He'll just mention it at work, and someone there will say that their brother's 14 year-old kid knows about all that stuff, and the kid will order a greymarket converter from China for 5 dollars, and charge 20 bucks for it.
It will be a perfectly legal speaker decoder, proobably the exact same thing you get in Chinese speakers, that plugs into your digital speaker out, except sending the signal to a DAC, it has a USB plug on the other end that shows up as a stereo sound input when you plug it in.
The guy will neither know or care he's breaking the law. Basically, exactly the same way Job 6pack gets music off the net...everyone knows a guy who knows a kid who can hook them up, and they just do it.
They can't keep drugs out of this country, and you can detect those a hell of a lot easier than you figure out what a random circuit board is for.
So where do you draw the line on what gets enforced and what doesn't?
Well, I don't. If there's an unoffical line, than police can move it at will. (Or, should I say, do move it at will.) And an offical line marking laws that don't get enforced doesn't really make any sense.;)
I think all laws should be enforced, all the time, as strictly as possible. Anything less than that invites 'priviledge', aka, 'private law'. Where some people get arrested for one thing, and some people don't.
In fact, we should look at all the random laws the police don't enforce, and pick a traditionally low crime time and one particular law, and enforce it in force, completely. Then pick a different one next week. And, hell, I'm willing to let everyone off with warnings the first time it rolls around, in the hope it won't be around the next time.
If we don't want a law enforced as is, we should take it off the books, or modify it.
We should start with clearly idiotic laws, like carrying a lattern in front of automobile. I bet the police wouldn't give out fifty tickets before an emergency juling by a judge stopped them, and the very next day that law would be removed from the books.
So why don't they? The police like have a bunch of laws everyone breaks all the time. It gives them an excuse to bother you.
I think that the SCOTUS screwed up royally with the anti-soddomy laws in Texas when they ruled that they were unconstitutional.
IMHO, what should have been the ruling (and the same net effect, but a much broader interpretation) was that laws that are not actively enforced, and consistantly enforced for all citizens become in effect nullified. In other words, if the executive branch of government refused to enforce a given law and can't prove that the law has been enforced for a given period of time, it has in essence said that the law no longer exists.
That's certainly an idea.
But what happens when, for example, all the out-of-town people get speeding traps, but they don't ticket the people living there? Or they constantly arrest black people holding beers in public for 'public drunkenness', and mysteriously ignore white people?
I mean, I don't see anything wrong with that idea, but it won't solve everything.
And I'm really not happy with the supreme court's justification of how sex and abortion is somehow a privacy issue, but taking drugs and prostitution isn't. The obvious ruling is that 'doing things to yourself' should be legal, but the court absolutely refuses to go there.
Anyone can attack a flagless vessel if allowed to by the laws of the country they are sailing under. (And they're in international waters.)
Erm, well, actually, they can attack it anyway. They're just breaking the law, not committing piracy, and as such no other country can get them for it, just their own.
As for being in some country's waters, that's more complicated. You're technically still under your own country's laws until you accept entrance into the country, at customs, but only if you're in 'innocent passage'. You are explicitly disallowed from threatening other vessels while in innocent passage (Hence the name.), if you do so you lose your innocent passage.
However, you can attack other vessels in self defense. (Any other vessels, not just flagless ones.)
And countries are required to respond to reports of piracy within their own waters, even involving ships that are just in passage.
Don't be an idiot. What makes sovereignty is the strength to defend it. Historically it has required the resources found on land to gain that strength, but technology is changing that.
No. What makes a sovereign nation is the recognization of other entities. Until then you can be insurgents or rebels or whatver, but you are not a 'sovereign nation'.
See, 'sovereign nation' has a specific legal meaning, and it's not 'ability to fight off other people'. If that were so, for example, Cuba wouldn't be a sovereign nation, because the US could bitchslap it into non-existance any time it wants. Alternately, a guy in a tank would be one, until two other tanks showed up.
No countries, or the UN, will recognize anything other than land areas as nations. (Any kind of nation, sovereign or otherwise.) You can call yourself a sovereign nation, just like you could call yourself a Jovian moon, but that doesn't mean they're going to follow any international conventions about outer space with regard to you.
Quit being such a fucking idiot. Pirates are hostile. Anybody who engages in piracy is a pirate, no matter what flag they fly.
I didn't say they were pirates, I said the vessel was a pirate vessel, which is what flagless ships are considered by all navies of the world. Google 'pirate fishing' if you don't believe me, which is fishing done by pirate vessels. Pirate vessel is another term for a flagless vessel.
