People just don't seem to get it. Whatever you may think, people are not entitled to music. Never have been. You are entitled to life, liberty, housing, food, water, and clothes, and right to legally acquire property
You're right. But at the same time, people should only be punished "an eye for an eye". It's ludicrous to think that downloading a song is so heinous a crime that a person should be fined thousands. At most it's a misdemeanor, a slap on the wrist.
What use is a "free" country if large corporations and/or organizations can extort large damages just "to send a message"?
It mights as well be $20,000.00; that's a lot of money for a single mother.
I want to donate $5.00 towards paying them back the moeny the RIAA stole from them. They were quick to settle because they know it's bad PR. If we the./ community all chipped in a couple bucks, we could send them a cheque for $2000.00 easily. Not only would we be supporting the poster child for corporate greed gone bad, but maybe even catch the media's attention and send the message that the RIAA's actions are just plain evil.
Who can I trust to take up a collection for these folks? EFF?
BTW, Debian is still up, but the top of the fold indicates their support of the protest.
Maybe this is totally naive, but what if we setup a "thought bank". Most patents holders need to show their idea was theirs first don't they? If someone else can show prior art (ie. newspaper article, widely available source code, etc, anything to prove that someone else thought of the idea first) then the patent is invalid.
People who think of an idea who don't want someone else to patent it can describe their idea in the thought bank. It would then digitally sign the idea and post it for search engines and archive.org to catalogue it, and thereby providing a central place to create "prior art".
Any comments on why this is a [good|bad] idea?
(and just so you know, I'm patenting the idea of a "thought bank"...just kidding:-)
This is a little long, but it gets to the heart of the accident and why it happened:
Executive Summary: Paragraphs 2,3 and 4
The Board recognized early on that the accident was probably not an anomalous, random event, but rather likely rooted to some degree in NASAs history and the human space flight programs culture. Accordingly, the Board broadened its mandate at the outset to include an investigation of a wide range of historical and organizational issues, including political and budgeary considerations, compromises, and changing priorities over the life of the Space Shuttle Program. The Boards conviction regarding the importance of these factors strengthened as the investigation progressed, with the result that this report, in its findings, conclusions, and recommendations, places as much weight on these causal factors as on the more easily understood and corrected physical cause of the accident.
The physical cause of the loss of Columbia and its crew was a breach in the Thermal Protection System on the leading edge of the left wing, caused by a piece of insulating foam which separated from the left bipod ramp section of the External Tank at 81.7 seconds after launch, and struck the wing in the vicinity of the lower half of Reinforced Carbon-Carbon panel number 8. During re-entry this breach in the Thermal Protection System allowed superheated air to penetrate through the leading edge insulation and progressively melt the aluminum structure of the left wing, resulting in a weakening of the structure until increasing aerodynamic forces caused loss of control, failure of the wing, and breakup of the Orbiter. This breakup occurred in a flight regime in which, given the current design of the Orbiter, there was no possibility for the crew to survive.
The organizational causes of this accident are rooted in the Space Shuttle Programs history and culture, including the original compromises that were required to gain approval for the Shuttle, subsequent years of resource constraints, fluctuating priorities, schedule pressures, mischaracterization of the Shuttle as operational rather than developmental, and lack of an agreed national vision for human space flight. Cultural traits and organizational practices detrimental to safety were allowed to develop, including: reliance on past success as a substitute for sound engineering practices (such as testing to understand why systems were not performing in accordance with requirements); organizational barriers that prevented effective communication of critical safety information and stifled professional differences of opinion; lack of integrated management across program elements; and the evolution of an informal chain of command and decision-making processes that operated outside the organizations rules.
"The Sun" is purely a troll publication, just looking to spark controversy. At least let's discuss from a reliable publication, like "The Enquirer" or "The Weekly World News". Better yet, how about this one!
Trying to stop file sharing is like trying to nail jello to a tree. Every time they think they've put a nail through the heart of file sharing, it just slips off the stake and morphs into something else.
The only way government and pseudo-government (RIAA, MPAA, etc) officials will help reduce illegal file sharing is if people choose to not download files. It's all about freedom of choice, folks. So save your money from suing people and spend it on advertising, appealing to people's sense of right and wrong. Being a bully and suing some poor college student is just kicking the hornet's nest, and begs for someone like Earth Station 5 to rise up and make what they're trying to stop even worse.
