I think you are missing the point entirely. There hasn't been any suggestion that anyone broke any laws. Most computer literate people know that you can gather a huge amount of personal information from public sources.
IMHO, the point that Google is trying to make is that they don't like CNET basing their article on discovering information about the Google CEO and then publishing it without discussing (or even notifying) this individual beforehand. Google retaliated by refusing to talk to CNN - which is their undisputed right. In the past, a number of news publications have been cut off from sources (such as the White House Press Office) for crass behavior and AFAIK nobody has suggested that this is a freedom of the press issue.
Why did CNET select the Google CEO as their test subject? They could have selected themselves to demonstrate the capability to gather personal information. However, they probably didn't like the idea of their own information being outed, so they selected someone they felt "deserved" it more. I think CNET crossed the line here, and are merely getting what they deserve - no access to that particular news source for a while.
The "apology" by the UK division is funny, but also disingenuous. Clearly they don't think they did anything wrong. Actually they remind me of playground bullies who do like doing mean things to others, but when someone complains they say "Why are you upset? It's only a little fun."
CNET just didn't think things through. Or perhaps there isn't enough editorial oversight there. Either way, someone at CNET should have considered the implications of their actions and selected a more appropriate target - one who agreed in advance to their personal data being used as an illustration of the ease of aggregating data in the internet age.
I see this whole issue as a breakdown in journalistic ethics, and the "apology" just compounds the problem. Perhaps this is one area where the print media are far ahead of the digital media.
On July 22, 1946 Jewish terrorists assembled in a classroom at a seminary in Jerusalem. One of them was Menahim Begin, later a prime minister of Israel. Disguised as arabs, the terrorists made their way to the King David Hotel. Some went on foot, some went in a van with 7 milk churns, each containing 50 kilograms of explosives.
The terrorists overpowered the guards and placed the explosives in the basement of the hotel. They set the timer on the bombs for 30 minutes and left the building. Over 90 people died in the resulting explosion. One who died was my uncle, an officer in the British Army who was acting as the editor for a English language newspaper in Jerusalem. He had a wife and two young children.
In a wonderful exercise in justification, the Iraelis have repeated pointed out that the terrorists telephoned a warning 20 minutes before the explosion, and the people who died were therefore the responsibility of the British who failed to act promptly on that warning. To this day it is unclear whether they actually did telephone that warning.
As you can imagine, my parents and their siblings hate Israel with a passion. Every day they still see the effects of Jewish terrorism in our family. Although I was not born at that time this happened, I still see the effects of the blast on my family.
This was only one of many, many terrorist acts that resulted in the formation of Israel. This is the same Israel that now uses their superior weapons technology to hunt down and kill (without trial) anyone that they believe supports terrorism against them. The same Israel that restricts their Arab citizens to certain parts of the country, and routinely denies them the right to pass across "Jewish" territory to go to work. The same Israel that allows Jewish settlers to carry and use machine guns while killing Palestinians who throw stones.
It is unfortunate that the parent post has such a one sided view of the conflict. I can't help wondering if he would condemn the acts of the people who used terrorism to further the aims of the Jewish people.
As a person recently diagnosed with cancer and currently in chemo, I find more than passing interest in this story. Although, very clearly the approach described here isn't going to help me, I've spent a lot of time researching cancer therapies of various types and I feel qualifed to comment.
Cancer isn't one disease, it's a group of related diseases. A solution that works for say breast cancer may or may not work for other cancers. The idea of targetting cancer cells specifically for apoptosis (cell death) isn't new but the idea of using a delivery vehicle that can have a deadly payload seems to be somewhat novel.
There are a number of other drugs in development that might have a similar effect. Also there are human clinical trials already in progress for methods of creating a vaccine tailored to a specific person by using that person's tumor. Given that a phase 1 trial of the approach described in the article will not start for two years and that trials generally take at least 7 years before approval, it's likely that other equally novel delivery methods will be approved substantially before this one. This approach will have to show it's better than the others that will be on the market already when approval time comes along.
With some popular cancers such as breast and colorectal cancers, it's quite likely that there will be better therapies. However, if this approach can be targetted to the really deadly cancers (like lung and ovarian cancers) or the many cancers that don't have any good treatment options, this could be a real winner. If you can wait long enough before getting your disease.
Enderle seems to have declared war on Linux. There is so much wrong with this article that it's hard to know where to start commenting or when to stop. Linux supporters are not terrorists (in the main), but the article clearly portrays them as such.
At no time in history has a technology firm been as thoroughly attacked as SCO.
In 2003, SCO started a lawsuit against IBM, began spreading FUD, and demanded $699 for every copy of Linux. Their lies have been attacked, as they should be. SCO's business has suffered because of this, but that's just collateral damage. If you offend a lot of people, a large number of them will respond negatively.
their executive leadership has been threatened, and their ability to function has been almost completely eliminated.
That's what happens when you attack a community. But it was wrong to make physical threats. Please don't imagine that because someone made a threat then all people against SCO must all be terrorists.
In addition, companies using Linux technology and not complying with the GPL generally face a combination of legal and public relations exposures
EXACTLY. People who commit civil torts should face legal sanctions. Why is the article suggesting it's wrong to enforce a licence? Should Microsoft or IBM not enforce their licences?
Let's take the most powerful software company in the world, Microsoft, and imagine a scenario where they had a problem with a negative article. Generally they could call and complain
And that's pretty much what happened - a large number of people complained to the publisher and the advertisers. It is their right, isn't it? It's not mob rule to complain when someone pisses you off.
The O'Gara/PJ saga also demonstrates the lack of mature leadership.
There was no leadership... just a large number of individuals who expressed their views on MOG's article. Linux folks don't need no stinking leadership. Linux isn't a union or a political party.
Without strong leadership any organization with this much power can easily find itself with an image more similar to that of organized crime
I really can't see anyone organizing Linux folks on anything other than a technical level. Too diverse, too independent, too spread out across the globe, too focused on technical issues, too apolitical probably.
I have to wonder if this is just another round in the MS/Linux war. Enderle seems to have picked his side - the one with the money - and is attacking the enemy to the best of his ability. Fortunately, that's not a big threat.
