Ok, so andover.net has a lot of money for these very, very expensive lawyers. Microsoft no doubt will have wasted even more in this department (because they can). The point? Microsoft could ultimately win or force andover.net/slashdot to settle on unacceptable terms.
The solution? Let's hope it never comes to a money issue, but if it is, I say we form a Slashdot Defense Fund. Money could be generated in many ways.
Direct contributions - If everyone who read this site daily donated $5 that could help *alot*
PBS style fundraising - Buying certain slashdot apparel/items. T-Shirts that not only raise money but bear a nifty slogan about it's legal troubles with Microsoft, the possibilities here are endless.
Direct legal help - Are you a lawyer or have certain legal knowledge that could undoubtedly help slashdot? People with these skills could certainly donate their time/skills/efforts
Ad campaigns - If everyone with a website were to put up a certain "yellow ribbon" style ad on their site it would help raise awareness. If you run a banner ad or some other web/print/tv ad service or publication/network you could help by donating ad space.
The more people that aware of what is going on, the better. A highly moderated post earlier stated something to the effect that if people were to become more aware of Microsoft and it's shifty doings, say a Mutual Fund Manager, they might just backoff their investments with MSFT and might just create pressure on how much they have to spend on their uber-expensive lawyers.
You're moral argument isn't an argument and it's a slippory slope justificaton. When is a corporation big? When is it undeserving of your money? If your earnings weren't feeble, would it therefore be ok to pay for it? Should people only pay as much as they can afford for something?.. as much as they want to pay?
If it is *legal* I feel I have the right to decide, loophole or none. If for whatever reason I feel, company X is a bastard and makes more in an hour then I will in a lifetime (note that this does not qualify them for bastardness), and they use legal loopholes of their own, sure I'll not pay for it.
There are several good companies out there that are rich as hell, but I have nothing against them, and if I want their product bad enough, even if I can't afford it, then I'll wait until I can.
Ok, how about we get the option to remove/edit our comments with some sort of system notice that identifies to other users that a comment was there, but now removed by... or edited by...
Of course the anonymous cowards won't be able to do that.
So because it's GNU, the ends justify the means. Break the law and free some code. Property is theft. And you wonder why people keep equating the free software movement with the Russian Revolution?
If it's to extend my freedoms as a consumer and not to be used a tool to be profitted upon, yes. I'm not saying it's ok to break the law either, but if its declared within a United States court of law that legally I can do so, I will (I have no morals when it comes to depriving a huge corporation of my feeble earnings if I can get away with it).
I also don't recall specifically stating that I wasn't being hypocritical either. Freud once said "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar".
Sounds great! But I thought patents include "likeness" as well? Or am I mistaken? Wouldn't it still be infringed upon regardless?
Sheesh. *Something* needs to be done about copyright and patents, they were designed back in the day and surely they would have been designed differently had they known of the internet especially. This reminds me of the constitution being drafted 200+ years ago (I won't name any specific points here as to avoid touching off any political/religous/freedoms debates).
I think it's pretty pathetic that when Microsoft uses a loophole in an agreement to start exploiting someone else's technology to their own ends people use it as an example of MS' evil, but when some GNU project does the same thing they're applauded for their efforts...
Yeah, but look at your examples here.. Microsoft and GNU... It's viewed as many (for better or for worse) as The Imperials and the Rebels, The Dark and the Light.
How so is it pathetic that GNU programmers are extending loopholes to extend our freedoms of software and informational puproses only? Something that we should be entitled to anyway if you ask me. Whereas Microsoft extends them to profit on us, not really caring about the consumer anyway.
So the RIAA, Metallica, and NetPD want to play hardball in getting Napster shutdown? Why make it so easy?
Who says it is copyright infringement to rename a public domain mp3 file and rename it something as "metallica - sucks!" or something of that effect? If they are using bots its going to be funny having thousands of users wrongfully flagged as copyright infringmers. The only way to prove it is a metallica file is for them to download it from your box, and last time I checked anyway, we still have freedom of speech, and, it isn't illegal to cancel a file transfer from Napster if you don't want them to leech your bandwidth! (Nor is this a violation of the napster license i beleive.)
Are they going to conduct a search and seizure raid of everyone's computer to find if it is a metallica song actually? Think the government is going to waste it's time if we all get dragged to court?
