There may another way to keep legislators in line that nobody really considers - a popular veto. If a legislator is trying to pass something, it not only has to pass the House and Senate and be signed by the president, but in that period, there would be a request for public comments open to the constituents of the legislator(s). These comments would go on the record along with an Approve/Neutral/Disapprove rating, and if enough people disapprove (determine the semantics later) the bill would not pass. Effectively, this means that the representatives must keep their constituents' interests in mind at all times if they don't want their bills vetoed, or even worse, a hostile public that simply hamstrings their every move until they are ousted. It will also provide a permanent record of how well their actions match up with the desires of their constituents.
Microsoft's strategy is consistent with their talk about overhauling the patent system - the system is garbage, but they should hedge their bets and defensive patent in case it (the system) doesn't get changed.
Consistent? Then why are they the primary lobbyist behind the EU software patent initiative?
First of all, no it doesn't. What it means is that Red Hat, Suse, Mandrake, etc can't put your icon set on CDs that they *sell*. They're perfectly free to include it in a downloadable ISO, or some other means.
This is a common myth. Anti-commerce clauses in licenses are frequently _not_ limited to the paid-for distribution of software. They usually state "you can't make any money from this software" or something similar, which is a much broader scope. It could trivially be argued that Red Hat is using freely downloadable ISOs to make money (if not, their shareholders would be mighty miffed with them). If you can't see this, think about their business model - based on a low unit price and extensive support. Getting the software onto as many desktops as possible increases their support volume, and nifty icon sets would be an attractive feature to a potential consumer.
I would *only* agree that an anti-commerce clause is reasonable if it specifically limited itself to distribution where a significant profit is made on the distribution itself. Anything broader (or easier to write) essentially means that no profit-making enterprise can have anything to do with your product, which benefits you in no way (unless you're some anti-capitalist sort) and even further impedes others innovating upon your work.
As the creator and copyright holder of the piece, I believe I have the right to say how it's used.
By "used" I hope you mean "modified and redistributed", not "how the consumer makes use of it".
and did not want anyone to build upon to work to preserve it's artistic integrity.
This is a lame excuse. This problem has already been solved in most free software licenses by stipulating that any modified versions must clearly be marked as such.
Each claim should be evaluated regardless of messenger. If the claims don't make sense, there's no reason to immediately dismiss them because you know you're right. Instead, address them.
While a reasonable attitude, this approach is subject to a DoS attack. It is much harder to make a new claim that is both true and non-trivial than it is to make a new false claim. As my free time approaches zero and the number of paid bullshit artists approaches infinity, there has to be a filter in the chain somewhere. That filter is credibility.
Credibility does not give you a basis to refute a claim (you're a known liar, therefore your claim is false), nor does it suggest that we should automatically accept claims of credible sources (argument from authority); but it does give us a metric for prioritizing evaluation of new claims.
If I hear a claim from someone who is known to be a credible and reasonable source, and a claim from someone who is known to be unreasonable or biased, I'm going to give the claim from the credible source the time of day, and the PR mouthpiece will be ignored until I have more time. The exception is when he is making claims that are so obviously false that they can be refuted immediately.
The LGPL can be boiled down simply. You either provide the source code for your program that is a derived work of LGPL code, or do one of the following:
1) Statically link it, and provide the user the ability to relink with a bugfixed version of the LGPL code
2) Dynamically link it.
Plenty of commercial developers use LGPL code with no problems. See UT2004 et.al.'s use of SDL.
You can use apt-build to build your packages locally with whatever compiler options you want. Furthermore, where optimization is necessary for performance (like in crypto packages), optimized libraries are provided. See/usr/lib/i686 and friends.
Does anyone know of a decent/usable OSS LDAP browser that includes schema/template editing? I'm using a closed source Java LDAP browser which barely works, but haven't found anything else even comparable yet.
Re:The responses to this post are fascinating
on
Donald Knuth On NPR
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· Score: 1
Religious beliefs by one who claims to be a scientist _should_ cause people to be more vigilant in examining his work. Refuting his work outright based on those beliefs would be an ad hominem fallacy, and a fallacy committed very often in this politically correct world because it's attractive to the uneducated. But we should always consider the source of a claim, and when there is potential bias or conflict of interest, examine those claims with more scrutiny than we would for someone who had no observable contradictions. That doesn't call the person's character into question at all, it just means that we are ensuring that no soggy claims are being passed off as truth - which would only end up setting us back down the road if we accept a false claim and then build upon it.
