Show me proof of ownership for your toilet. Bet you can't!
That's actually very easy, as a toilet is considered to be a component of your house, and thus property of the house owner. So you only have to prove ownership of the house, which is usually well documented.
Usually, the possessor of an object is considered to be the owner, unless the contrary is proven.
Software isn't an object. It's information, and you need a licence, a contract to be allowed to copy it. Hence, you're not proving your ownership, but you have to prove that you were entitled to make a copy (install it).
RTL Z (national television, all day business news), the Netherlands, this afternoon:
It was said that if you valued security, Microsoft wasn't the best solution. You'd be better off with Apple or Linux.
This could very well be a (another) turning point for linux. Of course, by the time something like this happens to Linux, everybody is going to run the other way again, but it could give OS some inroads.
When I worked with the technical service at a local computershop (paradigit, Utrecht) we once did the same.
A man came in with a broken computer. He didn't know how it happened, but we suspected lightning strike. The chips at his harddrive and graphics card had literally exploded, while some on his motherboard had melted. Obviously, his HDD was lost, but the man had 3 months of work on it and no backup (This incident is when I started making backups of anything important).
Anyway, we took a box of hdd's that were up for warranty (quantum bigfoots, which failed 25% of the time), swapped the boards, and it worked. We copied all of this to a new hdd, and presto. Happy man, for only the price of a new harddrive and f25,- labour costs (about US$10 at the time).
Luckily for him, we didn't need to go searching different firmware boards. But even the more experienced people at the shop had never encountered something similar before, so it was quite exciting.
I can see how these people, that devote so much time to the game, get so good at it. Many winning athletes get large sums of prize money, so I don't see why computer gamers wouldn't.
But for it to really take off it they should turn it into a mass spectator sport somehow. The more people watching it, the more money gets involved, and the better (read more fanatical) the contestants get.
I can even envision some sort of shirt sponsoring (skin sponsoring?) for the contestants. That's where the biggest income is for many sporters.
What I'm interested is not so much how it looks, but how much noise it makes. Do how does it hold up??
It's really spoiling the fun when you're watching a DVD and are distracted by the fans trying to cool an overheating proc in a cool looking but hot running too small enclosure.
The fact that a fan deaf overclocker tells me it's quiet isn't really informative.
<sarcasm>And so many legal decisions are based on analogies rather than the law</sarcasm> Yes, they are. It's an often used tool for legal reasoning. In fact, the whole common law system is based on analogies and distictions between a case and precedents.
If you want to read about it: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/legal-reas- inter pret/ http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/bridge/Analogy /analog y1.htm http://academic.udayton.edu/legaled/online /analyti cal/analys04.htm
I merely quoted Eben Moglen. If you're saying he's wrong then that's your call, but I'm betting he knows more about copyright law than you do.
I'm not saying he's wrong. I do say you may have misquoted him, because you obviously don't understand the matter.
Rights can be split, as is the case in intellectual property. Eg, when you have a the copyright to a book, you can sell that right for North America to one party, and for Europe to another. You can keep doing that, all the way down to individual right, which is what happens when you buy a CD.
When, instead of buying a CD, you decide to download an mp3, you very well deprive the copyright holder of a right that's split from his right to licence it. So they are deprived of their right.
You can yell that they still have the original number of candy, but in fact, they have one less. So the analogy is more correct than you gave it credit for.
Your question is a different one: you are talking about creating, by use of a duplicator in this case. Any matter, idea, or piece of music you create, you have the rights to. If, however, you use the duplicator to create a patented piece of machinery, you're infringing, just as you would had you used a hammer and a forge.
It's not the same thing, because your example deals with physical property and the article's example is related to intellectual property and contractual agreements.
No, not exactly, but the analogy is there. What he is referring to is the nemo plus rule (from "nemo plus iuris ad alium transferre postest quam ipse habet"). This says you can never transfer more rights to anything than you had in the first place.
What you call physical property, is nothing but rights you have to a certain piece of matter. It is really not as dissimilar to intellectual rights, which are rights to an idea or concept. Both of them can (and are!) regulated by law. The only real difference is the object to which it applies.
Next, please consider the following: rights are goods too. You can trade rights, just as you would trade physical goods. E.g. if you have a right to build a house on property you don't own, you can sell that right to a 3rd party. You can have a right to a right (e.g. the above example, you can have the right (option) to buy the above building rights)
This brings us on a sidetrack: theft. Now that we've established that property is nothing but rights, and rights are goods, we can say something about taking or using intellectual property without permission. In that case, you take something that is not yours, and use it without having a right to. As you can see, that is theft. Often it is argued that with physical theft, the original owner gets deprived. But consider the following: someone has 1 billion pieces of candy. You take one, to keep for yourself, without permission. Is it theft? Do you think the person will be deprived? This is a good analogy to what is happening when an mp3 is copied. Theft is theft. (Piracy is something else)
Once you realise that property isn't as absolute as you thought it was, the next step isn't hard to understand, although still hard to answer: who is liable in case of theft and fencing?
