He's a good guy - he's done a lot of good work and his founding of GNU, contribution to all sorts of major projects that have been core of Free Software and Open Source, never mind the GPL, have been fantastic.
But Stallman's views on Intellectual Property as just expressed do not represent my belief in Copyright (if you don't have Copyright, then you don't have the GPL), and I'm tired of people thinking that Stallman is representative of the ideals of Free Software / Open Source community as a whole. Of course I know that people who decide to look deeper into the community have discovered that most of us have a much more open attitude, 'use what works best' - if that's commercial software, so be it.
And, of course this rant of mine comes from having read Lars' commentary on the community, but, if he's managed to create such a view of us from just ESR's and RSM's web pages, we need to do something. I'd like to point out that, if you got to the end of the page, he actually managed to illuminate some good things.
Anyways,
The problem is that when stuff like this shows up in the mainstream press, everyone at the top of the food chain thinks we're all Zealots, even though the opposite is the case. We need to stand up and say that we like good software, that authors of _anything_ deserve compensation for their work (as they see fit), and that ESR and RSM are not representative of the community as a whole.
Whew. So much for all my Karma Whoring, but I just had to say something.
But I'm not sure that it should be everyone else's (= vs. == is a good example).
Further, at the University of Victoria, they moved to teaching Java and I keep hearing complaints about how bad the 1st and 2nd year's code is. Plus, you have more of that C-the-second-most-cryptic-syntax-in-the-world (brainfuck) problem.
Basic doesn't really teach control structures so I wouldn't suggest it either. Actually, don't tell them about gotos at all - take the section out of the book, or at least tell them how evil they are.
Personally, I thought Modula-2 was a really cool language when I studied it a few years ago. Very logical, nifty nesting, no super wacky syntax, but exposure to something that looks mostly like Java and C. If that's hard to get a hold of, then Pascal should be a good language also - it has the control structures, and clean syntax.
Napster isn't designed to help you find something that is in a genre that you might like, so you'd never know that there is this great band there because the search engine is too precise. One needs a co-existing service to work with napster to help you find 'something that sounds like'.
1. This man apparently makes a living selling books. He's probably never going to sell to the linux/Open Source/Free Software communities, but he can sell to current developers, and a little FUD never hurts anyways (oooh, fortune 500 companies won't allow GPL source code in? I'd sure better not...).
2. CORBA bindings for KDE/Gnome/Qt/Gtk make the component issue a moot point... Or maybe he missed that paradigm???
I think everything else I had a gripe about has already been covered.
Anyone who tries to tie "The American Dream", "Plato", "Darwinian Theory", "anti-bodies" and Economics together in one conceptual package deserves a Lifetime Achievement Award in "Smoking Waaaay Too Much Crack".
I guess there is no need to comment on this poor soul's meshing of cliches, common misconceptions of economics, and a crack filled evening of reading Plato's Republic.
Oddly enough, I just did tie all those subjects in a sentence, so I guess I should be a recipient of said award also.
"Of course officer, its just legal hemp we're growing in our hydroponics..."
There was an experiment in our neighborhood (the first of its kind in Canada) where a farmer took an acre, fenced it off, and grew hemp (this is on the west coast, I know our pot is world famous). He couldn't get a decent crop because of STUPID kids breaking in and stealing plants, wrecking plants, etc.
In short: Hemp doesn't work because: 1. Enforcment. See caption above. 2. Cost to protect it. See paragraph above.
Granted, if you change the laws about pot growing, you remove the enforcement problem. Trouble is, another legal drug is a serious problem when its pretty easy to grow it in your backyard... tends to take a chunk out of the taxes on alcohol, never mind the social implications.
However, you still have the protection problem - there will always be enough stupid kids to go out and wreck your crop, just because it might be 'the real thing'.
I don't know why I'm posting this, I just get fed up with the stupid 'hemp can save the world' mentality. It has nothing to do with DuPont, it has nothing to do with some US Government anti-save-the-world-fuck-you-neo-hippies conspiracy - it just doesn't fucking work.
The funny thing about this is, that everyone seems to have an opinion about what should be, or shouldn't be, on today's Slashdot.
