There is nothing like shuting the barn door...
on
NSync Copy Protected CD
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
when the horse has already run out.
I would be willing to venture that the number of people downloading music illegaly has pretty much stabalized since the demise of napster. No other network has achieved the market penetration that napster had. Now is not the time for the record labels to do things to prevent people from ripping CDs.
There was a time when I used napster etc. I can even remember hunting for ftp sites that didn't have a ratio. Anymore I just rip my own CDs so that I can leave them in my car and still listen to them at home. If anything moves like this increase the chances of me going out and hunting for songs online. If I can't rip my own CD digitally I'll either 1) Do it analog myself or 2) Find it online and while I'm at it, find several other songs too.
All that this will do is stop the most casual of copiers. The hard core rippers will find a way to force the CD-ROM drive to recognize the CD. The general public dosen't rip what they own so they won't care. So the only people that this really affects are the casual copiers, and they will just go out and find a copy that someone else has ripped.
Actually you still can't copy that book. Why you ask? In most books there are gramatical corrections, typesetting changes etc. made by the publisher that place the book back under copyright. This becomes even more true with things oringally written in a foriegn language, or in pre-modern English. The translation of a foriegn language piece, such as a play by Checkov is copyrighted, not just the play itself. Even Shakespeare's works have to "translated" into modern English.
Project Guttenburg often goes through great pains to find books that the copyright has actually expired on so that they can create Guttenburg texts.
Here are a few highlights from the list...
REM "It's the End of the World as We Know It" - Why does everyone always pick on this song without listening to what they are really saying. Everyopne always stops after reading the first six words of the title.
The Beatles "Obla Di, Obla Da" - The only offense I can think of for this song is that it says "Life goes on" and isn't that what everyone has been saying anyway, that we need to try and return to normal
U2 "Sunday Bloody Sunday" - This song speaks out against terroism, rather blatantly.
Jan and Dean "Dead Man's Curve" - What are we doing, banning any song that mentions death in any way?
Lenny Kravitz "Fly Away" - Or any song that mentions air travel?
I can see banning a few songs, but they have just decimated the play list, not only of Rock stations, but of oldies stations as well. I would say that about half of the list predates 1980! In my opinion they are fully within their rights to do this, but they are making an ill reasoned bussiness decision.
Actually both Johnson and Nixon micromanaged the military during Vietnam, which is part of the reason why we were so ineffectual during that war. The president recieved target lists on a daily basis and chose which targets the military was and was not allowed to strike.
I think akamai could have handled the load without any problem what so ever. My primary mainstream media source all day Tuesday was The Washington Post becuase it was the only page that would load reliably. It was very obvious as soon as you clicked into any of the links that this site was akamaized.
Israel is constrained in its response by the nature of the region in which they live in. Israel has the military power to roll over every bit of Palastinian controlled land. However the rest of the region would react in revulsion, and it would quite possibly boil over into a war encompasing the entire mid-east. Israel would probably lose that war.
In the case of the recent attacks on the U.S. many nations have condemed these attacks. NATO is talking about invoking Article 5, which is one of the main planks of the NATO accord, that an attack on any member nation is an attack on all member nations. In other words whoever did this would not have just the U.S. to deal with but, all of NATO. There isn't a group, nation, or alliance on this planet that has a chance against the combined military might of a determined NATO.
When Japan attacked us at Pearl Harbor they thought they would break our resolve, and make incapacitate us until there was nothing we could do about the problem. In reality all they did was give us a bloody nose. Yes, it hurt, it hurt a lot, but once we had stoped the bleeding we weren't broken, if anything our resolve was strengthend. Once again someone thinks that they can strike terror into the hearts of Americans, and I am confident that once again they are going to discover that they have awakened a sleeping giant!
And that is why I mentioned Bush dangling the carrot of a better position. Bush knows that Bill could finance his reelection campaingn single handedly, therefore why not do things to make Bill happy. Being nice to Bill is in Bush's best interest.
Bush also has the power to promote a judge to a higher court, be they the Appeals courts, or even the supreme court. So it is in the judge's best interests to make Bush happy.
