The use of GPLv3 as a tool against DRM co-opts the work of thousands of people for the FSF's political ends, which they consider a violation of said trust (they do consider DRM a bad thing, they just don't want to be pulled into the FSF's war against it).
FFS stop perpetuating the myth that the FSF is forcing people to switch from GPLv2 to GPLv3.
Sure many of us will not switch because of its politics, but I can still use GPLv2 for new projects in year 2050 if we still have computers that write code.
Again, they aren't forcing anyone to do anything.
Either you can use GPLv3 or you can use GPLv2 until the end of time.
If you don't like to use code that is licensed under GPLv3, then tough. That author (aka copyright owner) has chosen to use it and you are going to have to write your own code base if you refuse to comply with his or her license... which you are free to use GPLv2 or BSD or even keep it closed if you feel like it as long as you don't use their code.
Because if you don't like GPLv3, then you can still use GPLv2 until the end of time.
This is what irks me about anyone voicing outrage over GPLv3 because no one is forcing anyone to use it nor does the GPLv2 around the world magically become GPLv3.
Only the author and copyright holder of the software can decide whether or not this will happen and even then... It won't magically causes its dirivatives to jump to GPLv3 by default
Its only if you go back and start using the new work that has been licensed by GPLv3 and if you don't like those terms then write your own code under whatever license you feel like.
Actually, the Land lines went down to and so did the interet for most of NYC because many telco's and major ISPs had their equipment in a central office in one of basements of the WTCs.
Now, it's possible that if we'd never built these weapons of war to fight the Soviet Union, people like Brezhnev wouldn't have taken the opportunity to conquer Western Europe or at least extort from it money to prop up the Soviet Union, and accordingly the only reason we built them was to fund a military-industrial complex.
You don't think the reason that Brezhnev didn't invade western Europe... well... um... didn't have anything to do with the thousands of nuclear bombs aimed at living person in the Soviet Union?
Truth be told the only reason we never went to war with the Soviets was the hanging sword of Mutual Assured Destruction.
Not because we had better tanks and planes. And in reality, as world War II has shown us, if you fight a conventional war between two superpowers it doesn't matter how good your planes and tanks are (otherwise the Germans would have won hands down) but rather how many of them you can make and afford to loose.
Oh and don't foget during Mr. Brezhnev's time he was more concerned about a conventional war with China than with the US.
So pretty much the only reason we built these kind of things was to make sure we could win localized non-nuclear conflicts. And there was some manufacturing jockeying in there as well.
Probably the best defense against having to deal with software patents is to keep the software closed. Don't make the code public and don't tell how it works. If people don't know you've violated their patent, they are not likely to sue you, and their software patent won't be worth very much.
I hate to ask this, but if someone uses your code and uses it in their own... Isn't that a copyright violation?
I say this because just because you have the code doesn't make the process easy to copy. Unless of course you copy the code... Ergo... Copyright violation of the GPL.
No one can simply look at 50,000 lines of code and go... "OOOOH! I wish I had thought of that process!"
(well most of us anyways)
But chances are the programmers are going to by really tempted to use a copy and paste with their text utility before they can analyze the process and copy the end results.
That said, if you can simply copy the process by looking at the end results (and or code), chances are it wasn't worth patenting in the first place.
People shouldn't be paid for their ideas, but rather the implementation of them.
If I come up with an idea and use that to create a physical working device then I should patent the device... Not the idea of the device.
If I come with an idea and I write code then the code and the effort is copyrighted.
If I come up with an idea for a business... I should create the business and trademark it and not patent the idea to keep people from competing with my so called "idea".
The reasons behind patents and copyrights was to benefit society and give a carrot to the author or inventor.
The fact the author or inventor gets paid is a nice side effect of this part of our constitution, but it is not a god given right.
On occasion during the early history of our nation... Some patents were revoked for the beenfit of our society like the first non-hand wheat thresher because the PTO thought it too important.
If I invent a new software algorithm, and it is not patented, then someone can copy it (not a copy of the code, but of the process) into their own software, which they have far greater resources to distribute and undercut on price. Why should I spend time inventing new algorithms, then?
Because chances are the algorithm you created was most likely neither novel nor unique to the large amounts of algorithms created before you. As in... Your algorithm had to be based on some math that everyone knows or at the most an obscure math professor came up with years ago.
You aren't writing your own language but taking from knowledge of mankind and applying it to your own methods.
Secondly, copyrights protect someone from copying your code, but not your methods because if someone can simply recreate your algorithm simply by looking at the results and not even see any of your source code then again... your algorithm was neither novel nor unique and therby not deserve a patent.
