"...the associations that collect royalties for musical performances and pay these to the composers."...
Because what we really need is another RIAA!
RIAA != ASCAP/BMI/SESAC.
RIAA are evil bastards who exploit musicians, degrade the art of music, and will be first against the wall when the revolution comes.
ASCAP et. al, while flawed in execution, are based on a good idea: songwriters should get a cut when someone makes money off a song they wrote. If I sell a CD with a cover of "Tangled Up in Blue", or play it at a gig at my local tavern, these are the guys who make sure Dylan gets his nickel out of the profits. (Google for "songwriter royalties performance mechanical".) However - and this is key - if I'm playing for fun not profit, Bob doesn't get a penny.
For years I've been suggesting that royalties for copying recordings ought to work the same way - share for free, but if you're selling the artist gets a cut.
It is ALWAYS a result of government mucking things up again with taxes, tariffs, onerous rent-seeking regulations, monopoly franchises, or other abuses of free enterprise.
Ah, knee-jerk libertarian capitalism. Almost as much fun to watch as knee-jerk religious fundamentalism, and based largely on the same idea: the infallibility of some invisible higher power.
The irony is that the capitalism they love so much is completely a product of the state they deride; the artificial property rights (land right, copyrights and patents, et cetera) and the corporations themselves are state creations. If we truly "got government out of the way", the result would not be some capitalist utopia, but libertarian socialism.
This news is at least 2 or 3 days old, what's wrong with/. lately???
The same thing that's been wrong for years: people who don't understand that something that happened a few days ago - even a few weeks ago - is still news.
Great, you heard about it days ago, doubtless you monitor all sorts of websites and cable news channels 24/7 and know everything before the rest of us. Congratulations, you win. But those of us who occasionally turn away from the various glass teats appreciate hearing about things that may have happened more than five minutes ago.
some companies have said they're not going to hire his graduates because they don't like the perception of having someone on board who has written viruses.
Some companies are run by idiots.
How are people supposed to write security software if they don't know malware works? And how can one really learn how malware works without writing some?
When I worked on a firewall project years ago, I wrote some code to test it versus SYN floods. Where we supposed to just do a theoretic analysis and say "sure, it's safe against this attack"?
When I'm not hacking, among the other things I do is teach karate. That includes playing the attacker sometime for my students to defend. And sometimes they play the attacker for other students. It's the only way to learn.
(Of course in both hacking and budo there are legitimate safety issues. While there aren't enough details in TFA to say for sure, it sounds like they've addressed them.)
I mean, why should competitors be allowed to use a trademark in advertisements.
Why in the world not? How can Pepsi make a print ad about people taking the "Pepsi Challenge" without using the trademarked word "Coke"? (Technically as I understand it, words themselves can't really trademarks, but there are "word marks" that accomplish the same end.)
The purpose of a trademark is consumer protection, not to give some company control over the use of some word or picture to the point where thou shalt not take the Corporate Lord's name in vain.
A answer by fsf on exactly this issue can be found here.
The issue is derivative works. The FSF holds that linking a program to a GPL'd library makes the program a derivative work with respect to copyright law. This is not a matter the FSF gets to decide - the question of whether a work is a derivative of another is generally decided on a case-by-case basis in the courts, and there is no precedent on this yet.
What constitutes combining two parts into one program? This is a legal question, which ultimately judges will decide. We believe that a proper criterion depends both on the mechanism of communication (exec, pipes, rpc, function calls within a shared address space, etc.) and the semantics of the communication (what kinds of information are interchanged).
If the modules are included in the same executable file, they are definitely combined in one program. If modules are designed to run linked together in a shared address space, that almost surely means combining them into one program.
By contrast, pipes, sockets and command-line arguments are communication mechanisms normally used between two separate programs. So when they are used for communication, the modules normally are separate programs. But if the semantics of the communication are intimate enough, exchanging complex internal data structures, that too could be a basis to consider the two parts as combined into a larger program.
(I'm not 100% convinced about their shared address space assertation.)
So a license that allows people to modify source code of a program isn't modifiable. So it doesn't conform to it's own beliefs of open/modifiable standards.
Licences are not software, and so require different handling.
I am cetainly free to licence my software under the GPL + additional conditions that I name, in effect making my total licence a modified GPL.
I can even create a new licence ("Tom's Public License") based on the terms of GPL with my changes.
But because licences are a very different sort of entity than software, I can't "modify" the GPL and still call it the GPL, any more than I can modify Moby Dick and still call it Moby Dick. The problem is pretty obvious: "Oh, so I can only distribute this work under the GPL? Fine. I'll use this version of the GPL put out by Microsoft. Ha-ha!"
