Seriously, A friend of mine, in an icq conversation told me it wasn't true. Plus my mom said so as well.
Translation: Accept information only from Official Sources(tm).
Any reports, of any event, not vetted by Your Official Corporate Public Relations Officer(tm) isn't real and has no validity.
Do not accept word of mouth. Healthy kepticism is not sufficient (for the facts may speak for themselves and undermine Our Official Position(tm)); you are to ignore any anectdotes, any word of mouth reporting, completely and utterly.
Indeed, you shall respond to any unofficial information with disparagement and hostility, as is your duty as a drone Consumer(tm).
Accept the Party Line. It is the Truth(tm), all else is Heresy.
Either BayStar is betting a huge wad of cash on this "horserace" hoping for the big payoff, knows something we don't (which I doubt), or is really stupid. Whatever the management at BayStar is smoking, I'd like some of that.
Or Baystar is merely a front for Microsoft, whose interest in SCO has nothing whatsoever to do with SCO's profit margin, long term business viability, or direct return on investment vis-a-vis the value of SCOX stock.
I hope we don't get Gore ][ when Kerry loses in November.
If people incapable of critical thought ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H republicans don't want to see a Gore ][ in November, then they should stop stealing elections from the American electorate, shredding the constitution, ignoring the bill of rights, disparaging the UN, violating the Geneva convention, starting wars under false pretenses, intimidating the news media into offering only subdued criticism of these practices, and otherwise behaving like the party that, in contrast to the Republicans in 2000, actually won the elections in Germany... circa 1939.
Keep in mind that this was paid by the Microsoft tax often ridiculed by slashdotters....
So, because someone uses a small portion of their crooked winnings to do something good we shouldn't criticize their misbehavior?
Carnegie did a lot of great things with a tiny portion of his ill-gotten wealth. The libraries and universities he built were very cool (and a great thing for our society), but not a single brick made his child labor practices, or union busting through violence, any less appalling. Nor did the good they did even begin to outweigh the harm is business practices caused.
Microsoft is a blight upon the software industry and a menace to the further freedom and innovation of the technology. That doesn't make what Paul Allen is doing any less cool, or my enthusiasm for Space Ship One any less intense. Nor does the latter make criticism of Microsoft's terrible behavior past and present any less apropos.
AllOfMP3 and other grey market Russian MP3 sites do not pay them anything at all. Maybe, just maybe they got a few pennies from the sale of the CDs that these companies bought to master their catalogs, but I really doubt that as well.
Not true. allofmp3.com pays royalties to ROMS. ROMS keeps a small fee to cover costs, and pays the rest as royalties to the artists. As to whether the artists get more royalties from a $0.04 cent allofmp3.com ogg or mp3 file, or an iTunes $0.99 (soon to be $1.25?) song is an interesting question. I would suspect it is quite likely the do not. Either way, the artist does get royalties, the service is legal, and the recording industry of America that has been systematically screwing artists and citizens alike for the last century is left completely out of the (profit) loop.
It's a pretty cheap service, but some doubts were brought up whether Americans could legally use the service.
Those doubts are quickly allayed here. allofmp3.com is perfectly legal under US law. The RIAA doesn't like it, and will tell you otherwise, but they are being no more honest than the MPAA is when it flashes those FBI warnings at the beginning of each DVD telling you you have no right to make a backup copy for personal use... knowing full well that the law and the courts consistently say otherwise.
The short explaination for those too lazy to follow the above link.
1) Under US law, anyone may import any music so long as they are licensed to do so under the copyright laws of their own country. If you buy a mailorder CD from Canada and the company is licensed by either the artist or the CIAA member company, it is legal to import the CD. If you buy a mailorder CD from the US and the US seller is licensed by the artist (or the RIAA member company), it is legal. Under Russian copyright law, which the US is bound by treaty to respect, allofmp3.com has a license to distribute all copyrighted music from the Russian equivelent of the RIAA, known as ROMS.
The RIAA may hate the fact that you can buy $0.99 iTunes songs in whatever unencumbered format you like for around $0.04 per song, but the law throughout the developed world, including the USA, is quite clear that this is a perfectly legal service to use, yes, even in Once But No Longer Free America.
Seriously, whoever was responsible for designing and implementing the system the coast guard uses is at fault.
I find this propensity for blaming the victim to be very disturbing. Microsoft has been fraudulantly representing their system as both stable and secure, just as they have been fraudulantly representing their system as less expensive than their competitors' products (GNU/Linux, OS X, *BSD, etc). This is a matter of public record... one need only peruse their website and their past marketing of Windows, coupled with their slanderous misrepresentations of competitors such as Linux.
