My first hard drive was 270 Megs. When it was new, I thought I'd never fill it up. When I inevitably did fill it, I upgraded to a "huge" 3GB drive. I figured that would be more than enough to last me for a while. It was. Then I discovered mp3s. Right now, I've got a total of about 50GB of space, and spend half my time working out what data I no longer need in order to make space for what I'm doing.
Noe, 400GB seems vast. More than enough to be going on with, but I know this would fill up as well. So will the 4TB drive I'll eventually have. I wonder if we'll ever have "enough" space. I also wonder what I'll actually fill all this space with.
Perhaps, but copyright law is complex and full of contradictions. It may be possible to use the oft misquoted Fair Use exceptions. A copy for personal use that is not sold or distributed, and causes no financial loss to Nintendo may well fall under this area of the law even if Nintendo of America Inc. v. Computer & Entertainment Inc. Ot it may not.
The law is similar in the UK. As in New South Wales, an exception is if a knife is a tool used for one's occupation. This is quite useful, since if I'm stopped by the police, I can explain that I'm a mugger and therefore the knife is a tool of the trade.
I'd agree more or less, but would suggest finding someone with a little training to produce a good quality documentry. There have to be plenty of budding producers who would love to get some decent experience, and will have the training to know what makes a good documentry.
Well maybe not exactly. If you're talking about name resolution the client machine will use whatever nameservers it is configured to use, whether that be via dhcp or set manually.
Yep. Resolve was the wrong term. My bad. What was the term I'm after? Basically, the client should be connected to a local intranet where the other machine is every IP address.
Frankly those users have ignored all the obvious aspects of being infected (100% cable light flashing) and have probably consumed more bandwidth than an army of teenagers downloading MP3s. That cable *should* be cut and I stand by my comments about desiring cable access being denied to them UNTIL they remove their virus.
I think you're expecting a little too much technical competence from people. They don't even realise that their computer can be hijacked, and they certainly don't know what to expect from the mysterious flashing lights on their modem.
It should be possible to connect them to a router that resolves *.*.*.* to a server that contains only a website with information on why they have been disconnected, and how to remove the virus/trojan from their system. Most users use the web at some point. This would be the only page they could access.
Actually, a lot of deals have a negative net value. You sell the rights to your music for what amounts to a loan. They give you an advance, but that, and things like marketting, recording studio time, CD pressing costs, and breakages (calculated from the losses caused by records breaking) are deducted from the bands cut of the royalties. A lot of people will find themselves in debt to a record company after a fairly succesful album.
Knowledge is useful though. AI researchers have discovered this. It's a lot easier to make a machine appear smart if you give it a few concepts in the first place rather than make everything from first principles. It may seem like a cheat, but it turns out that most animals (including humans) do this. For example, parts of the brain deal with language and some gramatical concepts are understood before we know how to speak.
Re:They'll never get into the schools though, unti
on
KDE 3.2.1 Released
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· Score: 5, Funny
But how are they handling error messages? Are they doing a literal translation, or will it be more along the lines of "This application has shamed itself with a segmentation fault!"?
It's still illegal to rip your own CD's to MP3 format in the UK,
I think this is legitimate under the concept of "making copies of segments of a work for private study". I seem to recall that the appropriate government department said that this did include listening to music for pleasure.
Unfortunately, fair use... means whatever the copyright holder or pigopolists want it to mean.
Actually, it's what the courts want it to mean. However, the copyrigyt holder has no obligation to allow you to use it in any specific manner that may be "fair use".
I think there's a direct comparison with ripping MP3's for personal use to be drawn here. If it is fair use to do this in the US, why isn't it for DVD's?
It is legal to do it with DVDs. It's just not legal to break encryption to do it. Granted, this makes it technically illegal to copy most DVDs, but you are permitted to do it if you have a non-encrypted disc.
I say make a computer that boots fast, has 3 buttons. 1 Internet(www) 2 email 3 wordprocessor
and nothing else, and you must eb able to turn it of at once..
I've been pondering this. A TV metaphor for GUI design. I think one of the problems is that there are too many inputdevices on a PC (well, only 2, but the keyboard is overly complicated for most tasks). Different applications can be channels. Perhaps have some sort of record button to save, and replace a filesystem with "a library", which is essentially the same thing with a different name.
