This is because every copy of a program that is made in the course of installing and running it (e.g. the installed copy on your hard-drive, the copy in memory, the bits of it in your swap, etc.) is ''actionable'' under copyright law, i.e. you can be sued for making those copies.
This is the main principle and reason behind the ''license agreements'', which is MS allowing you to make a copy by installing it in exchange for agreeing not to sue, assume fitness or merchantability for a particular purchase, etc. etc. etc.
You can't attach an EULA to hardware. The last people to try that were Digital:Convergence with:CueCat, and they were (rightfully) made a laughing stock of.
I don't know if you're trolling, but the situation you just described (a ''friend'' selling a borrowed car) is completely different to you modding hardware you paid for.
The Xbox is not software, it requires no license, and you're free to use it, mod it, paint it, burn it, toss it off a cliff, whatever, there's not a damn thing Microsoft should be able to do about you tinkering with something you own.
Makes you think, what constitutes source code for different types of content?
It might be interesting to have music tracks that come with (for example) the samples and vocal tracks that make up the thing, under a GPL/sharealike license i.e. tracks using those samples must give away all their samples in turn.
I think Creative Commons is a better approach, and I think it's even a better approach than GPL/LGPL. The licenses are worded in a very common sense fashion, written by a team of IP experts, and give *you* the flexibility in determining what features you do and do not want in a license.
What you've got to remember is that software developers already have a plethora of licenses to choose from, based on what freedoms and flexibilities they want to keep/grant/whatever. A good summary of the "licensing ecosystem" is this table, although I'm sure there are better onces out there.
The "open content" licensing scene never had the choice between a good number of licenses all worked on by professional IP lawyers. CC provides the creative equivalent of the BSD, Apache, LGPL and GPL licenses, and maybe one or two more.
Someone needs to explain to me how the EU can enforce American companies to collect a tax for the EU.
Just like they do it now in countries like Belgium. I'll give you an example:
I order $30 worth of MT Ts from thinkgeek. They ship it to me, and when it goes through customs, they say "Oh look! No VAT number!", and for me to get my parcel they make me pay VAT (EU10) and handling fees (EU20). Or I put the VAT number of a company, and they just send the VAT bill to that company(I think).
Eventually if a company wants to ship competitively to the EU, they'll have to figure out how to charge the tax at source.
I don't like the EU much either, what with my libertarian tendencies, but the rest of your post is just uninformed waffle. Sorry dude.
You're getting your panties in a twist about some asshat kid who was stupid enough to ''troll'' someone who knew how to get his own back.
To be honest, I don't care. Some trolls can be really, really funny (the Adequacy crowd comes to mind), but I really don't give a fig what happens to juvenile, antisocial idiots who use the anonymity of the ''net to piss in the communal pool.
You have some good points, and I'm glad I've never faced a customer with a $1K bill for bandwidth!
There's a number of things that could be taken from the mobile industry on how to deal with this. For example, make it pay-per-go - bandwidth not paid for in the previous month is carried over.
Feedback is another thing. If there was an automated SMS/mail/voice notification every (say) 5 gigs once the customer is over the limit, the huge bill wouldn't be such a nasty suprise, and may even be averted.
Another idea; people hate throttling, but what if you let the user choose his throttle? For example, after a couple of months when the usage patterns have been established, a customer might choose to limit himself, so that no matter how much he leeches, he can never spend more than $X per month on bandwidth.
This is a problem with the business models of the ISPs, not the way the bandwidth is being used.
ISPs at some level buy bandwidth in Gigs/Teras transfer/month. Charging users a flat fee for access to a pipe that can use too much bandwidth only makes sense if you know most users wouldn't use the service intensively.
When users only ran clients for http, smtp, and (just maybe) news, that was a valid assumption, and helped make AOL as big as it is. But that's not going to work if nodes start acting as servers as well as clients, like they were designed to.
