...if the government has wandered by Slashdot, helped themselves to a member list (without Taco knowing -- thanks Patriot Act!) and just put every last one of us on their watch list. I mean, damn, what an easy way to round up every last consipracy theorist, anarchist, and anyone else suspected of "failure to support the administration." After coming here, they don't need to look anywhere else. We're the meta-list!
What bugs me about the EFF statement is that they've backed away from it. I thought it was right all along to sue the individuals responsible for copyright infringement, and I still do (although I'm crass enough to make disparaging comments about the RIAA/MPAA as they sue). I currently use Kazaa to share out a handful of audio sermons from my church's pastor -- content that we own the copyrights to and are fully, legally allowed to distribute however we wish. So I have a vested interest in Kazaa and BitTorrent remaining legal. They have a legitimate use: they diminish the load on our Web server (and by extension, the cost) by distributing the load.
As the Web sites I volunteer for begin experiementing with video and other large chunks of data, it is imperative that technology assist us in moving forward. If we artifically limit the technology, then we will be unable to offer up content, even though we own the copyright on it, and wish to provide it for free!
Of course, suing thousands of naive kids and tech-illiterate grannies isn't really going to stop an onslaught of millions of infringers, and does have a chilling effect on legitimate uses such as mine, and does play right into the old line about making all citizens into criminals to keep them under control. So even though it's the right way to do it, I'm not sure what good it does.
It looks now as though exactly what I told my friends would happen, is happening. I told them, "I'm going to vote for Kerry, and then be extremely sad to see Bush win anyway." Bush is pulling ahead. I expect he will be declared the winner in the next 2 hours.
All I can say is how disappointed I am with my fellow voters. I'm sure the Bush fans will find that nonsensical, and I'm sure the Bush voters are quite happy to cast a ballot based upon their moral compass. But IMHO, their vote means more allies will abandon the USA; the dollar will become even weaker as people, banks, and governments consider us less meaningful to their world; more Americans will find themselves pretending to be Canadians as they vacation around the world; we will be less successful exporting our laws, our entertainment/media, and our policies to other countries (hmm, possibly the only good to come of this); our rights as citizens and human beings will continue to erode; and Iraq will become our new Vietnam.
But beyond any of that, what makes me saddest is that none of the people who vote for Bush this time around will look back 4 years from now and connect the dots. Every bad thing that happens will be explained away or ignored. None of the consequences we are about to experience as a nation will be associated with our actions today.
I'm bummed that they didn't pick one of mine. But at least the flag has a creative idea behind it -- namely, keeping the tradition of the original logo alive a little bit.
Oh well. If any developers would like to claim those logos I made, I have SVG (and EPS, I think) versions lying around. I can send them on, possibly with a project name added in. There is a link at the bottom of my logo page that reads, "contact the webmaster." Use that if you're interested.
And as for Iraq and the 'War on Terrorism', a great many people have been deceived and believe we *have* had compromise and diplomacy and honest relations with the world. Many Americans are under the mistaken impression that most of the world (and our allies) generally support Bush and the US's invasion of Iraq and our terrorism efforts, or that world oppinion is at least neutral. Most Americans have no idea how badly Bush has alienated out allies and ruined our global relationships and support.
At this point, I'd have to say this is less about deception, and more about lethargy. It's not that Bush has been 100% honest -- I'm not suggesting that. But so many people have debunked Bush's claims, that anyone who still believes Bush is an idiot. Of course, I said the problem wasn't idiocy, but lethargy. My thinking is that most US citizens are not idiots; they have heard the rebuttals to Bush's propaganda, they just don't care. For example, in my Bible study, I'm the only liberal. I've mentioned that Bush was HUGELY wrong about WMD. The Bible study people just shrug and talk about how great it was to liberate the people. When I talk about how that has alienated many countries, and how the situation has denigrated, they talk about how Bush is God-fearing, has a great tax policy, bans stem cell research, etc. In other words, they don't care how badly he's fucked up our relations with the rest of the world, because he's aligned himself with so many of their other beliefs, that he has a get-out-of-jail-free card.
Here is why this freaks me out: it will happen again. Even if Bush is de-throned on November 2nd, even if we all breathe a sigh of relief -- right after Kerry's term(s), this mass of voters will elect Jeb Bush, or someone like-minded. We will be right back in the same situation. It's not even conservatives that are to blame (as much as I would like to blame 'em, being a liberal). It's this huge swath of voters who don't bother to learn about Canada's opinion, France's opinion, Russia's opinion, etc. You say that US citizens think "world opinion is at least neutral." I would say that US citizens just don't think about world opinion. That's "giving the UN a veto" thinking, and it's flat-out rejected by many people in the USA now, even if it has nothing to do with the UN and doesn't truly impact our sovereignty. It's some hideous mix of protectionism and imperialism, and it has its talons in our hearts and minds now. We're in a situation where multiple generations appear to ignore the fallout of our actions, and vote that way. So my fear is that even if we have a course correction right now, it's only a bump in the road to international irrelevance, a weaker dollar, and entrenchment by the embattled voters who put us in this situation.
