If you read the book, you'll see the fact-based analysis showing that the USSR was in serious trouble going into the 80's.
Of course it was — just as Reagan was taking the office (in 1981). USSR's attempts to keep up the arms-race, including SDI — duly decried by the Soviet newspapers daily — helped kill it, instead of allowing it to survive (again) on higher oil prices and slave labor.
Millions of people of the former USSR, myself included, have a lot to thank Ronald Reagan for. The fact, that various Commies (and Commie-sympathizers) still hate him, only adds to the guy's credits.
Internet "radio" stations were enticing listeners with content (music, largely), which the content's owners did not license for such use.
Slashdot, being what it is, is always happy to "stick it" to the owners of anything worth stealing, so there is a lot of sympathy towards these businesses.
Watch this thread deteriorate into the "piracy is not exactly stealing, therefore there is nothing wrong with it" obfuscation and muddying.
What exactly gave you the impression that the POV of someone who is paid is less valid than the POV of someone who isn't?
The payee's POV is likely to, at least, consider the POV of the payer. As simple as that. For example, whenever various studies are discussed on this and other forums, the source of funding is often mentioned as a significant source of bias.
Being paid does not completely destroy one's credibility, of course. But it does diminish it, even though a number of other factors (such as the desire to keep credibility, and the good old-fashioned honesty) usually compensate.
Yeah, they will probably totally buy into and disseminate propaganda such as "Global Warming" and other such nonsense that clearly only exists to further the German government's grip on power.
In other words, in your POV, Germany's POV makes sense. True or not, that is irrelevant.
What is discussed here, is that Germany has found a way to "pay the piper" — to further its POV. Perhaps less sloppily, but not entirely unlike the other astro-turfers. Again, whether that is a good or a bad POV is not, actually, relevant.
In fact, you've done even worse than that by providing evidence that destroys your argument.
I would never knowingly suppress evidence against my argument, but this particular part (existence of ECHELON) supports it. The proposition was, that Bush is responsible for the French government being concerned, that US may spy on them. My counter-argument was, that no, they had perfect reasons for these concerns for decades, and that Bush is not to blame for them. That they allowed Blackberries to creep into government use at all, is a failure of France's previous administration, I guess.
Then why has it been just recently that the relationship between France and the US has gotten so bad?
Because we attacked Iraq — against France's objections. Duh! The relationship is quickly improving, however — France has just elected a rather pro-American President, whom his opponents even label "neo-conservative"... Being French he is suspicious of Anglo-Saxon's designs, but his election is evidence of significant improvement of relationship — fear-mongering Leftists were trounced.
is there anything that has happened over the last six years that Bush *can* be held responsible for?
Yes — gross mismanagement of the post-war Iraq. I will not debate this point further here — I satisfied your curiosity, but it is off-topic.
Ok, so the only bad thing to have happened in recent years, for which BushCo is not at least partially responsible in your opinion, is the disappearance of a lake in Andes. Thanks!:-)
But this is about a foreign nation worried that the US isn't trustworthy.
Read up on Echelon... Hardly a Bush-time invention, but one for exactly the kind of espionage, that the French are concerned about.
A nation who, until fairly recently, we were best buds with ( politically speaking ).
Read up on the first President of the France's current republic, and his nationalist (often anti-American) stand. Whether the stand is justified or not, it the philosophy strongly influenced French government since then.
Personally, I don't understand how/why these devices can be used by anyone, really, who cares for the privacy/secrets. The connection to your mail-server is not secured at all.
Even if device->RIM connection is secure (which is not certain, for they are using a proprietary protocol, AFAIK), you have to trust your privacy to RIM, a Canadian company foreign to most of its users.
Sure, they have a good incentive to keep your privacy, but it would be better still to just use an end-to-end secure connection directly to your servers (via IMAPS, for example). Devices capable of that are becoming available, and the wireless networks grow as well... RIM exploded in prominence because it did not use Internet Protocol and was able to deliver relatively light and power-efficient devices to do the job.
But technology is quickly eliminating that advantage — and the French may help create a better alternative, for a change.
The point, which you have missed, is not about copying and whether it is right or wrong. The point is - how does Canada benefit from a law designed to protect American business interests?
That's irrelevant — you are changing the subject, teacher of the people.
If A is illegal, but people continue to engage in A, than either the anti-A laws/procedures ought to become stricter, or it should stop being illegal.
Which of the two options to take is the question, and the answer depends, primarily, on whether A is wrong — if it is (that is, it became illegal for a good reason), then the laws ought to be become stricter and/or the procedures wider-reaching.
