Actually I'm in the process right now, so I know how easy it is to get false reports off your credit report.
And to call this idenity theft is quite a stretch. It's just a stolen credit card. Having your credit card stolen and a couple thousand racked up on it, with it all reported within 30 days, that isn't going to even be mentioned on your credit report. Have you ever disputed a charge on your credit card before? I have, and there's no mention of it on my credit report (and no, I didn't have to pay).
Well, if you believe his story (and I don't), then the kids were taken to jail in handcuffs on his say-so. I wouldn't call that nothing. But I'm more concerned about the fact that a description of the kids, their room number, their habits, etc., were all given to some random Yahoo who happened to have a credit card they used.
Don't you get it? This isn't play money. It's real money that the merchants, banks, and card processors have to cough up.
Actually, it's Denny's food that Denny's has to cough up, and hotel space that...probably would have gone to waste anyway. And as for the Denny's food, I mean, whatever, how much food does Denny's throw away every day anyway?
Higher merchandise prices (or, eroded retail margins, and fewer mom-and-pop retailers as a result), higher bank fees, and higher transaction fees. All of that, all of it, trickles down to the paying consumer in one way or the other.
The $0.00000000001 trickles down to him isn't enough to justify wasting a few hours of his time trying to catch a thief. That's what the police are paid for.
Maybe he had fun playing cop, and hey that's worth it I guess. I dunno.
Thieves like this are taking it from all of us, however indirectly.
Not from all of us. Just those of us who eat at Denny's, or pay exorbitant fees to Discover Card.
They weren't stealing his money, they were stealing his time.
Seems to me he stole his own time. Unless you're talking about the 3 minutes he spent on the phone telling Discover card "no, I didn't make those charges".
Having dealt with and watched friends deal with the fallout from identity theft, I can tell you it can be pretty time-consuming,
Well, I don't know what you mean by "identity theft", since, I mean, you can't steal someone's identity. But I know someone who had his credit card number stolen, and it didn't take up very much of his time at all. The FBI caught the people, and the employees of the people wound up with the bill.
a stolen debit card can drain your bank account and you're screwed (or at least you're liable for like $500)
That was true back when debit cards first came out, but nowadays most if not all debit cards offer the exact same legal protections as credit cards. The problem with them is that it's up to you if there's a dispute to convince the bank to follow the law.
Well strangely enough, with the new chip-and-pin system they've just brought in in the UK, if the vendor doesn't accept c&p (i.e. they just take a signature), they are liable.
Here in the US the vendor is pretty much always liable. So there's no need for a stupid chip-and-pin system. A lot of the time we don't even need a signature (gas stations, fast food restaurants, etc.)
Can you get those things anonymously? If so that's kind of cool.
As far as security though, I'd rather use a credit card than a debit card. With a credit card, the worst case scenario is they can convince someone else I owe them money. With a debit card, they can take my money and it's up to me to get it back.
id rather spend the 30 minutes to put the cash on the card and buy something online with it than than let some druggy scum waltz off with my hard earned money.
Please, they're not stealing the money from you. If you haven't done anything negligent (like lose your card which you never signed), you're responsible for nothing. Even if you have been negligent, with most credit card agreements you're still responsible for nothing. At the most you're responsible for like $50 if you report your card lost or stolen within a reasonable amount of time. And that's just if you lost your card, without having signed the back, and the thief stole the card, signed the back, bought something with the card, using the same signature, and managed to not get caught.
What worries me the most is that so many people were so cooperative in trying to find "the thief". You go to Denny's, show them a credit card, and they give you a description of the person who used the credit card? That's the scary part.
That some kid stole a couple thousand dollars from Discover Card and some Visa merchant - so what? This guy acts like they were stealing the money from him.
It's as charity today. It could turn into a publically-traded corporation tommorrow with a board vote.
No it can't. You can't turn a charity into a publically traded corporation.
"Free Software Foundation" is just a trademark, after all, which can be passed on or even sold to any other group.
Nonsense. The license isn't referring to the name, it's referring to the actual foundation. That's like saying that I can cash a check made out to "Bill Gates" by changing my name to Bill Gates.
