I can think of two simple ways. One is having no conscience. There are people who make a living as professional hitmen, con artists, and the like. In the past, there were people who happily served as deathcamp guards. Telemarketing is small potatoes in comparison. The other approach is to genuinely believe that it's OK to do anything so long as it's legal and the goal is to make money. They can even rationalize that the people who receive the calls can simply hang up (or use some kind of blocked ID guard) if they don't want the sales. After all, what's good for them should be fine for you, right?
It's almost a pity Dave Barry is a humor columnist in a way.
I don't know. It's quite possible that he has a higher readership than more traditional news types, so his being a humor columnist actually helps to get his knowledge to a wider audience.
Well, first they aren't claiming 3B in lost sales. They are claiming 1B in damages, which in federal court automaticaly gets trippled to 3B.
Incorrect. The $3 billion is not from $1 billion subject to triple damages. They want $1 billion for violation of IBM's Software licensing agreement, $1 billion for violation of Sequent's Software licensing agreement, and $1 billion for illegal competetion. Of course they also want punitive damages, extra for IBM's profits from sale of AIX, tortious interference, and a variety of other causes. Where on earth they get the idea that they've lost anything close to $1 billion in business to Linux is anyone's guess. I think they must have chosen that number because it sounds good, not because it has any relationship to reality.
I'd think that one obvious place to look would be Slashdot's sister site, ThinkGeek. It has all of the latest and presumably greatest technobaubles that any geek could possibly want. Of course after getting ideas there you might want to shop around to see if you can get a better price, since I think that they're a bit on the high side pricewise.
SGI claims 200, SCO claims hundreds of thousands! Who do I believe?
The big issue here is that their code count is subtly but substantially different. SCO is claiming that they've found about 200 lines of code that are direct copies of something from SysV. There may be a bit more than that in there somewhere, but it's unlikely to be a really huge numbers.
SCO is claiming that there are hundreds of thousands of lines that are covered by their intellectual property claims. This is under the theory that their SysV licensing agreements require all modifications to the code to be treated as confidential, just as the original code was. By that claim SCO is saying that any code that was added on to their ancient SysV stuff is protected and can't be released. But that's not the case. The side letters that AT&T made state clearly that new code written by SysV licensees that interacts with the SysV core (like a new file system such as XFS) still belongs to its authors and that they can do with it as they see fit. Since SCO's "all your code are belong to us" legal theory is bogus, so are their claims of hundreds of thousands of lines being illegitimately copied into Linux.
As a result, SCO would be unlikely to get anything more than actual damages, which would be small. And, if the infringing code was removed before SCO obtained its copyright registration (which you'll recall was quite late in the game), they probably wouldn't even get that.
That's not right. Any copyright holder is always entitled to actual damages in a copyright suit, whether the copyright is registered or not. You're correct that in this case the actual damages would likely be quite small, since the amount of possibly infringing material is a tiny portion of the whole, may be available under other licenses anyway, and was easily replaced as it duplicated other functions already in the kernel.
Registration allows the copyright holder to sue for statutory damages, which are a fixed amount per infringement and can add up very quickly. This, incidentally, looks like the reason that IBM didn't include the copyright infringement charge in their initial counterclaim to SCO. They hadn't bothered to register their copyrights for the code they had contributed to the Linux kernel, so they were only entitled to actual damages. Between the inital counterclaim and the ammended counterclaim, though, they did register their copyright, so in the ammended claim they're allowed to ask for statutory damages.
Sure, you'd be free to sue. Unfortunately for you, if SCO loses its suit with IBM, there's not likely to be much left of the company. All you'll get for your trouble is the right to collect pennies on the dollar from the smoking crater that used to be SCO.
What boggles my mind is why telemarketers think their job is going to be harder with a list of people who don't want to receive calls from them.
It's more logical than you think. One very important subset of the people who don't want the calls are those who don't want them because they work. I don't understand their psychology very well, but there are apparently some people who simply find it very difficult to say no to telemarketers, and those people often find themselves spending a lot of money on things they don't need as a result. OTOH, many of them apparently have no problem with going to a web site to register not to be called in the first place- they only have a problem saying no to a person. If you prevent telemarketers from calling those people, which the DNC should do, then telemarketing will be much less profitable. Of course the telemarketers don't want to stand up and say, "You have to let us call the poor suckers who don't really want to buy from us but can be talked into doing so anyway," so they phrase everything in free speech terms, but that's what the real issue is.
