Linux distributions include choices! I can pick what I want from those choices -- which editor, which word-processor, which web-browser, which audio software, which image and drawing tools, and lots more.
I know my own job, my own needs, my own cognittive style. I am not forced into having to use stuff from some a** named Bill who thinks he knows my job better than I do.
But ran in 32-bit mode. The same way VMS
originally did.
SGI was the first "mainstream" vendor to go
with a 64-bit OS (and it still has 32-bit-mode
and 64-bit-mode executables. DEC was next with
OSF/1 (later renamed Digital UNIX), and eventually VMS. IBM and Sun came later -- about the same
time as Linux (for Alpha and then for MIPS).
IMNHO, there was a very good reason Intel made
such an investment into the IA-64 port of Linux:
so that they could be sure there would be an OS
for it by the time it came on the market!
MS is a latecomer for that (currently have Linux
and two other UNIX ports that I know of with 64-bit support for IA-64).
The US gov't should follow the same route. It makes no sense that the US govm't be beholden to standards of one software company...
And when it deals with individual citizens, I do not take it as Constitutional for the US government to require that those citizens be
subservient to Bill Gates.
Of course, I do believe that the Constitution is supposed to restrict the US
government, which is rather an unusual opinion
these days.
The best solution is for enough people only to buy products that has Linux drivers and Linux clearly printed on the box.
And then drop a polite snail-mail note to the non-supporting competition's Vice President of Marketing
indicating why you were unwilling even to consider his product.
Yes, although we still haven't figured out quite what to do with the waste of
nuclear power generation...
Bullshit.
It has been proposed to dissolve wastes in Pyrex glass, cast the glass into stainless-steel tubs, then case the result in concrete for shipping and bury it into geologically stable desert cave regions. The fatal objection to this plan is that if somehow it were subject to 1000-atmosphere pressures and 500-degree water containing phosphoric acid, it would dissolve the Pyrex and release the wastes.
I'm sorry; I do not find this a credible objection. What I find in this objection is someone who wants to play God. And who doesn't mind lying in the attempt.
Go read through the Copyright Act at the
Cornell
Legal Information Institute and you'll find
that under the current (post-Berne-treqaty) copyright law, a work is automatically copyright
by its author as soon as he/she saves it to disk.
Moreover, the author for the purpose of copyright
law is not a third party (i.e., the work is not a "work for hire") unless either
it is made in the normal course of employment,
or else there is an explicit written grant of
title for the specific work in question.
Students are not ipso facto employees
(lots of case law on that, but I don't have it
at my fingertips).
A general college policy does
not fit under the "specific
written grant" provision, since it does not
name the particular work in question.
OTOH, it is not unreasonable for a university
to require the license for internal use of the
students' works as a condition for granting a
degree (fits the quid-pro-quo consideration required for a valid contract).
As for
I've seen several submissions
where colleges take total posession of reports
and projects created by students in their
classes.
I think that in these cases, it is entirely in
order for the students in question to follow the
precedents of the Software Publishing Association
and the Scientologists. They should get an
ex parte court order to go in with Federal marshals and sieze everything in sight to examine it for evidence of the copyright violations that have taken place. And then sue the socks off the
bastards, both personally and corporately.
But yes there is -- at least if you're using
IA64: SGI open-sourced its Itanium F95 compiler.
And by the way (judging by my own benchmarks on
"real-world" meteorological code, it is one of
the most sophisticated optimizing compilers that
is available.
is in fact old news among ethologists; this article describes modeling support
for trying to get the details of how it happened.
A good reference is Robert Ardrey's The Hunting Hypothesis, published in the late seventies.
Homo sapiens is a cursile group-hunting species,
in fact a very efficient one. Note that the only
places there are large fauna extant are where
the species arose in Africa and Asia, and evolved
slowly enough that the rest of the fauna could keep up. Elsewhere, they didn't have time to adapt.
