Unless you want to talk to the folks at Websters about changing the definition of the word?
not only websters but words like theft have a legal definaition irrespective of what the dictionary says. in the UK at least theft, legally speaking means a crime that is punishable under the theft act of err.. 1968? can't remember the date.
if I remember correctly, copyright infringement (if that is what this is, and I don't think this is) has been defined as not theft in a case in the 70's (err.. oxford vs moore I think) where oxford university attempted to prosecute a student who photocopied an exam paper before the exam for theft. the judge told them that as the paper wasn't missing it wasn't theft.
inmho it's apple's fault for being so silly. what was published are only instructions. they aren't offering the software for download and they aren't offering a l33t program to hax0r it for you.
How fair is it for a someone to spend millions of dollars of a schoo's research money and then shut the university out of the financial rewards of that invention?
hang on, I don't exactly know how the american education system works but surely the student pays to be at university, or someone pays on their behalf (ie grant from the gov etcetc) in most cases. if that is so then why does the student not have the right to their inventions. libraries won't sue you to be included on a patent just because you did some research form one of their books.
if the university gives the student a full scholarship then fair enough, if the gov gives the student a scholarship (does this happen?) then the patent should go to the gov to throw open as public domain.
however, if the student has paid their way though then why should they not own the patent?
just because it says so in your cotract doesn;t mean it is so. many illegal tihngs go into contracts and just because you've signed them doesn't make it valid.
yes, for the most part if you come up with something ptentable while at work, on work related topic then it's highly likely to belong to the co, but there are clauses in english law at least where the worker can get that patent for themselves
if the invention happened in a subject of which any knowledgeable person in the field whould not expect any innovation to reasonably come from, then the inventor has a good claim to keep the patent for himself. there is also stuff in the uk patent laws about if a company buys a patent off you for little and then makes a huge amount of money off it, you can get compensation off them for not paying you enough in the first place.
don't know if any of tihs stuff has been superseeded by euro stuff though.
I don't tihnk the RIAA were prepared to find out whether people behaved this way or not. they didn't care. what worried them was losing control of the distribution of music. their comments about protecting the artist were pure excuse.
this would be why courtney love sued her label for er share of the napster payout (what happened with that anyways?).
the label's claim to be protecting the artist but they really do't much care afaics.
yes, items may have symbolic power but again, I think it's a freedom of speech issue. if in middle eastern dictatorship X the courts decided to tell yahoo to stop auctioning bibles would anyon give a damn? not likely.
it's the old freedom of speech cliche, I may not agree with what you say but I will defend to the death your right to [say it|tell such LIES] etc.
we don't want to make saying what you feel (inciting ppl to violence aside) illegal becuase what happens if they are right? okay, there may be many who are obviously not (in our opinions) but where does one draw the line?
afaik yahoo FR never auctioned nazi stuff (due to the law) but yahoo US did (as is it's right). if yahoo US made yahoo FR an independant company then what could the french courts do? you can't punish yahoo FR for the actions of a completely different company (even if it used to own you). yahoo US can indeed filter out most of the french users via IP but it's an ugly hack and why should they low down their high bandwidth site for a small fraction of viewers?
of course yahoo can decide as it likes about what it will sell, body parts and a bit yucky, user underwear.. well I woulda thought that would get high percentages from japan on those but hey (and another social stereotype exposes itself there:)
I tihnk the reason that the free speechers didn;t hop over thosewas that they don;t buy those things? (but they do nai stuff? who knows) or more likely, they appreciate that yahoo can make it's own mind up abot what to sell and not to, they just don;t lie it when yahoo are told what to do.
I am personaly of the opinion that nazi memorabilia are just "things" and as such have no power in themselves. if mr X who was going to buy an item was prevented by the french ruling then is this really going to stop him being a nazi sympathiser? besides, where do these lines get drawn? what is an allowed object and what isn't. this plate is legal and tihs is isn't because it has a swastika on it?
so if america eventually destroys afghanistan does that mean that the sale of any items left should be illegal?
however, thats besides the point. france, like any country, can bring about any law it likes and if it wishes to ban nazi memorabilia then so be it.
except I have never understood how a french court can have *any* juristiction over an american company. apart from PR, what forces yahoo US to give a damn what a french court says. yahoo FR maybe (is there such a thing) but why yahoo US?
yes, because the government were so keen to listen to us when they asked for our opinion on the RIP act. everyone asked said no so they brought it in anyways.
