Actually a band that wasn't signed to a label always had the option of -- get ready for it -- playing music for its fans in person. (Amazingly enough, bands signed to labels had that option, and often found it was the only way to actually make money now that they were signed to a label that insisted on nickeling-and-diming them to death as agreed to in their contract.) In recent years they've also had the option of making CDs to sell directly to the fans. Well, they've always had the option of selling directly to the fans, but until relatively recently it was prohibitively expensive.
Now there are two threats to the music division of what I've termed the Entertainment-Industrial Complex. First is that people will discover that you can find performers that play music you enjoy and are good at it, without their assistance and without having the EIC-sanctioned acts shoved down your throat. Second is that, having found those groups, you will support them through live concerts and recordings, without the assistance of the EIC.
There are a lot of people involved in the music arm of the Entertainment-Industrial Complex, from the guy stocking the bins at the Best Buy to the president of Warner Brothers Records, and this emerging paradigm is threatening every single one of them. It's going to be a long fight, and unless they adapt the EICers will die, but it's not going to be pretty along the way.
Actually I remember PPP standing for "Point to Point Protocol".* Minor quibble, really, because when I first got into networking in 1995 the Internet was indeed held up as an example of a massive peer-to-peer network, where content is offered by the machines on the network, as opposed to a server-based network (think NT domain or Netware network).
Trying to redefine "peer-to-peer" network as "mechanism for wholesale IP theft"** will of course net make it so. This strikes me as one of those bills whose purpose is to make it look like Congress is doing a Good Thing(tm), only to have the law struck down in the courts so the congresscritters can say they tried, it's not their fault.
* But hey, they tell me I remembered the origins of PHP wrong, so what do I know?
** Yes I know it's copyright violation, not theft, but that's the way they'll try to present it.
No, no, no, no, no. I realize this is offtopic, but . ..
BSD is free to share, sharing is caring, caring shows love, love is blind, Ray Charles is blind, Ray Charles wrote BSD, Ray Charles is dead, BSD is dead.
The whole point is not to make legal sense but to keep enough bafflement in there to confuse the "investors" and keep them hoping that there is still some reason why SCO stock should not be printed on toilet paper.
Especially since the first P in PHP stands for Perl (well, it used to anyway, PHP started life as Perl Header Pages).
Readability is a matter of choosing the proper variable names, the proper coding style (e.g. proper indentation) and of commenting properly. Regular expressions have little to do with it. If you have to write a regex that looks like you buy your punctuation at Costco, you should tell the world what it does to make it easier for the next guy down the pike to maintain your code.
Nobody has a right to profit. Everybody has a right to try to make a profit, and some succeed -- but no one has a right to profit.
"There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute nor common law."
-Robert Heinlein
(The rest of your points are quite good, by the way.)
The problem with that of course is that if we ignore him, he becomes free to spout his lies, half-truths, misinformation and FUD to anyone who will listen and who doesn't know any better. And unfortunately, his book is aimed at people who, while they might or might not listen, don't know any better, but won't let that stop them when they enact policies and laws governing free and open source software.
Sorry, but the consequences of not acting are worse than the consequences of overacting. And remember, "All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to stand by and do nothing."
Route 66 would be cool, but unfortunately large tracks of it (primarily between Arizona and Oklahoma, from what I remember) no longer exist.
I remember a book that was funded by the WPA (I think -- I haven't seen the book in years) that documented the highways of Texas as they existed in the 1930s, including landmarks (drive 0.3 miles west and turn left at the red barn). Imagine if the technology had been in place to put frame-per-second camera on cars and document the highways of the time on film. In fact maybe we should do something like this now. Our cities and highways will probably look as quaint and antiquated to the people of 2074 as the highways of 1934 look to us.
OK, considering that there are a number of vehicles who stayed ahead of the car for several frames, either there are a LOT of similar-looking cars on the road that just happened to be in the right place at the right time, or else there are a bunch of other cars in this video doing Mach 9 as well.
