Possible Apple converts. I had someone ask me just last week about what type of laptop to buy. He said he's "sick of PCs", which I can only assume means sick of viruses and generally sucky software. I came close to recommending he try Ubuntu, but I was planning to recommend OSX. More of these types of announcements could make Ubuntu a viable contender for the "it just works" crowd.
If they've waited this long, and waited until after Debian's announcement, it really doesn't make sense for them to go with Ubuntu.
Sure it does. As great as Debian is if you have a little idea what you're doing, Debian is damn near unsupportable in the conventional sense. I wouldn't support Debian on a home user's desktop, and I can't blame either Canonical or HP for not wanting to either.
This is why projects like User Linux and Ubuntu cut out most of the packages and architectures in Debian, and add a little polish, before offering support. That way, the support personnel know what they're dealing with and can eliminate 90% of the "where is the menu icon for MSN chat?" questions.
Okay, what if we created an "open source" movie. Instead of producing an entire video, people could submit ideas, screenplays, scenes, or do editing to add special effects or voice-overs, under an "open source" license. The final product could be cleaned up, turned into a DVD, and submitted to the MS contest. This would show the benefits of collaboration in making the movie itself.
The United States Constitution is "the law of the land";
Okay, and where in the Constitution does it outlaw secession? Keep looking, bucko...
a succession ordinace can't trump it.
Actually, it can. You see, the right to secede was reserved to the States by the tenth amendment. Here it is if you'd like to read it.
Regardless, the US government was founded on the principle of self-government, as espoused in the Declaration of Independence. For Lincoln to deny it a mere 70 years later was hypocritical and tyrannical.
I believe this was to be the fourth sign of the apocalypse: ESL students correcting native English speakers on their grammar. The end is nigh, people, the end is nigh...
Since aluminum manufacturing consumes a notoriously large amount of energy, let's assume cars are made of 100% aluminum.
The energy required to produce aluminum is about 15 KWh/Kg.
Assuming the average car weighs 2 tons, that's 1814 Kg of aluminum.
1814 Kg * 15 KWh/Kg comes out to 27,210 KWh. At 5 cents per KWh (industrial prices), that's $1500 worth of energy to smelt our aluminum. As far as materials costs go, that sounds about right.
Fine, now a gallon of gasoline contains 125,000 Btu of energy. That's about 37 KWh.
If your car's getting 40 mpg, and if you're driving it 10,000 miles per year, you're using 250 gallons of gasoline a year. 250 * 37 KWh is 9,250 KWh per year.
Drive your car for three years and you've used more energy than it took to build. If we wanted to compare the "theoretical maximum" amount of energy that can be extracted (at 50% efficiency) from gasoline, you're only looking at a year and a half. Any car built in the last ten years should last five to ten times that long.
Why does this rubbish still keep getting modded up?
Did you nitwits notice that this crap automatic update "feature" is the cause of the exploit we're talking about here? I sure as hell don't want any more attack vectors. And I don't want my users to have the ability to update system software. Period.
What people need to do is learn how to download and install a little 5MB software package. No.. wait, people already know how to do that when the software package is Bonzai Buddy or some other crap spyware. But if it's an essential, free program with better a better security track record than commercially available ones, all the modem users know how to do is bitch and moan.
What people need to do is suck it up and stop bitching.
That was kind of the point of his post. The courts have said over and over that "political" speech is the most absolutely protected type of speech in existance. In fact, ruling after ruling has shown that if you're doing anything that may reasonably be interpreted as "communication" and saying anything that could even remotely be interpreted as "political", your rights are protected.
It's so protected, even, that we must create "campaigning" laws to prevent partisans from lying about the other candidate at the last minute before an election, when there's no time for a voter to verify such claims.
I'd like to see this "charter school" try to sue him.
You obviously didn't read the article. Microsoft isn't "handing you the keys". They're leasing you something they couldn't get to work. And, wherever you manage to take it, you take them with you. You can bet your ass it won't be worth diddly squat to the "Open Source Community".
What we need get back to is the idea that there is dignity in all work. It does not matter if it is picking up trash in a park what you earn is yours.
No. What we need to get "back" to is the idea of personal responsibility.
