What distribution were you using. Every distro I've seen in Taiwan (can't speak for RedFlag Linux, which is a mainland product and hence not terribly popuplar here) uses CLE ("Chinese Language Edition"), such that all menus, most of the core apps (there are two or three Chinese term programs available, for example) and an increasing number of HOWTOs and man pages, are in Chinese.
Input methods for Chinese vary, including pinyin (not widely used here in Taiwan, except for foreigners), handwriting recognition (which has improved dramatically in the last few years), and bopomofo (a system of phonetic transcription developed in Beijing, but only widely used in Taiwan). Taiwanese keyboards are universally labelled with both roman characters, bopomofo and a third transcription system with which I'm not familiar (I believe it's used in Hong Kong and, perhaps, Singapore).
Generally, the bopomofo method is fairly quick, after a period of familiarization. As you type in the bopomofo representation, a list of characters is presented matching the bopomofo; generally, you only need to hit one or two keys, then pick the character off a list. Adept users can enter Chinese quite rapidly.
Handwriting recognition software is also improving, though it takes a bit more skill to get it to work consistently. It depends heavily on stroke order (the order in which one makes the strokes that compose a Chinese character) so unlike English (and despite the complexities of Chinese characters) one's handwriting doesn't need to be pristine for proper recognition.
However, even with the most recent versions of CLE (currently at either 1.0 or 1.1), one still sees a fair amount of English onscreen. This isn't too great a problem, as most Taiwanese have at least a passing acquaintance with English.
I can't speak to the programmer's experience, as I aren't one. Ditto for emacs.
When a large segment of the population must, for financial reasons, rely on public libraries and schools for their Internet connections, government filtering of those connections is telling them what they can view.
How does this differ from the argument the arts community in the US tried a few years back during the whole debate on public arts funding? Their argument was that failure to fund art projects was tantemount to censorship. As I recall, the argument was thrown out of the courts, which noted that the government does not prohibit anyone from producing art, regardless of content. Conversely, however, since the government is under no obligation to fund art it can thus choose with impugnity how its arts dollars are spread around, even if such choices are demonstrably content-based.
The best-known example was the Piss-Christ, an image of a crucifix submerged in a jar of urine, which was highly offensive to a large segment of the American population. The government argued -- and the courts agreed -- that the arts community had no right to expect the government to fund work which was so patently offensive to such a large segment of the population. This was a demonstrably content-based decision, which the courts overwhelmingly upheld.
This issue strikes me as the same. The government cannot a priori prohibit anyone from accessing the Internet or viewing whatever content is available. Conversely, however, the government is under no obligation to fund or provide Internet access to any citizen, regardless of economic status. That government institutions do so is a public service, not a public right. And, therefore, the government can, with impugnity, choose whether and what portions of the Internet can be viewed on public kiosks, even if such choices are demonstrably content-based, without thereby falling afoul of anti-censorship regulations.
In short, since the government is not obliged to provide Internet access, it is free to chose whether and in what manner such publically-subsidized access is provided.
I am sure that there are censorware packages being released by people with all sorts of agendas. But that's the point: They have an agenda.
As far as I can see, everybody has an agenda. It's just that it's usually easier to see others' than our own.
By the way, I appreciate both your intelligence and debating skills. It's rare to find both on Slashdot
My great strength and my great weakness is that I tend to be too detached from things, up to and including my own opinions. This is a strength, in that it allows me to debate ideas without taking opposition too personally. Conversely, there are times in life where I long to have the sort of passion about things I see in others (including those damned religious fanatics) around me.
If you doubt my sincerity, think about my motives. I have no children.
Then I doubt you can understand the concerns of parents in this respect.
I believe in the Constitution of the United States and I oppose government-mandated filtering of what the public can read and see.
As I don't live in the U.S., the American Constitution is of little relevance to me. However, I don't see your point. Mandated filtering has nothing to do with the government telling you what you can or can not view -- not at any rate until they begin to require filters on your home connection. It has everything to do with controlling the use made of public facilities. I have a degree of sympathy with those who object to their tax dollars subsidizing some poor slob's porn habit and, as a parent, I would be quite incensed to find libraries or schools providing unfiltered Internet access to my children. Fortunately in Taiwan public institutions generally take a more sensible approach.
