Is is just me or does anyone else think that it is funny that this guy honestly thought that the government of New Zealand wouldn't have a problem with him building a cruise missile?
No wonder the government folks said that he could export his creation to Iran, my guess is that they thought he was completely crazy. They probably called the folks with the jackets that zip up in the back and the oversized butterfly nets the second the guy walked out of the office. It's never a good idea to rile up crazy people.
From what I have read they should have just called her "69," as that will explain what she spends most of her time doing.
I don't mind the folks at BSG ripping off story elements. In fact, I would encourage them to rip off story elements. Just please make sure that you rip off good story elements.
The thing that made BSG cool was the mythical backstory, and the whole ragtag alliance of humans against the machine thing. Let's face it, good versus evil plays well. Mix in some girls in lycra suits and some space battles and you have an interesting show. You don't even need good actors or clever special effects if you have the right story (think of how bad Mark Hamill was in "Star Wars: A New Hope").
However, without the backstory all you have is soft-core porn in space. Not my cup o' tea.
The work that freedesktop.org is working on is on the tip of the iceberg. I am talking about getting DCOP and Bonobo to interoperate (or DCOP and DBUS as the case may be). Mix in Mozilla's custom components and StarOffice's components and you have a lot of work that needs to get done before the Linux gets where it needs to be.
The fact of the matter is that there is going to be quite a bit of consolidation as the desktop folks get interoperation truly worked out, and with the Gnome folks holding all of the access to corporate dinero it will be the KDE folks that end up migrating to Gnome-like tools.
Not to mention the fact that KDE-specific applications will very likely find themselves without corporate backing. Especially KDE-specific tools where the Gnome equivalent is further along. For example, Novell is not likely to want to spend money on both Evolution and Aethera.
Pretending that the Novell buyout of SuSE isn't going to shake things up in KDE-land is just wishful thinking.
The question becomes a little murkier when you realize that a sizable percentage of the KDE hackers will soon work for Novell, and that Nat Friedman is heading up Novell's desktop Linux division.
Don't get me wrong, I don't expect KDE to disappear overnight, but the Gnome crowd now has the majority of the professional KDE hackers by their paycheck. At the very least you can expect their to be a lot more talk in the KDE world about "integration" (and it will be the Gnome crowd calling the shots).
Everyone that has ever commented on the state of the Linux desktop has begged for consolidation. And now with Novell/SuSE, RedHat, Sun, HP, and IBM all backing Gnome it would appear that said consolidation is finally going to happen.
Re:The Desktop Is Not Important Right Now
on
Linux in 2004?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Of course, in real life there isn't an arbitrary 5 man limit to your team. The championship Celtics were good, but they couldn't take on the best of the NBA greats all at the same time. Heck, they couldn't even compete with high school players if the opposing team had 500 guys on the court at the same time.
Microsoft has gotten to the point where they are competing with a huge percentage of their Windows developers. What's worse, if you come up with software that works well on Windows and starts making you a profit there is a good chance that Microsoft will copy your functionality and drive you out of business. This is why the commercial software industry is shifting towards Linux, that's the only way that they could possibly compete in the long run.
No matter how many sharp people Microsoft has working for them, if they turn this into a Microsoft-against-the-world battle they will lose.
Linux will win the desktop war in the same way that it is winning the server war. The key is to offer a product that is "good enough" at a lower price. Linux doesn't have to be better than Windows, it simply has to be "good enough."
This is why government conversions are such a big deal. When the government asks you for a document in a certain format, you don't send them a different format, even if the different format is the "standard."
Once OpenOffice/StarOffice gets entrenched in government Microsoft is going to have a very hard time maintaining their grip over all of the rest of us. After all, all of us that have dealings with the government are going to need a copy of OpenOffice or StarOffice in order to share documents with the government. The fact that OpenOffice is available free of charge (it even comes with source code) will further accelerate the change.
Once the need for compatibility with MS Office is gone OpenOffice/StarOffice is an easy choice. OpenOffice is actually a pretty darn amazing piece of work. Unfortunately, most reviews only touch on its ability to share documents with MS Office users.
Exactly, it's the process that makes Debian work so well. It's thousands of packages and thousands of end users that are willing to test how those packages work together and report bugs.
However, this doesn't necessarily mean that Fedora doesn't pose a threat to Debian. A community-based distribution with a powerful packaging manager (which implies automatic dependency checking), and the help of full-time paid engineers at Red Hat could be very cool.
