Not necessarily, if smbfs needs code from the Samba project, its authors can of course give it to smbfs under GPLv2, or whatever other license they choose.
The police maintains a VOLUNTARY blacklist that Swedish ISPs can use if they so choose. Many do, and believe it to be a SERVICE to their customers. Whether or not it is a service or a disservice depends on each customer, and it's bad that it's something many ISPs force on all their customers. It's ultimately up to the police to decide who gets on this blacklist and who doesn't, and I think in this case they abused this power.
There's no Great Firewall of Sweden, it's not gonna be impossible to reach the site from within Sweden, it's just a DNS blacklist. The police maintains a small list of sites that they think/know traffics in child pornography. All Swedish ISPs can subscribe to this list and add it to their DNS servers so that any of their customers that tries to lookup these addresses will instead get the IP to a webserver that informs you that the site you wanted is bad.
If you use an ISP that does not subscribe to this list, nothing happens. If you don't use the DNS that your ISP supplies, nothing happens. You're not blocked from the content, your DNS lookup is hijacked in some sort or attempt at policing the internets.
It's kinda hard to say that the idea was bad from the start, but I can't say it was very good either. However, what we have now is a perfect example of the slippery slope in action. There is a censoring system in place, and someone decides to use it for their own agenda. Annoying, but in the end everyone that cares is just gonna switch away from their ISP's DNS servers to open alternatives such as http://www.opendns.com/
When you download a program you need a license to use that program. Some programs have commercial licenses only, which requires that you pay money to the author for the license to use it. Some programs come with the GPL, which means that you won't have to pay any money to the author, but you have to abide by the rules in the GPL. Some programs come with a lot of licenses, allowing you to choose which one you want, usually either by paying for a commercial license or getting it for free under the GPL. Regardless of which license you get for the program, you need to obey it, otherwise you cannot use the program anymore.
However, the GPL is a perpetual license. This means that once you have downloaded a program and gotten it under the GPLv2 license, you are using the program under that license only. It doesn't matter if new versions of the GPL gets released, it doesn't matter if the author stops distributing his program under the GPL and only sells commercial licenses to it, it doesn't matter which licenses other people are using it under. The version you have is governed by GPLv2 in this case.
Note that you can redistribute this program you got under GPLv3 if you so wish. You can redistribute it to yourself, so if you want it under the GPLv3, you can easily do that. If you don't, you don't have to. But you can't redistribute it under a lesser version of GPL, and that is the kicker in this case. Novell can't downgrade the license under which they redistribute SUSE. They can choose what to redistribute, and only redistribute GPLv2 programs for as long as possible, but sooner or later there will simply be so much new code under GPLv3 that they have to redistribute some. And when they do that, someone with a voucher can redeem it for GPLv3 code, and by doing so, the patent protection given by that voucher extends to every user of that code.
But how did Media Sentry obtain the material in the first place?
If they were given the job by the copyright owners to create a honeypot site where they offered some material, and if they were given this material by the copyright owners, then that MUST be an implicit license to distribute the material freely. You can't interpret it any other way, can you?
Argh, I'm too tired to follow through on my own posts. Sorry for the multiple posts.
What this means is that this cannot be entrapment, since by downloading the material they made available, you are not violating copyright, you are not doing something illegal. So a honeypot it is, although if you just skip or block their scanner, there's no way you can be busted for anything illegal.
The copyright owners MUST have authorized this firm to make the material available on the internet, for everyone, for free. This means that any material obtained this way is a perfectly legal copy. The only way it could not be so is if this honeypot website has some sort of hidden license agreement or too-long-to-read-eula that actually states that you are not allowed to download this material. But if they don't, going to this site and downloading the material IS NOT ILLEGAL.
That is why they need the scanner program that checks if you have OTHER copyrighted material on your machine that you have downloaded illegally, and this is something they might bust you for.
I know most slashdot'ers look at it the other way but I have always thought that hosting the files is not the issue, that person has done nothing. The downloader is the one actually making the copy, writing out a new file. No, this is wrong. The one hosting the files, the one that is making the copyrighted material available is violating the copyright. It doesn't matter who is technically making the copying operation, it's the actual spreading that's prohibited. The person that hosts the files has done something, he has made the material available. Any other interpretation is insane.
