free speech means I can make all the baseless claims and lie all I want. What I can't do is yell "fire" in a crowded movie theater (the classic example).
In a way that's just what SCO was doing: Spreading FUD by claiming that there were lawsuits coming when in reality there wasn't any base to that. That's not so different from yelling "fire" in a theatre.
Right now, I'm sitting on the beach typing this and that later today I'm going to take a long drive in my Ferrari.
See, that was a lie! I'm sitting in my cubicle right now! But according to your definition of free speech, I just committed a crime by lying where I am and what I'm doing.
Cut me some slack here, okay? I admit that my wording there wasn't very exact. (IANAL, and neither is English my first language.)
I was not referring to personal conversation, I was referring to libel and slander. If you're lying about your whereabouts, that's not a crime, of course, and it never should be. (Technically, SCO didn't commit crimes, either - they're not being punished for what they said, they're only not allowed to repeat it unless they can beef it up with facts.) But if you're publicly making wrong accusations against someone else, that person should be able to stop you from making those accusations.
Again: Imagine I had a big newspaper and I had it in for you: Would you like me to be able to print big headlines with false accusations against you again and again with no way to stop me? (Fining won't help much - my imaginary self would have enough money to pay that without a wink.)
Or if you had a company and I was a bigger competitor routing claims to the media that your prooduct was somehow defective or dangerous. Shouldn't there be a way to stop me from doing that?
Note that the court order in the article wasn't simply given out of a whim - it was after fact checking that the court concluded that there wasn't enough to back those claims but that they had the potential to hurt SCO's competition.
I agree that it's difficult where to draw the line there, again mainly because IANAL, but free speech does not mean that you're powerless against efficient slanderers. There should be a way to say: "Either give me some proof or shut up."
That all-caps line isn't so nice a thing to post (pre-1945 national anthem, forbidden to sing in Germany). The intend is warmly received, the wording is not.;-)
Just for the record: While I agree that people shouldn't sing/shout/whatever that line, it's technically not forbidden. It even used be part of the anthem. The base text of the anthem is "Das Lied der Deutschen" by Hoffmann von Fallersleben which is from the 19th century. Until 1990, all the verses made up the anthem, it was just that only the 3rd verse was sung. They changed that after the re-unification, now the anthem is officially only the 3rd verse. However you're still allowed to print, read or sing all the verses. (Different from some Nazi-era songs or slogans which could really get you into legal trouble.)
However, I agree: Just because it isn't forbidden doesn't mean you should do it, because it most certainly wouldn't make you look good.
I don't know about that - it's not about denying free speech, it's about disallowing groundless claims. If you were an innocent citizen and I were someone with enough media clout to send out the message that you're a murderer over all available news outlets, you'd probably try to get a court order to stop me from doing that, as well. And rightly so.
Free speech is fine when we're talking about opinions and facts - it shouldn't protect lying and baseless claims.
Yes, but if it's GPL, they must make it available by other means, as well (which they dont't).
There's not d/l-link for the source or binaries anywhere.
If it's not GPL'd but covered by their "OpenOSX WinTel-License" instead, I'd like to see a copy of that license, but there isn't one anywhere on the website.
the only thing that has the capability of lifting enough nukes into an intercept course to hit it early enough to get a good deflection vector. Of course the eco freaks won't like the idea of Orion being nuclear powered...
Erm... If you're using a series of explosions to blast nuclear warheads into space, there'd be a risk of potential fallout in case of a failure, no matter what technology you'd use to generate the explosions - nuclear warheads have a tendency to be radioactive themselves...
Besides: Orion would be "nuclear powered" not in the semi-clean sense of power plants ("Clean unless there's a disastrous failure and if you know a place to store the leftovers for the next couple of thousands of years."), but rather in the sense of an atmospheric nuclear weapons test ("Sure to generate radioactive fallout which will eventually contaminate some area somewhere."), so you don't have to be an "eco freak" to doubt its feasibility.
If the danger were much greater, it might be considered an option, but for now it looks as if there's not much to worry about anyway.
I'm trying really hard to think of anything negative coming out of this for the Average Joe, but I can't find anything.
A "police state" is generally a state in which there is little or no privacy.
The stated application - reconstructing faces from skulls - doesn't seem to have any privacy implications whatsoever. And I simply can't think of any application for this technology that'd violate or diminish my privacy.
