I'm guessing you hadn't yet had your morning coffee when you read GP and posted that? Let me quote for you the post you replied to: -- Damages in U.S. civil suits are broken down into two parts:
Compensatory - to compensate the victim for financial losses suffered.
Punitive - to discourage the perpetrator from engaging in improper or illegal activities in the future. --
"The award that the plaintiff seeks should have some sort of reflection on the actual damages." - that's the first half. If someone causes damage, they need to compensate the person who suffered the damage. If someone dents your car, they need to pay to have it fixed (via insurance, typically).
If someone *intentionally* does an unlawful act, *knowing* that it will likely cause damage, punishment is often in order. If someone takes a sledgehammer to your car on purpose, having them pay to have it fixed may not be quite enough.
> What if the product had been BeOS?... Those companies are much smaller (or extinct).
If the owner of BeOS (Access Co.) intentionally broke the law and caused damage to your system, they could be punished harshly with a $1 million award. That would be roughly equal to their profit last year. $1 million wouldn't punish Microsoft.
> Just like it was in 2001. I am still hopeful that a more interactive content
And that formula has been working, and Wikipedia constantly growing, since 2001. Be VERY careful about changing what works so well.
Have a look at the world's most popular web page - the Google home page. See all the animated gifs, the dynamic content with sliders and dials for the the user to.play with? Nope. Just a logo, a text field, and a button. Just like 2001.
Contrast this with the sites that WERE super popular in 2001,with lots of animated gifs. Geocities and MySpace were on top of the world. Until animated gifs and such killed them.
Most articles I find on the net follow a pretty consistent pattern, using one of two variations on that pattern:
How To Foo a Fizz
Fizz s very popular these days blah blah. First paragraph says nothing useful at all.
Fizz is good for blah blah. Second paragraph also pointless.
Sometimes it helps to Foo your Fizz. Some people like to Foo it because blah blah blah.
You can Foo your Fizz by: Clicking the tiny menu at the bottom Choose Preferences Select "Foo"
Now your Fizz is Foo and blah blah blah.
Share this on Facebook. On Twitter. On Google Plus. MySpace. Yourspace. Farmers only . Black people meet. Stupid people meet.
Pretty standard pattern. The first two or three paragraphs are pointless. Sometimes they forget to actually tell you how to do it, and ONLY have the fluff. That's really annoying.
The "human interest" version is similar:
How to Close a Resume Cover Letter
Debbie Wood, a mother of two from Englewood, Colorado was driving home in her blue Mustang when she stopped for some fries. After eating them, with ketchup, she got a call saying she was fired. Blah blah blah.
Blah blah blah about Debbie.
Debbie worked at Poor Writing Inc for six years, starting out as an eraser. Blah blah blah.
Debbie wrote "I'm looking forward to hearing from you" at the end of her cover letter. It worked great.
Debbie now works at blah blah blah. She enjoys blah at her blah job blah blah blah.
Share this on Facebook. On Twitter. On Google Plus. MySpace. Yourspace. Farmers only . Black people meet. Stupid people meet.
Pretty much the entire useful part of the story is the fourth paragraph.
> If they hit a problem, I'd tell them to try to find the answer on their own for maybe half an hour, then come and ask.
I could probably do a better job giving people guidance on when to ask and when to keep trying themselves. Also encouraging them to sometimes try asking each other.
> Get their head around our application, source control, red tape, etc. Initially, every task I assign to them takes more of my time to explain and review than if I did it myself. Maybe I'll try to explain what I mean a couple of times
You were probably addressing two separate things here, but it occurs to me that we sometimes spend time explaining source control, red tape, etc. At a company I owned, and again at my current employer, we documented all that stuff using a wiki. I was actually a bit annoyed when my then-new boss wanted to spend so much time writing wiki docs for so many things, but it has paid off in short order. At my company, I told people "if you need me to explain something for you, it might be a good idea to make notes in the wiki." Not always, of course, but often enough, because there will be another new in six months.
Of course, his idea with the documentation might be that I would be documenting myself out of a job - writing down all the stuff that the cheap people will need to know so they can get rid of the expensive people. Hopefully the bosses see that the less-expensive engineers are a lot more effective in combination with an old guy who is practicing effective teamwork. I believe that's the cheapest (most efficient) way in the long run. I'm trying to make it so, and make it show.