Consider: during an average day, for an average paper, there is only room to print 5% of the news that reaches the newsroom of a (traditional) paper. This number is dated, and I suspect its more like 1% these days. Anyways, it is up to the editors to decide what should be printed, ie. what is important to the readers. Always, there is some human, with, by necessity, a bias, choosing what should be printed and what should not.
So, we come to slashdot, and this story. Taco obviously didn't want to post it, for whatever reasons he has. Obviously, everyone knows about the market correction in the past week, everyone probably knows someone that lost money in the last week, and everyone should know that keeping your life savings in the market is one of the best ways to retire penniless.
Now then - did Taco think that any of these things have anything to do with security, languages, hardware, Open Source, Free Software, social implications of technology and technology change?
No.
Its Taco's / Hemos' / Andover's site. They can run it however they want. If you don't like it, start up stockdot.org, and run live numbers and comments on VA, RedHat, etc. I'm sure you'll triple the readership of slashdot.
Cyano
PS - maybe someone should start up trolldot? That way we could send them all there...
You cannot replicate intellectual works for $0. There is a cost to everything - weather its a pen and paper and someone's time to copy a manuscript, a printing press and someone to set the type, or someone sucking up all the OC3 links, several megabytes of disk space (oh, is that free?) and a bunch of their time to wade through all the Britney Spears tracks to download MP3s with Napster.
Further, you need to read some Heinlein (The Moon is a Harsh Mistress) if you think that Air is Free. TANSTAAFL.
Instead then, we come back to the economic problem of allocating scarce resources. And, as microeconomics teaches us oh, wait, you've never taken any economics, riiight? corporations will try to maximize profit, which includes price discrimination (cheap movie tickets for children, seniors, and on tuesdays...) and lots of clever pricing models.
Fortunately, we find that if someone is making too much money in a particular segment of the market, someone else will step in. This is Napster's role, this is ICraveTV's role, and this is Slashdot's role. (Note: I believe that as artists discover that there are other distribution channels out there where the RIAA doesn't get its cut, the whole copying protection issue will become a moot point (but this probably only works for books and music, movies have too high a barrier to entry to produce at the home level, and thus we will continue to have difficulties with the MPAA))
Anyways, back to your conclusions about ownership - just because something is mine doesn't mean that you can have it, or take a copy of it. If I choose to give it to you, or a copy, that fair. But if I have something you want, then there is nothing wrong, unethical, evil, or otherwise morally corrupt about asking you to pay for it, and the terms I issue use to you are the terms that you must agree to, or you can just as well do without it.
In the US at least, one needs a targeted search warrant - the police cannot just invade your (virtual) house and look around for anything that might be illegal. Even aquiring a search warrant for kiddy porn and then booking you for warez is not legal.
In Canada, that is not the case:-( . But this protects the data stored on a node from being outright sifted.
Of course, the courts might decide that since the material is publicly available, this is equivalent to putting up pictures of kiddie porn on your front lawn.
Hoewver, due to the cacheing nature of the system, I can't see how you could be held liable for the contents of a filing cabinet you put on your front lawn, and then someone else starts putting illegal things into it.
In the end, I suspect that someone, somewhere will legislate against this sort of thing, but for now it will probably be legal.
Take the appropriate DLLs from the Windoze codecs and write an xanim wrapper pluggable codec around the (original) codec? If we're really lucky, somebody forgot to strip out the symbol table and then things should be quite easy.
Of course, it might be much easier to just to get Wine to run it instead.
>>And suppose this extra clause said that no matter what, they couldn't be held liable for writing it. Do you think such a thing would stand up in court? >>Sorry, but if you break the law, not even a fine print disclaimer will save you. > >Although if UCITA is passed, this sort of ridiculous license cluase may well become legal in some cases.
OK, so sum up UCITA and DMCA, and we can put clauses into software licences that would get around the DMCA?
Rip apart house & steam / boil ants out $10000 creates lots of waste
Hire Orkin-Man $100 Probably same risks as Raid.
Thus, most people just buy the damn bottle of ant poison and leave it on the counter for a few weeks.
