Um... no. If you don't agree to licensing terms, then you aren't bound by them. The GPL terms are a *condition of giving you the software*. If a judge found out that someone didn't agree to the terms of a license, and you told people it was okay to use it anyway, he'd laugh you out of the court!
On the contrary, my understanding of copyright law (IANAL, but I have read the GPL) is that you need a license to distribute copies of the source code. If you download a copy of Red Hat's ISO, you're not the one distributing it, Red Hat is -- they're the ones who need a license, they're the ones who have to abide by the GPL.
Once you legally acquire a copy (by getting it from a licensed distributor such as Red Hat), you can run it however you want, the GPL doesn't apply. You only need the GPL (or some other license) to distribute; once you have it, you have all your fair-use rights.
I don't know how normal software licensing works (has it even been tested in a court of law?), but if you read the GPL, it doesn't care about licensing to use, it only cares about a license to distribute.
I'm not gay, but I've met enough homophobes (as opposed to those just off the street) in church to realize it's much more prevalent in churchgoers.
Fair enough -- I'm sorry that I misunderstood you.
BTB, you still haven't described exactly what you mean by 'homophobe' and 'gay basher' yet, so I don't know if you actually mean:
People who talk about / advocate / practice physical violence towards homosexuals
People who might demean homosexuals to their faces and generally treat them poorly / unfairly
People who verbally demean homosexuals when they're not around but are polite to their faces
People who think that homosexuality is morally wrong, and are opposed to anti-discrimination laws and/or gay marriage, but try to treat homosexuals with love and fairness.
People who think that homosexuality is morally wrong, but are willing to have anti-discrimination laws and gay marriage (because we live in a pluralistic society, not a Christian one).
This reaks of bias. I don't want to put words in your mouth (as you did to me) but the essence of this statement is that "homosexuality is evil, but not the most evil." Who the heck are you to say that it is evil? Because a book written by illiterate nomads, thousands of years ago, said it's bad.
Hmm, a book written by illiterate nomads, huh? =) Anyway, I don't know what you mean by 'bias'. Yes, I think that homosexuality is morally wrong, on the authority of sources I trust. I don't feel too confident arguing about it, because I don't have any experience with it -- never done it, never talked to anyone who does it; I know that I have a relatively uninformed opinion. There are other issues -- like pornography, abortion, and so on that I am more confident to talk about. Furthermore, like it or not, I'm a product of our culture -- a culture which rates 'kindness' as one of the highest virtues, and 'cruelty' as one of the worst vices. Since homosexuality doesn't visibly hurt anybody, it's hard for me to be really upset at people who do it.
Is authority bad? Depends. We take all kinds of stuff on authority: from quantum physics to the situation in the Middle East. You always have to check the authority to see how trustworthy it is, and give it the appropriate amount of confidence. I've found the Bible worthy of my confidence. If you haven't, I wouldn't expect you place any trust in it.
There are lots of books written by lots of people. If the Bible were just 'a book written by illiterate nomads', why has it lasted so long, and had so much influence? Islam survives because it has a lot of the truth (surprise, a lot of it's copied from the Bible). Gnosticism didn't. =)
This has no bearing on the conversation, so feel free to ignore it, but everyone feels hate at some point in their life. So that means they cannot love God and will therefore suffer in hell (barring true repentance, of course) for eternity. That doesn't make much sense coming from the NT "loving god."
Well, barring true repentance, yes -- not just for hate, but for lots of things. I don't know you personally, but I'm guilty of acting in un-loving ways and causing pain to people around me, probably every single day, by the choices I make. If God is trying to create a paradise without suffering, why would he let me in as I am? Wouldn't I mar it with my selfishness within a week? The choice God gives people is simple: "Be holy as I am holy," or "Depart from me, ye evildoers."
The vital point you're missing is that God is working, and doing everything He can, to bring us to true repentance. Anyone who ends up in Hell will have absolutely no excuse -- God gave him every opportunity: He not only left all His glory to walk in our shoes, to be humiliated and tortured to death; but he continues to seek and pursue us.
That's what I've seen and experienced, anyway; I'm satisfied that God is Love.
Out of curiosity, what turned you off to Christianity? Why were you interested in it before, and what changed?
