I think it is admirable that you will only buy into DVD if and when the MPAA license a linux platform DVD player. Although the case revolves around this, I think the core issue here is one that affects intellectual freedom worldwide, that they could bring this charge against Mr. Johansen at all. DeCSS is no more a piracy tool than a pencil is a copyright infringement tool or a gun a tool for murder. The fact that it is possible to use it to break a law should not be a sufficient argument to outlaw it.
Re:How to take care of the situation you describe
on
Copyright as Cudgel
·
· Score: 2
That's an interesting point. I have thought about that before and I tend to agree, though I would love to hear an argument to the contrary. Considering the high percentage of black males who spend at least part of their life in prison, could the felony/no vote laws be just a roundabout method to suppress that segment of the population?
Re:How to take care of the situation you describe
on
Copyright as Cudgel
·
· Score: 2
How about this: make it legal only for registered voters to donate to a politician. This rules out corporate entities, minors, pets, convicted felons, as well as foreigners.
On a side note: (from the article)
We are fighting for the First Amendment right of a hacker magazine, 2600 (and for the right of everyone), to describe certain illegal algorithms and create hyperlinks to other pages that describe or offer those algorithms.
I thought 2600 dropped the case before it got reviewed by the Supreme Court. Or am I confusing it with something else?
When XP and Redhat 7.(2 or 3) came out at about the same time, I went right over to CompUsa to get my copy and as I approached the checkout counter some guy who had been standing near the register with a box of XP excitedly asked the clerk if there was any software for XP, who pointed at the Office XP, etc. in the first rack behind the registers. He ran over and merrily grabbed one of everything that said XP on it and headed back to get in line behind me. The clerk virtually busted out laughing when he saw I was buying Redhat though I didn't get the feeling that he was laughing at me, and he said they had been selling a lot of it. The whole thing with the XP guy just seemed staged, especially after I looked back on my way out and they weren't even ringing up his "purchases". So I don't think using shills to generate fake excitement is anything new.
Linux is dead on the desktop.
Translation: Englightenment is dead as a Linux window manager so I hope it will be a bittersweet victory for the successful coders.
BSD is a better license than GPL because it let's people steal your code.
Translation: Would somebody please steal my code? Please? Half my life was wasted on E and now nobody wants to use it.
I offered to mould e to be the GNOME wm, but at the time Miguel was convinced you could do a desktop without a wm.
Translation: Miguel knew what a spoiled, freaky, pain in the ass I am so he pretended not to need what I had to offer.
E is there to poke and prod and do something new. KDE and GNOME are there to appeal to the masses.
Translation: KDE and GNOME appeal to the masses. The ingrateful bastards!
If you replace 'communism' with 'totalitarianism' then you might be closer to the truth. Check out this site I came across recently which has short snippets of Orwell's writings and shows his political leanings and what drove the man.
http://www.abattoir.com/~prime8/Orwell/
1984 was a warning which is still valid today regardless of what system of government happens to be in place. You seem to be saying something similar when you state that 'an equally compelling book' is needed today. However I think you should rethink putting everything in terms of Capitalism and Communism since the Cold War propaganda is still so fresh in everyone's minds that people will tune you out without even attempting to understand what you have to say.
Every city has a paper, every city has local bands. It's a great match. And when the RIAA sues ostensibly for , the paper already has lawyers who have defended the first amendment before.
I'm not surprised that your friend made an off the cuff remark like this which portrays physicians simplistically as a walking database. But I think it would be closer to the truth to call them walking neural networks which are constantly learning and which use databases (reference books) to affirm their suspicions, and also who are cerified by a board and licensed by the state to be responsible, ethical, and competent.
Doctors must also take into account that the person describing the symptoms may have more than one condition simultaneously, that the patient may be exagerating something common or normal as a symptom because he believes it is related to the other actual symptoms. As others have pointed out in this discussion people can unconsciously pick up symptoms based on information they have read. It is rare to have a doctor these days that knows you for very long and who has treated you and your family for many years but that would give the doctor more insight into what the problem could be.
The article starts off with an example where Dr. Cross had an unusual case for which he did not recognize the symptoms and which turned out to be a condition he hadn't even heard of before. This is a situation where using this program makes sense; it merely computerizes the literature search. But I disagree with you that doctor's could easily be replaced. This program can only be a helpful tool used in conjunction with all the physicians other tools.
