The clause I had in mind was 1201(a) [attached]. While the tone of the act suggests it applies to performances and literary works, it is my understanding that it applies to software/firmware/devices as well. It was clearly the intent of Dell that you click to agree and by circumventing this process you are availing yourself of whatever IP is inside the computer, thus circumventing the copyright protection system.
Sec. 1201. Circumvention of copyright protection systems
`(a) VIOLATIONS REGARDING CIRCUMVENTION OF TECHNOLOGICAL MEASURES- (1)(A) No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title. The prohibition contained in the preceding sentence shall take effect at the end of the 2-year period beginning on the date of the enactment of this chapter.
Blake Stowell, director of public relations at SCO, told the INQUIRER late today: "Just because we aren't "planning" to sue Linux companies doesn't mean we won't. [...]
Also, just because we are saying that we won't sue Linux companies doesn't mean that we won't sue Linux customers".
My conjecture is that at this time they can't afford the retainer to Boise et al to undertake any new litigation.
An alternate theory is based on the fact that their "letter to Linux users" has indeed disappeared from www.sco.*: perhaps the pseudo-softening of their position is the result of a cease-and-desist order.
The basis for SCO's claim was a dusty old contract that IBM signed with AT&T. It had no provision at all for IBM returning code to AT&T. You can read it at SCO's web site (as an attachment to their complaint).
AFAIK, IBM added nothing to SYSV. IBM added code to AIX, which is a derivative of SYSV. The legal fine point on which SCO rested their initial case was that any new features added to the derivative work became part of the derivative, and were therefore subject to non-disclosure agreements. At first SCO said this had 'nothing to do with copyright' but now they seem to think that copyright also applies to these peripherally added components.
This analysis applies to SMP, journalling, and the other big items that SCO like to parade in front of us.
But then there are the infamous 80 lines that are allegedly in SCO's SYSV code and also Linux. These apparently are independent of the 'derivative work'code. Only Laura Didio (who was trained as a reporter before she became a professional industry apologist and has no software expertise) finds this example convincing.
SCO's argument in trying to collect license fees from Linux users and distributors is that a license will buy peace of mind and immunity from SCO lawsuits.
Anybody who gives SCO even $0.01 enters into a contract with said company, and invites being hauled off to Utah to defend against breach-of-contract suits.
It seems to me that the most effective way to fight the extortion (over and above what RedHat is doing) is to impress on potential extortees that paying off SCO is *not* a safe move for the risk-averse.
RedHat's fund appears to me a much better use of a Linux user's spare change.
Notably absent from the article is any mention of the energy efficiency of this beast. At one-and-a-half-tons, it hauls around a lot of mass for a single seater.
We seem to assume that because we can't see or smell it that electricity is 'free energy.' Electricity is not free; electrical energy generation and storage are horribly inefficient and not particularly environmentally friendly. Radioactive waste, diverted watersheds, burnt fossil fuels, or lead-acid batteries are friendly neither to your pocket book nor to your planet.
That said, I do acknowledge that the creators' original intent was to use fuel cells which may prove to be a superior energy delivery system. However, even if I subtract out 1000 lbs for the batteries, the car is still very heavy for its capacity. Even worse than the new Mini, which weighs more than double the original.
The Falls should be seen, but there is nothing in the City of Niagara Falls, Canada that is worth seeing. Unless you are into tacky wax museums, Ripley's, etc. Niagara Falls, U.S. has some nice parks and a mall but other than that is residential/industrial stuff and not very touristy.
Anyway, in Niagara Falls, take a ride on the Maid of the Mist and/or go in the tunnels under the falls, and then get out.
Since you're Australian and a/. member, you might be interested in wine technology, particulary in a new wine region. There are some fine wineries in the vicinity (Chateau des Charmes, Inniskillin, Cave Spring, 30 Bench, Henry of Pellham to name a few). Canada's (serious) wine industry is very new and you can take a tour. (Drinking age in Ontario is 19)
The ads often appear with fake window frames, so that the X takes you to the advertised site. You don't have to be that much of a bumpkin to be taken in.
Thanks for pointing out this clause. I am concerned, however that the 'the commercial email' qualification neuters these provisions.
Forgery is forgery is forgery. The qualification admits the defense that 'this isn't commercial email.'
In my opinion, an amendment chaning all occurrences of 'the commercial email' to 'any email message' would make these provisions apropos, and render irrelevant much of the rest of the bill.
Even if everybody stopped using soap, Amway wouln't go away. For the same reason, I am unconvinced that spam would go away were there no takers. The spam tool market is self-perpetuating.
