Nonsense. Due to a disasterous year as a mechanical engineer, I barely had a 3.0 GPA. Within my CS major, though, my GPA was a 3.8 or something. And I was hired by IBM.
On the one hand, you apparently are against people using legal means to block e-mail, as in this case, but on the other, when it comes to spam, you're for it. Can't have it both way, I'm afraid.
I'd just like to correct something here: they aren't replacing the previous zSeries operating system, they're adding another choice. Now you can choose between z/OS, z/VM, and Linux. While there is something called Unix System Services that run within z/OS, it's not a stand-alone operating system; it's rund under z/OS, not by itself.
And with Linux, you do loose a lot of the RAS characteristics that z/OS provides, as well as 40 years of compatibility with existing workloads. Linux is being sold as something to run new workloads on, workloads that z/OS previously wouldn't have been considered for.
Dvorak's right; IBM makes very little money on PC's, perhaps is even loosing money, when looked at by itself. That's why they no longer sell to people through office stores and so on. But IBM has a services/solutions arm, and having a PC division allows the services division to sell complete IBM solutions, which is very profitible. So, the moral here is to look at things from a company point of view, not at individual divisions.
Note, I work for IBM, but have no real connection to the PC division, though I do think my ThinkPad rocks. The above is conjecture.
If he had permission, you'd be correct. He didn't have permission to use the computer he had grabbed/etc/passwd to. And for that matter, I'd argue that running crack against/etc/passwd is tresspassing as well. As a unix person, you shoul know better.
Nonsense. Even if I leave my front door unlocked, coming into my house is still trespassing, and removing things from my house is still theft. Granted, theft in a digital world is a bit hard to define, but in this case, theft seems the right word.
Gods, where to start. I don't even know how to explain all I'm feeling, let alone . . . I know I'm not thinking completely clearly. Perhaps a chronology will be best place to start . . .
Twenty minutes before 9, give or take: a passenger jet is crashed into one tower of the World Trade Center. About 9:00, a second passenger jet is crashed into the other tower. This was caught on film, as there were news crews filming the other tower. People apparently jumped out of the towers to avoid burning to death, choosing a different way to die. An hour and a half later or so, the two towers collapsed. I've heard estimates that 20,000 or more people may have been killed, not including those in the planes. A bit later, another passenger jet was crashed into the Pentagon, and a forth plane, which was being taken to a target unknown, crashed/was shot down outside of Pittsburgh. Apparently a fifth plane crashed as well, though no one's revealed where, yet. This was almost certainly a coordinated act of terrorism, the largest act in history, and even that's a guess. Nobody knows who's responsible; though suspicion of course falls on radical Muslims, those who are more than willing to die if they can take their enemies with them. And I agree, while not liking the fact that I do; I hate making snap, uninformed judgements, especially those based on prejudice. And that seems to sum up everything; I'm just really conflicted about this.
I'm horrified, but from a distance; I can't say I'm that surprised, as I've been expecting something like this for years. We as a country have pissed off so many people and countries over the past thirty, fourty, fifty years, not including those who hate us over religion. And I can understand their anger, I think, understand their desire to strike back in the only way they can, and I can't hate them for that, horrified though I am. Hate the sin, love the sinner, I suppose . . .
And I fear the future. Fear we will strike back for revenge, not justice; fear that we will strike back before we really know what happened, hurt innocent people (and those who hate us, but had no role in this attack, are innocents); fear that this attack will be used as an excuse to curtail our freedoms; fear that people may take "justice" into their own hands, lynching those who share the belief or race of those responsible; distaste at the orgy of news coverage this is going to generate, for who knows how long.
But there's hope, too. Hope that maybe this will force America, and our leaders, to get our collective head our of our ass, and realize we're part of a world of nations, not a dictator. Hope that this will maybe make people take fundamentalism of all stripes a bit more seriously.
Ond, on ther personal scale, things I'msort of ashamed to write about. There's fear this could push the world economy over the edge, into recession, even though the whole thing is a figment of our imagination. And there's hope that this will put an end to the missle defense system that various people have been yammering about for years, and which, as has been so ably demonstrated today, would be very easy to circumvent, assuming we can even get the bloody thing to work.
