There is more to the GPL than making the source code available. There are also restrictions on how the binaries can be used, as far as linking with proprietary code goes. That's why there is the LGPL (Lesser/Library GPL) - LGPL'd code can be linked with non-GPL code.
From http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html :
This General Public License does not permit incorporating your program into proprietary programs. If your program is a subroutine library, you may consider it more useful to permit linking proprietary applications with the library. If this is what you want to do, use the GNU Library General Public License instead of this License.
the same people in this discussion, on the side of the GPL, are on the same side that believes that pirating music and software is part of their "free right"
What the hell are you talking about? I'm a big proponent of the GPL. I also agree that pirating copyrighted music is illegal. Heck, I even think it's immoral.
I also think that the recording industry ranks slightly below pond scum, but I still don't advocate theft.
So fine, that's your $0.02, but keep those pennies to yourself, and don't speak for me...
Well for starters, RMS is not a big fan of OSS, as that's a marketing phrase designed simply to sound "better" than "Free Software." Of course, "Open Source Software" says nothing about freedom, and that's what RMS will probably tell you if you ask him this question again.
Try reading some of the drivers in the kernel source - I've found that much of the V4L stuff (bttv mostly) is fairly easy to read (I was even able to write a new audio chip driver based on existing code), and Donald Becker's ethernet drivers seem to be extremely well documented and commented...
Of course when you're reading device drivers, you should have the hardware datasheet in hand, so that you'll have some idea what's going on...
I don't think this is a smart move, Rob. What's next, stories about hot grits and natalie portman? As soon as you give in to these demands, you're out of control of your site. I've been pissed off lately about all this stuff too, but I don't think this is a good precedent.
Seriously... at what point is all of this electromagnetic energy going to have a measurable effect on the carbon-based lifeforms down here? History is full of "harmless" new technology (x-rays in shoe stores come to mind...) that was later shown to have horrible effects on the human body.
We pump tons of energy into the air all day long, with pagers, cell phones, tv, radio, broadband... I just have to wonder - is there really no physiological effect?
The user doesn't have control (any more than a web server) over what gets sent - if it's in the directory that's available, Napster will send it when it is requested to do so. Period.
Sorta like when you share a drive in Windows?
And the banning windows thing...hm. Not only does the ISP have nothing to do with that (Network Neighborhood doesn't exactly do anything with a 56k modem)
Oh, but Napster does? I fail to see the difference...
but any method of file sharing is only available from the local network, not anyone with a net connection, as Napster and any web server are.
Depends on your ISP - if they don't block the ports, your drive sure as hell is available to anyone with a net connection. Remember the whole Quake coder / GPL violator thing? Some guy just walked right onto his desktop, got the code, then trashed his system.
I think the ISP has every right to ban Napster on the basis that it's a server.
I agree with you there - if you knew up front that your ISP banned servers, well - there you go. Of course you could still use it in client mode, and not share any files...
And there are no arbitrary definitions for differentiation.
Ah, but I think there are. ISPs should not be able to say "no servers" and then pick and choose which programs to crack down on. They need better definitions if they're gonna write this stuff into contracts. "Server" to me means a program which sends information to a remote host that requests it. By that definition, ping is illegal, and so is mIRC (identd), and file and printer sharing under windows sure as hell is...
Well, anyway... whatever. I'm just glad I have a real ISP that trusts me with an IP, charges me for the bandwidth that I use, and stays out of my way.
1) if you're _mailing_ your submissions, well, you're doing it wrong. It says that pretty clearly on the submission page.
2) the aforementioned submission page also has a running total of oh, about 300 sumissions. Slashdot posts maybe 10 stories a day max. I think _that_ explains why so many people's sumissions never get posted.
I know why Holy Ralph is teaming up w/ Microsoft and not the Linux heathens. Of course we can't see what's in the Windows source...
