It's an interesting thought experiment, to be sure, but it's really of no consequence in the real world. Linus' kernel doesn't have spyware. And we may place a fairly high probability on the prediction that it never will contain spyware. That being the case, this is a purely hypothetical issue.
Nah, they're an MS subsidiary in effect. Ask Novelle, and Symantec, and lots of other companies. The BSA catches folks pirating a wide range of software, but their 'remedy' is typically to pay MS a ton and forget the other vendors.
They come standard with wireless mesh and connection sharing, IIRC. The idea being that the school can get at least one of them connected, then they all are. Things they all need still only need to be downloaded once, then shared peer to peer over the much faster wireless connection, so it should be quite useful.
The books have one of the deepest 'moral' messages you'll find in any literature of any time or place. Tolkien knew how to write a good story first, and let the morality play aspect be implicit, instead of bashing the reader on the head with it repeatedly - and he most definitely didn't like to talk about it, of course he felt those that were ready to see it would see it without being told, and those that didn't would never see it no matter what he said - that doesn't mean it's not there.
The movie wasn't, and couldn't be, as good as the book in that respect. It's a much more limited medium. But the message is still there, if you look closely, pared away to a few seconds here and there, but not done away with entirely. And for that reason it may well still be worth viewing in a decade or two. Perhaps the message will even be more obvious, in retrospect, or at least, less difficult to face.
Quite the opposite, it reinforces classical ideals.
Sadly, in this day and age classical ideals are revolutionary challenges to societal norms and perceptions.
I think that our own history gives this statement a significant contrast. The railroads, the various land concerns (ranchers, loggers, etc) made their employees into indentured servants in a way that modern companies can only dream of.
To the contrary, although these events are conventionally painted that way, the truth of the matter is quite the opposite. Take the railroads, for instance. What was their power based on? State sanction and favour, simple as that. These were the original corporate welfare-whores. They bought all the right lobbyists, gave all the right congressmen donations, and got exclusive contracts, huge grants of land, and all sorts of legal carve-outs in return. That's what enabled them to become abusive violators of human rights.
has never been addicted to anything, and never had to have friends, family and loved ones suffer with the side effects of that addiction.
Actually I started smoking tobacco when I was 13, and nearly two decades later, addicted to the tune of three packs a day, finally realised I had to quit or it would kill me. Several of my childhood friends got themselves dead, involved with other addictive substances, and many others close to me got pretty screwed up, though fortunately not dead, for the same reasons. That's a pretty good benchmark of just how wrong you are.
I've read your other posts through this thread, and it's all the same crap. You want someone to save you from having to take responsibility for your own actions, and you don't give a damn that means enslaving everyone of us as well. You know, if you want to have someone else tell you what to do and think for you and generally take care of you, fine. But don't expect the rest of us to pay for your lack of responsibility, either with our money or our liberty.
Better yet, why not try acting like a free man and taking responsibility for your own actions? Spend your time improving yourself instead of whining about how nothing's your fault and someone should have stopped you? You never know, if you tried it you might find you like it.
We allow political power to define the playing field. This means the larger actors can afford to buy legislatures and get the economic rules rewritten in their favour. And so of course they do. It's much less work and more money than actually competing.
And what kind of non-political solutions are there? Honestly, I'd love to hear of them.
The smaller and more powerless the political machine can be made, the less the market can be distorted towards the favoured players, the better chance the rest of us have to compete. This is both political (in a sense) and not (in a sense) because it does focus on politics as a prerequisite to real change, but it's radically apolitical - the goal is not to take over the machinery of state and use it to impose new, different distortions in favour of the formerly oppressed class, but simply to weaken that machine to the point where it no longer matters who controls it.
And whether any of us like it or not, the politicians - from the local level on up - are our only buffer against the corporate greed;
I think that sentence represents quite clearly an extremely common, but fundamentally mistaken, view of the relationship.
The politicians are never a buffer against corporate greed. They're its creators, sustainers, and enablers.
Consider, just for a moment, that the corporation itself owes its existence to the political realm. Corporations are not natural entities. They originated in letters patent issued by the Monarch. Today the legislature plays his role. Without political power distorting the marketplace there would be no corporations.
And then where would the minimum wage worker would be without the raise?