And, being fundamentalists, we can be pretty sure they never will. There are, after all, many instances of genocide, torture, mass murder, homosexual activity, rape . . . a sick, sick book. And that's our defense, I think. They want to yank Star Wars. Fine, but they have to yank The Ten Commandments, too.
Of course, now I'm expecting consistency from the Religious Right, so . ..
Sorry, I should have expanded earlier. Digital property is a different beast than physical property; me "stealing" something doesn't deprive the original buyer of anything, though it does deprive the content producer of revenue (assuming I would have bought the property had I not "stolen" it).
In order to address this problem, we, as a society, have made a deal with content producers: we created a concept of ownership for imaginary things, like novels, and movies, and songs, and so on, that allow the content producers to profit from their creation. In return, though, the content producer agrees that society retains certain rights, like the rule of first sale (after someone buys a book, they can do what they will with it), various sorts of fair use, and the idea that copyrights expire.
Until now, the content producers had to agree to the deal, as they really couldn't effectively limit any of the rights society kept for itself, and they had to take what they were given from a legal point of view. Now, though, they want the protection of copyright without upholding their side of the deal; in fact, they want to set things up so that there's no way for society to make them agree to the deal we had before. I think they should be forced to choose: make the deal, and we'll protect your works under law (and remember that anything digital can be copied; CSS doesn't stop copying, just viewing), or protect your works with technology, and you don't have to accept the fair use provisions you would otherwise, but if your technology is broken, well, we're sorry, but you chose not to accept the deal. Content producers shouldn't be able to have it both ways.
In fact, we already have such a distinction when it comes to ideas. There's patents, where a company agrees to reveal the invention to the world, and for some period of time, no other company can use said invention, even if they come up with the idea on their own, and then there's trade secrets, where they can keep something secret for as long as they wish, and competitors can't do unfair things to learn about the invention, but if a competitor discovers the idea independantly, well, too bad. A company isn't allowed to claim exclusive use of ideas they won't reveal to everyone else.
My apologies for the quotes, incidentally. Words in quotes usually annoy me, but words like property, theft, steal, and so on don't mean the same thing when used in reference to IP as opposed to physical property, but we have no substitutes, so I use the quotes to emphasize that they need to be looked at differently.
I agree. In fact, in this new digital age we're in, I think companies should have to make a choice when it comes to protecting their "intellectual property," or, more accurately, their recently produced IP. They should either broadcast their stuff in the clear, and rely on the law to protect them, or they should rely on technology, and have no copyright apply to their work. They shouldn't be able to have both, especially not when the law portion is as draconian as the DMCA.
I feel bad saying this, sorta, but . . . the world has too many people in it, yes? When populations get to big, something usually comes along to, well, cull the herd. Maybe AIDS is just what we need right now. Almost all of our really big problems would be solved if there were fewer people in the world.
No, they weren't owned by the people. What the regulation part meant was that the amount of profit they could make was regulated: they invested x amount of money for something, and the amount they could make was limited to xy, where y was something like 1.1.
According to the Straight Dope, home of all useful knowledge, sending a brick will do no good, as it will simply be discarded by your local post office. Sad, but true.
Much to the disapointment of my coworkers (mainframe developers), the vast majority of Y2K bugs were fixed, though I did see one: CompQWK, my QWK mail reader (remember the grand old days of FIDONET?), can't handle a year 2000 date, so I gave up on FIDONET. Not a serious problem, though I do miss some of the people I'd met there. The reason it doesn't work is that COMPQWK is no longer being developed. I suspect there are a number of other old freeware/shareware products with similar problems.
Yes, but assuming they're claiming trade secret protection here, unless they're alledging that the software developers stole the relevant code or whatever (literally stole, as in broke in to a server or something), their trade secret just went away. With a trade secret, it is perfectly legal to attempt to reverse engineer that secret, and assuming the reverse engineering succeeds, you can no longer claim that whatever is a trade secret.
I'm sorry, but the arguement that was made about defending IP or loosing it is simply wrong. If you have a trademark, yes, you have to defend it or loose it (witness Kleenex and Xerox, for example). That is not true of patents or of copyright, however. I think that in some cases there can be anti-trust problems with selectively enforced patents, but I don't see that being a problem here.
