What in my post makes me an asshole? Because I disagree with you? Since when was not following your politics make one an asshole?
"You do not have the right to just walk up to my house and right the doorbell to sell me crap if I have a "No Solicitors" sign on the front gate."
I agree with the general case, however, it differs from what we have here. First of all, in the case of a "No Solicitors" sign, the "no solicitors" sign is posted by the individual, and not in a government-maintained and paid-for database.
YOU are communicating that you don't want to be disturbed. You are not enlisting the government to communicate that for you, unless someone abuses it. Only then is the government involved. In addition, it probably would not be suable if the person didn't see the sign, etc., which is good. Under the "telephone" law, if someone makes a _mistake_, they owe $500. That's crazy! $500 for a database glitch or an user-entry error! It's absolutely insane.
I could see something where the phone company allowed you to place a message for all callers where you could say "no solicitors allowed" or whatever. See, that would be left in the hands of private citizens, and not the government, which is already WAY too big. It would only go to the government if seriously abused by the same person or group repeatedly.
"Do I have the right to follow you around every day and annoy you? no, I don't, that is called harassment."
The lines between harassment and legitimate communication are blurry. I agree that harassment should be illegal. However, not everything that you don't like qualifies as harassment.
"Not everything you can reach belongs to you. Go back to kindergarten & see if you can pick up on that concept."
I didn't argue that, only that the government should not be involved.
'ust out of curiosity, do you really mean your emails generate "click throughs", or do you mean "web-bugs used to verify that some sucker is reading email in an HTML-using program and that we have a live address"?'
Yes, I am talking about someone actually clicking through to the site, intentionally. As I said, the people we send to generally _ask_ to be sent to, or are at least already a customer of the person. Think about it, when you ask for email, it's because you want it. For example, on half.com I'm signed up to get emails when certain books reach certain prices. You bet I click through on those!
Our clients are more local, and have local customer bases, but the same concepts apply.
" I don't see your way of thinking. People RELY on a phone for communications. If that communication channel gets filled with junk, it is useless."
I agree with you to a point, but I don't like the government mandating how that happens. The private sector should do that, and, in a large part, they are (ever heard of tele-zapper?)
Remember, everything the government does they do by the authority of guns and violence. Many things are worth this, but many things are better left to the authority of social norms, not people with guns.
The problem is that these days we've decided to trash all forms of social norms, and just let big daddy government handle all of our worries, which is why they chew up over 30% of our paychecks (which makes life difficult when you have 15% going to medical expenses of family).
When given the choice between organizing protests and boycotts against unethical companies and making laws against them, lately we've been choosing the law. The problem is that it makes it difficult to do anything without someone having the ability to take you to court.
"How is this any different from a phone ringing when you don't want to be disturbed?"
If I don't want to be disturbed, I turn my phone off. I have a little more say about my house, because it's my property. But I have no right to prevent someone coming near my property and shouting in my direction "are you home?"
They are either lists that people sign up for, or are our customer's customer lists. We coach our customers how to collect email addresses from their clients, how to keep in touch with them the best, etc.
"No, you shouldn't have the right to call me for a certain purpose if I specifically state that I do not want to be called for that certain purpose."
Why not? You don't have to pick up the phone. If contacting someone for a purpose they don't appreciate is illegal, we have already lost many of our freedoms.
Should we have a "do not ring my doorbell list" for people who don't want strangers ringing their doorbell? No, we shouldn't. We should simply not answer the doorbell if it's someone we don't like.
Making silly little laws against everything that annoys certain individuals eventually leads to a world where you can't do anything without getting sued. Ooops. we're already there. Gee, wonder why our economy is in the trash.
Although I agree that "do-not-call" lists are bad when regulated by the government (I should have every right to call you for any purpose, just as you should have every right to not pick up the phone), I am surprised that telemarketers don't like the concept.
I work in email-marketing, and we get and maintain our clients on the basis of what percentage of click-throughs we get. If someone doesn't want to receive the email and we send it anyway, that just hurts our click-through ratio. We usually get about 10-30% click-throughs on our emails. We try to get the list as clean as possible so that we can show them how successful it was, rather than unsuccessful.
