Parent has insightfully noticed his own error. And the error is modded up. So mod the parent up.
The move is clearly against the BSD license. (Also, combining GPLv2ed code and BSDed code is subtly against the GPL, as the requirement to reproduce the license - as shown and violated here - is an extra requirement compared to the GPL, violating the "no additional restrictions" clause of the GPL.)
It take more faith to believe in evolution than it takes to believe in God
Either faith or investment. It's quite a lot of work to investigate evolution; and if you don't put that work in, it's faith, and as you obviously understand, evolution makes more concrete claims than belief in God does. As a such, you must accept these concrete claims, and as a larger set of claims they require more faith. Of course, when you start to look, you'll find that they're all connected and have a ton of evidence, so it doesn't require much faith at all (sort of like it's fairly easy to believe in chairs), but before you've investigated carefully and understood evolution and what claims it makes and what evidence it has, it's a whopper.
Oh, and if you haven't yet gotten to believe in chairs - I'm sorry, evolution - I can recommend Richard Dawkins' "Climbing Mount Improbable". It's a wonderful introduction, showing a mountain of evidence.
The fanboys forget that GPL is not end-all of software, and that it's really only practical in certain situations.
Free software advocates beleive that freedom is always practical, indeed is the only practical choice in the long run. I'm sorry if you don't value freedom.
Word games.
If you really valued freedom, you would give away your software under a license giving away complete freedoms - that is, as public domain. But you don't value freedom.
Oh, you noticed that this was word games, too?
Then stop yours.
All of our licenses is about trading some forms of freedom against other forms of freedom. Various variations of these trades apply in different situations. A careful analysis of the situations and how various choices affect them is, in my opinion, the only way to get REAL freedom out of it. In this, the different licenses are mere tools, and the actual activity around the software - writing it, copying it, modifying it, with people doing it for love or for money or a combination, with money ultimately providing the possibility (as people have to live) - are the things to analyse. Sometimes the restrictions of the GPL are the way to go. Sometimes the freedom of the BSD style licenses is the way. And sometimes something else.
Yeah, they care about statistics - that's the primary tool to them. What they really care about is what odds they predict of something going in each direction, and underlying security can change how they calculate those odds.
This is how you get lowered insurance premiums from installing an alarm system, and it is a primary force for various company investments in security (though as far as I know not commonly in computer security, as the present security models there are too simple.)
So, sure, they might change the risk assessment based on something being obscure; a smart insurance company would also change it based on something actually being fairly secure, as far as they could evaluate. It's just a question of how it is easy to evaluate - and it all end up as a selection of statistics, as that's what they end up with. It doesn't meant that the model underneath those statistics has to be naive - and remember, EVERYTHING is a question of statistics... Even the existence of the world, it just has very very good odds.
There's interesting information in there, especially the stuff about lab plasma.
It does lead me to one intriguing question, too: Could the reason plasma behaves "life-like" be that these kinds of structures form and evolve so freaking fast in plasma that even new plasma has had time to evolve a suitable population? I have no idea of the generation time or how plasma behaves, so this is very much off the wall and most likely not so - I just felt it had to be asked...
I agree that somebody should be liable for all the malware that is circulating.
End of the line, this liability has to "pass through" the end user's computer, as this is the point the rest of the world can see.
At that point, there are a few different possibilities.
One is that the liability strictly follows software unless the user has done something wrong. The user will probably still have to get liability insurance, and in some cases the insurer will be able to recover from the software maker. This option stop free software, as it is impossible to give away software without having a significant cost from insuring it.
Another is that liability strictly follow the user, and the user can get liability insurance wherever they want. This allows the software developer to provide insurance if they want to - and they're in a pretty good position to do so - and otherwise allows somebody else to pick up the insurance. This allows free software to continue, with the possible slight speed bump that it will be hard to get it certified (so insurance premiums may be higher).
The advantage of the first option is that it force quality everywhere. The advantage of the second is flexibility, including the ability to provide software for free.
Personally, I prefer the second option, as I find free software to be important, and I believe the trade off about what risks to accept (ie, cost of insurance) most reasonably can be taken by the end user. I also believe that insurance premiums will drive forth the choice of good software practices. With manufacturer liability, I think we'll just see a bunch of "shell corporations" going bankrupt when the software turn out to be buggy, and a lot of problems of finding out if "incident X" was caused by the user or by the software.
Yeah, it's scary. Unfortunately, given today's technologies, it also seems inevitable.
I know that I don't have complete control; and I've written parts of the OS I run on (including being part of the security team for it for a while), and hacked on most of the components I run. There's just too much code and the security model we run is too difficult to keep secure.