Though I don't have a problem with people using Open Source to make money, the commercial aspects of other distros are disquieting to me - in the sense that I believe they will result in restrictions somewhere down the line
A good example is the Smoothwall project. The leader of the project wanted to make more money, so now there's two versions, an Open Source version and a version with Closed Source add-ons.
Of course, some people didn't like this, so the code forked into the IPCop project. Same will probably happen in Linux distros, except for Deb heads of course:-)
So is Microsoft saying code developed by a third party is bad? I use nothing but third party code in my Linux operating system, and everything's rock stable.
Maybe the issue isn't who wrote the code. Maybe the issue is how the code was written.
Really, I don't understand why people always complain about Debian not releasing often. Why is it so important to install a new cd for you?
Just move to testing or unstable, run dselect everyday and you will see new packages are added and updated every day.
I agree. I use all three; unstable for my workstation (so I can see all the newest loot), testing for most of my servers, and stable for my ultra-paranoid box. I keep a 40GB mirror of the distro which rsync's updates everyday so I can install new machines very quickly from a LAN instead of the Internet. "apt-get" and "dselect" (front-ends to dpkg, the latter being a curses-based selection utility) are reason enough to use Debian. And you virtually never have to backup a system, erase the drive, install a newer OS then restore your data to upgrade your machine.
Oh, never mind. I switched all of our company's systems over to Linux months ago. I can rest in the fact that the world around me may be burning down from another brain dead defect in Microsoft's crap code, but I am blissfully unaffected because Linux is secure.
Yeah, that's right, secure. For those of you who say Linux is just as bad as Windows, you keep telling yourself that tonight when you're up patching systems.
But (Michael Tague's) delight turned to anger when he contacted NetApp to purchase a maintenance agreement for the used system. "They weren't interested in negotiating the maintenance agreement until we paid $15,000 to relicense the operating system that came with the unit"
This is just another example of Sharecropping. It's Cisco's right to do whatever they want with their [soft|hard]ware platform, as it is for Microsoft and other commercial [hard|soft]ware companies. Having said that, I think it's reasonable for people like Mr. Tague to be angry at Cisco for their greed.
And of course I'm preaching to the choir when I say the solution to problems like these is to invest in Open Source soultions.
Quality has been the victim as companies cut corners to cut costs
Yup. Nothing new here. The problem of how to improve software is the same problem of improving a product or service. The answer: quality. So how do you improve quality? Talk to the Japanese (aka Deming's Way, Lean Thinking and of course Six Sigma). What I find fascinating is how no one has documented the parallels between Lean Thinking/Six Sigma and the Open Source development model.
Open Source works because it's all about doing things "the right way". When you do things properly, costs go down, quality goes up and customers and companies are happier. Now if we can just get rid of more muda in the Linux world...
If IBM were serious about addressing the real problems with Linux, it would offer full customer indemnification and move away from the GPL license
This is all the proof I need to show that Microsoft is behind all this. SCO's case is all about alleged theft of their code, which will prove to be a red herring. The real issue is to discredit the GPL. It's ludicrous for a company like SCO to pick a fight with so many people, unless they have Microsoft's billions to back them up.
SCO sues IBM, Red Hat sues SCO, IBM sues SCO, et cetera, ad nauseum, ad infinitum.
I say forget the legal process. It's too slow. Let's get each company to build their own BattleBot and go on Robot Wars to settle this whole mess. Just imagine: "Big Blue", a huge flipper bot flinging "SCObot" through the air while a big red bowler hat smashes into SCO at every opportunity. Chunks of metal flying, flames licking up from dismembered metallic remains.
Ah I love the smell of burnt electric motors and battery acid in the morning!
No I'm not trolling. It's a good question. If IBM and Red Hat are so certain that SCO doesn't have a case, why not just say "if you use our products, you don't have to pay SCO. We'll cover you". The minute they indemnify their customers from having to pay anyone else to use Linux, SCO's arguement immediately has no bearing and no weight.
I'm glad IBM and Red Hat are doing something about it. I personally will continue to use Linux and will refuse to pay SCO one red cent. But for my customers who ask "will I have to pay SCO sometime in the future to use Linux?", the fact that IBM & Red Hat won't offer indemnity they way Microsoft has is a good business question.
Laura DiDio, an analyst with the Yankee Group, said that a bigger issue than whether SCO prevails in its IBM suit is why IBM and other companies supporting Linux will not indemnify customers against potential claims from SCO.
