Having mentioned Stallman, if you haven't done so already, you may be interested to read Stallman's biography. It's available on the web. It has a bit to say about music, including your points about function and opinion. According to the book, Stallman's views on music have been changing over time. It's interesting to read about the reasoning behind his views and why they are changing. (It's also interesting just to read about RMS.)
I agree with your logic. I guess individual choice of license comes down to an individual's priorities. One could also argue that choice of license is part of an opinion and so part of an artistic work! (maybe I'm stretching it here?!?)
(I can't get through to your article at the moment. Might be all those Cisco routers crashing!:-) )
Fair enough, and thanks for taking the time to reply. I guess it depends on each person's perspective.
Some programmers also view their software as a deep expression of who they are. Lets face it, some software represents decades of a person's life and design is a very individual thing. Even then they 'set it free'. I don't think software and music are as far apart as you think. There is non-artistic software and music (production line pop). There is also artistic software and music.
It's a thing I've battled with and it does take a certain form of 'courage' to release something that is 'Free' and trust the rest of the world. Ultimately, I think it comes back to the fact that someone extending your work does not diminish your original work. Maybe with music the difficulty is the greater difficulty in tracing lineage and so preserving credit for your original work? Perhaps a 'changelog' for music is the way to go? I think the creative commons it taking some tentative steps in this area.
Anyway, as you are the author, I respect your choice of license. Best of luck with the music.
The *real* anonymity will come when freenet is implemented as a network layer over WiFi equipment, displacing the IP protocol. It might even be possible to also replace the datalink layer, eliminating ethernet addresses as well.
It will be impossible to gather IP addresses, as there will *be* no IP address. The only way of identifying a user will be to identify the chain of nodes though which the request passed. This will require extracting data from every user in the chain. A difficult task with no user keeping logs.
I can't vouch for the 60% figure, as it just came from the article.
I can vouch for the fact that I helped write a University course in embedded systems and TRON came into it. According to my sources, TRON is dominant in Asia. I suspect it sees deployment in 'everyday' consumer goods such as whitegoods, not things like routers and IT type stuff. This probably accounts for the figures.
I would argue that distribution of a picture of a 7 year old being raped isn't the actual crime. The crime is:
Raping the 7 year old
Possibly the act of enjoying the picture of the 7 year old being raped.
If the actual distribution (and distribution *ONLY*) was wrong, wouldn't it be wrong to distribute such a picture for use as evidence against the rapist?
I can see that distribution of the picture could have positive effects.
It alerts society that 7 year olds are being raped, so it can be stopped.
It provides evidence, increasing the chances of a particular offender being caught.
Yes, a picture of a 7 year old being raped is *repulsive*. At the same time, isn't blocking that picture from view because it repulses you, while allowing the 7 year old to be raped, a selfish act pandering to your own sensibilities? To put it in politically correct terms, it is like banning pictures of the Jewish holocaust because the act was so horrible. Yet there are museums full of holocaust pictures so we remember.
Maybe one could argue that the rape was soley motivated by the desire to distribute a picture of it and without the picture the rape would not have occured? That argument strikes me as tenuous, and my response is "Back up your argument with evidence". How would you get that evidence? One way is to use Freenet to interview those who rape 7 years olds to find out their motivations. One can then address the real cause of the problem.
I don't see child pornography as an argument against Freenet.
How can TRON be unknown when it running on 60% of the world's microprocessors? (according to the article). Someone knew about it. One could accuse it of not being publicised, but I wouldn't put it in the unknown class.
In actual fact, TRON is one of the standards of the embedded world and most students should hear about it in any embedded/microprocessor course they do.
Find six people who want a piece of work done. Charge each of them 20% of the normal rate, in return for you keeping the rights to all work produced so you can release it as opensource
Also, by the time you have become 'independently wealthy', you will probably be old, decrepit and be only be able to use the money to pay for a better funeral (or leave it to a bunch of spoilt brats who will spend the rest of their lives fighting each other over the inheritance).
Forget about all this crap. Just get on and live the life you want to live *NOW*. If you want to put more time into developing opensource stuff, just get on and do it, even if it means compromising in other, less important, parts of your life (like being enslaved to becoming financially independent). While you figure out all those complicated plans, your body is busy dying.
Is anyone aware of any brokers who specialise in buying stuff from US web sites, shipping it to a US addess, then forwarding it to an international address?
