It's shocking that anyone in this day and age still finds it surprising when scientific experiments produce counterintuitive results. So-called intuition and common sense are usually nothing more than widely held but unquestioned assumptions. That people involved in software as much as Slashdot readers and contributors should be surprised is even more absurd. We ought to know well that intuitive interfaces are really familiar interfaces; the only really intuitive interface, as some wit once remarked, is the nipple.
In any case, knowledge unverified by scientific experimentation is not knowledge at all. If there is anything surprising here, it is that we made it all the way to 2009 before someone thought to conduct experiments on a matter as important to public safety as emergency exits.
I must give a nod to this highly creative solution to net addiction: charge the victim so much money they can afford neither a computer nor a net connection! The elegance of the solution is awe-inspiring.
...with my eyesight failing from old age like this, it's too hard to aim if you're across the street.
Somewhere between reactionary neophilia and reactionary neophobia, there is a sparsely populated middle ground where things are evaluated on their own merits, and new things are not automatically good nor old things automatically bad, or vice versa. The modern predilection for the new is just as robotic and mindless as the pre-modern predilection for tradition, the only difference being that we're now indoctrinated into neophilia by advertising instead of being indoctrinated into neophobia by religion.
Maybe, if we learned from the past instead of ignoring it, we wouldn't feel compelled to reinvent COBOL every thirty years. Then we would have been spared the horror of Visual Basic, and then later, Python. Can't wait to see what the next lumbering reanimated monster from the forgotten past will be.
Oh wait, I can already guess: another implementation of Scheme.
That's a win for Microsoft, no matter how you spin it.
Well, maybe. The open source ecosystem has long since become large enough to be self-sustaining, so it's questionable how much it matters that Microsoft still has a majority of the market share. If MS went bankrupt tomorrow, it would be a minor win for Linux but mostly a huge win for Apple, and Apple's behavior as a company suggests strongly that they would be no less unpleasant as a near-monopoly than Microsoft currently is.
The important thing to me is that I have multiple free (in both senses) alternatives to MS and that those are not likely to go away in the foreseeable future. Would I like to buy a laptop without the Microsoft tax. Sure, but then, I pretty much already can, since I usually buy year-old off-lease corporate laptops at a steep discount -- being neither a hardcore gamer nor a videographer, most machines have been more than fast enough for everything else for several years now.
If the whole Free/Open Source Software movement was a battle for our freedom, we already won, and won decisively. The battle against Microsoft's very existence? Who cares? Odds are, Microsoft will be around for a long time to come, and waiting for it to die is like waiting for Apple or one of the *BSDs or any other stable niche offering to die: time better spent having actual fun and getting real work done.
Besides, it's not like Dell's products or their customer support are very good to begin with. When I can buy generic, standard laptop parts to build my own laptop as well as I can build my own desktop boxes, then I'll get excited. Until then, the token gestures of companies selling proprietary, closed hardware are really nothing to become overly concerned about.
Sure, there are GPL zealots, but that's entirely beside the point. The original statement is misleading because, for an ideological GPL advocate, the issue of "open source" is a necessary part of what they call Free Software, but it is not sufficient. No serious Free Software advocate is going to tell you that there should only be one Open Source license, because Open Source isn't really their concern. From the Free Software point of view, much of Open Source is merely a less onerous variety of non-free software.
I would suggest that if any Open Source advocates find their association with Free Software damaging to their reputation, they should stop associating with Free Software. Free Software advocates will, for their part, probably be grateful that the Open Source people have stopped trying to pirate Free Software by looking for a back door in the GPL. Free Software and Open Source can get along quite well without each other.
What's really infuriating about the Open Source camp's hyperbolic claims of zealotry and fanaticism is that it is just a cover for laziness and greed. Don't like Free Software licenses? Then don't use Free Software. The situation is really no different than if you don't care for Microsoft's EULAs -- fine, don't use Microsoft software. But the hordes of wannabe Open Source entrepreneurs -- and more than a few of the closed source corporations they yearn to emulate -- see Free Software as a dragon's hoard of riches there for the plundering, unguarded by well-paid attorneys. It's quite disgraceful. Don't like being told how you should behave? Lead by example and stop trying to tell people how they should license their work, and go do you own work. Being dishonest and hypocritical might actually serve you well in business, but being lazy, shiftless, and parasitic probably won't.
Producers of proprietary, closed-source software often ask this question. How does one get around the GPL? The answer is quite simple, even obvious.
Write your own code.
That's really all there is to it. The whole idea behind the GPL, and Free/Libre software generally, is that instead of charging money for the license, the authors expect a different kind of compensation, which is that you agree to share the code and any changes you made to it with the general public. For some reason, this boggles the heck out of people who are trained to look at everything in terms of money and think it's some radical new idea, but it's actually a much older idea than money itself: the trade in kind. It'd be no different if we were farmers trading seeds.
