"I mean, in all seriousness - I go to the toystore and buy a boxed set of Monopoly for $10. I turn around and resell it to you for $15, that's none of their business - I paid them the price they asked, legally."
Yes, the history of this is interesting. The manufacturers of just about every kind of product in existence, at one time or another, has tried to put restrictions on the after-sale use of their products. Even hammers and shovels. They tried putting "agreements" on the labels, inside and outside the packages, etc. The courts ruled, in EVERY case except (recently) software, that if you walk into a retail store (or mail order), and plunk down your money, it is YOURS and you can do whatever you want with it, regardless of any "agreement" on or in the package.
The only reason software has been an exception has been corporate lobbying. And I'd sure like to see that go away. I don't understand why software should be any different from any other copyrighted work. And in fact it wasn't, until pretty recently.
A little more than 100 years ago, software became common, in the form of those paper rolls of music for player pianos. They are software, in every real sense. Publishers didn't like that people were copying them with paper punches. (Sound familiar? That's what Bill Gates took exception to when his company sold a BASIC interpreter for the Altair on paper tape.) And they tried to put restrictions on their use after first sale, arguing that they were different from other published works, because they controlled a machine. The courts said no. The form of the work didn't matter. Paper rolls with holes in them were nothing more than a different form of the published sheet music.
So what's different with today's software? Nothing. Software is also a written work. Some coder(s) had to sit down and write it. And yes, it might control a machine (a computer), but so did player piano rolls, and punch cards for looms 200 years ago. Same same.
Yes, well, my personal site (if you even want to call it that) has nothing BUT this on the home page. I never bothered to measure the traffic, but it's probably not much higher.:o)
"Seriously? Reselling a physical product you bought legally needed the highest court in the land to adjudicate?"
Yes, it did. BUT, you're wrong about one thing. It isn't the "physical product" that is at issue here. it's the copyrighted work.
This has BIG implications for copyrighted works. In essence, it upholds the 100-year-old rule that says publishers' "terms" bedamned: if you bought it, it's YOURS. You can sell it, burn it, or whatever you want.
Although lower courts have upheld First Sale Doctrine re: copyrighted software for resale on Ebay and Amazon, it was reaffirmed here by the Supreme Court.
So unless you have an existing contract with the publisher when you buy software, you can pretty much ignore their "license agreement". You bought it, it's yours. Once you have paid for it, you can do whatever you want with it, regardless of any "license agreement" inside the box or in a popup window. But you still can't legally distribute copies without the copyright holder's permission.
Close, but not quite. Most members already have the code on their sites already. Alerts show up automatically, members don't have to "add them" to their sites.
They are, however, looking for new members, and want THEM to add the alert code.
"This translates to failure probabilities of 0.1% , 0.2% and 1.0%. Multiplying these failure probabilities yields a much smaller probability of failure, which is nonsense."
You are the second person to make this mistake.
I did NOT say to take the failure probabilities and multiply them together. I stated that the probability of failure is multiplied. Those are NOT the same things!
No, my statement was not wrong. 1.3 is many MULTIPLES of 0.1. My point here was that the result is found by MULTIPLYING the numbers. Whether you are multiplying the figures as they are, or their inverses, is irrelevant: the result is still a product, as opposed to a sum.
Learn how to read. Your income could be multiplied by 0.01. You might not like that, but it would still be multiplication.
"Yes it was his fault. He was trafficking in stolen property. And of course he stole it in the first place. The newspaper might also have committed a crime, but that doesn't mean he didn't."
Are you just HUNTING for stuff to argue with me about? Could it be that says something about you?
I did not try to claim he was blameless. I simply stated (truthfully) that he wasn't the one who published. Blame him for what you like, but blame the publisher for publishing.
"Think about what you just said for a second... now go make the real posters sandwiches."
You are claiming that Gawker has no responsibility for publishing? According to the official accounts, "Goatse Security" had tried to contact several "more responsible" news outlets to get the story out. They only resorted to including some emails with the story when that failed, in order to verify that it was real.
