We have selected the GPL because it encourages sharing by ensuring that any
applications created with it are also open.
This isn't true for any current compiler available under GPL, why would it be
true for thier compiler?
It *is* true for all current compilers in major use. If you look at your favourite compiler's license, you'll see an *explicit* exception that exempts compiled programs from being covered by the compiler's copyright claims. The Microsoft compilers do it, even GCC does it.
Disclosure is no silver bullet, though. Most programmers don't know much about security or privacy. Even if they're willing to disclose everything their program does, what if they simply don't realize what the consequences of some things are? And what if a year later, some new privacy/security breach or bug is found, when the user had long since agreed only to the previously known issues?
There's no substitute for users having total control over their phones.
We shouldn't be expecting vendors to merely permit us to have some selected forms of privacy.
If you have control over your phone, you can edit the hosts file if you want,
and you can decde exactly what inputs and outputs any program on your machine gets to receive or send. And if you're not too technical, you can install some third party software written by hackers to protect you from commercial exploitation if you want, like many people already do with adblocker addons for their browsers.
But if the phone vendors and network service providers control your phone's systems "for your own good", then you'll always be at their mercy, their greed, and their incompetence.
I'm sure the primary use will be getting directions when driving not watching
porn.
I highly doubt that. People don't _need_ directions very often. Quick: do you remember how to drive to work every day? Do you even look at the signs while driving to work? Do you regularly make a left turn when it should be a right turn, and arrive at work 30 minutes late because of it? No? Then you don't need directions.
What you _will_ need from the HUD regularly is entertainment. Because let's face it, driving to and from work is boring, that's why people keep the radio on.
Driving to the shopping mall is boring, too. With a HUD, you can watch TV without actually taking your eyes off the road. Possibly porn, but more probably some stupid morning shows and TV series.
No offense, but I don't want to pay for a DOJ that
staffs an extra 2,000 people just so that they can read every piece of email that comes in, and respond back with a detailed analysis of all
the legal mistakes made.
I'd prefer they waste their money on that, than use it to prosecute hackers who copy science papers.
The money, once in the budget, will be spent regardless. If it _won't_ be spent on serving the public, it _will_ get spent on selfish career making schemes.
That's still graphical/visual programming in text mode, not command line programming in the conventional sense.
A typical command line program simply reads data from STDIN, parameter values from argv[], and writes some values to STDOUT, maybe some error messages to STDERR.
Command line programs don't care if the user is a human being or a script, unlike a ncurses program, whose fancy display formatting is all about human interactivity, but is often difficult to script.
No, patents really are intended to foster innovation.
Intention does not make reality.
Imagine you're a
company/individual that's developed some wicked new technology. Maybe you've
spent 5-10 years tuning this process/product to the point where it works and
you're ready to sell it to the public. You have two choices: keep the actual
process and details secret so no one can copy it, or disclose the details in
exchange for a finite monopoly privilege.
The monopoly privilege directly harms innovation by third parties. The least destructive option is therefore trade secrets. I have no problem with that, because it allows others to come up with inventions independently.
Let's try an example: you've developed some chemistry that allows extremely
high detail, realistic color photographs. Now, if you sell the film and
chemicals, any bozo can analyze and replicate the chemistry, and your
development work is up in smoke.
As it should be, for if I come up with something that other chemists can duplicate, there's no reason to give me a monopoly. I would only be setting back the scientific advances by a generation.
So, if you want to keep it secret, you have
to keep the developer secret and in-house. Force customers to buy sealed
cameras and ship them back to the factory for developing and printing. This
might still be better than contemporary technology, but you have to admit
it's inconvenient.
Nobody said life shouldn't be inconvenient, except those arguing for patents. And they conveniently forget how inconvenient they make life for everybody else, since that is the price for making life convenient for just one.
Suppose you invent an airplane, and patent it. You'll prevent innovation ands stifle your local industry , while in other parts of the world people who are just as smart as you will make huge progress.
That said, you still aren't forced to make sealed cameras, you can sell unsealed cameras that people can tinker with. If your cameras are good, you will still make a nice living from them. And if you get competitors, then the market will grow, and you'll sell more units.
The other alternative is to take patent protection on the formula, maybe even
sell/license the developing process to smaller chemists, and sell
replaceable-film cameras that people can have developed locally. Much better
for the customer.
This is not better. You're monopolizing the process, thereby preventing others from improving "your" idea, expect rent from everyone and cause the idea to be shunned by the vast majority of potential inventors until your patent expires.
This is not better for the customer, who could be having a full ecosystem of alternatives and modifications.
A side benefit (to society) of this is that by disclosing
the details of the manufacturing process, some other guy can look at those
details, find places to improve, and sell consumers even better cameras. The
new guy will owe you some royalty for your contribution to his camera, but he
ought still be able to make a profit - he has a better product - any you get
compensated for your lost sales.
