Yes, the writeup ommitted the claim that EFF and Indymedia, the one whose servers were taken don't have the ability to request the unsealing. It also ommitted the claim that the request pertains to international treaty regarding confidentiality. But the government did in fact dismiss the claims on the grounds that, and I quote, " the sealed documents pertain to an ongoing criminal terrorism investigation". That's what the writeup claimed, that's what actually is in the document. So I'm left wondering what exactly your point is regarding "card-carrying tinfoil elitists crying wolf". There's the fucking wolf right there in writing, you can see it too, so this is not "crying wolf" in the allegorical sense but in the factual there-is-actually-a-wolf sense.
But to pick yet another (they tend to multiply like lice in Moria) in fact all that is required is that you have the offer. In truth, you only need be aware of the offer, since it is in fact required to be an offer valid for any third party, not any third party who has the binary.
I think nits are being picked here, since I think his point was about not distributing the software, which is what I believe the original case of custom software was describing.
Here's the deal: If you don't distribute binaries to any third party, then you do not have to offer the source to any third party.
If you do distribute binaries to any third party, then you do have to offer the source to any third party.
Being able to keep your program to yourself is a fundamental right the GPL doesn't violate. It doesn't force you to distribute your program, it only forces you to distribute source when/if you distribute your program.
You probably agree with what I've said, so I hope everyone is clear now.
Don't leave out lesbians, who can also exercise their patriotic libido by imagining what it'd be like to bump uglies with the feminine personification of freedom. Oh yeah...
I hereby revoke your membership in the tinfoil hat club.
Liar, you don't have the power. There's only one member of the Tinfoil Hat Club who holds the power to revoke membership, and he/she would never reveal himself to Them by actually using it.
Yes, Democrats and Republicans are different. If you'll pardon the hyperbole, Pol Pot and Stalin are different, but I wouldn't vote for either.
The key thing to understand is that while Democrats and Republicans (and any other powerful party, the States just happen to have only two) may differ in many ways, they are very similar in that they are politicians and should not be trusted. Clinton signing the DMCA and the roving wiretap laws is a very salient example of the ways you can be screwed by whoever is holding power if you fail to hold them accountable. Forgiving Clinton and the Democrats for signing a blatantly anti-4th Ammendment law because Democrats and Republicans are different is foolish.
It's that kind of partisan loyalty that allows both parties to get away with this kind of crap. Of course the way this works is as soon as someone wants to hold someone of one party accountable, a loyalist says "But the other party is no better!" thus distracting the issue of accountability as it goes back and forth. The appropriate response? Yes, you're right, so let's hold them all accountable.
Yes, I know I'm only some 5 Karma Star Armchair General in front of a PC and it's easy to critize but still...
That's very true, but consider these two points: 1) It might be difficult and require lots of training to do something right, but it is usually easy to recognize something being horribly botched. 2) Nothing you're saying hasn't already been said by actual Generals and then ignored by the civilian command (at least until the Generals were proven right).
I heard about this on NPR. Some expert writing a book or some such was describing the very failure at the Euphrates. It seems part of the problem was that the information was streaming -up- to the generals back at base, but wasn't getting filtered down to the armies on the move. He contrasted this with a case in Afghanistan where some Special Forces on the ground spotted a line of Taliban troops, and was able to communicate with the air force to bring a nearby pilot in to hit the line while it was still exposed. The difference in models seems to have made part of the difference in results.
There is a lot of potential for a highly networked battlefield, but like all technologies or strategies they only work if you use them correctly.
I agree. Their goal is to provide computers that just about anyone will be able to buy, where "just about anyone" includes rural China. $185 is way too much.
Dude, Half Life was a Doom ripoff, just done well (to a degree not seen before, don't get me wrong HL gets much props).
But seriously... Complaining about D3's plot as a HL ripoff is really silly, since it is explicitly a re-telling of the Doom -1- story. Although I did hear that id actually hired a writer to create the script for them (based, of course, on the original Doom 1 constraints), in which case I think they got ripped off. As they did on the score, except for the decent tool-ripoff title screen track.
First, you can't use slavery to distinguish between the cases of 1776 and 1860. In both cases, the seceding states held slaves.
