I actually know quite a few people who go out and commit violent acts if they can't get a fag. So smoking has actually saved a few lives.
Come 1 July, the pubs will be full of self-righteous arseholes who "can go for a drink at last without smelling like an old ashtray". (And will spend most of their time taking occasional sips from the one soft drink they bought and which will last them all night). Where the fuck were all these people before, and why didn't they open their own little pubs where they could put up their own little "no smoking" signs, turn away smokers and have fun not smoking together? But oh, no; they wouldn't be happy unless they could fuck it up for everyone else, would they?
As long as it can be proved that it's only simulated and no actual children were harmed in the production, I really don't see anything wrong with a "child rape" video game. If somebody wants to get their rocks off, they will do; and if they can be persuaded to do so into nothing worse than a box of Kleenex, then I call that pretty effective damage limitation.
Now, if somebody gets the idea to go out and rape an actual child, then yes, of course they should be punished for that. But FCOL, there's no way in hell that you can equate looking at drawings -- for remember, we have already stated above that that is all these computer graphics are, they are not photographs -- with the act depicted.
As for "ethnic cleansing in Serbia", wouldn't that just be Operation Wolf with different graphics?
France is SECAM, not PAL; but as long as you are using an RGB connection to your set (a single thick SCART cable, not separate audio/video plugs) that shouldn't be a problem. Note: on most sets, only the socket labelled "AV1" actually accepts RGB. Australia, being a member of the British commonwealth, uses PAL; they use VHF as opposed to UHF for broadcasts, but that doesn't matter since the SCART connection bypasses the TV receiver circuitry.
If you want an example, look at bus companies in the UK. When Thatcher deregulated public transport and broke up the National Bus Company, the way was suddenly clear for upstart competitors who would buy up old, knackered buses, and then run them on the most popular routes in direct competition with the "established" companies (formed out of the former NBC and former city transport companies). Sometimes, with two or three companies on one route, there would be a bus literally every couple of minutes. The established companies, though, only had to bide their time. The young upstart competitors would end up having to lower their fares below cost. Having less money to play with, they would run out first.....
Only till gamers start reaching positions of power in the EU parliament. Then, any attempt to deny third parties the right to develop games for consoles will be struck down as the "Anti-Competitive Behaviour" it is. Just like what happened with DVD region coding: if you buy a DVD player on the Continent, it will be all-region.
No, in those days copyright in the USA was for 14 years or 28 years. And unless Article One, Section Nine of the US Constitution has been repealed, once something enters the Public Domain it's there for good. That's what "no Ex Post Facto law" means.
I'm not saying people lock themselves in because they're afraid of someone bursting into their home and shooting them. I'm saying it's the same thing that makes one person lock their front door while they're at home, that makes another person reach for a gun at the first sign of anything unusual. And that the cause of this abject distrust is what really needs to be addressed. (Unfortunately, I suspect that this distrust is actually making big money for somebody.)
In the same vein, eating ice cream doesn't make you more likely to die by drowning, but it's the same thing that causes more ice cream to be sold, that causes more people to die by drowning.
There used to be a diaeresis over the "e", in "science" or even "sciënce", thus indicating that it should be pronounced separately from the "i"; but it disappeared a long time ago. Probably slipped off, landed upright and got mistaken for a colon. Or got mistaken for an umlaut (which looks similar, but indicates the sound should be changed as though there were a following "e"; a habit in which the Germans persist to this day, though the Dutch indicate sound-changes by doubling a vowel {except that "ii" becomes "ij", which looked so suspiciously similar to a "y" with a diaeresis or umlaut as to inspire the addition of such a character to various versions of the 8-bit extensions to ASCII} and we English {the Jocks, Taffs and Paddies very thoughtfully have their own languages so we don't have to talk to them, nor indeed they to each other; though I harbour a private suspicion that they understand enough of one another's native tongues to agree on how terrible the English are} just made our spelling up as we went along so as to confuse the foreigners. Nonetheless, it is fun {and entirely correct, especially if you have a little German in you [and if not, Fraülein, vould you like some?]} sometimes to refer to the female hormone as "östrogen". I suppose you could, in theory at least, spell the word "diaeresis" with an umlaut, so making it "diäresis". But nobody would get it except language history bores {and people who know how to nest multiple levels of brackets properly}.) So..... well, it's a bit overcast today, isn't it? Probably going to rain again this afternoon.
