I'd mod you down. Did it ever occur to you that maybe the "rules" we apply to "normal" kids is what holds them back? That the bigger, more interesting sandbox we give to more intelligent kids is what helps them grow up to have positive impacts on society with their inventions and perspectives?
You're the type of person who thinks that everyone should be treated the same, except you don't realise that not every person actually is the same.
I have, however, spent some time researching the consensus view. I've also had the privilege of seeing Al Gore give his presentation in person.
In my time doing some research, I've understood enough of the issues, I think, to be able to comment on the veracity of the article in the Telegraph. And yes, of course, I have read it in its entirety.
My view is that the article is disingenuously factually inaccurate, and it does not directly address the actual arguments put forth by respected climate scientists who understand the most recent research and issues.
Unfortunately, I don't have the patience or the time to rehash the research and evidence (since I am not a scientist, I will have to re-read a variety of sources and synthesise my arguments back into a cohesive, convincing comment-- for someone not dealing with these arguments constantly on a daily basis, it would take me upwards of 24 hours to collate and synthesise the counter-argument) so I will leave the detailed rebuttal to a more qualified person.
But on its face, from the research I've done, it rings hollow-- a rehash of the same bullshit by disingenuous naysayers. I mean, the guy worked for Margaret Thatcher. What do you expect?
How come no one has any videos of the _television commercials_ that were playing on network news on election day 2000? Am I the only person who noticed that, on that night, defense companies like Lockheed Martin were running commercials with slogans like "Lockheed: Getting ready with the technology to fight the information warfare of the 21st Century."
I think that there is a war on information. And we are the targets. Maybe it's time to fight back, eh?
No, IT DOES NOT WORK ON FIREFOX. Perhaps you haven't noticed, but the functionality on Firefox is limited. When you access Windows Live Mail Beta on Firefox you are getting absolutely NO ajax-style features. There is no preview pane. There is no interactivity whatsoever. There is even a bolded error message telling you that you are in "Hotmail Classic" mode which is even less featured than the old Hotmail interface. The bolded message suggests that you navigate to the "options" menu and turn on the full interactive Live Beta experience. You can do that in Firefox, but NOTHING HAPPENS and you will be greeted with the same bolded message whenever you look at your inbox. It tells you that you need to be using IE to fully use Live. It's completely unusable without ANY javascript functionality, you know.
It doesn't work. Microsoft is dragging their feet on Firefox support because, once again, their programmers do not know how to write to standards. Either that, or their managers are telling the programmers to wait on implementing a "workaround" for non-IE browers.
My guess though is that it's the former-- Microsoft simply doesn't hire employees that know or care about web standards. These guys are probably just learning about Firefox and the DOM as they go. They've only ever written to Microsoft's own JavaScript extensions.
Holy shit, how is this moderated as Insightful? It's totally wrong.
They're listing situaitons [sic] in which they won't reveal information
In fact, they are listing the situations under which they will reveal information.
[W]e do not disclose your personally identifying information to third parties unless we believe we are required to do so by law or have a good faith belief that such access, preservation or disclosure is reasonably necessary to (a) satisfy any applicable law, regulation, legal process or governmental request, (b) enforce the Gmail Terms of Use, including investigation of potential violations thereof, (c) detect, prevent, or otherwise address fraud, security or technical issues (including, without limitation, the filtering of spam), (d) respond to user support requests, or (e) protect the rights, property or safety of Google, its users and the public.
Clearly, they will provide personal information to anyone when they believe it is necessary to do either (a), (b), (c), (d), or (e).
If you look at the very first condition (a), you'll see that they explicitly define a government request as seperate from a "legal process", "law", or "regulation". Clearly, the act of obtaining and presenting a warrant or subpoena falls under the category of "legal process", which is identified as being different from a "government request".
As well, notice that that Google explicitly says that they will turn over personal information to "third parties". That could mean anyone-- your boss, your teacher, your parents, the RIAA, or even your Rabbi. The simple fact of the matter is that the only way to get privacy in e-mail is to run your own servers and only send and receive encrypted e-mail messages.
