You may be a lawyer, but you manage to be incorrect. You do not have a license to listen to the CD, anymore than you have a license to set an alarm clock you owe or a license to eat food you're purchased.
And you're not paying for the 'right' to listen to recording either. You always have the right to listen to whatever you want, at least in America, that's considered part of the freedom of speech. You don't have to pay for the right to listen to a CD.
All you pay for is the physical copy, period. You have purchased literally a CD, and that's it.
At that point, it is presumed that you, being the legal owner of your copy, can do whatever the hell you want with it, as long as you does not violate copyright law in the process.
And to violate copyright law almost always requires copying the thing. (With exceptions like 'public performences', and stupid shit like the DMCA.)
In other words, you can type on a typewriter, you can drive nails with a hammer, you can play a CD in an appropriate player, or even try them on a record table if you feel like it. You can disassemble your car to make a couch, you can eat your CDs, and you can fill your swimming pool with soft drinks. Basic property rights says, by default, you can do whatever you want with your property. You do not need a 'license' or 'permission' to play a CD you own, as long as you do not run afoul of any law.
Their superior code? If it's their superior code, they why don't they release it under whatever license they want?
Meanwhile, back to the LinkSys discussion, which is about LinkSys using someone elses's superior code. (And, BTW, is a bunch of crap, the article poster has no evidence that the binaries are modified.)
Except that there's already plenty of stuff up there turning O3 into O2 + O, it's not just sunlight. So in reality what you're talking about in the first cycle happens maybe half the time, and the maybe we dumped enough CFCs into the air to make that cycle happen, instead, 10% of the half of the time. (Which is an amazing amount of CFCs to get up there, but whatever.)
And the second cycle doesn't show fewer rays hitting anything...it shows fewer rays hitting per cycle. As there are the same amount of rays coming it, that just means the cycles will run faster...like I said, the sunlight's just going to hit more O2 and turn it into ozone. That's how the damn thing stays stable anyway!
In other words, the ozone layer is a buffer against UV radiation that is formed by UV radiation, which is, of course, the best and most stable kind of buffer. To alter it, you'd need to vastly alter the chemical composition of the atmopshere. Meanwhile, you can't point at changes in it as some sort of horrible thing we humans have done, because it's equally likely that's the buffer acting exactly how it's always acted...reacting to the sun with slight lag.
Not, BTW, that I'm not a little glad that we stopped using CFCs. The moment we started detecting they got up into the ozone layer, we needed to stop and say 'Hey, where else are these things getting?'.
I just think the decision to stop using them was made because of junk science, professional panicers, and profits. We don't know anywhere near enough about the ozone layer to pretend we 'hurt' it or that it's 'healing'.
Have you even ever looked at how CFCs are claimed to work? Check it out, it's completely nonsensical.
All the crappy science out there will talk about how ozone is 'destroyed', when, of course, CFCs are just turning it into O2, which is all that's up there to start with, sans radiation.
And there's plenty of proof the ozone layer doesn't fucking care...strip away some ozone, more radiation will get through, it will hit O2, and you'll get more O3 to stop the radiation. Duh!
Meanwhile, there's plenty of evidence that ozone operates completely independently of anything we've ever done as humans. The thinning in the ozone layer is a rather obvious example, it's interesting how one of the largest gaps in the ozone layer is over a completely uninhabited section of the world. It's due to frickin ice particles.
And, as has been pointed out elsewhere, the ozone layer seems to follow directly behind the sunspot cycle.
Basically, things don't magically stay in balance until we humans release a few chemicals and destroy it. Yes, that can happen, but there's absolutely no evidence of that here. Yes, we might have temporarily altered some of the O2/O3 balance in the upper atmosphere...but, then again, we might not. Meanwhile, the tiny dent we may or may not have made is completely overbalanced by the fact the level of radiation from the sun alters all the time, and that is the main producer of ozone.