Now, one can argue that the technical staff of the coast guard should have known better (so too should every victim of every fraud perpetrated), but the fact that they didn't is hardly negligence on their part, when their vendor misrepresents their product's security on a daily basis.
I can't belive that people who put together systems that perform life critical functions cannot be held liable for the choices they make
I dont think the OS choice is relevent.
Clearly the data do not support this. Mac OS X is demonstrably more secure than windows, both systematically through an architectural analsys, and through historical emperical data (number of exploits, timeliness of patches, effectiveness of patches, etc.). Ditto for the various flavors of BSD, ditto for Linux, ditto for IBM's various mainframe operating systems, and the list goes on.
Clearly, as the underlying architect and definition of a system's security design, policy, and implimentation, the operating system is the single most relevant design choice one can make.
Its the setting up of a system that is exposed to the internet. Systems on which peoplses lives depend have no business being connected to unsecure systems - they should be dealing ONLY with the data needed to perform their task.
That is unrealistic. Systems which are networked together can save lives. A ship is in trouble and automatically reports its position for rescue, allowing the crew to get on with the more immediate task of not drowning. A hospital computer notes a patient's decline and automatically notifies other systems, which notify the appropriate physicians and medical staff. Proper implimentation is critical, of course, but the "cut the cable" solution is nonsensical, particularly when reasonably secure alternatives such as Linux, Mac OS X, and *BSD exist and are well proven.
The worm writer, and Microsoft's fraudulant representation of their operating system as stable and secure, are the primary culprits in this fiasco. It is time we stopped blaming their victims, and held the perpetrators responsible instead.
Slashdotters appear to be a bunch of leaches unwilling to leave their sessions open for others to download with.
Fortunately, for those of us who weren't reading slashdot last night, suprnova.org has a far better torrent available (which still works the morning after):
It's worrying to think that this development might lead to people becoming complacent about their oral hygiene. Just as the pill doesn't prevent people from contracting STD's, the ability to grow teeth through stem cell technology shouldn't send the message to the general public that it's OK to cut corners with personal health.
Exactly right. Jokes about no longer flossing aside, if you lose your gums to gum disease, it won't matter how many shiny new teeth you can grow. Without gums they'll be worse than useless, they'll be a liability, complete with nerves to exact an excruciating lesson as to why.
That having been said, its an excellent addition to our medical/dental toolkit, and one I welcome. Stupid people will use it as an excuse to let their hygene go to hell... the rest of us will continue to excersize good habits, and have even better dental health available to us than beforehand...complete with new teeth when our old ones fail simply as a result of age, get cracked, or otherwise damaged with time and use.
The other side's just as dirty, and in the USA, that kind of thing goes on all the time.
Gerrymandering is a national past-time with our elected officials.
What happened in Texas was more dramatic, and sinister, than that.
No, Gerrymandering doesn't go on "all the time." It is however fairly common, and occurs generally once every ten years when districts are redrawn as a result of census results (populations move from state-to-state, changing the electorial and congressional map, and from region to region within a state, changing local and state electorial maps).
What happened in Texas was that the Republican controlled congress conspired with the Republican governor to redraw district lines just three years after they had been redrawn (as a result of our last census)...the difference this time being that there was no democratic majority in one of the houses to force a reasonable compromise on the ruling party's governor (back then, Dubya Bush).
Because such an extraordinary action required a quorum to be present, and various other parliamentary machinations, a number of Democratic state senators made a point of not being around when the Republicans tried to steamroller these changes through. The result was the governor putting out an arrest warrant on the senators (with the idea of taking them to the capitol in chains and having the necessary quorum present), forcing the senators to seek asylum in neighboring states.
It was positively banana-republic-esque... which is essentially what my country (the United States) has become over the last four years.
In the end other parliamentary maneuvers were taken, and I believe the Gerrymandering (without the need to compromise with the opposition) went through, guaranteeing the republicans several seats in the Congress that are currently held by democratic constituencies now divided into Republican-majority districts.
We are watching the the decline (and probably, ultimately, the fall) of a once great nation. Four years ago, after Bush Junior had stolen the election, I argued that, while we have to endure four years of a usurpur running our country, we will survivie this, and can elect a replacement in four years.
Now I'm not so sure. Even if Kerry does win, the mess they've created in four short years (the strategic and political blunders that have cost us the world's sympathy, the world's respect, and most of our non-military influence in the same world, and left the middle east a shambles, not to mention the (possibly irreversable) erosion of our fundamental constitutional rights in this country) is so tremendous that, while he at least will probably not inflict further damage, it will probably be more than one presidency, or even several, can adequately repair.
