One word makes the whole difference - why most _successful_ terrorists are engineers? Because in a developing country most smart people go to engineering professions and being smart makes you much more likely to be successful at carrying out a terrorist act, especially when chemicals and bombs and/or air planes are involved. A pretty simple explanation that does not make all engineers terrorists.
If the code does not do what is supposed to do and noone can actually explain what it actually does and how, then he has a point. Some teams spend months designing object hierarchies and charting all kinds of UML diagrams to decide which class should subclass what other class. Other teams spend a week writing a simple, procedural, hackish program that does the job (poorly) and passes the tests (mostly) and after that spend a month or two re-factoring it into something proper, understandable, maintainable and documented and adding polish (passing all the tests, tweaking UI colors, adding the functions that user just though of as critical,...)
You can do whatever you want with GPL software, as long as you give your users the same freedoms that GPL software gave to you - which means you should licence that under GPL as well. If you want to restrict your users and grant them less rights, well then you are on your own and you should get legal advice.
While you might argue that in Slashdot, it will not fly in the courts. There is no difference between compiled and interpreted code as far as law is concerned.
You have no rights to use the GPL code, unless you agree to the GPL licence and thus its provisions regarding the derrived works. This is well established in legal precedents.
I don't think so. For one pirates are cool. So your argument is invalid. Also it is much easier to counteract MAFIAAs message if we 'embrace and extend' their message against them. They call us pirates, so we have fun like all the cool pirates do. If they can make stuff up, so can we! Piratez of the world unite and fight back the ninjas of MAFIAA! For the boooty!
GPL is a clever hack of the copyright system created because people did not agree with the predominant (then) system of knowledge lockdown. Stallman has stated in the past that if he would have the power to abolish copyright, he would do so, even considering the fact that this would also kill the power that GPL depends on, because this is what GPL was created to defeat in the first place. By hacking around it.
We already have screwdrivers with power detectors in them. So he just picked up a super advanced sonic screwdriver from the future with power wire and field detection and display technology and 'upgraded' that module in his lab to pick up and display other kinds of power too:) Possibly in the special 'display' mode where the power slider adjusts the type of detected power.
Most of the time it is pretty plausible that a sonic screwdriver with some detectors built in that has been in the hands of a tinkering timelord for age could do *THAT*.
And didn't you love what they did with the time jumping in the last episodes of this season? That was some solid (and fun) scifi stuff!
P.S. You *REALLY* must watch the Doctor Who Confidential episodes after each episode of the main show to really and trully seed all the genius and dedication that goes into making every part of that show brilliant.
I am talking about competition among companies. Job market is not a place to foster competition, it is open enough already by it nature. EU does not tell US what to do with your immigration, stop whining. Majority of US citizens are the people that want immigration reform, we here in the EU really don't care what you do there.
Again - lack of regulation. If two companies can give you a runaround and not provide you with a working service, that means that regulations are not in place to punish them for such anti-competitive behaviour. (Anti-competitive because one can assume that if you had the same company provide cable and the service they would fix it)
Less than 1% of Internet users upload photos to Flickr or upload vdeos to YouTube? Or watch their TV remotely using Sling? Might be that in the US it is true, just because of the crappy Internet most people have, however give grandma an HD camera and FTTH and she'll be Youtubing 1080p videos of grass growing in no time!
Actually, *you* don't have the rights to bear arms in the US. Read your Constitution - 'a well regulated militia' has the rights to bear arms. If you are not a member of a well regulated militia, you have jack squat.
You are using welfare (at least in the way that you are not mugged on the streets by the jobless), EU has college assistance for everyone (if you don't go to college, that's your own fault for being too dumb) and social security with guaranteed investments that are super secure government bonds and not in the crazy stock market, so it is going nowhere.
USA is instituting trade barriers because their companies lobbied your government to do so. Real government for the people is there to put up regulation that increases competition. That is exactly what is and has always been the norm in the EU.
If you take a bit of money from everyone and you don't have to turn a profit or do marketing, it is possible to provide a much better service to the society. Corporations waste way too much money on advertising (or lobbying), profit and elimination of competition to be effective. Corporations are flexible and fast to take in new markets, but if you need to provide an essential service to the society, there better be a public option. EU has proven that works the best.
I think you hit the nail on the head here. The problem is what you mean with 'return'.
For an ISP a return on their investment is how much people will pay for the service.