[sandeen@Lager linux]$ grep --recursive -i fuck */* arch/i386/kernel/mtrr.c:/* Some BIOS's are fucked and don't set all MTRRs the same! */ arch/mips/kernel/irixelf.c:#if 0/* XXX No fucking way dude... */ arch/mips/kernel/irixioctl.c: * irixioctl.c: A fucking mess... arch/mips/sgi/kernel/setup.c: * fucking with the memory controller because it needs to know the arch/sparc/kernel/head.S:/* XXX Fucking Cypress... */ arch/sparc/kernel/process.c:/* fuck me plenty */ arch/sparc/kernel/sunos_ioctl.c:/* Binary compatibility is good American knowhow fuckin' up. */ arch/sparc/kernel/ptrace.c:/* Fuck me gently with a chainsaw... */ arch/sparc64/kernel/process.c:/* fuck me plenty */ arch/sparc64/kernel/ptrace.c:/* Fuck me gently with a chainsaw... */ arch/sparc64/kernel/binfmt_aout32.c:/* Fuck me plenty... */ arch/sparc64/mm/init.c:/* Fucking losing PROM has more mappings in the TLB, but drivers/block/cmd640.c: * These chips are basically fucked by design, and getting this driver drivers/cdrom/sbpcd.c: CURRENT=req->next;/* task can fuck it up GTL */ drivers/net/sunhme.c:/* Only Sun can take such nice parts and fuck up the programming interface drivers/net/sunhme.c:/* This card is _fucking_ hot... */ drivers/net/sunhme.c:/* This card is _fucking_ hot... */ drivers/net/sunhme.c:/* This card is _fucking_ hot... */ drivers/scsi/esp.c: * how bad the target and/or ESP fucks things up. drivers/scsi/esp.c: * phase things. We don't want to fuck directly with drivers/scsi/esp.c:/* Be careful, we could really get fucked during synchronous drivers/scsi/qlogicpti.h:/* Am I fucking pedantic or what? */ drivers/scsi/NCR53C9x.c: * how bad the target and/or ESP fucks things up. drivers/scsi/NCR53C9x.c: * phase things. We don't want to fuck directly with drivers/scsi/NCR53C9x.c:/* Be careful, we could really get fucked during synchronous drivers/video/tgafb.c:/* XXX Why the fuck is it called modename if it identifies the board? */ fs/binfmt_aout.c:/* Fuck me plenty... */ include/asm-mips/mmu_context.h:/* Fuck. The f-word is here so you can grep for it:-) */ include/asm-sparc64/system.h:/* If you fuck with this, update ret_from_syscall code too. */ \ lib/vsprintf.c: * Wirzenius wrote this portably, Torvalds fucked it up:-)
In addition to being a painstaking reporter, Tarbell was a moralist. She viewed anti-competitive practices as corrupting as well as unlawful. Here are a few of her comments on the intertwined oil and railroad industries -- as exciting, novel and wildly profitable in the early 1900s as computers and the Internet are now.
Success is sanctified. If all the country had suffered from these raids on competition had been the limiting of the business opportunity of a few hundred men and a constant higher price for refined oil, the case would be serious enough, but there is a more serious side to it. The ethical cost of all this is the deep concern. We are a commercial people. We cannot boast of our arts, our crafts, our cultivation; our boast is in the wealth we produce. As a consequence, business success is sanctified, and, practically, any methods which achieve it are justified by a larger and larger class. All sorts of subterfuges and sophistries and slurring over of facts are employed to explain aggregations of capital whose determining factor has been like that of the Standard Oil Company, special privileges obtained by persistent secret effort in opposition to the spirit of the law, the efforts of legislators, and the most outspoken public opinion.
Pretty applicable, eh? Especially considering it was written 100 years ago.
San Francisco intellectual property attorney Neil Smith of Limbach & Limbach acknowledges the law is ambiguous but said he believes Congress intended it to protect Net access providers like America Online, AT&T WorldNet and MCI Worldcom, definitely not companies like Napster.
Reading between the lines...
San Francisco intellectual property attorney Neil Smith of Limbach & Limbach acknowledges the law is ambiguous but said he believes Congress intended it to protect (multi-billion-dollar) Net access providers like America Online, AT&T WorldNet and MCI Worldcom (who have paid lobbyists millions), definitely not companies like Napster (who are tiny little startups which can be effectively controlled).
