interesting indeed. I don't really think that it would matter though, as far as the GPL is concerned. The GPL exists mainly as a weapon, a weapon which we only need because of the situation which "they" (Disney or whoever...) have got us into. It exists because we don't want what we do to become part of a tool of oppression of ideas. So really the first issue fades a little. We could worry a lot less if everyone was playing by fair rules of the game - a shorter copyright would benefit us all so I'm sure people would be happy.
The second issue also is not so much of an issue because of the open source method. People are free to use the source code, look at it, etc. Public domain does give you more rights so someone might have an interest in looking through the code to pull out the Public Domain stuff - but thats not really our problem (maybe it might be nice to include a more detailed history of when each section was last amended). So long as the whole lot wasn't in the public domain the copyleft would still apply.
..partly because I don't know how. I'm sure I could find out easy enough if I really wanted to (say, if anyone knows how to do it using only software which is in the fedora yum repos I'd be interested out of curiosity). Partly because I (at the moment) don't have the HD space for it. Partly because it'd take ages. And partly just because whilst its a hastle to dig out my DVDs and put them in the drive its far less of a hastle than having to rip and then having no space on my computer.
This page has the info from ninty about the E3 show, sure I guess a lot of it we might have heard of before, but Wii Fitness was a new one to me. The work out board looks pretty cool too, if they make a way to make it higher then you could do step exercises with it as well. All in all I'm glad I've got a wii/DS combo.
Deflect the electron beams with magnets you say? back in my day we had to guide each one with our hands - and always ensure that our hands maintained a refractive index of 0 or less to not spoil the illusion. Magnets? we'd have killed for magnets!
It really is worth reading. Fascinating and scary at the same time. Not that long, and contains an update which brings the current trends we've seen to light within the context that RMS sets out in the parable.
Nope. TPB does not host any illegal content. All they have on there site is what is ostensibly text files saying "this guy (ip address) has this file (file name)"... thats really all there is to it. Nothing illegal under their laws, no matter that file or ip address it actually says. Torrent actually makes it easier to track people who do host child porn because the police can just download the torrent and then leach the porn whilst grabbing the ip addresses of the people who have it. A quick look up and raid later and you have yet another peado in prison.
then you might be equally as mad about the preceding sections of this act - read above the linked section to discover that if you are subject to a miscarriage of justice, i.e. the police deliberately fabricate evidence to set you up for a crime that you didn't commit, no matter how long you spend in prison wrongly, nor how much you would have earned, you will still only get compensation up to a maximum of £500,000.
So if you earn £1 million p/a and get set up (maybe just by bent coppers, or maybe by a political office) such as that you spend 10 years in prison, lose your house/car/wife/family... you can only get £500K!
This law fails to discourage adequately the sort of criminal and negligent acts which cause these issues. If the Home Office has to pay out £50 million each time you can bet you bollocks to a barn dance that they'll try really hard for this not to happen - £500k is less than they spend on paper.
Also, about the porno law, if you have an illegal image but not for an "unreasonably long" period of time, you've got a valid legal defence - so downloading into a browser would still be legal because once it has been opened so long as there isn't any interactive content it (as far as I am aware) can't tell if it was open for 1 second, 5 mins, or 1 year. Seems like a badly drafted law to me all round...
Sure, I can. Basically we have political parties. There are groups of people who would do anything for power. Things like this play well to a group of voters who read the Sun (biggest selling "news"paper here) and are aged 40+. These people are very likely to vote. Votes matter. So you do things which might seem insane, inflammatory, likely to cause crime (90 day detention, I'm looking at you), illegal, undemocratic, or just plain stupid - because it could swing the all important swing voter over a little (or make the even more important big business/media swing a little).
Basically thats what it comes down to... Same as everywhere else.
I hate to cast aspersions on you and whether or not you might actually be "FUD-ing", but it seems like you might be.