And when, pray tell O wise one, did the US Navy last seize a vessel in extranational waters merely because there was no flag? No sane captain would go looking for trouble like that.
I think you are seriously overestimating the amount of ships that travel international waters that refuse to show a flag that are on legit business. There are...um...none. At all. Except one or two seriously lost people in canoes.
And the government does it all the time around Florida, catching quite a lot of Cubans trying to sneak into the US.
If by "assload of weapons" you mean "a pistol with a single bullet", you're right. Seizing a ship creates confusion, and confusion gets people hurt. (Just look at the mortality rate for military training exercises.) If you go looking for trouble, you will always find it.
And supposing your hypothetical hang-em-from-the-yard-arm captain did seize a ship, just what would he get for his trouble? Mouths to feed. Paperwork, reams of it. Lawsuits. Bills. CNN interviewing the family of the Malaysian kid who got shot because he didn't expect a warrior to suddenly stick an M16 in his face. Amnesty International claiming that the ship was in fact clearly flagged and that the captain screwed the pooch. Diplomatic protests on behalf of the citizens you seized for no statutory purpose. Again, no sane captain would gratuitously do that to himself.
Do you even have the slightest idea what we're talking about here? First of all, flagless vessels (Since you apparently don't like the term 'pirate vessels'.) are seized all the fucking time.
Smugglers sail flagless ships (and fly flagless aircrafts, which count the same), and are boarded or forced down, every day. Refugees from Cuba come in every day, and their ships are boarded. People who operate in international 'waters' (Which includes the air), without a flag are stopped and questioned, all the time, by every navy of the world. The people on board might be let loose, or they might be detained and arrested, because any nation can apply its law to a flagless ship.
And we're not even talking about a random flagless ship, we're talking, hypothetically, about one explicitly set up to avoid US labor and immigration laws. (Not that the ship this article is talking about would actually be flagless, that's just the hypothetical.)
You really think the Navy wouldn't attempt to board it to make sure everything was okay there?
And you really think firing on the US Navy is really a clever idea for them to do? Firing on the navy in those circumstances is not only an act of piracy itself, it's illegal under US law, which the US can choose to apply to any flagless ship.
You do realize I was being silly, right? The US is actually obligated under some treaties to respond to piracy attempts if near. Presumably, there are indeed some Navy ships near LA.
Even without treaties, the US wouldn't just ignore the ship. It you start letting pirates attack ships off LA, they'll start attacking actual cruise ships and whatnot.
This doesn't mean, of course, that they will arrive quickly...
There might be a 'regrettable' amount of damages inflicted 'before the US could get there', and it might turn into a rescue operation because the ship isn't seaworthy anymore.
Vehicles cannot be sovereign nations, period. No country will recognize them, the UN won't recognize them. Sovereign nations have to be attached in one place. (Even if they are just oil rigs.)
They can call themselves one, but what they will be is actually a 'flagless' ship, aka, a pirate vessel, and can be boarded by anyone who feels like it, and will immediately ordered to heave to and surrender by any navy that wanders across it. And they will shoot you if you refuse.
If you're planning on such a ship, you better have an assload of weapons, because you're going to be at siege with every military force in the world for the rest of your life.
Hey, it's not the US's concern, is it? You want US protection, you either fly a US flag or you stay in US waters. Um, duh.
If whatever tiny Caribbean they're flying under wants to save their ass, they can go right ahead. Of course, who knows how good their Navy is, and how long does it take to get from the Caribbean to LA anyway?
The US, and all militaries, are legally free to impose their will on any flagless ships, in their own country's waters or international waters. (And even in other country's waters unless the other country objects.)
There's certain laws of the sea that only work if you fly a flag.
For example, if a US ship (be it military or civilian) tries to board a Canadian ship, and a Mexician ship is wandering by, it has the right to try to stop the US.
But any ship not flying a flag can, as far as I know, be legally attacked by anyone, not just the military. (By legally, I mean 'internationally'. I suspect US law, for example, would prohibit US civilian ships from attacking any other ships, even flagless ones.) Flagless ships have no 'rights' at all under international law and conventions of the sea. It's the truest form of anarchy...you can do anything to anyone, and not legally answer for it, but anyone can do anything to you, and not legally answer for it, at least not internationally.
If a US ship is attacking a flagless ship, no one can stop them. Flagless ships are classified as 'pirates', and not only are they allowed to be attacked, it's assumed they'll be attacked. Meanwhile, any ship with a flag attacking them can't be, itself, attacked. (Well, your own government can attack you.)
