If you're so dead set against "intellectual property", then what does the perversion of copyright law have to do with anything?
Copyright law in the US is not based on the concept of intellectual property. The founding fathers believed in property as an absolute right which was recognized, not granted, by government. However copyright is an artificial right created by a government for a utilitarian reason - to encourage the arts and sciences. Copyright is not a governmental recognition of a natural right. Therefore, it's quite logical that people who do not believe in intellectual property are upset at the perversion of copyright law. Copyright is now being extended and defended on the basis of the 'intellectual property rights' of the copyright holders. There are no such rights.
That was my first thought too. On the other hand, the free software world really needs some good taillights to chase. M$ is unreliable crap - when we clone it, we get reliable crap. Maybe there are cool things in QNX that should be imitated. Giving lots of people the chance to play with QNX at home can only be good.
There are lots of ways to hide a backdoor or key leak in an SSL implementation because it's complex and uses public-key cryptography. The most popular idea is to tamper with the random number generator. However it would be quite hard to backdoor a symmetric block cipher like AES and still have it interoperate with reference implementations. Although you could design the chip to leak some key data via RF. This would only benefit adversaries capable of getting an antenna near the chip.
I really do. But every time I look into this area, I find some unpleasant facts:
You're forced to subsidize Microsoft. I don't want to do that.
Installation is a big science project.
WinCE continues to live in ROM, so you're always dragging around a piece of Microsoft code which the machine is always threatening to run if it's powered up wrong or something.
I'd love a Unix PDA, but I don't want it to be such a struggle. Hopefully someone will come up with a 'chipped' PDA that is 100% unix-friendly.
I agree, with you, but remember: the US is primarily about freedom. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance. We are always finding abuses in the business and government spheres which need to be stopped or even punished. And because we pay so much attention to these abuses, it's possible to get a very unpleasant perspective on America. But the whole reason we're free today is that people have been constantly impeaching, investigating, convicting, and punishing the same kind of entrenched criminals who are now trying to enforce their market segmentation. The garden of freedom will never be perfect. We need an independent press and judiciary to constantly weed it of people like the MPAA/RIAA/Doubleclick. Although I think the gardening implements should become a bit sharper and more destructive. I would greatly enjoy seeing Hilary Rosen face a firing squad, as a lesson to other corporatists.
I don't get it. Let's say Microsoft wants to write an Ogg Vorbis player. Rather than pay for the development, they'll get the Department of Energy to write it. DOE releases the player under the BSD license, and Microsoft swallows it into proprietary Windows Media Player and runs around screaming about how innovative they are. Meanwhile, everyone in the world is free to start a GPL'd project based on the DOE code, or to incorporate that code into an existing GPL project. So when you say:
GPL is the only license model that is sufficiently restrictive to guarantee that public works are not purely for the direct benefit of lobbyist.
I think that even if the DOE code is intended to only benefit Microsoft, it will still, by virtue of its license, benefit all people trying to write audio players. Maybe you can postulate a government-funded project that is closely married to the Microsoft platform and could never be useful on Unix. But such a project would be equally problematic if it were GPL'd.
I hope that gets modded up. I'm always tempted to post that when this crappy 'IP' thread rears its head, but it's like shouting into the wind. In the version I heard, the poor man had rented a room over the cookshop and used to eat his bowl of porridge while inhaling the rich cooking odors coming through the cracks in the floor. In the end, the judge says, "for the smell of fish, the sound of coin."
I agree. Unauthorized copying has no more to do with stealing than with any other offense. Why not call it rape if you're trying to excite moral indignation? Are you afraid that calling it by its true name, copying, will deflate the drama? (Not you, Cardinal)
Are you sure you're not confusing Google's explicitly sold advertisements with search results? There is usually a text ad in a shaded cell at the top of the results, in addition to 'adwords' adds on the right hand side. I haven't seen any clearcut commercial bias in the actual search results google delivers. Can you cite an example?
