I always thought, based on the original posts, it was based on Linus being pissed off with tridge for releasing a BitKeeper export tool. If that's true, and only Linus truly knows, it doesn't improve my opinion of Linus.
What you'd typically do in that case with Bazaar is to use "bzr send" to send your changes (including merge and log information) to a mailing list or another developer as an email, and perhaps into the Bundle Buggy patch review system.
In git it seems it is more common to ask people to pull from you (which would require a public ip), or to send them a plain diff with no history.
So far (touch wood) I've avoided sleeping with my immediate family or murdering anyone. If yahweh's prophets told white lies to avoid awkward situations, or fudged their expense claims I might have more sympathy for them. We're not exactly talking about perfection here, just the difference between regular folks and outright psychos.
Bear in mind they're not just fallible humans: they're doing what god tells them. "Kill the heretics!" and they do it. Both the god and the people are culpable.
The text of the bible is at odds with with the values people claim to draw from it. They say "don't kill", but there are few other books that so heartily encourage killing.
Suppose I published a new book today encouraging people to kill anyone who cooks on a Sunday, or who worships the wrong god, or a hundred other things. What kind of response do you think I'd get? People genuinely closely following the bible are complete nutjobs of the sort more recently associated with Aryan Nation, Al Qaeda or Aum Shinrikyo.
Other books that propound ethics tend to have characters who, after a period of struggle, exemplify those ethics. Or they have characters who defy the proposed code, but in some way are seem to suffer or be reduced by doing so. This is not true of the bible; perhaps it follows a different formula but if so I've never seen a good explanation of it.
You can get some nice, poetic, inspiring, life-affirming quotes if you selectively pick & choose from the bible. That's fine with me; I do it myself on occasion. But you could do that from almost any book, from 'Thus Spake Zarathustra' to 'The Lord of the Rings'.
#7 Thou shalt not commit adultery (cheat on my wife)
Since the bible contains plenty of examples of sympathetic godly characters killing and fucking around its credibility as a moral manifesto is pretty thin.
If you pay attention to the fine print, it's actually "do not kill - unless they're from an enemy nation, or they work on Sunday (or maybe Saturday?), or they're an unfaithful woman, or a fag, or worship a different god, or unless the voices in your head tell you to, or...." This sounds more like the code of a death cult than anything I'd like my children involved with.
So, yeah, the bible's great, as long as you abbreviate it down to a few dot points we could probably all agree on anyhow.
Loaded with syntactic sugar, it has a much wider scope than shell and it is massive overkill.
Here's the complete grammar of Python 2.4, as good a measure of the amount of syntactic sugar as anything. I doubt the grammar of Bourne shell is any smaller. (I seem to recall that there are so many irregularities in shell syntax that it's not even possible to describe it in EBNF, but I might be wrong.)
Python is also conceptually unstable. Constant incompatable upgrades are made.
A more reasonable comparison is to the 10+ DVDs in the MSDN toolkit, since typical distros comes with compilers for a bunch of languages, some documentation, editors, debuggers, web server, and on and on.
Aside from gentoo, only bsd based systems are limited to 1 or 2 cds now.
Ubuntu comes on one CD. Doubtless you could find a dozen more on distrowatch.
And as I understand, being a democratic nation, this must be true for Australia too.
No, it's not true for Australia. There is legal aid, but as far as I know it doesn't cover business matters such as this. And frankly I wouldn't want to rely on it when going up against, e.g., SCO.
If it's not even a baby apocalypse, why is the zdnet story leading with the A$5000 scare figure?
Because publishers (both slashdot and zdnet) often like to make stories sound more catastrophic than they actually are, so as to get more readers.
From my understanding of AfC's blog entry, there's no immediate need for anyone to pay a cent. But then "Small amount of paperwork to secure Linux trademark" is hardly going to be front-page news.
You're welcome to think of, or research, alternative theories for the origin of life, the universe and cheese.
Let me know when you get some useful results.
I'm happy for people to think and write about new theories. Where I have a problem is when they want to teach random unsubstantiated theories in schools in place of established mainline science.
Otherwise you'll get an inky dink. Try explaining *that* to the wife.
Re:19 million Amperes is chicken feed
on
19 million Amps
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· Score: 1
If you read the actual article (only 2 pages!) you'll see they claim it delivers more power than the Earth's energy production, not more current. It seems plausible that they had 19MA at many MV, which could be more power than the instantaneous production of the world
Actually they say it "generates electrical energy", which I think is a bit sloppy. But it's just a press release.
