Freedom of the press is about preventing government censorship and has nothing to do with copyright.
Ah, but who makes and enforces copyright law? Oh right, it's the Government! Copyright IS a form of government censorship. The GP is correct in asserting that copyright is an abridgment of freedom of speech and the press.
The idea is not new, nor originated by Microsoft. It was actually pioneered by Ken Thompson and company at Bell Labs when they designed Inferno. Like Singularity it too is a "managed code" OS, but with Plan 9 as its base. User applications under Inferno are generally not run as native code, but as bytecode executing under the Dis Virtual Machine, because all native code runs with kernel privileges. This was done mainly to allow Inferno to run under embedded microprocessors that may not have many of the hardware features that OS designers have come to expect, with all memory protection, process scheduling, and the like provided in software by the Dis virtual machine which is at the heart of the Inferno kernel. Perhaps Singularity is intended to be a similar OS, geared mainly for the embedded market.
From what I know of Singularity, it's basically Microsoft's attempt to replicate the Inferno OS, but using C#/CLR instead of Limbo/Dis. At least the people behind Inferno had the balls to use real Free/Open Source licenses for their stuff. Sheesh, does anyone else find it a coincidence that Stephen Hawking applied the phrase from Dante's Inferno: "Abandon all hope, all ye who enter here" when describing black hole singularities? Or perhaps the designers of Singularity were well aware of the work done in Bell Labs by Ken Thompson and the like that led to the design of Inferno, and chose the name consciously?
Tsu-ri-zu-mu, in katakana. That would make it sound the same as the gairago word meaning 'tourism', but then again the Japanese are pretty much tolerant of homonyms, given that their language has got plenty of those going around, as long as it doesn't sound like something most people would think of as being blatantly offensive or generates some ridiculous connotations.
The fact that Firefox, being an XUL application, has significant chunks of core code written in JavaScript, is probably the main reason why this matters very much. Even if you never visit a site in the wild that uses JavaScript or run with JavaScript totally disabled, you should still see some general improvements in Firefox's performance.
From what I know, nuclear fusion happens only inside the core of a star. What happens when the sun reaches its red giant phase is that the core shrinks to maintain the pressures needed to sustain helium fusion. The sun itself may become less and less dense but the core at the center where fusion takes place gets more and more dense. The sun growing to such a large size is simply the first phase of the sun's gradually shedding off its outer layers.
The US Navy still teaches its people how to navigate using chronometers, almanacs, sextants, and compasses, just in case the GPS system falls out for any number of plausible reasons.
I bought an abacus on my last trip to Japan. Will be buying a slide rule when I can find one. All of these on the same principle...
True, but the studios themselves also believe that copyright ought to last forever. Only if it's their copyright. If copyright law doesn't suit them, then they will do whatever they can to get away with not paying for the license, including such dirty tricks as this. And they have the gall to complain about piracy when they are no better than pirates themselves. What utter hypocrisy.
I imagine, like much of the Third World, including where I am right now, the Internet infrastructure is fragmented and few ISP's have direct peering arrangements, so a packet from one Egyptian ISP customer going to a system hosted at another Egyptian ISP might well need to pass that severed cable going to Europe, or worse yet, many sites intended for Middle Eastern consumption might rather be hosted in European or American data centers instead of locally, where clean power and reliable connectivity arrangements are in general much more costly to come by. We found ourselves in a similar unfortunate situation in the weeks following the Taiwan earthquake just after Christmas 2006. What a mess. It costs serious money to get peering arrangements, and after you've spent a ton of money for an international link, investing in local peering isn't gonna be a big priority.
In the Philippines, widely considered the SMS capital of the world, where the three major carriers among themselves handle over a billion messages a day, prices have always been relatively low as well. They have generally been, for as long as I can remember, priced at PhP 1, which is about 2.5 US cents at current exchange rates, also with no charge for incoming messages. The basic rates go even lower when you factor in things like the carriers giving you a certain number of free SMS per month for monthly plans and per prepaid load, unlimited text messaging for a day for a fixed rate deals and other similar things. And even at these rates it can't be said that the carriers are losing money. In fact, they're making scads of it.
