Guess what, their probably isn't any money left to sue for.
I'm afraid you have not read the articles. Bertelsmann actually offered good hard cash for the Napster assets. This cash - at least - would have been "the money left" and could have been used to pay a part of Napster's debt.
Due to the decision of that bankruntcy court now the creditors will not see that money. The question is now: will the court be able to get a better - or at least comparable - offer for the napster assets. If it doesn't, it has harmed the creditors and should duly compensate them. The court, after all, is the trustee of the creditor's interest and should act according to these duties.
Somebody else has suggested - and I share that sentiment - that some of the creditors might rather see Napster go down in flames but see its assets in Bertelsmann hands. The only legitimate way to acchieve that of course would be presenting a better offer. But that costs money. So the court has indirectly done, say, Disneys bidding here - by killing of the Bertelsmann offer the court has made it cheaper for them to get the whole Napster destroyed forever, to the strategic advantage of a few companies and to the detriment of the other Napster creditors.
Now add to that that the nasty suspicion that the benificaries are probably US companies (Disney, Time/Warner etc), while one of the victims is a Euroopean Company (Bertelsmann is with ~ US$ 100 Mill. one of Napster's larger creditors as well) you come to conclude that a judge may have bent the law and acted against his duties to give an advantage to some US companies over their European competitor.
As a funny sidenote, some of the articles suggest that Bertelsmann's Napster credits are 'secured' - if I understand that correctly Bertelsmann will get a better share or even the lions share of any payout from Napster. So this takeover bid might even have been a close-to-zero-sum-game - Betelsmann pays the money for the assets and gets most of it back as debt repayment. This means they were more or less entitled to Napster's assets as result of their credit contracts anyway. So we have a judge tricking a foreign company out of leagl entitlements to the advantage of an ameriacn competitor.
If this were in fact the case, they indeed should take a hard look at the judge and initiate legal action against him.
[...] since Bertelsmann announced that they would close napster. Guess they are pretty happy now that the deal didn't go through...
Exactly. German media reports Bertelsman coming close to essentially saying "Thank you, your honor. Thank you. Thank you.". They have already announced not to pursue the issue any further.
If I were a Napster creditor (the only financial stakeholders left), I'd try to sue whomever is responsible for this colossal blunder.
diablo2 was also the most patched game in history, so i wouldn't exactly hail blizzard
Huh ? Diablo2 is now at 1.09. That means 9 patches alltogether, some of which never reached the public (like 1.07). All this includes the expansion, which added a substantial number of features.
In all there were 5 or 6 patches to Diablo2.
Doom had _way_ more patches. Don't know about quake.
And, patches or not, Blizzard's client-server architecture is the right way to go.
Gosh! Peer to peer. Truly distributed. No central server. Bingo ! Bingo ! Bingo !
Aside from that fact that I just won Bulshit Bingo, this means cheating hell.
Hello, Mr Carmack, been busy coding for the last few years, have you ? never noticed those problems game communities have with people hacking their software to gain unfair advantages ? never heard of the likes of punkbuster and co ? never wondered why Blizzard went away from a real P2P-Game system in Diablo 1 to a strict client-server system in Diablo 2, to even have a chance to control cheating ?
Keep in mind that the cash that they do make has/all/ been handed over voluntarily by the masses -- nobody, to my knowledge, has ever been kidnapped by the record companies and forced to buy music
Voluntarily ? You want song X ? you have to pay their monopoly price. What choice do I have ?
5 Companies essentially conrol the whole market. This is anything but a free market.
If it isn't already, 1G ought to be standardized at 10.0 m/s2, to simplify calculations.
Good Idea. You should try to submit your idea to this USian commitee that already had such tremendous success standardizing PI at an easier to handle number.
You folks shouldn't judge that intiative based on your disdain of Verisign.
Others have already commented on Nominet's non-profit structure.