Re:What I found interesting.
on
Donald Knuth On NPR
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· Score: 3, Insightful
In terms of the scientific method, the difference between atheists and agnostics is their view of the theory "God exists". Atheists consider this a testable theory, and the lack of convincing evidence supporting that theory (or any supernatural theory, for that matter) means to them that there is room to doubt that theory. Atheism does not imply a blind rejection of God, nor does it have anything to do with the rejection of organized religion. However, atheism is frequently associated with scientists, who frequently also reject organized religion, so atheism has gained that connotation by accident. Also, some very loud people who call themselves atheists blindly reject God without consideration - these are just zealots of a different nature.
Agnosticism is very similar to atheism with one key difference: agnostics believe that the theory "God exists" is not testable, and is thus disinteresting from the point of view of science.
Some view this as the "easy way out" of the deist question, but it's actually just another way of looking at the question from a scientific perspective. A theory must be testable in order for it to be verified or rejected through experiments. Theories which are not testable are nothing more than nice ideas or speculation from the perspective of science.
Most atheists and agnostics are not openly hostile to organized religion, but some are, and the rest of us get a bad name because of these loud few. Please do not associate atheism or agnosticism with anything more than differing opinions on how the scientific method should be applied to the question of God. Both atheism and agnosticism are closely related and in a different class from all other beliefs regarding God, in that they both reject faith as a way to find truth of God's existence or lack of existence.
Or you could take the "lame" way out and do mplayer -dumpstream rtsp://.... - it'll leave you with a Real format file, but save you from the sarcastic bitching about how hard command line utilities are to use.
You're purposely conflating the idea of my paying taxes for something that is useless to me, and my paying taxes for something that contradicts my interests. All of those things that you mentioned, while useless, do not contradict my interests; they are simply a waste of money from my perspective. What I object to is being taxed to fund government action that I believe is wrong and which directly affects me in a negative fashion. Arbitrary copyright is one example. The war on drugs is yet another prominent example.
Finally, I would rather someone build my car with a marijuana hangover then an alcohol hangover. Because there is on such thing as a Marijuana hangover.
There is such a thing if you buy cheap product instead of more pure stuff or using vaporisation. Of course the hangover is of a completely different nature than an alcohol hangover, and actually many people *like* the mellow and calm mood that a marijuana "hangover" provides, whereas you'd have a hard time finding anyone who likes the upset stomach and spinning head of an alcohol hangover.
Why is every bad habit these days assigned a diagnosis of "addiction"?
I'll tell you why. Because if we can blame our bad habits on a disease, something out of our control, then we can absolve ourselves of any responsibility for it.
I'll also tell you why. Because when a culture warrior can play up some set of actions that he disapproves of as a weakness or character flaw in a group of people (as opposed to their choice of how to utilize their freedom), it's easier to get legislation passed to discriminate against those people. The culture warrior cannot sleep at night until he is certain that anyone doing something that he disapproves of is either being punished or risking punishment for it - and he believes in it so much he willingly forks over higher taxes to put the system in charge of "re-educating" or "rehabilitating" those people. See drug prohibition as the most notorious example, but you could substitute just about any act here that is done by consenting adults in the privacy of their own home, yet is subject to criminal prosecution (i.e. sodomy).
Culture warriors see their actions as molding the Great Society they see in their minds according to their subjective moral code, when in the end what they are doing amounts to persecution of a carefully selected minority.
I'm interested in others' thoughts on this matter. Is the pyramid of 'who makes money' important in the ethics of piracy?
Yes, but not for the reasons you stated. When a pirated product is sold, it becomes a substitute for the real product. That means the consumer was willing to pay at least the price they paid for the pirated product, and the original author was deprived of that income.
On the other hand, when an item is copied for no profit, it's possible that the recipient might feel that he no longer has to buy the product (in fact I'm sure this happens quite often), but it's also possible that he would buy the product after checking it out, since he still has his money (I know this also happens quite often in the scope of me and my acquaintances). Selling a pirated product takes the money out of the hands of the consumer, not only enriching an illegitimate enterprise, but also decreasing the likelihood that the legitimate author will ever see his share.
Then you have the representation issue - i.e., I paid good money for this, and it turns out it's a piece of crap! $ORIGINAL_AUTHOR sucks! The original author's name is tarnished in the eyes of the suckered consumer and anyone they come in contact with. Well, they have no idea what the pirate did to their copy of that item, so it's a trade misrepresentation (call it plagiarism maybe?) issue as well as a copyright one.
