I was filling out the TurboTax form for my Virginia taxes last night and they asked me how much I had purchased from out of state and then used in-state. They called it a use tax, but it was the same rate as the sales tax.
So much for the Internet Tax Moratorium. It may be constitutional, as discussed above, but it is prohibited, unless I missed something.
"The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
So even if Habeas Corpus isn't enumerated, it still exists, and can't be denied except in cases of rebellion or invasion.
But this still doesn't explain why some opponents of the President think that Constitutional rights guaranteed to the citizens of the US need to be extended to their enemies.
This is something I've brought up before, but it bears mentioning again. How could a GPL program's author ever detect a violation of the license in a closed-source program? That is, if a programmer whose code was not published decided to use the code from a GPL program in a non-GPL program, thus requiring him/her to publish their code, how could it ever be detected and remedied?
The article cites a marketing suit who claims that the prevailing economic conditions account for this
I know this is picking at nits, but as a community, can we please refrain from calling people in sales and marketing "suits"? The first thing I thought of when I read this article was a legal suit in a court of law, and I'm sure that's the last thing Sales & Marketing (S&M?) wants to be associated with.
Get involved by digging into the source code, then writing about what it does. Programmers desperately need detail about the tools they use, regardless of the platform they work on. Writing summaries of functions and data structures is an excellent way of contributing to both the community and an individual project.
Mainsoft Corporation, the leader in common code-base cross-platform solutions for the enterprise, today announced that Microsoft Corp (NYSE: MSFT) has signed an updated contract with Mainsoft securing Mainsoft?s Professional Services and the right to use MainWin' to port Internet Explorer technologies and potentially other technologies to UNIX platforms.
Nowhere, save at the very end, do they mention porting anything to Linux. At the end the sentence is very general:
To date, the company has deployed more than one million end-user licenses of MainWin. For example, some of the leading business applications re-hosted to UNIX and Linux with MainWin include: Microsoft Internet Explorer; Microsoft Outlook Express; Computer Associates? OpenRoad; Alcatel?s X-Vision Enterprise and Magic?s Enterprise Edition V.8.
They don't specify which apps of MS (if any) are actually being ported to Linux, but still, we can always speculate.
I wonder, however, just how wise an investment this will be. According to the WinFormant article yesterday, MS will be using the platform in the same way they use Office on the Mac: as a means to transition people to Windows. But, for the most part, Linux is used on desktops by those transitioning away from Windows, not towards it. Taking this as true, one wonders what the use would be in porting only the IE apps at first. Perhaps it is a means of getting us to use MS software for free, then shelling out the cash later when the Office apps come.
But that doesn't make much sense either, since by the time Office for Linux comes around, many more people will be using Star Office and its competitors than today.
Very odd, but I guess that if you have the cash to burn like MS does, you don't care and only want market share.
Pardon my skepticism, but the first thought that crossed my mind when I saw this guy's site is "how can I trust this binary? I don't know him or his site, why should I believe he isn't trying to root my box?". He brags about releasing AOL 6.0 2 months ago, but perhaps that is a typo (or not). Besides, what would anyone gain with a 9.4 MB download, besides clogged chat rooms, ALL CAPS PEOPLE WHO CAN'T SPELL, and an AOL stain on your tux? Yes, the net appliance angle is a valid point, but personally, I'll stick with my dial-up.
I don't know if anyone else has seen this, but the fortune at the bottom of the page hasn't changed in several hours. I've checked it out on several computers, reloading the page doesn't help. Clairol's infinite loop still shows up.
It could be some time before a similar system takes the place of an English court. "It would have to satisfy the authorities that it was absolutely foolproof first," says a spokesman for the Lord Chancellor's office, which oversees courts in England and Wales.
Something has always puzzled me about the GPL. Suppose the following: a company/individual has a closed source program that could be improved by some GPL software, so they decide to take the GPL code and put it into their product, but not publish their source. How would the original programmer (the one who wrote the GPL program) discover such an infringement, and what recourse would/could/should they have?
