Wow, okay, you officially pwned me with that last one. Yea, you're right, I have no idea what I'm talking about.
(Writing GPL-compatible made me go, wait a second, that couldn't be right, I checked the list of GPL-compatible licenses, and it lists everthing you were saying.)
Anyway, maybe I'm just confused and I have my own definition of it. I always thought of "Free software" meaning anything with a copyleft sort of license, and "Open source" as any software that has the source available. After questioning that definition, I'm not positive that my definitions match up to everyone else's. Anyway, sorry for wasting your time.
Okay, okay, there we go, I made another mistake then. What I meant to say was "Free software" is used with GPL-compatible licenses solely. Sorry. No, there's no difference between free software and Free software, except that the capital F usually reminds people that we're not talking about money. Most people on slashdot, if they capitalize Free in Free software, it means GPL-compatible.
Someone's already brought up this point, I apologized for including the term open source software ("Free Software" (with a capital F) is used solely with the gpl), and agreed that I did leave out BSD licenses and such. I award you -1 Redundant.
you're right. However, the larger a corporation gets, the more they *typically* forget any moral or social responsibility, and become simply greedy. For example, SCO. How is SCO benefitting technology with what it's doing right now? How is it benefitting anyone but the small amount of lawyers it employs, and the small amount of shareholders? SCO was a large company at one point. Walmart is another example. Walmart employs much child labor, runs out every business it can, and generally does harm to the world, plus it treats the great majority of its employees like *crap*, paying minimum wage, and immediately destroying any concept of a union.
It's not the small corporations I'm worried about, it's the ones that help to increase the class divide that annoy me.
Free Software. You should go learn the terminology before you attempt to correct me.
I also know the difference between a copyright and a license. If you had read the post I was responding to, you might have realized that the argument I presented was exactly what I was trying to present. Copyright is what allows software to have enforceable licenses.
You also seem to be confused about copyright law, IANAL, but if your product contains even one function of code directly copied from something else, then you have to follow the license of that 'something else' You can't just say "Oh, hey, I've changed this enough, it's mine now."
And about the algorithm argument being lazy, go read the other comments to my post. That argument has been presented, and other people have come up with better responses than I could have.
Here's some of the comments arguing about software patents being 'different': Comment 1 Comment 2
Heh, I can't tell if you're being serious or not...but have fun qouting. Read the other comments before you do so though, some of the other slashdotters have posted some good responses to it. I'm sure someone like RMS or some of the other good, insightful people of our day have written something much better.
Yea, you're right. I did sorta ignore anything other than the GPL. Guess I shoulda left it at "Free Software" instead of "Free Software/Open Source Software"
Open source software, and free software *depend* on copyright. Yes, depend on it. Without copyright, then anyone could take the code, including large corporations, and modify it for their own interest, and sell it without releasing the source code. Basically, it'd defeat the point of the difference between "free", and "Free".
Software shouldn't be *patented* because you're patenting an algorithm. And computer code is a completely logical process. It'd be very similar to patenting a mathematical formula. They're both *discovered*, not really *created*. It also creates a lot of problems in enforceability, and in large corporations being able to sue anyone they please. It's not only logically wrong, but also effectively wrong. It's similar, in a way, to the DMCA in that it gives bigger corporations the power to control everyone.
Very very few people argue against copyright when it comes to software. Free software people/open source people argue against patents alone.
oh, and trademark has nothing to do with the issue. Don't lump the three under the whole "intellectual property" umbrella. You'll almost always be wrong when you do. They have very little to do with each other.
Yes, but in the beginning, people were into something primarily because it interested them, secondly because it made them money. Whenever people start going into an industry primarily for the money, that's when an industry is 'bastardized', because it takes all of the passion, and actual caring for whether the game is good, and replaces it with caring for whether the game will make money. There's a big difference between the output of the two.
You're right. I hadn't thought of that method of bribery. Hmm. Well, it'd be possible to eliminate the slip, but giving someone something which they can keep to prove to officials that they voted a certain way would be useful. Maybe only provide an encrypted slip showing how they voted, along with an ID number, and only allow the voters to check on, or correct their votes in person, with noone else around?
I guess it's getting kinda complex and losing a lot of the points that way, but I can't put off the attractiveness of having the ability to verify that my vote was counted correctly.
