If you listed Microsoft, SCO, and Apple all in a database of "douchebag companies", posted that on your site, and then told everyone to block them for being douchebags, I have a feeling you would get sued (and rightfully so). Nope, you're wrong. Since you mentioned Apple...
Carl Sagan once sued Apple for calling him a "butt-head astronomer." Sagan lost the suit, because according to the judge:
There can be no question that the use of the figurative term 'Butt-Head' negates the impression that Defendant was seriously implying an assertion of fact. It strains reason to conclude that Defendant was attempting to criticize Plaintiff's reputation or competency as an astronomer. One does not seriously attack the expertise of a scientist using the undefined phrase 'butt-head.'
I'm sure "douchebag companies" would fall into the same category.
Spamhaus' Register Of Known Spam Operations (ROKSO) is a list of "known professional spam operations that have been terminated by a minimum of 3 Internet Service Providers for spam offenses." That's a much more serious accusation than "butt-head" or "douchebag." If it's true, of course, then the plaintiffs can burn in hell... but they claim it's not true, and they've been falsely labeled by Spamhaus, which has damaged their reputation and cost them business.
It's all meaningless in the face of the laws the USA have enacted in the last several years which have destroyed several sections of the US constitution. Laws passed by Congress cannot override the Constitution. Any law that does is can be determined by the courts to be unconstitutional and therefore invalid.
It's all meaningless considering that your judges don't have the balls to uphold your constitution and strike down such laws. That's a pessimistic generalization. Some judges don't have balls. Some judges actually take their job seriously, and will uphold the Constitution no matter how unpopular that may be. Others, unfortunately, will do whatever they're told, apparently. Which kind of judge will this guy get? We don't know, but hopefully the good kind.
The only way to get an unconstitutional law invalidated by the courts is to actually fight it in court. You might lose, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't try.
Your ancestors fought and died for that constitution, for you to have those rights, but no, instead people are concerned that a consumer might actually have to prove he purchased the goods he's trying to remove from a store? One of the rights guaranteed by the Constitution that our ancestors fought for is the right to be "secure in [our] persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures." This guy believes what happened to him to be unreasonable, and he may or may not be right. I'm not sure, but if he is, he's doing the right thing by fighting to keep the rights our ancestors fought for.
It's up to the courts to determine exactly what the Constitution means by "unreasonable", and whether or not this incident qualifies.
The iPod will be obsolete, but there would be a Walkman-like device... Wow. Sony sure wants to spread FUD.
When he says a "Walkman-like device" he really means "something made by Sony and not by Apple." He doesn't mean "something more similar to a Walkman than to an iPod."
Reading e-books? COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT! It's not copyright infringement if you have a license, and an e-book license may be significantly cheaper than textbooks.
Sure, that's the package file format, but I was referring to slackpkg, which acts as a front-end to Slackware's installpkg/removepkg/upgradepkg tools. It's included in the "extras" directory, or you can download it from that web site.
Once it's installed, edit/etc/slackpkg/mirrors and uncomment your favorite mirror. Then type: slackpkg update
Once it's done retrieving the list of available packages, type: slackpkg upgrade-all
You'll get a list of all available updates, with the option to upgrade each package. When you're finished, it will ask how to handle modified configuration files: blindly delete the old one and use the new one, blindly delete the new one and keep the old one, or save both so you can merge them manually.
It's just as easy as those other "modern" package managers, but it's all hacked together from shell scripts and tarballs.:-D
I flipped past the end of an episode some time later, and caught a couple minutes of alien reptile Nazis in 20th century Hawaii. What the fuck were they thinking? That's actually a serious question. Can anyone explain why they did that stupid time-traveling lizard-Nazis thing? At the end of Season 3, the Enterprise finished an epic struggle to save the galaxy and finally returned home to Earth. But the creators of the show were afraid that the series might be cancelled, so they thought to themselves, how can we make sure Paramount has no choice but to let us keep going? Hey, I know! Let's make up some kind of a crazy cliffhanger, so if Paramount cancels the show, fans will be up in arms demanding to know what the hell is going on. Job security!
So instead of ending the season finale with the Enterprise triumphantly returning home and celebrating a job well done, they instead discover that they've somehow gone back in time to the 1940s and there are Nazi war planes flying over San Francisco, shooting alien laser beams. To be continued!
