The MPAA was distributing "modified binaries" of GPLed software without distributing, or offering to distribute under the terms of the GPL, the modifications.
Even if all you do is change a strcat(); line, you have to (at minimum) distribute that change's source.
Simply taking the guy aside and just saying "hey, dude, it's no big deal or nothing, but.. how should I proceed with this?" doesn't sound like a major Career Limiting Move.
Speeding rarely effectively increases your travel time. The vast majority of travel time across any major American city is spent at traffic signals.
Try it sometime. Time a trip between two points on a typical afternoon, one obeying the speed limit and another one speeding. At most, you'll probably shave less than 5 minutes off your trip speeding, unless you are traveling 100 miles or more.
As somebody who has tried to use the system, you can typically only get service if you're sitting under the node, outside. You get more than 50 feet from the node location, and it either doesn't work, or works so spotty that you can't shift your laptop or even cough without losing packets or connectivity.
And forget about inside.
MetroFi is also now "holding the city hostage" by saying that they will only "complete" the network if the City promises to become an "anchor tenant." The city (wisely) is saying they have no interest in it, and so the rollout of additional MetroFi nodes has come to a halt with only about 40% of the city covered (oddly enough, if you look at the node maps, it is the parts of the city that don't really NEED MetroFi because of the high concentrations of other solutions).
Portland MetroFi is beginning to look like a failure, at least to those of us in Portland. The fine geeks at PersonalTelco had managed to get a good chunk of the city "unwired" just by increasing public awareness and helping interested non-geeks install nodes...
Part of the reason why the machine had an "outrageous" price is mostly because it's a specialty device manufactured in small quantities, and AlphaSmart provides a whole lot of support to their purchasers. They never intended to market the device to end users: it was designed, marketed, and sold primarily to the educational channel. A lot of the larger educational customers weren't paying full list for the product, but even so, it's been priced at under $500 for quite some time.
The Neo is currently $219, which seems totally in line with a mature product based on a low-end 16-bit CPU (IIRC, the Neo is a 68000-derived chip) and Flash memory. While the parts might be $10.. I don't know if you've ever done small-run production before, but it would not surprise me if it cost them (today) $50 per unit to build at a typical job shop. That margin is totally in-line with a lot of other specialized electronics.. you think the $3000 plasma sets at Circuit City cost more than $600 to make? They don't.
Additionally, AlphaSmart used to be very "friendly" with repairs and returns. A lot of the cost of the device included after-sales support. I worked in their repair shop (at least a number of years back, they did ALL of their repairs here in the US), and you'd be surprised what kids can do to these things in an educational environment. Often times, we'd be rebuilding machines for free, or for parts-cost if it was a broken display. We also refurbed the units for schools on a regular basis (send us your entire stock, and we'll clean them up, put the latest software, etc.) dirt cheap.
Lastly, to AlphaSmart's credit, the machine isn't a sloppily assembled Chinese piece of crap toy. It is sturdily built, well thought out, and well supported by the company...
I worked for the company that makes the AlphaSmart machines for a while.
The Dana is pretty impressive for a PalmOS machine. However, it is worth pointing out that the Dana's odd screen size causes problems with a lot of PalmOS software. A lot of programs run, but are confined to traditional PalmOS screen formats. Other programs crash-and-burn.
The "mysterious" expansion slots are SD/MMC slots. IIRC, the machine has two of them and one of them is SDIO compatible. The "word processing" program included is basic, but a lot more powerful than the PalmOS memo pad function. It also includes Documents2Go, which means you have access to Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents on the machine (and Documents2Go does support the Dana's odd screen configuration).
It's a bit of an odd machine, however. The keyboard isn't horrible, which is a big plus. I don't know if the one I had was the latest and greatest PalmOS, but it seemed a little bit crash-prone compared to other PalmOS devices I've owned.
Battery life was.. fantastic, however. It can run on 3 AA batteries.
The thing that I don't like about this scheme, is that YCM will (wisely) withdraw all the lawsuits before focusing on making a profit out of the deal. This means that at the end of the whole 4 year mess, there will be no clear verdict stating how badly SCO has behaved.
IANAL, but I'm not 100% sure SCO can "back out" of this whole 4 year mess that easily. IBM's counterclaims are still on the table, and my understanding is at this stage SCO is in no position to dismiss those claims. IBM seems hell bent on getting a judgment on their counterclaims, and probably aren't going to go away for a measly $36 million, even if Novell and the bankruptcy court allowed it.