Oh, and the other thing to borrow from a TV - a 5 second boot time.
My mid 80's computer (a Commodore Amiga) had a very simple GUI. I shoved in a disk, and after about 30 seconds, I had a screen with precicely one obvious icon to prod with a mouse. No choice. No complexity.
Now, at this stage, we get to the complex bit. I had to learn to use the mouse to move the cursor (fairly intuitive really), and then double click the icon. This stage is less obvious, but it's about all I need to know. Once we get there, something has happened. A window has opened and it contains another button. Repeat the previous step, and you get the application.
Under Windows, things are a lot more complicated. You have the obvious "My computer" icon. Clearly you don't want the network, or the trashcan, so that's the obvious first button to press. It's also the wrong one. It comes up with a list of the internals of the machine. It turns out that I made a mistake. So, I press "start". Well, I guess it's a fairly obvious second choice, but I had to backtrack. What do I want now? Run, or programs? Run doesn't work too well. Let's try programs. Experimentation gets me there in the end, but it's not totaly intuitive, and mistakes are demoralising.
Program Manager and Windows 3.1 were a lot better in this respect. It was obvious which bit to click on there.
It's certainly faster, but a single mistake could result in you overwriting resolve.conf, or creating a new file called/etc/resvole.conf and being very confused about why your DNS is broken.
I see why it's seen as neccesary, but surely the cure is worse than the disease. Should you be blacklisted if the doctor was drinking, and botched a routine operation as a result? Using this blacklist, you will be.
The only way I can see to prevent this type of lawsuit is for every doctor to defend each and every case, no matter how much merit, as aggressively as possible, and to lobby for legal reforms that limit the payout.
Now we just need a judgement striking down "Thou shalt not speak badly of us," terms in EULAs, which have been used to intimidate publications into not running negative reviews.
I believe there have been cases where these clauses were struck down. Of course, if I read this groklaw article about the difference between a license and a contract correctly, an EULA can't actually prevent you from doing anything that isn't forbidden by law. If this is the case, I'm surprised nobody has tried to use this point as a defence.
These clauses tend not to be policed too heavily anyway. A lot of publishers can't afford to back down. Since they rely on their reputation, they have to fight for the right to print their honest opinion.
I don't think there is any dispute as to the nature of the agreement. The guy volunteered to host and maintain the site in exchange for free publicity. Then he decided to stop doing so.
I think that in itself raises a dispute. I've heard that there needs to be some form of payment from both sides in a contract. If I offer to give something away, then you cannot hold me to that. If I offer to sell something, and you give me the payment, then you can. So, there's a question as to whether the sherrif's office "paid" the guy to produce the website, by allowing him to use it for publicity.
But whatever the case, I think an arrest and criminal charge is totally disproportionate. To be charged as a criminal, I feel it should be pretty much indusputable that what the guy has done is clearly a criminal act.
The dictionary definition of extortion simply indicates how the term is used. Typically the courts will use a legal definition, which typically involves threats or undue pressure.
If I volunteer to do work for you for free, and then send you a bill for it, that is fraud and/or extortion.
It's certainly not extortion. It may be fraud. Depends on the nature of the bill, and the nature of the agreement. If there is a dispute abut the nature of the agreement, (abnd it appears that there is) then it is a civil matter. Not a criminal matter.
The first link (which goes to a somewhat unbiased newspaper) clearly says he asked for $300K.
Don't trust the media to get all the facts right. they tend to make small mistakes, and mishear things, and write what they think happened rather than what actually happened.
So, rather than simply transferring it over to the county and telling them to deal with it, he SHUTS IT DOWN and effectively HOLDS IT HOSTAGE? If Pat is *really* not looking for his investment back, he'd simply hand it over to anyone else and be done with it.
It depends. We're really not getting the whole story here. Did the sherrif offer to pay for future hosting, or ask for their domain back? Was he demanding that amount of money for handing it over? Is it really extortion? It's a bit of a stretch to assume that the sherrif office owns the rights to the domain name. Perhaps it does, but that's amatter for a civil court to determine.
