So, you just ban exclusive licences: a work must be licenced to all parties on exactly the same terms, or not at all. (That would enable music delivery services -- be they record labels or download sites -- to compete on a truly fair basis.) As long as the artist gets (say) 10p per album sold, it shouldn't matter where that money came from -- whether it came from a record company selling a packaged CD, or from someone paying for the right to copy a CD they borrowed from a friend and enjoyed. Note that an exception is necessary for copyrighted works which have been mortgaged. Otherwise you could never use Intellectual Property as collateral for a loan (which is the whole basis of an idea I had for a new model for the music industry in the 21st century), because the lender might conceivably never get their money back. In such a case, I think it's fair for the lender to stipulate exclusive licencing terms; but the moment the debt is cleared, no more exclusivity.
Distributing the source code makes it much easier for the user of proprietary software to edit out digital restrictions management subroutines. This is a show-stopper for many publishers of proprietary software.
True, true..... Look how many distros apply a certain patch to XPDF! However, DRM won't be around forever..... it's a fundamentally flawed concept and once people realise that, its days are numbered.
Besides, it doesn't guarantee compatibility, as what runs on one machine may die (e.g. a PC running Ubuntu) with a nearly immediate "Virtual memory exhausted" on a smaller machine (e.g. a Nintendo DS running DSLinux).
Well, them's the breaks, unfortunately. Breaks as in, when it breaks, you get to keep all the pieces. At least having the Source Code makes it possible for you to produce a "lite" version which trades some functionality for more efficient resource usage, though.
Distributions are still a fragmented mess, it's incredibly difficult to produce a binary for Linux that will work across all distributions (especially with Gentoo and their whole CFLAGS fiasco...thank goodness that fad died off).
Indeed..... and it's even more difficult to produce a binary for Linux that will work across all distributions when you factor in that Linux runs on other hardware architectures besides x86.
As much as you'd like to complain about Windows and Apple, binary compatibility is not a problem.
Not a problem? You're having a laugh. Binary compatibility on Windows has been a complete disaster, with machines falling prey to malware which at best hogs resources and at worst displays gratuitous, offensive popup adverts. If a computer couldn't run binaries which had not been specifically compiled for only that exact computer and no other one anywhere else in the world, viruses and worms would be stopped dead in their tracks.
There's plenty of smart, dedicated people out there that could find a solution to this, particularly the people working on the kernel. Why isn't it a high priority to increase compatibility -between- Linux distributions, or to form some sort of a community-based standard...one that actually works (as opposed to the LSB)?
There is already a very simple way of guaranteeing compatibility across all distributions, and even all machine architectures. That is called, distributing the Source Code. It is the business of the distro maintainer to compile a generic Source package and create a binary package which works with their distro's own peculiarities; during which process, they might well change things subtly so as to match their distro's "look and feel".
Something similar worked with BT payphones ("Blue Payphone 2", aka "Payphone 500"). If you modified the returned coin chute cover slightly {by forcibly pulling the inward-opening door out and removing the inner plate; after which mistreatment the door would open both ways, thus allowing you to reach into places when the door was opened outward which normally would be blocked off when the door was opened inward}, it was possible to knock 20p coins down from their temporary-storage chute -- coins were counted only at insertion, held in separate chutes according to value and routed either to the metal safe under the phone or the return chute, depending how much credit had been used, upon replacing the receiver -- during a call, and reinsert them for extra credit. The modification was invariably short-lived, and BT soon came up with mods of their own to prevent it: first a welded plate further restricting the returned coins aperture, then a new one-piece chute door casting. I don't doubt that a suitable tool could have been crafted to release coins without modifying the door; but I never made one.
Phone Phreaking is something that's never, ever going to be possible again. All modern systems are using out-of-band signalling; so playing various tones down the line is approximately as effective as shining lines down the coin slot of a payphone.
You can do some kinds of interesting things with an ISDN line, because you have access to the D-channel which is the actual, real, live out-of-band signalling channel; but they're still limited, because the exchange is acting as a man-in-the-middle and knows when you are taking the mick. For instance, you can send your own caller ID as part of the call-setup message; but it has to be a number that the phone company recognise as belonging to you, otherwise the exchange will just change it to "withheld" (or refuse to connect the call).
There are always new avenues, though. Hacking is driven by one of the same primitive instincts that fetched us down from the trees, and that instinct will always find a way to manifest itself.
