Ever heard of a kinetic penetrator? It is a type of ammunition used in the main gun of tanks. It contains no explosives, but rather a very dense, arrow-like projectile which uses its high speed (and thus its kinetic energy) for all its destructive power. Kinetic energy weapons are generally weapons that rely solely on their kinetic energy for their destructive power.
Other more sci-fi types of kinetic energy weapons would be rail guns and coil guns.
How can we drill in the skull of people spouting this "argument" that if somebody (company, individual, whatever) decides to use the GPL, then nobody can claim they are being "robbed" of anything if somebody else becomes rich using that same code?
The GP's argument becomes even more weird when you consider that the purported "victim" of this "robbery", that is Red Hat, make no such claims themselves. They are fully aware of the implications of the GPL, but they don't mind.
That would be a nice thing to (metaphorically) drill into the skull of people like the GP.
This is not as clear-cut as you might think. As you might know, the binaries are not available for download, they are only available as part of the packages that they offer for sale.
What they sell is a complete package, including compiled software ready for installation and a support contract. If you don't buy it, you cannot get the compiled software, and instead have to get the source packages and build them all yourself.
This doesn't detract from the fact that the free software remains free. Building and packaging the software is a paid-for service that is included in the distributed package that they sell. That does not mean that the software itself is actually sold.
It is like stealing money from those who created the original work. Redhat spends a lot of money to develop their product, and others just copy it and give it away for free.
Not to diminish the contribution by Red Hat, which is pretty extensive, the above argument is invalid. Red Hat did not create the products included in their distributions. They take existing free software, package it, and sells it as part of a complete package, including support. The software is still free.
Some projects whose products are included in Red Hat distributions were created by Red Hat and staffed by Red Hat personnel. They chose the GPL anyway. They have even purchased several companies and relicensed the products of those companies under the GPL. Do you really think that Red Hat would have done this if they thought that this would severely impact their business?
We periodically see companies trying to make open source products switch to closed source for this very reason.
Those companies are in a very different situation. They own the copyrights to their entire code base, and are thus able to change the license to a proprietary one if they think that it will create an advantage. Companies like Red Hat cannot do this, since many of the components of their products are free software. They could have done it with those components that they have written themselves, or acquired the producers of, but they mostly haven't.
While legal, I think it is morally wrong.
Why? Not even Red Hat think so. They argue that people or organizations that have little or no money are not their target market, and thus, it doesn't impact them that those instead use free rebuilds of their product. In fact, it is a better option for them than to use a completely different distribution, such as a Debian one, since using CentOS means that you are already used to their distribution, and may become a customer in the future when you have acquired the financial capabilities, as well as the demand for commercial support contracts.
1. Violate the GPL
2. Make sure that someone drags you to court for the violation
3. Start crying how the GPL is a communist cancer that should stay away from corporate source code to avoid "infection"
4....
5. Profit!
With existing FDE systems, one can replace binaries with keyloggers, and nobody would notice. BitLocker, the TPM would notice a different value and not return a decryption key.
How does this work? Does the TPM read the BitLocker binary directly from disk? Or is there any other way that it can make sure that the BitLocker binary hasn't been altered?
If atheism is the default position, why are there so many people who believe in some sort of supreme being?
Because they are indoctrinated at an early age, and thus are infected with the psychological disease of religion at an age when they are the most vulnerable to it. Very young children are wired to accept what adults tell them as the truth. Being infected by religion at this early age makes it a chronic disease in most cases, with no effective cure available.
No, that is how diesel-electric locomotives work, such as those popular in the United States. There are other types of diesel locomotives, such as diesel-hydraulic and diesel-mechanical locomotives.
Not if your running applications are using them, you can't. Everytime I update firefox with apt, firefox needs to be restarted because it starts doing weird crap (not opening new tabs, giving weird error messages). Same thing happens if I update gnome libraries.
Are you sure that this behavior is due to replaced shared libraries (.dll,.so, etc)? I'd rather suspect some other type of file that is opened each time it is used, such as script and/or data files (in the case of Firefox, Javascript and XUL files used by the user interface).
Yeah, I remember that. I also remember the teacher doing the same with lithium and potassium, with lithium giving a much weaker reaction and potassium giving a much stronger reaction.
If a lithium battery bursts, exposing the lithium directly to the air, then you might get some real pyrotechnics going.
Hardly. It's not like lithium will explode in contact with the air, it'll just oxidize its surface. Your chemistry teacher never showed you? Even dropping a piece in water doesn't produce any exciting reaction. Sodium, or even more so potassium, on the other hand...
So why are Slashdotters constantly opposed to copyright and in favor of piracy except in GPL violation articles?
Are you too boneheaded to understand that Slashdotters may not all think in the same way? That one subset of Slashdotters may support piracy, and another subset may support the GPL. It's a pretty simple concept actually, I'm surprised that you don't understand it, unless you are a troll of course.