Just got an idea. Put out that slip with the encrypted data. When a voter votes, the machine prints out an encrypted slip containing the voting data, and an ID. You can then goto the public web site, type in the ID on the slip, and verify that it matches with the encrypted data. There's no way to decrypt that data without meeting with an official. If the ID isn't recorded on the web site, or differs from the encrypted data, then you know that your vote has been tampered with. Otherwise, you know your vote got counted.
you should also be allowed to meet with an official alone and just verify that the encrypted data matches how you voted...not that you'll be able to change it, but it'd make it known if there was some sort of fraud.
I think what should really happen, though this might be a bit too technologically advanced...is that, after you hit the vote button, you get a receipt, giving you a generated ID number, and how the machine recorded your vote....if what is on the slip is different from how you voted, then you tell the election officials before you leave and they'll either correct it, or remove your last vote and let you vote again.
The reason for all of this, is that within a couple of days, the results should be posted on the internet, where you can type in your given ID number, and it'll report what results were recorded for you. If they are wrong, then you can take your slip to an official and show them how you voted, and that it's being reported wrong. (Also, there should be an automated phone service for people who don't have access to the internet). Of course, something needs to be made so that the slips can't be faked, otherwise you'll have people buying the slips from other people. You could do it by simply cryptographically signing everything that's printed on the slip, and printing the signature along with it.
Nice thing about this, is that there's no need for a recount of votes, and it's no longer in the official's hands. If the news reports that one county is being counted wrong, then anyone who cares will contact the automated services to make sure that their vote is being counted correctly. If they don't contact an official, then they're effectively saying "Hey, I don't care, just throw away my vote." It becomes part of the voter's responsibility to make sure that things are being counted right. (And you can only get an official to change your votes *if* they're reported *differently* from the slip. You can't just say "Oh, this is how I meant to vote"...you should have corrected that at the booth).
Also, Implement condorcet voting. It'd make the whole thing a lot more fair.
The donation that people put in was not supposed to go solely to the ad. The money that's not used on the ad they specifically said will go to other launching expenses, be that more advertising or whatever.
All of the criterion on this page are supported by condorcet except for two. Plurality at least supports three of the criterion. IRV supports *none*.
While the people who wrote this page obviously prefer condorcet, if you actually read through the criterion and understand it, they all make logical sense, and are something that is desirable.
Look, specifically, at the condorcet criterion. In the comments, it explains a situation in which IRV completely screws up:
" Consider, for example, the following vote count with three candidates {A,B,C}:
8: A,B
7: C,B
5: B
In this case, B is preferred to A by 12 votes to 8, and B is preferred to C by 13 to 7, hence B is preferred to both A and C. So according to common sense and the Condorcet criteria, B should win. But under IRV, B does not win. According to the rules of IRV, B is ranked first by the fewest voters and is eliminated. Again, an election method that allows such nonsensical anomalies should be rejected. "
You're talking about condorcet? I wasn't sure cause you didn't seem to make that too clear.
This is *not* how condorcet works. Not at all. For o ne, the user side of it is much simpler, simply rankt he candidates in the order you prefer.
In IRV, ranking a candidate higher can actually make them lose. This is impossible in condorcet.
With condorcet, let's say you ranked the candidates A, B, C, D. With this ranking, if you're looking at C, the order doesn't matter whatsoever between A and B, they both beat C.
If you truly prefer candidate A (Nader, suppose), above candidate B(Kerry), then ranking Nader above Kerry can only help Nader win against Kerry.
IRV has a lot of flaws, condorcet is the ideal method for voting, what's at debate is whether it's the ideal method for the united states, because of it's complexity in computing the results.
Approval I can sorta see that, but that's not really a bad thing. I think the better way to phrase it is 'everyone should have equal voting potential'. And everyone does.
The end-user view of condorcet is essentially the same as IRV, I don't see how you could argue that.
The problems with IRV are that it can do just the opposite of what you intend in certain situations.
Rating one candidate *higher* can actually make them lose. This should *never* happen, it's exactly the opposite of what a voting method should do.
I'll give you sources if you can't find them on your own.
Eventually, because of these problems, the two major politcal parties are justgoing to be saying "Put our candidate absolutely first or else you're going to be plagued byt hese problems and your vote won't count!" We'll have quite a bit of FUD, and quite a bit of scary stuff that's not FUD.
Condorcet would be much better. Heck, even approval's not bad.
"Could have so much potential"? Slashcode is open source. What exactly is it about slashdot that makes it have more potential than say, you making your own site based on slashcode? Heck, you should have more potential because you don't have to develop your own code base to get started.
