Arguing against the messenger and not the message? His work appears to be well researched and referenced - which of his arguments do you think are incorrect? It's not as if he is the only writer to make these claims:
Bishop Wala, the leading churchman of the Frankish kingdom, convened the Council at Paris... the council explicitly endoresed the death penalty for sodomy. Moreover, Canon 34 not only endorsed Leviticus but also interpreted Paul's Epistle to the Romans as advocating capital punishment: "Moreoever, the Lord in his law commands that any who commit this infamous crime be punished with death [Lev. 20:13], and the Apostle adds that they are "worthy of death [Rom. 1:32]. We may recall that at the end of the first chapter of Romans, Paul accuses non-believers of a long list of sins, in which homosexuality is given a special prominence. Tnen he adds that the "judgement of God" makes such sinners "worthy of death."
Justinian's jurists had made male love responsible for the "destruction of cities." But Canon 34 went further and make it the reason for Noah's Flood - and the near extinction of humanity....
page 162
Elsewhere in Islamic cultre, however, the evidence is strikingly contradictory. Popular attitudes were more accepting than in Christendom, and European visitors were repeatedly shocked by the relaxed tolerance of Arabs, Turks, and Persians, who seemed to find nothing unnatural in love between men and boys. Behind this important cultural difference lies a vein of romanticism that runs deep through medieval Arab treatises on love. For Islamic writers, emotional intoxication might spring not just from the love of women, as with the troubadours, but also from the love of males.
Finally, the Christian interpretation of the unnaturalness of homosexuality was consolidated and given theoretical statement by St. Thomas's reformulation of St. Augustine's view that the only proper 'genital commotion' is that aimed toward the reproduction of the species in marriage... Building on these Augustinian foundations, St. Thomas argued that, even granting that homosexual acts between consenting adults harm no one, it is still unnatural and immoral, for it is an offense to God himself who has ordained procreation as the only legitimate use of sexuality.Summa Theologica, II-II, Q. cliv, I, II, and XII. St. Thomas takes the Platonic view - namely, that human sexuality has a distinct purpose - and gives it a theological interpretation. Homosexuality is unnatural not primarily because it degrades proper human function, but because it violates divine law, which sanctions that function.
On the basis of such views, there arose the conviction that homosexuality was a heresy, a clear and fragrant violation of express divine command. Accordingly, throughout the Middle Ages, homosexuals were prosecuted as heretics, often being burned at the stake....... during the Middle Ages in England, homosexuality was... within the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical courts... The first English statute forbidding homosexual acts... confiring the religious grounds of its legitimacy, recited that the law was necessary to combat the prevalence of the 'horrible and detestable vice of buggery, aforesaid, to the high displeasure of Almighty God.'... citing Old Testament prohibitions and the Sodom and Gomorrah legend for the appropriateness of capital punishment (preferably, it seems, by burning).
I am not aware of these roman laws, I was under the impression most of those were lost, and you do not specify your sources. And yes, many European states, which were Christian, did have laws outlawing homosexuality (they did not, despite what you say, prescribe capital punishment however).
I linked to the source document on canon law and homosexuality that all of the extracts were taken from. It clearly states that in the Christian Roman Empire and subsequent European Christian states homosexuality was punished by execution, usually by the sword or by burning.
the punishment for homosexuality in canon law is a mild form of banishment.
The Christian punishment for homosexuality has traditionally been execution. The following extracts are taken from a document on Canon law and homosexuality:
If a man lie with mankind as he lieth with awoman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them." (Leviticus 20: 13, reinforcing the earlier prohibition in 18:22). From this dire injunction, which applies to male homosexuals only, stem all later Western laws prescribing the death penalty for sodomy....
After the Roman Empire's recognition of Christianity as effectively the state religion (A.D. 3 13), capital enactments against male homosexuality made their way into the Civil Law. One statute of 342 prescribed death by the sword, another of 390 indicated burning.... A new wave of hostile legislation emerged in the twelfth century, starting with the Nablus Council of 1120, which specified burning. The prevalence of this penalty is based in part on the Sodom story, but it also reflects the parallel with heretics who were usually burned. A somewhat later French law required execution only on the third offense....
