Now, here on Slashdot, I am free to say whatever comes to mind, as we all are. How many things have been stated as absolute fact that a quick bit of research would show are false? How many people would shoot off at the mouth with so little thought if the comments would be associated with them, personally, throughout their life?
How many print articles contain inaccurate information as well? One example comes from this past week, where the AP reported that the crowed "booed" when Bush made remarks about Clinton being in the hospital. In reality, the crowd cheered Bush's well-wishing.
Dismissing someone as a coward because they use a pseudonym, is a major fallacy. The name a person uses does not change the content of their remarks, nor the validity.
I stopped reading and only skimmed the article after I read this:
Note: Participants in the thread use aliases rather than real names. So much for the courage of their convictions.
I'm sorry, but the use of an alias or username doesn't say anything about the "courage of their convictions". It is a common practice to use an account name, if only to provide a unique identifier for a user.
For example, I've done a search on Google for my own name, and found that there are several other people in the US who share my name. One is a preacher in Florida. Another is a lawyer in Pennsylvania. I don't even have all that common of a name.
What about my cousin, named David Evans? Evans is a common last name (at least for those of Welsh extraction), and david isn't exactly a rare first name. How many "David Evans" might post at a site as popular as Slashdot?
I'm sorry, but to dismiss someone (and their arguments) as cowardly because they use a screen name or user account is to ignore the substance of their remarks. If he were really interested in accepting constructive criticism and improving his ideas, he would not be ridiculing those who comment on them.
By the way: Richard Clarke may have authorized the flight, but do you honestly believe there wasn't pressure from Bush? He has multi-billion dollar contracts with these people and he will do anything to protect himself and appear separate. What better way than to have on the record as someone else authorizing such things. What did Clarke have to gain from sending them out? Nothing. What did Bush stand to possibly lose had they stayed? A lot.
THen perhaps you missed the date on the link I provided. Clarke accepted full responsibility for the flights publicly after he left government service. It was also after his book had been released. He had no reason to take sole responsibility, especially considering many of the attacks on him from supporters of the Administration.
21 members of the Bin Laden family were flown out of the country on special chartered flights on September 13 while all other flights were grounded. They were NEVER questioned on Osama at all and there is no clear reason why they were given free flight out without interrogation.
But do you know who authorized that? It wasn't Bush. It was Richard Clarke, the same man who Moore has praised for his comments about Bush's handling of 9/11 and Iraq. Clarke has publicly taken sole responsibility for the flight.
However, in the film, Moore tried to portray Bush as being responsible for it.
Having seen the film, the part that disgusted me the most what when Moore kept making a big deal about Bush's connections to the bin Laden family and making it seem as if that meant that Bush was connected to Osama. Osama was disowned by his family a long time ago.
I once dated the niece of Teb Bundy (the serial killer). Does that mean that I supported his actions? Not at all. Does it mean that she supported his actions, just because they were related? Again, not at all.
I consider a lie to be any statement made with the intent to decieve. That includes outright falsehoods, half-truths, or even the full truth told in a manner to make a personl believe otherwise. Moore's biggest form of lie is in what he ommits, not in what he explicitly says.
no hot drinks? What the heck is that about? Coffeine and tobacco prohibition I can understand, but hot drinks? wha' happen?
We've been told by modern prophets that hot drinks refers to coffee and tea. Other drinks (like hot chocolate, spiced cider, or herb teas) are perfectly allowable.
Some just recommend it informally, some leave it up to the individual, others (like the Mormons) make it dogma.
Actually, the Mormon prohibition on drinking has nothing to do with the New Testament, but instead comes from modern revelation from a living prophet.
The Word of Wisdom was given to Joseph Smith in 1833 and can be found here. It's not just "don't drink, don't smoke", but a list of things to eat that are healthy for you as well.
A derivitave of a public-domain work is also public domain. I assume you are refering to New Internation Version or the other "plain language" translations. I don't know if they are copyrighted or not, but they shouldn't be.
That's not true. A derivative of a public domain work is copyrightable. That's how Disney makes so much money off of their animated films. All that public domain means is that you don't need anyone's permission to use it.
My church (LDS - Mormons) uses the KJV. We insert hyper-link-like annotations in the text. A word followed by a superscript has info at the bottom of the page about other signifigant appearances of that word. I'm not sure if it's copyrighted, but I'd argue that it shouldn't be.
Actually, the LDS edition of the Bible is copyrighted (1979), and the LDS edition of the Triple Combination (Boom of Mormon/Doctrine & Covenants/Pearl of Great Price) is copyrighted as well (1981).
