of moding the OS to "embrace and extend" your application, then the MPL, or a version of the MPL which also covers wire protocols and file formats would fix the weakness of the BSD license without the GPL's viral baggage.
National governments should have very little reason to worry about the GPL. A national legislature can simply amend copyright law so that enforcement doesn't apply to the software in question (rendering non-acceptance of GPL terms moot), or use eminent domain to outright nationalize all IP rights to the software in question.
The reason these companies want to eliminate the GPL from consideration is obvious: the GPL prohibits them from incorporating other people's work into their proprietary software.
The GPL does no such thing. It does not prohibit dual licensing. These companies are perfectly free to offer to buy the rights to incorporate the code under another license directly from the copyright holders.
Now why should the government, in other words *you*, via your tax dollars, be financing work which proprietary software vendors can then appropriate for nothing and sell at a profit? Welfare programs should be reserved for people that need help, not Bill Gates.
Software which all the taxpayers pay for should be available to all taxpayers. The rights to any additional software should be reserved to those who invested in the salaries of the programmers who developed the software. IMHO, government programs should be reserved for all citizens, not just the rich OR the poor.
The GPL does not forbid selling the software. Its main restriction is that source code must be available to everyone who gets the executable program.
It's main restriction is that the source code must be available, recompilable, and redistributable by everyone who gets the executable. This means the GPL essentially forbids selling software to more than one intelligent entrepreneurial person, since this person will then undercut your price or just give your software away to the second potential customer. If your potential market is over 200 intelligent customers, then rounded to the nearest percent, the GPL forbids you from selling to 100% of your market (unless your product caters to charitable people, or people to lazy to google for the source and recompile).
Slashdot Mirror
One dangerous possibility is for a court to find that indeed someone did violate the GPL by distributing modified executables; but that the remedy for this violation of the copyright law does not include forcing them to comply with the GPL; and that the monatary damages for not complying in the case of GPL'd code is zero, because the copyright holders are freely distributing the source code to anonymous parties without requiring any monatary consideration, and because the copyright holders themselves did not file with the copyright office.
Now your mom doesn't want to check her mailbox at all anymore. But many people would just tell mom to call instead, since they no longer want to search for her letter amidst the toxic waste. And they certainly wouldn't send their kids down to stick their hand in the mailbox anymore with all those wrapped and unwrapped filthy needles.
People will stop wasting their time with email (as currently implemented), and thus this new form of communication will be strangled soon after its birth.
That's nothing impressive--Microsoft accomplished that years ago with Windows 95
No no no... MS support required you to first re-install the OS and then reboot.
On the contrary...
This is a perfect machine for Grandma if you are worried about her clicking on some chain-mailed trojan, or spyware, or otherwise fsck'ing up some setting and then calling you up in the middle of the night to ask for help fixing it. Just tell her the machine needs to "rest" at night; every morning she'll get a squeeky clean reboot.
It's a lot easier to remotely hack the network boot address in NVRAM than it is to modify a read-only CDROM in a padlocked drive.
Your spam may be my correspondence
But not mine. People who want anonymous and spam-like email should invent their own protocol, opt-in, and find a way to pay for the network bandwidth used by it. Maybe you can pay extra for email forwarding to an address with "spamMe" embedded in your user-name. The rest of us (probably 99% of all email users) should get the stuff filtered as close to the senders as possible to help unclog network traffic.
And what's to prevent a competitor from undercutting that price? The owners of the outsourcing company can live in India and still be rich in terms of local cost-of-living.
Keystroke loggers are easily defeated by the use of one-time passwords. Just carry an s-key app on your palmpilot. Or even a paper list of encrypted OTP's in your wallet (someone would have to both steal your wallet and keylog your decode key).
you have to burn more calories than you take in.
Yes, but there is a lot of medical evidence that the type of calories you consume strongly effect how efficiently your body burns them, and also somewhat your desire to consume more. Do a web search on the terms "glycemic index".
There is also some evidence that most of the health benefits of exercise appears at fairly low levels of exercise (e.g. walking briskly), as long as done regularly. So even though running results in increased fitness levels, one has to trade this off with the increased risk of certain types of injuries.
In one large office building where I used to work, I would routinely send my documents to a laser printer on the opposite side of the building (the fact I had to walk by the receptionists desk to get there was purely coincidental :).
You can retro-actively interpret a license any way you want as long as all parties involved (user, distributor and copyright holders) mutually agree to that interpretation and/or settle their issues out of court. Only if if the court goes to trial do the lawyers and judges opinions on the interpretation mean anything.
... but IANAL.
Laptops which weigh less than 3 lbs usually cost way more than $500.
And this Clie is actually a little smaller, in terms of cubic inches, than a Palm III !
The Zaurus is worse in terms of size, weight, and battery life.
