in the united states, it's legal to sell armour-piercing ammuniction -- bullets whose sole purpose of design is to go through bullet proof vests; obviously a device designed to kill or maim human beings. the manufacturers to do not even make the pretense of proposing other uses for said ammunition. this activity is all fine and legal.
It's not against the law in the US to kill or maim human beings in self defense. Whether this is appropriate or not is a separate issue, but that's the law, and self-defense is a legitimate use.
Which is why it would be legal to sell a gun designed to kill people, but not to sell a program designed to copy the Bay City Rollers' first album.
Of course that leaves open the question of what Grokster's designed for, but the Supremes didn't rule on that... they just said that Betmax isn't carte blanche.
how did expressing your opinion and raising a valid and on-topic point suddenly warrent a troll moderation?
Welcome to slashdot.:)
I don't agree with the OP's reasoning, obviously, but it's amazing how little it takes to get a "Troll" mod around here. The real trick is managing to get multiple "Troll" and "Interesting" or even "Insightful". If you can manage that, you're ready to take on Kipling's "If"...:)
The lower courts reasoned that, like VCRs, the file-sharing software can be used for "substantial" legal purposes, such as giving away free songs, free software or government documents. They also said the file-sharing services were not legally responsible because they don't have central servers pointing users to copyright material.
But in Monday's ruling, Souter said lower courts could find the file-sharing services responsible by examining factors such as how companies marketed the product or whether they took easily available steps to reduce infringing uses.
So the Supreme court didn't actually draw the line, they didn't find Grokster guilty of anything, all they did was take away the Betamax "Get Out Of Jail Free" card and toss the actual decision back to a lower court.
The lower courts reasoned that, like VCRs, the file-sharing software can be used for "substantial" legal purposes, such as giving away free songs, free software or government documents. They also said the file-sharing services were not legally responsible because they don't have central servers pointing users to copyright material.
But in Monday's ruling, Souter said lower courts could find the file-sharing services responsible by examining factors such as how companies marketed the product or whether they took easily available steps to reduce infringing uses.
In other words, this ruling doesn't say "Grokster is responsible for the infringing acts of their customers". It says "If a company promotes a product for infringing use, the Betamax decision doesn't give them a free pass". It's up to the lower court to determine if Grokster actually crossed the line.
There's an awful lot of legitimate software sharing, primarily large open-source or otherwise freely redistributable packages, over peer-to-peer networks... mainly bittorrent. Just follow slashdot for a while, just about any time a new release of something gets slashdotted, you get three posts right after each other: someone sets up a mirror, the mirror gets slashdotted so someone sets up a torrent, and then someone points out you can still get the original site through nyud.net.
On the other hand, I was absolutely amazed how long the original Napster was able to operate. The intent of the product was clearly to promote copyright violation, and to profit from them. The whole "pirate" theme from their logo on seemed like they were just begging to be prosecuted.
On the gripping hand, Grokster doesn't seem to be taking anything like the same kind of approach, so I'd like to see the basis of the decision that Grokster was distributing "a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright". I guess I'll have to wait until it's posted and/or transcribed.
Like you, I feel that if I give up on a book (or movie, for that matter) before it's done then I've done an injustice to the author.
I used to feel that way, but I don't any more. I let go of the idea that a book was a commitment twenty years ago, and I've been happier for it. Life's too short for bad books... particularly the particular kind of bad books that only brilliant writers can produce.
Ayn Rand, for example: I can't say I exactly admire your commitment but I'm certainly impressed.
So although the collected works of Jane Austen were on my reading list one year, I read none of them and focused on DH Lawrence, Faulkner, etc.
Good choice.
I've read three Jane Austen novels. Two of them were a complete waste of time, since they were all the same story with different characters. Well, different names. Or should I say "character", since apart from the female protagonist there weren't any. I've been told that one Jane Austen or Emily Bronte novel would satisfy my lifetime requirement for that genre, and I can believe it.
Not if you're reading Crime and Punishment. My god that book is terrible.
When I was a kid somehow I acquired the meme that it was immoral to give up on a book if you didn't like it. I read a lot of bad books, simply because I had them and thus I felt I had to read them. I was in college when I first ran into a book that was so bad that I threw it across the room rather than finish it, but that experience freed me to simply give up and go on to another book when I realised I was wasting my time. That same week I was actually able to box up some books that had been sitting unfinished on my bookshelf for months and donate them to the library. The sense of relief was amazing.
