There's no realization that an artist does is not forced to put EVERYTHING THEY MAKE under CC after they first sip the Kool-Aid.
Interesting sentence construction. May I ask, have you studied Neuro Linguistic Programming? You use some very Eriksonian language patterns there.
Yes, there are cons, in that you give up editorial control and a fair chunk of revenue generation,
More accurate would be to say that you have the option to give up these things if you so choose, depending on the options you select for your licence. The CC is not nearly so monolithic as you seem to think.
Of course, once you consider these things as options rather than as some sort of compulsion, it becomes difficult to see them as "cons", doesn't it?;)
If there's something that you can't bear to have recontextualized, DON'T CC IT! If there's something that you want control over, DON'T CC IT! If you think it'll lose you money, and you don't want that, DON'T CC IT!
Are you sure you're not an NLPer? All those CAPITALISED EMBEDDED COMMANDS make me feel like I'm talking to Ross Jeffries.
Really, all I can say to these folks is: THINK FIRST! CC is a license, a legal document which gives up your rights.
Gosh. If you put it that way, I get an image of a big paper scroll with red sealing wax, SNEAKING up on someone, STEALING all their rights, and then running away away laughing as it hands them off to passers by. Silly, isn't it?
You get a much clearer understanding if you consider the process as one whereby you choose to grant to others a selection of rights over a particular creation of yours. That way we're clear that the creator controls which rights are granted, and that the grant is by his or her own choice. And we don't need any anthropomorphic legal documents running around and giggling, either.
You'd be amazed at how small the anti-microsoft group actually is.
I might at that, if you can support that claim.
Add this marketing ploy from MS onto the stack of reasons NOT to make a switch to linux and I think it would be hard to convince your management to spend alot of money to change especially when what you already have is "working fine".
Granted. But the PHB contingent have been firmly in the MS camp for a decade or more. They're pre-sold, since they'll go with whatever seems to threaten them the least.
And yet Linux still continues spread in spite of them, so these wouldn't seem to be the people Microsoft must convince.
But I think that out of everything MS does, marketing is their strength (look at it, with inferior product they control the market) and I don't see this as the hole digging that you do.
Then why do they want the OSDL on board?
The trouble is that I don't think this is a marketing problem, and I don't think marketing can fix it. At best Microsoft stands to slow the rate of adoption for a while. But as long as the underlying problems remain, people will keep coming back for another look.
The factors that encouraged the spread of Linux to it's current level of deployment wre going to continue to operate. This is an Out-Of-Band problem for MS. We just don't register on their scanners.
Writing your own license may seem like a good idea until you need to step into court and defend it.
Or if you prefer, you can sign away all your rights to an agency and take whatever they are willing to give you in return. The point isn't that writing licences is easy (I wouldn't know - IANAL) but that you are free to licence your work as you choose and the CC does expands your choices rather than restrict them.
As such, it seems like a good thing.
If it were that simple would we have bi-weekly postings on slashdot about the legitimacy of the GPL in court?
Well we don't really; not since Harald Welte won a case for violation of the GPL. There's still wriggle room for GPL detractors in that (as far as I know) there has yet to be a US test of the licence. But one of the SCO cases should supply that test real soon now. No one seems to think the GPL will be overturned.
It's a copyright licence. Your copyrights are just as enforceable under a CC licence as under any other.
I mean, what's the incentive to claim/release/share a copyrighted article if there is no way of protecting it properly?
That's jumping the gun a little - you've yet to establish that there is a problem with enforcement. It's a licence under copyright, the same mechanism that Mircosoft use to distribute software and that the record labels and movie studios use to distribute films and music. Ask them about enforceability. They've successfully sued enough people for copyright infringement.
It seems nowadays, lawsuits are about financial depth, whoever has enough cash to burn in court for the next 10-20 years will be pretty safe from any litigation, regardless of the right or wrong.
So what's your point? Money talks, obviously. Big corps can bully the little guy, okay. Are you suggesting this as a disincentive to employ a CC licence? I can't see how that follows.
You can't really make any money in a decentralized system
I know it's peripheral to your central point, but I think I'd like to challenge that assumption.
The Web is the archetypal decentralised system. It makes tons of money for all sorts of people.
But at Google, it's all about centralization. That's their way.
Is it? I have problems taking that on board.
If you want a company that was all about centralisation, look at CompuServe, who maintained their own private internet and charged a steep fee for access. You got stricty the services they offered and they allegedly censored discussions as a matter of routine.
By the standards of the time they were a prestigious service making reasonable money. By modern standards, almost no one used it.
AOL were also centralisation freaks, determined to make all the best stuff on the web AOL subscribers only. That didn't work either, and AOL lost customers almost as fast as it gained them.
Google, by contrast make megabucks by aggregating and indexing. There's nothing in Google that prevents you from accessing Yahoo or AltaVista if you wish, and they index everything they are allowed to index.
This isn't to say I support their partitioning of the Jabber network. I think that is a spectacularly boneheaded move hioch makes their client enormously less attractive.
It's also a move that seems out of character, and I hope they'll relent. Certainly it'll be worth watching to see what they do.
The people they are targetting are, as you correctly point out, those wavering on the edge of Linux adoption.