I don't think that a censorware company run by born-again, evangelical Christians should be given a mandate...
Now consider the motives of the filtering proponents.
I personally know little about fltering companies in the U.S., but I detect in your words both strawman reasoning and ad hominen argumentation: if I can label them "born-again evangelical Christians", then I don't have to deal with the content of their argument, as we all know born-again types are incapable of rational thought.
Your allusion to the "motives of the filtering proponents" also relies heavily on stereotyping. In choosing to simply lump them all together as moral fanatics bent on imposing their narrow views on the rest of society, you avoid having to deal with the complex motivations of real people. Strawmen, after all, are much easier to knock about.
Now, I don't claim to speak for any Americans, let alone "born-again" ones. However, my own experiences suggest that people -- even those with whom I disagree -- are general quite complex, and operate from a variety of motivations. As a result, I'm sceptical of any attempts to paint a group of people with such a broad brush.
So, what evidence do you have that A) all filtering companies (or at least all those contracted by government agencies) are run by "born-again evangelical Christians", and B) that all filtering proponents are bent on pushing their morality down others' throats?
By the way, I am neither a born-again evangelical, nor do I go around forcing my morality down others' throats. I do, however, see a legitimate, albeit limited, role for filtration software on public access terminals (most Taiwanese do).
As to your comments about the poor, they strike me as quite paternalistic. As one who has in the past lived in poverty, I was always bemused by middle-class do-gooders running around talking about me in third-person terms, as if I were a category rather than an individual, and were actually in need of their protection. Generally speaking such folks didn't even know any "poor people".
Free clinics seldom employ top-notch oncologists who are up-to-date on the latest research, clinical trials, and regimens.
And a poor woman surfing at her local library is going to get more and better information off the net than she can get from a gynecologist, "top-notch" or not? If your daughter were sick, would you take her to a doctor (be he Harvard or locally trained) or would you attempt to diagnose and treat her yourself with nothing more than a broadband connection? Sorry, I don't see that.
prevent "the poor" (whatever that means)
It means people that have very little money.
No. My comment was meant to indicate that "the poor" are every bit the shibboleth for filtering opponents as "the children" are for proponents. Proponents want to protect "the children", opponents want to protect "the poor". I have a hard time subscribing to the sincerity of either side.
If a poor woman in the inner city wants to find out about her treatment options for ovarian cancer, she should be able to using the library's computer.
Or better yet consult the doctors at the local free clinic.
Frankly, most of the argument on BOTH sides of this issue are strawmen. Filtering proponents are no more out to prevent "the poor" (whatever that means) from accessing information on STDs than opponents are trying to cram porn down children's throats.
If porn and video games do not make for normal students, I dare say that there has never been a normal male child, ever.
There is similar concern here in Taiwan as on the Mainland about Internet cafes, which tend to be havens for teenage boys -- a fair number of them truants -- hanging out for hours surfing the net and playing network wargames with their friends.
The problem isn't so much surfing and games per se, but the fact that Internet cafes are often connected to other video game parlors, which feature gambling. In addition, many Internet cafes are actually Internet bars serving alcohol and cigarettes. Toss in truancy and Internet porn, and it adds up to a real concern amongst Taiwanese parents that Internet cafes are not a proper environment for teens. Recently, in fact, in an effort to address these concerns, the city of Taipei passed an ordinance restricting the hours during which teens are permitted to frequent cafes, mandating -- IIRC -- filters on all terminals, and forbidding any Internet cafes within a certain distance (200 meters?) of a school.
This settlement donates between $1.1-$1.7 billion of software.
It does no such thing. At "educational prices" the donated software may look like a billion dollars or so, but the only real cost to Microsoft will be the pressing of a few thousand CDs. And MS will probably get double its money back on those by writing off the full billion come tax time.
Worst case, you could argue that each "donated" product costs MS a cash sale; but that sale would put no more than $10-15 in Microsoft's pocket anyway. It stills totals out at a small fraction of the $1.1 billion paper figure Microsoft gets to crow about.
Bottom line for MS: this "$1.1 billion" settlement will cost no more than $200 million in real cash outlay; that's less than the Caldera settlement for DR-DOS, and means MS gets 65 million consumers off its back for less than 3 bucks a piece. This settlement will ultimately cost MS less than it lost to accountants' rounding errors last quarter. To borrow from Liberace, Microsoft must be crying all the way to the bank.