For the society as a whole there are other returns: people get better informed, better connected, get easier access to learning and knowledge (including farming info and crop prices), people have the possibility to look beyond their surroundings and look at the big picture, people can innovate and communicate their innovations to anyone in the whole world, people can even telecommute and work jobs that are simply not available locally. The society gets a much greater 'return' from investments into the Internet in rural areas.
Therefore it is the job of the government to enact such policies that would align the ROI of the ISP with the ROI of the society. Most likely by forcing the ISPs to provide service into larger areas that contain both high-ROI and low-ROI zones so that the average ISP ROI for the whole area would be comparable to the societies ROI for the whole area.
You wanna bet which of those two will be first to have 100% coverage of 100Mbit FTTH or even 50%? Size is not an argument when even the largest and densest US cities have crappy Internet by the world standards.
Cool, so how are the FTTH projects doing in New York? Chicago? LA? Other top 100 cities in the USA? They must have much higher population densities than Sweeden or Finland as a whole, so surely every larger USA city must have fiber to every home. Right?
Ditto the US Constitution. Read it sometime. Carefully. It gives the nation-states of the US the power to completely abolish the US, and go off on their separate routes. You are trying to make a difference where none exists.
That would be false. Read up on the Civil War. All the Southern states wanted was to secede from the Union. Only Texas has that 'right' due to the peculiar way it joined the US.
The US and EU are more alike than different. Consider that 75% of laws are now passed, not by state parliaments, but by the central EU. We have a near-identical arrangement in the US.
All laws in Europe are written and passed by state parliaments. Some parts of some of the laws are written to satisfy the recommendations of the EU (issued as EU Directives), however there is a huge degree of variance between the laws that is allowed in the directives and sometimes the laws are written outside the specification of the directive and then the country and EU negotiate - EU could fine the country some amount of money or just forget the infraction if the country offers something else in return.
So before you go off and compare US and EU, better learn something about both.
You apparently don't know bureaucrats - damaging infrastructure is a huge one. Have you tried bringing an Internet connection cable into a house without 'damaging infrastructure'? Like digging up roads or putting up cables on masts or even connecting to pre-existing copper in a house?
It would be much more effective to use the UK model - split up physical and logical providers: the cables must be owned by one company and the service must be provided by another, separate company. And the company that owns the cables must provide access to those cables at the same price to all companies that ask for it. Add a few provisions for switching service providers and about mandatory access to backbone channels for a fixed, government regulated rate and you're golden: every ISP in the whole country can compete in all markets at once.
So, you'll better spend several times more for a crappier Internet connection and be locked into a monopoly or a duopoly for the majority of your territory (and only be offered dial-up or sub1Mbps connections for crazy money in a lot of places) and also deal with actually having to fill your super complicated tax forms every year than have a few more percent of your paycheck withheld?
Oh and please tell me the next time you go and choose to spend some of your money building a transatlantic fiber cable. I'll go and watch.
Internet is not funded by taxes in most of these countries, the government only sets up the rules so that there is more competition on the market, for example by forcing companies that own copper going into homes or fiber going between cities to sell access to these services for the same price to all competitors (including internal buyers). So the big players can't buy out all ISPs in town, take control of all backbones going out of town and of all the copper going into people homes and then raise prices tenfold (over 5 years) while not investing a single penny in infrastructure development.
Also government can setup rules like, if you have 100k urban customers, you must also have 10k rural customers. Or a rule like - if you want access to this government owned and operated hyperspeed backbone, then you must offer same connection price to all people in this area (which includes both profitable urban locations and unprofitable rural locations).
And in some places where actual municipal networks do exist and thus is very cheap or free for people to connect to and is funded by public funds, such network is usually pretty slow, boring and cheap as hell to maintain.
Government is not bad - it is there to force companies to do unprofitable things that benefit the people.
That's exactly because US has no government regulation. In UK for example, the phone company is required to lease the copper lines that go into your house (and backbone) for a fixed , government regulated rate to any ISP in the country that wants to connect to you. Bring this concept to USA and even if you only apply it state by state, you'd have a skyrocketing of competition, because any small ISP in any part of the state would be able to connect and service any person in the whole state (provided that there is copper or fiber going into their home).
Slashdot Mirror
One word makes the whole difference - why most _successful_ terrorists are engineers? Because in a developing country most smart people go to engineering professions and being smart makes you much more likely to be successful at carrying out a terrorist act, especially when chemicals and bombs and/or air planes are involved. A pretty simple explanation that does not make all engineers terrorists.
