A contract that says "You must give me a license to all your patents if you distribute X" is about as conscionable as "You must give me everything you own if you distribute X". Not gonna fly.
That's a reasonable argument, but I'm not sure if a judge would agree with it. The patent license only applies to derivative software of the piece of GPLv3 covered software that was distributed, so it's not an unlimited patent license - it's more like a license to use the piece of software that was distributed without being sued, which is entirely reasonable.
It has to do with intellectual property, meaning property laws apply.
You've been confused by the term intellectual property. That's why the term was created: to confuse you.
The exact details of copyright law (the law that applies to data protected by copyright) are somewhat complex. The laws and legal rulings applying to software licensing are also complex. But neither of those have anything to do with physical property laws, and if you try to reason about them by comparing them to your understanding of physical property you'll probably end up coming to an incorrect conclusion.
Physical property laws have developed in reaction to the natural properties of physical objects, most importantly the fact that if I'm using a physical object (say, driving my car to work), you can't use the same physical object at the same time. Data does not have that property - although frequently people receiving commercial software are forced to enter a contract agreeing to pretend that it does. Even in those cases, the software still isn't physical property nor protected by physical property laws - it's just data with it's use by a specific person constrained by a contract.
Opera is fast and all, don't get me wrong. I love it more than Firefox. But that doesn't change the fact that it's broken.
You'd think that Opera is broken... at least until you actually try to make a JavaScript enabled web page. At that point you'll realise that it's actually IE that's painfully broken and Firefox that's only somewhat less broken. Oh, and the standards? They're poorly designed and occasionally nonsensical.
If there are three ways to do something, the standard will specify the dumbest way and IE will implement the second-dumbest way as an "improvement". 5/6ths of the time Firefox will follow the standard, and the rest of the time it will implement the third (least stupid) option... that disagrees with both the standard *and* the way IE does it.
No, it is not a natural state of affairs. I may lend you an item, but if you tinker with it and modify it, you're liable in the case that I do not agree with the changes you made. Likewise, software developers lend you their code, but if you tinker with it and modify it, you're liable for any damages they may demand. The only difference between these two scenarios is that one of the contracts is expressive, and the other is implied. They're both legally binding. It doesn't matter if the code was "just a copy". My item was "just a copy" of a blueprint that the manufacturer developed, too.
Don't confuse physical objects with data, and don't confuse property rights with any of the laws limiting the use of data. If I own a physical object, I have the right to tinker with it. If I borrow your physical object, I'm expected to return it undamaged. If you give me your data, you still have a copy - you have no reason to expect me to return either the copy you gave me or any other copies I may make of that data. If the data is a computer program, then it will be stored on a hard disk that I own and executed on a computer that I own - tinkering with the software is an extension of my right to tinker with my computer (a physical object that I own).
The logic is as follows: Things that are against some actual law are illegal, and things that aren't are not. The freedom of speech laws in Sweden are a bit behind the times when it comes to modern multi-party electronic communication, and they haven't passed any massively overbroad copyright enforcement laws. There's no logical contradiction - the Swedish lawmakers are just slow to act, which is probably a good thing in the long run.
Now if those words have action attached to them (e.g. I told you to go kill my rival), then I have to worry. That's where the line is crossed.
That should be true only if A.) your rival is killed / there is a legitimate attempt to kill him B.) it can be reasonably shown that the perpetrator was influenced by your instructions.
You should go kill Paris Hiltion.
There's no reason my previous statement should be taken as any sort of criminal act.
The right to live are more important than the right to free speach in Sweden. Those that misuse the right to free speach to get people murdered and thus impose on others right to live are criminals.
Obviously that's what they law is saying, or we wouldn't be having this discussion.
The question is this: Is that really a good idea? Can you really have freedom when the government can decide what you're allowed to say? Do "hate speech" laws even help, or do they just drive hate speech underground where it can't even be argued against in public discussions?
Like in any society, even the USA, there have to be limits to your freedoms because you can't just do everything you bloody well want to.
Starting with that as a premise doesn't promote freedom very much, now does it?
I much prefer to start with the premise that we *should* have the freedom to do everything that we bloody well want to, and that everything short of that is a grudgingly agreed upon compromise. The philosophical argument between these two positions has gone on for a long time, but if freedom is an important value then it seems reasonable to start with the assumption that it's prefereable for us to be free.
Wait a second... the government is using copyright to prevent the unmodified and accurate reproduction of a historical text?!?
I had been waiting for an obvious case where copyright was used to distort history and prevent free communication in a politically relevant manner, and there it is.
The first couple are usually about human life, health, freedom - those kinda things. Americans may think that it is OK to have free speech trump all these, but just because you think so doesn't make it so.
The founders of the United States thought through the structure they were building quite a bit. The first two amendments to the constitution were a key element - the answer to the question "What if what we've built isn't good enough?"