So you attack the previous argument on the basis of its style, not its substance. That's surely a non sequitur!
This continued use of one phallacy against another phallacy is what characterises "debate" nowadays. Moore is fat and whiny so nothing he says can possibly be important. Oh, you're making irrelevant comments, so nothing you say can possibly be important. You smell, you're gay, whatever, am I bovvered?
Getting back to the point about M. Moore; based at least on these experiences, the point about locking doors doesn't even seem to be relevant to his issue of gun control.
It's relevant because locking your door while at home and the idea of "shoot first, ask questions later" have a common cause; a certain level of fear, distrust and suspicion. Find out what's making people so afraid, deal with that properly and (1) you have a neighbourhood where people feel safe with their doors unlocked and (2) you have a society which doesn't see everyone as a potential threat (hence, less likely to be trigger-happy).
He seemed to be saying (to me, I'm British) that people in the USA locked their front doors while they were at home, which is the disturbing bit. Locking your door while you're out is fair enough, but there is something very seriously wrong if you feel you have to lock it while you're in.
Once a law like that is in force anywhere in the world, we can be sure that software supplied through that country comes with the four freedoms in effect, even if not in intent.
Getting serious for a moment, that's kind of going against Freedom Zero. Not sure RMS would approve of that..... Freedom of Speech means sometimes having to listen to things with which you may not agree, and Freedom of Software means having to put up with people using your software who you'd rather weren't.
Will there ever be a GPL4? Or will there be a law passed, in some little country somewhere in the world, which will guarantee Freedoms Zero to Three "across the board" in that country -- kind of like an institutionalised GPL? La ley de la libertad del software would compel the supply of Source Code (and make it easier for software vendors to discover copyright violations by allowing them to study their competitors' code more closely). Whilst it wouldn't enforce Freedoms One and Three directly (cf. certain security / encryption software, which is supplied in Source Code form to permit auditing {otherwise it would be worse than useless} but whose licence does not permit passing on of copies to third parties), it would certainly permit them to be taken by force as easily as Freedoms Zero and Two can be taken by force today.
Once a law like that is in force anywhere in the world, we can be sure that software supplied through that country
It'll make it harder for people to pretend that their fake Vista DVDs are genuine, but so what?
The sort of person who buys a pirated copy of Windows Vista isn't the sort of person who cares if or not it's "genuine". That in itself wouldn't be so bad, but they also don't care if they get locked out of automatic security updates and their PC ends up spewing adverts for more counterfeit software, dodgy German shares and sex drugs.
Meanwhile, honest people have to pay more for this flawed "copy prevention" technology.
You don't need to know that graphite is amorphous carbon, nor that paper consists of a matrix of cellulose fibres. All you need to know is that, once the ballot paper has been marked -- by an instrument held right there in the voter's own hand -- folded in half, pushed through the slot into the ballot box and allowed to unfold slightly so it is now too big to come back out via the slot, it isn't going to change (so by rights, we should be using chinagraph pencils -- which contain a mixture of pigments suspended in a paraffin wax base -- rather than graphite), nor can it be removed without breaking the wire seal holding the lid on the box.
The best way to make sure the count is fair is to have it performed by representatives of all the candidates, in a place where independent scrutineers have already verified that there is nothing there that could be used to falsify a ballot paper (no blanks, no Official Mark stamps {used to validate ballot papers as they are issued to voters; these are collected up by the Returning Officer after the close of polling} and no pencils of the same colour used in the voting booth). Each of the people doing the counting is already assuming that all the others are going to cheat. Everybody starts by counting "their" own "ones" from the pile, then their left-hand neighbour's "ones", and so on till every counter has counted every candidate's "ones" and all agree on the totals. Then either we have a winner, or we have to eliminate someone and then do another round of counting.
