With that mindset, the winning team will be the one with the 20mph car. At that speed it will be able to steer itself around the other team's wrecks and finish the race in a day or two... How exciting!
With FF 11, it was some obscure change with CORS xmlHTTPRequests that worked on FF 10, but not anymore on FF11. I am not talking about a plugin or anything like that, just a web site that worked under FF 10 but not anymore on FF 11.
Just like what the author of the article is complaining about, TinyMCE (as the version used on some sites he needs) stopped working with FF11.
You can always claim that this is not the fault of FF, but at the point where FF is not able to display the sites you rely on consistently after every other upgrade, you know you need to switch to another browser that does not require web sites updates every time the browser is updated.
This (along with plugins) is the best way to loose users. We used to tell our customers to use FF as the preferred browser, we now advocate Chrome. This is just less trouble for us and our customers. Too bad.
The article is really well balanced. No offence, but every 6 weeks I am reminded why sticking with FF 3.6 is a good idea, as I see my colleagues scream at FF because of yet another broken thing.
Rapid releases are not a bad idea as long as you do it right (like chrome), if you do it wrong (like FF), it just pisses everybody off.
What the Moz team seams to not understand is that doing rapid release right means that users should not notice. With FF, users are hurt every 6 weeks, the bugs fixed and new features are probably nice, but they are not worth the pain of having something that does not work in a predictable way in the long run.
The good news is that there are alternatives: - Chrome - FF ESR (to some extent) - FF 3.6
But for me, the plain FF with auto-updates, no thank you.
Anytime you try to combine two goals in one design you are sure to make a bad decision. SSL is no exception. Both authentication and encryption are valuable. Why make the later depend on the former ??? This is just a blatant beginner's design mistake, there is no excuse for this. I am still waiting for somebody trying to explain me how this was a good idea in the first place.
The only players who gain anything from that are the certificate monopolies.
And the funniest thing is that nobody seems to be trying to fix the problem. The closest thing that resembles a fix for this mistake are the self-signed certificates, but none of the major browser accept them for what they are (I want encryption, I don't care for authentication), and instead insist in scaring everybody off. Sad sad sad!
Who cares if the DNA analysis is expensive. This cost should be more than covered by the fine issued to the offender, so really for the tax-payer that has no dog or who takes care of his dog's crap, it makes no difference. The fine for the dog owner's who litter the public space should be high enough to encourage them to not do so and to cover for all expenses related to the service.
I don't really get why there is a need for the reward. Fine the bad players and let the good players alone.
Yes your are right the BSD licence gives you permission to do that (i.e. not contribute back to the BSD source). There is nothing legally wrong with this. However what is ironic is doing it while claiming to be 'holier that thou' which is what relicensing the code as GPL does.
Yes your code is still available as open source code, but ironically you did not contribute anything to the project you took code from. This is legally ok (as it is explicitely allowed by the licence) but it is morally dubious as you pretend to be contributing while you are really not to the original project.
In fact this type of action is exactly similar to the situation of a company taking the code and not contributing back as far as the original BSD project is concerned. Because nothing will be gained by the BSD project. This is the ironic part.
And I am not commenting on the removal of the BSD licence on a legal POV as I have no idea if it is legal or not.
Your comment misses the point. What Theo claims (and he is right about it) is that by removing the BSD licence you don't contribute back to the BSD project that created the code you took. In other words you are doing just what you claim companies would be doing, because as soon as you put that under the GPL, the BSD project cannot use it anymore.
What he said is that this type of action is equal to not playing the community game as far as the BSD project is concerned. Your code maybe available for Linux, but it is not available anymore for OpenBSD or other non-GPL project. In essence you are removing freedom on code you did not create. This is what is ironic.
Well the article is interesting in that at least people now recognize publically that patenting some technology is viewed as the best way to stiffle competition. This is probably not surprising to most slashdotters but opinions like this are important outside the geek community.
This really tells how a system that was devised to foster inovation by disclosing discoveries (i.e. help build the competition) is now used as a way to do the exact opposite thanks to various flaws in our current economic model, namely:
- lack of proper validation of the patents (for some parts only, really if you think about it: there is nothing wrong in stating and formalizing something obvious, it is just not terribly usefull on a knowledge sharing level)
- the current state of the legal system that always favors the richer and the more powerfull (this is the main issue really, and this is not limited to patents.) Fixing this is beyond the power of any government I am afraid as it is really deeply rooted in the way society works, not only in the states but anywhere.
- of course this situation is not made any better by governments too happy to support it and not willing to assess the situation fairly.
Really the all thing is an indication of how our modern world works now: a new knowledge far west: the only rule is how much money you have (i.e. do you have the better gun ?)