This is where the checks and balances really start to come into play though. Congress dosen't have to play along. Bush can nominate the judge and congress, specifically the senate can say "I don't think so." Why would they say this? If their consituents are calling and saying "This judge is easily manipulated by the president and we don't like it" then it is not in their best intrests to go along with the judge's promotion.
That is the beauty of our triparte government system, not even two of the three branches working in collusion can trump the governamental system in whole. The founding fathers were men, and while they were great men, they knew that power corrupts and that absolute power corrupts absolutely. So they fashioned a system of governement that even in the face of people in power acting in their own interests would still be able to function.
Legislative Branch - Makes the Laws = Congress
Executive Branch - Enforces the Laws = President
Judicial Branch - Evaluates the Laws = Judges
The Department of Justice is part of the Executive branch, as well it should be. The executive branch is charged with law enforcement. Bush can't order the judge in the case to rule in a certain way, but he can tell the government lawyers prosocuting the case to proceed the way he wants them to. Checks and balances are still maintained. Even if Bush were to dangle the carrot of a higher position within the courts in front of the judge checks and balances would still be maintained because congress would still have to aprove her for her new position.
They aren't trying to make money off of this, so much as trying to benifit a good cause. They say that the money from the auction is going to go to the 4H foundation, which makes a lot of sense. If it wasn't for 4H and the FFA most state fairs would be nothing more then a carnival these days. Its the kids involved in these programs that are involved in the agricultural exhibits.
This is basically an oversize version of the classic "cake auction" where a business might buy the blue ribbon cake for several hundred dollars, more to give the money to the 4H program then anything else. I'd much rather they do this then just throw the thing away.
The problem being that horsepower is a measure of output power, not internal engine conditions. You can compare the horsepower between two very different engines and it still means something. The clock speed of the chip is more like the number of RPMs a clock does. Say you have the engines from a Viper and a Neon. For arguments sake lets say the redline for both vehicles is 5000 RPMs. Which engine would you rather have?
The chip speed battle is similar. A 1.4 GhZ Athalon and a 1.4 GhZ PentiumIV both run at the same internal speed. The Athalon can do more every clock cycle though. The problem is educating the public about this. The public has been conditioned to care about clock cycles, not how many instructions per second the system can process, or even better, the throughput of the system handling real world tasks.
Brazil is a sovereign government. In other words they have the right to decide what the laws in their country are. If they decide to honor human life over intelectual property that is their choice. In the same way there are countries in which software patents do not exist. In those countries you could implement one-click shoping and there is nothing Amazon could do about it. Just because there is an international agreement dosen't mean you have to follow it. Look at the U.S. and Dubya's opinion of the Kyoto accord. The international community agreed to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases, but the U.S. is a sovereign power, and doesn't have to abide by it if they don't want to.
International politics are no different then playground politics. There are two kids playing on the playground Tom and Jack. Jack wants to play on the swing, Tom dosen't want him to. Tom can do a few things, he can try and reason with Jack, he can threaten Jack, or he can go get the teacher. The pharmasucitcal companies and their parent nations can try and convince Brazil this is a bad thing, they can threaten Brazil with sactions or military retaliation, or they can go running to the WTO. The teacher(WTO) can still only do so much though. If Jack decides that the fun from playing on the swing is worth going to the principal's office then there isn't much the WTO can do. Especially if Jack knows that his did won't punish him when he gets home. On the field of intenational politics, the same as on the playground one rule reigns over all others, might makes right. If the U.S. wanted to invade Brazil and stop them, they could. But the U.S. isn't going to, but this little IP dispute isn't worth a war to anyone.
Internet security is no different then the locks on your house or your car. A truly determined attacker will succed no matter how many security measures you have in place.
The first thing that locks do is keep the honest people honest. If I walk up to a building and the door is wide open I may very well just waltz right in. But if the door is locked an honest person won't try and jimmy the lock. If I happen to surf to port 80 of a system and find a webserver with no protection what so ever I am going to assume that its resources are available for my use.
