I keep hearing that TCPA is NOT the death of Free software. But how can that be?
TCPA is not Palladium. Here's a link to some whitepapers on TCPA (posted to/. yesterday).
Here's how I understand Palladium. It is implemented beginning at the hardware level. The hardware refuses to execute a boot sector that has not been digitally signed. Therefore, only "trusted" boot loaders will work.
TCPA is more like pgp than like ssl, i.e. there are no "root certificates". The chip contains a key, and can store signatures. So, when you install a system, you sign it, and install the signature in the chip. The boot loader only has to be trusted by you.
Palladium is irrelevent because it's not going to be part of Linux (or BSD). If you install MS's OS and give them your trust, you have no one but yourself to blame.
There is no way that Microsoft is going to sign a bootloader like, say, LILO
Signatures from MS are irrelevent. What matters is that the signature stored on the chip matches the boot sector. MS doesn't have to sign it; you do. Of course, this might prevent you from dual-booting Linux and MS, since MS might make their system refuse to install unless you put their signature into the chip, but I have an easy solution to that. I just install Linux, and don't run anything from MS.:)
since the you can't change the kernel without changing the signature on the nub you can't make a kernel that lies.
The fly in the ointment is that they have no way to *check* the signature of the kernel except by asking the kernel, so the kernel just has to lie about its signature too, then it can lie about everything else.
Furthermore, it'll take about a week before someone hacks their media player to simply bypass the entire check-for-trusted-kernel code, and then the whole scheme is down the drain.
Geeze, I may have risen to the bait of a troll, but that hardly makes me a troll.
Let's review: an article is posted pointing to white papers explaining what TCPA is, and detailing how it's clearly useless for DRM. Kevitt responds, "TCPA...DRM...Palladium? What the hell's the difference in the end?" If he'd read the white papers, he'd know the answer to that question, but somehow, he gets modded "insightful". I point out one of the key reasons that TCPA will be all-but-useless for DRM, quoting one of the white papers, and I get modded as a troll. Sheesh!
Let me just say, as a member of the Debian project, I'm sure that Debian will have support for IBM's TCPA-enabled systems before long. Not because we want to prevent you from doing whatever you want with your system, but because we want to allow others to prevent you from doing what you want with their systems.
No, it's just that we can read, apparently unlike you. The system that's being described seems to resemble tripwire combined with a public key system more than anything else.
To quote from the TCPA rebuttal paper: "TCPA was designed to protect the user's data from external atack, not from attack by the owner. Defending against owner attack is a much harder problem in hardware tamper resistance."
They're both things that clueless people like to whine about on/., while people who actually know something about them are perfectly happy with.:)
Interestingly, while it used to be Linux users laboring under the delusion that PDF was a closed format who would whine the loudest, nowadays it seems to be mostly MS users who snivel about PDF files. Of course, having used Acrobat, I can sympathize a little, but only a little. Switch to Linux, or get a copy of pdf2ps and ghostview, and shut up!:)
I refuse to buy a monitor that doesn't have at least a 120 DPI native resolution. That rules out pretty much every CRT.
Hmm, my several-year-old Sony 19" does 1920x1440 just fine. By my back-of-the-envelope calculations, that's around 125 dpi. However, I generally find that to be a bit excessive, and stick to 1792x1344, which gives me nearly 118 dpi (possibly a little more, since the display doesn't quite go all the way to the edges of the screen), and the refresh rate is high enough that there's no noticable flicker.
Anyway, if you don't want your old trinitron any more, I'm sure I can find it a nice home.:)
Is there a clear legal definition somewhere of spamming?
No.
And what about regulation from where it's sent?
What about it?
US law do not apply if I'm from Canada...right?
US law applies if you do business in the US. Of course, Canada may be reluctant to allow US cops to arrest you (assuming this is a matter for arrest) if you never actually enter the US. On the other hand, Canada and the US have a lot of strong trade agreements, so it might not matter.
So I cannot be brought into a US court if I'm spamming from outside US! ?
