"A willful infringement, which the magistrate judge found, combined with a willful default, however, warrant an award greater and more significant than one which corresponds so closely to an estimated loss to the plaintiff,"
I don't know anything about the facts of this one case, but by itself, this seems reasonable enough to me. I mean, if you download a music album and happen to get sued for it, and the court forces you to pay the $15 that the CD would have cost in a store, that's virtually no risk at all. I would support punitive damages equal to two, three, or perhaps as high as ten times the retail value of the CD.
Which, of course, doesn't even come close to the tens of thousands of dollars that the RIAA thinks is fair. They and common sense are in different galaxies.
Or hedge your bets with sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop, so you can have GNOME and KDE on the same Ubuntu system. It's convenient enough, as you can switch between desktop environments by clicking a menu option at login. It has a few flaws though, such as dumping some menu items into both environments that only work in one.
They will also consider open-source software on an even footing with proprietary for all new software purchases. [...] Their only criticism was, 'can't you do more?' with one advocating that free and open source software be given preference, not equal footing."
Indeed, it seems irrational that open source software isn't always considered on an even footing, not just in Vancouver but everywhere. Do governments assume that there is some inherent advantage to the source code being kept secret and copyrighted—security through obscurity, perhaps?
And it seems at least as irrational that open source isn't already given preferential treatment on account of its price, which is generally zero. You always hear about governments automatically going with the lowest bidder, even to their own detriment. Yet, when it comes to software, it almost goes without saying that they shell out money for Windows and Office.
Well, the migration couldn't have happened if the FSF didn't sign off on the change; they were the only ones with the authority to make an update to the GFDL allowing it. Although it seems that the FSF's decision came out of a negotiation that took place back in 2007, so perhaps it wasn't really their idea and it was more a matter of bowing to pressure from the masses. Also, I have no idea how RMS personally felt about it.
I definitely agree that the GFDL was totally unsuitable for Wikipedia.
Each page of Wikipedia (or any other wiki that runs on an open copyright license) is a licensed work, and each version of the page is a derivative work based on the previous ones. Using your suggestion, users could only choose their own license terms when they create a new page—any edits to existing pages need to comply with the license terms of the previous edits, in order to be permitted as derivative works of those edits. And letting the creator of each page choose their own license for it wouldn't work out well, since content couldn't be moved from page to page if their licenses didn't match.
Actually, I believe it's just "nuclear free zone", reflecting a ban on both nuclear weapons and nuclear power.
I heard a chemistry professor suggest that this means that the atoms there weren't allowed to have nuclei. My theory is that everyone who lives there is a prokaryote.
Actually, the nuclear free zone goes great with those "Drug Free Zone" signs you sometimes see. No joking, there's actually one on Telegraph Avenue. Of course, the standard interpretation is "Free Drug Zone". Perhaps the maintenance guys were just high. Thank you, I'll be here all week...
I'm a computer science major at Berkeley and I can attest that, outside of the EECS department, things run on pretty much the same software as at any university. I don't know about server software specifically, but all the administrative computers I've seen run Windows or are Macs.
Inside the EECS department, though, you can see the Unix-centric heritage. It's like a little software enclave—it's got its own class account system with email and newsgroups, no doubt dating back to when it was the only department on the campus to have such things. Oddly enough, most of the machines don't run on BSD, nor on Linux, but on Solaris. I think Sun must have given them a deal on hardware a while back. Of course, there are some BSD and Linux boxes around too.
I've been saying for years that it would be a great idea for public schools to invest in the production of open-source-style licensed textbooks. As long as textbooks are being sold by traditional publishers, they get to charge a per-unit price for them. If you want ten million students to read some publishing house's version of Our Glossy History of America or what have you, then you have to pay ten million times n dollars. If you instead invest in having a new textbook written from scratch and placed under a Creative Commons license, then you pay an up-front cost (expensive, no doubt, but probably pretty cheap as line items on the state budget go) and then it can be issued to any arbitrary number of students for no more than the cost of having copies printed up by the lowest bidder. The publisher's markup, marketing costs, and distribution costs vanish from the price.
