No, it isn't. Gravity is a law, as in "this is what is known to happen". A theory would be something like loop quantum gravity (which I'm pretty sure we *don't* teach kids), that goes into what and why and how about parts we can't see and makes predictions about things we haven't seen yet.
And YOU are ignoring the fact that only ONE thing decides cost or profit in a free-market economy.
Tom Cruise gets $20 million because he can.
And the reason he can is that he isn't competing in a free market. Free markets require lots of producers of interchangeable goods, but there's only 1 Tom Cruise. Sure there are other actors, but they're all different. So instead of a free market we have somewhat of a monopoly market, with somewhat different behavior and rules.
Recessions aren't supposed to happen based on Keynesian theory [....]
There is no recession
Or maybe Keynesian theory is just crap.
Of course, the reality is that the central banks have been creating credit for one specific reason: to transfer wealth from the poor and middle class to the bank-connected elites.
There is no recession -- it's just part of the cycle of credit expansion/contraction that occurs to regularly shift our future wealth to those who have been taking advantage of that credit creation since the 70s, if not earlier.
<cynical>Considering who owns most productive capital, they could also just deny everyone use of that capital. This would cause a recession/depression (lower production, because everyone just lost access to all the fancy tools). Then they could buy up all the other stuff that the now-going-bankrupt people couldn't afford any more.</cynical>
I don't think an office is unreasonable for anyone.
The group I'm in wouldn't work nearly as well if everyone was in offices, we talk to eachother too much. Our boss have even turned down at least one offer to have an office, so as not to get out of the loop.
Even if simply moving on could mean the death of the project? How would that work, are you saying their performance is so underwhelming that constantly being in a mud fight is the only way to not be forgotten?
The DRM terms of GPL3 are not a field-of-endeavor restriction as a "no military use" term would be, because the GPL3 terms don't restrict you from having DRM. They only restrict you from making the GPL3 software itself unmodifiable in situ or impairing its functionality if it's modified. It restricts you from having certain kinds of DRM. Much like saying it can't be used to kill people doesn't restrict it from military use.
If you program in Java or C#, you take one more step up. You gain in productivity by getting memory management and class libraries, but you have to trust that the compiler writers and VM writers did their job properly. This you seem unable to do.
I personally would like these languages a lot more if their way of managing (assumed plentiful) memory for me didn't also make it much harder to manage scarce resources (yes, occasionally including memory) properly. VMs are awesome, class libraries are rather nice, single inheritance is sometimes annoying, and the inability to mark a class as needing deterministic finalization is a horrible pain.
But how is it a God-given right to hack the hardware you buy? I'll admit that this would be my personal preference for a device, and something I'd value highly enough to influence which electronics I buy. However, I don't see why manufacturers should be compelled to cater to my tastes. Ultimately, if I want I hackable DVR badly enough I'll build my own.
Making it not hackable requires extra effort to reduce the functionality. There probably should be rules against this, but they'd need to handle the case of things like ATMs or voting machines where not being user-modifiable is a very important feature.
Of course, this discussion also misses the point entirely. And the point is: how can a "free" licence for a particular component forbid it's use with certain other (non-free) components? Doesn't this make the "free" component not actually free? Does it even achieve the goal of increasing freedom, or does it just mean that the "free" compenent gets ignored in favor of more legally compatible alternatives?
If I were RMS, I would forbid the packaging of any GNU code with a GPLv2 GNU/Linux. Without altering the language of the GPL, simply put, he can't.
It wouldn't actually be that big of a change, just remove the exclusions (for things like system libraries) from the definition of "corresponding source". That's a far smaller change than, say, the new patent language or the anti-tivo section.
GPL3 is also compatible with DRM for media, as long as the DRM isn't done in the GPL3 program. So, Sony could have used it, and could have made it more possible for this device to continue to live.
I wonder how the additional complexity of making only half of the firmware user-updatable would compare to the cost or complexity of using either BSD or some commercial package... If that came out the "wrong" way, your GPLv3 wouldn't really help much.
- acceleration from 0-60 not being lower than 4 seconds (which you need to do, when? ah yes, to accelerate out of the way of the runaway semi)
Good for making left turns across traffic, or for too-short interstate entrance ramps.