Stop freaking complaining, start your own site, or stop reading slashdot. In fact, do all three. They might not be the greatest editors in the world, but I think they sure do a damn better job than you would. At least you don't see them complaining about how repetitive, or idiotic the comments are.
Here's an article dated January 2003 talking about how google decided to cooperate with the Chinese government, and why. This isn't new at all, in fact it's over a year old. Google's don't be evil policy hasn't changed, this is one decision which they decided it was less evil to cooperate.
Uh-huh. And if someone gave you a cow or corn for free, would you consider butchering/shucking them then? I'm sure you wouldn't be complaining to the guy who gave 'em to you for free that he didn't butcher/shuck them for you.
Keep in mind, gaim is ran by volunteers. I'm sure if you cared to put some cash towards the gaim project, they'd be willing to start compiling mac binaries.
I might be wrong, but after a cursory glance at 'slub', what the guy in this article is doing is quite a bit different.
In Slub, it appears that they code the scripts beforehand, then decide while they're there when to play them, etc. The guy in this article is actually writing the scripts while on stage. I could definitely see myself doing the former, but the latter....wow, I mean, it's a lot more like improving (as mentioned in the article), because if something you do doesn't sound right, the whole audience hears it....if you've written everything beforehand, you *know* what it sounds like.
Programmatically generating music is nothing new (I'm pretty sure stuff was out in the 80s for it), but actually doing the programming while on stage is. At least, I think so.
Then, they know that *you* cracked it. I'm sure they woulda thought of that before, and would have designed the system so it would stand up through some legal action in the court. If they can logically prove that *you* distributed your copy, and your key, then you're liable for quite a bit of piracy...and well..you probably don't wanna go down that lane.
Now, even if that did happen, that release would still be out there. I never played HL1, so I don't know how multiplayer based it is, but if it's multiplayer enough, they could start blocking any keys that get pirated, much like unreal tournament does with cd-keys. Of course, this is assuming that the game stores the key after it's been decrypted...in some way or form...not quite sure how all that works out, but I'm sure there's a way, and I'm too lazy right now.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, okay, you officially pwned me with that last one. Yea, you're right, I have no idea what I'm talking about.
(Writing GPL-compatible made me go, wait a second, that couldn't be right, I checked the list of GPL-compatible licenses, and it lists everthing you were saying.)
Anyway, maybe I'm just confused and I have my own definition of it. I always thought of "Free software" meaning anything with a copyleft sort of license, and "Open source" as any software that has the source available. After questioning that definition, I'm not positive that my definitions match up to everyone else's. Anyway, sorry for wasting your time.
Okay, okay, there we go, I made another mistake then. What I meant to say was "Free software" is used with GPL-compatible licenses solely. Sorry. No, there's no difference between free software and Free software, except that the capital F usually reminds people that we're not talking about money. Most people on slashdot, if they capitalize Free in Free software, it means GPL-compatible.
Someone's already brought up this point, I apologized for including the term open source software ("Free Software" (with a capital F) is used solely with the gpl), and agreed that I did leave out BSD licenses and such. I award you -1 Redundant.
you're right. However, the larger a corporation gets, the more they *typically* forget any moral or social responsibility, and become simply greedy. For example, SCO. How is SCO benefitting technology with what it's doing right now? How is it benefitting anyone but the small amount of lawyers it employs, and the small amount of shareholders? SCO was a large company at one point. Walmart is another example. Walmart employs much child labor, runs out every business it can, and generally does harm to the world, plus it treats the great majority of its employees like *crap*, paying minimum wage, and immediately destroying any concept of a union.
It's not the small corporations I'm worried about, it's the ones that help to increase the class divide that annoy me.
Free Software. You should go learn the terminology before you attempt to correct me.
I also know the difference between a copyright and a license. If you had read the post I was responding to, you might have realized that the argument I presented was exactly what I was trying to present. Copyright is what allows software to have enforceable licenses.
You also seem to be confused about copyright law, IANAL, but if your product contains even one function of code directly copied from something else, then you have to follow the license of that 'something else' You can't just say "Oh, hey, I've changed this enough, it's mine now."
And about the algorithm argument being lazy, go read the other comments to my post. That argument has been presented, and other people have come up with better responses than I could have.
Here's some of the comments arguing about software patents being 'different':
Comment 1
Comment 2
Heh, I can't tell if you're being serious or not...but have fun qouting. Read the other comments before you do so though, some of the other slashdotters have posted some good responses to it. I'm sure someone like RMS or some of the other good, insightful people of our day have written something much better.
