Just FYI, Christians are well aware that resurrection from the dead goes against the second law of thermodynamics. That's why it's called a "miracle".
To put it another way: the 2nd law is concerned with closed systems, but the Christian claim is precisely that the resurrection represented an intervention from outside the system. Hence no breach of the second law.
Sounds similar to N.T. Wright's take on the end of Mark. He suggests that the abrupt ending is meant to put the onus back on the reader/listener: "Christ is risen: now over to you. What are you going to do about it?"
First, as others have pointed out, the Codex is from the 4th century CE (i.e. "AD") rather than BCE (or "BC").
Second, saying "it makes no mention of the resurrection" is inaccurate. It doesn't contain the final 8 verses from Mark's Gospel, which have been considered to be a late addition for years and are usually square-bracketed in modern Bible editions.
However, if you actually *read* Mark's Gospel, it has plenty of references to the resurrection of Jesus earlier in the text. Plus the Codex Sinaiticus also includes the other three Gospels, all of which include post-resurrection appearances of Jesus.
But apart from misdating the document by 800 years, misstating the impact of putting it online and misrepresenting the likely attitude of Christians to its publication, the summary is fine...
It is certainly true that "open source" is subject to some semantic unclarity (which is one reason why I personally dislike the term, preferring "free software" - albeit that has problems of its own, of course).
However, that doesn't mean that the likes of MS should be allowed to get away with their bait-and-switch tactics of attempting to gain the perceived kudos and good marketing karma of promoting "open source" (in the OSI sense) and then turning around and saying, "Oh, we only meant it was 'open source' as in 'the source is available, on restrictive terms'". Nor that, as I said in my original comment,/. should be adding to the confusion over the term.
My guess is that the original submitter didn't appreciate that "non-commercial" takes the licence outside the scope of the OSI's definition of open source - not that they meant to use "open source" in some broader sense of "source is available".
The licence only allows non-commercial use, and therefore does not meet the requirements of the Open Source Definition.
Given MS's propensity for muddying (or FUDdying?) the waters as regards open-source/free software (with terminology like "shared source"), a site like/. really shouldn't be doing their work for them...
Perhaps things have changed since early 2004, but the OEM version of Windows on my Dell (currently inhabiting a small, lonely, unloved and unvisited/dev/hda1 partition) required activation, and also required separate driver installations (for the default, factory-shipped hardware), including rebooting between each driver. The contrast with installing GNU/Linux, even back in 2004, was... instructive.
I've also not had any problems with the transition from mozilla-firefox to iceweasel. Were you previously using the official Mozilla installer for Firefox? That may be where the problem lies.
The Iceweasel branding is a matter of taste. I quite like it (and can understand the reasons why Debian had to go down that route), my wife thinks Iceweasel is the best thing ever. The Iceweasel logo is certainly an improvement on the blue, foxless globe Debian used before.
Unix was developed by the old American Telephone & Telegraph. The company allowed the system to be copied, leading to multiple versions, some of which effectively leaked into the public domain. In the early 1990s, Linus Torvalds, then a college student in Helsinki, wrote a version of the program from scratch that he called Linux. Torvalds posted Linux on the Internet, allowing others to copy and improve upon it. The sytem became popular for use on servers as an alternative to Microsoft's Windows.
Yup, that's right, ol' Linus just sat down and cloned the entire Unix operating system from scratch. On his own. With no antecedents.
I'm a Linux user in the UK, but I'm not remotely surprised by this news. By and large, people in the UK are extremely conservative about IT: Firefox take-up here has been far lower than in the US or mainland Europe, for example.
Basically most people don't want to appear remotely "geek-ish", and to show the slightest interest in what software your computer is running, or to change any of the standard default settings (internetexploreroutlookexpressmicrosoftoffice...) , is to break this anti-geek taboo.
This applies in business and the public sector as well as the consumer market. The use of FOSS in the UK is far lower than in most other EU jurisdictions, in all sectors.
As I've said in another reply, I'm well aware what the purpose of the video was. My point was more that the creator had better be ready for a legal fight to demonstrate that it is fair use. I can't see Disney shrugging their shoulders and saying, "Meh. It's fair use. What's the point setting our lawyers onto them?"
