... is that the radio stations' argument, that
"Congress intended the law to apply only to services that would enable users to select and download songs, not online radio-style broadcasts that do not allow users to save songs", if it prevails, would eliminate the payments not only for radio stations, but for net-only streaming services, as long as it's a stream where the program director or DJ, not the individual listener, chooses the songs to play. Nowhere are they saying that they deserve special rights because they have an FCC license to broadcast on the radio. It is the RIAA spokesman who is saying that the radio stations are seeking "special treatment".
Given this, I don't understand the objections I'm seeing here.
Mono is a stupid reason to switch from Gnome to KDE, in that the Gnome project has not accepted Mono. It's a proposal from the Ximian folks that Gnome eventually accept Mono. I wouldn't be surprised to see the Gnome project split if Mono were forced on it in a central role (rather than as an optional add-on), as many Gnome developers are not fans of it at all.
What will you do if some KDE developer says he wants to support.NET in the KDE framework? You'll then have to drop KDE, since you drop platforms based merely on proposals that they go in a direction you don't like.
If you think that what Yahoo agreed to in France was to censor itself to "a far greater extent", there is something wrong with your judgment. In France, Yahoo agreed to a very narrow set of restrictions having to do with Nazi and neo-Nazi material. The Chinese agreement, though, covers anything the Chinese state defines as subversive, which includes pretty much any criticism of the Chinese state. French people can read lots of criticism of the French government on yahoo.fr.
I like the folks at Red Hat, they have made huge contributions to everyone. The OpenBSD folks, for example, can't build a single executable without using a compiler that has been developed and maintained largely by Red Hat folks over the last ten years (about 50% of all gcc development work over the last decade, if not more, has been by Red Hat/Cygnus people, and it was their business/marketing people that got the funding to allow all those guys to work full-time on gcc).
Nevertheless, Red Hat has in the past put out releases that were horribly insecure, and this has been a problem for the net as a whole. They've gotten much better, but by the time a release sold in stores requires so many updates to make it secure that it would take 12 hours to download them all on a dialup modem, that makes the retail version dangerous to the public, a product that should be recalled. This goes both for Windows and Linux. Bad security doesn't just affect the owner of the system, an "owned" system is commonly used as a launch pad for distributed denial of service attacks.
Maybe the thing to do is to get any BSD or Linux distribution that is sold at retail or shipped on CDs that might not be current, to "phone home" the first time the system is connected to the net (telling the user what is happening, of course),
so that the very first thing that happens is that all security updates that enable remote exploits get installed.
Oh, give me a break. If someone is fired for leaking an internal memo he/she would have no grounds to sue; on the contrary, the company could get the employee prosecuted under the trade secret laws (however, in many cases such leaks are authorized or there's no hope of catching the leaker, because ten thousand folks got the memo).
In the US, a company can fire an employee for nearly any reason; the only exceptions are thinks like race/sex/etc discrimination or (for unionized workers) violation of the union contract.
Workers for government contractors may have "whistle-blower" protection against being fired for revealing that taxpayers are being ripped off.
There may a couple of other exceptions as well.
For the rest of us in the private sector, we can be fired anytime.
Agent_Eight writes:
As far as scene files and generated images... hey your free to do whatever you want with the images.
This is incorrect: read the license again.
You are not permitted to make any derivative works using the files in the SCENES directory, except for those in its INCDEMO subdirectory, or distribute such works, unless the file itself explicitly grants this permission, and most do not. Copying any text out of one of the supplied scenes files for use in a description of your own image would be to make a derivative work.
If enforced strictly, it would be dangerous to even read the scenes files if you later on plan to use povray to make similar images, though in practice this is unlikely to be enforced.
PovRay is not open source, but rather has a very complicated licensing scheme. Not only that, care must be taken to be sure even that an image you produce with PovRay is legal to distribute, since there are rather severe licensing restrictions on many of the object description files provided with PovRay you must read these carefully to be sure that what you are doing is legal.
