We don't make the entire physical world child-friendly; we build playgrounds and schools and other kid-specific places for them so they can enjoy themselves safely, and adults can do the wide variety of things that adults do everywhere else that eight-year-olds probably shouldn't.
Actually... outside of the bedroom (or whereever you prefer to do it), what do adults do that kids should be excluded from?
Work? Kids can flip burgers, punch prices into a cash register and make change, put crates in a truck. Maybe you shouldn't let them near the hard drugs (doctor), your client's confidential data (lawyer) or your company's unreleased designs (EEngineer) or code (developer). Maybe kids don't benefit in great amounts from seeing knowledge-intensive work if they don't have enough background knowledge.
But I think exposing kids to the adult world and showing them what it is peoeple (er, adults) do for a living would teach kids a lot about the world; let them intern where applicable. A large dose of primary experience is probably good for their education. Why don't school do that?
One answer, according to Paul Graham, is that the real (not stated) purpose of school is to keep kids off the street: http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html
Another answer, by John Taylor Gatto, is that school is deliberately meant to hinder us, see http://www.cantrip.org/gatto.html/Off-topic (But I can sustain the karma burn)
The problem is particularly bad with Ubuntu: it can't be "the Linux for the rest of us" and bleeding edge, because "the rest of us" don't want to be obliged to upgrade our whole OS every 6 months just to get the latest OpenOffice.
I think you're right in your hypothesis about non-nerds not wanting to upgrade the OS to update applications. Heck, ISTR upgrades not even being supported; you have to reinstall your OS every 6 months on the Ubuntu bandwagon.
Here's a better idea - go for more stability, not less. If Linux is maturing as a desktop OS then there shouldn't be a need for 6 monthly, let alone daily, updates. Here's a better idea: [plan]
Here I start to disagree. I think your goals are absolutely wonderful---stability for end-users is a great thing.
However, it seems to me one ought to ask oneself "how does software become stable?" in order to bring that about. It also seems to be that the answer must include---though this is not a complete story---testing on a lot of different hardware, and in a lot of different software interactions.
The best way I can think of doing this is by letting all the VERY_LARGE_VALUE_OF_N use the bleeding-edge less-tested versions if they want to, and somehow record for the packages how thoroughly tested the software is.
I mean... in order to fix software, someone has to first discover that it's broken.
The way I've always understood nondeterministic Turing machines is that they are an idealized model of computation where you in essence have unbounded parallelism.
Can you formalise this?
I know you can define NP in two equivalent ways: as the languages of either (1) non-deterministic machines making polynomially many transitions along every computation path; or (2) deterministic polynomial-time machines which verify polynomially sized solution candidates to a given instance.
I'm not sure how parallelism enters the picture. I know of parallelism relating to NC, Nick's Class (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NC_(complexity)) which can equivalently be defined in terms of polylog-depth poly-size (acyclic) boolean circuits.
Yes, although we're not saying "This takes O(f(n)) turing machine transitions" nor "This takes O(g(n)) instructions on an abstract pointer machine" nor "This takes O(h(n)) x86 cpu cycles".
In this situation you have a massive number of small processors limited in the data of the problem they have access to, compared to the traditional model of computation with one actor.
I conjecture this to be turing-simulatable with polynomial overhead. If they can do it in polynomial time, so can my turing machine. Which would prove P = NP. Which would be big news.
Thing is, companies keep building out to these different standards precisely because consumers let themselves be locked into one or the other, and didn't demand portability.
Free markets do a lot of things right. Here's a case, in my opinion, of them not working so well: consumers often fail to understand complex issues.
Understanding that you should pick the ice cream that says "vanilla" on the tin if you prefer that flavor to chocolate is something everyone can do, and the producers and retailers organize themselves according to the amounts demanded across the consumer base.
Understanding the long-term benefits of buying an open vs. closed platform---or more abstractly, buying a higher-level plan economy vs. free market---is not something people do well. Either that, or they prefer the benefits of closed systems more than I do:-)
For example, Microsoft likes to say that Windows is an open platform---anyone can write software that goes on top of it and Microsoft can do nothing to control people. The game console market functions differently; there's a lot of top-down control from the platform provider. Similarly for the Apple App Store.
Similar stories can be told about telecommunication and electricity: someone should operate the wires that make up the basic transmission system. Someone should deliver stuff via those wires (joules, voice calls, datagrams). If you own the base "platform" (wires), you might use that to control what the wires are used for.
