Under the Rivers and Harbors Act of 1899 (33 U.S.C. 407) one may not dispose of waste into any navigable stream without a permit from the Army Corps of Engineers; penalties include a fine of up to $2500.00 per day, with half going to the party who reports it.
Consider a law like this imposed upon spammers and those who hire them. Follow the money, cut off and confiscate the money, reduce spam.
If it is a private campus, they can ban whatever they please as far as RF emitting devices are concerned.
Public colleges are a different story, of course. They have to follow federal law as a public entity and only permit the FCC to regulate these matters.
Neither organization has any right to restrict use by a person who has a right to posession of a space to use of wireless spectrum, neither a private college nor a public one has any right to restrict or regulate unlicensed radio frequency spectrum use.
how much does it cost to monitor and enforce the right?
if FCC has not limited the number of access points that one man can have, the landlord can muscle out its tenant's right easily. Just install as many APs as possible.
The landlord is using unlicensed radio frequency space. (1) The landlord has no right to exclusive use of the radio frequencies, someone else can set up their own equipment in the same area on the same frequency spectrum; (2) As a user of radio freqency equipment, the user's device must not cause interference to other licensed users; and (3) must accept interference from others, including interference causing undesired operation.
So how do you figure that your landlord is allowed to tell you not to have pets, or that you can't get an antenna mounted to the side of your house for wireless internet service from your local ISP (we've had this happen at work several times.. the landlord said.. no way.. you can't put that thing on the house!)
The landlord can dictate you can't damage their property such as by leaving fleas or animal waste. It may be considered unreasonable for a landlord to prohibit, say, the keeping of an fishbowl or aquarium since the possibility of damage to their property is minimal to nonexistent. They could conceivably prohibit you from mounting an antenna on the side of the building because it leaves damaging mounting holes. He can't prohibit you from putting up a standing antenna that is mounted, say, on a PVC pole inside a paint bucket filled with cement in the back yard. He has no property right in the radio frequency spectrum on his land unless he has an exclusive license to it. And as long as where you put the bucket is an area that you have posession of as part of your lease, he has no right to stop you.
Landlord can also say.. no holes in the house. No nails in the rooms, etc. He still owns the house. You can go find elsewhere to rent if you don't like the rules. But the landlord can tell you whatever he pleases, it's his house!
They do not own any property right or have any right of control over the airwaves unless they have a license giving them exclusive use of the frequency in that area. Unless they do they have no right of action to stop or prevent someone else's use of said freqency. When you rent a piece of property, the landlord gives up certain rights to the tenant, one of which is that the tenant is entitled to "quiet enjoyment" of the facility and right of posession. Landlord has to let them use the place (posession) and leave them alone (quiet enjoyment) as long as they pay the rent and don't make disturbances. Landlord has no right to restrict how tenant uses unlicensed radio frequencies since the landlord has no posessory right, title or interest in them.
Just like when you are on MY network you won't be running Kazaa!
Difference is, it's your wired network someone would be tapping into, and you do have an ownership right in the wires. And to the extent someone connects to your network through your radio equipment that's a different matter. But that doesn't mean you have any right to stop someone else who has a legitimate right of posession of an area of setting up a separate (wireless) network of their own in their area and using their equipent.
But if they own the house, I see no reason why they can't dictate who runs what in the house.
There's this new invention called Rent, where you take money and give up some of your rights. When you rent someone an apartment you have no right to tell the renters if they can eat cheese inside the apartment (even though you own the apartment). There's restrictions of course, (like not allowing pets, etc). Massport could possibly ban WiFi equipment entirely, but they can't say who can and cannot use the spectrum.
They do not even have any right to ban WiFi equipment unless they can show they either have an exclusive license to the frequency range or that there would be some danger to some other licensed service. Homeowners associations tried to ban ham radio antennas and the FCC told them to get stuffed. The FCC has exclusive jurisdiction over the regulation of radio services in the U.S.
I posted the following on the NANOG list in response without even having read the actual decision and it looks like I got it almost exactly right:
In an attempt to add a little more light than heat to this issue, let me add my.02 Euros. I am not a lawyer although I've had to defend myself in court a few times, so I do know a few things.
