Your post reminds me about a case I saw in the papers a while back.
A man from Newfoundland decided for whatever reason he was going to go out in a shooting rampage. He decided he'd commit the rampage in Toronto because he thought people weren't very nice there. So he was at a park in Toronto, car full of guns and ammo scouting out the scene before starting his rampage. As it happened a woman was walking her dog ended up having a friendly conversation with him. The man then decided that people were too nice to kill in Toronto as well and so he turned himself into police.
Give the NSA the power to monitor foreigners without seeking FISA court approval, even if the surveillance is conducted by tapping phones and e-mail accounts in the United States. A lot of the Bush administrations rights abuses seem to be centering around people without US citizenship. Does anyone know if this selective application of rights to only apply to American citizens something that's alway existed in the US (albeit to a lower extent) or is this division something more or less invented by the Bush Administration?
It won't work because the internet can't be policed, and those who would self-police aren't the problem anyway. Actually I think it could work.
Humans are social creatures, we like to conform to community standards and feel shameful when we don't. One of the problems with online dialog is that local community standards no longer apply, this leads to a lot of people feeling that there aren't any standards at all, thus they no longer regulate their behaviour. If a code of conduct (or multiple codes) was established that a majority of people could agree to then there would be a community standard and I feel a lot of people who are currently somewhat abusive would realize their behavior doesn't fall in line with this standard would feel pressure to alter their behaviour.
That being said I think that the O'Reilly code concentrated too much on stuff like comments and not enough on peoples general online conduct.
None of these facts are relevant to the discussion. The sole issue is that Michael Buesch made a public spectacle out of Marcus' mistake. It should have been addressed privately between developers, and then broadcast publicly if discussions were unsuccessful. Regardless of whether you believe Marcus' actions were a mistake or a theft, you must give someone with his track record the benefit of the doubt. By embarrassing him publicly, Michael destroyed Marcus' motivation to work in bcw(4) and benefit the non-GPL user communities.
Even Jeff Garzik, one of the bcm43xx developers, admitted that Michael's actions were wrong. It's unfortunate that Michael Beusch is more concerned about defending his actions than correcting the injustice.
I agree with you that doing in a public forum was harsh and that responding privately would have been more polite and possibly would have lead to a better resolution. But I don't agree with Theo's hyperbolic characterization of Micheal and the others as a bunch of GPL fanatics relishing at the opportunity to drag an OpenBSD developer through the mud and then try to make him come back begging like a dog (yes he used both those metaphors). Micheal and the others were probably a little angry, with good reason, their code had been copied without permission and without credit. How would you feel if you saw another open source developer was taking your work and passing it off as their own? My guess is responding in a public forum was their way to both get back some of that credit and perhaps give a little vindictive shaming. Not the purest of motives but not entirely out of line either.
However Theo's first reaction was to turn the situation into an attack on Micheal. Note in the first email Theo sent his first suggestion of how the problem may be resolved was "Maybe he'll just delete the driver and quit even trying, because you chose to cc so many people, and malign him. Maybe he'll simply replace every single line that looks similar, and then he could rightly not even mention any of the efforts of people like you". So his first suggestion is that the developer quit, his second is that the developer remove any GPL code from the driver (denying the GPL authors credit is given as a prominent benefit here). No where in the email does he directly acknowledge the option that the bcm43xx developers did give, to relicense a bunch of that code under BSD. To me it sounds like Theo had no interest in coming to a constructive solution and instead was just trying to turn the situation around into an attack on Micheal and the others. Note that despite sending the email in a public forum their entire dialog was very polite, constrained, and actually trying to find a solution. The only other thing they could be faulted was stating their belief that the copying was deliberate and the developer knew he was violating the GPL, considering the developer was an experienced BSD contributor I'd say these beliefs are valid.
Note that by the time Marcus had gotten around to responding (no idea if he was hesitating or if he hadn't read his email yet) Theo had already turned the thread into a full flame war (with him doing all the flaming). Also Theo had already presented the idea, multiple times, that Marcus just quit and never acknowledged the idea of asking the original authors to re-license some of the code (which they repeatedly said they would do) as a valid solution. In my opinion Micheal Buesch bears very little responsibility for the developer quiting, Theo basically left him with no other option (besides contradicting him).
There was an interesting bit about how they're dealing with the Novell-Microsoft agreement.
The other paragraph, and these are both in section [11], is aimed at the Novell side in the deal, which is, it says that if you distribute the program under an arrangement you made with someone else, to gain promises of patent safety for your customers in a discriminatory way, then you're violating the licence and you lose your right to distribute.
This actually has a few more conditions because we were trying to avoid covering certain other things, for instance, consider a patent parasite, one of those companies that has only one business which is to go around threatening people with patent law suits and making them pay. When this happens, the businesses that are attacked often have no choice but to pay them off. We don't want to put them in a position of being GPL violators as a result. So we put in a condition: "this paragraph applies only if the patent holder makes a business of distributing software". Patent parasites don't. As a result, the victim of the patent parasites is not put in violation by this paragraph. I'm a little nervous about "this paragraph applies only if the patent holder makes a business of distributing software", does that mean all the parasite has to do is put up a site that says "download a copy of ls for only $10" and they're a distributor? Ok, that's a bit extreme but a lot of patent parasites are dying software companies who would likely be considered distributors. As well it's possible for this clause to be exploited. What's to stop the next SCO from selling all their patents to a patent parasite who in return gives them a license? They've sidestepped the clause entirely and the parasite can threaten to sue whoever they want (except Novell & customers).
