I think you have a slight misunderstanding of the intention of the new license.
Imagine this scenario:
Company X is a web hosting company. To be competitative in the marketplace, they adopt GPL'd software, like FooBar. However, they want to differentiate their service, so they extend FooBar to add new functionality, and call it BazBar. Since they are not "distributing" BazBar, only using it in-house, the teeth of the GPL have no affect. They can still sell access to BazBar without distributing it, and therefore requiring their changes to be made public, and effectively locking up the new code they wrote.
I believe that this is the scenario that the GPLv3 is going to address. I sincerely doubt that they will charge to use GPL software in the commonly accepted way, but I think they will change the terms to close this loophole. I think that it will likely be a scenario where any companies currently doing this are given the option of releasing their code, or paying a dollar amount. You can't just tell someone that what they have been doing legally for years is now illegal because of an updated license, so there will have to be options.
If you don't agree with these kinds of changes, license your code under the GPLv2, and make it clear that you will not allow it to be licensed under future versions.
Uh, you seem to have missed my point. I was saying that methadone (if administered by clinics) is better because it's a habit which can be supported without committing crimes.
"My apologies, I meant to say 'televised tobacco ads.'
Yes, but 1) that's unique to radio and TV because they're media that are subject to regulation more than any other (print tobacco ads are common), and 2) it's not a very solidly tested law, and if it were challenged, I suspect it would fall."
That's not really the point. The point is that it's advertising, and it's regulated. There is a precedent for this sort of thing.
"If they have the right to send me their spam, I should have the right - and more importantly, the ability - to ignore it.
Absolutely. But this doesn't necessarily stretch so far as to mean that the spammers have to take steps to help you, which is what standard headers would be."
What would you call the do-not-call lists which each telemarketer was required by law to maintain before the creation of the national DNC list?
While it's not exactly like a standard header you can filter on, it's the same principle. The fact is, again, the volume of spam is the issue here. It would be almost impossible to reduce your spam by contacting each spammer and asking them to stop.
Having a standard header to filter on would be much cheaper than maintaining do-not-spam lists, and the precedent already exists.
"What I'm defending is spam that is not deceptive or fraudulent and which is not sent via such bad practices as listed above. When people talk about getting rid of spam, they're including this kind, and that's when they go too far."
That's because most people don't want spam, legal or otherwise. You seem to be arguing that spammers have the right to send me their crap, but I don't have the right to easily get rid of it. I can't agree with that.
"For example, televised alcohol ads are banned
No they're not. I don't know if you watch any sports, but I assure you that you'll see a lot of beer ads if you do."
My apologies, I meant to say "televised tobacco ads."
"If spammers would just stick to a set of reasonable rules - like sending mail from a valid address, actually removing your address when you request it, using a standard header to indicate that the mail is a mass-mailing - I'd have no problem with it, because I could easily filter it out. This is what the spammers in the FA got nailed for - "...using false Internet addresses to send mass e-mail ads." I have no problem with this.
I think that spammers that did the above would be on solid legal footing, and they are the ones that I'm defending here. Also I don't think that standard headers would need to be required; there's certainly no requirement that junk mail make itself obvious, and we all seem to get by okay."
Again, it comes down to a matter of volume. Spam makes up the majority of my (and many other people's) email, which makes it more difficult to use the medium effectively. If they have the right to send me their spam, I should have the right - and more importantly, the ability - to ignore it.
The post office has Form 1500, and the FTC has the Do Not Call Registry. Where is the comparable method for stopping spam?
Filtering does help, but not (in my experience) enough. Saying that "Filtering and pressing delete is not that hard" is a gross oversimplification of the problem. Finding which ones you should be deleting is like finding a needle in a haystack, and is beyond many users.
The issue is about the clearly fraudulent and illegal means which spammers use to communicate. Compromised systems, spyware, and misconfigured relays or proxies are the tools of the spammer trade.
Abusing free speech is nothing new, and is not legal. The classical example is shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theater. Trumpeting "Free Speech" in support of spamming is a lame argument. Speech, particularly advertising, is regulated in many ways. For example, televised alcohol ads are banned, companies doing telemarketing must maintain a do-not-call list, certain types of ads are prohibited near schools, and so forth.
If spammers would just stick to a set of reasonable rules - like sending mail from a valid address, actually removing your address when you request it, using a standard header to indicate that the mail is a mass-mailing - I'd have no problem with it, because I could easily filter it out. This is what the spammers in the FA got nailed for - "...using false Internet addresses to send mass e-mail ads." I have no problem with this.
I'd also point out that with snailmail-based advertising, I usually get 3-4 flyers a week, representing around 20% of all my mail. This is a reasonable volume to deal with. With spam, however, I get several hundred messages a day, making up over 90% of all my email. This is completely unreasonable.
I'd much rather see operating systems designed from the ground up not to be vulnerable to viruses. I'm tired of being plagued by popups, spyware, adware, and the sort.
Unless I'm horribly misreading the specification, it appears to be a way to package up XML documents and binary data that they reference into a neat package with MIME - not a way to convert a (text) XML document into a binary one.
