After over a month of the same spammer spamming me from prserv.net in Austin, TX, I went to look that up, and you're right.
It appears that the mysterious 's1618' (passed by the 105th senate) that spammers sometimes claim (usually falsely, I find) to be in accordance with, got through the senate 3 years ago, and promptly fell into a House of Representatives committee black hole...
It wouldn't be TOO bad as far as legislation on such matters can go. It appears that is IS 'opt-out', but at least it requires the REAL email, phone, and physical address of the spamming company AND (if different) of the person doing the actual sending of the spam, so at least you can find out who they really are if they are really in compliance...
How much do you want to bet it'll rot and die in the HoR committee, like a bug in a 'roach motel', though....
Compilations of data or other material, in any form, which by reason of the selection or arrangement of their contents constitute intellectual creations, are protected as such.
I THINK what they mean here is that if, for example, you publish a book containing 10 public-domain short-stories or articles, that if someone else comes along and publishes a book with the same 10 public-domain works, that it would be a violation of your copyright to the particular collection you've put together, though the reprinting of none of the individual original public-domain works violates any copyright law...
This is a decision your bosses made because they want to play hardball with the judge.
While this wouldn't surprise me, there's another possible explanation - simple incompetence.
I get the impression that the DOI isn't even really SURE which machines can access the sensitive data in question, and don't know which ones have bad passwords, and so on. It may be that they just have to pull them all off because they have no way of figuring out how to pull off just the 'sensitive' ones...
Re:Interesting, the GM reaction, a little PR pleas
on
GM DNA Spreading...
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· Score: 2
Fish genes can get into tomatoes naturally? How exactly does that happen?
In addition to viruses, people need to realize that (in this context) there is no such thing as a "fish gene".
I know, strange thing to say, but here's what I mean. A 'gene', especially as discussed here, is a template for making a protein - a sort of a 'protein algorithm'. That's all. It is irrelevant where the specific 'implementation' of this algorithm came from. Consider the herbicide resistant crops - there is NO FUNDAMENTAL DIFFERENCE (in terms of 'biochemicals' being produced) between the unmodified plant, and the resistant plant - the 'new' gene, which comes from bacteria (GASP!), performs exactly the same function as the original plant version - it's just not affected by glyphosphate herbicides like the plant version is. (Imagine if fuel additives in the US clogged and destroyed fuel-injection systems in, say, Honda cars. If US Honda owners started bolting fuel-injection systems from Saturns onto their Honda engines to deal with the problem instead of waiting for Honda to start producing US-fuel-additive-resistant cars, would THAT be 'horribly unnatural', or a fundamental change in the vehicle they're driving around?) The REAL question is 'is there anything horribly unnatural about this protein being in this organism'. Unless you believe that there is no possible way that a plant population can develop individuals resistant to a type of herbicide, or resistant to frost, or whatever, 'naturally', I'd say the answer is 'no'.
It should also be pointed out that any genetic additions (e.g. production of an extra 'antifreeze' protein) have a cost to the organism in question as well. It takes energy to produce proteins. Outside of the specific environment where the extra protein gives the plant an advantage, the extra gene is a burden which will hinder the gene's ability to compete with the 'natural' wild population.
In the case of glyphosphate resistance, I don't honestly know if the gene is as efficient as the original one it's replacing, but even if we assume it is - the gene is STILL only an advantage in areas where herbicide is being sprayed. There is no 'advantage' in the wild for plants that have the 'glyphosphate resistant' version of the gene, unless the farmers are taking their expensive herbicides and spraying it outside of their fields just for fun. The gene may end up in part of the wild population, but is unlikely to ever end up as a large proportion of it, let alone take it over completely.
Finally, as to the notion, mentioned elsewhere, that this is like 'taking pieces of program code and dumping them randomly into our own programs to see if they work' - gene expression happens in parallel. It doesn't MATTER where, fundamentally, on the genome the new gene ends up, so long as it ends up in a place that the organism's cellular machinery is looking for expressable genes. The only thing random about where the new gene will show up is whether or not it ends up A) in the genome at all or B) in a place where it will be expressed enough or not. That's it. Places where the gene is under or over expressed are a detriment to the plant, and those versions get selected out during development just like good old-fashioned 'natural selection', and the rest are cultivated.
