> Bill Gates never said "640 KB of memory should be enough for anybody."
He did, in 1981.
> Intel does not fear AMD.
"Only the paranoid survive." - Andy Grove, founder of Intel.
> Linux in five years will be about as mature (for the home user) as Windows 98 is today.
Never try to predict that far into the future when it comes to computers. Five years ago, Winmodems and Winprinters didn't exist. Five years before that, Windows didn't either (in any game sense, anyway). Hell, five years from now, computers themselves may be passe. How many people did you know with PDAs in 1996? And home users don't generally read Slashdot, so they don't normally care what Slashdotters call them.
For the usual result of trying to predict the future of technology, I refer you to the quote above, that you said Mr. Gates never said.
Having a job for which you're underqualified is gambling. Not saving a portion of your inflated salary against the possibility of losing that job is just dumb.
Would you have any sympathy for a sysadmin that ran a mission critical application on underpowered hardware, without any disaster recovery plan?
If you're not the decision maker in any job you hold (in terms of keeping or quitting the job), that's your own damn fault. It'd make these peoples' lives (and the entire industry) a better place if everyone in this position would just fix it.
Irrelevant. I have kids, but I also have savings to prevent my having problems if I should be unemployed for a time (six months, at my last calculation). If you can't save enough to support yourself if you lose your job, you need to spend less. And don't tell me you can't; I lived dirt cheap for a while when I was younger so I could afford to tell my employer to stick it if I hated my job. I have plenty of expenses, but I don't have more expenses than salary, and I never have. If you do, then you're making your own slavery. Disaster recovery is important for any work you do, and so it should be for your financial health as well.
> Nobody's talking about putting a muzzle on ANYBODY. Your freedom of speech does NOT mean that I have to pay you to defamate my character! I guess it doesn't bother you that the Iraqi goverment will take the vast profits from the oil we buy from them and support groups like Al-Qaida to blow up our buildings and terrorize our population. Or would you qualify the destruction of the WTC as "freedom of expression"?
Sorry, but it doesn't follow. We're not paying them to defame us, we're paying them to give us crude oil. What bothers me is that U.S. companies buy oil from Iraq in the first place. If we don't like the way they do things, why are we buying their oil? And, Al-Queda was supported by the Afghani government, from which we don't buy anything. So your example of the destruction of the WTC is simple infammatory rhetoric.
> I have no problem with bringing any country into the civilized world. However, groups that sponsor terrorism and governments that either sponsor or tolerate them are the enemies of the civilized world, in no uncertain terms.
I'm sure that most would agree with you. However, where your argument hits a wall is in the definition of "terrorism". By most definitions, the Israeli government sponsors and supports terrorism. So does China. And Russia. And, the good ole' U.S. of A. Unless you consider putting out assassination orders on foreign government officials not to be terrorism. Or killing civilians? How about forcible overthrow of governments? You'd be hard pressed to find any government in the first world that didn't suffer some of these faults, and recently the U.S. has been doing worse on them than most. Whether or not it's justified depends on which side you're on.
> What's worse is that many moderates in Islam don't condone these activities, but they don't condemn them, either.
This is flat-out inaccurate. Most moderates strongly condemn such activities. The problem is that in many Middle Eastern countries, active protest by the population is suppressed and the governments of these countries are afraid of getting too involved with the U.S. for fear of inflaming the zealots in their own nations. This is one of the main reasons for Saudi Arabia all but asking us to remove our military forces.
> However, we also have to recognize that OPEC nations have more influence over us than we have over them.
You've got to be kidding me. Which one of them could change our foreign or domestic policy? Which of them could cause us (as a nation) to do something we didn't want to do? The answer is none of them. The only thing OPEC can control is the cost of crude oil. That has fairly strong economic repercussions, but if you think that means that they wield more influence over us than we do over them, you're delusional. If you think that they can lord an oil embargo over us to get us over a barrel (pun intended), you need to reread your economics (and history) books more closely.
> If they want our money, they need to find out how to get on our good side.
Apparently not.
> Remember, in the 1980's we FERVENTLY worked to make Iraq an ally. See what it got us? Nothing.
