Slashback: IceWeasel, Online Gambling, GPU Folding, Evolution 214
The facts about Debian Iceweasel. john-da-luthrun writes, "Debian Firefox/XULrunner maintainer Mike Hommey reports on the Firefox/Iceweasel wrangle, correcting various assertions that have been made in the assorted trollfests/flamewars currently raging over the proposed Firefox rename. Hommey confirms that Firefox in Etch will be renamed 'Iceweasel,' but this will only be a renamed version of the vanilla Firefox, not the GNU Iceweasel fork — though the Debian and GNU Iceweasel teams may work together in future."
A closer look at Folding@home's GPU client. TheRaindog writes, "Slashdot recently covered some impressive client statistics for Stanford's Folding@home project, but they don't tell the whole story. The Tech Report has taken a closer look at the GPU client, running it on a Radeon X1900 XTX against the CPU client on a dual-core Opteron. The results are enlightening, especially considering how Stanford has chosen to award points GPU client work units. Power consumption is more interesting, with the GPU client apparently far more power-efficient than folding with a CPU."
David Brin need not lament — KidBasic. sproketboy writes, "I was thinking about the recent slashdot story David Brin Laments Absence of Programming For Kids, and after looking around I found KidBasic. KidBasic is quite good and teaches all the basics of programming. My 4 year old nephew and I have been able to get a few simple games programmed with it."
Online gambling ban may violate international law. An anonymous reader writes, "As Slashdot noted earlier, Congress has passed an effective ban on online gambling in the U.S. This may not be the end of the story, however. The law may be struck down by the World Trade Organization on the grounds that it violates the United States' international obligation not to discriminate in favor of domestic casinos. If the WTO strikes down this U.S. gambling ban, it would not be the first time. In November of 2004, the WTO struck down a U.S. anti-gambling law as illegally discriminating against the nation of Antigua."
Human species may do whatnow?. jamie writes, "'I might have believed this nonsense could come from some late 19th century eugenicist, but now? Is there any evidence...?' That's biologist PZ Myers's comment on the BBC story that claims the human species may split in two. It was posted on Slashdot as humor, but Myers's comments are a much-needed sober appraisal of this kind of pseudoscientific claim."
Another RIAA lawsuit dropped. skelator2821 writes, "Another RIAA lawsuit has been dropped against a defendant who had been accused of illegally sharing songs online, according to Ars Technica. Looks like the Mob tactics are not paying off for our good friends at the RIAA anymore."
F@H (Score:5, Insightful)
International law? (Score:5, Insightful)
Nonsense (Score:3, Insightful)
The WTO does not have the power to strike down any US law.
Re:International law? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:International law? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Thy shall not steal (Score:5, Insightful)
Stolen name; nice one. (Score:2, Insightful)
And you wonder why Mozilla doesn't want them abusing their trademark...
Ok so this is slashback so it's not offtopic (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:International law? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:International law? (Score:5, Insightful)
When it's convienent.
Re:International law? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Nonsense (Score:5, Insightful)
The US federal government cannot regulate gambling transactions that don't cross state lines, due to the Commerce Clause in the US Constitution.
Oh c'mon. The Commerce Clause hasn't been taken seriously (by the Supreme Court) in decades. See Gonzales v. Raich for one of the most recent examples. If the federal government can regulate the cultivation of marijuana in a home garden, they can regulate gambling within one state.
The US federal government shouldn't be allowed to regulate gambling transactions that don't cross state lines, but they sure as hell can.
Wickard v. Filburn (Score:3, Insightful)
O RLY? The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that Congress can regulate wheat and marijuana production that does not cross state lines because they compete with products that do cross state lines. Wickard v. Filburn [wikipedia.org]; Gonzales v. Raich [wikipedia.org].
Re:Nonsense (Score:3, Insightful)
They have set up a back door to get around this. Congress just has to state they want to stop or regulate interstate gambling, and also state that intrastate gambling is a part of that market. At that point they get to invoke "necessary and proper" [wikipedia.org] to take whatever powers that they want. This happens all the time. There are effectively no constitutional limits to Congress' power.
Re:Crapweasel (Score:5, Insightful)
If you don't want to allow distributions to make changes to software they redistribute to enhance system integration, user experience, and conform to distribution policies, perhaps you should instead spend your time petitioning the Mozilla project to consider going closed source.
And what is your problem with the DFSGs? They were influential in shaping what the very term Open Source means today.
Re:Thy shall not steal (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Stolen name; nice one. (Score:1, Insightful)
And they wonder why people are moving away from Debian. God damn.
