On combating defamation of religions, the Council strongly deplored all acts of psychological and physical violence and assaults, and incitement thereto, against persons on the basis of their religion or belief, and such acts directed against their businesses, properties, cultural centres and places of worship, as well as targeting of holy sites, religious symbols and venerated personalities of all religions. The Council noted with deep concern the intensification of the overall campaign of defamation of religions and incitement to religious hatred in general, including the ethnic and religious profiling of Muslim minorities in the aftermath of the tragic events of 11 September 2001. The resolution was passed by a vote of 23 in favour, 13 against and 11 abstentions.
, except that the against and abstentions numbers seem to be reversed. The long version (further down that same page) is:
Action on Draft Resolution on Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Forms of Intolerance
In a resolution (A/HRC/10/L.2/Rev.1) on combating defamation of religions
, adopted by a vote of 23 in favour, 11 against, and 13 abstentions, the Council strongly deplores all acts of psychological and physical violence and assaults, and incitement thereto, against persons on the basis of their religion or belief, and such acts directed against their businesses, properties, cultural centres and places of worship, as well as targeting of holy sites, religious symbols and venerated personalities of all religions; notes with deep concern the intensification of the overall campaign of defamation of religions and incitement to religious hatred in general, including the ethnic and religious profiling of Muslim minorities in the aftermath of the tragic events of 11 September 2001; expresses deep concern in this respect that Islam is frequently and wrongly associated with human rights violations and terrorism and regrets the laws or administrative measures specifically designed to control and monitor Muslim minorities; deplores the use of the print, audio-visual and electronic media, including the Internet, and any other means to incite acts of violence, xenophobia or related intolerance and discrimination against any religion, as well as the targeting of religious symbols and venerated persons; emphasizes that, as stipulated in international human rights law, the exercise of freedom of expression carries with it special duties and responsibilities and may therefore be subject to limitations only as provided for by law and are necessary for respect of the rights or reputations of others, protection of national security or of public order, public health or morals and general welfare; urges all States to apply and, where required, reinforce existing laws when xenophobic or intolerant acts, manifestations or expressions occur, in order to deny impunity for those who commit such acts; urges all States to provide, within their respective legal and constitutional systems, adequate protection against acts of hatred, discrimination, intimidation and coercion resulting from defamation of religions and incitement to religious hatred in general, and to take all possible measures to promote tolerance and respect for all religions and beliefs; calls for strengthened international efforts to foster a global dialogue for the promotion of a culture of tolerance and peace at all levels; requests the Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism to report on all manifestations of defamation of religions, and in particular on the serious implications of Islamophobia, on the
Is anyone able to link to or post up devil'd advocate on closed source cloud? There's got to be some advantages to it, and we need both sides represented here to compare them.
Really far-out R&D is expensive with no expected near- or medium-term payback. So it tends to be funded by companies that can charge monopoly rents, like Microsoft or old AT&T. It cannot be supported by providing competitive open services, so a closed cloud will result in more basic research and greater long-term innovation.
But aren't these things fairly well shielded anyway? I can't imagine a big EMP pulse getting through a zinc wrapper (galvanised steel can, isn't it?) and then I'd think you're dealing with some fairly heavy duty windings. Power line transformers survive lightning strikes sometimes, don't they?
Electronics, yes, some stuff would fry. But electrical supply?
The problem is the really long wires in the power grid. EMP effects are of the form "X volts per meter", so I'd expect your wristwatch and unplugged laptop to be fine. Power transformers connected to miles of wire wouldn't do so well... maybe the voltages wouldn't actually be much higher than the normal multi-kilovolt line voltages, but they'd be DC (or very low frequency) instead of 60 Hz AC which makes a big difference for inductive devices like transformers.
I believe circuit breakers are also harder to make work with DC than with AC. Apparently they arc when first opening, and DC arcs don't extinguish as easily as AC arcs. So even if they do have circuit breakers, they might not work unless opened before it hits.
The carbon is still being sequestered, just not where they expected it.