However, as I see it, this is solvable by re-allocating risk - so insurance solve it. And, as you mention, simple security measures will help bring the price down.
Deeper security measures could bring the price down more - so, there would suddenly be a good economic foundation for getting more secure code.
"Self-organization of any structure needs energy sources and sinks in order to decrease the entropy locally. Dissipation usually serves as a sink, while external sources (such as radiation of the Sun for organic life) provide the energy input. Furthermore, memory and reproduction are necessary for a self-organizing dissipative structure to form a `living material'. The well known problem in explaining the origin of life is that the complexity of living creatures is so high that the time necessary to form the simplest organic living structure is too large compared to the age of the Earth. Similarly, the age of the Universe is also not sufficient for organic life to be created in a distant environment (similar to that on the Earth) and then transferred to the Earth."
Emphasis mine.
Sounds a little like this guy's been buying into "Intelligent" design a little too much...
Actually, I also see the emphasised part as a well known problem, though his formulation seems a bit off. It's basically the core abiogenesis problem.
The point is that self-assembly of the kind of biochemistry we run off (RNA/DNA transcription) has a ridiculously low chance of happening "randomly" in a primordial soup. We need to find some better environment or an intermediate process that can happen more easily to have a reasonable explanation for the origin of life from non-living compounds. We have some possible solutions to it, though - for instance, James Ferris' work on the way the mineral montmorillonite can assemble RNA (and we even get "membranes" for free), or Graham Cairns-Smith's Clay Hypothesis, which is based on clay crystals reproducing and being subjected to natural selection, and over time pulling along organic compounds that increase reproduction, and then at the end the organic compounds "taking off by themselves". There has been experiments that at least show that RNA could be plausibly involved in this.
Nobody knows which theory is right; several seems fairly plausible, and none of them have been accepted as shown-to-be-true yet. And it may never be: Our end result could be that life can originate in many different ways, so we won't be able to show which one in particular caused life. This would, to me, be a very satisfying result - as it would show there is almost certainly life elsewhere.
With regards "Why is the user not liable for stupidly clicking everything he sees?" - I have asked myself more or less the same question: "Why not make the owner of a machine responsible for the damage that machine does?" Actually, I know the answer: People are afraid of doing that change and feel it "unfair" to be held responsible for something they don't feel they control.
The consequences of holding the users responsible would be fairly small for the users in the end, though, though it might become large for software developers (and possibly be bad for open source).
The first consequence would be that everybody would "have" to have insurance if they wanted to go on the net, as there would be a risk of large liabilities.
The second consequence would that insurance companies started managing security properly, and took various levels of payment depending on how they estimated risk. This would mean that it would be too expensive to run around with an insecure system or with insecure practices.
The third consequence would be that we got software that actually was secure by design, because the liability ended up where it was supposed to go: At the point where the damage is possible to control. For the cases of complex software that the user don't control and the insurance company won't cover, this would have to be indemnified by the software vendor.
Overall, I feel this is the right model: Put the cost of the risk where the risk is possible to control, which is at the user level. This creates incentive for users to learn and behave, and through users and insurance companies incentives for vendors and software developers.
Capitol records is owned by EMI. EMI is - or was - publicly traded. The last news is this: Terra Firma seals takeover of EMI (for 2.4 billion pounds).
Terra Firma is a private equity firm; they specialize in buying out companies, restructuring them and fixing management issues, and taking profit from the restructuring.
So, the NEW owners haven't yet had time to do much. Whether they will change or not remains to be seen - they've only had a couple of weeks on their hands...
I thought that "Exercise will regulate your appetite" was well accepted as at least part of the explanation? As far as I know, exercise will lower appetite for a period for men, especially heavy exercise (weight lifting and similar) is effective. For women, there is much less of an effect, and if they're eating fat heavy, there are studied that show the effect work the opposite direction, see Effects of short-term exercise on appetite responses in unrestrained females. (Though that's only one study.)
WRT calories expelled: What I have been told by an expert is that there is fairly close to perfect calorie absorption, no matter what. It sounds semi-plausible to me - if we had problems with absorption of calories that are fairly easy to digest, we'd expect to get a lot of wind. This happens when we have other things we can't digest - e.g, lactose intolerance, problems with protein digestion.
you do like the PC platform, right? Is that a trick question? The PC platform has evolved from "Totally sucks" to "Tolerable", yet it still bears the legacy of suck (the instruction set, various aspects of the the hardware interface). An alternate basis would in my opinion have led to a much better situation today.