I don't know what a lawyer would have advised him. For all I know he did get legal advice first.
The lesson I take from this sad episode is: before threatening to report someone for a felony, get legal advice on the possible consequences to yourself. At worst, you're a few hundred bucks down and you got a chance to think it over before acting; at best you saved having your home raided and your computers effectively stolen.
It's not reasonable that a publisher can put arbitrary conditions on access to a web site. ("By reading this paragraph you agree to pay me $50.") As you say, there is a common convention that a server listening on port 80 is generally intended to provide a public resource, and by default anyone can read the information there. As you say: anyone can walk into a hamburger joint, *but not if they've been previously told not to come back*.
According to Salzenberg's account HMS knew they were accessing the servers against the wishes of the property owner, which is prima facie unauthorized access, a crime.
robots.txt is a common convention, published by almost all nontrivial web sites and respected by all reputable robots. As Salzenberg correctly observes, Federal courts have already recognized this role.
In retail sales, putting price tags on articles in public is an "offer to treat", an offer to negotiate.
That's fine, but irrelevant. If someone is barred from a shop and they sneak back in wearing a wig it's still trespass. It doesn't matter that the public at large is allowed in, or that the shop doesn't require a signed contract to enter, or that the person wasn't notified in writing that they were banned. It doesn't matter that they managed to get past security. It's a criminal offense, and I can understand Salzenberg wanting no part of it.
"negative video" seems to propose two unusal theories:
1. HTTP is legally enforceable, but robots.txt is merely a gentleman's agreement. That seems a hard distinction to draw: both are just conventions adopted for interoperability. Both are widely implemented and respected within the industry it is also very common for them to be violated. HTTP has the imprimatur of W3, but not as far as I know of an international treaty organization like (iirc) ITU or ISO.
I'm not aware of any legislation anywhere that says merely violating HTTP would be a crime, although there are laws against unauthorized radio broadcasts or telephone signals.
2. "Whatever is not technically prevented is by definition permitted." If this were really the case, there would be no crime of trespass, since the owner should have made the trespass impossible. Indeed if that were adopted it would overturn the whole concept of property law.
A more useful argument, which was tried in some of the EBay cases, is that a property which is generally available to the public cannot exclude a particular client. The law is not yet clear here, and it's not clear what would be reasonable. Small-print agreements to access a public web site seem dodgy, but excluding a particular client seems fairly clear.
In any case, it sounds like HMS were infringing the copyrights of the sites they scraped, and that probably is cut-and-dried.
You're way off beam if you're thinking about changes to the server. It is not necessary for a client to cause changes to the server to constitute illegal unauthorized access. Australian law, for example, distinguishes unathorized access from unauthorized modification; both are illegal but the second has a higher maximum penalty.
Clearly harm can be done by somebody merely reading information they are not entitled to get.
The analogy is of a library open to the public that bars a particular person because of past bad behaviour. Having been told they are not allowed, it would possibly be trespass for them to sneak back in. The publishers would perhaps be in a stronger position if they specifically told HMS in writing to desist, but blocking their IP and adding a robots.txt line makes the intention clear.
And before you even do that, see a lawyer! Work out what risk or protection you'll have, what your liability may be to the company, whether you should resign first and if so how, and so on. Remember the prosecutor and police will not always act in your best interest.
Obviously the point is to have enough sense to know when you need to see a lawyer and when you should save your money.
Seems to me that before starting a fight with (what you believe to be) a criminal organization it would be a good idea to see a lawyer. A few hundred bucks for a consultation is small change compared to what he's up for now.
Slashdot Mirror
I always thought, based on the original posts, it was based on Linus being pissed off with tridge for releasing a BitKeeper export tool. If that's true, and only Linus truly knows, it doesn't improve my opinion of Linus.
What you'd typically do in that case with Bazaar is to use "bzr send" to send your changes (including merge and log information) to a mailing list or another developer as an email, and perhaps into the Bundle Buggy patch review system.
In git it seems it is more common to ask people to pull from you (which would require a public ip), or to send them a plain diff with no history.
(Kind of lame ad hominem, but anyhow...)