That "stupid ass disclaimer" is SOP for most professionals such as lawyers, doctors, accountants and anyone who deals with confidential messages. It doesn't make him look like a moron, in fact he would look like an asshole if he DIDN'T have it on there.
Aside from the fact that such disclaimers have ZERO legal weight. You cannot bind someone to any agreement without their consent. This is why the SG site has no fear of posting the email even though the text at the bottom says they must not disclose the contents.
I could send you an email saying you have to flap your arms and cluck like a chicken. Or that you have to pay me 25 cents for each email I send. But it means nothing, because you were never in on the negotiations. You never signed a thing. I can't obligate you without your informed consent. And so I think the OP is correct: it does make the sender look like a moron, because she is a lawyer or representative for a lawyer, and yet she doesn't seem to understand a fundamental, basic premise of the law.
Hmmm. When I wrote the parent post, it hadn't registered that 3D was off the table. So I guess the question is more like this: a sorta cute goth girl walks up to her geek friend and says "Technically, I'm a sure thing. Should we do it?"
Sure, she may not be a blonde cheerleader who shaves her pubes and has bisexual hot tub parties with her girlfriends, but still, the goth girl might be worth considering.
our DNA has too many mutations for all organisms on land to have been reduced to small number of breeding partners in only the last couple thousand years.
But I don't know of any religion that says we sprouted up in the last 2000 years. I know many who mention a messiah 2000 years ago, but by that point, humanity had been humming along for quite some time.
Perhaps you're thinking of Biblical lists of ancestry. For example, in the Bible it traces back some leader's ancestors all the way to Adam & Eve, so you can calculate the age of humanity by allotting a certain amount of years per generation. That's the "young Earth" school of thought, but it suggests only that humans have been around for about 10,000 years. It's called "young Earth" because most of those people believe Earth & Humans are on roughly the same timetable. Although I'm religious, I don't believe that. I believe the lines of ancestry are made up to impress readers at the time, and that Earth & Humans didn't spring into existence at the same moment, anyway.
I have heard interesting things about our genes. For one, the Discovery channel ran a feature on a near-extinction event that appears to have reduced the human gene pool down to just a few hundred or thousand people, about 70,000 years ago. Could have been something struck Earth, wiped out a lot of life except for a few people in boats. It's a possible real-world source of the Noah's Ark story, although I personally suspect whatever humans experienced 70,000 years ago, they survived because they were deep, deep cave dwellers. And I've also heard of what some scientists call Adam & Eve -- a common ancestor that apparently can be seen in everyone's genetic makeup, regardless of race. But I never looked into that very hard. The few times I heard of it, it always sounded like it hadn't solidified.
Weird. I made a post to/. about this a year ago. I can't find it. My basic idea/suggestion was the same: legalese is overwhelming us and automated assistants would help. However, my solution was a little more P2P -- upload the checksum of a a legal contract to a centralized server, and on that server qualified people would enter summary bullet-points for each contract. Moderation would mod up the most accurate/easy-to-understand batch of bullet points. End-users would be able to view the bullet points right next to the contract or EULA. Overall, the idea was to build a simple system that kept a bit of data, and allowed moderation to separate the wheat from the chaff. The system would be simple to build, but would grow from community involvement. If you kept it cleanly client-server, you could have multiple GUIs. Web contracts/EULAs/privacy documents could have a brower bar or similar interface to get bullet points. Windows applications with click-through EULAs could be monitored by a small app that sits in the background and pops up some bullet points when an app starts for the first time. Linux & Mac clients could be developed to pull from the same resource.
I stand by my comment (although I also stand by my disclaimer that if the Literati Group is lying, then all bets are off).
But it doesn't rebut anything - you can't take unsupported claims from their website as a statement of a fact.
I don't understand how you can quote the part in bold and then say I'm taking their statements as fact.
Since neither of them are sharing all the documents, it makes me distrust them both. That's all I allege.
It doesn't matter what words he used in his communication.
It does to me. I was voicing my opinion, not issuing a court ruling.
I'm spent. Your arguing has devolved to pointlessness. You can have the last word for all I care. I'm done.
Re:Emir is underhanded, Connolly is dense
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· Score: 3, Insightful
If there's one thing I can't stand, it's when a poster boasts of having 'bothered to read' the article but has casually skip-read it at best.
