When you mention these small third parties with their token 3-4 representatives out of the 400+ in the House or the 100 in the Senate, do you happen to mention how they've had any real impact to change anything? How many third party political meetings have you attended? Are you aware that getting involved with a third party to the point of receiving any real support is a venture which requires a significant devotion of your time--to the tune of 30+ hours/week? You don't just show up at the county Courthouse and say,"I'd like to run for the State Senate as a Green." Do you have any remote clue of the process of registering and qualifying as a candidate? Are you even remotely aware of the significant requirements necessary to even have your name listed on the ballot? Are you aware of the thousands of signatures which much be collected, in person, just to make a candidate valid in the eyes of the State Elections Board? The major political parties probably have the signature sheets at the door when they hold their monthly meetings--everyone else has to do real footwork. Have you ever worked as a volunteer in a grass-roots campaign, spent all of your free time for two years trying to push a candidate who _DID_ have a $250k budget, television, and radio ads only to watch that candidate hold an election day party to receive 8% of the vote?
No? That's probably because you're an armchair quarterback that likes to point to poster children as if they're any real factor in political circles. As the topic of this thread states,"Typical technical ignorance."
Go ahead. Make me your foe. You know you want to do it.:)
It's not a blind assertion. You aren't considering the following: bank note currency is far more important today than it was 50 years ago, and certainly more important than it was 150 years ago. 150 years ago, a federal deficit of $25000 may have seemed like a vast majority. Today, that's barely above poverty income.
So, in essence, OF COURSE the majority of debt has been accrued in the past 25 years. Look at the value of the stock markets over the last 25 years. Or the price of milk. It's a little bit more complicated than base level inflation but not by much.
It was also illegal and unconstitutional as all get out
The constitution gives politicians the right to borrow money on the credit of the US. I always find it suspicious that the founding fathers never included a clause of accountability for those borrowed funds. Some might say that the accountability was theoretically preempted by the election of the official. First, people change. Second, life changes and times can get tough. Third, I find it impossible to believe that the founding fathers were ignorant to rigging the jury (rigging the vote). England had done it to them for decades.
I don't want to be too hard on the original GW or Thomas Jefferson or the rest but the concept of borrowing someone's horse and never returning it couldn't have been new. What of the concept of borrowing a horse, selling it for profit, and coming up with a sad sack story of how the horse was stolen and offering the lender a sum of about 50% what the horse was sold for by playing a pity trip?
My only conclusion is that they, for all the patriotism surrounding the American Revolution, perhaps the founding fathers were, at least to some degree, "in on it".
"be kind to small dogs and children and in defense of apple pie act"
HAHAHA! (tears rolling down cheeks)
ou can't be "against it" or you are a..whatever, bad person
The "T" word?
This political scene we have now is mostly psychodrama, it doesn't represent what really happens or who calls the shots, it's to keep people dumbed down and thinking they have any say in matters
w3rd
There has NEVER been an audit of the federal reserve 12 private bank consortiums vaults
Even if there were such an audit would never come back as less than perfect.
"golly gee, looks like we, the scam corporate party, won again! ain't we lucky!"
The art of war: win at all costs.
"they" always fund BOTH SIDES. "They" always arm BOTH SIDES. "They" always stick their own guys in, on both sides
Allow me to mimic a troll for a moment: "Who is this 'they'? Are 'they' just some segment of fictitious people out there? Try coming up with some names and evidence before you start spouting this FUD you paranoid conspiracy lunatic!"
Usually I get hit with at least 5 ACs and trolls for a post like this one. Glad to find someone whose brain actually works.:)
But they don't. They go down while our spending goes up, which is why our debt goes up ever faster
Taxes, fees, regulatory charges. I keep a spreadsheet of how much of my money goes to paying all government tithes from the sales tax at the register to the hidden fee in my monthly rent which my landlord uses to pay the property tax to a calculated percentage that I pay to subsidize the condominium tax deduction that my landlord gets back at the end of the year. Last year the government took 56.3%. This year, so far, it's sitting at 58.4%.
Of the current debt, almost all of it was incurred by just two administrations: Reagan and GW Bush
Artificial numbers. So what? The bare fact is that the banks collaborated with the politicians to use the American public as a life-support system, without any real effort of their own, for over 150 years.