This is a temporary restraining order. These are commonly issued "ex parte" meaning at the request of one of the parties and may even be done where the other party did not even show up or was given notice. The purpose is to "preserve the status quo." The court apparently - from the description of the TRO - issued it verbatim as the plaintiff filed it. I doubt the court even knew what half the terms on the order meant. I had trouble and I'm somewhat familiar with Internet networking.
In the case at hand, it may be that the contract with the provider could in theory have allowed immediate repossession of the IP address space which was loaned to them in the event they changed providers. In which case, if the company that has the particular IP space, allowing them to have their address range "snatched away" from them immediately would constitute irreparable harm, since it can take up to a week for an address change to propagate throughout the Internet.
A Temporary Restraining Order is intended to keep things as they are at the time it was issued, until such time as a court has the opportunity to hear evidence and to make a decision. Generally they are issued subject to the following conclusions:
1. The party asking for the order (the plaintiff, here) is quite likely to suffer irreparable harm if the relief requested by the order is not granted.
2. The party to whom the order is issued against (the defendant, here) either will not suffer harm as a result of the order or the amount of harm is minor or substantially less than that which would occur to the other party if the order isn't granted.
There are additional conditions involved, but these are the two most important. Here, allowing the customer to keep the number on a temporary basis while the court decides the issue does not necessarily harm the defending ISP and failing to do so would probably be devastating to the customer.
Now, to the extent the customer has other options (such as using the number block which they have been assigned directly) will provide the court with a reasonable solution as to why the TRO should be dissolved after the customer has some reasonable time to correct the problem, e.g. to renumber their systems and advertise the new routes to the various routers and DNS systems might require, say 7-10 days.
Also, if the contract between the company and the ISP provides them sufficient protection to allow them the time necessary to renumber and reroute then the need for the TRO becomes moot. However, if the contract was silent on this point or explicitly allowed immediate repossession then the TRO may have been a valid issue in order to preserve the status quo for the time being until the issue can be sorted out.
This is the basic reason such decisions are issued, so that things can remain as they are until the court can figure out who is entitled to relief. It does not necessarily mean the customer will win or even has a valid cause of action, it just simply means that it is less catastrophic to the ISP to require they not "yank" the IP addresses from the customer than it would be to allow them to do so, pending the outcome of the actual trial on the merits of the issues involved.
Please excuse me if this is obvious, but I thought it might help.
I wouldn't get too excited. The FCC has authority derived from the interstate commerce clause of the U.S. Constitution. Technically they have no authority to govern intrastate radio emissions.
In U.S. v. Southwestern Cable Co., 392 U.S. 157 (1968), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the FCC has jurisdiction over an intrastate cable television company carrying signals exclusively in California between Los Angeles and San Diego. It may be arguable that since the usage of radio frequencies is regulated by treaty that Congress might have chosen to give the FCC exclusive jurisdiction over the regulation of the airwaves. Whether a court would permit state regulation of certain types of intrastate radio transmission is abother matter and is probably not likely.
This ruling only stops other arms of the goverment from trying to take on the activities only the FCC is legally set out to do.
How do you think movie theaters get away with telling people not to use cell phones during the movie?
You do not have a leasehold interest in the space you obtain to sit in a movie theatre, therefore they can impose restrictions. But even then, there must be some reasonableness to them as it does not own the radio space in its theatre (except and to the extent it has any form of FCC license).
Also, the theatre is not interested in your using cell phones during a movie as long as it doesn't interfere with the film. Want to bet that the theatre won't care a whit if you spend ten minutes talking in their lobby on your cell phone but would be concerned if you spend ten seconds talking in the auditorium when the movie is on.
It's simple common courtesy to the other movie goers.
Can the management of the expo say that you cannot hook up a Wi-Fi router to the network that they have a monopoly over in the convention center?
Yes, but since you have a valid leashold right in the space you have there, you can set up your own network. They cannot contractually prohibit you from doing so (except for very limited exceptions, none of which would apply to, say, plugging a wireless router box into an electrical wall socket) and any such prohibibitions in your contract are void.
but your landlord can just put the "must use the landlord's wireless network" clause in your lease. You sign away many, many rights when you sign a lease already, this would just be one more.