If there's one thing I can't stand, it's when a poster makes an assertion about another poster that he has never met, never seen, and doesn't know. Go ahead, assert that I skip-read it. I am not aware of any eye-tracking device that you have attached to my head, or any mind-reading ability on your part. I might as well respond to you by saying that I hate it when posters write one-handed while having a thumb up their ass. It's a great disparaging remark lobbed in your direction, but it is wholly removed from reality. Or at least I hope it is.
Sakic says seven times that the Mambo core code is not derived from the 9 lines he wrote for Connolly.
Ah, but that's not quite what he says. If it is, could you quote where you found that? I just copied some of your verbiage and ran a search on the article, and it's not coming up with that wording. Instead, the wording is: "The code delivered to Brian Connolly is not the same as the code implemented in Mambo." Well, duh. Because he changed it, like any intelligent person would. He does the same thing regarding the contract. He doesn't say there was never any contractual obligation, he simply says he didn't sign it. Which gets back to my original point: he's right, he'll win in a court of law, but it sounds disingenuous, like he's relying on semantics for protection. This works in a court of law. In the court of public opinion, people like me can be skeptical.
Connolly has only three possible grievances:
No. He has a fourth, which is the one I've been trying to put forward:
4. He employed Emir to write some software, and even had a contract keeping those changes private in accordance with the GPL. But he never got more than (I suspect) an email or verbal agreement to the contract, and even if he did, Emir is smart enough to modify the code beyond recognition. So his grievance is that he got suckered. His problem is that there is no law against getting suckered (probably).
So I concede that Connolly is thick-skulled twice-over if he's going to sue people over this. I said from the start that Emir would win. My point was only that this doesn't absolve Emir, because (if the Literati documents are truthful), he knew the technicalities of this far better than Connolly and used it in a misleading way, at Connolly's expense (again, legal, but ethically, I don't want to work with someone like that). And again with the disclaimer: if it turns out the published documents are not truthful, then everything I say could be wrong. This is just Slashdot-level armchair-warrior/backseat driving. And shame on you, townmouse, for trying to raise the discourse to Groklaw's level.:)
Re:Emir is underhanded, Connolly is dense
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· Score: 3, Informative
zurab writes:
So, if they wanted to acquire copyrights from a contractor company/individual that customized someone else's software for them, there probably had to be a written legal agreement with the clear intent for transfer/ownership of the copyrights on those customizations.
But this is from the literati website:
1. We have a written contract dated 9/2/03 with Emir Sakic (a lead developer of Mambo) that expressly contains the provision "Upon finished project all copyright rights to code written by [Sakic] will belong to literatigroup.com [Furthermore's parent company]. This contracted has been provide to Robert Castley, project manager of Mambo OS.
I think that rebuts your point, and I stand by my comment (although I also stand by my disclaimer that if the Literati Group is lying, then all bets are off).
zurab also writes:
Now, if you copied the same code without permission, then you'd be likely violating copyrights; but there's no indication of that in this case - and the burden of proof is on Furthermore.
You're right, there's no proof, but that's not a rebuttal to my point, as I wasn't asserting that there was proof. I simply formed my own opinion based upon Emir's creepy behavior, which included asking Connolly AFTER the code was already in Mambo if he would mind putting it out there. Now, why ask permission if you already have rights? That's suspicious. And when Connolly said "no thanks" to sharing the code, Emir replied:
Hehe I was afraid you would feel like that
That kind of reply is odd and doesn't instill faith that he's on the up & up. Is that proof? No. Could Connolly be lying about Emir's email? Yes. But Emir could be lying too. Since neither of them are sharing all the documents, it makes me distrust them both. That's all I allege.
Regarding the Furthermore company suing or threatening end-customers, zurab writes:
This is bullshit, and goes to demonstrate Furthermore's executives' personal vendetta rather than a search for legal resolution.
Agreed. It gets back to the title of this thread, specifically: Connolly is dense.
I'm guessing you never worked in a commercial shop?
Maybe you can disregard my first reply to your post (this is the second). I originally read your comment to imply, "Hey everyone, ignore this idiot who has never worked in the real world, yet wants to spout off as if he has a brain." And I guess if you did mean that, then my first response stands as my defense of my work experience. But I think I've found a second meaning for what you wrote: a darkly cynical comment that is something like, "Look bud, you and I both know that this kind of copying-but-rewriting-to-hide-it happens every day. It's unstoppable." And if that's what you were going for, I think it's rather amusing and wish to let it stand.
Re:Emir is underhanded, Connolly is dense
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Emir behaved terribly, and I wouldn't want such a person working on my codebase.
That's how people learn, get a clue.