Would you EVER, EVER willing give someone else the power to borrow money on YOUR credit unless you trust them nearly with your life? Why not? Have you ever met your politicians in person to know if you would trust them with your bank account? Just think about that for a moment.
But I CONCIOUSLY decided not to. This is what makes HUMANS different from ANIMALS
More correctly it's the difference between honest humans and dishonest humans.
You've heard the saying,"All's fair in love and war?"
Imagine you work in a large company. A hot topic comes up at the lunch table. You say something which offends a manager who sits three tables away. He can find out where you live. He can probably figure out your home ISP. He happens to know, through the golf club, a guy who works with Manpower to staff the ISP. Through Manpower he can get in touch with one of the admins at the ISP. He gets a line on reading your personal e-mail just to research how to screw with you.
You make a great armchair quarterback. Just shut up, troll. Seriously. You're only making yourself look ignorant. Everyone is well aware of the massive amount of funding and support that it takes to pick up a seat even in the state House. Unless you've sold your soul to one of the two major political parties, a $250k campaign will get you about 12% of the vote, if you're lucky. There are special cases of third party elected officials. The overwhelming majority are independently wealthy or their family is _VERY_ well established in their constituent area.
Um, by your argument we shouldn't allow anyone to be elected to any position, because they're clearly going make laws that would benefit their own positions
SHHHHH! Don't tell anyone. They might figure it out.
How they racked up that debt is beyond me, but it's supposedly the "law" someplace.
What you're looking for is Article 1, Section 8, Clause 2 of the US Constitution
Section. 8.
Clause 1: The Congress shall have Power...
Clause 2: To borrow Money on the credit of the United States;
If you give politicians the power to borrow money eventually _SOMEONE_ will have to pay it back. It's like appointing the head of the Neighborhood Watch Program and then giving him the power to borrow money on the credit of the entire neighborhood. Does it sound like a recipe for disaster? I think so.
The debt was racked up by the many wars that we've undergone here in the US. In the Civil War the northern military had to borrow quite a bit of money in order to pay the soldiers. This money was happily lent to them by the northern bank conglomerates who were the driving interest behind the Civil War. In reality it had nothing to do with the morality of slave auctions, the slave trade, or human rights. The Civil War was about the _definition_ of slavery. The northern banks wanted very badly for every southern accounting ledger and business transaction to be made with _THEIR_ currency. Consequently they were happy to loan their currency to the northern army. Since the credit of the government, at the time, was backed by good solid gold the interest rates on these loans were probably reasonable. The government could afford to pay back the loan at any time by dumping a mound of gold into the banks who held the loans. The banks, of course, didn't want the gold. They wanted the business. They couldn't raise the interest rate through the roof because, if they did, the loan would simply be repaid and the business would be gone.
In the early 1900s the United States began to slip off of the gold standard. This made the situation far easier for the banks to exploit. I believe it was 1916 that the US formally exited the gold standard and sold out to the Federal Reserve. This was just in time for WW-I. Massive funding was needed for WW-I and the banks were only too happy to extend the credit. This time, however, the banks knew that the government could not repay the loan. The government had already put its gold in the banking pawn shop. This put the power in the hands of the banks. The government needed the money but had no real equity or credit left so the banks were free to adjust interest rates as they saw fit. What do you suppose happens when the lender is free to adjust or modify repayment terms at a whim?
I imagine, through some legal or accounting magic, that the US government was close to repaying the entire debt by 1929. If I remember my history studies well enough the stock market had boomed much like the.com bubble. The banks saw that their prime customer was about to get out from under the hoof and the collapse was engineered. What followed was a version of the three-cup disappearing pea trick. The banks claimed they had lent the money to investors. Investors claimed that they put the money into businesses. Businesses claimed that they paid the money out to distributors and clients. Distributors and clients claimed they paid the money to workers. Workers claimed they had put the money back into the banks. Suddenly, there was no more money. A sham, for certain. Just like late 1999. Anyone with a close eye on the market saw it beginning to deflate long before 2001.
WW-II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iraq again. It's all the same phenomenon. The banks control the credit rating of the USA. The USA needs money to fund these huge operations. The banks control the repayment plan. Our politicians have the legal authority to sign any loan and use our hard work as the backing equity.