Part of the solution, I'm afraid is to get some
other source of broadband (problematic, I know),
get a cell-phone, cancel your Plain Old Telephone Service, and then make sure the entire
Verizon management knows why you cancelled your
service with them. And publicise that
fact as widely as you can (send copies to the
state public utility commission, publicize on
usenet in your area, send letters to the editor,
etc.)
They won'tl listen to you until you
hit them in the pocketbook.
The current status is:
McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Comm'n, 514 U.S. 334 (1995).
Justice Stevens delivered the opinion of the Court.
...Accordingly, an
author's decision to remain anonymous, like other decisions concerning omissions or
additions to the content of a publication, is an aspect of the freedom of speech protected by
the First Amendment.
More like sub-25 is what you need, at least for
X-based GUI apps.
Without some major changes in infrastructure and philosophy (aggregating geographically close servers, rather than 'fling wide' topology) it would be impossible to improve upon a 150ms ping time.
At work, I'm at a major supercomputing center right on the backbone. Depending upon where I'm working, I can see a wide range of ping-times
(0.5 on our LAN, 3.0-4.0 to Ga Tech, 6.0-8.0 to
Penn State, 10.0 to NCAR, and currently 25.0 (used
to be 65.0) to/from my home DSL). My experience
is that character-based X apps are uncomfortable
over about 25.0 ms ping times, and GUI apps are
uncomfortable past 10.
As far as the infrastructure goes, Maui supercomputing center is on the order of that
25.0, too, so sub-150 ping times are definitely
quite reachable, if the right hardware is thrown
at it. 150 ms is a tenth of the way to the Moon!
Back in 1993, Microsoft testified in court that their spreadsheet did not use undocumented calls. Recently (1999) researchers at Cambridge University (UK) finished disassembling the machine code -- and it did use those undocumented calls (as Lotus 1-2-3 could not).
Not only does Microsoft use improper monopolistic business practices, they are more than willing to perjure themselves about it.
59. There is a huge flaw with this core of these Supremacy Clause preemption arguments.
The underlying rationales given for performing a separate Supremacy Clause preemption
analysis are exactly the same arguments made for finding the license procedurally or
substantively unconscionable under state contract law.
How does this square with shrinkwrap license clauses that demand no one publish reviews or benchmarks without permission? Both Microsoft and Oracle employ such clauses, for example. It would seem to me that this conflicts with the original (1823?) Supreme Court decision that established the "fair use" doctrine -- the Court declared that Congress might not pass a copyright law so stringent as to restrain freedom of speech nor freedom of the press... and benchmarking and publishing the results certainly is a legitimate exercise of the latter! And the subject would seem to me to be precisely a Supremacy Clause argument...
Their page seems to be a dummy that requires
Javvascript to open up a "toolbar=no,location=no,directories=no,status=no,s crollbars=no,menubar=no,resizable=no,width=720,hei ght=520" popup for display of their actual
content.
It's my computer and
my screen, and I don't
give you permission to take it over!!
Don't they know that about one-fifth
of the Net users out there are irremediably
turned off by insistence on Javascript? --
probably the most clueful one-fifth, and among the
most influential...
CERT says that Javascript constitutes a
security risk. Who are they to argue?
particularly inasmuch as wireless
networking is a field particularly in need
of security, since the signal is going
over the public airwaves!
Sorry, too late: I took a rather stronger
approach, and have already sent off the
following letter to the Editor of the ABA Journal:
It is well-known in the computer industry that allowing so-called
"active content" -- such as Javascript, Microsoft VBS, etc. -- from
sources on the Internet to execute on one's computer, one opens
him/herself up to a plethora of security risks.
Furthermore, it is observed that Net browsers with such active content
enabled crash _much_ more often than browsers with it disabled (and
in some cases, it is easily demonstrated that certain Javascript
based sites such as Brooks Brothers _reliably_ cause certain browser
combinations to crash).
Given the above facts, and the further fact that the ABA insists on
Javascript-enabled browsers before it lets the reader access them,
what I want to know is this:
When the ABA's web site crashes my system, is
the ABA
willing to pay for all the consequent
damages?