Depends. If you defraud or otherwise infringe on the rights of a US citizen, the Canadian government might decide to be cooperative and hand you over to the US for prosecution; likewise the other way around if you're a US citizen who has defrauded or spammed a Canadian. It's probably safer to spam US mailboxes from Canada than from somewhere in the US, but it's hardly a get-out-of-jail-free card.
My suggestion is: move to Iraq or North Korea...:)
At least, we don't need new laws. We already have laws that enforce proper behavior--we need to enforce the laws that currently govern "real-world" behavior, on the Internet.
That's been tried -- there was a fairly concerted effort to get the anti-junk-faxes laws to apply to spam. There's a lot of similarity: cost is to the receiver, etc. Unfortunately, the existing law was apparently too specific, and I don't believe this approach has been successful.
This is a two-sided coin -- if the law is too generic, then it may not actually be a good fit when new technology comes along and disrupts the existing paradigm. Contrariwise (as in the case above), if the law is too specific, then it may not apply in a new case where it probably should apply.
Any internet crime has a real-world equivalent
So nothing on the Internet is new? It's all just old things in new clothing? I disagree -- I don't think there's any exact equivalent to rooting a bunch of machines and using them to launch a DDoS. That scenario pretty much requires a set of intelligent, programmable machines networked together (i.e. the Internet).
Seriously, what was the last good internet law that went through Congress?
Yeah, if at first you don't succeed, throw up your hands and give up. That "try, try again" stuff is for idiots!:)
The question was: "Vi or Emacs". The answer is: "yes!"
OTOH, when the question is: "sh or csh", the answer is, "csh and all its derivatives are the spawn of Satan and should be banned from all right-thinking communities.":)
After all, human twins are often physically indistinguishable.
Actually, I'm pretty sure that even identical twins have different fingerprints. This seems like it might be the same sort of thing, but on a more obvious scale.
I have to strongly agree, it's simple, it's reasonably clean, it's popular, it's been around long enough to well supported and accepted. And it runs on just about anything out there. And it's the default widget set for most of the most popular scripting languages: perl, python, ruby, and of course, tcl. Yet somehow it stays apolitical.
Of course, I may be accused of bias, since I'm the new Tcl/Tk maintainer for the Debian project. But in all honesty, I don't even care that much for tcl. It's ok, but nothing to write home about. It's tk I like, and tk that made me willing to adopt these packages.
People argue against legal solutions being used against spam because they simply won't work. Probably half of the spam I receive qualifies as fraud. There are already laws against that, but the spam continues.
And you think a 50% reduction in spam would be a bad thing?
What happens when your email server isn't patched quick enough and you end up with a $2mil fine for the spam that is sent through it?
Why would you get sued? Did you send the spam? No. The person who sent the spam is the one who should be liable. Yes, I agree, it would be stupid to advocate making people liable for running insecure servers, even though it aids the spammers. That's not what I'm advocating. I'm advocating making spamming illegal.
I also take issue with your claim that the technical solution is only being offered by those with a monetary incentive.
Not only those with a monetary incentive. There are also the insane and the clueless.:)
So far I've used nothing but free solutions to save myself from spam and its over 98% effective (no false positives).
First of all, unless you're an ISP, you're not saving yourself from squat, except a tiny amount of inconvenience. The cost of spam goes to the ISPs who have to have bigger servers with more bandwidth and bigger disks to store all the terabytes of spam that comes in daily. And, of course, that cost is passed along to you, the customer.
And as for "free solutions", as the old saying goes, it's only free if you don't value your time. Most ISPs have full-time staff members devoted to fighting spam. Those people earn salaries. Which again, like the cost of bandwidth and storage, gets passed on to you.
We've been trying technical solutions for nearly two decades, and the seas of spam show no sign of abating. No, I don't expect anti-spam regulation will magically make all spam disappear, but I do think it might be the first thing ever to make a noticable dent. Of course, the kooks who think we ought to abolish all government, and magically live together in peace and harmony with flowers and butterflies will still oppose the idea, but don't think life is that simple.