The reason that some telemarketers don't want to abide by the list is that people aren't as rational as you'd think. There are some people who simply have a very hard time saying no to telemarketers when they call, even though they know perfectly well that they don't need what the marketers are selling. Those people are the ones who will benefit the most by not being called, since for them it's not just a matter of being disturbed but also of spending lots of money on unnecessary stuff. It's precisely those people who the telemarketers most want to reach, so the temptation to ignore the list is very strong.
That's not at all true. For a long time the FSF got most of its money by selling tapes of GNU code. They continue to sell copies of GNU software on their website, so RMS would be pretty hypocritical to criticize others for selling free software. (Hypocricy has never struck me as being one of RMS's failings; he's unusually true to his principles.) There's a page about selling free software on the FSF web site, and it should clear up confusion on this matter. The FSF positively encourages anyone who's distributing Free Software to charge as much for it as they think they can get away with. A particularly salient quote from that page (emphasis is theirs):
So if you are redistributing copies of free software, you might as well charge a substantial fee and
make some money. Redistributing free software is a good and legitimate activity; if you do it, you might as well make a profit from it.
That sure doesn't sound like an objection to selling software to me!
No, they don't. But IBM does. There's a great quote from IBM later in the article:
"The typical approach to indemnity, and apparently HP's approach as outlined in the press, we believe runs fundamentally counter to the Linux value proposition," Samson wrote. Because HP's indemnification is rendered void as soon as customers make modifications to the source code, "it will inhibit customers from taking full advantage of the open source development process," he wrote.
That's a quote from somebody who genuinely understands the power of Free/Open Source software.
It's pretty clear that IBM's lawyers get the legal aspects of the GPL, too. I remember hearing a story about IBM when they were first considering going into Free/Open Source software. IBM, being IBM, didn't want to get involved without understanding the legal issues, so they asked their lawyers to look over the GPL. The lawyers came back with the opinion that it was a well written legal document. Their business background meant that they didn't understand why anyone would want to release their code under the GPL, but they agreed that it actually would achieve its goal of keeping the source open. IBM never would have used GPLed software if they weren't quite confident that the license was sound.
Nope. Not when "www.icanwatch.org" shows up in SiteFinder, but rather when "www.icann.org" does. Or when it starts directing to a fake site that praises the design of SiteFinder and proclaims it a novel and appropriate user friendly technology. Verisign could do it, if they really wanted to. They'd be burning their bridges in the process, but it's certainly technically feasible.
As to your call for us to suspend the service, I would respectfully suggest that it would be premature to decide on any course of action until we first have had an opportunity to collect and review the available data.
That's an interesting thing for them to say, especially because earlier in the letter they said:
All indications are that users, important members of the internet community we all serve, are benefiting from the improved web navigation offered by Site Finder.
So which is it? Have they not yet had a chance to gather any data, or have they gathered the data and found that it's beneficial to users? Or, as seems most likely, are they just saying anything that they think will get ICANN off their backs for long enough for them to sell a bunch of registrations?
Re:Looking forward... mostly
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The Sumerian myth stuff probably came straight from Julian Jaynes' The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind which was pretty much where he got the Snow Crash's take on NLP.
This seems to be quite likely, since Stephenson made extensive reference to TOoCitBotBM in The Big U. If an author goes to a particular source in one book, it seems very likely that he'd go back in another.
How can someone own the idea of classifying books by subject hierarchically?
They don't, and they're not claiming to. They do, however, have the rights to a specific system of categorizing books, one that they've put a lot of time and effort into applying. If the hotel wanted to develop their own, new scheme for classifying books they wouldn't have to pay a red cent, though they'd probably find that it wound up costing them a lot more than paying the proper licensing fees. Every time a new book comes out, somebody has to decide exactly where in the system it goes. Multiply that effort by the millions of books that have been published and you have a lot of time and effort that's been devoted to developing the system. It's not right for somebody to come along and use that system, together with the name and goodwill that the developers have generated, without compensating those developers for their effort.
And consequently the most biased and unlikely to give you a reasonably balanced view of the events. This is the underlying problem with sites like Indymedia; they lean so far to one side that they make the conventional, corporate media look completely objective and unbiased in comparison.
The internet may make it easier and cheaper to publish the news, but it doesn't make it any easier and cheaper to go out there and find the news. You still need reporters out there where the news is happening. If you try to get away with using casual amateurs as your reporters, you'll be stuck with the kind of news you'd expect casual amateurs to collect.