Never mind their motivations. Yes they acted irresponsibly. But that is as may be. They weren't responsible for first "publishing" emails.
"Actually, the probability of success is multiplied, which lowers it. Your "statistically accurate" statement implies that adding dependencies to a system lowers its failure probability..."
No, the statement is still correct, even if the math requires you to use division. The probability of failure is still actually multiplied. In the example shown, 1.3% probability of failure is 13 times the 0.1% probability it had before adding the dependencies.
"he difference with the cloud is that you've added two additional horribly complex systems (the network and the external servers) that can also be screwed up by people or fail for various reasons. You've also added the latency required to access the remote service."
This is my main point. If your service depends on other services, the probability of failure is multiplied. That is a statistically accurate statement.
For example, if your system depends on other systems to work properly, i.e., system A is dependent on both systems B and C, and you have probilities of failure thus:
Your system reliability: 99.9%
System B reliability: 99.8%
System C reliability: 99.0%
Then your actual expected uptime is 98.7%, which may be unacceptable for your purposes. If you add yet another system D (as a customer of mine did, against my better judgment) at 99.0%, you are clear down below 98%.
"... you can't really assess the damage done by publishing 1k+ email addresses."
He DIDN'T publish the addresses. He sent them to the newspaper as proof that AT&T was screwing up. If the newspaper published them, you can blame the newspaper. It sure as hell wasn't his fault.
"Yea it is always someone else's servers. or your ISP."
It's simply the truth. No server of mine has gone down. It is true that my ISP did, for a few short periods. But that is a web service... that doesn't detract from my point, it reinforces it. The fact is that the Web is not yet mature enough for 99.99% reliability.
I know somebody who had a website (which I worked on for them a bit) on Amazon.
Amazon sent them an email, saying that the server their S3 data was on was experiencing difficulties, and they had 2 days to copy their data off of the Amazon server before it was taken down for repair or replacement. (This despite Amazon's claim of "multiple redundancy" of users' data.)
The problem is that the email appeared in the client's inbox AFTER the 2 days had passed.
Even though Amazon admitted that it was their hardware problem, and that the email problem was at their end, they refused to lift a single finger to try to help fix anything... unless the client bought a minimum $400 pay-as-you-go service plan. Which was too late anyway, of course.
"I can only think of one time when they had multiple availability zones down at the same time."
Whether multiple zones are down at the same time hardly matters, if you are in the zone that is affected. But in fact multiple zones were down for a while in 2011 (ALL of them) and also in 2012.
"I often use it that way, too, it just isn't the magic fix-it-all system if you don't use it like it is intended."
"As intended?" You mean maintaining multiple zones manually (a pain in the ass), or paying more money for Cloudfront?
Yes, it has been "pretty good". But my own servers have been better.
"I can prove it. There are no smart-phones made in the United States. There are no personal computers where all of the components are made in the United States (A few are assembled here, but that is a game, all the real manufacturing is in Asia)."
No, you can't. Because your "proof" is based on several invalid assumptions.
First, who said I use a "smartphone"? I certainly did not state that anywhere on Slashdot. So do I, or don't I? You can guess all you like, but you have no "proof" either way. Or even evidence.
Second, when was the computer manufactured, and WHERE did the parts come from? You don't know. The fact is that I used to be a computer technician (I am still A+ certified) and I have usually built my computers myself from parts I hand-pick.
There are many electronics manufacturers around the world, and nowhere near all of them are in China (it may surprise you that many of them are even in the U.S.). This thread was about me buying a computer that was supposedly made in China, remember? I did nothing of the sort. While there may be a few Chinese components on the boards of the computer I last bought new, the majority of them are not, and the majority of it was neither designed or manufactured in China.
"Manufacturers have systematically used copyright in this manner over the past 20 years to limit our access to information. Technology has moved too fast for copyright laws to keep pace, so corporations have been exploiting the lag to create information monopolies at our expense and for their profit."
