Particularly in the state of Illinois, this is not permittable. If you register with the Secretary of State as a sole proprietorship, partnership, LLC, LLP, or C-Corp you cannot use a P.O. Box as the registered business address.
What if you live in a rural area where a post office box is the only way that you have to receive mail? Or does everywhere in Illinois have door-to-door mail service?
This issue has come up in Canada a few times in the past. See this for numerous article and editiorial links regarding this matter.
It's my understanding that the main objection to software programmers being called "engineers" is that an engineer is liable for faults and mistakes. He follows definite principles of design (how many definite principles/laws of design do we have for software?) and certifies that his design meets all of the standards and so on. And he's liable if he certifies something incorrectly.
Do you want to be liable for a fault in the accounts receivable program that you wrote last week? "That will be ten million dollars, please." How about the fault that the black-hats found in your firewall that's currently being used by numerous large businesses?
Read some of the articles cited in the above link. It's truly interesting material.
take a look at Privoxy [privoxy.com] (from the guys that brought you junkbuster.
NOT from the guys that brought you junkbuster.
These are other guys, who picked up Junkbuster and developed it further after the junkbuster.com folks appeared to have abandoned further development themselves.
There are sections in law that allow open source projects to export strong encryption outside the United States, for example. I'm sure the dept of Homeland Security would simply love to wipe that section out
And...?
*shrug*
The USA doesn't have a monopoly on cryptographers, mathematicians or programmers, or on students or hobbyists interested in any of the above.
As the field of "permitted research" in the USA becomes more and more restricted, more and more research and development will simply be done elsewhere. The losing end of this deal, ultimately, will probably be the USA.
Easy fix: make it illegal to fire an employee for refusing excess overtime.. say 2 hours per week, or 40 hours total in any 90 day period. If the employee is OK with it, no problem.
There is still a potential problem. If I'm the boss and you refuse overtime and I can't fire you, I can still make life miserable for you. Suddenly you get the boring task that nobody else wants to undertake. Somehow you get "forgotten" when it comes time to hand out bonuses or other perks. Forget that promotion. And so on.
"Everyone else was ok with it" doesn't mean that it's really ok.
I remember seeing a C64 + 1541 drive with a FastDrive cartridge installed -- 5-10x speed increase (from something 100x too slow to begin with though;)). I was amazed. And I still don't know how it worked -- some sort of caching or somthing? Anyone know the basic idea?
That was the Epyx FastLoad cartridge. They worked by replacing the drive's firmware and basically bypassing the extensive error-checking that was normally done, basically by telling the drive, "Just give me the damn file".
There were also some software-only implementations of this. Epyx Vorpal was the most common commercial one; it was integrated into a number of their later C64 games. Compute! magazine also published one, TurboDisk or something similar to that as I recall.
Problem was the software in the 1541 was really bad, very slow.
I don't think the problem was the drive's firmware, as much as the design decisions that went into making the device in the first place. It was the fact that it was a 9600bps serial device that had substantial error-checking and so on going on all the time. It could be made several times faster using something like the Epyx FastLoad cartridge which bypassed most of the error checking and just loaded the damn file.
In other words, a decision was made to make the most reliable device possible rather than the fastest one. One could argue that point, of course, by pointing out the hard-stop at track 0 that the head would buzz against every time the drive was reset (several times, if the drive hit a bad block on the disk) that tended to knock the head out of alignment. But the idea was there.
The BSA's notice states that they make their claims under penalty of perjury.
As their information is easily shown to be false and incorrect, and as it's also easily shown that they should have known enough to check simple facts like these....
How about applying to the court for the application of the penalty for perjury, which I believe is time in jail, to the folks who are responsible for this obviously faulty notice that they obviously didn't bother to check for accuracy and that they themselves have sworn to the accuracy of.
Penalty of perjury isn't just a form of words like "How do you do" or "Have a nice day". The penalty is real and should be applied where warranted. The BSA requested the penalty for perjury in their notice. It should be delivered.
If you follow links they suggest, it asks you to buy their stuff before getting source code of the GPLed components.
The GPL doesn't require them to give the source code to every Tom, Dick and Harriet. Just to those who purchase/obtain the software from them. Therefore, if you buy it from them, they have to give you the source code. Until then they can legitimately tell you to go jump off a cliff.
No word on what to do if I got a Walmart PC.
In that case I believe that Walmart would be required to give you the source code as they were the vendor that sold it to you.
Perhaps, but neither of those will work. MBR is the Master Boot Record, which occupies the first sector on the boot track, only. The boot track has 64 sectors in total, 63 of them are generally "ignored" by the os ad everything else. This turbotax thing writes to sector 33 on the boot track, not to the MBR which is also on the boot track but not right there.
