Well, I do now, but I'm saving up for a car that wasn't designed by software. You see, a car with no microchips of any kind is a car that any regular person can fix.
A car can be "designed by software" and have no microchips (or designed by hand, and have several microchips). The two concepts are completely orthogonal.
AFAIK, about the only thing that isn't 'open' about cars is their engine management software & other associated softwares.
What else really is there to protect?
Everything else is trivially reverse engineered.
"Trivially" does not mean "legally". Auto manufacturers use IP laws to control technology, too, though patent is more important, relative to copyright, than is the case in the software industry.
It's a cool idea, but there's a few practical problems. Firstly, open source works for software because an intelligent person can pick up a few books and learn how to write code. Designing a car has a higher barrier to entry.
I'm not sure that's really an apples-to-apples comparison. Any (even assuming a decent general education, but no specialty in the field) person off the street is unlikely to pick up a few books and people capable of putting together, say, an enterprise-ready RDBMS from scratch on their own, any more than they are going to be able to do the same and be able to put together a complete, production-ready quality automobile design.
OTOH, its probably not all that hard for lots of reasonably educated, interested people to pick up a book and have insight useful for putting together designs for certain components for either of those projects, while a smaller group of specialists with greater expertise and who also have commitment open principles focus on the overall architecture and more technically-involved components.
I'm not sure on the history here, but wasn't ECMAScript standardization a product of Microsoft working to get its somewhat-incompatible copy of JavaScript written into an international standard? If so, I'm not sure its really the best possible counterexample to the claim that ECMA is just standardizing Microsoft apps.
That aside though I belive the majority of the 6000 pages he is referring to is actually a 4000 page primer on the markup MS use, complete with verbose desciption, examples and pretty pictures etc.
Even assuming that's true and the meat is only the remaining 2000 pages of the specification, its still over 3 times as big as the 600 pages cited for OpenDoc.
What value does it offer (aside from currently being implemented by Microsoft) that OpenDoc doesn't for the additional complexity?
It's a bad thing... the day when a goverment (or any company or person for that matters) prefers a software piece over another just becuase it's Open Source or Commercial. The criteria to select a software must be: quality, usefullness (is that a word?) and , why not price, but NEVER political and isiological (idiotogical) reasons.
Governments exist to serve the interests of their people; if that includes increasing the freely-usable software available to those people, and if using F/OSS for government projects has that effect, the government would be foolish not to prefer F/OSS.
It is foolish to undermine your policy interests with your purchasing practices.
Based on the thoroughness of the statement and the use of the word 'precedent' in the second sentence, it appears that the Google PR team huddled with the legal team to get their point across.
I know it's a troll point of view at/. but for every McCartney there's a thousand artists who are struggling and barely make it with the present system.
And extending copyright terms helps people who can't make money with a 50-year copyright term how, exactly?
Extending copyright terms helps (if any artists), the most successful under the current system, and by reducing the need for recording companies and other gatekeepers of the artistic world to make deals with new artists to get exclusive content, hurts those artists that are currently are marginal.
In distant history, professional musicians were paid by the church, the government, or by wealthy patrons.
...who in turn used their work and its popularity to advance their own financial, political, or other interests.
Now, they are paid by wealthy record companies, publishing houses, and wealthy individual patrons, who use the work and its popularity to further their own financial, political, and other interests.
One idea I've had is to have maybe 20 years of "free" copyright, after that, the work would have an (owner-stated) value, and be taxed annually at some percentage of that value, and any person or group of persons could, by paying the stated value, "buy" the work into the public domain. There'd be an outside limit on the length of copyright, too, but it wouldn't have to be too short (though shorter than the current US system, IMO), perhaps the greater of 75 years from creation or creator's life+20 years for personal works, and a flat 75 years for corporate works.
I care some.. If we don't protect the artists rights then we are effectively discouraging people from creating art. Being a musician today is already a dicey proposition at best.
Have the term of copyright be 20, or 50, or 75, or life+75 years won't change that; the majority of creative works makes most of the money they will make in the first few years after they are created; the ones that continue making money after that tend to also be the ones that are wildly successful initially.