It's been more like 15 years for most of the abuse, and the majority of the problem is due to bad recent laws like the DMCA and CFAA. Granted, CFAA is from 1984 law but it has been amended several times, even recently.
In the case of CFAA, I agree that the law is outdated and needs serious change. But (as clearly shown by DMCA), it is NOT a matter of technology moving too fast for law to keep up. On the contrary: corporate lobbying has deliberately twisted the law into a corporate profiteering tool, rather than something intended to protect consumers and enforce freedom and privacy.
What we need to do, among other things, it get the lobbying out of politics. There are ways. We just have to suck it up and get it done.
"That is one of the many problems with relying on clouds."
Sadly, the main problem is the whole concept. While it might be a good idea, at some point in the future, that future is not yet here.
What major online service, e.g. iCloud (based on MS Azure), Amazon AWS, etc. has not gone down for a significant period in each of the last few years? I am having trouble thinking of one.
And before anybody says "Yes, but it's still more reliable than your own servers" I call bullshit. My own servers have not been down at all in the last few years.
"It doesn't matter what anyone has accused you of doing. It is YOU who made the claim that you are NOT using Chinese gear."
Wrong.
If you are going to participate in a debate, maybe you should go find a book on the rules of debate and look it the fuck up.
"The accusation is merely speculative, you are the one who is defending with a supposed FACT (which you HAVE NOT backed up)."
Wrong again. This was the accusation:
"No offense but you're part of the problem...posting from your Chinese made computer, and talking on your Chinese made smartphone."
It was a statement purporting to be fact ("You are..."). There was not the slightest thing "speculative" about it. So let's see something concrete to back it up. Otherwise this exchange is over.
No offense but I rather fuck you.
You can't go and claim to be holier than thou and not provide proof.
List your hardware otherwise lying hypocrite like yourself is the problem.
Bullshit. Somebody (you?) made an accusation based on zero evidence. It is up to the person making the accusation to prove their accusations. I have no obligation to prove a damn thing, and I don't owe that person anything at all. Not even this reply.
"Most Favored Nation status has not existed for about 15 years."
Well, I have read it in the news a lot more recently than 15 years ago, so maybe the news sources were behind the times.
But regardless of labels, we have done China many economic favors (in terms of outsourcing, even if you ignore anything else), and in turn they have done pretty much as I stated: stabbed us in the back.
As far as I am concerned, these days, any corporation offshoring their manufacturing just to save a buck is declaring themselves an enemy of the American economy, and therefore Americans in general.
"Theres no such thing as a "police action" in the territory of a foreign state, against the wishes of that foreign state."
NO SHIT, Sherlock!!!
REPEAT: "I am not defending the actions of the U.S."
The U.S. government called it a "police action". That doesn't mean it was. By "technically", I meant that the United States cannot go to war (according to our Constitution) unless Congress declares war, which they refused to do. So "technically", the U.S. was not at war.
As a practical matter, however, of course it was. And I am as big a critic of my government's actions in that regard as anyone. If Congress doesn't have the guts to declare war, they should not be sending people into war.
"That's not a cultural reason FOR the split. That's a result of the split."
It might not have been a cultural CAUSE of the split, but it sure as hell is a cultural reason now. They have grown very far apart culturally.
"Well, that's what the propaganda in your country says anyway."
My comment had nothing to do with any propaganda. It was based on some actual films made of recent visits to N. Korea by some private parties. Some of them famous, some not so famous. Not all of them Americans, and none of them representing government. You can find the films on YouTube easily enough.
Slashdot Mirror
"I mean, in all seriousness - I go to the toystore and buy a boxed set of Monopoly for $10. I turn around and resell it to you for $15, that's none of their business - I paid them the price they asked, legally."