It depends, do squid (and whatever eats squid) and whales sink to the bottom when the die? The idea is to completely remove some carbon from the normal carbon cycle, I guess to compensate for the carbon we dig out of the ground and add to the cycle.
What's your credibility to suggest anything at all when you have to come to (of all places) Slashdot for advice?
Presumably better than if he was the type to pretend he knows everything.
Large corps have lots at stake, and they really, really, REALLY are terrified of any solutions that aren't basically guaranteed to work by large, trusted vendors.
Is this a rational fear? It probably is for hardware, where the big vendor can overnight replace the entire system for you after a rat eats it, but what about software where the failure causes are different? How does responsiveness and the effectiveness of that response compare between the various guarantees? How often is this actually needed?
Now, compare 'Drupal' to 'Microsoft'. Maybe everybody HERE knows how painful it can be to get MS stuff to work, but nobody is going to be fired for saying MS because it's the biggest commodity vendor in the software space.
To sell your OSS solution you have to that there's no/little risk in going with it.
Or that the benefits outweigh the risk, else why would pretty much everyone run Windows instead of something that people don't bother to write viruses for?
He's been crazy for years. My first exposure to his loony ideas was in that old story of his, "The Right To Read". He wrote that when I'd just entered college and just started using this "GNU" stuff, and I remember being being stunned by his paranoia.
Sure, there's basically no way that kind of absurdity would be tolerated sufficiently for it to get that far.
That's just the more general issue of special interests intruding and making a mess of things. Don't they do similar things with cosmology and historical biology and sex ed? That's also what I understand gender studies (is it still called that) and the like are, which I think have also reached grade school now.
Software being outlawed for being able to edit RAM that someone else's program allocated?
No. I think it's called something like "substantial noninfringing uses".
That's not what that is. There are some theoretical bad uses, but somehow those don't seem to have materialized... probably because people aren't stupid.
And then there's the central point of the story, that eventually people would be stuck with books they couldn't lend or resell!
Funny thing is, things are actually going in the opposite direction. iTunes has non-DRM tracks now, there are other online music stores popping up that sell ordinary MP3 files, there are various Open Textbook projects, research seems to be moving to open access publishing instead of / in addition to the old closed journals, etc.
That Stallman guy was clearly a nutjob.
Yep. Visions of dystopia can make the slope look very slippery and very scary, but time tends to show that things don't actually end up going that way. And it isn't even copyleft that prevents it, it's people saying "wtf this makes no sense" and going elsewhere.
Oh, please, as if you're going through your/usr/src directory, browsing through source trees and "fixing" all the applications you run.
Of course not. But I have fixed a couple when I ran across bugs (and sent the patches upstream), and have also been able to report a couple bugs with file/line info on exactly where the problem was (which got it fixed more quickly, since upstream has less work to do).
As for someone EOLing a product, that happens in the OSS world all the time. Projects mysteriously die, the owner disappears and can't be contacted, and some new maintainer half-heartedly keeps it updated until the project closes completely.
Sure, but you're not stuck when this happens. It's still possible to recompile against the newer libraries that everything else has moved to, fix bugs yourself, etc, until it's convenient to move to something else.
Why do I care if I visit a web site and "non-free" JavaScript runs in my browser?
Right now you shouldn't care, I agree.
Now let's jump in time, say 10 years from now, and suppose that the vision of the "software as service" supporters turns out to be completely true. [...]
So, do you care now?
Not really, but then I don't find that vision to be very believable. If it was at all realistic, shouldn't the various "walled garden" networks like AOL have succeeded and prevented the emergence of the Internet?
Call him crazy but Stallman tries to see where technology goes and predict how this can create a threat to our freedom.
But apparently without regard to how credible the predictions are, or how severe the threats would be.
Except that all of those thing either don't apply to web apps at all, or apply to all web apps. There's nothing to install, upgrade, or fix locally, and you're dependent on some service provider regardless of the status of the code.
