Looking at the article a little more closely, it does not say directly but the equipment concerned is being sold as a satelite TV decoder device. The programmer has been modified to 'unloop' cards. It has been modified for the purposes of hacking.
The story would not read quite as well if these facts were more prominent. The DMCA is a royal pain, but it does exist and if you are going to buy hacking gear you have to do so in a way that protects you.
Given my list of past clients, jobs etc I could probably buy anything and prove that I was using it legitimately under one of the 'research' clauses. Even so I am very careful to make sure I have documented proof of the purpose for having each item.
Did you read the article? A group of 7 people filed a suit against them claiming extortion. The judge ruled in favor of DirecTV and awarded DirecTV $100,000 in lawyers fees. Not only did these people get screwed out of $3500 each, they got screwed out of another $14000 each trying to fight the company
The case is under appeal, the judge is clearly a jerk who was simply looking to get the case out of his court.
Awarding the attorney costs in this instance indicates malice on the part of the judge. Attorney costs are awarded so rarely that an award of this amount for a case thrown out before trial stinks.
The fact that cases have now gone to trial and been dismissed demonstrates that there is a problem with the original demand letter.
Like Zeinfeld, I find the anti-American spin of the article more than a bit suspect. In particular, the statements about Super 301 trade laws blocking the introduction of TRON into Japanese school computers. This just doesn't make any sense?
Well you do have to remember the time. Not a lot made sense. The statement does not make sense to me because it is very clear that that is not the sort of threat the Japanese would have given in to at the time. The only reason they would have given in is if the TRON O/S was in fact being pushed as a part of a restraint of trade scheme and they got caught. For example a contract to fill japanese schools with some homebrew hardware concoction powered by TRON to keep IBM PCs out of the bidding.
The reason I discount Microsoft as being the nexus here is the politics of the time. Microsoft did not give the campaign contributions necessary to get that type of muscle, and the cost of the lost MSDOS licenses would have been small change. It is much more likely that a hardware manufacturer was upset.
At the time Japan bashing was a national political sport. The media printed a constant stream of smug articles about how the Japanese economy was going to kick, no sorry was kicking US butt. The US resorted with regular complaints about Japanese 'protectionism' while playing many of the same games themselves.
The nadir was when President George Bush mkI threw up on the Prime Minister of Japan at a state banquet.
Err... smartcards just store data, they don't have an embedded OS on them.
Smartcards with embedded processors have been available for years. Sun does very nicely selling its JavaCard technology. Before that there were plenty of cards with a standard cell 6502 onboard.
Story is out of whack. In 1989 Microsoft Windows barely worked and the machines of the day barely had the processing power.
It is more likely that the trade barrier being described would be for sale of hardware rather than for software. I can't see the US Govt getting up in a lather about the MSDOS license fee.
The other issue the story ignores is that there would not be as many copies of the O/S if there was a charge of a cent a copy.
The most widely used O/S is embedded on some smartcard or other...
And if we didn't use Napster we were infants in diapers?
Yeah, like at the peak of the dotCOM bubble I realy needed to steal music through Napster.
I read the book, it is a lot better than the review (which admittedly says little). The thing that is so fascinating is that these people were trying to make money out of a business scheme which was completely and utterly whacko.
Napster was originally put together without any thought for the legality of what they were doing. When they went to look for funding they obtained a number of legal opinions which they treated in pretty much the same way the Bush administration handled intelligence on Iraqi uranium deals. They believed anything that they liked and ignored the vast majority that they disliked.
The basic business strategy was to make Napster so big that they could then deal with the record industry and dictate terms. So they refused to talk to the RIAA when they tried to talk.
The other surprising thing that came out of the book was the reason for Napster being granted an appeal against the interim injunction. This was touted as a huge vindication of Napster at the time. In fact what went on was that one of the judges on the appeals review board was big into copyright law and internet and saw the opportunity to be involved in a really important precedent setting rulling.
The story of the VC funding is equally depressing.
HOWEVER, there's a fundamental problem with that plan; the left isn't nearly as cohesive or well organized as the right, and he's depending on a skittish bunch.
I think you have to take a look at the policies Dean has actually committed to rather than his anti-war stance alone.
Dean's base is not looking for a different policy so much as validation of their original opposition to the war. Dean is attacking the administration on the original decision to invade, he is not demanding immediate unilateral withdrawal or any similar woolly-headed peacenik McGovern type program.