The GPL is extremely permissive (although short of a BSD style, of course), use it if you want - you don't even have to agree to the license for that. Use someone else's software if you want - you're free to do that too. But surely it is nice, and only fair, that if you give away your software to anyone who wants to use it that they tell you what they've done with it and how. The FSF are not saying "OMG!!11! WE'LL SUE APPLE FOR 1 TRILLION DOLLARS!!" they are saying "if there is a license violation, which we are not sure that there is, then they would need to make sure that the software that WE wrote can be accessed by us and we know what has been done with it"
When you put it like that I think they sound a whole lot more reasonable
no really sure why you earned the "flamebait" mod, other than the fact the the most rabid Apple fanboy might have taken your post as a slur on their beloved company.
You bring up a good point. I don't have an iPhone, nor will I be buying one (I couldn't even if I wanted to...) and I assume that I'm not in the minority here. So what is the need for not just about 10 stories in the past 4 days, but now about another 5 stuck in one as a form of digest.
Give it a rest.
I agree, I too searched and found no mention for 64bit windows, I certainly wouldn't have got that 64 bit wasn't supported. Hell, with how common it is getting I was expecting a big "64BIT WINDOWS IS NOT SUPPORTED". This just makes me laugh at the people who bought into all their hype and seem happy to put up with this crap from their software/hardware providers. Stupid.
I really wouldn't worry about that. Sure, it could potentially make a weapon, if properly worked upon with that goal in mind. You would have to be pretty dedicated though. And it would have the side effect of attacking all humans because of the similarities of DNA and the probabilities of mutation... who would want to create a weapon to kill everyone on the planet when we already have so many. Smallpox would make a far more viable weapon, or an old fashioned cobalt bomb.
The fact is we've already reached doomsday as far as weapons are concerned, but we're still doing ok.
whilst that does sound scary (as does "trusted computing" for that matter). I think that its important to remember that things like this aren't inherently bad. Imagine if this system exists but you are the only one who can control it (and it's been implemented properly and the spec is open and secure). It would make admin-ing systems easier. It would make attacks harder (it does mention being able to quickly isolate infected computers).
As always it comes down to where the power is, if it is with the users then there really isn't a problem with this. I understand the fear that that power will be taken away from the users, but as a community we've proven ourselves pretty resourceful.
As a side not, couldn't the community set up an open hardware manufacturer producing chips? we could finance it through a shared ownership system... Or Mark Shuttleworth could buy it
"unreported contact with foreign government, military, or intelligence officials
OK, I might give them this."
I had contact whilst in my first year of university with a nice guy who worked in Islamabad for the Pakistan government. I think he was based in the intelligence side of their civil service. I had a few beers with him and his friend and we talked for a bit. I saw him a few times after that but not in any great detail. Under these rules would I have had to have known that I would meet him before I did and file a report 3 months ago so that I could speak to him? should I report everything that we talked about to the nice friendly agent after (which was generally just lamenting the politicisation of the civil service in both our countries).
Its not even like this sort of thing is a one off, I also met an officer from the Norwegian army on a night out, he was alright to talk to... bought me a pint. One of my friends is a foreign national who is being conscripted when he gets back to his native country - would that count too?
These rules seem like they would be completely unworkable in the real world setting of a modern university. You should not support any of the ideas.
Surely open source can still have a use, even if it doesn't contain the right to modify. For example if I really like some software and am happy with the way it works (and also don't have the technical knowledge to be able to add new features) then I'll be happy with it as it is; even if it is more static than you seem to want. What would be good to know is that it won't be installing a ton of crapware and key loggers onto my computer when I install it. If it is open source then we can be sure that it won't (so long as at least someone who "the community" (whoever that actually is) trusts has looked through it).
So open source as defined above would give an important and useful right, it would act as a strong bond of trust, and would allow people who have searched for bugs to submit them to the developers to seek changes... but the project would be centrally controlled.
I don't seem to see how Microsoft is winning if people expect to be sure that their programs are not acting in a traitorous way - when we all know Windows has been calling home for years. This is the very diversity that "open source" will need to finally win the battle
Thanks for the link, if I ever do try and give it another go then I'll have a look through that. I would say though that I wasn't trolling, I was merely saying that I didn't find it easy to do whilst investing a limited amount of time in it. That's not to say that they are wrong, but it does say that I find linux the easiest to work with (and then Windows). I might be being a tool, I might be a complete n00b with it, maybe I should STFU... maybe. But if I didn't find it to be an easy alternative when I've got experience with unix-like systems and am not afraid of doing some research (although I admit it was pretty limited) then a windows user who has no experience with unix, and has been indoctrinated into the very "idiosyncratic" MS way of doing things, would find it a million times harder.
