Now, how long before AOL, Real, Earthlink et al start making Linux versions of their stuff? (ok, it will be awhile, but I think it will happen.)
Like any other software, it'll happen when the companies concerned feel that they can make more money by producing the software than it would require to create it. Right now there simply isn't the market for it. (Although there *is* a Real player for Linux, of course)
I think Vista might be a factor in this. If it stinks, and continues to stick for awhile, people (I hope) will start looking for an alturnative.
Even if that happens, I suspect that you'll find that the alternative that most people pick will simply be to not upgrade. Not that the vast majority of users ever upgrade by any means other than simply using whatever comes with their new PC of course, and Vista would have to be unbelievably bad (as in, unusably bad) to actually stop people buying new PCs because of it.
IANAL, but I believe that US copyright law allows for punitive damages, that is damages that are intended to serve as a punishment.
UMG aren't suing YouTube just for the money they made by distributing these videos, they're suing to punish them for violating their rights.
There is incentive for major content providers to completely destroy user content websites. After all, the content oligarchy would not want competition, even poorly made funny cat video competition.
As much as I don't like a lot of what certain copyright holders and their interest groups are doing, this is easily avoided by simply not violating someone's copyright.
Violation of the GPL and "stealing" of code would have to involve financial gain without the contribution of the new extensions you added to the source.
The violation would be in distribution of binaries without making the source available, financial gain has nothing to do with it.
The analogy isn't great, but the basic thrust of the argument does hold - someone is doing something with a copyrighted work that the copyright holder does not approve of (and that is covered by copyright law). It may make sense to us for UMG to allow YouTube to do this for marketing purposes, but they don't want to, and that's their choice.
Even if the above were true it defies logic that a browser is more/less secure because of the number of people examining it.
"Many eyes make shallow bugs" is the relevant quote - the idea is that with more people looking at something, you have a greater chance of spotting flaws.
A bug in MSIE leads to the whole computer being compromised.
Only if you run as admin, which admittedly is depressingly common in the Windows world.
In most households he is introduced at an early age to the computer as a toy and treats it as a toy while growing up. He does not look at it as a toolkit to assemble something usefull. He has no incentive to write anything in the first place and is getting less and less incentive as the personal computing continues to devolve to joe sub-average level.
You could have said exactly that 24 years ago when I got my first computer (a 16K ZX Spectrum). All most people did with those things was play games; the closest they got to programming was typing LOAD "" and hitting enter.
It was only really those of us that not only did that, but also typed in program listings (in BASIC) from magazines that went on to experiment with writing code ourselves. My parents didn't provide me with programing resources (although from memory, the Spectrum came with a BASIC manual), or particularly encourage me to experiment, I did it all off my own back. Of course, being me, they didn't *need* to encourage me; at times, it was all they could do to stop me taking things apart to see how they worked...
But yeah, al-q is real, and so were the London, India, USS Cole (sp?), etc. bombings - so not taking threats seriously - and personally - is pretty damned stupid.
I've lived, studied and worked in London for 13 years now. I was on my way in to work when the bombs went off last year; I walked past police officers leading some rather shocked looking people away from (I assume) a bus. I was here when the IRA were still actively targetting the main land, I was here when some nutter was detonating nail bombs (one in a pub just round the corner from where I worked), I was here when a bus blew up outside the BBC building, etc.
I guess I must be stupid though, as I certainly don't take the threat personally. Nor do I support some of the more egregious measures that are being taken in the name of the so-called war on terror. I refuse to allow myself to be cowed by the vague threat of being involved in an attack. I have far, far more chance of being killed crossing the road than I do of being blown up.
Sure, the threat is real, and should be taken seriously. However, it seems to me that a lot of the things that are being done are knee-jerk overreactions that we'll be lucky not to regret in the future. I worry about the sort of world my daughter is going to end up living in, as much for the direction my country seems to be heading in as for the threat of terrorism.
Those classes have been replaced by Java, where you don't even worry about resource leaks. Hey, garbage collector takes care of it!
