Although I disagree with everything you just said, let me single this statement out:
> Strangely, collateral damage was never an issue during WW2, but now it's a big deal to everyone.
Ask any European or Japanese person how collateral damage did not matter in WW2. Or any Jew, for that matter. Or gypsy. Or gay. Collateral damage didn't matter in the USA, because there was hardly any collateral damage there. You need to get a more broad point of view. Other people live in this world besides you, and they have rights and religion and everything, it's amazing. Freedom doesn't mean YOU can be free, it means EVERYONE can be free.
Saddam Hussein was aided by the USA. The Taliban (back then they were called Jihad freedom warriors or something, see Rambo3 for your history lesson on that) was aided by the USA. Want more? Visit a news site sometimes.
I can think of a bunch of countries that I feel are more free than the USA as it exists today. It's pretty pathetic that the "beacon of freedom and democracy", the "land of the brave and free" needs to be compared to Afghanistan to be considered free anymore.
> Potential terrorist plots are reported constantly, in the US and elsewhere. How do you know this? Where do you get this information? Have you ever questioned the source? Is the source influenced by the people making the policies? Or vice versa? Do these people have any motives to tell you that there is a "constant threat"? "Make no mistake, there is a constant threat, they are out to get freedom"? Remember, it is not unamerican or unpatriotic to get your leaders to do a good job for you. Some would even say it's your duty. Don't be fazed by all that "you're either with us or against us" crap. Look at what is happening, and look at the big picture. Look at what is happening to your civil rights. Sure, terror is bad and should be prosecuted, but it's not worth the price you are paying.
> slightly more suspicious [foxnews.com] Ah... Forget what I asked, I have my answers.
We don't have or want a Java back end. That would pretty much rule out either ZK or the GWT. right? What to do? So far, we've been programming a bunch in YUI, which is pretty nice because it's so extensible. Most other toolkits, especially scriptaculous (or scriptalicisousness or whatever, here's a couple of dots to spray in random spots in the url:.....) are nice and fast but not as extensible as YUI.
>The other issue I have is that I normally use a VPN to connect to work, and the VPN tunnel doesn't like getting shut down and restarted, especially with a different IP address, so I still have to re-authenticate by typing in my security token code to the VPN client.
Isn't that what's supposed to happen? You've left your computer for a while, especially a portable one, it better disconnect any secure resources it has. It's comfort over security as usual, but I think this is by design.
Although I agree with you in principle, this makes for a strange society. In the Netherlands, when a doctor fucks up badly, he gets sued by the insurance company of the victim and if he fucks up royally, there will be repercussions from the doctor's association (whatever it is called) and he might be forced to stop practicing. Doctors usually know what they are doing. They have to have a certain space in which to practice their profession, a safe zone where they shouldn't be afraid of getting sued all the time. I hear that it's hard to find good emergency room doctors in the US because they fear they will get sued when they make the wrong decision in a case. This should not be. When a doctor makes an error that leads to the patient being in a worse state than before, that's bad. Doctors are willing to make an effort to do things right, though, even without the looming lawsuits. I could see that the additional stress would not be beneficial.
That said, your friend is unfortunate and it really sucks to not be able to do something about it, especially when the doctor was arrogant and condescending. I have a very good friend who was sent home repeatedly with a stomach ache (and a known disease) and when she went in for a second opinion, she found herself in the operating room within hours, and the doctors told her afterwards that it could have been fatal if she had come to the hospital any later. So I know the horror stories.
Well, the ISPs thought it wasn't fair that the Googles of the world got to use their (the ISPs) network for free. They felt they had the right to charge Google or Yahoo or MS for use of those network tubes. This is unfair because Google is already paying for its access to the internet by being hooked up to backbones, renting serverspace (well, not in Google's case, but you get what I mean), etc. This greedy move on the part of the ISPs was then justified by saying it's in the customer's best interest. I don't see how it's in my best interest when my ISP suddenly decides which packets it deems more important than others, and which sites pay them more money to get the best response times. Also, when I wake up tomorrow with the great idea for the new MySpaceGoogleTubeFlickr2.0, I'd have to pay off the ISPs to get my site delivered to the customers in a timely fashion. This would stifle innovation.
That's about all I remember off the top of my head, I'm glad this bill has now died.