Re:Thy shall not steal (Score:3, Insightful)
Or I can go a different route and argue that you're not stealing something tangible such as a pattern of bits that is a song, but you are stealing a potential customer from the artist to whom they'd be able to sell their song. Let's go to the extreme.
If we decided to pass a law that it is not a crime to copy songs if you haven't bought them, and I can copy music without any worry of violating the law, I can't in good conscience convince myself that selling music would be profitable. Even with scarcity of artists following this crash, you can't really argue that the good old law of supply-demand will keep the music going in this case.
However, I do agree that there needs to be a balance of fair use such as being able to play music at a block party or make as many copies as I want on different mediums so that I can play my favorite music on my ipod, in my car, etc.
Re:Crapweasel (Score:3, Insightful)
Not really. Trademark enforcement is separate issue than whether something is open-sourced. See, many open-sourced products have trademarks that they don't want other people using. You think the Debian people would like it if someone else put out something called "Debian Linux" that was not made from the real/authorized Debian packages or codebase? Really, think about it. If I started distributing my own version of "Debian Linux", which was really a rebranded copy of Redhat with spyware installed, don't you think the Debian people would want me to stop using that name?
But if it's open-sourced, no matter what trademark issues there are, you can always take the code and rebrand it. You rebrand it with your own trademarks, which you can then protect or not. But keep in mind that if you don't protect your trademarks, you lose rights to them.
It sounds like they had already forked earlier (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Thy shall not steal (Score:5, Insightful)
The issue here is that the RIAA/MPAA would like to have you believe that copyright infringement and stealing are the same thing when they are not. What they're trying to do is pound into the public that copyright infringement is stealing because, quite frankly, which term sounds worse? Stealing or copyright infringement?
Re:Thy shall not steal (Score:5, Insightful)
Ok, so the abolition of copyright has lead to destruction of the music industry. Only the very few art-for-art's sake type musicians still release music.
Is there still a demand for music? Yes? Then there is the potential for a market. Obviously the market won't operate on the basis of selling a single song many times cheaply due to copyright. What would the artist do? Demand money up-front. Instead of working "on-spec", the artist works on commission. Either a rich guy commissions a song/album, or a coalition of moderately wealthy people (fans) pool their money to commission an album. End result: artist gets paid, music gets made.
Such a scheme wouldn't work know - why would any consumer go to that length of trouble when they can go to the CD store and just buy an album for $25? But if the current distribution method died, the commission-based system would become attractive as the only way to get new music. That sort of shift would also have a noticable effect on the end product. In the current model, artists must write to please studios, so they can get in to the global distribution and publicity network the studios offer. In the commission-based model, artists must write to please their fans, or they're not going to get another commission after the first. It would probably also put commercial radio out of business.
As long as there is significant demand for music - and there has been throughout all recorded history - then music will be made. What changes is how, why and how much.
Re:Stolen name; nice one. (Score:1, Insightful)
The Devs aren't wondering. Most have their heads too far up their asses to notice. Others just don't care.
There's a little more to it (Score:5, Insightful)
This is true, and no offense, but frankly I'm impressed that you are aware of this. It's a welcome relief from the overwhelmingly ignorant "globalization this" and "free trade that" rants that I often read on Slashdot. What you might not know, however, is that allowing the nation who petitioned the Dispute Settlement Body to choose the way in which they are to be compensated has had an unexpected political side-effect, at least in the U.S. It turns out that one of the best ways of putting pressure on lawmakers and even the President of the United States is to impose tariffs on goods that are made in certain politically volatile states.
For instance, let's say it's 3 years ago and you're, I dunno...Germany. You just won your DSB case because you successfully demonstrated that you were harmed because of let's say, an economic initiative by George Bush that involved giving domestic steel producers in the northeast an unfair subsidy. As Germany, you turn around and impose a heavy tariff against all oranges coming from the United States, knowing full well many of those oranges come from Florida. Then, the pressure is ramped up on Bush, because he must then explain to Florida orange growers (who have a powerful lobby, by the way) why it is that they're having trouble selling their oranges in certain European markets.
That's the theory, anyway.
Re:Stolen name; nice one. (Score:4, Insightful)
"So they forked a project, then decided they didn't want to use the fork" is absolute rubbish. Try reading the article.
Re:The rules of evolution... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Stolen name; nice one. (Score:4, Insightful)
I basically agree with everything you say until the last line. This is not 100% Mozilla's problem and this is demonstrated by the willingness of other distributions to jump through Mozilla's hoops to have Firefox in their distro.