It seems likely that Maureen O'Gara (or someone) employed a private detective to investigate Pamela Jones. The article shows that quite a lot of information was obtained from the super of PJ's apartment building.
Perhaps someone should have a gentle word with this individual not to be quite so open when discussing the affairs of the tenants. After all, a portion of their rent money is used to employ him, and I'm reasonably certain that no part of his job description includes making private details about his (indirect) employers available to anyone who just happens to turn up and asks him politely. However, if he was paid for his information, he really should be terminated.
From MOG's description of PJ's apartment, I'm wondering if the super even let someone look around.
Apple, they say, isn't playing friendly. They don't provide a CVS history, just the modified files where nobody can understand how and when things have changed.
First of all, anytime you fork off a large project like KHTML the source code bases will start to grow apart. When the new fork has a dedicated group of engineers updating it for their needs then it will quickly diverge to the point where it makes little sense to attempt to keep patches in lock step. In my career I can recall several times where this has happened, and it always seems to come as a surprise to the people maintaining the less active fork.
Apple doesn't use CVS as their normal source control system. To provide CVS documentation, Apple engineers would have to maintain a CVS database as well as maintain their patches in their standard internal SCS. This used to be perforce, I believe, and probably still is as switch a SCS is generally a royal PITA.
Because the sources have been diverging for several years, it's unrealistic to expect that the Safari patches will be directly applicable to KHTML, and I frankly doubt that even having the Safari patch documentation would help very much after several years of Apple patches. This probably isn't anything underhanded on Apple's part. It's just the way engineers work - they change the code to fit their needs, and rarely consider the impact on the old fork that they started from in the absence of an explicit mandate to stay compatible with the old fork. That level of compatibility would require the Apple folks to always have the current KHTML sources and be familiar with that source and particularly to understand the differences between the KHTML code and the Safari code.
Apple does provide the modified files, and usually this is a huge improvement on starting from scratch in implementing a new feature or fixing bugs. It does require the KHTML engineers to be able to read and understand the Safari code. To say that nobody can do that sounds a little strange.
It's quite likely that KHTML developers will have to write their own code to pass the acid2 test.
Well, yes. Should Apple engineers be expected to maintain the KHTML engine also? Apple's engineers are probably focused on their code base exclusively. The KHTML engineers are the right people to modify their own code base. Does anyone expect Apple engineers to be responsible for maintaining compatibility between Safari and KHTML? Apple makes changes, and they provide the changes files to the KHTML team. The rest is up to the KHTML folks if they want to extract the Apple code they want to use and put it into their code.
I honestly can't see why these two reporters are protecting their sources in the Valerie Plame case. Supposedly, someone (or some people) wanted to settle a score with the operative's husband and decided that the best way was to ruin this lady's career. This was a criminal act under Section 421 of Title 50 of the United States Code (better known as the Intelligence Identities Protection Act) which is designed to protect the agent, the agent's contacts in the USA and in foreign countries, and prevent impairment of the country's national security efforts.
In short, these reporters were used to do someone's dirty work. They must have known this, but they still protect the person or persons who used them, possibly even to the extent of going to jail.
Here's an example of the difficulty in allowing the reporters to keep secrets. Suppose that I happen to know that a friend of mine is a spy and I tell anyone this fact, then I can go to prison for 10 years. But (by the reporters reasoning) if I tell a journalist, he can publish that information with impunity and doesn't even have to say where he got the information. Doesn't that seem wrong somehow?
In any case, how does it serve the interests of the country to publish the name of an American spy? The idea of shielding journalists is so that they are free to communicate freely and to report on scandals that need to be exposed to public scrutiny. In this case, the sources that the reporters are protecting were not whistleblowers with knowledge of a scandal. Indeed, the sources ARE the scandal. They are not brave tellers of truth, determined to get a dastardly plot out in the public eye - they are nothing but craven scoundrels bent on settling a score. I would have thought that real journalists would hate being used in this fashion. I know I would.
Wouldn't it serve the best interests of the press to expose these people rather than protect them?
"reports solicit people for secrets of one sort or another all the time, it's there job."
Yes, but inducing people to break the law is illegal for everyone, including reporters.
"Again, you assume only people revealing a "dark secret" deserve protection."
You have a monumental set of blinkers. Should I be allowed to publish your Social Security Number? Should I be allowed to publish the fact that you have AIDS? Everyone should be allowed to keep their personal details private - even companies. Unless they are doing something illegal. Yes, whistle blowing should only apply to illegal, immoral or unethical conduct.
"thats what journalists do."
This will come as a shock to you. Journalists report news. There is a lot of difference between the journalist who reported on Prison Health Care (and the lack thereof) in the NY Times this weekend, and someone who makes a web site called "Think Secret" specifically to print details of trade secrets of one company to get advert revenue.
"no, but writing about stuff does."
No. So you say that every school child, every college student, every teacher, everyone who writes a book, everyone who makes a flyer about an upcoming concert is a journalist? Hogwash!
"what legal protections? the only legal thing a corporation can do is instate company measure to protect there trade secret."
Wrong. If someone signs an NDA saying they will not speak about something, and then they do, they broke a contract and they may pay damages. A contract is only as good as the people who sign it - how do you protect a trade secret except by teling people not to talk about it, and kicking the asses of anyone who does.
"what about little things that don't seem like a 'dark secret' but latter turn out to be just the tip of the iceberg?"
What are you talking about? How can future product details be the tip of an illegal iceberg?
Here's an example of why specs for unreleased products qualify as trade secrets.
Many years ago, back in the days of 8 bit systems, Adam Osborne created the "Osborne 1" computer. It sold very well, but it became known that Osborne was working the Osborne 2. Sales of the Osborne 1 died as people decided to wait to see that wonders would be in the the new system. The company's cash flow disappeared and they went bankrupt. The Osborne 2 never saw the light of day.
I know this an extreme example. I'm not suggesting that Apple will go belly up if the specs of their new hardware are plastered all over the internet. However, it is likely to hurt sales of the current product to some greater or lesser extent, and so it can be argued that Apple was hurt by this leak. The courts have long held that unreleased products can be trade secrets.
