So if Best Buy sold you a disk with GPL breaking code, you can sue Best Buy for distribution?
Probably not since, given the doctrine of first sale, Best Buy doesn't need a copyright license to distribute a physical copy they have purchased in good faith from a vendor, so they don't need the GPL's permission to sell their copy.
Apple, OTOH, is transmitting a new digital copy to each purchaser, which does require either a legal privilege that trumps copyright (e.g., fair use, which pretty clearly doesn't apply here) or permission from the copyright holder. Insofar as the FSF is the holder of copyright in material included in an app on the App Store, and licenses it only under the GPL, the GPL is the only basis on which Apple can claim to have the required permission.
While I have been aware that there are more than 10 amendments (since 2nd grade or so), I was not aware that 11 of them were now considered the Bill of Rights.
There were 12 amendments proposed in 1789 as the Bill of Rights. 11 of them were eventually adopted; they were adopted as Amendments 1-10 in 1791, and Amendment 27 in 1992.
IF it was a new amendment, it couldn't be anything less than the 28th.
The Constitution didn't stop being amended with the "Bill of Rights" (well, in one sense it did, since Amendment XXVII, the most recently adopted of the 12 amendments proposed as the bill of rights -- 11 of which have been adopted -- is also the most recently passed amendment to the Constititon; in any case, it didn't stop with the 10th Amendment.)
With Term limits they would have to go get real jobs after say 12 years total.
I can't see why in any job with significant responsibility, you'd want to cap the experience that someone can have in the job.
What term limits due is shift power from elected representatives to non-elected staff, interest group lobbyists, and others, who don't have term limits capping their experience.
The main problem term limits seek to address is the lack of meaningful choice in elections, which is a product of an electoral structure which assures that there will be at most two viable choices, one of which is usually the incumbent.
Fixing the underlying electoral system to not use plurality or majority/runoff elections in single member districts would do far more to promote real choice than term limits do, and would avoid the undesirable effects of term limits.
With, say, 5 member districts with legislators elected by STV, you'd have far more real choice than with the U.S.'s current electoral systems (even with term limits added), and probably more change in individual representatives year-to-year, though it would still be possible for candidates that really did a good job in the eyes of the voters to keep doing the job as long as they retained the support of the electorate.
Probably not a wiki; we should be using git repositories for working on laws.
Anybody can commit their suggested changes, but getting them merged will be really difficult.
The key prerequisite (and probably more important) is getting a standardized, structured format for representing law codes, adopting it for use as the representation of record in which codes are maintained, and then making the official, current version widely and freely accessible on the internet.
After that, yeah, using something like a DVCS for managing changes makes sense.
Really repressive governments are very skilled in the techniques of rubber hose cryptoanalisis
More effective, but less repressive, governments know that that method is far better at getting people -- guilty or not -- to confess and implicate a laundry list of "accomplices" -- guilty or not -- than it is at actually revealing what the target actually knows.
Actually, "really repressive" governments are generally aware of that, too, for the most part, though given that loyalty is valued far more than competence in such regimes, there may be some exceptions.
But even leaving that aside, given that repressive regimes will have enemies, and given that those enemies will work against the regime, and given that the regime will devote its energies to identifying them, exposing their secrets, and suppressing them, its better for them to have encryption than not.
The problem is that the approach Genachowski wants to use means adding ISPs into the existing structure used to regulate telcos. While this would insure net neutrality it would also open a giant can of worms in applying the rest of a giant regulatory structure to ISPs.
This is wrong; neither the legislative authority under which telcos are regulated nor the intended use of that authority under the approach outlined by Genachowski would apply the entire "giant regulatory structure" currently applied to telcos to ISPs.
I am not convinced that the average consumer is interested in a fragmented (albeit "free") experience.
Android users don't have a "fragmented" experience, they have an experience of the particular device they choose -- and the greater diversity of Android devices on the market (currently the case with phones, and almost certainly the case in a short while with tablets) means that consumers are more likely to find an Android device aligned with their interest than an iPhoneOS device that is as well aligned with their interests.
With smartphones, I've heard from plenty of non-techies -- who are current iPhone owners but not Apple cultists -- expressing jealousy over various newer Android phones that they've run into people with.