That is exactly his point -- and the fact that these limitations can be worked around.
Not having anything to install or upgrade locally is a feature. Forcing some parts of a web app to be local may let you fix them, but it will also break things when your local version gets out of date. I'd also be very interested to know how you intend to work around needing a service provider for your collaboration / document sharing / photo sharing / communication / whatever, web apps tend to have some fundamental need to be networked.
Why do you care if non-free python, C, or whatever apps run on your computer?
Because it's generally harder to upgrade/maintain (not in the standard apt repositories), I can't fix it myself, and whoever controls it can just randomly disappear or EOL it.
So if you do care about free software on the desktop, it's reasonable that you should care about free software in your browser.
Except that all of those thing either don't apply to web apps at all, or apply to all web apps. There's nothing to install, upgrade, or fix locally, and you're dependent on some service provider regardless of the status of the code.
The thing about libertarians is that they are VERY PRO IP, and very pro ownership.
What, all of them? I'd think that patents/copyrights would be considered an intrusion on people's liberty, since their essence is that one person is allowed to tell other people what they can't do.
How on earth can something that deals with copyright be considered a matter of national security?
Have you ever seen movies with scary monsters in them? Those monsters are actually real, and the MPAA has threatened to release them near D.C. if the treaty doesn't turn out to their liking.
If I can get something for $0, and if that thing has any value at all - entertainment value, real-life utility, whatever - then I've just profited since I paid $0 for something of value.
Correct me if I am wrong (as I am sure many will), but aren't patents granted by independent law firms? I didn't think Congress had any direct involvement in decisions about which patents get granted and which don't.
Patents are granted by the Patent and Trademark Office, which is part of the federal government. Congress is not directly involved, but it is responsible for the laws which direct the PTO on what should and should not be patentable.
How? How on Earth would you get paid for your work on an invention, if anyone could take it and produce it without paying you a dime?
Um, maybe by actually using it? Or you have superior understanding of it (being the inventor and all), and can manufacture it at higher quality? Or because you have some time before your competitors catch up?
Invention did not suddenly come into existence with the introduction of patents. How did people get paid for their work before then? There clearly must have been some profit to them, or they wouldn't have bothered.
... or writing if someone else can come along and make money off your invention.
Because you also make money off it.
Just imagine if Wal-Mart could print and sell and book they wanted without permission from the author or the publisher. What if they could take your program or product, have it made in China for a tenth of your cost and sell it for their own profit.
Good for them. If there's enough volume for them to do this profitably, then I've probably already made enough money and can move on to something else.
If I come up with a unique and new idea, it's mine (or at least it belongs to the company I created it for.)
Why? And what happens when someone else has the same idea later, should they be denied the right to their own thoughts?
Patents and copyright exist to ensure that the creator is protected. Sure there are problems with the way things are now, where patents are being given a little too freely, but to abolish copyrights and patents altogether is just absurd.
This protection comes at the public expense. And since it appears that this expense is greater than the benefits resulting from the protection, not abolishing copyright and patents is what is absurd.
The situation isn't good, but goodness, if there weren't ANY copyrights on non-implemented ideas, the idea of private "inventors" would be over; corporations could be in the business of stealing (only it wouldn't be stealing) ideas.
Ideas are about as valuable as air, so I really don't expect that that's a generally valid worry. People who actually put in actual work would still find ways to get paid.
Abolishing them completely is a bad idea - in fact, it would make people stop using their heads. Right now if something is patented, you need to figure out another way to do the same thing. Sometimes the new method is even better than the original. THAT IS THE [IMPLIED] GOAL. Without a patent, everyone would just use the 1st method and nobody would want to improve upon it.
This is complete nonsense. The purpose of copyright and patents is to increase profits for the rightsholders by granting them a monopoly. Supposedly this will increase innovation, because some amount of innovation is necessary in order to obtain this grant of monopoly. The "innovation through workarounds" theory is an after-the-fact justification, and reminds me somewhat the broken window fallacy ("destroy" some portion of research to force investment in duplicate research).