The journalist shield law was intended to protect whistleblowers, not to allow people to shield themselves from the legal consequences of their wrongful actions. A person who decides to break his NDA has broken a contract and there are penalties for that conduct. It might be argued that the "Think Secret" web site induced him to do so by soliciting for information and providing a method to send information them anonymously. That might suggest that they knew or should have known that the information was a trade secret.
Your point about freedom of speech if not valid. If you sign a document saying that you will not talk about something then you have given up your right to talk about it. You have made a contract and if your break the terms of the contract you will be liable, unless there was a good legal reason for doing so. There's no freedom of speech issue. A search of law references will turn up many, many examples.
The idea behind protecting a journalist's sources is so that people will talk to reporters in confidence, particularly about scandals that need to be exposed to public view, so that a journalist and his sources can be free to expose all the gory details without fear of legal retribution. That's all very laudable.
This is somewhat different. Here the leak itself is the scandal. Some guy is breaking his NDA for some unknown reason - fame, revenge, to make himself feel good, whatever. For goodness sake, "Think Secret" was even soliciting people to talk to them about Apple's trade secrets. This case has nothing at all to do with protecting sources who are putting themselves at risk to expose a dark secret that the public needs to know about.
This isn't about protecting a journalist's sources. It's just greed. This guy is not a journalist, he's merely exposing other people's secrets to make money. Calling himself a journalist doesn't make it so. If a person can be labelled a journalist (with legal source protection) just by creating a web site containing trade secret information, then the legal protection for trade secrets exposed in this way is weakened considerably.
Almost anytime that you get a group of people together you will have politics and disagreements. Whether you label the group ICANN, ITU, UN, or the local PTA matters little in this respect.
Frankly, ICANN has been hijacked by a bunch of corporate political players. ITU has also had its problems but (as far as I can tell) they haven't been obviously corrupt, and they do have a record of successfully implementating technical solutions worldwide over the last 140 years - even between countries that don't like each other very much. I'd vote for the ITU over ICANN any day of the week.
we're seeing one in the US headlines now, with two reporters facing jail time for refusing to reveal who violated national security by outing a CIA operative
I honestly can't see why these two reporters are protecting their source. Supposedly, someone (or some people) wanted to settle a score with the operative's husband and decided that the best way was to ruin this lady's career. This was a criminal act under Section 421 of Title 50 of the United States Code (better known as the Intelligence Identities Protection Act) which is designed to protect the agent, the agent's contacts in the USA and in foreign countries, and prevent impairment of the country's national security efforts.
In short, these reporters were used to do someone's dirty work. They must have known this, but they still protect the person, possibly even to the extent of going to jail.
If I know that my friend is a spy and I tell anyone, I can go to prison for 10 years. But (by the reporters reasoning) if I tell a journalist, he can publish that information with impunity and doesn't even have to say where he got the information. Doesn't that seem wrong?
In any case, how does it serve the interests of the country to publish the name of a spy? The idea of shielding journalists is so that they are free to communicate freely and report on scandals that need to be exposed to public scrutiny. In this case, the sources that the reporters are protecting were not whistleblowers with knowledge of a scandal. Indeed, the sources ARE the scandal. They are not brave tellers of truth, determined to get a dastardly plot out in the public eye - they are nothing but craven scoundrels bent on settling a score. I would have thought that real journalists would hate being used in this fashion.
Wouldn't it serve the best interests of the press to expose these people rather than protect them?
1. Get some information on future Apple products. 2. Make a web-site with said information. 3. Call yourself a "journalist" to protect the people who leaked the information. 4. Sell adverts on the site so that you can... 5. Profit!!!
The idea behind protecting a journalist's sources is so that people will talk to reporters in confidence, particularly about shady goings on, so that journalists can be free to expose all the gory details without fear. That's all very laudable.
This is different. Here the leak itself is the shady thing. Some guy is breaking his NDA for some unknown reason - money, fame, revenge, make himself feel good, whatever. "Think Secret" was even soliciting people to talk to them about Apple's trade secrets.
There's no dark dangerous secret here that needs to be exposed for the public good. This isn't about protecting a journalist's sources. It's just greed. This guy is not a journalist, he's merely exposing other people's secrets to make money. Calling himself a journalist doesn't make it so.
Well, there is one difference....
on
SCO Targets UK Firms
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· Score: 3, Interesting
As I recall, in the UK there is much less incentive to settle a legal argument (if you feel sure you are in the the right) because the loser of the court case pays the costs of both sides.
Even if you win you might end up out of pocket. I recall a case where a man sued for slander and actually won the action, but he was awarded two pence in damages and ordered to pay the costs of both sides. And lawyers in the UK are no cheaper than their US equivalents.
The UK courts (usually) have a good sense of fairness and even some measure of common sense, which seems remarkably uncommon in some courts. This cuts down immensely on frivolous law suits.
EA doesn't deserve all this criticism. We live in a free market, if those coders don't like their 80 hour weeks, they should quit.
You have to be joking or a troll. Anyway, I'll bite...
Do you believe that everybody signing on at EA is told in advance that they will be asked to work 12 hours a days, 6 or 7 days a week for months on end, and if they don't conform to these hours they will be fired? (Assuming that the stories are true, and there seem to be altogether too many people asserting they are.)
It seems to me that EA is taking advantage of the label "salaried" to go back to the old days when workers had no rights. When will people realize that "salaried" has become another term of for "no overtime will be paid"? For many people there certainly doesn't appear to be any other differentiation between salaried and non-salaried positions.
It's very easy for you to suggest that people just leave if they don't like the work. By all accounts, EA hires mostly direct from college graduates. People have rent and utilites to pay, food and clothes to buy, and a car is essential in the public-transport challenged SF Bay Area. All these things need money, and programmer jobs are not that easy to find if you are young and somewhat inexperienced.
So, how does it sound if you say to your next potential employer that you are one year out of college and you left your last job because they worked you too hard? Not a great sounding reason to leave, is it?
I'm an ex-policeman, and not really by choice. When our first child was born, my wife insisted^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H strongly suggested that I give up the job because of her fears that I would come home dead one day, or (based on previous work patterns) not give sufficient attention to our children.