That is pure fantasy. Have you even read a single patent? They are totally unsuitable for learning a process. Nobody reads patents to learn a competitor's secrets, they just look at the other guy's products, and think through the problem or reverse engineer. Granted, this requires other people with the same basic knowledge and intelligence as the inventor. There are plenty of those in the world.
Finally, I don't believe the claim that everybody is better off if the new guy has to pay royalties. In the absence of patents, the new guy can just reinvent his own version of the product, and price it competitively (you don't believe tha
Actually, the negative aspects of guilds can be directly attributed to the primitive patents and royally granted perpetual monopolies that made their existence both possible and tolerated.
Patents
are designed to foster innovation. They give an idea value so that people
will take the risk of investing in that idea whatever the scale of the
inventor. If all ideas are trivially copied once their details are known then
either the ideas have no value so no one invests in them or the ideas get
kept secret and we don't get to know about them and build on them. Good
patents provide this functionality, they temporarily stifle competition in
order to foster innovation.
Yeah, patents are designed to foster innovation like my kid's bee costume is designed to let him fly.... badly.
Patents don't give an idea value. They give a piece of paper value. That creates an economy based on pieces of paper, and to prevent those pieces of paper from losing their artificial value, you need to enforce restrictions on people, ie take away some of their freedom.
But actually, all you *really* need for people to invest in an idea is lots of them. The more people you have, the more likely you'll find one willing to invest in an idea. It's that simple. That's how it's always worked before patents even existed.
Here's another secret: all you need for lots of inventions is lots and lots of inventors: educated people with time to tinker. We have those, more than we ever had in the history of the world. Ideas get rediscovered *all*the*time*.
We really don't need silly pieces of paper that are collected by a bunch of rich corporations so they can stop other people from actually inventing new things. And we don't need US courts to tell us we should pay a ransom to the owners of those pieces of paper, just because they paid the USPTO a fee for the privilege of demanding our money.
Omine is the Latin word omen in ablative singular case. It could be translated loosely as "from an omen", ie some kind of explicit argument from authority.
However, it's also possible you misheard "omine": There's the word "domine",
which is vocative singular, which could be translated as "Hey God, Hear Me!" (dominus = master of the house, but due to historical misuse by the catholic church it also means the christian god).
You might have a tiny point if it wasn't for the fact that we've already seen many examples of copyright related trials in the US where sentencing has been widely out of proportion with the offense. Like millions for downloading a handful of songs costing less than a dollar each.
The truth is that the US justice system's response to copyright violations is currently all over the place, and it is entirely reasonable to expect Aaron to have been sent to jail for most of his life.
"One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a
willingness to accept the penalty," is what MLK said from a Birmingham jail.
Please don't propagate this fairytale meme. MLK said a lot of good things, but this is ridiculous.
If you're going to break an unjust law, always make sure that you cannot get caught. This is important, so I'll repeat it. Do not get caught. Unjust laws must be broken again, and again, and again. You cannot do that if you're in prison.
Only those who aren't caught can break unjust laws again and again.
Imagine if Robin Hood, after his first robbery, had turned himself in to the Sheriff straight away? We wouldn't be reading about his exploits, that's for sure, and _nothing_ would have changed.
Of course he was a hero. Liberating scientific knowledge for the masses is a heroic deed and worthy of respect. Many more of us should be doing it, walking into libraries and scanning journals and books, posting them on the internet for all.
He is a hero precisely because most of us don't do that, and wouldn't do that. The knight who slays a dragon is a hero for doing what must be done for the good of all, when others do not or cannot.
But Aaron was not a very successful hero. Many of JSTOR's documents are still locked up despite his attempts. And JSTOR is only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much knowledge buried and hidden in universities. What is it buried for? Humanity needs it _now_.
We live in a world where copyright is misused to stifle progress, to control what people can learn, to segregate the rich and the poor through access to knowledge. And the trend is accelerating by technological means.
What word would you choose for waking up this morning to find this out?
Shit happens.
Bad things happen to good people all the time. That doesn't make it surreal, it's just evidence that life isn't always fair. Come to think of it, a better word than surreal might be normal/commonplace.
Why? If you want conservative, just use Debian stable. However, most people don't, and that's because they don't _want_ conservative, they _actually_ want lots of updates all the time. Open source caters for all types. Use what you like, and if you change your mind, use what you like after.
"Not like the brazen parties of media fame,
With grasping hands astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, downunder beaches shall stand
A mighty party with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lighting, and its name
Party of Pirates. From her beacon website
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild policies command
The ether-bridged harbor that the noosphere frame.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your hackers, your thieves,
Your anonymous masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your copyrighted shore,
Send these, the privacyless, TOS whacked to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
You do not need any human DNA (or modern human DNA) to produce a clone of
something extinct. This has already been proven.
