I can't believe that Tim O'Reilly is going to be one of the panelists. Or any of their other panelists. Somehow I doubt that they're going to have someone from the FSF or representing free software there at all.
There's nothing wrong with open source if your #1 priority is the popularity of your application, the user base, and what development model you prefer. But while those are important priorities for free softare, the number one priority is freedom. And somehow I doubt that they're going to have anybody there that's willing to go to bat for freedom. The result is usually a bastardized discussion where "open source" luminaries try to justify their existence to the business world. And while they may sometimes do a good job, they're still missing the point that the reason open source exists is because someone gave a damn about freedom above everything else.
I think you're seriously confusing the issues of whether or not you have access to the source code with whether or not you have to pay for the application.
Unless you're not mentioning some detail of that transaction, Bill Gates opposing people not paying for his BASIC program has nothing to do with his opinion on open source or free software.
My favorite RMS quote is this - "Just because it's free software doesn't mean that you can afford it". Let's not spread assumptions about free software or open source by acting as if the gratis nature of many open source and free software projects is the only way to do it.
So by your logic, since cops are evil since a few cops commit crimes, black people are very evil, because many black people commit crimes. Yay for collective labelling.
Are you intentionally missing the point? It's not crime in general I'm talking about, that was your "collective labelling". What I'm talking about is crime committed by cops which is specifically a violation of public trust and a misuse of their authority. Not everybody can even commit the same crimes as cops can, because they supposedly have the public trust, and they definately have power in the form of nightsticks and handguns.
It's a time-honored absurd form of arguing to extend the argument to something that clearly isn't included in the discussion and then attack the false conclusion instead of the original point.
For someone supposedly trying to point at abuses of prejudice from the police you dish out a very aweful injustice yourself.
Tell me, do you think they're equivalent? I may be unfairly representing cops, that's just my admittedly heated opinion about them from the kids in my highschool that I've seen go on to become cops.
Do you truely think those you describe could ever grow up wanting to hurt innocent people? Then you have very little grasp of reality. Those in the circumstances you describe often grow up to be very humble and honourable people with a real desire to uncover the exact same issues you are describing.
Certainly there are good people who were like that earlier in life. What I'm trying to say though is that the occupation of police officer may attract good people who want to make the world a better place, but it probably also attracts people who want to have authority and power over others. Cops make split second decisions on whether people live or die, and we both know that there are people out there that this really appeals to. Those are just the people that shouldn't be cops. IMHO, those are the types of people that end up committing these crimes against the people they patrol.
What you have said here started off well but you have proved that even wise words can come from an idiot. Think about what you're saying, some of those picked on, were picked on for standing up against the crowd, for being themselves when pressure to conform was highest, for not allowing the other picked on kids to go it alone. For helping the weakest amongst them. Being Heroes if you like. Yes, we hated them at school but look back again, they are the least of our wories in society now. In fact, you are probably still one of their nighmares.
Why is it that of the entire post you pick out this one small portion of my personal opinion to attack? Did it hit a raw nerve of some sort? I was like this on highschool too, but I didn't end up becoming a cop. I wasn't one of the people who picked on those kids, so I doubt I'm still in their nightmares, but I'm not sure why you feel the need to attack me as an "idiot" for expressing personal opinion.
While the AC is clearly either naive or a troll (his "If he hadn't run, he wouldn't have gotten shot" logic is hilarious), ad hominem attacks aren't much better. I thought far more of your post before I got to the end.
Taking a guess that the poster is probably white isn't an ad-hominem attack, unless it's recently become somehow bad to be white in America that I didn't know about.
Thinking of the readership of slashdot, with the SES factors of income it takes to be interested in technology, have internet access, and percentages on the internet, I think it's fairly safe to guess (although I have no way of knowing that I'm right/wrong) that the poster was white. The reason I was pointing that out is that its very common for whites in the suburbs who have never seen inner city cops to act as apologists for cops because they never see the things people are so angry about when it comes to the cops.
That's what I was trying to sum up when I said that. And I don't think it's an ad hominem attack. If I tell you "you are a white man", do you think that it's an insult or an attack on your character?
1) unarmed black (or white) men shouldn't run away, at night when an arrest warrant is being served. If he hadn't run, he wouldn't have gotten shot.
Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't see the logic that running away from a cop deserves the death penalty. It's all so clear now.
2) The guy who sodomized the poor guy with a broken broom handle is now serving a lengthy stretch in a state prison, so what is your point?
Uh, that he did it? Regardless of whether or not he went to jail, he did it, and cops all over America are commiting other crimes as well. I think what got that guy was the media. If it hadn't been reported nation wide, his own police unit probably could have covered it up enough. That's another thing that makes me sick about cops. Their loyalty to one another forces them to lie for one another even when they know that one of their members is in the wrong.
Cops are people, and people break laws, what is important is that they are punished when they do.
But only when they get caught, which isn't very often. And even when they do get caught, it's a citizens word against a cop's. Who is the judge listening to?
4) Last I heard, the guys that beat down Rodney King are doing a stretch in a federal prison.
Whether or not cops are in prison has nothing to do with what I'm talking about, which is that they are often extremely brutal motherfuckers that are often willing to do some pretty nasty things to people. Cops are often small, small human beings. The type that got made fun of in junior high and could never get dates. Give them guns and clubs, and you get the crimes that I listed. Just because somebody went to jail for them doesn't mean they're any less horrible or any less likely to occur in the future.
But then again, you're probably a middle class whiteboy who doesn't have to worry about these types of things, since you're never a target. What do you care?
Blaming the US for the Quebec police is stretching things.
Ever hear about the Quebec or Candian police doing anything like that when the US isn't involved? The meeting may have taken place in Quebec, but it was about North American free trade. The main proponent of which is the US, who also tends to deal with its citizens like that when they protest.
Of course you always have a few bad incidents, and with a watchdog media that needs to fill the insatiable news demand of america, any incident gets blown out of proportion.
Exactly how do you blow out of proportion a dude getting sodomized with a broken broom handle while in custody? Nobody needs to sensationalize that, that's just plain torture. Also, while you talk about the crimes cops commit in a very blase way as "a few bad incidents" I have to wonder how many times this sort of thing happens and it's never reported. You probably prefer the american cops to other countries because here in america they don't use nazi tactics, keep people's rights away from them and torture them. Oh but wait...they do.
Such a thing could never exist in the U.S. for longer than it took to load up the tear gas grenade launchers.
Yeah...not many people know that the Quebec protesters stopped getting tear gassed only when the cops RAN OUT of tear gas.
The cops in the US (and surrounding US events, like the meeting in quebec) certainly aren't as shy as the cops in other parts of the world. I mean, they do shoot unarmed black men who are running away. They do sodomize suspects in bathrooms with broken broom handles. They do shoot guys something like 40 times for pulling wallets in a dark alley. And they do beat the bejeezus out of motorists who aren't offering any resistance.
Obviously getting compromised is bad, but outside of vandalism of existing source code, like if they delete your CVS codebase, what are they going to do? Steal something you could already get through the web for nothing?
Of course passwords could be compromised, which means the silly monkeys that use "er33t" as the password for sourceforge, slashdot, freshmeat, and hotgoatsex.com will have to change the passwords in different places too.
What are the implications of this security break in? I'm open to the idea that they're larger than just vandalism of source code and passwords, but what's the bigger problem?
Until diesel pumps are everywhere, I think I'll hold out for my solar/hydrogen-fuel-cell/flywheel hybrid.
And that's exactly why they aren't eveywhere. Because people are 'holding out'. New technology (even sometimes old technology like deisel) takes adoption.
That these places always publish their documents in some wimpy quiche-eating format like PDF and postscript only?
PDF and postscript are excellent for hardcopies, but they're not distributing hardcopies. They're distributing electronic copies.
I suppose it's just WAY too difficult to run their PDF through a filter to convert it from PDF to HTML or text. Of course, I could do it myself, but I'm a slashdot poster, and I whine, I don't actually do anything proactive.