Where the hell do you work in the scientific field, where you don't keep lab notebooks and the such.
Lab notebooks are the property of the company and I would never try to take one of those out the door.
I was adding to the comments about coders who keep a portfolio of personal libraries, scripts, and routines which they find useful to the everyday portion of their jobs. According to the types of employee agreements that I sign that material would, technically, be property of the company they were working for when they first wrote such routines, scripts, and object libraries.
To continue the comparison you are correct. What Affinity is accusing Orkut of doing would be similar to me transplanting an entire development project from one company to another. The whole "agreed not to develop social networking software for" is a overly vague, however. I would never agree "not to develop a cancer treatment drug" for a new company. Technically speaking, yes, I learned all I know about cancer therapies from my former employer but I'm sure as sugar going to use what I know to further my career.
In the scientific field where I work this is taken care of by the employee agreement that one signs on the way in the door. You agree to gain employment, they agree to own any part of your brain which is even remotely excited while you're on the job.
And yes, they do wire us with neuron mapping electrodes every day as we walk in the door.
I suppose coders have it worse. Where I take job-specific skills and knowledge about what works and what doesn't in the realm of pharmaceutical development, all of which is intangible knowledge which is never recorded in writing, coders can be caught with libraries.
While there are thousands of examples of how the internet should and shouldnt be used it always boils down to one thing. Information
Doesn't it boil down to two things: information AND entertainment?
Those of using the internet for information find it relatively easy to stay safe, secure, and bug-free. Those using the internet for entertainment require all of the plugins which open a zillion security holes.
Spam just needs to be made illegal in all countries and investigated like any other international crime (e.g. extrodition orders, sharing of information across borders, copperation on investigations).
Just what we need: an excuse for the politicians to garnish more of our wages, mount cameras in our homes, and pay their pampered offspring enormous wages to actively monitor our speech.
Perhaps we should be fining the ISPs who happily let spam-servers loose on their network?
ISPs are going to _LOVE_ this, especially now that some brilliant judge decided to let customers keep IP blocks. Think of the situation. The ISP gives a business account to someone. That someone turns out to be a spammer. The ISP is faced with heavy fines if they don't terminate the customer but faced with the clusterbomb of DNS mayhem if they do terminate the customer.
Well, basically. Let's take a good short hard look at the concept of rights. We all know we're supposed to have rights but do we _really_ have rights? When was the last time that someone violated your rights and you were compensated for the violation? At best the concept of rights serves as a deterrent to such violations but, should such a violation actually occur, recouping any sort of compensation requires police reports, proof, evidence, an attorney who gives a plaid rabid flying badger's patootle, and usually more time and hassle than it's worth. For the most part, if a person is targeted, the best thing they can do is pick up, move on, and hope to h-e-double-toothpicks that it doesn't happen again. If the rights of a _large_ number of people are violated then the outcry is enough to draw significant attention and warrant the popularity contest of a public lawsuit. If an attorney happens on a case which is in the right place at the right time then a poster child will be made who rides the political and media wave. For the most part, however, it's a live at your own risk world. Every second that goes by you should be thankful you're not being viciously exploited.
Cynical? Maybe so. I have yet to see the concept of rights given justice on an individual basis. Everyone believes they have rights because they're never violated. The concept of "rights" sounds good because it's never tested. It's very easy to show an individual how little right they have to anything.
Maybe the guy was hosting spammers in his address space and that's why NAC pulled him?
What's life going to be like when a spammer can pick up their entire IP block and move around from one ISP to another? It'll be almost impossible to track down who's actually hosting them at any given time.
The GPL says a lot more than you can't sell code that was licensed by it
You're becoming very defensive, especially with your quip about ignorance. I'm well aware that the GPL allows you to charge a fee for distribution to cover the cost of materials and distribution.
What consolation prize do we have for our brave little contestant
Oh please. Save your breath. I've read it plenty of times to see just how restrictive the "all or nothing" GPL clause is. Are there ANY OTHER SIGNIFICANT restrictions in the GNU GPL aside from that one line which makes it all or nothing GNU GPL? Is there? Is there?