The most important requirement for any election system is universal comprehensibility. If voting systems use anything too complex to be understood by a school leaver with passing grades in all subjects, they're too complex full stop. Most people wouldn't be able to understand blueprints, schematics and source code listings even if it became mandatory to publish them. (But, of course, I'm not suggesting that they should be kept secret; subjugating the requirements of democracy to the whims and caprices of a corporation is beneath unthinkable.)
Pencil and paper fulfil the requirement for universal comprehensibility. There are only two failure modes; one of them (someone manages to identify a voter from their ballot paper) can be eliminated altogether and the other (a ballot paper is miscounted) can be minimised.
And Microsoft will no doubt argue that that amounts to a Bill of Attainder, and therefore is unconstitutional (article 1 section 9.3 IMMSMS -- but IANAA).
That is not what is happening. Linux is just one kernel that happened to fit with the GNU userland. Before that, you had to use a BSD kernel to get a GNU system up and running (and almost nobody did, because BSD comes with its own userland stuff which is also Free Software. Who but an enthusiast with a bee in their bonnet is going to buy a complete car, then rip out just the engine and transplant it to an existing chassis?) You can also run GNU with a Solaris kernel. Come to think of it, quite a lot of OpenSolaris seems to be GNU alternatives to Sun's proprietary userland tools. GNU/Solaris may well be the Open Source OS of the future.
None of which is to denigrate the Linux people in any way. They've done a great job in raising the profile of Open Source / Free Software (and they are the same thing) to the point where an entrenched monopoly is running scared.
As for Hurd, well, that failed simply because it's a microkernel and microkernels plain don't work. Hurd is designed around the idea of building fences where they look pretty, irrespective of how much traffic may have to pass through them. Linux is designed around the idea of building fences where as little traffic as possible ever has to pass through them, no matter how ugly it may look to an outsider with no understanding of what those fences are there to do. The existence of layers is natural, but the boundaries between them are determined by cold, hard mathematics. Attempting to adjust those boundaries will ultimately be futile.
What about the other way around? Currently, you can claim back part of the duty paid on fuel which is used in a non-roadgoing application (e.g. Coleman stove, lawn mower, chainsaw or generator). Not that I do, because I only get through a few litres a year even with all those appliances, but will this be affected?
1. Can I do it with Linux today (GPL2) and tomorrow (GPL3)?
Yes, though you will have to distribute Source Code for any GPL and similarly-licenced components you distribute. As for GPL4, who knows?
2. Can I statically link the code with Linux libraries? (My own experience shows that dynamic linking is too much to bear.)
Not unless the libraries are released under LGPL. Many libraries nowadays are under the full GPL specifically in order to prevent people statically linking closed code against them.
3. Can I obfuscate my code (e.g. encode it)?
There's no point obfuscating Source Code which you aren't releasing because nobody else is going to see it. There's no point obfuscating binaries because the code to de-obfuscate them is required to run them.
4. Could I be forced to publish this code by some 3-d party?
Only as part of a settlement package if you were doing something you shouldn't, and even then only by mutual agreement unless the law changes in future to make "intellectual property" subject to forfeiture. There will always be an alternative (though that may well be to pay out a large sum of money and not sell any more of your product).
5. Am I correct that programming in and selling BSD-based boxes won't raise any of the above problems?
Not necessarily. Even BSD systems contain some components which are under GPL and/or LGPL. Of course, you can buy commercial versions which do not have such restrictions.
The view from between the lines is somewhat less rosy. Your questions (2) and (3) suggest that you don't know very much about programming, and the fact that you want to keep your Source Code closed at all suggests that whatever you're doing isn't actually going to be all that special. So, be warned: some third party is most probably going to come along and blow you out of the water, offering a superior and True Open Source solution to whatever problem you are trying to solve. In fact, if and when they do just that, they can probably expect a hefty wodge of donations from Slashdot readers eager to see a closed-source product fail spectacularly.
Actually, I think Microsoft will pee on their chips sometime in the near future. (They already pee on your chips and tell you it's vinegar, but I'm mixing my metaphors there.)