PS I always make sure that I praise the Junior's work in a team meeting, rather than taking credit myself. They obviously wouldn't want to do the grunt work while I took the credit. Conversely, when I very much direct any praise their way, they often feel the need to "set the record straight" by pointing out that the cool thing was my idea. "I just had the idea, YOU made it actually work", I'll reply. I suspect it won't take too long for our new project manager to notice a pattern there.:)
On a different note, my initial post may have sounded arrogant. I'm not the best programmer in the world. We're ALL the biggest fish in a small pond, if you define a suitably small pond. When I'm working with the main Linux kernel devs, I'm the junior. Working on Linux kernel raid, I asked Neil Brown for guidance and certainly he (and others) reviewed my work. I'm a tiny guppy in the kernel pond. I happen to be "the biggest fish" (most experienced) at my particular office. If I went to work for Red Hat, I'd probably report to Florian Weimer and I'd be a guppy again compared to him.
The newer guys at my company wouldn't shut up about Amazon Lambda (not to be confused with actual lambda functions). No matter what the question, their answer was always "Lambda!"
Tiring of "arguing" with them all the time (shooting them down), I eventually let one proposal proceed to the point where they scheduled a meeting to discuss how to move a certain project to Lambda, with management present. It was a process that handles processing a data feed from Microsoft. In that meeting, I didn't shut them down right away. I let them talk about the many benefits of Lambda vs the current system, mainly scalability. And... scalability. Yeah pretty much just scalability. After they pitched it pretty hard, I asked "so the main driver of this, the primary reason to take a couple of weeks to rewrite this using Lambda, is for massive scalability, right? It could run thousands of times per second, right?" "Yep, that's the great thing about Lambda", they said. "Our current implementation can only run about once per minute, right?", I asked. "Yeah, the current code takes a minute or so to run". "And what it does is process the Patch Tuesday data which comes out once a month, right? We need to run it once a month?" "ummmm....". "We need to scale in case Patch Tuesday starts occurring thousands of times per minute?"
After stammering for a minute, one of them piped up with a great answer "we'll be able to parse more feeds, from other sources!" "True, that might be good", I said. "Our current system does four feeds. It probably can't handle more than about 500-1,000 feeds. Over the last six years, we've added a total of four feeds. How long do you think it will be before we have more than 500 feeds and need something more scalable? 25 years? 50 years? 200 years? Should we plan on building something that can handle 500 feeds and schedule to that project 50 years from now?"
I haven't heard a word about Lambda since then.
What I HAVE done since then is found a good pattern to maximize the productivity of the team, seniors and juniors combined, while making my job more fun. Some trivial problems the juniors just handle. Anything that might benefit from a senior developer's attention, I look at at make some notes about generally how it might be solved, and any traps that may be lurking. I might include a link to a certain third-party module that may be useful. Then the junior person has my notes pointing them in the right direction. At each morning scrum, I remind the team that I *love* helping to solve problems and helping people understand things they are having trouble with. So they reach out when they hit a wall or need help choosing between two options. Then when they finish the task we do code review - I, or another Senior, looks over the code and makes suggestions as needed. The junior guys handle the details of actually implementing the ideas I suggest. They write the unit tests. They fill out the change request forms. All the bureaucratic red tape is theirs. It works great. I can guide five to ten times as much work as I could do myself. Their code isn't quite what mine might be "in the small", but the approach they use, the overall design, is either what I suggested, or something better they found. Code doesn't go to production with glaring errors that would be obvious to me, because I've looked over all the code, and made a unit test policy. It works quite well.
So junior devs work out nicely in my system, IF they can do one particular thing right - know when to ask for help. Don't ask me AGAIN the same thing you've asked me ten times, knowing the right answer but just lacking confidence, and don't go charging ahead when you have no idea wtf you're doing. Ask when you need to ask, and not when you don't. If they can do that, a team of junior devs and senior devs who have a solid system of working together can be very productive, multiplying the benefit of the Senior dev's experience. My company also isn't paying me senior salary to fill out change request forms and crap. The juniors can do that, based on the documentation that I wrote for them.
Our company provides security services for many fairly large companies. Rackspace, for example, is one of our many customers. You can imagine how much data flows through our IDS every day. We have millions of security events logged.
Attacks can be broadly classified into two groups - bulk, unsophisticated attacks, and targeted, more sophisticated attacks.
The largest VOLUME of attacks come from Eastern Europe and Russia, places where local law enforcement isn't all that concerned about hackers targeting the US, and there are computer geeks capable of attacks. That's a lot of countries, though - the single country with the greatest number of attacks is China.
The most sophisticated attacks come from China.
I have phone numbers of FBI agents at the Cyber Division who want to hear about any significant attacks originating in the US. If a domestic attacker targets a specific organization or group of organizations, the FBI can send a Cyber Action Team to the targeted facility within 24-48 hours. The CAT performs the initial forensics, making sure evidence isn't lost, assesses the threat, and can call on other experts as needed. The Cyber Action Team is the first step in series of events that involves the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. The US is not a the place to be if you're a black hat hacker. If you're going to try to hack US computers in a significant way, you REALLY want to be somewhere the FBI won't go to visit you.