Until we stop politically cowtowing to "eco-nuts", "consumer advocates". and other neo-luddites this is going to keep happening.
Interesting: Apparently this whole thing came about because of excess power consumption (among a combination of other factors). Yet you're trying to put the blame on those people who advocate reducing power consumption and conserving energy.
we're a living in a tech world now. We need the power.
IIRC, no other country needs as much energy per capita as the USA. European countries have a similar standard of living without the energy consumption.
There are so many copies of old aracade, C64, etc.games already out there, that I don't think it'll make much of a difference whether people are allowed to share them or not.
C64 file trading took off long before the internet was popular and at a time when there was actual money to be made with that software (for the publishers, not the swappers). Nowadays it's easier to share the files and furthermore the target market for those games is so small that most companies probably won't bother paying the legal fees to protect software that won't bring in any money.
That'd only be reasonable if you get a hight enough number of spams.
Up to now, I'm lucky - currently, spam accounts for less than 10% of my incoming mail and most of that comes in via the alternate freemailer account that's victim to brute force spamming every other day. (I don't leave my main mail address at many places across the net.)
It's such a small amount that I could almost ignore it, but instead i use it to train my POPFile installation which is already very good at sorting not only spam, but all kinds of other stuff, as well: Private mail from work related mail - family mail from those of friends, mailing lists, etc.
In any case, requiring all my legitimate contacs to white-list themselves is overkill for my situation. Jens
Bertelsmann isn't just a shareholder: They were the last owner of Napster (the company) which, AFAIK, is now dissolved, with Napster (the brand name) sold to Roxio.
So by buying Napster, Bertelsmann probably pretty much "inherited" Napster's problems and lawsuits. (Plus, I imagine, any financial liabilities.)
It is unclear when the Constitutional Court will definitely decide[...]
I'm a German, but since IANAL, my legalese isn't up to scratch, so I might be wrong here, but I think that in the press release it says something about a 6 month time frame:
Der Zweite Senat des Bundesverfassungsgerichts hat heute[...] der Präsidentin des Oberlandesgerichts Düsseldorf für die Dauer von sechs Monaten, längstens bis zu einer Entscheidung über die Verfassungsbeschwerde untersagt, die [...] Schadensersatzklage [..] zustellen zu lassen.
Rough translation:
"The 2nd chamber of the constitutional court today ruled that the president of the Düsseldorf court may not serve the writ for a six month time period, or at the utmost until there's been a decision about the constitutional complaint."
Now there's probably a lot been lost in the translation, but to me this sounds like the court isn't allowed to serve the writ until either the constitutional court has made a decision or 6 months have passed.
But again, IANAL and I may very well have mis-interpreted (and thus mis-translated) that part.
I'm not an X-Plane user myself, so I don't know how difficult it is to build a model that actually flies. If the physics are really realistic, that'd be quite a challenge. The plane building program will probably lend you a hand, though...
Their intention, one assumes, would have been "to protect U.S. desktop operating system makers", but in 1989 that meant Microsoft and, well, Microsoft.
What about Apple? Had M$ already won the desktop by 1989?
To get this back on topic: AFAIK, all of Apple's online stores (it has them for various countries) only sell to people living in the respective countries, and I'm afraid the feeling in Cupertino is that the Mac market share in Hungary is too small to warrant a localized online store with all the additional costs. (Call center, etc.) And the ITMS is, as you probably know, all tangled up in complicated European licensing issues - there's no European equivalent for the RIAA and even within single countries, the labels can't seem to agree on a common policy.
Will Amazon.com sell you DVDs? They should - there isn't that much of a warranty issue with them and I can get them overe here in Germany without any problem.
(BTW, if you're in the market for US-DVDs and Amazon won't sell them to you, try play.com or dvdboxoffice.com )
As for the earlier post that mentioned Hungary's countryside: I sure hope it's beautiful; I'll be visting Budapest a month from now.:-)
A while ago, I found out a way to try out different mailers without having to migrate my mails:
I have an IMAP server running on my system. Its inboxes are being filled using perl scripts that get the mails from my POP3-accounts, sorting spam, mailing lists, etc. via POPFile.
Just took me an evening to set up, and now I can use any IMAP compatible mailer I desire. (As a bonus, I get complete access to all my mails from both my dektop and laptop.)
