You're forgetting Donald's ethernet drivers which they grabbed a while ago too and incorporated into their kernel. This makes three times that they've done it, THAT WE KNOW ABOUT.
As someone else pointed out. Nobody forced them to use Bruce's code, Donald's code, or the bootloader code. The very fact that the public's been so permissive is what's surprising.
I actually had this question for him a while ago. I suggested something like a license where the terms change after a period of time..
So distribute the code under the most anal proprietary license you want, and say that in 6-12 months that the license then changes to the GPL.
I asked this of RMS a few months ago, specifically I asked what time period he would find acceptable. He said 6-12 months.
There is a second way to make money from GPL software. Sell exceptions to it. If you hold the copyright to your work, you can distribute it under any license you want, and several licenses concurrently.
So, if you create the ultimate video codec, you can license the decoder as LGPL. Then, since the coder is the hard part, you can license it with a proprietay license which expires into the GPL in 6 months. (So you always have 6 months of leadtime to sell your new version before it goes under the GPL.) Finally, you can sell exceptions to your license. (If someone wants to make Net-TV boxes, you can offer to let them license the coder/decoder under a NON-GPL license so that they won't have to worry about distributing source.)
Another example is if you make a game. What you do is you hand the source code to (say) the FSF's lawyer in escrow for 6-12 months. Then you make money from selling the game for 6-12 months.
Or, if you make a GPL game engine which other people want to use, but without the 'issue' of the GPL, you can sell them a different license at whatever terms and prices you want.
This is how Aladdin works. Old versions of Ghostscript become GPL, and then they sell their postscript interpreter to various printer manufacturers under a more acceptable license.
Remember, RMS isn't demanding that software be 'free' immediatly, just that it will be free in a reasonable time frame. And I think that he would accept minor offshoots that are not free, as long as the main body is.
The solution is simple:The origional term of 28y
on
RMS On eBooks
·
· Score: 2
The solution is very simple. How about we regress copyright to the same term it was a century ago. 14 years, which may be renewed for a second 14-year term.
Would you all agree that a maximum 28-year term is reasonable? Copyright isn't fun, but it wasn't designed to be. But 28 years of misery is a hell of a lot better than the >130 years that Dilbert will be under copyright as things are now. (70? years after death, and Scott Adams will probably be alive another 60 years or so.)
I admit it, I don't like copyright all that much on one hand. But on the other hand, my life will be spent creating artistic works.
Remember, a big business with a huge market share (like Intel or MS or a utility) cannot do things that a small business can do with impunity. Things like product-tying are considered monopolistic if done by a business with 90% marketshare, but are more acceptable as a marketing technique if done by a business with 5% marketshare.
I like the quote right at the beginning of the article ``Artists should get paid for their work''. If that's so, then I have a lot of canned human feces I HAD BETTER GET PAID FOR. I call it art and I want my money! (Heh, one of the nicest things about shit is that there's an endless supply of it, if I get desperate enough I can use the RIAA website as a source for more.)
That is sorta understandable.. They've done some interesting studies that the top programmers can sometimes be 10x-100x better and more productive than an average programmer. They might not write as many lines of code as the average programmer, but their code is clearer, more bug free, simpler, or more elegant. And given the cost of maintance combined with the cost of bugs, that number is VERY easy to understand.
And the rarity of people in that class is also easy to understand. You don't join that class by learning C on your own. Nor by having an MCSE. You learn it by loving computer science, knowing the fundamentals, and gaining experience.
To: graphics.sales@matrox.com Bcc: info@nvidia.com, emailsupport@3dfx.com Subject: Matrox Millenium G400, NVidia and linux
Hello.. I've been a very happy linux user for the last 3 years. I am also about to graduate. I appreciate that you've realeased most of the specs for the Matrox Millenium G400 and worked on open-source drivers.
This was the primary reason I chose your video card to put in my new system. As long as your company is the one with the foremost support of linux and its ideals and you continue to make great hardware, I will always be your customer and reccomend your hardware to my friends and family.
Today it was announced that NVidia will be releasing binary-only drivers for linux. I had slightly considered their video chipset as the one for me, but they were beginning to show their lack of support of the ideals of linux two months ago when I was to make my choice. With the recent announcement, many people who had purchased NVidia's hardware specifically because it appeared to promise support now feel betrayed.
I heartily encourage you to not make the same mistake.. Continue to release specs and start to release the remaining specs that you've not yet releasted.
Myself and many other young computer professionals are looking for a company who fits with our ideals on open-source and linux. We may be a small market now, but we will become much more critical as enter industry over the next few years. Our purchases have been and will be dependent on how well our software and ideals are supported.
Thanks for your great product, and thanks for your support.. Next time I crack open my case to read off the serial number, I'll register the card as a happy linux user.
I liked their comment about how they've already suffered damages from DeCSS because they decided to postpone the release of DVD-audio because of the release of DeCSS. That's sorta like ford suing someone [for damages] who wrote a bad review of the Pinto a few months before the Pinto(2) was to be released because NOW they have to postpone the Pinto(2) to redesign it.