Well, it was won just like Vietnam was won. The USA just doesn't admit defeat. Remember, there was a treaty saying that weapon stashes would be diminished, and after that Russia fell apart.
> I do think that the rule of law is our crown jewel, and is the bedrock of our democracy, and that in our common law system the law evolves in part through judicial decisionmaking.
I used to be a law student (so: IANAL) and I agree with this statement. If nothing else, my years studying law made me aware of the cultural influence and importance of a well functioning judicial system and a 'cultural law', as we call it. This is in the Netherlands.
> Respect for law, to my mind, suggests that we should respect the courts
And here is where my beef lies: when a judge upholds a screenshot of an IP address as evidence, I don't think that particular court deserves any respect. It appears that at least some of the judges around need to be visited by the man with the cluestick, if you know what I mean. The big cluestick.
Hmm, after reading this: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060803-7416 .html I don't know how much of my accusations are true, so I hope someone corrects me if I'm wrong (then again, this is/. so there's no doubt about that.)
It would be great if everyone who could write songs well would make money with it. Regrettably, this is not reality today. Yes, it costs money to buy guitars, computers, software, amps, turntables, whatever you need. Renting practice space (especially for more serious bands) can be troublesome and expensive as well. These musicians hope to break even.
Why do they do it? Because it's fun. Do they dream of making it big? Who doesn't! I dream of making it big and I write webpages! Come on.
The reality of today is that most musicians have a regular job. Only the high profile guys make enough to buy fifteen powermacs to store in their underground private studio und run non-cracked versions of whatever on it. A lot of really amazing music is made in damp basement rooms between two jobs.
I totally agree with your last statement. It would be nice indeed if the music industry was about providing musicians with money so they can make music. This is not the case.
It's not a strange argument. Most problematic pupils come from a broken or underclass family, most likely without a lot of extra cash to spend. You need to pay a private school money to be admitted, these people can't pay that money. Technically, a private school can't refuse a pupil, but practically, hardly any really problematic kids are getting into private education.
> Parents have no leverage. Parents aren't educators. It would be nice if they would be, but most parents are clueless, especially about anything as tough as education. Schools that give parents leverage turn into burocratic bullshit machines. Parents will lobby for what they think is the best for their child, etc. My mother is a schoolteacher and is utterly fed up with parents who think they know what is best for their child.
> When this country was founded private education was the norm. When was that? I recall that horse-and-carriage was the norm back then as well. And cowboys. And fighting with the UK. And killing Indians. What's your point again?
In most every place I've worked or studied with a decent number of computers the OS was roled out via Ghost or something like that. I've never ever heard of any company who just unpack their computer as they come in from Dell and start using them (except maybe Mac shops, I don't know). Surely you can set power profile stuff in the image?
Not trying to get metaphysical here, but what is the way a sound is intended to be heard? By whom? The producers? The musicians? Some records were recorded in a basement, in a bathroom, in a shed in the outback, just for that vibe and tone. No recording room is alike. Can you replicate those environments in your home? Or in your iPod?
I say that there is no wrong way to listen to a recording. Some ways are more pleasing to some people, and overall we can agree that tiny speakers blowing on full tilt sound bad. Then again, when I listen to some music on headphones or on regular speakers, I tend to hear different things in the music. Does that make one better than the other? Do we have to have a degree in music history to correctly identify and consume music? It's like reading a book. Only in the reading is the book finished, not in the writing and publishing.
In short: by dividing the community into protected and unprotected parts. By saying: "our customers" are protected, instead of making a deal for the entire Linux community. By taking code written by countless programmers and not giving them or their users any of that protection they deem necessary for their customers. By technically and legally staying inside the GPLv2, but morally and ethically being in another galaxy.
Thanks for clearing that up! I thought he meant that they were alone, as in lonesome, no girlfriends. Which would have made sense, and would have provided some hope for an evolution-believer like me. Too bad!
If you want opinions and or marketing speak, you don't have to appoint a known partisan member to your committee. All the members are supposed to be independent, right? There aren't any abiword, openoffice, wordperfect, notepad, vi or emacs shilling members on that board now are there? What is that guy doing there?
