+1 on "The Future Does Not Compute". One of my favorite books on this topic; IMHO it didn't get enough notice when it was new -- would be nice to see it get some now.
And Chris Daw, if you're out there: I still have your copy! I bought my own long ago; I've been trying to track you down ever since to return yours.
Odd typo (or transcript-o) -- the word "privatizations" should be "prioritizations" in this sentence:
"Given the huge topic space the authors had to choose from, their privatizations [should be 'priorizations'] are intelligently made and obviously reflective of long experience using Git."
I reviewed the book at my own schedule, and as far as I know O'Reilly Media planned their Cyber Monday without any connection to when this review would be posted. Slashdot didn't promise me a posting schedule anyway, although a few days ago an editor wrote to say he'd probably run it on Monday. I forwarded that fact to a couple of people at O'Reilly (see below), but that was on Thursday, which was the Thanksgiving holiday in the U.S. Suffice it to say it is highly doubtful that O'Reilly Media planned their whole Cyber Monday thing starting a mere three days before the event and over a long holiday weekend!
However, I should have added a couple of disclaimers to the review:
O'Reilly sent me the copy to review, and, more importantly, the editor on the book, Andy Oram, is also my editor. The free review copy is not really worth a disclaimer, though; I'm just trying to be thorough. First of all, the amount of time it takes to read a book and write a review far outweighs the cost of purchasing a copy, and second of all, as an O'Reilly author I'm pretty sure I could have just emailed them asking for a copy anyway, regardless of whether I were reviewing it:-). As for sharing an editor: while Andy's a friend, I know he wouldn't want me to write a review differently just because he were the editor, he knows I wouldn't do so anyway, and he knows that I know that he knows I know he wouldn't want that. (The two people at O'Reilly whom I emailed about the probable Monday posting were Andy and the person who had sent me the review copy.)
So, this was not a slashvertisement -- just a coincidence, to the best of my knowledge.
That's a good point about the rewards, but note that non-profits have been using the "increasing rewards for increasing donations" system forever. It *long* predates Kickstarter and even the Internet. Think of donating to your local public radio station: give $10 and you get a thank-you card; give $50 and you get a tote bag too; give $100 and you get a tote bag plus discounts at cooperating restaurants and shops all over town; give $1000 and you get all of the above plus your name read live on the air plus maybe more. It's just fundraising 101.
While you're right that it's an important characteristic of Kickstarter, it's not a particularly defining one, because most serious fundraising operations are doing it already. Whereas the Threshold Pledge system, while not unique to Kickstarter, is much less widespread in fundraising in general.
I hope the FSF, or (say) the Software Freedom Conservancy, adds it as a feature, because I'd love to be supporting free software projects through organizations like them using Threshold Pledge.
Hackable medical devices are a known problem -- there's a great paper on it from Karen Sandler, at that time at the Software Freedom Law Center (she's given OSCON talks about it too):
This is not the Kickstarter model. It's just accepting directed donations toward a project (and MediaGoblin is certainly a fine cause!).
The Kickstarter model is the "Threshold Pledge" system (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_pledge_system). It means you set a threshold, a minimum fundraising goal, and all the funders pledge amounts toward that goal. Until the goal is reached, the pledges are either not called in, or are held in escrow to be returned in the event the goal is not reached. That way, everyone who gives money knows that, if their money reaches the recipient, then the recipient got enough to actually accomplish what it is trying to do. If the recipient doesn't get enough pledged to reach the goal, then no one loses their money.
It is designed to solve the problem of "I'd love to donate to X, but only if I know that enough other people will donate for X to be sustainable / achievable / whatever." In economics, it's called an "assurance contract".
What the FSF is doing here is not the threshold pledge system. It's just accepting directed donations.
I should have done that research before posting -- thank you for clarifying the situation.
There is still a bug here, in that (according to the linked bug ticket) even if one *requests* a key using a longer ID, from a keyserver that can handle the request, GPG transforms it to the short ID and then returns you all the keys that match. That seems like non-optimal behavior, given that the user asked carefully, and the server could have answered, if only GPG would transmit the true request.
However, that's a slightly different problem from what I originally posted, so I'm glad you replied.