However, your effort and code should be copyrighted and protected by such methods.
It's not a moot issue because there are scores of PC users who wouldn't know how else to rip a CD.
As we say in the IT world when dealing with others outside of our scope of support...
Not. My. Problem.
Sure it is heartless, but the rest of the world is not our responsibility.
Using "free" products that are known to screw you over won't be getting sympathy from many of us who use alternatives. If you don't know or haven't bothered to learn... Then suffering is always the best education.
Just as with everything else, this generation has created YET ANOTHER disposable product; friendship. MySpace and it's ilk have CHEAPENED friendship and turned it into another mass-market, easily tossed commodity with zero expectations of longetivity or nostalgia value.
To be fair, it wasn't heir generation that caused it, but ours... Or rather the programmers that created Myspace and of course our masters of the 80's generation who funded it... Otherwise known as newscorpration.
Had young angsty teens actually programmed Myspace and developed the databases behind it... (Although it does look like a 13 year old design myspaces backend) Then I'd say it was their fault.
But its not... They are just sheep like the children of all generations being led to the slaughter by million dollar corporations out to make a buck or two.
On the bright side it keeps me employed with other non-related technology jobs.
You won't be 200 with the body of a 200 year old, but rather 200 with the body of a 21 year old. Hence the reason you had retirement in the first place goes out the window. If I could be 21 for the rest of my life, I wouldn't mind keeping a day job (Heck if you lived that long you could just put a sum of money in a bank and collect on interest in a hundred years.)
Personally, I would like to avoid what happened to my grandparents. Dementia, Alzheimer's, lung cancer, and then pancreatic cancer aren't good ways to end up when your that old.
I would rather die than sit in an old age home and crap my pants and not know who I was or what I was doing that day and not even remember my family. That is why I feel this research is important because it address the issue of aging on the human body rather than just trying to make a human live longer with a decaying body.
Also, whenever the debate of immortality comes up I would like to point out Nick Bostrom's The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant which a very good argument for why death is bad and that we need to take care of the problem of death as soon as possible.
Before I forget, Peter also helped the 2006 Singularity Challenge by donating $100,000 to match everyone's donation to the Singularity Institute which is basically an non-profit organization researching friendly strong AI. (I've donated a small amount of money to them as well)
Sure these goals are almost Sci-Fi or things we may never see in our life time, but I feel that they will be more beneficial to mankind than trying to "band-aid" fix our problems with short term solutions.
Perhaps the size of the price sign is what matters. Gas prices are shown in large high contrast fonts on every street corner. The price sticker on a bottle of shampoo is less noticeable or sometimes not noticeable at all. You just pick it up and put it in your cart.
I wouldn't say that because gasoline is required for us to live as a way of live.
As in... I could choose to not buy shampoo and still keep my job. (Albeit that funky smell in my cubicle... *coughs* not that I sometimes not shower anyways *coughs*)
Wheras if I can no longer buy gas to drive to work, I will not be able to go to work... Hence... I will loose my job and then have no money for food or housing and the shampoo will be a moot point.
Not only do we have people who believe firmly that both elections were stolen, but we have people who literally believe something will cause a suspension of the 2008 elections, allowing Bush to remain in power. To me, the growing ranks of people who believe that with all their heart - growing mostly because of the internet, and sources of information that reinforce what they want to believe - are actually more of a threat to our system of government than anything else.
And you say this like it is a bad thing?
Our system of government is flawed and should collapse and be replaced by something else.
Hopefully, by a proportional representative democracy much like Isreal's in which your vote does count. And maybe have a parliment and prime minister and president.
I'm not saying America and its way of life should collapse but rather our system is starting to get more corrupt than a Roman Senate on bribe day. The checks and ballances are being cheated and things are looking bad.
I'm also not saying the Republicans are rigging the election and wanting to install a dictator. They are far from it... BUT... If we continue down this path we might have one in 20 to 30 years if we slowly errode the constitution and empower government authority.
I'm not so worried about Bush than the person who is looking at him now going, "Damn, thats a lot of power I would like to have just go I can do evil things!"
Well I doubt anyone calls themselves evil but you get my point.
One is where the person installs a mail server and doesn't know how to configure it. The other is where someone runs an operating system and doesn't know how to use it.
Of course the latter might be more because it it was made by developers who didn't know how to write it.
FTFA: 1sockchuck writes to mention a Netcraft article wondering who should bear the brunt of phishing costs.