I would like to see a similar map for Australia. Unlike the US, it has about a dozen large cities with hardly anything in between (apologies to all those outback towns).
I reckon the continent is spanned by a couple of (a few if you're lucky) fibre optic cables. Chances are you don't even need a map to find them. Just follow the line of solar powered repeaters, one of the handful of roads or the single railway line. Alternatively, just look for the line of brightly coloured posts marking the cables, in an attempt to stop people accidentally digging them up!
Take your ditch digger into a remote area, carve a 100 metre ditch perpendicular to the road and bingo, one severed optical fibre cable.
This one has my vote. Good move! Thanks for running PG.
I know it is complicated, but is it worth also publshing a style sheet for each work, which can be used to replicate the 'look and feel' of the original? It shouldn't interfere with the aims of readability, as one is free to ignore the style sheet and just read the raw XML or text file.
On a different topic, even if Linksys hasn't provided the 'correct' source code, as suggested by some, their acknowledgement of the GPL should at least mean open slather on reverse engineering any binary which has a hint of GPL to it.
Does that mean the quantum vacuum comes into play, causing the space-time continuum to fold in on itself and explode, when a sound system reaches 194dB? Cool!:-)
>Except now, you had bums popping in a quarter, and having a free room for the night. More lawsuits ensued.
Sydney (Australia) City Council has solved this problem. After 20 minutes, the door pops open! Hint: Don't use a pay dunny in Sydney if you have major constipation!
"Brings up some interesting issues surrounding the Turing test."
I wonder if a corollary of the Turing test is that 'only an intelligent being can administer a turing test'?
(How can non-intelligence test for intelligence?) Consequently and those distorted letters could not be any form of Turing test.
Maybe that will be humankind's job when all other jobs are automated! To administer Turing tests!:-)
So what are the rules if you don't actually
install the software? Instead you manually
unpack the software on to the drive and
never click on any 'I agree' button.
I can see one way companies might get around
this is to encrypt the software, and have
decryption initiated by the 'I agree' button. The DMCA would then be invoked against anyone who wrote their own installation program. Even then, is it cut and dried whether an alternative installation system is covered by the DMCA?
Is installing a piece of software one has just bought an act of copyright circumvention? You're not circumventing copyright, just the contract the author has attached. One could argue that you can't use a work without agreeing to the author's contract, but hasn't the author already made a contract with you by accepting your money?
Instead, EVERYONE should be writing 'Free' patents on every idea under the sun and publishing them far and wide. Once it is published, it's prior art. Surely 100,000 geeks can match a bunch of lawyers? We have the advantage that we don't have to pay for 'free patents' and there is no red tape.
Maybe EFF/FSF's contribution can be to set up a wiki which can be used to make a permanant, easily searchable, record of all these ideas?
I guess such a scheme addresses the 'prevention aspect' but doesn't address the 'bargaining' aspect.
If a patent is only gong to be used as a bargaining chip, it probably doesn't have to be particlarly strong, so it might be possible to D.I.Y. and eliminate legal fees. That way, it might be affordable to patent some of the 'better' ideas.
As I see it, such an act is tipped slightly against Free contetnt (but not Opensource content).
With the current setup, the stronger copyright is, the stronger copyleft is. For example, if copyright terms are 90 years, it will be 90 years before Free software can copy Unix code, but it will also be 90 years before Unix can copy Free software and make it closed source.
Under the proposed act, if one assumes the Free content is less likely to have a revenue stream than the closed source content (an invalid assumption?) it is more likely that the Free content's copyrights will lapse while the closed-source content's copyrights are renewed.
Okay, software will probably be obsolete in 50 years, but the same applies to music, films, books and other forms of content which don't go obsolete as quickly.
End result: Closed source content has a chance to use Free content while Free content doesn't get a reciprocal benefit.
I'm not necessarily saying it is a bad thing. It might turn out that the boost Free content gets from all that new public domain material is bigger than the loss, but it's something to think about.
The Australian Government accidentally released an uncensored report into cryptography and other things (the Walsh Report). The uncensored version was withdrawn a few weeks after release, but by then people (such as the EFA) had taken copies.
Here is section 6.3.4 of the Walsh Report. It is in red, which means it was removed from th ecensored version.
