Copywrite applies to distribution, not to modification. Private modifications are derivitave works, they just aren't distributed and so never fall under the control of copyright law.
OK, how about a "three strikes" rule: if any legislator has voted in favor of three separate laws, each of which was found to be unconstitutional, that legislator is immediately removed from office and prevented from running for any office ever again. If the courts don't have time to make sure the law is correct, then let's put the responsibility back on those who are screwing up the laws in the first place: Congress.
That already exists - since copyright only applies to distribution anyway, you can take any GPL'd code, hack it up whichever way, and use it internally to your organization. As long as you don't distribute any binaries built from it you are under no oblication to ever provide source code.
I don't see how you think this would help companies open up and write Open Source code, though - source that never leaves the company walls is effectively not open, and those changes will never get rolled back into the community. That doesn't seem like a very productive outcome.
When I was searching recently, it appeared that many good domain names are available. If by "available" you mean have expired registration 1 or two years ago but are still listed as registered by NSI. Since the.com crash there are plenty of great names, if the registration system would just let you get them.
Just because the meaning of a word has been subverted by those with a monetary interest in doing so does not make their definition true, either. Or more precisely, it does not make their definition right. Would it be OK if I started to referring to port-scanning in the popular vernacular as "killing people"? No, that would be a tremendous disservice to murder victims everywhere. It is the same with "piracy".
So, is there really anyone out there willing to change their browser window size, desktop resolution, number of colors, and even install a new frickin' font just to view that guy's page? Seems a little arrogant to me...
Touché:) But of course Red Hat isn't suing anyone for pointing out that this is possible to do, nor have they ever tried to publish an "upgrade" that was also a full installer and keep that a secret.
Really, I don't see what Apple's big problem with this is - they're a hardware company that developed an OS to drive adoption of their hardware. They should be happy to give the thing away for free, and just tie in the new OS a little more tightly to the hardware so that even if someone has OS X for free, they'll want to buy new hardware to run it on.
They're not losing any money on it at all, unless after the install you go over to One Infinite Loop with a handgun and a ski mask. I refuse to limit my actions based on the question of whether some company's poor business planning will cause them to not be able to sell their product for as much as they had planned. You might as well say that it is equally my fault that they lost $$$ when I bought a PC instead of a Mac. Money that you might have made but didn't is not the same as money that you had that someone took from you.
Apple was stupid enough to provide the full goods for free at the same time they are trying to charge for them, and it shouldn't be illegal to mention to all and sundry what a dumb idea that was. Their current litigation is just the knee-jerk reaction that they usually have to this sort of thing. The correct knee-jerk reaction would be to fire the 10.1 updater team and/or whoever OK'd handing out the full product for 1/6th its price (or free in some cases).
Re:Electronic calculations in the office?
on
Electronic Abacus
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· Score: 1
"Come now, Smithers, this isn't rocket science, it's brain surgery!"
That is a reasonable perspective if you are talking about desktop PC OS usage at home. Most people don't want to mess around with their desktop PC at home; they want to use it to actually do things, and then once they're done they want to quit dealing with the computer and go back to watching TV or whatever else it is that they do. I don't have any problem with this, although I'm not really one of those people.
But when it comes to the selection of computing equipment, OSes, and software for a business environment or to be used as part of an embedded system which has certain requirements, it's ridiculous for a developer to say that they are not willing to learn how to create the best system/device possible. The whole point of being in IT, engineering, or development is to create the solution that meets your requirements in the best way, not just to stick with what you know and trust a vendor (and a particularly disreputable one at that) that their product will do the job. "I'm just too lazy to learn about alternatives" is an acceptable excuse for a home user, but it is professional incompetence in a business setting. You don't see accountants who fail to learn the new accounting rules because they can't be bothered to, do you? Or rather, you don't see those accountants employed for very long.
There are plenty of people who came into computing from a desktop PC background, have never known anything but Microsoft, and thus always choose the Microsoft solution for every project they work on. They've never known anything better, and in fact are unable to evaluate "better" in any terms other than the ones Microsoft has supplied. I work with a number of these people. Pity me:)
That's nothing - wait until e911 is implemented in the U.S. and your wireless company will be able to track your location to within 10 meters or so. It remains to be seen whether users will be able to deactivate the locator service if they are not making a 911 call, but it sounds like the wireless companies want this to be left up to them. Which means that if you care about privacy you'll want to figure out which traces to cut in your phone to disconnect the GPS.
In Illinois at least, the power to run an entire household (ok, with gas heat but otherwise all electric) is cheaper than the cost of my internet access for the month, it's cheaper than my phone bill for the month, in fact the electric bill is about the cheapest bill that I have to pay every month. Maybe you folks in California should just not destroy your power industry, and it will treat you right in return:)
Oh yeah, and 75% of this cheap power is nuclear which probably helps a lot with the cost since it doesn't fluctuate like gas/oil. Although we're in trouble if there's ever an accident, I admit.