I would be interested to know, right now, what fraction of spammers actually net any revenue from their practices.
I've had the same email account for 20+ years. Two years ago, spam was a minor annoyance. One year ago it was annoying enough that I started using spamassassin. This year it is annoying enough that I can cope only by using spamassassin with a bayes filter. Next year?
Let me quantify my statements. In June 2002 I received 732 legitimate email messages and 375 spams. In June 2003 I received 683 legitimate email messages, and 1872 spams. in June 2004, I expect to receive 700 legitimate messages; how many spams? Let's start a pool!
Technology is cool but not a panacea. I ran a personal version of Spamassassin 2.60 on my last 15 months' email. Every decision was fed back into the automatic learning process, and every incorrect decision was corrected manually. Here are the numbers:
total legit: 13726
total spam: 11441
false positives: 11
false negatives: 272
These numbers look good (2.3% of spams slip through under the radar and 0.08% of legit mail gets trapped). But they aren't that good. The numbers mean that one or two spams a day get through right now, and who-knows-how-many next year. Hardly an adequate approach to keeping offensive material from my eyes. The numbers also mean that I would have missed 11 legitimate messages in the last year or so had I not sifted through the crap.
While I'm not holding my breath for a legislative panacea, I believe that something has to be done to check the uncontrolled growth in the volume of spam being sent. Receiver-end controls won't cope.
As I have mentioned in a previous comment, I believe that the volume can be abated by prohibiting deceptive email, as opposed to trying to adjudicate the consensuality of the relationship between sender and receiver.
From the article's paraphrasal of the spam bill, I would say that it misses the mark. The problem is not advertising per se, but email designed to trick you. The leading trick is a fake sender address.
Almost all spam uses a fake sender address. Usually the sender address is bogus. Pernicious spam uses a real, forged sender's address. Not only is this difficult to detect, it causes the victim of the identity theft to receive rejection messages and hate mail. I have been the victim of such identity theft and it isn't pleasant.
I support legislation making it a criminal offense to forge the sender's address, and a lesser offense to send email (especially in quantity) with a bogus sender address.
I believe that legitimate advertisers and freedom-of-expression devotes can agree that forgery has no legitimate purpose.
If emails were signed, it would be much easier to bring pressure to bear on the senders of undesirable email to cease and desist.
Travelling Salesman belongs to the NP-complete class of problems. It is not true that "there is no solution" as claimed elsewhere in this thread. There is no known *efficient* solution.
Efficiency doesn't matter if the problem is small enough. The 1992 ACM finals has a travelling salesman: (Problem B, "Getting in Line", http://acm.uva.es/p/v2/216.html ) The trick is to notice that the maximum number of nodes is 8, so you can try all 8 factorial (40320) orderings.
Other NP-complete problems (maximum subset sum, hamiltonian cycle, clique, independent set, graph coloring, bin packing) appear frequently in these contests. The trick is to notice that they are hard and to find an approach (such as brute force or dynamic programming) that will solve the problem for the size given.
It is not quite accurate to say that they haven't had a judging problem in 10 years.
They haven't had a judging problem that survived the end of the contest in 10 years.
We have first-hand experience with two judging problems on previous finals. In 1995, we were awarded a balloon only to have it taken away much later. In 1997 we had a problem judged incorrect for some reason (probably due to ambiguity in the output). We moved on to another question and an hour or two later a "correct submission" message popped up for that question.
Judging problems at the finals are rare but do occur. Judging problems at the regionals are more common, because they are run locally and those in charge may lack experience.
In any event, judging problems do occur and dealing with them is part of contest preparation. However, it is important not to overestimate the chance of error - even in the worst-run regional, a judgement of "incorrect" is much more likely an error in the submission than an error in judging.
only Melbourne and Waterloo did not get Problem F on the first try,
Tsinghua tried F and didn't get it, even in the rejudging. So they weren't directly affected in the same way as Waterloo and Melbourne. Nevertheless, they would have seen the scoreboard and may have made tactical decisions based on the perception that something was wrong with the data. For example, they may have had some trivial bug and 1/2 hour to spare at the end of the contest. Had a large fraction of the teams solved F, they would have had the savvy to spend some more time looking for a simple bug rather than perhaps working on a long shot.
Bad judging affects everybody. Due to luck or skill, it affects some more than others. Tactical decisions are made in real time based on the judgements and there is no way to undo the effects. I encourage the ACM judging team to be more open about the process, to admit their mistakes, and to do a thorough and public post-mortem on this failure in their QA process.