Which is why, if this project gets off the ground, they'll be flying some flag. Otherwise they're risking some ship from, say, Panama, legally boarding them and stealing all their stuff and their ship. And even if other nations want to stop them, they can't, because they are not allowed to fire on Panama's ships. (Well, without actually declaring war.)
Yeah, I think people are confused as to how 'international waters' works.
Ships have to sale under the flag of a nation. If they do so, they are legally part of that nation, and have to heave to and let the coast guard and navy of that nation board. They can be punished for crimes committed.
It's just that a lot of crimes are state or local crimes in the US, and don't exist at sea, and of course unless you're on a cruise ship, there's no one to enforce laws anyway. But try to get away with murder and claim you're in international waters...
The other option is to sale under no flag. At which point you're a pirate vessel, you can't dock anywhere except a few quasilegal ports, and not only can any military board you, they can legally just sink you if they feel like it. (Legally according to international law, that is. Possibly not according to their own law.)
I once lived in a dorm where the administration learned that, like all dorm networks, 95% of the files shared on it were copyright violations or porn, and overreacted, claiming they were going to start scanning people's shared folders for 'illegal' stuff. (Probably including porn in that, although all dorms I've ever heard of, including this one, require people to be 18 to live there.)
Everyone started using a easy-to-guess password, of those who weren't already. Either 'password' or the initials of the school or the name of the computer. One person had a webpage with his password, right after a 'terms of use' that explicitly denied access to anyone working for the university.
We then made sure to point out to them that we had not granted them access, and if they were to attempt to 'guess' our password, they would be committing felony computer misuse under Georgia law, which would pretty much trump any sharing of movies they discovered. (And landlords commiting felonies against their tenants is probably extra illegal.)
And the guys running the network didn't actually want to do that anyway, and this gave them a nice excuse. 'You want me to break into student's computers? Can I have that order in writing, please?'.
Luckily, we had a real housing contract, which they couldn't change in mid-term, with a dedicated line for the internet access we were solely paying for, even though it went through the university's NOC. (In fact, the whole dorm was self-sufficient.) The housing adminstration was sufficently seperate that they refused to change the housing contracts, at least while I went there.
If they felt we were breaking the law, of course, they could always call in the police. Oddly enough, it never came to that.;)
I think police officers enforcing the law evenly and completely is a lot better than the alternatives, which appaear to be enforcing the law, and even going past it, against people they don't like the look of.
Stable binary interfaces for the sole purpose of supporting binary modules is dumb.
I was complaining about the fact the linux-wlan-ng people can't get their act together and work within the kernel, not the fact I have to recompile.
Which I don't actually have to do most of the time, I could just keep moving the modules when upgrading, but it's easier to just 'emerge linux-wlan-ng', and I don't have to worry about the ABI.
You are mostly right, and that's a point I've been making about the DMCA. How can Apple sell iPods that 'circumvent the access control' on 'their' DRM content...because it's not their copyright, they're just licensed it.
The whole concept is gibberish when you have multiple entities selling content and multiple entities selling decodering devices, and magically one set of decoding devices are illegal access circumvention devices and the others presumably aren't. Especially when there's no patent or trade secret involved.
How you're possibly supposed to know which is 'good' and which is 'bad', is unknown, as is how Apple can 'license' the ability to decode the DRM on Sony's music to HP.
The provisions of the DMCA only apply to something that is primarily intended to provide access to copyrighted material against the wishes of the copyright owner...
But you're wrong here. There's no 'primary' here, The devices are illegal to provide, period. And there's nothing about 'the wishes of the copyright owner'...it is possibly illegal to circumvent an access control device protecting your own work. It is certainly illegal for me to provide a device to you for you to access your own stuff.
Disabling modules won't protect you from cracking attempts. If, God forbid, the kernel has an exploit in it, it's really unlike that it would be in an unloaded module that the cracker can somehow cause to be loaded. Either the module's loaded, or it's compiled in, and you're screwed.
What it will stop is rootkits. Things that alter files on disk to install backdoors, and then install a kernel module to hide said changes. Sometimes this kernel module will also hide the listening ports, or even keep them closed until it detects a special knock. It will had backdoor processes. It can do anything, and you'll never find it.
So completely disabling them? Yeah, that's a good idea for a server that isn't going to see much hardware changes. I've done it for a router before. It won't keep crackers out, it will just make them slightly more visible. Or at least keep them from being completely invisible. (Barring, of course, their patching and compiling a new kernel, but that requires, at least, a reboot.)
