Problem: the language of patents is interpretable only by lawyers. Problem: most FOSS projects don't have the resources to make sure they don't violate patents. Even the SFLC probably doesn't have the resources to help anywhere near the number of FOSS projects that are potentially affected.
So if free software voilates patents, Microsoft has to ask Windows users to pay for using free software on their OS too. No, they don't. Holders of patents and copyrights are permitted to not pursue action against any violators they choose, and they may change their mind at any time.
Moglen contends that software is a mathematical algorithm and, as such, not patentable. (The Supreme Court has never expressly ruled on the question.)
If MS has the cajones to file any patent suits, maybe Moglen or his successor can raise that issue. He's still counsel of the SFLC, just not on the board anymore.
What I find troubling is that people here are defending Child Porn, even virtual, on ANY level. [...] It should not be defended, for any reason. Why not? Why should anyone accept such a claim by assertion alone? Prove to me that adults role-playing as virtual children and engaging in virtual sex is exploitive of real children.
I would even be so bold as to assert to the contrary, that such role-playing may in some cases act as a substitute for the real thing, therefore protecting real children from exploitation. I have no proof, but I daresay you haven't any for yours either, just the power of affixing the social stigma.
Most children are exploited by people they know, such as family, neighbors, and authority figures close to them (e.g., teachers or clergy). My advice to law enforcement everywhere is to stop the Internet witch-hunt and concentrate on working locally; if this were really about protecting children instead of exercising power, that is what would be done.
Anyone who does so in my eyes is crazy. I don't know about that; my psychiatrist never saw any reason to have me carted off in either a straitjacket or handcuffs, and I think he knows me better than you do.
You forgot to say at what bandwidth levels full offloading becomes relevant. I think your target audience is (for the foreseeable future) a lot smaller than you're implying, or so it seems to me.
FWIW, I tend to agree with the Kernel devs' general position on TOE. The way that many hardware companies are so damn secretive about the interfaces to their hardware (for whatever the reason, whether justified or not), I certainly won't blame the skepticism.
Every interface is different. Stop teaching interfaces and start teaching ideas. Stop teaching MSFT word, start teaching word processing. Teach spreadsheets not excel. Needs repeating.
If you take a movie without paying for it, that movie studio has to reduce the "few cents an hour" it pays its employees. Duh. Ditto with the guys in the recording studio.
[...]
Given, the MPAA/RIAA have gone way overboard, but the other side is just as guilty. There has to be a common ground where everybody is happy and everybody with the genuine talent can make a living from it, but posting some stupid encryption key that the MPAA's already stopped using isn't really getting anybody any closer to that ideal. The only reasonable way out of this mess, as I see it, is to abandon the retail model in the long term; sure, one can still reserve the right to sell hard copies, but this cannot work where the product has no natural scarcity, and the nature of any artificial scarcity is beyond the understanding of most people.
Or would you rather go down the DRM-everything route, into the realm of the information dystopia? Ultimately, I don't see how effective enforcement can work without turning into an IP police state. Giving up an inch of enforcement results in infringers taking a mile, so this is not a good choice for those concerned with making a profit.
I've always wanted to convince creators to try experimental business models. I've had one in particular in mind for a while, involving the collection of most monies before the release of the work under liberal terms (such as a Creative Commons license).
It takes a lot of bravery to have faith in their incompetence. IIRC there were only technical reasons behind ACPI, but DRM has big money behind it, and I don't trust them to screw up things like that.
Everybody who believes to the contrary should have to dig around in disassembled DSDT code to try to make their thermal zones report the temperature properly (which I've done) and make the machine resume from S3 instead of rebooting when hitting the power button (which has failed miserably) in a spec-compliant ACPI implementation.
If you haven't done that, go do it. Now. Gain an appreciation for either the difficulty in following the spec properly or the incompetence of the OEMs to implement their part properly---or both.
90% of what comes out of his mouth is pure drivel and should be discarded. 5% is sentimentally true but needs lots of editing to be generally palatable. The last 5% are actually good ideas.
Recover whatever ideas you can from him and incorporate them into your own beliefs, if you so choose. The rest can be safely ignored, because nobody else is going to listen to him with any seriousness. Really, I don't understand what the problem is here.