I'm not saying that Google is evil-- though they do admit that they will be more than helpful in providing anyone with your personal information if the request satisfies any of the above conditions which, in my opinion, are overly broad -- but I do think that any organisation that really cared about your privacy would have a simple policy: they would not turn over information unless the request was made through the legal process.
In a sense I think you're right, but I've developed a bit of a knee-jerk reaction to explanations of phenomena which appeal to biological or evolutionary processes. I think that, as an analytic, it's overused.
That having been said, I think that if you're correct, what we have here is an exaptation.
Specifically, though, the thesis in the documentary had little to do with evolution, explicitly. Since it was Freud, the idea was that people had base desires (mostly sexual), and that if you could tie having a product into an association with fulfilling that desire, then people would go out and buy that product in order to sate their subconscious needs. Specifically, the documentary focused a lot on Freud's nephew in the United States, a man by the name of Edward Bernays. Bernays was one of the first people to become aware of Freud's theories in the 20th Century because he and Freud were in contact at the beginning of the century. In the '20s, Bernays invented the notion of 'public affairs' or 'public relations', as well as the use of the mass media for advertising. The documentary continues in many directions (it's four hours long) all the way in to the present day: how Ronald Reagan won the White House using the same theories, and how Bill Clinton copied Reagan, and the same theories, to win a second term. This might sound a bit far-fetched, and in some places it certainly seems like it, but, given the film's length, it has more hits than misses.
But getting back to your point about evolutionary psychology, I think in a way you've pointed out a way in which I find the analytic untenable. After all, you managed to snag your wife before you got into the all-consuming rat-race, right?
Seems to me that capitalism is based on people always wanting more.
Yes, and you might be surprised at how this has come to be. There is an excellent, albeit long, documentary done by the BBC on this very subject. The basic premise is that much of the psychology surrounding this desire for wanting more can be traced back to the theories of Sigmund Freud.
Here is a link to the documentary's website at the BBC:
I saw this film myself in October at an International Film Festival and I thought it was excellent. It will come out on video eventually, but you should contact the BBC to find out when it will be released if you're interested. Fascinating stuff, and worth the effort.
Ah yes, I see what you mean. I did mean "slap on" as "replace", and I understood the parent of my post to mean replace. However, I am still under the impression that a specific product would be less likely to have its use challenged if the licensor is also the copyright holder. There is something that I find morally strange about licensing something and not being the copyright holder of that thing. I still think that in a very technical sense, the license does apply specifically to the lines of code in question. But I do think that you are right in the defacto case.
I agree that the restrictions on BSD-licensed code are pretty much non-existent. But my understanding of licenses is that the licensor must be the copyright holder if the license has any chance of hell of being upheld in court. Licenses are grants of permission for use from the copyright holder to licensees. I was under the impression that it was this fact that made the GPL so potent. The BSD license does not transfer copyright from the Regents to the user. See my post elsewhere in this thread for the details on why I think that you can't technically relicense BSD code, though you can modify BSD code and release your modifications under a different license.
First of all, the link you provide doesn't address any issue related to this discussion. It merely outlines the changes to the BSD license wrt to the advertising clause from a few years ago.
I don't disagree with you that it's possible to add or modify a source code file released under BSD license and then add a GPL to the added or modified parts. But remember that the GPL will only apply to the code you've changed/added. The rest of the original code still falls under the BSD license, and you have to follow both licenses if you want to use the code. So, we agree.
However, there was nothing contradictory in the parent.
I do maintain that you can't relicense BSD code under the GPL. When you add the GPL to a source file that you've modified, the GPL only applies to the parts that you've modified, not all of the code in the file. If somebody came along and took your modified source file and copied and pasted some of the code into their own file, and if they only copied lines of code that you didn't modify, they would be bound by the BSD license and not necessarily the GPL. However, if they copied your code, they would be bound by the GPL and not necessarily the BSD license. Sure, it's difficult to tell which lines were in the original and which were in the modified version but it does seem like the licenses apply to the code itself, and not the entire file. Like I said, it seems like we agree, but I don't see how what I said was contradictory.