Continuing on, this principle will show itself over and over and over again in much larger systems, such as Positive Crankcase Ventillation (the most important anti-pollution system on your car) (costs an extra $20 to have it). Low cost solutions to environmental problems, and solutions that financially incent people to be environmentally responsible are the only solutions which will work in the long run.
CDs all cost more or less the same because that's what the consumer is willing to pay - why buy Puff Daddy at $40 a CD when Notorious BIG is only $20? Smart market researchers / economists have determined that the recording companies will make an optimum profit from selling CDs at $xx.xx. Assuming that any one piece of music has the same value as any other is the assumption that keeps the price of music CDs flat.
Of course, if the record companies got really smart, they would charge for music based on the demand for it - in economic terms 'price discrimination'. So a Barry Manilow MP3 will go for $.10 and a Jennifer Lopez MP3 will go for $3.00.
Please note - my selection of artists for examples has nothing to do with my music taste...
I am not an economist, but I'm targeting a minor in Economics on my CSC degree:
Sales taxes are inefficient because they are difficult to administer. Consider a retailer who sells 1000 $0.50 items in a day, (20,000 tax calculations a month!), and then consider an income based tax which is calculated twice per month for each employee.
Note that this penalizes small businesses heavily as they are much more likely to be selling $.50 items than $100,000 items. There are exceptions, such as Wal-Mart, but go ask a small retailer what they have to do to work around the local sales based taxes.
Most conservatives will probably argue (myself included) for a Capital Gains Exemption (such as we have in Canada) where only 75% of your capital gain income (stocks, bonds, interest, house sales, etc.) is taxed. Note that in the current budget, this is moving to 67% of capital gains over the next 3 years. The capital gains exemption gives you all the benefits of increased rates of savings (you know that, in the long run, you won't be beaten over the head with taxes (as badly as regular income)), and the exemption is relatively easy to calculate, and its difficult to cheat on, whereas sales taxes, due to their transaction nature, are much easier to cheat on and bury.
Oh, I see, so we shouldn't put anything into space (for cheap) because eventually it will become floating space debris and... get in the way of putting more incredibly useful stuff in space?
Honestly, cheap heavy lift is part of the solution to this because now you can afford to put something up in orbit to CLEAN UP THE JUNK!!! Of course, who pays for it becomes another interesting question - but if you really want to put something up there, you sure can afford to clean up anything that's in the way...
And... when did mother nature move up above the atmosphere???
If Sony wishes to obtain a lawful monopoly on the functional concepts in its software, it must satisfy the more stringent standards of the patent laws. See Bonito Boats, Inc. v. Thunder Craft Boats, Inc., 489 U.S. 141, 160-61 (1989); Sega, 977 F.2d at 1526. This Sony has not done. The second statutory factor strongly favors Connectix.
I had more, but knote seems to have eaten them.
back to studying for tomorrow's midterms (yes, that's plural, sucks to be me)
Slashdot Mirror
I was talking about the implications of his statement - that copying outside of 'fair use' is not a crime, because how can sharing be a crime?
Cyano
That's what I meant - I figured the Zealots would bounce me down as troll / flamebait / offtopic / whatever.
:-)
Seems to not be the case so far tho
Cyano
He's a good guy - he's done a lot of good work and his founding of GNU, contribution to all sorts of major projects that have been core of Free Software and Open Source, never mind the GPL, have been fantastic.
But Stallman's views on Intellectual Property as just expressed do not represent my belief in Copyright (if you don't have Copyright, then you don't have the GPL), and I'm tired of people thinking that Stallman is representative of the ideals of Free Software / Open Source community as a whole. Of course I know that people who decide to look deeper into the community have discovered that most of us have a much more open attitude, 'use what works best' - if that's commercial software, so be it.
And, of course this rant of mine comes from having read Lars' commentary on the community, but, if he's managed to create such a view of us from just ESR's and RSM's web pages, we need to do something. I'd like to point out that, if you got to the end of the page, he actually managed to illuminate some good things.
Anyways,
The problem is that when stuff like this shows up in the mainstream press, everyone at the top of the food chain thinks we're all Zealots, even though the opposite is the case. We need to stand up and say that we like good software, that authors of _anything_ deserve compensation for their work (as they see fit), and that ESR and RSM are not representative of the community as a whole.