Well, here's information from a police report where a cop actually talked to him: it's found at this address:
I asked Randal why he was using the "CRACK" program to obtain passwords and asked if he realized that these passwords would access
the SSD system. Randal advised that he did realize this and that he wanted to get his E-mail quicker
Weird, eh? But check this out:
I asked Randal why he would need forty to fifty passwords and he said, "I needed them in case they caught me doing it and knew they would shut
me down so the more passwords I had, the longer I could continue doing what I wanted to do." Randal advised that he had the capability to do it and he knew he could do it. I asked Randal if this was wrong and in violation of Intel policy and Randal said, "Yes it is, but I knew I could do it anyway." Randal said that he wanted to do it because he wanted to be efficient in getting his E-mail very fast and he felt was important and when they shut him down, he wanted to continue doing what he was doing and since he had the capability to do it and knew he could do it, he did it without permission.
Well from that, what he himself said to a policeman, he comes across as a dirt-common script kiddie.
This is a Good Thing because it's nice that serial killers can't keep killing while awaiting trial. How else could the system be run?
Accusing someone and holding them is a completely different story - the article says they haven't even been charged with anything.
So the cops are saying: "We're pretty sure you've done *something* wrong. We don't know what it is yet, so we're going to take all of your stuff and sift through it until we can find evidence of *something* to charge you with."
There's nothing wrong with detaining people and seizing something if you've got a leg to stand on. The article makes it sound as if the cops don't even know what these guys have done wrong. Something vague about credit card fraud. But they haven't been charged with that. If the cops don't charge you with something, it's pretty clear they don't think they can make a case of it. Why should people have their stuff taken if the cops don't even have enough evidence against them to file a charge? Do you realize how bad that could get?
Son, come over here and empty your pockets. I'm *positive* you're doing something wrong. And once I search you, I'll find evdience to charge you with something.
Does it bother anybody else that the article clearly states that they've raided this guys place and taken all of his stuff, and then follows it up with "We haven't yet filed any charges"?
Whatever happened to "innocent until proven guilty?"
I'll freely admit I don't know the details of the case, but even totally guilty felons have constitutional rights.
There was an interesting piece on Marketplace last night (radio show on NPR) where they were talking about just this.
It seems that the New York Times has an interesting position here - while they have regularly posted rants in the editorial column against napster and what they refer to as the "looting" of other people's intellectual property, they're firmly in favor of being able to use freelance material without paying for it again. The New York Times has a high percentage of freelance stuff in its pages, and it would be quite a financial blow if they were to have to pay writers for the second go around.
The point is moot in some cases, since many freelance writers sign contracts before they turn their stuff over that says that the company can do whatever they want with it in perpetuity. Of course that's a shit deal, but if you're starving and you've got something to sell (like a freelance article) you take whatever terms will put money in your pocket.
Whether or not that's a fair application of the law is of course an entirely different debate.
What I want to know is when we're going to get motherboards with IO buses and IO devices that can DEAL with a processor running this fast.
Let's face it. You can attach a 40 million gallon per hour water pump to a straw. But that doesn't make it any better than a 30 million gallon per hour water pump because of other limiting factors.
I know that as it stands, the range of numbers available is so ridiculously wide that you can't realistically guess a credit card number, but will that stay the same if the average person maybe chews through 40-50 CCN's a year?
C'mon. Let's make a list of licenses that have been tested in court, and let's make a list of corporations who have put millions of dollars behind those untested software licenses.
So some people are worried about testing the GPL based off of the fact that it tries to force developers to free their source when they use it in certain ways. They're not worried about commercial licenses which come up with dozens of dubiously legal ways to make you give up your freedom.
And besides all of that, this argument is quite old, and the GPL is still adopted by companies. I wouldn't call this 100% FUD, but it's definately >=60% FUD.
Sometimes innovation seems to slow when it's not actually slowing. I.e. if many people are deep in the midst of major research whose results are coming out TOMORROW, it may look like nothing is happening.
Be careful not to fall into the rut that this poor guy did:
"Everything that can be invented has been invented."
-- Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. Office of Patents, 1899.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't believe that Tim O'Reilly is going to be one of the panelists. Or any of their other panelists. Somehow I doubt that they're going to have someone from the FSF or representing free software there at all.
There's nothing wrong with open source if your #1 priority is the popularity of your application, the user base, and what development model you prefer. But while those are important priorities for free softare, the number one priority is freedom. And somehow I doubt that they're going to have anybody there that's willing to go to bat for freedom. The result is usually a bastardized discussion where "open source" luminaries try to justify their existence to the business world. And while they may sometimes do a good job, they're still missing the point that the reason open source exists is because someone gave a damn about freedom above everything else.