They got exactly the reaction they were hoping for: WHAT THE HELL?!? And the series was renewed for another year.
Then suddenly they realized that they had to start Season 4 by explaining how the Enterprise had been mysteriously transported back in time, along with some aliens who'd been supplying weapons to the Germans, and then figure out what was happening, defeat the aliens, repair the timeline, and make it back to the correct century. Oops. They hadn't thought of that at all.
Since you seem to have a good handle on this I'll ask you: See what happens when you sound assertive enough on Slashdot? People are suckered into thinking you actually know what you're talking about!:-D
Sifting through the linked discussion and Theo's flames, I ran across an argument about the nature of dual-licensing. Someone mentioned that the GPL has wording to the effect of "You must give others the same freedoms that you had when you received the software" - I presume that's from the preamble or something higher-level than legalese. Still, could that be properly interpreted to mean that, under the terms of the GPL itself, if you receive a piece of software that is dual-licensed, you are required to preserve both licenses in your redistribution? I kind of doubt it, but I wonder what the argument in that case would be. You should read the GPL sometime.
5. You are not required to accept this License, since you have not signed it. However, nothing else grants you permission to modify or distribute the Program or its derivative works. These actions are prohibited by law if you do not accept this License. Therefore, by modifying or distributing the Program (or any work based on the Program), you indicate your acceptance of this License to do so, and all its terms and conditions for copying, distributing or modifying the Program or works based on it.
9. Acceptance Not Required for Having Copies. You are not required to accept this License in order to receive or run a copy of the Program. Ancillary propagation of a covered work occurring solely as a consequence of using peer-to-peer transmission to receive a copy likewise does not require acceptance. However, nothing other than this License grants you permission to propagate or modify any covered work. These actions infringe copyright if you do not accept this License. Therefore, by modifying or propagating a covered work, you indicate your acceptance of this License to do so.
No, you're not required to accept the GPL at all, and if you choose not to accept it, then you are not bound by its terms. This section says nothing else grants you permission, but in the case of dual-licensed software, that's not the case: you can choose to accept the other license, and be bound by its terms instead.
This is the purpose of the 3 envelopes. Forensic testing will show tampering. In addition, you have the bank logs. Together this is rather difficult to dispute. Forensic testing costs more than copyright registration.
They have to keep copies for years, with timestamps. Says who?
My e-mail servers rotate log files weekly, and anything older than a month is deleted automatically. This was the default configuration, which I haven't seen a need to change.
Better yet, mail yourself an empty unsealed envelope, so that in the future you'll have a dated envelope you can seal something inside as proof of your claims.
You can have your exit row seats. It depends on the plane, but they often don't recline. Not that regular seats recline a whole lot anyway, but it's something.
I just found out that if you get a voucher for a free ticket on United (because you volunteered to give up your seat on an overbooked flight), you can't use it to book your flight online. You have to call their call center in India, reserve your flight over the phone, then bring the actual physical coupon to a ticket agent at the airport in exchange for actual physical tickets. Or mail it to them, and they'll mail you your tickets.
The Nazi thing was a huge mistake, and probably was a significant factor in killing the series. Other than that, Enterprise was really surprisingly good, most of the time. Their best stuff was when they expanded on ideas that had been introduced in previous episodes of Star Trek, and managed to do it without breaking anything (for example, they encounter the Ferengi, but since the crew was unconscious when the Ferengi boarded Enterprise, the ship's log never mentioned them by name, which is why Picard had never heard of them; they encounter Romulans a couple of times, but never actually see them face to face, which is why everyone is shocked when Kirk finally establishes visual contact).
If you're not going to follow the cannon, why bother to call it Star Trek? I thought Enterprise was going to be terrible, precisely because I thought they couldn't do it without breaking canon. I was wrong.
Roddenberry's dream was that in the future, humanity will be perfect. We'll all have worked out our differences, and there will be no crime, poverty or disease. In fact, there will be no money, because everyone will have whatever they need, thanks to replicator technology. All conflict must therefore come from encounters with alien species that aren't as evolved as we are.
But that dream just doesn't fit reality. Looking back over the last several thousand years of recorded history, I've seen absolutely no indication that human nature has changed one bit. Sure, technology has changed a lot, but people are still people. The Bible is full of examples of kings committing atrocities, businessmen and religious leaders being asshats, hypocrisy, racism, corruption, greed, etc. etc. We still have these problems today, and we will still have these problems in the 24th century.