The other thing you are doing in securing your system is making your system less inviting. If I can break into 10 unlocked cars in an hour and take the steros out of all of them, or spend an hour to break into the locked car with an alarm to take one stero, which am I going to do? Unless the car with the alarm has a $5,000 stereo I'm going to take the 10 easy targets.
In order for you to have a right to privacy you must be in a situation where there is a resonable expectation of privacy. Part of your right to privacy prohibts unreasonable searches, if you have a joint in your pockets there is a reasonable expectation of privacy. If it falls out of your pocket while you are sitting in a restraunt, there is no longer an expectation of privacy for that joint. The same applies to people. If you are in your house you have a resonable expectation of privacy. The police can't use thermal imaging gear to see if there is a room in your house that is substantially hotter then it should be because you are growing marajuna in it. If you grow it on your front lawn and a cop sees it you are going to get arrested. In public there is no resonable expectation of privacy, anyone can see you. Therefore there is no right to privacy.
The Nokia 8260 takes a step in this direction. You can assign people in your phone book to one of five distinct caller groups. Each of these caller groups can be assigned a different ringtone and graphic. It is also possible to configure the phone so that it only rings when the caller has been assigned to a group.
It still uses the RTTL format to define ringtones, but progress comes by taking many small steps more often then by taking one giant leap. For those of you with an 8260 who haven't found a place to download ringtones check out www.the-mobile.net.
First off, as another reader clarified, I was refering mainly to user terminal services. Secondly it is not just Microsoft who recomneds that they be seperate boxes. I've looked at several applications that require the PDC and the Terminal Server box hosting the application be seperate systems.
Lastly in the context of the original comment I made your situation would not apply. There are plenty of other ways to administer a Linux box remotely. You can launch a remote X session, have the vnc server installed and launch a vnc viewer on your windows system onto your linux system. Or the simplest way of all telnet (yeah I know for security sake you should use ssh) into the box.
For that matter you could run the windows vnc-server on your system instead of Terminal Services and use vnc for remote administration.
They are both CALs. Microsoft has two types of CALs, per server, and per seat. The per server CALs are connection based, the per seat CALs are not. Every CAL you buy is a "per server" CAL, however Microsoft allows you to convert them to "per seat" CALs.
Both licenses can make sense depending on your arangement. If you have a large number of users who make brief connections then a "per server" paradigm probably will be cheaper. For example if your server is only providing DNS services. On the other hand if your users make fairly permenant connections, or connect to multiple servers then per seat licensing is for you. My company has users store all their files on a network share. At the same time they may be accessing files stored on another server, or printing through a third server. By licensing on a per seat basis we don't have to worry about how many connections there are.
A lot of those other services you mention can be provided by a Linux server. DHCP and DNS are much more robust on a Linux server. Apache provides the same basic functionality as IIS. Terminal Services on the PDC are a bad idea so thats a moot point.
It all boils down to SAMBA having the potential to reduce the number of W2K systems in a mixed shop. In a pure W2K shop it takes something major to make management wake up and decide that some Linux makes sense. Things like a loss for the year or declining stock prices as a result of decreasing earnings.
The problem is that the way some of the microsoft licenses are written when you enter into them you give Microsoft the right to inspect you for software license compliance. If all your software is either OEM or Retail software then they don't have a very strong leg to stand on. In large part because they don't even know who you are.
The problem comes for companies who use the various Microsoft licensing programs such as Open, Enterprise, and Select. There are clauses in the master agreements for these programs that give Microsoft the right to audit you. And most companies with more then 15 or 20 desktops are probably using one of these programs both for ease of tracking and cost benifits.
I want to preface this by saying that this discussion is entirely an exercise in possiblity. I am not saying that anyone will do what I am talking about. I'm just saying that because this list was posted the potential for abuse exists.
The problem isn't limited to what Ben does. Say I maintain the foobar package and I decide that I am going to give it up. Now say I supported someone other then Ben, and was upset that they didn't get in. I can go and look at this list and see that x supported the same person as I did. So even though they aren't as qualified as person y who supported Ben I decide that because x and myself both voted for the same person I am going to have x succeed me.
