The dividing line between fantasy and sci-fi is sometimes grey, but pure fantasy tends to have people doing "magic" with no explanations whatsoever, rather than the reasonably detailed description of the early settlers using space shuttle equivalents to land on the third planet of the Rukbat star in Sagittarius, then using genetic engineering to modify the fire-lizards and watch-wyers into Dragons. Fantasy dragons generally don't have to worry about eating phosphine-bearing rock to emit flame (being a sci-fi dragon is tougher, apparently!), or people using "agenothree" (aka HNO3, or nitric acid) in their anti-Thread flamethrowers.
(Admittedly, jumping between or Moreta's leap through time is never really "explained" and is pretty much a matter of fantasy.)
In any event, no, the people on Pern did not have advertisements for Coke. Nor should they.
I think we all agree that ads in games are fine as long as they don't ruin the immersion.
Um, no, we do not all agree that ads in games are fine.
In a car racing game, it is comon to see adds along the side of the road in certain sections of a track. This is fine.
Um, no. I thoroughly enjoyed playing some of the older racing games (ie, Need for Speed: Porsche Unleashed, Hot Persuit 2, etc), because they involved driving around in nice looking cars and outside in interesting tracks/environments that have lots of interesting turns or shortcuts or whatever. I've never been willing to watch NASCAR or F1 because I find a car covered in ads to be horribly ugly, so I don't play NASCAR/F1-style racing games either. I don't like the way the cars look, and I don't like boring fixed racing tracks (gee, let's switch from an oval to a figure-8 with an overpass!) with billboards and crap festooned all over the place.
I won't be purchasing NFS: Underground 2, or Getaway, or Carbon, because of the inline ads and the game have shifted away from purchasing a car I like and racing it, and maybe tweaking it by buying a better engine or choosing the right gearbox-- to having to place stickers on your vehicle to "enhance your rep" and similar nonsense.
Simple. I don't pay people to advertise to me. If they want, they can pay for advertising themselves, by offerring free content tied with ads (ie, broadcast TV which contains ads)....
Agreed, if they used UCal/Berkeley sources, the advertising clause was deleted by the Regents of California/Berkeley some years ago, and all software owned by them was relicensed under the terms of the "new BSD" license. This isn't true of all of the BSD code used in Microsoft Windows; if you check here:
...you'll find that Microsoft lists a number of BSD licenses and authors, such as Luigi Rizzo, who wrote the IPFW firewall now used as part of Windows (as well as in MacOS X, FreeBSD, NetBSD and elsewhere). However, if the GP's claim was right-- that someone removed the copyright statement entirely from FreeBSD code, that would be a crime per 17 US 506(d):
Parent is dead-on correct; if you place a restriction on who can use the software, the restriction means the software is no longer "open source".
I'm not fond of the Microsoft/Novell cross-licensing agreement, because it does seem to involve those companies playing games and creating FUD rather than actually doing something to create better software, but I don't see a reason to become paranoid that Novell is suddenly going to pervert the GPL license terms. If they tried, Novell would lose the right to redistribute Linux themselves...so there is no need to try to write some kind of anti-Novell (or anti-anyone) clause into a license.
(a) There's a big difference between traffic tickets and confiscating illegal goods/drugs.
(b) Go pick up a AAA magazine and look for a section they have every issue on the top-10 speed traps. There are counties which make over half their revenue from speeding tickets, generally involving a highway which suddenly switches from 55 or 65 to 35, with a cop 100 feet downwind of the traffic sign, catching everyone non-local who doesn't immediately brake. While you can fight the ticket, you will lose the first round in the local court and have appeal it outside the local county court before you have any real chance.
Some organizations like iDefense will pay a bounty for independent security research.
Otherwise, you can gain some degree of credibility by detecting and publishing security exploits, and there are organizations which will hire "white-hat" teams to perform penetration testing, or hire people who have a good security track record to fix major security holes, but a big part of that involves working with the organizations and being willing to not publicize security exploits until the vendor has had a reasonable period of time to fix things. Trying to coerce an organization into paying you is another matter entirely....