DENIC operates under the very strict German rules of a "licensed cooperative". Every ISP (a few simple technical criteria determine what an ISP is) is entitled membership in this cooperative, it has a clear, open fee structure and has served the German internet community extraordinary well for last few years. It may not be a model for ICANN itself (since there is no real user involvement) but it certainly is a model for an effective, community driven registrar.
When ICANN's Stuart Lynn comments (from the article):
A registry by definition has a monopoly, so they all have a common interest in preserving individual monopolistic practices, so they don't want to be accountable to anybody," Lynn said.
Registry operators like VeriSign, DENIC and Nominet wield substantial power over valuable, limited resources, Lynn said. ICANN maintains the only real check on those powers, he added.
he is purposefully distorting the truth with respect to Nominet and DENIC
you can be even safer if you do make -n install as non-root, then execute the steps by hand
LOL
Just try this once with a FreBSD port. you get a few pages of meaningless drivel, and the commands you look for are not there
They send you through 3 layers of indirection. make install somewhere calls make realinstallm and that in turn somewhere calls make doinstall or somne such. And _that_ one calls te other make file with make install, but with an option line that has more words than a Microsoft EULA.
Good luck finding the three menaingful options in there:-)
Thats the price you pay for make doing automagically the right thing all the time.
I rather doubt people want to see those sites that much, especially if offered workable alternatives.
Hogwash. We've been there before. India tried this isolation shit in the 70s and 80s with computers, and it cost their economy dearly. Yahoo, Ebay and friends will just sit it out.
quoting someone else:
Especially in the case of eBay, this will mean near certain death for the current India ISPs. eBay is doing fine as it is
Depends. An auction site needs to build some kind of connected market to be attractive. EBay US is mostly uselss for me in Germany, since it doesn't establish German/European areas. So, I venture to guess, it is for Indians.
(* define "inapropriate comment"... sounds to me like he was stupid enough to a joke about terrorists in an airport. *)
Well...
According to this Article he said
""Why are you worried about tweezers when I could crash the plane?".
A perfectly legitimate question for a pilot, from my point of view.
The only OSF/1 system to see much use was [...] DEC OSF/1, then Digital UNIX and then Digital Tru64 UNIX, then Compaq Tru64 UNIX and now, pant, pant, I hear that another name change is in the works under HP.
hmmm... like... um... Garbage Fill ?
IIRC, it's supposed to be scrapped in favour of world's ugliest surviving Unix, aka HPUX.
Yep, you are right. But the tax is going to make that worse, and therefore it's a Bad Thing (tm). Furthermore it advances the idea of 'all things are taxeable' and fattens the already overfat tax rates in Europe a little more.
So, from my point of view as an European citizen that tax should be removed. (OTOH we should better do something against widespreasd government overspending and overtaxation in general, since for some strange reason there is not a single party here around promising (and fulfilling) substantial tax breaks. We need something like the US tax revolt in the ninties.
The concept of a "licensed professional" does not translate well to many other countries. Germany, for instance, has a very mixed system of chambers and university degrees (and even payment systems) regulating access to certain professions, and no universal description for them.
This.pro thing is mainly taylored to the anglo saxon world, with a focus to the US of A (what a surprise:-/ ). They should have called it ".pro.us".
Actually here in Argentina we are kind of property of corporations. The IMF (International Monetary Fund) practically dictates the economy. It would take just a telephone call from USA embassy to government to turn off one such initiative. And no, I'm not exagerating.
*sigh*
The IMF is anything but a corporation.
Actually, the IMF is essentially a giant pile of taxpayer cash from a number of industrialized nations (yep, that's my tax dollars, too) amassed to bail out nations from bankruptcy that don't have anybody else to bail them out. All this based on the - untested - assumption that bailing them out is somehow prefereable from letting them going bankrupt.
Whatever the IMF is asking Argentina to do it mainly does to get them into a position to pay back their foreign debt, including, but not limited to, IMF money.