You bring up an interesting point. I have to agree that it sounds unreasonable to have a clause like that. The only difference I can find is that the software contract is a contract between you and me, and the copyright is a government-granted monopoly. When I write a song, I usually don't do that because we have a contract or business deal (although, regrettably, sometimes it is.) When I write software as part of a business deal, it's purely out of commercial interest. And here I go treading on thin ice... What are the songwriters incentives? Can they be compared to the purely commercial reasons of a business contract?
To me, it's all very unclear how copyright should really work. It may be interesting to look at authorship instead of at copyright on produced work, but it's not apparent how that could result in any cash in hand, so to speak.
In the end, it's just annoying to see descendents of creative people making money off of hoarding their ancestor's copyright. Remember the Goya (I think it was) Google logo, commemorating his birthday? It was shot down by the Goya estate. Copyright troll or reasonable business model?
It does worry me that the Novell people seemingly don't know the difference between copyright and patents. The code is copyrighted. That is why it's not allowed to go in the Linux code, and that is good. We have our own code which works just fine. The patents are what this is all about: the way it's implemented is of no concern, it's the idea behind the code that has a restricting patent on it. Novell just paid MS a bunch of cash for not getting sued, they're now acknowledging that they can't use the "patented code" anyway. Sounds fishy. Can or can they not use the patents?
I hope this was just a typo/braino, but when people who just got into a highly suspicious deal with a company that is not known for its benevolence, I can't help but be worried.
My only question is, will they really? Will the content providers adapt? Online is always threatening offline, there's always some tv/telephone/cinema/cd/etc killer around. Traditional content providers never speak about the opportunities they see or have taken. That's alright though, it's adapt or die, or at least it would be in a real open economy. What we see now is that the companies have the power to do something about the rise of threatening new technology, either through bad press or bad politics.
Slashdot Mirror
Although I disagree with everything you just said, let me single this statement out:
> Strangely, collateral damage was never an issue during WW2, but now it's a big deal to everyone.
Ask any European or Japanese person how collateral damage did not matter in WW2. Or any Jew, for that matter. Or gypsy. Or gay.
Collateral damage didn't matter in the USA, because there was hardly any collateral damage there. You need to get a more broad point of view. Other people live in this world besides you, and they have rights and religion and everything, it's amazing. Freedom doesn't mean YOU can be free, it means EVERYONE can be free.
Saddam Hussein was aided by the USA. The Taliban (back then they were called Jihad freedom warriors or something, see Rambo3 for your history lesson on that) was aided by the USA. Want more? Visit a news site sometimes.
I can think of a bunch of countries that I feel are more free than the USA as it exists today. It's pretty pathetic that the "beacon of freedom and democracy", the "land of the brave and free" needs to be compared to Afghanistan to be considered free anymore.
> Potential terrorist plots are reported constantly, in the US and elsewhere.
How do you know this? Where do you get this information? Have you ever questioned the source? Is the source influenced by the people making the policies? Or vice versa? Do these people have any motives to tell you that there is a "constant threat"? "Make no mistake, there is a constant threat, they are out to get freedom"?
Remember, it is not unamerican or unpatriotic to get your leaders to do a good job for you. Some would even say it's your duty. Don't be fazed by all that "you're either with us or against us" crap. Look at what is happening, and look at the big picture. Look at what is happening to your civil rights. Sure, terror is bad and should be prosecuted, but it's not worth the price you are paying.
> slightly more suspicious [foxnews.com]
Ah... Forget what I asked, I have my answers.
Thank you and have a nice day!
We don't have or want a Java back end. That would pretty much rule out either ZK or the GWT. right? What to do? So far, we've been programming a bunch in YUI, which is pretty nice because it's so extensible. Most other toolkits, especially scriptaculous (or scriptalicisousness or whatever, here's a couple of dots to spray in random spots in the url: .....) are nice and fast but not as extensible as YUI.
>The other issue I have is that I normally use a VPN to connect to work, and the VPN tunnel doesn't like getting shut down and restarted, especially with a different IP address, so I still have to re-authenticate by typing in my security token code to the VPN client.
Isn't that what's supposed to happen? You've left your computer for a while, especially a portable one, it better disconnect any secure resources it has. It's comfort over security as usual, but I think this is by design.
