Napster and Kazaa with websites is tantamount to a drug dealer on the corner with a sign
Nope. They are like someone who puts some benches covered with advertisements on a street corner and lets people sit and transact whatever business they might have with each other. They don't either provide "drugs" (illegal copies) or have a sign to encourage drug trading.
When Porsche is forced to limit speed of their cars to 65Mph and US citizens are banned from opening numbered swiss bank accounts, it might be even fair to penalize them. Then again, this wouldn't be a very nice country to live in.
There is nothing that prevents a corporation from donating to charitable causes, or restricting their business to being nice. They just have to disclose these things to shareholders in earning reports if they are expected to influence the bottom line. You can then decide to invest based both on your wallet and your morals.
Bill Gates plans to donate a large part of his wealth, when he could have given himself smaller stock grants and distributed the money to shareholders, without any change to his own bottom line. I don't see any huge outcry among investors.
The only trouble is, not enough people are making these choices. The solution I think is creating more opportunities for people to help themselves and close family members, which we are relatively good at. It will not be anything pleasant for big corporations:-)
Socialism is an economic system. Democracy is a political system. Liberalism is a way of individual's thinking. The three have little to do with each other. You can have a liberal king in a socialist country who advocates free market reform because he doesn't want to arrest people who just sell stuff they made.
I hate to say it, but try Gentoo. The initial setup is crazy, but this is the end of dependency problems. You get up-to-date versions of every library, not something distro maintainers neglected for a while. Then in your system configuration file you can disable support for unwanted components, like java or kde, which reduces number of dependencies or potential problems to begin with. Finally, configure can adopt a package to a far wider range of systems, versions and presence/absence of specific software than a binary package can handle.
If you don't specifically need Linux kernel, fink might be an easier option. You get access to the same packages as gentoo without, but setup on top of OSX is trivial. You can still run your server without UI if you want. Edit/etc/ttys and replace loginwindow with getty.
Copyright law only restricts redistribution. I can just disagree with EULA and continue using my own copy as I please, including learning general concepts through reverse engineering and using them in my own code (as opposed to copying your stuff verbatim). Easier yet, I can excersize my legally protected right to buy a secondhand copy and not see any agreement at all.
But what I really would like is to release a derivative work based on Microsoft shared source which is protected as a parody.
Of course, you can't do some things with proprietary software, like reverse engineering.
Ouch! You can certainly do reverse engineering for fair use purposes like writing interoperable software or playing the game you legally bought without a CD. What you can not do is violate copyright and post a cracked copy on kazaa.
Used samba or OpenOffice lately? Don't give Microsoft or your government any ideas now...
By the way, unintended but non-fradulant use of an internet service is also legal. Otherwise web crawlers would be banned long time ago.
You are buying too much into MS concept that operating system includes one standard UI. I am sure Gnome and KDE have all kind of configuration files not covered in POSIX. On the other hand, most Linux apps, including Gnome and KDE, compile and run on OSX without any drastic code changes. Why would you say OSX is less "UNIX" than Redhat then?
And if you need X, and only one company makes a program that does X, then you don't have much choice. But if X won't work on 1/2 of the distros out there, then that one company may just decide that Linux is too much trouble, and just make X for Windows.
Ah, the evil X consortium, only making X/Windows and not X/Linux!
Raping someone is one of the worst things you can do to someone. In a lot of ways, it's worse than killing them outright because they're left with that trauma for the rest of their life and they often wonder what was wrong with them that caused that to happen.
As someone with an "interesting" childhood and teenage years, I got to tell you - getting killed is overrated. Sure, you can be pretty messed up by your life experiences for a while, but chances are 10 years later you will be still alive and not thinking all that much about what happened. If not, the person should look for some cause other than the original traumatic event.
As for fault, well it's natural for people to think of how they could have avoided some unpleasant experiences. After all, if you put one criminal in jail, there will be 1000s more on the street. So the most effective way to prevent further crime is through your own actions. I think healthy expressions of this impulse - like taking a self defense class, or getting a gun and a dog - should be encouraged.
