You want me to find another example of somebody who wrote the original essay on Civil Disobedience? Maybe you don't believe his actions went far enough, but his essay was the one that popularized the term Civil Disobedience.
There are plenty of people who have gone to jail over their refusal to follow an unjust law, without any get out of jail free cards either, so you really can't be asking for an example of that.
It's 100% relative if you want to talk about what Civil Disobedience means, and how it is being redefined or not.
Also, the fundamental issues haven't changed at all. Slavery might not still be an issue, but there are still unjust wars and laws. Just ignoring something because it was written a couple of hundred years ago is obtuse.
However, you can not sit there with a straight face and say Huffington is any better. Fox is just more blatant about it. It is the subtle ones you need to watch out for.
Huffington Post subtle? Good one.
Anybody who takes the Huffington Post as a serious news organization has got to be waist-deep in liberal bullshit. It's nothing but a mouthpiece for liberal bloggers and peddlers.
As for her selling the site, I suppose there's absolutely nothing illegal about it though it does seem to go against the basic assumptions someone would make about why she put it together in the first place. The assumption would be that it's intended to be a megaphone for getting progressive values into the public sphere, gaining suitable publicity, and any money-making activity there should be limited to the non-profit, self-perpetuating kind.
People are so naive. The first basic assumption anybody should make is that people are in it for the money unless presented with strong evidence to the contrary. I'm sure it wasn't even declared as a non-profit.
The myth of 'Civil Disobedience is all about getting caught' is spread by those who don't like the goals of today's civil disobedience, only those of yesterday.
"Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison."
That's from Thoreau's Civil Disobedience essay. He refused to pay his taxes because of slavery and the war with Mexico. He was sent to jail, but ended only spending a day because somebody paid his taxes for him.
Whether you agree with him or not, that's the root of Civil Disobedience. It is true that he didn't say that you should go out of your way to be caught, but he was also willing to go to prison rather than fund the government.
I'd go farther and suggest that reading Slashdot using something other than a web browser (think usenet/email client with proper threading support) would be an improvement.
It would only be better if the client supported moderation. A typical Slashdot story has around 200 or 300 comments. Moderation really helps to keep that readable.
classic nerd failing of assuming that because we're smart people who know a lot about a lot of things, we're geniuses who know everything about everything. And I'm probably as guilty of it as anyone else...
Also, there aren't "ads" in the way you are probably thinking, but when you start the game you *have* to watch the game studio logos. I don't know if it's just loading or what, but it's annoying. If it's loading, it should still let you skip the logo animations and give you a screen that just says "loading."
Yeah, I really hate games that won't let you skip all the cruft on startup. I agree, if it's loading it should just say so.
These are game-specific problems, and as far as I can tell
I can believe it. The multiplayer implementation for PS3 games can vary widely. Then again, it wouldn't surprise me if something deeper was wrong. There's not much transparency when it comes to network problems.
The barrier to entry isn't monetary though; it's just publicity.
Not quite true. YouTube spent millions per month on hosting and bandwidth fees before they were bought out by Google and eventually started showing ads. Many startups take at least several million in funding to get off the ground.
Legal intervention isn't necessary because if YouTube tried to abuse its monopoly (say, if its ads grew overly annoying), people would gradually start looking for alternatives, which would open the market to competitors.
At which point they could either temporarily cut back their advertising or claim their competitor is dumping by not having sufficient advertising to cover their costs.
That said, I'm not really a big fan of government intervention in the market. I just think it's interesting how the standard model for web startups is to offer for free it's services until a substantial user-base springs up, and then start charging via advertisements or premium services. It's essentially dumping.
Anti-dumping laws are designed to prevent someone (who has the ability to make a high initial investment) from gaining a monopoly by selling product at a loss in order to drive competitors out of business. The intent of this, obviously, would be to gain a monopoly, then raise prices exorbitantly high and make back their original loss quickly.
The interesting thing is that companies like YouTube did this to attract tons of viewers, and then put up advertisements later once they captured the market. It's pretty much the standard way of doing business for web startups.
In regards to peoples complaint about pirates and cheating, I find it's more an issue of poor development. I do not see any noticeable change. Sometimes I'm in a game of BC2 that I can't seem to hit anything even when I empty 100 rounds in the back of some unsuspecting chap. Other times it feels that every confrontation I'm in I win.