What do you mean by "requiring the use of source code"? Use for what purpose? By whom?
I would like to help you with arguments - I feel source code availability to defendants is an important issue, even if the legal precedents aren't in my own country - yet I feel I don't understand exactly what you propose, so it's hard to see if I can help.
As I read it, that clause is talking to BOTH of you. Both you and MySQL have to do it. "Any third party", it says. Not even just those that have the binary, *any* third party.
Teens with high IQ also likely comes from families with high IQs (IQ is highly inheritable). I feel it likely this would also lead to different family attitudes: More importance on learning, less importance on this kind social skills, more positive to school achievement, more open for eduction about results of sex, less positive to early sexual contact (as that in itself is seen as less positive in middle class and above than in "low" class, and high IQ parents tends to get to at least middle class).
Of course, to have any significant opinion in the area, I should read research around it...
Is there REALLY a need for the GPL and LGPL? Is there REALLY a need for the GPLv3?
The other licenses mark other tradeoffs, including but not limited to the tradeoff of having a community feel they own the license. This may be as important as the feeling of a GPL-using community that they "don't get abused".
For instance, there is yet no license that marks the tradeoff that I see as reasonable: An attempt at optimizing the copyright term to the one that is most productive for society. While Stallman go on and on about how different length copyright terms are more effective for other forms of copyrighted works, and copyright is fair and proper there, he goes for "can work" for the functional class of works - and implements this as the GPL. I agree with him about using optimal terms, and see this as extending into the area of functional works.
Most convenient IS (often) fittest. Convenience is an important part of the fitness function.
Your attempt at debunking evolution (which I'm not sure if is serious or not?) is, if serious, based on a misunderstanding of fitness. Fitness is measured for genes and measured in reproduction, not measured for individuals and measured in survival. Large cows need more to eat and have difficulty with breathing.
While I do not fully agree - I believe we'll keep using intelligence for cognitive abilities, and distinguishing "right" from "wrong" inside a particular framework of "right" and "wrong" is just one cognitive ability among many - it was definite food for though. Thanks.
No, I can't force how they use them. However, I can say that your claim that "machines by definition cannot be intelligent" will most likely, if you use a definition that allows humans to be intelligent, fall. Also, notice for yourself: You refused to answer the question. You refused to do the definitions.
Ask yourself: Is this fair towar5ds yourself and knowledge? Can you be sure that you are right unless you actually go in and look at the question *with hard edges*? Do you feel reasonable when you refuse to look at the question in depth? And how would your thoughts be if you just dropped the assertion and looked carefully at the actual behaviour here? Might it not be just as true that intelligence may occur in machines, if you just try this on properly, losing that single assumption?
As for "arbiter of culture", the culture we have use intelligence as a term to refer to humans. I'm referring to that, and I say that a definition of "intelligence" that disagree with this is, in my estimation, unlikely to match anything, and it is unlikely to be useful. You are the one that tries to go away from the common culture in this usage. Are you brave enough to see that you're projecting? Or will you just be angry, because somebody disagrees with you?
You're assuming that humans aren't machines - in this context, that's actually a matter of faith. Human intelligence may be a result of "machine processes" - ie, direct physical processes. If we assume that humans are intelligent - otherwise, the term seems sort of useless - we can't rule out machines being intelligent by them being machines unless we have a definition of machine that excludes humans. (And I believe such a definition would probably be counter-productive when it comes to the matter of defining intelligence.)
This stuff could be bad news for open source. If learning about bugs start to require cash, then proprietary software (with its higher cash flow) gains a large advantage compared to open source.
Possible solution: Set up an enterprise pool where enterprises could pool money to buy exploit information, and get fixes up front for those exploits (before the patch was publicly released.) Might still leave those that couldn't afford to be in the pool with a worse situation than today, though.
If you lost your anger and listened to your counter-debatant, you'd get much further in this discussion. As far as I can tell, you are continually shouting against something you THINK he said or meant, rather than relating to what he said. Of course, what you think he means may be quite offensive - however, what he's been saying, word by word, is quite reasonable.
Slashdot Mirror
The move is clearly against the BSD license. (Also, combining GPLv2ed code and BSDed code is subtly against the GPL, as the requirement to reproduce the license - as shown and violated here - is an extra requirement compared to the GPL, violating the "no additional restrictions" clause of the GPL.)
Eivind.