Add to that the fundamental attack on our democratic institutions, of which Diebold, Florida, and Texas are but a part, and one wonders just how much longer our civil society will survive, in any form.
The original poster has valid point. If you are installing Gentoo on the underwear covered machine at foot of your bed than the current install procedure is fine. You have the time to spare. For production, one does not have the time to duplicate the tedious steps of the Gentoo install procedure for every machine.
Perhaps not, but if one is a competent admin, one can quickly put together a python (or [insert your favorite scripting language here]) script to automate these tedius steps in response to a few quick questions posed at the start of the script.
That is what I did when we deployed Gentoo enterprise-wide for my employer. (Maintaining your own sync server, frozen to your enterprise's tested and vetted state, is also a wise thing to do. Still vastly more managable, flexible, and easy to keep up to date than any other distro I've come across, and over the years since my first pre-distro use of Linux back in '93 that is more than I care to count).
When you download from this site, there is a master copy in Russia. At the end of the process, there is a master copy in Russia AND a copy on your hard drive. That's two copies, and that already indicates that it's not an import. And the copyright holder has the exclusive right to reproduce his work in the US per 106.
If it is illegal for Americans to legally purchase music in another jurisdiction and move it directly to their computer in the technological backwater that is quickly becoming the United States, then perhaps one might colo a computer with some storage in Russia, download the legally purchased music there, and then move the files personally from the computer in russia to the computer in the soon-to-be-impoverished-through-asinine-IP-laws United States.
The purchase and download all happen in Russia. The importation from one's personal PC in Russia to one's personal PC in the United States is, well, personal, and shouldn't run afoul of any laws.
And if it does... well, that is just one more in an ever growing (and already very long) list of reasons to emigrate to a more sensible jurisdiction (read: just about anywhere else in the developed world, and plenty of places in the developing world)
This just goes to show the fundamental problem with the current legal system: regardless of the merit of their position, the rich can use the courts to impose their will on the poor by killing them with legal fees.
Yes. The system is working exactly as designed.
What, you mean you expected justice and freedom for the drone class? Sorry, those privileges are reserved solely for the oligarchs, feel-good rhetoric from their appointed figureheads to the contrary notwithstanding.
Fine, wrong word, whatever. I'm not exactly familiar with anyone forcing someone to take their mp3's over P2P, so sharing them would be about as close to uploading as you can get.
It is important to get it right, especially if you live in Canada and plan on sharing music (legally). Upload that song to an FTP or web server somewhere and you've broken the law in Canada. Leave it sitting on your hard drive and open the door for others to download it (via bittorrent or what have you) and you are, apparently, not breaking the law in Canada.
This is important to understand if you're planning on doing something like this. It may seem like a nit-pick, but in an environment where large, dying corporate powers are routinely smashing the little guy's life to smithereans in a belated effort to save their obsolete business models, legal definitions like these are critical. Get it wrong, and you'll find yourself wearing a big fat bullseye inviting those thugs to destroy your financial life.
"No evidence was presented that the alleged infringers either distributed or authorized the reproduction of sound recordings," von Finckenstein wrote in his 28-page ruling. "They merely placed personal copies into their shared directories which were accessible by other computer users via a P2P service." http://www.cbc.ca/storyview/MSN/2004/03 /31/downloa d_court040331
Sounds to me like uploading's legal too.
No, uploading is not legal in Canada (IANAL, &c).
Check your definitions again.
Having a file on your hard drive is not, by any reasonable definition, uploading.
Opening the door so that others can access your system is not, by any reasonable definition, uploading.
Telling people your door is open (and what your address is) is not, by any reasonable definition, uploading.
If people come through your open door and help themselves, you are not (by any reasonable definition) engaging in distribution. They are doing the copying, not you.
Under Canadian law this is apparently legal. Ironic, as I just asked this question in another thread before this story ran... because reading the Canadian law on the subject, it should, logically, be legal to run bittorrents, as it is solely an act of downloading, not uploading.
You can legally _download_ music in Canada - it is covered by the levies we pay on the media (yay!:). You cannot legally _upload_ (i.e. share) music, as that makes you a "distributor" (and thus not covered under any form of personal use).
So if I have a song on my hard drive (legally ripped from my own CD), and I open the door for you to come to my hard drive and download that song, I haven't uploaded anything. Therefor, under Canadian copyright law, running p2p software such as bittorrent should be completely legal. Everything is being downloaded... nothing is being uploaded to a server (except perhaps a message saying "hey, there's a file on my system and the door is open").
Well, don't think this behaviour is exclusive to Microsoft. Every CEO and Marketing exec is saying exactly the same thing, and have been for years. Everyone wants their ad where the user is.