IANAL, but if the article weren't satire (or probably even
though it is), the trademark is quite vulnerable to
challenge. Recall that Bayer lost the trademark
over "aspirin" because the term had become one
used generically by a large portion of the public,
rather than as a trade name for a specific product.
In this case, the generic use of emoticons greatly predates the trademark (allegedly applied for in 1998): According to ESR's _The New Hacker Dictionary_,
2nd Ed (1993),
...used to indicate an emotional state in email
or news... are virtually required under certain
circumstances in high-volume text-only communications forums...
...are in common use. These include...
:-(
It appears that the emoticon was invented by one
Scott Fahlman on the CMU bboard systems around
1980...
So: invalid, indefensible trademark--
already in use as a generic even before the
trademark application.
One good thing will happen if Ashcroft is the
Attorney General: he is known to be an advocate
both of encryption and increased support/protection
for personal privacy.
I always hear this argument when it comes to
copy protection. "It's not fair because people
have legitimate uses."
At least wthin the US, what about the argument below?
Copy protection breaks the Supreme Law of the
Land; those who have suborned the law to support
it are thieves and robbers, and the fact that
they have willing accomplices in Congress, the
Executive, and the Courts does NOT lessen their
culpability!
The US Constitution is the
supreme law of the land in the US.
It says that the protection afforded by copyright MUST be
limited in term; when the DMCA breaks that Constitutional requirement by supporting content protection with unlimited duration, it is itself illegal.
Those who suborned Congress, the President, and
the courts into accepting it and enforcing it
are themselves ipso facto thieves and
robbers, and the Congress, President, and judges
who have colluded in this are oathbreakers and
outlaws, breaking their oaths of office to support and defend the Constitution.
Furthermore, at least according to the Supreme
Court, the Government may not invent nor enforce any notion of intellectual property so strong that it suppresses First
Amendment freedom
of speech nor freedom of the press. To suppress
Prof. Felten's research under the DMCA is also
an outrageous infringement of these freedoms.
For all there is wrong with WallMart, what about
the action of the RIAA to prevent them from discounting CDs? It also violates this Supreme Court decision.
In the case of Bobbs-Merrill Co. v. Straus, 210 U.S. 339 (1908) [sorry, the web-links I know are fee-for-service: WestDoc or Lexis-Nexis], the Supreme Court held that the exclusive right to sell copyrighted works only applied to the first sale of a copyrighted work. 210 U.S. 339, 349-350.
While the copyright owner retained the underlying copyright to the expression fixed in the work, the copyright owner gave up his ability to control the fate of the work once it had been sold.
More recently, on March 9, 1998, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the first sale doctrine applies to copyrighted goods produced in the United States and sold in foreign markets. In the case of Quality King Distributors, Inc. v. L'anza Research International, Inc., 1998 WL 96265 (U.S. Cal.), the court held that the first sale doctrine prevents copyright owners from controlling the importation of copyrighted goods sold outside the United States. The court found that section 602(a) of the Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. 602(a), gives copyright owners the right to control the importation of copies into the United States, is an extension of the copyright owner's exclusive right to distribute copies under section 106 and not an additional right of the copyright owner.
So the Authors Guild action is an attempt to do an end-run around the Supreme Court. As far as the
"earn no payment for the authors and publishers of the book" goes, that is exactly the point -- the SC says that they have already earned their payment and are not due more!
This is an unconscionable power play and should be slapped down as such. Go, Jeff Bezos!
When the engages in a conspiracy to break US law,
and then acts within the US to break US law, it is in fact a criminal organization and should be punished accordingly.
Note 1: In a long series of decisions dating back all the way to 1817, the
US Supreme Court has held that "fair use" is a Constitutional free speech/free press right.
Note 2: "Conspiracy" consists in an agreement among parties to violate the law, together with at least one overt act [within the
jurisdiction of the law] (but which act need not itself be illegal) in accordance with that agreement. Conspiracy -- even to commit a misdemeanor -- is a felony, as the KKK found out in the '60s.
Note 3: Acting within the US to deprive US citizens of their Constitutional rights is not a legal act.
