If BeOS were GPLed, we'd get to see some apparently very clean multimdia code. That could then be incorporated into something which would run on Linux or other Free operating systems.
The problem is that Linux is a geek's operating system, and although you will have developers for it (probably the same type of steadfast people who developed for Amiga), you won't have the same momentum as Linux does.
What would happen, though, is a great Free operating system for your grandmother. Let's face it, Linux isn't right, no matter how much you dumb it down. OS X isn't Free, and neither is QNX (or however you spell that bugger). For Free Software to take off, we need a Free OS which does the kinds of things that Windows and Mac have done well, be just what a person sitting at home or at thier desk needs, and nothing more. That means a PC with lots of applications, a very limited number of uses, and a very simple interface for hardware and software configuation.
Network security in this sheme would come from the idea if no apps are running, it would have no open ports.
We won't create any original content, we'll just read a lot of stories and allow other people to send us stuff from other people's reporting that we find interesting.
Then I'll quote those mails in one paragraph forms, put links up to the original sites.
Finally, to make this really original, I would allow people to comment on the articles and rate each others comments, further reducing the amount of work I need to do.
Katz dismisses anyone not of his mindset as a Luddite, dismissing the idea of legitimate concerns and the rights of the individual to reject things they don't want in thier lives.
I suppose security folk, people who use cryptography and those talking about the dangers of jumping into something that one doesn't fully grasp is a bad thing. No. Katz proclaims that we must jump into the Net full force, not look back, and not think about the long term consequences of our actions.
I'm a friend of our author and work with him. While even I disagree with part of what he did, the idea that this was allright or even justifiable on the part of the police is complete and utter shit. Our rights are protected. Walking down the street minding your own buisness is something it should be okay to do.
Secondly, it wasn't durring the protests, it was over a day after they were over. The police were, simply, overreacting and making trouble.
Did anyone here listen to the police chief on TV say that he thought none of the protestors had a legitimate right to be there? I think this attitude by law enforcement is a real problem.
I sympathize with the police, and I lived in Philadelphia for many years- and I disagree with much of what Vergil did, but he had the right to do so.
Well, since Coleco went out of buisness can people legally trade them?
If people don't remember Colleco (is it Coleco or Colleco?), they made an advanced game system for the time with features like 8 bit graphics and a joystick with two firing buttons, a controller and twelve presable buttons for options.
And then they put out a computer, the Adam, a peice of garbage which I still have a fondness for.
Anyway, Colleco ROMs are on the net, and though there are some made by Sega and Nintendo and whatnot, can those made my Colleco itself (Smurfs!) be legally traded?
- Serge Wroclawski
PS if you do get a Colleco ADAM, don't put keep the tape in the tape drive when you turn the machine on, bad things happen!
You obviously don't understand my post whatsoever. You can distribute something with a copyright as long as it says you are allowed to, but not modify.
The best way I see to combat this is the unfortunate trend of putting a copyright notice in one's.sig stating the terms where that work can be used, including free unmodified distribution. If that is then violated, you have the right to go after Deja for altering the content of your message.
They may argue that you can have your posts removed, but that does not matter since you already had a set of terms and conditions which they had to follow in much the same way that a user of a Free Software must follow the enclosed licnese.
Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer, I'm only speaking from my own limited understanding of the issue and based on that offering a solution.
The real solution, of course, is to mail this person at Deja and tell them we hate thier new feature and make sure that it's known that the people who post to USENET and read the postings will be personally offended by this feature.
To the argument that "This is a free service", being free does not excuse one from the law.
There have been many promises about this product and patches submitted and ideas submitted and although the product is a good one, I've heard people complain that they make lots of promises and don't keep them. I wouldn't hold my breath on this issue and I'll "believe it when I see it".
This article says it will be released Open Source, but the Sun Community License is _not_ OSG compliant, and is especially not Free Software compliant.
I wish the posters and article writers would be more careful with headlines.
It will tighten security when attacked. Well why the heck isn't security tight anyway?! Viruses aren't a problem when you have an OS with permissions.
Port scans aren't really attacks, only tell you what's on, and firewalls take care of this.