By all accounts, when a victim choses to forgive the perpetrator of any serious crime, it dramatically improves her (or his) recovery. And when such intentions are communicated to the perpetrator, it also reduces likelihood of repeated crime and makes him more likely to try to compensate the society for what he did.
Death penalty on the other hand is a messy business. Even if you don't think much of the person, he may have parents, wife, children. Don't you think they would be as traumatized by the killing as anyone was by the original crime?
So, at least in this woman's case, she could have used some assertiveness training.
Well, obviously for not opening the door. But for not wanting to send someone to prison for 20 years, I am surprised you don't see this as something to admire rather than want to change. Christians should make her a saint. I am not religious, but I still wish the world learned something from her rather than criticizing. 20 years of prison is pretty much ending once life. I think no matter what happens, one should think very hard before wishing it on anyone.
Credit card companies were hit with fraud long time ago, yet they chose to absorb most of the costs rather than imposing "impolite", onerous security. Chances are, most Mitnick's victims adopted similar policy after considering how alternatives would affect customer and employee goodwill.
I especially have to disagree with the last scenario. Given recent SCO and Eolas news, don't you think companies are already overprotected against others lifting their research? It's practically better to keep doors open, because then you can sue the whole world for any traces of what you are doing.
People do need to get on with their work or life if they forgot their passwords, account names or access numbers. Since there is no reasonable way to prove identity of unfamiliar people over the phone, a support person will just fool around a bit and then let you have what you need. A skilled con man can own you, but in the end he will be the one in jail and you will just suffer a few hours of inconvenience proving which transactions are yours and which aren't. I am sure Kevin regrets his stupidity.
Or you can do business with smaller shops that personally know all their customers. I bet they will have no problem "authenticating" you over the phone and may not even need passwords.
I am now working on a Linux project and the only sane solution I found is to NFS-mount my home to a rather old Mac and fire up XCode. Don't KDeveloper guys think I might want to see more than one of my source files at once or see two places in a file at the same time with a split view? Or use separate windows instead of their tabs? On top of that it's buggy as hell. For example, breakpoints are randomly ignored when debugging. Eclipse looks more promising, but for one thing insists on copying everything into its project directory. Also all menus and other UI are in weird (IBM?) style that makes it hard to find how to do what you want. If anyone knows of a decent IDE for Linux, I will gladly switch, because this Mac is really sluggish. As it is, I plan on pestering a Mac Mini out of our product manager for some future OSX port.
Your wrong, a mac is alot more than just a fancy box, it's a superor solution in all but one way (Openess).
I am not defending Apple, just curious how you define openness.
Software: the base system is open sourced, probably fewer binary-only drivers to deal with than Windows. You can compile and run all Linux user apps under provided X11 or run Linux natively if that's all you want. UI is close-sourced, but based on an open standard, get GNUStep if you want.
Hardware: Mac-on-Linux runs on any PPC hardware, like IBM or Amiga stuff. OSX license is problematic, but Apple hasn't sued or locked in the OS either. But anyway, if you want openness you must be using Linux, so you should have nice interoperability across multi-vendor Power architecture:-)
Well, TCP/IP has been rock stable for 14 years I have been using it. Take any ancient UNIX system, put it on today's ethernet and it will be happily trading packets and using services like telnet, ftp and NFS. Such flawless interoperability can not come from just reading the standard - there will always be something a little unclear. No doubt, the reason is that everyone was free to use as much of BSD sources as they wanted, without any burden on their own software.
But how many complex standards originally established in GPLed products found such wide acceptance and perfect interoperability between implementations? Why are free projects copying Java and.Net from companies for which the don't have many kind words?
GPL is good for an isolated product, like a game. If I wrote I free one, I might not want for people to just add a menu launcher and sell the whole thing as their own closed source work. They can talk to me an offer me a share of profits for dual license. But if you are working on something you think should be standartisable - word processor with its own document format, a filesystem, an interpreter for a new programming language - don't be an ass and let everyone play with a BSD-style license.
With broadcast TV/radio, the argument was that airwaves are limited public resource and should have content that the majority in the public will find acceptable. Last I heard, cable lines are built by private companies, so what cause does FCC have to regulate what they do or don't show? Consumer groups are insane if they voluntarily sign up for a cable channel and then expect to control its content. I am sure there are a few christian or whatever channels already where they don't even say "darn". Do people in US really have to be educated about the revolutionary idea that you can buy stuff you like rather than trying to change the stuff you don't through legislation?