All this needs the approval of the bankruptcy court. Since Novell's standing with the court is more than just a "creditor", you can bet Novell will demand that any of the funds from this go towards giving Novell their money (it's not just a "debt" that SCO owes Novell: it was never SCO's money in the first place).
The original Game Boy didn't use the 6502 processor, it used the Sharp x80 processor.. sort-of a Z80 without the coolness factor of the bazillion registers the Zilog chip had, while still having a lot of the useful instructions Zilog added to the i8080 instruction set.
LiveJournal's staff has clearly stated that they believe LiveJournal's Terms of Service is not to be taken literally, and that it in no way shape or form dictates actual LJ policy. What document does state that is left as an exercise to the reader.
That's the point in TFA, actually. Linux is failing on the desktop because it's not being targeted to, nor developed by, people using "user-class" machines. In the article, he even states that it is difficult to get a bug report acknowledged when the sluggishness doesn't manifest on a quad-processor machine with a RAID array as root.
I know a couple of kernel developers. Both have machines that are.. literally obscenely fast and with gobs of memory and megalithic disk configurations. None of them ever try to run their code on a $500 Celeron Mobile 1.6GHz laptop they could pick up at Wal-Mart. And, as somebody who's running Linux on same (actually, I got the machine at Costco), it shows.
The -ck kernels will be missed by this Linux-on-the-desktop user.
It's not just texting. They are doing a lot of communication through social networking sites, many of whom have private messaging features that allow for longer, more "thought out" communications.
It's not just "kids", either. I find that 80% of my former E-mail communication has moved to places like LiveJournal and other people's blogs.
Given past performance of the US Congress when intelligence in legislative action is required involving the entertainment industry, we can expect Congress to not only NOT intervene, if they do it will likely NOT be in the consumers' favor.
Both the LACMTA Green Line and Gold Line have significant rights-of-way in the center of Interstates. People seem to have no problem getting to the stations.
Hint: think pedestrian bridges and stairs/elevators.
It's a shame that Sony's use of copy protection (that breaks even playback on standard licensed DVD players) means that at least one significant MPAA member disagrees..... not to mention the recent actions against YouTube.
As you point out, a District Attorney is responsible for enforcing the laws in their jurisdiction. Technically, and this might sound odd to you, but the interior or a courtroom is not their jurisdiction. The rule of law in a courtroom falls squarely on the presiding judge.
That is why most courts in the United States have "bailiffs", who often fall under the purview of a judicial authority, and not common police officers who answer typically to a municipal executive. (Note that there are exceptions to this rule based upon local laws in many places)
The reason for this is simple. What if the person committing the "crime against justice" is himself a police officer or the district attorney?
In most states, the district attorney does not have standing to haul somebody in for perjury in a small claims' case. Only the magistrate or judge of the court has the ability to do anything, and in small claims, it almost never happens.
In Oregon, for example, it is perfectly legal for a party of any telephone conversation to tape the phone call. They do not need permission of the other party. Note that this only would legally cover calls within Oregon..
Where this all breaks down, of course, is the fact that many commercial DVD copying tools already can "pad bad sectors" on read.
My non-computer-tech neighbor (who is a Mac user like me) and I struck up a conversation at the mailbox when I got my Netflix discs recently. We talked about what movies we rent and buy, and he picked up a copy of Casino Royale at the video store down the street. It didn't work on his fairly new (Sony branded, I might point out) DVD player.. and..
(here's the punchline)
".. Here's the part I don't understand. When it didn't work, I tried to copy it using Fast DVD Copy.. the copy works just fine, so I just play the copy."
Sucks to be Sony. This guy had to have me help set up his DVD player, for cripes sake.
I couldn't play a rented copy of Casino Royale on my (old and crappy) DVD player. I stuck it in my Mac, used a freeware DVD ripper, burned it back out using Roxio Toast, and watched the COPY on my crappy DVD player.
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The MPAA was distributing "modified binaries" of GPLed software without distributing, or offering to distribute under the terms of the GPL, the modifications.
Even if all you do is change a strcat(); line, you have to (at minimum) distribute that change's source.
I agree.
Simply taking the guy aside and just saying "hey, dude, it's no big deal or nothing, but.. how should I proceed with this?" doesn't sound like a major Career Limiting Move.
The problem with your logic:
Speeding rarely effectively increases your travel time. The vast majority of travel time across any major American city is spent at traffic signals.
Try it sometime. Time a trip between two points on a typical afternoon, one obeying the speed limit and another one speeding. At most, you'll probably shave less than 5 minutes off your trip speeding, unless you are traveling 100 miles or more.
