For $150? I'd buy it in a heartbeat. For $250, I might consider it. For more than the price of a Mac Mini? No way.
A Mac Mini costs at least $599, according to Apple's webstore (not including educational discounts). This open-pc.com computer is being advertised at €359 which is approximately $509 as I type this.
When you buy a Mac Mini you're buying a non-free OS and hardware you might not be able to fully operate with free software drivers. The open-pc.com machine is being advertised as a machine that runs on "100% free software and drivers".
Handing off a URL to a PDF application could accomplish the same thing, no?
Re:And we're trusting you because....
on
Hiding From Google
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Google desktop search indexes your documents in order to provide a quick search service. There's no way users can be sure the indices aren't shared with Google, despite no technical need to do so in order to provide that desktop user with a quick search of their own data. If Google gets any sensitive data, who's to know how many people get a copy of that data from Google? I imagine this is why institutions with sensitive data tell their workers they are not allowed to install Google Desktop, despite any convenience it may bring. Like any other proprietary program, Google applications are largely uninspectable in any common way, even for programmers skilled in reading program source code. If someone found a security problem in a Google program and patched it the license forbids them from legally distributing their improved version of the program. So we really don't know for sure everything Google apps do when they run and we have no way to help others through distributing improved versions of Google programs.
There is talk of educational institutions outsourcing email (and possibly calendaring) to places like Google and Microsoft as default policy—by default, students get Google/Microsoft accounts instead of accounts hosted by the school. There are also reasonable concerns about what to do with sensitive email/calendaring data not hosted locally. It's not easy to contract around these problems. Institutions can't rely on local law to help (most educational institutions are not in California or Washington). Some educational institutions can't reveal the existence of students at their school (in the US there is the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act which protects student privacy including divulging whether the person is a student at a particular school). Making it default policy to route student email/calendars through Google's servers risks inadvertent exposure of private student data and places the educational institution in a position where it would be hard for them to do anything to prevent that leak from happening again.
Google isn't unique in what I just wrote. Any organization faces the same challenge: convince the user that their data is safest with the organization. But you asked about Google. As for trusting this (ostensibly) anonymizing service as a front-end to Google's services: I merely find it interesting that people would be willing to try this with so little information about who runs it and what structural forces may result in them divulging your data to anyone but you.
So you're complaining that nobody has produced a fix while trying to convince us that a program we're free to fix is equivalent to a program we're forbidden from fixing. No wonder the fix isn't coming fast enough to satisfy you! I think that when you encourage people to think that way you shoot yourself in the foot by conflating freedom with dependency. I fully appreciate that most users aren't capable of helping or going to help, but I also don't think it's fair or wise to give the impression it's reasonable to tell people nothing practical they can do to help. We can all help by contributing time and money toward those who can help fix things.
And to the average user, there is no differnce. They'll have to way for FF to update itself to get the patch as well, as they're waiting on the mozilla people to do so.
Freedom is not a guarantee of help. Having free speech doesn't make one a great orator. Freedom is permission to do something. The average computer user hasn't been taught about software freedom, no thanks to the open source movement which purposefully pushes aside software freedom to speak to business interests. The average computer user hasn't been taught about why they should value community and sharing even when that means buggy software (as it will). We all want more reliable stuff but in the real world everything breaks. The fact remains that free software gives us all more options to get involved help the community than proprietary software does.
It puts users are the mercy of the OS community (which has an attitude "if you didn't pay for it you don't have a right to complain") instead of a company. But at the end of the day, its the same for them. Don't be delusional; people just want to USE their computers, not spend time learning to program to fix other people's software.
People just want to drive their cars (not deal with broken tires, busted timing belts, and other failures), people just want to live in houses (not deal with electrical, plumbing, and roofing problems), people just want to drink potable affordable water (not effluent from the printing plant or get water-borne diseases), and much more. But society can't afford the short-term what-about-my-project political laziness you defend. "People just want to..." doesn't help anyone understand the real world where we all have to live with broken and unsafe stuff. The question remains, particularly for those who can help such as you in this situation, how much you're willing to put into fixing things to make life better and help the community. Eschewing freedom to fix things is not at all productive. The amount of software the free software community has made and improved over 20 years is anything but "delusional".