Luckilly for those of us who haven't completely devolved, and remain nominally human, we have the ability to eliminate nearly all pestering ads.
Like when they first showed the earth wasn't flat, and suddenly christianity collapsed because a flat world was one of its cornerstones? Don't kid yourself, there is a world of difference between dogma and religion. Dogma comes and goes like the tides, religion is eternal. The handy thing about holy scripture is that you need to interpret it, so what it actually says is left up to the interpreter.
Religion certainly isn't "eternal." It may be an affliction humankind is cursed with until the end of humanity's days, perhaps, or we may in fact survive this ugly adolescence of our species and become enlightened enough to shed its yoke one day.
Even in the worst case scenerio, where religion continues to reinvent itself with every new scientific discovery that renders its tenants untenable and humankind (or a portion thereof) clings to it stubbornly regardless of how many revisions are made to its "Eternal Truths(tm)", every religion known to man today or in the future will most certainly die.
At the absolute, very latest, when the last thinking, breathing human being dies, or when the universe reaches its penultimate expression of entropy (and all life, of any kind, anywhere, becomes untenable)... whichever comes first.
But you are right - religion will reinvent itself (yet again) and claim to have "known all along" the moment alien biology is discovered. Indeed, most religious organizations have had decades in which to prepare their individual spins should such a discovery be made.
I don't stand up for it installing spyware, but if it just pops up a message with a black pirate flag and says you have been logged...the only thing that is harmed is the privacy of a criminal. If they start using this information for blackmail...that is illegal!
No, unauthorized modification of a computer is a crime, in both the UK and the US (and probably most other developed nations' jurisdictions).
What we have here are felons (system crackers planting trojans on people's PCs) who are compromising the privacy of individuals who have committed civil offenses (copyright violations). The seriousness of the former crime is much greater than the seriousness of the crimes of their victims.
That having been said, the FBI has protected murderers who were on their payroll (including sending an innocent man to jail for the murder committed by one of their informants), who turned evidence against people guilty of far less. So the alluded to by others remains: given the current political climate the feds are likely to overlook the felonies being committed in the interest of persuing the civil offenses being committed against their primary constituency, namely the copyright cartels.
PETA 2 is now accepting donations of livestock, bison and venison which have been "rescued" from ranchers and hunters. Our facilities guarantee the animals will be well cared for and well fed for the rest of their lives.
Disclaimer (4 point font): "People Eating Tastey Animals 2" is not affiliated with "People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals."
Speaking with your wallet is great and all but without a massive movement that information doesn't always flow upstream very quickly. In other words speak with your wallet and with your voice. Email is still free (mostly) so everytime your specifically purchase a non-DRM product over theirs write and tell them! Let them know how much $$$ they're losing on a sale-to-sale basis.
Excellent point, but it does not go far enough.
Each time you make such a purchase, tell NOT ONLY the DRM manufacturer why they lost a sale, be sure to also tell the DRM-Free manufacturer that you bought their product specifically because you value consumer rights and resent their competitors. In other words, give positive feedback to the people who are doing the right thing as well...lest they be befuddled by the likes of Microsoft as well.
to privatize the patent office. Contract out the work of reviewing patents, and renew the contracts of the best workers when the contracts expire.
Oh yeah, there's a great idea. I can see the press release a few days after that happens...
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE.
Ligitious Thugs R Us, Unlimited has signed a strategic agreement with Patent Outsources & Examiners, Inc. This historic alliance of Industry with government subsidiaries will facilitate greatly improved speed in the protection of Our Intellectual Property, and that of our Clients. We expect cases of conflicting patent applications to be resolved by Patent Outsourcers and the USPTO in a manner consistent with increasing shareholder value. This is indeed a great day for innovation in America.
Sianara any remaining pretence of fairness in an already destructive, broken system.
To prevent a predator from evolving to depend on their "blooms" and wipe them out when they emerge, they only do it at prime number intervals. That way a predator would have to multiply in the same time interval and not some fraction of it. If it was 12 years a predator could multiply every 2,3,4, or 6 years and have a chance of feeding just when the cicadas were blooming. It's a lot less likely that a predator will multiply at only 17 years at the same time as the cicadas.
There are also species of bamboo that periodically produce tons of seeds to reproduce, but on the order of every 70 years. These too only do it on prime number years.
It's a neat theory, and it is probably true that species with life cycles which are a prime number of years have an evolutionary advantage over those whose cycles are evenly divisible, but the advantage is slight enough that his assertion there are only species with life cycles that are prime numbers is wrong.
Quoth the article:
Question: What is the life span of a cicada?