No, it's not. Not even by your own definition. What you described -- person works for company A, gets better, then goes on to do a better job at company B -- is NOT what happened. That was the entire fucking point I was trying to make. To shoehorn what happened with Emir into your example, it's like this: person works for company A, keeps the code he/she wrote for company A, then delivers that code (with lots of changes to cover up the copying) to company B.
When I go from company to company, I take my knowledge with me, and I implement roughly the same thing each time -- a better intranet, usually. But I rewrite my code from scratch. I do not have the other company's code in front of me, I do not copy it, I do not necessarily even use the same patterns/layout for objects, functions, methods, modules, included files, etc. I get a clean start. That is perfectly fine, and in line with what you describe as "normal." But that is also NOT what Emir did. Or perhaps more accurately, it is not what he appears to have done, based upon what I've seen. Some of his messages to Connolly have sounded rather weasely. He gives the impression of a man who pleads innocence, but only on a technicality or letter of the law, all the while knowing full well that he wasn't following the spirit of the law. This is why Emir WILL win any lawsuit that comes against him for this -- and it makes him slightly clever. But it also is why I wouldn't want to work with him.
At this point, I should make a general disclaimer: I've only read what both sides (well, all three sides, including the Mambo team) have published. It's entirely possible someone lied or misquoted. In which case, Emir might emerge as entirely honorable, or Connolly might emerge as entirely sane. I just happen to doubt either side will come out looking good to me.
I'm guessing you never worked in a commercial shop?
My credentials are right in my Slashdot profile, which you could have easily viewed. They are a damn sight better than the cred of an AC.
Emir is underhanded, Connolly is dense
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· Score: 5, Informative
There seem to be a lot of misunderstandings. I bothered to read the article, the responses (they both added comments to the Newsforge article), and some of the messages posted.
Some people seem to think that because Mambo is GPL, the code modifications must be released under the GPL. This is only true if Connolly distributes his application. If he keeps the code "within his walls" then he can keep his code changes private. When Emir put the code out there, that violated the GPL which allows Connolly to keep the code to himself in this special case. OK? So Connolly isn't a 100% whack-job.
But the next misunderstanding is on Connolly's part: his code is NOT in the Mambo codebase! Emir re-implemented the code, and gave it extra functionality. So the whole first misunderstanding is mostly irrelevant, because there is no copied code! And this is (I think) why Mambo keeps asking for more info and not getting it: if Connolly had to give line-by-line details of the violation, we would see that there is no line-by-line theft.
However, there is the third misunderstanding (or assumption). And that is that many people appear to assume that Emir clean-roomed this. He didn't. From everything I've read, Emir got sneaky: he liked the feature, he wanted it in Mambo, so he took the code he already wrote for Connolly, and tweaked the shit out of it so it looked different and better. And it really is different and better, but it's built right off what he had already done for Connolly. I don't know what to think about this part -- there is no law I know of that would address this clearly. It probably exists, but I don't know of it. And so I'm left thinking that Connolly is completely out of luck and has absolutely no case at ALL, but Emir behaved terribly, and I wouldn't want such a person working on my codebase.
HardOCP did a hatchet job on the CEO and Infinium threatened them legally, HardOCP then sued Infinium. Quite amazing really.
What is amazing? Infinium threatened legal action, and HardOCP responded in kind. This is what you should expect if you threaten to sue someone. Mmmkay?
For all of you who, like me, didn't get the Greedo reference, (probably less than 1% of/.) here's a link which explains the whole Greedo and Han thingamy bob.
And I'm going to carelessly flaunt my nerdy lame side by disagreeing with that link you provided. Or at least, here is an additional reason (my reason) that Greedo shooting first is hugely bad: redemption. I remember being a kid in a crowded theater on the opening weekend, and having a clear understanding that Han was NOT the good guy. Not evil either, but clearly in it for himself. Later in the movie, when Han swooped in to help the fight, I actually hooted and hollered, and the audience applauded and cheered. It wasn't just a simple "yay! explosions!" kind of cheering -- it was like, "holy crap, the badass is going to help!" People understood this. But if you make Han the good guy from the start, you completely undermine his turnaround. Lucas has traded character development (however rough) for political correctness. That's a crappy tradeoff, and a worse movie.
It's funny that you say that, since that is exactly the oppposite of what Gene Roddenberry intended. He thought of Start Trek largely as a social commentary, and he added in the kick-ass Kirk character to appease NBC.
True that Kirk was brought on board for the "second" pilot episode. And it is true that Roddenberry had some noble ideas brewing in his head, especially for TNG. But that doesn't erase the low-brow comments he made in many interviews. He called Trek a space-western. He made jokes about putting extra naughtiness into his scripts so that even after the censors censored it, there might be some edge remaining. He made it clear that some of the big things we attribute to him, he didn't even realize were big things. For example, he accepted congratulations for having a black woman on the bridge, but even he admitted that he relegated her to the role of secretary. Roddenberry was enough of a visionary that he did some great things without even trying. But he also liked a good fight and some sex to keep things spicy.