I watch about 24 stocks on my ticker, mostly technology oriented. Semiconductor, software, and internet stocks. Today, 21 of 24 closed down, some as bad as 13% down. (Hell, my company closed over 11% down today, and we actually sell products! Like _billions_ a year! With a good profit margin!)
So if CORL was down today, don't take it personally. It was a bad day.
So... what if I put up a whole page of _links_ to child pornography. Call it www.kiddiesex.com, but I don't host any of the images. However, I scour the net every day to find images, and keep my links up to date, sort of a convenient one-stop-shop for your kiddie porn needs.
Would this be legal?
It's not really any different from the DeCSS case (as far as linking issues go) - the material linked to has been declared illegal, at least in the US. Now, you may not like the fact that it's illegal, but if it is, I imagine that you're not immune because you simply linked to it.
Yep, I just got a pair of wireless cards from WebGear (the Aviator 2.4) because my wife was tired of dragging an ethernet cable around behind her laptop, and tired of waiting for me to wire the house. It works extremely well! Even with a DSL line behind it, it's transparent for all but the largest downloads.
I love it when I can spend $150 on geek toys and have my wife appreciate it!:) Of course, the biggest coup was installing the X10 light switch remote. The other night, she said "That's the best thing you've ever done!" I'm still trying to decide if that's a good thing...:-)
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Tell your lawmakers what you think (Thanks MS!)
on
Microsoft Loses
·
· Score: 4
MS has been nice enough to provide a simple form for you to email your lawmakers with. If you agree with, and support, the DOJ action, feel free to talk to your lawmakers and let them know that. The link is on the "Freedom to Innovate Network" - which is here. Oh yeah... it's a Perl script that runs the submissions.:-)
(congress.nw.dc.us is hosting the freedom to innovate network? huh?!)
It's not subjective control of the net. Each sysadmin chooses whether (s)he wants to use these tools (ORBS an MAPS), or not. If you use it, you are explicitly trusting the judgement and managment of the tools.
I also find your anecdote extremely surprising, and I'd like to see some proof... I thought that the RBL was a last-ditch effort after contacts had been made.
"AOL has been added to ORBS" is a hell of a strong statement. Surely AOL operates more than one mail host. If one is insecure, then it _should_ be in ORBS. 'nuff said. I don't want crap in my mailbox just because someone wants their daughter's happy birthday java-crashy card.
I'm sure the vast majority of the AOL machines are NOT in ORBS, and most mail will get through.
It seems that this is a losing battle. If we want to bring about an end to net censorship tools, then why not come up with something better?
I would like to see a tool which would give children free reign on the net, but which would notify parents of visited URLS. The scenario:
Mom & Dad talk to Johnny, tell him about the Web, and lay down the law for what they think is appropriate. Johnny goes surfing. Each day, mom and dad get an email with the URLs Johnny visited. The PARENTS decide what's a problem and what's not, and since Johnny knows mom and dad are watching, he tries to do What's Right.
Now, of course, the problem is, this requires (gasp) active parental involvement. But you're not going to have to argue that one too hard. What's cybersitter going to say - "Yes, but with our product, you don't have to take an active part in your child's life!" You could make it easier on parents by having lists similar to cybersitter's lists - but instead of BLOCKING those URLs, they could be used to flag URLs which have been visited - and then the parents decide.
This would not be that hard to do (for someone with better programming skills than I have...)
I always thought esound's functionality was pretty nifty, but I've heard rumblings that it's severely limited, and due to be replaced. What are the plans for a replacement, and is anyone currently working on it?
It seems like they're fairly limited in their options to lock this thing down. Removing the header wouldn't help, since soldering is straightforward. Re-spinning the board to remove the header traces completely would take a fair amount of time. A BIOS change to disallow more than 1 IDE device might do it, but someone would probably distribute the original BIOS image, or a trace could probably be cut to disable the SanDisk flash and allow another IDE device...
What would it take to _really_ lock this thing down?
Disclaimer - I think NetPliance is a pretty cool company, and I'd hate to see them fail as a result of this attention. They've certainly gotten a lot of press lately, which can't hurt, and hopefully offsets the monetary losses to the hardware-hacking geeks...