Sooner or later, someone will bring unlocked service to the US masses and only then will they have to adapt to the demands of a liberated consumer. There, fixed it for you. We're so sorry your phone companies are assholes over there.
I was at a friend's 30th birthday party and happened to mention to his 13 year old nephew that I'm playing World of Warcraft. It quickly became apparent that the two of us simply weren't playing the same game. He was very interested in finding holes in the world, finding exploits, using private servers, getting twinked by higher-level friends, and owning non-twinks in the battlegrounds. He was still mid-lvl after a few months, and wasn't really into the whole quests thing.
I'm high-level, I've been in the same raiding guild for two years now, and we're slowly but steadily progressing through the endgame raid dungeons. I don't really care about PvP or twinking.
We're both aiming to "beat" something in the game, it's just not the same things. Not all players are like him, and not all players are like me. And I really hope that his type is not in the majority.
Don't get me wrong: I'm all for turning the place into an offworld paradise if it's at all possible. But what about those that will oppose such actions on the basis of loosing billions of years of geologic history in the process*. Better yet, how about those that simply believe in the perservation of things as they are, without human intervention, simply on principle. Maybe Ann Clayborne was right?
Oh cut the self-righteous drama, please, especially if you don't know the law or the purpose of the law.
You're not automatically responsible for everything that other people write on your webpages. However, if someone notices you of the existence of hate speech or similar, you should probably remove it.
Swedish law is, like a bunch of other law systems, more concerned with the PURPOSE of a law than the exact letter of the law. Laws themselves are usually pretty short and readable, but are accompanied by instructions for their purpose, how they should be interpreted, how they should be applied etc. Ultimately, it's up to judges to judge, but they get a lot of guidance.
The purpose of this law is to make sure that you can't post hate speech under the guise of anonymous posters. It's not meant to punish people who aren't screening/cleaning their webpages constantly, it's meant to punish those that promote hate speech, and it's pretty safe to say that that is not the case here.
Also, what constitutes as hate speech in Sweden is basically promoting genocide or etnocide, and I think we can kinda live without that. Yes, it can turn into a slippery slope, but I'm not worried about that.
The blogger has somewhat of a grudge against our current right-wing government and writes about any setback or "scandal" with glee, and tries to manufacture scandal where there isn't one. But it's probably some other moron who posted the comments.
Note that the stage this is in is that a prosecutor is investigating if they're even gonna bother pressing charges. Considering similar cases before, and considering the severity of the comments, absolutely nothing is going to happen, it's just the wet dreams of one blogger. Move along. Nothing to see here.
If they wanna make a share of the subscribers monthly bill, like the cut they get from AT&T, then yes, they need to make a deal with the people doing the billing. Further they need a little cooperation to support visual voicemail. I really wonder if that's gonna fly up here in Scandinavia. Some others from the US and UK posted their prices, and compared to what I pay, it's outrageous and compared to how bound I am, the rules are draconian.
Here, you can always get a subscription with either no or a really small (~2-3€) monthly fee, on top of which you only pay for minutes. And those minutes still cost 1/5 of those UK prices someone posted. You can get the reverse where you pay a monthly fee of about 60€, and after that all your calls and messages are free, except roaming abroad. And you can get every kind of subscription or plan inbetween.
All of those subscriptions are totally independent of whatever phone you purchase. You can always get a phone and keep whatever subscription you have, or you can get a subsidy if you also bind yourself to a plan, but the choice as to which phone and which plan is completely up to the buyer. There are absolutely no "if you want this phone you have to get this plan"-deals. None.
So the margins are already pretty low, and consumers are used to free choice of phones and operators and plans.
If Apple tries to enter this market with the idea that they could make their phone exclusive to one operator, and that that operator would be willing to pay for that privilege, they're deluding themselves. Only the most die-hard Apple fans would purchase it at those conditions.