British payphones have *always* held track of credit in the payphone itself, rather than relying on the exchange to do it {which is just stupidly vulnerable to attacks}. Metering pulses {common-mode with respect to Earth} were sent down the line from the exchange after each unit. If you tried disconnecting the Earth wire to block the pulses, the phone would just cut you off anyway after a preset timeout, equivalent to one unit at the cheapest rate. Nowadays, payphones are smart enough to know, from the STD code and the time of day, how much to charge for a call and so meter pulses are not required (the facility is even being withdrawn as exchanges are modernised).
The biggest difference between British payphones is how much armour-plating they use. A privately-owned payphone in a hairdresser's salon may well be constructed in lightweight polycarbonate; one in a pub might have a metal coin safe. Street payphones are close to bomb-proof.
Payphones are an endangered species in Britain anyway, now almost everyone has a mobile phone.
Also, remember that the UK and US differ in their idea of what constitutes a "gallon". We had not yet invented the litre (for the benefit of the French, who would have had severe difficulty winning so much as a bronze medal in a measuring-unit-inventing competition if there were only two other entrants; in the end we let them take the credit for it in return for being allowed to be thought of as recognising another world-changing invention in future. This favour was called in in 1959 when Britain "invented" front-wheel drive cars that had only been in use in France for about 30 years already) at the time when the Pilgrim Fathers set sail from Plymouth. When they arrived in the New World, not only did they display a singular lack of imagination by naming the place where they landed after the place where they set sail from; they also forgot that there are in fact twenty fluid ounces in a pint, not sixteen as there are solid ounces in a pound, and that words like "colour" have a "u" in them. Whilst the initial failure to carry a dictionary and a table of weights and measures might be excused in the light of the demands of the circumstances facing the people, that situation no longer persists.
In the meantime, just remember that five American gallons (each of 3.785L) are equivalent to four proper gallons (each of 4.546L); so while 30 miles per US gallon doesn't sound much, it's really 37.5 miles per gallon. Which is still fuck-all. And continue to annoy Septics by referring to "eight gallon hats" and pronouncing the name of a certain town in Pennsylvania as "Pittsborough".
The only problem with two-stroke engines is the need for lubricating oil to be mixed in with the fuel -- and usually, not so well that it burns up completely. With better materials, it ought to be possible to create a two-stroke engine with no need for any lubricating oil. Countries that banned two-strokes as a knee-jerk reaction confusing ends with means will be the last to benefit from such an invention.
Which is why we need a Continental-style, legislated wall of separation between private and working lives. Quite simply, nothing I do whilst "off the clock" is any of my employer's business, unless I invite him to watch.
Thing with that is, you can write the scripting language to do the job and write the wizard to write the scripts, but you can't make people expose their application's functionality to your language.
Through the combined magic of Open Source and the Unix Methodology (programs do one thing), though, they usually dois. If there's a function in a library that could usefully be made into a standalone command-line application, it usually is. Lame and ImageMagick probably are the canonical examples of this.
Automater is not the way to do it. There is a rather large overhead in the code it generates even for something as simple as a directory listing, though hidden from the user. Automator is also limited to only applications that are friendly to it and the number of applications so friendly is small. There is also the limitations of Automator in being dynamic enough to produce stand alone programs, not to even consider stand alone programs that are automator friendly, as it is designed in the line of hypercard to apple script to its current incarnation which does use applescript. If anything it is a glue type program fitting in the class of tcl/tk which has recently seen a rare upgrade.
It doesn't have to be Automation Assistant. It can be anything that does the same job -- sort of a drag-and-drop frontend to a POSIX shell. {And generating ordinary shell commands, because all that stuff already exists}. It just needs a unified method for constructing commands. Something like "find all ___ files and do the following with them: [box into which to drag actions]" would translate to an empty for FILENAME in $FILELIST; do... done loop; and you could drag various actions {the palette of available actions would change, depending on the context -- you don't want to convert a JPG file to OGG format} into the loop and arrange them up and down and drag them away. Or "display the last ___ lines of file" would translate to tail -n$N $FILENAME. There would be special "And, if that succeeds..." {&&} and "or, if that does not work..." {||} connectors for chaining actions. All the usual commands are known about {because POSIX specifies how they work}, so you just need to have a database of the proper syntax for any extensions {and in many cases, the correct syntax will be $ command --longoption -o filename}. Provide a central repository where people can share their amazing scripts with the world, and where programmers can upload syntax entries to make their wares compatible with auto-scripting and users can download them {distributors who offered auto-scripting support as one of their main features would also be able to put relevant syntax entries in with packages, so automated scripting would Just Work if you got all your packages from the official repository -- and, if it becomes really popular, there's nothing to stop a configure script from detecting your auto-scripting syntax database and updating it as part of the installation}.