Although I agree with you in principle, this makes for a strange society. In the Netherlands, when a doctor fucks up badly, he gets sued by the insurance company of the victim and if he fucks up royally, there will be repercussions from the doctor's association (whatever it is called) and he might be forced to stop practicing.
Doctors usually know what they are doing. They have to have a certain space in which to practice their profession, a safe zone where they shouldn't be afraid of getting sued all the time. I hear that it's hard to find good emergency room doctors in the US because they fear they will get sued when they make the wrong decision in a case. This should not be.
When a doctor makes an error that leads to the patient being in a worse state than before, that's bad. Doctors are willing to make an effort to do things right, though, even without the looming lawsuits. I could see that the additional stress would not be beneficial.
That said, your friend is unfortunate and it really sucks to not be able to do something about it, especially when the doctor was arrogant and condescending. I have a very good friend who was sent home repeatedly with a stomach ache (and a known disease) and when she went in for a second opinion, she found herself in the operating room within hours, and the doctors told her afterwards that it could have been fatal if she had come to the hospital any later. So I know the horror stories.
Just some thought.
Well, they're definitely less powerful than before. I don't know if that has anything to do with the cold war, though.
Well, the ISPs thought it wasn't fair that the Googles of the world got to use their (the ISPs) network for free. They felt they had the right to charge Google or Yahoo or MS for use of those network tubes. This is unfair because Google is already paying for its access to the internet by being hooked up to backbones, renting serverspace (well, not in Google's case, but you get what I mean), etc. This greedy move on the part of the ISPs was then justified by saying it's in the customer's best interest. I don't see how it's in my best interest when my ISP suddenly decides which packets it deems more important than others, and which sites pay them more money to get the best response times. Also, when I wake up tomorrow with the great idea for the new MySpaceGoogleTubeFlickr2.0, I'd have to pay off the ISPs to get my site delivered to the customers in a timely fashion. This would stifle innovation.
That's about all I remember off the top of my head, I'm glad this bill has now died.
> cold war was won
Well, it was won just like Vietnam was won. The USA just doesn't admit defeat. Remember, there was a treaty saying that weapon stashes would be diminished, and after that Russia fell apart.
Tell me how many Iraqi civilians are now dead.
Also, bringing the holocaust into this is totally uncalled for.
Yes! And CPO is kind of like a version 0 of C3PO, so that would be cool too!
> I do think that the rule of law is our crown jewel, and is the bedrock of our democracy, and that in our common law system the law evolves in part through judicial decisionmaking.
6 .html I don't know how much of my accusations are true, so I hope someone corrects me if I'm wrong (then again, this is /. so there's no doubt about that.)
I used to be a law student (so: IANAL) and I agree with this statement. If nothing else, my years studying law made me aware of the cultural influence and importance of a well functioning judicial system and a 'cultural law', as we call it. This is in the Netherlands.
> Respect for law, to my mind, suggests that we should respect the courts
And here is where my beef lies: when a judge upholds a screenshot of an IP address as evidence, I don't think that particular court deserves any respect. It appears that at least some of the judges around need to be visited by the man with the cluestick, if you know what I mean. The big cluestick.
Hmm, after reading this: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060803-741
It would be great if everyone who could write songs well would make money with it. Regrettably, this is not reality today. Yes, it costs money to buy guitars, computers, software, amps, turntables, whatever you need. Renting practice space (especially for more serious bands) can be troublesome and expensive as well. These musicians hope to break even. Why do they do it? Because it's fun. Do they dream of making it big? Who doesn't! I dream of making it big and I write webpages! Come on. The reality of today is that most musicians have a regular job. Only the high profile guys make enough to buy fifteen powermacs to store in their underground private studio und run non-cracked versions of whatever on it. A lot of really amazing music is made in damp basement rooms between two jobs. I totally agree with your last statement. It would be nice indeed if the music industry was about providing musicians with money so they can make music. This is not the case.
It's not a strange argument. Most problematic pupils come from a broken or underclass family, most likely without a lot of extra cash to spend. You need to pay a private school money to be admitted, these people can't pay that money. Technically, a private school can't refuse a pupil, but practically, hardly any really problematic kids are getting into private education.
> Parents have no leverage.