I blame the worldwide dearth of good science education, and horribly bad science in Television and movie science fiction. ("Biogenetic plague"? Is that like a "geopetrified fossil"?)....
I think Apple require Sorenson to exclusively license their products to only Apple
The way I understood the Apple Quicktime/Linux problem, Apple and Sorenson are busy childishly pointing fingers at each other as the reason they can't do a Linux version. Sorenson says "Apple can do Sorenson on Linux if they write Quicktime player for it" and Apple says "We can't write a Quicktime player for Linux without Sorenson on it first".
Ogg Tarkin, where are you?:-)
Re:Please people read the decision before complain
on
Felten vs. RIAA Hearing
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Dmitry broke the law and Felton did not?
This is something that really bothers me about this whole situation. It seems the only way to challenge a law is to become a criminal. As I understood it, what Felton was trying to do was get a firm decision from the courts declaring once-and-for-all whether or not publishing information about decryption is grounds for being sued - or threatened with suits! - under the DMCA.
I got the impression that the judge was, in effect, saying "I don't personally think what you were doing was grounds for lawsuit but since the threat was withdrawn I don't have to decide officially. So there. Case dismissed. Come back next time somebody sues you."
It seems that in the US legal system, if you think a law is unconstitutional, the only way to get the courts to decide on it is to break the law and get yourself arrested. If you're only in jail for a year or less (while the courts deliberate and lawyers babble and corporations exchange money and so on) before the courts let you go, then you were right...
True, but it's still a "bad start", in the sense of "unpleasant", for the "brasilian guy", because his very first task involves the urgent need for a quick release of a bug-fixed 2.4.16...Imagine getting hired as a sysadmin and the very first morning you walk into the office 100 or so computers belonging to senior management all start propagating MS VB viruses amongst themselves and the rest of the system, crashing machines, emailing sensitive data to random people outside of the company, slowing network traffic to a crawl, etc. etc.....
I can't think of a single dish I would let near my face.
Mmmmm... 'soft roe' ice cream....:-)
Actually a lot of the stuff sounded really good to me, but it definitely was always punctuated with the occasional "They're making that out of WHAT?!?!?!"...
Are those tracks actually on the CD, or is that a function of the kaudio plug-in?
Nope, they're "virtual". If you've got the LAME stuff installed, you should also get a virtual mp3 direcggtory also. If you want to 'rip' a track, then, you switch to, say, the ogg virtual directory and just drag the file to where you want it as if it was real, and KDE Ogg-encodes it on-the-fly and puts it where you dropped it.
Only used it once or twice to try it out, but it's pretty spiffy...
Re:Bad screenshots for showing anti-aliasing
on
KDE 3.0 Screenshots
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· Score: 2
I thought that whole GIF patent thing had already expired. Am I wrong?
Nope. As I recall, that's next year (June 2002, I think). Or maybe later than that (the year 2005 sticks in my mind for some reason). At any rate, there a minimum of another year before the obnoxious LZW patent goes away.
In a way, I kind of hope it's 2005 - maybe we'll see some.mng building tools for Linux and such in time to help me replace a few animated.gif's...(I keep wondering, if it expires soon, will everyone then just give in and go back to.gif's again?)
Doing a tcptraceroute from here, the last few entries are:
18 EarthlinkLA-gw.customer.ALTER.NET (157.130.224.86) 107.363 ms 107.592 ms 106.501 ms
19 f5-0-0-cr02-pas.neteng.itd.earthlink.net (207.217.1.44) 106.004 ms 107.202
ms 106.447 ms
20 207.217.2.27 (207.217.2.27) 107.577 ms 109.698 ms 111.014 ms
21 216.249.64.35 (216.249.64.35) 107.946 ms 108.521 ms 106.762 ms
22 hsa015.pool022.at101.earthlink.net (216.249.93.15) [closed] 124.726 ms 123.248 ms 129.078 ms
Fact is hate sites should be monitored, any site which threatens anyone should be taken down.