In my opinion this would be time and effort better spent than fiddling with the rankings in an attempt to please everyone.
One thing that is done in the ECNA regionals is to write an "input checker" routine. Imagine that the contest question is recast as "print 'yes' if the input conforms to the given specification; otherwise print 'no'." I don't see how this year's F data could have passed such a test.
The original posted rankings can be found at http://plg.uwaterloo.ca/~gvcormac/acmresults/final 2000.html This page also has a pointer to the revised results that were posted April 16, but the "rankings" section was deleted later the same day, replaced by "Final Rankings are under review" The trouble with re-judging is that it is impossible to undo the effect of the bad judging. Some teams were not affected by the problem, because they chose a method that happened by chance to conform to the judges' expectations. Some spent a great deal of time and did not have an accepted submission. Some spent a great deal of time diagnosing the data and deducing an approach that would be accepted. Some moved on very quickly when their first submission was rejected - of these many actually had it correct but many had trivial errors that they *could* have fixed had there been correct judgements (it was easy to infer that something was screwy by the number of teams failing to receive credit for this easy question). I am glad that the organizers are prepared to be more open about the process. I have little complaint about the issuance of more medals, but a reranking in which people can only move up makes no sense to me. And I can't think of any teams that deserve to be moved down. All sports and competitions admit the possibility of "bad calls." In nearly all such competitions the referee's decision stands and the results are not changed post hoc (except for disqualification or penalties due to the fault of the competitors). Everything should be done to make judging as reliable as possible, but bad calls are part of the game, and the standing is determined, at least in part, by how competitors respond to the situation.
Slashdot Mirror
Your challenge occasioned me to (re)read the DMCA
The clause I had in mind was 1201(a) [attached]. While the tone of the act suggests it applies to performances and literary works, it is my understanding that it applies to software/firmware/devices as well. It was clearly the intent of Dell that you click to agree and by circumventing this process you are availing yourself of whatever IP is inside the computer, thus circumventing the copyright protection system.
Sec. 1201. Circumvention of copyright protection systems
`(a) VIOLATIONS REGARDING CIRCUMVENTION OF TECHNOLOGICAL MEASURES- (1)(A) No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title. The prohibition contained in the preceding sentence shall take effect at the end of the 2-year period beginning on the date of the enactment of this chapter.
I wouldn't be surprised if this approach could be prosecuted under the DMCA.
From u the inquirer
Blake Stowell, director of public relations at SCO, told the INQUIRER late today: "Just because we aren't "planning" to sue Linux companies doesn't mean we won't. [...]
Also, just because we are saying that we won't sue Linux companies doesn't mean that we won't sue Linux customers".
My conjecture is that at this time they can't afford the retainer to Boise et al to undertake any new litigation.
An alternate theory is based on the fact that their "letter to Linux users" has indeed disappeared from www.sco.*: perhaps the pseudo-softening of their position is the result of a cease-and-desist order.
Here's an article that has a link to the text of IBM's response/countersuit:
h ives.asp?ArticleID=43784
http://www.crn.com/sections/BreakingNews/dailyarc
The basis for SCO's claim was a dusty old contract that IBM signed with AT&T. It had no provision at all for IBM returning code to AT&T. You can read it at SCO's web site (as an attachment to their complaint).
AFAIK, IBM added nothing to SYSV. IBM added code to AIX, which is a derivative of SYSV. The legal fine point on which SCO rested their initial case was that any new features added to the derivative work became part of the derivative, and were therefore subject to non-disclosure agreements. At first SCO said this had 'nothing to do with copyright' but now they seem to think that copyright also applies to these peripherally added components.
This analysis applies to SMP, journalling, and the other big items that SCO like to parade in front of us.
But then there are the infamous 80 lines that are allegedly in SCO's SYSV code and also Linux. These apparently are independent of the 'derivative work'code. Only Laura Didio (who was trained as a reporter before she became a professional industry apologist and has no software expertise) finds this example convincing.
http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/030804/lam110_1.html
SCO's argument in trying to collect license fees from Linux users and distributors is that a license will buy peace of mind and immunity from SCO lawsuits.
Anybody who gives SCO even $0.01 enters into a contract with said company, and invites being hauled off to Utah to defend against breach-of-contract suits.
It seems to me that the most effective way to fight the extortion (over and above what RedHat is doing) is to impress on potential extortees that paying off SCO is *not* a safe move for the risk-averse.
RedHat's fund appears to me a much better use of a
Linux user's spare change.
Not on my SPARC system.