HOW MUCH does this guy pay for bandwidth? Even at $2.50/gig, he'd have to be pushing terabytes per month.
He's charging for more than that. Still, it's a lot to pay even for a web administrator working full time on a single site. Maybe it was an initial estimate of the total he'd spent on the site.
I dunno. Yeah, I guess the guy's probably in the wrong. It's just this looks more like a contractual dispute rather than a criminal act. The crimes he's being charged with seem a little inappropriate. It's surely not extortion if he's holding refusing to provide a servie unless a fee is paid, or if he's refusing to turn over his own property to the police. Larceny by conversion seems like it's intended to deal with money laundering or something. Failure to provide a website is not obstruction of justice. The crime os use of a computer to commit a crime is only valid if there was another crime (what the hell is the point of this sort of law anyway? Why does using a computer to commit a crime make the crime so much more serious? But I digress).
The company isn't charging a per copy fee the way Microsoft and Adobe do. It's simply paying someone to produce some custom software for a fixed fee.
No software is free for the company writing it. This is my point. The programmers writing the software will always have a job because most software does not generate revenue by itself for each copy sold.
That's not the analogy. Come to think of it, tt wasn't an analogy in the first place.
The fact is, if you're going to justofy sharing on Kazaa as sharing between friends, you should also justify lending a complete stranger 20 as lending it to a friend. The poster was somply redefining terms to make it into the same level of dishonest argument.
I know a lot of people who create software. Out of all of them, I think I am the only one who works on software that is sold on a cost-per copy basis.
Most programmers write software used internally for highly specialised purposes, or a custom application targetted at a single customer. Most of these organisations make great use of free software, and many contribute their changes back to the community. Other people produce drivers - which are given away for free with hardware - and third party defence systems with a single customer willing to pay a lot of money.
Added to this, most people are not willing to pay enough for software to make it worth marketing. His example of the software he wrote is an exception. Very rarely does software have a perceived value of several hundred dollars. Even if it does, it is often cheaper and easie to write it yourself. If people are going to do that, then you might as well give them a headstart.
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My first hard drive was 270 Megs. When it was new, I thought I'd never fill it up. When I inevitably did fill it, I upgraded to a "huge" 3GB drive. I figured that would be more than enough to last me for a while. It was. Then I discovered mp3s. Right now, I've got a total of about 50GB of space, and spend half my time working out what data I no longer need in order to make space for what I'm doing.
Noe, 400GB seems vast. More than enough to be going on with, but I know this would fill up as well. So will the 4TB drive I'll eventually have. I wonder if we'll ever have "enough" space. I also wonder what I'll actually fill all this space with.
Perhaps, but copyright law is complex and full of contradictions. It may be possible to use the oft misquoted Fair Use exceptions. A copy for personal use that is not sold or distributed, and causes no financial loss to Nintendo may well fall under this area of the law even if Nintendo of America Inc. v. Computer & Entertainment Inc. Ot it may not.
The law is similar in the UK. As in New South Wales, an exception is if a knife is a tool used for one's occupation. This is quite useful, since if I'm stopped by the police, I can explain that I'm a mugger and therefore the knife is a tool of the trade.
I'd agree more or less, but would suggest finding someone with a little training to produce a good quality documentry. There have to be plenty of budding producers who would love to get some decent experience, and will have the training to know what makes a good documentry.
Well maybe not exactly. If you're talking about name resolution the client machine will use whatever nameservers it is configured to use, whether that be via dhcp or set manually.
Yep. Resolve was the wrong term. My bad. What was the term I'm after? Basically, the client should be connected to a local intranet where the other machine is every IP address.
Frankly those users have ignored all the obvious aspects of being infected (100% cable light flashing) and have probably consumed more bandwidth than an army of teenagers downloading MP3s. That cable *should* be cut and I stand by my comments about desiring cable access being denied to them UNTIL they remove their virus.
I think you're expecting a little too much technical competence from people. They don't even realise that their computer can be hijacked, and they certainly don't know what to expect from the mysterious flashing lights on their modem.
It should be possible to connect them to a router that resolves *.*.*.* to a server that contains only a website with information on why they have been disconnected, and how to remove the virus/trojan from their system. Most users use the web at some point. This would be the only page they could access.