On the other side, add up the money it would take to bribe each FSF board member, none of whom are fantastically rich.
Yeah right. RMS is going to just roll over for the millions. C'mon, this guy is an idealist. He'd love to be offered the bribe just so he could brag about how he didn't take it.
Besides, even if the board was bribed, they still couldn't inure to the benefit of Bill Gates or Microsoft. They're a charity, and they can only do things for charitable purposes.
Seriously though, are there any places where they don't speak English? I was just talking to someone from Germany today who said pretty much all of Europe speaks English. Maybe outside Europe it's different though.
Don't take a year off unless you're going to be working an incredibly shit job for absolutely no pay.
This is especially true if you're a US citizen. Working for more money than you need to survive right before college makes pretty much no sense, because the more you make, the less you'll get in grants.
If you really want to go to college, then just go. If you decide to "take a year off" odds are you'll never actually end up going.
I was going to say this myself, because of my experience with "taking a few years off" between college and grad school. But if you have the cash to take a year off and not start a career, it might be possible.
I suppose another problem is that during that year off you will forget things. I took Calc I in my Junior year of high school, and no math class my Senior year. When I moved on to Calc II in college, it was a bit of a struggle getting back into things (I pulled off a C+ in Honors Calc II, which wasn't horrible, but it was enough to convince me not to continue with the honors math program).
Personally I think it's ridiculous that if you give a copy of a GPLed program to your friend, you are required to give her the source. But I'm not a big fan of the GPL. I only use it when I have to.
but I can't think of any reason why that would be done
Because you want to make the software more free. "[Carrying] prominent notices stating that you changed the files and the date of any change" is a real pain in the ass for a program which has undergone hundreds of thousands of changes by thousands of contributors. Forcing people to distribute the source code of any change they make is even worse.
It's nice having flexible hours. Of course, my cat won't let the hours be too flexible. Maybe I'm actually in the "I don't have a snooze button" camp...
The problem is when you have projects with large numbers of contributors. It's very hard (and probably impossible if you didn't think hard and set things up right in the beginning), to get agreement among all the contributors to switch. Perhaps one possibility is to change the clause to "or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation and approved by [insert your name here]". Then in order to switch the project, you'd have to have a new version which is both published by the FSF and approved by you.
Personally I don't like using the GPL in the first place, and I'll only use it where I have to. I like to have the option of keeping my source code hidden, and if I used the GPL, and someone made modifications to my software, I couldn't make further modifications to that without distributing the source.
Microsoft has enough dollars to buy almost anything, included the FSF!
The FSF is a non-profit charity. No one "owns" it so you can't "buy" it. Microsoft is a company, so it couldn't even be on the board. Bill Gates could theoretically be on the board, but only if the current board of directors voted for him to be on the board.
wouldn't it be theoretically possible for FSF to publish, for example, GPL v10 saying "You can use and modify this software without any restriction whatsoever, but only if you are Microsoft (Sun, Google, whatever)"?
No. The FSF is a non-profit charity, and isn't allowed to inure to the benefit of Microsoft (Sun, Google, or whatever).
That said, they can make an awful lot of changes legally, without the permission of the copyright holder, and that's why I personally wouldn't license anything I write under "GPL 2 (or later)".
Being forced to distribute ANYTHING when you are just USING the software, however, is too ornerous to be tolerated.
I don't think that's the idea. I think the idea is to require that you give source to anyone if you distribute binaries to anyone. Right now you only have to give source to the person you distribute the binaries to.
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I hope you weren't planning on buying a house...
Actually I'm in the process right now, so I know how easy it is to get false reports off your credit report.
And to call this idenity theft is quite a stretch. It's just a stolen credit card. Having your credit card stolen and a couple thousand racked up on it, with it all reported within 30 days, that isn't going to even be mentioned on your credit report. Have you ever disputed a charge on your credit card before? I have, and there's no mention of it on my credit report (and no, I didn't have to pay).
What's so surprising about that?
Nothing, really, I just think it would have made a neat story with a useful twist at the end.
At least in this case their cooperativeness was a good thing!
If you believe the story. I'm skeptical.
