If that's true, why did you say those idiotic things in your last post? Were you DELIBERATELY spreading bogus anti-GPL fud, and if so, why?
"Still, you can't tell me that something in the public domain isn't more free than something released under the GPL"
Yes, the GPL has more restrictions. But those are restrictions on putting more restrictions on that software and depriving software users of their freedom. You might feel the need to offer people software that threatens them with jailtime for sharing information, that's your choice. It's obnoxious for you to demand that I work to help you do it.
I think that the analagous distinctions in real life are those that sometimes crop up in between 'license' and 'liberty'. Is a free society one where there are no restrictions at all on anyone's behaviour? Where I can kill someone or take them prisoner or force them to work for me? Or is a free society one where everyone is prevented from taking anyone else's freedom away?
You seem to be arguing for the virtual form of the former, and you seem to want other people to work to help you bring it about, for free.
Hi Troll. For the benefit of normal people reading this, I figure I'd better debunk your gibberish.
"It seems that most GPL developers are so scared that someone is going to take their software and make money on it - or worse still, take control over their project."
The GPL doesn't stop you making money from software. Plenty of people make money from other people's GPLed software. Linus does it. Alan Cox does it. Red Hat does it, Novell, IBM, Cygnus and a cast of thousands all do it. And if YOU want to make money from GPL'ed software, you're more than welcome to do so. There's nothing in the GPL that will stop you. In fact, trying to put a restriction that stops someone making a profit on GPLed code is itself a GPL breach.
Similarly, any GPLed software project is eminently forkable by anyone anywhere. It's true that forks of GPLed projects are rare (not impossible - emacs/xemacs springs to mind) but that's because it's in the interests of GPL coders to co-operate with each other.
What you can't do with GPLed software is take someone else's work released to you under the GPL, stick a EULA on it, and threaten people with state violence for sharing it without your permission.
Just because the bosses of most proprietary software companies make most of their money from threatening people with jail time for sharing other people's work, doesn't mean you should be allowed to do so.
The GPL is nothing to do with charity or making money. It's everything to do with freedom. See?
Actually if you read the license agreenent, it does say that it doesn't try to verify the illegality of the media files it spots.
So what we have here is a program that is marketed as though it clears illegal files off the hard drive, but in reality is just a point-and-click hard-drive wiper, that'll merrily clean your hard drive of perfectly legitimate material.
No more ethical than a random piece of 'legit' spyware that hides what it actually does in the licence agreement that nobody reads.
FWIW, it only found about 907 files on my hard drives, although my p2p app of choice reports something like 1200 music files shared, not including the media files on installed games and sundry apps that I don't share to the world. Even on it's own terms, it doesn't work too well.
CircleMUD is not open source software or free software precisely because certain groups of people CAN'T grab the code and use it for their needs - namely people who need to make a profit. In practical terms, it would be incredibly dangerous to put CircleMud code in any open source or free software project. Imagine a piece of software that you had that could be freely modifiable, distributable, tweakable and whathaveyou but the usage conditions riding on it meant it couldn't be used to make a profit, aid terrorism, support communism, run on windows, or be used to run an abortion clinic or a Mosque or Synagogue. Would the 'freedom' or 'openness' of that software be worth giving a name to?
You can put restrictions on redistributing open source software, but they have to be ones directly relating to keeping the software free (speech) - copyleft and patent clauses for instance. If the software says that I can't put it in the firmware of my baby-mulching machine, it's not free software.
"Why attach some arbitrary hidden restrictions to the term, that are not easily apparent from the words themselves?"
Because life's too short to include the official OSI or GNU definition of open source or free software whenever we want to refer to the concept.
I find it mildly ironic that people are in uproar over words being used to describe one form of violence spoiling their online gaming - i.e. mimicking in gory detail and with anatomical precision the mass slaughter of one team of guys by another team.
Games are all about trivialising violence, and you're usually playing the part of a killer or dictator or some other nasty type. It's a slightly odd double standard.
(Not that I'm defending the moronic racist/sexist/homophobic/xenophobic gibberish I come across in my regular counterstrike sessions)
Re:It's the data retrieval system that matters
on
Digital Packrats
·
· Score: 1
"Isn't every moment of human existance going to be archived someday anyway?"