What about Antarctica?
Actually, a lot of deals have a negative net value. You sell the rights to your music for what amounts to a loan. They give you an advance, but that, and things like marketting, recording studio time, CD pressing costs, and breakages (calculated from the losses caused by records breaking) are deducted from the bands cut of the royalties. A lot of people will find themselves in debt to a record company after a fairly succesful album.
Knowledge is useful though. AI researchers have discovered this. It's a lot easier to make a machine appear smart if you give it a few concepts in the first place rather than make everything from first principles. It may seem like a cheat, but it turns out that most animals (including humans) do this. For example, parts of the brain deal with language and some gramatical concepts are understood before we know how to speak.
But how are they handling error messages? Are they doing a literal translation, or will it be more along the lines of "This application has shamed itself with a segmentation fault!"?
Ummm..... Do RAM chips have zero volume or something?
It's still illegal to rip your own CD's to MP3 format in the UK,
... means whatever the copyright holder or pigopolists want it to mean.
I think this is legitimate under the concept of "making copies of segments of a work for private study". I seem to recall that the appropriate government department said that this did include listening to music for pleasure.
Unfortunately, fair use
Actually, it's what the courts want it to mean. However, the copyrigyt holder has no obligation to allow you to use it in any specific manner that may be "fair use".
I think there's a direct comparison with ripping MP3's for personal use to be drawn here. If it is fair use to do this in the US, why isn't it for DVD's?
It is legal to do it with DVDs. It's just not legal to break encryption to do it. Granted, this makes it technically illegal to copy most DVDs, but you are permitted to do it if you have a non-encrypted disc.
I say make a computer that boots fast, has 3 buttons. 1 Internet(www) 2 email 3 wordprocessor and nothing else, and you must eb able to turn it of at once..
I've been pondering this. A TV metaphor for GUI design. I think one of the problems is that there are too many inputdevices on a PC (well, only 2, but the keyboard is overly complicated for most tasks). Different applications can be channels. Perhaps have some sort of record button to save, and replace a filesystem with "a library", which is essentially the same thing with a different name.
Oh, and the other thing to borrow from a TV - a 5 second boot time.
My mid 80's computer (a Commodore Amiga) had a very simple GUI. I shoved in a disk, and after about 30 seconds, I had a screen with precicely one obvious icon to prod with a mouse. No choice. No complexity.
Now, at this stage, we get to the complex bit. I had to learn to use the mouse to move the cursor (fairly intuitive really), and then double click the icon. This stage is less obvious, but it's about all I need to know. Once we get there, something has happened. A window has opened and it contains another button. Repeat the previous step, and you get the application.
Under Windows, things are a lot more complicated. You have the obvious "My computer" icon. Clearly you don't want the network, or the trashcan, so that's the obvious first button to press. It's also the wrong one. It comes up with a list of the internals of the machine. It turns out that I made a mistake. So, I press "start". Well, I guess it's a fairly obvious second choice, but I had to backtrack. What do I want now? Run, or programs? Run doesn't work too well. Let's try programs. Experimentation gets me there in the end, but it's not totaly intuitive, and mistakes are demoralising.
Program Manager and Windows 3.1 were a lot better in this respect. It was obvious which bit to click on there.
It's certainly faster, but a single mistake could result in you overwriting resolve.conf, or creating a new file called /etc/resvole.conf and being very confused about why your DNS is broken.
I see why it's seen as neccesary, but surely the cure is worse than the disease. Should you be blacklisted if the doctor was drinking, and botched a routine operation as a result? Using this blacklist, you will be.
The only way I can see to prevent this type of lawsuit is for every doctor to defend each and every case, no matter how much merit, as aggressively as possible, and to lobby for legal reforms that limit the payout.
Now we just need a judgement striking down "Thou shalt not speak badly of us," terms in EULAs, which have been used to intimidate publications into not running negative reviews.
I believe there have been cases where these clauses were struck down. Of course, if I read this groklaw article about the difference between a license and a contract correctly, an EULA can't actually prevent you from doing anything that isn't forbidden by law. If this is the case, I'm surprised nobody has tried to use this point as a defence.