While it might be relevant in a civil trial where Google claimed a certain level of damages and the defendant claimed that the amount Google lost wasn't actually what Google claimed, Google doesn't have to prove it lost money from click-fraud for the criminal case to proceed, nor would showing that other people commit click-fraud be a mitigating defense against the blackmail/extortion attempt.
Sure, a defendant does have fairly broad rights to subpoena relevant information to his defense, by no means does that information become a matter of public record-- it's quite normal for a company to claim some information is a trade secret, and have discovery limited to what is actually relevant rather than the judge granting an over-broad permission for everything, and/or to have the information filed under seal.
I like books. They don't come with flashing banner ads, pop-up windows, pop-under ads, and all the rest of the active content that pollutes a lot of the WWW nowadays. Of course, if you don't install Flash, disable animated images, Javascript, and so forth, the web becomes a lot less annoying and more legible.
As for YouTube, or anything else that requires Flash or something to work, well, I live without.
Yep, and here is why. Choosing Windows is the safe and easy choice.
If you want or need to run Windows software, OK, choosing Windows is an easy choice. But "safe"?
Can you name a single year in the past decade where there was not another remotely exploitable hole in the default configuration of Windows found?
Everyone uses it and if you have problems you can run down to Best Buy and have Geek Squad solve all your problems.
Not everyone. This is Slashdot, so people will exaggerate, but your point would be stronger if it were not trivially refutable. Perhaps 90% of computer users run Windows-- Macs are a couple of percent, Linux is a couple of percent, Solaris and the BSDs and others are a few percent.
If for some reason (and there are plenty of them...I only run linux on my servers) someone decides to make that magical jump over to linux then who are they going to turn to when something goes wrong? They've been hearing about how great the "communities" surrounding "linux" are, so they ask a question. When they get called a "fool" for not knowing about a command line or vi or bash or whatever they will leave with a bad taste in their mouth not just about "linux" but all open source software.
Do the Linux mailing lists really do that? How unfortunate....
Perhaps they'd find the MacOS community, or the various BSD projects more friendly.
For the most part, Apple has been adding APIs between point releases, not removing them or changing existing APIs. While Apple could do a better job of marking features for deprecation and handling that side-- by contrast, Sun & Solaris handle that very well-- backwards compatibility in MacOS X is handled reasonably well.
By this, I mean, you can run an app compiled for 10.1 or 10.2 on a later release, ie, 10.3, 10.4, etc. However, you seem to be expecting forwards compatibility-- ie, running an app compiled for 10.4 on 10.3, and pretty much no operating system vendor will support that. If an app is released which uses an API which is new in 10.4, and does not exist in 10.3, the 10.3 system is not going to be able to run that app.
However, if the source is available, you can try to backport the software yourself, and build it on 10.3 either by creating a compatibility shim or by removing calls to APIs not present in 10.3.
The right to petition your government is essential.
The "right" to bribe politicians to vote your way isn't a right, much less essential-- and I'd be just as happy to see a bright light pointing at these scumbags, and see just how many lobbyists and dirty Congresscritters we can convict and jail from what we get out of Abramoff. Whether the politicans are Democrats or Republicans doesn't matter one bit to me...what matters is whether they are honest or for sale to the highest bidder.
People running a web cache *ought* to scan the cache directory periodicly with a virus-scanner.
For a specific example, I use Squid + ClamAV both for at work and at a number of client sites for which I provide sysadmin support; every so often, the scan of the squid cache files finds an exploit being cached, and I can look that specific file up against the Squid logs, and identify which client machine was responsible for accessing the malware.
The next steps are to check the client machine and see whether it has been owned (typically, yes), and to suggest to management that they restrict that employee from doing random web-surfing...