This all serves to underscore my point that the quote "emphasizes ease of use and aims to convert Windows users" is not true enough, by a long shot.
I've given this one a go. I'm mainly a linux man myself. I'm no stranger to the command line and often find bash the easiest way to fix problems with linux. This however did not give me any grounding for this BSD. Maybe this is just my fault... I suppose I should have been expecting some troubles. I think the biggest issue I had was with updating software. I wanted to upgrade firefox from the version that came on the DVD I was given (I think that it was 1.5.0.3 or something.
The first thing I thought of was going to the firefox site and see if they had an installer for BSD but couldn't find one. Then I decided to search online to see if there was an easy way to do it. The thing I looked at suggested cd-ing into the directory/.../www/firefox (that might be wrong, but you get the idea) and then type "make install clean". I tired to do that and just got loads of text output which didn't seem to be going anywhere. After about 15 mins I decided to kill that and look around.
I found another site which listed the 9 ways he'd tried to update firefox and how in the end none of them work properly. He got flamed in the comments on his blog with comments calling him an ignorant n00b etc. (which would be an image which would put me off going on the forums... or at least make me nervous). In the end I decided that it'd just be a hell of a lot less of a headache to go back to fedora and do "yum update" to update the whole system - there's even a GUI if thats your thing.
So if you think that I've missed something really obvious about this OS or that I've got it totally wrong, you could be right... it doesn't really matter. It still highlights the fact that it just isn't a "user friendly windows alternative" in the same way that a lot of linuxes are.
This has proper fucked me off. I was looking forward to buying this game, I've actually set aside the games to trade in to get it... but now, oh now they're on their high horse. No More Heroes sounds like a good game though, they guy who is making it claimed that it would be "as violent, if not more so, than manhunt 2". Maybe I might be able to get this game on import from another PAL territory (although I've never looked into if Australian games will work with no problems).
"now we can see some [fanboys] in their native habitat"
Here? really? we have Sony (among others) for "blu-ray" and M$ (among others) for HD-DVD. Whatever the opposite of fanboy is, that's me. I hope that they both lose.
I must admit that I've never heard of people being sent to France, but I would support it if it was the best way to treat people. The fact still remains though that in the UK, no matter what you need, the service is free (well, apart from prescription fees if you earn enough - and that's only £6.50 for any medicine that you get from a GP, all hospital medicine is always free for everyone). Even if the service wasn't as good as a paid for system (though I suspect that it might be) I would still be in favour of the system.
If people want profits then they will intentionally cut services and corners. If people don't care about profits or shareholders then they can be free to use any surplus to improve the quality of the service.
Indeed, but maybe you were making a different point to the one you thought. They cite "cell phone (6%) as distinct from "cell phone misuse" which they say "Many [accidents] are due to"
"has limited the ability of these officials to prevent the kind of violence that occurred at Virginia Tech.""
You can't prevent this sort of thing. It really is impossible. Unless, that is, you want to start treating people who haven't committed a crime but seem a bit "different" as criminally insane. But you'd have to lock them up forever, because if you steal someones life and then let them go... well, he'd be more pissed off than ever before - if he even could do something like these shootings you should bet your arse this would trigger it off.
I suspect that the response will be what we can usually expect from pretty much any government though, "this generates bad headlines, "THINK OF THE CHILDREN!" generates good headlines regardless of the consequences, therefore we should do the whole think of the children thing to an even greater degree". And if they do remove a large section of privacy from people - especially if they go as far as to interfere with doctor/patient privacy - then you can expect more shootings as people who could have been stopped with help and support are forced back upon themselves.
although the ship doesn't actually move at all, it instead moves the universe around it. So it could probably appear to move faster than any given light speed.
The engines were designed in a dream and where then forgotten in a different dream...
Slashdot Mirror
interesting indeed. I don't really think that it would matter though, as far as the GPL is concerned. The GPL exists mainly as a weapon, a weapon which we only need because of the situation which "they" (Disney or whoever...) have got us into. It exists because we don't want what we do to become part of a tool of oppression of ideas. So really the first issue fades a little. We could worry a lot less if everyone was playing by fair rules of the game - a shorter copyright would benefit us all so I'm sure people would be happy.