Now, Argentina paying Microsoft Tax, in US$ and to Redmont, is not in anybody's interest but Microsoft's, because any cent going to M$ is neither going to one of Argentina's foreign creditor banks nor to the IMF. So I venture to guess your initiative should not find opposition from this place.
And, frankly, judging from what we read in the daily papers, instead of calling the US embassy M$ would probably get whatever it wants way easier by just calling one of the numerous utterly corrupt politicians and public servants you guys continue to elect to office on and on again.
It is a very sensible position. Shut down first, ivestiagte immediately after, then shut down permanent.
Alchemy has every right to pull the plug immediately. You might debate if they have the right to leave the thing unplugged without any investiagtion - but venture to guess they got someone to have a look at the site's code immediatley.
It really pisses me off when some dumb son of a bitch thinks they have the right to directly send an email from their dialup account
It really pisses me off when some dumb son of a bitch thinks he has the right to tell me what to do with my computer.
It really pisses me off when some dumb son of a bitch thinks his personal pet peeve (here: spam prevention) is so much more important than everything else that the whole world has to be changed to accomodate his wishes.
And finally, it really pisses me off when said dumb son of a bitch not only entertains all these delusions but also fails to think what kind of internet he creates in pursuit of his goals, with second class citizens under strict and draconian ISP rule.
Frankly I think there should be a mandatory MTA registration process like there is for DNS servers
There is no such thing as a "mandatory DNS server registration process". Whoever pays you for consulting is royally wasting his funds.
There is almost never a legitimate reason for dialup clients to be doing direct delivery of mail!
Hogwash. My ISP places a number of restrictions on my use of his Mail Relay (among them encoding my customer number in the headers - say goodbye to pseudonymous mail - an upper limit of mails / day and stuff like that.) I don't like these restrictions. My ISP has a monopoly. No choice for me to get broadband from somehwere else.
Just because the RFCs allow it, doesn't mean that it has to be considered "valid". Emails with virii may (though often don't) conform correctly to RFCs, but I'll reject them if I can detect them.
So what? I want to send an email. Somebody refuses that mail although it is neither spam nor elsweher illegitimate.
Ths means he refuses perfectly valid mail. q.e.d.
There's two solutions-- get a static IP from your ISP which they have not listed on the DUL-- case solved. Or relay through a static IP which is not listed on the DUL-- case solved. Otherwise, I and many many many other people will reject it, because while it conforms to the RFC, we do not consider it valid.
Let me bluntly state you are an arrogant asshole. Because you know many of us don't have these choices. If we go through our ISP's relays we have to subject ourselves whatever ludicrous restrictions he puts on this usage, and static IPs are something just not available for an ordinary private citizen in many parts of the world (including the one I live in).
So your "solutions" amount to that french queen's suggestion "let them eat cake". And we all know how that lady ended.
Unfortunately the slashdot crowd has, in knee-jerk fashion, completely missed the point of the original post.
Nonsense. Hogwash. Most posters I've read until here have well understood the questions. They just refuse playing by these stupid "rules" because the rules are rigged for the enemy.
When did you stop beating your wife ? Now either answer precisely, or don'ts qay anything, thus admitting "never"!
"Given that the industry is going to get SOME law put on the books to protect their interests, what form of law would be preferable
None. What part of this don't you understand ?
Or better "Congress hereby abolished copyright and terminates the United States of America's mebership in the Berne Convention.".
Coke snorting music execs are today's equivalent of heaters on electric locomotives.
The IP mafia already has more than it should have with the DMCA. If you actually think the slashdot crowd (including me) would tolerate (not to mention support) legislation supposed to keep peoples activities on the internet under constant surveillance you should stop smoking whatever you smoke real soon.
tell the lady to repeal the DMCA as well
entertain her with references to the heaters on electric lokomotives Britain used to employ far into the seventies. She should get the reference
tell her Hollywood earns enough already
make reference to price fixing and other anti consumer behaviour by the music publishers. ask her to stop that in the first time.
tell her politic is not supposed to legislate company earnings
Slashdot Mirror
Bertelsmann actually offered good hard cash for the Napster assets. This cash - at least - would have been "the money left" and could have been used to pay a part of Napster's debt.