The refurbishers he was selling to had three options: Legitimate copies from Microsoft for $25 His copies with the Microsoft logo for $20 Download for free from Dell
If they WOULD pay him $20 for the fake, some would have paid $25 for an original Microsoft copy, if he hadn't been selling them for $20.
Why not just download a copy from Dell and burn it to a CD-R? Thanks would be an interesting question to ask the shops who would have bought from him.
> The law actually says that one of the factors that must be considered is the purpose and character of the use.
Let's read exactly what the copyright statute says: --- Purpose and character of the use, including whether the use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes ---
The law says the court must consider if it's commercial (he was selling them for $20) as opposed to nonprofit educational.
> The additional impact of the copyright violation is precisely zero, and thus, the total financial impact to Microsoft from this person's actions is also precisely zero.
And THAT is a reasonable defense. Or half defense. The penalty does depend on the amount of financial harm. The refurbishers buying his discs for $20 could instead download a restore disc from Dell for free. So he argues there is no loss.
They could also buy a fresh Windows from Microsoft for $25. If they DID pay $20 for his bootleg disc instead of downloading for free, it's reasonable to figure some of them would otherwise pay $25 for a genuine Windows. Again, his customers are companies paying $20 for a disc with the Windows logo - knowing they'll all pay $20, some would go to $25 for the real thing, if his $20 bootleg wasn't available. Therefore we can say that some, but not all, would have otherwise bought from MS. Therefore his penalty was perhaps greater than it should have been under the law - it was based on $25 per disc.
It is true those are the four factors that MUST be considered. A court CAN consider other factors. Indeed a judge, and police as well, often consider the universal factor "is he being a bad guy or a good guy?" The letter of the law only goes so far - judges also seek justice, most of the time. (Obviously in plea bargains the judge never hears the case, but that's a different topic entirely.)
Having said that, the factors that MUST be considered all weigh very much against this defendant *for a fair use defense*. There are other defenses, besides fair use. Remember these factors MUST be considered:
How much of the work did the defendant take? A six-word quote from a book is normally okay, taking the whole work almost never is. This defendant took the whole thing.
How much new and original did the defendant add? If the infringing work is mostly new, with only a small part borrowed, that may be fair use. If the infringer added nothing of their own, it's likely not fair use. This defendant added nothing.
Transformative - is the infringing work of a fundamentally different kind than the original work? In this case it's not at all different, it's a duplicate.
This person may have a good defense, but not a fair use defense.
> If copying software which has already been paid for and is specifically attached to hardware isn't "fair use," what is
Well the discs this guy was selling weren't attached to any particular hardware, and he didn't pay Microsoft for them, but that still leaves your question "what is fair use?"
The four factors considered for fair use are:
transformative use the nature of the copyrighted work the amount and substantiality of the portion taken the effect of the use upon the potential market
Transformative use is the degree to which the user turns one thing into something else. Making a statute from baseball cards would transform them from cards to sculpture. This person did no transformation, just straight duplication.
The nature of the copyrighted work is considered on at least two axis. Non-fiction works are easier to use fairly than more creative, fictional, and especially complete fantasy works. Facts themselves have no copyright protection at all, only the particular expression and arrangement of them can have any protection. A fictional work that takes place in a completely fictional universe is less likely to be fair use because the author created that whole universe - there's probably no reason you *have* to step into their universe.
Also regarding the character of the original work, published works are more available for fair use than unpublished works. I have the right to keep my private writing private, and decide when and how to make it public. Similarly, works that have become a widely recognized part of the culture have less protection. If you wrote a book about American culture in 2018, you might have very good reason to quote CNN, etc.
The amount of the work taken is fairly self-explanatory. It's generally fair to use a five-word quote out of a book. Copying the entire book is not okay. There is a wide range of in-between. Also, what percentage of the new work consists of stuff taken from other people's work? If you write a 20,000-word book and have 300 words of quotes in it, that's probably okay. This guy copied the entirety of MS Windows, and added nothing of his own. That's the opposite of fair use.
The effect of the use upon the potential market - will some people buy the infringing work *instead of* the original work? If you make wall plaques each with a quotes from a bunch of books, nobody is going to buy the wall plaques instead of the books. You haven't hurt the market for the books. This guy was going to be selling Windows discs. Had he not had these 28,000 Windows discs for sale, would some people instead buy from Microsoft?