I'm impressed with those semis. That many sonic booms in their immediate vicinity all at once should have knocked them off the road.
Human society, as a general rule, seems to be a suspicious lot of witch hunters always looking for the next witch.
There's an old proverb that has new currency. In modern terms: The Department of Homeland Security is like a group of blind men in a dark room, looking for a black cat that isn't there . . . and still they manage to find the cat.
Fercryinoutloud, everyone knows the propeller scrambles the transmissions so you can't accidentally zap bystanders with backscatter mind-control radiation.
On the other hand, randomized backscatter mind control radiation might be the easiest way to explain the behavior of certaincompanies.
It won't even get that far. The outfit publishing this . . . well I suppose I have to call it a "book" since I can't think of a good pejorative . . . prints them to order, one at a time.
The general public is never going to see this book.
First off, it's libel when it's printed, not slander. (Although if, for instance, Brown were to spout his nonsense on a talk show, I don't know whether it would be libel or slander. Probably the latter.) Second, to win a libel case you have to prove damages, and you have to prove that the information was both false and malicious.
In this case, is it false? Yes. Malicious? That's harder to prove, but could be. Damages? There's the rub. Unless this work damages Linus somehow -- he gets thrown in prison because of allegations in the book, or loses his job (which may I remind you is with a group that is undoubtedly aware of Brown's blatant disregard for the truth), neither of which is likely -- damages would be pretty hard to prove. Especially if sales and usage of Linux continue to climb.
So I think the best course of action is just to refute the FUD everywhere it rears its pointed little head. If Linus were to sue for libel the most likely result would be to make two sets of lawyers richer.
Of course I could be wrong. John Henry Faulk sued AWARE for libel and effectively ended blacklisting in this country. Something similar might come out of a lawsuit against AdTI, but really only Linus could decide if it's worth the effort.
Take a look at this page., especially the photo accompanying this text:
Another advantage of having used a view camera is that it gives you an understanding of perspective. With a view camera, the lens and film aren't fixed parallel to each other. This opens up a huge range of creative opportunities that are unavailable to most users of 35mm and medium format gear. For example, if you want to take a photo of a building with a Nikon, you have to point the camera up towards the sky. You will then be projecting the vertical exterior of the building onto the angled film surface. The lines of the building will converge towards the top of the frame. With a view camera, you shift the lens up and/or the film down. The film is now "looking up" at the building through the lens, but the film is still parallel to the building exterior so lines don't converge.
Personally I'd like to see someone come out with a reasonably-priced view-format-equivalent digital camera with a bellows-mounted lens. It would be expensive at first, since the CCD would have to be several times larger, several times more dense, or both than the ones we have now, but the way camera technology is developing we could see one in the sub-$1000 range by the end of the decade.
Re:SCO attempting to prove selective enforcement?
on
FSF Subpoenaed by SCO
·
· Score: 1
If that's the case they'd better be subpoenaing everyone else involved in kernel development over the last 11 years, from Linus on down. There are probably individual contributors who have contributed more to the kernel (or hold more of the copyrights in individual files) than the FSF has, all of whom would presumably have standing should someone decide to sue SCOG for copyright violation based on distribution of the Linux kernel.
At any rate the copyright on the kernel as a whole is held by Linus, and the FSF just wrote the license that allows you to modify and redistribute the kernel.
Who says this is about sexual discomfort? If you WANT sexually explicit spam, good for you, route anything with the SEXUALLY-EXPLICIT tag straight to your mailbox and flag it Important.
Me, I'd like to have a heads-up on stuff I didn't ask for and don't want, whether it's sexually explicit material, home mortgages, vacations in Thailand or mailarounds of jokes that were old ten years ago.
So when your PHB who doesn't know jack about X-headers starts getting mail with SEXUALLY-EXPLICIT: in the subject line he can go ballistic and get the company's IT staff to do something about it, whatever it takes, thereby getting Linux into the workplace.