I'm not visual at all. If you ask me what you're wearing, even if I've been sitting in the car with you for half an hour, if I don't look and see I can't answer that question.
So if you ask me questions like that about a book, I'll blow them. I get out of a book what I want to get out of it, and that's clearly not the same kinds of things you want to get out of it. One of the things I get out of books is connections between books, between viewpoints of authors looking at the same subject. That's fun, but it's hard to get that if you don't read a LOT of books.
I can't read Finnegan's Wake, or most of the other works that are more about showing how bloody clever the author is with language than telling a story, and most of the Russian novels I've read have been mostly exquisitely brilliant depictions of interestingly pathological personalities, and that's not something I'd spend any more time on (but if you can recommend something more along the lines of Chekov's short stories (but not for the love of god his plays) I'd be obliged). So they won't slow me down at all...
Yeh, I have kids. You're right, that cut my reading time dramatically... I can generally stretch a novel out 2 or 3 days now, but rarely more than that... unless I'm so exhausted I collapse it still takes up to half a paperback to get me to sleep of an evening. I've pared down my personal library to stuff that I can re-read a couple of times a year, which has really helped me cut back my Amazon/Borders/Fictionwise bill.
This is the second case I've heard of where an organization sent legal notices through e-mail and took legal action as a result of a failure to respond.
This might have been a reasonable thing to do in 1990, but since then the flood of spam and viruses has increased to the point where it's effectively impossible to accept and read all email that arrives at a well-known address. Assuming that a message has been recieved because you don't receive a bounce message is completely unreasonable.
The labels allege Swiftel's senior systems administrators Melissa Ong and Ryan Briggs ignored calls to remove Web sites that were in breach of copyright, and instead "treated the infringement notices like spam."
Given the way facts get twisted even when all parties are trying to communicate accurately, this quote could well be a distorted version of something like "a spam filter at the ISP inadvertently lost the messages".
The whole idea of defense-in-depth is that you design your system so that each layer is a complete sandbox. That is, you design the browser so there's no way to break its security model, then you assume someone will break it anyway so you design the multiuser security so there's no way out, then you add a firewall, then (though this isn't normally done it can be easily implemented) you assume that someone will break that so you build a jail that can only be opened from the outside... so for someone to break out they need to launch three or four separate independent attacks, one after the other, each of which requires different techniques and each of which can be fixed in turn. You limit your services to listen to local connection only, then you firewall them anyway.
In Windows, you can't configure your services to only listen locally, so the firewall is not an extra layer of security. You can't disable Active Content and close down all the "security zones" because then local stuff like the control panel breaks, so you use multiuser security as part of the sandbox.
Instead of having all these layers as redundant defenses that need to be attacked in serial, they're parallel efforts each shoring up a different part of the system. Which is why Windows users don't much care, running as an untrusted user still leaves all your local files subject to attack, running IE with reduced security will still leave an exploit able to attack your online assets, your paypal and email. And it's really inconvenient to do things this way, because too many applications expect to run with privileges...
Maybe the PC version of Office is better, it has to be or no one would use it.
Don't bet on it. Office doesn't understand about any chunk of text bigger than a paragraph, it fakes everything by stitching paragraphs together. Lists, tables, sections, chapters, nesting, everything else is handled by having paragraphs with the right attributes and controlling what a paragraph inherits from the previous paragraph.
Only once have I used Microsoft Word as anything but a viewer for files produced by someone else, and the experience was agonizing. It would have been easier for me to produce the document I finally arrived at using raw HTML and "vi", because Word has no concept of a textual object larger than a paragraph or a table cell. Everything else, chapters, lists, sections, blocks, are faked by applying styles to paragraphs and inheriting styles from one paragraph to another. Pasted text carried along with it the context of the source section, inserting paragraphs in lists resulted in the lists being split. There was absolutely no way to distinguish content and layout, I ended up spending more time reapplying layout and styles than working on the text itself.
Ever since then I have simply written content in plain text and left it to the people in Word Processing to make it fit the corporate style.
No wonder IE doesn't support CSS, nobody at Microsoft has experience with a real text processing system.
Excel, on the other hand, is a pretty decent spreadsheet. Mostly, I still just use it as a viewer... because I rarely deal with material that needs a spreadsheet to handle... but it's not because I'm actively avoiding it like I am Word.
So I simply can't understand this need for an "Office Suite" for the Mac. A good spreadsheet, yes, but OS X already comes with a better word processor than Word in TextEdit.