Exactly. To emphasize the point here - if they are censored, they will go underground, and monitoring them, as you (and probably most other sane people) say should be done (and, quite frankly, I agree), would become rather difficult.
"Threatening someone" is already illegal (this falls under the category of assault, as I recall). Should someone really be charged with TWO separate crimes ("Threatening someone" and "Threatening someone in the form of speech"?) And I thought the twists and turns of the US legal system was bad...
kiddie porn sites too
Kiddie porn is illegal because of necessity it involves sexual abuse (a form of assault, again) of children. Personally, I'd therefore consider trading in kiddie-porn to be, roughly, in the same category as "selling and receiving stolen goods" (which is already illegal, of course), in that it's trade that derives directly from legitimately illegal acts.
if you use morpheus to get kiddie porn, and someone monitors you and reports you, that is your problem.
Exactly. As you are pointing out, the things that "hate"-censorship are intended to get rid of are ALREADY illegal. If one criminalizes TALKING ABOUT those things, it will be very difficult to monitor or do anything about.
Flash is a bitch too; I've got the netscape plugin but half the sites STILL do the double-popup begging you to buy Flash.
I'm not CERTAIN, but I think this may be due to the one place where Konqueror occasionally lets me down, and that's Javascript/ECMAscript support. I think that the sites that complain that you don't have Flash are using a javascript call to check which plugins you've got, and either that bit of javascript is bombing out or giving the "wrong" answers.
I haven't actually confirmed this, but it's the only reason I can think of. Javascript support IS improving, and I hear the KDE3 will have a new, rewritten javascript engine, but at the moment it's still the one place where I occasionally run into limitations.
(e.g. I can't play videos off of atomfilms.com any more, because the "play" button is linked to a javascript function to start up the play window, and it doesn't run...)
Whilst MS may be a horrible, monopolistic company bent on dominating the industry at all costs, saying that what they do is worse than what the tobacco companies do/did is absurd.
Well, yes and no. Many of us maintain that if you intentially use a product that's been known to cause cancer for the last 50 years or so, that's your own choice (much as an alcoholic who get cirrhosis of the liver has mainly him/herself to blame).
That said, though, your point is valid. In my opinion, if a corporation has the same rights as a real person, then they should have the same punishments as a real person. Microsoft's actions aren't much like murder (hmmm...unless you consider "manslaughter"-like charges for 'killing' other corporations with their business practices), but more like fraud and racketeering. Therefore, rather than a "death penalty", they should instead be "incarcerated" (assets frozen, charter temporarily suspended, etc.) for a few years, then allowed to resume business. By that time, their competitors will have had a chance to prepare for them, and we can have competition again...
Not that such a thing is likely to happen, but it'd be nice. Even if the sentence itself was commuted, it'd be very pleasant to see a real legal precedent showing that corporations are subject to the same responsibilities and punishments as real persons, if they're going to have the same rights as real persons...
but what means: "the first commercial" Distribution?
I believe they mean it was the first distribution available as pre-made disks from a commercial entity (in addition to being able to download and build your own set of disks). In that case, what was being sold was "the pre-made disks", not the Linux-based system itself.
I find it interesting the way The Two Parties(tm) hang onto their power. I've noticed that very few people I ever hear vote a particular way do so because they are incredibly fond of the party they're voting for, but more often because they HATE the "other" party...at least, the more vocal ones seem to. It often seems like The Two Parties rally their minions by warning them what horrible, unspeakable evils will be perpetrated by That Other Party if they are allowed to win...
Personally, I find the choice between the two "big" parties to be nothing more than a choice between which set of corporations gets to write your laws - Big Oil(tm) or the MPAA. (Or, to bring at least a marginal note of relevance to this story back into it - Microsoft or the MPAA.)