Really if one company is attacked for patent infringement on a piece of GPL'd software than every user is vulnerable and it's only a matter of time before the parasite makes the rounds through all the companies. I think the old form was better since it didn't allow a distributor to back down and pay them off, perhaps giving the community to gather and fight back. Of course the old version also allows an unscrupulous competitor to give their patents to a shell company with the understanding that the shell company will put the competition out of business...
This entire post is the most insightful thing I've seen on Slashdot in months. It just seems that being unable to rate it beyond 5 points is somehow cheating it, but at least it was correctly modded as high as possible. Wow, thanks for the compliment, you truly just made my day.
On a related note I'm actually more pleased that your comment got positive mods than any mods my comment got, do I get to claim those mod points and go for a +8?
I wanted to like, "Serenity." I went to the theatre expecting to like it. But I was bored silly by a boring plot that was full of holes. The characters weren't especially compelling. I couldn't figure out what was so great about this. After finishing it, I couldn't even figure out what was tolerable about it. From what I've seen since then, it seems as though "Serenity" fans are fanatically loyal and vocal, but most people who weren't already fans didn't find the movie especially entertaining. Obviously, I haven't taken a poll, but the box office results must mean SOMETHING. I watched and really enjoyed firefly, when I heard about the movie I was very sceptical that it would translate onto the big screen, I found the movie enjoyable, maybe even good, but I'd stop far short of labelling it great.
I find people have a tendency to ally themselves with a certain bit of media or subsection of culture, they'll then defend any show, movie, or book that falls into this subsection even though they realize that it isn't very good. Conversely they'll denigrate anything that falls into categories that they don't like, regardless of its quality. I know I've often found myself wrestling with these very tendencies.
Simply put firefly fans were fanatical enough about firefly that they earned themselves a movie. When this movie came about, even though it wasn't as good as the series, they had so much personally invested that they continued to push it every chance they got. I'd suspect that a good portion of those firefly fans who voted for Serenity realize, and would even admit that Serenity isn't the greatest science fiction movie ever. But they perceive an attack on Serenity as an attack on their community, and therefore themselves, and thus feel the need to defend it.
This bill identifies the specific problems and concerns with eVoting. It addresses them one-by-one in the logical manner suggested by the vast majority of people educated about eVoting. It is simply a well written piece of legislation.
In other words it doesn't have a hope in hell of passing, couldn't someone at least throw in some ammendment about a program to train Arctic monkies to do the recounts so legislators will consider it?
Question for any games devs out there, which kind of AI is generally more difficult to write, turn based or real time?
Now ignoring stuff like FPS where you can get away with fairly basic AI if you want, you have turn based (ie Civ, chess, Battle for Wesnoth etc) and real time (Starcraft, C&C, boswars, etc). Obviously there must be some very different strategies and approaches, for turn based you get to spend a lot more cycles figuring what to do, then again the player has a lot more expectation of a good strategy from you. For real time you don't have much time to make decisions and need to be very event based, but on the other hand you generally have fewer variables to worry about (after all humans need to play it as well) and you have a significant click speed advantage over the human player.
So any game designers out there who've worked with both and have an opinion on the respective difficulties?
So you're sure that in 10-20 years rms will still be at the helm of the FSF? If he isn't who replaces him, who decides who replaces him? Which way does the FSF go, does someone like Sun find a way to get a controlling interest then go in a different way then you want to go?
No, I'm not. Which is why I wrote "By itself, that's fine, trusting a third party to always put out fair licenses is a massive mistake, but where Torvalds screwed up was in not replacing (the mechanism allowing the ability to use future versions of the GPL.)"
Ok maybe the other mechanism you suggested. Maybe a vote by committers, what if some company gets a big portion of the committers then try to push their own agenda? Ok, an organisation built around the kernel. Who decides who runs that organization?
You can create checks and balances that will reduce the chances of a serious problem to close to zero. Whereas the likelihood that the license you're using from 1991 being still relevent in 2007 is, to put it mildly, close to zero.
The simplest is to require a license be both a newer version of the GPL, and be blessed by Linus Torvalds. That's also being proposed by the FSF as a way forward for people with these problems.
Really I think that's more of a political gesture (or a specific shot at Linus) than anything. Linus can be hit by a bus, decide he wants to work on other stuff, or simply have his branch of the kernel lose significance (maybe Red Hat, IBM, and others decide they want their own branch that's run a different way). The fundamental problem is that any time you provide a way for your license to be changed you're taking a big risk because the one thing you can be sure of is it won't be the same license you agreed to. It's really hard to design checks and balances around that.
At this stage, the difficulty of getting enough of the contributors to ensure a smooth transition to GPLv3 seems difficult to surmount. Code exists in Linux today that's derived code of people who contributed 15 years ago, and I suspect a fair number are uncontactable. At this stage, those who believe it can be done say that it's ok, we can always rewrite the 10-25% we're unable to find and get consent from the authors of, but can we? How identifiable is this code?