I'm still not 100% convinced it's boot sector, though, since changing the OS and writing a new B-S would kill it. It doesn't. It requires a ground-up "low-level format"
It's not the boot sector that it writes to, it's the boot TRACK. Track 0 has 64 sectors (generally) and the boot sector occupies only one. There are 63 other sectors there and this Turbotax thing writes to sector 33 on the boot track. That sector is normally "not used" and is not looked at by your operating system.
Barring that, I agree with another poster who suggests meeting in a room for a limited period of time with a printout of your credit report that you bring and take away from the meeting.
Shall I bring the one that I just printed out myself? I only made a few insignificant changes from the original....
There are also quite a few arcade roms that have been put into the public domain over the years.
No arcade rom that I'm aware of is "public domain", with the possible exception of PolyPlay, which was written in East Germany and the copyright holder has now vanished completely.
The only other games that are freely distributable by anyone are Gridlee and Robby Roto, both licensed by their respective copyright holders for free distribtuion for non-commercial use only. Which is a long way from public domain. See here for download information and the relevant licenses.
Not only is this true, but they have shipped a "MAME-Dev blessed" version of MAME in the past
That's not exactly the situation. It's not "MAMEdev-blessed", but rather more along the line of "let sleeping dogs lie" as far as MAMEdev is concerned in regard to the Capcom Classics disk.
Every company needs some sort of motivation for creating Open Source software. I'd hate to state the obvious, but if you want to make the opensource community attractive... there needs to be money involved somehow.
How about usefulness and getting the job done?
In a majority of situations, the software involved in doing a job is secondary to the actual job at hand. In other words, if I hire you to build me a desk I don't care if you use a circular saw, a hand saw, or a jigsaw to cut the lumber. As long as I get a nice-looking desk from you, I'm happy and you get your cheque.
Software is like that too. In most cases (other than proprietary software companies) the software is secondary. "Make it work." The incentive you mention is not direct cash-for-software, it's getting the job done as efficiently and economically as possible. If the job can be done efficiently using open-source software, and if the software needs improvement in order to get that job done, BLAMMO!
Make it clear to Borland that you are willing to cooperate in any way possible,
Reading this over, it strikes me that somewhere the relationship between supplier and customer has gone off of the rails in regard to commercial computer software of whatever type.
The "balance of power" has shifted from the customer (NOT "the consumer", by the way) to the vendor/supplier in some way.
"We will cooperate with Borland in any way possible." Pardon me? Since when should it be MY responsibility as a customer to "cooperate" with a company who theoretically wants to sell me more stuff and keep me coming back?
Hell, if I am a big customer and I want my next copy of their software to be delivered in a green plaid package they should be getting the green paint out!
What other industry is there where the supplier is in a position to basically threaten their customers, the customers bow to their demands however unreasonable, and then the customers, by golly, come back for more! "Sell me more software, please, I'll be good and give you more money. Kick me again!"
Truly amazing. As I said, I don't think there is any other industry that operates in this manner, or could.
You can always print out hard-copy and punch the hard copy into the company's time clock so it gets a date/time stamp marked upon it's physical self.
This won't work. I could time-stamp a blank sheet of paper and print whatever I wanted to on it at a later date. Same thing goes with those people who say "mail a registered letter to yourself". So I mailed myself an empty envelope and filled it later....
My ghawd. I don't think I've ever seen so many superscripted (tm) and (r) labels in a single paragraph or a single page before.
I suppose it could be worse; one day soon all of that stuff might be littered with "patent pending" and we all know how well the US patent office works.
he was still fully aware before he planted the 1998 crop (the one that the judgement against him addressed) that the seed he had was glyphosate resistant to a high degree.
So? If you deliver newspapers and leave one at my door every day even though I don't subscribe to the paper, am I not entitled to read it? And would I not be within my rights to tell you to go fly a kite if you came to me three weeks later on and said, "Hey, you have been reading the newspapers that I leave in your doorway - pay up!"
It would probably cost Wal-Mart less to just pay FatWallet's legal costs rather than go to court.
I think there is more to it than this. Or there damn well should be.
Somebody at Walmart swore under penalty of perjury that they owned the copyright to something that they now admit they don't own the copyright to.
That somebody should be going to jail for a long time; the courts view wilful perjury as a very serious offence.
So where's the sheriff and when will the raid on Walmart's corporate office begin so everyone can see the example of what happens when you abuse this draconian law in a deliberately fraudulent manner?
Slashdot Mirror
Particularly in the state of Illinois, this is not permittable. If you register with the Secretary of State as a sole proprietorship, partnership, LLC, LLP, or C-Corp you cannot use a P.O. Box as the registered business address.
What if you live in a rural area where a post office box is the only way that you have to receive mail? Or does everywhere in Illinois have door-to-door mail service?
