Correction, he *claims* he never said it. I wouldn't own up to it either if I said that. It's inconclusive.
Also, the quote was 640k in its original context. That's the ammount of memory under 1MB that a MS-DOS has to run a program it, minus some TSR space, unless it loads segments of the program into high memory. While early PCs did ship with very little memory, there was no hard-coded 64k limit and Bill was never in a position to comment on these, being a software guy and that simply being a matter of installing more ram chips. The 640k is his "fault" though.
Mandrake is probably the most-used distro by people on Slashdot (the single most, not that over 50% of the Linux users use it) so this is directly relevant to many people on here.
There's also the issue of getting the pre-release versions tested. If these things don't hit Slashdot, fewer people will know and thus fewer people will test.
There's a big difference between paying $2 for convenience and paying $49.95 for a boxed set of a distro I may just be vaugely interested in.
I use Debian and Mandrake enough to warrant paying them something, the rest of the distros I try out, but it's just to see what they have to offer. If I buy a CD they get paid something, maybe $.25, and don't pay for the gig or two of bandwidth. If I download it they get paid nothing unless I really like it, and have to pay for my bandwidth.
I think these cheap-CD places are a good thing, especially if they pitch in some money.
Not at all. If Intel releases a new chip and someone prints their press release, that's news. The news is that there's a new product, features - according to the manufacturer as follows, that I should be informed of. Or, if you wish to see it this way, it's news that Intel thinks it's got a newsworthy product.
This Slashdot article said "Mandrake is 9.2rc1 is out! If you wish to get it without downloading, we're happy to provide that service." Both parts of that are news. That mandrake 9.2rc1 is out is news, and that there's a company that'll burn a CD and fedex it to you is also news. I am interested, at least in general, by both items.
What is not news, for instance, would be an unfair representation of the truth for advertisement purposes. If SCO releases a "Linux is ours" press release, the release itself isn't news, though it is valid news that SCO released a document claiming to be news.
Gotcha, a business that says "No shirt, No shoes, No Service" is a terrorist organization because they're threatening (to not to business - doesn't have to be violent) you to force you to comply with their wishes.
It's perfectly valid under the lame definition you posted.
Their "demand" if you can call it such, is that they demand you take off your shoes before entering their house, or the houses of their friends. If you do not, they will tell their friends you are uncouth and their friends will likely not admit you either.
They don't want spam. If you send spam, or are hard to distinguish from a spammer because you use a company that hosts spammers, they simply tell their friends that you are a spammer, or are indirectly involved in spam, and to not accept email from you.
You have no right to force them to accept your email, which means that they may freely block your email. This causes MUCH less harm to you than the spam does to them. You get a nice bounce letter explaining that your email won't go through, whereas they, if they accept email from these spammers will get gigabytes of penile enlargement spam flooding their mailboxes and the mailboxes of their customers.
As long as a single lawyer is willing to say that SCO may have a case, the execs can talk about it as if it's a sure thing. Their disclosure document has to say "if we lose, we're bankrupt", but even Microsoft says that sort of thing. The circumstances and consequences on those documents are a little out of touch with reality.
Also, whose to say once the dust clears if they lost because it was a stupid claim, or if it was 90% in their favor and they got unlucky? If nobody challenges the basis of their claim, by showing proof now that McBride will be liable for not investigating, he can just say that he was wrong. Sorry, 'bout all that.
It's not unless we show that he knows now that he's lying that there's actually proof this is a crime. Until there's proof, this looks like all other corporate long-shots.
We need to show that there's no way you could accidently incorporate BSD code into your product and think it was your own. That there's no way they could have found the similar code in Linux and not (with due dilligence) looked at the change-log where someone said "Borrowing this cool code from BSD, malloc.c, lines 467-502" or whatever. We need to show that if they actually performed an honest investigation of this they'd know that their public claims are false. Proving that their public claims are knowingly false, means that they either shut up about them, or can be easily sued for libel and charged with fraud (stock manipultion, etc), and other crimes.
What is the fourth-amendment connection to "right of anonymity"?
If you're walking down the street in a crowded city you're effectively anonymous. The police can't, without reason, stop you and demand identification. You have the right to be as anonymous as your actions allow. To me, this equates to you having the right to do everything without having to advertise your identity, or even provide it when requested by someone without proper legal authority (as specified in the fourth ammendment).