The doctor must be the one who diagnoses. He can not become just a technician asking the patient questions and entering the response into a computer form. Physicians are licensed for the same reason that Professional Engineers are licensed. When human life hangs in the balance, someone must be accountable to make sure things are done right.
About 5-6 years ago I read that both MS and Intel were making about 65% profit margins. That was back when their stock was doubling and tripling every year. So no, a 1/3 margin today doesn't surprise me. Bill and Co. still view themselves as a growth company and that is how they are running their business. If you don't like it don't buy their stock. Evidently a lot of people don't like it though since investors have lost more than half their investment over about the last three years.
I went to a ham radio fest recently for the first time, and I noticed that most of the guys there were older men. I guess ham radio must have seemed a lot more exciting to young people several decades ago. And I know that is true with Rocketry because of the hype back in the fifties and sixties over the russian ICBMs and getting to the moon first. So what do you guys think, are rocketeers a dying breed or is it an interest which is becoming more popular lately? On the one hand, many of the fifties-era, crew-cut, slide-rule carrying rocket scientists are gone. But OTOH, you don't have to be a superpower to get in the game now and space may be on the verge of commercialization. So is Aerospace Engineering a "cool" profession for the next generation?
I can see this working for my company but only for certain job functions. I'm sure that Sun isn't implementing this across the board for all their employees. I think this might work well at my company for inside sales, technical support, and in conjunction with a beefy PDA even for outside sales. Basically anything that doesn't require storing piles of stuff someplace or leaving parts laying out for extended periods.
As for being able to talk to people you work with in person, this system will enable personal teleconferencing with an optional camera. And if you still want to be face to face how about browsing to a webpage on your intranet that displays a floorplan highlighting everyone in your department? You could also search by name. You would be registered automatically when you swipe your card in the reader.
Besides people will automatically congregate together based on physical location and habit. For example, Marketing people might head for the open cubes near the color copier while Engineers would look first for an open cube near the R+D lab. And everyone is going to want to be near people they hang around with so they can take breaks or go to lunch with friends.
Also inter-personal conflicts will work themselves out since workers can relocate easily. So the hot girl in Accounting can avoid that creepy MSCE guy and move closer to her hunky Unix god.;)
I can see this working for my company but only for certain job functions. I'm sure that Sun isn't implementing this across the board for all their employees. I think this might work well at my company for inside sales, technical support, and in conjunction with a beefy PDA even for outside sales. Basically anything that doesn't require storing piles of stuff someplace or leaving parts laying out for extended periods.
As for being able to talk to people you work with in person, this system will enable personal teleconferencing with an optional camera. And if you still want to be face to face how about browsing to a webpage on your intranet that displays a floorplan highlighting everyone in your department? You could also search by name. You would be registered automatically when you swipe your card in the reader.
Besides people will automatically congregate together based on physical location and habit. For example, Marketing people might head for the open cubes near the color copier while Engineers would look first for an open cube near the R)
The first issue, of course, is whether the searches in question were actually illegal. That in turn hinges on whether or not the searches are, in the words of the 4th, "unreasonable".
I'm not claiming that it's a good idea or that the gov't is necessarility justified in what they did, but the fact that you find it distasteful does not necessarily make it unconstitutional or illegal.
I can see from your comment and others that many people are reading "unreasonable" as something which is debatable. It is important that people understand the the terms "reason" and "cause" have specific legal meanings and they are synonyms in this context. Saying that NO searches will take place WITHOUT reason is the same as saying that searches will ONLY take place WITH reason, which is exactly what they say in the following clause when they specify that a narrowly defined warrant MUST be issued first and a warrant can ONLY be issued when the evidence shows that a crime has PROBABLY been committed.
I know you weren't trolling. I wish I had replied sooner so that more people might have seen this because it seems that quite a few people are misinterpreting based on "conversational" English. And this is an incredibly important point today judging by the way things have been headed lately.
That sounds like a pretty sweet printer and it is extremely cool that they support Linux. You said it is compatibe with Mac so does that mean it talks Postscript? Being able to cat a.ps file directly to the port saved my butt several years ago when my print filters got messed up. That is the only thing keeping me from replacing my HP 5MP.
I won't even consider an inkjet. I had one years ago and went through one ink cartridge for every 500 sheets of paper. Either it ran out of ink or the nozzles would get so stopped up that I had to replace the cartridge just to be able to read what it printed.