The greater diversity of Android devices resulting from the absence of central control may make it more likely that any individual consumer will find one that is too their liking than the handful of iPhoneOS devices available -- and there is no reason this would be any less true for tablets than it is for phones.
I suspect Apple will, in the mobile market, end up the same place they are in the traditional desktop and laptop PC market -- a large successful player with a very vocal and devoted fan base and a substantial, but nowhere near majority, share of the market.
The government is absolutely convinced that law enforcement will come to a screeching halt if people can communicate casually without being subject to eavesdropping.
Some people in government are, some people in government pretend to be to sell policies they wish to abuse for purposes other than the overt purpose, and some people in government don't even pretend to be. "The government" -- even referring to any single, particular government -- isn't a hivemind with a uniform point of view or agenda.
I'm guessing that, in the dystopian future, the list of evil governments that would suppress speech but not ban encrypting it will be very short.
Probably, but encryption is still valuable to the victims of such regimes as one (of several) layers of protection, as the government discovering that you are (illegally or not) concealing information from them is not as useful to the repressive government as finding out the content of the encrypted communication.
Legalize sin (victimless crimes), tax things deemed "harmful" to society, and we'd have enough money to run government.
No, we wouldn't. Or at least, you haven't provided any reason to believe we would.
If we internalize all the external costs from activities which are harmful to society, we would have enough money to fund a government sufficient to address all of those activities, but to do that through taxes presumes a whole lot (most notably, that every harmful activity -- not just "victimless crimes" -- is committed by someone who has resources which can be taxed sufficient to offset the social costs imposed by the activity, including the cost of identifying the wrongdoer and collecting the taxes.) This is sheer fantasy.
Profits aren't a dirty word, why would we want to tax people earning a living (income tax), investing (Capital Gains), and providing an inheritance for their kids(Death taxes)??
The reason we tax income (which is what all of those things are -- income from work, from investments, and from gifts, whether the gift was a bequest or inter vivos transfer) and/or property is that the those earning the most income or retaining the most property are benefiting the most from organized society (which enables amassing large incomes and stores of wealth) and thus ought to contribute the most to maintain it.
Taxes are punitive in nature,
Taxes on income at a marginal rate of less than 100% are not punitive in nature, nor, in general, are ad valorem taxes on property (though its certainly possible to constructed punitive income or property taxes.)
Reducing the marginal gain from something isn't punishing it (transforming an activity with a net marginal gain into a marginal loss is, at least arguably, punitive, but for an income tax that requires a marginal rate of greater than 100%.)
The only thing making things like this illegal does, is cause crime.
Sure, if all you do is make it illegal, and don't enforce the law, all you've done is create new categories of "crime". Just as clearly, making things illegal can be part of actually reducing their incidence -- it can also fail to do that -- so the generalization you state is, at best, meaningless.
We don't need more people in prison, we need less. Meaning less things defined as "crime".
Or different punishments for crime. Or more effort at preventing crime. Or... Needing less people in prison doesn't mean needing less things defined as crime.
This approach would work except for one thing. That being the busybodies who want to rule everyone and tell them how to live, be they on the right (moral police) and the left (profit police).
Defining which things are "sin" (or, more secularly, which have "unprivileged external costs which need to be internalized") and ought therefore to be taxed and is no less "moral policing" than defining which things are crimes and ought to be prohibited. It might be a more desirable way to address certain externalities (indeed, I'd agree that it is a more desirable way to address many externalities), but its certainly a subjective and moral judgement that is imposed through force of law on others.
Don't want something? Tax it, it will go away.
Well, unless its cigarettes.
Or alcohol.
Or gasoline.
Or any of the millions of other things that are taxed that haven't gone away.
Make it illegal, it doesn't go away, it just becomes a crime.
I would contend that, while far not perfectly successful, making slavery illegal in the US has done far more to make slavery go away than taxing, say, real property has done to make real property go away.
Anything -- whether its civil or criminal prohibition that comes wi
Then, we would all would be rich, and have a well funded government.
No, we wouldn't.
I would offer a more detailed rebuttal, but since you haven't actually offered an argument to rebut, just a bare assertion, I'll settle for simple contradiction until you do.
