Excessive response, and automated systems to determine guilt. With a side issue that it appears that the same response occurs when people are doing perfectly legitimate things that happen to be covered by the wording of the usage agreement.
Going without network connection for a couple of hours should be deterrent enough. Even if applied a lot of times. As long as file sharing results in more downtime than uptime, it will work perfectly adequately as a deterrent. 5 days downtime is far too much. A punishment should make people feel they did the wronmg thing, not make them angry at the party carrying out the punishment. It simply breeds resentment.
The fact that it is automated means that even if you do use the system entirely for material that may be legitimately shared, you still receive the same punishment as iuf you are breaking the law. If it simply appears that you are doing so, you receive the same penalty.
Finally, whuy is it in the university's interest that people don't run Quake servers? These don't take a lot of bandwidth - Quake was designed to work on dialup! They decided to ban all servers
because some of them were being used to offere illegal services. How can a Quake server be used to do anything illegal? It can't. Even if it could, a human being should investigate and determine the nature of the server rather than leaving moral judgements to a machine.
But would they? It results in a slower bulkier harvester that is more inclined to crash. Since it can't easily determine whether the result of a script is an email address until it tries executing all javascript on the page. This will leave the harvester open to traps.
Of course you were criticised!
on
Mplayer Revisited
·
· Score: 4, Funny
I mean, imagine suggesting that a Linux user might not have a full and completye knowledge of the system, or that anyone should install Linux without first knowing absolutely everything about it.
Are you an idiot? The MPlayer programmers were born with this information (which does probably make them about 12, which kinda figures).
Rather than complaining you should be grateful and worshipful that they deigned to come down to this level, and allow us mere mortals access to their holy media player.
They will probably not bother to renew it when it expires. It all depends on whether someone else will get hold of it, and whether you can be bothered waiting until it expires.
Revenge
Your old job back
Back Pay
A message to the CEO that says "Don't fuck with me"
The chance to quit with honour (and pay)
Escape from the control of your embezzling CEO.
The knowledge that you had done you part for society.
To be honest, I'm kinda surprised I got a "funny" modifier.
Re:I remember it like it was yesterday...
on
How Were You Fired?
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· Score: 1
Yep. A similar thing happened to me. After a complaint from a colleague with a slightly unusual style which may be a little anal, but some people find more readable and less likely to cause errors, a PHB called me into his office, and decided that because his culture was mentioned by name it must be an insult.
Anyway, because I assumed he was opposed to a style that embedded the type in a variable name, I suggested instead that we postfix the operator, even though neither MFC or Java support this syntax.
He immediately turned into a caricature from a very bad comedy because, all foreigners are intrinsically funny with their funny languages that we know they just make up.
Be interesting to see what happens since I've commited a number of federal crimes and claimed that the company ordered me to do them.
An illegal contract is illegal. Any attempt to enforce it legally would be laughed out of court. There's no need to challenge it.
Anyone who made an employee sign such a contract would be a moron not to realise that he was giving his victim evidence of a crime!
Giving a negative reference is a bad idea. You can be sued for libel if you make false claims.
And who the hell asks for references from an employer from 7+ years ago anyway?
Jeez, if it had happened to me, I would have watined until the cash was in my account, then gone to the police with my backup floppy and the contract that I was forced to sign, and got the guy arrested.
A contract with illegal (i.e. criminal, rather than not backed up by law) clauses in it is not valid. An agreement not to disclose a criminal act could probably be used as evidence against him.
Harder than that. They've got to reach "space" twice. Using the same vessel. Although I believe the definition of space is a little subjective. It is high enough for NASA to consider them astronauts, but I believe it is not high enough for a satellite launch.
The right to speak does implicitely include the right to be heard. They seem to be stretching the right a little to think it includes the right to force it on people.
Exactly the same reasoning would give you the constitutional right to break into a newspaper publisher, and use their printing presses to publish your own newspaper.
This is a very important question. Since the First amendment was written, the world has changed. We really need to consider whether speech actually requires both the listener and the speaker. Purely on the grounds of semantics, it doesn't. There is freedom for the speaker only.
However, in the past it has never been considered a problem. You actually have to make a positive effort to buy and read a newspaper, or watch a broadcast. You don't get the same level of choice with telemarkating.
It's a political point that really needs to be cleared up.
Fair use is deliberately vague. Take for example the line "I think I'm in Love", which has to have been in quite a few crappy pop songs. This is not copyrighted. The importance to the original work is what's important.