I tend towards a libertarian perspective, myself, but personally, I'd rather see people vote for the (American) "Green" party (about as opposite as you can get from libertarianism without going all the way to the "peace and freedom" [socialist] party) than either of "The Two Parties(tm)" that are currently entrenched...
Having a monopoly IS NOT WRONG. It's not bad, and it's NOT illegal. Abusing it is.
Exactly. It's a bit like being a parent, in a way. It is perfectly legal and reasonable to maintain a "monopoly" on what your children are allowed to do, including restricting their ability to leave the house. It is not, however, legal or reasonable to lock them in a closet for a week or to beat them with baseball bats.
Granted, that's a somewhat melodramatic analogy, but it does illustrate the difference between having and using power and abusing power...
Interesting analogy, though it's not illegal for YOU to rip that tag off of a mattress YOU'VE purchased, really. It's illegal for, say, the furniture store to remove the tag before selling it to you (Last time I checked, the language on the tags now said "not to be removed except by the consumer" or some variant thereof
What makes this interesting is the fact that aspects of the DMCA, and Hollings' pet law, and such, is that they are LIKE making it illegal to remove tags from your own mattresses.
As I understand it, the "tag law" (whatever it's officially called) is there to protect the consumer from being ripped off, but the consumer is supposed to be able to do whatever they want with it once they've legally obtained ownership of the physical mattress (EXCEPT, I suppose, resell the mattress to someone else without the tags).
Pre-DMCA copyright law (in general) seemed to be a reasonable matter of "you may do whatever you want with the physical copy you've legally aquired, except resell or distribute it to other people without permission from the copyright holder". Post-DMCA copyright laws seem to be a lot like a "real" version of the common perception of the tag laws - imagine that they said "You may not remove this tag under penalty of law, even if you are the consumer, because you MIGHT resell the mattress to someone later". Sound analogous to the justification for the ridiculous copyright laws being pushed these days...
(Another analogy - as far as I know, it's illegal to run away from the police if they try to detain you, yet criminals insist on doing to anyway. OBVIOUSLY we need to outlaw shoes which make it easier for criminals to escape. Sure, this means a bit of inconvenience for non-criminals, but isn't it a small price to pay to be protected from dangerous criminals?)
I mean, I'm not selling the CD's, just giving them to friends for gifts, or using them myself.
"Giving them to friends for gifts", if your friends don't own legal copies of the individual tracks of their own, IS a violation of existing copyright law, not just the newer, unreasonable laws and proposed laws. (Personally, I don't think this aspect of copyright law is actually "unreasonable", as much as at the same time I don't think giving a track or two would really HARM the copyright holder...) On the other hand, making copies of tracks you legally own for YOUR OWN use is not SUPPOSED to be illegal, as far as I know, this INCLUDES 'private' parties (if you're inviting the general public, then it's a "public performance" and you have to pay royalties and such, I believe). THIS is the part that the newer, unreasonable (in my opinion) laws and proposals would criminalize (e.g. the DMCA's attempt to criminalize 'unsanctioned' DVD decoders which might be usable to make 'space-shifted' copies of DVD movies).
Interesting question about the speakers, though - especially if digital devices start popping up to take the niche formerly occupied by microcassette recorders. If the SSSCA passed, then the recorder has to have copy-prevention in it. But if it's recording from speakers, as you say, the digital copy-prevention part of the signal is gone...as well as your example of taking speaker output from one device through the line-in on another.
(Sort of like using a video capture card connected to a standalone DVD player to capture a DVD movie to a different format, which the MPAA surely would love to criminalize somehow, regardless of the intended use of such a "space-shifted" copy...)
(As always, I Am Not A Lawyer(tm), so don't assume I know what I'm talking about...)
Something that broad and that dangerous will never pass...