I think you're seriously confusing the issues of whether or not you have access to the source code with whether or not you have to pay for the application.
Unless you're not mentioning some detail of that transaction, Bill Gates opposing people not paying for his BASIC program has nothing to do with his opinion on open source or free software.
My favorite RMS quote is this - "Just because it's free software doesn't mean that you can afford it". Let's not spread assumptions about free software or open source by acting as if the gratis nature of many open source and free software projects is the only way to do it.
So by your logic, since cops are evil since a few cops commit crimes, black people are very evil, because many black people commit crimes. Yay for collective labelling.
Are you intentionally missing the point? It's not crime in general I'm talking about, that was your "collective labelling". What I'm talking about is crime committed by cops which is specifically a violation of public trust and a misuse of their authority. Not everybody can even commit the same crimes as cops can, because they supposedly have the public trust, and they definately have power in the form of nightsticks and handguns.
It's a time-honored absurd form of arguing to extend the argument to something that clearly isn't included in the discussion and then attack the false conclusion instead of the original point.
For someone supposedly trying to point at abuses of prejudice from the police you dish out a very aweful injustice yourself.
Tell me, do you think they're equivalent? I may be unfairly representing cops, that's just my admittedly heated opinion about them from the kids in my highschool that I've seen go on to become cops.
Do you truely think those you describe could ever grow up wanting to hurt innocent people? Then you have very little grasp of reality. Those in the circumstances you describe often grow up to be very humble and honourable people with a real desire to uncover the exact same issues you are describing.
Certainly there are good people who were like that earlier in life. What I'm trying to say though is that the occupation of police officer may attract good people who want to make the world a better place, but it probably also attracts people who want to have authority and power over others. Cops make split second decisions on whether people live or die, and we both know that there are people out there that this really appeals to. Those are just the people that shouldn't be cops. IMHO, those are the types of people that end up committing these crimes against the people they patrol.
What you have said here started off well but you have proved that even wise words can come from an idiot. Think about what you're saying, some of those picked on, were picked on for standing up against the crowd, for being themselves when pressure to conform was highest, for not allowing the other picked on kids to go it alone. For helping the weakest amongst them. Being Heroes if you like. Yes, we hated them at school but look back again, they are the least of our wories in society now. In fact, you are probably still one of their nighmares.
Why is it that of the entire post you pick out this one small portion of my personal opinion to attack? Did it hit a raw nerve of some sort? I was like this on highschool too, but I didn't end up becoming a cop. I wasn't one of the people who picked on those kids, so I doubt I'm still in their nightmares, but I'm not sure why you feel the need to attack me as an "idiot" for expressing personal opinion.
While the AC is clearly either naive or a troll (his "If he hadn't run, he wouldn't have gotten shot" logic is hilarious), ad hominem attacks aren't much better. I thought far more of your post before I got to the end.
Taking a guess that the poster is probably white isn't an ad-hominem attack, unless it's recently become somehow bad to be white in America that I didn't know about.
Thinking of the readership of slashdot, with the SES factors of income it takes to be interested in technology, have internet access, and percentages on the internet, I think it's fairly safe to guess (although I have no way of knowing that I'm right/wrong) that the poster was white. The reason I was pointing that out is that its very common for whites in the suburbs who have never seen inner city cops to act as apologists for cops because they never see the things people are so angry about when it comes to the cops.
That's what I was trying to sum up when I said that. And I don't think it's an ad hominem attack. If I tell you "you are a white man", do you think that it's an insult or an attack on your character?
1) unarmed black (or white) men shouldn't run away, at night when an arrest warrant is being served. If he hadn't run, he wouldn't have gotten shot.
Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't see the logic that running away from a cop deserves the death penalty. It's all so clear now.
2) The guy who sodomized the poor guy with a broken broom handle is now serving a lengthy stretch in a state prison, so what is your point?
Uh, that he did it? Regardless of whether or not he went to jail, he did it, and cops all over America are commiting other crimes as well. I think what got that guy was the media. If it hadn't been reported nation wide, his own police unit probably could have covered it up enough. That's another thing that makes me sick about cops. Their loyalty to one another forces them to lie for one another even when they know that one of their members is in the wrong.