Due to the decision of that bankruntcy court now the creditors will not see that money. The question is now: will the court be able to get a better - or at least comparable - offer for the napster assets. If it doesn't, it has harmed the creditors and should duly compensate them. The court, after all, is the trustee of the creditor's interest and should act according to these duties.
Somebody else has suggested - and I share that sentiment - that some of the creditors might rather see Napster go down in flames but see its assets in Bertelsmann hands. The only legitimate way to acchieve that of course would be presenting a better offer. But that costs money. So the court has indirectly done, say, Disneys bidding here - by killing of the Bertelsmann offer the court has made it cheaper for them to get the whole Napster destroyed forever, to the strategic advantage of a few companies and to the detriment of the other Napster creditors.
Now add to that that the nasty suspicion that the benificaries are probably US companies (Disney, Time/Warner etc), while one of the victims is a Euroopean Company (Bertelsmann is with ~ US$ 100 Mill. one of Napster's larger creditors as well) you come to conclude that a judge may have bent the law and acted against his duties to give an advantage to some US companies over their European competitor.
As a funny sidenote, some of the articles suggest that Bertelsmann's Napster credits are 'secured' - if I understand that correctly Bertelsmann will get a better share or even the lions share of any payout from Napster. So this takeover bid might even have been a close-to-zero-sum-game - Betelsmann pays the money for the assets and gets most of it back as debt repayment. This means they were more or less entitled to Napster's assets as result of their credit contracts anyway. So we have a judge tricking a foreign company out of leagl entitlements to the advantage of an ameriacn competitor.
If this were in fact the case, they indeed should take a hard look at the judge and initiate legal action against him.
If I were a Napster creditor (the only financial stakeholders left), I'd try to sue whomever is responsible for this colossal blunder.
You cannot trust code running in an untrustworthy environment. Period.
In all there were 5 or 6 patches to Diablo2.
Doom had _way_ more patches. Don't know about quake.
And, patches or not, Blizzard's client-server architecture is the right way to go.
Gosh! Peer to peer. Truly distributed. No central server. Bingo ! Bingo ! Bingo !
Aside from that fact that I just won Bulshit Bingo, this means cheating hell.
Hello, Mr Carmack, been busy coding for the last few years, have you ? never noticed those problems game communities have with people hacking their software to gain unfair advantages ? never heard of the likes of punkbuster and co ? never wondered why Blizzard went away from a real P2P-Game system in Diablo 1 to a strict client-server system in Diablo 2, to even have a chance to control cheating ?
Bah!
5 Companies essentially conrol the whole market.
This is anything but a free market.
Ah. I love Americans.
and check this
Others have already commented on Nominet's non-profit structure.
DENIC operates under the very strict German rules of a "licensed cooperative". Every ISP (a few simple technical criteria determine what an ISP is) is entitled membership in this cooperative, it has a clear, open fee structure and has served the German internet community extraordinary well for last few years. It may not be a model for ICANN itself (since there is no real user involvement) but it certainly is a model for an effective, community driven registrar.
When ICANN's Stuart Lynn comments (from the article): he is purposefully distorting the truth with respect to Nominet and DENIC
LOL
Just try this once with a FreBSD port. you get a few pages of meaningless drivel, and the commands you look for are not there
They send you through 3 layers of indirection. make install somewhere calls make realinstallm and that in turn somewhere calls make doinstall or somne such. And _that_ one calls te other make file with make install, but with an option line
that has more words than a Microsoft EULA.
Good luck finding the three menaingful options in there
Thats the price you pay for make doing automagically the right thing all the time.
I sincerely hope you did an exact byte-by-byte image of your hard drive. Else you've probably destroyed the easiest track back to the punk who did it!
As for "rebuilt from source" you _did_ build on a clean machine, did you ??