Yes, the history of this is interesting. The manufacturers of just about every kind of product in existence, at one time or another, has tried to put restrictions on the after-sale use of their products. Even hammers and shovels. They tried putting "agreements" on the labels, inside and outside the packages, etc. The courts ruled, in EVERY case except (recently) software, that if you walk into a retail store (or mail order), and plunk down your money, it is YOURS and you can do whatever you want with it, regardless of any "agreement" on or in the package.
The only reason software has been an exception has been corporate lobbying. And I'd sure like to see that go away. I don't understand why software should be any different from any other copyrighted work. And in fact it wasn't, until pretty recently.
A little more than 100 years ago, software became common, in the form of those paper rolls of music for player pianos. They are software, in every real sense. Publishers didn't like that people were copying them with paper punches. (Sound familiar? That's what Bill Gates took exception to when his company sold a BASIC interpreter for the Altair on paper tape.) And they tried to put restrictions on their use after first sale, arguing that they were different from other published works, because they controlled a machine. The courts said no. The form of the work didn't matter. Paper rolls with holes in them were nothing more than a different form of the published sheet music.
So what's different with today's software? Nothing. Software is also a written work. Some coder(s) had to sit down and write it. And yes, it might control a machine (a computer), but so did player piano rolls, and punch cards for looms 200 years ago. Same same.
Yes, well, my personal site (if you even want to call it that) has nothing BUT this on the home page. I never bothered to measure the traffic, but it's probably not much higher. :o)
"It says that we have at least some overlap in the stories that interest us."
Okay. Good point.
"Seriously? Reselling a physical product you bought legally needed the highest court in the land to adjudicate?"
Yes, it did. BUT, you're wrong about one thing. It isn't the "physical product" that is at issue here. it's the copyrighted work.
This has BIG implications for copyrighted works. In essence, it upholds the 100-year-old rule that says publishers' "terms" bedamned: if you bought it, it's YOURS. You can sell it, burn it, or whatever you want.
Although lower courts have upheld First Sale Doctrine re: copyrighted software for resale on Ebay and Amazon, it was reaffirmed here by the Supreme Court.
So unless you have an existing contract with the publisher when you buy software, you can pretty much ignore their "license agreement". You bought it, it's yours. Once you have paid for it, you can do whatever you want with it, regardless of any "license agreement" inside the box or in a popup window. But you still can't legally distribute copies without the copyright holder's permission.
Close, but not quite. Most members already have the code on their sites already. Alerts show up automatically, members don't have to "add them" to their sites.
They are, however, looking for new members, and want THEM to add the alert code.
"This translates to failure probabilities of 0.1% , 0.2% and 1.0%. Multiplying these failure probabilities yields a much smaller probability of failure, which is nonsense."
You are the second person to make this mistake.
I did NOT say to take the failure probabilities and multiply them together. I stated that the probability of failure is multiplied. Those are NOT the same things!
No, my statement was not wrong. 1.3 is many MULTIPLES of 0.1. My point here was that the result is found by MULTIPLYING the numbers. Whether you are multiplying the figures as they are, or their inverses, is irrelevant: the result is still a product, as opposed to a sum.
Learn how to read. Your income could be multiplied by 0.01. You might not like that, but it would still be multiplication.
"Yes it was his fault. He was trafficking in stolen property. And of course he stole it in the first place. The newspaper might also have committed a crime, but that doesn't mean he didn't."
Are you just HUNTING for stuff to argue with me about? Could it be that says something about you?
I did not try to claim he was blameless. I simply stated (truthfully) that he wasn't the one who published. Blame him for what you like, but blame the publisher for publishing.
"Think about what you just said for a second... now go make the real posters sandwiches."
You are claiming that Gawker has no responsibility for publishing? According to the official accounts, "Goatse Security" had tried to contact several "more responsible" news outlets to get the story out. They only resorted to including some emails with the story when that failed, in order to verify that it was real.
Never mind their motivations. Yes they acted irresponsibly. But that is as may be. They weren't responsible for first "publishing" emails.
Now go make some cheese sandwiches for Goatse.
