If we can put so much money into preventing paper currency counterfeiting, we can utilize the same technology for ballot stuffing.
All the machine has to do is print out a paper ballot for the voter to cast into a box, after the voter has voted electronically. It doesn't matter if the printing in and of itself has anti-counterfeiting measures (though it should be trivial to do the yellow dots thing for those machines), as long as the paper printed upon does. The electronic tally and the paper box tally should match. If they don't, then it's obvious one of the two has been tampered with, and it's a lot easier to trace which machine recorded the bogus vote from there.
Your analogy is flawed. For starters, murder is a criminal act. Said copyright infringement (for now) is by and large civil.
The police's job is to maintain public safety and order. They are bound by certain rules of engagement, like warrants and probable cause. The MPAA is a trade association, and a representative of media corporations. They are not bound by anything except the size of their wallets.
I doubt this would happen. China is where the major counterfeiters are, and they're likely the ones making the real parts as well, so this machine probably won't change anything.
A far more likely application would be for you to be able to "print out" the models you designed yourself. Or, print out building blocks (lego, but not called lego because they're your own) for your own models.
Isn't there a there's a gray area if patent-encumbered code gets reimplemented (i.e. optimized)?
Granted, if the contributor who implemented it in the first place is going to sue, he would remove his code contributions and effectively void the patent license before suing, and if he isn't, it wouldn't matter either way, but what if someone wanted to sabotage a project by patenting a process and then putting in a very slow implementation of it, while leaving the optimized implementation for his own proprietary software?
No freedom is lost under BSD. Under BSD, you're free to make software. Under GPL, you're free to make free software.
The nonexistent distinction between users and developers is exactly the reason why BSD is less free than GPL. Considering that (in your own terms) you're not free to make non-free software with the GPL license, I'd say the GPL license is less free than the BSD license.
GPL is a guarantee that software released freely remains free. It is a method of control over the software's redistribution (right of copy) for the developer. It is an additional limitation (over the BSD notice limitation that BSD software requires).
Remember that strictly from a code perspective the initial developer has all the rights. It is the user who needs rights explicitly granted to him. And in this sense, GPL grants less rights to the user than BSD.
How does GP's defense of GGGP have any bearing on the issue at hand? I think if you had any reasonable replies to GP's counterarguments, you would've stated them, instead of resorting to ad hominem attacks on GP and GGGP.
And for the record, there is nothing in GGGP's anecdote that has raised any red flags for me.
What's particularly interesting is that China will be a huge proponent of OSS, as the government is very suspicious of closed-source software, especially ones developed in the US (*cough* Microsoft *cough*).
The people might not respect copyrights (the culture certainly doesn't have any interest in the concept of "intellectual property"), but the government will have to at least pay lip service to it, and that usually means playing by the GPL.
It's ironic, but it also makes sense that "open" governments have to hide their dirty laundry, while governments that have no need to maintain the pretense of being democratic and free can actually openly air their dirty laundry.
At the end of the day, the goal of governments, and the people working for them, is controlling the governed, and it's not only unrealistic, but naieve to think otherwise. The US government is just as guilty of this as Iran or North Korea, as we've been witness to over the past few decades since the witch hunt of the 50's, the difference being that the US government's limits are more in line with our expectations, and the Iranian government's limits are not. That and what we define to be within the boundaries of "good" appear to be more productive than what North Korea defines to be "good."
Anyway, I digress.
As soon as they get their act together, we should be seeing more OSS initiatives from China. After all, they wouldn't want the NSA hiding keyloggers in the export versions of Windows or Acrobat or PowerDVD or WOW or stuff like that. China will want control of the software that gets installed in their government computers, and oddly enough, the only way to do that without reinventing the wheel is to release control of the software.
Of course, proprietary software is still useful for making surveillance tools, but that's something we get to choose to install on our systems--for now at least.
Except there really wasn't anything interesting in the Firefly curses. They weren't real curses a la shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, tits or even fart, turd, or twat (and yes, I stole the list from George Carlin's Seven Dirty Words sketch from Wikipedia).
It would've been really sweet if they actually used curses, but no, the worst was something like, "your mom's a dirty pig" or something along those lines.
They also used Mandarin, which doesn't quite have the colorful and often amusing phrasing that Cantonese does. Mandarin curses tend to emulate Cantonese ones anyway (the use of "mother" in Chinese curses, probably borrowed from the British, is of Cantonese origin which the northerners recently picked up in the past twenty years).