I will grant that this problem is much less likely to occur in a group as Debian where the developers have generally fewer and weaker relationships with each other. This kind of thing becomes a major issue in something like a high school student council election for several reasons. First off there is the fact that you see and interact with everyone else who voted on a much more regular basis. The second reason is what I think will save Debian from having too many problems with this, high school students as a group tend to be much more petty then Debian developers as a group.
Well one reward that I can think of is being made the maintainer of a high prestige package, or being given various other positions within the Debian project. These positions can result in experience and name recognition which can lead to a better job. I know of atleast one company, Progeny Linux Systems, that is looking to hire Debian developers.
Punishment could include things like not getting a maintership that you are the best person for, or having benificial patches rejected by the maintainer because of who you voted for.
Both rewards and punishment based on the way people voted will in the long run be detrimental to the Debian Project as a whole. Thats why I hope everyone just ignores the information about who voted for what and it can fade into obscurity.
That's already been commented on in the debian-vote list in several places. Most notably here and here with a direct reference to the Debian constitution.
It's probably an honest mistake made with the intention of being open and transparent, although it went a little far. Its too late to get rid of it, I just hope that everyone will ignore it so that people aren't punished or rewarded for the way they voted. This is probably too much to hope for though, human nature being what it is.
Sounds kinda like the way Microsoft is licensing Terminal Services for Windows 2000 Client Access Licenses. Each CAL is registered to the MAC address of the Network Card in the computer. If a card goes bad and you have to replace it then you have to call Microsoft and have them reissue the license. To top it off, the way the license is worded, if you decide to replace a system that has been issued a CAL with a new system you can't reuse the CAL for the new system.
In other words I have a 300 MHz Laptop thats a few years old. If my company were to deploy windows 2000 terminal services and I were to aquire a CAL for this system then when my boss decides that its finally time to replace the laptop we have to buy another Terminal Services CAL for the new laptop.
Its amazing what you can do when you have a monopoly.
Slashdot Mirror
when the horse has already run out.
I would be willing to venture that the number of people downloading music illegaly has pretty much stabalized since the demise of napster. No other network has achieved the market penetration that napster had. Now is not the time for the record labels to do things to prevent people from ripping CDs.
There was a time when I used napster etc. I can even remember hunting for ftp sites that didn't have a ratio. Anymore I just rip my own CDs so that I can leave them in my car and still listen to them at home. If anything moves like this increase the chances of me going out and hunting for songs online. If I can't rip my own CD digitally I'll either 1) Do it analog myself or 2) Find it online and while I'm at it, find several other songs too.
All that this will do is stop the most casual of copiers. The hard core rippers will find a way to force the CD-ROM drive to recognize the CD. The general public dosen't rip what they own so they won't care. So the only people that this really affects are the casual copiers, and they will just go out and find a copy that someone else has ripped.
Amazon
This text is here to get around the infamous lameness filter. Sometimes a link is worth a thousand words, but the lameness filter dosen't know that.
Actually you still can't copy that book. Why you ask? In most books there are gramatical corrections, typesetting changes etc. made by the publisher that place the book back under copyright. This becomes even more true with things oringally written in a foriegn language, or in pre-modern English. The translation of a foriegn language piece, such as a play by Checkov is copyrighted, not just the play itself. Even Shakespeare's works have to "translated" into modern English.
Project Guttenburg often goes through great pains to find books that the copyright has actually expired on so that they can create Guttenburg texts.
Here are a few highlights from the list...
REM "It's the End of the World as We Know It" - Why does everyone always pick on this song without listening to what they are really saying. Everyopne always stops after reading the first six words of the title.
The Beatles "Obla Di, Obla Da" - The only offense I can think of for this song is that it says "Life goes on" and isn't that what everyone has been saying anyway, that we need to try and return to normal
U2 "Sunday Bloody Sunday" - This song speaks out against terroism, rather blatantly.
Jan and Dean "Dead Man's Curve" - What are we doing, banning any song that mentions death in any way?
Lenny Kravitz "Fly Away" - Or any song that mentions air travel?