I've reviewed the replies, and I think most of them are crud. I think the real, underlying reason why so many people argue so strongly against legal solutions here and in other technical forums is that technical solutions involve giving money to technical people, while legal solutions don't. There's a lot of people who are making money fighting spam, and if spam problem actually started to abate, then sales of anti-spam software and, more importantly, sales of anti-spam expertise would drop severely.
Unfortunately, that is not a solution. It would take the slimy spammer worms one microsecond to evolve.
The "evolution" you describe would be useless to a US-based company (or even a company that does business in the US) if it were illegal to spam in the US. Companies that do business in the US are subject to US law (as Elcomsoft was recently forced to remember).
The best source of headlines is the Apple archives. They've been dying since 1984, longer than anybody.
Actually, Unix in general has been dying since the mid-seventies. I think it might even have been pronounced DOA. Between DEC with VMS and IBM with their "minis", Unix never had a chance, poor thing. *sniff*
Actually, the people who use openview probably don't dress any better than you (unless you're naked, in which case, there's probably a few that can match you). It's usually used in the Network Operations center, and if the guys in ops wear better clothes than your average admin or code monkey, it's news to me.
The guys who buy openview probably dress better, but then the same can be said for most of the guys who buy anything for enterprise, including the hardware to run Linux.
No, "enterprise" doesn't mean "business", "Enterprise" means "big". It's basically (in this context) a category of business software which is distinct from SOHO (small office/home office) software. (At least, it's distinct in theory -- in practice, there's a lot of overlap, and a lot of business software that doesn't fit neatly into either category.)
Does anyone ever ask what enterprise you work for?
Does anyone ever ask what small office/home office you work for? No, the question doesn't make sense. It makes an unwarranted assumption about the size of the organization you work for (among other problems). Doesn't mean you don't work for a place that uses enterprise software (or SOHO software).
"in its present form" says to me "in its present form", i.e. with their trademarks and logos on it. I would assume that another form (one without their trademarks and logos) would be fine.
That pretty much says "pull the site down" to most laymen.
Speaking as a layman, I'd have to disagree. Maybe I'm just not paranoid enough....:)
Uh huh. This guy was breaking the law, using their trademarks without permission -- and not just their trademarks, but their logos, which is where he started to lose my sympathy. You don't use other people's images without permission, that's just not cool. I don't care if it's a trademark or official logo or not, that's just not cool.
So what do they do? They send him a letter. Oh no, those bastards! What's next, Faxing with Malice Aforethought? Grievous Bodily Phone Calling? What evil, vicious brutes! Yeah, a letter is pretty much equivalent to a nuclear cannon shell. Sheesh! Get a grip, man.
Ok, fine, so they could have been a little more polite (though frankly, I thought it was pretty polite for a C&D letter). But how did this become a major issue? It was a freakin' letter, for gods sake. If this whole situation can't be described as a tempest in a teapot, then I don't know what can.
Trademarks must be defended [...] copyrights are always in effect
True and true. The post you were responding to was incorrect in saying that copyrights must be defended or you lose them. However, this particular case was a trademark case (the web site was reportedly using trademarked terms and logos without permission), so the PCI-SIG did indeed need to defend their trademark or risk losing it. Perhaps they were needlessly heavy-handed, but they clearly had to do something.
Uh, keep in mind, this is/., and the quote you're whining about comes from one of the/. editors, which means it has just about zero credibility.
If you'd actually read the article, you'd see that this is all in reference to some old compatibility libraries that aren't included with your typical Linux distro. It goes on to say, "SCO is exploring the options of getting intellectual property payments from companies that use SCO licensed libraries [...] without paying for them," and goes on to say, "[c]ompanies like IBM have been, and are continuing to pay, SCO for the use of these and other licenses." (Emhasis mine.)
As a lot of us expected, this whole thing really does seem to be a tempest in a teapot.
I used to "dabble" in mainstream fiction, and found that most of it was crap. And what do we learn from this? Sturgeon was right.