It would've been really amusing if Jayne actually said something like "Fuck their mom's smelly cunts" or something more colorful in Chinese, but alas, it was not to be... It probably wouldn't've been censored either, as their Chinese was so butchered anyway only a native Chinese speaker really familiar with poorly spoken Chinese would've been able to decipher it. And the amount of those who'd actually watch Firefly probably number in the low hundreds, if not tens, across the US.
NetBEUI has its own share of security issues, and Windows' implementation of it is probably pretty just as shoddy. Besides, the biggest security flaw in Windows is not the OS, but the user. The OS can help to reduce the risks, but at the end of the day, if Photo Slideshow Screensaver wants system-level privileges to install and run, and the user grants it despite any warnings, there's nothing the OS can really do.
And MacOS and Windows 2.0 copied the windowing idea off of Xerox's Parc. What's your point?
Until OSX, I found elements of MacOS to be clunky, annoying, and counter-intuitive. For example, trashing a disk (or disc) to eject it? I want to eject my disk, not erase its contents. What, the little apple icon at the corner is actually click-able and is important? What would make a novice user realize this? At least Windows had a raised motif over the start button, and the actual words "Start" on it to tell you to start there.
Windows 95's interface was much easier to use for multitasking. Alt-tab not withstanding, the taskbar that summarizes all of your open programs so that you can just click to go to that particular program.
Let's talk starting up programs. 95 had a programs list to quickly get to all the installed applications. MacOS, not so much. In 98, the quick launch toolbar made it just a click of a button to start up commonly-used programs. By your reasoning, OSX's dashboard is just a copy of the taskbar and quicklaunch combination.
And, you could navigate to every UI element with the keyboard alone.
My point isn't to be inflammatory. My point is that it is ridiculous to claim that just because certain UI elements were taken from MacOS, that the MacOS actually deserves any of the credit for the user experience in Windows. And to base the claim that the Windows GUI wasn't innovative only on the elements that were copied, and ignore all the other major improvements and advances in UI design is extremely shortsighted.
I would disagree that Win95 was the high point. Win98 and 98se were both improvements over 95. This was before the internet became popular, so security wasn't really that much of an issue, but it wouldn't matter, as 98 and 95 likely had the same security issues.
I would say the pinnacle of Windows was probably 2K, which was the first user-friendly NT. I'm still running it on all my windows systems even now. XP offered a number of minor improvements, but its major flaw was the ridiculous activation scheme. It was relatively compact (XP's install in contrast, doing the same thing, was 3-4 times as large), and relatively lightweight. XP also made a number of sacrifices in the name of user experience, and that really had a detrimental effect on resources consumed as well as security.
Even if we compare each Windows version to all of the other major OS's of their respective times, Windows has dominated since 95 until quite recently, so to say that 95 was a peak because it was so much better than the other existing OS's at the time wouldn't really fly either. The downfall of XP is partly due to the activation racket, and partly due to the security issues that poor programming has caused and the handling thereof. But the latter is only an issue because Windows is so ubiquitous. Of course, as soon as they gain enough market share, OSX and other *NIX OS's are probably going to suffer similar security issues. I think Apple is going to be worse at handling their security problems than Microsoft, but Linux will shine in this regard.
Well, there's anthropological evidence that there were several migrations from Asia to the Americas, namely, two island-hopping sea routes and one over the land bridge in the north. This just sort of confirms this idea.
I don't know how palladium absorbs hydrogen. However, it is really is capable of absorbing 900 times its volume in hydrogen, then it must be either full of space, or the hydrogen is pretty compact.
The question is, is it possible for the hydrogen to be so compact that certain hydrogen atoms fuse? I know there's a lot of space in between gaseous hydrogen atoms. However, if 99.9% of that empty space were removed in between the atoms, is that enough to pack it in? In fact, what if due to variation in the crystalline structure of palladium, hydrogen could potentially be packed into 99.999% of the space?
I'm just conjecturing here, with no real numbers, but it might be something worth thinking about.
Drugs would be invented anyways, with or without a company behind it. Whether it'd be in an academic setting, or a private setting, people will still contract diseases, and there'll still be a need for doctors with knowledge of medicine. The downside is that a doctor who's unwilling or unable to give up his secrets before he passes means the knowledge is lost. But that's even less likely to occur in this day and age.
Medicine is probably the second oldest profession in the world, after prostitution. It's worked without patents for several hundred thousand years. There's no reason why it needs patents now of all times.
WOW has a very invasive DRM system attached to it.
It is used to prevent cheating.
A better example might be the Spore in an imaginary universe where it'll be without DRM. It would've been the ideal game to point to and say that dropping DRM doesn't drop sales, but unfortunately, EA is too stupid to see this (or maybe they don't want to for political reasons).