I can see banning a few songs, but they have just decimated the play list, not only of Rock stations, but of oldies stations as well. I would say that about half of the list predates 1980! In my opinion they are fully within their rights to do this, but they are making an ill reasoned bussiness decision.
Actually both Johnson and Nixon micromanaged the military during Vietnam, which is part of the reason why we were so ineffectual during that war. The president recieved target lists on a daily basis and chose which targets the military was and was not allowed to strike.
Here is the Correct Link for the lazy. With some stuff on the end to get around the lameness filter...
I think akamai could have handled the load without any problem what so ever. My primary mainstream media source all day Tuesday was The Washington Post becuase it was the only page that would load reliably. It was very obvious as soon as you clicked into any of the links that this site was akamaized.
Israel is constrained in its response by the nature of the region in which they live in. Israel has the military power to roll over every bit of Palastinian controlled land. However the rest of the region would react in revulsion, and it would quite possibly boil over into a war encompasing the entire mid-east. Israel would probably lose that war.
In the case of the recent attacks on the U.S. many nations have condemed these attacks. NATO is talking about invoking Article 5, which is one of the main planks of the NATO accord, that an attack on any member nation is an attack on all member nations. In other words whoever did this would not have just the U.S. to deal with but, all of NATO. There isn't a group, nation, or alliance on this planet that has a chance against the combined military might of a determined NATO.
When Japan attacked us at Pearl Harbor they thought they would break our resolve, and make incapacitate us until there was nothing we could do about the problem. In reality all they did was give us a bloody nose. Yes, it hurt, it hurt a lot, but once we had stoped the bleeding we weren't broken, if anything our resolve was strengthend. Once again someone thinks that they can strike terror into the hearts of Americans, and I am confident that once again they are going to discover that they have awakened a sleeping giant!
And that is why I mentioned Bush dangling the carrot of a better position. Bush knows that Bill could finance his reelection campaingn single handedly, therefore why not do things to make Bill happy. Being nice to Bill is in Bush's best interest.
Bush also has the power to promote a judge to a higher court, be they the Appeals courts, or even the supreme court. So it is in the judge's best interests to make Bush happy.
This is where the checks and balances really start to come into play though. Congress dosen't have to play along. Bush can nominate the judge and congress, specifically the senate can say "I don't think so." Why would they say this? If their consituents are calling and saying "This judge is easily manipulated by the president and we don't like it" then it is not in their best intrests to go along with the judge's promotion.
That is the beauty of our triparte government system, not even two of the three branches working in collusion can trump the governamental system in whole. The founding fathers were men, and while they were great men, they knew that power corrupts and that absolute power corrupts absolutely. So they fashioned a system of governement that even in the face of people in power acting in their own interests would still be able to function.
Legislative Branch - Makes the Laws = Congress
Executive Branch - Enforces the Laws = President
Judicial Branch - Evaluates the Laws = Judges
The Department of Justice is part of the Executive branch, as well it should be. The executive branch is charged with law enforcement. Bush can't order the judge in the case to rule in a certain way, but he can tell the government lawyers prosocuting the case to proceed the way he wants them to. Checks and balances are still maintained. Even if Bush were to dangle the carrot of a higher position within the courts in front of the judge checks and balances would still be maintained because congress would still have to aprove her for her new position.
They aren't trying to make money off of this, so much as trying to benifit a good cause. They say that the money from the auction is going to go to the 4H foundation, which makes a lot of sense. If it wasn't for 4H and the FFA most state fairs would be nothing more then a carnival these days. Its the kids involved in these programs that are involved in the agricultural exhibits.
This is basically an oversize version of the classic "cake auction" where a business might buy the blue ribbon cake for several hundred dollars, more to give the money to the 4H program then anything else. I'd much rather they do this then just throw the thing away.
The problem being that horsepower is a measure of output power, not internal engine conditions. You can compare the horsepower between two very different engines and it still means something. The clock speed of the chip is more like the number of RPMs a clock does. Say you have the engines from a Viper and a Neon. For arguments sake lets say the redline for both vehicles is 5000 RPMs. Which engine would you rather have?