Merely limiting the number of modules, however, while having them enabled, doesn't help anything at all. A rootkit modules can load and then remove itself from the list and you'd be no wiser.
Do you have the slightest idea what you're talking about?
No one wants to 'apt-get' a 4500 byte driver. No one. That's just insanity. That should come with your distro, and already be installed. Keeping track of that would suck more space than just it coming with the distro.
And trying to figure out what drivers are 'needed' is impossible. About the only drivers you can be sure you won't need during an install are sound drivers and framebuffer drivers. Almost every other driver could run some critical piece of hardware.
The response to you is exactly the same as the response to people who want 'x86-only downloads of the kernel'...80% of the kernel code can be used on more than one platform. Well, 90% of the code is required to make some computer boot up and get to the net. Splitting it apart makes no sense at all. (In fact, Macs need the framebuffer, don't they?)
And it wouldn't expose any _real_ problems with the kernel, because the problems you are talking about do not exist. If you want something, you can turn it on as a module, compile it, run depmod, and load it without rebooting your computer. That used to be iffy, under like 2.2, but now it works for everything, all the time. (And thanks to them fixing the dependency issue with 2.6, compiling one module takes twenty seconds instead of an hour.)
The only things you can't do that for are things that can't be modules at all. And some stuff simply doesn't make any sense as a module. The only alternative would be to have it always on, and everyone's free to do that if they want.
And, of course, if you're talking about this from a distro point of view, you have no idea what you're talking about, because every distro (except maybe Gentoo) comes with a nice, precompiled kernel with every modules, and thus you never under any circumstances recompile the kernel.
In fact, there's a make command that turns everything that can take 'M' to 'M' and everything else to 'Y' to configure the kernel. Feel free to use it and stop bitching. You can either use a initrd with all the modules on startup, or run 'make menuconfig' afterward and go in and flip IDE or SCSI, and whatever filesystem you use, to 'Y', which is what I'd do.
(Of course, you'll waste time compiling inane modules like XT hard drives and parallel port tape drives, but apparently that's what you want, as compiling modules once when you buy new hardware is too much work and you can't seem to figure out where your distro provided kernel is.)
Me? I live in the real world, the middle ground. I have every piece of hardware built into my machine built into the kernel. I have every piece of hardware laying around that could get hooked into my machine, and quite a few common devices I do not have (Like a USB flash drive), set up as modules. The rest I have off, and I know how to go in and change that if I aquire something.
I think the 'appropriately licensed' is referring to the fact that VMWare and whatnot load an entire extra operating system inside different memory space.
You need a license for the host OS, and a license for the hosted OS. It's also having to provide fake hardware.
With Xen, maybe it's not that extreme. With the same OS inside and out, and it knowing about itself, it might not be running two copies at all, acting like a really extreme version of chroot instead. Hence the licencing being better.
And it would seem to be a lot saner. I mean, think about disk files. With VMWare, VMWare takes the file, fakes a device from it, and Linux accesses the device, but that's rather goofy when you think about it, because Linux can already mount files. With kernel support, the host kernel could let the hosted OS have direct disk access to that file, and only that file.
In the Linux kernel, there are a lot of 'loopback' and 'fake devices' concepts like that. There's the loopback mounter, there's SCSI emulation, there's fake network devices, there's the fake PS/2 mouse in/dev/input/mice, there's all sorts of pretend hardware. With Linux-on-Linux support in the kernel, that fake hardware could trivially turn into 'real' hardware for a hosted machine, where the hosted kernel know it's accessing something fake, and the host kernel just needs to restrict access.
Hopefully this will be extendable enough that the 'devices' the hosted kernel use can be shared with Linux-on-other-platforms, like coLinux on Windows. And the devices exposed to the hosted machine could be exposed to other emulators.
I already have a third part driver, from linux-wlan-ng, and every time I upgrade the kernel I have to remember to recompile it again.
The kernel should have everything. Obvious, for licensing reasons, only GPL stuff, but everything that's GPL, and is a kernel driver, and is up to minimal code standards.
In fact, having to track down third party drivers has been a much more valid complaint than 'Too many drivers', which is just idiotic.
No, I said the Lexmark decision doesn't apply here. There, the court said that merely putting encryption in hardware to stop third-party hardware from being connected is not a valid use of the DMCA.
I was just saying, that's not what's happening here. Here, the access control mechanism actually is controlling access to a copyrighted work, and thus the Lexmark decision isn't helpful.