That's one of the unique properties of the GPL. Unless ownership is otherwise assigned by the author ( such as to the FSF) each contributor retains full ownership rights to everything they contributed.
But it relies on copyright. If the work is not covered by copyright, the GPL need not apply. No idea what copyright and fair use says about contributing a trivial amount to produce a derived work though.
They are claiming someone took their code and put it into Linux, then GAVE it back to SCO including source code, SCO made modifications and then released it under GPL.
Yup. Their claim is that this makes it non-GPL
If I put your lawn furniture at the curb, and then you pile your household garbage on top of it and the trashman takes it away, you have given up your right to claim I threw away your property because you either knew or should have known your property was in jeopardy and acted to retrieve it or prosecute me BEFORE you added to the trashpile and BEFORE the garbage collectors took the pile away.
I may not have realised it was my furniture. I miht have assumed it was someone elses. Besides, it's not something large and easily identifiable like furniture we're talking about. Suppose instead, i throw your expensive watch away. You can hardly be expected to check.
If there really are massive amounts of infringing IP as SCO/Caldera claims, then they either KNEW or SHOULD HAVE KNOWN it was there BEFORE releasing it under the GPL. If they knew it was there when it was released, then WHO PUT IT THERE becomes irrelevant.
SCO's press releases and legal docs don't seem to agree on this point. Their press releases claim that roughly every line of code belongs to SCO. Their legal filing seems to limit this to a handful of pieces of code. SCO's position is that they didn't have any reason to know it was in there. They assumed that the information regarding Linux was 100% true, and it was all the work of hobbyists.
SCO's take is that they distributed Linux - a piece of software that they acquired in good faith - and distributed according to the terms. They then discovered that someone had pirated their code (just accept the use of the term "pirate" for now. We all know what I mean), thus meaning that everyone who had distributed it since then had committed copyright infringement.
Their code is not under GPL, because although they distributed it under the GPL - They didn't put it there. In fact, IBM did. After discovering this, they ceased distribution, but in order to remain compliant with licencing terms, continued to allow their customers to download the code as required by the GPL. Not allowing people who had received binaries access to the source would be breach of licence or copyright violation. It is just as likely to be a violation if the allowed downloads or disallowed downloads since the GPL requires that source is made available. It is also a breach of licence to include their code in the download, but SCO didn't breach the licence. Whoever put SCO's code in there did.
Hence SCO are abiding by their commitments under the GPL, at considerable cost to themselves. In much the same way, they believe that the people who have illegally acquired SCO's code should abide by SCO's licence requirements and pay for a licence. It may or may not be possible to abide by the GPL and pay SCO's fee, but this is not SCO's responsibility since they didn't put the code in Linux. They cannot be held responsible for the actions of a third party.
So, to summarise, their distribution is the minimal they believe they can manage to stay roughly within the GPL. They are also charging a licence fee for use of their code, which is not GPL since they didn't put it in the kernel. There are a couple of contradictions caused when the GPL is used on code unlawfully added to a project which makes it impossible to abide by, so therefore it is not valid for this situation.
The US doesn't want to sell the technology. They want to keep it to themselves since they can make more money selling shuttle flights than selling the technology, mush like MS can make more money selling copies of Windows than they ever could selling a comprehensive source code licence. The EU gets nothing out of that apart from putting their satellites and probes in space. Building your own means you get satellites into space, and something to sell
We tried that before. The US doesn't like sharing its technology. The result is that trhe EU would get none of the fringe benefits of developing spacecraft.
It was the least realistic show in history! I mean what was with the spaceship design? A Blue box? Rockets are meant to be streamlined. Something that shape wouldn't be able to get anywhere. And how is it that nobody noticed that the inside couldn't have possibly fitted inside the box. Clearly stuff inside the spaceship were filmed in a studio.
Worse that that though, the sense of history was daft. Sometimes he was in ancient Rome, other times he was on a different planet. How does that happen? The romans only had rudimentary space capability, that could barely manage a low earth orbit, let alone get to another planet.
Slashdot Mirror
Excessive response, and automated systems to determine guilt. With a side issue that it appears that the same response occurs when people are doing perfectly legitimate things that happen to be covered by the wording of the usage agreement.
Going without network connection for a couple of hours should be deterrent enough. Even if applied a lot of times. As long as file sharing results in more downtime than uptime, it will work perfectly adequately as a deterrent. 5 days downtime is far too much. A punishment should make people feel they did the wronmg thing, not make them angry at the party carrying out the punishment. It simply breeds resentment.