In Germany, they're planning on broadcasting only digital signals over the air by 2010. That way, you'd get dozens of channels over the air. There's a pilot project underway for this in Berlin right now.
Not quite true. Automation leads to higher productivity, meaning one worker can produce more.
As long as there's enough demand, people can get new jobs. This happened,e.g, when new technologies killed off many jobs in the agriculture sector: People went to the cities to work in factories.
At the moment, however, I don't see the Next Big Thing that'll generate the jobs lost to automation. I don't the killer product that'll create a huge demand and'll lead to millions of jobs. Many thought, the internet would bring that on, but, as we all know now, that wasn't the case.
- Automatization leads to fewer and fewer workers being needed to do the same amount of work, meaning higher profits for the producer. - Outsourcing leads to those workers being paid less and less , meaning again higher profits. - This, in turn leads to higher unemployment rates and a higher number of workers with low wages. - While any individual company might profit from cost-cutting measures, wide-scaled implementation of these measures will lead to too few consumers with enough money to buy the products. - Thus, to keep the system going, those profiting from it - the producers - must eventually give back enough of the profits to keep the whole thing going, otherwise the distribution of wealth will be too uneven to allow the system to work.
(If you happen to be immoral, other possible ways to boost the economy would be forceful destruction of goods and/or workers, which would a) create the need for rebuilding the destroyed goods and b) lower unemployment, because after the destruction there'd be not only more work but also less workers left. This process is commonly known as "war".)
I don't think any format will get Ebooks to catch on until we have reader hardware that makes reading those books at least as pleasant as reading a paper book.
Slashdot Mirror
free speech means I can make all the baseless claims and lie all I want. What I can't do is yell "fire" in a crowded movie theater (the classic example).
In a way that's just what SCO was doing: Spreading FUD by claiming that there were lawsuits coming when in reality there wasn't any base to that. That's not so different from yelling "fire" in a theatre.
Right now, I'm sitting on the beach typing this and that later today I'm going to take a long drive in my Ferrari.
See, that was a lie! I'm sitting in my cubicle right now! But according to your definition of free speech, I just committed a crime by lying where I am and what I'm doing.
Cut me some slack here, okay? I admit that my wording there wasn't very exact. (IANAL, and neither is English my first language.)
I was not referring to personal conversation, I was referring to libel and slander. If you're lying about your whereabouts, that's not a crime, of course, and it never should be. (Technically, SCO didn't commit crimes, either - they're not being punished for what they said, they're only not allowed to repeat it unless they can beef it up with facts.) But if you're publicly making wrong accusations against someone else, that person should be able to stop you from making those accusations.
Again: Imagine I had a big newspaper and I had it in for you: Would you like me to be able to print big headlines with false accusations against you again and again with no way to stop me? (Fining won't help much - my imaginary self would have enough money to pay that without a wink.)
Or if you had a company and I was a bigger competitor routing claims to the media that your prooduct was somehow defective or dangerous. Shouldn't there be a way to stop me from doing that?
Note that the court order in the article wasn't simply given out of a whim - it was after fact checking that the court concluded that there wasn't enough to back those claims but that they had the potential to hurt SCO's competition.
I agree that it's difficult where to draw the line there, again mainly because IANAL, but free speech does not mean that you're powerless against efficient slanderers. There should be a way to say: "Either give me some proof or shut up."
Baumi
That all-caps line isn't so nice a thing to post (pre-1945 national anthem, forbidden to sing in Germany). The intend is warmly received, the wording is not. ;-)
Just for the record: While I agree that people shouldn't sing/shout/whatever that line, it's technically not forbidden. It even used be part of the anthem.
The base text of the anthem is "Das Lied der Deutschen" by Hoffmann von Fallersleben which is from the 19th century. Until 1990, all the verses made up the anthem, it was just that only the 3rd verse was sung. They changed that after the re-unification, now the anthem is officially only the 3rd verse. However you're still allowed to print, read or sing all the verses. (Different from some Nazi-era songs or slogans which could really get you into legal trouble.)
However, I agree: Just because it isn't forbidden doesn't mean you should do it, because it most certainly wouldn't make you look good.