DoS attacks, and this is my favorite... they will shut down the port when they get a DoS attack! Well, that to me sounds like DoS!!! So to protect ourselves from a DoS, we're going to turn off all the services.Please excuse me while I shoot myself in the head,, I think I just caught a cold.
Even if it just blocks that one machine, like PortSentry, how the heck does it _really_ know the offending machine, that can be spoofed. Either way, it's just denying service to that machine, making the whole thing just a little more useless.
When you walk down a crouded street, you're (for the most part) anonymous. Even if there are cameras on you, they don't know it's you (unless you're being followed). But the net, and especially the web, is different. Cookies and logs make you as trackable and traceable as if you had a homing device and all your vital information was sent without human intervention.
Free speech is one issue and privacy another, but they tie in with being able to being anonymous.
A great quote, "If it can't be abused- it's not a freedom".
It's like parody of Evangelion, but it's also serious in parts. One of the best Anime out there which hasn't so far been mentioned.The title is Kidou Senkan Nadesico but most people just call it Nadesico.
Also, I strongly recommend the film "The Ultimate Teacher", I almost dirtied myself laughing... yet another Anime where you have no idea what the heck's going on.
For a funny but also sappy story, I love the OVA !Ah My Goddess (or Oh! My Goddess). It's also even funnier if you know the Norse gods, who are characters in the series.
Well... thanks Slashdot for having this as a story... when's the "Ask Slashdot" about Hentai guide comming;P (just kidding).
I didn't say being a racist was illegal. I said that the laws were very much the same. In fact, on the BBC a few weeks ago there was talk about the removal of some author over his book which was deemed by UK courts to be racist. - Serge Wroclawski
They'd sue Yahoo France I'd suppose. Yahoo has decided to put an office there- so now it's thier responsibility to respect the laws there, just as any other buisness. - Serge Wroclawski
Use of the words "Universal Access"
on
Universal Access
·
· Score: 2
This essay does not describe universal access at all. Universal access is access for everyone, not merely a few select individuals who have the money and a few who happen to work for a particular company.
The only way we can assure truly universal access in the US is to legislate this as a requirement. For instance, cable companies have monopolies in the US. We allow them to have monopolies, but at the same time, they can or can't (by thier choise) offer internet access, and even then, only to certain users they like (non Windows users need not apply), and can restrict the purpose of the server (people who run ircd need not apply). This is not universal access.
Universal access is the telephone company. They must give you telephone if you can pay the bill. They can't say "We don't want to serve you telephone becuase you live too far out there" nor can they can "You like to use that phone from company XYZ and we only allow phones made from ABC."
Additionally, there is no definition of access here. Is access PPP? What about an email address? Do you need mail to have "access"? Is the ability to surf the web withot restrictions like NetNanny access or can access include such restrictions?
I contend that universal access is more than an IP address just as phone access is more than just a peice of wire in one's house. If the people want true universal access, these terms need to be discussed and agreed upon.
When 100% of the population has the opportunity to be online then it will become a choice as to whether or not they want in (just as some people choose not to own a telephone). As things stand now, universal access is just a dream.
BTW, to all of you who showed me I mispelled the subject, I figured that out about 3 seconds after hitting Post, so don't bother.:) While you're right in some sense, we have to be sensitive to the fact that the law in this nation (and in Canada and England and Germany) says you may not publish/post racist material or things relating to racist material. Those are the laws, period. The issue becomes what a country does about them. Does the country say "well we can't stop it so we we'll do nothing", or do they say "you can't look at it and if you do we'll put you in jail" or do they say "we'll block access so this whole issue will be prevented". It has to be one of the three.
In this case, France is trying to do the sane thing which is to ask that the material be removed. Otherwise they will be forced to block access, put web surfers in jail or, like Germany did, if any of the Yahoo people go to France, lock them up.
This is the best that can be done in the circumstances as I see it. If they were to do anything beyond this, we'd scream bloody murder.
And as hinted, Yahoo may have to respect laws in France... well then maybe that's the solution. The web site must now adapt content based on... IP addresses? Well that's not really easy, nor is it assuring that I'm maybe not using an ISP somewhere else and happen to be in France at the time.
I'd like to see a suggestion on how the French government could deal with the situation that does not include breaking thier own laws or ignoring them.
Even on the Internet, there must be respect for law and repect for individual country's laws.
