Every Javascript that executes, style that is interpreeted, etc. has to carefully segregate favored behaviors from poor behaviors done for compatibility.
There needs to be several levels. In some cases, there are standards-compliant behaviors that have traditionally been so poorly implemented by browsers that these should also be flagged as non-portable.
Browsers bend over backwards to be compatible with lots of pages, and by so doing promote worse behaviors.
The mess that passes for HTML is a direct result of the permissive approaches of browsers. It is understandable that browser vendors want to make the browser work on as many pages as possible, but it is a horrible tool to use in the hands of web developers because the bottom line is if it works, it is OK.
Browsers need modes that can be enabled for developers that raise exceptions when exercising behaviors that were inserted for compatability but which violate standards and/or are likely to break other browsers/versions. They need to do this to make it easy for developers to use the browser to test their web pages while not promoting worse-formed content. Whichever browser does this first, will be my choice of main browser to use when testing my web pages.
Using digital signatures, wouldn't it be possible to establish a secure-but-anonymous identity?
Combine that with securely-signed endorsements between identities (i.e. a person endorsed in the following text by contributor X -- no one can prove whether it is or is not contributor X or that he even knows who contributor X is -- will be speaking at a conference), and it might be possible to get some degree of useful recognition anonymously. That way you maybe do not have the police waiting at the door as they were for Sklyarov.
And it would seem possible to have books published, etc. by related identities to be able to claim that book X was written by a major contributor to project Y.
This doesn't solve the problem that eventually the contributor whose work has been criminalized will be hunted down and stopped and commercial entities in countries behind the Intellectual Protectionist Curtain can be easily prevented from using it, but if it were to become more common and Freeneted, who knows the degree of success you might have with the model.
these people truly think they are doing the right thing. They are not inherently evil, even if their actions end up seeming that way. In the end it is a skewed view of the individual, not someone being actively evil.
At the risk of calling out the Godwin Nazis, Hitler and Sadaam also truly thought they were doing the right thing for their respective countries and were honestly not trying to be evil, but were trying to be a savior for their respective peoples. Anyone who knew them personally knows that.
It is amazing how many people don't understand this basic thing, that no successful leader considers himself evil, but sincerely considers his opponents evil, i.e. the caricatures of the Jews in the case of Hitler, etc., as the source of all evil. And there is some logic that can be used to justify any such demonization. It is spin leading to polarization, which is what makes the world go around and often becomes the excuse for ignoring one's own supposed ethics and morals.
One of Gate's villified enemies (I can name a series of others) was so-called software piracy, which he more than anyone else has made into a crime more than it ever was before. As much credit as the uninformed give him for progress in computers, this has destroyed growth and freedom that would have come otherwise. Could Unix have emerged under the current copyright regime? Operating systems would have been built for commodotized hardware one way or the other, but it was one more degree of freedom lost that is now hard to recover from under his shadow.
Look for any Microsoft license on serious new open source technology to be more restrictive and viral, not less, than the GPL.
There is a lot of silliness like this post claiming that Microsoft would somehow be more open to open source if only the GPL were not so viral.
The fact is, Microsoft would be far less inclined to release code that could be trivially redeployed against them by rivals using licenses less-viral than GPL.
The only situation where having a less viral license helps them is when their rivals release code not protected, they can then redeploy it against them without giving anything back and even kinking it so that the interoperability is destroyed.
Every serious software producer who is actually going to distribute their own produced code under some sort of open source license suddenly realizes that the minute they become serious open source players, having a broadly-acknowledged open source license works for them and protects them. It only works against those who intend to exploit the system.
There are more-valid arguments that Windows is not Open Source.
What do you think would happen if Steve Jobs showed up at a Microsoft's Headquarters and said, "I'm here to see the Windows Source Code. I'll fill out whatever forms you like." as you propose anyone can do?
Bill whips out the "All your bases are belong to us" form and Apple is out of business.
Yeah, but the terrorists aren't using Nuclear Weapons.
