The Muslims have no problem with evolution. Neither do the Bhuddists, the Hindus or 95% of the Christians. There is one sub-set of Christians that have a problem. But why? The Catholic Church accepts evolution, and they aint exactly an enlightened or scientific organization. Their position is that evolution is to the human soul as a recipe is to a banquet. Try to eat a recipe. It's God's purpose that's important, not His methods.
From a completely ruthless business point of view, Nikon has made a monumentally stupid decision. Really, this is one for the text books. If they don't about face immediately, they will lose the professional market entirely. Though more conservative than the typical slashdot reader, pro photographers are even more jealous of their rights. And no matter how you spin it, Nikon appears to be encrypting some of my information for the sole purpose of selling me software to decrypt it. That's extortion.
But that's not the monumentally stupid part. The once-in-a-lifetime blunder is in the numbers. In order to pull a few million in software sales, they are throwing away a billion dollars in brand value. Value that took 50 years to build. Value they will likely never be able to reclaim. That brand recognition gets them shelf space in stores, and ensures their cameras are reviewed by journalists, and gets their products support from companies like Adobe. The annual worth of those benefits is probably 10x the revenue they could hope to pull from their software. Unbelievable.
All this arguing about $5 million per day and why should MS care what the EU thinks is completely missing the point. Mega multi-nationals like MS are the servants of capital markets. 95% of the time, the markets don't give a shit what kind of trouble a company has if the profits are rolling in as expected. But, trouble like getting shut out of a market the size of the EU would be disaster. The markets would punish MS severely.
A company that can't do business in the EU is not a global company, and their growth prospects would be drastically reduced. Remember that there's nothing personal here. The stock is worth the market's estimation of all future profits discounted for inflation, capital cost, risk, etc. $5 million a day in fines would have a much lower impact on MS' stock price. That's because the fine is quantified, predictible and likely short-term. But to be shut out of a market the size of the EU is unprecidented in modern corporate history. No corporate leader could possibly risk such an event. Imagine the shareholder lawsuits if MS stock price fell because they refused to comply with a the law in a juristiction the size of the EU. MS would knuckle under far before such a thing could happen.
All the RTFA and "this is just MS bashing" posts are missing the point. This license is not intended to control the protocols, its intended to control the developers. If you sign this license, you have a legally binding agreement with MS that you can't use protocol XYZ in a GPL product. It doesn't matter if MS owns or controls protocol XYZ, if you sign this contract, they don't need to. If enough developers sign this, or things like it, MS can squeeze open source development without owning anything. The idea isn't to do a knock-out blow against Linux, just a lot of little things to put a chill in the air.
The point here is not what they can choose to carry, but what they could be required not to carry. The significance of this ruling is that CRIA (our RIAA) can't bring suit to force ISPs to filter content. That may have no bearing on the government passing a law on the matter, but I'd rather deal with my MP than a battery of corporate lawyers.
Yes, those are real questions. But they can't get answered until we overcome the present industry structure. The **AAs are trying to use artist compensation, copyright law and the courts to protect their business models. The Internet has started to make those models irrelevant.
Those who create copyright content are rightly concerned that free-for-all culture that has developed might deprive them of a living. Unfortunately, the **AAs are happy to exploit those very realistic fears, and the "freedom-fighter" opposition are happy to dismiss those same fears, or cast the issue in apocalyptic evil corporations/vs human beings terms. Both exploit the unlucky artist. However, while the freedom-fighters and file sharers may be depriving artists of money (this has not been definitively demonstrated), the industry associations, particularly the RIAA members, have been robbing artists blind for generations. I don't know how to answer the poster's questions except to say that unless the present regime is gotten rid of, that's not going to change.
Yow. I've never seen so many obvious MS posts on any story here before. They must have been rousing people from bed in Redmond today to get the word out.
