why would you be using FreeNet if you weren't moving illegal material?
And the logical extension of that is... Why would you be using strong encryption if you weren't moving illegal material?
In both cases, you might be using it for something that's perfectly legal but just private and embarrassing.
Re:engineers are goths at heart
on
Mood Home
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· Score: 1
It had solar panels, double-paned windows with a hollow wall between them and the outside,
A wall between the window and the outside? That kind of defeats the object of the window, doesn't it? Unless the wall is transparent... in which case the window is redundant.
In the computing field, I find that http://www.researchindex.com is very useful - it has 5 million pages worth of papers, mostly from the last decade. A lot of them are on the academic's own homepages anyway - but it also offers some very nice features: citation indexing (forward and backward), active bibliographies, ranking, auto-conversion, etc.
The GPL does not discriminate against people who want to deny OSD rights to recipients of their code.
Such people are perfectly free to modify and/or redistribute GPL'ed code.
This argument is only true for the originator of the software.
Not so. They too are free to modify, use and/or redistribute GPL'd code.
The GPL does not say "You may not use this software for commercial purposes." It does not say "You may not modify this software for commercial purposes". It does not say "You may not distribute this software to further commercial aims". It does not even say "You may not sell this software" (although obviously it makes it impractical to do so profitably, that's why there aren't any commercial Linux distributors - hey, wait a minute...)
(Yes, I know distributions are often loss-leaders, but Red Hat never would have got where it was today were it not for its distribution - loss-leaders can be extremely important to profitability, even if not actually profitable when considered atomically.)
Every licence, and also the Open Source Definition, by definition discriminates against people who would like to break the terms of the license. The GPL is not unique here - The Apache license, for example, discriminates against people who want to use Apache code without giving proper credit, or people who want to call their product "Apache Foo". Neither the GPL or the Apache licenses discriminate against all commercial activities.
Let me give a concrete example. A license falling foul of the discrimination clause would have to say something like "you may not use this software in the production of non-open-source software". That is not what the GPL says. You can use gcc to write any kind of software, proprietary or not.
No, he's talking about the revolutionaries, not the regime. And FYI, atheism means "does NOT believe in God". You confused atheism with its opposite, theism.
I'm sure your average clueless judge or member of the public would say the absence of the keys don't matter, they're easily available on the net therefore it is effectively a circumvention device.
But then where do you draw the line? Remove one character from the end, and it's still a (broken) circumvention device because you can easily get the last char off the net. Keep removing characters... eventually you get to the stage where any compiler, interpreter, or general-purpose microprocessor, is a copyright circumvention device, which is true in a sense (it's potentially a circumenvention device) but legally ridiculous.
If, on the other hand, you say it isn't a circumvention device unless it is physically distributed with the keys, this provides a ridiculously simple legal loophole, rendering the DMCA anti-circumvention-device provision effectively impotent.
That's the Sorites paradox for you.
This is far from unusual though - the Sorites paradox also crops up in many other legal and moral areas. Morally, for example, it seems arbitrary to draw a line and say that killing a foetus at age x days is okay but killing a foetus (or newborn) at age x+1 days is a horrible crime. Yet this is exactly what the law effectively says today.
What do you suggest people do? Take a week our of their lives to read a 400 page manual and work through the
intricacies of installing and setting up unix/linux and spend another few weeks learning the subtleties of securing
said system?
For organisations that are large enough to have sysadmins, that's the sysadmin's job. And yes they should learn to set up a Un*x system and secure it - Red Hat isn't that hard, for one (if you're lucky with the hardware). Ever heard of training courses? Yes they cost money but they can be a good investment - especially when you consider that clueless sysadmins can spend hours doing trivial tasks due to misunderstandings/not knowing the faster ways to do it.
there is clear evidence of a student disrespecting the establishment
Think!! What the hell do you think the First Amendment is for? Is its most important purpose to allow people to say disrespectful things about their parents or something? No, its most important purpose is to allow people to disrespect the establishment. This is supposed to be a democracy. Unfortunately, schools aren't typically very democratic, despite some rather limited school councils.
First of all, "Astrobiology" is a field that NASA invented
I doubt it. I think you'll find the "alternative science" communities were there long before. Charles Fort, for example - he could be more scientific than some of the scientists in his day. (Do you know scientists once claimed that meteorities could not exist, because "There are no rocks in the sky, therefore rocks cannot fall from the sky". Can't fault their logic!)
Today, the field may be defined as the research conducted by those scientists who have noticed the large pot of
money earmarked for Astrobiology at NASA, and have tailored their grant proposals to suit the Research
Opportunity Announcements.
Nearly all scientists need research funding. You say this as if this was something unusual. In fact you could replace "Astrobiology at NASA" with almost any other kind of science and this sentence would still hold true.
