If you get a license and then don't follow the terms, the copyright holder (or their agent) can sue you for breach of contract - but (again) copyright law says *nothing* about this.
Slashdot reported on a GPL-violator that tried to make that argument in court a while ago. I don't remember how it turned out, but I think it was scoffed at by the majority of open source people. The company's argument relied on the notion that since the software was being given away at no cost, the project lost no money when the company violated their license.
Why, what changed? Are you basing this entirely on a slashdot article? Because I remember reading Suse's EULA in 2005 before any of this Microsoft nonsense and it still looked ridiculous for a project based on open source work. I didn't rtfa, but if that benchmark line refers to the prohibition against publishing benchmarks of the distro, along with a grant of automatic permission to reciprocate against any company that violates this clause, then this is very old news.
You hit that on the nail. I had plenty of/. time while I was in school and before I started my summer job. Now I'm resigned to trying to catch up on the weekend before I fall asleep at 9 PM. Real life sucks.
My grandfather, who was an electrical engineer, bought me a 200-in-1 kit when I was a kid, and I had a lot of fun with it. Some of the projects were a bit advanced for me, and I never understood how some of them worked even if I could assemble them, but it sure did encourage experimentation. You could do a lot with those things.
I also had a 150-in-1 and 300-in-1, but the 200-in-1 was my favorite by far.
One time I tried to test the remaining strength of the batteries by pressing a Duracell tester across the terminals they were connected to on the kit, and almost instantly burnt my fingers. Somehow the Duracell people thought it was a good idea to encourage people to short circuit their batteries with what was basically a bare strip of metal. Luckily we had an allo cactus in the house to treat it. So one way or another I guess you can't help but learn with a kit like that at your disposal.
Thank you for blasting the guy who felt it necessary to add the correlationisnotcausation tag. Those kinds of comments demonstrate a sort of preemptive ignorance.
Meh, I downloaded the demo of Savage 2 and it's unplayable due to a shader glitch between the game and ATI's fglrx drivers. The character models end up not being rendered. This is a known bug listed on their forums and there is no workaround.
I kinda consider that a blocker against the game even being released, much less being listed as one of the best (unless the others really suck).
Here's to hoping that they patch it to not require shaders, or that radeonhd adds support for my r600 card.
You're presuming that I tried to add an exception. Why would I necessarily want to do that without viewing the certificate first?
> It actually *forces* you to
It takes four mouse clicks to view the certificate. It'd be nice to get that down to one.
When Firefox blocks a popup, it doesn't let me view the window just one time. It can only keep track of absolutes, and either I allow a site or I don't. Why should I have known that an SSL exception would be any different, and why does the fact that it is excuse mozilla's poor UI design?
I agree there's a lot of pseudo skepticism as you call it, but I'm pessimistic about the individual's ability to perform critical reasoning to arrive at a "correct" answer even if he or she is a true skeptic and is not biased towards either side. Just because I don't believe what I'm told without justification doesn't mean I know how to divine truth out of conflicting arguments (short of pointing out fallacies).
The bed and boarding costs story sounded absurd, but I didn't realize the source was shady. I couldn't stop thinking about Terry Gilliam's "Brazil" and post-mortum torture/interrogation fees.
Mozilla doesn't seem to understand how to add new features without displacing sensible default behavior. For instance, in one of the v3 betas that I'm using now, going to an SSL-secured site where the certificate doesn't check out for any reason results in me being prompted to either leave the site or add a permanent exception for the one site. There is no option to inspect the actual certificate information. I'm sure a way exists, because the alternative is absurd, but it shouldn't take anyone who's ever used a web browser before more than five seconds to find it.
And I thought it was bad enough in previous versions that firefox displayed scary messages when it came across a self-signed certificate, just like every other browser, despite the fact that it's far more secure than plaintext.
Seriously, did you know that you can add and change advanced configuration settings through about:config, but you can't delete a setting after it's explicitly created because they want to protect you from fubaring your installation? You have to open a text editor to restore its original state.
Somehow they said what the woman did wasn't illegal, or at least they couldn't find anything to charge her under. I find this astounding, that "endangering the welfare of a child" apparently doesn't extend to instigating their suicide; or else maybe the state didn't have such a law, but again that's not a matter that needs to be specific to the Internet.
