This was exactly my first reaction too when I saw this story.
Another relevant quote, from my taglines file (sadly without an attribution):
As the boffins sit in their labratories devising ever more ingenious new gadgets, the one question they consistently fail to ask themselves is "so what?".
Sorry, but the paper-based version of this law holds just as true to someone photocopying fifty copies of his handwritten pamphlet as it does to the major national newspapers.
The difference is that no-one ever bothers to persue the small guy. If he's only printed fifty copies of his pamphlet, what really is the point in forcing him to print a retraction?
The same will hold true of the internet. You can write as much as you like about Microsoft on your homepage, and they won't do a thing about it. Why? Because it's frankly not worth the effort.
How many people visit your homepage each month? It's simply not enough to make it worth their time to go after you. In order to use their right to reply, they have to respond to what you've said, which means reading it, and writing a reply that deals with the points you've made.
Google searches and boilerplate letters may work for cease-and-desist letters, but to get their right to reply they will have to actually do some work, so unless your site has a *lot* of visitors, I think you'll remain perfectly safe in your obscurity.
The law may or may not suck. I didn't say anything about it's pros and cons.
My point was simply that the scare-mongering reaction "I might be forced to host a 500 meg file that will crash my server" is simply and demonstrably wrong.
You can object to the principle of it if you like (that's your call, and I don't really care much either way what your principles say on the matter) but alarmist reactions are not a good way to further your cause.
Sadly, they seem to be par for the course here, but that's a whole other topic of discussion.
No, it means that when you post anti-Microsoft tirades on your little blog site, MS has the right to come in and force you to put up a 500k.doc file telling everyone why you are full of shit.
Rubbish.
As has already been said (here and in the earlier dup story), this is the same as laws that already exist for newspapers, etc.
If your alarmist reaction had any foundation in reality, our newspapers would by now be reduced to massive slabs of paper filled with 500 page responses to various articles.
It simply doesn't work like that.
What we actually see are the responses that don't usually take up more space than a small article. These responses, by the way can be from large comapnies, but are also often from individuals like you and me.
Trying to make them print a 500 page response would never happen. For one, the newspapers would jusifiably ask you to pay for the printing, but more importantly, the purpose of the right to reply is to give you the chance to get your point across. A 500 page reply would simply not be read by anyone, so it fails that basic criteria.
I posted a longer version of this comment in the previous version of this story.
The reaction to this has been way over the top. Not unusual for Slashdot, I'll grant, but still I'm suprised to see you moaning so much about a law that effectively enhances your freedom of speech.
Firstly, you're going over the top, because in reality this is never going to affect the little guy, any more than current laws make much difference to someone who prints off fifty copies of something to hand out to his friends. You won't see people or companies trawling the web looking for bad things said about them on every little web page. If your personal page doesn't get any traffic, why should they have any reason to bother you?
On the other hand however, if a site does get a lot of traffic, and they publish a complaint about you or your business, would you not be upset if they then told you that you couldn't have your own say?
All those people looking at that site will presumably accept what is said (after all, it's a high-traffic site, so it must have some respect among it's visitors), so you would be left with a load of people getting a negative view about you, with you not being able to do anything about it.
I think it's perfectly justified in that case that you would want to be able to put your side of the argument across.
Those who complain that the reply might be a huge document that would swamp their site are missing the point, and have obviously not seen how it already operates in the traditional press. Here in Europe, it is routine to see small panels in the corners of pages, making corrections to an article from a previous edition. This is how it works. The newspaper would obviously never publish a hundred-page reply, and neither would a web site be forced to publish a hundred megabyte file. Such a document or file would in any case defeat the point of the excersise (ie to correct any perceived misrepresentation), for the simple reason that no-one would read it.
I haven't studied the article or the proposed law in detail, but if it works in any way close to the way the existing laws work for newspapers, then only people who have anything to fear are those who routinely insult others... and they should probably be more worried about the libel laws, anyway.
...but these guys have produced lengths of 100 metres at the rate of 70cm per minute!
Not bad.:-)
At that rate we should have enough for a space-elevator in just a couple of years. (assuming they don't think of a more down-to-earth use for it in the meanwhile...)
I would just tell them to look up during the night. You can't miss it.
Re:About as viral as accidentally giving away secr
on
What if SCO is Right?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
If they did release their code as GPL, it was their choice.
Ummm.... lets see now....
