I seriously do not understand exactly what that passage you quoted says. I've read it through a few times, but it's so incredibly soaked in marketing speak that the essence of the information actually seems hidden. "Remix creativity in the way that flexible licenses are intended to enable"?
Correct me if I'm wrong about this. Isn't it so that technically, while it is possible to say that if license A allows for uses B and C, one can use the work in those ways, it is not possible to say that if license A is fully compatible with license B, the a work licensed under license A is also licensed under license B. This is simply impossible, even if license B is very highly similar to license A. Not unless someone grabs the work, makes a derivative, and then decides to release it under the fully compatible license B.
To be honest, that sounds reasonable to me, if it is what I think it's like.
They're not a multi-billion dollar international. They rely on donations from the public and don't make a single dime of profit. As such, what makes you think they have the ability to get into a lawsuit? Microsoft might not have won if they did go to court over those files, but it would have been very costly. That's not something that they will want to do to their donators at all. Additionally, it would be bad press and make it very difficult for people to continue being donators, because they'd never know what their money is going to be (mis)used for. It was in their best interest to take down those files. This is also a policy that other important free content sites (like Wikipedia) uphold.
I never believed that P2P would have a significant effect on the sales of records. Let's face it: most of us will simply go out and buy a record if we really want to have it. If we don't really want to have it, we may still pirate it. But we would definitely not go out and hand over a hunk of cash for it. Most of the music that we warez, I believe, would be the music that we wouldn't otherwise buy. Same goes for movies, games, everything.
It's easy for the large publishers to complain and act as though their sales are declining due to the increasing amount of P2P networking, but you might as well say that global warming is the cause. Afterall, neither have ever been proven to have a huge effect on record sales...
You're correct. They'd have to start maintaining their own GPLv2 fork of the GNU toolchain, as they wouldn't be able to use any GPLv3 code. Any code that Novell would want in the GPLv3 versions of the software would be rejected. Afterall, it seems that Novell is exempt from patent infringement litigation, which means that there's the possibility of patented code being inserted into GPL programs if they're allowed to edit it, and that would be a serious problem. Because they've made this dodgy deal with Microsoft, I actually wouldn't be very surprised if they tried using this loophole to get Microsoft to be able to sue other major Linux vendors.
True. Or you just want to check to see for yourself whether it really fixes some of those nasty CSS problems. There are plenty of reasons for installing IE7, but none of them imply that you will also be actually using it. Site statistics will have to assess whether IE7 is really being used a lot, not the amount of downloads.
If you don't want to read through the entire PDF (which I can understand, since it's 287 pages in size), there are some interesting figures in the first paragraph which highlights the study's key findings.
"Europe is the leading region in terms of globally collaborating FLOSS software developers, and leads in terms of global project leaders, followed closely by North America (interestingly, more in the East Coast than the West), Asia and Latin America face disadvantages at least partially due to language barriers, but may have an increasing share of developers active in local communities."
"Weighted by regional PC penetration, central Europe and Scandinavia provide disproportionally high numbers of developers; weighted by average income, India is the leading provider of FLOSS developers by far, followed by China."
"The existing base of quality FLOSS applications with reasonable quality control and distribution would cost firms almost Euro 12 billion to reproduce internally. This code base has been doubling every 18-24 months over the past eight years, and this growth is projected to continue for several more years."
"The existing base of FLOSS software represents a lower bound of about 131.000 real person-years of effort that has been devoted exclusively by programmers. As this is mostly by individuals not directly paid for development, it represents a significant gap in national accounts of productivity. [...]"
"Defined broadly, FLOSS-related services could reach a 32% share of all IT services by 2010, and the FLOSS-related share of the economy could reach 4% of European GDP by 2010. [...]"
"[...] FLOSS and proprietary software show a ration of 30:70 (overlapping) in recent job postings indicating significant demand for FLOSS-related skills."
There is a huge amount of information in this PDF, and while it pertains directly to Europe, it's also interesting to read for people who don't live there. Basically, it discusses the role of software libre in the European economy (both its direct and indirect impacts), and its general trends, scenarios and policy strategies. Everything is in great detail, too.
Yes, THIS! Mod parent up, for he's absolutely correct AND giving an argument that none of the advertisement supporters have ever dared to touch in the debate. Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia that aims to discuss each notable topic in a neutral way. We've gone through inspiringly great lengths to create millions of articles in many different languages already, constantly using this neutrality as our most important asset. Why is anyone willing to throw that neutrality, that sanctity that has caused this source of information to become so reliable?