Also, to the poster who said installed apps would be under the "Debian" menu, that wasn't always true.
There are two reasons this might be true:
You accidentally removed the 'menu' package, which is responsible for updating your window manager's menu when a package is installed.
You installed a program which has no GUI. Having these in the WM menu would be pointless.
Every Debian package that has a GUI installs a menu file as part of policy. update-menus from the 'menu' package is responsible for taking these menu files and constructing a Debian menu for each installed window manager, and it is automatically invoked by the script that dh_installmenus provides when building the package. If these are left out, it is a serious package bug and should be filed rather than ignored. But more likely, one of the two conditions I listed is what actually happened.
As usual, in CherryOS articles, copyright infringement of GPL code mysteriously becomes theft. In P2P piracy articles, copyright infringement mysteriously becomes an okay natural culture movement.
As usual, with people trying desperately to expose the mythical Slashdot hive-mind, nonprofit sharing of copyrighted works without permission is morally equivalent to exploiting someone else's copyrighted work without permission for financial gain.
Considering most bugs in non-driver code are endianness assumptions, I'd say that Linus running a big endian machine and the rest of the PC world running little endian machines provides a rather high probability that neither would be broken.
Maybe if you tried to get your head out of your rectum and stopped equating your hobby/hacker love of Linux with how things work out there - you know, in the real world - you'd begin to understand.
What you've failed to consider is that many of us _are_ in the real world, and that's where our experiences and opinions come from. Yes, I'm a Linux hobbyist, and fortunately I also get to work with Linux professionally. You do not have a monopoly on real world insight, as much as you'd like to think you do.
Your insinuation that you will rebuff any attempts to "educate" you (i.e. present an opinion that contradicts your own) just illustrates what a narrow and unwavering perspective you have. You know - that of a zealot.
Your frequent attempts to lump all Slashdot readers and editors into one hive-mind are only successful in getting a rise out of the ones for whom any direct and valid criticism applies. As for the rest, intelligent readers just chuckle for a moment at your silly propaganda techniques and rhetoric, and foe-list you.
Open Source solutions are so much better because they get the fixes out so much faster?
No. OSS solutions are better because they get the fixes out faster to people who are willing to do their own QA. The key here is that the user has a choice whether to wait for their vendor to release a QA'd fix, or to choose to install the fix themselves because they know no regression will affect them as much as the window of vulnerability would. You don't have that choice as you wait for a proprietary vendor to lumber along on its own schedule to get the patch out the door.
Slashdot Mirror
There may another way to keep legislators in line that nobody really considers - a popular veto. If a legislator is trying to pass something, it not only has to pass the House and Senate and be signed by the president, but in that period, there would be a request for public comments open to the constituents of the legislator(s). These comments would go on the record along with an Approve/Neutral/Disapprove rating, and if enough people disapprove (determine the semantics later) the bill would not pass. Effectively, this means that the representatives must keep their constituents' interests in mind at all times if they don't want their bills vetoed, or even worse, a hostile public that simply hamstrings their every move until they are ousted. It will also provide a permanent record of how well their actions match up with the desires of their constituents.
I would *only* agree that an anti-commerce clause is reasonable if it specifically limited itself to distribution where a significant profit is made on the distribution itself. Anything broader (or easier to write) essentially means that no profit-making enterprise can have anything to do with your product, which benefits you in no way (unless you're some anti-capitalist sort) and even further impedes others innovating upon your work.
Credibility does not give you a basis to refute a claim (you're a known liar, therefore your claim is false), nor does it suggest that we should automatically accept claims of credible sources (argument from authority); but it does give us a metric for prioritizing evaluation of new claims.
If I hear a claim from someone who is known to be a credible and reasonable source, and a claim from someone who is known to be unreasonable or biased, I'm going to give the claim from the credible source the time of day, and the PR mouthpiece will be ignored until I have more time. The exception is when he is making claims that are so obviously false that they can be refuted immediately.
If your customers are consumers, why would they care or bother unless you suddenly changed your tune on support?
1) Statically link it, and provide the user the ability to relink with a bugfixed version of the LGPL code
2) Dynamically link it.
Plenty of commercial developers use LGPL code with no problems. See UT2004 et.al.'s use of SDL.
Poster 2: That's really generous of you.