As far as I know Ebay Germany is doing OK right now.
quoting someone else: Depends. An auction site needs to build some kind of connected market to be attractive. EBay US is mostly uselss for me in Germany, since it doesn't establish German/European areas. So, I venture to guess, it is for Indians.
hmmm
IIRC, it's supposed to be scrapped in favour of world's ugliest surviving Unix, aka HPUX.
Uh.., I forgot
Yep, you are right. But the tax is going to make that worse, and therefore it's a Bad Thing (tm). Furthermore it advances the idea of 'all things are taxeable' and fattens the already overfat tax rates in Europe a little more.
So, from my point of view as an European citizen that tax should be removed. (OTOH we should better do something against widespreasd government overspending and overtaxation in general, since for some strange reason there is not a single party here around promising (and fulfilling) substantial tax breaks. We need something like the US tax revolt in the ninties.
German ?
.pro thing is mainly taylored to the anglo saxon world, with a focus to the US of A (what a surprise :-/ ). They should have called it ".pro.us".
The concept of a "licensed professional" does not translate well to many other countries. Germany, for instance, has a very mixed system of chambers and university degrees (and even payment systems) regulating access to certain professions, and no universal description for them.
This
The IMF is anything but a corporation.
Actually, the IMF is essentially a giant pile of taxpayer cash from a number of industrialized nations (yep, that's my tax dollars, too) amassed to bail out nations from bankruptcy that don't have anybody else to bail them out. All this based on the - untested - assumption that bailing them out is somehow prefereable from letting them going bankrupt.
Whatever the IMF is asking Argentina to do it mainly does to get them into a position to pay back their foreign debt, including, but not limited to, IMF money.
Now, Argentina paying Microsoft Tax, in US$ and to Redmont, is not in anybody's interest but Microsoft's, because any cent going to M$ is neither going to one of Argentina's foreign creditor banks nor to the IMF. So I venture to guess your initiative should not find opposition from this place.
And, frankly, judging from what we read in the daily papers, instead of calling the US embassy M$ would probably get whatever it wants way easier by just calling one of the numerous utterly corrupt politicians and public servants you guys continue to elect to office on and on again.
It is a very sensible position. Shut down first, ivestiagte immediately after, then shut down permanent.
Alchemy has every right to pull the plug immediately. You might debate if they have the right to leave the thing unplugged without any investiagtion - but venture to guess they got someone to have a look at the site's code immediatley.
It really pisses me off when some dumb son of a bitch thinks he has the right to tell me what to do with my computer.
It really pisses me off when some dumb son of a bitch thinks his personal pet peeve (here: spam prevention) is so much more important than everything else that the whole world has to be changed to accomodate his wishes.
And finally, it really pisses me off when said dumb son of a bitch not only entertains all these delusions but also fails to think what kind of internet he creates in pursuit of his goals, with second class citizens under strict and draconian ISP rule.
There is no such thing as a "mandatory DNS server registration process". Whoever pays you for consulting is royally wasting his funds.
Ths means he refuses perfectly valid mail. q.e.d.
Let me bluntly state you are an arrogant asshole. Because you know many of us don't have these choices. If we go through our ISP's relays we have to subject ourselves whatever ludicrous restrictions he puts on this usage, and static IPs are something just not available for an ordinary private citizen in many parts of the world (including the one I live in).
So your "solutions" amount to that french queen's suggestion "let them eat cake". And we all know how that lady ended.
You can politely tell them to go home. They are not entitled to anything.
When did you stop beating your wife ? Now either answer precisely, or don'ts qay anything, thus admitting "never"!
None. What part of this don't you understand ?
Or better "Congress hereby abolished copyright and terminates the United States of America's mebership in the Berne Convention.".
Coke snorting music execs are today's equivalent of heaters on electric locomotives.
The IP mafia already has more than it should have with the DMCA. If you actually think the slashdot crowd (including me) would tolerate (not to mention support) legislation supposed to keep peoples activities on the internet under constant surveillance you should stop smoking whatever you smoke real soon.