What I find personally disturbing about the question itself is that it all but presupposes unethical intentions. You are asking how you can thwart the spirit of the license while adhering to its letter. If you're okay with behaving unethically and antisocially as long as what you're doing is technically legal, go right ahead. You can probably even ignore the legal implications of outright violating the license, depending on whose code it is -- the FSF has the resources to sue and routinely makes plausible threats to do so, but J. Random Hacker who is offering you a license to some library or other in good faith probably does not have those resources. I wouldn't personally pursue this route, but since you're looking at this in terms of what you can get away with rather than what you ought to do, I thought I'd mention it.
My personal recommendation, however, is that it would be prudent, in addition to ethical, to avoid gray areas like this. If you're producing commercial, proprietary software, the concept of paying for goods and services should not be alien to you. Consider offering money to the author of the library in exchange for a different license. It's possible that they'll say no, but then you should consider offering money to a professional programmer -- a lot of whom are short of work these days -- in exchange for writing a clone. Just a thought.
Right, because anarchy has proven to work so terribly well already.
If doing something harmful is profitable, it will be done to the fullest possible extent without (and sometimes even) outright breaking the law. That includes trying to generate profit by making the market less free, hence monopolies and cartels. While it's fashionable in some circles to argue that the market is a panacea for all conceivable problems, that argument is so absurd on its face that it wouldn't be worth refuting if there weren't so many laissez-faire bobbleheads nodding gleefully every time some business model comes along touting anti-competitive practices dressed up as "innovation". Touting Facebook and iPhone apps as innovative -- seriously, Facebook apps? -- crosses the line from absurdity into actual comedy.
All regulation isn't bad. Remember that the next time you spout off some reactionary wisecrack and the regulations against assault and battery keep me from bashing you over the head with a sack full of iPhones.
Did I miss something, or are we or are we not talking about television? From all the outrage being flung around, you'd think we were talking about something vital and necessary, like food or medical care.
Requiring people to pay extra for access to lowest common denominator spectacle -- and actually getting them to do it by the tens of millions -- isn't an outrage, it's a hack. With extra bonus points for genuine irony.
Depending on how fine you slice it, we have a lot more than five (or six) senses. There are four kinds of receptors in the eyes, five on the tongue, and more than a dozen for smell. Even something as simple as the sense of touch can be broken down into pressure and temperature (and probably something else that I'm forgetting), each with its own specialized nerves to detect the appropriate stimulus. Then there are the meta-senses that are assembled by the brain from raw sensory data: varying pressure on the skin over time as you drag your fingers over a surface gets translated into a very distinct "sense" of texture, and vision and hearing are a cornucopia of derived senses.
While we're at it, why are we still teaching kids that there are only three states of matter?
Due to the wavelengths involved, your radio "eyes" would have to be quite large to get any kind of resolution at all. Depending on the frequencies you want to be able to see, we could be talking meters.
Actually, the atmosphere during much of the dinosaur era was likely lower in CO2 and higher in oxygen than the present era, due to sequestration of CO2 in all that vegetation that later turned into coal and oil. The high oxygen content is indicated by the presence of the large insects like the famous giant dragonflies: because insects lack lungs, the level of atmospheric oxygen imposes an upper limit on their body size.
Despite the popular superstition that scientists just like to overcomplicate things -- which is, in fact, almost the polar opposite of what scientists actually try to do -- the fact of the matter is that climate is complex, and simplistic reasoning like, "If warmer weather was good for the dinosaurs, it will be good for us," can pretty much be dismissed out of hand.
Interestingly, I was actually pleased that LeGuin -- whom I've always admired -- specifically used the phrasing "violate my copyright" instead of "stole from me"; it suggests she knows the difference between the two and is not one of the bad guys.
As far as "the People" are concerned, the People long ago agreed to live in a nation of laws, the means for change being the election of representatives to legislatures at various levels. Piracy is illegal, and as such is a violation of the social contract, outside of which no rights exist, silliness about "natural rights" notwithstanding.
All that said, I won't lie through my teeth and claim that I have not pirated books, music, movies, software, and a few more obscure categories of data, but I'm not going to work myself into a moral lather and appeal to folk mysticism and claim with righteous rage that artists' livelihoods are "privileges" for which they should extend their gratitude and respect to the slavering consumer masses.
In Ms. LeGuin's case, I have bought almost all of her books in hardcopy, some of them in several different editions. That much is fair; it costs money to print books. What I object to is that if I want an electronic copy, I have to pay nearly the same amount again despite an actual cost that is very rapidly amortized to near zero, and I object to the fact that her copyright will persist after her personal demise as a free-floating property, entirely divorced from the original purpose of copyright, which was to encourage creators to create more. Dead authors, on the other hand, despite their numerical superiority over living authors and the vastly greater length of their careers as dead authors, have yet to produce a single character of text. Moreover, now that plausible alternatives to the venerable paper book are beginning to appear, the cost to the public domain is more apparent than ever.
In any case, it is worth bearing in mind that if actual sales of artistic works decline far enough, their availability will decline for both paying customer and pirate alike, if for no other reason than that the already relatively small number of self-supporting artists will have less time to produce material because they're too busy working day jobs. It may be worth considering that the privilege of copyright protection is not entirely a ripoff for the reading public; it is in fact something we have exchanged in a fair trade for having lots of good books to read.