Dean's position is much closer to that of Nixon in '68 on Vietnam. Nixon was not responsible for the original decision to go into Vietnam, in '68 he sold himself as the surest pair of hands to set right the mess created by the other party. It is not that difficult for Dean to convince people that he is more likely to succeed in the necessary diplomatic maneuvers than Bush. Bush has after all managed to create a split in his own party, loosing the Senate majority in 2001. He his engaged in an idiotic vendetta against the French and Germans. Worst of all he is apparently addicted to making unnecessary grandstanding statements in speaches to make himself appear tough, even when they create real problems for US diplomacy and US troops. 20 US soldiers were injured the day after Bush made his 'bring 'em on' comment.
Bush cannot triangulate Dean the way Nixon triangulated McGovern in '72 by pledging immediate 'peace with honor'. McGovern was a one issue candidate, stop the war. The peace negotiations had already started before the election.
The one area where Dean may have to trim his policies slightly is in the area of reversing the Bush tax cuts. Fiscal responsibility and a balanced budget would in previous years have been considered a 'conservative' position. Kerry is saying he would only repeal the planned future tax cuts. I suspect that by the time of the primaries Dean will have shifted his position slightly to cancel the future cuts and only roll back the cuts in the inheritance tax and others that only affect the rich. The amount of money that the Bush tax cuts give to poor and middle income famillies is simply not that large to be a priority.
I hate Bush, but common decency (which the right doesn't appear to have) prevents me from wanting to impeach Bush on the flimsiest of excuses, or find a way to recall him.
Of course Bush should not be impeached on a flimsy pretext. Lying to Congress in the State of the Union Address to create a spurious pretext for war is not a flimsy pretext, it is the type of high crime that impeachment is for. LBJ should probably have been impeached for lying about the Gulf of Tonkin incident.
Better though would be to throw the lying bum out at the next election. Consider the list of lies to date:
The budget surplus is large enough to support a huge tax cut.
The SEC exonerated him from improper conduct while a director of Harken oil.
Kenneth Lay supported his opponent for Govenor of Texas.
That no strings were pulled to get him a placement in the Texas National Guard.
Everybody benefits from the tax cuts.
"Compassionate Conservative"
And that is not to mention his DUI conviction or going AWOL from the Texas National Guard. The pattern of lies and evasions makes it impossible to take anything he says as being credible.
If Al Gore had won and he'd been the one who ordered the invasion of Iraq I seriously doubt that most Democrats and other dyed in the wool lefties would be complaining one little bit.
That is very unlikely. Gore would certainly have 'invaded' Afghanistan - although that particular 'war' was won more through bribes and politics than by actual fighting. That is the way to do it if you have the option of course.
It is highly unlikely that Gore would have gone into Iraq with Bin Laden still on the loose. The intelligence assements were that Iraq was a containable threat. North Korea and Iran are far more urgent situations - although in large part as a result of the idiotic 'axis of evil comment'.
It the immediate aftermath of 9-11 there was a window of opportunity to support the democratically elected moderates in Iran stage a coup against the clerics and the 'guardianship council'.
The problem with invading Iraq was never going to be the invasion part, it was the occupation that would be necessary afterwards that was always the issue. That was the reason that Bush '41 did not continue into Iraq.
Charges by the ICC? Possible but unlikely. Anyone from the GWB administration answering to the ICC, cold day in the seventh ring.
Actually the rules of the ICC are that a national trial prempts the ICC. The only way a US citizen could end up in front of the ICC would be if the US declined to prosecute or a Presidential pardon was used to prevent prosecution.
The crimes that the ICC can try are the most serious type of war crimes, genocide, torture etc. Lying to Congress about the reasons for a war does not make the cut.
What could rise to that level is the breaches of the Geneva protocols at Guantanamo. It is likely that the next scandal to hit will be revelations that the legal council advised Ashcroft that you can't make it up as you go along as they have been doing.
The doctrinal issue seems to be that insurance indicates a lack of faith in God.
The fact that throughout the middle ages the church was in effect the social security system seems to be forgotten. Thats what the tithes were really for.
Still you gotta love the fact there is an Amish Web site.
Star Wars was one of the biggest reasons that the cold war is over.
Gorbachev and Solidarity are the reason the cold war ended. Reagan's policy was one of containment, not toppling the Soviets.
Star wars cannot have had a critical effect on the Soviet Union for the simple reason they never responded. Moreover Reagan agreed to a series of arms control measures that actually reduced the Soviet military spending. This switch and bait wise after the fact argument is pretty insulting to Reagan. It implies that he was totally insincere about his foreign policy, I don't believe that is the case.
The turning point in the cold war was much earlier, putting a man on the moon. That was the critical achievement that the USSR was unable to match.
The somewhat curious fact is that the carrier would be launched while he was still alive. That would in earlier days be seen as a form of insult, wishing he was dead. They did the same with Thatcher. Granted neither Thatcher or Reagan is at this point in a position to know what is going on in their name, but even so it is somewhat odd.
