In case you had any doubts, patents are already hurting open source. Daniel Philips describes "patent chill" (fear of infringing on one or more patents) as the main reason for ceasing work on Tux2, a promising, phase-tree based filesystem project.
This is a bad situation getting worse. The problems created by the US patent system being extending to Europe increases the risk of open source being gradually left behind, as new and important ideas are patented throughout most of the western world.
Don't hope for companies to do the "right thing" -- remember they have a moral obligation to their shareholders to develop every possible asset. Free software can only survive if prolonged, exclusive access to critical ideas simply isn't on offer.
"This is why distros drop the K from all the KDE programs: somebody else is trying to establish a brand name, and that is a market threat they want to cut off."
Have no illusions -- this is what Hans Reiser is worried about, his business. The morality of giving credit-where-due is a red herring.
The debate that sparked this off was Debian removing 20-something lines of crap about sponsors from mkreiserfs. That scares him, because it weakens his power in promoting his sponsors and his brand.
To which I say tough. The GPL was written to ensure that users could make software serve them. If a GPLed program spews unhelpful messages, then anybody has the right to remove them. Incidentally, it's undoubtedly justified in this case, when there's a screenful of rubbish, and the program is regularly used in stressful, recovery situations, potentially on a terminal with no scrollback.
Nobody, I imagine, advocates removing authorship credits entirely, but the GPL does not guarantee free promotion for your company, sponsors, or anything else. If that's what you wanted, you were plain stupid to choose the GPL in the first place.
First definition: large crowds of booted skinheads and homeless "alternative lifestyle" (eg alcholic and heavy drug abusing) ex-punks with spiderweb tattoos, on the rampage, smashing in storefront windows, defacing public monuments and lobbing half-bricks at the riot police."
Catchy rhetoric, but ignorant of the facts. Britain has a population of around 60 million. On the 15th of February around a million of us were not only against the war, but felt so strongly that we spent our free time and money making our way to London to protest.
There was no violence, no vandalism, just a monumental expression of public opinion. Young and old; families and people in suits outnumbering the dreadlocked and tie-died. It was the biggest political protest in this country, to date, and similar events happened in cities across the globe. Very few saw violence instigated by the protesters, because -- like myself -- the majority were totally unlike the provocative stereotypes you invoke.
The very thing that makes these people a superpower is that they are not just extremists, rather a vast number of responsible, everyday people who will not support military agression without international consensus, especially where it promises numerous economic and political rewards to the participants.
You just sound bitter. It's not my fault they took away all your guns.
True, but if it was I would thank you. Have you seen the US homicide rates compared to the UK, and the rest of Europe? No? Let me help you out. You have about 40x as many gun homicides as us.
Guess how bitter I am that me, and the people I care about, are 4000% less likely to be gunned down today than you and yours. Not very.
Isn't Yahoo REQUIRED to filter out pro Nazi content on their German site?
Isn't e-bay REQUIRED to prevent selling Nazi artifacts to visitors from Germany?
No, last I heard the German authorities had merely asked them to do so. It was France that took legal action, demanding that they block all such content.
So limiting peoples freedoms in Germany is OK, but its taboo in China?
Neither is OK, IMO. However some of us perceive a slight difference in scale between democracies placing limitations on one extremist and historically sensitive subject area; vs the actions of a totalitarian, censorial administration with a litany of apalling human rights violations.
It's a subtle distinction, I understand how you might have missed it.
True, but you can't be angry at the guy who invented fire
No, you can't. Because you can't invent fire, you dolt.
Yes, China's communist practices of censorship are not a Good Thing, but just because companies produce filtering technology and sell it to them doesn't make THEM bad.
Quite right -- I resent people criticising me for selling Saddam Hussein smallpox. That doesn't make ME bad, there are perfectly valid uses for it.
It's the age old dispute that applies here - "guns don't kill, people do".
It's an age old argument, but that doesn't make it any less stupid. Guns and bullets are designed to wound and kill. In the US pretty much anyone can get at them, and the homicide rate per capita is many times greater than here in the UK, where private citizens cannot own any sort of firearm, for any purpose, including target shooting. Amen to that.
The problem is exacerbated by the fact that they are chasing a moving target..
Nope.