Just because a bunch of scientists have seen funding opportunities, doesn't mean they aren't interested in the subject for other reasons as well. Maybe they wanted to do it all along but they didn't want to stick their knecks out - which is actually quite rational risk-averse behaviour for beginning scientists.
particularly given the gales of laughter that greeted the equally breathless announcement
about the last Mars rock with "strong supporting evidence" for life on Mars.
Well, arguably it was a lot stronger than any previous so-called "evidence". And it was good rhetoric, anywhere. The public are generally dumb and short-termist, so it helps occassionally to have a big front-page news story to whip up public support for increased NASA funding (assuming you're in favor of increased NASA funding). Even if the truth has to be stretched somewhat.
Of course, there may be some truth in what you say. But don't forget that funding priorities determine research priorities almost everywhere. This is not unusual.
Seriously guys, please remember that NASA is not a scientific agency. They don't really care about the science -
they care about spaceflight, engineering, launch, astronautics. But not the science.
I think you'll find that accidents resulting in the desctruction of expensive experimental apparatus are taken very seriously.
Bottom line: the opinion of JSC researchers on the subject of that rock is not to be taken seriously.
Bzztt!! Ad homenim (yes, I know, wrong spelling - I didn't do dead languages at school). Minus 150 points to you. Let's see some arguments on the scientific evidence, please, not poorly-justified character assassinations.
You're probably just a jealous researcher in a less-well-funded area, aren't you? If so, maybe if you wised up and learned about the logical fallacies (like ad homenim), you'd become a better scientist.
I'm not joking, incidentally - the rate of serious errors in some scientific or part-scientific fields (e.g. medicine) is appalling. E.g. Statistically meaningless sample sizes, flawed statistic analysis, the common "correlation implies causation" fallacy (implicit or explicit), etc.
Re:This could be bad news for manned space travel.
on
Life On Mars: ALH84001
·
· Score: 1
Don't be an idiot. Are you seriously suggesting that Christopher Columbus should have "relinquished" his exploring (Bill Joy parallel)? Someone else would have gone and found the Americas at some point, so why bother?
Your example supports the previous poster's conclusion - it's not a counterexample.
Yeah, there was an excellent little scene in Charles Dicken's "Great Expectations" railing against that that kind of "I've heard he did it so he must be guilty" stupidity. It's by no means a new phenomenon.
You can't even use GPL 2 code in a
GPL 3 license, or vice-versa, unless someone said "or a later version".
The GPL says "or a later version"! Linus put a note at the top of his copy contradicting that (and it's not clear what legal effect that has) but this is very very rare.
Still, I agree viral licenses are a PITA as regards reuse. That's why the Apache Software Foundation, for one, steers clear of them.
Slashdot Mirror
And the logical extension of that is... Why would you be using strong encryption if you weren't moving illegal material?
In both cases, you might be using it for something that's perfectly legal but just private and embarrassing.
A wall between the window and the outside? That kind of defeats the object of the window, doesn't it? Unless the wall is transparent... in which case the window is redundant.
Bzzt - wrong. Look in the top-right corner of every abstract page - free downloadable copies! 5 million pages in all.
In terms of the citations, though - yes, you're right, not all of them are online.
Hello?? They shouldn't be using rlogin (except maybe on a one-person home network not connected to the internet) - they should be using ssh.
the resurgance of the Conservatives in Britain,
Come on, man, you've got to do better than that.
You HAVE to give out passwords to servers, and they HAVE to store them somewhere, otherwise how are they going to authenticate you?
In the computing field, I find that http://www.researchindex.com is very useful - it has 5 million pages worth of papers, mostly from the last decade. A lot of them are on the academic's own homepages anyway - but it also offers some very nice features: citation indexing (forward and backward), active bibliographies, ranking, auto-conversion, etc.
This argument is only true for the originator of the software.
Not so. They too are free to modify, use and/or redistribute GPL'd code.
The GPL does not say "You may not use this software for commercial purposes." It does not say "You may not modify this software for commercial purposes". It does not say "You may not distribute this software to further commercial aims". It does not even say "You may not sell this software" (although obviously it makes it impractical to do so profitably, that's why there aren't any commercial Linux distributors - hey, wait a minute...)
(Yes, I know distributions are often loss-leaders, but Red Hat never would have got where it was today were it not for its distribution - loss-leaders can be extremely important to profitability, even if not actually profitable when considered atomically.)
Every licence, and also the Open Source Definition, by definition discriminates against people who would like to break the terms of the license. The GPL is not unique here - The Apache license, for example, discriminates against people who want to use Apache code without giving proper credit, or people who want to call their product "Apache Foo". Neither the GPL or the Apache licenses discriminate against all commercial activities.
Let me give a concrete example. A license falling foul of the discrimination clause would have to say something like "you may not use this software in the production of non-open-source software". That is not what the GPL says. You can use gcc to write any kind of software, proprietary or not.
