In Australia it now is, we are not allowed to create any copy protection circumvention mechanisms. To all you Americans: thanks for nothing.
Last I checked US troops aren't marching house to house in Australia, or occupying the Australian parliament.
Blame your own gutless politicians for your own mess. I don't blame Aussies for Bush being in office, despite the fact that one right-wing Aussie happens to own FOX and had no small part in running the propoganda machine that conviced approximately 50% of the US voters to vote the moron back into office.
You're responsible for your own mess, and the sooner you take your own leaders to task for it, rather than blaming a foreign power, the sooner you'll get it fixed. The same goes for us, by the way. The sooner we start blaming our own leaders for the current mess, rather than boogeymen in caves and Al Q'aide, the sooner our mess here in the states will get sorted out.
I don't expect either country's population to do this anytime soon, however.
There is a big difference between closing bittorrent sites that act as trackers for pirated materials and using the bittorrent protocol for distributing MPAA's approved legal content.
Sure there is, and that isn't lost on anybody.
The point is that the recording and movie industries have attempted to buy legislation banning the technology itself. This would have made using bittorrent (or any other peer-to-peer technology) illegal even for legitimate means, such as distributing Linux iso images. Now these same industries, who tried their damndest to ban the technology completely, are embracing it. That is news, and as you say, protects the technology, not those using the technology to violate copyright.
Thankfuly for you and your sense of justice. The person in question has repeatedly stated that he was in the wrong.
Yes, and no one has argued otherwise.
What he did was wrong. But does that mean his admission of guilt was truly of his own free will, or coerced out of him? And if it was coerced, how reliable is it? In this case, pretty reliable. In many, many other cases, coerced confessions have been anything but reliable or factually accurate.
You are overextending the definition of "coercion".
Hardly. I used the term correctly and accurately. This is stark contrast to the phrase "equitable agreement" as used in the post I replied to.
By this logic, you are saying that all of the plea bargaining that goes on in the justice system every day is mere "coercion". But most people would not use this word to describe a situation where a prosecutor wants to guarantee a conviction, so she offers the defendant a reduced sentence in exchange for a guilty plea.
There is a great deal of coercion that does in fact go on in the plea bargaining process, to the point that innocent people have plea-bargained despite their innocence to avoid what they see as an inevitable worse outcome, and to the point where people have given false evidence in order to get off more lightly.
Whether or not coercing people in these situations is just or not is another debate, but the fact of the matter is that it is coercion. I would argue that when private companies can engage in such coercion, that that has far more unpleasant implications than when a district attorney does so. Nevertheless, as history has shown, both often have unjust and unintended consiquences. We accept it anyway, partly out of comfort with the status quo and fear of change, partly because we can't imagine a better approach, and partly because we're involved in our own lives and don't really give a shit.
1. To force to act or think in a certain way by use of pressure, threats, or intimidation; compel.
2. To dominate, restrain, or control forcibly: coerced the strikers into compliance. See Synonyms at force.
3. To bring about by force or threat: efforts to coerce agreement.
So if you want to call lessening the punishment "coherced", you can. Apple gets what it want, untrustworthy developer get what he wants. Others might call it an equitable settlement.
"In exchange for an apology and being example to others (by signing this confession), we'll reduce the sentence from death to twenty years in the Gulag". So if you want to call lessening the punishment "coherced" [sic], you can. Russia gets what it wants, untrustworthy citizen get [sic] what he wants. Others might call it an equitable settlement.
See the problem with your logic, and your definition? I hope so, even if you can't bring yourself to admit it publicly.
I don't want to defend or excuse the actions of this fool for having disseminated Apple's secrets all over the net, violating not only the NDA, but trade secrets and copyright, but to call what happened "uncoerced" is to redefine the term along Newspeak guidelines.
Was what he did wrong and illegal? Yes. Was the law clearly on Apple's side? Yes. Could it have been worse for the offendor? Yes. Was the offendor coerced into making a public apology and serving as a scary example to others? You bet he was.
$10,000 is probably a lot to most any 22-year-old. $500,000 would have destroyed him. "Do what we tell you or we'll destroy you" is about as coercive as it gets, whether or not the one being coerced is on the right side of the law. If you have any doubt about this, I suggest referring to the definition of the word, which I have conveniently pasted above.
Opterons have a better bang/buck ratio than any Apple product, and I say this as one who enjoys his powerbook immensly (of course, I also enjoy my Linux boxes, and my Linux partition on my powerbook).
This is Steve Jobs, though. He can probably get Xserves for Pixar at cost from Apple.
Then he'd be stealing from one set of stockholders to pad the pockets of another set. Unless Pixar becomes a division of apple in an official, complete merger, doing something like this would be a very bad idea. There's good reason companies keep separate books (and often separate stocks) even when they are conglomerated together.
Seriously, this notion that Microsoft has "bought" Ireland is totally insulting to me and to a couple of million other Irish people.
Then I think you need to lighten up on your nationalism a little (and yes, this is rich coming from an American).
People have observed on more than one occasion that Microsoft has "bought" the U.S., and I have certainly never felt "personally offended" by it. And what offense I do feel by it I take up with the appropriate parties, ie. the corrupt politicans who have sold out my country to private interests... not those who have observed and reported the fact.
Microsoft did leverage Ireland to buy influence in the EU, and in many respects they did "buy" the country's government. Do they own everyone in Ireland, or even most people in the Irish government? No, of course not, but they did pump money into the economy and almost single-handedly catalyzed its move from one of the poorest in Europe to one of the richest (in per capita income terms), something they were able to do with a small economy that would have been completely impossible with a larger one (like, say, Italy, Germany, France, Great Britain, etc.). This bought them a great deal of influence in Ireland, which in turn has been leveraged into a very disproportionate influence in Europe.