This logic is equally true, whether A is murder, marijuana smoking, speeding, or, indeed, copying/sharing somebody else's works.
Just trying to set the debate straight here. If it is wrong, and if the current countermeasures aren't sufficiently deterrent, than stricter measures must be introduced.
Is it wrong to copy somebody else's work despite the owner's objections? Stick to this point...
Too bad. NASA joins the sorry list of software authors (like ffmpeg), who provide cool stuff, but can't be bothered to cut releases. One has to setup and configure their YaM-Lite piece of software (a Perl-wrapper around CVS), and then use that to get their various software modules.
Yes, you can ask for a slice of the code as of a certain date, but you need to know, when it was stable. You could also, presumably, ask for a certain code branch, but that is still a moving target...
Better than no code at all, of course... But extra pain to port it.
Because writing a check and mailing it to the recipient just is not the way that money transfers are done in the 21st century, and it's obviously very clumsy.
There are other ways of sending payments — including by phone and by Internet.
In the rest of the modern world it stopped to be the way in maybe the 80s.
So, in addition to all these other methods, America's system still supports check-writing. Nothing wrong with having additional options, in my opinion.
And if there is a particular method, that's not in use in the States (like by using your GSM-phone), the ability to use checks is not to blame for that...
Ain't that sweet... Thank you, darling, for losing whatever point you tried to make. Your pretense at being a lawyer (or knowing, what they think) was quite pathetic too, but calling me "an idiot" really did it...
Manage your expenses wisely, and you'll never need a loan or a mortgage.
Right. You can live 15 years in a cheapo rented appartment saving money for a decent place, instead of getting a decent place right away and paying it off in 30 years.
Funny that you should talk about 3rd world countries when your banking system (WTF, you actually still use checks?) is the most ancient in the first world.
Yes, and our Democracy is also "the most ancient" in the world (not just "first world"). So what?
Using hand-written checks is still possible, yes. Why is that wrong?
Well, since the RIAA considers a single extra copy for personal use "distribution" I would say that assuming distribution to cover only copies sent outside the company to be an intrepretation. I'm not saying you are wrong. I'm saying that the legal department could validly disagree with you because of legal ambiguities.
And a homeless junkie under the bridge thinks, immigrants have ruined his life. So what? Would it make a legal department's opposition to hiring foreigners valid?
This dragging out RIAA as a sign of the end of the world is getting tiresome...
Because Apple is not a monopoly. A lot of normally legal things become illegal, when you gain over 90% of market share...
That said, I wonder, if Microsoft's fixing their own bugs is Ok... In particular, when the bug-fixing drives someone out of business... Their introduction of IE (which killed Netscape) was a feature-addition. Well, one's missing feature is another's bug...
Then I'd rather be a pirate. Like my grandpa said, better to die in your boots than on your knees. And no, he didn't forget the "to live" in the knee part. Because living is only a temporary state when you're on your knees
Hello? We are talking about music and movies here. Entertainment is not a matter of life or death... You, Americans, getting all worked up to utter big-sounding words like "liberty" and "death" over something as negligible as entertainment, are rather pathetic...
Then, on the other hand, your having nothing more serious to worry about is also quite reassuring. I love this country!
How do you know one of the many other *nix machines doesn't have a bespoke application that uses Foo SSH's headers?
The Solaris-using application is a standalone one, it does not converse with other servers (most of them — AIX). There are no "ssh headers" either and no custom program relies on libssh. And lastly, if this were their reason, they should've said so. But they did not — these two guys' perception was, that: a) OpenSSH is GPLed; b) GPL means "no commercial use".
Both a) and b) are purely false — no "ifs" nor "buts" about it. But that is still the perception...
They obviously have a problem though, as slolaris 10 SSH default has slipped under their radar and should be brought into line.
No, if it comes from Sun (a vendor), it is Ok. No problem...
I suppose copying the products to your companies subsidaries counts as copying.
Nope, downloading binaries and installing them on multiple machines is not copying — not even in a lawyer's mind. And GPL is not BSD...
It all comes from the headlines like "Such-and-such is pressured to do this-and-this because of their use of GPL software". Which, in a busy executive's mind, translates into "Free software — trouble"...
Well the financial industry has money so its their problem and not yours if they want to waste it.
It is my problem as a member of society — we are wasting efforts duplicating work, that has already been done. It may be Ok, if doers of that work did not want to share it (or wanted too much in exchange for the sharing). But when it is pure ignorance, it bugs me greatly...
It is also my problem, because I need to implement scripts on top of ssh, and I'd rather rely on the widely-used OpenSSH, than some obscure Foo SSH implementation, that need not even exist!
