I use Mozilla for the day to day browsing but I still have to use IE to access my online banking application.
In a bizarre twist, I can use Mozilla 1.5 RC2 with my bank's web site, and it works much better than the same site in IE. What's frustrating is that Firebird won't render the pages at all.
China (being the modern purveyor and possibly last hope of open technology)
Maybe you were trying to be funny, but this is the real future. China is our guarantee against Microsoft's attempts to lock out competing OSes at the hardware level.
Capitalism is atrocious at distributing the fruits of innovation. Each labor-saving device means the idling of thousands of people, wasting their years of experience, rigorous training, and practical insights.
Riiiight. So it would be better to await a State agency to reassign me to work at the broom factory than for me to use my intelligence and imagination to come up with a new way to make money on my own. No thank you. And I don't get how exactly people's abilities are "wasted" just because they lost their jobs. The only "waste" would be to continue to pay them for unneeded services.
Capitalism has a few flaws, and its proponents usually have some misguided ideas (clue stick: governmental regulation is one of the exercises of a free market), but it sucks far less than the alternatives.
Losing the telephone tax base is not the end of the world - governments will increase the revenue stream elsewhere.
This is a Good Thing(tm). The fewer tax streams, the better. It is vastly preferable to be taxed once (say, on income and capital gains, because it needs to be progressive) and be done with it. Taxing citizens 2-5 times on the same money only creates government incentives that are hard to manage. This is a prime example -- government effectively working against the people because of a too-complex tax picture.
People have already pointed out the one interesting paragraph in the article (i.e., the music exec stealing a Forrester report). The article should have stopped there. I despise this kind of "culture analysis" article that aims to shed light on those rascally inscrutable teenagers. It reminds me of Better Off Dead, where the father reads a book called "How to Talk to Teenagers" and tries out slang but screws it up, e.g., "Right off!"
Here some great lines from the NYT article:
use your pirated e-mail program to send tidbits to your hundred closest friends. Uh, what? Who the hell pirates an email program?
If this is the democracy of the copy, it is enough to make one long for the elitism of creative genius. This is annoying in oh so many ways. OF COURSE people copy what artists create. It's normal behavior. In fact, it's normal for artists to copy other artists too. I'm really getting fed up with this idea that "creative genius" pops out of nowhere and isn't itself somehow a copy or a derivative.
Under that logic it is a perfectly valid concern that a SCO employee might "inevitably" bring some SCO IP into the company and result in SCO filing a lawsuit.
Exactly right. As a project manager you can't allow an ex-SCO engineer to code on one of your projects. Do you think it would take one week or two before you were sued for SCO IP in your software? According to SCO, simply being around their sacred code taints everything you do afterward. Well, so it does.
Re:Go Big Blue!
on
Back To SCO
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Generally accurate.
No. Not accurate. From the grandparent:
So, I think steal applies [to alleged copied code in Linux], at least according to dictionary.com, because to steal is to take property, and property can be somethign intangible like a copyright.
Absolute hogwash. If you were to abscond with the copyright itself, then perhaps you would have stolen something, because only one entity can claim to have the copyright on a work. However, making a copy does not constitute theft. Please, please research common law on property. Property theft is a crime because it deprives the rightful owner of his possessions. "Offenses" such as copyright infringement are not crimes.
Many people go out and buy music based about what they download from p2p networks. I myself have done that.
Yes, me too. Maybe this is a hint about how the RIAA could push something softer into legislature. What if it was legitimate to trade music below a certain sampling rate, i.e., radio quality or lower? Then it would only fall into the category of a copyright offense if you shared high-quality tracks. Seems like both ends of the spectrum get served by that.
Note I'm not saying "make a law against sharing high-quality audio." If the copyright holder wants to share high quality stuff, go for it. I'm only saying you cannot be sued for sharing low quality tracks.
[A non-infringing use] does not affect the moral, ethecial or legal status of Copyright Infringement.