You don't get beat down by the delays, the breakdowns, and the illnesses you contract because you are in enclosed spaces with people who cough in your face.
I don't know how BART and Muni stack up against other transit systems in terms of delays and breakdowns. But when last I commuted by car (I telecommute these days) I got plenty beat down by backups, accident delays, road construction, et cetera.
No, I didn't have people coughing in my face, but I did have plenty of stress from the traffic and from avoiding colliding with idiots. I could feel my blood pressure going up.
(For that, maybe we could do with adopting the Japanese custom of wearing surgical-style masks when ill to keep your germs to yourself.)
That sound you just heard was every slashdot reader in the SF bay area falling out of their chairs from shock. It's news to me that these are 'excellent' systems.
I found it impressive - clean, easy to figure out, able to get me where I wanted to go. But maybe it just looks good in comparison.:-)
The only problem I had was in planning to take the F from the Fisherman's Wharf area to Market Street on a Saturday afternoon, right after there had apparently been a big abortion rights rally. This didn't work out so good. But I was able to change plans on the fly since there are bus route maps all over the place - that is a rare and beautiful thing.
Baltimore has a subway, you could have it a lot worse!
Not in any sense that counts. The Metro is a single line. Not a grid, not a loop, not a network: a one-dimensional system. If you live in the suburban neighborhood of Ownings Mills and work downtown, it's great, otherwise it's nearly frickin' useless. I've lived in the Baltimore area my whole life (execpt for 6 years of college and grad school, and that was right down the road in College Park) and known only one person who uses our Metro regularly.
Our light rail system is little better; it too is a single line running from the suburbs downtown. But at least it goes all the way through the city and links BWI (airport) with Penn Station (Amtrak).
(The only time I find it useful is when I take a train to New York and catch a car ride back with someone (which is not unusual for me) - I can have them drop me at a light rail stop and ride back to Penn Station (Baltimore's one, not NYC's) to pick up my car.)
If the doctor says you're not fit to drive your licence is taken away. There are periodic checkups, and they are mandatory.
Part of the problem is that here in the U.S., in many areas it is very difficult to live indepentently without a car. I don't just mean rural areas, I mean cities like my hometown of Baltimore with suck-ass mass transit. (Though some U.S. cities are great in this respect - I just got back from San Francisco with it's excellent Muni and BART systems.)
Take someone's licence away, and thanks to our automobile-centric planning they quite possibly can't even get to the grocery store anymore.
If the AARP was smart, they'd be lobbying for good public transportation - it would be a great benefit for senior citizens who can't drive safely.
Hippies don't typically promote the right to carry firearms.
You'd be surrpised. While "hippie" hasn't been a useful label since the late 1960s, many people who feel some affinity or nostalgia for that movement believe in self-reliance, including the right to self-defense and gun owmership. ("Hippie" sympathizers are not folks who think highly of the police and military - why would they want the state to have a monopoly on guns?)
Remember that Leary carried a gun when he was on the run, and that Reagan signed gun control legislation (the Mulford Act) when he was governor of California.
Why do folks constantly reinvent the same thing? No or little borrowing. All customized.
NIH syndrome knows no language, it's universal.
PHP has PEAR and the PHP Foundry on SourceForge, developers who don't check there for code to meet their needs before running off to write stuff deserve the pain.
Plone borrowing from Zope and Zope borrowing from Python
Plone, Zope, and Python are entirely different sorts of beasts. I'm not sure what your point is.
If they're truly fake, it shouldn't be hard to disprove what they're saying, and you shouldn't have to resort to logical fallacies to discredit them. Ad hominem attacks have no place in science.
What they're saying has been disproved. There is no scientific debate on these points:
global climate change is occuring,
some part of this change is due to human activity
the change is a potential threat to the well-being of humans
What's happening here isn't science.
The "Scientific Alliance" was founded by Robert Durward, a quarry owner who is known for his extremist views (he describes himself as "a businessman who is totally fed up with all this environmental stuff" and thinks Tony Blair ought to "declare martial law and let the army sort out our schools, hospitals, and roads as well"), and by political shill Mark Adams.
(Yes, one can fine a few credentialed scientists who honestly disagree. One can also find a few cosmologists who still hold to the Steady State theory, even the odd biologist who holds with creationism. That doesn't mean there's any lack of a scientific consensus on these issues.)
while also making upper management feel warm and fuzzy?