If you feel insulted by this, I suggest you take it up with your government, not with the messenger. You've been used badly by one of our companies. You should be offended, but not with me.
simply because a couple of big foreign companies (Microsoft and IBM) can buy a small economy outright and throw money around to depress or accelerate other economies,
I obviously didn't make it clear that the "small" economy I was referring to was Ireland in the early-to-mid 1990s, NOT the EU in the early twenty-naughties. MS in some respects essentially "bought" Ireland, and by so doing, bought an imense amount of influence in the EU through Ireland as a proxy. This is born out by Ireland's willingness to sell out the rest of the EU's interesst vis-a-vis software patents at the behest of their own biggest taxpayer, the Microsoft Monopoly in pushing software patents through the EU. Microsoft probably didn't have enough money to have a similiar impact on, say, Denmark, France or Germany's economy, though they can throw enough money around to help or hurt those economies, as they have publicly threatened to do.
I think you're making a slight mistake if you think of the EU as a "small economy
I was referring to the economy of Ireland, which at the time Microsoft moved in, was "small" in relative terms. It was an easy way for Microsoft to build up one economy, and get a disproportionate amount of influence over the EU as a whole as their return, via Ireland as proxy. The way the software patent issue played out illustrates that point perfectly.
The EU won't put up with it since it will dilute their power.
Sure they will. Microsoft bought Ireland cheap, raised their standard of living, and thereby leveraged their influence over the European Union. This has already paid off, and will continue to do so. Take a look at how software patents have been literally shoved down the Europeans' throats, against their will, despite overwhelming votes against them in the token democratic portions of the EU governance regime, despite opposition from most EU members, and despite protocols that required the issue to be handled differently than it was.
If the EU will bend over for software patents, something that is going to wipe out their technology sector almost completely, simply because a couple of big foreign companies (Microsoft and IBM) can buy a small economy outright and throw money around to depress or accelerate other economies, they'll certainly bpw to a (proportionately) minor quibble such as this.
I admire your ideology-before-productivity attitude, though... inspiring.
That is a very unfair (and inaccurate) characterization of the grandparent post.
Productivity is only one factor, and often not the most critical one. Just as any liability lawyer, security consultant, or sysadmin whose had to recover using an offsite backup.
Your data is your most valuable possession. The cost (in time, energy, money, resources, you name it) of creating your data far outweighs the value of the hardware it resides on, the software you paid for, and probably even the office in which it resides. It is the one thing insurance can't replace, and the one thing you (or your business) probably can't live without.
Having your data (e.g. the Linux kernel) beholden to a proprietary product, managed in a proprietary format, is over the long term quite foolhardy. Imagine, for example, if Microsoft were to buy Bitkeeper (this is hardly unimaginable, and arguably not so unlikely). It isn't an "end of the world" scenerio by any means, but it is damn inconvinient to move the kernel sources to another revision control system, and unfortunately for the kernel developers, there is unlikely to be a libre one that suits their purposes available because they haven't been contributing feedback, criticisms, and suggestions for improvement to any of the free projects by virtue of the fact that they aren't using any of them and so aren't in a position to make said suggestions, etc.
It is generally a mistake to have one's data beholden to a proprietary product. Sometimes it can't be avoided, and sometimes the cost is worthwhile. And sometimes, the results are absolutely catastrophic. Unfortunately, in the case of the Linux kernel, if the results should be catastrophic in some manner, it will be catastrophci for the millions upon millions of Linux users around the world. OTOH there are enough tarballs and parallel CVS repositories around that such a scenerio is very unlikely. What isn't so unlikely is the "OMFG this is painful, we'll have to move to $free-rcs and its going to cost us at least a couple of months productivity."
Now, in the case of the Kernel, Linus has judged these risks to be small enough, and his productivity improvements to be great enough, for the potential tradeoff to be worthwhile. The grandparent post has judged the opposite. Both may be correct for their respective problem domains, but to characterize the one as "ideology-before-productivity" is very disingenuous, and ignores a whole slew of real-world issues that proprietary management schemes, formats, and restrictions bring to the table.
Furthermore, union actors often work on non-union projects under a pseudonym and to the best of my knowlege. no SAG member has ever been forced out of the union for working in a non-union project.
If five years, if "trusted" computing doesn't destroy it, our home computers will be able to render photo-realistic films with photo-realistic actors in something close to real-time, allowing the merging of machinima and classical rendering. With these sorts of tools, any small group of people with a good story to tell and a modicum of talent will be able to choreagraph, render, and distribute feature-length films that do not resemble cartoons or computer animation so much as life, real-action movies.
Actor's guilds that try to shut out new, innovative ways for creative people to collaborate are simply ensuring the demise of their own profession. $10 Million contracts for lead actors will become a thing of the past, and I for one won't be shedding a whole lot of tears (though I will shed a few... I'd much rather see actors bringing their talent to the screen in cooperation with the larger creative community, but if their unions are going to plant their feet on this sort of thing, then their passing will go largely unlamented).
Yeah, I'm bashing Microsoft but it is deserved in this case.
It's deserved in most cases. Their track record is abominable, whether your referring to their vaporware products that never materialized but kept people from buying the products of early innovators who were thus driven out of business and the retrograde consiquences on technological development in IT, their habit of intimidating their own customers into locking themselves into their products ("if you standardize on Netscape we'll charge you triple for every copy of Windows!"), their habit of obsconding with the ideas and concepts of others and claiming it as their own "innovation," their habit of violating anti-trust law, their patenting of every trivial idea under the sun, their dirty tricks in ramming software patents down the throat of Europeans (better get used to being on your knees, folks), or their habit of producing appallingly shoddy hardware.