People seem to prefer the iPhone to Android and Android to N900 (and the Freerunner). They like gaming consoles. They seem to be annoyed about incompatibilities and Little Dongly Things (http://www.douglasadams.com/dna/980707-03-a.html) but not do much about it in terms of their purchasing decisions. They tend to discount the long-term advantages of promoting open platforms and the greater amount of innovation that tend to happen on top of them. If people truly have short-term preferences, they're not wrong to do so, but see also Dan Gilbert and Daniel Kahnemann's TED(.com) talks.
(lesson from DNA: three things had to align; his preferences, the sales rep's understanding of those preferences and the sales rep's understanding of the product. By asking "are you sure?", you're not aligning any of those, you're just making the sales rep even more certain of their wrong conclusion. Instead, ask them directly about their observations, or ask about the same things in different terms, or ask about the negation; i.e. "does it have a power adapter? How does it look? How does it work?" Might help you do family tech support over the phone as well)/ramble (sorry)
China is already at war with us, but it is an economic war.
Now, I may be hopelessly naive and/or grossly underinformed, but here goes:
How do you know they're not just trying to achieve economic growth for the benefit of the selectorate*?
* The selectorate is the group of people who selects the leaders and give them their power. Hey look, that sentence works without the s as well (electorate [...] elects [...]), and the electorate _is_ the selectorate in a democracy. In a military dictatorship, the selectorate is a small cabinate of generals.
Uhm... it's a series of chained if-then-else statements. It's essentially the same as a firewall: does this packet match this rule? no? Then go to next rule (default: deliver).
The only non-obvious part (IMNSHO) is the insight---which we haven't, AFAICT, tested and verified, so the jury is still out---that there is a _market_ for this as a user-facing feature. This insight is a marketing insight, not a software insight.
if we're going to allow them at all, then this seems like one we should allow.
Again, I disagree. To explain why, I need us to take a step back and look at the point of having a patent system---it's a legal tool similar to (physical) property rights which is used to make us as materially prosperous as can be.
Having property rights and subsequently having cops and courts to catch bad guys who would steal our stuff lets us _not_ spend steel making locks and _not_ spend our time guarding our stuff. The steel and time can be converted to consumer goods; those goods would be lost without property rights.
Some ideas are expensive to have but cheap to copy and turn into products (or product features). The financial return one can expect from investing in the process of trying to have ideas might be negative (or less than one, depending on whether you have an additive or multiplicative wallet). The patent system is an attempt to fix this: by giving out temporary monopolies, they increase the return on the particular investment of trying to have (certain kinds of) ideas.
When a field contains both ideas that are cheap to have and ideas that are expensive to have, giving patents to all ideas in that field means one player gets to exclude other players from using the cheap ideas---or at least the cheap ideas that player got to have first. With enough big players, you get cross-licensing and the ability of the big players to shut out all the small players.
Ask any economist and they'll say (I think) that having small and medium-sized players in any sector of the economy is vital.
Software is a field with both cheap and expensive ideas. Software-wise, this patent is an idea that's cheap to have. Knowing that it's an idea people want to use is not a kind of ideas I'm familiar with, so I can't comment on whether it's a cheap or expensive idea to have.
Some of my local pizza shops put their menu on-line. This sounds like a good idea; if I'm going to order a pizza, I want to know (and decide!) what's on it, and I don't store menus (I'm a bad enough pack rat without them). But no pizza shop I know of has a patent on putting a menu on-line. The first pizza shop to do is has of course discovered a novel use of HTML, which is bound to be profitable: you'll out-compete those who don't do it. Should pizza shops be able to take out a patent on publishing their menus on the web?
I think this idea is similar. I think an economy without patents contains enough incentives to come up with this idea. It takes time imitating (reimplementing) your competitors' ideas. The first-to-market gap might be enough time to earn back what was spent discovering this idea---which I'm sure is a team of market analysts, two senior developers and a UI design comittee, sitting around for years going "how could we make our web site better? Hm..."/sarcasm
TL;DR: this patent is bullshit. Listen to Michele Boldrin for an explanation of why, at http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2009/05/boldrin_on_inte.html. You can read his book there as well (for free!) and I can recommend EconTalk if your podcatcher is hungry for feed(s).
If their talented engineers are by-and-large leaving and they are by-and-large unable to hire more, they will quickly become a dying shell of a mediocre company.