Uh, no:
"We also affirm that... under the FCC's Over-the-Air Reception Devices... rules apply... to customer antennas - one meter or less in size - used for transmitting and/or receiving any
fixed wireless signal of any commercial nonbroadcast communications signal that is transmitted via wireless technology to or from a customer location. The rules prohibit homeowner associations, landlords, state and
local governments, or any other third parties from placing restrictions that impair a customer antenna user's ability to install, maintain, or use such customer antennas transmitting and/or receiving commercial nonbroadcast communications signals when the antenna is located "on property within the exclusive use or control" of the user where the user has a "direct or indirect" ownership or leasehold interest in the property, except under certain exceptions for safety and
historic preservation." - Commission Staff Clarifies FCC's...Rules Governing Customer
Antennas and Other Unlicensed Equipment (bold emphasis added)
The ruling applies only to governmental and quasi governmental entities. The private sector can do whatever they please, unless some specific law limits their powers.
So landlords could restrict tenants rights, regardless of what the FCC does.
Not so. The FCC has ruled in earlier cases that a homeowner's association cannot prohibit use of satellite dishes even if there is a rule against them (forcing owners to subscribe to a local cable company that pays the association kickbacks, for example.)
A homeowner's association is a private body, not a governmnent agency. As such, it can require through the contract and restrictive covenants certain requirements a government agency could not, such as prohibiting you from, say, painting your house a certain color or having a stained-glass window of Jesus or painting a cross or Star of David on your house.
The following quote is used to give an example of the size of a meter (and centimeter). The actual size of a centimeter is 0.4 inches, but 1/2 is close enough as a rule of thumb.
"I'm going to ask you something. If you don't understand, ask me to explain. Otherwise say yes or no, okay?"
"Yes."
"Now if I promise that you can go certain places without being hurt, on condition that you only go where I say and no other place, and that if you break that promise you release me from every promise I have ever made to you, would you be willing to give me that promise?"
"Yes."
"So we make this very clear, if I say that you can go, say, 20 meters outside this building, and you promise to agree, then you were to go 20 meters and 1 centimeter, that you've then broken your promise, which means all of my promises to protect you are gone, and it means that my [police officer] friend Joan can take you [to jail]. Do you understand?"
"What's a meter?"
"It's a little over 3 feet, about 3 inches more than a yard. A centimeter is about half an inch."
"Oh. Okay. Yes."
- Supervisor 246 to Leroy 504337 in Paul Robinson's "Instrument of God"
Strangely, though an inch is defined as 2.54 cm, they open the web page by indicating that a meter is approximately 39 1/2 inches. No, I'm not implying they mean 39 (1/2 inches) [or 19.5 in] -- rather that they approximate poorly. 39.37 does not equal 39.5 inches (even if NIST, the US National Institute of Standards and Technology, says so.)
They probably should have said "aproximately 39 1/3" inches, which would have been closer. But I think "approximately 39 1/2" is "good enough for government work."
Maybe they should have checked with the National Bureau of Standards (NBS), who set the standards for measurement. Oh wait, that's who they used to be! If even they can't get it right, we're screwed.
The decision by SCOTUS *ACTUALLY* says that the police can require you to give your name when you *ARE* suspected of a crime or wrongdoing.
Let's consider that for a moment how easy it is for the police to suspect anyone of a crime.
YOU,THE DEFENDANT: Your honor, I was just standing there, waiting for the bus, when this cop stopped and asked me who I was and what I was doing there. I hadn't done anything wrong, so I wouldn't answer his question.
THE COURT: Officer?
OFFICER JOHNSON: Your honor, a confidential informant told me that someone who is (insert a description of you) was selling crack at the bus stop.
THE COURT: The officer had reasonable grounds to believe you were committing a crime, therefore your refusal violated the law. You are found guilty.
THE DEFENDANT: But I hadn't done anything!
THE COURT: It doesn't matter. If you weren't suspected of a crime then the officer would have no right to require you to answer, but since you were suspected of a crime, you were required to answer.
Also, the case had little to do with being anonymous. It was about a man who was suspected of a engaging in a domestic disturbance who refused to identify himself when stopped by police.
