I think this could stop Kazaa quicker than anything else. They have had how many million downloads?
The obvious route for Kaza to go would be to just pay the $50,000 fee. After 'only' 2 million downloads this would amortize to 2.5cents per download -- and dropping.
I don't know if they'd have to pay the streaming fee, since they don't directly do the down/up-loading. (an interesting legal fight, there).
IIRC, Britain requires that two psychiatrists, in addition to the person who recommends the sectioning (usually the patient's psychiatrist), sign off on this, and as I understand it, usually they'll interview the individual before making their recommendation.
And if you really want to incarcerate someone, how hard would it be to get two doctors to sign off on him? Say: Two doctors who are known for prescribing extra narcotics to their patients turning a blind eye to multiple other prescriptions -- or a pediophile child psychologist?
-----
A number of years ago, there was a Lawyer in Vancouver by the name of
Jack Cram. He was most famous for taking on the government for conspiracies (and winning in court).
One day he took on a case that was to undo him: It was a young lawyer (Renata Andreas-Auger) who claimed that she was being harrassed by the Law Society of BC (who control the lawyers).
It seemed like a reasonably straight-forward case to Cram, but after taking on her case, it seemed that the Law Society -- and even some of the judges of the Supreme court of BC (The SCBC handles primary trials for civil cases and serious criminal offences with appeals going to the court of appeal).
After suffering for a while at the hands of the Law Society and the Courts, Cram finally ended up in a legal fight with the court system itself (oops). In the middle of the trial (and a whole boatload of other shenanigans), He was suddenly declared, by two doctors, to be a mental health threat. They whisked him off to a mental hostpital where he was held for evaluation and 'treatment' for a week.
The "committal" was authorized by two doctors who had just happened (what a coincidence!) to be sitting in the courtroom and had declared on the certificates that they had examined Cram! Now it's committal by remote control!
-- from A tale of Two Lawyers
The doctors at the mental facility where he was held eventually gave him a clean bill of health, but he spent a good period of time heavily drugged, etc.
Even though he was declared mentally fit, he came out of the hospital essentially a broken man. He handed his case over to another lawyer, meekly accepted a suspension of his bar priveledges, and has since (from what I've heard) refused to talk about the cases.
I interviewed him on video, in the middle of the trial (just before he was comitted). He explained to me his case, the case of Renata Andreas-Auger and the case/comspiracy that was beneath the whole mess.
The case -- Delgamuukw was famous in it's own right. It was a landmark Native rights case. The trial Judge incensed the Canadien people by declaring that the native people of BC were, among other things "Savages whose lives were brutish and short". It eventually made it's way to the Supreme Court of Canada, where rights of the natives to unceeded lands were given at least some acknowledgement before ordering the case back to be retried under a new judge.
Renata had been an articling student doing research for the Delgamuukq legal team, and had found a basic block of constitutional law that would (should) have cemented the case for the natives. She felt that the lawyers had ignored her research, and effectively thrown the case.
When she finally convinced Jack to look at the Delgamuukw case (some time after he'd started to take flack for her persecution case), Jack concluded that -- yes the lawyers had sabotaged their case at law, and had proceded instead with a very weak argument -- But that shouldn't have been a big shock, because their biggest clients were essentially the people who would have been most hurt by a successful prosecution.
The affected parties? The Government and the resource industries. The conspiracy, according to Cram, was a consipircy of silence over native rights. Constitutional documents acknowledge native claim to the lands of North America until, and unless they sign those lands over in a public treaty. For over 95% of BC that's never been done and, for decades, it was actually illegal for natives to hire a lawyer over land claims.
According to Cram, the native claims are real, and laws on Fiduciary duty would call for penalties against the Canadien & BC governments in the range of 3 times the current value of any resources taken out of BC in the last century. Read: bankrupt the country.
Besides Cram and Auger, I've seen Two other lawyers willing to take on native claims using those constitutional laws. One had his license to practice revoked. The other was 'warned off' with a veiled threat that he took quite seriously.
No black copters, No trenchcoats. Just a bunch of paper and people in $1,200 suits. And it scares me to the bone.
(damn. I thought I had some stuff about the Cram case on my website.... Oh well.)