Open Source OSes are going from strength to strength. The only thing Microsoft have anymore is artificial vendor lock-in (which is in breach of EU law). We know about the document formats issue, but there will come a point where the benefit of no longer being tied to Microsoft will outweigh the disadvantage of not being able to open legacy documents anymore. At that point, businesses will just decide to cut their losses.
No, no, no! Haven't you seen the Public Information Films?
If people start dating robots, they won't feel the need to do bizarre and outrageous things in order to impress the opposite sex (or, in some cases, the same sex). As a result, human progress will come to an end, and society will stagnate!
See how my e-mail address is "armoured" ? You've only got to look for/\{([^}]+)\}\s*\{ta\}\s*\{([^}]+)/ and then $email = (reverse split "", $2) . "\@" . reverse split "", $1; . All the others are left as an exercise for the reader.
By the way, if you're reading this in the future, the armouring may have changed so as this won't make sense anymore.
Slashdot Mirror
I actually know quite a few people who go out and commit violent acts if they can't get a fag. So smoking has actually saved a few lives.
Come 1 July, the pubs will be full of self-righteous arseholes who "can go for a drink at last without smelling like an old ashtray". (And will spend most of their time taking occasional sips from the one soft drink they bought and which will last them all night). Where the fuck were all these people before, and why didn't they open their own little pubs where they could put up their own little "no smoking" signs, turn away smokers and have fun not smoking together? But oh, no; they wouldn't be happy unless they could fuck it up for everyone else, would they?
As long as it can be proved that it's only simulated and no actual children were harmed in the production, I really don't see anything wrong with a "child rape" video game. If somebody wants to get their rocks off, they will do; and if they can be persuaded to do so into nothing worse than a box of Kleenex, then I call that pretty effective damage limitation.
Now, if somebody gets the idea to go out and rape an actual child, then yes, of course they should be punished for that. But FCOL, there's no way in hell that you can equate looking at drawings -- for remember, we have already stated above that that is all these computer graphics are, they are not photographs -- with the act depicted.
As for "ethnic cleansing in Serbia", wouldn't that just be Operation Wolf with different graphics?
France is SECAM, not PAL; but as long as you are using an RGB connection to your set (a single thick SCART cable, not separate audio/video plugs) that shouldn't be a problem. Note: on most sets, only the socket labelled "AV1" actually accepts RGB. Australia, being a member of the British commonwealth, uses PAL; they use VHF as opposed to UHF for broadcasts, but that doesn't matter since the SCART connection bypasses the TV receiver circuitry.
If you want an example, look at bus companies in the UK. When Thatcher deregulated public transport and broke up the National Bus Company, the way was suddenly clear for upstart competitors who would buy up old, knackered buses, and then run them on the most popular routes in direct competition with the "established" companies (formed out of the former NBC and former city transport companies). Sometimes, with two or three companies on one route, there would be a bus literally every couple of minutes. The established companies, though, only had to bide their time. The young upstart competitors would end up having to lower their fares below cost. Having less money to play with, they would run out first .....
Only till gamers start reaching positions of power in the EU parliament. Then, any attempt to deny third parties the right to develop games for consoles will be struck down as the "Anti-Competitive Behaviour" it is. Just like what happened with DVD region coding: if you buy a DVD player on the Continent, it will be all-region.
No, in those days copyright in the USA was for 14 years or 28 years. And unless Article One, Section Nine of the US Constitution has been repealed, once something enters the Public Domain it's there for good. That's what "no Ex Post Facto law" means.
I don't see the point of all this Haitch Dee Tee Vee. I can barely see 625 lines. There's no way I'll be able to see 1080 lines!
I'm not saying people lock themselves in because they're afraid of someone bursting into their home and shooting them. I'm saying it's the same thing that makes one person lock their front door while they're at home, that makes another person reach for a gun at the first sign of anything unusual. And that the cause of this abject distrust is what really needs to be addressed. (Unfortunately, I suspect that this distrust is actually making big money for somebody.)