6.3.4 The relationship of these agencies with AUSTRAC may well prove crucial once encryption becomes more pervasive. Major subjects of investigation, whether they be narcotics suppliers or distributors, pornography distributors, money-launderers or terrorists, rely and will continue to rely on the banking system to provide value to their transactions. The 'money trail', provided by credit and smart-cards, not to ignore fly-buys, may well provide a continuously available hand-rail in a darkening investigative world.
The 'fly-buys' (my emphasis) mentioned is Australia's version of 'Airmiles'. Basically, the Australian government thinks 'fly-buys' is a good thing since it allows them to track cash transactions. That was back in the 1990's, so by now there is a fair chance tracking has actually been implemented. I can't imagine the US government is any different. It also explains why the government has not eliminated 'fly-buys' as a breach of competition law.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with your logic. I guess individual choice of license comes down to an individual's priorities. One could also argue that choice of license is part of an opinion and so part of an artistic work! (maybe I'm stretching it here?!?)
(I can't get through to your article at the moment. Might be all those Cisco routers crashing! :-) )
Some programmers also view their software as a deep expression of who they are. Lets face it, some software represents decades of a person's life and design is a very individual thing. Even then they 'set it free'. I don't think software and music are as far apart as you think. There is non-artistic software and music (production line pop). There is also artistic software and music.
It's a thing I've battled with and it does take a certain form of 'courage' to release something that is 'Free' and trust the rest of the world. Ultimately, I think it comes back to the fact that someone extending your work does not diminish your original work. Maybe with music the difficulty is the greater difficulty in tracing lineage and so preserving credit for your original work? Perhaps a 'changelog' for music is the way to go? I think the creative commons it taking some tentative steps in this area.
Anyway, as you are the author, I respect your choice of license. Best of luck with the music.
It will be impossible to gather IP addresses, as there will *be* no IP address. The only way of identifying a user will be to identify the chain of nodes though which the request passed. This will require extracting data from every user in the chain. A difficult task with no user keeping logs.
I can vouch for the fact that I helped write a University course in embedded systems and TRON came into it. According to my sources, TRON is dominant in Asia. I suspect it sees deployment in 'everyday' consumer goods such as whitegoods, not things like routers and IT type stuff. This probably accounts for the figures.
- Raping the 7 year old
- Possibly the act of enjoying the picture of the 7 year old being raped.
If the actual distribution (and distribution *ONLY*) was wrong, wouldn't it be wrong to distribute such a picture for use as evidence against the rapist?I can see that distribution of the picture could have positive effects.
- It alerts society that 7 year olds are being raped, so it can be stopped.
- It provides evidence, increasing the chances of a particular offender being caught.
Yes, a picture of a 7 year old being raped is *repulsive*. At the same time, isn't blocking that picture from view because it repulses you, while allowing the 7 year old to be raped, a selfish act pandering to your own sensibilities? To put it in politically correct terms, it is like banning pictures of the Jewish holocaust because the act was so horrible. Yet there are museums full of holocaust pictures so we remember.Maybe one could argue that the rape was soley motivated by the desire to distribute a picture of it and without the picture the rape would not have occured? That argument strikes me as tenuous, and my response is "Back up your argument with evidence". How would you get that evidence? One way is to use Freenet to interview those who rape 7 years olds to find out their motivations. One can then address the real cause of the problem.
I don't see child pornography as an argument against Freenet.
In actual fact, TRON is one of the standards of the embedded world and most students should hear about it in any embedded/microprocessor course they do.
I guarantee my Nitric Acid (TM) toothpaste gives a hell of a lot better tingle than your peroxide toothpaste.
Also, by the time you have become 'independently wealthy', you will probably be old, decrepit and be only be able to use the money to pay for a better funeral (or leave it to a bunch of spoilt brats who will spend the rest of their lives fighting each other over the inheritance).
Forget about all this crap. Just get on and live the life you want to live *NOW*. If you want to put more time into developing opensource stuff, just get on and do it, even if it means compromising in other, less important, parts of your life (like being enslaved to becoming financially independent). While you figure out all those complicated plans, your body is busy dying.
Or it takes one (or a few) VERY dedicated people.
Is anyone aware of any brokers who specialise in buying stuff from US web sites, shipping it to a US addess, then forwarding it to an international address?
I reckon the continent is spanned by a couple of (a few if you're lucky) fibre optic cables. Chances are you don't even need a map to find them. Just follow the line of solar powered repeaters, one of the handful of roads or the single railway line. Alternatively, just look for the line of brightly coloured posts marking the cables, in an attempt to stop people accidentally digging them up!