If you don't worry about resource leaks then you are doomed to suffer resource starvation the moment your website starts getting a decent amount of traffic. The garbage collector is not a panacea; it means you don't have to worry about calling free() or an object's destructor, but you still have to clean up file handles, db connections, etc. There is no guarantee that your object will ever be reclaimed by gc, and certainly not in time to free up a scarce resource before you run out.
FDR won WWII in not much more time than we've been in Iraq.
Look, everyone appreciates the US's help in WW2, but that sort of statement is part of the reason why the US is not afforded the respect it feels it deserves in some parts of the world. As several other commenters have already pointed out, the US did not win WW2, if anything it was Russia. No, Russia probably couldn't have done it alone, but saying that the US won the war is bordering on offensive.
This won't have been about earning money for MS, it will have been about taking it away from this cretin and trying to make sure he doesn't do it again.
I believe that part of the point is that your "digital identity" is independent of any contact details, so you can change your email address and still be idenitifiable as you.
A contaminant is something that spoils the purity of something or makes it poisonous. While tihs rice isn't poisonous, the affected rice is definitely not pure (in the sense of being completel GMO-free), and in that sense, this is a contaminant.
Just because the word has harmful connotations doesn't necessarily mean that that's its only use.
the music industry would be hauling their customers to court for making personal copies of songs and trading songs with friends
DO you have any links to back that up? Obviously I've heard about court cases against p2p users, but suing over personal copies or sharing with friends is a new one on me...
What the EU wants is eminently relevant, if MS are breaking or are in danger of breaking EU law.
Part of the cost of doing business in a particular market is abiding by the laws of that market. If the EU passed a law banning use of the colour green in operating systems, MS would have to obey or face the consequences, no matter how ridiculous the law may seem.
Get in line mate - I turned 32 yesterday, I think I have first dibs!
32 "early middle age" indeed! I'm still perfectly capable of literally dancing the night away clubbing on a Saturday night and being a useful human being the following day, thank you very much.
That at the time of the Manhattan Project, some people were afraid that detonating a nuclear bomb would start a chain reaction that would burn off the Earth's atmosphere.
Why do the british/american people delude themselves under the false assumption that it could never happen with them?
Why do you think that the majority of the US and UK population even realise that there are any parallels to be drawn between the two situations? I suspect that the vast majority see their government taking (to them) common-sense measures to protect their safety, and nothing else. Should anyone dare to challenge these measures, the replies will be along the lines of "If you're doing nothing wrong...", "No smoke without fire" and "But they're terrorists, why shouldn't they be watched?"
I've heard people express the opinion that Charles de Menezes deserved to be shot, because he was acting suspiciously and ran from the police - "He must've been up to something!". I've also heard the opinion that the odd innocent death is worth it to protect the majority. Well, maybe it is to some people, but it isn't to me; friendly fire is still fire, and they're still just as dead.
The leaders generally work towards that state, however well intentioned they might be.
I think that in the vast majority of cases, it is not intentional, that the leaders sincerely believe that they are acting in the best interests of the country and the population as a whole. They tell themselves that desperate threats require strong measures, that *of course* the powers will never be used for bad, that the means justify the ends, etc. I don't think so much that power corrupts, as that it blinds you to certain considerations. Or perhaps I'm just being naive. It doesn't really matter either way; some of the powers being claimed in the name of the war on terror are just plain scary. There is too much scope for abuse - perhaps not by this government, but what of the next, or the one after that? Just what sort of world is my daughter going to grow up in?
Trust? Why don't you let me borrow your car, since you think you can trust total strangers with nudie pics of yourself.
If you can't tell the difference between those two things then I'm not sure there's any point continuing this debate, but still...
I give everyone a default level of trust, until and unless they do something to either increase or decrease that level of trust. For what it's worth, I wouldn't send random strangers nude pictures of myself either, or give them contact details I couldn't ditch without issue (eg throwaway email address).
Implied trust? No EULA, no contract, no binding trust.
No, no binding trust; just an assumed level of common decency and honesty that was clearly lacking in this case.