DNA evidence will never convict somebody by itself, any more than a fingerprint or an eye witness account will.
I am honestly shocked by your naive response. There have been a huge number of convictions based solely on eye witness identification with no additional evidence.
If a partial match on a fingerprint can land you in jail, then a full DNA match will likely do the same. Policemen can be mistaken, so can DAs. Their job is to get convictions to improve their "clear-up" rate and that aim has little to making certain the convicted person is guilty. The most usual test is "can I get a conviction?" not "is this guy guilty?".
Sadly, the justice system is not to be trusted in the matter of guilt or innocence. Prosecutors tend to look at everything the worst possible light, and there is an increasing tendency towards "guilty until proven innocent" justice.
Well, whoever wrote that certainly got it right. Yes, the telephone is incredibly useful, but it has most certainly resulted in many incursions into my private time.
1. Go to a bar. 2. Gather stray hairs, saliva from glasses, or whatever other organic bits you can find and place in bag. Yes, gross, I know. 3. Commit a felony and scatter the contents of said bag. 4. Watch police arrest innocents.
Alternatively, replace items 1 and 2 above with: 1/2 Obtain samples from someone you have a grudge against... some blood would be really nice.
It's not easy to plant fingerprints at the scene of a crime. What are the chances that if this becomes standard crooks will be scattering DNA at crime scenes like confetti at a wedding.
Just remember what happened recently to the Oregon lawyer who was unlucky enough to have a fingerprint fairly close to that of terrorist suspect. A false positive match put him in prison for some weeks as a "material witness" and he was only released when Spanish police made a match to another person. There was no evidence against the guy, apart from the fingerprint.
I suspect it will be much worse with a false positive (or planted) DNA.
Noone has a given right to use someone elses property to make money from
That's a pretty short sighted view. They sold a copy of the product to me. It's mine, not theirs.
Imagine, if you will, that Black and Decker (the tools people) required any contractor who uses a B&D drill to pay them $5 a month if they use the drill to do work for a customer? There's no extra work for B&D, they have already sold the product, but suddenly they have a huge additional revenue stream which would very quickly outstrip the initial price of the product. Consider the consequences of buying an axe and having to sign a license that says you can use it for chopping wood, but if you sell the wood you must pay additional money to the manufacturer. It's none of their damn business how I use their product after they have sold it to me. It's mine, not theirs. What would be the economic consequences if everyone demanded additional money for a product if it was used in a particular manner?
This is a pretty unique aspect of computer program sales. It's also rather egregious because the marginal cost of making a computer game is often less than $5 - the CD, box, minimal instructions on paper, shrink-wrap, shipping, etc. And now they expect to tell some customers, people who have paid for the product but want t use it in a particular way, that they must pay more money.
Valve certainly have the right to ask for additional money every month, approximately twice their initial cost of selling the product, if you have the audacity to attempt to use their product in your business. But not everything that that you have the right to do is right to do.
I notice you didn't counter my point regarding the reasonableness of comparing dual and single processor systems.
For nickel and dime items we can start with a free, full blown, industrial strength developer package for multiple languages. I use Visual Studio for x86 development, and Apple's free package is arguably better and can be used for both x86 and PowerPC development. In fact I build x86 projects using the Mac developer environment daily.
As far as cost is concerned, wander over to Dell's site and configure a dual processor Xeon system with approximately the same feature set as the Mac. You will find (if you do an honest comparison of features) that the Dell comes out about $500 more expensive. And an Opteron is considerably more expensive than a Xeon, last time I looked.
As a person who runs three Athlon 64 systems in Antec Sonata quiet cases, as well as two G5 systems, I can only say that you are incorrect.
The Athlon 64s do not wipe the floor with the Macs (or vice versa, come to that) and the Macs are cost competitive in real-world configurations, and I can't honestly hear much difference in the sound volume between the systems.
But hey, don't let your speculation be interrupted by practical experience...
Did that include the cost of the OS and equivalents of all the other software goodies in the Apple package? Or all the nickel and dime extras you need for a PC that come with a Mac. And I can't be too surprised when you compare a single processor system with a dual processor system and then declare the single processor to be less expensive. And when you say the single processor system is faster you may be technically correct, but I wonder if it will do more work; which is what really matters imho.
The myth that Apple is more expensive is just not true, as anyone who has done a serious comparison of features will tell you.
I happen to have three Athlon 64 systems and two G5 systems. I spend time on all of them as a mercenery for hire, but I believe that I'm most productive for my non-professional work on the Mac, which is where I put all my personal stuff.
One of the wonderful things about the legal system is that you have no money, you have little chance to get any justice. I guess the guy took Red Hat to be an honorable company whose word could be trusted.
Shame on Red Hat for promising to sponsor the project and then reneging. At this point I'm glad that I switched to SuSE
Apparantly you seem to think that all an open source project needs is access to the internet for the website and CVS.
You must be living with your parents still... Unfortunately, it costs money to live by yourself, you know, food, somewhere to sleep, electricity for the computer, toilet paper, weird stuff like that. Some are lucky and can do their Open Source projects at work and be paid for it, some are not.
If you are developing a project in your spare time you are lucky to spend 20 to 30 hours a week on it. If you are full time on that project, that's an additional 40 to 50 hours hours right there.
In this case the guy was working full time on his project based on a promise from a company (rumors are it was Red Hat) that they would sponser the project with money - which in this case really means sponser the lone developer. No money means no project, unless the guy wants to do it in his spare time, which it seems he doesn't. I can't blame him for that.
This is a very arcane procedure in XP. I shall try to explain, but only a professional should attempt this.
1. Right click on drive icon, select properties 2. Select Tools tab and click on "Defragment Now" 3. Click on "Analyze" 4. When analysis finishes, click on "View Report"
This shows two list windows, one containing general properties of the disk such as volume size, free space, total fragmentation, file fragmentation and free space fragmentation. The second list shows all fragmented files and how badly they are fragmented.
One of the (many) comments from SCO management was that they didn't notice that SCO source code was included in Linux when they released their Linux version under the GPL, even though they do admit that Caldera employees had worked on the Linux source and added code to the source themselves.