In the US for instance, we have laws about child pornography which may not exist in other places.
In France, just as in Canada, England and Germany, racism is against the law.
Whether you agree with this law or not does not change the fact that it's not up to Americans whether they agree or not. It's up to the French citizens how they decide to run thier own country. That is how democracy works.
If you respect democracy, then you must allow countries to run thier country the way they want.
The fact they recognize that the Internet is international only shows how complicated this issue is for everyone.
I doubt that all these negative posts would come if we found the US government was going to some small nation with a child pornography or snuff film sale.
If the GPL was in effect, this would require Real to publish the entire source, not just diffs, for the Real product. I don't know if thie MPL has the same requirements, but this is exactly why the GPL is viral. Does anyone have information on how the MPL allows the distribution of only the diffs? - Serge Wroclawski
One problem I have is that a lot of these manuals are Windows binaries, even if the information inside is just general specs.
So, for now, I have to get paper docs as an alternative to this.
While I personally prefer documentation in plain text, HTML or postscript, only a few vendors that I deal with have taken the steps to conver all thier documentation to this and making it available for download on thier web site.
Slashdot Mirror
Robilmo,
You're an intelligent, insightful man. You have a lot of thoughtful ideas and have a good grasp on technology and where things are moving.
So why, if you're so damn smart, do you wear Hawian shirts like a tourist from the 80s?
- Serge Wroclawski
If BeOS were GPLed, we'd get to see some apparently very clean multimdia code. That could then be incorporated into something which would run on Linux or other Free operating systems.
The problem is that Linux is a geek's operating system, and although you will have developers for it (probably the same type of steadfast people who developed for Amiga), you won't have the same momentum as Linux does.
What would happen, though, is a great Free operating system for your grandmother. Let's face it, Linux isn't right, no matter how much you dumb it down. OS X isn't Free, and neither is QNX (or however you spell that bugger). For Free Software to take off, we need a Free OS which does the kinds of things that Windows and Mac have done well, be just what a person sitting at home or at thier desk needs, and nothing more. That means a PC with lots of applications, a very limited number of uses, and a very simple interface for hardware and software configuation.
Network security in this sheme would come from the idea if no apps are running, it would have no open ports.
Simple as that.
- Serge Wroclawski
That story URL was good, here's another (and I think more comprehensive), from a DC LUG meeting more than a year ago.
/linux/wireless.html
Thanks to Peter Teuben for doing this:
http://www.astro.umd.edu/~teu ben
- Serge Wroclawski
I would like to submit a patent for a news site.
We won't create any original content, we'll just read a lot of stories and allow other people to send us stuff from other people's reporting that we find interesting.
Then I'll quote those mails in one paragraph forms, put links up to the original sites.
Finally, to make this really original, I would allow people to comment on the articles and rate each others comments, further reducing the amount of work I need to do.
I'll make a fortune with this idea!
- Serge Wroclawski
Katz dismisses anyone not of his mindset as a Luddite, dismissing the idea of legitimate concerns and the rights of the individual to reject things they don't want in thier lives.
I suppose security folk, people who use cryptography and those talking about the dangers of jumping into something that one doesn't fully grasp is a bad thing. No. Katz proclaims that we must jump into the Net full force, not look back, and not think about the long term consequences of our actions.
I'd hate to see what he thinks of Clifford Stoll.
- Serge Wroclawski
Okay, I think I should speak up now.
I'm a friend of our author and work with him. While even I disagree with part of what he did, the idea that this was allright or even justifiable on the part of the police is complete and utter shit. Our rights are protected. Walking down the street minding your own buisness is something it should be okay to do.
Secondly, it wasn't durring the protests, it was over a day after they were over. The police were, simply, overreacting and making trouble.
Did anyone here listen to the police chief on TV say that he thought none of the protestors had a legitimate right to be there? I think this attitude by law enforcement is a real problem.
I sympathize with the police, and I lived in Philadelphia for many years- and I disagree with much of what Vergil did, but he had the right to do so.
That's my point.
- Serge Wroclawski
Well, since Coleco went out of buisness can people legally trade them?
If people don't remember Colleco (is it Coleco or Colleco?), they made an advanced game system for the time with features like 8 bit graphics and a joystick with two firing buttons, a controller and twelve presable buttons for options.
