it's only made more humorous by people who are incensed by it because of silly political affiliations.
Yeah, because people who think that maintaining some of level of accuracy in the general public's knowledge of the history of the net are just a bunch of whiny liberals. Give me a fucking break.
You do know that outside of Slashdot, practically no one has heard of or cares to hear about the DMCA, right? Putting that up on the same level as the PATRIOT ACT is, quite frankly, ludicrous.
And yet more people, by a couple orders of magnitude, have been directly and personally affected by the DMCA than have been by the patriot acts.
If for some reason your future wife happens to need to get the ring cut off due to an accident, and the hospital cannot get the ring off with the tools on hand, they will cut off the finger. I found this out after speaking to two registered nurses.
They pretty much own the audiobook download market
Talk about a market where DRM is going to be the least effective. The analog hole kind of sucks for music, because there is some amount of quality degradation which requires either hi-quality equipment to reduce, or haxor tools to strip the DRM digitally.
But for the spoken word? Anyone can crack the DRM on an audiobook and get satisfactory results, even a cheap-ass microphone sitting in front of a cheap-ass PC speaker will do fine.
No it didn't. Try to find proof. You won't because the windows nt 3.1 stack was written by Spider Systems - it was STREAMS based and a 100% fresh reimplementation. I know about the reimplementation part because I was involved with stuffing STREAMS into another unix and the company decided on licensing the Spider stack. There were no BSD copyrights in the source (hell, it was so different from BSD they probably couldn't have reused anything more than a few subroutines even if they wanted to).
Furthermore, that was ONLY NT 3.1 - not a very big seller at all, by the next release - NT 3.5 - MS had done their own reimplementation. I think the best you can do is that some of the utilities, like the ftp client used some BSD code. Nobody bought NT 3.1 for the ftp client.
Developer freedom matters, too. That's what BSD/MIT are for.
Gee, don't you remember my original point. The one where I said it all depends on what definition of "Free" you pick? No, of course you didn't otherwise, you wouldn't have gone off on that nutso rant about ethics of choices which happen to be made purely by free will. Ironic with all your blather about "making sense."
Very, very few actual commercial applications are GPL licensed--they're either based on support (which is a business model applicable only to a very narrow selection of software) with the applications being free, or they "abuse" the GPL through exposing functionality via web services. But I'm sure you know that.:)
Dollars to donuts more money has been made with the sale of GPL licensed software than with any other Freely licensed code.
That's because pro-GPL mindsets don't make sense.
No surprise you replied with a trite response. Don't blame the inadequacies of your small mind on others. The "more free" and "more open" that apply to gnu means that every single copy of compiled code comes with a corresponding guarantee of FREE and OPEN source code to the end user. You can not say that about BSD, MIT or public domain.
That's exactly why the GPL makes my eye twitch. Some of us don't care if our code is used commercially, that'fine. Trying to say that you're "more free" and "more open" because you ban that is prima facie stupidity.
That you think the GPL is about preventing commercial use of code is also prima facie stupidity. Just look at all of the commercial endeavors that are GNU licensed.
As for how in the world GNU software could be "more free" and "more open" - well both of those terms have multiple meanings, you pick the meaning that applies and it makes sense, you apply an anti-GPL mindset and pick a meaning that doesn't make sense and doh! it doesn't make sense.
So say you have Comcast's triple-play or some VOIP service that rides out of your house on your Comcast connection. You get cut off for one reason or another, such as exceeding this cap. Is your phone service dead, too?
No, Comcast's VOIP service is out-of-band from regular IP. Skype and others, yep. Funny how that works out to Comcast's benefit, eh?
Hulu has some shows in HD. Xbox360 has pseudo-HD movies (720p) for 'rent' Watch for Tivo to do the same with their various partnerships like Amazon unbox. For a while some of the broadcast networks (ABC/CBS/NBC/FOX/WB) had pseudo-HD versions of their primetime shows on their websites, they may still, haven't checked.
Ok, so: (a) no proof that he gets paid anything by the Alliance for Climate Protection. (b) You have a fundamental misunderstanding of the point of carbon credits
- the fact that polluters are members of a carbon credit exchange (CCX) is EXACTLY the point. (c) On the Zinc mine you linked to a guest opinion piece that was originally in - you guessed it - a ditto blog. You didn't link to the actual article, probably because the worst you could find in there are statements like these: "The operation has a record of vigilance in not operating to harm the environment, and we certainly hope that the renewed operation will maintain this record," "Gore sent a letter asking the company to work with Earthworks, a national environmental group, to make sure the operation doesn't damage the environment." "the terms of the 30-year lease provided the Gores "no legal recourse" even if they had wanted to cancel it." --Environmentalist Gore allowed zinc mine
So, for a third time, a couple of minutes with google and the application of critical thinking takes the wind out of your sails. I think the pattern is pretty well established by now.
