Okay... copyright means that the author has the absolutely exclusive _rights_ to copy the work and others can only obtain _permission_ to copy the work by authorization from the copyright holder. Fair use, btw, is granted permission by the copyright act and the copyright holder has no choice but to implicitly grant that permission.
you know....it's not really "absolutely exclusive" if there is a mandated exception to it.
So in what world is putting a file that you do _NOT_ own the copyright on, and have not actually obtained permission from the copyright holder to copy for purposes beyond fair use, in a publicly shared folder for others to obtain _not_ a violation of the copyright act?
nowhere in this description has the person making the file available made a copy of it. They have also not distributed it in any way. Just because they left their legally owned property in an unsafe environment does not mean they have infringed someone's copyright.
Downloading copyrighted materials may be perfectly legal in Canada (albeit unethical IMO, since one is aiding another in violating copyright), but it makes no sense to even _BEGIN_ to tolerate uploading whenever and wherever you can positively ascertain that it is occurring.
no uploading has occured in your description. Putting a file in a public directory is not uploading. The uploading doesnt occur until someone tries to copy that file. Until you prove the file has been copied from that location, there has been no violation of copyright.
Why, pray tell, is the Judge so hell-bent on ignoring the obvious conclusion?
because criminal law doesnt deal in speculation. It deals in proof. In this case, the record company has no evidence to suggest that anything illegal has happened.
do you really think "it seems likely" is the level of proof that should be required to start invading someone's life?
would that be acceptable if they wanted to invade your privacy?
Nit-picky post there. Nicely avoids the subject though.
i dont think it avoided the subject. The subject, in the case of this thread, is the technical appropriateness of using the term murder for abortions. The personal opinions of the people discussing it is pretty much irrelevant to the definition of murder in the eyes of the law.
as far as being nit-picky goes. my post is nit-picky because it's a restatement of the original exception that started this tangent (which was pretty nit-picky to begin with). realistically, the whole issue is about technical use of language. Outside of environments where precision of language is necessary, it is a nit-picky argument.
your referred post does not contradict what i said. I said that under the current legal definition of murder, abortion is clearly not one. I also specifically said that the legal view of what is murder and the status of a fetus as a person can be expanded to make abortion murder. I also agreed with you that there were some efforts underway that could give a fetus personhood and make abortion murder in the eyes of the law. i am certainly not saying the definition of murder can never be expanded.
It just looked to me like his argument wasnt being very clear and maybe a rephrasing of where he was coming from might help. he is right about the technical usage of the term, even if he is taking your statement more literally than you intended. I wasnt trying to attack you; i was just trying to clarify what he was taking issue with and what the issue was based on. (i was also trying to do so in a more civil way than the original poster had).
I also didn't mean to say that you were inconsistent in your beliefs with respect to capital punishment. I just wanted to point out where the "killing a human being" statement was a little too broad and didnt accurately reflect what you intended to say. I wasnt trying to draw you into a debate about capital punishment.
I make the assumption that a fetus is 'innocent' by default, thus not deserving of death, yet still a living human being.
and under those criteria it would be murder. The sticking point that started this whole thing is just that the law doesnt currently consider a fetus a living human being.
It really boils down to this: the original exception that was taken to your statement was that your statement was phrased in a way that stated "abortion is murder" as a fact as opposed to a belief. If you had said "abortion should be murder", i dont think he would have had a problem, and most people would probably have read your statemtent to mean that. However, this is probably a pet peeve of his and he took exception to it.
Technically, he's right. And that's all he's arguing about is the technical use of the term.
NB Spelling may be off, but it's late... looked good to me.
The real argument is whether or not abortion (I'll use your term) is killing (no appeal to emotion here buddy) a living human being. If it *is* killing a living human being, then it should be illegal. If not, then it isn't, nor can it be, murder.
I disagree with the assertion that killing a living human being should always be illegal. Self defense, for example, would be a case where i could envision someone killing a living human being legally.
In fact, there is currently legal hearings going on in some state (can't remember which) as to whether killing a fetus through abuse of a pregnant woman counts as murder.
while it may be true that someone is arguing that point in court, and it is true that there is some action to make a federal law that does the same thing, it doesnt change the fact that currently a fetus has no legal personhood (and hasnt for at least 30 years). Therefore abortion is not killing a living human being in the eyes of the law and cannot be murder.
I believe that a fetus is a living human being, from inception on. Therefore, in my mind, it is rightly called murder if you kill it without a trial and court order (a fetus commited of capital crime?)