This is where companies like redhat might lose clients and companies like yours might move towards windows.
Neah, Linux is, actually, making it into this company. Companies like RedHat and Novell are riding the same misconception: "Free means trouble". They charge (a lot of) money, which gives these same ignorant executives a warm fuzzy feeling. Microsoft (and SCO) know this, and are trying to attack that comfort with FUD — by dropping grave warnings about "thousands of violated patents" (and by outright lawsuits).
Ubuntu can be downloaded free, so you can only have it on a personal-use computer, get it?
(Then, again, Dell may be trying to address Microsoft's — privately expressed, but still weighty — concern, that buyers of Ubuntu computers will be installing pirated Windows en-masse...)
Slashdot Mirror
Of course it was — just as Reagan was taking the office (in 1981). USSR's attempts to keep up the arms-race, including SDI — duly decried by the Soviet newspapers daily — helped kill it, instead of allowing it to survive (again) on higher oil prices and slave labor.
Millions of people of the former USSR, myself included, have a lot to thank Ronald Reagan for. The fact, that various Commies (and Commie-sympathizers) still hate him, only adds to the guy's credits.
Yes, as in many games, once you get enough credits, you get another "life".
Internet "radio" stations were enticing listeners with content (music, largely), which the content's owners did not license for such use.
Slashdot, being what it is, is always happy to "stick it" to the owners of anything worth stealing, so there is a lot of sympathy towards these businesses.
Watch this thread deteriorate into the "piracy is not exactly stealing, therefore there is nothing wrong with it" obfuscation and muddying.
The payee's POV is likely to, at least, consider the POV of the payer. As simple as that. For example, whenever various studies are discussed on this and other forums, the source of funding is often mentioned as a significant source of bias.
Being paid does not completely destroy one's credibility, of course. But it does diminish it, even though a number of other factors (such as the desire to keep credibility, and the good old-fashioned honesty) usually compensate.
In other words, in your POV, Germany's POV makes sense. True or not, that is irrelevant.
What is discussed here, is that Germany has found a way to "pay the piper" — to further its POV. Perhaps less sloppily, but not entirely unlike the other astro-turfers. Again, whether that is a good or a bad POV is not, actually, relevant.
NPOV is an unreachable ideal. These German-trained contributor's POV will coincide with Germany's and will, no doubt, leach into their contributions.
I would never knowingly suppress evidence against my argument, but this particular part (existence of ECHELON) supports it. The proposition was, that Bush is responsible for the French government being concerned, that US may spy on them. My counter-argument was, that no, they had perfect reasons for these concerns for decades, and that Bush is not to blame for them. That they allowed Blackberries to creep into government use at all, is a failure of France's previous administration, I guess.
Because we attacked Iraq — against France's objections. Duh! The relationship is quickly improving, however — France has just elected a rather pro-American President, whom his opponents even label "neo-conservative"... Being French he is suspicious of Anglo-Saxon's designs, but his election is evidence of significant improvement of relationship — fear-mongering Leftists were trounced.
Yes — gross mismanagement of the post-war Iraq. I will not debate this point further here — I satisfied your curiosity, but it is off-topic.
That's evidence, that this particular law is not bullshit — in the majority's opinion, anyway...
Ok, so the only bad thing to have happened in recent years, for which BushCo is not at least partially responsible in your opinion, is the disappearance of a lake in Andes. Thanks! :-)
Read up on Echelon... Hardly a Bush-time invention, but one for exactly the kind of espionage, that the French are concerned about.
Read up on the first President of the France's current republic, and his nationalist (often anti-American) stand. Whether the stand is justified or not, it the philosophy strongly influenced French government since then.
Is there anything that's wrong with today's world, for which BushCo is not at least partly responsible? In your opinion?..
Thank you.
Personally, I don't understand how/why these devices can be used by anyone, really, who cares for the privacy/secrets. The connection to your mail-server is not secured at all.
Even if device->RIM connection is secure (which is not certain, for they are using a proprietary protocol, AFAIK), you have to trust your privacy to RIM, a Canadian company foreign to most of its users.
Sure, they have a good incentive to keep your privacy, but it would be better still to just use an end-to-end secure connection directly to your servers (via IMAPS, for example). Devices capable of that are becoming available, and the wireless networks grow as well... RIM exploded in prominence because it did not use Internet Protocol and was able to deliver relatively light and power-efficient devices to do the job.
But technology is quickly eliminating that advantage — and the French may help create a better alternative, for a change.
That's irrelevant — you are changing the subject, teacher of the people.
