who take money from Microsoft and play anti-Linux FUD on the front page. I actually enjoys those ads, I mean how often is it that Microsoft sponsors its own bashing!! (well other than funding vista of course...)
How would Americans feel if some Chinese company doing buisness in the US claimed chinese law should be upheld in the US?
I don't see the relevance. Perhaps you meant, "How would Chinese feel if some Chinese company doing business in the U.S. claimed that Chinese law should not be upheld in the U.S.?"
Since the PRC government is more than willing to prosecute Chinese nationals for violations of Chinese law in parts of the world where the PRC does not have jurisdiction, this is still a bad comparison to make, especially since the U.S. will do the same thing in certain instances.
The question is: if the U.S. government is willing to prosecute some violations of U.S. law overseas, why not others?
And the answer is simple: Yahoo (and fuck you, marketdroids, I'm not using your infantile punctuation) has a better lobbyist presence than child molesters.
Actually there is a basic difference. Consider Country A to be the country in which the acts are being committed, and Country B to be the country who wants to charge it's nationals for breaking its laws in Country A.
With the situation of child molesters we are dealing with an act that if it isn't illegal in Country A, is at least not something you are legally required to do. Thus while the laws of Country B add additional restrictions to the laws of Country A for citizens of B who are in A, they do not actually contradict the criminal code of Country A.
With this situation Yahoo! is required by the laws of Country A to give up the journalist's information. Thus when Country B says that Yahoo! is not allowed to give up that information Country B is now contradicting the laws of Country A.
There is a fundamental difference, the first situation (child molestation) says that the laws of Country B can still apply to it's citizens when in foreign lands, the second situation (Yahoo! suit) says that the laws of Country B actually trump the laws of Country A when it's citizens are in country A.
Now there may be situations when you feel that the trumping of foreign laws is appropriate (ie law says you should kill that dude) and I'm not making a judgement on this specific situation. I'm just pointing out that your comparison isn't valid.
Does anyone know what the actual effect of this issue is? I haven't used windows in years so I don't really know how often you'd end up talking to the genuine advantage server, does anybody have an idea how many windows users would have been affected by this incident and have lost functionality as a result?
I think there are three important things to consider here:
1) Chances are by working with Amir he'd be doing absolutely nothing to harm national, or aid terrorists, or anything that could be considered harmful. In fact he'd be more likely to help national security by improving relations with Iran (though this would be on a pretty small scale).
2) If this ever does enter the political arena, and start getting into talk shows and pundits (1) is completely irrelevant. Most likely Amir will be branded as a potential terrorist and this fellow as either irresponsible or naive.
3) Homeland security is more concerned about 2 than 1.
That being said I'd ask someone like the EFF or ACLU for guidance if for no other reason than to make sure that he won't get into too much trouble if 2 or 3 come into play.
This void is around 450M light years wide. An advanced civilization expanding for a billion or so of years would produce this kind of void by capturing and using all radiated energy for its own use. Note that we can see the other side of the hole so we're not talking about something like a giant dyson sphere. However your explanation could work if they found a way to do something like remove that region from our universe (thus leaving the hole) and make their own separate mini-universe, one with shiny walls and stuff to keep radiated energy in.
I think you and I are the only persons to realize this.
Al Queda struck a magor blow to the American way of life. While not an instant knock down, it may in fact be a mortal blow. More like a bee sting to a person allergic to bee venom.
I have to wonder, how much of this would have happened if it wasn't for 9/11?
I can't help but think that if 9/11 never happened we'd be seeing much of the same thing except the scapegoats would be stuff like kidnapping, child pornography, and drugs.
The license meets every criteria for "Open Source" that OSI has published, and MS is following all the published procedures for approval.
They have no choice but to approve it, unless they want to lose credibility, and change "Open Source" to mean "whatever they happen to like", rather than "a license that meets this specified list of objective criteria".
I agree in general though I would state there are instances where a license could meet every criteria but still hurt Open Source in general, I feel that's part of the reason that we have a credible organization like the OSI to give approval.
