Nah, a fake ID is illegal full stop. It's a similar idea to banknotes having to have "SAMPLE" written on them even if they're obviously not banknotes ie on other printed material - it is (afaik, ianal) illegal to reproduce or attempt to reproduce or imitate any official document even if it has incorrect information. For example, any form of 'fake ID' runs afoul of this but there is nothing to stop me creating my own 'ID Card' with my false information, as long as it doesn't look too much like an official one.
Makes me wonder though what makes this website legal. From the WHOIS data I could gather, it even seems to be hosted in California... are the IDs sold there really that much different from real IDs?
So in my opinion, the economic case for OSS is at least as clear as for proprietary software - except in the relatively uncommon case of a company developing software to sell off the shelf.
And those are exactly the companies that would get screwed a million times around by the abolition of copyright.
These are corporate managers who only have dollar signs in their eyes. They don't see how anyone would possibly develop or create anything without wanting to make MORE money. Sure, some developers end up making money but some don't off of their OSS, yet the fact that someone would just want to volunteer their time and create something completely escapes these individuals. This goes actually says quite a bit about _them_.
Would you please share your secrets on how you keep yourself fed if not by buying food with money? Now, wouldn't it be grand if you could acquire said money by developing OSS? What the hell is wrong with the idea of making money? I have to write proprietary software for a living because that's where the money is, and I try to find the time to do OSS when I can. The overall amount of OSS produced could me much bigger if more people could do that for a living.
On the other hand, as soon as money is involved, some OSS developers become childish and want it all for themselves. See what Dunc Tank has done to Etch. People who were developing for free before decided it was no longer worth it to do it for free because somebody was being paid.
chase.com does that on their front page. Browser gives the user NO indication that the form is secure, and to be honest - I usually place a bad account number and password combo to force the "https" page up. Try it. Put in 4/4 and hit log on, and it'll redirect you to the full secure page....
American Express Canada is just as bad. They expect you to log on on an unencrypted connection (and they even put a little padlock icon next to the "login" button). I've mentionned it several times to their customer service, but they don't seem to care. There used to be a time when adding the "s" to "http" manually would trigger an expired certificate alert, but I think they fixed that now. I managed to find a login form that uses HTTPS and put a bookmark on that.
As a sidenote, we Canadians do have both Second Cup and (Star|Four|Six)buck's (whichever "crack in a cup" refers to). They're generally found in malls and shopping centres (not standalone stores) and mainly popular with fancy lads who make their own soap. Correct me if I'm mistaken, but this isn't much different from how it is south of the 49th...
For all I know, south of the 49th, there's pretty much only Starbucks. At least up here, we still got plenty of choices for coffee. Tim Horton's, Dunkin' Donuts, Second Cup, Starbuck, Van Houtte, Presse Café, Cafe Depot, Café Suprême, etc. If you don't like Starbuck here, you still got plenty of options. If you don't like Starbuck south, you're screwed.
All that being said. The reason for the second amendment is to protect us from the government when it *inevitably* goes evil on us.
For some reason, I thought your government had gone evil on you a couple of years ago. Nobody has done anything with his guns to change that though. I'm still waiting for the show
Gun nut: I don't want no PATRIOT act or the gov'nment 'tapping my phone. Let's take our guns and head to the White House!
Crowd of gun nuts: HURRAY!
FBI: Yeah... I don't think it's gonna happen
I don't believe that's the only way. It's not 1985 anymore. Political campaigns are able to raise millions of dollars from individual contributions, without even guaranteeing anyone that their money will produce any useful result, thanks largely to the power of the internet as an organizational tool. Sellaband does it with music, although their model isn't the greatest either. Finding those 100,000 people in advance isn't trivial, but it isn't an insurmountable obstacle either.
I'd really like to see a private company tell its potential customers "Give us $100 today, and we'll give you a free software in 10 years". What do you think the odds are that those same customers will simply say "Make your software on your own, and we'll pay you when you're done". Honestly, ask around (don't just ask geeks, ask casual people too). How many people do you know would be happy to pay $100 today to buy software (or to buy services to develop software) which will only be available 10 years from now.