Whew. So much for all my Karma Whoring, but I just had to say something.
Cyano.
But I'm not sure that it should be everyone else's (= vs. == is a good example).
Further, at the University of Victoria, they moved to teaching Java and I keep hearing complaints about how bad the 1st and 2nd year's code is. Plus, you have more of that C-the-second-most-cryptic-syntax-in-the-world (brainfuck) problem.
Basic doesn't really teach control structures so I wouldn't suggest it either. Actually, don't tell them about gotos at all - take the section out of the book, or at least tell them how evil they are.
Personally, I thought Modula-2 was a really cool language when I studied it a few years ago. Very logical, nifty nesting, no super wacky syntax, but exposure to something that looks mostly like Java and C. If that's hard to get a hold of, then Pascal should be a good language also - it has the control structures, and clean syntax.
Cyano
Napster isn't designed to help you find something that is in a genre that you might like, so you'd never know that there is this great band there because the search engine is too precise. One needs a co-existing service to work with napster to help you find 'something that sounds like'.
Cyano
A more messed up language I have never seen. If you don't know what I'm talking about, you should go look at freshmeat.
Note the clever Karma whoring below:
Perhaps Microsoft should start writing its OSs in brainfuck - I can't see how it would make them any worse...
Cyano
1. This man apparently makes a living selling books. He's probably never going to sell to the linux/Open Source/Free Software communities, but he can sell to current developers, and a little FUD never hurts anyways (oooh, fortune 500 companies won't allow GPL source code in? I'd sure better not...).
2. CORBA bindings for KDE/Gnome/Qt/Gtk make the component issue a moot point... Or maybe he missed that paradigm???
I think everything else I had a gripe about has already been covered.
Cyano
Anyone who tries to tie "The American Dream", "Plato", "Darwinian Theory", "anti-bodies" and Economics together in one conceptual package deserves a Lifetime Achievement Award in "Smoking Waaaay Too Much Crack".
I guess there is no need to comment on this poor soul's meshing of cliches, common misconceptions of economics, and a crack filled evening of reading Plato's Republic.
Oddly enough, I just did tie all those subjects in a sentence, so I guess I should be a recipient of said award also.
Cyano
MORON.
Hemp looks exactly like contraband (Marijuana).
"Of course officer, its just legal hemp we're growing in our hydroponics..."
There was an experiment in our neighborhood (the first of its kind in Canada) where a farmer took an acre, fenced it off, and grew hemp (this is on the west coast, I know our pot is world famous). He couldn't get a decent crop because of STUPID kids breaking in and stealing plants, wrecking plants, etc.
In short: Hemp doesn't work because:
1. Enforcment. See caption above.
2. Cost to protect it. See paragraph above.
Granted, if you change the laws about pot growing, you remove the enforcement problem. Trouble is, another legal drug is a serious problem when its pretty easy to grow it in your backyard... tends to take a chunk out of the taxes on alcohol, never mind the social implications.
However, you still have the protection problem - there will always be enough stupid kids to go out and wreck your crop, just because it might be 'the real thing'.
I don't know why I'm posting this, I just get fed up with the stupid 'hemp can save the world' mentality. It has nothing to do with DuPont, it has nothing to do with some US Government anti-save-the-world-fuck-you-neo-hippies conspiracy - it just doesn't fucking work.
Cyano
Creepy - I'm learning Czech right now and some of the words had the same look and sound to them...
Cyano
The funny thing about this is, that everyone seems to have an opinion about what should be, or shouldn't be, on today's Slashdot.
Consider: during an average day, for an average paper, there is only room to print 5% of the news that reaches the newsroom of a (traditional) paper. This number is dated, and I suspect its more like 1% these days. Anyways, it is up to the editors to decide what should be printed, ie. what is important to the readers. Always, there is some human, with, by necessity, a bias, choosing what should be printed and what should not.
So, we come to slashdot, and this story. Taco obviously didn't want to post it, for whatever reasons he has. Obviously, everyone knows about the market correction in the past week, everyone probably knows someone that lost money in the last week, and everyone should know that keeping your life savings in the market is one of the best ways to retire penniless.