The system was working (it's now pretty broken), but it wasn't fine at all. It's been due for a major overhaul since the industrial revolution. Unfortunately, the changes since then have made things worse, not better.
For example, patent length should be dependent on the speed of technological progress. Patents should be issued for no more than 5 years these days. 200 years ago, it took a long time to capitalize on new inventions and hence the 20-year patent length. Today, it takes perhaps a year.
Copyrights have always been a sore point. Because they're so specific to a particular work, they should last the length of the creator's life (the actual human creator, not the owner which could be a corporation). However, that's a fairly simplistic view, and probably needs to be refined. On the flip side, copyright violations should be criminal and only criminal, and should only be a crime when there is an actual exchange of goods (be it barter or whatnot). Damages awarded should be the market value of the goods. And in the case of non-copyable works (art pieces for example), it should be treated as a slander/libel case.
Unfortunately, such "drugs" are detrimental to people around you as well as yourself. And once that happens, then these substances need to be regulated. Even opiates, which primarily cause lethargy, are detrimental to others. A human being still needs to eat and sleep in order to survive. Hence, a family member not pulling their weight, or not doing their best to do so, is having a detrimental effect on the people around them. Now, there are people who are born with conditions where they are more dependent on those around them. But drugs are a choice and genetics is not.
One of the greatest tragedies in US is that alcohol is so poorly regulated. For example, I don't mind abolishing the drinking age, but the adult that serves should be fully responsible for the minor who's drinking. That could be the grocer, the bartender, or the parent.
At the end of the day, the victor is the owner. Others may feel that they are the "rightful" owner, but if they're not in possession of the property, they're not the effective owner and of little to no consequence.
It's great to be able to comfortably sit in an armchair and dream of righting all the injustices ever done in the world. It's quite impossible to do so however, and instead of picking fights and picking sides, it'd be better to just roll with the existing situation.
Unfortunately, US foreign policy is heavily skewed by special interest groups who are interested in picking sides, to the detriment of the rest of the nation.
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If we can put so much money into preventing paper currency counterfeiting, we can utilize the same technology for ballot stuffing.
All the machine has to do is print out a paper ballot for the voter to cast into a box, after the voter has voted electronically. It doesn't matter if the printing in and of itself has anti-counterfeiting measures (though it should be trivial to do the yellow dots thing for those machines), as long as the paper printed upon does. The electronic tally and the paper box tally should match. If they don't, then it's obvious one of the two has been tampered with, and it's a lot easier to trace which machine recorded the bogus vote from there.
More like:
Kids with computers will use them to play games.
Your analogy is flawed. For starters, murder is a criminal act. Said copyright infringement (for now) is by and large civil.
The police's job is to maintain public safety and order. They are bound by certain rules of engagement, like warrants and probable cause. The MPAA is a trade association, and a representative of media corporations. They are not bound by anything except the size of their wallets.
I doubt this would happen. China is where the major counterfeiters are, and they're likely the ones making the real parts as well, so this machine probably won't change anything.
A far more likely application would be for you to be able to "print out" the models you designed yourself. Or, print out building blocks (lego, but not called lego because they're your own) for your own models.
I guess I'll go install it. I hope I don't have any cooties.
I guess I'll go install it. I hope I don't have any grues.
I guess I'll go install it. I hope I don't have any women to nag at me.
I guess I'll go install it. I hope I don't have any pizza that's been sitting in the fridge for more than a month.
I guess I'll go install it. I hope I don't have any other nerds squatting in mom's my basement.
I guess I'll go install it. I hope I don't have any comments that stop in the middle of a sentence on the front page of slashdot.
Isn't there a there's a gray area if patent-encumbered code gets reimplemented (i.e. optimized)?
Granted, if the contributor who implemented it in the first place is going to sue, he would remove his code contributions and effectively void the patent license before suing, and if he isn't, it wouldn't matter either way, but what if someone wanted to sabotage a project by patenting a process and then putting in a very slow implementation of it, while leaving the optimized implementation for his own proprietary software?
The nonexistent distinction between users and developers is exactly the reason why BSD is less free than GPL. Considering that (in your own terms) you're not free to make non-free software with the GPL license, I'd say the GPL license is less free than the BSD license.
GPL is a guarantee that software released freely remains free. It is a method of control over the software's redistribution (right of copy) for the developer. It is an additional limitation (over the BSD notice limitation that BSD software requires).
Remember that strictly from a code perspective the initial developer has all the rights. It is the user who needs rights explicitly granted to him. And in this sense, GPL grants less rights to the user than BSD.
How does GP's defense of GGGP have any bearing on the issue at hand? I think if you had any reasonable replies to GP's counterarguments, you would've stated them, instead of resorting to ad hominem attacks on GP and GGGP.