The computer is your friend
The computer is your only friend
Trust the computer
Trust the computer in all things
and remember -- in all liklihood, the computer wants you dead
(for this, my signature is especially appropriate).
Yep, they're the biggest player on the block. Yep, just about everybody that releases a package for Linux will release an RPM. Yep, they sometimes make silly decisions that cause problems for users. Yep, they're trying to make money off of their name and recognition.
Nothing wrong with all that (except the stupid decisions).
Where RedHat can't be a Redmond is in the area of control and ownership. RH doesn't control Linux, and they don't own it. They can't threaten to pack up their ball and go home with it, because they've given us all copies of the ball.
Unlike MS, RedHat actually has to keep their customers happy if they want to keep 'control' of the market They can't sue me for fixing their broken code They can't stop me from distributing a version of Linux that has IE instead of Mozilla or Knoquerer as the default browser (but they can tease me mercilesslY) They can't sue me for installing 137 copies instead of 130. They can only convince me to pay them for support or training or for the fact that, in creating the distributions, they provide a valuable service that I'm willing to pay to support.
If you reall only need the equivalent of an RS232 connection, then you may only need a crossover cable. Similarly, it may be cheaper to provide two or three ethernet trancievers and crossover cables to the associated units, than it would be to pay for a third-party low-power hub.
Sigma took the XVid code, modified it, and then released a binary-only version with an absolutely non-GPL EULA.
they got caught red handed.
They mumbled something along the lines of "I'll get right back to you" and then stopped answering calles.
The XVid served a 'notice of intent to declare war'.
Sigma declares that one of their programmers 'accidently' copied 'a bit' of the XVid code, but that management really didn't know
sigma 'graciously' decided to release a version of their software under GPL, but continue to claim copyright.
Now having access to the code, there seems to be
Wholesale copying of XVid code
copying of other projects' code as well
sophmore attempts to cover up some of the plagiarism.
It seems to me that the best thing to do is to demand that Sigma simply turn over copyright to the entirety of the code to the XVid people (except for stuff stolen from other people). This would save a future fight over what was stolen and what wasn't. It also makes up for the disruption caused by their criminal acts. They would, however, be allowed to pretty up the spin on this 'gracious' act in some way that made them look like reasonably good guys.
If this goes to court, then I would expect that any decent judge/jury would do the same thing (along with a nice spoonful of monetary relief. The assignment of ownership would be part declaratory relief and part punitive damages. It would save the court from the trouble of figuring out what was stolen and what was genuinely created by Sigma.
(
If you take Sigma's declaration at face value this really wouldn't hurt Sigma much, anyways, because they're now claiming that they originally intended to give away the whole project anyways. )
What they mean is a 1 microsecond shutter speed - 1 microsecond frames with 9707 microsecond gaps
Wrong: the camera takes 1million frames per second (but only for about 103 microseconds), and then it can play back those 103 frames at 10 frames/second. ( It's great for some applications, but it's obviously not going to do anything usefull if you're trying to do a time-lapsed sunset:-)
[8gigabits/second for a tiny 300x300 image.... ] What are we going to use to transfer that much data around a cluster?
From reading the article, the bandwidth problem was solved by giving each pixel of the camera it's own memory. One problem that I can see is that: This is going to eat space on the chip that would normally be used for imaging. If you put too much memory around a pixel, you're going to start suffering in the quality of the image. (and they already had to increase the size of each pixel to be able to capture the light fast enough)
It would seem that they pegged the usable tradeoff at 103 samples per pixel, so that's how many images you can store.
I am not convinced that the $0 price tag even has
to be admitted into the case.
I was originally of the opinion that
ot would be pretty hard not to mention the $0 price tag, but it turns out that you really don't have to mention the GPL.
All you have to do is accuse them of violating copyright for your source code. You can easily prove that they have access to it, and they seem to have done the analysis to show, with reasonable certainty, that the object code is probably based on the same source.
For someone who was following the spirit (if not the letter) of the GPL, the normal defence would have been that the GPL gave them The right to make those copies.
Since Sigma is refusing to release the source code, they can't use the GPL as a defence.
(If the GPL doesn't apply, this becomes a simple copyright violation case.)
As a simple copyright case, the questions would be:
Did the defendants distribute copies of the code in question?