Exposure = Sales Trading MP3's with my buddies = Exposure Do you get the point?
Your point is irrelevant. The fact that they get exposure does not excuse people from breaking the law.
As for listening to music before buying it, I have no problem with this, as long as the artist approves of the means of pre-sale distribution. Granted, IANAL, but it does seem fairly clear to me that the artist's rights of distribution take precedence over any claimed by individuals, especially given Title 17 USC.
Consider, if you will, the implications of boycotting Metallica, simply because they choose to exercise their legal rights. If Metallica fails, then there will be precedent for the rights of others to be ignored in the realm of copyright. I remind you that the GNU GPL is indeed a copyright, despite what RMS claims. If copyright is turned over, consider what could be turned over next.
Given the fact that those trafficking the MP3s and recipients of the MP3s are most likely not owners of the Metallica albums, Metallica has every right to sue. Their copyright has been infringed, and it is almost certain that if brought to trial they would win.
That being said, Metallica is suing the wrong people. The universities are not, per se, doing the trading, and I doubt they would allow it if they could stop it, since it eats so much bandwidth. Metallica should sue the traders of MP3s, who are the ones infringing the copyright, and Napster, since they could probably be found guilty of creating a program with the direct intent to break the (US Copyright) Law.
Rather than sue the universities, who are probably strapped for cash anyway, they should sue those who are actually breaking the law.
The problem with MP3s is that people think that since they are files on their computer, and they're being used for personal use, that trading them is legal. Title 17 of the US Code contradicts this belief. It says that the creator of the copyrighted material owns the copyright, unless they give it to someone else. IIRC, there was a court case that showed that copying copyrighted material was legal, if done for personal use AND NOT redistributed.
Therefore, if I own a Metallica (or any other band) cd, I can rip it, but not redistribute it.
Now, I know there are those of you shouting "Hey hipocrite! Get that log out of your eye before you call me a crook!". Well, I have ONLY MP3s ripped from my own CDs or obtained from artists who have explicitly put their work on the net. The only possible MP3s I have that could be questionable are the Budweiser Frogs, but if someone shows me those are illegal, then I will either buy the CD or get rid of them.
Another reason why grammar software needs to be used in conjunction with the fish:
that-make-a-beowulf-large-to regroup dept.
Ellen Spertus writes, " the history of the museum of the Center calculating, situated to the field of Moffett in the Mountain View, is to sponsor series of gears of the PC of Beowulf-Class called talk: A Perpective Storico' series of gears of the PC of Beowulf-Class called talk: One historical Perpective' given from Thomas Sterling, that the square of the NASA has lead that has developed to the first series of gears of the PC of the Beowulf-code category and is the Co-author How in order to construct one Beowulf. The talk will happen the evening of thursday, 13 April. RSVP within 10 April. All the history center of the calculating communicates it has had to be large. "
Alright, I could understand the Swedish Chef, I'm still working on the second one, but this one required the Babbling Fish to understand (sorta). Spanish and Italian didn't work, so I tried Portugese:
to streetlawyer full submitted a plugging to surprise: staffers pparently unknown of Andover.Net offtopic has used the feature undocumented of the quarrel in slash to communicate in Slashdot Marketing. The truth is disclosed suddenly all.
Not surprisingly, this is more confusing than the protugese.
Couldn't fit all of a given name in one submission, so I borke them up:
Cmdr Taco: Common Modular Disk Router Turbo Array Client Object Hemos: Hierarchical Equipment Multi-Overlay Software Emmett: Electronic Media Multi-Enhanced Text Terminal JonKatz: Joint Overlay Node Known Asymmetric Technology Zone Rob Malda: Recording Option Bus Multi-Architecture Logical Desktop Array Jeff Bates: Journalling Engine Floppy Format Bidirectional Asynchronous Technology Equipment Software
David Thomas Bell, 33, of Coon Rapids, faces 11 felony charges. They include three counts of unauthorized computer access, two counts of theft of trade secrets, two counts of attempted theft of trade secrets, two counts of computer theft and two counts of possession of burglary or theft tools (specifically, a software program for extracting user IDs and passwords from a computer system).