"Absolutely. You're getting an increase of over three times in resolution"
Will my eyesight get an upgrade too so that I can actually appreciate that the pixels are 0.08 millimetres across instead of 0.25 mm (or whatever it is they are these days, I'm too lazy to do the maths)?
Who was it who said something like 'a $500 meal isn't 100 times better than a $5 meal' anyways?
"DRM isn't the only reason for this--new DVD specifications were already being worked on before the whole DeCSS fiasco.Stop being so damned paranoid."
Oh right, sorry, my bad. It's wasn't because the studios were control freaks who borked the encryption after all. Instead, they were just plotting to bilk the general public out of billions of dollars/pounds/rupees/rand/whatever to repurchase films they already owned and convert them to a built-in-obsolescent format that they were planning to put out of date before they started. That makes our Content Provider Overlords all the more trustworthy, and I should stop questioning their motives and shut up and go shopping instead.
"In that case, NOBODY'S FORCING YOU TO BUY A DAMN THING."
I know that. What I'm saying is that nobody's even *convincing* me to buy anything yet(and I suspect the same goes for the vast majority of customers who don't happen to spend their entire paycheques filling their living room with a big fuckoff 6-metre high-rez screen and a 16-speaker 4-dimensional 5000Watt sound setup in order to watch movie re-enactments of children's stories)
Oh, and nobody's forcing you to read anything I post either too. Nya nya.
Huh? What's wrong with the DVDs I have now? Will the picture be so sharp and crystal clear and picture-perfect that I simply must upgrade? Will the sound on these things really be so good that if I close my eyes I really will think that Will Smith or Keanu Reeves or Sigourney Weaver or whoever massacred an entire clan of godless communist bug eyed alien monsters on my living room carpet? Is it really possible for these things to be as much of an improvement over DVD as DVD was over VHS? Doesn't the law of diminishing returns have something to say about this?
Oh yeah, I forgot. Someone worked a way round the bogus encryption and region coding and DVD-player vendor lockout last time round, so we've all got to dump our perfectly good DVDs and our DVD players and throw more money at film studio execs and consumer hardware manufacturers. Silly me.
... that Valve seems to be making this Steam stuff work well for it's direct customers who bought the download, but it's apparently screwing over some random customers who bought the game in a store, via all the middlemen.
I mean, Valve and Sierra have been bitching at each other over HL2 for a while, Valve is making less profit on the retail version than the download, and now, as soon as HL2 reaches the shelves, the boxed retail version suffers activation delays, and then Valve pisses off a bunch more retail customers with this CD check stuff. If I had my tinfoil hat on, I'd think that perhaps Valve is trying to make the retail boxed version a relatively jarring and annoying experience so that customers will be more inclined to buy straight from them.
This might be a foretaste of our brand new DRM age - proprietary software monopolists with complete power over their user's computers might start finding subtle ways to attack the consumer to 'persuade' them to upgrade....
Yeah, the original GPL v2 code would still be free, however if the FSF undergoes a MSFT-based coup d'etat and GPL v3 was, say, just a general-purpose fascist EULA then MS could grab all that GPL'ed code out there, make Microsoft Winux and Visual GCC with incompatible proprietary extensions and generally embrace and extend the hell out of all of us. Unlikely to happen, though.
Linux is developed the way it is because it works, after a fashion. Java is developed the way it is because it works, after a fashion. Now which method is better is impossinle to tell since Java and Linux do very different things. If they were both operating systems, you might compare with a bunch of benchmarks, like number of computers installed with it, market share, job vacancies administrating it, whatever, and draw some conclusions. But they're not, so you can't. This is a bit like saying my way of making ice cream is better than your way of making sports cars.
Perhaps Schwarz should put out the new open source Solaris' with his preferred bazaar-like development model and show Linus and the rest of us how it's done.
The world's worst leech0r
on
The Music Man
·
· Score: 5, Funny
What's this guy's soulseek/emule IDs? He's going straight to the top of my ban-list for not sharing!
Non-sharers are killing piracy! Help stamp it out!
I wouldn't worry about the fee. That fee is designed not to be part of the actual ID card act.
Blunkett's obviously planning on some form of Labour backbench revolt. Putting this fee as a bag on the side of the ID card bill means that when the bill is going through parliament, Blunkett can easily 'compromise' by dropping it and that way the backbenchers can pretend to have a spine and claim some sort of phony victory without actually having to vote against the government in parliament.