The chip speed battle is similar. A 1.4 GhZ Athalon and a 1.4 GhZ PentiumIV both run at the same internal speed. The Athalon can do more every clock cycle though. The problem is educating the public about this. The public has been conditioned to care about clock cycles, not how many instructions per second the system can process, or even better, the throughput of the system handling real world tasks.
Brazil is a sovereign government. In other words they have the right to decide what the laws in their country are. If they decide to honor human life over intelectual property that is their choice. In the same way there are countries in which software patents do not exist. In those countries you could implement one-click shoping and there is nothing Amazon could do about it. Just because there is an international agreement dosen't mean you have to follow it. Look at the U.S. and Dubya's opinion of the Kyoto accord. The international community agreed to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases, but the U.S. is a sovereign power, and doesn't have to abide by it if they don't want to.
International politics are no different then playground politics. There are two kids playing on the playground Tom and Jack. Jack wants to play on the swing, Tom dosen't want him to. Tom can do a few things, he can try and reason with Jack, he can threaten Jack, or he can go get the teacher. The pharmasucitcal companies and their parent nations can try and convince Brazil this is a bad thing, they can threaten Brazil with sactions or military retaliation, or they can go running to the WTO. The teacher(WTO) can still only do so much though. If Jack decides that the fun from playing on the swing is worth going to the principal's office then there isn't much the WTO can do. Especially if Jack knows that his did won't punish him when he gets home. On the field of intenational politics, the same as on the playground one rule reigns over all others, might makes right. If the U.S. wanted to invade Brazil and stop them, they could. But the U.S. isn't going to, but this little IP dispute isn't worth a war to anyone.
Internet security is no different then the locks on your house or your car. A truly determined attacker will succed no matter how many security measures you have in place.
The first thing that locks do is keep the honest people honest. If I walk up to a building and the door is wide open I may very well just waltz right in. But if the door is locked an honest person won't try and jimmy the lock. If I happen to surf to port 80 of a system and find a webserver with no protection what so ever I am going to assume that its resources are available for my use.
The other thing you are doing in securing your system is making your system less inviting. If I can break into 10 unlocked cars in an hour and take the steros out of all of them, or spend an hour to break into the locked car with an alarm to take one stero, which am I going to do? Unless the car with the alarm has a $5,000 stereo I'm going to take the 10 easy targets.
In order for you to have a right to privacy you must be in a situation where there is a resonable expectation of privacy. Part of your right to privacy prohibts unreasonable searches, if you have a joint in your pockets there is a reasonable expectation of privacy. If it falls out of your pocket while you are sitting in a restraunt, there is no longer an expectation of privacy for that joint. The same applies to people. If you are in your house you have a resonable expectation of privacy. The police can't use thermal imaging gear to see if there is a room in your house that is substantially hotter then it should be because you are growing marajuna in it. If you grow it on your front lawn and a cop sees it you are going to get arrested. In public there is no resonable expectation of privacy, anyone can see you. Therefore there is no right to privacy.
The Nokia 8260 takes a step in this direction. You can assign people in your phone book to one of five distinct caller groups. Each of these caller groups can be assigned a different ringtone and graphic. It is also possible to configure the phone so that it only rings when the caller has been assigned to a group.
It still uses the RTTL format to define ringtones, but progress comes by taking many small steps more often then by taking one giant leap. For those of you with an 8260 who haven't found a place to download ringtones check out www.the-mobile.net.
First off, as another reader clarified, I was refering mainly to user terminal services. Secondly it is not just Microsoft who recomneds that they be seperate boxes. I've looked at several applications that require the PDC and the Terminal Server box hosting the application be seperate systems.
Lastly in the context of the original comment I made your situation would not apply. There are plenty of other ways to administer a Linux box remotely. You can launch a remote X session, have the vnc server installed and launch a vnc viewer on your windows system onto your linux system. Or the simplest way of all telnet (yeah I know for security sake you should use ssh) into the box.
For that matter you could run the windows vnc-server on your system instead of Terminal Services and use vnc for remote administration.
They are both CALs. Microsoft has two types of CALs, per server, and per seat. The per server CALs are connection based, the per seat CALs are not. Every CAL you buy is a "per server" CAL, however Microsoft allows you to convert them to "per seat" CALs.
