If you think of the programmer as a creative artist (actually, in many ways there's more truth to this than seeing them as engineers) then this is fully justified. If you are a person who pimps^Wcontrols a rock musician, then the government will try to guarantee you an income even when your product is becoming completely outdated (like 70 years!). If you have a bunch of keyboard monkey slaves, you are expected to live in a competitive market. Nobody goes around changing the law to guarantee you money.
I think almost anybody reasonable can see how that is unfair. What we need is a PIAA which arranges guaranteed incomes for people who have once employed a programmer (as long as they don't actually program or do anything useful themselves). The BSA are a bunch of useless wimps.
Thing one; Don't ask for legal advice on slashdot, ask a laywer. I don't really think this should be worth saying, but I think it can even be illegal to give legal advice; which this is not.
Now on with the rampant speculation.
a) If you have your own software you can distribute it under any terms you want. Including "like the GPL but you can't provide commercial support"
b) The partner agreement is probably not related to GPL software distribution so the GPL isn't relevant.
c) they can probably stop doing business with anyone giving support if they want.
d) details likely vary from country to country and so on so a lawyer would need much more detail to help you
I'm not sure it's really so much "making an example" as avoiding any compensation claims. She's been unfairly prosecuted. Everything the prosecutor said outside the court could have been sued over since, if she was innocent, it would have been proven slanderous. Now she has one charge and an easy risk of getting into more trouble if she opens up any further court action. I think it's more about protecting one particular prosecutor by keeping her out of the way than any particular global message.
No; you are partisan when you think an accusation against one side can be answered by an accusation against the other side. They are both bad (they are US politicians; corruption is so endemic that it's legal and called lobbying), but Clinton's presidency ended about eight years ago and isn't something worth discussing now.
The questions are; how to make sure Bush follows the law for what he still does? How to make sure Obama doesn't start off like Bush?
Most of the time it doesn't work because getting it to work well costs much more than just installing more bandwidth. However, in some special circumstances it can be very useful. Typical examples are mobile radio links where adequate over-provisioning is very difficult and there are just a few subscribers.
A typical good usage is that if you run a home web server you shape your traffic down just a little and leave a little overhead for your upgoing ack packets. The alternative is to actively give your ack packets priority, but that means that your ongoing uplink traffic may actually lose a packet (which has the send buffer completely full because it's not shaped) and become slower overall than it would be if you shaped it.
Another option might be to use RED to keep the buffers low anyway, but that would lead to a chance of dropping the odd ACK packet which is always a bad idea.
Anon coward is right. Traffic shaping is perfectly legitimate way to make sure that your links are used fairly and efficiently without actually dropping packets. You hold a few packets back in long lasting streams to allow other low latency streams better service and then let them go later. What they are doing is best described as traffic limiting, even if they use traffic shaping to help with this and they are just avoiding calling it what it really is.
Microsoft only has one obligation as a publicly traded company.. Making a profit for shareholders
This is so much ignorant shit and it's repeated so often like a stupid mantra that it's worth ripping it apart for once.
A) Microsoft has a huge range of obligations which come from being a company. They have to follow minimum pay laws. They have to pay their taxes. They have to pay their electricity bills. They have to report more or less honestly. They have to follow customer contracts even if they turn out to be badly written and unprofitable. None of these is directly about making a profit.
B) Microsoft is a public listed corporation. Most corporations have a strict definition of what they do ("develops and sells software to customers") which is not directly related to making a profit. The reason for this is that investors have to decide which companies they want to invest in and this means they need to know what each company does. As long as Microsoft does what it says it's supposed to do, no legal action can be taken against the board. If they fail to make a profit, the shareholders may, and are even likely to, change the board. However that is their choice and is in no way an obligation. Looking at their SEC statements, the only thing they have to do is make sure that they are more or less true at the time they are made and that any changes from their plan that they make are justified in some way. There's no need to make a profit, especially if they said they might not.
C) Short term profit has repeatedly been proven to be not the best way to long term profit. If you want profit in the long term it's often more important to protect rights, reputation and loyalty than make an immediate profit. Microsoft has always shown a clear commitment to this strategy in, for example, always making sure that they fully control software even where it would be cheaper not to.