What we're getting to, slowly but surely, is the idea that all work is boring and unnecessesary.
In Bush & Co.'s "Ownership Society", you own your trash. If you throw it in a park, you get your ass kicked. You don't get somebody whose job was replaced by a machine to pick it up for you.
And the great thing is, the libertine liberals can't do a damn thing about it, because their candidate will lose badly against whomever follows Bush.
a slower moving car is always going to be less deadly than a faster moving one.
Consider this: You're driving on icy roads, around a bend on a major highway. There is a large median between you and opposing traffic. You look to the left and see a truck traveling the opposite direction didn't quite make the turn and is spiraling into the median, towards your car.
At your present rate of speed, the truck will have missed you by the time it gets across the median. However, your (driver/MS software) is instinctively slowing down because of the obviously dangerous situation. If you keep slowing down, you will be hit by the oncoming truck. What do you do?
As someone who's been in this situation, I'll tell you what I did. I said "speed the fuck up" to the driver. He stopped slowing down and sped up a little to give the truck some room, and we all lived happily ever after. Does Windows respond to "speed the fuck up"?
How Debian (really) works...
on
Sarge is Now Frozen
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Although yours is a competely accurate description of how Debian is *supposed* to work, I have a feeling reality is somewhat different. This is my analysis. Feel free to correct it.
Debian Stable seems to be doing just fine. It's a bit old, so hardware support is dated, but no one who needs a "stable" distro ever complains that Debian Stable isn't "stable" enough. Those using Stable are the same people who like to assume that Debian is a server-only distro, and wonder what all the fuss is about "new releases". Unless you're one of the new users who clicks on debian.org and mistakenly downloads and installs Stable, expecting a modern desktop with modern hardware support, Stable is great.
Testing, which is a somewhat new addition to Debian, doesn't really seem to be fulfilling its mission. The goal for Debian Testing was for it to always be "ready to release". In theory, then, Testing would be an ideal base for third-party distros. Unfortunately, for some reason, few Debian-derived distros use Testing as a base. Most use Unstable instead. Testing is also supposed to be the branch that users can place on a non-production box in order to test out what the next stable will be, and to help stabilize it. Structurally, however, there is little difference between Unstable and Testing. Packages from Unstable are automatically migrated to Testing after a couple of weeks, unless they have glaring flaws. In the time between Debian Stable releases, most upstream sources go through multiple development cycles. Due to this and the constant churn of packages from Unstable into Testing, much of the work done stabilizing Testing is done in vain. Testing is touted as the ideal desktop, and many even use it as a server due to the outdatedness of the Stable branch. Debian Testing is more stable than 90% of other operating systems. But the Testing branch lacks security updates, and broken packages are frequently removed completely from Testing in order to enforce the "ready to release" philosophy. Also, the branch is in constant flux, meaning third-party support is near impossible.
Unstable is supposed to be a developers' and ricers' haven, with the latest up-to-date packages, fresh from the build farms and ready for hours of enjoyment. Unfortunately, Debian Unstable isn't new and unstable enough for many users. Creating Debian's well-built packages takes time, so the latest software usually isn't available overnight. Also, for fear of breaking Unstable, developers have created an even more unstable branch, Experimental, to contain truly unstable packages. Unstable is sometimes preferred over Testing as a desktop because there is no wait for security updates to migrate.
As a former member of both, I can tell you that Boy's State is not the same as the Boy Scouts.
Regardless, you're pretty spot-on. Boy's State is a brainwashing joke of an exprience, complete with marching in formation and "classes" taught by half-wit legal scholars to explain their theories of how a flag burning amendment would fit into the Constitution.
I'm well aware of that. But what of the argument that a grant of license, if it is truly one sided, may be limited in scope, but may not require consideration on the part of the acceptor. If it requires consideration, it then becomes a contract, and takes on all of the features and requirements of such.
Is this merely a false dichotomy? Does it matter whether the GPL is a license or a contract? I look forward to your response.
he would've had to testify as to his drug production history, which would guarantee a conviction.
That's great. You've completely justified removing any opportunity for independent thought from juries. Clearly judges are the only ones capable of separating fact from law.