The rational answer should be that law enforcement should persue the criminals and put a freeze on their accounts and seek retribution in monetary and jailtime punishments.
Seriously, if we can find and freeze "terrorist" accounts, how hard is it to track where this money goes?
I mean Phishers have to get it from a bank or ATM somewhere.
Why don't the bank simply reverse the process and force other banks to freeze the accounts? What is preventing them?
Why is it, that on blogs, in comments, and many other places, I see this exact bahvior ascribed to Apple (adds DRM to.mp3s, has "proprietary format" conversion) when they've never done any such thing - and when Microsoft does it, it's no big deal?
Umm... Well, its no big deal with Apple because they don't put any DRM on any MP3s and never have.
Their iTunes AAC files (which you purchase from their site) do have fairplay DRM on them but MP3s they are not. They are a completley different file format and are a different beast when it comes to lossey codecs.
You can rip CDs all day long with iTunes to MP3s or AACs (I don't know why you would want to rip to AAC but you can) and not get a bit of DRM on those files.
Heck you can even rip to Apple Loseless mp4 without DRM. Its just that only quicktime, iTunes, and iPods only have the patent codec for them, but I can share a MP4 with my friends all day long and they can make copies and put it on their iPods if they wanted.
Slashdot Mirror
The use of GPLv3 as a tool against DRM co-opts the work of thousands of people for the FSF's political ends, which they consider a violation of said trust (they do consider DRM a bad thing, they just don't want to be pulled into the FSF's war against it).
FFS stop perpetuating the myth that the FSF is forcing people to switch from GPLv2 to GPLv3.
Sure many of us will not switch because of its politics, but I can still use GPLv2 for new projects in year 2050 if we still have computers that write code.
Again, they aren't forcing anyone to do anything.
Either you can use GPLv3 or you can use GPLv2 until the end of time.
If you don't like to use code that is licensed under GPLv3, then tough. That author (aka copyright owner) has chosen to use it and you are going to have to write your own code base if you refuse to comply with his or her license... which you are free to use GPLv2 or BSD or even keep it closed if you feel like it as long as you don't use their code.
The resurgence of the BSD license?
The answer is no.
Because if you don't like GPLv3, then you can still use GPLv2 until the end of time.
This is what irks me about anyone voicing outrage over GPLv3 because no one is forcing anyone to use it nor does the GPLv2 around the world magically become GPLv3.
Only the author and copyright holder of the software can decide whether or not this will happen and even then... It won't magically causes its dirivatives to jump to GPLv3 by default
Its only if you go back and start using the new work that has been licensed by GPLv3 and if you don't like those terms then write your own code under whatever license you feel like.
Actually, the Land lines went down to and so did the interet for most of NYC because many telco's and major ISPs had their equipment in a central office in one of basements of the WTCs.
Like premiere where? MTV doesn't play music videos anymore.
Oh you mean... Premiere on AOL's page?
Well... I think that is a blessing considering had it not bene canceled and not been on Slashdot and Youtube that many of us would have never seen it.
Maybe they'll decide the market is too crowded already.
No market is too crowded for Microsoft.
And they'll have no choice, because you can't download IE for OS X anymore from Microsoft.
Of course, I'd try to lessen the shock by installing Firefox for OS X for them.
the site isn't worth it for them, and it turns out their BANKING or STOCK site doesn't work
Unless they are upper management... Then why are they looking at their Banking or Stock sites at work?!
As for upper management... Well... They'll just get IE Tab plug in for Firefox.
Last I checked most of the hip-hop/rap/gangsta' crap on MTV doesn't even USE guitars!
Last I checked MTV didn't even play that kind of music... Much less any music at all.
Now, it's possible that if we'd never built these weapons of war to fight the Soviet Union, people like Brezhnev wouldn't have taken the opportunity to conquer Western Europe or at least extort from it money to prop up the Soviet Union, and accordingly the only reason we built them was to fund a military-industrial complex.
You don't think the reason that Brezhnev didn't invade western Europe... well... um... didn't have anything to do with the thousands of nuclear bombs aimed at living person in the Soviet Union?
Truth be told the only reason we never went to war with the Soviets was the hanging sword of Mutual Assured Destruction.
Not because we had better tanks and planes. And in reality, as world War II has shown us, if you fight a conventional war between two superpowers it doesn't matter how good your planes and tanks are (otherwise the Germans would have won hands down) but rather how many of them you can make and afford to loose.
Oh and don't foget during Mr. Brezhnev's time he was more concerned about a conventional war with China than with the US.