Quite ingenious really.
Re:SCO attempting to prove selective enforcement?
on
FSF Subpoenaed by SCO
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Trouble is, SCOG doesn't seem to understand that the FSF doesn't enforce the GPL, except in cases where they own the copyright to the product offered under the license (e.g. GNU software such as GNU Emacs and gcc). They seem to think the FSF is some kind of GPL Police, which is not the case. It's up to the individual copyright holder to enforce his/her/its copyright.
This, of course, being only one of the many things SCOG doesn't understand about the GPL.
Yeah that would be nice but I strongly suspect they are barely getting by as it is with Sci-Fi.
Personally I wish Sci-Fi would just get behind some better original programming. Surely someone could come up with something at least as good as Red Dwarf, which strikes me as being produced with the typical BBC budget of 25 quid an episode but gets by with good character interaction and clever writing, instead of drek like Scare Tactics and Mad Mad House.
Those of us who were around for Star Trek: The Original Series remember that, after NBC was forced to renew ST:TOS thanks to the massive letter-writing campaign, they moved the show from its original 8:30 time slot (Thursdays the first season, Fridays the second) to Fridays at 10 PM, thereby ensuring that the show would never make it to a fourth season because that time slot was a ratings graveyard.
Today with VCRs and TiVos abounding fans of the show will probably be able to catch it no matter when it airs, but still, couldn't they have found a better time slot? Seems to me it's sort of like being in a half-empty movie theater and choosing to sit in the worst seat possible.
Ha ha. Yeah, I know that was meant to be fuhny, but here in the You Ess Ay you can apply to the FCC to get what's called a "1x1" call sign for special event stations (one letter before the number, one letter after). The call sign is issued for a finite amount of time and can be used by a different club/orgainzation in the future.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually a band that wasn't signed to a label always had the option of -- get ready for it -- playing music for its fans in person. (Amazingly enough, bands signed to labels had that option, and often found it was the only way to actually make money now that they were signed to a label that insisted on nickeling-and-diming them to death as agreed to in their contract.) In recent years they've also had the option of making CDs to sell directly to the fans. Well, they've always had the option of selling directly to the fans, but until relatively recently it was prohibitively expensive.
Now there are two threats to the music division of what I've termed the Entertainment-Industrial Complex. First is that people will discover that you can find performers that play music you enjoy and are good at it, without their assistance and without having the EIC-sanctioned acts shoved down your throat. Second is that, having found those groups, you will support them through live concerts and recordings, without the assistance of the EIC.
There are a lot of people involved in the music arm of the Entertainment-Industrial Complex, from the guy stocking the bins at the Best Buy to the president of Warner Brothers Records, and this emerging paradigm is threatening every single one of them. It's going to be a long fight, and unless they adapt the EICers will die, but it's not going to be pretty along the way.
Actually I remember PPP standing for "Point to Point Protocol".* Minor quibble, really, because when I first got into networking in 1995 the Internet was indeed held up as an example of a massive peer-to-peer network, where content is offered by the machines on the network, as opposed to a server-based network (think NT domain or Netware network).
Trying to redefine "peer-to-peer" network as "mechanism for wholesale IP theft"** will of course net make it so. This strikes me as one of those bills whose purpose is to make it look like Congress is doing a Good Thing(tm), only to have the law struck down in the courts so the congresscritters can say they tried, it's not their fault.
* But hey, they tell me I remembered the origins of PHP wrong, so what do I know?
** Yes I know it's copyright violation, not theft, but that's the way they'll try to present it.
No, no, no, no, no. I realize this is offtopic, but . . .
BSD is free to share,
sharing is caring,
caring shows love,
love is blind,
Ray Charles is blind,
Ray Charles wrote BSD,
Ray Charles is dead,
BSD is dead.
Even the name Simba sounds like the name of the hero from the Japanese series!
Well, duh. "Simba" is Swahili for "lion."
I don't know where you got your info on the origin of PHP
Slashdot, of course.