True. And copyright infringement is not theft. Plain and simple. When A steals a bike from B, B has no bike anymore. It's just unauthorised sharing.
"DRM-free game reaches 10 times larger audience, offers a discount."
If the code does not do what is supposed to do and noone can actually explain what it actually does and how, then he has a point. Some teams spend months designing object hierarchies and charting all kinds of UML diagrams to decide which class should subclass what other class. Other teams spend a week writing a simple, procedural, hackish program that does the job (poorly) and passes the tests (mostly) and after that spend a month or two re-factoring it into something proper, understandable, maintainable and documented and adding polish (passing all the tests, tweaking UI colors, adding the functions that user just though of as critical, ...)
You can do whatever you want with GPL software, as long as you give your users the same freedoms that GPL software gave to you - which means you should licence that under GPL as well. If you want to restrict your users and grant them less rights, well then you are on your own and you should get legal advice.
While you might argue that in Slashdot, it will not fly in the courts. There is no difference between compiled and interpreted code as far as law is concerned.
You have no rights to use the GPL code, unless you agree to the GPL licence and thus its provisions regarding the derrived works. This is well established in legal precedents.
I don't think so. For one pirates are cool. So your argument is invalid. Also it is much easier to counteract MAFIAAs message if we 'embrace and extend' their message against them. They call us pirates, so we have fun like all the cool pirates do. If they can make stuff up, so can we! Piratez of the world unite and fight back the ninjas of MAFIAA! For the boooty!
GPL is a clever hack of the copyright system created because people did not agree with the predominant (then) system of knowledge lockdown. Stallman has stated in the past that if he would have the power to abolish copyright, he would do so, even considering the fact that this would also kill the power that GPL depends on, because this is what GPL was created to defeat in the first place. By hacking around it.
Marketing towards computer-savvy customers? Those that usually recommend ISP to others too?
We already have screwdrivers with power detectors in them. So he just picked up a super advanced sonic screwdriver from the future with power wire and field detection and display technology and 'upgraded' that module in his lab to pick up and display other kinds of power too :) Possibly in the special 'display' mode where the power slider adjusts the type of detected power.
Most of the time it is pretty plausible that a sonic screwdriver with some detectors built in that has been in the hands of a tinkering timelord for age could do *THAT*.
And didn't you love what they did with the time jumping in the last episodes of this season? That was some solid (and fun) scifi stuff!
P.S. You *REALLY* must watch the Doctor Who Confidential episodes after each episode of the main show to really and trully seed all the genius and dedication that goes into making every part of that show brilliant.
I see, so you found *that* fanfic comic too?
I am talking about competition among companies. Job market is not a place to foster competition, it is open enough already by it nature. EU does not tell US what to do with your immigration, stop whining. Majority of US citizens are the people that want immigration reform, we here in the EU really don't care what you do there.
Again - lack of regulation. If two companies can give you a runaround and not provide you with a working service, that means that regulations are not in place to punish them for such anti-competitive behaviour. (Anti-competitive because one can assume that if you had the same company provide cable and the service they would fix it)
Less than 1% of Internet users upload photos to Flickr or upload vdeos to YouTube? Or watch their TV remotely using Sling? Might be that in the US it is true, just because of the crappy Internet most people have, however give grandma an HD camera and FTTH and she'll be Youtubing 1080p videos of grass growing in no time!
Actually, *you* don't have the rights to bear arms in the US. Read your Constitution - 'a well regulated militia' has the rights to bear arms. If you are not a member of a well regulated militia, you have jack squat.
You are using welfare (at least in the way that you are not mugged on the streets by the jobless), EU has college assistance for everyone (if you don't go to college, that's your own fault for being too dumb) and social security with guaranteed investments that are super secure government bonds and not in the crazy stock market, so it is going nowhere.
USA is instituting trade barriers because their companies lobbied your government to do so. Real government for the people is there to put up regulation that increases competition. That is exactly what is and has always been the norm in the EU.
If you take a bit of money from everyone and you don't have to turn a profit or do marketing, it is possible to provide a much better service to the society. Corporations waste way too much money on advertising (or lobbying), profit and elimination of competition to be effective. Corporations are flexible and fast to take in new markets, but if you need to provide an essential service to the society, there better be a public option. EU has proven that works the best.
