Combine this with FISA, and suddenly the only obstacle left is encryption. We all know what's coming next... The "No encryption for potential terrorists act", the "mandatory back-door act", or the "if you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear act".
...so instead of posting about how we're all so insightful for foreseeing it, or just whining about the government (as though our congressman might read Slashdot), let's do what we do best and solve this problem, except this time before it even happens.
It seems to me that the solution to censorship is to route around it. How about if we code up some steganography tool to hide encrypted messages, and give them the back-door to a bunch of worthless garbage? (i.e. SSH over Nigerian scam mail.) Perhaps they'll notice that all the geeks are communicating with variations of Nigerian spam emails, but the only way they could stop us would be to solve the SPAM problem. Good luck legislating that away.
The success of this all depends on whether the major distros will accept this as part of their core set of default packages. As long as everyone has to install it manually, it will always be an ineffective toy, but if a lot of servers start supporting it (which would only happen if it's a default), then there is incentive for the clients to use it, and in turn more incentive for servers to do it.
Does this allow reverse-engineering of the skype protocol?
It means that Skype used someone's code w/o a license. According to the law, that person is entitled to some compensation. Neither the GPL nor the law specifies that this compensation must be in the form of source code. The GPL is not viral. It does not force anyone to give up their source code, even people that infringe upon it.
IMHO, it would be very fitting to demand compensation in the form of source code and release that source code under the GPL, but that decision is up to the parties involved and the courts, not the open source community.
The spam problem has two parts: 1) The protocols are flawed, and 2) Everyone uses those protocols. The first one is a technical problem and needs a technical solution. The second one is a social problem, and is where government intervention belongs.
...but engineers don't believe #2 will ever be solved, so instead of working on problem #1, they write filters and technical solutions to address problem #2 themselves. And the gov't has no clue that there are technical solutions to #1, so instead of doing anything about problem #2, it uses its powers to try to solve #1 itself by making it a crime to compute in certain ways. What a mess! Couldn't everyone please just attack the problems they are qualified to solve?
How is this any different than what Apple does? I want my pull-down menus at the top of my windows, but they are so confident that being able to bump your mouse against the top of the screen is a better UI design that they absolutely refuse to give me the option. I want a second mouse button, but they know that the second button leads to UI confusion, so they will not give me an option to turn on support for another button. I want to run on hardware that I built myself, but they know I'm better off running on their hardware so they won't let me. Apple has the same complex in spades, so don't diss on the Linux community by trying to compare with Apple.
A cease fire is when both sides agree to stop shooting. So is ISO saying they will agree to stop attacking us? I didn't even notice ISO was attacking me.
People need to realize that there's something unethical about long and complex user agreements, and stop doing business with companies that use them. A good company will provide a simple service and do it well. It won't be easy, because most companies have long and complex user agreements, but this is a shift that needs to happen eventually.
I installed Kubuntu beta with KDE4. Almost everything just worked.
Had a tiny issue with KNetworkManager. It only wanted to recognize one network card at a time. I had to manually edit/etc/network/interfaces to fix it. That's the only old-style hackery I had to do. Did everything else via the GUI.
Now it's functioning as a gateway, interfaces with Windows machines on my home network via samba, set up apache and all that stuff. KDE4 is a bit tough to customize. The features are pretty sparse. I can't tell my clock to display seconds, it's really inconvenient to move icons around on the taskbar--gotta go through many menues, etc., but I suppose this will get better with time.
Summary: KDE4 isn't done, but it looks like it will be nice. Almost everything just works.
Don't switch. If you are happy and have already ponied up for windows and office - have a great time.
I consider my time too valuable to spend it developing skills with a product to which I don't have the "keys". Effort spent learning a proprietary product is less productive than effort spend learning a free product, period--even if (and especially because) you have to pay money for the proprietary product.
I own a very old house with lead paint all over the ceiling. Since your survival depends on renting my basement, I think I'll start the bidding at $100,000/mo+utils, no pets.