If you can bite on that then you should go on Fear Factor. Those Madagascar cockroaches wouldn't bother you a bit.:)
I just downloaded PHP for Netware today though I haven't installed it yet. I don't know if I can port my Linux PHP scripts over until they get PostgreSQL running on Netware (which is in the works). But I hope they update PHP to version 4.2x since a lot of the Postgres functions I used are only in the latest versions.
As long as we can access an Oracle database running on another box from the Netware PHP/Web server then this is going to resolve a lot of problems for us.
The surveillance system captured not only the electronic communications of the court-authorized target, "but also picked up E-Mails on non-covered" individuals, a violation of federal wiretap law.
Amendment IV of the U.S. Constitution: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Notice that the Constitution does not say that illegal searches may be performed as long as any resulting evidence is not used against the persons being illegally searched. It says that it shall not happen. This interception of mail was not just a violation of federal wiretap law, it was a violation of the Bill of Rights. We are supposedly fighting a "war on terrorism" to protect our way of life, but that way of life is rooted in our Constitution. The only way to win the hearts and minds of the rest of the world is to stick to our principles and abide by the highest law of the land which is the U.S. Constitution.
It is nice to think that there is an FBI agent who believes in upholding the fourth amendment. It is too bad he is at the bottom of the totem pole instead of the top.
But didn't it make a difference that he was putting a URL to *his* website on the CD? If he had made the URL point to the author's website where she made the software available in the first place then maybe the answer would have been different. IANFL so I don't know.
It's not confusing at all. If more and more artists continue to bypass the middleman (RIAA) and release music through alternative media such as the Internet then the RIAA is doomed. This bill is only a boon for artists under the old system which is rapidly changing.
But if the RIAA can lower the bar for the hot new artists to come in under the system which they already control then they keep their grip on both the artists and the consumers. The losers will be the independent promoters. But the RIAA knows that the "indies" have to be sacrificed, so now after 40 years of collaboration they point fingers and scream 'Payola!'
It has been discussed on slashdot before that if Open Source advocates held software patents that other software patent holders want to use then cross licensing agreements might be set up allowing Open Sourcerers to duplicate the functionality of those programs that you say are forever off limits. Well I say we need more software patents to be held by free software friendly parties as well as a legal mechanism to pool those patents and use them as bargaining chips.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it is admirable that you will only buy into DVD if and when the MPAA license a linux platform DVD player. Although the case revolves around this, I think the core issue here is one that affects intellectual freedom worldwide, that they could bring this charge against Mr. Johansen at all. DeCSS is no more a piracy tool than a pencil is a copyright infringement tool or a gun a tool for murder. The fact that it is possible to use it to break a law should not be a sufficient argument to outlaw it.
That's an interesting point. I have thought about that before and I tend to agree, though I would love to hear an argument to the contrary. Considering the high percentage of black males who spend at least part of their life in prison, could the felony/no vote laws be just a roundabout method to suppress that segment of the population?
On a side note: (from the article)
We are fighting for the First Amendment right of a hacker magazine, 2600 (and for the right of everyone), to describe certain illegal algorithms and create hyperlinks to other pages that describe or offer those algorithms.
I thought 2600 dropped the case before it got reviewed by the Supreme Court. Or am I confusing it with something else?
When XP and Redhat 7.(2 or 3) came out at about the same time, I went right over to CompUsa to get my copy and as I approached the checkout counter some guy who had been standing near the register with a box of XP excitedly asked the clerk if there was any software for XP, who pointed at the Office XP, etc. in the first rack behind the registers. He ran over and merrily grabbed one of everything that said XP on it and headed back to get in line behind me. The clerk virtually busted out laughing when he saw I was buying Redhat though I didn't get the feeling that he was laughing at me, and he said they had been selling a lot of it. The whole thing with the XP guy just seemed staged, especially after I looked back on my way out and they weren't even ringing up his "purchases". So I don't think using shills to generate fake excitement is anything new.
I am serious about putting TechnophobeLinux together. Please reply if you are interested in helping.
I hope you change the name for Christ's sake. Hell, even "AnalProbeLinux" would sound friendlier than that!
Linux is dead on the desktop.
Translation: Englightenment is dead as a Linux window manager so I hope it will be a bittersweet victory for the successful coders.