I agree, on the architecture/programming relationship and would throw music composition into the mix as well. All three require an understanding of the underlying mathematics and all three require asthetics too.
I think that in practice your theory is disproved by the existence of The Monkees, Play and Hanson as counterexamples.
The book is probably useful mostly as an innoculation against the type of pseudo-security people often get hung up on. It is particularly useful in that it is written by some of the people who are frequently cited as the source of dogmas that they actually disclaim.
One of the commonly repeated security shiboleths is 'end to end' security. This is a good thing in the same way that it is a good idea to have a burglar alarm in your house. The problem is when people start claiming that you should ONLY have a burglar alarm and that locking your front door is a BAD IDEA.
Over ten years ago I was involved in a series of arguments over the need for shadow passwords in UNIX. Not only did most people not get that they were needed there was actual opposition to the idea, people would claim repeatedly that protecting the password file made a system less secure. This despite the fact that crack was already circulating and usually managed to break a sizable proportion of passwords.
I get rather worried by the way some network administrators seem to consider getting a firewall to be the end of their security issues. It is as if they think a firewall is a +5 amulet of invincibility. But I get equally woried when folk make the claim that firewalls are unnecessary, and there are some very expensive consultants who make that claim when their clients are not arround.
(1) He obviously can't tell the difference between pure and applied mathematics and
(2) How come all the loser mathematicians who can't hack it end up becoming programmers?.
Well I have something of an advantage here, having actually read the original notes rather than the article about them. Back in the late 1980s I spent an afternoon reading them. Dijkstra used to send the notes out to what he considered the major computer science labs. Since Oxford was run by Tony Hoare it was obviously on the list.
At the time some of the other students thought that this practice was somewhat pretentious, tending to imply a somewhat elevated self-opinion. Today of course everyone from the lowliest grad student shares far more mundane thoughts in their blogs.
What Dijkstra was actually doing in the article referred to was pointing out that there was nothing intrinsically superior about 'pure' mathematics. At the time computer science was regularly condescended to as an inferior for of mathematics.
Where Dijkstra was wrong is that comp sci is not a branch of mathematics at all, it is as my tutor Tony Hoare pointed out 'An engineering profession'. At the time this was first proposed the idea was somewhat controvertial, today almost every programmer regards themselves as an engineer.
I think that in fact we have to go a bit further and understand that the highest levels of programming are actually more akin to architecture. It combines art and engineering, just as engineering combines science and mathematics.
There are plenty of architects and engineers who could never make much progress in the pure sciences. But take the best architects and the best engineers and you will often find that not only were most capable of being top class scientists, in many cases they actually were.
Sometimes, if you're lucky, a link to a zipped HTML version also appears. Why you'd ZIP an HTML file that you're offering on a web site is beyond me.
The point is to make the plaintext version the accessible one and hide the HTML that someone produced.
We get exactly the same attitude from the IETF which also has a wierd plaintext fetish. You can submit drafts in plaintext and also postscript, but not HTML.
The reasons given make absolutely no sense, it is pretty easy to verify that an HTML text complies with a DTD or schema using well known tools so it is easy to make sure that documents do not use poorly supported features or appear differently on different browsers. The probability that knowledge of interpeting HTML will be lost is NIL.
Gutenberg is great and all, but it really needs to dump the text format. So much information is lost that it makes reading some texts extremely difficult.
The guy that runs the scheme is a bigott on this issue. He has some wierd issue with the Web as a competitor to what he sees as his domain.
Use of a lightweight markup of any sort would improve the value of the texts. Even if they invented their own markup it would be an improvement.
Archeologists have managed to decipher the Myan hierogliphs, even linear B. Yet we still have people making the idiotic claim that HTML should be avoided lest people forget how to read it.
When I first used HTML I had to reverse engineer it from other web pages because there wasn't a manual yet. it took me all of about ten minutes to have H1..H6, P and UL figured out.
An Assembly committee has rejected a consumer-backed bill that would ban unsolicited e-mail ads but approved a rival measure supported by Microsoft and other computer industry companies.
That would be the situation according to the congresswoman whose bill got squelched. I doubt many others see it that way, and since when did Microsoft have undue influence in the CALIFORNIA senate?
The woman got a bill passed last year that failled so it is hardly suprising that the committee thought it was someone else's turn this time arround. Nobody can claim that the bill that passed is anything other than anti-spam. It may not be the anti spam bill the woman wanted - i.e. with her name attached. But bloocking the Bowers self promotion bill is not the same as being pro-spam any more that blocking drilling in ANWAR Alaska is pro-Bin Laden.