Download it under two accounts, then average the waves together. The watermark will be ruined, and the sound quality will stay at least as good as before. Problem solved. Of course you'll have to pay twice, but if you're paying the right price, 2x0=0.
Arrow's Impossibility Theorem is based on the premise that the purpose of a social welfare system (voting system) is to combine everyone's set of preferences into a set of preferences for society. It's true that this can't be done perfectly. (It's like trying to represent information from 300 million dimensions losslessly in one dimension.)
...but who cares? That's not a rational goal anyway, as Arrow proved. A better goal is to give everyone an equal opportunity to influence the final outcome. And hey, our current system does exactly that. Everyone knows how the votes will be counted. Everyone has a symmetric/equal (or nearly equal, due to the electoral college) opportunity to game the system.
...and the best thing about a goal based on giving everyone a fair chance to game the system is: smart people have more influence. The only thing Arrow's Impossibility Theorem did was make people think a perfectly functional system was somehow broken because it didn't satisfy some impossible goal that was subtly irrational anyway. And now people are trying to fix a system that ain't broke.
It's like saying everybody must fly coach, and nobody should be able to offer first-class or business-class seating.
It's a bit more like this...
Thankyou for flying coach-air, and welcome to coach-France. Since you didn't fly first-class, you may not visit the Eiffel Tower or the Louvre, but you may visit any of the fine attractions on this list of businesses that support our airline. Since you flew during our limited offer, you will be permitted to purchase three souveniers instead of the usual two. And remember, don't try to visit anyone you know in France--that would be a violation of the terms of service under which you flew. We hope you enjoy your visit to coach-France. If you'd like to upgrade your service in order to visit some of the finer attractions in France, your stewardess will be happy to help you make arrangements. Please have your credit cards ready, and remember, it's a violation of Federal law to visit attractions that do not comply with the terms of this airline service.
Alan Turing is usually considered to be the father of computers. He invented a theoretical machine that he conjectured could solve any problem that could be solved by a machine. It consisted of a an infinitely long tape (memory) and a small finite set of operations that could be performed infinitely fast. Modern computers are *very* similar to his theoretical machine, except they're only very fast (as opposed to infinitely fast) and they only have a lot of memory (as opposed to an infinite amount of memory). No one has ever found a problem that could be solved by a more complex machine and could show that it couldn't be solved by a Turing machine. (BTW, Turing eventually killed himself by eating a poisoned apple after most of the scientific community shunned his work due to some personal habits. This was the inspiration for Apple computers' logo.)
So Wolfram proposed an even simpler machine and conjectured that it could solve anything that a Turing machine could solve. Now this guy proved that Wolfram was right.
I should mention for completeness that two other guys (Church, and dang, I forgot the other one) also proposed systems that were provably equivalent to Turing's machine around the same time, but Turing's was the easiest one to turn into an actual machine.
This is like my lawyer begging a street-bum for permission to let me wash my car. Really, here's why this is a good analogy: So patent-holders are like the bums that wash my car windows at a stoplight, and then demand payment for their work. If they had gotten my consent prior to doing the work, then it would make sense for me to have to pay for it. Of course it's not reasonable for a company to get consent from every interested party before doing some research, so that's where the government comes in, and hands out consent on behalf of everyone for a company to own an idea if they do the work. So if the government represents us (in theory anyway), then now they're turning to the bums and begging for permission on our behalf so that we can get our windows washed elsewhere. Man, this patent thing is really getting weird!
To the extent Adobe and friends succeed at keeping the stack of software that comes with Windows incomplete, Linux will have and edge because it can still offer everything for free.
To the extend that Microsoft grows the stack of software it offers with Windows, the larger the surface area becomes over which their products have potential to look inferior with those offered by the rest of the industry.
You should have considered the consequences of your actions when you configured your computer to allow other people to route data through it, knowing that some of that data could be something of a criminal nature.
Who says these people didn't consider the consequences of their actions? Maybe they knew there was a chance of harrassment, but they believed in freedom enough to do it anyway. How does that make the harrassment justifiable?
I've found that a Venn diagram helps a lot when people misunderstand the GPL.