Christian Emperors when they became heads of the church meted out savage penalties for unrepentant sodomites: the sons of Constantine the sword, and Theodosius and Justinian the avenging flames...
the council of Nablus, preoccupied with sodomy, decreed in 1120 that guilty men should be burnt at the stake...
at the moment when the Virgin Mary was giving birth to Jesus, all sodomites died a sudden death. From then on, canonists regularly cite Justinian's Novella 77 that disasters such as famine, pestilence, and earthquake, to which many added floods and other natural catastrophes, are divine retribution for 'crimes against nature."...
Like the Scholastics, canon law treated homosexuality, bestiality, and masturbation as contra naturam, "contrary to nature," because they excluded the possibility of procreation, which thus became the touchstone of sexualmorality. Such crimes on the part of a religious constituted sacrilege, because his or her body was a vessel consecrated to the service of God....
the papal Inquisition in due course in certain regions extended its jurisdiction to sodomites as well, now viewed as allied with supernatural powers, demons, devils, and witches. The convicted were handed over to the secular authorities for punishment; in time the secular governments were to act independently of the Church in prescribing and enforcing the death penalty. Before execution, confessions were wrung from victims by torture.
If not a troll, it is a seriously unconsidered argument. You are essentially arguing that if something is the law, then prosecutions under that law can't be "wrong". Are you seriously trying to argue that prosecutions under the Nuremberg Laws, which resulted in people being sentenced to death for the "crime" of belonging to a certain ethnic group, were not wrong, because they represented the laws of the prevailing government of the day?
homosexuality is not a flaw? I mean, if ever I saw a trait that evolution would suppress, this would be it.
And yet, homosexuality exists, and separated twin studies show convincingly that there is a genetic basis for it. So maybe there is a flaw in your reasoning? Various hypotheses have been proposed, that homosexuality may benefit the family group rather than the individual, that it was only recently in history that it became usual for homosexuals to not have a regular partner of the opposite sex, that homosexual men rank higher than straight men on various tests of agreeableness and other positive personality tests, etc. Try Evolution myths: Natural selection cannot explain homosexuality and The Economist: The evolution of homosexuality.
Actually, the evidence currently suggests that there is probably some neurological basis towards a predisposition to believe in religion. There is some evidence that tending towards belief in the divine would have benefited early groups of humans, thus creating an evolutionary drive towards belief. Studies of separated twins show that belief or not belief in the pair is not just random, inferring a genetic basis of belief. See for example Why do we believe in God? by Robert Winston, or Religion is a product of evolution, software suggests. There are many other papers in a similar vein.
So, maybe people don't choose to be feel religious after all, in much the same way as people don't choose to feel homosexual.
Technically there is no reason why this has to be Windows only. All it would require is to modify the Skype binary to call an mp3 encode function for each audio block it sends or receives. If you can get the user to run your Skype binary, either by replacing the original, or by changing $PATH, then it will work. Skype is supposed to have some anti-reverse engineering code, but it has been cracked before.
Because you won't have a choice if you want to develop for Nokia phones. Nokia will ship PySide as part of the base install and it will be used by their Maemo GUI. Nokia isn't interested in competing with PyQt for that £350 of developer cash - they're interested in shipping millions of QT based Maemo phones with an app store that supports Python applications.
Israel on the other hand has a functioning democracy
Israel has a strange kind of functioning democracy, where the citizens of Israeli occupied territories are both denied actual citizenship and denied a vote in the Israeli elections, and when those citizens elect a representative government for their own territory, that government is called illegal and terrorist and ignored.
I'm aware that it can, and does, happen in the US too. There were reports a few years ago of Disney using imprisoned paedophiles to manufacture childrens toys. The great movie "The Shawshank Redemption" illustrated very well how such a system can lead to corruption.