When a person buys stolen property in good faith, most jurisdictions will protect that person. But what if that person is notified of the status of that property? In that case the person cannot claim good faith anymore. That's point one. From which moment on can't the buyer claim good faith? People who bought Linux before SCO came with their claims, obviously shouldn't need to worry. But people who bought after IBM refuted their claims? Is IBM's reputation so much stronger than SCO's that they can claim good faith?
Why bother, when you get even the easy ones wrong. I'm sorry to say, but he was a lot closer than you were. Please check your assumptions before making conclusions.
I did this with my old company. They had a very strict firewall policy, and to get a port open, you had to get through higer management.
Of course, they blocked anything apart from 80, 443 and 25, and checked the type of protocol that went over it. 80 only accepted http. Which was real handy, condidering we were an internet company, and had support contracts we had to fulfil. Not. No SSH, no newsgroups to look for answers, no remote admin tools...
So I took httptunnel, and tunneled ssh over it. My boss was ecstatic. Now we didn't have to use the phone anymore to connect to the internet in earnest. We could actually help out customers!
Moral of this story: when people get as resourceful to tunnel through your firewall, consider that it's time to review your policy: they obviously perceive a need to do so. A 'block anything that goes in and block anything that goes out' policy doesn't really work in many cases, other than frustrating the work.
the community is very pedantic on making sure they do not use Microsoft code or break any laws
You make it sound if the community has one mind and consensus about everything. In practice that's not true, and often there are disagreements. I wouldn't make a claim that there is no OSS that doesn't infringe on someone else's rights because nobody wants to. Some people just don't care. It may even be that OSS that is legal in one country infringes rights in another (the US most likely).
Even for people that do take care and pay attention, there's a problem. Often they have insufficient information about either the law, or the rights of others over certain mechanics they implement in software. So even whilst being careful, you can still infringe on someone else's rights.
With a car, fan sound is less of an annoyance than in an otherwise silent office of living room. A car already makes quite some noise. As long as the fan noise stays under the car noise, it's not a bother.
Maybe you'll say that modern luxury cars are actually more silent than a 'puter fan. I do not think that is true, except for the high end lexus, volvo and bmw. Those are always equipped with airc, so they need less ventilation because they can are cooled with cool air anyway.
I don't know who came up with this story, but it totally unlikely that the french government would go ahead with this.
This is against EU laws, which prohibits governments supporting local companies, to promote competition across the EU (Article 87 of the Treaty Establishing The European Community).
If the french would do this, they would face stiff penalties.
I once wrote a piece of javascript that would do this client side. It was for a corporate intranet, so I knew which version of which browser was going to be used.
The idea was simple: I created a table with every cell one pixel large, and set the colors accordingly to the input for the frame. It started out as a simple line graph, but in the end it could do bar and pies too.
This should be doable crossbrowser now that JS has stabilized enough between IE and Moz. If implemented right, it can really do with much lower bandwidth than pictures (which was the main requirement then): the.js file can be cached, so only the data has to be sent, measuring a large multicolor pie graph in bytes rather Kbytes.
Yesterday morning the service was flakey as hell over here, where it's usually quite solid. As was in several other places. Read the original announcement here on slashdot, there are several people stating the same. The exploit had probably already emerged.
It isn't the wrong message: you shouldn't ever attempt to do first aid if you're not licenced! If anything goes wrong, and it is easy to go wrong, you're at risk to end on the wrong side of a tort claim. In other words: it can easily ruin you.
Your obligation to help in this legal climate is limited to calling 112, 911 or whatever the emergency number is at your location. And then hope the emergency services are in time.
International? EU has postponed their laws on the subject. They might well be rejected now. (one can always hope)
America being pushy on the subject doesn't really help either. There's a growing resentment of the US bullying around European countries. This may well be the downfall of said legislation over here.
Slashdot Mirror
Show me proof of ownership for your toilet. Bet you can't!
That's actually very easy, as a toilet is considered to be a component of your house, and thus property of the house owner. So you only have to prove ownership of the house, which is usually well documented.
Usually, the possessor of an object is considered to be the owner, unless the contrary is proven.
Software isn't an object. It's information, and you need a licence, a contract to be allowed to copy it. Hence, you're not proving your ownership, but you have to prove that you were entitled to make a copy (install it).