It works just as well (or better) if your only metric is how much software gets written, or how quickly. But consider the fact that the first model must be propped up by a complicated system of laws that stifle freedom of speech, restrict technical and artistic innovation, and eventually lead to lawsuits against 10-year-old girls and C&D letters for 16-byte hex strings, while the second model is inherently stable. Just how much are you willing to give up to get software written a little faster?
What the *AA is doing is quite insane really. My company relies on copyright laws alone to sell software licenses. DRM and DMCA is taking it to the extreme, and I do not agree with that either. But then, this kind of madness only happens in the US (for now), so I'm safe from that (for now). I find it a little harsh though that you put all proprietary software in the same basket as the MAFIAA. You ask how much I'm willing to give up to get software written a little faster. I don't support suing 10 year old girls, and I don't believe software companies do that quite often, even in the US. But how much would you be willing to give up to get software written at all? The GIMP is quite good, but it tries to clone Photoshop. What would it have cloned if Photoshop hadn't been there first? Rhythmbox is simply an iTunes ripoff, and OpenOffice.org is trying to match MS-Office feature-by-feature. Heck, even Linus didn't try anything new, he simply wanted to clone MINIX.
Proprietary software and Free software both have their place in this universe, and they somewhat depend on each other in the computer ecosystem. I respect both, I use both, and I develop both.
The viable model would've been to realize from the beginning that you're performing a service, not manufacturing a product, and find enough people who are willing to pay you (or at least sign an agreement to pay) to produce the information in the first place.
Sometimes it's easier to find 100,000 people willing to pay $100 than to find 10 people willing to pay $1,000,000 or 100 people to pay $100,000. The time it would have taken to find enough people with enough money to secure the funds to invest in R&D and provide the service (produce the software) is just ridiculous.
You can't personally contact 100,000 people. The way to reach them is to put a box on store's shelves and let them buy your software.
I respect OSS, I use it and try to contribute to it. However, I do not despise proprietary software. If what I need to do is done by a proprietary software, then I buy it and I use it. It's simply using the best tool for the job. I know I'm gonna get modded Troll for this, but the business model of "let's do the R&D right away and let many people pay small amounts of money afterwards" works just as well as "let's try to secure the money first and then do a software with whatever money we got". Difference is, the proprietary model gets the R&D done much sooner, and much faster, and that is why, for software that requires a fair amount of R&D and innovation, while there is almost always a GPL alternative, the proprietary software is ususally more advanced, both in features and in quality (e.g. Excel, Photoshop, Maya, object files linkers (GNU ld doesn't even support incremental linking), videogames, etc.)
And then there's the third group you conveniently ignore: the genuine activists who truly care about the freedom to share information, even information you've paid for. The ones who believe that the concept of requiring permission to share a number is inherently unjust and offensive, whether that number is a few bytes (like this key) or a few gigabytes (like a movie).
Ok, say I'm an information maker. That's what I do for a living, I create information, and I sell that information (a couple hundred of megabytes worth of information) to people. This particular information takes the form of software. In the past 10 years, it has cost me several million dollars in R&D to produce this information. I let people use that information if they pay me $100. In exchange for their money, I give them a CD which contains the information I made in the past 10 years.
Explain to me what is the rationale for me wanting you to share that information freely with the whole world now. I spend millions of dollars, you give me $100, and you would like me to let you give it away for free to just about everyone who wants it. Sure the idea is noble, but where's the economic viability in that business model?
I am in no way supporting the censorship of this key, but they actually could technically get into legal trouble over it being on their site. The DMCA outlaws the distribution of information that allows others to crack encryption algorithms.
What if, as a Canadian citizen living in Canada, I post the number on my website, which is hosted on a Canadian server, and you view the website from an American computer. Who's in trouble? Am I "exporting" illegal stuff to the US, or are you "importing" it?
