Fair enough. Here's the deal: let's change places. I don't and have never paid a dime in federal income tax.
Have fun making about $25,000/yr and having a personal equity of -$88,000. I'll be happy to pay $75,000 in federal taxes because that would mean that I'm making something near 7 figures.
If you think paying taxes is bad, try being below the poverty line (not that I am, but many are).
The wording could be better. I prefer a blanket "right of defense" in the bill of rights rather than the right to bear arms. Of course, the 9th amendment protects the right of defense, but most politicians rely on the Robert Bork theory of the 9th amendment.
I suppose I don't mind overgeneralizing because I do know the differences between the terms. But as you say, many others don't and are confused. I would suppose when speaking about copyrights, patents, and trademarks to someone who does understand the difference, I would refer to them collectively as IP. This is similar to the way I refer to GNU/Linux as "Linux" to those well versed enough to know the whole naming controversy. It all has to do with the cumbersomeness of the language. Really, I prefer to speak of the actual distro when possible, rather than GNU/Linux as a generic term, but I digress.
I tend to agree with RMS on a lot of things, but here he is just wrong. Copyright, patents, and trademarks are indeed linked; they are government granted monopolies over "ideas". Obviously, copyright protects your expression of an idea, patents protect a process, and trademarks protect a specific usage of a phrase with respect to a product. The framers knew that copyright and patents were linked since they put them side by side in Constitution.
I agree that the term "intellectual property" is a misnomer as there is actually no property involved in the strictest sense. Since copyright is now automatic, it does seem like a property right. "Intellectual monopoly rights" seems to be a more apt way to talk about those concepts. It does pay to not lump them all together all the time, but when talking in general about IP law being too strict or too loose, etc. one can avoid unnecessary wordiness.
Given that Novell already releases much software under GPL, why did you suggest a "more permissive license [such as BSD or public domain]"?
They aren't going to sue over the copyrights, so they might as well release to the public domain.
If I copyright some code and say I won't sue anyone for infringement of it, then it makes no sense for me to do anything other than release it to the public domain. Now if I wanted some recognition of the code, I'd put it under a permissive license. Putting it under the GPL is kind of odd given that I'm not going to sue anyone for using it.
I don't see how that addresses anything. I might have been a little careless by assuming that Novell now holds the copyright to "Unix", which due to your post disabused me of that notion.
The SCO v. Novell case resulted with Novell having control of some portion of Unix. Since Novell says they do not wish to sue over its use, then it would only make sense to release that code under a permissive license or even to the public domain.
So the entirety of Unix might not be FOSS, but at least Novell's contribution can be.
Novell said they wouldn't be suing anyone over their copyrighted Unix files. If they aren't going to be suing they might as well release under a permissive license. Nowhere did I say that the BSD license is better than the GPL. In fact, I prefer the GPLv2 and GPLv3 to the BSD/MIT/etc. licenses in most cases. True freedom requires restrictions on what people can do with it (slavery, for example).
Oh, and this article has nothing to do with GPL software. It has to do with Novell's copyrights on some Unix code. Next time, think before you rant.
Then it wouldn't hurt to put any and all software they own the copyrights to under the BSD license or even release them to the public domain. If they aren't going to sue anyone who infringes on their copyrights, then they might as well release the code under a permissive license
Pretty much. As you know, what constitutes a derivative work in the software world isn't completely fleshed out. The FSF interprets the law broadly, while Linus and other more pragmatic people interpret it more narrowly. IIRC, the other popular position is that statically linked works are derivatives while dynamically linked works are not. Linus's thoughts are available FTA.
RMS et al. attempted to state more concretely their view of this in the GPLv3, which I recall, you are not fond of.
I certainly haven't. I tend to go out of my way to vote for minor party and independent candidates. In fact, I'm considering running in the 2010 election on an IP-reform platform (as an indy or perhaps Libertarian or Green).
I was just mentioning that usually both major party candidates are bought and paid for (or at least will be after a few months in office). The only way to stop electing corrupt politicians is to vote for minor party and independent candidates. At that point, I usually hear the "wasting your vote" line.
It seems the only way to vote against corruption and blind partisanship is to waste one's vote.