Well, if you believe his story (and I don't), then the kids were taken to jail in handcuffs on his say-so. I wouldn't call that nothing. But I'm more concerned about the fact that a description of the kids, their room number, their habits, etc., were all given to some random Yahoo who happened to have a credit card they used.
Don't you get it? This isn't play money. It's real money that the merchants, banks, and card processors have to cough up.
Actually, it's Denny's food that Denny's has to cough up, and hotel space that...probably would have gone to waste anyway. And as for the Denny's food, I mean, whatever, how much food does Denny's throw away every day anyway?
Higher merchandise prices (or, eroded retail margins, and fewer mom-and-pop retailers as a result), higher bank fees, and higher transaction fees. All of that, all of it, trickles down to the paying consumer in one way or the other.
The $0.00000000001 trickles down to him isn't enough to justify wasting a few hours of his time trying to catch a thief. That's what the police are paid for.
Maybe he had fun playing cop, and hey that's worth it I guess. I dunno.
Thieves like this are taking it from all of us, however indirectly.
Not from all of us. Just those of us who eat at Denny's, or pay exorbitant fees to Discover Card.
If you don't object to people stealing from big evil corporations, how can you reasonably object when they steal from you?
It's pretty easy, actually. It's called a double standard.
They weren't stealing his money, they were stealing his time.
Seems to me he stole his own time. Unless you're talking about the 3 minutes he spent on the phone telling Discover card "no, I didn't make those charges".
Having dealt with and watched friends deal with the fallout from identity theft, I can tell you it can be pretty time-consuming,
Well, I don't know what you mean by "identity theft", since, I mean, you can't steal someone's identity. But I know someone who had his credit card number stolen, and it didn't take up very much of his time at all. The FBI caught the people, and the employees of the people wound up with the bill.
a stolen debit card can drain your bank account and you're screwed (or at least you're liable for like $500)
That was true back when debit cards first came out, but nowadays most if not all debit cards offer the exact same legal protections as credit cards. The problem with them is that it's up to you if there's a dispute to convince the bank to follow the law.
Well strangely enough, with the new chip-and-pin system they've just brought in in the UK, if the vendor doesn't accept c&p (i.e. they just take a signature), they are liable.
Here in the US the vendor is pretty much always liable. So there's no need for a stupid chip-and-pin system. A lot of the time we don't even need a signature (gas stations, fast food restaurants, etc.)
Can you get those things anonymously? If so that's kind of cool.
As far as security though, I'd rather use a credit card than a debit card. With a credit card, the worst case scenario is they can convince someone else I owe them money. With a debit card, they can take my money and it's up to me to get it back.
id rather spend the 30 minutes to put the cash on the card and buy something online with it than than let some druggy scum waltz off with my hard earned money.
Please, they're not stealing the money from you. If you haven't done anything negligent (like lose your card which you never signed), you're responsible for nothing. Even if you have been negligent, with most credit card agreements you're still responsible for nothing. At the most you're responsible for like $50 if you report your card lost or stolen within a reasonable amount of time. And that's just if you lost your card, without having signed the back, and the thief stole the card, signed the back, bought something with the card, using the same signature, and managed to not get caught.
What worries me the most is that so many people were so cooperative in trying to find "the thief". You go to Denny's, show them a credit card, and they give you a description of the person who used the credit card? That's the scary part.
That some kid stole a couple thousand dollars from Discover Card and some Visa merchant - so what? This guy acts like they were stealing the money from him.
It's as charity today. It could turn into a publically-traded corporation tommorrow with a board vote.
No it can't. You can't turn a charity into a publically traded corporation.
"Free Software Foundation" is just a trademark, after all, which can be passed on or even sold to any other group.
Nonsense. The license isn't referring to the name, it's referring to the actual foundation. That's like saying that I can cash a check made out to "Bill Gates" by changing my name to Bill Gates.
On the other side, add up the money it would take to bribe each FSF board member, none of whom are fantastically rich.
Yeah right. RMS is going to just roll over for the millions. C'mon, this guy is an idealist. He'd love to be offered the bribe just so he could brag about how he didn't take it.