Did they not teach you about concepts like double jeopardy and presumption of innocence in your Junior High? Not only that, but you and (more concerningly) the rest of the legal system seem incapable of separating crime (which requires intent, not to mention injury) from farsical persecution (which only requires ability).
If American juries weren't so mind-numbingly stupid, then perhaps you would still get to be the "supreme arbiters of both fact and law" as our founders intended. Perhaps even we wouldn't be spiraling into a banana-republic-like police-state shithole. Instead, the gov't will have to take those rights from you for your own good. Good job, citizen. You may resume consumption.
Okay, let me see if I can distill this down a little bit. I've never heard of this guy before, but his ideas sound worthy of a little analysis, at least.
Contrary to the subject of this story, which equates the GPL to an corrupt trust price-fixing scheme, Mr. Wallace instead seems to consistently promote the idea that the GPL is invalid based on an interpretation of derivative works that requires consent from their author, in addition to the original author, for distribution.
He points out that the FSF and the GPL do not consider such consent to be necessary. He makes a distinction between a unilateral license, like the owner of property letting you borrow their property for free, and a mutual agreement, like you renting property. He claims that the GPL is more like the former, one-sided grant of license than the mutual agreement. Most importantly he claims that a derivative work, to be distributed under copyright law, requires the consent of both the original author and the author of the derivative parts, ie. a mutual contract rather than a one-sided grant of license. He argues that the GPL places no value on the consent of a developer who creates a derivative of a GPLed work.
The crux of his argument seems to revolve around the recursive nature of the GPL. He argues that the GPL may well be valid with regards to an original author and one derivative author. But since it is not a bilateral agreement, the GPL cannot then go on to bind the derivative author to it's terms with regards to distribution of his own work. That, he argues, requires the mutual consent of the original and derivative authors.
As far as I can tell, without having spent hours researching this, it boils down to a choice between two interpretations: either the original author is all-powerful in dictating terms to all successors who create derivative works based on the original, or, each author has dominion over his derivative work, with that work being made possible through mutual agreement with all prior authors, and with distribution of that work to be made possible by agreement of all parties. Mr. Wallace argues that the FSF and the GPL rely upon the former view, while copyright requires the latter.
I suppose my basic argument is that "intent" is a contrived notion. One party's intent should not be solely relied upon; we should at least take the interests of both parties into account when intent is not clear and is at odds with physical reality. My "intent", for instance, is to thoroughly comprehend any intellectual "property" that is handed to me. Why is my intent not "implied" by the courts?
How do we know where acceptable access ends and unacceptable access begins? Is there a "no trespassing" sign? Is there a sufficient fence? Lawyers like to place "reading this is a violation of blahblah" on their e-mails, but the courts have said that doesn't matter. If ISPs have access to your mail, they can read it.
How about this, as a modified analogy: I give away candy bars with an EULA. What are my damages when it is broken?
if we come to the conclusion that this was sufficiently "protected," such that someone had to circumvent protection measures
But that's the crux of the matter, isn't it? If I have the keys to the trunk, am I "circumventing" anything?
I'm trying to frame this in a way that causing physical damage doesn't come into it. Surely that would be criminal. What I'm suggesting is that there is a difference between "breaking" into something, be it a code or a trunk, and simply opening it. And the crime is in breaking and entering; mere trespass is forgiven by God. Trespass for necessity is even a protected right in most states.
Furthermore, information is not "broken" in the same way as physical objects. "Breaking in" in the physical sense implies damage. It does not imply damage in the "intellectual property" sense. The information is still intact. The right to copy and profit by that information is also intact.
Furthermore, to the extent the concept of copyright was created and is authorized to protect data, it is to do so with the goal of encouraging publication, not restricting it.
Slashdot Mirror
Possible Apple converts. I had someone ask me just last week about what type of laptop to buy. He said he's "sick of PCs", which I can only assume means sick of viruses and generally sucky software. I came close to recommending he try Ubuntu, but I was planning to recommend OSX. More of these types of announcements could make Ubuntu a viable contender for the "it just works" crowd.
If they've waited this long, and waited until after Debian's announcement, it really doesn't make sense for them to go with Ubuntu.