The law clearly does not agree with your belief that the fetus is a living human being. So calling it murder is incorrect in a legal sense.
by your previous statement, in the first piece of text i quoted, death penalties should still be considered murder. (not really the point, i know. i just wanted to point out the inconsistency so you could refine your point to more accurately reflext what you intended).
You believe, I'm guessing, that it becomes a human being at some arbitrary point in it's development? Thus it is not murder to 'abort' it. Or perhaps you actually have no true opinion, and just blindly follow the letter of the law in this case? You've not said, you've only bitched about my use of the word murder.
I think the guy you are responding to was specifically trying to not make what he believes an issue. His argument was that your use of the term "murder" was incorrect (and i would agree with him). What he believes isnt relevant to that argument.
As far as "blindly following the letter of the law in this case"; murder is a legal term. How the law looks at something is the only relevant way to look at it when determining if something is murder. If you disagree with it, you need to work on getting the law to expand their view of murder. Until they do, it isnt murder. Maybe it should be murder, but it isnt currently murder.
Gambling is a Vice and an addictive activity (even has a 12 step program to help recovering addicts whose lives have been shattered just like the 12 steps for drugs and alcohol).
Alcohol consumption is legal in the United States. So is consumption of tobacco products (which are also a vice and addictive activity). Why should it being a vice or addictive activity have any bearing on it's legality considering the other legal addictive vices?
There is almost zero difference between the WTO ruling on this case and if they had ruled that Columbia has the right to export cocain.
There is one huge difference. Cocaine use and distribution is illegal in most of the WTO countries. Distribution of cocaine is also illegal in Columbia.
And taken another way the WTO is weaking the vice laws to the lowest common denominator -- anyone for 12 year old denmark kiddy porn?
Kiddy porn is illegal in denmark. The legal age of consent there is 15 years old. Even then, if you are significantly older or more experienced, you can be charged with inducement to sexual activity if they are under 18. Most kiddy porn comes from Japan (where it is also not legal).
Given this stupid ruling, it's not a stretch at all for the WTO to rule this is legal as well.
i disagree. i think it's a huge stretch. you are comparing them making a ruling about something that is legal in every member country other than the U.S. to them possibly making rulings demanding we legalize things that are not legal in any other member country.
i dont know what you think "my purposes" are, but it's irrelevent to what the text says.
The national guard was prominently mentioned in what he posted. It's also prominently mentioned in what i posted. In both posts it is prominently mentioned in exactly the same context. The national guard reference is clearly and specifically referring to the requirements for a female citizen to be considered a member of the militia. It has no bearing on a male citizen's status in the militia.
But seriously, I have never heard anyone explain why a private citizen needs to own a fully automatic assault rifle (other than "it's in the constitution", which is the traditional definition of begging the question).
because i want one?
All the rights have limits; for instance it's not free speech to shout "fire" in a crowded theater
it says all males between 17 and 45 who are able bodied and are, or have declared an intention to become, citizens are de facto members of the militia.
it also says females who are citizens and members of the national guard are also de facto members of the militia.
"This is f*cking brilliant" is not protected speech, never has been, and never will be, and you don't have to be religious to find certain phrases vulgar or offensive.
actually, it is. The barometer for when speech falls outside of first amendment protection is if it represents a clear and present danger of bringing about substantive evils.
i dont think any reasonable person would say the phrase "this is fucking brilliant" meets that requirement.
To use an example that/. readers can comprehend SCO can not claim that "All your Linux base belong to us," and then pretend they are merely exercising their right to free speech when it is shown that in fact they don't own all of your Linux bases.
actually, until this point of contention is ruled on by a court, SCO can claim that everyone owes them linux licensing fees. Until they prove their claim, nobody has to believe them, though.
and in case you hadn't noticed, that is exactly what is happening. SCO is claiming everyone owes them money for using Linux, and nobody is believing them.
Once a court rules against them, you're right that they cannot say it at that point, but that's because it is fraud. The substantive harm is provable by IBM, Red Hat, etc. at that point.
You might disagree with this, and you might even feel that the use of vulgar language should be encouraged over public broadcasts. However, the vast majority of folks disagree with you.
and you base this assertion about the vast majority of people on.....what?
the "Fire in a crowded theater" example comes from Schenck V. United States. It says falsely yelling fire in a crowded theater and causing a panic is not protected speech.
It goes on to say:
The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.
This is the barometer that the supreme court defined for determining the limitation on speech.
because in the computer marketplace microsoft enters into exclusionary deals with distribution channels to keep competitors from being able to bring choices to the customers.
In the computer marketplace, microsoft does tie applications to the operating system in a way you cannot remove them.