One could make the argument that some users may already have a Windows license, they effectively already own a copy of Windows, and he was helping them use the licensed copy of Windows they already owned. That may be a cogent argument. Fair use? Not by a long shot.
The definition of second world was "the USSR and its allies". First world is NATO (US and allies). Third world is countries not aligned with either major power, often because they weren't significant enough to make a big difference anyway, so they weren't courted by either the US or USSR.
I don't see much to argue about. Different uses and different users have different needs and preferences. As sqorbit said, the question itself is silly. Like asking "what vehicle is best?" - kinda depends on whether you want to haul 10,000 pounds of cargo, race a slalom, or impress your date. Sometimes a semi truck is the right thing for the job, sometimes a motorcycle is.
I run different distributions for different roles, and other people will prefer other distros for those same roles because they have different preferences. For example my "default" distribution for general computing is CentOS. One reason I choose CentOS is simply because it's the one I'm most familiar with, having used that lineage for 15 years under various names. Someone else might choose Debian or Ubuntu for the same reason - it's the one they know best.
A major difference to consider for desktop / laptop use is whether you prefer cutting edge new features or stability and reliability. In the Redhat / CentOS realm, Fedora is cutting edge, Redhat / CentOS is stable. Neither is right or wrong, better or worse, it just depends on what you want. So instead of spending time trying to find "the best", spend that time asking "what are my needs and which fits my needs best?"
I don't know, it *might* be split up, but Vermont is only half a million people. Less than where I live, North Dallas. Here, our suburbs aren't divided into different zones for different ISPs, each ISP covers 8 million people or so. I guess neither of us knows the situation in Vermont.
> it sounds like they have a monopoly on wired internet.
According to https://www.highspeedinternet.... , 92% of Vermont residents have DSL available, 78% have cable. The largest provider in the state is FairPoint. Xfinity and Spectrum sell cable internet there.
The site rates Vermont dead last in internet availbility.
So your suggestion is that products should be made impossible to open, no matter what tools a competitor uses, so that can't see how it works? Some kind of self-destruct mechanism that sets off burning metal if the case is opened?
> If someone can copy it then your idea wasn't that innovative in the first place
You do realize that "a new idea" and "hard to copy" have nothing whatsoever to do with each other, right? For millennia people lifted water in buckets. They tried to find easier ways. They all thought Archimedes screw was an amazing new idea, though once you see how it works it's pretty simple. Probably millions of hours were spent by scribes copying books. For a thousand years nobody thought of the printing press, until someone done. It was MAJOR, world-changing innovation, which is easy to copy once you've seen one.
That might be a reasonable alternative in many cases, to route the video over the internet from wherever it is, to the cable TV facilities. If the venue has high-speed internet that is RELIABLY cable of broadcast quality HD, even when many people are there using it for wifi, of course.
The current demand from the PUC is that if Comcast has (TV) cabling within X distance of the event, they have to roll a remote TV broadcast unit to the event. Obviously that provides better picture quality than most internet streams. But it's a meeting of the Podunk Town Council, does it HAVE to be in Hollywood-grade HD?
The news covers spectacular car crashes. They don't cover the millions of car trips that go well every day.
About once a month, Slashdot covers another patent application that sounds rather questionable, based on the summary posted to Slashdot. Maybe half of those ARE actually bad patent applications, so several per year. There are half a million patent applications, and 250,000 patents issued, every year that don't make an interesting article, because they are bog-standard patents, with everything good and proper.
The ruling in this case is exactly what we'd expect. Like "arriving safely at your destination", it's the normal course of things. The patents and applications that make the news are the highly unusual ones - that's why they're news.
Of course, a successful company only spends a million on marketing if it'll lead to at least two million in sales. So less marketing would leave the company with less money. Sad but true.
You're saying because it's a business expense, it reduces the federal tax the company pays on its profits by about $80 million?
If the company wouldn't otherwise spend that marketing / advertising money with TV ads or Facebook or whatever other marketing, that would be true. It would be $400 million for the owner of the stadium (typically the city), and $80 million less for the feds. So net $320 for the taxpayer.
If the company would otherwise do OTHER marketing, there is no tax impact. It's just $400 million to the city instead of $400 million to Facebook or Google.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm guessing you hadn't yet had your morning coffee when you read GP and posted that? Let me quote for you the post you replied to:
--
Damages in U.S. civil suits are broken down into two parts:
Compensatory - to compensate the victim for financial losses suffered.
Punitive - to discourage the perpetrator from engaging in improper or illegal activities in the future.