Back to the topic, there have been reports for years of Chinese officials harvesting human organs from those who "die" in custody (e.g. Falun Gong). There are similar reports of Israeli officials harvesting human organs from Palestinians who "die" in custody. Is it all true? Who knows. On the other hand, once a person is dead, what's wrong with using their organs to save a life, even if it's against the wishes of the "donor"? After all, they're dead and don't have an opinion anymore. If you're going to kill them anyway, what difference does it make? Surely it only becomes an issue if you kill specifically in order to obtain the organs? But if it's just a side-effect of what was always going to happen that you can save a life, are you doing a good thing or a bad thing? One to ponder...
What are the figures relative to the criminal population of those countries? China is a nation of over 1 billion people, any absolute figure will be skewed by that.
Interesting Amnesty International report though: "in 2008 China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistand and the United States of America were the five states with the highest rate of executions. Together they carried out 93% of all executions worldwide."
Yes, I've read that in China corporations can set up factories in prison camps and the prisoners will be forced to work for free. Apparently, the prison guards of some of these camps actually go and arrest people specifically when a larger workforce is needed. If there's profit in people being arrested and imprisoned, then more people will be arrested and imprisoned.
That is true. However, China does not receive weapons and military aid from the West, and it does not pretend to be a democracy, or pretend to have freedom of the press. OTOH, China has had a lot of negative press about Tibet.
There have been allegations of an Israeli human body part smuggling ring for years (2003 BBC report).
The new allegations centre around a scandal in New Jersey in which two state legislators and several Rabbis have been arrested for trafficking in human body parts. The Slate article claims that Jewish religious law allow most other laws can be broken to save the life of a Jew ("for the sake of saving a life, a Jew is allowed to break just about any commandment.") and that the Rabbis would see human body part trafficking as a good thing ("They sincerely felt they were not hurting anyone; indeed, by giving life to another, they probably felt they were mimicking the divine. They were in the business of saving lives.") The additional allegation made by the Swedish newspaper is that the IDF were removing organs from Palestinian prisoners who die in custody, and from other sources of dead Palestinian bodies, in order to supply the smuggling groups.
his satellites deliver TV programs in five continents, all but dominating Britain, Italy, and wide swaths of Asia and the Middle East. He publishes 175 newspapers, including the New York Post and The Times of London. In the U.S., he owns the Twentieth Century Fox Studio, Fox Network, and 35 TV stations that reach more than 40% of the country...His cable channels include fast-growing Fox News, and 19 regional sports channels. In all, as many as one in five American homes at any given time will be tuned into a show News Corp. either produced or delivered.
Murdoch's global corporations pay an average of 6% corporation tax. Wikipedia's tax rates around the world should tell you that there's something odd about this. Murdoch even had a special tax credit for himself written into a US bill during the Clinton era. In the UK it was revealed that News International pays only 1.2% tax, and the governing Labour party refused to say anything on the issue. It is worrying that, in a democratic society, any single individual can influence public opinion so convincingly that even the governing left-leaning politicians, who would be his traditional enemies, must do underhand deals in order to gain his support and stay in power.
About the details, why I keep the copyright on this, I can't offer a statement.
My guess would be liability. If Skype want to sue the "owner" of the trojan, the company is safe. If a "victim" of the trojan wants to sue the "owner", the company is safe. In any court case, the company can turn around and say "Ah, but we just provide advice and consultancy services. The creator and owner of the trojan code is Ruben Unteregger, and he is a completely different legal entity."
I would agree but I've seen it reported elsewhere too, and the following suggests otherwise:
Don Foster, the Liberal Democrat culture, media and sport spokesman, said: "The Conservative's incompetence when they were in Government has made laws designed to prevent video piracy and protect children from harmful DVDs unenforceable and thrown film censorship into chaos."
It may be that everyone is just confusing the issue. I guess we'll have to wait and see...
I added this as a comment to the original submission but it didn't get picked up.
According to The Telegraph this also means that there is now no copyright on DVDs. I'm not sure of the reasoning for this since copyright is supposed to be enforced by the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, but that's the legal system for you.
So, apparently the UK is now (unwittingly) running the first national experiment in the abolition of copyright and age controls on DVDs. Should be interesting!
