The code base would have to have no known defects (bugs) regardless or scope or scale of the bug/defect.
I imagine you can get around this by publishing the URL of your bug tracker in the contract.
Of course, this URL would probably go to a server that was configured to display no bugs past $DATE and to only display the initial bug report or title, not the ensuing discussion (at least for secretive companies).
Bigger companies (those that sell shrink-wrapped software) might have to just keep a public bug tracker. That would be really nice, because I could look up whether a piece of software had any issues on my hardware before I bought it. (This might be useful for enterprise Linux distros.)
I suspect that in commercial software, there is an implication of warranty (because the customer paid for it), and that warranty can't always be signed away by a contract (because of things like consumer protection laws).
I would think that if a piece of software is free as in beer, it would be easy to explain to a judge that the project authors had no business relationship with the user, and thus could not be held liable.
It's sort of like the "I am not your lawyer, this is not legal advice" disclaimer--the person giving advice is less likely to lose a malpractice suit if he/she says "I have no business relationship with you, so don't take this with the same gravity that you might take my real legal advice."
the brain simulation would not be capable of learning and growing, but would instead be stuck at whatever development stage it was created at.
Well, part of the idea of the singularity is that the first time such an artificial brain is created that is smarter than us silly humans, it can be tasked to create the next version of itself (which will be better than humans could make).
Do you know of any bands that became popular this way? Because you could be right, but I remain incredibly skeptical until I see it starting to happen.
top of that, I simply can't bloody afford albums that cost more than DVD's anymore.
I used to love punk compilation albums. Hell, maybe I should start buying those again. They often weren't produced by big record companies, and they used to cost $3-5 at the music store I liked. I wonder whether the price has changed...
You're a troll, but I've gotta respond (sorry). The internet just doesn't solve everything. I mean, who's gonna buy your music and how do they know about it? Just existing and having a viable method distribution doesn't do much for you. You need marketing--that's where a record label comes in.
All the dye does, according to the article, is prevent the body from damaging itself further following a spinal cord injury. It must be injected before that additional damage can occur--I wonder if this will end up in every first-aid kit? That's the only way I see it helping.
Well, I'm an idiot. I've thought of a bunch of unstated assumptions I made that are probably wrong. I still think a bigger drive may have more throughput, but it's not something that I can take for granted without detailed specs (that I don't have).
Well, if the disk is full and spinning at a constant rate, the head is passing over a given number of bits each second--this rate depends on the disk size. (I don't think the number of platters should matter.)
I'm making a big assumption--that the head can read/write as fast as the disk spins. Even with large and sequential reads/writes, I don't know whether this is true.
A 5400 RPM drive of this size should have twice the data transfer of drives that are currently available (500GB). In fact, this should have 10x the throughput of my current laptop drive. I'm drooling already...
Obviously, this only applies to sequential reads/writes. Is there any other bottleneck, or can I actually expect to write large files 10x faster?
I've been hearing that these ethanol energy plans would use more water than we have available. While that's certainly true in California (there's a drought here), I wonder if it's true in the rest of the US. If water becomes scarce, it's gonna get expensive, and it will no longer be feasible to use it to produce ethanol.
Unless the MITM is closer to the web server than you. Just because you think your home connection is trustworthy doesn't make it so
Well, that's true. The web server itself could be compromised (and then certs don't help).
As far as my home connection not being secure, security is a tradeoff with usability, and I'm willing to assume that my home connection is probably secure, unless money is involved.
A self-signed certificate isn't a good reason to trust a site, but untrustworthy sites can get certificates, too. Trust is a complicated beast.
If a site doesn't require much security (no logins or commercial transactions), self-certification is great! It makes it more difficult for an ISP to inject ads, and other users on your network can't see what you're reading.
Encryption is useless if you don't know who is at the other end. SSL and TLS are designed to stop man-in-the-middle attacks, and you cannot do that without trusted authentication.
A self-signed certificate can reduce man-in-the-middle attacks. Here's how it works: I log on the first time from my home computer. Ideally, Firefox would prompt me once and I would choose "allow this certificate in the future" (without its current punitive user-interface). Because my home connection is mostly secure (Comcast isn't changing my data), I can subsequently log in from a coffee shop, I'll know that the certificate is legitimate, and I mostly trust the transaction.
I blame firefox's big scary error page that comes up every time a page uses a self-signed certificate. I've gotten so good at ignoring that, I probably wouldn't notice if a page said "the certificate doesn't match" instead of "the certificate is self-signed."