Somewhere between the extremes of the media cartels and quasi-religious bullshit about natural rights, it may be possible for reasonable artists and reasonable audiences to work out a fair exchange.
If your goal is wide acceptance in the business world, then yes, the Apache license or BSD or, for that matter, public domain is far better than the GPL in most cases -- other posters have noted the glaring exceptions.
If your goal is maximum utility for individual users, then the GPL or a close relative is the way to go.
The thing about ESR and RMS is that they approach the issue from diametrically opposed positions and assume that everyone must follow their lead, when the fact is that motivations vary. I was interested in Free Software from the beginning for reasons that were (and remain) essentially altruistic: I wanted to help develop software that would be useful to individual users and accessible to individual developers of like mind. I don't care one way or the other if anything I've done becomes especially popular or widely adopted in the business world, though I have contributed to projects that were.
ESR and many of his supporters, on the other hand, do care very much whether their work is adopted by the corporate world, and many of them are hoping to profit from it. While that's not to my personal taste, it's all fine and well, and I support their freedom to take that approach.
That said, it has often seemed to me that if you want to write software for the corporate world and to make decent sums of money at it, it makes a lot more sense to just get a programming job at a corporation or start a closed-source software company. I know there are a lot of folks out for world domination with varying amounts of tongue-in-cheek, but I've never been convinced that there is any tangible benefit for individual users (including myself, when I'm using rather than coding software) to be derived from massive corporate adoption of most FOSS software. Conversely, there is a great deal of risk, not to corporations playing with "viral" licenses, but to the freedom of free software itself, when you play games with large corporations with lots of money and attorneys. In such a contest, the small FOSS project is always overmatched unless it aligns itself with another large corporation, which entails even more risk.
Anyway, the long and the short of it is that we have many different kinds of free/open licenses for the simple reason that developers have many different goals for their projects. One size does not fit all, ESR and RMS to the contrary.
I dunno 'bout you, but when I accidentally turn logging on some high-volume task, I usually find out about it pretty quickly when/var/log fills up.
Now, while I doubt that the high-volume task the NSA was monitoring -- like, oh, let's say all voice and data communications in the US -- went to/var/log, the fact is that when most folks build out storage for data collection, it tends to be built in proportion to the amount of data to be collected, plus some moderate wiggle room for unexpected overages. Exactly how much wiggle room you allocate depends, of course, on how big you think a plausible overage is, but since cost is a factor, even for -- or so I presume -- organizations with black budgets, you don't build out multiple petabytes to hold a couple of gigs worth of data, for example.
So if the NSA was really only intending to capture a few, carefully targeted communications, you'd think someone would have noticed very quickly if they'd accidentally recorded more than they'd intended. For fucking years.
I'm not sure what's worse: the original crime, lying about it, or this gross insult to the intelligence of everyone listening to their transparent fictions.
Some years ago, I worked for a partner of a then-enormous national ISP that shall remain unnamed, but its initials are AOL. At one point, I had access to a large list of usernames and passwords of their users. Out of curiosity, I performed a statistical analysis of the data and discovered, to my not very large surprise, that about 20% -- I forget the exact figure -- had passwords that were either "password", "secret", or their username. In other words, if you know one of their usernames, you have a roughly one-in-five chance of being able to compromise their account. (You'll have to take my word for this, since AOL users are a lot harder to come by now than they were five years ago.)
One would hope that people with actual ssh accounts would be smarter, but I frankly doubt it. This being the case, the wise administrator will require strong passwords. Even otherwise smart (i.e., non-AOL) users can be amazingly clueless about basic computer security.
Are you shooting for +5 Funny? We already have been tinkering with the global climate by dumping enormous quantities of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere for decades. The question isn't so much whether we have a right to do this, but whether we have a responsibility to do something.
That said, this particular proposal seems like a really bad idea. If we reduce the amount of light reaching the surface, then we will have to keep producing greenhouse gases to avoid global cooling. While it might seem that we would have little difficulty doing so, what happens when we run out of fossil fuels or fossil fuels are rendered uneconomical by, let's say, the invention practical fusion power? It's also worth noting that the greenhouse effect is not the only problem arising from our freewheeling pollution habits.
Fundamentally, that's it, and it's a problem for OS vendors in general, not just Microsoft: from the perspective of the majority of users, the current generation of operating systems have reached maturity. While that's not necessarily the case for specialized users -- developers, sysadmins, hobbyist tinkerers -- for everyone else, it's good enough. The average user would probably like more stability, speed, security, and general reliability, any other complaints they have are relatively minor quibbles. The same applies to most categories of applications with the sole exception of games, which have more in common with the TV and movie industries than the software industry. There's always room for a new game just as there's always room for another episode of a popular TV show, but at this point, who really needs a new version of a word processor or a media player? Oh sure, there can always be refinements, but how many of those could possibly be compelling enough to pay for?