The producers of this show have, I can only divine, seemingly tried to turn Enterprise into a kind of childish 'Capt. Proton' (if you get me) that takes gleeful joy in ignoring, destroying, or just plain making fun of everything Trek that came before.
I actually think most of your rant is off -- the whole T'Pol issue is a non-issue, IMHO. But the part I quoted above I think is spot-on. It's why I hate the new Trek. Enterprise has a transporter, even though on TOS they called them "new-fangled" and error-prone. They shouldn't even exist in the Enterprise timeline. And our first meeting with the Klingons was supposedly disastrous (based on what has been said in the previous movies and TV shows). But on Enterprise, humans handle their first interaction with Klingons pretty OK. It's crap like this, over and over and over again. They just ignore all the stuff that came before, and hope the fans won't think about it. In a handful of cases during the first season, they were inconsistent with their own episodes. I can't suspend my disbelief that much. It just feels sloppy. And I blame B&B for it.
Vacation implies no work. Dictionary.com says vacation is "A period of time devoted to pleasure, rest, or relaxation, especially one with pay granted to an employee.
That seems to support his point, not rebut it -- even Bush himself couldn't quite justify all his time off when a reporter asked him about it. Perhaps you agree that Bush was a slacker President. If so, ignore my post.
Slashdot Mirror
...if the government has wandered by Slashdot, helped themselves to a member list (without Taco knowing -- thanks Patriot Act!) and just put every last one of us on their watch list. I mean, damn, what an easy way to round up every last consipracy theorist, anarchist, and anyone else suspected of "failure to support the administration." After coming here, they don't need to look anywhere else. We're the meta-list!
Sigh. You guys make me feel so much better. After enjoying your sarcasm, I'm almost not miserable about the state of my country.
C'mon. Group hug.
What bugs me about the EFF statement is that they've backed away from it. I thought it was right all along to sue the individuals responsible for copyright infringement, and I still do (although I'm crass enough to make disparaging comments about the RIAA/MPAA as they sue). I currently use Kazaa to share out a handful of audio sermons from my church's pastor -- content that we own the copyrights to and are fully, legally allowed to distribute however we wish. So I have a vested interest in Kazaa and BitTorrent remaining legal. They have a legitimate use: they diminish the load on our Web server (and by extension, the cost) by distributing the load.
As the Web sites I volunteer for begin experiementing with video and other large chunks of data, it is imperative that technology assist us in moving forward. If we artifically limit the technology, then we will be unable to offer up content, even though we own the copyright on it, and wish to provide it for free!
Of course, suing thousands of naive kids and tech-illiterate grannies isn't really going to stop an onslaught of millions of infringers, and does have a chilling effect on legitimate uses such as mine, and does play right into the old line about making all citizens into criminals to keep them under control. So even though it's the right way to do it, I'm not sure what good it does.
It looks now as though exactly what I told my friends would happen, is happening. I told them, "I'm going to vote for Kerry, and then be extremely sad to see Bush win anyway." Bush is pulling ahead. I expect he will be declared the winner in the next 2 hours.
All I can say is how disappointed I am with my fellow voters. I'm sure the Bush fans will find that nonsensical, and I'm sure the Bush voters are quite happy to cast a ballot based upon their moral compass. But IMHO, their vote means more allies will abandon the USA; the dollar will become even weaker as people, banks, and governments consider us less meaningful to their world; more Americans will find themselves pretending to be Canadians as they vacation around the world; we will be less successful exporting our laws, our entertainment/media, and our policies to other countries (hmm, possibly the only good to come of this); our rights as citizens and human beings will continue to erode; and Iraq will become our new Vietnam.
But beyond any of that, what makes me saddest is that none of the people who vote for Bush this time around will look back 4 years from now and connect the dots. Every bad thing that happens will be explained away or ignored. None of the consequences we are about to experience as a nation will be associated with our actions today.
I'm bummed that they didn't pick one of mine. But at least the flag has a creative idea behind it -- namely, keeping the tradition of the original logo alive a little bit.
Oh well. If any developers would like to claim those logos I made, I have SVG (and EPS, I think) versions lying around. I can send them on, possibly with a project name added in. There is a link at the bottom of my logo page that reads, "contact the webmaster." Use that if you're interested.