The trouble is that (IMHO) a great many of these people are moving primarily because they're pissed off at Microsoft. For this reason, they're unlikely to give much weight to a Microsoft sponsored survey and such propaganda may rebound against MS, further harming their credibility. We've already seen this happen with the Get The Facts campaign
So that's why MS so desperately needs a linux insider to endorse the study. If ODSL come on board, then they can claim a degree of balance and impartiality to the report, however illusory it may in fact be.
But without someone from inside the Linux camp, all they're going to do is dig a deeper hole for themselves.
Who cares? People don't switch to Linux based on MS recommendation.
Every time MS launches a marketing campaign against Linux, it shoots itself in the corporate foot. Redmond is very low on corporate credibility in some circles, and every one of these nasty, transparent assaults of theirs just makes them look worse and Linux look more attractive.
They're fighting themselves. They're shadowboxing and they don't even know it. And they can't understand why their knuckles bleed everytime they go for a knockout blow.
You did. You even went out of your way to point out that Google might be merely buying cable for selfish reasons that benefit only themselves, as opposed to actively trying to shaft the rest of the world.
It's balance of a sort, I suppose.
Then there's the
Of course it is. After all, Google does no evil [/sarcasm]
bit, which makes it sound just a teeny a bit to
those of us who have "difficult with English"
as if you might be implying something. Similarly the "truly" in
If this is truly the purpose they have for the fiber optic
could be taken to suggest that you very much doubt this to be the case.
Now, if you think they have anything to answer for, by all means let's hear it. If not,
I suggest we save the scarasm and innuendo until they actually do transgress.
Whilst your sentiment has merit, your example is atrocious. Verifying that there weren't any "vendor supplied backdoors" in an arbitrary Linux distribution would require - at a minimum - a deep understanding of the code and principles involved in implementing firewalling, both in general and specific to the Linux kernel.
That's true to an extent. However, you're overlooking one of the fundamental strengths of the Open Source Model - the "many eyes" principle.
I don't need to understand all of that to have a high degree of confidence in the code. It is enough for my purposes that there are a lot of people activelyreviewing the code for exploits. Not only do we have the Kernel code reviews, but also any number of variously hatted hackers. Some of them will review the code out of personal paranoia, some of the for the kudos they gain in being the first to report a vulnerability. And some of course have more nefarious purposes. However even the black hats serve us, since onece used, exploits are quickly found and patched.
All in all, the Linux codebase is the subject of one of the most brutal ongoing code reviews in existence. And that allows me to have faith in the mechanism. From there all I need understand are the iptables rules that constitute my specific firewall configuration.
If you're using, say, KDE, it's pretty hard to avoid khtml. This doesn't seem to bother a lot of people, because they accept such depndencies are part and parcel of the whole package.
Yes. But KDE is not compulsory. IE is not only insecure, on Windows it is inescapable.
Simple fact is, if you're not a hardcore coder, you have to put the same amount of trust in your Linux vendor as you do your Windows vendor.
Simple it may be, a fact it ain't. Show me the thousands of independant, non-NDAed reviewers for the Microsoft codebase, and I might begin to conceed the point. Otherwise, I must beg to differ.
Yes, yes, yes. Ken Thompson's paper describing how a malicous compiler can, theoretically, compromise any secirity function on a platform by inserting backoors into login programs and the like. It's one of the great hobgoblins of the UNIX world; a campfire story that *NIX geeks use to scare one another before bedtime.
However Ken describes a theoretical possibility. As a real world scenario I can't give it much credence; It's all a bit too Mulder and Scully for my taste. Besisdes, if there were such a backdoor, the script kiddies and spammers would have been using it since forever. D00dz! t3h Sikrit L1nux P@ssw0Rdz R "transubstantiation". Ch3ck 17 0uT!
Still, for the sake of the discussion, let's suppose the scenario is credible.
Because Microsoft too use compilers. In fact since windows is more widely deployed than linux, you could argue that windows is more likely to suffer from such a systemic security compromise since the payoff for the culprit is higher.
Thompson explains his scenario in terms of UNIX, but there's nothing there that couldn't be applied to Windows.
In fact, all the criticisms iplicit in Thompson's paper apply to all platorms, so it's really rather of a null argument when discussing comparative security.
So maybe I cannot be sure that my iptables module contains no backdoors. I can however have a far higher degree of confidence in my firewall than I can in the XP firewall, or in (say) Zone Alarm.
I really have to disagree if your implication is that relative security is easy
to measure between two systems.
I didn't think that was the GPs point at all. I took the point as
In general, Linux machines are more resistant to cracking than are windows boxes.
I think we can agree that it's possible to discuss generalities
here. Few would quibble if I said
In general, systems that set a password are more secure than those that do not.
I don't think you can support that implicit assertion that only comparisons
of specific systems are valid : feel free to argue the case to the contrary.
switching from MS to a completely
Open Source platform normally requires changing the whole software
stack. In such cases you can't do a line by line comparison between
the two different implementations.
mmm... and if you have a context where it is necessary to compare two specific systems, a line by line comparison is arguably essential.
But, given that we can legitimately discuss general relative security,
it seems unwise to insist on a discussion only of specific systems.
Linux allows the user to have a far greater degree of confidence
for a relatively small expenditure of effort. For example: It is possible
to understand your firewall's operation and to validate that there are
no vendor supplied backdoors and that there are no port knocking exploits other
that those you may choose to define yourself. That is not so easy under Windows. Another example: on windows, it is difficult to avoid internet
explorer. Even if you use (say) firefox, the filer windows still use
IE dlls and sooner or later one of the IE security holes will make
itself manifest. This is far easier to avoid on Linux.