Yes, but in 1775, none of the colonists had representation in their government, and they seceeded to get it. The situation was somewhat the opposite in 1860 -- the secessionists in fact had government representation. That is the concept under which it was legitimate: that seceding from the Union represented the will of the people of those states and in this case a state should be allowed to secede, while the existence of unrepresented slaves clearly goes against that.
Second, the belief that a war was necessary to end slavery is ridiculous, considering that every other slave-owning nation of the world managed to end slavery peacefully through comepensated emancipation.
That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that the civil war to a large degree occured because of the slavery issue. Whether it was hypothetically possible for the slaves to have been emancipated without a war is irrelevent to my point. The decline of slavery is irrelevent to the South's willingness to fight over it and the other issues that were intertwined with slavery. The issue was long-lived and deeply divided the nation, and whether or not the issue could have been resolved in some fashion is irrelevent to the fact that it wasn't. Like I said, Lincoln did not wage the war to free the slaves, he did it to save the Union (this according to his own words) which they did shortly after he took office, before he could have possibly mended the issues causing secession.
Id' you'd like to learn more, I'd recommend "The Real Lincoln" by Thomas DiLorenzo.
Heh. I won't rag on you for not understanding what 'marginal cost' means.
I will rag on you for somehow forgetting that hardware also has a large development cost. You have to pay someone to develop the hardware, and in the case of Intel, AMD, Via, NVidia, ATI, that's a lot of someones over a long period of time. I would imagine it cost Intel billions to develop the current version of the Pentium 4. Intel probably has as many testing engineers on the project as MS has programmers on XP.
And THEN you have to add on the marginal cost. The real, substantial, physical cost of producing each part. And, of course, all the engineers involved in manufacturing and developing the manufacturing processes.
And STILL hardware sells with margins drastically below that of software. Hardware STILL has been going down in price while software has not.
This isn't an attempt to justify software piracy; it's still copyright violation. This is rather simply pointing out the fact that because software is such a high price compared to the hardware despite have basically no marginal cost and not going down in price like basically every other part of the computer, THAT is why people pirate. And THAT is why the parent of your post was marked insightful.
Civil rights and abolition of slavery were later incorporated into the justification for the war, as the body count rose and the South under some brilliant military leadership retained the initiative. "Slavery" is the kindergarden version recounted to try and justify the self-mutilation the US underwent in the 1870s.
This is true... Lincoln's intent was not to free the slaves, it was to "save the union" by waging war on half of it. However, the issue of slavery was deeply woven into the reasons for the conflict. In many ways, the Civil War was just the culmination of the conflict over slavery that began before the Constitution was ratified. The issue was recognized at the time as being so divisive that it had to simply be ignored, lest the flegdling union break apart. In particular, any discussion on the issue of slavery in Congress or any alteration to the Constitution prohibiting slavery was disallowed until 1808 (the latter actually being in the Constitution itself). At several points attempts to put forward anti-slavery ammendments or bills had threatened the union. Cessation was threatened before finally being acted upon, and in those earlier days there would have been little chance of the northern states preventing this.
On the issue of the right of the southern states to leave the union... It's probably true that they should have had the right, and were just as justified as they were when they rebelled against Britain. On the other hand, when the majority of their population had no say in this decision, can they really be said to be executing a right? That's only the perspective from my moral high horse in 2004, though. After all, the North disenfranchised the female half of its population. But were it to come up again in modern times, I think we would be justified in preventing seccession on behalf of the rights of those the secceeding states wished to strip rights from.
It is an old joke. Sam on Cheers once said when picking up a lady: "Not many people know this but I'm actually famous". New jokes don't come around much, so I settle for good delivery of old ones.:)
This is completely orthogonal to the points brought up in this thread, but if you're talking about MFC (Microsoft Foundation Classes) then it's not a big deal... The STL didn't exist when that was written, and in fact just about every vendor had their own set of classes to do all the basic stuff like containers.
Still wondering why this "charity" would be more worthwhile than one that say, oh I dunno, feeds hungry people, provides health care for sick people, keeps tabs on our government, etc.?
Yeah, I think expiration dates are a good thing. Sometimes the effects of a law aren't obvious, and being able to say "okay, how did this law work out in practice?" and either let it go away or try to refine it if necessary sounds like a good thing to me. Without the expiration date stupid laws are too likely to just stick around.