Presumably the Three Letter Agencies generate their own cert chains themselves, and employees manually confirm the fingerprints and tell their browsers to trust those custom certs? In other words, their internal sensitive data shouldn't be at risk of exposure due to the DigiNotar problems, because they'd be crazy to depend on a cert root that they didn't generate anyway. I can see how this whole fiasco might make a difference for some non-employee accessing a CIA (or whichever) web site, but other than that, it shouldn't be significant for the TLAs... right?
I just sent this to a freeculture.org mailing list -- thought I'd spread the idea here too (not having time at the moment to implement it):
---
A good protest method, if anyone has time & a means to contact some students there:
Students there start deliberately using the software to share completely legal things (e.g., freely licensed and public domain music and books), and then when the police come knocking, explain to the police that sharing culture and information is not inherently illegal. Force the administration and the police to start making distinctions, instead of always assuming that something is prohibited until proven permitted.
QuestionCopyright.org might try to organize something like that, if we can find some spare cycles, but... it would be a *perfect* kind of action for Free Culture / SFC! Please, please beat us to it!:-)
The Maltron -- http://www.maltron.com/. It's been a lifesaver -- not only a better shape (curved, to match your hands) but a better layout of letters (to avoid "single-finger hurdles" and other problematic movements). See also http://www.red-bean.com/kfogel/maltron.html.
Some editors have sentence-wise motion commands (for example, M-a and M-e in Emacs). These rely on the "two spaces after a sentence-ending period" rule in order to distinguish sentence ending from abbreviations. Documents that follow the two-spaces convention are more easily editable by people who use those commands.
Personally, I also find it much easier on the eyes -- I can find sentence boundaries with minimal mental effort, which saves those cycles for something else (like, say, understanding what the document is saying:-) ).
Yes, should have been Nevada, not Arizona -- and the fault was mine in the original submission, not Slashdot's. Sorry about that! I'm glad they updated the post.
Considering how many great composers lived and wrote before copyright was even invented or could affect them (*cough* J.S. Bach *cough*), it would make more sense to call this "one composer's view of copyright". Especially given how much every composer -- Brown included -- is indebted to other composers.
Good point, but also remember that legislators didn't explictly allow software patents in the first place either, IIRC. Most of the important decisions along the way were made by what is effectively a regulatory body (the USPTO) or by the courts. Asking the Supreme Court to correct the mistakes of either a regulatory agency or of lower courts is not quite the same as asking it to overrule explicit Congressional direction.
The Software Freedom Law Center has a great response up. From SFLC chairman Eben Moglen: "The confusion and uncertainty behind today's ruling guarantees that the issues involved in Bilski v. Kappos will have to return to the Supreme Court after much money has been wasted and much innovation obstructed."
(I hope they'll be providing a deeper analysis later on; the above came out like ten minutes after the decision, so obviously it's just based on the summary of the decision.)
So I'd love to know how much water, say, New York City uses in a given time period. Anyone know? Like many of us, I don't know what "600 million metric tons of water" means in practice. Comparing it to some more meaningful figure, like a major city's water usage over one year, would help a lot.
The CVS access that started in 1993 was not network-based (since CVS didn't have networking then). You had to log into the server where the masters were. It was still an improvement over raw RCS, however.
I've used both and don't agree. Bazaar's quite good. Not that there's anything wrong with git, either. At this point in their development, I think the old rule is starting to apply: "the smaller the differences, the louder the arguments".
Slashdot Mirror
FWIW, I wrote up a somewhat in-depth analysis of this SFLC / Conservancy dispute here: http://www.rants.org/2017/11/c...
TL;DR: Software Freedom Conservancy is behaving appropriately, and SFLC is not.
+1 on "The Future Does Not Compute". One of my favorite books on this topic; IMHO it didn't get enough notice when it was new -- would be nice to see it get some now.
And Chris Daw, if you're out there: I still have your copy! I bought my own long ago; I've been trying to track you down ever since to return yours.
I use SVN daily too. Sometimes SVN is the right tool for the job, sometimes Git is.
-Karl
They fixed it fast! (I'd delete the original comment now if I could.)