I thought the battle plans against non-nuclear Iraq include them, specifically inserted by terrorists like Bush and Rumsfeld over the objections of the professional military that had been trained to think of them as last-ditch defensive weapons.
Until Iran goes online, they don't have access to the materials, so they'll be using Biological and Chemical weapons.
You don't think our Pakistani "friends" have already spread them far and wide, to a much greater degree than Iran would be willing to share them with unstable elements?
Copyright is not about free trade, but about granting of monopoly. Anti-circumvention legislation is even less about free trade but about further restricting what consumers are permitted to do with their already restricted copyrights.
You may argue about whether it is good or bad, but free trade it will never be. However much Americans may like to claim the west is about freedom, often they are about restrictions and anti-freedom. China loves to copy our restrictions wherever it suits them. Copying our games only should be flattering to Americans where it is something good, but you know Americans: "They hate us for our Freedom"(TM) so lets banish more freedom and call it patriotic.
While everyone wants to see China improving its enforcement of IP rights, is this a step too far?
If by everyone, you mean some, then you are right. You clearly do not speak for everyone or for me. There is great value in having diversity in laws in different areas of the world, it is sad to see freedoms lost, and it is obvious to me that China will borrow our worst policies, including DCMA-style anti-circumvention nonsense.
Wine has been a silly idea from the start, and is as important to public adoption of Linux as the Windows emulation in OS/2 was (destructive rather than constructive). In other words, it makes everyone say, if I am just emulating windows, why not run the real thing, instead of the reverse tactic, having good applications that are desirable on Windows, get there through hacky procedures like Cygwin, and eventually leads people to believe that Linux is the real thing they should be running.
In the end, Sun has the right to use any license they want, and the ethical choice in a free society is to support that. Anyone is welcome to try to convince others to change the social contract, but the good guys shouldn't do it by demonizing Sun, etc, because they won't accept someone else's non-advantageous license terms for their own work.
And then we have to hear them whine in court and elsewhere, for example, that they don't like Microsoft's embrace and extend, that they don't like being excluded from distributions, that they don't understand why their platform is not trusted, etc. when GPL would have made it clear at the start that any extensions would be publicly distributable and could not be used to trap people.
Java is already open, as open as it is usefull to the open source community. it is not as open as stallman's dogma says it is desired, but that is another matter.
To many in the open source community, it could be far more useful if it were more open. You do not speak for the open source community or me in any way, as you parrot Sun's tired old excuses and whining for better acceptance without being willing to do what it takes.
Freedom includes freedom to fork. The battle should have been about standards, not about proprietary right to dictate others compliance. That is why they have such a hard time getting it all this time later.
...please shoot him and put us all out of his misery? Fucking whiny hippy.
I am not sure which of the Sun whiners you are referring to as a hippy, but yes, shut them all up and their whining pathetic excuse-making and empty announcements.
Do you have some particular hatred of Microsoft products and loath the idea they might be included in your distro? Many do. However, if that is the case, consider that your argument is in bad faith on another level. It is essentially an argument where you compare what your opponent's position to some position that Hitler held since you know that people generally think that Hitler is a bad guy, and that the mere association with your opponent will make people more likely to disagree with him.
You will coninue to have answers as long as you keep ignoring licensing issues. You obviously couldn't care less about licensing. If Microsoft VB had a free license, I would include it tomorrow, just as I would do with Java. There is no basis for your assertion of hating Microsoft products or your other assertions about your favorite Hitler comparisons, any more than any of the other assertions in your post. But free software is a license to freedom, which is important.
What next, are they going to refuse to include the linux *kernel* because it doesn't use the latest version of the GNU license? Why would they do that. The kernel is free software whereas Java never has been anything like free software.
Where do they get off demanding that sun or any company release its software under any particular license? They only control the nature of what they ship
Sun is *already* giving away their software for free. Only in the limited sense that Internet Explorer is "free". It comes with very limited freedom and lots of strings.
Red Hat and others should consider themselves lucky that it gets to sell software that it didn't even write in the first place. Luck had nothing to do with it. It is free by design, and were it not free, it would not have received the contributions.