--
"The award that the plaintiff seeks should have some sort of reflection on the actual damages." - that's the first half. If someone causes damage, they need to compensate the person who suffered the damage. If someone dents your car, they need to pay to have it fixed (via insurance, typically).
If someone *intentionally* does an unlawful act, *knowing* that it will likely cause damage, punishment is often in order. If someone takes a sledgehammer to your car on purpose, having them pay to have it fixed may not be quite enough.
> What if the product had been BeOS? ... Those companies are much smaller (or extinct).
If the owner of BeOS (Access Co.) intentionally broke the law and caused damage to your system, they could be punished harshly with a $1 million award. That would be roughly equal to their profit last year. $1 million wouldn't punish Microsoft.
And how exactly does that prevent you from clicking the link in the summary to look at the extension yourself?
> Just like it was in 2001. I am still hopeful that a more interactive content
And that formula has been working, and Wikipedia constantly growing, since 2001. Be VERY careful about changing what works so well.
Have a look at the world's most popular web page - the Google home page. See all the animated gifs, the dynamic content with sliders and dials for the the user to.play with? Nope. Just a logo, a text field, and a button. Just like 2001.
Contrast this with the sites that WERE super popular in 2001,with lots of animated gifs. Geocities and MySpace were on top of the world. Until animated gifs and such killed them.
Is clicking two links to see for yourself really that hard?
For the entitled weenies who can't do ANYTHING for themselves and need us actual adults to do everything for them:
https://github.com/bijij/ViewI...
Most articles I find on the net follow a pretty consistent pattern, using one of two variations on that pattern:
How To Foo a Fizz
Fizz s very popular these days blah blah. First paragraph says nothing useful at all.
Fizz is good for blah blah. Second paragraph also pointless.
Sometimes it helps to Foo your Fizz. Some people like to Foo it because blah blah blah.
You can Foo your Fizz by:
Clicking the tiny menu at the bottom
Choose Preferences
Select "Foo"
Now your Fizz is Foo and blah blah blah.
Share this on Facebook. On Twitter. On Google Plus. MySpace. Yourspace. Farmers only . Black people meet. Stupid people meet.
Pretty standard pattern. The first two or three paragraphs are pointless. Sometimes they forget to actually tell you how to do it, and ONLY have the fluff. That's really annoying.
The "human interest" version is similar:
How to Close a Resume Cover Letter
Debbie Wood, a mother of two from Englewood, Colorado was driving home in her blue Mustang when she stopped for some fries. After eating them, with ketchup, she got a call saying she was fired. Blah blah blah.
Blah blah blah about Debbie.
Debbie worked at Poor Writing Inc for six years, starting out as an eraser. Blah blah blah.
Debbie wrote "I'm looking forward to hearing from you" at the end of her cover letter. It worked great.
Debbie now works at blah blah blah. She enjoys blah at her blah job blah blah blah.
Share this on Facebook. On Twitter. On Google Plus. MySpace. Yourspace. Farmers only . Black people meet. Stupid people meet.
Pretty much the entire useful part of the story is the fourth paragraph.
The dictionary definition of bing:
A heap or pile
I want to ask Microsoft, "your search engine is a heaping pile of *what*, exactly?"
> If they hit a problem, I'd tell them to try to find the answer on their own for maybe half an hour, then come and ask.
I could probably do a better job giving people guidance on when to ask and when to keep trying themselves. Also encouraging them to sometimes try asking each other.
> Get their head around our application, source control, red tape, etc. Initially, every task I assign to them takes more of my time to explain and review than if I did it myself. Maybe I'll try to explain what I mean a couple of times
You were probably addressing two separate things here, but it occurs to me that we sometimes spend time explaining source control, red tape, etc. At a company I owned, and again at my current employer, we documented all that stuff using a wiki. I was actually a bit annoyed when my then-new boss wanted to spend so much time writing wiki docs for so many things, but it has paid off in short order. At my company, I told people "if you need me to explain something for you, it might be a good idea to make notes in the wiki." Not always, of course, but often enough, because there will be another new in six months.
Of course, his idea with the documentation might be that I would be documenting myself out of a job - writing down all the stuff that the cheap people will need to know so they can get rid of the expensive people. Hopefully the bosses see that the less-expensive engineers are a lot more effective in combination with an old guy who is practicing effective teamwork. I believe that's the cheapest (most efficient) way in the long run. I'm trying to make it so, and make it show.