Yea, you're right. I did sorta ignore anything other than the GPL. Guess I shoulda left it at "Free Software" instead of "Free Software/Open Source Software"
Um, I think you're a little confused.
Open source software, and free software *depend* on copyright. Yes, depend on it. Without copyright, then anyone could take the code, including large corporations, and modify it for their own interest, and sell it without releasing the source code. Basically, it'd defeat the point of the difference between "free", and "Free".
Software shouldn't be *patented* because you're patenting an algorithm. And computer code is a completely logical process. It'd be very similar to patenting a mathematical formula. They're both *discovered*, not really *created*. It also creates a lot of problems in enforceability, and in large corporations being able to sue anyone they please. It's not only logically wrong, but also effectively wrong. It's similar, in a way, to the DMCA in that it gives bigger corporations the power to control everyone.
Very very few people argue against copyright when it comes to software. Free software people/open source people argue against patents alone.
oh, and trademark has nothing to do with the issue. Don't lump the three under the whole "intellectual property" umbrella. You'll almost always be wrong when you do. They have very little to do with each other.
Yes, but in the beginning, people were into something primarily because it interested them, secondly because it made them money. Whenever people start going into an industry primarily for the money, that's when an industry is 'bastardized', because it takes all of the passion, and actual caring for whether the game is good, and replaces it with caring for whether the game will make money. There's a big difference between the output of the two.
You're right. I hadn't thought of that method of bribery. Hmm. Well, it'd be possible to eliminate the slip, but giving someone something which they can keep to prove to officials that they voted a certain way would be useful. Maybe only provide an encrypted slip showing how they voted, along with an ID number, and only allow the voters to check on, or correct their votes in person, with noone else around?
I guess it's getting kinda complex and losing a lot of the points that way, but I can't put off the attractiveness of having the ability to verify that my vote was counted correctly.
Just got an idea. Put out that slip with the encrypted data. When a voter votes, the machine prints out an encrypted slip containing the voting data, and an ID. You can then goto the public web site, type in the ID on the slip, and verify that it matches with the encrypted data. There's no way to decrypt that data without meeting with an official. If the ID isn't recorded on the web site, or differs from the encrypted data, then you know that your vote has been tampered with. Otherwise, you know your vote got counted.
you should also be allowed to meet with an official alone and just verify that the encrypted data matches how you voted...not that you'll be able to change it, but it'd make it known if there was some sort of fraud.
I think what should really happen, though this might be a bit too technologically advanced...is that, after you hit the vote button, you get a receipt, giving you a generated ID number, and how the machine recorded your vote....if what is on the slip is different from how you voted, then you tell the election officials before you leave and they'll either correct it, or remove your last vote and let you vote again.
The reason for all of this, is that within a couple of days, the results should be posted on the internet, where you can type in your given ID number, and it'll report what results were recorded for you. If they are wrong, then you can take your slip to an official and show them how you voted, and that it's being reported wrong. (Also, there should be an automated phone service for people who don't have access to the internet). Of course, something needs to be made so that the slips can't be faked, otherwise you'll have people buying the slips from other people. You could do it by simply cryptographically signing everything that's printed on the slip, and printing the signature along with it.
Nice thing about this, is that there's no need for a recount of votes, and it's no longer in the official's hands. If the news reports that one county is being counted wrong, then anyone who cares will contact the automated services to make sure that their vote is being counted correctly. If they don't contact an official, then they're effectively saying "Hey, I don't care, just throw away my vote." It becomes part of the voter's responsibility to make sure that things are being counted right. (And you can only get an official to change your votes *if* they're reported *differently* from the slip. You can't just say "Oh, this is how I meant to vote"...you should have corrected that at the booth).
Also, Implement condorcet voting. It'd make the whole thing a lot more fair.
He specifically put up the mirrors because his servers were getting attacked before. It's not just from mass visitation.
The donation that people put in was not supposed to go solely to the ad. The money that's not used on the ad they specifically said will go to other launching expenses, be that more advertising or whatever.
Um...why? Just because it supports your favorite method? I couldn't find anything on that site comparing it with the other methods of voting.
http://www.electionmethods.org/evaluation.htm
All of the criterion on this page are supported by condorcet except for two. Plurality at least supports three of the criterion. IRV supports *none*.
While the people who wrote this page obviously prefer condorcet, if you actually read through the criterion and understand it, they all make logical sense, and are something that is desirable.