Now then - did Taco think that any of these things have anything to do with security, languages, hardware, Open Source, Free Software, social implications of technology and technology change?
No.
Its Taco's / Hemos' / Andover's site. They can run it however they want. If you don't like it, start up stockdot.org, and run live numbers and comments on VA, RedHat, etc. I'm sure you'll triple the readership of slashdot.
Cyano
PS - maybe someone should start up trolldot? That way we could send them all there...
You cannot replicate intellectual works for $0. There is a cost to everything - weather its a pen and paper and someone's time to copy a manuscript, a printing press and someone to set the type, or someone sucking up all the OC3 links, several megabytes of disk space (oh, is that free?) and a bunch of their time to wade through all the Britney Spears tracks to download MP3s with Napster.
Further, you need to read some Heinlein (The Moon is a Harsh Mistress) if you think that Air is Free. TANSTAAFL.
Instead then, we come back to the economic problem of allocating scarce resources. And, as microeconomics teaches us oh, wait, you've never taken any economics, riiight? corporations will try to maximize profit, which includes price discrimination (cheap movie tickets for children, seniors, and on tuesdays...) and lots of clever pricing models.
Fortunately, we find that if someone is making too much money in a particular segment of the market, someone else will step in. This is Napster's role, this is ICraveTV's role, and this is Slashdot's role. (Note: I believe that as artists discover that there are other distribution channels out there where the RIAA doesn't get its cut, the whole copying protection issue will become a moot point (but this probably only works for books and music, movies have too high a barrier to entry to produce at the home level, and thus we will continue to have difficulties with the MPAA))
Anyways, back to your conclusions about ownership - just because something is mine doesn't mean that you can have it, or take a copy of it. If I choose to give it to you, or a copy, that fair. But if I have something you want, then there is nothing wrong, unethical, evil, or otherwise morally corrupt about asking you to pay for it, and the terms I issue use to you are the terms that you must agree to, or you can just as well do without it.
Cyano
IANAL.
:-( . But this protects the data stored on a node from being outright sifted.
In the US at least, one needs a targeted search warrant - the police cannot just invade your (virtual) house and look around for anything that might be illegal. Even aquiring a search warrant for kiddy porn and then booking you for warez is not legal.
In Canada, that is not the case
Of course, the courts might decide that since the material is publicly available, this is equivalent to putting up pictures of kiddie porn on your front lawn.
Hoewver, due to the cacheing nature of the system, I can't see how you could be held liable for the contents of a filing cabinet you put on your front lawn, and then someone else starts putting illegal things into it.
In the end, I suspect that someone, somewhere will legislate against this sort of thing, but for now it will probably be legal.
Cyano
Take the appropriate DLLs from the Windoze codecs and write an xanim wrapper pluggable codec around the (original) codec? If we're really lucky, somebody forgot to strip out the symbol table and then things should be quite easy.
Of course, it might be much easier to just to get Wine to run it instead.
Cyano
>>And suppose this extra clause said that no matter what, they couldn't be held liable for writing it. Do you think such a thing would stand up in court?
>>Sorry, but if you break the law, not even a fine print disclaimer will save you.
>
>Although if UCITA is passed, this sort of ridiculous license cluase may well become legal in some cases.
OK, so sum up UCITA and DMCA, and we can put clauses into software licences that would get around the DMCA?
(Note: not a serious post)
Cyano
Yeah, ladybugs work great so longs as they like your yard and not the neighbors...
Honestly, as Utility-Maximizing entities (Economics speak) we humans will choose the lowest cost solution that gives us the highest level of benefit.
Alternatives for killing ants in the kitchen:
Product Cost Risk / Environmental hazard
Raid $10 mild carcinogen
Rip apart house & steam / boil ants out
$10000 creates lots of waste
Hire Orkin-Man
$100 Probably same risks as Raid.
Thus, most people just buy the damn bottle of ant poison and leave it on the counter for a few weeks.
Continuing on, this principle will show itself over and over and over again in much larger systems, such as Positive Crankcase Ventillation (the most important anti-pollution system on your car) (costs an extra $20 to have it). Low cost solutions to environmental problems, and solutions that financially incent people to be environmentally responsible are the only solutions which will work in the long run.