It seems to me that if the school was making the kids financially responsible for the laptops (which is implied by the "recommendation" that they take out insurance on them), then don't the students get corresponding rights? I know that if I was going to be made personally responsible for two grand of computer hardware I wouldn't consider accepting those kinds of restrictions on how I could use it.
I used it successfully and productively for many years, but then at the time I had a choice between VUE/CDE with Applixware, and Windows 3.11 with Microsoft Office.
Sounds to me you're comparing applications. I'm sure you could run the Applix applications under any "desktop environment", or just under a window manager like the generic Motif window manager that CDE replaced.
And I don't know anyone who wasn't more productive with just the generic mwm than with CDE, and when CDE became the standard in Tru64 we practically had a civil war over it until I was able to come up with a hack that let people choose which window manager they wanted on a per-user basis. A "desktop environment" that made you less productive than no "desktop environment" at all has to be considered a failure.
I see nothing wrong with Apple or Mozilla's mechanisms, because it's one method and the user gets used to what they would see as suspicious activity, and realize that there's a way to run a potentially harmful application inside another.
I'm sorry, I can't parse this. I honestly don't understand what this sentence means. Can you try again?
Not to mention the ridiculous ease in which someone can compromise a station.
Um, yes, I already said that the Microsoft HTML control is a much much much more serious violation of the sandbox. But XPI and "open safe files after download" are still holes, however small. There's no good reason for any of them.
While I agree in the Microsoft issue, simply due to the various exploitation methods using Visual Basic Scripting, I think I would disagree with XPI and the "open safe files after downloading".
Each of these introduces a mechanism whereby a potentially malicious object can be opened outside the sandbox without the explicit request of the user. They are a lot harder to compromise than a mechanism that's designed explicitly to grant local rights to remote objects, but there have been demonstration exploits created for each... and though in each case the response from the publisher (Apple or Mozilla) was swift (Microsoft's response rarely qualifies as that), in neither case was the mechanism itself removed... which leaves open the potential of additional exploits.
Slashdot Mirror
in the united states, it's legal to sell armour-piercing ammuniction -- bullets whose sole purpose of design is to go through bullet proof vests; obviously a device designed to kill or maim human beings. the manufacturers to do not even make the pretense of proposing other uses for said ammunition. this activity is all fine and legal.
It's not against the law in the US to kill or maim human beings in self defense. Whether this is appropriate or not is a separate issue, but that's the law, and self-defense is a legitimate use.
Which is why it would be legal to sell a gun designed to kill people, but not to sell a program designed to copy the Bay City Rollers' first album.
Of course that leaves open the question of what Grokster's designed for, but the Supremes didn't rule on that... they just said that Betmax isn't carte blanche.
how did expressing your opinion and raising a valid and on-topic point suddenly warrent a troll moderation?
:)
:)
Welcome to slashdot.
I don't agree with the OP's reasoning, obviously, but it's amazing how little it takes to get a "Troll" mod around here. The real trick is managing to get multiple "Troll" and "Interesting" or even "Insightful". If you can manage that, you're ready to take on Kipling's "If"...
The lower courts reasoned that, like VCRs, the file-sharing software can be used for "substantial" legal purposes, such as giving away free songs, free software or government documents. They also said the file-sharing services were not legally responsible because they don't have central servers pointing users to copyright material.
But in Monday's ruling, Souter said lower courts could find the file-sharing services responsible by examining factors such as how companies marketed the product or whether they took easily available steps to reduce infringing uses.
So the Supreme court didn't actually draw the line, they didn't find Grokster guilty of anything, all they did was take away the Betamax "Get Out Of Jail Free" card and toss the actual decision back to a lower court.
The lower courts reasoned that, like VCRs, the file-sharing software can be used for "substantial" legal purposes, such as giving away free songs, free software or government documents. They also said the file-sharing services were not legally responsible because they don't have central servers pointing users to copyright material.
But in Monday's ruling, Souter said lower courts could find the file-sharing services responsible by examining factors such as how companies marketed the product or whether they took easily available steps to reduce infringing uses.
In other words, this ruling doesn't say "Grokster is responsible for the infringing acts of their customers". It says "If a company promotes a product for infringing use, the Betamax decision doesn't give them a free pass". It's up to the lower court to determine if Grokster actually crossed the line.
There's an awful lot of legitimate software sharing, primarily large open-source or otherwise freely redistributable packages, over peer-to-peer networks... mainly bittorrent. Just follow slashdot for a while, just about any time a new release of something gets slashdotted, you get three posts right after each other: someone sets up a mirror, the mirror gets slashdotted so someone sets up a torrent, and then someone points out you can still get the original site through nyud.net.
