But the rules and regulations that you "cannot fight" are, at their root, wrong.
Behaviour in a person which transgresses against a moral code is defined as immoral. The word "amoral," often used to describe corporate behaviour, suggests that the entity in question cannot be held to a moral code because it cannot understand it. Nothing that I have seen in my (admittedly hobbyist) reading of law suggests that there is any attempt to codify morality for corporations.
Under contract law, for example, the decision of whether or not to keep your promises is an entirely economic one. If it costs less to repudiate your contract than to fulfill it, you are expected to repudiate it. "Natural" persons tend to attach a little extra weight to having given their word that they will perform as they have stated.
Corporations are granted legal personality. They are run by people who have that all-important moral sense. On both counts, morally incorrect behaviour by a corporation must be considered immoral. We have granted corporations legal personality because it is economically advantageous to do so. If they are to have that status, then they must act the part.
If we accept the possibility that there is a greater good than the economic one, then it seems that corporations must be forced to act in accordance with that greater good. I for one believe that the corporations should exist to serve the people.
Things can and should be changed. If I didn't believe that, I wouldn't get out of bed in the morning.
I tell you three times: Disclose! You are much less likely to ever get in trouble if all the facts are out in the open from the start.
Now, as to whether you can release the patches,
From the GPL, section 2b:
<BLOCKQUOTE>b) You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License.</BLOCKQUOTE>
However "you" in this case refers to the modifying entity (your employer). They are not required even to GPL the resulting derivative work, provided they do not distribute it. If you release the work-time patches into the world without at least verbal permission, it is clearly theft. Hey, I don't write the laws, I just vote against the people who do.
Notwithstanding the above, there are lots of good reasons (adequately covered in ESR's essays) why your employer should be <I>asking</I> you to release your changes, however. The ones they're most likely to accept are gratis peer-review and testing.
Write your DLL. Release it as GPL. Write a compatible translation interface which is "original," not derived from the original source code. Relase it as LGPL.
Your end product depends on (and is derived from) an implementing the translation interface, not the DLL. As far as I can tell, there nothing stopping you from distributing the DLL (and its source) along with the rest of your end product.
It is relatively easy to MASQ pptp but you must patch your kernel. Here is a good place to start.
Caveats: I have never used pcAnywhere, and Network Neighborhood browsing doesn't work. I haven't bothered trying to get it going though; I think it's uselessly slow.
Re:Problem with Mozilla has nothing to do with ski
on
Suck On Skins And UI
·
· Score: 1
Actually my first response was to ask if it wouldn't be possible to have a skinning subsystem such that it is possible to write non-portable skins that actually _do_ use native widgets.
I am intrigued by the possibilities that a net-wide Distributed Filesystem Filesystem such as Freenet offers, but put off by the obvious tendency to fragment. A DFS is obviously subject to network effect; the more people use it, the more valuable it becomes.
Is the architecture of Freenet such that it could someday be extended to gateway to or otherwise include/subsume other parallel systems?
I'm all for an open forum for free speech, but this seems almost reckless. In most venues of speech, accountability for someone's words is fundamental.
More importantly for me, does the ID3 file identification have enough room to allow for a meta-Napster?
I.e., why choose? Couldn't a Gnutella or Freenet client gateway into the other networks, thereby allowing one to participate in all of the other distributed filesharing systems?
The big issue that I see is creating a generalized file properties schema.
I heard somewhere that The Onion is an online-only publication. I find that hard to believe, however, as there really isn't very much funny stuff on the internet. Can anybody confirm or deny this for me?
Think of it as a trust fund with the sole purpose of getting leverage, it's pretty slick. I'd happily toss a hundred bucks into the pot in spite of my poorly-fed student status. A few hundred hundred-buckses, and we might be able to play ball.
However, I never met a man I trusted. Not on the 'net, anyhow. Nor has anyone else with a grain of sense. Who could run this in such a manner as to make it possible for me to participate?
By me? Nope, I'm Canadian, and nobody else will trust me by dint of my flapping head and beady eyes.
By some distinguished/.er who might be the hot grits troll in disguise?
By Andover itself? I don't know what their corporate mandate is, but probably not this.
By a trust organization or shell corporation formed by the charter Slashdot guys? We know where they live, so they're trustworthy. Probably.
We used to leave our front door unlocked. Sure was nice. Once when we were away on vacation the neighbour dropped by and closed a window we had left open because it was raining.