Might it not be easier to "steal" FreeBSD's kernel and relicense it as GPLv3, than go through the expense and hassle of trying to convert Linux?
I'm not arguing that a change won't be a big pain, those numbers are a little higher than I'd expect but I'm not a kernel contributor so I can't really comment on it. But I think it's feasible to start up a branch where a few people just start re-writing that code (keeping the API) while the rest of the kernel keeps coding on. It might take a couple years but at the end they should have a close to drop in replacement for the old code without a huge cost.
I should note that I think that the Kernel should have included the update clause in their version of the license, but I disagree with you in that I believe that their reasons for not including it were sound.
Seriously - there seems to be plenty of oil still. Maybe even more than was once thought. (Google "north pole oil" for details).
The unstated point of the whole question of "alternative" fuels probably has something to do with "global warming" (which probably IS happening) and the underlying assumption that we human critters have a gnat's-ass of influence on said warming (which we do - have a gnat's-ass worth of input, i.e. not much.) Google "The Great Global Warming Swindle" for some interesting links.
You can choose a "side", but think about it a bit first.
Yeah, either I can believe a handful of scientists hand-picked by a documentary maker. Or I can believe countless numbers of brilliant climatologists who have dedicated their lives to the study of climate, constantly checking their results and critiquing each-others research as is the norm in science.
Hmmm, that's a tough one. Well maybe all those brilliant scientists are actually doing some big self serving conspiracy, yeah sure scientists are generally known as having a lot more integrity than other fields but it must be them decieving everyone, not the energy companies who clearly have the purest motives!
I'm sorry for being sarcastic but I find all the global warming conspiracy talk to be irritating. Consider the following:
1) Name a single instance where a large scientific community has conspired to decieve the public. Science is built on integrity, researchers need to be highly critical of their own results otherwise their reputation suffers (and they care a lot about their reputation), I find it highly unlikely that they would be even willfully ignorant since they simply can't afford to be.
2) The scientific community HAS spoken, that was part of the idea of the IPCC report on climate change. To show that the scientists studying the climate overwhelmingly support the hypothesis that we are warming up the planet. The thought that there's a conscious conspiracy is ludicrous, even the theory that their all convinced/intimidated by a pro-global warming scientific lobby I find unconvincing given (1).
3) Now if you accept (2), that all these scientists do genuinely believe in global warming, now the only option left is that they're wrong. Yes, some film-makers, politicians, oil execs, journalists, and a small minority of scientists (many not even climatologists), many who have strong motives to convince people global warming doesn't exists, are right. On the other hand the very smart climatologists, who have dedicated their considerable intellect to studying this issue, are wrong. Maybe between all of them those issues mentioned in the documentary just never occurred to them, someone should probably send them a copy to clear this mess up.
The fact is we have scientists for a reason, to study stuff, to become experts in a field so they can aid the rest of society with their knowledge in that field. You know that clueless person who always asks you to fix their computer? They think the problem is X, you know the problem is Y, but you just can't convince them. Well we're the clueless person, and the experts are telling us the answer is Y, I don't know about you but I'm gonna trust them on this one because they know a heck of a lot more than me about it.
Whereupon Torvalds threw a fit, because he'd fucked up. Seriously fucked up. Early on in Linux development, he settled on the GPLv2, but didn't like one commonly included licensing mechanism, the ability to use future versions of the GPL. By itself, that's fine, trusting a third party to always put out fair licenses is a massive mistake, but where Torvalds screwed up was in not replacing it. So you're sure that in 10-20 years rms will still be at the helm of the FSF? If he isn't who replaces him, who decides who replaces him? Which way does the FSF go, does someone like Sun find a way to get a controlling interest then go in a different way then you want to go?
Ok maybe the other mechanism you suggested. Maybe a vote by committers, what if some company gets a big portion of the committers then try to push their own agenda? Ok, an organisation built around the kernel. Who decides who runs that organization?
Really at the end of the day the GPLv2 is a pretty good license. If a situation comes up where they feel they have to switch to GPLv3 then they can start going through the committers logs and start getting permission, a lot of the code is copyrighted by companies like Red Hat, IBM, Novell, etc, you get them on board and a lot of the work is already done, most of the individual committers are probably still reachable as well and almost all of them will agree. Now some of the stuff they won't get permission for, and they'll have to re-write that, it sucks but other projects have done the same thing and while it will be a bump in the road it certainly won't kill kernel development.
A lot of the violent crimes committed against males are due to them doing something to provoke it.
So, what has Kathy Sierra done to provoke this?
I'm not saying that she did anything wrong, but these threats certainly don't seem random. Did she piss off somebody somehow? Snub somebody? Unpopular political views? Is merely being a successful, apparently intelligent woman sufficient? (I don't know anything about her beyond what's in her Wikipedia page, but she does appear to be successful and intelligent. But I wouldn't consider that to be unusual enough to warrant death threats?)
My guess is she provoked it by being successful, intelligent, and by blogging (I don't know what she blogs about but that may also be a factor), these qualities are apparently what attracted these threats. As others have pointed out it's not uncommon for threats like this to show up, especially for those with a significant on-line presence. She just happens to feel that blogging isn't worth the cost of dealing with these threats and she's removing the provokation by ceasing to blog.