Humor. My bad, I forgot we were on/.
That's the problem with a purely textual medium; humour can be very hard to spot at times, especially given the level of maturity of some people here (who would consider that a valid reason).
The dude is a bad person because he outed some perverts?... I have no problem with what they are doing
You should choose your words more carefully then; pervert is rather emotive, and is almost only ever used in a negative sense.
I grew up with finger, and nerds never freaked out about people knowing "I am in the computer lab at 4:00 AM again".
I grew up with finger, but finger doesn't invite you to contact it under false pretences then post personal information of the sort the vast majority of people would not want published in that way to a heavily-visited website.
No offence, but your analogies suck. I'm not even really disagreeing that these people were unwise to give out that sort of information on first contact with a complete stranger, but two wrongs don't make a right. The guy is a dick, plain and simple. If he carries on behaving in this fashion, eventually he's going to piss off the wrong person and things are going to turn very nasty. As much as these people need to learn to be a little less free with their personal info, this guy needs to learn that.
Maybe you don't understand how personal communication works.
I understand perfectly how personal communication works. Perhaps you have problems with "common decency" and "trust"?
There is no expectation of privacy for stuff you freely give away to a freaking stranger you don't even know.
There is an implied level of trust in this sort of thing. From the point of view of the respondents, they are replying to a like-minded individual who is advertising in an appropriate forum. This trust has been abused. No law has been broken, it's true, but it's a pretty reprehensible thing to do. I agree in my original comment that sending such personal contact details in an initial contact is perhaps naive, but that's still no excuse for this guy's actions.
but when you send me nude pics of your beautiful 300 lb naked self, you have no right to tell me what to do with them.
Nice ad hominem - so this behaviour is acceptable because the people caught out by it are ugly? Well, they must be, right? They use a personals site.
No, you have no right to tell someone what to do with a picture you send them - although you are of course free to *request* that they treat it with a little respect. Again, there is an expected behaviour in this situation, and this guy violated that expectation. He knew how most of these people would feel, and didn't care - he was in fact counting on it, that was the whole point. In my book, that makes him a bad person. Does it matter? Not really, but it does help make the world that little bit less of a nice place. Perhaps I'm old-fashioned, but I think it's better to be nice to people than unnecessarily nasty.
These perverts are probably mostly married and looking for a fling and they deserve what they get.
Ah, now we get to the crux of the matter - this sort of activity contravenes your personal morality, and so it's ok for them to be treated in this way. You have no evidence that any of these people were married - although I concede that some of them probably are. Of those, of course, some will have the explicit permission of their partner, who may even be expecting to participate. Of the ones who are cheating on their partner, fine, perhaps they did get what they deserved. The rest, however, most certainly did not, no matter how perverted you may personally find their particular sexual preferences.
I agree with you to an extent, but this is not the same as people expecting blog postings to magically only be visible to the intended audience. This is people responding to an invitation to contact someone who is making that invitation under false pretences. There is absolutely no difference between this, and someone placing a personal ad in a newspaper, then publishing the responses in that paper (other than that this costs the guy nothing).
I agree that there should be no expectation of privacy regarding information that is published on the web. However, this was *not* published on the web, and I think there is an implied expectation of privacy regarding personal communications (eaves-droppers notwithstanding).
You're right, in that some of these people were perhaps a little foolish to supply personal contact details quite so readily, but that doesn't excuse the guy who did this. I'm certainly not a psychologist, but this guy pretty much fits my personal, layman's definition of sociopath, as he clearly has zero empathy or respect for the people he did this to.
Slashdot Mirror
Now, how long before AOL, Real, Earthlink et al start making Linux versions of their stuff? (ok, it will be awhile, but I think it will happen.)
Like any other software, it'll happen when the companies concerned feel that they can make more money by producing the software than it would require to create it. Right now there simply isn't the market for it. (Although there *is* a Real player for Linux, of course)
I think Vista might be a factor in this. If it stinks, and continues to stick for awhile, people (I hope) will start looking for an alturnative.