To be more precise, you're an event-driven state machine when working like that. If you've ever programmed using select(2), poll(2), or (under Linux) epoll(7), the basic concept is familiar. That isn't really multitasking, but it's a perfectly valid way of writing network servers.
Which makes me wonder... If it does come to that, who will stop the new American Reich when it comes to power? The United States arguably had its Reichstag Fire six years ago....
Three letter acronym for you: NDA. Selling the software to a third party is NOT the same as open sourcing it! If IBM were to sell the source code for OS/2, the recipient of the sale would be subject to the same contractual obligations that IBM had during OS/2's development, in particular, any non-disclosure agreements that IBM had to sign. I imagine that because OS/2 was developed as a joint project with Microsoft, Microsoft and IBM would have signed many NDA's over certain critical pieces of code that prevent them from ever releasing it to the public. Rewriting code covered by such an agreement is definitely possible, but I imagine that IBM is unwilling to fund such a massive development effort in-house.
I think that gentoo just tends not to appeal to the sorts of people who like taking care of this stuff - largely because it emphasizes pragmatism and technical achievement - while other distros like debian have an appeal to the kinds of folks who love to read licenses since they make a big deal about that kind of stuff.
So you're saying that Gentoo has more of the Linus Torvalds mindset, whereas Debian has more of the Richard Stallman mindset? Interesting point. I moved to Gentoo largely because I was fed up with the RPM-based distros I had been stuck with until then. Never really got around to trying Debian, but I may soon make the switch, if these troubles really get out of hand.
During my run-in with these folks, they said that they would also inspect any external media that I had in my possession, of which I had several, including an external drive that is as big as the one inside my laptop. They never got around to doing this though, but I imagine they might do this with others as well.
This happened to me the last time I visited the United States. Apparently, they're looking for child pornography. So they started rifling through all of my files, specifically at my stash of (legal) pornography. They specifically looked for image files and movie files. They didn't seem to care that my laptop was loaded with stuff that could potentially be in violation of some copyright somewhere. This took them a long time, and it nearly made me miss my flight to my final destination. Sheesh, after that ordeal I'd rather not go back to the United States ever again if I can help it. What an absolutely pointless exercise. Looking for terrorist correspondence would be an even more pointless exercise.
I suppose they realized that it would be just a matter of time before someone outside of Microsoft discovers a way to use the kill switch. And then every Internet-connected computer running Vista will die instantly. Hmm... Doesn't sound like such a bad idea after all...
Only because copyright violations are a civil matter, not a criminal matter. Now, if any of the copyright holders of the GPLed packages in Xubuntu were to decide to take the matter to court, then the MPAA would have to pay many red cents in statutory damages should they lose. The only reason why it's never come to this point in the past is that the FSF has always been more interested in compliance than in punishment:
In approximately a decade of enforcing the GPL, I have never insisted on payment of damages to the Foundation for violation of the license, and I have rarely required public admission of wrongdoing. Our position has always been that compliance with the license, and security for future good behavior, are the most important goals. We have done everything to make it easy for violators to comply, and we have offered oblivion with respect to past faults.
--from "Enforcing the GPL" by Prof. Eben Moglen, general counsel for the Free Software Foundation. Nothing but this policy prevents the FSF from collecting damages for GPL violations. If they decide to change this policy after encountering an egregious, willful, or stubborn violator, or if a non-FSF copyright holder of GPLed code decides to sue (they could just as easily get their own lawyer), then well, all bets are off.
None of what this AC says is true. It doesn't matter if the MPAA never changed any code, the fact remains that they were distributing the code, changed or not. Now, if you want to distribute GPLed code, either you comply with the license and provide source code, or you find yourself just as guilty of copyright infringement as these people torrenting movies that they are so quick to prosecute. What happened was the latter. As for suing them for copyright violation, the fact that no one lost any money is also immaterial. There is such a thing as statutory damages, which would be at minimum US$750 for each copyrighted work thus violated, and could be as high as US$30,000. They would thus theoretically be on the hook for statutory damages for every GPLed package in the Xubuntu distribution, just like Ms. Jammie Thomas. There are hundreds of GPLed packages in Xubuntu... You do the math.