NO. You cannot slap another license or copyright header on BSD code. I do not know how this rumour got started, but the BSD license is very clear. You must retain the BSD copyright notice in the source code, and, in the case of binary redistribution, you must have the software display the BSD license. If you read the copyright information for MS Windows, for example, either on the Windows installation CD, or, IIRC, at the bottom of the EULA flashed during installation, the BSD copyright notice is there.
If a Linux kernel programmer took some header files from FreeBSD or 4.4BSD, for example, but removed the BSD copyright notice, that is a violation of the BSD license terms. HOWEVER, that does not mean that SCO was wronged. The only party that could sue for violation of the BSD license is, of course, the Regents of the University of California. AFAIK, but IANAL.
You're right; you can only get it to play music that you've added using their bundled version of MusicMatch Jukebox. However, it still does function as a Mass Storage Device-- you can copy whatever you want onto it. However, it will not play any audio files that you copy over manually. I would assume that someone would be able to write some software that gets around this if it could be discovered what the MusicMatch program does that is so special. But until that's available (and provided it doesn't get DMCA-slapped), I don't know how useful the player is to non-Windows users.
I'll second that. I read a review of the 2004 Prius in the National Post that was also essentially a rave. The writer claimed that the car had more horsepower, more cabin space, and was generally an all around improvement over the previous model. For example, he said that in his test-drive, where the previous model was a bit sluggish when attempting to pass other cars, especially on the highway, the new model's increased horsepower and tweaked computer made passing a problem-free manouvre.
The article also mentioned that, beyond a Lexus SUV that will come equipped with Toyota's 2004 hybrid engine, Nissan has licensed that technology and the new engine will thus appear in a 2005 Altima. As well, Toyota plans to include hybrid engine options on its entire vehicle line sometime before the end of the decade.
Yeah, I didn't mention anything in my article about the GPL. That's going to be a huge part of this lawsuit as well, but I didn't want to touch it with a ten foot pole. The GPL is going to have its day in court for sure, and the outcome is going to have gigantic ramifications. Let's say that IBM is off the hook because of the GPL, well, then people like Sun or Microsoft will probably use that fact to scare people away from the GPL by highlighting it's "viral" nature and the danger that it could effectively destroy a company's rights over their own technology should they not fully understand what and how they use GPL code. On the other hand, if the GPL is shown to not be valid (though I have no reason to believe that it would end up that way), that would devastate the open source/free software movement as we know it. Obviously, the movement would heal and continue on, but in what form is anybody's guess.
In all honesty, I'm not sure what SCO is trying to accomplish here. If they had, in fact, removed all Linux kernels from their software and stopped distributing GPL'ed code that they claimed infringed their rights as soon as they made their case public, then the courts might let them off the hook with having released their code under the GPL. But to just let it sit on their FTP servers for months afterwards makes me think that they actually want IBM to use the GPL defense. I have no idea why, though, as it makes SCO's case that much weaker.
Well my inclination in this case is to say that it doesn't matter. I think once it's put into Dynix, it falls under the agreement. It's a tough contract, to be sure, but the responsibility falls to the signing parties to make sure that the terms of the contract are agreeable. Maybe Sequent just didn't have a very good bargaining position against AT&T, so they couldn't get the same amendment that IBM got. Maybe their lawyers just didn't pay close enough attention or just didn't care. Who knows? I guess if there's something that can be learnt from this, it's never to "sell your soul" when it comes to intellectual property. Always try to retain ownership of the work you do. I guess it's a principle thing-- don't sell out. If you're being offered a contract where you don't like the terms then never hesitate to walk. Stick to your principles, and you'll always be covered.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't understand the difference. Who cares? If someone can get the job done, that's what counts.
