Ok, patents are the biggest threat, but here's another.
Suppose Larry decides he's not happy with just changing the license on one of the dozens of open source products he's acquired and decides to actually start demanding payment for use of earlier versions of the software.. Does a copyright owner have the legal right to retract an issued license? Does that right apply to the GPL? This is a massive blindspot in copyright law.
Patents that are actually developed into something useful in their enforcement lifetime.. sure.. but there's plenty of patents that are simply uneconomical to implement so long as you have to include legal costs into the budget. When the patent expires the cheap operators are free to investigate how to make actual products from it.
Of course, for many industries the cheap operators are in China, and they don't tend to take much notice of patents either way. (god bless em).
Terrible article.. what's amazing here is that a whole mess of satellites have been launched to GEO but this is the first time anyone bothered to release photos from the altitude to the public. Isn't it glorious to see the entire Earth in one frame?!
While I accept your point that people like this still do exist, I think it is fair to speak in general terms that this is no longer how the world works.
Similarly, clothes are not made by tailors anymore.. While it's possible to go buy a tailor made suit, in general clothes are made by machines which are tended by technicians.
I hate to once again point out that nerds tend to be unnecessarily pedantic, but we all need to learn how other people talk and learn to live with it.
You have this vision of "a farmer" which barely even exists anymore. Machines make food for us.. those machines are tended by people who work for major corporations - in other words, just cogs in the machine. Those corporations pay the cogs to tend the machines to make the food so the product can be delivered to market and produce profits. They need the profits to entice institutional investors to buy their stock so they can expand their operation. They need to expand their operation to entice the institutional investors to not sell their stock by continually growing the stock price. The institutional investors are interested in stocks that grow because most their capital comes from retirement funds, which have to grow to keep up with inflation. The primary cause of inflation is the continual growth of industry.
It's a giant house of cards which falls down *all the time*. The real wonder is that they manage to keep it going.
I think it's perfectly accurate. Remember, the Star Trek universe is a branch off of the 1960s where communism wins, resulting in some of the worst weapons of war ever being created (eugenics wars) and the outright decimation of human society. What happens next? Massive culture shock of meeting a superior race who deliberately hold back all technological development to give humanity time to get back in touch with their communist ideology.
Now go watch every single episode where Scotty or Geordi come into contact with superior technology. There's no "we've gotta stay here and study it and write a few scientific papers". They just throw the shit away or blow it up. The Vulcans taught them a heavy bigotry of "No Invented Here" and their history taught them that any technological innovation beyond a snail's pace was bad. Just look at how slowly technology advanced in the hundred years (yes, 100 years) between TOS and TNG.
Imagine you want a new employee to perform a computing task.. think about the conversation you would have to them as you show them how to do it. You might have to explain some concepts to them that they have no experience with. They might ask you some questions. Depending on how terrible the questions are you might get the feeling that they're starting to understand what it is you want from them. Eventually they'll be able to do something productive and you leave them to do that for a few hours. Checking out how they went, you discover they did certain obvious mistakes.. the kind you'd expect from just about anyone new to the job. You explain to them what they did wrong and how to sort the good results from the bad, then leave 'em to it.
Technically (which is what you're being), the act doesn't authorize anything for Orion. The authorization is for a crew capsule in the 2016 timeframe.. that might turn out to be Orion, it might not.
You're right.. you'd have to put them at their highest orbit, robotically. It would be about 600km altitude and last centuries.. or until it collided with something else:)
That might be why you would choose to buy the hat at $12 instead of at $1, but that presumes you actually know where to go buy the hat at $1. Are you saying the retailer has a moral responsibility to tell you where to get it wholesale? If not, then why does the blender repackager? (and again, don't quote the GPL to me).
Ignoring the specifics of this case (as they've been explored in other comments) I'd like to get back to the fundamental question here:
Is it "ok" to repackage open source software and sell it at greater than zero?
Under what circumstances is it ok? Do you need to add some significant "value"? Do you have to tell anyone who asks (or who didn't) where you got the source from or just your customers?
Don't quote me the GPL or the law.. I want to hear your opinion.
Are businessmen who buy hats for $1 and sell them for $12 morally superior because they transport the hats? Should they be required to tell their customers the cost price and where they got them from?
Every single time I use BCC these days I think "this is gunna bite me in the ass".
That said, try to find an email program that gives any "help" or description of the functionality. Email software is arcane and unlearnable by the isolated individual. They really are a relic of a long forgotten time when people were introduced to computers with "training" provided by competent professionals, in a community where someone was available to provide gentle reminders of appropriate etiquette.
sorry, you'll have to explain that more if you expect me to understand you.
I'm suggesting that there is the right types of materials inside the comet to refine into solar panels which could be used to cover the outer surface for power production. What are you saying?