Either faith or investment. It's quite a lot of work to investigate evolution; and if you don't put that work in, it's faith, and as you obviously understand, evolution makes more concrete claims than belief in God does. As a such, you must accept these concrete claims, and as a larger set of claims they require more faith. Of course, when you start to look, you'll find that they're all connected and have a ton of evidence, so it doesn't require much faith at all (sort of like it's fairly easy to believe in chairs), but before you've investigated carefully and understood evolution and what claims it makes and what evidence it has, it's a whopper.
Oh, and if you haven't yet gotten to believe in chairs - I'm sorry, evolution - I can recommend Richard Dawkins' "Climbing Mount Improbable". It's a wonderful introduction, showing a mountain of evidence.
Eivind.
Free software advocates beleive that freedom is always practical, indeed is the only practical choice in the long run. I'm sorry if you don't value freedom.
Word games.If you really valued freedom, you would give away your software under a license giving away complete freedoms - that is, as public domain. But you don't value freedom.
Oh, you noticed that this was word games, too?
Then stop yours.
All of our licenses is about trading some forms of freedom against other forms of freedom. Various variations of these trades apply in different situations. A careful analysis of the situations and how various choices affect them is, in my opinion, the only way to get REAL freedom out of it. In this, the different licenses are mere tools, and the actual activity around the software - writing it, copying it, modifying it, with people doing it for love or for money or a combination, with money ultimately providing the possibility (as people have to live) - are the things to analyse. Sometimes the restrictions of the GPL are the way to go. Sometimes the freedom of the BSD style licenses is the way. And sometimes something else.
Eivind.
This is how you get lowered insurance premiums from installing an alarm system, and it is a primary force for various company investments in security (though as far as I know not commonly in computer security, as the present security models there are too simple.)
So, sure, they might change the risk assessment based on something being obscure; a smart insurance company would also change it based on something actually being fairly secure, as far as they could evaluate. It's just a question of how it is easy to evaluate - and it all end up as a selection of statistics, as that's what they end up with. It doesn't meant that the model underneath those statistics has to be naive - and remember, EVERYTHING is a question of statistics... Even the existence of the world, it just has very very good odds.
Eivind.
It does lead me to one intriguing question, too: Could the reason plasma behaves "life-like" be that these kinds of structures form and evolve so freaking fast in plasma that even new plasma has had time to evolve a suitable population? I have no idea of the generation time or how plasma behaves, so this is very much off the wall and most likely not so - I just felt it had to be asked...
Eivind.
End of the line, this liability has to "pass through" the end user's computer, as this is the point the rest of the world can see.
At that point, there are a few different possibilities.
One is that the liability strictly follows software unless the user has done something wrong. The user will probably still have to get liability insurance, and in some cases the insurer will be able to recover from the software maker. This option stop free software, as it is impossible to give away software without having a significant cost from insuring it.
Another is that liability strictly follow the user, and the user can get liability insurance wherever they want. This allows the software developer to provide insurance if they want to - and they're in a pretty good position to do so - and otherwise allows somebody else to pick up the insurance. This allows free software to continue, with the possible slight speed bump that it will be hard to get it certified (so insurance premiums may be higher).
The advantage of the first option is that it force quality everywhere. The advantage of the second is flexibility, including the ability to provide software for free.
Personally, I prefer the second option, as I find free software to be important, and I believe the trade off about what risks to accept (ie, cost of insurance) most reasonably can be taken by the end user. I also believe that insurance premiums will drive forth the choice of good software practices. With manufacturer liability, I think we'll just see a bunch of "shell corporations" going bankrupt when the software turn out to be buggy, and a lot of problems of finding out if "incident X" was caused by the user or by the software.
Eivind.
I know that I don't have complete control; and I've written parts of the OS I run on (including being part of the security team for it for a while), and hacked on most of the components I run. There's just too much code and the security model we run is too difficult to keep secure.
However, as I see it, this is solvable by re-allocating risk - so insurance solve it. And, as you mention, simple security measures will help bring the price down.
Deeper security measures could bring the price down more - so, there would suddenly be a good economic foundation for getting more secure code.
It'd be interesting...
Eivind.
Emphasis mine.
Sounds a little like this guy's been buying into "Intelligent" design a little too much...
Actually, I also see the emphasised part as a well known problem, though his formulation seems a bit off. It's basically the core abiogenesis problem.The point is that self-assembly of the kind of biochemistry we run off (RNA/DNA transcription) has a ridiculously low chance of happening "randomly" in a primordial soup. We need to find some better environment or an intermediate process that can happen more easily to have a reasonable explanation for the origin of life from non-living compounds. We have some possible solutions to it, though - for instance, James Ferris' work on the way the mineral montmorillonite can assemble RNA (and we even get "membranes" for free), or Graham Cairns-Smith's Clay Hypothesis, which is based on clay crystals reproducing and being subjected to natural selection, and over time pulling along organic compounds that increase reproduction, and then at the end the organic compounds "taking off by themselves". There has been experiments that at least show that RNA could be plausibly involved in this.