This is false.. You always posess your own code. See my other posts for details..
The GPL is not a software license. By copyright law, you have no permission to distribute the origional program or any derivative/patched work. The GPL is the only thing which gives you that right. You can distribute your patches any way you see fit with whatever license. You cannot distribute a patched program unless you are allowed to.. Which means satisfying the GPL.
Since you wrote your code, you can distribute your patch under any license you wish, including multiple licenses simultanously.
So if you were to write patches for the gcc, you could distribute them under any license you wished.. If you wanted to distribute them with GCC, you would have to offer to distribute them under the GPL. But you still retain copyright for your patches and you could license them as-is under any number of licenses you wished... (Say, you create a big patch to GCC that lets one super-optimize a program. You distribute those patches with GCC so you have to offer them under the terms of the GPL. BUT, if a commercial compiler vendor also wants to use them, you can license your patches and code to them TOO with whatever terms you wish. Or you can incrementally reimplement the rest of GCC until you have a functioning version that contains no GPL-licensed code in it. If you do this, then since you own the copyright for the entire program, the GPL doesn't apply. (Example: Berkely reimplementing those last pieces of BSD to get it out from under AT&T's thumb.)
So overall, the GPL is not unfair. You always posess your patch and your own code. Copyright prohibits you from distributing THEIR code with your patchs/code.... unless you you satisfy the terms of the license. (the GPL/NPL/MPL/QPL...).
Your university only has 24 terabyte of diskspace? Wow! I know we're in the triple-digits of terabytes drivespace, and that's excluding students. Informedia alone has a few terabytes of diskspace.
You can license the patch under any license you wish. IANAL
What the GPL says is that you cannot distribute the origional program unless you supply source code. Nor can you distribute modified copies of the program unless you supply source code.
So if you have a patch, you could distribute a patch under whatever license you want. Proprietary for example.. But you cannot distribute the origional program which the patch applies to unless you also license the patch under the GPL.
I could make a patch to gcc and distribute it under the terms that if you use it you must give me your firstborn son. What I cannot do is distribute the patched version of gcc.
[Minor subtle point about the GPL] Copyright law gives me no rights to distribute gcc in any case (patched or unpatched). The GPL is the only thing that gives me the right to distribute it. By satisfying the clauses from the GPL, I gain permission to distribute it. So thus the GPL is actually MORE free than standard copyright. Because if the software is under normal copyright you'd have no rights to distribute the software or any modified copies at all. This is also why its different from a shrinkwrap software license. A shrinkwrap software license covers the USE of the software, not the distribution, which is what the GPL covers. (Though the software companies would like to claim that they are the same; you have to COPY a software into memory in order to use it. Therefore the license gives you the right to COPY it into memory. Or you can look at a shrinkwrapped license as contract.) This is also why the GPL is fairly safe under copyright law.
To get back on topic... You can make a patch and distribute it under any license.. But you cannot distribute that patch with GCC as a derivative work without permission from the copyright holder, or satisfying the terms of the GPL. Because the only way you can get permission to distribute GCC is by being willing to give full source code.
Of course, a patch alone is useless without the software which it is to patch.
So my opinion is that you would be subject to the terms of the GPL if you distributed patched binaries, if you distributed the stock GCC (and source code) and a binary-patcher. Or if you put the patch (with source code, but no rights to redistribute) and GCC on the same CD.
But one could reasonably claim that ANY patched program is a derivative work of the origional, no matter by what means its patched. (As the patch is useless without the program.. And the program is a seperate work before being patched.)
Because of this reason, I'd also say that distributing your patch and a script to download GCC off of the web might be in violation of the letter of the license.
I also note that all of these restrictions apply if you distribute a patched version publically. The GPL explicitly allows you to keep modified copies in-house. (So I could patch GCC and compile propreitary software all year, sell that software, and not have to give the source to my modified version.. But I cannot distribute the modified GCC binary or source code publically without satisfying the GPL.)
This all is IANAL, but that subtle point about how the GPL applies is important. The GPL is not a shrinkwrap license, it is a license giving you more permission than copyright. You have no permission to distribute the origional software unless you satisfy the terms of the GPL, and for a patch to be useful, it must be distributed with the program itself.
To calculate man-years.. What I did was I divide the total economic output of the US by its population. (9 trillion divided by 300 million). I then multiplied in a fudge factor of 3x..
Roughly for every $100,000 spent, that's the economic output of a full individual for a full year. And 5 billion is 50,000 times that. Of course this counts all of the production used, from the cleaners who cleaned the floor where the rocket fuel for launch was refined, to the engineers who designed the chips in the birds.
Another way to look at it is that its about one half of.1% of one years worth of economic output of the US.
(Some armchair economics follows)
My belief is that there's only one real fundamental shortage, that of human labor. There are enough atoms of iron, uranium, alluminum, iridium, and everything else in the earth's crust to satisfy almost any demand that's short of building a dyson sphere. Anyways, I sorta like to convert currency from units of dollars into units of human labor. So the CDR I burned today cost $.71 or required about 6-30 minutes of human labor to build. (including the price of the raw materials, the amortized cost of the manufacturing equipment, the cost of the materials to build the manufacturing equipment,....)
