The main point is just semantics, but semantics matter. Lawmakers have chosen to define this guy's crime as "terrorism", which is extremely stupid. While what he's accused of is bad and puts lives at risk, so do thousands of other felonies that aren't regarded as terorism.
By describing any bad thing done with a computer as terrorism, lawyers and the media devalue the word and make this guy sound even worse than he really is. Eventually, they'll have to come up with some other term to describe mass violent hate crimes committed by paramilitary groups.
Wireless USB was just announced yesterday. It sounds quite useful, but you won't be able to buy a wireless USB gadget until (at least) Christmas 2005. It'll add at least $20 to the price of a device (compared to $5 for Bluetooth and 50 cents for regular USB), so it won't be used much until the price comes down.
The article is wrong: Intel hasn't abandoned Bluetooth. It bought a Bluetooth chip company three months ago and announced yesterday that it would include Bluetooth along with 802.11a, b and g in the next version of Centrino.
Thanks purely to Intel's huge advertisng campaign, Centrino is already the most popular Wi-Fi chipset on the market, so its inclusion of Bluetooth will actually give the technology a huge boost. (The exact opposite of what the article says.) What Intel actually claimed is that UWB might replace Bluetooth five to ten years from now. Just like (Intel hopes) Itanium will replace its new Opteron clone.
Yes. The problem is that violent criminals tended to get long sentences anyway, so the three strikes law doesn't make a lot of difference to them. (Yes, life without parole is theoretically different from a 20-year sentence, but in practice they are often equivalent because whether people are let out of jail depends more on the current political and judicial mood than on what the original court decided.) It makes a huge difference to someone convicted on a minor charge like smoking pot or reverse-engineering a DVD.
But the OP is right: Many people who support the War on Drugs and Three Strikes don't support the War on Sharing.
This tradeoff would work if every spam message actually replaced a piece of physical junk mail. The problem is that a junk mailer can send millions of spams for the cost of one paper flyer, and they do.
Does anyone know if spam has actually decreased the volume of paper junk mail, or at least slowed its increase? My guess is that it probably hasn't, except in a few specialist areas such as press release distribution.
There may be a risk that the RIAA will sue people who download the torrent. It's not normally illegal to download RIAA music (despite the misleading superbowl commercials) but the torrent protocol does enforce sharing. Couldn't an RIAA lawyer click on the link, then sue all the unlucky fans who it taps for packets?
It's worse than that. The "stoners=terrorists" FUD was a political ad, but it was bought and paid for by the government using taxpayers' money.
Re:Militarisation of space - one option
on
The Future of NASA
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Why not make space, or at least the space around the earth, the same as the air: the space above a particular country belongs to that country
Because the first satellites were launched by the superpowers, and other countries didn't want to argue with them. There was actually some talk of dividing space up like this at the time, but when the USSR launched Sputnik, the US decided not to complain about it flying over. After all, the US wanted to fly its satellites over the USSR too.
Technically, some geostationary orbital slots do belong to the countries below, but that's a bit different: a permanent position, not just overflight.
This simply isn't true. Filling in a NIP is not incriminating youreslf; it is simply acknowledging receipt of the notice. You still have the right to go to court and plead "Not Guilty" if you think you've been wrongly accused.
The SCO case is more like me accusing you of theft, without any evidence. Because I have no idea what you supposedly stole, I then demand that you hand over all your posessions to me so that I can search through them and see if any of them might righfully be mine.
Most stock market prices owe more to speculation than fundamentals. That's obvious with SCO, but also true to a lesser extent with companies like Novell, IBM and Microsoft.
Novell is still in the business of selling software. It's just that some of this software (not all) happens to be GPL,. In general, the low-level OS-type stuff (ie. Linux, Mono) is Free, while higher application-layer stuff (ie. Netware) is not. So, the next version of NetWare will run on the Linux kernel, but will not itself be Free.
Re:when we're finished patting ourselves on the ba
on
2003: Year of Apache
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· Score: 1
If you're a household name, Microsoft will offer you a big discount (maybe even free-as-in-beer software and support) in order to go public and praise them. The people profiled in all those case studies you read about IIS and Windows Server haven't just spontaneously come forward.
If you're a big company or a govt. department and you threaten to switch to Linux, they'll offer you even more in order to avoid the bad publcity. But if you don't have bargaining power or a brand name, its ever-rising costs and BSA audits.
It all depends on whether Google's founders plan for it to be a real company or just another doomed dot-com that makes them rich in an over-hyped IPO and then disappears. Paying SCO would be very stupid in the long-term, because it will:
Show that Google is an easy mark for millions of other scammers, willing to pay out for supposed copyright violations without evidence. Google's position is further weakened by the fact that the Google cache (on which its search engine depends) really can be seen as violating the letter of the copyright law.
Demonstrate that Google's "don't be evil" maxim is just PR, turning everyone in the IT industry against the company. Thus is actually important in the short-term too, because dot-com IPOs depend mostly on public sentiment about a company, not rational revenue projections.