Or, how about a graphical user interface for cron? Using existing clock and calendar setting paradigms, it wouldn't be too hard -- and the actions would be user-generated scripts. Through the same frontend, you could hook into various events e.g. USB device being plugged in. {Whenever a device is plugged into a USB port, check to see if it is a DC1400, and if so: connect to the device just plugged in (treating it as a storage device), create a new folder in my "pictures" folder, copy everything in the folder DCIM on the device just plugged in to the new folder we just created, disconnect the device safely, for each.JPG file in the folder: shrink it to thumbnail size, renaming from.jpg to.mini.jpg and leaving the original in place.}
If we can build that, there is no doubt that they will come. People will appreciate having that sort of power over their computers. I've shown off the power of one-liners to people who have been used to doing everything through GUIs, and jaws have dropped -- and not always at the fact that I can even remember how to do all that complicated shit. The shell is where Linux shines, but we keep hiding it away from users, pretending it's too complicated for them which becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Well, if we can't bring ordinary users to the shell, then we have to bring the shell to
Copyright infringement is criminal in the UK. Most offences here are indeed "innocent until proven guilty", though there are "guilty until proven innocent" offences (e.g. racism, terrorism) and "guilty despite being proved innocent" offences (anything sexual).
Just because something isn't definitely an offence doesn't mean you can't be arrested for it if a constable thinks it looks like an offence, and detained while they work out whether or not it was an offence or whether you may have done something else which was definitely an offence. If they think you have, they can hold onto you for that.
(On a deeper level, there are "law abiding citizens" and "criminals". Which group you belong to has little relation to whether or not what you are doing is actually illegal. In fact, most things are illegal in the UK; but as long as you are a Law Abiding Citizen, you can get away with them. If a Criminal tried the same things, they would be arrested. It is not always easy for a visitor to tell the difference between L.A.C.s and Criminals, but watch what goes on on a typical British housing estate to work out who is who.)
Is he the one that had the idea something like: in English we put the adjective before the noun and we put the given name before the family name. So when we hear a family name (such as "Lakoff") alone we unconsciously associate a given name with it (such as "George"); and if we hear an adjective-noun phrase enough times we tend unconsciously to associate that adjective with that noun even if the noun is used on its own. So if you keep talking about "binge drinking" and "illegal immigrants" for example, and soon people will come to see any drinking as binge-drinking and any immigrant as an illegal immigrant, and politicians have been doing this for years just to screw us over?
If you want to prove that ripping a CD is fair use, you need to test it in court. It is the job of the courts to decide the fine details of law.
In the UK, it would be called Fair Dealing, and has never been tested in a Court of Law. Therefore the Authorities can assume it is illegal, giving the police powers of arrest for the cassettes in people's cars that they taped from CDs using equipment that they bought in good faith for that purpose. In practice, however, so many people are doing it that nobody gets arrested. The only way it can be useful is as part of a "fishing expedition" where, on the basis of the existence illegally-copied cassettes about a suspect's person, premises or vehicle, a warrant is obtained to search for something more "interesting". By the time it gets to court, the tapes will be conveniently forgotten. This is all deliberate. It's not going to be tested in court. Out of a jury of twelve people, at least eleven of them have at least one home-taped cassette in their car. They aren't going to convict. If they did, the record companies might be happy for a moment; but in the real world, the police would have a field day stopping motorists to search for illegal tapes and there would be uproar. Strikes, rioting in the streets, that sort of thing, and the Government would be forced to intervene and explicitly legalise home taping (and, therefore, by analogy, ripping CDs to MP3s; although this might require another test case and a motion summarily to dismiss on the basis of similarity to an earlier case). If the jury acquit, of course, then home taping is automatically legalised. Either way, the record company fat cats lose! This is why the present situation persists: the Authorities get to feel they have a lever they can use against criminals, and the People get to feel they are doing something deliciously subversive. The only thing that would get in the way of this happy win-win situation would be for the legality of format-shifting to be tested in Court -- and it's the Authorities who control which cases get heard.