Did the defendants refuse distribute true copies of the source code in question?
Did the defendants have permission to distribute the code in question (a simple assertion to the negative would be sufficient -- they would have to produce prove (or at least raise a reasonable question) that they did have permission).
I don't think that lack of price is an issue. There are many things that are distributed to the public free of charge. Radio is without cost. So are television and the many weeklies distributed on street corners The Georgia Straight that I pick up on Vancouver's streets have copyright (syndicated, even!) articles in them. If I was to plagiarise and resell them, I'd be up sh*t creek.
FUD about OSers being anarchists aside -- GPL code should not be judged on a different basis.
Just because I'm not charging cash for something doesn't mean that it's not valuable -- or that there isn't a 'price' associated with access.
Software distributed with the GPL is not without cost The 'price' of using GPL code is that if you make changes to the code, you can't distribute the modified object code without also distributing the modified source code.
(I.E. the price is your derivative code).
In any case, these people are stealing copyright code without permission. Since they're charging for it, then they are liable for both the price they're charging for this stolen code and any punitive damages (which can be quite hefty for copyright violation).
It looks like this might be a good time to call in the lawyers.
____________
And yes there IS damage to me from having someone steal my GPL code. When I put code under the GPL, my expectation is that, in return for making my source code freely available, I'll get back from the community that uses my code the work that they do to improve my code. When someone steals my code and puts it into a proprietary product, I loose in a few ways:
I don't get the 'payment' of the changes you made to my code.
If you make 'interesting' changes, I have to pay you to get access to my code (as modified by you).
If people start using your code instead of mine, then they may stop contributing GPL codebase.
I don't get the public exposure that comes from the acknowledgement that people are using my code. (this could cost me job opportunities).
They seemed to start to go in the direction.. they talked about how MTV, for example, managed to launch the video-based British (re)invasion by providing an avenue for a 'different' musical style to enter the market, and how the current market has become monopolized and bland.
They didn't however, go the the next stage of the argument -- that P2P networks have provided an avenue for (currently) non-mainstream artists to get exposure and market share.
They also seem to miss the question of whether the rise and fall of Napster coincided with the rise and fall of CD purchases. These seemed like obvious next steps for the article, but then it just seemed to.... stop.
That's their answer to questions like: What if someone threatens to beat you into submission with a lawsuit? The answer is: Many of our volunteers are also lawyers, thus litigation will be annoying but free,
It's not uncommon for a big company to sue someone even though they would never win. The expectation is that the little guy -- despite being in the right -- will give up because the cost of surrender is less than the cost of winning.
(happily for the ranch), this business model doesn't work when you're threatening to sue a community that includes a handfull of law firms.
This is also (I would guess) why they were able to afford to litigate QWEST into providing the spare loops. Litigation is expensive if you have to pay for the lawyers. If you are are self represented (and just happen to have a few decades of combined legal experience), it's a lot less expensive.
Self represented, I've managed to engage in lawsuits against some of the largest entities in this province for a total cost of about
Getting a lawyer to represent me in a contempt of court accusation that was dropped in the preliminary stages cost more than that -- even after I got subsidised by the Legal Aid Society.
Windows is, at it's heart a single user operating system. It'd been kludged to handle multiple user profiles. The kludges are getting better as time goes on, but they're still kludges.
Unix, on the other hand, was designed -- from the start -- as a multi-user operating system. Running it as a desktop operating system is simply the degenerate case of N==1.
Unless users find a local root exploit, they pretty much can't mess up each others' settings.
There are the system-wide settings which are generally controlled by the system's administrator and then there are the user settings which can usually override the system settings -- but only for that user.
All user settings (with the exception of the password information) are stored in the user's home directory. In a normal setting, users have full control over the contents of their home directory.
Under normal conditions, If I (as a regular user) install an application, other users wouldn't have access to them unless (1) I allowed them permission to access them, and (2) they explicitly referenced my installation.
[
About the only time you'll see two users' preferences getting in the way of each other would be if you were running two separate X servers in different virtual consoles. It allows for rapid switching between users, but runs into the problem of fighting over things like the sound hardware (I guess you could install two sound cards, but that's getting into woo-woo land for me.