Just because Microsoft is being bashed nearly all of the time doesn't mean they haven't earned almost every bit of it the old fashioned way, by being unbearably despicable and discovering new, innovative ways to behave badly.
However, beyond the macro perspective here, I fail to see how a corporation that doesn't like Linux somehow justifies armed revolt and murder of innocent people who aren't even related.
I wasn't referring to that specific example. I agree, advocating armed revolt because some idiots spread a little anti-Linux FUD is rediculous. I was referring to a deeper trend in our culture, where people routinely advocate massive violence when things aren't going there way. Some of it is self-centeredness, but a whole lot of it comes from a feeling of disempowerment, and the growing notion that we CAN'T effect change any other way. I don't agree with that notion. Boycotts, massive protests, and elections still do work... occasionally (though I do believe the powers that be are getting better at making sure they don't work, which feeds into and magnifies the ugliness I allude to).
I wonder if this is a red herring or not. Sure, lawyers have turned the U.S. into a lawsuit-happy country where people are visited in the hospital right after surgery with promises of grand malpractice suits (I work in a hospital, so that's the only example that comes to my mind right away).
Until congress passed a limitation on the liability of aircraft manufacturers under Clinton in the 1990s the production of private, single engine aircraft had fallen to zero. Why? Because some boneheaded pilot could decide he could fly IFR (instrument conditions, bad weather) despite not having the rating ("what does the damn gubmint know that I don't"), crash the plane killing himself (and maybe some others who had the misfortune to trust him/her and climb aboard), and the aircraft manufacturer would not only be sued, but often lose and have idiot juries award tens of millions to the relatives of the idiot pilot! I kid you not. It happened enough times that virtually every manufacturer of small aircraft ceased production. They simply could not clear a profit once liability costs were factered in.
It wasn't until congress limited this liability to a mere 19 years after manufactur that the industry rebounded, and one can buy new personal aircraft once again.
Look to software patents as another example where, in the not too distant future, patent attorneys and bad governance will converge to kill another innovative industry: ours.
While I believe there are real technical issues vis-a-vis the energy storage density of batteries that probably killed the EV1, liability was probably a non-negligable factor in decreasing the overall profitability beneath the threashhold required for the car to survive.
Innovation is far riskier than doing the staid, "tried and true" thing. That is one of the reasons why most aircraft engine designs are decades old (the design of mine dates back to the 1930s), and manufacturers are loathe to modernize them despite the plethora of good ideas out there. Patents are another reason, but compared to litigation risks, probably secondary in this instance.
So don't kid yourself, lawyers can and do kill entire industries, dead. The lucky ones rebound, the unlucky ones disappear for good, or for decades at a time.
However I find it interesting that you have nothing to say about my point - that its a sad state of affairs when OS advocacy degenerates into endorsing violence and murder but have plenty to say on a preceived mistake on my part that was a tiny component of what I had to say.
Everything is degenerating in this manner. It appears to be a broader symptom of an escalation of business malpractice and outright malfeascance without consiquences, and a general consensus in the population that there is absolutely nothing anyone can do about it (within the "system").
I've heard everyone from my mother (who's 60+) to small children I've passed on the street make similiar comments. The undercurrent and consensus that is forming, at a subconscious level perhaps, is that the only way to effect change is going to require violence. So far, the cost of a violent uprising againt $favorite-powerful-jackass is greater than the perceived reward, or put another way, the pain of living with injustice the way it is is less than the pain involved in changing it. However, the latter remains constant while the former is increasing at a pretty good clip. At some point the two will be equal, and at some later point, the pain of living with the status quo will be greater than the pain of violent revolt. Sometime after that things will get very nasty indeed.
I only hope I never live to see that day... as much as I detest and despise our corporate masters and the mindless suit-clad lemmings that follow them, I loath and despise violent civil conflict even more. However, as the misdeeds of said corporate masters escalate, there will come a time when violent civil war is the lessor of two evils. Monanto poisoning the deep south and killing scores of Americans in the 1990s, not yet. The theft of thousands of people's retirements by the Billionaires of WorldCom, Enron, and the White House? Not yet, but getting closer perhaps, particularly when those tens of thousands find themselves homeless and ultimately dying as a result.
The mass starvation of most of the population because there is no social security, everyone's retirement has been pilfered, our constitutional protections are (completely) long gone, and there is no democratic process to ever reverse it, and monanto's production of seed grain is interrupted by a manufacturing hiccup? Probably... may those days come long after I'm gone, or better yet, not at all.
I haven't used scsi emulation support to burn CDs (or DVDs) in donkey's years. In fact, I don't even compile scsi emulatin into the kernel or as a modules, because I don't what it ever changing my cd-rom devices to scsi devices. CDRecord on Linux has been able to talk to ATA CD burners natively for quite some time.
Mastering video DVDs under linux IS easy
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NeroLinux vs. K3b
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· Score: 5, Informative
Like mastering and burning video DVDs, in linux there is no easy tool.
And with NeroLinux there is still no easy tool, because NeroLinux doesn't do DVD mastering. k3b burns DVDs just as well as NeroLinux does (k3b also doesn't do mastering).
Excellent points, but I take issue with the statement "there is still no easy tool."
I use qdvdauthor, which is quite intuitive, for mastering video DVDs. I put together a DVD of my grandmother's memorial service for the family, complete with fancy menus and all the usual bells and whistles. It was quite easy, and k3b burned the resulting.iso painlessly.