Mozilla isn't doing anybody any favors with their heightened paranoia.
Some occasional spot checking on my spam filter has shown no e-mail arriving to any plus addresses.
This may not be completely surefire, because spammers might strip out the +stuff at the end of the address. In practice, it should work for now, because according to research like this article, spammers are lazy.
If in the future your main e-mail address starts to get spam, you could set your account up so that "address+real@gmail.com" goes to your inbox and anything addressed to just address@gmail.com is assumed to be spam. (Obviously, you only give out example+real@gmail.com to those you trust.)
I would have liked the article to state which sites sell e-mail addresses to spammers. They would certainly deserve it.
I use unique e-mail addresses for (almost) everything I sign up for, and I've never gotten a spam message from any of those unique accounts. I started getting a lot of spam when I first posted to LKML, which is published online.
Right, but my point is that there are 2 options: contributors must either consign copyright, or they must grant you a cart-blanche license to use their contribution. Note that this second option would allow the maintainer to relicense it under other terms if he/she chooses to do so, even if the contributor attaches a GPL copyright notice to the top of the file.
Sorry, posting to undo my accidental modding of you down.
For what it's worth, I agree. Many cats are too affectionate to just think of humans as a food source. I also think they put up with a lot of shit--ever hug your cats? The human is the alpha cat in the house (if the cat is fixed, anyway).
People can contribute back just fine, but if you want their contributions to go into your closed-source product, you need the copyright from them.
I don't think so--isn't it enough to get a royalty-free non-exclusive license to use and distribute their code? No need for copyright consignment... though, I suppose it is less of a legal minefield if all the copyrights are owned by one individual.
Thank you for the correction, I understand now. Which button performs a middle click? That is, where is "button 2" located? I can't easily reprogram mice, but if there is a "middle click" button in the mouse's default configuration, the Nano may be a big improvement over the VX Revolution.
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The code base would have to have no known defects (bugs) regardless or scope or scale of the bug/defect.
I imagine you can get around this by publishing the URL of your bug tracker in the contract.
Of course, this URL would probably go to a server that was configured to display no bugs past $DATE and to only display the initial bug report or title, not the ensuing discussion (at least for secretive companies).
Bigger companies (those that sell shrink-wrapped software) might have to just keep a public bug tracker. That would be really nice, because I could look up whether a piece of software had any issues on my hardware before I bought it. (This might be useful for enterprise Linux distros.)
Oh, and I'm not a lawyer. And if I were, I probably wouldn't be you lawyer. In which case this would not be legal advice...
I suspect that in commercial software, there is an implication of warranty (because the customer paid for it), and that warranty can't always be signed away by a contract (because of things like consumer protection laws).
I would think that if a piece of software is free as in beer, it would be easy to explain to a judge that the project authors had no business relationship with the user, and thus could not be held liable.
It's sort of like the "I am not your lawyer, this is not legal advice" disclaimer--the person giving advice is less likely to lose a malpractice suit if he/she says "I have no business relationship with you, so don't take this with the same gravity that you might take my real legal advice."
the brain simulation would not be capable of learning and growing, but would instead be stuck at whatever development stage it was created at.
Well, part of the idea of the singularity is that the first time such an artificial brain is created that is smarter than us silly humans, it can be tasked to create the next version of itself (which will be better than humans could make).
Do you know of any bands that became popular this way? Because you could be right, but I remain incredibly skeptical until I see it starting to happen.
top of that, I simply can't bloody afford albums that cost more than DVD's anymore.
I used to love punk compilation albums. Hell, maybe I should start buying those again. They often weren't produced by big record companies, and they used to cost $3-5 at the music store I liked. I wonder whether the price has changed...
You're a troll, but I've gotta respond (sorry). The internet just doesn't solve everything. I mean, who's gonna buy your music and how do they know about it? Just existing and having a viable method distribution doesn't do much for you. You need marketing--that's where a record label comes in.
- anticompetitive business practices (price fixing, etc) that have given potential customers a sour attitude towards music labels
There is some truth in that, but come on. People really stopped buying music because of that?
I have. I don't feel that I can give money to the major record companies in good conscience.
All the dye does, according to the article, is prevent the body from damaging itself further following a spinal cord injury. It must be injected before that additional damage can occur--I wonder if this will end up in every first-aid kit? That's the only way I see it helping.
