That's not what the CNET article claims. It says that sending any (U)CE using fraudulent headers will be illegal (hooray!), and that registering for 5 or more email addresses using false details will be illegal.
Both crimes will carry penalties of up to 3 years jail time!
I'm happy. It won't stop all spam, but it will stop most of the US-originating spammers, if properly enforced.
Um, RMS proclaims the virtues of open source not at all these days. He proclaims the purist virtues of Free Software, and denounces the advocates of Open Source as lacking in moral principle.
It's very good, very stable, fast, lightweight, has good defaults, is nice and secure, and get this - you don't have to compile anything ever if you don't want.
Course, I would advise compiling the latest SSH/Apache/FTPd whatever daemons you run, and whatever apps have local root exploits,
So what you're saying is, if you want an exploitable server, use Gentoo Linux and you'll never have to compile anything?
But if you don't, you will have to compile all updates, right? Or has this situation changed?
His books make wild leap of faith arguments, and most importantly, he's commited the unforigivable error of having a hypothesis based on personal beliefs which he then searches for evidence to support.
That's not particularly unusual in science or technical beliefs (basing a hypothesis on "hunches" for example) and doesn't imply that he is wrong. Indeed, he has sought out and rationally rebutted many common objections to his arguments, as you'd know if you'd read Shadows of the Mind.
Except they didn't patent a function. The patented a specific means for achieving that function.
That dubious distinction is how software patents are supposed to work. That's the propaganda that patent supporters put about. In reality, however, they don't work like that. My understanding is that they patent a series of Claims, any one of which, if you infringe, you are infringing the patent. The rest of it is just verbiage needed to impress the patent examiners and the court into believing that the "invention" is "innovative", but it's not actually the pivot about which patent disputes revolve. The Claims are the pivot.
Now if you read the Claims, Claim #1 is ridiculously overbroad, and Claim #2 would be self-parody if it weren't so deadly serious.
So no, they are trying to patent ideas, not just narrow, specific implementations. It appears to be absolutely standard practice to do so - and as we see with the farcical Eolas case, not only the PTO but even the courts will sometimes allow plaintiffs to do this. (I suspect in the Eolas case the judge must have been bribed, or perhaps off his trolley - why else would he bar the showing of obvious prior art?)
One shouldn't bow down to patent lawyers, or indeed any kind of lawyers, as if they were some kind of deities who must be consulted to even understand one claim of a patent. That's not the case.
Moreover, it's important to read the last paragraph of the patent, and realise that the claims are what really matters. And it's quite traditional to put a ridiculously overbroad claim in as Claim #1 - because it's safer to do so and because they just know the PTO will let it sail through, just as they have for so many patents in the past.
The claims are in fact possible to decipher. Check out Claim #1. It's bullshit to say that's innovation. Now, just for laughs, read claim #2. It's pathetic.
It doesn't take a patent lawyer to tell that this patent is not an "invention".
And before you dispute that, I'd like to remind you that patents are supposed to be a mechanism to serve the public interest. They are not supposed to be a mechanism to force the public to serve the interests of inventors.
recently in the past month i started to read your online diary and also your Robitc Nations series of essays. I cannot help but get a sense of a crank.
From your strange capitalisation habits (reminiscent of certain trolls) I cannot help but get a sense of a crank, or troll. I'm sorry, that's just the way it is.
However, your statement "Society as it is designed today wastes an unbelievable amount of human potential through mechanisms just like these." is outrageous and absurd.
Societies are not designed. And, it doesn't "waste" things.
You are being overly literal. Suffering from caffeine deprivation? Sleep deprivation? Or do you just have an overly literal way of reacting to things? The quoted setence is perfectly comprehensible to a reasonable individual.
However, it is harmful to propergate the implication that there is an evil doer or collection of greedy businessman forcing artisans to their sorry condition.
No it isn't. It is truthful. The people who are destroying our planet, the people who are increasing world poverty, the people who are supporting murderous regimes that enslave whole nations, exist, and they have names and addresses.
Linux is far from being considered the best.
He said "one of the best". Which is what you also said. So where's the disagreement here?
This i find ridiculous. Linux is perhaps one of the best operating system on the planet for a computing professional who love free things, but it is UNUSABLE for the vast consumer in homes or corporations.