1. Caldera releases a distribution of Linux. 2. Caldera buys SCO. 3. Caldera now has access to the source for both OSs. 4. After a few months comparing the code, they find some that matches. 5. As soon as they find them, they drop their Linux product, and launch a lawsuit.
Given that set of circumstances, I can't see how they made a choice to release the code.
Of course, there is still an argument to be had as to whether that really was the sequence of events, or whether there really is any of their code in Linux, but I don't think there's any scenario where they actually chose to release their code: if the above sequence is right, they did everything possible to limit the damage once they found out, and if it isn't correct, then they probably haven't got a case.
Don't know about any Federal law, but where I come from (UK), this would definitely fall under the Unfair Dismissal laws.
Unfair Dismissals can be ruled even where someone leaves voluntarily, if they can prove that there was discrimination/abuse/intimidation that forced them to leave.
yeah taht is why the brit governmnet sucks. the4y can take any private ideas and classify them. why the hell are they not declassified for use today?
Concorde's technology also got classified, but that didn't stop them building it and making a success of it.
Besides, this is the '80s we're talking about - people were still paranoid about espionage back then.
Anyway assuming the law doesn't change, it'll all get declassified automatically in another 20-odd years, thanks to the "30-year rule". (though it might be somewhat academic by then)
Slashdot Mirror
They should use a hydrogen balloon instead of helium - that way when they ignite the rocket, they'll get extra boost as the balloon explodes.
>:-D
Should I expect to find "herbal remedies" in this zip file?
Duh. It'll be a bigger pen1s, of course. What else would you expect to find if you open a zip?
And for that matter, why did you think this virus is called "So Big?"
This was exactly my first reaction too when I saw this story.
Another relevant quote, from my taglines file (sadly without an attribution):
As the boffins sit in their labratories devising ever more ingenious new gadgets, the one question they consistently fail to ask themselves is "so what?".
from the better-than-most-tlas dept.
:-D
Oh, it's TLAs. D'oh! I read that as "better than most TLDs".
I'm a writer. You know... stories, articles, poetry... that sort of thing.
Doesn't actually help to get me away from the computer much, though.
(ps - if you enjoy writing, or reading for that matter, my favorite writer's site is this one: Lit.org - enjoy)
Sorry, but the paper-based version of this law holds just as true to someone photocopying fifty copies of his handwritten pamphlet as it does to the major national newspapers.
The difference is that no-one ever bothers to persue the small guy. If he's only printed fifty copies of his pamphlet, what really is the point in forcing him to print a retraction?
The same will hold true of the internet. You can write as much as you like about Microsoft on your homepage, and they won't do a thing about it. Why? Because it's frankly not worth the effort.
How many people visit your homepage each month? It's simply not enough to make it worth their time to go after you. In order to use their right to reply, they have to respond to what you've said, which means reading it, and writing a reply that deals with the points you've made.
Google searches and boilerplate letters may work for cease-and-desist letters, but to get their right to reply they will have to actually do some work, so unless your site has a *lot* of visitors, I think you'll remain perfectly safe in your obscurity.
The law may or may not suck. I didn't say anything about it's pros and cons.
My point was simply that the scare-mongering reaction "I might be forced to host a 500 meg file that will crash my server" is simply and demonstrably wrong.
You can object to the principle of it if you like (that's your call, and I don't really care much either way what your principles say on the matter) but alarmist reactions are not a good way to further your cause.
Sadly, they seem to be par for the course here, but that's a whole other topic of discussion.
No, it means that when you post anti-Microsoft tirades on your little blog site, MS has the right to come in and force you to put up a 500k .doc file telling everyone why you are full of shit.
Rubbish.
As has already been said (here and in the earlier dup story), this is the same as laws that already exist for newspapers, etc.
If your alarmist reaction had any foundation in reality, our newspapers would by now be reduced to massive slabs of paper filled with 500 page responses to various articles.
It simply doesn't work like that.
What we actually see are the responses that don't usually take up more space than a small article. These responses, by the way can be from large comapnies, but are also often from individuals like you and me.
Trying to make them print a 500 page response would never happen. For one, the newspapers would jusifiably ask you to pay for the printing, but more importantly, the purpose of the right to reply is to give you the chance to get your point across. A 500 page reply would simply not be read by anyone, so it fails that basic criteria.
I posted a longer version of this comment in the previous version of this story.
Getting paid to volunteer? Huh? That's a bit of a non-sequitor.
How can it possibly count as volunteer-work if you get paid for it?