And the Supreme Court said in Terry v. Ohio decades ago - and as was pointed out in the dissents - that one is under no obligation to answer if asked and may not be arrested merely for refusing to answer. Now SCOTUS is completely changing what had been the rule before, and is patently and obviously ignoring the 4th and 5th Amendments. Now if one refuses to identify oneself to a police officer one can be arrested, then it's the defendant's job to prove that they were not suspected of a crime. The most ironic thing about this is that if you believe you are wanted (say a warrant for an outstanding traffic ticket), you could invoke the fifth amendment if giving them your name could allow them to do a warrants check and find you as being wanted, but you would have no such right. If you are (or believe you are) guilty of something you have the right to refuse to answer but no right to refuse if you're innocent!
Your headline and description leads the reader to believe that all sorts of anonymous activity is illegal, and that is just not so.
No, the headline and description got it right. I read the decision. The Supremes got it wrong again, this is bad law.
First thing I do when I install XP is to snag the hosts file from someonewhocares.org, since I've used that, neither ad-aware nor spybot have detected one bit of spyware.
I agree, that's what I did. But there's one problem. If you don't also run a local webserver or have one on wherever the hostname is pointed to for those ad servers and malware servers, in some cases some web sites will not open. Slashdot is one, for some reason if it can't resolve the address of the banner ad, the page becomes the banner address instead of the actual address and the page won't load. But if you run a local webserver (like Universal Server that runs Apache, PHP and MYSQL on a Windows machine (even Windows 98) the address does resolve, is returned bad and the web pages then load correctly, just without the popups.
I have a linksys wireless router between my DSL modem and my computers. I've gotten malware and spyware on my main computer (I found out later when I ran a checking program) but never got a virus or a worm. When I later installed Apache locally on a Win 98 machine and put in a.hosts file with a list of all the adware companies and their servers routed back to localhost, (which causes the local copy of Apache to try to serve them and report no such page) it also stopped almost all popups and a lot of in-line ads.
In his commentary on Brooks' work. There are a number of issues Willis comments about, including a 'sneer' at the software rent and memory rent. And other comments on the expensive costs of computers at that time. Realize Brooks' is talking about programming on mainframes, machines where you mostly did batch processing and served hundreds or thousands of users.
It wasn't all that long ago when parts for micro computers were expensive, very expensive. I remember when 16 megabytes of memory - and a lot slower than what is available now - cost US$400. I remember when an 80 megabyte hard drive cost US$420.00. I remember these prices because that's what I paid. This is less than 15 years ago. The availablility of really powerful computers for individuals at astonishingly low prices is an extremely recent development.
The lowering of prices (and the resultant raising of the standard of living for those who buy those things) has been going on for thousands of years, as long as we've had free markets to allow this to happen. But initially (or as long as someone has had monopoly control over supply) prices were high and often the items were difficult to obtain. As products become commodities, prices drop. This is why 640 MB CDs (commodity) are now as low as 16c each (qty. 100), 50c each qty. 1. 4,200 MB DVD-Rs are $1 each (qty 4), while 100MB zip disks (proprietary) are still about $8 each (almost no discount in quantity).
Willis is comparing terms and conditions now with the situation of (much worse scarcity) of 30-35 years ago, then cracks up in laughter at his own ignorance of the past.
Erm... Brad Pitt was supposed to be a Greek, not a Geek nor a Roman.
Not Brad Pitt the actor, you goofball. Brad Pitt the famous Gaul tribal leader of 96-50 BC.
I believe it is unfair and unreasonable to expect the average person to know of someone from a(n) historic time who has an identical name to a currently famous person unless you properly identify that you are referring to the other party.
This is Slashdot, where there are more than a fair share of programmers, yet if I wrote an article referring to Michael Jackson, most would presume I was referring to the gentleman who is currently accused of pederasty, not to the gentleman who is involved in the structured programming movement.
that nobody has right to decide have I right to read something or not!
The copyright owner does.
Wrong. The copyright law makes it clear that once you sell a work you have no right to control its future distribution and that the purchaser of a work has every right to the normal use, enjoyment and even resale of that work. See Bobbs-Merrill Co. v. Straus, 210 U.S. 339 (1908) where the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that once the copyright holder sells a work they lose control of that copy and may not prevent transfer or future resale. If a copyright proprietor has no right to stop resale, it certainly should have no right to determine how or under what conditions you read or use a work as long as you aren't making copies for others.