I don't see how a read-only ftpd is a particular protection; I could send a hand-crafted get request that smashes the stack just as easily to that ftp server. Unless by read-only you mean chrooted or run with the root drive mounted ro so that the ftpd user really can't write to anything important, but then again I could do that with any other ftpd as well. If publicfile is all audited and such then I agree it is probably more secure (not that the insecurity of wu-ftpd is a surprise) but I don't think it is because it is read-only.
Security provided by passwords and encryption are based on shared secrets (or for public-key cryptography, mathematical properties of prime numbers). The only thing that has to be hidden is the secret, which cannot be determined by an attacker, even with knowledge of the algorithm, in less time than it would take to brute force guess the secret. Security through obscurity is more of the case where your protocol itself is broken, so that you must keep both the shared secret and the protocol as well secret. The reason that this is so much less secure is because there are an infinite variety of shared secret passwords to choose, but only so many protocols. Once a broken protocol is cracked it is cracked for everyone that uses it; once your password is guessed it only affects you.
So in each case there is something that must be protected from being found out; but the chances of the thing being found out and the consequences if it is found out are vastly different.
This was a recent/. story concerning a proposed settlement of private antitrust cases against Microsoft. Their proposed penalty was to donate $1.1 billion worth of software to schools. Presumably they would write off this entire amount. It should also be available on news.com, the register, etc.
The "ex post facto" protection means that you cannot be prosecuted for actions that are now illegal but were legal when you did them. "ex post facto" only applies to the passage of new laws, not to a judicial reinterpretation of an existing law.
So Ebay was holding users to a higher standard than it turns out the law actually requires. I don't know if this would be grounds for a civil suit, though - Ebay can do pretty much whatever they want on their private servers, you know.
But if the FBI told your security goons not to tell you that they were there, you wouldn't expect them to do that, would you? If you are paying for information about what is going on with your property, and your employees/virus software aren't providing that information, you'd be a little upset, right?
This is totally aside from any War On Drugs^WTerrorism "secret warrants" that allow your property to be searched without telling you, of course. When the government has to employ tools like those to catch criminals, maybe it's time to say that we can live with some level of crime...
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Wait, what was that? I missed half of your post because my 3rd-party IP stack crashed :)
Copywrite applies to distribution, not to modification. Private modifications are derivitave works, they just aren't distributed and so never fall under the control of copyright law.
OK, how about a "three strikes" rule: if any legislator has voted in favor of three separate laws, each of which was found to be unconstitutional, that legislator is immediately removed from office and prevented from running for any office ever again. If the courts don't have time to make sure the law is correct, then let's put the responsibility back on those who are screwing up the laws in the first place: Congress.
That already exists - since copyright only applies to distribution anyway, you can take any GPL'd code, hack it up whichever way, and use it internally to your organization. As long as you don't distribute any binaries built from it you are under no oblication to ever provide source code.
I don't see how you think this would help companies open up and write Open Source code, though - source that never leaves the company walls is effectively not open, and those changes will never get rolled back into the community. That doesn't seem like a very productive outcome.
When I was searching recently, it appeared that many good domain names are available. If by "available" you mean have expired registration 1 or two years ago but are still listed as registered by NSI. Since the .com crash there are plenty of great names, if the registration system would just let you get them.
Just because the meaning of a word has been subverted by those with a monetary interest in doing so does not make their definition true, either. Or more precisely, it does not make their definition right. Would it be OK if I started to referring to port-scanning in the popular vernacular as "killing people"? No, that would be a tremendous disservice to murder victims everywhere. It is the same with "piracy".
So, is there really anyone out there willing to change their browser window size, desktop resolution, number of colors, and even install a new frickin' font just to view that guy's page? Seems a little arrogant to me...
Please don't, he said, over a Covad line :)
It just goes to show you: in every Brave New World, there's a silver lining :)
Touché :) But of course Red Hat isn't suing anyone for pointing out that this is possible to do, nor have they ever tried to publish an "upgrade" that was also a full installer and keep that a secret.
Really, I don't see what Apple's big problem with this is - they're a hardware company that developed an OS to drive adoption of their hardware. They should be happy to give the thing away for free, and just tie in the new OS a little more tightly to the hardware so that even if someone has OS X for free, they'll want to buy new hardware to run it on.
They're not losing any money on it at all, unless after the install you go over to One Infinite Loop with a handgun and a ski mask. I refuse to limit my actions based on the question of whether some company's poor business planning will cause them to not be able to sell their product for as much as they had planned. You might as well say that it is equally my fault that they lost $$$ when I bought a PC instead of a Mac. Money that you might have made but didn't is not the same as money that you had that someone took from you.
Apple was stupid enough to provide the full goods for free at the same time they are trying to charge for them, and it shouldn't be illegal to mention to all and sundry what a dumb idea that was. Their current litigation is just the knee-jerk reaction that they usually have to this sort of thing. The correct knee-jerk reaction would be to fire the 10.1 updater team and/or whoever OK'd handing out the full product for 1/6th its price (or free in some cases).