Answer: That depends on the Genus and species of the cicada. The Magicicada Genus of North America has a 17 or 13 year life cycle (the largest of any insect). Other Geniuses of cicadas have life cycles of a variety of years (never more than 17 and usually a primary number). The Tibicen or "dog day" cicada has a life cycle of only a couple of years and which is one of the reasons why we see them each year.
Most are prime number cycles (probably as a result of the advantage vis-a-vis cyclic predators you cite), but NOT ALL.
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously, A friend of mine, in an icq conversation told me it wasn't true. Plus my mom said so as well.
Translation: Accept information only from Official Sources(tm).
Any reports, of any event, not vetted by Your Official Corporate Public Relations Officer(tm) isn't real and has no validity.
Do not accept word of mouth. Healthy kepticism is not sufficient (for the facts may speak for themselves and undermine Our Official Position(tm)); you are to ignore any anectdotes, any word of mouth reporting, completely and utterly.
Indeed, you shall respond to any unofficial information with disparagement and hostility, as is your duty as a drone Consumer(tm).
Accept the Party Line. It is the Truth(tm), all else is Heresy.
Thank you.
Your Cisco Security.
("Stooges R Us")
Either BayStar is betting a huge wad of cash on this "horserace" hoping for the big payoff, knows something we don't (which I doubt), or is really stupid. Whatever the management at BayStar is smoking, I'd like some of that.
Or Baystar is merely a front for Microsoft, whose interest in SCO has nothing whatsoever to do with SCO's profit margin, long term business viability, or direct return on investment vis-a-vis the value of SCOX stock.
Which has already been well documented publicly.
I hope we don't get Gore ][ when Kerry loses in November.
... circa 1939.
If people incapable of critical thought ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H republicans don't want to see a Gore ][ in November, then they should stop stealing elections from the American electorate, shredding the constitution, ignoring the bill of rights, disparaging the UN, violating the Geneva convention, starting wars under false pretenses, intimidating the news media into offering only subdued criticism of these practices, and otherwise behaving like the party that, in contrast to the Republicans in 2000, actually won the elections in Germany
Keep in mind that this was paid by the Microsoft tax often ridiculed by slashdotters....
So, because someone uses a small portion of their crooked winnings to do something good we shouldn't criticize their misbehavior?
Carnegie did a lot of great things with a tiny portion of his ill-gotten wealth. The libraries and universities he built were very cool (and a great thing for our society), but not a single brick made his child labor practices, or union busting through violence, any less appalling. Nor did the good they did even begin to outweigh the harm is business practices caused.
Microsoft is a blight upon the software industry and a menace to the further freedom and innovation of the technology. That doesn't make what Paul Allen is doing any less cool, or my enthusiasm for Space Ship One any less intense. Nor does the latter make criticism of Microsoft's terrible behavior past and present any less apropos.
I'm afraid you're confused. On 9/12/2001 the USA officially switched from a 'freedom to' model to the less terror-friendly 'freedom from' model.
Does that include freedom from religion?
AllOfMP3 and other grey market Russian MP3 sites do not pay them anything at all. Maybe, just maybe they got a few pennies from the sale of the CDs that these companies bought to master their catalogs, but I really doubt that as well.
Not true. allofmp3.com pays royalties to ROMS. ROMS keeps a small fee to cover costs, and pays the rest as royalties to the artists. As to whether the artists get more royalties from a $0.04 cent allofmp3.com ogg or mp3 file, or an iTunes $0.99 (soon to be $1.25?) song is an interesting question. I would suspect it is quite likely the do not. Either way, the artist does get royalties, the service is legal, and the recording industry of America that has been systematically screwing artists and citizens alike for the last century is left completely out of the (profit) loop.
Which IMHO is an excellent thing.
It's a pretty cheap service, but some doubts were brought up whether Americans could legally use the service.
... knowing full well that the law and the courts consistently say otherwise.
Those doubts are quickly allayed here. allofmp3.com is perfectly legal under US law. The RIAA doesn't like it, and will tell you otherwise, but they are being no more honest than the MPAA is when it flashes those FBI warnings at the beginning of each DVD telling you you have no right to make a backup copy for personal use
The short explaination for those too lazy to follow the above link.
1) Under US law, anyone may import any music so long as they are licensed to do so under the copyright laws of their own country. If you buy a mailorder CD from Canada and the company is licensed by either the artist or the CIAA member company, it is legal to import the CD. If you buy a mailorder CD from the US and the US seller is licensed by the artist (or the RIAA member company), it is legal. Under Russian copyright law, which the US is bound by treaty to respect, allofmp3.com has a license to distribute all copyrighted music from the Russian equivelent of the RIAA, known as ROMS.