This is because we as a society do not care two figs about violence against males. We do not value our young males, and we do not teach them to take care of themselves. Quite the opposite: we teach them to be careless of their own safety, and we teach them they are cowards or worse if they take reasonable precautions like giving a thought to being attacked when walking to their car in a dark parking lot.
This is not to say that violence against females is acceptable. It is obviously not. But any time I hear anyone decrying "violence against women" as being particularly bad I have to wonder if they think violence against men is OK? Or at least not so particularly bad? And if they do think that, I really have to wonder why. If they are even remotely decent and humane it certainly cannot be the fact that most violence is committed by men, because it is also the case that, for example, in the United States most violence is committed by black people, and there is a word for people who think that that fact makes violence against black people OK. You make some good points but I think you overlooked 2 important things:
1) While males may be at higher risk from violent crimes we don't FEEL at higher risk, partially because we feel we have the ability to defend ourselves in the way a woman can't. Thus we feel much more secure walking through a parking lot or being on a dark sidewalk at night because we feel if we are attacked there's something we can do about it.
2) A lot of the violent crimes committed against males are due to them doing something to provoke it. Now I'm not saying that mouthing off in a bar means that someone has the right to assault you, but you're a lot more likely to get assaulted if you're mouthing off than if you're completely passive. I know that I'm personally a very passive individual and have never even gotten in a heated argument much less a fight, it's very unlikely that myself or similiar individuals are going to be involved in one of those violent crime statistics. As a result myself and other males feel a lot more secure since any violent confrontation is probably something we've initiated on some level and we trust ourselves not to get ourselves into something we can't handle (even if this trust is misplaced). My experience is that women rarely provoke violent incidents to anywhere near the same extent that males do, thus females have a lot less control over these incidents and a passive female is probably at greater risk of violent crime then a passive male.
The fact is that women do feel more vulnerable to violent attacks, and to an extent they are justified in those feelings.
This is yet another illustration of my point... the people that need to be in Iraq and Afghanistan are the NYPD and the LAPD. Their SWAT, negotiations, and (apparently!) intelligence teams are what's needed - these efforts ceased being appropriate "military actions" some time ago. What's needed now is an effective police force - which not the U.S. Army or Marines. I won't argue that the US has the wrong types of troops in Iraq (need forces trained to keep peace, not just kill enemies). But just dropping in a western police force isn't going to work either, you need troops trained in real combat (not the occational shootout you sometime get here) and who know how to deal with a foreign population while keeping order.
Any actual law enforcement that doesn't involve a military threat should probably be left to local authorities so you aren't percieved as occupiers.
The argument for pre-installations is really about novice users who can't be bothered to install an OS onto a fresh machine, and just want something that's going to work with minimal fuss. They need a distribution that's as idiot-proof and "polished" as possible, and that's what the criteria for choosing it should be. Actually for myself (who is definitely not a novice user) there are two very tangible benefits for a pre-installed version.
1) Even if I don't use the version they installed I will know that there are drivers (hopefully open source) available for that specific hardware and these drivers can likely be ported to my distro (if they haven't already).
2) If piece of hardware X isn't working right now I have no idea if it's a hardware or driver problem. If they have a pre-installed version I can throw it on pre-installed distro and test it. If the hardware still doesn't work that still means it's either the hardware is broken or the driver is broken. However with the pre-installed distro I now have the ability to bug Dell about it since in either case it's still their problem.
Actually a wasteful system seems like a very good idea. Historically, there is a direct correlation between how oppressive and how efficient a government is. It seems like all governments have an inherent urge to oppress their constituents and that greater inefficiency slows it down. Then again, we all hae to pay for that in terms of taxes so it sucks either way. Good point though I don't really think that the US government needs any help being less efficient:)
Absolutely. I was just discussing this with someone today - if the "readings" in Congress were mandatory and could not be bypassed by consent, we'd have a much better legal system for a variety of reasons - Congressional representatives couldn't claim ignorance, there would be an incentive to keep bills shorter, and an unexpected change would be noticed more readily. Is it just me or does the idea of a major legislative body just sitting around, listening to someone read what everyone concerned should already know, seem quite wasteful?
Even if they did do as you say a subtle change snuck in could still slip past because no one is paying attention (as they feel it's a waste of time and the change is subtle). The problem, as the submitter said, is realizing that a handful of words among thousands have just changed. The solution, as the submitter said, is some form of source control, not wasting everyones time with a solution that won't fix the true problem.
The USA should quit funding the UN and bulldoze their New York office ...
In most of America, I can shoot anybody who threatens me or my property ...
the Anti-Christian Lawsuit Union - er - the American Civil Liberties Union's lawsuits It took me a couple reads through before I decided your comment wasn't satire. Excerpts such as the above were a major reason for that confusion.
If you expect people to take you seriously I would suggest a more reasonable argument.
There's no "gene" per se that explains why humans believe in God and the supernatural. Humans believe in God because they want to believe that their life means something, that we are living for a reason. It comforts humans "knowing" that there is something bigger than them out there, it comforts them "knowing" that when one dies, they just go up to heaven to live a better life. Humans believe in God simply because they want to believe. So according to you believing in God and the supernatural gives people comfort and meaning. Wouldn't something like that tend to offer those people a competetive advantage over their peers who lack similar psychological benefits?