I'm surprised, then, that the telemarketing association would go against the do-not-call list. It reduces their target area to people who don't mind being called! This should increase, not decrease, their success.
So, I'm against the law as a law, but I think the telemarketing agencies are stupid for not at least holding their own.
"gets(), dangerous as it is, cannot just be yanked out from under the millions of lines of product code that it supports."
I don't think it's as bad as you say. If you are actually using gets() in production, you deserve to have the LSB guys take up your time fixing it. It's not for the vendors, it's for the user's of vendor's software.
Re:Please explain away the whole threading lib
on
LSB & Posix Conflicts
·
· Score: 1
I actually like it. You see, with Linux, there are just processes (this may have changed recently, but go with me here). You can have processes that share nothing (like most processes) or processes that share everything (like threads). However, it's more general than that. Processes can share memory, file descriptors, certain regions of memory -- ANYTHING. So, you basically have one concept of processes, and another concept of sharing, and you can share or not share anything you like. Shared nothings are just called "processes" while shared everythings are called "threads", but really there's no technical distinction between the two.
I agree with your sentiments, but, contrary to popular belief, Linux is NOT a single operating system. Linux is a single kernel that runs several different operating systems.
Hmmm.... "X" didn't put together an operating system, neither did GNOME or KDE. BSD is the closest thing, but really the runtime of Linux is GNU. The whole thing would just be GNU, except that RMS wanted to give credit to Linus, without whom GNU/Linux would still be waiting on those HURD developers.
' We might not want to live in a world where the patent office "pushes innovation by ownership," but it's the reality of Capitalism. You can't turn off cash flow, or you essentially turn off innovation and invention.'
Completely incorrect. In fact, it has been noted by many that the free flow of information is what makes progress happen. The Internet and advances in communication are what are making the technological advances of today, not patents and copyrights.
"I love Open Source Software, but I also respect the rights of others, however evil they might be."
IP is not a _right_. It is a grant of monopoly FROM THE PUBLIC to others in order that society can benefit. As it is given by the public, the public can remove the benefit/grant at will, when it is being misused. This is much different from other things (free speech, etc) which are believed to be rights of people, not grants from the public.
"They're selling ideas and expressions of ideas, and if you say they can't control their creations you're saying they have no right to make a living."
What we're saying is that they have no right to make a living by restricting the freedoms of the rest of us. There is nothing wrong with saying that certain means of making a living is wrong.
Just because _you_ can't think of a way to make money when ideas are copyable doesn't mean they don't exist. In fact, artists and inventors have been producing excellent works and being paid for them long before there were ANY IP laws.
"That's the problem with the FSF et al - they expect everyone else to respect the GPL, but they won't reciprocate by respecting licenses such as the EULA."
On what planet has the FSF not followed the licenses it must obey? Please list examples.
Company A takes your code, uses it in their products.
They notice some of the ideas in there are patentable.
They take out patents on your ideas
They send you a cease and decist order to you to stop distributing your code, because you are in violation of their license.
You say, "but YOU are using MY code"!
They say, "we have a patent, and YOU don't - all your code are belong to us."
Although you can prove that they are using your code, you can't prove that you had the idea before them, or that it was adequately distributed as to count as prior art.
With the GPL, if you can prove that they are distributing your code, they have given agreements to all to use it under these terms without the threat of patents.
Actually, what really makes the GPL code more free is that the company who uses BSD code can come out with patents and other such idiocy to block companies from using the original BSD code. With the GPL, the person who redistributes has to validate that they aren't going to set up any such roadblock.
IE1 is basically Microsoft using Spyglass's code, but without paying the royalties. Microsoft eventually just payed them a "one-time licensing fee", which is a cover for "either take this or we'll kill you in court". Stories available:
Interestingly, because Microsoft distributed GPL code, that means that any patents that would be applicable over that code are not usable in an attack against _ANY_ GPL code.