Ok, so you wouldn't get provider stuff such as visual voicemail, You can drop the "such as", the iPhone has no other feature that requires a special deal with the provider. Everything else it can do is standard GSM.
Now, a basic radio is great for getting weather forcasts if necessary. On the other hand, you can get a basic radio for about the cost of a meal, so it's not exactly a huge expense. A basic small TV can be had for about five times more. Yes, and at some point in the future you will be able to get a computer and broadband access for almost no money at all.
It will happen. I want to know when. This report is a step in that direction.
(Mental note: I was dead wrong about the Urbanization of the US, it's one of the worlds most urbanized countries, #10 according to that list, I had no idea!)
Food is important. Shelter is important. Medical care is important. Happiness is important. So you think broadband is a luxury. Why? Why should it always be like that? Radio is definitely not a luxury anymore. TV is not a luxury any more. As our society and culture move more and more to the internet, why should there exist a digital divide?
The internet enables people to make themselves heard in a way never seen before. It strengthens liberty and democracy and free information exchange, it is very important that those that need it the most also get it.
The numbers are meaningless. It has nothing to do with a desire on the part of the US to be number one in all things...that belief is a standard European conceit that smacks more of jingoism than rational debate. 1) The numbers are not meaningless. They describe the state and growth of broadband in the world. If you make money off the internet, this stuff is REALLY interesting, since it effectively describes the emerging markets.
2) European conceit? What? I didn't see any "haa haa the US sucks" this time around, but there were still the same tiring excuses and attempts at trivializing this report as all the previous times. You don't see the Brits wining about South Korea being more urbanized than the UK, and you don't see the Finns whining that Sweden has a higher population density. It's always, always, US readers that try to raise the population density or the urbanization or whatever excuse is popular this instant.
THIS IS NOT A COMPETITION. Yet those readers (and the angle of the story submission itself) are making this into a pissing contest, instead of seeing the thing for what it is: Useful information about the market.
Out of curiosity what country has a lower population density and has better penetration than the U.S.? Couldn't find the actual list TFA was refering to, but these are the western countries with less population density than the US:
Sweden, Finland, Norway, Canada, Iceland, New Zealand, Autralia. I bet a bunch of them also has higher broadband penetration than the US.
What country has less urbanization and more penetration? According to this http://devdata.worldbank.org/wdipdfs/table3_10.pdf, the US is 42% urban. The average for western Europe is about 20%, and of the above countries with low population density, only Australia sitting at 61% is more urban than the US.
Needless to say, these facts I present here appeared in the last discussion on broadband penetration here on Slashdot, and the one before that, and the one before that. This "discussion" gets more and more tiring...
EVERY time a story like this pops up on Slashdot, the exact same discussion ensues. There are a lot of readers from the US who for some reason or other just can't stand the fact that the US is not #1 in everything tech-related, and start slagging the story.
"But we're leading in total numbers!"
Yes, but penetration is important because it will be a lot more interesting when everyone in society has it, not just you, or your friends, or everyone in the upper-middle class and above.
"But we have such low population density!"
Yes, on average, the US population density is pretty low compared to the rest of the west, but on the broadband penetration list, there are countries that are less dense than the US, but still have better penetration.
"But, population density is only an average, we have such low levels of urbanization!"
Yes, on average, the US' level of urbanization is pretty low compared to the rest of the west, but on the broadband penetration list, there are countries that are less urbanized than the US, but still have better penetration.
"But, averages suck, we should compare big cities!"
Ok, New York might have the best penetration in the US for example, but there are plenty of other big cities that have better penetration, and are not situated in the US.
"But, those stinking pinko liberal commie Europeans have government subsidies on broadband!"
Well, there are lots of places in the US that had the phone copper paid for by taxes, and there are lots of place sin the US where local government subsidizes broadband, and the same goes for lots of places in the west. But not all places.
There are other countries/cities/areas that have better broadband penetration than the US, in relative terms, in absolute terms, despite being less urbanized and less densely populated, without government subsidies, and in a free market economy. Get over it for fuck's sake.
If you so desperately want to be #1 in this as well, DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT instead of dismissing the reports or refuse to believe in them or squint and look at them sideways. Stop the whining already. Look at those that do better and LEARN from it.