We are fully aware that people like you (the bad people) are out there trying take away our liberties for the smallest and most false sense of security. Thats why we applaud this. Its a victory against you bad people. Don't worry we know you exist!
Just curious. What liberties have you lost due to anti-terror legislation in whatever country you are living in?
I ask because I keep hearing about how the US has become a police state. Well, I'm in the US and as far as I can tell, this new Bush police state looks exactly as it did under Clinton, except the economy is better. I think it is only fair that I stand with my fellow Americans and suffer as they have, but before I do that, I need to know what it is I'm missing. Well be glad you name isn't Mahar Arar.
I'm sure there were a lot of people in Nazi Germany as well who didn't notice their rights were being infringed because they never got on the wrong side of the state. If you're a productive, well-behaved citizen I doubt there's a police state in existance that would hassle you. Liberties are what you're left with when you go against the state, when you happen to have a tenuous connection to some possible terrorists, or to expose an obvious and glaring security hole, those are the things that are vanishing from your country.
Because obviously the hacker is guilty of more crimes than that judge
-> clear violation of privacy of thousands of people -> use of that information for private gain -> passing off vigilante-collected information to the police -> (plus or minus) collecting that same porn
All this obviously without a court order, or even being in the police force.
This is also seriously worse than the riaa has ever done. So what should the punishment for the hacker be ? Clearly he cannot go free, despite having caught this criminal. Ahh but you forget, child pornography was involved, one of Bruce Schneier's four horsemen of the information apocalypse. You can be assured that no right is safe, nor investigative method over the line, when one of the horsemen is involved.
You know, no matter what they throw in their ToS I don't think that companies (even those providing free services) should be able to hold peoples data hostage
I'm not sure what exactly the laws are, but I think the data actually belongs to lycos and they can do what they wish with it. Does anyone know what the law is? From my understanding if you write it you own the copyright and Lycros can't take it. Theoretically they could put something in their ToS to say they gain copyright when you put it through their servers but I don't think they'd want to do that as it would jepordize their common carrier status. However, you having copyright only really says that they can't do something with your data that you didn't agree to in the ToS, for instance they can't publish the book that you wrote then emailed your friend for a review. However they should be well within their legal rights to delete that data at a whim as long as it's covered in their ToS.
On the other hand, it is a free service, and Lycos has just proven that you do, indeed, get what you pay for. It is a shame that the old E-mails are gone, and it is unfortunate that nobody thought of a way to archive them off of Lycos' servers so that it no longer cluttered their machines, but it does appear to have been part of their ToS, so my sympathy is limited there, too. You know, no matter what they throw in their ToS I don't think that companies (even those providing free services) should be able to hold peoples data hostage. You use the services for the features it provides, and if you part ways you should lose those features. But the data you entrust to their service is yours, you own the copyright and you should be able to do whatever you want with it (including archiving it in a convenient way). Unfortunately since the companies control the keys to the data they seem to feel it's their to do with as they please, including using it's value to pressure its users. It's the same thing with flickr and yahoo and the simple fact is as long as we entrust companies with our data with no way to get that data back out we'll be vulnerable to things like this.
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Your post reminds me about a case I saw in the papers a while back.
A man from Newfoundland decided for whatever reason he was going to go out in a shooting rampage. He decided he'd commit the rampage in Toronto because he thought people weren't very nice there. So he was at a park in Toronto, car full of guns and ammo scouting out the scene before starting his rampage. As it happened a woman was walking her dog ended up having a friendly conversation with him. The man then decided that people were too nice to kill in Toronto as well and so he turned himself into police.
It won't work because the internet can't be policed, and those who would self-police aren't the problem anyway. Actually I think it could work.
Humans are social creatures, we like to conform to community standards and feel shameful when we don't. One of the problems with online dialog is that local community standards no longer apply, this leads to a lot of people feeling that there aren't any standards at all, thus they no longer regulate their behaviour. If a code of conduct (or multiple codes) was established that a majority of people could agree to then there would be a community standard and I feel a lot of people who are currently somewhat abusive would realize their behavior doesn't fall in line with this standard would feel pressure to alter their behaviour.
That being said I think that the O'Reilly code concentrated too much on stuff like comments and not enough on peoples general online conduct.
None of these facts are relevant to the discussion. The sole issue is that Michael Buesch made a public spectacle out of Marcus' mistake. It should have been addressed privately between developers, and then broadcast publicly if discussions were unsuccessful. Regardless of whether you believe Marcus' actions were a mistake or a theft, you must give someone with his track record the benefit of the doubt. By embarrassing him publicly, Michael destroyed Marcus' motivation to work in bcw(4) and benefit the non-GPL user communities.
Even Jeff Garzik, one of the bcm43xx developers, admitted that Michael's actions were wrong. It's unfortunate that Michael Beusch is more concerned about defending his actions than correcting the injustice.