Also, didn't I read something in the DMCA stating you can be penalized if you wrongfully accuse someone of infringement? NetPD better "hire millions like mad" in this case to make for certain they are getting users who are actually providing bona fide metallica songs.
Wow, it is nice to have seen Slashdot grow and grow and become much cooler every month since it's inception as Fish 'n' Chips! (You hardcore slashdotters remember that?)
The newer server is pretty fast for more or less. The old one it just moved from (was it still that old alpha?) was fast enough.
If memory serves me right, when slashdot.org first started, it was it's own machine, but not the alpha yet - this was fast enough as this was right before the bandwith bottleneck hadn't yet occurred, as there wasn't hundreds of thousands of hits/day as just quite yet.
Fish 'n' Chips was mightily fast as there was an article or two about every day (primarily window manager and linux release anouncements) - boy I remember one time there hadn't been an article posted in three days and I started to think maybe he had discontinued it. Then again, I just installed junkbuster again, so typically everything is faster all around.
Way to go Rob! (Even though at times I don't fully agree on your opinions at times - but hey, you are an enlightened child, as we worship the same deity - I look forward to slashdotting everyday)
P.S., Rob if you ever read this, on your personal homepage, in the windowmaker section, it hasn't been updated in about 2 years (The "Your'e Early" splash is there - I gave up waiting for an update on that one about a year ago, heh, I always figured you'd make an uber cool windowmaker section).
Option 1: Realease early often and show the world all the work you are doing. Including the dumb stupid moronic bugs. Get flamed for putting out such low quality work.
Option 2: Release periodically when you have a nice stable point. Make sure as many bugs are out as possible. Get flamed for not being open source.
One possible solution (?) would be to make the first release a low-level basic functioning stable release and split the tree into a developmental release.
In essense, this can give users the working version and the more functional - yet even less guarentees release. It wouldn't fully solve the dilema as we get the more anticipated "When you gonna release 2.0" syndrome - but in theory it should reduce 2 flame topics into (hopefully a lessor) 1 flame topic.
However it is nice to see sources released in standard tarballs occasionaly. It's kind of a stroll down memory lane - 5 years ago running an old slack distro and doing everything by hand. I'm glad things were more complicated and aggravating back then before RedHat RPM and Debian, because I learned things. How to install and un-install stuff, what belongs where, etc.
I guess it shouldn't be that hard to design your own with those cheap radio shack programmable cards. Someone with enough time (and knowledge) on their hands could implement one and release the driver source for all platforms.
This is something I had suspected all along once the huge ".com IPO's" started occuring. As everyone else starts "following the herd" and investing everything into tech stocks, we see this nice rise in the market and everyone is happy - for now.
As history has proved itself before, as the market gets pretty huge gains in a very short period of time, we get what is called a market correction. We see sharp drops in the market in a short period of time, like a day or so. It "corrects" itself. Some economists theorize that the casual investor sees himself making huge amounts of money in a short period of time figures he should just sell right away and take that profit, since everyone else is getting rich, and they may get the same idea. So a few people do this, and others start it as well, then the snowball effect occurs.
Remember back in June or was is July of '98? This same thing had occured. The tech stocks were rising sharply and over a few days the DJIA dropped 500+ points over a couple days. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was more or less composed of technology stocks at the time. For those of you who don't know, the DJIA is basically an index of the top 10 (or is it 30?) or so stocks basically, and they use that index's performance to "guage" the market and see how it is doing. (If you want a better measuring stick, use the S&P 500.) Since all of these or most anyway were tech stocks it drove the DJIAA way down and everyone started to panic a little bit, selling their K-Mart and McDonalds stocks as well.
I will be investing in a few technology stocks myself, but my portfolio will more or less consist of companies that produce things that we humans need for survival, not just want. (i.e., paper, textiles, livestock industries)
Microsoft Corp. is drafting a counterproposal to the government's breakup plan that involves limits on its business practices, such as giving computer makers more flexibility to alter Windows software and offering versions of Windows without access to the company's Internet browser...
To me it sounds like there are just planning on giving the general public access to some of their API for the windows operating system, that developers mainly had access to.
If they were to truly "open source" parts of their code for windows like they seem to be hinting at, do you really think they are going to accept changes by third party programmers and hobbyists?
It almost sounds like the government declassifying worthless documents on sensitive issues, they say they've released some good stuff to get the public off their backs, and it's mainly just worthless junk.