The people that are acting to *prevent* anyone from getting access to java are the linux distro makers who refuse to put java in. It has been Sun's decisions to restrict its freedom from the outset, which is why many people who cared most about Java have abandoned it for better alternatives.
This is nothing but an inconvenience for users. Who seriously does not go ahead and install sun java anyway? There are any number of languages with a free or open source base whose users do not just go ahead and install Java, and their numbers will continue to swell as long as Java is proprietary.
Who is not inconvenienced by the fact that most distros refuse to integrate it into their package management scheme? Apparently Sun is not inconvenienced, and it is their call to make the license free or proprietary.
There's literally no reason that red hat, ubuntu and others couldn't package sun java. Only if you are someone who can't tell the difference between Free / Open Source and proprietary software.
They only do it out of a desire to strongarm sun into using a different license which will not provide any benefit to their user base. Their current user base or their potential user base? The Sun directions have greatly restricted the former. You may be right that those who care about programming and distribution freedom have already moved on which is why there is no one asking for it any more. I stopped asking quite a while ago and ported away from Java.
If I was a shareholder, I would punish them severely for this nonsense, as it doesn't serve any kind of business end that I can see, and is more reminiscent of the behavior of the FSF than a for profit company. Someone needs to remind them that they are obligated to pursue the ends of their users and their shareholders before anything else. Of course, and by the same logic, they really should be packaging Visual Basic, instead of Java in the first place.
You are right. TECO rulez.
on
Vim 7 Released
·
· Score: 1
Before any useful medical advancement becomes available to the general public. Yes, this is a cynical remark. Is any other kind of a remark merited by the way things work today?
Slashdot Mirror
Every Javascript that executes, style that is interpreeted, etc. has to carefully segregate favored behaviors from poor behaviors done for compatibility.
There needs to be several levels. In some cases, there are standards-compliant behaviors that have traditionally been so poorly implemented by browsers that these should also be flagged as non-portable.
Browsers bend over backwards to be compatible with lots of pages, and by so doing promote worse behaviors.
The mess that passes for HTML is a direct result of the permissive approaches of browsers. It is understandable that browser vendors want to make the browser work on as many pages as possible, but it is a horrible tool to use in the hands of web developers because the bottom line is if it works, it is OK.
Browsers need modes that can be enabled for developers that raise exceptions when exercising behaviors that were inserted for compatability but which violate standards and/or are likely to break other browsers/versions. They need to do this to make it easy for developers to use the browser to test their web pages while not promoting worse-formed content. Whichever browser does this first, will be my choice of main browser to use when testing my web pages.
Using digital signatures, wouldn't it be possible to establish a secure-but-anonymous identity?
Combine that with securely-signed endorsements between identities (i.e. a person endorsed in the following text by contributor X -- no one can prove whether it is or is not contributor X or that he even knows who contributor X is -- will be speaking at a conference), and it might be possible to get some degree of useful recognition anonymously. That way you maybe do not have the police waiting at the door as they were for Sklyarov.
And it would seem possible to have books published, etc. by related identities to be able to claim that book X was written by a major contributor to project Y.
This doesn't solve the problem that eventually the contributor whose work has been criminalized will be hunted down and stopped and commercial entities in countries behind the Intellectual Protectionist Curtain can be easily prevented from using it, but if it were to become more common and Freeneted, who knows the degree of success you might have with the model.
Monthly Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging of candidate or elected politicians to find out what part of what they spew is intended to be deceptive.
these people truly think they are doing the right thing. They are not inherently evil, even if their actions end up seeming that way. In the end it is a skewed view of the individual, not someone being actively evil.
At the risk of calling out the Godwin Nazis, Hitler and Sadaam also truly thought they were doing the right thing for their respective countries and were honestly not trying to be evil, but were trying to be a savior for their respective peoples. Anyone who knew them personally knows that.