Now, the 3 counts of unauthorized computer access will probably stick, as will the trade secrets, the attempted theft, and the computer theft charge. The beef I have with CmdrTaco is that he wrote the story in such a way as to make it sound like the city had passed a law making L0phtCrack illegal (they didn't). The prosecutor is doing what any other prosecutor would do: trying to set a precedent. If people can be busted for posession of burglary tools, then they might think twice about that.
The problem is that a wrench could be interpreted as a burglary tool. The problem with a posession law is that it does not account for legitimate use; in the case of a wrench, it could be used to break a window or loosen a nut on a car; with L0phtCrack, it could be used to find weak user passwords for the purpose of strengthening or compromising a system. I don't have hard numbers, but I would imagine that most posession laws would not hold up in court when applied to tools with legitimate uses.
I see it as a simple case of property. At first, you owned the domain name, for legitimate reasons. As you now have no need of it, At first offer it to the highest bidder from those who would have legitimate use of it. For instance, if the domain was xyz.com, offer it to XYZ software, inc, XYZ hardware, inc., and XYZ blenders, Inc. If, for some reason, none of them take it, offer it up for auction. Then if any of those companies try to sue you for cyber squatting, you can say you offered it to them first.
Searching through the archive some time ago I found a program that actually did something neat. It would take as input a text file and output that file in braille, using stars for the dots. The fun part, though, was decoding it. I essentially went through and replaced the #defines with readable pnemonics, then reformatted the thing so it looked like normal C (if there is such a thing).
Slashdot Mirror
For those keeping track, this is 1 yellow square on the XKCD chart.
I was filling out the TurboTax form for my Virginia taxes last night and they asked me how much I had purchased from out of state and then used in-state. They called it a use tax, but it was the same rate as the sales tax.
So much for the Internet Tax Moratorium. It may be constitutional, as discussed above, but it is prohibited, unless I missed something.
Amazon Simple Storage Service = A.S.S. Service
"The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
So even if Habeas Corpus isn't enumerated, it still exists, and can't be denied except in cases of rebellion or invasion.
But this still doesn't explain why some opponents of the President think that Constitutional rights guaranteed to the citizens of the US need to be extended to their enemies.
... when people fall asleep in circuits class. They design circuits that blow up.
Then again, some of my circuits blew up even if I payed attention in class. Gotta watch out for those polarized capacitors!
Usually, this sign is found next to the rear entrances of people's homes, but it might work in this situation:
Warning:
Intruders will be shot
Survivors will be shot again
According to Dictionary.com an aileron is:
"Either of two movable flaps on the wings of an airplane that can be used to control the plane's rolling and banking movements."
Since a helicopter doesn't have ailerons, only a control rotor, this isn't, strictly speaking, an aileron roll; its more of a control rotor roll.
This is something I've brought up before, but it bears mentioning again. How could a GPL program's author ever detect a violation of the license in a closed-source program? That is, if a programmer whose code was not published decided to use the code from a GPL program in a non-GPL program, thus requiring him/her to publish their code, how could it ever be detected and remedied?
I know this is picking at nits, but as a community, can we please refrain from calling people in sales and marketing "suits"? The first thing I thought of when I read this article was a legal suit in a court of law, and I'm sure that's the last thing Sales & Marketing (S&M?) wants to be associated with.
Get involved by digging into the source code, then writing about what it does. Programmers desperately need detail about the tools they use, regardless of the platform they work on. Writing summaries of functions and data structures is an excellent way of contributing to both the community and an individual project.
Mainsoft Corporation, the leader in common code-base cross-platform solutions for the enterprise, today announced that Microsoft Corp (NYSE: MSFT) has signed an updated contract with Mainsoft securing Mainsoft?s Professional Services and the right to use MainWin' to port Internet Explorer technologies and potentially other technologies to UNIX platforms.