Maybe I should (dang internet filtering at the office). But my point was more: "I hope this person knows what they're letting themselves in for..."
Even if this does fit within "fair use" - I've no idea, I'm not an American, and UK copyright law is far more restrictive about this sort of thing - the creator had better be prepared for the possibility of a legal fight to establish that. That's all I was saying.
Hmm. Using copyright material without authorisation in order to explain... copyright law. O-kaaaay.
Still, it might just work provided you don't use material belonging to someone really litigious and with a highly, um, proactive approach towards protecting their "intellectual property".
What was that? Oh. You used Disney material. Ulp.
I'd flee the jurisdiction right now, save yourself time...
More evidence that DRM and similar systems are totally ineffective against attempts to circumvent them. The only people they affect are "innocent bystanders" who don't know how to get round the problems caused by, for example, "false negatives" in validation/activation.
It's not just people living in Norway who will be affected by this. Around 10 million people (more than twice the population of Norway itself) use the Opera Mini browser for mobile phones, which uses proxy servers based in Norway. Presumably Opera Mini users will be caught by the Great Fjordwall of Norway in the same way as Norwegian inhabitants.
This is actually quite smart from a legal point of view. Once Second Life had decided not to go down the road of trying to sue the parody site into oblivion - a wise decision given the PR meltdown such cases tend to cause - it then had a choice.
If it ignored the parody site, that could dilute or otherwise weaken its trade mark rights, making it harder to take action against truly problematic infringement in future. However, by sending a "permit-and-proceed" letter, it not only gets some positive PR for taking a pragmatic and humorous approach - it also transforms the parody site from a trademark-diluting independent endeavour into something that is, in effect, licensed by Second Life. This means they can still be seen to have asserted their trade mark rights rather than allowing the parody site to continue without any intervention at all.
A similar position can arise in relation to land, at least under English law. If someone encroaches on your land for a sufficiently long period of time (12+ years) and you do nothing about it one way or another, you can lose your rights in the land (many people living near railway lines have extended their gardens to the edge of the line by these means). However, if you say to the encroacher, "Oh, that's fine, carry on, I don't mind, you have my permission", then that turns it into a licence, and they cannot then claim "adverse possession" against you later.
But how much of the development of free software can be described as "amateur"? The report in question states that around 50-60% of free software has been developed by individuals, the rest by a mix of academic institutions, businesses etc. So that's 40-50% that's not "amateur" to start with.
As for the 50-60% arising from individual effort, I'd imagine that the majority has been developed by people who earn their living through IT, even if not all of them get paid for their development of free software. As opposed to the "teenager in his mother's basement" stereotype.
This is even assuming you can - with a straight face - describe software such as Linux (i.e. the kernel), the various GNU programs, Firefox, Apache, OpenOffice.org, the leading GNU/Linux distros (Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, Red Hat, Debian etc) as nothing more than the software equivalent of amateur dramatics.
Microsoft Linux is next. I predict within 5 years, Vista will become a legacy product, and all new computers will be shipped with Microsoft's Windows API hosted on a Linux kernel.
It may be relevant to note that a recent EU report estimated that the total value of the free/open-source software collected together in Debian is around EUR 12 bn ($15.5 bn), based on the cost of a proprietary software company recreating the free software codebase. Contrast this with the estimated development costs of Vista of $6 bn - taking into account that this is for a smaller set of components, it is still of the same order of magnitude.
However, the same report suggested that a conservative estimate of the value of the free software codebase by 2010 would be around EUR 100 bn ($130 bn). If that prediction proves correct, it is difficult to see how proprietary software companies can possibly keep pace with that level of development. "Microsoft Linux" would then seem to be a real possibility - something that looks like Windows from the POV of a user - a major advantage, whatever some of us may think of "the Windows experience" - but is built on a free software base.
Well, quite. But the point is that until MS do something, most computer users see it as "weird" and "geeky". Last week it was weird and geeky to have a home server. This week it is normal. (See also: tabbed browsing.)
Hopefully a specifically-tailored home server edition would avoid these difficulties. Most of the difficulties with desktop Linux come not with the install, but with what happens next - adding proprietary drivers, multimedia, installing Java, yada yada yada. A home server edition would presumably avoid all this - the message would be, "Why spend $$$/£££/ on a MS 'home server' when you can just drop this free disk into that three-year old PC in the spare room and have a functioning home server within 20 minutes?". *That* is quite a strong sell.