Actually, I would argue that today, the meta-category of "speculative fiction" has, overall, a higher percentage of good stuff because it simply give the author more scope. All of time and space, all the lands of the imagination, up to and including the real world here-and-now. How can someone who is truly creative and inventive resist this wider scope? I think this is a fairly minor factor, and is partially offset by the stigma of being a "genre author", but I nevertheless think it's a factor.
avoid the topsellers lists, its filled with pedestrian crap
Here I strongly disagree. Sure, 90% of the bestsellers are crap, but remember Sturgeon's law. Throughout history, most of the great writers have been popular writers, at least as far back as Shakespeare. If you're not writing to entertain, then why the hell are you writing? I'd much rather have a novel written by someone who has worked for years to learn how to write an entertaining, popular novel, than by someone who has spent years trying to prove to the world how much smarter he is than the average joe.
The first step to enlightenment is to be a book snob.
Yeah, I tried that back when I was a young student, a couple of decades ago. Now, looking back, I realize what a pretentious young idiot I was. Back then, I thought James Joyce was the height to which literature could and should aspire. Now I realize that it's simply an interesting side-branch of literature. Worth investigating, but no better in any absolute sense than the best of the popular best-selling authors.
As for learning something, I think that in general, you'll do better to read some non-fiction. I read fiction for entertainment, and thus, I expect it to be entertaining. If it isn't, it's probably just a waste of my time.
Why "ask slashdot"? Wouldn't it make more sense to check out some SF related web sites for information and suggestions about SF?
Now I have an unfair advantage in that I live near not one, but two, high quality stores specializing in SF (Other Change of Hobbit and Dark Carnival, both in Berkeley CA), and I get a lot of recommendations by going in there and looking at their recommended shelves, or asking people who work there what's new and good.
If you aren't lucky enough to have a good SF bookstore nearby, then you might want to try some SF websites. This year's Hugo voting included the category of web site (a "one-shot" category that I hope will become permanent in future).Locus Online, the Hugo winner, and SF Site, which came in third, are my two favorites. Both are full of book reviews (and author interviews, and links to other interesting sites. (The second place Hugo vote went to the SciFi Channel's website, which is more oriented towards TV and movies than written SF, but still might be worth a look).
And speaking of awards, the various SF & Fantasy awards are a great place to look for recommendations. Check out the nominee list, not just the winners (it really is an honor just to be nominated), and don't forget to check out other works by the same authors. If you don't like short stories, you should still check out the winners (and nominees) in the short-story categories; they may have written some good novels too. Locus Online (link above) has extensive listings of the major SF awards.
That said, here's a few authors who have been high on my must-read list recently: Lois McMaster Bujold, David Brin, Orson Scott Card, C. J. Cherryh, Greg Egan, Tom Holt, Guy Gavriel Kay, Nancy Kress, Jane Lindskold[1], Ken McLeod[2], Wil McCarthy (yes, one 'l'), Jack McDevitt, Patricia A. McKillip, Robert Rankin, Allen Steele, Neal Stephenson, and Connie Willis. I probably included a few that qualify as "old school", there, and left out a few thinking they were "old school" that you may never have heard of, but such is life.
HTH
[1] Lindskold is an associate of, and collaborated with Zelazny, and is well worth checking out if you like Zelazny, IMO.
[2] MacLeod is the only SF writer I know of who has mentioned Linux in his SF. Others, most notably Stephenson, have mentioned it in non-fiction writings, but only MacLeod so far has embedded it in his fictional future.
Spammers can't use probability based filters to test their spams, because the filters are personal.
Technically, yes, the filters are personal. In practice, however, most of them are going to be trained on the same sets of data, and will evolve fairly similar sets of rules.
Slashdot Mirror
But it is optional. Just disable the security (hardware manufacturers have promised that you CAN disable it), and then run an unsigned kernel.
Or sign your own kernel when you install it. This already works, rampant paranoia aside. The Linux drivers are already available from IBM.
I keep hearing that TCPA is NOT the death of Free software. But how can that be?