D) Many other companies regularly operate with better ethics than Microsoft and yet few of them are punished for that.
they need to have a unique identifier to hand off call from one cell tower to another,
that's true, but there is already a feature built into GSM networks which stops you from tracking with this. The actual number used to track you is a temporary local number (TMSI) and the IMSI isn't used in normal communications.
there are definitely techniques which could protect against these attacks. You could encrypt everything between the phone and the local network and even encrypt all identity information even back to the home network.
most of those standards were specifically weakened for "the Feds" requirements (basically that meant USA & France over the interests of Germany if I remember right). It's a) clear that it's not really the cell phone industry's fault since they wouldn't get approval otherwise b) clear that "everybody" in some sense knew about this otherwise the weakening wouldn't have been done.
A very specific change made in the UMTS standard from GSM is to require that the phone verifies the network. Without that it's always been possible to intercept. The change is pretty useless at present, since all UMTS phones include a GSM radio and very few can be forced into 3G mode.
not every real book is worth more than an electronic copy
Totally couldn't agree more. However, when you start reading a book you're going to make an investment of your time. Buying the paper copy; or, even better, getting the electronic copy free from Gutenberg is a way of protecting that investment. You're sure you can easily share it later. Since you can never be sure which books are worthwhile it's worth getting all of them DRM free.
There are also other ways to cut down that 90%. Sell your books in bulk to second hand book stores. Put them about through various book sharing schemes. Sell them in low volume through some reseller on the internet.
Even better is to find a lending library near you. Get most books from there. You get the benefits of cheap access and you can still even share the books.
Finally, a good thing to do is to subscribe to a source of book reviews. The New Yorker or the London Review of Books for example. Or most decent newspapers have a review seciton. Even slashdot has reviews, though they might not fit your taste. This will give you a better chance of buying books you like, so most books will be ones you want to keep and/or share.
The stock market was designed to allow more or less normal (though mostly rich) people invest for the future in companies without having to take full responsibility for that and risk their freedom in something that they don't understand. The trade off is that they have to have limited knowledge about and control of the company (because if they do understand and control the company they could use it as cover for doing illegal things without responsibility).
Insider trading completely breaks those assumptions by conning those normal people who think they have a fair way of investing. Technical traders are already pretty close to evil (they profit only from other investor's inability to get the information they have and move as fast as they do). Insider traders are directly stealing grandma's pension.
The fact they steal from people on a grand scale shouldn't make the penalty any lighter. The idea that a country can send a mother to jail for life for stealing a pizza to feed her kids whilst leaving unpunished those that steal pizza from millions is exactly the stupidity that got the world economy into it's current mess.
It's not just about selling. Most of the value in culture is sharing. If I have a real physical book, I can lend it to my friend. I can give it to a family member. I can say "read this; I loved it". If it's locked into my Kindle then that's much less likely to happen. That may not happen with every book, but you don't know which ones are going to be important till you read them.
A real book is worth much more than a DRM controlled image of one.
Ignoring laws is fine as long as those laws ignore you. Unfortunately, the more people ignore the laws, the more they tend to be strengthened and enforced. The only solution to such stupidity is political.
Right. Reading the article, this has nothing to do with the DMCA since Toyota specifically avoided sending DMCA notices. The answer is to get a lawyer (yes actually get a real one) to reply to them with something like.
I believe the images are not yours.
a specific example where you know who took the photo and that it wasn't Toyota
Your letter includes no information to make me think otherwise.
Further research will cost money which I would like in advance.
I paid for this letter and would like my money back.
Please talk to my lawyer not myself.
Don't mess around with the people who are telling you to completely ignore it because it's not a DMCA notice. There are some cases the DMCA doesn't cover (e.g. if you did a photo yourself from a Toyota ad and forgot about it) and for which you might end up out of pocket. You want to show at least one example which shows that their claim is over broad so that if they later come with a specific claim you can show that it was their fault you didn't know about (the notice wasn't useful and specific) it not yours.
Abortion doctors are not normally killed in riots. Riot laws do not cover all cases of incited attacks against people. It's not even sufficient to require direct incitement. This is one of the problems with recent terrorism laws. In order to cover as many as possible such cases they cover also things like having materials describing terrorism which might be for research or personal interest only.
Well, several of seem to be implemented with heat wheels, but, for example Alstom makes it pretty clear that one of the benefits of their system is that the gasses don't mix. So I'm not sure how that's relevant?
Generally an emergency is not the time for messing around trying to work out laptop power supply compatibility (and any servicing you do during a power outage is likely to be emergency related).
Your service engineer, normally from a random vendor, arrives from outside. He has never seen your system before. You give him a power interface he understands and has used before. That means AC.
How does this thing really work? It seems to me to be carrying the heat round on the wheel from one air mass to the other rather than mixing the air? If you RTFA it seems to imply that the first mix and then unmix the air. That would be worth of a patent...
