It might be a stretch to say that by sending SPAM to your POP3 server, that they had used your computer to retrieve and store SPAM without authorization.
Even that could be argued. CAUCE has been promoting an SMTP-banner-based, machine-parsable policy. Someone with such a banner would be in a better position to claim that the spamming was unauthorized access.
They explained the situation to the police and the investigation ended there.
Rereading the story seems to imply that they explained the situation to the school administration, had the AP CS teacher back them up on what the fortune command was, and then still had the police called in by the administration.
But I agree that you're right in the sense that the investigation seems to be a "case closed, nothing to see" deal. But I still don't like the overreaction to a single, half-nonsensical snippet of text with the keyword "shotgun" in it.
This story is an example of why vouchers are a bad idea. Private schools can do whatever they heck they want, and are not bound by all of those things that public schools are.
However, the key factor that seems to be thrown around as to why the private schools can get away with acting like that do is that they don't take public funds. If vouchers were construed to be public funds, then it seems possible that private schools would be forced to accept some of the civil rights-related standards that have (supposedly) been set for public schools.
Exactly, when was the last time (if ever) a shotgun was used in one of these school shootings?
I don't know when the last time was, but as far as "if ever" goes this CNN article on Columbine indicates that the two boys fired 37 shotgun rounds (and 151 9mm rounds).
Honestly, what is Jamie expecting? That the police will say, "Oh, a Perl error! We'll shred all the files and pretend this never happened?"
It seems easy enough to explain it to me:
The quote on the web page was random (easily done with the 'reload' button)
The script was inadvertently trimming the quote (easily done via fixing the bug and showing both versions being run)
All the quotes are coming from the fortune program (easily done via running the fixed web page and then doing a 'fortume -m (keyword)' in another session)
The fortune program is a standard part of Unix (take an empty PC; erase the harddrive; open a shrink-wrapped copy of RedHat Linux; install; run fortune).
The quote in question is listed _twice_ in the quote files of the PC used in the previous point (fortune -m Adidas).
The fortune files contain over 13 thousand quotations, ranging from Dave Berry to Star Trek to Hunter S. Thompson to Shakespeare. (I suppose you could just do a grep for the/^%$/ separator and count the results, but it'd be more impressive to print out the entire/usr/share/games/fortunes directory.)
Unless the cameras are focusing on a particular vehicle, I doubt you'll be able to read plates.
Reading the plates may be unrealistic, but what about using the camera footage to track the car? You would, most likely, get a rough make/model/color and the direction the car was headed. Even better, you're likely to get the car on other cameras further along. While I would be hesitant to treat it as conclusive evidence if the car were to pass through an unmonitored gap, it would probably be sufficient to track the suspected car to wherever it stops. Hit-and-run should leave enough physical evidence that finding the car rapidly could help secure a conviction. If I'm not mistaken, this is how the generally try and find hit-and-run drivers over here (US), where we don't have cameras and where the witnesses didn't get the plates; they take the make/model/color and then do lots of tedious foot-work.
Of course, personally, I still dislike the idea of cameras everywhere. But I won't argue that they aren't useful. It's just a question of whether or not it's worth sacrificing some privacy for some safety. (And yes, despite them being used in public places, it is an issue of privacy. "Public" may mean that there's a reasonable expectation of other people knowing where you are, but doesn't cover a reasonable expectation of someone tracking your every single move outside of private property.)
Yeah, and these "television" and "radio" methods of distributing content will soon die fiery deaths because they cannot force joe sixpack to make micropayment or monthly subscription in order to watch NFL football.
On the other hand, television and radio don't have the problem of their costs scaling with their popularity. If ten times the expected number of people tune in to the superbowl, the network will still turn a profit and will make a note to up their advertising rates next year. If ten times the expected number of people turn up at a portal, there's a good chance people'll be getting 503 errors left and right and all hell'll break lose.
For me, it all started to crumble when they released Quest for Glory IV with its "arcade-style" combat system.
For me, it all started to crumble when they released Quest for Glory IV with so many game-crashing bugs that I, as a die-hard fan who had played all the earlier ones to completion (multiple times for 1 and 2), couldn't even get far enough in the game to see its arcade-style combat system.