I think what we're likely to see in the consumer computer market is a demand for much longer lifetimes for their purchases, both hardware and software. Why shouldn't a computer and its software remain usable for as long as a refrigerator or a garbage disposal or a stereo? If you're not an enthusiast of computers for their own sake, what do you care about the new stuff when the old stuff serves your needs adequately and doesn't require you to spend more money or struggle through learning curves?
Mind you, I am a software developer and an enthusiast, but outside of work and hobbies, I'd be perfectly content if I could keep the same desktop or laptop for ten years or so, and frankly, as far as my hobbies go, the average machine three years ago was more than fast enough to do everything I wanted to do. (I have upgraded hard drives several times, though.)
What MS and others are facing is the terrifying prospect of a mature industry, and they are working hard to coerce their customers into behaving as if it was still a young, growing business. I suspect they'll be quite a pain in the ass until the market finally beats them into submission.
I'm not much of a video game player myself, but I rather suspect that most people who do play video games regularly, especially teenagers with lots of spare time, rack up more than fifty hours in nine weeks; that's about five and a half hours a week.
Appear to show someone under eighteen? Under such a law, there would be two possible responses:
1. Only depict people who are obviously middle-aged or older having sex.
2. Write stories in which all of the characters are androids. This could include, of course, androids that look like three-year-olds having sex with robots that look like dogs.
While I have no particular interest in seeing either option, I certainly hope someone puts both in the same comic book and sells it in every comic store in the UK.
While that is perhaps especially typical of young people (and I was certainly no exception), I've come to suspect that it's just typical of people of all ages, period. For every twenty-something who's dead certain that the language du jour is the be-all and end-all of development tools, there's a forty-something who is equally certain about some formerly popular language or methodology and completely resistant to anything new.
With the young ones, it's because they don't know anything else. With the older ones, it's because they've seen enough empty fads come and go that they assume that every innovation is just a repackaging of something old. (Arguably, that's true of most but hardly all new trends, but I digress.)
Human beings have a lot of strengths, but being humble and observant are not among them. If there is anything new about that, it is only new in terms of geologic time.
Also, wouldn't the accuracy of this depend on the theater's dimensions and acoustics as well as the layout/calibration of the speaker system?
Less than you'd think, though it certainly would require some calibration (and ongoing periodic recalibration). The main problem, as everyone and their brother has noted, is that it doesn't do you any good to know where the bootlegger was sitting unless you know who was sitting where.
It seems to me that it would be a lot more useful to simply detect the RF emissions from camcorders, provided you could reliably distinguish them from cell phones, iPods, Blackberrys, and the plethora of other small electronics that people are increasingly carrying.
If you want to make a bunch of money, though, it really doesn't matter if it works or not. All that's important is that you can convince the dipshits who write the checks for the MPAA that it does. Look at how much money various companies have made from selling ineffective antipiracy schemes to the music and software industries. And, at the end of the day, would you really feel bad about cheating the MPAA?
It especially doesn't make sense as MS's yearly net profits exceed the entire gross revenues of either the recording or movie industries.
I'm glad to see I'm not the only person who's noticed that. I have long found it perplexing that the music and movie industries get to call the shots for the vastly larger software industry when it comes to legislation. I can only assume that the software industry must have some incredibly shitty lobbyists. It's not like it doesn't cost Microsoft money to pay developers to engineer their operating system to RIAA/MPAA specifications. If there aren't some large checks being written to MS to get this done, then Steve Ballmer is an even bigger meathead than I thought -- and do not underestimate how big of a meathead I think he is already.
It's more than the money, too. Our civilization would trundle along just fine if music and movie production ground to a total halt, but we have long since passed the point where we could operate without software, even Microsoft's buggy, insecure software.
Oh well, it's no skin off my nose. Ever since it became possible to run CS3 under WINE, the only reason I haven't switched completely to Linux is that I just haven't had the time to shift everything around. Time to get cracking, I guess.
We have toll roads that were supposed to expire (ga400) when they paid off, guess what, ain't happened and won't ever happen.
Roads are never paid off. They require constant, and fairly expensive, upkeep. That's not to say that in your case, your government is not collecting more than the cost of upkeep, but the idea that one builds a road and then it just lies there forever is nonsense. Asphalt roads will disintegrate from sunlight alone, and even reinforced concrete slabs are subject to considerable wear and tear when you roll several million tons of vehicles over them every day. It's got to be paid for somehow.
Mind you, I care about the environment and I have three motor vehicles that I enjoy, of which two are quite fuel-efficient and the other, a 1983 VW van, is mostly a sink for money, time, and nostalgia. Having lived in areas that have poorly-maintained roads, I can say I definitely prefer well-maintained roads, especially when I'm out on the motorcycle. There's no conspiracy here to rip anyone off; there's just no such thing as a free lunch.