Nice try, but we didn't do anything of the sort. The only reason we wanted ties with Iraq in the '80s was that we wanted them to kick the hell out of Iran for us, so we wouldn't have to go to war. We never tried to establish any diplomatic ties with them, and as soon as we got our hostages back, all talks with Saddam Hussein stopped. It got us nothing because we never wanted anything from them. Except oil, that is, and we're still getting that despite huge economic sanctions against Iraq (that strangely don't include crude oil).
> In the beginning, it was obligatory in the US, but _illegal_ in many european countries (illegal to install _any_ additional lights inside/on cars...)
Not exactly the same thing, though. In Europe, it was (and in some places, still is) illegal to add aftermarket lights. The restriction doesn't apply to automakers themselves, who can design them in and always could.
There's so many points to contend here that I can only begin to cover them all, but I'll try.
First, OPEC doesn't comprise only Middle Eastern countries, unless you consider Indonesia and Venezuela to be a part of the Middle East. Second, there are member nations in the Middle East (like Kuwait, for example) that don't exactly promote anti-American sentiment. Third, disallowing anti-American sentiment (or anti-anything sentiment, for that matter) is unamerican in nature, since it involves governmental suppression of free speech. Fourth, we would have more problems in the region if it was destabilized than not. Do you really think that wiping out the economies of these countries is likely to foster a more democratic or equitable society in any of them, or is it more likely to cause even more powermongering (in which it has been historically proven that the more extreme factions get control than the more moderate)?
Maybe you should spend more time considering why these countries have such large constituencies of anti-American people, and you'll get a clearer idea as to realistic ways to change that sentiment. Reducing our reliance on foreign (and domestic) petroleum is a laudable goal, but not for the purpose of damaging OPEC.
I actually saw a legitimate proposal for this type of energy recovery that involved dirigibles which makes sense in a weird sort of way. The concept is to use Aleutian windmills to generate electricity to separate hydrogen (and, of course, oxygen) from seawater. Then, they would use the hydrogen to inflate large dirigibles that would carry suspended tanks of compressed oxygen south to the U.S. When the dirigible arrives, the envelope is deflated into capture tanks and the dirigible is packed on a ship for the return trip to Alaska. Safety is not such a concern as it was with the Hindenburg because the oxygen is in suspended tanks that can be dropped in the ocean in the event of a fire so they don't cause an explosion, the envelope won't be nearly as flammable as dirigibles were when the Hindenburg went down, and for the biggest safety boost they can be flown by remote with no human crew, over the Pacific until they're near their landing zone so the risk of collateral damage from a crash is minimized.
I can imagine that getting this whole thing to be cost-effective would be tough, but technically it's doable.
The cost of switching wouldn't be much of a consideration, because the easiest way to switch is attrition. Just require hydrogen burners on all new cars, and in a decade most of the cars on the road are hydrogen powered (think about those eye-level brake lights to see how attrition works). The real issue is switching things that don't turn over as fast as cars, like trucks (which burn a big percentage of the fossil fuels burned), planes, ships and power plants (which don't generally burn gas/oil but coal is a fossil fuel, after all). That's where the real costs involved in switching will pop up. So, even if cars all went to hydrogen, there would still be a large market for crude oil for a very long time (several decades at least).
A very good suggestion, but I raise two points. First, Mac hardware is expensive versus PC clones, and it's a lot harder to find places willing to donate Macs to the cause than old PCs. Second, you have to have some (not tons, but not zero) Mac savvy to keep your network happy, and if SickKiwi doesn't have the expertise he'll have to learn it or hire it.
Still, despite these pitfalls it's worth some consideration.
> The 9/11 bombers hated us for reasons that we have no way of alterring... unless one considers it acceptable for us to give up our equal treatment of women, our freedom to NOT be religious, and yes, even our indulgences in Hollywood entertainment and other things that affluence brings.
You've either spent too much time listening to recent rhetoric, or not enough time boning up on history. The U.S. being rich or not being a Muslim nation has very little to do with what happened on September 11th. For the most part, Osama bin Laden hates the U.S. for three reasons, in no particular order:
1.) We're closely allied with Israel.
2.) We've had a military presence in Saudi Arabia (his homeland and what he considers Muslim holy land) for decades.
3.) After training and equipping him and his assistants in 1980-1983 so they could fend off the Russian invasion, we pulled out of Afghanistan, leaving the Muhajadin (sp?) (which became the Taliban) poorly equipped to fight a civil war with the other Afghan factions that lasted to the present day (they were still fighting the Northern Alliance when the attacks occurred).