Cost Google a lot of money. SCO has repeatedly stated that it views contracts as a weapon, something that should warn anyone against entering into any kind of agreement with them. $7 million is just the start.
Having said all that, I don't think Google will buckle. It has a history of standing up to lawsuits
That tiny piece of land contains more than half the world's supply of oil. The desire for this on the part of Bush, Saddam and Bin Laden is economically motivated, even if the people who actually fight and die for it are often led to believe otherwise.
Re:Proud to be a Heretic!
on
What You Can't Say
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· Score: 4, Interesting
The current copyright system is not biased towards creators. It's biased towards copyright holders, an entirely different animal.
The monopoly position of media companies enables them to foist unfair contracts on creators. Similarly, levies on blank recoridng media and the criminilization of tools prevents creators from using new technology to bypass the monopolies. Copyright extensions maintain the profits of copyright holders, while actively harming creators by (like software patents) increasing the chance that they will be sued for an accidental violation.
There was one notable exception, when the BBC broadcast the SAS killing terrorists in London on not-quite-live TV. It's about the earliest thing I can remember watching on the news, and they still have the footage on their site.
Ironically, the terrorists were probably backed by Iraq, the one and only incident when Saddam really did sponsor terrorism in the UK. But no-one mentions that because it occured back in 1980, when we were still arming him with chemical weapons.
I feel the same way, but telemarketers and spammers are already taking advantage of it. Scammers have called me and said they were conducting a poll, only to ask questions like "When is your home insurance due for renewal?"
One of SCO's main PR arguments is that Linux can't possibly match proprietary software becuase it's written by amateurs, not professionals employed by a software company. We can expect them to use the exact same argument to attack the open-source legal analysis at Groklaw.
If SCO is like a lot of bankrupt companies, particularly those with ethically-challenged or delusional management, it won't officially lay off most employees. It'll just fail to make payroll. People will find that they've been working for free, and are way behind the lawyers in the creditor pecking order.
I'd vote for anyone who isn't Bush, which of course means a Democrat. But even someone who hates both major parties should still vote, because independent or third-party votes do make a difference.
If the major parties see a substantial portion of votes going to a single-issue candidate, they'll see that people feel strongly about that issue and try to adjust their platform to attract those voters. When people don't vote at all, politicians just assume that nobody cares what they do.
I dislike the libertarians because (like Bush) they often seem to be more interested in the rights of corporations than of human beings, but the principle still stands.
Slashdot Mirror
The main point is just semantics, but semantics matter. Lawmakers have chosen to define this guy's crime as "terrorism", which is extremely stupid. While what he's accused of is bad and puts lives at risk, so do thousands of other felonies that aren't regarded as terorism.
By describing any bad thing done with a computer as terrorism, lawyers and the media devalue the word and make this guy sound even worse than he really is. Eventually, they'll have to come up with some other term to describe mass violent hate crimes committed by paramilitary groups.
Wireless USB was just announced yesterday. It sounds quite useful, but you won't be able to buy a wireless USB gadget until (at least) Christmas 2005. It'll add at least $20 to the price of a device (compared to $5 for Bluetooth and 50 cents for regular USB), so it won't be used much until the price comes down.
The article is wrong: Intel hasn't abandoned Bluetooth. It bought a Bluetooth chip company three months ago and announced yesterday that it would include Bluetooth along with 802.11a, b and g in the next version of Centrino.
Thanks purely to Intel's huge advertisng campaign, Centrino is already the most popular Wi-Fi chipset on the market, so its inclusion of Bluetooth will actually give the technology a huge boost. (The exact opposite of what the article says.) What Intel actually claimed is that UWB might replace Bluetooth five to ten years from now. Just like (Intel hopes) Itanium will replace its new Opteron clone.
Yes. The problem is that violent criminals tended to get long sentences anyway, so the three strikes law doesn't make a lot of difference to them. (Yes, life without parole is theoretically different from a 20-year sentence, but in practice they are often equivalent because whether people are let out of jail depends more on the current political and judicial mood than on what the original court decided.) It makes a huge difference to someone convicted on a minor charge like smoking pot or reverse-engineering a DVD.
But the OP is right: Many people who support the War on Drugs and Three Strikes don't support the War on Sharing.
This tradeoff would work if every spam message actually replaced a piece of physical junk mail. The problem is that a junk mailer can send millions of spams for the cost of one paper flyer, and they do.
Does anyone know if spam has actually decreased the volume of paper junk mail, or at least slowed its increase? My guess is that it probably hasn't, except in a few specialist areas such as press release distribution.
There may be a risk that the RIAA will sue people who download the torrent. It's not normally illegal to download RIAA music (despite the misleading superbowl commercials) but the torrent protocol does enforce sharing. Couldn't an RIAA lawyer click on the link, then sue all the unlucky fans who it taps for packets?
