. ..perhaps there could be introduced a standard for putting tags around the actual article on news sites, so they would know what else to filter out?
Not to be overly simplistic, but the bottom line is that there can't (and shouldn't) be a technological subsitute for good, old fashioned critical thinking skills. Deciding what to filter in and what to filter out, what is bogus and what isn't, whether you should take information with a grain of salt, and how big that grain of salt should be is ultimately up to the reader, and no amount of tagging and markup will change this.
As I understand it (and by no means am I any sort of expert here), Stallman's main objection is that the APSL is asymmetric, in the sense that Apple, as the original creator of APSL'ed code, has more and different rights then subsequent modifiers of the code. Specifically, if you change ASPL'ed code, even if you don't publicly release the changes, you still have to notify Apple of the changes. In the eyes of GNU/FSF/Stallman, this is a violation of privacy which free software licenses should protect, and represents a central control over code which free software licenses should prevent. For more info, see This commentary on the GNU site.
This might be a bit redundant, but it seems to me that the most interesting thing about all this is that Apple seems to have hit on a business model that actually makes money off open source software. First came OSX, which isn't really much more of a modifed PPC port of FreeBSD (Darwin) with a wicked nice (and nicely engineered) GUI (Aqua) slapped on top. Now we have Rendezvous, where Apple is making their implementation of an open standard open source, in hopes that its broad adoption will encourage people to buy Apple's software. Imagine what these guys could do with Ogg. ..
So maybe the moral of the story is this:
Find a niche for an open source project (using BSD to give MacOS solid underpinnings)
Add value by adding high-quality proprietary elements (Aqua) by making use of your existing strengths (GUI design)
Give back to the community (Darwin)
Profit?
Of course, you can't attribute all (or even most) of Apple's financial success to their OSS endeavours, but (and I speak from personal experience here) OSX has changed Macs from cute little toys to a viable and intiguing alternative to x86 hardware. And if Rendezvous takes off, not only will it be a boon for the community, but Apple could do quite nicely as well. In the end though, Apple might be a pretty unique case: Apple is primarily a hadware vendor, and Apple's involvement with OSS primarily adds value to the hardware it sells (I'll buy a TiBook because it's the only game in town for running OSX), and there aren't a heck of a lot of hardware vendors who are in a position to duplicate what Apple is doing.
How long before they come under new management or are bought and we are forced to pay to create and listen to mp3's?
I for one can't see how it would make good business sense for Thomson to use patents and licenses to restrict the use and spread of software MP3 players. It seems to me that they'd want to encourage MP3 as the de facto standard for compressed audio on the internet, and charge content providers and hardware MP3 player manufacturers. It's hard enough for software makers to ensure that each home user has a license for each piece of software they install (look at the silly lengths Microsoft goes to with XP), but major content providers (like record companies) and hardware manufacturers are relatively easy to hit with licensing fees. And the market pressure of MP3 being the dominant compressed music format forces the content providers and hardware manufacturers to keep using MP3 despite the licensing costs.
To put it another way, as long as Ogg files aren't readily availible on Kazaa (or whatever is the most popular P2P app), there won't be the market demand for a hardware Ogg player. So it's in Thomson's interest to ensure that MP3s are still widely used, and that means free (like beer at least) software MP3 players.
His real problem...
on
Mr Anti-Google
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
When you type "NameBase" into Google, Brandt's site comes up first, but Brandt is not satisfied with that. "My problem has been to get Google to go deep enough into my site," he says. In other words, Brandt wants Google to index the 100,000 names he has in his database, so that a Google search for "Donald Rumsfeld" will bring up NameBase's page for the secretary of defense. -- From the Salon article
So it seems that this guy's real problem isn't with how Google ranks his site, but rather that Google isn't pushing his product to every searcher who hits their site. So he talks about the "undemocracy" of Google, but when it comes down to it, his main issue is that Google isn't helping his business, or rather, that Google's ranking algorithm isn't compatible with his business plan.
Too often, when people say something is undemocratic, it's just because they aren't getting there own way.
Please excuse my ignorance, as I'm not 100% sure on all the mechanics behind PGP, GPG and other such encryption schemes. But if someone is using a program like eBlaster on your computer that captures not only outgoing e-mails but also keystrokes, would having access to both the encrypted message and the plaintext (via keystroke logging) make it any easier to deduce your private key? If this is the case, then eBlaster could severely undermine public-key encryption.
Again, sorry if this is stupid or alarmist. I'm not trolling, I'm asking out of curiousity.
. ..Windows came on one CD and many Linux distros require multiple CDs to install. ..
There are a few fundamental differences between a one CD Windows package and a multi-cd Linux distribution. First of all (as a few other posters have pointed out) Windows contains just the OS, with a few minimally useful "accessories", while Linux distributions include boatloads of applications (my Mandrake 8.1 3-disk set included something like 3 or 4 icq clients, for goodness sake). Also, unlike Windows, Linux distributions often include source code as well, and that takes up space too.
...I'll have to hold on to my current mp3 player, cause it looks like I won't be able to download winamp for free any more...
Even if this were the case, (and I somehow doubt that most distributors of MP3 software won't bite the relatively small $110,000 bullet to get a license) the previous poster pretty much hit the nail on the head: Almost every PC out there right now has an MP3 player that came with it already. Windows comes with Window's Media Player, Macs come with iTunes, Linux distributions come with XMMS and at least 3 or 4 other players, and so on. It seems like the worst case scenario for most MP3 users will be that they won't be able to upgrade their free players anymore. And I don't think that the situation will be much worse for purchasers of new PCs either -- people using proprietary operating systems probably won't notice an extra $.75 for a license, and as it has already been pointed out, Ogg is becoming the format of choice in the open source community.