I agree with you that doing in a public forum was harsh and that responding privately would have been more polite and possibly would have lead to a better resolution. But I don't agree with Theo's hyperbolic characterization of Micheal and the others as a bunch of GPL fanatics relishing at the opportunity to drag an OpenBSD developer through the mud and then try to make him come back begging like a dog (yes he used both those metaphors). Micheal and the others were probably a little angry, with good reason, their code had been copied without permission and without credit. How would you feel if you saw another open source developer was taking your work and passing it off as their own? My guess is responding in a public forum was their way to both get back some of that credit and perhaps give a little vindictive shaming. Not the purest of motives but not entirely out of line either.However Theo's first reaction was to turn the situation into an attack on Micheal. Note in the first email Theo sent his first suggestion of how the problem may be resolved was "Maybe he'll just delete the driver and quit even trying, because you chose to cc so many people, and malign him. Maybe he'll simply replace every single line that looks similar, and then he could rightly not even mention any of the efforts of people like you". So his first suggestion is that the developer quit, his second is that the developer remove any GPL code from the driver (denying the GPL authors credit is given as a prominent benefit here). No where in the email does he directly acknowledge the option that the bcm43xx developers did give, to relicense a bunch of that code under BSD. To me it sounds like Theo had no interest in coming to a constructive solution and instead was just trying to turn the situation around into an attack on Micheal and the others. Note that despite sending the email in a public forum their entire dialog was very polite, constrained, and actually trying to find a solution. The only other thing they could be faulted was stating their belief that the copying was deliberate and the developer knew he was violating the GPL, considering the developer was an experienced BSD contributor I'd say these beliefs are valid.
Note that by the time Marcus had gotten around to responding (no idea if he was hesitating or if he hadn't read his email yet) Theo had already turned the thread into a full flame war (with him doing all the flaming). Also Theo had already presented the idea, multiple times, that Marcus just quit and never acknowledged the idea of asking the original authors to re-license some of the code (which they repeatedly said they would do) as a valid solution. In my opinion Micheal Buesch bears very little responsibility for the developer quiting, Theo basically left him with no other option (besides contradicting him).
This actually has a few more conditions because we were trying to avoid covering certain other things, for instance, consider a patent parasite, one of those companies that has only one business which is to go around threatening people with patent law suits and making them pay. When this happens, the businesses that are attacked often have no choice but to pay them off. We don't want to put them in a position of being GPL violators as a result. So we put in a condition: "this paragraph applies only if the patent holder makes a business of distributing software". Patent parasites don't. As a result, the victim of the patent parasites is not put in violation by this paragraph. I'm a little nervous about "this paragraph applies only if the patent holder makes a business of distributing software", does that mean all the parasite has to do is put up a site that says "download a copy of ls for only $10" and they're a distributor? Ok, that's a bit extreme but a lot of patent parasites are dying software companies who would likely be considered distributors. As well it's possible for this clause to be exploited. What's to stop the next SCO from selling all their patents to a patent parasite who in return gives them a license? They've sidestepped the clause entirely and the parasite can threaten to sue whoever they want (except Novell & customers).
Really if one company is attacked for patent infringement on a piece of GPL'd software than every user is vulnerable and it's only a matter of time before the parasite makes the rounds through all the companies. I think the old form was better since it didn't allow a distributor to back down and pay them off, perhaps giving the community to gather and fight back. Of course the old version also allows an unscrupulous competitor to give their patents to a shell company with the understanding that the shell company will put the competition out of business...
Damn, patents suck.
On a related note I'm actually more pleased that your comment got positive mods than any mods my comment got, do I get to claim those mod points and go for a +8?
I find people have a tendency to ally themselves with a certain bit of media or subsection of culture, they'll then defend any show, movie, or book that falls into this subsection even though they realize that it isn't very good. Conversely they'll denigrate anything that falls into categories that they don't like, regardless of its quality. I know I've often found myself wrestling with these very tendencies.
Simply put firefly fans were fanatical enough about firefly that they earned themselves a movie. When this movie came about, even though it wasn't as good as the series, they had so much personally invested that they continued to push it every chance they got. I'd suspect that a good portion of those firefly fans who voted for Serenity realize, and would even admit that Serenity isn't the greatest science fiction movie ever. But they perceive an attack on Serenity as an attack on their community, and therefore themselves, and thus feel the need to defend it.
This bill identifies the specific problems and concerns with eVoting. It addresses them one-by-one in the logical manner suggested by the vast majority of people educated about eVoting. It is simply a well written piece of legislation.
In other words it doesn't have a hope in hell of passing, couldn't someone at least throw in some ammendment about a program to train Arctic monkies to do the recounts so legislators will consider it?
Question for any games devs out there, which kind of AI is generally more difficult to write, turn based or real time?
Now ignoring stuff like FPS where you can get away with fairly basic AI if you want, you have turn based (ie Civ, chess, Battle for Wesnoth etc) and real time (Starcraft, C&C, boswars, etc). Obviously there must be some very different strategies and approaches, for turn based you get to spend a lot more cycles figuring what to do, then again the player has a lot more expectation of a good strategy from you. For real time you don't have much time to make decisions and need to be very event based, but on the other hand you generally have fewer variables to worry about (after all humans need to play it as well) and you have a significant click speed advantage over the human player.
So any game designers out there who've worked with both and have an opinion on the respective difficulties?
No, I'm not. Which is why I wrote "By itself, that's fine, trusting a third party to always put out fair licenses is a massive mistake, but where Torvalds screwed up was in not replacing (the mechanism allowing the ability to use future versions of the GPL.)"