There is good reason to go carefully here. Utah passed an anti spam bil that has turned out to be a disaster. Hundreds of class action suits have been filled, none of which go after the hard core worst of the worst spammers like Ralsky or Eddy Marin.
Removing the alleged infringing code does not eliminate the infringement but it does significantly limit the damages.
No, it doesn't.
Care to cite an authority for that? Continuing to infringe after you have been put on notice is a serious matter. Trebble damages and all that.
If the infringement is willful it becomes a criminal matter.
That is why you put someone on notice.
Of course one could try the slashdot approach, 'yes your honor we continued to ship the same code for two years after SCO presented the evidence of infringement'. I suspect that you do a lot better with 'we stopped infringing the minute SCO brought the issue to our attention.'
who finds these types of articles really, really, really boring
I have to wonder what the point is of having a card that is any faster than the one the guys writing the games software use. Like what is the probability that someone is going to write a game that only works on a $400 card?
It was one thing when the issue was whether you could do 3D and run the monitor at 800x400 or 1024x1280 but I'm not exactly in a hurry to go beyond that...
Guess how much the card that was top of the line 2 years ago costs now - `yes thats right you get them given away free in boxes of breakfast cereal.
I think that what is going on here is that the people who used to be "audiophile" biggots have got into something new now that CD and dvd have made the difference between high end and commodity gear irrelevant.
I just got myself an ATI all in wonder board it was a bit pricer because it had tv out, video capture etc but those are the features I need and there is still an appreciable difference between good and bad capture cards, but give that a few more years and it will all be the same as well.
The thing that is a bigger issue is heat. I had an nvidia card that was cuting edge at the time, damn thing went as soon as the heatwave started. Before that I had a 3DFx card that I had to replace when Windows XP came along. I wanted to upgrade to XP because the machine was unstable, but with 3DFx out of business there were no new drivers. But the instability problem went as soon as I ditched the 3DFx card anyway..
These days there are plenty of things I care more about than raw speed. Things like heat produced, reliability, robustness of the software drivers, ease of installation etc. It remains a mystery to me why case manufacturers seem unable to comprehend that there might be a market for a media PC in a case that looks good in a video rack... ho hum...
That's bullshit, go ahead and ask any IP lawyer. Just because the infringing code is removed doesn't negate the fact that the infringement occured, and it would have absolutely no negative effect on any damages awarded.
Removing the alleged infringing code does not eliminate the infringement but it does significantly limit the damages.
If the infringement is deemed to be willful the plaintif is entitled to statutory damages irrespective of any actual damage that occurs and punitive trebled damages.
If the infringement is not willful SCO only get to recover actual damages. In this case the cost of a cafe latte and doughnut for each member of the board.
(Good) lawyers don't JUMP at anything they don't have to jump at. They act more like snipers, studying their target(s) carefully, finding the best angle to attack from, and then fire a single shot designed to do the most damage
In this case the FSF lawyer seems to be taking the best approach for damage limitation. Ask SCO for specific details of the parts of Linux they claim are infringing.
Courts tend to try to act in a reasonable way. The two big issues for a copyright lawsuit are financial losses and intention. It is unlikely that the courts are going to impose substantial damages for unintentional infringement if there is no financial loss for the copyright holder or gain for the alleged infringer.
What the FSF is doing here is taking the moral high ground. Clearly there is no way anyone can prove the provenance of every line of code in a million lines of source. But they can demonstrate that they are not willfully infringing.
SCO knows that there is no chance of significant damages if the alleged infringing code is replaced before the case comes to trial. That is the reason they are trying to avoid stating their claim. It is an utterly futile legal strategy, in the first place the court is not going to set a trial date before SCO specifies the lines of code at issue. Secondly the fact SCO is trying to prevent linux removing the alleged infringing code is likely to be taken into account by the court.
no wonder we have children who have no sense of what's right because parents don't let them find out what is right but of course they let them find out what is wrong but don't say its wrong (porn)
Hang on, who said anything about stopping children watching anything. It's my parent's viewing that I am censoring, and that is because I don't like to sit and listen to TV channels that publish lies and bigottry.
I see nothing wrong in porn, at least porn is truth of a kind. But Murdoch's hate TV on the other hand is evil.
Why should a company be forced to include a competitors product with their own?
It's a punitive measure.
But even with Ascroft as AG the courts still presume innocence before a case is settled. Sun is not entitled to damages or any form of punishment until they prove their case. An injunction is strictly limited to preventing certain types of irreparable harm.