You may have to identify yourself to the ISP to pay for an account, but you pay with credit-cards in the physical world and identify yourself to chosen people (the shop-keeper) only. Obviously the intent of the 4th is to keep you from having to provide documents and be searched, in any way, unless there's evidence or valid suspicion of a crime.
The 4th applies to non-visible items on your person, non-visible items in your home, the non-visible contents of your car, etc. It's been ruled to apply to telephone conversations. (You need a warrant to tap a line.) Why would it not apply to text communication over a wire as well?
Disliking excessive religion (ie, anything outside of your house) is completely different than disliking someone because of skin color or something.
If your views are repulsive to me, I have a right to be intolerant towards you. If your views are simply irrational and you try to apply these to real life, I have a right to not respect you.
How many people want to receive spam, often upwards of ten times more per day than email? I assert, *NOBODY*. Spam is by definition unsolicited. People who want these things can sign up. Search for it on google, there are a trillion websites offering these things.
As for cost, email costs the user because it costs their ISP. Users receiving email they don't want pay higher ISP fees for the transmission and storage of this junk.
Is it wrong to bill, even indirectly, people for listening to your ads? Yes. It's already illegal to call cell-phones for telemarketing, why is this any different?
As far as a commons goes, a commons is any shared resource. In this case, email is free to send and receive, beyond your own network costs, because it's assumed to be a desired communication between parties. If you break that implicit assumption and send me crap, you're forcing me to pay for you. Doing that to everyone abuses a common resource.
In short, spammers abuse the trust and good-will of others. What little service they may offer can be handled in better ways. They are leeches, of no value to anyone. (Besides their negative value...)
Considering there aren't any real horses in this context, specific legal threats (meaning in this case, threats of legal action) were made, and there's no reason to assume this would be meant violently, it's perfectly defensible. Hell, it's even easy to see from context that the "criminal mastermind in a bunker" was referring to ESR's view of McBride's paranoid ranting, not that he actually thought there was a SCO bunker deep beneath Utah.
(But knowing Mormons, there might be... Aren't they supposed to have one years worth of legal fees in the basement at all times, to protect against legal disasters?)
Watching a movie with bad science is as frustrating as watching a movie where the hero's gun never runs out of bullets, or where the bad-guy gets shot six times and falls dead to the ground, only to get up as soon as the hero turns away.
These are things that don't happen in life. We want to watch a movie to see how someone with a clearly defined set of abilities solves problems, in the world as they describe it. The world of the Matrix enables people to break these laws, that's fine, now that we've been told. The world of Trek allows people to travel FTL and has transporter beams, that's also fine. What's not fine is when changes are made, usually mid-story, without logical explanation and just to get past a tricky plot hole.
Bond is usually fine, because Q shows him the gadgets in the beginning and he simply finds ingenious ways to use them. Trek isn't because they've all got some killer virus and are going to die, then Wesley rigs the transporter to remove viruses and they all live. But it never could do that before and they conveniently forget how to use the transporter to be a life-saving medical device as soon as the show is over because it's less than five episodes before someone has another terrible virus or parasite that they should, with what happened before, be able to simply teleport out of the unlucky crew-member.
Fiction doesn't have to be consistent with our world, just with itself. If you show your neutron-star guys punching through Earth walls because of their incredible density, don't show them hang-gliding.
The speed of an unladen african skydiver, sans coconuts, with aproximately 200kph when falling spread-eagle, 400 when diving for maximum speed. 200kph is 56m/s, aproximately. Without wind resistance it'd take six seconds to reach that speed, during which she'd have fallen 180m. Of course, there's air resistance slowing your fall, which means you don't get to your terminal velocity so quickly. (And, without air, there is no terminal velocity, but hey...)
She'd have accelerated rapidly to 120kph or so, and then more slowly. If it took six-ten seconds for Supe to catch her, she'd have been travelling between 150 and 200kph, at a rough guess. (She wasn't shown spread-eagled, but she was wearing a dress which was flapping around, and she wasn't folded up, so we'll use the lower of the two speeds.)
Even if Supe stopped completely to catch her, it would be as if she slammed into two iron bars at the maximum speed of a sporty car. What's described in the industry as "oops".