If you were to populate Tempel 1, you'd do it inside the comet thanks to radiation. With that nice wide diameter you could dig a tunnel that goes around in a circle and install a high speed train to produce artificial gravity. The occupants could spend their day mining the interior to cover the surface with solar panels.
As soon as astronauts enter the zero gravity environment they start losing bone mass. Exercise doesn't help - based on spiral CT (so-called QCT) studies which measure bone loss in trabecular bone as well as cortical bone, the problem of bone loss is twice as bad as was once suspected.. it appears the trabecular bone you lose in spaceflight doesn't come back. That is, It may be permanently lost. As for reproduction, experiments with mice done by Russia were inconclusive (as so much of Russian space medicine is) but indicated that the embryo has trouble embedding. So where the article says "try not to get pregnant", there's most likely no chance of that anyway.
That's zero-g, what about partial gravity? The only data we have is from Apollo and no-one stayed on the Moon for long enough - or knew what to look for - to get conclusive results. When people ask "could humans colonize the Moon or other planets?" the answer has to be that we don't know. We'll probably not know conclusively until humans go there with the intention of staying, and making a new generation.
Now stop and think about that for a minute. If your idea of people-in-space is NASA astronauts then I hope you find this suggestion as distasteful as I do. In our modern world governments should not be sending anyone anywhere with orders to reproduce - it just seems a little totalitarian doesn't it? Maybe China will do it. Personally, I'd rather see free men and women go out to the frontier and populate it.
Sigh. On a Mac, my drunken bigoted friend, a Mach-O file renamed to foo.jpg will happily run *because* the operating system dives into the file format to figure out how to run it. If I embed the appropriate icon resource in the file it'll even look like your default image viewer is going to open it, and if I subsequently start that image viewer once I've got control you'll never know it wasn't.
That's the security flaw: you can make an icon look to the user like it will only open up the image viewer, when actually arbitrary code will be executed.
Without file extensions being hidden you see foo.jpg.exe and say "that's an exe, I'm not going to run that", even if it has a friendly jpg icon embedded in it.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, patents are the biggest threat, but here's another.
Suppose Larry decides he's not happy with just changing the license on one of the dozens of open source products he's acquired and decides to actually start demanding payment for use of earlier versions of the software.. Does a copyright owner have the legal right to retract an issued license? Does that right apply to the GPL? This is a massive blindspot in copyright law.
Patents that are actually developed into something useful in their enforcement lifetime.. sure.. but there's plenty of patents that are simply uneconomical to implement so long as you have to include legal costs into the budget. When the patent expires the cheap operators are free to investigate how to make actual products from it.
Of course, for many industries the cheap operators are in China, and they don't tend to take much notice of patents either way. (god bless em).
Tell that to all the people who decline to buy a Tesla because of what they saw on Top Gear...
wtf is Dish Network? ;)
But seriously, someone should ustream that up.
Terrible article.. what's amazing here is that a whole mess of satellites have been launched to GEO but this is the first time anyone bothered to release photos from the altitude to the public. Isn't it glorious to see the entire Earth in one frame?!
While I accept your point that people like this still do exist, I think it is fair to speak in general terms that this is no longer how the world works.
Similarly, clothes are not made by tailors anymore.. While it's possible to go buy a tailor made suit, in general clothes are made by machines which are tended by technicians.
I hate to once again point out that nerds tend to be unnecessarily pedantic, but we all need to learn how other people talk and learn to live with it.
You have this vision of "a farmer" which barely even exists anymore. Machines make food for us.. those machines are tended by people who work for major corporations - in other words, just cogs in the machine. Those corporations pay the cogs to tend the machines to make the food so the product can be delivered to market and produce profits. They need the profits to entice institutional investors to buy their stock so they can expand their operation. They need to expand their operation to entice the institutional investors to not sell their stock by continually growing the stock price. The institutional investors are interested in stocks that grow because most their capital comes from retirement funds, which have to grow to keep up with inflation. The primary cause of inflation is the continual growth of industry.
It's a giant house of cards which falls down *all the time*. The real wonder is that they manage to keep it going.
This seems relevant: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2010/8/11/
If you don't understand why: http://webcomicoverlook.com/2010/08/17/penny-arcade-and-jokes-about-rape/
Apparently few made the connection to: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Dick%20Wolf
Obeying authority is what some people consider "civilized".
Sad but true.
I think it's perfectly accurate. Remember, the Star Trek universe is a branch off of the 1960s where communism wins, resulting in some of the worst weapons of war ever being created (eugenics wars) and the outright decimation of human society. What happens next? Massive culture shock of meeting a superior race who deliberately hold back all technological development to give humanity time to get back in touch with their communist ideology.