The whole point is not to make legal sense but to keep enough bafflement in there to confuse the "investors" and keep them hoping that there is still some reason why SCO stock should not be printed on toilet paper.
.
Well, for starters you'd pay like $5 a roll . .
It's a good idea, but it's not that good.
Especially since the first P in PHP stands for Perl (well, it used to anyway, PHP started life as Perl Header Pages).
Readability is a matter of choosing the proper variable names, the proper coding style (e.g. proper indentation) and of commenting properly. Regular expressions have little to do with it. If you have to write a regex that looks like you buy your punctuation at Costco, you should tell the world what it does to make it easier for the next guy down the pike to maintain your code.
Sounds like Finland to me . . .
Nobody has a right to profit. Everybody has a right to try to make a profit, and some succeed -- but no one has a right to profit.
"There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute nor common law."
-Robert Heinlein
(The rest of your points are quite good, by the way.)
The problem with that of course is that if we ignore him, he becomes free to spout his lies, half-truths, misinformation and FUD to anyone who will listen and who doesn't know any better. And unfortunately, his book is aimed at people who, while they might or might not listen, don't know any better, but won't let that stop them when they enact policies and laws governing free and open source software.
Sorry, but the consequences of not acting are worse than the consequences of overacting. And remember, "All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to stand by and do nothing."
English is English
At least one guy agrees with you. He considered the American language sufficiently different from the mother tongue* to have written a scholarly work on the subject (also available in dead tree form).
And don't forget George Bernard Shaw's declaration that "England and America are two countries divided by a common language."
* So called because Father never gets a chance to use it.
Route 66 would be cool, but unfortunately large tracks of it (primarily between Arizona and Oklahoma, from what I remember) no longer exist.
I remember a book that was funded by the WPA (I think -- I haven't seen the book in years) that documented the highways of Texas as they existed in the 1930s, including landmarks (drive 0.3 miles west and turn left at the red barn). Imagine if the technology had been in place to put frame-per-second camera on cars and document the highways of the time on film. In fact maybe we should do something like this now. Our cities and highways will probably look as quaint and antiquated to the people of 2074 as the highways of 1934 look to us.
OK, considering that there are a number of vehicles who stayed ahead of the car for several frames, either there are a LOT of similar-looking cars on the road that just happened to be in the right place at the right time, or else there are a bunch of other cars in this video doing Mach 9 as well.
I'm impressed with those semis. That many sonic booms in their immediate vicinity all at once should have knocked them off the road.
Human society, as a general rule, seems to be a suspicious lot of witch hunters always looking for the next witch.
There's an old proverb that has new currency. In modern terms: The Department of Homeland Security is like a group of blind men in a dark room, looking for a black cat that isn't there . . . and still they manage to find the cat.
Fercryinoutloud, everyone knows the propeller scrambles the transmissions so you can't accidentally zap bystanders with backscatter mind-control radiation.
On the other hand, randomized backscatter mind control radiation might be the easiest way to explain the behavior of certain companies.
It won't even get that far. The outfit publishing this . . . well I suppose I have to call it a "book" since I can't think of a good pejorative . . . prints them to order, one at a time.
The general public is never going to see this book.
First off, it's libel when it's printed, not slander. (Although if, for instance, Brown were to spout his nonsense on a talk show, I don't know whether it would be libel or slander. Probably the latter.) Second, to win a libel case you have to prove damages, and you have to prove that the information was both false and malicious.
In this case, is it false? Yes. Malicious? That's harder to prove, but could be. Damages? There's the rub. Unless this work damages Linus somehow -- he gets thrown in prison because of allegations in the book, or loses his job (which may I remind you is with a group that is undoubtedly aware of Brown's blatant disregard for the truth), neither of which is likely -- damages would be pretty hard to prove. Especially if sales and usage of Linux continue to climb.
So I think the best course of action is just to refute the FUD everywhere it rears its pointed little head. If Linus were to sue for libel the most likely result would be to make two sets of lawyers richer.