Employed?
Seriously, there's a huge institutional imbalance between labour and capital, but papering over it with minimum wage laws and welfare systems does nothing to address the root problem. It just places more and more people in a position where their survival is dependent on politics. Good for the politicians, bad for everyone else.
And so what? Why is it any of their business what you choose to put in your body? Whether it's meth or tide with bleach or patté (banned in many places now, ISYN,) it's no ones business but your own. Forgetting that basic principle and accepting the nanny state and the endless 'wars' (the war on (some) poverty, the war on (some) drugs, the war on (some) terrorists) is what's gotten us into this mess.
So far as the original posters question, no, 1984 didn't come late. 1984 was simply 1948, with a bit of embellishment. Today is even worse than you think.
You are correct in one small point, I did scan the dif of v2 and v3 in haste, and miss the significant change. However, it is far from fixing the problem here, and you are also misinterpreting what I said badly very badly.
This part is a red herring. The same is true for GPLv2. Do you think copyright violations go away magically because they are violations? No, they require the copyright holder to first notice the violation, including collecting some sort of evidence of genuine violation, then commence some sort of legal action, usually involving the sending of a cease and desist notice.
Absolutely, it's the same under v2 or v3. That was my point, which seems to have flown right over your head. It's the same in any case of copyright violation. It means incurring substantial costs. If the enforcement effort cannot generate revenue at least equal to those costs, the world being what it is, enforcement will be rare indeed.
Under v2, however, in the scenario I gave, it's unambiguous and unarguable that the license terminated on the shipment of the first appliance - five months BEFORE the copyright holder was even aware of the problem. That means a court may be asked for damages for the entire lot, and all profit made by the violation might be forfeited. There's no room for argument and games. This is why folks like Harold Welte can afford to do enforcement actions and ensure the rest of us the access to source code that the GPL requires we be granted. He says 'comply with the license and reïmburse me my expenses and we'll call it good, otherwise see you in court tomorrow' and the violators lawyers say 'don't go to court, there's nothing we can argue here' so the case gets resolved.
Under v3, even with the change to the language, it can be argued that violators are in the clear as long as their violations are 60 days old before they are noticed. It can also be argued that violations prior to license termination are not actionable, or are actionable at a reduced level only. This ambiguity is NOT good for enforcement efforts. It gives violators lawyers room to argue and delay and play all kinds of games in court - just the encouragement they need to go there, instead of complying immediately. It may 'encourage' corporate use of GPL code yes, but we're talking about use in violation of its terms, which is not something that needs to be encouraged. There's quite enough of that going on already, thanks.
So, I take your software, modify it a little to run on my embedded hardware appliance, sell the appliance with no mention of your software or the GPL. I sell it for 6 months, then phase in the new model, which is similar but not the same. Five months into the production of the first one, you, the author of the GPL code I'm misusing, get a tip about it. You have to go BUY one my appliances, which can be a significant outlay of money, then investigate it carefully, a significant outlay of your valuable time, before you can even be certain I did use your code. You're in the hole here, and you still have to give me 60 days to come into compliance before you can terminate the license and have any leverage at all with me. So, great, 30 days later, on schedule, I cease production of that model. You're out a good deal of time and money on the case, and have no way to recoup it. And if you suspect my new model might be similarly infringing, you've got to go back to step one and go buy it and spend time proving your case again.
Not to mention, in some jurisdictions, if you wait 60 days after becoming aware of the violation to file with a court for an injunction, you are no longer eligible to be granted an injunction.
The way this works now, under GPL v2, is great. The license terminates automatically. When copyright holders go to the time and expense of determining that a product infringes, they have the needed leverage to recoup those costs because of this. Under v3, they won't have that anymore. That will spell the end of enforcement activities by the vast majority of copyright holders, who simply don't have the time and money to do this with no hope of being able to recoup their costs. Take a look at gpl-violations.org. He's had a great deal of success enforcing his copyrights, getting the violators to reïmburse his expenses and come into compliance quickly, because he has a nice lever on them. GPL v3, as now drafted, takes that lever away.