Well, stupidity died pretty quick in this case. Despite the 5 billion investment, it WAS allowed to die. No reputations, no government, no nostalgia is being allowed to keep it alive beyond its time.
Its sad that a beautiful idea just came too late to work.. Its sad that the result of 5 billion dollars (over 50,000 man years) of work is being scheduled to be burned to ash in the atmosphere, barely a year after it went public. (Iridium first opened for service Nov 98)
But it does go to show how capitalism works.. Sometimes mistakes happen and lots of effort gets wasted. But things aren't kept artifically alive beyond their time. It shows that the market works.
The people who put their dreams and time into iridium will go on to other projects and create new ideas and give us technological progress.
Its sad, but life must go on. The only thing that is unchanging is death.
To respond to both this message and the sibling message. It doesn't matter if the statistics are normal. In a human, there are a few billion base-pairs in DNA. If the secret is encoded at some unknown position, it might be hard to extract without the primers, but there are ONLY a few billion positions it could be in.. So this looks like cryptography with a 32-bit key.
This is much like the 'secret' cypher where you encode each word of some plaintext message as a list of page, line, and word numbers in some arbitrary book. 12-3-5 (page 12, line 3, word 5). The book itself acts like the key. Unfortunately, this isn't secure as there aren't so many books out there. I can just try each one till I find one that gives a reasonable message, say a 20-bit key.
On the other hand, this is a news report, the story might have just 'skipped over' this issue and Viviana thought over it and has a solution. Or maybe not, don't forget that good steganography is damned hard. I ask you, how would you try to 'hide' some secret message so that somebody couldn't even detect it?
Can I point out an important contrast between what you say about how spamming is wrong because its abusing YOUR bandwidth and YOUR servers? Many people on slashdot seem to agree with you (as remarked by your current score)..
Yet there's the other side of it. What about the NAPSTER side of it with colleges. Doesn't the college reserve the right to choose how THEIR bandwidth and THEIR private property are to be used?
You can't have it rabidly both ways at the same time. Choose which one, or give a better way to make that decision.
Oops. I hate making stupid mistakes like that. Thanks.
As for the size of monroe county. The numbers I gave are about right. I think I remember them right from about 10 years ago. And Rochester NY is in Monroe County.. Rochester is the world headquarters of Kodak and Bausch&Lomb, and Xerox has a large presence. Its also one of the top 50 (or so) urban areas in the nation. Its not huge, but its not inconsequential either.
Looking at his numbers, I find something fishy.. He says that its ONLY 35 billion among 50 states... That's 700 million per state (or so. I don't know about other counties, but in Monroe county (in NY), the yearly budget is about a billion. It also has a 8% sales tax. Of that, 5% (?) goes to the county. But of the billion dollars, only about 200 million is actually discretionary spending. (The state forces them to spend the other 800 million for welfare and other state-required programs.) There are around 40 counties in NY, so Monroe's share of that 700 million would be about $20 million a year. That's a lot of money if you compare it to the discretionary budget. Its an increase of almost 10%. That isn't inconsequential or chump change.
I don't know about other states or other areas of the country, but at least in monroe county in NY, a lot of the sales tax revenues are given to local governments and to the schools, where they help keep property taxes down.
I remember this because about 10 years ago there was a big debate on whether the county should lobby the state to increase the sales tax from 7% to 8%.
I'm ignoring all of his arguments on the problems in collecting taxes on internet goods, but how he blows off 35 billion is fishy.
If there was no copyright, maybe the number of artistic works would go down, or maybe it would go up!
There is a frequent assumption about the supply curve for artistic works (IE: the supply generated as a function of the price). They assume that there will be zero production if the price is zero. Why do people assume this as a given?
While that MIGHT be true for most institutional generation of artistic works, I believe that if the price were zero, the non-institutional generation of artistic works would dwarf the loss.
Anyone look at the 'Matrix Spoof' here a couple of weeks ago? Was that legal? Are most fan sites actually legal? How about the southpark spoof? Did that violate the copyrights of southpark and starwars? Regardless of your answer, all of these things were created without a profit motive.
How many artistic works might be created if we could freely rearrange the images, sounds, and video of our culture, and then be able to freely distribute the result? How about taking Madonna's 'Like a Prayer', and putting video clips from Zardoz in it to make a music video? How about a Dilbert Starwars spoof?
Remember, copyright is locking up our cultural heritage away in fiefdoms controlled and owned by corporations and descendents of the origional creators. We have no rights to view our own cultural heritage unless they are granted. There are more than a few examples where the fiefs have prevented this from happening. Look at the case of Kate Bush and Ulysses. She had a song using Molly Blum's speech; It fit the words beautifully and it was ready for release but the Joyce estate, specifically James Joyce's GRANDSON refused permission. This song was blocked not by the author, not even by the author's children, but the author's GRANDSON. She had to rewrite the song. This isn't the first time that it has happened with him either.
I would like to COPY a quote that describes the situation so much better than I could myself.