And for the record, there is nothing in GGGP's anecdote that has raised any red flags for me.
What's particularly interesting is that China will be a huge proponent of OSS, as the government is very suspicious of closed-source software, especially ones developed in the US (*cough* Microsoft *cough*).
The people might not respect copyrights (the culture certainly doesn't have any interest in the concept of "intellectual property"), but the government will have to at least pay lip service to it, and that usually means playing by the GPL.
It's ironic, but it also makes sense that "open" governments have to hide their dirty laundry, while governments that have no need to maintain the pretense of being democratic and free can actually openly air their dirty laundry.
At the end of the day, the goal of governments, and the people working for them, is controlling the governed, and it's not only unrealistic, but naieve to think otherwise. The US government is just as guilty of this as Iran or North Korea, as we've been witness to over the past few decades since the witch hunt of the 50's, the difference being that the US government's limits are more in line with our expectations, and the Iranian government's limits are not. That and what we define to be within the boundaries of "good" appear to be more productive than what North Korea defines to be "good."
Anyway, I digress.
As soon as they get their act together, we should be seeing more OSS initiatives from China. After all, they wouldn't want the NSA hiding keyloggers in the export versions of Windows or Acrobat or PowerDVD or WOW or stuff like that. China will want control of the software that gets installed in their government computers, and oddly enough, the only way to do that without reinventing the wheel is to release control of the software.
Of course, proprietary software is still useful for making surveillance tools, but that's something we get to choose to install on our systems--for now at least.
Except there really wasn't anything interesting in the Firefly curses. They weren't real curses a la shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, tits or even fart, turd, or twat (and yes, I stole the list from George Carlin's Seven Dirty Words sketch from Wikipedia).
It would've been really sweet if they actually used curses, but no, the worst was something like, "your mom's a dirty pig" or something along those lines.
They also used Mandarin, which doesn't quite have the colorful and often amusing phrasing that Cantonese does. Mandarin curses tend to emulate Cantonese ones anyway (the use of "mother" in Chinese curses, probably borrowed from the British, is of Cantonese origin which the northerners recently picked up in the past twenty years).
It would've been really amusing if Jayne actually said something like "Fuck their mom's smelly cunts" or something more colorful in Chinese, but alas, it was not to be... It probably wouldn't've been censored either, as their Chinese was so butchered anyway only a native Chinese speaker really familiar with poorly spoken Chinese would've been able to decipher it. And the amount of those who'd actually watch Firefly probably number in the low hundreds, if not tens, across the US.
Frightening thing is, people will actually believe this crap.
Well, the USA needs an enemy, now that "terrorists" have replaced "drugs" instead of the USSR.
NetBEUI has its own share of security issues, and Windows' implementation of it is probably pretty just as shoddy. Besides, the biggest security flaw in Windows is not the OS, but the user. The OS can help to reduce the risks, but at the end of the day, if Photo Slideshow Screensaver wants system-level privileges to install and run, and the user grants it despite any warnings, there's nothing the OS can really do.
And MacOS and Windows 2.0 copied the windowing idea off of Xerox's Parc. What's your point?
Until OSX, I found elements of MacOS to be clunky, annoying, and counter-intuitive. For example, trashing a disk (or disc) to eject it? I want to eject my disk, not erase its contents. What, the little apple icon at the corner is actually click-able and is important? What would make a novice user realize this? At least Windows had a raised motif over the start button, and the actual words "Start" on it to tell you to start there.
Windows 95's interface was much easier to use for multitasking. Alt-tab not withstanding, the taskbar that summarizes all of your open programs so that you can just click to go to that particular program.
Let's talk starting up programs. 95 had a programs list to quickly get to all the installed applications. MacOS, not so much. In 98, the quick launch toolbar made it just a click of a button to start up commonly-used programs. By your reasoning, OSX's dashboard is just a copy of the taskbar and quicklaunch combination.
And, you could navigate to every UI element with the keyboard alone.
My point isn't to be inflammatory. My point is that it is ridiculous to claim that just because certain UI elements were taken from MacOS, that the MacOS actually deserves any of the credit for the user experience in Windows. And to base the claim that the Windows GUI wasn't innovative only on the elements that were copied, and ignore all the other major improvements and advances in UI design is extremely shortsighted.
I would disagree that Win95 was the high point. Win98 and 98se were both improvements over 95. This was before the internet became popular, so security wasn't really that much of an issue, but it wouldn't matter, as 98 and 95 likely had the same security issues.