Nobody knows which theory is right; several seems fairly plausible, and none of them have been accepted as shown-to-be-true yet. And it may never be: Our end result could be that life can originate in many different ways, so we won't be able to show which one in particular caused life. This would, to me, be a very satisfying result - as it would show there is almost certainly life elsewhere.
Eivind.
The consequences of holding the users responsible would be fairly small for the users in the end, though, though it might become large for software developers (and possibly be bad for open source).
The first consequence would be that everybody would "have" to have insurance if they wanted to go on the net, as there would be a risk of large liabilities.
The second consequence would that insurance companies started managing security properly, and took various levels of payment depending on how they estimated risk. This would mean that it would be too expensive to run around with an insecure system or with insecure practices.
The third consequence would be that we got software that actually was secure by design, because the liability ended up where it was supposed to go: At the point where the damage is possible to control. For the cases of complex software that the user don't control and the insurance company won't cover, this would have to be indemnified by the software vendor.
Overall, I feel this is the right model: Put the cost of the risk where the risk is possible to control, which is at the user level. This creates incentive for users to learn and behave, and through users and insurance companies incentives for vendors and software developers.
Eivind.
Terra Firma is a private equity firm; they specialize in buying out companies, restructuring them and fixing management issues, and taking profit from the restructuring.
So, the NEW owners haven't yet had time to do much. Whether they will change or not remains to be seen - they've only had a couple of weeks on their hands...
Eivind.
WRT calories expelled: What I have been told by an expert is that there is fairly close to perfect calorie absorption, no matter what. It sounds semi-plausible to me - if we had problems with absorption of calories that are fairly easy to digest, we'd expect to get a lot of wind. This happens when we have other things we can't digest - e.g, lactose intolerance, problems with protein digestion.
Eivind.
Eivind.
I would like to help you with arguments - I feel source code availability to defendants is an important issue, even if the legal precedents aren't in my own country - yet I feel I don't understand exactly what you propose, so it's hard to see if I can help.
Eivind.
Eivind.
Eivind.
Of course, to have any significant opinion in the area, I should read research around it...
Eivind.
The other licenses mark other tradeoffs, including but not limited to the tradeoff of having a community feel they own the license. This may be as important as the feeling of a GPL-using community that they "don't get abused".
For instance, there is yet no license that marks the tradeoff that I see as reasonable: An attempt at optimizing the copyright term to the one that is most productive for society. While Stallman go on and on about how different length copyright terms are more effective for other forms of copyrighted works, and copyright is fair and proper there, he goes for "can work" for the functional class of works - and implements this as the GPL. I agree with him about using optimal terms, and see this as extending into the area of functional works.
Eivind.
Your attempt at debunking evolution (which I'm not sure if is serious or not?) is, if serious, based on a misunderstanding of fitness. Fitness is measured for genes and measured in reproduction, not measured for individuals and measured in survival. Large cows need more to eat and have difficulty with breathing.
Eivind.
While I do not fully agree - I believe we'll keep using intelligence for cognitive abilities, and distinguishing "right" from "wrong" inside a particular framework of "right" and "wrong" is just one cognitive ability among many - it was definite food for though. Thanks.
Eivind.
Ask yourself: Is this fair towar5ds yourself and knowledge? Can you be sure that you are right unless you actually go in and look at the question *with hard edges*? Do you feel reasonable when you refuse to look at the question in depth? And how would your thoughts be if you just dropped the assertion and looked carefully at the actual behaviour here? Might it not be just as true that intelligence may occur in machines, if you just try this on properly, losing that single assumption?
As for "arbiter of culture", the culture we have use intelligence as a term to refer to humans. I'm referring to that, and I say that a definition of "intelligence" that disagree with this is, in my estimation, unlikely to match anything, and it is unlikely to be useful. You are the one that tries to go away from the common culture in this usage. Are you brave enough to see that you're projecting? Or will you just be angry, because somebody disagrees with you?
Eivind.
Eivind.
Possible solution: Set up an enterprise pool where enterprises could pool money to buy exploit information, and get fixes up front for those exploits (before the patch was publicly released.) Might still leave those that couldn't afford to be in the pool with a worse situation than today, though.
Eivind.
Informative on spoofing.
Interesting view.
Eivind.