You can create checks and balances that will reduce the chances of a serious problem to close to zero. Whereas the likelihood that the license you're using from 1991 being still relevent in 2007 is, to put it mildly, close to zero.
Really I think that's more of a political gesture (or a specific shot at Linus) than anything. Linus can be hit by a bus, decide he wants to work on other stuff, or simply have his branch of the kernel lose significance (maybe Red Hat, IBM, and others decide they want their own branch that's run a different way). The fundamental problem is that any time you provide a way for your license to be changed you're taking a big risk because the one thing you can be sure of is it won't be the same license you agreed to. It's really hard to design checks and balances around that.The simplest is to require a license be both a newer version of the GPL, and be blessed by Linus Torvalds. That's also being proposed by the FSF as a way forward for people with these problems.
I'm not arguing that a change won't be a big pain, those numbers are a little higher than I'd expect but I'm not a kernel contributor so I can't really comment on it. But I think it's feasible to start up a branch where a few people just start re-writing that code (keeping the API) while the rest of the kernel keeps coding on. It might take a couple years but at the end they should have a close to drop in replacement for the old code without a huge cost.
I should note that I think that the Kernel should have included the update clause in their version of the license, but I disagree with you in that I believe that their reasons for not including it were sound.
The unstated point of the whole question of "alternative" fuels probably has something to do with "global warming" (which probably IS happening) and the underlying assumption that we human critters have a gnat's-ass of influence on said warming (which we do - have a gnat's-ass worth of input, i.e. not much.) Google "The Great Global Warming Swindle" for some interesting links.
Yeah, either I can believe a handful of scientists hand-picked by a documentary maker. Or I can believe countless numbers of brilliant climatologists who have dedicated their lives to the study of climate, constantly checking their results and critiquing each-others research as is the norm in science.You can choose a "side", but think about it a bit first.
Hmmm, that's a tough one. Well maybe all those brilliant scientists are actually doing some big self serving conspiracy, yeah sure scientists are generally known as having a lot more integrity than other fields but it must be them decieving everyone, not the energy companies who clearly have the purest motives!
I'm sorry for being sarcastic but I find all the global warming conspiracy talk to be irritating. Consider the following:
1) Name a single instance where a large scientific community has conspired to decieve the public. Science is built on integrity, researchers need to be highly critical of their own results otherwise their reputation suffers (and they care a lot about their reputation), I find it highly unlikely that they would be even willfully ignorant since they simply can't afford to be.
2) The scientific community HAS spoken, that was part of the idea of the IPCC report on climate change. To show that the scientists studying the climate overwhelmingly support the hypothesis that we are warming up the planet. The thought that there's a conscious conspiracy is ludicrous, even the theory that their all convinced/intimidated by a pro-global warming scientific lobby I find unconvincing given (1).
3) Now if you accept (2), that all these scientists do genuinely believe in global warming, now the only option left is that they're wrong. Yes, some film-makers, politicians, oil execs, journalists, and a small minority of scientists (many not even climatologists), many who have strong motives to convince people global warming doesn't exists, are right. On the other hand the very smart climatologists, who have dedicated their considerable intellect to studying this issue, are wrong. Maybe between all of them those issues mentioned in the documentary just never occurred to them, someone should probably send them a copy to clear this mess up.
The fact is we have scientists for a reason, to study stuff, to become experts in a field so they can aid the rest of society with their knowledge in that field. You know that clueless person who always asks you to fix their computer? They think the problem is X, you know the problem is Y, but you just can't convince them. Well we're the clueless person, and the experts are telling us the answer is Y, I don't know about you but I'm gonna trust them on this one because they know a heck of a lot more than me about it.
Ok maybe the other mechanism you suggested. Maybe a vote by committers, what if some company gets a big portion of the committers then try to push their own agenda? Ok, an organisation built around the kernel. Who decides who runs that organization?
Really at the end of the day the GPLv2 is a pretty good license. If a situation comes up where they feel they have to switch to GPLv3 then they can start going through the committers logs and start getting permission, a lot of the code is copyrighted by companies like Red Hat, IBM, Novell, etc, you get them on board and a lot of the work is already done, most of the individual committers are probably still reachable as well and almost all of them will agree. Now some of the stuff they won't get permission for, and they'll have to re-write that, it sucks but other projects have done the same thing and while it will be a bump in the road it certainly won't kill kernel development.
So, what has Kathy Sierra done to provoke this?
My guess is she provoked it by being successful, intelligent, and by blogging (I don't know what she blogs about but that may also be a factor), these qualities are apparently what attracted these threats. As others have pointed out it's not uncommon for threats like this to show up, especially for those with a significant on-line presence. She just happens to feel that blogging isn't worth the cost of dealing with these threats and she's removing the provokation by ceasing to blog.I'm not saying that she did anything wrong, but these threats certainly don't seem random. Did she piss off somebody somehow? Snub somebody? Unpopular political views? Is merely being a successful, apparently intelligent woman sufficient? (I don't know anything about her beyond what's in her Wikipedia page, but she does appear to be successful and intelligent. But I wouldn't consider that to be unusual enough to warrant death threats?)