"Your honor, we didn't notice the code. After all, it was only a million lines, and we can't be expected to look at every line, now can we..."
Slashdot Mirror
I think you are missing the point entirely. There hasn't been any suggestion that anyone broke any laws. Most computer literate people know that you can gather a huge amount of personal information from public sources.
IMHO, the point that Google is trying to make is that they don't like CNET basing their article on discovering information about the Google CEO and then publishing it without discussing (or even notifying) this individual beforehand. Google retaliated by refusing to talk to CNN - which is their undisputed right. In the past, a number of news publications have been cut off from sources (such as the White House Press Office) for crass behavior and AFAIK nobody has suggested that this is a freedom of the press issue.
Why did CNET select the Google CEO as their test subject? They could have selected themselves to demonstrate the capability to gather personal information. However, they probably didn't like the idea of their own information being outed, so they selected someone they felt "deserved" it more. I think CNET crossed the line here, and are merely getting what they deserve - no access to that particular news source for a while.
The "apology" by the UK division is funny, but also disingenuous. Clearly they don't think they did anything wrong. Actually they remind me of playground bullies who do like doing mean things to others, but when someone complains they say "Why are you upset? It's only a little fun."
CNET just didn't think things through. Or perhaps there isn't enough editorial oversight there. Either way, someone at CNET should have considered the implications of their actions and selected a more appropriate target - one who agreed in advance to their personal data being used as an illustration of the ease of aggregating data in the internet age.
I see this whole issue as a breakdown in journalistic ethics, and the "apology" just compounds the problem. Perhaps this is one area where the print media are far ahead of the digital media.
On July 22, 1946 Jewish terrorists assembled in a classroom at a seminary in Jerusalem. One of them was Menahim Begin, later a prime minister of Israel. Disguised as arabs, the terrorists made their way to the King David Hotel. Some went on foot, some went in a van with 7 milk churns, each containing 50 kilograms of explosives.
The terrorists overpowered the guards and placed the explosives in the basement of the hotel. They set the timer on the bombs for 30 minutes and left the building. Over 90 people died in the resulting explosion. One who died was my uncle, an officer in the British Army who was acting as the editor for a English language newspaper in Jerusalem. He had a wife and two young children.
In a wonderful exercise in justification, the Iraelis have repeated pointed out that the terrorists telephoned a warning 20 minutes before the explosion, and the people who died were therefore the responsibility of the British who failed to act promptly on that warning. To this day it is unclear whether they actually did telephone that warning.
As you can imagine, my parents and their siblings hate Israel with a passion. Every day they still see the effects of Jewish terrorism in our family. Although I was not born at that time this happened, I still see the effects of the blast on my family.
This was only one of many, many terrorist acts that resulted in the formation of Israel. This is the same Israel that now uses their superior weapons technology to hunt down and kill (without trial) anyone that they believe supports terrorism against them. The same Israel that restricts their Arab citizens to certain parts of the country, and routinely denies them the right to pass across "Jewish" territory to go to work. The same Israel that allows Jewish settlers to carry and use machine guns while killing Palestinians who throw stones.
It is unfortunate that the parent post has such a one sided view of the conflict. I can't help wondering if he would condemn the acts of the people who used terrorism to further the aims of the Jewish people.
As a person recently diagnosed with cancer and currently in chemo, I find more than passing interest in this story. Although, very clearly the approach described here isn't going to help me, I've spent a lot of time researching cancer therapies of various types and I feel qualifed to comment.
Cancer isn't one disease, it's a group of related diseases. A solution that works for say breast cancer may or may not work for other cancers. The idea of targetting cancer cells specifically for apoptosis (cell death) isn't new but the idea of using a delivery vehicle that can have a deadly payload seems to be somewhat novel.
There are a number of other drugs in development that might have a similar effect. Also there are human clinical trials already in progress for methods of creating a vaccine tailored to a specific person by using that person's tumor. Given that a phase 1 trial of the approach described in the article will not start for two years and that trials generally take at least 7 years before approval, it's likely that other equally novel delivery methods will be approved substantially before this one. This approach will have to show it's better than the others that will be on the market already when approval time comes along.
With some popular cancers such as breast and colorectal cancers, it's quite likely that there will be better therapies. However, if this approach can be targetted to the really deadly cancers (like lung and ovarian cancers) or the many cancers that don't have any good treatment options, this could be a real winner. If you can wait long enough before getting your disease.
Enderle seems to have declared war on Linux. There is so much wrong with this article that it's hard to know where to start commenting or when to stop. Linux supporters are not terrorists (in the main), but the article clearly portrays them as such.
At no time in history has a technology firm been as thoroughly attacked as SCO.
In 2003, SCO started a lawsuit against IBM, began spreading FUD, and demanded $699 for every copy of Linux. Their lies have been attacked, as they should be. SCO's business has suffered because of this, but that's just collateral damage. If you offend a lot of people, a large number of them will respond negatively.
their executive leadership has been threatened, and their ability to function has been almost completely eliminated.
That's what happens when you attack a community. But it was wrong to make physical threats. Please don't imagine that because someone made a threat then all people against SCO must all be terrorists.
In addition, companies using Linux technology and not complying with the GPL generally face a combination of legal and public relations exposures
EXACTLY. People who commit civil torts should face legal sanctions. Why is the article suggesting it's wrong to enforce a licence? Should Microsoft or IBM not enforce their licences?
Let's take the most powerful software company in the world, Microsoft, and imagine a scenario where they had a problem with a negative article. Generally they could call and complain
And that's pretty much what happened - a large number of people complained to the publisher and the advertisers. It is their right, isn't it? It's not mob rule to complain when someone pisses you off.
The O'Gara/PJ saga also demonstrates the lack of mature leadership.
There was no leadership... just a large number of individuals who expressed their views on MOG's article. Linux folks don't need no stinking leadership. Linux isn't a union or a political party.
Without strong leadership any organization with this much power can easily find itself with an image more similar to that of organized crime
I really can't see anyone organizing Linux folks on anything other than a technical level. Too diverse, too independent, too spread out across the globe, too focused on technical issues, too apolitical probably.