IE may extend the standards, but at least it supports them.
The two problems with this are that A) Mozilla (and certainly W3C's own reference browser, Amaya, which was also blocked) is arguably at least as standards-compliant as IE6, and B) MSN's site wasn't standards compliant anyway.
After changing my User-Agent string, I was able to access MSN's site with the latest Mozilla nightly; to my eye, it rendered MSN identically to IE5.5, a fact of which MS must surely have been aware. Toss in B) above, and it becomes obvious that the whole standards claim was a smokescreen.
The browswer lockout, IMHO, was simply a piece of the Microsoft package. With all the links in WinXP driving users to MSN, the next step is to cajole, encourage and lock all this new traffic into Internet Explorer. If everything from Office to IE to Windows Media Player to keyword searches to online help is going to throw MSN up on my screen, only to remind me how inferior my current browser is, I can either figure out how to decouple XP from MSN (a hopeless quest), or simply ditch my browser. No rocket science here.
It is plenty stable for desktop use (I've only had 3 BSODs in over a year of running Win2k)
I dual boot between Win2K (service packless) and Mandrake (recently upgraded to 8.1), and dearly wish I had your lack of problems. 3 BSOD's a year? I probably average twice that a week, and that's not an exaggeration. I can all but guarentee a BSOD just by firing up Roxio's EZ-CD Creator 5. Win2K is NOT a stable platform. At least, not for me.
Conversely, Mandrake has yet to belly-up once. YMMV.
our government has looked for the most peaceful solution possible. The fact that that taliban was unwilling to cooperate even in the slightest makes the bombing both justified, and appropriate.
Umm, excuse me -- the Taliban was unwilling to cooperate? Two weeks ago the U.S. laid down four conditions, which it knew the Taliban would never agree to meet, and has refused to budge from its position. The Taliban made numerous attempts to negotiate, to counter-offer, to avert American attacks, and the U.S. response was the same each time: "Sorry, not interested."
Look, I'm no fan of the Taliban or bin Laden, but to claim the U.S. has been looking for a peaceful solution to this is ridiculous. The U.S. was determined to go to war, and did absolutely nothing to forward a peaceful solution. Whether U.S. actions in Afghanistan are justified is not the point: the point is simply that no reading of U.S. actions could possibly suggest the U.S. was trying to avoid military action.
Umm, excuse me -- troll?! A link to goatse.cx is a troll. This was a question! Where're the metamoderators?
I repeat: do companies really consider usernames and passwords "intellectual property"? Under what circumstances, and to what extent? Can my name become someone else's intellectual property?
Intellectual property redux
on
Brian West Update
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· Score: 0, Troll
return all property of the Company including intellectual property
When did a username and password become "intellectual property"? What if my usernmane is, say, my first name and M.I., and my password is my birthday? Are my name and birthdate now the intellectual property of my former employer? What if I write them on a piece of paper prefixed with "Techo, Inc. UN/PW"? Now are they intellectual property?
try to enroll in college, open a bank account, get a drivers license.
Enrolling in school and getting a DL, no problem. I simply told my school that I would not give them my SSN and they assigned me a different number.
The DL Bureau I just made up a number. The SS Administration cannot verify SSNs, so they have no way to confirm whether the number I supplied is correct. Ditto health insurers, credit card companies, etc. Per federal law no private organization can require you to provide your SSN, so the most they can do if you're caught is cancel your service.
Banks are a different issue, since they report earnings to the SSA.
Theoretically, yes, under certain circumstances. But the government has walled off the procedure behind a small army of clueless bureaucrats (which, to my mind, is still the only unbreakable security system ever invented), making it practically impossible.
a _lot_ of damage can be done if that falls into the wrong person's hands
Or -- Lord forbid -- the government's hands.
This is precisely why I never gave out my proper SSN to anyone aside from the SSA, my banks and employers. Credit card companies, Equifax, health insurers, my colleges, even the drivers' license bureau, all got made-up ones, and no one was the wiser. The down side was I had to remember what number I gave to whom.