At this point, I'd have to say this is less about deception, and more about lethargy. It's not that Bush has been 100% honest -- I'm not suggesting that. But so many people have debunked Bush's claims, that anyone who still believes Bush is an idiot. Of course, I said the problem wasn't idiocy, but lethargy. My thinking is that most US citizens are not idiots; they have heard the rebuttals to Bush's propaganda, they just don't care. For example, in my Bible study, I'm the only liberal. I've mentioned that Bush was HUGELY wrong about WMD. The Bible study people just shrug and talk about how great it was to liberate the people. When I talk about how that has alienated many countries, and how the situation has denigrated, they talk about how Bush is God-fearing, has a great tax policy, bans stem cell research, etc. In other words, they don't care how badly he's fucked up our relations with the rest of the world, because he's aligned himself with so many of their other beliefs, that he has a get-out-of-jail-free card.
Here is why this freaks me out: it will happen again. Even if Bush is de-throned on November 2nd, even if we all breathe a sigh of relief -- right after Kerry's term(s), this mass of voters will elect Jeb Bush, or someone like-minded. We will be right back in the same situation. It's not even conservatives that are to blame (as much as I would like to blame 'em, being a liberal). It's this huge swath of voters who don't bother to learn about Canada's opinion, France's opinion, Russia's opinion, etc. You say that US citizens think "world opinion is at least neutral." I would say that US citizens just don't think about world opinion. That's "giving the UN a veto" thinking, and it's flat-out rejected by many people in the USA now, even if it has nothing to do with the UN and doesn't truly impact our sovereignty. It's some hideous mix of protectionism and imperialism, and it has its talons in our hearts and minds now. We're in a situation where multiple generations appear to ignore the fallout of our actions, and vote that way. So my fear is that even if we have a course correction right now, it's only a bump in the road to international irrelevance, a weaker dollar, and entrenchment by the embattled voters who put us in this situation.
Aside from the fact that such disclaimers have ZERO legal weight. You cannot bind someone to any agreement without their consent. This is why the SG site has no fear of posting the email even though the text at the bottom says they must not disclose the contents.
I could send you an email saying you have to flap your arms and cluck like a chicken. Or that you have to pay me 25 cents for each email I send. But it means nothing, because you were never in on the negotiations. You never signed a thing. I can't obligate you without your informed consent. And so I think the OP is correct: it does make the sender look like a moron, because she is a lawyer or representative for a lawyer, and yet she doesn't seem to understand a fundamental, basic premise of the law.
Hmmm. When I wrote the parent post, it hadn't registered that 3D was off the table. So I guess the question is more like this: a sorta cute goth girl walks up to her geek friend and says "Technically, I'm a sure thing. Should we do it?"
Sure, she may not be a blonde cheerleader who shaves her pubes and has bisexual hot tub parties with her girlfriends, but still, the goth girl might be worth considering.
Isn't that a bit like a pretty girl walking up to a geek and saying, "It's like this: technically, I'll fuck your brains out. Should we do it?"
I mean, unless she has an STD, the answer is pretty damn obvious.
But I don't know of any religion that says we sprouted up in the last 2000 years. I know many who mention a messiah 2000 years ago, but by that point, humanity had been humming along for quite some time.
Perhaps you're thinking of Biblical lists of ancestry. For example, in the Bible it traces back some leader's ancestors all the way to Adam & Eve, so you can calculate the age of humanity by allotting a certain amount of years per generation. That's the "young Earth" school of thought, but it suggests only that humans have been around for about 10,000 years. It's called "young Earth" because most of those people believe Earth & Humans are on roughly the same timetable. Although I'm religious, I don't believe that. I believe the lines of ancestry are made up to impress readers at the time, and that Earth & Humans didn't spring into existence at the same moment, anyway.
I have heard interesting things about our genes. For one, the Discovery channel ran a feature on a near-extinction event that appears to have reduced the human gene pool down to just a few hundred or thousand people, about 70,000 years ago. Could have been something struck Earth, wiped out a lot of life except for a few people in boats. It's a possible real-world source of the Noah's Ark story, although I personally suspect whatever humans experienced 70,000 years ago, they survived because they were deep, deep cave dwellers. And I've also heard of what some scientists call Adam & Eve -- a common ancestor that apparently can be seen in everyone's genetic makeup, regardless of race. But I never looked into that very hard. The few times I heard of it, it always sounded like it hadn't solidified.
Weird. I made a post to /. about this a year ago. I can't find it. My basic idea/suggestion was the same: legalese is overwhelming us and automated assistants would help. However, my solution was a little more P2P -- upload the checksum of a a legal contract to a centralized server, and on that server qualified people would enter summary bullet-points for each contract. Moderation would mod up the most accurate/easy-to-understand batch of bullet points. End-users would be able to view the bullet points right next to the contract or EULA. Overall, the idea was to build a simple system that kept a bit of data, and allowed moderation to separate the wheat from the chaff. The system would be simple to build, but would grow from community involvement. If you kept it cleanly client-server, you could have multiple GUIs. Web contracts/EULAs/privacy documents could have a brower bar or similar interface to get bullet points. Windows applications with click-through EULAs could be monitored by a small app that sits in the background and pops up some bullet points when an app starts for the first time. Linux & Mac clients could be developed to pull from the same resource.