The RIAA may hate the fact that you can buy $0.99 iTunes songs in whatever unencumbered format you like for around $0.04 per song, but the law throughout the developed world, including the USA, is quite clear that this is a perfectly legal service to use, yes, even in Once But No Longer Free America.
Seriously, whoever was responsible for designing and implementing the system the coast guard uses is at fault.
... one need only peruse their website and their past marketing of Windows, coupled with their slanderous misrepresentations of competitors such as Linux.
I find this propensity for blaming the victim to be very disturbing. Microsoft has been fraudulantly representing their system as both stable and secure, just as they have been fraudulantly representing their system as less expensive than their competitors' products (GNU/Linux, OS X, *BSD, etc). This is a matter of public record
Now, one can argue that the technical staff of the coast guard should have known better (so too should every victim of every fraud perpetrated), but the fact that they didn't is hardly negligence on their part, when their vendor misrepresents their product's security on a daily basis.
I can't belive that people who put together systems that perform life critical functions cannot be held liable for the choices they make
I dont think the OS choice is relevent.
Clearly the data do not support this. Mac OS X is demonstrably more secure than windows, both systematically through an architectural analsys, and through historical emperical data (number of exploits, timeliness of patches, effectiveness of patches, etc.). Ditto for the various flavors of BSD, ditto for Linux, ditto for IBM's various mainframe operating systems, and the list goes on.
Clearly, as the underlying architect and definition of a system's security design, policy, and implimentation, the operating system is the single most relevant design choice one can make.
Its the setting up of a system that is exposed to the internet. Systems on which peoplses lives depend have no business being connected to unsecure systems - they should be dealing ONLY with the data needed to perform their task.
That is unrealistic. Systems which are networked together can save lives. A ship is in trouble and automatically reports its position for rescue, allowing the crew to get on with the more immediate task of not drowning. A hospital computer notes a patient's decline and automatically notifies other systems, which notify the appropriate physicians and medical staff. Proper implimentation is critical, of course, but the "cut the cable" solution is nonsensical, particularly when reasonably secure alternatives such as Linux, Mac OS X, and *BSD exist and are well proven.
The worm writer, and Microsoft's fraudulant representation of their operating system as stable and secure, are the primary culprits in this fiasco. It is time we stopped blaming their victims, and held the perpetrators responsible instead.
Slashdotters appear to be a bunch of leaches unwilling to leave their sessions open for others to download with.
X _V3.4-2004-05-04-EN.iso.torrent
Fortunately, for those of us who weren't reading slashdot last night, suprnova.org has a far better torrent available (which still works the morning after):
http://66.90.75.92/suprnova//torrents/1681/KNOPPI
After getting 0kB/s via the torrent provided to slashdot, I was gratified to be getting 79kB/s via the suprnova.org torrent.
It's worrying to think that this development might lead to people becoming complacent about their oral hygiene. Just as the pill doesn't prevent people from contracting STD's, the ability to grow teeth through stem cell technology shouldn't send the message to the general public that it's OK to cut corners with personal health.
... the rest of us will continue to excersize good habits, and have even better dental health available to us than beforehand...complete with new teeth when our old ones fail simply as a result of age, get cracked, or otherwise damaged with time and use.
Exactly right. Jokes about no longer flossing aside, if you lose your gums to gum disease, it won't matter how many shiny new teeth you can grow. Without gums they'll be worse than useless, they'll be a liability, complete with nerves to exact an excruciating lesson as to why.
That having been said, its an excellent addition to our medical/dental toolkit, and one I welcome. Stupid people will use it as an excuse to let their hygene go to hell
The other side's just as dirty, and in the USA, that kind of thing goes on all the time.
... which is essentially what my country (the United States) has become over the last four years.
Gerrymandering is a national past-time with our elected officials.
What happened in Texas was more dramatic, and sinister, than that.
No, Gerrymandering doesn't go on "all the time." It is however fairly common, and occurs generally once every ten years when districts are redrawn as a result of census results (populations move from state-to-state, changing the electorial and congressional map, and from region to region within a state, changing local and state electorial maps).
What happened in Texas was that the Republican controlled congress conspired with the Republican governor to redraw district lines just three years after they had been redrawn (as a result of our last census)...the difference this time being that there was no democratic majority in one of the houses to force a reasonable compromise on the ruling party's governor (back then, Dubya Bush).
Because such an extraordinary action required a quorum to be present, and various other parliamentary machinations, a number of Democratic state senators made a point of not being around when the Republicans tried to steamroller these changes through. The result was the governor putting out an arrest warrant on the senators (with the idea of taking them to the capitol in chains and having the necessary quorum present), forcing the senators to seek asylum in neighboring states.