For all the other critera, everyone will have their arguments. But for this one, I think it's Red Hat, hands down.
I'm not saying it's "the best", for whatever technical defintion of "best" we might choose; but I think we're moving toward a situation of "no one ever got fired for buying Red Hat".
is it really surprising to people that government-educated children think so "highly" of the government?
Public schools are administered by local governments, not the federal one.
In the Baltimore County school system, in the 1980s, high school seniors were required to take a "Citizenship, Constitution, and Poltical Issues" class to graduate, which covered exactly this sort of issue.
I also had some of the most free-thinking people I've ever encountered as teachers there. Public school teachers are government employees, not government agents - and they're underpaid and underrespected by their employer. If public school students have positive ideas about government, they're probably not getting them from teachers!
(And when the only alternatives are religious schools or military-style academies, I'd pick a decent public school any time.)
Some of the prophesies involved the place of birth, the method of death, specific details of his life that would have been impossible to emulate by anyone other than the real Messiah.
As I said, such details could simply have been lies. Making stuff up is a well-established religious tradition; it's quite probable that Matthew made up the whole Herod-killing-the-babies thing, since it's found nowhere else.
If Jeshua wanted to give evidence via prophecy that he was divine, all he had to do was write a few good solid predictions for years to come.
Heck, he could at least have given us a definative autobiography, instead of leaving it to a dozen contradictory biographers. (He was a rabbi, so I'm presuming he was literate in Hebrew.) Certainly if you believed you were to most important person to ever walk to face of the earth, you could write a few things down for the rest of us?
Sorry. No evidence from prophecy. Heck, the case is better for Nostradamus having magical powers.
That's a much closer analogue to what happened with the disciples and lends what they say a lot more credibility.
Not so much. Try it this way:
Twelve guys run around with a suspected insurgent leader. They're pretty brave guys to hang around him in the first place - some are even starting to get pissed off that the leader is talking more peace and love and less about "sell your cloak and buy a sword" - but they don't have any sort of deathwish.
So the bosses, as they usually do, get tired of this long-haired trouble maker. They take him and his buddies by surprise; one of his buddies starts to fight, and Jeshua tells him not to. (Maybe he knows its inevitable and doesn't want anyone else to get hurt.)
If you don't fight, and you're not resigned to dying, you've got one option - run. So Jeshua's homeboys do. They're separated, hiding, on the run.
Things end very badly for Jeshua. Are his buddies scared? In shock? You bet. Until they can regroup. It's amazing what getting back with comrades can do.
Now, something interesting happens. Jeshua's buddies are highly stressed, probably hungry and sleep-deprived. Some types of stress increase suggestibility enormously - it's a tatic used by destructive cults today. I'm picturing these guys working themselves into a total groupthink hysteria, and convincing themselves that Jeshua can't really be dead.
Or, maybe deciding that their best option is to spread a story that he's not really dead, maybe they can use that to get the people together against the Roman occupiers.
So they either fool themselves or decide on a deliberate propaganda campaign. Maybe some combination of the two, a propaganda campaign that they come to believe themselves in the end.
Slashdot Mirror
But you could send several thousand rovers for the cost of sending one human, and the rovers can stay longer.
Except they didn't.
But yes, there is a sometimes a fine line about what constitutes for-profit use.
RIAA != ASCAP/BMI/SESAC.
RIAA are evil bastards who exploit musicians, degrade the art of music, and will be first against the wall when the revolution comes.
ASCAP et. al, while flawed in execution, are based on a good idea: songwriters should get a cut when someone makes money off a song they wrote. If I sell a CD with a cover of "Tangled Up in Blue", or play it at a gig at my local tavern, these are the guys who make sure Dylan gets his nickel out of the profits. (Google for "songwriter royalties performance mechanical".) However - and this is key - if I'm playing for fun not profit, Bob doesn't get a penny.
For years I've been suggesting that royalties for copying recordings ought to work the same way - share for free, but if you're selling the artist gets a cut.
I have to phone them (haven't done it yet) to get my account type changed. Here's the number they gave:
402-938-3531
Save it if you ever need it.
Ah, knee-jerk libertarian capitalism. Almost as much fun to watch as knee-jerk religious fundamentalism, and based largely on the same idea: the infallibility of some invisible higher power.
The irony is that the capitalism they love so much is completely a product of the state they deride; the artificial property rights (land right, copyrights and patents, et cetera) and the corporations themselves are state creations. If we truly "got government out of the way", the result would not be some capitalist utopia, but libertarian socialism.