BSD is a better license than GPL because it let's people steal your code.
Translation: Would somebody please steal my code? Please? Half my life was wasted on E and now nobody wants to use it.
I offered to mould e to be the GNOME wm, but at the time Miguel was convinced you could do a desktop without a wm.
Translation: Miguel knew what a spoiled, freaky, pain in the ass I am so he pretended not to need what I had to offer.
E is there to poke and prod and do something new. KDE and GNOME are there to appeal to the masses.
Translation: KDE and GNOME appeal to the masses. The ingrateful bastards!
1984 was a warning which is still valid today regardless of what system of government happens to be in place. You seem to be saying something similar when you state that 'an equally compelling book' is needed today. However I think you should rethink putting everything in terms of Capitalism and Communism since the Cold War propaganda is still so fresh in everyone's minds that people will tune you out without even attempting to understand what you have to say.
Moderate this post double plus good! :)
Every city has a paper, every city has local bands. It's a great match. And when the RIAA sues ostensibly for , the paper already has lawyers who have defended the first amendment before.
I'm not surprised that your friend made an off the cuff remark like this which portrays physicians simplistically as a walking database. But I think it would be closer to the truth to call them walking neural networks which are constantly learning and which use databases (reference books) to affirm their suspicions, and also who are cerified by a board and licensed by the state to be responsible, ethical, and competent.
Doctors must also take into account that the person describing the symptoms may have more than one condition simultaneously, that the patient may be exagerating something common or normal as a symptom because he believes it is related to the other actual symptoms. As others have pointed out in this discussion people can unconsciously pick up symptoms based on information they have read. It is rare to have a doctor these days that knows you for very long and who has treated you and your family for many years but that would give the doctor more insight into what the problem could be.
The article starts off with an example where Dr. Cross had an unusual case for which he did not recognize the symptoms and which turned out to be a condition he hadn't even heard of before. This is a situation where using this program makes sense; it merely computerizes the literature search. But I disagree with you that doctor's could easily be replaced. This program can only be a helpful tool used in conjunction with all the physicians other tools.
The doctor must be the one who diagnoses. He can not become just a technician asking the patient questions and entering the response into a computer form. Physicians are licensed for the same reason that Professional Engineers are licensed. When human life hangs in the balance, someone must be accountable to make sure things are done right.
About 5-6 years ago I read that both MS and Intel were making about 65% profit margins. That was back when their stock was doubling and tripling every year. So no, a 1/3 margin today doesn't surprise me. Bill and Co. still view themselves as a growth company and that is how they are running their business. If you don't like it don't buy their stock. Evidently a lot of people don't like it though since investors have lost more than half their investment over about the last three years.
I went to a ham radio fest recently for the first time, and I noticed that most of the guys there were older men. I guess ham radio must have seemed a lot more exciting to young people several decades ago. And I know that is true with Rocketry because of the hype back in the fifties and sixties over the russian ICBMs and getting to the moon first. So what do you guys think, are rocketeers a dying breed or is it an interest which is becoming more popular lately? On the one hand, many of the fifties-era, crew-cut, slide-rule carrying rocket scientists are gone. But OTOH, you don't have to be a superpower to get in the game now and space may be on the verge of commercialization. So is Aerospace Engineering a "cool" profession for the next generation?
Does anyone know when this law was enacted or what it was in response to?
Yeah and they didn't zoom out far enough to show that the universe is really just sitting on the back of a much larger turtle. :)
Only for about the next 10 years...
I can see this working for my company but only for certain job functions. I'm sure that Sun isn't implementing this across the board for all their employees. I think this might work well at my company for inside sales, technical support, and in conjunction with a beefy PDA even for outside sales. Basically anything that doesn't require storing piles of stuff someplace or leaving parts laying out for extended periods.
;)
As for being able to talk to people you work with in person, this system will enable personal teleconferencing with an optional camera. And if you still want to be face to face how about browsing to a webpage on your intranet that displays a floorplan highlighting everyone in your department? You could also search by name. You would be registered automatically when you swipe your card in the reader.
Besides people will automatically congregate together based on physical location and habit. For example, Marketing people might head for the open cubes near the color copier while Engineers would look first for an open cube near the R+D lab. And everyone is going to want to be near people they hang around with so they can take breaks or go to lunch with friends.