Maybe not, but who wants to bet that rather than abandon this tripe, the legislature will instead try to "fix" it by tacking on a wad of amendments instead, and end up passing it essentially as it was intended, but with a lot of language to make it sound "not so bad" (much as the language about not abridging fair use rights and allowing reverse-engineering for interoperability are in the DMCA to make it sound 'not so bad', even though they appear to be ignored in reality)
Not really - it's too slow. A card with an embedded chip can be scanned in an instant, but PCR and electrophoresis and/or sequencing would take hours, at best. Plus, what do you do about hemophiliacs? "How were we to know he'd bleed to death while we waited for the sequencing to finish? We thought he was just resisting because he was a terrorist..."
Slashdot Mirror
After over a month of the same spammer spamming me from prserv.net in Austin, TX, I went to look that up, and you're right.
It appears that the mysterious 's1618' (passed by the 105th senate) that spammers sometimes claim (usually falsely, I find) to be in accordance with, got through the senate 3 years ago, and promptly fell into a House of Representatives committee black hole...
It wouldn't be TOO bad as far as legislation on such matters can go. It appears that is IS 'opt-out', but at least it requires the REAL email, phone, and physical address of the spamming company AND (if different) of the person doing the actual sending of the spam, so at least you can find out who they really are if they are really in compliance...
How much do you want to bet it'll rot and die in the HoR committee, like a bug in a 'roach motel', though....
I THINK what they mean here is that if, for example, you publish a book containing 10 public-domain short-stories or articles, that if someone else comes along and publishes a book with the same 10 public-domain works, that it would be a violation of your copyright to the particular collection you've put together, though the reprinting of none of the individual original public-domain works violates any copyright law...
I think.
While this wouldn't surprise me, there's another possible explanation - simple incompetence.
I get the impression that the DOI isn't even really SURE which machines can access the sensitive data in question, and don't know which ones have bad passwords, and so on. It may be that they just have to pull them all off because they have no way of figuring out how to pull off just the 'sensitive' ones...
In addition to viruses, people need to realize that (in this context) there is no such thing as a "fish gene".
I know, strange thing to say, but here's what I mean. A 'gene', especially as discussed here, is a template for making a protein - a sort of a 'protein algorithm'. That's all. It is irrelevant where the specific 'implementation' of this algorithm came from. Consider the herbicide resistant crops - there is NO FUNDAMENTAL DIFFERENCE (in terms of 'biochemicals' being produced) between the unmodified plant, and the resistant plant - the 'new' gene, which comes from bacteria (GASP!), performs exactly the same function as the original plant version - it's just not affected by glyphosphate herbicides like the plant version is. (Imagine if fuel additives in the US clogged and destroyed fuel-injection systems in, say, Honda cars. If US Honda owners started bolting fuel-injection systems from Saturns onto their Honda engines to deal with the problem instead of waiting for Honda to start producing US-fuel-additive-resistant cars, would THAT be 'horribly unnatural', or a fundamental change in the vehicle they're driving around?) The REAL question is 'is there anything horribly unnatural about this protein being in this organism'. Unless you believe that there is no possible way that a plant population can develop individuals resistant to a type of herbicide, or resistant to frost, or whatever, 'naturally', I'd say the answer is 'no'.
It should also be pointed out that any genetic additions (e.g. production of an extra 'antifreeze' protein) have a cost to the organism in question as well. It takes energy to produce proteins. Outside of the specific environment where the extra protein gives the plant an advantage, the extra gene is a burden which will hinder the gene's ability to compete with the 'natural' wild population.
In the case of glyphosphate resistance, I don't honestly know if the gene is as efficient as the original one it's replacing, but even if we assume it is - the gene is STILL only an advantage in areas where herbicide is being sprayed. There is no 'advantage' in the wild for plants that have the 'glyphosphate resistant' version of the gene, unless the farmers are taking their expensive herbicides and spraying it outside of their fields just for fun. The gene may end up in part of the wild population, but is unlikely to ever end up as a large proportion of it, let alone take it over completely.