PS I always make sure that I praise the Junior's work in a team meeting, rather than taking credit myself. They obviously wouldn't want to do the grunt work while I took the credit. Conversely, when I very much direct any praise their way, they often feel the need to "set the record straight" by pointing out that the cool thing was my idea. "I just had the idea, YOU made it actually work", I'll reply. I suspect it won't take too long for our new project manager to notice a pattern there. :)
On a different note, my initial post may have sounded arrogant. I'm not the best programmer in the world. We're ALL the biggest fish in a small pond, if you define a suitably small pond. When I'm working with the main Linux kernel devs, I'm the junior. Working on Linux kernel raid, I asked Neil Brown for guidance and certainly he (and others) reviewed my work. I'm a tiny guppy in the kernel pond. I happen to be "the biggest fish" (most experienced) at my particular office. If I went to work for Red Hat, I'd probably report to Florian Weimer and I'd be a guppy again compared to him.
The newer guys at my company wouldn't shut up about Amazon Lambda (not to be confused with actual lambda functions). No matter what the question, their answer was always "Lambda!"
Tiring of "arguing" with them all the time (shooting them down), I eventually let one proposal proceed to the point where they scheduled a meeting to discuss how to move a certain project to Lambda, with management present. It was a process that handles processing a data feed from Microsoft. In that meeting, I didn't shut them down right away. I let them talk about the many benefits of Lambda vs the current system, mainly scalability. And ... scalability. Yeah pretty much just scalability. After they pitched it pretty hard, I asked "so the main driver of this, the primary reason to take a couple of weeks to rewrite this using Lambda, is for massive scalability, right? It could run thousands of times per second, right?" "Yep, that's the great thing about Lambda", they said. "Our current implementation can only run about once per minute, right?", I asked. "Yeah, the current code takes a minute or so to run". "And what it does is process the Patch Tuesday data which comes out once a month, right? We need to run it once a month?" "ummmm....". "We need to scale in case Patch Tuesday starts occurring thousands of times per minute?"
After stammering for a minute, one of them piped up with a great answer "we'll be able to parse more feeds, from other sources!" "True, that might be good", I said. "Our current system does four feeds. It probably can't handle more than about 500-1,000 feeds. Over the last six years, we've added a total of four feeds. How long do you think it will be before we have more than 500 feeds and need something more scalable? 25 years? 50 years? 200 years? Should we plan on building something that can handle 500 feeds and schedule to that project 50 years from now?"
I haven't heard a word about Lambda since then.
What I HAVE done since then is found a good pattern to maximize the productivity of the team, seniors and juniors combined, while making my job more fun. Some trivial problems the juniors just handle. Anything that might benefit from a senior developer's attention, I look at at make some notes about generally how it might be solved, and any traps that may be lurking. I might include a link to a certain third-party module that may be useful. Then the junior person has my notes pointing them in the right direction. At each morning scrum, I remind the team that I *love* helping to solve problems and helping people understand things they are having trouble with. So they reach out when they hit a wall or need help choosing between two options. Then when they finish the task we do code review - I, or another Senior, looks over the code and makes suggestions as needed. The junior guys handle the details of actually implementing the ideas I suggest. They write the unit tests. They fill out the change request forms. All the bureaucratic red tape is theirs. It works great. I can guide five to ten times as much work as I could do myself. Their code isn't quite what mine might be "in the small", but the approach they use, the overall design, is either what I suggested, or something better they found. Code doesn't go to production with glaring errors that would be obvious to me, because I've looked over all the code, and made a unit test policy. It works quite well.
So junior devs work out nicely in my system, IF they can do one particular thing right - know when to ask for help. Don't ask me AGAIN the same thing you've asked me ten times, knowing the right answer but just lacking confidence, and don't go charging ahead when you have no idea wtf you're doing. Ask when you need to ask, and not when you don't. If they can do that, a team of junior devs and senior devs who have a solid system of working together can be very productive, multiplying the benefit of the Senior dev's experience. My company also isn't paying me senior salary to fill out change request forms and crap. The juniors can do that, based on the documentation that I wrote for them.
Our company provides security services for many fairly large companies. Rackspace, for example, is one of our many customers. You can imagine how much data flows through our IDS every day. We have millions of security events logged.
Attacks can be broadly classified into two groups - bulk, unsophisticated attacks, and targeted, more sophisticated attacks.
The largest VOLUME of attacks come from Eastern Europe and Russia, places where local law enforcement isn't all that concerned about hackers targeting the US, and there are computer geeks capable of attacks. That's a lot of countries, though - the single country with the greatest number of attacks is China.
The most sophisticated attacks come from China.
I have phone numbers of FBI agents at the Cyber Division who want to hear about any significant attacks originating in the US. If a domestic attacker targets a specific organization or group of organizations, the FBI can send a Cyber Action Team to the targeted facility within 24-48 hours. The CAT performs the initial forensics, making sure evidence isn't lost, assesses the threat, and can call on other experts as needed. The Cyber Action Team is the first step in series of events that involves the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. The US is not a the place to be if you're a black hat hacker. If you're going to try to hack US computers in a significant way, you REALLY want to be somewhere the FBI won't go to visit you.