It was positively banana-republic-esque
In the end other parliamentary maneuvers were taken, and I believe the Gerrymandering (without the need to compromise with the opposition) went through, guaranteeing the republicans several seats in the Congress that are currently held by democratic constituencies now divided into Republican-majority districts.
We are watching the the decline (and probably, ultimately, the fall) of a once great nation. Four years ago, after Bush Junior had stolen the election, I argued that, while we have to endure four years of a usurpur running our country, we will survivie this, and can elect a replacement in four years.
Now I'm not so sure. Even if Kerry does win, the mess they've created in four short years (the strategic and political blunders that have cost us the world's sympathy, the world's respect, and most of our non-military influence in the same world, and left the middle east a shambles, not to mention the (possibly irreversable) erosion of our fundamental constitutional rights in this country) is so tremendous that, while he at least will probably not inflict further damage, it will probably be more than one presidency, or even several, can adequately repair.
Add to that the fundamental attack on our democratic institutions, of which Diebold, Florida, and Texas are but a part, and one wonders just how much longer our civil society will survive, in any form.
The original poster has valid point. If you are installing Gentoo on the underwear covered machine at foot of your bed than the current install procedure is fine. You have the time to spare. For production, one does not have the time to duplicate the tedious steps of the Gentoo install procedure for every machine.
Perhaps not, but if one is a competent admin, one can quickly put together a python (or [insert your favorite scripting language here]) script to automate these tedius steps in response to a few quick questions posed at the start of the script.
That is what I did when we deployed Gentoo enterprise-wide for my employer. (Maintaining your own sync server, frozen to your enterprise's tested and vetted state, is also a wise thing to do. Still vastly more managable, flexible, and easy to keep up to date than any other distro I've come across, and over the years since my first pre-distro use of Linux back in '93 that is more than I care to count).
When you download from this site, there is a master copy in Russia. At the end of the process, there is a master copy in Russia AND a copy on your hard drive. That's two copies, and that already indicates that it's not an import. And the copyright holder has the exclusive right to reproduce his work in the US per 106.
... well, that is just one more in an ever growing (and already very long) list of reasons to emigrate to a more sensible jurisdiction (read: just about anywhere else in the developed world, and plenty of places in the developing world)
If it is illegal for Americans to legally purchase music in another jurisdiction and move it directly to their computer in the technological backwater that is quickly becoming the United States, then perhaps one might colo a computer with some storage in Russia, download the legally purchased music there, and then move the files personally from the computer in russia to the computer in the soon-to-be-impoverished-through-asinine-IP-laws United States.
The purchase and download all happen in Russia. The importation from one's personal PC in Russia to one's personal PC in the United States is, well, personal, and shouldn't run afoul of any laws.
And if it does
This just goes to show the fundamental problem with the current legal system: regardless of the merit of their position, the rich can use the courts to impose their will on the poor by killing them with legal fees.
Yes. The system is working exactly as designed.
What, you mean you expected justice and freedom for the drone class? Sorry, those privileges are reserved solely for the oligarchs, feel-good rhetoric from their appointed figureheads to the contrary notwithstanding.
Fine, wrong word, whatever. I'm not exactly familiar with anyone forcing someone to take their mp3's over P2P, so sharing them would be about as close to uploading as you can get.
It is important to get it right, especially if you live in Canada and plan on sharing music (legally). Upload that song to an FTP or web server somewhere and you've broken the law in Canada. Leave it sitting on your hard drive and open the door for others to download it (via bittorrent or what have you) and you are, apparently, not breaking the law in Canada.
This is important to understand if you're planning on doing something like this. It may seem like a nit-pick, but in an environment where large, dying corporate powers are routinely smashing the little guy's life to smithereans in a belated effort to save their obsolete business models, legal definitions like these are critical. Get it wrong, and you'll find yourself wearing a big fat bullseye inviting those thugs to destroy your financial life.
"No evidence was presented that the alleged infringers either distributed or authorized the reproduction of sound recordings," von Finckenstein wrote in his 28-page ruling. "They merely placed personal copies into their shared directories which were accessible by other computer users via a P2P service."3 /31/downloa d_court040331
... because reading the Canadian law on the subject, it should, logically, be legal to run bittorrents, as it is solely an act of downloading, not uploading.
http://www.cbc.ca/storyview/MSN/2004/0
Sounds to me like uploading's legal too.
No, uploading is not legal in Canada (IANAL, &c).
Check your definitions again.
Having a file on your hard drive is not, by any reasonable definition, uploading.