On the other hand, I was absolutely amazed how long the original Napster was able to operate. The intent of the product was clearly to promote copyright violation, and to profit from them. The whole "pirate" theme from their logo on seemed like they were just begging to be prosecuted.
On the gripping hand, Grokster doesn't seem to be taking anything like the same kind of approach, so I'd like to see the basis of the decision that Grokster was distributing "a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright". I guess I'll have to wait until it's posted and/or transcribed.
Like you, I feel that if I give up on a book (or movie, for that matter) before it's done then I've done an injustice to the author.
I used to feel that way, but I don't any more. I let go of the idea that a book was a commitment twenty years ago, and I've been happier for it. Life's too short for bad books... particularly the particular kind of bad books that only brilliant writers can produce.
Ayn Rand, for example: I can't say I exactly admire your commitment but I'm certainly impressed.
So although the collected works of Jane Austen were on my reading list one year, I read none of them and focused on DH Lawrence, Faulkner, etc.
Good choice.
I've read three Jane Austen novels. Two of them were a complete waste of time, since they were all the same story with different characters. Well, different names. Or should I say "character", since apart from the female protagonist there weren't any. I've been told that one Jane Austen or Emily Bronte novel would satisfy my lifetime requirement for that genre, and I can believe it.
Not if you're reading Crime and Punishment. My god that book is terrible.
When I was a kid somehow I acquired the meme that it was immoral to give up on a book if you didn't like it. I read a lot of bad books, simply because I had them and thus I felt I had to read them. I was in college when I first ran into a book that was so bad that I threw it across the room rather than finish it, but that experience freed me to simply give up and go on to another book when I realised I was wasting my time. That same week I was actually able to box up some books that had been sitting unfinished on my bookshelf for months and donate them to the library. The sense of relief was amazing.
Okay okay, we get it, you can read super fast
Uh-uh. I know people who read super-fast. I'm not one of them.
I'm not visual at all. If you ask me what you're wearing, even if I've been sitting in the car with you for half an hour, if I don't look and see I can't answer that question.
So if you ask me questions like that about a book, I'll blow them. I get out of a book what I want to get out of it, and that's clearly not the same kinds of things you want to get out of it. One of the things I get out of books is connections between books, between viewpoints of authors looking at the same subject. That's fun, but it's hard to get that if you don't read a LOT of books.
I can't read Finnegan's Wake, or most of the other works that are more about showing how bloody clever the author is with language than telling a story, and most of the Russian novels I've read have been mostly exquisitely brilliant depictions of interestingly pathological personalities, and that's not something I'd spend any more time on (but if you can recommend something more along the lines of Chekov's short stories (but not for the love of god his plays) I'd be obliged). So they won't slow me down at all...
Yeh, I have kids. You're right, that cut my reading time dramatically... I can generally stretch a novel out 2 or 3 days now, but rarely more than that... unless I'm so exhausted I collapse it still takes up to half a paperback to get me to sleep of an evening. I've pared down my personal library to stuff that I can re-read a couple of times a year, which has really helped me cut back my Amazon/Borders/Fictionwise bill.
One title per week seems pretty leisurely to me.
This is the second case I've heard of where an organization sent legal notices through e-mail and took legal action as a result of a failure to respond.
This might have been a reasonable thing to do in 1990, but since then the flood of spam and viruses has increased to the point where it's effectively impossible to accept and read all email that arrives at a well-known address. Assuming that a message has been recieved because you don't receive a bounce message is completely unreasonable.
The labels allege Swiftel's senior systems administrators Melissa Ong and Ryan Briggs ignored calls to remove Web sites that were in breach of copyright, and instead "treated the infringement notices like spam."
Given the way facts get twisted even when all parties are trying to communicate accurately, this quote could well be a distorted version of something like "a spam filter at the ISP inadvertently lost the messages".
The whole idea of defense-in-depth is that you design your system so that each layer is a complete sandbox. That is, you design the browser so there's no way to break its security model, then you assume someone will break it anyway so you design the multiuser security so there's no way out, then you add a firewall, then (though this isn't normally done it can be easily implemented) you assume that someone will break that so you build a jail that can only be opened from the outside... so for someone to break out they need to launch three or four separate independent attacks, one after the other, each of which requires different techniques and each of which can be fixed in turn. You limit your services to listen to local connection only, then you firewall them anyway.