If you run a website or any other colo'd server, you get (say) 40Gig transfer into the bargain, and pay extra for anything over that.
If ISPs throw in the first 5 gigs with their DSL subscriptions, and make customers pay extra for more transfer, 90% of surfers will never incur extra charges, and will probably pay costs similar to current rates. The rest should pay for what they use.
That's [restriction on distribution of encumbered work] not stated in the GPL
I think this should cover it:
7. If, as a consequence of a court judgment or allegation of patent infringement or for any other reason (not limited to patent issues), conditions are imposed on you (whether by court order, agreement or otherwise) that contradict the conditions of this License, they do not excuse you from the conditions of this License. If you cannot distribute so as to satisfy simultaneously your obligations under this License and any other pertinent obligations, then as a consequence you may not distribute the Program at all. For example, if a patent license would not permit royalty-free redistribution of the Program by all those who receive copies directly or indirectly through you, then the only way you could satisfy both it and this License would be to refrain entirely from distribution of the Program.
Now, IANAL, but if SCO claim that Linux is encumbered, this should meet the criteria of 'conditions'' that ''contradict the conditions of [the GPL]''. So if(the above == true) then ''as a consequence you may not distribute the Program at all.'', which is fairly clear.
Uh, I was talking about the RIAA website running Windows 2000 Server, and then letting it get repeatedly rooted with the exploit-du-jour and dumber stuff.
The article says that hard-drives are scanned for MP3s. You are correct, if I distribute MP3s of CDs that I own, then I'm comitting copyright infringement.
However, I don't distribute MP3s, and haven't downloaded any (from a p2p system) since Napster went offline[0], but there are plenty of other uses for p2p software.
[0] Since then, I've stopped buying so many CDs as well. The size of my CD collection doubled because of Napster, and stopped growing when I stopped listening to new music. Funny that.
If they want to delete pirated MP3s, they'll have to tell them apart from MP3s ripped from CDs you own.
That's impossible, but of course I'm sure the RIAA will err on the side of caution, to ensure you're a law-abiding citizen.
A program that continually pops up with ''Do you own the CD for <artist>-<album>-<track number>-<track name>?'' over and over again for every single MP3 on my two HDs isn't just malicious, it's a freakin' pain in the ass.
OTOH, anyone who lets themselves get rooted by the RIAA, an organization that can't even keep a website up for more than ten minutes, or do basic things like run Windows Update, will probably loose more self-esteem than data.
(The Expires header is probably a round number in the UNIX date format.) What this does is instructs every proxy server, squid and browser cache between you and Google not to bother re-downloading the image until 2038. Of course, you can probably make the browser override that.
The 3.2x were really, really sucky under load. There was also a recusion problem of some sort - if you sent a GET then close the recieving socket - it may not have been this exactly, but I recall pressing & holding CTRL-R on 3.2.2 (IIRC) caused CPU usage to rocket to 100%, and eventually you'd get a stack overflow exception.
This got fixed in 3.3 and upwards (post-refactoring), which is what I'm using now. Now it just logs an IOException + stack trace, which is no less gracefull but doesn't chew memory. I'm waiting for 4.1 before switching.
I skimmed your XML critique. One of the points worth making is that SOAP is not really an RPC protocol - there is too much baggage for that - headers, envelopes, etc. It is, funnily enough, meant for simple object access...
For RPC there is XML-RPC, which works fine enough. SOAP is more along the lines of moving data between objects. An example of this is a lightweight online client - validation and processing happens on the server, while interface niceties, user input and pre-validation happen on the client. Communication between the server and the client is as simple as if(isValid()) outputStream.write(toXML()).
I agree that XML is no silver bullet, but it does have a large number of applications in a variety of areas. High-load network communications just may not be one of them.
One of the biggest problems with SELinux is the non-trivial effort involved in creating policies. It took me a couple of nights just to get to grips with the concepts...