Sun's case for forcing Microsoft to carry Java is pretty ludicrous. They sued Microsoft to stop them carrying Java. Then they were surprised that Microsoft wanted nothing more to do with Java and in particular Sun's Java.
It is even more ludicrous when you look at where client side Java is these days. Client side java was getting nowhere when Microsoft was distributing it, in large part because the software Sun originally delivered was utter crap.
What Scott McNealy is up to is tring to find an excuse for the reason Sun is going down the toilet. The reason for that is not Microsoft, its Linux. Some companies are moving from expensive Sun boxes to WNT machines, but the flight from SPARC to Intel is making much deeper cuts in Sun's market share. Sun's problem is not Microsoft, its Dell, HP and IBM, each of which is taking deep bites out of Sun each quarter and saying yum yum yum, give me more.
Its a bit like blaming Bin Laden for the budget deficit. Bin Laden is a really bad guy, but 9/11 is not the cause of the Bush recession or the Bush deficit.
An interesting contrast to the know nothing lawyer who had an opinion piece on news.com.com last week.
I did notice one point where the professor's argument seemed a little weak, he did not push on the expertise question as hard as he should have. In particular I fail to see how entering into a contractual relationship with AT&T confers any sort of 'expertise' on SCO employees.
Assuming SCO did win, and their assertions about fundemental os features were upheld. Don't you think that Microsoft would be the first company they would go after?
That is unlikely in the extreeme, this is simply Microsoft having a relatively cheap bit of fun and make a bit of money for themselves. If SCO did win their next target would be Sun. But nobody really expects that to happen.
Slashdot Mirror
The story would not read quite as well if these facts were more prominent. The DMCA is a royal pain, but it does exist and if you are going to buy hacking gear you have to do so in a way that protects you.
Given my list of past clients, jobs etc I could probably buy anything and prove that I was using it legitimately under one of the 'research' clauses. Even so I am very careful to make sure I have documented proof of the purpose for having each item.
The case is under appeal, the judge is clearly a jerk who was simply looking to get the case out of his court.
Awarding the attorney costs in this instance indicates malice on the part of the judge. Attorney costs are awarded so rarely that an award of this amount for a case thrown out before trial stinks.
The fact that cases have now gone to trial and been dismissed demonstrates that there is a problem with the original demand letter.
Well you do have to remember the time. Not a lot made sense. The statement does not make sense to me because it is very clear that that is not the sort of threat the Japanese would have given in to at the time. The only reason they would have given in is if the TRON O/S was in fact being pushed as a part of a restraint of trade scheme and they got caught. For example a contract to fill japanese schools with some homebrew hardware concoction powered by TRON to keep IBM PCs out of the bidding.
The reason I discount Microsoft as being the nexus here is the politics of the time. Microsoft did not give the campaign contributions necessary to get that type of muscle, and the cost of the lost MSDOS licenses would have been small change. It is much more likely that a hardware manufacturer was upset.
At the time Japan bashing was a national political sport. The media printed a constant stream of smug articles about how the Japanese economy was going to kick, no sorry was kicking US butt. The US resorted with regular complaints about Japanese 'protectionism' while playing many of the same games themselves.
The nadir was when President George Bush mkI threw up on the Prime Minister of Japan at a state banquet.
Smartcards with embedded processors have been available for years. Sun does very nicely selling its JavaCard technology. Before that there were plenty of cards with a standard cell 6502 onboard.
It is more likely that the trade barrier being described would be for sale of hardware rather than for software. I can't see the US Govt getting up in a lather about the MSDOS license fee.
The other issue the story ignores is that there would not be as many copies of the O/S if there was a charge of a cent a copy.
The most widely used O/S is embedded on some smartcard or other...
Yeah, like at the peak of the dotCOM bubble I realy needed to steal music through Napster.
I read the book, it is a lot better than the review (which admittedly says little). The thing that is so fascinating is that these people were trying to make money out of a business scheme which was completely and utterly whacko.
Napster was originally put together without any thought for the legality of what they were doing. When they went to look for funding they obtained a number of legal opinions which they treated in pretty much the same way the Bush administration handled intelligence on Iraqi uranium deals. They believed anything that they liked and ignored the vast majority that they disliked.
The basic business strategy was to make Napster so big that they could then deal with the record industry and dictate terms. So they refused to talk to the RIAA when they tried to talk.
The other surprising thing that came out of the book was the reason for Napster being granted an appeal against the interim injunction. This was touted as a huge vindication of Napster at the time. In fact what went on was that one of the judges on the appeals review board was big into copyright law and internet and saw the opportunity to be involved in a really important precedent setting rulling.
The story of the VC funding is equally depressing.