It actually is pretty hard to make an implosion-type bomb work. They didn't work out the designs using slide rules, but actually cobbled together what was a hell of a lot of computing power for the day. I don't remember if they actually built any general-purpose electronic computers, but at least some of the work was done by large teams of workers using single purpose calculating machines. One machine would could add, another multiply, etc. and the system was "programmed" by coming up with a specific order in which IBM cards containing the information being processed were run through the system. Richard Feynman discussed a lot about this system in "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!". Admittedly the average mobile phone these days probably had enough processing power to do those calculations, but the Nobel Prize winning minds in charge of the project had a lot more to do with its success than the raw processing power.
FWIW, you can learn far more than you ever wanted to know about nuclear weapons by reading the Nuclear Weapons Archive. When you understand everything in there, you can start thinking about building bombs.
No, I want the copyright laws changed back to the way they were before the 100 year lifetimes and worst of all, corporations being able to own the copyright to a creative work.
I've heard this comment before, but there's an inherent problem with it: who owns the copyright of a work that's the product of a large number of artists combining their efforts? If John, Paul, George, and Ringo collaborate to write a song, you can't fairly assign copyright to just one of them, so it must be assigned to them as a group. But that group may very well be a corporation. You're stuck either denying them the right to copyright things that they worked on as a group (obviously unfair), forcing them to assign copyright to just one of the four (also obviously unfair), or let them copyright it as a corporation.
Even if you somehow prevent corporations from owning the copyright per se, you're never going to be able to prevent corporations from being able to have exclusive rights to the copyrighted material, which is just as good from their standpoint. Or are you going to suggest that artists shouldn't be allowed to sell exclusive rights to their works to corporations? If so, you'll have a hell of a time getting anything published, since almost all of the major publishers, record companies, movie studios, etc. are corporations.
The problem is that producing TV, radio, and newspapers is very expensive. Doing a good job of reporting the news (which is presumably the area of greatest concern) means having hundreds or even thousands of reporters throughout the world together with all of their support staff like cameramen, editors, etc. That costs serious money, and means that it won't be easy for a newcomer to break into the business. This also means that the news will naturally wind up in the hands of large corporations, since they're the only ones with the resources to do the job. That means that there's going to be an inherent pro-corporation bias in the news that will be very difficult to eradicate.
You're interfering with people's livelihoods here.
Too bad. Making money is not a blanket excuse for doing things that would be otherwise unacceptable. Telemarketers' desire to earn a living does not trump ordinary people's expressed desire not to be called. It doesn't matter whether that expression has the force of law behind it (as the do not call list would have it) or not (as the telemarketers would have it). It's still wrong either way, and the telemarketers will get none of my sympathy.
It's not an either/or question, you know. Blocking the message from getting to its intended recipient is completely unrelated to sending a message back to the alleged sender. It's perfectly possible to block the message without informing the (alleged) sender. It's even desirable in the case of email worms like SOBIG that are known to forge the From: header, since in that case you're pretty much guaranteed not to be sending the message to the right person. A well writting program would take this kind of thing into account.
Slashdot Mirror
I can think of two simple ways. One is having no conscience. There are people who make a living as professional hitmen, con artists, and the like. In the past, there were people who happily served as deathcamp guards. Telemarketing is small potatoes in comparison. The other approach is to genuinely believe that it's OK to do anything so long as it's legal and the goal is to make money. They can even rationalize that the people who receive the calls can simply hang up (or use some kind of blocked ID guard) if they don't want the sales. After all, what's good for them should be fine for you, right?
I don't know. It's quite possible that he has a higher readership than more traditional news types, so his being a humor columnist actually helps to get his knowledge to a wider audience.
Incorrect. The $3 billion is not from $1 billion subject to triple damages. They want $1 billion for violation of IBM's Software licensing agreement, $1 billion for violation of Sequent's Software licensing agreement, and $1 billion for illegal competetion. Of course they also want punitive damages, extra for IBM's profits from sale of AIX, tortious interference, and a variety of other causes. Where on earth they get the idea that they've lost anything close to $1 billion in business to Linux is anyone's guess. I think they must have chosen that number because it sounds good, not because it has any relationship to reality.
I'd think that one obvious place to look would be Slashdot's sister site, ThinkGeek. It has all of the latest and presumably greatest technobaubles that any geek could possibly want. Of course after getting ideas there you might want to shop around to see if you can get a better price, since I think that they're a bit on the high side pricewise.