How on earth did this get modded up? It's obviously a troll.
I looked everywhere in that graph, but I did not see Objective-C. How come that was not included?
It really works.
I'd mod you down. Did it ever occur to you that maybe the "rules" we apply to "normal" kids is what holds them back? That the bigger, more interesting sandbox we give to more intelligent kids is what helps them grow up to have positive impacts on society with their inventions and perspectives? You're the type of person who thinks that everyone should be treated the same, except you don't realise that not every person actually is the same.
Hello,
I am not a climate scientist.
I have, however, spent some time researching the consensus view. I've also had the privilege of seeing Al Gore give his presentation in person.
In my time doing some research, I've understood enough of the issues, I think, to be able to comment on the veracity of the article in the Telegraph. And yes, of course, I have read it in its entirety.
My view is that the article is disingenuously factually inaccurate, and it does not directly address the actual arguments put forth by respected climate scientists who understand the most recent research and issues.
Unfortunately, I don't have the patience or the time to rehash the research and evidence (since I am not a scientist, I will have to re-read a variety of sources and synthesise my arguments back into a cohesive, convincing comment-- for someone not dealing with these arguments constantly on a daily basis, it would take me upwards of 24 hours to collate and synthesise the counter-argument) so I will leave the detailed rebuttal to a more qualified person.
But on its face, from the research I've done, it rings hollow-- a rehash of the same bullshit by disingenuous naysayers. I mean, the guy worked for Margaret Thatcher. What do you expect?
LONE STAR!
Mod parent up.
How come no one has any videos of the _television commercials_ that were playing on network news on election day 2000? Am I the only person who noticed that, on that night, defense companies like Lockheed Martin were running commercials with slogans like "Lockheed: Getting ready with the technology to fight the information warfare of the 21st Century."
I think that there is a war on information. And we are the targets. Maybe it's time to fight back, eh?
You're totally right ZOMG I totally forgot that Firefox won't have MICROSOFT AJAX(TM) support until version 3.0
C'mon Mozilla, hurry up, you're behind the fucking curve.
No, IT DOES NOT WORK ON FIREFOX. Perhaps you haven't noticed, but the functionality on Firefox is limited. When you access Windows Live Mail Beta on Firefox you are getting absolutely NO ajax-style features. There is no preview pane. There is no interactivity whatsoever. There is even a bolded error message telling you that you are in "Hotmail Classic" mode which is even less featured than the old Hotmail interface. The bolded message suggests that you navigate to the "options" menu and turn on the full interactive Live Beta experience. You can do that in Firefox, but NOTHING HAPPENS and you will be greeted with the same bolded message whenever you look at your inbox. It tells you that you need to be using IE to fully use Live. It's completely unusable without ANY javascript functionality, you know.
It doesn't work. Microsoft is dragging their feet on Firefox support because, once again, their programmers do not know how to write to standards. Either that, or their managers are telling the programmers to wait on implementing a "workaround" for non-IE browers.
My guess though is that it's the former-- Microsoft simply doesn't hire employees that know or care about web standards. These guys are probably just learning about Firefox and the DOM as they go. They've only ever written to Microsoft's own JavaScript extensions.
In other words, they are incompetent.
....The Canadian government had looked into this for Canadian passports but a decision was made recently not to change the passport.
If you look at the very first condition (a), you'll see that they explicitly define a government request as seperate from a "legal process", "law", or "regulation". Clearly, the act of obtaining and presenting a warrant or subpoena falls under the category of "legal process", which is identified as being different from a "government request".
As well, notice that that Google explicitly says that they will turn over personal information to "third parties". That could mean anyone-- your boss, your teacher, your parents, the RIAA, or even your Rabbi. The simple fact of the matter is that the only way to get privacy in e-mail is to run your own servers and only send and receive encrypted e-mail messages.