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Exactly. That's how Nintendo has managed to stay #1!
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I don't understand how you can quote the part in bold and then say I'm taking their statements as fact.
It does to me. I was voicing my opinion, not issuing a court ruling.
I'm spent. Your arguing has devolved to pointlessness. You can have the last word for all I care. I'm done.
If there's one thing I can't stand, it's when a poster makes an assertion about another poster that he has never met, never seen, and doesn't know. Go ahead, assert that I skip-read it. I am not aware of any eye-tracking device that you have attached to my head, or any mind-reading ability on your part. I might as well respond to you by saying that I hate it when posters write one-handed while having a thumb up their ass. It's a great disparaging remark lobbed in your direction, but it is wholly removed from reality. Or at least I hope it is.
Ah, but that's not quite what he says. If it is, could you quote where you found that? I just copied some of your verbiage and ran a search on the article, and it's not coming up with that wording. Instead, the wording is: "The code delivered to Brian Connolly is not the same as the code implemented in Mambo." Well, duh. Because he changed it, like any intelligent person would. He does the same thing regarding the contract. He doesn't say there was never any contractual obligation, he simply says he didn't sign it. Which gets back to my original point: he's right, he'll win in a court of law, but it sounds disingenuous, like he's relying on semantics for protection. This works in a court of law. In the court of public opinion, people like me can be skeptical.
No. He has a fourth, which is the one I've been trying to put forward:
4. He employed Emir to write some software, and even had a contract keeping those changes private in accordance with the GPL. But he never got more than (I suspect) an email or verbal agreement to the contract, and even if he did, Emir is smart enough to modify the code beyond recognition. So his grievance is that he got suckered. His problem is that there is no law against getting suckered (probably).
So I concede that Connolly is thick-skulled twice-over if he's going to sue people over this. I said from the start that Emir would win. My point was only that this doesn't absolve Emir, because (if the Literati documents are truthful), he knew the technicalities of this far better than Connolly and used it in a misleading way, at Connolly's expense (again, legal, but ethically, I don't want to work with someone like that). And again with the disclaimer: if it turns out the published documents are not truthful, then everything I say could be wrong. This is just Slashdot-level armchair-warrior/backseat driving. And shame on you, townmouse, for trying to raise the discourse to Groklaw's level. :)
zurab writes:
But this is from the literati website:
I think that rebuts your point, and I stand by my comment (although I also stand by my disclaimer that if the Literati Group is lying, then all bets are off).
zurab also writes:
You're right, there's no proof, but that's not a rebuttal to my point, as I wasn't asserting that there was proof. I simply formed my own opinion based upon Emir's creepy behavior, which included asking Connolly AFTER the code was already in Mambo if he would mind putting it out there. Now, why ask permission if you already have rights? That's suspicious. And when Connolly said "no thanks" to sharing the code, Emir replied:
That kind of reply is odd and doesn't instill faith that he's on the up & up. Is that proof? No. Could Connolly be lying about Emir's email? Yes. But Emir could be lying too. Since neither of them are sharing all the documents, it makes me distrust them both. That's all I allege.
Regarding the Furthermore company suing or threatening end-customers, zurab writes:
Agreed. It gets back to the title of this thread, specifically: Connolly is dense.
Maybe you can disregard my first reply to your post (this is the second). I originally read your comment to imply, "Hey everyone, ignore this idiot who has never worked in the real world, yet wants to spout off as if he has a brain." And I guess if you did mean that, then my first response stands as my defense of my work experience. But I think I've found a second meaning for what you wrote: a darkly cynical comment that is something like, "Look bud, you and I both know that this kind of copying-but-rewriting-to-hide-it happens every day. It's unstoppable." And if that's what you were going for, I think it's rather amusing and wish to let it stand.
No, it's not. Not even by your own definition. What you described -- person works for company A, gets better, then goes on to do a better job at company B -- is NOT what happened. That was the entire fucking point I was trying to make. To shoehorn what happened with Emir into your example, it's like this: person works for company A, keeps the code he/she wrote for company A, then delivers that code (with lots of changes to cover up the copying) to company B.
When I go from company to company, I take my knowledge with me, and I implement roughly the same thing each time -- a better intranet, usually. But I rewrite my code from scratch. I do not have the other company's code in front of me, I do not copy it, I do not necessarily even use the same patterns/layout for objects, functions, methods, modules, included files, etc. I get a clean start. That is perfectly fine, and in line with what you describe as "normal." But that is also NOT what Emir did. Or perhaps more accurately, it is not what he appears to have done, based upon what I've seen. Some of his messages to Connolly have sounded rather weasely. He gives the impression of a man who pleads innocence, but only on a technicality or letter of the law, all the while knowing full well that he wasn't following the spirit of the law. This is why Emir WILL win any lawsuit that comes against him for this -- and it makes him slightly clever. But it also is why I wouldn't want to work with him.