Slashdot Mirror
It's shocking that anyone in this day and age still finds it surprising when scientific experiments produce counterintuitive results. So-called intuition and common sense are usually nothing more than widely held but unquestioned assumptions. That people involved in software as much as Slashdot readers and contributors should be surprised is even more absurd. We ought to know well that intuitive interfaces are really familiar interfaces; the only really intuitive interface, as some wit once remarked, is the nipple.
In any case, knowledge unverified by scientific experimentation is not knowledge at all. If there is anything surprising here, it is that we made it all the way to 2009 before someone thought to conduct experiments on a matter as important to public safety as emergency exits.
I must give a nod to this highly creative solution to net addiction: charge the victim so much money they can afford neither a computer nor a net connection! The elegance of the solution is awe-inspiring.
...with my eyesight failing from old age like this, it's too hard to aim if you're across the street.
Somewhere between reactionary neophilia and reactionary neophobia, there is a sparsely populated middle ground where things are evaluated on their own merits, and new things are not automatically good nor old things automatically bad, or vice versa. The modern predilection for the new is just as robotic and mindless as the pre-modern predilection for tradition, the only difference being that we're now indoctrinated into neophilia by advertising instead of being indoctrinated into neophobia by religion.
Maybe, if we learned from the past instead of ignoring it, we wouldn't feel compelled to reinvent COBOL every thirty years. Then we would have been spared the horror of Visual Basic, and then later, Python. Can't wait to see what the next lumbering reanimated monster from the forgotten past will be.
Oh wait, I can already guess: another implementation of Scheme.
That's a win for Microsoft, no matter how you spin it.
Well, maybe. The open source ecosystem has long since become large enough to be self-sustaining, so it's questionable how much it matters that Microsoft still has a majority of the market share. If MS went bankrupt tomorrow, it would be a minor win for Linux but mostly a huge win for Apple, and Apple's behavior as a company suggests strongly that they would be no less unpleasant as a near-monopoly than Microsoft currently is.
The important thing to me is that I have multiple free (in both senses) alternatives to MS and that those are not likely to go away in the foreseeable future. Would I like to buy a laptop without the Microsoft tax. Sure, but then, I pretty much already can, since I usually buy year-old off-lease corporate laptops at a steep discount -- being neither a hardcore gamer nor a videographer, most machines have been more than fast enough for everything else for several years now.
If the whole Free/Open Source Software movement was a battle for our freedom, we already won, and won decisively. The battle against Microsoft's very existence? Who cares? Odds are, Microsoft will be around for a long time to come, and waiting for it to die is like waiting for Apple or one of the *BSDs or any other stable niche offering to die: time better spent having actual fun and getting real work done.
Besides, it's not like Dell's products or their customer support are very good to begin with. When I can buy generic, standard laptop parts to build my own laptop as well as I can build my own desktop boxes, then I'll get excited. Until then, the token gestures of companies selling proprietary, closed hardware are really nothing to become overly concerned about.
Sure, there are GPL zealots, but that's entirely beside the point. The original statement is misleading because, for an ideological GPL advocate, the issue of "open source" is a necessary part of what they call Free Software, but it is not sufficient. No serious Free Software advocate is going to tell you that there should only be one Open Source license, because Open Source isn't really their concern. From the Free Software point of view, much of Open Source is merely a less onerous variety of non-free software.
I would suggest that if any Open Source advocates find their association with Free Software damaging to their reputation, they should stop associating with Free Software. Free Software advocates will, for their part, probably be grateful that the Open Source people have stopped trying to pirate Free Software by looking for a back door in the GPL. Free Software and Open Source can get along quite well without each other.
What's really infuriating about the Open Source camp's hyperbolic claims of zealotry and fanaticism is that it is just a cover for laziness and greed. Don't like Free Software licenses? Then don't use Free Software. The situation is really no different than if you don't care for Microsoft's EULAs -- fine, don't use Microsoft software. But the hordes of wannabe Open Source entrepreneurs -- and more than a few of the closed source corporations they yearn to emulate -- see Free Software as a dragon's hoard of riches there for the plundering, unguarded by well-paid attorneys. It's quite disgraceful. Don't like being told how you should behave? Lead by example and stop trying to tell people how they should license their work, and go do you own work. Being dishonest and hypocritical might actually serve you well in business, but being lazy, shiftless, and parasitic probably won't.
Producers of proprietary, closed-source software often ask this question. How does one get around the GPL? The answer is quite simple, even obvious.
Write your own code.
That's really all there is to it. The whole idea behind the GPL, and Free/Libre software generally, is that instead of charging money for the license, the authors expect a different kind of compensation, which is that you agree to share the code and any changes you made to it with the general public. For some reason, this boggles the heck out of people who are trained to look at everything in terms of money and think it's some radical new idea, but it's actually a much older idea than money itself: the trade in kind. It'd be no different if we were farmers trading seeds.