we may have a high newspaper readership (and how much is the Sun or the News of the World) but our gov still ignores the general populace for the most part and does as it pleases.
hang on, the claim was only that one time pad's were the strongest form of crypto, which is true. he never said anything about being good for key distribution (a logistical problem not a cryptographic one) or about authentication. auth may be related to crypto in our world but it's a different subject that public key encryption just happenes to take care of.
basically the one time ad is the best crypto for security there is. it's not subject to frequency analysis as it's a polyalphabetical substitution cypher, you can subject it to multiple frequency analysis as the key length is the same as the code. if it's a truely random key (hard to find) then there are no patterns to take advantage of. it's unbeatable.
the big problem with it is that it is a logistical nightmare but, but thats the price of security. if you want unbreakable encryption then you have to like with the caveat's
yes, but oceana is the UK plus the US plus a few iirc. so assuming yo're US or UKian (a fairly likely assumption here) you'd be at war with your own country.
is it really that bad in the US? in the UK alot of shops will let you return cd's and comptuer games and such, poened up to about a week or 10 days after yo bought it. ofr music at places like hmv or virgin, you often don't even need the receipt (but you'll only get an exchange). hell, they don't even care why.
if you have a mind you can go into game or electronics boutique and buy q3a, take it home, copy it, take it back the next weekend (without giving a reason) and get your money back. yet even with all that tempation to pirate, those shops still make a profit.
also I think you'd definately have a right to return it as I imagine they won't be cd's. by that I mean that they won't have the CD logo as it won't be redbook audio (CD is a standard doncha know). therefore while it might be musical data stored on a plastic disc impregnated with an aluminium foil, it won't be a CD and any attempt to sell it as such is a breach of trade descriptions.
I have the eagles's "hell freezes over" album in 5.1 DTS audio on a cd format silver disc at home. now while everyone refered to them as dts cd's neither the disc ont the packaging actually has the cd logo on them and they are officially not cd's. if you play them in a stereo cd player al you get a is a nice, soft static noise.
it was passed (grr) alas. everybody who heard about it said no, including big business groups like the chamber of commerce etc, but they decided to pass the law anyways. we didn't really mean we disliked it obviously.
2 years for not giving up the keys, 5 years of telling anyone they you're being asked. and it's a guilty until proven innocent law.
use fucking useless, hmm.. terrorist.. 2 years in minimum for not giving up the keys or 30 years to life in max security if you do decode the message.. difficult choice..
I too have an MX-500 and it's great, although I have to point out that it doesn't have a touchscreen. it has an LCD panel at the top with 5 (6? 5 I think, sorry, it's in the lounge and I'm in bed:) buttons on each side. the buttons are labelled on the lcd panel.
so while it has that standard transport buttons (play, stop, pause rew, FF etc) and the numbers, thumbpad with click to select, it also has these buttons at the top labelled with lcd. it's just a fantastic combo. it does almost everything I want from a remote control. you can punchthrough volume from (say) the amp to all your other components. you can record macro's on virtually any button, it's got a strong IR transmitter, easy menu interfave for configging it, the list goes on.
on the bad side, you can't enter discrete codes into it via the remote itself, although it will happily learn the codes if you can teach them from another remot (lots of ppl recommend picking up a radioshack programmable remote for it just to use for teaching it discrete codes). ermm.. you can't program it from a PC. umm... thats about it afaiac.
I got one for £115 and haven't regretted it. it controls all my kit fine. I could have used the preprogrammed button templates but hey, I'm a geek to I decided to blank it and teach it all the codes myself so I could place all the buttons on it I wanted and in the places I wanted.
it controls my amp, dvd player, tv, vidja, tuner, md deck and tivo.
if you've got a second line via DACS and you use it for data then you should complain to BT. dacs is good enough for voice but not for data (as you well know). with all the advertising bt used to do about getting a seocnd phone line for modem use they should damn well install a full second line and not mux, after all, you're paying a full second amount of line rental I'm sure.
get them to send the engineers back and do a proper job.
people pay extra for region free players (assuming it's a hardware hack) but the money doesn't go to the studio's at all. they'd rather you couldn't mod dvd players. the money pays for the parts and labour to replace the bios or change the jumpers or spill solder all over the mobo etcetc.
things like this nec lappie, and the sony picture book (and some of the other little vaio's are great except they are missing two things that I think would make them really popular.
a) onboard 100meg ethernet
b) a 9 pin serial port
when a core router dies you don't want to be scrabbling around for a legacy ports dongle. you wanna unhook the ethernet and power, grab the notebook and run to the data suite.
