More like the winds of stupidity. GNOME is still designed for idiots, and the KDE developers decided that being a rock solid DE with a good OLE model was less important than having cool looking visual effects and trendy desktop applets.
Perl is still a great language for processing text, and plenty of people are still writing new Perl programs. The main reason Perl is not trendy anymore is that its strength, text processing, is not as relevant to the trendy programming styles use in webdev these days. Perl's syntax is weird and lends itself to unreadable code, sure, but I have seen horrible code in a lot of other languages and programming models.
There are still plenty of text processing tasks to be done, and Perl is still strong for those tasks.
The GPL does not require you to make your changes public, stop spreading the FUD. You are free to keep your changes private, just as much as you are free to do so with the BSD and MIT licenses. The only difference is that the GPL requires you to make the source code available to everyone you give the program to under the same license. You are not required to distribute your program to anyone, you are only required to follow certain rules if you do distribute your program.
Considering that Python 3 scripts are being written, I see no reason to doubt that Perl 6 scripts will be written too. Perl may not be trendy anymore, but I am sure that there are still people writing new applications in Perl.
That is because "global warming" creates a lot of confusion; a lot of people are not certain what the "warming" actually refers to, and think that because they have seen cold winters in their area, that means that there is no warming trend.
So? I bet if you interview 100 Ubuntu users, 95 of them will be using the plain, default version of Ubuntu that is prominently displayed on the Ubuntu webpage. As for "Well there are all these versions, Lucid Lynx, Hardy Heron," Apple does not seem to have any issues with naming Mac OS X versions after animals.
Your link is more of a problem with the CA system than with trying to use cryptography to protect your privacy. The idea that a CA has control of your certificates has bothered a lot of people, even before that article came out, and a lot of people push for web of trust models for that very reason. Unfortunately, the web of trust is a little hard to pull off when only a handful of people in geek communities actually bother to maintain a keypair and engage in key signings.
That really summarizes the problem: there are not enough people who care. As always, if more people cared, these problems would be less significant.
Actually, most Facebook users don't give a damn about their privacy, and would not switch to another social networking system unless there was some exciting reason for them to. Seriously, I am in a small minority in my social circle when it comes to privacy. I tell people that Facebook records every action they take on the website from the moment they signed up, and people say, "So what?" I tell them that Facebook is engaged in data mining, and that researchers have already published methods of deducing more information than a person thinks they are giving from seemingly insignificant details, and they say, "So what, I have nothing to hide."
Anyone who thinks that privacy is the issue that will cause migration away from Facebook is mistaken. The number of people who left Facebook because of privacy concerns is not even a blip on the radar compared to the number of new users who have signed up for Facebook during the past year.
"Linux" is not an operate system; most of the confusion people have stems from the idea that "Linux" is a single operating system that has fractured. If we instead refer to individual distros as operating systems, which is far more accurate, we are left with this situation: people have to choose "flavors" of a distro. That is not so bad, considering that they wind up having to do the same with Windows (Home, Premium, Professional, Ultimate...). I have install Fedora on computers that are used by people with a range of technical proficiency, from my mother who has very little technical knowledge to a person in my research group, who only needed me around to help figure out why some obscure hardware was misbehaving. Even for people with little to no technical skill, "learning Linux" amounted to about 10 minutes of getting used to GNOME and seeing where the Firefox icon is located.
The days of needing significant technical skill to boot up GNU/Linux (for lack of a better term) are long gone. There is still a bit of a reputation, but when people see what GNOME looks like, the usual reaction I get is, "Well that doesn't look so bad."
"Closed source" is the wrong term to use here. Facebook is a proprietary social networking and communication system, because of the following (not exhaustive, just what stands out to me):
To interact with a Facebook user, you yourself must be a Facebook user; any attempt to automate to circumvent this requirement results in an immediate ban for TOS violations (compare to email, in which users of one system can easily communicate with users of another system).
A Facebook user is forced to deal with whatever changes Facebook pushes on them. There are no options for rolling back to earlier versions, or for taking some new features and not others. While this is true of any web app (you are at the webmaster's mercy), it is important to remember that this is nothing more than an interface change; if users were allowed to use some other service or perhaps a desktop program to access Facebook, they could be free of unwanted changes.
You are not allowed to add your own features to Facebook; again, this is typical with web apps, and again, this goes back to the thorough lack of interoperability with any other system.
To put it another way, it is entirely possible to create proprietary software using GCC; people do it all the time.
Then perhaps ASCAP should find someone who can hold their ground in a debate against Lessig. I have a great deal of respect for him and his intellect, but it is absurd to think that he is the most intelligent person in the world, and I doubt that there are no equally intelligent people in the copyright lobby.