Is it an all in one monolithic solution? Thankfully, no, and as far as I'm concerned, I hope people who do want to bring the windoze notion of one program doing a mediocre job at everything stay the hell away from *BSD and Linux. I like simple programs that do a focused task well. It means the programs are better, more reliable, and more easy for the developers to maintain, which means I get better software. For burning DVDs under Linux from your camcorder, for example, it's as easy as 1, 2, 3...
1) use kino to import video data from the camera into dv2 format
2) use qdvdauthor to master the dvd
3) use k3b to burn the DVD
each program does what it does very well, none are monolothic, and if something better comes along for any of the steps above I can substitute the new, better tool, without losing the features I'm used to or prefer in the other two steps.
Nero is dead. These people should have done a little market research before trying to sell a product that, when it matures, won't do any more than the libre software already available does just fine, k3b being just one example.
For example, the "mail forwarding" feature cannot be disabled once it has been enabled. Any change to it does not not save.
I wished I'd known about this yesterday. I'm suffering from having my gmail account spam another account right now, and can't get the damn thing to stop. I'm thinking about creating a new gmail account for myself, but that involves changing my email address, which is itself a pain.
I really hope they fix this soon. Another day or two and I'm simply going to start blocking gmail traffic for a few days.
That is really stretching the definitions of both magic and science beyond the breaking point.
How so, they're the same thing.
At which point you stopped reading and shut off your brain. Had you continued reading the very same paragraph, you would have seen:
magic is not science...though as Arthur C. Clark did point out, a sufficiently advanced technology will be indistinguishable from science. But that refers to our inability to comprehend, not a fundamental legitimacy of magic as science.
Arthur C. Clark's "law" refers to limitations in our perceptions and abilities to understand a sufficiently advanced technology. It does not, and never has, implied that hocus pocus equals science.
Seriously though, it would be in the phone companies best interest to figure out how to block this. After the legislation for the do not call list, calls to our home plummeted. And rightly so. If I have to deal with telemarketers calling my home again, I will simply have the phone company disconnect my land line, especially with the prospect of 100-150 calls/day.
Absolutely. I dumped my landline years ago in no small part because Ameritech (re)sold my number to telemarketers everytime I moved. At the time I was moving every year or two, chasing cheaper rents as my rent was increased. After I bought it was less of an issue, but by then I was used to being wireless only and never went back.
My wife has a landline which we use, but if junk phone calls were to ever come back, she'd probably ditch it as well.
Fantasy is a sub-genre of Science Fiction. It contains fictional science. That is the definition of Science Fiction. Magic and trolls and what not do not exist in real life therefore a fictional science needs to be created in order to explain it.
That is really stretching the definitions of both magic and science beyond the breaking point. By that definition religion creates fictional science to explain things, which is nonsense. Whether they are truthful or not, religions are not science. Whether magical worlds can be articulated that are perfectly self-consistent (they can, at least to the "dust-mote" level) or not, magic is not science...though as Arthur C. Clark did point out, a sufficiently advanced technology will be indistinguishable from science. But that refers to our inability to comprehend, not a fundamental legitimacy of magic as science.
In any event, most fantasy never tries to explain why magic works, and that that does, generally doesn't do so with any semblance of science, Robert Shea's adventures being a notable exception. Which doesn't disprove my point: a few science fiction/fantasy crossover novels that blend the two does not two disparate genres unify, any more than romance and horror are one and the same simply because a few novels have been written that incorporate elements of both.
In addition, I would wager that many people that refer to themselves as atheists actually mean they are agnostic, but are perhaps not familiar with that terminology.
There appears to be some overlap in the terminology. Saying "I do not believe there is a god because I see no evidence to indicate there is" is not imcompatible with the notion that "there is no way to know for sure," nor with the notion "I don't believe it, but I must logically concede the possibility that I, as a fallable human being without the sum of the universes knowledge in my skull might be wrong, current evidence notwithstanding." The former defines an athiest, the latter two an agnostic. I fit all three definitions, so frankly, it seems to me that my choice of labelling myself agnostic or athiest is a matter of preference, at least until someone nails down a better definition for differentiating between the two than has been discussed here (or in many other common fora, such as talk.origins, etc.)
I agree with you WRT the elephant question, with the following caveat: "invisible pink elephants" cannot exist logically. An object that is invisible by definition has no color to it, pink or otherwise. However, invisible evidence could concievably exist. I don't believe in them, because the evidence that they exist is equal to the evidence that a God exists (ie. absolutely none), but I must logically concede the possibility that I'm wrong, as the premise is not disprovable.
However, during the civil war (and, arguably, during WWII w.r.t. Japanese internment) Habeas Corpus was suspended outright. Was this a problem? Yes. Was it the end of everything? No.
Everything? I guess not. But it was VERY BAD if you were japanese and you were placed in internment.
And for some of the detained, it was the end of everything. They "died" while being detained... a euphemism for "they were murdered in American concentration camps," but we aren't really aloud to say that out loud, because we want to continue to believe that America hasn't had, doesn't have, and never would have concentration camps, no matter how hight the mountain of evidence to the contrary.
In any event, for those who are "lawfully" murdered under such toxic laws, these abuses really are "the end of everything." Life will certainly go on (though perhaps only at the microbial level if the worst of the worst were to happen), civilization will probably go on (though as history shows, at some point we'll have one abuse too many, and civilization will fall. The more abuses we heap on, the sooner that day will come), and for most of the detainees, some semblance of continued existence will go on, though certainly diminished in emotional and financial terms from what they would have had had they not been subject to such abuses.
As for America's formerly good reputation for fairness, enlightened, and lawful behavior, that is gone and probably will never be recovered. The PATRIOT act, however, was just one nail in the coffin of that dead ghost, however. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice et. al. have hammered a bunch of them in, the litany of which (Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and so on) should raise the hairs on the back of the neck of every decent human being, everywhere.