There are external benefits, too. Some day it might be plausible for schools to save even more money by going all-digital; they wouldn't even have to pay to print the books. If the books are formatted in such a way that they can be printed paper-bound at your local Kinko's (the way most college readers are), students could cheaply have one or two extra copies as their private property—one to highlight and take notes in, or one copy for the locker and one for home. And free online textbooks would be a resource to autodidacts and other schools, not just in the state, but anywhere on the Internet.
The analogy to open-source software is apt. These days, reproducing information costs next to nothing, as long as it was produced by someone who chooses not to charge a per-unit price. Public schools essentially pay rent on individual textbooks issued to students, not unlike the so-called Microsoft tax when you buy a PC. I have nothing against the textbook publishers' profit-seeking activities—they're free to try whatever business model they like—but philanthropists and volunteers really ought to be able to beat their prices.
What we really could use is a distro meant specifically to prevent this this, with (among other security features) default configurations that don't save any data about what your applications have been doing. Perhaps Paranoid Linux, if it matures.
They totally intentionally installed the software. You can't make a machine Malware proof without also making it software proof... Anyone who tells you different is confusing the issue. OS X has plenty of problems, this isn't one of them.
You're presenting a false dichotomy. You can make OS's more resistant to malware and harder to write malware for without making it completely proof from malware.
In fact, this semi-academic essay goes even further by arguing that OSes can and should be made completely resistant to malware, through things such as sandboxing (which you mention). Of course, there is no OS that fully achieves this—let alone conveniently—but that's no reason not to ask for it.
It's orders of magnitude more secure against malware than Windows.
Even if it doesn't have the feature you want right now, community development means it probably will soon.
That last point is most likely the best way to promote the "freedom" side of it that will speak to people who will never see a byte of source code. We may think it's the best part of Linux, perhaps even its very essence, but advertisements should push the pragmatic benefits. I'm inspired by the approach that IBM took in its Linux ad, which should be an example for current efforts. But items #1 and #2 are the most desirable points to typical people, and item #3 makes it feasible to try Linux without doing scary things to your file system.
Also, the advertisements will really be more effective if they point newcomers to a particular distro. Audiences will balk if they decide to try out your product only to find that you're making them do the homework of researching distros first. Ubuntu is the best choice at present, especially considering #3 above.
(And yes, I freely admit I'm talking about what average users want when I myself am a programmer-geek. My guess is as good as anyone's, I suppose.)
No, sorry for being unclear. I was talking about the the one where you view the ASCII Star Wars animation through telnet. It's not an Easter egg in any piece of software, it's just viewing something on the Internet in an unusual way. (Also, I noticed after posting that I called the telnet thing "visiting a website". Technically, it's not; it's an Internet site.) The about: ones are indeed actual Easter eggs.
Like other commenters in this thread, I'm amazed that visiting a website counts even as an "almost" Easter egg. I guess you can sort of make it fit the pattern of a typical Easter egg: if you go into your Web browser—an innocuous, everyday application—and type the "special code" (i.e., some URL) into the address bar, you see funny cartoons. I guess it seems more like an Easter egg to typical Windows users if you use telnet, because it's unfamiliar and un-graphicky. God forbid they ever get a hold of Lynx, the whole damned Internet will count as a funny surprise.
The Emacs ones are almost as lame. Tetris and the psychotherapist aren't Easter eggs; they're documented features. And not the most offbeat ones in Emacs by a long shot. They even appear in the default pull-down menus in the windowed versions! A better, more obscure one for Emacs is M-x hanoi-unix, which is a countdown to the Year 2038 bug expressed as a puzzle.
Did anyone else notice the sets of nested quotation marks in the summary?
Miracle Jones writes "The ever-quotable speculative fiction writer [...] had this to say: 'The arrogance, the pompous dismissive imperial manner of those who "have more important things to worry about,"
Those are scare quotes within a quotation within a quotation. Which I just quoted above. ("Ever-quotable" is right, I guess.) It reminds me of nested parentheses in Lisp, in a good way.
It's a North America based company, thus it should not allow voting until the film is out in North America.