The more difficult message to get across in all this is the amount of control we are handing over to the likes of MS and Apple if we adopt this type of technology using their products. The most important benefit of a Linux-driven home server is the software freedom issue - an increasingly key aspect to how your home "works" will remain under your control rather than the control of a software/hardware vendor. But in the meantime, "It's free(-as-in-beer), quick and easy" will be a start.
TFA is written from a world in which there are two OSes: Windows and Mac. In an ideal world - and I'm fully aware we don't live in an ideal world, but let's move on for now - the rise of the home server would be a boost to Linux, as people finally twigged they were being asked to pay for the same product over and over again when they use Windows, say, and decided to use something else for their home server (which can be more of a "workhorse" than a desktop system, thus circumventing some of the remaining usability issues for desktop Linux).
If Ubuntu have their wits about them, a home server edition of Ubuntu would be their next plan: a single CD which you can drop into an old, spare PC to turn it into a home server without paying the Windows Tax all over again.
Thanks for that explanation. However, doesn't this presuppose that you are slotting your card into a bona fide machine? Couldn't someone do what the team in TFA have done and replace the innards of a chip and pin machine with new electronics? Then this machine could fake the entire process of entering your pin, the whole "Checking card, not not remove", "Please remove card" thing, spit out a receipt from the cash register and away you go, innocently believing that you have just completed a purchase when in fact you have handed over your card details to the crooked retailer.
My understanding is that this is the purpose of TFA: to point out that chip and pin depends on the user's trust that the machine in front of them is a genuine, verified chip and pin machine, when in fact the user has no way of checking this for sure, and that the validation for chip and pin (i.e. entering your PIN) is highly vulnerable to compromise by such means.
Slashdot Mirror
Just FYI, Christians are well aware that resurrection from the dead goes against the second law of thermodynamics. That's why it's called a "miracle".
To put it another way: the 2nd law is concerned with closed systems, but the Christian claim is precisely that the resurrection represented an intervention from outside the system. Hence no breach of the second law.
Sounds similar to N.T. Wright's take on the end of Mark. He suggests that the abrupt ending is meant to put the onus back on the reader/listener: "Christ is risen: now over to you. What are you going to do about it?"
First, as others have pointed out, the Codex is from the 4th century CE (i.e. "AD") rather than BCE (or "BC").
Second, saying "it makes no mention of the resurrection" is inaccurate. It doesn't contain the final 8 verses from Mark's Gospel, which have been considered to be a late addition for years and are usually square-bracketed in modern Bible editions.
However, if you actually *read* Mark's Gospel, it has plenty of references to the resurrection of Jesus earlier in the text. Plus the Codex Sinaiticus also includes the other three Gospels, all of which include post-resurrection appearances of Jesus.
But apart from misdating the document by 800 years, misstating the impact of putting it online and misrepresenting the likely attitude of Christians to its publication, the summary is fine...
It is certainly true that "open source" is subject to some semantic unclarity (which is one reason why I personally dislike the term, preferring "free software" - albeit that has problems of its own, of course).
However, that doesn't mean that the likes of MS should be allowed to get away with their bait-and-switch tactics of attempting to gain the perceived kudos and good marketing karma of promoting "open source" (in the OSI sense) and then turning around and saying, "Oh, we only meant it was 'open source' as in 'the source is available, on restrictive terms'". Nor that, as I said in my original comment, /. should be adding to the confusion over the term.
My guess is that the original submitter didn't appreciate that "non-commercial" takes the licence outside the scope of the OSI's definition of open source - not that they meant to use "open source" in some broader sense of "source is available".
A non-commercial, academic license is not "open source". Parent makes a perfectly legitimate point.
The licence only allows non-commercial use, and therefore does not meet the requirements of the Open Source Definition.
Given MS's propensity for muddying (or FUDdying?) the waters as regards open-source/free software (with terminology like "shared source"), a site like /. really shouldn't be doing their work for them...