If our planet can withstand massive amounts of nitrogen, chloride, flouride, and bromide being belched from volcanos, then it can withstand a bottle of fucking hairspray.
But, hey, you're got 'solid evidence', so let's hear it.
Santa Clara County vs. Southern Pacific Railroad is just simply nonsensical and wrong.
If corporations are people, how can we own them? If corporations are people, why don't they have the right to vote?
It doesn't matter what the idiotic judge pronounced before the trial, or how the court reporter wrote it down. He can certainly consider corporations persons under the constitution, but that does not make it so.
IBM isn't anywhere near a monopoly anymore, and even purchasing Unix and refusing to license it anymore (beyond the licenses that already exist and they can't cancel) wouldn't be questionable.
Just being a monopoly at some point in the past doesn't mean you can't ever do anything again.
Actually, there's a very good reason corporate speech (That is, speech by corporations) has a blatant exception...corporations are not people, and people (and technically you can include states) are the only entities with rights under the constitution.
Yes, there are laws that give them person-like status, but normal laws cannot, duh, modify the constitution. You can't pass a law that says red-headed people are not really people, and thus have no 1st amendment rights, and you can't pass a law that says Microsoft is really a person and has 1st amendment rights.
Now, you can pass a law saying that corporations have the same rights as people, but if you then pass another law saying, no, they don't, all you've got is two laws that conflict. There's no 'shall make no law' issue going on there.
There is no way to bootstrap corporations into 1st amendment protection without a constitutional amendment, as they are not people under the constitution, and hence have no rights whatsoever.
They can be searched without due process, they have be forced to quarter soldiers in their homes (Well, they have no homes, but whatever.), they can be subject to cruel and unusual punishment (As punishment for violating the Sherman antitrust act, Microsoft must now conduct business in the nude.), and they have no right of freedom of speech.
That's not to say people making up a corporation do not have said rights. Just that when people make actions 'behind the corporate veil', it's the corporation legally making such actions.
To rephrase that: I, working for a corporation, can say and do whatever I want. I can either do things as myself, or as a representitive of the corporation.
The government can hold me liable for any action I do as myself, and for some actions I do as the corporation. The government cannot hold me liable for speech either way, no matter what. (And don't nitpick the 'action' vs 'speech' thing. However you want to define them.)
However, the government has no such restriction about corporations, and can hold them liable for 'their' speech, in addition to 'their' actions. It can do anything it wants to them, for any reason at all, it doesn't even technically have to follow due process, a corporation has no rights at all. (Although there are other reasons the government always is supposed to due process.)
Now, if it did something like disband the corporation, that is considered a 'taking' under the law from the stockholders or other owners of the company, and that must follow due process, as, ultimately, people own the company, and you can't take things from people without due process.
Correct punishment for a spammer: Every victim of the spammer gets one thumbtack per spam. The spammer is tied up in a stadium and the line starts on the left.
I'll even be charitable and exclude eyes and genitalia for spammers advertising legal products. But anywhere else is fair game.
If the voter is the only one who knows his number, it can't be tracked. The only purpose of the number is to allow the voter to verify his vote was counted correctly. Nobody else need know it. Have a sticker with two copies of the number, drawn at random. He puts one copy on his ballot before he places it in a sealed box, the other in his pocket and lets no one else see the number.
Tht allows vote buying/vote extortion. All they have to do is ask/demand to see your number.
As for just adding more votes, if everyone can verify their vote is correct and that the total adds up to what was reported, then it's just a matter of making sure the number of votes is less than the number of registered voters. Except in very close elections, you would have to add a bunch more votes to make a difference. Keep in mind, the system we have now doesn't disallow adding more votes either. This would at least allow people to verify their vote was counted correctly.
That doesn't make any sense. You want everyone to read the list and push a button if their vote showed up? well, find, but all you've done is delay the issue...either their 'that's my vote' is matched up with their vote, in which case you're just managed to make it non-anoynous, or it isn't, and there's no reason someone can't sit there and say 'that's my vote' fifty times. Actually, there's no reason they couldn't do that if it wasn't anonymous, either.