And then they put out a computer, the Adam, a peice of garbage which I still have a fondness for.
Anyway, Colleco ROMs are on the net, and though there are some made by Sega and Nintendo and whatnot, can those made my Colleco itself (Smurfs!) be legally traded?
- Serge Wroclawski
PS if you do get a Colleco ADAM, don't put keep the tape in the tape drive when you turn the machine on, bad things happen!
Okay, sure it would be nice to have footpedals for Emacs, the way Emacs was meant to be, but is it really worth $99?
- Serge Wroclawski
An interface that exists which breaks all the ease of use and natural/ergonomic rules... We already have that.
:)
I use it. It's called emacs.
- Serge Wroclawski
You obviously don't understand my post whatsoever.
You can distribute something with a copyright as long as it says you are allowed to, but not modify.
- Serge Wroclawski
The best way I see to combat this is the unfortunate trend of putting a copyright notice in one's .sig stating the terms where that work can be used, including free unmodified distribution. If that is then violated, you have the right to go after Deja for altering the content of your message.
They may argue that you can have your posts removed, but that does not matter since you already had a set of terms and conditions which they had to follow in much the same way that a user of a Free Software must follow the enclosed licnese.
Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer, I'm only speaking from my own limited understanding of the issue and based on that offering a solution.
The real solution, of course, is to mail this person at Deja and tell them we hate thier new feature and make sure that it's known that the people who post to USENET and read the postings will be personally offended by this feature.
To the argument that "This is a free service", being free does not excuse one from the law.
- Serge Wroclawski
There have been many promises about this product and patches submitted and ideas submitted and although the product is a good one, I've heard people complain that they make lots of promises and don't keep them. I wouldn't hold my breath on this issue and I'll "believe it when I see it".
- Serge Wroclawski
This article says it will be released Open Source, but the Sun Community License is _not_ OSG compliant, and is especially not Free Software compliant.
I wish the posters and article writers would be more careful with headlines.
- Serge Wroclawski
Be careful Hemos...
She might have married you for your karma points...
Just kidding... Despite all these lame postings, I'm sure everyone here is happy for you and wishes you well in the years to come.
Well, except for the lamer whose going to reply to this post and say he doesn't wish you well, but just ignore him.
Congratulations!
- Serge Wroclawski
So this is the part no one's focusing in on...
It will tighten security when attacked. Well why the heck isn't security tight anyway?! Viruses aren't a problem when you have an OS with permissions.
Port scans aren't really attacks, only tell you what's on, and firewalls take care of this.
DoS attacks, and this is my favorite... they will shut down the port when they get a DoS attack! Well, that to me sounds like DoS!!!
So to protect ourselves from a DoS, we're going to turn off all the services.Please excuse me while I shoot myself in the head,, I think I just caught a cold.
Even if it just blocks that one machine, like PortSentry, how the heck does it _really_ know the offending machine, that can be spoofed. Either way, it's just denying service to that machine, making the whole thing just a little more useless.
- Serge Wroclawski
Wrong. People do want to be anonymous.
When you walk down a crouded street, you're (for the most part) anonymous. Even if there are cameras on you, they don't know it's you (unless you're being followed). But the net, and especially the web, is different. Cookies and logs make you as trackable and traceable as if you had a homing device and all your vital information was sent without human intervention.
Free speech is one issue and privacy another, but they tie in with being able to being anonymous.
A great quote, "If it can't be abused- it's not a freedom".
- Serge Wroclawski
Don't forget Nadescio!
;P (just kidding).
It's like parody of Evangelion, but it's also serious in parts. One of the best Anime out there which hasn't so far been mentioned.The title is Kidou Senkan Nadesico but most people just call it Nadesico.
Also, I strongly recommend the film "The Ultimate Teacher", I almost dirtied myself laughing... yet another Anime where you have no idea what the heck's going on.
For a funny but also sappy story, I love the OVA !Ah My Goddess (or Oh! My Goddess). It's also even funnier if you know the Norse gods, who are characters in the series.
Well... thanks Slashdot for having this as a story... when's the "Ask Slashdot" about Hentai guide comming
- Serge Wroclawski
Crystal Ball huh?
