If I say a baseball player stole second base, and some Slashdot troll says "no he didn't, running from first base to second base isn't illegal under local larceny statutes", you'd pop in to defend him, wouldn't you?
Is there anything stopping you today from producing your own hit movie and releasing it without DRM?
You mean besides not having millions of dollars to spend to produce and distribute that hit movie? Well, not having the talent to do so. But other than that...
Of course, to you a "hit movie" is probably something that's gotten more than 100 views on youtube. Those of us more grounded in reality might have a different definition of "hit".
The police had no access whatsoever to records of any transactions that didn't match their specific criteria. The didn't "examine" these records in any sense, and know nothing about them except that they don't match these specific criteria. There was absolutely no violation of the privacy of anyone who's not now a suspect.
Now, you may be able to argue that it's not the intent of the privacy law to allow the police to say "we have an unknown number of anonymous suspects whose identities we can get through this specific request for information" rather than "we suspect this specific individual of committing this specific crime, and we'd like this specific information to prove that", and you might have a reasonable case there, but that's a whole other issue. I'm not a lawyer and I can't read German, so I'm not about to try to parse their law to form an opinion on that.
Not quite. Americans' "English units" actually differ from Imperial units for volume, so the 2 systems are not exactly the same thing. The measures of length and weight are the same, except that very few Americans will have any idea what a Brit means if they say something weighs "12 stone".
The scientific community has been using metric, even in the US, for years.
Unfortunately, the manufacturing sector is as stubborn as the rest of the country. As mentioned in TFA, the Mars Climate Orbiter debacle was not caused by NASA not using metric, but rather because they were using metric and confusion ensued when one of their boneheaded vendors wasn't.
Right, those non-suspects records were "ploughed through" in the same sense that if the police requested one record with a specific transaction ID from the creit card company's database, all of the records were "ploughed through" when the query to retrieve that record was run. You're either a troll, have no idea how a database works, or don't know how to read.
Umm no. "With contract" means that's the discounted price you get on the hardware when you sign the contract, not that you don't have to pay Cingular's fees too.
It might not be so much an issue of Apple "letting in" the other wireless companies as the carriers not wanting a phone like this. I can assure you that nothing I've seen from Verizon Wireless makes me believe they'd ever be willing to sell a phone that's able to sync with a PC in any way. They'd sooner go bankrupt than let one of their customers rip MP3s from a CD and put them on their phone instead of paying Verizon $2 per track to download a crappy copy that can't be played on other devices. Your carrier may vary.
Sure, and I've known people who called 3.5" floppies "hard disks" too, because they're hard and they're disks. That doesn't mean those people weren't idiots.
If they don't funciton properly using Firefox, how is changing what useragent Firefox claims to be going to have an effect?
If the sites actually do function just fine in Firefox but refuse to do so unless you trick them, you should probably notify the site's administrators or stop using the damn site.
I believe OP's contention was that the point of the GPL is that the person doing the actual work decides that they don't need to be paid for doing that work, and that they insist that no one else should make money from their work, either. It's not.
Granted, releasing your source code with a BSD license probably makes it a lot easier for others to profit from your work, as they don't have to compete with people who want to take the changes they add on to your work and undercut you on price, but neither license has anything to do with the right of a third party to try to make money; the difference is in whether the new not-free-as-in-beer software must remain Open Source.
If you don't want anyone profiting from your work, you don't GPL it, you use a license that forbids commercial use.
Unless RMS is being a total hypocrite by not sharing the secret to immortality he's discovered with anyone outside the FSF, no one can really predict whether or not the FSF will one day change into something completely different, but retain the right to release licenses called "GPL".
In any event, anyone releasing software under the GPL whose primary concern isn't with the Public's right to use their software and any future revisions thereof is probably missing the point of the license.
Or, you know, not. If the Democrats in Congress wanted to impeach Bush, they'd do it. "Forcing" them to refer a bill to a committee where it will never been seen again is really just wasting your time.
Thomas Jefferson badly paraphrased Ben Franklin just like everyone on Slashdot does? Neat. But I bet Alexander Hamilton modded him -1 Redundant, the bastard.
Have you seen the Supreme Court lately? At least 4 of them would be happy to let Bush cross out the entire 4th Amendment from the original copy of the Constititution in the National Archives with a magic marker, and he could probably get a 5th to go along with him if he claims that he really needed to read everyone's first class mail to keep the Terrorists from killing us all.
Punch card ballots may be subject to user error, such that there can be an election so close that it actually matters who the incompetent voters meant to vote for, and whether they did a good enough job in expressing that preference for their votes to count. This is not a security issue.
An electronic ballot with no paper trail can be changed with no evidence whatsoever that such a change has been made. This is a security issue. See the difference?
Slashdot Mirror
Well, yeah, I'm apparently unable to type "506" accurately, so I'm wrong too. Oh the irony.
However, I'm fairly certain his insistence that copyright violation is absolutely positively never a crime wasn't a typo.
Title 17, Section 505 of the US Code disagrees with you. You're wrong. Have a nice day.
The OP used the word "steal" not "theft".