So pretty much the only reason we built these kind of things was to make sure we could win localized non-nuclear conflicts. And there was some manufacturing jockeying in there as well.
Probably the best defense against having to deal with software patents is to keep the software closed. Don't make the code public and don't tell how it works. If people don't know you've violated their patent, they are not likely to sue you, and their software patent won't be worth very much.
I hate to ask this, but if someone uses your code and uses it in their own... Isn't that a copyright violation?
I say this because just because you have the code doesn't make the process easy to copy. Unless of course you copy the code... Ergo... Copyright violation of the GPL.
No one can simply look at 50,000 lines of code and go... "OOOOH! I wish I had thought of that process!"
(well most of us anyways)
But chances are the programmers are going to by really tempted to use a copy and paste with their text utility before they can analyze the process and copy the end results.
That said, if you can simply copy the process by looking at the end results (and or code), chances are it wasn't worth patenting in the first place.
People shouldn't be paid for their ideas, but rather the implementation of them.
If I come up with an idea and use that to create a physical working device then I should patent the device... Not the idea of the device.
If I come with an idea and I write code then the code and the effort is copyrighted.
If I come up with an idea for a business... I should create the business and trademark it and not patent the idea to keep people from competing with my so called "idea".
The reasons behind patents and copyrights was to benefit society and give a carrot to the author or inventor.
The fact the author or inventor gets paid is a nice side effect of this part of our constitution, but it is not a god given right.
On occasion during the early history of our nation... Some patents were revoked for the beenfit of our society like the first non-hand wheat thresher because the PTO thought it too important.
If I invent a new software algorithm, and it is not patented, then someone can copy it (not a copy of the code, but of the process) into their own software, which they have far greater resources to distribute and undercut on price. Why should I spend time inventing new algorithms, then?
Because chances are the algorithm you created was most likely neither novel nor unique to the large amounts of algorithms created before you. As in... Your algorithm had to be based on some math that everyone knows or at the most an obscure math professor came up with years ago.
You aren't writing your own language but taking from knowledge of mankind and applying it to your own methods.
Secondly, copyrights protect someone from copying your code, but not your methods because if someone can simply recreate your algorithm simply by looking at the results and not even see any of your source code then again... your algorithm was neither novel nor unique and therby not deserve a patent.
However, your effort and code should be copyrighted and protected by such methods.
It's not a moot issue because there are scores of PC users who wouldn't know how else to rip a CD.
As we say in the IT world when dealing with others outside of our scope of support...
Not.
My.
Problem.
Sure it is heartless, but the rest of the world is not our responsibility.
Using "free" products that are known to screw you over won't be getting sympathy from many of us who use alternatives. If you don't know or haven't bothered to learn... Then suffering is always the best education.
(Damn... I'm being extra heartless this morning.)
All the knowledge in the world is meaningless if you're incompetent at communication.
Pardon me... But did you just call all the major world religions deities meaningless?
Just as with everything else, this generation has created YET ANOTHER disposable product; friendship. MySpace and it's ilk have CHEAPENED friendship and turned it into another mass-market, easily tossed commodity with zero expectations of longetivity or nostalgia value.
To be fair, it wasn't heir generation that caused it, but ours... Or rather the programmers that created Myspace and of course our masters of the 80's generation who funded it... Otherwise known as newscorpration.
Had young angsty teens actually programmed Myspace and developed the databases behind it... (Although it does look like a 13 year old design myspaces backend) Then I'd say it was their fault.
But its not... They are just sheep like the children of all generations being led to the slaughter by million dollar corporations out to make a buck or two.
On the bright side it keeps me employed with other non-related technology jobs.
We need better quality, not quantity of life.
That is the point of this type of research.
You won't be 200 with the body of a 200 year old, but rather 200 with the body of a 21 year old. Hence the reason you had retirement in the first place goes out the window. If I could be 21 for the rest of my life, I wouldn't mind keeping a day job (Heck if you lived that long you could just put a sum of money in a bank and collect on interest in a hundred years.)
Personally, I would like to avoid what happened to my grandparents. Dementia, Alzheimer's, lung cancer, and then pancreatic cancer aren't good ways to end up when your that old.
I would rather die than sit in an old age home and crap my pants and not know who I was or what I was doing that day and not even remember my family. That is why I feel this research is important because it address the issue of aging on the human body rather than just trying to make a human live longer with a decaying body.
Also, whenever the debate of immortality comes up I would like to point out Nick Bostrom's The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant which a very good argument for why death is bad and that we need to take care of the problem of death as soon as possible.