Slashdot Mirror
In Australia it now is, we are not allowed to create any copy protection circumvention mechanisms. To all you Americans: thanks for nothing.
Last I checked US troops aren't marching house to house in Australia, or occupying the Australian parliament.
Blame your own gutless politicians for your own mess. I don't blame Aussies for Bush being in office, despite the fact that one right-wing Aussie happens to own FOX and had no small part in running the propoganda machine that conviced approximately 50% of the US voters to vote the moron back into office.
You're responsible for your own mess, and the sooner you take your own leaders to task for it, rather than blaming a foreign power, the sooner you'll get it fixed. The same goes for us, by the way. The sooner we start blaming our own leaders for the current mess, rather than boogeymen in caves and Al Q'aide, the sooner our mess here in the states will get sorted out.
I don't expect either country's population to do this anytime soon, however.
There is a big difference between closing bittorrent sites that act as trackers for pirated materials and using the bittorrent protocol for distributing MPAA's approved legal content.
Sure there is, and that isn't lost on anybody.
The point is that the recording and movie industries have attempted to buy legislation banning the technology itself. This would have made using bittorrent (or any other peer-to-peer technology) illegal even for legitimate means, such as distributing Linux iso images. Now these same industries, who tried their damndest to ban the technology completely, are embracing it. That is news, and as you say, protects the technology, not those using the technology to violate copyright.
Thankfuly for you and your sense of justice. The person in question has repeatedly stated that he was in the wrong.
Yes, and no one has argued otherwise.
What he did was wrong. But does that mean his admission of guilt was truly of his own free will, or coerced out of him? And if it was coerced, how reliable is it? In this case, pretty reliable. In many, many other cases, coerced confessions have been anything but reliable or factually accurate.
You are overextending the definition of "coercion".
Hardly. I used the term correctly and accurately. This is stark contrast to the phrase "equitable agreement" as used in the post I replied to.
By this logic, you are saying that all of the plea bargaining that goes on in the justice system every day is mere "coercion". But most people would not use this word to describe a situation where a prosecutor wants to guarantee a conviction, so she offers the defendant a reduced sentence in exchange for a guilty plea.
There is a great deal of coercion that does in fact go on in the plea bargaining process, to the point that innocent people have plea-bargained despite their innocence to avoid what they see as an inevitable worse outcome, and to the point where people have given false evidence in order to get off more lightly.
Whether or not coercing people in these situations is just or not is another debate, but the fact of the matter is that it is coercion. I would argue that when private companies can engage in such coercion, that that has far more unpleasant implications than when a district attorney does so. Nevertheless, as history has shown, both often have unjust and unintended consiquences. We accept it anyway, partly out of comfort with the status quo and fear of change, partly because we can't imagine a better approach, and partly because we're involved in our own lives and don't really give a shit.
So if you want to call lessening the punishment "coherced", you can. Apple gets what it want, untrustworthy developer get what he wants. Others might call it an equitable settlement.
"In exchange for an apology and being example to others (by signing this confession), we'll reduce the sentence from death to twenty years in the Gulag". So if you want to call lessening the punishment "coherced" [sic], you can. Russia gets what it wants, untrustworthy citizen get [sic] what he wants. Others might call it an equitable settlement.
See the problem with your logic, and your definition? I hope so, even if you can't bring yourself to admit it publicly.
I don't want to defend or excuse the actions of this fool for having disseminated Apple's secrets all over the net, violating not only the NDA, but trade secrets and copyright, but to call what happened "uncoerced" is to redefine the term along Newspeak guidelines.
Was what he did wrong and illegal? Yes.
Was the law clearly on Apple's side? Yes.
Could it have been worse for the offendor? Yes.
Was the offendor coerced into making a public apology and serving as a scary example to others? You bet he was.
$10,000 is probably a lot to most any 22-year-old. $500,000 would have destroyed him. "Do what we tell you or we'll destroy you" is about as coercive as it gets, whether or not the one being coerced is on the right side of the law. If you have any doubt about this, I suggest referring to the definition of the word, which I have conveniently pasted above.
Opterons have a better bang/buck ratio than any Apple product, and I say this as one who enjoys his powerbook immensly (of course, I also enjoy my Linux boxes, and my Linux partition on my powerbook).
This is Steve Jobs, though. He can probably get Xserves for Pixar at cost from Apple.
Then he'd be stealing from one set of stockholders to pad the pockets of another set. Unless Pixar becomes a division of apple in an official, complete merger, doing something like this would be a very bad idea. There's good reason companies keep separate books (and often separate stocks) even when they are conglomerated together.
Seriously, this notion that Microsoft has "bought" Ireland is totally insulting to me and to a couple of million other Irish people.
... not those who have observed and reported the fact.
Then I think you need to lighten up on your nationalism a little (and yes, this is rich coming from an American).
People have observed on more than one occasion that Microsoft has "bought" the U.S., and I have certainly never felt "personally offended" by it. And what offense I do feel by it I take up with the appropriate parties, ie. the corrupt politicans who have sold out my country to private interests
Microsoft did leverage Ireland to buy influence in the EU, and in many respects they did "buy" the country's government. Do they own everyone in Ireland, or even most people in the Irish government? No, of course not, but they did pump money into the economy and almost single-handedly catalyzed its move from one of the poorest in Europe to one of the richest (in per capita income terms), something they were able to do with a small economy that would have been completely impossible with a larger one (like, say, Italy, Germany, France, Great Britain, etc.). This bought them a great deal of influence in Ireland, which in turn has been leveraged into a very disproportionate influence in Europe.