That's bullshit. You don't know what the fuck you're talking about. Are you stuck in a 1995 timewarp or something? Or tried one distro and think that "is Linux"? Give me one reason why Linux per se is "unusable" for the "vast majority" of consumers in homes or corporations (and which doesn't also apply to Windows XP etc.)?
However, since you are a full-time online writer with your celebrity status, i question if your alarmist tone and style is doing some great harm to the geek community, who are already poor on social sciences and prone to conspiracy theories.
One of my pet hates is the Slashdot post which chastises other people for their alleged ignorance of social sciences (usually economics), but fails to elucidate any significant, valid criticisms. This happens often. Your post is IMO an example of it.
I am not a Marxist but there are a couple of important background points here. First, Marx hated Marxism for good reason--Marx was a capitalist. His angry missive of the Communist Manifesto was an amazing display of self-masochism and simply at odds with his real beliefs.
The/proc filesystem on Linux 2.4.x (and earlier, I assume) is a bit broken. All file sizes are reported as 0, which breaks high-level input routines in glibc, and at least some drivers don't handle random access reads well. grep may work OK, but in general it's safest to always use cat to read from procfs.
If they had meant "exact version required" they would have said "exact version required", not "minimum", don't you think? Thanks for the useless explanation.
We need to think about lateral solutions to the problem, like "how to ensure that children can't get into that situation."
And if we lock children indoors, all 20 will survive.
Seriously, quantitative decisions about "how much bad" to allow almost never solve problems.
But if we can save a lot of lives, especially children's lives, by enforcing or lowering speed limits, why shouldn't we do it? Some scientifically-proven reduction is better than no reduction due to flailing about with some namby-pamby, wishy-washy, touchy-feely, education programme that probably won't work because it's been tried already. Let's stop beating about the bush and enforce the laws we already have!
I'm running the current 2.4.x release that Gentoo has and I tried with the preemptive kernel options, but it only seemed to break a lot of modules. Even deleting the modules folder and rebuilding caused many of the modules to fail on startup saying that it could not find the preempt function (something like that)make clean / make mrproper didn't help either so I'll wait to 2.6 is gold before messing with it again.
You must not be building or installing correctly. Perhaps the ebuild scripts are broken, or perhaps you're not using them correctly - I don't use Gentoo so I couldn't say.
It sounds like you built the kernel but didn't install it correctly, hence the not finding the preempt routine messages.
The safest way to recompile a kernel without problems is:
Make sure you have a saved copy of the configuration you want to use / base it on
Run "make mrproper" (which tries to return the build directory to a pristine state, without even a configuration file)
Put the configuration back
Run "make oldconfig" if you don't want to change anything, or some other variant of "make fooconfig" if you do.
Slashdot Mirror
Both crimes will carry penalties of up to 3 years jail time!
I'm happy. It won't stop all spam, but it will stop most of the US-originating spammers, if properly enforced.
Funnily enough... look at the copyright statement at the bottom of the page...
Course, I would advise compiling the latest SSH/Apache/FTPd whatever daemons you run, and whatever apps have local root exploits,
So what you're saying is, if you want an exploitable server, use Gentoo Linux and you'll never have to compile anything?
But if you don't, you will have to compile all updates, right? Or has this situation changed?
That's not particularly unusual in science or technical beliefs (basing a hypothesis on "hunches" for example) and doesn't imply that he is wrong. Indeed, he has sought out and rationally rebutted many common objections to his arguments, as you'd know if you'd read Shadows of the Mind.
You are incorrect.
No, you are incorrect. First there is no 'kernel license'.
WRONG!
Second, GPL is also used for user-land applications.
True - but IRRELEVANT
Third, Linus has no 'interpretation' of the GPL.
WRONG!
Forth, there are no exemptions.
WRONG!
That dubious distinction is how software patents are supposed to work. That's the propaganda that patent supporters put about. In reality, however, they don't work like that. My understanding is that they patent a series of Claims, any one of which, if you infringe, you are infringing the patent. The rest of it is just verbiage needed to impress the patent examiners and the court into believing that the "invention" is "innovative", but it's not actually the pivot about which patent disputes revolve. The Claims are the pivot.