I admit that I like the freedom of Open Source and the ready access to
code makes evaluation easier. It is my personal preference but I don't
see it as a panacea of security and I'm sick of both sides slinging
mud at each other.
Obviously there are no panaceas in the security world, and I'd agree that
mud slinging is a waste of everyone's time. But we can, and should, have
civilised discussions of the relative merits of both systems - security
included. And since security is one are where Linux historically does
much bette than Windows, it seems a little unfair to say "come on
chaps! let's keep restrict security discussion to specific installations".
FAT32 of course was a good thing; it was also in Win95 OSR2, IIRC. Likewise JPEG wallpaper.
IE integration was (IMHO) a retrograde step and part pf the reason they've had so many security problems since. JPEG wallpaper (we had this in Win95, surely?) and Drag and drop menus are nice, but hardly the basis for a new OS.
I honestly can't say I noticed the stability improvements. It must have been there with a thousand bugs fixed. But really, the bugs should never have been in '95 in the first place.
Which leaves us with plug and play. That, in retrospect, was nice. Credit where credit's due and all that. I'm just not sure it was worth all the hoopla.
3.11 to 95 was groundbreaking stuff. 98 was a bugfix release. Nothing wrong with that per se. But they hyped it as the same sort of quantum leap forward as from 3.11 to 95 and it clearly was not. And then they did the same thing with WindowsME, which wasn't even a bugfix release. Quite the reverse as it turned out...
Again, credit where credit's due, they seem to been a bit more responsible with their OS releases in recent years. They've still got a lot of ground to make up. And at the rate features are being withdrawn from Longhorn/Vista, you have to wonder what's going to be left to justify the mammoth increase in hardware that supposedly will be needed to run it. And if it turns out to be a marketing release offering nothing but bloat and eyecandy... well that's more or less where we came in.
Before we were blacklisted, we made 0 outgoing phone sales calls. Everyone found us, contacted us, and made us money. Now, we could have some problems; we could go under if we can't afford to hire a sales team.
Your complaint is not with Google but with the company that made false accusations against you. You have perhaps considered legal recourse against them? So far as I can see Google did the proper thing suspended you until they could check the facts and then reinstated you post haste.
You have a legitimate complaint, but it ain't with google.
Barring ME, there are tons of improvements with each successive version of Windows. If you cant find a difference between even 95 and 98, you need your head checked.
Now, now. Be polite:)
Sure I can find tons of differences. The icons are nicer. There is USB support. The tops of the windows do that gradient thing... errm... loads of stuff, sure.
I just can't think of a lot of stuff that couldn't have been either a patch or a new theme.
Feel free to point out all the very obvious things I'm missing, but outside of the purely cosmetic and a few drivers, I didn't notice any real improvement in the computing experience
.
At the time, I think a lot of people got carried away Microsof's enthusiasm. It's like the way everyone I know said Matrix: Reloaded or Terminator 3 were good films for a couple of weeks. Then the hype wore off and everyone thought "what a dog!".
And once the gloss wore off 98, and the registry started to fill up again, you could be forgiven for wondering waht these great benefits were.
So, having checked my head and determined that it remains on my shoulders, what were these benefits? I'm genuinely curious.
For instance, everyone who identifies BillG as the wellspring of all evil forgets how scared we all were of IBM back in the day.
Nope. Remember it well. That was one reason I used to like Microsoft.
I think the "wellspring of all evil" is sub-contracted under licence. Every now and then Satan takes a look at his minion-in-chief and holds a review to see if they've been performing up to expectations. Every now and then, the licence gets withdrawn and appliations are invited for a new Wellspring.
But according to sources in Hell (who do not wish to be named) even if Google starts now with the Microsoft class bastardry, Bill's tenure is reckoned to be good for another ten years.
Thanks for the clarification. I am not so sure there is any discrepancy here. As I mentioned before, violent behaviour is not necessarily a criminal act, particularly amongst the young. As such, I am not sure that introducing the crime rate is entirely relevant. It is possible, for example, that the over-all crime rate has decreased, yet the level of aggression and non-criminal violence in our society has increased.
Yep, that's entirely possible. On the other hand if violent juvenile crime had spiked over the time since videogames became popular, we can be sure that proponents of the videogames-cause-violence theory would offer this datum up as supporting evidence. However since the data shows the opposite in this case, and I really think we need to consider it as evidence against, at least until we see some further studies to explain the point. Probably a doctorate in there for someone if that's where their interests lie.
Incidentally, a couple of points bear mentioning here. Firstly I seem to have taken it on trust that there has been a drop in violent youth crime rather than crime overall. I got this from an earlier poster, and rereading those earlier posts the supposition may well be unfounded. I really do need to some background reading on this subject.
The second thing I wanted to say was that I only really got into this because I objected to MP3Chuck attempting to dismiss the drop in juvenile crime with an offhand "correlation != causation". I didn't really intend to debate the pros and cons of the study - which is my excuse for not doing the background reading.
I suppose the reason I tend to distrust studies of this nature lies in the fact that they are a convenient source of political capital and have been used as such
ever since Fredric Wertham and Seduction of the Innocent. We've seen the successive demonisation of (among others) Comic Books, Rock and Roll, Kung Fu Films, Dungeons and Dragons, Tom and Jerry, Punk Rock, Video Rental, Comic Books (again) Japanses Animation, The Internet and now Videogames. Most of these concerns seem either laughable or at least overstated after ten years or so have passed.
