"And if anyone has a favorite replacement term for "piracy," in the context of electronic copyright violation, please suggest it below."
Umm, a copyright violation? Copyright infringement? Why not just call it what it is instead of bringing in some new word that's going to have a specific connotation?
"Personally, I would vote with my feet ASAP if my ISP stopped passing on data for anything other than technical or legal reasons."
Problem is, even after crippling usenet, Verizon is still the best in my area - I can either go with them, Comcast, or RCN (cable) unless I want to shell out for a dedicated line. I'm surely not going to vote with my feet over to Comcast, and RCN doesn't have a stellar reputation, either.
Canonical/Ubuntu wants you to assign them copyright on at least some projects, too; see Bazaar. The FSF wants you to assign them copyright on all contributions to official GNU projects. The FSF maintains it's easier to protect the copyright that way; I don't know what Canonical's story is.
"It [the GPL] was written before software could be patented, and it certainly didn't contemplate patents like a patent on adding 2 + 2 in Basic."
GPLv2 was from the early 90s. The Free Software Foundation has been working against software patents longer than that - one of the classic cases RMS cites is from the mid-80s of the FSF trying to create a compression program that doesn't use a patented algorithm.
I downloaded off of the Pirate Bay - first the MP3 version, then the FLAC one when it became available - because I couldn't get the copy I purchased. They charged my credit card but I haven't gotten an email with a link (or a response to my query to their support email). I held off downloading it from TPB because I *wanted* to get it from them, but their ordering and delivery process was a disaster.
"FreeBSD hasn't wanted journaling filesystems for years, since we've had softupdates which solve many of the same problems but with half the writes."
It doesn't solve the "wait hours for fsck after unclean unmount", which has made it a dead-end for a number of years now. FreeBSD may not have wanted a solution to this problem, but lots of people have; it was a recurring topic on the FreeBSD mailing lists until ZFS support was added.
"Your goal: invent a terrorist plot to hijack or blow up an airplane with a commonly carried item as a key component. The component should be so critical to the plot that the TSA will have no choice but to ban the item once the plot is uncovered. I want to see a plot horrific and ridiculous, but just plausible enough to take seriously.
Make the TSA ban wristwatches. Or laptop computers. Or polyester. Or zippers over three inches long. You get the idea."
If you're converting to mp3, and have an operating system that supports FUSE (GNU/Linux and FreeBSD are the ones I know about), take a look at mp3fs - it's a virtual filesystem that will encode from lossless to lossy on the fly. It's great for putting stuff on a small flash memory player.
I'd like to point out that in the first years of the country, when the people who said that sort of stuff were running their new government, the people tried to have a revolution and the same quotable people put it down with military force. Look up the Whiskey Rebellion.
- They're working with BSL-1 critters, which he described as "don't eat them, but if you do, nothing bad will happen"
- The critters they create are not as fit as the ones they created them from, so even if they did get out, they're not likely to survive. He's in the business of making them more simple so they're easier to understand and build, and by simplifying, they're losing functionality. Apparently a e. coli can act completely differently depending on its environment - dirt or your stomach - and by simplifying, they lose some of that ability.
I saw a talk by Tom Knight recently about BioBricks. It's a cool concept.
Some interesting points I remember from the talk:
- His lab and others like it are trying to take the craft out of manipulating cells and make it an engineering discipline.
- They've got ready-made kits of cell building blocks that you can piece together like Legos, and are adding thousands of new ones each year.
- Cells are enormously more efficient at storing information that we can in silicon - 5 or 6 orders of magnitude more dense - but most cells aren't good at writing new data, just reading it.
- Cells are really good at making precise structures at the atomic level, but our mechanical processes rely on statistics and probabilities to get things right. The smaller the structures get, the more a small statistical variation can really mess things up. Carbon nanotubes are much-hyped, and guess what's really good at making carbon structures?
- Another useful critter that was created for the last competition detected arsenic in water. The best manufactured/chemical solution costs is tens of dollars per test; using these kits, undergraduates from Edinburgh created something over a summer that is so cheap the bottles to put it in are the dominate cost.
"If I understand it right bandwidth isn't an issue because they can tailor how much of the pool load goes to your machine."
Yes and no. Besides the jerks who hammer servers, the bandwidth problem is one of accumulation. Even if you're in the DNS rotation for 15 minutes, you'll pick up clients, and those clients may not go away anytime soon. When I left the pool a few years ago, I didn't shut down the server right away, and found that two months after my IP was no longer in rotation, I was still getting traffic from the same hosts. ISC ntpd and OpenNTPd and the others resolve hostnames to IP addresses on startup and don't check back, so if a client has a month or two uptime, it's going to be asking you the entire time.