It is amazing how many people don't understand this basic thing, that no successful leader considers himself evil, but sincerely considers his opponents evil, i.e. the caricatures of the Jews in the case of Hitler, etc., as the source of all evil. And there is some logic that can be used to justify any such demonization. It is spin leading to polarization, which is what makes the world go around and often becomes the excuse for ignoring one's own supposed ethics and morals.
One of Gate's villified enemies (I can name a series of others) was so-called software piracy, which he more than anyone else has made into a crime more than it ever was before. As much credit as the uninformed give him for progress in computers, this has destroyed growth and freedom that would have come otherwise. Could Unix have emerged under the current copyright regime? Operating systems would have been built for commodotized hardware one way or the other, but it was one more degree of freedom lost that is now hard to recover from under his shadow.
Look for any Microsoft license on serious new open source technology to be more restrictive and viral, not less, than the GPL.
There is a lot of silliness like this post claiming that Microsoft would somehow be more open to open source if only the GPL were not so viral.
The fact is, Microsoft would be far less inclined to release code that could be trivially redeployed against them by rivals using licenses less-viral than GPL.
The only situation where having a less viral license helps them is when their rivals release code not protected, they can then redeploy it against them without giving anything back and even kinking it so that the interoperability is destroyed.
Every serious software producer who is actually going to distribute their own produced code under some sort of open source license suddenly realizes that the minute they become serious open source players, having a broadly-acknowledged open source license works for them and protects them. It only works against those who intend to exploit the system.
There are more-valid arguments that Windows is not Open Source.
What do you think would happen if Steve Jobs showed up at a Microsoft's Headquarters and said, "I'm here to see the Windows Source Code. I'll fill out whatever forms you like." as you propose anyone can do?
Bill whips out the "All your bases are belong to us" form and Apple is out of business.
Disney has announced the renaming of its well-known theme park ride: Terrorists of the Carribean.
Yeah, but the terrorists aren't using Nuclear Weapons.
I thought the battle plans against non-nuclear Iraq include them, specifically inserted by terrorists like Bush and Rumsfeld over the objections of the professional military that had been trained to think of them as last-ditch defensive weapons.
Until Iran goes online, they don't have access to the materials, so they'll be using Biological and Chemical weapons.
You don't think our Pakistani "friends" have already spread them far and wide, to a much greater degree than Iran would be willing to share them with unstable elements?
Free trade must be reciprocal.
Copyright is not about free trade, but about granting of monopoly. Anti-circumvention legislation is even less about free trade but about further restricting what consumers are permitted to do with their already restricted copyrights.
You may argue about whether it is good or bad, but free trade it will never be. However much Americans may like to claim the west is about freedom, often they are about restrictions and anti-freedom. China loves to copy our restrictions wherever it suits them. Copying our games only should be flattering to Americans where it is something good, but you know Americans: "They hate us for our Freedom"(TM) so lets banish more freedom and call it patriotic.
While everyone wants to see China improving its enforcement of IP rights, is this a step too far?
If by everyone, you mean some, then you are right. You clearly do not speak for everyone or for me. There is great value in having diversity in laws in different areas of the world, it is sad to see freedoms lost, and it is obvious to me that China will borrow our worst policies, including DCMA-style anti-circumvention nonsense.
Additionally he is infinitely more likely to make contact with enemies of the state than the average person.
Do you really think that White House calls are in the record?
Wine has been a silly idea from the start, and is as important to public adoption of Linux as the Windows emulation in OS/2 was (destructive rather than constructive). In other words, it makes everyone say, if I am just emulating windows, why not run the real thing, instead of the reverse tactic, having good applications that are desirable on Windows, get there through hacky procedures like Cygwin, and eventually leads people to believe that Linux is the real thing they should be running.
In the end, Sun has the right to use any license they want, and the ethical choice in a free society is to support that. Anyone is welcome to try to convince others to change the social contract, but the good guys shouldn't do it by demonizing Sun, etc, because they won't accept someone else's non-advantageous license terms for their own work.
And then we have to hear them whine in court and elsewhere, for example, that they don't like Microsoft's embrace and extend, that they don't like being excluded from distributions, that they don't understand why their platform is not trusted, etc. when GPL would have made it clear at the start that any extensions would be publicly distributable and could not be used to trap people.
