Vote for Gore and thinks won't get better for sure. This guy is definition of ever-present, forcefull goverment.
Let's not forget that his wife and running mate are big supporters of media censorship, net filtering, mandatory ratings, anti-video-game stuff (Leiberman, mainly), you name it...
With this stuff going on at the same time, I'm starting to think a Gore presidency would be extremely detrimental to our digital and intellecutal rights.
Conversely, I have no clue what to make of Nader (he's way too secretive), and don't even get me started on Buchanan...
Anyone happen to know what Bush's involvement in things has been? (or would like to suggest another party+candidate?)
My aunt and uncle have refused to get a dvd player until they can record with it (and they record a LOT of crap). There is no way in hell thay'd ever touch such a thing voluntarily if they knew it was capable oof not letting them record stuff (and the stuff they'd want t record is likely the very same stuff that this would block.
too bad. Once they phase out analog TV, the TVs with the mandatory digital anti-piracy measures will be the only ones availible.
I guess people like your relatives will just have to give up on TV then. Not such a loss, really.
Too bad the FCC's given the airwaves to the corporations. Otherwise, us Open Source types might be able to do things like make our own (short-range) analog TV stations using old equipment, broadcasting Open Content that could be viewed on non-crippled devices.
I'm curious why they asked people to use HTTP instead of FTP to download the files. Is HTTP now considered better for file transfer than FTP?
If you're just downloading something, there are some distinct advantages to HTTP, mainly relating to setup/teardown:
lower session setup/teardown costs
simpler negotiation
HTTP is stateless (no sessions to worry about)
No requirement to negotiate secondary TCP connections
Data retreived over HTTP is inherently typed ("Content-type:") [I use this to great advantage on my site -- "look ma, no extensions!"]... not so much an advantage for file transfer, except that if the server's set up properly, text/binary conversion issues are magically okay
HTTP can negotiate special encodings -- e.g. gzip compression -- transparently (wuftpd does let you request filenames with a.gz extension added for the same net effect, but it's hardly transparent, and you have to manually uncompress)
Once you get past setup/teardown, though, both HTTP and FTP are essentially shoving raw bytes down the pipe as fast as they can.
What kind of content? I'm more interested in the tech end myself, but I'm wondering what kind of Free content people are working on. Free artwork (still visual stuff) is already fairly common...
Well, I don't know of that much being worked on. Some amount of Free music, and of course visual artists will put some stuff up on their sites, but the latter is often still relatively restricted.
What I'd really like to see happen is Free animation, film, and other "multimedia" work in particular, as well as written fiction, as well as a simple, consistent, and usable donation system to help support all this.
Since I'm a coder, visual artist, writer, and musician, I'm starting to experiment with as many of these as I can. I've already started a few personal projects -- in the next year or so we'll see if they get anywhere. Real "multimedia" stuff is down the road, though -- the first few items are manga and serial fiction. I have some ideas for implementing a web-based Street Performer-type system, as well.
Hopefully I'll manage to squeeze enough time around school and work to get stuff done, and ideally eventually I'll be able to replace the work bit.:P (at least the school bit will end soon)
What really needs to happen, though, is for multidisciplinary groups to be doing this kind of thing.
Another thing I'd like to see (and that I plan on doing myself) is people releasing their work into the public domain after 14 years (the original copyright term), to combat/protest the current sick situation where nothing substantial has entered the intellectual/cultural commons since World War I...
And yes, I realize all this is untried. I'm not demanding that anyone else do this. Someone has to experiment with this stuff, though, and so that's why I want to put my own time (and to some extent money) where my mouth is.
No, "piracy" will do about as much for advancing Free media as it has for Free software. Approximately nil.
RMS didn't set about illegally distributing software to achieve his goals; instead, he wrote his own software that he could legally distribute in the fashion he desired.
Freely distributable content, voluntarily made by artists, is the only thing that can "save" us.
Everyone here is ranting and raving about the system and then everyone rants and raves about no one doing anything about it. I'm pretty ticked off about the whole thing too so I need to know how many of you would back me for a political stand.