How are these obvious trolls and flamebait getting modded up? Every single MS monopoly story has some bonehead saying "how come Apple doesn't get in trouble for bundling iTunes..." This has been definitively answered dozens of times, but here it is again, and modded up too. Likewise, every story has someone saying "what's wrong with bundling things people find useful..."(apart from anti-trust law, nothing) or "who gets hurt by forcing MS to stop breaking the law? Joe Sixpack, that's who..." (I agree, let's ignore laws that restrain Microsft's freedom to innovate) Both are here as well, and modded up.
What's going on? The low number of comments on the story seem to have revealed a distinct pattern that would normally go unnoticed.
Is seeing something you put your heart into sink like a stone, or never make it out the door. The heartbreak these guys are feeling is the heartbreak of not making all the money you thought you were going to. Its not like piracy started last week. Did they think their game was going to be different? That everyone would pay for it even though that never happens with other games?
As someone who has published software, I can sympathize, but really. Piracy is a fact of life. Its been going on since the earliest days of the computer business. Remember Bill Gates' famous letter? If you can't stand to see your program pirated, then get into another business. Or at least another line of programming. The broader the appeal of a software title, the broader the base of people that will take it for free if they can. And it has to be taken into account when budgeting the cost of a project. If you can't make sufficient income because of pirating, then your business model is broken.
You're reading too much into it. The article and post are about MS' troubles, not DRM or content providers. The hardware people have no opposition to DRM, they just don't want to pay Sony or MS or anyone else to implement it. Governments will mostly support DRM unless there is political hay to be made with privacy issues or the like. In any case, Monti is in charge of competition. I think recovering from his recent court setbacks are uppermost in his mind.
$100m or $1b, it doesn't matter to the EU or Microsoft. The real penalty will be the order to unbundle Media Player and open some server APIs. When all this started, Media Player was a fairly insignificant OS add-on. That's changed. Media Player is now the key part of an MS DRM standard. Without the ability to force media through a universal MS controlled front-end, the whole excercise becomes difficult. Maybe impossible.
Microsoft's strategy was to woo content providers with a de-facto universal DRM scheme based on Windows. By signing up enough providers, MS would be able to end-run hardware makers and force them to adopt MS DRM in turn. This would nicely place MS (and Windows) in the middle of the food-chain. Without near-universal control of the media front-end, MS can't offer seamless protection to the content providers. Even with MS's abysmal security record, a blanket MS controlled regieme is preferable to the record companies et.al. than the current anarchy. Without the content providers on board, MS can't tell the hardware makers "our way or the highway". That means they have to compete with Sony and friends rather than outmaneuver them. And the hardware makers will always support open standards (free as in beer) whenever possible. That's because they've been paying gobs of money for technology licences to Sony and Matsushita for the last 25 years and they're sick of it.
If Monti orders an unbundle, it will almost certainly stand on appeal. And that just about wrecks the current MS DRM effort. Don't worry, though. They'll come up with another, but it will take a few years.
The fine is irrelevant to MS. They have a big pile o cash and Ballmer is sensibly using it to buy his way out of legal problems. This is a major cultural shift at MS and should be applauded (at least by MS shareholders).
The opening of APIs and such is a pain for MS, but unlikely to actually do much short-term damage. It might even be good in the long-run because it will make them compete more on the basis of quality and value. Better MS products spawn better open source products and everyone is better off.
What is significant is the potential unbundling of Media Player. At the beginning of this process, MP was a fairly insignificant element of Windows. Now, however, it is central to MS DRM and NGSC (or whatever they are calling Palladium this week). With control over the media front-end, MS can deal directly with content owners and muscle themselves a new monopoly. Media Player is the critical component in a strategy to end-run the hardware companies. Fuck you Sony, HP, Apple, we Ownz u. Without that control they are just another computer company. And one Hollywood would rather do without because of security problems.