The only reason most of entities request your social security number is because they assume everyone else already has it. Credit card companies request it because they assume your credit history is already tracked under it. My drivers' license bureau requires it because the government is already de facto using it as a standard ID number (SSA regulations restricting it to social security purposes only were revised back in the early seventies, and the restriction statement was removed from SSN cards at that time).
Even a local video store once required me to provide it when I tried to sign up for a membership. Only when I challenged them on it, and the manager couldn't explain why they wanted it, did they relent. And I once went several rounds with a health insurer who had absolutely no provision for assigning records except under the customer's SSN, even though no one there could explain why it had to be my SSN. I finally told some manager I was just going to make up a number, and she agreed there wouldn't be any repercussions.
Now that I'm back in Taiwan, I can't even remember what my SSN is. It's a relief in a way.
"Can I have your phone number?"
And with the advent of GPS-enabled cellphones, it won't even be necessary to call the phone company to have the number forwarded; it will follow you automatically. What could be more convenient?
And yet there are any number of legitimate reasons for having multiple phone numbers. I don't want business calls ringing my home phone; I don't want faxes setting off my cell phone; I might prefer having an unlisted home phone; I might have a personalized number.
And phone numbers aren't just assigned to individuals. Businesses use them too, of course. What about all those businesses with personalized numbers, such as 1.800.CALL-ATT? Who gets first rights to such phone numbers? Am I going to find myself sued some day for "cyberphone-squatting?"
I should be able to give away my... Windows... install it on my desktop *and* on my laptop... dissect, decompile and reverse engineer it... [and] make... archival copies as I require. If that's not the way Microsoft wants it, then they should never have *sold* me a copy.
Conversely, if you don't agree to such restrictions, you should never have *purchased* it.
They should have leased the copy instead.
EULAs generally include statements such as "This software is licensed, not sold" in order to circumvent the arguments you've presented, though the subtleties of of such distinctions tend to be lost on most IANAL-types. I think the real West-East difference here is that at least most Westerners have a general sense of the improprieties of buy-once install-many, even if they don't care, whereas the possibility of potential ethical issues would never even occur to the traditional Asian mindset.
In general, I find myself somewhere in the middle. I agree with some of your points but others strike me as more problematic.
Most probably, yes.... you have complete control over the software you use
Yes, one of the true freedoms of "free" software. The benefits probably cannot be overestimated. However, it does tend to negate the financial arguments for the adoption of open source, as any cost "savings" turns into cost shifting.
pirating windows is STILL not enough... How are you going to modify windows to suit your needs?
Agreed. I was simply addressing the financial aspect. However, you raise a point: are companies going to have to plow all that open-source cost savings into in-house open-source programming talent?
Yeah, OK, so not even close. When I started composing my message there was only one other comment. Ninety seconds later, there were dozens. Doesn't anybody have better things to do with their time?
Here in Taiwan, I don't think cost is as much of a factor, given the high rate of Windows piracy (even, I suspect, in government offices). As an example, when I recently went shopping for a new home system, I explained to the sales critters that I didn't want Windows, because I was planning on loading Linux and didn't want to pay the Microsoft tax. The response was always the same: You might as well take it, since it's FREE! Not a single store I visited loaded legal copies of Windows, for the simple reason that razor thin profit margins don't allow it.
Add to that the Chinese mindset which doesn't quite grasp Western concepts of intellectual property: the attitude here is that if I purchased (not 'licensed', Western-style EULAs not withstanding) a Windows CD, it's mine to do with as I wish -- including installing it on every machine in the office. You can begin to understand why Windows piracy rates in China are estimated at 95% or higher.
Oh, please! What's next? We put up a website inviting vigilantes to picket their homes and shoot them on site?
Posting their home addresses in public fora is idiotic, and quite possibly an invasion of privacy. If you need to contact these folks, do so C/O Adobe.
Yes, what he did is legal in Russia. But he marketted and sold the product to US citizens, and it is certainly illegal in the US
As I understand it, it was Sklyarov's company, not Sklyarov himself, which marketed and sold the product in the U.S. Now, unless Sklyarov is a member of the board of directors, it is not usual, even in the U.S., to prosecute employees for the actions of their employer.