Even if that happens, I suspect that you'll find that the alternative that most people pick will simply be to not upgrade. Not that the vast majority of users ever upgrade by any means other than simply using whatever comes with their new PC of course, and Vista would have to be unbelievably bad (as in, unusably bad) to actually stop people buying new PCs because of it.
IANAL, but I believe that US copyright law allows for punitive damages, that is damages that are intended to serve as a punishment.
UMG aren't suing YouTube just for the money they made by distributing these videos, they're suing to punish them for violating their rights.
There is incentive for major content providers to completely destroy user content websites. After all, the content oligarchy would not want competition, even poorly made funny cat video competition.
As much as I don't like a lot of what certain copyright holders and their interest groups are doing, this is easily avoided by simply not violating someone's copyright.
Violation of the GPL and "stealing" of code would have to involve financial gain without the contribution of the new extensions you added to the source.
The violation would be in distribution of binaries without making the source available, financial gain has nothing to do with it.
The analogy isn't great, but the basic thrust of the argument does hold - someone is doing something with a copyrighted work that the copyright holder does not approve of (and that is covered by copyright law). It may make sense to us for UMG to allow YouTube to do this for marketing purposes, but they don't want to, and that's their choice.
When you agreed to their license, which was a binding legal contract.
Are you sure that applies throughout the EU?
I suspect it's "mainstream" as in "aimed at normal people rather than techies".
Even if the above were true it defies logic that a browser is more/less secure because of the number of people examining it.
"Many eyes make shallow bugs" is the relevant quote - the idea is that with more people looking at something, you have a greater chance of spotting flaws.
A bug in MSIE leads to the whole computer being compromised.
Only if you run as admin, which admittedly is depressingly common in the Windows world.
In most households he is introduced at an early age to the computer as a toy and treats it as a toy while growing up. He does not look at it as a toolkit to assemble something usefull. He has no incentive to write anything in the first place and is getting less and less incentive as the personal computing continues to devolve to joe sub-average level.
You could have said exactly that 24 years ago when I got my first computer (a 16K ZX Spectrum). All most people did with those things was play games; the closest they got to programming was typing LOAD "" and hitting enter.
It was only really those of us that not only did that, but also typed in program listings (in BASIC) from magazines that went on to experiment with writing code ourselves. My parents didn't provide me with programing resources (although from memory, the Spectrum came with a BASIC manual), or particularly encourage me to experiment, I did it all off my own back. Of course, being me, they didn't *need* to encourage me; at times, it was all they could do to stop me taking things apart to see how they worked...
But yeah, al-q is real, and so were the London, India, USS Cole (sp?), etc. bombings - so not taking threats seriously - and personally - is pretty damned stupid.
I've lived, studied and worked in London for 13 years now. I was on my way in to work when the bombs went off last year; I walked past police officers leading some rather shocked looking people away from (I assume) a bus. I was here when the IRA were still actively targetting the main land, I was here when some nutter was detonating nail bombs (one in a pub just round the corner from where I worked), I was here when a bus blew up outside the BBC building, etc.
I guess I must be stupid though, as I certainly don't take the threat personally. Nor do I support some of the more egregious measures that are being taken in the name of the so-called war on terror. I refuse to allow myself to be cowed by the vague threat of being involved in an attack. I have far, far more chance of being killed crossing the road than I do of being blown up.
Sure, the threat is real, and should be taken seriously. However, it seems to me that a lot of the things that are being done are knee-jerk overreactions that we'll be lucky not to regret in the future. I worry about the sort of world my daughter is going to end up living in, as much for the direction my country seems to be heading in as for the threat of terrorism.
Those classes have been replaced by Java, where you don't even worry about resource leaks. Hey, garbage collector takes care of it!
If you don't worry about resource leaks then you are doomed to suffer resource starvation the moment your website starts getting a decent amount of traffic. The garbage collector is not a panacea; it means you don't have to worry about calling free() or an object's destructor, but you still have to clean up file handles, db connections, etc. There is no guarantee that your object will ever be reclaimed by gc, and certainly not in time to free up a scarce resource before you run out.