You should be able to set up round-robin routing such that new (outbound) connections are routed through different routers.
With a download manager set to use n connections to download something (where n is the number of available connections to the net), you should be able to get the full (aggregate) bandwidth downloading one thing.
"Can't we have just one installer, one package management tool and one portage system that is shared by all the linux distributions, the bsd variants, OS X fink, windows cygwin, the comercial vendors, and all the rest?"
Sod the MP3 player. MP3 is dead. What they need is a portable SIDfile player.
Though I'd probably get some strange looks as I rock out to the "Commando" theme on the bus.
Re:I for one welcome our new SCO overlords.
on
SCO Targets UK Firms
·
· Score: 1
Regardless, your original post treated this as if it was a mere $699. If you have 100 Linux systems deployed, thats $69k. For 500, it's just under $350k.
That is not a pittance. Particulatly when weighed against, say, per-CPU licenses of Windows XP. I would not at all be surprised to learn that the "licensing program" was intended to simply steer people away from deploying Linux in the first place, rather than extorting fees from current users.
Suing to get out of the contract could also restore some of the rights granted by the GPL, which some (probably not all, or even most) companies may find advantageous to their business.
And comparing an original purchase (you seem to make the "buy commercial software once, install n times" assumption) is rather different than having someone come up to you and say "we want you to cough up $699 times n."
Re:I for one welcome our new SCO overlords.
on
SCO Targets UK Firms
·
· Score: 1
$699 per CPU. So if someone with a large-scale Linux deployment paid the protection fee, it could be in their interest to sue SCO back.
Yup, this is one of the terribly irritating thing about google... there is simply no way to search for an exact string which contains non-alphanumeric characters. It strips out most punctuation.
e.g. search for 'tmp/foo/bar' or 'tmp/foo/bar#baz'. You'll see results for '/tmp/foo.bar', '/tmp/foo/bar', and so forth. What if I'm looking for that exact string? This can be very frustrating when searching for posts about a specific error message, since a page with 'condition foo: bar' will be just as likely to show up as 'foo: bar condition', but they aren't necessarily the same.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you have a slight misunderstanding of the intention of the new license.
Imagine this scenario:
Company X is a web hosting company. To be competitative in the marketplace, they adopt GPL'd software, like FooBar. However, they want to differentiate their service, so they extend FooBar to add new functionality, and call it BazBar. Since they are not "distributing" BazBar, only using it in-house, the teeth of the GPL have no affect. They can still sell access to BazBar without distributing it, and therefore requiring their changes to be made public, and effectively locking up the new code they wrote.
I believe that this is the scenario that the GPLv3 is going to address. I sincerely doubt that they will charge to use GPL software in the commonly accepted way, but I think they will change the terms to close this loophole. I think that it will likely be a scenario where any companies currently doing this are given the option of releasing their code, or paying a dollar amount. You can't just tell someone that what they have been doing legally for years is now illegal because of an updated license, so there will have to be options.
If you don't agree with these kinds of changes, license your code under the GPLv2, and make it clear that you will not allow it to be licensed under future versions.
...when I say, "two single-layer DVDs, or dual-layer?"
Uh, you seem to have missed my point. I was saying that methadone (if administered by clinics) is better because it's a habit which can be supported without committing crimes.
If it's administered by a clinic, there's no need for junkies to go robbing people to get money for a fix.
I don't agree with the war on drugs, but there are definitely downsides to the current state of affairs.
"...it turned out that it was a case change of the tr and td tags (why? it's not like it'll change anything)..."
Probably a compatibility change. In XML (and therefore XHTML), element and attribute names must be lower-case. In SGML, they could be upper or lower.
"My apologies, I meant to say 'televised tobacco ads.'
Yes, but 1) that's unique to radio and TV because they're media that are subject to regulation more than any other (print tobacco ads are common), and 2) it's not a very solidly tested law, and if it were challenged, I suspect it would fall."
That's not really the point. The point is that it's advertising, and it's regulated. There is a precedent for this sort of thing.
" If they have the right to send me their spam, I should have the right - and more importantly, the ability - to ignore it.
Absolutely. But this doesn't necessarily stretch so far as to mean that the spammers have to take steps to help you, which is what standard headers would be."
What would you call the do-not-call lists which each telemarketer was required by law to maintain before the creation of the national DNC list?
While it's not exactly like a standard header you can filter on, it's the same principle. The fact is, again, the volume of spam is the issue here. It would be almost impossible to reduce your spam by contacting each spammer and asking them to stop.
Having a standard header to filter on would be much cheaper than maintaining do-not-spam lists, and the precedent already exists.
"What I'm defending is spam that is not deceptive or fraudulent and which is not sent via such bad practices as listed above. When people talk about getting rid of spam, they're including this kind, and that's when they go too far."
That's because most people don't want spam, legal or otherwise. You seem to be arguing that spammers have the right to send me their crap, but I don't have the right to easily get rid of it. I can't agree with that.
"For example, televised alcohol ads are banned
No they're not. I don't know if you watch any sports, but I assure you that you'll see a lot of beer ads if you do."