One of the problems Microsoft (and this/. thread) gets at is how out of control Microsoft's users are. Microsoft wants you to upgrade to a version of a proprietary browser that can still be compromised with some reconfiguration. Because IE is proprietary, all IE users must wait until Microsoft genuinely fixes the bugs that allow remote code to compromise the browser even after said reconfiguration. Firefox, while vulnerable even in a default install, is free software. Firefox's destiny is in our collective hands. We decide how and when Firefox is fixed and we decide how thorough that fix is.
So while you're probably not a programmer, like most computer users, you have options with Firefox that you don't have with IE. You could learn to program and help fix Firefox's code. You stand virtually no chance of doing this with IE's code no matter how expert you become. It is of no help to look at this as though Firefox hackers are your workers so you can sit back and wait for them to deliver a fix ("I haven't seen any indication that they aren't working on a fix. What will you say if the patch comes out?").
Software freedom changes the game by giving you permission to control your computer; the more free software you run, the more control you have. Like with any other freedom how much of that permission you're willing to leverage is up to you.
It's not up to you to decide what is useless for anyone but yourself. People can determine for themselves what they want and what they don't want. The volume of data is no reason to restrict anyone from getting to that data.
That's not what I thought of when I read downloading the data. I thought I'd be pointed to an FTP server of huge files or something similar. Instead I've found my way to a map where I can use various graphical means to select which subset of the data I want. There are many limitations with this interface.
Why isn't this data posted to a large archive site where people can freely download more than that GUI allows (or get data in a differently controlled way that facilitates big downloads). Perhaps the Internet Archive can host all of the data and allow such downloading.
I do exactly that with business documents every day. I open them in OpenOffice.org, print them from OO.o, and if something doesn't import/open correctly due to mistranslation, I make do with what I've got just like millions of users have done across decades of opening important documents in various versions of Microsoft office programs. Microsoft's office programs don't always open and work flawlessly across operating systems or even versions of Microsoft Office. Any talk about "guarantees" and 100% perfect conversion, that's the utopia.
That sounds overbroad and anti-social to me. Let me explain by way of a few hypothetical scenarios:
A friend of mine buys a copy of the movie from a home video store and gives it to me as a gift. Given what you just said, I "have[n't] any business getting it at all!" because I didn't pay for the copy.
I comment on the movie on my blog and use a fair use clip to illustrate my critique, as is my right under copyright. I've now "gotten it" and helped others get a portion of it via my freedom of speech.
I pay local taxes some of which fund my local library which buys one copy for lending. Now lots of people get to see it without paying directly for the movie.
I sell my copy, as is my right under first sale doctrine. I've not only "gotten it" but I'm profiting from my sale of the movie.
All of these scenarios keep communities thriving and involve interaction among fellows. All of these scenarios are fair and just, after all you got paid for your work. But DRM tries to stop all of these scenarios from occurring. This notion of stopping people from experiencing the work because they didn't pay is abhorrent to civil society.
Your industry seems to have shifted a lot of work to Canada. I'm guessing they didn't do that just to meet the friendly Canadians. I think they did that to take advantage of cheaper labor at all levels of production and editing. It wouldn't surprise me if this includes information technology support.
Can you point to serious refutations of copyright where the point of the argument is that copyright should last 2 years or not exist at all? FSF speakers have long pointed out the problem of no copyright, a very short term of copyright, and overly long copyright. My experience is that calls for no or very short terms of copyright are posited by people who ought to reconsider what is in society's best interests.
No copyright means no end to the tyranny of proprietary software (said programs never enter the public domain even on paper), no way for free software developers to require credit when building on their work (as some free software licenses require), and no reciprocal contribution to the commons when distributing or conveying the work or a derivative (like the GPL does).
Short terms of copyright (like the 2-year term you mention) means that proprietors can incorporate strongly copylefted work into their proprietary software during the time in which the software is reasonably current and likely to provide a competitive edge. This means even those who want to a defensible commons (like what the GPL maintains) cannot do so based on copyright law alone. A short term of copyright came up in Richard Stallman's critique of the Swedish Pirate Party:
How would the Swedish Pirate Party's platform affect copylefted free software? After five years, its source code would go into the public domain, and proprietary software developers would be able to include it in their programs. But what about the reverse case?