I would say the pinnacle of Windows was probably 2K, which was the first user-friendly NT. I'm still running it on all my windows systems even now. XP offered a number of minor improvements, but its major flaw was the ridiculous activation scheme. It was relatively compact (XP's install in contrast, doing the same thing, was 3-4 times as large), and relatively lightweight. XP also made a number of sacrifices in the name of user experience, and that really had a detrimental effect on resources consumed as well as security.
Even if we compare each Windows version to all of the other major OS's of their respective times, Windows has dominated since 95 until quite recently, so to say that 95 was a peak because it was so much better than the other existing OS's at the time wouldn't really fly either. The downfall of XP is partly due to the activation racket, and partly due to the security issues that poor programming has caused and the handling thereof. But the latter is only an issue because Windows is so ubiquitous. Of course, as soon as they gain enough market share, OSX and other *NIX OS's are probably going to suffer similar security issues. I think Apple is going to be worse at handling their security problems than Microsoft, but Linux will shine in this regard.
Well, there's anthropological evidence that there were several migrations from Asia to the Americas, namely, two island-hopping sea routes and one over the land bridge in the north. This just sort of confirms this idea.
I don't know how palladium absorbs hydrogen. However, it is really is capable of absorbing 900 times its volume in hydrogen, then it must be either full of space, or the hydrogen is pretty compact.
The question is, is it possible for the hydrogen to be so compact that certain hydrogen atoms fuse? I know there's a lot of space in between gaseous hydrogen atoms. However, if 99.9% of that empty space were removed in between the atoms, is that enough to pack it in? In fact, what if due to variation in the crystalline structure of palladium, hydrogen could potentially be packed into 99.999% of the space?
I'm just conjecturing here, with no real numbers, but it might be something worth thinking about.
Choice you do not get, English must you speak.
You don't need sarcasm tags for that statement.
They're already property. The big benefit of property is that you can do whatever you want with your property, including throwing it away.
Drugs would be invented anyways, with or without a company behind it. Whether it'd be in an academic setting, or a private setting, people will still contract diseases, and there'll still be a need for doctors with knowledge of medicine. The downside is that a doctor who's unwilling or unable to give up his secrets before he passes means the knowledge is lost. But that's even less likely to occur in this day and age.
Medicine is probably the second oldest profession in the world, after prostitution. It's worked without patents for several hundred thousand years. There's no reason why it needs patents now of all times.
WOW has a very invasive DRM system attached to it.
It is used to prevent cheating.
A better example might be the Spore in an imaginary universe where it'll be without DRM. It would've been the ideal game to point to and say that dropping DRM doesn't drop sales, but unfortunately, EA is too stupid to see this (or maybe they don't want to for political reasons).
The system was working (it's now pretty broken), but it wasn't fine at all. It's been due for a major overhaul since the industrial revolution. Unfortunately, the changes since then have made things worse, not better.
For example, patent length should be dependent on the speed of technological progress. Patents should be issued for no more than 5 years these days. 200 years ago, it took a long time to capitalize on new inventions and hence the 20-year patent length. Today, it takes perhaps a year.
Copyrights have always been a sore point. Because they're so specific to a particular work, they should last the length of the creator's life (the actual human creator, not the owner which could be a corporation). However, that's a fairly simplistic view, and probably needs to be refined. On the flip side, copyright violations should be criminal and only criminal, and should only be a crime when there is an actual exchange of goods (be it barter or whatnot). Damages awarded should be the market value of the goods. And in the case of non-copyable works (art pieces for example), it should be treated as a slander/libel case.
Which is why I'm against drug laws.
Unfortunately, such "drugs" are detrimental to people around you as well as yourself. And once that happens, then these substances need to be regulated. Even opiates, which primarily cause lethargy, are detrimental to others. A human being still needs to eat and sleep in order to survive. Hence, a family member not pulling their weight, or not doing their best to do so, is having a detrimental effect on the people around them. Now, there are people who are born with conditions where they are more dependent on those around them. But drugs are a choice and genetics is not.
One of the greatest tragedies in US is that alcohol is so poorly regulated. For example, I don't mind abolishing the drinking age, but the adult that serves should be fully responsible for the minor who's drinking. That could be the grocer, the bartender, or the parent.
Nothing to see here... move along.
At the end of the day, the victor is the owner. Others may feel that they are the "rightful" owner, but if they're not in possession of the property, they're not the effective owner and of little to no consequence.
It's great to be able to comfortably sit in an armchair and dream of righting all the injustices ever done in the world. It's quite impossible to do so however, and instead of picking fights and picking sides, it'd be better to just roll with the existing situation.
Unfortunately, US foreign policy is heavily skewed by special interest groups who are interested in picking sides, to the detriment of the rest of the nation.