Ok, so it is $1.50/day, but the fact is, some people will actually pay for it. It is great for emulation to be recognized by a major corporation and at least seen as a chance for profitability then for them to slap lawsuits and injuctions on the programmers.
All too often we read about the average emulation programmer hobbyist getting threatened with legal action from a large corporation, or about the whole DeCSS fiasco.
I'm just glad to see that someone has finally embraced the technology, be it they charge $20/day or for free.
They can't go after every programmer, every user, and every copyright infringement.
If they manage to shutdown someone here, who is to say they couldn't shut down someone's server in say, China anyway?
This kind of pressure from the rich, elite, record execs is just going to polarize the situation at hand anyway.
The issue has arisen, the battle lines are being drawn, and in the end no one is going to be completely satisfied. Despite record sales actually on theincrease, the RIAA is casting it's fear, uncertainty, and doubt on the MP3 file format. Whereas we, the MP3 users are not only defending it, but are promoting it.
If you examine this really closely, there doesn't seem to be much of a problem at all in a sense. Everyone is making more money and the consumer is getting more convenient access to their music, legitamely and ill-legitamately.
How do you expect to keep alot of your fans by alienating them? Common sense suggests that if you are going to sue your fan base it's kind of hard to keep them around. (HINT: Most people, or at least myself and many others, actually buy albums after getting an illegal, copyrighted mp3.)
The reason I beleive that they put a cash prize out there is to help give a little nudge in the development of better tools for programmers. There is nothing wrong or offensive with that, or at least that's my opinion anyway.
To me I do not concern myself with how much money a certain entity is making of his/her software, as long as it useful. I could not care less if whomever wrote it made millions or is bankrupt.
Common sense dictates that if you want to establish a good customer base that you should not alienate your fans, especially by threatening lawsuits against the same very people who bought your albums in the first place!
Only David Bowie got away with alienating his fans back in the late 80's when he formed his band Tin Machine, a pretty heavy, dark metal band. This was right after he had managed to sellout stadium after stadium and got to where he was on his own terms. (A T-shirt he was spotted wearing after many fans complained of his new music venture stated "Fuck you, I'm in Tin Machine.") Fans were expecting him to put out more songs like China Girl and instead they got alot of heavy metal/industrial.
And here I was just wrapping up my 10 year reclusive doctorates thesis on calculating how to harness the force, these new data have set me back 20 years! I think I'll resort to plan B and take over the world with my armed robotic army set to replace/install every machine on the planet with CP/M (!)
It's moves like these from companies that are starting to occur more and more frequently. A few years ago when something like this happened it was such a big deal, like when iD Software ported DooM to linux. Now more and more companies are beginning to realize there is a linux market out there and it is benificial to open source parts of their projects or the whole thing. This is has to be the only "good" example of a "domino theory" I can think of that is presently occuring right now.
Slashdot Mirror
The solution? Let's hope it never comes to a money issue, but if it is, I say we form a Slashdot Defense Fund. Money could be generated in many ways.
The more people that aware of what is going on, the better. A highly moderated post earlier stated something to the effect that if people were to become more aware of Microsoft and it's shifty doings, say a Mutual Fund Manager, they might just backoff their investments with MSFT and might just create pressure on how much they have to spend on their uber-expensive lawyers.
You're moral argument isn't an argument and it's a slippory slope justificaton. When is a corporation big? When is it undeserving of your money? If your earnings weren't feeble, would it therefore be ok to pay for it? Should people only pay as much as they can afford for something? .. as much as they want to pay?
If it is *legal* I feel I have the right to decide, loophole or none. If for whatever reason I feel, company X is a bastard and makes more in an hour then I will in a lifetime (note that this does not qualify them for bastardness), and they use legal loopholes of their own, sure I'll not pay for it.
There are several good companies out there that are rich as hell, but I have nothing against them, and if I want their product bad enough, even if I can't afford it, then I'll wait until I can.
Ok, how about we get the option to remove/edit our comments with some sort of system notice that identifies to other users that a comment was there, but now removed by... or edited by...
Of course the anonymous cowards won't be able to do that.
So because it's GNU, the ends justify the means. Break the law and free some code. Property is theft. And you wonder why people keep equating the free software movement with the Russian Revolution?