Perhaps things have changed since early 2004, but the OEM version of Windows on my Dell (currently inhabiting a small, lonely, unloved and unvisited /dev/hda1 partition) required activation, and also required separate driver installations (for the default, factory-shipped hardware), including rebooting between each driver. The contrast with installing GNU/Linux, even back in 2004, was... instructive.
Where's Captain Copyright when you need him? Protecting Canada's youth (and America's content-providers) from the scourge of copyright ignorance...
I've also not had any problems with the transition from mozilla-firefox to iceweasel. Were you previously using the official Mozilla installer for Firefox? That may be where the problem lies.
The Iceweasel branding is a matter of taste. I quite like it (and can understand the reasons why Debian had to go down that route), my wife thinks Iceweasel is the best thing ever. The Iceweasel logo is certainly an improvement on the blue, foxless globe Debian used before.
From TFA:
Unix was developed by the old American Telephone & Telegraph. The company allowed the system to be copied, leading to multiple versions, some of which effectively leaked into the public domain. In the early 1990s, Linus Torvalds, then a college student in Helsinki, wrote a version of the program from scratch that he called Linux. Torvalds posted Linux on the Internet, allowing others to copy and improve upon it. The sytem became popular for use on servers as an alternative to Microsoft's Windows.
Yup, that's right, ol' Linus just sat down and cloned the entire Unix operating system from scratch. On his own. With no antecedents.
I'm a Linux user in the UK, but I'm not remotely surprised by this news. By and large, people in the UK are extremely conservative about IT: Firefox take-up here has been far lower than in the US or mainland Europe, for example.
Basically most people don't want to appear remotely "geek-ish", and to show the slightest interest in what software your computer is running, or to change any of the standard default settings (internetexploreroutlookexpressmicrosoftoffice...) , is to break this anti-geek taboo.
This applies in business and the public sector as well as the consumer market. The use of FOSS in the UK is far lower than in most other EU jurisdictions, in all sectors.
As I've said in another reply, I'm well aware what the purpose of the video was. My point was more that the creator had better be ready for a legal fight to demonstrate that it is fair use. I can't see Disney shrugging their shoulders and saying, "Meh. It's fair use. What's the point setting our lawyers onto them?"
Maybe you should watch the video.
Maybe I should (dang internet filtering at the office). But my point was more: "I hope this person knows what they're letting themselves in for..."
Even if this does fit within "fair use" - I've no idea, I'm not an American, and UK copyright law is far more restrictive about this sort of thing - the creator had better be prepared for the possibility of a legal fight to establish that. That's all I was saying.
Hmm. Using copyright material without authorisation in order to explain... copyright law. O-kaaaay.
Still, it might just work provided you don't use material belonging to someone really litigious and with a highly, um, proactive approach towards protecting their "intellectual property".
What was that? Oh. You used Disney material. Ulp.
I'd flee the jurisdiction right now, save yourself time...
More evidence that DRM and similar systems are totally ineffective against attempts to circumvent them. The only people they affect are "innocent bystanders" who don't know how to get round the problems caused by, for example, "false negatives" in validation/activation.
Playing computer RPG's wastes your time? Who knew?
It's not just people living in Norway who will be affected by this. Around 10 million people (more than twice the population of Norway itself) use the Opera Mini browser for mobile phones, which uses proxy servers based in Norway. Presumably Opera Mini users will be caught by the Great Fjordwall of Norway in the same way as Norwegian inhabitants.
This is actually quite smart from a legal point of view. Once Second Life had decided not to go down the road of trying to sue the parody site into oblivion - a wise decision given the PR meltdown such cases tend to cause - it then had a choice.
If it ignored the parody site, that could dilute or otherwise weaken its trade mark rights, making it harder to take action against truly problematic infringement in future. However, by sending a "permit-and-proceed" letter, it not only gets some positive PR for taking a pragmatic and humorous approach - it also transforms the parody site from a trademark-diluting independent endeavour into something that is, in effect, licensed by Second Life. This means they can still be seen to have asserted their trade mark rights rather than allowing the parody site to continue without any intervention at all.
A similar position can arise in relation to land, at least under English law. If someone encroaches on your land for a sufficiently long period of time (12+ years) and you do nothing about it one way or another, you can lose your rights in the land (many people living near railway lines have extended their gardens to the edge of the line by these means). However, if you say to the encroacher, "Oh, that's fine, carry on, I don't mind, you have my permission", then that turns it into a licence, and they cannot then claim "adverse possession" against you later.