NY has 31 EVs, Bush got 40% of the vote there. That would give him about 12 EVs. Let's assume that is the lower bound for any Republican candidate is 35% and the upper bound is 55% (hey, it's possible a Republican could win NY, just not bloody likely). So any Republican candidate would get at the very least 10 EVs (rounding down from 10.85). He could conceivably get as many as 17 EVs. So using what seems to be a best case scenario, a possible gain of only 7 EVs would result from a Republican campaign in NY. Iowa has 7 EVs, so this isn't a totally lost situation for the Republican candidate.
You aren't wrong in thinking that splitting EVs like that will give more incentive for people to campaign in safe states. But changing to a proportional elector system unilaterally will just end up giving more EVs to the minority candidate. For instance, if CA and NY did this for the 2008 election, the Republican would already be spotted 34EVs. That is more than enough to elect a President with something near 40% of the popular vote.
Proportional allocation could work so long as red and blue states paired up to do it. Doing so by themselves would be a boon for the minority party in that state.
Actually, it's open to anyone. Mesa is an FOSS implementation of OpenGL licensed under the MIT license. Addons are licensed under some non-free licenses.
Who else was expecting a Holy Bible implemented in OpenGL? I can see the conversation now:
1: Hey, did you see SuperBible? This thing rocks. 2: SuperBible, wtf? 1: It's God's word in full 3D. You can rotate the book on all 3 axes, flip pages, and it even has full scene rendering during the great flood. 2: That's ridiculous. Who would want that? 1: Bah, at the very least you can use it as a benchmarking program. I'm getting 200FPS at the Sermon on the Mount.
I hear you. At least you have a Libertarian party. In Ohio we have 2 state-recognized parties. Everyone who wants to run outside that system has to run as an independent. Thankfully, our ballot access laws were ruled unconstitutional and were changed until the legislature drafts a new law.
I think the Libertarians might gain access this next time around. It'd be a boon for them because our petition requirements for established parties are very lenient. Of course, I'm sure our enlightened representatives in Columbus will do their best to change that once there is an actual recognized 3rd party.
Then all you've done is moved from swing states to swing districts.
I take it you're pissed because you live in CA and your state has already been called Democratic for the 2008 Presidential election. Fair enough. If you live in a safe district, then your vote is just as meaningless as if you live in a safe state.
This plan was brought up by Republicans in California because they know they can swing a few Republican districts, which would certainly work out well for the Republican nominee. That doesn't make it a bad plan on its face, but I guarantee you those same people wouldn't be for the same plan in a large red state, say Texas. You think it was a travesty that Bush won the election in 2000 when he lost the popular vote? If that plan went through, we could have President Rudy Giuliani with 42% of the popular vote.
We need a system where every vote counts towards an increase in the EVs a particular candidate gets. Obviously this can't be perfectly done due to rounding when calculating EVs, but the plan I described is the best plan I've seen yet. We need to keep the electoral college if we're going to maintain any resemblance of a federal republic. The increasing scope of federal power and encroachment on states' rights is concerning. If they go as far as to abolish the electoral college, we might as well become a unitary state with devolved assemblies in the states (simliar to what they have in the UK).
In theory, you're absolutely right. The fairest way to allocate electoral votes is to allocate them as a percentage of the total vote. If X gets 40% of the vote, he gets 40% of the electoral votes. Colorado had this on the ballot. It lost by a wide margin.
Why did it fail? Lets use my home state of Ohio as an example. Ohio has 20 electoral votes, and is notoriously a swing state in presidential elections. If Ohio adopted the allocation as above, pretty much any major party candidate would get at least 40% of the vote. So by default the lesser of the two candidates gets 8 EVs just for being alive. The other major candidate would likely get the rest. So we know for sure that each candidate will get at least 8 EVs for being on the ballot. That leaves only 4 EVs to fight over. What does that mean for Ohio? No more candidates spending all their money in our state. No more enhanced influence for our voters.
We don't want fair elections, we want our votes to count more than others. Using a fairer method means less incentive for candidates to come to your state every few days during the campaign season. This plan works only under a mutual disarmament scenario, much like the national popular vote plan that states are passing (whereby the state allocates it's electoral votes according to the popular vote). Only if everyone agrees to the same plan, will there be any reform.
IRV/Approval get our foot in the door. Condorcet is, mathematically speaking, the best. Unfortunately, getting the average American to understand things like beatpaths and the like is not bloody likely. It'd be dead in the water because people would think it was a way to try and control the outcome of the election.
How is that? I'd vote Libertarian as a 1st choice and Democratic as a 2nd choice.
If you even believe in the "siphoning votes" argument, the Constitution party is the one that draws from the Republicans. Libertarians seem to draw about evenly.