All what I would want out of an official support contract would be a direct update line ( so that I could have a caching update server on my network, which my machines would hit )
and a per-incident support rate.
That's the rub. Red Hat doesn't want to be in the per-incident support business, and who can blame them. If they are going to go through the expense of hiring expensive Linux cluster engineers they want a guaranteed cash flow. You've seen the Maytag repairman commercials. Red Hat doesn't want to have to have engineers on the payroll whose primary job is to sit around and hope someone's Linux cluster breaks.
As for Red Hat's licensing terms, well, they don't have any licensing terms. Unlike commercial software vendors Red Hat doesn't charge you for the privilege of using the software. Instead they charge for service contracts.
That leaves Red Hat cluster customers with three choices. They can either pony up for Red Hat service contracts, they can support the Linux cluster themselves, or they can find another vendor that is willing to provide support at a price they can afford. That's a lot better deal than commercial vendors offer.
The fact of the matter is that Red Hat's subscription service is doing very well, and they are significantly above their projected targets. There are lots of other folks that are falling all over themselves to pay Red Hat's service fees. That makes it a seller's market. Red Hat has a limited resource (engineer time) and others are willing to pay Red Hat's price for their time.
The problem is that Wal-Mart knows the power of the "absolute" low price. No matter how large Wal-Mart's buying power may be it's still not bigger than Dell's or HP's (when it comes to computers). In fact, the only way to trump Dell's price is to offer a machine without an OS. It seems to be working too. Wal-Mart.com's OS-less and Linux PCs are their biggest sellers. Besides, even if the Microsoft tax were as low as $20, that's 10% of the retail price of Wal-Mart.com's low-end machines. Wal-Mart didn't get where they are today by overlooking a 10% markup.
The fact of the matter is that Microsoft's pricetag is a significant part of the price in a low-end machine. Not to mention the fact that operating systems are clearly a business where there are some room for "increased efficiencies." Heck, Microsoft's profit margin for their OS division is over 80%.
My guess is that Wal-Mart smells blood in the water.
Actually, if the RIAA said that I distributed their files and I didn't then I could countersue and get a fat pile of money from them. That's part of the reason why the RIAA is only targetting folks that they have the goods on.
When I say that the girl is guilty, I am not saying that she is guilty in the eyes of the law. Thanks the the RIAA offering her immunity she won't face a judge. That does not mean that she didn't, in fact, break the law.
Oops. I had been very careful to use the words "violate their copyrights" instead of steal, because I knew that if I made the mistake of using the word steal that I would get a response like the one that posted.
Fact is, you are 100% right. Violating a copyright is not theft. However, that still doesn't make violating the RIAA's copyrights legal or ethical.
I don't agree with the RIAA's business methods, but their slimy (but legal) business methods don't give us the right to violate their copyrights. That's the gist of my argument.
I agree, to an extent, with your argument that the damages claimed by the RIAA are ridiculous. However, these damages are based on current laws, and I don't really see the point in rewriting those laws since it is generally far easier to simply avoid distributing someone else's copyrighted material. If the RIAA did try and accuse me of distributing their copyrighted material then I could easily countersue. Such a case could very likely turn out to my advantage. The RIAA has a lot of money to lose, and punishments for corporations that harass individuals have often gotten to be very large.
The trick, once again, is to simply not distribute their copyrighted material.
You are certainly correct that folks with deep pockets and questionable ethics can cause a lot of problems, but that's nothing new. The US legal system leaves lots of opportunity for people to screw up your life.
Fighting is only the right thing to do when you are not guilty. My father is a public defendant, and the biggest part of his job is plea bargaining. Basically the idea is to get the best possible deal in exchange for not tying up the court system.
If the girl were protesting her innocence I would agree with you that the RIAA was being heavy handed, but that's simply not the case. The girl isn't saying that she didn't share the files.
I must admit that I do hope that the RIAA's tactics of prosecuting filesharers is effective. One way or another people are going to make the Internet safe for copyrighted works. I would just as soon that they didn't wreck it with heavy DRM in the process. I can live with the prosecution of illegal filesharing. That's a far better fate than a world of mandatory DRM.