IANAL, but that's how I see it: if the IOC tries this against US web-sites, they should be prosecuted.
In the US, the Constitution provides that "intellectual property" is a synthetic (artificial, "invented") monopoly that exists as law only subject to the constraints of the Supreme Law of the Land, the Constitution. In particular, in the original Supreme Court cases that established the "fair use doctrine", the Court
said that copyright law can not be so strong that it supresses freedom of speech nor freedom of the press.
IANAL, but if I read the BBC's coverage correctly, that is exactly what the IOC is attempting to do. They are "engaging in an agreement to violate [US] law, together with at least one overt act toward that end" -- the definition of conspiracy. And conspiracy is a felony.
So if they continue with such action against any
US website, the individuals involved should be prosecuted and (when found guilty) jailed, and the corporation either fined or broken up, and in any case not allowed to engage in any business in the US.
Also, to make matters worse, usually the university requires a full declaration of all intellectual property developed by you EVEN if the university doesn't own it.
Under the copyright act, it is the act of fixing a creative work on paper (or other media) that creates the copyright item. Under this standard,
your letters home to Mom are copyright works... does the university expect everyone to report each and every one of those? If not, they are setting up a vague and capricious policy, and should be taken to the cleaners on that account.
In many film depts. for example, the university explicitly owns copyright on work created. My undergrad college sold a video piece I had worked on (and which I and my collaborators had contributed our own money toward making, and received no compensation for other than course credit).
IANAL, but (assuming it was in the US), from my reading of US CODE TITLE 17 SECTION 101 (web-referenced elsewhere on this page), your undergraduate institution was breaking the law big time, and you could get them rather massively for copyright infringement.
Slashdot Mirror
I know my own job, my own needs, my own cognittive style. I am not forced into having to use stuff from some a** named Bill who thinks he knows my job better than I do.
originally did.
SGI was the first "mainstream" vendor to go
with a 64-bit OS (and it still has 32-bit-mode
and 64-bit-mode executables. DEC was next with
OSF/1 (later renamed Digital UNIX), and eventually VMS. IBM and Sun came later -- about the same
time as Linux (for Alpha and then for MIPS).
IMNHO, there was a very good reason Intel made
such an investment into the IA-64 port of Linux:
so that they could be sure there would be an OS
for it by the time it came on the market!
MS is a latecomer for that (currently have Linux
and two other UNIX ports that I know of with 64-bit support for IA-64).
And when it deals with individual citizens, I do not take it as Constitutional for the US government to require that those citizens be
subservient to Bill Gates.
Of course, I do believe that the Constitution is supposed to restrict the US
government, which is rather an unusual opinion
these days.
It has been proposed to dissolve wastes in Pyrex glass, cast the glass into stainless-steel tubs, then case the result in concrete for shipping and bury it into geologically stable desert cave regions. The fatal objection to this plan is that if somehow it were subject to 1000-atmosphere pressures and 500-degree water containing phosphoric acid, it would dissolve the Pyrex and release the wastes.
I'm sorry; I do not find this a credible objection. What I find in this objection is someone who wants to play God. And who doesn't mind lying in the attempt.
FWIW.
IANAL, but...
Go read through the Copyright Act at the Cornell Legal Information Institute and you'll find that under the current (post-Berne-treqaty) copyright law, a work is automatically copyright by its author as soon as he/she saves it to disk. Moreover, the author for the purpose of copyright law is not a third party (i.e., the work is not a "work for hire") unless either it is made in the normal course of employment, or else there is an explicit written grant of title for the specific work in question.
Students are not ipso facto employees (lots of case law on that, but I don't have it at my fingertips).
A general college policy does not fit under the "specific written grant" provision, since it does not name the particular work in question.
OTOH, it is not unreasonable for a university to require the license for internal use of the students' works as a condition for granting a degree (fits the quid-pro-quo consideration required for a valid contract).