Actually, it does. There is a great deal of confusion on/. about the difference between a crime an a civil offense, so perhaps you can be forgiven./me gets up on soapbox
Copyright "infringement" is what we might call an actionable offense. It falls into the same class of issues as contract violations. Breaking a contract is not "against the law" -- the police aren't going to arrest you. The law says that if you copy something without the author's permission then the author can choose whether or not he/she has been maligned, and if so he/she may try to seek damages from you by bringing the matter in front of a judge who also has to agree that damage has taken place. And even if they both agree and the judge makes you pay, you still haven't "broken the law." (Now if you refuse to pay like the judge asked, THEN you will have broken the law.)
Copyright infringement is neither immoral, nor unethical, nor illegal. It's merely actionable. The very excellent reason for this is that it cannot be determined whether you damaged a copyright holder by copying his/her work except by examining each case as it comes along. As we see in this case, unauthorized copying does not necessarily damage the copyright holder. No harm, no foul as we used to say.
It's adherents sure act like fundamentalists whenever someone deigns to question their closely held beliefs. "Prove to me X exists". I say prove it doesn't.
You don't know anything about skepticism or the scientific method, do you? We "adherents" simply like to draw rational, testable conclusions based on careful observation. Virtually all pseudoscience goes at this the opposite way -- making a statement about the world first and then looking for evidence to back it up, or as in this case, brush off critics by daring them to "prove it doesn't exist." The problem with this approach is that you can make essentially any claim, such as "undetectable intelligent carrots from outer space are controlling us with magic mind-beams." I assure you it's impossible to prove this idea wrong, but that does not make it a good theory about the world.
I suggest the resistance you detect from scientists and skeptics lies with your sheer lack of observable evidence. It is possible that they are wrong and you are right (all scientists know how easy it is to come to the wrong conclusion about something), but they won't even want to start talking about your ideas without looking at the evidence first.
I always liked the hidden commentary in the movie Chain Reaction that someone really did discover cold fusion but it has been massively covered up by existing power interests (e.g., oil, coal). Surely nonesense, because this is a genie that would not go back in the bottle if it was true, but if cold fusion really was developed you can bet your ass we'd see Congress trying to pass some kind of doublespeak like "Protecting Home Access to Electricity Act" which makes it illegal to purchase non-coal generated electricity.
Nice spin job. Here's some observations about the study you quote:
The definition of "firearm" is never given, and individual countries were left to define that term on their own.
The agency which did the shooting is never specified. Anyone want to bet that Israel did not include "military" (ahem) shootings? I further wager that Arabic deaths didn't figure in their numbers.
Other countries do not have such anti-gun agendas, and will look to minimize these figures by using the above two points to exclude deaths from their figures. The U.S., however, is full of anti-gun zealots and will look to maximize these figures.
They told police they were emulating Grand Theft Auto on the night of June 25 when they took shotguns to Interstate 40, near their Newport, Tenn., home, and opened fire on vehicles.
ABC news burns me up. I hate their spin^H^H^H^Hreporting. If these kids were using shotguns then they must have been leaping onto passing autos and shooting point-blank into the windshields. ABC's anti-gun editors are using RIAA math, where.22 caliber is the "equivalent" of a shotgun.
This will be problematic for MS in ways they don't imagine. High level managers and executives may think they want information locked down, but it always works against their interests in the end -- if businesses buy into Office 2003 and use the DRM features, the speed of information flowing through their company will dramatically slow down. That is always bad for any company. So there will be one of two outcomes: either (1) business will buy into Office 2003 and get burned or (2) business [those with savvy executives] will avoid this upgrade (exactly the opposite of what MS wanted to happen).
Rights are something that everybody has, and they have to be protected. She is innocent until proven guilty.
Quick U.S. law primer for citizens.