Personally, I don't think your involvement with hackers.com would wash very well in the political arena. Keep the day job for now.
There are, however, some very specific things you can do:
if you're a coder, contribute to OGG and other Free media infrastructure projects. write Free software.
if you're an artist, writer, or musician, experiment with various donation systems for funding, and try the Open Publication license. We need to be able to present viable alternatives for compensation, and experimentation is the only way to find and fine-tune them.
if you're a musician, also boost Vorbis instead of MP3.
Well, it looks like we're going to be increasingly cut out of legally participating in the current media standards (DVD/CSS, Real, MP3) by software patents and the DMCA.
Worse, this is extending into hardware. We're nearing the point where it will be illegal to write open-source video drivers, because the connection to the monitor is encrypted in a CSS-like fashion [before you call me paranoid, Intel and a group of other corporations are already developing just that and more -- do some research on HDCP, the High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection spec, and its application in e.g. DVI].
The only compelling argument (for most people) against such draconian hardware measures is the existence legitimate Free alternative technologies (and unencumbered content to go with it!). Of all the boats, let's hope we don't miss this one.
All those that can, hit ogg.org and similar projects, and see what you can contribute. Myself, I plan on working on the content side of things.
Could it be that the GPV isn't as ironclad as RMS and his cult followers would have us believe?
All licenses (the GPL is not excepted) are only as ironclad as the degree to which they are enforced.
One of the reasons the KDE situation bothers RMS so much, I think, is that the KDE developers were being so cavalier about the terms of the GPL, and undermining it as an enforcable license as a result.
How many people combined SSH (not OpenSSH) with Linux or *BSD?
Nobody, at least not in contravention of the licenses. Mere agregation is not the same thing as linking (the GPL does make an explicit distinction).
The same applies to the rest of your examples. The licensing problems came in when GPLed code (e.g. KOffice) was linked to Qt at compile time and the binaries distributed.
If you don't understand runtime/compile-time dependencies and linking, you are really not qualified to speak on this.
(moreover, your BSD example is bogus; the BSD license essentially lets you do whatever you want -- it'd be entirely legal to link a BSD-licenced app with Qt)
That's already sorta true... you buy toilet paper, right? Ok, so we don't have a little midget in the bathroom to scrub our ass after we do our business -- well, not until you get "really old".
True, but right now I'm free to use e.g. yesterday's newspaper instead of TP, and even if I bought toilet paper, I'm not legally obligated to hire the midget to use it.
Corruption is a fact of life.
Certainly. Human nature is what it is. I'm just bitching because most people seem so damn naive about it...
...what about preventing people who aren't even aware of the difference between copyrights, patents, and trademarks, from pontificating on IP issues?
I really think slashdot should have little "reference cards" at the bottom of the article for various pieces of information like this.
Since discussion now is invariably so mis-informed on even the basics, perhaps such a brief reference would raise the general level of discussion, at least a bit?
Of course, that assumes the Slashdot editorial staff are capable of getting these things right themselves... unfortunately, they don't even seem to consistently manage to spell "copyright" correctly (which this poster did, kudos to him for that).
...this hardly deserves "Insightful". It's pretty content-free. Note the needless repetition of ideas, malapropisms, and use of filler such as "ever-expanding rapid rate".
Read carefully. The poster could have said the same thing in much less space:
We need to think about how space exploration (in particular, the Mars Meteorites) will change our lives, because it is very controversial. Some people introduce new ideas, while others hold on to existing (possibly flawed) ideas.
Which of them is right?
The latter group says that the meteorites threaten our existing theories in ways we are not prepared to handle. Maybe the meteorites should be forgotten.
The former group says that if we study them, we will learn new things. Then scientists will get new tools that only the "elite" formerly posessed.
Maybe both groups are right. The new ideas might make us uncomfortable, but they could be better than the old ones.
What will happen? We don't know yet, execept that people will argue about it a lot.