Oh well, and finally for the obligatory slashdot reference:
Who cares if he lied, acted unconstitutionally or abused his powers, as long as he did not receive a blowjob in the oval office then he is truly a good president.
I guess god asked him to do all that, what a faithfull president!
They don't really have to change their model. Only get rid of the DRM and set the proper price. Really I am sure that most illegal downloads of music that happen on P2P networks is because the CDs/DVDs are just too expansive.
As far as I am concerned, I am not willing to pay 20 for a CD, it is at least 2x too much for my budget. Consider the Laffer Curve http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laffer_curve/... Too summarize: "too much taxes kills the taxes": if some state tries to collect taxes at a too high rate, the people will have an insentive to develop a parallel economy and avoid tax, so the state revenue will actually decrease. Now replace state by music/movie industry and see for yourself. Just ask yourself at what price you'd rather buy a CD or DVD and not go through the trouble of downloading it via some illegal means ?
The trouble is, the music/movie industry should really be asking themselves these question rather than claiming that piracy is the cause of the reduced revenues when they hike the prices of CD's from 10 to 20 for new releases... duh!
Another interesting article on the subject is how walmart pressured the music labels to drop the price of CD below 10$ to be carried at walmart. Guess what the music industry is following... in that article there is a break down of the cost of a 15.99$ CD:
Here is what you should cut with an legal online distribution: - 3.89 => retail overhead - 0.90 => distribution - 0.80 => packaging/manufacturing - 2.91 => label overhead
total 8.50$, this means that there is no excuse to sell a full album on-line for more than 7$ whatsoever. And I am ready to bet that at this price you really don't need any DRM, and most people will just buy the music without considering for a second that a p2p tool is worth the trouble.
And then of course you could just combine a few hashes together, say MD5 and SHA1 and why not CRC32 for good measure. Seriously even if you can individually generate 2 messages that will have the same hash with any of the above algorithms what are the chances that the same 2 messages will work with all three of them at the same time ?
I am not a cryptographer, but it seems to me that such a scheme would be good enough in reducing the practicality of an attack on any ONE of the hash method.
Interesting enough, it seems that virtualmda is just making an official version of the common new generation of virus remailers. From the previous post it seems that the only purpose of such a thing is to send spam.
Now here is an idea: if all slashdot users with a windows machine (could wine work ?) should register with the service and then promptly block outgoing connections to port 25 from that machine (we all have firewalls don't we ?).
This scheme would have a few advantages: - less span is sent (good) - may make money in the process (doubtful) - create a mess for the spammer and kill this dubious scheme
I have a PowerBook with a PC-Card slot. I use it to grab photos from a compact-flash card that I put in an adaptor. This saves me from the crappy download software that came with the camera and it means one less cable to worry about. As a bonus this is way faster that USB 1.1 transfers.
However if I did not have the PC-Card slot, everything would still work... So this is not stricktly required for me.
A friend of mine needed a PC-Card slot for some data over GSM services, but again this is a limited use.
Your comment on section 3.1 is ignoring the point in 3.2 which states that the licence must have been made available to you prior to the download so that you can be in compliance of 3.1.
Also if you check most projects you know which licence it is under long before you download it.
Better yet, make the patent office liable in case a patent is bad: the person who got sued by a company with an invalid patent should then be able to claim damages from the patent office equal to at least 10 times the fee collected by the patent office when it issued the patent.
This way you will be sure that the patent office will take a closer look at the validity of the applications...
I think the patent office should be made liable for issueing bad patents. In case a patent is fought off and shut down, the patent office should have to pay damages to the people who sued to bring the patent down.
This I think is the only thing that would make the patent office stop granting stupid/obvious stuff. Let one go and you have a class action suit to fight! Then it should also pay damages to the patent-holding entity for loss of business edge.
There is really no reason to go after people holding bad patents (these are just using all available tools to make money), the patent office is the one that should be sued for granting such bad tools.
Slashdot Mirror
how classy of him!
Capillary damage ? As in a really bad haircut... yeah that's definitely something we should avoid by all means!
With that mindset, the winning team will be the one with the 20mph car. At that speed it will be able to steer itself around the other team's wrecks and finish the race in a day or two... How exciting!
With FF 11, it was some obscure change with CORS xmlHTTPRequests that worked on FF 10, but not anymore on FF11. I am not talking about a plugin or anything like that, just a web site that worked under FF 10 but not anymore on FF 11.
Just like what the author of the article is complaining about, TinyMCE (as the version used on some sites he needs) stopped working with FF11.