If you refuse to move away from ISPs that host spammers you not only don't leave me much choice, but I don't really want to talk to someone who makes the spam problem worse through his unwillingness to help.
Think of it this way. I can cut you and a few other ISPs off and have 2% of the spam I would otherwise, so that I can communicate with everyone else without trying to find the real email in a haystack of spam, or I can "communicate" with you which seems to mean bending over and accept whatever ammount of spam your ISP-mates wish to send me, and miss real communications in the flood.
Besides, you have to black-hole less far less than 1% of the internet (on the "dedicated-spammer, won't change" list) to block over 90% of the spam. That's not everyone I have to ignore, but the more popular black-hole lists get the more people are ignoring you.
Hauling gas around in trucks, or through fragile pipelines has quite a high energy loss rate too.
The technology for electric cars didn't exist before, in fact, it's just borderline now. With better batteries or fuel cells they'll be much more practical.
I for one, am all over the idea. Even if power ends up costing exactly the same as fuel does currently, which is highly unlikely, it has two strong benefits for me. One, even if pollution is equal, it's not all concentrated in downtown cores (though I believe it's easier to pollution-proof a power plant than a million cars) and the mechanics of my cars will be really simple. An electric motor at the end of each axle. No brakes (the motors will do that, and collect power from doing so). The steering will be easier to implement. You won't need a big drive shaft just to get rear-wheel drive, or four-wheel drive. Oh, and quiet... they'll be electric, other than a moderate hum and road noises, they don't make noise.
Which is exactly what I said. You don't have a right to send me email, so you have no right to complain when I decide not to accept it. Just like you have no right to get a webpage from me, you only have a right to ask for it. If I don't send it you can't sue me.
This is why spammers are barking up the wrong tree when complaining about blackhole lists. Nobody has to deal with you, if you're an ass, they'll choose to do business with someone else. As long as they've got a documented example of you being an ass (spamming) they're immune to charges of slander/libel in telling people to ignore you as well. At least in the USA, truth is an absolute defense.
If you're financing the companies that support spam, and doing so knowingly, then you're part of the problem. You're just arguing against sanctions because you're lazy and don't want to have to choose another host.
IMHO, you're a perfect example of why black-hole lists will work. Some people will get annoyed at not being able to reach you, but they're customers of yours, if they can't reach you they can't pay you. Eventually when enough of your customers decide to go with someone else - remember that your blocked email appears exactly the same as you choosing to not respond - you'll come around.
But, if everyone coddles you, and accepts gigabytes of spam as the price for doing so, you'll happily continue to support the spammers. All because it's so terribly hard to pick up a machine and move it from one server park to another. Cry me a bloody river, I've put in way more work filtering spam.
You don't have a right to fetch a webpage from my server either. I can shut down your access if I want. Look at Bugzilla, it already blocks anyone coming from Slashdot.
Your post would only be relevant if you were forced to serve pages to me against you will.
Ignoring someone is perfectly valid, be it email or web requests. If you abuse the system I'm going to block you from wasting my resources.
As that kid himself said, he didn't write the code. Friends of his did (perhaps from a hacking group) and he volunteered to release it, because he was under 18 and living outside of the USA.
You not only own the disk, but you own the data as well. What you don't own is the right to duplicate that data for most reasons. The reason this is important is that you don't need a license to use something that you own.
It's like a book. They don't put after-sale restrictions on books because the courts ruled that they could not.
As copyright law has special provisions for copying that is required in use (copy a game to the HD, or a movie into RAM and into video RAM, etc) there's no unlawful access involved in decrypting a DVD and copying it to the HD for viewing.
Doing anything with it after this, re-encoding it for instance, might be problematic, but the actual use of DeCSS to decrypt it and make it watchable is perfectly legal.
btw, because you're perfectly entitled to use copyrighted works that you bought, including copying them as necessary, you don't need to agree to EULAs. They're after-sale contracts which have never been valid.
Perhaps they managed to develop interstellar travel without plastics. You know, so that raincoats aren't possible...
Then there's the whole issue of the crop circles. Way to let people know that something was going on. I mean, could you perhaps spray-paint it in fifty-meter high letters on the side of a mountain just in case someone missed it?!