Sure it does. As great as Debian is if you have a little idea what you're doing, Debian is damn near unsupportable in the conventional sense. I wouldn't support Debian on a home user's desktop, and I can't blame either Canonical or HP for not wanting to either.
This is why projects like User Linux and Ubuntu cut out most of the packages and architectures in Debian, and add a little polish, before offering support. That way, the support personnel know what they're dealing with and can eliminate 90% of the "where is the menu icon for MSN chat?" questions.
Okay, what if we created an "open source" movie. Instead of producing an entire video, people could submit ideas, screenplays, scenes, or do editing to add special effects or voice-overs, under an "open source" license. The final product could be cleaned up, turned into a DVD, and submitted to the MS contest. This would show the benefits of collaboration in making the movie itself.
Please don't make Thunderbird any more bloated than it alread is. Why must a calendar be integrated with e-mail anyways?
The project would need a good website
Why don't we just copy the MS site?
Is it just me or does contracting with children for their IP rights sound, I don't know, illegal?
Ha-Ha! /points
You loser Democrats and your "oh Russ he's so hunky; he would never sell us out". That's what you get for believing in goodness.
(I've got a friend like you. I'm just practicing for giving him a hard time over this.)
The United States Constitution is "the law of the land";
Okay, and where in the Constitution does it outlaw secession? Keep looking, bucko...
a succession ordinace can't trump it.
Actually, it can. You see, the right to secede was reserved to the States by the tenth amendment. Here it is if you'd like to read it.
Regardless, the US government was founded on the principle of self-government, as espoused in the Declaration of Independence. For Lincoln to deny it a mere 70 years later was hypocritical and tyrannical.
The Constitution had stated that "the union shall be perpetual."
And, now you're just making things up. The word "perpetual" exists nowhere in the US Constitution.
Really, you just sound like a dipshit. And you can't even spell secession. Just shut the hell up before you make more of a fool of yourself.
I believe this was to be the fourth sign of the apocalypse: ESL students correcting native English speakers on their grammar. The end is nigh, people, the end is nigh...
Since aluminum manufacturing consumes a notoriously large amount of energy, let's assume cars are made of 100% aluminum.
The energy required to produce aluminum is about 15 KWh/Kg.
Assuming the average car weighs 2 tons, that's 1814 Kg of aluminum.
1814 Kg * 15 KWh/Kg comes out to 27,210 KWh. At 5 cents per KWh (industrial prices), that's $1500 worth of energy to smelt our aluminum. As far as materials costs go, that sounds about right.
Fine, now a gallon of gasoline contains 125,000 Btu of energy. That's about 37 KWh.
If your car's getting 40 mpg, and if you're driving it 10,000 miles per year, you're using 250 gallons of gasoline a year. 250 * 37 KWh is 9,250 KWh per year.
Drive your car for three years and you've used more energy than it took to build. If we wanted to compare the "theoretical maximum" amount of energy that can be extracted (at 50% efficiency) from gasoline, you're only looking at a year and a half. Any car built in the last ten years should last five to ten times that long.
Why does this rubbish still keep getting modded up?
Did you nitwits notice that this crap automatic update "feature" is the cause of the exploit we're talking about here? I sure as hell don't want any more attack vectors. And I don't want my users to have the ability to update system software. Period.
What people need to do is learn how to download and install a little 5MB software package. No.. wait, people already know how to do that when the software package is Bonzai Buddy or some other crap spyware. But if it's an essential, free program with better a better security track record than commercially available ones, all the modem users know how to do is bitch and moan.
What people need to do is suck it up and stop bitching.
That was kind of the point of his post. The courts have said over and over that "political" speech is the most absolutely protected type of speech in existance. In fact, ruling after ruling has shown that if you're doing anything that may reasonably be interpreted as "communication" and saying anything that could even remotely be interpreted as "political", your rights are protected.
It's so protected, even, that we must create "campaigning" laws to prevent partisans from lying about the other candidate at the last minute before an election, when there's no time for a voter to verify such claims.
I'd like to see this "charter school" try to sue him.
Key Largo
It's nicely relevant to the current political climate in the US as well.