Parents aren't educators. It would be nice if they would be, but most parents are clueless, especially about anything as tough as education. Schools that give parents leverage turn into burocratic bullshit machines. Parents will lobby for what they think is the best for their child, etc. My mother is a schoolteacher and is utterly fed up with parents who think they know what is best for their child.
> When this country was founded private education was the norm.
When was that? I recall that horse-and-carriage was the norm back then as well. And cowboys. And fighting with the UK. And killing Indians. What's your point again?
In most every place I've worked or studied with a decent number of computers the OS was roled out via Ghost or something like that. I've never ever heard of any company who just unpack their computer as they come in from Dell and start using them (except maybe Mac shops, I don't know). Surely you can set power profile stuff in the image?
Anyway, your point is still valid.
> the way the sound is intended to be heard
Not trying to get metaphysical here, but what is the way a sound is intended to be heard? By whom? The producers? The musicians? Some records were recorded in a basement, in a bathroom, in a shed in the outback, just for that vibe and tone. No recording room is alike. Can you replicate those environments in your home? Or in your iPod?
I say that there is no wrong way to listen to a recording. Some ways are more pleasing to some people, and overall we can agree that tiny speakers blowing on full tilt sound bad. Then again, when I listen to some music on headphones or on regular speakers, I tend to hear different things in the music. Does that make one better than the other? Do we have to have a degree in music history to correctly identify and consume music? It's like reading a book. Only in the reading is the book finished, not in the writing and publishing.
In short: by dividing the community into protected and unprotected parts. By saying: "our customers" are protected, instead of making a deal for the entire Linux community. By taking code written by countless programmers and not giving them or their users any of that protection they deem necessary for their customers. By technically and legally staying inside the GPLv2, but morally and ethically being in another galaxy.
1 03031303
Bruce Perens' petition: http://techp.org/petition/show/1
Groklaw article on GPLv3 & Novell/MS deal: http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20061116
Thanks for clearing that up! I thought he meant that they were alone, as in lonesome, no girlfriends. Which would have made sense, and would have provided some hope for an evolution-believer like me. Too bad!
If you want opinions and or marketing speak, you don't have to appoint a known partisan member to your committee. All the members are supposed to be independent, right? There aren't any abiword, openoffice, wordperfect, notepad, vi or emacs shilling members on that board now are there? What is that guy doing there?
Can we also count the civilian deaths in Iraq? Thanks. (random Google search)
You bring up an interesting point. I have to agree that it sounds unreasonable to have a clause like that. The only difference I can find is that the software contract is a contract between you and me, and the copyright is a government-granted monopoly. When I write a song, I usually don't do that because we have a contract or business deal (although, regrettably, sometimes it is.) When I write software as part of a business deal, it's purely out of commercial interest. And here I go treading on thin ice... What are the songwriters incentives? Can they be compared to the purely commercial reasons of a business contract?
To me, it's all very unclear how copyright should really work. It may be interesting to look at authorship instead of at copyright on produced work, but it's not apparent how that could result in any cash in hand, so to speak.
In the end, it's just annoying to see descendents of creative people making money off of hoarding their ancestor's copyright. Remember the Goya (I think it was) Google logo, commemorating his birthday? It was shot down by the Goya estate. Copyright troll or reasonable business model?
It does worry me that the Novell people seemingly don't know the difference between copyright and patents. The code is copyrighted. That is why it's not allowed to go in the Linux code, and that is good. We have our own code which works just fine. The patents are what this is all about: the way it's implemented is of no concern, it's the idea behind the code that has a restricting patent on it. Novell just paid MS a bunch of cash for not getting sued, they're now acknowledging that they can't use the "patented code" anyway. Sounds fishy. Can or can they not use the patents?
I hope this was just a typo/braino, but when people who just got into a highly suspicious deal with a company that is not known for its benevolence, I can't help but be worried.
> The community is the strength of FOSS.
Can we patent that community thing you're talking about?
My only question is, will they really? Will the content providers adapt? Online is always threatening offline, there's always some tv/telephone/cinema/cd/etc killer around. Traditional content providers never speak about the opportunities they see or have taken. That's alright though, it's adapt or die, or at least it would be in a real open economy. What we see now is that the companies have the power to do something about the rise of threatening new technology, either through bad press or bad politics.