Anonymous Dumbass (sneering): True generosity would have been to give all of your money to the relief effort.
You can use apt-build to build your packages locally with whatever compiler options you want. Furthermore, where optimization is necessary for performance (like in crypto packages), optimized libraries are provided. See /usr/lib/i686 and friends.
Does anyone know of a decent/usable OSS LDAP browser that includes schema/template editing? I'm using a closed source Java LDAP browser which barely works, but haven't found anything else even comparable yet.
Religious beliefs by one who claims to be a scientist _should_ cause people to be more vigilant in examining his work. Refuting his work outright based on those beliefs would be an ad hominem fallacy, and a fallacy committed very often in this politically correct world because it's attractive to the uneducated. But we should always consider the source of a claim, and when there is potential bias or conflict of interest, examine those claims with more scrutiny than we would for someone who had no observable contradictions. That doesn't call the person's character into question at all, it just means that we are ensuring that no soggy claims are being passed off as truth - which would only end up setting us back down the road if we accept a false claim and then build upon it.
Agnosticism is very similar to atheism with one key difference: agnostics believe that the theory "God exists" is not testable, and is thus disinteresting from the point of view of science.
Some view this as the "easy way out" of the deist question, but it's actually just another way of looking at the question from a scientific perspective. A theory must be testable in order for it to be verified or rejected through experiments. Theories which are not testable are nothing more than nice ideas or speculation from the perspective of science.
Most atheists and agnostics are not openly hostile to organized religion, but some are, and the rest of us get a bad name because of these loud few. Please do not associate atheism or agnosticism with anything more than differing opinions on how the scientific method should be applied to the question of God. Both atheism and agnosticism are closely related and in a different class from all other beliefs regarding God, in that they both reject faith as a way to find truth of God's existence or lack of existence.
Or you could take the "lame" way out and do mplayer -dumpstream rtsp://.... - it'll leave you with a Real format file, but save you from the sarcastic bitching about how hard command line utilities are to use.
You're purposely conflating the idea of my paying taxes for something that is useless to me, and my paying taxes for something that contradicts my interests. All of those things that you mentioned, while useless, do not contradict my interests; they are simply a waste of money from my perspective. What I object to is being taxed to fund government action that I believe is wrong and which directly affects me in a negative fashion. Arbitrary copyright is one example. The war on drugs is yet another prominent example.
Culture warriors see their actions as molding the Great Society they see in their minds according to their subjective moral code, when in the end what they are doing amounts to persecution of a carefully selected minority.
That's funny considering tax preparation is a private industry that only exists because the IRS exists.
On the other hand, when an item is copied for no profit, it's possible that the recipient might feel that he no longer has to buy the product (in fact I'm sure this happens quite often), but it's also possible that he would buy the product after checking it out, since he still has his money (I know this also happens quite often in the scope of me and my acquaintances). Selling a pirated product takes the money out of the hands of the consumer, not only enriching an illegitimate enterprise, but also decreasing the likelihood that the legitimate author will ever see his share.
Then you have the representation issue - i.e., I paid good money for this, and it turns out it's a piece of crap! $ORIGINAL_AUTHOR sucks! The original author's name is tarnished in the eyes of the suckered consumer and anyone they come in contact with. Well, they have no idea what the pirate did to their copy of that item, so it's a trade misrepresentation (call it plagiarism maybe?) issue as well as a copyright one.
Every Debian package that has a GUI installs a menu file as part of policy. update-menus from the 'menu' package is responsible for taking these menu files and constructing a Debian menu for each installed window manager, and it is automatically invoked by the script that dh_installmenus provides when building the package. If these are left out, it is a serious package bug and should be filed rather than ignored. But more likely, one of the two conditions I listed is what actually happened.
Considering most bugs in non-driver code are endianness assumptions, I'd say that Linus running a big endian machine and the rest of the PC world running little endian machines provides a rather high probability that neither would be broken.
Your insinuation that you will rebuff any attempts to "educate" you (i.e. present an opinion that contradicts your own) just illustrates what a narrow and unwavering perspective you have. You know - that of a zealot.
Your frequent attempts to lump all Slashdot readers and editors into one hive-mind are only successful in getting a rise out of the ones for whom any direct and valid criticism applies. As for the rest, intelligent readers just chuckle for a moment at your silly propaganda techniques and rhetoric, and foe-list you.
And how would you plan to accomplish this? Legislation? Licensing? Guilds?