I agree with your sentiment, i.e., that due process protects citizens from bullying by the government and/or powerful interest groups. However, you are confusing criminal law with civil law. No one is found "innocent" or "guilty" in a civil case, and there is no doctrine of "innocent until proven guilty" in civil law. In civil cases, it's just about whether someone's conduct caused [financial] harm to another party, which must be established only with a preponderance of evidence (as opposed to "beyond a reasonable doubt" as in criminal cases).
This goes for posts above saying the RIAA should have to file complaints with the police vis-a-vis file trading. No. File trading -- and copyright infringement in general -- isn't criminal conduct (yet).
SCO may eventually make other claims that all of Linux is their stolen property
Um, hello? SCO already does this. That's the basis of their licensing scam^H^H^H^Hprogram for Linux. They claim that since, er, 14 trillion lines of code have been copied verbatim into Linux, that Linux is an unauthorized derivative of Unix. Here is an example article detailing their claims.
What's next, computer lawyers, computer judges?...This reminds me of the Simpsons.
How about Futurama? The episode where Fry and Leela go to rescue Bender from the planet of robots (who hate all humans). They end up getting caught and tried in a robot court for the crime of being humans. The judge is a Macintosh SE and when the prosecution's case is presented, there's a little Mac bleep and a progress bar appears on the screen that says "Judging...".
Ted has some interesting thoughts, particularly how online game-based economics (Star Wars Galaxies, EverQuest, Lineage, etc.) will eventually serve as the bases for "real governments."
That's great. In the future, a 13-year-old named "a55ha1rZ" who bots 24 hours a day is going to be a government heavyweight.
But for the love of god and all that is holy, WHY are they fighting so hard against paper records?
[Cynicism ON] Maybe you don't understand. You see, in the political parties' view the problem with Florida in 2000 wasn't the lack of integrity in the voting system, it was that they had too hard a time tampering with the results. In an all-electronic, non-reviewable voting system, nobody in the voting public can see whether the votes were tampered with. I anticipate more "surprising" election results in the future. [Cynicism OFF]
This next election is important
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Saving the Net
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· Score: 1
Think about this. If everyone who reads/. voted a particular way this next election, for the candidate who "gets it" more, we will swing the election.
It's not just the President, either. Take a look at Senators and Representatives, too. You don't even have to do an in-depth analysis. If your Senator doesn't get it, vote him/her out. Period. You might even get away with simply voting younger. If the average age of Congress dropped 20 years we'd have a different government.
The issue here is that IBM licensed some code and SCO is claiming that IBM then used this licensed code in Linux.
NO. IBM did not license any of the technologies in question from SCO. What SCO is claiming is that even though the code was developed by IBM (during AIX and OS/2 development) that SCO has exclusive rights over it because it constitutes a derivative of Unix. This affects Linux because now that this "Unix derivative" code is in Linux, SCO claims Linux is a derivative of Unix.
If you're going to quote SCO's bullshit lies, get it right!
Awesome paragraph from LinuxJournal
on
My Visit to SCO
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· Score: 3, Insightful
It's worth noting that if a court does accept such a broad notion of derivative work, it will weaken SCO's defense against the allegations that Linux code was copied into UnixWare. That would seem to put SCO on the horns of a dilemma; I don't know how it plans to resolve it.
Bingo. As a Linux distributor, SCO was looking at Linux source code. SCO was also developing UnixWare. Now SCO's argument is that because you have access to the Unix source, anything you write into Linux is necessarily a derivative of Unix. So likewise, because SCO had access to the Linux source, anything they develop in UnixWare is a derivative of Linux. Oh, dear, I guess UnixWare is GPL now.
Slashdot Mirror
In a bizarre twist, I can use Mozilla 1.5 RC2 with my bank's web site, and it works much better than the same site in IE. What's frustrating is that Firebird won't render the pages at all.
Maybe you were trying to be funny, but this is the real future. China is our guarantee against Microsoft's attempts to lock out competing OSes at the hardware level.