If I say a baseball player stole second base, and some Slashdot troll says "no he didn't, running from first base to second base isn't illegal under local larceny statutes", you'd pop in to defend him, wouldn't you?
Is there anything stopping you today from producing your own hit movie and releasing it without DRM?
You mean besides not having millions of dollars to spend to produce and distribute that hit movie? Well, not having the talent to do so. But other than that...
Of course, to you a "hit movie" is probably something that's gotten more than 100 views on youtube. Those of us more grounded in reality might have a different definition of "hit".
Except that they did no such thing.
The police had no access whatsoever to records of any transactions that didn't match their specific criteria. The didn't "examine" these records in any sense, and know nothing about them except that they don't match these specific criteria. There was absolutely no violation of the privacy of anyone who's not now a suspect.
Now, you may be able to argue that it's not the intent of the privacy law to allow the police to say "we have an unknown number of anonymous suspects whose identities we can get through this specific request for information" rather than "we suspect this specific individual of committing this specific crime, and we'd like this specific information to prove that", and you might have a reasonable case there, but that's a whole other issue. I'm not a lawyer and I can't read German, so I'm not about to try to parse their law to form an opinion on that.
Not quite. Americans' "English units" actually differ from Imperial units for volume, so the 2 systems are not exactly the same thing. The measures of length and weight are the same, except that very few Americans will have any idea what a Brit means if they say something weighs "12 stone".
The scientific community has been using metric, even in the US, for years.
Unfortunately, the manufacturing sector is as stubborn as the rest of the country. As mentioned in TFA, the Mars Climate Orbiter debacle was not caused by NASA not using metric, but rather because they were using metric and confusion ensued when one of their boneheaded vendors wasn't.
Right, those non-suspects records were "ploughed through" in the same sense that if the police requested one record with a specific transaction ID from the creit card company's database, all of the records were "ploughed through" when the query to retrieve that record was run. You're either a troll, have no idea how a database works, or don't know how to read.
You clearly have no idea what "natural selection" means. I swear the Intelligent Design nutjobs probably understand Darwin better than you do.
Umm no. "With contract" means that's the discounted price you get on the hardware when you sign the contract, not that you don't have to pay Cingular's fees too.
It might not be so much an issue of Apple "letting in" the other wireless companies as the carriers not wanting a phone like this. I can assure you that nothing I've seen from Verizon Wireless makes me believe they'd ever be willing to sell a phone that's able to sync with a PC in any way. They'd sooner go bankrupt than let one of their customers rip MP3s from a CD and put them on their phone instead of paying Verizon $2 per track to download a crappy copy that can't be played on other devices. Your carrier may vary.
I'm sure if you adjust your meds you can get your imaginary girlfriend to stop with the hallucinated eye rolling.
Did Microsoft acquire MIT when I wasn't looking?
Holding out? I'm already using the Web3.0.2 beta. It's great.
I prefer "PAM" because they're really only pseudorandom.
Sure, and I've known people who called 3.5" floppies "hard disks" too, because they're hard and they're disks. That doesn't mean those people weren't idiots.
A cushion of air. Duh.
If they don't funciton properly using Firefox, how is changing what useragent Firefox claims to be going to have an effect?
If the sites actually do function just fine in Firefox but refuse to do so unless you trick them, you should probably notify the site's administrators or stop using the damn site.
I believe OP's contention was that the point of the GPL is that the person doing the actual work decides that they don't need to be paid for doing that work, and that they insist that no one else should make money from their work, either. It's not.
Granted, releasing your source code with a BSD license probably makes it a lot easier for others to profit from your work, as they don't have to compete with people who want to take the changes they add on to your work and undercut you on price, but neither license has anything to do with the right of a third party to try to make money; the difference is in whether the new not-free-as-in-beer software must remain Open Source.
If you don't want anyone profiting from your work, you don't GPL it, you use a license that forbids commercial use.
Unless RMS is being a total hypocrite by not sharing the secret to immortality he's discovered with anyone outside the FSF, no one can really predict whether or not the FSF will one day change into something completely different, but retain the right to release licenses called "GPL".
In any event, anyone releasing software under the GPL whose primary concern isn't with the Public's right to use their software and any future revisions thereof is probably missing the point of the license.
Or, you know, not. If the Democrats in Congress wanted to impeach Bush, they'd do it. "Forcing" them to refer a bill to a committee where it will never been seen again is really just wasting your time.
Thomas Jefferson badly paraphrased Ben Franklin just like everyone on Slashdot does? Neat. But I bet Alexander Hamilton modded him -1 Redundant, the bastard.
Have you seen the Supreme Court lately? At least 4 of them would be happy to let Bush cross out the entire 4th Amendment from the original copy of the Constititution in the National Archives with a magic marker, and he could probably get a 5th to go along with him if he claims that he really needed to read everyone's first class mail to keep the Terrorists from killing us all.
Punch card ballots may be subject to user error, such that there can be an election so close that it actually matters who the incompetent voters meant to vote for, and whether they did a good enough job in expressing that preference for their votes to count. This is not a security issue.
An electronic ballot with no paper trail can be changed with no evidence whatsoever that such a change has been made. This is a security issue. See the difference?
Red Hat seems to be making money just fine, thanks.