What I find personally disturbing about the question itself is that it all but presupposes unethical intentions. You are asking how you can thwart the spirit of the license while adhering to its letter. If you're okay with behaving unethically and antisocially as long as what you're doing is technically legal, go right ahead. You can probably even ignore the legal implications of outright violating the license, depending on whose code it is -- the FSF has the resources to sue and routinely makes plausible threats to do so, but J. Random Hacker who is offering you a license to some library or other in good faith probably does not have those resources. I wouldn't personally pursue this route, but since you're looking at this in terms of what you can get away with rather than what you ought to do, I thought I'd mention it.
My personal recommendation, however, is that it would be prudent, in addition to ethical, to avoid gray areas like this. If you're producing commercial, proprietary software, the concept of paying for goods and services should not be alien to you. Consider offering money to the author of the library in exchange for a different license. It's possible that they'll say no, but then you should consider offering money to a professional programmer -- a lot of whom are short of work these days -- in exchange for writing a clone. Just a thought.
Right, because anarchy has proven to work so terribly well already.
If doing something harmful is profitable, it will be done to the fullest possible extent without (and sometimes even) outright breaking the law. That includes trying to generate profit by making the market less free, hence monopolies and cartels. While it's fashionable in some circles to argue that the market is a panacea for all conceivable problems, that argument is so absurd on its face that it wouldn't be worth refuting if there weren't so many laissez-faire bobbleheads nodding gleefully every time some business model comes along touting anti-competitive practices dressed up as "innovation". Touting Facebook and iPhone apps as innovative -- seriously, Facebook apps? -- crosses the line from absurdity into actual comedy.
All regulation isn't bad. Remember that the next time you spout off some reactionary wisecrack and the regulations against assault and battery keep me from bashing you over the head with a sack full of iPhones.
Did I miss something, or are we or are we not talking about television? From all the outrage being flung around, you'd think we were talking about something vital and necessary, like food or medical care.
Requiring people to pay extra for access to lowest common denominator spectacle -- and actually getting them to do it by the tens of millions -- isn't an outrage, it's a hack. With extra bonus points for genuine irony.
Depending on how fine you slice it, we have a lot more than five (or six) senses. There are four kinds of receptors in the eyes, five on the tongue, and more than a dozen for smell. Even something as simple as the sense of touch can be broken down into pressure and temperature (and probably something else that I'm forgetting), each with its own specialized nerves to detect the appropriate stimulus. Then there are the meta-senses that are assembled by the brain from raw sensory data: varying pressure on the skin over time as you drag your fingers over a surface gets translated into a very distinct "sense" of texture, and vision and hearing are a cornucopia of derived senses.
While we're at it, why are we still teaching kids that there are only three states of matter?
Due to the wavelengths involved, your radio "eyes" would have to be quite large to get any kind of resolution at all. Depending on the frequencies you want to be able to see, we could be talking meters.
Actually, the atmosphere during much of the dinosaur era was likely lower in CO2 and higher in oxygen than the present era, due to sequestration of CO2 in all that vegetation that later turned into coal and oil. The high oxygen content is indicated by the presence of the large insects like the famous giant dragonflies: because insects lack lungs, the level of atmospheric oxygen imposes an upper limit on their body size.
Despite the popular superstition that scientists just like to overcomplicate things -- which is, in fact, almost the polar opposite of what scientists actually try to do -- the fact of the matter is that climate is complex, and simplistic reasoning like, "If warmer weather was good for the dinosaurs, it will be good for us," can pretty much be dismissed out of hand.
Interestingly, I was actually pleased that LeGuin -- whom I've always admired -- specifically used the phrasing "violate my copyright" instead of "stole from me"; it suggests she knows the difference between the two and is not one of the bad guys.
As far as "the People" are concerned, the People long ago agreed to live in a nation of laws, the means for change being the election of representatives to legislatures at various levels. Piracy is illegal, and as such is a violation of the social contract, outside of which no rights exist, silliness about "natural rights" notwithstanding.
All that said, I won't lie through my teeth and claim that I have not pirated books, music, movies, software, and a few more obscure categories of data, but I'm not going to work myself into a moral lather and appeal to folk mysticism and claim with righteous rage that artists' livelihoods are "privileges" for which they should extend their gratitude and respect to the slavering consumer masses.
In Ms. LeGuin's case, I have bought almost all of her books in hardcopy, some of them in several different editions. That much is fair; it costs money to print books. What I object to is that if I want an electronic copy, I have to pay nearly the same amount again despite an actual cost that is very rapidly amortized to near zero, and I object to the fact that her copyright will persist after her personal demise as a free-floating property, entirely divorced from the original purpose of copyright, which was to encourage creators to create more. Dead authors, on the other hand, despite their numerical superiority over living authors and the vastly greater length of their careers as dead authors, have yet to produce a single character of text. Moreover, now that plausible alternatives to the venerable paper book are beginning to appear, the cost to the public domain is more apparent than ever.
In any case, it is worth bearing in mind that if actual sales of artistic works decline far enough, their availability will decline for both paying customer and pirate alike, if for no other reason than that the already relatively small number of self-supporting artists will have less time to produce material because they're too busy working day jobs. It may be worth considering that the privilege of copyright protection is not entirely a ripoff for the reading public; it is in fact something we have exchanged in a fair trade for having lots of good books to read.