/. yesterday).
:)
TCPA is not Palladium. Here's a link to some whitepapers on TCPA (posted to
Here's how I understand Palladium. It is implemented beginning at the hardware level. The hardware refuses to execute a boot sector that has not been digitally signed. Therefore, only "trusted" boot loaders will work.
TCPA is more like pgp than like ssl, i.e. there are no "root certificates". The chip contains a key, and can store signatures. So, when you install a system, you sign it, and install the signature in the chip. The boot loader only has to be trusted by you.
Palladium is irrelevent because it's not going to be part of Linux (or BSD). If you install MS's OS and give them your trust, you have no one but yourself to blame.
There is no way that Microsoft is going to sign a bootloader like, say, LILO
Signatures from MS are irrelevent. What matters is that the signature stored on the chip matches the boot sector. MS doesn't have to sign it; you do. Of course, this might prevent you from dual-booting Linux and MS, since MS might make their system refuse to install unless you put their signature into the chip, but I have an easy solution to that. I just install Linux, and don't run anything from MS.
since the you can't change the kernel without changing the signature on the nub you can't make a kernel that lies.
The fly in the ointment is that they have no way to *check* the signature of the kernel except by asking the kernel, so the kernel just has to lie about its signature too, then it can lie about everything else.
Furthermore, it'll take about a week before someone hacks their media player to simply bypass the entire check-for-trusted-kernel code, and then the whole scheme is down the drain.
Geeze, I may have risen to the bait of a troll, but that hardly makes me a troll.
Let's review: an article is posted pointing to white papers explaining what TCPA is, and detailing how it's clearly useless for DRM. Kevitt responds, "TCPA...DRM...Palladium? What the hell's the difference in the end?" If he'd read the white papers, he'd know the answer to that question, but somehow, he gets modded "insightful". I point out one of the key reasons that TCPA will be all-but-useless for DRM, quoting one of the white papers, and I get modded as a troll. Sheesh!
Let me just say, as a member of the Debian project, I'm sure that Debian will have support for IBM's TCPA-enabled systems before long. Not because we want to prevent you from doing whatever you want with your system, but because we want to allow others to prevent you from doing what you want with their systems.
Have all of you gone insane?
No, it's just that we can read, apparently unlike you. The system that's being described seems to resemble tripwire combined with a public key system more than anything else.
To quote from the TCPA rebuttal paper: "TCPA was designed to protect the user's data from external atack, not from attack by the owner. Defending against owner attack is a much harder problem in hardware tamper resistance."
They're both things that clueless people like to whine about on /., while people who actually know something about them are perfectly happy with. :)
:)
Interestingly, while it used to be Linux users laboring under the delusion that PDF was a closed format who would whine the loudest, nowadays it seems to be mostly MS users who snivel about PDF files. Of course, having used Acrobat, I can sympathize a little, but only a little. Switch to Linux, or get a copy of pdf2ps and ghostview, and shut up!
I refuse to buy a monitor that doesn't have at least a 120 DPI native resolution. That rules out pretty much every CRT.
:)
Hmm, my several-year-old Sony 19" does 1920x1440 just fine. By my back-of-the-envelope calculations, that's around 125 dpi. However, I generally find that to be a bit excessive, and stick to 1792x1344, which gives me nearly 118 dpi (possibly a little more, since the display doesn't quite go all the way to the edges of the screen), and the refresh rate is high enough that there's no noticable flicker.
Anyway, if you don't want your old trinitron any more, I'm sure I can find it a nice home.
Is there a clear legal definition somewhere of spamming?
:)
No.
And what about regulation from where it's sent?
What about it?
US law do not apply if I'm from Canada...right?
US law applies if you do business in the US. Of course, Canada may be reluctant to allow US cops to arrest you (assuming this is a matter for arrest) if you never actually enter the US. On the other hand, Canada and the US have a lot of strong trade agreements, so it might not matter.
So I cannot be brought into a US court if I'm spamming from outside US! ?