If you never let anybody see your work, you give away no rights: (dot in center)
With a proprietary licence you give away this many rights: (teeny circle around it)
With the GPL you give away this many rights: (slightly bigger circle around both)
With the BSD you give away this many rights: (much bigger circle around them)
If you dedicate it to public domain: (huge circle around everything)
At this point the light seems to turn on for people and they say something like "You mean the GPL is closer to a proprietary license than the BSD?". That's when I know the confusion has finally been dispelled. Nothing annoys me more than people who are afraid of the GPL because they believe it will somehow take their rights away from them.
...maybe the EFF can talk the US Supreme Court into invalidating ALL software patents
Not likely. The Supreme Court's job is to uphold law, not make new ones. If they did, all the proponents of software patents would turn to Congress, and they'd have a valid reason to be indignant. In the worst case, Congress would pass a law in the opposite direction just to tell the Supremes to do their own jobs. Furthermore, I doubt the EFF would even raise the argument. They're comprised of lawyers who should know that court isn't the place to make big changes to law. If you want to save the world, do it properly so it has a chance of sticking.
The FCC is waiting for someone to explain it to them!? Yikes! And these are the same people that make the regulations? Am I missing something? They don't actually think about the issues themselves? They just sit back and watch while the opposing sides duke it out? Did it never cross their minds that telcos might a different amount of lobbying power than ordinary citizens? Is this really how the system works? Come on, no way! I can't believe it's come down to that. Nope, no way.
Fortunately, the founding fathers of this country had the foresight to give everyone a constitutional right to move to another state whenever they feel like it for any reason. That way when one state does something stupid, they just lose taxpayers. Now if the federal government does something stupid, on the other hand, the people have to live with it until some terms expire. (And if the Supreme Court does something stupid, we're hosed.) Just be thankful the states still have some of the power to govern themselves so the fed won't do it!
Slashdot Mirror
Combine this with FISA, and suddenly the only obstacle left is encryption. We all know what's coming next... The "No encryption for potential terrorists act", the "mandatory back-door act", or the "if you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear act".
...so instead of posting about how we're all so insightful for foreseeing it, or just whining about the government (as though our congressman might read Slashdot), let's do what we do best and solve this problem, except this time before it even happens.
It seems to me that the solution to censorship is to route around it. How about if we code up some steganography tool to hide encrypted messages, and give them the back-door to a bunch of worthless garbage? (i.e. SSH over Nigerian scam mail.) Perhaps they'll notice that all the geeks are communicating with variations of Nigerian spam emails, but the only way they could stop us would be to solve the SPAM problem. Good luck legislating that away.
The success of this all depends on whether the major distros will accept this as part of their core set of default packages. As long as everyone has to install it manually, it will always be an ineffective toy, but if a lot of servers start supporting it (which would only happen if it's a default), then there is incentive for the clients to use it, and in turn more incentive for servers to do it.
Does this allow reverse-engineering of the skype protocol?
It means that Skype used someone's code w/o a license. According to the law, that person is entitled to some compensation. Neither the GPL nor the law specifies that this compensation must be in the form of source code. The GPL is not viral. It does not force anyone to give up their source code, even people that infringe upon it.
IMHO, it would be very fitting to demand compensation in the form of source code and release that source code under the GPL, but that decision is up to the parties involved and the courts, not the open source community.
therefore, it is *not* Linux-friendly
The spam problem has two parts: 1) The protocols are flawed, and 2) Everyone uses those protocols. The first one is a technical problem and needs a technical solution. The second one is a social problem, and is where government intervention belongs.
...but engineers don't believe #2 will ever be solved, so instead of working on problem #1, they write filters and technical solutions to address problem #2 themselves. And the gov't has no clue that there are technical solutions to #1, so instead of doing anything about problem #2, it uses its powers to try to solve #1 itself by making it a crime to compute in certain ways. What a mess! Couldn't everyone please just attack the problems they are qualified to solve?