/bin/ls | mores age: ls -1RaAdCxmnlogrtucpFbqisfL [files]% 3ld
%4lld
plg2.math 3>uname -a
SunOS plg2.math 5.8 Generic_108528-22 sun4u sparc SUNW,Sun-Fire-880
plg2.math 4>strings
SUNW_OST_OSCMD
RaAdC1xmnlogrtucpFbqisfL
u
COLUMNS
total %llu
%llu
%3ld
%-8s
%-8lu
%-8s
%-8lu
%3ld,
%b %e %Y
%b %e %H:%M
->
%s%s
%s%s
%-8lu
%-8lu
%10llu
%llu
%lld
%lld
%7lld
%lld
plg2.math 5>
Notably absent from the article is any mention of the energy efficiency of this beast. At one-and-a-half-tons, it hauls around a lot of mass for a single seater.
We seem to assume that because we can't see or smell it that electricity is 'free energy.' Electricity is not free; electrical energy generation and storage are horribly inefficient and not particularly environmentally friendly. Radioactive waste, diverted watersheds, burnt fossil fuels, or lead-acid batteries are friendly neither to your pocket book nor to your planet.
That said, I do acknowledge that the creators' original intent was to use fuel cells which may prove to be a superior energy delivery system. However, even if I subtract out 1000 lbs for the
batteries, the car is still very heavy for its capacity. Even worse than the new Mini, which weighs more than double the original.
The Falls should be seen, but there is nothing in the City of Niagara Falls, Canada that is worth seeing. Unless you are into tacky wax museums, Ripley's, etc. Niagara Falls, U.S. has some nice parks and a mall but other than that is residential/industrial stuff and not very touristy.
/. member, you might be interested in wine technology, particulary in a new wine region.
Anyway, in Niagara Falls, take a ride on the Maid of the Mist and/or go in the tunnels under the falls, and then get out.
Since you're Australian and a
There are some fine wineries in the vicinity (Chateau des Charmes, Inniskillin, Cave Spring, 30 Bench, Henry of Pellham to name a few). Canada's (serious) wine industry is very new and you can take a tour. (Drinking age in Ontario is 19)
The ads often appear with fake window frames, so that the X takes you to the advertised site. You don't have to be that much of a bumpkin to be taken in.
Thanks for pointing out this clause. I am concerned, however that the 'the commercial email' qualification neuters these provisions.
Forgery is forgery is forgery. The qualification admits the defense that 'this isn't commercial email.'
In my opinion, an amendment chaning all occurrences of 'the commercial email' to 'any email message' would make these provisions apropos, and render irrelevant much of the rest of the bill.
Even if everybody stopped using soap, Amway wouln't go away. For the same reason, I am unconvinced that spam would go away were there no takers. The spam tool market is self-perpetuating.
I would be interested to know, right now, what fraction of spammers actually net any revenue from their practices.
I've had the same email account for 20+ years. Two years ago, spam was a minor annoyance. One year ago it was annoying enough that I started using spamassassin. This year it is annoying enough that I can cope only by using spamassassin with a bayes filter. Next year?
Let me quantify my statements. In June 2002 I received 732 legitimate email messages and 375 spams. In June 2003 I received 683 legitimate email messages, and 1872 spams. in June 2004, I expect to receive 700 legitimate messages; how many spams? Let's start a pool!
Technology is cool but not a panacea. I ran a personal version of Spamassassin 2.60 on my last 15 months' email. Every decision was fed back into the automatic learning process, and every incorrect decision was corrected manually. Here are the numbers:
total legit: 13726
total spam: 11441
false positives: 11
false negatives: 272
These numbers look good (2.3% of spams slip through under the radar and 0.08% of legit mail gets trapped). But they aren't that good. The numbers mean that one or two spams a day get through right now, and who-knows-how-many next year. Hardly an adequate approach to keeping offensive material from my eyes. The numbers also mean that I would have missed 11 legitimate messages in the last year or so had I not sifted through the crap.
While I'm not holding my breath for a legislative panacea, I believe that something has to be done to check the uncontrolled growth in the volume of spam being sent. Receiver-end controls won't cope.
As I have mentioned in a previous comment, I believe that the volume can be abated by prohibiting deceptive email, as opposed to trying to adjudicate the consensuality of the relationship between sender and receiver.
From the article's paraphrasal of the spam bill, I would say that it misses the mark. The problem is not advertising per se, but email designed to trick you. The leading trick is a fake sender address.