I suspect the situation would be similar in the USA. Declaring a near-universal practice to be criminal would be suicide for any government. Even if it only works out to be the case that format-shifting is legalised in one state, you can bet there will be movements to legalise it in others. The record companies aren't going to like that, so they won't bring a case to court if there's a real possibility that format-shifting could be declared Fair Use as a result.
It's my property, so nothing about it is a secret from me. That is a fundamental right -- it's part of the definition of ownership. Any constitution which permits the ownership of property should grant this right, if governments were doing the job we paid them to do properly.
Yes, Gentoo's package management system is based mainly on Source packages. Bandwidth, processor cycles and RAM are cheap enough now for that to work. And in future, more packages will be written in interpreted languages (PHP, Python, Java &c., plus whatever newer and trendier languages come along) thereby being independent of machine architecture.
Distro-proliferation is a necessary phase, which will come to an end sooner or later. Remember all those 8-bit home computers that were around in the mid-to-late 1980s? They couldn't all last. It ended with there being just four major platforms: Spectrum, Commodore 64, Amstrad and BBC. Something similar will inevitably happen to the Linux distribution scene, but with an important difference: nobody is going to lose anything this time, because all the Source Code will be available. If your favourite distribution goes under, you can always take all your software with you when you have to choose another. Even if it's closed-source and so picky that you have to run a particular old kernel and libraries under virtualisation to get it to work, it will be possible; processors will be fast enough by then that it won't seem any slower, and thanks to open protocols it can be interacted with. Of course, that's just a temporary fix until someone comes out with an Open Source version that does the same thing.
And yes, I do realize that in practice it would be very hard and expensive to strike a contract that provides you with specs. So what? The right to negotiate a contract does not guarantee that you will find a partner who accepts your conditions.
So, it is the legitimate purpose of Government to ensure that the people get all the rights they deserve, all the time. Including the right to be privy to any secret embodied in any article they rightfully own. In other words: If you won't tell me of your own free will, it's the Government's job to make you tell me.
Where are the brand-new software ideas that never had closed-source inspiration?
Sendmail and BIND never had closed-source inspiration. Do they count? And there are countless others out there. You just don't know they're out there; perhaps because you aren't one of the few hundred people worldwide that couldn't live without them, or perhaps because you use them all the time and don't even know it.
Apple have an "automation assistant"; basically, a script-creating Wizard.
Think about it. We all have our own favourite Bash scripts and one-liners, don't we? But now, Apple users don't even need to know any Bash to write a script. And people are going to be swapping ideas on these things somewhere. You know if somebody finds a way to play the second-longest.mp3 tune in their gramlib with an "f" in the name somewhere, they're bound to want to share that with the world. And if it doesn't involve the likes of # mpg321 `for i in ~/songs/*f*.mp3; do ls -l $i | awk '{print $5 " " $9'}; done | sort -nr | awk 'BEGIN {j=0}; (j++ == 1) {print $2};'`, then so much the better. An Open Source version of something like that would bring the idea of programming a computer to do exactly what you want it to do within reach of everyone. Then we'll all see what computers can really do.....
(funnily enough, I bet I get at least one reply calling me out on that one-liner. It's just a guess, OK?.)
As opposed to the dozens of Linux distros we have now, each with their own repositories of custom compiled software that typically doesn't work anywhere but on that specific version of that specific distro.
And they aren't meant to work anywhere else -- they don't have to. That's the point. You have to use pre-compiled packages that suit your distro (maybe you have to choose your distro by what's available pre-compiled; the "mainstream" Fedora and Ubuntu distributions have by far the largest repositories, SuSE fewer and Mandriva even fewer) or compile from source. The second method works everywhere, and is actually a lot more painless than some people -- most of whom, by the way, have never even tried it -- would have you believe.
(*) As an aside, it is beyond me how some (note I say some) supposed libertarians can advocate mandatory opening of product specs. Apart from the irony of a "libertarian" requesting more regulation, this would reduce freedom, not improve it. One of the key aspects of freedom of speach is the freedom to shut the fuck up and not tell you what I don't want to.