But how much of the development of free software can be described as "amateur"? The report in question states that around 50-60% of free software has been developed by individuals, the rest by a mix of academic institutions, businesses etc. So that's 40-50% that's not "amateur" to start with.
As for the 50-60% arising from individual effort, I'd imagine that the majority has been developed by people who earn their living through IT, even if not all of them get paid for their development of free software. As opposed to the "teenager in his mother's basement" stereotype.
This is even assuming you can - with a straight face - describe software such as Linux (i.e. the kernel), the various GNU programs, Firefox, Apache, OpenOffice.org, the leading GNU/Linux distros (Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, Red Hat, Debian etc) as nothing more than the software equivalent of amateur dramatics.
Microsoft Linux is next. I predict within 5 years, Vista will become a legacy product, and all new computers will be shipped with Microsoft's Windows API hosted on a Linux kernel.
It may be relevant to note that a recent EU report estimated that the total value of the free/open-source software collected together in Debian is around EUR 12 bn ($15.5 bn), based on the cost of a proprietary software company recreating the free software codebase. Contrast this with the estimated development costs of Vista of $6 bn - taking into account that this is for a smaller set of components, it is still of the same order of magnitude.
However, the same report suggested that a conservative estimate of the value of the free software codebase by 2010 would be around EUR 100 bn ($130 bn). If that prediction proves correct, it is difficult to see how proprietary software companies can possibly keep pace with that level of development. "Microsoft Linux" would then seem to be a real possibility - something that looks like Windows from the POV of a user - a major advantage, whatever some of us may think of "the Windows experience" - but is built on a free software base.
Well, quite. But the point is that until MS do something, most computer users see it as "weird" and "geeky". Last week it was weird and geeky to have a home server. This week it is normal. (See also: tabbed browsing.)
Hopefully a specifically-tailored home server edition would avoid these difficulties. Most of the difficulties with desktop Linux come not with the install, but with what happens next - adding proprietary drivers, multimedia, installing Java, yada yada yada. A home server edition would presumably avoid all this - the message would be, "Why spend $$$/£££/ on a MS 'home server' when you can just drop this free disk into that three-year old PC in the spare room and have a functioning home server within 20 minutes?". *That* is quite a strong sell.
The more difficult message to get across in all this is the amount of control we are handing over to the likes of MS and Apple if we adopt this type of technology using their products. The most important benefit of a Linux-driven home server is the software freedom issue - an increasingly key aspect to how your home "works" will remain under your control rather than the control of a software/hardware vendor. But in the meantime, "It's free(-as-in-beer), quick and easy" will be a start.
TFA is written from a world in which there are two OSes: Windows and Mac. In an ideal world - and I'm fully aware we don't live in an ideal world, but let's move on for now - the rise of the home server would be a boost to Linux, as people finally twigged they were being asked to pay for the same product over and over again when they use Windows, say, and decided to use something else for their home server (which can be more of a "workhorse" than a desktop system, thus circumventing some of the remaining usability issues for desktop Linux).
If Ubuntu have their wits about them, a home server edition of Ubuntu would be their next plan: a single CD which you can drop into an old, spare PC to turn it into a home server without paying the Windows Tax all over again.
His requirements -- Install a distribution which is easy to maintain and run.
So you installed Gentoo. You bastard. Did you run over his dog at the same time?
Thanks for that explanation. However, doesn't this presuppose that you are slotting your card into a bona fide machine? Couldn't someone do what the team in TFA have done and replace the innards of a chip and pin machine with new electronics? Then this machine could fake the entire process of entering your pin, the whole "Checking card, not not remove", "Please remove card" thing, spit out a receipt from the cash register and away you go, innocently believing that you have just completed a purchase when in fact you have handed over your card details to the crooked retailer.
My understanding is that this is the purpose of TFA: to point out that chip and pin depends on the user's trust that the machine in front of them is a genuine, verified chip and pin machine, when in fact the user has no way of checking this for sure, and that the validation for chip and pin (i.e. entering your PIN) is highly vulnerable to compromise by such means.