I'm not going to try to argue the importance of the second amendment here, but making freedom of speech prominent had an important purpose: It makes it harder to intentionally and harmfully subvert by saying that other things trump it. If human life, for example, trumps the freedom of speech then it's trivial for some highly placed government officials to claim that freedom of speech needs to be suspended "temporarily" to protect human life (even in some vague and indirect manner - like for hate speech laws).
I guess the key thing here is that the government is made up of people, sometimes they get stuff wrong, and if that can't be discussed it becomes very hard to fix.
Luckily, we still have the freedom of speech necessary to promote the alteration of those laws. We haven't made much progress on it in the last 40 years in the USA - possibly because those drugs should remain legal, possibly because the construction of our federal government isn't conducive to enabling any sort of democratic change - but with freedom of speech we can continue the discussion and discuss strategies to improve our policies.
It would need to be by consent of all, made by all and interpreted by all.
So basically you're suggesting actual policy on the basis of an unlikely fantasy?
We're much better off preserving preserving freedom of speech and political flexibility in case we get things wrong and need to change them, rather than trying to guess at which speech it's safe to restrict.
Reckless endangerment: A person commits the crime of reckless endangerment if the person recklessly engages in conduct which creates a substantial risk of serious physical injury to another person. "Reckless" conduct is conduct that exhibits a culpable disregard of foreseeable consequences to others from the act or omission involved. The accused need not intentionally cause a resulting harm or know that his conduct is substantially certain to cause that result. The ultimate question is whether, under all the circumstances, the accused's conduct was of that heedless nature that made it actually or imminently dangerous to the rights or safety of others.
That's pretty clear, and it pretty obviously covers the "yelling FIRE in a crowded theater" case. The key thing is that it causes an "actual or imminent danger" to specific other people - something that saying "every right thinking person should kill all black people they see" on a web site doesn't do.
Have your free speech, but it stops as soon as you start inciting other people to violence and crimes.
Unacceptable. If free speech stops when it advocates things that happen to currently be illegal then it stops being useful to promote certain types of political change. And no, there aren't laws that are exempt from being challenged - we may both agree that murder should always stay illegal, but I'm sure you can find a lot of people in Iran that say that premarital sex should always be illegal. It's much better to allow people to advocate for murder than to prevent people from promoting the legality of pre-marital sex.
We do have to separate out things like coercion by threat of violence. "I'll shoot you if you don't give me your wallet" when you're holding a gun on someone isn't protected speech - it's a mugging. But that sort of thing absolutely must not be stretched in the direction of legitimate political speech or even legitimate expression of facts, opinions, and ideas.
In fact, coordination and reaction times are forms of intelligence in themselves.
I disagree. Those are excellent examples of traits that are *not* intelligence. The meaning of the word "intelligence" has to do with deliberate reasoning - be it about mathematics, social situations, ethics, literary criticism, or any other complex topic.
Physical coordination requires no reasoning, and in order to get fast reaction times you have to ingrain reflexes rather than making reasoned decisions. Also, generally learning things doesn't make you more intelligent. Training / learning may make you more knowledgeable or skillful, but intelligence is largely a product of genetics and nutrition / intellectual stimulation as a child. You don't get more intelligent by learning to play tennis (or by taking a class in linear algebra).
And somehow Chandon Seldon got a +3, Informative for:
It's only a +2 informative. I get an awesome karma bonus. =P
Can anyone provide an actual answer?
Three main reasons:
Although agreements like the Novel / Microsoft deal are extremely dangerous, this specific agreement isn't that big a threat. Microsoft's empty threats aren't forcing everyone to license SuSE in order to use the GNU/Linux system.
By allowing Novel and Microsoft to distribute GPLv3 software, the FSF hopes that Microsoft will end up distributing some GPLv3 software inadvertently and thereby provide patent licenses to the world.
Preventing Novell from distributing SuSE doesn't actually help anyone here, and would hurt the free software community overall.
I envy "researchers" who can come up with this sort of neo-darwinistic crap, rummage through some I.Q. scores and tell the world "If you aren't a first born son, forget about it."
Do you think that human intelligence shouldn't be studied? Is it the sensationalist headline? This is perfectly legitimate research that tells us something useful - most likely about differences in learning environment between siblings - the fact that you're insulted by the idea that some people are smarter than others is your problem.
Just because we don't understand everything about the world doesn't mean we can't compare measurements and come to conclusions.
This study has produced an interesting result: firstborn children are slightly better at IQ tests than their siblings. And, statistically, we can be *very sure* that this result is correct. We can argue all day about what IQ means, but that won't change this result. On the other hand, this result and others like it *could* change our understanding of what IQ means and what influences it - which would be pretty useful.