If you feel insulted by this, I suggest you take it up with your government, not with the messenger. You've been used badly by one of our companies. You should be offended, but not with me.
simply because a couple of big foreign companies (Microsoft and IBM) can buy a small economy outright and throw money around to depress or accelerate other economies,
I obviously didn't make it clear that the "small" economy I was referring to was Ireland in the early-to-mid 1990s, NOT the EU in the early twenty-naughties. MS in some respects essentially "bought" Ireland, and by so doing, bought an imense amount of influence in the EU through Ireland as a proxy. This is born out by Ireland's willingness to sell out the rest of the EU's interesst vis-a-vis software patents at the behest of their own biggest taxpayer, the Microsoft Monopoly in pushing software patents through the EU. Microsoft probably didn't have enough money to have a similiar impact on, say, Denmark, France or Germany's economy, though they can throw enough money around to help or hurt those economies, as they have publicly threatened to do.
I think you're making a slight mistake if you think of the EU as a "small economy
I was referring to the economy of Ireland, which at the time Microsoft moved in, was "small" in relative terms. It was an easy way for Microsoft to build up one economy, and get a disproportionate amount of influence over the EU as a whole as their return, via Ireland as proxy. The way the software patent issue played out illustrates that point perfectly.
The EU won't put up with it since it will dilute their power.
Sure they will. Microsoft bought Ireland cheap, raised their standard of living, and thereby leveraged their influence over the European Union. This has already paid off, and will continue to do so. Take a look at how software patents have been literally shoved down the Europeans' throats, against their will, despite overwhelming votes against them in the token democratic portions of the EU governance regime, despite opposition from most EU members, and despite protocols that required the issue to be handled differently than it was.
If the EU will bend over for software patents, something that is going to wipe out their technology sector almost completely, simply because a couple of big foreign companies (Microsoft and IBM) can buy a small economy outright and throw money around to depress or accelerate other economies, they'll certainly bpw to a (proportionately) minor quibble such as this.
I admire your ideology-before-productivity attitude, though... inspiring.
That is a very unfair (and inaccurate) characterization of the grandparent post.
Productivity is only one factor, and often not the most critical one. Just as any liability lawyer, security consultant, or sysadmin whose had to recover using an offsite backup.
Your data is your most valuable possession. The cost (in time, energy, money, resources, you name it) of creating your data far outweighs the value of the hardware it resides on, the software you paid for, and probably even the office in which it resides. It is the one thing insurance can't replace, and the one thing you (or your business) probably can't live without.
Having your data (e.g. the Linux kernel) beholden to a proprietary product, managed in a proprietary format, is over the long term quite foolhardy. Imagine, for example, if Microsoft were to buy Bitkeeper (this is hardly unimaginable, and arguably not so unlikely). It isn't an "end of the world" scenerio by any means, but it is damn inconvinient to move the kernel sources to another revision control system, and unfortunately for the kernel developers, there is unlikely to be a libre one that suits their purposes available because they haven't been contributing feedback, criticisms, and suggestions for improvement to any of the free projects by virtue of the fact that they aren't using any of them and so aren't in a position to make said suggestions, etc.
It is generally a mistake to have one's data beholden to a proprietary product. Sometimes it can't be avoided, and sometimes the cost is worthwhile. And sometimes, the results are absolutely catastrophic. Unfortunately, in the case of the Linux kernel, if the results should be catastrophic in some manner, it will be catastrophci for the millions upon millions of Linux users around the world. OTOH there are enough tarballs and parallel CVS repositories around that such a scenerio is very unlikely. What isn't so unlikely is the "OMFG this is painful, we'll have to move to $free-rcs and its going to cost us at least a couple of months productivity."
Now, in the case of the Kernel, Linus has judged these risks to be small enough, and his productivity improvements to be great enough, for the potential tradeoff to be worthwhile. The grandparent post has judged the opposite. Both may be correct for their respective problem domains, but to characterize the one as "ideology-before-productivity" is very disingenuous, and ignores a whole slew of real-world issues that proprietary management schemes, formats, and restrictions bring to the table.
Furthermore, union actors often work on non-union projects under a pseudonym and to the best of my knowlege. no SAG member has ever been forced out of the union for working in a non-union project.
... I'd much rather see actors bringing their talent to the screen in cooperation with the larger creative community, but if their unions are going to plant their feet on this sort of thing, then their passing will go largely unlamented).
If five years, if "trusted" computing doesn't destroy it, our home computers will be able to render photo-realistic films with photo-realistic actors in something close to real-time, allowing the merging of machinima and classical rendering. With these sorts of tools, any small group of people with a good story to tell and a modicum of talent will be able to choreagraph, render, and distribute feature-length films that do not resemble cartoons or computer animation so much as life, real-action movies.
Actor's guilds that try to shut out new, innovative ways for creative people to collaborate are simply ensuring the demise of their own profession. $10 Million contracts for lead actors will become a thing of the past, and I for one won't be shedding a whole lot of tears (though I will shed a few
Yeah, I'm bashing Microsoft but it is deserved in this case.
It's deserved in most cases. Their track record is abominable, whether your referring to their vaporware products that never materialized but kept people from buying the products of early innovators who were thus driven out of business and the retrograde consiquences on technological development in IT, their habit of intimidating their own customers into locking themselves into their products ("if you standardize on Netscape we'll charge you triple for every copy of Windows!"), their habit of obsconding with the ideas and concepts of others and claiming it as their own "innovation," their habit of violating anti-trust law, their patenting of every trivial idea under the sun, their dirty tricks in ramming software patents down the throat of Europeans (better get used to being on your knees, folks), or their habit of producing appallingly shoddy hardware.