All of the objections raises are very pointless. For example, there was the objection to how it does not get along with some other licenses. Hello! The same thing applies to many of the already-approved licenses. The objections from the Google guy are even worse--they don't seem to have anything whatsoever to do with the stated purpose of OSI. He's just using the mailing list as a soapbox. He does seem fairly biased but I do think some of his objections have merit. For instance the term "Shared Source" can cause confusion, if Microsoft does get approval it's possible that they may start taking about their "Shared Source" licenses, and mention this particular "Shared Source license is an approved Open Source license by OSI" which could suggest that Shared Source is Open Source. Not to mention in MS-PL PL stands for "Permissive License", PL is an extremely common abbreviation used for Open Source licenses and it always means "Public License", choosing that acronym and choosing "Permissive License" instead on serves to muddy the brand (I am extremely sceptical that is no coincidence).
At the end of the day the question is why is MS writing its own license? I can only think of several possible reasons
1) They legitimately feel that none of the legalese for existing licenses work for them, I find this doubtful though I do note that their license is very short and easy to read (then again there might be a reason other projects feel they need the extra legalese).
2) They don't want to be releasing code under a pre-existing license belonging to someone else. This is fairly possible and understandable (particularly in the best case scenario where they do want to become a legitimate and major open source player), however for both 1 and 2 they could have done this without the naming problems.
3) This is just like every other interaction they've had with the Open Source community and is some sort of trap. This would best explain the poor naming conventions and continued shared source thing. I'm hoping it isn't a trap but the OSI needs to be super careful here since experience shows that Microsoft is up to something nefarious. And if the OSI can't get whatever changes or concessions it needs to make sure this isn't a trap than even if the MS-PL meets the legal definition than I believe they should reject it.
Mira is traveling faster than a speeding bullet, relative to what object? Actually the speed (relative to anything) is irrelevant. A moving object will leave a tail in two scenarios:
1) It's moving quickly relative to its medium (ie a wake left by a ship through water). Now there's no such thing as the ether but presumably there could be some magnetic or gravitational factor (a nearby black hole) that's stripping away material, maybe even some weird property of the solar system is causing it to spew out material in that direction.
2) The star is accelerating and leaving bits behind, I'm not sure what would cause this but I'd guess a black hole or something.
It's almost degrading to women that people keep bringing this stuff up. Condescending might be the right word. Like when someone feels the need to comment about how well Colin Powell speaks. There's an unspoken 'and he's black' that is left hanging for the listener to fill in by themselves. Actually the unspoken 'and' isn't 'and he's black', it's 'and he was part of Bush's administration'.
Now I'm not saying that there aren't members of the Bush administration who are well spoken, polite, and intelligent. But you can't deny the fact that those qualities are statistically less likely to show up there than in other populations. Sure you may call it prejudice when I see one of them on the street and check to make sure none of my civil liberties are missing, but isn't it being naive to assume that I'm not more likely to end up in Guantanamo after running into one of them in a darkened courthouse?
Now it's unfortunate that Collin Powell is burdened with the preconceptions of others of his political alignment but it's hard to ignore the facts.
As a career choice. People who want to be in politics are probably the last people you want in charge. I say we double the pay for every single elected position in the country, halve the term periods, and appoint people (meeting certain criteria, 25 years old, HS diploma, US citizen) to every single position based on a lottery system at whatever level (local, state, federal) the position is for. I'm not sure it works at the executive level but I believe this is the way to go for the legislative bodies, in fact a fairly famous early democracy actually used this system.
As opposed to the big internet companies that want net neutrality? Oh right, they're not evil because they say they aren't. And little Internet companies that want net neutrality, and bloggers, and well basically everybody else on the Internet who doesn't want peoples ability to access to their site to be at the mercy of whatever telecom their bits happen to go through.
But jails are a private enterprise, and by lowering the recidivism rate, they are getting rid of their cash flow. The prisons aren't interested in rehabilitating people, and the health insurance companies aren't interested in providing health care. That's what happens when things that should be socially funded get turned into a money making scheme. I wonder if you could change the system so that recidivism costs the prison money (say the next time that prisoner commits a crime some of the cost of incarceration comes from their former institutions). You'd need some sort of safeguards to stop them from fighting over low recidivism criminals of course but it would certainly give the institutions a strong incentive to rehabilitate prisoners.
I see what you're saying now. But the original meme doesn't specify that. Hmm, I can see that interpretation in the sense that any attempt to stop the spread of information, regardless of its type, is fundamentally futile. Though according to this link its original use does seem to be mostly limited to Intellectual Property. In either case I do like the meme better as referring specifically to non-personal information (ie IP) since that fits better with what I understand to be the common usage as I rarely see it applied to privacy discussions.