In short, that doesn't accomplish anything. People will just verify the extra votes.
You do have a point with election buying. But if buying votes is illegal, then the candidate buying the votes opens himself up to criminal risks by offering to buy votes. The risk is proportional to how many votes he needs to buy to win the election. If he doesn't need many votes, it probably isn't worth the risk. If he needs a lot, the risk is much higher that someone will turn him in.
That's why vote extortion is so popular. Just blackmail/threaten people into voting for you.
It's not a complete solution. But as it is now, the only person who knows how he voted is the voter and he has no way of telling his vote was counted correctly. There are no checks on the vote counters whether they be machines or people. Solve that problem, and the issue of how the votes get counted becomes much simpler.
There is, however, physical security, and that seems to work fairly well. They lock down the unvoted ballots, so it's hard to fake them, and they put the box in plain sight so it's hard to submit more than one, even assuming you managed to get extra blanks. Later, they have a lot of people watching to make sure that extra ballots don't get slipped in later, and they count the ballots from each district as soon as possible, after which it basically becomes impossible to add more.
Compare that with electronic systems, where there's no security at all...it's a blackbox system that get randomly modified beforehand, there's nothing to prevent a delibrate or accidental flaw from being used to vote more than once, and, worse of all, said vote completely vanishes from view from when it's entered to when it's counted, and votes can vanish or appear during that time and there's no way to find out. (Well, as you point out, you can come up with a system for checking if they vanish, which no system actually does, but it's impossible to check if they appear.)
Basically, physical vote security depends on the concept that all workers in a district, or all workers in a vote counting place, or whereever, will not be corrupt, or at least not corrupt in the same way,and hence they will all watch each other to make sure everything's running correctly. Electronic vote security has none of that, there are quite a few places where a single person could alter the vote.
That is not a DoS, that's just an attack. If you call that a DoS, you have to start calling bank robberies DoS, or driving a truck into a polling place a DoS.
Maybe you should check the actual defination of 'denial of service'. To deny someone service, you have to leave the physical infastructure intact, and instead deny their ability to use the service over said equipment.
Usually this is done by denying them a usable network, but it could be stretched to include standing by a pay phone and airhorning everyone who tries to use it. It cannot be stretched to include 'breaking shit', that's just vandalism.
Every single person who thinks about this problem more than three minutes, and knows the slightest bit about computers, comes up with exactly this idea. (Although it shouldn't be a punch card...machines can quite easily read machine printed text nowadays.)
The fact it hasn't been implimented shows one of three things: People deciding on the system haven't thought three minutes about it, people deciding on the systemdon't know anything about computers, or people deciding on the system don't want a system that can't be tampered with.
Those are your choices: stupid people, ignorant people, or villians.
The problem is that if everyone has a one time number, either you're hooking them up with IDs, or you're not.
If you hook them up with IDs, their vote can be tracked.
If you don't do that, then there's a blatantly obvious method of election fraud...just add more votes. Everyone will see their number, and it's all fine.
Note to mention assigning a number, anbd publishing how that number voted, allows election buying, so it's probably best to scrap that idea right now.
It's trivially easy to allow people to only vote once, and it doesn't require anything at all.
All you do is give the poor slobs sitting behind a table a row of buttons, one for each booth, to reset them. Someone walks in, they get one vote, machine stops working until it's reset by the guy behind the table who IDs the people, presumably when he assigns them a booth.
What kind of stupid election judge can't figure this out?
That's one the inherit flaws in the system, it assumes some sort of god-like abilities for copyright owners to completely ignore the law. It's rather surreal.
There are just so many examples of things like this it's not funny. What if the next generation filesharing application required a password to access the files, or even search for them? That's an access and copy protection device, or whatever the DMCA calls it, and it's illegal to break it.