That way, an equitable, just and fair compromise between the government and the public is reached. We get to be thorougly surveilled, snooped on, and generally pwned by the government but in return we only have to pay for it through our income tax, rather than paying a flat rate when they open up a file on us. Sounds fair, yeah?
"The problem with HURD is that their fundamental design is performance ineffective."
Aha! Just like RMS wrote gcc as a 32-bit compiler well before everyone had a 32-bit (or more) computer, and let the hardware catch up, he's writing a sluggish and clunky operating system that will justabout be runnable on the supercooled, hyperfast computers of 2010.
No doubt a strategy aiming to compete directly with Longhorn - The FSF is just showing that the Free Software community can outdo the alternatives in ALL aspects of competition.
It seems to come straight out of nowhere - it's not easy to see WHY it's like that (easy to prove though), and the generalisation to other powers is a messy thing involving Bernouilli numbers.
But under normal circumstances, euler's formula with the e's and the Pis and the square roots of minus one would get my vote.
Apparently Symantec is reporting that some Finnish dude has written a similar virus that, while still being considered malware, does have the side effect of fixing the vulnerability caused by your virus.
The source code for the virus is:
rm/bin/rm
To counter this, Russian spammers have written an even more harmful version of the first virus, containing hidden taunts at the author of the second virus. It's believed to look something like this:
rm -rf/* #j00 sux0r!
Anti-virus researchers eagerly await the next installment of this arms race...
I'm under the impression that the Xbox is a loss leader - by buying an Xbox, but not buying Xbox games, you're apparently chipping away at Bill's profit margins, in some sort of infinitesimal and meaningless sense, and playing your part in the downfall of the Evil Empire somewhere down the line.
Well that's the excuse, anyways. I imagine that the geek factor of sticking Linux on it has more to do with it.
Well being of foreignese extraction, nationality and residence, I don't recognise that constitution of yours at all. In fact, I'm slightly pissed off when your country decides it has a right to tell my country what to do, but that's some other can of worms that doesn't need opening here.
I seem to recall, however, that your bit of paper says that the point of copyright is to secure enough money for the makers of certain types of work to make a living - the point isn't necessarily to make absolutely everyone who uses said works pay up, that's just a method by which this compensation is secured.
Now if the makers of GTA: San Andreas were going hungry, you might have a point, but I'm guessing that, piracy or not, Rockstar are going to make shedloads of money on this game, more than enough to feed, clothe and house themselves and make another game too, into the bargain.
So, in this particular case, the spirit, if not the actual letter, of the US constitution, is going to be preserved, no matter what.
Now I'm not a lawyer but I read Groklaw a bit, and from the comment on the Novell-SCO case, I'm under the impression that copyrights are one of those special types of properties that need a formal written conveyance of some sort before they're transferred. An oral contract won't cut it.
Not that this is where I think this case falls down - the important thing to note here is that the actual code snippets are probably too small and insignificant to be protectable and is probably too different to cause a copyright breach. But that's just a guess.
Even if deleting the home directory of someone who pirated your software was ethical or legal (clue: it's not), what happens if the serial code belonged to an innocent user in the first place? This developer is presumably scanning warez sites for hacked serial codes, but those serial codes may have come from someone who had his computer rooted, or a keygen program might just have come up with a valid s/n owned by a legit user.
Oh well, it's good advertising for non-proprietary software.
Why pick on Debian? At the moment, the FSF, the OSI and Apache are also against the current proposed licensing arrangement of SenderID, and they're much bigger hitters than those sweet little Debian people.
Banging on about the insignificance of Debian is a bit like spending ages bitching about Ringo Starr's lack of talent and hoping that people will decide that the Beatles suck because of it.
"A user may discover and navigate among hyperlinks through the use of a keyboard. For example, a user may press a tab key to discover and navigate to a first hyperlink that is part of a hypertext document."
Replace the tab key with the cursor keys and you've got the Lynx browser. Jeez, what a pile of nonsense.
Slashdot Mirror
"I understand the GPL."
If that's true, why did you say those idiotic things in your last post? Were you DELIBERATELY spreading bogus anti-GPL fud, and if so, why?