When dealing with the government attempting to gain knowledge about you, or even a friend gaining/spreading personal knowledge about you, it's a completely different class of knowledge. The knowledge that the quote refers is non-personal knowledge wanted for personal reasons. In the knowledge you refer to it's personal knowledge that is being sought. You have created an entirely arbitrary and inaccurate distinction. You are driving on a public road, shared with other drives doing the same, and have badged your car with an id tag for the privilege. An id tag whose purpose is to allow your vehicle's location to be tracked for the purpose of law enforcement. Keep in mind that this doesn't track who is driving, so it can't solely prove you're guilty of some crime. I don't see how the distinction is arbitrary or inaccurate at all. I suspect you're confused since you're applying a privacy angle that I never made to my argument. The contention I'm making is that public or private, and whether or not it can be proven that you were in the vehicle or not, this is undoubtedly knowledge about you. This is a very different class of knowledge than a movie or a song which are not primarily knowledge about a person.
I'm pretty anti-state as well and don't particularly like it. But unfortunately I don't see this as overstepping any existing boundaries. I never took sides in the argument about the scanning of license plates (I still haven't made a decision on it). What I made argument with is your use of the quote "information wants to be free". You suggested a hypocrisy on part of people who support legalized file sharing but oppose this action. I however counter that no such hypocrisy exists and my beliefs on file-sharing and license scanning aren't relevant to this argument.
The information referred to in the quote generally refers to creative works, music, movies, source code, stuff that if it were free would theoretically be to the overall benefit of society. I see, so the quote should be: "Information that I want to be free, wants to be free." Can we get anymore hypocritical here? There's nothing hypocritical about it. The basic premise is you have the right to communicate the knowledge around you, that most often involves "I like that song/video, I want to communicate it to my friend", and "my government has me on a list, I want to know why", or sometimes even "I like that program though I want it to do X slightly differently and share my improvement with my friend". In all cases the knowledge is knowledge that either you have or it's knowledge that affects you.
When dealing with the government attempting to gain knowledge about you, or even a friend gaining/spreading personal knowledge about you, it's a completely different class of knowledge. The knowledge that the quote refers is non-personal knowledge wanted for personal reasons. In the knowledge you refer to it's personal knowledge that is being sought.
You may argue that it's self-serving (since the knowledge sought is for personal reasons it's almost by definition self-serving, though not necessarily wrong) but it's certainly not hypocritical since it's not an exception to the rule but a completely different classes of knowledge we're talking about personal vs. non-personal.
And solving crime isn't beneficial to society? My bad, I was lazy and abstracted too much in my previous reply, I meant beneficial to society in the sense of increasing the cultural communication of society as a whole (though certain organizations would argue this) as opposed to catching individual criminals (which still improves society as a whole but is more applied to individuals whereas knowledge sharing is more applied to groups).
I'm sorry but whenever a discussion like this comes up someone always brings up the "information wants to be free" quote and always neglects the fact that it's referring to a completely different kind of information.
The information referred to in the quote generally refers to creative works, music, movies, source code, stuff that if it were free would theoretically be to the overall benefit of society.
The information you refer to has to do with the private lives of individuals (whether or not it can be gathered publicly) and is not the type of information that quote refers to.
MS knows it can't fight open source software (legally or marketwise) and attempting to do so is futile as we've seen with FUD, SCO, and hinting around with patents. Open source can't be squashed, so the next best thing is getting you to run it on Windows instead of Linux. You can debate about Microsoft's motives and intent all day long but you have to remember it's a corporation. Individual psychology does not apply when understanding a corporation's motives. A corporation will attack a problem (ahem Linux) on all fronts, which can and does result in Microsoft performing confusing or opposing actions. The problem is that Microsoft has very little credibility when playing with others, when playing with Open Source it has virtually none.
I mean what interactions has Microsoft had with Open Source that haven't been some kind of trap? OOXML? An "open" standard that is anything but. Patent deals with Novel and Linspire? Ok, the trigger hasn't been fully pulled on those yet but MS is already throwing around patent FUD. Before that more patent FUD, other FUD, namecalling, and general hostility, honestly the only positive thing from Microsoft I can think of wrt copyleft style open source is some windows installer that they released on sourceforge.
I don't have any problem with anyone who opts to use or opts to write OSS for Windows. Windows may not provide value for you Linux or BSD elitists, but it does for those who want it. I'm 100% Linux and I'd love to see more open source on windows.