Until self-signed certificates are less safe than bare http any justification for putting up scary messages for self-signed only is nonsense.
Consider this - how often is a neophyte going to connect to a site with a self-signed certificate that actually has important information to keep encrypted but without any special instructions given ahead of time? Now how often is a neophyte going to connect to a spoof site (of a site which, by definition has important information, else it wouldn't be spoofed) with the use of a self-signed certificate?
I think the second case is going to be a lot more common than the first.
It's not good policy to put up popups that have no meaning. Just like the boy that cried wolf and Vista UAC all you're doing is training the user to ignore popups when they do matter.
Talk about missing the point. Neophytes will NEVER know what to do with a pop-up of highly technical nature like this one. So better that the pop-up guide the neophyte into the default safe case while still providing information and choice to cognizant users. That's exactly what firefox does now.
What should be done is that self-signed certs should be acceptable, with the right handling. The way ssh does this is a good one; it alerts you when you initially connect, and throws up an extremely loud and nasty warning if the host's cert has changed from the last time you connect.
That's great and all if you are an internet mechanic. But what if you just want to drive the damn car? For those people, who are the majority, those messages don't mean squat. Which means they have just as much a chance of picking the unsafe choice as they do the safe choice. So Firefox's solution has been make it hard to pick the unsafe choice. Make it so that you pretty much have to understand what's going on in order to even get the chance to pick the potentially unsafe choice. That seems like a pretty good policy to me.
Why should anyone believe half the crap that you spew? Seriously, why are you so gung-ho confident about stuff that can be so easily disproven with 60 seconds of googling? Its like you are repeating something someone else told you and never bothered to question it.
has a home that costs thousands of dollars a month in electricity,
the 60- to 70-year-old house is undergoing renovations to add solar panels to reduce consumption off the power grid, and energy-efficient windows have been installed. The home also uses "compact" fluorescent light bulbs and other energy-saving technology, the Gores drive hybrids and participate in two programs that indirectly reduce carbon emissions.
One is through the local power company -- the massive Tennessee Valley Authority -- which runs the Green Power Switch program that uses some renewable energy like wind and solar power. The second is through a so-called carbon credit program, in which the Gores pay money to invest in a third party to reduce one ton of carbon emissions for every ton of carbon the Gores emit. --Fox News
, and does very little himself monetarily speaking to help with environmental groups, despite all of the millions he is pulling in from his "documentary"
"My wife Tipper and I are devoting 100% of whatever profits we receive from both the movie and the book to a new organization of The Alliance for Climate Protection that environmental groups in the United States have helped to initiate, but goes beyond environmental groups to include faith groups, labor and business groups and they are planning now a nation-wide persuasion campaign in the United States.
And in fact, Paramount has done something unprecedented in agreeing to contribute 5% of its domestic gross [not just profits] from this movie. They have already committed $5,000 as a minimum." --Cannes Interview with Gore
You can spin it any way you like, just shows your fanboyism for Gore.
The only fanboyism on display here is your refusal to acknowledge the context of the quote and the jargon in it. When faced with a reasonable explanation, you insist on believing the unreasonable.
This is not a good measure of how good or bad a database is. Its good to have a table for every type of data and every data type. Read about normalization. You can go overboard, but as long as your database is designed well, having 463 tables might be just fine.
From various reports we know that the only thing in the database are names - no ages, no addresses, no physical descriptions. We also know that roughly 400,000 individuals (comprising over 1 million name variations) are on the list. I would not be surprised at all if it turns out that each table is just a piece of the list with up to 1,000 entries.
That's actually an example of what I am talking about - the people who only care about 'securing the system' but not using it are the ones who put those requirements down on paper.
By the way, most organizations that have the mindset "We must will do any stupid thing, as long as it is written down on paper" typically do have methods to change what is written on paper. Its just a long tedious process to get it done.
WTF are you smoking? They've had binary only drivers for YEARS.
Of course this confusion is intentional, since the problem is obvious to every native English speaker, which RMS is.
Rrrrright. Because freedom of speech is such a rare concept in the english speaking world, no one would ever consider that defintion would make sense.
The other problem with term is that RMS wants you to think that the software is "free" as in "unencumbered,"
Ok. Back that shit up. I mean it. Lets see ONE citation of RMS saying anything remotely like that. Just ONE. You are so confident, there has to be SOME proof, right?