In Windows, you can't configure your services to only listen locally, so the firewall is not an extra layer of security. You can't disable Active Content and close down all the "security zones" because then local stuff like the control panel breaks, so you use multiuser security as part of the sandbox.
Instead of having all these layers as redundant defenses that need to be attacked in serial, they're parallel efforts each shoring up a different part of the system. Which is why Windows users don't much care, running as an untrusted user still leaves all your local files subject to attack, running IE with reduced security will still leave an exploit able to attack your online assets, your paypal and email. And it's really inconvenient to do things this way, because too many applications expect to run with privileges...
Yes, it's such a shame that there's absolutely no way for a Windows box to communicate except through SMB/CIFS.
And in any case, this would make for something like a flash-based iPod Mini before a flash-based laptop.
Maybe the PC version of Office is better, it has to be or no one would use it.
Don't bet on it. Office doesn't understand about any chunk of text bigger than a paragraph, it fakes everything by stitching paragraphs together. Lists, tables, sections, chapters, nesting, everything else is handled by having paragraphs with the right attributes and controlling what a paragraph inherits from the previous paragraph.
People find this perfectly OK.
I find it incomprehensible.
Only once have I used Microsoft Word as anything but a viewer for files produced by someone else, and the experience was agonizing. It would have been easier for me to produce the document I finally arrived at using raw HTML and "vi", because Word has no concept of a textual object larger than a paragraph or a table cell. Everything else, chapters, lists, sections, blocks, are faked by applying styles to paragraphs and inheriting styles from one paragraph to another. Pasted text carried along with it the context of the source section, inserting paragraphs in lists resulted in the lists being split. There was absolutely no way to distinguish content and layout, I ended up spending more time reapplying layout and styles than working on the text itself.
Ever since then I have simply written content in plain text and left it to the people in Word Processing to make it fit the corporate style.
No wonder IE doesn't support CSS, nobody at Microsoft has experience with a real text processing system.
Excel, on the other hand, is a pretty decent spreadsheet. Mostly, I still just use it as a viewer... because I rarely deal with material that needs a spreadsheet to handle... but it's not because I'm actively avoiding it like I am Word.
So I simply can't understand this need for an "Office Suite" for the Mac. A good spreadsheet, yes, but OS X already comes with a better word processor than Word in TextEdit.
It seems to me that if the school was making the kids financially responsible for the laptops (which is implied by the "recommendation" that they take out insurance on them), then don't the students get corresponding rights? I know that if I was going to be made personally responsible for two grand of computer hardware I wouldn't consider accepting those kinds of restrictions on how I could use it.
I used it successfully and productively for many years, but then at the time I had a choice between VUE/CDE with Applixware, and Windows 3.11 with Microsoft Office.
Sounds to me you're comparing applications. I'm sure you could run the Applix applications under any "desktop environment", or just under a window manager like the generic Motif window manager that CDE replaced.
And I don't know anyone who wasn't more productive with just the generic mwm than with CDE, and when CDE became the standard in Tru64 we practically had a civil war over it until I was able to come up with a hack that let people choose which window manager they wanted on a per-user basis. A "desktop environment" that made you less productive than no "desktop environment" at all has to be considered a failure.
what alternatives are there for SMB/CIFS on unix?
HTTP NFS AFS(Apple) AFS(Andrew) RFS FTP Alex (FTP-NFS gateway) iSCSI Clusters Gnome-VFS VFS and carrying floppies from desk to desk...
Don't their buddies at Microsoft have problems with Samba?
I see nothing wrong with Apple or Mozilla's mechanisms, because it's one method and the user gets used to what they would see as suspicious activity, and realize that there's a way to run a potentially harmful application inside another.
I'm sorry, I can't parse this. I honestly don't understand what this sentence means. Can you try again?
Not to mention the ridiculous ease in which someone can compromise a station.
Um, yes, I already said that the Microsoft HTML control is a much much much more serious violation of the sandbox. But XPI and "open safe files after download" are still holes, however small. There's no good reason for any of them.
While I agree in the Microsoft issue, simply due to the various exploitation methods using Visual Basic Scripting, I think I would disagree with XPI and the "open safe files after downloading".
Each of these introduces a mechanism whereby a potentially malicious object can be opened outside the sandbox without the explicit request of the user. They are a lot harder to compromise than a mechanism that's designed explicitly to grant local rights to remote objects, but there have been demonstration exploits created for each... and though in each case the response from the publisher (Apple or Mozilla) was swift (Microsoft's response rarely qualifies as that), in neither case was the mechanism itself removed... which leaves open the potential of additional exploits.