For example, most Hondas come with a rebranded Honda stereo. These days, you don't even have a choice - the car comes with a stereo. Find me one that doesn't. So is that "unfair" to JVC or Sony or other manufacturers? Seems to me the aftermarket stereo market is quite brisk.
i wonder how brisk it would be if Honda designed the cars so that the stereo couldn't be removed (rewired the ignition sequence to go through the stereo or something). I mean, it's no big deal. If you want a different stereo, just put a blank face plate over the honda one and find another piece of your console real estate to use for your after market stereo.
That wont happen though, because people who are really into stereos would never buy a honda if they did that. That's because they have a choice and the market can effectively regulate itself.
Are you sure that it was Microsoft who forced them to enter the "Free" browser market, and not Mosaic?
I'm sure. One of the principal developers of NCSA's mosaic started Netscape. Mosaic had been around and had been free for a while before Netscape existed. Netscape wasnt forced to distribute their product for free until microsoft entered the picture.
Some of the other NCSA developers started selling Mosaic under the name Spyglass. The codebase for mosaic was licensed by Microsoft to create the original release of Internet Explorer (so, i guess, in a way you could say it was mosaic's fault). According to the CEO of Spyglass, Microsoft then stole the code, stopped paying them the licensing fee and crushed the company. Spyglass survived by giving up on Mosaic and finding a new market. They started developing a toolset for embedding stuff into the windows desktop. After their initial release, Microsoft developed ActiveX and crushed them under a pile of lawyers. They survived by cutting loose that idea too. Now they just look for markets they think microsoft wont care about. (actually, i think they're out of business now) That story came from the CEO of spyglass, so feel free to consider it biased.
How about the guys who wrote Lynx? Did they force Netscape to release their browser for free? no. they were around when netscape was charging for their browser. that didnt seem to be a problem.
You seem to have this odd idea that Microsoft were the first people to put out a browser for free. no, but they were the first company to tie it to the operating system and make restrictive licensing deals that cut off distribution channels from their competitor in the market.
Were you actually around for the whole start of the WWW, or are you one of these people who came later? yes, i was around for the whole start of the web. I remember using gopher, even.
I was under the impression there already was a trademarked piece of software called Eclipse
There are no trademark symbols used anywhere on that page with respect to the use of the name Eclipse for that piece of software. I imagine it is not trademarked.
If it were, it might still not be considered an infringement of their trademark since their software has a different market than the eclipse ide.
i dont necessarily agree or disagree with your assertions, but i did note a couple things in your post.
What I find amazing is the fact that NONE of the statistics support any of these positions. According to two recent studies - one by the AMA and the other by the Harvard Public Policy school (?, I believe the Harvard Medical Practice Study) - both found that:
- malpractice, at least as defined by negligence, is fairly common
do you have the definition of negligence handy? the abstracts of the studies you cite do not define it. they also dont define their definition of negligence for the purposes of the study. (i'm sure the study does, but i dont have accounts on those websites, so i cannot read anything but the abstract)
from the abstracts, though, it appears that about 1% of medical events result in adverse events resulting from negligence. that doesnt really seem that common to me.
- of those with valid claims, only about 1% actually bring suit against a doctor
This seems (From the abstracts, at least) to be an incredibly vague point. How are claims determined to be valid if they are not filed? Were suits not filed because settlements were reached? Were they technically valid, but so insignificant it wasnt important to the patient? I'm not sure that there is any meaning in this statistic.
- of those who bring suit, only 1% are successful
i didnt find this statistic in the abstracts. Do you have a more specific place i should look to find this data?
i did find the statement that most malpractice claims were for adverse effects not resulting from negligence. this seems to imply that the majority of malpractice claims are for actions that do not constitute malpractice. (of 51 claims filed in the study, only 8 were for actions that constituted malpractice). i'm not sure if that is an accurate inference to make, though, because the information in the abstracts is vague. (that's not a condemnation, it's an abstract, after all) This means that 1/100 of a percent of incidents of malpractice actually result in an award.
i'm not sure that's a fair assumption. 1/100 of a percent of malpractice cases that were deemed valid resulted in a lawsuit that was successful. Does this take into account settlements? Is there a difference between the definition of actionable malpractice in law and actionable malpractice in the study? I would also be interested in knowing how many malpractice claims for actions that were not negligent were successful.
Then you have the fact that the review committees in every case are made up of doctors and professionals,
the studies you have cited were all compiled and presented by doctors, weren't they? it seems to me that doctors are exactly who you want evaluating claims of medical malpractice.
Do you happen to have a link for the NY study about 10 doctors being responsible for nearly 50% of the cases? I didnt see that in the abstracts in your other post.