The fact that it is automated means that even if you do use the system entirely for material that may be legitimately shared, you still receive the same punishment as iuf you are breaking the law. If it simply appears that you are doing so, you receive the same penalty.
Finally, whuy is it in the university's interest that people don't run Quake servers? These don't take a lot of bandwidth - Quake was designed to work on dialup! They decided to ban all servers because some of them were being used to offere illegal services. How can a Quake server be used to do anything illegal? It can't. Even if it could, a human being should investigate and determine the nature of the server rather than leaving moral judgements to a machine.
But would they? It results in a slower bulkier harvester that is more inclined to crash. Since it can't easily determine whether the result of a script is an email address until it tries executing all javascript on the page. This will leave the harvester open to traps.
I mean, imagine suggesting that a Linux user might not have a full and completye knowledge of the system, or that anyone should install Linux without first knowing absolutely everything about it.
Are you an idiot? The MPlayer programmers were born with this information (which does probably make them about 12, which kinda figures).
Rather than complaining you should be grateful and worshipful that they deigned to come down to this level, and allow us mere mortals access to their holy media player.
Option 3 is just wait.
They will probably not bother to renew it when it expires. It all depends on whether someone else will get hold of it, and whether you can be bothered waiting until it expires.
You'd have got
Revenge
Your old job back
Back Pay
A message to the CEO that says "Don't fuck with me"
The chance to quit with honour (and pay)
Escape from the control of your embezzling CEO.
The knowledge that you had done you part for society.
To be honest, I'm kinda surprised I got a "funny" modifier.
Yep. A similar thing happened to me. After a complaint from a colleague with a slightly unusual style which may be a little anal, but some people find more readable and less likely to cause errors, a PHB called me into his office, and decided that because his culture was mentioned by name it must be an insult.
Anyway, because I assumed he was opposed to a style that embedded the type in a variable name, I suggested instead that we postfix the operator, even though neither MFC or Java support this syntax.
He immediately turned into a caricature from a very bad comedy because, all foreigners are intrinsically funny with their funny languages that we know they just make up.
Be interesting to see what happens since I've commited a number of federal crimes and claimed that the company ordered me to do them.
Of course he's lying.
An illegal contract is illegal. Any attempt to enforce it legally would be laughed out of court. There's no need to challenge it.
Anyone who made an employee sign such a contract would be a moron not to realise that he was giving his victim evidence of a crime!
Giving a negative reference is a bad idea. You can be sued for libel if you make false claims. And who the hell asks for references from an employer from 7+ years ago anyway?
Jeez, if it had happened to me, I would have watined until the cash was in my account, then gone to the police with my backup floppy and the contract that I was forced to sign, and got the guy arrested.
Your lawyer was incompetent.
A contract with illegal (i.e. criminal, rather than not backed up by law) clauses in it is not valid. An agreement not to disclose a criminal act could probably be used as evidence against him.
:)
Harder than that. They've got to reach "space" twice. Using the same vessel. Although I believe the definition of space is a little subjective. It is high enough for NASA to consider them astronauts, but I believe it is not high enough for a satellite launch.
But of course, Linux users are free to attend."
They wil later becharged a $699 admission fee when SCO decides that they were actually trespassing.
Orbiting solar collectors beaming the energy down by microwave.
Never played Sim City?
The right to speak does implicitely include the right to be heard. They seem to be stretching the right a little to think it includes the right to force it on people.
Exactly the same reasoning would give you the constitutional right to break into a newspaper publisher, and use their printing presses to publish your own newspaper.
This is a very important question. Since the First amendment was written, the world has changed. We really need to consider whether speech actually requires both the listener and the speaker. Purely on the grounds of semantics, it doesn't. There is freedom for the speaker only.
However, in the past it has never been considered a problem. You actually have to make a positive effort to buy and read a newspaper, or watch a broadcast. You don't get the same level of choice with telemarkating.
It's a political point that really needs to be cleared up.
The NYT has in the past been very supportive of freedom of the press in many respects, as should be expected from a major US newspaper.
Could we see the situation where the NYT is attacking the means used to prosecute someone who they had charged with a crime in the first place?
Fair use is deliberately vague. Take for example the line "I think I'm in Love", which has to have been in quite a few crappy pop songs. This is not copyrighted. The importance to the original work is what's important.