Now what if everyone starts using the password, oh, 'studmuffin'? Everyone knows the password, everyone can (technically illegally) get in...but the RIAA can't get in to prove any of the files are theirs, or they themselves just violated the DMCA.
Of course, the entire concept is even more surreal when you look at DeCSS. The problem isn't that DeCSS isn't legal, possibly it is, possibly it isn't...the problem is that if it's illegal, there's no good reason any other DVD player should be legal...after all, no DVD player manufacturer has manufactured all DVDs! And hence, if DeCSS is deigned to circumvent something, their product is designed to circumvent the same thing, on everyone else's DVDs! Sony DVD players would be okay if they could play only Sony Pictures movies, but they can, without Univeral's permission, play Univeral's movies! I really wish someone had made a movie, encoded it with CSS, and explictly stated that no current DVD player was authorized to play it except DeCSS.
To paraphrase Douglas Adams, the stupidity of the current uses of the DMCA has overshadowed the fundamental nonsensicalness of the DMCA. It's like banning people from 'being too far to the left of other people', it's just a completely wackjob law.
There's no way to present such a hash or prove the system is secure without, duh, using the system.
It is absolutely 100% flat out impossible for someone who does not have complete access to a box (including disassembling it and putting the HD in another box) to verify that someone hasn't tampered with it.
Of course, that's assuming that there was 'tampering' and not some sort of delibrate design flaw that would allow people with certain knowledge to untraceably abuse the machine. That would be the way to do it.
Printing human readable ballots is the only way to design a secure voting system, full stop. The put in their choices, it prints a ballot, and they either put it in the 'vote' box or the 'shred' box. If it was wrong, it's shredded, and they vote again. If it's right, that vote is the vote that's counted.
The reason no one thinks there is no issues is that this isn't how you fix a copyright violation. First and foremost, you notifity them of the infringing part so they can remove it. Absolutely no one can be liable for anything until they have received (not under an NDA, that does't work) legal notification of their use of copyright code. If they stop, you can sue them for past damages, if they continue, you can get triple damages.
But as SCO hasn't done that, they aren't even, at this point, capable of suing for copyright violation.
That's how a copyright infringement process starts, it's a fairly well defined process.
There's another well defined process by which you make wild claims about what's infringing without showing any evidence, and try to get people to pay you money without any proof.
No, it in itself is not criminal, but SCO distributing copies of the kernel is criminal if their IP claims are correct.
Which they are doing.
Actually, now that I think of it, I think this is almost the defination of extortion. Someone is doing something 'illegal', so you make them pay you money so you won't get them in trouble...which, of course, hasn't made their actions legal.
Not that using Linux actually is illegal, even if it turns out it has SCO stuff in it...copying Linux would be what's illegal. You don't violate any laws by possessing illegally made copies of stuff.
And now that I thnk about it, threatening to sue someone unless they pay you money for something that can't possibly be a crime is also illegal, it's called barratry.
Dry ice won't drain out holes in a bucket, silly. Dry ice sublimates from a solid to a gas without becoming a liquid.
And, frankly, it's an okay way to cool a room as long as you don't have people hanging out in there. Just dump the whole damn container on the floor, or possibly into a pan of water. (Note you don't want too much water, as that will make everything humid, but something like a cookie sheet might be okay.) Then you grab a box fan and aim it over the dry ice.
The danger is that most people can't breathe CO2, so you either can't go in the server room, or you can't keep doing this. (Of course, if you can't go in the server room, you can't keep doing it anyway, but you get my point.) But remember it's CO2, not CO, and it's not 'toxic' or 'poisonious' and it will be very obvious if there's not enough oxygen in the room, unlike with CO, which is impossible to notice.
And won't that just end up with all the heat in the air anyway? I mean, you can't make heat magically disappear, so it seems like all that would do is put a thin layer of water on everything, which would then evaporate, which is great for cooling people down, and might even work on the equipment if you don't short it out, but it's not going to actually cool the room down, so you're just delaying the inevitable.