If you think that our affluence and our non-Muslimism is such a factor, you're not paying attention. It's easy to say that they hate us because they're jealous or because they're simply religious zealots, but it's wrong, and such myopia only serves to prevent us from considering how we can really change things in the world.
> The only money that was lost was by the store, and not by Universal.
So, what you're really saying is that I can do this, and then Tower Records (which carries significantly more weight in the industry than I do) will put the screws to UMG for costing them so much time/money, so I don't have to bother.
Uh, sorry, this analogy only applies if one or two Ritz crackers were good and the rest of them burned or whatever. In that case, yes, I'd pitch a fit if most of my box of crackers was cardboard discs with one or two (admittedly tasty) crackers tossed in.
I'm not following your logic at all. How did you get from modifying the source of a program vs. hacking the executable to GPL issues? To wit, the original discussion was about modifying a program your company uses. My point was that altering OSS was different from hacking Microsoft because you're not legally allowed to hack the.EXEs, but you're legally allowed to monkey with OSS. The GPL in this case would only apply to redistributed code, not "internal, proprietary software development" (your words). And while RMS and Co. could lay on a lawsuit charging you with pilfering GPL code within a program you sell, they'd have to prove it just like anyone else who wants to sue you, so there's no larger risk of litigation than from any code jockey you ever come in contact with.
> Of course all code isn't GPLd...but that which is represents a similar risk to the EULA.
Not at all. They're different animals, with different situations. As stated above, the GPL applies only to redistributed code. If I get a copy of Red Hat Linux and munge the kernel code to run faster on my local Frankensystem 2002, but I don't redistribute that code outside my business, the GPL never applies. Hacking WINWORD.EXE is always, under every circumstance, illegal, even if I then don't even run the modified executable. Just changing it is a violation.
> I'm not sure it's fair to hold Microsoft responible for making
> possible the actions of a malicious hacker. Is it Honda's fault a
> slimjim opens the door of my Civic?
Well, to get a realistic comparison, you'd need to compare on even ground. Pretend for a moment that your car door locks went to "locked" when you pushed the lock button, and "unlocked" when you pushed the unlock. However, they didn't actually engage the tumblers in the door, so when it's locked, the handle still opens the door. Now, there's a switch inside the door that you can get to by pulling the door side off, and when you throw it the tumblers connect and when the door says "locked" it now really means it.
Now, would you blame Honda if they didn't set the switch to "on" at the factory, and didn't tell anyone about the switch, and only acknowledged that it exists when someone in the field finds it and threatens to tell the general public?
I'd bet you would. That's a fairer comparison, and so yes, I think the companies that produce easily exploitable software should be forced to reckoning for it.
Having a legitimate need for something does not imply or enforce a right to it. There are many examples of things that I could need to which I have no right, under certain circumstances, but to say that not having rights to something invalidates the need for it is backwards logic. To say this is to argue that because a slave has no "right" to freedom, his need for freedom is invalid. A company can need to make a profit and have no "right" to do so, in which case it dies.
There are two things to consider. First, file access logs don't get run by default. You need to turn them on. Second, nobody remembered that the program was there, so unless the FA logger was set to promiscuous (a BIG drain on disk space and processor time) it wouldn't have been included in the sweep.
All this, however, goes around the point. If the BSA didn't have a way to prove that he was misusing the copy of WordPerfect, why did he have to pony up the fines for it? He was punished for not being able to prove that he didn't commit any crime.
Again, it's the force majeure of a big group of software companies winning out over the legal tenet of "innocent until proven guilty" and that's where the real crime resides.
You can indeed "go compliant" by switching. At the time they request the audit by mass mailing, there's no specific lawsuit involved. If you respond to the warning by dumping all of the licensed software in favor of free software, when they come calling for real, you can truthfully say, "I'm running only free software, so you have no license violations to pursue." At that point, they'd have to prove (in a legal sense) that you'd illegally used their stuff in the past to charge you, and the "anonymous tip" isn't sufficient for that point.