Playstation, huh? hehehe. Microsoft blew that one big time! :-D
The reaction to this has been way over the top. Not unusual for Slashdot, I'll grant, but still I'm suprised to see you moaning so much about a law that effectively enhances your freedom of speech.
Firstly, you're going over the top, because in reality this is never going to affect the little guy, any more than current laws make much difference to someone who prints off fifty copies of something to hand out to his friends. You won't see people or companies trawling the web looking for bad things said about them on every little web page. If your personal page doesn't get any traffic, why should they have any reason to bother you?
On the other hand however, if a site does get a lot of traffic, and they publish a complaint about you or your business, would you not be upset if they then told you that you couldn't have your own say?
All those people looking at that site will presumably accept what is said (after all, it's a high-traffic site, so it must have some respect among it's visitors), so you would be left with a load of people getting a negative view about you, with you not being able to do anything about it.
I think it's perfectly justified in that case that you would want to be able to put your side of the argument across.
Those who complain that the reply might be a huge document that would swamp their site are missing the point, and have obviously not seen how it already operates in the traditional press. Here in Europe, it is routine to see small panels in the corners of pages, making corrections to an article from a previous edition. This is how it works. The newspaper would obviously never publish a hundred-page reply, and neither would a web site be forced to publish a hundred megabyte file. Such a document or file would in any case defeat the point of the excersise (ie to correct any perceived misrepresentation), for the simple reason that no-one would read it.
I haven't studied the article or the proposed law in detail, but if it works in any way close to the way the existing laws work for newspapers, then only people who have anything to fear are those who routinely insult others... and they should probably be more worried about the libel laws, anyway.
How can anything solve Boeing's sales problem when there's whole fleets of aircraft sitting idle in the desert?
I'd have thought the airlines will bring those back into service before they start buying new planes.
This is an old article. It's been on the BBC at least three days already! You should have picked a more youthful one. ;-)
...but these guys have produced lengths of 100 metres at the rate of 70cm per minute!
:-)
Not bad.
At that rate we should have enough for a space-elevator in just a couple of years. (assuming they don't think of a more down-to-earth use for it in the meanwhile...)
black and white striped shirt, white face paint
You mean Beetlejuice? I didn't know he had a forcefield...?
Aw man. They got a webby. I want one. :)
Of course, Captain Janeway would tell you that these sorts of things are caused by wars in the Q Continuum...
What's worse than raining cats and dogs?
;-)
Hailing taxi-cabs.
(yeah, I know... only just on topic... but I couldn't resist
They haven't even stopped yet, and we're talking about letting them resume spamming?!
oh, wait... you meant "resumé", didn't you?
Yes, AOL sends commercial messages to its members, but it doesn't spam the rest of the world too...
[AOL] "Wha-?! You mean there's people using email *outside* of AOL?? That must mean they didn't get our CDs then! Did we miss someone?"
Museum looking for space
I would just tell them to look up during the night. You can't miss it.
If they did release their code as GPL, it was their choice.
Ummm.... lets see now....
1. Caldera releases a distribution of Linux.
2. Caldera buys SCO.
3. Caldera now has access to the source for both OSs.
4. After a few months comparing the code, they find some that matches.
5. As soon as they find them, they drop their Linux product, and launch a lawsuit.
Given that set of circumstances, I can't see how they made a choice to release the code.
Of course, there is still an argument to be had as to whether that really was the sequence of events, or whether there really is any of their code in Linux, but I don't think there's any scenario where they actually chose to release their code: if the above sequence is right, they did everything possible to limit the damage once they found out, and if it isn't correct, then they probably haven't got a case.
Don't know about any Federal law, but where I come from (UK), this would definitely fall under the Unfair Dismissal laws.
Unfair Dismissals can be ruled even where someone leaves voluntarily, if they can prove that there was discrimination/abuse/intimidation that forced them to leave.
yeah taht is why the brit governmnet sucks. the4y can take any private ideas and classify them. why the hell are they not declassified for use today?
Concorde's technology also got classified, but that didn't stop them building it and making a success of it.
Besides, this is the '80s we're talking about - people were still paranoid about espionage back then.
Anyway assuming the law doesn't change, it'll all get declassified automatically in another 20-odd years, thanks to the "30-year rule". (though it might be somewhat academic by then)
Are these loudspeakers designed for use in say, a PA system? Or for use in home theater, or theater theater? Perhaps for DJing purposes?
None of the above. They're designed to enable rich people to show off.