I'm not going to get into if a call is to a US citizen outside the US. That is a very tangled web, and I wish to defer that discussion for clarity's sake.
Case 2 isn't a problem. If no US citizens are involved, our country doesn't afford any protections to them.
Case 1 is the problem. Obviously if the other end is outside our country then it devolves into case 2. If the other end is inside our country (read: one end is a US citizen in the USA*), then this would certainly constitute an illegal search and seizure under the 4th amendment.
The standard argument boils down to saying that we have to error on the side of gaining intelligence rather than protect the liberties of our citizens. That is a losing argument on its face.
Let us also recall that under case 1, the wiretap can still be carried out using the standard FISA procedure, which as we all know, almost never rejects a warrant request.
This notion that we need to stop an attack at all costs is frankly ridiculous. I recall a slashdotter saying something along the lines of "if this is what we have to do to stop another attack, then I'll take another attack". I couldn't have said it better myself. The cure is worse than the disease.
Well you better throw them out next election by voting for the Republicans (and then Democrats the next election, etc.). You wouldn't be dumb enough to vote for a minor party or independent candidate who can't win, would you? You'll vote for the Democrats and you'll like it. If they don't do your bidding you'll vote Republican and like it. Anything else is treason.
Voting for a minor party means that you've siphoned votes from one of the major party candidates. How dare you steal their votes by voting for a different candidate! If you're liberal, the Democrats have already bought and paid for your vote. If you're conservative, the Republicans have done the same.
For the love of God, vote for someone who is going to make a difference. They can't win unless you vote for them! And even when they don't win, at least you won't have the taste of bile in your throat when your party does something like this.
To be completely fair, only 41 Democrats voted for the measure. Two Republicans voted against.
Of course, that doesn't change the fact that the Democrats control the House and should have insisted on more privacy safeguards. I really am starting to get tired of the Democrats calling foul on Bush administration law violations and then pass laws making the programs legal.
History has shown that when the Democrats throw away their focus groups and polls and start standing up for their beliefs, they do well. One day, they might find their collective spines. Don't hold your breath, though.
My point was that even in a state (Ohio) were we don't have contractual monopolies, we still don't have anything much more than a choice between the phone monopoly and the cable monopoly for Internet connections.
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Fair enough. Here's the deal: let's change places. I don't and have never paid a dime in federal income tax.
Have fun making about $25,000/yr and having a personal equity of -$88,000. I'll be happy to pay $75,000 in federal taxes because that would mean that I'm making something near 7 figures.
If you think paying taxes is bad, try being below the poverty line (not that I am, but many are).
Pretty much agreed.
The wording could be better. I prefer a blanket "right of defense" in the bill of rights rather than the right to bear arms. Of course, the 9th amendment protects the right of defense, but most politicians rely on the Robert Bork theory of the 9th amendment.
I suppose I don't mind overgeneralizing because I do know the differences between the terms. But as you say, many others don't and are confused. I would suppose when speaking about copyrights, patents, and trademarks to someone who does understand the difference, I would refer to them collectively as IP. This is similar to the way I refer to GNU/Linux as "Linux" to those well versed enough to know the whole naming controversy. It all has to do with the cumbersomeness of the language. Really, I prefer to speak of the actual distro when possible, rather than GNU/Linux as a generic term, but I digress.
All in all, point taken.
I tend to agree with RMS on a lot of things, but here he is just wrong. Copyright, patents, and trademarks are indeed linked; they are government granted monopolies over "ideas". Obviously, copyright protects your expression of an idea, patents protect a process, and trademarks protect a specific usage of a phrase with respect to a product. The framers knew that copyright and patents were linked since they put them side by side in Constitution.
I agree that the term "intellectual property" is a misnomer as there is actually no property involved in the strictest sense. Since copyright is now automatic, it does seem like a property right. "Intellectual monopoly rights" seems to be a more apt way to talk about those concepts. It does pay to not lump them all together all the time, but when talking in general about IP law being too strict or too loose, etc. one can avoid unnecessary wordiness.
If I copyright some code and say I won't sue anyone for infringement of it, then it makes no sense for me to do anything other than release it to the public domain. Now if I wanted some recognition of the code, I'd put it under a permissive license. Putting it under the GPL is kind of odd given that I'm not going to sue anyone for using it.
I don't see how that addresses anything. I might have been a little careless by assuming that Novell now holds the copyright to "Unix", which due to your post disabused me of that notion.