Cops are people, and people break laws, what is important is that they are punished when they do.
But only when they get caught, which isn't very often. And even when they do get caught, it's a citizens word against a cop's. Who is the judge listening to?
4) Last I heard, the guys that beat down Rodney King are doing a stretch in a federal prison.
Whether or not cops are in prison has nothing to do with what I'm talking about, which is that they are often extremely brutal motherfuckers that are often willing to do some pretty nasty things to people. Cops are often small, small human beings. The type that got made fun of in junior high and could never get dates. Give them guns and clubs, and you get the crimes that I listed. Just because somebody went to jail for them doesn't mean they're any less horrible or any less likely to occur in the future.
But then again, you're probably a middle class whiteboy who doesn't have to worry about these types of things, since you're never a target. What do you care?
Blaming the US for the Quebec police is stretching things.
Ever hear about the Quebec or Candian police doing anything like that when the US isn't involved? The meeting may have taken place in Quebec, but it was about North American free trade. The main proponent of which is the US, who also tends to deal with its citizens like that when they protest.
Of course you always have a few bad incidents, and with a watchdog media that needs to fill the insatiable news demand of america, any incident gets blown out of proportion.
Exactly how do you blow out of proportion a dude getting sodomized with a broken broom handle while in custody? Nobody needs to sensationalize that, that's just plain torture. Also, while you talk about the crimes cops commit in a very blase way as "a few bad incidents" I have to wonder how many times this sort of thing happens and it's never reported. You probably prefer the american cops to other countries because here in america they don't use nazi tactics, keep people's rights away from them and torture them. Oh but wait...they do.
Such a thing could never exist in the U.S. for longer than it took to load up the tear gas grenade launchers.
Yeah...not many people know that the Quebec protesters stopped getting tear gassed only when the cops RAN OUT of tear gas.
The cops in the US (and surrounding US events, like the meeting in quebec) certainly aren't as shy as the cops in other parts of the world. I mean, they do shoot unarmed black men who are running away. They do sodomize suspects in bathrooms with broken broom handles. They do shoot guys something like 40 times for pulling wallets in a dark alley. And they do beat the bejeezus out of motorists who aren't offering any resistance.
Obviously getting compromised is bad, but outside of vandalism of existing source code, like if they delete your CVS codebase, what are they going to do? Steal something you could already get through the web for nothing?
Of course passwords could be compromised, which means the silly monkeys that use "er33t" as the password for sourceforge, slashdot, freshmeat, and hotgoatsex.com will have to change the passwords in different places too.
What are the implications of this security break in? I'm open to the idea that they're larger than just vandalism of source code and passwords, but what's the bigger problem?
Until diesel pumps are everywhere, I think I'll hold out for my solar/hydrogen-fuel-cell/flywheel hybrid.
And that's exactly why they aren't eveywhere. Because people are 'holding out'. New technology (even sometimes old technology like deisel) takes adoption.
You can find more information about this at Advogato where one of the guys involved in this posts about his experiences.
It also contains some technical evidence as to which functions were lifted and how they know.
That these places always publish their documents in some wimpy quiche-eating format like PDF and postscript only?
PDF and postscript are excellent for hardcopies, but they're not distributing hardcopies. They're distributing electronic copies.
I suppose it's just WAY too difficult to run their PDF through a filter to convert it from PDF to HTML or text. Of course, I could do it myself, but I'm a slashdot poster, and I whine, I don't actually do anything proactive.
It's bad??? Really???
You mean I've been decieved by those nasty GNU hippies all this time?
Oh I'm so sorry! I've been such a fool for so long. I'll go nuke my linux partition right now. I don't want to be running a nasty business-harming OS.
Microsoft, I know I've been bad, but if you give me one more chance...
Well, here's information from a police report where a cop actually talked to him: it's found at this address:
I asked Randal why he was using the "CRACK" program to obtain passwords and asked if he realized that these passwords would access
the SSD system. Randal advised that he did realize this and that he wanted to get his E-mail quicker
Weird, eh? But check this out:
I asked Randal why he would need forty to fifty passwords and he said, "I needed them in case they caught me doing it and knew they would shut
me down so the more passwords I had, the longer I could continue doing what I wanted to do." Randal advised that he had the capability to do it and he knew he could do it. I asked Randal if this was wrong and in violation of Intel policy and Randal said, "Yes it is, but I knew I could do it anyway." Randal said that he wanted to do it because he wanted to be efficient in getting his E-mail very fast and he felt was important and when they shut him down, he wanted to continue doing what he was doing and since he had the capability to do it and knew he could do it, he did it without permission.