That sounds like lag, not poor development. Though maybe it's poor that developers don't indicate when lag is happening. They prefer to lie for a smoother user experience (which works out OK when you've got minor lag). How to handle lag is a difficult problem for real-time games.
Most of the time I have under an hour to play. These constant updates take over 15 minutes to complete and won't work in the background.
The updates average less than once a month, can be downloaded automatically, and in my experience do not take 15 minutes to install. More like 5 minutes or less.
Once installed and rebooted you go through a 2 to 5 minute wait just to get in to load the game and view all the ads.
What ads? Is this a particular game that does this?
Once you're finally in you get a no games available message. It used to happen occasionally. Since the last update it seams to happen 4 out of 5 times. I initially thought it was my cable provider until I started researching on the net.
Is this just for a particular game? Maybe people have stopped playing that game?
It's time to jailbreak and pirate, in this way I will still get some entertainment from my console.
In other words, you're doing what you always wanted to do. Pirate the games. You're just rationalizing your behavior.
Read the license yourself. I'm intimately familiar with it. The license contains one sentence on allowed "mere aggregation" (a clause often abused and misinterpreted), but spends several on works distributed as a whole.
Are you saying that a bundle cannot consist of separate works under different licenses?
Not when they are distributed as part of a whole. You cannot claim that assets added to a GPL engine used to make a game are not part of the whole.
"If identifiable sections of that work are not derived from the Program, and can be reasonably considered independent and separate works in themselves, then this License, and its terms, do not apply to those sections when you distribute them as separate works. But when you distribute the same sections as part of a whole which is a work based on the Program, the distribution of the whole must be on the terms of this License, whose permissions for other licensees extend to the entire whole, and thus to each and every part regardless of who wrote it. "
If I distribute a GPL game engine, and then somebody redistributes that engine with assets to make a game, then those assets are not just data, but instead an integral part of the program that must also be under the GPL.
Note I'm not talking about the particular game this article is about. All I'm saying is that in general, assets can come under the GPL. The person who started this thread made a blanket assertion that they could not.
If I wrote a GPL application that read an RSS feed from some newspaper, that would not put that RSS content under the GPL.
Agreed, and the important distinction here is that the RSS content is not being distributed as part of the GPL application.
There is no clause whatsoever in the GPL that the source released must be functional or even worth anything to anyone or to suit any kind of specific purpose.
Of course not, but it does say you need to provide the complete source to the program, and all of it must be under the GPL. It goes to great lengths to talk about the work as a whole. Thus, you can't just separate out "assets" as something that the GPL does not apply to.
And again, the engine is working perfectly fine and is entirely useable. You are the one expecting it to be more than it is whereas others take it for simply a game engine.
I did no such thing. I was talking responding to the general claims of my parent poster, who said, "GPL is for source code, not assets."
I made no claims that this particular game was in violation of the GPL. If it's their code, they can license it however they wish, including or not including assets.
4. GPL is for source code, not assets. For that, you're looking at a creative commons type license for something similar.
It's quite reasonable that assets are considered part of the source code for a program. If a program is completely unusable without the assets, then those assets are essential data, and can be considered part of the source that gets compiled into a whole program.
To think otherwise would be deny the whole purpose of the GPL. There was no "creative commons" before the GPL, and it was expecting that the GPL covered everything needed to run the program. It is one work, a whole.
If you were to take some GPL source code that you don't have the copyright for, slap in your own assets on top of it, and redistribute it, there's a good chance you'd lose in court if those assets weren't also GPL.
This particular case is a little different because, I presume, the Lugaru guys own the copyright for the GPL parts, so they can release the source as GPL and then do what nobody else can, which is release a non-GPL version which includes proprietary assets. This is the GPL game that MySql played -- being able to dual-license their product for commercial benefit.
Welp, they said 'Full stop.' That means there's no sense arguing because the argument is over.
Look, I'm the Senior Vice President, Online Services Division. I did not copy from that search engine, Google. I never told anybody to copy, not a single time -- never. These allegations are false. And I need to go back to work for the Internetian people.
Yes, I am very happily judging Afghan sheep herders as not worthy opponents.
Except al-Qaeda isn't a bunch of sheep herders. You're just full of shit.