Why were they practicing? Because the medical review boards hed declined to suspend their licenses for the incidents. These are people like the guy who operated on the wrong side of his patients skull, the guy who carved his initials into his patients abdomens etc.
in the case of the guy who carved his initials, his license was revoked. It took 5 months to revoke his license, but it was revoked. I didnt see the guy operating on the wrong side of his patient's skull story.
But if they reject it in any manner, then they can't redistribute anything licensed under it and if they do they're just making themselves lawsuit fodder.
they can reject the GPL for a specific application and that does not affect their acceptance of it on other GPLed applications. If they were to accept the GPL on the linux kernel and reject it for nmap, they could distribute the linux kernel, but could not distribute nmap.
the only way they could reject the GPL on one application and have it affect other applications (barring invalidating the GPL outright, which i dont think will ever happen) is if they violated the oft mentioned estoppel rules. (at least, that's the only way i can think of)
I disagree. As the president of Pixar, his job is to do what's in the best interests of the company. If his admins came to him and said they wanted to make a render farm using a bunch of xeons running linux and he told them to use Apple products instead, just because he's in charge at apple, he wouldnt be doing what is in the best interest of Pixar. He'd be doing what's in the best interest of Apple, and that's not his job at Pixar.
Since everyone thought it was just dandy to package someone else's graphics system (XFree) with their Linux distribution, these is exactly the sort of consequences one should expect.
yeah. it's ridiculous of alan cox to think he can just use the graphics system he worked on for the graphical desktop of the linux distribution he worked on.
seriously, though, the consequences (barring a reconciliation) are that the project will be forked and the work of the people who made the license change will be abandoned and reimplemented. The original project will end up marginalized as they ignore their users' desires.
it seems like this was anticipated by the people who created freedesktop.org and just happened faster than they could get a replacement ready.
I was just illustrating that sandboxing an application under a unique user account was a silly, and merely masks the underlying problem.
i wouldnt say it's silly. There are some cases where you cannot solve the underlying problem and sandboxing becomes an acceptable damage mitigation solution. As i understand it (and i could be wrong about this), this was a solution microsoft used to deal with a root exploit involving SqlServer.
Just because the tools are there to prevent the problem doesn't mean they will be used. No home user will use a system where they can't run a program of their choice (which you seem to acknowledge).
i agree that the tool existing doesnt mean it will be used. my point was that it is available if the user is so inclined. realistically, it doesnt matter how much security your operating system has built into it if the user decides it's too inconvenient and turns it all off.
However, you don't need to have active scripting in your mail client to have a flaw present which allows arbitrary code to run. A flaw could exist in HTML rendering code, MIME decoding, the code which displays the subject line, etc...
sure, we saw this last year (i think) with a buffer overflow in the subject line of some mail reader (i forgot which one, maybe mozilla?). For that kind of thing, you're really at the mercy of the patch process for the application (unless you have the source and ability to patch it yourself, but that doesnt apply to generic users).
The same solutions that you describe can be implemented on a Windows system with the tools currently available. Nobody does it, because it's a pain in the ass for the user.
i dont think the cron job nightly backup idea is a pain in the ass. you could even build an install system for it that would set it up for the user to backup and restore their directory to the last backup. that doesnt mean the user would actually use it, though.
The post you originally responded to was working from the context of employees at a company with an IT department, though. That makes things like the backup and noexec ideas more feasible since someone other than the typical user would be managing the system (and also means protecting other user accounts becomes more important)
realistically, home machines of users who are non-technical would be screwed in a way that, to them, might not be quantifiably better than how screwed they'd be on a windows box. in the original context of the conversation, though (corporate users with an IT dept), i still think the damage mitigation of linux over windows is a big deal.
Sure, while we're at it, let's create separate accounts for the word processor, gimp, the application you use to transfer pictures from your digital camera...
while i agree that creating a separate account just for mail is extreme, your examples dont really compare (except probably the word processor one). Those other applications are not a concern for virus propagation.
The problem still remains -- damage is done.
but that wasnt the point. the point wasnt that viruses cause damage at all. the point was it is much easier to minimize the damage a virus can cause in linux than in windows.
So a 'well written' worm will contain the text:
"Hey, check out this cool new game...you'll have to run 'chmod 755' on the file after saving it before you can run it." The problem still exists. In fact, with all of the stupid things people email each other your user will already be conditioned that such an operation is a normal thing to do.
i'm pretty sure that if you mount the filesystem noexec, chmod will not give you executable permissions on files on that filesystem. I agree that people will do stupid things and no amount of engineering can stop that. But i dont think this piece of social engineering would work on a noexec filesystem. Tangentially related (and solely my opinion), i think the windows ui encourages people to do stupid things.