"There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or a corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute nor common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back, for their private benefit. That is all." -- Robert A. Heinlein ("Life-Line")
I feel that the time has come to look at copyright very closely to decide if it is warranted, or what the term should be. Personally, I would like a fixed term of 14 years, renewable by an additional 14 years. This would be 28 years maximum; the origional length of copyright. Copyright actually was 28 years until after the turn of the century [I think].
I leave after reciting this example. Dilbert will probably not leave copyright until the year 2100 or after. There will be no fan-dilbert strips. We will probably never see a dilbert-southpark strip in our lifetimes, by anyone. With luck and no more copyright extensions, our grandchildren might have the ``freedom'' to freely use the cultural heritage we are creating now. Is this not locking up our cultural heritage?
While capitalism does tend to lead to efficiency in many types of markets, it doesn't work in all markets.
One failures in capitalism are in defense-spending. An army is a very ineffecient use of resources. Capitalism also tends to not create incentives to create goods where the initial cost is large, but the marginal cost is very small, like creative works. (music, software, film,...) Therefore we have government for defense, and we have monopolies (patents and copyright) granted for creative works.
The free market also assumes that there is more than one source of any particular good, and that the sources are competing with each other. (No price fixing, collusion, or monopolistic practices.) This doesn't always hold true in the face of patents and copyrights.
The problem with the automated patenting of genes is that there cannot be competetion; patents are temporary monopolies. And because of CRA's squatting on large tracts of the geonome, they will be retarding research. The geonome is a large book in a cryptic language. CRA is getting a monopoly on pages, just because they transcribed them, while the people who translate those pages into discoveries, cures, and knowledge may get very little.
Also, the monopoly granted through patents isn't coming from the free market, and it won't be 'fixed' by the free market either. A free market doesn't have patents. In a pure free market the moment an innovation becomes public, it becomes public domain and free for all to use. Is this the free market that you want?
Patents and copyrights and government exist to overcome the shortcomings in the free market and to make civilization more efficient. Sometimes they fail at that, and new laws have to be made to try to restore efficiency.
[Personally, I feel that patents and copyright are OK if they're properly allowed. Patents should be allowed on those creations which actually contribute to civilization and knowledge. Copyright is OK if the term is a reasonable length, I like 20 years (with a 20 year extension). This was the origional term.) By granting patents for trivial inventions and granting copyrights for a hundred years (after death), you cheapen them for all.]
Selective enforcement of a law is a bad problem, because it keeps the public from being outraged at the law, while still letting them use it as tool to silence whatever critics they want. If the public really understood DMCA, if it was actually applied fairly to everyone. There would be outrage in the streets. The law would be repealed immediately. But because of the 'selective enforcement', this isn't happening.
``But sir, 80% of our constituents are in violation of your proposed law.''
``Don't worry, we'll only prosecute those who do it excessively.''
[OT] Aliasing bugs and solving the insolveable.
on
Multics Scheduler
·
· Score: 2
Two things.. First of all, there is no way to find all aliasing bugs in a program unless we solve the halting problem. (which is unsolveable).
But regardless of that, code which has pointer aliasing bugs is not standards conformant. The compiler is completely within the spec if it miscompiles this code, or if it prints out 'You are an idiot' one million times.
You can try to write code in the compiler to detect these bugs. It can't be completely accurate, the question is can we make it useful. If it catches every bug, but also flags a lot of standards-conformant code as bad, that's can be more useless than missing instances of this bug.
Besides which, aliasing issues exist because compilers are using the many registers that a modern RISC CPU's has, and they don't want to be forced to reload potentially dirty data on every memory-write. Choose another language then. C/C++ wasn't, isn't, and can't be fully optimized on this type of modern CPU. Even with aliasing analysis, there are still avoidable ineffeciencies.
Have you ever seen the Jetson's episode where Judy get so stressed out each morning doing housework (pressing in about 5 buttons)? So thus they get a maid to save her from all that aggrevating work.
You cannot judge misery strictly on a relative scale. There will ALWAYS be people who are on top, whether that's because of their drive, their heritage, or their desire. Humans are social animals, we like to have an alpha leader to follow. Similarily, there will always be people who are poor and miserable because they're forced to press in 5 buttons in the morning to do their housework.
There will always be `misery' because humans will always look toward leaders, there will always be jealousy at how well the affluent seem to live. [and you never about the downsides of that life.] There will always be people who don't want, don't wish, or won't strive to improve change their life. I don't see any of this changing.
For a few anecdotes.. There are people who are genius-level and should be in a university, but live much like the absent-minded professor, collecting and playing with toys. Also, a not-insignifigant percentage of the homeless chose that lifestyle.
For myself.. You couldn't GIVE me a a couple of million dollars right now. I would refuse. I don't want it, and I don't need it warping my life.. Am I mad, am I stupid, am I one of those 'avoidable misery' cases? No. I want to continue my life by becoming a graduate student, and then go into industry; inventing neat stuff. Too much money would warp that life and seduce me away from my dreams.
Oh, and if anyone has a few million they want to offer; ask me in 5-10 years.:)
Slashdot Mirror
You're forgetting Donald's ethernet drivers which they grabbed a while ago too and incorporated into their kernel. This makes three times that they've done it, THAT WE KNOW ABOUT.