Also inter-personal conflicts will work themselves out since workers can relocate easily. So the hot girl in Accounting can avoid that creepy MSCE guy and move closer to her hunky Unix god.
I can see this working for my company but only for certain job functions. I'm sure that Sun isn't implementing this across the board for all their employees. I think this might work well at my company for inside sales, technical support, and in conjunction with a beefy PDA even for outside sales. Basically anything that doesn't require storing piles of stuff someplace or leaving parts laying out for extended periods.
As for being able to talk to people you work with in person, this system will enable personal teleconferencing with an optional camera. And if you still want to be face to face how about browsing to a webpage on your intranet that displays a floorplan highlighting everyone in your department? You could also search by name. You would be registered automatically when you swipe your card in the reader.
Besides people will automatically congregate together based on physical location and habit. For example, Marketing people might head for the open cubes near the color copier while Engineers would look first for an open cube near the R)
I can see from your comment and others that many people are reading "unreasonable" as something which is debatable. It is important that people understand the the terms "reason" and "cause" have specific legal meanings and they are synonyms in this context. Saying that NO searches will take place WITHOUT reason is the same as saying that searches will ONLY take place WITH reason, which is exactly what they say in the following clause when they specify that a narrowly defined warrant MUST be issued first and a warrant can ONLY be issued when the evidence shows that a crime has PROBABLY been committed.
I know you weren't trolling. I wish I had replied sooner so that more people might have seen this because it seems that quite a few people are misinterpreting based on "conversational" English. And this is an incredibly important point today judging by the way things have been headed lately.
That sounds like a pretty sweet printer and it is extremely cool that they support Linux. You said it is compatibe with Mac so does that mean it talks Postscript? Being able to cat a .ps file directly to the port saved my butt several years ago when my print filters got messed up. That is the only thing keeping me from replacing my HP 5MP.
I won't even consider an inkjet. I had one years ago and went through one ink cartridge for every 500 sheets of paper. Either it ran out of ink or the nozzles would get so stopped up that I had to replace the cartridge just to be able to read what it printed.
If you can bite on that then you should go on Fear Factor. Those Madagascar cockroaches wouldn't bother you a bit. :)
I just downloaded PHP for Netware today though I haven't installed it yet. I don't know if I can port my Linux PHP scripts over until they get PostgreSQL running on Netware (which is in the works). But I hope they update PHP to version 4.2x since a lot of the Postgres functions I used are only in the latest versions.
As long as we can access an Oracle database running on another box from the Netware PHP/Web server then this is going to resolve a lot of problems for us.
Amendment IV of the U.S. Constitution: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Notice that the Constitution does not say that illegal searches may be performed as long as any resulting evidence is not used against the persons being illegally searched. It says that it shall not happen. This interception of mail was not just a violation of federal wiretap law, it was a violation of the Bill of Rights. We are supposedly fighting a "war on terrorism" to protect our way of life, but that way of life is rooted in our Constitution. The only way to win the hearts and minds of the rest of the world is to stick to our principles and abide by the highest law of the land which is the U.S. Constitution.
It is nice to think that there is an FBI agent who believes in upholding the fourth amendment. It is too bad he is at the bottom of the totem pole instead of the top.
But didn't it make a difference that he was putting a URL to *his* website on the CD? If he had made the URL point to the author's website where she made the software available in the first place then maybe the answer would have been different. IANFL so I don't know.
I won't waste my time pointing out all the flaws in your FUD. Luckily I don't have to. Most Slashdot readers are smart enough to see through it.
It's not confusing at all. If more and more artists continue to bypass the middleman (RIAA) and release music through alternative media such as the Internet then the RIAA is doomed. This bill is only a boon for artists under the old system which is rapidly changing.
But if the RIAA can lower the bar for the hot new artists to come in under the system which they already control then they keep their grip on both the artists and the consumers. The losers will be the independent promoters. But the RIAA knows that the "indies" have to be sacrificed, so now after 40 years of collaboration they point fingers and scream 'Payola!'
It has been discussed on slashdot before that if Open Source advocates held software patents that other software patent holders want to use then cross licensing agreements might be set up allowing Open Sourcerers to duplicate the functionality of those programs that you say are forever off limits. Well I say we need more software patents to be held by free software friendly parties as well as a legal mechanism to pool those patents and use them as bargaining chips.