In the same vein, eating ice cream doesn't make you more likely to die by drowning, but it's the same thing that causes more ice cream to be sold, that causes more people to die by drowning.
There used to be a diaeresis over the "e", in "science" or even "sciënce", thus indicating that it should be pronounced separately from the "i"; but it disappeared a long time ago. Probably slipped off, landed upright and got mistaken for a colon. Or got mistaken for an umlaut (which looks similar, but indicates the sound should be changed as though there were a following "e"; a habit in which the Germans persist to this day, though the Dutch indicate sound-changes by doubling a vowel {except that "ii" becomes "ij", which looked so suspiciously similar to a "y" with a diaeresis or umlaut as to inspire the addition of such a character to various versions of the 8-bit extensions to ASCII} and we English {the Jocks, Taffs and Paddies very thoughtfully have their own languages so we don't have to talk to them, nor indeed they to each other; though I harbour a private suspicion that they understand enough of one another's native tongues to agree on how terrible the English are} just made our spelling up as we went along so as to confuse the foreigners. Nonetheless, it is fun {and entirely correct, especially if you have a little German in you [and if not, Fraülein, vould you like some?]} sometimes to refer to the female hormone as "östrogen". I suppose you could, in theory at least, spell the word "diaeresis" with an umlaut, so making it "diäresis". But nobody would get it except language history bores {and people who know how to nest multiple levels of brackets properly}.) So ..... well, it's a bit overcast today, isn't it? Probably going to rain again this afternoon.
So you attack the previous argument on the basis of its style, not its substance. That's surely a non sequitur!
This continued use of one phallacy against another phallacy is what characterises "debate" nowadays. Moore is fat and whiny so nothing he says can possibly be important. Oh, you're making irrelevant comments, so nothing you say can possibly be important. You smell, you're gay, whatever, am I bovvered?
He seemed to be saying (to me, I'm British) that people in the USA locked their front doors while they were at home, which is the disturbing bit. Locking your door while you're out is fair enough, but there is something very seriously wrong if you feel you have to lock it while you're in.
Once a law like that is in force anywhere in the world, we can be sure that software supplied through that country comes with the four freedoms in effect, even if not in intent.
Getting serious for a moment, that's kind of going against Freedom Zero. Not sure RMS would approve of that ..... Freedom of Speech means sometimes having to listen to things with which you may not agree, and Freedom of Software means having to put up with people using your software who you'd rather weren't.
Will there ever be a GPL4? Or will there be a law passed, in some little country somewhere in the world, which will guarantee Freedoms Zero to Three "across the board" in that country -- kind of like an institutionalised GPL? La ley de la libertad del software would compel the supply of Source Code (and make it easier for software vendors to discover copyright violations by allowing them to study their competitors' code more closely). Whilst it wouldn't enforce Freedoms One and Three directly (cf. certain security / encryption software, which is supplied in Source Code form to permit auditing {otherwise it would be worse than useless} but whose licence does not permit passing on of copies to third parties), it would certainly permit them to be taken by force as easily as Freedoms Zero and Two can be taken by force today.
Once a law like that is in force anywhere in the world, we can be sure that software supplied through that country
It'll make it harder for people to pretend that their fake Vista DVDs are genuine, but so what?
The sort of person who buys a pirated copy of Windows Vista isn't the sort of person who cares if or not it's "genuine". That in itself wouldn't be so bad, but they also don't care if they get locked out of automatic security updates and their PC ends up spewing adverts for more counterfeit software, dodgy German shares and sex drugs.
Meanwhile, honest people have to pay more for this flawed "copy prevention" technology.
You don't need to know that graphite is amorphous carbon, nor that paper consists of a matrix of cellulose fibres. All you need to know is that, once the ballot paper has been marked -- by an instrument held right there in the voter's own hand -- folded in half, pushed through the slot into the ballot box and allowed to unfold slightly so it is now too big to come back out via the slot, it isn't going to change (so by rights, we should be using chinagraph pencils -- which contain a mixture of pigments suspended in a paraffin wax base -- rather than graphite), nor can it be removed without breaking the wire seal holding the lid on the box.