I had thought that maybe they had laws applicable to the situation but the penalties were insultingly low, but this is still limited to two years so I don't see the improvement.
*raised eyebrow* Are you talking about the parents of the grown woman who decided it was a good idea to harass a 13 year old to the point of suicide? Or are you suggesting that the parents of a teen are responsible for monitoring their child's every conversation, or else they should be held accountable for the coercive and abusive actions of an external party?
IIRC, covers don't require licenses, there's a compulsory (or as Lessig would say, statutory) license explicitly built into the law. Music has a number of exceptions and caveats that complicate copyright law considerably.
Meh. They're releasing 2008.0 soon. Gentoo has been in decline for a while, but they got a great kick in the pants when they were shamed in January with the public news of their disencharterment with the state of New Mexico (which has recently been rectified). They've been improving for a while, but I write this just to warn you that it may not be exactly like you remember it.
I'm still sticking with it for my new box. Gotta love that startkde package.
Sounds like you emerged the wrong package - kde-meta or whatever it's called, which contains everything under the sun. If you're going to pull in applications you don't want then Gentoo is not at all the right distro to do it in.
kde-base/kdebase-startkde is a minimalist package that only pulls in the core libraries and their dependencies. It basically takes your X server and just does enough to replace the ugly grey x-checkered pattern with a default background, without installing additional common components like kicker, konqueror, or konsole.
I installed this on an AMD Athlon XP / Sempron, 1.2 GHz, 512 MB; it does not take much longer than most other packages.
Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot reported on a GPL-violator that tried to make that argument in court a while ago. I don't remember how it turned out, but I think it was scoffed at by the majority of open source people. The company's argument relied on the notion that since the software was being given away at no cost, the project lost no money when the company violated their license.
Why, what changed? Are you basing this entirely on a slashdot article? Because I remember reading Suse's EULA in 2005 before any of this Microsoft nonsense and it still looked ridiculous for a project based on open source work. I didn't rtfa, but if that benchmark line refers to the prohibition against publishing benchmarks of the distro, along with a grant of automatic permission to reciprocate against any company that violates this clause, then this is very old news.
You hit that on the nail. I had plenty of /. time while I was in school and before I started my summer job. Now I'm resigned to trying to catch up on the weekend before I fall asleep at 9 PM. Real life sucks.
My grandfather, who was an electrical engineer, bought me a 200-in-1 kit when I was a kid, and I had a lot of fun with it. Some of the projects were a bit advanced for me, and I never understood how some of them worked even if I could assemble them, but it sure did encourage experimentation. You could do a lot with those things.
I also had a 150-in-1 and 300-in-1, but the 200-in-1 was my favorite by far.
One time I tried to test the remaining strength of the batteries by pressing a Duracell tester across the terminals they were connected to on the kit, and almost instantly burnt my fingers. Somehow the Duracell people thought it was a good idea to encourage people to short circuit their batteries with what was basically a bare strip of metal. Luckily we had an allo cactus in the house to treat it. So one way or another I guess you can't help but learn with a kit like that at your disposal.
Thank you for blasting the guy who felt it necessary to add the correlationisnotcausation tag. Those kinds of comments demonstrate a sort of preemptive ignorance.
Meh, I downloaded the demo of Savage 2 and it's unplayable due to a shader glitch between the game and ATI's fglrx drivers. The character models end up not being rendered. This is a known bug listed on their forums and there is no workaround.
I kinda consider that a blocker against the game even being released, much less being listed as one of the best (unless the others really suck).
Here's to hoping that they patch it to not require shaders, or that radeonhd adds support for my r600 card.
And all this time I hadn't realized that my digital cables were compressing my music without my ever realizing it...
> look at what was on your screen.
You're presuming that I tried to add an exception. Why would I necessarily want to do that without viewing the certificate first?
> It actually *forces* you to
It takes four mouse clicks to view the certificate. It'd be nice to get that down to one.
When Firefox blocks a popup, it doesn't let me view the window just one time. It can only keep track of absolutes, and either I allow a site or I don't. Why should I have known that an SSL exception would be any different, and why does the fact that it is excuse mozilla's poor UI design?
