If the world can beat Kazaa, it will send a strong message that theft is wrong, and allow the content producers to lead the way into the beginning of the true information age.
Nonsense. The ethics people follow does not arise from governmental actions. If you stop downloading and you tell your friends that "theft is wrong", the situation might change. However as long as you are promoting your ethical views through hypocritical anonymous ranting that promote government-organized regulations, the rest of the world can be rather certain that your views will not become any more popular than they already are.
The truth is that the majority of people don't care all that much about copyrights and it would take something completely different from what you describe to change this situation.
Erm, well according to the freshmeat page, it's licenced under the GPL. So presumably the source code is available somewhere.
As far as Knoppix is concerned, this issue was recently discussed on debian-legal list. See the answer from Klaus Knopper. I don't know the details of this modified version, though.
The EUCD was supposed to be a law in all European Union member countries already by last December. That is after each parliament had two years to pass the law. As far as I know, only two or three EU member nations have modified their laws to comply with the EUCD.
On the other hand, sooner or later the national laws must be passed. I personally wish that at least one EU member would refuse to implement the law so that the issue would be brought back to the EU parliament.
After the fall of Soviet Union, EU became the new safe haven for bureucrates so it's really hard to say how the EUCD situation will develop due to lobbying and politics. What is clear, however, is that most of the national parliaments have not been all that happy with many regulations the EUCD is trying to enforce. I hope that the Swedish parliament will protect its citizens from this legislation that goes way over any reasonable balance.
I hear "high speed" as "very fast", and "full speed" as "fast as possible." But then again what do I know, clearly the group that made the change is more sensible.;)
Maybe "speed" is actually a secret code word for "fraudulent". Thus we get that USB 1.1 is fully fraudulent while USB 2.0 is only highly fraudulent.
This industry code word is also featured in products such as "high-speed internet access".
It sounds like they have learned from some of the mistakes our patent system has made.
No, we haven't learned from your mistakes, I'm afraid. Before EU started gathering together the directive, some countries, including Finland where I live, had no software patents at all.
Nice idea, but Brazil is a signatory of the Berne Convention (look it up). Essentially, Brazil won't be able to change its laws on copyright without some major hassle from the international community, probably including economic sanctions.
Yes, I'm aware that (like another reply said) that it's not very realistic to expect any government to make substantially weaker copyright laws due to the international treaties and many other reasons. The contradiction still remains, however, and my post was simply meant to be an observation of this contradiction.
Neverthless I hope that the wider adoption of open source will also make the decision-makers to reconsider their views about copyright.
One thing that really bugs me about many governments around the world is how they are never willing to touch the fundamental issue behind free vs. proprietary software. Copyright is a government-granted exclusive right to a work. If this government-granted right is hurting the society, the society should reconsider the principles behind the copyright.
I find it insane that the Brazilian government first grants each author with strong rights for the software they write and then they say that sorry, we can't use such software because you use the rights we have given you. I also find it insane that the US government grants software authors similar rights and when one company simply uses those government-granted rights (well, I guess you know what company I'm talking about), the government sues it for abusing those rights.
Making open source mandatory is pointless. The proper way to change things is not to grant anyone privileges that hurt the society. The copyright, to some extent, might be a good thing. If it becomes such a bad thing that the government itself wishes to use only copyleft software, there is something fundamentally flawed either in the government decision or the copyright law.
Does anyone else find it thoughtless and ungrateful to criticize one of the communities greatest single person assets because the tremendous efforts he puts forth FOR FREE are colored by his personal experiences?
Not all responsibility comes from money. I think that taking a voluntary task can also imply that you must take some responsibility, even if you're not getting paid by anyone. If someone claims he is describing the hacker folklore, then yes, I do not think it is thoughtless or ungrateful to present (harsh) criticism if he writes ESR folklore instead of hacker folklore.
Anyway, it's not that I was be intimately familiar with hacker folklore so it's hard for me to tell whether ESR is going too far or not.
With Microsoft in control of the system, Finland will mysteriously disappear from all the routing systems...
Hmm, as a person living in Finland, if that implies Microsoft wouldn't find their way to Finland any longer, it actually sounds like an excellent idea...
The irony is that even after that discount they lost. Since Microsoft is starting to get some serious competition, I'm not sure how long it will be proper to accuse Microsoft of abusing its monopoly position.
As if the people who claim the NASA missions to the moon are hoaxes didn't have enough ammuntion already...