I wouldn't accept this from a student, let alone give it anything better than a "D".
I'm beginning to think we're headed into a new age where private property is abolished -- but instead of everything being owned by the state, it will be owned by corporations.
Nader calls this Corporate Socialism. I'm beginning to think he has a point.
Some days I wonder if we're headed toward a society where you can't even wipe your own butt for yourself, instead of having some corporation do it for you (for a nominal fee).
If you did it yourself, you'd be depriving some butt-wiping company of revenue, you see. Putting honest, hard-working people out of jobs, for heaven's sakes!
(if you disagree, you're a communist butt pirate and should be shipped off for re-education)
This is severe hyperbole, of course, but unfortunately something very near that mindset is truly already out here in corporate-land.
What's your experience been like with it (I assume you use it)?
I'm somewhat interested in messing with e-gold, but to me (reading their site) it looks like you'd eventually get bled to death by storage fees for the metal (your balance slowly goes down as a result), and you also get charged for exchanging currency both to and from e-gold...
Are the fees really so small in practice that this doesn't matter?
A slightly toned down version of the troll's post (reproduced below, since the moderators did not recognize its value) could very easily be used as an argument in court by DVD-CCA lawyers (and in fact, this reasoning is most likely exactly where they came up with their comment in the first place). Worse, I can easkily see this being used later in news broadcasts (remember who owns the major news distributors) and PR campeigns...
The troll:
The statements made by the lawyer do not defame or slander open source, which advocates that we "free the code" in just such a way, by making it freely available over the inernet. The GPL even mandates that we do. Get your facts straight.
GNU/Linux was created by reverse-engineering the inellectual property of others. It's a rip-off of unix. Now Gnome and Kde are trying to rip off the Windows desktop and COM as well. Reverse engineering is illegal! Richard Stallman, spokesman of free software, advocates software piracy and does not acknowledge intellectual property rights over software or artistic creations such as film and music.
Don't let open source fanatics tear down our economic system by freely distributing the property of others. This menace must be stamped out, and the courts so far have done a fine job of setting a precedent to do just that. Soon the rightful owners of software copied by GNU-Linux will be collecting royalties from every user of Linux, BSD and Apache, which are no better than pirated MP3's so far as the law is concerned. Software piracy is illegal!
If something is published with a pseudonym, then all rights to ownership are forfited, including copyrights.
That is false. It does, however, mean that you get the shorter copyright term otherwise given to corporations, rather than the longer one for individuals. (they're both almost 100 years or more, so big whoop:P)
Oh, I don't think there is any question of that, despite what some of the more heritical sects think. Why, even the Pirket avot (which I may not be spelling correctly this late) says something to the effect of "and the sons of the Rabbi's did not hesitate to embelish the works of thier fathers, to more suit thier time and needs."
That's getting outside my immediate realm of knowledge.
I do recall that the copying procedures that were generally observed by the "mainline" rabbinical types through the centuries were amazingly anal, though. Munge a letter, start over. Observe certain rituals when writing "YHWH". &c... &c...
The second relates to something else that ISN'T in the bible: The length of gods's day. For all we know, Dino's are part of the "Clay" so to speak. Evolution could be Gods' hands! So, they're part of the process. This is what I think.
Also note that Genesis is written in a high literary mode; it's not the same literary style that would have been used for e.g. a history.
Chances are the language is, indeed, figurative. (Some other tip-offs, too, like the sudden appearance of cities before Adam and Eve have had that many children)
It is admittedly easy to go too far with this and simply declare the entire mess to be figurative. It's not. Couched in the symbolism, there are two elements which are, in fact, particularly important, and historical:
God's relationship with man (the species, not the gender)
Man's relationship with God; in particular, the primordial choices made by our first anscestors
As for other specifics, I doubt Genesis was intended as a scientific treatise, contrary to what many extreme fundamentalists and atheists seem to insist.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's not forget that his wife and running mate are big supporters of media censorship, net filtering, mandatory ratings, anti-video-game stuff (Leiberman, mainly), you name it...