600Mhz, Nvidia video, DVD... gee, sounds like my PC, only with less RAM. So what can I do with this that I can't do with my PC? What games can it play - the ones I can play on my PC? I don't see what the hype's all about...
The Sonys and the Segas had some kick-ass hardware in them that made for some stunning games, stuff that I've never seen on a PC... and I doubt I'll see on the "X-Box."
Slashdot Mirror
From http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html :
This General Public License does not permit incorporating your program into proprietary programs. If your program is a subroutine library, you may consider it more useful to permit linking proprietary applications with the library. If this is what you want to do, use the GNU Library General Public License instead of this License.
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What the hell are you talking about? I'm a big proponent of the GPL. I also agree that pirating copyrighted music is illegal. Heck, I even think it's immoral.
I also think that the recording industry ranks slightly below pond scum, but I still don't advocate theft.
So fine, that's your $0.02, but keep those pennies to yourself, and don't speak for me...
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Well for starters, RMS is not a big fan of OSS, as that's a marketing phrase designed simply to sound "better" than "Free Software." Of course, "Open Source Software" says nothing about freedom, and that's what RMS will probably tell you if you ask him this question again.
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Of course when you're reading device drivers, you should have the hardware datasheet in hand, so that you'll have some idea what's going on...
---
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We pump tons of energy into the air all day long, with pagers, cell phones, tv, radio, broadband... I just have to wonder - is there really no physiological effect?
---
Sorta like when you share a drive in Windows?
And the banning windows thing...hm. Not only does the ISP have nothing to do with that (Network Neighborhood doesn't exactly do anything with a 56k modem)
Oh, but Napster does? I fail to see the difference...
but any method of file sharing is only available from the local network, not anyone with a net connection, as Napster and any web server are.
Depends on your ISP - if they don't block the ports, your drive sure as hell is available to anyone with a net connection. Remember the whole Quake coder / GPL violator thing? Some guy just walked right onto his desktop, got the code, then trashed his system.
I think the ISP has every right to ban Napster on the basis that it's a server.
I agree with you there - if you knew up front that your ISP banned servers, well - there you go. Of course you could still use it in client mode, and not share any files...
And there are no arbitrary definitions for differentiation.
Ah, but I think there are. ISPs should not be able to say "no servers" and then pick and choose which programs to crack down on. They need better definitions if they're gonna write this stuff into contracts. "Server" to me means a program which sends information to a remote host that requests it. By that definition, ping is illegal, and so is mIRC (identd), and file and printer sharing under windows sure as hell is...
Well, anyway... whatever. I'm just glad I have a real ISP that trusts me with an IP, charges me for the bandwidth that I use, and stays out of my way.
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2) the aforementioned submission page also has a running total of oh, about 300 sumissions. Slashdot posts maybe 10 stories a day max. I think _that_ explains why so many people's sumissions never get posted.
:)
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[sandeen@Lager linux]$ grep --recursive -i fuck */*
arch/i386/kernel/mtrr.c:/* Some BIOS's are fucked and don't set all MTRRs the same! */
arch/mips/kernel/irixelf.c:#if 0
arch/mips/kernel/irixioctl.c: * irixioctl.c: A fucking mess...
arch/mips/sgi/kernel/setup.c: * fucking with the memory controller because it needs to know the
arch/sparc/kernel/head.S:
arch/sparc/kernel/process.c:
arch/sparc/kernel/sunos_ioctl.c:
arch/sparc/kernel/ptrace.c:/* Fuck me gently with a chainsaw... */
arch/sparc64/kernel/process.c:
arch/sparc64/kernel/ptrace.c:/* Fuck me gently with a chainsaw... */
arch/sparc64/kernel/binfmt_aout32.c:
arch/sparc64/mm/init.c:
drivers/block/cmd640.c: * These chips are basically fucked by design, and getting this driver
drivers/cdrom/sbpcd.c: CURRENT=req->next;
drivers/net/sunhme.c:/* Only Sun can take such nice parts and fuck up the programming interface
drivers/net/sunhme.c:
drivers/net/sunhme.c:
drivers/net/sunhme.c:
drivers/scsi/esp.c: * how bad the target and/or ESP fucks things up.