When Flash Player 10.1 is generally available, it (or a special version of it) will be integrated (i.e., bundled with) Chrome and the integrated version will (either always or by default, I forget which) take precedence over any separate system-installed Flash Player when Chrome accesses Flash content. IIRC, Flash Player 10.1 is already integrated with Chrome on the Beta channel, but because Flash Player 10.1 isn't generally released yet, its not integrated on the non-beta channel.
First it's not enough privacy options. Now it's too many privacy options.
I don't remember any substantial number of complaints about Facebook not having enough privacy options. I do remember complaints about them repeatedly changing settings related to privacy to expose more information more widely without advance notice and the opportunity to opt-out (or, better, the option to opt-in to the change) of the change in defaults for existing users.
Adding more settings after the fact does nothing to address the problem, and, insofar as it increases confusion and reduces the ability of the average users to understand and effectively manage how their information is exposed, is part of the same problem.
Are you saying that as long as externally visible behavior stays the same that there won't be new bugs/behaviors under the hood??
If a change in behavior is not externally visible (that is, if it is entirely contained within the internal process of the replaced component, and has no external effect) it can't matter (and can't be a "new bug", since a bug is an undesirable, externally visible behavior.
Re:OSI is getting exactly what they pushed
on
Why We Still Need OSI
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· Score: 2, Informative
Does that not sound like it hasn't already happened? In 2002, yeah, it sounded stupid
Uh, no, it didn't. It had already happened then; the description in the essay is exactly what trusted computing was being sold as, by its promoters, to the kinds of companies that would use it to enforce their restrictions, looked at from the consumer's point of view -- it wasn't an extrapolation, just the same description from the consumer perspective.
Doesn't it mean that if a search for a medical condition at work my employers can't see it?
Maybe. If you have administrative control of your desktop.
Otherwise, securing the connection between your desktop and Google won't prevent the employer from finding out everything you do using the computer that they control.
Rewriting means rethinking; most legacy code is functional and is usually rebuilt in OOP. Whenever you rethink how something works it tends to change the entire behavior to say nothing of all the new bugs you'll have to hunt down.
First, presumably that is intended to be "imperative" not "functional".
Second, if you change the externally-visible behavior (including introducing new bugs) as a result of rethinking the best way to acheive the existing externally-visible behavior, you are doing it wrong.
Maybe it should fail simple dimensional analysis because, hey, smashing people and hours together doesn't always generate productivity
First, that doesn't make sense: if it fails dimensional analysis, its a nonsense measure, not a "subtle" one that "needs certain assumptions".
Second, "Person-hours" isn't a unit of productivity, its a unit of labor.
$ (or some other value measure) is the usual unit of output, and $/person-hour (or $/person-year) is the usual unit of productivity.
Re:OSI is getting exactly what they pushed
on
Why We Still Need OSI
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· Score: 3, Insightful
However, I think we can all agree now that GPL V3 was a good idea because it would prevent our current situation of half-open devices.
No, we can't. First of all, because I doubt we'll all agree that "half-open" devices are inherently evil, and second because I'm sure some of us would disagree that, even granting that "half-open" devices are evil, that the general approach in the GPL v3 approach to addressing the problem is desirable, and lastly because the GPL v3 specifically allows half-open business- (rather than consumer-) oriented devices, so even if the general approach it takes to addressing half-open devices were a desirable approach to dealing with a real problem, the GPLv3 would not, in fact, prevent half-open devices.
Re:OSI is getting exactly what they pushed
on
Why We Still Need OSI
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· Score: 2, Insightful
If you use the BSD license you end up with OSX
And Free/NetBSD, etc. If you use a BSD-style license (or a public domain declaration, like SQLite), sure, you'll have commercial, closed derivatives. If there is sufficient community interest and the code is open, you'll also have a thriving open-source community, and often the people making closed derivatives (or in-house derivatives that aren't distributed under any license) will still commit code -- and money --back to the open projects (because they realize the benefit they get from having the community improving the code, even if they have some bits they want to keep for themselves.)
Problems are solved by people being invested in solving them, not process.
Both are, IMO, essential, which is while while I pointed at particular areas of process, my big picture message was about IT shops taking "responsibility for assuring the quality of the IT infrastructure."