This post best explains the GPL's legal status. The GPL is not a contract, it is not a 'license' in the same that EULA are licenses. (Yes, it's legally a license, but that's not the point. EULA are proported to be contracts, and that's how they 'work'.)
Meanwhile, the GPL is literally a written permission to do something with your property if they follow certain rules.
It's like you open an area of your land to campers, provided they don't start fires. Well, campers come in, and start fires, and you tried to kick them out, and it went to court. Just how surreal a legal decision would it be if they managed to get all your rules invalidated and suddenly could do anything they wanted?
The idea is obviously completely absurd, but because some people don't understand copyright law and most EULA aren't worth the electrons they're printed on, think that's somehow a possible outcome of a GPL case.
It is your code, it is not a 'contract' where both sides can be in fault, it is nothing but written permission to do some very explict things, very well explained and documented. If they manage to invalidate the written permission, they've just screwed themselves, and that's all they've accomplished.
Now, there are legal issues with the GPL, specifically whether or not linking into a shared library is a 'derived work' or not. But that can't possibly apply to this situtation.
Slashdot Mirror
And you're not paying for the 'right' to listen to recording either. You always have the right to listen to whatever you want, at least in America, that's considered part of the freedom of speech. You don't have to pay for the right to listen to a CD.
All you pay for is the physical copy, period. You have purchased literally a CD, and that's it.
At that point, it is presumed that you, being the legal owner of your copy, can do whatever the hell you want with it, as long as you does not violate copyright law in the process.
And to violate copyright law almost always requires copying the thing. (With exceptions like 'public performences', and stupid shit like the DMCA.)
In other words, you can type on a typewriter, you can drive nails with a hammer, you can play a CD in an appropriate player, or even try them on a record table if you feel like it. You can disassemble your car to make a couch, you can eat your CDs, and you can fill your swimming pool with soft drinks. Basic property rights says, by default, you can do whatever you want with your property. You do not need a 'license' or 'permission' to play a CD you own, as long as you do not run afoul of any law.
Meanwhile, back to the LinkSys discussion, which is about LinkSys using someone elses's superior code. (And, BTW, is a bunch of crap, the article poster has no evidence that the binaries are modified.)
And the second cycle doesn't show fewer rays hitting anything...it shows fewer rays hitting per cycle. As there are the same amount of rays coming it, that just means the cycles will run faster...like I said, the sunlight's just going to hit more O2 and turn it into ozone. That's how the damn thing stays stable anyway!
In other words, the ozone layer is a buffer against UV radiation that is formed by UV radiation, which is, of course, the best and most stable kind of buffer. To alter it, you'd need to vastly alter the chemical composition of the atmopshere. Meanwhile, you can't point at changes in it as some sort of horrible thing we humans have done, because it's equally likely that's the buffer acting exactly how it's always acted...reacting to the sun with slight lag.
Not, BTW, that I'm not a little glad that we stopped using CFCs. The moment we started detecting they got up into the ozone layer, we needed to stop and say 'Hey, where else are these things getting?'.
I just think the decision to stop using them was made because of junk science, professional panicers, and profits. We don't know anywhere near enough about the ozone layer to pretend we 'hurt' it or that it's 'healing'.
All the crappy science out there will talk about how ozone is 'destroyed', when, of course, CFCs are just turning it into O2, which is all that's up there to start with, sans radiation.
And there's plenty of proof the ozone layer doesn't fucking care...strip away some ozone, more radiation will get through, it will hit O2, and you'll get more O3 to stop the radiation. Duh!
Meanwhile, there's plenty of evidence that ozone operates completely independently of anything we've ever done as humans. The thinning in the ozone layer is a rather obvious example, it's interesting how one of the largest gaps in the ozone layer is over a completely uninhabited section of the world. It's due to frickin ice particles.
And, as has been pointed out elsewhere, the ozone layer seems to follow directly behind the sunspot cycle.