- range being less than 100 miles (because gas stations are so hard to find? Oh right, you like taking your economical car to the Alaskan planes or Utah salt beds; I forgot)
It can be significant on the longer trips that some people take occasionally, and I do recall passing a sign (in eastern Missouri, not Alaska or the salt flats) saying there wasn't anything for the next 60 miles. I'm not sure I'd like driving something with such a short range that I couldn't afford to miss an exit.
On the other hand, the examples you gave (credit card and cheque payments) aren't about authentication. They are about payment. I don't know why anybody (including myself) buying anything with my cheques or credit card (neither of which are actually common forms of payment in Europe, where I live) would have anything to do with my identity. These are just payment methods. The money may be mine, but, other than that, it has nothing to do with me.
The authentication is to make sure that the person spending your money is actually allowed to do so. For cash this is implied by having posession of it, but you need (and unfortunately don't get) something a little better for electronic systems. The only reason for the authentication to tie in to your identity is so that governemnt and business can spy on you for taxes and credit scores.
Is data theft at an all-time high because of hackers or just dumb companies not encrypting their backup data that gets lost in transit?
No, it's because we're using shared secrets (hey look, an oxymoron!) to establish identity.
As far as your finances are concerned, anyone who knows your name/birthdate/SSN/address/card number/etc is *you*, and can do pretty much anything you can do. And of course anyone you do business with knows enough of these things that they or anyone who steals their database can pretend to be you.
Convince everyone that financial stuff should use public-key signiatures where the only copy of the private key is in a card the bank gave you, and stealing much of that data is significantly more pointless.
- make it so that when you try to fix a small problem (say upgrade or install some small application) that you don't end up with having to upgrade more and more of the system.
That doesn't happen if you run the 'stable' version, and is kinda the whole point of unstable/testing. If you want to mix-and-match different versions of different things, you probably want/need one of the source-based distros.
- stop switching kernel API's around every few releases, release a binary driver spec and stick to it
I actually expect that this will happen eventually, once Linux is sufficiently evolved that the kernel devs can't find any more technical reasons to change things (will this be before or after the Windows driver API becomes stable across releases?). (I also think that free drivers are superior for non-religious reasons, like not being dependent on a single vendor with an incentive to EOL things.)
- get rid of all those duplicate halfbaked projects and put all the effort into a single set of office software.
This will never, ever happen, and I see that as a good thing. It's a reasonably efficient and embarrasingly parallelizable way to explore the design space, and it's also something many developers do for fun.
That said, I haven't had windows on my desktop box for the last 4 years and in spite of the above I'm very happy with it.
Linux and BSD suck, but everything else sucks worse. Friends don't help friends install Windows.
Just because it's designed to be modular and scriptable, doesn't make GUI programs work less well. I'd say that most of the graphical desktops you can run on Linux (and certainly all the ones that people are likely to have heard of) are better than the one in MS Windows. For many things, the command line is better still.
If they're asleep, why don't they log out? Like a normal person? Because they're not stuck with the limitations of dialup, so there's no good *technical* reason to not stay logged in? On developers' channels at least, the scrollback buffer can be very useful to see if any issues or important discussions came up while you were away.
It seems very silly (at best) to expect "privacy" on a public communications channel, especially when probably a lot of the participants keep their own logs anyway.
Basically you are saying, don't use software if you are not willing to follow the license.
At what point does a license become ridiculous? Car manufacturers don't get to dictate how you're allowed to modify your car no matter how much they might want to. Sure software authors have a legal right to do that, but why do you seem to be saying that doing so is morally defensible? It's just an artifact of twisting a system meant to protect artistic expression to also protect useful tools.
"You may make, run and propagate covered works that you do not
convey, without conditions so long as your license otherwise remains
in force."
is compatible with the new Affero license? Oh, that clause is not part of the Affero license? Then how can it be classified as "essentially the GPLv3"?
Very misleading. This is a sad day for F/OSS.