So were you trying to say you're in <b>favour</b> of a community where folks live in fear? Isn't the logical extension of that philosophy a police state?
I have thought for a very long time that a "lines of ownership" database would be a very useful thing, but I have always thought in terms of corporate ownership rather than individuals. My original purpose was to be able to effectively boycott companies which I thought deserved it -- but to boycott the whole thing rather than the one toenail which acted most stupidly. Boycotts aside, it would be just-plain-interesting to have a map of who owns who.
My idea involves one volunteer being the record maintainer each company with a listing in the database. They would be responsible for owning one share in said company and reading/decoding the shareholder reports. There is lots of interesting information in those reports if you can wade through the propaganda -- but it would have to be a pretty large scale effort before it was useful.
Those were two examples of what was wrong. I apologize if I offended you by using them both in the the same paragraph. Perhaps I should have used Stalingrad instead? Passchendale?
The point is that there are two things that are majorly wrong in war. One is internal to a country and the other is external. The U.N. is an attempt to address both.
As for the rest of your discourse, I'd agree with you if you were right. Guess that makes us both wrong, huh?
OK, I was stretching it, but it seems to me like it was the crisis point between government on behalf of the people, rather than based on divine right. Limiting the monarchy, some authority to the nobles, guarantee of property rights, yada yada yada.
And isn't "Sign this or we kill you," a kind of protest, when you get right down to it?
I _have_ taken the intro course you refer to, and I learned a very important lesson.
"In the long run, we are all dead." - John Maynard Keynes -
The argument you refer to is that the best way to get a country to stop polluting and abusing their workers is to raise their standard of living. (Just like in the U.S.). The best way for them to get there is to follow the same economic path to stardom that the U.S. did.
I question whether the world is a sufficiently large pollution sink for this _theory_ to work for all countries which are not currently first world. I'd like to keep the planet livable at _least_ for my lifetime. I really like going outside.
Frankly, I don't see what the big hurry is to get everything all worked out. It might be absolutely wrong. It might take a long time to hammer out universally acceptible "fair trade" restrictions. Trade only accounts for about 3% of the GDP. Are you willing to risk _everything_ for a 5% gain on 3%?
The U.N. was created with two major missions, both to prevent a recurrence of the horrors of the second world war.
The first was to prevent global nuclear war. Basically, sovereignty was a "bribe" to countries in exchange for their right to wage war. "You don't go outside _your_ borders, we guarantee that nobody _else_ interferes within them."
Hiroshima was only half of what was all fucked up in WWII, however. The other half occurred at Auschwitz. Therefore, the U.N. was granted the authority to intervene in sovereign affairs, when human rights, most particularly in the case of genocide, are at stake.
During the cold war, intervention was too dangerous. It tore at the foundations erected by the promise of sovereignty. Better to permit rights violations than to destroy the race.
The cold war is over. The U.N. can now afford to be more actively involved.
"Man who fight and run away, live to fight another day."
- Juluka (?) -
Right: It's not invasion of privacy, it's theft.
on
Another Software Spy
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· Score: 2
Look: They want this information to the point where they're willing to run the risk of pissing people off by taking it without asking. Doesn't that suggest that maybe the information has some intrinsic value?
Doesn't that, in turn, suggest that it's theft?
Your "not a big deal" argument falls flat. If someone breaks into my house and doesn't steal anything except some silverware that I don't want anyhow, does that make it OK? This sounds like 100,000 counts of petty theft to me.
I'm concerned about selfish foreign entities dictating policy to my government. If that's an agenda, so be it.
I do care about the people of the world and I am in favour of the international co-operation you refer to. I am opposed to the value of that co-operation being evaluated strictly in monetary terms. I am also opposed to that co-operation being externally imposed upon national governments, who, as I have pointed out, exist for a reason.
If you wish to address China's human rights record, perhaps you should question the policy of _requiring_ my country to trade freely with them. I believe that to do so serves neither my people nor theirs.
I apologize for my earlier tirade. It was very late when I wrote it. I have attempted to simplify my stand and remove the psychobabble. Is it possible that you might reiterate your argument, and remove _your_ rhetoric?
Slashdot Mirror
Mod down! -1: Scary
But the rules and regulations that you "cannot fight" are, at their root, wrong.