Your point is well taken, but that's not where they went wrong. The problem is that the BSA doesn't restrict itself to companies where they have any evidence that piracy is going on, and they're very hardline on cases where the possibility of violation exists even if there's no proof of violation (in a case mentioned above, a user had a copy of WordPerfect installed on a network server, and the BSA enforcement team simply assumed that they were using it illegally because they could not prove that they weren't (in this case, nobody remembered it was there, so they weren't violating the EULA for the product, but they had no way to prove that nobody was using it)). Both of these practices fly in the face of "innocent until proven guilty" and when they use the threat of legal action to force companies to spend a lot of money to prove that they're not doing anything wrong, they step over the ethical line. I agree that they should have the right to enforce their license rights, but their method is overreaching and wrong.
The usual method for inspecting your stuff goes something like this. They send the letter, and you refuse/ignore the audit. They open a lawsuit charging you with copyright infringement, often based on evidence that's either sketchy or "from an anonymous tip." In the course of the lawsuit, the judge assigned issues a subpoena (or warrant, based on certain legal concerns) for your company's software records. If you don't pony them up, you face contempt and other possible criminal charges. If you do, then their lawyers examine your stuff and your records, and if something doesn't ken, you get fined. Since this whole process can get prohibitively expensive quickly, most companies will perform the audit and buy licenses to get compliant, which is the real reason behind the letters.
BTW, federal marshals are basically the "U.S. police force", as opposed to state police or local police. They're usually attached to the FBI office in the area in which they work.
The PC case doesn't have to sit on the desktop, but it's a safe argument that the monitor does. Small desk plus 19' CRT means early blindness from sitting two feet away from it, and wrist cramps from having your keyboard crammed on to the same small geography. With a flat panel, you can recover a huge amount of desktop (meatspace desktop, that is) so you can work more comfortably.
Slashdot Mirror
> Bill Gates never said "640 KB of memory should be enough for anybody."
He did, in 1981.
> Intel does not fear AMD.
"Only the paranoid survive." - Andy Grove, founder of Intel.
> Linux in five years will be about as mature (for the home user) as Windows 98 is today.
Never try to predict that far into the future when it comes to computers. Five years ago, Winmodems and Winprinters didn't exist. Five years before that, Windows didn't either (in any game sense, anyway). Hell, five years from now, computers themselves may be passe. How many people did you know with PDAs in 1996? And home users don't generally read Slashdot, so they don't normally care what Slashdotters call them.
For the usual result of trying to predict the future of technology, I refer you to the quote above, that you said Mr. Gates never said.
Virg
Having a job for which you're underqualified is gambling. Not saving a portion of your inflated salary against the possibility of losing that job is just dumb.
Would you have any sympathy for a sysadmin that ran a mission critical application on underpowered hardware, without any disaster recovery plan?
If you're not the decision maker in any job you hold (in terms of keeping or quitting the job), that's your own damn fault. It'd make these peoples' lives (and the entire industry) a better place if everyone in this position would just fix it.
Virg
> You don't have kids, do you?
Irrelevant. I have kids, but I also have savings to prevent my having problems if I should be unemployed for a time (six months, at my last calculation). If you can't save enough to support yourself if you lose your job, you need to spend less. And don't tell me you can't; I lived dirt cheap for a while when I was younger so I could afford to tell my employer to stick it if I hated my job. I have plenty of expenses, but I don't have more expenses than salary, and I never have. If you do, then you're making your own slavery. Disaster recovery is important for any work you do, and so it should be for your financial health as well.
Virg
> Nobody's talking about putting a muzzle on ANYBODY. Your freedom of speech does NOT mean that I have to pay you to defamate my character! I guess it doesn't bother you that the Iraqi goverment will take the vast profits from the oil we buy from them and support groups like Al-Qaida to blow up our buildings and terrorize our population. Or would you qualify the destruction of the WTC as "freedom of expression"?
Sorry, but it doesn't follow. We're not paying them to defame us, we're paying them to give us crude oil. What bothers me is that U.S. companies buy oil from Iraq in the first place. If we don't like the way they do things, why are we buying their oil? And, Al-Queda was supported by the Afghani government, from which we don't buy anything. So your example of the destruction of the WTC is simple infammatory rhetoric.
> I have no problem with bringing any country into the civilized world. However, groups that sponsor terrorism and governments that either sponsor or tolerate them are the enemies of the civilized world, in no uncertain terms.