M$ is not trying to ban the GPL. They are trying to get publicly funded projects to use the BSD license instead. This is not an unreasonable request. Basically, if software development is funded by everyone's tax dollars, why should it be licensed in a way that discriminates against some taxpayers? BSD licensed software can be incorporated into GPL software or proprietary software. Hence, it is symmetrical and unbiased in this debate. That is appropriate for something publicly funded. Now, a good case could also be made for licensing publicly funded software under the GPL. Namely, that it is not in the public interest to encourage the growth of proprietary software, which has proven to be harmful. My point is that this is a legitimate debate (if you even think the government should be funding software development, which is itself a legitimate debate.).
Actually, historians are always rewriting history. History is not the simple thing you are painting it as. If you are American, look at the changing history of Christopher Columbus. And can you explain the history of the Potato Famine in one paragraph? Do you think that same history was understood 50 years ago? Holocaust denial goes considerably beyond the examples I gave, but exists on the same continuum of doubt and debate over history. The only reason we ever think history is black and white is that we learned it initially from simplified childrens' textbooks. Historians doubt history just as scientists doubt science, and for the same reason - they make it.
That's a cool story. Is the whole thing on the web somewhere? I think we need a web site for these things that would contain contact info for the administrators involved. Then every year, on the anniversary of the incident, hundreds of geeks could call the responsible officials and ask, 'do you still think that was a good idea?'
Actually, traffic offenses are generally not criminal offenses in the US. Speeding by more than X MPH above the speed limit can be a criminal offense. There are at least five kinds of offenses within the US, not counting civil torts: administrative, traffic, disorderly, misdemeanor, and felony. I'm sure a lawyer could cite many more. Only misdemeanors and felonies are criminal offenses.
No, hopefully she'll learn that the soft sciences are off limits to intelligent people, and study physics or chem or something where political correctness does not yet trump truth.
You know what I told the person who suggested that I was an objectivist because my parents didn't want me to be?
No, I must have been sick that day. What did you tell that person? I wouldn't completely dismiss that idea, by the way. Objectivism tends to feed on parental opposition. It's impossible to oppose Ayn Rand without sounding just like one of her villains.
Ah, but isn't it possible that being subjected to arbitrary rules and discipline actually encourages critical thinking? I wonder if I'd be as independent as I am if I were raised in some ideal environment. Where are kids going to learn what tyranny and censorship really mean? From a textbook? Much better to let them learn first hand what it's like to have your freedom suppressed, and schools are very good at this. If you read The Diamond Age, there's a rather nasty teacher who's employed mainly to teach the girls that the world is not full of nice, rational people.
Teachers can be very two-faced, displaying the enlightened, human persona to the outside world while acting as a petty and cruel dictator within the school. I would say that this is the norm rather than the exception. To be fair, teachers get this way partly through dealing with children over a long period of time. I once talked to a Las Vegas Jail Officer at a party. He was a very nice guy. Hearing his war stories, though, I became aware that he does not show his 'nice guy' side to inmates. I haven't seen much explicit political message from teachers. They do share an implicit philosophy of unquestioning subservience to authority.
Wow. We have come a long way. And I can't explain what's really driving it, except for the media's need to provoke anxiety in order to sell ads. Actually, it may be that society has a more feminine perspective today. In the past there were many dark corners that women did not approve of. Now it seems that those dark corners are being first illuminated, then sanitized. I am pretty confident that fire will be illegal within my lifetime. For civilian use, I mean. If the Philadelphia police want to firebomb a building full of weirdos, that's different.
Of course this experiment has been done before. Not that I'm complaining; science fair stuff isn't meant to be original. The funny thing is that the racial preference for white is even stronger among black children than among white children. I read this in a book about the Barbie dolls. Anyhow, for black girls the issue seemed to be primarily hair texture. They wanted a doll with smooth, straight hair. And I'm not 100% convinced that the authorities were wrong to censor this. Not everything in science is suitable for children to see.
But there's not much correlation between world domination and profitability. So linux servershare and mindshare continue to increase as linux-based business plans suffer. So we might see world domination coincide with utter commercial failure.
I'd much rather have normal, standard parts than the weird junk that Compaq uses. I don't see proprietary motherboards as a big value-add. However, I agree that VA were simply building 'best practices' clone boxes and selling them at inflated prices. They were hoping to get the kind of unified identity that Sun or HP have - they sell the box with the OS and support the combo. If spending my own money, I'd rather build clones from scratch because then I trust them. But I wouldn't recommend this to a big company - it's easier for them to spend a few bucks more on VA. I've never understood what keeps compaq and dell afloat - their stuff is not as cheap or as good as generic clone hardware.