The second issue also is not so much of an issue because of the open source method. People are free to use the source code, look at it, etc. Public domain does give you more rights so someone might have an interest in looking through the code to pull out the Public Domain stuff - but thats not really our problem (maybe it might be nice to include a more detailed history of when each section was last amended). So long as the whole lot wasn't in the public domain the copyleft would still apply.
..partly because I don't know how. I'm sure I could find out easy enough if I really wanted to (say, if anyone knows how to do it using only software which is in the fedora yum repos I'd be interested out of curiosity). Partly because I (at the moment) don't have the HD space for it. Partly because it'd take ages. And partly just because whilst its a hastle to dig out my DVDs and put them in the drive its far less of a hastle than having to rip and then having no space on my computer.
http://ms.nintendo-europe.com/e32007/enGB/index.ht ml?feature=4Qs_Rj-SZwwItyhbXcTIfqhPN_a3EmxF
This page has the info from ninty about the E3 show, sure I guess a lot of it we might have heard of before, but Wii Fitness was a new one to me. The work out board looks pretty cool too, if they make a way to make it higher then you could do step exercises with it as well. All in all I'm glad I've got a wii/DS combo.
MAGNETS!
Deflect the electron beams with magnets you say? back in my day we had to guide each one with our hands - and always ensure that our hands maintained a refractive index of 0 or less to not spoil the illusion. Magnets? we'd have killed for magnets!
for the lazy, this is the article which the OP was talking about when he mentioned the "right to read"... http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
It really is worth reading. Fascinating and scary at the same time. Not that long, and contains an update which brings the current trends we've seen to light within the context that RMS sets out in the parable.
"Were they hosting child porn?"
Nope. TPB does not host any illegal content. All they have on there site is what is ostensibly text files saying "this guy (ip address) has this file (file name)"... thats really all there is to it. Nothing illegal under their laws, no matter that file or ip address it actually says. Torrent actually makes it easier to track people who do host child porn because the police can just download the torrent and then leach the porn whilst grabbing the ip addresses of the people who have it. A quick look up and raid later and you have yet another peado in prison.
then you might be equally as mad about the preceding sections of this act - read above the linked section to discover that if you are subject to a miscarriage of justice, i.e. the police deliberately fabricate evidence to set you up for a crime that you didn't commit, no matter how long you spend in prison wrongly, nor how much you would have earned, you will still only get compensation up to a maximum of £500,000.
So if you earn £1 million p/a and get set up (maybe just by bent coppers, or maybe by a political office) such as that you spend 10 years in prison, lose your house/car/wife/family... you can only get £500K!
This law fails to discourage adequately the sort of criminal and negligent acts which cause these issues. If the Home Office has to pay out £50 million each time you can bet you bollocks to a barn dance that they'll try really hard for this not to happen - £500k is less than they spend on paper.
Also, about the porno law, if you have an illegal image but not for an "unreasonably long" period of time, you've got a valid legal defence - so downloading into a browser would still be legal because once it has been opened so long as there isn't any interactive content it (as far as I am aware) can't tell if it was open for 1 second, 5 mins, or 1 year. Seems like a badly drafted law to me all round...
Sure, I can. Basically we have political parties. There are groups of people who would do anything for power. Things like this play well to a group of voters who read the Sun (biggest selling "news"paper here) and are aged 40+. These people are very likely to vote. Votes matter. So you do things which might seem insane, inflammatory, likely to cause crime (90 day detention, I'm looking at you), illegal, undemocratic, or just plain stupid - because it could swing the all important swing voter over a little (or make the even more important big business/media swing a little).
Basically thats what it comes down to... Same as everywhere else.
I wish you weren't modded "funny", what you say is both true and insightful but its not funny... it's very, very sad
I hate to cast aspersions on you and whether or not you might actually be "FUD-ing", but it seems like you might be.