I'd be willing to put every dollar I own down on the bet that of the gay-bashers, a large majority of them are Christian and of them, most are anti-gay simply because the church tells them it's wrong
You just said that you have no personal experience or evidence for that belief other than a prejudice against Christianity that you've received from popular culture. If
Look, I could come up with all kinds of reasons to kill gays. I'm an atheist evolutionist? Well, I want to promote the human race, and homosexuality is an aberration that doesn't generate any children. (Hitler killed homosexuals too.) I'm a Christian/Muslim/Jew? God said it's wrong. I'm a Chinese ancestor-worshipper? Well, I want as many progeny as possible to support me after I'm dead, and if my kids become gay, that's less progeny for me.
The point is, people who want someone to hate are going to find someone to hate, and an excuse to do so. Because our culture has a lot of Christian influence, right now those people are going to identify themselves as "Christians" and hear the things from Christianity that they want to hear. But
If anyone says, "I love God," yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen." (1 John 4:20)
Now, if by "gay-basher" you mean someone who thinks homosexuality is a perversion and morally wrong, I have to disagree. There are a lot of evil things in this world, of which homosexuality is certainly not the worst. Because we don't live in a Christian society, we don't encode all our moral standards into laws -- I haven't seen anyone thrown in jail for adultery in my lifetime, for instance, although I don't hesitate to call it wrong. Christians should be "the salt of the Earth." What was the main use of salt when Jesus said that? It was used to preserve things, to keep them from rotting. I ought to do what I can to encourage people chose fidelity over adultery, honesty over lies, love over selfishness, and purity over sexual immorality (while working to make all those choices myself as well). Sometimes that means making laws, such as making murder, perjury, and theft illegal, and punishing those who do them: sometimes not, as in the case of adultery and homosexuality.
Well, I think as RMS has pointed out, an operating system is more than a kernel... it's a complete set of utilities needed to run. Sure anyone can download the Linux kernel, but it's not a whole lot of good without bash, init, gcc, glibc, and so on.
For that matter, it's not all that useful to most people without a web browser and a media player; hence the packaged distributions like RedHat and so on. I hate to say it, because it plays right into M$'s hands, but I think that the honest truth is that they, just like Apple and RedHat, are selling a complete desktop product, not just a kernel; and modern people expect "operating system" to include windowing capabilities, web, and media players. I'm glad that Apple & RedHat work to make all their applications work well together and get synergy; I'm not surprised that Microsoft tries to do the same.
However there is something to be said for not living in a totally pristine environment. If you lived in a bubble and had your environment completely sterilized then you would never get sick (at least not from outside agents). Thus your immune system would never get challenged and the amount and diversity of the various immunological bodies in your system would be reduced. If your bubble got compromised then you would probably get very ill very quickly.
Additionally, I remember reading that they thought that lack of exposure to pathogens actually increases your chances of being highly allergic to things as well. Allergies are basically when your immune system falsely identifies some harmless substance as a pathogen and attacks it; the collateral damage done in fighting the "pathogen" then reinforces the classification of that substance as a "pathogen" (because, hey, there was a strong correlation between the "pathogen" and the damage done).
The thought is that your immune system "knows" that it's supposed to be attacking something; if it doesn't get anything in the first couple of years, it turns up its sensitivity until it finds something to attack.
People have actually done this -- look up "A sense of self for UNIX processes", by Stephanie Forrest.
There are three problems, as far as I can tell:
Processing overhead. In your body, you have the ability to do massive parallel processing; simply create a new anti-body, and bam, you have another independent thread roaming around looking for things to kill; the rest of your body's "processing" goes on as normal. In today's computers, each anti-body requires one of a very limited number of CPUs to run (usually only one).
Diversity of your own platform. Your body basically makes all its own proteins, and has the code available from the time you're born. In computers, you download new "code" all the time -- every new program you install is written by someone else, and will have different access patterns.
Threat model. Our immune systems are designed to fight evolutionary viruses, which mutate more or less randomly. If there's a one in a million probability that your system will miss an evolutionary virus, you've accomplished your goal. But for computers, you're talking about viruses specifically crafted to fly under immune systems -- because you have an "intelligent watchmaker" rather than a "blind watchmaker", you can almost guarantee that if there's a way to hide from the radar, the blackhats will find it. If they know what code you're probably running, and have a good guess what your access patterns are, they can write a virus which is indistinguishable from the "self" to whatever "immune system" you're running.