That's what his company, Vertica, is developing. Their database is aimed at the data warehouse market - yes, they update information continuously or on some regular schedule, but most of their heavy usage is reads. They've got a small, traditional row-based store for inserting data, and it's periodically incorporated into the large, column-based store. It's all transparent to the user, and looks pretty slick.
Some projects - the one that comes first to mind is the Glasgow Haskell Compiler (ghc) - have fields in their bug trackers that rate the anticipated difficulty to fix a particular bug. That's a great help in identifying what's doable right away and what's not.
"Enterprise-priced server support: Red Hat and SuSE. Community supported for techies: Debian and Gentoo."
Pidgeonholing Debian into a "community supported" group just isn't accurate - remember the article a few months back about HP attributing $25 million/year in sales to their support for Debian? http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3 661481
A good option is to get a cheap virtual host. You get root, install what you like, run what you like, and it uses less power - none of yours - because there are several mostly-idle virtual machines on the same host.
Disk space is relatively expensive, and this may not be an option for you if by 'BitTorrent' you mean 'fill up my 500GB hard drive'.
"But it should have been clearly established that the vulnerabilities noted in Mac OS X are for services that the user specifically enabled. The general description does not call this out, and I think that the conclusions are flawed because of this."
They applied the same standard and procedure to FreeBSD. Nessus revealed *zero* vulnerabilities. It's all great and fine to disable services by default, but what happens when you want to use those services?
Slashdot Mirror
"And if anyone has a favorite replacement term for "piracy," in the context of electronic copyright violation, please suggest it below."
Umm, a copyright violation? Copyright infringement? Why not just call it what it is instead of bringing in some new word that's going to have a specific connotation?
... because djb recognized the vulnerability. it's even documented as such: http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/dns_random.html
"Personally, I would vote with my feet ASAP if my ISP stopped passing on data for anything other than technical or legal reasons."
Problem is, even after crippling usenet, Verizon is still the best in my area - I can either go with them, Comcast, or RCN (cable) unless I want to shell out for a dedicated line. I'm surely not going to vote with my feet over to Comcast, and RCN doesn't have a stellar reputation, either.
Canonical/Ubuntu wants you to assign them copyright on at least some projects, too; see Bazaar. The FSF wants you to assign them copyright on all contributions to official GNU projects. The FSF maintains it's easier to protect the copyright that way; I don't know what Canonical's story is.
"It [the GPL] was written before software could be patented, and it certainly didn't contemplate patents like a patent on adding 2 + 2 in Basic."
GPLv2 was from the early 90s. The Free Software Foundation has been working against software patents longer than that - one of the classic cases RMS cites is from the mid-80s of the FSF trying to create a compression program that doesn't use a patented algorithm.
I see no source code. They're not joining the free software community, they're selling to it.
I downloaded off of the Pirate Bay - first the MP3 version, then the FLAC one when it became available - because I couldn't get the copy I purchased. They charged my credit card but I haven't gotten an email with a link (or a response to my query to their support email). I held off downloading it from TPB because I *wanted* to get it from them, but their ordering and delivery process was a disaster.
"FreeBSD hasn't wanted journaling filesystems for years, since we've had softupdates which solve many of the same problems but with half the writes."
It doesn't solve the "wait hours for fsck after unclean unmount", which has made it a dead-end for a number of years now. FreeBSD may not have wanted a solution to this problem, but lots of people have; it was a recurring topic on the FreeBSD mailing lists until ZFS support was added.
They sell packages for cable, internet, and landline/voice; if selling telephone service doesn't make them a telephone company, what does?
"The Free Software Foundation has a transparent agenda: GPL at all costs."
Don't spread FUD about the FSF. Their agenda is not the GPL at all costs, it is to promote free software, and those are two different things.
Counterexamples to your claim of "GPL at all costs":
- The FSF plainly says that free software does not require using the GPL [0]
- The FSF plainly says that releasing software under the modified BSD license (or another non-copyleft license) is not wrong [1]
- The FSF does not use the GPL for all of its software, because it hopes that by doing so it will promote free software [2]
[0] http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#DoesFreeSoftwareMeanUsingTheGPL
[1] http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-copyleft.html
[2] http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-not-lgpl.html
Bruce Schneier has run two; the latest one can be found at http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/04/announcing_seco.html
"Your goal: invent a terrorist plot to hijack or blow up an airplane with a commonly carried item as a key component. The component should be so critical to the plot that the TSA will have no choice but to ban the item once the plot is uncovered. I want to see a plot horrific and ridiculous, but just plausible enough to take seriously.