It is similarly not illegal (even by DCMA standards) to produce, sell, or otherwise distribute copy protection schemes outside the U.S. Hawking his wares in Russia does not make him a criminal in the U.S.
It is my understanding that Sklyarov was arrested not because he discussed the weaknesses of Adobe's copy protection schemes, but because he was selling his product at the trade show where he was arrested. If this is the case then he is clearly in violation of U.S. law and the FBI is well within its jurisdiction to detain, arrest and prosecute him.
Whether the laws are just is a separate issue, one which it is up to the courts, not the FBI, to sort out. The FBI did what it was required to do.
Slashdot Mirror
What distribution were you using. Every distro I've seen in Taiwan (can't speak for RedFlag Linux, which is a mainland product and hence not terribly popuplar here) uses CLE ("Chinese Language Edition"), such that all menus, most of the core apps (there are two or three Chinese term programs available, for example) and an increasing number of HOWTOs and man pages, are in Chinese. Input methods for Chinese vary, including pinyin (not widely used here in Taiwan, except for foreigners), handwriting recognition (which has improved dramatically in the last few years), and bopomofo (a system of phonetic transcription developed in Beijing, but only widely used in Taiwan). Taiwanese keyboards are universally labelled with both roman characters, bopomofo and a third transcription system with which I'm not familiar (I believe it's used in Hong Kong and, perhaps, Singapore).
Generally, the bopomofo method is fairly quick, after a period of familiarization. As you type in the bopomofo representation, a list of characters is presented matching the bopomofo; generally, you only need to hit one or two keys, then pick the character off a list. Adept users can enter Chinese quite rapidly.
Handwriting recognition software is also improving, though it takes a bit more skill to get it to work consistently. It depends heavily on stroke order (the order in which one makes the strokes that compose a Chinese character) so unlike English (and despite the complexities of Chinese characters) one's handwriting doesn't need to be pristine for proper recognition.
However, even with the most recent versions of CLE (currently at either 1.0 or 1.1), one still sees a fair amount of English onscreen. This isn't too great a problem, as most Taiwanese have at least a passing acquaintance with English.
I can't speak to the programmer's experience, as I aren't one. Ditto for emacs.
How does this differ from the argument the arts community in the US tried a few years back during the whole debate on public arts funding? Their argument was that failure to fund art projects was tantemount to censorship. As I recall, the argument was thrown out of the courts, which noted that the government does not prohibit anyone from producing art, regardless of content. Conversely, however, since the government is under no obligation to fund art it can thus choose with impugnity how its arts dollars are spread around, even if such choices are demonstrably content-based.
The best-known example was the Piss-Christ, an image of a crucifix submerged in a jar of urine, which was highly offensive to a large segment of the American population. The government argued -- and the courts agreed -- that the arts community had no right to expect the government to fund work which was so patently offensive to such a large segment of the population. This was a demonstrably content-based decision, which the courts overwhelmingly upheld.
This issue strikes me as the same. The government cannot a priori prohibit anyone from accessing the Internet or viewing whatever content is available. Conversely, however, the government is under no obligation to fund or provide Internet access to any citizen, regardless of economic status. That government institutions do so is a public service, not a public right. And, therefore, the government can, with impugnity, choose whether and what portions of the Internet can be viewed on public kiosks, even if such choices are demonstrably content-based, without thereby falling afoul of anti-censorship regulations.
In short, since the government is not obliged to provide Internet access, it is free to chose whether and in what manner such publically-subsidized access is provided.
I am sure that there are censorware packages being released by people with all sorts of agendas. But that's the point: They have an agenda.
As far as I can see, everybody has an agenda. It's just that it's usually easier to see others' than our own.
By the way, I appreciate both your intelligence and debating skills. It's rare to find both on Slashdot
My great strength and my great weakness is that I tend to be too detached from things, up to and including my own opinions. This is a strength, in that it allows me to debate ideas without taking opposition too personally. Conversely, there are times in life where I long to have the sort of passion about things I see in others (including those damned religious fanatics) around me.
Then I doubt you can understand the concerns of parents in this respect.
I believe in the Constitution of the United States and I oppose government-mandated filtering of what the public can read and see.