Without a shred of evidence, I believe the recent push on Xbox2 is related to the EU problems. If Media Player is hobbled, no hardware end-run is possible. The Japanese electronics firms won't play ball with an MS Windows DRM standard. Oh they'll do this and that, but they don't want another Sony to send cheques to every quarter. That makes the Xbox really important again. That IMO, is why Ed Fries left. He wanted to build a gaming box. Gates needs a media center. Forcing Gates' hand on this issue may be the real penalty the EU is effectively handing MS.
He's a clever man, no doubt. First buy a knighthood. Then buy a Nobel peace prize. And top it off with buying sainthood from the pope. Whats the use of all that money if you cant buy what other people cant have?
This is great. Sorry I can't mod it up. You and I are old enough to remember Mitchell and Colson, but the tender/.ers reading most of this stuff are not. The only thing I'd add is that Nixon's minions were like Keystone Cops. None was as dangerous as Ashcroft and Dubya's other functionaries. Their only religous devotion was to power.
This is one of those classic things that looks sneaky but within the usual beltway rules, until everyone finds out about it. Some smart guy figures out how to pull a fast one without thinking through the consequences. But this is a lot bigger than a simple dirty trick. It looks like numerous criminal laws were broken, although IANAL.
I just remember Watergate. The story simmered in the background through the summer and fall of 1972. Few people paid much attention to it. In 1973, the thing suddenly went critical and took out a major chunk of the Republican leadership over the next year and a half. The major crimes in Watergate happened during that quiet period in late 1972. But the scandal ripped the lid off a festering pool of nastiness with all kinds of secondary consequences. Guys like Agnew got nailed for things completely unrelated, but without the scandal, they never would have been investigated. If this blows up, watch for a lot of other things (Haliburton?) to suddenly show up on the law-enforcement agendas.
There are lots of morons in suits that think this bit of news is a good thing. However, the smart ones will think just about the same as the/. crowd. This is a huge admission of weakness by the UK music industry. Sure its easy to crush some dotcom, but they've just raised a huge flag that will attract attention from those not so easily intimidated. The legal basis for the threatened action against CD-Wow is thin at best. Amazon or someone else who can afford the legal bickering can now swoop in and do exactly what CD-Wow is backing off of.
This is, IMHO, another example of the record company's desperation. Cooler heads would have ignored CD-Wow. Realistically, how much could an HK based dotcom change the UK market? Not much in my estimation. But by taking this action, the BPI suggests to retailers that they might be able to get a leg up by importing CDs. The BPI just fucked its members. I hope they are enjoying their "victory" today. A few more like this will kill them.
uhhhh, that should be "beat the shit out of your customers" but its kind of funny the way it is. I've got some shit I'd like to see the boys at SCO eat.
Is this a precursor to DRM in scanners, CD drives, and output devices?
No. Its a precursor to many companies going bankrupt because new competitors come along that don't treat customers like criminals. This is as insane a business model as any tried during the internet bubble. Yet the RIAA, SCO, Adobe and even some respectible companies are trying it. Don't worry. It won't last. eat the shit out of your customers for long enough and someone will take them away.
The real story is that the brilliant minds that figured Guantanamo would be outside the writ of the US Courts decided the moon would be even better. Beyond the UN too. No pesky reporters, lawyers or hooman rites ativists either. Go ahead and serve a habeus corpus, bring it on.
My favourite was the guy in the 1940s that got sick of the "who really wrote Shakespeare's plays?" theorists. He used a sophisticated deconstructive algorithm (I can't remember what, probably looking for anagrams or suchlike) to "prove" some of the plays were variously written by Gertrude Stein, Picasso and FDR. My dad, an English literature PHD has the official line that the plays were not written by Shakespeare at all, but by someone else of the same name.
The argument makes sense, except there are legal and business considerations. The "common carrier" protection of traditional information movers like the phone companies will likely prevail eventually for data providers as well. The "safe harbour" clause of the DMCA was an attempt to head that off. However it probably won't work. There are a lot of big corporations that like being common carriers in fact if not in name. The phone companies, the backbone providers, Fedex. None want a serious precident that might make them liable for the content they move. They do want to keep the pipes independent and they have the money and lobbying power to slow down or stop any attempts to make them othewise.