Most people call free software open source because that's what it really is.
Only those who cannot tell the difference. Lots of people misidentify lots of things, and this does not make it so.
Java is already open, as open as it is usefull to the open source community. it is not as open as stallman's dogma says it is desired, but that is another matter.
To many in the open source community, it could be far more useful if it were more open. You do not speak for the open source community or me in any way, as you parrot Sun's tired old excuses and whining for better acceptance without being willing to do what it takes.
Freedom includes freedom to fork. The battle should have been about standards, not about proprietary right to dictate others compliance. That is why they have such a hard time getting it all this time later.
I am not sure which of the Sun whiners you are referring to as a hippy, but yes, shut them all up and their whining pathetic excuse-making and empty announcements.
In a world with any respect for innocence until proven guilty.
How do they prove beyond a reasonable doubt that you remember your key if you say you forgot it.
Of course with current policies, yes, they can lock you up forever.
Do you have some particular hatred of Microsoft products and loath the idea they might be included in your distro? Many do. However, if that is the case, consider that your argument is in bad faith on another level. It is essentially an argument where you compare what your opponent's position to some position that Hitler held since you know that people generally think that Hitler is a bad guy, and that the mere association with your opponent will make people more likely to disagree with him.
You will coninue to have answers as long as you keep ignoring licensing issues. You obviously couldn't care less about licensing. If Microsoft VB had a free license, I would include it tomorrow, just as I would do with Java. There is no basis for your assertion of hating Microsoft products or your other assertions about your favorite Hitler comparisons, any more than any of the other assertions in your post. But free software is a license to freedom, which is important.
What next, are they going to refuse to include the linux *kernel* because it doesn't use the latest version of the GNU license? Why would they do that. The kernel is free software whereas Java never has been anything like free software.
Where do they get off demanding that sun or any company release its software under any particular license? They only control the nature of what they ship
Sun is *already* giving away their software for free. Only in the limited sense that Internet Explorer is "free". It comes with very limited freedom and lots of strings.
Red Hat and others should consider themselves lucky that it gets to sell software that it didn't even write in the first place. Luck had nothing to do with it. It is free by design, and were it not free, it would not have received the contributions.
The people that are acting to *prevent* anyone from getting access to java are the linux distro makers who refuse to put java in. It has been Sun's decisions to restrict its freedom from the outset, which is why many people who cared most about Java have abandoned it for better alternatives.
This is nothing but an inconvenience for users. Who seriously does not go ahead and install sun java anyway? There are any number of languages with a free or open source base whose users do not just go ahead and install Java, and their numbers will continue to swell as long as Java is proprietary.
Who is not inconvenienced by the fact that most distros refuse to integrate it into their package management scheme? Apparently Sun is not inconvenienced, and it is their call to make the license free or proprietary.
There's literally no reason that red hat, ubuntu and others couldn't package sun java. Only if you are someone who can't tell the difference between Free / Open Source and proprietary software.
They only do it out of a desire to strongarm sun into using a different license which will not provide any benefit to their user base. Their current user base or their potential user base? The Sun directions have greatly restricted the former. You may be right that those who care about programming and distribution freedom have already moved on which is why there is no one asking for it any more. I stopped asking quite a while ago and ported away from Java.
If I was a shareholder, I would punish them severely for this nonsense, as it doesn't serve any kind of business end that I can see, and is more reminiscent of the behavior of the FSF than a for profit company. Someone needs to remind them that they are obligated to pursue the ends of their users and their shareholders before anything else. Of course, and by the same logic, they really should be packaging Visual Basic, instead of Java in the first place.
Who needs anything besides TECO.
As I read the article, he was generous with the new production proceedure, because anyone using it already owed royalties.
As I read it, he was generous with the new production proceedure, because anyone using it already owed royalties.
Before any useful medical advancement becomes available to the general public. Yes, this is a cynical remark. Is any other kind of a remark merited by the way things work today?