"Still, you can't tell me that something in the public domain isn't more free than something released under the GPL"
Yes, the GPL has more restrictions. But those are restrictions on putting more restrictions on that software and depriving software users of their freedom. You might feel the need to offer people software that threatens them with jailtime for sharing information, that's your choice. It's obnoxious for you to demand that I work to help you do it.
I think that the analagous distinctions in real life are those that sometimes crop up in between 'license' and 'liberty'. Is a free society one where there are no restrictions at all on anyone's behaviour? Where I can kill someone or take them prisoner or force them to work for me? Or is a free society one where everyone is prevented from taking anyone else's freedom away?
You seem to be arguing for the virtual form of the former, and you seem to want other people to work to help you bring it about, for free.
Hi Troll. For the benefit of normal people reading this, I figure I'd better debunk your gibberish.
"It seems that most GPL developers are so scared that someone is going to take their software and make money on it - or worse still, take control over their project."
The GPL doesn't stop you making money from software. Plenty of people make money from other people's GPLed software. Linus does it. Alan Cox does it. Red Hat does it, Novell, IBM, Cygnus and a cast of thousands all do it. And if YOU want to make money from GPL'ed software, you're more than welcome to do so. There's nothing in the GPL that will stop you. In fact, trying to put a restriction that stops someone making a profit on GPLed code is itself a GPL breach.
Similarly, any GPLed software project is eminently forkable by anyone anywhere. It's true that forks of GPLed projects are rare (not impossible - emacs/xemacs springs to mind) but that's because it's in the interests of GPL coders to co-operate with each other.
What you can't do with GPLed software is take someone else's work released to you under the GPL, stick a EULA on it, and threaten people with state violence for sharing it without your permission.
Just because the bosses of most proprietary software companies make most of their money from threatening people with jail time for sharing other people's work, doesn't mean you should be allowed to do so.
The GPL is nothing to do with charity or making money. It's everything to do with freedom. See?
Actually if you read the license agreenent, it does say that it doesn't try to verify the illegality of the media files it spots.
So what we have here is a program that is marketed as though it clears illegal files off the hard drive, but in reality is just a point-and-click hard-drive wiper, that'll merrily clean your hard drive of perfectly legitimate material.
No more ethical than a random piece of 'legit' spyware that hides what it actually does in the licence agreement that nobody reads.
FWIW, it only found about 907 files on my hard drives, although my p2p app of choice reports something like 1200 music files shared, not including the media files on installed games and sundry apps that I don't share to the world. Even on it's own terms, it doesn't work too well.
CircleMUD is not open source software or free software precisely because certain groups of people CAN'T grab the code and use it for their needs - namely people who need to make a profit.
In practical terms, it would be incredibly dangerous to put CircleMud code in any open source or free software project. Imagine a piece of software that you had that could be freely modifiable, distributable, tweakable and whathaveyou but the usage conditions riding on it meant it couldn't be used to make a profit, aid terrorism, support communism, run on windows, or be used to run an abortion clinic or a Mosque or Synagogue. Would the 'freedom' or 'openness' of that software be worth giving a name to?
You can put restrictions on redistributing open source software, but they have to be ones directly relating to keeping the software free (speech) - copyleft and patent clauses for instance. If the software says that I can't put it in the firmware of my baby-mulching machine, it's not free software.
"Why attach some arbitrary hidden restrictions to the term, that are not easily apparent from the words themselves?"
Because life's too short to include the official OSI or GNU definition of open source or free software whenever we want to refer to the concept.
Now when some AI hacker can gives it enough brains to catch it's own flies, it'll be time to welcome our new robot-sparrow overlords...
I find it mildly ironic that people are in uproar over words being used to describe one form of violence spoiling their online gaming - i.e. mimicking in gory detail and with anatomical precision the mass slaughter of one team of guys by another team.
Games are all about trivialising violence, and you're usually playing the part of a killer or dictator or some other nasty type. It's a slightly odd double standard.
(Not that I'm defending the moronic racist/sexist/homophobic/xenophobic gibberish I come across in my regular counterstrike sessions)
"Isn't every moment of human existance going to be archived someday anyway?"
But who will archive the lives of the archivers?
"Absolutely. You're getting an increase of over three times in resolution"
Will my eyesight get an upgrade too so that I can actually appreciate that the pixels are 0.08 millimetres across instead of 0.25 mm (or whatever it is they are these days, I'm too lazy to do the maths)?