You can always claim that this is not the fault of FF, but at the point where FF is not able to display the sites you rely on consistently after every other upgrade, you know you need to switch to another browser that does not require web sites updates every time the browser is updated.
This (along with plugins) is the best way to loose users. We used to tell our customers to use FF as the preferred browser, we now advocate Chrome. This is just less trouble for us and our customers. Too bad.
The article is really well balanced. No offence, but every 6 weeks I am reminded why sticking with FF 3.6 is a good idea, as I see my colleagues scream at FF because of yet another broken thing.
Rapid releases are not a bad idea as long as you do it right (like chrome), if you do it wrong (like FF), it just pisses everybody off.
What the Moz team seams to not understand is that doing rapid release right means that users should not notice. With FF, users are hurt every 6 weeks, the bugs fixed and new features are probably nice, but they are not worth the pain of having something that does not work in a predictable way in the long run.
The good news is that there are alternatives:
- Chrome
- FF ESR (to some extent)
- FF 3.6
But for me, the plain FF with auto-updates, no thank you.
He could have Gingrich web sites removed from the net without bothering with going to court!
This would have been the mother of all wake up call for politicians supporting legislation such as ACTA/PIPA/SOPA.
Perl 6 for 2013! That would be cool... ok maybe 2014 if hurd wants the spot!
So true!
Anytime you try to combine two goals in one design you are sure to make a bad decision. SSL is no exception. Both authentication and encryption are valuable. Why make the later depend on the former ??? This is just a blatant beginner's design mistake, there is no excuse for this. I am still waiting for somebody trying to explain me how this was a good idea in the first place.
The only players who gain anything from that are the certificate monopolies.
And the funniest thing is that nobody seems to be trying to fix the problem. The closest thing that resembles a fix for this mistake are the self-signed certificates, but none of the major browser accept them for what they are (I want encryption, I don't care for authentication), and instead insist in scaring everybody off. Sad sad sad!
Who cares if the DNA analysis is expensive. This cost should be more than covered by the fine issued to the offender, so really for the tax-payer that has no dog or who takes care of his dog's crap, it makes no difference. The fine for the dog owner's who litter the public space should be high enough to encourage them to not do so and to cover for all expenses related to the service.
I don't really get why there is a need for the reward. Fine the bad players and let the good players alone.
Yes your are right the BSD licence gives you permission to do that (i.e. not contribute back to the BSD source). There is nothing legally wrong with this. However what is ironic is doing it while claiming to be 'holier that thou' which is what relicensing the code as GPL does.
Yes your code is still available as open source code, but ironically you did not contribute anything to the project you took code from. This is legally ok (as it is explicitely allowed by the licence) but it is morally dubious as you pretend to be contributing while you are really not to the original project.
In fact this type of action is exactly similar to the situation of a company taking the code and not contributing back as far as the original BSD project is concerned. Because nothing will be gained by the BSD project. This is the ironic part.
And I am not commenting on the removal of the BSD licence on a legal POV as I have no idea if it is legal or not.
Your comment misses the point. What Theo claims (and he is right about it) is that by removing the BSD licence you don't contribute back to the BSD project that created the code you took. In other words you are doing just what you claim companies would be doing, because as soon as you put that under the GPL, the BSD project cannot use it anymore.
What he said is that this type of action is equal to not playing the community game as far as the BSD project is concerned. Your code maybe available for Linux, but it is not available anymore for OpenBSD or other non-GPL project. In essence you are removing freedom on code you did not create. This is what is ironic.
Well the article is interesting in that at least people now recognize publically that patenting some technology is viewed as the best way to stiffle competition. This is probably not surprising to most slashdotters but opinions like this are important outside the geek community.
This really tells how a system that was devised to foster inovation by disclosing discoveries (i.e. help build the competition) is now used as a way to do the exact opposite thanks to various flaws in our current economic model, namely:
- lack of proper validation of the patents (for some parts only, really if you think about it: there is nothing wrong in stating and formalizing something obvious, it is just not terribly usefull on a knowledge sharing level)
- the current state of the legal system that always favors the richer and the more powerfull (this is the main issue really, and this is not limited to patents.) Fixing this is beyond the power of any government I am afraid as it is really deeply rooted in the way society works, not only in the states but anywhere.
- of course this situation is not made any better by governments too happy to support it and not willing to assess the situation fairly.
Really the all thing is an indication of how our modern world works now: a new knowledge far west: the only rule is how much money you have (i.e. do you have the better gun ?)
Oh well, and finally for the obligatory slashdot reference:
1. patent something (preferrably usefull, obvious or not)
2. ???