Basically, things don't magically stay in balance until we humans release a few chemicals and destroy it. Yes, that can happen, but there's absolutely no evidence of that here. Yes, we might have temporarily altered some of the O2/O3 balance in the upper atmosphere...but, then again, we might not. Meanwhile, the tiny dent we may or may not have made is completely overbalanced by the fact the level of radiation from the sun alters all the time, and that is the main producer of ozone.
If our planet can withstand massive amounts of nitrogen, chloride, flouride, and bromide being belched from volcanos, then it can withstand a bottle of fucking hairspray.
But, hey, you're got 'solid evidence', so let's hear it.
If corporations are people, how can we own them? If corporations are people, why don't they have the right to vote?
It doesn't matter what the idiotic judge pronounced before the trial, or how the court reporter wrote it down. He can certainly consider corporations persons under the constitution, but that does not make it so.
Just being a monopoly at some point in the past doesn't mean you can't ever do anything again.
Yes, there are laws that give them person-like status, but normal laws cannot, duh, modify the constitution. You can't pass a law that says red-headed people are not really people, and thus have no 1st amendment rights, and you can't pass a law that says Microsoft is really a person and has 1st amendment rights.
Now, you can pass a law saying that corporations have the same rights as people, but if you then pass another law saying, no, they don't, all you've got is two laws that conflict. There's no 'shall make no law' issue going on there.
There is no way to bootstrap corporations into 1st amendment protection without a constitutional amendment, as they are not people under the constitution, and hence have no rights whatsoever.
They can be searched without due process, they have be forced to quarter soldiers in their homes (Well, they have no homes, but whatever.), they can be subject to cruel and unusual punishment (As punishment for violating the Sherman antitrust act, Microsoft must now conduct business in the nude.), and they have no right of freedom of speech.
That's not to say people making up a corporation do not have said rights. Just that when people make actions 'behind the corporate veil', it's the corporation legally making such actions.
To rephrase that: I, working for a corporation, can say and do whatever I want. I can either do things as myself, or as a representitive of the corporation.
The government can hold me liable for any action I do as myself, and for some actions I do as the corporation. The government cannot hold me liable for speech either way, no matter what. (And don't nitpick the 'action' vs 'speech' thing. However you want to define them.)
However, the government has no such restriction about corporations, and can hold them liable for 'their' speech, in addition to 'their' actions. It can do anything it wants to them, for any reason at all, it doesn't even technically have to follow due process, a corporation has no rights at all. (Although there are other reasons the government always is supposed to due process.)
Now, if it did something like disband the corporation, that is considered a 'taking' under the law from the stockholders or other owners of the company, and that must follow due process, as, ultimately, people own the company, and you can't take things from people without due process.
Well, yeah, and serial killers beget criminal profilers, but I doubt anyone considers that a good thing.
I'll even be charitable and exclude eyes and genitalia for spammers advertising legal products. But anywhere else is fair game.
We should make things harder because they're getting too easy? What the fuck?
If you want things hard, you can go back to using a typewriter and a mechanical calculator. The rest of the world will keep making things easy.
Tht allows vote buying/vote extortion. All they have to do is ask/demand to see your number.
As for just adding more votes, if everyone can verify their vote is correct and that the total adds up to what was reported, then it's just a matter of making sure the number of votes is less than the number of registered voters. Except in very close elections, you would have to add a bunch more votes to make a difference. Keep in mind, the system we have now doesn't disallow adding more votes either. This would at least allow people to verify their vote was counted correctly.
That doesn't make any sense. You want everyone to read the list and push a button if their vote showed up? well, find, but all you've done is delay the issue...either their 'that's my vote' is matched up with their vote, in which case you're just managed to make it non-anoynous, or it isn't, and there's no reason someone can't sit there and say 'that's my vote' fifty times. Actually, there's no reason they couldn't do that if it wasn't anonymous, either.
In short, that doesn't accomplish anything. People will just verify the extra votes.