Look, specifically, at the condorcet criterion. In the comments, it explains a situation in which IRV completely screws up:
"
Consider, for example, the following vote count with three candidates {A,B,C}:
8: A,B
7: C,B
5: B
In this case, B is preferred to A by 12 votes to 8, and B is preferred to C by 13 to 7, hence B is preferred to both A and C. So according to common sense and the Condorcet criteria, B should win. But under IRV, B does not win. According to the rules of IRV, B is ranked first by the fewest voters and is eliminated. Again, an election method that allows such nonsensical anomalies should be rejected.
"
You're talking about condorcet? I wasn't sure cause you didn't seem to make that too clear.
This is *not* how condorcet works. Not at all. For o ne, the user side of it is much simpler, simply rankt he candidates in the order you prefer.
In IRV, ranking a candidate higher can actually make them lose. This is impossible in condorcet.
With condorcet, let's say you ranked the candidates A, B, C, D. With this ranking, if you're looking at C, the order doesn't matter whatsoever between A and B, they both beat C.
If you truly prefer candidate A (Nader, suppose), above candidate B(Kerry), then ranking Nader above Kerry can only help Nader win against Kerry.
IRV has a lot of flaws, condorcet is the ideal method for voting, what's at debate is whether it's the ideal method for the united states, because of it's complexity in computing the results.
Approval I can sorta see that, but that's not really a bad thing. I think the better way to phrase it is 'everyone should have equal voting potential'. And everyone does.
The end-user view of condorcet is essentially the same as IRV, I don't see how you could argue that.
The problems with IRV are that it can do just the opposite of what you intend in certain situations.
Rating one candidate *higher* can actually make them lose. This should *never* happen, it's exactly the opposite of what a voting method should do.
I'll give you sources if you can't find them on your own.
Eventually, because of these problems, the two major politcal parties are justgoing to be saying "Put our candidate absolutely first or else you're going to be plagued byt hese problems and your vote won't count!" We'll have quite a bit of FUD, and quite a bit of scary stuff that's not FUD.
Condorcet would be much better. Heck, even approval's not bad.
Why must it be *IRV*? Why can't it be condorcet or something a little less flakey than IRV?
"Could have so much potential"? Slashcode is open source. What exactly is it about slashdot that makes it have more potential than say, you making your own site based on slashcode? Heck, you should have more potential because you don't have to develop your own code base to get started.
Stop freaking complaining, start your own site, or stop reading slashdot. In fact, do all three. They might not be the greatest editors in the world, but I think they sure do a damn better job than you would. At least you don't see them complaining about how repetitive, or idiotic the comments are.
This doesn't apply to the topic of conversation at all.
Here's an article dated January 2003 talking about how google decided to cooperate with the Chinese government, and why. This isn't new at all, in fact it's over a year old. Google's don't be evil policy hasn't changed, this is one decision which they decided it was less evil to cooperate.
_ pr .html
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.01/google
Uh-huh. And if someone gave you a cow or corn for free, would you consider butchering/shucking them then? I'm sure you wouldn't be complaining to the guy who gave 'em to you for free that he didn't butcher/shuck them for you.
Keep in mind, gaim is ran by volunteers. I'm sure if you cared to put some cash towards the gaim project, they'd be willing to start compiling mac binaries.
I might be wrong, but after a cursory glance at 'slub', what the guy in this article is doing is quite a bit different.
In Slub, it appears that they code the scripts beforehand, then decide while they're there when to play them, etc. The guy in this article is actually writing the scripts while on stage. I could definitely see myself doing the former, but the latter....wow, I mean, it's a lot more like improving (as mentioned in the article), because if something you do doesn't sound right, the whole audience hears it....if you've written everything beforehand, you *know* what it sounds like.
Programmatically generating music is nothing new (I'm pretty sure stuff was out in the 80s for it), but actually doing the programming while on stage is. At least, I think so.
Then, they know that *you* cracked it. I'm sure they woulda thought of that before, and would have designed the system so it would stand up through some legal action in the court. If they can logically prove that *you* distributed your copy, and your key, then you're liable for quite a bit of piracy...and well..you probably don't wanna go down that lane.
Now, even if that did happen, that release would still be out there. I never played HL1, so I don't know how multiplayer based it is, but if it's multiplayer enough, they could start blocking any keys that get pirated, much like unreal tournament does with cd-keys. Of course, this is assuming that the game stores the key after it's been decrypted...in some way or form...not quite sure how all that works out, but I'm sure there's a way, and I'm too lazy right now.