However, at the end of the day it's like the bully who's beaten you up twenty times and asks you to step into the alley so you can discuss the homework assignment. If you just look at the deal and ignore who's making it then it looks good, and heck, maybe the bully is serious. But if you don't want another black eye you have to consider that their previous pattern of behaviour may indicate an ulterior motive. Maybe Microsoft is playing nice this time, but they're going to have to prove it since there's no way I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt.
What also troubles me is that Linux, GNU, and Open Source tend to react to technologies instead of really developing new technological ideas. We see that feature such and such has been created and that is often reproduced, though maybe in a superior way. What I'd like to see are more unique ideas coming from the Linux community itself thus ensuring that some key new technological concepts come from Open Source. It is sort of like when John Warnock created Adobe and created PostScript for the Apple Mac and the Laser printer. It was a technology like that which propelled Apple to the front of certain markets and it is that which made John Warnock the rich man he is today. I just can see some killer app being developed for Linux which draws people into the industry created and supported by so many of us. I personally feel that the lack of innovation is due more to a lack of maturity in some application spaces than from a lack of ideas. At the end of the day Open Source development is driven by the needs of the current users and developers rather than potential future users. As a result when given a choice between a innovative new feature and an existing proven feature they'll choose the existing feature since they know people, particularly their current userbase, will need and use that feature. Proprietary products are primarily concerned with getting users away from other products, so rather than making a good solid product they're more concerned with adding the killer feature that draws customers away from the competition and towards them. One important thing to note is just like mutations most new features are kinda useless, do you really want a project spending its time hoping to build a killer feature when there's an existing feature you really need?
That doesn't mean Open Source innovation doesn't happen, but rather it happens when the project is mature and there aren't a lot of important basic features missing. Firefox is one example (though I don't know how many of their innovations came from Opera), and Amarok is another, I've heard a lot of people say they like Amarok better than iTunes, I've never really used iTunes but I know that my favourite Amarok feature, using the win key as a global shortcut, apparently doesn't exist in iTunes. As well the desktop managers are getting refined enough that they have time to devote to Compiz Fusion and the kernel has lots of innovations but those aren't really visible to the user.
Wow you really took that and ran. I have no idea where you got half the crap you tried to put into my mouth there. I got it from your post though I may have interpreted it differently then you intended:)
What i was referring to is that they are obviously NOT in a situation of embargo or having severe problems with foreign intereference. Where is the pressure being applied? Afghanistan Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. Is your claim that Saudi Arabia and UAE being subject to less foreign interference from the US than the places the US has either invaded or threatened to invade? I would argue that there is a fundamental difference in that Saudi Arabia and the UAE are more or less willingly cooperating with the US before 9/11 and in fact are kept in power in part due to assistance from the US, this is a source of motivation for terrorist groups.
The rationale behind most of this to get most americans in line was "NEVER FORGET".
Never forget what? Never forget who? It seems they forgot before they ever remembered.
Explain to me please how the vocal group of the American populace is completely unable and unwilling to form their own opinions, or question ANYTHING, is more where i was going with this. That may be your intended point but it wasn't the one I got from your post. Do you want people to question the US's relationship with Saudi Arabia and the UAE specifically, do you believe that those governments are deserving of sanctions or embargos? Or are you merely bemoaning the general ignorance and false conceptions that most people seem to have about terrorism and the middle east in general?
Why is America in Iraq again? How about Afghanistan? If you say Tyranny keep in mind the number of tyrants in Africa that get along great with the white house, Democratic white house OR republican for that matter. Its just as cocked up as when the US FIRST GOT INTO ALL THIS BY ARMING REZA SHAH (leader of what would become Iran...) and then subsequently arming Iraq. For Afghanistan I'd say a mixture of revenge, some general desire to help the people (though more on the part of the international community), and an opportunity to increase US influence in the Arabic world. For Iraq I'd say mostly a chance to increase US influence.
All this ranting simply boils down to one thing; America is easily distractable, and I am expressing a disbelief into how much people seem to prefer being distracted to knowing anything. This has nothing to do with questioning whether they ARE being distracted, its the fact that most DO NOT WANT TO KNOW ANYTHING THAT WILL MAKE LIFE HARDER TO DEAL WITH, truth or not. I won't argue with that, though I think it also has to do with the fact that most people think it won't affect them and even if it does they can't affect it so why bother forming coherent opinions about it.