Say you want to use some library or module in your program to perform some common function that you don't want to have to code yourself. In order to do that, your entire project must itself be licensed under the GPL
As I said. You take something GPL, you add three lines of code, and you try to sell it as your own. If the function is that "common" then you should be able to write it easily or find it under someone else's license.
That is again a major restriction
It's not a major restriction. If you want to steal code for your own profit do it under someone else's license. If you want to play fair for the benefit of everyone then you're more than happy to adhere to GNU GPL.
But to say that the GPL is an unrestricted license is an outright lie. I quote now from the Preamble from the GPL itself
Get off your high horse. I didn't say the GPL is unrestricted but we've already admitted that the common definition of a software license necessitates having a restriction even if the license were completely blank.
If you have personal issues surrounding the word "restricted", thats between you and your shrink
I don't have personal issues with any words. I do have personal issues with people who take the only real restriction of the GNU GPL, which makes it all or nothing GNU GPL, and blow it up as if it's a straitjacket.
Once again. If you want to steal code do it on someone else's license. If you want to play fair to benefit everyone then you will be more than happy to adhere to the GNU GPL.
If this ruling stands then script-kiddies and spammers will have a field day. Eventually the politicians will run a news story and write a number of bills in which the government will demand oversight of all DNS servers and routers.
I repeat: Bugs should not result in security issues!
You are so absolutely right. They shouldn't. The fact is that many many many programmers do not hold themselves to the same standards that you do. In the proprietary community, as many have pointed out, this is often overlooked if the end product can still be shipped to the client. In the open source community this is more often caught and fixed with a bug report.
It used to be that a bug caused the compiler to choke or the application to exit abnormally. As things got larger and more complex bugs allow programs to skip routines, traverse code, or even modify memory or files that they shouldn't. For many years now I've tried to get more people to take up the motto: "Every bug is an exploitable bug."
the fact of the matter remains the GPL is VERY restritive (emphasis mine)
That's not fact and that's where many people are putting the negative spin on a logical necessity. The GPL is not "very" restrictive. It is a common chant among thieves to say that common law is unnecessarily restrictive. The GPL simply makes it clear that you cannot take someone else's code, add three lines, and call it your own to 4) PROFIT!. While I admire the level of trust and philanthropy (not to mention potential implications of tax credits) behind the BSD license history has shown us that too many people are plagued by greed to make a BSD type world practical.
Hmmmmm... perhaps that last observation says everything that needs to be said.
Unless you plan on stealing someone else's work for your own profit the GPL is not "very" restrictive. It's just restrictive like any other license. Get over it. Move on. If you want to steal, do it on someone else's license. If you want to play fair then you'll be more than happy to adhere to GNU GPL.
If he's supposed to be perfect, why would God change his covenant with humanity?
Wow. You sure hooked a lot of Bible thumpers on this as shown by the millions of quotes farther on down the list. Ignore all of them.
God is perfect. Humanity is not. God changed the covenant because humanity keeps showing him that we can screw up even the simplest of instruction sets. That's because of the Devil whom God is always at odds with.
Then there's the whole thing about "if God is perfect then why doesn't he create humans to be perfect or why doesn't he just get rid of the Devil?" The practical answer is: what else is he going to do for all eternity? If he gets rid of the Devil he would have to go back to playing solitaire and all of us, rather than being an amusing time-suck that constantly needs guidance and thought, would be perfect zombie drones who would run like perfect clockwork, leaving God nothing to do but play solitaire. Solitaire gets really boring after a while. He made us imperfect so that we would screw things up and give him something to do trying to fix it.
For that matter, maybe there've been a dozen since then.
Once again, it makes a good script for God if we humans divide ourselves into a least a few factions. Some of the factions do terrible, horrible things to each other. Sometimes even seemingly normal people do terrible, horrible things to each other. The people who are victims are rewarded after death. Don't worry about them. God has them covered. Suffering is part of life because it makes for a good script. Once again, without a good script, God is left to playing solitaire. God was playing solitaire about 2 billion-million-trillion years ago, got fed up with it, and threw the deck against a wall. That resulted in the Big Bang and, ever since, God has been watching, making observations, taking notes, and constantly waiting for humanity to screw the next thing up so that he doesn't have to go back to playing solitaire.