There is currently so much excess high-speed telecom and datacom excess capacity that you could toss 50% of it and still have enough, though there may be localized disruptions. This is because of huge overbuilding during the dot-com boom.
When you read an article like this, the first thing you should be considering is what the agenda is.
The DEA probably leaked the info on purpose,
perhaps to try to promote its agenda of getting more money for the Colombian drug wars.
Whenever you see a story in the press quoting anonymous sources or leaks, remember that the
sources and leakers have an axe to grind.
Attacks against people like John Gilmore (or Richard Stallman) for refusing to be "reasonable" and compromise their principles remind me of this quote from George Bernard Shaw:
A reasonable man adapts himself to suit his environment. An unreasonable man persists in attempting to adapt his environment to suit himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
This is not to say that Gilmore or Stallman are right about everything, they are not. But their effectiveness is associated with their refusal to abandon principle.
See
this article. If someone can get your fingerprint,
he can make a "fake finger" out of gelatin with
your fingerprint on it, put it over his own finger,
and then eat the evidence.
Well, here in Canada, we've had funny-looking money for ages. It was supposed to help cut down on counterfeiters, but bubble-jets keep getting better - they're even cloning the $5 bills now!
Given what inkjet printer cartridges cost, anyone
using an inkjet to counterfeit a Canadian $5 (which is worth a hair more than $3 US) would
probably lose money.
It's only the stupid way we set up the Senate
that made Amtrak such a mess: every state had to
get service. Trains work great in the DC to Boston
corridor, as there are 50 million+ people within
a short distance of the line. Similarly, San Diego
to LA to San Jose to SF/Oakland can serve 20 million+. Trains make sense for 200-500 mile trips
and can be faster than planes once you add in the
extra time needed to get to the airport, get through security etc, but they aren't really a good option for much longer distances. We should probably
dump the idea of a national Amtrak in favor of a
group of regional train systems.
But some senator from one of those gigantic empty
states will object, claiming his state isn't getting as much gravy as some other states with
10-20x the population.
Not everyone who uses the GPL have in mind RMS's
software commons. Some use it as a business method,
and strategically choose to release some GPL code and some proprietary code, or sell rights to use GPL code in a proprietary way. The argument, by Russell Nelson, was "When I write proprietary software I expect to get paid"; his company,
Crynwr, follows
this model, as does Aladdin,
the company that brought you Ghostscript.
The BSD model is more communist than the GPL model.
"From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs", as Marx said. It is the
BSD model that asks people to give away their work without restriction: with the GPL, it's a trade:
I'll give you mine if you give me yours. I respect people who release their own work under BSD-like
licensing (that's the license used for the largest free software project I was part of,
Ptolemy),
but I have no respect for those who demand that
others use BSD-style licensing: these are
just people who want a free lunch.
I was surprised to see that Google is currently
showing this bogus Microsoft shell of a think tank
as the #1 result for the query "Alexis de Toqueville". I am afraid that recent publicity
from the Linux news sites may have moved them into
this spot.
This bogosity is easily fixed.
Those of you who run popular sites should do the
following: add links to your more popular pages
saying something like
Learn more about <a href="SOME-SITE_HERE">Alexis de Toqueville</a>
As the link target, use one of the more academically respectable Toqueville sites,
like www.toqueville.org or the one at the University of Virginia.
Remember, the purpose is to allow Google to
provide better results to people who want to
find out more about Toqueville, and to make
this set of imposters less visible.
Whoever moderated the above well-reasoned posting
as flamebait should never be allowed to moderate
again. This is a serious ethical violation of
the moderation privilege. "Flamebait" does not
mean "I strongly disagree with this". "Flamebait"
means something that is posted insincerely just
to produce flames, that is, you believe that the
purpose for the posting is just to cause outrage
rather than to express a sincere belief.
A friend of mine who has hacked his Tivo verified
that Tivo already does exactly this: every
click by the user is sent to Tivo, along with the
exact context, in an XML format.