As someone else pointed out. Nobody forced them to use Bruce's code, Donald's code, or the bootloader code. The very fact that the public's been so permissive is what's surprising.
I actually had this question for him a while ago. I suggested something like a license where the terms change after a period of time..
So distribute the code under the most anal proprietary license you want, and say that in 6-12 months that the license then changes to the GPL.
I asked this of RMS a few months ago, specifically I asked what time period he would find acceptable. He said 6-12 months.
There is a second way to make money from GPL software. Sell exceptions to it. If you hold the copyright to your work, you can distribute it under any license you want, and several licenses concurrently.
So, if you create the ultimate video codec, you can license the decoder as LGPL. Then, since the coder is the hard part, you can license it with a proprietay license which expires into the GPL in 6 months. (So you always have 6 months of leadtime to sell your new version before it goes under the GPL.) Finally, you can sell exceptions to your license. (If someone wants to make Net-TV boxes, you can offer to let them license the coder/decoder under a NON-GPL license so that they won't have to worry about distributing source.)
Another example is if you make a game. What you do is you hand the source code to (say) the FSF's lawyer in escrow for 6-12 months. Then you make money from selling the game for 6-12 months.
Or, if you make a GPL game engine which other people want to use, but without the 'issue' of the GPL, you can sell them a different license at whatever terms and prices you want.
This is how Aladdin works. Old versions of Ghostscript become GPL, and then they sell their postscript interpreter to various printer manufacturers under a more acceptable license.
Remember, RMS isn't demanding that software be 'free' immediatly, just that it will be free in a reasonable time frame. And I think that he would accept minor offshoots that are not free, as long as the main body is.
The solution is very simple. How about we regress copyright to the same term it was a century ago. 14 years, which may be renewed for a second 14-year term.
Would you all agree that a maximum 28-year term is reasonable? Copyright isn't fun, but it wasn't designed to be. But 28 years of misery is a hell of a lot better than the >130 years that Dilbert will be under copyright as things are now. (70? years after death, and Scott Adams will probably be alive another 60 years or so.)
I admit it, I don't like copyright all that much on one hand. But on the other hand, my life will be spent creating artistic works.
Remember, a big business with a huge market share (like Intel or MS or a utility) cannot do things that a small business can do with impunity. Things like product-tying are considered monopolistic if done by a business with 90% marketshare, but are more acceptable as a marketing technique if done by a business with 5% marketshare.
I like the quote right at the beginning of the article ``Artists should get paid for their work''. If that's so, then I have a lot of canned human feces I HAD BETTER GET PAID FOR. I call it art and I want my money! (Heh, one of the nicest things about shit is that there's an endless supply of it, if I get desperate enough I can use the RIAA website as a source for more.)
That is sorta understandable.. They've done some interesting studies that the top programmers can sometimes be 10x-100x better and more productive than an average programmer. They might not write as many lines of code as the average programmer, but their code is clearer, more bug free, simpler, or more elegant. And given the cost of maintance combined with the cost of bugs, that number is VERY easy to understand.
:)
And the rarity of people in that class is also easy to understand. You don't join that class by learning C on your own. Nor by having an MCSE. You learn it by loving computer science, knowing the fundamentals, and gaining experience.
Remember Sturgens law: 90% of everything sucks.
To: graphics.sales@matrox.com
Bcc: info@nvidia.com, emailsupport@3dfx.com
Subject: Matrox Millenium G400, NVidia and linux
Hello.. I've been a very happy linux user for the last 3 years. I am also
about to graduate. I appreciate that you've realeased most of the specs
for the Matrox Millenium G400 and worked on open-source drivers.
This was the primary reason I chose your video card to put in my new
system. As long as your company is the one with the foremost support of
linux and its ideals and you continue to make great hardware, I will
always be your customer and reccomend your hardware to my friends and
family.
Today it was announced that NVidia will be releasing binary-only drivers
for linux. I had slightly considered their video chipset as the one for
me, but they were beginning to show their lack of support of the ideals of
linux two months ago when I was to make my choice. With the recent
announcement, many people who had purchased NVidia's hardware specifically
because it appeared to promise support now feel betrayed.
I heartily encourage you to not make the same mistake.. Continue to
release specs and start to release the remaining specs that you've not yet
releasted.
Myself and many other young computer professionals are looking for a
company who fits with our ideals on open-source and linux. We may be a
small market now, but we will become much more critical as enter industry
over the next few years. Our purchases have been and will be dependent
on how well our software and ideals are supported.
Thanks for your great product, and thanks for your support.. Next time I
crack open my case to read off the serial number, I'll register the card
as a happy linux user.
I liked their comment about how they've already suffered damages from DeCSS because they decided to postpone the release of DVD-audio because of the release of DeCSS. That's sorta like ford suing someone [for damages] who wrote a bad review of the Pinto a few months before the Pinto(2) was to be released because NOW they have to postpone the Pinto(2) to redesign it.
This is false.. You always posess your own code. See my other posts for details..