I'm sure that most would agree with you. However, where your argument hits a wall is in the definition of "terrorism". By most definitions, the Israeli government sponsors and supports terrorism. So does China. And Russia. And, the good ole' U.S. of A. Unless you consider putting out assassination orders on foreign government officials not to be terrorism. Or killing civilians? How about forcible overthrow of governments? You'd be hard pressed to find any government in the first world that didn't suffer some of these faults, and recently the U.S. has been doing worse on them than most. Whether or not it's justified depends on which side you're on.
> What's worse is that many moderates in Islam don't condone these activities, but they don't condemn them, either.
This is flat-out inaccurate. Most moderates strongly condemn such activities. The problem is that in many Middle Eastern countries, active protest by the population is suppressed and the governments of these countries are afraid of getting too involved with the U.S. for fear of inflaming the zealots in their own nations. This is one of the main reasons for Saudi Arabia all but asking us to remove our military forces.
> However, we also have to recognize that OPEC nations have more influence over us than we have over them.
You've got to be kidding me. Which one of them could change our foreign or domestic policy? Which of them could cause us (as a nation) to do something we didn't want to do? The answer is none of them. The only thing OPEC can control is the cost of crude oil. That has fairly strong economic repercussions, but if you think that means that they wield more influence over us than we do over them, you're delusional. If you think that they can lord an oil embargo over us to get us over a barrel (pun intended), you need to reread your economics (and history) books more closely.
> If they want our money, they need to find out how to get on our good side.
Apparently not.
> Remember, in the 1980's we FERVENTLY worked to make Iraq an ally. See what it got us? Nothing.
Nice try, but we didn't do anything of the sort. The only reason we wanted ties with Iraq in the '80s was that we wanted them to kick the hell out of Iran for us, so we wouldn't have to go to war. We never tried to establish any diplomatic ties with them, and as soon as we got our hostages back, all talks with Saddam Hussein stopped. It got us nothing because we never wanted anything from them. Except oil, that is, and we're still getting that despite huge economic sanctions against Iraq (that strangely don't include crude oil).
Virg
> In the beginning, it was obligatory in the US, but _illegal_ in many european countries (illegal to install _any_ additional lights inside/on cars...)
Not exactly the same thing, though. In Europe, it was (and in some places, still is) illegal to add aftermarket lights. The restriction doesn't apply to automakers themselves, who can design them in and always could.
Virg
There's so many points to contend here that I can only begin to cover them all, but I'll try.
First, OPEC doesn't comprise only Middle Eastern countries, unless you consider Indonesia and Venezuela to be a part of the Middle East. Second, there are member nations in the Middle East (like Kuwait, for example) that don't exactly promote anti-American sentiment. Third, disallowing anti-American sentiment (or anti-anything sentiment, for that matter) is unamerican in nature, since it involves governmental suppression of free speech. Fourth, we would have more problems in the region if it was destabilized than not. Do you really think that wiping out the economies of these countries is likely to foster a more democratic or equitable society in any of them, or is it more likely to cause even more powermongering (in which it has been historically proven that the more extreme factions get control than the more moderate)?
Maybe you should spend more time considering why these countries have such large constituencies of anti-American people, and you'll get a clearer idea as to realistic ways to change that sentiment. Reducing our reliance on foreign (and domestic) petroleum is a laudable goal, but not for the purpose of damaging OPEC.
I actually saw a legitimate proposal for this type of energy recovery that involved dirigibles which makes sense in a weird sort of way. The concept is to use Aleutian windmills to generate electricity to separate hydrogen (and, of course, oxygen) from seawater. Then, they would use the hydrogen to inflate large dirigibles that would carry suspended tanks of compressed oxygen south to the U.S. When the dirigible arrives, the envelope is deflated into capture tanks and the dirigible is packed on a ship for the return trip to Alaska. Safety is not such a concern as it was with the Hindenburg because the oxygen is in suspended tanks that can be dropped in the ocean in the event of a fire so they don't cause an explosion, the envelope won't be nearly as flammable as dirigibles were when the Hindenburg went down, and for the biggest safety boost they can be flown by remote with no human crew, over the Pacific until they're near their landing zone so the risk of collateral damage from a crash is minimized.
I can imagine that getting this whole thing to be cost-effective would be tough, but technically it's doable.