Of course I could be wrong. John Henry Faulk sued AWARE for libel and effectively ended blacklisting in this country. Something similar might come out of a lawsuit against AdTI, but really only Linus could decide if it's worth the effort.
Take a look at this page., especially the photo accompanying this text:
Another advantage of having used a view camera is that it gives you an understanding of perspective. With a view camera, the lens and film aren't fixed parallel to each other. This opens up a huge range of creative opportunities that are unavailable to most users of 35mm and medium format gear. For example, if you want to take a photo of a building with a Nikon, you have to point the camera up towards the sky. You will then be projecting the vertical exterior of the building onto the angled film surface. The lines of the building will converge towards the top of the frame. With a view camera, you shift the lens up and/or the film down. The film is now "looking up" at the building through the lens, but the film is still parallel to the building exterior so lines don't converge.
Personally I'd like to see someone come out with a reasonably-priced view-format-equivalent digital camera with a bellows-mounted lens. It would be expensive at first, since the CCD would have to be several times larger, several times more dense, or both than the ones we have now, but the way camera technology is developing we could see one in the sub-$1000 range by the end of the decade.
If that's the case they'd better be subpoenaing everyone else involved in kernel development over the last 11 years, from Linus on down. There are probably individual contributors who have contributed more to the kernel (or hold more of the copyrights in individual files) than the FSF has, all of whom would presumably have standing should someone decide to sue SCOG for copyright violation based on distribution of the Linux kernel.
At any rate the copyright on the kernel as a whole is held by Linus, and the FSF just wrote the license that allows you to modify and redistribute the kernel.
Disclaimer: I could be wrong about any of this.
Who says this is about sexual discomfort? If you WANT sexually explicit spam, good for you, route anything with the SEXUALLY-EXPLICIT tag straight to your mailbox and flag it Important.
Me, I'd like to have a heads-up on stuff I didn't ask for and don't want, whether it's sexually explicit material, home mortgages, vacations in Thailand or mailarounds of jokes that were old ten years ago.
So when your PHB who doesn't know jack about X-headers starts getting mail with SEXUALLY-EXPLICIT: in the subject line he can go ballistic and get the company's IT staff to do something about it, whatever it takes, thereby getting Linux into the workplace.
Quite ingenious really.
Trouble is, SCOG doesn't seem to understand that the FSF doesn't enforce the GPL, except in cases where they own the copyright to the product offered under the license (e.g. GNU software such as GNU Emacs and gcc). They seem to think the FSF is some kind of GPL Police, which is not the case. It's up to the individual copyright holder to enforce his/her/its copyright.
This, of course, being only one of the many things SCOG doesn't understand about the GPL.
Yeah that would be nice but I strongly suspect they are barely getting by as it is with Sci-Fi.
Personally I wish Sci-Fi would just get behind some better original programming. Surely someone could come up with something at least as good as Red Dwarf, which strikes me as being produced with the typical BBC budget of 25 quid an episode but gets by with good character interaction and clever writing, instead of drek like Scare Tactics and Mad Mad House.
Those of us who were around for Star Trek: The Original Series remember that, after NBC was forced to renew ST:TOS thanks to the massive letter-writing campaign, they moved the show from its original 8:30 time slot (Thursdays the first season, Fridays the second) to Fridays at 10 PM, thereby ensuring that the show would never make it to a fourth season because that time slot was a ratings graveyard.
Today with VCRs and TiVos abounding fans of the show will probably be able to catch it no matter when it airs, but still, couldn't they have found a better time slot? Seems to me it's sort of like being in a half-empty movie theater and choosing to sit in the worst seat possible.
Ha ha. Yeah, I know that was meant to be fuhny, but here in the You Ess Ay you can apply to the FCC to get what's called a "1x1" call sign for special event stations (one letter before the number, one letter after). The call sign is issued for a finite amount of time and can be used by a different club/orgainzation in the future.