Many of the sites posting the numbers are not hosted in DMCA-aware countries. What will the "big man" do about those? When the Pirate Bay gets a hold of that number, what will happen on a legal point of view?
From SCRATCH? Which video card does said game engine interface to? Or did they write said game engine on top of an OS with support for multiple graphics cards?
Right... cause nothing can be built from scratch now since everything depends on something? If I want to make a Hello World application from scratch, should I build a whole operating system too? And then, that still wouldn't be from scratch right? I need to design and build the CPU first. Oh, and I guess I have to mine the raw material too? Oh, and that's still cheating, cause the material was already there, so I guess I need to cram up a whole lotta energy into a singularity and create a big bang first, right? All that for Hello World.
Building on top of an operating system can still be considered building from scratch.
You're right. I didn't think Qt was still being distributed under the QPL, but I found this:
# If you wish to use the Qt Open Source Edition, you must contribute all your source code to the open source community in accordance with the GPL when your application is distributed.
# For historical reasons, the Qt/X11 version is also available under the QPL license. We do not recommend the use of the QPL, especially if you are planning for your Open Source software to be distributed on Mac OS X or Windows.
Ah, thanks. I didn't realize KDE uses the LGPL license for its libraries -- do they make use of Qt's QPL, then? I was under the assumption that linking against a GPL'ed library would require your application (or extending library) to be GPL'ed as well.
Qt is dual-licensed. Anything you link to Qt has to be GPL, unless you buy a commercial license from Trolltech.
KDE links to Qt, and KDE is LGPL. KDE's LGPL is compatible with the Qt's GPL. Therefore, you can develop (L)GPL software and link it against KDE's LGPL and Qt's GPL. You can also develp commercial software and link it against KDE's LGPL and Qt's commercial license.
Not a state of fear, a state of CYA. Would you want to be the teacher who saw this kid's essay and didn't do anything, after he goes on a shooting spree? DIYD, DIYD. If you don't do anything and it happens, you are skewered because you didn't. If you do something, you are skewered because you "overreacted" to someone who "would never do that kind of thing". Unfortunately, you have no tools to determine who would and would not actually do "that kind of thing", so you are left to guess. And you cannot tell after you act if he would have done it, because it was prevented by your actions, maybe.
The problem here isn't that the teacher overreacted. She did what she had to do and warned the principal. Then from what I understand, a committee talked about the boy's paper and to evaluate how they should react. This is also correct. Their decision was to call the police, and this is where things started to go wrong. They should have called either his parents, or a psychologist, or both. And the police is also wrong. They should have replied "we can't arrest him, what he did is neither a crime nor a civil offense, get a psychologist instead".
The teacher was right to react, it's the police that got it wrong.
Free is a relative term. $50 is free. $2500 software packages that run on it are not. Even Vista at $200 or whatever is still more expensive than hardware.
Give me a 4-core CPU with 2GB RAM and most of south-bridge for $50, and I'll be more than happy to... install free software on it. Although I do wish it will happen in 10 years, I still doubt it.
A couple of years ago, we thought the gigahertz race was over, and the price of chips would fall. Oh it did, and I can get me a P4-3GHz for well under $100 today. But the new thing is the Core 2 Duo, and the Core 2 Quad. And new applications will implement a whole lot of bells and whistles to make sure you "need" 4 cores. Then they'll invent a new type of RAM, and a new GPU technology... And we'll eventually have optical processors, or quantum processors, and the CPU+RAM+south-bridge combo you will get for $50 is gonna be way obsolete. Heck, even today I bet I can build a computer from pieces for less than the price of Vista Ultimate, but it won't be half powerful enough Vista won't run on it.
Hardware makers are not about to go broke. They will always sell older tech at very affordable price, but they will also always have high-end stuff at ridiculously high prices.
Gates is right. Sooner or later HW consolidation will be that the CPU will run everything and have everything. Just see the world of microcontrollers. You've got your entire bus, memory, peripherals right on the chip. It is just a matter if time before Intel or AMD start to ship a CPU with
* CPU
* RAM
* all of south bridge.
[...]