Neglect of process is a symptom of people not being invested in solving problems that leads to bad results on its own, but even a good (nominal) process isn't going to work well if people aren't invested.
This requires the antithesis of "Units" - Ownership; Ownership in the company, Ownership of the mission, and a direct heart felt connection to the success of the company.
I prefer "responsibility"; "ownership" is, IMO, misapplied here. (Though, arguably, one of the reasons people do not take responsibility is because they don't, in fact, have ownership -- but ownership is a material relationship, and responsibility is the relevant attitude.)
But I think in substance we generally agree.
Until you have staff, from the CEO down, that own problems, from the mess in the coffee room to server down time, you will have a "business house of cards" no matter how good the process. In fact, most of the time, fixing things involves re-writing and/or reconsidering process - usually starting with asking the question - "Do we really need that?"
You kind of contradict yourself there: if fixing things usually requires changing the process, then "how good the process" is obviously has fairly direct bearing on success. The key thing is that processes aren't good (or bad) in a vacuum, they are good or bad based on the effects they have in your organization, in acheiving your mission; the same nominal process that is good for a group of people when considered against one mission is going to be bad for the same group of people when considered against different goals, and the same process that is good for one group of people with a given mission will suck for another group of people with the same mission, because people matter.
What the hell was wrong with "x hours of productivity" which came long before "man-hour"?
It fails simple dimensional analysis. N hours of operation of a facility employing M persons obviously is NM person-hours of work, not NM hours of work.
Slashdot Mirror
Probably not since, given the doctrine of first sale, Best Buy doesn't need a copyright license to distribute a physical copy they have purchased in good faith from a vendor, so they don't need the GPL's permission to sell their copy.
Apple, OTOH, is transmitting a new digital copy to each purchaser, which does require either a legal privilege that trumps copyright (e.g., fair use, which pretty clearly doesn't apply here) or permission from the copyright holder. Insofar as the FSF is the holder of copyright in material included in an app on the App Store, and licenses it only under the GPL, the GPL is the only basis on which Apple can claim to have the required permission.
There were 12 amendments proposed in 1789 as the Bill of Rights. 11 of them were eventually adopted; they were adopted as Amendments 1-10 in 1791, and Amendment 27 in 1992.
IF it was a new amendment, it couldn't be anything less than the 28th.
The Constitution didn't stop being amended with the "Bill of Rights" (well, in one sense it did, since Amendment XXVII, the most recently adopted of the 12 amendments proposed as the bill of rights -- 11 of which have been adopted -- is also the most recently passed amendment to the Constititon; in any case, it didn't stop with the 10th Amendment.)
I can't see why in any job with significant responsibility, you'd want to cap the experience that someone can have in the job.
What term limits due is shift power from elected representatives to non-elected staff, interest group lobbyists, and others, who don't have term limits capping their experience.
The main problem term limits seek to address is the lack of meaningful choice in elections, which is a product of an electoral structure which assures that there will be at most two viable choices, one of which is usually the incumbent.
Fixing the underlying electoral system to not use plurality or majority/runoff elections in single member districts would do far more to promote real choice than term limits do, and would avoid the undesirable effects of term limits.
With, say, 5 member districts with legislators elected by STV, you'd have far more real choice than with the U.S.'s current electoral systems (even with term limits added), and probably more change in individual representatives year-to-year, though it would still be possible for candidates that really did a good job in the eyes of the voters to keep doing the job as long as they retained the support of the electorate.
The key prerequisite (and probably more important) is getting a standardized, structured format for representing law codes, adopting it for use as the representation of record in which codes are maintained, and then making the official, current version widely and freely accessible on the internet.
After that, yeah, using something like a DVCS for managing changes makes sense.
More effective, but less repressive, governments know that that method is far better at getting people -- guilty or not -- to confess and implicate a laundry list of "accomplices" -- guilty or not -- than it is at actually revealing what the target actually knows.
Actually, "really repressive" governments are generally aware of that, too, for the most part, though given that loyalty is valued far more than competence in such regimes, there may be some exceptions.
But even leaving that aside, given that repressive regimes will have enemies, and given that those enemies will work against the regime, and given that the regime will devote its energies to identifying them, exposing their secrets, and suppressing them, its better for them to have encryption than not.