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#InternalDistribution is more appropriate. However, the answer seems US-centric, leaving open the question of whether other legal systems may treat employees as "individuals". The FAQ does suggest that if the work is not a "work for hire" (eg. if the employee is a contractor) then distributing to the employee is actual distribution and the GPL applies. This advice is also US-centric and it may be that in other legal systems, particularly ones where employees can't legally sign over copyright to their works (as I believe is the case in Germany), this would not apply.
Also, if the software is copied on to a PC, laptop, or memory stick that is the property of an employee rather than the company, then that would probably count as "distribution". What if the software is burnt to a CD and handed to an employee - it could now be fairly said that the employee owns the CD (since there is no rental contract or otherwise that would keep ownership with the company), is that distribution? Also, the FAQ question appears to predate the GPLv3 - do the wording changes to "propagation" and "convey" (see terms) make a difference here? While we can argue about whether "distribution" applies internally or not, the definition of "convey" is more clear ("any kind of propagation that enables other parties to make or receive copies").
The only way to answer these questions for difference legal jurisdictions is to actually have court cases in different jurisdictions.
Fortunately, the law is based on what is provable beyond reasonable doubt. It sounds like a competent lawyer could establish reasonable doubt in this case.
Slashdot Mirror
Arguing against the messenger and not the message? His work appears to be well researched and referenced - which of his arguments do you think are incorrect? It's not as if he is the only writer to make these claims:
Homosexuality & Civilization By Louis Crompton
page 158
Bishop Wala, the leading churchman of the Frankish kingdom, convened the Council at Paris... the council explicitly endoresed the death penalty for sodomy. Moreover, Canon 34 not only endorsed Leviticus but also interpreted Paul's Epistle to the Romans as advocating capital punishment: "Moreoever, the Lord in his law commands that any who commit this infamous crime be punished with death [Lev. 20:13], and the Apostle adds that they are "worthy of death [Rom. 1:32]. We may recall that at the end of the first chapter of Romans, Paul accuses non-believers of a long list of sins, in which homosexuality is given a special prominence. Tnen he adds that the "judgement of God" makes such sinners "worthy of death."
Justinian's jurists had made male love responsible for the "destruction of cities." But Canon 34 went further and make it the reason for Noah's Flood - and the near extinction of humanity....
page 162
Elsewhere in Islamic cultre, however, the evidence is strikingly contradictory. Popular attitudes were more accepting than in Christendom, and European visitors were repeatedly shocked by the relaxed tolerance of Arabs, Turks, and Persians, who seemed to find nothing unnatural in love between men and boys. Behind this important cultural difference lies a vein of romanticism that runs deep through medieval Arab treatises on love. For Islamic writers, emotional intoxication might spring not just from the love of women, as with the troubadours, but also from the love of males.
Sex, drugs, death and the law: an essay on human rights and overcriminalization By David Richards
page 70
Finally, the Christian interpretation of the unnaturalness of homosexuality was consolidated and given theoretical statement by St. Thomas's reformulation of St. Augustine's view that the only proper 'genital commotion' is that aimed toward the reproduction of the species in marriage... Building on these Augustinian foundations, St. Thomas argued that, even granting that homosexual acts between consenting adults harm no one, it is still unnatural and immoral, for it is an offense to God himself who has ordained procreation as the only legitimate use of sexuality.Summa Theologica, II-II, Q. cliv, I, II, and XII. St. Thomas takes the Platonic view - namely, that human sexuality has a distinct purpose - and gives it a theological interpretation. Homosexuality is unnatural not primarily because it degrades proper human function, but because it violates divine law, which sanctions that function.
On the basis of such views, there arose the conviction that homosexuality was a heresy, a clear and fragrant violation of express divine command. Accordingly, throughout the Middle Ages, homosexuals were prosecuted as heretics, often being burned at the stake.... ... during the Middle Ages in England, homosexuality was... within the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical courts... The first English statute forbidding homosexual acts... confiring the religious grounds of its legitimacy, recited that the law was necessary to combat the prevalence of the 'horrible and detestable vice of buggery, aforesaid, to the high displeasure of Almighty God.'... citing Old Testament prohibitions and the Sodom and Gomorrah legend for the appropriateness of capital punishment (preferably, it seems, by burning).