Not to mention the aliens being dumber than dirt. They can't get through two two-by-fours nailed across a door. They've never managed crowbars either. They do have the 'stick arms through holes in doors and grope wildly' skill down pat.
One of the worst movies I'd ever seen. Pathetic plot, characters, and implementation. I haven't seen so much staring-into-nothing since Spartacus.
I must agree with the other posters. I'm not for shooting people trespassing over the corner of your lawn, but shooting someone breaking into your home is different.
The burglar could choose safety by staying home. You didn't seek out danger, it was brought to you. IMHO, if there's even a small chance that your safety will be helped by shooting the buglar, it's justifiable. This means, if they're running away, it's too late. If they're coming in, fair game. You could give them a warning, but if they were willing to hurt you all you've done is give away the element of surprise.
And no, I'm not from the USA. I'm from Canada, where we've got almost the same gun laws as in the UK. I simply value the life of the farmer infinitely far ahead of the burglar.
2001 would have been just as accurate, however much it really is, had they cut 20 minute long staring scenes into 30 seconds scenes.
I know space travel is slow. Emphasize that if you must by giving the actor a beard at the end, but don't make me sit through every painful minute of it. Movies are for entertainment, they should be entertaining.
Two ways this is made more efficient. For one, bigger power stations are more efficient. You can burn fossil fuels in a huge generating station and get more energy and less pollution than from burning the fuel in a thousand cars. Also, electric motors are *much* cheaper and better for the environment than IC engines.
Second, if there's a large spike in grid power, it's possible to investigate new energy sources. It's not practical for everyone to have a windmill, but huge farms of them have proven effective in Denmark. Tidally generated power is also unreasonable on a smaller scale, but practical for a whole country. Even Nuclear could be done reasonably if it wasn't for the half-governmental, half-privatized, over-regulated, under-inspected state of the industry.
Yeah, the lack of due process is a problem. "United States vs Ford Explorer" is a mockery of justice. But, don't give the cops the money for auctioning off that car and they'll have a lot less motivation to do so.
Ideally, the law would be changed so they'd have to prove your were a criminal before confiscating your property, but hey, America isn't concerned with justice, just expedience.
Slashdot Mirror
Correction, he *claims* he never said it. I wouldn't own up to it either if I said that. It's inconclusive.
Also, the quote was 640k in its original context. That's the ammount of memory under 1MB that a MS-DOS has to run a program it, minus some TSR space, unless it loads segments of the program into high memory. While early PCs did ship with very little memory, there was no hard-coded 64k limit and Bill was never in a position to comment on these, being a software guy and that simply being a matter of installing more ram chips. The 640k is his "fault" though.
Mandrake is probably the most-used distro by people on Slashdot (the single most, not that over 50% of the Linux users use it) so this is directly relevant to many people on here.
There's also the issue of getting the pre-release versions tested. If these things don't hit Slashdot, fewer people will know and thus fewer people will test.
There's a big difference between paying $2 for convenience and paying $49.95 for a boxed set of a distro I may just be vaugely interested in.
I use Debian and Mandrake enough to warrant paying them something, the rest of the distros I try out, but it's just to see what they have to offer. If I buy a CD they get paid something, maybe $.25, and don't pay for the gig or two of bandwidth. If I download it they get paid nothing unless I really like it, and have to pay for my bandwidth.
I think these cheap-CD places are a good thing, especially if they pitch in some money.
Not at all. If Intel releases a new chip and someone prints their press release, that's news. The news is that there's a new product, features - according to the manufacturer as follows, that I should be informed of. Or, if you wish to see it this way, it's news that Intel thinks it's got a newsworthy product.
This Slashdot article said "Mandrake is 9.2rc1 is out! If you wish to get it without downloading, we're happy to provide that service." Both parts of that are news. That mandrake 9.2rc1 is out is news, and that there's a company that'll burn a CD and fedex it to you is also news. I am interested, at least in general, by both items.
What is not news, for instance, would be an unfair representation of the truth for advertisement purposes. If SCO releases a "Linux is ours" press release, the release itself isn't news, though it is valid news that SCO released a document claiming to be news.
Do you see what I mean?
Gotcha, a business that says "No shirt, No shoes, No Service" is a terrorist organization because they're threatening (to not to business - doesn't have to be violent) you to force you to comply with their wishes.
It's perfectly valid under the lame definition you posted.