So you're saying their fall started when they got too close to Sun? Sound like Icarus;-)
that doesn't mean they're not useful for encrypting traffic
That certainly depends on where you want your encrypted traffic to go.
Suppose you have (you'll never guess the names) Alice connected to Eve who is connected to Bob. Alice would like to send Bob a secret message.
She asks Eve for Bob's key. She gets back a self-signed key. She encrypts her message with this key and gives it to Eve.
Bob sees this: I'm asked for my self-signed key, so I give it out. Then I receive an encrypted message.
Eve does this: when Alice asks her for Bob's key, she asks Bob for his key. Then she gives Alice her own (Eve's) self-signed key. Then she gets an encrypted message from Alice. She decrypts it and reads it. Then she gives Bob her own (Eve's) new and different message, encrypted with Bob's key.
It requires Eve to be present when the session is initiated, but if she is the self-signed keys offer nothing. You can trust me because I made a certificate that says I'm an expert;-)
The point is they don't need to agree to the license, the GPL never forces anyone into it
You're not forced into it if you only run the code. If you redistribute the code, you are either in violation of the law or you have accepted the GPL, or the program is dual-licensed and you have accepted the other license (or multi-licensed and you accepted the nth).
In fact a case can be made that apps that include a click-through EULA of the GPL violate the GPL.
You refer to section 10, which talk about legal (not practical) restrictions.
Sure, building the software to force people to click "I accept" is a practical restriction (though not a big one), and you might argue that it goes against the spirit of the license, but---I've only seen installers that "impose" the GPL, not any other license, e.g. one with additional legal restrictions.
If a GPL'ed app had an "I accept" license nag screen that had you say you accepted the 4-clause BSD license (or some GPL-incompatible license), that would go against the spirit of the license. If these license nag screens carry legal weight, it might be against the law and license to add such a 4-clause BSD nag screen to a program.
I feel convinced that it would be legal for the copyright holder to distribute such a program under the GPL, because (s)he doesn't need permission from anyone; in particular (s)he doesn't need the permission given in the GPL.
I think that's why DRM doesn't go against the First Sale doctrine: you're allowed to try and resell DRM'ed stuff, it's just that the DRM makes your right kinda' moot. That the making-mootness-of-rights is the point of DRM seems to not matter.
You can think of licenses as permission slips or something like it; copyright law forbids you from doing some things. The GPL undoes that by giving you a "hall pass"-like conceptual token which allows you to do certain things as long as you posses that token. If you act in breach of the license, you lose the token and the hall monitor can make you pay damages or (in aggravated cases) fines.
That's how I see it, anyways. IANAL, TINLA, HAND.
I think it would be the Publishers' Guild of Ameri
on
LimeWire Lives Again
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that an infinate number of monkeys, working for an infinate amount of time will eventually recreate the works of shakespere.. does this mean the *IAA will seek to outlaw monkeys, or just the practice of giving monkeys keyboards?
I think the "*IAA" in this case is the Publishers' Guild of America, but I don't know. (I don't live in the USA, FWIW.)
[Also, starting a sentence in the subject and continuing it in the body annoys some people. Also also, it's `infin/i/te' and `/S/hakespe/are/'. JTYMLTK]
I thought this economical system was supposed to transform individual greed into overall progress, but the more I look into it, the more broken it appears to me...
That's the general idea: by optimizing your own benefit, the optimal societal benefit arises as an emergent phenomenon. You may want to think of the economy as a large distributed algorithm. What it computes is prices and an allocation of resources which (supposedly) optimizes how well off the economic agents are.
The problem is that the system is self-contained---money can not only buy you resources you either want for their own sake ("consumer goods") or which you use to transform other resources into consumer goods ("capital"), money can also buy you changes to the system ("brib^Wlobbying").
The latter part is, as I understand it, much of what Public Choice Theory is about---how a collection of people make collective decisions. In USA, this tends to happen by the campaign contribution mechanism---the extent to which your opinion is considered is the degree to which you contribute to politicians' campaigns.
The more I look into this kind of issues, the harder it becomes to not consider them like a bug in the capitalist/free trade system.
It is in every agent's rational self-interest to rig the game in that agent's favor. Internet service providers being given local monopolies seems to fit this. Media industry influencing the FCC seems to fit it as well.