And, yes, it may be your copyright, but trafficing in access control circumvention devices is illegal, even if they're going to be used for legal purposes.
You can probably legally break the encryption on your own stuff. Adobe, however, cannot sell a program to do so. You can't give away your program to do so.
Even though, in this instance, it's nearly impossible to come up with circumstances where cracking the encryption would actually be illegal, trafficing in access circumvention devices is simple illegal, full stop. No exceptions whatsoever, except possibly that one librarians demanded for archiving that I can't recall if they got.
And, three numbers that represent the white balance are not, logically, copyrightable, so this entire issue might be moot. Is it just three numbers, or is it three numbers a pixel? Copyright over that is akin to copyright over the latitude and longitude displaying on your GPS...that's just idiotic.
The copyright on photos comes from the crativitity in lighting, framing, and timing them, etc. The light-level measurement, which you probably can't even see when taking the photo, is not creative enough to be copyrightable by itself.
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It will be a perfectly legal speaker decoder, proobably the exact same thing you get in Chinese speakers, that plugs into your digital speaker out, except sending the signal to a DAC, it has a USB plug on the other end that shows up as a stereo sound input when you plug it in.
The guy will neither know or care he's breaking the law. Basically, exactly the same way Job 6pack gets music off the net...everyone knows a guy who knows a kid who can hook them up, and they just do it.
They can't keep drugs out of this country, and you can detect those a hell of a lot easier than you figure out what a random circuit board is for.
Bet it doesn't.
I'm not quite sure in what universe it's reasonable to swim from Norway to Hawaii to make the trip shorter.
There are other countries below Mexico. Where coffee and drugs come from.
The internet. Where men are men, women are men, and 13 year old schoolgirls are FBI agents.
Well, I don't. If there's an unoffical line, than police can move it at will. (Or, should I say, do move it at will.) And an offical line marking laws that don't get enforced doesn't really make any sense. ;)
I think all laws should be enforced, all the time, as strictly as possible. Anything less than that invites 'priviledge', aka, 'private law'. Where some people get arrested for one thing, and some people don't.
In fact, we should look at all the random laws the police don't enforce, and pick a traditionally low crime time and one particular law, and enforce it in force, completely. Then pick a different one next week. And, hell, I'm willing to let everyone off with warnings the first time it rolls around, in the hope it won't be around the next time.
If we don't want a law enforced as is, we should take it off the books, or modify it.
We should start with clearly idiotic laws, like carrying a lattern in front of automobile. I bet the police wouldn't give out fifty tickets before an emergency juling by a judge stopped them, and the very next day that law would be removed from the books.
So why don't they? The police like have a bunch of laws everyone breaks all the time. It gives them an excuse to bother you.
I think that the SCOTUS screwed up royally with the anti-soddomy laws in Texas when they ruled that they were unconstitutional.
IMHO, what should have been the ruling (and the same net effect, but a much broader interpretation) was that laws that are not actively enforced, and consistantly enforced for all citizens become in effect nullified. In other words, if the executive branch of government refused to enforce a given law and can't prove that the law has been enforced for a given period of time, it has in essence said that the law no longer exists.
That's certainly an idea.
But what happens when, for example, all the out-of-town people get speeding traps, but they don't ticket the people living there? Or they constantly arrest black people holding beers in public for 'public drunkenness', and mysteriously ignore white people?
I mean, I don't see anything wrong with that idea, but it won't solve everything.
And I'm really not happy with the supreme court's justification of how sex and abortion is somehow a privacy issue, but taking drugs and prostitution isn't. The obvious ruling is that 'doing things to yourself' should be legal, but the court absolutely refuses to go there.
Erm, well, actually, they can attack it anyway. They're just breaking the law, not committing piracy, and as such no other country can get them for it, just their own.
As for being in some country's waters, that's more complicated. You're technically still under your own country's laws until you accept entrance into the country, at customs, but only if you're in 'innocent passage'. You are explicitly disallowed from threatening other vessels while in innocent passage (Hence the name.), if you do so you lose your innocent passage.
However, you can attack other vessels in self defense. (Any other vessels, not just flagless ones.)
And countries are required to respond to reports of piracy within their own waters, even involving ships that are just in passage.
No. What makes a sovereign nation is the recognization of other entities. Until then you can be insurgents or rebels or whatver, but you are not a 'sovereign nation'.
See, 'sovereign nation' has a specific legal meaning, and it's not 'ability to fight off other people'. If that were so, for example, Cuba wouldn't be a sovereign nation, because the US could bitchslap it into non-existance any time it wants. Alternately, a guy in a tank would be one, until two other tanks showed up.