RTL Z (national television, all day business news), the Netherlands, this afternoon:
It was said that if you valued security, Microsoft wasn't the best solution. You'd be better off with Apple or Linux.
This could very well be a (another) turning point for linux. Of course, by the time something like this happens to Linux, everybody is going to run the other way again, but it could give OS some inroads.
When I worked with the technical service at a local computershop (paradigit, Utrecht) we once did the same.
A man came in with a broken computer. He didn't know how it happened, but we suspected lightning strike. The chips at his harddrive and graphics card had literally exploded, while some on his motherboard had melted. Obviously, his HDD was lost, but the man had 3 months of work on it and no backup (This incident is when I started making backups of anything important).
Anyway, we took a box of hdd's that were up for warranty (quantum bigfoots, which failed 25% of the time), swapped the boards, and it worked. We copied all of this to a new hdd, and presto. Happy man, for only the price of a new harddrive and f25,- labour costs (about US$10 at the time).
Luckily for him, we didn't need to go searching different firmware boards. But even the more experienced people at the shop had never encountered something similar before, so it was quite exciting.
I can see how these people, that devote so much time to the game, get so good at it. Many winning athletes get large sums of prize money, so I don't see why computer gamers wouldn't.
But for it to really take off it they should turn it into a mass spectator sport somehow. The more people watching it, the more money gets involved, and the better (read more fanatical) the contestants get.
I can even envision some sort of shirt sponsoring (skin sponsoring?) for the contestants. That's where the biggest income is for many sporters.
What I'm interested is not so much how it looks, but how much noise it makes. Do how does it hold up??
It's really spoiling the fun when you're watching a DVD and are distracted by the fans trying to cool an overheating proc in a cool looking but hot running too small enclosure.
The fact that a fan deaf overclocker tells me it's quiet isn't really informative.
<sarcasm>And so many legal decisions are based on analogies rather than the law</sarcasm>
- inter pret/y /analog y1.htme /analyti cal/analys04.htm
Yes, they are. It's an often used tool for legal reasoning. In fact, the whole common law system is based on analogies and distictions between a case and precedents.
If you want to read about it:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/legal-reas
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/bridge/Analog
http://academic.udayton.edu/legaled/onlin
I merely quoted Eben Moglen. If you're saying he's wrong then that's your call, but I'm betting he knows more about copyright law than you do.
I'm not saying he's wrong. I do say you may have misquoted him, because you obviously don't understand the matter.
Rights can be split, as is the case in intellectual property. Eg, when you have a the copyright to a book, you can sell that right for North America to one party, and for Europe to another. You can keep doing that, all the way down to individual right, which is what happens when you buy a CD.
When, instead of buying a CD, you decide to download an mp3, you very well deprive the copyright holder of a right that's split from his right to licence it. So they are deprived of their right.
You can yell that they still have the original number of candy, but in fact, they have one less. So the analogy is more correct than you gave it credit for.
Your question is a different one: you are talking about creating, by use of a duplicator in this case. Any matter, idea, or piece of music you create, you have the rights to. If, however, you use the duplicator to create a patented piece of machinery, you're infringing, just as you would had you used a hammer and a forge.
It's not the same thing, because your example deals with physical property and the article's example is related to intellectual property and contractual agreements.
No, not exactly, but the analogy is there. What he is referring to is the nemo plus rule (from "nemo plus iuris ad alium transferre postest quam ipse habet"). This says you can never transfer more rights to anything than you had in the first place.
What you call physical property, is nothing but rights you have to a certain piece of matter. It is really not as dissimilar to intellectual rights, which are rights to an idea or concept. Both of them can (and are!) regulated by law. The only real difference is the object to which it applies.
Next, please consider the following: rights are goods too. You can trade rights, just as you would trade physical goods. E.g. if you have a right to build a house on property you don't own, you can sell that right to a 3rd party. You can have a right to a right (e.g. the above example, you can have the right (option) to buy the above building rights)
This brings us on a sidetrack: theft. Now that we've established that property is nothing but rights, and rights are goods, we can say something about taking or using intellectual property without permission. In that case, you take something that is not yours, and use it without having a right to. As you can see, that is theft. Often it is argued that with physical theft, the original owner gets deprived. But consider the following: someone has 1 billion pieces of candy. You take one, to keep for yourself, without permission. Is it theft? Do you think the person will be deprived? This is a good analogy to what is happening when an mp3 is copied. Theft is theft. (Piracy is something else)
Once you realise that property isn't as absolute as you thought it was, the next step isn't hard to understand, although still hard to answer: who is liable in case of theft and fencing?