Take your ditch digger into a remote area, carve a 100 metre ditch perpendicular to the road and bingo, one severed optical fibre cable.
This one has my vote. Good move! Thanks for running PG.
I know it is complicated, but is it worth also publshing a style sheet for each work, which can be used to replicate the 'look and feel' of the original? It shouldn't interfere with the aims of readability, as one is free to ignore the style sheet and just read the raw XML or text file.
(from a Distributed Proofreader)
Perhaps iTunes can claim precedent and say it is defending the 78?!
If an artist wants to release an album as a 'single work', why not release it as a single 78 minute long file (containing multiple songs)?
On a different topic, even if Linksys hasn't provided the 'correct' source code, as suggested by some, their acknowledgement of the GPL should at least mean open slather on reverse engineering any binary which has a hint of GPL to it.
Does that mean the quantum vacuum comes into play, causing the space-time continuum to fold in on itself and explode, when a sound system reaches 194dB? Cool! :-)
Subject says it all.
Sydney (Australia) City Council has solved this problem. After 20 minutes, the door pops open! Hint: Don't use a pay dunny in Sydney if you have major constipation!
"Brings up some interesting issues surrounding the Turing test."
I wonder if a corollary of the Turing test is that 'only an intelligent being can administer a turing test'? (How can non-intelligence test for intelligence?) Consequently and those distorted letters could not be any form of Turing test.
Maybe that will be humankind's job when all other jobs are automated! To administer Turing tests! :-)
Further improve the startup and shutdown time
Improve real-time capabilities
Reduce ROM/RAM size requirements
Improve efficiency of power management
Aren't at least some of these requirements (especially #2) already addressed by L4Linux?
OpenCores isn't a company. The best comparison is probably an immature version of the Debian Project.
I can see one way companies might get around this is to encrypt the software, and have decryption initiated by the 'I agree' button. The DMCA would then be invoked against anyone who wrote their own installation program. Even then, is it cut and dried whether an alternative installation system is covered by the DMCA?
Is installing a piece of software one has just bought an act of copyright circumvention? You're not circumventing copyright, just the contract the author has attached. One could argue that you can't use a work without agreeing to the author's contract, but hasn't the author already made a contract with you by accepting your money?
Instead, EVERYONE should be writing 'Free' patents on every idea under the sun and publishing them far and wide. Once it is published, it's prior art. Surely 100,000 geeks can match a bunch of lawyers? We have the advantage that we don't have to pay for 'free patents' and there is no red tape.
Maybe EFF/FSF's contribution can be to set up a wiki which can be used to make a permanant, easily searchable, record of all these ideas?
I guess such a scheme addresses the 'prevention aspect' but doesn't address the 'bargaining' aspect.
If a patent is only gong to be used as a bargaining chip, it probably doesn't have to be particlarly strong, so it might be possible to D.I.Y. and eliminate legal fees. That way, it might be affordable to patent some of the 'better' ideas.
With the current setup, the stronger copyright is, the stronger copyleft is. For example, if copyright terms are 90 years, it will be 90 years before Free software can copy Unix code, but it will also be 90 years before Unix can copy Free software and make it closed source.
Under the proposed act, if one assumes the Free content is less likely to have a revenue stream than the closed source content (an invalid assumption?) it is more likely that the Free content's copyrights will lapse while the closed-source content's copyrights are renewed.
Okay, software will probably be obsolete in 50 years, but the same applies to music, films, books and other forms of content which don't go obsolete as quickly.
End result: Closed source content has a chance to use Free content while Free content doesn't get a reciprocal benefit.
I'm not necessarily saying it is a bad thing. It might turn out that the boost Free content gets from all that new public domain material is bigger than the loss, but it's something to think about.
The Australian Government accidentally released an uncensored report into cryptography and other things (the Walsh Report). The uncensored version was withdrawn a few weeks after release, but by then people (such as the EFA) had taken copies.
Here is section 6.3.4 of the Walsh Report. It is in red, which means it was removed from th ecensored version.
The 'fly-buys' (my emphasis) mentioned is Australia's version of 'Airmiles'. Basically, the Australian government thinks 'fly-buys' is a good thing since it allows them to track cash transactions. That was back in the 1990's, so by now there is a fair chance tracking has actually been implemented. I can't imagine the US government is any different. It also explains why the government has not eliminated 'fly-buys' as a breach of competition law.