Almost all spam uses a fake sender address. Usually the sender address is bogus. Pernicious spam uses a real, forged sender's address. Not only is this difficult to detect, it causes the victim of the identity theft to receive rejection messages and hate mail. I have been the victim of such identity theft and it isn't pleasant.
I support legislation making it a criminal offense to forge the sender's address, and a lesser offense to send email (especially in quantity) with a bogus sender address.
I believe that legitimate advertisers and freedom-of-expression devotes can agree that forgery has no legitimate purpose.
If emails were signed, it would be much easier to bring pressure to bear on the senders of undesirable email to cease and desist.
Many historians believe that Atanasoff invented the electronic computer, not Eckert & Mauchly.
In the ACM contest, three copies of the problem
set are given to the contestants.
Travelling Salesman belongs to the NP-complete
class of problems. It is not true that "there
is no solution" as claimed elsewhere in this
thread. There is no known *efficient* solution.
Efficiency doesn't matter if the problem is small
enough. The 1992 ACM finals has a travelling
salesman: (Problem B, "Getting in Line",
http://acm.uva.es/p/v2/216.html ) The trick
is to notice that the maximum number of nodes
is 8, so you can try all 8 factorial (40320) orderings.
Other NP-complete problems (maximum subset sum,
hamiltonian cycle, clique, independent set,
graph coloring, bin packing) appear frequently
in these contests. The trick is to notice that
they are hard and to find an approach (such
as brute force or dynamic programming) that will
solve the problem for the size given.
They haven't had a judging problem that survived the end of the contest in 10 years.
We have first-hand experience with two judging problems on previous finals. In 1995, we were awarded a balloon only to have it taken away much later. In 1997 we had a problem judged incorrect for some reason (probably due to ambiguity in the output). We moved on to another question and an hour or two later a "correct submission" message popped up for that question.
Judging problems at the finals are rare but do occur. Judging problems at the regionals are more common, because they are run locally and those in charge may lack experience.
In any event, judging problems do occur and dealing with them is part of contest preparation. However, it is important not to overestimate the chance of error - even in the worst-run regional, a judgement of "incorrect" is much more likely an error in the submission than an error in judging.
Gordon Cormack
Coach, Waterloo ACM team
only Melbourne and Waterloo did not get Problem F on the first try,
Tsinghua tried F and didn't get it, even in the rejudging. So they weren't directly affected in the same way as Waterloo and Melbourne. Nevertheless, they would have seen the scoreboard and may have made tactical decisions based on the perception that something was wrong with the data. For example, they may have had some trivial bug and 1/2 hour to spare at the end of the contest. Had a large fraction of the teams solved F, they would have had the savvy to spend some more time looking for a simple bug rather than perhaps working on a long shot.
Bad judging affects everybody. Due to luck or skill, it affects some more than others. Tactical decisions are made in real time based on the judgements and there is no way to undo the effects. I encourage the ACM judging team to be more open about the process, to admit their mistakes, and to do a thorough and public post-mortem on this failure in their QA process.
In my opinion this would be time and effort better spent than fiddling with the rankings in an attempt to please everyone.
One thing that is done in the ECNA regionals is to write an "input checker" routine. Imagine that the contest question is recast as "print 'yes' if the input conforms to the given specification; otherwise print 'no'." I don't see how this year's F data could have passed such a test.
Gordon Cormack
Coach, Waterloo ACM Team
The original posted rankings can be found at http://plg.uwaterloo.ca/~gvcormac/acmresults/final 2000.html This page also has a pointer to the revised results that were posted April 16, but the "rankings" section was deleted later the same day, replaced by "Final Rankings are under review" The trouble with re-judging is that it is impossible to undo the effect of the bad judging. Some teams were not affected by the problem, because they chose a method that happened by chance to conform to the judges' expectations. Some spent a great deal of time and did not have an accepted submission. Some spent a great deal of time diagnosing the data and deducing an approach that would be accepted. Some moved on very quickly when their first submission was rejected - of these many actually had it correct but many had trivial errors that they *could* have fixed had there been correct judgements (it was easy to infer that something was screwy by the number of teams failing to receive credit for this easy question). I am glad that the organizers are prepared to be more open about the process. I have little complaint about the issuance of more medals, but a reranking in which people can only move up makes no sense to me. And I can't think of any teams that deserve to be moved down. All sports and competitions admit the possibility of "bad calls." In nearly all such competitions the referee's decision stands and the results are not changed post hoc (except for disqualification or penalties due to the fault of the competitors). Everything should be done to make judging as reliable as possible, but bad calls are part of the game, and the standing is determined, at least in part, by how competitors respond to the situation.