Finally, as to the notion, mentioned elsewhere, that this is like 'taking pieces of program code and dumping them randomly into our own programs to see if they work' - gene expression happens in parallel. It doesn't MATTER where, fundamentally, on the genome the new gene ends up, so long as it ends up in a place that the organism's cellular machinery is looking for expressable genes. The only thing random about where the new gene will show up is whether or not it ends up A) in the genome at all or B) in a place where it will be expressed enough or not. That's it. Places where the gene is under or over expressed are a detriment to the plant, and those versions get selected out during development just like good old-fashioned 'natural selection', and the rest are cultivated.
I blame the worldwide dearth of good science education, and horribly bad science in Television and movie science fiction. ("Biogenetic plague"? Is that like a "geopetrified fossil"?)....
The way I understood the Apple Quicktime/Linux problem, Apple and Sorenson are busy childishly pointing fingers at each other as the reason they can't do a Linux version. Sorenson says "Apple can do Sorenson on Linux if they write Quicktime player for it" and Apple says "We can't write a Quicktime player for Linux without Sorenson on it first".
Ogg Tarkin, where are you? :-)
This is something that really bothers me about this whole situation. It seems the only way to challenge a law is to become a criminal. As I understood it, what Felton was trying to do was get a firm decision from the courts declaring once-and-for-all whether or not publishing information about decryption is grounds for being sued - or threatened with suits! - under the DMCA.
I got the impression that the judge was, in effect, saying "I don't personally think what you were doing was grounds for lawsuit but since the threat was withdrawn I don't have to decide officially. So there. Case dismissed. Come back next time somebody sues you."
It seems that in the US legal system, if you think a law is unconstitutional, the only way to get the courts to decide on it is to break the law and get yourself arrested. If you're only in jail for a year or less (while the courts deliberate and lawyers babble and corporations exchange money and so on) before the courts let you go, then you were right...
Nope. 2.4.15 was released by Linus
True, but it's still a "bad start", in the sense of "unpleasant", for the "brasilian guy", because his very first task involves the urgent need for a quick release of a bug-fixed 2.4.16...Imagine getting hired as a sysadmin and the very first morning you walk into the office 100 or so computers belonging to senior management all start propagating MS VB viruses amongst themselves and the rest of the system, crashing machines, emailing sensitive data to random people outside of the company, slowing network traffic to a crawl, etc. etc.....
Talk about "trial by fire"....
Mmmmm... 'soft roe' ice cream.... :-)
Actually a lot of the stuff sounded really good to me, but it definitely was always punctuated with the occasional "They're making that out of WHAT?!?!?!"...
Boy, talk about Freudian slips... :-)
Nope, they're "virtual". If you've got the LAME stuff installed, you should also get a virtual mp3 direcggtory also. If you want to 'rip' a track, then, you switch to, say, the ogg virtual directory and just drag the file to where you want it as if it was real, and KDE Ogg-encodes it on-the-fly and puts it where you dropped it.
Only used it once or twice to try it out, but it's pretty spiffy...
Nope. As I recall, that's next year (June 2002, I think). Or maybe later than that (the year 2005 sticks in my mind for some reason). At any rate, there a minimum of another year before the obnoxious LZW patent goes away.
In a way, I kind of hope it's 2005 - maybe we'll see some .mng building tools for Linux and such in time to help me replace a few animated .gif's...(I keep wondering, if it expires soon, will everyone then just give in and go back to .gif's again?)
232 or so, last time I counted, though this was over 20 years ago. Never thought anyone cared...
Thanks.You're welcome. :-)
18 EarthlinkLA-gw.customer.ALTER.NET (157.130.224.86) 107.363 ms 107.592 ms 106.501 ms
19 f5-0-0-cr02-pas.neteng.itd.earthlink.net (207.217.1.44) 106.004 ms 107.202 ms 106.447 ms
20 207.217.2.27 (207.217.2.27) 107.577 ms 109.698 ms 111.014 ms
21 216.249.64.35 (216.249.64.35) 107.946 ms 108.521 ms 106.762 ms
22 hsa015.pool022.at101.earthlink.net (216.249.93.15) [closed] 124.726 ms 123.248 ms 129.078 ms
Pasadena area, maybe?