You obviously didn't read the article. Microsoft isn't "handing you the keys". They're leasing you something they couldn't get to work. And, wherever you manage to take it, you take them with you. You can bet your ass it won't be worth diddly squat to the "Open Source Community".
No. What we need to get "back" to is the idea of personal responsibility.
What we're getting to, slowly but surely, is the idea that all work is boring and unnecessesary.
In Bush & Co.'s "Ownership Society", you own your trash. If you throw it in a park, you get your ass kicked. You don't get somebody whose job was replaced by a machine to pick it up for you.
And the great thing is, the libertine liberals can't do a damn thing about it, because their candidate will lose badly against whomever follows Bush.
a slower moving car is always going to be less deadly than a faster moving one.
Consider this: You're driving on icy roads, around a bend on a major highway. There is a large median between you and opposing traffic. You look to the left and see a truck traveling the opposite direction didn't quite make the turn and is spiraling into the median, towards your car.
At your present rate of speed, the truck will have missed you by the time it gets across the median. However, your (driver/MS software) is instinctively slowing down because of the obviously dangerous situation. If you keep slowing down, you will be hit by the oncoming truck. What do you do?
As someone who's been in this situation, I'll tell you what I did. I said "speed the fuck up" to the driver. He stopped slowing down and sped up a little to give the truck some room, and we all lived happily ever after. Does Windows respond to "speed the fuck up"?
Although yours is a competely accurate description of how Debian is *supposed* to work, I have a feeling reality is somewhat different. This is my analysis. Feel free to correct it.
Debian Stable seems to be doing just fine. It's a bit old, so hardware support is dated, but no one who needs a "stable" distro ever complains that Debian Stable isn't "stable" enough. Those using Stable are the same people who like to assume that Debian is a server-only distro, and wonder what all the fuss is about "new releases". Unless you're one of the new users who clicks on debian.org and mistakenly downloads and installs Stable, expecting a modern desktop with modern hardware support, Stable is great.
Testing, which is a somewhat new addition to Debian, doesn't really seem to be fulfilling its mission. The goal for Debian Testing was for it to always be "ready to release". In theory, then, Testing would be an ideal base for third-party distros. Unfortunately, for some reason, few Debian-derived distros use Testing as a base. Most use Unstable instead. Testing is also supposed to be the branch that users can place on a non-production box in order to test out what the next stable will be, and to help stabilize it. Structurally, however, there is little difference between Unstable and Testing. Packages from Unstable are automatically migrated to Testing after a couple of weeks, unless they have glaring flaws. In the time between Debian Stable releases, most upstream sources go through multiple development cycles. Due to this and the constant churn of packages from Unstable into Testing, much of the work done stabilizing Testing is done in vain. Testing is touted as the ideal desktop, and many even use it as a server due to the outdatedness of the Stable branch. Debian Testing is more stable than 90% of other operating systems. But the Testing branch lacks security updates, and broken packages are frequently removed completely from Testing in order to enforce the "ready to release" philosophy. Also, the branch is in constant flux, meaning third-party support is near impossible.
Unstable is supposed to be a developers' and ricers' haven, with the latest up-to-date packages, fresh from the build farms and ready for hours of enjoyment. Unfortunately, Debian Unstable isn't new and unstable enough for many users. Creating Debian's well-built packages takes time, so the latest software usually isn't available overnight. Also, for fear of breaking Unstable, developers have created an even more unstable branch, Experimental, to contain truly unstable packages. Unstable is sometimes preferred over Testing as a desktop because there is no wait for security updates to migrate.
As a former member of both, I can tell you that Boy's State is not the same as the Boy Scouts.
Regardless, you're pretty spot-on. Boy's State is a brainwashing joke of an exprience, complete with marching in formation and "classes" taught by half-wit legal scholars to explain their theories of how a flag burning amendment would fit into the Constitution.
That'd be sort of like the Fox giving a tutorial in henhouse construction.
The EFF is more like the fox building his own henhouse, giving away chickens for free, and putting other henhouses out of business.
I'm well aware of that. But what of the argument that a grant of license, if it is truly one sided, may be limited in scope, but may not require consideration on the part of the acceptor. If it requires consideration, it then becomes a contract, and takes on all of the features and requirements of such.