Make the TSA ban wristwatches. Or laptop computers. Or polyester. Or zippers over three inches long. You get the idea."
If you're converting to mp3, and have an operating system that supports FUSE (GNU/Linux and FreeBSD are the ones I know about), take a look at mp3fs - it's a virtual filesystem that will encode from lossless to lossy on the fly. It's great for putting stuff on a small flash memory player.
I'd like to point out that in the first years of the country, when the people who said that sort of stuff were running their new government, the people tried to have a revolution and the same quotable people put it down with military force. Look up the Whiskey Rebellion.
Few other things I forgot to mention:
- They're working with BSL-1 critters, which he described as "don't eat them, but if you do, nothing bad will happen"
- The critters they create are not as fit as the ones they created them from, so even if they did get out, they're not likely to survive. He's in the business of making them more simple so they're easier to understand and build, and by simplifying, they're losing functionality. Apparently a e. coli can act completely differently depending on its environment - dirt or your stomach - and by simplifying, they lose some of that ability.
I saw a talk by Tom Knight recently about BioBricks. It's a cool concept.
Some interesting points I remember from the talk:
- His lab and others like it are trying to take the craft out of manipulating cells and make it an engineering discipline.
- They've got ready-made kits of cell building blocks that you can piece together like Legos, and are adding thousands of new ones each year.
- Cells are enormously more efficient at storing information that we can in silicon - 5 or 6 orders of magnitude more dense - but most cells aren't good at writing new data, just reading it.
- Cells are really good at making precise structures at the atomic level, but our mechanical processes rely on statistics and probabilities to get things right. The smaller the structures get, the more a small statistical variation can really mess things up. Carbon nanotubes are much-hyped, and guess what's really good at making carbon structures?
- Another useful critter that was created for the last competition detected arsenic in water. The best manufactured/chemical solution costs is tens of dollars per test; using these kits, undergraduates from Edinburgh created something over a summer that is so cheap the bottles to put it in are the dominate cost.
"You might ask just as well why the Linux community tolerates RedHat. It's the way it's supposed to work."
Or because Red Hat gives a huge amount to the GNU/Linux community, and employs some of its most prominent figures?
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/RedHatContributions
They say it builds the tree much faster - I can believe that - but does the code run faster?
"If I understand it right bandwidth isn't an issue because they can tailor how much of the pool load goes to your machine."
Yes and no. Besides the jerks who hammer servers, the bandwidth problem is one of accumulation. Even if you're in the DNS rotation for 15 minutes, you'll pick up clients, and those clients may not go away anytime soon. When I left the pool a few years ago, I didn't shut down the server right away, and found that two months after my IP was no longer in rotation, I was still getting traffic from the same hosts. ISC ntpd and OpenNTPd and the others resolve hostnames to IP addresses on startup and don't check back, so if a client has a month or two uptime, it's going to be asking you the entire time.
That's what his company, Vertica, is developing. Their database is aimed at the data warehouse market - yes, they update information continuously or on some regular schedule, but most of their heavy usage is reads. They've got a small, traditional row-based store for inserting data, and it's periodically incorporated into the large, column-based store. It's all transparent to the user, and looks pretty slick.
Some projects - the one that comes first to mind is the Glasgow Haskell Compiler (ghc) - have fields in their bug trackers that rate the anticipated difficulty to fix a particular bug. That's a great help in identifying what's doable right away and what's not.
"Enterprise-priced server support: Red Hat and SuSE.
3 661481
Community supported for techies: Debian and Gentoo."
Pidgeonholing Debian into a "community supported" group just isn't accurate - remember the article a few months back about HP attributing $25 million/year in sales to their support for Debian? http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/
A good option is to get a cheap virtual host. You get root, install what you like, run what you like, and it uses less power - none of yours - because there are several mostly-idle virtual machines on the same host.
Disk space is relatively expensive, and this may not be an option for you if by 'BitTorrent' you mean 'fill up my 500GB hard drive'.
"But it should have been clearly established that the vulnerabilities noted in Mac OS X are for services that the user specifically enabled. The general description does not call this out, and I think that the conclusions are flawed because of this."
They applied the same standard and procedure to FreeBSD. Nessus revealed *zero* vulnerabilities. It's all great and fine to disable services by default, but what happens when you want to use those services?
I can't find any source for that statement; it seems likely that the submitter threw that in and that it is not the position of the FSF.
"The FSF has also explicitly asked the community whether the new patent provisions should apply retroactively to the Microsoft-Novell deal."
I didn't see that in any of TFAs; does anyone have a link?