Actually, that clause is in the Affero license. The only difference is that there is an extra section with restrictions on how you can modify the program. (Of course, I can have two sentences which are essentially the same (as determined by diff(1)) but mean completely different things, because the only difference is that one has the word "not" added to it...)
In the USA, you have the legal right to make copies of software for the purpose of using it. Copying it to your server is not copyright infringement. Running it is not copyright infringement. You don't need a license. So what compels AGPL users to accept this license and be bound by its terms? Where is the consideration?
It doesn't say that *you* have to provide the source, it says the *program* has to provide the source. Changing the program to *not* provide the source would be making a derivative work, and therefore require permission from the copyright holder. (Of course if the program uses external facilities to provide the source, I don't really see how the license can prevent you from breaking those facilities...)
Unless john1040 is correct, in which case the whole thing falls apart.
It places restrictions on the kind of changes you are permitted to make (i.e., it infringes freedom 1 and maybe 3). Like the AC says, it is only compatible with GPLv3 because both it and GPLv3 explicitly say that it is.
Here we go again, as mentioned, we are trying to enact laws that punish the wrong person(s). The fact that they have personal data on a laptop that is not physically secured is a sign that the organization that they work for is corrupt or inept. Please please please let's look at how such incidents happen, then punish the culpable, not simply state that the bag man is going to hang.
The summary is very clear that the charges would be against the person who lost the laptop, rather than the organization that lost it. The article seems to be slightly less clear about this, so it may not actually be the case.
Information commissioner Richard Thomas and his deputy, David Smith, revealed to members of eth House of Lords they had called on the Ministry of Justice to make it a criminal offence "for those who knowingly and recklessly flout data protection principles" where there are serious consequences.
Would this be the person who it was stolen from, or the IT group that set it up without encryption?
Slashdot Mirror
No, it isn't. Gravity is a law, as in "this is what is known to happen". A theory would be something like loop quantum gravity (which I'm pretty sure we *don't* teach kids), that goes into what and why and how about parts we can't see and makes predictions about things we haven't seen yet.
And the reason he can is that he isn't competing in a free market. Free markets require lots of producers of interchangeable goods, but there's only 1 Tom Cruise. Sure there are other actors, but they're all different. So instead of a free market we have somewhat of a monopoly market, with somewhat different behavior and rules.
Recessions aren't supposed to happen based on Keynesian theory [....]
There is no recession
Or maybe Keynesian theory is just crap.
Of course, the reality is that the central banks have been creating credit for one specific reason: to transfer wealth from the poor and middle class to the bank-connected elites.
There is no recession -- it's just part of the cycle of credit expansion/contraction that occurs to regularly shift our future wealth to those who have been taking advantage of that credit creation since the 70s, if not earlier.
<cynical>Considering who owns most productive capital, they could also just deny everyone use of that capital. This would cause a recession/depression (lower production, because everyone just lost access to all the fancy tools). Then they could buy up all the other stuff that the now-going-bankrupt people couldn't afford any more.</cynical>
Send someone up with a really big vacuum cleaner.
I personally would like these languages a lot more if their way of managing (assumed plentiful) memory for me didn't also make it much harder to manage scarce resources (yes, occasionally including memory) properly. VMs are awesome, class libraries are rather nice, single inheritance is sometimes annoying, and the inability to mark a class as needing deterministic finalization is a horrible pain.
Making it not hackable requires extra effort to reduce the functionality. There probably should be rules against this, but they'd need to handle the case of things like ATMs or voting machines where not being user-modifiable is a very important feature.
Of course, this discussion also misses the point entirely. And the point is: how can a "free" licence for a particular component forbid it's use with certain other (non-free) components? Doesn't this make the "free" component not actually free? Does it even achieve the goal of increasing freedom, or does it just mean that the "free" compenent gets ignored in favor of more legally compatible alternatives?
It wouldn't actually be that big of a change, just remove the exclusions (for things like system libraries) from the definition of "corresponding source". That's a far smaller change than, say, the new patent language or the anti-tivo section.
I wonder how the additional complexity of making only half of the firmware user-updatable would compare to the cost or complexity of using either BSD or some commercial package... If that came out the "wrong" way, your GPLv3 wouldn't really help much.