FDR won WWII in not much more time than we've been in Iraq.
Look, everyone appreciates the US's help in WW2, but that sort of statement is part of the reason why the US is not afforded the respect it feels it deserves in some parts of the world. As several other commenters have already pointed out, the US did not win WW2, if anything it was Russia. No, Russia probably couldn't have done it alone, but saying that the US won the war is bordering on offensive.
So how's that $100 PC coming along? WHAT?? Why do you need those kinds of specs?
Because without those specs, I can't use my PC for what I want to use it for. We don't all just surf, email, and fire up vi occasionally.
This won't have been about earning money for MS, it will have been about taking it away from this cretin and trying to make sure he doesn't do it again.
I believe that part of the point is that your "digital identity" is independent of any contact details, so you can change your email address and still be idenitifiable as you.
Also, on Windows at least, é is alt gr-e. (Test: é)
A contaminant is something that spoils the purity of something or makes it poisonous. While tihs rice isn't poisonous, the affected rice is definitely not pure (in the sense of being completel GMO-free), and in that sense, this is a contaminant.
Just because the word has harmful connotations doesn't necessarily mean that that's its only use.
the music industry would be hauling their customers to court for making personal copies of songs and trading songs with friends
DO you have any links to back that up? Obviously I've heard about court cases against p2p users, but suing over personal copies or sharing with friends is a new one on me...
What the EU wants is eminently relevant, if MS are breaking or are in danger of breaking EU law.
Part of the cost of doing business in a particular market is abiding by the laws of that market. If the EU passed a law banning use of the colour green in operating systems, MS would have to obey or face the consequences, no matter how ridiculous the law may seem.
Get in line mate - I turned 32 yesterday, I think I have first dibs!
32 "early middle age" indeed! I'm still perfectly capable of literally dancing the night away clubbing on a Saturday night and being a useful human being the following day, thank you very much.
The Linux = Ubuntu thing? It just happens, the amount of times I have heard "I am using Linux 3" when they are refering to Fedora Core 3 or such...
Similarly, I've heard people say that they're using Windows 97, when what they're actually using is Word 97 on Windows 95.
The average user doesn't really give two hoots what their OS is called, as long as they're convinced that it's the right/best one for them.
That at the time of the Manhattan Project, some people were afraid that detonating a nuclear bomb would start a chain reaction that would burn off the Earth's atmosphere.
That was ridiculous too.
Why do the british/american people delude themselves under the false assumption that it could never happen with them?
Why do you think that the majority of the US and UK population even realise that there are any parallels to be drawn between the two situations? I suspect that the vast majority see their government taking (to them) common-sense measures to protect their safety, and nothing else. Should anyone dare to challenge these measures, the replies will be along the lines of "If you're doing nothing wrong...", "No smoke without fire" and "But they're terrorists, why shouldn't they be watched?"
I've heard people express the opinion that Charles de Menezes deserved to be shot, because he was acting suspiciously and ran from the police - "He must've been up to something!". I've also heard the opinion that the odd innocent death is worth it to protect the majority. Well, maybe it is to some people, but it isn't to me; friendly fire is still fire, and they're still just as dead.
The leaders generally work towards that state, however well intentioned they might be.
I think that in the vast majority of cases, it is not intentional, that the leaders sincerely believe that they are acting in the best interests of the country and the population as a whole. They tell themselves that desperate threats require strong measures, that *of course* the powers will never be used for bad, that the means justify the ends, etc. I don't think so much that power corrupts, as that it blinds you to certain considerations. Or perhaps I'm just being naive. It doesn't really matter either way; some of the powers being claimed in the name of the war on terror are just plain scary. There is too much scope for abuse - perhaps not by this government, but what of the next, or the one after that? Just what sort of world is my daughter going to grow up in?
Trust? Why don't you let me borrow your car, since you think you can trust total strangers with nudie pics of yourself.
/.
... I have no problem with what they are doing
If you can't tell the difference between those two things then I'm not sure there's any point continuing this debate, but still...