In the case of Copyrights, the idea is actually to overcome a shortcoming in free trade capitalism: if there's tremendously high fixed costs to creating a song (or book, or piece of software, or [...]) but copying the first instance is practically free and is possible by everybody who holds an instance, the agent which produces the first copy will have a barrier to entry, in that he will have to pay costs the others won't. The rational response is to provide less of the good in question than what is socially beneficial.
The remedy is the granting of a temporary monopoly, such that the maker will have monopoly rent as an incentive to create, and society will eventually be able to consume the creation in the "right" amount once the price closes in on the cost of the one additional copy.
I think currently, special interests (MPAA, RIAA, BSA) has overstated the public benefit of more new stuff vs. the public benefit of being able to use the old stuff for free---i.e. at the electricity and bandwidth cost of copying (which is close to 0 but is still positive).
That's the longwinded way of saying "I agree, copyrights are a bug [but they don't have to be]." See also Michele Boldrin's Against Intellectual Property (http://www.micheleboldrin.com/research/aim.html) and his conversation with EconTalk's Russ Roberts (http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2009/05/boldrin_on_inte.html)
Slashdot Mirror
You could say she was afraid of his wiki leaking.
I think you mean wiwi.
As a red-blodded American, I demand the right to impose my values on private parties!
I agree! Now pay the tea tax to your queen (the English one).
So thanks for helping me make my point.
One of the makers of nerd culture has passed away, and already we have people fighting.
I have a bad feeling about this...
I'm getting 100,000,000,000,000 dollars in the mail soon.
It's funny, the mails I get also talk about a "Stimulus package"
We don't make the entire physical world child-friendly; we build playgrounds and schools and other kid-specific places for them so they can enjoy themselves safely, and adults can do the wide variety of things that adults do everywhere else that eight-year-olds probably shouldn't.
Actually... outside of the bedroom (or whereever you prefer to do it), what do adults do that kids should be excluded from?
Work? Kids can flip burgers, punch prices into a cash register and make change, put crates in a truck. Maybe you shouldn't let them near the hard drugs (doctor), your client's confidential data (lawyer) or your company's unreleased designs (EEngineer) or code (developer). Maybe kids don't benefit in great amounts from seeing knowledge-intensive work if they don't have enough background knowledge.
But I think exposing kids to the adult world and showing them what it is peoeple (er, adults) do for a living would teach kids a lot about the world; let them intern where applicable. A large dose of primary experience is probably good for their education. Why don't school do that?
One answer, according to Paul Graham, is that the real (not stated) purpose of school is to keep kids off the street: http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html
Another answer, by John Taylor Gatto, is that school is deliberately meant to hinder us, see http://www.cantrip.org/gatto.html /Off-topic (But I can sustain the karma burn)
I think we agree, we just describe "Plan B" in different terms.
The best way I can think of doing this is by letting all the VERY_LARGE_VALUE_OF_N use the bleeding-edge less-tested versions.
You misquoted my " if they want to." as just "."
The problem is particularly bad with Ubuntu: it can't be "the Linux for the rest of us" and bleeding edge, because "the rest of us" don't want to be obliged to upgrade our whole OS every 6 months just to get the latest OpenOffice.
I think you're right in your hypothesis about non-nerds not wanting to upgrade the OS to update applications. Heck, ISTR upgrades not even being supported; you have to reinstall your OS every 6 months on the Ubuntu bandwagon.
Here's a better idea - go for more stability, not less. If Linux is maturing as a desktop OS then there shouldn't be a need for 6 monthly, let alone daily, updates. Here's a better idea: [plan]
Here I start to disagree. I think your goals are absolutely wonderful---stability for end-users is a great thing.
However, it seems to me one ought to ask oneself "how does software become stable?" in order to bring that about. It also seems to be that the answer must include---though this is not a complete story---testing on a lot of different hardware, and in a lot of different software interactions.
The best way I can think of doing this is by letting all the VERY_LARGE_VALUE_OF_N use the bleeding-edge less-tested versions if they want to, and somehow record for the packages how thoroughly tested the software is.
I mean... in order to fix software, someone has to first discover that it's broken.
[from parent's signature] Microsoft is a marketing company, not a software company. Apple is a marketing company, not a hardware company.
What kind of company does that not make Google?
The way I've always understood nondeterministic Turing machines is that they are an idealized model of computation where you in essence have unbounded parallelism.
Can you formalise this?