"By the way, a lot of people think that the Windows API is too much of a moving target
for WINE to catch up. As a Windows
developer, let me say, this is rubbish. Almost
every Windows app out there is tested on Win
95 to make sure it runs decently on the entire
32 bit Windows product line. If WINE could
ever catch up to Win 95, they would be almost
completely done. The target hasn't moved
anywhere since August, 1995." -- Joel Spolsky
Considering that much of the controversy surrounding the Sex Pistols was centered around Queen Elizabeth II's silver jubilee, it's somewhat ironic that the band is now celebrating their own
Errr... no it's not. There is no irony there.
Unless you they were speaking out against 25 year anniversaries or something?! (It's debatable whether they were really speaking out about anything, but it was a pretty effective way to sell records.)
Amusing anecdote about the Pistols -- they were originally signed to EMI, but were dropped after they said some naughty words on British TV. A&M gave them a deal but cancelled it a week later, after a couple of little incindents (one of which left a TV engineer needing stiches). A&M paid them £7000 to leave the label, which I think is about twice what my parents paid for our house, around that time.
Warren Robinett does not own the copyright; Infogrames does. Infogrames, being a company, is more interested in protecting its intellectual property rights than in being "honored" by unauthorized fan-made works. (If they weren't so inclined, their management could be sued and put in jail for neglecting their fiduciary responsibility. That's business.)
You've got all the right ideas, totally misapplied.
Yep, it's all about money, but there's not another penny to be made from Adventure; whereas the damage to Infogrames' image if they were to take legal action against a fan of an ancient game could be very costly. It's an intanglible, but it has a very real value (albeit hard to quantify).
This is not like a trademark, they lose nothing by letting it slide. It would make no financial sense for them to pursue it.
Because of its past, Germany does live under the microscope in that sense and it sometimes makes Germans a bit hyper-sensitive, and excesses (such as the (IMHO extremely stupid and counter-productive) law that denying the holocaust happened is an offense) do happen.
The latter being interesting, because it would appear to contravene Article 10 (freedom of expression) of the European Convention on Human Rights.
Unfortunately the state has better legal representation than most defendants, and they'd probably get off under paragraph 2 (which has stuff about public safety, prevention of disorder, etc).
Errrr, no -- the ITV franchises, including 4 & 5, are commercial entities.
> The BBC has within it a large number of TV and > radio stations. On the TV side, they have 2 > nationally broadcast terrestrial stations (out > of 5), with about 6 sets of regional opt-outs, > plus 3 cable services
Where 3 == 6 (CBBC, CBeebies, BBC News 24, BBC Choice, BBC Four and BBC Parliament).
> while on Radio, they have 4 national stations
Pardon? Have you ever even visited the UK? Even if you can't count, they number the stations, and Radio 5 has been around for over 10 years now.
Of course that's not counting the digital stations (of which there are at least 2, plus data streams) and the magnificent World Service.
> (compared to I think 2 national commercial > rivals)
``While I certainly don't speak for RMS's looniness, this is a rather unfortunate clause given Larry's stated goal of helping kernel development. Not only do most Linux vendors ship "competing" products"''
Yes, they SHIP competing products. That is ever so slightly different from DESIGNING, where you could use your free copy to steal ideas and features. Larry simply objects to giving FREE HELP to people who are trying to put him and his colleagues out of business!
``such as CVS''
Larry has gone on the record that he does not regard CVS as competition. Yes, it may be a SCMS, but its featureset is just not in the same league as BK.
They day 3DFX bought STB was the beginning of the end. The sheer arrogance of believing they could cut off all their customers and just have the whole business to themselves. That they could compete with both chip *and* board manufacturers, and still come out on top. Sure, they had a head start, but Creative, Diamond, etc, would inevitably throw their considerable support behind another chip company.
The management overplayed their hand, big style, they were bound to lose. They were just way too cocky. Of course you can see that just from the lunch budget.
>> All cellphone numbers start with 07. Other >> ranges of numbers are reserved for various >> things. > > And what happens when you run out of 07 numbers? > Don't tell me "it'll never happen".
It'll never happen, smartass. The 07 is followed by nine more digits. That gives us 1,000,000,000 (1 billion, in US terms) possible mobile numbers. The population of the UK is ~58,000,000 (58 million). So unless you think we need over 17 mobile numbers each...?
And if it turns out we do, no big deal. We use 01 & 02 for geographic, 08 for non-geographic, 09 for and premium, etc, but we still have a few digits reserved for future use.