Slashdot Mirror
When you mention these small third parties with their token 3-4 representatives out of the 400+ in the House or the 100 in the Senate, do you happen to mention how they've had any real impact to change anything? How many third party political meetings have you attended? Are you aware that getting involved with a third party to the point of receiving any real support is a venture which requires a significant devotion of your time--to the tune of 30+ hours/week? You don't just show up at the county Courthouse and say,"I'd like to run for the State Senate as a Green." Do you have any remote clue of the process of registering and qualifying as a candidate? Are you even remotely aware of the significant requirements necessary to even have your name listed on the ballot? Are you aware of the thousands of signatures which much be collected, in person, just to make a candidate valid in the eyes of the State Elections Board? The major political parties probably have the signature sheets at the door when they hold their monthly meetings--everyone else has to do real footwork. Have you ever worked as a volunteer in a grass-roots campaign, spent all of your free time for two years trying to push a candidate who _DID_ have a $250k budget, television, and radio ads only to watch that candidate hold an election day party to receive 8% of the vote?
:)
No? That's probably because you're an armchair quarterback that likes to point to poster children as if they're any real factor in political circles. As the topic of this thread states,"Typical technical ignorance."
Go ahead. Make me your foe. You know you want to do it.
Additionally, in most areas, dispensing of gasoline from the pumps into unapproved containers is illegal.
You should try Gentoo
Gratuitous Gentoo-is-the-cureall plug # 45067421258
It's not a blind assertion. You aren't considering the following: bank note currency is far more important today than it was 50 years ago, and certainly more important than it was 150 years ago. 150 years ago, a federal deficit of $25000 may have seemed like a vast majority. Today, that's barely above poverty income.
So, in essence, OF COURSE the majority of debt has been accrued in the past 25 years. Look at the value of the stock markets over the last 25 years. Or the price of milk. It's a little bit more complicated than base level inflation but not by much.
Last first because it's the most important.
:)
:)
It would be funny if it wasn't serious.
Life is sweet, eh? *sigh*
Also a great congame for those who profit from it
That's the #2 point.
It was also illegal and unconstitutional as all get out
The constitution gives politicians the right to borrow money on the credit of the US. I always find it suspicious that the founding fathers never included a clause of accountability for those borrowed funds. Some might say that the accountability was theoretically preempted by the election of the official. First, people change. Second, life changes and times can get tough. Third, I find it impossible to believe that the founding fathers were ignorant to rigging the jury (rigging the vote). England had done it to them for decades.
I don't want to be too hard on the original GW or Thomas Jefferson or the rest but the concept of borrowing someone's horse and never returning it couldn't have been new. What of the concept of borrowing a horse, selling it for profit, and coming up with a sad sack story of how the horse was stolen and offering the lender a sum of about 50% what the horse was sold for by playing a pity trip?
My only conclusion is that they, for all the patriotism surrounding the American Revolution, perhaps the founding fathers were, at least to some degree, "in on it".
"be kind to small dogs and children and in defense of apple pie act"
HAHAHA! (tears rolling down cheeks)
ou can't be "against it" or you are a..whatever, bad person
The "T" word?
This political scene we have now is mostly psychodrama, it doesn't represent what really happens or who calls the shots, it's to keep people dumbed down and thinking they have any say in matters
w3rd
There has NEVER been an audit of the federal reserve 12 private bank consortiums vaults
Even if there were such an audit would never come back as less than perfect.
"golly gee, looks like we, the scam corporate party, won again! ain't we lucky!"
The art of war: win at all costs.
"they" always fund BOTH SIDES. "They" always arm BOTH SIDES. "They" always stick their own guys in, on both sides
Allow me to mimic a troll for a moment: "Who is this 'they'? Are 'they' just some segment of fictitious people out there? Try coming up with some names and evidence before you start spouting this FUD you paranoid conspiracy lunatic!"
Usually I get hit with at least 5 ACs and trolls for a post like this one. Glad to find someone whose brain actually works.
But they don't. They go down while our spending goes up, which is why our debt goes up ever faster
Taxes, fees, regulatory charges. I keep a spreadsheet of how much of my money goes to paying all government tithes from the sales tax at the register to the hidden fee in my monthly rent which my landlord uses to pay the property tax to a calculated percentage that I pay to subsidize the condominium tax deduction that my landlord gets back at the end of the year. Last year the government took 56.3%. This year, so far, it's sitting at 58.4%.