Proprietary software is restricted by EULAs, not just by copyright, and the users don't have the source code. Even if copyright permits noncommercial sharing, the EULA may forbid it. In addition, the users, not having the source code, do not control what the program does when they run it. To run such a program is to surrender your freedom and give the developer control over you.
So what would be the effect of terminating this program's copyright after 5 years? This would not require the developer to release source code, and presumably most will never do so. Users, still denied the source code, would still be unable to use the program in freedom. The program could even have a "time bomb" in it to make it stop working after 5 years, in which case the "public domain" copies would not run at all.
Thus, the Pirate Party's proposal would give proprietary software developers the use of GPL-covered source code after 5 years, but it would not give free software developers the use of proprietary source code, not after 5 years or even 50 years. The Free World would get the bad, but not the good. The difference between source code and object code and the practice of using EULAs would give proprietary software an effective exception from the general rule of 5-year copyright -- one that free software does not share.
Most countries give people the means to place their work into the public domain immediately upon publication or else waive copyright restrictions their laws mandate. Building the PD in this way simply doesn't strike me as an impediment to social progress. But those looking to provide alternatives to proprietary software in order to share freedom for all computer users don't have the PD as a viable option; we would be universal donors and proprietors would build upon our works as universal recipients. I certainly don't want to treat proprietors as charities.
That depends on what you mean by "use". Typically people mean executing a program, running the software. The terms of the GPLv2 (Busybox's license) do not compel one to do anything upon running the software. And this quality is not unique to the GPL.
The thing about privacy options offered by the system is that they're completely untrustworthy. You're essentially hoping that AskJeeves will do what you want despite the fact that AskJeeves has all the information they need to tell people details of your search(es). You are trusting a corporation with your privacy for no good reason. Even if everyone at AskJeeves honors those settings they could inadvertently spill details about your queries. Just because they say "When AskEraser is enabled your search activity will be deleted from Ask.com (not third-party) servers..." doesn't mean they'll erase anything. Maybe they'll tag the information you want erased and keep it around, then interpret that tag with a different meaning than what you intended: you want this erased, but they'll consider that more important to keep because now they know you want it erased.
When Google bought DejaNews' Usenet database Google didn't initially honor the "X-no-archive: yes" header/first-line-of-post setting (which was intended to tell Usenet archivists something about tagged posts; a foolish approach to be sure but fun to play with just to see what happens). At first it was possible to retrieve Usenet posts from Google's database which had this header/body-line set. Later Google honored the setting and the posts were no longer searchable by people outside Google HQ. But this was enough to show that x-no-archive wasn't being used as a signal not to store/index these posts (DejaNews and Google obviously did just that), nor did x-no-archive mean not to convey the posts to others (DejaNews obviously conveyed them to Google). One can safely assume that if one initiates a search from a trusted place (say, from machines inside Google HQ), one can pull up these posts today.
The only way to preserve your privacy is to think about what information is important and not distribute secret information in the first place.
From another poster in this discussion, it sounds like Gmail's conversation view is not threaded. One can mail a response with a different subject header and that email is still in the same thread (because threads are tracked by ordered lists of message-IDs, not the subject header). From what it sounds like, Gmail, sorts emails into "conversations" by subjects and date/timestamps.
So asking for Gmail-style conversations means giving up something quite valuable Thunderbird has provided for a long time (possibly for as long as it has been available), which can scale up to handling discussions with more than 2 participants, and handle participants who edit the subject header reflect what they're talking about.
Did you try setting mail.check_all_imap_folders_for_new to true?
For as long as I can remember I've read on people's blogs (Tinymail's initial implementor's blog, for example) that GMail's IMAP has always been poor and that this is the fault of the implementor (Google), not the client. Van Hoof recommends Dovecot and Cyrus for IMAP service instead, but to be sure, people are probably more attracted to Google's gratis service and large mail quota even if it means allowing Google to index all of your mail.
When you say "I hate the GPL... so much." you should have to explain why; something you have not done with the exception that it won't let you link in GPL-incompatibly licensed code such as ZFS. Perhaps your anger should be directed toward those that license incompatibly with the GPL. After all, as the grandparent poster points out, the GNU GPL has done a lot for you as you "promote BSD" systems. Your hatred of the GPL comes off as though you don't understand what the GPL says or why.