But if nobody can figure out another way to do the same thing, the patent does indeed stifle innovation (since other inventions often build on top of existing ones).
They stifle innovation regardless, because a section of the research field is made off-limits for a couple decades.
Aw come on now. If you call this childish, what would you say to that Cat Agreeing to an EULA story that got nearly 1000 replies. Internet forums aren't the top priority for anyone seeking highly intellectual arguments or discussions.
Slashdot Mirror
I want to see the actual resolution. Whether this is a good or bad thing depends on what exactly the resolution said.
I think they're referring to this, from http://www.unhchr.ch/huricane/huricane.nsf/view01/4C99B0F4E7BC7EE8C1257585007B5D90?opendocument:
, except that the against and abstentions numbers seem to be reversed. The long version (further down that same page) is:
Is anyone able to link to or post up devil'd advocate on closed source cloud? There's got to be some advantages to it, and we need both sides represented here to compare them.
Really far-out R&D is expensive with no expected near- or medium-term payback. So it tends to be funded by companies that can charge monopoly rents, like Microsoft or old AT&T. It cannot be supported by providing competitive open services, so a closed cloud will result in more basic research and greater long-term innovation.
Open Standards never work
So how did you manage to post that?
Microsoft... complains about something because it is too secretive?
Hard to corrupt something you're excluded from...</paranoid>
But aren't these things fairly well shielded anyway? I can't imagine a big EMP pulse getting through a zinc wrapper (galvanised steel can, isn't it?) and then I'd think you're dealing with some fairly heavy duty windings. Power line transformers survive lightning strikes sometimes, don't they?
Electronics, yes, some stuff would fry. But electrical supply?
The problem is the really long wires in the power grid. EMP effects are of the form "X volts per meter", so I'd expect your wristwatch and unplugged laptop to be fine. Power transformers connected to miles of wire wouldn't do so well... maybe the voltages wouldn't actually be much higher than the normal multi-kilovolt line voltages, but they'd be DC (or very low frequency) instead of 60 Hz AC which makes a big difference for inductive devices like transformers.
I believe circuit breakers are also harder to make work with DC than with AC. Apparently they arc when first opening, and DC arcs don't extinguish as easily as AC arcs. So even if they do have circuit breakers, they might not work unless opened before it hits.
The carbon is still being sequestered, just not where they expected it.
It depends, do squid (and whatever eats squid) and whales sink to the bottom when the die? The idea is to completely remove some carbon from the normal carbon cycle, I guess to compensate for the carbon we dig out of the ground and add to the cycle.
What's your credibility to suggest anything at all when you have to come to (of all places) Slashdot for advice?
Presumably better than if he was the type to pretend he knows everything.
Large corps have lots at stake, and they really, really, REALLY are terrified of any solutions that aren't basically guaranteed to work by large, trusted vendors.
Is this a rational fear? It probably is for hardware, where the big vendor can overnight replace the entire system for you after a rat eats it, but what about software where the failure causes are different? How does responsiveness and the effectiveness of that response compare between the various guarantees? How often is this actually needed?
Now, compare 'Drupal' to 'Microsoft'. Maybe everybody HERE knows how painful it can be to get MS stuff to work, but nobody is going to be fired for saying MS because it's the biggest commodity vendor in the software space.
isn't this essentially the classic definition of FUD ("nobody ever got fired for buying IBM equipment")?
To sell your OSS solution you have to that there's no/little risk in going with it.
Or that the benefits outweigh the risk, else why would pretty much everyone run Windows instead of something that people don't bother to write viruses for?
He's been crazy for years. My first exposure to his loony ideas was in that old story of his, "The Right To Read". He wrote that when I'd just entered college and just started using this "GNU" stuff, and I remember being being stunned by his paranoia.
Sure, there's basically no way that kind of absurdity would be tolerated sufficiently for it to get that far.
Grade schools wasting time preaching about intellectual property?