I've tested such an installation and it works, but it's not an any default setup that I know of. It's just fun to experiment with. All you have to do is add an entry to the xdm/Xservers file to start a second server on display:1 . For RedHat, it'll start the extra login screen in console 8.
]
Been there, done that (vicariously)
on
MIT vs. Las Vegas
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
A friend of mine did that. He got a grant of free CPU time on the mainframe at the University of Alberta in around 1979/80 to do stastical analisys on blackjack. He came up with a nice card counting system.. managed to reduce it to a single index-card
cheat sheet. There were different rules for local (Edmonton) blackjack and Las Vegas.
He was able to make money off of it, but I'm not sure how much.
The FBI also used card counting many years ago when they did some undercover investigation in
Las Vegas. They siphoned cash through the Casinos and then did statistical analysis on how much of it made it to the banks. They used Card counting to limit their losses.
With a proper statistical analysis, a 1-in-a-million designation doesn't mean that it happened 300 times today. It means that -- given that it happened -- there's a 0.0001% chance that it's a coincidence.
In other words, it would be VERY worth spending the manpower to investigate a 1-in-1million 'coincidence' unless there's some collateral indication that it really is a mistake (e.g. some Darwin Award deaths).
The letter claims that he used the Godzilla name and a reptilian image of some sort on his site. If that's not true, then they've got a REAL flimsy suit against him. Probably just some under-utilized lawyers on a make-work binge.
We need to go to 13 to standardize with the current standard for the rest of this planet, but they're already planning to go to 14 soon -- so anybody who limits their software expansion to 13 digits is going to be in for some needless extra expense in a couple more years.
Disk space is cheap these days. Not expanding to allow for at least 14 digits would be the biggest waste of manpower I can think of. For a bit of forward expandability, I'd say allow for at least 16 digits. That way, you can allow for future expansion and/or allow the inclusion of your own data via secondary ID units.
In this case, they claim that he actually used the "Godzilla" name, and the image of a Godzilla-like creature. I think that his biggest mistake was not attributing the owners of the trademark he was 'using', and not including something like "used without permission", or "appologies to the {I for get the name} -- owners of the Godzilla trademark".
For the most part, however, I doubt that people would think that dave was endorsed by the Godzilla trademark owners. Less so, Mozilla which doesn't actually use the "Godzilla" name. There's nothing wrong with parody, or flattery by mimicry. I don't think that there's much reason for fear, as long as the Mozilla group doesn't try to branch into the horror-movie genre.
About the only one of those three that MS-Windos has over linux would be the ability to switch display modes quickly.
I think most people would find CTRL-ALT-Plus and CTRL-ALT-Minus quicker than anything using a mouse.
I guess that I should have said, "the ability to change display modes straight-forwardly". The ctrl-alt-{+,-} only changes the screen resolution, but not the virtual window size, so you end up in virtual-scroll mode (which I generally find annoying).
In a perfect Linux world, it should be possible to switch from 1600x1288x32bit to 640x480x8bit and decide whether or not to keep the desktop in fullscreen mode or switch it to virtual-scroll.
Even better, would be the ability to have each of the multiple desktops be in it's own resolution (might be more backwards compatible for many programs than flipping modes for an already populated desktop)
It's not so much a case of replacing the motherboard in an existing machine -- I have, however, moved the drive for a machine from my older box, to my newer box... (easier than moving all the files). To the OS, this is the same as replacing the motherboard.
In the world of special relativity, the observer is always stationary (It't not acceleration -- it's just changes in gravity.).
The article doesn't really do much to 'debunk' the original story. It's full of lots of quasi-science that doesn't really touch on the real question.
I would have considered it a proper debunking if it had done a peoper statistical analysis of the deaths -- or something like that. Instead, it simply explained away a couple of the deaths, and hand-waved the others. When the original story went out, I was willing to explain away 3 of the original 11 deaths as 'normal' That still left a cluster of 8 wierd disappearances. This article hand-waved at least one of the deaths that I had already considered 'normal'.
On the pro-cosnpiracy side of this story:
A similar story occured in Vancouver: about 50 or 60 women mysteriously disappeared over the last 10 years in Vancouver. Most of these women were drug users and/or prostitutes. The nature of a prostitute's business is such that a prostitute would be a very juicy target for a serial killer (where else can you consistently get a woman to wander off with a stranger to a remote and secluded area?)