I'm not saying that Google is evil-- though they do admit that they will be more than helpful in providing anyone with your personal information if the request satisfies any of the above conditions which, in my opinion, are overly broad -- but I do think that any organisation that really cared about your privacy would have a simple policy: they would not turn over information unless the request was made through the legal process.
In a sense I think you're right, but I've developed a bit of a knee-jerk reaction to explanations of phenomena which appeal to biological or evolutionary processes. I think that, as an analytic, it's overused.
That having been said, I think that if you're correct, what we have here is an exaptation.
Specifically, though, the thesis in the documentary had little to do with evolution, explicitly. Since it was Freud, the idea was that people had base desires (mostly sexual), and that if you could tie having a product into an association with fulfilling that desire, then people would go out and buy that product in order to sate their subconscious needs. Specifically, the documentary focused a lot on Freud's nephew in the United States, a man by the name of Edward Bernays. Bernays was one of the first people to become aware of Freud's theories in the 20th Century because he and Freud were in contact at the beginning of the century. In the '20s, Bernays invented the notion of 'public affairs' or 'public relations', as well as the use of the mass media for advertising. The documentary continues in many directions (it's four hours long) all the way in to the present day: how Ronald Reagan won the White House using the same theories, and how Bill Clinton copied Reagan, and the same theories, to win a second term. This might sound a bit far-fetched, and in some places it certainly seems like it, but, given the film's length, it has more hits than misses.
But getting back to your point about evolutionary psychology, I think in a way you've pointed out a way in which I find the analytic untenable. After all, you managed to snag your wife before you got into the all-consuming rat-race, right?
Seems to me that capitalism is based on people always wanting more.
Yes, and you might be surprised at how this has come to be. There is an excellent, albeit long, documentary done by the BBC on this very subject. The basic premise is that much of the psychology surrounding this desire for wanting more can be traced back to the theories of Sigmund Freud.
Here is a link to the documentary's website at the BBC:
The Century of the Self.
I saw this film myself in October at an International Film Festival and I thought it was excellent. It will come out on video eventually, but you should contact the BBC to find out when it will be released if you're interested. Fascinating stuff, and worth the effort.
Ah yes, I see what you mean. I did mean "slap on" as "replace", and I understood the parent of my post to mean replace. However, I am still under the impression that a specific product would be less likely to have its use challenged if the licensor is also the copyright holder. There is something that I find morally strange about licensing something and not being the copyright holder of that thing. I still think that in a very technical sense, the license does apply specifically to the lines of code in question. But I do think that you are right in the defacto case.
I agree that the restrictions on BSD-licensed code are pretty much non-existent. But my understanding of licenses is that the licensor must be the copyright holder if the license has any chance of hell of being upheld in court. Licenses are grants of permission for use from the copyright holder to licensees. I was under the impression that it was this fact that made the GPL so potent. The BSD license does not transfer copyright from the Regents to the user. See my post elsewhere in this thread for the details on why I think that you can't technically relicense BSD code, though you can modify BSD code and release your modifications under a different license.
First of all, the link you provide doesn't address any issue related to this discussion. It merely outlines the changes to the BSD license wrt to the advertising clause from a few years ago.
I don't disagree with you that it's possible to add or modify a source code file released under BSD license and then add a GPL to the added or modified parts. But remember that the GPL will only apply to the code you've changed/added. The rest of the original code still falls under the BSD license, and you have to follow both licenses if you want to use the code. So, we agree.
However, there was nothing contradictory in the parent.
I do maintain that you can't relicense BSD code under the GPL. When you add the GPL to a source file that you've modified, the GPL only applies to the parts that you've modified, not all of the code in the file. If somebody came along and took your modified source file and copied and pasted some of the code into their own file, and if they only copied lines of code that you didn't modify, they would be bound by the BSD license and not necessarily the GPL. However, if they copied your code, they would be bound by the GPL and not necessarily the BSD license. Sure, it's difficult to tell which lines were in the original and which were in the modified version but it does seem like the licenses apply to the code itself, and not the entire file. Like I said, it seems like we agree, but I don't see how what I said was contradictory.