I minor detail, but the 9/11 hijackers were not shiite muslims. This is one question I wish was asked more often, despite knowing the answer, is why Saudi Arabia has been untouched by agression when the largest percentage of the hijackers were Saudi. In fact the hijackers were ALL from countries with which the oil companies...er....the US is friendly with (with Egypt being the longest stretch by that definition), primarily Saudia Arabia and the UAE. Because a country isn't responsible for the actions of every single one of its citizens?
Of course why terrorists tend to come from countries with US backed governments is another issue...
Has anyone looked at the development of Dubai over the past 10 years? or the wealth of the royal family in Saudi Arabia? Money is flowing to someone from somewhere over there that is for sure. Yeah, I think it comes this black kinda gooey stuff called oil:)
Either way I'm not quite sure what you're saying there, are you alleging corruption as how they got their wealth, or that they have so much money they must be funding terrorists?
Now I'm not saying that Saudi's or UAE citizens are evil by default, simply that there has been absolutely 0 backlash against these regions while the US uses 9/11 to justify everything else it has been doing everywhere else.
Wheres the puzzled slightly-tilted looks of hwhaaa? Again there's a big difference between holding a country responsible for the actions of a subset of its population and holding a country responsible for the actions of its government. Also note that the Saudis don't exactly need any encouragement to combat al-Queda and other terrorists.
I'd drop the term DRM since that term is already associated with a technology that I feel differs greatly from what you propose. Call it something like License Compatibility System (LCS). Basically say in the the Gimp or something if you include a CC photo in your project it would automatically update the License requirements for the rest of the project, if you include two bits that have conflicting requirements or something if will inform you that the current license state is incompatible and the project can't be redistributed.
This differs from DRM in two important ways.
First this system does not give creators extra rights like the ability to force usage for only certain periods or under certain conditions, it only seeks to inform a user/creator when redistribution is not permitted under the current state of the license.
This leads to the second difference which is due to the lack of restrictions on usage encryption isn't a part of this system (other than maybe signatures so people could prove they were the original author of a work) so there isn't any sort of lock in to particular programs or formats.
The Jurassic Park-esque cloning talk is definitely going to be the focus of most of the discussion, but have any of the articles mentioned how well the tissues, organs, and fluids are preserved? This seems like an extraordinary chance to find hard evidence on what caused their extinction. From TFA
"Such a unique skin condition protects all the internal organs from modern microbes and micro-organisms... In terms of its future genetic, molecular and microbiological studies, this is just an unprecedented specimen."
But Tikhonov dismissed suggestions the mammoth could be cloned and used to breed a live mammoth. Cloning can only be done if whole cells are intact, but the freezing conditions will have caused the cells to burst, he Tikhonov.
There is a risk but I think this is something that can be done very well, and from the article it looks like they intend to do that.
there is no such thing as a neutral unbiased source of information. This saying always bugs me. Can you be completely 100% neutral and unbiased? Of course not. But if you're trying it's not that hard to get pretty damn close. The fact is we see so little of it because we don't want to, people want their opinions reinforced, they want some "flavour" with their information so the media gives us what we want. But I've always considered that quote to be an excuse for people to slant info however they want and not even try to be unbiased.
there is no such thing as a neutral unbiased source of information. but a site unhinged from corporate ownership or governmental oversight or funding accountability is pretty much as close as you are going to get. involving any outside entity with an agenda, no matter how innocuous the agenda nor how limited the scope of the involvement nor what the model of involvement is, it taints everything about how you must perceive the site if you have a healthy bullshit meter The risk with wikipedia is there's a bit of a power vacuum, volunteers are effective but there are a lot of organizations with the capital and the lack of morals to hire a non-trivial number of people to deliberately, and ruthlessly, try to skew information in their favour and I'm not sure volunteers can compete with that. Sooner or later some organized group is going to start doing this and some other organized group will be required to fight back. Now you have the risk of agendas at any level but I think if a government establishes an independent organization, gives them a mandate that says "supply good impartial information" then you'll get good impartial information.
One has to wonder though. Given a userbase that often doesn't RTFA, why should we expect the editors to do better?