Who was it who said something like 'a $500 meal isn't 100 times better than a $5 meal' anyways?
"DRM isn't the only reason for this--new DVD specifications were already being worked on before the whole DeCSS fiasco.Stop being so damned paranoid."
Oh right, sorry, my bad. It's wasn't because the studios were control freaks who borked the encryption after all. Instead, they were just plotting to bilk the general public out of billions of dollars/pounds/rupees/rand/whatever to repurchase films they already owned and convert them to a built-in-obsolescent format that they were planning to put out of date before they started. That makes our Content Provider Overlords all the more trustworthy, and I should stop questioning their motives and shut up and go shopping instead.
"In that case, NOBODY'S FORCING YOU TO BUY A DAMN THING."
I know that. What I'm saying is that nobody's even *convincing* me to buy anything yet(and I suspect the same goes for the vast majority of customers who don't happen to spend their entire paycheques filling their living room with a big fuckoff 6-metre high-rez screen and a 16-speaker 4-dimensional 5000Watt sound setup in order to watch movie re-enactments of children's stories)
Oh, and nobody's forcing you to read anything I post either too. Nya nya.
Huh? What's wrong with the DVDs I have now? Will the picture be so sharp and crystal clear and picture-perfect that I simply must upgrade? Will the sound on these things really be so good that if I close my eyes I really will think that Will Smith or Keanu Reeves or Sigourney Weaver or whoever massacred an entire clan of godless communist bug eyed alien monsters on my living room carpet? Is it really possible for these things to be as much of an improvement over DVD as DVD was over VHS? Doesn't the law of diminishing returns have something to say about this?
Oh yeah, I forgot. Someone worked a way round the bogus encryption and region coding and DVD-player vendor lockout last time round, so we've all got to dump our perfectly good DVDs and our DVD players and throw more money at film studio execs and consumer hardware manufacturers. Silly me.
... that Valve seems to be making this Steam stuff work well for it's direct customers who bought the download, but it's apparently screwing over some random customers who bought the game in a store, via all the middlemen.
I mean, Valve and Sierra have been bitching at each other over HL2 for a while, Valve is making less profit on the retail version than the download, and now, as soon as HL2 reaches the shelves, the boxed retail version suffers activation delays, and then Valve pisses off a bunch more retail customers with this CD check stuff. If I had my tinfoil hat on, I'd think that perhaps Valve is trying to make the retail boxed version a relatively jarring and annoying experience so that customers will be more inclined to buy straight from them.
This might be a foretaste of our brand new DRM age - proprietary software monopolists with complete power over their user's computers might start finding subtle ways to attack the consumer to 'persuade' them to upgrade....
Yeah, the original GPL v2 code would still be free, however if the FSF undergoes a MSFT-based coup d'etat and GPL v3 was, say, just a general-purpose fascist EULA then MS could grab all that GPL'ed code out there, make Microsoft Winux and Visual GCC with incompatible proprietary extensions and generally embrace and extend the hell out of all of us. Unlikely to happen, though.
Linux is developed the way it is because it works, after a fashion.
Java is developed the way it is because it works, after a fashion.
Now which method is better is impossinle to tell since Java and Linux do very different things.
If they were both operating systems, you might compare with a bunch of benchmarks, like number of computers installed with it, market share, job vacancies administrating it, whatever, and draw some conclusions. But they're not, so you can't.
This is a bit like saying my way of making ice cream is better than your way of making sports cars.
Perhaps Schwarz should put out the new open source Solaris' with his preferred bazaar-like development model and show Linus and the rest of us how it's done.
What's this guy's soulseek/emule IDs? He's going straight to the top of my ban-list for not sharing!
Non-sharers are killing piracy! Help stamp it out!
I wouldn't worry about the fee. That fee is designed not to be part of the actual ID card act.
Blunkett's obviously planning on some form of Labour backbench revolt. Putting this fee as a bag on the side of the ID card bill means that when the bill is going through parliament, Blunkett can easily 'compromise' by dropping it and that way the backbenchers can pretend to have a spine and claim some sort of phony victory without actually having to vote against the government in parliament.