Star Trek VI hinted that there are at least some humans who don't get along with everyone, and Deep Space Nine (created after Roddenberry's death) showed that greed still exists. I'd like to see that taken a few steps further.
Step forward in time a generation or two after the return of Voyager. The Federation isn't operating efficiently, not everyone has access to everything they want, and advanced technology can't fix everyone's problems. Starfleet Command has appeared to be in great shape for a long time, but behind the scenes, things have been falling apart. Several of the outer planets have formed their own alliance and decided to secede from the Federation, which has led to civil war. Alliance spies have infiltrated Starfleet to gain military intelligence, and some members of the Federation Council are of the opinion that desperate times call for desperate measures.
You could definitely come up with all kinds of interesting stories in that kind of environment. Plan a story arc, the way Babylon 5 was planned out. This has the disadvantage that viewers may get left out if they jump in in the middle of the series or miss a few episodes here and there, but the advantage that you can actually have character development and an overall plot! You still have to wrap up the main story in 42 minutes, but it frees you to move in new directions. What if the show was about the crew of the Enterprise G, but the captain and a few bridge crew members have personal ties with friends and family on Alliance worlds, and by the end of Season 1 they've decided the moral thing to do is to switch sides and turn against the Federation, helping to defend the freedom and liberty of the Alliance from the Federation oppressors?
Surely there are some good science fiction writers out there who can come up with better plot ideas than I can. Paramount just has to be willing to turn over the reigns to somebody with real vision.
If I were one of the authors affected, I would be pretty offended. The SFWA is asserting copyright on things that Cory has written, and someone could easily be confused into thinking they're representing him when they issue these notices. That's borderline on libel - it could give someone completely wrong ideas about Cory, if they don't realize he didn't authorize the SFWA's takedown notices.
He should be pissed at them. I would, if this happened to me.
They came as little artificial pellets, but once you put them in water -- look out -- LIFE! Those weren't artificial pellets, those were actual living brine shrimp in cryptobiosis.
They're not. My experience has been that the PDX airport wifi network works just fine, while MetroFi is horribly broken to the point of being unusable, but I haven't used MetroFi as much (because it hasn't been around as long, and I don't actually live in the city), so maybe they're working on that.
The original implementation was dual licensed BSD/GPL.
The submitter changed some bits and decided to pick the GPL license (both would have been allowed).
Using BSD-licensed code under the GPL is just fine.
CHANGING OR REMOVING A COPYRIGHT NOTICE is illegal, one of the very few clear restrictions imposed by the BSD license. It's one of the things you just don't ever do. But the copyright notice wasn't removed, only the BSD license information was removed. Attribution is still there. And since the original code was dual-licensed GPL or BSD, that means you can choose to use it under ONE of those licenses, right? And if you choose to use it under the GPL, then you're not required to keep the BSD license text. Right?
A patch to existing code would be considered a derivative work. Correct.
Derivative works all belong to the original copyright owner. No matter who wrote them. Only partially correct. Derivative works belong to both the original copyright owner AND the author of the derivative work. I can take BSD-licensed code, hack it however I like, and release the result as a proprietary application, as long as I give proper attribution as required under the BSD license. Doing so does NOT give the authors of the BSD code the right to use my derivative code for free; they'd have to buy it from me at whatever price I set (if I choose to offer it for sale). Although I have to comply with their license in order to use their code in this way, they don't own the result.
This is what keeps someone from trying to add in a patch that has a different license from original GPL work. By submitting a patch, you're implicitly granting a license for your code to be included with the project, under the same license(s) as the rest of the project, but you still hold the copyright on your code. Some projects have legal wording to clarify their policy on accepting patches, but this is how things are generally understood to work.
The original licensee does not allow it. The inclusion of BSD-licensed code in GPL-licensed software is perfectly fine, as long as the conditions of the BSD license are met. In this case, it sounds like the conditions of the BSD license may not have been met. The author of most of the driver took the whole thing (including patches owned by other people and licensed under the BSD license), and tried to relicense the whole thing under GPLv2 without dotting all the i's and crossing all the t's. The idea of what he was trying to do is totally OK, but a couple of details may not have been handled correctly and might need to be fixed.