Woohp-di-fucking-do. 20 billion against a 14 trillion dollar economy?
First off, the point stands. Your analogy was completely wrong and trivialized what was a severe blow. Losing the World Trade Center and having a plane fly into the Pentagon isn't just something you shrug your shoulders about, and that $20 billion only covers the property damage. What the hell are you going to do, just sit around and wait for them to repeat or top the performance?
Do you think any populace of a first-world nation would stand for that?
First, we were actually facing REAL threats so you can almost give them a pass on acting like cowards in those cases.
The United States was relatively isolated and was not going to be invaded by Japan or Germany any time soon. We had plenty of time to build up, and the American Japanese living in our country were not a credible threat. The whole thing was a racist attack. Why didn't we round up all the people of German descent?
Second, and far more importantly, we pulled back from our cowardly ways in all of those cases within three years, recognized we had acted like cowards, and swore to never do it again.
That's easy to do once the war is over, isn't it? It was also a war we finished by vaporizing two cities with atomic bombs, after the Germans had been defeated and Japan had no capacity to hurt us at all.
NCIs entire research budget for 2009? 4.97 billion plus another 1.26 billion from the stimulus. The budget for defense? $1.01 and $1.35 TRILLION in fiscal year 2010. Hrm, cancer kills basically every single fucking American who isn't killed by heart disease and we spend fuck all on it.
You're really good at manipulating numbers in ridiculous fashion. You're comparing the entire defense budget with the research dollars for one cancer institute. Perhaps you should compare it against the budget for health care instead.
Furthermore, there are already private funds being used for issues like cancer research. We don't have private companies funding military operations.
Slashdot Mirror
So Pirate Bay is registered as a non-profit and has open books that are freely auditable?
should be a synch
cinch
You want me to find another example of somebody who wrote the original essay on Civil Disobedience? Maybe you don't believe his actions went far enough, but his essay was the one that popularized the term Civil Disobedience.
There are plenty of people who have gone to jail over their refusal to follow an unjust law, without any get out of jail free cards either, so you really can't be asking for an example of that.
It's 100% relative if you want to talk about what Civil Disobedience means, and how it is being redefined or not.
Also, the fundamental issues haven't changed at all. Slavery might not still be an issue, but there are still unjust wars and laws. Just ignoring something because it was written a couple of hundred years ago is obtuse.
However, you can not sit there with a straight face and say Huffington is any better. Fox is just more blatant about it. It is the subtle ones you need to watch out for.
Huffington Post subtle? Good one.
Anybody who takes the Huffington Post as a serious news organization has got to be waist-deep in liberal bullshit. It's nothing but a mouthpiece for liberal bloggers and peddlers.
As for her selling the site, I suppose there's absolutely nothing illegal about it though it does seem to go against the basic assumptions someone would make about why she put it together in the first place. The assumption would be that it's intended to be a megaphone for getting progressive values into the public sphere, gaining suitable publicity, and any money-making activity there should be limited to the non-profit, self-perpetuating kind.
People are so naive. The first basic assumption anybody should make is that people are in it for the money unless presented with strong evidence to the contrary. I'm sure it wasn't even declared as a non-profit.
The myth of 'Civil Disobedience is all about getting caught' is spread by those who don't like the goals of today's civil disobedience, only those of yesterday.
"Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison."
That's from Thoreau's Civil Disobedience essay. He refused to pay his taxes because of slavery and the war with Mexico. He was sent to jail, but ended only spending a day because somebody paid his taxes for him.
Whether you agree with him or not, that's the root of Civil Disobedience. It is true that he didn't say that you should go out of your way to be caught, but he was also willing to go to prison rather than fund the government.
I'd go farther and suggest that reading Slashdot using something other than a web browser (think usenet/email client with proper threading support) would be an improvement.
It would only be better if the client supported moderation. A typical Slashdot story has around 200 or 300 comments. Moderation really helps to keep that readable.
Stereotypes are fun. From "As Good as It Gets":
Receptionist: How do you write women so well?
Melvin Udall: I think of a man, and I take away reason and accountability.
I'm pretty sure that's a "whoosh".
And don't try to argue that I should read reviews. Those things are bought-and-paid-for by the companies, and therefore worthless.