I actually downloaded the list of wikileaks once, switched to opendns (whom we all should avoid) and checked it out. I really, really regretted it. There really was childporn there.
Did you check the entire list? I haven't seen it, but I'd guess that it contains more than just a handful of sites, so checking the entire list could be a pretty hefty job. There is no surprise that the list contains child porn sites, I mean, that's the publicly stated goal of the list. The problem with such a list is that there may be certain sites sneaked into the list by the government, despite having no connection to child porn, simply because the government deems them unfit for general consumption. Since the list is confidential, it is in practice not possible to appeal inclusion into the list, since nobody outside the government and the ISPs know what it contains.
Personally, I'd rather get the child pornographers prosecuted and their sites taken offline, than having a secret list unavailable to public scrutiny, of sites that all ISPs simply block. It's the difference between taking care of a problem and pretending that it doesn't exist. That the secret list can be silently expanded to other topics that the government doesn't like, with the public having no say in the matter, is also a significant problem since it allows for unchecked censorship by the government.
Do unordered lists like that look odd to anyone else? This only happens to me on Slashdot, but whenever anyone uses the UL and LI tags here, it ends up putting annoying greyish bars smack in the middle of the list.
It does to me, specifically the gray bars that appear below (on the z-axis) the list items.
and morally justifiable at best (i.e. western governments are doing it too)
I beg to differ. That western governments do something does not mean that it is morally justifiable. Case in point: The United States and torture. Torture is an appalling act, but the US government did it anyway, despite being a "western government". Thus it does not follow that something is morally justifiable just because western governments do it too. QED
unfortunately in order to wield that power you need to teach a sufficient proportion of the consumer base why something like DRM is bad...
Fortunately, the media companies have provided some help in teaching average consumers the pitfalls of DRM. Case in point: The shutdown of DRM license servers. In an instant, heaps of music became unusable, and that really burned some people who had acquired significant libraries of DRMed music tracks. Some people cannot be taught not to do something that can hurt them, they must feel the pain themselves before they really get the lesson.
Slashdot Mirror
Ever heard of a kinetic penetrator? It is a type of ammunition used in the main gun of tanks. It contains no explosives, but rather a very dense, arrow-like projectile which uses its high speed (and thus its kinetic energy) for all its destructive power. Kinetic energy weapons are generally weapons that rely solely on their kinetic energy for their destructive power.
Other more sci-fi types of kinetic energy weapons would be rail guns and coil guns.
So in your opinion, a board of directors is not good enough at providing leadership to a project/company? Only a dictator is good enough for you?
CJ's stuck in a stereotype.
As with everything else in GTA.
How can we drill in the skull of people spouting this "argument" that if somebody (company, individual, whatever) decides to use the GPL, then nobody can claim they are being "robbed" of anything if somebody else becomes rich using that same code?
The GP's argument becomes even more weird when you consider that the purported "victim" of this "robbery", that is Red Hat, make no such claims themselves. They are fully aware of the implications of the GPL, but they don't mind.
That would be a nice thing to (metaphorically) drill into the skull of people like the GP.
This is not as clear-cut as you might think. As you might know, the binaries are not available for download, they are only available as part of the packages that they offer for sale.
What they sell is a complete package, including compiled software ready for installation and a support contract. If you don't buy it, you cannot get the compiled software, and instead have to get the source packages and build them all yourself.
This doesn't detract from the fact that the free software remains free. Building and packaging the software is a paid-for service that is included in the distributed package that they sell. That does not mean that the software itself is actually sold.
It is like stealing money from those who created the original work. Redhat spends a lot of money to develop their product, and others just copy it and give it away for free.
Not to diminish the contribution by Red Hat, which is pretty extensive, the above argument is invalid. Red Hat did not create the products included in their distributions. They take existing free software, package it, and sells it as part of a complete package, including support. The software is still free.
Some projects whose products are included in Red Hat distributions were created by Red Hat and staffed by Red Hat personnel. They chose the GPL anyway. They have even purchased several companies and relicensed the products of those companies under the GPL. Do you really think that Red Hat would have done this if they thought that this would severely impact their business?
We periodically see companies trying to make open source products switch to closed source for this very reason.
Those companies are in a very different situation. They own the copyrights to their entire code base, and are thus able to change the license to a proprietary one if they think that it will create an advantage. Companies like Red Hat cannot do this, since many of the components of their products are free software. They could have done it with those components that they have written themselves, or acquired the producers of, but they mostly haven't.
While legal, I think it is morally wrong.
Why? Not even Red Hat think so. They argue that people or organizations that have little or no money are not their target market, and thus, it doesn't impact them that those instead use free rebuilds of their product. In fact, it is a better option for them than to use a completely different distribution, such as a Debian one, since using CentOS means that you are already used to their distribution, and may become a customer in the future when you have acquired the financial capabilities, as well as the demand for commercial support contracts.