There's a real need for some sort of tool that just builds and manages simple policies for daemons, apps & utilities. Problem is, that sort of thing is best built upon a sound model of the policy. apol (http://www.tresys.com/selinux.html) has something, and there's work going on at IBM (Alphaworks?) and at MITRE, all of it very cool stuff, but it's a) geared towards analysis, and b) proprietary.
The SELinux tarball has sample polciies for a lot of stuff. There are more on the sourceforge site.
There's tools also (apol at http://www.tresys.com/selinux.html, and a Perl script I can't find at the moment by this guy ''Mark Westerman'', try searching the list archives) that help in the analysis of security policies.
Linux Security module is what adds hooks into the kernel for security. LIDS uses the LSM hooks, and so does SELinux, and (I think?) others. But LIDS != LSM.
What I'd be really interested in seeing is a keyboard where each key is a small hi-res LCD display. Not do-able today, maybe, but imagine the things you could do with this.
It would not only allow for self-customising layout, but also things like when you press [shift], letters go upper-case, and the positions of the ''1'' and the ''!'' are reversed. When you press CTRL or ALT, the keys that do have functions assigned could get highlighted or something. The font of the letters could change according to the font you're writing with, or with the display font you're using... PC games could take advantage of this in very cool ways... all kinds of stuff.
I'm pretty sure this isn't really possible right now, but I can guess at some of the stumbling blocks. Durability would be one problem, although you could embedd the LCD in transparent keys. The contacts per key to make this happen would be ridiculous... managing 101-104 little displays would be an interesting problem.
a law that tried to force ISPs to keep every piece of data their customers sent and recieved for IIRC 7 years
You're referring to data retention laws. It's an EU-wide thing. NCIS (UK crime intel) stole a march on everyone. They want to retain records of communication not the communication itself. The supposed reasons are for establishing alibis(yeah right), etc., as this applies to GSM location data too.
After 911 there was a proposal levelled at the EU parliament, can't find the link.
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EULA's are for software, not hardware.
This is because every copy of a program that is made in the course of installing and running it (e.g. the installed copy on your hard-drive, the copy in memory, the bits of it in your swap, etc.) is ''actionable'' under copyright law, i.e. you can be sued for making those copies.
This is the main principle and reason behind the ''license agreements'', which is MS allowing you to make a copy by installing it in exchange for agreeing not to sue, assume fitness or merchantability for a particular purchase, etc. etc. etc.
You can't attach an EULA to hardware. The last people to try that were Digital:Convergence with :CueCat, and they were (rightfully) made a laughing stock of.
I don't know if you're trolling, but the situation you just described (a ''friend'' selling a borrowed car) is completely different to you modding hardware you paid for.
The Xbox is not software, it requires no license, and you're free to use it, mod it, paint it, burn it, toss it off a cliff, whatever, there's not a damn thing Microsoft should be able to do about you tinkering with something you own.
They didn't distribute the compiler, so they don't have to distribute the source.
Makes you think, what constitutes source code for different types of content?
It might be interesting to have music tracks that come with (for example) the samples and vocal tracks that make up the thing, under a GPL/sharealike license i.e. tracks using those samples must give away all their samples in turn.
Just food for thought.
What you've got to remember is that software developers already have a plethora of licenses to choose from, based on what freedoms and flexibilities they want to keep/grant/whatever. A good summary of the "licensing ecosystem" is this table, although I'm sure there are better onces out there.
The "open content" licensing scene never had the choice between a good number of licenses all worked on by professional IP lawyers. CC provides the creative equivalent of the BSD, Apache, LGPL and GPL licenses, and maybe one or two more.
Just like they do it now in countries like Belgium. I'll give you an example:
I order $30 worth of MT Ts from thinkgeek. They ship it to me, and when it goes through customs, they say "Oh look! No VAT number!", and for me to get my parcel they make me pay VAT (EU10) and handling fees (EU20). Or I put the VAT number of a company, and they just send the VAT bill to that company(I think).