They might mix the cameras, so *some* are fake and some are real. When you get on a bus, you don't know which is which.
You you can still access the text-only AV. They call it Raging Search, and it's even cleaner than Google.
If only AV did a better job at separating paid links from real search results. (Its actual results aren't great either, but neither are Google's.)
It's worse than that. The "stoners=terrorists" FUD was a political ad, but it was bought and paid for by the government using taxpayers' money.
Why not make space, or at least the space around the earth, the same as the air: the space above a particular country belongs to that country
Because the first satellites were launched by the superpowers, and other countries didn't want to argue with them. There was actually some talk of dividing space up like this at the time, but when the USSR launched Sputnik, the US decided not to complain about it flying over. After all, the US wanted to fly its satellites over the USSR too.
Technically, some geostationary orbital slots do belong to the countries below, but that's a bit different: a permanent position, not just overflight.
This simply isn't true. Filling in a NIP is not incriminating youreslf; it is simply acknowledging receipt of the notice. You still have the right to go to court and plead "Not Guilty" if you think you've been wrongly accused.
The SCO case is more like me accusing you of theft, without any evidence. Because I have no idea what you supposedly stole, I then demand that you hand over all your posessions to me so that I can search through them and see if any of them might righfully be mine.
Most stock market prices owe more to speculation than fundamentals. That's obvious with SCO, but also true to a lesser extent with companies like Novell, IBM and Microsoft.
Novell is still in the business of selling software. It's just that some of this software (not all) happens to be GPL,. In general, the low-level OS-type stuff (ie. Linux, Mono) is Free, while higher application-layer stuff (ie. Netware) is not. So, the next version of NetWare will run on the Linux kernel, but will not itself be Free.
If you're a household name, Microsoft will offer you a big discount (maybe even free-as-in-beer software and support) in order to go public and praise them. The people profiled in all those case studies you read about IIS and Windows Server haven't just spontaneously come forward.
If you're a big company or a govt. department and you threaten to switch to Linux, they'll offer you even more in order to avoid the bad publcity. But if you don't have bargaining power or a brand name, its ever-rising costs and BSA audits.
Having said all that, I don't think Google will buckle. It has a history of standing up to lawsuits
Verisign once issued a certificate to a fraudster who claimed to be Microsoft, prompting MS to issue an emergency patch for even otherwise-unsupported OSs.
If Verisign won't even bother to verify the identity of their own partner in monopoly, do you really trust them to check anyone else's?
That tiny piece of land contains more than half the world's supply of oil. The desire for this on the part of Bush, Saddam and Bin Laden is economically motivated, even if the people who actually fight and die for it are often led to believe otherwise.
The current copyright system is not biased towards creators. It's biased towards copyright holders, an entirely different animal.
The monopoly position of media companies enables them to foist unfair contracts on creators. Similarly, levies on blank recoridng media and the criminilization of tools prevents creators from using new technology to bypass the monopolies. Copyright extensions maintain the profits of copyright holders, while actively harming creators by (like software patents) increasing the chance that they will be sued for an accidental violation.
There was one notable exception, when the BBC broadcast the SAS killing terrorists in London on not-quite-live TV. It's about the earliest thing I can remember watching on the news, and they still have the footage on their site.
Ironically, the terrorists were probably backed by Iraq, the one and only incident when Saddam really did sponsor terrorism in the UK. But no-one mentions that because it occured back in 1980, when we were still arming him with chemical weapons.
There isn't a difference. Working together for the greater good is in our self-interest, at least in the long term.
I feel the same way, but telemarketers and spammers are already taking advantage of it. Scammers have called me and said they were conducting a poll, only to ask questions like "When is your home insurance due for renewal?"
Sounds like the no-backpack rule is to prevent you bringing in your own food and drink, not camcroders.
Personally, I wouldn't go to a movie theater that enforces rules like that or searches bags. My guess is that a lot of other people won't either.
One of SCO's main PR arguments is that Linux can't possibly match proprietary software becuase it's written by amateurs, not professionals employed by a software company. We can expect them to use the exact same argument to attack the open-source legal analysis at Groklaw.
If SCO is like a lot of bankrupt companies, particularly those with ethically-challenged or delusional management, it won't officially lay off most employees. It'll just fail to make payroll. People will find that they've been working for free, and are way behind the lawyers in the creditor pecking order.
I'd vote for anyone who isn't Bush, which of course means a Democrat. But even someone who hates both major parties should still vote, because independent or third-party votes do make a difference.
If the major parties see a substantial portion of votes going to a single-issue candidate, they'll see that people feel strongly about that issue and try to adjust their platform to attract those voters. When people don't vote at all, politicians just assume that nobody cares what they do.
I dislike the libertarians because (like Bush) they often seem to be more interested in the rights of corporations than of human beings, but the principle still stands.
Most companies don't care about the future. Their timeframe is strictly until the executives' stock options vest.