I think you hit the nail on the head here. The problem is what you mean with 'return'.
For an ISP a return on their investment is how much people will pay for the service.
For the society as a whole there are other returns: people get better informed, better connected, get easier access to learning and knowledge (including farming info and crop prices), people have the possibility to look beyond their surroundings and look at the big picture, people can innovate and communicate their innovations to anyone in the whole world, people can even telecommute and work jobs that are simply not available locally. The society gets a much greater 'return' from investments into the Internet in rural areas.
Therefore it is the job of the government to enact such policies that would align the ROI of the ISP with the ROI of the society. Most likely by forcing the ISPs to provide service into larger areas that contain both high-ROI and low-ROI zones so that the average ISP ROI for the whole area would be comparable to the societies ROI for the whole area.
You wanna bet which of those two will be first to have 100% coverage of 100Mbit FTTH or even 50%? Size is not an argument when even the largest and densest US cities have crappy Internet by the world standards.
Cool, so how are the FTTH projects doing in New York? Chicago? LA? Other top 100 cities in the USA? They must have much higher population densities than Sweeden or Finland as a whole, so surely every larger USA city must have fiber to every home. Right?
Ditto the US Constitution. Read it sometime. Carefully. It gives the nation-states of the US the power to completely abolish the US, and go off on their separate routes. You are trying to make a difference where none exists.
That would be false. Read up on the Civil War. All the Southern states wanted was to secede from the Union. Only Texas has that 'right' due to the peculiar way it joined the US.
The US and EU are more alike than different. Consider that 75% of laws are now passed, not by state parliaments, but by the central EU. We have a near-identical arrangement in the US.
All laws in Europe are written and passed by state parliaments. Some parts of some of the laws are written to satisfy the recommendations of the EU (issued as EU Directives), however there is a huge degree of variance between the laws that is allowed in the directives and sometimes the laws are written outside the specification of the directive and then the country and EU negotiate - EU could fine the country some amount of money or just forget the infraction if the country offers something else in return.
So before you go off and compare US and EU, better learn something about both.
You apparently don't know bureaucrats - damaging infrastructure is a huge one. Have you tried bringing an Internet connection cable into a house without 'damaging infrastructure'? Like digging up roads or putting up cables on masts or even connecting to pre-existing copper in a house?
It would be much more effective to use the UK model - split up physical and logical providers: the cables must be owned by one company and the service must be provided by another, separate company. And the company that owns the cables must provide access to those cables at the same price to all companies that ask for it. Add a few provisions for switching service providers and about mandatory access to backbone channels for a fixed, government regulated rate and you're golden: every ISP in the whole country can compete in all markets at once.
So, you'll better spend several times more for a crappier Internet connection and be locked into a monopoly or a duopoly for the majority of your territory (and only be offered dial-up or sub1Mbps connections for crazy money in a lot of places) and also deal with actually having to fill your super complicated tax forms every year than have a few more percent of your paycheck withheld?
Oh and please tell me the next time you go and choose to spend some of your money building a transatlantic fiber cable. I'll go and watch.
Internet is not funded by taxes in most of these countries, the government only sets up the rules so that there is more competition on the market, for example by forcing companies that own copper going into homes or fiber going between cities to sell access to these services for the same price to all competitors (including internal buyers). So the big players can't buy out all ISPs in town, take control of all backbones going out of town and of all the copper going into people homes and then raise prices tenfold (over 5 years) while not investing a single penny in infrastructure development.
Also government can setup rules like, if you have 100k urban customers, you must also have 10k rural customers. Or a rule like - if you want access to this government owned and operated hyperspeed backbone, then you must offer same connection price to all people in this area (which includes both profitable urban locations and unprofitable rural locations).
And in some places where actual municipal networks do exist and thus is very cheap or free for people to connect to and is funded by public funds, such network is usually pretty slow, boring and cheap as hell to maintain.
Government is not bad - it is there to force companies to do unprofitable things that benefit the people.
That's exactly because US has no government regulation. In UK for example, the phone company is required to lease the copper lines that go into your house (and backbone) for a fixed , government regulated rate to any ISP in the country that wants to connect to you. Bring this concept to USA and even if you only apply it state by state, you'd have a skyrocketing of competition, because any small ISP in any part of the state would be able to connect and service any person in the whole state (provided that there is copper or fiber going into their home).