"Come now, Smithers, this isn't rocket science, it's brain surgery!"
That is a reasonable perspective if you are talking about desktop PC OS usage at home. Most people don't want to mess around with their desktop PC at home; they want to use it to actually do things, and then once they're done they want to quit dealing with the computer and go back to watching TV or whatever else it is that they do. I don't have any problem with this, although I'm not really one of those people.
But when it comes to the selection of computing equipment, OSes, and software for a business environment or to be used as part of an embedded system which has certain requirements, it's ridiculous for a developer to say that they are not willing to learn how to create the best system/device possible. The whole point of being in IT, engineering, or development is to create the solution that meets your requirements in the best way, not just to stick with what you know and trust a vendor (and a particularly disreputable one at that) that their product will do the job. "I'm just too lazy to learn about alternatives" is an acceptable excuse for a home user, but it is professional incompetence in a business setting. You don't see accountants who fail to learn the new accounting rules because they can't be bothered to, do you? Or rather, you don't see those accountants employed for very long.
There are plenty of people who came into computing from a desktop PC background, have never known anything but Microsoft, and thus always choose the Microsoft solution for every project they work on. They've never known anything better, and in fact are unable to evaluate "better" in any terms other than the ones Microsoft has supplied. I work with a number of these people. Pity me :)
Yes. Just because you've never seen it doesn't mean it doesn't occur. Maybe that's why that ATM seems to be running embedded DOS now...
Wait a minute - NNTP isn't a Microsoft protocol. Surely there must be some mistake here?
That's nothing - wait until e911 is implemented in the U.S. and your wireless company will be able to track your location to within 10 meters or so. It remains to be seen whether users will be able to deactivate the locator service if they are not making a 911 call, but it sounds like the wireless companies want this to be left up to them. Which means that if you care about privacy you'll want to figure out which traces to cut in your phone to disconnect the GPS.
Well, we still have their faces up on a mountain in Georgia I think, so to some of the U.S. they still are patriots.
You are nuts.
In Illinois at least, the power to run an entire household (ok, with gas heat but otherwise all electric) is cheaper than the cost of my internet access for the month, it's cheaper than my phone bill for the month, in fact the electric bill is about the cheapest bill that I have to pay every month. Maybe you folks in California should just not destroy your power industry, and it will treat you right in return :)
Oh yeah, and 75% of this cheap power is nuclear which probably helps a lot with the cost since it doesn't fluctuate like gas/oil. Although we're in trouble if there's ever an accident, I admit.
I don't see how a read-only ftpd is a particular protection; I could send a hand-crafted get request that smashes the stack just as easily to that ftp server. Unless by read-only you mean chrooted or run with the root drive mounted ro so that the ftpd user really can't write to anything important, but then again I could do that with any other ftpd as well. If publicfile is all audited and such then I agree it is probably more secure (not that the insecurity of wu-ftpd is a surprise) but I don't think it is because it is read-only.
Security provided by passwords and encryption are based on shared secrets (or for public-key cryptography, mathematical properties of prime numbers). The only thing that has to be hidden is the secret, which cannot be determined by an attacker, even with knowledge of the algorithm, in less time than it would take to brute force guess the secret. Security through obscurity is more of the case where your protocol itself is broken, so that you must keep both the shared secret and the protocol as well secret. The reason that this is so much less secure is because there are an infinite variety of shared secret passwords to choose, but only so many protocols. Once a broken protocol is cracked it is cracked for everyone that uses it; once your password is guessed it only affects you.
So in each case there is something that must be protected from being found out; but the chances of the thing being found out and the consequences if it is found out are vastly different.
Woops, sorry. ethereal gets back to work...
This was a recent /. story concerning a proposed settlement of private antitrust cases against Microsoft. Their proposed penalty was to donate $1.1 billion worth of software to schools. Presumably they would write off this entire amount. It should also be available on news.com, the register, etc.
The "ex post facto" protection means that you cannot be prosecuted for actions that are now illegal but were legal when you did them. "ex post facto" only applies to the passage of new laws, not to a judicial reinterpretation of an existing law.
So Ebay was holding users to a higher standard than it turns out the law actually requires. I don't know if this would be grounds for a civil suit, though - Ebay can do pretty much whatever they want on their private servers, you know.
IANAL and haven't slept much of late, though.
But if the FBI told your security goons not to tell you that they were there, you wouldn't expect them to do that, would you? If you are paying for information about what is going on with your property, and your employees/virus software aren't providing that information, you'd be a little upset, right?
This is totally aside from any War On Drugs^WTerrorism "secret warrants" that allow your property to be searched without telling you, of course. When the government has to employ tools like those to catch criminals, maybe it's time to say that we can live with some level of crime...