The problem isn't anything Microsoft doing, it's users who don't upgrade their OS. Did you notice the part where this only affects IE6 and IE7? Upgrade to IE8, and, presto, you're immune!
Some users, like office workers, are not in control of the computers they use and cannot switch away from what they were given. Sometimes they were set up with particular versions of software to suit other programs. The "Banner" system some universities use, for instance, requires MSIE7 and a particular old version of Sun's Java runtime. Certain sections of Banner don't work properly with non-MSIE browsers like Firefox. I understand this is an extremely costly system and switching away is considerably complicated. I'm not endorsing these choices or claiming any of these choices is wise, but it is there.
So third-party security researchers never find vulnerabilities in closed-source software?
You're asking the wrong question or in search of the wrong point. Some vulnerabilities in proprietary software go undiscovered for a long time and no vulnerabilities in proprietary software are fixed by third parties. One's "security record" is irrelevant when that software is uninspectable, immutable, and changes cannot be shared. You cannot know if Opera keeps you safe precisely because you don't know what Opera is doing when it runs. There is simply too much unknown about proprietary software to claim it is more secure. All software has bugs but malicious software works better when distributed such that people are forbidden from inspecting, changing, and sharing their improvements. Even for accidental errors which lead to security problems, programmers make mistakes no matter whether the user's software freedom is respected. It's not a good idea, therefore, to cut yourself off from the freedom to inspect, fix, and share software. If you value your software freedom as you say you do, you can choose to run a free software browser and only install free software add-ons. These steps are impossible with a proprietary web browser. Furthermore, the principles of this discussion are not unique to web browsers; this is true of all computer software.
Your post has been moderated "insightful" yet there's nothing insightful about trading away your software freedom to fight security vulnerabilities. Proprietary software can only be inspected or fixed by the proprietor. Free software can be inspected and fixed by a lot more people (including yourself if you so choose).
Maybe they're trying to innovate and do something new and different. I don't share your doubts but if I did, I would rather give them the benefit of any doubt then criticize before I had even tried the software. It seems to me that they're in a tough spot: do what UIs have been doing for a long time and get accused of copying rather than doing something new, or do something new and get bad word from people who reject the free software out of hand at their "first look".
Couldn't Gnash feature some interface that effectively prohibit a program from doing things common to malware (fetching data from the user's storage, connecting to someplace else, or sending data, for example)? These things might make some uses very inconvenient but more secure by default than Adobe's flash player.
Obviously I don't know enough about what flash players are expected to be able to do, but I don't see the question being raised elsewhere in the thread.
Which is a shame, somewhere with unabiguously legal content available freely and freely would be great. I have plenty of content that i would happily share freely, but im not going to pay to share it. Id bet there's a few others in a similar situation aswell.
If you're serious, consider The Internet Archive. Servers around the world, zero cost, unlimited uploading and downloading for all, and no size limits (as far as I know). IA hosts a lot of large files (full-length movies, DVDs, some periodic TV shows upload broadcast-quality episodes). I'm sure they'll host your images too.
On the other hand, even if such a place did exist, having only 512kbit upload would make sharing multi-gigabyte, multi-gigapixel images tedious anyway.
So are you looking for gratis hosting or aren't you?
May I ask what you're doing what to remedy this? It seems to me that working to fix this is more productive than only complaining about it. Are there some technical people working on a specification so people can enjoy free books with pictures in free formats?
If you want to encourage literacy (in the developing world or elsewhere) you've got to start small.
I sense you mean well, but I suggest you'd do better to convince people to help you improve the state of e-books by asking for assistance instead of telling people in what order they should donate their time to address the under-served. People need all sorts of things simultaneously, not some things in a particular order.
I was not a child who wanted "picture books", I found the pictures undermined my imagination. I did a far better job casting, clothing, and set dressing the story in my head than any illustrator. I imagine there are other children out there who don't want to be prejudiced about how things looked, just as I imagine there are kids who want pictures to go enhance the reading. We'll get to the point where more people's literary needs are met in freedom. Clearly things are heading in the right direction and with your help and experience in what you believe people want, I'm sure we'll get there faster.
And Project Gutenberg's e-books treat the reader with respect: no DRM, no special format hassles, wide availability, sharing-friendly (no need to fear what happens on copying, loaning, or selling your copy at a yard sale), easy to annotate, readable on every device, and available gratis (but worth money).