So you're saying we need to make sure that geographic limitations remain in force even in a medium where they are totally irrelevant? That kind of wastes some of the potential of the ol' information superhighway there, doesn't it?
Also, it has a review that doesn't even review the movie, but instead says the books are great therefore the movie should be too. Does the word 'shills' come to mind?
Actually, the word "fanboys" comes to mind. For any given fictional franchise, there will inevitably be enough people floating around the Internet who care so much about the movie being good that (in their minds) it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
From the summary, it seems like the software wasn't really sold though. They're trying to extract the money due to the user's agreement to a EULA, which (if that means in this context what it usually does) binds the user to some terms on the condition of using the copyrighted software. But, according to LGPL 2.1 (which is OOo's license):
8. You may not copy, modify, sublicense, link with, or distribute the Library except as expressly provided under this License. Any attempt otherwise to copy, modify, sublicense, link with, or distribute the Library is void, and will automatically terminate your rights under this License. However, parties who have received copies, or rights, from you under this License will not have their licenses terminated so long as such parties remain in full compliance. [emphasis added]
Selling a copy of the software—with an up-front price, like you said—would be one thing, but it appears that they are trying to impose a secondary license agreement (the EULA) on top of the LGPL that contractually binds the user to some payment after the fact. The license, and all other versions of the GPL and LGPL, forbid that outright. In fact, that company may now be forbidden from distributing OpenOffice.org to anyone at all, since they voided the entire license for themselves. (Not a lawyer.)
Nice. More on the Newtonian level, my high school physics teacher said that police don't really issue speeding tickets, since the ticket will list your direction of travel at the time of the infraction. So it's really a velocity ticket.
Actually, he instructed us to correct the police officer on this if we were ever pulled over. He was a funny guy.
Slashdot Mirror
"A willful infringement, which the magistrate judge found, combined with a willful default, however, warrant an award greater and more significant than one which corresponds so closely to an estimated loss to the plaintiff,"
I don't know anything about the facts of this one case, but by itself, this seems reasonable enough to me. I mean, if you download a music album and happen to get sued for it, and the court forces you to pay the $15 that the CD would have cost in a store, that's virtually no risk at all. I would support punitive damages equal to two, three, or perhaps as high as ten times the retail value of the CD.
Which, of course, doesn't even come close to the tens of thousands of dollars that the RIAA thinks is fair. They and common sense are in different galaxies.
Or hedge your bets with sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop, so you can have GNOME and KDE on the same Ubuntu system. It's convenient enough, as you can switch between desktop environments by clicking a menu option at login. It has a few flaws though, such as dumping some menu items into both environments that only work in one.
They will also consider open-source software on an even footing with proprietary for all new software purchases. [...] Their only criticism was, 'can't you do more?' with one advocating that free and open source software be given preference, not equal footing."
Indeed, it seems irrational that open source software isn't always considered on an even footing, not just in Vancouver but everywhere. Do governments assume that there is some inherent advantage to the source code being kept secret and copyrighted—security through obscurity, perhaps?
And it seems at least as irrational that open source isn't already given preferential treatment on account of its price, which is generally zero. You always hear about governments automatically going with the lowest bidder, even to their own detriment. Yet, when it comes to software, it almost goes without saying that they shell out money for Windows and Office.
Well, the migration couldn't have happened if the FSF didn't sign off on the change; they were the only ones with the authority to make an update to the GFDL allowing it. Although it seems that the FSF's decision came out of a negotiation that took place back in 2007, so perhaps it wasn't really their idea and it was more a matter of bowing to pressure from the masses. Also, I have no idea how RMS personally felt about it.
I definitely agree that the GFDL was totally unsuitable for Wikipedia.
Each page of Wikipedia (or any other wiki that runs on an open copyright license) is a licensed work, and each version of the page is a derivative work based on the previous ones. Using your suggestion, users could only choose their own license terms when they create a new page—any edits to existing pages need to comply with the license terms of the previous edits, in order to be permitted as derivative works of those edits. And letting the creator of each page choose their own license for it wouldn't work out well, since content couldn't be moved from page to page if their licenses didn't match.