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Ah, but who makes and enforces copyright law? Oh right, it's the Government! Copyright IS a form of government censorship. The GP is correct in asserting that copyright is an abridgment of freedom of speech and the press.
You joke, but Saturn's (Cronus's) wife in mythology was named Rhea. A bit of a coincidence that.
The idea is not new, nor originated by Microsoft. It was actually pioneered by Ken Thompson and company at Bell Labs when they designed Inferno. Like Singularity it too is a "managed code" OS, but with Plan 9 as its base. User applications under Inferno are generally not run as native code, but as bytecode executing under the Dis Virtual Machine, because all native code runs with kernel privileges. This was done mainly to allow Inferno to run under embedded microprocessors that may not have many of the hardware features that OS designers have come to expect, with all memory protection, process scheduling, and the like provided in software by the Dis virtual machine which is at the heart of the Inferno kernel. Perhaps Singularity is intended to be a similar OS, geared mainly for the embedded market.
From what I know of Singularity, it's basically Microsoft's attempt to replicate the Inferno OS, but using C#/CLR instead of Limbo/Dis. At least the people behind Inferno had the balls to use real Free/Open Source licenses for their stuff. Sheesh, does anyone else find it a coincidence that Stephen Hawking applied the phrase from Dante's Inferno: "Abandon all hope, all ye who enter here" when describing black hole singularities? Or perhaps the designers of Singularity were well aware of the work done in Bell Labs by Ken Thompson and the like that led to the design of Inferno, and chose the name consciously?
Tsu-ri-zu-mu, in katakana. That would make it sound the same as the gairago word meaning 'tourism', but then again the Japanese are pretty much tolerant of homonyms, given that their language has got plenty of those going around, as long as it doesn't sound like something most people would think of as being blatantly offensive or generates some ridiculous connotations.
The fact that Firefox, being an XUL application, has significant chunks of core code written in JavaScript, is probably the main reason why this matters very much. Even if you never visit a site in the wild that uses JavaScript or run with JavaScript totally disabled, you should still see some general improvements in Firefox's performance.
From what I know, nuclear fusion happens only inside the core of a star. What happens when the sun reaches its red giant phase is that the core shrinks to maintain the pressures needed to sustain helium fusion. The sun itself may become less and less dense but the core at the center where fusion takes place gets more and more dense. The sun growing to such a large size is simply the first phase of the sun's gradually shedding off its outer layers.
But isn't that what it is already?
After all, an atom is smaller than a wavelength of visible light, so atoms are quite literally colorless.
The US Navy still teaches its people how to navigate using chronometers, almanacs, sextants, and compasses, just in case the GPS system falls out for any number of plausible reasons.
I bought an abacus on my last trip to Japan. Will be buying a slide rule when I can find one. All of these on the same principle...
True, but the studios themselves also believe that copyright ought to last forever. Only if it's their copyright. If copyright law doesn't suit them, then they will do whatever they can to get away with not paying for the license, including such dirty tricks as this. And they have the gall to complain about piracy when they are no better than pirates themselves. What utter hypocrisy.
I imagine, like much of the Third World, including where I am right now, the Internet infrastructure is fragmented and few ISP's have direct peering arrangements, so a packet from one Egyptian ISP customer going to a system hosted at another Egyptian ISP might well need to pass that severed cable going to Europe, or worse yet, many sites intended for Middle Eastern consumption might rather be hosted in European or American data centers instead of locally, where clean power and reliable connectivity arrangements are in general much more costly to come by. We found ourselves in a similar unfortunate situation in the weeks following the Taiwan earthquake just after Christmas 2006. What a mess. It costs serious money to get peering arrangements, and after you've spent a ton of money for an international link, investing in local peering isn't gonna be a big priority.
In the Philippines, widely considered the SMS capital of the world, where the three major carriers among themselves handle over a billion messages a day, prices have always been relatively low as well. They have generally been, for as long as I can remember, priced at PhP 1, which is about 2.5 US cents at current exchange rates, also with no charge for incoming messages. The basic rates go even lower when you factor in things like the carriers giving you a certain number of free SMS per month for monthly plans and per prepaid load, unlimited text messaging for a day for a fixed rate deals and other similar things. And even at these rates it can't be said that the carriers are losing money. In fact, they're making scads of it.