I appreciate that's not evidence - more of a position statement, really:)
It is an interesting topic to research and it will continue to be studied. I am sure that people will be able to debate this issue for a very long time...
It's been an interesting debate. I'll try and enter the next one with a bit more background data I think:)
mmm... I had a discussion a while back with a chap who held that all
patents were a bad thing and that we should junk the system.
I have to say I was sceptical at the time, but have dome some more reading
on the subject since. It really seems as though patents in general serve
to preserve the status quo and protect vested interests, at the cost of
chilling innovation and economic expansion.
Copyright law... it's difficult for me to be objective here. The
one hand the GPL is founded on copyright law. If not for the GPL
we would likely have no free software movement. On the other hand,
it's fair to ask if we would need one in the absence of copyright law.
Alas, the GPL's dependency on copyright tends to be used to browbeat
geeks who raise such questions, which may explain why I've yet to see a decent debate on the question.
I should also declare an interest (sort of) and say that having tried
my hand at writing, I do how writers would ever get paid if publishers
could just print the manuscript without permission. As the information age
matures, the barrier to publishing may be expected to continue to fall. so
maybe the problem will go away. But while I don't feel authors have a
right to expect megabucks (J.K.Rowling and Stephen King may disagree)
I think they should have some avenue of recompense.
Certainly serious copyright reform is called for. The timescales are far to
long and some of the measures in the DMCA would be laughable if they weren't
a little bit scary. All the same, I've yet to be persuaded of a case for
junking copyright.
Feel free to put the opposing case - it's an interesting question.
The point: Linux is just as guilty as Windows in the matter. Moreso actually, Linux can update almost daily, Windows doesnt even update yearly
I run Gentoo. I do update daily. I don't have a problem with updates. As long as there is some clear technical benefit, why the more the merrier!
My objection lies in Microsoft's release strategy, and in the cynical way they manipulated the marketing of new OS versions to boost revenue without offering the customer commensurate improvement in functionality.
That and the fact that these upgrades always seem to require a new bigger faster computer, which nevertheless doesn't seem any faster with the new OS installed.
And with the way that MS started to withdraw support for widely deployed versions of the OS when it became clear that their userbase was starting to see through these ploys. I have a problem with that, too.
Upgrades are, in and of themselves, A Good Thing. I like upgrades. I don't like paying out money for no benefit however, and that's what I have found objectionable in Microsoft's release strategy on occasion.
mmmm... it's a complicated issue and deserves rather more than just a throwaway one liner. Let me take a shot at this seriously. Unless noted otherwise, all this is strictly IMHO. It's a very personal view of the matter.
I have several problems with Microsoft's upgrade strategy.
Many of them seem have been technically unnecessary. 3.11->95 and ME->XP I can understand. Most of the rest (I'm discounting NT since I don't know much about it) could have been released as patches.
Most of them required hardware upgrades without delivering any noticable improvement in the computing experience.
Lately windows users, corporate users with large installations especially, seem to have become reluctant to upgrade. In response to the above MS have "unsupporting" older systems to force the matter.
They also tried to inflict an annual licence model in order to decouple their revenue stream from the upgrade cycle.
In both of cases they have met considerable resistance.
The impression I get from this is that MS place a far greater value on revenue than they do on user satisfaction. It's hard to tell beforehand whether a given version of windows will be the quantum leap inevitablty claimed by the advertising, or a bug ridden liability like WindowsME. This may be a legitimate marketing technique, but it does little do endear MS or Windows to users such as myself.
Recently MS seem to have adopted a more responsible attitude to new releases of their system. However this may be more pragmatic than altruistic and given their history in this area, I fear I must remain skeptical for the time being.
So: their releases have mainly been revenue driven and without noticable benefit for the user. In response to this users are becoming reluctant to upgrade, which led them to try and force the issue. I expect further experiments in this area from Microsoft, probably using DRM and time based licence expiry.
Based on their past actions, it is difficult to trust Microsoft, and I find myself reluctant to invest any money or effort in their products. Happily there is an alternative whose upgrade cycle is not so cynically manipulative and which offers substantially better value for money.
The crime rate is a strawman. The APA study does not (nor claim to) identify a correlation between observed violence and the juvenille crime rate.
Nah. A straw man is where you deliberately misrepresent your opponents position to make it easier to dismiss. A straw man argument would have been if I said:
The APA study claims a correlation between observed violence and the juvenille crime rate. However the crime rate figures contradict this, therefore the study is erroneous
However, the point I was actually making was:
It is claimed that violence in videogames encourages real life violence violence in children. If this were so, we might reasonably expect a rise in violent juvenile crime over the last ten years. However, we find a drop in juvenile violent crime over the same period. From this I conclude that we should be careful not to take this theory too seriously until such time as the researchers satisfactorily account for this seeming discrepancy.
So. as you can see, no straw man. I apologise if my argument was unclear from my earlier posts.
Incidentally, misrepresenting my arguments and then dismissing them as a straw man is a straw man argument. Hope that helps.
I won't argue with your research, mainly because it's too late at night over here to embark on that much reading. Except to say that Huesman's advice seems eminently sensible, and that Bandura's experiment had adults attacking the inflatable bozo. I'm not entirely sure that video games carry comparible authority to adults in a child's eyes.