Whether mega-successful artists (if they manage to keep the rights out of the hands of someone else in the first place, which may be hard if they want to get a distribution deal) can have their children and grandchildren live off their work doesn't make much difference to whether struggling artists can make a living in the field (actually, if older works go into the public domain sooner, it may make it easier for creators of new works to sell them, as exclusive content will always have value, and shorter copyright terms means that to keep a library of exclusive content, you'll have to buy more new content from creators, so if it makes a difference, it may be in the opposite of the direction you seem to suggest.)
...any more than they were before; they were never criminally charged, they were civilly charged, which meant, if they lost, they would pay a fine. By settling, they paid a fine and were subject to specific conduct controls.
<blockquote>Thats ridiculous - the shareholders must pay for the directors' irresponsilibity?</blockquote>
Yes, the shareholders pay for their directors' irresponsibility. This makes the shareholders responsible for the choice of directors. (Of course, the shareholders are free to sue the directors for violating their obligations to the shareholders.)
<blockquote>And since when was it possible to settle criminal cases!</blockquote>
This wasn't a criminal case; the criminal cases against Dunn and four others are still progressing; OTOH, plea bargains, the rough analog of a civil settlement (but that don't allow avoiding admission of guilt) do exist in the criminal system, and have for some time.
The case did only involve a civil complaint, so it probably would have ultimately ended up with a financial settlement and some sort of compromised "corrective" measures like we see here, but I really think this is an injustice for the people who had their identities and privacy compromised, and for HP shareholders in the long run. The evidence that senior executives at HP, potentially including Mark Hurd, either ignored or were ignorant of the ongoing, "probably illegal" actions is pretty well documented, and pretty overwhelming.
Yes, so? What did you expect to come out of the civil charges against HP beyond the payout and the imposition of terms that came from the settlement?
The unfortunate thing for Mark Hurd is that his level of responsibility and accountability wasn't determined in this process.
I think that's fortunate for Hurd, if anything; but criminal cases can expand to implicate new defendants as they progress, and Dunn is not the only one already facing criminal charges.
(Plus, HP shareholders have their own suit against the company for shenanigans related to the scandal, and this doesn't affect that.)
Normally I'd say put HP's feet to the fire, but I think here the Governator is being pragmatic and actually doing something to help his state in the long run.
You mean Attorney-General Bill Lockyer, the independently-elected statewide Constitutional officer responsible for the settlement, who isn't even from the same party as the "Governator", right?
Then clicked through to the article, it was fluff, too. Finally, I clicked through the original blog entry, and it still says nothing but that Phipps has some vague warm fuzzy feelings about the way the GPL v3 process is working: not anything he likes about the license, not any arguments against the criticism (just that he is "amazed" that people are criticizing things that people are still working on: apparently he hasn't figured out that the things people are working on are being worked on particularly becuase they have been the target of criticism in earlier drafts.)
Complete, empty, content-free fluff the whole way back up to the source.
I think you are reading what I wrote to mean far more than it did: I'm not saying that that correlation would be enough to justify anything, only that without it, you can't justify saying that people with arrest records are somehow "more dangerous". I'm not saying that with it the case would be made, only that without it it cannot.
Same logic: Per capita, more black people commit crimes than white people, therefore, black people are more dangerous to hire.
Yes, and that's quite accurate, as far as it goes. Of course, to be meaningful (in either case) you want to drill down and control for other factors, particularly, to see if that still holds among people with the kind of non-race features that would lead you to hire them in the first place, but my point was that that first initial correlation wasn't even demonstrated, not that if it had been, that would make the case that there was a clear danger (though, its a little different, since the people involved were already hired in sensitive positions; we weren't talking about population incidence of criminality.)
More importantly, it doesn't tell you if the 30% of "insiders" who launch attacks that have arrest records is greater or less than the proportion of people in similar positions that have arrest records to start with, and therefore if people with arrest records in are even more dangerous than others.
Sure, he had a criminal record with offenses 20 to nearly 40 years prior to the time he was hired. I don't see that that's a real indication that he is likely to lauch a "logic bomb".
I've certainly heard plenty of stories about disgruntled IT workers in sensitive positions doing things like that—usually a criminal history isn't mentioned. Is there any evidence that there is a correlation between that and long-past criminal convictions that aren't closely related to the kind of damage they later do?
Or is this just a case of "Ooh, something bad happened, lets look for something about the person that might explain it, and then assume that this proves the general utility of background checks"?