A Christian response to homo
I am not aware of these roman laws, I was under the impression most of those were lost, and you do not specify your sources. And yes, many European states, which were Christian, did have laws outlawing homosexuality (they did not, despite what you say, prescribe capital punishment however).
I linked to the source document on canon law and homosexuality that all of the extracts were taken from. It clearly states that in the Christian Roman Empire and subsequent European Christian states homosexuality was punished by execution, usually by the sword or by burning.
the punishment for homosexuality in canon law is a mild form of banishment.
The Christian punishment for homosexuality has traditionally been execution. The following extracts are taken from a document on Canon law and homosexuality:
If a man lie with mankind as he lieth with awoman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them." (Leviticus 20: 13, reinforcing the earlier prohibition in 18:22). From this dire injunction, which applies to male homosexuals only, stem all later Western laws prescribing the death penalty for sodomy. ...
After the Roman Empire's recognition of Christianity as effectively the state religion (A.D. 3 13), capital enactments against male homosexuality made their way into the Civil Law. One statute of 342 prescribed death by the sword, another of 390 indicated burning. ... ...
A new wave of hostile legislation emerged in the twelfth century, starting with the Nablus Council of 1120, which specified burning. The prevalence of this penalty is based in part on the Sodom story, but it also reflects the parallel with heretics who were usually burned. A somewhat later French law required execution only on the third offense.
Christian Emperors when they became heads of the church meted out savage penalties for unrepentant sodomites: the sons of Constantine the sword, and Theodosius and Justinian the avenging flames ...
the council of Nablus, preoccupied with sodomy, decreed in 1120 that guilty men should be burnt at the stake ...
at the moment when the Virgin Mary was giving birth to Jesus, all sodomites died a sudden death. From then on, canonists regularly cite Justinian's Novella 77 that disasters such as famine, pestilence, and earthquake, to which many added floods and other natural catastrophes, are divine retribution for 'crimes against nature." ...
Like the Scholastics, canon law treated homosexuality, bestiality, and masturbation as contra naturam, "contrary to nature," because they excluded the possibility of procreation, which thus became the touchstone of sexualmorality. Such crimes on the part of a religious constituted sacrilege, because his or her body was a vessel consecrated to the service of God. ...
the papal Inquisition in due course in certain regions extended its jurisdiction to sodomites as well, now viewed as allied with supernatural powers, demons, devils, and witches. The convicted were handed over to the secular authorities for punishment; in time the secular governments were to act independently of the Church in prescribing and enforcing the death penalty. Before execution, confessions were wrung from victims by torture.
How was that prosecution wrong?
No, seriously, this is not a troll.
If not a troll, it is a seriously unconsidered argument. You are essentially arguing that if something is the law, then prosecutions under that law can't be "wrong". Are you seriously trying to argue that prosecutions under the Nuremberg Laws, which resulted in people being sentenced to death for the "crime" of belonging to a certain ethnic group, were not wrong, because they represented the laws of the prevailing government of the day?
The fact is: Alan Turing broke the law that was on the books at that time.
So did: Oskar Schindler, The Suffragettes, Galileo Galilei, the Founding Fathers of the United States, and Jesus Christ.
Breaking the law is not necessarily a bad thing when you live in an unjust world.
homosexuality is not a flaw? I mean, if ever I saw a trait that evolution would suppress, this would be it.
And yet, homosexuality exists, and separated twin studies show convincingly that there is a genetic basis for it. So maybe there is a flaw in your reasoning? Various hypotheses have been proposed, that homosexuality may benefit the family group rather than the individual, that it was only recently in history that it became usual for homosexuals to not have a regular partner of the opposite sex, that homosexual men rank higher than straight men on various tests of agreeableness and other positive personality tests, etc. Try Evolution myths: Natural selection cannot explain homosexuality and The Economist: The evolution of homosexuality.
Actually, the evidence currently suggests that there is probably some neurological basis towards a predisposition to believe in religion. There is some evidence that tending towards belief in the divine would have benefited early groups of humans, thus creating an evolutionary drive towards belief. Studies of separated twins show that belief or not belief in the pair is not just random, inferring a genetic basis of belief. See for example Why do we believe in God? by Robert Winston, or Religion is a product of evolution, software suggests. There are many other papers in a similar vein.