MySQL owns the code they dual license. They're free to under it under whatever terms they like. Same for Trolltech and many others. If they decide to go to GPLv3 that won't affect their ability to offer the same code under a different license at all. In fact, I suspect they'll be in a hurry to switch to v3, as to whatever degree it's more restrictive of commercial use (I don't think it is at all, but that seems to be the impression people are getting, and in business perception is often more important than reality) that would just make it more likely that companies buy their commercial license rather than using it for free under the GPL.
The Apache and (modified) BSD licenses in common usage are one-way compatible to GPL v2. That will remain true with v3.
Honestly, most of the changes people are focusing on are inconsequential. For the most part v3 just clarifies things that are already in v2. Even tivoisation is probably illegal under v2, v3 just makes it absolutely clear so that they copyright holders will no longer have the prospect of a long and expensive court case to prove it.
The one really scary clause in v3 seems to be the one that everyone overlooks. The license termination clause looks rather toothless in comparison to GPL2, and, outside of the guy that runs the GPL violations web site, no one seems to be paying much attention to that.
They could just drop in a patched firefox exectutable... or whatever. The problem here is that the original exploit gets write access. No amount of patching over that problem will make a system that allows the initial exploit secure. Just slower and more bloated.
Pretty much. It may be possible for the firefox developers to block this on their end, by inserting some kludges for the windows builds, but the exploit itself is an exploit of Windows/IE, and won't affect Firefox on a sane system. (Not even on Windows, if IE is thoroughly removed and a sane email program used.)
Innocent until proven guilty only applies to criminal charges, not civil suits.
No, actually that's not true. The plaintiff in a civil case has the burden of proof. They just have a slightly lower standard of proof. 'Preponderence of evidence' rather than 'beyond a reasonable doubt.'
Strangely, nowthatsfuckedup.com (linked from the second link on that search, at least at the moment) is now directed to the polk county sherrif's office. A bit strange...
At any rate, anyone want to grab some karma by posting instructions for making the accessible search the default search in firefox?
I don't think that's exactly true. Notice that they do NOT rank themselves highly on their own accessible search. They aren't cheating here. They do have some problems, but every indication is that they'll be fixing them, not obfuscating like the competition would do.
I don't know why you say you can't determine the geneology of the fossil. There are clear morphological differences, and the burials are at different sites. If they weren't completely different species, I'd expect that you'd see some clear convergence, morphologically, considering the extraordinary time period we're talking about they should probably have converged completely by the end if there was any interbreeding at all - we are talking *thousands* of generations. But you just don't see that. They're every bit as distinct morphologically in the late period of the overlap as they were 50ky earlier.
So far as Canis, without commenting on some of the more farflung species that are sometimes assigned to it that I am not personally very knowledgeable about, I'll comment just on the divide between wolves and domesticated dogs, as that's something I'm very familiar with. And yes, it's very debateable whether they should be considered different species, as they *can* interbreed without hybridisation. But if that were the end of the story, there would be no room for debate - they'd be the same species. Fact is it's more complicated than that. Although they can interbreed, there are very serious behavioural barriers to it, and knowledgeable and determined human intervention is required for it to happen. Their mating cycles are strongly determinative and almost completely incompatible, and even on the rare instances when they overlap, the responses just aren't in tune - the wolf will sooner kill the dog than mate with it. I'm not aware of any instances where grey wolves and domesticated dogs have interbred in the wild. It's a LOT of work to get them to do so in captivity. Red wolves and coyotes are a good deal easier to cross-breed, but it's still extremely uncommon.
Still, show me two populations of these canines in close proximity for a century or more and it's very likely you'll find some evidence of interbreeding - morphological convergence even if I don't have the means to do DNA testing. Dog/coyote interbreeding in the wild, rare as it is, has been known to happen for a long time. Two human populations side by side for 50k years with no such evidence just seems utterly impossible to me, unless they really were completely separate species - much further apart than a domesticated dog and a grey wolf.
I have always had trouble understanding why some scientists flatly deny that interbreeding between Neanderthals and modern humans would have even been possible... It would seem to me that Neanderthals and modern humans probably could interbreed, in light of what history tells us about human nature it would be strange if they didn't
That's exactly why many don't buy it, actually. We know they lived basically side by side for tens of thousands of years in many places - in one location in particular for over 50,000 years. If the two populations were able to interbreed, had that kind of long-term opportunity to do so, and didn't, that would in fact be a lot more than strange. It's just not credible at all, knowing what we do of human behaviour.