Athletic ability, A loving heart, Ability to listen, Compassion
The other things you mention are arguable, but these items are clearly not related to intelligence. They may be nice qualities to have, but "Intelligence" actually has a meaning, and it doesn't include those items.
A quarterback who can gauge how the field looks at a given moment and decide upon a particular action is just as intelligent (in a different way) as someone who is excellent at arithmetic. Similarly, someone who has excellent social skills (i.e. read emotions) is just as intelligent as someone who has a prodigious memory. A marketing person is just as intelligent as a computer programmer in a different way, and a tennis player is just as intelligent as a musician, in a different way.
"Intelligent" does actually mean something, and some people are more intelligent than others. There are different forms of intelligence, but that doesn't mean that everyone gets one of them. There are some professions that require more intelligence than others: dumb people can play tennis, but they can't be mathematics professors. That isn't to say there aren't extremely smart tennis players, but it's not a prerequisite.
Tactics are exactly the answer here - the FSF has a history of making tactical compromises. The FSF's process has no more been compromised over this than it was when they decided to release the LGPL and license GNU libc under it.
It's actually an evil scheme on the part of the FSF to get Microsoft to distribute GPLv3 software, thus taking away their ability to make patent threats. Further, the Novell-Microsoft deal looks to be mostly harmful in practice - that sort of deal is horribly problematic in theory, but in this particular case it's worth more to the community to yell "Bad Dog" really loud rather than to sucker punch them.
Slashdot Mirror
That's a reasonable argument, but I'm not sure if a judge would agree with it. The patent license only applies to derivative software of the piece of GPLv3 covered software that was distributed, so it's not an unlimited patent license - it's more like a license to use the piece of software that was distributed without being sued, which is entirely reasonable.
You've been confused by the term intellectual property. That's why the term was created: to confuse you.
The exact details of copyright law (the law that applies to data protected by copyright) are somewhat complex. The laws and legal rulings applying to software licensing are also complex. But neither of those have anything to do with physical property laws, and if you try to reason about them by comparing them to your understanding of physical property you'll probably end up coming to an incorrect conclusion.
Physical property laws have developed in reaction to the natural properties of physical objects, most importantly the fact that if I'm using a physical object (say, driving my car to work), you can't use the same physical object at the same time. Data does not have that property - although frequently people receiving commercial software are forced to enter a contract agreeing to pretend that it does. Even in those cases, the software still isn't physical property nor protected by physical property laws - it's just data with it's use by a specific person constrained by a contract.
You'd think that Opera is broken... at least until you actually try to make a JavaScript enabled web page. At that point you'll realise that it's actually IE that's painfully broken and Firefox that's only somewhat less broken. Oh, and the standards? They're poorly designed and occasionally nonsensical.
If there are three ways to do something, the standard will specify the dumbest way and IE will implement the second-dumbest way as an "improvement". 5/6ths of the time Firefox will follow the standard, and the rest of the time it will implement the third (least stupid) option... that disagrees with both the standard *and* the way IE does it.
So requiring a web user to use FireFox is like a shoe store saying "In order to try on our shoes, you need to wear this free pair of clean socks"?
Somehow, I'm not seeing the problem there.
Don't confuse physical objects with data, and don't confuse property rights with any of the laws limiting the use of data. If I own a physical object, I have the right to tinker with it. If I borrow your physical object, I'm expected to return it undamaged. If you give me your data, you still have a copy - you have no reason to expect me to return either the copy you gave me or any other copies I may make of that data. If the data is a computer program, then it will be stored on a hard disk that I own and executed on a computer that I own - tinkering with the software is an extension of my right to tinker with my computer (a physical object that I own).
The logic is as follows: Things that are against some actual law are illegal, and things that aren't are not. The freedom of speech laws in Sweden are a bit behind the times when it comes to modern multi-party electronic communication, and they haven't passed any massively overbroad copyright enforcement laws. There's no logical contradiction - the Swedish lawmakers are just slow to act, which is probably a good thing in the long run.
That should be true only if A.) your rival is killed / there is a legitimate attempt to kill him B.) it can be reasonably shown that the perpetrator was influenced by your instructions.
You should go kill Paris Hiltion.
There's no reason my previous statement should be taken as any sort of criminal act.
Obviously that's what they law is saying, or we wouldn't be having this discussion.
The question is this: Is that really a good idea? Can you really have freedom when the government can decide what you're allowed to say? Do "hate speech" laws even help, or do they just drive hate speech underground where it can't even be argued against in public discussions?
Starting with that as a premise doesn't promote freedom very much, now does it?
I much prefer to start with the premise that we *should* have the freedom to do everything that we bloody well want to, and that everything short of that is a grudgingly agreed upon compromise. The philosophical argument between these two positions has gone on for a long time, but if freedom is an important value then it seems reasonable to start with the assumption that it's prefereable for us to be free.