Eventually if a company wants to ship competitively to the EU, they'll have to figure out how to charge the tax at source.
I don't like the EU much either, what with my libertarian tendencies, but the rest of your post is just uninformed waffle. Sorry dude.
I don't know about JBoss, but Tomcat 4.1 and upwards are installed using the NullSoft installer. Very easy, no complications.
The 3-series was a right PIA though. Glad to see the back of that.
You're getting your panties in a twist about some asshat kid who was stupid enough to ''troll'' someone who knew how to get his own back.
To be honest, I don't care. Some trolls can be really, really funny (the Adequacy crowd comes to mind), but I really don't give a fig what happens to juvenile, antisocial idiots who use the anonymity of the ''net to piss in the communal pool.
You have some good points, and I'm glad I've never faced a customer with a $1K bill for bandwidth!
There's a number of things that could be taken from the mobile industry on how to deal with this. For example, make it pay-per-go - bandwidth not paid for in the previous month is carried over.
Feedback is another thing. If there was an automated SMS/mail/voice notification every (say) 5 gigs once the customer is over the limit, the huge bill wouldn't be such a nasty suprise, and may even be averted.
Another idea; people hate throttling, but what if you let the user choose his throttle? For example, after a couple of months when the usage patterns have been established, a customer might choose to limit himself, so that no matter how much he leeches, he can never spend more than $X per month on bandwidth.
This is a problem with the business models of the ISPs, not the way the bandwidth is being used.
ISPs at some level buy bandwidth in Gigs/Teras transfer/month. Charging users a flat fee for access to a pipe that can use too much bandwidth only makes sense if you know most users wouldn't use the service intensively.
When users only ran clients for http, smtp, and (just maybe) news, that was a valid assumption, and helped make AOL as big as it is. But that's not going to work if nodes start acting as servers as well as clients, like they were designed to.
If you run a website or any other colo'd server, you get (say) 40Gig transfer into the bargain, and pay extra for anything over that.
If ISPs throw in the first 5 gigs with their DSL subscriptions, and make customers pay extra for more transfer, 90% of surfers will never incur extra charges, and will probably pay costs similar to current rates. The rest should pay for what they use.
That's [restriction on distribution of encumbered work] not stated in the GPL
I think this should cover it:
Now, IANAL, but if SCO claim that Linux is encumbered, this should meet the criteria of 'conditions'' that ''contradict the conditions of [the GPL]''. So if(the above == true) then ''as a consequence you may not distribute the Program at all.'', which is fairly clear.
Just my two cents.
Uh, I was talking about the RIAA website running Windows 2000 Server, and then letting it get repeatedly rooted with the exploit-du-jour and dumber stuff.
I didn't lose anything. HTH.
The article says that hard-drives are scanned for MP3s. You are correct, if I distribute MP3s of CDs that I own, then I'm comitting copyright infringement.
However, I don't distribute MP3s, and haven't downloaded any (from a p2p system) since Napster went offline[0], but there are plenty of other uses for p2p software.
[0] Since then, I've stopped buying so many CDs as well. The size of my CD collection doubled because of Napster, and stopped growing when I stopped listening to new music. Funny that.
If they want to delete pirated MP3s, they'll have to tell them apart from MP3s ripped from CDs you own.
That's impossible, but of course I'm sure the RIAA will err on the side of caution, to ensure you're a law-abiding citizen.
A program that continually pops up with ''Do you own the CD for <artist>-<album>-<track number>-<track name>?'' over and over again for every single MP3 on my two HDs isn't just malicious, it's a freakin' pain in the ass.
OTOH, anyone who lets themselves get rooted by the RIAA, an organization that can't even keep a website up for more than ten minutes, or do basic things like run Windows Update, will probably loose more self-esteem than data.
See also the response from Attrition, who got nastygrams due to their image archive. They didn't take it too kindly either...