Did you read the PDF? Did you look at the graph at the bottom?
The US shows a steady increase of greenhouse gas emissions, EXCEPT for the period between 2000 and 2002 where it shows a pretty sharp decline. This decline is NOT because of a conscious effort to reduce emissions, it's a direct result of 9/11 and its effects on the airline industry. There's no will behind the decline, it's just a freak accident, a secondary effect. And to include that decline in any sort of comparison and say "Look guys, we're doing better!" is completely dishonest.
Is pollution per land mass a more fair measurement?
So when the US is polluting near twice as much as the EU in absolute terms, and almost four times as much if you measure per capita, you want to look at the one measurement where the EU is slightly worse than the US? Mmm, tasty, tasty cherries.:-)
The only fair view is that they are ALL interesting. Per land mass is interesting if you want to measure the ecological footprint and the carrying capacity of your land and base any levels off of that.
But the per capita is interesting because it tells you how much you need to pollute to maintain your standard of living. There is very little difference in standard of living between the average american and the average european, but for some reason, the average american pollutes four times as much to maintain it. Why? And most importantly: Don't you think there's plenty of room for improvement there?
Slashdot Mirror
Not necessarily, if smbfs needs code from the Samba project, its authors can of course give it to smbfs under GPLv2, or whatever other license they choose.
Legality has nothing to do with this.
The police maintains a VOLUNTARY blacklist that Swedish ISPs can use if they so choose. Many do, and believe it to be a SERVICE to their customers. Whether or not it is a service or a disservice depends on each customer, and it's bad that it's something many ISPs force on all their customers. It's ultimately up to the police to decide who gets on this blacklist and who doesn't, and I think in this case they abused this power.
There's no Great Firewall of Sweden, it's not gonna be impossible to reach the site from within Sweden, it's just a DNS blacklist. The police maintains a small list of sites that they think/know traffics in child pornography. All Swedish ISPs can subscribe to this list and add it to their DNS servers so that any of their customers that tries to lookup these addresses will instead get the IP to a webserver that informs you that the site you wanted is bad.
If you use an ISP that does not subscribe to this list, nothing happens. If you don't use the DNS that your ISP supplies, nothing happens. You're not blocked from the content, your DNS lookup is hijacked in some sort or attempt at policing the internets.
It's kinda hard to say that the idea was bad from the start, but I can't say it was very good either. However, what we have now is a perfect example of the slippery slope in action. There is a censoring system in place, and someone decides to use it for their own agenda. Annoying, but in the end everyone that cares is just gonna switch away from their ISP's DNS servers to open alternatives such as http://www.opendns.com/
No, it works like this:
When you download a program you need a license to use that program. Some programs have commercial licenses only, which requires that you pay money to the author for the license to use it. Some programs come with the GPL, which means that you won't have to pay any money to the author, but you have to abide by the rules in the GPL. Some programs come with a lot of licenses, allowing you to choose which one you want, usually either by paying for a commercial license or getting it for free under the GPL. Regardless of which license you get for the program, you need to obey it, otherwise you cannot use the program anymore.
However, the GPL is a perpetual license. This means that once you have downloaded a program and gotten it under the GPLv2 license, you are using the program under that license only. It doesn't matter if new versions of the GPL gets released, it doesn't matter if the author stops distributing his program under the GPL and only sells commercial licenses to it, it doesn't matter which licenses other people are using it under. The version you have is governed by GPLv2 in this case.
Note that you can redistribute this program you got under GPLv3 if you so wish. You can redistribute it to yourself, so if you want it under the GPLv3, you can easily do that. If you don't, you don't have to. But you can't redistribute it under a lesser version of GPL, and that is the kicker in this case. Novell can't downgrade the license under which they redistribute SUSE. They can choose what to redistribute, and only redistribute GPLv2 programs for as long as possible, but sooner or later there will simply be so much new code under GPLv3 that they have to redistribute some. And when they do that, someone with a voucher can redeem it for GPLv3 code, and by doing so, the patent protection given by that voucher extends to every user of that code.