I think you are confusing freedom with power. The freedom to make use of your own hardware is more important than the power to withhold information from the people who paid your wages, and that freedom is what government should be protecting. It's unfortunate, but as long as there are arseholes motivated by pure power lust and with no respect for anyone else's freedom, there will be a need for governments to keep them in check.
Remember: In a society where the keeping of slaves is permitted, the freest citizen is more free than in a society where the keeping of slaves is forbidden. However, in the former society, the average citizen is almost certainly less free than in the latter. If you could choose to be allocated a position at random in one of these societies, which one would you pick to maximise your freedom?
Well, I didn't buy a toaster because I can't stand the taste of electric toast. Gas toast just tastes nicer. And methane toast tastes better than butane toast.
And now, the rest of it..... it was half past two and I had to get to the shops.
Suppose the voting goes something like this:
Conservative
Labour
Conservative
Liberal Democrat
Conservative
Conservative
Green
Labour
Liberal Democrat
Independent
BNP
Conservative
Labour
Green
Conservative
Independent
Liberal Democrat
Conservative
Labour
Green
This gives us an actual result of: Conservative, 7; Labour, 4 (11); Liberal Democrat, 3 (14); Green, 3 (17); Indie, 2 (19); BNP, 1 (20). But the result is declared as: Labour, 7; Conservative, 5 (12); Green, 3 (15); Liberal Democrat, 2 (17); BNP, 2 (19); Indie, 1 (20). Each of the 20 people has a code which they can enter into a computer to look at their vote. They see the "correct" result -- the person they actually voted for -- and assume everything is OK. But none of them know how any of the other 19 voted, and the codes are hard enough to guess that any attempt would be spotted and dealt with (meaning The Authorities would be on you like a ton of bricks, and you would be up on a charge of Treason) before any harm could be done. To prove the election was rigged, you would have to uncover at least six Conservative votes -- and you'd sure as shit be in the back of a Black Mariah before you'd found the second.
There is a way to defeat that, and that is to have all the actual candidates fully aware of how many votes were cast for each one: Show the actual ballot papers, marked and checked by the voters to their own satisfaction, to the candidates and have them count them by hand. It has to be every single ballot paper, not just a "representative" sample, because things can get hidden in the numbers. And it has to be the actual candidates, because the natural animosity and distrust between them precludes any cheating.
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So, you just ban exclusive licences: a work must be licenced to all parties on exactly the same terms, or not at all. (That would enable music delivery services -- be they record labels or download sites -- to compete on a truly fair basis.) As long as the artist gets (say) 10p per album sold, it shouldn't matter where that money came from -- whether it came from a record company selling a packaged CD, or from someone paying for the right to copy a CD they borrowed from a friend and enjoyed. Note that an exception is necessary for copyrighted works which have been mortgaged. Otherwise you could never use Intellectual Property as collateral for a loan (which is the whole basis of an idea I had for a new model for the music industry in the 21st century), because the lender might conceivably never get their money back. In such a case, I think it's fair for the lender to stipulate exclusive licencing terms; but the moment the debt is cleared, no more exclusivity.
OLPC is for people who already have food and water. Ting! Next, please.
Something similar worked with BT payphones ("Blue Payphone 2", aka "Payphone 500"). If you modified the returned coin chute cover slightly {by forcibly pulling the inward-opening door out and removing the inner plate; after which mistreatment the door would open both ways, thus allowing you to reach into places when the door was opened outward which normally would be blocked off when the door was opened inward}, it was possible to knock 20p coins down from their temporary-storage chute -- coins were counted only at insertion, held in separate chutes according to value and routed either to the metal safe under the phone or the return chute, depending how much credit had been used, upon replacing the receiver -- during a call, and reinsert them for extra credit. The modification was invariably short-lived, and BT soon came up with mods of their own to prevent it: first a welded plate further restricting the returned coins aperture, then a new one-piece chute door casting. I don't doubt that a suitable tool could have been crafted to release coins without modifying the door; but I never made one.
Phone Phreaking is something that's never, ever going to be possible again. All modern systems are using out-of-band signalling; so playing various tones down the line is approximately as effective as shining lines down the coin slot of a payphone.