Of the current debt, almost all of it was incurred by just two administrations: Reagan and GW Bush
Artificial numbers. So what? The bare fact is that the banks collaborated with the politicians to use the American public as a life-support system, without any real effort of their own, for over 150 years.
Would you EVER, EVER willing give someone else the power to borrow money on YOUR credit unless you trust them nearly with your life? Why not? Have you ever met your politicians in person to know if you would trust them with your bank account? Just think about that for a moment.
But I CONCIOUSLY decided not to. This is what makes HUMANS different from ANIMALS
More correctly it's the difference between honest humans and dishonest humans.
You've heard the saying,"All's fair in love and war?"
Imagine you work in a large company. A hot topic comes up at the lunch table. You say something which offends a manager who sits three tables away. He can find out where you live. He can probably figure out your home ISP. He happens to know, through the golf club, a guy who works with Manpower to staff the ISP. Through Manpower he can get in touch with one of the admins at the ISP. He gets a line on reading your personal e-mail just to research how to screw with you.
Sun Tsu: The Art of War.
But I actually don't care since I switched to Gentoo
Gratuitous Gentoo plug # 45002582194
there is nothing stopping you from running
You make a great armchair quarterback. Just shut up, troll. Seriously. You're only making yourself look ignorant. Everyone is well aware of the massive amount of funding and support that it takes to pick up a seat even in the state House. Unless you've sold your soul to one of the two major political parties, a $250k campaign will get you about 12% of the vote, if you're lucky. There are special cases of third party elected officials. The overwhelming majority are independently wealthy or their family is _VERY_ well established in their constituent area.
Um, by your argument we shouldn't allow anyone to be elected to any position, because they're clearly going make laws that would benefit their own positions
SHHHHH! Don't tell anyone. They might figure it out.
My other response is: NO KIDDING! BRILLIANT!
What you're looking for is Article 1, Section 8, Clause 2 of the US Constitution
If you give politicians the power to borrow money eventually _SOMEONE_ will have to pay it back. It's like appointing the head of the Neighborhood Watch Program and then giving him the power to borrow money on the credit of the entire neighborhood. Does it sound like a recipe for disaster? I think so.
The debt was racked up by the many wars that we've undergone here in the US. In the Civil War the northern military had to borrow quite a bit of money in order to pay the soldiers. This money was happily lent to them by the northern bank conglomerates who were the driving interest behind the Civil War. In reality it had nothing to do with the morality of slave auctions, the slave trade, or human rights. The Civil War was about the _definition_ of slavery. The northern banks wanted very badly for every southern accounting ledger and business transaction to be made with _THEIR_ currency. Consequently they were happy to loan their currency to the northern army. Since the credit of the government, at the time, was backed by good solid gold the interest rates on these loans were probably reasonable. The government could afford to pay back the loan at any time by dumping a mound of gold into the banks who held the loans. The banks, of course, didn't want the gold. They wanted the business. They couldn't raise the interest rate through the roof because, if they did, the loan would simply be repaid and the business would be gone.
In the early 1900s the United States began to slip off of the gold standard. This made the situation far easier for the banks to exploit. I believe it was 1916 that the US formally exited the gold standard and sold out to the Federal Reserve. This was just in time for WW-I. Massive funding was needed for WW-I and the banks were only too happy to extend the credit. This time, however, the banks knew that the government could not repay the loan. The government had already put its gold in the banking pawn shop. This put the power in the hands of the banks. The government needed the money but had no real equity or credit left so the banks were free to adjust interest rates as they saw fit. What do you suppose happens when the lender is free to adjust or modify repayment terms at a whim?
I imagine, through some legal or accounting magic, that the US government was close to repaying the entire debt by 1929. If I remember my history studies well enough the stock market had boomed much like the
WW-II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iraq again. It's all the same phenomenon. The banks control the credit rating of the USA. The USA needs money to fund these huge operations. The banks control the repayment plan. Our politicians have the legal authority to sign any loan and use our hard work as the backing equity.
There's little wonder that taxes keep going up.
Where the hell do you work in the scientific field, where you don't keep lab notebooks and the such.
Lab notebooks are the property of the company and I would never try to take one of those out the door.