Yet, with all that exposure, and many many datapoints to work with, no one's come up with any convincing indicator that it ever happened. Not even once. Therefore, it seems like a very good bet that it must have been impossible.
Slashdot Mirror
If I pay for the hardware, it's mine, however, not theirs.
It's an interesting thought experiment, to be sure, but it's really of no consequence in the real world. Linus' kernel doesn't have spyware. And we may place a fairly high probability on the prediction that it never will contain spyware. That being the case, this is a purely hypothetical issue.
Nah, they're an MS subsidiary in effect. Ask Novelle, and Symantec, and lots of other companies. The BSA catches folks pirating a wide range of software, but their 'remedy' is typically to pay MS a ton and forget the other vendors.
Why on earth would you want to do that? Enjoy the low gravity instead. Give our overworked hearts a break. Strap on your wings and fly!
They come standard with wireless mesh and connection sharing, IIRC. The idea being that the school can get at least one of them connected, then they all are. Things they all need still only need to be downloaded once, then shared peer to peer over the much faster wireless connection, so it should be quite useful.
The books have one of the deepest 'moral' messages you'll find in any literature of any time or place. Tolkien knew how to write a good story first, and let the morality play aspect be implicit, instead of bashing the reader on the head with it repeatedly - and he most definitely didn't like to talk about it, of course he felt those that were ready to see it would see it without being told, and those that didn't would never see it no matter what he said - that doesn't mean it's not there.
The movie wasn't, and couldn't be, as good as the book in that respect. It's a much more limited medium. But the message is still there, if you look closely, pared away to a few seconds here and there, but not done away with entirely. And for that reason it may well still be worth viewing in a decade or two. Perhaps the message will even be more obvious, in retrospect, or at least, less difficult to face.
Sadly, in this day and age classical ideals are revolutionary challenges to societal norms and perceptions.
To the contrary, although these events are conventionally painted that way, the truth of the matter is quite the opposite. Take the railroads, for instance. What was their power based on? State sanction and favour, simple as that. These were the original corporate welfare-whores. They bought all the right lobbyists, gave all the right congressmen donations, and got exclusive contracts, huge grants of land, and all sorts of legal carve-outs in return. That's what enabled them to become abusive violators of human rights.
They also don't want us to see the bizaare hacks they use to detect benchmarking in progress and cheat for higher grades ;)
The US forced school system was modeled on the Prussian one.
Actually I started smoking tobacco when I was 13, and nearly two decades later, addicted to the tune of three packs a day, finally realised I had to quit or it would kill me. Several of my childhood friends got themselves dead, involved with other addictive substances, and many others close to me got pretty screwed up, though fortunately not dead, for the same reasons. That's a pretty good benchmark of just how wrong you are.
I've read your other posts through this thread, and it's all the same crap. You want someone to save you from having to take responsibility for your own actions, and you don't give a damn that means enslaving everyone of us as well. You know, if you want to have someone else tell you what to do and think for you and generally take care of you, fine. But don't expect the rest of us to pay for your lack of responsibility, either with our money or our liberty.
Better yet, why not try acting like a free man and taking responsibility for your own actions? Spend your time improving yourself instead of whining about how nothing's your fault and someone should have stopped you? You never know, if you tried it you might find you like it.
We allow political power to define the playing field. This means the larger actors can afford to buy legislatures and get the economic rules rewritten in their favour. And so of course they do. It's much less work and more money than actually competing.
The smaller and more powerless the political machine can be made, the less the market can be distorted towards the favoured players, the better chance the rest of us have to compete. This is both political (in a sense) and not (in a sense) because it does focus on politics as a prerequisite to real change, but it's radically apolitical - the goal is not to take over the machinery of state and use it to impose new, different distortions in favour of the formerly oppressed class, but simply to weaken that machine to the point where it no longer matters who controls it.
I think that sentence represents quite clearly an extremely common, but fundamentally mistaken, view of the relationship.
The politicians are never a buffer against corporate greed. They're its creators, sustainers, and enablers.