Maybe you should admit you're full of it.
Their "demand" if you can call it such, is that they demand you take off your shoes before entering their house, or the houses of their friends. If you do not, they will tell their friends you are uncouth and their friends will likely not admit you either.
They don't want spam. If you send spam, or are hard to distinguish from a spammer because you use a company that hosts spammers, they simply tell their friends that you are a spammer, or are indirectly involved in spam, and to not accept email from you.
You have no right to force them to accept your email, which means that they may freely block your email. This causes MUCH less harm to you than the spam does to them. You get a nice bounce letter explaining that your email won't go through, whereas they, if they accept email from these spammers will get gigabytes of penile enlargement spam flooding their mailboxes and the mailboxes of their customers.
How does this cause you so much harm?
As long as a single lawyer is willing to say that SCO may have a case, the execs can talk about it as if it's a sure thing. Their disclosure document has to say "if we lose, we're bankrupt", but even Microsoft says that sort of thing. The circumstances and consequences on those documents are a little out of touch with reality.
Also, whose to say once the dust clears if they lost because it was a stupid claim, or if it was 90% in their favor and they got unlucky? If nobody challenges the basis of their claim, by showing proof now that McBride will be liable for not investigating, he can just say that he was wrong. Sorry, 'bout all that.
It's not unless we show that he knows now that he's lying that there's actually proof this is a crime. Until there's proof, this looks like all other corporate long-shots.
We need to show that there's no way you could accidently incorporate BSD code into your product and think it was your own. That there's no way they could have found the similar code in Linux and not (with due dilligence) looked at the change-log where someone said "Borrowing this cool code from BSD, malloc.c, lines 467-502" or whatever. We need to show that if they actually performed an honest investigation of this they'd know that their public claims are false. Proving that their public claims are knowingly false, means that they either shut up about them, or can be easily sued for libel and charged with fraud (stock manipultion, etc), and other crimes.
What is the fourth-amendment connection to "right of anonymity"?
If you're walking down the street in a crowded city you're effectively anonymous. The police can't, without reason, stop you and demand identification. You have the right to be as anonymous as your actions allow. To me, this equates to you having the right to do everything without having to advertise your identity, or even provide it when requested by someone without proper legal authority (as specified in the fourth ammendment).
You may have to identify yourself to the ISP to pay for an account, but you pay with credit-cards in the physical world and identify yourself to chosen people (the shop-keeper) only. Obviously the intent of the 4th is to keep you from having to provide documents and be searched, in any way, unless there's evidence or valid suspicion of a crime.
The 4th applies to non-visible items on your person, non-visible items in your home, the non-visible contents of your car, etc. It's been ruled to apply to telephone conversations. (You need a warrant to tap a line.) Why would it not apply to text communication over a wire as well?
Disliking excessive religion (ie, anything outside of your house) is completely different than disliking someone because of skin color or something.
If your views are repulsive to me, I have a right to be intolerant towards you. If your views are simply irrational and you try to apply these to real life, I have a right to not respect you.
How many people want to receive spam, often upwards of ten times more per day than email? I assert, *NOBODY*. Spam is by definition unsolicited. People who want these things can sign up. Search for it on google, there are a trillion websites offering these things.
As for cost, email costs the user because it costs their ISP. Users receiving email they don't want pay higher ISP fees for the transmission and storage of this junk.
Is it wrong to bill, even indirectly, people for listening to your ads? Yes. It's already illegal to call cell-phones for telemarketing, why is this any different?
As far as a commons goes, a commons is any shared resource. In this case, email is free to send and receive, beyond your own network costs, because it's assumed to be a desired communication between parties. If you break that implicit assumption and send me crap, you're forcing me to pay for you. Doing that to everyone abuses a common resource.
In short, spammers abuse the trust and good-will of others. What little service they may offer can be handled in better ways. They are leeches, of no value to anyone. (Besides their negative value...)
Considering there aren't any real horses in this context, specific legal threats (meaning in this case, threats of legal action) were made, and there's no reason to assume this would be meant violently, it's perfectly defensible. Hell, it's even easy to see from context that the "criminal mastermind in a bunker" was referring to ESR's view of McBride's paranoid ranting, not that he actually thought there was a SCO bunker deep beneath Utah.