It's not about protecting the RIAA. I hate the RIAA. I changed my music purchasing habits so that I would no longer support the RIAA. I simply believe that it is important to stick up for the rights of everyone, even people that I detest. It's a matter of principle. Just because I don't like an organization doesn't mean that I can ignore their rights.
It's a matter of principle.
By the way, thanks for cutting back on the insults. Your arguments are far stronger without the ad hominem attacks.
I think that you will find, as you become involved in politics, that it is far less about money than you think. If money were the only ingredient in politics then all sorts of groups that enjoy quite a bit of political clout would find themselves powerless. The Environmental movement is a good example, the NRAA is one from the other end of the spectrum. Neither one of these groups raises that much money, but both control the votes of large groups of people.
When push comes to shove politics is all about motivating large masses of people. Most of the people that rail of the US's political system either haven't ever seen any alternatives, or have very unpopular views.
I am not asking the ISPs to monitor. In fact, I don't want the ISPs to monitor. I simply think that they should volunteer the needed information once the RIAA has evidence against a user. Heck, if the RIAA was trying to catch a spammer the ISP would fall all over themselves turning over the IP address information. ISPs aren't really trying to protect their users anonymity, they are simply trying to protect their own business.
As for the "everyone is doing it" argument. That's something my children say when two or three of their friends are doing something that they are not allowed to do. It's a standard adolescent exaggeration. That's why I put the phrase in quotation marks. If everyone were, in fact, guilty of filesharing MP3s I would agree with you that the law should be changed. However, that's not really the case. In fact, if you tried to pass a law making filesharing of copyrighted material legal my guess is that you would find that only a small but very vocal minority would actually welcome such a law.
Good luck finding a vendor that will support a 512 node cluster for $50 a node. Supporting a cluster is *not* the same as supporting just one box. painehope can wish all he wants, but that doesn't mean that some vendor is going to magically fulfill his wishes at a price that he is willing to pay.
Fortunately there are plenty of alternatives in the Linux world for people who can't afford support. Fedora is likely to be one such alternative, Debian is my personal favorite, and other swear by Mandrake.
At the end of the day Red Hat is entitled to set their own prices, if you don't like their prices, then there are plenty of other choices. That's part of the beauty of Linux.
I actually see Fedora as a return to Red Hat's roots. A community lead distribution with plenty of paid help from the Red Hat staff should make for a pretty interesting beast. Debian, for example, is great, I love it, but it could use some of the fancy dan stuff that Red Hat contributes. I think that there is at least some chance that Fedora could become a better Debian than Debian.
Either way it is hard to fault how Red Hat has handled this. They aren't a charity, but they do make all of the source code that they write available. I see nothing wrong with trying to make a buck selling service and support. The folks that used Red Hat before, but who can't afford the new service agreements, still have plenty of options. If SuSE dropped support for their distribution folks would have to move away from their proprietary YaST2 installer. Red Hat gave their tools away.
The RIAA is slimy enough in so many areas that it is hard not to paint all of their actions with the same brush. If the girl had shared up thousands of digitized textbooks the publishing industry would be forced to do precisely the same thing.
Just because the RIAA is slimy doesn't give you the right to steal from them.
If Fedora moves too quickly, and you can't afford Red Hat's support then you need to join up with the folks that are banding together to support older Red Hat distributions (Szulik mentioned this).
Or you could just use Debian. Most folks ridicule Debian Stable for being too stable, but it sounds like just what the doctor ordered in your case.
I am of the opinion that the ISP should volunteer this information. If my neighbors saw someone running out of my house with a television set they wouldn't hide the details of the crime from me later. A crime was committed and the only reason that the ISPs aren't handing over the evidence is that they know that a large percentage of their users bought broadband so that they could download music faster. They have a vested interest in hiding these crimes.
In short, it's in their best interest to encourage the violation of the music industry's copyrights. They should have to turn over that information. I do agree that if the ISP is going to be forced to turn over this information, there should be a judge involved (on general principles), but I don't necessarily agree that people have the right to perfect anonymity on the Internet.
The fact of the matter is that so far their haven't exactly been any cases of the RIAA abusing this power. Basically the folks that they have targetted have been guilty and their only defense has been that "everyone does it." In my opinion, that's not much of a defense, especially when you consider that they generally understood that what they were doing was illegal, they just didn't have any idea how illegal.
First of all thank you very much for your very reasonable response.