The smaller the black hole, the quicker the evaporation, agreed. Black holes that weigh on the order of a moon or small planet will absorb more mass/energy from the ~3 Kelvin cosmic background radiation than they emit via Hawking radiation, which means that they are effectively immortal and will outlast the rest of the universe.
The Open Source Definition allows you to require that someone who modifies your program must call it by some other name, to avoid random people confusing the "official" version released by the original author with modified versions.
This being said, you're pretty much right that it's a silly argument for both sides to get into...
Exactly. Or as someone else put it, "black holes are fuzzy, but they have no hair".
The exact border of a black hole is slightly imprecise, or fuzzy, and a particle pair which appears right on this border can have one particle get swallowed but have the other escape. So black holes actually radiate a small amount of this so-called Hawking radiation, and a tiny black hole (ie, one massing much less than the moon does), will eventually evaporate if it doesn't keep swallowing mass.
They passed Sarbanes-Oxley because of Enron, Tyco, and Worldcom/MCI.
If SCO really did conceal $25-odd million dollars of SysV royalties from Novell three years ago *and* failed to properly disclose this material fact in their SEC filings and statements to investors, Mr McBride might want to find a Monopoly set and hang on to that "Get out of jail free" card.
The Microsoft dev tools (ie, Visual Studio) actually do encode the username and filepath info into at least debugging versions of executables and.dlls which they build.
A specific case to consider is something like a Linux box running an SSL webserver; if the system is using GPLv3 code somewhere to generate active content which gets displayed via SSL (PKI is a form of DRM), does this mean the site has to release their X.509 private key...?
Or, if a Linux system uses some form of signed binary packaging or updates, does RedHat or Debian have to release their GPG private keyrings to anyone which can create forged packages, patches, security announcements, etc?
What happens with GnuPG or GnuTLS under the GPLv3, anyway?
Can anyone name a notable OSS project released under the BSD licence that was subsequently 'stolen' for a commercial product?
Good question, modulo the fact that a company using BSD code isn't stealing anything by using that code for their own purposes, even if they do binary-only releases without also releasing the source code.
MacOS X is probably the biggest example, or perhaps the Nokia IP firewall platform, or any commercial version of Linux like Red Hat et all which ship BSD-licensed libraries and binaries. There's also plenty of proprietary Windows programs which come with a zlib.dll or utilize BSD-licensed TCP/IP networking code, for which no source is available.
You're perfectly able to fork FreeBSD if you like; see Matt Dillon and the DragonFly project for a reasonably successful example which forked from FreeBSD-4_STABLE. I know of at least a couple of Linux distributions which use significant parts of the FreeBSD docs, or the ports tree, as well as things like Zlib or NCurses/termcap, and so forth-- and you are welcome to do the same, since the BSD license is completely GPL-miscable, and you can add as much more GPLv2 (or GPLv3, for that matter) code to it as you like.
However, you can't relicense the existing code, except for the parts you write or significantly modify yourself. The BSD license is a simple, permissive license, but it does not grant anyone permission to remove the BSD license and replace it with another license. Don't change or remove someone else's license terms without talking to them, your lawyer, or preferably both first.
b) there seems to be an irrational opposition to GPLv3
Do you believe that ALL opposition to the GPLv3 is irrational?
If so, your position is self-consistent but not one that is useful or even possible to debate.
I guess you're going to have to live with or deliberately ignore the fact that quite a few people, notably the ~30 Linux kernel hackers, who have published source trees like the Linux kernel under GPLv2, have major concerns about some aspects found in the GPLv3 proposed drafts. Telling these people that they are "ignorant wankers" and:
I am claiming that they are ignorant of the issues they are trying to address with their statement, which still appears to be true, and they are blowing a lot of hot air without first trying to understand the purpose of the object of their irrational dislike. It's pretty simple, if I don't think they know what they are talking about, I'm not going to respect their opinion.
It's pretty clear that you will never help address their concerns if you discount any possibility that they might have actual justification for these concerns.