NO. You cannot slap another license or copyright header on BSD code. I do not know how this rumour got started, but the BSD license is very clear. You must retain the BSD copyright notice in the source code, and, in the case of binary redistribution, you must have the software display the BSD license. If you read the copyright information for MS Windows, for example, either on the Windows installation CD, or, IIRC, at the bottom of the EULA flashed during installation, the BSD copyright notice is there.
If a Linux kernel programmer took some header files from FreeBSD or 4.4BSD, for example, but removed the BSD copyright notice, that is a violation of the BSD license terms. HOWEVER, that does not mean that SCO was wronged. The only party that could sue for violation of the BSD license is, of course, the Regents of the University of California. AFAIK, but IANAL.
Ditto on seeing it at the very end of the Vancouver Fringe. It was very good.
Thanks, Tynan!
I was talking about the dell kit.
You're right; you can only get it to play music that you've added using their bundled version of MusicMatch Jukebox. However, it still does function as a Mass Storage Device-- you can copy whatever you want onto it. However, it will not play any audio files that you copy over manually. I would assume that someone would be able to write some software that gets around this if it could be discovered what the MusicMatch program does that is so special. But until that's available (and provided it doesn't get DMCA-slapped), I don't know how useful the player is to non-Windows users.
I'll second that. I read a review of the 2004 Prius in the National Post that was also essentially a rave. The writer claimed that the car had more horsepower, more cabin space, and was generally an all around improvement over the previous model. For example, he said that in his test-drive, where the previous model was a bit sluggish when attempting to pass other cars, especially on the highway, the new model's increased horsepower and tweaked computer made passing a problem-free manouvre.
The article also mentioned that, beyond a Lexus SUV that will come equipped with Toyota's 2004 hybrid engine, Nissan has licensed that technology and the new engine will thus appear in a 2005 Altima. As well, Toyota plans to include hybrid engine options on its entire vehicle line sometime before the end of the decade.
Yeah, I didn't mention anything in my article about the GPL. That's going to be a huge part of this lawsuit as well, but I didn't want to touch it with a ten foot pole. The GPL is going to have its day in court for sure, and the outcome is going to have gigantic ramifications. Let's say that IBM is off the hook because of the GPL, well, then people like Sun or Microsoft will probably use that fact to scare people away from the GPL by highlighting it's "viral" nature and the danger that it could effectively destroy a company's rights over their own technology should they not fully understand what and how they use GPL code. On the other hand, if the GPL is shown to not be valid (though I have no reason to believe that it would end up that way), that would devastate the open source/free software movement as we know it. Obviously, the movement would heal and continue on, but in what form is anybody's guess.
In all honesty, I'm not sure what SCO is trying to accomplish here. If they had, in fact, removed all Linux kernels from their software and stopped distributing GPL'ed code that they claimed infringed their rights as soon as they made their case public, then the courts might let them off the hook with having released their code under the GPL. But to just let it sit on their FTP servers for months afterwards makes me think that they actually want IBM to use the GPL defense. I have no idea why, though, as it makes SCO's case that much weaker.
Well my inclination in this case is to say that it doesn't matter. I think once it's put into Dynix, it falls under the agreement. It's a tough contract, to be sure, but the responsibility falls to the signing parties to make sure that the terms of the contract are agreeable. Maybe Sequent just didn't have a very good bargaining position against AT&T, so they couldn't get the same amendment that IBM got. Maybe their lawyers just didn't pay close enough attention or just didn't care. Who knows? I guess if there's something that can be learnt from this, it's never to "sell your soul" when it comes to intellectual property. Always try to retain ownership of the work you do. I guess it's a principle thing-- don't sell out. If you're being offered a contract where you don't like the terms then never hesitate to walk. Stick to your principles, and you'll always be covered.