While I agree that the Gentoo documentation is excellent, I can't say I liked the distribution. Maybe if I were to have installed it myself from scratch, instead of having inherited an installation, I might have understood why stuff broke as often as it does. But my one experience with Gentoo was on a production machine, and the first time I tried to update the system, the mailing system broke.
My own advice to the submitter is to go between Gentoo and LFS with respect to automation and below both with respect to complexity and use Slackware. I've used it exclusively for my own machines for the several years I've used Linux, and in the process of taking a stable core system and trying to add onto it, compiling from source as necessary, I've broken and fixed things enough. The build scripts are available too, so you can customize as in LFS, but with the advantage of simple packaging.
Well, I don't know about that, but I'm sure a few rogue organizations and governments out there would accept donations in exchange for a few items that would effectively accomplish the same purpose, should he actually enter orbit.
This is the same issue that the Luddites could not come to terms with. Greater efficiency means less work to be done. Less work necessitates fewer employees and/or smaller wages.
While I generally agree with you, something just occurred to me when I read your post.
Imagine a situation where, say, 5% of the population is involved in some occupation. Then some technological improvement is made such that only one person now performs that occupation. This is an improvement, economically, because the people who were involved in that occupation can now do something else -- the average amount of wealth created per person has increased, benefiting society in general (although individually, some more than others).
But what happens if that one person is killed by accident? And the thing they provided was actually rather important? Suddenly we're SOL. It can put us in a risky position to reduce the prevalence of a certain occupation. This is why absolute efficiency is not the best policy. This is also why insurance exists, to allow trading money for reduced risk.
I'm not saying this is the case with record store owners; but a general variety of occupations (and the associated experiences those people have) is, at least theoretically, healthy for society. We might want to examine if there are implications to getting rid of any occupation we can, just because it's more economically efficient.
To put it another way: economic efficiency is not the goal, a healthy society is the goal. Economic efficiency can contribute toward a healthy society, but so can many other factors, and we might want to make sure we're not ignoring one. I don't recall asserting that efficiency is an end goal. My statements were only slightly normative, if that at all.
But to change what I initially said, I just realized that I, like others, are taking exception to the store owner's assessment, not the top-level poster's. The store likely relied on students for its sales, and Internet-savvy students know how to obtain music online, regardless of the legality of the method.
Here's the problem with your assessment of this anecdote.
Technology has increased the efficiency of distributing information. Music is information too. Because the old model based on physical media transfer is being overtaken, there's less overhead. Of course, this means that there's less pie to go around. People and organizations by necessity need to leave the industry or to accept the fact that they're going to get a smaller share if they remain in. Or, like the RIAA, they can try to maintain their share at the expense of everyone else.
This is the same issue that the Luddites could not come to terms with. Greater efficiency means less work to be done. Less work necessitates fewer employees and/or smaller wages. Instead of coming to terms with the reality and exploring other lines of work, they decided to resort to destruction of property to maintain the status quo.
True, but until they actually reach her with a subpoena, she's not under any legal requirement to do so. Hearing about a subpoena in the news (or via a motion she's retrieved from the internet) isn't nearly the same thing as actually being served. And if she's not actively dodging it (for example, if she's honestly taking a long-planned vacation somewhere and prefers to keep the destination private), then that's just SCO's tough luck.
I mean, really, why make it easy for SCO?
She's not under an affirmative duty to seek being served, but as you say she's neither allowed to avoid it intentionally. My lawyer differs in opinion.
I would argue that as an officer of the court, and one who (I hope) believes in the system, she should in this case seek service. It's not going to make anything easier for SCO, as she has nothing to hide. She can be clever in her deposition and publish it on the site for our amusement.
That's just my opinion, of course, but it seems reasonable and logical to me. There's no reason to lower oneself to the tactics of the other side. If the personality she demonstrates online is genuine, then you don't seem to "understand" PJ.
She appears to be very paranoid, in case you haven't figured it out; and while it's not without good reason, it is at times truly excessive. The point is that to her, if any agent of any side opposed to her so much as sees her, she's a dead woman. The pseudonymity of the Internet may be the only thing that permits her to continue what she is doing, and if that barrier is shattered, it is impossible to say how she would handle it. Therefore, in this context, being served with a subpoena is a total defeat.