Every amendment in the Constitution deals with what Congress shall or Congress shall not do.
False. Counterexamples include Amendments II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, XII, and XXII; additionally, a number of others deal only tangentially with what Congress shall or shall not do, granting particular individual rights, often enforceable against the states, but stating that Congress shall have the power to enforce the provisions of the amendment by appropriate legislation.
Come to think of it, the only amendments that are principally concerned with what Congress shall or shall not do are the first and, so far, last: Amendments I and XXVII.
If you had a legal system of some righteousness, you would force someone that files a case against another person (unless for crimes that involve violence) to pay the defendant legal costs in case the defendant was found innocent...
Which would encourage even more the power of money and tip the justice system more than it already is in favor of the rich; no thanks.
mean honestly...look, the woman was sued by the RIAA because she was obviously doing something illegal. The woman is now suing the company that enabled her to do the illegal thing in the first place.
Does that mean I can sue my crack dealer if I get caught?
Nonparallel situations. Crimes are different that civil offenses. Suits between civil wrongdoers involved in different ways in the same wrongdoing to apportion damages are a well-established feature of our civil justice system, and are nothing particularly new.
Surely this is a horrible display of where we as a society are headed.
Its not a sign of our society heading anywhere, because its not new.
But how can the State Attorneys submit a bill to anyone when they are salaried employees of the State?
The money to pay those attorneys' salary (and other expenses incurred in the litigation) come out of taxpayer funded accounts. The award of attorneys' fees takes money from the wrongdoer and puts it back in those accounts, saving the taxpayers the expenses incurred in the litigation and allowing them (through their elected representatives) to use that money for other purposes.
Slashdot Mirror
A car can be "designed by software" and have no microchips (or designed by hand, and have several microchips). The two concepts are completely orthogonal.
I'm not sure that's really an apples-to-apples comparison. Any (even assuming a decent general education, but no specialty in the field) person off the street is unlikely to pick up a few books and people capable of putting together, say, an enterprise-ready RDBMS from scratch on their own, any more than they are going to be able to do the same and be able to put together a complete, production-ready quality automobile design.
OTOH, its probably not all that hard for lots of reasonably educated, interested people to pick up a book and have insight useful for putting together designs for certain components for either of those projects, while a smaller group of specialists with greater expertise and who also have commitment open principles focus on the overall architecture and more technically-involved components.
I'm not sure on the history here, but wasn't ECMAScript standardization a product of Microsoft working to get its somewhat-incompatible copy of JavaScript written into an international standard? If so, I'm not sure its really the best possible counterexample to the claim that ECMA is just standardizing Microsoft apps.
Even assuming that's true and the meat is only the remaining 2000 pages of the specification, its still over 3 times as big as the 600 pages cited for OpenDoc.
What value does it offer (aside from currently being implemented by Microsoft) that OpenDoc doesn't for the additional complexity?
Governments exist to serve the interests of their people; if that includes increasing the freely-usable software available to those people, and if using F/OSS for government projects has that effect, the government would be foolish not to prefer F/OSS.
It is foolish to undermine your policy interests with your purchasing practices.
I don't think they've forgotten it, I just think they don't care.
Advancing the "arts and sciences" doesn't add to their campaign warchest. Advancing the interests of Disney and the RIAA does.
And extending copyright terms helps people who can't make money with a 50-year copyright term how, exactly?
Extending copyright terms helps (if any artists), the most successful under the current system, and by reducing the need for recording companies and other gatekeepers of the artistic world to make deals with new artists to get exclusive content, hurts those artists that are currently are marginal.
Now, they are paid by wealthy record companies, publishing houses, and wealthy individual patrons, who use the work and its popularity to further their own financial, political, and other interests.
Copyright sure changed a lot!
One idea I've had is to have maybe 20 years of "free" copyright, after that, the work would have an (owner-stated) value, and be taxed annually at some percentage of that value, and any person or group of persons could, by paying the stated value, "buy" the work into the public domain. There'd be an outside limit on the length of copyright, too, but it wouldn't have to be too short (though shorter than the current US system, IMO), perhaps the greater of 75 years from creation or creator's life+20 years for personal works, and a flat 75 years for corporate works.