As others have pointed out, ASCAP has nothing to gain from a debate. They are not looking for publicity outside of the world of music production, and within that world they are already well known. They already have politicians catering to their every whim. Lessig is not well known outside of tech circles, he does not have the sort of political power ASCAP has, and a debate would only serve to increase the number of people who hear Lessig's arguments (or make no change at all -- in either case, ASCAP does not really win).
The letter was perfectly reasonable at its beginning -- the man was basically saying, "My job is to promote the financial interests of these people," which is at least honest. Then he says that a debate would be a waste of time, which is a bit insulting but not terrible as far as the things that copyright lobbyists say. Then he finishes the letter by saying that the copyleft movement seeks to silence criticism, which makes absolutely no sense whatsoever given that he was responding to a challenge to a public debate, and is basically just an attempt to play the victim.
ASCAP should bury this guy before he makes them look any more desperate.
Off topic, but CC non-commercial licenses were a bad idea to begin with -- the idea behind CC is that I should be able to share, but if I cannot charge for the service of, say, burning a compilation of CC media to Blu-ray (not at all far fetched to do), then the license is not really furthering the goal of sharing. This is exactly the sort of argument behind why the GPL allows commercial distribution.
I think it is just as likely that the courts would find that since there are plenty of DVD players licensed by the MPAA, including software implementations, that the DMCA does not deny anyone their rights. "Reasonable and non-discriminatory" is the phrase that comes to my mind; most judges are not free software supporters.
A great argument...and 12 years too late. The DMCA is already signed into law, and there is no indication that anyone with any power is going to repeal it. It enjoys the support of democrats and republicans, and both Presidents Bush and Obama are pushing for similar laws to be passed in other countries, as well as for the DMCA to be strengthened here in the USA. The likelihood that this law is going to be repealed or overturned is effectively nil, and that is a reality that we have to live with for the time being.
Exemptions are the new battle, and we need to get as many of them passed as we possibly can.
The DMCA is not going to die any time soon, and we need to accept that the battle was lost in 1998. Now we have to find a way to live with the DMCA and try to get as many exceptions to the anti-circumvention clause as possible, with a focus on the most relevant and pressing exceptions (jail breaking cell phones, freeing ebooks etc.). That, or we can try to get the majority of people to wake up and realize how their apathy has led to a situation where megacorps take advantage of them, and hopefully those people will actually do something about it -- I won't hold my breath though.
What if someone is physically unable to click - how will a website cater to that need?
By not requiring a mouse? Most web browsers all you to navigate using the arrow keys. Of course, this means that websites may be required to not use Flash (which cannot be navigated with a keyboard only) for every damned thing, or at least provide an option for no-Flash -- the horror!
The ADA has nothing to do with making ridiculous accommodations. The requirements are sane and help ensure that people with disabilities can still function as members of our society; wheelchair ramps, braille on ATMs, lifts and elevators in public transportation. Given the fact that certain critical services are now accessed through the web (e.g. banking), it is both reasonable and logical to require certain websites to provide accessibility for people who have vision problems or who have difficulty handling a mouse/keyboard.
Or should someone be excluded from paying bills online because they happen to be disabled?
Well for one, it is not clear that all websites would be required to do this, and for another, it is not terribly hard to be compliant...well, unless you are one of those people who insists on using Flash and Javascript for every damned thing, and considers creating a less "feature filled" version of your webpage to be an undue burden.
Except that the ADA already requires certain businesses to make provisions for people with handicaps. For example, a hotel is required to have a wheelchair entrance, because it is a "public accommodation." Likewise, banks have to put braille on their ATMs, bus operators have to be able to handle people who have difficulty climbing stairs (to board the bus), etc. Why should websites be exempt from these requirements?
Same here; I killed my Facebook account 3 years ago, but who knows how long these guys have been aggregating their data, or who else might have been posting information about me.
There is another significant difference: there is no "Linux monoculture," the way there is a "Windows monoculture." If I tell you that I use Linux, I am not really telling you much -- as a case in point, plenty of people look at my monitor and ask, "What the heck operating system is that?!" because they have never seen e16 before. Even a basic trojan would stand out if a user did not have the particular environment that the author thinks they have -- a KDE user will be harder to fool with a trojan that was intended for GNOME users.
As another example, consider the number of viruses that exploit buffer overflows in Windows Media Player. I have seen these files, played in another media player, and they display a simple message: to play this properly, use Windows Media Player. Would such a strategy work for a desktop Linux user? Well, again, which media player would you target? There is no one universally installed media player across different distros or different "flavors" of a single distro. Your trojan is going to be less successful if you need to force people to open their package manager and search for a given media player first.