Well you should. Rates of male victimization for all crimes other than rape are considerably higher than female victimization. The rate of rape in males is very hard to estimate, but is reported at about 1/4 of the rate in females. Given that males are much less likely than females to report themselves as victims of rape, it is quite possible that the rate of rape in males is comparable to that in females. It is certainly the case that rates of violent assault and murder are about four times higher in males than females.
This is because we as a society do not care two figs about violence against males. We do not value our young males, and we do not teach them to take care of themselves. Quite the opposite: we teach them to be careless of their own safety, and we teach them they are cowards or worse if they take reasonable precautions like giving a thought to being attacked when walking to their car in a dark parking lot.
This is not to say that violence against females is acceptable. It is obviously not. But any time I hear anyone decrying "violence against women" as being particularly bad I have to wonder if they think violence against men is OK? Or at least not so particularly bad? And if they do think that, I really have to wonder why. If they are even remotely decent and humane it certainly cannot be the fact that most violence is committed by men, because it is also the case that, for example, in the United States most violence is committed by black people, and there is a word for people who think that that fact makes violence against black people OK. You make some good points but I think you overlooked 2 important things:
1) While males may be at higher risk from violent crimes we don't FEEL at higher risk, partially because we feel we have the ability to defend ourselves in the way a woman can't. Thus we feel much more secure walking through a parking lot or being on a dark sidewalk at night because we feel if we are attacked there's something we can do about it.
2) A lot of the violent crimes committed against males are due to them doing something to provoke it. Now I'm not saying that mouthing off in a bar means that someone has the right to assault you, but you're a lot more likely to get assaulted if you're mouthing off than if you're completely passive. I know that I'm personally a very passive individual and have never even gotten in a heated argument much less a fight, it's very unlikely that myself or similiar individuals are going to be involved in one of those violent crime statistics. As a result myself and other males feel a lot more secure since any violent confrontation is probably something we've initiated on some level and we trust ourselves not to get ourselves into something we can't handle (even if this trust is misplaced). My experience is that women rarely provoke violent incidents to anywhere near the same extent that males do, thus females have a lot less control over these incidents and a passive female is probably at greater risk of violent crime then a passive male.
The fact is that women do feel more vulnerable to violent attacks, and to an extent they are justified in those feelings.
Any actual law enforcement that doesn't involve a military threat should probably be left to local authorities so you aren't percieved as occupiers.
I realize that assembly is very useful to know and can be useful in certain instances.
But writing in assembly has always given me the same feeling as eating rice with a single chopstick.
1) Even if I don't use the version they installed I will know that there are drivers (hopefully open source) available for that specific hardware and these drivers can likely be ported to my distro (if they haven't already).
2) If piece of hardware X isn't working right now I have no idea if it's a hardware or driver problem. If they have a pre-installed version I can throw it on pre-installed distro and test it. If the hardware still doesn't work that still means it's either the hardware is broken or the driver is broken. However with the pre-installed distro I now have the ability to bug Dell about it since in either case it's still their problem.
Even if they did do as you say a subtle change snuck in could still slip past because no one is paying attention (as they feel it's a waste of time and the change is subtle). The problem, as the submitter said, is realizing that a handful of words among thousands have just changed. The solution, as the submitter said, is some form of source control, not wasting everyones time with a solution that won't fix the true problem.
If you expect people to take you seriously I would suggest a more reasonable argument.
Just curious. What liberties have you lost due to anti-terror legislation in whatever country you are living in?
I ask because I keep hearing about how the US has become a police state. Well, I'm in the US and as far as I can tell, this new Bush police state looks exactly as it did under Clinton, except the economy is better. I think it is only fair that I stand with my fellow Americans and suffer as they have, but before I do that, I need to know what it is I'm missing. Well be glad you name isn't Mahar Arar.
I'm sure there were a lot of people in Nazi Germany as well who didn't notice their rights were being infringed because they never got on the wrong side of the state. If you're a productive, well-behaved citizen I doubt there's a police state in existance that would hassle you. Liberties are what you're left with when you go against the state, when you happen to have a tenuous connection to some possible terrorists, or to expose an obvious and glaring security hole, those are the things that are vanishing from your country.
-> clear violation of privacy of thousands of people
-> use of that information for private gain
-> passing off vigilante-collected information to the police
-> (plus or minus) collecting that same porn
All this obviously without a court order, or even being in the police force.
This is also seriously worse than the riaa has ever done. So what should the punishment for the hacker be ? Clearly he cannot go free, despite having caught this criminal. Ahh but you forget, child pornography was involved, one of Bruce Schneier's four horsemen of the information apocalypse. You can be assured that no right is safe, nor investigative method over the line, when one of the horsemen is involved.
I'm not sure what exactly the laws are, but I think the data actually belongs to lycos and they can do what they wish with it. Does anyone know what the law is? From my understanding if you write it you own the copyright and Lycros can't take it. Theoretically they could put something in their ToS to say they gain copyright when you put it through their servers but I don't think they'd want to do that as it would jepordize their common carrier status. However, you having copyright only really says that they can't do something with your data that you didn't agree to in the ToS, for instance they can't publish the book that you wrote then emailed your friend for a review. However they should be well within their legal rights to delete that data at a whim as long as it's covered in their ToS.
Their moral rights on the other hand...