Have the term of copyright be 20, or 50, or 75, or life+75 years won't change that; the majority of creative works makes most of the money they will make in the first few years after they are created; the ones that continue making money after that tend to also be the ones that are wildly successful initially.
Whether mega-successful artists (if they manage to keep the rights out of the hands of someone else in the first place, which may be hard if they want to get a distribution deal) can have their children and grandchildren live off their work doesn't make much difference to whether struggling artists can make a living in the field (actually, if older works go into the public domain sooner, it may make it easier for creators of new works to sell them, as exclusive content will always have value, and shorter copyright terms means that to keep a library of exclusive content, you'll have to buy more new content from creators, so if it makes a difference, it may be in the opposite of the direction you seem to suggest.)
...any more than they were before; they were never criminally charged, they were civilly charged, which meant, if they lost, they would pay a fine. By settling, they paid a fine and were subject to specific conduct controls.
HP surrendered, they didn't get away.
Ick. Didn't mean to spin to "Code", and meant to hit Preview rather than submit. That came out badly...
<blockquote>Thats ridiculous - the shareholders must pay for the directors' irresponsilibity?</blockquote>
Yes, the shareholders pay for their directors' irresponsibility. This makes the shareholders responsible for the choice of directors. (Of course, the shareholders are free to sue the directors for violating their obligations to the shareholders.)
<blockquote>And since when was it possible to settle criminal cases!</blockquote>
This wasn't a criminal case; the criminal cases against Dunn and four others are still progressing; OTOH, plea bargains, the rough analog of a civil settlement (but that don't allow avoiding admission of guilt) do exist in the criminal system, and have for some time.
ridiculous
nuke california
You mean Attorney-General Bill Lockyer, the independently-elected statewide Constitutional officer responsible for the settlement, who isn't even from the same party as the "Governator", right?
Then clicked through to the article, it was fluff, too. Finally, I clicked through the original blog entry, and it still says nothing but that Phipps has some vague warm fuzzy feelings about the way the GPL v3 process is working: not anything he likes about the license, not any arguments against the criticism (just that he is "amazed" that people are criticizing things that people are still working on: apparently he hasn't figured out that the things people are working on are being worked on particularly becuase they have been the target of criticism in earlier drafts.)
Complete, empty, content-free fluff the whole way back up to the source.
I think you are reading what I wrote to mean far more than it did: I'm not saying that that correlation would be enough to justify anything, only that without it, you can't justify saying that people with arrest records are somehow "more dangerous". I'm not saying that with it the case would be made, only that without it it cannot.
Yes, and that's quite accurate, as far as it goes. Of course, to be meaningful (in either case) you want to drill down and control for other factors, particularly, to see if that still holds among people with the kind of non-race features that would lead you to hire them in the first place, but my point was that that first initial correlation wasn't even demonstrated, not that if it had been, that would make the case that there was a clear danger (though, its a little different, since the people involved were already hired in sensitive positions; we weren't talking about population incidence of criminality.)
More importantly, it doesn't tell you if the 30% of "insiders" who launch attacks that have arrest records is greater or less than the proportion of people in similar positions that have arrest records to start with, and therefore if people with arrest records in are even more dangerous than others.
Sure, he had a criminal record with offenses 20 to nearly 40 years prior to the time he was hired. I don't see that that's a real indication that he is likely to lauch a "logic bomb".
I've certainly heard plenty of stories about disgruntled IT workers in sensitive positions doing things like that—usually a criminal history isn't mentioned. Is there any evidence that there is a correlation between that and long-past criminal convictions that aren't closely related to the kind of damage they later do?
Or is this just a case of "Ooh, something bad happened, lets look for something about the person that might explain it, and then assume that this proves the general utility of background checks"?
Which would encourage even more the power of money and tip the justice system more than it already is in favor of the rich; no thanks.
Nonparallel situations. Crimes are different that civil offenses. Suits between civil wrongdoers involved in different ways in the same wrongdoing to apportion damages are a well-established feature of our civil justice system, and are nothing particularly new.
The money to pay those attorneys' salary (and other expenses incurred in the litigation) come out of taxpayer funded accounts. The award of attorneys' fees takes money from the wrongdoer and puts it back in those accounts, saving the taxpayers the expenses incurred in the litigation and allowing them (through their elected representatives) to use that money for other purposes.