Write a robot that posts replies to articles on Slashdot. The winner would be the first unaided bot to hit the karma cap. Anyone know if this has been attempted before?
If I'm not mistaken, someone was using a MegaHAL-like bot trained on JonKatz's ramblings. (At least I'm guessing that it was a script -- it's entirely possible that the person was cooking up their own fake JonKatz ramblings.) The postings were done under some name that implied it was a fake JonKatz. I do remember it getting moderated up as funny on a few occasions.
Personally, I think it wouldn't be too hard to hit the karma cap by writing a bot that posts "First, they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win." to every Slashdot story that has both Microsoft and Linux in it.
I suppose you might also make a bot capable of recognizing similar Slashdot stories and then just have it still a few +5 posts from the earlier story. There's a bit of risk with having it grab irrelevant comments -- it'd probably be worthwhile to ignore any (+5, Funny) posts since they tend to be more specific to a given article. It'd also be funny if someone posted the latest DeCSS/DVD thing and the bot tried to pick an article out of the Big Brother awards, because the article text has a gratuitous mention of the MPAA. But in general, I think it would do decently, although probably not as well as the google-bot.
Finally, if you wanted to get really ballsy, you could do a script that skimmed The Register, the NY Times, and a few other popular sources of Slashdot articles for anything with "Linux", "Internet", "MPAA", "RIAA", "DVD", "DeCSS", "Intel", "AMD", "Transmeta", "Playstation", "PS2", "Dreamcast", "DMCA", or any other keywords that're especially hot on Slashdot and then submitted the resulting story. It'd be an all-or-nothing gamble, with a whopping 5 points of karma for every hit, but the potential to reach new levels of negative karma should it raise the ire of CmdrTaco and crew.
WHat people do is they add code to the source and then play with their funky new cheat, something the other players in the game don't have. This gives them an edge.
The WorldForge philosophy, as I understand it, is that anything you can do with a client from an automation or display standpoint is 100% legal. So, provided there's not a bug in server enforcement of game rules, the open-source thing should be a non-issue.
However, I do disagree with some of the philisophical decisions the WorldForge developers have made on this issue. As I understand it, it would be legal to have a bevy of automated "slaves" that bankroll your main character.
That still doesn't address the issue of your current desktop. My desktop is defined by both the programs that start up when I login, as well as the programs that I currently have up and running. Starting up a remote WM addresses the former, but it doesn't magicially transfer programs that're in the middle of running. If I were in the middle of reading Slashdot on one desktop, even if my desktop contained a thing to auto-start Netscape, I'd still have to manually renavigate to where I was on the site.
what bennefit does it have over ssh + X11 forwarding?
Besides, the Windows deal, X forwarding doesn't let you take control of a program session that's in the middle of being worked on. As such, the project mentioned here (namely, having your desktop follow you around from machine to machine automatically), Just Wouldn't Work with X forwarding.
This would be a good idea - make software manufacturers legally liable for security holes that others could demonstrate could be avoided.
I was actually thinking about this from the darker end of things (i.e. "The program you have tried to run, LOADLIN.EXE, has not been signed with an unapproved and/or expired software vendor key. Please contact the vendor for an update."), but I see how security holes might count.
On the other hand, I can see the liability from something like that easily exceeding any and all potential revenue it could generate. If I were Microsoft, I'd pull IE and the networking code out of Windows, sell them as-is to a third-party vendor, and simultaneously minimize a lot of my exposure while at the same time deflating the DOJ's anti-trust case.
Also, there're things that're only security issues if configured improperly. How far should a system go to prevent this? To use Unix as an example, is requiring a non-empty root password at installation time sufficient or should we disable any and all forms of root access if someone were to manually edit/etc/passwd and blank out root's password field? If we absolve misconfiguration, what's to stop Unix vendors from just installing with all remote services disabled? (Admittedly, this is a good idea, anyway, but it circumvents the issue of a security hole in a service that an admin would want running under normal circumstances.)
In the section of the article on "Lessons and Guidelines for P2P Developers" is a section on using open source to remain safe.
I found his open source comments especially interesting when considered with respect to everyone's other favorite current major legal battle involving a four-letter industry association.