There is no way an encyclopedia can be neutral if it is non-neutral by asserting its endorsement of commercial products in the form of advertisements. Wikipedia will lose its credibility completely, and that's the LAST thing that we want. We, the editors, the people who try hard to make this encyclopedia a really important asset to us as human beings. Our work will be broken, should serious advertisement -- even stuff like Google AdSense -- ever come to our pages. Please let it NEVER happen.
In the US legal system, you can. There is no real legal argument that prevents you from charging someone with murder, even if there is no body. All you have to prove is that the person is never going to walk back in alive. I consider that impossible myself...
They aren't violating the license. That's one of the key points of Allison's post; he says that even though Novell is not violating the GPL, under which Samba is released, it still is not upholding the true intent of the license. Whether or not you agree with that is up to you (I personally do), but nothing is really going to stop Novell from using it.
And that's the exact reason why we should get some facts on this. What is the effect of (cartoon) child porn on pedophiles? Does/anybody/ know? I've never seen any scientific reports on this myself. While I'm not specifically looking for these kind of reports, you'd recon that after having done this discussion on such places as forums and IRC channels a few times, you'd stumble across one of them at some point.
The Japanese have legalized the creation and selling of this material, and they must have their reasons. Maybe they've found that it's benevolent to those who/need/ it? Maybe it stems from a consensus that says such minorities should just be able to do whatever they want, regardless of ethics? Or maybe people are simply too busy minding their own business?
They could be created after real images. Or anyway, I personally don't think that no cartoon child porn maker has ever used real images as example for their drawings. Furthermore, it could be argued that this kind of stuff existing could alter the behavior of pedophiles.
That/is/ next. See, they will never be able to accurately define which drawn cartoons can be seen as child porn and which can't. That, in turn, will allow them to effectively ban a much wider range of them; in the end, all cartoon pornography is vulnerable.
I don't particularly care for cartoon pornography, especially when it depicts children, but I really wonder if it is the right way to ban it. Does anyone know of studies that prove this kind of stuff to be benevolent or malevolent? I don't ever recall hearing facts being stated when someone argues for this kind of stuff to be banned.
That's not all. This guy's an idiot for proclaiming that he has solved this problem before his findings have been researched by mathematicians that do know their stuff (e.g. those that don't teach young children their basic arithmetic). He's actually teaching kids things that might very well be completely wrong, or at the very least, awkward to those kids' ability to understand mathematics in general.
I honestly personally believe that he's just in it for the attention.
The first hour of teaching should be used to familiarize the pupils with whatever software they'll be using. If you're using the Flash IDE, you've got the advantage of being able to draw movie clips to use for the visualization. If not, the teaching should be about simple, weakly typed code at first.
A fibonacci generator comes to mind, but that's overdone and not impressive for your average pupil. Maybe a program that takes grades from students and calculates a class average, as well as whether an individual student did better or worse than the average and whether the student passes the course.
The movie clip drawing API could be taught, in its simplest form, in one class. The one that comes after the basics.
You know what, this may sound strange, but I would recommend ActionScript for beginning programmers. Why, you ask? Well, aside of the fact that ActionScript is very simple, it's fully integrated with the capabilities of the SWF file format. That means you can make some kind of visual representation of what you're doing extremely quickly, and you won't have to worry about advanced rendering code, since it's all already there. You can have people algorithmically draw lines and shapes and graphs in virtually no time at all. Whereas you'd just be oversimplifying things if you gave people Python and a good library to take care of the visualization part.
Now that there's a free and open source compiler around, I think that schools should start considering it.
The risk of everything turning out okay if you accidentally delete all your files or format your hard drive, perhaps (given that you are able to undo this in some virtualization software). Oh, what about the risk of being able to revert quickly if you get infected by a virus? Those are all terrible risks, and it's imperative that home users don't touch virtualization because of it!
Not just impossible, it should also not be allowed. Perhaps I'll be labelled as old-fashioned for saying this, but I still believe that if I've bought something, I should be able to do what I want with it. It's supposed to be mine, isn't it? (Yes, I know it's more complicated than that; but I still strongly disagree with that.) If I want to virtualize my copy of Vista, I should be able to do so. If the program somehow fails due to Microsoft deliberately making it impossible, then that's sabotage to me. Yet another reason for me to not get it.
Take a look at the footer: it says the website is optimized for Microsoft(R) Windows(R) & Internet Explorer(R). I've never seen so many (R)s in one sentence that wasn't written by Microsoft! Feel free to burn his bandwidth, I guess...
Slashdot Mirror
Let me give a very short answer to that.
Um. Yes?
I seriously do not understand exactly what that passage you quoted says. I've read it through a few times, but it's so incredibly soaked in marketing speak that the essence of the information actually seems hidden. "Remix creativity in the way that flexible licenses are intended to enable"?