With this stuff going on at the same time, I'm starting to think a Gore presidency would be extremely detrimental to our digital and intellecutal rights.
Conversely, I have no clue what to make of Nader (he's way too secretive), and don't even get me started on Buchanan...
Anyone happen to know what Bush's involvement in things has been? (or would like to suggest another party+candidate?)
too bad. Once they phase out analog TV, the TVs with the mandatory digital anti-piracy measures will be the only ones availible.
I guess people like your relatives will just have to give up on TV then. Not such a loss, really.
Too bad the FCC's given the airwaves to the corporations. Otherwise, us Open Source types might be able to do things like make our own (short-range) analog TV stations using old equipment, broadcasting Open Content that could be viewed on non-crippled devices.
It's another incremental step in completely shutting off Open Source from all involvement in consumer-level media. CSS was another.
We need Open Media. Now.
If you're just downloading something, there are some distinct advantages to HTTP, mainly relating to setup/teardown:
Once you get past setup/teardown, though, both HTTP and FTP are essentially shoving raw bytes down the pipe as fast as they can.
Hmm, this is true, but I suspect the KDE authors were not aware of the Konnotation.
Please, think about the future. Consider Vorbis instead.
It's "out of the frying pan and into the fire" if you stick with MP3. [remember the patents?]
Well, I don't know of that much being worked on. Some amount of Free music, and of course visual artists will put some stuff up on their sites, but the latter is often still relatively restricted.
What I'd really like to see happen is Free animation, film, and other "multimedia" work in particular, as well as written fiction, as well as a simple, consistent, and usable donation system to help support all this.
Since I'm a coder, visual artist, writer, and musician, I'm starting to experiment with as many of these as I can. I've already started a few personal projects -- in the next year or so we'll see if they get anywhere. Real "multimedia" stuff is down the road, though -- the first few items are manga and serial fiction. I have some ideas for implementing a web-based Street Performer-type system, as well.
Hopefully I'll manage to squeeze enough time around school and work to get stuff done, and ideally eventually I'll be able to replace the work bit. :P (at least the school bit will end soon)
What really needs to happen, though, is for multidisciplinary groups to be doing this kind of thing.
Another thing I'd like to see (and that I plan on doing myself) is people releasing their work into the public domain after 14 years (the original copyright term), to combat/protest the current sick situation where nothing substantial has entered the intellectual/cultural commons since World War I...
And yes, I realize all this is untried. I'm not demanding that anyone else do this. Someone has to experiment with this stuff, though, and so that's why I want to put my own time (and to some extent money) where my mouth is.
The name alone is sufficient to damage you politically.
No, "piracy" will do about as much for advancing Free media as it has for Free software. Approximately nil.
RMS didn't set about illegally distributing software to achieve his goals; instead, he wrote his own software that he could legally distribute in the fashion he desired.
Freely distributable content, voluntarily made by artists, is the only thing that can "save" us.
Personally, I don't think your involvement with hackers.com would wash very well in the political arena. Keep the day job for now.
There are, however, some very specific things you can do:
I'd much rather say "Streaming Vorbis" instead...
Well, it looks like we're going to be increasingly cut out of legally participating in the current media standards (DVD/CSS, Real, MP3) by software patents and the DMCA.
Worse, this is extending into hardware. We're nearing the point where it will be illegal to write open-source video drivers, because the connection to the monitor is encrypted in a CSS-like fashion [before you call me paranoid, Intel and a group of other corporations are already developing just that and more -- do some research on HDCP, the High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection spec, and its application in e.g. DVI].
The only compelling argument (for most people) against such draconian hardware measures is the existence legitimate Free alternative technologies (and unencumbered content to go with it!). Of all the boats, let's hope we don't miss this one.
All those that can, hit ogg.org and similar projects, and see what you can contribute. Myself, I plan on working on the content side of things.
Let's not forget Tipper Gore's rating games either...
At least with regard to the ratings/censorship issue, a Gore administration would really suck big-time.