I think you have to take a look at the policies Dean has actually committed to rather than his anti-war stance alone.
Dean's base is not looking for a different policy so much as validation of their original opposition to the war. Dean is attacking the administration on the original decision to invade, he is not demanding immediate unilateral withdrawal or any similar woolly-headed peacenik McGovern type program.
Dean's position is much closer to that of Nixon in '68 on Vietnam. Nixon was not responsible for the original decision to go into Vietnam, in '68 he sold himself as the surest pair of hands to set right the mess created by the other party. It is not that difficult for Dean to convince people that he is more likely to succeed in the necessary diplomatic maneuvers than Bush. Bush has after all managed to create a split in his own party, loosing the Senate majority in 2001. He his engaged in an idiotic vendetta against the French and Germans. Worst of all he is apparently addicted to making unnecessary grandstanding statements in speaches to make himself appear tough, even when they create real problems for US diplomacy and US troops. 20 US soldiers were injured the day after Bush made his 'bring 'em on' comment.
Bush cannot triangulate Dean the way Nixon triangulated McGovern in '72 by pledging immediate 'peace with honor'. McGovern was a one issue candidate, stop the war. The peace negotiations had already started before the election.
The one area where Dean may have to trim his policies slightly is in the area of reversing the Bush tax cuts. Fiscal responsibility and a balanced budget would in previous years have been considered a 'conservative' position. Kerry is saying he would only repeal the planned future tax cuts. I suspect that by the time of the primaries Dean will have shifted his position slightly to cancel the future cuts and only roll back the cuts in the inheritance tax and others that only affect the rich. The amount of money that the Bush tax cuts give to poor and middle income famillies is simply not that large to be a priority.
Of course Bush should not be impeached on a flimsy pretext. Lying to Congress in the State of the Union Address to create a spurious pretext for war is not a flimsy pretext, it is the type of high crime that impeachment is for. LBJ should probably have been impeached for lying about the Gulf of Tonkin incident.
Better though would be to throw the lying bum out at the next election. Consider the list of lies to date:
- The budget surplus is large enough to support a huge tax cut.
- The SEC exonerated him from improper conduct while a director of Harken oil.
- Kenneth Lay supported his opponent for Govenor of Texas.
- That no strings were pulled to get him a placement in the Texas National Guard.
- Everybody benefits from the tax cuts.
- "Compassionate Conservative"
And that is not to mention his DUI conviction or going AWOL from the Texas National Guard. The pattern of lies and evasions makes it impossible to take anything he says as being credible.That is very unlikely. Gore would certainly have 'invaded' Afghanistan - although that particular 'war' was won more through bribes and politics than by actual fighting. That is the way to do it if you have the option of course.
It is highly unlikely that Gore would have gone into Iraq with Bin Laden still on the loose. The intelligence assements were that Iraq was a containable threat. North Korea and Iran are far more urgent situations - although in large part as a result of the idiotic 'axis of evil comment'.
It the immediate aftermath of 9-11 there was a window of opportunity to support the democratically elected moderates in Iran stage a coup against the clerics and the 'guardianship council'.
The problem with invading Iraq was never going to be the invasion part, it was the occupation that would be necessary afterwards that was always the issue. That was the reason that Bush '41 did not continue into Iraq.
Actually the rules of the ICC are that a national trial prempts the ICC. The only way a US citizen could end up in front of the ICC would be if the US declined to prosecute or a Presidential pardon was used to prevent prosecution.
The crimes that the ICC can try are the most serious type of war crimes, genocide, torture etc. Lying to Congress about the reasons for a war does not make the cut.
What could rise to that level is the breaches of the Geneva protocols at Guantanamo. It is likely that the next scandal to hit will be revelations that the legal council advised Ashcroft that you can't make it up as you go along as they have been doing.
Yep, take a look at the amish web site
The doctrinal issue seems to be that insurance indicates a lack of faith in God.
The fact that throughout the middle ages the church was in effect the social security system seems to be forgotten. Thats what the tithes were really for.
Still you gotta love the fact there is an Amish Web site.
Gorbachev and Solidarity are the reason the cold war ended. Reagan's policy was one of containment, not toppling the Soviets.
Star wars cannot have had a critical effect on the Soviet Union for the simple reason they never responded. Moreover Reagan agreed to a series of arms control measures that actually reduced the Soviet military spending. This switch and bait wise after the fact argument is pretty insulting to Reagan. It implies that he was totally insincere about his foreign policy, I don't believe that is the case.
The turning point in the cold war was much earlier, putting a man on the moon. That was the critical achievement that the USSR was unable to match.