That's just the more general issue of special interests intruding and making a mess of things. Don't they do similar things with cosmology and historical biology and sex ed? That's also what I understand gender studies (is it still called that) and the like are, which I think have also reached grade school now.
Software being outlawed for being able to edit RAM that someone else's program allocated?
No. I think it's called something like "substantial noninfringing uses".
People who didn't have the root passwords for their own computers?
That's not what that is. There are some theoretical bad uses, but somehow those don't seem to have materialized... probably because people aren't stupid.
And then there's the central point of the story, that eventually people would be stuck with books they couldn't lend or resell!
Funny thing is, things are actually going in the opposite direction. iTunes has non-DRM tracks now, there are other online music stores popping up that sell ordinary MP3 files, there are various Open Textbook projects, research seems to be moving to open access publishing instead of / in addition to the old closed journals, etc.
That Stallman guy was clearly a nutjob.
Yep. Visions of dystopia can make the slope look very slippery and very scary, but time tends to show that things don't actually end up going that way. And it isn't even copyleft that prevents it, it's people saying "wtf this makes no sense" and going elsewhere.
Oh, please, as if you're going through your /usr/src directory, browsing through source trees and "fixing" all the applications you run.
Of course not. But I have fixed a couple when I ran across bugs (and sent the patches upstream), and have also been able to report a couple bugs with file/line info on exactly where the problem was (which got it fixed more quickly, since upstream has less work to do).
As for someone EOLing a product, that happens in the OSS world all the time. Projects mysteriously die, the owner disappears and can't be contacted, and some new maintainer half-heartedly keeps it updated until the project closes completely.
Sure, but you're not stuck when this happens. It's still possible to recompile against the newer libraries that everything else has moved to, fix bugs yourself, etc, until it's convenient to move to something else.
Why do I care if I visit a web site and "non-free" JavaScript runs in my browser?
Right now you shouldn't care, I agree.
Now let's jump in time, say 10 years from now, and suppose that the vision of the "software as service" supporters turns out to be completely true. [...]
So, do you care now?
Not really, but then I don't find that vision to be very believable. If it was at all realistic, shouldn't the various "walled garden" networks like AOL have succeeded and prevented the emergence of the Internet?
Call him crazy but Stallman tries to see where technology goes and predict how this can create a threat to our freedom.
But apparently without regard to how credible the predictions are, or how severe the threats would be.
Except that all of those thing either don't apply to web apps at all, or apply to all web apps. There's nothing to install, upgrade, or fix locally, and you're dependent on some service provider regardless of the status of the code.
That is exactly his point -- and the fact that these limitations can be worked around.
Not having anything to install or upgrade locally is a feature. Forcing some parts of a web app to be local may let you fix them, but it will also break things when your local version gets out of date. I'd also be very interested to know how you intend to work around needing a service provider for your collaboration / document sharing / photo sharing / communication / whatever, web apps tend to have some fundamental need to be networked.
Why do you care if non-free python, C, or whatever apps run on your computer?
Because it's generally harder to upgrade/maintain (not in the standard apt repositories), I can't fix it myself, and whoever controls it can just randomly disappear or EOL it.
So if you do care about free software on the desktop, it's reasonable that you should care about free software in your browser.
Except that all of those thing either don't apply to web apps at all, or apply to all web apps. There's nothing to install, upgrade, or fix locally, and you're dependent on some service provider regardless of the status of the code.
The thing about libertarians is that they are VERY PRO IP, and very pro ownership.
What, all of them? I'd think that patents/copyrights would be considered an intrusion on people's liberty, since their essence is that one person is allowed to tell other people what they can't do.
It's sad to see programs that purport to be about computer science cover only a few popular procedural languaages.
"we covered 3 programming languages: C, C++ and Java"
Could you perhaps expand on how C++ and Java are "procedural" languages, rather than, say, object-oriented or generic programming languages?
ddr3 + x58 board kills any deal on a 920 until there are mobos in the 150$ price range and ddr3 in the 100-150$ for 6gig.