Yes, because every review on the planet is bought and paid for, including those of your friends and people talking in online forums.
classic nerd failing of assuming that because we're smart people who know a lot about a lot of things, we're geniuses who know everything about everything. And I'm probably as guilty of it as anyone else ...
Also, there aren't "ads" in the way you are probably thinking, but when you start the game you *have* to watch the game studio logos. I don't know if it's just loading or what, but it's annoying. If it's loading, it should still let you skip the logo animations and give you a screen that just says "loading."
Yeah, I really hate games that won't let you skip all the cruft on startup. I agree, if it's loading it should just say so.
These are game-specific problems, and as far as I can tell
I can believe it. The multiplayer implementation for PS3 games can vary widely. Then again, it wouldn't surprise me if something deeper was wrong. There's not much transparency when it comes to network problems.
The barrier to entry isn't monetary though; it's just publicity.
Not quite true. YouTube spent millions per month on hosting and bandwidth fees before they were bought out by Google and eventually started showing ads. Many startups take at least several million in funding to get off the ground.
Legal intervention isn't necessary because if YouTube tried to abuse its monopoly (say, if its ads grew overly annoying), people would gradually start looking for alternatives, which would open the market to competitors.
At which point they could either temporarily cut back their advertising or claim their competitor is dumping by not having sufficient advertising to cover their costs.
That said, I'm not really a big fan of government intervention in the market. I just think it's interesting how the standard model for web startups is to offer for free it's services until a substantial user-base springs up, and then start charging via advertisements or premium services. It's essentially dumping.
Anti-dumping laws are designed to prevent someone (who has the ability to make a high initial investment) from gaining a monopoly by selling product at a loss in order to drive competitors out of business. The intent of this, obviously, would be to gain a monopoly, then raise prices exorbitantly high and make back their original loss quickly.
The interesting thing is that companies like YouTube did this to attract tons of viewers, and then put up advertisements later once they captured the market. It's pretty much the standard way of doing business for web startups.
In regards to peoples complaint about pirates and cheating, I find it's more an issue of poor development. I do not see any noticeable change. Sometimes I'm in a game of BC2 that I can't seem to hit anything even when I empty 100 rounds in the back of some unsuspecting chap. Other times it feels that every confrontation I'm in I win.
That sounds like lag, not poor development. Though maybe it's poor that developers don't indicate when lag is happening. They prefer to lie for a smoother user experience (which works out OK when you've got minor lag). How to handle lag is a difficult problem for real-time games.
Most of the time I have under an hour to play. These constant updates take over 15 minutes to complete and won't work in the background.
The updates average less than once a month, can be downloaded automatically, and in my experience do not take 15 minutes to install. More like 5 minutes or less.
Once installed and rebooted you go through a 2 to 5 minute wait just to get in to load the game and view all the ads.
What ads? Is this a particular game that does this?
Once you're finally in you get a no games available message. It used to happen occasionally. Since the last update it seams to happen 4 out of 5 times. I initially thought it was my cable provider until I started researching on the net.
Is this just for a particular game? Maybe people have stopped playing that game?
It's time to jailbreak and pirate, in this way I will still get some entertainment from my console.
In other words, you're doing what you always wanted to do. Pirate the games. You're just rationalizing your behavior.
I think you need to read the license again.
Read the license yourself. I'm intimately familiar with it. The license contains one sentence on allowed "mere aggregation" (a clause often abused and misinterpreted), but spends several on works distributed as a whole.
Are you saying that a bundle cannot consist of separate works under different licenses?
Not when they are distributed as part of a whole. You cannot claim that assets added to a GPL engine used to make a game are not part of the whole.
"If identifiable sections of that work are not derived from the Program, and can be reasonably considered independent and separate works in themselves, then this License, and its terms, do not apply to those sections when you distribute them as separate works. But when you distribute the same sections as part of a whole which is a work based on the Program, the distribution of the whole must be on the terms of this License, whose permissions for other licensees extend to the entire whole, and thus to each and every part regardless of who wrote it. "
Assets here are runtime data, not source code.
If I distribute a GPL game engine, and then somebody redistributes that engine with assets to make a game, then those assets are not just data, but instead an integral part of the program that must also be under the GPL.
Note I'm not talking about the particular game this article is about. All I'm saying is that in general, assets can come under the GPL. The person who started this thread made a blanket assertion that they could not.