As I don't live in the U.S., the American Constitution is of little relevance to me. However, I don't see your point. Mandated filtering has nothing to do with the government telling you what you can or can not view -- not at any rate until they begin to require filters on your home connection. It has everything to do with controlling the use made of public facilities. I have a degree of sympathy with those who object to their tax dollars subsidizing some poor slob's porn habit and, as a parent, I would be quite incensed to find libraries or schools providing unfiltered Internet access to my children. Fortunately in Taiwan public institutions generally take a more sensible approach.
I don't think that a censorware company run by born-again, evangelical Christians should be given a mandate ...
Now consider the motives of the filtering proponents.
I personally know little about fltering companies in the U.S., but I detect in your words both strawman reasoning and ad hominen argumentation: if I can label them "born-again evangelical Christians", then I don't have to deal with the content of their argument, as we all know born-again types are incapable of rational thought.
Your allusion to the "motives of the filtering proponents" also relies heavily on stereotyping. In choosing to simply lump them all together as moral fanatics bent on imposing their narrow views on the rest of society, you avoid having to deal with the complex motivations of real people. Strawmen, after all, are much easier to knock about.
Now, I don't claim to speak for any Americans, let alone "born-again" ones. However, my own experiences suggest that people -- even those with whom I disagree -- are general quite complex, and operate from a variety of motivations. As a result, I'm sceptical of any attempts to paint a group of people with such a broad brush.
So, what evidence do you have that A) all filtering companies (or at least all those contracted by government agencies) are run by "born-again evangelical Christians", and B) that all filtering proponents are bent on pushing their morality down others' throats? By the way, I am neither a born-again evangelical, nor do I go around forcing my morality down others' throats. I do, however, see a legitimate, albeit limited, role for filtration software on public access terminals (most Taiwanese do).
As to your comments about the poor, they strike me as quite paternalistic. As one who has in the past lived in poverty, I was always bemused by middle-class do-gooders running around talking about me in third-person terms, as if I were a category rather than an individual, and were actually in need of their protection. Generally speaking such folks didn't even know any "poor people".
And a poor woman surfing at her local library is going to get more and better information off the net than she can get from a gynecologist, "top-notch" or not? If your daughter were sick, would you take her to a doctor (be he Harvard or locally trained) or would you attempt to diagnose and treat her yourself with nothing more than a broadband connection? Sorry, I don't see that.
prevent "the poor" (whatever that means)
It means people that have very little money.
No. My comment was meant to indicate that "the poor" are every bit the shibboleth for filtering opponents as "the children" are for proponents. Proponents want to protect "the children", opponents want to protect "the poor". I have a hard time subscribing to the sincerity of either side.
Or better yet consult the doctors at the local free clinic.
Frankly, most of the argument on BOTH sides of this issue are strawmen. Filtering proponents are no more out to prevent "the poor" (whatever that means) from accessing information on STDs than opponents are trying to cram porn down children's throats.
There is similar concern here in Taiwan as on the Mainland about Internet cafes, which tend to be havens for teenage boys -- a fair number of them truants -- hanging out for hours surfing the net and playing network wargames with their friends.
The problem isn't so much surfing and games per se, but the fact that Internet cafes are often connected to other video game parlors, which feature gambling. In addition, many Internet cafes are actually Internet bars serving alcohol and cigarettes. Toss in truancy and Internet porn, and it adds up to a real concern amongst Taiwanese parents that Internet cafes are not a proper environment for teens. Recently, in fact, in an effort to address these concerns, the city of Taipei passed an ordinance restricting the hours during which teens are permitted to frequent cafes, mandating -- IIRC -- filters on all terminals, and forbidding any Internet cafes within a certain distance (200 meters?) of a school.
Uh, better look again. It's right there between the 13th and the 15th amendments.
It does no such thing. At "educational prices" the donated software may look like a billion dollars or so, but the only real cost to Microsoft will be the pressing of a few thousand CDs. And MS will probably get double its money back on those by writing off the full billion come tax time.
Worst case, you could argue that each "donated" product costs MS a cash sale; but that sale would put no more than $10-15 in Microsoft's pocket anyway. It stills totals out at a small fraction of the $1.1 billion paper figure Microsoft gets to crow about.