A lot of us would like to protect material from damage or destruction, or would prefer not to keep subjecting our originals to constant exposure to use. (This was more of an issue with tape because of friction.) Or maybe I don't want to have to buy two copies of the same disk or tape because I don't want to have to keep a copy upstairs and a copy downstairs in order to watch it. I can afford to buy duplicate 50c-$1 used books; buying, say, 500 duplicate DVDs at 15-30 bucks a pop is out of the question. My sister has a DVD player in her room that holds 300 discs. It also has a system to allow you to type in the names of every disc. You can use the remote (if you're masochistic or a lunatic) or you can (much closer to sanity) plug in a keyboard. But if you remove a disc from the machine, you lose the stored data. (If you take it out and put it back without doing anything else, you're okay, but once you watch any other disc it will lose the stored info. I can't watch any of the disks from her machine without losing the stored disc info unless she does not use the machine at all for anything. Would be simpler for me to make a copy and watch the copy upstairs than to go downstairs, remove the disc, watch it up there, take it back downstairs, then re-enter the stored data for that disc when she's not using her machine. If I was using DVD-RW, I could simply copy the disc, make a copy, watch it, then erase the copy and use the DVD-RW for watching a temporary copy of a different disc. But I can't do that because of anti-copying protections.
One time I was copying the master CD of an application we make and by accident I dropped it, which scratched it so badly it would no longer work. And I'm careful.
There are lots of legitimate reasons for making copies of things, none of which has anything to do with piracy.
To protect your Toy Story Disc from damage by children, you put it in a a safe place, and make them ask you for it before they watch it.
I've never been a parent but I have the suspicion you've never been either. Do you really expect to keep kids out of any place you can think of to hide things? And it doesn't matter even if you do make them ask; kids can damage things unintentionally in unbelievable ways. And not just kids, either. My sister has a friend whose child comes by to visit. I have to remind this little girl on a constant basis not to slam the door on the car I'm driving. (I have also had to remind my brother, who is over 50 and older than me, not to do the same thing, so it isn't just kids that have problems (he's broken the side mirror on two of the cars I've owned)). This little lady did something to the Windows Me computer we have that completely destroyed the ability for it to boot-up normally; windows kept saying there was a protection error and would not boot. Would come up in safe mode but not otherwise. Reinstall from the CD would not fix the problem. I ended up having to wipe the hard drive and reinstall on bare metal. I'll tell you this: I have been doing programming for over 20 years and I'll be damned if I can figure out how she did it. I'd even be willing to redo the reinstallation of everything if I could see and find out how she did it.
People keep bringing up the case of Jon Johansen, and Dmitri Skryalov. They neglect to mention that both of them were found totally innocent,
After spending time in jail and thousands of dollars in legal fees to have to prove they were innocent.
and in the makers of the garage door openers lost their case.
After spending thousands of dollars in legal fees to prove their actions were non-infringing.
Okay, so the law is badly worded to allow these actions in the first place, but we now have soem case law that explicitely spells out the exceptions.
PHP is just another (interpreted) version of the C language
Huh? PHP is very dissimilar to C.
I didn't say it was a clone of C, I said it was "just another version." Yes there are some differences but it's heavily based upon it.
It is weakly typed, has variable substitution into strings, is object oriented, uses garbage collected memory allocation, and has a syntax that is designed to be embedded into webpages.
If it looks like C despite some differences, I'm going to call it as I see it.
About the only thing they have in common is the syntax of a few basic statements, which is just superficial.
Well, let's see:
the if statement is the same, using () to surround the arguments
the for statement is the same, including using ; to separate parameters
uses { and } for statement blocks
uses; for statement terminator
break statement to exit loops
use of = for assignment and == for equality testing
I can go on for some time, but the fact is that a large percentage of the control structures and syntax for PHP is derived from C. It may not be exactly the same - Turbo Pascal is quite different from Standard Pascal, and Visual Basic is radically different from the original BASIC - but the similarities are close enough.
Every programming languages has its strengths and its weaknesses. PHP is just another (interpreted) version of the C language which is why it's popular (and because it has a module which can be statically linked into Apache.) I presume Perl is popular because it provides fairly complex pattern matching. And there are other scripting languages out there. People will use what they know and what is available to them.