Behaviour in a person which transgresses against a moral code is defined as immoral. The word "amoral," often used to describe corporate behaviour, suggests that the entity in question cannot be held to a moral code because it cannot understand it. Nothing that I have seen in my (admittedly hobbyist) reading of law suggests that there is any attempt to codify morality for corporations.
Under contract law, for example, the decision of whether or not to keep your promises is an entirely economic one. If it costs less to repudiate your contract than to fulfill it, you are expected to repudiate it. "Natural" persons tend to attach a little extra weight to having given their word that they will perform as they have stated.
Corporations are granted legal personality. They are run by people who have that all-important moral sense. On both counts, morally incorrect behaviour by a corporation must be considered immoral. We have granted corporations legal personality because it is economically advantageous to do so. If they are to have that status, then they must act the part.
If we accept the possibility that there is a greater good than the economic one, then it seems that corporations must be forced to act in accordance with that greater good. I for one believe that the corporations should exist to serve the people.
Things can and should be changed. If I didn't believe that, I wouldn't get out of bed in the morning.
I tell you three times: Disclose! You are much less likely to ever get in trouble if all the facts are out in the open from the start.
Now, as to whether you can release the patches,
From the GPL, section 2b:
<BLOCKQUOTE>b) You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License.</BLOCKQUOTE>
However "you" in this case refers to the modifying entity (your employer). They are not required even to GPL the resulting derivative work, provided they do not distribute it. If you release the work-time patches into the world without at least verbal permission, it is clearly theft. Hey, I don't write the laws, I just vote against the people who do.
Notwithstanding the above, there are lots of good reasons (adequately covered in ESR's essays) why your employer should be <I>asking</I> you to release your changes, however. The ones they're most likely to accept are gratis peer-review and testing.
The point was that there were parts of the source that NOBODY understood.
Write your DLL. Release it as GPL. Write a compatible translation interface which is "original," not derived from the original source code. Relase it as LGPL.
Your end product depends on (and is derived from) an implementing the translation interface, not the DLL. As far as I can tell, there nothing stopping you from distributing the DLL (and its source) along with the rest of your end product.
Caveats: I have never used pcAnywhere, and Network Neighborhood browsing doesn't work. I haven't bothered trying to get it going though; I think it's uselessly slow.
Actually my first response was to ask if it wouldn't be possible to have a skinning subsystem such that it is possible to write non-portable skins that actually _do_ use native widgets.
But perhaps I'm not clueful.
Is the architecture of Freenet such that it could someday be extended to gateway to or otherwise include/subsume other parallel systems?
If so, what would it take?
Such as in voting, for example?
More importantly for me, does the ID3 file identification have enough room to allow for a meta-Napster?
I.e., why choose? Couldn't a Gnutella or Freenet client gateway into the other networks, thereby allowing one to participate in all of the other distributed filesharing systems?
The big issue that I see is creating a generalized file properties schema.
I heard somewhere that The Onion is an online-only publication. I find that hard to believe, however, as there really isn't very much funny stuff on the internet. Can anybody confirm or deny this for me?
However, I never met a man I trusted. Not on the 'net, anyhow. Nor has anyone else with a grain of sense. Who could run this in such a manner as to make it possible for me to participate?
By me? Nope, I'm Canadian, and nobody else will trust me by dint of my flapping head and beady eyes.
By some distinguished /.er who might be the hot grits troll in disguise?
By Andover itself? I don't know what their corporate mandate is, but probably not this.
By a trust organization or shell corporation formed by the charter Slashdot guys? We know where they live, so they're trustworthy. Probably.
Well, you tell me. Youse guys are the smart ones.
We used to leave our front door unlocked. Sure was nice. Once when we were away on vacation the neighbour dropped by and closed a window we had left open because it was raining.
So were you trying to say you're in <b>favour</b> of a community where folks live in fear? Isn't the logical extension of that philosophy a police state?
E
I have thought for a very long time that a "lines of ownership" database would be a very useful thing, but I have always thought in terms of corporate ownership rather than individuals. My original purpose was to be able to effectively boycott companies which I thought deserved it -- but to boycott the whole thing rather than the one toenail which acted most stupidly. Boycotts aside, it would be just-plain-interesting to have a map of who owns who.
My idea involves one volunteer being the record maintainer each company with a listing in the database. They would be responsible for owning one share in said company and reading/decoding the shareholder reports. There is lots of interesting information in those reports if you can wade through the propaganda -- but it would have to be a pretty large scale effort before it was useful.