You can do some kinds of interesting things with an ISDN line, because you have access to the D-channel which is the actual, real, live out-of-band signalling channel; but they're still limited, because the exchange is acting as a man-in-the-middle and knows when you are taking the mick. For instance, you can send your own caller ID as part of the call-setup message; but it has to be a number that the phone company recognise as belonging to you, otherwise the exchange will just change it to "withheld" (or refuse to connect the call).
There are always new avenues, though. Hacking is driven by one of the same primitive instincts that fetched us down from the trees, and that instinct will always find a way to manifest itself.
British payphones have *always* held track of credit in the payphone itself, rather than relying on the exchange to do it {which is just stupidly vulnerable to attacks}. Metering pulses {common-mode with respect to Earth} were sent down the line from the exchange after each unit. If you tried disconnecting the Earth wire to block the pulses, the phone would just cut you off anyway after a preset timeout, equivalent to one unit at the cheapest rate. Nowadays, payphones are smart enough to know, from the STD code and the time of day, how much to charge for a call and so meter pulses are not required (the facility is even being withdrawn as exchanges are modernised).
The biggest difference between British payphones is how much armour-plating they use. A privately-owned payphone in a hairdresser's salon may well be constructed in lightweight polycarbonate; one in a pub might have a metal coin safe. Street payphones are close to bomb-proof.
Payphones are an endangered species in Britain anyway, now almost everyone has a mobile phone.
Also, remember that the UK and US differ in their idea of what constitutes a "gallon". We had not yet invented the litre (for the benefit of the French, who would have had severe difficulty winning so much as a bronze medal in a measuring-unit-inventing competition if there were only two other entrants; in the end we let them take the credit for it in return for being allowed to be thought of as recognising another world-changing invention in future. This favour was called in in 1959 when Britain "invented" front-wheel drive cars that had only been in use in France for about 30 years already) at the time when the Pilgrim Fathers set sail from Plymouth. When they arrived in the New World, not only did they display a singular lack of imagination by naming the place where they landed after the place where they set sail from; they also forgot that there are in fact twenty fluid ounces in a pint, not sixteen as there are solid ounces in a pound, and that words like "colour" have a "u" in them. Whilst the initial failure to carry a dictionary and a table of weights and measures might be excused in the light of the demands of the circumstances facing the people, that situation no longer persists.
In the meantime, just remember that five American gallons (each of 3.785L) are equivalent to four proper gallons (each of 4.546L); so while 30 miles per US gallon doesn't sound much, it's really 37.5 miles per gallon. Which is still fuck-all. And continue to annoy Septics by referring to "eight gallon hats" and pronouncing the name of a certain town in Pennsylvania as "Pittsborough".
The only problem with two-stroke engines is the need for lubricating oil to be mixed in with the fuel -- and usually, not so well that it burns up completely. With better materials, it ought to be possible to create a two-stroke engine with no need for any lubricating oil. Countries that banned two-strokes as a knee-jerk reaction confusing ends with means will be the last to benefit from such an invention.
Which is why we need a Continental-style, legislated wall of separation between private and working lives. Quite simply, nothing I do whilst "off the clock" is any of my employer's business, unless I invite him to watch.
It doesn't have to be Automation Assistant. It can be anything that does the same job -- sort of a drag-and-drop frontend to a POSIX shell. {And generating ordinary shell commands, because all that stuff already exists}. It just needs a unified method for constructing commands. Something like "find all ___ files and do the following with them: [box into which to drag actions]" would translate to an empty for FILENAME in $FILELIST; do ... done loop; and you could drag various actions {the palette of available actions would change, depending on the context -- you don't want to convert a JPG file to OGG format} into the loop and arrange them up and down and drag them away. Or "display the last ___ lines of file" would translate to tail -n$N $FILENAME. There would be special "And, if that succeeds ..." {&&} and "or, if that does not work ..." {||} connectors for chaining actions. All the usual commands are known about {because POSIX specifies how they work}, so you just need to have a database of the proper syntax for any extensions {and in many cases, the correct syntax will be $ command --longoption -o filename}. Provide a central repository where people can share their amazing scripts with the world, and where programmers can upload syntax entries to make their wares compatible with auto-scripting and users can download them {distributors who offered auto-scripting support as one of their main features would also be able to put relevant syntax entries in with packages, so automated scripting would Just Work if you got all your packages from the official repository -- and, if it becomes really popular, there's nothing to stop a configure script from detecting your auto-scripting syntax database and updating it as part of the installation}.