Odd typo (or transcript-o) -- the word "privatizations" should be "prioritizations" in this sentence:
"Given the huge topic space the authors had to choose from, their privatizations [should be 'priorizations'] are intelligently made and obviously reflective of long experience using Git."
I don't know how that happened. It was "prioritizations" in my submission at http://slashdot.org/submission/2368485/book-review-version-control-with-git-2nd-edition .
-Karl Fogel
It is not possible to compete with Git on its own terms without being open source. Being zero-charge for small teams is not going to cut it, IMHO.
Nope, no coordination nor conspiracy.
I reviewed the book at my own schedule, and as far as I know O'Reilly Media planned their Cyber Monday without any connection to when this review would be posted. Slashdot didn't promise me a posting schedule anyway, although a few days ago an editor wrote to say he'd probably run it on Monday. I forwarded that fact to a couple of people at O'Reilly (see below), but that was on Thursday, which was the Thanksgiving holiday in the U.S. Suffice it to say it is highly doubtful that O'Reilly Media planned their whole Cyber Monday thing starting a mere three days before the event and over a long holiday weekend!
However, I should have added a couple of disclaimers to the review:
O'Reilly sent me the copy to review, and, more importantly, the editor on the book, Andy Oram, is also my editor. The free review copy is not really worth a disclaimer, though; I'm just trying to be thorough. First of all, the amount of time it takes to read a book and write a review far outweighs the cost of purchasing a copy, and second of all, as an O'Reilly author I'm pretty sure I could have just emailed them asking for a copy anyway, regardless of whether I were reviewing it :-). As for sharing an editor: while Andy's a friend, I know he wouldn't want me to write a review differently just because he were the editor, he knows I wouldn't do so anyway, and he knows that I know that he knows I know he wouldn't want that. (The two people at O'Reilly whom I emailed about the probable Monday posting were Andy and the person who had sent me the review copy.)
So, this was not a slashvertisement -- just a coincidence, to the best of my knowledge.
Best,
-Karl Fogel
That's a good point about the rewards, but note that non-profits have been using the "increasing rewards for increasing donations" system forever. It *long* predates Kickstarter and even the Internet. Think of donating to your local public radio station: give $10 and you get a thank-you card; give $50 and you get a tote bag too; give $100 and you get a tote bag plus discounts at cooperating restaurants and shops all over town; give $1000 and you get all of the above plus your name read live on the air plus maybe more. It's just fundraising 101.
While you're right that it's an important characteristic of Kickstarter, it's not a particularly defining one, because most serious fundraising operations are doing it already. Whereas the Threshold Pledge system, while not unique to Kickstarter, is much less widespread in fundraising in general.
I hope the FSF, or (say) the Software Freedom Conservancy, adds it as a feature, because I'd love to be supporting free software projects through organizations like them using Threshold Pledge.
Hackable medical devices are a known problem -- there's a great paper on it from Karen Sandler, at that time at the Software Freedom Law Center (she's given OSCON talks about it too):
Killed by Code: Software Transparency in Implantable Medical Devices
And the SFLC's announcement / summary of the paper:
Software Defects in Cardiac Medical Devices are a Life-or-Death Issue
This is not the Kickstarter model. It's just accepting directed donations toward a project (and MediaGoblin is certainly a fine cause!).
The Kickstarter model is the "Threshold Pledge" system (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_pledge_system). It means you set a threshold, a minimum fundraising goal, and all the funders pledge amounts toward that goal. Until the goal is reached, the pledges are either not called in, or are held in escrow to be returned in the event the goal is not reached. That way, everyone who gives money knows that, if their money reaches the recipient, then the recipient got enough to actually accomplish what it is trying to do. If the recipient doesn't get enough pledged to reach the goal, then no one loses their money.
It is designed to solve the problem of "I'd love to donate to X, but only if I know that enough other people will donate for X to be sustainable / achievable / whatever." In economics, it's called an "assurance contract".
What the FSF is doing here is not the threshold pledge system. It's just accepting directed donations.
I should have done that research before posting -- thank you for clarifying the situation.
There is still a bug here, in that (according to the linked bug ticket) even if one *requests* a key using a longer ID, from a keyserver that can handle the request, GPG transforms it to the short ID and then returns you all the keys that match. That seems like non-optimal behavior, given that the user asked carefully, and the server could have answered, if only GPG would transmit the true request.