1. Violate the GPL ...
2. Make sure that someone drags you to court for the violation
3. Start crying how the GPL is a communist cancer that should stay away from corporate source code to avoid "infection"
4.
5. Profit!
In a place like America this would be considered "communism".
And thus evil. Letting people starve on the other hand, would be considered noble.
You can, but an animated Jesus will come and smite the pictures/movies after a while.
With existing FDE systems, one can replace binaries with keyloggers, and nobody would notice. BitLocker, the TPM would notice a different value and not return a decryption key.
How does this work? Does the TPM read the BitLocker binary directly from disk? Or is there any other way that it can make sure that the BitLocker binary hasn't been altered?
when they said the Christians killed Galileo (they didn't)
No, they killed (by burning at the stake) Giordano Bruno (among others) instead.
If atheism is the default position, why are there so many people who believe in some sort of supreme being?
Because they are indoctrinated at an early age, and thus are infected with the psychological disease of religion at an age when they are the most vulnerable to it. Very young children are wired to accept what adults tell them as the truth. Being infected by religion at this early age makes it a chronic disease in most cases, with no effective cure available.
I completely agree.
Many people seem to think that amateur is a synonym for incompetent.
Ravers in all their idiocy are like modern retardo hippies
Depending on one's own point of view, I think analogous statements can be made about many of the subcultures associated with various music genres.
This is how diesel locomotives work.
No, that is how diesel-electric locomotives work, such as those popular in the United States. There are other types of diesel locomotives, such as diesel-hydraulic and diesel-mechanical locomotives.
Not if your running applications are using them, you can't. Everytime I update firefox with apt, firefox needs to be restarted because it starts doing weird crap (not opening new tabs, giving weird error messages). Same thing happens if I update gnome libraries.
Are you sure that this behavior is due to replaced shared libraries (.dll, .so, etc)? I'd rather suspect some other type of file that is opened each time it is used, such as script and/or data files (in the case of Firefox, Javascript and XUL files used by the user interface).
Yeah, I remember that. I also remember the teacher doing the same with lithium and potassium, with lithium giving a much weaker reaction and potassium giving a much stronger reaction.
If a lithium battery bursts, exposing the lithium directly to the air, then you might get some real pyrotechnics going.
Hardly. It's not like lithium will explode in contact with the air, it'll just oxidize its surface. Your chemistry teacher never showed you? Even dropping a piece in water doesn't produce any exciting reaction. Sodium, or even more so potassium, on the other hand...
That won't produce any exciting effect. The surface of the lithium will oxidize in a short time, but that's all.
So why are Slashdotters constantly opposed to copyright and in favor of piracy except in GPL violation articles?
Are you too boneheaded to understand that Slashdotters may not all think in the same way? That one subset of Slashdotters may support piracy, and another subset may support the GPL. It's a pretty simple concept actually, I'm surprised that you don't understand it, unless you are a troll of course.
I actually downloaded the list of wikileaks once, switched to opendns (whom we all should avoid) and checked it out. I really, really regretted it. There really was childporn there.
Did you check the entire list? I haven't seen it, but I'd guess that it contains more than just a handful of sites, so checking the entire list could be a pretty hefty job. There is no surprise that the list contains child porn sites, I mean, that's the publicly stated goal of the list. The problem with such a list is that there may be certain sites sneaked into the list by the government, despite having no connection to child porn, simply because the government deems them unfit for general consumption. Since the list is confidential, it is in practice not possible to appeal inclusion into the list, since nobody outside the government and the ISPs know what it contains.
Personally, I'd rather get the child pornographers prosecuted and their sites taken offline, than having a secret list unavailable to public scrutiny, of sites that all ISPs simply block. It's the difference between taking care of a problem and pretending that it doesn't exist. That the secret list can be silently expanded to other topics that the government doesn't like, with the public having no say in the matter, is also a significant problem since it allows for unchecked censorship by the government.
Do unordered lists like that look odd to anyone else? This only happens to me on Slashdot, but whenever anyone uses the UL and LI tags here, it ends up putting annoying greyish bars smack in the middle of the list.
It does to me, specifically the gray bars that appear below (on the z-axis) the list items.
and morally justifiable at best (i.e. western governments are doing it too)
I beg to differ. That western governments do something does not mean that it is morally justifiable. Case in point: The United States and torture. Torture is an appalling act, but the US government did it anyway, despite being a "western government". Thus it does not follow that something is morally justifiable just because western governments do it too. QED
unfortunately in order to wield that power you need to teach a sufficient proportion of the consumer base why something like DRM is bad...
Fortunately, the media companies have provided some help in teaching average consumers the pitfalls of DRM. Case in point: The shutdown of DRM license servers. In an instant, heaps of music became unusable, and that really burned some people who had acquired significant libraries of DRMed music tracks. Some people cannot be taught not to do something that can hurt them, they must feel the pain themselves before they really get the lesson.