I'll give this 10-20 years, but it will be the reality.
Yeah, so? You expect Intel or AMD to give you such a chip for (almost) free? That's what Gates is saying.
I think one of Microsoft's big problems has they have overpriced the boxed versions of Vista. It is a crazy state of affairs when my local computer shop is selling complete PCs cheaper than the boxed versions of Vista.
But then, isn't that Bill Gates' vision of the future? Hardware will be free and people will only pay for software.
Many modern distro, when installed as a "Workstation", does not even install a compiler by default.
Really? Which ones? More importantly for those that have a desktop option instead of workstation, do they include a compiler?
Fedora (4, 5 and 6), Ubuntu (Dapper and Edgy, haven't tested Feisty yet) and Novell SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop. With all the default installer options (that is, boot from the disk and click next-next-next-next...), none of them install gcc. I haven't tested OpenSuSE, Mandriva and Debian, but of all the majors, I would only expect Debian to include gcc in the standard "desktop" install.
And while gcc is very easy to install on just about any distro, telling a non-geek Linux user they need to install a compiler to use some desktop applications (WTF is a compiler? they ask...) will leave some of them baffled.
And if you don't want to provide the sources (and there are valid reasons for that), binary compatibility across distros is hard to achieve.
This has not been my experience, but even if it is true in the general case, that does not make it all that hard to simply recompile for the top 10 or whatever and distribute binaries for them.
While compiling once for every distro in the top 10 might be possible for some, it requires a lot of logistics for commercial software. Plus, we distribute 3 binaries on 1 CD, one for Windows, one for OSX, and one for Linux. Putting 10 binaries for Linux would require multiple CDs, or a DVD, or maybe even multiple DVDs. And posting updates on the website needs extra links for each distro, and that takes for granted that the customer actually knows what distro he uses. Recompiling on 10 distros is a piece of cake compared to the trouble of distributing those 10 binaries and dealing with the end user.
As far as licensing goes, with GTK+/GNOME you can develop proprietary applications; with Qt, if you want to do so you have to buy a commercial license, and with KDE.. you cannot. Simple as that.
You got misinformed there. You can develop proprietary applications with KDE. KDE is LGPL'd, and the LGPL allows proprietary applications. The caveat though is that KDE links to Qt, and Qt is either GPL or commercial. So in order to develop a proprietary application with KDE, you need a commercial license for Qt, but it is possible.
Slashdot Mirror
Makes me wonder though what makes this website legal. From the WHOIS data I could gather, it even seems to be hosted in California... are the IDs sold there really that much different from real IDs?
And those are exactly the companies that would get screwed a million times around by the abolition of copyright.
Would you please share your secrets on how you keep yourself fed if not by buying food with money? Now, wouldn't it be grand if you could acquire said money by developing OSS? What the hell is wrong with the idea of making money? I have to write proprietary software for a living because that's where the money is, and I try to find the time to do OSS when I can. The overall amount of OSS produced could me much bigger if more people could do that for a living.
On the other hand, as soon as money is involved, some OSS developers become childish and want it all for themselves. See what Dunc Tank has done to Etch. People who were developing for free before decided it was no longer worth it to do it for free because somebody was being paid.
American Express Canada is just as bad. They expect you to log on on an unencrypted connection (and they even put a little padlock icon next to the "login" button). I've mentionned it several times to their customer service, but they don't seem to care. There used to be a time when adding the "s" to "http" manually would trigger an expired certificate alert, but I think they fixed that now. I managed to find a login form that uses HTTPS and put a bookmark on that.
Yep.
For all I know, south of the 49th, there's pretty much only Starbucks. At least up here, we still got plenty of choices for coffee. Tim Horton's, Dunkin' Donuts, Second Cup, Starbuck, Van Houtte, Presse Café, Cafe Depot, Café Suprême, etc. If you don't like Starbuck here, you still got plenty of options. If you don't like Starbuck south, you're screwed.
What? Are you telling me your US coins aren't created out of thin air by God Himself? "In God We Trust", I thought that was His signature...