Exactly. To emphasize the point here - if they are censored, they will go underground, and monitoring them, as you (and probably most other sane people) say should be done (and, quite frankly, I agree), would become rather difficult.
"Threatening someone" is already illegal (this falls under the category of assault, as I recall). Should someone really be charged with TWO separate crimes ("Threatening someone" and "Threatening someone in the form of speech"?) And I thought the twists and turns of the US legal system was bad...
kiddie porn sites tooKiddie porn is illegal because of necessity it involves sexual abuse (a form of assault, again) of children. Personally, I'd therefore consider trading in kiddie-porn to be, roughly, in the same category as "selling and receiving stolen goods" (which is already illegal, of course), in that it's trade that derives directly from legitimately illegal acts.
if you use morpheus to get kiddie porn, and someone monitors you and reports you, that is your problem.Exactly. As you are pointing out, the things that "hate"-censorship are intended to get rid of are ALREADY illegal. If one criminalizes TALKING ABOUT those things, it will be very difficult to monitor or do anything about.
Just wanted to emphasize your point...
I'm not CERTAIN, but I think this may be due to the one place where Konqueror occasionally lets me down, and that's Javascript/ECMAscript support. I think that the sites that complain that you don't have Flash are using a javascript call to check which plugins you've got, and either that bit of javascript is bombing out or giving the "wrong" answers.
I haven't actually confirmed this, but it's the only reason I can think of. Javascript support IS improving, and I hear the KDE3 will have a new, rewritten javascript engine, but at the moment it's still the one place where I occasionally run into limitations.
(e.g. I can't play videos off of atomfilms.com any more, because the "play" button is linked to a javascript function to start up the play window, and it doesn't run...)
Well, yes and no. Many of us maintain that if you intentially use a product that's been known to cause cancer for the last 50 years or so, that's your own choice (much as an alcoholic who get cirrhosis of the liver has mainly him/herself to blame).
That said, though, your point is valid. In my opinion, if a corporation has the same rights as a real person, then they should have the same punishments as a real person. Microsoft's actions aren't much like murder (hmmm...unless you consider "manslaughter"-like charges for 'killing' other corporations with their business practices), but more like fraud and racketeering. Therefore, rather than a "death penalty", they should instead be "incarcerated" (assets frozen, charter temporarily suspended, etc.) for a few years, then allowed to resume business. By that time, their competitors will have had a chance to prepare for them, and we can have competition again...
Not that such a thing is likely to happen, but it'd be nice. Even if the sentence itself was commuted, it'd be very pleasant to see a real legal precedent showing that corporations are subject to the same responsibilities and punishments as real persons, if they're going to have the same rights as real persons...
I believe they mean it was the first distribution available as pre-made disks from a commercial entity (in addition to being able to download and build your own set of disks). In that case, what was being sold was "the pre-made disks", not the Linux-based system itself.
All true.
I find it interesting the way The Two Parties(tm) hang onto their power. I've noticed that very few people I ever hear vote a particular way do so because they are incredibly fond of the party they're voting for, but more often because they HATE the "other" party...at least, the more vocal ones seem to. It often seems like The Two Parties rally their minions by warning them what horrible, unspeakable evils will be perpetrated by That Other Party if they are allowed to win...
Personally, I find the choice between the two "big" parties to be nothing more than a choice between which set of corporations gets to write your laws - Big Oil(tm) or the MPAA. (Or, to bring at least a marginal note of relevance to this story back into it - Microsoft or the MPAA.)
I tend towards a libertarian perspective, myself, but personally, I'd rather see people vote for the (American) "Green" party (about as opposite as you can get from libertarianism without going all the way to the "peace and freedom" [socialist] party) than either of "The Two Parties(tm)" that are currently entrenched...