Consider, just for a moment, that the corporation itself owes its existence to the political realm. Corporations are not natural entities. They originated in letters patent issued by the Monarch. Today the legislature plays his role. Without political power distorting the marketplace there would be no corporations.
Umm sure there is. Free markets don't have monopoly grants. Doh! That's the entire point!
Employed?
Seriously, there's a huge institutional imbalance between labour and capital, but papering over it with minimum wage laws and welfare systems does nothing to address the root problem. It just places more and more people in a position where their survival is dependent on politics. Good for the politicians, bad for everyone else.
And so what? Why is it any of their business what you choose to put in your body? Whether it's meth or tide with bleach or patté (banned in many places now, ISYN,) it's no ones business but your own. Forgetting that basic principle and accepting the nanny state and the endless 'wars' (the war on (some) poverty, the war on (some) drugs, the war on (some) terrorists) is what's gotten us into this mess.
So far as the original posters question, no, 1984 didn't come late. 1984 was simply 1948, with a bit of embellishment. Today is even worse than you think.
You are correct in one small point, I did scan the dif of v2 and v3 in haste, and miss the significant change. However, it is far from fixing the problem here, and you are also misinterpreting what I said badly very badly.
Absolutely, it's the same under v2 or v3. That was my point, which seems to have flown right over your head. It's the same in any case of copyright violation. It means incurring substantial costs. If the enforcement effort cannot generate revenue at least equal to those costs, the world being what it is, enforcement will be rare indeed.
Under v2, however, in the scenario I gave, it's unambiguous and unarguable that the license terminated on the shipment of the first appliance - five months BEFORE the copyright holder was even aware of the problem. That means a court may be asked for damages for the entire lot, and all profit made by the violation might be forfeited. There's no room for argument and games. This is why folks like Harold Welte can afford to do enforcement actions and ensure the rest of us the access to source code that the GPL requires we be granted. He says 'comply with the license and reïmburse me my expenses and we'll call it good, otherwise see you in court tomorrow' and the violators lawyers say 'don't go to court, there's nothing we can argue here' so the case gets resolved.
Under v3, even with the change to the language, it can be argued that violators are in the clear as long as their violations are 60 days old before they are noticed. It can also be argued that violations prior to license termination are not actionable, or are actionable at a reduced level only. This ambiguity is NOT good for enforcement efforts. It gives violators lawyers room to argue and delay and play all kinds of games in court - just the encouragement they need to go there, instead of complying immediately. It may 'encourage' corporate use of GPL code yes, but we're talking about use in violation of its terms, which is not something that needs to be encouraged. There's quite enough of that going on already, thanks.
So, I take your software, modify it a little to run on my embedded hardware appliance, sell the appliance with no mention of your software or the GPL. I sell it for 6 months, then phase in the new model, which is similar but not the same. Five months into the production of the first one, you, the author of the GPL code I'm misusing, get a tip about it. You have to go BUY one my appliances, which can be a significant outlay of money, then investigate it carefully, a significant outlay of your valuable time, before you can even be certain I did use your code. You're in the hole here, and you still have to give me 60 days to come into compliance before you can terminate the license and have any leverage at all with me. So, great, 30 days later, on schedule, I cease production of that model. You're out a good deal of time and money on the case, and have no way to recoup it. And if you suspect my new model might be similarly infringing, you've got to go back to step one and go buy it and spend time proving your case again.
Not to mention, in some jurisdictions, if you wait 60 days after becoming aware of the violation to file with a court for an injunction, you are no longer eligible to be granted an injunction.
The way this works now, under GPL v2, is great. The license terminates automatically. When copyright holders go to the time and expense of determining that a product infringes, they have the needed leverage to recoup those costs because of this. Under v3, they won't have that anymore. That will spell the end of enforcement activities by the vast majority of copyright holders, who simply don't have the time and money to do this with no hope of being able to recoup their costs. Take a look at gpl-violations.org. He's had a great deal of success enforcing his copyrights, getting the violators to reïmburse his expenses and come into compliance quickly, because he has a nice lever on them. GPL v3, as now drafted, takes that lever away.