Wait a second... the government is using copyright to prevent the unmodified and accurate reproduction of a historical text?!?
I had been waiting for an obvious case where copyright was used to distort history and prevent free communication in a politically relevant manner, and there it is.
The founders of the United States thought through the structure they were building quite a bit. The first two amendments to the constitution were a key element - the answer to the question "What if what we've built isn't good enough?"
I'm not going to try to argue the importance of the second amendment here, but making freedom of speech prominent had an important purpose: It makes it harder to intentionally and harmfully subvert by saying that other things trump it. If human life, for example, trumps the freedom of speech then it's trivial for some highly placed government officials to claim that freedom of speech needs to be suspended "temporarily" to protect human life (even in some vague and indirect manner - like for hate speech laws).
I guess the key thing here is that the government is made up of people, sometimes they get stuff wrong, and if that can't be discussed it becomes very hard to fix.
Err... "remain illegal". I apparently am bad at typing.
Luckily, we still have the freedom of speech necessary to promote the alteration of those laws. We haven't made much progress on it in the last 40 years in the USA - possibly because those drugs should remain legal, possibly because the construction of our federal government isn't conducive to enabling any sort of democratic change - but with freedom of speech we can continue the discussion and discuss strategies to improve our policies.
So basically you're suggesting actual policy on the basis of an unlikely fantasy?
We're much better off preserving preserving freedom of speech and political flexibility in case we get things wrong and need to change them, rather than trying to guess at which speech it's safe to restrict.
From Wikipedia:
That's pretty clear, and it pretty obviously covers the "yelling FIRE in a crowded theater" case. The key thing is that it causes an "actual or imminent danger" to specific other people - something that saying "every right thinking person should kill all black people they see" on a web site doesn't do.
Unacceptable. If free speech stops when it advocates things that happen to currently be illegal then it stops being useful to promote certain types of political change. And no, there aren't laws that are exempt from being challenged - we may both agree that murder should always stay illegal, but I'm sure you can find a lot of people in Iran that say that premarital sex should always be illegal. It's much better to allow people to advocate for murder than to prevent people from promoting the legality of pre-marital sex.
We do have to separate out things like coercion by threat of violence. "I'll shoot you if you don't give me your wallet" when you're holding a gun on someone isn't protected speech - it's a mugging. But that sort of thing absolutely must not be stretched in the direction of legitimate political speech or even legitimate expression of facts, opinions, and ideas.
I disagree. Those are excellent examples of traits that are *not* intelligence. The meaning of the word "intelligence" has to do with deliberate reasoning - be it about mathematics, social situations, ethics, literary criticism, or any other complex topic.
Physical coordination requires no reasoning, and in order to get fast reaction times you have to ingrain reflexes rather than making reasoned decisions. Also, generally learning things doesn't make you more intelligent. Training / learning may make you more knowledgeable or skillful, but intelligence is largely a product of genetics and nutrition / intellectual stimulation as a child. You don't get more intelligent by learning to play tennis (or by taking a class in linear algebra).
It's only a +2 informative. I get an awesome karma bonus. =P
Three main reasons:
Do you think that human intelligence shouldn't be studied? Is it the sensationalist headline? This is perfectly legitimate research that tells us something useful - most likely about differences in learning environment between siblings - the fact that you're insulted by the idea that some people are smarter than others is your problem.
Wait... What's wrong with frist posts about the GNAA in Soviet Russia? Isn't that the whole point of Slashdot?
Just because we don't understand everything about the world doesn't mean we can't compare measurements and come to conclusions.
This study has produced an interesting result: firstborn children are slightly better at IQ tests than their siblings. And, statistically, we can be *very sure* that this result is correct. We can argue all day about what IQ means, but that won't change this result. On the other hand, this result and others like it *could* change our understanding of what IQ means and what influences it - which would be pretty useful.
The other things you mention are arguable, but these items are clearly not related to intelligence. They may be nice qualities to have, but "Intelligence" actually has a meaning, and it doesn't include those items.
"Intelligent" does actually mean something, and some people are more intelligent than others. There are different forms of intelligence, but that doesn't mean that everyone gets one of them. There are some professions that require more intelligence than others: dumb people can play tennis, but they can't be mathematics professors. That isn't to say there aren't extremely smart tennis players, but it's not a prerequisite.
Tactics are exactly the answer here - the FSF has a history of making tactical compromises. The FSF's process has no more been compromised over this than it was when they decided to release the LGPL and license GNU libc under it.
It's actually an evil scheme on the part of the FSF to get Microsoft to distribute GPLv3 software, thus taking away their ability to make patent threats. Further, the Novell-Microsoft deal looks to be mostly harmful in practice - that sort of deal is horribly problematic in theory, but in this particular case it's worth more to the community to yell "Bad Dog" really loud rather than to sucker punch them.