Yeah, but the problem is that they can charge a large enough licensing fee that SDRAM becomes at least as expensive, if not more expensive than, RDRAM.
I really don't understand why everyone is so upset about this. My opinion of MP3s aside, Metallica is being stolen from, thanks to Napster. And while I do think they're going after the wrong people, the carrier instead of the people doing the sharing, they have every right to do what they are doing. The money they make playing music, and selling recordings of that music, is their livelihood. And while they, and some other big name bands, could probably make a living just touring and selling merchandise, a lot of smaller bands can't.
The way I see it, there are two extremes here: the MP3 fanatics, who seem to want all music freely available, damn the artists, and the record labels, who want to be able to charge a fee every time you listen to something. In the first scenario, the artist gets screwed, in the second, the consumer does. There has to be a happy middle someplace.
It's not that, it's that before, you were guarenteed 17 years of protection, no longer how long the patent took to be approved by the patent office. Now, you get 20 years - time it takes to be approved, which in some cases, can be five years, ten years, or more. In one case, it took something like forty years to approve a patent, because the patent office kept requesting changes to be made.
The idea of the Turing Test is a really cool one, at least at first. And if people who tried building Turing Test capable machines worked with the spirit of the test in mind, it would stay cool. The problem is that they don't. Instead of focusing on things that make us intelligent, they focus on things that make us human. They analyze speech patterns, type patterns, and similar things that are easy to duplicate, and they write programs that duplicate our failings, not our intelligence. Programs have been written that can pass the Turing Test. Eliza, for example, does really well. But hook Eliza up to another of its ilk, and you get utter gibberish. So perhaps that's a better cantidate for a Turing Test - design a program that can make intelligent conversation with a pseudo-Turing capable program.
SETI is based on the premise that other cultures, assuming such exist, are broadcasting powerfully enough for us to hear. But what if everyone is just listening? Things like this can't hurt.
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Nonsense. Due to a disasterous year as a mechanical engineer, I barely had a 3.0 GPA. Within my CS major, though, my GPA was a 3.8 or something. And I was hired by IBM.
What are you talking about. Intel is sueing them. Intel blocked them and when they got arround it, Intel sued them. No one is against blocking email.
Sorry, that was less than clear. Legal as in using the law system, when technical means (i.e. blocking) fail.
But hey, I got a first post. Which I'm still amazed by. Or is that not a big deal anymore? Or was it ever, really?
On the one hand, you apparently are against people using legal means to block e-mail, as in this case, but on the other, when it comes to spam, you're for it. Can't have it both way, I'm afraid.
I'd just like to correct something here: they aren't replacing the previous zSeries operating system, they're adding another choice. Now you can choose between z/OS, z/VM, and Linux. While there is something called Unix System Services that run within z/OS, it's not a stand-alone operating system; it's rund under z/OS, not by itself.
And with Linux, you do loose a lot of the RAS characteristics that z/OS provides, as well as 40 years of compatibility with existing workloads. Linux is being sold as something to run new workloads on, workloads that z/OS previously wouldn't have been considered for.
Dvorak's right; IBM makes very little money on PC's, perhaps is even loosing money, when looked at by itself. That's why they no longer sell to people through office stores and so on. But IBM has a services/solutions arm, and having a PC division allows the services division to sell complete IBM solutions, which is very profitible. So, the moral here is to look at things from a company point of view, not at individual divisions.
Note, I work for IBM, but have no real connection to the PC division, though I do think my ThinkPad rocks. The above is conjecture.
If he had permission, you'd be correct. He didn't have permission to use the computer he had grabbed /etc/passwd to. And for that matter, I'd argue that running crack against /etc/passwd is tresspassing as well. As a unix person, you shoul know better.
Nonsense. Even if I leave my front door unlocked, coming into my house is still trespassing, and removing things from my house is still theft. Granted, theft in a digital world is a bit hard to define, but in this case, theft seems the right word.
Gods, where to start. I don't even know how to explain all I'm feeling, let alone . . . I know I'm not thinking completely clearly. Perhaps a chronology will be best place to start . . .