Oh, come on. The Moon is a Propaganda Hoax. The Mad Revisionist is even offering $100,000 for anyone who provides them, by e-mail, conclusive physical evidence of the existence of the moon.
I used to see a lot of popup ads before Mozilla could block them. Are the advertisers still using them?
I have memories of popups as well but Mozilla (or mostly Galeon in my case) deals with them so well that I don't even know of their existence.
Some time ago blocking popups wasn't always so succesful because some sites relied on users' ability to see popups. I remember one common use was a username/password popup but I think they have mostly disappeared. Because site designers know that they can't rely on popups to deliver important information or functionality, popups are nowadays used mostly for advertising or useless multimedia. So there's not much to lose if you block popups.
What's the idea in this news item? That people can get jail time for breaking a law? As long as unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material over internet is illegal, this is a direct consequence. No news, really.
The important issues are when new laws are passed or when business wants to stretch the limits of existing laws. However I see nothing in the article that would suggest either.
Debian isn't about to remove all documentation licensed under GFDL, only the documentation that takes advantage of the invariant sections (or some other non-modifiable features of GFDL). Unfortunately this includes most of the GNU project documentation since the GNU project has marked the usual GNU propaganda blurbs invariant.
What's strange is that according to GFDL the invariant sections must not be about the actual subject of the documentation. Instead must be "secondary sections", as described in the GFDL:
A "Secondary Section" is a named appendix or a front-matter section of the Document that deals exclusively with the relationship of the publishers or authors of the Document to the Document's overall subject (or to related matters) and contains nothing that could fall directly within that overall subject. (Thus, if the Document is in part a textbook of mathematics, a Secondary Section may not explain any mathematics.) The relationship could be a matter of historical connection with the subject or with related matters, or of legal, commercial, philosophical, ethical or political position regarding them.
The "Invariant Sections" are certain Secondary Sections whose titles are designated, as being those of Invariant Sections, in the notice that says that the Document is released under this License. If a section does not fit the above definition of Secondary then it is not allowed to be designated as Invariant. The Document may contain zero Invariant Sections. If the Document does not identify any Invariant Sections then there are none.
Frankly, it seems to me that the GNU project would have added the invariant sections only force their political statements to be carried everywhere along the documentation. Many people have pondered that if they request the operating system to be called GNU/Linux, why don't they add a clause in their license to demand that. Well, maybe they have started moving towards that direction.
This could also be just a smart move by the FirebirdSQL team. The project has been relatively obscure up until now, but with the/. articles people are much more aware of its existence.
This is just plain silly. One of my favorite pieces of classical music is called "Firebird" by Igor Stravinsky. Maybe I should start campaigning against FirebirdSQL project to stop associating their product with that piece of music?
Both of the projects have picked a word that is used in many, many contexts. As long as you pick one short English word, things like this might happen, as we can see.
However if both of the projects wish to get an unique name in this area, perhaps they should take a look at projects like fvwm2 and udhcpd that do not suffer from this problem. If they were named frbdsql and frbdhttp, all these silly battles over common words would cease.:)
But wait, release a GPL product with your IP embedded in it... doesn't that mean that your IP is now GPL?
IANAL, but if I recall correctly, the SCO vs. IBM issue is about trade secrets and contract violations, not about copyright or patents. Therefore the GPL clauses about patents and copyright are irrelevant in this case.
As to this latter trend, the more media channels there are to promulgate a message, the more intense seems to become the competition to exploit them by whatever means.
Yes, but the Internet will eventually strike back. To borrow the words from an anonymous author at alt.religion.kibology, I suspect a new emerging trend on the net is about to become the standard course of action:
"The Internet interprets blogging as damage, and routes around it."
.... all packets originating from Microsoft Windows machines?
I doubt that. After all, Microsoft Windows-based products have a bad habit of not following the Internet standards.
On another news, the Mozilla project has announced that it will introduce the EVIL bit on all HTTP requests originating from users clicking links on duplicate Slashdot news items. The announcement has received good response from the Internet community. An anonymous system administrator was heard stating: "I am very pleased of this late development. I wish more hardware could learn to drop all packets with EVIL bit before it consumes all the bandwidth of the victim."
You realize, don't you, by actually saying that something will never happen, you have practically assured that it will happen at some point. Just like when people said man would not fly.
Well, watching HDTV with a computer has already happened.:) See the HDTV snapshots from the GNU Radio project site.
