The point is to develop a desktop that works well for everyone
...which is a recipe for disaster. I've never used metacity (because sawfish kicks every other wm's ass in every possible way...), but to think that you can design something that works well for every user is beyond stupid.
...without requiring you to go through dozens of preference dialogs to get something that will work correctly....
But, aside from that, metacity does support an always on top keybinding (I commited this about a month ago) It's just not bound by default; you can edit it using gconf-editor though.
Ah... so having to wade through dialogs to get a working configuration is bad, but going through another poorly designed, poorly documented, unintuitive to the core, configuration database to do the same thing is good? Jesus H Christ...
...or is Greece trying their hardest to embarrass themselves nowadays?
I mean, first of all it's far from certain that all the construction required for next-year's Olympics in Athens will be completed on time. Indeed, substantial portions of the construction have yet to even start, and the mess of building regulations (especially concerning archaeological finds) makes construction iffy. It's only the Olympics, the biggest sporting event on Earth (especially in financial terms), and if Greece comes off looking poorly in this, it makes them look bad to nearly every country on Earth.
Then, on top of that, they've got an incompetently worded ban on videogames... Jesus H Christ!
Unfortunately, Digitial Phonorecord Deliveries carry no right of resale. I don't think this makes sense, but it's the law. If you buy a download, you can't then sell it to me, even if you delete the original. There is no first sale right for DPDs.
Try reading your own link. That is a report from an executive branch body which has no legal standing. It is fundamentally advisory in nature. To say that the law puts forth that there is no digital first-sale doctrine is inaccurate.
However, it must be noted that the report from the Copyright Office would carry some weight in a court.
Maintenance is very easy, however 2.0 -> 2.2 you'll have to do something, 2.2 -> 2.4 you'll have to do something, 2.4 -> 2.6 you'll have to do something, 2.6 -> 2.8...the linux croud delights in changing everything around.
If you can convince the PHBs to release it under the GPL, then you don't have to spend time or money maintaining it. One of the kernel janitors will probably port it to new kernels.
Thinking about this, it may be necessary to make it a more centralized system. However, since we're talking about something that may have more legality than Napster, that may be acceptable.
Transaction management would be handled by this central server. Negotiation of a sale would go thorugh the server and would involve the exchange of a checksum (say MD5), but computed only from the portions of the file that are actually audio (ie without any ID3 included). The server would track which users had the right to transfer a file with that checksum and disallow listings of invalid files. While re-encoding is still an option, this would effectively require a re-encoding for each sale; the quality loss over time and/or the time required to re-encode to get a different checksum would make this somewhat less than common.
If there's a file out there that hasn't been cleared by the rights-holder for any digital distribution (ie, it would have to have come through fair-use ripping and is thus not distributable), then it's a simple matter of entering the infringing file's checksum into the db and refusing any transfers of files matching that checksum.
And Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms made their money because wealthy people paid them to write it.
Do you necessarily want a world where most of the music is chosen by those who are wealthy enough to either make it themselves or to hire someone to make it for them?
But just because someone wants to make a living by selling horse carriages does mean (at least in a capitalist system) that the government should protect them from having their carriages taken without their consent.
Also, with regards to public companies... the shareholders might be last in line,
First of all... corporation does not imply public company. And in any corporation, the shareholders do not have a right to the assets of the company until it liquidates.
Say you own.0003% of IBM. You can't go to IBM and demand your share of their assets. Now, if IBM were a partnership, you could do that (withdraw your share at any time). However, no one would want to do this as a partnership (because the partners are jointly liable for the actions of the partnership). Even if incorporated as an LLP, you would still need a General Partner who takes all liability beyond the initial contributions of the limited partners.
However, corporations in the US are limited liability by definition. The LLC designation is (along with its cousin, the LLP) one of the new methods of incorporation that a few states have trotted out which mingle features of partnerships, sole proprietorships, and traditional corporations.