However, the Book of Mormon, and the Pearl of Great Price are not copyrighted. They have both lapsed into the public domain. The older editions of the D&C are also public domain, but the more recent ones aren't because of the addition of the official declaration 2 and Section 138. However, the Church offers a license to all those who would use the scriptures (including the footnotes) for non-commercial uses.
There's nothing wrong with this, though. Copyright law does not change just because a work is religious in nature. For example, I could publish Don Quixote in the original Spanish and would hold no copyright. However, if I were to translate it into English myself, I would then hold the copyright on that derivative work (translation).
I've loved Mozilla since I first used it 2 years ago.
However, with 1.3, I've found one problem. It seems that the "Open Unrequested Windows" option for javascript (used to block popups) is missing now. I haven't been able to find it on new installations to turn it off.
If anyone knows where it moved to (or if I'm just hallucinating), please let me know.
There is nothing whatsoever in the Bible that claims that the Earth is only 6000 years old. Instead, the chronology of the Bible only makes the claim that the Fall of Adam happened about 6000 years ago.
Genesis 1 only talks about the creation (and the term "day" can also refer to a period of time, not just a literal 24-hour period). The Fall doesn't happen until Genesis 3. The funny thing is that the Bible doesn't say anything about how much time went in between the two events. The age given for Adam when he died was measured from the time of his Fall.
It's funny how people don't read what it is saying because they only see what they want it to say.
However, I don't believe that any of the Editors are Spanish-speakers. I am.
I made a mistake in spelling a name in a foreign language. The editors do not speak that language either, so they decided to trust my spelling until someone else pointed out the mistake. I won't defend them on repeat stories (I will on updates, though), English spelling mistakes, poor English grammar, and so forth, but I am willing to cut them some slack in foreign languages, especially when I speak the language and they do not.
Go and read the actual bill. It is very specific in how it modifies the current Copyright law. For example:
(a) The first sentence of section 107, Title 17, United StatesCode, is amended by inserting after "or by any other means specified in that section," the following: "and by analog or digital transmissions,";
What this bill does is add some sorely needed wording to the current law that protects such things as the First Sale doctrine for digital items.
Another quote from the bill:
Section 1201 of Title 17, United States Code, is amended as follows:
(a) by redesignating paragraphs (c), (d), (e), (f), (g), (h), (i), (j) and (k) as paragraphs (d), (e), (f), (g), (h), (i), (j), (k) and (l); and (b) by adding after paragraph (b) the following:
"(c)(1) Notwithstanding any other provision in this title, a person who lawfully obtains a copy or phonorecord of a work, or who lawfully receives a transmission of a work, may circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access or protects a right of a copyright holder under this title if-
"(A) such act is necessary to make a non-infringing use under this title; and
"(B) the copyright owner fails to make publicly available the necessary means to perform such non-infringing use without additional cost or burden to such person.
"(2) Notwithstanding the provisions of subsections (a)(2) and (b), any person may manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise make available technological means to circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access or protects a right of a copyright holder under this title if, if-
"(A) such means are necessary to enable a non-infringing use under paragraph (1)(A);
"(B) such means are designed, produced and marketed to enable a non-infringing use under paragraph (1)(A); and
"(C) the copyright owner fails to make available the necessary means referred to in paragraph (1)(B).".
As you can see, it redefines parts of the law (specifically the paragraph numbering) and then adds "notwithstanding the providions..." to clarify and interpret other parts.
If the content was created in one country and hosted in another country which laws should apply?
If you make the decision to host your content in another country, then you should abide by the laws of that country. If I decided to write a parody and host it in North Korea (where it is illegal) I should be prepared to face the consequences.
Let me provide a counter example: Should China ba allowed to shut down a site in the U.S. because it was written by a Chinese political dissident? No. They can prosecute those who read the material within their jurisdiction, but they should have no authority over content in other countries.
While Microsoft's new page is a nice change from the old one, it still contains quite a bit of their same old FUD. Here's a nice tidbit from the very bottom of the page:
To ensure proper management of its intellectual property rights, an OEM must carefully examine an array of licensing complexities around the General Public License (GPL) that govern Linux. These complexities have resulted in embedded and dedicated operating system companies such as Wind River saying that they are seeing "a growing problem due to the growing uncertainty of using GPL-based code in embedded devices". An example of this risk can be taken from NVIDIA. An NVIDIA programmer, in the course of developing a driver for one of its products, used a portion of code from a freely available video driver. The developer failed to realize the code was licensed under the GPL and would therefore require NVIDIA to release the source code for its entire driver. Because NVIDIA did not want to release the source code to its commercial software, the company incurred substantial cost to develop a new driver that did not contain the GPL code.