Come again? I'm not aware of DRM implementations in any of the things you have mentioned.
Well, perhaps you should consider whether PKI is a form of DRM. Haven't you ever performed a credit-card purchase over an SSL website? How do you think Verisign's Payflow system and other OLTP systems work?
Slashdot Mirror
The dividing line between fantasy and sci-fi is sometimes grey, but pure fantasy tends to have people doing "magic" with no explanations whatsoever, rather than the reasonably detailed description of the early settlers using space shuttle equivalents to land on the third planet of the Rukbat star in Sagittarius, then using genetic engineering to modify the fire-lizards and watch-wyers into Dragons. Fantasy dragons generally don't have to worry about eating phosphine-bearing rock to emit flame (being a sci-fi dragon is tougher, apparently!), or people using "agenothree" (aka HNO3, or nitric acid) in their anti-Thread flamethrowers.
(Admittedly, jumping between or Moreta's leap through time is never really "explained" and is pretty much a matter of fantasy.)
In any event, no, the people on Pern did not have advertisements for Coke. Nor should they.
Um, no, we do not all agree that ads in games are fine.
In a car racing game, it is comon to see adds along the side of the road in certain sections of a track. This is fine.
Um, no. I thoroughly enjoyed playing some of the older racing games (ie, Need for Speed: Porsche Unleashed, Hot Persuit 2, etc), because they involved driving around in nice looking cars and outside in interesting tracks/environments that have lots of interesting turns or shortcuts or whatever. I've never been willing to watch NASCAR or F1 because I find a car covered in ads to be horribly ugly, so I don't play NASCAR/F1-style racing games either. I don't like the way the cars look, and I don't like boring fixed racing tracks (gee, let's switch from an oval to a figure-8 with an overpass!) with billboards and crap festooned all over the place.
I won't be purchasing NFS: Underground 2, or Getaway, or Carbon, because of the inline ads and the game have shifted away from purchasing a car I like and racing it, and maybe tweaking it by buying a better engine or choosing the right gearbox-- to having to place stickers on your vehicle to "enhance your rep" and similar nonsense.
Simple. I don't pay people to advertise to me. If they want, they can pay for advertising themselves, by offerring free content tied with ads (ie, broadcast TV which contains ads)....
Microsoft license
US copyright law
Parent is dead-on correct; if you place a restriction on who can use the software, the restriction means the software is no longer "open source".
I'm not fond of the Microsoft/Novell cross-licensing agreement, because it does seem to involve those companies playing games and creating FUD rather than actually doing something to create better software, but I don't see a reason to become paranoid that Novell is suddenly going to pervert the GPL license terms. If they tried, Novell would lose the right to redistribute Linux themselves...so there is no need to try to write some kind of anti-Novell (or anti-anyone) clause into a license.
(a) There's a big difference between traffic tickets and confiscating illegal goods/drugs.
(b) Go pick up a AAA magazine and look for a section they have every issue on the top-10 speed traps. There are counties which make over half their revenue from speeding tickets, generally involving a highway which suddenly switches from 55 or 65 to 35, with a cop 100 feet downwind of the traffic sign, catching everyone non-local who doesn't immediately brake. While you can fight the ticket, you will lose the first round in the local court and have appeal it outside the local county court before you have any real chance.
*wince* I bet your poor transmission and engine got kinda pissed, too.
Some organizations like iDefense will pay a bounty for independent security research.
Otherwise, you can gain some degree of credibility by detecting and publishing security exploits, and there are organizations which will hire "white-hat" teams to perform penetration testing, or hire people who have a good security track record to fix major security holes, but a big part of that involves working with the organizations and being willing to not publicize security exploits until the vendor has had a reasonable period of time to fix things. Trying to coerce an organization into paying you is another matter entirely....