And if your main use isn't too carry it in your pocket without a power cord, then a small laptop might be better than either.
It only takes one snowflake to start an avalanche.
Marginally mentally stable religious fanatic gun nut find porn spam in little daughters email. Tech savvey nephew tracks down these spammers for fun, while daughters email account gets even grosser spam. Gun nut whacks-out and goes on multi-state shooting spree with list of addresses which n3ph3w has gleamed, taking out several spammers and one lazy sys-admin who didn't shut down his relay fast enough. Feds catch up in a nationally televised hostage shoot-out.
Spammers breath a sigh of relief... until all the copycat nuts come out of the woodwork. Guido also "visits" a few offshore businesses who have sent his boss unwanted email about competing "services", figuring his visit will get blamed on the copycats.
Suddenly sending spam becomes less popular.
This is religious dogma whose prime assumption is that what humans think is proper procedure actually works. In actuality, proper procedure (as understood before the fact) often fails, and adaptive problem solving often wins in real life and the market. Most of the dominant software and hardware platforms in use today did not start out as elegant ISO design exercises.
Increasing the costs of spamming (attorney's fees, foreign money laundering costs, replacing confiscated servers, etc.) will take some of the profit out of spamming; and that will reduce the number of people who can afford to stuff this junk down our networks.
You are forgeting that humans have a failure rate also. If whatever takes control away from pilots has a lower failure rate than those pilots, then, over a large enough statistical sample, it will kill less people than will the pilot error that will occur over that same time period. Pilots don't like it, because no person thinks they are the one who will make one of those fatal errors. But pilot error, either in flight management or judgement, turns out to be a major cause of aircraft crashes.
If a rape crisis center, whistle-blower journalist, police tip hotline, etc. wish to receive anonymous emails and phone calls, they are certainly welcome. People can still use public phone booths and unsigned/unsecured SMTP for this purpose. But (unless employed by one of the above) that doesn't mean I have to read the stuff also.
For the rest of us, this registration system will be great, because spammers must now have a verified mailing address which the postal inspector (or "cousin" Guido ) can visit.
It is incorrect to use a compiler other than the ones used,or which you will use on the applications for which you are purchasing a system.
Who cares how fast that Ferrari runs on nitro if you will only be putting Chevron gas in it for your drives around the block.
The most accurate benchmarks are the ones closest to how you will actually be using your system. If that's the fuel you'll actually be buying for your cars at the local gas station, then that's the most appropriate fuel for comparing cars you might purchase. If gcc is the compiler you'll actually be using to compile your apps, the using gcc will produce the most accurate benchmark comparisons.
How many linux apps which you use were built with the Intel compiler? If the answer approaches zero, then the SPEC numbers using that compiler are useless for a linux user/developer.
Actually, true 64-bit systems were common in the mid-90's on many TV tops and living rooms among the 12-year old kid market (N64 using MIPS 4300i CPU)
They can code around the retry-period for grey-listing mail agents. By then the honeypot mail agents will already have the email, and during the retry period the FTC can try to find the server for the contact URL or the phone number, and put a wire-tap on it.
I think that this is the key problem with BSD and public domain licensing for taxpayer-funded software.
(1) The GPL wouldn't completely fix this problem. MS could always release the changes to the application's source, and then update the OS API's underneath it to modify the wire protocols or file formats.
(2) If you aren't worries about the above method of moding the OS to "embrace and extend" your application, then the MPL, or a version of the MPL which also covers wire protocols and file formats would fix the weakness of the BSD license without the GPL's viral baggage.
National governments should have very little reason to worry about the GPL. A national legislature can simply amend copyright law so that enforcement doesn't apply to the software in question (rendering non-acceptance of GPL terms moot), or use eminent domain to outright nationalize all IP rights to the software in question.
The GPL does no such thing. It does not prohibit dual licensing. These companies are perfectly free to offer to buy the rights to incorporate the code under another license directly from the copyright holders.
Now why should the government, in other words *you*, via your tax dollars, be financing work which proprietary software vendors can then appropriate for nothing and sell at a profit? Welfare programs should be reserved for people that need help, not Bill Gates.
Software which all the taxpayers pay for should be available to all taxpayers. The rights to any additional software should be reserved to those who invested in the salaries of the programmers who developed the software. IMHO, government programs should be reserved for all citizens, not just the rich OR the poor.
It's main restriction is that the source code must be available, recompilable, and redistributable by everyone who gets the executable. This means the GPL essentially forbids selling software to more than one intelligent entrepreneurial person, since this person will then undercut your price or just give your software away to the second potential customer. If your potential market is over 200 intelligent customers, then rounded to the nearest percent, the GPL forbids you from selling to 100% of your market (unless your product caters to charitable people, or people to lazy to google for the source and recompile).