Virg
The cost of switching wouldn't be much of a consideration, because the easiest way to switch is attrition. Just require hydrogen burners on all new cars, and in a decade most of the cars on the road are hydrogen powered (think about those eye-level brake lights to see how attrition works). The real issue is switching things that don't turn over as fast as cars, like trucks (which burn a big percentage of the fossil fuels burned), planes, ships and power plants (which don't generally burn gas/oil but coal is a fossil fuel, after all). That's where the real costs involved in switching will pop up. So, even if cars all went to hydrogen, there would still be a large market for crude oil for a very long time (several decades at least).
Virg
A very good suggestion, but I raise two points. First, Mac hardware is expensive versus PC clones, and it's a lot harder to find places willing to donate Macs to the cause than old PCs. Second, you have to have some (not tons, but not zero) Mac savvy to keep your network happy, and if SickKiwi doesn't have the expertise he'll have to learn it or hire it.
Still, despite these pitfalls it's worth some consideration.
Virg
> The 9/11 bombers hated us for reasons that we have no way of alterring... unless one considers it acceptable for us to give up our equal treatment of women, our freedom to NOT be religious, and yes, even our indulgences in Hollywood entertainment and other things that affluence brings.
You've either spent too much time listening to recent rhetoric, or not enough time boning up on history. The U.S. being rich or not being a Muslim nation has very little to do with what happened on September 11th. For the most part, Osama bin Laden hates the U.S. for three reasons, in no particular order:
1.) We're closely allied with Israel.
2.) We've had a military presence in Saudi Arabia (his homeland and what he considers Muslim holy land) for decades.
3.) After training and equipping him and his assistants in 1980-1983 so they could fend off the Russian invasion, we pulled out of Afghanistan, leaving the Muhajadin (sp?) (which became the Taliban) poorly equipped to fight a civil war with the other Afghan factions that lasted to the present day (they were still fighting the Northern Alliance when the attacks occurred).
If you think that our affluence and our non-Muslimism is such a factor, you're not paying attention. It's easy to say that they hate us because they're jealous or because they're simply religious zealots, but it's wrong, and such myopia only serves to prevent us from considering how we can really change things in the world.
Virg
There's already a year-long summer bioproject. It's called Bermuda.
Virg
> The only money that was lost was by the store, and not by Universal.
So, what you're really saying is that I can do this, and then Tower Records (which carries significantly more weight in the industry than I do) will put the screws to UMG for costing them so much time/money, so I don't have to bother.
And this is a bad plan exactly why?
Virg
Uh, sorry, this analogy only applies if one or two Ritz crackers were good and the rest of them burned or whatever. In that case, yes, I'd pitch a fit if most of my box of crackers was cardboard discs with one or two (admittedly tasty) crackers tossed in.
Virg
Correct my British if needed, but doesn't "cracking" mean "good"?
Just wondering.
Virg
I'm not following your logic at all. How did you get from modifying the source of a program vs. hacking the executable to GPL issues? To wit, the original discussion was about modifying a program your company uses. My point was that altering OSS was different from hacking Microsoft because you're not legally allowed to hack the .EXEs, but you're legally allowed to monkey with OSS. The GPL in this case would only apply to redistributed code, not "internal, proprietary software development" (your words). And while RMS and Co. could lay on a lawsuit charging you with pilfering GPL code within a program you sell, they'd have to prove it just like anyone else who wants to sue you, so there's no larger risk of litigation than from any code jockey you ever come in contact with.
> Of course all code isn't GPLd...but that which is represents a similar risk to the EULA.
Not at all. They're different animals, with different situations. As stated above, the GPL applies only to redistributed code. If I get a copy of Red Hat Linux and munge the kernel code to run faster on my local Frankensystem 2002, but I don't redistribute that code outside my business, the GPL never applies. Hacking WINWORD.EXE is always, under every circumstance, illegal, even if I then don't even run the modified executable. Just changing it is a violation.
Virg
> In any case you could equally say that Microsoft provides you the binary so why don't you just hexedit the security faults out.
We can't do that, because modifying or reverse-engineering the code is forbidden by the EULA.
So there.
Virg
> I'm not sure it's fair to hold Microsoft responible for making
> possible the actions of a malicious hacker. Is it Honda's fault a
> slimjim opens the door of my Civic?