Companies need to recognize that in embedded and dedicated devices, such as server appliances, significant gray areas exist in the implications of the GPL's terms. Some forms of code linking and commingling may or may not trigger legal obligations under the GPL. As Michael Scott and Michael Krieger, a lawyer and computer science professor respectively, recently wrote, "Rare is the month when a lawyer who specializes in technology does not have a new client asking for help in untangling an open source code problem".
In other words, they are still yelling "GPL bad! MS good!", they're just using a more dignified approach now.
I find it especially telling to look at the example they used. They place all the blame for the NVIDIA programmer's mistake on the GPL. I'm sorry, but if you are going to use someone else's code in your program, it is your fault if you don't abide by their rules, not theirs.
Other things being equal, we expect that open and closed systems will exhibit similar growth in reliability and in security assurance.
Even though open and closed systems are equally secure in an ideal world, the world is not ideal, and is often adversarial.
The problem is that in an ideal world, there would be almost no bugs anyway. It completely overlooks some of the factors in proprietary software that cause the bugs. Items such as deadlines for a product can actually encourage sloppy programming (Compare Mozilla 1.0 with Netscape or IE's early releases).
One poster on ZDNet said it best: "In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is."
I'd recommend that we wait before we panic. Since they have not yet stopped SELinux's distribution (and have even encouraged it), all we can really do is wait and see what they do.
Then, if they decide that it is incompatible with the GPL, we can panic. If we let our fears and emotions run away with this we could just drive them farther away from the Open Source Community. As one poem says:
School thy feelings, O my Brother. Train thy warm, impulsive soul. Do not its emotions smother, but let wisdom's voice control.
I have a hotmail address (from before their sellout to the evil empire). I also am using Mozilla 1.0 RC2. When I tried to change the settings, I got the following message:
Microsoft®.NET Passport no longer supports the Web browser version you are using. Please upgrade to a current Web browser, such as Microsoft Internet Explorer version 4.0 or later, or Netscape Navigator version 4.08 or later.
It appears that they're deciding to block browsers from accessing Passport unless they want them to, much like they did with MSN.com a few months back.
In the case of someone like Hotmail or Yahoo, they clearly state in their TOS that they have the right to add their text to your message. In this case, there was no notification whatsoever. That makes for quite a difference.
One could argue that all of the text of your message (including the headers that your computer put on it) are copyrighted by you. If they change it without authority, they have infringed your copyright. If their TOS mentioned something about it, then by using their service you would give them authority (or a license) to do so. Without that, they should have no right.
I know we have all read Linus's great rant "The Cathedral and the Bizarre,"
Linus didn't write "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", Eric S. Raymond did. Linus is not very involved in the politics of Open Source. He's said many times that he doesn't WANT to be.
But America doesn't get it. When you say Linux, they want to know the stock symbol and the CEO.
No, America doesn't want to know the stock symbol, et al. Most Americans (who have heard of Linux) think of it as a single product, not a company. The thing that they don't understand is that it is a single product with multiple manufacturers/distributors.
Slashdot Mirror
How many print articles contain inaccurate information as well? One example comes from this past week, where the AP reported that the crowed "booed" when Bush made remarks about Clinton being in the hospital. In reality, the crowd cheered Bush's well-wishing.
Dismissing someone as a coward because they use a pseudonym, is a major fallacy. The name a person uses does not change the content of their remarks, nor the validity.
For example, I've done a search on Google for my own name, and found that there are several other people in the US who share my name. One is a preacher in Florida. Another is a lawyer in Pennsylvania. I don't even have all that common of a name.
What about my cousin, named David Evans? Evans is a common last name (at least for those of Welsh extraction), and david isn't exactly a rare first name. How many "David Evans" might post at a site as popular as Slashdot?
I'm sorry, but to dismiss someone (and their arguments) as cowardly because they use a screen name or user account is to ignore the substance of their remarks. If he were really interested in accepting constructive criticism and improving his ideas, he would not be ridiculing those who comment on them.
THen perhaps you missed the date on the link I provided. Clarke accepted full responsibility for the flights publicly after he left government service. It was also after his book had been released. He had no reason to take sole responsibility, especially considering many of the attacks on him from supporters of the Administration.
But do you know who authorized that? It wasn't Bush. It was Richard Clarke, the same man who Moore has praised for his comments about Bush's handling of 9/11 and Iraq. Clarke has publicly taken sole responsibility for the flight.