Your local ISP may be intimidated by court orders or nastly letters from some lawyer. Verizon and SBC aren't. They want no part of the copyright wars because of the expense and potential for customer churn. The boys over in legal don't generate revenue and bandwidth is part of the cost of doing business. As long as one is willing to put up with the bandwidth from P2P, they will all have to put up with it.
I don't trust big corporations except to do whatever they can to look out for their own interests. As long as their interests and ours coincide we have a measure of safety.
In related news, a team of legal technologists has invented a robot intellectual property lawyer. The device scans dozens of websites for technology terms, assembles dossiers on new terms, files patents for the technologies and sends threatening letters to companies mentioned on the websites. The next step, according to researchers, is to build in the capability to automatically file lawsuits. "The antiquated US courts are not yet capable of accepting robot filings. The Japanese are far ahead of us in this regard. We must act swiftly to ensure our continued technological dominance. Our national identity could be at stake" said project manager Kevin McBride.
Please forgive me for resposting almost the same thing as the last time this came up, but the guy is wrong.
I don't know anything about the martian atmosphere, but plenty about photography and photoshop. His "corrected" images are way too cyan. The cyan cast dulls the image making it appear too flat. Things that should be clean have a dull light blue colour to them. Look at any photo shot outside on earth on a sunny day. Highlights are white, not blue.
Any photo has a sweet spot where you get maximum vibrancy across all the colous. You can clearly see in his earlier examples that the NASA image is much richer and more satisfying than his. That, to my mind, makes it "better". BUT, you have to remember that there is no 100
% correct colour to be found in photography. Film and CCDs work very differently than the human eye. The human eye compensates for vast colour and brightness differences no artificial sensor can handle. Photography of any kind is only an approximation. That the martian sky is red, or blue of butterscotch can only be definitively settled by the first pair of human eyes that has a look. In the meantime, all I have to do to confim the surface of mars is reddish is to go outside and have a look. It looks red to me.
With all due respect, this guy reminds me of the nazi dentist in the Kurt Vonnegut book that "proved" Jesus was an aryan by careful study of His teeth in mideval paintings.
From my own indirect experience I'd suggest you could formulate a rule. With apologies to real mathmeticians, something along the lines of
(discipline's nastiness index) = the inverse (verifiability of results) x (ego constituent of peer review) to the inverse power of (chance someone could be killed by a wrong conclusion).
Don't confuse what SCO is saying outside the court with what they are saying inside the court. Outside statements can't help them inside, but supply potential ammunition for the opposition. That's why IBM and RedHat have had so little to say.
Inside the court, there has been no talk by SCO of "millions of lines" or "literal copying". They seem to be following the line that IBM's contributions to Linux, if based directly or indirectly on AIX, were improper. And that until IBM details what those contributions were, SCO cannot specify the offending code. That's a very different case than the one they are talking up in the press. It appears SCO's entire case rests on the interpretation of existing contracts between IBM and ATT. They are using their interpretation to assert ownership of code (AIX) that they did not write and have never seen. As you might imagine, that's a bit of a stretch.
Even if they were somehow to prevail in this argument, the liability of Linux creators and users would still be zero. SCO has explicitly avoided mitigating their damages. As a result, no liability would occur until SCO prevailed in court. And because there would have been ample opportunity to fix the offending code in the meantime but for SCO's intransegence, its unlikely any court would award damages until after a reasonable amount of time had passed to fix the offending code. They've painted themselves into a corner.
Now, we've got the Novell angle, which means SCO has a two-front war. Before they collect a penny from anyone, they need to beat both IBM and Novell. They have to prove its their code, that it was improperly contributed and that their subsequent distribution of the code under the GPL doesn't wipe the slate clean anyway. That's three very difficult wins. Especially the last as they have embarked on the almost impossible course of arguing the GPL is illegal and unconstitutional. And if they did prove these things, they have the lack of mitigation to deal with before they can collect any money from anyone but IBM.