Someone at FreeBSD needs a hug.
On the Linux mailing list, "deliberate intimidation" is graded like a gymnastic routine, 1-10 points. Linus has the most points so far.
>. only a total idiot would have bought
The refurbishers he was selling to had three options:
Legitimate copies from Microsoft for $25
His copies with the Microsoft logo for $20
Download for free from Dell
If they WOULD pay him $20 for the fake, some would have paid $25 for an original Microsoft copy, if he hadn't been selling them for $20.
Why not just download a copy from Dell and burn it to a CD-R? Thanks would be an interesting question to ask the shops who would have bought from him.
> The law actually says that one of the factors that must be considered is the purpose and character of the use.
Let's read exactly what the copyright statute says:
---
Purpose and character of the use, including whether the use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes
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The law says the court must consider if it's commercial (he was selling them for $20) as opposed to nonprofit educational.
> The additional impact of the copyright violation is precisely zero, and thus, the total financial impact to Microsoft from this person's actions is also precisely zero.
And THAT is a reasonable defense. Or half defense. The penalty does depend on the amount of financial harm.
The refurbishers buying his discs for $20 could instead download a restore disc from Dell for free. So he argues there is no loss.
They could also buy a fresh Windows from Microsoft for $25. If they DID pay $20 for his bootleg disc instead of downloading for free, it's reasonable to figure some of them would otherwise pay $25 for a genuine Windows. Again, his customers are companies paying $20 for a disc with the Windows logo - knowing they'll all pay $20, some would go to $25 for the real thing, if his $20 bootleg wasn't available. Therefore we can say that some, but not all, would have otherwise bought from MS. Therefore his penalty was perhaps greater than it should have been under the law - it was based on $25 per disc.
It is true those are the four factors that MUST be considered. A court CAN consider other factors. Indeed a judge, and police as well, often consider the universal factor "is he being a bad guy or a good guy?" The letter of the law only goes so far - judges also seek justice, most of the time. (Obviously in plea bargains the judge never hears the case, but that's a different topic entirely.)
Having said that, the factors that MUST be considered all weigh very much against this defendant *for a fair use defense*. There are other defenses, besides fair use. Remember these factors MUST be considered:
How much of the work did the defendant take? A six-word quote from a book is normally okay, taking the whole work almost never is. This defendant took the whole thing.
How much new and original did the defendant add?
If the infringing work is mostly new, with only a small part borrowed, that may be fair use. If the infringer added nothing of their own, it's likely not fair use. This defendant added nothing.
Transformative - is the infringing work of a fundamentally different kind than the original work? In this case it's not at all different, it's a duplicate.
This person may have a good defense, but not a fair use defense.
> If copying software which has already been paid for and is specifically attached to hardware isn't "fair use," what is
Well the discs this guy was selling weren't attached to any particular hardware, and he didn't pay Microsoft for them, but that still leaves your question "what is fair use?"
The four factors considered for fair use are:
transformative use
the nature of the copyrighted work
the amount and substantiality of the portion taken
the effect of the use upon the potential market
Transformative use is the degree to which the user turns one thing into something else. Making a statute from baseball cards would transform them from cards to sculpture. This person did no transformation, just straight duplication.
The nature of the copyrighted work is considered on at least two axis. Non-fiction works are easier to use fairly than more creative, fictional, and especially complete fantasy works. Facts themselves have no copyright protection at all, only the particular expression and arrangement of them can have any protection. A fictional work that takes place in a completely fictional universe is less likely to be fair use because the author created that whole universe - there's probably no reason you *have* to step into their universe.
Also regarding the character of the original work, published works are more available for fair use than unpublished works. I have the right to keep my private writing private, and decide when and how to make it public. Similarly, works that have become a widely recognized part of the culture have less protection. If you wrote a book about American culture in 2018, you might have very good reason to quote CNN, etc.
The amount of the work taken is fairly self-explanatory. It's generally fair to use a five-word quote out of a book. Copying the entire book is not okay. There is a wide range of in-between. Also, what percentage of the new work consists of stuff taken from other people's work? If you write a 20,000-word book and have 300 words of quotes in it, that's probably okay. This guy copied the entirety of MS Windows, and added nothing of his own. That's the opposite of fair use.
