Slashdot Mirror
Australian Court says Kazaa Users Breach Copyright
mferrare writes "This from Reuters UK: An Australian court ruled on Monday that users of Kazaa, a popular internet music file-swapping system, breached music copyright and ordered its owners to modify the software. The music industry told the court that Sharman Network licensed users to access a network it knew was being used for piracy and hence it was authorising people to infringe copyright"
The Sky is blue.
Microsoft are convicted monopolists.
Geek groupies exist.
(Ok, so I made the last one up, we can't expect a totally perfect day now can we)
liqbase
People in the computing field like to spur the use of spurious jargons. The less educated they are, the more they like extraneous jargons, such as in the Unix & Perl community. Unlike mathematicians, where in mathematics there are no fewer jargons but each and every one are absolutely necessary. For example, polytope, manifold, injection/bijection/surjection, group/ring/field.., homological, projective, pencil, bundle, lattice, affine, topology, isomorphism, isometry, homeomorphism, aleph-0, fractal, supremum/infimum, simplex, matrix, quaternions, derivative/integral, ... and so on. Each and every one of these captures a concept, for which practical and theoretical considerations made the terms a necessity. Often there are synonyms for them because of historical developments, but never "jargons for jargon's sake" because mathematicians hate bloats and irrelevance.
The jargon-soaked stupidity in computing field can be grouped into classes. First of all, there are jargons for marketing purposes. Thus you have Mac OS "X", Windows "XP", Sun OS to Solaris and the versioning confusion of 4.x to 7 to 8 and also the so called "Platform" instead of OS. One flagrant example is Sun Microsystem's Java stuff. Oak, Java, JDK, JSDK, J2EE, J2SE enterprise edition or no, from java 1.x to 1.2 == Java 2 now 1.3, JavaOne, JFC, Jini, JavaBeans, entity Beans, Awk, Swing... fucking stupid Java and fuck Sun Microsystems. This is just one example of Jargon hodgepodge of one single commercial entity. Marketing jargons cannot be avoided in modern society. They abound outside computing field too. The Jargons of marketing came from business practice, and they can be excusable because they are kinda a necessity or can be considered as a naturally evolved strategy for attracting attention in a laissez-faire economy system.
The other class of jargon stupidity is from computing practitioners, of which the Unix/Perl community is exemplary. For example, the name Unix & Perl themselves are good examples of buzzing jargons. Unix is supposed to be opposed of Multics and hints on the offensive and tasteless term eunuchs. PERL is cooked up to be "Practical Extraction & Reporting Language" and for the precise marketing drama of being also "Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister". These types of jargons exude juvenile humor. Cheesiness and low-taste is their hall-mark. If you are familiar with unixism and perl programing, you'll find tons and tons of such jargons embraced and verbalized by unix & perl lovers. e.g. grep, glob, shell, pipe, man, regex, more, less, tarball, shebang, Schwartzian Transform, croak, bless, interpolation, TIMTOWTDI, DWIM, RFC, RTFM, I-ANAL, YMMV and so on.
There is another class of jargon moronicity, which i find them most damaging to society, are jargons or spurious and vague terms used and brandished about by programers that we see and hear daily among design meetings, online tech group postings, or even in lots of computing textbooks or tutorials. I think the reason for these, is that these massive body of average programers usually don't have much knowledge of significant mathematics, yet they are capable of technical thinking that is not too abstract, thus you ends up with these people defining or hatching terms a-dime-a-dozen that's vague, context dependent, vacuous, and their commonality is often a result of sopho-morons trying to sound big.
Here are some examples of the terms in question:
anonymous functions or lambda or lamba function
closure
exceptions (as in Java)
list, array, vector, aggregate
hash (or hash table) ? fantastically stupid
rehash (as in csh or tcsh)
regular expression (as in regex, grep, egrep, fgrep)
name space (as in Scheme vs Common Lisp debates)
depth first/breadth first (as in tree traversing.)
operator
operator overloading
polym
Come on now. Kazaa "authorized" them to do it (according to the article). This is a little like prosecuting people who claim the devil made them do it. We think they're insane; not criminals.
... but even so, can one criminally download anything? Hmmmmmmm ... ? Afterall, it is all there just for the taking on Kazaa ... offered for free. Hell, Kazaa is FFFRRREEEEEEEE!!!!
Well, maybe criminally insane
Just like Robin Hood and his merry band. Were the starving of England criminals because they ate the King's food and drank the King's wine, all approppriated by Robin Hood's valiant hoarde?
We the people are starving for entertainment. The world is a shambles. We need a little fantasy. Kazaa gives people something to do. Don't prosecute them.
Why are you proud of it?
What do you consider as your contribution to make you proud of yourself?
My brother with designer jeans and a iriver mp3 player, modernly dressed went to Australia, Adeliade to visit a friend of him.
The guy he visits is Italian-Australian and waits for him outside.
They kept him 2 hours without any explanation. He says he felt like a jew trying to enter Germany in 1939.
FYI, he is a turkish guy. Remember Al Queda blew us 2 times, not we blew anything.
Australian courts should start discussing what can be done to avoid such racist things, not about a fucking spyware and its so called freedom of information.
It is clear to me that Wilcox probably sucked a lot of cock to get where he is.
Judges have the brains of maggots, not even. Oooo Judges have the ability to send people to jail for being innocent; sue them sue them!
I say give everyone a gun, and remove laws. Will fix an awful lot!