You do have a point with election buying. But if buying votes is illegal, then the candidate buying the votes opens himself up to criminal risks by offering to buy votes. The risk is proportional to how many votes he needs to buy to win the election. If he doesn't need many votes, it probably isn't worth the risk. If he needs a lot, the risk is much higher that someone will turn him in.
That's why vote extortion is so popular. Just blackmail/threaten people into voting for you.
It's not a complete solution. But as it is now, the only person who knows how he voted is the voter and he has no way of telling his vote was counted correctly. There are no checks on the vote counters whether they be machines or people. Solve that problem, and the issue of how the votes get counted becomes much simpler.
There is, however, physical security, and that seems to work fairly well. They lock down the unvoted ballots, so it's hard to fake them, and they put the box in plain sight so it's hard to submit more than one, even assuming you managed to get extra blanks. Later, they have a lot of people watching to make sure that extra ballots don't get slipped in later, and they count the ballots from each district as soon as possible, after which it basically becomes impossible to add more.
Compare that with electronic systems, where there's no security at all...it's a blackbox system that get randomly modified beforehand, there's nothing to prevent a delibrate or accidental flaw from being used to vote more than once, and, worse of all, said vote completely vanishes from view from when it's entered to when it's counted, and votes can vanish or appear during that time and there's no way to find out. (Well, as you point out, you can come up with a system for checking if they vanish, which no system actually does, but it's impossible to check if they appear.)
Basically, physical vote security depends on the concept that all workers in a district, or all workers in a vote counting place, or whereever, will not be corrupt, or at least not corrupt in the same way,and hence they will all watch each other to make sure everything's running correctly. Electronic vote security has none of that, there are quite a few places where a single person could alter the vote.
Maybe you should check the actual defination of 'denial of service'. To deny someone service, you have to leave the physical infastructure intact, and instead deny their ability to use the service over said equipment.
Usually this is done by denying them a usable network, but it could be stretched to include standing by a pay phone and airhorning everyone who tries to use it. It cannot be stretched to include 'breaking shit', that's just vandalism.
Or, indeed, if you are thinking of entering into new contracts with SCO.
The fact it hasn't been implimented shows one of three things: People deciding on the system haven't thought three minutes about it, people deciding on the systemdon't know anything about computers, or people deciding on the system don't want a system that can't be tampered with.
Those are your choices: stupid people, ignorant people, or villians.
If you hook them up with IDs, their vote can be tracked.
If you don't do that, then there's a blatantly obvious method of election fraud...just add more votes. Everyone will see their number, and it's all fine.
Note to mention assigning a number, anbd publishing how that number voted, allows election buying, so it's probably best to scrap that idea right now.
It's trivially easy to allow people to only vote once, and it doesn't require anything at all.
All you do is give the poor slobs sitting behind a table a row of buttons, one for each booth, to reset them. Someone walks in, they get one vote, machine stops working until it's reset by the guy behind the table who IDs the people, presumably when he assigns them a booth.
What kind of stupid election judge can't figure this out?
It's entirely possibly to design a network that cannot have DoS. The most obvous way is to not use the fucking internet.
There are just so many examples of things like this it's not funny. What if the next generation filesharing application required a password to access the files, or even search for them? That's an access and copy protection device, or whatever the DMCA calls it, and it's illegal to break it.
Now what if everyone starts using the password, oh, 'studmuffin'? Everyone knows the password, everyone can (technically illegally) get in...but the RIAA can't get in to prove any of the files are theirs, or they themselves just violated the DMCA.
Of course, the entire concept is even more surreal when you look at DeCSS. The problem isn't that DeCSS isn't legal, possibly it is, possibly it isn't...the problem is that if it's illegal, there's no good reason any other DVD player should be legal...after all, no DVD player manufacturer has manufactured all DVDs! And hence, if DeCSS is deigned to circumvent something, their product is designed to circumvent the same thing, on everyone else's DVDs! Sony DVD players would be okay if they could play only Sony Pictures movies, but they can, without Univeral's permission, play Univeral's movies! I really wish someone had made a movie, encoded it with CSS, and explictly stated that no current DVD player was authorized to play it except DeCSS.