I was adding to the comments about coders who keep a portfolio of personal libraries, scripts, and routines which they find useful to the everyday portion of their jobs. According to the types of employee agreements that I sign that material would, technically, be property of the company they were working for when they first wrote such routines, scripts, and object libraries.
To continue the comparison you are correct. What Affinity is accusing Orkut of doing would be similar to me transplanting an entire development project from one company to another. The whole "agreed not to develop social networking software for" is a overly vague, however. I would never agree "not to develop a cancer treatment drug" for a new company. Technically speaking, yes, I learned all I know about cancer therapies from my former employer but I'm sure as sugar going to use what I know to further my career.
In the scientific field where I work this is taken care of by the employee agreement that one signs on the way in the door. You agree to gain employment, they agree to own any part of your brain which is even remotely excited while you're on the job.
And yes, they do wire us with neuron mapping electrodes every day as we walk in the door.
I suppose coders have it worse. Where I take job-specific skills and knowledge about what works and what doesn't in the realm of pharmaceutical development, all of which is intangible knowledge which is never recorded in writing, coders can be caught with libraries.
but anything that hurts spammers must be good
That's not really a bright philosophy to follow in general.
While there are thousands of examples of how the internet should and shouldnt be used it always boils down to one thing. Information
Doesn't it boil down to two things: information AND entertainment?
Those of using the internet for information find it relatively easy to stay safe, secure, and bug-free. Those using the internet for entertainment require all of the plugins which open a zillion security holes.
Let's hope he gets it figured out correctly.
Spam just needs to be made illegal in all countries and investigated like any other international crime (e.g. extrodition orders, sharing of information across borders, copperation on investigations).
Just what we need: an excuse for the politicians to garnish more of our wages, mount cameras in our homes, and pay their pampered offspring enormous wages to actively monitor our speech.
BRILLIANT!
Perhaps we should be fining the ISPs who happily let spam-servers loose on their network?
ISPs are going to _LOVE_ this, especially now that some brilliant judge decided to let customers keep IP blocks. Think of the situation. The ISP gives a business account to someone. That someone turns out to be a spammer. The ISP is faced with heavy fines if they don't terminate the customer but faced with the clusterbomb of DNS mayhem if they do terminate the customer.
BRILLIANT!
Righto. _censored_ human rights
Well, basically. Let's take a good short hard look at the concept of rights. We all know we're supposed to have rights but do we _really_ have rights? When was the last time that someone violated your rights and you were compensated for the violation? At best the concept of rights serves as a deterrent to such violations but, should such a violation actually occur, recouping any sort of compensation requires police reports, proof, evidence, an attorney who gives a plaid rabid flying badger's patootle, and usually more time and hassle than it's worth. For the most part, if a person is targeted, the best thing they can do is pick up, move on, and hope to h-e-double-toothpicks that it doesn't happen again. If the rights of a _large_ number of people are violated then the outcry is enough to draw significant attention and warrant the popularity contest of a public lawsuit. If an attorney happens on a case which is in the right place at the right time then a poster child will be made who rides the political and media wave. For the most part, however, it's a live at your own risk world. Every second that goes by you should be thankful you're not being viciously exploited.
Cynical? Maybe so. I have yet to see the concept of rights given justice on an individual basis. Everyone believes they have rights because they're never violated. The concept of "rights" sounds good because it's never tested. It's very easy to show an individual how little right they have to anything.
Maybe the guy was hosting spammers in his address space and that's why NAC pulled him?
What's life going to be like when a spammer can pick up their entire IP block and move around from one ISP to another? It'll be almost impossible to track down who's actually hosting them at any given time.
The GPL says a lot more than you can't sell code that was licensed by it
You're becoming very defensive, especially with your quip about ignorance. I'm well aware that the GPL allows you to charge a fee for distribution to cover the cost of materials and distribution.
What consolation prize do we have for our brave little contestant
Oh please. Save your breath. I've read it plenty of times to see just how restrictive the "all or nothing" GPL clause is. Are there ANY OTHER SIGNIFICANT restrictions in the GNU GPL aside from that one line which makes it all or nothing GNU GPL? Is there? Is there?