This is wrong; neither the legislative authority under which telcos are regulated nor the intended use of that authority under the approach outlined by Genachowski would apply the entire "giant regulatory structure" currently applied to telcos to ISPs.
Android users don't have a "fragmented" experience, they have an experience of the particular device they choose -- and the greater diversity of Android devices on the market (currently the case with phones, and almost certainly the case in a short while with tablets) means that consumers are more likely to find an Android device aligned with their interest than an iPhoneOS device that is as well aligned with their interests.
With smartphones, I've heard from plenty of non-techies -- who are current iPhone owners but not Apple cultists -- expressing jealousy over various newer Android phones that they've run into people with.
The greater diversity of Android devices resulting from the absence of central control may make it more likely that any individual consumer will find one that is too their liking than the handful of iPhoneOS devices available -- and there is no reason this would be any less true for tablets than it is for phones.
I suspect Apple will, in the mobile market, end up the same place they are in the traditional desktop and laptop PC market -- a large successful player with a very vocal and devoted fan base and a substantial, but nowhere near majority, share of the market.
Some people in government are, some people in government pretend to be to sell policies they wish to abuse for purposes other than the overt purpose, and some people in government don't even pretend to be. "The government" -- even referring to any single, particular government -- isn't a hivemind with a uniform point of view or agenda.
Probably, but encryption is still valuable to the victims of such regimes as one (of several) layers of protection, as the government discovering that you are (illegally or not) concealing information from them is not as useful to the repressive government as finding out the content of the encrypted communication.
No, we wouldn't. Or at least, you haven't provided any reason to believe we would.
If we internalize all the external costs from activities which are harmful to society, we would have enough money to fund a government sufficient to address all of those activities, but to do that through taxes presumes a whole lot (most notably, that every harmful activity -- not just "victimless crimes" -- is committed by someone who has resources which can be taxed sufficient to offset the social costs imposed by the activity, including the cost of identifying the wrongdoer and collecting the taxes.) This is sheer fantasy.
The reason we tax income (which is what all of those things are -- income from work, from investments, and from gifts, whether the gift was a bequest or inter vivos transfer) and/or property is that the those earning the most income or retaining the most property are benefiting the most from organized society (which enables amassing large incomes and stores of wealth) and thus ought to contribute the most to maintain it.
Taxes on income at a marginal rate of less than 100% are not punitive in nature, nor, in general, are ad valorem taxes on property (though its certainly possible to constructed punitive income or property taxes.)
Reducing the marginal gain from something isn't punishing it (transforming an activity with a net marginal gain into a marginal loss is, at least arguably, punitive, but for an income tax that requires a marginal rate of greater than 100%.)
Sure, if all you do is make it illegal, and don't enforce the law, all you've done is create new categories of "crime". Just as clearly, making things illegal can be part of actually reducing their incidence -- it can also fail to do that -- so the generalization you state is, at best, meaningless.
Or different punishments for crime. Or more effort at preventing crime. Or... Needing less people in prison doesn't mean needing less things defined as crime.
Defining which things are "sin" (or, more secularly, which have "unprivileged external costs which need to be internalized") and ought therefore to be taxed and is no less "moral policing" than defining which things are crimes and ought to be prohibited. It might be a more desirable way to address certain externalities (indeed, I'd agree that it is a more desirable way to address many externalities), but its certainly a subjective and moral judgement that is imposed through force of law on others.
Well, unless its cigarettes.
Or alcohol.
Or gasoline.
Or any of the millions of other things that are taxed that haven't gone away.
I would contend that, while far not perfectly successful, making slavery illegal in the US has done far more to make slavery go away than taxing, say, real property has done to make real property go away.
Anything -- whether its civil or criminal prohibition that comes wi
No, we wouldn't.
I would offer a more detailed rebuttal, but since you haven't actually offered an argument to rebut, just a bare assertion, I'll settle for simple contradiction until you do.
Chrome works fine with Flash.
When Flash Player 10.1 is generally available, it (or a special version of it) will be integrated (i.e., bundled with) Chrome and the integrated version will (either always or by default, I forget which) take precedence over any separate system-installed Flash Player when Chrome accesses Flash content. IIRC, Flash Player 10.1 is already integrated with Chrome on the Beta channel, but because Flash Player 10.1 isn't generally released yet, its not integrated on the non-beta channel.