Bottom line for MS: this "$1.1 billion" settlement will cost no more than $200 million in real cash outlay; that's less than the Caldera settlement for DR-DOS, and means MS gets 65 million consumers off its back for less than 3 bucks a piece. This settlement will ultimately cost MS less than it lost to accountants' rounding errors last quarter. To borrow from Liberace, Microsoft must be crying all the way to the bank.
The two problems with this are that A) Mozilla (and certainly W3C's own reference browser, Amaya, which was also blocked) is arguably at least as standards-compliant as IE6, and B) MSN's site wasn't standards compliant anyway.
After changing my User-Agent string, I was able to access MSN's site with the latest Mozilla nightly; to my eye, it rendered MSN identically to IE5.5, a fact of which MS must surely have been aware. Toss in B) above, and it becomes obvious that the whole standards claim was a smokescreen.
The browswer lockout, IMHO, was simply a piece of the Microsoft package. With all the links in WinXP driving users to MSN, the next step is to cajole, encourage and lock all this new traffic into Internet Explorer. If everything from Office to IE to Windows Media Player to keyword searches to online help is going to throw MSN up on my screen, only to remind me how inferior my current browser is, I can either figure out how to decouple XP from MSN (a hopeless quest), or simply ditch my browser. No rocket science here.
I dual boot between Win2K (service packless) and Mandrake (recently upgraded to 8.1), and dearly wish I had your lack of problems. 3 BSOD's a year? I probably average twice that a week, and that's not an exaggeration. I can all but guarentee a BSOD just by firing up Roxio's EZ-CD Creator 5. Win2K is NOT a stable platform. At least, not for me.
Conversely, Mandrake has yet to belly-up once. YMMV.
Umm, excuse me -- the Taliban was unwilling to cooperate? Two weeks ago the U.S. laid down four conditions, which it knew the Taliban would never agree to meet, and has refused to budge from its position. The Taliban made numerous attempts to negotiate, to counter-offer, to avert American attacks, and the U.S. response was the same each time: "Sorry, not interested."
Look, I'm no fan of the Taliban or bin Laden, but to claim the U.S. has been looking for a peaceful solution to this is ridiculous. The U.S. was determined to go to war, and did absolutely nothing to forward a peaceful solution. Whether U.S. actions in Afghanistan are justified is not the point: the point is simply that no reading of U.S. actions could possibly suggest the U.S. was trying to avoid military action.
The blade Frodo uses on Weathertop was destroyed, so it couldn't be Sting. It was one of the Numenorean blades from the barrows.
Umm, excuse me -- troll?! A link to goatse.cx is a troll. This was a question! Where're the metamoderators?
I repeat: do companies really consider usernames and passwords "intellectual property"? Under what circumstances, and to what extent? Can my name become someone else's intellectual property?
When did a username and password become "intellectual property"? What if my usernmane is, say, my first name and M.I., and my password is my birthday? Are my name and birthdate now the intellectual property of my former employer? What if I write them on a piece of paper prefixed with "Techo, Inc. UN/PW"? Now are they intellectual property?
Hmm...
Not possible -- Frodo uses his blade to defend himself on Weathertop before they reach Rivendell.
Enrolling in school and getting a DL, no problem. I simply told my school that I would not give them my SSN and they assigned me a different number.
The DL Bureau I just made up a number. The SS Administration cannot verify SSNs, so they have no way to confirm whether the number I supplied is correct. Ditto health insurers, credit card companies, etc. Per federal law no private organization can require you to provide your SSN, so the most they can do if you're caught is cancel your service.
Banks are a different issue, since they report earnings to the SSA.
Theoretically, yes, under certain circumstances. But the government has walled off the procedure behind a small army of clueless bureaucrats (which, to my mind, is still the only unbreakable security system ever invented), making it practically impossible.
a _lot_ of damage can be done if that falls into the wrong person's hands
Or -- Lord forbid -- the government's hands.
This is precisely why I never gave out my proper SSN to anyone aside from the SSA, my banks and employers. Credit card companies, Equifax, health insurers, my colleges, even the drivers' license bureau, all got made-up ones, and no one was the wiser. The down side was I had to remember what number I gave to whom.
The only reason most of entities request your social security number is because they assume everyone else already has it. Credit card companies request it because they assume your credit history is already tracked under it. My drivers' license bureau requires it because the government is already de facto using it as a standard ID number (SSA regulations restricting it to social security purposes only were revised back in the early seventies, and the restriction statement was removed from SSN cards at that time).