Many thanks to Project Gutenberg for all their hard work. Project Gutenberg sets a great example the public should keep in mind when commercial outfits offer significantly less for considerable forfeiture of your freedom and money.
RMS, as you rightly point out, understands that non-free software which eventually becomes free software is significantly better than non-free software that stays non-free forever because the former leads to eventually respecting our software freedom while the other can lead to our loss of software freedom. The open source movement is interested in a development methodology aimed primarily at businesses, not framing issues in terms of user's software freedom. Open source proponents aren't taught to think in terms of user's software freedom. This too can lead to the loss of software freedom. So whenever someone licenses a non-free program, open source advocates have little reason to object despite how that chips away at our freedom (from the aforementioned essay, "This attitude will reward schemes that take away our freedom, leading to its loss."). Free software activists, on the other hand, lament the disrespect for user's freedom which motivates them to support a project to develop a free replacement so that everyone can do that job whilst retaining their software freedom. Finally, as for the GPL: RMS wrote the GPL with user's freedoms in mind. The reason we enjoy the freedoms you champion at the end of your post is precisely because RMS pays attention to all computer user's software freedom. Had he taken an interest in mere development methodology instead, proprietary derivatives might be far more common than they are.
Slashdot Mirror
A Mac Mini costs at least $599, according to Apple's webstore (not including educational discounts). This open-pc.com computer is being advertised at €359 which is approximately $509 as I type this.
When you buy a Mac Mini you're buying a non-free OS and hardware you might not be able to fully operate with free software drivers. The open-pc.com machine is being advertised as a machine that runs on "100% free software and drivers".
Handing off a URL to a PDF application could accomplish the same thing, no?
Google desktop search indexes your documents in order to provide a quick search service. There's no way users can be sure the indices aren't shared with Google, despite no technical need to do so in order to provide that desktop user with a quick search of their own data. If Google gets any sensitive data, who's to know how many people get a copy of that data from Google? I imagine this is why institutions with sensitive data tell their workers they are not allowed to install Google Desktop, despite any convenience it may bring. Like any other proprietary program, Google applications are largely uninspectable in any common way, even for programmers skilled in reading program source code. If someone found a security problem in a Google program and patched it the license forbids them from legally distributing their improved version of the program. So we really don't know for sure everything Google apps do when they run and we have no way to help others through distributing improved versions of Google programs.
There is talk of educational institutions outsourcing email (and possibly calendaring) to places like Google and Microsoft as default policy—by default, students get Google/Microsoft accounts instead of accounts hosted by the school. There are also reasonable concerns about what to do with sensitive email/calendaring data not hosted locally. It's not easy to contract around these problems. Institutions can't rely on local law to help (most educational institutions are not in California or Washington). Some educational institutions can't reveal the existence of students at their school (in the US there is the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act which protects student privacy including divulging whether the person is a student at a particular school). Making it default policy to route student email/calendars through Google's servers risks inadvertent exposure of private student data and places the educational institution in a position where it would be hard for them to do anything to prevent that leak from happening again.
Google isn't unique in what I just wrote. Any organization faces the same challenge: convince the user that their data is safest with the organization. But you asked about Google. As for trusting this (ostensibly) anonymizing service as a front-end to Google's services: I merely find it interesting that people would be willing to try this with so little information about who runs it and what structural forces may result in them divulging your data to anyone but you.
So you're complaining that nobody has produced a fix while trying to convince us that a program we're free to fix is equivalent to a program we're forbidden from fixing. No wonder the fix isn't coming fast enough to satisfy you! I think that when you encourage people to think that way you shoot yourself in the foot by conflating freedom with dependency. I fully appreciate that most users aren't capable of helping or going to help, but I also don't think it's fair or wise to give the impression it's reasonable to tell people nothing practical they can do to help. We can all help by contributing time and money toward those who can help fix things.
Freedom is not a guarantee of help. Having free speech doesn't make one a great orator. Freedom is permission to do something. The average computer user hasn't been taught about software freedom, no thanks to the open source movement which purposefully pushes aside software freedom to speak to business interests. The average computer user hasn't been taught about why they should value community and sharing even when that means buggy software (as it will). We all want more reliable stuff but in the real world everything breaks. The fact remains that free software gives us all more options to get involved help the community than proprietary software does.