The GPL is extremely permissive (although short of a BSD style, of course), use it if you want - you don't even have to agree to the license for that. Use someone else's software if you want - you're free to do that too. But surely it is nice, and only fair, that if you give away your software to anyone who wants to use it that they tell you what they've done with it and how. The FSF are not saying "OMG!!11! WE'LL SUE APPLE FOR 1 TRILLION DOLLARS!!" they are saying "if there is a license violation, which we are not sure that there is, then they would need to make sure that the software that WE wrote can be accessed by us and we know what has been done with it"
When you put it like that I think they sound a whole lot more reasonable
no really sure why you earned the "flamebait" mod, other than the fact the the most rabid Apple fanboy might have taken your post as a slur on their beloved company.
You bring up a good point. I don't have an iPhone, nor will I be buying one (I couldn't even if I wanted to...) and I assume that I'm not in the minority here. So what is the need for not just about 10 stories in the past 4 days, but now about another 5 stuck in one as a form of digest.
Give it a rest.
I agree, I too searched and found no mention for 64bit windows, I certainly wouldn't have got that 64 bit wasn't supported. Hell, with how common it is getting I was expecting a big "64BIT WINDOWS IS NOT SUPPORTED". This just makes me laugh at the people who bought into all their hype and seem happy to put up with this crap from their software/hardware providers. Stupid.
I really wouldn't worry about that. Sure, it could potentially make a weapon, if properly worked upon with that goal in mind. You would have to be pretty dedicated though. And it would have the side effect of attacking all humans because of the similarities of DNA and the probabilities of mutation... who would want to create a weapon to kill everyone on the planet when we already have so many. Smallpox would make a far more viable weapon, or an old fashioned cobalt bomb.
The fact is we've already reached doomsday as far as weapons are concerned, but we're still doing ok.
whilst that does sound scary (as does "trusted computing" for that matter). I think that its important to remember that things like this aren't inherently bad. Imagine if this system exists but you are the only one who can control it (and it's been implemented properly and the spec is open and secure). It would make admin-ing systems easier. It would make attacks harder (it does mention being able to quickly isolate infected computers).
As always it comes down to where the power is, if it is with the users then there really isn't a problem with this. I understand the fear that that power will be taken away from the users, but as a community we've proven ourselves pretty resourceful.
As a side not, couldn't the community set up an open hardware manufacturer producing chips? we could finance it through a shared ownership system... Or Mark Shuttleworth could buy it
"unreported contact with foreign government, military, or intelligence officials
OK, I might give them this."
I had contact whilst in my first year of university with a nice guy who worked in Islamabad for the Pakistan government. I think he was based in the intelligence side of their civil service. I had a few beers with him and his friend and we talked for a bit. I saw him a few times after that but not in any great detail. Under these rules would I have had to have known that I would meet him before I did and file a report 3 months ago so that I could speak to him? should I report everything that we talked about to the nice friendly agent after (which was generally just lamenting the politicisation of the civil service in both our countries).
Its not even like this sort of thing is a one off, I also met an officer from the Norwegian army on a night out, he was alright to talk to... bought me a pint. One of my friends is a foreign national who is being conscripted when he gets back to his native country - would that count too?
These rules seem like they would be completely unworkable in the real world setting of a modern university. You should not support any of the ideas.
Surely open source can still have a use, even if it doesn't contain the right to modify. For example if I really like some software and am happy with the way it works (and also don't have the technical knowledge to be able to add new features) then I'll be happy with it as it is; even if it is more static than you seem to want. What would be good to know is that it won't be installing a ton of crapware and key loggers onto my computer when I install it. If it is open source then we can be sure that it won't (so long as at least someone who "the community" (whoever that actually is) trusts has looked through it).
So open source as defined above would give an important and useful right, it would act as a strong bond of trust, and would allow people who have searched for bugs to submit them to the developers to seek changes... but the project would be centrally controlled.
I don't seem to see how Microsoft is winning if people expect to be sure that their programs are not acting in a traitorous way - when we all know Windows has been calling home for years. This is the very diversity that "open source" will need to finally win the battle
Thanks for the link, if I ever do try and give it another go then I'll have a look through that. I would say though that I wasn't trolling, I was merely saying that I didn't find it easy to do whilst investing a limited amount of time in it. That's not to say that they are wrong, but it does say that I find linux the easiest to work with (and then Windows). I might be being a tool, I might be a complete n00b with it, maybe I should STFU... maybe. But if I didn't find it to be an easy alternative when I've got experience with unix-like systems and am not afraid of doing some research (although I admit it was pretty limited) then a windows user who has no experience with unix, and has been indoctrinated into the very "idiosyncratic" MS way of doing things, would find it a million times harder.