Note that I am not addressing who has the right approach, just that the problem is in part created by the DFSG (the very core rules for debian and the thing that ensures it remains more Free then virtually any other distribution). I don't actually think Mozilla is being unreasonable, they don't want the Firefox name tarnished so they want to control what is called Firefox, but they are taking an approach which means that their flagship product is not Free Software (as by definition it must include non-free parts and derivatives cannot be freely distributed without a patch sign-off).
Of course as IceWeasel demonstrates, while Firefox may not be Free, it's source code is, so if you want to distribute your own Free version of Firefox you are free to do so as long as you change the name and remove the logo. What this really highlights, to those who can think beyond "you suck", is that the co-operation implicit in good Free software license's allows diverse needs to still work together past fundamental differences in their approach.
Re:Thy shall not steal (Score:3, Insightful)
But according to yor logic I didn't do anything wrong. I didn't take any physical object from you. I didn't take away your ability to provide services to others. So you have no reason to be upset, right?
Re:Crapweasel (Score:3, Insightful)
The Mozilla rules on using their tradmarks make a lot of sense (and are probably required legally in order to maintain the trademark). Without it, third parties could make thier own version of Firefox loaded with spyware and crap and distribute it under the Firefox name.
Now Mozilla can grant Debian (and Redhat, Suse, Ubuntu, etc) a license to use their logos and stuff. But they can't give a license to everyone who wants to make their own distro based off Debian. Now, Debian doesn't allow debian derivatives to use the official debian logo, so they could maybe add to that rule that you couldn't use the Firefox logo either. But either that didn't occur to them or they just didn't want to do it.
Re:Moral-driven tyranny is still undemocratic. (Score:3, Insightful)
Sure, go ahead, piss off more people - but don't come crying to other countries.
Re:Thy shall not steal (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course. The example would have pointless if he wasn't.
copyright infringment is still wrong
Agreed.
If you had said copyright infringment is rape or copyright infringment is murder, and someone replied saying "no it's not", would you jump to the conclusion that they were somehow saying copyright infringment was ok? Of course not. Or at least I assume not. Infringment is not theft rape or murder, and should not be thought of in terms of theft rape or murder.
Copyright is a good and usefull thing.
Copyright is not the same thing as property rights and it is not supposed to be the same as property rights. Copyright law is not the same as property law and it is not supposed to be the same as property law. You should not assume someone is "anti-copyright" when they object/reject the terms [theft steal property Intellectual_Property].
If someone supports copyright, then why the fuss over that sort of language? Because Copyright industry public relations push those terms on the public to create the impression and assumption that copyright = property and that copyright law = property law and that copyright law should equal property law, when in fact they are different and are supposed to be different for good reason. And more importantly because copyright industry lobbyists push those same terms in all dealings with legislators for the exact same reason... to create the incorrect assumption in their minds that copyright law is already the same as property law, and to create the expectation that the law should be the same as property law... so that when legislators come across the fact that copyright is treated differently than property and that copyright law is different than property law they come to the mistaken conclusion that there is something wrong with the law and that they obviously should "fix" that "problem".
For example DMCA is bad law. It is based on the invalid concepts that copyright is property and that encryption schemes are the owner's lock on his property, and that someone opening that lock is breaking the law and that someone selling a key to open that lock is breaking the law. To the extent we want to go with that property analogy, it is like someone selling me a home which of course includes a lock in the front door. Once I buy the house, I am not commiting a crime if I open that lock. I am not commiting a crime if I PICK that lock. And it is not a crime for someone to sell me a key or a drill to open that lock on my front door. A law prohibiting me from opening the lock on a house I bought is a bad law. A law criminalizing products that help me get into my own house is a bad law.
The copyright conflict is a conflict over the language and the basic public perception and understanding of copyright.
And look at how effective that public relations shaping of the issue has been: I'd be reasonably satisfied with the copyright law we had not ten years ago, defending good old traditional copyright, and you leapt to the conclusion that I think copyright infringment is OK and presumably that I want to abolish all copyright law.
The copyright lobby's agenda is to reshape the public perception of copyright and to push the notion that not passing new law somehow equals eliminating copyright and pushing the notion that anyone who dares object to new law wants to eliminate copyright.
There is almost no one actually arguing to eliminate copyright. Look back through this thread and you'll see that almost every post arguing against the "stealing" language in fact explicitly supports copyright. You (and others in this thread) are clearly arguing from the presumption that you are arguing with copyright opponents, when in fact you are arguing against copyright supporters.
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