Imagine an open-sourced DVD player that provides hooks such that anyone with a copy of the infamous DeCSS.c source can drop it into the source tree for the player, change a #define or re-run GNU's configure, and then build a fully functional DVD player. Let's also imagine that, since the player doesn't actually include DeCSS, that it is being developed openly and publically on something like SourceForge, with no effort being made to conceal the identity of the developers.
Now under vicarious infringement, the open sourced nature would provide a fairly strong protection via negating the "control" clause. However, let's look at contributory infringement:
Direct infringement -- yes, by way of violating the DMCA
Knowledge -- yes, by way of the fact that they provided hooks in the code and delibrately avoiding distributing DeCSS
Material contribution -- yes, by way of the fact that they're providing a mechanism to automate the use of DeCSS, making the violation easier
Now, normally one could argue against contributory infrigement by pointing at a number of non-infringing uses. However, thanks to the DMCA, playing the same region 1 DVD that I can legally play on a DVD player on my TV set would be considered infringement when played via this open sourced player.
Because Linux is open-source, and because Linus doesn't add skr1pt k1dd13 features to it, Linus can't be sued.
So if I had, say, a closed-source operating system (such as Windows) and it had a mechanism for restricting what code can be run on it (such as Windows ME's requirement that DLL's be distributed in a signed package), would that satisfy the control requirements? What about a system with an anti-virus package, which from a functional standpoint consists of "code we have declared as bad will not be run"? And while we're at it, let's not forget the whole ActiveX code-signing deal.
I'm half-joking in the above paragraph, but I'm also half-serious. Is it possible for there to be a compelling legal argument for software manufacturers to start providing safety controls to prevent code with an illegal intent from running? I'd like to hope that I'm speculating out on the "kook" end of a slippery slope, but I do think it's a point worth thinking about.
It is pretty stupid to try and impute his motives without reading it.
Mea culpa. I went back and read it. I'm still not certain that banishing my ignorance was worth the cost of the headache I now have from reading it.
It also would've helped if he had thrown more actual facts into his text rather than just repeating over and over, in all caps and sans apostrophes, text that more or less boiled down to "THEYRE EVIL! THEYVE GOT LAWYERS. WRITERS ARE BROKE. SEND MONEY."
Even as someone who's fairly sympathetic to their plight (especially after I realized one of the fundamental flaws in my earlier post -- apparently he's going after AOL because of their Gnutella involvement), I just can't bring myself to provide support to something with such a garish poster boy.
But seriously, FWIW, it looks like he's going after an actual pirate, so that makes him a good guy.
Not quite. To quote from the article (in the lawyer stuff later on; I skipped the 1337 ALL CAPS part): Stephen Robertson settled with Harlan almost immediately and is no longer a part of the case except for evidence he may have to provide during discovery and trial.
So it looks like he had the pirate sitting right in his sights and then realized the fundamental rule of all lawsuits: Go after someone with big pockets. (I'm reminded of a Doonesbury [or was it Bloom County?] where one of the character sued a camera manufacturer for not including a warning label that snapping pictures of Sean Penn could be dangerous to your health.) Even one of the Slashdot readers who considers the RIAA justified in going after Napster, I consider this a different situation in that AOL seemed to just be carrying newsgroups in general, rather than the Napster situation (where they pretty much knew and intended the service to exist primarily for trading illegal mp3s).
In this case "useful"=="too complicated for your local boob to handle".
I think you underestimate the value of convenience. If it were just an issue of end-user intelligence, something like a TiVo would be strictly an item for Joe Consumer. However, the proliferation of the TiVo hacking community and the repeated mentions of TiVo on Slashdot indicate that it also holds a geekish appeal.
So why would an intelligent, geeky person go for something like this? Convenience. Am I capable of, say, recording programs by specifying it as an at-job? Sure. Do I really want to? Hell, no. Especially not when I'm sitting in front of the TV. I just want to be able to pick up the remote and push a few buttons in a nice, friendly GUI. And this is coming from someone who, under normal circumstances, is a die-hard CLI/text-user -- Hell, I even use lynx and emacs to read and post to Slashdot. But when I'm in front of a TV, all I care about is ease-of-use. Period.