Serious question, that. These days, there's plenty of other news aggregator feeds out there, many of which hold themselves to much higher editorial standards than Slashdot does. You have to seriously ask if "editor posts wildly misleading description, and hilarity ensues" is perceived by the user community as a feature rather than a bug... Well I'm basically reevaluating how I use/. wrt my online habits. For years I've used/. primarily as a news aggregator, however I've recently started using RSS/Atom feeds a lot more to get the news I'm really interested in from specific sites and blogs. I still get info from/. on a couple subjects where I'm not interested enough to follow primary sources but for the most part I'm starting to see/. as more of a town hall meeting for the internet (or at least the portion of it interested in Linux and open source). It seems that this is a kind of place where the community as a whole gathers to discuss important issues (we don't make decisions so much as discuss and explain the decisions that have been made elsewhere). However even under this interpretation poor summaries just distract from the useful content of a discussion (although in this case there is no story but the poor summary).
True there is some entertainment to be found in making fun of the summaries but I think that's outweighed by the cost of giving people bad information.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't see the relevance. Perhaps you meant, "How would Chinese feel if some Chinese company doing business in the U.S. claimed that Chinese law should not be upheld in the U.S.?"
Since the PRC government is more than willing to prosecute Chinese nationals for violations of Chinese law in parts of the world where the PRC does not have jurisdiction, this is still a bad comparison to make, especially since the U.S. will do the same thing in certain instances.
The question is: if the U.S. government is willing to prosecute some violations of U.S. law overseas, why not others?
And the answer is simple: Yahoo (and fuck you, marketdroids, I'm not using your infantile punctuation) has a better lobbyist presence than child molesters.
Actually there is a basic difference. Consider Country A to be the country in which the acts are being committed, and Country B to be the country who wants to charge it's nationals for breaking its laws in Country A.With the situation of child molesters we are dealing with an act that if it isn't illegal in Country A, is at least not something you are legally required to do. Thus while the laws of Country B add additional restrictions to the laws of Country A for citizens of B who are in A, they do not actually contradict the criminal code of Country A.
With this situation Yahoo! is required by the laws of Country A to give up the journalist's information. Thus when Country B says that Yahoo! is not allowed to give up that information Country B is now contradicting the laws of Country A.
There is a fundamental difference, the first situation (child molestation) says that the laws of Country B can still apply to it's citizens when in foreign lands, the second situation (Yahoo! suit) says that the laws of Country B actually trump the laws of Country A when it's citizens are in country A.
Now there may be situations when you feel that the trumping of foreign laws is appropriate (ie law says you should kill that dude) and I'm not making a judgement on this specific situation. I'm just pointing out that your comparison isn't valid.
Does anyone know what the actual effect of this issue is? I haven't used windows in years so I don't really know how often you'd end up talking to the genuine advantage server, does anybody have an idea how many windows users would have been affected by this incident and have lost functionality as a result?
I think there are three important things to consider here:
1) Chances are by working with Amir he'd be doing absolutely nothing to harm national, or aid terrorists, or anything that could be considered harmful. In fact he'd be more likely to help national security by improving relations with Iran (though this would be on a pretty small scale).
2) If this ever does enter the political arena, and start getting into talk shows and pundits (1) is completely irrelevant. Most likely Amir will be branded as a potential terrorist and this fellow as either irresponsible or naive.
3) Homeland security is more concerned about 2 than 1.
That being said I'd ask someone like the EFF or ACLU for guidance if for no other reason than to make sure that he won't get into too much trouble if 2 or 3 come into play.
Note sure where I heard this but Gentoo is Linux with racing stripes :)
I think you and I are the only persons to realize this.
Al Queda struck a magor blow to the American way of life. While not an instant knock down, it may in fact be a mortal blow. More like a bee sting to a person allergic to bee venom.
I have to wonder, how much of this would have happened if it wasn't for 9/11?I can't help but think that if 9/11 never happened we'd be seeing much of the same thing except the scapegoats would be stuff like kidnapping, child pornography, and drugs.
I agree in general though I would state there are instances where a license could meet every criteria but still hurt Open Source in general, I feel that's part of the reason that we have a credible organization like the OSI to give approval. All of the objections raises are very pointless. For example, there was the objection to how it does not get along with some other licenses. Hello! The same thing applies to many of the already-approved licenses. The objections from the Google guy are even worse--they don't seem to have anything whatsoever to do with the stated purpose of OSI. He's just using the mailing list as a soapbox. He does seem fairly biased but I do think some of his objections have merit. For instance the term "Shared Source" can cause confusion, if Microsoft does get approval it's possible that they may start taking about their "Shared Source" licenses, and mention this particular "Shared Source license is an approved Open Source license by OSI" which could suggest that Shared Source is Open Source. Not to mention in MS-PL PL stands for "Permissive License", PL is an extremely common abbreviation used for Open Source licenses and it always means "Public License", choosing that acronym and choosing "Permissive License" instead on serves to muddy the brand (I am extremely sceptical that is no coincidence).They have no choice but to approve it, unless they want to lose credibility, and change "Open Source" to mean "whatever they happen to like", rather than "a license that meets this specified list of objective criteria".