In any case, the Vancouver Police department continued to pooh-pooh complaints of Downtown Eastside residents that these disappearances were unusual. They simply explained it as 'they probably just skipped town'. It wasn't until America's Most Wanted did a story about how Vancouver was a great place to be a serial killer, that they responded at all to the complaints. They still spent a year, or more claiming that it was just a coincidence, despite the fact that a forensic statistician on their own staff found clear evidence of improbability.
It wasn't until last year that some real manpower was put into the investigation, and this year
a pig farmer was charged with the murder of a half dozen or more of the missing prostitutes. This summer police hired a bunch of anthropology students to help look for bone fragments and body bits in the dirt pile on his farm.
The moral of the story: Just because something MAY be a coincidence, doesn't mean that it is. If you want to prove, or disprove, a conspiracy around this cluster, you need to look at the whole cluster -- not just point out the easily explainable (or more worrisome) deaths and hand-wave about statistics.
The story at the base of this article neither proves nor disproves the probability of a conspiracy around this cluster of deaths. It simply points out that they're not all unexplainable (something that was clear some time ago).
It would be interesting to find out if any other early inventors shared Franklin's generous views on patents.
The inventor of the bicycle (a blacksmith who made one with iron wheels) refused to patent it, and seemed to have been pleased that other people copied (and later improved on) his design.
There was a story about him a month or so ago in The Georgia Straight a month, or so ago, but I don't have the time to hunt it down (got a class to get off to).
Slashdot Mirror
The obvious route for Kaza to go would be to just pay the $50,000 fee. After 'only' 2 million downloads this would amortize to 2.5cents per download -- and dropping.
I don't know if they'd have to pay the streaming fee, since they don't directly do the down/up-loading. (an interesting legal fight, there).
And if you really want to incarcerate someone, how hard would it be to get two doctors to sign off on him? Say: Two doctors who are known for prescribing extra narcotics to their patients turning a blind eye to multiple other prescriptions -- or a pediophile child psychologist?
-----
A number of years ago, there was a Lawyer in Vancouver by the name of Jack Cram. He was most famous for taking on the government for conspiracies (and winning in court).
One day he took on a case that was to undo him: It was a young lawyer (Renata Andreas-Auger) who claimed that she was being harrassed by the Law Society of BC (who control the lawyers).
It seemed like a reasonably straight-forward case to Cram, but after taking on her case, it seemed that the Law Society -- and even some of the judges of the Supreme court of BC (The SCBC handles primary trials for civil cases and serious criminal offences with appeals going to the court of appeal).
After suffering for a while at the hands of the Law Society and the Courts, Cram finally ended up in a legal fight with the court system itself (oops). In the middle of the trial (and a whole boatload of other shenanigans), He was suddenly declared, by two doctors, to be a mental health threat. They whisked him off to a mental hostpital where he was held for evaluation and 'treatment' for a week.
The doctors at the mental facility where he was held eventually gave him a clean bill of health, but he spent a good period of time heavily drugged, etc.
Even though he was declared mentally fit, he came out of the hospital essentially a broken man. He handed his case over to another lawyer, meekly accepted a suspension of his bar priveledges, and has since (from what I've heard) refused to talk about the cases.
I interviewed him on video, in the middle of the trial (just before he was comitted). He explained to me his case, the case of Renata Andreas-Auger and the case/comspiracy that was beneath the whole mess.
The case -- Delgamuukw was famous in it's own right. It was a landmark Native rights case. The trial Judge incensed the Canadien people by declaring that the native people of BC were, among other things "Savages whose lives were brutish and short". It eventually made it's way to the Supreme Court of Canada, where rights of the natives to unceeded lands were given at least some acknowledgement before ordering the case back to be retried under a new judge.
Renata had been an articling student doing research for the Delgamuukq legal team, and had found a basic block of constitutional law that would (should) have cemented the case for the natives. She felt that the lawyers had ignored her research, and effectively thrown the case.
When she finally convinced Jack to look at the Delgamuukw case (some time after he'd started to take flack for her persecution case), Jack concluded that -- yes the lawyers had sabotaged their case at law, and had proceded instead with a very weak argument -- But that shouldn't have been a big shock, because their biggest clients were essentially the people who would have been most hurt by a successful prosecution.