No countries, or the UN, will recognize anything other than land areas as nations. (Any kind of nation, sovereign or otherwise.) You can call yourself a sovereign nation, just like you could call yourself a Jovian moon, but that doesn't mean they're going to follow any international conventions about outer space with regard to you.
Quit being such a fucking idiot. Pirates are hostile. Anybody who engages in piracy is a pirate, no matter what flag they fly.
I didn't say they were pirates, I said the vessel was a pirate vessel, which is what flagless ships are considered by all navies of the world. Google 'pirate fishing' if you don't believe me, which is fishing done by pirate vessels. Pirate vessel is another term for a flagless vessel.
And when, pray tell O wise one, did the US Navy last seize a vessel in extranational waters merely because there was no flag? No sane captain would go looking for trouble like that.
I think you are seriously overestimating the amount of ships that travel international waters that refuse to show a flag that are on legit business. There are...um...none. At all. Except one or two seriously lost people in canoes.
And the government does it all the time around Florida, catching quite a lot of Cubans trying to sneak into the US.
If by "assload of weapons" you mean "a pistol with a single bullet", you're right. Seizing a ship creates confusion, and confusion gets people hurt. (Just look at the mortality rate for military training exercises.) If you go looking for trouble, you will always find it.
And supposing your hypothetical hang-em-from-the-yard-arm captain did seize a ship, just what would he get for his trouble? Mouths to feed. Paperwork, reams of it. Lawsuits. Bills. CNN interviewing the family of the Malaysian kid who got shot because he didn't expect a warrior to suddenly stick an M16 in his face. Amnesty International claiming that the ship was in fact clearly flagged and that the captain screwed the pooch. Diplomatic protests on behalf of the citizens you seized for no statutory purpose. Again, no sane captain would gratuitously do that to himself.
Do you even have the slightest idea what we're talking about here? First of all, flagless vessels (Since you apparently don't like the term 'pirate vessels'.) are seized all the fucking time.
Smugglers sail flagless ships (and fly flagless aircrafts, which count the same), and are boarded or forced down, every day. Refugees from Cuba come in every day, and their ships are boarded. People who operate in international 'waters' (Which includes the air), without a flag are stopped and questioned, all the time, by every navy of the world. The people on board might be let loose, or they might be detained and arrested, because any nation can apply its law to a flagless ship.
And we're not even talking about a random flagless ship, we're talking, hypothetically, about one explicitly set up to avoid US labor and immigration laws. (Not that the ship this article is talking about would actually be flagless, that's just the hypothetical.)
You really think the Navy wouldn't attempt to board it to make sure everything was okay there?
And you really think firing on the US Navy is really a clever idea for them to do? Firing on the navy in those circumstances is not only an act of piracy itself, it's illegal under US law, which the US can choose to apply to any flagless ship.
Even without treaties, the US wouldn't just ignore the ship. It you start letting pirates attack ships off LA, they'll start attacking actual cruise ships and whatnot.
This doesn't mean, of course, that they will arrive quickly...
There might be a 'regrettable' amount of damages inflicted 'before the US could get there', and it might turn into a rescue operation because the ship isn't seaworthy anymore.
They can call themselves one, but what they will be is actually a 'flagless' ship, aka, a pirate vessel, and can be boarded by anyone who feels like it, and will immediately ordered to heave to and surrender by any navy that wanders across it. And they will shoot you if you refuse.
If you're planning on such a ship, you better have an assload of weapons, because you're going to be at siege with every military force in the world for the rest of your life.
If whatever tiny Caribbean they're flying under wants to save their ass, they can go right ahead. Of course, who knows how good their Navy is, and how long does it take to get from the Caribbean to LA anyway?
The US, and all militaries, are legally free to impose their will on any flagless ships, in their own country's waters or international waters. (And even in other country's waters unless the other country objects.)
For example, if a US ship (be it military or civilian) tries to board a Canadian ship, and a Mexician ship is wandering by, it has the right to try to stop the US.
But any ship not flying a flag can, as far as I know, be legally attacked by anyone, not just the military. (By legally, I mean 'internationally'. I suspect US law, for example, would prohibit US civilian ships from attacking any other ships, even flagless ones.) Flagless ships have no 'rights' at all under international law and conventions of the sea. It's the truest form of anarchy...you can do anything to anyone, and not legally answer for it, but anyone can do anything to you, and not legally answer for it, at least not internationally.