People just want to drive their cars (not deal with broken tires, busted timing belts, and other failures), people just want to live in houses (not deal with electrical, plumbing, and roofing problems), people just want to drink potable affordable water (not effluent from the printing plant or get water-borne diseases), and much more. But society can't afford the short-term what-about-my-project political laziness you defend. "People just want to..." doesn't help anyone understand the real world where we all have to live with broken and unsafe stuff. The question remains, particularly for those who can help such as you in this situation, how much you're willing to put into fixing things to make life better and help the community. Eschewing freedom to fix things is not at all productive. The amount of software the free software community has made and improved over 20 years is anything but "delusional".
One of the problems Microsoft (and this /. thread) gets at is how out of control Microsoft's users are. Microsoft wants you to upgrade to a version of a proprietary browser that can still be compromised with some reconfiguration. Because IE is proprietary, all IE users must wait until Microsoft genuinely fixes the bugs that allow remote code to compromise the browser even after said reconfiguration. Firefox, while vulnerable even in a default install, is free software. Firefox's destiny is in our collective hands. We decide how and when Firefox is fixed and we decide how thorough that fix is.
So while you're probably not a programmer, like most computer users, you have options with Firefox that you don't have with IE. You could learn to program and help fix Firefox's code. You stand virtually no chance of doing this with IE's code no matter how expert you become. It is of no help to look at this as though Firefox hackers are your workers so you can sit back and wait for them to deliver a fix ("I haven't seen any indication that they aren't working on a fix. What will you say if the patch comes out?").
Software freedom changes the game by giving you permission to control your computer; the more free software you run, the more control you have. Like with any other freedom how much of that permission you're willing to leverage is up to you.
It's not up to you to decide what is useless for anyone but yourself. People can determine for themselves what they want and what they don't want. The volume of data is no reason to restrict anyone from getting to that data.
That's not what I thought of when I read downloading the data. I thought I'd be pointed to an FTP server of huge files or something similar. Instead I've found my way to a map where I can use various graphical means to select which subset of the data I want. There are many limitations with this interface.
Why isn't this data posted to a large archive site where people can freely download more than that GUI allows (or get data in a differently controlled way that facilitates big downloads). Perhaps the Internet Archive can host all of the data and allow such downloading.
I do exactly that with business documents every day. I open them in OpenOffice.org, print them from OO.o, and if something doesn't import/open correctly due to mistranslation, I make do with what I've got just like millions of users have done across decades of opening important documents in various versions of Microsoft office programs. Microsoft's office programs don't always open and work flawlessly across operating systems or even versions of Microsoft Office. Any talk about "guarantees" and 100% perfect conversion, that's the utopia.
That sounds overbroad and anti-social to me. Let me explain by way of a few hypothetical scenarios:
All of these scenarios keep communities thriving and involve interaction among fellows. All of these scenarios are fair and just, after all you got paid for your work. But DRM tries to stop all of these scenarios from occurring. This notion of stopping people from experiencing the work because they didn't pay is abhorrent to civil society.
Your industry seems to have shifted a lot of work to Canada. I'm guessing they didn't do that just to meet the friendly Canadians. I think they did that to take advantage of cheaper labor at all levels of production and editing. It wouldn't surprise me if this includes information technology support.
Can you point to serious refutations of copyright where the point of the argument is that copyright should last 2 years or not exist at all? FSF speakers have long pointed out the problem of no copyright, a very short term of copyright, and overly long copyright. My experience is that calls for no or very short terms of copyright are posited by people who ought to reconsider what is in society's best interests.
No copyright means no end to the tyranny of proprietary software (said programs never enter the public domain even on paper), no way for free software developers to require credit when building on their work (as some free software licenses require), and no reciprocal contribution to the commons when distributing or conveying the work or a derivative (like the GPL does).
Short terms of copyright (like the 2-year term you mention) means that proprietors can incorporate strongly copylefted work into their proprietary software during the time in which the software is reasonably current and likely to provide a competitive edge. This means even those who want to a defensible commons (like what the GPL maintains) cannot do so based on copyright law alone. A short term of copyright came up in Richard Stallman's critique of the Swedish Pirate Party:
Most countries give people the means to place their work into the public domain immediately upon publication or else waive copyright restrictions their laws mandate. Building the PD in this way simply doesn't strike me as an impediment to social progress. But those looking to provide alternatives to proprietary software in order to share freedom for all computer users don't have the PD as a viable option; we would be universal donors and proprietors would build upon our works as universal recipients. I certainly don't want to treat proprietors as charities.