[...] > Don't you have that "crazy" per-minute charge > for local calls on your land lines? We don't > here.
How silly -- your line rental is therefore subsidising people who make more local calls than you do, since they are increasing the requirement for network capacity more than you, but you are bearing the costs of running the network equally.
> Anyway, there's so many minutes included with > my calling plan that I've never paid an extra > charge.
So you paid in advance, instead of afterwards... that doesn't really change very much, does it. And again you're buying a set deal, and since you don't use it all, again it looks like you're subsidising other people. Oh dear.
My monthly payment is exactly zero -- I pay only for the calls I make.
If you reverse the situation, you make everyone with cell phones happier ("Hey, my cell phone bill just went WAY down!") but you anger all the non-cell phone users ("What are all these extra charges on my bill?").
Ummm, DUHHH... that doesn't happen, because everybody KNOWS. You dial 07... and you know you're calling a mobile (cellular) phone, and it's gonna be expensive. Y'know, like you do when you dial a long distance or international code?
And this solves the telesales problem pretty neatly. Calls to mobiles are more than 5x more expensive than calls to landlines, which is ample to put them off the idea.
Over 80% of the UK population has a mobile now -- I really pity you guys over the pond...
Nah, that's a lie. In Britain, we're used to being ripped off for everything. It's nice to see you paying more for once:-P
> Add on another feature; plug the relay into
> your phone line, and when you're at home or
> near it, your cell phone becomes a cordless
> phone (like in L. Neil Smith's book Hope
> [lneilsmith.com].
Like in reality, too. BT/Cellnet, in the UK, offered a cordless/cellular phone a year or two ago, but it flopped. (You'd think it should have been a massive success, but in spite of their huge market share, BT could screw up anything.)
>They increase the price of new music in order to make up for supposed piracy, which in turn makes >people more likely to pirate. Its a catch22 of the WORSE kind.
No, this is a vicious circle. A 'catch 22' is different, that's a no win situation.
Whereas this problem is very easy to solve -- as soon as the music industry (including retailers) stops taking the piss, and charges fair prices, everybody will win. An audio CD, including case and printed material, costs about 50 cents. Duhh, hello, where's the rest going? Greedy, fat pigs, with an oligopoly on the market, that's where.
Cut the prices and the problem goes away. Who on earth would go through all the hassle of tracking down and downloading an inferior electronic version if you could buy a CD for 5 dollars/pounds a time? Yeah, there would be a few skinflints, sure, but the vast majority of people would go back to buying CDs, and will buy more than ever.
Unfortunately aforementioned greedy, fat pigs running the show can't see the answer, because wherever they look, their vision is obscured by enormous piles of money. We call this market failure. This is when governments are supposed to intervene. Except the politicians are all too busy taking brib^W donations from the RIAA...
Slashdot Mirror
This is a bad situation getting worse. The problems created by the US patent system being extending to Europe increases the risk of open source being gradually left behind, as new and important ideas are patented throughout most of the western world.
Don't hope for companies to do the "right thing" -- remember they have a moral obligation to their shareholders to develop every possible asset. Free software can only survive if prolonged, exclusive access to critical ideas simply isn't on offer.
Have no illusions -- this is what Hans Reiser is worried about, his business. The morality of giving credit-where-due is a red herring.
The debate that sparked this off was Debian removing 20-something lines of crap about sponsors from mkreiserfs. That scares him, because it weakens his power in promoting his sponsors and his brand.
To which I say tough. The GPL was written to ensure that users could make software serve them. If a GPLed program spews unhelpful messages, then anybody has the right to remove them. Incidentally, it's undoubtedly justified in this case, when there's a screenful of rubbish, and the program is regularly used in stressful, recovery situations, potentially on a terminal with no scrollback.
Nobody, I imagine, advocates removing authorship credits entirely, but the GPL does not guarantee free promotion for your company, sponsors, or anything else. If that's what you wanted, you were plain stupid to choose the GPL in the first place.
Catchy rhetoric, but ignorant of the facts. Britain has a population of around 60 million. On the 15th of February around a million of us were not only against the war, but felt so strongly that we spent our free time and money making our way to London to protest.
There was no violence, no vandalism, just a monumental expression of public opinion. Young and old; families and people in suits outnumbering the dreadlocked and tie-died. It was the biggest political protest in this country, to date, and similar events happened in cities across the globe. Very few saw violence instigated by the protesters, because -- like myself -- the majority were totally unlike the provocative stereotypes you invoke.