The affected parties? The Government and the resource industries. The conspiracy, according to Cram, was a consipircy of silence over native rights. Constitutional documents acknowledge native claim to the lands of North America until, and unless they sign those lands over in a public treaty. For over 95% of BC that's never been done and, for decades, it was actually illegal for natives to hire a lawyer over land claims.
According to Cram, the native claims are real, and laws on Fiduciary duty would call for penalties against the Canadien & BC governments in the range of 3 times the current value of any resources taken out of BC in the last century. Read: bankrupt the country.
Besides Cram and Auger, I've seen Two other lawyers willing to take on native claims using those constitutional laws. One had his license to practice revoked. The other was 'warned off' with a veiled threat that he took quite seriously.
No black copters, No trenchcoats. Just a bunch of paper and people in $1,200 suits. And it scares me to the bone.
(damn. I thought I had some stuff about the Cram case on my website.... Oh well.)
The computer is your only friend
Trust the computer
Trust the computer in all things
and remember -- in all liklihood, the computer wants you dead
(for this, my signature is especially appropriate).
Nothing wrong with all that (except the stupid decisions).
Where RedHat can't be a Redmond is in the area of control and ownership. RH doesn't control Linux, and they don't own it. They can't threaten to pack up their ball and go home with it, because they've given us all copies of the ball.
Unlike MS, RedHat actually has to keep their customers happy if they want to keep 'control' of the market
They can't sue me for fixing their broken code
They can't stop me from distributing a version of Linux that has IE instead of Mozilla or Knoquerer as the default browser (but they can tease me mercilesslY)
They can't sue me for installing 137 copies instead of 130.
They can only convince me to pay them for support or training or for the fact that, in creating the distributions, they provide a valuable service that I'm willing to pay to support.
If you reall only need the equivalent of an RS232 connection, then you may only need a crossover cable. Similarly, it may be cheaper to provide two or three ethernet trancievers and crossover cables to the associated units, than it would be to pay for a third-party low-power hub.
The Gnome article Stolen from butthead's post.
- Sigma took the XVid code, modified it, and then released a binary-only version with an absolutely non-GPL EULA.
- they got caught red handed.
- They mumbled something along the lines of "I'll get right back to you" and then stopped answering calles.
-
The XVid served a 'notice of intent to declare war'.
- Sigma declares that one of their programmers 'accidently' copied 'a bit' of the XVid code, but that management really didn't know
-
sigma 'graciously' decided to release a version of their software under GPL, but continue to claim copyright.
- Now having access to the code, there seems to be
-
Wholesale copying of XVid code
- copying of other projects' code as well
- sophmore attempts to cover up some of the plagiarism.
It seems to me that the best thing to do is to demand that Sigma simply turn over copyright to the entirety of the code to the XVid people (except for stuff stolen from other people). This would save a future fight over what was stolen and what wasn't. It also makes up for the disruption caused by their criminal acts. They would, however, be allowed to pretty up the spin on this 'gracious' act in some way that made them look like reasonably good guys.If this goes to court, then I would expect that any decent judge/jury would do the same thing (along with a nice spoonful of monetary relief. The assignment of ownership would be part declaratory relief and part punitive damages. It would save the court from the trouble of figuring out what was stolen and what was genuinely created by Sigma.
( If you take Sigma's declaration at face value this really wouldn't hurt Sigma much, anyways, because they're now claiming that they originally intended to give away the whole project anyways. )
Wrong: the camera takes 1million frames per second (but only for about 103 microseconds), and then it can play back those 103 frames at 10 frames/second. :-)
( It's great for some applications, but it's obviously not going to do anything usefull if you're trying to do a time-lapsed sunset
From reading the article, the bandwidth problem was solved by giving each pixel of the camera it's own memory. One problem that I can see is that: This is going to eat space on the chip that would normally be used for imaging. If you put too much memory around a pixel, you're going to start suffering in the quality of the image. (and they already had to increase the size of each pixel to be able to capture the light fast enough)
It would seem that they pegged the usable tradeoff at 103 samples per pixel, so that's how many images you can store.