Depends. If you defraud or otherwise infringe on the rights of a US citizen, the Canadian government might decide to be cooperative and hand you over to the US for prosecution; likewise the other way around if you're a US citizen who has defrauded or spammed a Canadian. It's probably safer to spam US mailboxes from Canada than from somewhere in the US, but it's hardly a get-out-of-jail-free card.
My suggestion is: move to Iraq or North Korea...
At least, we don't need new laws. We already have laws that enforce proper behavior--we need to enforce the laws that currently govern "real-world" behavior, on the Internet.
:)
That's been tried -- there was a fairly concerted effort to get the anti-junk-faxes laws to apply to spam. There's a lot of similarity: cost is to the receiver, etc. Unfortunately, the existing law was apparently too specific, and I don't believe this approach has been successful.
This is a two-sided coin -- if the law is too generic, then it may not actually be a good fit when new technology comes along and disrupts the existing paradigm. Contrariwise (as in the case above), if the law is too specific, then it may not apply in a new case where it probably should apply.
Any internet crime has a real-world equivalent
So nothing on the Internet is new? It's all just old things in new clothing? I disagree -- I don't think there's any exact equivalent to rooting a bunch of machines and using them to launch a DDoS. That scenario pretty much requires a set of intelligent, programmable machines networked together (i.e. the Internet).
Seriously, what was the last good internet law that went through Congress?
Yeah, if at first you don't succeed, throw up your hands and give up. That "try, try again" stuff is for idiots!
The question was: "Vi or Emacs". The answer is: "yes!"
:)
OTOH, when the question is: "sh or csh", the answer is, "csh and all its derivatives are the spawn of Satan and should be banned from all right-thinking communities."
After all, human twins are often physically indistinguishable.
Actually, I'm pretty sure that even identical twins have different fingerprints. This seems like it might be the same sort of thing, but on a more obvious scale.
I have to strongly agree, it's simple, it's reasonably clean, it's popular, it's been around long enough to well supported and accepted. And it runs on just about anything out there. And it's the default widget set for most of the most popular scripting languages: perl, python, ruby, and of course, tcl. Yet somehow it stays apolitical.
Of course, I may be accused of bias, since I'm the new Tcl/Tk maintainer for the Debian project. But in all honesty, I don't even care that much for tcl. It's ok, but nothing to write home about. It's tk I like, and tk that made me willing to adopt these packages.
People argue against legal solutions being used against spam because they simply won't work. Probably half of the spam I receive qualifies as fraud. There are already laws against that, but the spam continues.
:)
And you think a 50% reduction in spam would be a bad thing?
What happens when your email server isn't patched quick enough and you end up with a $2mil fine for the spam that is sent through it?
Why would you get sued? Did you send the spam? No. The person who sent the spam is the one who should be liable. Yes, I agree, it would be stupid to advocate making people liable for running insecure servers, even though it aids the spammers. That's not what I'm advocating. I'm advocating making spamming illegal.
I also take issue with your claim that the technical solution is only being offered by those with a monetary incentive.
Not only those with a monetary incentive. There are also the insane and the clueless.
So far I've used nothing but free solutions to save myself from spam and its over 98% effective (no false positives).
First of all, unless you're an ISP, you're not saving yourself from squat, except a tiny amount of inconvenience. The cost of spam goes to the ISPs who have to have bigger servers with more bandwidth and bigger disks to store all the terabytes of spam that comes in daily. And, of course, that cost is passed along to you, the customer.
And as for "free solutions", as the old saying goes, it's only free if you don't value your time. Most ISPs have full-time staff members devoted to fighting spam. Those people earn salaries. Which again, like the cost of bandwidth and storage, gets passed on to you.
We've been trying technical solutions for nearly two decades, and the seas of spam show no sign of abating. No, I don't expect anti-spam regulation will magically make all spam disappear, but I do think it might be the first thing ever to make a noticable dent. Of course, the kooks who think we ought to abolish all government, and magically live together in peace and harmony with flowers and butterflies will still oppose the idea, but don't think life is that simple.