Just because Microsoft is being bashed nearly all of the time doesn't mean they haven't earned almost every bit of it the old fashioned way, by being unbearably despicable and discovering new, innovative ways to behave badly.
However, beyond the macro perspective here, I fail to see how a corporation that doesn't like Linux somehow justifies armed revolt and murder of innocent people who aren't even related.
... occasionally (though I do believe the powers that be are getting better at making sure they don't work, which feeds into and magnifies the ugliness I allude to).
I wasn't referring to that specific example. I agree, advocating armed revolt because some idiots spread a little anti-Linux FUD is rediculous. I was referring to a deeper trend in our culture, where people routinely advocate massive violence when things aren't going there way. Some of it is self-centeredness, but a whole lot of it comes from a feeling of disempowerment, and the growing notion that we CAN'T effect change any other way. I don't agree with that notion. Boycotts, massive protests, and elections still do work
I wonder if this is a red herring or not. Sure, lawyers have turned the U.S. into a lawsuit-happy country where people are visited in the hospital right after surgery with promises of grand malpractice suits (I work in a hospital, so that's the only example that comes to my mind right away).
Until congress passed a limitation on the liability of aircraft manufacturers under Clinton in the 1990s the production of private, single engine aircraft had fallen to zero. Why? Because some boneheaded pilot could decide he could fly IFR (instrument conditions, bad weather) despite not having the rating ("what does the damn gubmint know that I don't"), crash the plane killing himself (and maybe some others who had the misfortune to trust him/her and climb aboard), and the aircraft manufacturer would not only be sued, but often lose and have idiot juries award tens of millions to the relatives of the idiot pilot! I kid you not. It happened enough times that virtually every manufacturer of small aircraft ceased production. They simply could not clear a profit once liability costs were factered in.
It wasn't until congress limited this liability to a mere 19 years after manufactur that the industry rebounded, and one can buy new personal aircraft once again.
Look to software patents as another example where, in the not too distant future, patent attorneys and bad governance will converge to kill another innovative industry: ours.
While I believe there are real technical issues vis-a-vis the energy storage density of batteries that probably killed the EV1, liability was probably a non-negligable factor in decreasing the overall profitability beneath the threashhold required for the car to survive.
Innovation is far riskier than doing the staid, "tried and true" thing. That is one of the reasons why most aircraft engine designs are decades old (the design of mine dates back to the 1930s), and manufacturers are loathe to modernize them despite the plethora of good ideas out there. Patents are another reason, but compared to litigation risks, probably secondary in this instance.
So don't kid yourself, lawyers can and do kill entire industries, dead. The lucky ones rebound, the unlucky ones disappear for good, or for decades at a time.
Not a bad idea. I was about to do that, when I decided to try disabling it once again, and ...
IT WORKED!
The folks at Google have thankfully fixed this bug
However I find it interesting that you have nothing to say about my point - that its a sad state of affairs when OS advocacy degenerates into endorsing violence and murder but have plenty to say on a preceived mistake on my part that was a tiny component of what I had to say.
... as much as I detest and despise our corporate masters and the mindless suit-clad lemmings that follow them, I loath and despise violent civil conflict even more. However, as the misdeeds of said corporate masters escalate, there will come a time when violent civil war is the lessor of two evils. Monanto poisoning the deep south and killing scores of Americans in the 1990s, not yet. The theft of thousands of people's retirements by the Billionaires of WorldCom, Enron, and the White House? Not yet, but getting closer perhaps, particularly when those tens of thousands find themselves homeless and ultimately dying as a result.
... may those days come long after I'm gone, or better yet, not at all.
Everything is degenerating in this manner. It appears to be a broader symptom of an escalation of business malpractice and outright malfeascance without consiquences, and a general consensus in the population that there is absolutely nothing anyone can do about it (within the "system").
I've heard everyone from my mother (who's 60+) to small children I've passed on the street make similiar comments. The undercurrent and consensus that is forming, at a subconscious level perhaps, is that the only way to effect change is going to require violence. So far, the cost of a violent uprising againt $favorite-powerful-jackass is greater than the perceived reward, or put another way, the pain of living with injustice the way it is is less than the pain involved in changing it. However, the latter remains constant while the former is increasing at a pretty good clip. At some point the two will be equal, and at some later point, the pain of living with the status quo will be greater than the pain of violent revolt. Sometime after that things will get very nasty indeed.
I only hope I never live to see that day
The mass starvation of most of the population because there is no social security, everyone's retirement has been pilfered, our constitutional protections are (completely) long gone, and there is no democratic process to ever reverse it, and monanto's production of seed grain is interrupted by a manufacturing hiccup? Probably
like CDwriting without scsi-emulation support
I haven't used scsi emulation support to burn CDs (or DVDs) in donkey's years. In fact, I don't even compile scsi emulatin into the kernel or as a modules, because I don't what it ever changing my cd-rom devices to scsi devices. CDRecord on Linux has been able to talk to ATA CD burners natively for quite some time.
Like mastering and burning video DVDs, in linux there is no easy tool.
.iso painlessly.
...
And with NeroLinux there is still no easy tool, because NeroLinux doesn't do DVD mastering. k3b burns DVDs just as well as NeroLinux does (k3b also doesn't do mastering).
Excellent points, but I take issue with the statement "there is still no easy tool."