There's a paper on this too, by David Wagner.
In addition, if the virus only responds to the receptors found on cancer cells (which is, I imagine, how it works), then there is next to no chance of it ever infecting normal healthy cells.
Actually, the FAQ linked to by the article has a very simple description of how it works:
6. Why doesn't the reovirus infect normal cells?
It enters normal cells, but when this happens, an anti-viral response mechanism is turned on and the virus is quickly eliminated. Anyone injected with reovirus is usually able to clear it completely from the body in about two weeks.
7. Why does the reovirus kill cancer cells?
Scientific studies have demonstrated that approximately two-thirds of all human cancer cells have an activated Ras pathway, one of the most common set of mutations leading to cancer. An activated Ras pathway leads to a constant barrage of growth signals to the cell, causing uncontrolled growth. In cells with an activated Ras pathway, the anti-viral response appears to be turned off. When reovirus infects one of these cancer cells, it is able to replicate and eventually kill the cancer cell. Up to 5,000 progeny virus organisms can then infect and kill surrounding cancer cells. Theoretically, the cycle of infection, replication and cell death will continue until there are no longer any cancer cells accessible.
So in fact, it can and does infect normal cells; but it's so weak that it never causes any problem. Elsewhere on the FAQ it says that most humans show evidence of having been infected by it at some time (it's a naturally occuring virus).
Yeah, you're right -- I guess I really meant, "provide for" or "arrange for". I do kernel hacking for my research, but none of my stuff is in the mainline kernel (yet); and if I weren't a graduate student, I'd gladly help some other hacker sue.
Well first of all, this should be able to be put into a class action lawsuit; between FSF and EFF, there ought to be enough money to pay for lawyers to do that.
Secondly, even if the developers do try each case individually: sure, each coder has to pay for his own lawyer; but SCO has to pay for a team of lawyers for each coder as well. I can certainly afford a few thousand dollars for something so important; if I'm willing to spend so much of my free time writing Linux kernel code, I'd be willing to spend at least as much fighting to keep it free. Can SCO afford to handle 1000 cases all at once?
I don't really know what it is SCO's up to; it's clear that they're doing this song-and-dance for effect, but I have no idea what that effect is supposed to be. But I can't but think that SCO being sued into oblivion, and the GPL being held up in court, would be a great thing for the GPL in general.
A bunch of reasons already mentioned, but also diversity of platforms. As long as most Unix users are super-choice people (use Mozilla, Galleon, Firebird, Konqueror, whatever), and as long as distributions and configurations abound (RedHat, Gentoo, Debian, Mandrake)
it's going to be pretty tough to get spyware that hijacks enough applications to be worth any money to the spies.
OTOH, if one distribution or configuration takes over, and becomes popular, you can bet there will be programs there... someone suggested the possibility of adding things to.bashrc or.profile, those are pretty standard tools...
And holy FSOF, since when did complying with the license the software is released under become such an onerous act?
And I like how he talks about the GPL "enforcement" squad as hit men, "snooping" into companies to try to find hidden violations. What about the Business Software Alliance? Don't Oracle and Microsoft do the same thing, looking for illegal copies of their software?
No one made Linksys or Broadcom use Linux; they were perfectly free to buy someone else's kernel, or to write their own. If they'd put Windows CE in there without paying for a license, you can bet Microsoft / BSA would be down their throat in a heartbeat. Why should it be any different for us?
The other thing that pisses me off about the article is that you can tell, from some of the quotes, that he's playing that stupid journalistic "selective quoting" game. If the OSS and FSF people he quoted knew that he was going to write such a bigoted article, they probably wouldn't have talked to him. I guess it gets articles published, but it sure is a shame to have to lie and betray people to make a buck...
I'm flattered that you think my slashdot posts can be categorized as a 'great novel'...
Hehe... unfortunately, I saw this riposte about 5 seconds after I'd clicked the 'Submit' button, else I would've addressed it. I suppose the best way would've been to say, "You're all 100% wrong; 1984 was really a love story about a Zoroastrian monk and the goddess Athena" -- an interpretation I hope you would believe able to be invalidated.