These clauses tend not to be policed too heavily anyway. A lot of publishers can't afford to back down. Since they rely on their reputation, they have to fight for the right to print their honest opinion.
I don't think there is any dispute as to the nature of the agreement. The guy volunteered to host and maintain the site in exchange for free publicity. Then he decided to stop doing so.
I think that in itself raises a dispute. I've heard that there needs to be some form of payment from both sides in a contract. If I offer to give something away, then you cannot hold me to that. If I offer to sell something, and you give me the payment, then you can. So, there's a question as to whether the sherrif's office "paid" the guy to produce the website, by allowing him to use it for publicity.
But whatever the case, I think an arrest and criminal charge is totally disproportionate. To be charged as a criminal, I feel it should be pretty much indusputable that what the guy has done is clearly a criminal act.
The dictionary definition of extortion simply indicates how the term is used. Typically the courts will use a legal definition, which typically involves threats or undue pressure.
If I volunteer to do work for you for free, and then send you a bill for it, that is fraud and/or extortion.
It's certainly not extortion. It may be fraud. Depends on the nature of the bill, and the nature of the agreement. If there is a dispute abut the nature of the agreement, (abnd it appears that there is) then it is a civil matter. Not a criminal matter.
The first link (which goes to a somewhat unbiased newspaper) clearly says he asked for $300K.
Don't trust the media to get all the facts right. they tend to make small mistakes, and mishear things, and write what they think happened rather than what actually happened.
So, rather than simply transferring it over to the county and telling them to deal with it, he SHUTS IT DOWN and effectively HOLDS IT HOSTAGE? If Pat is *really* not looking for his investment back, he'd simply hand it over to anyone else and be done with it.
It depends. We're really not getting the whole story here. Did the sherrif offer to pay for future hosting, or ask for their domain back? Was he demanding that amount of money for handing it over? Is it really extortion? It's a bit of a stretch to assume that the sherrif office owns the rights to the domain name. Perhaps it does, but that's amatter for a civil court to determine.
HOW MUCH does this guy pay for bandwidth? Even at $2.50/gig, he'd have to be pushing terabytes per month.
He's charging for more than that. Still, it's a lot to pay even for a web administrator working full time on a single site. Maybe it was an initial estimate of the total he'd spent on the site.
I dunno. Yeah, I guess the guy's probably in the wrong. It's just this looks more like a contractual dispute rather than a criminal act. The crimes he's being charged with seem a little inappropriate. It's surely not extortion if he's holding refusing to provide a servie unless a fee is paid, or if he's refusing to turn over his own property to the police. Larceny by conversion seems like it's intended to deal with money laundering or something. Failure to provide a website is not obstruction of justice. The crime os use of a computer to commit a crime is only valid if there was another crime (what the hell is the point of this sort of law anyway? Why does using a computer to commit a crime make the crime so much more serious? But I digress).
The company isn't charging a per copy fee the way Microsoft and Adobe do. It's simply paying someone to produce some custom software for a fixed fee.
No software is free for the company writing it. This is my point. The programmers writing the software will always have a job because most software does not generate revenue by itself for each copy sold.
And this is why they're so stringent with their protection. any leeway they give will be abused by people who will nitpick and redefine basic terms.
That's not the analogy. Come to think of it, tt wasn't an analogy in the first place.
The fact is, if you're going to justofy sharing on Kazaa as sharing between friends, you should also justify lending a complete stranger 20 as lending it to a friend. The poster was somply redefining terms to make it into the same level of dishonest argument.
I know a lot of people who create software. Out of all of them, I think I am the only one who works on software that is sold on a cost-per copy basis.
Most programmers write software used internally for highly specialised purposes, or a custom application targetted at a single customer. Most of these organisations make great use of free software, and many contribute their changes back to the community. Other people produce drivers - which are given away for free with hardware - and third party defence systems with a single customer willing to pay a lot of money.
Added to this, most people are not willing to pay enough for software to make it worth marketing. His example of the software he wrote is an exception. Very rarely does software have a perceived value of several hundred dollars. Even if it does, it is often cheaper and easie to write it yourself. If people are going to do that, then you might as well give them a headstart.