I am simply stretching a new canvas on which others may spread their oils
Okay, that's just gross.
Riiiight. So it would be better to await a State agency to reassign me to work at the broom factory than for me to use my intelligence and imagination to come up with a new way to make money on my own. No thank you. And I don't get how exactly people's abilities are "wasted" just because they lost their jobs. The only "waste" would be to continue to pay them for unneeded services.
Capitalism has a few flaws, and its proponents usually have some misguided ideas (clue stick: governmental regulation is one of the exercises of a free market), but it sucks far less than the alternatives.
This is a Good Thing(tm). The fewer tax streams, the better. It is vastly preferable to be taxed once (say, on income and capital gains, because it needs to be progressive) and be done with it. Taxing citizens 2-5 times on the same money only creates government incentives that are hard to manage. This is a prime example -- government effectively working against the people because of a too-complex tax picture.
Here some great lines from the NYT article:
use your pirated e-mail program to send tidbits to your hundred closest friends. Uh, what? Who the hell pirates an email program?
If this is the democracy of the copy, it is enough to make one long for the elitism of creative genius. This is annoying in oh so many ways. OF COURSE people copy what artists create. It's normal behavior. In fact, it's normal for artists to copy other artists too. I'm really getting fed up with this idea that "creative genius" pops out of nowhere and isn't itself somehow a copy or a derivative.
Exactly right. As a project manager you can't allow an ex-SCO engineer to code on one of your projects. Do you think it would take one week or two before you were sued for SCO IP in your software? According to SCO, simply being around their sacred code taints everything you do afterward. Well, so it does.
No. Not accurate. From the grandparent:
So, I think steal applies [to alleged copied code in Linux], at least according to dictionary.com, because to steal is to take property, and property can be somethign intangible like a copyright.
Absolute hogwash. If you were to abscond with the copyright itself, then perhaps you would have stolen something, because only one entity can claim to have the copyright on a work. However, making a copy does not constitute theft. Please, please research common law on property. Property theft is a crime because it deprives the rightful owner of his possessions. "Offenses" such as copyright infringement are not crimes.
Yes, me too. Maybe this is a hint about how the RIAA could push something softer into legislature. What if it was legitimate to trade music below a certain sampling rate, i.e., radio quality or lower? Then it would only fall into the category of a copyright offense if you shared high-quality tracks. Seems like both ends of the spectrum get served by that.
Note I'm not saying "make a law against sharing high-quality audio." If the copyright holder wants to share high quality stuff, go for it. I'm only saying you cannot be sued for sharing low quality tracks.
Actually, it does. There is a great deal of confusion on /. about the difference between a crime an a civil offense, so perhaps you can be forgiven. /me gets up on soapbox
Copyright "infringement" is what we might call an actionable offense. It falls into the same class of issues as contract violations. Breaking a contract is not "against the law" -- the police aren't going to arrest you. The law says that if you copy something without the author's permission then the author can choose whether or not he/she has been maligned, and if so he/she may try to seek damages from you by bringing the matter in front of a judge who also has to agree that damage has taken place. And even if they both agree and the judge makes you pay, you still haven't "broken the law." (Now if you refuse to pay like the judge asked, THEN you will have broken the law.)
Copyright infringement is neither immoral, nor unethical, nor illegal. It's merely actionable. The very excellent reason for this is that it cannot be determined whether you damaged a copyright holder by copying his/her work except by examining each case as it comes along. As we see in this case, unauthorized copying does not necessarily damage the copyright holder. No harm, no foul as we used to say.
You don't know anything about skepticism or the scientific method, do you? We "adherents" simply like to draw rational, testable conclusions based on careful observation. Virtually all pseudoscience goes at this the opposite way -- making a statement about the world first and then looking for evidence to back it up, or as in this case, brush off critics by daring them to "prove it doesn't exist." The problem with this approach is that you can make essentially any claim, such as "undetectable intelligent carrots from outer space are controlling us with magic mind-beams." I assure you it's impossible to prove this idea wrong, but that does not make it a good theory about the world.