The APA is a respected organization. They would not issue a statement on this issue unless the research was compelling...
Have a look at
this post
; bigbigbison argues the point better than I could
Time and time again, I hear about some company sharing my personal information with another company against my will. Right now, my credit card company seems to be free to do whatever it wants with my info so long as it sends me a notice of its new policy disguised as a piece of junk mail. If I were able to DRM-enable my own personal information, on the other hand, I could prevent them from doing that in an active, technology-driven way.
Or you might find that the keys are held by the credit card company and that the only person prevented from accessing your data is you, yourself.
It all comes down to who is going to hold they keys. You may not be offered the option.
Given the recent form of some of the corporate participants, I'm inclined toward pessimism, myself.
Whether you accept the concept of pervasive DRM for all kinds of data or not, if we accept that DRM is an eventuality, isn't it better for DRM technology development to proceed through a community-based action than to let a few corporations control it?
mmm... there are a few presuppositions there. A community based DRM may well be better than a corporate version. However, the infrastructure will likely not be in the hands of the community, and so the corporations may be expected to have rather more say as to what models get used.
I wouldn't oppose a FOSS DRM framework you understand: there are possible benign applications. I'm just not about to get to starry eyed in anticipation of some new digital utopia.
And I'd just as soon not accept DRM as inevtiable, at least not as currently envisaged. I think the technology will
in time stand revealed as a bare faced power grab by certain of its proponents and that this will bring the scheme to ruin.
So is it better that the FOSS crowd get involved? Probably not. In the short to medium term I think the best we can aspire to in this area is irrelevance.
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting sentence construction. May I ask, have you studied Neuro Linguistic Programming? You use some very Eriksonian language patterns there.
Yes, there are cons, in that you give up editorial control and a fair chunk of revenue generation,
More accurate would be to say that you have the option to give up these things if you so choose, depending on the options you select for your licence. The CC is not nearly so monolithic as you seem to think.
Of course, once you consider these things as options rather than as some sort of compulsion, it becomes difficult to see them as "cons", doesn't it? ;)
If there's something that you can't bear to have recontextualized, DON'T CC IT! If there's something that you want control over, DON'T CC IT! If you think it'll lose you money, and you don't want that, DON'T CC IT!
Are you sure you're not an NLPer? All those CAPITALISED EMBEDDED COMMANDS make me feel like I'm talking to Ross Jeffries.
Really, all I can say to these folks is: THINK FIRST! CC is a license, a legal document which gives up your rights.
Gosh. If you put it that way, I get an image of a big paper scroll with red sealing wax, SNEAKING up on someone, STEALING all their rights, and then running away away laughing as it hands them off to passers by. Silly, isn't it?
You get a much clearer understanding if you consider the process as one whereby you choose to grant to others a selection of rights over a particular creation of yours. That way we're clear that the creator controls which rights are granted, and that the grant is by his or her own choice. And we don't need any anthropomorphic legal documents running around and giggling, either.
Thinking, as always, remains a good idea.
I might at that, if you can support that claim.
Add this marketing ploy from MS onto the stack of reasons NOT to make a switch to linux and I think it would be hard to convince your management to spend alot of money to change especially when what you already have is "working fine".
Granted. But the PHB contingent have been firmly in the MS camp for a decade or more. They're pre-sold, since they'll go with whatever seems to threaten them the least.
And yet Linux still continues spread in spite of them, so these wouldn't seem to be the people Microsoft must convince.
But I think that out of everything MS does, marketing is their strength (look at it, with inferior product they control the market) and I don't see this as the hole digging that you do.
Then why do they want the OSDL on board?
The trouble is that I don't think this is a marketing problem, and I don't think marketing can fix it. At best Microsoft stands to slow the rate of adoption for a while. But as long as the underlying problems remain, people will keep coming back for another look.
The factors that encouraged the spread of Linux to it's current level of deployment wre going to continue to operate. This is an Out-Of-Band problem for MS. We just don't register on their scanners.
But you are entitled to your oppinion! :D
You too, I'm sure :D
Was there some point you were trying to make, or was this just a random opportunity with spam us on behallf of Ayn Rand?
Or if you prefer, you can sign away all your rights to an agency and take whatever they are willing to give you in return. The point isn't that writing licences is easy (I wouldn't know - IANAL) but that you are free to licence your work as you choose and the CC does expands your choices rather than restrict them.
As such, it seems like a good thing.
If it were that simple would we have bi-weekly postings on slashdot about the legitimacy of the GPL in court?
Well we don't really; not since Harald Welte won a case for violation of the GPL. There's still wriggle room for GPL detractors in that (as far as I know) there has yet to be a US test of the licence. But one of the SCO cases should supply that test real soon now. No one seems to think the GPL will be overturned.
It's a copyright licence. Your copyrights are just as enforceable under a CC licence as under any other.
I mean, what's the incentive to claim/release/share a copyrighted article if there is no way of protecting it properly?
That's jumping the gun a little - you've yet to establish that there is a problem with enforcement. It's a licence under copyright, the same mechanism that Mircosoft use to distribute software and that the record labels and movie studios use to distribute films and music. Ask them about enforceability. They've successfully sued enough people for copyright infringement.
It seems nowadays, lawsuits are about financial depth, whoever has enough cash to burn in court for the next 10-20 years will be pretty safe from any litigation, regardless of the right or wrong.