Besides, even if the board was bribed, they still couldn't inure to the benefit of Bill Gates or Microsoft. They're a charity, and they can only do things for charitable purposes.
Try for places where they don't speak English.
Union City, New Jersey?
Seriously though, are there any places where they don't speak English? I was just talking to someone from Germany today who said pretty much all of Europe speaks English. Maybe outside Europe it's different though.
Don't take a year off unless you're going to be working an incredibly shit job for absolutely no pay.
This is especially true if you're a US citizen. Working for more money than you need to survive right before college makes pretty much no sense, because the more you make, the less you'll get in grants.
If you really want to go to college, then just go. If you decide to "take a year off" odds are you'll never actually end up going.
I was going to say this myself, because of my experience with "taking a few years off" between college and grad school. But if you have the cash to take a year off and not start a career, it might be possible.
I suppose another problem is that during that year off you will forget things. I took Calc I in my Junior year of high school, and no math class my Senior year. When I moved on to Calc II in college, it was a bit of a struggle getting back into things (I pulled off a C+ in Honors Calc II, which wasn't horrible, but it was enough to convince me not to continue with the honors math program).
For noncommercial distribution, you can provide a copy of the offer to get the source that you received with your copy of the binary.
Only if I received a copy of an offer to get the source with my binary. Which rarely happens. And as you said, only for noncommercial distribution.
Personally I think it's ridiculous that if you give a copy of a GPLed program to your friend, you are required to give her the source. But I'm not a big fan of the GPL. I only use it when I have to.
I think you could drop stuff like section 2c
Sure, 2c, 2a, 3a, 3b, 3c, 4, parts of 1...
but I can't think of any reason why that would be done
Because you want to make the software more free. "[Carrying] prominent notices stating that you changed the files and the date of any change" is a real pain in the ass for a program which has undergone hundreds of thousands of changes by thousands of contributors. Forcing people to distribute the source code of any change they make is even worse.
Yes, but isn't GPL the most free copyleft license one can possibly write?
Nope, the QingPL is (ShareAlike 1.0 is a close second though).
In other words, if you remove a single restriction from it, would it still be copyleft?
No, if you removed the restriction that you can't distribute binaries without distributing source, it'd still be a copyleft.
"Alarm clock? What alarm clock?"
It's nice having flexible hours. Of course, my cat won't let the hours be too flexible. Maybe I'm actually in the "I don't have a snooze button" camp...
The problem is when you have projects with large numbers of contributors. It's very hard (and probably impossible if you didn't think hard and set things up right in the beginning), to get agreement among all the contributors to switch. Perhaps one possibility is to change the clause to "or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation and approved by [insert your name here]". Then in order to switch the project, you'd have to have a new version which is both published by the FSF and approved by you.
Personally I don't like using the GPL in the first place, and I'll only use it where I have to. I like to have the option of keeping my source code hidden, and if I used the GPL, and someone made modifications to my software, I couldn't make further modifications to that without distributing the source.
Microsoft has enough dollars to buy almost anything, included the FSF!
The FSF is a non-profit charity. No one "owns" it so you can't "buy" it. Microsoft is a company, so it couldn't even be on the board. Bill Gates could theoretically be on the board, but only if the current board of directors voted for him to be on the board.
wouldn't it be theoretically possible for FSF to publish, for example, GPL v10 saying "You can use and modify this software without any restriction whatsoever, but only if you are Microsoft (Sun, Google, whatever)"?
No. The FSF is a non-profit charity, and isn't allowed to inure to the benefit of Microsoft (Sun, Google, or whatever).
That said, they can make an awful lot of changes legally, without the permission of the copyright holder, and that's why I personally wouldn't license anything I write under "GPL 2 (or later)".
Being forced to distribute ANYTHING when you are just USING the software, however, is too ornerous to be tolerated.
I don't think that's the idea. I think the idea is to require that you give source to anyone if you distribute binaries to anyone. Right now you only have to give source to the person you distribute the binaries to.
The only thing the GPL3 can do and still be compatible with GPL2 is to have fewer restrictions. In which case, what's the point, we already have BSD.
BSD is not copylefted.