[citation needed].
We are not yet at the point where nanomachines can build fertilized eggs from individual atoms. Correct me if I am wrong, but the technology we are talking about here is merely splicing some reconstucted sequences into existing human cells.
1) Carrying a baby does not make that person the "mother". There is no reason
it must contain modern human DNA at all.
Given that neanderthals are extinct, you're clearly wrong. Some modern human DNA from the mother (no quotes necessary) will be present.
2) You are way out of bounds calling ANYTHING I said "racist". For one, this
has nothing to do with race, we are talking about species and sub-species.
On the contrary. While I do not mean to insult you, the actual argument you make is totally racist. It suggests that it is entirely legitimate to _consider_ discrimination against a child based upon a genetic classification.
It is _exactly_ the argument made by racists when they claim that whites are generically superior and therefore have different rights.
This argument has been discredited when applied to whites and blacks, why should it be fought yet again for every viable combination of genetical differences?
Of course he's human. Having a human mother guarantees this. You may not be aware of it, but you're thinking like a racist in this instance. Try susbtituting "semi-human" with "black" in your sentence, and it reads like something someone from the 50s would say.
Try a search for "gay people in Kenya," for example.
Nobody cares about gays. If you're looking to point out the evils of facebook stalking technology, don't point out minority groups in a country most people couldn't place on a map. Point out instead that kids are now fair game for stalking. *That* is an argument against Facebook that the soccer moms and politicians will get behind 100%.
Slashdot Mirror
It *is* true for all current compilers in major use. If you look at your favourite compiler's license, you'll see an *explicit* exception that exempts compiled programs from being covered by the compiler's copyright claims. The Microsoft compilers do it, even GCC does it.
There's no substitute for users having total control over their phones. We shouldn't be expecting vendors to merely permit us to have some selected forms of privacy.
If you have control over your phone, you can edit the hosts file if you want, and you can decde exactly what inputs and outputs any program on your machine gets to receive or send. And if you're not too technical, you can install some third party software written by hackers to protect you from commercial exploitation if you want, like many people already do with adblocker addons for their browsers.
But if the phone vendors and network service providers control your phone's systems "for your own good", then you'll always be at their mercy, their greed, and their incompetence.
I highly doubt that. People don't _need_ directions very often. Quick: do you remember how to drive to work every day? Do you even look at the signs while driving to work? Do you regularly make a left turn when it should be a right turn, and arrive at work 30 minutes late because of it? No? Then you don't need directions.
What you _will_ need from the HUD regularly is entertainment. Because let's face it, driving to and from work is boring, that's why people keep the radio on. Driving to the shopping mall is boring, too. With a HUD, you can watch TV without actually taking your eyes off the road. Possibly porn, but more probably some stupid morning shows and TV series.
It will happen.
Drop the steak from orbit, it's the only way to be sure.
I love xkcd :)
I'd prefer they waste their money on that, than use it to prosecute hackers who copy science papers. The money, once in the budget, will be spent regardless. If it _won't_ be spent on serving the public, it _will_ get spent on selfish career making schemes.
A typical command line program simply reads data from STDIN, parameter values from argv[], and writes some values to STDOUT, maybe some error messages to STDERR. Command line programs don't care if the user is a human being or a script, unlike a ncurses program, whose fancy display formatting is all about human interactivity, but is often difficult to script.
Tut, tut! Don't assume! Go to Mars, turn her over, and check!
Intention does not make reality.
The monopoly privilege directly harms innovation by third parties. The least destructive option is therefore trade secrets. I have no problem with that, because it allows others to come up with inventions independently.
As it should be, for if I come up with something that other chemists can duplicate, there's no reason to give me a monopoly. I would only be setting back the scientific advances by a generation.
Nobody said life shouldn't be inconvenient, except those arguing for patents. And they conveniently forget how inconvenient they make life for everybody else, since that is the price for making life convenient for just one.
Suppose you invent an airplane, and patent it. You'll prevent innovation ands stifle your local industry , while in other parts of the world people who are just as smart as you will make huge progress.
That said, you still aren't forced to make sealed cameras, you can sell unsealed cameras that people can tinker with. If your cameras are good, you will still make a nice living from them. And if you get competitors, then the market will grow, and you'll sell more units.
This is not better. You're monopolizing the process, thereby preventing others from improving "your" idea, expect rent from everyone and cause the idea to be shunned by the vast majority of potential inventors until your patent expires. This is not better for the customer, who could be having a full ecosystem of alternatives and modifications.
That is pure fantasy. Have you even read a single patent? They are totally unsuitable for learning a process. Nobody reads patents to learn a competitor's secrets, they just look at the other guy's products, and think through the problem or reverse engineer. Granted, this requires other people with the same basic knowledge and intelligence as the inventor. There are plenty of those in the world.