How is this any different than what Apple does? I want my pull-down menus at the top of my windows, but they are so confident that being able to bump your mouse against the top of the screen is a better UI design that they absolutely refuse to give me the option. I want a second mouse button, but they know that the second button leads to UI confusion, so they will not give me an option to turn on support for another button. I want to run on hardware that I built myself, but they know I'm better off running on their hardware so they won't let me. Apple has the same complex in spades, so don't diss on the Linux community by trying to compare with Apple.
Boot from a Knoppix or Ubuntu live CD /hda1 /dev/hda1 /hda1 /hda1
sudo su
mkdir
mount
cd
explore away...
A cease fire is when both sides agree to stop shooting. So is ISO saying they will agree to stop attacking us? I didn't even notice ISO was attacking me.
People need to realize that there's something unethical about long and complex user agreements, and stop doing business with companies that use them. A good company will provide a simple service and do it well. It won't be easy, because most companies have long and complex user agreements, but this is a shift that needs to happen eventually.
I installed Kubuntu beta with KDE4. Almost everything just worked.
/etc/network/interfaces to fix it. That's the only old-style hackery I had to do. Did everything else via the GUI.
Had a tiny issue with KNetworkManager. It only wanted to recognize one network card at a time. I had to manually edit
Now it's functioning as a gateway, interfaces with Windows machines on my home network via samba, set up apache and all that stuff. KDE4 is a bit tough to customize. The features are pretty sparse. I can't tell my clock to display seconds, it's really inconvenient to move icons around on the taskbar--gotta go through many menues, etc., but I suppose this will get better with time.
Summary: KDE4 isn't done, but it looks like it will be nice. Almost everything just works.
Don't switch. If you are happy and have already ponied up for windows and office - have a great time.
I consider my time too valuable to spend it developing skills with a product to which I don't have the "keys". Effort spent learning a proprietary product is less productive than effort spend learning a free product, period--even if (and especially because) you have to pay money for the proprietary product.
I own a very old house with lead paint all over the ceiling. Since your survival depends on renting my basement, I think I'll start the bidding at $100,000/mo+utils, no pets.
Download it under two accounts, then average the waves together. The watermark will be ruined, and the sound quality will stay at least as good as before. Problem solved. Of course you'll have to pay twice, but if you're paying the right price, 2x0=0.
Arrow's Impossibility Theorem is based on the premise that the purpose of a social welfare system (voting system) is to combine everyone's set of preferences into a set of preferences for society. It's true that this can't be done perfectly. (It's like trying to represent information from 300 million dimensions losslessly in one dimension.)
...but who cares? That's not a rational goal anyway, as Arrow proved. A better goal is to give everyone an equal opportunity to influence the final outcome. And hey, our current system does exactly that. Everyone knows how the votes will be counted. Everyone has a symmetric/equal (or nearly equal, due to the electoral college) opportunity to game the system.
...and the best thing about a goal based on giving everyone a fair chance to game the system is: smart people have more influence. The only thing Arrow's Impossibility Theorem did was make people think a perfectly functional system was somehow broken because it didn't satisfy some impossible goal that was subtly irrational anyway. And now people are trying to fix a system that ain't broke.
It's like saying everybody must fly coach, and nobody should be able to offer first-class or business-class seating.
It's a bit more like this...
Thankyou for flying coach-air, and welcome to coach-France. Since you didn't fly first-class, you may not visit the Eiffel Tower or the Louvre, but you may visit any of the fine attractions on this list of businesses that support our airline. Since you flew during our limited offer, you will be permitted to purchase three souveniers instead of the usual two. And remember, don't try to visit anyone you know in France--that would be a violation of the terms of service under which you flew. We hope you enjoy your visit to coach-France. If you'd like to upgrade your service in order to visit some of the finer attractions in France, your stewardess will be happy to help you make arrangements. Please have your credit cards ready, and remember, it's a violation of Federal law to visit attractions that do not comply with the terms of this airline service.