That's one of the unique properties of the GPL. Unless ownership is otherwise assigned by the author ( such as to the FSF) each contributor retains full ownership rights to everything they contributed.
But it relies on copyright. If the work is not covered by copyright, the GPL need not apply. No idea what copyright and fair use says about contributing a trivial amount to produce a derived work though.
Yup. Their claim is that this makes it non-GPL
If I put your lawn furniture at the curb, and then you pile your household garbage on top of it and the trashman takes it away, you have given up your right to claim I threw away your property because you either knew or should have known your property was in jeopardy and acted to retrieve it or prosecute me BEFORE you added to the trashpile and BEFORE the garbage collectors took the pile away.
I may not have realised it was my furniture. I miht have assumed it was someone elses. Besides, it's not something large and easily identifiable like furniture we're talking about. Suppose instead, i throw your expensive watch away. You can hardly be expected to check.
If there really are massive amounts of infringing IP as SCO/Caldera claims, then they either KNEW or SHOULD HAVE KNOWN it was there BEFORE releasing it under the GPL. If they knew it was there when it was released, then WHO PUT IT THERE becomes irrelevant.
SCO's press releases and legal docs don't seem to agree on this point. Their press releases claim that roughly every line of code belongs to SCO. Their legal filing seems to limit this to a handful of pieces of code. SCO's position is that they didn't have any reason to know it was in there. They assumed that the information regarding Linux was 100% true, and it was all the work of hobbyists. Not a fact, not proven.
In SCO's legal opinion.
You're assuming the situation is too simple.
SCO's take is that they distributed Linux - a piece of software that they acquired in good faith - and distributed according to the terms. They then discovered that someone had pirated their code (just accept the use of the term "pirate" for now. We all know what I mean), thus meaning that everyone who had distributed it since then had committed copyright infringement.
Their code is not under GPL, because although they distributed it under the GPL - They didn't put it there. In fact, IBM did. After discovering this, they ceased distribution, but in order to remain compliant with licencing terms, continued to allow their customers to download the code as required by the GPL. Not allowing people who had received binaries access to the source would be breach of licence or copyright violation. It is just as likely to be a violation if the allowed downloads or disallowed downloads since the GPL requires that source is made available. It is also a breach of licence to include their code in the download, but SCO didn't breach the licence. Whoever put SCO's code in there did.
Hence SCO are abiding by their commitments under the GPL, at considerable cost to themselves. In much the same way, they believe that the people who have illegally acquired SCO's code should abide by SCO's licence requirements and pay for a licence. It may or may not be possible to abide by the GPL and pay SCO's fee, but this is not SCO's responsibility since they didn't put the code in Linux. They cannot be held responsible for the actions of a third party.
So, to summarise, their distribution is the minimal they believe they can manage to stay roughly within the GPL. They are also charging a licence fee for use of their code, which is not GPL since they didn't put it in the kernel. There are a couple of contradictions caused when the GPL is used on code unlawfully added to a project which makes it impossible to abide by, so therefore it is not valid for this situation.
f you have written a single line of code that is being distributed in a file that SCO is charging a license fee for
SCO might be able to completely ignore your rights as the author because trivial segments are covered under fair use.
c) SCO says that the GPL is valid, but their behaviour does not violate it since random legal jargon under clause 13.3(b) subsection 2.1.4a(31.7).
The US doesn't want to sell the technology. They want to keep it to themselves since they can make more money selling shuttle flights than selling the technology, mush like MS can make more money selling copies of Windows than they ever could selling a comprehensive source code licence. The EU gets nothing out of that apart from putting their satellites and probes in space. Building your own means you get satellites into space, and something to sell
We tried that before. The US doesn't like sharing its technology. The result is that trhe EU would get none of the fringe benefits of developing spacecraft.
"Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistiguishable from science." The Doctor (Battlefield)
It was the least realistic show in history! I mean what was with the spaceship design? A Blue box? Rockets are meant to be streamlined. Something that shape wouldn't be able to get anywhere. And how is it that nobody noticed that the inside couldn't have possibly fitted inside the box. Clearly stuff inside the spaceship were filmed in a studio.
Worse that that though, the sense of history was daft. Sometimes he was in ancient Rome, other times he was on a different planet. How does that happen? The romans only had rudimentary space capability, that could barely manage a low earth orbit, let alone get to another planet.
Does it really matter if the owner still has its own copy?
Yes. The reason theft is wrong is not that the perpretrator gains something, but that the owner has lost something.