Ha! Reminds me of a funny quote I read somewhere :
At the beginning, there was nothing. God said "Let there be light!". There was still nothing, but now you could see it.
For some reason, I thought your government had gone evil on you a couple of years ago. Nobody has done anything with his guns to change that though. I'm still waiting for the show
Gun nut: I don't want no PATRIOT act or the gov'nment 'tapping my phone. Let's take our guns and head to the White House!
Crowd of gun nuts: HURRAY!
FBI: Yeah... I don't think it's gonna happen
Only until Americans realize getting rid of things that kill you also means getting rid of guns, then they'll go all Second Amendment on you.
How about, I don't want to be using a mobile phone browser when I'm on my desktop?
I'd really like to see a private company tell its potential customers "Give us $100 today, and we'll give you a free software in 10 years". What do you think the odds are that those same customers will simply say "Make your software on your own, and we'll pay you when you're done". Honestly, ask around (don't just ask geeks, ask casual people too). How many people do you know would be happy to pay $100 today to buy software (or to buy services to develop software) which will only be available 10 years from now.
What the *AA is doing is quite insane really. My company relies on copyright laws alone to sell software licenses. DRM and DMCA is taking it to the extreme, and I do not agree with that either. But then, this kind of madness only happens in the US (for now), so I'm safe from that (for now). I find it a little harsh though that you put all proprietary software in the same basket as the MAFIAA. You ask how much I'm willing to give up to get software written a little faster. I don't support suing 10 year old girls, and I don't believe software companies do that quite often, even in the US. But how much would you be willing to give up to get software written at all? The GIMP is quite good, but it tries to clone Photoshop. What would it have cloned if Photoshop hadn't been there first? Rhythmbox is simply an iTunes ripoff, and OpenOffice.org is trying to match MS-Office feature-by-feature. Heck, even Linus didn't try anything new, he simply wanted to clone MINIX.
Proprietary software and Free software both have their place in this universe, and they somewhat depend on each other in the computer ecosystem. I respect both, I use both, and I develop both.
Sometimes it's easier to find 100,000 people willing to pay $100 than to find 10 people willing to pay $1,000,000 or 100 people to pay $100,000. The time it would have taken to find enough people with enough money to secure the funds to invest in R&D and provide the service (produce the software) is just ridiculous.
You can't personally contact 100,000 people. The way to reach them is to put a box on store's shelves and let them buy your software.
I respect OSS, I use it and try to contribute to it. However, I do not despise proprietary software. If what I need to do is done by a proprietary software, then I buy it and I use it. It's simply using the best tool for the job. I know I'm gonna get modded Troll for this, but the business model of "let's do the R&D right away and let many people pay small amounts of money afterwards" works just as well as "let's try to secure the money first and then do a software with whatever money we got". Difference is, the proprietary model gets the R&D done much sooner, and much faster, and that is why, for software that requires a fair amount of R&D and innovation, while there is almost always a GPL alternative, the proprietary software is ususally more advanced, both in features and in quality (e.g. Excel, Photoshop, Maya, object files linkers (GNU ld doesn't even support incremental linking), videogames, etc.)
Ok, say I'm an information maker. That's what I do for a living, I create information, and I sell that information (a couple hundred of megabytes worth of information) to people. This particular information takes the form of software. In the past 10 years, it has cost me several million dollars in R&D to produce this information. I let people use that information if they pay me $100. In exchange for their money, I give them a CD which contains the information I made in the past 10 years.
Explain to me what is the rationale for me wanting you to share that information freely with the whole world now. I spend millions of dollars, you give me $100, and you would like me to let you give it away for free to just about everyone who wants it. Sure the idea is noble, but where's the economic viability in that business model?
What if, as a Canadian citizen living in Canada, I post the number on my website, which is hosted on a Canadian server, and you view the website from an American computer. Who's in trouble? Am I "exporting" illegal stuff to the US, or are you "importing" it?