However, that's a slightly different problem from what I originally posted, so I'm glad you replied.
Presumably the Three Letter Agencies generate their own cert chains themselves, and employees manually confirm the fingerprints and tell their browsers to trust those custom certs? In other words, their internal sensitive data shouldn't be at risk of exposure due to the DigiNotar problems, because they'd be crazy to depend on a cert root that they didn't generate anyway. I can see how this whole fiasco might make a difference for some non-employee accessing a CIA (or whichever) web site, but other than that, it shouldn't be significant for the TLAs... right?
-Karl Fogel
I just sent this to a freeculture.org mailing list -- thought I'd spread the
idea here too (not having time at the moment to implement it):
---
A good protest method, if anyone has time & a means to contact some
students there:
Students there start deliberately using the software to share completely
legal things (e.g., freely licensed and public domain music and books),
and then when the police come knocking, explain to the police that
sharing culture and information is not inherently illegal. Force the
administration and the police to start making distinctions, instead of
always assuming that something is prohibited until proven permitted.
QuestionCopyright.org might try to organize something like that, if we :-)
can find some spare cycles, but... it would be a *perfect* kind of
action for Free Culture / SFC! Please, please beat us to it!
-Karl
The Maltron -- http://www.maltron.com/. It's been a lifesaver -- not only a better shape (curved, to match your hands) but a better layout of letters (to avoid "single-finger hurdles" and other problematic movements). See also http://www.red-bean.com/kfogel/maltron.html.
Not a conspiracy theory, just history taken from primary and secondary sources. See http://questioncopyright.org/promise#history .
Counterfeiting money is unrelated to copyright: see http://questioncopyright.org/faq#counterfeiting .
Some editors have sentence-wise motion commands (for example, M-a and M-e in Emacs). These rely on the "two spaces after a sentence-ending period" rule in order to distinguish sentence ending from abbreviations. Documents that follow the two-spaces convention are more easily editable by people who use those commands.
Personally, I also find it much easier on the eyes -- I can find sentence boundaries with minimal mental effort, which saves those cycles for something else (like, say, understanding what the document is saying :-) ).
Yes, should have been Nevada, not Arizona -- and the fault was mine in the original submission, not Slashdot's. Sorry about that! I'm glad they updated the post.
-Karl Fogel
Considering how many great composers lived and wrote before copyright was even invented or could affect them (*cough* J.S. Bach *cough*), it would make more sense to call this "one composer's view of copyright". Especially given how much every composer -- Brown included -- is indebted to other composers.
http://questioncopyright.org/minute_memes/all_creative_work_is_derivative
(See the embedded video there.)
Good point, but also remember that legislators didn't explictly allow software patents in the first place either, IIRC. Most of the important decisions along the way were made by what is effectively a regulatory body (the USPTO) or by the courts. Asking the Supreme Court to correct the mistakes of either a regulatory agency or of lower courts is not quite the same as asking it to overrule explicit Congressional direction.
The Software Freedom Law Center has a great response up. From SFLC chairman Eben Moglen: "The confusion and uncertainty behind today's ruling guarantees that the issues involved in Bilski v. Kappos will have to return to the Supreme Court after much money has been wasted and much innovation obstructed."
(I hope they'll be providing a deeper analysis later on; the above came out like ten minutes after the decision, so obviously it's just based on the summary of the decision.)
-Karl Fogel
So I'd love to know how much water, say, New York City uses in a given time period. Anyone know? Like many of us, I don't know what "600 million metric tons of water" means in practice. Comparing it to some more meaningful figure, like a major city's water usage over one year, would help a lot.
The CVS access that started in 1993 was not network-based (since CVS didn't have networking then). You had to log into the server where the masters were. It was still an improvement over raw RCS, however.
I can't remember if it was in the paper offhand, but in any case Emacs development is not really very cathedral-y.
It's a matter of long debate among grammarians, and I take other grammarians's point of view :-).
I've used both and don't agree. Bazaar's quite good. Not that there's anything wrong with git, either. At this point in their development, I think the old rule is starting to apply: "the smaller the differences, the louder the arguments".