Opening the door so that others can access your system is not, by any reasonable definition, uploading.
Telling people your door is open (and what your address is) is not, by any reasonable definition, uploading.
If people come through your open door and help themselves, you are not (by any reasonable definition) engaging in distribution. They are doing the copying, not you.
Under Canadian law this is apparently legal. Ironic, as I just asked this question in another thread before this story ran
You can legally _download_ music in Canada - it is covered by the levies we pay on the media (yay!:). You cannot legally _upload_ (i.e. share) music, as that makes you a "distributor" (and thus not covered under any form of personal use).
... nothing is being uploaded to a server (except perhaps a message saying "hey, there's a file on my system and the door is open").
So if I have a song on my hard drive (legally ripped from my own CD), and I open the door for you to come to my hard drive and download that song, I haven't uploaded anything. Therefor, under Canadian copyright law, running p2p software such as bittorrent should be completely legal. Everything is being downloaded
Well, don't think this behaviour is exclusive to Microsoft. Every CEO and Marketing exec is saying exactly the same thing, and have been for years. Everyone wants their ad where the user is.
Luckilly for those of us who haven't completely devolved, and remain nominally human, we have the ability to eliminate nearly all pestering ads.
Like when they first showed the earth wasn't flat, and suddenly christianity collapsed because a flat world was one of its cornerstones? Don't kid yourself, there is a world of difference between dogma and religion. Dogma comes and goes like the tides, religion is eternal. The handy thing about holy scripture is that you need to interpret it, so what it actually says is left up to the interpreter.
... whichever comes first.
Religion certainly isn't "eternal." It may be an affliction humankind is cursed with until the end of humanity's days, perhaps, or we may in fact survive this ugly adolescence of our species and become enlightened enough to shed its yoke one day.
Even in the worst case scenerio, where religion continues to reinvent itself with every new scientific discovery that renders its tenants untenable and humankind (or a portion thereof) clings to it stubbornly regardless of how many revisions are made to its "Eternal Truths(tm)", every religion known to man today or in the future will most certainly die.
At the absolute, very latest, when the last thinking, breathing human being dies, or when the universe reaches its penultimate expression of entropy (and all life, of any kind, anywhere, becomes untenable)
But you are right - religion will reinvent itself (yet again) and claim to have "known all along" the moment alien biology is discovered. Indeed, most religious organizations have had decades in which to prepare their individual spins should such a discovery be made.
I don't stand up for it installing spyware, but if it just pops up a message with a black pirate flag and says you have been logged...the only thing that is harmed is the privacy of a criminal.
If they start using this information for blackmail...that is illegal!
No, unauthorized modification of a computer is a crime, in both the UK and the US (and probably most other developed nations' jurisdictions).
What we have here are felons (system crackers planting trojans on people's PCs) who are compromising the privacy of individuals who have committed civil offenses (copyright violations). The seriousness of the former crime is much greater than the seriousness of the crimes of their victims.
That having been said, the FBI has protected murderers who were on their payroll (including sending an innocent man to jail for the murder committed by one of their informants), who turned evidence against people guilty of far less. So the alluded to by others remains: given the current political climate the feds are likely to overlook the felonies being committed in the interest of persuing the civil offenses being committed against their primary constituency, namely the copyright cartels.
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Speaking with your wallet is great and all but without a massive movement that information doesn't always flow upstream very quickly. In other words speak with your wallet and with your voice. Email is still free (mostly) so everytime your specifically purchase a non-DRM product over theirs write and tell them! Let them know how much $$$ they're losing on a sale-to-sale basis.
Excellent point, but it does not go far enough.
Each time you make such a purchase, tell NOT ONLY the DRM manufacturer why they lost a sale, be sure to also tell the DRM-Free manufacturer that you bought their product specifically because you value consumer rights and resent their competitors. In other words, give positive feedback to the people who are doing the right thing as well...lest they be befuddled by the likes of Microsoft as well.
Oh yeah, there's a great idea. I can see the press release a few days after that happens
Sianara any remaining pretence of fairness in an already destructive, broken system.
By that logic, Anna Nicole Smith qualifies. ;)
So that's what has been perturbing earth's orbit!
There are also species of bamboo that periodically produce tons of seeds to reproduce, but on the order of every 70 years. These too only do it on prime number years.
It's a neat theory, and it is probably true that species with life cycles which are a prime number of years have an evolutionary advantage over those whose cycles are evenly divisible, but the advantage is slight enough that his assertion there are only species with life cycles that are prime numbers is wrong.
Quoth the article:
Most are prime number cycles (probably as a result of the advantage vis-a-vis cyclic predators you cite), but NOT ALL.