Somewhere between the extremes of the media cartels and quasi-religious bullshit about natural rights, it may be possible for reasonable artists and reasonable audiences to work out a fair exchange.
If your goal is wide acceptance in the business world, then yes, the Apache license or BSD or, for that matter, public domain is far better than the GPL in most cases -- other posters have noted the glaring exceptions.
If your goal is maximum utility for individual users, then the GPL or a close relative is the way to go.
The thing about ESR and RMS is that they approach the issue from diametrically opposed positions and assume that everyone must follow their lead, when the fact is that motivations vary. I was interested in Free Software from the beginning for reasons that were (and remain) essentially altruistic: I wanted to help develop software that would be useful to individual users and accessible to individual developers of like mind. I don't care one way or the other if anything I've done becomes especially popular or widely adopted in the business world, though I have contributed to projects that were.
ESR and many of his supporters, on the other hand, do care very much whether their work is adopted by the corporate world, and many of them are hoping to profit from it. While that's not to my personal taste, it's all fine and well, and I support their freedom to take that approach.
That said, it has often seemed to me that if you want to write software for the corporate world and to make decent sums of money at it, it makes a lot more sense to just get a programming job at a corporation or start a closed-source software company. I know there are a lot of folks out for world domination with varying amounts of tongue-in-cheek, but I've never been convinced that there is any tangible benefit for individual users (including myself, when I'm using rather than coding software) to be derived from massive corporate adoption of most FOSS software. Conversely, there is a great deal of risk, not to corporations playing with "viral" licenses, but to the freedom of free software itself, when you play games with large corporations with lots of money and attorneys. In such a contest, the small FOSS project is always overmatched unless it aligns itself with another large corporation, which entails even more risk.
Anyway, the long and the short of it is that we have many different kinds of free/open licenses for the simple reason that developers have many different goals for their projects. One size does not fit all, ESR and RMS to the contrary.
I dunno 'bout you, but when I accidentally turn logging on some high-volume task, I usually find out about it pretty quickly when /var/log fills up.
Now, while I doubt that the high-volume task the NSA was monitoring -- like, oh, let's say all voice and data communications in the US -- went to /var/log, the fact is that when most folks build out storage for data collection, it tends to be built in proportion to the amount of data to be collected, plus some moderate wiggle room for unexpected overages. Exactly how much wiggle room you allocate depends, of course, on how big you think a plausible overage is, but since cost is a factor, even for -- or so I presume -- organizations with black budgets, you don't build out multiple petabytes to hold a couple of gigs worth of data, for example.
So if the NSA was really only intending to capture a few, carefully targeted communications, you'd think someone would have noticed very quickly if they'd accidentally recorded more than they'd intended. For fucking years.
I'm not sure what's worse: the original crime, lying about it, or this gross insult to the intelligence of everyone listening to their transparent fictions.
Some years ago, I worked for a partner of a then-enormous national ISP that shall remain unnamed, but its initials are AOL. At one point, I had access to a large list of usernames and passwords of their users. Out of curiosity, I performed a statistical analysis of the data and discovered, to my not very large surprise, that about 20% -- I forget the exact figure -- had passwords that were either "password", "secret", or their username. In other words, if you know one of their usernames, you have a roughly one-in-five chance of being able to compromise their account. (You'll have to take my word for this, since AOL users are a lot harder to come by now than they were five years ago.)
One would hope that people with actual ssh accounts would be smarter, but I frankly doubt it. This being the case, the wise administrator will require strong passwords. Even otherwise smart (i.e., non-AOL) users can be amazingly clueless about basic computer security.
Are you shooting for +5 Funny? We already have been tinkering with the global climate by dumping enormous quantities of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere for decades. The question isn't so much whether we have a right to do this, but whether we have a responsibility to do something.
That said, this particular proposal seems like a really bad idea. If we reduce the amount of light reaching the surface, then we will have to keep producing greenhouse gases to avoid global cooling. While it might seem that we would have little difficulty doing so, what happens when we run out of fossil fuels or fossil fuels are rendered uneconomical by, let's say, the invention practical fusion power? It's also worth noting that the greenhouse effect is not the only problem arising from our freewheeling pollution habits.
Fundamentally, that's it, and it's a problem for OS vendors in general, not just Microsoft: from the perspective of the majority of users, the current generation of operating systems have reached maturity. While that's not necessarily the case for specialized users -- developers, sysadmins, hobbyist tinkerers -- for everyone else, it's good enough. The average user would probably like more stability, speed, security, and general reliability, any other complaints they have are relatively minor quibbles. The same applies to most categories of applications with the sole exception of games, which have more in common with the TV and movie industries than the software industry. There's always room for a new game just as there's always room for another episode of a popular TV show, but at this point, who really needs a new version of a word processor or a media player? Oh sure, there can always be refinements, but how many of those could possibly be compelling enough to pay for?