Ownership is not transitive (at least in this sense). The assets of the corporation and the assets of the shareholders are separate (though the shares of the corporation are assets of the shareholders). Part of the definition of a corporation is that it is a separate entity from its shareholders.
Taken as a whole shareholders are the owners of the company. If they own the company they also own the company's assets, i.e. the music. Thus, the people obtaining the music from the company to some extent share ownership of the music they download.
However, there is still a distinction between the assets of the corporation and the assets of the shareholders. The assets of the corporation do not become the assets of the shareholders until the corporation liquidates, and then the shareholders are last in line (as various governments, followed by those who are owed money by the corporation have first crack at the assets). Even then, each shareholder would get it on a pro-rata basis. If the corporation bought 50,000 CDs and had 5,000 shares outstanding, you would ultimately be able to get 10 CDs for each share (assuming no one was ahead of the shareholders in this example) you held, and you would be the only shareholder to get each particular CD.
It probably (almost certainly, but IANAL) wouldn't work.
Remember, the corporation and its shareholders are legally separate entities. Thus the shareholders don't own the music (or any rights to it, more properly); they own a company which owns the rights to the music. And since it's doubtful that the RIAA grants a right to rent the music (first sale would not cover renting), the corporation doesn't have the ability to give its shareholders its rights.
In theory, you could do something within the confines of first-sale; it could be implemented as follows:
User A has file containing song in their collection.
User B wants said file.
User B offers to pay User A $0.00 for the file.
User A accepts the offer.
File is transferred from User A to User B; upon transfer, User A deletes the file
However, there are kinks in that plan; first, it's doubtful that files made by fair-use rights could be incorporated into this (fair-use as it's been understood by the courts only extends to personal copying; as soon as it's transferred, any legitimacy conferred by fair-use is lost). However, files downloaded without taking advantage of fair-use (iTMS for instance) would not have this issue. Then there's the final requirement; in order to qualify for a first-sale defense, the file would have to be deleted from the server after being transferred. This is somewhat difficult to accomplish, even if you could DRM stuff. However, perhaps copying the file which you obtained through this system to another location would be fair-use (and the system might even employ a hash database to prevent further transfers).
Back to the topic. Even if the corporation could rent/sell it to its shareholders, some portion of the actual value of the data would likely be counted as a dividend, or at least income, for the shareholder, who may end up paying taxes on it.
This is part of why I think that SpamAssassin may well have the best Bayesian implementation, if only they modified it to do the Bayesian computations as a last step in the filtering process. Then some of the tokens the Bayesian scanner would look for would be from the summary of regex matches that SpamAssassin found. Since most of these transcend the simple tokenization used by most Bayesian algorithms, this should be more effective.
Is it necessarily a bad thing that being hacked has its consequences? If stories start coming out along the lines of: "I left my unpatched Windows XP box and got radmin'd and end up being on the hook for $270,000 from the RIAA and filing for bankruptcy and ruining my life for the next 309 years," maybe users on.edu and broadband ISPs will start taking security seriously. If that happens, hell, I'll thank the RIAA personally.
Most of the time, portscans from university machines are not initiated by the legitimate users of those machines; more often a portscan is a concomitant effect of the legitimate user's machine being compromised! In these cases, revealing the name of the student would almost certainly be a breach of privacy (unless of course we think it's OK to report a student's poor system administration skills).
I'm not saying that the records should be disclosed to anyone (except it be through a lawful subpoena, etc.), but merely that the Universities should log this if only so they know whose MAC addresses and Ethernet ports to shut down.