To paraphrase Douglas Adams, the stupidity of the current uses of the DMCA has overshadowed the fundamental nonsensicalness of the DMCA. It's like banning people from 'being too far to the left of other people', it's just a completely wackjob law.
It is absolutely 100% flat out impossible for someone who does not have complete access to a box (including disassembling it and putting the HD in another box) to verify that someone hasn't tampered with it.
Of course, that's assuming that there was 'tampering' and not some sort of delibrate design flaw that would allow people with certain knowledge to untraceably abuse the machine. That would be the way to do it.
Printing human readable ballots is the only way to design a secure voting system, full stop. The put in their choices, it prints a ballot, and they either put it in the 'vote' box or the 'shred' box. If it was wrong, it's shredded, and they vote again. If it's right, that vote is the vote that's counted.
Reporting attempts at extortion is not a legal 'attack'. ;)
But as SCO hasn't done that, they aren't even, at this point, capable of suing for copyright violation.
That's how a copyright infringement process starts, it's a fairly well defined process.
There's another well defined process by which you make wild claims about what's infringing without showing any evidence, and try to get people to pay you money without any proof.
This is called a scam.
Which they are doing.
Actually, now that I think of it, I think this is almost the defination of extortion. Someone is doing something 'illegal', so you make them pay you money so you won't get them in trouble...which, of course, hasn't made their actions legal.
Not that using Linux actually is illegal, even if it turns out it has SCO stuff in it...copying Linux would be what's illegal. You don't violate any laws by possessing illegally made copies of stuff.
And now that I thnk about it, threatening to sue someone unless they pay you money for something that can't possibly be a crime is also illegal, it's called barratry.
And, frankly, it's an okay way to cool a room as long as you don't have people hanging out in there. Just dump the whole damn container on the floor, or possibly into a pan of water. (Note you don't want too much water, as that will make everything humid, but something like a cookie sheet might be okay.) Then you grab a box fan and aim it over the dry ice.
The danger is that most people can't breathe CO2, so you either can't go in the server room, or you can't keep doing this. (Of course, if you can't go in the server room, you can't keep doing it anyway, but you get my point.) But remember it's CO2, not CO, and it's not 'toxic' or 'poisonious' and it will be very obvious if there's not enough oxygen in the room, unlike with CO, which is impossible to notice.
And won't that just end up with all the heat in the air anyway? I mean, you can't make heat magically disappear, so it seems like all that would do is put a thin layer of water on everything, which would then evaporate, which is great for cooling people down, and might even work on the equipment if you don't short it out, but it's not going to actually cool the room down, so you're just delaying the inevitable.
This post best explains the GPL's legal status. The GPL is not a contract, it is not a 'license' in the same that EULA are licenses. (Yes, it's legally a license, but that's not the point. EULA are proported to be contracts, and that's how they 'work'.)
Meanwhile, the GPL is literally a written permission to do something with your property if they follow certain rules.
It's like you open an area of your land to campers, provided they don't start fires. Well, campers come in, and start fires, and you tried to kick them out, and it went to court. Just how surreal a legal decision would it be if they managed to get all your rules invalidated and suddenly could do anything they wanted?
The idea is obviously completely absurd, but because some people don't understand copyright law and most EULA aren't worth the electrons they're printed on, think that's somehow a possible outcome of a GPL case.
It is your code, it is not a 'contract' where both sides can be in fault, it is nothing but written permission to do some very explict things, very well explained and documented. If they manage to invalidate the written permission, they've just screwed themselves, and that's all they've accomplished.
Now, there are legal issues with the GPL, specifically whether or not linking into a shared library is a 'derived work' or not. But that can't possibly apply to this situtation.