The very thing that makes these people a superpower is that they are not just extremists, rather a vast number of responsible, everyday people who will not support military agression without international consensus, especially where it promises numerous economic and political rewards to the participants.
arch/i386/kernel/dmi_scan.c
[...]
/*
* Check for clue free BIOS implementations who use
* the following QA technique
*
* [ Write BIOS Code ]<------
* | ^
* < Does it Compile >----N--
* |Y ^
* < Does it Boot Win98 >-N--
* |Y
* [Ship It]
*
True, but if it was I would thank you. Have you seen the US homicide rates compared to the UK, and the rest of Europe? No? Let me help you out. You have about 40x as many gun homicides as us.
Guess how bitter I am that me, and the people I care about, are 4000% less likely to be gunned down today than you and yours. Not very.
>>A president should have nothing to do with the >>wheels of justice.
>
>Wrong. Executives across the country are >empowered with discharging mercy
He didn't say they DO he said they SHOULD. Ever hear of separation of powers?
"The leading principle of our Constitution is the independence of the Legislature, Executive and Judiciary of each other." -- Thomas Jefferson
And I'm not even American.
It's a subtle distinction, I understand how you might have missed it.
"By the way, a lot of people think that the Windows API is too much of a moving target for WINE to catch up. As a Windows developer, let me say, this is rubbish. Almost every Windows app out there is tested on Win 95 to make sure it runs decently on the entire 32 bit Windows product line. If WINE could ever catch up to Win 95, they would be almost completely done. The target hasn't moved anywhere since August, 1995." -- Joel Spolsky
Unless you they were speaking out against 25 year anniversaries or something?! (It's debatable whether they were really speaking out about anything, but it was a pretty effective way to sell records.)
Amusing anecdote about the Pistols -- they were originally signed to EMI, but were dropped after they said some naughty words on British TV. A&M gave them a deal but cancelled it a week later, after a couple of little incindents (one of which left a TV engineer needing stiches). A&M paid them £7000 to leave the label, which I think is about twice what my parents paid for our house, around that time.
Nice work if you can get it.
Yep, it's all about money, but there's not another penny to be made from Adventure; whereas the damage to Infogrames' image if they were to take legal action against a fan of an ancient game could be very costly. It's an intanglible, but it has a very real value (albeit hard to quantify).
This is not like a trademark, they lose nothing by letting it slide. It would make no financial sense for them to pursue it.
afrotechmods.com
Unfortunately the state has better legal representation than most defendants, and they'd probably get off under paragraph 2 (which has stuff about public safety, prevention of disorder, etc).
> Channel 4 is in public ownership
Errrr, no -- the ITV franchises, including 4 & 5, are commercial entities.
> The BBC has within it a large number of TV and
> radio stations. On the TV side, they have 2
> nationally broadcast terrestrial stations (out
> of 5), with about 6 sets of regional opt-outs,
> plus 3 cable services
Where 3 == 6 (CBBC, CBeebies, BBC News 24, BBC Choice, BBC Four and BBC Parliament).
> while on Radio, they have 4 national stations
Pardon? Have you ever even visited the UK? Even if you can't count, they number the stations, and Radio 5 has been around for over 10 years now.
Of course that's not counting the digital stations (of which there are at least 2, plus data streams) and the magnificent World Service.
> (compared to I think 2 national commercial
> rivals)
Try 4.
``While I certainly don't speak for RMS's looniness, this is a rather unfortunate clause given Larry's stated goal of helping kernel development. Not only do most Linux vendors ship "competing" products"''
Yes, they SHIP competing products. That is ever so slightly different from DESIGNING, where you could use your free copy to steal ideas and features. Larry simply objects to giving FREE HELP to people who are trying to put him and his colleagues out of business!
``such as CVS''
Larry has gone on the record that he does not regard CVS as competition. Yes, it may be a SCMS, but its featureset is just not in the same league as BK.
They day 3DFX bought STB was the beginning of the end. The sheer arrogance of believing they could cut off all their customers and just have the whole business to themselves. That they could compete with both chip *and* board manufacturers, and still come out on top. Sure, they had a head start, but Creative, Diamond, etc, would inevitably throw their considerable support behind another chip company.
The management overplayed their hand, big style, they were bound to lose. They were just way too cocky. Of course you can see that just from the lunch budget.