The effect of the use upon the potential market - will some people buy the infringing work *instead of* the original work? If you make wall plaques each with a quotes from a bunch of books, nobody is going to buy the wall plaques instead of the books. You haven't hurt the market for the books. This guy was going to be selling Windows discs. Had he not had these 28,000 Windows discs for sale, would some people instead buy from Microsoft?
One could make the argument that some users may already have a Windows license, they effectively already own a copy of Windows, and he was helping them use the licensed copy of Windows they already owned. That may be a cogent argument. Fair use? Not by a long shot.
Don't forget distopian / dystopian. :D
I hate it when I make multiple typos.
I'm going to be off-topic and pedantic here.
> Russia was a third-world country
The definition of second world was "the USSR and its allies".
First world is NATO (US and allies).
Third world is countries not aligned with either major power, often because they weren't significant enough to make a big difference anyway, so they weren't courted by either the US or USSR.
I don't see much to argue about. Different uses and different users have different needs and preferences. As sqorbit said, the question itself is silly. Like asking "what vehicle is best?" - kinda depends on whether you want to haul 10,000 pounds of cargo, race a slalom, or impress your date. Sometimes a semi truck is the right thing for the job, sometimes a motorcycle is.
I run different distributions for different roles, and other people will prefer other distros for those same roles because they have different preferences. For example my "default" distribution for general computing is CentOS. One reason I choose CentOS is simply because it's the one I'm most familiar with, having used that lineage for 15 years under various names. Someone else might choose Debian or Ubuntu for the same reason - it's the one they know best.
A major difference to consider for desktop / laptop use is whether you prefer cutting edge new features or stability and reliability. In the Redhat / CentOS realm, Fedora is cutting edge, Redhat / CentOS is stable. Neither is right or wrong, better or worse, it just depends on what you want. So instead of spending time trying to find "the best", spend that time asking "what are my needs and which fits my needs best?"
I don't know, it *might* be split up, but Vermont is only half a million people. Less than where I live, North Dallas. Here, our suburbs aren't divided into different zones for different ISPs, each ISP covers 8 million people or so. I guess neither of us knows the situation in Vermont.
> it sounds like they have a monopoly on wired internet.
According to https://www.highspeedinternet.... , 92% of Vermont residents have DSL available, 78% have cable. The largest provider in the state is FairPoint. Xfinity and Spectrum sell cable internet there.
The site rates Vermont dead last in internet availbility.
> if you want to keep it secret do so.
So your suggestion is that products should be made impossible to open, no matter what tools a competitor uses, so that can't see how it works? Some kind of self-destruct mechanism that sets off burning metal if the case is opened?
> If someone can copy it then your idea wasn't that innovative in the first place
You do realize that "a new idea" and "hard to copy" have nothing whatsoever to do with each other, right? For millennia people lifted water in buckets. They tried to find easier ways. They all thought Archimedes screw was an amazing new idea, though once you see how it works it's pretty simple. Probably millions of hours were spent by scribes copying books. For a thousand years nobody thought of the printing press, until someone done. It was MAJOR, world-changing innovation, which is easy to copy once you've seen one.
That might be a reasonable alternative in many cases, to route the video over the internet from wherever it is, to the cable TV facilities. If the venue has high-speed internet that is RELIABLY cable of broadcast quality HD, even when many people are there using it for wifi, of course.
The current demand from the PUC is that if Comcast has (TV) cabling within X distance of the event, they have to roll a remote TV broadcast unit to the event. Obviously that provides better picture quality than most internet streams. But it's a meeting of the Podunk Town Council, does it HAVE to be in Hollywood-grade HD?
The news covers spectacular car crashes. They don't cover the millions of car trips that go well every day.
About once a month, Slashdot covers another patent application that sounds rather questionable, based on the summary posted to Slashdot. Maybe half of those ARE actually bad patent applications, so several per year. There are half a million patent applications, and 250,000 patents issued, every year that don't make an interesting article, because they are bog-standard patents, with everything good and proper.
The ruling in this case is exactly what we'd expect. Like "arriving safely at your destination", it's the normal course of things. The patents and applications that make the news are the highly unusual ones - that's why they're news.
That's funny.
Of course, a successful company only spends a million on marketing if it'll lead to at least two million in sales. So less marketing would leave the company with less money. Sad but true.
You're saying because it's a business expense, it reduces the federal tax the company pays on its profits by about $80 million?
If the company wouldn't otherwise spend that marketing / advertising money with TV ads or Facebook or whatever other marketing, that would be true. It would be $400 million for the owner of the stadium (typically the city), and $80 million less for the feds. So net $320 for the taxpayer.
If the company would otherwise do OTHER marketing, there is no tax impact. It's just $400 million to the city instead of $400 million to Facebook or Google.