MySQL owns the code they dual license. They're free to under it under whatever terms they like. Same for Trolltech and many others. If they decide to go to GPLv3 that won't affect their ability to offer the same code under a different license at all. In fact, I suspect they'll be in a hurry to switch to v3, as to whatever degree it's more restrictive of commercial use (I don't think it is at all, but that seems to be the impression people are getting, and in business perception is often more important than reality) that would just make it more likely that companies buy their commercial license rather than using it for free under the GPL.
The Apache and (modified) BSD licenses in common usage are one-way compatible to GPL v2. That will remain true with v3.
Honestly, most of the changes people are focusing on are inconsequential. For the most part v3 just clarifies things that are already in v2. Even tivoisation is probably illegal under v2, v3 just makes it absolutely clear so that they copyright holders will no longer have the prospect of a long and expensive court case to prove it.
The one really scary clause in v3 seems to be the one that everyone overlooks. The license termination clause looks rather toothless in comparison to GPL2, and, outside of the guy that runs the GPL violations web site, no one seems to be paying much attention to that.
They could just drop in a patched firefox exectutable... or whatever. The problem here is that the original exploit gets write access. No amount of patching over that problem will make a system that allows the initial exploit secure. Just slower and more bloated.
Pretty much. It may be possible for the firefox developers to block this on their end, by inserting some kludges for the windows builds, but the exploit itself is an exploit of Windows/IE, and won't affect Firefox on a sane system. (Not even on Windows, if IE is thoroughly removed and a sane email program used.)
Here's a rogues gallery. Should jog the memory.
No, actually that's not true. The plaintiff in a civil case has the burden of proof. They just have a slightly lower standard of proof. 'Preponderence of evidence' rather than 'beyond a reasonable doubt.'
Strangely, nowthatsfuckedup.com (linked from the second link on that search, at least at the moment) is now directed to the polk county sherrif's office. A bit strange...
At any rate, anyone want to grab some karma by posting instructions for making the accessible search the default search in firefox?
I don't think that's exactly true. Notice that they do NOT rank themselves highly on their own accessible search. They aren't cheating here. They do have some problems, but every indication is that they'll be fixing them, not obfuscating like the competition would do.
I don't know why you say you can't determine the geneology of the fossil. There are clear morphological differences, and the burials are at different sites. If they weren't completely different species, I'd expect that you'd see some clear convergence, morphologically, considering the extraordinary time period we're talking about they should probably have converged completely by the end if there was any interbreeding at all - we are talking *thousands* of generations. But you just don't see that. They're every bit as distinct morphologically in the late period of the overlap as they were 50ky earlier. So far as Canis, without commenting on some of the more farflung species that are sometimes assigned to it that I am not personally very knowledgeable about, I'll comment just on the divide between wolves and domesticated dogs, as that's something I'm very familiar with. And yes, it's very debateable whether they should be considered different species, as they *can* interbreed without hybridisation. But if that were the end of the story, there would be no room for debate - they'd be the same species. Fact is it's more complicated than that. Although they can interbreed, there are very serious behavioural barriers to it, and knowledgeable and determined human intervention is required for it to happen. Their mating cycles are strongly determinative and almost completely incompatible, and even on the rare instances when they overlap, the responses just aren't in tune - the wolf will sooner kill the dog than mate with it. I'm not aware of any instances where grey wolves and domesticated dogs have interbred in the wild. It's a LOT of work to get them to do so in captivity. Red wolves and coyotes are a good deal easier to cross-breed, but it's still extremely uncommon. Still, show me two populations of these canines in close proximity for a century or more and it's very likely you'll find some evidence of interbreeding - morphological convergence even if I don't have the means to do DNA testing. Dog/coyote interbreeding in the wild, rare as it is, has been known to happen for a long time. Two human populations side by side for 50k years with no such evidence just seems utterly impossible to me, unless they really were completely separate species - much further apart than a domesticated dog and a grey wolf.
That's exactly why many don't buy it, actually. We know they lived basically side by side for tens of thousands of years in many places - in one location in particular for over 50,000 years. If the two populations were able to interbreed, had that kind of long-term opportunity to do so, and didn't, that would in fact be a lot more than strange. It's just not credible at all, knowing what we do of human behaviour.
Yet, with all that exposure, and many many datapoints to work with, no one's come up with any convincing indicator that it ever happened. Not even once. Therefore, it seems like a very good bet that it must have been impossible.