yes I know serial portsare old fashioned but lots of kit still has consoles available over it. even a serial port available over rj45 would do (in fact would be great) so you can just grab the notebook, wrap a cisco rollover cable, and maybe cat5 round it and go. on messing about, no looking for the special bag that has all the dingles in it.
ffs, there are loads of network techies who would kill for a picturebook with onboard ethernet and a serial port. does no-one get that?
dave
something like a picturebook would be ideal, it's light and tiny, runs linux happily. if it had a serial port then you could close it, wrap the
Re:So I will drive with my windows open, NEXT
on
Remote Breathalyzer
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· Score: 1
okay, I'm a brit so I don't have any constitutional rights at all however I'd say that this seems like another "but what about the children" flag waving attempt to lock people down.
we're all responsible adults. this is supposed to be a world of "innocent until proven guilty" (although in the UK that is increasingly becoming false) and this is essentially a search of your person with no warrant or probably cause. hell, it's not even by the police, it's by a car company.
the "first world" governments seem to be increasingly sliding towards an environment where their citizens are not allowed to do anything in case it hurts someone. how long will it be before we're all forced to wear think cotton wool coats in case we walk into someone? and have mind reading hats on in case we think about a crime (after all, if we're innocent, what have we got to hide?).
ffs, can we not take responsibility for ourselves. if we commit a crime then certainly, we ought to repay our debt to society, but as long as we are innocent we should all have the right not to be harrassed by the nanny-state.
one of the first telephones numbers I remember having (well, my parents had it) was 4 digits with a 2 digit local area code and a 4 digit bigger area code. (ie 0254 for blackburn and 81 for mellor(small villiage within blackburn))
now the small local code is glued onto the 4 digit code to create a 6 digit code.
Don't forget that people might just *want* another name. in the UK you can take on a new name any time you like as long as you are not doing it for the purposes of deception.
Slashdot Mirror
not only websters but words like theft have a legal definaition irrespective of what the dictionary says. in the UK at least theft, legally speaking means a crime that is punishable under the theft act of err.. 1968? can't remember the date.
if I remember correctly, copyright infringement (if that is what this is, and I don't think this is) has been defined as not theft in a case in the 70's (err.. oxford vs moore I think) where oxford university attempted to prosecute a student who photocopied an exam paper before the exam for theft. the judge told them that as the paper wasn't missing it wasn't theft.
inmho it's apple's fault for being so silly. what was published are only instructions. they aren't offering the software for download and they aren't offering a l33t program to hax0r it for you.
imho apple can sod off
dave
actually, we're a miles country too. it's the continent which is km's
dave
but signatures produced from it are legaly binding, so they are very dangerous machines to own.
steal your congressman's autopen today!
dave
hang on, I don't exactly know how the american education system works but surely the student pays to be at university, or someone pays on their behalf (ie grant from the gov etcetc) in most cases. if that is so then why does the student not have the right to their inventions. libraries won't sue you to be included on a patent just because you did some research form one of their books.
if the university gives the student a full scholarship then fair enough, if the gov gives the student a scholarship (does this happen?) then the patent should go to the gov to throw open as public domain.
however, if the student has paid their way though then why should they not own the patent?
dave
just because it says so in your cotract doesn;t mean it is so. many illegal tihngs go into contracts and just because you've signed them doesn't make it valid.
yes, for the most part if you come up with something ptentable while at work, on work related topic then it's highly likely to belong to the co, but there are clauses in english law at least where the worker can get that patent for themselves
if the invention happened in a subject of which any knowledgeable person in the field whould not expect any innovation to reasonably come from, then the inventor has a good claim to keep the patent for himself. there is also stuff in the uk patent laws about if a company buys a patent off you for little and then makes a huge amount of money off it, you can get compensation off them for not paying you enough in the first place.
don't know if any of tihs stuff has been superseeded by euro stuff though.
dave
I don't tihnk the RIAA were prepared to find out whether people behaved this way or not. they didn't care. what worried them was losing control of the distribution of music. their comments about protecting the artist were pure excuse.
this would be why courtney love sued her label for er share of the napster payout (what happened with that anyways?).
the label's claim to be protecting the artist but they really do't much care afaics.
dave
yes, items may have symbolic power but again, I think it's a freedom of speech issue. if in middle eastern dictatorship X the courts decided to tell yahoo to stop auctioning bibles would anyon give a damn? not likely.