Baumi
I don't know about that - it's not about denying free speech, it's about disallowing groundless claims. If you were an innocent citizen and I were someone with enough media clout to send out the message that you're a murderer over all available news outlets, you'd probably try to get a court order to stop me from doing that, as well. And rightly so.
Free speech is fine when we're talking about opinions and facts - it shouldn't protect lying and baseless claims.
Baumi
Yes, but if it's GPL, they must make it available by other means, as well (which they dont't).
There's not d/l-link for the source or binaries anywhere.
If it's not GPL'd but covered by their "OpenOSX WinTel-License" instead, I'd like to see a copy of that license, but there isn't one anywhere on the website.
Jens
the only thing that has the capability of lifting enough nukes into an intercept course to hit it early enough to get a good deflection vector. Of course the eco freaks won't like the idea of Orion being nuclear powered...
Erm... If you're using a series of explosions to blast nuclear warheads into space, there'd be a risk of potential fallout in case of a failure, no matter what technology you'd use to generate the explosions - nuclear warheads have a tendency to be radioactive themselves...
Besides: Orion would be "nuclear powered" not in the semi-clean sense of power plants ("Clean unless there's a disastrous failure and if you know a place to store the leftovers for the next couple of thousands of years."), but rather in the sense of an atmospheric nuclear weapons test ("Sure to generate radioactive fallout which will eventually contaminate some area somewhere."), so you don't have to be an "eco freak" to doubt its feasibility.
If the danger were much greater, it might be considered an option, but for now it looks as if there's not much to worry about anyway.
I'm trying really hard to think of anything negative coming out of this for the Average Joe, but I can't find anything.
A "police state" is generally a state in which there is little or no privacy.
The stated application - reconstructing faces from skulls - doesn't seem to have any privacy implications whatsoever. And I simply can't think of any application for this technology that'd violate or diminish my privacy.
Anyone else?
Jens
Until we stop politically cowtowing to "eco-nuts", "consumer advocates". and other neo-luddites this is going to keep happening.
Interesting: Apparently this whole thing came about because of excess power consumption (among a combination of other factors). Yet you're trying to put the blame on those people who advocate reducing power consumption and conserving energy.
we're a living in a tech world now. We need the power.
IIRC, no other country needs as much energy per capita as the USA. European countries have a similar standard of living without the energy consumption.
Jens
They decided to declare the Laws of Physics invalid since they conflict with U.S. legislation.
There are so many copies of old aracade, C64, etc.games already out there, that I don't think it'll make much of a difference whether people are allowed to share them or not.
C64 file trading took off long before the internet was popular and at a time when there was actual money to be made with that software (for the publishers, not the swappers). Nowadays it's easier to share the files and furthermore the target market for those games is so small that most companies probably won't bother paying the legal fees to protect software that won't bring in any money.
Jens
Wouldn't they have to GPL the movie if they used Tux in it? Or is Tux LGPL'd?
When I read the headline I thought it'd be a story about Slashdot-forums. :-)
That'd only be reasonable if you get a hight enough number of spams.
Up to now, I'm lucky - currently, spam accounts for less than 10% of my incoming mail and most of that comes in via the alternate freemailer account that's victim to brute force spamming every other day. (I don't leave my main mail address at many places across the net.)
It's such a small amount that I could almost ignore it, but instead i use it to train my POPFile installation which is already very good at sorting not only spam, but all kinds of other stuff, as well: Private mail from work related mail - family mail from those of friends, mailing lists, etc.
In any case, requiring all my legitimate contacs to white-list themselves is overkill for my situation.
Jens
Bertelsmann isn't just a shareholder: They were the last owner of Napster (the company) which, AFAIK, is now dissolved, with Napster (the brand name) sold to Roxio.
So by buying Napster, Bertelsmann probably pretty much "inherited" Napster's problems and lawsuits. (Plus, I imagine, any financial liabilities.)
Jens
It is unclear when the Constitutional Court will definitely decide[...]
I'm a German, but since IANAL, my legalese isn't up to scratch, so I might be wrong here, but I think that in the press release it says something about a 6 month time frame:
Der Zweite Senat des Bundesverfassungsgerichts hat heute[...] der Präsidentin des Oberlandesgerichts Düsseldorf für die Dauer von sechs Monaten, längstens bis zu einer Entscheidung über die Verfassungsbeschwerde untersagt, die [...] Schadensersatzklage [..] zustellen zu lassen.