The big issue here is that their code count is subtly but substantially different. SCO is claiming that they've found about 200 lines of code that are direct copies of something from SysV. There may be a bit more than that in there somewhere, but it's unlikely to be a really huge numbers.
SCO is claiming that there are hundreds of thousands of lines that are covered by their intellectual property claims. This is under the theory that their SysV licensing agreements require all modifications to the code to be treated as confidential, just as the original code was. By that claim SCO is saying that any code that was added on to their ancient SysV stuff is protected and can't be released. But that's not the case. The side letters that AT&T made state clearly that new code written by SysV licensees that interacts with the SysV core (like a new file system such as XFS) still belongs to its authors and that they can do with it as they see fit. Since SCO's "all your code are belong to us" legal theory is bogus, so are their claims of hundreds of thousands of lines being illegitimately copied into Linux.
That's not right. Any copyright holder is always entitled to actual damages in a copyright suit, whether the copyright is registered or not. You're correct that in this case the actual damages would likely be quite small, since the amount of possibly infringing material is a tiny portion of the whole, may be available under other licenses anyway, and was easily replaced as it duplicated other functions already in the kernel.
Registration allows the copyright holder to sue for statutory damages, which are a fixed amount per infringement and can add up very quickly. This, incidentally, looks like the reason that IBM didn't include the copyright infringement charge in their initial counterclaim to SCO. They hadn't bothered to register their copyrights for the code they had contributed to the Linux kernel, so they were only entitled to actual damages. Between the inital counterclaim and the ammended counterclaim, though, they did register their copyright, so in the ammended claim they're allowed to ask for statutory damages.
Sure, you'd be free to sue. Unfortunately for you, if SCO loses its suit with IBM, there's not likely to be much left of the company. All you'll get for your trouble is the right to collect pennies on the dollar from the smoking crater that used to be SCO.
No. It might be able to make her performance naked and petrified, though, or pour a bowl of hot grits down her pants.
It's more logical than you think. One very important subset of the people who don't want the calls are those who don't want them because they work. I don't understand their psychology very well, but there are apparently some people who simply find it very difficult to say no to telemarketers, and those people often find themselves spending a lot of money on things they don't need as a result. OTOH, many of them apparently have no problem with going to a web site to register not to be called in the first place- they only have a problem saying no to a person. If you prevent telemarketers from calling those people, which the DNC should do, then telemarketing will be much less profitable. Of course the telemarketers don't want to stand up and say, "You have to let us call the poor suckers who don't really want to buy from us but can be talked into doing so anyway," so they phrase everything in free speech terms, but that's what the real issue is.
The reason that some telemarketers don't want to abide by the list is that people aren't as rational as you'd think. There are some people who simply have a very hard time saying no to telemarketers when they call, even though they know perfectly well that they don't need what the marketers are selling. Those people are the ones who will benefit the most by not being called, since for them it's not just a matter of being disturbed but also of spending lots of money on unnecessary stuff. It's precisely those people who the telemarketers most want to reach, so the temptation to ignore the list is very strong.
That's not at all true. For a long time the FSF got most of its money by selling tapes of GNU code. They continue to sell copies of GNU software on their website, so RMS would be pretty hypocritical to criticize others for selling free software. (Hypocricy has never struck me as being one of RMS's failings; he's unusually true to his principles.) There's a page about selling free software on the FSF web site, and it should clear up confusion on this matter. The FSF positively encourages anyone who's distributing Free Software to charge as much for it as they think they can get away with. A particularly salient quote from that page (emphasis is theirs):
That sure doesn't sound like an objection to selling software to me!
No, they don't. But IBM does. There's a great quote from IBM later in the article:
That's a quote from somebody who genuinely understands the power of Free/Open Source software.
It's pretty clear that IBM's lawyers get the legal aspects of the GPL, too. I remember hearing a story about IBM when they were first considering going into Free/Open Source software. IBM, being IBM, didn't want to get involved without understanding the legal issues, so they asked their lawyers to look over the GPL. The lawyers came back with the opinion that it was a well written legal document. Their business background meant that they didn't understand why anyone would want to release their code under the GPL, but they agreed that it actually would achieve its goal of keeping the source open. IBM never would have used GPLed software if they weren't quite confident that the license was sound.
Translation: All Your Code Are Belong to Us
I believe that the quote you're looking for is:
OK, I made a slight substitution in the above, but you know which one I mean.
Nope. Not when "www.icanwatch.org" shows up in SiteFinder, but rather when "www.icann.org" does. Or when it starts directing to a fake site that praises the design of SiteFinder and proclaims it a novel and appropriate user friendly technology. Verisign could do it, if they really wanted to. They'd be burning their bridges in the process, but it's certainly technically feasible.