Slashdot Mirror
Given this, I don't understand the objections I'm seeing here.
Mono is a stupid reason to switch from Gnome to KDE, in that the Gnome project has not accepted Mono. It's a proposal from the Ximian folks that Gnome eventually accept Mono. I wouldn't be surprised to see the Gnome project split if Mono were forced on it in a central role (rather than as an optional add-on), as many Gnome developers are not fans of it at all.
What will you do if some KDE developer says he wants to support .NET in the KDE framework? You'll then have to drop KDE, since you drop platforms based merely on proposals that they go in a direction you don't like.
If you think that what Yahoo agreed to in France was to censor itself to "a far greater extent", there is something wrong with your judgment. In France, Yahoo agreed to a very narrow set of restrictions having to do with Nazi and neo-Nazi material. The Chinese agreement, though, covers anything the Chinese state defines as subversive, which includes pretty much any criticism of the Chinese state. French people can read lots of criticism of the French government on yahoo.fr.
I like the folks at Red Hat, they have made huge contributions to everyone. The OpenBSD folks, for example, can't build a single executable without using a compiler that has been developed and maintained largely by Red Hat folks over the last ten years (about 50% of all gcc development work over the last decade, if not more, has been by Red Hat/Cygnus people, and it was their business/marketing people that got the funding to allow all those guys to work full-time on gcc).
Nevertheless, Red Hat has in the past put out releases that were horribly insecure, and this has been a problem for the net as a whole. They've gotten much better, but by the time a release sold in stores requires so many updates to make it secure that it would take 12 hours to download them all on a dialup modem, that makes the retail version dangerous to the public, a product that should be recalled. This goes both for Windows and Linux. Bad security doesn't just affect the owner of the system, an "owned" system is commonly used as a launch pad for distributed denial of service attacks.
Maybe the thing to do is to get any BSD or Linux distribution that is sold at retail or shipped on CDs that might not be current, to "phone home" the first time the system is connected to the net (telling the user what is happening, of course), so that the very first thing that happens is that all security updates that enable remote exploits get installed.
Oh, give me a break. If someone is fired for leaking an internal memo he/she would have no grounds to sue; on the contrary, the company could get the employee prosecuted under the trade secret laws (however, in many cases such leaks are authorized or there's no hope of catching the leaker, because ten thousand folks got the memo).
In the US, a company can fire an employee for nearly any reason; the only exceptions are thinks like race/sex/etc discrimination or (for unionized workers) violation of the union contract. Workers for government contractors may have "whistle-blower" protection against being fired for revealing that taxpayers are being ripped off. There may a couple of other exceptions as well. For the rest of us in the private sector, we can be fired anytime.
Q. How can the Chinese authorities get around the fact that the Great Firewall of China is doomed to be imperfect?
A. Get all westerners to ban .cn as spam. Then Chinese dissidents will be unable to communicate with the outside world.
Well, people watch this show. The original Buffy movie was a joke, of course, but the TV show takes things quite seriously.
SirSlud writes: Check out "The Dark Knight Returns", where Batman defeats Superman (using some Kryptonite, btw.)
Cool. So Christopher Reeve can play Superman after all.
Agent_Eight writes: As far as scene files and generated images ... hey your free to do whatever you want with the images.
This is incorrect: read the license again. You are not permitted to make any derivative works using the files in the SCENES directory, except for those in its INCDEMO subdirectory, or distribute such works, unless the file itself explicitly grants this permission, and most do not. Copying any text out of one of the supplied scenes files for use in a description of your own image would be to make a derivative work.
If enforced strictly, it would be dangerous to even read the scenes files if you later on plan to use povray to make similar images, though in practice this is unlikely to be enforced.
PovRay is not open source, but rather has a very complicated licensing scheme. Not only that, care must be taken to be sure even that an image you produce with PovRay is legal to distribute, since there are rather severe licensing restrictions on many of the object description files provided with PovRay you must read these carefully to be sure that what you are doing is legal.