DiDio argues that IBM's failure to protect its customers sends several signals to the market, including that Linux is not ready to become a mainstream computer operating system, and that there is a chance that SCO's claims against IBM just might have some validity.
"Every other software and hardware vendor provides indemnification for its products," DiDio said. "IBM is saying it doesn't want to take that chance because SCO might win."
Why won't IBM indemnify their customers? And for that matter how about Red Hat offering indemnity as well for users of their products? If SCO wins, Linux is dead, so it's do or die for Red Hat. Why not diffuse this whole mess and let companies battle it out in the courts?
I think we should take a collection and buy Chris Hoover a faster internet connection. His Syringe with a RJ-11 jack is really nice, but who uses a phone line anymore? I would think a RJ-45 high-speed ethernet connection would be more apropos.
Vancouver, Canada is the home of the 2010 Olympic Winter Games. It also has a rich history of tech-related sites. One of the most fun is to visit the folks over at User Friendly. They're in New Westminster, about a 30 minute drive outside Vancouver, and are right next door to Paralynx, aka Mind Link, the company that inspired Illiad to start the User Friendly strip (he called the company "Columbia Internet" because Paralynx is at the Columbia Skytrain station stop).
They're a great bunch of folks to visit, so if you're on the West Coast of Canada, drop by and say hi to them.
Dang! And I was just about to file my lawsuits against the hundreds of companies whose servers are still infected by Code Red & Nimda, and attack mine on an hourly basis.
Guess now that they have infinite legal resources, I should become a lawyer instead.
Slashdot Mirror
People just don't seem to get it. Whatever you may think, people are not entitled to music. Never have been. You are entitled to life, liberty, housing, food, water, and clothes, and right to legally acquire property
You're right. But at the same time, people should only be punished "an eye for an eye". It's ludicrous to think that downloading a song is so heinous a crime that a person should be fined thousands. At most it's a misdemeanor, a slap on the wrist.
What use is a "free" country if large corporations and/or organizations can extort large damages just "to send a message"?
It mights as well be $20,000.00; that's a lot of money for a single mother.
./ community all chipped in a couple bucks, we could send them a cheque for $2000.00 easily. Not only would we be supporting the poster child for corporate greed gone bad, but maybe even catch the media's attention and send the message that the RIAA's actions are just plain evil.
I want to donate $5.00 towards paying them back the moeny the RIAA stole from them. They were quick to settle because they know it's bad PR. If we the
Who can I trust to take up a collection for these folks? EFF?
BTW, Debian is still up, but the top of the fold indicates their support of the protest.
:-)
Maybe this is totally naive, but what if we setup a "thought bank". Most patents holders need to show their idea was theirs first don't they? If someone else can show prior art (ie. newspaper article, widely available source code, etc, anything to prove that someone else thought of the idea first) then the patent is invalid.
People who think of an idea who don't want someone else to patent it can describe their idea in the thought bank. It would then digitally sign the idea and post it for search engines and archive.org to catalogue it, and thereby providing a central place to create "prior art".
Any comments on why this is a [good|bad] idea?
(and just so you know, I'm patenting the idea of a "thought bank"...just kidding
"...including political and budgeary considerations..."
It may just be the cynic in me, but is this document and the board itself a political attempt to wrestle control from the current NASA leadership?
So if that's the case, that viruses make operating systems strong, Windows is the best operating system in the world!
Hmmm...
This is a little long, but it gets to the heart of the accident and why it happened:
Executive Summary: Paragraphs 2,3 and 4
The Board recognized early on that the accident was probably not an anomalous, random event, but rather likely rooted to some degree in NASAs history and the human space flight programs culture. Accordingly, the Board broadened its mandate at the outset to include an investigation of a wide range of historical and organizational issues, including political and budgeary considerations, compromises, and changing priorities over the life of the Space Shuttle Program. The Boards conviction regarding the importance of these factors strengthened as the investigation progressed, with the result that this report, in its findings, conclusions, and recommendations, places as much weight on these causal factors as on the more easily understood and corrected physical cause of the accident.
The physical cause of the loss of Columbia and its crew was a breach in the Thermal Protection System on the leading edge of the left wing, caused by a piece of insulating foam which separated from the left bipod ramp section of the External Tank at 81.7 seconds after launch, and struck the wing in the vicinity of the lower half of Reinforced Carbon-Carbon panel number 8. During re-entry this breach in the Thermal Protection System allowed superheated air to penetrate through the leading edge insulation and progressively melt the aluminum structure of the left wing, resulting in a weakening of the structure until increasing aerodynamic forces caused loss of control, failure of the wing, and breakup of the Orbiter. This breakup occurred in a flight regime in which, given the current design of the Orbiter, there was no possibility for the crew to survive.