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Copyright law in the US is not based on the concept of intellectual property. The founding fathers believed in property as an absolute right which was recognized, not granted, by government. However copyright is an artificial right created by a government for a utilitarian reason - to encourage the arts and sciences. Copyright is not a governmental recognition of a natural right.
Therefore, it's quite logical that people who do not believe in intellectual property are upset at the perversion of copyright law.
Copyright is now being extended and defended on the basis of the 'intellectual property rights' of the copyright holders. There are no such rights.
That was my first thought too. On the other hand, the free software world really needs some good taillights to chase. M$ is unreliable crap - when we clone it, we get reliable crap. Maybe there are cool things in QNX that should be imitated. Giving lots of people the chance to play with QNX at home can only be good.
There are lots of ways to hide a backdoor or key leak in an SSL implementation because it's complex and uses public-key cryptography. The most popular idea is to tamper with the random number generator. However it would be quite hard to backdoor a symmetric block cipher like AES and still have it interoperate with reference implementations.
Although you could design the chip to leak some key data via RF. This would only benefit adversaries capable of getting an antenna near the chip.
I'd love a Unix PDA, but I don't want it to be such a struggle. Hopefully someone will come up with a 'chipped' PDA that is 100% unix-friendly.
I agree, with you, but remember: the US is primarily about freedom. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance. We are always finding abuses in the business and government spheres which need to be stopped or even punished. And because we pay so much attention to these abuses, it's possible to get a very unpleasant perspective on America. But the whole reason we're free today is that people have been constantly impeaching, investigating, convicting, and punishing the same kind of entrenched criminals who are now trying to enforce their market segmentation.
The garden of freedom will never be perfect. We need an independent press and judiciary to constantly weed it of people like the MPAA/RIAA/Doubleclick. Although I think the gardening implements should become a bit sharper and more destructive. I would greatly enjoy seeing Hilary Rosen face a firing squad, as a lesson to other corporatists.
Meanwhile, everyone in the world is free to start a GPL'd project based on the DOE code, or to incorporate that code into an existing GPL project. So when you say:
I think that even if the DOE code is intended to only benefit Microsoft, it will still, by virtue of its license, benefit all people trying to write audio players.
Maybe you can postulate a government-funded project that is closely married to the Microsoft platform and could never be useful on Unix. But such a project would be equally problematic if it were GPL'd.
I hope that gets modded up. I'm always tempted to post that when this crappy 'IP' thread rears its head, but it's like shouting into the wind. In the version I heard, the poor man had rented a room over the cookshop and used to eat his bowl of porridge while inhaling the rich cooking odors coming through the cracks in the floor.
In the end, the judge says, "for the smell of fish, the sound of coin."
I agree. Unauthorized copying has no more to do with stealing than with any other offense. Why not call it rape if you're trying to excite moral indignation? Are you afraid that calling it by its true name, copying, will deflate the drama? (Not you, Cardinal)
Yes, but a subpoena is issued by a judge, right? We're talking about an email from a private individual here.
Are you sure you're not confusing Google's explicitly sold advertisements with search results? There is usually a text ad in a shaded cell at the top of the results, in addition to 'adwords' adds on the right hand side.
I haven't seen any clearcut commercial bias in the actual search results google delivers. Can you cite an example?
M$ is not trying to ban the GPL. They are trying to get publicly funded projects to use the BSD license instead. This is not an unreasonable request. Basically, if software development is funded by everyone's tax dollars, why should it be licensed in a way that discriminates against some taxpayers?
BSD licensed software can be incorporated into GPL software or proprietary software. Hence, it is symmetrical and unbiased in this debate. That is appropriate for something publicly funded.
Now, a good case could also be made for licensing publicly funded software under the GPL. Namely, that it is not in the public interest to encourage the growth of proprietary software, which has proven to be harmful. My point is that this is a legitimate debate (if you even think the government should be funding software development, which is itself a legitimate debate.).