If I wrote a GPL application that read an RSS feed from some newspaper, that would not put that RSS content under the GPL.
Agreed, and the important distinction here is that the RSS content is not being distributed as part of the GPL application.
There is no clause whatsoever in the GPL that the source released must be functional or even worth anything to anyone or to suit any kind of specific purpose.
Of course not, but it does say you need to provide the complete source to the program, and all of it must be under the GPL. It goes to great lengths to talk about the work as a whole. Thus, you can't just separate out "assets" as something that the GPL does not apply to.
And again, the engine is working perfectly fine and is entirely useable. You are the one expecting it to be more than it is whereas others take it for simply a game engine.
I did no such thing. I was talking responding to the general claims of my parent poster, who said, "GPL is for source code, not assets."
I made no claims that this particular game was in violation of the GPL. If it's their code, they can license it however they wish, including or not including assets.
4. GPL is for source code, not assets. For that, you're looking at a creative commons type license for something similar.
It's quite reasonable that assets are considered part of the source code for a program. If a program is completely unusable without the assets, then those assets are essential data, and can be considered part of the source that gets compiled into a whole program.
To think otherwise would be deny the whole purpose of the GPL. There was no "creative commons" before the GPL, and it was expecting that the GPL covered everything needed to run the program. It is one work, a whole.
If you were to take some GPL source code that you don't have the copyright for, slap in your own assets on top of it, and redistribute it, there's a good chance you'd lose in court if those assets weren't also GPL.
This particular case is a little different because, I presume, the Lugaru guys own the copyright for the GPL parts, so they can release the source as GPL and then do what nobody else can, which is release a non-GPL version which includes proprietary assets. This is the GPL game that MySql played -- being able to dual-license their product for commercial benefit.
Welp, they said 'Full stop.' That means there's no sense arguing because the argument is over.
Look, I'm the Senior Vice President, Online Services Division. I did not copy from that search engine, Google. I never told anybody to copy, not a single time -- never. These allegations are false. And I need to go back to work for the Internetian people.
Oh wait, it is already popular.
And Microsoft wants to keep it that way. There's a big push right now to get away from it for a truly open standard.
Selling their books with/without DRM probably isn't Amazon's choice...
Of course it is. Even if they only allowed it as an option for publishers, it would be better than selling everything in their proprietary format.
The thing is, Amazon is perfectly happy to lock you in to their proprietary format.
I bought an iPad primarily for the ability to read Kindle books.
I don't get it. Why not just buy a Kindle then?
Yes, I am very happily judging Afghan sheep herders as not worthy opponents.
Except al-Qaeda isn't a bunch of sheep herders. You're just full of shit.
Woohp-di-fucking-do. 20 billion against a 14 trillion dollar economy?
First off, the point stands. Your analogy was completely wrong and trivialized what was a severe blow. Losing the World Trade Center and having a plane fly into the Pentagon isn't just something you shrug your shoulders about, and that $20 billion only covers the property damage. What the hell are you going to do, just sit around and wait for them to repeat or top the performance?
Do you think any populace of a first-world nation would stand for that?
First, we were actually facing REAL threats so you can almost give them a pass on acting like cowards in those cases.
The United States was relatively isolated and was not going to be invaded by Japan or Germany any time soon. We had plenty of time to build up, and the American Japanese living in our country were not a credible threat. The whole thing was a racist attack. Why didn't we round up all the people of German descent?
Second, and far more importantly, we pulled back from our cowardly ways in all of those cases within three years, recognized we had acted like cowards, and swore to never do it again.
That's easy to do once the war is over, isn't it? It was also a war we finished by vaporizing two cities with atomic bombs, after the Germans had been defeated and Japan had no capacity to hurt us at all.
NCIs entire research budget for 2009? 4.97 billion plus another 1.26 billion from the stimulus. The budget for defense? $1.01 and $1.35 TRILLION in fiscal year 2010. Hrm, cancer kills basically every single fucking American who isn't killed by heart disease and we spend fuck all on it.
You're really good at manipulating numbers in ridiculous fashion. You're comparing the entire defense budget with the research dollars for one cancer institute. Perhaps you should compare it against the budget for health care instead.
Furthermore, there are already private funds being used for issues like cancer research. We don't have private companies funding military operations.