.JPG file in the folder: shrink it to thumbnail size, renaming from .jpg to .mini.jpg and leaving the original in place.}
Or, how about a graphical user interface for cron? Using existing clock and calendar setting paradigms, it wouldn't be too hard -- and the actions would be user-generated scripts. Through the same frontend, you could hook into various events e.g. USB device being plugged in. {Whenever a device is plugged into a USB port, check to see if it is a DC1400, and if so: connect to the device just plugged in (treating it as a storage device), create a new folder in my "pictures" folder, copy everything in the folder DCIM on the device just plugged in to the new folder we just created, disconnect the device safely, for each
If we can build that, there is no doubt that they will come. People will appreciate having that sort of power over their computers. I've shown off the power of one-liners to people who have been used to doing everything through GUIs, and jaws have dropped -- and not always at the fact that I can even remember how to do all that complicated shit. The shell is where Linux shines, but we keep hiding it away from users, pretending it's too complicated for them which becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Well, if we can't bring ordinary users to the shell, then we have to bring the shell to
Copyright infringement is criminal in the UK. Most offences here are indeed "innocent until proven guilty", though there are "guilty until proven innocent" offences (e.g. racism, terrorism) and "guilty despite being proved innocent" offences (anything sexual).
Just because something isn't definitely an offence doesn't mean you can't be arrested for it if a constable thinks it looks like an offence, and detained while they work out whether or not it was an offence or whether you may have done something else which was definitely an offence. If they think you have, they can hold onto you for that.
(On a deeper level, there are "law abiding citizens" and "criminals". Which group you belong to has little relation to whether or not what you are doing is actually illegal. In fact, most things are illegal in the UK; but as long as you are a Law Abiding Citizen, you can get away with them. If a Criminal tried the same things, they would be arrested. It is not always easy for a visitor to tell the difference between L.A.C.s and Criminals, but watch what goes on on a typical British housing estate to work out who is who.)
Is he the one that had the idea something like: in English we put the adjective before the noun and we put the given name before the family name. So when we hear a family name (such as "Lakoff") alone we unconsciously associate a given name with it (such as "George"); and if we hear an adjective-noun phrase enough times we tend unconsciously to associate that adjective with that noun even if the noun is used on its own. So if you keep talking about "binge drinking" and "illegal immigrants" for example, and soon people will come to see any drinking as binge-drinking and any immigrant as an illegal immigrant, and politicians have been doing this for years just to screw us over?
If you want to prove that ripping a CD is fair use, you need to test it in court. It is the job of the courts to decide the fine details of law.
In the UK, it would be called Fair Dealing, and has never been tested in a Court of Law. Therefore the Authorities can assume it is illegal, giving the police powers of arrest for the cassettes in people's cars that they taped from CDs using equipment that they bought in good faith for that purpose. In practice, however, so many people are doing it that nobody gets arrested. The only way it can be useful is as part of a "fishing expedition" where, on the basis of the existence illegally-copied cassettes about a suspect's person, premises or vehicle, a warrant is obtained to search for something more "interesting". By the time it gets to court, the tapes will be conveniently forgotten. This is all deliberate. It's not going to be tested in court. Out of a jury of twelve people, at least eleven of them have at least one home-taped cassette in their car. They aren't going to convict. If they did, the record companies might be happy for a moment; but in the real world, the police would have a field day stopping motorists to search for illegal tapes and there would be uproar. Strikes, rioting in the streets, that sort of thing, and the Government would be forced to intervene and explicitly legalise home taping (and, therefore, by analogy, ripping CDs to MP3s; although this might require another test case and a motion summarily to dismiss on the basis of similarity to an earlier case). If the jury acquit, of course, then home taping is automatically legalised. Either way, the record company fat cats lose! This is why the present situation persists: the Authorities get to feel they have a lever they can use against criminals, and the People get to feel they are doing something deliciously subversive. The only thing that would get in the way of this happy win-win situation would be for the legality of format-shifting to be tested in Court -- and it's the Authorities who control which cases get heard.
I suspect the situation would be similar in the USA. Declaring a near-universal practice to be criminal would be suicide for any government. Even if it only works out to be the case that format-shifting is legalised in one state, you can bet there will be movements to legalise it in others. The record companies aren't going to like that, so they won't bring a case to court if there's a real possibility that format-shifting could be declared Fair Use as a result.