I agree that charging the kid millions of dollars in fines is not reasonable. However, I don't think that charging her $3,500 is unreasonable. I think that's quite a deal. That's the cheapest "Get Out Of Jail Free" card I have ever heard of.
The problem is how do you craft a law that allows companies to protect their copyrighted material but doesn't allow you to prosecute people who share that material illegally with the entire world. You can't. This girl took over a thousand copyrighted files and shared them up to the entire world. In fact, she was caught distributing these files to hundreds of other people. Are you going to make a special set of rules that says that you can only be prosecuted for copyright infringement if you are a middle-aged, Italian-American named Guido, and that cute little girls can violate copyrights whenever they want?
I honestly am not sure what your argument is. If a corporation wants to build an illegal fence on their own private property (I have never heard of such a thing, but I will humor you), then it would be the city's (or the county's) job to prosecute their illegal land use. The government has more than enough resources for this sort of thing. And if the politicians decide to change the laws so that the fence is legal, that's fine too. If you don't like the new rules, make sure to vote in the next election.
I honestly don't see how your argument applies.
Listen, I personally agree that copyright lengths have gotten out of hand. It's criminal that nothing new is going to entre the public domain in my lifetime. However, the girl in quesiton almost certainly wasn't sharing music from the 1950's. She was sharing music that would have been protected even under the shortest of copyright spans. Unless you are one of those folks that believes we should toss out copyrights altogether, then you have to admit that what the girl did was illegal.
In fact, what she did is a felony offense.
I am not trying to stick up for the RIAA for all of the other crappy things that they do and have done. I hate the RIAA so much that I have changed the music that I listen to. I just don't see how it is that you can justify away the girl's crime.
Name one case where a person was prosecuted by the RIAA for sharing tapes or CDs with their personal friends.
Good luck on your search, because you won't find anything.
I never said that the RIAA publicly condoned sharing CDs or tapes, but they certainly haven't taken anyone to court over it. There are two reasons for this.
1) It's a bit of an iffy case legally, and if they lost then it would become legal to share these home-made CDs and tapes with your friends. The RIAA is more than happy to leave this a legal gray area.
2) The RIAA knows that casual music sharing is like free advertisement. As long as the copyright violations don't become widespread the casual sharing works to their advantage.
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Is is just me or does anyone else think that it is funny that this guy honestly thought that the government of New Zealand wouldn't have a problem with him building a cruise missile?
No wonder the government folks said that he could export his creation to Iran, my guess is that they thought he was completely crazy. They probably called the folks with the jackets that zip up in the back and the oversized butterfly nets the second the guy walked out of the office. It's never a good idea to rile up crazy people.
From what I have read they should have just called her "69," as that will explain what she spends most of her time doing.
I don't mind the folks at BSG ripping off story elements. In fact, I would encourage them to rip off story elements. Just please make sure that you rip off good story elements.
The thing that made BSG cool was the mythical backstory, and the whole ragtag alliance of humans against the machine thing. Let's face it, good versus evil plays well. Mix in some girls in lycra suits and some space battles and you have an interesting show. You don't even need good actors or clever special effects if you have the right story (think of how bad Mark Hamill was in "Star Wars: A New Hope").
However, without the backstory all you have is soft-core porn in space. Not my cup o' tea.
The work that freedesktop.org is working on is on the tip of the iceberg. I am talking about getting DCOP and Bonobo to interoperate (or DCOP and DBUS as the case may be). Mix in Mozilla's custom components and StarOffice's components and you have a lot of work that needs to get done before the Linux gets where it needs to be.
The fact of the matter is that there is going to be quite a bit of consolidation as the desktop folks get interoperation truly worked out, and with the Gnome folks holding all of the access to corporate dinero it will be the KDE folks that end up migrating to Gnome-like tools.
Not to mention the fact that KDE-specific applications will very likely find themselves without corporate backing. Especially KDE-specific tools where the Gnome equivalent is further along. For example, Novell is not likely to want to spend money on both Evolution and Aethera.
Pretending that the Novell buyout of SuSE isn't going to shake things up in KDE-land is just wishful thinking.
The question becomes a little murkier when you realize that a sizable percentage of the KDE hackers will soon work for Novell, and that Nat Friedman is heading up Novell's desktop Linux division.