That depends on what you mean by "use". Typically people mean executing a program, running the software. The terms of the GPLv2 (Busybox's license) do not compel one to do anything upon running the software. And this quality is not unique to the GPL.
The thing about privacy options offered by the system is that they're completely untrustworthy. You're essentially hoping that AskJeeves will do what you want despite the fact that AskJeeves has all the information they need to tell people details of your search(es). You are trusting a corporation with your privacy for no good reason. Even if everyone at AskJeeves honors those settings they could inadvertently spill details about your queries. Just because they say "When AskEraser is enabled your search activity will be deleted from Ask.com (not third-party) servers..." doesn't mean they'll erase anything. Maybe they'll tag the information you want erased and keep it around, then interpret that tag with a different meaning than what you intended: you want this erased, but they'll consider that more important to keep because now they know you want it erased.
When Google bought DejaNews' Usenet database Google didn't initially honor the "X-no-archive: yes" header/first-line-of-post setting (which was intended to tell Usenet archivists something about tagged posts; a foolish approach to be sure but fun to play with just to see what happens). At first it was possible to retrieve Usenet posts from Google's database which had this header/body-line set. Later Google honored the setting and the posts were no longer searchable by people outside Google HQ. But this was enough to show that x-no-archive wasn't being used as a signal not to store/index these posts (DejaNews and Google obviously did just that), nor did x-no-archive mean not to convey the posts to others (DejaNews obviously conveyed them to Google). One can safely assume that if one initiates a search from a trusted place (say, from machines inside Google HQ), one can pull up these posts today.
The only way to preserve your privacy is to think about what information is important and not distribute secret information in the first place.
From another poster in this discussion, it sounds like Gmail's conversation view is not threaded. One can mail a response with a different subject header and that email is still in the same thread (because threads are tracked by ordered lists of message-IDs, not the subject header). From what it sounds like, Gmail, sorts emails into "conversations" by subjects and date/timestamps.
So asking for Gmail-style conversations means giving up something quite valuable Thunderbird has provided for a long time (possibly for as long as it has been available), which can scale up to handling discussions with more than 2 participants, and handle participants who edit the subject header reflect what they're talking about.
Did you try setting mail.check_all_imap_folders_for_new to true?
For as long as I can remember I've read on people's blogs (Tinymail's initial implementor's blog, for example) that GMail's IMAP has always been poor and that this is the fault of the implementor (Google), not the client. Van Hoof recommends Dovecot and Cyrus for IMAP service instead, but to be sure, people are probably more attracted to Google's gratis service and large mail quota even if it means allowing Google to index all of your mail.
When you say "I hate the GPL ... so much." you should have to explain why; something you have not done with the exception that it won't let you link in GPL-incompatibly licensed code such as ZFS. Perhaps your anger should be directed toward those that license incompatibly with the GPL. After all, as the grandparent poster points out, the GNU GPL has done a lot for you as you "promote BSD" systems. Your hatred of the GPL comes off as though you don't understand what the GPL says or why.
Some users, like office workers, are not in control of the computers they use and cannot switch away from what they were given. Sometimes they were set up with particular versions of software to suit other programs. The "Banner" system some universities use, for instance, requires MSIE7 and a particular old version of Sun's Java runtime. Certain sections of Banner don't work properly with non-MSIE browsers like Firefox. I understand this is an extremely costly system and switching away is considerably complicated. I'm not endorsing these choices or claiming any of these choices is wise, but it is there.
The article also says the status of MSIE8 is not mentioned by the researchers: "Neither company [Symantec and Vupen] was able to confirm that the attack worked on Microsoft's latest browser, IE 8.". What part of what article were you referring to?