I prefer:
In post-Soviet Russia, KGB shows its papers to YOU!
It's sort of inspiring, actually.
Actually, I believe it's just "nuclear free zone", reflecting a ban on both nuclear weapons and nuclear power.
I heard a chemistry professor suggest that this means that the atoms there weren't allowed to have nuclei. My theory is that everyone who lives there is a prokaryote.
Actually, the nuclear free zone goes great with those "Drug Free Zone" signs you sometimes see. No joking, there's actually one on Telegraph Avenue. Of course, the standard interpretation is "Free Drug Zone". Perhaps the maintenance guys were just high. Thank you, I'll be here all week...
I'm a computer science major at Berkeley and I can attest that, outside of the EECS department, things run on pretty much the same software as at any university. I don't know about server software specifically, but all the administrative computers I've seen run Windows or are Macs.
Inside the EECS department, though, you can see the Unix-centric heritage. It's like a little software enclave—it's got its own class account system with email and newsgroups, no doubt dating back to when it was the only department on the campus to have such things. Oddly enough, most of the machines don't run on BSD, nor on Linux, but on Solaris. I think Sun must have given them a deal on hardware a while back. Of course, there are some BSD and Linux boxes around too.
Dude, you do have problems - using aholic as a prefix and a suffix.
Clearly an aholicaholic.
I've been saying for years that it would be a great idea for public schools to invest in the production of open-source-style licensed textbooks. As long as textbooks are being sold by traditional publishers, they get to charge a per-unit price for them. If you want ten million students to read some publishing house's version of Our Glossy History of America or what have you, then you have to pay ten million times n dollars. If you instead invest in having a new textbook written from scratch and placed under a Creative Commons license, then you pay an up-front cost (expensive, no doubt, but probably pretty cheap as line items on the state budget go) and then it can be issued to any arbitrary number of students for no more than the cost of having copies printed up by the lowest bidder. The publisher's markup, marketing costs, and distribution costs vanish from the price.
There are external benefits, too. Some day it might be plausible for schools to save even more money by going all-digital; they wouldn't even have to pay to print the books. If the books are formatted in such a way that they can be printed paper-bound at your local Kinko's (the way most college readers are), students could cheaply have one or two extra copies as their private property—one to highlight and take notes in, or one copy for the locker and one for home. And free online textbooks would be a resource to autodidacts and other schools, not just in the state, but anywhere on the Internet.
The analogy to open-source software is apt. These days, reproducing information costs next to nothing, as long as it was produced by someone who chooses not to charge a per-unit price. Public schools essentially pay rent on individual textbooks issued to students, not unlike the so-called Microsoft tax when you buy a PC. I have nothing against the textbook publishers' profit-seeking activities—they're free to try whatever business model they like—but philanthropists and volunteers really ought to be able to beat their prices.
What we really could use is a distro meant specifically to prevent this this, with (among other security features) default configurations that don't save any data about what your applications have been doing. Perhaps Paranoid Linux, if it matures.
Will it give me free beer and hookers?
Free as in speech, silly.
In 9.10, there will be free hookers who speak freely and have beer.
But until the next LTS release, be sure to use a condom.
They totally intentionally installed the software. You can't make a machine Malware proof without also making it software proof... Anyone who tells you different is confusing the issue. OS X has plenty of problems, this isn't one of them.
You're presenting a false dichotomy. You can make OS's more resistant to malware and harder to write malware for without making it completely proof from malware.
In fact, this semi-academic essay goes even further by arguing that OSes can and should be made completely resistant to malware, through things such as sandboxing (which you mention). Of course, there is no OS that fully achieves this—let alone conveniently—but that's no reason not to ask for it.
That last point is most likely the best way to promote the "freedom" side of it that will speak to people who will never see a byte of source code. We may think it's the best part of Linux, perhaps even its very essence, but advertisements should push the pragmatic benefits. I'm inspired by the approach that IBM took in its Linux ad, which should be an example for current efforts. But items #1 and #2 are the most desirable points to typical people, and item #3 makes it feasible to try Linux without doing scary things to your file system.