I could be completely wrong, and this could be the greatest dupe job in a long time, but this is how I perceive PJ. Logic has nothing to do with this.
Slashdot Mirror
And then I'd contact a few macrophiles and tell them to go "skeet, skeet, skeet" on MS.
Problem: the language of patents is interpretable only by lawyers.
Problem: most FOSS projects don't have the resources to make sure they don't violate patents. Even the SFLC probably doesn't have the resources to help anywhere near the number of FOSS projects that are potentially affected.
Hopefully, this is where the cross-licensing agreements come up woefully short for MS.
This needs to happen sooner or later, and we might as well get it over with, regardless of the outcome.
I would even be so bold as to assert to the contrary, that such role-playing may in some cases act as a substitute for the real thing, therefore protecting real children from exploitation. I have no proof, but I daresay you haven't any for yours either, just the power of affixing the social stigma.
Most children are exploited by people they know, such as family, neighbors, and authority figures close to them (e.g., teachers or clergy). My advice to law enforcement everywhere is to stop the Internet witch-hunt and concentrate on working locally; if this were really about protecting children instead of exercising power, that is what would be done. Anyone who does so in my eyes is crazy. I don't know about that; my psychiatrist never saw any reason to have me carted off in either a straitjacket or handcuffs, and I think he knows me better than you do.
You forgot to say at what bandwidth levels full offloading becomes relevant. I think your target audience is (for the foreseeable future) a lot smaller than you're implying, or so it seems to me.
FWIW, I tend to agree with the Kernel devs' general position on TOE. The way that many hardware companies are so damn secretive about the interfaces to their hardware (for whatever the reason, whether justified or not), I certainly won't blame the skepticism.
[...]
Given, the MPAA/RIAA have gone way overboard, but the other side is just as guilty. There has to be a common ground where everybody is happy and everybody with the genuine talent can make a living from it, but posting some stupid encryption key that the MPAA's already stopped using isn't really getting anybody any closer to that ideal. The only reasonable way out of this mess, as I see it, is to abandon the retail model in the long term; sure, one can still reserve the right to sell hard copies, but this cannot work where the product has no natural scarcity, and the nature of any artificial scarcity is beyond the understanding of most people.
Or would you rather go down the DRM-everything route, into the realm of the information dystopia? Ultimately, I don't see how effective enforcement can work without turning into an IP police state. Giving up an inch of enforcement results in infringers taking a mile, so this is not a good choice for those concerned with making a profit.
I've always wanted to convince creators to try experimental business models. I've had one in particular in mind for a while, involving the collection of most monies before the release of the work under liberal terms (such as a Creative Commons license).
Then get a USB<->RS-232 converter.
It takes a lot of bravery to have faith in their incompetence. IIRC there were only technical reasons behind ACPI, but DRM has big money behind it, and I don't trust them to screw up things like that.
I don't think opening that debate would be useful. In fact, I think would be very harmful.
Why is this? Because filters are the only thing holding back laws like the CDA and the COPA.
Or would you rather let the US Congress get their hands on a huge piece of the public Internet? I sure as hell don't.
See ionice.
It's a crude program, but it does prioritize I/O like nice does for CPU time.
Everybody who believes to the contrary should have to dig around in disassembled DSDT code to try to make their thermal zones report the temperature properly (which I've done) and make the machine resume from S3 instead of rebooting when hitting the power button (which has failed miserably) in a spec-compliant ACPI implementation.
If you haven't done that, go do it. Now. Gain an appreciation for either the difficulty in following the spec properly or the incompetence of the OEMs to implement their part properly---or both.
Tubgirl is so much better than Goatse.
And by "better", I mean "more thoroughly disgusting". The latter makes me laugh; the former turns my stomach.
90% of what comes out of his mouth is pure drivel and should be discarded. 5% is sentimentally true but needs lots of editing to be generally palatable. The last 5% are actually good ideas.
Recover whatever ideas you can from him and incorporate them into your own beliefs, if you so choose. The rest can be safely ignored, because nobody else is going to listen to him with any seriousness. Really, I don't understand what the problem is here.