If it's to extend my freedoms as a consumer and not to be used a tool to be profitted upon, yes. I'm not saying it's ok to break the law either, but if its declared within a United States court of law that legally I can do so, I will (I have no morals when it comes to depriving a huge corporation of my feeble earnings if I can get away with it).
I also don't recall specifically stating that I wasn't being hypocritical either. Freud once said "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar".
Sounds great! But I thought patents include "likeness" as well? Or am I mistaken? Wouldn't it still be infringed upon regardless?
Sheesh. *Something* needs to be done about copyright and patents, they were designed back in the day and surely they would have been designed differently had they known of the internet especially. This reminds me of the constitution being drafted 200+ years ago (I won't name any specific points here as to avoid touching off any political/religous/freedoms debates).
I think it's pretty pathetic that when Microsoft uses a loophole in an agreement to start exploiting someone else's technology to their own ends people use it as an example of MS' evil, but when some GNU project does the same thing they're applauded for their efforts...
... It's viewed as many (for better or for worse) as The Imperials and the Rebels, The Dark and the Light.
Yeah, but look at your examples here.. Microsoft and GNU
How so is it pathetic that GNU programmers are extending loopholes to extend our freedoms of software and informational puproses only? Something that we should be entitled to anyway if you ask me. Whereas Microsoft extends them to profit on us, not really caring about the consumer anyway.
So the RIAA, Metallica, and NetPD want to play hardball in getting Napster shutdown? Why make it so easy?
Who says it is copyright infringement to rename a public domain mp3 file and rename it something as "metallica - sucks!" or something of that effect? If they are using bots its going to be funny having thousands of users wrongfully flagged as copyright infringmers. The only way to prove it is a metallica file is for them to download it from your box, and last time I checked anyway, we still have freedom of speech, and, it isn't illegal to cancel a file transfer from Napster if you don't want them to leech your bandwidth! (Nor is this a violation of the napster license i beleive.)
Are they going to conduct a search and seizure raid of everyone's computer to find if it is a metallica song actually? Think the government is going to waste it's time if we all get dragged to court?
Also, didn't I read something in the DMCA stating you can be penalized if you wrongfully accuse someone of infringement? NetPD better "hire millions like mad" in this case to make for certain they are getting users who are actually providing bona fide metallica songs.
Way to go Rob! (Even though at times I don't fully agree on your opinions at times - but hey, you are an enlightened child, as we worship the same deity - I look forward to slashdotting everyday)
P.S.,
Rob if you ever read this, on your personal homepage, in the windowmaker section, it hasn't been updated in about 2 years (The "Your'e Early" splash is there - I gave up waiting for an update on that one about a year ago, heh, I always figured you'd make an uber cool windowmaker section).
Option 1: Realease early often and show the world all the work you are doing. Including the dumb stupid moronic bugs. Get flamed for putting out such low quality work.
Option 2: Release periodically when you have a nice stable point. Make sure as many bugs are out as possible. Get flamed for not being open source.
One possible solution (?) would be to make the first release a low-level basic functioning stable release and split the tree into a developmental release.
In essense, this can give users the working version and the more functional - yet even less guarentees release. It wouldn't fully solve the dilema as we get the more anticipated "When you gonna release 2.0" syndrome - but in theory it should reduce 2 flame topics into (hopefully a lessor) 1 flame topic.
However it is nice to see sources released in standard tarballs occasionaly. It's kind of a stroll down memory lane - 5 years ago running an old slack distro and doing everything by hand. I'm glad things were more complicated and aggravating back then before RedHat RPM and Debian, because I learned things. How to install and un-install stuff, what belongs where, etc.
Yay. You get 2 points on the board.. Um, someone moderate this post the hell up!
I guess it shouldn't be that hard to design your own with those cheap radio shack programmable cards. Someone with enough time (and knowledge) on their hands could implement one and release the driver source for all platforms.
If it is in full color I will finally have a use for the Playboy Channel and all these dvd pr0ns.
This is something I had suspected all along once the huge ".com IPO's" started occuring. As everyone else starts "following the herd" and investing everything into tech stocks, we see this nice rise in the market and everyone is happy - for now.
As history has proved itself before, as the market gets pretty huge gains in a very short period of time, we get what is called a market correction. We see sharp drops in the market in a short period of time, like a day or so. It "corrects" itself. Some economists theorize that the casual investor sees himself making huge amounts of money in a short period of time figures he should just sell right away and take that profit, since everyone else is getting rich, and they may get the same idea. So a few people do this, and others start it as well, then the snowball effect occurs.