The GPL is not a software license. By copyright law, you have no permission to distribute the origional program or any derivative/patched work. The GPL is the only thing which gives you that right. You can distribute your patches any way you see fit with whatever license. You cannot distribute a patched program unless you are allowed to.. Which means satisfying the GPL.
Since you wrote your code, you can distribute your patch under any license you wish, including multiple licenses simultanously.
So if you were to write patches for the gcc, you could distribute them under any license you wished.. If you wanted to distribute them with GCC, you would have to offer to distribute them under the GPL. But you still retain copyright for your patches and you could license them as-is under any number of licenses you wished... (Say, you create a big patch to GCC that lets one super-optimize a program. You distribute those patches with GCC so you have to offer them under the terms of the GPL. BUT, if a commercial compiler vendor also wants to use them, you can license your patches and code to them TOO with whatever terms you wish. Or you can incrementally reimplement the rest of GCC until you have a functioning version that contains no GPL-licensed code in it. If you do this, then since you own the copyright for the entire program, the GPL doesn't apply. (Example: Berkely reimplementing those last pieces of BSD to get it out from under AT&T's thumb.)
So overall, the GPL is not unfair. You always posess your patch and your own code. Copyright prohibits you from distributing THEIR code with your patchs/code.... unless you you satisfy the terms of the license. (the GPL/NPL/MPL/QPL...).
Your university only has 24 terabyte of diskspace? Wow! I know we're in the triple-digits of terabytes drivespace, and that's excluding students. Informedia alone has a few terabytes of diskspace.
You can license the patch under any license you wish. IANAL
What the GPL says is that you cannot distribute the origional program unless you supply source code. Nor can you distribute modified copies of the program unless you supply source code.
So if you have a patch, you could distribute a patch under whatever license you want. Proprietary for example.. But you cannot distribute the origional program which the patch applies to unless you also license the patch under the GPL.
I could make a patch to gcc and distribute it under the terms that if you use it you must give me your firstborn son. What I cannot do is distribute the patched version of gcc.
[Minor subtle point about the GPL] Copyright law gives me no rights to distribute gcc in any case (patched or unpatched). The GPL is the only thing that gives me the right to distribute it. By satisfying the clauses from the GPL, I gain permission to distribute it. So thus the GPL is actually MORE free than standard copyright. Because if the software is under normal copyright you'd have no rights to distribute the software or any modified copies at all. This is also why its different from a shrinkwrap software license. A shrinkwrap software license covers the USE of the software, not the distribution, which is what the GPL covers. (Though the software companies would like to claim that they are the same; you have to COPY a software into memory in order to use it. Therefore the license gives you the right to COPY it into memory. Or you can look at a shrinkwrapped license as contract.) This is also why the GPL is fairly safe under copyright law.
To get back on topic... You can make a patch and distribute it under any license.. But you cannot distribute that patch with GCC as a derivative work without permission from the copyright holder, or satisfying the terms of the GPL. Because the only way you can get permission to distribute GCC is by being willing to give full source code.
Of course, a patch alone is useless without the software which it is to patch.
So my opinion is that you would be subject to the terms of the GPL if you distributed patched binaries, if you distributed the stock GCC (and source code) and a binary-patcher. Or if you put the patch (with source code, but no rights to redistribute) and GCC on the same CD.
But one could reasonably claim that ANY patched program is a derivative work of the origional, no matter by what means its patched. (As the patch is useless without the program.. And the program is a seperate work before being patched.)
Because of this reason, I'd also say that distributing your patch and a script to download GCC off of the web might be in violation of the letter of the license.
I also note that all of these restrictions apply if you distribute a patched version publically. The GPL explicitly allows you to keep modified copies in-house. (So I could patch GCC and compile propreitary software all year, sell that software, and not have to give the source to my modified version.. But I cannot distribute the modified GCC binary or source code publically without satisfying the GPL.)
This all is IANAL, but that subtle point about how the GPL applies is important. The GPL is not a shrinkwrap license, it is a license giving you more permission than copyright. You have no permission to distribute the origional software unless you satisfy the terms of the GPL, and for a patch to be useful, it must be distributed with the program itself.
To calculate man-years.. What I did was I divide the total economic output of the US by its population. (9 trillion divided by 300 million). I then multiplied in a fudge factor of 3x..
.1% of one years worth of economic output of the US.
....)
Roughly for every $100,000 spent, that's the economic output of a full individual for a full year. And 5 billion is 50,000 times that. Of course this counts all of the production used, from the cleaners who cleaned the floor where the rocket fuel for launch was refined, to the engineers who designed the chips in the birds.
Another way to look at it is that its about one half of
(Some armchair economics follows)
My belief is that there's only one real fundamental shortage, that of human labor. There are enough atoms of iron, uranium, alluminum, iridium, and everything else in the earth's crust to satisfy almost any demand that's short of building a dyson sphere. Anyways, I sorta like to convert currency from units of dollars into units of human labor. So the CDR I burned today cost $.71 or required about 6-30 minutes of human labor to build. (including the price of the raw materials, the amortized cost of the manufacturing equipment, the cost of the materials to build the manufacturing equipment,
Well, stupidity died pretty quick in this case. Despite the 5 billion investment, it WAS allowed to die. No reputations, no government, no nostalgia is being allowed to keep it alive beyond its time.