I've reviewed the replies, and I think most of them are crud. I think the real, underlying reason why so many people argue so strongly against legal solutions here and in other technical forums is that technical solutions involve giving money to technical people, while legal solutions don't. There's a lot of people who are making money fighting spam, and if spam problem actually started to abate, then sales of anti-spam software and, more importantly, sales of anti-spam expertise would drop severely.
Unfortunately, that is not a solution. It would take the slimy spammer worms one microsecond to evolve.
The "evolution" you describe would be useless to a US-based company (or even a company that does business in the US) if it were illegal to spam in the US. Companies that do business in the US are subject to US law (as Elcomsoft was recently forced to remember).
The best source of headlines is the Apple archives. They've been dying since 1984, longer than anybody.
Actually, Unix in general has been dying since the mid-seventies. I think it might even have been pronounced DOA. Between DEC with VMS and IBM with their "minis", Unix never had a chance, poor thing. *sniff*
Actually, the people who use openview probably don't dress any better than you (unless you're naked, in which case, there's probably a few that can match you). It's usually used in the Network Operations center, and if the guys in ops wear better clothes than your average admin or code monkey, it's news to me.
The guys who buy openview probably dress better, but then the same can be said for most of the guys who buy anything for enterprise, including the hardware to run Linux.
No, "enterprise" doesn't mean "business", "Enterprise" means "big". It's basically (in this context) a category of business software which is distinct from SOHO (small office/home office) software. (At least, it's distinct in theory -- in practice, there's a lot of overlap, and a lot of business software that doesn't fit neatly into either category.)
Does anyone ever ask what enterprise you work for?
Does anyone ever ask what small office/home office you work for? No, the question doesn't make sense. It makes an unwarranted assumption about the size of the organization you work for (among other problems). Doesn't mean you don't work for a place that uses enterprise software (or SOHO software).
"in its present form" says to me "in its present form", i.e. with their trademarks and logos on it. I would assume that another form (one without their trademarks and logos) would be fine.
:)
That pretty much says "pull the site down" to most laymen.
Speaking as a layman, I'd have to disagree. Maybe I'm just not paranoid enough....
Uh huh. This guy was breaking the law, using their trademarks without permission -- and not just their trademarks, but their logos, which is where he started to lose my sympathy. You don't use other people's images without permission, that's just not cool. I don't care if it's a trademark or official logo or not, that's just not cool.
So what do they do? They send him a letter. Oh no, those bastards! What's next, Faxing with Malice Aforethought? Grievous Bodily Phone Calling? What evil, vicious brutes! Yeah, a letter is pretty much equivalent to a nuclear cannon shell. Sheesh! Get a grip, man.
Ok, fine, so they could have been a little more polite (though frankly, I thought it was pretty polite for a C&D letter). But how did this become a major issue? It was a freakin' letter, for gods sake. If this whole situation can't be described as a tempest in a teapot, then I don't know what can.
Trademarks must be defended [...] copyrights are always in effect
True and true. The post you were responding to was incorrect in saying that copyrights must be defended or you lose them. However, this particular case was a trademark case (the web site was reportedly using trademarked terms and logos without permission), so the PCI-SIG did indeed need to defend their trademark or risk losing it. Perhaps they were needlessly heavy-handed, but they clearly had to do something.
Uh, keep in mind, this is /., and the quote you're whining about comes from one of the /. editors, which means it has just about zero credibility.
If you'd actually read the article, you'd see that this is all in reference to some old compatibility libraries that aren't included with your typical Linux distro. It goes on to say, "SCO is exploring the options of getting intellectual property payments from companies that use SCO licensed libraries [...] without paying for them," and goes on to say, "[c]ompanies like IBM have been, and are continuing to pay, SCO for the use of these and other licenses." (Emhasis mine.)
As a lot of us expected, this whole thing really does seem to be a tempest in a teapot.
J. Random Passerby: "Gee, Mr. Sturgeon, you write scifi? I've read some of this scifi stuff, and honestly, most of it is crud!"