Anyway, the 'interpretation' in question was what the word doublethink meant in the novel. In this case, it isn't something meant to be beautifully ambiguous: it's defined explicitly, and then given very concrete examples several times in the book. It seems pretty clear that Orwell had a concrete idea of what 'doublethink' meant, and wanted to communicate that idea. It's hard to imagine how he could've done it any more clearly.
In your post, you give an interpretation, and you attempt to validate it (or make it appear likely or reasonable) through reasoned argument; why is it therefore impossible to invalidate it (or make it appear unlikely or unreasonable) through the same means? It may turn out that there's not enough data to decide between two interpretations, and that both are equally plausible. But just because in certain cases, some interpretations can't be invalidated, that doesn't mean that no interpretation can ever be invalidated.
...unless you were sitting next to george when he wrote it and asking his exact meaning, I fail to see how you can invalidate someone elses interpretation.
Awesome post! I haven't heard such a great defense of Zoroastrianism in a long time. I agree, all infidels should be destroyed! Amen, Brother!
What, that's not what you meant? Well, I'll be dashed... I mean, I wasn't sitting next to you when you wrote it, so how could I possibly know what you meant, unless I asked you?
/sarcasm Seriously though, what did you mean by that statement? Are you actually defending the idea that any interpretation is possible, and that there can be no reasoned discussion as to which is the one Orwell meant? If that's so, what's the point of writing, or even speaking at all? Because even if you were sitting next to George, and asking him what he meant, the words he spoke would be open to interpretation as well; and that would be worse, because presumably you're the only one who heard it, and who can even tell if your memory's playing tricks or not?
But you give yourself away by even posting. You assumed that your interpretation of the parent post was "correct" and wrote your response based on it (were you sitting next to him asking him what he meant?);
and wrote what you wrote assuming that most people would interpret it the way that you meant.
The purpose of 1984 wasn't to be beautiful, but to communicate an idea, a truth he believed about the world; and if no one understood it, then Orwell failed. If it is beautiful, it is because the truth he was trying to communicate really was true.
Life's real stories of youngsters abandoned shows something quite different. In the Polish ghettos, Nazi camps, streets of Rio and of Kinshasa... children form groups and look after each other.
Well, and that's what almost happened with the one kid. I forget the names of everybody in there, except Piggy; but there were to main leaders: a good guy who was sort of for democracy, and the head of the boys' choir who was for despotism and control (not anarchy, as has been previously said).
In a sense, the thing that gave the despot power was the training that the kids in his choir already had -- the discipline of the choir. The lead boy parlayed this into a despotism, using the power he had to get more. If there had never been any choir, there's a better chance that the good guy would have been able to keep things going right.
How are people supposed to know it is wrong if there is no sign? This is why murder is such a big problem. We have NO fucking anti-murder signs. Wake up people!
Actually, when I was in New Orleans a couple of years ago, I saw the following billboard downton:
"Thou shalt not kill."
That's probably why the crime rate in New Orleans is so low!
I certainly see where you're coming from, it's the first thought I had in response to this one.
But remember, there are already tons of government agencies that do inspections of all sorts of things. Aren't you happy there are health inspectors? And the SEC, the FDA, the EPA, and so on? Aren't you glad that governments test the water regularly and investigate corporate polutants and such?
And remember the focus: not private individuals in their homes, but large corporations who should be protecting your private data, but may not be. The only ones holding them accountable are illegal hackers like the ones in this story; this makes all the wrong incentives for large companies. Why secure your data, when you can just press charges against anyone who exposes your weakness?
I was at a conference recently, and one of the talks was given by someone from the NSA. After introducing himself, he sad as an aside, "By the way, I just want to assure you that all the people I know at the NSA, FBI, etc take their vow to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States very seriously -- and that includes the first and fourth amendments. We're not part of some government conspiracy to take away your liberties, but to protect them." And that's why the vow is not allegiance to the government -- which may be good or bad, honest or corrupt -- but to the constitution.
It's always a good idea to keep a suspicious eye on the government, especially in cases like this. But when people suggest that Bush is working up to institute a military coup, it shows that they're completely ignorant of what the US military is like. The military is made up of Americans, who hold the same values of freedom and liberty that you do. You can bet that if their superiors told them to be oppressive to other Americans, they'd tell their superiors to go to hell.