I have to wonder if this is just another round in the MS/Linux war. Enderle seems to have picked his side - the one with the money - and is attacking the enemy to the best of his ability. Fortunately, that's not a big threat.
It seems likely that Maureen O'Gara (or someone) employed a private detective to investigate Pamela Jones. The article shows that quite a lot of information was obtained from the super of PJ's apartment building.
Perhaps someone should have a gentle word with this individual not to be quite so open when discussing the affairs of the tenants. After all, a portion of their rent money is used to employ him, and I'm reasonably certain that no part of his job description includes making private details about his (indirect) employers available to anyone who just happens to turn up and asks him politely. However, if he was paid for his information, he really should be terminated.
From MOG's description of PJ's apartment, I'm wondering if the super even let someone look around.
Apple, they say, isn't playing friendly. They don't provide a CVS history, just the modified files where nobody can understand how and when things have changed.
First of all, anytime you fork off a large project like KHTML the source code bases will start to grow apart. When the new fork has a dedicated group of engineers updating it for their needs then it will quickly diverge to the point where it makes little sense to attempt to keep patches in lock step. In my career I can recall several times where this has happened, and it always seems to come as a surprise to the people maintaining the less active fork.
Apple doesn't use CVS as their normal source control system. To provide CVS documentation, Apple engineers would have to maintain a CVS database as well as maintain their patches in their standard internal SCS. This used to be perforce, I believe, and probably still is as switch a SCS is generally a royal PITA.
Because the sources have been diverging for several years, it's unrealistic to expect that the Safari patches will be directly applicable to KHTML, and I frankly doubt that even having the Safari patch documentation would help very much after several years of Apple patches. This probably isn't anything underhanded on Apple's part. It's just the way engineers work - they change the code to fit their needs, and rarely consider the impact on the old fork that they started from in the absence of an explicit mandate to stay compatible with the old fork. That level of compatibility would require the Apple folks to always have the current KHTML sources and be familiar with that source and particularly to understand the differences between the KHTML code and the Safari code.
Apple does provide the modified files, and usually this is a huge improvement on starting from scratch in implementing a new feature or fixing bugs. It does require the KHTML engineers to be able to read and understand the Safari code. To say that nobody can do that sounds a little strange.
It's quite likely that KHTML developers will have to write their own code to pass the acid2 test.
Well, yes. Should Apple engineers be expected to maintain the KHTML engine also? Apple's engineers are probably focused on their code base exclusively. The KHTML engineers are the right people to modify their own code base. Does anyone expect Apple engineers to be responsible for maintaining compatibility between Safari and KHTML? Apple makes changes, and they provide the changes files to the KHTML team. The rest is up to the KHTML folks if they want to extract the Apple code they want to use and put it into their code.
I honestly can't see why these two reporters are protecting their sources in the Valerie Plame case. Supposedly, someone (or some people) wanted to settle a score with the operative's husband and decided that the best way was to ruin this lady's career. This was a criminal act under Section 421 of Title 50 of the United States Code (better known as the Intelligence Identities Protection Act) which is designed to protect the agent, the agent's contacts in the USA and in foreign countries, and prevent impairment of the country's national security efforts.
In short, these reporters were used to do someone's dirty work. They must have known this, but they still protect the person or persons who used them, possibly even to the extent of going to jail.
Here's an example of the difficulty in allowing the reporters to keep secrets. Suppose that I happen to know that a friend of mine is a spy and I tell anyone this fact, then I can go to prison for 10 years. But (by the reporters reasoning) if I tell a journalist, he can publish that information with impunity and doesn't even have to say where he got the information. Doesn't that seem wrong somehow?
In any case, how does it serve the interests of the country to publish the name of an American spy? The idea of shielding journalists is so that they are free to communicate freely and to report on scandals that need to be exposed to public scrutiny. In this case, the sources that the reporters are protecting were not whistleblowers with knowledge of a scandal. Indeed, the sources ARE the scandal. They are not brave tellers of truth, determined to get a dastardly plot out in the public eye - they are nothing but craven scoundrels bent on settling a score. I would have thought that real journalists would hate being used in this fashion. I know I would.
Wouldn't it serve the best interests of the press to expose these people rather than protect them?
"reports solicit people for secrets of one sort or another all the time, it's there job."
Yes, but inducing people to break the law is illegal for everyone, including reporters.
"Again, you assume only people revealing a "dark secret" deserve protection."
You have a monumental set of blinkers. Should I be allowed to publish your Social Security Number? Should I be allowed to publish the fact that you have AIDS? Everyone should be allowed to keep their personal details private - even companies. Unless they are doing something illegal. Yes, whistle blowing should only apply to illegal, immoral or unethical conduct.
"thats what journalists do."
This will come as a shock to you. Journalists report news. There is a lot of difference between the journalist who reported on Prison Health Care (and the lack thereof) in the NY Times this weekend, and someone who makes a web site called "Think Secret" specifically to print details of trade secrets of one company to get advert revenue.
"no, but writing about stuff does."
No. So you say that every school child, every college student, every teacher, everyone who writes a book, everyone who makes a flyer about an upcoming concert is a journalist? Hogwash!
"what legal protections? the only legal thing a corporation can do is instate company measure to protect there trade secret."
Wrong. If someone signs an NDA saying they will not speak about something, and then they do, they broke a contract and they may pay damages. A contract is only as good as the people who sign it - how do you protect a trade secret except by teling people not to talk about it, and kicking the asses of anyone who does.
"what about little things that don't seem like a 'dark secret' but latter turn out to be just the tip of the iceberg?"
What are you talking about? How can future product details be the tip of an illegal iceberg?
You are indeed living in a fantasy world.
Here's an example of why specs for unreleased products qualify as trade secrets.
Many years ago, back in the days of 8 bit systems, Adam Osborne created the "Osborne 1" computer. It sold very well, but it became known that Osborne was working the Osborne 2. Sales of the Osborne 1 died as people decided to wait to see that wonders would be in the the new system. The company's cash flow disappeared and they went bankrupt. The Osborne 2 never saw the light of day.
I know this an extreme example. I'm not suggesting that Apple will go belly up if the specs of their new hardware are plastered all over the internet. However, it is likely to hurt sales of the current product to some greater or lesser extent, and so it can be argued that Apple was hurt by this leak. The courts have long held that unreleased products can be trade secrets.