If a US ship is attacking a flagless ship, no one can stop them. Flagless ships are classified as 'pirates', and not only are they allowed to be attacked, it's assumed they'll be attacked. Meanwhile, any ship with a flag attacking them can't be, itself, attacked. (Well, your own government can attack you.)
Which is why, if this project gets off the ground, they'll be flying some flag. Otherwise they're risking some ship from, say, Panama, legally boarding them and stealing all their stuff and their ship. And even if other nations want to stop them, they can't, because they are not allowed to fire on Panama's ships. (Well, without actually declaring war.)
Ships have to sale under the flag of a nation. If they do so, they are legally part of that nation, and have to heave to and let the coast guard and navy of that nation board. They can be punished for crimes committed.
It's just that a lot of crimes are state or local crimes in the US, and don't exist at sea, and of course unless you're on a cruise ship, there's no one to enforce laws anyway. But try to get away with murder and claim you're in international waters...
The other option is to sale under no flag. At which point you're a pirate vessel, you can't dock anywhere except a few quasilegal ports, and not only can any military board you, they can legally just sink you if they feel like it. (Legally according to international law, that is. Possibly not according to their own law.)
Everyone started using a easy-to-guess password, of those who weren't already. Either 'password' or the initials of the school or the name of the computer. One person had a webpage with his password, right after a 'terms of use' that explicitly denied access to anyone working for the university.
We then made sure to point out to them that we had not granted them access, and if they were to attempt to 'guess' our password, they would be committing felony computer misuse under Georgia law, which would pretty much trump any sharing of movies they discovered. (And landlords commiting felonies against their tenants is probably extra illegal.)
And the guys running the network didn't actually want to do that anyway, and this gave them a nice excuse. 'You want me to break into student's computers? Can I have that order in writing, please?'.
Luckily, we had a real housing contract, which they couldn't change in mid-term, with a dedicated line for the internet access we were solely paying for, even though it went through the university's NOC. (In fact, the whole dorm was self-sufficient.) The housing adminstration was sufficently seperate that they refused to change the housing contracts, at least while I went there.
If they felt we were breaking the law, of course, they could always call in the police. Oddly enough, it never came to that. ;)
I think police officers enforcing the law evenly and completely is a lot better than the alternatives, which appaear to be enforcing the law, and even going past it, against people they don't like the look of.
You're stealing adminission, if you, duh, rob the box office.
I was complaining about the fact the linux-wlan-ng people can't get their act together and work within the kernel, not the fact I have to recompile.
Which I don't actually have to do most of the time, I could just keep moving the modules when upgrading, but it's easier to just 'emerge linux-wlan-ng', and I don't have to worry about the ABI.
The whole concept is gibberish when you have multiple entities selling content and multiple entities selling decodering devices, and magically one set of decoding devices are illegal access circumvention devices and the others presumably aren't. Especially when there's no patent or trade secret involved.
How you're possibly supposed to know which is 'good' and which is 'bad', is unknown, as is how Apple can 'license' the ability to decode the DRM on Sony's music to HP.
The provisions of the DMCA only apply to something that is primarily intended to provide access to copyrighted material against the wishes of the copyright owner...
But you're wrong here. There's no 'primary' here, The devices are illegal to provide, period. And there's nothing about 'the wishes of the copyright owner'...it is possibly illegal to circumvent an access control device protecting your own work. It is certainly illegal for me to provide a device to you for you to access your own stuff.
What it will stop is rootkits. Things that alter files on disk to install backdoors, and then install a kernel module to hide said changes. Sometimes this kernel module will also hide the listening ports, or even keep them closed until it detects a special knock. It will had backdoor processes. It can do anything, and you'll never find it.
So completely disabling them? Yeah, that's a good idea for a server that isn't going to see much hardware changes. I've done it for a router before. It won't keep crackers out, it will just make them slightly more visible. Or at least keep them from being completely invisible. (Barring, of course, their patching and compiling a new kernel, but that requires, at least, a reboot.)
Merely limiting the number of modules, however, while having them enabled, doesn't help anything at all. A rootkit modules can load and then remove itself from the list and you'd be no wiser.
No one wants to 'apt-get' a 4500 byte driver. No one. That's just insanity. That should come with your distro, and already be installed. Keeping track of that would suck more space than just it coming with the distro.
And trying to figure out what drivers are 'needed' is impossible. About the only drivers you can be sure you won't need during an install are sound drivers and framebuffer drivers. Almost every other driver could run some critical piece of hardware.