But how did Media Sentry obtain the material in the first place?
If they were given the job by the copyright owners to create a honeypot site where they offered some material, and if they were given this material by the copyright owners, then that MUST be an implicit license to distribute the material freely. You can't interpret it any other way, can you?
Argh, I'm too tired to follow through on my own posts. Sorry for the multiple posts.
What this means is that this cannot be entrapment, since by downloading the material they made available, you are not violating copyright, you are not doing something illegal. So a honeypot it is, although if you just skip or block their scanner, there's no way you can be busted for anything illegal.
The copyright owners MUST have authorized this firm to make the material available on the internet, for everyone, for free. This means that any material obtained this way is a perfectly legal copy. The only way it could not be so is if this honeypot website has some sort of hidden license agreement or too-long-to-read-eula that actually states that you are not allowed to download this material. But if they don't, going to this site and downloading the material IS NOT ILLEGAL.
That is why they need the scanner program that checks if you have OTHER copyrighted material on your machine that you have downloaded illegally, and this is something they might bust you for.
So I heard he's somewhat of a legal nazi...
That depends on the players.
I was at a friend's 30th birthday party and happened to mention to his 13 year old nephew that I'm playing World of Warcraft. It quickly became apparent that the two of us simply weren't playing the same game. He was very interested in finding holes in the world, finding exploits, using private servers, getting twinked by higher-level friends, and owning non-twinks in the battlegrounds. He was still mid-lvl after a few months, and wasn't really into the whole quests thing.
I'm high-level, I've been in the same raiding guild for two years now, and we're slowly but steadily progressing through the endgame raid dungeons. I don't really care about PvP or twinking.
We're both aiming to "beat" something in the game, it's just not the same things. Not all players are like him, and not all players are like me. And I really hope that his type is not in the majority.
Oh cut the self-righteous drama, please, especially if you don't know the law or the purpose of the law.
You're not automatically responsible for everything that other people write on your webpages. However, if someone notices you of the existence of hate speech or similar, you should probably remove it.
Swedish law is, like a bunch of other law systems, more concerned with the PURPOSE of a law than the exact letter of the law. Laws themselves are usually pretty short and readable, but are accompanied by instructions for their purpose, how they should be interpreted, how they should be applied etc. Ultimately, it's up to judges to judge, but they get a lot of guidance.
The purpose of this law is to make sure that you can't post hate speech under the guise of anonymous posters. It's not meant to punish people who aren't screening/cleaning their webpages constantly, it's meant to punish those that promote hate speech, and it's pretty safe to say that that is not the case here.
Also, what constitutes as hate speech in Sweden is basically promoting genocide or etnocide, and I think we can kinda live without that. Yes, it can turn into a slippery slope, but I'm not worried about that.
I can bet quite a lot.
The blogger has somewhat of a grudge against our current right-wing government and writes about any setback or "scandal" with glee, and tries to manufacture scandal where there isn't one. But it's probably some other moron who posted the comments.
Note that the stage this is in is that a prosecutor is investigating if they're even gonna bother pressing charges. Considering similar cases before, and considering the severity of the comments, absolutely nothing is going to happen, it's just the wet dreams of one blogger. Move along. Nothing to see here.
Here, you can always get a subscription with either no or a really small (~2-3€) monthly fee, on top of which you only pay for minutes. And those minutes still cost 1/5 of those UK prices someone posted. You can get the reverse where you pay a monthly fee of about 60€, and after that all your calls and messages are free, except roaming abroad. And you can get every kind of subscription or plan inbetween.
All of those subscriptions are totally independent of whatever phone you purchase. You can always get a phone and keep whatever subscription you have, or you can get a subsidy if you also bind yourself to a plan, but the choice as to which phone and which plan is completely up to the buyer. There are absolutely no "if you want this phone you have to get this plan"-deals. None.
So the margins are already pretty low, and consumers are used to free choice of phones and operators and plans.
If Apple tries to enter this market with the idea that they could make their phone exclusive to one operator, and that that operator would be willing to pay for that privilege, they're deluding themselves. Only the most die-hard Apple fans would purchase it at those conditions.