I still remember the State of the Union when Bush warned that PATRIOT was going to expire and there was cheering.:)
Sarge: 320 by 240? Son, when I was your age, only the best systems would run at 320 by 200! Us poor enlisted men were stuck with 160 by 100, and it was good enough for us!
secure in the knowledge that if anything horrible happens someone's gonna pay dearly for it.
Who exactly pays? Not the corporation; a corporation is a "what", not a "who". The people in that company are shielded by the "corporate person". The corporation may be sued and fined, but the actual people who made the decisions and made the profit are safe.
And the companies usually aren't sued "into oblivion" either. Ford Pinto, the Firestone tire failures (which were actually Ford's specifications) caused deaths, but Ford is still around. Phillip Morris... need I say more? Which of their execs are in jail, or for that matter simply not really really rich anymore?
"Sue them into oblivion if something goes wrong" can be an effective deterrent. History has shown that it often is not, and when it is a deterrent it is only after some disaster happens and the industry decides to shape up.
Self-interest is exactly why companies spend more time marketing that their product is safe rather than actually making it so.
Yes. It's quite possible that in another hijack attempt, all the passengers will die.
The difference, next time, will be that the passengers will know that if they don't fight back, they will still die. They will die, and many others will die too.
The only reason we were taught to cooperate is that we believed that would help us survive. Now we know that isn't the case.
That's the tradeoff. What they actually end up doing is both -- develop the new technology, but try to block the need for it as long as possible to maintain their current margins.
I saw this happen when I worked at the EPA emissions testing lab. Negotiating on new emissions regulations the auto industry reps would say that there was no way to develop the tech, it would be too expensive if they could, and eventually the proposed reductions in emissions were drastically reduced, and the required date for implementation pushed out.
Six months later, the advertisements said "meets EPA 200x standards!"
Industry certainly has an incentive to prepare for an oil-free future. They have little incentive to bring that future to pass any sooner than they have to.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, the writeup ommitted the claim that EFF and Indymedia, the one whose servers were taken don't have the ability to request the unsealing. It also ommitted the claim that the request pertains to international treaty regarding confidentiality. But the government did in fact dismiss the claims on the grounds that, and I quote, " the sealed documents pertain to an ongoing criminal terrorism investigation". That's what the writeup claimed, that's what actually is in the document. So I'm left wondering what exactly your point is regarding "card-carrying tinfoil elitists crying wolf". There's the fucking wolf right there in writing, you can see it too, so this is not "crying wolf" in the allegorical sense but in the factual there-is-actually-a-wolf sense.
But to pick yet another (they tend to multiply like lice in Moria) in fact all that is required is that you have the offer. In truth, you only need be aware of the offer, since it is in fact required to be an offer valid for any third party, not any third party who has the binary.
I think nits are being picked here, since I think his point was about not distributing the software, which is what I believe the original case of custom software was describing.
Here's the deal: If you don't distribute binaries to any third party, then you do not have to offer the source to any third party.
If you do distribute binaries to any third party, then you do have to offer the source to any third party.
Being able to keep your program to yourself is a fundamental right the GPL doesn't violate. It doesn't force you to distribute your program, it only forces you to distribute source when/if you distribute your program.
You probably agree with what I've said, so I hope everyone is clear now.
Don't leave out lesbians, who can also exercise their patriotic libido by imagining what it'd be like to bump uglies with the feminine personification of freedom. Oh yeah...
I hereby revoke your membership in the tinfoil hat club.
Liar, you don't have the power. There's only one member of the Tinfoil Hat Club who holds the power to revoke membership, and he/she would never reveal himself to Them by actually using it.
Yes, Democrats and Republicans are different. If you'll pardon the hyperbole, Pol Pot and Stalin are different, but I wouldn't vote for either.
The key thing to understand is that while Democrats and Republicans (and any other powerful party, the States just happen to have only two) may differ in many ways, they are very similar in that they are politicians and should not be trusted. Clinton signing the DMCA and the roving wiretap laws is a very salient example of the ways you can be screwed by whoever is holding power if you fail to hold them accountable. Forgiving Clinton and the Democrats for signing a blatantly anti-4th Ammendment law because Democrats and Republicans are different is foolish.