These sort of things basically dull the impact of viruses. It is still possible to write viruses, of course, but it will be harder to spread a single virus as rapidly.
Slashdot Mirror
More like the winds of stupidity. GNOME is still designed for idiots, and the KDE developers decided that being a rock solid DE with a good OLE model was less important than having cool looking visual effects and trendy desktop applets.
Perl is still a great language for processing text, and plenty of people are still writing new Perl programs. The main reason Perl is not trendy anymore is that its strength, text processing, is not as relevant to the trendy programming styles use in webdev these days. Perl's syntax is weird and lends itself to unreadable code, sure, but I have seen horrible code in a lot of other languages and programming models.
There are still plenty of text processing tasks to be done, and Perl is still strong for those tasks.
The GPL does not require you to make your changes public, stop spreading the FUD. You are free to keep your changes private, just as much as you are free to do so with the BSD and MIT licenses. The only difference is that the GPL requires you to make the source code available to everyone you give the program to under the same license. You are not required to distribute your program to anyone, you are only required to follow certain rules if you do distribute your program.
Considering that Python 3 scripts are being written, I see no reason to doubt that Perl 6 scripts will be written too. Perl may not be trendy anymore, but I am sure that there are still people writing new applications in Perl.
And people wonder why they show ridiculous looking code that consists of special characters arranged in weird ways in movies...
That is because "global warming" creates a lot of confusion; a lot of people are not certain what the "warming" actually refers to, and think that because they have seen cold winters in their area, that means that there is no warming trend.
So? I bet if you interview 100 Ubuntu users, 95 of them will be using the plain, default version of Ubuntu that is prominently displayed on the Ubuntu webpage. As for "Well there are all these versions, Lucid Lynx, Hardy Heron," Apple does not seem to have any issues with naming Mac OS X versions after animals.
Your link is more of a problem with the CA system than with trying to use cryptography to protect your privacy. The idea that a CA has control of your certificates has bothered a lot of people, even before that article came out, and a lot of people push for web of trust models for that very reason. Unfortunately, the web of trust is a little hard to pull off when only a handful of people in geek communities actually bother to maintain a keypair and engage in key signings.
That really summarizes the problem: there are not enough people who care. As always, if more people cared, these problems would be less significant.
Actually, most Facebook users don't give a damn about their privacy, and would not switch to another social networking system unless there was some exciting reason for them to. Seriously, I am in a small minority in my social circle when it comes to privacy. I tell people that Facebook records every action they take on the website from the moment they signed up, and people say, "So what?" I tell them that Facebook is engaged in data mining, and that researchers have already published methods of deducing more information than a person thinks they are giving from seemingly insignificant details, and they say, "So what, I have nothing to hide."
Anyone who thinks that privacy is the issue that will cause migration away from Facebook is mistaken. The number of people who left Facebook because of privacy concerns is not even a blip on the radar compared to the number of new users who have signed up for Facebook during the past year.
"Linux" is not an operate system; most of the confusion people have stems from the idea that "Linux" is a single operating system that has fractured. If we instead refer to individual distros as operating systems, which is far more accurate, we are left with this situation: people have to choose "flavors" of a distro. That is not so bad, considering that they wind up having to do the same with Windows (Home, Premium, Professional, Ultimate...). I have install Fedora on computers that are used by people with a range of technical proficiency, from my mother who has very little technical knowledge to a person in my research group, who only needed me around to help figure out why some obscure hardware was misbehaving. Even for people with little to no technical skill, "learning Linux" amounted to about 10 minutes of getting used to GNOME and seeing where the Firefox icon is located.
The days of needing significant technical skill to boot up GNU/Linux (for lack of a better term) are long gone. There is still a bit of a reputation, but when people see what GNOME looks like, the usual reaction I get is, "Well that doesn't look so bad."
What is closed source at Facebook?
"Closed source" is the wrong term to use here. Facebook is a proprietary social networking and communication system, because of the following (not exhaustive, just what stands out to me):
To put it another way, it is entirely possible to create proprietary software using GCC; people do it all the time.
Something has to build the ATMs! Clearly, this hacker has discovered that the robots that build ATMs also create money.
Then perhaps ASCAP should find someone who can hold their ground in a debate against Lessig. I have a great deal of respect for him and his intellect, but it is absurd to think that he is the most intelligent person in the world, and I doubt that there are no equally intelligent people in the copyright lobby.