Both licenses can make sense depending on your arangement. If you have a large number of users who make brief connections then a "per server" paradigm probably will be cheaper. For example if your server is only providing DNS services. On the other hand if your users make fairly permenant connections, or connect to multiple servers then per seat licensing is for you. My company has users store all their files on a network share. At the same time they may be accessing files stored on another server, or printing through a third server. By licensing on a per seat basis we don't have to worry about how many connections there are.
A lot of those other services you mention can be provided by a Linux server. DHCP and DNS are much more robust on a Linux server. Apache provides the same basic functionality as IIS. Terminal Services on the PDC are a bad idea so thats a moot point.
It all boils down to SAMBA having the potential to reduce the number of W2K systems in a mixed shop. In a pure W2K shop it takes something major to make management wake up and decide that some Linux makes sense. Things like a loss for the year or declining stock prices as a result of decreasing earnings.
If thats the case then China really dosen't need to worry about the destroyers that the U.S. is thinking about selling to Taiwan.
The problem is that the way some of the microsoft licenses are written when you enter into them you give Microsoft the right to inspect you for software license compliance. If all your software is either OEM or Retail software then they don't have a very strong leg to stand on. In large part because they don't even know who you are.
The problem comes for companies who use the various Microsoft licensing programs such as Open, Enterprise, and Select. There are clauses in the master agreements for these programs that give Microsoft the right to audit you. And most companies with more then 15 or 20 desktops are probably using one of these programs both for ease of tracking and cost benifits.
I want to preface this by saying that this discussion is entirely an exercise in possiblity. I am not saying that anyone will do what I am talking about. I'm just saying that because this list was posted the potential for abuse exists.
The problem isn't limited to what Ben does. Say I maintain the foobar package and I decide that I am going to give it up. Now say I supported someone other then Ben, and was upset that they didn't get in. I can go and look at this list and see that x supported the same person as I did. So even though they aren't as qualified as person y who supported Ben I decide that because x and myself both voted for the same person I am going to have x succeed me.
I will grant that this problem is much less likely to occur in a group as Debian where the developers have generally fewer and weaker relationships with each other. This kind of thing becomes a major issue in something like a high school student council election for several reasons. First off there is the fact that you see and interact with everyone else who voted on a much more regular basis. The second reason is what I think will save Debian from having too many problems with this, high school students as a group tend to be much more petty then Debian developers as a group.
Well one reward that I can think of is being made the maintainer of a high prestige package, or being given various other positions within the Debian project. These positions can result in experience and name recognition which can lead to a better job. I know of atleast one company, Progeny Linux Systems, that is looking to hire Debian developers.
Punishment could include things like not getting a maintership that you are the best person for, or having benificial patches rejected by the maintainer because of who you voted for.
Both rewards and punishment based on the way people voted will in the long run be detrimental to the Debian Project as a whole. Thats why I hope everyone just ignores the information about who voted for what and it can fade into obscurity.
That's already been commented on in the debian-vote list in several places. Most notably here and here with a direct reference to the Debian constitution.
It's probably an honest mistake made with the intention of being open and transparent, although it went a little far. Its too late to get rid of it, I just hope that everyone will ignore it so that people aren't punished or rewarded for the way they voted. This is probably too much to hope for though, human nature being what it is.
It was Ken Thompson in an implementation of a C compiler. His paper on it can be found here.
Sounds kinda like the way Microsoft is licensing Terminal Services for Windows 2000 Client Access Licenses. Each CAL is registered to the MAC address of the Network Card in the computer. If a card goes bad and you have to replace it then you have to call Microsoft and have them reissue the license. To top it off, the way the license is worded, if you decide to replace a system that has been issued a CAL with a new system you can't reuse the CAL for the new system.
In other words I have a 300 MHz Laptop thats a few years old. If my company were to deploy windows 2000 terminal services and I were to aquire a CAL for this system then when my boss decides that its finally time to replace the laptop we have to buy another Terminal Services CAL for the new laptop.
Its amazing what you can do when you have a monopoly.