So far (touch wood) I've avoided sleeping with my immediate family or murdering anyone. If yahweh's prophets told white lies to avoid awkward situations, or fudged their expense claims I might have more sympathy for them. We're not exactly talking about perfection here, just the difference between regular folks and outright psychos.
Bear in mind they're not just fallible humans: they're doing what god tells them. "Kill the heretics!" and they do it. Both the god and the people are culpable.
The text of the bible is at odds with with the values people claim to draw from it. They say "don't kill", but there are few other books that so heartily encourage killing.
Suppose I published a new book today encouraging people to kill anyone who cooks on a Sunday, or who worships the wrong god, or a hundred other things. What kind of response do you think I'd get? People genuinely closely following the bible are complete nutjobs of the sort more recently associated with Aryan Nation, Al Qaeda or Aum Shinrikyo.
Other books that propound ethics tend to have characters who, after a period of struggle, exemplify those ethics. Or they have characters who defy the proposed code, but in some way are seem to suffer or be reduced by doing so. This is not true of the bible; perhaps it follows a different formula but if so I've never seen a good explanation of it.
You can get some nice, poetic, inspiring, life-affirming quotes if you selectively pick & choose from the bible. That's fine with me; I do it myself on occasion. But you could do that from almost any book, from 'Thus Spake Zarathustra' to 'The Lord of the Rings'.
#6 Thou shalt not kill
...." This sounds more like the code of a death cult than anything I'd like my children involved with.
#7 Thou shalt not commit adultery (cheat on my wife)
Since the bible contains plenty of examples of sympathetic godly characters killing and fucking around its credibility as a moral manifesto is pretty thin.
If you pay attention to the fine print, it's actually "do not kill - unless they're from an enemy nation, or they work on Sunday (or maybe Saturday?), or they're an unfaithful woman, or a fag, or worship a different god, or unless the voices in your head tell you to, or
So, yeah, the bible's great, as long as you abbreviate it down to a few dot points we could probably all agree on anyhow.
This is a crying shame. On the other hand, there don't seem to be uptodate GNOME bindings for any Lisp implementation, so...
Loaded with syntactic sugar, it has a much wider scope than shell and it is massive overkill.
Here's the complete grammar of Python 2.4, as good a measure of the amount of syntactic sugar as anything. I doubt the grammar of Bourne shell is any smaller. (I seem to recall that there are so many irregularities in shell syntax that it's not even possible to describe it in EBNF, but I might be wrong.)
Python is also conceptually unstable. Constant incompatable upgrades are made.
Such as?
A more reasonable comparison is to the 10+ DVDs in the MSDN toolkit, since typical distros comes with compilers for a bunch of languages, some documentation, editors, debuggers, web server, and on and on.
Aside from gentoo, only bsd based systems are limited to 1 or 2 cds now.
Ubuntu comes on one CD. Doubtless you could find a dozen more on distrowatch.
What is this "Google" you speak of? Why do you nerds have to use all these funny made-up words???!?!
As the FAQ says, it specifically doesn't affect use of the word as a description or noncommercially.
It would affect you if, say, you started a business called "Genuine Linux inc". And fair enough, I say.
And as I understand, being a democratic nation, this must be true for Australia too.
No, it's not true for Australia. There is legal aid, but as far as I know it doesn't cover business matters such as this. And frankly I wouldn't want to rely on it when going up against, e.g., SCO.
If it's not even a baby apocalypse, why is the zdnet story leading with the A$5000 scare figure?
Because publishers (both slashdot and zdnet) often like to make stories sound more catastrophic than they actually are, so as to get more readers.
From my understanding of AfC's blog entry, there's no immediate need for anyone to pay a cent. But then "Small amount of paperwork to secure Linux trademark" is hardly going to be front-page news.
You're welcome to think of, or research, alternative theories for the origin of life, the universe and cheese.
Let me know when you get some useful results.
I'm happy for people to think and write about new theories. Where I have a problem is when they want to teach random unsubstantiated theories in schools in place of established mainline science.
Calling it an "unborn child" or "baby" rather begs the more important question of whether it is a baby yet or not.
Many people arguing that, for example, RU-486 is ethical would say that a fertilized egg is not a baby.
I think it's best to just accept it's a grey area.
Otherwise you'll get an inky dink. Try explaining *that* to the wife.