At this point, I should make a general disclaimer: I've only read what both sides (well, all three sides, including the Mambo team) have published. It's entirely possible someone lied or misquoted. In which case, Emir might emerge as entirely honorable, or Connolly might emerge as entirely sane. I just happen to doubt either side will come out looking good to me.
My credentials are right in my Slashdot profile, which you could have easily viewed. They are a damn sight better than the cred of an AC.
There seem to be a lot of misunderstandings. I bothered to read the article, the responses (they both added comments to the Newsforge article), and some of the messages posted.
Some people seem to think that because Mambo is GPL, the code modifications must be released under the GPL. This is only true if Connolly distributes his application. If he keeps the code "within his walls" then he can keep his code changes private. When Emir put the code out there, that violated the GPL which allows Connolly to keep the code to himself in this special case. OK? So Connolly isn't a 100% whack-job.
But the next misunderstanding is on Connolly's part: his code is NOT in the Mambo codebase! Emir re-implemented the code, and gave it extra functionality. So the whole first misunderstanding is mostly irrelevant, because there is no copied code! And this is (I think) why Mambo keeps asking for more info and not getting it: if Connolly had to give line-by-line details of the violation, we would see that there is no line-by-line theft.
However, there is the third misunderstanding (or assumption). And that is that many people appear to assume that Emir clean-roomed this. He didn't. From everything I've read, Emir got sneaky: he liked the feature, he wanted it in Mambo, so he took the code he already wrote for Connolly, and tweaked the shit out of it so it looked different and better. And it really is different and better, but it's built right off what he had already done for Connolly. I don't know what to think about this part -- there is no law I know of that would address this clearly. It probably exists, but I don't know of it. And so I'm left thinking that Connolly is completely out of luck and has absolutely no case at ALL, but Emir behaved terribly, and I wouldn't want such a person working on my codebase.
What is amazing? Infinium threatened legal action, and HardOCP responded in kind. This is what you should expect if you threaten to sue someone. Mmmkay?
Damnit! That's the part I never realized. Aaaugh!!! It would have been good to get this advice TEN YEARS AGO!
And I'm going to carelessly flaunt my nerdy lame side by disagreeing with that link you provided. Or at least, here is an additional reason (my reason) that Greedo shooting first is hugely bad: redemption. I remember being a kid in a crowded theater on the opening weekend, and having a clear understanding that Han was NOT the good guy. Not evil either, but clearly in it for himself. Later in the movie, when Han swooped in to help the fight, I actually hooted and hollered, and the audience applauded and cheered. It wasn't just a simple "yay! explosions!" kind of cheering -- it was like, "holy crap, the badass is going to help!" People understood this. But if you make Han the good guy from the start, you completely undermine his turnaround. Lucas has traded character development (however rough) for political correctness. That's a crappy tradeoff, and a worse movie.
True that Kirk was brought on board for the "second" pilot episode. And it is true that Roddenberry had some noble ideas brewing in his head, especially for TNG. But that doesn't erase the low-brow comments he made in many interviews. He called Trek a space-western. He made jokes about putting extra naughtiness into his scripts so that even after the censors censored it, there might be some edge remaining. He made it clear that some of the big things we attribute to him, he didn't even realize were big things. For example, he accepted congratulations for having a black woman on the bridge, but even he admitted that he relegated her to the role of secretary. Roddenberry was enough of a visionary that he did some great things without even trying. But he also liked a good fight and some sex to keep things spicy.
I actually think most of your rant is off -- the whole T'Pol issue is a non-issue, IMHO. But the part I quoted above I think is spot-on. It's why I hate the new Trek. Enterprise has a transporter, even though on TOS they called them "new-fangled" and error-prone. They shouldn't even exist in the Enterprise timeline. And our first meeting with the Klingons was supposedly disastrous (based on what has been said in the previous movies and TV shows). But on Enterprise, humans handle their first interaction with Klingons pretty OK. It's crap like this, over and over and over again. They just ignore all the stuff that came before, and hope the fans won't think about it. In a handful of cases during the first season, they were inconsistent with their own episodes. I can't suspend my disbelief that much. It just feels sloppy. And I blame B&B for it.
That seems to support his point, not rebut it -- even Bush himself couldn't quite justify all his time off when a reporter asked him about it. Perhaps you agree that Bush was a slacker President. If so, ignore my post.