Nowhere, save at the very end, do they mention porting anything to Linux. At the end the sentence is very general:
To date, the company has deployed more than one million end-user licenses of MainWin. For example, some of the leading business applications re-hosted to UNIX and Linux with MainWin include: Microsoft Internet Explorer; Microsoft Outlook Express; Computer Associates? OpenRoad; Alcatel?s X-Vision Enterprise and Magic?s Enterprise Edition V.8.
They don't specify which apps of MS (if any) are actually being ported to Linux, but still, we can always speculate.
I wonder, however, just how wise an investment this will be. According to the WinFormant article yesterday, MS will be using the platform in the same way they use Office on the Mac: as a means to transition people to Windows. But, for the most part, Linux is used on desktops by those transitioning away from Windows, not towards it. Taking this as true, one wonders what the use would be in porting only the IE apps at first. Perhaps it is a means of getting us to use MS software for free, then shelling out the cash later when the Office apps come.
But that doesn't make much sense either, since by the time Office for Linux comes around, many more people will be using Star Office and its competitors than today.
Very odd, but I guess that if you have the cash to burn like MS does, you don't care and only want market share.
Pardon my skepticism, but the first thought that crossed my mind when I saw this guy's site is "how can I trust this binary? I don't know him or his site, why should I believe he isn't trying to root my box?". He brags about releasing AOL 6.0 2 months ago, but perhaps that is a typo (or not). Besides, what would anyone gain with a 9.4 MB download, besides clogged chat rooms, ALL CAPS PEOPLE WHO CAN'T SPELL, and an AOL stain on your tux? Yes, the net appliance angle is a valid point, but personally, I'll stick with my dial-up.
I don't know if anyone else has seen this, but the fortune at the bottom of the page hasn't changed in several hours. I've checked it out on several computers, reloading the page doesn't help. Clairol's infinite loop still shows up.
It could be some time before a similar system takes the place of an English court. "It would have to satisfy the authorities that it was absolutely foolproof first," says a spokesman for the Lord Chancellor's office, which oversees courts in England and Wales.
Does that mean that English judges are fools?
Something has always puzzled me about the GPL. Suppose the following: a company/individual has a closed source program that could be improved by some GPL software, so they decide to take the GPL code and put it into their product, but not publish their source. How would the original programmer (the one who wrote the GPL program) discover such an infringement, and what recourse would/could/should they have?
Trading MP3's with my buddies = Exposure
Do you get the point?
Your point is irrelevant. The fact that they get exposure does not excuse people from breaking the law.
As for listening to music before buying it, I have no problem with this, as long as the artist approves of the means of pre-sale distribution. Granted, IANAL, but it does seem fairly clear to me that the artist's rights of distribution take precedence over any claimed by individuals, especially given Title 17 USC.
Consider, if you will, the implications of boycotting Metallica, simply because they choose to exercise their legal rights. If Metallica fails, then there will be precedent for the rights of others to be ignored in the realm of copyright. I remind you that the GNU GPL is indeed a copyright, despite what RMS claims. If copyright is turned over, consider what could be turned over next.
Given the fact that those trafficking the MP3s and recipients of the MP3s are most likely not owners of the Metallica albums, Metallica has every right to sue. Their copyright has been infringed, and it is almost certain that if brought to trial they would win.
That being said, Metallica is suing the wrong people. The universities are not, per se, doing the trading, and I doubt they would allow it if they could stop it, since it eats so much bandwidth. Metallica should sue the traders of MP3s, who are the ones infringing the copyright, and Napster, since they could probably be found guilty of creating a program with the direct intent to break the (US Copyright) Law.
Rather than sue the universities, who are probably strapped for cash anyway, they should sue those who are actually breaking the law.
The problem with MP3s is that people think that since they are files on their computer, and they're being used for personal use, that trading them is legal. Title 17 of the US Code contradicts this belief. It says that the creator of the copyrighted material owns the copyright, unless they give it to someone else. IIRC, there was a court case that showed that copying copyrighted material was legal, if done for personal use AND NOT redistributed.
Therefore, if I own a Metallica (or any other band) cd, I can rip it, but not redistribute it.