:)
Its still sad..... And I agree.
Its sad that a beautiful idea just came too late to work.. Its sad that the result of 5 billion dollars (over 50,000 man years) of work is being scheduled to be burned to ash in the atmosphere, barely a year after it went public. (Iridium first opened for service Nov 98)
But it does go to show how capitalism works.. Sometimes mistakes happen and lots of effort gets wasted. But things aren't kept artifically alive beyond their time. It shows that the market works.
The people who put their dreams and time into iridium will go on to other projects and create new ideas and give us technological progress.
Its sad, but life must go on. The only thing that is unchanging is death.
Life is perpetual change.
To respond to both this message and the sibling message. It doesn't matter if the statistics are normal. In a human, there are a few billion base-pairs in DNA. If the secret is encoded at some unknown position, it might be hard to extract without the primers, but there are ONLY a few billion positions it could be in.. So this looks like cryptography with a 32-bit key.
This is much like the 'secret' cypher where you encode each word of some plaintext message as a list of page, line, and word numbers in some arbitrary book. 12-3-5 (page 12, line 3, word 5). The book itself acts like the key. Unfortunately, this isn't secure as there aren't so many books out there. I can just try each one till I find one that gives a reasonable message, say a 20-bit key.
On the other hand, this is a news report, the story might have just 'skipped over' this issue and Viviana thought over it and has a solution. Or maybe not, don't forget that good steganography is damned hard. I ask you, how would you try to 'hide' some secret message so that somebody couldn't even detect it?
Can I point out an important contrast between what you say about how spamming is wrong because its abusing YOUR bandwidth and YOUR servers? Many people on slashdot seem to agree with you (as remarked by your current score)..
Yet there's the other side of it. What about the NAPSTER side of it with colleges. Doesn't the college reserve the right to choose how THEIR bandwidth and THEIR private property are to be used?
You can't have it rabidly both ways at the same time. Choose which one, or give a better way to make that decision.
Oops. I hate making stupid mistakes like that. Thanks.
As for the size of monroe county. The numbers I gave are about right. I think I remember them right from about 10 years ago. And Rochester NY is in Monroe County.. Rochester is the world headquarters of Kodak and Bausch&Lomb, and Xerox has a large presence. Its also one of the top 50 (or so) urban areas in the nation. Its not huge, but its not inconsequential either.
Disclaimer: I am NOT for internet taxes.
Looking at his numbers, I find something fishy.. He says that its ONLY 35 billion among 50 states... That's 700 million per state (or so. I don't know about other counties, but in Monroe county (in NY), the yearly budget is about a billion. It also has a 8% sales tax. Of that, 5% (?) goes to the county. But of the billion dollars, only about 200 million is actually discretionary spending. (The state forces them to spend the other 800 million for welfare and other state-required programs.) There are around 40 counties in NY, so Monroe's share of that 700 million would be about $20 million a year. That's a lot of money if you compare it to the discretionary budget. Its an increase of almost 10%. That isn't inconsequential or chump change.
I don't know about other states or other areas of the country, but at least in monroe county in NY, a lot of the sales tax revenues are given to local governments and to the schools, where they help keep property taxes down.
I remember this because about 10 years ago there was a big debate on whether the county should lobby the state to increase the sales tax from 7% to 8%.
I'm ignoring all of his arguments on the problems in collecting taxes on internet goods, but how he blows off 35 billion is fishy.
If there was no copyright, maybe the number of artistic works would go down, or maybe it would go up!
There is a frequent assumption about the supply curve for artistic works (IE: the supply generated as a function of the price). They assume that there will be zero production if the price is zero. Why do people assume this as a given?
While that MIGHT be true for most institutional generation of artistic works, I believe that if the price were zero, the non-institutional generation of artistic works would dwarf the loss.
Anyone look at the 'Matrix Spoof' here a couple of weeks ago? Was that legal? Are most fan sites actually legal? How about the southpark spoof? Did that violate the copyrights of southpark and starwars? Regardless of your answer, all of these things were created without a profit motive.
How many artistic works might be created if we could freely rearrange the images, sounds, and video of our culture, and then be able to freely distribute the result? How about taking Madonna's 'Like a Prayer', and putting video clips from Zardoz in it to make a music video? How about a Dilbert Starwars spoof?
Remember, copyright is locking up our cultural heritage away in fiefdoms controlled and owned by corporations and descendents of the origional creators. We have no rights to view our own cultural heritage unless they are granted. There are more than a few examples where the fiefs have prevented this from happening. Look at the case of Kate Bush and Ulysses. She had a song using Molly Blum's speech; It fit the words beautifully and it was ready for release but the Joyce estate, specifically James Joyce's GRANDSON refused permission. This song was blocked not by the author, not even by the author's children, but the author's GRANDSON. She had to rewrite the song. This isn't the first time that it has happened with him either.