There is currently so much excess high-speed telecom and datacom excess capacity that you could toss 50% of it and still have enough, though there may be localized disruptions. This is because of huge overbuilding during the dot-com boom.
When you read an article like this, the first thing you should be considering is what the agenda is. The DEA probably leaked the info on purpose, perhaps to try to promote its agenda of getting more money for the Colombian drug wars.
Whenever you see a story in the press quoting anonymous sources or leaks, remember that the sources and leakers have an axe to grind.
Attacks against people like John Gilmore (or Richard Stallman) for refusing to be "reasonable" and compromise their principles remind me of this quote from George Bernard Shaw:
This is not to say that Gilmore or Stallman are right about everything, they are not. But their effectiveness is associated with their refusal to abandon principle.
See this article. If someone can get your fingerprint, he can make a "fake finger" out of gelatin with your fingerprint on it, put it over his own finger, and then eat the evidence.
Given what inkjet printer cartridges cost, anyone using an inkjet to counterfeit a Canadian $5 (which is worth a hair more than $3 US) would probably lose money.
It's only the stupid way we set up the Senate that made Amtrak such a mess: every state had to get service. Trains work great in the DC to Boston corridor, as there are 50 million+ people within a short distance of the line. Similarly, San Diego to LA to San Jose to SF/Oakland can serve 20 million+. Trains make sense for 200-500 mile trips and can be faster than planes once you add in the extra time needed to get to the airport, get through security etc, but they aren't really a good option for much longer distances. We should probably dump the idea of a national Amtrak in favor of a group of regional train systems.
But some senator from one of those gigantic empty states will object, claiming his state isn't getting as much gravy as some other states with 10-20x the population.
Airlines in the US receive massive state subsidies. Same with highways. It's only Amtrak that is asked to make it on its own.
Not everyone who uses the GPL have in mind RMS's software commons. Some use it as a business method, and strategically choose to release some GPL code and some proprietary code, or sell rights to use GPL code in a proprietary way. The argument, by Russell Nelson, was "When I write proprietary software I expect to get paid"; his company, Crynwr, follows this model, as does Aladdin, the company that brought you Ghostscript.
The BSD model is more communist than the GPL model. "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs", as Marx said. It is the BSD model that asks people to give away their work without restriction: with the GPL, it's a trade: I'll give you mine if you give me yours. I respect people who release their own work under BSD-like licensing (that's the license used for the largest free software project I was part of, Ptolemy), but I have no respect for those who demand that others use BSD-style licensing: these are just people who want a free lunch.
I was surprised to see that Google is currently showing this bogus Microsoft shell of a think tank as the #1 result for the query "Alexis de Toqueville". I am afraid that recent publicity from the Linux news sites may have moved them into this spot. This bogosity is easily fixed.
Those of you who run popular sites should do the following: add links to your more popular pages saying something like
Learn more about <a href="SOME-SITE_HERE">Alexis de Toqueville</a>
As the link target, use one of the more academically respectable Toqueville sites, like www.toqueville.org or the one at the University of Virginia. Remember, the purpose is to allow Google to provide better results to people who want to find out more about Toqueville, and to make this set of imposters less visible.
Actually, if I were inclined to mod you down, it would be because the first Unix worm came out in 1988.
By calling the 4.95 "shipping and handling" they don't have to pay sales tax.
Whoever moderated the above well-reasoned posting as flamebait should never be allowed to moderate again. This is a serious ethical violation of the moderation privilege. "Flamebait" does not mean "I strongly disagree with this". "Flamebait" means something that is posted insincerely just to produce flames, that is, you believe that the purpose for the posting is just to cause outrage rather than to express a sincere belief.
To use moderation in this way is just censorship.
"super-size" means that it holds an amazing number of french fries.
A friend of mine who has hacked his Tivo verified that Tivo already does exactly this: every click by the user is sent to Tivo, along with the exact context, in an XML format.
Your reading is wrong. The DMCA text has a number of exceptions; it simply doesn't apply here.