This is one of the reasons white hat hackers like Lamo do what they do. The companies aren't doing what they should, out of fear, thus leaving all the doors wide open. It's a deriliction of duty that the white hats expose to the public.
Perhaps we need a government agency to do this instead? We have health inspectors, after all, and all kinds of other inspectors for other industries. Imagine if every company that dealt with sensitive customer information were "inspected" once a year by a tiger-team of white-hat hackers, and fined for every security problem they found.
In my circuits lab in undergrad, we sometimes had trouble with extensive 'jitter' on the bus. The TA's simple solution was to pop some capacators on it. Is it possible that the wire you saw had a similar effect?
I really like the 'more magic' switch... I can just imagine some guy putting that in: "Boy, this'll really fry their noggins..."
you don't have the right to "make copies" of a copyrighted work, even if you purchase something that contains that copyrighted work.
Isn't this called "fair use"? If I buy a book I have a legal right to copy pages for my own personal use; if I buy a CD I have a legal right to make a backup copy verbatim, copy it onto a tape, rip it & make mp3s (or oggs).
Nothing the publisher says or can say takes away my rights to do those things.
So why is it different with software on a CD? If I buy a CD with copyrighted material on it, don't I have a right to make backup copies? And wouldn't "loading it onto my own disk" and "loading it into memory" reasonably fall under fair use?
We will be sure to laugh heartily when you, your brother, father, son, uncle and/or cousins are sentenced to 30 days for some minor offense which they may or may not have committed.
[nitpick] I'm pretty sure a 30-day sentence will put you in jail, which is a lot different than a long-term prison sentence. I knew a guy who tried to stop some cops who were beating the crap out of his friend (his friend was fighting somebody, so he deserved something; but not what the cops gave him). Anyway, he got 60 days in jail, which meant sitting in a great big room with about 100 other people with nothing to do. [/niptick]
But you're right, rape is never an acceptable 'punishment', and shouldn't be condoned.
Out of curiosity, does anyone know the rate of re-conviction of white-collar criminals? I.e., how many stock market scammers or embezzlers or virus-writers are repeat offenders? I'd think for a lot of people, 2-5 years would be enough for a lifetime...
Yeah, but he gets a +5 truth bonus if he's innocent! Unfortunately, there's the -10 "courts don't understand computers" circumstance penalty, which unfortunately stacks with the -15 "somebody has to pay and we don't have anyone else yet" circumstance penalty... ask Kevin Mitnick about those.
Hmm, this is like the theory of Saddam & Osama working together. The US is in Saudi Arabia to protect it against Saddam; Osama doesn't like infidels in his holy homeland, so he attacks the US and teams with Saddam, rather than attacking Saddam, so that the US can just leave. (I'm aware that there's no evidence of Saddam & Osama teaming up: I'm saying that the idea of them teaming up is even more strange, since Saddam is the very reason the US is in Saudi in the first place.)
It seems to me that a better idea for said 'legitimate' sysadmin would be to DDOS all the spam sites, driving *their* bandwidth cost through the roof. But who says angry people are rational...
As has been discussed much in the previous post about Osirus going down, the purpose of blacklists was never to decrease your own spam, but to put pressures on ISPs to stop hosting spammers. With no 'collateral damage', an ISP has no economic incentive to shut down spammers. With the collateral damage, an ISP can chose between the money from the spammer, or the money from all its other customers adversely affected by the blacklist.
Slashdot Mirror
On the contrary, my understanding of copyright law (IANAL, but I have read the GPL) is that you need a license to distribute copies of the source code. If you download a copy of Red Hat's ISO, you're not the one distributing it, Red Hat is -- they're the ones who need a license, they're the ones who have to abide by the GPL.
Once you legally acquire a copy (by getting it from a licensed distributor such as Red Hat), you can run it however you want, the GPL doesn't apply. You only need the GPL (or some other license) to distribute; once you have it, you have all your fair-use rights.
I don't know how normal software licensing works (has it even been tested in a court of law?), but if you read the GPL, it doesn't care about licensing to use, it only cares about a license to distribute.
Q: What's brown and sticky?
A: A stick.
And one my sister made up:
Q: Why are pirates so cool?
A: Because they ARRRRrrr!
No, on second hand, I did make a follow-up to the pirate joke:
Q: Where's a Pirate's favorite place to hang out?