For what it's worth, Lars Ulrich, in an interview with an Italian metal magazine, said that the band liked Beatallica and would like to get in touch with the people behind Beatallica for the purpose of distributing the Beatallica covers as B-sides for upcoming singles...
unless they are able to cooberate a mac with the router and the nic
I can say for a fact that UMass does that; when you connect a NIC with an unrecognized MAC to the network, it assigns you a non-routable IP and all DNS queries from that block are answered with the IP of the server used to register the MAC address. In order to register, you need to know two things: a student ID number (which is no longer their SS#) and the user's password. That process would probably be sufficient to demonstrate identity in court (especially in a civil case, where the standard's not "beyond reasonable doubt" but "preponderance of probabilities").
To be honest, I think universities and similar institutions should keep these records, if only because of the number of times I get portscanned or a flood of Code Red/Nimda scans from University IPs...
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...which is a recipe for disaster. I've never used metacity (because sawfish kicks every other wm's ass in every possible way...), but to think that you can design something that works well for every user is beyond stupid.
Ah... so having to wade through dialogs to get a working configuration is bad, but going through another poorly designed, poorly documented, unintuitive to the core, configuration database to do the same thing is good? Jesus H Christ...
Sawfish can do that (and more).
Just "killall -15 metacity && sawfish" and save your GNOME session...
However, it's useful to be able to designate a window as floating-on-top...
...or is Greece trying their hardest to embarrass themselves nowadays?
I mean, first of all it's far from certain that all the construction required for next-year's Olympics in Athens will be completed on time. Indeed, substantial portions of the construction have yet to even start, and the mess of building regulations (especially concerning archaeological finds) makes construction iffy. It's only the Olympics, the biggest sporting event on Earth (especially in financial terms), and if Greece comes off looking poorly in this, it makes them look bad to nearly every country on Earth.
Then, on top of that, they've got an incompetently worded ban on videogames... Jesus H Christ!
Try reading your own link. That is a report from an executive branch body which has no legal standing. It is fundamentally advisory in nature. To say that the law puts forth that there is no digital first-sale doctrine is inaccurate.
However, it must be noted that the report from the Copyright Office would carry some weight in a court.
What about Youppi?
If you can convince the PHBs to release it under the GPL, then you don't have to spend time or money maintaining it. One of the kernel janitors will probably port it to new kernels.
Thinking about this, it may be necessary to make it a more centralized system. However, since we're talking about something that may have more legality than Napster, that may be acceptable.
Transaction management would be handled by this central server. Negotiation of a sale would go thorugh the server and would involve the exchange of a checksum (say MD5), but computed only from the portions of the file that are actually audio (ie without any ID3 included). The server would track which users had the right to transfer a file with that checksum and disallow listings of invalid files. While re-encoding is still an option, this would effectively require a re-encoding for each sale; the quality loss over time and/or the time required to re-encode to get a different checksum would make this somewhat less than common.
If there's a file out there that hasn't been cleared by the rights-holder for any digital distribution (ie, it would have to have come through fair-use ripping and is thus not distributable), then it's a simple matter of entering the infringing file's checksum into the db and refusing any transfers of files matching that checksum.
And Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms made their money because wealthy people paid them to write it.
Do you necessarily want a world where most of the music is chosen by those who are wealthy enough to either make it themselves or to hire someone to make it for them?
But just because someone wants to make a living by selling horse carriages does mean (at least in a capitalist system) that the government should protect them from having their carriages taken without their consent.
First of all... corporation does not imply public company. And in any corporation, the shareholders do not have a right to the assets of the company until it liquidates.
Say you own .0003% of IBM. You can't go to IBM and demand your share of their assets. Now, if IBM were a partnership, you could do that (withdraw your share at any time). However, no one would want to do this as a partnership (because the partners are jointly liable for the actions of the partnership). Even if incorporated as an LLP, you would still need a General Partner who takes all liability beyond the initial contributions of the limited partners.
However, corporations in the US are limited liability by definition. The LLC designation is (along with its cousin, the LLP) one of the new methods of incorporation that a few states have trotted out which mingle features of partnerships, sole proprietorships, and traditional corporations.