Well, to get a realistic comparison, you'd need to compare on even ground. Pretend for a moment that your car door locks went to "locked" when you pushed the lock button, and "unlocked" when you pushed the unlock. However, they didn't actually engage the tumblers in the door, so when it's locked, the handle still opens the door. Now, there's a switch inside the door that you can get to by pulling the door side off, and when you throw it the tumblers connect and when the door says "locked" it now really means it.
Now, would you blame Honda if they didn't set the switch to "on" at the factory, and didn't tell anyone about the switch, and only acknowledged that it exists when someone in the field finds it and threatens to tell the general public?
I'd bet you would. That's a fairer comparison, and so yes, I think the companies that produce easily exploitable software should be forced to reckoning for it.
Virg
Having a legitimate need for something does not imply or enforce a right to it. There are many examples of things that I could need to which I have no right, under certain circumstances, but to say that not having rights to something invalidates the need for it is backwards logic. To say this is to argue that because a slave has no "right" to freedom, his need for freedom is invalid. A company can need to make a profit and have no "right" to do so, in which case it dies.
Virg
There are two things to consider. First, file access logs don't get run by default. You need to turn them on. Second, nobody remembered that the program was there, so unless the FA logger was set to promiscuous (a BIG drain on disk space and processor time) it wouldn't have been included in the sweep.
All this, however, goes around the point. If the BSA didn't have a way to prove that he was misusing the copy of WordPerfect, why did he have to pony up the fines for it? He was punished for not being able to prove that he didn't commit any crime.
Again, it's the force majeure of a big group of software companies winning out over the legal tenet of "innocent until proven guilty" and that's where the real crime resides.
Virg
The original comment:
> > "The BSA member does have a legitimate need to get a return on investment"
Your comment:
> there is NO such thing as a right on ROI.
The original poster claimed not "right to ROI", just a legitimate need for it. His statement is correct.
Virg
You can indeed "go compliant" by switching. At the time they request the audit by mass mailing, there's no specific lawsuit involved. If you respond to the warning by dumping all of the licensed software in favor of free software, when they come calling for real, you can truthfully say, "I'm running only free software, so you have no license violations to pursue." At that point, they'd have to prove (in a legal sense) that you'd illegally used their stuff in the past to charge you, and the "anonymous tip" isn't sufficient for that point.
Virg
Your point is well taken, but that's not where they went wrong. The problem is that the BSA doesn't restrict itself to companies where they have any evidence that piracy is going on, and they're very hardline on cases where the possibility of violation exists even if there's no proof of violation (in a case mentioned above, a user had a copy of WordPerfect installed on a network server, and the BSA enforcement team simply assumed that they were using it illegally because they could not prove that they weren't (in this case, nobody remembered it was there, so they weren't violating the EULA for the product, but they had no way to prove that nobody was using it)). Both of these practices fly in the face of "innocent until proven guilty" and when they use the threat of legal action to force companies to spend a lot of money to prove that they're not doing anything wrong, they step over the ethical line. I agree that they should have the right to enforce their license rights, but their method is overreaching and wrong.
Virg
The usual method for inspecting your stuff goes something like this. They send the letter, and you refuse/ignore the audit. They open a lawsuit charging you with copyright infringement, often based on evidence that's either sketchy or "from an anonymous tip." In the course of the lawsuit, the judge assigned issues a subpoena (or warrant, based on certain legal concerns) for your company's software records. If you don't pony them up, you face contempt and other possible criminal charges. If you do, then their lawyers examine your stuff and your records, and if something doesn't ken, you get fined. Since this whole process can get prohibitively expensive quickly, most companies will perform the audit and buy licenses to get compliant, which is the real reason behind the letters.
BTW, federal marshals are basically the "U.S. police force", as opposed to state police or local police. They're usually attached to the FBI office in the area in which they work.
Virg
...deserve all of my funny mod points for this.
Virg
The PC case doesn't have to sit on the desktop, but it's a safe argument that the monitor does. Small desk plus 19' CRT means early blindness from sitting two feet away from it, and wrist cramps from having your keyboard crammed on to the same small geography. With a flat panel, you can recover a huge amount of desktop (meatspace desktop, that is) so you can work more comfortably.
Virg