"But there are plenty of discoveries that wouldn't have been made if not for patents -- prescription drugs, for example."
Most of the discoveries that "wouldn't have made it if not for patents" are those that only benefit the creator. Take prescription drugs, for instance. Many, many prescription drugs just do what natural substances do. However, since they are patentable, that's what they use, and that's what they convince doctors to use.
"what methods of income does OSS provide besides Licensing and the honor system?"
There are several ways to earn income:
1) Get a job at a place the _uses_ OSS heavily. Likely that will include making updates and changes.
2) Get a job consulting. This is like #1 above, but being done on behalf of clients, not your boss. This can also include writing new software from scratch.
3) Get a job supporting companies using OSS software.
Often times, companies need to be explained the benefits of the open-source approach for them. I have seen this done successfully many times. The person I work for now had never heard of open-source before I came on board, but now it is one of the major parts of what we do. Chris, the head honcho here, explains to customers how technical people improve on each others work by sharing and helping each other, and that these developers have an implicit access to a larger pool of specialists. Therefore, by releasing what they need under an open license, they have access to specialists, but for the cost of a smaller development company. The tradeoff is that they have to share part or all of what is produced.
For hosted projects, clients usually don't even care. They don't even ask to see the code. If you use an OSS project wholesale, use pieces, or open-source what you build yourself, they really don't care.
One thing most people don't know is that the Free Software Foundation was funded in its early days almost entirely from Richard Stallman writing custom extensions to emacs.
Also, remember, open-source does not require that you post something publicly. Only that, for whoever you distribute, you must give the rights enumerated in the GPL, including source code.
Slashdot Mirror
" I believe you are a Troll"
Why? Check my posting history.
"maybe you are just an asshole"
What in my post makes me an asshole? Because I disagree with you? Since when was not following your politics make one an asshole?
"You do not have the right to just walk up to my house and right the doorbell to sell me crap if I have a "No Solicitors" sign on the front gate."
I agree with the general case, however, it differs from what we have here. First of all, in the case of a "No Solicitors" sign, the "no solicitors" sign is posted by the individual, and not in a government-maintained and paid-for database.
YOU are communicating that you don't want to be disturbed. You are not enlisting the government to communicate that for you, unless someone abuses it. Only then is the government involved. In addition, it probably would not be suable if the person didn't see the sign, etc., which is good. Under the "telephone" law, if someone makes a _mistake_, they owe $500. That's crazy! $500 for a database glitch or an user-entry error! It's absolutely insane.
I could see something where the phone company allowed you to place a message for all callers where you could say "no solicitors allowed" or whatever. See, that would be left in the hands of private citizens, and not the government, which is already WAY too big. It would only go to the government if seriously abused by the same person or group repeatedly.
" I can accept that. As long as you recognize my right to bill you my hourly rate for my time (one hour minimum charge), of course."
If that is communicated up front, it sounds like a great idea.
"Do I have the right to follow you around every day and annoy you? no, I don't, that is called harassment."
The lines between harassment and legitimate communication are blurry. I agree that harassment should be illegal. However, not everything that you don't like qualifies as harassment.
"Not everything you can reach belongs to you. Go back to kindergarten & see if you can pick up on that concept."
I didn't argue that, only that the government should not be involved.
'ust out of curiosity, do you really mean your emails generate "click throughs", or do you mean "web-bugs used to verify that some sucker is reading email in an HTML-using program and that we have a live address"?'
Yes, I am talking about someone actually clicking through to the site, intentionally. As I said, the people we send to generally _ask_ to be sent to, or are at least already a customer of the person. Think about it, when you ask for email, it's because you want it. For example, on half.com I'm signed up to get emails when certain books reach certain prices. You bet I click through on those!
Our clients are more local, and have local customer bases, but the same concepts apply.
" I don't see your way of thinking. People RELY on a phone for communications. If that communication channel gets filled with junk, it is useless."