Well, they did mention that they're looking for a home for the products. If the division isn't autonomous enough, it might be more viable for the entire division to be sold to a larger software company rather than having it try and survive on its own.
And to jump topics over to the people questioning the wisdom of selling off a profitable division (and to provide another answer to the "why sell it rather than spinning it off" question), it's possible that ORA wants to invest capital in a more profitable line of business. Or they want to invest that capital in a line of business that's closer to their core philosophy.
That said, if it were in the UK then RIAA would still have problems as the UK copyright act is completely different from the laws in the US.
As mentioned in my half-silly dialogue, article 11bis of the Berne convention controls broadcast rights. According to this list, the UK is a party of the Berne convention.
As for declaring war... are all you guys that dumb?
Err, yes. We're stupid, violent Americans with our fast food, inefficient cars, and lots and lots of guns. Kill, kill, kill!
Seriously, I doubt it would reach that point. There're too many easier, nonviolent, Internet-connection snipping means of achieving similar goals. But I'm sure someone, somewhere is thinking, "Dammit, if we go to war, we could really kick their asses." Especially when you consider that we did the whole Gulf War thing in order to protect our oil interests.
what would you be able to do that would make a large number of people want to run Linux?
You'll get the same answer I used in the "Dreamcast running Linux" thread, namely you can theoretically use Linux as a means of developing and running your own games.
Much like the argument people were making about targetting Windows and doing a minimal effort X-box port (yes, I'm aware it does require some effort and that supposedly MS will demand that the X-box version has added stuff), you could theoretically do the same with Linux, Dreamcast, and Playstation 2.
Anyone wanna place bets on how long until someone manages to get Tux Racer up and running on the PS2? It may be a ways off, but it'd still be a neat goal.
The only downside is that I'd (presumably) have to go through the trouble of mod-chipping my PS2. I'm not sure I want to invalidate the warranty just yet.
remember that bands like Phish and the Dead encourage their fans to tape their live performances and swap them with other fans.
As one possible alternative, I'd like to point to the etree project. Their goal is to create a collection of high-quality recordings of various concerts from artists that permit such recordings.
One could argue that it's not quite the same as mp3's (it's nice that it's higher quality, but it's a bit more unwieldy), but it does provide an alternative, particularly one that should be free of an legal problems.
There is no fucking way ever, full stop/period, that the UK would allow anyone with guns anywhere near Sealand unless they are part of the UK navy or Sealand government.
"I'm sorry, chaps. We know you went through the trouble of declaring war and everything, but we can't let you invade Sealand."
"So you're saying Sealand _is_ a part of the UK? Great, then we'll just bring you up in front of the International Court of Justice for violating articles 11bis and 16 of the Berne Convention."
"Err, on second thought, have fun storming the cast^H^H^H^Hbunker."
Seriously, though, either Sealand's a sovereign nation, in which case obtaining permission from the UK to travel through their territorial waters in order to attack should be fairly trivial. I admit that, given the rocky history between the US and the UK (WW I, WW II, and even the recent joint US/UK bombings on Iraq all come to mind), it might be difficult for us to reach a compromise, but I'm sure we'll work something out.
And if the UK decides that Sealand isn't sovereign territory, then suddenly the regular UK copyright laws take effect. At worst, it would be mildly inconvenient for the RIAA to have to pursue a UK-based legal battle, but I'm more than confident that they've got the money to pull it off.
Second, he's actually in the clear from the moral point of view.
Depends on who you ask. It takes a lot more than just a few musicians to record an album. I don't disagree that most recording contracts are unfair to the artists. I also don't disagree that the record companies have an oligopoly. But like it or not, the costs of a recording studio, a producer, and promotion are the reason why many artists are better off with a recording contract than without.
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Even that could be argued. CAUCE has been promoting an SMTP-banner-based, machine-parsable policy. Someone with such a banner would be in a better position to claim that the spamming was unauthorized access.
Rereading the story seems to imply that they explained the situation to the school administration, had the AP CS teacher back them up on what the fortune command was, and then still had the police called in by the administration.
But I agree that you're right in the sense that the investigation seems to be a "case closed, nothing to see" deal. But I still don't like the overreaction to a single, half-nonsensical snippet of text with the keyword "shotgun" in it.