Cyano
I live in BC - and there are three reasons that the economy here has been hosed since the early ninties:
Vander Zalm - did something stupid and destroyed his party
Harcourt - brain damaged leader who wasted tons of money and chased euntrepreneurs away from BC
Clark - brain damaged leader who wasted even more money, and chased even more money / smart people out of BC, but he got a sundeck...
Dosang won't get any time to do anything...
And, cleaning up the mess will be a very very ugly affair.
As for Alberta, Klein / Day are the reasons that they've done so well. If only it wasn't so cold... (I'm from BC...)
Cyano
CDs all cost more or less the same because that's what the consumer is willing to pay - why buy Puff Daddy at $40 a CD when Notorious BIG is only $20? Smart market researchers / economists have determined that the recording companies will make an optimum profit from selling CDs at $xx.xx. Assuming that any one piece of music has the same value as any other is the assumption that keeps the price of music CDs flat.
.10 and a Jennifer Lopez MP3 will go for $3.00.
Of course, if the record companies got really smart, they would charge for music based on the demand for it - in economic terms 'price discrimination'. So a Barry Manilow MP3 will go for $
Please note - my selection of artists for examples has nothing to do with my music taste...
I am not an economist, but I'm targeting a minor in Economics on my CSC degree:
Sales taxes are inefficient because they are difficult to administer. Consider a retailer who sells 1000 $0.50 items in a day, (20,000 tax calculations a month!), and then consider an income based tax which is calculated twice per month for each employee.
Note that this penalizes small businesses heavily as they are much more likely to be selling $.50 items than $100,000 items. There are exceptions, such as Wal-Mart, but go ask a small retailer what they have to do to work around the local sales based taxes.
Most conservatives will probably argue (myself included) for a Capital Gains Exemption (such as we have in Canada) where only 75% of your capital gain income (stocks, bonds, interest, house sales, etc.) is taxed. Note that in the current budget, this is moving to 67% of capital gains over the next 3 years. The capital gains exemption gives you all the benefits of increased rates of savings (you know that, in the long run, you won't be beaten over the head with taxes (as badly as regular income)), and the exemption is relatively easy to calculate, and its difficult to cheat on, whereas sales taxes, due to their transaction nature, are much easier to cheat on and bury.
Cyano
Since we all know that 99.999% of internet sales are PR0N related, that's what we're really talking about here.
This post is funny. Laugh.
We Canadians jump ship and get an H1B! Of course, there are still two things that keep most Canadians in Canada:
1. Nobody shoots at you if you drive into the wrong part of town in Canada.
2. There really isn't that much of a 'wrong part of town' to drive into anyways.
Interesting anecdote: of 127 CSc grads at Waterloo (Canada's top CSc/math University) in 1998, how many went south of the border?
127, of course! And, Chretien continues to insist that there is no brain drain...
Cyano
Oh, I see, so we shouldn't put anything into space (for cheap) because eventually it will become floating space debris and... get in the way of putting more incredibly useful stuff in space?
Honestly, cheap heavy lift is part of the solution to this because now you can afford to put something up in orbit to CLEAN UP THE JUNK!!! Of course, who pays for it becomes another interesting question - but if you really want to put something up there, you sure can afford to clean up anything that's in the way...
And... when did mother nature move up above the atmosphere???
Cyano
The Wheel Weaves as the Wheel Wills
www.attilavista.com
And don't forget the pr0n banner ads that might have appeared for her if she had typed something like
'chocolate chip cockie/cock/coock etc.'
This is good precedent: (IANAL)
If Sony wishes to obtain a lawful monopoly on
the functional concepts in its software, it must satisfy the more stringent standards of the patent laws. See Bonito Boats, Inc. v. Thunder Craft Boats, Inc., 489 U.S. 141, 160-61 (1989); Sega, 977 F.2d at 1526. This Sony has not done. The second statutory factor strongly favors Connectix.
I had more, but knote seems to have eaten them.
back to studying for tomorrow's midterms (yes, that's plural, sucks to be me)
Cyano
The Thomas Edison foundation (or whatever it is called) is a large contributor to the Smithsonian?
Just my $.02.