I agree with you to a point, but I don't like the government mandating how that happens. The private sector should do that, and, in a large part, they are (ever heard of tele-zapper?)
Remember, everything the government does they do by the authority of guns and violence. Many things are worth this, but many things are better left to the authority of social norms, not people with guns.
The problem is that these days we've decided to trash all forms of social norms, and just let big daddy government handle all of our worries, which is why they chew up over 30% of our paychecks (which makes life difficult when you have 15% going to medical expenses of family).
When given the choice between organizing protests and boycotts against unethical companies and making laws against them, lately we've been choosing the law. The problem is that it makes it difficult to do anything without someone having the ability to take you to court.
"How is this any different from a phone ringing when you don't want to be disturbed?"
If I don't want to be disturbed, I turn my phone off. I have a little more say about my house, because it's my property. But I have no right to prevent someone coming near my property and shouting in my direction "are you home?"
They are either lists that people sign up for, or are our customer's customer lists. We coach our customers how to collect email addresses from their clients, how to keep in touch with them the best, etc.
"No, you shouldn't have the right to call me for a certain purpose if I specifically state that I do not want to be called for that certain purpose."
Why not? You don't have to pick up the phone. If contacting someone for a purpose they don't appreciate is illegal, we have already lost many of our freedoms.
Should we have a "do not ring my doorbell list" for people who don't want strangers ringing their doorbell? No, we shouldn't. We should simply not answer the doorbell if it's someone we don't like.
Making silly little laws against everything that annoys certain individuals eventually leads to a world where you can't do anything without getting sued. Ooops. we're already there. Gee, wonder why our economy is in the trash.
Although I agree that "do-not-call" lists are bad when regulated by the government (I should have every right to call you for any purpose, just as you should have every right to not pick up the phone), I am surprised that telemarketers don't like the concept.
I work in email-marketing, and we get and maintain our clients on the basis of what percentage of click-throughs we get. If someone doesn't want to receive the email and we send it anyway, that just hurts our click-through ratio. We usually get about 10-30% click-throughs on our emails. We try to get the list as clean as possible so that we can show them how successful it was, rather than unsuccessful.
I'm surprised, then, that the telemarketing association would go against the do-not-call list. It reduces their target area to people who don't mind being called! This should increase, not decrease, their success.
So, I'm against the law as a law, but I think the telemarketing agencies are stupid for not at least holding their own.
I use /opt/webhosting/
/opt/webhosting/conf for config data /opt/webhosting/sites/xxx.yy.zzz/htdocs is where each site goes.
/var/webhosting instead?
since the actual web sites are different than the Apache program. I consider a website to be a "package" which changes often.
I have
I don't know if the FHS would agree with me, but perhaps
"gets(), dangerous as it is, cannot just be yanked out from under the millions of lines of product code that it supports."
I don't think it's as bad as you say. If you are actually using gets() in production, you deserve to have the LSB guys take up your time fixing it. It's not for the vendors, it's for the user's of vendor's software.
I actually like it. You see, with Linux, there are just processes (this may have changed recently, but go with me here). You can have processes that share nothing (like most processes) or processes that share everything (like threads). However, it's more general than that. Processes can share memory, file descriptors, certain regions of memory -- ANYTHING. So, you basically have one concept of processes, and another concept of sharing, and you can share or not share anything you like. Shared nothings are just called "processes" while shared everythings are called "threads", but really there's no technical distinction between the two.
I agree with your sentiments, but, contrary to popular belief, Linux is NOT a single operating system. Linux is a single kernel that runs several different operating systems.
Hmmm.... "X" didn't put together an operating system, neither did GNOME or KDE. BSD is the closest thing, but really the runtime of Linux is GNU. The whole thing would just be GNU, except that RMS wanted to give credit to Linus, without whom GNU/Linux would still be waiting on those HURD developers.
' We might not want to live in a world where the patent office "pushes innovation by ownership," but it's the reality of Capitalism. You can't turn off cash flow, or you essentially turn off innovation and invention.'