At least this song doesn't make my ears bleed.
While I agree that the Gentoo documentation is excellent, I can't say I liked the distribution. Maybe if I were to have installed it myself from scratch, instead of having inherited an installation, I might have understood why stuff broke as often as it does. But my one experience with Gentoo was on a production machine, and the first time I tried to update the system, the mailing system broke.
My own advice to the submitter is to go between Gentoo and LFS with respect to automation and below both with respect to complexity and use Slackware. I've used it exclusively for my own machines for the several years I've used Linux, and in the process of taking a stable core system and trying to add onto it, compiling from source as necessary, I've broken and fixed things enough. The build scripts are available too, so you can customize as in LFS, but with the advantage of simple packaging.
Also h
Even the Slashdot editors were less misleading.
Well, I don't know about that, but I'm sure a few rogue organizations and governments out there would accept donations in exchange for a few items that would effectively accomplish the same purpose, should he actually enter orbit.
Not that I approve of something like that.
<_<
>_>
While I generally agree with you, something just occurred to me when I read your post.
Imagine a situation where, say, 5% of the population is involved in some occupation. Then some technological improvement is made such that only one person now performs that occupation. This is an improvement, economically, because the people who were involved in that occupation can now do something else -- the average amount of wealth created per person has increased, benefiting society in general (although individually, some more than others).
But what happens if that one person is killed by accident? And the thing they provided was actually rather important? Suddenly we're SOL. It can put us in a risky position to reduce the prevalence of a certain occupation. This is why absolute efficiency is not the best policy. This is also why insurance exists, to allow trading money for reduced risk. I'm not saying this is the case with record store owners; but a general variety of occupations (and the associated experiences those people have) is, at least theoretically, healthy for society. We might want to examine if there are implications to getting rid of any occupation we can, just because it's more economically efficient.
To put it another way: economic efficiency is not the goal, a healthy society is the goal. Economic efficiency can contribute toward a healthy society, but so can many other factors, and we might want to make sure we're not ignoring one. I don't recall asserting that efficiency is an end goal. My statements were only slightly normative, if that at all.
But to change what I initially said, I just realized that I, like others, are taking exception to the store owner's assessment, not the top-level poster's. The store likely relied on students for its sales, and Internet-savvy students know how to obtain music online, regardless of the legality of the method.
In aggregate, yes, people generally stay employed and paid. However, I was talking within the context of one industry.
Here's the problem with your assessment of this anecdote.
Technology has increased the efficiency of distributing information. Music is information too. Because the old model based on physical media transfer is being overtaken, there's less overhead. Of course, this means that there's less pie to go around. People and organizations by necessity need to leave the industry or to accept the fact that they're going to get a smaller share if they remain in. Or, like the RIAA, they can try to maintain their share at the expense of everyone else.
This is the same issue that the Luddites could not come to terms with. Greater efficiency means less work to be done. Less work necessitates fewer employees and/or smaller wages. Instead of coming to terms with the reality and exploring other lines of work, they decided to resort to destruction of property to maintain the status quo.
I mean, really, why make it easy for SCO?
She's not under an affirmative duty to seek being served, but as you say she's neither allowed to avoid it intentionally. My lawyer differs in opinion. I would argue that as an officer of the court, and one who (I hope) believes in the system, she should in this case seek service. It's not going to make anything easier for SCO, as she has nothing to hide. She can be clever in her deposition and publish it on the site for our amusement.
That's just my opinion, of course, but it seems reasonable and logical to me. There's no reason to lower oneself to the tactics of the other side. If the personality she demonstrates online is genuine, then you don't seem to "understand" PJ.
She appears to be very paranoid, in case you haven't figured it out; and while it's not without good reason, it is at times truly excessive. The point is that to her, if any agent of any side opposed to her so much as sees her, she's a dead woman. The pseudonymity of the Internet may be the only thing that permits her to continue what she is doing, and if that barrier is shattered, it is impossible to say how she would handle it. Therefore, in this context, being served with a subpoena is a total defeat.
I could be completely wrong, and this could be the greatest dupe job in a long time, but this is how I perceive PJ. Logic has nothing to do with this.
OK, but neither the title nor the summary says this.