I would like to COPY a quote that describes the situation so much better than I could myself.
"There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or a corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute nor common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back, for their private benefit. That is all." -- Robert A. Heinlein ("Life-Line")
I feel that the time has come to look at copyright very closely to decide if it is warranted, or what the term should be. Personally, I would like a fixed term of 14 years, renewable by an additional 14 years. This would be 28 years maximum; the origional length of copyright. Copyright actually was 28 years until after the turn of the century [I think].
I leave after reciting this example. Dilbert will probably not leave copyright until the year 2100 or after. There will be no fan-dilbert strips. We will probably never see a dilbert-southpark strip in our lifetimes, by anyone. With luck and no more copyright extensions, our grandchildren might have the ``freedom'' to freely use the cultural heritage we are creating now. Is this not locking up our cultural heritage?
While capitalism does tend to lead to efficiency in many types of markets, it doesn't work in all markets.
...) Therefore we have government for defense, and we have monopolies (patents and copyright) granted for creative works.
One failures in capitalism are in defense-spending. An army is a very ineffecient use of resources. Capitalism also tends to not create incentives to create goods where the initial cost is large, but the marginal cost is very small, like creative works. (music, software, film,
The free market also assumes that there is more than one source of any particular good, and that the sources are competing with each other. (No price fixing, collusion, or monopolistic practices.) This doesn't always hold true in the face of patents and copyrights.
The problem with the automated patenting of genes is that there cannot be competetion; patents are temporary monopolies. And because of CRA's squatting on large tracts of the geonome, they will be retarding research. The geonome is a large book in a cryptic language. CRA is getting a monopoly on pages, just because they transcribed them, while the people who translate those pages into discoveries, cures, and knowledge may get very little.
Also, the monopoly granted through patents isn't coming from the free market, and it won't be 'fixed' by the free market either. A free market doesn't have patents. In a pure free market the moment an innovation becomes public, it becomes public domain and free for all to use. Is this the free market that you want?
Patents and copyrights and government exist to overcome the shortcomings in the free market and to make civilization more efficient. Sometimes they fail at that, and new laws have to be made to try to restore efficiency.
[Personally, I feel that patents and copyright are OK if they're properly allowed. Patents should be allowed on those creations which actually contribute to civilization and knowledge. Copyright is OK if the term is a reasonable length, I like 20 years (with a 20 year extension). This was the origional term.) By granting patents for trivial inventions and granting copyrights for a hundred years (after death), you cheapen them for all.]
Bad bad bad..
Selective enforcement of a law is a bad problem, because it keeps the public from being outraged at the law, while still letting them use it as tool to silence whatever critics they want. If the public really understood DMCA, if it was actually applied fairly to everyone. There would be outrage in the streets. The law would be repealed immediately. But because of the 'selective enforcement', this isn't happening.
``But sir, 80% of our constituents are in violation of your proposed law.''
``Don't worry, we'll only prosecute those who do it excessively.''
Two things.. First of all, there is no way to find all aliasing bugs in a program unless we solve the halting problem. (which is unsolveable).
But regardless of that, code which has pointer aliasing bugs is not standards conformant. The compiler is completely within the spec if it miscompiles this code, or if it prints out 'You are an idiot' one million times.
You can try to write code in the compiler to detect these bugs. It can't be completely accurate, the question is can we make it useful. If it catches every bug, but also flags a lot of standards-conformant code as bad, that's can be more useless than missing instances of this bug.
Besides which, aliasing issues exist because compilers are using the many registers that a modern RISC CPU's has, and they don't want to be forced to reload potentially dirty data on every memory-write. Choose another language then. C/C++ wasn't, isn't, and can't be fully optimized on this type of modern CPU. Even with aliasing analysis, there are still avoidable ineffeciencies.
DOH!! (thanks :)
Have you ever seen the Jetson's episode where Judy get so stressed out each morning doing housework (pressing in about 5 buttons)? So thus they get a maid to save her from all that aggrevating work.
:)
You cannot judge misery strictly on a relative scale. There will ALWAYS be people who are on top, whether that's because of their drive, their heritage, or their desire. Humans are social animals, we like to have an alpha leader to follow. Similarily, there will always be people who are poor and miserable because they're forced to press in 5 buttons in the morning to do their housework.
There will always be `misery' because humans will always look toward leaders, there will always be jealousy at how well the affluent seem to live. [and you never about the downsides of that life.] There will always be people who don't want, don't wish, or won't strive to improve change their life. I don't see any of this changing.
For a few anecdotes.. There are people who are genius-level and should be in a university, but live much like the absent-minded professor, collecting and playing with toys. Also, a not-insignifigant percentage of the homeless chose that lifestyle.
For myself.. You couldn't GIVE me a a couple of million dollars right now. I would refuse. I don't want it, and I don't need it warping my life.. Am I mad, am I stupid, am I one of those 'avoidable misery' cases? No. I want to continue my life by becoming a graduate student, and then go into industry; inventing neat stuff. Too much money would warp that life and seduce me away from my dreams.
Oh, and if anyone has a few million they want to offer; ask me in 5-10 years.