Correct me if I'm wrong about this. Isn't it so that technically, while it is possible to say that if license A allows for uses B and C, one can use the work in those ways, it is not possible to say that if license A is fully compatible with license B, the a work licensed under license A is also licensed under license B. This is simply impossible, even if license B is very highly similar to license A. Not unless someone grabs the work, makes a derivative, and then decides to release it under the fully compatible license B.
To be honest, that sounds reasonable to me, if it is what I think it's like.
The smaller the scale, the more freaked out people get.
Well, APPARENTLY! Did you see how many complaints they got? OVER 80!!! That's no less than over 0.000004% of the population!
They're not a multi-billion dollar international. They rely on donations from the public and don't make a single dime of profit. As such, what makes you think they have the ability to get into a lawsuit? Microsoft might not have won if they did go to court over those files, but it would have been very costly. That's not something that they will want to do to their donators at all. Additionally, it would be bad press and make it very difficult for people to continue being donators, because they'd never know what their money is going to be (mis)used for.
It was in their best interest to take down those files. This is also a policy that other important free content sites (like Wikipedia) uphold.
I never believed that P2P would have a significant effect on the sales of records. Let's face it: most of us will simply go out and buy a record if we really want to have it. If we don't really want to have it, we may still pirate it. But we would definitely not go out and hand over a hunk of cash for it. Most of the music that we warez, I believe, would be the music that we wouldn't otherwise buy. Same goes for movies, games, everything.
It's easy for the large publishers to complain and act as though their sales are declining due to the increasing amount of P2P networking, but you might as well say that global warming is the cause. Afterall, neither have ever been proven to have a huge effect on record sales...
You're correct. They'd have to start maintaining their own GPLv2 fork of the GNU toolchain, as they wouldn't be able to use any GPLv3 code. Any code that Novell would want in the GPLv3 versions of the software would be rejected. Afterall, it seems that Novell is exempt from patent infringement litigation, which means that there's the possibility of patented code being inserted into GPL programs if they're allowed to edit it, and that would be a serious problem. Because they've made this dodgy deal with Microsoft, I actually wouldn't be very surprised if they tried using this loophole to get Microsoft to be able to sue other major Linux vendors.
Host: So you don't like Microsoft Windows. Care to explain why?
Mac/Linux supporter: (Tosses chair at Microsoft supporter.)
You just proved Godwin's Law.
As a result, you've just automatically lost this debate.
True. Or you just want to check to see for yourself whether it really fixes some of those nasty CSS problems. There are plenty of reasons for installing IE7, but none of them imply that you will also be actually using it. Site statistics will have to assess whether IE7 is really being used a lot, not the amount of downloads.
If you don't want to read through the entire PDF (which I can understand, since it's 287 pages in size), there are some interesting figures in the first paragraph which highlights the study's key findings.
"Europe is the leading region in terms of globally collaborating FLOSS software developers, and leads in terms of global project leaders, followed closely by North America (interestingly, more in the East Coast than the West), Asia and Latin America face disadvantages at least partially due to language barriers, but may have an increasing share of developers active in local communities."
"Weighted by regional PC penetration, central Europe and Scandinavia provide disproportionally high numbers of developers; weighted by average income, India is the leading provider of FLOSS developers by far, followed by China."
"The existing base of quality FLOSS applications with reasonable quality control and distribution would cost firms almost Euro 12 billion to reproduce internally. This code base has been doubling every 18-24 months over the past eight years, and this growth is projected to continue for several more years."
"The existing base of FLOSS software represents a lower bound of about 131.000 real person-years of effort that has been devoted exclusively by programmers. As this is mostly by individuals not directly paid for development, it represents a significant gap in national accounts of productivity. [...]"
"Defined broadly, FLOSS-related services could reach a 32% share of all IT services by 2010, and the FLOSS-related share of the economy could reach 4% of European GDP by 2010. [...]"
"[...] FLOSS and proprietary software show a ration of 30:70 (overlapping) in recent job postings indicating significant demand for FLOSS-related skills."
There is a huge amount of information in this PDF, and while it pertains directly to Europe, it's also interesting to read for people who don't live there. Basically, it discusses the role of software libre in the European economy (both its direct and indirect impacts), and its general trends, scenarios and policy strategies. Everything is in great detail, too.
Not really. It's not like Sealand will actually ever be a recognized country. It's essentially England, and nobody's going to boycot them.
