runningdogx

There is no place for humor or overly subjective terms like "evil" in a software license or other legal document, and the problem with Douglas Crockford's license is that he fails to understand that.

That is, unless his intent is to keep every entity with sane lawyers from using his software. I don't think that's his intent. He said he wants to keep people without a sense of humor from using his software, but sane lawyers with a good sense of humor will object to the license just as strongly as sane lawyers with no sense of humor.

Venue matters. A lawsuit based on the evil clause of the license, in San Francisco or Los Angeles, would probably go nowhere. However, consider a jury in Birmingham, AL, and whether they would find that using some of Crockford's software in an abortion clinic was a violation of the license.

This makes no sense. Is Stallman so focused on software that he isn't considering the implications of continuing to apply broken software patents to hardware?

FPGAs? Is an algorithm implemented on a FPGA a software or hardware implementation?

Sufficiently popular software algorithms like mpeg4 (including avc) are often implemented in ASICs for speed. Stallman's suggestion does nothing to help in those cases.

What if Intel introduces new instructions that assist with some patented algorithm but do not carry out the complete algorithm? Software completes the algorithm using the chip instruction. Is that covered under Stallman's software patent immunity proposal?

The dichotomy between software implementations and hardware implementations is unhelpful. If you oppose software patents on principle, whether because you think they're harmful or because you think they're math and are not supposed to be patentable in the first place, why let the camel's nose into the tent by campaigning to allow hardware (ASIC?) implementation patents, but not allowing pure-software implementations?

Perhaps this is better framed as an economic argument. If cost were no object, more algorithms would be implemented in ASICs. There's a limit to the total chip area you'd want to fit into a computer, but a lot of algorithms could be implemented in a few custom ASICs. It's likely that some of those algorithms would be covered by patents. Stallman's proposal seems like discrimination against algorithms that are important enough to make faster execution worth a lot of money.

If software patents are not valid, and I don't believe they are valid, then allowing them to apply to hardware implementations is just applying a band-aid and punting on the real issue. Stallman's proposal may be pragmatic, in that it reduces risk to most start-ups and other entities worried about violating patents in software, but it sustains the confusion about what software patents are and whether they can be valid. I think there's more at stake than the money at issue in patent lawsuits every year. I think broad appreciation of the value of open culture, and recognition that algorithms should be part of that, is worth more than any extra value companies might be able to extract from hardware implementations of patented algorithms due to artificial monopolies created by patent protection.

With a modern pcre library version and nginx, instead of

    location ~ ^/([a-zA-Z0-9_]+)/ {
      set $username $1;

you can use named captures

    location ~ ^/(?<username>[a-zA-Z0-9_]+)/ {

Yeah, I think me_myselft meant rights in terms of social justice, and not "fundamental rights" in the sense of abstract political philosophy. So many arguments get caught up over semantics and not what people are trying to say.

Government doesn't create the principles of nuclear physics that allow fission and fusion to occur.

We can't get rid of the nuclear threat as long as the knowledge of nuclear physics exists and someone somewhere wants to conquer the world (or merely a continent in some cases).

Software patents are a legal construct. Get rid of that, and writing up software patents accomplishes nothing.

Over-achievement also fits into the clueless tier. The clueless can't get rich or into upper management except by accident, but they can have successful careers as long as the psychopath upper tier sees them as useful.

In the GP corporate hierarchy, the losers tend to do the minimum required to keep their jobs. If they start making stuff work beyond their immediate job responsibilities, that's not classic loser behavior.

At one point in that series of essays, the author talks about behaviors of the psychopath. In a startup environment, the psychopath puts in a lot of effort and gets things done because that's the fastest path to getting the company off the ground.

I think Oracle has gone round the bend, but does the anti-Oracle view of APIs mean basically that all GPL software is LGPL?

When you call a function, why should that function's copyright status have any bearing on the copyright status of your function? Because they're in the same file? What is a file?

Hint to law enforcement:

It doesn't matter whether copyright infringement is ethically good or bad. It doesn't matter whether these sites are legally liable for copyright infringement that goes on using them.

You look like complete morons trying to take down site after site. You are pissing people off and what do you have to show for it except a few hollow victories?

If copyright infringement through file sharing has decreased, it's due to itunes, amazon, google, and all the smaller companies offering digital versions of content. Guess who is missing from that list? MPAA and RIAA members.

Trying to fight copyright infringement through punitive fines or throwing people in prison is sick. It's like the drug war, only worse. At least you can point to a few crazy meth heads as a danger to the public. "Pirates" hurt... the meatspace content distributors that are rapidly becoming obsolete?

This is not about some new vulnerability. It is a survey of collected public keys. The main security-relevant conclusion is that some key generators are not using enough entropy.

Dr. Lenstra is a co-author of the paper (so it shouldn't be dismissed on the weakness of the reporting). The NY Times and Markoff should both be ashamed for publishing such a misleading article, particularly the title.