The journalist shield law was intended to protect whistleblowers, not to allow people to shield themselves from the legal consequences of their wrongful actions. A person who decides to break his NDA has broken a contract and there are penalties for that conduct. It might be argued that the "Think Secret" web site induced him to do so by soliciting for information and providing a method to send information them anonymously. That might suggest that they knew or should have known that the information was a trade secret.
Your point about freedom of speech if not valid. If you sign a document saying that you will not talk about something then you have given up your right to talk about it. You have made a contract and if your break the terms of the contract you will be liable, unless there was a good legal reason for doing so. There's no freedom of speech issue. A search of law references will turn up many, many examples.
The idea behind protecting a journalist's sources is so that people will talk to reporters in confidence, particularly about scandals that need to be exposed to public view, so that a journalist and his sources can be free to expose all the gory details without fear of legal retribution. That's all very laudable.
This is somewhat different. Here the leak itself is the scandal. Some guy is breaking his NDA for some unknown reason - fame, revenge, to make himself feel good, whatever. For goodness sake, "Think Secret" was even soliciting people to talk to them about Apple's trade secrets. This case has nothing at all to do with protecting sources who are putting themselves at risk to expose a dark secret that the public needs to know about.
This isn't about protecting a journalist's sources. It's just greed. This guy is not a journalist, he's merely exposing other people's secrets to make money. Calling himself a journalist doesn't make it so. If a person can be labelled a journalist (with legal source protection) just by creating a web site containing trade secret information, then the legal protection for trade secrets exposed in this way is weakened considerably.
Almost anytime that you get a group of people together you will have politics and disagreements. Whether you label the group ICANN, ITU, UN, or the local PTA matters little in this respect.
Frankly, ICANN has been hijacked by a bunch of corporate political players. ITU has also had its problems but (as far as I can tell) they haven't been obviously corrupt, and they do have a record of successfully implementating technical solutions worldwide over the last 140 years - even between countries that don't like each other very much. I'd vote for the ITU over ICANN any day of the week.
I honestly can't see why these two reporters are protecting their source. Supposedly, someone (or some people) wanted to settle a score with the operative's husband and decided that the best way was to ruin this lady's career. This was a criminal act under Section 421 of Title 50 of the United States Code (better known as the Intelligence Identities Protection Act) which is designed to protect the agent, the agent's contacts in the USA and in foreign countries, and prevent impairment of the country's national security efforts.
In short, these reporters were used to do someone's dirty work. They must have known this, but they still protect the person, possibly even to the extent of going to jail.
If I know that my friend is a spy and I tell anyone, I can go to prison for 10 years. But (by the reporters reasoning) if I tell a journalist, he can publish that information with impunity and doesn't even have to say where he got the information. Doesn't that seem wrong?
In any case, how does it serve the interests of the country to publish the name of a spy? The idea of shielding journalists is so that they are free to communicate freely and report on scandals that need to be exposed to public scrutiny. In this case, the sources that the reporters are protecting were not whistleblowers with knowledge of a scandal. Indeed, the sources ARE the scandal. They are not brave tellers of truth, determined to get a dastardly plot out in the public eye - they are nothing but craven scoundrels bent on settling a score. I would have thought that real journalists would hate being used in this fashion.
Wouldn't it serve the best interests of the press to expose these people rather than protect them?
So now the plan is:
1. Get some information on future Apple products.
2. Make a web-site with said information.
3. Call yourself a "journalist" to protect the people who leaked the information.
4. Sell adverts on the site so that you can...
5. Profit!!!
The idea behind protecting a journalist's sources is so that people will talk to reporters in confidence, particularly about shady goings on, so that journalists can be free to expose all the gory details without fear. That's all very laudable.
This is different. Here the leak itself is the shady thing. Some guy is breaking his NDA for some unknown reason - money, fame, revenge, make himself feel good, whatever. "Think Secret" was even soliciting people to talk to them about Apple's trade secrets.
There's no dark dangerous secret here that needs to be exposed for the public good. This isn't about protecting a journalist's sources. It's just greed. This guy is not a journalist, he's merely exposing other people's secrets to make money. Calling himself a journalist doesn't make it so.
As I recall, in the UK there is much less incentive to settle a legal argument (if you feel sure you are in the the right) because the loser of the court case pays the costs of both sides.
Even if you win you might end up out of pocket. I recall a case where a man sued for slander and actually won the action, but he was awarded two pence in damages and ordered to pay the costs of both sides. And lawyers in the UK are no cheaper than their US equivalents.
The UK courts (usually) have a good sense of fairness and even some measure of common sense, which seems remarkably uncommon in some courts. This cuts down immensely on frivolous law suits.
EA doesn't deserve all this criticism. We live in a free market, if those coders don't like their 80 hour weeks, they should quit.
You have to be joking or a troll. Anyway, I'll bite...
Do you believe that everybody signing on at EA is told in advance that they will be asked to work 12 hours a days, 6 or 7 days a week for months on end, and if they don't conform to these hours they will be fired? (Assuming that the stories are true, and there seem to be altogether too many people asserting they are.)
It seems to me that EA is taking advantage of the label "salaried" to go back to the old days when workers had no rights. When will people realize that "salaried" has become another term of for "no overtime will be paid"? For many people there certainly doesn't appear to be any other differentiation between salaried and non-salaried positions.
It's very easy for you to suggest that people just leave if they don't like the work. By all accounts, EA hires mostly direct from college graduates. People have rent and utilites to pay, food and clothes to buy, and a car is essential in the public-transport challenged SF Bay Area. All these things need money, and programmer jobs are not that easy to find if you are young and somewhat inexperienced.
So, how does it sound if you say to your next potential employer that you are one year out of college and you left your last job because they worked you too hard? Not a great sounding reason to leave, is it?
I'm an ex-policeman, and not really by choice. When our first child was born, my wife insisted^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H strongly suggested that I give up the job because of her fears that I would come home dead one day, or (based on previous work patterns) not give sufficient attention to our children.
DNA evidence will never convict somebody by itself, any more than a fingerprint or an eye witness account will.