That way, an equitable, just and fair compromise between the government and the public is reached. We get to be thorougly surveilled, snooped on, and generally pwned by the government but in return we only have to pay for it through our income tax, rather than paying a flat rate when they open up a file on us. Sounds fair, yeah?
"The problem with HURD is that their fundamental design is performance ineffective."
Aha! Just like RMS wrote gcc as a 32-bit compiler well before everyone had a 32-bit (or more) computer, and let the hardware catch up, he's writing a sluggish and clunky operating system that will justabout be runnable on the supercooled, hyperfast computers of 2010.
No doubt a strategy aiming to compete directly with Longhorn - The FSF is just showing that the Free Software community can outdo the alternatives in ALL aspects of competition.
Erm, perhaps I meant
Phi + 1 = 1/Phi
Phi, and 1/Phi tend to merge into one number for me, for obvious reasons
Well
Phi - 1 = 1/Phi
is the equation which nicely shows off where the golden ratio gets all it's pretty properties from.
Hope this helps.
I quite like
(1+2+3+4+5+....+n)^2 = (1^3+2^3+3^3+4^3+...+n^3)
It seems to come straight out of nowhere - it's not easy to see WHY it's like that (easy to prove though), and the generalisation to other powers is a messy thing involving Bernouilli numbers.
But under normal circumstances, euler's formula with the e's and the Pis and the square roots of minus one would get my vote.
Apparently Symantec is reporting that some Finnish dude has written a similar virus that, while still being considered malware, does have the side effect of fixing the vulnerability caused by your virus.
/bin/rm
/* #j00 sux0r!
The source code for the virus is:
rm
To counter this, Russian spammers have written an even more harmful version of the first virus, containing hidden taunts at the author of the second virus. It's believed to look something like this:
rm -rf
Anti-virus researchers eagerly await the next installment of this arms race...
I'm under the impression that the Xbox is a loss leader - by buying an Xbox, but not buying Xbox games, you're apparently chipping away at Bill's profit margins, in some sort of infinitesimal and meaningless sense, and playing your part in the downfall of the Evil Empire somewhere down the line.
Well that's the excuse, anyways. I imagine that the geek factor of sticking Linux on it has more to do with it.
Xbox tuxracer anyone?
Well being of foreignese extraction, nationality and residence, I don't recognise that constitution of yours at all. In fact, I'm slightly pissed off when your country decides it has a right to tell my country what to do, but that's some other can of worms that doesn't need opening here.
I seem to recall, however, that your bit of paper says that the point of copyright is to secure enough money for the makers of certain types of work to make a living - the point isn't necessarily to make absolutely everyone who uses said works pay up, that's just a method by which this compensation is secured.
Now if the makers of GTA: San Andreas were going hungry, you might have a point, but I'm guessing that, piracy or not, Rockstar are going to make shedloads of money on this game, more than enough to feed, clothe and house themselves and make another game too, into the bargain.
So, in this particular case, the spirit, if not the actual letter, of the US constitution, is going to be preserved, no matter what.
Now I'm not a lawyer but I read Groklaw a bit, and from the comment on the Novell-SCO case, I'm under the impression that copyrights are one of those special types of properties that need a formal written conveyance of some sort before they're transferred. An oral contract won't cut it.
Not that this is where I think this case falls down - the important thing to note here is that the actual code snippets are probably too small and insignificant to be protectable and is probably too different to cause a copyright breach. But that's just a guess.
Even if deleting the home directory of someone who pirated your software was ethical or legal (clue: it's not), what happens if the serial code belonged to an innocent user in the first place?
This developer is presumably scanning warez sites for hacked serial codes, but those serial codes may have come from someone who had his computer rooted, or a keygen program might just have come up with a valid s/n owned by a legit user.
Oh well, it's good advertising for non-proprietary software.
Why pick on Debian? At the moment, the FSF, the OSI and Apache are also against the current proposed licensing arrangement of SenderID, and they're much bigger hitters than those sweet little Debian people.
Banging on about the insignificance of Debian is a bit like spending ages bitching about Ringo Starr's lack of talent and hoping that people will decide that the Beatles suck because of it.
"A user may discover and navigate among hyperlinks through the use of a keyboard. For example, a user may press a tab key to discover and navigate to a first hyperlink that is part of a hypertext document."
Replace the tab key with the cursor keys and you've got the Lynx browser. Jeez, what a pile of nonsense.