Every job has its requirements; being a good programmer is being able to use the tools you have to solve the problem in a way that fits the requirements. Being a great programmer is knowing which tool is right for the job - and which isn't - and when they may have to look for something else.
Of course this made me think of yet another point =) Something like the removal of.gov in favor of gov.us, or making it us.gov (and allowing all other countries to participate under the.gov TLD).
Slashdot Mirror
Consider a law like this imposed upon spammers and those who hire them. Follow the money, cut off and confiscate the money, reduce spam.
Also, the theatre is not interested in your using cell phones during a movie as long as it doesn't interfere with the film. Want to bet that the theatre won't care a whit if you spend ten minutes talking in their lobby on your cell phone but would be concerned if you spend ten seconds talking in the auditorium when the movie is on.
It's simple common courtesy to the other movie goers.
A homeowner's association is a private body, not a governmnent agency. As such, it can require through the contract and restrictive covenants certain requirements a government agency could not, such as prohibiting you from, say, painting your house a certain color or having a stained-glass window of Jesus or painting a cross or Star of David on your house.
They probably should have said "aproximately 39 1/3" inches, which would have been closer. But I think "approximately 39 1/2" is "good enough for government work."
Maybe they should have checked with the National Bureau of Standards (NBS), who set the standards for measurement. Oh wait, that's who they used to be! If even they can't get it right, we're screwed.
YOU,THE DEFENDANT: Your honor, I was just standing there, waiting for the bus, when this cop stopped and asked me who I was and what I was doing there. I hadn't done anything wrong, so I wouldn't answer his question.
THE COURT: Officer?
OFFICER JOHNSON: Your honor, a confidential informant told me that someone who is (insert a description of you) was selling crack at the bus stop.
THE COURT: The officer had reasonable grounds to believe you were committing a crime, therefore your refusal violated the law. You are found guilty.
THE DEFENDANT: But I hadn't done anything!
THE COURT: It doesn't matter. If you weren't suspected of a crime then the officer would have no right to require you to answer, but since you were suspected of a crime, you were required to answer. And the Supreme Court said in Terry v. Ohio decades ago - and as was pointed out in the dissents - that one is under no obligation to answer if asked and may not be arrested merely for refusing to answer. Now SCOTUS is completely changing what had been the rule before, and is patently and obviously ignoring the 4th and 5th Amendments. Now if one refuses to identify oneself to a police officer one can be arrested, then it's the defendant's job to prove that they were not suspected of a crime. The most ironic thing about this is that if you believe you are wanted (say a warrant for an outstanding traffic ticket), you could invoke the fifth amendment if giving them your name could allow them to do a warrants check and find you as being wanted, but you would have no such right. If you are (or believe you are) guilty of something you have the right to refuse to answer but no right to refuse if you're innocent! No, the headline and description got it right. I read the decision. The Supremes got it wrong again, this is bad law.
I have a linksys wireless router between my DSL modem and my computers. I've gotten malware and spyware on my main computer (I found out later when I ran a checking program) but never got a virus or a worm. When I later installed Apache locally on a Win 98 machine and put in a .hosts file with a list of all the adware companies and their servers routed back to localhost, (which causes the local copy of Apache to try to serve them and report no such page) it also stopped almost all popups and a lot of in-line ads.
In his commentary on Brooks' work. There are a number of issues Willis comments about, including a 'sneer' at the software rent and memory rent. And other comments on the expensive costs of computers at that time. Realize Brooks' is talking about programming on mainframes, machines where you mostly did batch processing and served hundreds or thousands of users.
It wasn't all that long ago when parts for micro computers were expensive, very expensive. I remember when 16 megabytes of memory - and a lot slower than what is available now - cost US$400. I remember when an 80 megabyte hard drive cost US$420.00. I remember these prices because that's what I paid. This is less than 15 years ago. The availablility of really powerful computers for individuals at astonishingly low prices is an extremely recent development.
The lowering of prices (and the resultant raising of the standard of living for those who buy those things) has been going on for thousands of years, as long as we've had free markets to allow this to happen. But initially (or as long as someone has had monopoly control over supply) prices were high and often the items were difficult to obtain. As products become commodities, prices drop. This is why 640 MB CDs (commodity) are now as low as 16c each (qty. 100), 50c each qty. 1. 4,200 MB DVD-Rs are $1 each (qty 4), while 100MB zip disks (proprietary) are still about $8 each (almost no discount in quantity).