It's that kind of partisan loyalty that allows both parties to get away with this kind of crap. Of course the way this works is as soon as someone wants to hold someone of one party accountable, a loyalist says "But the other party is no better!" thus distracting the issue of accountability as it goes back and forth. The appropriate response? Yes, you're right, so let's hold them all accountable.
Yes, I know I'm only some 5 Karma Star Armchair General in front of a PC and it's easy to critize but still...
That's very true, but consider these two points:
1) It might be difficult and require lots of training to do something right, but it is usually easy to recognize something being horribly botched. 2) Nothing you're saying hasn't already been said by actual Generals and then ignored by the civilian command (at least until the Generals were proven right).
I heard about this on NPR. Some expert writing a book or some such was describing the very failure at the Euphrates. It seems part of the problem was that the information was streaming -up- to the generals back at base, but wasn't getting filtered down to the armies on the move. He contrasted this with a case in Afghanistan where some Special Forces on the ground spotted a line of Taliban troops, and was able to communicate with the air force to bring a nearby pilot in to hit the line while it was still exposed. The difference in models seems to have made part of the difference in results.
There is a lot of potential for a highly networked battlefield, but like all technologies or strategies they only work if you use them correctly.
I agree. Their goal is to provide computers that just about anyone will be able to buy, where "just about anyone" includes rural China. $185 is way too much.
Dude, Half Life was a Doom ripoff, just done well (to a degree not seen before, don't get me wrong HL gets much props).
But seriously... Complaining about D3's plot as a HL ripoff is really silly, since it is explicitly a re-telling of the Doom -1- story. Although I did hear that id actually hired a writer to create the script for them (based, of course, on the original Doom 1 constraints), in which case I think they got ripped off. As they did on the score, except for the decent tool-ripoff title screen track.
Maybe he just has no self-respect?
First, you can't use slavery to distinguish between the cases of 1776 and 1860. In both cases, the seceding states held slaves.
Yes, but in 1775, none of the colonists had representation in their government, and they seceeded to get it. The situation was somewhat the opposite in 1860 -- the secessionists in fact had government representation. That is the concept under which it was legitimate: that seceding from the Union represented the will of the people of those states and in this case a state should be allowed to secede, while the existence of unrepresented slaves clearly goes against that.
Second, the belief that a war was necessary to end slavery is ridiculous, considering that every other slave-owning nation of the world managed to end slavery peacefully through comepensated emancipation.
That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that the civil war to a large degree occured because of the slavery issue. Whether it was hypothetically possible for the slaves to have been emancipated without a war is irrelevent to my point. The decline of slavery is irrelevent to the South's willingness to fight over it and the other issues that were intertwined with slavery. The issue was long-lived and deeply divided the nation, and whether or not the issue could have been resolved in some fashion is irrelevent to the fact that it wasn't. Like I said, Lincoln did not wage the war to free the slaves, he did it to save the Union (this according to his own words) which they did shortly after he took office, before he could have possibly mended the issues causing secession.
Id' you'd like to learn more, I'd recommend "The Real Lincoln" by Thomas DiLorenzo.
Sounds interesting.
Heh. I won't rag on you for not understanding what 'marginal cost' means.
I will rag on you for somehow forgetting that hardware also has a large development cost. You have to pay someone to develop the hardware, and in the case of Intel, AMD, Via, NVidia, ATI, that's a lot of someones over a long period of time. I would imagine it cost Intel billions to develop the current version of the Pentium 4. Intel probably has as many testing engineers on the project as MS has programmers on XP.
And THEN you have to add on the marginal cost. The real, substantial, physical cost of producing each part. And, of course, all the engineers involved in manufacturing and developing the manufacturing processes.
And STILL hardware sells with margins drastically below that of software. Hardware STILL has been going down in price while software has not.
This isn't an attempt to justify software piracy; it's still copyright violation. This is rather simply pointing out the fact that because software is such a high price compared to the hardware despite have basically no marginal cost and not going down in price like basically every other part of the computer, THAT is why people pirate. And THAT is why the parent of your post was marked insightful.
Civil rights and abolition of slavery were later incorporated into the justification for the war, as the body count rose and the South under some brilliant military leadership retained the initiative. "Slavery" is the kindergarden version recounted to try and justify the self-mutilation the US underwent in the 1870s.