Google's HTML is stripped down, but the HTTP response headers on the main page are the bare minimum.
Using livehttpheaders on the Google logo shows these HTTP headers in the 200 OK:
Last-Modified: Mon, 21 Oct 2002 02:32:25 GMT
Expires: Sun, 17 Jan 2038 19:14:07 GMT
(The Expires header is probably a round number in the UNIX date format.) What this does is instructs every proxy server, squid and browser cache between you and Google not to bother re-downloading the image until 2038. Of course, you can probably make the browser override that.
Sun Hotel, rue de Berge - just off Ch. d'Ixelles. Cheap, if you don't mind the small rooms. +32 25112119.
Search on the mirror for ''testing''.
Search on google for ''esreveR nI gnitseT''
The same site is #1 in both results...
The 3.2x were really, really sucky under load. There was also a recusion problem of some sort - if you sent a GET then close the recieving socket - it may not have been this exactly, but I recall pressing & holding CTRL-R on 3.2.2 (IIRC) caused CPU usage to rocket to 100%, and eventually you'd get a stack overflow exception.
This got fixed in 3.3 and upwards (post-refactoring), which is what I'm using now. Now it just logs an IOException + stack trace, which is no less gracefull but doesn't chew memory. I'm waiting for 4.1 before switching.
I skimmed your XML critique. One of the points worth making is that SOAP is not really an RPC protocol - there is too much baggage for that - headers, envelopes, etc. It is, funnily enough, meant for simple object access...
For RPC there is XML-RPC, which works fine enough. SOAP is more along the lines of moving data between objects. An example of this is a lightweight online client - validation and processing happens on the server, while interface niceties, user input and pre-validation happen on the client. Communication between the server and the client is as simple as if(isValid()) outputStream.write(toXML()).
I agree that XML is no silver bullet, but it does have a large number of applications in a variety of areas. High-load network communications just may not be one of them.
One of the biggest problems with SELinux is the non-trivial effort involved in creating policies. It took me a couple of nights just to get to grips with the concepts...
There's a real need for some sort of tool that just builds and manages simple policies for daemons, apps & utilities. Problem is, that sort of thing is best built upon a sound model of the policy. apol (http://www.tresys.com/selinux.html) has something, and there's work going on at IBM (Alphaworks?) and at MITRE, all of it very cool stuff, but it's a) geared towards analysis, and b) proprietary.
The SELinux tarball has sample polciies for a lot of stuff. There are more on the sourceforge site.
There's tools also (apol at http://www.tresys.com/selinux.html, and a Perl script I can't find at the moment by this guy ''Mark Westerman'', try searching the list archives) that help in the analysis of security policies.
Linux Security module is what adds hooks into the kernel for security. LIDS uses the LSM hooks, and so does SELinux, and (I think?) others. But LIDS != LSM.
What I'd be really interested in seeing is a keyboard where each key is a small hi-res LCD display. Not do-able today, maybe, but imagine the things you could do with this.
It would not only allow for self-customising layout, but also things like when you press [shift], letters go upper-case, and the positions of the ''1'' and the ''!'' are reversed. When you press CTRL or ALT, the keys that do have functions assigned could get highlighted or something. The font of the letters could change according to the font you're writing with, or with the display font you're using... PC games could take advantage of this in very cool ways... all kinds of stuff.
I'm pretty sure this isn't really possible right now, but I can guess at some of the stumbling blocks. Durability would be one problem, although you could embedd the LCD in transparent keys. The contacts per key to make this happen would be ridiculous... managing 101-104 little displays would be an interesting problem.
Just an idea.
You're referring to data retention laws. It's an EU-wide thing. NCIS (UK crime intel) stole a march on everyone. They want to retain records of communication not the communication itself. The supposed reasons are for establishing alibis(yeah right), etc., as this applies to GSM location data too.
After 911 there was a proposal levelled at the EU parliament, can't find the link.