Twenty minutes before 9, give or take: a passenger jet is crashed into one tower of the World Trade Center. About 9:00, a second passenger jet is crashed into the other tower. This was caught on film, as there were news crews filming the other tower. People apparently jumped out of the towers to avoid burning to death, choosing a different way to die. An hour and a half later or so, the two towers collapsed. I've heard estimates that 20,000 or more people may have been killed, not including those in the planes. A bit later, another passenger jet was crashed into the Pentagon, and a forth plane, which was being taken to a target unknown, crashed/was shot down outside of Pittsburgh. Apparently a fifth plane crashed as well, though no one's revealed where, yet. This was almost certainly a coordinated act of terrorism, the largest act in history, and even that's a guess. Nobody knows who's responsible; though suspicion of course falls on radical Muslims, those who are more than willing to die if they can take their enemies with them. And I agree, while not liking the fact that I do; I hate making snap, uninformed judgements, especially those based on prejudice. And that seems to sum up everything; I'm just really conflicted about this.
I'm horrified, but from a distance; I can't say I'm that surprised, as I've been expecting something like this for years. We as a country have pissed off so many people and countries over the past thirty, fourty, fifty years, not including those who hate us over religion. And I can understand their anger, I think, understand their desire to strike back in the only way they can, and I can't hate them for that, horrified though I am. Hate the sin, love the sinner, I suppose . . .
And I fear the future. Fear we will strike back for revenge, not justice; fear that we will strike back before we really know what happened, hurt innocent people (and those who hate us, but had no role in this attack, are innocents); fear that this attack will be used as an excuse to curtail our freedoms; fear that people may take "justice" into their own hands, lynching those who share the belief or race of those responsible; distaste at the orgy of news coverage this is going to generate, for who knows how long.
But there's hope, too. Hope that maybe this will force America, and our leaders, to get our collective head our of our ass, and realize we're part of a world of nations, not a dictator. Hope that this will maybe make people take fundamentalism of all stripes a bit more seriously.
Ond, on ther personal scale, things I'msort of ashamed to write about. There's fear this could push the world economy over the edge, into recession, even though the whole thing is a figment of our imagination. And there's hope that this will put an end to the missle defense system that various people have been yammering about for years, and which, as has been so ably demonstrated today, would be very easy to circumvent, assuming we can even get the bloody thing to work.
And, being fundamentalists, we can be pretty sure they never will. There are, after all, many instances of genocide, torture, mass murder, homosexual activity, rape . . . a sick, sick book. And that's our defense, I think. They want to yank Star Wars. Fine, but they have to yank The Ten Commandments, too.
.
Of course, now I'm expecting consistency from the Religious Right, so . .
Sorry, I should have expanded earlier. Digital property is a different beast than physical property; me "stealing" something doesn't deprive the original buyer of anything, though it does deprive the content producer of revenue (assuming I would have bought the property had I not "stolen" it).
In order to address this problem, we, as a society, have made a deal with content producers: we created a concept of ownership for imaginary things, like novels, and movies, and songs, and so on, that allow the content producers to profit from their creation. In return, though, the content producer agrees that society retains certain rights, like the rule of first sale (after someone buys a book, they can do what they will with it), various sorts of fair use, and the idea that copyrights expire.
Until now, the content producers had to agree to the deal, as they really couldn't effectively limit any of the rights society kept for itself, and they had to take what they were given from a legal point of view. Now, though, they want the protection of copyright without upholding their side of the deal; in fact, they want to set things up so that there's no way for society to make them agree to the deal we had before. I think they should be forced to choose: make the deal, and we'll protect your works under law (and remember that anything digital can be copied; CSS doesn't stop copying, just viewing), or protect your works with technology, and you don't have to accept the fair use provisions you would otherwise, but if your technology is broken, well, we're sorry, but you chose not to accept the deal. Content producers shouldn't be able to have it both ways.
In fact, we already have such a distinction when it comes to ideas. There's patents, where a company agrees to reveal the invention to the world, and for some period of time, no other company can use said invention, even if they come up with the idea on their own, and then there's trade secrets, where they can keep something secret for as long as they wish, and competitors can't do unfair things to learn about the invention, but if a competitor discovers the idea independantly, well, too bad. A company isn't allowed to claim exclusive use of ideas they won't reveal to everyone else.
My apologies for the quotes, incidentally. Words in quotes usually annoy me, but words like property, theft, steal, and so on don't mean the same thing when used in reference to IP as opposed to physical property, but we have no substitutes, so I use the quotes to emphasize that they need to be looked at differently.