That's pretty normal in "teleco" equipment. 48V is standard for exchanges etc, and many server manufacturers provide it. It definitely helps for some circumstances and makes battery backup easier (generators, however, are disadvantaged since they need to be on the other side of your rectifier)
You always end up with a fair amount of invertors for all sorts of stupid things that you have to get AC for (e.g. service engineers laptop power supplies). You also end up with lots of big copper cables and / or buzz bars. That gets quite expensive. I've seen whole buildings kitted out for that, but it needs real pre-planning.
That means if I want a magazine that holds 50+ rounds, I can have it. If I want a machine gun, so be it. Handgun -you bet - and NO license if I want to carry.
I can barely shoot. However I have some training in Physics. My weapon of choice is a 100Megaton nuclear bomb. Shouldn't I be allowed? If not why not?
Oh, (sorry to reply to my own post) one more thing. Patent trolls are ridiculously vulnerable to stupid patents that can't get anyone else. The reason is that they have to argue for the validity of patents before they can sue. This means that many arguments they could use to destroy such patents go out of the window through their own legal point of view.
a) IBM wrote the book on patenting. They have been in patents much longer than they have been in "open source" and there are lots of bits of the company which do almost nothing with open source. Thinking that just because they start working in one area they can completely change the whole company in a few years, let alone overnight is unrealistic.
b) If you have a patent that means nobody else can have one. Just as the GPL guarantees a long term existence for some form of free software, having your own patents guarantees your ability to continue to produce software. Even RedHat gets patents. Having many trivial, stupid patents means that when you are sued you are more likely to be infringing. E.g. the patents IBM has on being a patent troll means that any time a patent troll sues IBM they risk their, and their parent companies, entire existence.
What matters most is not what patents IBM gets; it's what they do with them. If you find your FOSS project infringing an IBM patent, then ask them about it. If they refuse you a free license; then we can get angry.
wonder what the heck you are doing in Iraq all the years
From Bush's point of view it appears to have been primarily a personal vendetta, possibly based on a misunderstanding? All I can say is that if you seriously think that invading Pakistan is sensible you are crazy mad. Pakistan has getting towards 200 million people (compare with Iraq 30 million or Iran 70 million), nuclear weapons and a reasonably modern army. There is probably only one possible way to get the country organised and united in doing something.
Slashdot Mirror
We are specifically prohibited from speculating about anything in email because it can be a part of discovery
was that policy given to you in writing? I merely ask because they had better have pretty plausible deniability on that one...
If you think of the programmer as a creative artist (actually, in many ways there's more truth to this than seeing them as engineers) then this is fully justified. If you are a person who pimps^Wcontrols a rock musician, then the government will try to guarantee you an income even when your product is becoming completely outdated (like 70 years!). If you have a bunch of keyboard monkey slaves, you are expected to live in a competitive market. Nobody goes around changing the law to guarantee you money.
I think almost anybody reasonable can see how that is unfair. What we need is a PIAA which arranges guaranteed incomes for people who have once employed a programmer (as long as they don't actually program or do anything useful themselves). The BSA are a bunch of useless wimps.
Thing one; Don't ask for legal advice on slashdot, ask a laywer. I don't really think this should be worth saying, but I think it can even be illegal to give legal advice; which this is not.
Now on with the rampant speculation.
a) If you have your own software you can distribute it under any terms you want. Including "like the GPL but you can't provide commercial support"
b) The partner agreement is probably not related to GPL software distribution so the GPL isn't relevant.
c) they can probably stop doing business with anyone giving support if they want.
d) details likely vary from country to country and so on so a lawyer would need much more detail to help you
I'm not sure it's really so much "making an example" as avoiding any compensation claims. She's been unfairly prosecuted. Everything the prosecutor said outside the court could have been sued over since, if she was innocent, it would have been proven slanderous. Now she has one charge and an easy risk of getting into more trouble if she opens up any further court action. I think it's more about protecting one particular prosecutor by keeping her out of the way than any particular global message.
No; you are partisan when you think an accusation against one side can be answered by an accusation against the other side. They are both bad (they are US politicians; corruption is so endemic that it's legal and called lobbying), but Clinton's presidency ended about eight years ago and isn't something worth discussing now.
The questions are; how to make sure Bush follows the law for what he still does? How to make sure Obama doesn't start off like Bush?
Most of the time it doesn't work because getting it to work well costs much more than just installing more bandwidth. However, in some special circumstances it can be very useful. Typical examples are mobile radio links where adequate over-provisioning is very difficult and there are just a few subscribers.