No, what they did is choose a deliberately misleading name as a marketing ploy. They could have easily called it "freedom software" and they wouldn't have to anthropomorphise "software" in order to justify a non-obvious interpretation of the phrase "free software".
WTF? Since when is "Free as in Speech, not Free as in Beer" anthropomorphization?
The fact is that "free as in free" is more appealing than "free as in dogma".
Let's say there's some piece of hardware that there's a significant demand for a Linux driver. The manufacturer writes a driver for Linux. It works. But now some less than 1% comes around demanding that driver be released, but one already has been. Now the problem with the driver isn't that it doesn't exist, or doesn't work. It's that some vocal minority simply refuses to use it. That's a personal problem of their own manufacturing.
Which perfectly explains why ATI has opened up their internal documentation and started helping out the people working on completely Free drivers. Oh wait...
Also, let's not call GPL software "free." It's legally encumbered, just like everything else. If you want something to be truly free, then public domain it.
You ought to know better -- the term "free" has many meanings, only some of which apply to the public domain. The FSF has never made a secret of the specific meanings that they mean when they use the term "Free." I believe there is a phrase, you've probably heard it, about beer...
I'm simply more realistic; I've yet to see one person suggest a viable solution to making a profit from software without charging people for a copy of the game.
How is it realistic to deny that the internet has made copyright enforcement impossible? You complain that "idealism doesn't work without a solid plan to back it up" but you are being just as idealistic, if not more so because we absolutely know with 100% certainty that distribution is no longer an effective proxy for compensating creation, the internet killed it at least 10 years ago. So where is this "solid plan" for dealing with the consequences of that change?
Slashdot Mirror
it's only made more humorous by people who are incensed by it because of silly political affiliations.
Yeah, because people who think that maintaining some of level of accuracy in the general public's knowledge of the history of the net are just a bunch of whiny liberals.
Give me a fucking break.
You do know that outside of Slashdot, practically no one has heard of or cares to hear about the DMCA, right? Putting that up on the same level as the PATRIOT ACT is, quite frankly, ludicrous.
And yet more people, by a couple orders of magnitude, have been directly and personally affected by the DMCA than have been by the patriot acts.
If for some reason your future wife happens to need to get the ring cut off due to an accident, and the hospital cannot get the ring off with the tools on hand, they will cut off the finger. I found this out after speaking to two registered nurses.
Sounds like you don't want to go to their ER.
They pretty much own the audiobook download market
Talk about a market where DRM is going to be the least effective. The analog hole kind of sucks for music, because there is some amount of quality degradation which requires either hi-quality equipment to reduce, or haxor tools to strip the DRM digitally.
But for the spoken word? Anyone can crack the DRM on an audiobook and get satisfactory results, even a cheap-ass microphone sitting in front of a cheap-ass PC speaker will do fine.
Bullshit. Windows included a BSD-licensed stack.
No it didn't. Try to find proof. You won't because the windows nt 3.1 stack was written by Spider Systems - it was STREAMS based and a 100% fresh reimplementation. I know about the reimplementation part because I was involved with stuffing STREAMS into another unix and the company decided on licensing the Spider stack. There were no BSD copyrights in the source (hell, it was so different from BSD they probably couldn't have reused anything more than a few subroutines even if they wanted to).
Furthermore, that was ONLY NT 3.1 - not a very big seller at all, by the next release - NT 3.5 - MS had done their own reimplementation. I think the best you can do is that some of the utilities, like the ftp client used some BSD code. Nobody bought NT 3.1 for the ftp client.
Developer freedom matters, too. That's what BSD/MIT are for.
Gee, don't you remember my original point. The one where I said it all depends on what definition of "Free" you pick?
No, of course you didn't otherwise, you wouldn't have gone off on that nutso rant about ethics of choices which happen to be made purely by free will. Ironic with all your blather about "making sense."
Very, very few actual commercial applications are GPL licensed--they're either based on support (which is a business model applicable only to a very narrow selection of software) with the applications being free, or they "abuse" the GPL through exposing functionality via web services. But I'm sure you know that. :)
Dollars to donuts more money has been made with the sale of GPL licensed software than with any other Freely licensed code.
That's because pro-GPL mindsets don't make sense.
No surprise you replied with a trite response. Don't blame the inadequacies of your small mind on others. The "more free" and "more open" that apply to gnu means that every single copy of compiled code comes with a corresponding guarantee of FREE and OPEN source code to the end user. You can not say that about BSD, MIT or public domain.