The organizational causes of this accident are rooted in the Space Shuttle Programs history and culture, including the original compromises that were required to gain approval for the Shuttle, subsequent years of resource constraints, fluctuating priorities, schedule pressures, mischaracterization of the Shuttle as operational rather than developmental, and lack of an agreed national vision for human space flight. Cultural traits and organizational practices detrimental to safety were allowed to develop, including: reliance on past success as a substitute for sound engineering practices (such as testing to understand why systems were not performing in accordance with requirements); organizational barriers that prevented effective communication of critical safety information and stifled professional differences of opinion; lack of integrated management across program elements; and the evolution of an informal chain of command and decision-making processes that operated outside the organizations rules.
"The Sun" is purely a troll publication, just looking to spark controversy. At least let's discuss from a reliable publication, like "The Enquirer" or "The Weekly World News". Better yet, how about this one!
Trying to stop file sharing is like trying to nail jello to a tree. Every time they think they've put a nail through the heart of file sharing, it just slips off the stake and morphs into something else.
The only way government and pseudo-government (RIAA, MPAA, etc) officials will help reduce illegal file sharing is if people choose to not download files. It's all about freedom of choice, folks. So save your money from suing people and spend it on advertising, appealing to people's sense of right and wrong. Being a bully and suing some poor college student is just kicking the hornet's nest, and begs for someone like Earth Station 5 to rise up and make what they're trying to stop even worse.
Freakin' eh! I want one so I can win BattleBots. A robot that can keep killing after it's been damaged - ain't technology great?!
The internet may have made word of mouth travel faster, but I think three bigger reasons for bad ticket sales are:
1) The price of movies and condiments are just ludicrous. Prices have triped and quadrupled in the last 15 years.
2) Second run movie houses have become more popular. Why spend $15.00 to see a movie when you can wait 6 weeks and see the same flick for $6.00?
3) Home theatre systems have improved to the point where picture quality and sound are really, really good.
Though I don't have a problem with people using Open Source to make money, the commercial aspects of other distros are disquieting to me - in the sense that I believe they will result in restrictions somewhere down the line
:-)
A good example is the Smoothwall project. The leader of the project wanted to make more money, so now there's two versions, an Open Source version and a version with Closed Source add-ons.
Of course, some people didn't like this, so the code forked into the IPCop project. Same will probably happen in Linux distros, except for Deb heads of course
So is Microsoft saying code developed by a third party is bad? I use nothing but third party code in my Linux operating system, and everything's rock stable.
Maybe the issue isn't who wrote the code. Maybe the issue is how the code was written.
Really, I don't understand why people always complain about Debian not releasing often. Why is it so important to install a new cd for you?
Just move to testing or unstable, run dselect everyday and you will see new packages are added and updated every day.
I agree. I use all three; unstable for my workstation (so I can see all the newest loot), testing for most of my servers, and stable for my ultra-paranoid box. I keep a 40GB mirror of the distro which rsync's updates everyday so I can install new machines very quickly from a LAN instead of the Internet. "apt-get" and "dselect" (front-ends to dpkg, the latter being a curses-based selection utility) are reason enough to use Debian. And you virtually never have to backup a system, erase the drive, install a newer OS then restore your data to upgrade your machine.
Zzzzz...nnngg...huh? wh...What? A virus?
Oh, never mind. I switched all of our company's systems over to Linux months ago. I can rest in the fact that the world around me may be burning down from another brain dead defect in Microsoft's crap code, but I am blissfully unaffected because Linux is secure.
Yeah, that's right, secure. For those of you who say Linux is just as bad as Windows, you keep telling yourself that tonight when you're up patching systems.
(sigh) Hmm. I wonder what's on TV tonight?
But (Michael Tague's) delight turned to anger when he contacted NetApp to purchase a maintenance agreement for the used system. "They weren't interested in negotiating the maintenance agreement until we paid $15,000 to relicense the operating system that came with the unit"
This is just another example of Sharecropping. It's Cisco's right to do whatever they want with their [soft|hard]ware platform, as it is for Microsoft and other commercial [hard|soft]ware companies. Having said that, I think it's reasonable for people like Mr. Tague to be angry at Cisco for their greed.