The somewhat curious fact is that the carrier would be launched while he was still alive. That would in earlier days be seen as a form of insult, wishing he was dead. They did the same with Thatcher. Granted neither Thatcher or Reagan is at this point in a position to know what is going on in their name, but even so it is somewhat odd.
I think that in practice your theory is disproved by the existence of The Monkees, Play and Hanson as counterexamples.
One of the commonly repeated security shiboleths is 'end to end' security. This is a good thing in the same way that it is a good idea to have a burglar alarm in your house. The problem is when people start claiming that you should ONLY have a burglar alarm and that locking your front door is a BAD IDEA.
Over ten years ago I was involved in a series of arguments over the need for shadow passwords in UNIX. Not only did most people not get that they were needed there was actual opposition to the idea, people would claim repeatedly that protecting the password file made a system less secure. This despite the fact that crack was already circulating and usually managed to break a sizable proportion of passwords.
I get rather worried by the way some network administrators seem to consider getting a firewall to be the end of their security issues. It is as if they think a firewall is a +5 amulet of invincibility. But I get equally woried when folk make the claim that firewalls are unnecessary, and there are some very expensive consultants who make that claim when their clients are not arround.
(2) How come all the loser mathematicians who can't hack it end up becoming programmers?.
Well I have something of an advantage here, having actually read the original notes rather than the article about them. Back in the late 1980s I spent an afternoon reading them. Dijkstra used to send the notes out to what he considered the major computer science labs. Since Oxford was run by Tony Hoare it was obviously on the list.
At the time some of the other students thought that this practice was somewhat pretentious, tending to imply a somewhat elevated self-opinion. Today of course everyone from the lowliest grad student shares far more mundane thoughts in their blogs.
What Dijkstra was actually doing in the article referred to was pointing out that there was nothing intrinsically superior about 'pure' mathematics. At the time computer science was regularly condescended to as an inferior for of mathematics.
Where Dijkstra was wrong is that comp sci is not a branch of mathematics at all, it is as my tutor Tony Hoare pointed out 'An engineering profession'. At the time this was first proposed the idea was somewhat controvertial, today almost every programmer regards themselves as an engineer.
I think that in fact we have to go a bit further and understand that the highest levels of programming are actually more akin to architecture. It combines art and engineering, just as engineering combines science and mathematics.
There are plenty of architects and engineers who could never make much progress in the pure sciences. But take the best architects and the best engineers and you will often find that not only were most capable of being top class scientists, in many cases they actually were.
The point is to make the plaintext version the accessible one and hide the HTML that someone produced.
We get exactly the same attitude from the IETF which also has a wierd plaintext fetish. You can submit drafts in plaintext and also postscript, but not HTML.
The reasons given make absolutely no sense, it is pretty easy to verify that an HTML text complies with a DTD or schema using well known tools so it is easy to make sure that documents do not use poorly supported features or appear differently on different browsers. The probability that knowledge of interpeting HTML will be lost is NIL.
The guy that runs the scheme is a bigott on this issue. He has some wierd issue with the Web as a competitor to what he sees as his domain.
Use of a lightweight markup of any sort would improve the value of the texts. Even if they invented their own markup it would be an improvement.
Archeologists have managed to decipher the Myan hierogliphs, even linear B. Yet we still have people making the idiotic claim that HTML should be avoided lest people forget how to read it.
When I first used HTML I had to reverse engineer it from other web pages because there wasn't a manual yet. it took me all of about ten minutes to have H1..H6, P and UL figured out.
That would be the situation according to the congresswoman whose bill got squelched. I doubt many others see it that way, and since when did Microsoft have undue influence in the CALIFORNIA senate?
The woman got a bill passed last year that failled so it is hardly suprising that the committee thought it was someone else's turn this time arround. Nobody can claim that the bill that passed is anything other than anti-spam. It may not be the anti spam bill the woman wanted - i.e. with her name attached. But bloocking the Bowers self promotion bill is not the same as being pro-spam any more that blocking drilling in ANWAR Alaska is pro-Bin Laden.
There is good reason to go carefully here. Utah passed an anti spam bil that has turned out to be a disaster. Hundreds of class action suits have been filled, none of which go after the hard core worst of the worst spammers like Ralsky or Eddy Marin.
No, it doesn't.
Care to cite an authority for that? Continuing to infringe after you have been put on notice is a serious matter. Trebble damages and all that.
If the infringement is willful it becomes a criminal matter.
That is why you put someone on notice.
Of course one could try the slashdot approach, 'yes your honor we continued to ship the same code for two years after SCO presented the evidence of infringement'. I suspect that you do a lot better with 'we stopped infringing the minute SCO brought the issue to our attention.'