Even a local video store once required me to provide it when I tried to sign up for a membership. Only when I challenged them on it, and the manager couldn't explain why they wanted it, did they relent. And I once went several rounds with a health insurer who had absolutely no provision for assigning records except under the customer's SSN, even though no one there could explain why it had to be my SSN. I finally told some manager I was just going to make up a number, and she agreed there wouldn't be any repercussions.
Now that I'm back in Taiwan, I can't even remember what my SSN is. It's a relief in a way.
"Can I have your phone number?"
And with the advent of GPS-enabled cellphones, it won't even be necessary to call the phone company to have the number forwarded; it will follow you automatically. What could be more convenient?
And yet there are any number of legitimate reasons for having multiple phone numbers. I don't want business calls ringing my home phone; I don't want faxes setting off my cell phone; I might prefer having an unlisted home phone; I might have a personalized number.
And phone numbers aren't just assigned to individuals. Businesses use them too, of course. What about all those businesses with personalized numbers, such as 1.800.CALL-ATT? Who gets first rights to such phone numbers? Am I going to find myself sued some day for "cyberphone-squatting?"
So AT&T thinks I want business calls ringing my home phone? Or faxes setting off my cell phone?
Conversely, if you don't agree to such restrictions, you should never have *purchased* it.
They should have leased the copy instead.
EULAs generally include statements such as "This software is licensed, not sold" in order to circumvent the arguments you've presented, though the subtleties of of such distinctions tend to be lost on most IANAL-types. I think the real West-East difference here is that at least most Westerners have a general sense of the improprieties of buy-once install-many, even if they don't care, whereas the possibility of potential ethical issues would never even occur to the traditional Asian mindset.
In general, I find myself somewhere in the middle. I agree with some of your points but others strike me as more problematic.
Yes, one of the true freedoms of "free" software. The benefits probably cannot be overestimated. However, it does tend to negate the financial arguments for the adoption of open source, as any cost "savings" turns into cost shifting.
Agreed. I was simply addressing the financial aspect. However, you raise a point: are companies going to have to plow all that open-source cost savings into in-house open-source programming talent?
Yeah, OK, so not even close. When I started composing my message there was only one other comment. Ninety seconds later, there were dozens. Doesn't anybody have better things to do with their time?
[This is the closest I've ever come to FP]
Here in Taiwan, I don't think cost is as much of a factor, given the high rate of Windows piracy (even, I suspect, in government offices). As an example, when I recently went shopping for a new home system, I explained to the sales critters that I didn't want Windows, because I was planning on loading Linux and didn't want to pay the Microsoft tax. The response was always the same: You might as well take it, since it's FREE! Not a single store I visited loaded legal copies of Windows, for the simple reason that razor thin profit margins don't allow it.
Add to that the Chinese mindset which doesn't quite grasp Western concepts of intellectual property: the attitude here is that if I purchased (not 'licensed', Western-style EULAs not withstanding) a Windows CD, it's mine to do with as I wish -- including installing it on every machine in the office. You can begin to understand why Windows piracy rates in China are estimated at 95% or higher.
Lee Kai Wen
Taiwan, ROC
Posting their home addresses in public fora is idiotic, and quite possibly an invasion of privacy. If you need to contact these folks, do so C/O Adobe.
As I understand it, it was Sklyarov's company, not Sklyarov himself, which marketed and sold the product in the U.S. Now, unless Sklyarov is a member of the board of directors, it is not usual, even in the U.S., to prosecute employees for the actions of their employer.
It is similarly not illegal (even by DCMA standards) to produce, sell, or otherwise distribute copy protection schemes outside the U.S. Hawking his wares in Russia does not make him a criminal in the U.S.
It is my understanding that Sklyarov was arrested not because he discussed the weaknesses of Adobe's copy protection schemes, but because he was selling his product at the trade show where he was arrested. If this is the case then he is clearly in violation of U.S. law and the FBI is well within its jurisdiction to detain, arrest and prosecute him.
Whether the laws are just is a separate issue, one which it is up to the courts, not the FBI, to sort out. The FBI did what it was required to do.
Anyone care to correct my understanding?