I give everyone a default level of trust, until and unless they do something to either increase or decrease that level of trust. For what it's worth, I wouldn't send random strangers nude pictures of myself either, or give them contact details I couldn't ditch without issue (eg throwaway email address).
Implied trust? No EULA, no contract, no binding trust.
No, no binding trust; just an assumed level of common decency and honesty that was clearly lacking in this case.
Humor. My bad, I forgot we were on
That's the problem with a purely textual medium; humour can be very hard to spot at times, especially given the level of maturity of some people here (who would consider that a valid reason).
The dude is a bad person because he outed some perverts?
You should choose your words more carefully then; pervert is rather emotive, and is almost only ever used in a negative sense.
I grew up with finger, and nerds never freaked out about people knowing "I am in the computer lab at 4:00 AM again".
I grew up with finger, but finger doesn't invite you to contact it under false pretences then post personal information of the sort the vast majority of people would not want published in that way to a heavily-visited website.
No offence, but your analogies suck. I'm not even really disagreeing that these people were unwise to give out that sort of information on first contact with a complete stranger, but two wrongs don't make a right. The guy is a dick, plain and simple. If he carries on behaving in this fashion, eventually he's going to piss off the wrong person and things are going to turn very nasty. As much as these people need to learn to be a little less free with their personal info, this guy needs to learn that.
Maybe you don't understand how personal communication works.
I understand perfectly how personal communication works. Perhaps you have problems with "common decency" and "trust"?
There is no expectation of privacy for stuff you freely give away to a freaking stranger you don't even know.
There is an implied level of trust in this sort of thing. From the point of view of the respondents, they are replying to a like-minded individual who is advertising in an appropriate forum. This trust has been abused. No law has been broken, it's true, but it's a pretty reprehensible thing to do. I agree in my original comment that sending such personal contact details in an initial contact is perhaps naive, but that's still no excuse for this guy's actions.
but when you send me nude pics of your beautiful 300 lb naked self, you have no right to tell me what to do with them.
Nice ad hominem - so this behaviour is acceptable because the people caught out by it are ugly? Well, they must be, right? They use a personals site.
No, you have no right to tell someone what to do with a picture you send them - although you are of course free to *request* that they treat it with a little respect. Again, there is an expected behaviour in this situation, and this guy violated that expectation. He knew how most of these people would feel, and didn't care - he was in fact counting on it, that was the whole point. In my book, that makes him a bad person. Does it matter? Not really, but it does help make the world that little bit less of a nice place. Perhaps I'm old-fashioned, but I think it's better to be nice to people than unnecessarily nasty.
These perverts are probably mostly married and looking for a fling and they deserve what they get.
Ah, now we get to the crux of the matter - this sort of activity contravenes your personal morality, and so it's ok for them to be treated in this way. You have no evidence that any of these people were married - although I concede that some of them probably are. Of those, of course, some will have the explicit permission of their partner, who may even be expecting to participate. Of the ones who are cheating on their partner, fine, perhaps they did get what they deserved. The rest, however, most certainly did not, no matter how perverted you may personally find their particular sexual preferences.
I agree with you to an extent, but this is not the same as people expecting blog postings to magically only be visible to the intended audience. This is people responding to an invitation to contact someone who is making that invitation under false pretences. There is absolutely no difference between this, and someone placing a personal ad in a newspaper, then publishing the responses in that paper (other than that this costs the guy nothing).
I agree that there should be no expectation of privacy regarding information that is published on the web. However, this was *not* published on the web, and I think there is an implied expectation of privacy regarding personal communications (eaves-droppers notwithstanding).
You're right, in that some of these people were perhaps a little foolish to supply personal contact details quite so readily, but that doesn't excuse the guy who did this. I'm certainly not a psychologist, but this guy pretty much fits my personal, layman's definition of sociopath, as he clearly has zero empathy or respect for the people he did this to.
Even if they didn't, you would see that they accessed your report when you get a copy of your yearly free credit report.
Which is no good, of course, if it's due 10 months after you're turned down for the job.