"Actually, the probability of success is multiplied, which lowers it. Your "statistically accurate" statement implies that adding dependencies to a system lowers its failure probability..."
No, the statement is still correct, even if the math requires you to use division. The probability of failure is still actually multiplied. In the example shown, 1.3% probability of failure is 13 times the 0.1% probability it had before adding the dependencies.
But I concede that I could have worded it better.
"he difference with the cloud is that you've added two additional horribly complex systems (the network and the external servers) that can also be screwed up by people or fail for various reasons. You've also added the latency required to access the remote service."
This is my main point. If your service depends on other services, the probability of failure is multiplied. That is a statistically accurate statement.
For example, if your system depends on other systems to work properly, i.e., system A is dependent on both systems B and C, and you have probilities of failure thus:
Your system reliability: 99.9% System B reliability: 99.8% System C reliability: 99.0%
Then your actual expected uptime is 98.7%, which may be unacceptable for your purposes. If you add yet another system D (as a customer of mine did, against my better judgment) at 99.0%, you are clear down below 98%.
"... you can't really assess the damage done by publishing 1k+ email addresses."
He DIDN'T publish the addresses. He sent them to the newspaper as proof that AT&T was screwing up. If the newspaper published them, you can blame the newspaper. It sure as hell wasn't his fault.
"Well, thanks for that entirely statistically irrelevant anecdote."
It's not irrelevant to ME, or to the point I was making.
The fact is that if I want reliability, it isn't to be found in the cloud. Yet. Maybe some day.
"Yea it is always someone else's servers. or your ISP."
It's simply the truth. No server of mine has gone down. It is true that my ISP did, for a few short periods. But that is a web service... that doesn't detract from my point, it reinforces it. The fact is that the Web is not yet mature enough for 99.99% reliability.
It probably helps that my current server is not Windows.
I like your sig, by the way.
I know somebody who had a website (which I worked on for them a bit) on Amazon.
Amazon sent them an email, saying that the server their S3 data was on was experiencing difficulties, and they had 2 days to copy their data off of the Amazon server before it was taken down for repair or replacement. (This despite Amazon's claim of "multiple redundancy" of users' data.)
The problem is that the email appeared in the client's inbox AFTER the 2 days had passed.
Even though Amazon admitted that it was their hardware problem, and that the email problem was at their end, they refused to lift a single finger to try to help fix anything... unless the client bought a minimum $400 pay-as-you-go service plan. Which was too late anyway, of course.
"I can only think of one time when they had multiple availability zones down at the same time."
Whether multiple zones are down at the same time hardly matters, if you are in the zone that is affected. But in fact multiple zones were down for a while in 2011 (ALL of them) and also in 2012.
"I often use it that way, too, it just isn't the magic fix-it-all system if you don't use it like it is intended."
"As intended?" You mean maintaining multiple zones manually (a pain in the ass), or paying more money for Cloudfront?
Yes, it has been "pretty good". But my own servers have been better.
"No, you are the one making an extaordinary claim. The burden of proof is on you."
Bullshit. The claim is only "extraordinary" if you have made certain assumptions (which in fact you have). I am not responsible for your assumptions.
---
"I am not retained by the police to supply their deficiencies." -- Sherlock Holmes
"I can prove it. There are no smart-phones made in the United States. There are no personal computers where all of the components are made in the United States (A few are assembled here, but that is a game, all the real manufacturing is in Asia)."
No, you can't. Because your "proof" is based on several invalid assumptions.
First, who said I use a "smartphone"? I certainly did not state that anywhere on Slashdot. So do I, or don't I? You can guess all you like, but you have no "proof" either way. Or even evidence.
Second, when was the computer manufactured, and WHERE did the parts come from? You don't know. The fact is that I used to be a computer technician (I am still A+ certified) and I have usually built my computers myself from parts I hand-pick.
There are many electronics manufacturers around the world, and nowhere near all of them are in China (it may surprise you that many of them are even in the U.S.). This thread was about me buying a computer that was supposedly made in China, remember? I did nothing of the sort. While there may be a few Chinese components on the boards of the computer I last bought new, the majority of them are not, and the majority of it was neither designed or manufactured in China.