However, the key factor that seems to be thrown around as to why the private schools can get away with acting like that do is that they don't take public funds. If vouchers were construed to be public funds, then it seems possible that private schools would be forced to accept some of the civil rights-related standards that have (supposedly) been set for public schools.
I don't know when the last time was, but as far as "if ever" goes this CNN article on Columbine indicates that the two boys fired 37 shotgun rounds (and 151 9mm rounds).
It seems easy enough to explain it to me:
Reading the plates may be unrealistic, but what about using the camera footage to track the car? You would, most likely, get a rough make/model/color and the direction the car was headed. Even better, you're likely to get the car on other cameras further along. While I would be hesitant to treat it as conclusive evidence if the car were to pass through an unmonitored gap, it would probably be sufficient to track the suspected car to wherever it stops. Hit-and-run should leave enough physical evidence that finding the car rapidly could help secure a conviction. If I'm not mistaken, this is how the generally try and find hit-and-run drivers over here (US), where we don't have cameras and where the witnesses didn't get the plates; they take the make/model/color and then do lots of tedious foot-work.
Of course, personally, I still dislike the idea of cameras everywhere. But I won't argue that they aren't useful. It's just a question of whether or not it's worth sacrificing some privacy for some safety. (And yes, despite them being used in public places, it is an issue of privacy. "Public" may mean that there's a reasonable expectation of other people knowing where you are, but doesn't cover a reasonable expectation of someone tracking your every single move outside of private property.)
On the other hand, television and radio don't have the problem of their costs scaling with their popularity. If ten times the expected number of people tune in to the superbowl, the network will still turn a profit and will make a note to up their advertising rates next year. If ten times the expected number of people turn up at a portal, there's a good chance people'll be getting 503 errors left and right and all hell'll break lose.
For me, it all started to crumble when they released Quest for Glory IV with so many game-crashing bugs that I, as a die-hard fan who had played all the earlier ones to completion (multiple times for 1 and 2), couldn't even get far enough in the game to see its arcade-style combat system.
If I'm not mistaken, someone was using a MegaHAL-like bot trained on JonKatz's ramblings. (At least I'm guessing that it was a script -- it's entirely possible that the person was cooking up their own fake JonKatz ramblings.) The postings were done under some name that implied it was a fake JonKatz. I do remember it getting moderated up as funny on a few occasions.
Personally, I think it wouldn't be too hard to hit the karma cap by writing a bot that posts "First, they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win." to every Slashdot story that has both Microsoft and Linux in it.
I suppose you might also make a bot capable of recognizing similar Slashdot stories and then just have it still a few +5 posts from the earlier story. There's a bit of risk with having it grab irrelevant comments -- it'd probably be worthwhile to ignore any (+5, Funny) posts since they tend to be more specific to a given article. It'd also be funny if someone posted the latest DeCSS/DVD thing and the bot tried to pick an article out of the Big Brother awards, because the article text has a gratuitous mention of the MPAA. But in general, I think it would do decently, although probably not as well as the google-bot.
Finally, if you wanted to get really ballsy, you could do a script that skimmed The Register, the NY Times, and a few other popular sources of Slashdot articles for anything with "Linux", "Internet", "MPAA", "RIAA", "DVD", "DeCSS", "Intel", "AMD", "Transmeta", "Playstation", "PS2", "Dreamcast", "DMCA", or any other keywords that're especially hot on Slashdot and then submitted the resulting story. It'd be an all-or-nothing gamble, with a whopping 5 points of karma for every hit, but the potential to reach new levels of negative karma should it raise the ire of CmdrTaco and crew.
The WorldForge philosophy, as I understand it, is that anything you can do with a client from an automation or display standpoint is 100% legal. So, provided there's not a bug in server enforcement of game rules, the open-source thing should be a non-issue.
However, I do disagree with some of the philisophical decisions the WorldForge developers have made on this issue. As I understand it, it would be legal to have a bevy of automated "slaves" that bankroll your main character.
That still doesn't address the issue of your current desktop. My desktop is defined by both the programs that start up when I login, as well as the programs that I currently have up and running. Starting up a remote WM addresses the former, but it doesn't magicially transfer programs that're in the middle of running. If I were in the middle of reading Slashdot on one desktop, even if my desktop contained a thing to auto-start Netscape, I'd still have to manually renavigate to where I was on the site.