(But knowing Mormons, there might be... Aren't they supposed to have one years worth of legal fees in the basement at all times, to protect against legal disasters?)
Watching a movie with bad science is as frustrating as watching a movie where the hero's gun never runs out of bullets, or where the bad-guy gets shot six times and falls dead to the ground, only to get up as soon as the hero turns away.
These are things that don't happen in life. We want to watch a movie to see how someone with a clearly defined set of abilities solves problems, in the world as they describe it. The world of the Matrix enables people to break these laws, that's fine, now that we've been told. The world of Trek allows people to travel FTL and has transporter beams, that's also fine. What's not fine is when changes are made, usually mid-story, without logical explanation and just to get past a tricky plot hole.
Bond is usually fine, because Q shows him the gadgets in the beginning and he simply finds ingenious ways to use them. Trek isn't because they've all got some killer virus and are going to die, then Wesley rigs the transporter to remove viruses and they all live. But it never could do that before and they conveniently forget how to use the transporter to be a life-saving medical device as soon as the show is over because it's less than five episodes before someone has another terrible virus or parasite that they should, with what happened before, be able to simply teleport out of the unlucky crew-member.
Fiction doesn't have to be consistent with our world, just with itself. If you show your neutron-star guys punching through Earth walls because of their incredible density, don't show them hang-gliding.
The speed of an unladen african skydiver, sans coconuts, with aproximately 200kph when falling spread-eagle, 400 when diving for maximum speed. 200kph is 56m/s, aproximately. Without wind resistance it'd take six seconds to reach that speed, during which she'd have fallen 180m. Of course, there's air resistance slowing your fall, which means you don't get to your terminal velocity so quickly. (And, without air, there is no terminal velocity, but hey...)
She'd have accelerated rapidly to 120kph or so, and then more slowly. If it took six-ten seconds for Supe to catch her, she'd have been travelling between 150 and 200kph, at a rough guess. (She wasn't shown spread-eagled, but she was wearing a dress which was flapping around, and she wasn't folded up, so we'll use the lower of the two speeds.)
Even if Supe stopped completely to catch her, it would be as if she slammed into two iron bars at the maximum speed of a sporty car. What's described in the industry as "oops".
If you refuse to move away from ISPs that host spammers you not only don't leave me much choice, but I don't really want to talk to someone who makes the spam problem worse through his unwillingness to help.
Think of it this way. I can cut you and a few other ISPs off and have 2% of the spam I would otherwise, so that I can communicate with everyone else without trying to find the real email in a haystack of spam, or I can "communicate" with you which seems to mean bending over and accept whatever ammount of spam your ISP-mates wish to send me, and miss real communications in the flood.
Besides, you have to black-hole less far less than 1% of the internet (on the "dedicated-spammer, won't change" list) to block over 90% of the spam. That's not everyone I have to ignore, but the more popular black-hole lists get the more people are ignoring you.
Hauling gas around in trucks, or through fragile pipelines has quite a high energy loss rate too.
The technology for electric cars didn't exist before, in fact, it's just borderline now. With better batteries or fuel cells they'll be much more practical.
I for one, am all over the idea. Even if power ends up costing exactly the same as fuel does currently, which is highly unlikely, it has two strong benefits for me. One, even if pollution is equal, it's not all concentrated in downtown cores (though I believe it's easier to pollution-proof a power plant than a million cars) and the mechanics of my cars will be really simple. An electric motor at the end of each axle. No brakes (the motors will do that, and collect power from doing so). The steering will be easier to implement. You won't need a big drive shaft just to get rear-wheel drive, or four-wheel drive. Oh, and quiet... they'll be electric, other than a moderate hum and road noises, they don't make noise.
Which is exactly what I said. You don't have a right to send me email, so you have no right to complain when I decide not to accept it. Just like you have no right to get a webpage from me, you only have a right to ask for it. If I don't send it you can't sue me.
This is why spammers are barking up the wrong tree when complaining about blackhole lists. Nobody has to deal with you, if you're an ass, they'll choose to do business with someone else. As long as they've got a documented example of you being an ass (spamming) they're immune to charges of slander/libel in telling people to ignore you as well. At least in the USA, truth is an absolute defense.
If you're financing the companies that support spam, and doing so knowingly, then you're part of the problem. You're just arguing against sanctions because you're lazy and don't want to have to choose another host.