Don't get me wrong, I don't expect KDE to disappear overnight, but the Gnome crowd now has the majority of the professional KDE hackers by their paycheck. At the very least you can expect their to be a lot more talk in the KDE world about "integration" (and it will be the Gnome crowd calling the shots).
Everyone that has ever commented on the state of the Linux desktop has begged for consolidation. And now with Novell/SuSE, RedHat, Sun, HP, and IBM all backing Gnome it would appear that said consolidation is finally going to happen.
Of course, in real life there isn't an arbitrary 5 man limit to your team. The championship Celtics were good, but they couldn't take on the best of the NBA greats all at the same time. Heck, they couldn't even compete with high school players if the opposing team had 500 guys on the court at the same time.
Microsoft has gotten to the point where they are competing with a huge percentage of their Windows developers. What's worse, if you come up with software that works well on Windows and starts making you a profit there is a good chance that Microsoft will copy your functionality and drive you out of business. This is why the commercial software industry is shifting towards Linux, that's the only way that they could possibly compete in the long run.
No matter how many sharp people Microsoft has working for them, if they turn this into a Microsoft-against-the-world battle they will lose.
Linux will win the desktop war in the same way that it is winning the server war. The key is to offer a product that is "good enough" at a lower price. Linux doesn't have to be better than Windows, it simply has to be "good enough."
This is why government conversions are such a big deal. When the government asks you for a document in a certain format, you don't send them a different format, even if the different format is the "standard."
Once OpenOffice/StarOffice gets entrenched in government Microsoft is going to have a very hard time maintaining their grip over all of the rest of us. After all, all of us that have dealings with the government are going to need a copy of OpenOffice or StarOffice in order to share documents with the government. The fact that OpenOffice is available free of charge (it even comes with source code) will further accelerate the change.
Once the need for compatibility with MS Office is gone OpenOffice/StarOffice is an easy choice. OpenOffice is actually a pretty darn amazing piece of work. Unfortunately, most reviews only touch on its ability to share documents with MS Office users.
Exactly, it's the process that makes Debian work so well. It's thousands of packages and thousands of end users that are willing to test how those packages work together and report bugs.
However, this doesn't necessarily mean that Fedora doesn't pose a threat to Debian. A community-based distribution with a powerful packaging manager (which implies automatic dependency checking), and the help of full-time paid engineers at Red Hat could be very cool.
That's the rub. Red Hat doesn't want to be in the per-incident support business, and who can blame them. If they are going to go through the expense of hiring expensive Linux cluster engineers they want a guaranteed cash flow. You've seen the Maytag repairman commercials. Red Hat doesn't want to have to have engineers on the payroll whose primary job is to sit around and hope someone's Linux cluster breaks.
As for Red Hat's licensing terms, well, they don't have any licensing terms. Unlike commercial software vendors Red Hat doesn't charge you for the privilege of using the software. Instead they charge for service contracts.
That leaves Red Hat cluster customers with three choices. They can either pony up for Red Hat service contracts, they can support the Linux cluster themselves, or they can find another vendor that is willing to provide support at a price they can afford. That's a lot better deal than commercial vendors offer.
The fact of the matter is that Red Hat's subscription service is doing very well, and they are significantly above their projected targets. There are lots of other folks that are falling all over themselves to pay Red Hat's service fees. That makes it a seller's market. Red Hat has a limited resource (engineer time) and others are willing to pay Red Hat's price for their time.
The problem is that Wal-Mart knows the power of the "absolute" low price. No matter how large Wal-Mart's buying power may be it's still not bigger than Dell's or HP's (when it comes to computers). In fact, the only way to trump Dell's price is to offer a machine without an OS. It seems to be working too. Wal-Mart.com's OS-less and Linux PCs are their biggest sellers. Besides, even if the Microsoft tax were as low as $20, that's 10% of the retail price of Wal-Mart.com's low-end machines. Wal-Mart didn't get where they are today by overlooking a 10% markup.
The fact of the matter is that Microsoft's pricetag is a significant part of the price in a low-end machine. Not to mention the fact that operating systems are clearly a business where there are some room for "increased efficiencies." Heck, Microsoft's profit margin for their OS division is over 80%.
My guess is that Wal-Mart smells blood in the water.
Actually, if the RIAA said that I distributed their files and I didn't then I could countersue and get a fat pile of money from them. That's part of the reason why the RIAA is only targetting folks that they have the goods on.