Willis is comparing terms and conditions now with the situation of (much worse scarcity) of 30-35 years ago, then cracks up in laughter at his own ignorance of the past.
Paul Robinson <Postmaster@paul.washington.dc.us>I believe it is unfair and unreasonable to expect the average person to know of someone from a(n) historic time who has an identical name to a currently famous person unless you properly identify that you are referring to the other party.
This is Slashdot, where there are more than a fair share of programmers, yet if I wrote an article referring to Michael Jackson, most would presume I was referring to the gentleman who is currently accused of pederasty, not to the gentleman who is involved in the structured programming movement.
Wrong. The copyright law makes it clear that once you sell a work you have no right to control its future distribution and that the purchaser of a work has every right to the normal use, enjoyment and even resale of that work. See Bobbs-Merrill Co. v. Straus , 210 U.S. 339 (1908) where the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that once the copyright holder sells a work they lose control of that copy and may not prevent transfer or future resale. If a copyright proprietor has no right to stop resale, it certainly should have no right to determine how or under what conditions you read or use a work as long as you aren't making copies for others.
A lot of us would like to protect material from damage or destruction, or would prefer not to keep subjecting our originals to constant exposure to use. (This was more of an issue with tape because of friction.) Or maybe I don't want to have to buy two copies of the same disk or tape because I don't want to have to keep a copy upstairs and a copy downstairs in order to watch it. I can afford to buy duplicate 50c-$1 used books; buying, say, 500 duplicate DVDs at 15-30 bucks a pop is out of the question. My sister has a DVD player in her room that holds 300 discs. It also has a system to allow you to type in the names of every disc. You can use the remote (if you're masochistic or a lunatic) or you can (much closer to sanity) plug in a keyboard. But if you remove a disc from the machine, you lose the stored data. (If you take it out and put it back without doing anything else, you're okay, but once you watch any other disc it will lose the stored info. I can't watch any of the disks from her machine without losing the stored disc info unless she does not use the machine at all for anything. Would be simpler for me to make a copy and watch the copy upstairs than to go downstairs, remove the disc, watch it up there, take it back downstairs, then re-enter the stored data for that disc when she's not using her machine. If I was using DVD-RW, I could simply copy the disc, make a copy, watch it, then erase the copy and use the DVD-RW for watching a temporary copy of a different disc. But I can't do that because of anti-copying protections.
One time I was copying the master CD of an application we make and by accident I dropped it, which scratched it so badly it would no longer work. And I'm careful.
There are lots of legitimate reasons for making copies of things, none of which has anything to do with piracy.
I've never been a parent but I have the suspicion you've never been either. Do you really expect to keep kids out of any place you can think of to hide things? And it doesn't matter even if you do make them ask; kids can damage things unintentionally in unbelievable ways. And not just kids, either. My sister has a friend whose child comes by to visit. I have to remind this little girl on a constant basis not to slam the door on the car I'm driving. (I have also had to remind my brother, who is over 50 and older than me, not to do the same thing, so it isn't just kids that have problems (he's broken the side mirror on two of the cars I've owned)). This little lady did something to the Windows Me computer we have that completely destroyed the ability for it to boot-up normally; windows kept saying there was a protection error and would not boot. Would come up in safe mode but not otherwise. Reinstall from the CD would not fix the problem. I ended up having to wipe the hard drive and reinstall on bare metal. I'll tell you this: I have been doing programming for over 20 years and I'll be damned if I can figure out how she did it. I'd even be willing to redo the reinstallation of everything if I could see and find out how she did it.
After spending time in jail and thousands of dollars in legal fees to have to prove they were innocent.
After spending thousands of dollars in legal fees to prove their actions were non-infringing.
I can go on for some time, but the fact is that a large percentage of the control structures and syntax for PHP is derived from C. It may not be exactly the same - Turbo Pascal is quite different from Standard Pascal, and Visual Basic is radically different from the original BASIC - but the similarities are close enough.
Every job has its requirements; being a good programmer is being able to use the tools you have to solve the problem in a way that fits the requirements. Being a great programmer is knowing which tool is right for the job - and which isn't - and when they may have to look for something else.