As for
I think that in these cases, it is entirely in order for the students in question to follow the precedents of the Software Publishing Association and the Scientologists. They should get an ex parte court order to go in with Federal marshals and sieze everything in sight to examine it for evidence of the copyright violations that have taken place. And then sue the socks off the bastards, both personally and corporately.fwiw
me, too! ;-(
Part of the solution, I'm afraid is to get some other source of broadband (problematic, I know), get a cell-phone, cancel your Plain Old Telephone Service, and then make sure the entire Verizon management knows why you cancelled your service with them. And publicise that fact as widely as you can (send copies to the state public utility commission, publicize on usenet in your area, send letters to the editor, etc.)
They won'tl listen to you until you hit them in the pocketbook.
The current status is: McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Comm'n, 514 U.S. 334 (1995).
Justice Stevens delivered the opinion of the Court.
As far as the infrastructure goes, Maui supercomputing center is on the order of that 25.0, too, so sub-150 ping times are definitely quite reachable, if the right hardware is thrown at it. 150 ms is a tenth of the way to the Moon!
Not only does Microsoft use improper monopolistic business practices, they are more than willing to perjure themselves about it.
fwiw
In this case, the generic use of emoticons greatly predates the trademark (allegedly applied for in 1998): According to ESR's _The New Hacker Dictionary_, 2nd Ed (1993),
So: invalid, indefensible trademark-- already in use as a generic even before the trademark application.One good thing will happen if Ashcroft is the Attorney General: he is known to be an advocate both of encryption and increased support/protection for personal privacy.
Furthermore, at least according to the Supreme Court, the Government may not invent nor enforce any notion of intellectual property so strong that it suppresses First Amendment freedom of speech nor freedom of the press. To suppress Prof. Felten's research under the DMCA is also an outrageous infringement of these freedoms.
That's the blunt version of your answer.
For all there is wrong with WallMart, what about the action of the RIAA to prevent them from discounting CDs? It also violates this Supreme Court decision.
In the case of Bobbs-Merrill Co. v. Straus, 210 U.S. 339 (1908) [sorry, the web-links I know are fee-for-service: WestDoc or Lexis-Nexis], the Supreme Court held that the exclusive right to sell copyrighted works only applied to the first sale of a copyrighted work. 210 U.S. 339, 349-350.
More recently, on March 9, 1998, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the first sale doctrine applies to copyrighted goods produced in the United States and sold in foreign markets. In the case of Quality King Distributors, Inc. v. L'anza Research International, Inc., 1998 WL 96265 (U.S. Cal.), the court held that the first sale doctrine prevents copyright owners from controlling the importation of copyrighted goods sold outside the United States. The court found that section 602(a) of the Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. 602(a), gives copyright owners the right to control the importation of copies into the United States, is an extension of the copyright owner's exclusive right to distribute copies under section 106 and not an additional right of the copyright owner.So the Authors Guild action is an attempt to do an end-run around the Supreme Court. As far as the "earn no payment for the authors and publishers of the book" goes, that is exactly the point -- the SC says that they have already earned their payment and are not due more!
This is an unconscionable power play and should be slapped down as such. Go, Jeff Bezos!
Note 1: In a long series of decisions dating back all the way to 1817, the US Supreme Court has held that "fair use" is a Constitutional free speech/free press right.
Note 2: "Conspiracy" consists in an agreement among parties to violate the law, together with at least one overt act [within the jurisdiction of the law] (but which act need not itself be illegal) in accordance with that agreement. Conspiracy -- even to commit a misdemeanor -- is a felony, as the KKK found out in the '60s.
Note 3: Acting within the US to deprive US citizens of their Constitutional rights is not a legal act.
IANAL, but that's how I see it: if the IOC tries this against US web-sites, they should be prosecuted.
IANAL, but if I read the BBC's coverage correctly, that is exactly what the IOC is attempting to do. They are "engaging in an agreement to violate [US] law, together with at least one overt act toward that end" -- the definition of conspiracy. And conspiracy is a felony. So if they continue with such action against any US website, the individuals involved should be prosecuted and (when found guilty) jailed, and the corporation either fined or broken up, and in any case not allowed to engage in any business in the US.