When I say that the girl is guilty, I am not saying that she is guilty in the eyes of the law. Thanks the the RIAA offering her immunity she won't face a judge. That does not mean that she didn't, in fact, break the law.
Oops. I had been very careful to use the words "violate their copyrights" instead of steal, because I knew that if I made the mistake of using the word steal that I would get a response like the one that posted.
Fact is, you are 100% right. Violating a copyright is not theft. However, that still doesn't make violating the RIAA's copyrights legal or ethical.
I don't agree with the RIAA's business methods, but their slimy (but legal) business methods don't give us the right to violate their copyrights. That's the gist of my argument.
I agree, to an extent, with your argument that the damages claimed by the RIAA are ridiculous. However, these damages are based on current laws, and I don't really see the point in rewriting those laws since it is generally far easier to simply avoid distributing someone else's copyrighted material. If the RIAA did try and accuse me of distributing their copyrighted material then I could easily countersue. Such a case could very likely turn out to my advantage. The RIAA has a lot of money to lose, and punishments for corporations that harass individuals have often gotten to be very large.
The trick, once again, is to simply not distribute their copyrighted material.
You are certainly correct that folks with deep pockets and questionable ethics can cause a lot of problems, but that's nothing new. The US legal system leaves lots of opportunity for people to screw up your life.
Thanks for the discussion.
Fighting is only the right thing to do when you are not guilty. My father is a public defendant, and the biggest part of his job is plea bargaining. Basically the idea is to get the best possible deal in exchange for not tying up the court system.
If the girl were protesting her innocence I would agree with you that the RIAA was being heavy handed, but that's simply not the case. The girl isn't saying that she didn't share the files.
I must admit that I do hope that the RIAA's tactics of prosecuting filesharers is effective. One way or another people are going to make the Internet safe for copyrighted works. I would just as soon that they didn't wreck it with heavy DRM in the process. I can live with the prosecution of illegal filesharing. That's a far better fate than a world of mandatory DRM.
It's not about protecting the RIAA. I hate the RIAA. I changed my music purchasing habits so that I would no longer support the RIAA. I simply believe that it is important to stick up for the rights of everyone, even people that I detest. It's a matter of principle. Just because I don't like an organization doesn't mean that I can ignore their rights.
It's a matter of principle.
By the way, thanks for cutting back on the insults. Your arguments are far stronger without the ad hominem attacks.
I think that you will find, as you become involved in politics, that it is far less about money than you think. If money were the only ingredient in politics then all sorts of groups that enjoy quite a bit of political clout would find themselves powerless. The Environmental movement is a good example, the NRAA is one from the other end of the spectrum. Neither one of these groups raises that much money, but both control the votes of large groups of people.
When push comes to shove politics is all about motivating large masses of people. Most of the people that rail of the US's political system either haven't ever seen any alternatives, or have very unpopular views.
I am not asking the ISPs to monitor. In fact, I don't want the ISPs to monitor. I simply think that they should volunteer the needed information once the RIAA has evidence against a user. Heck, if the RIAA was trying to catch a spammer the ISP would fall all over themselves turning over the IP address information. ISPs aren't really trying to protect their users anonymity, they are simply trying to protect their own business.
As for the "everyone is doing it" argument. That's something my children say when two or three of their friends are doing something that they are not allowed to do. It's a standard adolescent exaggeration. That's why I put the phrase in quotation marks. If everyone were, in fact, guilty of filesharing MP3s I would agree with you that the law should be changed. However, that's not really the case. In fact, if you tried to pass a law making filesharing of copyrighted material legal my guess is that you would find that only a small but very vocal minority would actually welcome such a law.
Good luck finding a vendor that will support a 512 node cluster for $50 a node. Supporting a cluster is *not* the same as supporting just one box. painehope can wish all he wants, but that doesn't mean that some vendor is going to magically fulfill his wishes at a price that he is willing to pay.
Fortunately there are plenty of alternatives in the Linux world for people who can't afford support. Fedora is likely to be one such alternative, Debian is my personal favorite, and other swear by Mandrake.
At the end of the day Red Hat is entitled to set their own prices, if you don't like their prices, then there are plenty of other choices. That's part of the beauty of Linux.
I actually see Fedora as a return to Red Hat's roots. A community lead distribution with plenty of paid help from the Red Hat staff should make for a pretty interesting beast. Debian, for example, is great, I love it, but it could use some of the fancy dan stuff that Red Hat contributes. I think that there is at least some chance that Fedora could become a better Debian than Debian.