So what's your point? Money talks, obviously. Big corps can bully the little guy, okay. Are you suggesting this as a disincentive to employ a CC licence? I can't see how that follows.
I know it's peripheral to your central point, but I think I'd like to challenge that assumption.
The Web is the archetypal decentralised system. It makes tons of money for all sorts of people.
But at Google, it's all about centralization. That's their way.
Is it? I have problems taking that on board.
If you want a company that was all about centralisation, look at CompuServe, who maintained their own private internet and charged a steep fee for access. You got stricty the services they offered and they allegedly censored discussions as a matter of routine. By the standards of the time they were a prestigious service making reasonable money. By modern standards, almost no one used it.
AOL were also centralisation freaks, determined to make all the best stuff on the web AOL subscribers only. That didn't work either, and AOL lost customers almost as fast as it gained them.
Google, by contrast make megabucks by aggregating and indexing. There's nothing in Google that prevents you from accessing Yahoo or AltaVista if you wish, and they index everything they are allowed to index.
This isn't to say I support their partitioning of the Jabber network. I think that is a spectacularly boneheaded move hioch makes their client enormously less attractive. It's also a move that seems out of character, and I hope they'll relent. Certainly it'll be worth watching to see what they do.
The people they are targetting are, as you correctly point out, those wavering on the edge of Linux adoption.
The trouble is that (IMHO) a great many of these people are moving primarily because they're pissed off at Microsoft. For this reason, they're unlikely to give much weight to a Microsoft sponsored survey and such propaganda may rebound against MS, further harming their credibility. We've already seen this happen with the Get The Facts campaign
So that's why MS so desperately needs a linux insider to endorse the study. If ODSL come on board, then they can claim a degree of balance and impartiality to the report, however illusory it may in fact be.
But without someone from inside the Linux camp, all they're going to do is dig a deeper hole for themselves.
Every time MS launches a marketing campaign against Linux, it shoots itself in the corporate foot. Redmond is very low on corporate credibility in some circles, and every one of these nasty, transparent assaults of theirs just makes them look worse and Linux look more attractive.
They're fighting themselves. They're shadowboxing and they don't even know it. And they can't understand why their knuckles bleed everytime they go for a knockout blow.
I could almost feel sorry for them...
You did. You even went out of your way to point out that Google might be merely buying cable for selfish reasons that benefit only themselves, as opposed to actively trying to shaft the rest of the world.
It's balance of a sort, I suppose.
Then there's the
bit, which makes it sound just a teeny a bit to those of us who have "difficult with English" as if you might be implying something. Similarly the "truly" in could be taken to suggest that you very much doubt this to be the case.Now, if you think they have anything to answer for, by all means let's hear it. If not, I suggest we save the scarasm and innuendo until they actually do transgress.
That better?
Umm... what have they done that requires apology? Buying up cable that people are willing to sell? How evil is that?.
Having said that, this is all speculation
Quite so, quite so. So why don't we save the villification until such time as they actually transgress? Just for a change.
That's true to an extent. However, you're overlooking one of the fundamental strengths of the Open Source Model - the "many eyes" principle.
I don't need to understand all of that to have a high degree of confidence in the code. It is enough for my purposes that there are a lot of people activelyreviewing the code for exploits. Not only do we have the Kernel code reviews, but also any number of variously hatted hackers. Some of them will review the code out of personal paranoia, some of the for the kudos they gain in being the first to report a vulnerability. And some of course have more nefarious purposes. However even the black hats serve us, since onece used, exploits are quickly found and patched.
All in all, the Linux codebase is the subject of one of the most brutal ongoing code reviews in existence. And that allows me to have faith in the mechanism. From there all I need understand are the iptables rules that constitute my specific firewall configuration.
If you're using, say, KDE, it's pretty hard to avoid khtml. This doesn't seem to bother a lot of people, because they accept such depndencies are part and parcel of the whole package.
Yes. But KDE is not compulsory. IE is not only insecure, on Windows it is inescapable.
Simple fact is, if you're not a hardcore coder, you have to put the same amount of trust in your Linux vendor as you do your Windows vendor.
Simple it may be, a fact it ain't. Show me the thousands of independant, non-NDAed reviewers for the Microsoft codebase, and I might begin to conceed the point. Otherwise, I must beg to differ.
However Ken describes a theoretical possibility. As a real world scenario I can't give it much credence; It's all a bit too Mulder and Scully for my taste. Besisdes, if there were such a backdoor, the script kiddies and spammers would have been using it since forever. D00dz! t3h Sikrit L1nux P@ssw0Rdz R "transubstantiation". Ch3ck 17 0uT!
Still, for the sake of the discussion, let's suppose the scenario is credible. Because Microsoft too use compilers. In fact since windows is more widely deployed than linux, you could argue that windows is more likely to suffer from such a systemic security compromise since the payoff for the culprit is higher.
Thompson explains his scenario in terms of UNIX, but there's nothing there that couldn't be applied to Windows. In fact, all the criticisms iplicit in Thompson's paper apply to all platorms, so it's really rather of a null argument when discussing comparative security.
So maybe I cannot be sure that my iptables module contains no backdoors. I can however have a far higher degree of confidence in my firewall than I can in the XP firewall, or in (say) Zone Alarm.
And that is all I ever claimed.