6GB DDR3-1066 @ $81
6GB DDR3-1333 @ $94 (on sale for $85)
6GB DDR3-1600 @ $100 (on sale for $90; needs 1.65v instead of 1.5v)
But it looks like i7 mobos currently start at $200 ($190 cheapest on sale), so maybe you're half right.
convicted monopolist
"Convicted monopoly abuser", I'd think, since there's nothing wrong with simply having a monopoly.
How on earth can something that deals with copyright be considered a matter of national security?
Have you ever seen movies with scary monsters in them? Those monsters are actually real, and the MPAA has threatened to release them near D.C. if the treaty doesn't turn out to their liking.
I don't think they could reliably get computers from only inside GB.
Should be fairly simple with a decent GeoIP database.
If I can get something for $0, and if that thing has any value at all - entertainment value, real-life utility, whatever - then I've just profited since I paid $0 for something of value.
This only really works if your time is worthless.
Correct me if I am wrong (as I am sure many will), but aren't patents granted by independent law firms? I didn't think Congress had any direct involvement in decisions about which patents get granted and which don't.
Patents are granted by the Patent and Trademark Office, which is part of the federal government. Congress is not directly involved, but it is responsible for the laws which direct the PTO on what should and should not be patentable.
How? How on Earth would you get paid for your work on an invention, if anyone could take it and produce it without paying you a dime?
Um, maybe by actually using it? Or you have superior understanding of it (being the inventor and all), and can manufacture it at higher quality? Or because you have some time before your competitors catch up?
Invention did not suddenly come into existence with the introduction of patents. How did people get paid for their work before then? There clearly must have been some profit to them, or they wouldn't have bothered.
... or writing if someone else can come along and make money off your invention.
Because you also make money off it.
Just imagine if Wal-Mart could print and sell and book they wanted without permission from the author or the publisher. What if they could take your program or product, have it made in China for a tenth of your cost and sell it for their own profit.
Good for them. If there's enough volume for them to do this profitably, then I've probably already made enough money and can move on to something else.
If I come up with a unique and new idea, it's mine (or at least it belongs to the company I created it for.)
Why? And what happens when someone else has the same idea later, should they be denied the right to their own thoughts?
Patents and copyright exist to ensure that the creator is protected. Sure there are problems with the way things are now, where patents are being given a little too freely, but to abolish copyrights and patents altogether is just absurd.
This protection comes at the public expense. And since it appears that this expense is greater than the benefits resulting from the protection, not abolishing copyright and patents is what is absurd.
The situation isn't good, but goodness, if there weren't ANY copyrights on non-implemented ideas, the idea of private "inventors" would be over; corporations could be in the business of stealing (only it wouldn't be stealing) ideas.
Ideas are about as valuable as air, so I really don't expect that that's a generally valid worry. People who actually put in actual work would still find ways to get paid.
Abolishing them completely is a bad idea - in fact, it would make people stop using their heads. Right now if something is patented, you need to figure out another way to do the same thing. Sometimes the new method is even better than the original. THAT IS THE [IMPLIED] GOAL. Without a patent, everyone would just use the 1st method and nobody would want to improve upon it.
This is complete nonsense. The purpose of copyright and patents is to increase profits for the rightsholders by granting them a monopoly. Supposedly this will increase innovation, because some amount of innovation is necessary in order to obtain this grant of monopoly. The "innovation through workarounds" theory is an after-the-fact justification, and reminds me somewhat the broken window fallacy ("destroy" some portion of research to force investment in duplicate research).
But if nobody can figure out another way to do the same thing, the patent does indeed stifle innovation (since other inventions often build on top of existing ones).
They stifle innovation regardless, because a section of the research field is made off-limits for a couple decades.
Aw come on now. If you call this childish, what would you say to that Cat Agreeing to an EULA story that got nearly 1000 replies. Internet forums aren't the top priority for anyone seeking highly intellectual arguments or discussions.
"WTF, are you all insane?"