Exactly. It's a bit like being a parent, in a way. It is perfectly legal and reasonable to maintain a "monopoly" on what your children are allowed to do, including restricting their ability to leave the house. It is not, however, legal or reasonable to lock them in a closet for a week or to beat them with baseball bats.
Granted, that's a somewhat melodramatic analogy, but it does illustrate the difference between having and using power and abusing power...
Interesting analogy, though it's not illegal for YOU to rip that tag off of a mattress YOU'VE purchased, really. It's illegal for, say, the furniture store to remove the tag before selling it to you (Last time I checked, the language on the tags now said "not to be removed except by the consumer" or some variant thereof
What makes this interesting is the fact that aspects of the DMCA, and Hollings' pet law, and such, is that they are LIKE making it illegal to remove tags from your own mattresses.
As I understand it, the "tag law" (whatever it's officially called) is there to protect the consumer from being ripped off, but the consumer is supposed to be able to do whatever they want with it once they've legally obtained ownership of the physical mattress (EXCEPT, I suppose, resell the mattress to someone else without the tags).
Pre-DMCA copyright law (in general) seemed to be a reasonable matter of "you may do whatever you want with the physical copy you've legally aquired, except resell or distribute it to other people without permission from the copyright holder". Post-DMCA copyright laws seem to be a lot like a "real" version of the common perception of the tag laws - imagine that they said "You may not remove this tag under penalty of law, even if you are the consumer, because you MIGHT resell the mattress to someone later". Sound analogous to the justification for the ridiculous copyright laws being pushed these days...
(Another analogy - as far as I know, it's illegal to run away from the police if they try to detain you, yet criminals insist on doing to anyway. OBVIOUSLY we need to outlaw shoes which make it easier for criminals to escape. Sure, this means a bit of inconvenience for non-criminals, but isn't it a small price to pay to be protected from dangerous criminals?)
"Giving them to friends for gifts", if your friends don't own legal copies of the individual tracks of their own, IS a violation of existing copyright law, not just the newer, unreasonable laws and proposed laws. (Personally, I don't think this aspect of copyright law is actually "unreasonable", as much as at the same time I don't think giving a track or two would really HARM the copyright holder...) On the other hand, making copies of tracks you legally own for YOUR OWN use is not SUPPOSED to be illegal, as far as I know, this INCLUDES 'private' parties (if you're inviting the general public, then it's a "public performance" and you have to pay royalties and such, I believe). THIS is the part that the newer, unreasonable (in my opinion) laws and proposals would criminalize (e.g. the DMCA's attempt to criminalize 'unsanctioned' DVD decoders which might be usable to make 'space-shifted' copies of DVD movies).
Interesting question about the speakers, though - especially if digital devices start popping up to take the niche formerly occupied by microcassette recorders. If the SSSCA passed, then the recorder has to have copy-prevention in it. But if it's recording from speakers, as you say, the digital copy-prevention part of the signal is gone...as well as your example of taking speaker output from one device through the line-in on another.
(Sort of like using a video capture card connected to a standalone DVD player to capture a DVD movie to a different format, which the MPAA surely would love to criminalize somehow, regardless of the intended use of such a "space-shifted" copy...)
(As always, I Am Not A Lawyer(tm), so don't assume I know what I'm talking about...)
Heh...the idea of aalib with hardware acceleration and alpha transparency seems really funny to me... :-)
Maybe not, but who wants to bet that rather than abandon this tripe, the legislature will instead try to "fix" it by tacking on a wad of amendments instead, and end up passing it essentially as it was intended, but with a lot of language to make it sound "not so bad" (much as the language about not abridging fair use rights and allowing reverse-engineering for interoperability are in the DMCA to make it sound 'not so bad', even though they appear to be ignored in reality)
Not really - it's too slow. A card with an embedded chip can be scanned in an instant, but PCR and electrophoresis and/or sequencing would take hours, at best. Plus, what do you do about hemophiliacs? "How were we to know he'd bleed to death while we waited for the sequencing to finish? We thought he was just resisting because he was a terrorist..."