And of course I'm preaching to the choir when I say the solution to problems like these is to invest in Open Source soultions.
OTOH, this could be a distraction while MS builds their own Linux, but it is doubtful they will.
Wouldn't that be the ultimate irony. Microsoft resuscitating Xenix! (yes kids, Microsoft used to sell a unix clone too).
But like you said: fat chance.
Quality has been the victim as companies cut corners to cut costs
Yup. Nothing new here. The problem of how to improve software is the same problem of improving a product or service. The answer: quality. So how do you improve quality? Talk to the Japanese (aka Deming's Way, Lean Thinking and of course Six Sigma). What I find fascinating is how no one has documented the parallels between Lean Thinking/Six Sigma and the Open Source development model.
Open Source works because it's all about doing things "the right way". When you do things properly, costs go down, quality goes up and customers and companies are happier. Now if we can just get rid of more muda in the Linux world...
If IBM were serious about addressing the real problems with Linux, it would offer full customer indemnification and move away from the GPL license
This is all the proof I need to show that Microsoft is behind all this. SCO's case is all about alleged theft of their code, which will prove to be a red herring. The real issue is to discredit the GPL. It's ludicrous for a company like SCO to pick a fight with so many people, unless they have Microsoft's billions to back them up.
SCO sues IBM, Red Hat sues SCO, IBM sues SCO, et cetera, ad nauseum, ad infinitum.
I say forget the legal process. It's too slow. Let's get each company to build their own BattleBot and go on Robot Wars to settle this whole mess. Just imagine: "Big Blue", a huge flipper bot flinging "SCObot" through the air while a big red bowler hat smashes into SCO at every opportunity. Chunks of metal flying, flames licking up from dismembered metallic remains.
Ah I love the smell of burnt electric motors and battery acid in the morning!
No I'm not trolling. It's a good question. If IBM and Red Hat are so certain that SCO doesn't have a case, why not just say "if you use our products, you don't have to pay SCO. We'll cover you". The minute they indemnify their customers from having to pay anyone else to use Linux, SCO's arguement immediately has no bearing and no weight.
I'm glad IBM and Red Hat are doing something about it. I personally will continue to use Linux and will refuse to pay SCO one red cent. But for my customers who ask "will I have to pay SCO sometime in the future to use Linux?", the fact that IBM & Red Hat won't offer indemnity they way Microsoft has is a good business question.
An article posted on CBS Marketwatch has this to say:
Laura DiDio, an analyst with the Yankee Group, said that a bigger issue than whether SCO prevails in its IBM suit is why IBM and other companies supporting Linux will not indemnify customers against potential claims from SCO.
DiDio argues that IBM's failure to protect its customers sends several signals to the market, including that Linux is not ready to become a mainstream computer operating system, and that there is a chance that SCO's claims against IBM just might have some validity.
"Every other software and hardware vendor provides indemnification for its products," DiDio said. "IBM is saying it doesn't want to take that chance because SCO might win."
Why won't IBM indemnify their customers? And for that matter how about Red Hat offering indemnity as well for users of their products? If SCO wins, Linux is dead, so it's do or die for Red Hat. Why not diffuse this whole mess and let companies battle it out in the courts?
Dear SCO,
Please identify the code that you believe to be yours so that we can rewrite and then promptly remove your code from our kernel.
Thank you.
The Linux Community
I think we should take a collection and buy Chris Hoover a faster internet connection. His Syringe with a RJ-11 jack is really nice, but who uses a phone line anymore? I would think a RJ-45 high-speed ethernet connection would be more apropos.
Vancouver, Canada is the home of the 2010 Olympic Winter Games. It also has a rich history of tech-related sites. One of the most fun is to visit the folks over at User Friendly. They're in New Westminster, about a 30 minute drive outside Vancouver, and are right next door to Paralynx, aka Mind Link, the company that inspired Illiad to start the User Friendly strip (he called the company "Columbia Internet" because Paralynx is at the Columbia Skytrain station stop).
They're a great bunch of folks to visit, so if you're on the West Coast of Canada, drop by and say hi to them.
Dang! And I was just about to file my lawsuits against the hundreds of companies whose servers are still infected by Code Red & Nimda, and attack mine on an hourly basis.
Guess now that they have infinite legal resources, I should become a lawyer instead.