Didn't I see one of those in Dr. Who's Tardis?
Millions of US taxpayer's money spent to build a policebox...
- Serge Wroclawski
I didn't say being a racist was illegal. I said that the laws were very much the same. In fact, on the BBC a few weeks ago there was talk about the removal of some author over his book which was deemed by UK courts to be racist.
- Serge Wroclawski
They'd sue Yahoo France I'd suppose.
Yahoo has decided to put an office there- so now it's thier responsibility to respect the laws there, just as any other buisness.
- Serge Wroclawski
This essay does not describe universal access at all. Universal access is access for everyone, not merely a few select individuals who have the money and a few who happen to work for a particular company.
The only way we can assure truly universal access in the US is to legislate this as a requirement.
For instance, cable companies have monopolies in the US. We allow them to have monopolies, but at the same time, they can or can't (by thier choise) offer internet access, and even then, only to certain users they like (non Windows users need not apply), and can restrict the purpose of the server (people who run ircd need not apply). This is not universal access.
Universal access is the telephone company. They must give you telephone if you can pay the bill. They can't say "We don't want to serve you telephone becuase you live too far out there" nor can they can "You like to use that phone from company XYZ and we only allow phones made from ABC."
Additionally, there is no definition of access here. Is access PPP? What about an email address? Do you need mail to have "access"? Is the ability to surf the web withot restrictions like NetNanny access or can access include such restrictions?
I contend that universal access is more than an IP address just as phone access is more than just a peice of wire in one's house. If the people want true universal access, these terms need to be discussed and agreed upon.
When 100% of the population has the opportunity to be online then it will become a choice as to whether or not they want in (just as some people choose not to own a telephone). As things stand now, universal access is just a dream.
- Serge Wroclawski
BTW, to all of you who showed me I mispelled the subject, I figured that out about 3 seconds after hitting Post, so don't bother. :)
While you're right in some sense, we have to be sensitive to the fact that the law in this nation (and in Canada and England and Germany) says you may not publish/post racist material or things relating to racist material.
Those are the laws, period.
The issue becomes what a country does about them. Does the country say "well we can't stop it so we we'll do nothing", or do they say "you can't look at it and if you do we'll put you in jail" or do they say "we'll block access so this whole issue will be prevented". It has to be one of the three.
In this case, France is trying to do the sane thing which is to ask that the material be removed. Otherwise they will be forced to block access, put web surfers in jail or, like Germany did, if any of the Yahoo people go to France, lock them up.
This is the best that can be done in the circumstances as I see it. If they were to do anything beyond this, we'd scream bloody murder.
And as hinted, Yahoo may have to respect laws in France... well then maybe that's the solution. The web site must now adapt content based on... IP addresses? Well that's not really easy, nor is it assuring that I'm maybe not using an ISP somewhere else and happen to be in France at the time.
I'd like to see a suggestion on how the French government could deal with the situation that does not include breaking thier own laws or ignoring them.
- Serge Wroclawski
Even on the Internet, there must be respect for law and repect for individual country's laws.
In the US for instance, we have laws about child pornography which may not exist in other places.
In France, just as in Canada, England and Germany, racism is against the law.
Whether you agree with this law or not does not change the fact that it's not up to Americans whether they agree or not. It's up to the French citizens how they decide to run thier own country. That is how democracy works.
If you respect democracy, then you must allow countries to run thier country the way they want.
The fact they recognize that the Internet is international only shows how complicated this issue is for everyone.
I doubt that all these negative posts would come if we found the US government was going to some small nation with a child pornography or snuff film sale.
- Serge Wroclawski
If the GPL was in effect, this would require Real to publish the entire source, not just diffs, for the Real product.
I don't know if thie MPL has the same requirements, but this is exactly why the GPL is viral.
Does anyone have information on how the MPL allows the distribution of only the diffs?
- Serge Wroclawski
One problem I have is that a lot of these manuals are Windows binaries, even if the information inside is just general specs.
So, for now, I have to get paper docs as an alternative to this.
While I personally prefer documentation in plain text, HTML or postscript, only a few vendors that I deal with have taken the steps to conver all thier documentation to this and making it available for download on thier web site.
- Serge Wroclawski