IANAL, but it looks to me like the issue of SCO "data" in the kernel is almost 100% irrelevant at this point.
Slashdot Mirror
The Muslims have no problem with evolution. Neither do the Bhuddists, the Hindus or 95% of the Christians. There is one sub-set of Christians that have a problem. But why? The Catholic Church accepts evolution, and they aint exactly an enlightened or scientific organization. Their position is that evolution is to the human soul as a recipe is to a banquet. Try to eat a recipe. It's God's purpose that's important, not His methods.
From a completely ruthless business point of view, Nikon has made a monumentally stupid decision. Really, this is one for the text books. If they don't about face immediately, they will lose the professional market entirely. Though more conservative than the typical slashdot reader, pro photographers are even more jealous of their rights. And no matter how you spin it, Nikon appears to be encrypting some of my information for the sole purpose of selling me software to decrypt it. That's extortion.
But that's not the monumentally stupid part. The once-in-a-lifetime blunder is in the numbers. In order to pull a few million in software sales, they are throwing away a billion dollars in brand value. Value that took 50 years to build. Value they will likely never be able to reclaim. That brand recognition gets them shelf space in stores, and ensures their cameras are reviewed by journalists, and gets their products support from companies like Adobe. The annual worth of those benefits is probably 10x the revenue they could hope to pull from their software. Unbelievable.
All this arguing about $5 million per day and why should MS care what the EU thinks is completely missing the point. Mega multi-nationals like MS are the servants of capital markets. 95% of the time, the markets don't give a shit what kind of trouble a company has if the profits are rolling in as expected. But, trouble like getting shut out of a market the size of the EU would be disaster. The markets would punish MS severely.
A company that can't do business in the EU is not a global company, and their growth prospects would be drastically reduced. Remember that there's nothing personal here. The stock is worth the market's estimation of all future profits discounted for inflation, capital cost, risk, etc. $5 million a day in fines would have a much lower impact on MS' stock price. That's because the fine is quantified, predictible and likely short-term. But to be shut out of a market the size of the EU is unprecidented in modern corporate history. No corporate leader could possibly risk such an event. Imagine the shareholder lawsuits if MS stock price fell because they refused to comply with a the law in a juristiction the size of the EU. MS would knuckle under far before such a thing could happen.
All the RTFA and "this is just MS bashing" posts are missing the point. This license is not intended to control the protocols, its intended to control the developers. If you sign this license, you have a legally binding agreement with MS that you can't use protocol XYZ in a GPL product. It doesn't matter if MS owns or controls protocol XYZ, if you sign this contract, they don't need to. If enough developers sign this, or things like it, MS can squeeze open source development without owning anything. The idea isn't to do a knock-out blow against Linux, just a lot of little things to put a chill in the air.
The point here is not what they can choose to carry, but what they could be required not to carry. The significance of this ruling is that CRIA (our RIAA) can't bring suit to force ISPs to filter content. That may have no bearing on the government passing a law on the matter, but I'd rather deal with my MP than a battery of corporate lawyers.
Yes, those are real questions. But they can't get answered until we overcome the present industry structure. The **AAs are trying to use artist compensation, copyright law and the courts to protect their business models. The Internet has started to make those models irrelevant.
Those who create copyright content are rightly concerned that free-for-all culture that has developed might deprive them of a living. Unfortunately, the **AAs are happy to exploit those very realistic fears, and the "freedom-fighter" opposition are happy to dismiss those same fears, or cast the issue in apocalyptic evil corporations/vs human beings terms. Both exploit the unlucky artist. However, while the freedom-fighters and file sharers may be depriving artists of money (this has not been definitively demonstrated), the industry associations, particularly the RIAA members, have been robbing artists blind for generations. I don't know how to answer the poster's questions except to say that unless the present regime is gotten rid of, that's not going to change.
Yow. I've never seen so many obvious MS posts on any story here before. They must have been rousing people from bed in Redmond today to get the word out.