When a person buys stolen property in good faith, most jurisdictions will protect that person. But what if that person is notified of the status of that property? In that case the person cannot claim good faith anymore. That's point one. From which moment on can't the buyer claim good faith? People who bought Linux before SCO came with their claims, obviously shouldn't need to worry. But people who bought after IBM refuted their claims? Is IBM's reputation so much stronger than SCO's that they can claim good faith?
Why bother, when you get even the easy ones wrong.
I'm sorry to say, but he was a lot closer than you were. Please check your assumptions before making conclusions.
Remember: this is a communist processor. As a result all the Dragon processors in the world can only run as fast as the slowest processor.
*rimshot*
I did this with my old company. They had a very strict firewall policy, and to get a port open, you had to get through higer management.
Of course, they blocked anything apart from 80, 443 and 25, and checked the type of protocol that went over it. 80 only accepted http. Which was real handy, condidering we were an internet company, and had support contracts we had to fulfil. Not. No SSH, no newsgroups to look for answers, no remote admin tools...
So I took httptunnel, and tunneled ssh over it. My boss was ecstatic. Now we didn't have to use the phone anymore to connect to the internet in earnest. We could actually help out customers!
Moral of this story: when people get as resourceful to tunnel through your firewall, consider that it's time to review your policy: they obviously perceive a need to do so. A 'block anything that goes in and block anything that goes out' policy doesn't really work in many cases, other than frustrating the work.
</rant>
the community is very pedantic on making sure they do not use Microsoft code or break any laws
You make it sound if the community has one mind and consensus about everything. In practice that's not true, and often there are disagreements. I wouldn't make a claim that there is no OSS that doesn't infringe on someone else's rights because nobody wants to. Some people just don't care. It may even be that OSS that is legal in one country infringes rights in another (the US most likely).
Even for people that do take care and pay attention, there's a problem. Often they have insufficient information about either the law, or the rights of others over certain mechanics they implement in software. So even whilst being careful, you can still infringe on someone else's rights.
You need to work on your nerd level too :)
DIN is the Deutsches Institut fur Normung. A german standards body like ISO or ANSI.
politicians; those guys should be English majors instead of lawyers
Then you'd still be screwed, still not understand a bit of what they're saying, but at least it would sound nice
This is news for nerds.
I think I qualify as one when I say I immediately grasped what it was about. And I don't even own a car.
With a car, fan sound is less of an annoyance than in an otherwise silent office of living room. A car already makes quite some noise. As long as the fan noise stays under the car noise, it's not a bother.
Maybe you'll say that modern luxury cars are actually more silent than a 'puter fan. I do not think that is true, except for the high end lexus, volvo and bmw. Those are always equipped with airc, so they need less ventilation because they can are cooled with cool air anyway.
It's even worse. Most of the energy the sun produces passes the earth altogether. Talking about waste.
I don't know who came up with this story, but it totally unlikely that the french government would go ahead with this.
This is against EU laws, which prohibits governments supporting local companies, to promote competition across the EU (Article 87 of the Treaty Establishing The European Community).
If the french would do this, they would face stiff penalties.
I once wrote a piece of javascript that would do this client side. It was for a corporate intranet, so I knew which version of which browser was going to be used.
.js file can be cached, so only the data has to be sent, measuring a large multicolor pie graph in bytes rather Kbytes.
The idea was simple: I created a table with every cell one pixel large, and set the colors accordingly to the input for the frame. It started out as a simple line graph, but in the end it could do bar and pies too.
This should be doable crossbrowser now that JS has stabilized enough between IE and Moz. If implemented right, it can really do with much lower bandwidth than pictures (which was the main requirement then): the
Yesterday morning the service was flakey as hell over here, where it's usually quite solid. As was in several other places. Read the original announcement here on slashdot, there are several people stating the same. The exploit had probably already emerged.
Considering the time it often takes for governments to act, you'd think time has no meaning to them.
In startrek and warfare it's called jamming. But it's basically the same :)
It isn't the wrong message: you shouldn't ever attempt to do first aid if you're not licenced! If anything goes wrong, and it is easy to go wrong, you're at risk to end on the wrong side of a tort claim. In other words: it can easily ruin you .
Your obligation to help in this legal climate is limited to calling 112, 911 or whatever the emergency number is at your location. And then hope the emergency services are in time.
International? EU has postponed their laws on the subject. They might well be rejected now. (one can always hope)
America being pushy on the subject doesn't really help either. There's a growing resentment of the US bullying around European countries. This may well be the downfall of said legislation over here.
Seems obvious: port linux to it!
... it can't save my hdd. My linux server's harddisk seems to be dying. Gotta buy another monday I'm afraid.