The response to you is exactly the same as the response to people who want 'x86-only downloads of the kernel'...80% of the kernel code can be used on more than one platform. Well, 90% of the code is required to make some computer boot up and get to the net. Splitting it apart makes no sense at all. (In fact, Macs need the framebuffer, don't they?)
And it wouldn't expose any _real_ problems with the kernel, because the problems you are talking about do not exist. If you want something, you can turn it on as a module, compile it, run depmod, and load it without rebooting your computer. That used to be iffy, under like 2.2, but now it works for everything, all the time. (And thanks to them fixing the dependency issue with 2.6, compiling one module takes twenty seconds instead of an hour.)
The only things you can't do that for are things that can't be modules at all. And some stuff simply doesn't make any sense as a module. The only alternative would be to have it always on, and everyone's free to do that if they want.
And, of course, if you're talking about this from a distro point of view, you have no idea what you're talking about, because every distro (except maybe Gentoo) comes with a nice, precompiled kernel with every modules, and thus you never under any circumstances recompile the kernel.
In fact, there's a make command that turns everything that can take 'M' to 'M' and everything else to 'Y' to configure the kernel. Feel free to use it and stop bitching. You can either use a initrd with all the modules on startup, or run 'make menuconfig' afterward and go in and flip IDE or SCSI, and whatever filesystem you use, to 'Y', which is what I'd do.
(Of course, you'll waste time compiling inane modules like XT hard drives and parallel port tape drives, but apparently that's what you want, as compiling modules once when you buy new hardware is too much work and you can't seem to figure out where your distro provided kernel is.)
Me? I live in the real world, the middle ground. I have every piece of hardware built into my machine built into the kernel. I have every piece of hardware laying around that could get hooked into my machine, and quite a few common devices I do not have (Like a USB flash drive), set up as modules. The rest I have off, and I know how to go in and change that if I aquire something.
You need a license for the host OS, and a license for the hosted OS. It's also having to provide fake hardware.
With Xen, maybe it's not that extreme. With the same OS inside and out, and it knowing about itself, it might not be running two copies at all, acting like a really extreme version of chroot instead. Hence the licencing being better.
And it would seem to be a lot saner. I mean, think about disk files. With VMWare, VMWare takes the file, fakes a device from it, and Linux accesses the device, but that's rather goofy when you think about it, because Linux can already mount files. With kernel support, the host kernel could let the hosted OS have direct disk access to that file, and only that file.
In the Linux kernel, there are a lot of 'loopback' and 'fake devices' concepts like that. There's the loopback mounter, there's SCSI emulation, there's fake network devices, there's the fake PS/2 mouse in /dev/input/mice, there's all sorts of pretend hardware. With Linux-on-Linux support in the kernel, that fake hardware could trivially turn into 'real' hardware for a hosted machine, where the hosted kernel know it's accessing something fake, and the host kernel just needs to restrict access.
Hopefully this will be extendable enough that the 'devices' the hosted kernel use can be shared with Linux-on-other-platforms, like coLinux on Windows. And the devices exposed to the hosted machine could be exposed to other emulators.
I already have a third part driver, from linux-wlan-ng, and every time I upgrade the kernel I have to remember to recompile it again.
The kernel should have everything. Obvious, for licensing reasons, only GPL stuff, but everything that's GPL, and is a kernel driver, and is up to minimal code standards.
In fact, having to track down third party drivers has been a much more valid complaint than 'Too many drivers', which is just idiotic.
I was just saying, that's not what's happening here. Here, the access control mechanism actually is controlling access to a copyrighted work, and thus the Lexmark decision isn't helpful.
And, yes, it may be your copyright, but trafficing in access control circumvention devices is illegal, even if they're going to be used for legal purposes.
You can probably legally break the encryption on your own stuff. Adobe, however, cannot sell a program to do so. You can't give away your program to do so.
Even though, in this instance, it's nearly impossible to come up with circumstances where cracking the encryption would actually be illegal, trafficing in access circumvention devices is simple illegal, full stop. No exceptions whatsoever, except possibly that one librarians demanded for archiving that I can't recall if they got.
And, three numbers that represent the white balance are not, logically, copyrightable, so this entire issue might be moot. Is it just three numbers, or is it three numbers a pixel? Copyright over that is akin to copyright over the latitude and longitude displaying on your GPS...that's just idiotic.
The copyright on photos comes from the crativitity in lighting, framing, and timing them, etc. The light-level measurement, which you probably can't even see when taking the photo, is not creative enough to be copyrightable by itself.
So it's not really the same thing.