Say you want to use some library or module in your program to perform some common function that you don't want to have to code yourself. In order to do that, your entire project must itself be licensed under the GPL
As I said. You take something GPL, you add three lines of code, and you try to sell it as your own. If the function is that "common" then you should be able to write it easily or find it under someone else's license.
That is again a major restriction
It's not a major restriction. If you want to steal code for your own profit do it under someone else's license. If you want to play fair for the benefit of everyone then you're more than happy to adhere to GNU GPL.
But to say that the GPL is an unrestricted license is an outright lie. I quote now from the Preamble from the GPL itself
Get off your high horse. I didn't say the GPL is unrestricted but we've already admitted that the common definition of a software license necessitates having a restriction even if the license were completely blank.
If you have personal issues surrounding the word "restricted", thats between you and your shrink
I don't have personal issues with any words. I do have personal issues with people who take the only real restriction of the GNU GPL, which makes it all or nothing GNU GPL, and blow it up as if it's a straitjacket.
Once again. If you want to steal code do it on someone else's license. If you want to play fair to benefit everyone then you will be more than happy to adhere to the GNU GPL.
If this ruling stands then script-kiddies and spammers will have a field day. Eventually the politicians will run a news story and write a number of bills in which the government will demand oversight of all DNS servers and routers.
Ooooooh boy. Fun fun fun.
Bugs should not result in security issues.
I repeat: Bugs should not result in security issues!
You are so absolutely right. They shouldn't. The fact is that many many many programmers do not hold themselves to the same standards that you do. In the proprietary community, as many have pointed out, this is often overlooked if the end product can still be shipped to the client. In the open source community this is more often caught and fixed with a bug report.
It used to be that a bug caused the compiler to choke or the application to exit abnormally. As things got larger and more complex bugs allow programs to skip routines, traverse code, or even modify memory or files that they shouldn't. For many years now I've tried to get more people to take up the motto: "Every bug is an exploitable bug."
the fact of the matter remains the GPL is VERY restritive
(emphasis mine)
That's not fact and that's where many people are putting the negative spin on a logical necessity. The GPL is not "very" restrictive. It is a common chant among thieves to say that common law is unnecessarily restrictive. The GPL simply makes it clear that you cannot take someone else's code, add three lines, and call it your own to 4) PROFIT!. While I admire the level of trust and philanthropy (not to mention potential implications of tax credits) behind the BSD license history has shown us that too many people are plagued by greed to make a BSD type world practical.
Hmmmmm... perhaps that last observation says everything that needs to be said.
Unless you plan on stealing someone else's work for your own profit the GPL is not "very" restrictive. It's just restrictive like any other license. Get over it. Move on. If you want to steal, do it on someone else's license. If you want to play fair then you'll be more than happy to adhere to GNU GPL.
If he's supposed to be perfect, why would God change his covenant with humanity?
Wow. You sure hooked a lot of Bible thumpers on this as shown by the millions of quotes farther on down the list. Ignore all of them.
God is perfect. Humanity is not. God changed the covenant because humanity keeps showing him that we can screw up even the simplest of instruction sets. That's because of the Devil whom God is always at odds with.
Then there's the whole thing about "if God is perfect then why doesn't he create humans to be perfect or why doesn't he just get rid of the Devil?" The practical answer is: what else is he going to do for all eternity? If he gets rid of the Devil he would have to go back to playing solitaire and all of us, rather than being an amusing time-suck that constantly needs guidance and thought, would be perfect zombie drones who would run like perfect clockwork, leaving God nothing to do but play solitaire. Solitaire gets really boring after a while. He made us imperfect so that we would screw things up and give him something to do trying to fix it.
For that matter, maybe there've been a dozen since then.
Once again, it makes a good script for God if we humans divide ourselves into a least a few factions. Some of the factions do terrible, horrible things to each other. Sometimes even seemingly normal people do terrible, horrible things to each other. The people who are victims are rewarded after death. Don't worry about them. God has them covered. Suffering is part of life because it makes for a good script. Once again, without a good script, God is left to playing solitaire. God was playing solitaire about 2 billion-million-trillion years ago, got fed up with it, and threw the deck against a wall. That resulted in the Big Bang and, ever since, God has been watching, making observations, taking notes, and constantly waiting for humanity to screw the next thing up so that he doesn't have to go back to playing solitaire.