I have to wonder what the point is of having a card that is any faster than the one the guys writing the games software use. Like what is the probability that someone is going to write a game that only works on a $400 card?
It was one thing when the issue was whether you could do 3D and run the monitor at 800x400 or 1024x1280 but I'm not exactly in a hurry to go beyond that...
Guess how much the card that was top of the line 2 years ago costs now - `yes thats right you get them given away free in boxes of breakfast cereal.
I think that what is going on here is that the people who used to be "audiophile" biggots have got into something new now that CD and dvd have made the difference between high end and commodity gear irrelevant.
I just got myself an ATI all in wonder board it was a bit pricer because it had tv out, video capture etc but those are the features I need and there is still an appreciable difference between good and bad capture cards, but give that a few more years and it will all be the same as well.
The thing that is a bigger issue is heat. I had an nvidia card that was cuting edge at the time, damn thing went as soon as the heatwave started. Before that I had a 3DFx card that I had to replace when Windows XP came along. I wanted to upgrade to XP because the machine was unstable, but with 3DFx out of business there were no new drivers. But the instability problem went as soon as I ditched the 3DFx card anyway..
These days there are plenty of things I care more about than raw speed. Things like heat produced, reliability, robustness of the software drivers, ease of installation etc. It remains a mystery to me why case manufacturers seem unable to comprehend that there might be a market for a media PC in a case that looks good in a video rack... ho hum...
Removing the alleged infringing code does not eliminate the infringement but it does significantly limit the damages.
If the infringement is deemed to be willful the plaintif is entitled to statutory damages irrespective of any actual damage that occurs and punitive trebled damages.
If the infringement is not willful SCO only get to recover actual damages. In this case the cost of a cafe latte and doughnut for each member of the board.
In this case the FSF lawyer seems to be taking the best approach for damage limitation. Ask SCO for specific details of the parts of Linux they claim are infringing.
Courts tend to try to act in a reasonable way. The two big issues for a copyright lawsuit are financial losses and intention. It is unlikely that the courts are going to impose substantial damages for unintentional infringement if there is no financial loss for the copyright holder or gain for the alleged infringer.
What the FSF is doing here is taking the moral high ground. Clearly there is no way anyone can prove the provenance of every line of code in a million lines of source. But they can demonstrate that they are not willfully infringing.
SCO knows that there is no chance of significant damages if the alleged infringing code is replaced before the case comes to trial. That is the reason they are trying to avoid stating their claim. It is an utterly futile legal strategy, in the first place the court is not going to set a trial date before SCO specifies the lines of code at issue. Secondly the fact SCO is trying to prevent linux removing the alleged infringing code is likely to be taken into account by the court.
Hang on, who said anything about stopping children watching anything. It's my parent's viewing that I am censoring, and that is because I don't like to sit and listen to TV channels that publish lies and bigottry.
I see nothing wrong in porn, at least porn is truth of a kind. But Murdoch's hate TV on the other hand is evil.
It's a punitive measure.
But even with Ascroft as AG the courts still presume innocence before a case is settled. Sun is not entitled to damages or any form of punishment until they prove their case. An injunction is strictly limited to preventing certain types of irreparable harm.
Sun's case for forcing Microsoft to carry Java is pretty ludicrous. They sued Microsoft to stop them carrying Java. Then they were surprised that Microsoft wanted nothing more to do with Java and in particular Sun's Java.
It is even more ludicrous when you look at where client side Java is these days. Client side java was getting nowhere when Microsoft was distributing it, in large part because the software Sun originally delivered was utter crap.
What Scott McNealy is up to is tring to find an excuse for the reason Sun is going down the toilet. The reason for that is not Microsoft, its Linux. Some companies are moving from expensive Sun boxes to WNT machines, but the flight from SPARC to Intel is making much deeper cuts in Sun's market share. Sun's problem is not Microsoft, its Dell, HP and IBM, each of which is taking deep bites out of Sun each quarter and saying yum yum yum, give me more.
Its a bit like blaming Bin Laden for the budget deficit. Bin Laden is a really bad guy, but 9/11 is not the cause of the Bush recession or the Bush deficit.
I did notice one point where the professor's argument seemed a little weak, he did not push on the expertise question as hard as he should have. In particular I fail to see how entering into a contractual relationship with AT&T confers any sort of 'expertise' on SCO employees.
Assuming SCO did win, and their assertions about fundemental os features were upheld. Don't you think that Microsoft would be the first company they would go after?
That is unlikely in the extreeme, this is simply Microsoft having a relatively cheap bit of fun and make a bit of money for themselves. If SCO did win their next target would be Sun. But nobody really expects that to happen.