That's exactly why the GPL makes my eye twitch. Some of us don't care if our code is used commercially, that'fine. Trying to say that you're "more free" and "more open" because you ban that is prima facie stupidity.
That you think the GPL is about preventing commercial use of code is also prima facie stupidity. Just look at all of the commercial endeavors that are GNU licensed.
As for how in the world GNU software could be "more free" and "more open" - well both of those terms have multiple meanings, you pick the meaning that applies and it makes sense, you apply an anti-GPL mindset and pick a meaning that doesn't make sense and doh! it doesn't make sense.
So say you have Comcast's triple-play or some VOIP service that rides out of your house on your Comcast connection. You get cut off for one reason or another, such as exceeding this cap. Is your phone service dead, too?
No, Comcast's VOIP service is out-of-band from regular IP. Skype and others, yep. Funny how that works out to Comcast's benefit, eh?
Hulu has some shows in HD.
Xbox360 has pseudo-HD movies (720p) for 'rent'
Watch for Tivo to do the same with their various partnerships like Amazon unbox.
For a while some of the broadcast networks (ABC/CBS/NBC/FOX/WB) had pseudo-HD versions of their primetime shows on their websites, they may still, haven't checked.
it is evidence of an inefficient market.
The difference between theory and practice...
...is greater in practice than in theory.
In other words, there is no such thing as 100% efficient market and its rare to even get close.
Ok, so:
(a) no proof that he gets paid anything by the Alliance for Climate Protection.
(b) You have a fundamental misunderstanding of the point of carbon credits
- the fact that polluters are members of a carbon credit exchange (CCX) is EXACTLY the point.
(c) On the Zinc mine you linked to a guest opinion piece that was originally in - you guessed it - a ditto blog.
You didn't link to the actual article, probably because the worst you could find in there are statements like these:
"The operation has a record of vigilance in not operating to harm the environment, and we certainly hope that the renewed operation will maintain this record,"
"Gore sent a letter asking the company to work with Earthworks, a national environmental group, to make sure the operation doesn't damage the environment."
"the terms of the 30-year lease provided the Gores "no legal recourse" even if they had wanted to cancel it."
--Environmentalist Gore allowed zinc mine
So, for a third time, a couple of minutes with google and the application of critical thinking takes the wind out of your sails.
I think the pattern is pretty well established by now.
Until self-signed certificates are less safe than bare http any justification for putting up scary messages for self-signed only is nonsense.
Consider this - how often is a neophyte going to connect to a site with a self-signed certificate that actually has important information to keep encrypted but without any special instructions given ahead of time? Now how often is a neophyte going to connect to a spoof site (of a site which, by definition has important information, else it wouldn't be spoofed) with the use of a self-signed certificate?
I think the second case is going to be a lot more common than the first.
It's not good policy to put up popups that have no meaning. Just like the boy that cried wolf and Vista UAC all you're doing is training the user to ignore popups when they do matter.
Talk about missing the point. Neophytes will NEVER know what to do with a pop-up of highly technical nature like this one. So better that the pop-up guide the neophyte into the default safe case while still providing information and choice to cognizant users. That's exactly what firefox does now.
What should be done is that self-signed certs should be acceptable, with the right handling. The way ssh does this is a good one; it alerts you when you initially connect, and throws up an extremely loud and nasty warning if the host's cert has changed from the last time you connect.
That's great and all if you are an internet mechanic. But what if you just want to drive the damn car? For those people, who are the majority, those messages don't mean squat. Which means they have just as much a chance of picking the unsafe choice as they do the safe choice. So Firefox's solution has been make it hard to pick the unsafe choice. Make it so that you pretty much have to understand what's going on in order to even get the chance to pick the potentially unsafe choice. That seems like a pretty good policy to me.
Citations?
Just one for each claim - hard facts not ditto blogs.
Why should anyone believe half the crap that you spew?
Seriously, why are you so gung-ho confident about stuff that can be so easily disproven with 60 seconds of googling? Its like you are repeating something someone else told you and never bothered to question it.
has a home that costs thousands of dollars a month in electricity,
the 60- to 70-year-old house is undergoing renovations to add solar panels to reduce consumption off the power grid, and energy-efficient windows have been installed. The home also uses "compact" fluorescent light bulbs and other energy-saving technology, the Gores drive hybrids and participate in two programs that indirectly reduce carbon emissions.
One is through the local power company -- the massive Tennessee Valley Authority -- which runs the Green Power Switch program that uses some renewable energy like wind and solar power. The second is through a so-called carbon credit program, in which the Gores pay money to invest in a third party to reduce one ton of carbon emissions for every ton of carbon the Gores emit.