No, that's just a Windows bug.
Good for making left turns across traffic, or for too-short interstate entrance ramps.
It can be significant on the longer trips that some people take occasionally, and I do recall passing a sign (in eastern Missouri, not Alaska or the salt flats) saying there wasn't anything for the next 60 miles. I'm not sure I'd like driving something with such a short range that I couldn't afford to miss an exit.
The authentication is to make sure that the person spending your money is actually allowed to do so. For cash this is implied by having posession of it, but you need (and unfortunately don't get) something a little better for electronic systems. The only reason for the authentication to tie in to your identity is so that governemnt and business can spy on you for taxes and credit scores.
No, it's because we're using shared secrets (hey look, an oxymoron!) to establish identity.
As far as your finances are concerned, anyone who knows your name/birthdate/SSN/address/card number/etc is *you*, and can do pretty much anything you can do. And of course anyone you do business with knows enough of these things that they or anyone who steals their database can pretend to be you.
Convince everyone that financial stuff should use public-key signiatures where the only copy of the private key is in a card the bank gave you, and stealing much of that data is significantly more pointless.
That doesn't happen if you run the 'stable' version, and is kinda the whole point of unstable/testing. If you want to mix-and-match different versions of different things, you probably want/need one of the source-based distros.
I actually expect that this will happen eventually, once Linux is sufficiently evolved that the kernel devs can't find any more technical reasons to change things (will this be before or after the Windows driver API becomes stable across releases?). (I also think that free drivers are superior for non-religious reasons, like not being dependent on a single vendor with an incentive to EOL things.)
This will never, ever happen, and I see that as a good thing. It's a reasonably efficient and embarrasingly parallelizable way to explore the design space, and it's also something many developers do for fun.
Linux and BSD suck, but everything else sucks worse. Friends don't help friends install Windows.
Just because it's designed to be modular and scriptable, doesn't make GUI programs work less well. I'd say that most of the graphical desktops you can run on Linux (and certainly all the ones that people are likely to have heard of) are better than the one in MS Windows. For many things, the command line is better still.
I don't think so... Vesna Vulovic was female. ;)
After the accident, at least...It seems very silly (at best) to expect "privacy" on a public communications channel, especially when probably a lot of the participants keep their own logs anyway.
At what point does a license become ridiculous? Car manufacturers don't get to dictate how you're allowed to modify your car no matter how much they might want to. Sure software authors have a legal right to do that, but why do you seem to be saying that doing so is morally defensible? It's just an artifact of twisting a system meant to protect artistic expression to also protect useful tools.
Really? Then explain how this GPLv3 clause:
"You may make, run and propagate covered works that you do not
convey, without conditions so long as your license otherwise remains
in force."
is compatible with the new Affero license? Oh, that clause is not part of the Affero license? Then how can it be classified as "essentially the GPLv3"?
Very misleading. This is a sad day for F/OSS.
Actually, that clause is in the Affero license. The only difference is that there is an extra section with restrictions on how you can modify the program. (Of course, I can have two sentences which are essentially the same (as determined by diff(1)) but mean completely different things, because the only difference is that one has the word "not" added to it...)
In the USA, you have the legal right to make copies of software for the purpose of using it. Copying it to your server is not copyright infringement. Running it is not copyright infringement. You don't need a license. So what compels AGPL users to accept this license and be bound by its terms? Where is the consideration?
It doesn't say that *you* have to provide the source, it says the *program* has to provide the source. Changing the program to *not* provide the source would be making a derivative work, and therefore require permission from the copyright holder. (Of course if the program uses external facilities to provide the source, I don't really see how the license can prevent you from breaking those facilities...)
Unless john1040 is correct, in which case the whole thing falls apart.
It places restrictions on the kind of changes you are permitted to make (i.e., it infringes freedom 1 and maybe 3). Like the AC says, it is only compatible with GPLv3 because both it and GPLv3 explicitly say that it is.
The summary is very clear that the charges would be against the person who lost the laptop, rather than the organization that lost it. The article seems to be slightly less clear about this, so it may not actually be the case.
Would this be the person who it was stolen from, or the IT group that set it up without encryption?