Many of the sites posting the numbers are not hosted in DMCA-aware countries. What will the "big man" do about those? When the Pirate Bay gets a hold of that number, what will happen on a legal point of view?
Right... cause nothing can be built from scratch now since everything depends on something? If I want to make a Hello World application from scratch, should I build a whole operating system too? And then, that still wouldn't be from scratch right? I need to design and build the CPU first. Oh, and I guess I have to mine the raw material too? Oh, and that's still cheating, cause the material was already there, so I guess I need to cram up a whole lotta energy into a singularity and create a big bang first, right? All that for Hello World.
Building on top of an operating system can still be considered building from scratch.
Qt is dual-licensed. Anything you link to Qt has to be GPL, unless you buy a commercial license from Trolltech.
KDE links to Qt, and KDE is LGPL. KDE's LGPL is compatible with the Qt's GPL. Therefore, you can develop (L)GPL software and link it against KDE's LGPL and Qt's GPL. You can also develp commercial software and link it against KDE's LGPL and Qt's commercial license.
The problem here isn't that the teacher overreacted. She did what she had to do and warned the principal. Then from what I understand, a committee talked about the boy's paper and to evaluate how they should react. This is also correct. Their decision was to call the police, and this is where things started to go wrong. They should have called either his parents, or a psychologist, or both. And the police is also wrong. They should have replied "we can't arrest him, what he did is neither a crime nor a civil offense, get a psychologist instead".
The teacher was right to react, it's the police that got it wrong.
Give me a 4-core CPU with 2GB RAM and most of south-bridge for $50, and I'll be more than happy to... install free software on it. Although I do wish it will happen in 10 years, I still doubt it.
A couple of years ago, we thought the gigahertz race was over, and the price of chips would fall. Oh it did, and I can get me a P4-3GHz for well under $100 today. But the new thing is the Core 2 Duo, and the Core 2 Quad. And new applications will implement a whole lot of bells and whistles to make sure you "need" 4 cores. Then they'll invent a new type of RAM, and a new GPU technology... And we'll eventually have optical processors, or quantum processors, and the CPU+RAM+south-bridge combo you will get for $50 is gonna be way obsolete. Heck, even today I bet I can build a computer from pieces for less than the price of Vista Ultimate, but it won't be half powerful enough Vista won't run on it.
Hardware makers are not about to go broke. They will always sell older tech at very affordable price, but they will also always have high-end stuff at ridiculously high prices.
Yeah, so? You expect Intel or AMD to give you such a chip for (almost) free? That's what Gates is saying.
But then, isn't that Bill Gates' vision of the future? Hardware will be free and people will only pay for software.
Fedora (4, 5 and 6), Ubuntu (Dapper and Edgy, haven't tested Feisty yet) and Novell SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop. With all the default installer options (that is, boot from the disk and click next-next-next-next...), none of them install gcc. I haven't tested OpenSuSE, Mandriva and Debian, but of all the majors, I would only expect Debian to include gcc in the standard "desktop" install.
And while gcc is very easy to install on just about any distro, telling a non-geek Linux user they need to install a compiler to use some desktop applications (WTF is a compiler? they ask...) will leave some of them baffled.
While compiling once for every distro in the top 10 might be possible for some, it requires a lot of logistics for commercial software. Plus, we distribute 3 binaries on 1 CD, one for Windows, one for OSX, and one for Linux. Putting 10 binaries for Linux would require multiple CDs, or a DVD, or maybe even multiple DVDs. And posting updates on the website needs extra links for each distro, and that takes for granted that the customer actually knows what distro he uses. Recompiling on 10 distros is a piece of cake compared to the trouble of distributing those 10 binaries and dealing with the end user.
Shift+Enter =
Ctrl+Shift+Enter =
There are many situations where domain.com and domain.org are not the same thing.
You got misinformed there. You can develop proprietary applications with KDE. KDE is LGPL'd, and the LGPL allows proprietary applications. The caveat though is that KDE links to Qt, and Qt is either GPL or commercial. So in order to develop a proprietary application with KDE, you need a commercial license for Qt, but it is possible.