I know you can define NP in two equivalent ways: as the languages of either (1) non-deterministic machines making polynomially many transitions along every computation path; or (2) deterministic polynomial-time machines which verify polynomially sized solution candidates to a given instance.
I'm not sure how parallelism enters the picture. I know of parallelism relating to NC, Nick's Class (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NC_(complexity)) which can equivalently be defined in terms of polylog-depth poly-size (acyclic) boolean circuits.
Your comments?
Obligatory XKCD ref: http://xkcd.com/619/
I'm expecting Linux SE ;-)
Would standard big O notation even matter here?
Yes, although we're not saying "This takes O(f(n)) turing machine transitions" nor "This takes O(g(n)) instructions on an abstract pointer machine" nor "This takes O(h(n)) x86 cpu cycles".
In this situation you have a massive number of small processors limited in the data of the problem they have access to, compared to the traditional model of computation with one actor.
I conjecture this to be turing-simulatable with polynomial overhead. If they can do it in polynomial time, so can my turing machine. Which would prove P = NP. Which would be big news.
Thing is, companies keep building out to these different standards precisely because consumers let themselves be locked into one or the other, and didn't demand portability.
Free markets do a lot of things right. Here's a case, in my opinion, of them not working so well: consumers often fail to understand complex issues.
Understanding that you should pick the ice cream that says "vanilla" on the tin if you prefer that flavor to chocolate is something everyone can do, and the producers and retailers organize themselves according to the amounts demanded across the consumer base.
Understanding the long-term benefits of buying an open vs. closed platform---or more abstractly, buying a higher-level plan economy vs. free market---is not something people do well. Either that, or they prefer the benefits of closed systems more than I do :-)
For example, Microsoft likes to say that Windows is an open platform---anyone can write software that goes on top of it and Microsoft can do nothing to control people. The game console market functions differently; there's a lot of top-down control from the platform provider. Similarly for the Apple App Store.
Similar stories can be told about telecommunication and electricity: someone should operate the wires that make up the basic transmission system. Someone should deliver stuff via those wires (joules, voice calls, datagrams). If you own the base "platform" (wires), you might use that to control what the wires are used for.
People seem to prefer the iPhone to Android and Android to N900 (and the Freerunner). They like gaming consoles. They seem to be annoyed about incompatibilities and Little Dongly Things (http://www.douglasadams.com/dna/980707-03-a.html) but not do much about it in terms of their purchasing decisions. They tend to discount the long-term advantages of promoting open platforms and the greater amount of innovation that tend to happen on top of them. If people truly have short-term preferences, they're not wrong to do so, but see also Dan Gilbert and Daniel Kahnemann's TED(.com) talks.
(lesson from DNA: three things had to align; his preferences, the sales rep's understanding of those preferences and the sales rep's understanding of the product. By asking "are you sure?", you're not aligning any of those, you're just making the sales rep even more certain of their wrong conclusion. Instead, ask them directly about their observations, or ask about the same things in different terms, or ask about the negation; i.e. "does it have a power adapter? How does it look? How does it work?" Might help you do family tech support over the phone as well) /ramble (sorry)
you pull a new defense out of the hat near the end of the trial.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pr3sBks5o_8. 'Nuff said.
China is already at war with us, but it is an economic war.
Now, I may be hopelessly naive and/or grossly underinformed, but here goes:
How do you know they're not just trying to achieve economic growth for the benefit of the selectorate*?
* The selectorate is the group of people who selects the leaders and give them their power. Hey look, that sentence works without the s as well (electorate [...] elects [...]), and the electorate _is_ the selectorate in a democracy. In a military dictatorship, the selectorate is a small cabinate of generals.
It's just like fortune cookies. Append "with a computer" and you get a software patent.
In that case, I would like to patent adjusting finance, making budgets and improving one's standing with a computer. Jonas 1 - Net banking 0.
(I got that from http://walikeetz.blogspot.com/2006/01/dirty-dirty-fortune-cookie.html)
Not (really) obvious
Uhm... it's a series of chained if-then-else statements. It's essentially the same as a firewall: does this packet match this rule? no? Then go to next rule (default: deliver).
The only non-obvious part (IMNSHO) is the insight---which we haven't, AFAICT, tested and verified, so the jury is still out---that there is a _market_ for this as a user-facing feature. This insight is a marketing insight, not a software insight.
if we're going to allow them at all, then this seems like one we should allow.