So which is it? Have they not yet had a chance to gather any data, or have they gathered the data and found that it's beneficial to users? Or, as seems most likely, are they just saying anything that they think will get ICANN off their backs for long enough for them to sell a bunch of registrations?
This seems to be quite likely, since Stephenson made extensive reference to TOoCitBotBM in The Big U. If an author goes to a particular source in one book, it seems very likely that he'd go back in another.
They don't, and they're not claiming to. They do, however, have the rights to a specific system of categorizing books, one that they've put a lot of time and effort into applying. If the hotel wanted to develop their own, new scheme for classifying books they wouldn't have to pay a red cent, though they'd probably find that it wound up costing them a lot more than paying the proper licensing fees. Every time a new book comes out, somebody has to decide exactly where in the system it goes. Multiply that effort by the millions of books that have been published and you have a lot of time and effort that's been devoted to developing the system. It's not right for somebody to come along and use that system, together with the name and goodwill that the developers have generated, without compensating those developers for their effort.
And consequently the most biased and unlikely to give you a reasonably balanced view of the events. This is the underlying problem with sites like Indymedia; they lean so far to one side that they make the conventional, corporate media look completely objective and unbiased in comparison.
The internet may make it easier and cheaper to publish the news, but it doesn't make it any easier and cheaper to go out there and find the news. You still need reporters out there where the news is happening. If you try to get away with using casual amateurs as your reporters, you'll be stuck with the kind of news you'd expect casual amateurs to collect.
It actually is pretty hard to make an implosion-type bomb work. They didn't work out the designs using slide rules, but actually cobbled together what was a hell of a lot of computing power for the day. I don't remember if they actually built any general-purpose electronic computers, but at least some of the work was done by large teams of workers using single purpose calculating machines. One machine would could add, another multiply, etc. and the system was "programmed" by coming up with a specific order in which IBM cards containing the information being processed were run through the system. Richard Feynman discussed a lot about this system in "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!". Admittedly the average mobile phone these days probably had enough processing power to do those calculations, but the Nobel Prize winning minds in charge of the project had a lot more to do with its success than the raw processing power.
FWIW, you can learn far more than you ever wanted to know about nuclear weapons by reading the Nuclear Weapons Archive. When you understand everything in there, you can start thinking about building bombs.
I've heard this comment before, but there's an inherent problem with it: who owns the copyright of a work that's the product of a large number of artists combining their efforts? If John, Paul, George, and Ringo collaborate to write a song, you can't fairly assign copyright to just one of them, so it must be assigned to them as a group. But that group may very well be a corporation. You're stuck either denying them the right to copyright things that they worked on as a group (obviously unfair), forcing them to assign copyright to just one of the four (also obviously unfair), or let them copyright it as a corporation.
Even if you somehow prevent corporations from owning the copyright per se, you're never going to be able to prevent corporations from being able to have exclusive rights to the copyrighted material, which is just as good from their standpoint. Or are you going to suggest that artists shouldn't be allowed to sell exclusive rights to their works to corporations? If so, you'll have a hell of a time getting anything published, since almost all of the major publishers, record companies, movie studios, etc. are corporations.
The problem is that producing TV, radio, and newspapers is very expensive. Doing a good job of reporting the news (which is presumably the area of greatest concern) means having hundreds or even thousands of reporters throughout the world together with all of their support staff like cameramen, editors, etc. That costs serious money, and means that it won't be easy for a newcomer to break into the business. This also means that the news will naturally wind up in the hands of large corporations, since they're the only ones with the resources to do the job. That means that there's going to be an inherent pro-corporation bias in the news that will be very difficult to eradicate.
Too bad. Making money is not a blanket excuse for doing things that would be otherwise unacceptable. Telemarketers' desire to earn a living does not trump ordinary people's expressed desire not to be called. It doesn't matter whether that expression has the force of law behind it (as the do not call list would have it) or not (as the telemarketers would have it). It's still wrong either way, and the telemarketers will get none of my sympathy.
It's not an either/or question, you know. Blocking the message from getting to its intended recipient is completely unrelated to sending a message back to the alleged sender. It's perfectly possible to block the message without informing the (alleged) sender. It's even desirable in the case of email worms like SOBIG that are known to forge the From: header, since in that case you're pretty much guaranteed not to be sending the message to the right person. A well writting program would take this kind of thing into account.