Except Portland's system doesn't work either.
As somebody who has tried to use the system, you can typically only get service if you're sitting under the node, outside. You get more than 50 feet from the node location, and it either doesn't work, or works so spotty that you can't shift your laptop or even cough without losing packets or connectivity.
And forget about inside.
MetroFi is also now "holding the city hostage" by saying that they will only "complete" the network if the City promises to become an "anchor tenant." The city (wisely) is saying they have no interest in it, and so the rollout of additional MetroFi nodes has come to a halt with only about 40% of the city covered (oddly enough, if you look at the node maps, it is the parts of the city that don't really NEED MetroFi because of the high concentrations of other solutions).
Portland MetroFi is beginning to look like a failure, at least to those of us in Portland. The fine geeks at PersonalTelco had managed to get a good chunk of the city "unwired" just by increasing public awareness and helping interested non-geeks install nodes...
Funny. My EVDO BlackBerry seems to have adequate battery life. 2-3 days between a charge with some usage seems fine.
One of the things that "disappeared" in Leopard was Xnest.
I regularly use Xnest to log in to Linux machines running XDMCP.. and Leopard took it away.
What good is the X11 layer if it's not a complete implementation?
To defend AlphaSmart:
Part of the reason why the machine had an "outrageous" price is mostly because it's a specialty device manufactured in small quantities, and AlphaSmart provides a whole lot of support to their purchasers. They never intended to market the device to end users: it was designed, marketed, and sold primarily to the educational channel. A lot of the larger educational customers weren't paying full list for the product, but even so, it's been priced at under $500 for quite some time.
The Neo is currently $219, which seems totally in line with a mature product based on a low-end 16-bit CPU (IIRC, the Neo is a 68000-derived chip) and Flash memory. While the parts might be $10.. I don't know if you've ever done small-run production before, but it would not surprise me if it cost them (today) $50 per unit to build at a typical job shop. That margin is totally in-line with a lot of other specialized electronics.. you think the $3000 plasma sets at Circuit City cost more than $600 to make? They don't.
Additionally, AlphaSmart used to be very "friendly" with repairs and returns. A lot of the cost of the device included after-sales support. I worked in their repair shop (at least a number of years back, they did ALL of their repairs here in the US), and you'd be surprised what kids can do to these things in an educational environment. Often times, we'd be rebuilding machines for free, or for parts-cost if it was a broken display. We also refurbed the units for schools on a regular basis (send us your entire stock, and we'll clean them up, put the latest software, etc.) dirt cheap.
Lastly, to AlphaSmart's credit, the machine isn't a sloppily assembled Chinese piece of crap toy. It is sturdily built, well thought out, and well supported by the company...
I worked for the company that makes the AlphaSmart machines for a while.
The Dana is pretty impressive for a PalmOS machine. However, it is worth pointing out that the Dana's odd screen size causes problems with a lot of PalmOS software. A lot of programs run, but are confined to traditional PalmOS screen formats. Other programs crash-and-burn.
The "mysterious" expansion slots are SD/MMC slots. IIRC, the machine has two of them and one of them is SDIO compatible. The "word processing" program included is basic, but a lot more powerful than the PalmOS memo pad function. It also includes Documents2Go, which means you have access to Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents on the machine (and Documents2Go does support the Dana's odd screen configuration).
It's a bit of an odd machine, however. The keyboard isn't horrible, which is a big plus. I don't know if the one I had was the latest and greatest PalmOS, but it seemed a little bit crash-prone compared to other PalmOS devices I've owned.
Battery life was.. fantastic, however. It can run on 3 AA batteries.
The thing that I don't like about this scheme, is that YCM will (wisely) withdraw all the lawsuits before focusing on making a profit out of the deal. This means that at the end of the whole 4 year mess, there will be no clear verdict stating how badly SCO has behaved.
IANAL, but I'm not 100% sure SCO can "back out" of this whole 4 year mess that easily. IBM's counterclaims are still on the table, and my understanding is at this stage SCO is in no position to dismiss those claims. IBM seems hell bent on getting a judgment on their counterclaims, and probably aren't going to go away for a measly $36 million, even if Novell and the bankruptcy court allowed it.
All this needs the approval of the bankruptcy court. Since Novell's standing with the court is more than just a "creditor", you can bet Novell will demand that any of the funds from this go towards giving Novell their money (it's not just a "debt" that SCO owes Novell: it was never SCO's money in the first place).