Also, the advertisements will really be more effective if they point newcomers to a particular distro. Audiences will balk if they decide to try out your product only to find that you're making them do the homework of researching distros first. Ubuntu is the best choice at present, especially considering #3 above.
(And yes, I freely admit I'm talking about what average users want when I myself am a programmer-geek. My guess is as good as anyone's, I suppose.)
No, sorry for being unclear. I was talking about the the one where you view the ASCII Star Wars animation through telnet. It's not an Easter egg in any piece of software, it's just viewing something on the Internet in an unusual way. (Also, I noticed after posting that I called the telnet thing "visiting a website". Technically, it's not; it's an Internet site.) The about: ones are indeed actual Easter eggs.
Like other commenters in this thread, I'm amazed that visiting a website counts even as an "almost" Easter egg. I guess you can sort of make it fit the pattern of a typical Easter egg: if you go into your Web browser—an innocuous, everyday application—and type the "special code" (i.e., some URL) into the address bar, you see funny cartoons. I guess it seems more like an Easter egg to typical Windows users if you use telnet, because it's unfamiliar and un-graphicky. God forbid they ever get a hold of Lynx, the whole damned Internet will count as a funny surprise.
The Emacs ones are almost as lame. Tetris and the psychotherapist aren't Easter eggs; they're documented features. And not the most offbeat ones in Emacs by a long shot. They even appear in the default pull-down menus in the windowed versions! A better, more obscure one for Emacs is M-x hanoi-unix, which is a countdown to the Year 2038 bug expressed as a puzzle.
Did anyone else notice the sets of nested quotation marks in the summary?
Miracle Jones writes "The ever-quotable speculative fiction writer [...] had this to say: 'The arrogance, the pompous dismissive imperial manner of those who "have more important things to worry about,"
Those are scare quotes within a quotation within a quotation. Which I just quoted above. ("Ever-quotable" is right, I guess.) It reminds me of nested parentheses in Lisp, in a good way.
But without windows, how would we know if the sky was blue?
Indeed, the only time I ever see the sky is when I'm using Windows XP.
I personally like Fish eating birds.
I've never seen a fish eat a bird, but it sounds interesting to watch, so I guess I like it too.
I think it might count as a single phoneme in its native Czech? Not sure, IANAL (I am not a linguist).
It's a North America based company, thus it should not allow voting until the film is out in North America.
So you're saying we need to make sure that geographic limitations remain in force even in a medium where they are totally irrelevant? That kind of wastes some of the potential of the ol' information superhighway there, doesn't it?
Also, it has a review that doesn't even review the movie, but instead says the books are great therefore the movie should be too. Does the word 'shills' come to mind?
Actually, the word "fanboys" comes to mind. For any given fictional franchise, there will inevitably be enough people floating around the Internet who care so much about the movie being good that (in their minds) it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Well, it works well for languages that use lots of vowels. I think it works well for English, German, Spanish, Italian, French, Swedish...
So, ironically, not the kind of languages that would start a word with the phoneme "dv".
8. You may not copy, modify, sublicense, link with, or distribute the Library except as expressly provided under this License. Any attempt otherwise to copy, modify, sublicense, link with, or distribute the Library is void, and will automatically terminate your rights under this License. However, parties who have received copies, or rights, from you under this License will not have their licenses terminated so long as such parties remain in full compliance. [emphasis added]
Selling a copy of the software—with an up-front price, like you said—would be one thing, but it appears that they are trying to impose a secondary license agreement (the EULA) on top of the LGPL that contractually binds the user to some payment after the fact. The license, and all other versions of the GPL and LGPL, forbid that outright. In fact, that company may now be forbidden from distributing OpenOffice.org to anyone at all, since they voided the entire license for themselves. (Not a lawyer.)
Nice. More on the Newtonian level, my high school physics teacher said that police don't really issue speeding tickets, since the ticket will list your direction of travel at the time of the infraction. So it's really a velocity ticket.
Actually, he instructed us to correct the police officer on this if we were ever pulled over. He was a funny guy.