The SCO v. Novell case resulted with Novell having control of some portion of Unix. Since Novell says they do not wish to sue over its use, then it would only make sense to release that code under a permissive license or even to the public domain.
So the entirety of Unix might not be FOSS, but at least Novell's contribution can be.
Reread FTA and my comment.
Novell said they wouldn't be suing anyone over their copyrighted Unix files. If they aren't going to be suing they might as well release under a permissive license. Nowhere did I say that the BSD license is better than the GPL. In fact, I prefer the GPLv2 and GPLv3 to the BSD/MIT/etc. licenses in most cases. True freedom requires restrictions on what people can do with it (slavery, for example).
Oh, and this article has nothing to do with GPL software. It has to do with Novell's copyrights on some Unix code. Next time, think before you rant.
Then it wouldn't hurt to put any and all software they own the copyrights to under the BSD license or even release them to the public domain. If they aren't going to sue anyone who infringes on their copyrights, then they might as well release the code under a permissive license
Pretty much. As you know, what constitutes a derivative work in the software world isn't completely fleshed out. The FSF interprets the law broadly, while Linus and other more pragmatic people interpret it more narrowly. IIRC, the other popular position is that statically linked works are derivatives while dynamically linked works are not. Linus's thoughts are available FTA.
RMS et al. attempted to state more concretely their view of this in the GPLv3, which I recall, you are not fond of.
I certainly haven't. I tend to go out of my way to vote for minor party and independent candidates. In fact, I'm considering running in the 2010 election on an IP-reform platform (as an indy or perhaps Libertarian or Green).
I was just mentioning that usually both major party candidates are bought and paid for (or at least will be after a few months in office). The only way to stop electing corrupt politicians is to vote for minor party and independent candidates. At that point, I usually hear the "wasting your vote" line.
It seems the only way to vote against corruption and blind partisanship is to waste one's vote.
But they tell me that voting for a minor party or independent candidate is wasting my vote!
Well let's look at what would happen in NY.
NY has 31 EVs, Bush got 40% of the vote there. That would give him about 12 EVs. Let's assume that is the lower bound for any Republican candidate is 35% and the upper bound is 55% (hey, it's possible a Republican could win NY, just not bloody likely). So any Republican candidate would get at the very least 10 EVs (rounding down from 10.85). He could conceivably get as many as 17 EVs. So using what seems to be a best case scenario, a possible gain of only 7 EVs would result from a Republican campaign in NY. Iowa has 7 EVs, so this isn't a totally lost situation for the Republican candidate.
You aren't wrong in thinking that splitting EVs like that will give more incentive for people to campaign in safe states. But changing to a proportional elector system unilaterally will just end up giving more EVs to the minority candidate. For instance, if CA and NY did this for the 2008 election, the Republican would already be spotted 34EVs. That is more than enough to elect a President with something near 40% of the popular vote.
Proportional allocation could work so long as red and blue states paired up to do it. Doing so by themselves would be a boon for the minority party in that state.
You'll forgive me as my biblical knowledge is much less than the average American.
Who else was expecting a Holy Bible implemented in OpenGL? I can see the conversation now:
1: Hey, did you see SuperBible? This thing rocks.
2: SuperBible, wtf?
1: It's God's word in full 3D. You can rotate the book on all 3 axes, flip pages, and it even has full scene rendering during the great flood.
2: That's ridiculous. Who would want that?
1: Bah, at the very least you can use it as a benchmarking program. I'm getting 200FPS at the Sermon on the Mount.
I hear you. At least you have a Libertarian party. In Ohio we have 2 state-recognized parties. Everyone who wants to run outside that system has to run as an independent. Thankfully, our ballot access laws were ruled unconstitutional and were changed until the legislature drafts a new law.
I think the Libertarians might gain access this next time around. It'd be a boon for them because our petition requirements for established parties are very lenient. Of course, I'm sure our enlightened representatives in Columbus will do their best to change that once there is an actual recognized 3rd party.
Then all you've done is moved from swing states to swing districts.
I take it you're pissed because you live in CA and your state has already been called Democratic for the 2008 Presidential election. Fair enough. If you live in a safe district, then your vote is just as meaningless as if you live in a safe state.
This plan was brought up by Republicans in California because they know they can swing a few Republican districts, which would certainly work out well for the Republican nominee. That doesn't make it a bad plan on its face, but I guarantee you those same people wouldn't be for the same plan in a large red state, say Texas. You think it was a travesty that Bush won the election in 2000 when he lost the popular vote? If that plan went through, we could have President Rudy Giuliani with 42% of the popular vote.