I agree. In fact, in this new digital age we're in, I think companies should have to make a choice when it comes to protecting their "intellectual property," or, more accurately, their recently produced IP. They should either broadcast their stuff in the clear, and rely on the law to protect them, or they should rely on technology, and have no copyright apply to their work. They shouldn't be able to have both, especially not when the law portion is as draconian as the DMCA.
I feel bad saying this, sorta, but . . . the world has too many people in it, yes? When populations get to big, something usually comes along to, well, cull the herd. Maybe AIDS is just what we need right now. Almost all of our really big problems would be solved if there were fewer people in the world.
No, they weren't owned by the people. What the regulation part meant was that the amount of profit they could make was regulated: they invested x amount of money for something, and the amount they could make was limited to xy, where y was something like 1.1.
According to the Straight Dope, home of all useful knowledge, sending a brick will do no good, as it will simply be discarded by your local post office. Sad, but true.
Much to the disapointment of my coworkers (mainframe developers), the vast majority of Y2K bugs were fixed, though I did see one: CompQWK, my QWK mail reader (remember the grand old days of FIDONET?), can't handle a year 2000 date, so I gave up on FIDONET. Not a serious problem, though I do miss some of the people I'd met there. The reason it doesn't work is that COMPQWK is no longer being developed. I suspect there are a number of other old freeware/shareware products with similar problems.
Sounds nice, but what if, after creating the file, I don't want to open it up with whatever application created it to start with?
Could someone please explain that Richard Feynman comment to me?
Yes, but assuming they're claiming trade secret protection here, unless they're alledging that the software developers stole the relevant code or whatever (literally stole, as in broke in to a server or something), their trade secret just went away. With a trade secret, it is perfectly legal to attempt to reverse engineer that secret, and assuming the reverse engineering succeeds, you can no longer claim that whatever is a trade secret.
I'm sorry, but the arguement that was made about defending IP or loosing it is simply wrong. If you have a trademark, yes, you have to defend it or loose it (witness Kleenex and Xerox, for example). That is not true of patents or of copyright, however. I think that in some cases there can be anti-trust problems with selectively enforced patents, but I don't see that being a problem here.
And, of course, IANAL, and YMMV.
Yeah, but the problem is that they can charge a large enough licensing fee that SDRAM becomes at least as expensive, if not more expensive than, RDRAM.
Which is why I ordered another 128 MB today.
I really don't understand why everyone is so upset about this. My opinion of MP3s aside, Metallica is being stolen from, thanks to Napster. And while I do think they're going after the wrong people, the carrier instead of the people doing the sharing, they have every right to do what they are doing. The money they make playing music, and selling recordings of that music, is their livelihood. And while they, and some other big name bands, could probably make a living just touring and selling merchandise, a lot of smaller bands can't.
The way I see it, there are two extremes here: the MP3 fanatics, who seem to want all music freely available, damn the artists, and the record labels, who want to be able to charge a fee every time you listen to something. In the first scenario, the artist gets screwed, in the second, the consumer does. There has to be a happy middle someplace.
It's not that, it's that before, you were guarenteed 17 years of protection, no longer how long the patent took to be approved by the patent office. Now, you get 20 years - time it takes to be approved, which in some cases, can be five years, ten years, or more. In one case, it took something like forty years to approve a patent, because the patent office kept requesting changes to be made.
The idea of the Turing Test is a really cool one, at least at first. And if people who tried building Turing Test capable machines worked with the spirit of the test in mind, it would stay cool. The problem is that they don't. Instead of focusing on things that make us intelligent, they focus on things that make us human. They analyze speech patterns, type patterns, and similar things that are easy to duplicate, and they write programs that duplicate our failings, not our intelligence. Programs have been written that can pass the Turing Test. Eliza, for example, does really well. But hook Eliza up to another of its ilk, and you get utter gibberish. So perhaps that's a better cantidate for a Turing Test - design a program that can make intelligent conversation with a pseudo-Turing capable program.
SETI is based on the premise that other cultures, assuming such exist, are broadcasting powerfully enough for us to hear. But what if everyone is just listening? Things like this can't hurt.
Look at the very end of the article before panicing, foaks.