However, in the film, Moore tried to portray Bush as being responsible for it.
Having seen the film, the part that disgusted me the most what when Moore kept making a big deal about Bush's connections to the bin Laden family and making it seem as if that meant that Bush was connected to Osama. Osama was disowned by his family a long time ago.
I once dated the niece of Teb Bundy (the serial killer). Does that mean that I supported his actions? Not at all. Does it mean that she supported his actions, just because they were related? Again, not at all.
I consider a lie to be any statement made with the intent to decieve. That includes outright falsehoods, half-truths, or even the full truth told in a manner to make a personl believe otherwise. Moore's biggest form of lie is in what he ommits, not in what he explicitly says.
One of the best sources for information on this is from TheForce.Net's boards (Link is to the spoilers board).
Of course, I happen to moderate at those boards, so I might be a little biased.
Kimball_Kinnison
no hot drinks? What the heck is that about? Coffeine and tobacco prohibition I can understand, but hot drinks? wha' happen?
We've been told by modern prophets that hot drinks refers to coffee and tea. Other drinks (like hot chocolate, spiced cider, or herb teas) are perfectly allowable.
Some just recommend it informally, some leave it up to the individual, others (like the Mormons) make it dogma.
Actually, the Mormon prohibition on drinking has nothing to do with the New Testament, but instead comes from modern revelation from a living prophet.
The Word of Wisdom was given to Joseph Smith in 1833 and can be found here. It's not just "don't drink, don't smoke", but a list of things to eat that are healthy for you as well.
No, no, no!!!!!!
Your other left!
A derivitave of a public-domain work is also public domain. I assume you are refering to New Internation Version or the other "plain language" translations. I don't know if they are copyrighted or not, but they shouldn't be.
That's not true. A derivative of a public domain work is copyrightable. That's how Disney makes so much money off of their animated films. All that public domain means is that you don't need anyone's permission to use it.
My church (LDS - Mormons) uses the KJV. We insert hyper-link-like annotations in the text. A word followed by a superscript has info at the bottom of the page about other signifigant appearances of that word. I'm not sure if it's copyrighted, but I'd argue that it shouldn't be.
Actually, the LDS edition of the Bible is copyrighted (1979), and the LDS edition of the Triple Combination (Boom of Mormon/Doctrine & Covenants/Pearl of Great Price) is copyrighted as well (1981).
However, the Book of Mormon, and the Pearl of Great Price are not copyrighted. They have both lapsed into the public domain. The older editions of the D&C are also public domain, but the more recent ones aren't because of the addition of the official declaration 2 and Section 138. However, the Church offers a license to all those who would use the scriptures (including the footnotes) for non-commercial uses.
There's nothing wrong with this, though. Copyright law does not change just because a work is religious in nature. For example, I could publish Don Quixote in the original Spanish and would hold no copyright. However, if I were to translate it into English myself, I would then hold the copyright on that derivative work (translation).
That's just how copyright law works.
So, I guess this guy is just a mindless jerk who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.
As long as they don't put this stuff in doors or paranoid androids, I think I could deal with it.
I've loved Mozilla since I first used it 2 years ago.
However, with 1.3, I've found one problem. It seems that the "Open Unrequested Windows" option for javascript (used to block popups) is missing now. I haven't been able to find it on new installations to turn it off.
If anyone knows where it moved to (or if I'm just hallucinating), please let me know.
Oh yeah? Well I send over a million emails a day, and I'm lucky if 10 of them are legitimate!
There is nothing whatsoever in the Bible that claims that the Earth is only 6000 years old. Instead, the chronology of the Bible only makes the claim that the Fall of Adam happened about 6000 years ago.
Genesis 1 only talks about the creation (and the term "day" can also refer to a period of time, not just a literal 24-hour period). The Fall doesn't happen until Genesis 3. The funny thing is that the Bible doesn't say anything about how much time went in between the two events. The age given for Adam when he died was measured from the time of his Fall.
It's funny how people don't read what it is saying because they only see what they want it to say.
However, I don't believe that any of the Editors are Spanish-speakers. I am.
I made a mistake in spelling a name in a foreign language. The editors do not speak that language either, so they decided to trust my spelling until someone else pointed out the mistake. I won't defend them on repeat stories (I will on updates, though), English spelling mistakes, poor English grammar, and so forth, but I am willing to cut them some slack in foreign languages, especially when I speak the language and they do not.
It was first and foremost my mistake, not theirs.