Besides, the Windows deal, X forwarding doesn't let you take control of a program session that's in the middle of being worked on. As such, the project mentioned here (namely, having your desktop follow you around from machine to machine automatically), Just Wouldn't Work with X forwarding.
I was actually thinking about this from the darker end of things (i.e. "The program you have tried to run, LOADLIN.EXE, has not been signed with an unapproved and/or expired software vendor key. Please contact the vendor for an update."), but I see how security holes might count.
On the other hand, I can see the liability from something like that easily exceeding any and all potential revenue it could generate. If I were Microsoft, I'd pull IE and the networking code out of Windows, sell them as-is to a third-party vendor, and simultaneously minimize a lot of my exposure while at the same time deflating the DOJ's anti-trust case.
Also, there're things that're only security issues if configured improperly. How far should a system go to prevent this? To use Unix as an example, is requiring a non-empty root password at installation time sufficient or should we disable any and all forms of root access if someone were to manually edit /etc/passwd and blank out root's password field? If we absolve misconfiguration, what's to stop Unix vendors from just installing with all remote services disabled? (Admittedly, this is a good idea, anyway, but it circumvents the issue of a security hole in a service that an admin would want running under normal circumstances.)
I found his open source comments especially interesting when considered with respect to everyone's other favorite current major legal battle involving a four-letter industry association.
Imagine an open-sourced DVD player that provides hooks such that anyone with a copy of the infamous DeCSS.c source can drop it into the source tree for the player, change a #define or re-run GNU's configure, and then build a fully functional DVD player. Let's also imagine that, since the player doesn't actually include DeCSS, that it is being developed openly and publically on something like SourceForge, with no effort being made to conceal the identity of the developers.
Now under vicarious infringement, the open sourced nature would provide a fairly strong protection via negating the "control" clause. However, let's look at contributory infringement:
Now, normally one could argue against contributory infrigement by pointing at a number of non-infringing uses. However, thanks to the DMCA, playing the same region 1 DVD that I can legally play on a DVD player on my TV set would be considered infringement when played via this open sourced player.
So if I had, say, a closed-source operating system (such as Windows) and it had a mechanism for restricting what code can be run on it (such as Windows ME's requirement that DLL's be distributed in a signed package), would that satisfy the control requirements? What about a system with an anti-virus package, which from a functional standpoint consists of "code we have declared as bad will not be run"? And while we're at it, let's not forget the whole ActiveX code-signing deal.
I'm half-joking in the above paragraph, but I'm also half-serious. Is it possible for there to be a compelling legal argument for software manufacturers to start providing safety controls to prevent code with an illegal intent from running? I'd like to hope that I'm speculating out on the "kook" end of a slippery slope, but I do think it's a point worth thinking about.
Mea culpa. I went back and read it. I'm still not certain that banishing my ignorance was worth the cost of the headache I now have from reading it.
It also would've helped if he had thrown more actual facts into his text rather than just repeating over and over, in all caps and sans apostrophes, text that more or less boiled down to "THEYRE EVIL! THEYVE GOT LAWYERS. WRITERS ARE BROKE. SEND MONEY."
Even as someone who's fairly sympathetic to their plight (especially after I realized one of the fundamental flaws in my earlier post -- apparently he's going after AOL because of their Gnutella involvement), I just can't bring myself to provide support to something with such a garish poster boy.
Not quite. To quote from the article (in the lawyer stuff later on; I skipped the 1337 ALL CAPS part):
Stephen Robertson settled with Harlan almost immediately and is no longer a part of the case except for evidence he may have to provide during discovery and trial.
So it looks like he had the pirate sitting right in his sights and then realized the fundamental rule of all lawsuits: Go after someone with big pockets. (I'm reminded of a Doonesbury [or was it Bloom County?] where one of the character sued a camera manufacturer for not including a warning label that snapping pictures of Sean Penn could be dangerous to your health.) Even one of the Slashdot readers who considers the RIAA justified in going after Napster, I consider this a different situation in that AOL seemed to just be carrying newsgroups in general, rather than the Napster situation (where they pretty much knew and intended the service to exist primarily for trading illegal mp3s).