> Recently I overheard someone's pager, and heard the sounds
> "dididit dahdah dididit" which is "SMS" in Morse code.
That's not a pager, it's one of the longer SMS alerts found on Nokia phones. And damn annoying it is too.
"This is exactly where I see 100GHz machines coming in handy - the ability to render realistic virtual worlds on the fly."
That, and keeping small towns warm in the winter.
>> All cellphone numbers start with 07. Other
>> ranges of numbers are reserved for various
>> things.
>
> And what happens when you run out of 07 numbers?
> Don't tell me "it'll never happen".
It'll never happen, smartass. The 07 is followed by nine more digits. That gives us 1,000,000,000 (1 billion, in US terms) possible mobile numbers. The population of the UK is ~58,000,000 (58 million). So unless you think we need over 17 mobile numbers each...?
And if it turns out we do, no big deal. We use 01 & 02 for geographic, 08 for non-geographic, 09 for and premium, etc, but we still have a few digits reserved for future use.
[...]
> Don't you have that "crazy" per-minute charge
> for local calls on your land lines? We don't
> here.
How silly -- your line rental is therefore subsidising people who make more local calls than you do, since they are increasing the requirement for network capacity more than you, but you are bearing the costs of running the network equally.
> Anyway, there's so many minutes included with
> my calling plan that I've never paid an extra
> charge.
So you paid in advance, instead of afterwards... that doesn't really change very much, does it. And again you're buying a set deal, and since you don't use it all, again it looks like you're subsidising other people. Oh dear.
My monthly payment is exactly zero -- I pay only for the calls I make.
And this solves the telesales problem pretty neatly. Calls to mobiles are more than 5x more expensive than calls to landlines, which is ample to put them off the idea.
Over 80% of the UK population has a mobile now -- I really pity you guys over the pond...
Nah, that's a lie. In Britain, we're used to being ripped off for everything. It's nice to see you paying more for once :-P
Six months ago The Guardian asked Xbox's general manager, J Allard, about the XBox including PVR technology in the future. His response:
;)
"We are not confused: this is a single-function device entirely focused on the games market. We have to focus on creating great games."
I assume they thought twice when they saw the sales figures
> Add on another feature; plug the relay into > your phone line, and when you're at home or > near it, your cell phone becomes a cordless > phone (like in L. Neil Smith's book Hope > [lneilsmith.com]. Like in reality, too. BT/Cellnet, in the UK, offered a cordless/cellular phone a year or two ago, but it flopped. (You'd think it should have been a massive success, but in spite of their huge market share, BT could screw up anything.)
>They increase the price of new music in order to make up for supposed piracy, which in turn makes
>people more likely to pirate. Its a catch22 of the WORSE kind.
No, this is a vicious circle. A 'catch 22' is different, that's a no win situation.
Whereas this problem is very easy to solve -- as soon as the music industry (including retailers) stops taking the piss, and charges fair prices, everybody will win. An audio CD, including case and printed material, costs about 50 cents. Duhh, hello, where's the rest going? Greedy, fat pigs, with an oligopoly on the market, that's where.
Cut the prices and the problem goes away. Who on earth would go through all the hassle of tracking down and downloading an inferior electronic version if you could buy a CD for 5 dollars/pounds a time? Yeah, there would be a few skinflints, sure, but the vast majority of people would go back to buying CDs, and will buy more than ever.
Unfortunately aforementioned greedy, fat pigs running the show can't see the answer, because wherever they look, their vision is obscured by enormous piles of money. We call this market failure. This is when governments are supposed to intervene. Except the politicians are all too busy taking brib^W donations from the RIAA...
> I live in Hilsea, Portsmouth, which was won by
> the conservative (for the benefit of non-uk
> readers, right-wing) party
As opposed to the supposedly left-wing but in fact virtually identical ruling party.
I don't think US readers will have any difficulty understanding that bit.
> on the strength of two votes. (neither of which
> were mine)
At the General Election, my home (Cheadle) was taken from the Tories by the LibDems, by 30 odd votes. One of which was mine.
Muahaha.
> Blunkett is a dangerous man
No kidding. I thought the stupidity was over when Straw got moved, but it just gets worse.
> I am really starting to hate what this country
> is becoming
You're not the only one. I'm seriously considering emigrating.
But hey, it could be worse. We could be living in a country run by George Bush.