--Fox News
, and does very little himself monetarily speaking to help with environmental groups, despite all of the millions he is pulling in from his "documentary"
"My wife Tipper and I are devoting 100% of whatever profits we receive from both the movie and the book to a new organization of The Alliance for Climate Protection that environmental groups in the United States have helped to initiate, but goes beyond environmental groups to include faith groups, labor and business groups and they are planning now a nation-wide persuasion campaign in the United States.
And in fact, Paramount has done something unprecedented in agreeing to contribute 5% of its domestic gross [not just profits] from this movie. They have already committed $5,000 as a minimum."
--Cannes Interview with Gore
You can spin it any way you like, just shows your fanboyism for Gore.
The only fanboyism on display here is your refusal to acknowledge the context of the quote and the jargon in it. When faced with a reasonable explanation, you insist on believing the unreasonable.
This is not a good measure of how good or bad a database is. Its good to have a table for every type of data and every data type. Read about normalization. You can go overboard, but as long as your database is designed well, having 463 tables might be just fine.
From various reports we know that the only thing in the database are names - no ages, no addresses, no physical descriptions. We also know that roughly 400,000 individuals (comprising over 1 million name variations) are on the list. I would not be surprised at all if it turns out that each table is just a piece of the list with up to 1,000 entries.
A perfect example of the same sort of superficial derision. Go read up on what Al Gore actually said.
Wooooooooooooosh! I mean you even got the first sentence 100% right but you were still swept up by the woooosh.
"an Internet was sent by my staff"
Clearly not at his most lucid, but it's obvious that he meant "email".
Seems to me he just thought Al Gore was on his staff and could create an internet anytime he wanted to.
That's actually an example of what I am talking about - the people who only care about 'securing the system' but not using it are the ones who put those requirements down on paper.
By the way, most organizations that have the mindset "We must will do any stupid thing, as long as it is written down on paper" typically do have methods to change what is written on paper. Its just a long tedious process to get it done.
ATI didn't have any linux drivers!
WTF are you smoking? They've had binary only drivers for YEARS.
Of course this confusion is intentional, since the problem is obvious to every native English speaker, which RMS is.
Rrrrright. Because freedom of speech is such a rare concept in the english speaking world, no one would ever consider that defintion would make sense.
The other problem with term is that RMS wants you to think that the software is "free" as in "unencumbered,"
Ok. Back that shit up. I mean it. Lets see ONE citation of RMS saying anything remotely like that. Just ONE. You are so confident, there has to be SOME proof, right?
Who is the entity that enjoys this "freedom" that the GPL provides?
The end user who receives the software.
You've never heard the phrase "code wants to be free" in the context of the GPL?
Lol! The phrase you are reaching for is "information wants to be free" and no it is not regularly used in the context of the GPL.
No, what they did is choose a deliberately misleading name as a marketing ploy. They could have easily called it "freedom software" and they wouldn't have to anthropomorphise "software" in order to justify a non-obvious interpretation of the phrase "free software".
WTF? Since when is "Free as in Speech, not Free as in Beer" anthropomorphization?
The fact is that "free as in free" is more appealing than "free as in dogma".
WTF are you smoking?
Let's say there's some piece of hardware that there's a significant demand for a Linux driver. The manufacturer writes a driver for Linux. It works. But now some less than 1% comes around demanding that driver be released, but one already has been. Now the problem with the driver isn't that it doesn't exist, or doesn't work. It's that some vocal minority simply refuses to use it. That's a personal problem of their own manufacturing.
Which perfectly explains why ATI has opened up their internal documentation and started helping out the people working on completely Free drivers. Oh wait...
Also, let's not call GPL software "free." It's legally encumbered, just like everything else. If you want something to be truly free, then public domain it.
You ought to know better -- the term "free" has many meanings, only some of which apply to the public domain. The FSF has never made a secret of the specific meanings that they mean when they use the term "Free." I believe there is a phrase, you've probably heard it, about beer...
I'm simply more realistic; I've yet to see one person suggest a viable solution to making a profit from software without charging people for a copy of the game.
How is it realistic to deny that the internet has made copyright enforcement impossible? You complain that "idealism doesn't work without a solid plan to back it up" but you are being just as idealistic, if not more so because we absolutely know with 100% certainty that distribution is no longer an effective proxy for compensating creation, the internet killed it at least 10 years ago. So where is this "solid plan" for dealing with the consequences of that change?