As others have pointed out, ASCAP has nothing to gain from a debate. They are not looking for publicity outside of the world of music production, and within that world they are already well known. They already have politicians catering to their every whim. Lessig is not well known outside of tech circles, he does not have the sort of political power ASCAP has, and a debate would only serve to increase the number of people who hear Lessig's arguments (or make no change at all -- in either case, ASCAP does not really win).
The letter was perfectly reasonable at its beginning -- the man was basically saying, "My job is to promote the financial interests of these people," which is at least honest. Then he says that a debate would be a waste of time, which is a bit insulting but not terrible as far as the things that copyright lobbyists say. Then he finishes the letter by saying that the copyleft movement seeks to silence criticism, which makes absolutely no sense whatsoever given that he was responding to a challenge to a public debate, and is basically just an attempt to play the victim.
ASCAP should bury this guy before he makes them look any more desperate.
Off topic, but CC non-commercial licenses were a bad idea to begin with -- the idea behind CC is that I should be able to share, but if I cannot charge for the service of, say, burning a compilation of CC media to Blu-ray (not at all far fetched to do), then the license is not really furthering the goal of sharing. This is exactly the sort of argument behind why the GPL allows commercial distribution.
You cannot own information, please stop spreading propaganda.
I think it is just as likely that the courts would find that since there are plenty of DVD players licensed by the MPAA, including software implementations, that the DMCA does not deny anyone their rights. "Reasonable and non-discriminatory" is the phrase that comes to my mind; most judges are not free software supporters.
A great argument...and 12 years too late. The DMCA is already signed into law, and there is no indication that anyone with any power is going to repeal it. It enjoys the support of democrats and republicans, and both Presidents Bush and Obama are pushing for similar laws to be passed in other countries, as well as for the DMCA to be strengthened here in the USA. The likelihood that this law is going to be repealed or overturned is effectively nil, and that is a reality that we have to live with for the time being.
Exemptions are the new battle, and we need to get as many of them passed as we possibly can.
The DMCA is not going to die any time soon, and we need to accept that the battle was lost in 1998. Now we have to find a way to live with the DMCA and try to get as many exceptions to the anti-circumvention clause as possible, with a focus on the most relevant and pressing exceptions (jail breaking cell phones, freeing ebooks etc.). That, or we can try to get the majority of people to wake up and realize how their apathy has led to a situation where megacorps take advantage of them, and hopefully those people will actually do something about it -- I won't hold my breath though.
What if someone is physically unable to click - how will a website cater to that need?
By not requiring a mouse? Most web browsers all you to navigate using the arrow keys. Of course, this means that websites may be required to not use Flash (which cannot be navigated with a keyboard only) for every damned thing, or at least provide an option for no-Flash -- the horror!
The ADA has nothing to do with making ridiculous accommodations. The requirements are sane and help ensure that people with disabilities can still function as members of our society; wheelchair ramps, braille on ATMs, lifts and elevators in public transportation. Given the fact that certain critical services are now accessed through the web (e.g. banking), it is both reasonable and logical to require certain websites to provide accessibility for people who have vision problems or who have difficulty handling a mouse/keyboard.
Or should someone be excluded from paying bills online because they happen to be disabled?
Well for one, it is not clear that all websites would be required to do this, and for another, it is not terribly hard to be compliant...well, unless you are one of those people who insists on using Flash and Javascript for every damned thing, and considers creating a less "feature filled" version of your webpage to be an undue burden.
Except that the ADA already requires certain businesses to make provisions for people with handicaps. For example, a hotel is required to have a wheelchair entrance, because it is a "public accommodation." Likewise, banks have to put braille on their ATMs, bus operators have to be able to handle people who have difficulty climbing stairs (to board the bus), etc. Why should websites be exempt from these requirements?
Same here; I killed my Facebook account 3 years ago, but who knows how long these guys have been aggregating their data, or who else might have been posting information about me.
There is another significant difference: there is no "Linux monoculture," the way there is a "Windows monoculture." If I tell you that I use Linux, I am not really telling you much -- as a case in point, plenty of people look at my monitor and ask, "What the heck operating system is that?!" because they have never seen e16 before. Even a basic trojan would stand out if a user did not have the particular environment that the author thinks they have -- a KDE user will be harder to fool with a trojan that was intended for GNOME users.
As another example, consider the number of viruses that exploit buffer overflows in Windows Media Player. I have seen these files, played in another media player, and they display a simple message: to play this properly, use Windows Media Player. Would such a strategy work for a desktop Linux user? Well, again, which media player would you target? There is no one universally installed media player across different distros or different "flavors" of a single distro. Your trojan is going to be less successful if you need to force people to open their package manager and search for a given media player first.
These sort of things basically dull the impact of viruses. It is still possible to write viruses, of course, but it will be harder to spread a single virus as rapidly.