I use qdvdauthor, which is quite intuitive, for mastering video DVDs. I put together a DVD of my grandmother's memorial service for the family, complete with fancy menus and all the usual bells and whistles. It was quite easy, and k3b burned the resulting
Is it an all in one monolithic solution? Thankfully, no, and as far as I'm concerned, I hope people who do want to bring the windoze notion of one program doing a mediocre job at everything stay the hell away from *BSD and Linux. I like simple programs that do a focused task well. It means the programs are better, more reliable, and more easy for the developers to maintain, which means I get better software. For burning DVDs under Linux from your camcorder, for example, it's as easy as 1, 2, 3
1) use kino to import video data from the camera into dv2 format
2) use qdvdauthor to master the dvd
3) use k3b to burn the DVD
each program does what it does very well, none are monolothic, and if something better comes along for any of the steps above I can substitute the new, better tool, without losing the features I'm used to or prefer in the other two steps.
Nero is dead. These people should have done a little market research before trying to sell a product that, when it matures, won't do any more than the libre software already available does just fine, k3b being just one example.
For example, the "mail forwarding" feature cannot be disabled once it has been enabled. Any change to it does not not save.
I wished I'd known about this yesterday. I'm suffering from having my gmail account spam another account right now, and can't get the damn thing to stop. I'm thinking about creating a new gmail account for myself, but that involves changing my email address, which is itself a pain.
I really hope they fix this soon. Another day or two and I'm simply going to start blocking gmail traffic for a few days.
That is really stretching the definitions of both magic and science beyond the breaking point.
How so, they're the same thing.
At which point you stopped reading and shut off your brain. Had you continued reading the very same paragraph, you would have seen:
magic is not science...though as Arthur C. Clark did point out, a sufficiently advanced technology will be indistinguishable from science. But that refers to our inability to comprehend, not a fundamental legitimacy of magic as science.
Arthur C. Clark's "law" refers to limitations in our perceptions and abilities to understand a sufficiently advanced technology. It does not, and never has, implied that hocus pocus equals science.
Seriously though, it would be in the phone companies best interest to figure out how to block this. After the legislation for the do not call list, calls to our home plummeted. And rightly so. If I have to deal with telemarketers calling my home again, I will simply have the phone company disconnect my land line, especially with the prospect of 100-150 calls/day.
Absolutely. I dumped my landline years ago in no small part because Ameritech (re)sold my number to telemarketers everytime I moved. At the time I was moving every year or two, chasing cheaper rents as my rent was increased. After I bought it was less of an issue, but by then I was used to being wireless only and never went back.
My wife has a landline which we use, but if junk phone calls were to ever come back, she'd probably ditch it as well.
Fantasy is a sub-genre of Science Fiction. It contains fictional science. That is the definition of Science Fiction. Magic and trolls and what not do not exist in real life therefore a fictional science needs to be created in order to explain it.
That is really stretching the definitions of both magic and science beyond the breaking point. By that definition religion creates fictional science to explain things, which is nonsense. Whether they are truthful or not, religions are not science. Whether magical worlds can be articulated that are perfectly self-consistent (they can, at least to the "dust-mote" level) or not, magic is not science...though as Arthur C. Clark did point out, a sufficiently advanced technology will be indistinguishable from science. But that refers to our inability to comprehend, not a fundamental legitimacy of magic as science.
In any event, most fantasy never tries to explain why magic works, and that that does, generally doesn't do so with any semblance of science, Robert Shea's adventures being a notable exception. Which doesn't disprove my point: a few science fiction/fantasy crossover novels that blend the two does not two disparate genres unify, any more than romance and horror are one and the same simply because a few novels have been written that incorporate elements of both.
In addition, I would wager that many people that refer to themselves as atheists actually mean they are agnostic, but are perhaps not familiar with that terminology.
There appears to be some overlap in the terminology. Saying "I do not believe there is a god because I see no evidence to indicate there is" is not imcompatible with the notion that "there is no way to know for sure," nor with the notion "I don't believe it, but I must logically concede the possibility that I, as a fallable human being without the sum of the universes knowledge in my skull might be wrong, current evidence notwithstanding." The former defines an athiest, the latter two an agnostic. I fit all three definitions, so frankly, it seems to me that my choice of labelling myself agnostic or athiest is a matter of preference, at least until someone nails down a better definition for differentiating between the two than has been discussed here (or in many other common fora, such as talk.origins, etc.)
I agree with you WRT the elephant question, with the following caveat: "invisible pink elephants" cannot exist logically. An object that is invisible by definition has no color to it, pink or otherwise. However, invisible evidence could concievably exist. I don't believe in them, because the evidence that they exist is equal to the evidence that a God exists (ie. absolutely none), but I must logically concede the possibility that I'm wrong, as the premise is not disprovable.
However, during the civil war (and, arguably, during WWII w.r.t. Japanese internment) Habeas Corpus was suspended outright. Was this a problem? Yes. Was it the end of everything? No.
... a euphemism for "they were murdered in American concentration camps," but we aren't really aloud to say that out loud, because we want to continue to believe that America hasn't had, doesn't have, and never would have concentration camps, no matter how hight the mountain of evidence to the contrary.
Everything? I guess not. But it was VERY BAD if you were japanese and you were placed in internment.
And for some of the detained, it was the end of everything. They "died" while being detained
In any event, for those who are "lawfully" murdered under such toxic laws, these abuses really are "the end of everything." Life will certainly go on (though perhaps only at the microbial level if the worst of the worst were to happen), civilization will probably go on (though as history shows, at some point we'll have one abuse too many, and civilization will fall. The more abuses we heap on, the sooner that day will come), and for most of the detainees, some semblance of continued existence will go on, though certainly diminished in emotional and financial terms from what they would have had had they not been subject to such abuses.
As for America's formerly good reputation for fairness, enlightened, and lawful behavior, that is gone and probably will never be recovered. The PATRIOT act, however, was just one nail in the coffin of that dead ghost, however. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice et. al. have hammered a bunch of them in, the litany of which (Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and so on) should raise the hairs on the back of the neck of every decent human being, everywhere.