Base 2 is pointless because comms people use SI prefixes properly*. 1 megabit = 1,000,000 bits. Base 10.
Yeah, a mega of something is always 1 000 000 units of something. To address this ambiguity in computer world, it's been suggested that people started using kilobinaries, megabinaries, gigabinaries, or kibis, mebis, and gibis for short.
This way one kilo equals to 10^3 (1 000) while one kibi equals to 2^10 (1 024). One mega equals to 10^6 (1 000 000) while one mebi equals to 2^20 (1 048 576) etc.
For short notation k and M imply kilo and mega while ki and Mi imply kibi and mebi. If this caught on, the question whether "one mega" in computer world means either 1 000 000 or 1 048 576 would be solved since 1MB and 1MiB don't have this ambiguity.
I tried this on two systems of mine... on one system it worked, on the other I got "[-] Unable to attach: Operation not permitted" -- I have modules disabled on that system.
I did the same and got the same results. On a system running 2.4.18 with module support it worked (i.e. I got root) while on a system running 2.4.18 without module support it didn't work. But I'm not a kernel hacker so I don't know if that's the essential difference.
Slashdot Mirror
Nonsense. The ethics people follow does not arise from governmental actions. If you stop downloading and you tell your friends that "theft is wrong", the situation might change. However as long as you are promoting your ethical views through hypocritical anonymous ranting that promote government-organized regulations, the rest of the world can be rather certain that your views will not become any more popular than they already are.
The truth is that the majority of people don't care all that much about copyrights and it would take something completely different from what you describe to change this situation.
As far as Knoppix is concerned, this issue was recently discussed on debian-legal list. See the answer from Klaus Knopper. I don't know the details of this modified version, though.
The EUCD was supposed to be a law in all European Union member countries already by last December. That is after each parliament had two years to pass the law. As far as I know, only two or three EU member nations have modified their laws to comply with the EUCD.
On the other hand, sooner or later the national laws must be passed. I personally wish that at least one EU member would refuse to implement the law so that the issue would be brought back to the EU parliament.
After the fall of Soviet Union, EU became the new safe haven for bureucrates so it's really hard to say how the EUCD situation will develop due to lobbying and politics. What is clear, however, is that most of the national parliaments have not been all that happy with many regulations the EUCD is trying to enforce. I hope that the Swedish parliament will protect its citizens from this legislation that goes way over any reasonable balance.
Maybe "speed" is actually a secret code word for "fraudulent". Thus we get that USB 1.1 is fully fraudulent while USB 2.0 is only highly fraudulent.
This industry code word is also featured in products such as "high-speed internet access".
No, we haven't learned from your mistakes, I'm afraid. Before EU started gathering together the directive, some countries, including Finland where I live, had no software patents at all.
Yes, I'm aware that (like another reply said) that it's not very realistic to expect any government to make substantially weaker copyright laws due to the international treaties and many other reasons. The contradiction still remains, however, and my post was simply meant to be an observation of this contradiction.
Neverthless I hope that the wider adoption of open source will also make the decision-makers to reconsider their views about copyright.
One thing that really bugs me about many governments around the world is how they are never willing to touch the fundamental issue behind free vs. proprietary software. Copyright is a government-granted exclusive right to a work. If this government-granted right is hurting the society, the society should reconsider the principles behind the copyright.
I find it insane that the Brazilian government first grants each author with strong rights for the software they write and then they say that sorry, we can't use such software because you use the rights we have given you. I also find it insane that the US government grants software authors similar rights and when one company simply uses those government-granted rights (well, I guess you know what company I'm talking about), the government sues it for abusing those rights.
Making open source mandatory is pointless. The proper way to change things is not to grant anyone privileges that hurt the society. The copyright, to some extent, might be a good thing. If it becomes such a bad thing that the government itself wishes to use only copyleft software, there is something fundamentally flawed either in the government decision or the copyright law.
Why do I get the feeling that -- instead of the "pirates" -- the RIAA is the one going around stealing money from honest people?
Not all responsibility comes from money. I think that taking a voluntary task can also imply that you must take some responsibility, even if you're not getting paid by anyone. If someone claims he is describing the hacker folklore, then yes, I do not think it is thoughtless or ungrateful to present (harsh) criticism if he writes ESR folklore instead of hacker folklore.
Anyway, it's not that I was be intimately familiar with hacker folklore so it's hard for me to tell whether ESR is going too far or not.