I was originally of the opinion that ot would be pretty hard not to mention the $0 price tag, but it turns out that you really don't have to mention the GPL.
All you have to do is accuse them of violating copyright for your source code. You can easily prove that they have access to it, and they seem to have done the analysis to show, with reasonable certainty, that the object code is probably based on the same source.
For someone who was following the spirit (if not the letter) of the GPL, the normal defence would have been that the GPL gave them The right to make those copies. Since Sigma is refusing to release the source code, they can't use the GPL as a defence. (If the GPL doesn't apply, this becomes a simple copyright violation case.)
As a simple copyright case, the questions would be:
- Did the defendants distribute copies of the code in question?
- Did the defendants refuse distribute true copies of the source code in question?
- Did the defendants have permission to distribute the code in question (a simple assertion to the negative would be sufficient -- they would have to produce prove (or at least raise a reasonable question) that they did have permission).
I don't think that lack of price is an issue. There are many things that are distributed to the public free of charge. Radio is without cost. So are television and the many weeklies distributed on street corners The Georgia Straight that I pick up on Vancouver's streets have copyright (syndicated, even!) articles in them. If I was to plagiarise and resell them, I'd be up sh*t creek. FUD about OSers being anarchists aside -- GPL code should not be judged on a different basis.This is a mistake often made by people who grow up in our society. We all to often mistake priceless for valueless.
The two words are not the same.
Software distributed with the GPL is not without cost The 'price' of using GPL code is that if you make changes to the code, you can't distribute the modified object code without also distributing the modified source code.
(I.E. the price is your derivative code).
In any case, these people are stealing copyright code without permission. Since they're charging for it, then they are liable for both the price they're charging for this stolen code and any punitive damages (which can be quite hefty for copyright violation).
It looks like this might be a good time to call in the lawyers.
____________
And yes there IS damage to me from having someone steal my GPL code. When I put code under the GPL, my expectation is that, in return for making my source code freely available, I'll get back from the community that uses my code the work that they do to improve my code. When someone steals my code and puts it into a proprietary product, I loose in a few ways:
They didn't however, go the the next stage of the argument -- that P2P networks have provided an avenue for (currently) non-mainstream artists to get exposure and market share.
They also seem to miss the question of whether the rise and fall of Napster coincided with the rise and fall of CD purchases. These seemed like obvious next steps for the article, but then it just seemed to .... stop.
It's not uncommon for a big company to sue someone even though they would never win. The expectation is that the little guy -- despite being in the right -- will give up because the cost of surrender is less than the cost of winning.
(happily for the ranch), this business model doesn't work when you're threatening to sue a community that includes a handfull of law firms.
This is also (I would guess) why they were able to afford to litigate QWEST into providing the spare loops. Litigation is expensive if you have to pay for the lawyers. If you are are self represented (and just happen to have a few decades of combined legal experience), it's a lot less expensive.
Self represented, I've managed to engage in lawsuits against some of the largest entities in this province for a total cost of about Getting a lawyer to represent me in a contempt of court accusation that was dropped in the preliminary stages cost more than that -- even after I got subsidised by the Legal Aid Society.
Unix, on the other hand, was designed -- from the start -- as a multi-user operating system. Running it as a desktop operating system is simply the degenerate case of N==1.
Unless users find a local root exploit, they pretty much can't mess up each others' settings. There are the system-wide settings which are generally controlled by the system's administrator and then there are the user settings which can usually override the system settings -- but only for that user.
All user settings (with the exception of the password information) are stored in the user's home directory. In a normal setting, users have full control over the contents of their home directory.
Under normal conditions, If I (as a regular user) install an application, other users wouldn't have access to them unless (1) I allowed them permission to access them, and (2) they explicitly referenced my installation.
[
- About the only time you'll see two users' preferences getting in the way of each other would be if you were running two separate X servers in different virtual consoles. It allows for rapid switching between users, but runs into the problem of fighting over things like the sound hardware (I guess you could install two sound cards, but that's getting into woo-woo land for me.
:1 . For RedHat, it'll start the extra login screen in console 8.
]I've tested such an installation and it works, but it's not an any default setup that I know of. It's just fun to experiment with. All you have to do is add an entry to the xdm/Xservers file to start a second server on display
He was able to make money off of it, but I'm not sure how much.