While it might be relevant in a civil trial where Google claimed a certain level of damages and the defendant claimed that the amount Google lost wasn't actually what Google claimed, Google doesn't have to prove it lost money from click-fraud for the criminal case to proceed, nor would showing that other people commit click-fraud be a mitigating defense against the blackmail/extortion attempt.
Sure, a defendant does have fairly broad rights to subpoena relevant information to his defense, by no means does that information become a matter of public record-- it's quite normal for a company to claim some information is a trade secret, and have discovery limited to what is actually relevant rather than the judge granting an over-broad permission for everything, and/or to have the information filed under seal.
I like books. They don't come with flashing banner ads, pop-up windows, pop-under ads, and all the rest of the active content that pollutes a lot of the WWW nowadays. Of course, if you don't install Flash, disable animated images, Javascript, and so forth, the web becomes a lot less annoying and more legible.
As for YouTube, or anything else that requires Flash or something to work, well, I live without.
If you want or need to run Windows software, OK, choosing Windows is an easy choice. But "safe"?
Can you name a single year in the past decade where there was not another remotely exploitable hole in the default configuration of Windows found?
Everyone uses it and if you have problems you can run down to Best Buy and have Geek Squad solve all your problems.
Not everyone. This is Slashdot, so people will exaggerate, but your point would be stronger if it were not trivially refutable. Perhaps 90% of computer users run Windows-- Macs are a couple of percent, Linux is a couple of percent, Solaris and the BSDs and others are a few percent.
If for some reason (and there are plenty of them...I only run linux on my servers) someone decides to make that magical jump over to linux then who are they going to turn to when something goes wrong? They've been hearing about how great the "communities" surrounding "linux" are, so they ask a question. When they get called a "fool" for not knowing about a command line or vi or bash or whatever they will leave with a bad taste in their mouth not just about "linux" but all open source software.
Do the Linux mailing lists really do that? How unfortunate....
Perhaps they'd find the MacOS community, or the various BSD projects more friendly.
For the most part, Apple has been adding APIs between point releases, not removing them or changing existing APIs. While Apple could do a better job of marking features for deprecation and handling that side-- by contrast, Sun & Solaris handle that very well-- backwards compatibility in MacOS X is handled reasonably well.
By this, I mean, you can run an app compiled for 10.1 or 10.2 on a later release, ie, 10.3, 10.4, etc. However, you seem to be expecting forwards compatibility-- ie, running an app compiled for 10.4 on 10.3, and pretty much no operating system vendor will support that. If an app is released which uses an API which is new in 10.4, and does not exist in 10.3, the 10.3 system is not going to be able to run that app.
However, if the source is available, you can try to backport the software yourself, and build it on 10.3 either by creating a compatibility shim or by removing calls to APIs not present in 10.3.
What's frightening to me is not the (presumed?) sex offenders on MySpace, but that I could translate this acronym into words.
The right to petition your government is essential.
The "right" to bribe politicians to vote your way isn't a right, much less essential-- and I'd be just as happy to see a bright light pointing at these scumbags, and see just how many lobbyists and dirty Congresscritters we can convict and jail from what we get out of Abramoff. Whether the politicans are Democrats or Republicans doesn't matter one bit to me...what matters is whether they are honest or for sale to the highest bidder.
People running a web cache *ought* to scan the cache directory periodicly with a virus-scanner.
For a specific example, I use Squid + ClamAV both for at work and at a number of client sites for which I provide sysadmin support; every so often, the scan of the squid cache files finds an exploit being cached, and I can look that specific file up against the Squid logs, and identify which client machine was responsible for accessing the malware.
The next steps are to check the client machine and see whether it has been owned (typically, yes), and to suggest to management that they restrict that employee from doing random web-surfing...
The smaller the black hole, the quicker the evaporation, agreed. Black holes that weigh on the order of a moon or small planet will absorb more mass/energy from the ~3 Kelvin cosmic background radiation than they emit via Hawking radiation, which means that they are effectively immortal and will outlast the rest of the universe.