I agree there's a lot of pseudo skepticism as you call it, but I'm pessimistic about the individual's ability to perform critical reasoning to arrive at a "correct" answer even if he or she is a true skeptic and is not biased towards either side. Just because I don't believe what I'm told without justification doesn't mean I know how to divine truth out of conflicting arguments (short of pointing out fallacies).
The bed and boarding costs story sounded absurd, but I didn't realize the source was shady. I couldn't stop thinking about Terry Gilliam's "Brazil" and post-mortum torture/interrogation fees.
Mozilla doesn't seem to understand how to add new features without displacing sensible default behavior. For instance, in one of the v3 betas that I'm using now, going to an SSL-secured site where the certificate doesn't check out for any reason results in me being prompted to either leave the site or add a permanent exception for the one site. There is no option to inspect the actual certificate information. I'm sure a way exists, because the alternative is absurd, but it shouldn't take anyone who's ever used a web browser before more than five seconds to find it.
And I thought it was bad enough in previous versions that firefox displayed scary messages when it came across a self-signed certificate, just like every other browser, despite the fact that it's far more secure than plaintext.
Seriously, did you know that you can add and change advanced configuration settings through about:config, but you can't delete a setting after it's explicitly created because they want to protect you from fubaring your installation? You have to open a text editor to restore its original state.
In some respects, firefox is a lot like gnome.
I was unaware that the Scouts were known for requiring religious dogma. I thought it was all just secular homophobia.
Somehow they said what the woman did wasn't illegal, or at least they couldn't find anything to charge her under. I find this astounding, that "endangering the welfare of a child" apparently doesn't extend to instigating their suicide; or else maybe the state didn't have such a law, but again that's not a matter that needs to be specific to the Internet.
I had thought that maybe they had laws applicable to the situation but the penalties were insultingly low, but this is still limited to two years so I don't see the improvement.
*raised eyebrow* Are you talking about the parents of the grown woman who decided it was a good idea to harass a 13 year old to the point of suicide? Or are you suggesting that the parents of a teen are responsible for monitoring their child's every conversation, or else they should be held accountable for the coercive and abusive actions of an external party?
Sounds right to me. It's along the same lines as a maximum sentence of 40 years for allowing a minor to observe porn on a spyware ridden computer.
Must just be you.
The usual "woosh" sound of the point of this poll going above your head has turned into a deafening sonic boom. Don't take it so literally.
No, that would be security through obscurity.
You mean slashdot? Dunno if they have the same kind of big bucks as google / youtube.
IIRC, covers don't require licenses, there's a compulsory (or as Lessig would say, statutory) license explicitly built into the law. Music has a number of exceptions and caveats that complicate copyright law considerably.
PEBFAC (Problem Exists Between Food and Chair).
It's like taking on Rupert Murdoch. Don't be a fame glutton if you can't deal with the corporate sponsored payback.
Why not? I don't know how Dell compares to other companies for service, but it's not exactly like the bar is set very high. Since I just started reading wellingtongrey the other day, I'll link to this: http://wellingtongrey.net/miscellanea/archive/2008-03-31-the-trouble-with-tech-support.html
Meh. They're releasing 2008.0 soon. Gentoo has been in decline for a while, but they got a great kick in the pants when they were shamed in January with the public news of their disencharterment with the state of New Mexico (which has recently been rectified). They've been improving for a while, but I write this just to warn you that it may not be exactly like you remember it.
I'm still sticking with it for my new box. Gotta love that startkde package.
I was thinking that. Better yet, it'd be nice if the summary mentioned other graph properties such as girth.
Sounds like you emerged the wrong package - kde-meta or whatever it's called, which contains everything under the sun. If you're going to pull in applications you don't want then Gentoo is not at all the right distro to do it in.
kde-base/kdebase-startkde is a minimalist package that only pulls in the core libraries and their dependencies. It basically takes your X server and just does enough to replace the ugly grey x-checkered pattern with a default background, without installing additional common components like kicker, konqueror, or konsole.
I installed this on an AMD Athlon XP / Sempron, 1.2 GHz, 512 MB; it does not take much longer than most other packages.