"Manufacturers have systematically used copyright in this manner over the past 20 years to limit our access to information. Technology has moved too fast for copyright laws to keep pace, so corporations have been exploiting the lag to create information monopolies at our expense and for their profit."
It's been more like 15 years for most of the abuse, and the majority of the problem is due to bad recent laws like the DMCA and CFAA. Granted, CFAA is from 1984 law but it has been amended several times, even recently.
In the case of CFAA, I agree that the law is outdated and needs serious change. But (as clearly shown by DMCA), it is NOT a matter of technology moving too fast for law to keep up. On the contrary: corporate lobbying has deliberately twisted the law into a corporate profiteering tool, rather than something intended to protect consumers and enforce freedom and privacy.
What we need to do, among other things, it get the lobbying out of politics. There are ways. We just have to suck it up and get it done.
By the way: apparently Github was down, at least for a while, this morning.
"That is one of the many problems with relying on clouds."
Sadly, the main problem is the whole concept. While it might be a good idea, at some point in the future, that future is not yet here.
What major online service, e.g. iCloud (based on MS Azure), Amazon AWS, etc. has not gone down for a significant period in each of the last few years? I am having trouble thinking of one.
And before anybody says "Yes, but it's still more reliable than your own servers" I call bullshit. My own servers have not been down at all in the last few years.
"It doesn't matter what anyone has accused you of doing. It is YOU who made the claim that you are NOT using Chinese gear."
Wrong.
If you are going to participate in a debate, maybe you should go find a book on the rules of debate and look it the fuck up.
"The accusation is merely speculative, you are the one who is defending with a supposed FACT (which you HAVE NOT backed up)."
Wrong again. This was the accusation:
"No offense but you're part of the problem...posting from your Chinese made computer, and talking on your Chinese made smartphone."
It was a statement purporting to be fact ("You are..."). There was not the slightest thing "speculative" about it. So let's see something concrete to back it up. Otherwise this exchange is over.
No offense but I rather fuck you.
You can't go and claim to be holier than thou and not provide proof.
List your hardware otherwise lying hypocrite like yourself is the problem.
Bullshit. Somebody (you?) made an accusation based on zero evidence. It is up to the person making the accusation to prove their accusations. I have no obligation to prove a damn thing, and I don't owe that person anything at all. Not even this reply.
"Most Favored Nation status has not existed for about 15 years."
Well, I have read it in the news a lot more recently than 15 years ago, so maybe the news sources were behind the times.
But regardless of labels, we have done China many economic favors (in terms of outsourcing, even if you ignore anything else), and in turn they have done pretty much as I stated: stabbed us in the back.
As far as I am concerned, these days, any corporation offshoring their manufacturing just to save a buck is declaring themselves an enemy of the American economy, and therefore Americans in general.
"Theres no such thing as a "police action" in the territory of a foreign state, against the wishes of that foreign state."
NO SHIT, Sherlock!!!
REPEAT: "I am not defending the actions of the U.S."
The U.S. government called it a "police action". That doesn't mean it was. By "technically", I meant that the United States cannot go to war (according to our Constitution) unless Congress declares war, which they refused to do. So "technically", the U.S. was not at war.
As a practical matter, however, of course it was. And I am as big a critic of my government's actions in that regard as anyone. If Congress doesn't have the guts to declare war, they should not be sending people into war.
"That's not a cultural reason FOR the split. That's a result of the split."
It might not have been a cultural CAUSE of the split, but it sure as hell is a cultural reason now. They have grown very far apart culturally.
"Well, that's what the propaganda in your country says anyway."
My comment had nothing to do with any propaganda. It was based on some actual films made of recent visits to N. Korea by some private parties. Some of them famous, some not so famous. Not all of them Americans, and none of them representing government. You can find the films on YouTube easily enough.