:)
it's the old freedom of speech cliche, I may not agree with what you say but I will defend to the death your right to [say it|tell such LIES] etc.
we don't want to make saying what you feel (inciting ppl to violence aside) illegal becuase what happens if they are right? okay, there may be many who are obviously not (in our opinions) but where does one draw the line?
afaik yahoo FR never auctioned nazi stuff (due to the law) but yahoo US did (as is it's right). if yahoo US made yahoo FR an independant company then what could the french courts do? you can't punish yahoo FR for the actions of a completely different company (even if it used to own you). yahoo US can indeed filter out most of the french users via IP but it's an ugly hack and why should they low down their high bandwidth site for a small fraction of viewers?
of course yahoo can decide as it likes about what it will sell, body parts and a bit yucky, user underwear.. well I woulda thought that would get high percentages from japan on those but hey (and another social stereotype exposes itself there
I tihnk the reason that the free speechers didn;t hop over thosewas that they don;t buy those things? (but they do nai stuff? who knows) or more likely, they appreciate that yahoo can make it's own mind up abot what to sell and not to, they just don;t lie it when yahoo are told what to do.
thoughts?
dave
I am personaly of the opinion that nazi memorabilia are just "things" and as such have no power in themselves. if mr X who was going to buy an item was prevented by the french ruling then is this really going to stop him being a nazi sympathiser? besides, where do these lines get drawn? what is an allowed object and what isn't. this plate is legal and tihs is isn't because it has a swastika on it?
so if america eventually destroys afghanistan does that mean that the sale of any items left should be illegal?
however, thats besides the point. france, like any country, can bring about any law it likes and if it wishes to ban nazi memorabilia then so be it.
except I have never understood how a french court can have *any* juristiction over an american company. apart from PR, what forces yahoo US to give a damn what a french court says. yahoo FR maybe (is there such a thing) but why yahoo US?
can someone please explain this to me?
dave
yes, because the government were so keen to listen to us when they asked for our opinion on the RIP act. everyone asked said no so they brought it in anyways.
we may have a high newspaper readership (and how much is the Sun or the News of the World) but our gov still ignores the general populace for the most part and does as it pleases.
dave
edlin was never a vi clone. edlin wishe dit had the intuitiveness and user friendlyness that vi did.
Windows XP: form the people that brought you edlin.
dave
hang on, the claim was only that one time pad's were the strongest form of crypto, which is true. he never said anything about being good for key distribution (a logistical problem not a cryptographic one) or about authentication. auth may be related to crypto in our world but it's a different subject that public key encryption just happenes to take care of.
basically the one time ad is the best crypto for security there is. it's not subject to frequency analysis as it's a polyalphabetical substitution cypher, you can subject it to multiple frequency analysis as the key length is the same as the code. if it's a truely random key (hard to find) then there are no patterns to take advantage of. it's unbeatable.
the big problem with it is that it is a logistical nightmare but, but thats the price of security. if you want unbreakable encryption then you have to like with the caveat's
dave
don't forget gov and int. mind you, I've only ever seen one int in use ever.
and the cctld's of course
dave
where did you get the carriage returns form?
dave
PS. for that matter, how did you change virtual console's?
yes, but oceana is the UK plus the US plus a few iirc. so assuming yo're US or UKian (a fairly likely assumption here) you'd be at war with your own country.
:)
then again, perhaps thats right..
dave
yup, that old chesnut. if you don't agree with this law then you must be supporting terrorists/peadophiles/murderers/bad things.
*sigh*
dave
is it really that bad in the US? in the UK alot of shops will let you return cd's and comptuer games and such, poened up to about a week or 10 days after yo bought it. ofr music at places like hmv or virgin, you often don't even need the receipt (but you'll only get an exchange). hell, they don't even care why.
if you have a mind you can go into game or electronics boutique and buy q3a, take it home, copy it, take it back the next weekend (without giving a reason) and get your money back. yet even with all that tempation to pirate, those shops still make a profit.
also I think you'd definately have a right to return it as I imagine they won't be cd's. by that I mean that they won't have the CD logo as it won't be redbook audio (CD is a standard doncha know). therefore while it might be musical data stored on a plastic disc impregnated with an aluminium foil, it won't be a CD and any attempt to sell it as such is a breach of trade descriptions.
I have the eagles's "hell freezes over" album in 5.1 DTS audio on a cd format silver disc at home. now while everyone refered to them as dts cd's neither the disc ont the packaging actually has the cd logo on them and they are officially not cd's. if you play them in a stereo cd player al you get a is a nice, soft static noise.
dave
it was passed (grr) alas. everybody who heard about it said no, including big business groups like the chamber of commerce etc, but they decided to pass the law anyways. we didn't really mean we disliked it obviously.