Before I forget, Peter also helped the 2006 Singularity Challenge by donating $100,000 to match everyone's donation to the Singularity Institute which is basically an non-profit organization researching friendly strong AI. (I've donated a small amount of money to them as well)
Sure these goals are almost Sci-Fi or things we may never see in our life time, but I feel that they will be more beneficial to mankind than trying to "band-aid" fix our problems with short term solutions.
It would be easier to donate to the singularity institute.
Perhaps the size of the price sign is what matters. Gas prices are shown in large high contrast fonts on every street corner. The price sticker on a bottle of shampoo is less noticeable or sometimes not noticeable at all. You just pick it up and put it in your cart.
I wouldn't say that because gasoline is required for us to live as a way of live.
As in... I could choose to not buy shampoo and still keep my job. (Albeit that funky smell in my cubicle... *coughs* not that I sometimes not shower anyways *coughs*)
Wheras if I can no longer buy gas to drive to work, I will not be able to go to work... Hence... I will loose my job and then have no money for food or housing and the shampoo will be a moot point.
Not only do we have people who believe firmly that both elections were stolen, but we have people who literally believe something will cause a suspension of the 2008 elections, allowing Bush to remain in power. To me, the growing ranks of people who believe that with all their heart - growing mostly because of the internet, and sources of information that reinforce what they want to believe - are actually more of a threat to our system of government than anything else.
And you say this like it is a bad thing?
Our system of government is flawed and should collapse and be replaced by something else.
Hopefully, by a proportional representative democracy much like Isreal's in which your vote does count. And maybe have a parliment and prime minister and president.
I'm not saying America and its way of life should collapse but rather our system is starting to get more corrupt than a Roman Senate on bribe day. The checks and ballances are being cheated and things are looking bad.
I'm also not saying the Republicans are rigging the election and wanting to install a dictator. They are far from it... BUT... If we continue down this path we might have one in 20 to 30 years if we slowly errode the constitution and empower government authority.
I'm not so worried about Bush than the person who is looking at him now going, "Damn, thats a lot of power I would like to have just go I can do evil things!"
Well I doubt anyone calls themselves evil but you get my point.
To be fair, the only movies worse than Street Fighter was Home Alone 2 and 3 Ninjas: High Noon at Mega Mountain.
Er, ah, what's the difference again?
One is where the person installs a mail server and doesn't know how to configure it.
The other is where someone runs an operating system and doesn't know how to use it.
Of course the latter might be more because it it was made by developers who didn't know how to write it.
FTFA: 1sockchuck writes to mention a Netcraft article wondering who should bear the brunt of phishing costs.
The rational answer should be that law enforcement should persue the criminals and put a freeze on their accounts and seek retribution in monetary and jailtime punishments.
Seriously, if we can find and freeze "terrorist" accounts, how hard is it to track where this money goes?
I mean Phishers have to get it from a bank or ATM somewhere.
Why don't the bank simply reverse the process and force other banks to freeze the accounts? What is preventing them?
Sorry I missed "they've never done any such thing"
;)
But hopefully I have given a good explanation to backup your point
Why is it, that on blogs, in comments, and many other places, I see this exact bahvior ascribed to Apple (adds DRM to .mp3s, has "proprietary format" conversion) when they've never done any such thing - and when Microsoft does it, it's no big deal?
Umm... Well, its no big deal with Apple because they don't put any DRM on any MP3s and never have.
Their iTunes AAC files (which you purchase from their site) do have fairplay DRM on them but MP3s they are not. They are a completley different file format and are a different beast when it comes to lossey codecs.
You can rip CDs all day long with iTunes to MP3s or AACs (I don't know why you would want to rip to AAC but you can) and not get a bit of DRM on those files.
Heck you can even rip to Apple Loseless mp4 without DRM. Its just that only quicktime, iTunes, and iPods only have the patent codec for them, but I can share a MP4 with my friends all day long and they can make copies and put it on their iPods if they wanted.
Really? And here I thought it just represented some government's that are *shock* looking out for their constituents right! THE HORROR!
Ummm.... Well doesn't that mean this is bad government in action.
For one Apple isn't their constituent and secondly DRM is not in the interest of the average American's list of problems or needs.
If corporations could vote at the ballot box, then I'd say it would be different.
As it is, they can only "vote" with their money.
OGG is nice, but iPods won't play it so the MP3 will live a bit longer.
I've heard mostly because it doesn't have enough processing power, but who knows.