drivers/scsi/esp.c: * phase things. We don't want to fuck directly with
drivers/scsi/esp.c:
drivers/scsi/qlogicpti.h:/* Am I fucking pedantic or what? */
drivers/scsi/NCR53C9x.c: * how bad the target and/or ESP fucks things up.
drivers/scsi/NCR53C9x.c: * phase things. We don't want to fuck directly with
drivers/scsi/NCR53C9x.c:
drivers/video/tgafb.c:
fs/binfmt_aout.c:
include/asm-mips/mmu_context.h:/* Fuck. The f-word is here so you can grep for it
include/asm-sparc64/system.h:
lib/vsprintf.c: * Wirzenius wrote this portably, Torvalds fucked it up
---
I found this in an editorial in my local paper
In addition to being a painstaking reporter, Tarbell was a moralist. She viewed anti-competitive practices as corrupting as well as unlawful. Here are a few of her comments on the intertwined oil and railroad industries -- as exciting, novel and wildly profitable in the early 1900s as computers and the Internet are now.
Pretty applicable, eh? Especially considering it was written 100 years ago.
---
Reading between the lines...
San Francisco intellectual property attorney Neil Smith of Limbach & Limbach acknowledges the law is ambiguous but said he believes Congress intended it to protect (multi-billion-dollar) Net access providers like America Online, AT&T WorldNet and MCI Worldcom (who have paid lobbyists millions), definitely not companies like Napster (who are tiny little startups which can be effectively controlled).
Bah.
---
So if CORL was down today, don't take it personally. It was a bad day.
---
So... what if I put up a whole page of _links_ to child pornography. Call it www.kiddiesex.com, but I don't host any of the images. However, I scour the net every day to find images, and keep my links up to date, sort of a convenient one-stop-shop for your kiddie porn needs.
Would this be legal?
It's not really any different from the DeCSS case (as far as linking issues go) - the material linked to has been declared illegal, at least in the US. Now, you may not like the fact that it's illegal, but if it is, I imagine that you're not immune because you simply linked to it.
What do you think?
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I love it when I can spend $150 on geek toys and have my wife appreciate it!
---
(congress.nw.dc.us is hosting the freedom to innovate network? huh?!)
---
2.3 boots just fine on my laptop, but when I move it to the iopener, it fails to find the partitions on
Running an Iopener will be a major hurdle to the acceptance of 2.4. At least in my house.
Anybody had this same problem, or better yet, a solution?
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I also find your anecdote extremely surprising, and I'd like to see some proof... I thought that the RBL was a last-ditch effort after contacts had been made.
---
I'm sure the vast majority of the AOL machines are NOT in ORBS, and most mail will get through.
---
I would like to see a tool which would give children free reign on the net, but which would notify parents of visited URLS. The scenario:
Mom & Dad talk to Johnny, tell him about the Web, and lay down the law for what they think is appropriate. Johnny goes surfing. Each day, mom and dad get an email with the URLs Johnny visited. The PARENTS decide what's a problem and what's not, and since Johnny knows mom and dad are watching, he tries to do What's Right.
Now, of course, the problem is, this requires (gasp) active parental involvement. But you're not going to have to argue that one too hard. What's cybersitter going to say - "Yes, but with our product, you don't have to take an active part in your child's life!" You could make it easier on parents by having lists similar to cybersitter's lists - but instead of BLOCKING those URLs, they could be used to flag URLs which have been visited - and then the parents decide.
This would not be that hard to do (for someone with better programming skills than I have...)
---
---
What would it take to _really_ lock this thing down?
Disclaimer - I think NetPliance is a pretty cool company, and I'd hate to see them fail as a result of this attention. They've certainly gotten a lot of press lately, which can't hurt, and hopefully offsets the monetary losses to the hardware-hacking geeks...
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The Sonys and the Segas had some kick-ass hardware in them that made for some stunning games, stuff that I've never seen on a PC... and I doubt I'll see on the "X-Box."
---
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