A: The BARRRrrrr!
Fair enough -- I'm sorry that I misunderstood you.
BTB, you still haven't described exactly what you mean by 'homophobe' and 'gay basher' yet, so I don't know if you actually mean:
Hmm, a book written by illiterate nomads, huh? =) Anyway, I don't know what you mean by 'bias'. Yes, I think that homosexuality is morally wrong, on the authority of sources I trust. I don't feel too confident arguing about it, because I don't have any experience with it -- never done it, never talked to anyone who does it; I know that I have a relatively uninformed opinion. There are other issues -- like pornography, abortion, and so on that I am more confident to talk about. Furthermore, like it or not, I'm a product of our culture -- a culture which rates 'kindness' as one of the highest virtues, and 'cruelty' as one of the worst vices. Since homosexuality doesn't visibly hurt anybody, it's hard for me to be really upset at people who do it.
Is authority bad? Depends. We take all kinds of stuff on authority: from quantum physics to the situation in the Middle East. You always have to check the authority to see how trustworthy it is, and give it the appropriate amount of confidence. I've found the Bible worthy of my confidence. If you haven't, I wouldn't expect you place any trust in it.
There are lots of books written by lots of people. If the Bible were just 'a book written by illiterate nomads', why has it lasted so long, and had so much influence? Islam survives because it has a lot of the truth (surprise, a lot of it's copied from the Bible). Gnosticism didn't. =)
Well, barring true repentance, yes -- not just for hate, but for lots of things. I don't know you personally, but I'm guilty of acting in un-loving ways and causing pain to people around me, probably every single day, by the choices I make. If God is trying to create a paradise without suffering, why would he let me in as I am? Wouldn't I mar it with my selfishness within a week? The choice God gives people is simple: "Be holy as I am holy," or "Depart from me, ye evildoers."
The vital point you're missing is that God is working, and doing everything He can, to bring us to true repentance. Anyone who ends up in Hell will have absolutely no excuse -- God gave him every opportunity: He not only left all His glory to walk in our shoes, to be humiliated and tortured to death; but he continues to seek and pursue us.
That's what I've seen and experienced, anyway; I'm satisfied that God is Love.
Out of curiosity, what turned you off to Christianity? Why were you interested in it before, and what changed?
You just said that you have no personal experience or evidence for that belief other than a prejudice against Christianity that you've received from popular culture. If
Look, I could come up with all kinds of reasons to kill gays. I'm an atheist evolutionist? Well, I want to promote the human race, and homosexuality is an aberration that doesn't generate any children. (Hitler killed homosexuals too.) I'm a Christian/Muslim/Jew? God said it's wrong. I'm a Chinese ancestor-worshipper? Well, I want as many progeny as possible to support me after I'm dead, and if my kids become gay, that's less progeny for me.
The point is, people who want someone to hate are going to find someone to hate, and an excuse to do so. Because our culture has a lot of Christian influence, right now those people are going to identify themselves as "Christians" and hear the things from Christianity that they want to hear. But
Now, if by "gay-basher" you mean someone who thinks homosexuality is a perversion and morally wrong, I have to disagree. There are a lot of evil things in this world, of which homosexuality is certainly not the worst. Because we don't live in a Christian society, we don't encode all our moral standards into laws -- I haven't seen anyone thrown in jail for adultery in my lifetime, for instance, although I don't hesitate to call it wrong. Christians should be "the salt of the Earth." What was the main use of salt when Jesus said that? It was used to preserve things, to keep them from rotting. I ought to do what I can to encourage people chose fidelity over adultery, honesty over lies, love over selfishness, and purity over sexual immorality (while working to make all those choices myself as well). Sometimes that means making laws, such as making murder, perjury, and theft illegal, and punishing those who do them: sometimes not, as in the case of adultery and homosexuality.
I thought we wanted the good genes (in this case, geeks) to breed?
For that matter, it's not all that useful to most people without a web browser and a media player; hence the packaged distributions like RedHat and so on. I hate to say it, because it plays right into M$'s hands, but I think that the honest truth is that they, just like Apple and RedHat, are selling a complete desktop product, not just a kernel; and modern people expect "operating system" to include windowing capabilities, web, and media players. I'm glad that Apple & RedHat work to make all their applications work well together and get synergy; I'm not surprised that Microsoft tries to do the same.