This all serves to underscore my point that the quote "emphasizes ease of use and aims to convert Windows users" is not true enough, by a long shot.
I've given this one a go. I'm mainly a linux man myself. I'm no stranger to the command line and often find bash the easiest way to fix problems with linux. This however did not give me any grounding for this BSD. Maybe this is just my fault... I suppose I should have been expecting some troubles. I think the biggest issue I had was with updating software. I wanted to upgrade firefox from the version that came on the DVD I was given (I think that it was 1.5.0.3 or something.
/.../www/firefox (that might be wrong, but you get the idea) and then type "make install clean". I tired to do that and just got loads of text output which didn't seem to be going anywhere. After about 15 mins I decided to kill that and look around.
The first thing I thought of was going to the firefox site and see if they had an installer for BSD but couldn't find one. Then I decided to search online to see if there was an easy way to do it. The thing I looked at suggested cd-ing into the directory
I found another site which listed the 9 ways he'd tried to update firefox and how in the end none of them work properly. He got flamed in the comments on his blog with comments calling him an ignorant n00b etc. (which would be an image which would put me off going on the forums... or at least make me nervous). In the end I decided that it'd just be a hell of a lot less of a headache to go back to fedora and do "yum update" to update the whole system - there's even a GUI if thats your thing.
So if you think that I've missed something really obvious about this OS or that I've got it totally wrong, you could be right... it doesn't really matter. It still highlights the fact that it just isn't a "user friendly windows alternative" in the same way that a lot of linuxes are.
This has proper fucked me off. I was looking forward to buying this game, I've actually set aside the games to trade in to get it... but now, oh now they're on their high horse. No More Heroes sounds like a good game though, they guy who is making it claimed that it would be "as violent, if not more so, than manhunt 2". Maybe I might be able to get this game on import from another PAL territory (although I've never looked into if Australian games will work with no problems).
no custer's revenge?
"now we can see some [fanboys] in their native habitat"
Here? really? we have Sony (among others) for "blu-ray" and M$ (among others) for HD-DVD. Whatever the opposite of fanboy is, that's me. I hope that they both lose.
I must admit that I've never heard of people being sent to France, but I would support it if it was the best way to treat people. The fact still remains though that in the UK, no matter what you need, the service is free (well, apart from prescription fees if you earn enough - and that's only £6.50 for any medicine that you get from a GP, all hospital medicine is always free for everyone). Even if the service wasn't as good as a paid for system (though I suspect that it might be) I would still be in favour of the system.
If people want profits then they will intentionally cut services and corners. If people don't care about profits or shareholders then they can be free to use any surplus to improve the quality of the service.
Indeed, but maybe you were making a different point to the one you thought. They cite "cell phone (6%) as distinct from "cell phone misuse" which they say "Many [accidents] are due to"
"has limited the ability of these officials to prevent the kind of violence that occurred at Virginia Tech.""
You can't prevent this sort of thing. It really is impossible. Unless, that is, you want to start treating people who haven't committed a crime but seem a bit "different" as criminally insane. But you'd have to lock them up forever, because if you steal someones life and then let them go... well, he'd be more pissed off than ever before - if he even could do something like these shootings you should bet your arse this would trigger it off.
I suspect that the response will be what we can usually expect from pretty much any government though, "this generates bad headlines, "THINK OF THE CHILDREN!" generates good headlines regardless of the consequences, therefore we should do the whole think of the children thing to an even greater degree". And if they do remove a large section of privacy from people - especially if they go as far as to interfere with doctor/patient privacy - then you can expect more shootings as people who could have been stopped with help and support are forced back upon themselves.
although the ship doesn't actually move at all, it instead moves the universe around it. So it could probably appear to move faster than any given light speed.
The engines were designed in a dream and where then forgotten in a different dream...