So, maybe people don't choose to be feel religious after all, in much the same way as people don't choose to feel homosexual.
Technically there is no reason why this has to be Windows only. All it would require is to modify the Skype binary to call an mp3 encode function for each audio block it sends or receives. If you can get the user to run your Skype binary, either by replacing the original, or by changing $PATH, then it will work. Skype is supposed to have some anti-reverse engineering code, but it has been cracked before.
What stops the trojan from statically linking an mp3 encoder? Or just downloading a dynamic library if there are size constraints?
Yes, you may remember the recent Slashdot discussion on this exact topic.
I can't see why I would use PySide
Because you won't have a choice if you want to develop for Nokia phones. Nokia will ship PySide as part of the base install and it will be used by their Maemo GUI. Nokia isn't interested in competing with PyQt for that £350 of developer cash - they're interested in shipping millions of QT based Maemo phones with an app store that supports Python applications.
You are right, the Slate article doesn't state that. I don't know which specific bit of Jewish religious law the Slate article is referring to, I had assumed it was the "pursuer's decree", which only applies to Jewish lives. That was the legal ruling that some Rabbis used to justify the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, ("Under Jewish law, if a pursuer is chasing a Jew with the intent to kill him, one is required to kill the pursuer to save the life of the intended victim. This is one of the few exceptions to the general rule against killing.") It may indeed be the case that this was not the particular legal decree applied to justify organ smuggling.
Israel on the other hand has a functioning democracy
Israel has a strange kind of functioning democracy, where the citizens of Israeli occupied territories are both denied actual citizenship and denied a vote in the Israeli elections, and when those citizens elect a representative government for their own territory, that government is called illegal and terrorist and ignored.
and pays for everything.
Israel is the largest total recipient of direct economic and military assistance from the United States since World War II, and it was the largest annual recipient from 1976 to 2003. Israel pays for everything? Yes, with US taxpayer dollars.
I'm aware that it can, and does, happen in the US too. There were reports a few years ago of Disney using imprisoned paedophiles to manufacture childrens toys. The great movie "The Shawshank Redemption" illustrated very well how such a system can lead to corruption.
Back to the topic, there have been reports for years of Chinese officials harvesting human organs from those who "die" in custody (e.g. Falun Gong). There are similar reports of Israeli officials harvesting human organs from Palestinians who "die" in custody. Is it all true? Who knows. On the other hand, once a person is dead, what's wrong with using their organs to save a life, even if it's against the wishes of the "donor"? After all, they're dead and don't have an opinion anymore. If you're going to kill them anyway, what difference does it make? Surely it only becomes an issue if you kill specifically in order to obtain the organs? But if it's just a side-effect of what was always going to happen that you can save a life, are you doing a good thing or a bad thing? One to ponder...
What are the figures relative to the criminal population of those countries? China is a nation of over 1 billion people, any absolute figure will be skewed by that.
Interesting Amnesty International report though: "in 2008 China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistand and the United States of America were the five states with the highest rate of executions. Together they carried out 93% of all executions worldwide."
Yes, I've read that in China corporations can set up factories in prison camps and the prisoners will be forced to work for free. Apparently, the prison guards of some of these camps actually go and arrest people specifically when a larger workforce is needed. If there's profit in people being arrested and imprisoned, then more people will be arrested and imprisoned.
That is true. However, China does not receive weapons and military aid from the West, and it does not pretend to be a democracy, or pretend to have freedom of the press. OTOH, China has had a lot of negative press about Tibet.
The allegations are recent and were made by a Swedish tabloid newspaper, see Wikipedia.
BBC News article
CNN article
There have been allegations of an Israeli human body part smuggling ring for years (2003 BBC report).