Ted Sturgeon: "Indeed, about 90% of all science fiction is crud, but then 90% of everything, roughly speaking, is crud."
And thus was born Sturgeon's Law.
I used to dabble in scifi
I used to "dabble" in mainstream fiction, and found that most of it was crap. And what do we learn from this? Sturgeon was right.
Actually, I would argue that today, the meta-category of "speculative fiction" has, overall, a higher percentage of good stuff because it simply give the author more scope. All of time and space, all the lands of the imagination, up to and including the real world here-and-now. How can someone who is truly creative and inventive resist this wider scope? I think this is a fairly minor factor, and is partially offset by the stigma of being a "genre author", but I nevertheless think it's a factor.
avoid the topsellers lists, its filled with pedestrian crap
Here I strongly disagree. Sure, 90% of the bestsellers are crap, but remember Sturgeon's law. Throughout history, most of the great writers have been popular writers, at least as far back as Shakespeare. If you're not writing to entertain, then why the hell are you writing? I'd much rather have a novel written by someone who has worked for years to learn how to write an entertaining, popular novel, than by someone who has spent years trying to prove to the world how much smarter he is than the average joe.
The first step to enlightenment is to be a book snob.
Yeah, I tried that back when I was a young student, a couple of decades ago. Now, looking back, I realize what a pretentious young idiot I was. Back then, I thought James Joyce was the height to which literature could and should aspire. Now I realize that it's simply an interesting side-branch of literature. Worth investigating, but no better in any absolute sense than the best of the popular best-selling authors.
As for learning something, I think that in general, you'll do better to read some non-fiction. I read fiction for entertainment, and thus, I expect it to be entertaining. If it isn't, it's probably just a waste of my time.
Why "ask slashdot"? Wouldn't it make more sense to check out some SF related web sites for information and suggestions about SF?
Now I have an unfair advantage in that I live near not one, but two, high quality stores specializing in SF (Other Change of Hobbit and Dark Carnival, both in Berkeley CA), and I get a lot of recommendations by going in there and looking at their recommended shelves, or asking people who work there what's new and good.
If you aren't lucky enough to have a good SF bookstore nearby, then you might want to try some SF websites. This year's Hugo voting included the category of web site (a "one-shot" category that I hope will become permanent in future).Locus Online, the Hugo winner, and SF Site, which came in third, are my two favorites. Both are full of book reviews (and author interviews, and links to other interesting sites. (The second place Hugo vote went to the SciFi Channel's website, which is more oriented towards TV and movies than written SF, but still might be worth a look).
And speaking of awards, the various SF & Fantasy awards are a great place to look for recommendations. Check out the nominee list, not just the winners (it really is an honor just to be nominated), and don't forget to check out other works by the same authors. If you don't like short stories, you should still check out the winners (and nominees) in the short-story categories; they may have written some good novels too. Locus Online (link above) has extensive listings of the major SF awards.
That said, here's a few authors who have been high on my must-read list recently: Lois McMaster Bujold, David Brin, Orson Scott Card, C. J. Cherryh, Greg Egan, Tom Holt, Guy Gavriel Kay, Nancy Kress, Jane Lindskold[1], Ken McLeod[2], Wil McCarthy (yes, one 'l'), Jack McDevitt, Patricia A. McKillip, Robert Rankin, Allen Steele, Neal Stephenson, and Connie Willis. I probably included a few that qualify as "old school", there, and left out a few thinking they were "old school" that you may never have heard of, but such is life.
HTH
[1] Lindskold is an associate of, and collaborated with Zelazny, and is well worth checking out if you like Zelazny, IMO.
[2] MacLeod is the only SF writer I know of who has mentioned Linux in his SF. Others, most notably Stephenson, have mentioned it in non-fiction writings, but only MacLeod so far has embedded it in his fictional future.
Spammers can't use probability based filters to test their spams, because the filters are personal.
Technically, yes, the filters are personal. In practice, however, most of them are going to be trained on the same sets of data, and will evolve fairly similar sets of rules.