Again, I disagree. To explain why, I need us to take a step back and look at the point of having a patent system---it's a legal tool similar to (physical) property rights which is used to make us as materially prosperous as can be.
Having property rights and subsequently having cops and courts to catch bad guys who would steal our stuff lets us _not_ spend steel making locks and _not_ spend our time guarding our stuff. The steel and time can be converted to consumer goods; those goods would be lost without property rights.
Some ideas are expensive to have but cheap to copy and turn into products (or product features). The financial return one can expect from investing in the process of trying to have ideas might be negative (or less than one, depending on whether you have an additive or multiplicative wallet). The patent system is an attempt to fix this: by giving out temporary monopolies, they increase the return on the particular investment of trying to have (certain kinds of) ideas.
When a field contains both ideas that are cheap to have and ideas that are expensive to have, giving patents to all ideas in that field means one player gets to exclude other players from using the cheap ideas---or at least the cheap ideas that player got to have first. With enough big players, you get cross-licensing and the ability of the big players to shut out all the small players.
Ask any economist and they'll say (I think) that having small and medium-sized players in any sector of the economy is vital.
Software is a field with both cheap and expensive ideas. Software-wise, this patent is an idea that's cheap to have. Knowing that it's an idea people want to use is not a kind of ideas I'm familiar with, so I can't comment on whether it's a cheap or expensive idea to have.
Some of my local pizza shops put their menu on-line. This sounds like a good idea; if I'm going to order a pizza, I want to know (and decide!) what's on it, and I don't store menus (I'm a bad enough pack rat without them). But no pizza shop I know of has a patent on putting a menu on-line. The first pizza shop to do is has of course discovered a novel use of HTML, which is bound to be profitable: you'll out-compete those who don't do it. Should pizza shops be able to take out a patent on publishing their menus on the web?
I think this idea is similar. I think an economy without patents contains enough incentives to come up with this idea. It takes time imitating (reimplementing) your competitors' ideas. The first-to-market gap might be enough time to earn back what was spent discovering this idea---which I'm sure is a team of market analysts, two senior developers and a UI design comittee, sitting around for years going "how could we make our web site better? Hm..." /sarcasm
TL;DR: this patent is bullshit. Listen to Michele Boldrin for an explanation of why, at http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2009/05/boldrin_on_inte.html. You can read his book there as well (for free!) and I can recommend EconTalk if your podcatcher is hungry for feed(s).
If their talented engineers are by-and-large leaving and they are by-and-large unable to hire more, they will quickly become a dying shell of a mediocre company.
So you're saying their fall started when they got too close to Sun? Sound like Icarus ;-)
Now while we're at it, can I can a 'connect phone, run program, press button and you're done' solution for rooting my HTC Wildfire?
8 steps to root on the N900:
(1-5) main menu -- App manager -- Category:All -- gainroot -- install
(6-8) main menu -- xterm -- "sudo gainroot"
Works fine. You can also install custom Linux kernels from the package manager to get wifi-tethering (which I have done, and it works fine).
You can reek plenty of havoc.
Your spelling stinks ;-)
(Sorry)
that doesn't mean they're not useful for encrypting traffic
That certainly depends on where you want your encrypted traffic to go.
Suppose you have (you'll never guess the names) Alice connected to Eve who is connected to Bob. Alice would like to send Bob a secret message.
She asks Eve for Bob's key. She gets back a self-signed key. She encrypts her message with this key and gives it to Eve.
Bob sees this: I'm asked for my self-signed key, so I give it out. Then I receive an encrypted message.
Eve does this: when Alice asks her for Bob's key, she asks Bob for his key. Then she gives Alice her own (Eve's) self-signed key. Then she gets an encrypted message from Alice. She decrypts it and reads it. Then she gives Bob her own (Eve's) new and different message, encrypted with Bob's key.
It requires Eve to be present when the session is initiated, but if she is the self-signed keys offer nothing. You can trust me because I made a certificate that says I'm an expert ;-)
The point is they don't need to agree to the license, the GPL never forces anyone into it
You're not forced into it if you only run the code. If you redistribute the code, you are either in violation of the law or you have accepted the GPL, or the program is dual-licensed and you have accepted the other license (or multi-licensed and you accepted the nth).
In fact a case can be made that apps that include a click-through EULA of the GPL violate the GPL.
You refer to section 10, which talk about legal (not practical) restrictions.