And besides, it's not hard to believe that MP3 users might illicitly download free MP3 players against the wishes of those who feel they have intellectual property rights over the format. After all, that's kinda the basis of the popularity of MP3s to begin with...
Scientology was fiction, L God Hubbard was actually a decent sci-fi author till he started beliving what he was writing was divine (hence he started his religion)...
I thought Scientology had more to do with Hubbard realizing that there are tax advantages to publishing fiction as religious texts, and less to do with him actually believing any of it.
Slashdot Mirror
Not to be overly simplistic, but the bottom line is that there can't (and shouldn't) be a technological subsitute for good, old fashioned critical thinking skills. Deciding what to filter in and what to filter out, what is bogus and what isn't, whether you should take information with a grain of salt, and how big that grain of salt should be is ultimately up to the reader, and no amount of tagging and markup will change this.
As I understand it (and by no means am I any sort of expert here), Stallman's main objection is that the APSL is asymmetric, in the sense that Apple, as the original creator of APSL'ed code, has more and different rights then subsequent modifiers of the code. Specifically, if you change ASPL'ed code, even if you don't publicly release the changes, you still have to notify Apple of the changes. In the eyes of GNU/FSF/Stallman, this is a violation of privacy which free software licenses should protect, and represents a central control over code which free software licenses should prevent. For more info, see This commentary on the GNU site.
This might be a bit redundant, but it seems to me that the most interesting thing about all this is that Apple seems to have hit on a business model that actually makes money off open source software. First came OSX, which isn't really much more of a modifed PPC port of FreeBSD (Darwin) with a wicked nice (and nicely engineered) GUI (Aqua) slapped on top. Now we have Rendezvous, where Apple is making their implementation of an open standard open source, in hopes that its broad adoption will encourage people to buy Apple's software. Imagine what these guys could do with Ogg. . .
So maybe the moral of the story is this:
Of course, you can't attribute all (or even most) of Apple's financial success to their OSS endeavours, but (and I speak from personal experience here) OSX has changed Macs from cute little toys to a viable and intiguing alternative to x86 hardware. And if Rendezvous takes off, not only will it be a boon for the community, but Apple could do quite nicely as well. In the end though, Apple might be a pretty unique case: Apple is primarily a hadware vendor, and Apple's involvement with OSS primarily adds value to the hardware it sells (I'll buy a TiBook because it's the only game in town for running OSX), and there aren't a heck of a lot of hardware vendors who are in a position to duplicate what Apple is doing.
I for one can't see how it would make good business sense for Thomson to use patents and licenses to restrict the use and spread of software MP3 players. It seems to me that they'd want to encourage MP3 as the de facto standard for compressed audio on the internet, and charge content providers and hardware MP3 player manufacturers. It's hard enough for software makers to ensure that each home user has a license for each piece of software they install (look at the silly lengths Microsoft goes to with XP), but major content providers (like record companies) and hardware manufacturers are relatively easy to hit with licensing fees. And the market pressure of MP3 being the dominant compressed music format forces the content providers and hardware manufacturers to keep using MP3 despite the licensing costs.
To put it another way, as long as Ogg files aren't readily availible on Kazaa (or whatever is the most popular P2P app), there won't be the market demand for a hardware Ogg player. So it's in Thomson's interest to ensure that MP3s are still widely used, and that means free (like beer at least) software MP3 players.
So it seems that this guy's real problem isn't with how Google ranks his site, but rather that Google isn't pushing his product to every searcher who hits their site. So he talks about the "undemocracy" of Google, but when it comes down to it, his main issue is that Google isn't helping his business, or rather, that Google's ranking algorithm isn't compatible with his business plan.
Too often, when people say something is undemocratic, it's just because they aren't getting there own way.
Please excuse my ignorance, as I'm not 100% sure on all the mechanics behind PGP, GPG and other such encryption schemes. But if someone is using a program like eBlaster on your computer that captures not only outgoing e-mails but also keystrokes, would having access to both the encrypted message and the plaintext (via keystroke logging) make it any easier to deduce your private key? If this is the case, then eBlaster could severely undermine public-key encryption.
Again, sorry if this is stupid or alarmist. I'm not trolling, I'm asking out of curiousity.
There are a few fundamental differences between a one CD Windows package and a multi-cd Linux distribution. First of all (as a few other posters have pointed out) Windows contains just the OS, with a few minimally useful "accessories", while Linux distributions include boatloads of applications (my Mandrake 8.1 3-disk set included something like 3 or 4 icq clients, for goodness sake). Also, unlike Windows, Linux distributions often include source code as well, and that takes up space too.
And yeah, I know I'm off-topic. . .
Even if this were the case, (and I somehow doubt that most distributors of MP3 software won't bite the relatively small $110,000 bullet to get a license) the previous poster pretty much hit the nail on the head: Almost every PC out there right now has an MP3 player that came with it already. Windows comes with Window's Media Player, Macs come with iTunes, Linux distributions come with XMMS and at least 3 or 4 other players, and so on. It seems like the worst case scenario for most MP3 users will be that they won't be able to upgrade their free players anymore. And I don't think that the situation will be much worse for purchasers of new PCs either -- people using proprietary operating systems probably won't notice an extra $.75 for a license, and as it has already been pointed out, Ogg is becoming the format of choice in the open source community.
And besides, it's not hard to believe that MP3 users might illicitly download free MP3 players against the wishes of those who feel they have intellectual property rights over the format. After all, that's kinda the basis of the popularity of MP3s to begin with...
I thought Scientology had more to do with Hubbard realizing that there are tax advantages to publishing fiction as religious texts, and less to do with him actually believing any of it.