A typical good usage is that if you run a home web server you shape your traffic down just a little and leave a little overhead for your upgoing ack packets. The alternative is to actively give your ack packets priority, but that means that your ongoing uplink traffic may actually lose a packet (which has the send buffer completely full because it's not shaped) and become slower overall than it would be if you shaped it.
Another option might be to use RED to keep the buffers low anyway, but that would lead to a chance of dropping the odd ACK packet which is always a bad idea.
Anon coward is right. Traffic shaping is perfectly legitimate way to make sure that your links are used fairly and efficiently without actually dropping packets. You hold a few packets back in long lasting streams to allow other low latency streams better service and then let them go later. What they are doing is best described as traffic limiting, even if they use traffic shaping to help with this and they are just avoiding calling it what it really is.
Microsoft only has one obligation as a publicly traded company .. Making a profit for shareholders
This is so much ignorant shit and it's repeated so often like a stupid mantra that it's worth ripping it apart for once.
A) Microsoft has a huge range of obligations which come from being a company. They have to follow minimum pay laws. They have to pay their taxes. They have to pay their electricity bills. They have to report more or less honestly. They have to follow customer contracts even if they turn out to be badly written and unprofitable. None of these is directly about making a profit.
B) Microsoft is a public listed corporation. Most corporations have a strict definition of what they do ("develops and sells software to customers") which is not directly related to making a profit. The reason for this is that investors have to decide which companies they want to invest in and this means they need to know what each company does. As long as Microsoft does what it says it's supposed to do, no legal action can be taken against the board. If they fail to make a profit, the shareholders may, and are even likely to, change the board. However that is their choice and is in no way an obligation. Looking at their SEC statements, the only thing they have to do is make sure that they are more or less true at the time they are made and that any changes from their plan that they make are justified in some way. There's no need to make a profit, especially if they said they might not.
C) Short term profit has repeatedly been proven to be not the best way to long term profit. If you want profit in the long term it's often more important to protect rights, reputation and loyalty than make an immediate profit. Microsoft has always shown a clear commitment to this strategy in, for example, always making sure that they fully control software even where it would be cheaper not to.
D) Many other companies regularly operate with better ethics than Microsoft and yet few of them are punished for that.
they need to have a unique identifier to hand off call from one cell tower to another,
that's true, but there is already a feature built into GSM networks which stops you from tracking with this. The actual number used to track you is a temporary local number (TMSI) and the IMSI isn't used in normal communications.
there are definitely techniques which could protect against these attacks. You could encrypt everything between the phone and the local network and even encrypt all identity information even back to the home network.
designed by my co-workers to agreed standards
most of those standards were specifically weakened for "the Feds" requirements (basically that meant USA & France over the interests of Germany if I remember right). It's a) clear that it's not really the cell phone industry's fault since they wouldn't get approval otherwise b) clear that "everybody" in some sense knew about this otherwise the weakening wouldn't have been done.
A very specific change made in the UMTS standard from GSM is to require that the phone verifies the network. Without that it's always been possible to intercept. The change is pretty useless at present, since all UMTS phones include a GSM radio and very few can be forced into 3G mode.
not every real book is worth more than an electronic copy
Totally couldn't agree more. However, when you start reading a book you're going to make an investment of your time. Buying the paper copy; or, even better, getting the electronic copy free from Gutenberg is a way of protecting that investment. You're sure you can easily share it later. Since you can never be sure which books are worthwhile it's worth getting all of them DRM free.
There are also other ways to cut down that 90%. Sell your books in bulk to second hand book stores. Put them about through various book sharing schemes. Sell them in low volume through some reseller on the internet.
Even better is to find a lending library near you. Get most books from there. You get the benefits of cheap access and you can still even share the books.
Finally, a good thing to do is to subscribe to a source of book reviews. The New Yorker or the London Review of Books for example. Or most decent newspapers have a review seciton. Even slashdot has reviews, though they might not fit your taste. This will give you a better chance of buying books you like, so most books will be ones you want to keep and/or share.
The stock market was designed to allow more or less normal (though mostly rich) people invest for the future in companies without having to take full responsibility for that and risk their freedom in something that they don't understand. The trade off is that they have to have limited knowledge about and control of the company (because if they do understand and control the company they could use it as cover for doing illegal things without responsibility).
Insider trading completely breaks those assumptions by conning those normal people who think they have a fair way of investing. Technical traders are already pretty close to evil (they profit only from other investor's inability to get the information they have and move as fast as they do). Insider traders are directly stealing grandma's pension.