How are these obvious trolls and flamebait getting modded up? Every single MS monopoly story has some bonehead saying "how come Apple doesn't get in trouble for bundling iTunes..." This has been definitively answered dozens of times, but here it is again, and modded up too. Likewise, every story has someone saying "what's wrong with bundling things people find useful..."(apart from anti-trust law, nothing) or "who gets hurt by forcing MS to stop breaking the law? Joe Sixpack, that's who..." (I agree, let's ignore laws that restrain Microsft's freedom to innovate) Both are here as well, and modded up.
What's going on? The low number of comments on the story seem to have revealed a distinct pattern that would normally go unnoticed.
Is seeing something you put your heart into sink like a stone, or never make it out the door. The heartbreak these guys are feeling is the heartbreak of not making all the money you thought you were going to. Its not like piracy started last week. Did they think their game was going to be different? That everyone would pay for it even though that never happens with other games?
As someone who has published software, I can sympathize, but really. Piracy is a fact of life. Its been going on since the earliest days of the computer business. Remember Bill Gates' famous letter? If you can't stand to see your program pirated, then get into another business. Or at least another line of programming. The broader the appeal of a software title, the broader the base of people that will take it for free if they can. And it has to be taken into account when budgeting the cost of a project. If you can't make sufficient income because of pirating, then your business model is broken.
You're reading too much into it. The article and post are about MS' troubles, not DRM or content providers. The hardware people have no opposition to DRM, they just don't want to pay Sony or MS or anyone else to implement it. Governments will mostly support DRM unless there is political hay to be made with privacy issues or the like. In any case, Monti is in charge of competition. I think recovering from his recent court setbacks are uppermost in his mind.
$100m or $1b, it doesn't matter to the EU or Microsoft. The real penalty will be the order to unbundle Media Player and open some server APIs. When all this started, Media Player was a fairly insignificant OS add-on. That's changed. Media Player is now the key part of an MS DRM standard. Without the ability to force media through a universal MS controlled front-end, the whole excercise becomes difficult. Maybe impossible.
Microsoft's strategy was to woo content providers with a de-facto universal DRM scheme based on Windows. By signing up enough providers, MS would be able to end-run hardware makers and force them to adopt MS DRM in turn. This would nicely place MS (and Windows) in the middle of the food-chain. Without near-universal control of the media front-end, MS can't offer seamless protection to the content providers. Even with MS's abysmal security record, a blanket MS controlled regieme is preferable to the record companies et.al. than the current anarchy. Without the content providers on board, MS can't tell the hardware makers "our way or the highway". That means they have to compete with Sony and friends rather than outmaneuver them. And the hardware makers will always support open standards (free as in beer) whenever possible. That's because they've been paying gobs of money for technology licences to Sony and Matsushita for the last 25 years and they're sick of it.
If Monti orders an unbundle, it will almost certainly stand on appeal. And that just about wrecks the current MS DRM effort. Don't worry, though. They'll come up with another, but it will take a few years.
The fine is irrelevant to MS. They have a big pile o cash and Ballmer is sensibly using it to buy his way out of legal problems. This is a major cultural shift at MS and should be applauded (at least by MS shareholders).
The opening of APIs and such is a pain for MS, but unlikely to actually do much short-term damage. It might even be good in the long-run because it will make them compete more on the basis of quality and value. Better MS products spawn better open source products and everyone is better off.
What is significant is the potential unbundling of Media Player. At the beginning of this process, MP was a fairly insignificant element of Windows. Now, however, it is central to MS DRM and NGSC (or whatever they are calling Palladium this week). With control over the media front-end, MS can deal directly with content owners and muscle themselves a new monopoly. Media Player is the critical component in a strategy to end-run the hardware companies. Fuck you Sony, HP, Apple, we Ownz u. Without that control they are just another computer company. And one Hollywood would rather do without because of security problems.