Completely incorrect. In fact, it has been noted by many that the free flow of information is what makes progress happen. The Internet and advances in communication are what are making the technological advances of today, not patents and copyrights.
"I love Open Source Software, but I also respect the rights of others, however evil they might be."
IP is not a _right_. It is a grant of monopoly FROM THE PUBLIC to others in order that society can benefit. As it is given by the public, the public can remove the benefit/grant at will, when it is being misused. This is much different from other things (free speech, etc) which are believed to be rights of people, not grants from the public.
"They're selling ideas and expressions of ideas, and if you say they can't control their creations you're saying they have no right to make a living."
What we're saying is that they have no right to make a living by restricting the freedoms of the rest of us. There is nothing wrong with saying that certain means of making a living is wrong.
Just because _you_ can't think of a way to make money when ideas are copyable doesn't mean they don't exist. In fact, artists and inventors have been producing excellent works and being paid for them long before there were ANY IP laws.
Apple didn't "rip off" Xerox. Xerox gave it to them.
"That's the problem with the FSF et al - they expect everyone else to respect the GPL, but they won't reciprocate by respecting licenses such as the EULA."
On what planet has the FSF not followed the licenses it must obey? Please list examples.
A better example:
You develop BSD code
Company A takes your code, uses it in their products.
They notice some of the ideas in there are patentable.
They take out patents on your ideas
They send you a cease and decist order to you to stop distributing your code, because you are in violation of their license.
You say, "but YOU are using MY code"!
They say, "we have a patent, and YOU don't - all your code are belong to us."
Although you can prove that they are using your code, you can't prove that you had the idea before them, or that it was adequately distributed as to count as prior art.
With the GPL, if you can prove that they are distributing your code, they have given agreements to all to use it under these terms without the threat of patents.
Actually, what really makes the GPL code more free is that the company who uses BSD code can come out with patents and other such idiocy to block companies from using the original BSD code. With the GPL, the person who redistributes has to validate that they aren't going to set up any such roadblock.
IE1 is basically Microsoft using Spyglass's code, but without paying the royalties. Microsoft eventually just payed them a "one-time licensing fee", which is a cover for "either take this or we'll kill you in court". Stories available:
c net
http://news.com.com/2100-1001_3-258791.html
http://news.com.com/2100-1001-264079.html?legacy=
Interestingly, because Microsoft distributed GPL code, that means that any patents that would be applicable over that code are not usable in an attack against _ANY_ GPL code.
"But there are plenty of discoveries that wouldn't have been made if not for patents -- prescription drugs, for example."
Most of the discoveries that "wouldn't have made it if not for patents" are those that only benefit the creator. Take prescription drugs, for instance. Many, many prescription drugs just do what natural substances do. However, since they are patentable, that's what they use, and that's what they convince doctors to use.
"what methods of income does OSS provide besides Licensing and the honor system?"
There are several ways to earn income:
1) Get a job at a place the _uses_ OSS heavily. Likely that will include making updates and changes.
2) Get a job consulting. This is like #1 above, but being done on behalf of clients, not your boss. This can also include writing new software from scratch.
3) Get a job supporting companies using OSS software.
Often times, companies need to be explained the benefits of the open-source approach for them. I have seen this done successfully many times. The person I work for now had never heard of open-source before I came on board, but now it is one of the major parts of what we do. Chris, the head honcho here, explains to customers how technical people improve on each others work by sharing and helping each other, and that these developers have an implicit access to a larger pool of specialists. Therefore, by releasing what they need under an open license, they have access to specialists, but for the cost of a smaller development company. The tradeoff is that they have to share part or all of what is produced.
For hosted projects, clients usually don't even care. They don't even ask to see the code. If you use an OSS project wholesale, use pieces, or open-source what you build yourself, they really don't care.
One thing most people don't know is that the Free Software Foundation was funded in its early days almost entirely from Richard Stallman writing custom extensions to emacs.
Also, remember, open-source does not require that you post something publicly. Only that, for whoever you distribute, you must give the rights enumerated in the GPL, including source code.