I hope you don't take what I said as gospel - I'm sure a lawyer would see all kinds of errors in it.
Will Lisa Simpson be the next Hitler?
Next you'll be claiming that if you're old enough to be drafted, you're old enough to drink alcohol.
Actually, historians are always rewriting history. History is not the simple thing you are painting it as. If you are American, look at the changing history of Christopher Columbus. And can you explain the history of the Potato Famine in one paragraph? Do you think that same history was understood 50 years ago?
Holocaust denial goes considerably beyond the examples I gave, but exists on the same continuum of doubt and debate over history. The only reason we ever think history is black and white is that we learned it initially from simplified childrens' textbooks. Historians doubt history just as scientists doubt science, and for the same reason - they make it.
That's a cool story. Is the whole thing on the web somewhere? I think we need a web site for these things that would contain contact info for the administrators involved. Then every year, on the anniversary of the incident, hundreds of geeks could call the responsible officials and ask, 'do you still think that was a good idea?'
Actually, traffic offenses are generally not criminal offenses in the US. Speeding by more than X MPH above the speed limit can be a criminal offense. There are at least five kinds of offenses within the US, not counting civil torts: administrative, traffic, disorderly, misdemeanor, and felony. I'm sure a lawyer could cite many more. Only misdemeanors and felonies are criminal offenses.
No, hopefully she'll learn that the soft sciences are off limits to intelligent people, and study physics or chem or something where political correctness does not yet trump truth.
No, I must have been sick that day. What did you tell that person? I wouldn't completely dismiss that idea, by the way. Objectivism tends to feed on parental opposition. It's impossible to oppose Ayn Rand without sounding just like one of her villains.
Ah, but isn't it possible that being subjected to arbitrary rules and discipline actually encourages critical thinking? I wonder if I'd be as independent as I am if I were raised in some ideal environment. Where are kids going to learn what tyranny and censorship really mean? From a textbook? Much better to let them learn first hand what it's like to have your freedom suppressed, and schools are very good at this.
If you read The Diamond Age, there's a rather nasty teacher who's employed mainly to teach the girls that the world is not full of nice, rational people.
Teachers can be very two-faced, displaying the enlightened, human persona to the outside world while acting as a petty and cruel dictator within the school. I would say that this is the norm rather than the exception. To be fair, teachers get this way partly through dealing with children over a long period of time.
I once talked to a Las Vegas Jail Officer at a party. He was a very nice guy. Hearing his war stories, though, I became aware that he does not show his 'nice guy' side to inmates.
I haven't seen much explicit political message from teachers. They do share an implicit philosophy of unquestioning subservience to authority.
Wow. We have come a long way. And I can't explain what's really driving it, except for the media's need to provoke anxiety in order to sell ads.
Actually, it may be that society has a more feminine perspective today. In the past there were many dark corners that women did not approve of. Now it seems that those dark corners are being first illuminated, then sanitized. I am pretty confident that fire will be illegal within my lifetime. For civilian use, I mean. If the Philadelphia police want to firebomb a building full of weirdos, that's different.
Of course this experiment has been done before. Not that I'm complaining; science fair stuff isn't meant to be original. The funny thing is that the racial preference for white is even stronger among black children than among white children. I read this in a book about the Barbie dolls.
Anyhow, for black girls the issue seemed to be primarily hair texture. They wanted a doll with smooth, straight hair.
And I'm not 100% convinced that the authorities were wrong to censor this. Not everything in science is suitable for children to see.
But there's not much correlation between world domination and profitability. So linux servershare and mindshare continue to increase as linux-based business plans suffer. So we might see world domination coincide with utter commercial failure.
I'd much rather have normal, standard parts than the weird junk that Compaq uses. I don't see proprietary motherboards as a big value-add. However, I agree that VA were simply building 'best practices' clone boxes and selling them at inflated prices.
They were hoping to get the kind of unified identity that Sun or HP have - they sell the box with the OS and support the combo. If spending my own money, I'd rather build clones from scratch because then I trust them. But I wouldn't recommend this to a big company - it's easier for them to spend a few bucks more on VA. I've never understood what keeps compaq and dell afloat - their stuff is not as cheap or as good as generic clone hardware.