It will happen. I want to know when. This report is a step in that direction.
(Mental note: I was dead wrong about the Urbanization of the US, it's one of the worlds most urbanized countries, #10 according to that list, I had no idea!)
The internet enables people to make themselves heard in a way never seen before. It strengthens liberty and democracy and free information exchange, it is very important that those that need it the most also get it.
2) European conceit? What? I didn't see any "haa haa the US sucks" this time around, but there were still the same tiring excuses and attempts at trivializing this report as all the previous times. You don't see the Brits wining about South Korea being more urbanized than the UK, and you don't see the Finns whining that Sweden has a higher population density. It's always, always, US readers that try to raise the population density or the urbanization or whatever excuse is popular this instant.
THIS IS NOT A COMPETITION. Yet those readers (and the angle of the story submission itself) are making this into a pissing contest, instead of seeing the thing for what it is: Useful information about the market.
Sweden, Finland, Norway, Canada, Iceland, New Zealand, Autralia. I bet a bunch of them also has higher broadband penetration than the US. What country has less urbanization and more penetration? According to this http://devdata.worldbank.org/wdipdfs/table3_10.pd
Needless to say, these facts I present here appeared in the last discussion on broadband penetration here on Slashdot, and the one before that, and the one before that. This "discussion" gets more and more tiring...
No, not again!
EVERY time a story like this pops up on Slashdot, the exact same discussion ensues. There are a lot of readers from the US who for some reason or other just can't stand the fact that the US is not #1 in everything tech-related, and start slagging the story.
"But we're leading in total numbers!"
Yes, but penetration is important because it will be a lot more interesting when everyone in society has it, not just you, or your friends, or everyone in the upper-middle class and above.
"But we have such low population density!"
Yes, on average, the US population density is pretty low compared to the rest of the west, but on the broadband penetration list, there are countries that are less dense than the US, but still have better penetration.
"But, population density is only an average, we have such low levels of urbanization!"
Yes, on average, the US' level of urbanization is pretty low compared to the rest of the west, but on the broadband penetration list, there are countries that are less urbanized than the US, but still have better penetration.
"But, averages suck, we should compare big cities!"
Ok, New York might have the best penetration in the US for example, but there are plenty of other big cities that have better penetration, and are not situated in the US.
"But, those stinking pinko liberal commie Europeans have government subsidies on broadband!"
Well, there are lots of places in the US that had the phone copper paid for by taxes, and there are lots of place sin the US where local government subsidizes broadband, and the same goes for lots of places in the west. But not all places.
There are other countries/cities/areas that have better broadband penetration than the US, in relative terms, in absolute terms, despite being less urbanized and less densely populated, without government subsidies, and in a free market economy. Get over it for fuck's sake.
If you so desperately want to be #1 in this as well, DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT instead of dismissing the reports or refuse to believe in them or squint and look at them sideways. Stop the whining already. Look at those that do better and LEARN from it.
No we weren't.
Did you read the PDF? Did you look at the graph at the bottom?
The US shows a steady increase of greenhouse gas emissions, EXCEPT for the period between 2000 and 2002 where it shows a pretty sharp decline. This decline is NOT because of a conscious effort to reduce emissions, it's a direct result of 9/11 and its effects on the airline industry. There's no will behind the decline, it's just a freak accident, a secondary effect. And to include that decline in any sort of comparison and say "Look guys, we're doing better!" is completely dishonest.
So when the US is polluting near twice as much as the EU in absolute terms, and almost four times as much if you measure per capita, you want to look at the one measurement where the EU is slightly worse than the US? Mmm, tasty, tasty cherries.
The only fair view is that they are ALL interesting. Per land mass is interesting if you want to measure the ecological footprint and the carrying capacity of your land and base any levels off of that.
But the per capita is interesting because it tells you how much you need to pollute to maintain your standard of living. There is very little difference in standard of living between the average american and the average european, but for some reason, the average american pollutes four times as much to maintain it. Why? And most importantly: Don't you think there's plenty of room for improvement there?