Well from that, what he himself said to a policeman, he comes across as a dirt-common script kiddie.
This is a Good Thing because it's nice that serial killers can't keep killing while awaiting trial. How else could the system be run?
Accusing someone and holding them is a completely different story - the article says they haven't even been charged with anything.
So the cops are saying: "We're pretty sure you've done *something* wrong. We don't know what it is yet, so we're going to take all of your stuff and sift through it until we can find evidence of *something* to charge you with."
There's nothing wrong with detaining people and seizing something if you've got a leg to stand on. The article makes it sound as if the cops don't even know what these guys have done wrong. Something vague about credit card fraud. But they haven't been charged with that. If the cops don't charge you with something, it's pretty clear they don't think they can make a case of it. Why should people have their stuff taken if the cops don't even have enough evidence against them to file a charge? Do you realize how bad that could get?
Son, come over here and empty your pockets. I'm *positive* you're doing something wrong. And once I search you, I'll find evdience to charge you with something.
Does it bother anybody else that the article clearly states that they've raided this guys place and taken all of his stuff, and then follows it up with "We haven't yet filed any charges"?
Whatever happened to "innocent until proven guilty?"
I'll freely admit I don't know the details of the case, but even totally guilty felons have constitutional rights.
There was an interesting piece on Marketplace last night (radio show on NPR) where they were talking about just this.
It seems that the New York Times has an interesting position here - while they have regularly posted rants in the editorial column against napster and what they refer to as the "looting" of other people's intellectual property, they're firmly in favor of being able to use freelance material without paying for it again. The New York Times has a high percentage of freelance stuff in its pages, and it would be quite a financial blow if they were to have to pay writers for the second go around.
The point is moot in some cases, since many freelance writers sign contracts before they turn their stuff over that says that the company can do whatever they want with it in perpetuity. Of course that's a shit deal, but if you're starving and you've got something to sell (like a freelance article) you take whatever terms will put money in your pocket.
Whether or not that's a fair application of the law is of course an entirely different debate.
OK great. A newer, faster processor.
What I want to know is when we're going to get motherboards with IO buses and IO devices that can DEAL with a processor running this fast.
Let's face it. You can attach a 40 million gallon per hour water pump to a straw. But that doesn't make it any better than a 30 million gallon per hour water pump because of other limiting factors.
Is it going to be the standard 16 digits?
I know that as it stands, the range of numbers available is so ridiculously wide that you can't realistically guess a credit card number, but will that stay the same if the average person maybe chews through 40-50 CCN's a year?
"Peace, Love, and Linux"?
That will go a long way to getting rid of the "hippy" stereotype that comes with GNU/Linux.
C'mon. Let's make a list of licenses that have been tested in court, and let's make a list of corporations who have put millions of dollars behind those untested software licenses. So some people are worried about testing the GPL based off of the fact that it tries to force developers to free their source when they use it in certain ways. They're not worried about commercial licenses which come up with dozens of dubiously legal ways to make you give up your freedom. And besides all of that, this argument is quite old, and the GPL is still adopted by companies. I wouldn't call this 100% FUD, but it's definately >=60% FUD.
Will clones themselves ache from the sense that they may not be 'complete,' that they're inexorably removed from their so-called peers?
They'll do exactly what they're socially programmed to do, just like all of us non-clones.
Hey guys, on the free (beer/speech) information range, let's not forget:
Mutopia.
Render a MS-Breakup irrelevant? Is there anybody out there who thinks that the prosecution of MS is going to continue under Bush?
Of course they're hedging their bets, but as of inauguration day, I doubt they have much to worry about.
Sometimes innovation seems to slow when it's not actually slowing. I.e. if many people are deep in the midst of major research whose results are coming out TOMORROW, it may look like nothing is happening.
:)
Be careful not to fall into the rut that this poor guy did:
"Everything that can be invented has been invented."
-- Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. Office of Patents, 1899.
What a tool.