I totally agree. Under feudal system, peasants do all the labor and their lords do nothing but claim title to other people's work and give vague promises of protection from various villains. Yet how many peasants have been granted knighthood? Giving knighthood to Bill, Steve and Richard and leaving out Linus and Woz would be fully in keeping with ancient british tradition.
Nice concept, but reality is we live in what's called a zero-sum game. We as humanity have a finite amount of resources, which means that if I'm going to expend resources by writing software I need to get something in return, in order to provide for my family.
Ah, so you don't subscribe to those claims by Bill Gates and other reach dudes that they are creating wealth? If we truly live in a zero-sum game, we should certainly never allow Microsoft to make so much money, because it comes from our piece of the pie.:-)
Come on, it would be very tempting for CmdrTaco to remove trolls about his personal life and anime dolls, his own prediction that iPod will never take off, or embarrassing mistake in taking this screenshot seriously. But who want to read blogs with what slashdot editors want them to say, not with what we or them actually said before? It's bad enough that editors make unlimited use of mod points, but you have to give them credit for leaving some of the stuff readable even at -1 threshold. I don't think I would be able to show so much restraint.
Sounds like you guys need to set some limits for your children. If they are old enough to want to "help" with crafts, they can at least play SNES 1-2 hours per day while there mother is resting. Maybe you can take a few days off work and try to improve their behavior - in a nice way of course.
I am not even talking about money yet. Someone wrote code on their own and ported it to your operating system. Do you think you contributed enough to demand access to their work on your terms?
Because Linus and other kernel developers aren't willing to grant a GPL exception to binary-only kernel modules? Beyond practical reasons of why hardware manufacturers may not be able to open their code, it's not right to force people to license their own product under your terms.
Slashdot Mirror
And Porsche opened stores in California because they wanted to sell some cars to law-abiding individuals who never exceed 65Mph?
Napster and Kazaa with websites is tantamount to a drug dealer on the corner with a sign
Nope. They are like someone who puts some benches covered with advertisements on a street corner and lets people sit and transact whatever business they might have with each other. They don't either provide "drugs" (illegal copies) or have a sign to encourage drug trading.
When Porsche is forced to limit speed of their cars to 65Mph and US citizens are banned from opening numbered swiss bank accounts, it might be even fair to penalize them. Then again, this wouldn't be a very nice country to live in.
There is nothing that prevents a corporation from donating to charitable causes, or restricting their business to being nice. They just have to disclose these things to shareholders in earning reports if they are expected to influence the bottom line. You can then decide to invest based both on your wallet and your morals.
:-)
Bill Gates plans to donate a large part of his wealth, when he could have given himself smaller stock grants and distributed the money to shareholders, without any change to his own bottom line. I don't see any huge outcry among investors.
The only trouble is, not enough people are making these choices. The solution I think is creating more opportunities for people to help themselves and close family members, which we are relatively good at. It will not be anything pleasant for big corporations
Socialism is an economic system. Democracy is a political system. Liberalism is a way of individual's thinking. The three have little to do with each other. You can have a liberal king in a socialist country who advocates free market reform because he doesn't want to arrest people who just sell stuff they made.
I hate to say it, but try Gentoo. The initial setup is crazy, but this is the end of dependency problems. You get up-to-date versions of every library, not something distro maintainers neglected for a while. Then in your system configuration file you can disable support for unwanted components, like java or kde, which reduces number of dependencies or potential problems to begin with. Finally, configure can adopt a package to a far wider range of systems, versions and presence/absence of specific software than a binary package can handle.
/etc/ttys and replace loginwindow with getty.
If you don't specifically need Linux kernel, fink might be an easier option. You get access to the same packages as gentoo without, but setup on top of OSX is trivial. You can still run your server without UI if you want. Edit
In Australia it is illegal to commit, or attempt to commit suicide.
Would some ausie enlighten me on how the former crime is prosecuted. Do they have special coffins with metal bars or something?