IMHO, you're a perfect example of why black-hole lists will work. Some people will get annoyed at not being able to reach you, but they're customers of yours, if they can't reach you they can't pay you. Eventually when enough of your customers decide to go with someone else - remember that your blocked email appears exactly the same as you choosing to not respond - you'll come around.
But, if everyone coddles you, and accepts gigabytes of spam as the price for doing so, you'll happily continue to support the spammers. All because it's so terribly hard to pick up a machine and move it from one server park to another. Cry me a bloody river, I've put in way more work filtering spam.
You don't have a right to fetch a webpage from my server either. I can shut down your access if I want. Look at Bugzilla, it already blocks anyone coming from Slashdot.
Your post would only be relevant if you were forced to serve pages to me against you will.
Ignoring someone is perfectly valid, be it email or web requests. If you abuse the system I'm going to block you from wasting my resources.
As that kid himself said, he didn't write the code. Friends of his did (perhaps from a hacking group) and he volunteered to release it, because he was under 18 and living outside of the USA.
Close, but incorrect in an important way.
You not only own the disk, but you own the data as well. What you don't own is the right to duplicate that data for most reasons. The reason this is important is that you don't need a license to use something that you own.
It's like a book. They don't put after-sale restrictions on books because the courts ruled that they could not.
As copyright law has special provisions for copying that is required in use (copy a game to the HD, or a movie into RAM and into video RAM, etc) there's no unlawful access involved in decrypting a DVD and copying it to the HD for viewing.
Doing anything with it after this, re-encoding it for instance, might be problematic, but the actual use of DeCSS to decrypt it and make it watchable is perfectly legal.
btw, because you're perfectly entitled to use copyrighted works that you bought, including copying them as necessary, you don't need to agree to EULAs. They're after-sale contracts which have never been valid.
Perhaps they managed to develop interstellar travel without plastics. You know, so that raincoats aren't possible...
Then there's the whole issue of the crop circles. Way to let people know that something was going on. I mean, could you perhaps spray-paint it in fifty-meter high letters on the side of a mountain just in case someone missed it?!
Not to mention the aliens being dumber than dirt. They can't get through two two-by-fours nailed across a door. They've never managed crowbars either. They do have the 'stick arms through holes in doors and grope wildly' skill down pat.
One of the worst movies I'd ever seen. Pathetic plot, characters, and implementation. I haven't seen so much staring-into-nothing since Spartacus.
I must agree with the other posters. I'm not for shooting people trespassing over the corner of your lawn, but shooting someone breaking into your home is different.
The burglar could choose safety by staying home. You didn't seek out danger, it was brought to you. IMHO, if there's even a small chance that your safety will be helped by shooting the buglar, it's justifiable. This means, if they're running away, it's too late. If they're coming in, fair game. You could give them a warning, but if they were willing to hurt you all you've done is give away the element of surprise.
And no, I'm not from the USA. I'm from Canada, where we've got almost the same gun laws as in the UK. I simply value the life of the farmer infinitely far ahead of the burglar.
2001 would have been just as accurate, however much it really is, had they cut 20 minute long staring scenes into 30 seconds scenes.
I know space travel is slow. Emphasize that if you must by giving the actor a beard at the end, but don't make me sit through every painful minute of it. Movies are for entertainment, they should be entertaining.
Two ways this is made more efficient. For one, bigger power stations are more efficient. You can burn fossil fuels in a huge generating station and get more energy and less pollution than from burning the fuel in a thousand cars. Also, electric motors are *much* cheaper and better for the environment than IC engines.
Second, if there's a large spike in grid power, it's possible to investigate new energy sources. It's not practical for everyone to have a windmill, but huge farms of them have proven effective in Denmark. Tidally generated power is also unreasonable on a smaller scale, but practical for a whole country. Even Nuclear could be done reasonably if it wasn't for the half-governmental, half-privatized, over-regulated, under-inspected state of the industry.
Yeah, the lack of due process is a problem. "United States vs Ford Explorer" is a mockery of justice. But, don't give the cops the money for auctioning off that car and they'll have a lot less motivation to do so.
Ideally, the law would be changed so they'd have to prove your were a criminal before confiscating your property, but hey, America isn't concerned with justice, just expedience.