If you read the actual article (only 2 pages!) you'll see they claim it delivers more power than the Earth's energy production, not more current. It seems plausible that they had 19MA at many MV, which could be more power than the instantaneous production of the world
Actually they say it "generates electrical energy", which I think is a bit sloppy. But it's just a press release.
I don't know what a lawyer would have advised him. For all I know he did get legal advice first.
The lesson I take from this sad episode is: before threatening to report someone for a felony, get legal advice on the possible consequences to yourself. At worst, you're a few hundred bucks down and you got a chance to think it over before acting; at best you saved having your home raided and your computers effectively stolen.
Well, I'm not a lawyer. But they perhaps might have told him any of these things (I don't know which):
"Take out these sentences, it sounds like you're threatening them."
"Resign first, make absolutely sure you have none of their information on your machines, then send this."
"Don't warn them, just contact the DA."
"Don't be a hero, just resign and keep your mouth shut."
"Make a statory declaration of the facts first, and give me a copy of the documents."
Further:
It's not reasonable that a publisher can put arbitrary conditions on access to a web site. ("By reading this paragraph you agree to pay me $50.") As you say, there is a common convention that a server listening on port 80 is generally intended to provide a public resource, and by default anyone can read the information there. As you say: anyone can walk into a hamburger joint, *but not if they've been previously told not to come back*.
According to Salzenberg's account HMS knew they were accessing the servers against the wishes of the property owner, which is prima facie unauthorized access, a crime.
The courts accept common conventions.
robots.txt is a common convention, published by almost all nontrivial web sites and respected by all reputable robots. As Salzenberg correctly observes, Federal courts have already recognized this role.
In retail sales, putting price tags on articles in public is an "offer to treat", an offer to negotiate.
That's fine, but irrelevant. If someone is barred from a shop and they sneak back in wearing a wig it's still trespass. It doesn't matter that the public at large is allowed in, or that the shop doesn't require a signed contract to enter, or that the person wasn't notified in writing that they were banned. It doesn't matter that they managed to get past security. It's a criminal offense, and I can understand Salzenberg wanting no part of it.
forming a contract with a web server requires you to enter your name and perform some action
I think you need to read more about contract formation; it is not nearly that simple.
"negative video" seems to propose two unusal theories:
1. HTTP is legally enforceable, but robots.txt is merely a gentleman's agreement. That seems a hard distinction to draw: both are just conventions adopted for interoperability. Both are widely implemented and respected within the industry it is also very common for them to be violated. HTTP has the imprimatur of W3, but not as far as I know of an international treaty organization like (iirc) ITU or ISO.
I'm not aware of any legislation anywhere that says merely violating HTTP would be a crime, although there are laws against unauthorized radio broadcasts or telephone signals.
2. "Whatever is not technically prevented is by definition permitted." If this were really the case, there would be no crime of trespass, since the owner should have made the trespass impossible. Indeed if that were adopted it would overturn the whole concept of property law.
A more useful argument, which was tried in some of the EBay cases, is that a property which is generally available to the public cannot exclude a particular client. The law is not yet clear here, and it's not clear what would be reasonable. Small-print agreements to access a public web site seem dodgy, but excluding a particular client seems fairly clear.
In any case, it sounds like HMS were infringing the copyrights of the sites they scraped, and that probably is cut-and-dried.
You're way off beam if you're thinking about changes to the server. It is not necessary for a client to cause changes to the server to constitute illegal unauthorized access. Australian law, for example, distinguishes unathorized access from unauthorized modification; both are illegal but the second has a higher maximum penalty.
Clearly harm can be done by somebody merely reading information they are not entitled to get.
The analogy is of a library open to the public that bars a particular person because of past bad behaviour. Having been told they are not allowed, it would possibly be trespass for them to sneak back in. The publishers would perhaps be in a stronger position if they specifically told HMS in writing to desist, but blocking their IP and adding a robots.txt line makes the intention clear.
Staples?
And before you even do that, see a lawyer! Work out what risk or protection you'll have, what your liability may be to the company, whether you should resign first and if so how, and so on. Remember the prosecutor and police will not always act in your best interest.
Obviously the point is to have enough sense to know when you need to see a lawyer and when you should save your money.
Seems to me that before starting a fight with (what you believe to be) a criminal organization it would be a good idea to see a lawyer. A few hundred bucks for a consultation is small change compared to what he's up for now.