Or has something like this already been done?
What happened? I'm Canadian, and this concerns me a little.
Those were two examples of what was wrong. I apologize if I offended you by using them both in the the same paragraph. Perhaps I should have used Stalingrad instead? Passchendale?
The point is that there are two things that are majorly wrong in war. One is internal to a country and the other is external. The U.N. is an attempt to address both.
As for the rest of your discourse, I'd agree with you if you were right. Guess that makes us both wrong, huh?
OK, I was stretching it, but it seems to me like it was the crisis point between government on behalf of the people, rather than based on divine right. Limiting the monarchy, some authority to the nobles, guarantee of property rights, yada yada yada.
;-)
And isn't "Sign this or we kill you," a kind of protest, when you get right down to it?
Is there more to it than that?
I _have_ taken the intro course you refer to, and I learned a very important lesson.
"In the long run, we are all dead."
- John Maynard Keynes -
The argument you refer to is that the best way to get a country to stop polluting and abusing their workers is to raise their standard of living. (Just like in the U.S.). The best way for them to get there is to follow the same economic path to stardom that the U.S. did.
I question whether the world is a sufficiently large pollution sink for this _theory_ to work for all countries which are not currently first world. I'd like to keep the planet livable at _least_ for my lifetime. I really like going outside.
Frankly, I don't see what the big hurry is to get everything all worked out. It might be absolutely wrong. It might take a long time to hammer out universally acceptible "fair trade" restrictions. Trade only accounts for about 3% of the GDP. Are you willing to risk _everything_ for a 5% gain on 3%?
the Magna Carta (OK, that was an insurrection)
sufferage
slavery
black rights
pretty well everything else I can think of that's important
Come to think of it, I can't think of very many protests that went anywhere that _weren't_ for good causes.
In fact, you are partially incorrect.
The U.N. was created with two major missions, both to prevent a recurrence of the horrors of the second world war.
The first was to prevent global nuclear war. Basically, sovereignty was a "bribe" to countries in exchange for their right to wage war. "You don't go outside _your_ borders, we guarantee that nobody _else_ interferes within them."
Hiroshima was only half of what was all fucked up in WWII, however. The other half occurred at Auschwitz. Therefore, the U.N. was granted the authority to intervene in sovereign affairs, when human rights, most particularly in the case of genocide, are at stake.
During the cold war, intervention was too dangerous. It tore at the foundations erected by the promise of sovereignty. Better to permit rights violations than to destroy the race.
The cold war is over. The U.N. can now afford to be more actively involved.
As, in fact, they are.
I apologize for not making my irony more clear.
Beyond the link in my prior post is a fifty-cent rant against the WTO, for exactly the reasons you have outlined.
I am uncertain of the validity of what I have said there, but I am certain of the _uncertainty._ And that, in itself, is the root of my concern.
Cheers!
The entire column is rather offtopic relative to /.'s stated purpose. I don't think your activist comments would not be offtopic in the slightest.
I, for one, would like to see a good discussion of the issues between intelligent people.
Disclaimer: I have been known to espouse anti-WTO views in the past.
"Man who fight and run away, live to fight another day."
- Juluka (?) -
Look: They want this information to the point where they're willing to run the risk of pissing people off by taking it without asking. Doesn't that suggest that maybe the information has some intrinsic value?
Doesn't that, in turn, suggest that it's theft?
Your "not a big deal" argument falls flat. If someone breaks into my house and doesn't steal anything except some silverware that I don't want anyhow, does that make it OK? This sounds like 100,000 counts of petty theft to me.
I'm concerned about selfish foreign entities dictating policy to my government. If that's an agenda, so be it.
I do care about the people of the world and I am in favour of the international co-operation you refer to. I am opposed to the value of that co-operation being evaluated strictly in monetary terms. I am also opposed to that co-operation being externally imposed upon national governments, who, as I have pointed out, exist for a reason.
If you wish to address China's human rights record, perhaps you should question the policy of _requiring_ my country to trade freely with them. I believe that to do so serves neither my people nor theirs.
I apologize for my earlier tirade. It was very late when I wrote it. I have attempted to simplify my stand and remove the psychobabble. Is it possible that you might reiterate your argument, and remove _your_ rhetoric?