The new allegations centre around a scandal in New Jersey in which two state legislators and several Rabbis have been arrested for trafficking in human body parts. The Slate article claims that Jewish religious law allow most other laws can be broken to save the life of a Jew ("for the sake of saving a life, a Jew is allowed to break just about any commandment.") and that the Rabbis would see human body part trafficking as a good thing ("They sincerely felt they were not hurting anyone; indeed, by giving life to another, they probably felt they were mimicking the divine. They were in the business of saving lives.") The additional allegation made by the Swedish newspaper is that the IDF were removing organs from Palestinian prisoners who die in custody, and from other sources of dead Palestinian bodies, in order to supply the smuggling groups.
Well I'm not sure if it's "most", but it's a hell of a lot. Murdoch is the man The Independent called "so powerful that no politician dare take him on." According to Business Week:
his satellites deliver TV programs in five continents, all but dominating Britain, Italy, and wide swaths of Asia and the Middle East. He publishes 175 newspapers, including the New York Post and The Times of London. In the U.S., he owns the Twentieth Century Fox Studio, Fox Network, and 35 TV stations that reach more than 40% of the country...His cable channels include fast-growing Fox News, and 19 regional sports channels. In all, as many as one in five American homes at any given time will be tuned into a show News Corp. either produced or delivered.
Murdoch's global corporations pay an average of 6% corporation tax. Wikipedia's tax rates around the world should tell you that there's something odd about this. Murdoch even had a special tax credit for himself written into a US bill during the Clinton era. In the UK it was revealed that News International pays only 1.2% tax, and the governing Labour party refused to say anything on the issue. It is worrying that, in a democratic society, any single individual can influence public opinion so convincingly that even the governing left-leaning politicians, who would be his traditional enemies, must do underhand deals in order to gain his support and stay in power.
About the details, why I keep the copyright on this, I can't offer a statement.
My guess would be liability. If Skype want to sue the "owner" of the trojan, the company is safe. If a "victim" of the trojan wants to sue the "owner", the company is safe. In any court case, the company can turn around and say "Ah, but we just provide advice and consultancy services. The creator and owner of the trojan code is Ruben Unteregger, and he is a completely different legal entity."
I would agree but I've seen it reported elsewhere too, and the following suggests otherwise:
Don Foster, the Liberal Democrat culture, media and sport spokesman, said: "The Conservative's incompetence when they were in Government has made laws designed to prevent video piracy and protect children from harmful DVDs unenforceable and thrown film censorship into chaos."
It may be that everyone is just confusing the issue. I guess we'll have to wait and see...
I added this as a comment to the original submission but it didn't get picked up.
According to The Telegraph this also means that there is now no copyright on DVDs. I'm not sure of the reasoning for this since copyright is supposed to be enforced by the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, but that's the legal system for you.
So, apparently the UK is now (unwittingly) running the first national experiment in the abolition of copyright and age controls on DVDs. Should be interesting!
Hmm, flash memory degrades over time but a hard drive wouldn't?! How do you think data is encoded on the platters of the hard drive?
All of this has been asked before, and will be asked again.
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#InternalDistribution is more appropriate. However, the answer seems US-centric, leaving open the question of whether other legal systems may treat employees as "individuals". The FAQ does suggest that if the work is not a "work for hire" (eg. if the employee is a contractor) then distributing to the employee is actual distribution and the GPL applies. This advice is also US-centric and it may be that in other legal systems, particularly ones where employees can't legally sign over copyright to their works (as I believe is the case in Germany), this would not apply.
Also, if the software is copied on to a PC, laptop, or memory stick that is the property of an employee rather than the company, then that would probably count as "distribution". What if the software is burnt to a CD and handed to an employee - it could now be fairly said that the employee owns the CD (since there is no rental contract or otherwise that would keep ownership with the company), is that distribution? Also, the FAQ question appears to predate the GPLv3 - do the wording changes to "propagation" and "convey" (see terms) make a difference here? While we can argue about whether "distribution" applies internally or not, the definition of "convey" is more clear ("any kind of propagation that enables other parties to make or receive copies").
The only way to answer these questions for difference legal jurisdictions is to actually have court cases in different jurisdictions.
Fortunately, the law is based on what is provable beyond reasonable doubt. It sounds like a competent lawyer could establish reasonable doubt in this case.