Without a shred of evidence, I believe the recent push on Xbox2 is related to the EU problems. If Media Player is hobbled, no hardware end-run is possible. The Japanese electronics firms won't play ball with an MS Windows DRM standard. Oh they'll do this and that, but they don't want another Sony to send cheques to every quarter. That makes the Xbox really important again. That IMO, is why Ed Fries left. He wanted to build a gaming box. Gates needs a media center. Forcing Gates' hand on this issue may be the real penalty the EU is effectively handing MS.
He's a clever man, no doubt. First buy a knighthood. Then buy a Nobel peace prize. And top it off with buying sainthood from the pope. Whats the use of all that money if you cant buy what other people cant have?
This is great. Sorry I can't mod it up. You and I are old enough to remember Mitchell and Colson, but the tender /.ers reading most of this stuff are not. The only thing I'd add is that Nixon's minions were like Keystone Cops. None was as dangerous as Ashcroft and Dubya's other functionaries. Their only religous devotion was to power.
This is one of those classic things that looks sneaky but within the usual beltway rules, until everyone finds out about it. Some smart guy figures out how to pull a fast one without thinking through the consequences. But this is a lot bigger than a simple dirty trick. It looks like numerous criminal laws were broken, although IANAL.
I just remember Watergate. The story simmered in the background through the summer and fall of 1972. Few people paid much attention to it. In 1973, the thing suddenly went critical and took out a major chunk of the Republican leadership over the next year and a half. The major crimes in Watergate happened during that quiet period in late 1972. But the scandal ripped the lid off a festering pool of nastiness with all kinds of secondary consequences. Guys like Agnew got nailed for things completely unrelated, but without the scandal, they never would have been investigated. If this blows up, watch for a lot of other things (Haliburton?) to suddenly show up on the law-enforcement agendas.
There are lots of morons in suits that think this bit of news is a good thing. However, the smart ones will think just about the same as the /. crowd. This is a huge admission of weakness by the UK music industry. Sure its easy to crush some dotcom, but they've just raised a huge flag that will attract attention from those not so easily intimidated. The legal basis for the threatened action against CD-Wow is thin at best. Amazon or someone else who can afford the legal bickering can now swoop in and do exactly what CD-Wow is backing off of.
This is, IMHO, another example of the record company's desperation. Cooler heads would have ignored CD-Wow. Realistically, how much could an HK based dotcom change the UK market? Not much in my estimation. But by taking this action, the BPI suggests to retailers that they might be able to get a leg up by importing CDs. The BPI just fucked its members. I hope they are enjoying their "victory" today. A few more like this will kill them.
Yes. Have you considered a career in English Lit?
uhhhh, that should be "beat the shit out of your customers" but its kind of funny the way it is. I've got some shit I'd like to see the boys at SCO eat.
The real story is that the brilliant minds that figured Guantanamo would be outside the writ of the US Courts decided the moon would be even better. Beyond the UN too. No pesky reporters, lawyers or hooman rites ativists either. Go ahead and serve a habeus corpus, bring it on.
My favourite was the guy in the 1940s that got sick of the "who really wrote Shakespeare's plays?" theorists. He used a sophisticated deconstructive algorithm (I can't remember what, probably looking for anagrams or suchlike) to "prove" some of the plays were variously written by Gertrude Stein, Picasso and FDR. My dad, an English literature PHD has the official line that the plays were not written by Shakespeare at all, but by someone else of the same name.
The argument makes sense, except there are legal and business considerations. The "common carrier" protection of traditional information movers like the phone companies will likely prevail eventually for data providers as well. The "safe harbour" clause of the DMCA was an attempt to head that off. However it probably won't work. There are a lot of big corporations that like being common carriers in fact if not in name. The phone companies, the backbone providers, Fedex. None want a serious precident that might make them liable for the content they move. They do want to keep the pipes independent and they have the money and lobbying power to slow down or stop any attempts to make them othewise.