I think what we're likely to see in the consumer computer market is a demand for much longer lifetimes for their purchases, both hardware and software. Why shouldn't a computer and its software remain usable for as long as a refrigerator or a garbage disposal or a stereo? If you're not an enthusiast of computers for their own sake, what do you care about the new stuff when the old stuff serves your needs adequately and doesn't require you to spend more money or struggle through learning curves?
Mind you, I am a software developer and an enthusiast, but outside of work and hobbies, I'd be perfectly content if I could keep the same desktop or laptop for ten years or so, and frankly, as far as my hobbies go, the average machine three years ago was more than fast enough to do everything I wanted to do. (I have upgraded hard drives several times, though.)
What MS and others are facing is the terrifying prospect of a mature industry, and they are working hard to coerce their customers into behaving as if it was still a young, growing business. I suspect they'll be quite a pain in the ass until the market finally beats them into submission.
I'm not much of a video game player myself, but I rather suspect that most people who do play video games regularly, especially teenagers with lots of spare time, rack up more than fifty hours in nine weeks; that's about five and a half hours a week.
Appear to show someone under eighteen? Under such a law, there would be two possible responses:
1. Only depict people who are obviously middle-aged or older having sex.
2. Write stories in which all of the characters are androids. This could include, of course, androids that look like three-year-olds having sex with robots that look like dogs.
While I have no particular interest in seeing either option, I certainly hope someone puts both in the same comic book and sells it in every comic store in the UK.
I wonder how knowing the particulars of the case might effect the response of slashdot posters.
You mean slashdot posters can be affected by the actual facts of the case?
While that is perhaps especially typical of young people (and I was certainly no exception), I've come to suspect that it's just typical of people of all ages, period. For every twenty-something who's dead certain that the language du jour is the be-all and end-all of development tools, there's a forty-something who is equally certain about some formerly popular language or methodology and completely resistant to anything new.
With the young ones, it's because they don't know anything else. With the older ones, it's because they've seen enough empty fads come and go that they assume that every innovation is just a repackaging of something old. (Arguably, that's true of most but hardly all new trends, but I digress.)
Human beings have a lot of strengths, but being humble and observant are not among them. If there is anything new about that, it is only new in terms of geologic time.
Also, wouldn't the accuracy of this depend on the theater's dimensions and acoustics as well as the layout/calibration of the speaker system?
Less than you'd think, though it certainly would require some calibration (and ongoing periodic recalibration). The main problem, as everyone and their brother has noted, is that it doesn't do you any good to know where the bootlegger was sitting unless you know who was sitting where.
It seems to me that it would be a lot more useful to simply detect the RF emissions from camcorders, provided you could reliably distinguish them from cell phones, iPods, Blackberrys, and the plethora of other small electronics that people are increasingly carrying.
If you want to make a bunch of money, though, it really doesn't matter if it works or not. All that's important is that you can convince the dipshits who write the checks for the MPAA that it does. Look at how much money various companies have made from selling ineffective antipiracy schemes to the music and software industries. And, at the end of the day, would you really feel bad about cheating the MPAA?
so why do anti-abortion campaigners have to basically troll shock pictures to get their point across?
Because it's hard to get people excited with photos of blastocysts drying out in petri dishes?
It especially doesn't make sense as MS's yearly net profits exceed the entire gross revenues of either the recording or movie industries.
I'm glad to see I'm not the only person who's noticed that. I have long found it perplexing that the music and movie industries get to call the shots for the vastly larger software industry when it comes to legislation. I can only assume that the software industry must have some incredibly shitty lobbyists. It's not like it doesn't cost Microsoft money to pay developers to engineer their operating system to RIAA/MPAA specifications. If there aren't some large checks being written to MS to get this done, then Steve Ballmer is an even bigger meathead than I thought -- and do not underestimate how big of a meathead I think he is already.
It's more than the money, too. Our civilization would trundle along just fine if music and movie production ground to a total halt, but we have long since passed the point where we could operate without software, even Microsoft's buggy, insecure software.
Oh well, it's no skin off my nose. Ever since it became possible to run CS3 under WINE, the only reason I haven't switched completely to Linux is that I just haven't had the time to shift everything around. Time to get cracking, I guess.
We have toll roads that were supposed to expire (ga400) when they paid off, guess what, ain't happened and won't ever happen.
Roads are never paid off. They require constant, and fairly expensive, upkeep. That's not to say that in your case, your government is not collecting more than the cost of upkeep, but the idea that one builds a road and then it just lies there forever is nonsense. Asphalt roads will disintegrate from sunlight alone, and even reinforced concrete slabs are subject to considerable wear and tear when you roll several million tons of vehicles over them every day. It's got to be paid for somehow.
Mind you, I care about the environment and I have three motor vehicles that I enjoy, of which two are quite fuel-efficient and the other, a 1983 VW van, is mostly a sink for money, time, and nostalgia. Having lived in areas that have poorly-maintained roads, I can say I definitely prefer well-maintained roads, especially when I'm out on the motorcycle. There's no conspiracy here to rip anyone off; there's just no such thing as a free lunch.