Is this merely a false dichotomy? Does it matter whether the GPL is a license or a contract? I look forward to your response.
with that work being made possible through mutual agreement with all prior authors
Excuse me, but this should have read "with that (derivative) work being made possible through grant of license by all prior authors."
he would've had to testify as to his drug production history, which would guarantee a conviction.
That's great. You've completely justified removing any opportunity for independent thought from juries. Clearly judges are the only ones capable of separating fact from law.
Did they not teach you about concepts like double jeopardy and presumption of innocence in your Junior High? Not only that, but you and (more concerningly) the rest of the legal system seem incapable of separating crime (which requires intent, not to mention injury) from farsical persecution (which only requires ability).
If American juries weren't so mind-numbingly stupid, then perhaps you would still get to be the "supreme arbiters of both fact and law" as our founders intended. Perhaps even we wouldn't be spiraling into a banana-republic-like police-state shithole. Instead, the gov't will have to take those rights from you for your own good. Good job, citizen. You may resume consumption.
Okay, let me see if I can distill this down a little bit. I've never heard of this guy before, but his ideas sound worthy of a little analysis, at least.
Contrary to the subject of this story, which equates the GPL to an corrupt trust price-fixing scheme, Mr. Wallace instead seems to consistently promote the idea that the GPL is invalid based on an interpretation of derivative works that requires consent from their author, in addition to the original author, for distribution.
He points out that the FSF and the GPL do not consider such consent to be necessary. He makes a distinction between a unilateral license, like the owner of property letting you borrow their property for free, and a mutual agreement, like you renting property. He claims that the GPL is more like the former, one-sided grant of license than the mutual agreement. Most importantly he claims that a derivative work, to be distributed under copyright law, requires the consent of both the original author and the author of the derivative parts, ie. a mutual contract rather than a one-sided grant of license. He argues that the GPL places no value on the consent of a developer who creates a derivative of a GPLed work.
The crux of his argument seems to revolve around the recursive nature of the GPL. He argues that the GPL may well be valid with regards to an original author and one derivative author. But since it is not a bilateral agreement, the GPL cannot then go on to bind the derivative author to it's terms with regards to distribution of his own work. That, he argues, requires the mutual consent of the original and derivative authors.
As far as I can tell, without having spent hours researching this, it boils down to a choice between two interpretations: either the original author is all-powerful in dictating terms to all successors who create derivative works based on the original, or, each author has dominion over his derivative work, with that work being made possible through mutual agreement with all prior authors, and with distribution of that work to be made possible by agreement of all parties. Mr. Wallace argues that the FSF and the GPL rely upon the former view, while copyright requires the latter.
Discuss...
I suppose my basic argument is that "intent" is a contrived notion. One party's intent should not be solely relied upon; we should at least take the interests of both parties into account when intent is not clear and is at odds with physical reality. My "intent", for instance, is to thoroughly comprehend any intellectual "property" that is handed to me. Why is my intent not "implied" by the courts?
How do we know where acceptable access ends and unacceptable access begins? Is there a "no trespassing" sign? Is there a sufficient fence? Lawyers like to place "reading this is a violation of blahblah" on their e-mails, but the courts have said that doesn't matter. If ISPs have access to your mail, they can read it.
How about this, as a modified analogy: I give away candy bars with an EULA. What are my damages when it is broken?
if we come to the conclusion that this was sufficiently "protected," such that someone had to circumvent protection measures
But that's the crux of the matter, isn't it? If I have the keys to the trunk, am I "circumventing" anything?
I'm trying to frame this in a way that causing physical damage doesn't come into it. Surely that would be criminal. What I'm suggesting is that there is a difference between "breaking" into something, be it a code or a trunk, and simply opening it. And the crime is in breaking and entering; mere trespass is forgiven by God. Trespass for necessity is even a protected right in most states.
Furthermore, information is not "broken" in the same way as physical objects. "Breaking in" in the physical sense implies damage. It does not imply damage in the "intellectual property" sense. The information is still intact. The right to copy and profit by that information is also intact.
Furthermore, to the extent the concept of copyright was created and is authorized to protect data, it is to do so with the goal of encouraging publication, not restricting it.