The fact they steal from people on a grand scale shouldn't make the penalty any lighter. The idea that a country can send a mother to jail for life for stealing a pizza to feed her kids whilst leaving unpunished those that steal pizza from millions is exactly the stupidity that got the world economy into it's current mess.
It's not just about selling. Most of the value in culture is sharing. If I have a real physical book, I can lend it to my friend. I can give it to a family member. I can say "read this; I loved it". If it's locked into my Kindle then that's much less likely to happen. That may not happen with every book, but you don't know which ones are going to be important till you read them.
A real book is worth much more than a DRM controlled image of one.
Ignoring laws is fine as long as those laws ignore you. Unfortunately, the more people ignore the laws, the more they tend to be strengthened and enforced. The only solution to such stupidity is political.
Right. Reading the article, this has nothing to do with the DMCA since Toyota specifically avoided sending DMCA notices. The answer is to get a lawyer (yes actually get a real one) to reply to them with something like.
Don't mess around with the people who are telling you to completely ignore it because it's not a DMCA notice. There are some cases the DMCA doesn't cover (e.g. if you did a photo yourself from a Toyota ad and forgot about it) and for which you might end up out of pocket. You want to show at least one example which shows that their claim is over broad so that if they later come with a specific claim you can show that it was their fault you didn't know about (the notice wasn't useful and specific) it not yours.
Abortion doctors are not normally killed in riots. Riot laws do not cover all cases of incited attacks against people. It's not even sufficient to require direct incitement. This is one of the problems with recent terrorism laws. In order to cover as many as possible such cases they cover also things like having materials describing terrorism which might be for research or personal interest only.
Well, several of seem to be implemented with heat wheels, but, for example Alstom makes it pretty clear that one of the benefits of their system is that the gasses don't mix. So I'm not sure how that's relevant?
Generally an emergency is not the time for messing around trying to work out laptop power supply compatibility (and any servicing you do during a power outage is likely to be emergency related).
Your service engineer, normally from a random vendor, arrives from outside. He has never seen your system before. You give him a power interface he understands and has used before. That means AC.
How does this thing really work? It seems to me to be carrying the heat round on the wheel from one air mass to the other rather than mixing the air? If you RTFA it seems to imply that the first mix and then unmix the air. That would be worth of a patent...
(moderate: -1 troll - suggests Reading TFA anon-comments: Ewe muzt be newzor here)
That's pretty normal in "teleco" equipment. 48V is standard for exchanges etc, and many server manufacturers provide it. It definitely helps for some circumstances and makes battery backup easier (generators, however, are disadvantaged since they need to be on the other side of your rectifier)
You always end up with a fair amount of invertors for all sorts of stupid things that you have to get AC for (e.g. service engineers laptop power supplies). You also end up with lots of big copper cables and / or buzz bars. That gets quite expensive. I've seen whole buildings kitted out for that, but it needs real pre-planning.
I can barely shoot. However I have some training in Physics. My weapon of choice is a 100Megaton nuclear bomb. Shouldn't I be allowed? If not why not?
You, Sir are on the right site and we are honored to be on it with you. Leave this kind if "real world" irrelevancy to niche sites like bbc.co.uk.
Oh, (sorry to reply to my own post) one more thing. Patent trolls are ridiculously vulnerable to stupid patents that can't get anyone else. The reason is that they have to argue for the validity of patents before they can sue. This means that many arguments they could use to destroy such patents go out of the window through their own legal point of view.
a) IBM wrote the book on patenting. They have been in patents much longer than they have been in "open source" and there are lots of bits of the company which do almost nothing with open source. Thinking that just because they start working in one area they can completely change the whole company in a few years, let alone overnight is unrealistic.
b) If you have a patent that means nobody else can have one. Just as the GPL guarantees a long term existence for some form of free software, having your own patents guarantees your ability to continue to produce software. Even RedHat gets patents. Having many trivial, stupid patents means that when you are sued you are more likely to be infringing. E.g. the patents IBM has on being a patent troll means that any time a patent troll sues IBM they risk their, and their parent companies, entire existence.
What matters most is not what patents IBM gets; it's what they do with them. If you find your FOSS project infringing an IBM patent, then ask them about it. If they refuse you a free license; then we can get angry.
From Bush's point of view it appears to have been primarily a personal vendetta, possibly based on a misunderstanding? All I can say is that if you seriously think that invading Pakistan is sensible you are crazy mad. Pakistan has getting towards 200 million people (compare with Iraq 30 million or Iran 70 million), nuclear weapons and a reasonably modern army. There is probably only one possible way to get the country organised and united in doing something.