Doing the same thing in the other direction (including GPL-licensed code in a BSD-licensed project) is a no-no, by the way. The GPL has additional requirements that the BSD license doesn't satisfy.
What prevents the RSS from happening soon? Blogs are pretty common nowdays. The people who use these mailing lists don't want to use blogs. Many of them utterly abhor blogs.
Slashdot Mirror
Carl Sagan once sued Apple for calling him a "butt-head astronomer." Sagan lost the suit, because according to the judge:
I'm sure "douchebag companies" would fall into the same category.
Spamhaus' Register Of Known Spam Operations (ROKSO) is a list of "known professional spam operations that have been terminated by a minimum of 3 Internet Service Providers for spam offenses." That's a much more serious accusation than "butt-head" or "douchebag." If it's true, of course, then the plaintiffs can burn in hell... but they claim it's not true, and they've been falsely labeled by Spamhaus, which has damaged their reputation and cost them business.
The only way to get an unconstitutional law invalidated by the courts is to actually fight it in court. You might lose, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't try. Your ancestors fought and died for that constitution, for you to have those rights, but no, instead people are concerned that a consumer might actually have to prove he purchased the goods he's trying to remove from a store? One of the rights guaranteed by the Constitution that our ancestors fought for is the right to be "secure in [our] persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures." This guy believes what happened to him to be unreasonable, and he may or may not be right. I'm not sure, but if he is, he's doing the right thing by fighting to keep the rights our ancestors fought for.
It's up to the courts to determine exactly what the Constitution means by "unreasonable", and whether or not this incident qualifies.
When he says a "Walkman-like device" he really means "something made by Sony and not by Apple." He doesn't mean "something more similar to a Walkman than to an iPod."
Sure, that's the package file format, but I was referring to slackpkg, which acts as a front-end to Slackware's installpkg/removepkg/upgradepkg tools. It's included in the "extras" directory, or you can download it from that web site.
/etc/slackpkg/mirrors and uncomment your favorite mirror. Then type:
:-D
Once it's installed, edit
slackpkg update
Once it's done retrieving the list of available packages, type:
slackpkg upgrade-all
You'll get a list of all available updates, with the option to upgrade each package. When you're finished, it will ask how to handle modified configuration files: blindly delete the old one and use the new one, blindly delete the new one and keep the old one, or save both so you can merge them manually.
It's just as easy as those other "modern" package managers, but it's all hacked together from shell scripts and tarballs.
Nope, I run ISC dhcpd at home, and Vista never had a problem getting an IP.
A whole pile of other problems, but never that.
Hey, they make some pretty good DVD+R DL discs. I've got a burner that I can't get to write to any other brand.
So instead of ending the season finale with the Enterprise triumphantly returning home and celebrating a job well done, they instead discover that they've somehow gone back in time to the 1940s and there are Nazi war planes flying over San Francisco, shooting alien laser beams. To be continued!
They got exactly the reaction they were hoping for: WHAT THE HELL?!? And the series was renewed for another year.
Then suddenly they realized that they had to start Season 4 by explaining how the Enterprise had been mysteriously transported back in time, along with some aliens who'd been supplying weapons to the Germans, and then figure out what was happening, defeat the aliens, repair the timeline, and make it back to the correct century. Oops. They hadn't thought of that at all.
Does that answer your question?
Or the new GPL v3.0:
No, you're not required to accept the GPL at all, and if you choose not to accept it, then you are not bound by its terms. This section says nothing else grants you permission, but in the case of dual-licensed software, that's not the case: you can choose to accept the other license, and be bound by its terms instead.
Personally I'm a big fan of slackpkg.
My e-mail servers rotate log files weekly, and anything older than a month is deleted automatically. This was the default configuration, which I haven't seen a need to change.
Better yet, mail yourself an empty unsealed envelope, so that in the future you'll have a dated envelope you can seal something inside as proof of your claims.
You can have your exit row seats. It depends on the plane, but they often don't recline. Not that regular seats recline a whole lot anyway, but it's something.
I just found out that if you get a voucher for a free ticket on United (because you volunteered to give up your seat on an overbooked flight), you can't use it to book your flight online. You have to call their call center in India, reserve your flight over the phone, then bring the actual physical coupon to a ticket agent at the airport in exchange for actual physical tickets. Or mail it to them, and they'll mail you your tickets.