My apologies, I meant to say "televised tobacco ads."
"If spammers would just stick to a set of reasonable rules - like sending mail from a valid address, actually removing your address when you request it, using a standard header to indicate that the mail is a mass-mailing - I'd have no problem with it, because I could easily filter it out. This is what the spammers in the FA got nailed for - "...using false Internet addresses to send mass e-mail ads." I have no problem with this.
I think that spammers that did the above would be on solid legal footing, and they are the ones that I'm defending here. Also I don't think that standard headers would need to be required; there's certainly no requirement that junk mail make itself obvious, and we all seem to get by okay."
Again, it comes down to a matter of volume. Spam makes up the majority of my (and many other people's) email, which makes it more difficult to use the medium effectively. If they have the right to send me their spam, I should have the right - and more importantly, the ability - to ignore it.
The post office has Form 1500, and the FTC has the Do Not Call Registry. Where is the comparable method for stopping spam?
Filtering does help, but not (in my experience) enough. Saying that "Filtering and pressing delete is not that hard" is a gross oversimplification of the problem. Finding which ones you should be deleting is like finding a needle in a haystack, and is beyond many users.
The issue is about the clearly fraudulent and illegal means which spammers use to communicate. Compromised systems, spyware, and misconfigured relays or proxies are the tools of the spammer trade.
Abusing free speech is nothing new, and is not legal. The classical example is shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theater. Trumpeting "Free Speech" in support of spamming is a lame argument. Speech, particularly advertising, is regulated in many ways. For example, televised alcohol ads are banned, companies doing telemarketing must maintain a do-not-call list, certain types of ads are prohibited near schools, and so forth.
If spammers would just stick to a set of reasonable rules - like sending mail from a valid address, actually removing your address when you request it, using a standard header to indicate that the mail is a mass-mailing - I'd have no problem with it, because I could easily filter it out. This is what the spammers in the FA got nailed for - "...using false Internet addresses to send mass e-mail ads." I have no problem with this.
I'd also point out that with snailmail-based advertising, I usually get 3-4 flyers a week, representing around 20% of all my mail. This is a reasonable volume to deal with. With spam, however, I get several hundred messages a day, making up over 90% of all my email. This is completely unreasonable.
I'd much rather see operating systems designed from the ground up not to be vulnerable to viruses. I'm tired of being plagued by popups, spyware, adware, and the sort.
Oh, wait.
(Goes back to his Linux desktop)
I read the article... I'm already a bad slashdotter.
Unless I'm horribly misreading the specification, it appears to be a way to package up XML documents and binary data that they reference into a neat package with MIME - not a way to convert a (text) XML document into a binary one.
...poland.
Hopefully, this guy won't get the case.
It seems to me that anyone still running Windows NT 4.0 in 2005 is pretty successfully avoiding the particular "swirling vortex" you mention.
You should be able to set up round-robin routing such that new (outbound) connections are routed through different routers.
With a download manager set to use n connections to download something (where n is the number of available connections to the net), you should be able to get the full (aggregate) bandwidth downloading one thing.
"Can't we have just one installer, one package management tool and one portage system that is shared by all the linux distributions, the bsd variants, OS X fink, windows cygwin, the comercial vendors, and all the rest?"
No.
You must be new here.
Sod the MP3 player. MP3 is dead. What they need is a portable SIDfile player.
Though I'd probably get some strange looks as I rock out to the "Commando" theme on the bus.
Regardless, your original post treated this as if it was a mere $699. If you have 100 Linux systems deployed, thats $69k. For 500, it's just under $350k.
That is not a pittance. Particulatly when weighed against, say, per-CPU licenses of Windows XP. I would not at all be surprised to learn that the "licensing program" was intended to simply steer people away from deploying Linux in the first place, rather than extorting fees from current users.
Suing to get out of the contract could also restore some of the rights granted by the GPL, which some (probably not all, or even most) companies may find advantageous to their business.
And comparing an original purchase (you seem to make the "buy commercial software once, install n times" assumption) is rather different than having someone come up to you and say "we want you to cough up $699 times n."
$699 per CPU. So if someone with a large-scale Linux deployment paid the protection fee, it could be in their interest to sue SCO back.
There are ways of providing this kind of functionality without the serverside hit.
Yup, this is one of the terribly irritating thing about google... there is simply no way to search for an exact string which contains non-alphanumeric characters. It strips out most punctuation.
e.g. search for 'tmp/foo/bar' or 'tmp/foo/bar#baz'. You'll see results for '/tmp/foo.bar', '/tmp/foo/bar', and so forth. What if I'm looking for that exact string? This can be very frustrating when searching for posts about a specific error message, since a page with 'condition foo: bar' will be just as likely to show up as 'foo: bar condition', but they aren't necessarily the same.
Yes, but the effects were more amusing than the material.
And... you get to the second page how?
Of course, Slashdot isn't even close to being valid HTML, so you get what you can take rendering it - in any browser.
The Plextor PX-712SA is a SATA DVD burner.
Doesn't mention DL burning, but there's at least one company offering them. $40 more than the ATA drive, though.