Yes, THIS! Mod parent up, for he's absolutely correct AND giving an argument that none of the advertisement supporters have ever dared to touch in the debate. Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia that aims to discuss each notable topic in a neutral way. We've gone through inspiringly great lengths to create millions of articles in many different languages already, constantly using this neutrality as our most important asset. Why is anyone willing to throw that neutrality, that sanctity that has caused this source of information to become so reliable? There is no way an encyclopedia can be neutral if it is non-neutral by asserting its endorsement of commercial products in the form of advertisements. Wikipedia will lose its credibility completely, and that's the LAST thing that we want. We, the editors, the people who try hard to make this encyclopedia a really important asset to us as human beings. Our work will be broken, should serious advertisement -- even stuff like Google AdSense -- ever come to our pages. Please let it NEVER happen.
In the US legal system, you can. There is no real legal argument that prevents you from charging someone with murder, even if there is no body. All you have to prove is that the person is never going to walk back in alive. I consider that impossible myself...
They aren't violating the license. That's one of the key points of Allison's post; he says that even though Novell is not violating the GPL, under which Samba is released, it still is not upholding the true intent of the license. Whether or not you agree with that is up to you (I personally do), but nothing is really going to stop Novell from using it.
And that's the exact reason why we should get some facts on this. What is the effect of (cartoon) child porn on pedophiles? Does /anybody/ know? I've never seen any scientific reports on this myself. While I'm not specifically looking for these kind of reports, you'd recon that after having done this discussion on such places as forums and IRC channels a few times, you'd stumble across one of them at some point.
/need/ it? Maybe it stems from a consensus that says such minorities should just be able to do whatever they want, regardless of ethics? Or maybe people are simply too busy minding their own business?
The Japanese have legalized the creation and selling of this material, and they must have their reasons. Maybe they've found that it's benevolent to those who
They could be created after real images. Or anyway, I personally don't think that no cartoon child porn maker has ever used real images as example for their drawings. Furthermore, it could be argued that this kind of stuff existing could alter the behavior of pedophiles.
That /is/ next. See, they will never be able to accurately define which drawn cartoons can be seen as child porn and which can't. That, in turn, will allow them to effectively ban a much wider range of them; in the end, all cartoon pornography is vulnerable.
I don't particularly care for cartoon pornography, especially when it depicts children, but I really wonder if it is the right way to ban it. Does anyone know of studies that prove this kind of stuff to be benevolent or malevolent? I don't ever recall hearing facts being stated when someone argues for this kind of stuff to be banned.
That's why Linus exclaimed that it "wouldn't happen" in /his/ tree.
That's not all. This guy's an idiot for proclaiming that he has solved this problem before his findings have been researched by mathematicians that do know their stuff (e.g. those that don't teach young children their basic arithmetic). He's actually teaching kids things that might very well be completely wrong, or at the very least, awkward to those kids' ability to understand mathematics in general.
I honestly personally believe that he's just in it for the attention.
The first hour of teaching should be used to familiarize the pupils with whatever software they'll be using. If you're using the Flash IDE, you've got the advantage of being able to draw movie clips to use for the visualization. If not, the teaching should be about simple, weakly typed code at first.
A fibonacci generator comes to mind, but that's overdone and not impressive for your average pupil. Maybe a program that takes grades from students and calculates a class average, as well as whether an individual student did better or worse than the average and whether the student passes the course.
The movie clip drawing API could be taught, in its simplest form, in one class. The one that comes after the basics.
You know what, this may sound strange, but I would recommend ActionScript for beginning programmers. Why, you ask? Well, aside of the fact that ActionScript is very simple, it's fully integrated with the capabilities of the SWF file format. That means you can make some kind of visual representation of what you're doing extremely quickly, and you won't have to worry about advanced rendering code, since it's all already there. You can have people algorithmically draw lines and shapes and graphs in virtually no time at all. Whereas you'd just be oversimplifying things if you gave people Python and a good library to take care of the visualization part.
Now that there's a free and open source compiler around, I think that schools should start considering it.
The risk of everything turning out okay if you accidentally delete all your files or format your hard drive, perhaps (given that you are able to undo this in some virtualization software). Oh, what about the risk of being able to revert quickly if you get infected by a virus? Those are all terrible risks, and it's imperative that home users don't touch virtualization because of it!
Not just impossible, it should also not be allowed. Perhaps I'll be labelled as old-fashioned for saying this, but I still believe that if I've bought something, I should be able to do what I want with it. It's supposed to be mine, isn't it? (Yes, I know it's more complicated than that; but I still strongly disagree with that.) If I want to virtualize my copy of Vista, I should be able to do so. If the program somehow fails due to Microsoft deliberately making it impossible, then that's sabotage to me. Yet another reason for me to not get it.
Take a look at the footer: it says the website is optimized for Microsoft(R) Windows(R) & Internet Explorer(R). I've never seen so many (R)s in one sentence that wasn't written by Microsoft! Feel free to burn his bandwidth, I guess...
Am I missing something here? What on earth does Hong Kong have to do with Japan?