Hmm, as a person living in Finland, if that implies Microsoft wouldn't find their way to Finland any longer, it actually sounds like an excellent idea...
You can try bogofilter, ifile, SpamBayes, or POPFile. The newer versions of SpamAssassin also implement some kind of Bayesian filtering.
The irony is that even after that discount they lost. Since Microsoft is starting to get some serious competition, I'm not sure how long it will be proper to accuse Microsoft of abusing its monopoly position.
Oh, come on. The Moon is a Propaganda Hoax. The Mad Revisionist is even offering $100,000 for anyone who provides them, by e-mail, conclusive physical evidence of the existence of the moon.
Hey, that is exactly why it is not boring. :)
I have memories of popups as well but Mozilla (or mostly Galeon in my case) deals with them so well that I don't even know of their existence.
Some time ago blocking popups wasn't always so succesful because some sites relied on users' ability to see popups. I remember one common use was a username/password popup but I think they have mostly disappeared. Because site designers know that they can't rely on popups to deliver important information or functionality, popups are nowadays used mostly for advertising or useless multimedia. So there's not much to lose if you block popups.
What's the idea in this news item? That people can get jail time for breaking a law? As long as unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material over internet is illegal, this is a direct consequence. No news, really.
The important issues are when new laws are passed or when business wants to stretch the limits of existing laws. However I see nothing in the article that would suggest either.
Debian isn't about to remove all documentation licensed under GFDL, only the documentation that takes advantage of the invariant sections (or some other non-modifiable features of GFDL). Unfortunately this includes most of the GNU project documentation since the GNU project has marked the usual GNU propaganda blurbs invariant.
What's strange is that according to GFDL the invariant sections must not be about the actual subject of the documentation. Instead must be "secondary sections", as described in the GFDL:
Frankly, it seems to me that the GNU project would have added the invariant sections only force their political statements to be carried everywhere along the documentation. Many people have pondered that if they request the operating system to be called GNU/Linux, why don't they add a clause in their license to demand that. Well, maybe they have started moving towards that direction.
Yeah, a very good point. The sourceforge usage statistics for the Firebird project demonstrate this very well.
This is just plain silly. One of my favorite pieces of classical music is called "Firebird" by Igor Stravinsky. Maybe I should start campaigning against FirebirdSQL project to stop associating their product with that piece of music?
Both of the projects have picked a word that is used in many, many contexts. As long as you pick one short English word, things like this might happen, as we can see.
However if both of the projects wish to get an unique name in this area, perhaps they should take a look at projects like fvwm2 and udhcpd that do not suffer from this problem. If they were named frbdsql and frbdhttp, all these silly battles over common words would cease. :)
IANAL, but if I recall correctly, the SCO vs. IBM issue is about trade secrets and contract violations, not about copyright or patents. Therefore the GPL clauses about patents and copyright are irrelevant in this case.
Yes, but the Internet will eventually strike back. To borrow the words from an anonymous author at alt.religion.kibology, I suspect a new emerging trend on the net is about to become the standard course of action:
"The Internet interprets blogging as damage, and routes around it."
I doubt that. After all, Microsoft Windows-based products have a bad habit of not following the Internet standards.
On another news, the Mozilla project has announced that it will introduce the EVIL bit on all HTTP requests originating from users clicking links on duplicate Slashdot news items. The announcement has received good response from the Internet community. An anonymous system administrator was heard stating: "I am very pleased of this late development. I wish more hardware could learn to drop all packets with EVIL bit before it consumes all the bandwidth of the victim."
Well, watching HDTV with a computer has already happened. :) See the HDTV snapshots from the GNU Radio project site.
Yeah, a mega of something is always 1 000 000 units of something. To address this ambiguity in computer world, it's been suggested that people started using kilobinaries, megabinaries, gigabinaries, or kibis, mebis, and gibis for short.
This way one kilo equals to 10^3 (1 000) while one kibi equals to 2^10 (1 024). One mega equals to 10^6 (1 000 000) while one mebi equals to 2^20 (1 048 576) etc.
For short notation k and M imply kilo and mega while ki and Mi imply kibi and mebi. If this caught on, the question whether "one mega" in computer world means either 1 000 000 or 1 048 576 would be solved since 1MB and 1MiB don't have this ambiguity.
I did the same and got the same results. On a system running 2.4.18 with module support it worked (i.e. I got root) while on a system running 2.4.18 without module support it didn't work. But I'm not a kernel hacker so I don't know if that's the essential difference.