This is true... Lincoln's intent was not to free the slaves, it was to "save the union" by waging war on half of it. However, the issue of slavery was deeply woven into the reasons for the conflict. In many ways, the Civil War was just the culmination of the conflict over slavery that began before the Constitution was ratified. The issue was recognized at the time as being so divisive that it had to simply be ignored, lest the flegdling union break apart. In particular, any discussion on the issue of slavery in Congress or any alteration to the Constitution prohibiting slavery was disallowed until 1808 (the latter actually being in the Constitution itself). At several points attempts to put forward anti-slavery ammendments or bills had threatened the union. Cessation was threatened before finally being acted upon, and in those earlier days there would have been little chance of the northern states preventing this.
On the issue of the right of the southern states to leave the union... It's probably true that they should have had the right, and were just as justified as they were when they rebelled against Britain. On the other hand, when the majority of their population had no say in this decision, can they really be said to be executing a right? That's only the perspective from my moral high horse in 2004, though. After all, the North disenfranchised the female half of its population. But were it to come up again in modern times, I think we would be justified in preventing seccession on behalf of the rights of those the secceeding states wished to strip rights from.
That's called "knowing your audience".
It is an old joke. Sam on Cheers once said when picking up a lady: "Not many people know this but I'm actually famous". New jokes don't come around much, so I settle for good delivery of old ones. :)
This is completely orthogonal to the points brought up in this thread, but if you're talking about MFC (Microsoft Foundation Classes) then it's not a big deal... The STL didn't exist when that was written, and in fact just about every vendor had their own set of classes to do all the basic stuff like containers.
Still wondering why this "charity" would be more worthwhile than one that say, oh I dunno, feeds hungry people, provides health care for sick people, keeps tabs on our government, etc.?
:)
It's not.
Donate to both.
Problem solved.
Very nice. You'll find it's virtually impossible to ram this simple idea down people's throats, and damned if they will accept the idea willingly.
I don't care.
Yeah, I think expiration dates are a good thing. Sometimes the effects of a law aren't obvious, and being able to say "okay, how did this law work out in practice?" and either let it go away or try to refine it if necessary sounds like a good thing to me. Without the expiration date stupid laws are too likely to just stick around.
:)
I still remember the State of the Union when Bush warned that PATRIOT was going to expire and there was cheering.
Sarge: 320 by 240? Son, when I was your age, only the best systems would run at 320 by 200! Us poor enlisted men were stuck with 160 by 100, and it was good enough for us!
secure in the knowledge that if anything horrible happens someone's gonna pay dearly for it.
Who exactly pays? Not the corporation; a corporation is a "what", not a "who". The people in that company are shielded by the "corporate person". The corporation may be sued and fined, but the actual people who made the decisions and made the profit are safe.
And the companies usually aren't sued "into oblivion" either. Ford Pinto, the Firestone tire failures (which were actually Ford's specifications) caused deaths, but Ford is still around. Phillip Morris... need I say more? Which of their execs are in jail, or for that matter simply not really really rich anymore?
"Sue them into oblivion if something goes wrong" can be an effective deterrent. History has shown that it often is not, and when it is a deterrent it is only after some disaster happens and the industry decides to shape up.
Self-interest is exactly why companies spend more time marketing that their product is safe rather than actually making it so.
Yes. It's quite possible that in another hijack attempt, all the passengers will die.
The difference, next time, will be that the passengers will know that if they don't fight back, they will still die. They will die, and many others will die too.
The only reason we were taught to cooperate is that we believed that would help us survive. Now we know that isn't the case.
That's the tradeoff. What they actually end up doing is both -- develop the new technology, but try to block the need for it as long as possible to maintain their current margins.
I saw this happen when I worked at the EPA emissions testing lab. Negotiating on new emissions regulations the auto industry reps would say that there was no way to develop the tech, it would be too expensive if they could, and eventually the proposed reductions in emissions were drastically reduced, and the required date for implementation pushed out.
Six months later, the advertisements said "meets EPA 200x standards!"
Industry certainly has an incentive to prepare for an oil-free future. They have little incentive to bring that future to pass any sooner than they have to.