Ownership is not transitive (at least in this sense). The assets of the corporation and the assets of the shareholders are separate (though the shares of the corporation are assets of the shareholders). Part of the definition of a corporation is that it is a separate entity from its shareholders.
However, there is still a distinction between the assets of the corporation and the assets of the shareholders. The assets of the corporation do not become the assets of the shareholders until the corporation liquidates, and then the shareholders are last in line (as various governments, followed by those who are owed money by the corporation have first crack at the assets). Even then, each shareholder would get it on a pro-rata basis. If the corporation bought 50,000 CDs and had 5,000 shares outstanding, you would ultimately be able to get 10 CDs for each share (assuming no one was ahead of the shareholders in this example) you held, and you would be the only shareholder to get each particular CD.
It probably (almost certainly, but IANAL) wouldn't work.
Remember, the corporation and its shareholders are legally separate entities. Thus the shareholders don't own the music (or any rights to it, more properly); they own a company which owns the rights to the music. And since it's doubtful that the RIAA grants a right to rent the music (first sale would not cover renting), the corporation doesn't have the ability to give its shareholders its rights.
In theory, you could do something within the confines of first-sale; it could be implemented as follows:
However, there are kinks in that plan; first, it's doubtful that files made by fair-use rights could be incorporated into this (fair-use as it's been understood by the courts only extends to personal copying; as soon as it's transferred, any legitimacy conferred by fair-use is lost). However, files downloaded without taking advantage of fair-use (iTMS for instance) would not have this issue. Then there's the final requirement; in order to qualify for a first-sale defense, the file would have to be deleted from the server after being transferred. This is somewhat difficult to accomplish, even if you could DRM stuff. However, perhaps copying the file which you obtained through this system to another location would be fair-use (and the system might even employ a hash database to prevent further transfers).
Back to the topic. Even if the corporation could rent/sell it to its shareholders, some portion of the actual value of the data would likely be counted as a dividend, or at least income, for the shareholder, who may end up paying taxes on it.
C++ is effectively a super-set of C, though not a strict superset of C.
Good enough for you?
Next, the 666 will become 491...
Most RIAA contracts explicitly assign the copyright to the label, anyway...
A Blonde Named Dave... the sequel to "A Boy Named Sue"...
This is part of why I think that SpamAssassin may well have the best Bayesian implementation, if only they modified it to do the Bayesian computations as a last step in the filtering process. Then some of the tokens the Bayesian scanner would look for would be from the summary of regex matches that SpamAssassin found. Since most of these transcend the simple tokenization used by most Bayesian algorithms, this should be more effective.
Is it necessarily a bad thing that being hacked has its consequences? If stories start coming out along the lines of: "I left my unpatched Windows XP box and got radmin'd and end up being on the hook for $270,000 from the RIAA and filing for bankruptcy and ruining my life for the next 309 years," maybe users on .edu and broadband ISPs will start taking security seriously. If that happens, hell, I'll thank the RIAA personally.
I'm not saying that the records should be disclosed to anyone (except it be through a lawful subpoena, etc.), but merely that the Universities should log this if only so they know whose MAC addresses and Ethernet ports to shut down.
For what it's worth, Lars Ulrich, in an interview with an Italian metal magazine, said that the band liked Beatallica and would like to get in touch with the people behind Beatallica for the purpose of distributing the Beatallica covers as B-sides for upcoming singles...
I can say for a fact that UMass does that; when you connect a NIC with an unrecognized MAC to the network, it assigns you a non-routable IP and all DNS queries from that block are answered with the IP of the server used to register the MAC address. In order to register, you need to know two things: a student ID number (which is no longer their SS#) and the user's password. That process would probably be sufficient to demonstrate identity in court (especially in a civil case, where the standard's not "beyond reasonable doubt" but "preponderance of probabilities").
To be honest, I think universities and similar institutions should keep these records, if only because of the number of times I get portscanned or a flood of Code Red/Nimda scans from University IPs...