You're asking the wrong question or in search of the wrong point. Some vulnerabilities in proprietary software go undiscovered for a long time and no vulnerabilities in proprietary software are fixed by third parties. One's "security record" is irrelevant when that software is uninspectable, immutable, and changes cannot be shared. You cannot know if Opera keeps you safe precisely because you don't know what Opera is doing when it runs. There is simply too much unknown about proprietary software to claim it is more secure. All software has bugs but malicious software works better when distributed such that people are forbidden from inspecting, changing, and sharing their improvements. Even for accidental errors which lead to security problems, programmers make mistakes no matter whether the user's software freedom is respected. It's not a good idea, therefore, to cut yourself off from the freedom to inspect, fix, and share software. If you value your software freedom as you say you do, you can choose to run a free software browser and only install free software add-ons. These steps are impossible with a proprietary web browser. Furthermore, the principles of this discussion are not unique to web browsers; this is true of all computer software.
Your post has been moderated "insightful" yet there's nothing insightful about trading away your software freedom to fight security vulnerabilities. Proprietary software can only be inspected or fixed by the proprietor. Free software can be inspected and fixed by a lot more people (including yourself if you so choose).
Maybe they're trying to innovate and do something new and different. I don't share your doubts but if I did, I would rather give them the benefit of any doubt then criticize before I had even tried the software. It seems to me that they're in a tough spot: do what UIs have been doing for a long time and get accused of copying rather than doing something new, or do something new and get bad word from people who reject the free software out of hand at their "first look".
Couldn't Gnash feature some interface that effectively prohibit a program from doing things common to malware (fetching data from the user's storage, connecting to someplace else, or sending data, for example)? These things might make some uses very inconvenient but more secure by default than Adobe's flash player.
Obviously I don't know enough about what flash players are expected to be able to do, but I don't see the question being raised elsewhere in the thread.
If you're serious, consider The Internet Archive. Servers around the world, zero cost, unlimited uploading and downloading for all, and no size limits (as far as I know). IA hosts a lot of large files (full-length movies, DVDs, some periodic TV shows upload broadcast-quality episodes). I'm sure they'll host your images too.
So are you looking for gratis hosting or aren't you?
May I ask what you're doing what to remedy this? It seems to me that working to fix this is more productive than only complaining about it. Are there some technical people working on a specification so people can enjoy free books with pictures in free formats?
I sense you mean well, but I suggest you'd do better to convince people to help you improve the state of e-books by asking for assistance instead of telling people in what order they should donate their time to address the under-served. People need all sorts of things simultaneously, not some things in a particular order.
I was not a child who wanted "picture books", I found the pictures undermined my imagination. I did a far better job casting, clothing, and set dressing the story in my head than any illustrator. I imagine there are other children out there who don't want to be prejudiced about how things looked, just as I imagine there are kids who want pictures to go enhance the reading. We'll get to the point where more people's literary needs are met in freedom. Clearly things are heading in the right direction and with your help and experience in what you believe people want, I'm sure we'll get there faster.
And Project Gutenberg's e-books treat the reader with respect: no DRM, no special format hassles, wide availability, sharing-friendly (no need to fear what happens on copying, loaning, or selling your copy at a yard sale), easy to annotate, readable on every device, and available gratis (but worth money).
Many thanks to Project Gutenberg for all their hard work. Project Gutenberg sets a great example the public should keep in mind when commercial outfits offer significantly less for considerable forfeiture of your freedom and money.
Actually, pointing out why Open Source misses the point of Free Software isn't pedantic or irrelevant, these differences are real and they explain why RMS takes the position you just pointed out.
RMS, as you rightly point out, understands that non-free software which eventually becomes free software is significantly better than non-free software that stays non-free forever because the former leads to eventually respecting our software freedom while the other can lead to our loss of software freedom. The open source movement is interested in a development methodology aimed primarily at businesses, not framing issues in terms of user's software freedom. Open source proponents aren't taught to think in terms of user's software freedom. This too can lead to the loss of software freedom. So whenever someone licenses a non-free program, open source advocates have little reason to object despite how that chips away at our freedom (from the aforementioned essay, "This attitude will reward schemes that take away our freedom, leading to its loss."). Free software activists, on the other hand, lament the disrespect for user's freedom which motivates them to support a project to develop a free replacement so that everyone can do that job whilst retaining their software freedom. Finally, as for the GPL: RMS wrote the GPL with user's freedoms in mind. The reason we enjoy the freedoms you champion at the end of your post is precisely because RMS pays attention to all computer user's software freedom. Had he taken an interest in mere development methodology instead, proprietary derivatives might be far more common than they are.