2 years for not giving up the keys, 5 years of telling anyone they you're being asked. and it's a guilty until proven innocent law.
use fucking useless, hmm.. terrorist.. 2 years in minimum for not giving up the keys or 30 years to life in max security if you do decode the message.. difficult choice..
dave
I too have an MX-500 and it's great, although I have to point out that it doesn't have a touchscreen. it has an LCD panel at the top with 5 (6? 5 I think, sorry, it's in the lounge and I'm in bed :) buttons on each side. the buttons are labelled on the lcd panel.
so while it has that standard transport buttons (play, stop, pause rew, FF etc) and the numbers, thumbpad with click to select, it also has these buttons at the top labelled with lcd. it's just a fantastic combo. it does almost everything I want from a remote control. you can punchthrough volume from (say) the amp to all your other components. you can record macro's on virtually any button, it's got a strong IR transmitter, easy menu interfave for configging it, the list goes on.
on the bad side, you can't enter discrete codes into it via the remote itself, although it will happily learn the codes if you can teach them from another remot (lots of ppl recommend picking up a radioshack programmable remote for it just to use for teaching it discrete codes). ermm.. you can't program it from a PC. umm... thats about it afaiac.
I got one for £115 and haven't regretted it. it controls all my kit fine. I could have used the preprogrammed button templates but hey, I'm a geek to I decided to blank it and teach it all the codes myself so I could place all the buttons on it I wanted and in the places I wanted.
it controls my amp, dvd player, tv, vidja, tuner, md deck and tivo.
dave
if you've got a second line via DACS and you use it for data then you should complain to BT. dacs is good enough for voice but not for data (as you well know). with all the advertising bt used to do about getting a seocnd phone line for modem use they should damn well install a full second line and not mux, after all, you're paying a full second amount of line rental I'm sure.
get them to send the engineers back and do a proper job.
dave
people pay extra for region free players (assuming it's a hardware hack) but the money doesn't go to the studio's at all. they'd rather you couldn't mod dvd players. the money pays for the parts and labour to replace the bios or change the jumpers or spill solder all over the mobo etcetc.
dave
things like this nec lappie, and the sony picture book (and some of the other little vaio's are great except they are missing two things that I think would make them really popular.
a) onboard 100meg ethernet
b) a 9 pin serial port
when a core router dies you don't want to be scrabbling around for a legacy ports dongle. you wanna unhook the ethernet and power, grab the notebook and run to the data suite.
yes I know serial portsare old fashioned but lots of kit still has consoles available over it. even a serial port available over rj45 would do (in fact would be great) so you can just grab the notebook, wrap a cisco rollover cable, and maybe cat5 round it and go. on messing about, no looking for the special bag that has all the dingles in it.
ffs, there are loads of network techies who would kill for a picturebook with onboard ethernet and a serial port. does no-one get that?
dave
something like a picturebook would be ideal, it's light and tiny, runs linux happily. if it had a serial port then you could close it, wrap the
okay, I'm a brit so I don't have any constitutional rights at all however I'd say that this seems like another "but what about the children" flag waving attempt to lock people down.
we're all responsible adults. this is supposed to be a world of "innocent until proven guilty" (although in the UK that is increasingly becoming false) and this is essentially a search of your person with no warrant or probably cause. hell, it's not even by the police, it's by a car company.
the "first world" governments seem to be increasingly sliding towards an environment where their citizens are not allowed to do anything in case it hurts someone. how long will it be before we're all forced to wear think cotton wool coats in case we walk into someone? and have mind reading hats on in case we think about a crime (after all, if we're innocent, what have we got to hide?).
ffs, can we not take responsibility for ourselves. if we commit a crime then certainly, we ought to repay our debt to society, but as long as we are innocent we should all have the right not to be harrassed by the nanny-state.
*sigh* revlution brothers...
dave
We have this in the UK by law afaik. I think you have to pay fo it but it's doable.
dave
one of the first telephones numbers I remember having (well, my parents had it) was 4 digits with a 2 digit local area code and a 4 digit bigger area code. (ie 0254 for blackburn and 81 for mellor(small villiage within blackburn))
now the small local code is glued onto the 4 digit code to create a 6 digit code.
dave
Don't forget that people might just *want* another name. in the UK you can take on a new name any time you like as long as you are not doing it for the purposes of deception.
dave