Now go watch every single episode where Scotty or Geordi come into contact with superior technology. There's no "we've gotta stay here and study it and write a few scientific papers". They just throw the shit away or blow it up. The Vulcans taught them a heavy bigotry of "No Invented Here" and their history taught them that any technological innovation beyond a snail's pace was bad. Just look at how slowly technology advanced in the hundred years (yes, 100 years) between TOS and TNG.
What courts? Can you name the case or are you just making shit up?
Imagine you want a new employee to perform a computing task.. think about the conversation you would have to them as you show them how to do it. You might have to explain some concepts to them that they have no experience with. They might ask you some questions. Depending on how terrible the questions are you might get the feeling that they're starting to understand what it is you want from them. Eventually they'll be able to do something productive and you leave them to do that for a few hours. Checking out how they went, you discover they did certain obvious mistakes.. the kind you'd expect from just about anyone new to the job. You explain to them what they did wrong and how to sort the good results from the bad, then leave 'em to it.
That's how talking to a computer should be too.
hehe.. the fact that you think there has to be a difference suggests that computers just aren't ready yet.
Yes, you're right.. by NASA standards they're not ready to launch humans. I'd get on their next flight if they offered me the seat though.
Technically (which is what you're being), the act doesn't authorize anything for Orion. The authorization is for a crew capsule in the 2016 timeframe.. that might turn out to be Orion, it might not.
You're right.. you'd have to put them at their highest orbit, robotically. It would be about 600km altitude and last centuries.. or until it collided with something else :)
That might be why you would choose to buy the hat at $12 instead of at $1, but that presumes you actually know where to go buy the hat at $1. Are you saying the retailer has a moral responsibility to tell you where to get it wholesale? If not, then why does the blender repackager? (and again, don't quote the GPL to me).
Ignoring the specifics of this case (as they've been explored in other comments) I'd like to get back to the fundamental question here:
Is it "ok" to repackage open source software and sell it at greater than zero?
Under what circumstances is it ok? Do you need to add some significant "value"? Do you have to tell anyone who asks (or who didn't) where you got the source from or just your customers?
Don't quote me the GPL or the law.. I want to hear your opinion.
Are businessmen who buy hats for $1 and sell them for $12 morally superior because they transport the hats? Should they be required to tell their customers the cost price and where they got them from?
Every single time I use BCC these days I think "this is gunna bite me in the ass".
That said, try to find an email program that gives any "help" or description of the functionality. Email software is arcane and unlearnable by the isolated individual. They really are a relic of a long forgotten time when people were introduced to computers with "training" provided by competent professionals, in a community where someone was available to provide gentle reminders of appropriate etiquette.
Yes, email is now our lightsaber.
sorry, you'll have to explain that more if you expect me to understand you.
I'm suggesting that there is the right types of materials inside the comet to refine into solar panels which could be used to cover the outer surface for power production. What are you saying?
If you were to populate Tempel 1, you'd do it inside the comet thanks to radiation. With that nice wide diameter you could dig a tunnel that goes around in a circle and install a high speed train to produce artificial gravity. The occupants could spend their day mining the interior to cover the surface with solar panels.
It's actually Stardust-NExT.
As soon as astronauts enter the zero gravity environment they start losing bone mass. Exercise doesn't help - based on spiral CT (so-called QCT) studies which measure bone loss in trabecular bone as well as cortical bone, the problem of bone loss is twice as bad as was once suspected.. it appears the trabecular bone you lose in spaceflight doesn't come back. That is, It may be permanently lost. As for reproduction, experiments with mice done by Russia were inconclusive (as so much of Russian space medicine is) but indicated that the embryo has trouble embedding. So where the article says "try not to get pregnant", there's most likely no chance of that anyway.
That's zero-g, what about partial gravity? The only data we have is from Apollo and no-one stayed on the Moon for long enough - or knew what to look for - to get conclusive results. When people ask "could humans colonize the Moon or other planets?" the answer has to be that we don't know. We'll probably not know conclusively until humans go there with the intention of staying, and making a new generation.
Now stop and think about that for a minute. If your idea of people-in-space is NASA astronauts then I hope you find this suggestion as distasteful as I do. In our modern world governments should not be sending anyone anywhere with orders to reproduce - it just seems a little totalitarian doesn't it? Maybe China will do it. Personally, I'd rather see free men and women go out to the frontier and populate it.
Sigh. On a Mac, my drunken bigoted friend, a Mach-O file renamed to foo.jpg will happily run *because* the operating system dives into the file format to figure out how to run it. If I embed the appropriate icon resource in the file it'll even look like your default image viewer is going to open it, and if I subsequently start that image viewer once I've got control you'll never know it wasn't.
That's the security flaw: you can make an icon look to the user like it will only open up the image viewer, when actually arbitrary code will be executed.
Without file extensions being hidden you see foo.jpg.exe and say "that's an exe, I'm not going to run that", even if it has a friendly jpg icon embedded in it.
So, like USA?