At the end of the day the question is why is MS writing its own license? I can only think of several possible reasons
1) They legitimately feel that none of the legalese for existing licenses work for them, I find this doubtful though I do note that their license is very short and easy to read (then again there might be a reason other projects feel they need the extra legalese).
2) They don't want to be releasing code under a pre-existing license belonging to someone else. This is fairly possible and understandable (particularly in the best case scenario where they do want to become a legitimate and major open source player), however for both 1 and 2 they could have done this without the naming problems.
3) This is just like every other interaction they've had with the Open Source community and is some sort of trap. This would best explain the poor naming conventions and continued shared source thing. I'm hoping it isn't a trap but the OSI needs to be super careful here since experience shows that Microsoft is up to something nefarious. And if the OSI can't get whatever changes or concessions it needs to make sure this isn't a trap than even if the MS-PL meets the legal definition than I believe they should reject it.
1) It's moving quickly relative to its medium (ie a wake left by a ship through water). Now there's no such thing as the ether but presumably there could be some magnetic or gravitational factor (a nearby black hole) that's stripping away material, maybe even some weird property of the solar system is causing it to spew out material in that direction.
2) The star is accelerating and leaving bits behind, I'm not sure what would cause this but I'd guess a black hole or something.
Note I'm not a physicist.
Now I'm not saying that there aren't members of the Bush administration who are well spoken, polite, and intelligent. But you can't deny the fact that those qualities are statistically less likely to show up there than in other populations. Sure you may call it prejudice when I see one of them on the street and check to make sure none of my civil liberties are missing, but isn't it being naive to assume that I'm not more likely to end up in Guantanamo after running into one of them in a darkened courthouse?
Now it's unfortunate that Collin Powell is burdened with the preconceptions of others of his political alignment but it's hard to ignore the facts.
When dealing with the government attempting to gain knowledge about you, or even a friend gaining/spreading personal knowledge about you, it's a completely different class of knowledge. The knowledge that the quote refers is non-personal knowledge wanted for personal reasons. In the knowledge you refer to it's personal knowledge that is being sought.
You may argue that it's self-serving (since the knowledge sought is for personal reasons it's almost by definition self-serving, though not necessarily wrong) but it's certainly not hypocritical since it's not an exception to the rule but a completely different classes of knowledge we're talking about personal vs. non-personal. And solving crime isn't beneficial to society? My bad, I was lazy and abstracted too much in my previous reply, I meant beneficial to society in the sense of increasing the cultural communication of society as a whole (though certain organizations would argue this) as opposed to catching individual criminals (which still improves society as a whole but is more applied to individuals whereas knowledge sharing is more applied to groups).
I'm sorry but whenever a discussion like this comes up someone always brings up the "information wants to be free" quote and always neglects the fact that it's referring to a completely different kind of information.
The information referred to in the quote generally refers to creative works, music, movies, source code, stuff that if it were free would theoretically be to the overall benefit of society.
The information you refer to has to do with the private lives of individuals (whether or not it can be gathered publicly) and is not the type of information that quote refers to.
I mean what interactions has Microsoft had with Open Source that haven't been some kind of trap? OOXML? An "open" standard that is anything but. Patent deals with Novel and Linspire? Ok, the trigger hasn't been fully pulled on those yet but MS is already throwing around patent FUD. Before that more patent FUD, other FUD, namecalling, and general hostility, honestly the only positive thing from Microsoft I can think of wrt copyleft style open source is some windows installer that they released on sourceforge. I don't have any problem with anyone who opts to use or opts to write OSS for Windows. Windows may not provide value for you Linux or BSD elitists, but it does for those who want it. I'm 100% Linux and I'd love to see more open source on windows.
However, at the end of the day it's like the bully who's beaten you up twenty times and asks you to step into the alley so you can discuss the homework assignment. If you just look at the deal and ignore who's making it then it looks good, and heck, maybe the bully is serious. But if you don't want another black eye you have to consider that their previous pattern of behaviour may indicate an ulterior motive. Maybe Microsoft is playing nice this time, but they're going to have to prove it since there's no way I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt.