Now if you read the Claims, Claim #1 is ridiculously overbroad, and Claim #2 would be self-parody if it weren't so deadly serious.
So no, they are trying to patent ideas, not just narrow, specific implementations. It appears to be absolutely standard practice to do so - and as we see with the farcical Eolas case, not only the PTO but even the courts will sometimes allow plaintiffs to do this. (I suspect in the Eolas case the judge must have been bribed, or perhaps off his trolley - why else would he bar the showing of obvious prior art?)
Moreover, it's important to read the last paragraph of the patent, and realise that the claims are what really matters. And it's quite traditional to put a ridiculously overbroad claim in as Claim #1 - because it's safer to do so and because they just know the PTO will let it sail through, just as they have for so many patents in the past.
The claims are in fact possible to decipher. Check out Claim #1. It's bullshit to say that's innovation. Now, just for laughs, read claim #2. It's pathetic.
It doesn't take a patent lawyer to tell that this patent is not an "invention".
And before you dispute that, I'd like to remind you that patents are supposed to be a mechanism to serve the public interest. They are not supposed to be a mechanism to force the public to serve the interests of inventors.
[*] one of the names for this idea.
From your strange capitalisation habits (reminiscent of certain trolls) I cannot help but get a sense of a crank, or troll. I'm sorry, that's just the way it is.
However, your statement "Society as it is designed today wastes an unbelievable amount of human potential through mechanisms just like these." is outrageous and absurd.
Societies are not designed. And, it doesn't "waste" things.
You are being overly literal. Suffering from caffeine deprivation? Sleep deprivation? Or do you just have an overly literal way of reacting to things? The quoted setence is perfectly comprehensible to a reasonable individual.
However, it is harmful to propergate the implication that there is an evil doer or collection of greedy businessman forcing artisans to their sorry condition.
No it isn't. It is truthful. The people who are destroying our planet, the people who are increasing world poverty, the people who are supporting murderous regimes that enslave whole nations, exist, and they have names and addresses.
Linux is far from being considered the best.
He said "one of the best". Which is what you also said. So where's the disagreement here?
This i find ridiculous. Linux is perhaps one of the best operating system on the planet for a computing professional who love free things, but it is UNUSABLE for the vast consumer in homes or corporations.
That's bullshit. You don't know what the fuck you're talking about. Are you stuck in a 1995 timewarp or something? Or tried one distro and think that "is Linux"? Give me one reason why Linux per se is "unusable" for the "vast majority" of consumers in homes or corporations (and which doesn't also apply to Windows XP etc.)?
However, since you are a full-time online writer with your celebrity status, i question if your alarmist tone and style is doing some great harm to the geek community, who are already poor on social sciences and prone to conspiracy theories.
One of my pet hates is the Slashdot post which chastises other people for their alleged ignorance of social sciences (usually economics), but fails to elucidate any significant, valid criticisms. This happens often. Your post is IMO an example of it.
Really?? Can you elaborate on that point?
Is it still? I never notice - I browse at 1.
And if we lock children indoors, all 20 will survive.
Seriously, quantitative decisions about "how much bad" to allow almost never solve problems.
But if we can save a lot of lives, especially children's lives, by enforcing or lowering speed limits, why shouldn't we do it? Some scientifically-proven reduction is better than no reduction due to flailing about with some namby-pamby, wishy-washy, touchy-feely, education programme that probably won't work because it's been tried already. Let's stop beating about the bush and enforce the laws we already have!
You must not be building or installing correctly. Perhaps the ebuild scripts are broken, or perhaps you're not using them correctly - I don't use Gentoo so I couldn't say.
It sounds like you built the kernel but didn't install it correctly, hence the not finding the preempt routine messages.
The safest way to recompile a kernel without problems is:
The way you've got it now sounds very Aristotlian. And wrong.
The parent post didn't claim that. Ask an average Brit if they think Tony Blair's government is socialist.
What did she write that gave you the impression that she wasn't smart?
(Apart from "down loaders" [sic])
What else should they be based on?
Bribes?
The Didio quotes are there, in the Salon article, on page 2.
Otherwise that would be a loophole in the GPL big enough to drive a truck through.