Yeah, that's why Wave and other Google messaging services are based on XMPP instead of HTTP.
Heck, if it was up to Google, even the traffic on the internet that acts like HTTP wouldn't use vanilla HTTP, it would use SPDY.
I don't remember any substantial number of complaints about Facebook not having enough privacy options. I do remember complaints about them repeatedly changing settings related to privacy to expose more information more widely without advance notice and the opportunity to opt-out (or, better, the option to opt-in to the change) of the change in defaults for existing users.
Adding more settings after the fact does nothing to address the problem, and, insofar as it increases confusion and reduces the ability of the average users to understand and effectively manage how their information is exposed, is part of the same problem.
If a change in behavior is not externally visible (that is, if it is entirely contained within the internal process of the replaced component, and has no external effect) it can't matter (and can't be a "new bug", since a bug is an undesirable, externally visible behavior.
Uh, no, it didn't. It had already happened then; the description in the essay is exactly what trusted computing was being sold as, by its promoters, to the kinds of companies that would use it to enforce their restrictions, looked at from the consumer's point of view -- it wasn't an extrapolation, just the same description from the consumer perspective.
Maybe. If you have administrative control of your desktop.
Otherwise, securing the connection between your desktop and Google won't prevent the employer from finding out everything you do using the computer that they control.
Rewriting means rethinking; most legacy code is functional and is usually rebuilt in OOP. Whenever you rethink how something works it tends to change the entire behavior to say nothing of all the new bugs you'll have to hunt down.
First, presumably that is intended to be "imperative" not "functional".
Second, if you change the externally-visible behavior (including introducing new bugs) as a result of rethinking the best way to acheive the existing externally-visible behavior, you are doing it wrong.
First, that doesn't make sense: if it fails dimensional analysis, its a nonsense measure, not a "subtle" one that "needs certain assumptions".
Second, "Person-hours" isn't a unit of productivity, its a unit of labor.
$ (or some other value measure) is the usual unit of output, and $/person-hour (or $/person-year) is the usual unit of productivity.
No, we can't. First of all, because I doubt we'll all agree that "half-open" devices are inherently evil, and second because I'm sure some of us would disagree that, even granting that "half-open" devices are evil, that the general approach in the GPL v3 approach to addressing the problem is desirable, and lastly because the GPL v3 specifically allows half-open business- (rather than consumer-) oriented devices, so even if the general approach it takes to addressing half-open devices were a desirable approach to dealing with a real problem, the GPLv3 would not, in fact, prevent half-open devices.
And Free/NetBSD, etc. If you use a BSD-style license (or a public domain declaration, like SQLite), sure, you'll have commercial, closed derivatives. If there is sufficient community interest and the code is open, you'll also have a thriving open-source community, and often the people making closed derivatives (or in-house derivatives that aren't distributed under any license) will still commit code -- and money --back to the open projects (because they realize the benefit they get from having the community improving the code, even if they have some bits they want to keep for themselves.)
Both are, IMO, essential, which is while while I pointed at particular areas of process, my big picture message was about IT shops taking "responsibility for assuring the quality of the IT infrastructure."
Neglect of process is a symptom of people not being invested in solving problems that leads to bad results on its own, but even a good (nominal) process isn't going to work well if people aren't invested.
I prefer "responsibility"; "ownership" is, IMO, misapplied here. (Though, arguably, one of the reasons people do not take responsibility is because they don't, in fact, have ownership -- but ownership is a material relationship, and responsibility is the relevant attitude.)
But I think in substance we generally agree.
You kind of contradict yourself there: if fixing things usually requires changing the process, then "how good the process" is obviously has fairly direct bearing on success. The key thing is that processes aren't good (or bad) in a vacuum, they are good or bad based on the effects they have in your organization, in acheiving your mission; the same nominal process that is good for a group of people when considered against one mission is going to be bad for the same group of people when considered against different goals, and the same process that is good for one group of people with a given mission will suck for another group of people with the same mission, because people matter.
It fails simple dimensional analysis. N hours of operation of a facility employing M persons obviously is NM person-hours of work, not NM hours of work.