Additionally, I remember reading that they thought that lack of exposure to pathogens actually increases your chances of being highly allergic to things as well. Allergies are basically when your immune system falsely identifies some harmless substance as a pathogen and attacks it; the collateral damage done in fighting the "pathogen" then reinforces the classification of that substance as a "pathogen" (because, hey, there was a strong correlation between the "pathogen" and the damage done).
The thought is that your immune system "knows" that it's supposed to be attacking something; if it doesn't get anything in the first couple of years, it turns up its sensitivity until it finds something to attack.
There are three problems, as far as I can tell:
Actually, the FAQ linked to by the article has a very simple description of how it works:
So in fact, it can and does infect normal cells; but it's so weak that it never causes any problem. Elsewhere on the FAQ it says that most humans show evidence of having been infected by it at some time (it's a naturally occuring virus).
Yeah, you're right -- I guess I really meant, "provide for" or "arrange for". I do kernel hacking for my research, but none of my stuff is in the mainline kernel (yet); and if I weren't a graduate student, I'd gladly help some other hacker sue.
Secondly, even if the developers do try each case individually: sure, each coder has to pay for his own lawyer; but SCO has to pay for a team of lawyers for each coder as well. I can certainly afford a few thousand dollars for something so important; if I'm willing to spend so much of my free time writing Linux kernel code, I'd be willing to spend at least as much fighting to keep it free. Can SCO afford to handle 1000 cases all at once?
I don't really know what it is SCO's up to; it's clear that they're doing this song-and-dance for effect, but I have no idea what that effect is supposed to be. But I can't but think that SCO being sued into oblivion, and the GPL being held up in court, would be a great thing for the GPL in general.
OTOH, if one distribution or configuration takes over, and becomes popular, you can bet there will be programs there... someone suggested the possibility of adding things to .bashrc or .profile, those are pretty standard tools...
And I, for one, welcome our new FSF overlords!
(Sorry... good post, but I couldn't resist.)
And I like how he talks about the GPL "enforcement" squad as hit men, "snooping" into companies to try to find hidden violations. What about the Business Software Alliance? Don't Oracle and Microsoft do the same thing, looking for illegal copies of their software?
No one made Linksys or Broadcom use Linux; they were perfectly free to buy someone else's kernel, or to write their own. If they'd put Windows CE in there without paying for a license, you can bet Microsoft / BSA would be down their throat in a heartbeat. Why should it be any different for us?
The other thing that pisses me off about the article is that you can tell, from some of the quotes, that he's playing that stupid journalistic "selective quoting" game. If the OSS and FSF people he quoted knew that he was going to write such a bigoted article, they probably wouldn't have talked to him. I guess it gets articles published, but it sure is a shame to have to lie and betray people to make a buck...
Hehe... unfortunately, I saw this riposte about 5 seconds after I'd clicked the 'Submit' button, else I would've addressed it. I suppose the best way would've been to say, "You're all 100% wrong; 1984 was really a love story about a Zoroastrian monk and the goddess Athena" -- an interpretation I hope you would believe able to be invalidated.
Anyway, the 'interpretation' in question was what the word doublethink meant in the novel. In this case, it isn't something meant to be beautifully ambiguous: it's defined explicitly, and then given very concrete examples several times in the book. It seems pretty clear that Orwell had a concrete idea of what 'doublethink' meant, and wanted to communicate that idea. It's hard to imagine how he could've done it any more clearly.
In your post, you give an interpretation, and you attempt to validate it (or make it appear likely or reasonable) through reasoned argument; why is it therefore impossible to invalidate it (or make it appear unlikely or unreasonable) through the same means? It may turn out that there's not enough data to decide between two interpretations, and that both are equally plausible. But just because in certain cases, some interpretations can't be invalidated, that doesn't mean that no interpretation can ever be invalidated.
Awesome post! I haven't heard such a great defense of Zoroastrianism in a long time. I agree, all infidels should be destroyed! Amen, Brother!
What, that's not what you meant? Well, I'll be dashed... I mean, I wasn't sitting next to you when you wrote it, so how could I possibly know what you meant, unless I asked you?
But you give yourself away by even posting. You assumed that your interpretation of the parent post was "correct" and wrote your response based on it (were you sitting next to him asking him what he meant?); and wrote what you wrote assuming that most people would interpret it the way that you meant.