The same thing that's been wrong for years: people who don't understand that something that happened a few days ago - even a few weeks ago - is still news.
Great, you heard about it days ago, doubtless you monitor all sorts of websites and cable news channels 24/7 and know everything before the rest of us. Congratulations, you win. But those of us who occasionally turn away from the various glass teats appreciate hearing about things that may have happened more than five minutes ago.
According to TFA,
Some companies are run by idiots.
How are people supposed to write security software if they don't know malware works? And how can one really learn how malware works without writing some?
When I worked on a firewall project years ago, I wrote some code to test it versus SYN floods. Where we supposed to just do a theoretic analysis and say "sure, it's safe against this attack"?
When I'm not hacking, among the other things I do is teach karate. That includes playing the attacker sometime for my students to defend. And sometimes they play the attacker for other students. It's the only way to learn.
(Of course in both hacking and budo there are legitimate safety issues. While there aren't enough details in TFA to say for sure, it sounds like they've addressed them.)
Why in the world not? How can Pepsi make a print ad about people taking the "Pepsi Challenge" without using the trademarked word "Coke"? (Technically as I understand it, words themselves can't really trademarks, but there are "word marks" that accomplish the same end.)
The purpose of a trademark is consumer protection, not to give some company control over the use of some word or picture to the point where thou shalt not take the Corporate Lord's name in vain.
The issue is derivative works. The FSF holds that linking a program to a GPL'd library makes the program a derivative work with respect to copyright law. This is not a matter the FSF gets to decide - the question of whether a work is a derivative of another is generally decided on a case-by-case basis in the courts, and there is no precedent on this yet.
As the FSF notes:
(I'm not 100% convinced about their shared address space assertation.)
Licences are not software, and so require different handling.
I am cetainly free to licence my software under the GPL + additional conditions that I name, in effect making my total licence a modified GPL.
I can even create a new licence ("Tom's Public License") based on the terms of GPL with my changes. But because licences are a very different sort of entity than software, I can't "modify" the GPL and still call it the GPL, any more than I can modify Moby Dick and still call it Moby Dick. The problem is pretty obvious: "Oh, so I can only distribute this work under the GPL? Fine. I'll use this version of the GPL put out by Microsoft. Ha-ha!"
I don't know how BART and Muni stack up against other transit systems in terms of delays and breakdowns. But when last I commuted by car (I telecommute these days) I got plenty beat down by backups, accident delays, road construction, et cetera.
No, I didn't have people coughing in my face, but I did have plenty of stress from the traffic and from avoiding colliding with idiots. I could feel my blood pressure going up.
(For that, maybe we could do with adopting the Japanese custom of wearing surgical-style masks when ill to keep your germs to yourself.)
I found it impressive - clean, easy to figure out, able to get me where I wanted to go. But maybe it just looks good in comparison. :-)
The only problem I had was in planning to take the F from the Fisherman's Wharf area to Market Street on a Saturday afternoon, right after there had apparently been a big abortion rights rally. This didn't work out so good. But I was able to change plans on the fly since there are bus route maps all over the place - that is a rare and beautiful thing.
I thought I remembered seeing a connection when I looked at the maps, and according to the website is connects up at Millbrae. Maybe that's new.
Not in any sense that counts. The Metro is a single line. Not a grid, not a loop, not a network: a one-dimensional system. If you live in the suburban neighborhood of Ownings Mills and work downtown, it's great, otherwise it's nearly frickin' useless. I've lived in the Baltimore area my whole life (execpt for 6 years of college and grad school, and that was right down the road in College Park) and known only one person who uses our Metro regularly.
Our light rail system is little better; it too is a single line running from the suburbs downtown. But at least it goes all the way through the city and links BWI (airport) with Penn Station (Amtrak).
(The only time I find it useful is when I take a train to New York and catch a car ride back with someone (which is not unusual for me) - I can have them drop me at a light rail stop and ride back to Penn Station (Baltimore's one, not NYC's) to pick up my car.)
Part of the problem is that here in the U.S., in many areas it is very difficult to live indepentently without a car. I don't just mean rural areas, I mean cities like my hometown of Baltimore with suck-ass mass transit. (Though some U.S. cities are great in this respect - I just got back from San Francisco with it's excellent Muni and BART systems.)
Take someone's licence away, and thanks to our automobile-centric planning they quite possibly can't even get to the grocery store anymore.
If the AARP was smart, they'd be lobbying for good public transportation - it would be a great benefit for senior citizens who can't drive safely.