That doesn't mean Open Source innovation doesn't happen, but rather it happens when the project is mature and there aren't a lot of important basic features missing. Firefox is one example (though I don't know how many of their innovations came from Opera), and Amarok is another, I've heard a lot of people say they like Amarok better than iTunes, I've never really used iTunes but I know that my favourite Amarok feature, using the win key as a global shortcut, apparently doesn't exist in iTunes. As well the desktop managers are getting refined enough that they have time to devote to Compiz Fusion and the kernel has lots of innovations but those aren't really visible to the user.
Never forget what? Never forget who? It seems they forgot before they ever remembered.
Explain to me please how the vocal group of the American populace is completely unable and unwilling to form their own opinions, or question ANYTHING, is more where i was going with this. That may be your intended point but it wasn't the one I got from your post. Do you want people to question the US's relationship with Saudi Arabia and the UAE specifically, do you believe that those governments are deserving of sanctions or embargos? Or are you merely bemoaning the general ignorance and false conceptions that most people seem to have about terrorism and the middle east in general? Why is America in Iraq again? How about Afghanistan? If you say Tyranny keep in mind the number of tyrants in Africa that get along great with the white house, Democratic white house OR republican for that matter. Its just as cocked up as when the US FIRST GOT INTO ALL THIS BY ARMING REZA SHAH (leader of what would become Iran...) and then subsequently arming Iraq. For Afghanistan I'd say a mixture of revenge, some general desire to help the people (though more on the part of the international community), and an opportunity to increase US influence in the Arabic world. For Iraq I'd say mostly a chance to increase US influence. All this ranting simply boils down to one thing; America is easily distractable, and I am expressing a disbelief into how much people seem to prefer being distracted to knowing anything. This has nothing to do with questioning whether they ARE being distracted, its the fact that most DO NOT WANT TO KNOW ANYTHING THAT WILL MAKE LIFE HARDER TO DEAL WITH, truth or not. I won't argue with that, though I think it also has to do with the fact that most people think it won't affect them and even if it does they can't affect it so why bother forming coherent opinions about it.
Of course why terrorists tend to come from countries with US backed governments is another issue... Has anyone looked at the development of Dubai over the past 10 years? or the wealth of the royal family in Saudi Arabia? Money is flowing to someone from somewhere over there that is for sure. Yeah, I think it comes this black kinda gooey stuff called oil
Either way I'm not quite sure what you're saying there, are you alleging corruption as how they got their wealth, or that they have so much money they must be funding terrorists? Now I'm not saying that Saudi's or UAE citizens are evil by default, simply that there has been absolutely 0 backlash against these regions while the US uses 9/11 to justify everything else it has been doing everywhere else.
Wheres the puzzled slightly-tilted looks of hwhaaa? Again there's a big difference between holding a country responsible for the actions of a subset of its population and holding a country responsible for the actions of its government. Also note that the Saudis don't exactly need any encouragement to combat al-Queda and other terrorists.
Hmm, that's actually might be a good idea.
I'd drop the term DRM since that term is already associated with a technology that I feel differs greatly from what you propose. Call it something like License Compatibility System (LCS). Basically say in the the Gimp or something if you include a CC photo in your project it would automatically update the License requirements for the rest of the project, if you include two bits that have conflicting requirements or something if will inform you that the current license state is incompatible and the project can't be redistributed.
This differs from DRM in two important ways.
First this system does not give creators extra rights like the ability to force usage for only certain periods or under certain conditions, it only seeks to inform a user/creator when redistribution is not permitted under the current state of the license.
This leads to the second difference which is due to the lack of restrictions on usage encryption isn't a part of this system (other than maybe signatures so people could prove they were the original author of a work) so there isn't any sort of lock in to particular programs or formats.
"Such a unique skin condition protects all the internal organs from modern microbes and micro-organisms
But Tikhonov dismissed suggestions the mammoth could be cloned and used to breed a live mammoth. Cloning can only be done if whole cells are intact, but the freezing conditions will have caused the cells to burst, he Tikhonov.
Serious question, that. These days, there's plenty of other news aggregator feeds out there, many of which hold themselves to much higher editorial standards than Slashdot does. You have to seriously ask if "editor posts wildly misleading description, and hilarity ensues" is perceived by the user community as a feature rather than a bug... Well I'm basically reevaluating how I use
True there is some entertainment to be found in making fun of the summaries but I think that's outweighed by the cost of giving people bad information.