I am honestly shocked by your naive response. There have been a huge number of convictions based solely on eye witness identification with no additional evidence.
If a partial match on a fingerprint can land you in jail, then a full DNA match will likely do the same. Policemen can be mistaken, so can DAs. Their job is to get convictions to improve their "clear-up" rate and that aim has little to making certain the convicted person is guilty. The most usual test is "can I get a conviction?" not "is this guy guilty?".
Sadly, the justice system is not to be trusted in the matter of guilt or innocence. Prosecutors tend to look at everything the worst possible light, and there is an increasing tendency towards "guilty until proven innocent" justice.
Well, whoever wrote that certainly got it right. Yes, the telephone is incredibly useful, but it has most certainly resulted in many incursions into my private time.
1. Go to a bar.
2. Gather stray hairs, saliva from glasses, or whatever other organic bits you can find and place in bag. Yes, gross, I know.
3. Commit a felony and scatter the contents of said bag.
4. Watch police arrest innocents.
Alternatively, replace items 1 and 2 above with:
1/2 Obtain samples from someone you have a grudge against... some blood would be really nice.
It's not easy to plant fingerprints at the scene of a crime. What are the chances that if this becomes standard crooks will be scattering DNA at crime scenes like confetti at a wedding.
Just remember what happened recently to the Oregon lawyer who was unlucky enough to have a fingerprint fairly close to that of terrorist suspect. A false positive match put him in prison for some weeks as a "material witness" and he was only released when Spanish police made a match to another person. There was no evidence against the guy, apart from the fingerprint.
I suspect it will be much worse with a false positive (or planted) DNA.
Noone has a given right to use someone elses property to make money from
That's a pretty short sighted view. They sold a copy of the product to me. It's mine, not theirs.
Imagine, if you will, that Black and Decker (the tools people) required any contractor who uses a B&D drill to pay them $5 a month if they use the drill to do work for a customer? There's no extra work for B&D, they have already sold the product, but suddenly they have a huge additional revenue stream which would very quickly outstrip the initial price of the product. Consider the consequences of buying an axe and having to sign a license that says you can use it for chopping wood, but if you sell the wood you must pay additional money to the manufacturer. It's none of their damn business how I use their product after they have sold it to me. It's mine, not theirs. What would be the economic consequences if everyone demanded additional money for a product if it was used in a particular manner?
This is a pretty unique aspect of computer program sales. It's also rather egregious because the marginal cost of making a computer game is often less than $5 - the CD, box, minimal instructions on paper, shrink-wrap, shipping, etc. And now they expect to tell some customers, people who have paid for the product but want t use it in a particular way, that they must pay more money.
Valve certainly have the right to ask for additional money every month, approximately twice their initial cost of selling the product, if you have the audacity to attempt to use their product in your business. But not everything that that you have the right to do is right to do.
I notice you didn't counter my point regarding the reasonableness of comparing dual and single processor systems.
For nickel and dime items we can start with a free, full blown, industrial strength developer package for multiple languages. I use Visual Studio for x86 development, and Apple's free package is arguably better and can be used for both x86 and PowerPC development. In fact I build x86 projects using the Mac developer environment daily.
As far as cost is concerned, wander over to Dell's site and configure a dual processor Xeon system with approximately the same feature set as the Mac. You will find (if you do an honest comparison of features) that the Dell comes out about $500 more expensive. And an Opteron is considerably more expensive than a Xeon, last time I looked.
As a person who runs three Athlon 64 systems in Antec Sonata quiet cases, as well as two G5 systems, I can only say that you are incorrect.
The Athlon 64s do not wipe the floor with the Macs (or vice versa, come to that) and the Macs are cost competitive in real-world configurations, and I can't honestly hear much difference in the sound volume between the systems.
But hey, don't let your speculation be interrupted by practical experience...
Did that include the cost of the OS and equivalents of all the other software goodies in the Apple package? Or all the nickel and dime extras you need for a PC that come with a Mac. And I can't be too surprised when you compare a single processor system with a dual processor system and then declare the single processor to be less expensive. And when you say the single processor system is faster you may be technically correct, but I wonder if it will do more work; which is what really matters imho.
The myth that Apple is more expensive is just not true, as anyone who has done a serious comparison of features will tell you.
I happen to have three Athlon 64 systems and two G5 systems. I spend time on all of them as a mercenery for hire, but I believe that I'm most productive for my non-professional work on the Mac, which is where I put all my personal stuff.
One of the wonderful things about the legal system is that you have no money, you have little chance to get any justice. I guess the guy took Red Hat to be an honorable company whose word could be trusted.
Shame on Red Hat for promising to sponsor the project and then reneging. At this point I'm glad that I switched to SuSE
Apparantly you seem to think that all an open source project needs is access to the internet for the website and CVS.
You must be living with your parents still... Unfortunately, it costs money to live by yourself, you know, food, somewhere to sleep, electricity for the computer, toilet paper, weird stuff like that. Some are lucky and can do their Open Source projects at work and be paid for it, some are not.
If you are developing a project in your spare time you are lucky to spend 20 to 30 hours a week on it. If you are full time on that project, that's an additional 40 to 50 hours hours right there.
In this case the guy was working full time on his project based on a promise from a company (rumors are it was Red Hat) that they would sponser the project with money - which in this case really means sponser the lone developer. No money means no project, unless the guy wants to do it in his spare time, which it seems he doesn't. I can't blame him for that.
This is a very arcane procedure in XP. I shall try to explain, but only a professional should attempt this.
1. Right click on drive icon, select properties
2. Select Tools tab and click on "Defragment Now"
3. Click on "Analyze"
4. When analysis finishes, click on "View Report"
This shows two list windows, one containing general properties of the disk such as volume size, free space, total fragmentation, file fragmentation and free space fragmentation. The second list shows all fragmented files and how badly they are fragmented.
One of the (many) comments from SCO management was that they didn't notice that SCO source code was included in Linux when they released their Linux version under the GPL, even though they do admit that Caldera employees had worked on the Linux source and added code to the source themselves.
"Your honor, we didn't notice the code. After all, it was only a million lines, and we can't be expected to look at every line, now can we..."