Sure, building the software to force people to click "I accept" is a practical restriction (though not a big one), and you might argue that it goes against the spirit of the license, but---I've only seen installers that "impose" the GPL, not any other license, e.g. one with additional legal restrictions.
If a GPL'ed app had an "I accept" license nag screen that had you say you accepted the 4-clause BSD license (or some GPL-incompatible license), that would go against the spirit of the license. If these license nag screens carry legal weight, it might be against the law and license to add such a 4-clause BSD nag screen to a program.
I feel convinced that it would be legal for the copyright holder to distribute such a program under the GPL, because (s)he doesn't need permission from anyone; in particular (s)he doesn't need the permission given in the GPL.
I think that's why DRM doesn't go against the First Sale doctrine: you're allowed to try and resell DRM'ed stuff, it's just that the DRM makes your right kinda' moot. That the making-mootness-of-rights is the point of DRM seems to not matter.
You can think of licenses as permission slips or something like it; copyright law forbids you from doing some things. The GPL undoes that by giving you a "hall pass"-like conceptual token which allows you to do certain things as long as you posses that token. If you act in breach of the license, you lose the token and the hall monitor can make you pay damages or (in aggravated cases) fines.
That's how I see it, anyways. IANAL, TINLA, HAND.
that an infinate number of monkeys, working for an infinate amount of time will eventually recreate the works of shakespere.. does this mean the *IAA will seek to outlaw monkeys, or just the practice of giving monkeys keyboards?
I think the "*IAA" in this case is the Publishers' Guild of America, but I don't know. (I don't live in the USA, FWIW.)
[Also, starting a sentence in the subject and continuing it in the body annoys some people. Also also, it's `infin/i/te' and `/S/hakespe/are/'. JTYMLTK]
I'd like to preserve your sig (as I currently see it) alongside your post:
No. This punk is nothing more than a digital brownshirt, trying to silence those who he disagrees with.
Sorry, but silencing others is NOT protected as free speech.
--
Simply disagreeing with a comment is not a valid reason to mark it down.
--CmdrTaco
Quite fitting :-)
I thought this economical system was supposed to transform individual greed into overall progress, but the more I look into it, the more broken it appears to me...
That's the general idea: by optimizing your own benefit, the optimal societal benefit arises as an emergent phenomenon. You may want to think of the economy as a large distributed algorithm. What it computes is prices and an allocation of resources which (supposedly) optimizes how well off the economic agents are.
The problem is that the system is self-contained---money can not only buy you resources you either want for their own sake ("consumer goods") or which you use to transform other resources into consumer goods ("capital"), money can also buy you changes to the system ("brib^Wlobbying").
The latter part is, as I understand it, much of what Public Choice Theory is about---how a collection of people make collective decisions. In USA, this tends to happen by the campaign contribution mechanism---the extent to which your opinion is considered is the degree to which you contribute to politicians' campaigns.
The more I look into this kind of issues, the harder it becomes to not consider them like a bug in the capitalist/free trade system.
It is in every agent's rational self-interest to rig the game in that agent's favor. Internet service providers being given local monopolies seems to fit this. Media industry influencing the FCC seems to fit it as well.
In the case of Copyrights, the idea is actually to overcome a shortcoming in free trade capitalism: if there's tremendously high fixed costs to creating a song (or book, or piece of software, or [...]) but copying the first instance is practically free and is possible by everybody who holds an instance, the agent which produces the first copy will have a barrier to entry, in that he will have to pay costs the others won't. The rational response is to provide less of the good in question than what is socially beneficial.
The remedy is the granting of a temporary monopoly, such that the maker will have monopoly rent as an incentive to create, and society will eventually be able to consume the creation in the "right" amount once the price closes in on the cost of the one additional copy.
For a more in-depth analysis, see Liebowitz: http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/IntellectualProperty.html
I think currently, special interests (MPAA, RIAA, BSA) has overstated the public benefit of more new stuff vs. the public benefit of being able to use the old stuff for free---i.e. at the electricity and bandwidth cost of copying (which is close to 0 but is still positive).
That's the longwinded way of saying "I agree, copyrights are a bug [but they don't have to be]." See also Michele Boldrin's Against Intellectual Property (http://www.micheleboldrin.com/research/aim.html) and his conversation with EconTalk's Russ Roberts (http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2009/05/boldrin_on_inte.html)
Hope this helps :-)