The FBI also used card counting many years ago when they did some undercover investigation in Las Vegas. They siphoned cash through the Casinos and then did statistical analysis on how much of it made it to the banks. They used Card counting to limit their losses.
In other words, it would be VERY worth spending the manpower to investigate a 1-in-1million 'coincidence' unless there's some collateral indication that it really is a mistake (e.g. some Darwin Award deaths).
The letter claims that he used the Godzilla name and a reptilian image of some sort on his site. If that's not true, then they've got a REAL flimsy suit against him. Probably just some under-utilized lawyers on a make-work binge.
"Windows" has had a meaning before Microsoft as well (In the computing field, even), but that didn't stop them from going after the "Lindows" people.
There's reason, then there's laws. Then again, there's lawyers.
Disk space is cheap these days. Not expanding to allow for at least 14 digits would be the biggest waste of manpower I can think of. For a bit of forward expandability, I'd say allow for at least 16 digits. That way, you can allow for future expansion and/or allow the inclusion of your own data via secondary ID units.
For the most part, however, I doubt that people would think that dave was endorsed by the Godzilla trademark owners. Less so, Mozilla which doesn't actually use the "Godzilla" name. There's nothing wrong with parody, or flattery by mimicry. I don't think that there's much reason for fear, as long as the Mozilla group doesn't try to branch into the horror-movie genre.
I think most people would find CTRL-ALT-Plus and CTRL-ALT-Minus quicker than anything using a mouse.
I guess that I should have said, "the ability to change display modes straight-forwardly". The ctrl-alt-{+,-} only changes the screen resolution, but not the virtual window size, so you end up in virtual-scroll mode (which I generally find annoying).
In a perfect Linux world, it should be possible to switch from 1600x1288x32bit to 640x480x8bit and decide whether or not to keep the desktop in fullscreen mode or switch it to virtual-scroll.
Even better, would be the ability to have each of the multiple desktops be in it's own resolution (might be more backwards compatible for many programs than flipping modes for an already populated desktop)
In the world of special relativity, the observer is always stationary (It't not acceleration -- it's just changes in gravity.).
I would have considered it a proper debunking if it had done a peoper statistical analysis of the deaths -- or something like that. Instead, it simply explained away a couple of the deaths, and hand-waved the others. When the original story went out, I was willing to explain away 3 of the original 11 deaths as 'normal' That still left a cluster of 8 wierd disappearances. This article hand-waved at least one of the deaths that I had already considered 'normal'.
On the pro-cosnpiracy side of this story:
A similar story occured in Vancouver: about 50 or 60 women mysteriously disappeared over the last 10 years in Vancouver. Most of these women were drug users and/or prostitutes. The nature of a prostitute's business is such that a prostitute would be a very juicy target for a serial killer (where else can you consistently get a woman to wander off with a stranger to a remote and secluded area?)
In any case, the Vancouver Police department continued to pooh-pooh complaints of Downtown Eastside residents that these disappearances were unusual. They simply explained it as 'they probably just skipped town'. It wasn't until America's Most Wanted did a story about how Vancouver was a great place to be a serial killer, that they responded at all to the complaints. They still spent a year, or more claiming that it was just a coincidence, despite the fact that a forensic statistician on their own staff found clear evidence of improbability.
It wasn't until last year that some real manpower was put into the investigation, and this year a pig farmer was charged with the murder of a half dozen or more of the missing prostitutes. This summer police hired a bunch of anthropology students to help look for bone fragments and body bits in the dirt pile on his farm.
The moral of the story: Just because something MAY be a coincidence, doesn't mean that it is. If you want to prove, or disprove, a conspiracy around this cluster, you need to look at the whole cluster -- not just point out the easily explainable (or more worrisome) deaths and hand-wave about statistics.
The story at the base of this article neither proves nor disproves the probability of a conspiracy around this cluster of deaths. It simply points out that they're not all unexplainable (something that was clear some time ago).
The inventor of the bicycle (a blacksmith who made one with iron wheels) refused to patent it, and seemed to have been pleased that other people copied (and later improved on) his design.
There was a story about him a month or so ago in The Georgia Straight a month, or so ago, but I don't have the time to hunt it down (got a class to get off to).