Astounding.
Except for the Nazi thing, which was a huge mistake and was probably the biggest thing that killed the series.
The Nazi thing was a huge mistake, and probably was a significant factor in killing the series. Other than that, Enterprise was really surprisingly good, most of the time. Their best stuff was when they expanded on ideas that had been introduced in previous episodes of Star Trek, and managed to do it without breaking anything (for example, they encounter the Ferengi, but since the crew was unconscious when the Ferengi boarded Enterprise, the ship's log never mentioned them by name, which is why Picard had never heard of them; they encounter Romulans a couple of times, but never actually see them face to face, which is why everyone is shocked when Kirk finally establishes visual contact).
If you're not going to follow the cannon, why bother to call it Star Trek? I thought Enterprise was going to be terrible, precisely because I thought they couldn't do it without breaking canon. I was wrong.
You've definitely got something here.
Roddenberry's dream was that in the future, humanity will be perfect. We'll all have worked out our differences, and there will be no crime, poverty or disease. In fact, there will be no money, because everyone will have whatever they need, thanks to replicator technology. All conflict must therefore come from encounters with alien species that aren't as evolved as we are.
But that dream just doesn't fit reality. Looking back over the last several thousand years of recorded history, I've seen absolutely no indication that human nature has changed one bit. Sure, technology has changed a lot, but people are still people. The Bible is full of examples of kings committing atrocities, businessmen and religious leaders being asshats, hypocrisy, racism, corruption, greed, etc. etc. We still have these problems today, and we will still have these problems in the 24th century.
Star Trek VI hinted that there are at least some humans who don't get along with everyone, and Deep Space Nine (created after Roddenberry's death) showed that greed still exists. I'd like to see that taken a few steps further.
Step forward in time a generation or two after the return of Voyager. The Federation isn't operating efficiently, not everyone has access to everything they want, and advanced technology can't fix everyone's problems. Starfleet Command has appeared to be in great shape for a long time, but behind the scenes, things have been falling apart. Several of the outer planets have formed their own alliance and decided to secede from the Federation, which has led to civil war. Alliance spies have infiltrated Starfleet to gain military intelligence, and some members of the Federation Council are of the opinion that desperate times call for desperate measures.
You could definitely come up with all kinds of interesting stories in that kind of environment. Plan a story arc, the way Babylon 5 was planned out. This has the disadvantage that viewers may get left out if they jump in in the middle of the series or miss a few episodes here and there, but the advantage that you can actually have character development and an overall plot! You still have to wrap up the main story in 42 minutes, but it frees you to move in new directions. What if the show was about the crew of the Enterprise G, but the captain and a few bridge crew members have personal ties with friends and family on Alliance worlds, and by the end of Season 1 they've decided the moral thing to do is to switch sides and turn against the Federation, helping to defend the freedom and liberty of the Alliance from the Federation oppressors?
Surely there are some good science fiction writers out there who can come up with better plot ideas than I can. Paramount just has to be willing to turn over the reigns to somebody with real vision.
If I were one of the authors affected, I would be pretty offended. The SFWA is asserting copyright on things that Cory has written, and someone could easily be confused into thinking they're representing him when they issue these notices. That's borderline on libel - it could give someone completely wrong ideas about Cory, if they don't realize he didn't authorize the SFWA's takedown notices.
He should be pissed at them. I would, if this happened to me.
They're not. My experience has been that the PDX airport wifi network works just fine, while MetroFi is horribly broken to the point of being unusable, but I haven't used MetroFi as much (because it hasn't been around as long, and I don't actually live in the city), so maybe they're working on that.
Using BSD-licensed code under the GPL is just fine.
CHANGING OR REMOVING A COPYRIGHT NOTICE is illegal, one of the very few clear restrictions imposed by the BSD license. It's one of the things you just don't ever do. But the copyright notice wasn't removed, only the BSD license information was removed. Attribution is still there. And since the original code was dual-licensed GPL or BSD, that means you can choose to use it under ONE of those licenses, right? And if you choose to use it under the GPL, then you're not required to keep the BSD license text. Right?
Doing the same thing in the other direction (including GPL-licensed code in a BSD-licensed project) is a no-no, by the way. The GPL has additional requirements that the BSD license doesn't satisfy.
Thanks.