Finally, I don't believe the claim that everybody is better off if the new guy has to pay royalties. In the absence of patents, the new guy can just reinvent his own version of the product, and price it competitively (you don't believe tha
Actually, the negative aspects of guilds can be directly attributed to the primitive patents and royally granted perpetual monopolies that made their existence both possible and tolerated.
Yeah, patents are designed to foster innovation like my kid's bee costume is designed to let him fly.... badly.
Patents don't give an idea value. They give a piece of paper value. That creates an economy based on pieces of paper, and to prevent those pieces of paper from losing their artificial value, you need to enforce restrictions on people, ie take away some of their freedom.
But actually, all you *really* need for people to invest in an idea is lots of them. The more people you have, the more likely you'll find one willing to invest in an idea. It's that simple. That's how it's always worked before patents even existed.
Here's another secret: all you need for lots of inventions is lots and lots of inventors: educated people with time to tinker. We have those, more than we ever had in the history of the world. Ideas get rediscovered *all*the*time*.
We really don't need silly pieces of paper that are collected by a bunch of rich corporations so they can stop other people from actually inventing new things. And we don't need US courts to tell us we should pay a ransom to the owners of those pieces of paper, just because they paid the USPTO a fee for the privilege of demanding our money.
They should totally make a movie about this. They could call it Skyfall.
You've been watching too much Flesh Gordon.
However, it's also possible you misheard "omine": There's the word "domine", which is vocative singular, which could be translated as "Hey God, Hear Me!" (dominus = master of the house, but due to historical misuse by the catholic church it also means the christian god).
Whoa, Ted! How'd I end up in this excellent slashdot username?
The truth is that the US justice system's response to copyright violations is currently all over the place, and it is entirely reasonable to expect Aaron to have been sent to jail for most of his life.
Please don't propagate this fairytale meme. MLK said a lot of good things, but this is ridiculous. If you're going to break an unjust law, always make sure that you cannot get caught. This is important, so I'll repeat it. Do not get caught. Unjust laws must be broken again, and again, and again. You cannot do that if you're in prison. Only those who aren't caught can break unjust laws again and again.
Imagine if Robin Hood, after his first robbery, had turned himself in to the Sheriff straight away? We wouldn't be reading about his exploits, that's for sure, and _nothing_ would have changed.
Is that what passes for a "hack" these days? Here's a real hack that everyone can get excited about.
He is a hero precisely because most of us don't do that, and wouldn't do that. The knight who slays a dragon is a hero for doing what must be done for the good of all, when others do not or cannot.
But Aaron was not a very successful hero. Many of JSTOR's documents are still locked up despite his attempts. And JSTOR is only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much knowledge buried and hidden in universities. What is it buried for? Humanity needs it _now_.
We live in a world where copyright is misused to stifle progress, to control what people can learn, to segregate the rich and the poor through access to knowledge. And the trend is accelerating by technological means.
Shit happens.
Bad things happen to good people all the time. That doesn't make it surreal, it's just evidence that life isn't always fair. Come to think of it, a better word than surreal might be normal/commonplace.
Why? If you want conservative, just use Debian stable. However, most people don't, and that's because they don't _want_ conservative, they _actually_ want lots of updates all the time. Open source caters for all types. Use what you like, and if you change your mind, use what you like after.
"Not like the brazen parties of media fame,
With grasping hands astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, downunder beaches shall stand
A mighty party with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lighting, and its name
Party of Pirates. From her beacon website
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild policies command
The ether-bridged harbor that the noosphere frame.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your hackers, your thieves,
Your anonymous masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your copyrighted shore,
Send these, the privacyless, TOS whacked to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
[citation needed].
We are not yet at the point where nanomachines can build fertilized eggs from individual atoms. Correct me if I am wrong, but the technology we are talking about here is merely splicing some reconstucted sequences into existing human cells.
Given that neanderthals are extinct, you're clearly wrong. Some modern human DNA from the mother (no quotes necessary) will be present.
On the contrary. While I do not mean to insult you, the actual argument you make is totally racist. It suggests that it is entirely legitimate to _consider_ discrimination against a child based upon a genetic classification. It is _exactly_ the argument made by racists when they claim that whites are generically superior and therefore have different rights. This argument has been discredited when applied to whites and blacks, why should it be fought yet again for every viable combination of genetical differences?
Of course he's human. Having a human mother guarantees this. You may not be aware of it, but you're thinking like a racist in this instance. Try susbtituting "semi-human" with "black" in your sentence, and it reads like something someone from the 50s would say.
Nobody cares about gays. If you're looking to point out the evils of facebook stalking technology, don't point out minority groups in a country most people couldn't place on a map. Point out instead that kids are now fair game for stalking. *That* is an argument against Facebook that the soccer moms and politicians will get behind 100%.