Your local ISP may be intimidated by court orders or nastly letters from some lawyer. Verizon and SBC aren't. They want no part of the copyright wars because of the expense and potential for customer churn. The boys over in legal don't generate revenue and bandwidth is part of the cost of doing business. As long as one is willing to put up with the bandwidth from P2P, they will all have to put up with it.
I don't trust big corporations except to do whatever they can to look out for their own interests. As long as their interests and ours coincide we have a measure of safety.
In related news, a team of legal technologists has invented a robot intellectual property lawyer. The device scans dozens of websites for technology terms, assembles dossiers on new terms, files patents for the technologies and sends threatening letters to companies mentioned on the websites. The next step, according to researchers, is to build in the capability to automatically file lawsuits. "The antiquated US courts are not yet capable of accepting robot filings. The Japanese are far ahead of us in this regard. We must act swiftly to ensure our continued technological dominance. Our national identity could be at stake" said project manager Kevin McBride.
Please forgive me for resposting almost the same thing as the last time this came up, but the guy is wrong.
I don't know anything about the martian atmosphere, but plenty about photography and photoshop. His "corrected" images are way too cyan. The cyan cast dulls the image making it appear too flat. Things that should be clean have a dull light blue colour to them. Look at any photo shot outside on earth on a sunny day. Highlights are white, not blue.
Any photo has a sweet spot where you get maximum vibrancy across all the colous. You can clearly see in his earlier examples that the NASA image is much richer and more satisfying than his. That, to my mind, makes it "better". BUT, you have to remember that there is no 100 % correct colour to be found in photography. Film and CCDs work very differently than the human eye. The human eye compensates for vast colour and brightness differences no artificial sensor can handle. Photography of any kind is only an approximation. That the martian sky is red, or blue of butterscotch can only be definitively settled by the first pair of human eyes that has a look. In the meantime, all I have to do to confim the surface of mars is reddish is to go outside and have a look. It looks red to me.
With all due respect, this guy reminds me of the nazi dentist in the Kurt Vonnegut book that "proved" Jesus was an aryan by careful study of His teeth in mideval paintings.
From my own indirect experience I'd suggest you could formulate a rule. With apologies to real mathmeticians, something along the lines of
(discipline's nastiness index) = the inverse (verifiability of results) x (ego constituent of peer review) to the inverse power of (chance someone could be killed by a wrong conclusion).
Don't confuse what SCO is saying outside the court with what they are saying inside the court. Outside statements can't help them inside, but supply potential ammunition for the opposition. That's why IBM and RedHat have had so little to say.
Inside the court, there has been no talk by SCO of "millions of lines" or "literal copying". They seem to be following the line that IBM's contributions to Linux, if based directly or indirectly on AIX, were improper. And that until IBM details what those contributions were, SCO cannot specify the offending code. That's a very different case than the one they are talking up in the press. It appears SCO's entire case rests on the interpretation of existing contracts between IBM and ATT. They are using their interpretation to assert ownership of code (AIX) that they did not write and have never seen. As you might imagine, that's a bit of a stretch.
Even if they were somehow to prevail in this argument, the liability of Linux creators and users would still be zero. SCO has explicitly avoided mitigating their damages. As a result, no liability would occur until SCO prevailed in court. And because there would have been ample opportunity to fix the offending code in the meantime but for SCO's intransegence, its unlikely any court would award damages until after a reasonable amount of time had passed to fix the offending code. They've painted themselves into a corner.
Now, we've got the Novell angle, which means SCO has a two-front war. Before they collect a penny from anyone, they need to beat both IBM and Novell. They have to prove its their code, that it was improperly contributed and that their subsequent distribution of the code under the GPL doesn't wipe the slate clean anyway. That's three very difficult wins. Especially the last as they have embarked on the almost impossible course of arguing the GPL is illegal and unconstitutional. And if they did prove these things, they have the lack of mitigation to deal with before they can collect any money from anyone but IBM.
IANAL, but it looks to me like the issue of SCO "data" in the kernel is almost 100% irrelevant at this point.