Either way it is hard to fault how Red Hat has handled this. They aren't a charity, but they do make all of the source code that they write available. I see nothing wrong with trying to make a buck selling service and support. The folks that used Red Hat before, but who can't afford the new service agreements, still have plenty of options. If SuSE dropped support for their distribution folks would have to move away from their proprietary YaST2 installer. Red Hat gave their tools away.
The RIAA is slimy enough in so many areas that it is hard not to paint all of their actions with the same brush. If the girl had shared up thousands of digitized textbooks the publishing industry would be forced to do precisely the same thing.
Just because the RIAA is slimy doesn't give you the right to steal from them.
If Fedora moves too quickly, and you can't afford Red Hat's support then you need to join up with the folks that are banding together to support older Red Hat distributions (Szulik mentioned this).
Or you could just use Debian. Most folks ridicule Debian Stable for being too stable, but it sounds like just what the doctor ordered in your case.
And a compliment from an Anonymous Coward. Heck, I better hurry home, it's likely to start raining pigs any moment :).
I am of the opinion that the ISP should volunteer this information. If my neighbors saw someone running out of my house with a television set they wouldn't hide the details of the crime from me later. A crime was committed and the only reason that the ISPs aren't handing over the evidence is that they know that a large percentage of their users bought broadband so that they could download music faster. They have a vested interest in hiding these crimes.
In short, it's in their best interest to encourage the violation of the music industry's copyrights. They should have to turn over that information. I do agree that if the ISP is going to be forced to turn over this information, there should be a judge involved (on general principles), but I don't necessarily agree that people have the right to perfect anonymity on the Internet.
The fact of the matter is that so far their haven't exactly been any cases of the RIAA abusing this power. Basically the folks that they have targetted have been guilty and their only defense has been that "everyone does it." In my opinion, that's not much of a defense, especially when you consider that they generally understood that what they were doing was illegal, they just didn't have any idea how illegal.
First of all thank you very much for your very reasonable response.
I agree that charging the kid millions of dollars in fines is not reasonable. However, I don't think that charging her $3,500 is unreasonable. I think that's quite a deal. That's the cheapest "Get Out Of Jail Free" card I have ever heard of.
The problem is how do you craft a law that allows companies to protect their copyrighted material but doesn't allow you to prosecute people who share that material illegally with the entire world. You can't. This girl took over a thousand copyrighted files and shared them up to the entire world. In fact, she was caught distributing these files to hundreds of other people. Are you going to make a special set of rules that says that you can only be prosecuted for copyright infringement if you are a middle-aged, Italian-American named Guido, and that cute little girls can violate copyrights whenever they want?
I honestly am not sure what your argument is. If a corporation wants to build an illegal fence on their own private property (I have never heard of such a thing, but I will humor you), then it would be the city's (or the county's) job to prosecute their illegal land use. The government has more than enough resources for this sort of thing. And if the politicians decide to change the laws so that the fence is legal, that's fine too. If you don't like the new rules, make sure to vote in the next election.
I honestly don't see how your argument applies.
Listen, I personally agree that copyright lengths have gotten out of hand. It's criminal that nothing new is going to entre the public domain in my lifetime. However, the girl in quesiton almost certainly wasn't sharing music from the 1950's. She was sharing music that would have been protected even under the shortest of copyright spans. Unless you are one of those folks that believes we should toss out copyrights altogether, then you have to admit that what the girl did was illegal.
In fact, what she did is a felony offense.
I am not trying to stick up for the RIAA for all of the other crappy things that they do and have done. I hate the RIAA so much that I have changed the music that I listen to. I just don't see how it is that you can justify away the girl's crime.
Name one case where a person was prosecuted by the RIAA for sharing tapes or CDs with their personal friends.
Good luck on your search, because you won't find anything.
I never said that the RIAA publicly condoned sharing CDs or tapes, but they certainly haven't taken anyone to court over it. There are two reasons for this.
1) It's a bit of an iffy case legally, and if they lost then it would become legal to share these home-made CDs and tapes with your friends. The RIAA is more than happy to leave this a legal gray area.
2) The RIAA knows that casual music sharing is like free advertisement. As long as the copyright violations don't become widespread the casual sharing works to their advantage.