3. profit
Who cares if he lied, acted unconstitutionally or abused his powers, as long as he did not receive a blowjob in the oval office then he is truly a good president.
I guess god asked him to do all that, what a faithfull president!
proper links:
4 0
Laffer's curve: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laffer_curve
Walmart's 10$ CD: http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/_/id/65585
sorry
They don't really have to change their model. Only get rid of the DRM and set the proper price. Really I am sure that most illegal downloads of music that happen on P2P networks is because the CDs/DVDs are just too expansive.
As far as I am concerned, I am not willing to pay 20 for a CD, it is at least 2x too much for my budget. Consider the Laffer Curve http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laffer_curve/... Too summarize: "too much taxes kills the taxes": if some state tries to collect taxes at a too high rate, the people will have an insentive to develop a parallel economy and avoid tax, so the state revenue will actually decrease. Now replace state by music/movie industry and see for yourself. Just ask yourself at what price you'd rather buy a CD or DVD and not go through the trouble of downloading it via some illegal means ?
The trouble is, the music/movie industry should really be asking themselves these question rather than claiming that piracy is the cause of the reduced revenues when they hike the prices of CD's from 10 to 20 for new releases... duh!
Another interesting article on the subject is how walmart pressured the music labels to drop the price of CD below 10$ to be carried at walmart. Guess what the music industry is following... in that article there is a break down of the cost of a 15.99$ CD:
$0.17 Musicians' unions
$0.80 Packaging/manufacturing
$0.82 Publishing royalties
$0.80 Retail profit
$0.90 Distribution
$1.60 Artists' royalties
$1.70 Label profit
$2.40 Marketing/promotion
$2.91 Label overhead
$3.89 Retail overhead
Here is what you should cut with an legal online distribution:
- 3.89 => retail overhead
- 0.90 => distribution
- 0.80 => packaging/manufacturing
- 2.91 => label overhead
total 8.50$, this means that there is no excuse to sell a full album on-line for more than 7$ whatsoever. And I am ready to bet that at this price you really don't need any DRM, and most people will just buy the music without considering for a second that a p2p tool is worth the trouble.
I really love this. "OK you can't sell this to anybody, but I still get to use it"! How ironical!
How about the government uses only the service from a patent owning company like NTP ? Maybe patents are a bit clumsier to use than real products.
And then of course you could just combine a few hashes together, say MD5 and SHA1 and why not CRC32 for good measure. Seriously even if you can individually generate 2 messages that will have the same hash with any of the above algorithms what are the chances that the same 2 messages will work with all three of them at the same time ?
I am not a cryptographer, but it seems to me that such a scheme would be good enough in reducing the practicality of an attack on any ONE of the hash method.
Can somebody with more knowledge tell me ?
Interesting enough, it seems that virtualmda is just making an official version of the common new generation of virus remailers. From the previous post it seems that the only purpose of such a thing is to send spam.
Now here is an idea: if all slashdot users with a windows machine (could wine work ?) should register with the service and then promptly block outgoing connections to port 25 from that machine (we all have firewalls don't we ?).
This scheme would have a few advantages:
- less span is sent (good)
- may make money in the process (doubtful)
- create a mess for the spammer and kill this dubious scheme
I have a PowerBook with a PC-Card slot. I use it to grab photos from a compact-flash card that I put in an adaptor. This saves me from the crappy download software that came with the camera and it means one less cable to worry about. As a bonus this is way faster that USB 1.1 transfers.
However if I did not have the PC-Card slot, everything would still work... So this is not stricktly required for me.
A friend of mine needed a PC-Card slot for some data over GSM services, but again this is a limited use.
Maybe juste because they are fed up with side talking...
The Bush/Gore election in 2000...
Your comment on section 3.1 is ignoring the point in 3.2 which states that the licence must have been made available to you prior to the download so that you can be in compliance of 3.1.
Also if you check most projects you know which licence it is under long before you download it.
Better yet, make the patent office liable in case a patent is bad: the person who got sued by a company with an invalid patent should then be able to claim damages from the patent office equal to at least 10 times the fee collected by the patent office when it issued the patent.
This way you will be sure that the patent office will take a closer look at the validity of the applications...
I think the patent office should be made liable for issueing bad patents. In case a patent is fought off and shut down, the patent office should have to pay damages to the people who sued to bring the patent down.
This I think is the only thing that would make the patent office stop granting stupid/obvious stuff. Let one go and you have a class action suit to fight! Then it should also pay damages to the patent-holding entity for loss of business edge.
There is really no reason to go after people holding bad patents (these are just using all available tools to make money), the patent office is the one that should be sued for granting such bad tools.
... discussing spelling on slashdot!