The issue isn't money. The issue is freedom.
Freedom from choice, is what you want"
You'd be surrpised. While "hippie" hasn't been a useful label since the late 1960s, many people who feel some affinity or nostalgia for that movement believe in self-reliance, including the right to self-defense and gun owmership. ("Hippie" sympathizers are not folks who think highly of the police and military - why would they want the state to have a monopoly on guns?)
Remember that Leary carried a gun when he was on the run, and that Reagan signed gun control legislation (the Mulford Act) when he was governor of California.
Not at all. Diode noise will do just fine.
NIH syndrome knows no language, it's universal. PHP has PEAR and the PHP Foundry on SourceForge, developers who don't check there for code to meet their needs before running off to write stuff deserve the pain.
Plone, Zope, and Python are entirely different sorts of beasts. I'm not sure what your point is.
I want to program, not generate a simulation of line noise!
*duck* :-)
What they're saying has been disproved. There is no scientific debate on these points:
What's happening here isn't science. The "Scientific Alliance" was founded by Robert Durward, a quarry owner who is known for his extremist views (he describes himself as "a businessman who is totally fed up with all this environmental stuff" and thinks Tony Blair ought to "declare martial law and let the army sort out our schools, hospitals, and roads as well"), and by political shill Mark Adams.
This PR and corporate shillery, no different than research sponsored by tobacco companies that claimed no link between cigarettes and cancer. It is entirely approriate to label it as such.
(Yes, one can fine a few credentialed scientists who honestly disagree. One can also find a few cosmologists who still hold to the Steady State theory, even the odd biologist who holds with creationism. That doesn't mean there's any lack of a scientific consensus on these issues.)
For all the other critera, everyone will have their arguments. But for this one, I think it's Red Hat, hands down.
I'm not saying it's "the best", for whatever technical defintion of "best" we might choose; but I think we're moving toward a situation of "no one ever got fired for buying Red Hat".
Public schools are administered by local governments, not the federal one.
In the Baltimore County school system, in the 1980s, high school seniors were required to take a "Citizenship, Constitution, and Poltical Issues" class to graduate, which covered exactly this sort of issue.
I also had some of the most free-thinking people I've ever encountered as teachers there. Public school teachers are government employees, not government agents - and they're underpaid and underrespected by their employer. If public school students have positive ideas about government, they're probably not getting them from teachers!
(And when the only alternatives are religious schools or military-style academies, I'd pick a decent public school any time.)
As I said, such details could simply have been lies. Making stuff up is a well-established religious tradition; it's quite probable that Matthew made up the whole Herod-killing-the-babies thing, since it's found nowhere else.
Even then, these "prophecies" have to be distorted to claim they fit the story.
If Jeshua wanted to give evidence via prophecy that he was divine, all he had to do was write a few good solid predictions for years to come.
Heck, he could at least have given us a definative autobiography, instead of leaving it to a dozen contradictory biographers. (He was a rabbi, so I'm presuming he was literate in Hebrew.) Certainly if you believed you were to most important person to ever walk to face of the earth, you could write a few things down for the rest of us?
Sorry. No evidence from prophecy. Heck, the case is better for Nostradamus having magical powers.
Not so much. Try it this way:
Twelve guys run around with a suspected insurgent leader. They're pretty brave guys to hang around him in the first place - some are even starting to get pissed off that the leader is talking more peace and love and less about "sell your cloak and buy a sword" - but they don't have any sort of deathwish.
So the bosses, as they usually do, get tired of this long-haired trouble maker. They take him and his buddies by surprise; one of his buddies starts to fight, and Jeshua tells him not to. (Maybe he knows its inevitable and doesn't want anyone else to get hurt.)
If you don't fight, and you're not resigned to dying, you've got one option - run. So Jeshua's homeboys do. They're separated, hiding, on the run.
Things end very badly for Jeshua. Are his buddies scared? In shock? You bet. Until they can regroup. It's amazing what getting back with comrades can do.
Now, something interesting happens. Jeshua's buddies are highly stressed, probably hungry and sleep-deprived. Some types of stress increase suggestibility enormously - it's a tatic used by destructive cults today. I'm picturing these guys working themselves into a total groupthink hysteria, and convincing themselves that Jeshua can't really be dead.
Or, maybe deciding that their best option is to spread a story that he's not really dead, maybe they can use that to get the people together against the Roman occupiers.
So they either fool themselves or decide on a deliberate propaganda campaign. Maybe some combination of the two, a propaganda campaign that they come to believe themselves in the end.