I think you underestimate the value of convenience. If it were just an issue of end-user intelligence, something like a TiVo would be strictly an item for Joe Consumer. However, the proliferation of the TiVo hacking community and the repeated mentions of TiVo on Slashdot indicate that it also holds a geekish appeal.
So why would an intelligent, geeky person go for something like this? Convenience. Am I capable of, say, recording programs by specifying it as an at-job? Sure. Do I really want to? Hell, no. Especially not when I'm sitting in front of the TV. I just want to be able to pick up the remote and push a few buttons in a nice, friendly GUI. And this is coming from someone who, under normal circumstances, is a die-hard CLI/text-user -- Hell, I even use lynx and emacs to read and post to Slashdot. But when I'm in front of a TV, all I care about is ease-of-use. Period.
Well, they did mention that they're looking for a home for the products. If the division isn't autonomous enough, it might be more viable for the entire division to be sold to a larger software company rather than having it try and survive on its own.
And to jump topics over to the people questioning the wisdom of selling off a profitable division (and to provide another answer to the "why sell it rather than spinning it off" question), it's possible that ORA wants to invest capital in a more profitable line of business. Or they want to invest that capital in a line of business that's closer to their core philosophy.
As mentioned in my half-silly dialogue, article 11bis of the Berne convention controls broadcast rights. According to this list, the UK is a party of the Berne convention.
As for declaring war... are all you guys that dumb?
Err, yes. We're stupid, violent Americans with our fast food, inefficient cars, and lots and lots of guns. Kill, kill, kill!
Seriously, I doubt it would reach that point. There're too many easier, nonviolent, Internet-connection snipping means of achieving similar goals. But I'm sure someone, somewhere is thinking, "Dammit, if we go to war, we could really kick their asses." Especially when you consider that we did the whole Gulf War thing in order to protect our oil interests.
You missed the obvious one -- a TiVo.
You'll get the same answer I used in the "Dreamcast running Linux" thread, namely you can theoretically use Linux as a means of developing and running your own games.
Much like the argument people were making about targetting Windows and doing a minimal effort X-box port (yes, I'm aware it does require some effort and that supposedly MS will demand that the X-box version has added stuff), you could theoretically do the same with Linux, Dreamcast, and Playstation 2.
Anyone wanna place bets on how long until someone manages to get Tux Racer up and running on the PS2? It may be a ways off, but it'd still be a neat goal.
The only downside is that I'd (presumably) have to go through the trouble of mod-chipping my PS2. I'm not sure I want to invalidate the warranty just yet.
As one possible alternative, I'd like to point to the etree project. Their goal is to create a collection of high-quality recordings of various concerts from artists that permit such recordings.
One could argue that it's not quite the same as mp3's (it's nice that it's higher quality, but it's a bit more unwieldy), but it does provide an alternative, particularly one that should be free of an legal problems.
"I'm sorry, chaps. We know you went through the trouble of declaring war and everything, but we can't let you invade Sealand."
"So you're saying Sealand _is_ a part of the UK? Great, then we'll just bring you up in front of the International Court of Justice for violating articles 11bis and 16 of the Berne Convention."
"Err, on second thought, have fun storming the cast^H^H^H^Hbunker."
Seriously, though, either Sealand's a sovereign nation, in which case obtaining permission from the UK to travel through their territorial waters in order to attack should be fairly trivial. I admit that, given the rocky history between the US and the UK (WW I, WW II, and even the recent joint US/UK bombings on Iraq all come to mind), it might be difficult for us to reach a compromise, but I'm sure we'll work something out.
And if the UK decides that Sealand isn't sovereign territory, then suddenly the regular UK copyright laws take effect. At worst, it would be mildly inconvenient for the RIAA to have to pursue a UK-based legal battle, but I'm more than confident that they've got the money to pull it off.
Depends on who you ask. It takes a lot more than just a few musicians to record an album. I don't disagree that most recording contracts are unfair to the artists. I also don't disagree that the record companies have an oligopoly. But like it or not, the costs of a recording studio, a producer, and promotion are the reason why many artists are better off with a recording contract than without.