Copyright law only restricts redistribution. I can just disagree with EULA and continue using my own copy as I please, including learning general concepts through reverse engineering and using them in my own code (as opposed to copying your stuff verbatim). Easier yet, I can excersize my legally protected right to buy a secondhand copy and not see any agreement at all.
But what I really would like is to release a derivative work based on Microsoft shared source which is protected as a parody.
Of course, you can't do some things with proprietary software, like reverse engineering.
Ouch! You can certainly do reverse engineering for fair use purposes like writing interoperable software or playing the game you legally bought without a CD. What you can not do is violate copyright and post a cracked copy on kazaa.
Used samba or OpenOffice lately? Don't give Microsoft or your government any ideas now...
By the way, unintended but non-fradulant use of an internet service is also legal. Otherwise web crawlers would be banned long time ago.
You are buying too much into MS concept that operating system includes one standard UI. I am sure Gnome and KDE have all kind of configuration files not covered in POSIX. On the other hand, most Linux apps, including Gnome and KDE, compile and run on OSX without any drastic code changes. Why would you say OSX is less "UNIX" than Redhat then?
And if you need X, and only one company makes a program that does X, then you don't have much choice. But if X won't work on 1/2 of the distros out there, then that one company may just decide that Linux is too much trouble, and just make X for Windows.
Ah, the evil X consortium, only making X/Windows and not X/Linux!
Raping someone is one of the worst things you can do to someone. In a lot of ways, it's worse than killing them outright because they're left with that trauma for the rest of their life and they often wonder what was wrong with them that caused that to happen.
As someone with an "interesting" childhood and teenage years, I got to tell you - getting killed is overrated. Sure, you can be pretty messed up by your life experiences for a while, but chances are 10 years later you will be still alive and not thinking all that much about what happened. If not, the person should look for some cause other than the original traumatic event.
As for fault, well it's natural for people to think of how they could have avoided some unpleasant experiences. After all, if you put one criminal in jail, there will be 1000s more on the street. So the most effective way to prevent further crime is through your own actions. I think healthy expressions of this impulse - like taking a self defense class, or getting a gun and a dog - should be encouraged.
By all accounts, when a victim choses to forgive the perpetrator of any serious crime, it dramatically improves her (or his) recovery. And when such intentions are communicated to the perpetrator, it also reduces likelihood of repeated crime and makes him more likely to try to compensate the society for what he did.
Death penalty on the other hand is a messy business. Even if you don't think much of the person, he may have parents, wife, children. Don't you think they would be as traumatized by the killing as anyone was by the original crime?
So, at least in this woman's case, she could have used some assertiveness training.
Well, obviously for not opening the door. But for not wanting to send someone to prison for 20 years, I am surprised you don't see this as something to admire rather than want to change. Christians should make her a saint. I am not religious, but I still wish the world learned something from her rather than criticizing. 20 years of prison is pretty much ending once life. I think no matter what happens, one should think very hard before wishing it on anyone.
Credit card companies were hit with fraud long time ago, yet they chose to absorb most of the costs rather than imposing "impolite", onerous security. Chances are, most Mitnick's victims adopted similar policy after considering how alternatives would affect customer and employee goodwill.
I especially have to disagree with the last scenario. Given recent SCO and Eolas news, don't you think companies are already overprotected against others lifting their research? It's practically better to keep doors open, because then you can sue the whole world for any traces of what you are doing.
People do need to get on with their work or life if they forgot their passwords, account names or access numbers. Since there is no reasonable way to prove identity of unfamiliar people over the phone, a support person will just fool around a bit and then let you have what you need. A skilled con man can own you, but in the end he will be the one in jail and you will just suffer a few hours of inconvenience proving which transactions are yours and which aren't. I am sure Kevin regrets his stupidity.
Or you can do business with smaller shops that personally know all their customers. I bet they will have no problem "authenticating" you over the phone and may not even need passwords.