Remember back in June or was is July of '98? This same thing had occured. The tech stocks were rising sharply and over a few days the DJIA dropped 500+ points over a couple days. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was more or less composed of technology stocks at the time. For those of you who don't know, the DJIA is basically an index of the top 10 (or is it 30?) or so stocks basically, and they use that index's performance to "guage" the market and see how it is doing. (If you want a better measuring stick, use the S&P 500.) Since all of these or most anyway were tech stocks it drove the DJIAA way down and everyone started to panic a little bit, selling their K-Mart and McDonalds stocks as well.
I will be investing in a few technology stocks myself, but my portfolio will more or less consist of companies that produce things that we humans need for survival, not just want. (i.e., paper, textiles, livestock industries)
Not as bad as this one.
Microsoft Corp. is drafting a counterproposal to the government's breakup plan that involves limits on its business practices, such as giving computer makers more flexibility to alter Windows software and offering versions of Windows without access to the company's Internet browser ...
...
To me it sounds like there are just planning on giving the general public access to some of their API for the windows operating system, that developers mainly had access to.
If they were to truly "open source" parts of their code for windows like they seem to be hinting at, do you really think they are going to accept changes by third party programmers and hobbyists?
It almost sounds like the government declassifying worthless documents on sensitive issues, they say they've released some good stuff to get the public off their backs, and it's mainly just worthless junk.
I guess time will soon tell
Ok, so it is $1.50/day, but the fact is, some people will actually pay for it. It is great for emulation to be recognized by a major corporation and at least seen as a chance for profitability then for them to slap lawsuits and injuctions on the programmers.
All too often we read about the average emulation programmer hobbyist getting threatened with legal action from a large corporation, or about the whole DeCSS fiasco.
I'm just glad to see that someone has finally embraced the technology, be it they charge $20/day or for free.
The issue has arisen, the battle lines are being drawn, and in the end no one is going to be completely satisfied. Despite record sales actually on the increase , the RIAA is casting it's fear, uncertainty, and doubt on the MP3 file format. Whereas we, the MP3 users are not only defending it, but are promoting it.
If you examine this really closely, there doesn't seem to be much of a problem at all in a sense. Everyone is making more money and the consumer is getting more convenient access to their music, legitamely and ill-legitamately.
How do you expect to keep alot of your fans by alienating them? Common sense suggests that if you are going to sue your fan base it's kind of hard to keep them around. (HINT: Most people, or at least myself and many others, actually buy albums after getting an illegal, copyrighted mp3.)
The reason I beleive that they put a cash prize out there is to help give a little nudge in the development of better tools for programmers. There is nothing wrong or offensive with that, or at least that's my opinion anyway.
To me I do not concern myself with how much money a certain entity is making of his/her software, as long as it useful. I could not care less if whomever wrote it made millions or is bankrupt.
Why the number 42 and not say, 666, 777, 3.14157 ..?
Common sense dictates that if you want to establish a good customer base that you should not alienate your fans, especially by threatening lawsuits against the same very people who bought your albums in the first place!
Only David Bowie got away with alienating his fans back in the late 80's when he formed his band Tin Machine, a pretty heavy, dark metal band. This was right after he had managed to sellout stadium after stadium and got to where he was on his own terms. (A T-shirt he was spotted wearing after many fans complained of his new music venture stated "Fuck you, I'm in Tin Machine.") Fans were expecting him to put out more songs like China Girl and instead they got alot of heavy metal/industrial.
And here I was just wrapping up my 10 year reclusive doctorates thesis on calculating how to harness the force, these new data have set me back 20 years! I think I'll resort to plan B and take over the world with my armed robotic army set to replace/install every machine on the planet with CP/M (!)
It's moves like these from companies that are starting to occur more and more frequently. A few years ago when something like this happened it was such a big deal, like when iD Software ported DooM to linux. Now more and more companies are beginning to realize there is a linux market out there and it is benificial to open source parts of their projects or the whole thing. This is has to be the only "good" example of a "domino theory" I can think of that is presently occuring right now.
What are you talking about? The rule-less site or slashdot? Either way you'd be correct.
:P
The `rule-less' site, but come to think of sometimes slashdot applies to this as well