Point of order:
The original Game Boy didn't use the 6502 processor, it used the Sharp x80 processor.. sort-of a Z80 without the coolness factor of the bazillion registers the Zilog chip had, while still having a lot of the useful instructions Zilog added to the i8080 instruction set.
LiveJournal's staff has clearly stated that they believe LiveJournal's Terms of Service is not to be taken literally, and that it in no way shape or form dictates actual LJ policy. What document does state that is left as an exercise to the reader.
That's the point in TFA, actually. Linux is failing on the desktop because it's not being targeted to, nor developed by, people using "user-class" machines. In the article, he even states that it is difficult to get a bug report acknowledged when the sluggishness doesn't manifest on a quad-processor machine with a RAID array as root.
I know a couple of kernel developers. Both have machines that are.. literally obscenely fast and with gobs of memory and megalithic disk configurations. None of them ever try to run their code on a $500 Celeron Mobile 1.6GHz laptop they could pick up at Wal-Mart. And, as somebody who's running Linux on same (actually, I got the machine at Costco), it shows.
The -ck kernels will be missed by this Linux-on-the-desktop user.
Ah, so you didn't RTFA.
It's not just texting. They are doing a lot of communication through social networking sites, many of whom have private messaging features that allow for longer, more "thought out" communications.
It's not just "kids", either. I find that 80% of my former E-mail communication has moved to places like LiveJournal and other people's blogs.
Given Bennet (and Peacefire's) history, it's totally believable that he'd register with a bunch of different providers.
Given past performance of the US Congress when intelligence in legislative action is required involving the entertainment industry, we can expect Congress to not only NOT intervene, if they do it will likely NOT be in the consumers' favor.
How is using the MOS 6502 a "non-standard" processor?
Isn't the 6502 and it's immediate family the most common 8-bit processor?
Seems like Atari, Commodore (who, granted, owned MOS), and Apple all dominated the 8-bit landscape, and everybody else of the era was an also-ran...
Ask Los Angeles.
Both the LACMTA Green Line and Gold Line have significant rights-of-way in the center of Interstates. People seem to have no problem getting to the stations.
Hint: think pedestrian bridges and stairs/elevators.
It's a shame that Sony's use of copy protection (that breaks even playback on standard licensed DVD players) means that at least one significant MPAA member disagrees... .. not to mention the recent actions against YouTube.
The fact that you are not an attorney is obvious.
As you point out, a District Attorney is responsible for enforcing the laws in their jurisdiction. Technically, and this might sound odd to you, but the interior or a courtroom is not their jurisdiction. The rule of law in a courtroom falls squarely on the presiding judge.
That is why most courts in the United States have "bailiffs", who often fall under the purview of a judicial authority, and not common police officers who answer typically to a municipal executive. (Note that there are exceptions to this rule based upon local laws in many places)
The reason for this is simple. What if the person committing the "crime against justice" is himself a police officer or the district attorney?
In most states, the district attorney does not have standing to haul somebody in for perjury in a small claims' case. Only the magistrate or judge of the court has the ability to do anything, and in small claims, it almost never happens.
Actually, that's not true everywhere.
In Oregon, for example, it is perfectly legal for a party of any telephone conversation to tape the phone call. They do not need permission of the other party. Note that this only would legally cover calls within Oregon..
.. money that will likely come from taxpayers, not from the principal's pocket.
Which, once the kid becomes a homeowner, he'll be paying back anyway.
Where this all breaks down, of course, is the fact that many commercial DVD copying tools already can "pad bad sectors" on read.
My non-computer-tech neighbor (who is a Mac user like me) and I struck up a conversation at the mailbox when I got my Netflix discs recently. We talked about what movies we rent and buy, and he picked up a copy of Casino Royale at the video store down the street. It didn't work on his fairly new (Sony branded, I might point out) DVD player.. and..
(here's the punchline)
".. Here's the part I don't understand. When it didn't work, I tried to copy it using Fast DVD Copy.. the copy works just fine, so I just play the copy."
Sucks to be Sony. This guy had to have me help set up his DVD player, for cripes sake.
MacTheRipper was able to rip the DVD, although it took it a while and there was more than one complaint about bad sectors.
Good work there, Lou. You've managed to make a DVD that the only way I can watch it is to make a copy.
Funny thing about it is...
I couldn't play a rented copy of Casino Royale on my (old and crappy) DVD player. I stuck it in my Mac, used a freeware DVD ripper, burned it back out using Roxio Toast, and watched the COPY on my crappy DVD player.
Good move there, Sony.