I didn't think that was the GPs point at all. I took the point as
I think we can agree that it's possible to discuss generalities here. Few would quibble if I saidI don't think you can support that implicit assertion that only comparisons of specific systems are valid : feel free to argue the case to the contrary.
switching from MS to a completely Open Source platform normally requires changing the whole software stack. In such cases you can't do a line by line comparison between the two different implementations.
mmm... and if you have a context where it is necessary to compare two specific systems, a line by line comparison is arguably essential. But, given that we can legitimately discuss general relative security, it seems unwise to insist on a discussion only of specific systems.
Linux allows the user to have a far greater degree of confidence for a relatively small expenditure of effort. For example: It is possible to understand your firewall's operation and to validate that there are no vendor supplied backdoors and that there are no port knocking exploits other that those you may choose to define yourself. That is not so easy under Windows. Another example: on windows, it is difficult to avoid internet explorer. Even if you use (say) firefox, the filer windows still use IE dlls and sooner or later one of the IE security holes will make itself manifest. This is far easier to avoid on Linux.
I admit that I like the freedom of Open Source and the ready access to code makes evaluation easier. It is my personal preference but I don't see it as a panacea of security and I'm sick of both sides slinging mud at each other.
Obviously there are no panaceas in the security world, and I'd agree that mud slinging is a waste of everyone's time. But we can, and should, have civilised discussions of the relative merits of both systems - security included. And since security is one are where Linux historically does much bette than Windows, it seems a little unfair to say "come on chaps! let's keep restrict security discussion to specific installations".
Vaporware is always going to be cool.
I'd never have had Carted pegged for a ruskie
IE integration was (IMHO) a retrograde step and part pf the reason they've had so many security problems since. JPEG wallpaper (we had this in Win95, surely?) and Drag and drop menus are nice, but hardly the basis for a new OS.
I honestly can't say I noticed the stability improvements. It must have been there with a thousand bugs fixed. But really, the bugs should never have been in '95 in the first place.
Which leaves us with plug and play. That, in retrospect, was nice. Credit where credit's due and all that. I'm just not sure it was worth all the hoopla.
3.11 to 95 was groundbreaking stuff. 98 was a bugfix release. Nothing wrong with that per se. But they hyped it as the same sort of quantum leap forward as from 3.11 to 95 and it clearly was not. And then they did the same thing with WindowsME, which wasn't even a bugfix release. Quite the reverse as it turned out...
Again, credit where credit's due, they seem to been a bit more responsible with their OS releases in recent years. They've still got a lot of ground to make up. And at the rate features are being withdrawn from Longhorn/Vista, you have to wonder what's going to be left to justify the mammoth increase in hardware that supposedly will be needed to run it. And if it turns out to be a marketing release offering nothing but bloat and eyecandy... well that's more or less where we came in.
I can't be the first one to point this out, I'm sure:
http://www.altavista.com/
http://search.msn.com/
http://www.yahoo.com/
Before we were blacklisted, we made 0 outgoing phone sales calls. Everyone found us, contacted us, and made us money. Now, we could have some problems; we could go under if we can't afford to hire a sales team.
Your complaint is not with Google but with the company that made false accusations against you. You have perhaps considered legal recourse against them? So far as I can see Google did the proper thing suspended you until they could check the facts and then reinstated you post haste.
You have a legitimate complaint, but it ain't with google.
Now, now. Be polite :)
Sure I can find tons of differences. The icons are nicer. There is USB support. The tops of the windows do that gradient thing... errm... loads of stuff, sure.
I just can't think of a lot of stuff that couldn't have been either a patch or a new theme.
Feel free to point out all the very obvious things I'm missing, but outside of the purely cosmetic and a few drivers, I didn't notice any real improvement in the computing experience .
At the time, I think a lot of people got carried away Microsof's enthusiasm. It's like the way everyone I know said Matrix: Reloaded or Terminator 3 were good films for a couple of weeks. Then the hype wore off and everyone thought "what a dog!".
And once the gloss wore off 98, and the registry started to fill up again, you could be forgiven for wondering waht these great benefits were.
So, having checked my head and determined that it remains on my shoulders, what were these benefits? I'm genuinely curious.
Nope. Remember it well. That was one reason I used to like Microsoft.
I think the "wellspring of all evil" is sub-contracted under licence. Every now and then Satan takes a look at his minion-in-chief and holds a review to see if they've been performing up to expectations. Every now and then, the licence gets withdrawn and appliations are invited for a new Wellspring.
But according to sources in Hell (who do not wish to be named) even if Google starts now with the Microsoft class bastardry, Bill's tenure is reckoned to be good for another ten years.
Yep, that's entirely possible. On the other hand if violent juvenile crime had spiked over the time since videogames became popular, we can be sure that proponents of the videogames-cause-violence theory would offer this datum up as supporting evidence. However since the data shows the opposite in this case, and I really think we need to consider it as evidence against, at least until we see some further studies to explain the point. Probably a doctorate in there for someone if that's where their interests lie.
Incidentally, a couple of points bear mentioning here. Firstly I seem to have taken it on trust that there has been a drop in violent youth crime rather than crime overall. I got this from an earlier poster, and rereading those earlier posts the supposition may well be unfounded. I really do need to some background reading on this subject.
The second thing I wanted to say was that I only really got into this because I objected to MP3Chuck attempting to dismiss the drop in juvenile crime with an offhand "correlation != causation". I didn't really intend to debate the pros and cons of the study - which is my excuse for not doing the background reading.