Well, I'm an idiot. I've thought of a bunch of unstated assumptions I made that are probably wrong. I still think a bigger drive may have more throughput, but it's not something that I can take for granted without detailed specs (that I don't have).
Well, if the disk is full and spinning at a constant rate, the head is passing over a given number of bits each second--this rate depends on the disk size. (I don't think the number of platters should matter.)
I'm making a big assumption--that the head can read/write as fast as the disk spins. Even with large and sequential reads/writes, I don't know whether this is true.
A 5400 RPM drive of this size should have twice the data transfer of drives that are currently available (500GB). In fact, this should have 10x the throughput of my current laptop drive. I'm drooling already...
Obviously, this only applies to sequential reads/writes. Is there any other bottleneck, or can I actually expect to write large files 10x faster?
I've been hearing that these ethanol energy plans would use more water than we have available. While that's certainly true in California (there's a drought here), I wonder if it's true in the rest of the US. If water becomes scarce, it's gonna get expensive, and it will no longer be feasible to use it to produce ethanol.
Unless the MITM is closer to the web server than you. Just because you think your home connection is trustworthy doesn't make it so
Well, that's true. The web server itself could be compromised (and then certs don't help).
As far as my home connection not being secure, security is a tradeoff with usability, and I'm willing to assume that my home connection is probably secure, unless money is involved.
A self-signed certificate isn't a good reason to trust a site, but untrustworthy sites can get certificates, too. Trust is a complicated beast.
If a site doesn't require much security (no logins or commercial transactions), self-certification is great! It makes it more difficult for an ISP to inject ads, and other users on your network can't see what you're reading.
Encryption is useless if you don't know who is at the other end. SSL and TLS are designed to stop man-in-the-middle attacks, and you cannot do that without trusted authentication.
A self-signed certificate can reduce man-in-the-middle attacks. Here's how it works: I log on the first time from my home computer. Ideally, Firefox would prompt me once and I would choose "allow this certificate in the future" (without its current punitive user-interface). Because my home connection is mostly secure (Comcast isn't changing my data), I can subsequently log in from a coffee shop, I'll know that the certificate is legitimate, and I mostly trust the transaction.
I blame firefox's big scary error page that comes up every time a page uses a self-signed certificate. I've gotten so good at ignoring that, I probably wouldn't notice if a page said "the certificate doesn't match" instead of "the certificate is self-signed."
Mozilla isn't doing anybody any favors with their heightened paranoia.
Why would they possibly need the latest kernel version?
Wasn't there a kernel root exploit publicized (and patched) a few days ago?
Some occasional spot checking on my spam filter has shown no e-mail arriving to any plus addresses.
This may not be completely surefire, because spammers might strip out the +stuff at the end of the address. In practice, it should work for now, because according to research like this article, spammers are lazy.
If in the future your main e-mail address starts to get spam, you could set your account up so that "address+real@gmail.com" goes to your inbox and anything addressed to just address@gmail.com is assumed to be spam. (Obviously, you only give out example+real@gmail.com to those you trust.)
I would have liked the article to state which sites sell e-mail addresses to spammers. They would certainly deserve it.
I use unique e-mail addresses for (almost) everything I sign up for, and I've never gotten a spam message from any of those unique accounts. I started getting a lot of spam when I first posted to LKML, which is published online.
Right, but my point is that there are 2 options: contributors must either consign copyright, or they must grant you a cart-blanche license to use their contribution. Note that this second option would allow the maintainer to relicense it under other terms if he/she chooses to do so, even if the contributor attaches a GPL copyright notice to the top of the file.
Sorry, posting to undo my accidental modding of you down.
For what it's worth, I agree. Many cats are too affectionate to just think of humans as a food source. I also think they put up with a lot of shit--ever hug your cats? The human is the alpha cat in the house (if the cat is fixed, anyway).
People can contribute back just fine, but if you want their contributions to go into your closed-source product, you need the copyright from them.
I don't think so--isn't it enough to get a royalty-free non-exclusive license to use and distribute their code? No need for copyright consignment... though, I suppose it is less of a legal minefield if all the copyrights are owned by one individual.
Thanks! If my mouse ever dies, I'll consider getting a VX Nano.
Thank you for the correction, I understand now. Which button performs a middle click? That is, where is "button 2" located? I can't easily reprogram mice, but if there is a "middle click" button in the mouse's default configuration, the Nano may be a big improvement over the VX Revolution.