I am now working on a Linux project and the only sane solution I found is to NFS-mount my home to a rather old Mac and fire up XCode. Don't KDeveloper guys think I might want to see more than one of my source files at once or see two places in a file at the same time with a split view? Or use separate windows instead of their tabs? On top of that it's buggy as hell. For example, breakpoints are randomly ignored when debugging. Eclipse looks more promising, but for one thing insists on copying everything into its project directory. Also all menus and other UI are in weird (IBM?) style that makes it hard to find how to do what you want. If anyone knows of a decent IDE for Linux, I will gladly switch, because this Mac is really sluggish. As it is, I plan on pestering a Mac Mini out of our product manager for some future OSX port.
Your wrong, a mac is alot more than just a fancy box, it's a superor solution in all but one way (Openess).
:-)
I am not defending Apple, just curious how you define openness.
Software: the base system is open sourced, probably fewer binary-only drivers to deal with than Windows. You can compile and run all Linux user apps under provided X11 or run Linux natively if that's all you want. UI is close-sourced, but based on an open standard, get GNUStep if you want.
Hardware: Mac-on-Linux runs on any PPC hardware, like IBM or Amiga stuff. OSX license is problematic, but Apple hasn't sued or locked in the OS either. But anyway, if you want openness you must be using Linux, so you should have nice interoperability across multi-vendor Power architecture
Well, TCP/IP has been rock stable for 14 years I have been using it. Take any ancient UNIX system, put it on today's ethernet and it will be happily trading packets and using services like telnet, ftp and NFS. Such flawless interoperability can not come from just reading the standard - there will always be something a little unclear. No doubt, the reason is that everyone was free to use as much of BSD sources as they wanted, without any burden on their own software.
.Net from companies for which the don't have many kind words?
But how many complex standards originally established in GPLed products found such wide acceptance and perfect interoperability between implementations? Why are free projects copying Java and
GPL is good for an isolated product, like a game. If I wrote I free one, I might not want for people to just add a menu launcher and sell the whole thing as their own closed source work. They can talk to me an offer me a share of profits for dual license. But if you are working on something you think should be standartisable - word processor with its own document format, a filesystem, an interpreter for a new programming language - don't be an ass and let everyone play with a BSD-style license.
With broadcast TV/radio, the argument was that airwaves are limited public resource and should have content that the majority in the public will find acceptable. Last I heard, cable lines are built by private companies, so what cause does FCC have to regulate what they do or don't show? Consumer groups are insane if they voluntarily sign up for a cable channel and then expect to control its content. I am sure there are a few christian or whatever channels already where they don't even say "darn". Do people in US really have to be educated about the revolutionary idea that you can buy stuff you like rather than trying to change the stuff you don't through legislation?
I totally agree. Under feudal system, peasants do all the labor and their lords do nothing but claim title to other people's work and give vague promises of protection from various villains. Yet how many peasants have been granted knighthood? Giving knighthood to Bill, Steve and Richard and leaving out Linus and Woz would be fully in keeping with ancient british tradition.
Nice concept, but reality is we live in what's called a zero-sum game. We as humanity have a finite amount of resources, which means that if I'm going to expend resources by writing software I need to get something in return, in order to provide for my family.
:-)
Ah, so you don't subscribe to those claims by Bill Gates and other reach dudes that they are creating wealth? If we truly live in a zero-sum game, we should certainly never allow Microsoft to make so much money, because it comes from our piece of the pie.
Come on, it would be very tempting for CmdrTaco to remove trolls about his personal life and anime dolls, his own prediction that iPod will never take off, or embarrassing mistake in taking this screenshot seriously. But who want to read blogs with what slashdot editors want them to say, not with what we or them actually said before? It's bad enough that editors make unlimited use of mod points, but you have to give them credit for leaving some of the stuff readable even at -1 threshold. I don't think I would be able to show so much restraint.
Sounds like you guys need to set some limits for your children. If they are old enough to want to "help" with crafts, they can at least play SNES 1-2 hours per day while there mother is resting. Maybe you can take a few days off work and try to improve their behavior - in a nice way of course.
I am not even talking about money yet. Someone wrote code on their own and ported it to your operating system. Do you think you contributed enough to demand access to their work on your terms?
Because Linus and other kernel developers aren't willing to grant a GPL exception to binary-only kernel modules? Beyond practical reasons of why hardware manufacturers may not be able to open their code, it's not right to force people to license their own product under your terms.