We need a system where every vote counts towards an increase in the EVs a particular candidate gets. Obviously this can't be perfectly done due to rounding when calculating EVs, but the plan I described is the best plan I've seen yet. We need to keep the electoral college if we're going to maintain any resemblance of a federal republic. The increasing scope of federal power and encroachment on states' rights is concerning. If they go as far as to abolish the electoral college, we might as well become a unitary state with devolved assemblies in the states (simliar to what they have in the UK).
In theory, you're absolutely right. The fairest way to allocate electoral votes is to allocate them as a percentage of the total vote. If X gets 40% of the vote, he gets 40% of the electoral votes. Colorado had this on the ballot. It lost by a wide margin.
Why did it fail? Lets use my home state of Ohio as an example. Ohio has 20 electoral votes, and is notoriously a swing state in presidential elections. If Ohio adopted the allocation as above, pretty much any major party candidate would get at least 40% of the vote. So by default the lesser of the two candidates gets 8 EVs just for being alive. The other major candidate would likely get the rest. So we know for sure that each candidate will get at least 8 EVs for being on the ballot. That leaves only 4 EVs to fight over. What does that mean for Ohio? No more candidates spending all their money in our state. No more enhanced influence for our voters.
We don't want fair elections, we want our votes to count more than others. Using a fairer method means less incentive for candidates to come to your state every few days during the campaign season. This plan works only under a mutual disarmament scenario, much like the national popular vote plan that states are passing (whereby the state allocates it's electoral votes according to the popular vote). Only if everyone agrees to the same plan, will there be any reform.
IRV/Approval get our foot in the door. Condorcet is, mathematically speaking, the best. Unfortunately, getting the average American to understand things like beatpaths and the like is not bloody likely. It'd be dead in the water because people would think it was a way to try and control the outcome of the election.
How is that? I'd vote Libertarian as a 1st choice and Democratic as a 2nd choice.
If you even believe in the "siphoning votes" argument, the Constitution party is the one that draws from the Republicans. Libertarians seem to draw about evenly.
I'm not going to get into if a call is to a US citizen outside the US. That is a very tangled web, and I wish to defer that discussion for clarity's sake.
Case 2 isn't a problem. If no US citizens are involved, our country doesn't afford any protections to them.
Case 1 is the problem. Obviously if the other end is outside our country then it devolves into case 2. If the other end is inside our country (read: one end is a US citizen in the USA*), then this would certainly constitute an illegal search and seizure under the 4th amendment.
The standard argument boils down to saying that we have to error on the side of gaining intelligence rather than protect the liberties of our citizens. That is a losing argument on its face.
Let us also recall that under case 1, the wiretap can still be carried out using the standard FISA procedure, which as we all know, almost never rejects a warrant request.
This notion that we need to stop an attack at all costs is frankly ridiculous. I recall a slashdotter saying something along the lines of "if this is what we have to do to stop another attack, then I'll take another attack". I couldn't have said it better myself. The cure is worse than the disease.
Well you better throw them out next election by voting for the Republicans (and then Democrats the next election, etc.). You wouldn't be dumb enough to vote for a minor party or independent candidate who can't win, would you? You'll vote for the Democrats and you'll like it. If they don't do your bidding you'll vote Republican and like it. Anything else is treason.
Voting for a minor party means that you've siphoned votes from one of the major party candidates. How dare you steal their votes by voting for a different candidate! If you're liberal, the Democrats have already bought and paid for your vote. If you're conservative, the Republicans have done the same.
For the love of God, vote for someone who is going to make a difference. They can't win unless you vote for them! And even when they don't win, at least you won't have the taste of bile in your throat when your party does something like this.
To be completely fair, only 41 Democrats voted for the measure. Two Republicans voted against.
Of course, that doesn't change the fact that the Democrats control the House and should have insisted on more privacy safeguards. I really am starting to get tired of the Democrats calling foul on Bush administration law violations and then pass laws making the programs legal.
History has shown that when the Democrats throw away their focus groups and polls and start standing up for their beliefs, they do well. One day, they might find their collective spines. Don't hold your breath, though.
My point was that even in a state (Ohio) were we don't have contractual monopolies, we still don't have anything much more than a choice between the phone monopoly and the cable monopoly for Internet connections.