I suppose the reason I tend to distrust studies of this nature lies in the fact that they are a convenient source of political capital and have been used as such ever since Fredric Wertham and Seduction of the Innocent. We've seen the successive demonisation of (among others) Comic Books, Rock and Roll, Kung Fu Films, Dungeons and Dragons, Tom and Jerry, Punk Rock, Video Rental, Comic Books (again) Japanses Animation, The Internet and now Videogames. Most of these concerns seem either laughable or at least overstated after ten years or so have passed.
I appreciate that's not evidence - more of a position statement, really :)
It is an interesting topic to research and it will continue to be studied. I am sure that people will be able to debate this issue for a very long time...
It's been an interesting debate. I'll try and enter the next one with a bit more background data I think :)
I have to say I was sceptical at the time, but have dome some more reading on the subject since. It really seems as though patents in general serve to preserve the status quo and protect vested interests, at the cost of chilling innovation and economic expansion.
Copyright law... it's difficult for me to be objective here. The one hand the GPL is founded on copyright law. If not for the GPL we would likely have no free software movement. On the other hand, it's fair to ask if we would need one in the absence of copyright law. Alas, the GPL's dependency on copyright tends to be used to browbeat geeks who raise such questions, which may explain why I've yet to see a decent debate on the question.
I should also declare an interest (sort of) and say that having tried my hand at writing, I do how writers would ever get paid if publishers could just print the manuscript without permission. As the information age matures, the barrier to publishing may be expected to continue to fall. so maybe the problem will go away. But while I don't feel authors have a right to expect megabucks (J.K.Rowling and Stephen King may disagree) I think they should have some avenue of recompense.
Certainly serious copyright reform is called for. The timescales are far to long and some of the measures in the DMCA would be laughable if they weren't a little bit scary. All the same, I've yet to be persuaded of a case for junking copyright.
Feel free to put the opposing case - it's an interesting question.
I run Gentoo. I do update daily. I don't have a problem with updates. As long as there is some clear technical benefit, why the more the merrier!
My objection lies in Microsoft's release strategy, and in the cynical way they manipulated the marketing of new OS versions to boost revenue without offering the customer commensurate improvement in functionality.
That and the fact that these upgrades always seem to require a new bigger faster computer, which nevertheless doesn't seem any faster with the new OS installed.
And with the way that MS started to withdraw support for widely deployed versions of the OS when it became clear that their userbase was starting to see through these ploys. I have a problem with that, too.
Upgrades are, in and of themselves, A Good Thing. I like upgrades. I don't like paying out money for no benefit however, and that's what I have found objectionable in Microsoft's release strategy on occasion.
I hope that clarifies my position.
I have several problems with Microsoft's upgrade strategy.
The impression I get from this is that MS place a far greater value on revenue than they do on user satisfaction. It's hard to tell beforehand whether a given version of windows will be the quantum leap inevitablty claimed by the advertising, or a bug ridden liability like WindowsME. This may be a legitimate marketing technique, but it does little do endear MS or Windows to users such as myself.
Recently MS seem to have adopted a more responsible attitude to new releases of their system. However this may be more pragmatic than altruistic and given their history in this area, I fear I must remain skeptical for the time being.
So: their releases have mainly been revenue driven and without noticable benefit for the user. In response to this users are becoming reluctant to upgrade, which led them to try and force the issue. I expect further experiments in this area from Microsoft, probably using DRM and time based licence expiry.
Based on their past actions, it is difficult to trust Microsoft, and I find myself reluctant to invest any money or effort in their products. Happily there is an alternative whose upgrade cycle is not so cynically manipulative and which offers substantially better value for money.
Your mileage may of course vary.
Nah. A straw man is where you deliberately misrepresent your opponents position to make it easier to dismiss. A straw man argument would have been if I said:
However, the point I was actually making was: So. as you can see, no straw man. I apologise if my argument was unclear from my earlier posts.Incidentally, misrepresenting my arguments and then dismissing them as a straw man is a straw man argument. Hope that helps.
I won't argue with your research, mainly because it's too late at night over here to embark on that much reading. Except to say that Huesman's advice seems eminently sensible, and that Bandura's experiment had adults attacking the inflatable bozo. I'm not entirely sure that video games carry comparible authority to adults in a child's eyes.
The APA is a respected organization. They would not issue a statement on this issue unless the research was compelling...
Have a look at this post ; bigbigbison argues the point better than I could
Or you might find that the keys are held by the credit card company and that the only person prevented from accessing your data is you, yourself.
It all comes down to who is going to hold they keys. You may not be offered the option.
Given the recent form of some of the corporate participants, I'm inclined toward pessimism, myself.
Whether you accept the concept of pervasive DRM for all kinds of data or not, if we accept that DRM is an eventuality, isn't it better for DRM technology development to proceed through a community-based action than to let a few corporations control it?
mmm... there are a few presuppositions there. A community based DRM may well be better than a corporate version. However, the infrastructure will likely not be in the hands of the community, and so the corporations may be expected to have rather more say as to what models get used.
I wouldn't oppose a FOSS DRM framework you understand: there are possible benign applications. I'm just not about to get to starry eyed in anticipation of some new digital utopia.
And I'd just as soon not accept DRM as inevtiable, at least not as currently envisaged. I think the technology will in time stand revealed as a bare faced power grab by certain of its proponents and that this will bring the scheme to ruin.
So is it better that the FOSS crowd get involved? Probably not. In the short to medium term I think the best we can aspire to in this area is irrelevance.