Rough translation:
"The 2nd chamber of the constitutional court today ruled that the president of the Düsseldorf court may not serve the writ for a six month time period, or at the utmost until there's been a decision about the constitutional complaint."
Now there's probably a lot been lost in the translation, but to me this sounds like the court isn't allowed to serve the writ until either the constitutional court has made a decision or 6 months have passed.
But again, IANAL and I may very well have mis-interpreted (and thus mis-translated) that part.
Jens
There's a bunch of user-built aircrafts available. X-Plane comes with an aircraft modelling program.
I'm not an X-Plane user myself, so I don't know how difficult it is to build a model that actually flies. If the physics are really realistic, that'd be quite a challenge. The plane building program will probably lend you a hand, though...
Baumi
I'm just waiting for the cybernetic implants which allow simulations indistinguishable from reality.
:-)
Who says you aren't living in one already?
Baumi
What about Apple? Had M$ already won the desktop by 1989?
Jens
Running a compiler using VPC would be too slow to get any real work done.
The Codewarrior option could work, however.
It used to be like that when the G4 came out, but the policy has long since been revised.
:-)
To get this back on topic: AFAIK, all of Apple's online stores (it has them for various countries) only sell to people living in the respective countries, and I'm afraid the feeling in Cupertino is that the Mac market share in Hungary is too small to warrant a localized online store with all the additional costs. (Call center, etc.)
And the ITMS is, as you probably know, all tangled up in complicated European licensing issues - there's no European equivalent for the RIAA and even within single countries, the labels can't seem to agree on a common policy.
Will Amazon.com sell you DVDs? They should - there isn't that much of a warranty issue with them and I can get them overe here in Germany without any problem.
(BTW, if you're in the market for US-DVDs and Amazon won't sell them to you, try play.com or dvdboxoffice.com )
As for the earlier post that mentioned Hungary's countryside: I sure hope it's beautiful; I'll be visting Budapest a month from now.
A while ago, I found out a way to try out different mailers without having to migrate my mails:
I have an IMAP server running on my system. Its inboxes are being filled using perl scripts that get the mails from my POP3-accounts, sorting spam, mailing lists, etc. via POPFile.
Just took me an evening to set up, and now I can use any IMAP compatible mailer I desire. (As a bonus, I get complete access to all my mails from both my dektop and laptop.)
In Germany, they're planning on broadcasting only digital signals over the air by 2010. That way, you'd get dozens of channels over the air.
There's a pilot project underway for this in Berlin right now.
I'm actually a little suprised at the heavy handedness Apple has shown with preventing the LAN streaming of mp3's all together.
What are you talking about? AFAIK LAN streaming is still working. Internet streaming has been neutered.
(However, 4.0 won't open streams originating from 4.0.1 machines.)
Not quite true. Automation leads to higher productivity, meaning one worker can produce more.
,e.g, when new technologies killed off many jobs in the agriculture sector: People went to the cities to work in factories.
As long as there's enough demand, people can get new jobs. This happened
At the moment, however, I don't see the Next Big Thing that'll generate the jobs lost to automation. I don't the killer product that'll create a huge demand and'll lead to millions of jobs. Many thought, the internet would bring that on, but, as we all know now, that wasn't the case.
Let's look at a few trends:
- Automatization leads to fewer and fewer workers being needed to do the same amount of work, meaning higher profits for the producer.
- Outsourcing leads to those workers being paid less and less , meaning again higher profits.
- This, in turn leads to higher unemployment rates and a higher number of workers with low wages.
- While any individual company might profit from cost-cutting measures, wide-scaled implementation of these measures will lead to too few consumers with enough money to buy the products.
- Thus, to keep the system going, those profiting from it - the producers - must eventually give back enough of the profits to keep the whole thing going, otherwise the distribution of wealth will be too uneven to allow the system to work.
(If you happen to be immoral, other possible ways to boost the economy would be forceful destruction of goods and/or workers, which would a) create the need for rebuilding the destroyed goods and b) lower unemployment, because after the destruction there'd be not only more work but also less workers left. This process is commonly known as "war".)
I don't think any format will get Ebooks to catch on until we have reader hardware that makes reading those books at least as pleasant as reading a paper book.
Here's hoping that all those e-paper efforts will produce something usable soon.