It's my property, so nothing about it is a secret from me. That is a fundamental right -- it's part of the definition of ownership. Any constitution which permits the ownership of property should grant this right, if governments were doing the job we paid them to do properly.
Yes, Gentoo's package management system is based mainly on Source packages. Bandwidth, processor cycles and RAM are cheap enough now for that to work. And in future, more packages will be written in interpreted languages (PHP, Python, Java &c., plus whatever newer and trendier languages come along) thereby being independent of machine architecture.
Distro-proliferation is a necessary phase, which will come to an end sooner or later. Remember all those 8-bit home computers that were around in the mid-to-late 1980s? They couldn't all last. It ended with there being just four major platforms: Spectrum, Commodore 64, Amstrad and BBC. Something similar will inevitably happen to the Linux distribution scene, but with an important difference: nobody is going to lose anything this time, because all the Source Code will be available. If your favourite distribution goes under, you can always take all your software with you when you have to choose another. Even if it's closed-source and so picky that you have to run a particular old kernel and libraries under virtualisation to get it to work, it will be possible; processors will be fast enough by then that it won't seem any slower, and thanks to open protocols it can be interacted with. Of course, that's just a temporary fix until someone comes out with an Open Source version that does the same thing.
This is true.
.mp3 tune in their gramlib with an "f" in the name somewhere, they're bound to want to share that with the world. And if it doesn't involve the likes of # mpg321 `for i in ~/songs/*f*.mp3; do ls -l $i | awk '{print $5 " " $9'}; done | sort -nr | awk 'BEGIN {j=0}; (j++ == 1) {print $2};'`, then so much the better. An Open Source version of something like that would bring the idea of programming a computer to do exactly what you want it to do within reach of everyone. Then we'll all see what computers can really do .....
Apple have an "automation assistant"; basically, a script-creating Wizard.
Think about it. We all have our own favourite Bash scripts and one-liners, don't we? But now, Apple users don't even need to know any Bash to write a script. And people are going to be swapping ideas on these things somewhere. You know if somebody finds a way to play the second-longest
(funnily enough, I bet I get at least one reply calling me out on that one-liner. It's just a guess, OK?.)
Would you play poker at a table where all your opponents shew each other their hole cards before they bet?
If not, why not?
That's how collusion makes a market less free.
Remember: In a society where the keeping of slaves is permitted, the freest citizen is more free than in a society where the keeping of slaves is forbidden. However, in the former society, the average citizen is almost certainly less free than in the latter. If you could choose to be allocated a position at random in one of these societies, which one would you pick to maximise your freedom?
Well, I didn't buy a toaster because I can't stand the taste of electric toast. Gas toast just tastes nicer. And methane toast tastes better than butane toast.
Suppose the voting goes something like this:
- Conservative
- Labour
- Conservative
- Liberal Democrat
- Conservative
- Conservative
- Green
- Labour
- Liberal Democrat
- Independent
- BNP
- Conservative
- Labour
- Green
- Conservative
- Independent
- Liberal Democrat
- Conservative
- Labour
- Green
This gives us an actual result of: Conservative, 7; Labour, 4 (11); Liberal Democrat, 3 (14); Green, 3 (17); Indie, 2 (19); BNP, 1 (20). But the result is declared as: Labour, 7; Conservative, 5 (12); Green, 3 (15); Liberal Democrat, 2 (17); BNP, 2 (19); Indie, 1 (20). Each of the 20 people has a code which they can enter into a computer to look at their vote. They see the "correct" result -- the person they actually voted for -- and assume everything is OK. But none of them know how any of the other 19 voted, and the codes are hard enough to guess that any attempt would be spotted and dealt with (meaning The Authorities would be on you like a ton of bricks, and you would be up on a charge of Treason) before any harm could be done. To prove the election was rigged, you would have to uncover at least six Conservative votes -- and you'd sure as shit be in the back of a Black Mariah before you'd found the second.There is a way to defeat that, and that is to have all the actual candidates fully aware of how many votes were cast for each one: Show the actual ballot papers, marked and checked by the voters to their own satisfaction, to the candidates and have them count them by hand. It has to be every single ballot paper, not just a "representative" sample, because things can get hidden in the numbers. And it has to be the actual candidates, because the natural animosity and distrust between them precludes any cheating.