All licenses (the GPL is not excepted) are only as ironclad as the degree to which they are enforced.
One of the reasons the KDE situation bothers RMS so much, I think, is that the KDE developers were being so cavalier about the terms of the GPL, and undermining it as an enforcable license as a result.
Nobody, at least not in contravention of the licenses. Mere agregation is not the same thing as linking (the GPL does make an explicit distinction).
The same applies to the rest of your examples. The licensing problems came in when GPLed code (e.g. KOffice) was linked to Qt at compile time and the binaries distributed.
If you don't understand runtime/compile-time dependencies and linking, you are really not qualified to speak on this.
(moreover, your BSD example is bogus; the BSD license essentially lets you do whatever you want -- it'd be entirely legal to link a BSD-licenced app with Qt)
True, but right now I'm free to use e.g. yesterday's newspaper instead of TP, and even if I bought toilet paper, I'm not legally obligated to hire the midget to use it.
Certainly. Human nature is what it is. I'm just bitching because most people seem so damn naive about it...
...what about preventing people who aren't even aware of the difference between copyrights, patents, and trademarks, from pontificating on IP issues?
I really think slashdot should have little "reference cards" at the bottom of the article for various pieces of information like this.
Since discussion now is invariably so mis-informed on even the basics, perhaps such a brief reference would raise the general level of discussion, at least a bit?
Of course, that assumes the Slashdot editorial staff are capable of getting these things right themselves... unfortunately, they don't even seem to consistently manage to spell "copyright" correctly (which this poster did, kudos to him for that).
...this hardly deserves "Insightful". It's pretty content-free. Note the needless repetition of ideas, malapropisms, and use of filler such as "ever-expanding rapid rate".
Read carefully. The poster could have said the same thing in much less space:
I wouldn't accept this from a student, let alone give it anything better than a "D".
Nader calls this Corporate Socialism. I'm beginning to think he has a point.
Some days I wonder if we're headed toward a society where you can't even wipe your own butt for yourself, instead of having some corporation do it for you (for a nominal fee).
If you did it yourself, you'd be depriving some butt-wiping company of revenue, you see. Putting honest, hard-working people out of jobs, for heaven's sakes!
(if you disagree, you're a communist butt pirate and should be shipped off for re-education)
This is severe hyperbole, of course, but unfortunately something very near that mindset is truly already out here in corporate-land.
What's your experience been like with it (I assume you use it)?
I'm somewhat interested in messing with e-gold, but to me (reading their site) it looks like you'd eventually get bled to death by storage fees for the metal (your balance slowly goes down as a result), and you also get charged for exchanging currency both to and from e-gold...
Are the fees really so small in practice that this doesn't matter?
A slightly toned down version of the troll's post (reproduced below, since the moderators did not recognize its value) could very easily be used as an argument in court by DVD-CCA lawyers (and in fact, this reasoning is most likely exactly where they came up with their comment in the first place). Worse, I can easkily see this being used later in news broadcasts (remember who owns the major news distributors) and PR campeigns...
The troll:
That is false. It does, however, mean that you get the shorter copyright term otherwise given to corporations, rather than the longer one for individuals. (they're both almost 100 years or more, so big whoop :P)
Only if you're an exobiologist.
That's getting outside my immediate realm of knowledge.
I do recall that the copying procedures that were generally observed by the "mainline" rabbinical types through the centuries were amazingly anal, though. Munge a letter, start over. Observe certain rituals when writing "YHWH". &c... &c...
Also note that Genesis is written in a high literary mode; it's not the same literary style that would have been used for e.g. a history.
Chances are the language is, indeed, figurative. (Some other tip-offs, too, like the sudden appearance of cities before Adam and Eve have had that many children)
It is admittedly easy to go too far with this and simply declare the entire mess to be figurative. It's not. Couched in the symbolism, there are two elements which are, in fact, particularly important, and historical:
As for other specifics, I doubt Genesis was intended as a scientific treatise, contrary to what many extreme fundamentalists and atheists seem to insist.