That was my fault. I was in a hurry to submit it and did not proofread as much as I should have. Don't blame the editors for that one.
What this bill does is add some sorely needed wording to the current law that protects such things as the First Sale doctrine for digital items.
Another quote from the bill:
As you can see, it redefines parts of the law (specifically the paragraph numbering) and then adds "notwithstanding the providions..." to clarify and interpret other parts.
Here's ZDNet's article. It has a different picture with it. You can find it here.
If the content was created in one country and hosted in another country which laws should apply?
If you make the decision to host your content in another country, then you should abide by the laws of that country. If I decided to write a parody and host it in North Korea (where it is illegal) I should be prepared to face the consequences.
Let me provide a counter example: Should China ba allowed to shut down a site in the U.S. because it was written by a Chinese political dissident? No. They can prosecute those who read the material within their jurisdiction, but they should have no authority over content in other countries.
While Microsoft's new page is a nice change from the old one, it still contains quite a bit of their same old FUD. Here's a nice tidbit from the very bottom of the page:
To ensure proper management of its intellectual property rights, an OEM must carefully examine an array of licensing complexities around the General Public License (GPL) that govern Linux. These complexities have resulted in embedded and dedicated operating system companies such as Wind River saying that they are seeing "a growing problem due to the growing uncertainty of using GPL-based code in embedded devices". An example of this risk can be taken from NVIDIA. An NVIDIA programmer, in the course of developing a driver for one of its products, used a portion of code from a freely available video driver. The developer failed to realize the code was licensed under the GPL and would therefore require NVIDIA to release the source code for its entire driver. Because NVIDIA did not want to release the source code to its commercial software, the company incurred substantial cost to develop a new driver that did not contain the GPL code.
Companies need to recognize that in embedded and dedicated devices, such as server appliances, significant gray areas exist in the implications of the GPL's terms. Some forms of code linking and commingling may or may not trigger legal obligations under the GPL. As Michael Scott and Michael Krieger, a lawyer and computer science professor respectively, recently wrote, "Rare is the month when a lawyer who specializes in technology does not have a new client asking for help in untangling an open source code problem".
In other words, they are still yelling "GPL bad! MS good!", they're just using a more dignified approach now.
I find it especially telling to look at the example they used. They place all the blame for the NVIDIA programmer's mistake on the GPL. I'm sorry, but if you are going to use someone else's code in your program, it is your fault if you don't abide by their rules, not theirs.
A few quick quotes from the paper:
Other things being equal, we expect that open and closed systems will exhibit similar growth in reliability and in security assurance.
Even though open and closed systems are equally secure in an ideal world, the world is not ideal, and is often adversarial.
The problem is that in an ideal world, there would be almost no bugs anyway. It completely overlooks some of the factors in proprietary software that cause the bugs. Items such as deadlines for a product can actually encourage sloppy programming (Compare Mozilla 1.0 with Netscape or IE's early releases).
One poster on ZDNet said it best: "In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is."
ZDNet is running an article on this as well. It has some interesting comments posted by the readers in their Talkback section.
Then, if they decide that it is incompatible with the GPL, we can panic. If we let our fears and emotions run away with this we could just drive them farther away from the Open Source Community. As one poem says:
I have a hotmail address (from before their sellout to the evil empire). I also am using Mozilla 1.0 RC2. When I tried to change the settings, I got the following message:
.NET Passport no longer supports the Web browser version you are using. Please upgrade to a current Web browser, such as Microsoft Internet Explorer version 4.0 or later, or Netscape Navigator version 4.08 or later.
Microsoft®
It appears that they're deciding to block browsers from accessing Passport unless they want them to, much like they did with MSN.com a few months back.
In the case of someone like Hotmail or Yahoo, they clearly state in their TOS that they have the right to add their text to your message. In this case, there was no notification whatsoever. That makes for quite a difference.
One could argue that all of the text of your message (including the headers that your computer put on it) are copyrighted by you. If they change it without authority, they have infringed your copyright. If their TOS mentioned something about it, then by using their service you would give them authority (or a license) to do so. Without that, they should have no right.
I know we have all read Linus's great rant "The Cathedral and the Bizarre,"
Linus didn't write "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", Eric S. Raymond did. Linus is not very involved in the politics of Open Source. He's said many times that he doesn't WANT to be.
But America doesn't get it. When you say Linux, they want to know the stock symbol and the CEO.
No, America doesn't want to know the stock symbol, et al. Most Americans (who have heard of Linux) think of it as a single product, not a company. The thing that they don't understand is that it is a single product with multiple manufacturers/distributors.