But then where do you draw the line? Remove one character from the end, and it's still a (broken) circumvention device because you can easily get the last char off the net. Keep removing characters... eventually you get to the stage where any compiler, interpreter, or general-purpose microprocessor, is a copyright circumvention device, which is true in a sense (it's potentially a circumenvention device) but legally ridiculous.
If, on the other hand, you say it isn't a circumvention device unless it is physically distributed with the keys, this provides a ridiculously simple legal loophole, rendering the DMCA anti-circumvention-device provision effectively impotent.
That's the Sorites paradox for you.
This is far from unusual though - the Sorites paradox also crops up in many other legal and moral areas. Morally, for example, it seems arbitrary to draw a line and say that killing a foetus at age x days is okay but killing a foetus (or newborn) at age x+1 days is a horrible crime. Yet this is exactly what the law effectively says today.
Your parent post is flamebait, and a really bad troll, because any fool knows SQL Server won't run on DOS (duh!!)
And this, in fact, is one of the key arguments used by the DeCSS defense.
What do you suggest people do? Take a week our of their lives to read a 400 page manual and work through the intricacies of installing and setting up unix/linux and spend another few weeks learning the subtleties of securing said system?
For organisations that are large enough to have sysadmins, that's the sysadmin's job. And yes they should learn to set up a Un*x system and secure it - Red Hat isn't that hard, for one (if you're lucky with the hardware). Ever heard of training courses? Yes they cost money but they can be a good investment - especially when you consider that clueless sysadmins can spend hours doing trivial tasks due to misunderstandings/not knowing the faster ways to do it.
Think!! What the hell do you think the First Amendment is for? Is its most important purpose to allow people to say disrespectful things about their parents or something? No, its most important purpose is to allow people to disrespect the establishment. This is supposed to be a democracy. Unfortunately, schools aren't typically very democratic, despite some rather limited school councils.
I doubt it. I think you'll find the "alternative science" communities were there long before. Charles Fort, for example - he could be more scientific than some of the scientists in his day. (Do you know scientists once claimed that meteorities could not exist, because "There are no rocks in the sky, therefore rocks cannot fall from the sky". Can't fault their logic!)
Today, the field may be defined as the research conducted by those scientists who have noticed the large pot of money earmarked for Astrobiology at NASA, and have tailored their grant proposals to suit the Research Opportunity Announcements.
Nearly all scientists need research funding. You say this as if this was something unusual. In fact you could replace "Astrobiology at NASA" with almost any other kind of science and this sentence would still hold true.
Just because a bunch of scientists have seen funding opportunities, doesn't mean they aren't interested in the subject for other reasons as well. Maybe they wanted to do it all along but they didn't want to stick their knecks out - which is actually quite rational risk-averse behaviour for beginning scientists.
particularly given the gales of laughter that greeted the equally breathless announcement about the last Mars rock with "strong supporting evidence" for life on Mars.
Well, arguably it was a lot stronger than any previous so-called "evidence". And it was good rhetoric, anywhere. The public are generally dumb and short-termist, so it helps occassionally to have a big front-page news story to whip up public support for increased NASA funding (assuming you're in favor of increased NASA funding). Even if the truth has to be stretched somewhat.
Of course, there may be some truth in what you say. But don't forget that funding priorities determine research priorities almost everywhere. This is not unusual.
Seriously guys, please remember that NASA is not a scientific agency. They don't really care about the science - they care about spaceflight, engineering, launch, astronautics. But not the science.
I think you'll find that accidents resulting in the desctruction of expensive experimental apparatus are taken very seriously.
Bottom line: the opinion of JSC researchers on the subject of that rock is not to be taken seriously.
Bzztt!! Ad homenim (yes, I know, wrong spelling - I didn't do dead languages at school). Minus 150 points to you. Let's see some arguments on the scientific evidence, please, not poorly-justified character assassinations.
You're probably just a jealous researcher in a less-well-funded area, aren't you? If so, maybe if you wised up and learned about the logical fallacies (like ad homenim), you'd become a better scientist.
I'm not joking, incidentally - the rate of serious errors in some scientific or part-scientific fields (e.g. medicine) is appalling. E.g. Statistically meaningless sample sizes, flawed statistic analysis, the common "correlation implies causation" fallacy (implicit or explicit), etc.
Your example supports the previous poster's conclusion - it's not a counterexample.
Um...... No, forget it.
The GPL says "or a later version"! Linus put a note at the top of his copy contradicting that (and it's not clear what legal effect that has) but this is very very rare.
Still, I agree viral licenses are a PITA as regards reuse. That's why the Apache Software Foundation, for one, steers clear of them.
Sorry, I switched off after this point. Have you ever worked on an open source project? You do not need managers.