To be more precise, you're an event-driven state machine when working like that. If you've ever programmed using select(2), poll(2), or (under Linux) epoll(7), the basic concept is familiar. That isn't really multitasking, but it's a perfectly valid way of writing network servers.
Never whistle while your pissing.
Which makes me wonder... If it does come to that, who will stop the new American Reich when it comes to power? The United States arguably had its Reichstag Fire six years ago....
Three letter acronym for you: NDA. Selling the software to a third party is NOT the same as open sourcing it! If IBM were to sell the source code for OS/2, the recipient of the sale would be subject to the same contractual obligations that IBM had during OS/2's development, in particular, any non-disclosure agreements that IBM had to sign. I imagine that because OS/2 was developed as a joint project with Microsoft, Microsoft and IBM would have signed many NDA's over certain critical pieces of code that prevent them from ever releasing it to the public. Rewriting code covered by such an agreement is definitely possible, but I imagine that IBM is unwilling to fund such a massive development effort in-house.
So you're saying that Gentoo has more of the Linus Torvalds mindset, whereas Debian has more of the Richard Stallman mindset? Interesting point. I moved to Gentoo largely because I was fed up with the RPM-based distros I had been stuck with until then. Never really got around to trying Debian, but I may soon make the switch, if these troubles really get out of hand.
John McCarthy's original paper where Lisp is invented: Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and their Computation by Machine. Paul Graham translated it into modern Common Lisp.
Is that the museum where we see Casaubon hiding at the beginning of Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum? Where the TRES have their rite?
During my run-in with these folks, they said that they would also inspect any external media that I had in my possession, of which I had several, including an external drive that is as big as the one inside my laptop. They never got around to doing this though, but I imagine they might do this with others as well.
This happened to me the last time I visited the United States. Apparently, they're looking for child pornography. So they started rifling through all of my files, specifically at my stash of (legal) pornography. They specifically looked for image files and movie files. They didn't seem to care that my laptop was loaded with stuff that could potentially be in violation of some copyright somewhere. This took them a long time, and it nearly made me miss my flight to my final destination. Sheesh, after that ordeal I'd rather not go back to the United States ever again if I can help it. What an absolutely pointless exercise. Looking for terrorist correspondence would be an even more pointless exercise.
I suppose they realized that it would be just a matter of time before someone outside of Microsoft discovers a way to use the kill switch. And then every Internet-connected computer running Vista will die instantly. Hmm... Doesn't sound like such a bad idea after all...
Only because copyright violations are a civil matter, not a criminal matter. Now, if any of the copyright holders of the GPLed packages in Xubuntu were to decide to take the matter to court, then the MPAA would have to pay many red cents in statutory damages should they lose. The only reason why it's never come to this point in the past is that the FSF has always been more interested in compliance than in punishment:
--from "Enforcing the GPL" by Prof. Eben Moglen, general counsel for the Free Software Foundation. Nothing but this policy prevents the FSF from collecting damages for GPL violations. If they decide to change this policy after encountering an egregious, willful, or stubborn violator, or if a non-FSF copyright holder of GPLed code decides to sue (they could just as easily get their own lawyer), then well, all bets are off.
None of what this AC says is true. It doesn't matter if the MPAA never changed any code, the fact remains that they were distributing the code, changed or not. Now, if you want to distribute GPLed code, either you comply with the license and provide source code, or you find yourself just as guilty of copyright infringement as these people torrenting movies that they are so quick to prosecute. What happened was the latter. As for suing them for copyright violation, the fact that no one lost any money is also immaterial. There is such a thing as statutory damages, which would be at minimum US$750 for each copyrighted work thus violated, and could be as high as US$30,000. They would thus theoretically be on the hook for statutory damages for every GPLed package in the Xubuntu distribution, just like Ms. Jammie Thomas. There are hundreds of GPLed packages in Xubuntu... You do the math.