The Open Source Definition allows you to require that someone who modifies your program must call it by some other name, to avoid random people confusing the "official" version released by the original author with modified versions.
This being said, you're pretty much right that it's a silly argument for both sides to get into...
Exactly. Or as someone else put it, "black holes are fuzzy, but they have no hair".
The exact border of a black hole is slightly imprecise, or fuzzy, and a particle pair which appears right on this border can have one particle get swallowed but have the other escape. So black holes actually radiate a small amount of this so-called Hawking radiation, and a tiny black hole (ie, one massing much less than the moon does), will eventually evaporate if it doesn't keep swallowing mass.
They passed Sarbanes-Oxley because of Enron, Tyco, and Worldcom/MCI.
If SCO really did conceal $25-odd million dollars of SysV royalties from Novell three years ago *and* failed to properly disclose this material fact in their SEC filings and statements to investors, Mr McBride might want to find a Monopoly set and hang on to that "Get out of jail free" card.
My first thought was that "Zune" rhymes with "spitoon".... :-)
The Microsoft dev tools (ie, Visual Studio) actually do encode the username and filepath info into at least debugging versions of executables and .dlls which they build.
This was remarkably well said.
A specific case to consider is something like a Linux box running an SSL webserver; if the system is using GPLv3 code somewhere to generate active content which gets displayed via SSL (PKI is a form of DRM), does this mean the site has to release their X.509 private key...?
Or, if a Linux system uses some form of signed binary packaging or updates, does RedHat or Debian have to release their GPG private keyrings to anyone which can create forged packages, patches, security announcements, etc?
What happens with GnuPG or GnuTLS under the GPLv3, anyway?
Good question, modulo the fact that a company using BSD code isn't stealing anything by using that code for their own purposes, even if they do binary-only releases without also releasing the source code.
MacOS X is probably the biggest example, or perhaps the Nokia IP firewall platform, or any commercial version of Linux like Red Hat et all which ship BSD-licensed libraries and binaries. There's also plenty of proprietary Windows programs which come with a zlib.dll or utilize BSD-licensed TCP/IP networking code, for which no source is available.
You're perfectly able to fork FreeBSD if you like; see Matt Dillon and the DragonFly project for a reasonably successful example which forked from FreeBSD-4_STABLE. I know of at least a couple of Linux distributions which use significant parts of the FreeBSD docs, or the ports tree, as well as things like Zlib or NCurses/termcap, and so forth-- and you are welcome to do the same, since the BSD license is completely GPL-miscable, and you can add as much more GPLv2 (or GPLv3, for that matter) code to it as you like.
However, you can't relicense the existing code, except for the parts you write or significantly modify yourself. The BSD license is a simple, permissive license, but it does not grant anyone permission to remove the BSD license and replace it with another license. Don't change or remove someone else's license terms without talking to them, your lawyer, or preferably both first.
Do you believe that ALL opposition to the GPLv3 is irrational?
If so, your position is self-consistent but not one that is useful or even possible to debate.
I guess you're going to have to live with or deliberately ignore the fact that quite a few people, notably the ~30 Linux kernel hackers, who have published source trees like the Linux kernel under GPLv2, have major concerns about some aspects found in the GPLv3 proposed drafts. Telling these people that they are "ignorant wankers" and:
I am claiming that they are ignorant of the issues they are trying to address with their statement, which still appears to be true, and they are blowing a lot of hot air without first trying to understand the purpose of the object of their irrational dislike. It's pretty simple, if I don't think they know what they are talking about, I'm not going to respect their opinion.
It's pretty clear that you will never help address their concerns if you discount any possibility that they might have actual justification for these concerns.
Come again? I'm not aware of DRM implementations in any of the things you have mentioned.
Well, perhaps you should consider whether PKI is a form of DRM. Haven't you ever performed a credit-card purchase over an SSL website? How do you think Verisign's Payflow system and other OLTP systems work?