If A is illegal, but people continue to engage in A, than either the anti-A laws/procedures ought to become stricter, or it should stop being illegal.
Which of the two options to take is the question, and the answer depends, primarily, on whether A is wrong — if it is (that is, it became illegal for a good reason), then the laws ought to be become stricter and/or the procedures wider-reaching.
This logic is equally true, whether A is murder, marijuana smoking, speeding, or, indeed, copying/sharing somebody else's works.
Just trying to set the debate straight here. If it is wrong, and if the current countermeasures aren't sufficiently deterrent, than stricter measures must be introduced.
Is it wrong to copy somebody else's work despite the owner's objections? Stick to this point...
Too bad. NASA joins the sorry list of software authors (like ffmpeg), who provide cool stuff, but can't be bothered to cut releases. One has to setup and configure their YaM-Lite piece of software (a Perl-wrapper around CVS), and then use that to get their various software modules.
Yes, you can ask for a slice of the code as of a certain date, but you need to know, when it was stable. You could also, presumably, ask for a certain code branch, but that is still a moving target...
Better than no code at all, of course... But extra pain to port it.
NASA uses tcsh. Eat that, you bash loosahs...
There are other ways of sending payments — including by phone and by Internet.
So, in addition to all these other methods, America's system still supports check-writing. Nothing wrong with having additional options, in my opinion.
And if there is a particular method, that's not in use in the States (like by using your GSM-phone), the ability to use checks is not to blame for that...
Ain't that sweet... Thank you, darling, for losing whatever point you tried to make. Your pretense at being a lawyer (or knowing, what they think) was quite pathetic too, but calling me "an idiot" really did it...
Right. You can live 15 years in a cheapo rented appartment saving money for a decent place, instead of getting a decent place right away and paying it off in 30 years.
Does not make sense to most people, though...
Yes, and our Democracy is also "the most ancient" in the world (not just "first world"). So what?
Using hand-written checks is still possible, yes. Why is that wrong?
And a homeless junkie under the bridge thinks, immigrants have ruined his life. So what? Would it make a legal department's opposition to hiring foreigners valid?
This dragging out RIAA as a sign of the end of the world is getting tiresome...
Because Apple is not a monopoly. A lot of normally legal things become illegal, when you gain over 90% of market share...
That said, I wonder, if Microsoft's fixing their own bugs is Ok... In particular, when the bug-fixing drives someone out of business... Their introduction of IE (which killed Netscape) was a feature-addition. Well, one's missing feature is another's bug...
Hello? We are talking about music and movies here. Entertainment is not a matter of life or death... You, Americans, getting all worked up to utter big-sounding words like "liberty" and "death" over something as negligible as entertainment, are rather pathetic...
Then, on the other hand, your having nothing more serious to worry about is also quite reassuring. I love this country!
We may get our ability to legally backup and/or convert movies and music back...
The Solaris-using application is a standalone one, it does not converse with other servers (most of them — AIX). There are no "ssh headers" either and no custom program relies on libssh. And lastly, if this were their reason, they should've said so. But they did not — these two guys' perception was, that: a) OpenSSH is GPLed; b) GPL means "no commercial use".
Both a) and b) are purely false — no "ifs" nor "buts" about it. But that is still the perception...
No, if it comes from Sun (a vendor), it is Ok. No problem...
Nope, downloading binaries and installing them on multiple machines is not copying — not even in a lawyer's mind. And GPL is not BSD...
It all comes from the headlines like "Such-and-such is pressured to do this-and-this because of their use of GPL software". Which, in a busy executive's mind, translates into "Free software — trouble"...
It is my problem as a member of society — we are wasting efforts duplicating work, that has already been done. It may be Ok, if doers of that work did not want to share it (or wanted too much in exchange for the sharing). But when it is pure ignorance, it bugs me greatly...
It is also my problem, because I need to implement scripts on top of ssh, and I'd rather rely on the widely-used OpenSSH, than some obscure Foo SSH implementation, that need not even exist!
Neah, Linux is, actually, making it into this company. Companies like RedHat and Novell are riding the same misconception: "Free means trouble". They charge (a lot of) money, which gives these same ignorant executives a warm fuzzy feeling. Microsoft (and SCO) know this, and are trying to attack that comfort with FUD — by dropping grave warnings about "thousands of violated patents" (and by outright lawsuits).
Ubuntu can be downloaded free, so you can only have it on a personal-use computer, get it?
(Then, again, Dell may be trying to address Microsoft's — privately expressed, but still weighty — concern, that buyers of Ubuntu computers will be installing pirated Windows en-masse...)