Now, I know there are those of you shouting "Hey hipocrite! Get that log out of your eye before you call me a crook!". Well, I have ONLY MP3s ripped from my own CDs or obtained from artists who have explicitly put their work on the net. The only possible MP3s I have that could be questionable are the Budweiser Frogs, but if someone shows me those are illegal, then I will either buy the CD or get rid of them.
Another reason why grammar software needs to be used in conjunction with the fish:
that-make-a-beowulf-large-to regroup dept.
Ellen Spertus writes, " the history of the museum of the Center calculating, situated to the field of Moffett in the Mountain View, is to sponsor series of gears of the PC of Beowulf-Class called talk: A Perpective Storico' series of gears of the PC of Beowulf-Class called talk: One historical Perpective' given from Thomas Sterling, that the square of the NASA has lead that has developed to the first series of gears of the PC of the Beowulf-code category and is the Co-author How in order to construct one Beowulf. The talk will happen the evening of thursday, 13 April. RSVP within 10 April. All the history center of the calculating communicates it has had to be large. "
Alright, I could understand the Swedish Chef, I'm still working on the second one, but this one required the Babbling Fish to understand (sorta). Spanish and Italian didn't work, so I tried Portugese:
to streetlawyer full submitted a plugging to surprise: staffers pparently unknown of Andover.Net offtopic has used the feature undocumented of the quarrel in slash to communicate in Slashdot Marketing. The truth is disclosed suddenly all.
Not surprisingly, this is more confusing than the protugese.
Cmdr Taco: Common Modular Disk Router Turbo Array Client Object
Hemos: Hierarchical Equipment Multi-Overlay Software
Emmett: Electronic Media Multi-Enhanced Text Terminal
JonKatz: Joint Overlay Node Known Asymmetric Technology Zone
Rob Malda: Recording Option Bus Multi-Architecture Logical Desktop Array
Jeff Bates: Journalling Engine Floppy Format Bidirectional Asynchronous Technology Equipment Software
Any others? It kicks back a new one every time...
David Thomas Bell, 33, of Coon Rapids, faces 11 felony charges. They include three counts of unauthorized computer access, two counts of theft of trade secrets, two counts of attempted theft of trade secrets, two counts of computer theft and two counts of possession of burglary or theft tools (specifically, a software program for extracting user IDs and passwords from a computer system).
Now, the 3 counts of unauthorized computer access will probably stick, as will the trade secrets, the attempted theft, and the computer theft charge. The beef I have with CmdrTaco is that he wrote the story in such a way as to make it sound like the city had passed a law making L0phtCrack illegal (they didn't). The prosecutor is doing what any other prosecutor would do: trying to set a precedent. If people can be busted for posession of burglary tools, then they might think twice about that.
The problem is that a wrench could be interpreted as a burglary tool. The problem with a posession law is that it does not account for legitimate use; in the case of a wrench, it could be used to break a window or loosen a nut on a car; with L0phtCrack, it could be used to find weak user passwords for the purpose of strengthening or compromising a system. I don't have hard numbers, but I would imagine that most posession laws would not hold up in court when applied to tools with legitimate uses.
I see it as a simple case of property. At first, you owned the domain name, for legitimate reasons. As you now have no need of it, At first offer it to the highest bidder from those who would have legitimate use of it. For instance, if the domain was xyz.com, offer it to XYZ software, inc, XYZ hardware, inc., and XYZ blenders, Inc. If, for some reason, none of them take it, offer it up for auction. Then if any of those companies try to sue you for cyber squatting, you can say you offered it to them first.
Searching through the archive some time ago I found a program that actually did something neat. It would take as input a text file and output that file in braille, using stars for the dots. The fun part, though, was decoding it. I essentially went through and replaced the #defines with readable pnemonics, then reformatted the thing so it looked like normal C (if there is such a thing).
Two questions:
1: What is/are your favorite beer/s?
2: How did you get started in Linux?
Isn't it ironic that the quote of the day, listed right under this RMS article on the front page, was "Welcome to the Zoo!"?