The best way to make sure the count is fair is to have it performed by representatives of all the candidates, in a place where independent scrutineers have already verified that there is nothing there that could be used to falsify a ballot paper (no blanks, no Official Mark stamps {used to validate ballot papers as they are issued to voters; these are collected up by the Returning Officer after the close of polling} and no pencils of the same colour used in the voting booth). Each of the people doing the counting is already assuming that all the others are going to cheat. Everybody starts by counting "their" own "ones" from the pile, then their left-hand neighbour's "ones", and so on till every counter has counted every candidate's "ones" and all agree on the totals. Then either we have a winner, or we have to eliminate someone and then do another round of counting.
It's solving the wrong problem.
The most important requirement for any election system is universal comprehensibility. If voting systems use anything too complex to be understood by a school leaver with passing grades in all subjects, they're too complex full stop. Most people wouldn't be able to understand blueprints, schematics and source code listings even if it became mandatory to publish them. (But, of course, I'm not suggesting that they should be kept secret; subjugating the requirements of democracy to the whims and caprices of a corporation is beneath unthinkable.)
Pencil and paper fulfil the requirement for universal comprehensibility. There are only two failure modes; one of them (someone manages to identify a voter from their ballot paper) can be eliminated altogether and the other (a ballot paper is miscounted) can be minimised.
And Microsoft will no doubt argue that that amounts to a Bill of Attainder, and therefore is unconstitutional (article 1 section 9.3 IMMSMS -- but IANAA).
None of which is to denigrate the Linux people in any way. They've done a great job in raising the profile of Open Source / Free Software (and they are the same thing) to the point where an entrenched monopoly is running scared.
As for Hurd, well, that failed simply because it's a microkernel and microkernels plain don't work. Hurd is designed around the idea of building fences where they look pretty, irrespective of how much traffic may have to pass through them. Linux is designed around the idea of building fences where as little traffic as possible ever has to pass through them, no matter how ugly it may look to an outsider with no understanding of what those fences are there to do. The existence of layers is natural, but the boundaries between them are determined by cold, hard mathematics. Attempting to adjust those boundaries will ultimately be futile.
What about the other way around? Currently, you can claim back part of the duty paid on fuel which is used in a non-roadgoing application (e.g. Coleman stove, lawn mower, chainsaw or generator). Not that I do, because I only get through a few litres a year even with all those appliances, but will this be affected?
The view from between the lines is somewhat less rosy. Your questions (2) and (3) suggest that you don't know very much about programming, and the fact that you want to keep your Source Code closed at all suggests that whatever you're doing isn't actually going to be all that special. So, be warned: some third party is most probably going to come along and blow you out of the water, offering a superior and True Open Source solution to whatever problem you are trying to solve. In fact, if and when they do just that, they can probably expect a hefty wodge of donations from Slashdot readers eager to see a closed-source product fail spectacularly.
Actually, I think Microsoft will pee on their chips sometime in the near future. (They already pee on your chips and tell you it's vinegar, but I'm mixing my metaphors there.)
Open Source OSes are going from strength to strength. The only thing Microsoft have anymore is artificial vendor lock-in (which is in breach of EU law). We know about the document formats issue, but there will come a point where the benefit of no longer being tied to Microsoft will outweigh the disadvantage of not being able to open legacy documents anymore. At that point, businesses will just decide to cut their losses.
No, no, no! Haven't you seen the Public Information Films?
If people start dating robots, they won't feel the need to do bizarre and outrageous things in order to impress the opposite sex (or, in some cases, the same sex). As a result, human progress will come to an end, and society will stagnate!
Didn't Hunter S Thompson have something interesting to say about pineal glands?
See how my e-mail address is "armoured" ? You've only got to look for /\{([^}]+)\}\s*\{ta\}\s*\{([^}]+)/ and then $email = (reverse split "", $2) . "\@" . reverse split "", $1; . All the others are left as an exercise for the reader.
By the way, if you're reading this in the future, the armouring may have changed so as this won't make sense anymore.