And frankly our postal system is a bargain. Try sending 2 oz letter 3500 miles for $0.36 in any other country in the world.
48 cents in Canada, which is about 31 US cents at current exchange rates.
Try again.
This issue has come up in Canada a few times in the past. See this for numerous article and editiorial links regarding this matter.
It's my understanding that the main objection to software programmers being called "engineers" is that an engineer is liable for faults and mistakes. He follows definite principles of design (how many definite principles/laws of design do we have for software?) and certifies that his design meets all of the standards and so on. And he's liable if he certifies something incorrectly.
Do you want to be liable for a fault in the accounts receivable program that you wrote last week? "That will be ten million dollars, please." How about the fault that the black-hats found in your firewall that's currently being used by numerous large businesses?
Read some of the articles cited in the above link. It's truly interesting material.
take a look at Privoxy [privoxy.com] (from the guys that brought you junkbuster.
NOT from the guys that brought you junkbuster.
These are other guys, who picked up Junkbuster and developed it further after the junkbuster.com folks appeared to have abandoned further development themselves.
There are sections in law that allow open source projects to export strong encryption outside the United States, for example. I'm sure the dept of Homeland Security would simply love to wipe that section out
And...?
*shrug*
The USA doesn't have a monopoly on cryptographers, mathematicians or programmers, or on students or hobbyists interested in any of the above.
As the field of "permitted research" in the USA becomes more and more restricted, more and more research and development will simply be done elsewhere. The losing end of this deal, ultimately, will probably be the USA.
Easy fix: make it illegal to fire an employee for refusing excess overtime.. say 2 hours per week, or 40 hours total in any 90 day period. If the employee is OK with it, no problem.
There is still a potential problem. If I'm the boss and you refuse overtime and I can't fire you, I can still make life miserable for you. Suddenly you get the boring task that nobody else wants to undertake. Somehow you get "forgotten" when it comes time to hand out bonuses or other perks. Forget that promotion. And so on.
"Everyone else was ok with it" doesn't mean that it's really ok.
The phone co must have that info somewhere, or how would they know where to send the bill?
Prepaid cellphone minutes purchased at a convenience store. No record exists.
I remember seeing a C64 + 1541 drive with a FastDrive cartridge installed -- 5-10x speed increase (from something 100x too slow to begin with though ;)). I was amazed. And I still don't know how it worked -- some sort of caching or somthing? Anyone know the basic idea?
That was the Epyx FastLoad cartridge. They worked by replacing the drive's firmware and basically bypassing the extensive error-checking that was normally done, basically by telling the drive, "Just give me the damn file".
There were also some software-only implementations of this. Epyx Vorpal was the most common commercial one; it was integrated into a number of their later C64 games. Compute! magazine also published one, TurboDisk or something similar to that as I recall.
Problem was the software in the 1541 was really bad, very slow.
I don't think the problem was the drive's firmware, as much as the design decisions that went into making the device in the first place. It was the fact that it was a 9600bps serial device that had substantial error-checking and so on going on all the time. It could be made several times faster using something like the Epyx FastLoad cartridge which bypassed most of the error checking and just loaded the damn file.
In other words, a decision was made to make the most reliable device possible rather than the fastest one. One could argue that point, of course, by pointing out the hard-stop at track 0 that the head would buzz against every time the drive was reset (several times, if the drive hit a bad block on the disk) that tended to knock the head out of alignment. But the idea was there.
The BSA's notice states that they make their claims under penalty of perjury.
As their information is easily shown to be false and incorrect, and as it's also easily shown that they should have known enough to check simple facts like these....
How about applying to the court for the application of the penalty for perjury, which I believe is time in jail, to the folks who are responsible for this obviously faulty notice that they obviously didn't bother to check for accuracy and that they themselves have sworn to the accuracy of.
Penalty of perjury isn't just a form of words like "How do you do" or "Have a nice day". The penalty is real and should be applied where warranted. The BSA requested the penalty for perjury in their notice. It should be delivered.
If you follow links they suggest, it asks you to buy their stuff before getting source code of the GPLed components.
The GPL doesn't require them to give the source code to every Tom, Dick and Harriet. Just to those who purchase/obtain the software from them. Therefore, if you buy it from them, they have to give you the source code. Until then they can legitimately tell you to go jump off a cliff.
No word on what to do if I got a Walmart PC.
In that case I believe that Walmart would be required to give you the source code as they were the vendor that sold it to you.
Perhaps, but neither of those will work. MBR is the Master Boot Record, which occupies the first sector on the boot track, only. The boot track has 64 sectors in total, 63 of them are generally "ignored" by the os ad everything else. This turbotax thing writes to sector 33 on the boot track, not to the MBR which is also on the boot track but not right there.