The purpose of 1984 wasn't to be beautiful, but to communicate an idea, a truth he believed about the world; and if no one understood it, then Orwell failed. If it is beautiful, it is because the truth he was trying to communicate really was true.
Well, and that's what almost happened with the one kid. I forget the names of everybody in there, except Piggy; but there were to main leaders: a good guy who was sort of for democracy, and the head of the boys' choir who was for despotism and control (not anarchy, as has been previously said).
In a sense, the thing that gave the despot power was the training that the kids in his choir already had -- the discipline of the choir. The lead boy parlayed this into a despotism, using the power he had to get more. If there had never been any choir, there's a better chance that the good guy would have been able to keep things going right.
Actually, when I was in New Orleans a couple of years ago, I saw the following billboard downton:
"Thou shalt not kill."
That's probably why the crime rate in New Orleans is so low!
But remember, there are already tons of government agencies that do inspections of all sorts of things. Aren't you happy there are health inspectors? And the SEC, the FDA, the EPA, and so on? Aren't you glad that governments test the water regularly and investigate corporate polutants and such?
And remember the focus: not private individuals in their homes, but large corporations who should be protecting your private data, but may not be. The only ones holding them accountable are illegal hackers like the ones in this story; this makes all the wrong incentives for large companies. Why secure your data, when you can just press charges against anyone who exposes your weakness?
I was at a conference recently, and one of the talks was given by someone from the NSA. After introducing himself, he sad as an aside, "By the way, I just want to assure you that all the people I know at the NSA, FBI, etc take their vow to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States very seriously -- and that includes the first and fourth amendments. We're not part of some government conspiracy to take away your liberties, but to protect them." And that's why the vow is not allegiance to the government -- which may be good or bad, honest or corrupt -- but to the constitution.
It's always a good idea to keep a suspicious eye on the government, especially in cases like this. But when people suggest that Bush is working up to institute a military coup, it shows that they're completely ignorant of what the US military is like. The military is made up of Americans, who hold the same values of freedom and liberty that you do. You can bet that if their superiors told them to be oppressive to other Americans, they'd tell their superiors to go to hell.
Perhaps we need a government agency to do this instead? We have health inspectors, after all, and all kinds of other inspectors for other industries. Imagine if every company that dealt with sensitive customer information were "inspected" once a year by a tiger-team of white-hat hackers, and fined for every security problem they found.
I'd work for the government then. =)
I really like the 'more magic' switch... I can just imagine some guy putting that in: "Boy, this'll really fry their noggins..."
So why is it different with software on a CD? If I buy a CD with copyrighted material on it, don't I have a right to make backup copies? And wouldn't "loading it onto my own disk" and "loading it into memory" reasonably fall under fair use?
[nitpick] I'm pretty sure a 30-day sentence will put you in jail, which is a lot different than a long-term prison sentence. I knew a guy who tried to stop some cops who were beating the crap out of his friend (his friend was fighting somebody, so he deserved something; but not what the cops gave him). Anyway, he got 60 days in jail, which meant sitting in a great big room with about 100 other people with nothing to do. [/niptick]
But you're right, rape is never an acceptable 'punishment', and shouldn't be condoned.
Out of curiosity, does anyone know the rate of re-conviction of white-collar criminals? I.e., how many stock market scammers or embezzlers or virus-writers are repeat offenders? I'd think for a lot of people, 2-5 years would be enough for a lifetime...
Yeah, but he gets a +5 truth bonus if he's innocent! Unfortunately, there's the -10 "courts don't understand computers" circumstance penalty, which unfortunately stacks with the -15 "somebody has to pay and we don't have anyone else yet" circumstance penalty... ask Kevin Mitnick about those.
It seems to me that a better idea for said 'legitimate' sysadmin would be to DDOS all the spam sites, driving *their* bandwidth cost through the roof. But who says angry people are rational...
As has been discussed much in the previous post about Osirus going down, the purpose of blacklists was never to decrease your own spam, but to put pressures on ISPs to stop hosting spammers. With no 'collateral damage', an ISP has no economic incentive to shut down spammers. With the collateral damage, an ISP can chose between the money from the spammer, or the money from all its other customers adversely affected by the blacklist.