Alan Turing is usually considered to be the father of computers. He invented a theoretical machine that he conjectured could solve any problem that could be solved by a machine. It consisted of a an infinitely long tape (memory) and a small finite set of operations that could be performed infinitely fast. Modern computers are *very* similar to his theoretical machine, except they're only very fast (as opposed to infinitely fast) and they only have a lot of memory (as opposed to an infinite amount of memory). No one has ever found a problem that could be solved by a more complex machine and could show that it couldn't be solved by a Turing machine. (BTW, Turing eventually killed himself by eating a poisoned apple after most of the scientific community shunned his work due to some personal habits. This was the inspiration for Apple computers' logo.) So Wolfram proposed an even simpler machine and conjectured that it could solve anything that a Turing machine could solve. Now this guy proved that Wolfram was right. I should mention for completeness that two other guys (Church, and dang, I forgot the other one) also proposed systems that were provably equivalent to Turing's machine around the same time, but Turing's was the easiest one to turn into an actual machine.
This is like my lawyer begging a street-bum for permission to let me wash my car. Really, here's why this is a good analogy: So patent-holders are like the bums that wash my car windows at a stoplight, and then demand payment for their work. If they had gotten my consent prior to doing the work, then it would make sense for me to have to pay for it. Of course it's not reasonable for a company to get consent from every interested party before doing some research, so that's where the government comes in, and hands out consent on behalf of everyone for a company to own an idea if they do the work. So if the government represents us (in theory anyway), then now they're turning to the bums and begging for permission on our behalf so that we can get our windows washed elsewhere. Man, this patent thing is really getting weird!
To the extent Adobe and friends succeed at keeping the stack of software that comes with Windows incomplete, Linux will have and edge because it can still offer everything for free.
To the extend that Microsoft grows the stack of software it offers with Windows, the larger the surface area becomes over which their products have potential to look inferior with those offered by the rest of the industry.
You should have considered the consequences of your actions when you configured your computer to allow other people to route data through it, knowing that some of that data could be something of a criminal nature.
Who says these people didn't consider the consequences of their actions? Maybe they knew there was a chance of harrassment, but they believed in freedom enough to do it anyway. How does that make the harrassment justifiable?
I've found that a Venn diagram helps a lot when people misunderstand the GPL.
If you never let anybody see your work, you give away no rights: (dot in center)
With a proprietary licence you give away this many rights: (teeny circle around it)
With the GPL you give away this many rights: (slightly bigger circle around both)
With the BSD you give away this many rights: (much bigger circle around them)
If you dedicate it to public domain: (huge circle around everything)
At this point the light seems to turn on for people and they say something like "You mean the GPL is closer to a proprietary license than the BSD?". That's when I know the confusion has finally been dispelled. Nothing annoys me more than people who are afraid of the GPL because they believe it will somehow take their rights away from them.
...maybe the EFF can talk the US Supreme Court into invalidating ALL software patents
Not likely. The Supreme Court's job is to uphold law, not make new ones. If they did, all the proponents of software patents would turn to Congress, and they'd have a valid reason to be indignant. In the worst case, Congress would pass a law in the opposite direction just to tell the Supremes to do their own jobs. Furthermore, I doubt the EFF would even raise the argument. They're comprised of lawyers who should know that court isn't the place to make big changes to law. If you want to save the world, do it properly so it has a chance of sticking.
The FCC is waiting for someone to explain it to them!? Yikes! And these are the same people that make the regulations? Am I missing something? They don't actually think about the issues themselves? They just sit back and watch while the opposing sides duke it out? Did it never cross their minds that telcos might a different amount of lobbying power than ordinary citizens? Is this really how the system works? Come on, no way! I can't believe it's come down to that. Nope, no way.
...a patent application getting rejected is headline material!
...too many chiefs, not enough braves.
Fortunately, the founding fathers of this country had the foresight to give everyone a constitutional right to move to another state whenever they feel like it for any reason. That way when one state does something stupid, they just lose taxpayers. Now if the federal government does something stupid, on the other hand, the people have to live with it until some terms expire. (And if the Supreme Court does something stupid, we're hosed.) Just be thankful the states still have some of the power to govern themselves so the fed won't do it!