I suggest the resistance you detect from scientists and skeptics lies with your sheer lack of observable evidence. It is possible that they are wrong and you are right (all scientists know how easy it is to come to the wrong conclusion about something), but they won't even want to start talking about your ideas without looking at the evidence first.
Nice spin job. Here's some observations about the study you quote:
/rant off
They told police they were emulating Grand Theft Auto on the night of June 25 when they took shotguns to Interstate 40, near their Newport, Tenn., home, and opened fire on vehicles.
ABC news burns me up. I hate their spin^H^H^H^Hreporting. If these kids were using shotguns then they must have been leaping onto passing autos and shooting point-blank into the windshields. ABC's anti-gun editors are using RIAA math, where .22 caliber is the "equivalent" of a shotgun.
Plink, plink.
Holy crap! I suggest you immediately step away from the computer screen, pack a bag, and move out of your parents' basement.
Imagine saying that in 1980. Maybe in 2025 we'll be cheering Microsoft for taking on some new creepy company. [Sound of head exploding.]
Quick U.S. law primer for citizens.
I agree with your sentiment, i.e., that due process protects citizens from bullying by the government and/or powerful interest groups. However, you are confusing criminal law with civil law. No one is found "innocent" or "guilty" in a civil case, and there is no doctrine of "innocent until proven guilty" in civil law. In civil cases, it's just about whether someone's conduct caused [financial] harm to another party, which must be established only with a preponderance of evidence (as opposed to "beyond a reasonable doubt" as in criminal cases).
This goes for posts above saying the RIAA should have to file complaints with the police vis-a-vis file trading. No. File trading -- and copyright infringement in general -- isn't criminal conduct (yet).
Um, hello? SCO already does this. That's the basis of their licensing scam^H^H^H^Hprogram for Linux. They claim that since, er, 14 trillion lines of code have been copied verbatim into Linux, that Linux is an unauthorized derivative of Unix. Here is an example article detailing their claims.
How about Futurama? The episode where Fry and Leela go to rescue Bender from the planet of robots (who hate all humans). They end up getting caught and tried in a robot court for the crime of being humans. The judge is a Macintosh SE and when the prosecution's case is presented, there's a little Mac bleep and a progress bar appears on the screen that says "Judging...".
That's great. In the future, a 13-year-old named "a55ha1rZ" who bots 24 hours a day is going to be a government heavyweight.
[Cynicism ON] Maybe you don't understand. You see, in the political parties' view the problem with Florida in 2000 wasn't the lack of integrity in the voting system, it was that they had too hard a time tampering with the results. In an all-electronic, non-reviewable voting system, nobody in the voting public can see whether the votes were tampered with. I anticipate more "surprising" election results in the future. [Cynicism OFF]
It's not just the President, either. Take a look at Senators and Representatives, too. You don't even have to do an in-depth analysis. If your Senator doesn't get it, vote him/her out. Period. You might even get away with simply voting younger. If the average age of Congress dropped 20 years we'd have a different government.
NO. IBM did not license any of the technologies in question from SCO. What SCO is claiming is that even though the code was developed by IBM (during AIX and OS/2 development) that SCO has exclusive rights over it because it constitutes a derivative of Unix. This affects Linux because now that this "Unix derivative" code is in Linux, SCO claims Linux is a derivative of Unix.
If you're going to quote SCO's bullshit lies, get it right!
Bingo. As a Linux distributor, SCO was looking at Linux source code. SCO was also developing UnixWare. Now SCO's argument is that because you have access to the Unix source, anything you write into Linux is necessarily a derivative of Unix. So likewise, because SCO had access to the Linux source, anything they develop in UnixWare is a derivative of Linux. Oh, dear, I guess UnixWare is GPL now.