I'm still not 100% convinced it's boot sector, though, since changing the OS and writing a new B-S would kill it. It doesn't. It requires a ground-up "low-level format"
It's not the boot sector that it writes to, it's the boot TRACK. Track 0 has 64 sectors (generally) and the boot sector occupies only one. There are 63 other sectors there and this Turbotax thing writes to sector 33 on the boot track. That sector is normally "not used" and is not looked at by your operating system.
Barring that, I agree with another poster who suggests meeting in a room for a limited period of time with a printout of your credit report that you bring and take away from the meeting.
Shall I bring the one that I just printed out myself? I only made a few insignificant changes from the original....
There are also quite a few arcade roms that have been put into the public domain over the years.
No arcade rom that I'm aware of is "public domain", with the possible exception of PolyPlay, which was written in East Germany and the copyright holder has now vanished completely.
The only other games that are freely distributable by anyone are Gridlee and Robby Roto, both licensed by their respective copyright holders for free distribtuion for non-commercial use only. Which is a long way from public domain. See here for download information and the relevant licenses.
Not only is this true, but they have shipped a "MAME-Dev blessed" version of MAME in the past
That's not exactly the situation. It's not "MAMEdev-blessed", but rather more along the line of "let sleeping dogs lie" as far as MAMEdev is concerned in regard to the Capcom Classics disk.
Yes, there is a difference.
Even the birds...
Every company needs some sort of motivation for creating Open Source software. I'd hate to state the obvious, but if you want to make the opensource community attractive... there needs to be money involved somehow.
How about usefulness and getting the job done?
In a majority of situations, the software involved in doing a job is secondary to the actual job at hand. In other words, if I hire you to build me a desk I don't care if you use a circular saw, a hand saw, or a jigsaw to cut the lumber. As long as I get a nice-looking desk from you, I'm happy and you get your cheque.
Software is like that too. In most cases (other than proprietary software companies) the software is secondary. "Make it work." The incentive you mention is not direct cash-for-software, it's getting the job done as efficiently and economically as possible. If the job can be done efficiently using open-source software, and if the software needs improvement in order to get that job done, BLAMMO!
See?
and alerts to admins when certain events fire on the systems.
ALERT: The system is on fire!
Yup, definitely a needed Windows service! *tee hee*
Make it clear to Borland that you are willing to cooperate in any way possible,
Reading this over, it strikes me that somewhere the relationship between supplier and customer has gone off of the rails in regard to commercial computer software of whatever type.
The "balance of power" has shifted from the customer (NOT "the consumer", by the way) to the vendor/supplier in some way.
"We will cooperate with Borland in any way possible." Pardon me? Since when should it be MY responsibility as a customer to "cooperate" with a company who theoretically wants to sell me more stuff and keep me coming back?
Hell, if I am a big customer and I want my next copy of their software to be delivered in a green plaid package they should be getting the green paint out!
What other industry is there where the supplier is in a position to basically threaten their customers, the customers bow to their demands however unreasonable, and then the customers, by golly, come back for more! "Sell me more software, please, I'll be good and give you more money. Kick me again!"
Truly amazing. As I said, I don't think there is any other industry that operates in this manner, or could.
Please NOTICE the second one.... That says, I'll plan on registering soon.. just send me to the download page.
And if I don't plan on registering soon, but just want to download the software then which button should I click?
When I download RedHat I just go and get it from ftp.redhat.com, no "plan on registering" needed.
You can always print out hard-copy and punch the hard copy into the company's time clock so it gets a date/time stamp marked upon it's physical self.
This won't work. I could time-stamp a blank sheet of paper and print whatever I wanted to on it at a later date. Same thing goes with those people who say "mail a registered letter to yourself". So I mailed myself an empty envelope and filled it later....
My ghawd. I don't think I've ever seen so many superscripted (tm) and (r) labels in a single paragraph or a single page before.
I suppose it could be worse; one day soon all of that stuff might be littered with "patent pending" and we all know how well the US patent office works.
he was still fully aware before he planted the 1998 crop (the one that the judgement against him addressed) that the seed he had was glyphosate resistant to a high degree.
So? If you deliver newspapers and leave one at my door every day even though I don't subscribe to the paper, am I not entitled to read it? And would I not be within my rights to tell you to go fly a kite if you came to me three weeks later on and said, "Hey, you have been reading the newspapers that I leave in your doorway - pay up!"
It would probably cost Wal-Mart less to just pay FatWallet's legal costs rather than go to court.
I think there is more to it than this. Or there damn well should be.
Somebody at Walmart swore under penalty of perjury that they owned the copyright to something that they now admit they don't own the copyright to.
That somebody should be going to jail for a long time; the courts view wilful perjury as a very serious offence.
So where's the sheriff and when will the raid on Walmart's corporate office begin so everyone can see the example of what happens when you abuse this draconian law in a deliberately fraudulent manner?