>On top of that, there's no active scripting to exploit in most linux mail clients.
There no KNOWN active scripting exploit. And there's that "most" word...
I didnt say there were no active scripting exploits in linux mail clients. i said there is no active scripting to exploit. I included the "most" because i'm not personally familiar with all mail clients that exist for linux and expect there's probably one out there that does have an active scripting language in it.
It doesn't matter about the other users. The ability to get one user's address book means that the worm will probably end up being sent to your other users.
in the case of a family (since i used that example earlier), i would agree. If it gets one family member's address book, it'd probably propagate to the rest of them. The damage done to them can still be minimized.
In the case of a more public server (like a university email account server or something) i wouldnt agree. (which i recognise isnt really the situation we are talking about)
the point wasnt that you can prevent damage from happening at all. the point was that you can minimize the damage in a way that is significant to the user. The user doesnt have to be fucked because he doesnt have to lose all his data; and that makes it better.
Limited in the sense that the user can lose all of their data, but the system still boots. The user is still fucked, because they lost all their data. Somehow, that doesn't really seem any better to me.
really? it seems a lot better to me....especially if you have more than one user of the machine (like, say, a family). Sure, your stuff got nuked. Your wife and your kids still have all their stuff though.
Besides, if you're really worried about it, you can create two accounts; a work account and a mail account. Then crap in your inbox cannot nuke your work. Alternatively, you can set up a cron job to do nightly backups so a virus hosing your home directory only trashes work done since midnight the night before.
Meanwhile, your 30 gigs of riaa hated mp3s are safe and your porn collection is safe (and you can make it so your wife can't find it...maybe we should be promoting this as a reason to switch to linux).
Additionally, all of the worms that depend on the user launching them on windows could do an equal amount of 'damage' in the unix world. No special permissions are required for them to do their thing.
well, the afore mentioned noexec would stop them in their tracks. On top of that, there's no active scripting to exploit in most linux mail clients. Other user accounts are easily protected from having their address books read by these kinds of worms (i'm not sure if they grab multiple user address books in windows, so this may be a non-issue).
sure, they only require executable permissions to do their thing once they are run, but how are they going to get run?
Slashdot Mirror
Okay... copyright means that the author has the absolutely exclusive _rights_ to copy the work and others can only obtain _permission_ to copy the work by authorization from the copyright holder. Fair use, btw, is granted permission by the copyright act and the copyright holder has no choice but to implicitly grant that permission.
you know....it's not really "absolutely exclusive" if there is a mandated exception to it.
So in what world is putting a file that you do _NOT_ own the copyright on, and have not actually obtained permission from the copyright holder to copy for purposes beyond fair use, in a publicly shared folder for others to obtain _not_ a violation of the copyright act?
nowhere in this description has the person making the file available made a copy of it. They have also not distributed it in any way. Just because they left their legally owned property in an unsafe environment does not mean they have infringed someone's copyright.
Downloading copyrighted materials may be perfectly legal in Canada (albeit unethical IMO, since one is aiding another in violating copyright), but it makes no sense to even _BEGIN_ to tolerate uploading whenever and wherever you can positively ascertain that it is occurring.
no uploading has occured in your description. Putting a file in a public directory is not uploading. The uploading doesnt occur until someone tries to copy that file. Until you prove the file has been copied from that location, there has been no violation of copyright.
Why, pray tell, is the Judge so hell-bent on ignoring the obvious conclusion?
because criminal law doesnt deal in speculation. It deals in proof. In this case, the record company has no evidence to suggest that anything illegal has happened.
do you really think "it seems likely" is the level of proof that should be required to start invading someone's life?
would that be acceptable if they wanted to invade your privacy?
Nit-picky post there. Nicely avoids the subject though.
i dont think it avoided the subject. The subject, in the case of this thread, is the technical appropriateness of using the term murder for abortions. The personal opinions of the people discussing it is pretty much irrelevant to the definition of murder in the eyes of the law.
as far as being nit-picky goes. my post is nit-picky because it's a restatement of the original exception that started this tangent (which was pretty nit-picky to begin with).
realistically, the whole issue is about technical use of language. Outside of environments where precision of language is necessary, it is a nit-picky argument.
your referred post does not contradict what i said. I said that under the current legal definition of murder, abortion is clearly not one. I also specifically said that the legal view of what is murder and the status of a fetus as a person can be expanded to make abortion murder. I also agreed with you that there were some efforts underway that could give a fetus personhood and make abortion murder in the eyes of the law.
i am certainly not saying the definition of murder can never be expanded.
It just looked to me like his argument wasnt being very clear and maybe a rephrasing of where he was coming from might help. he is right about the technical usage of the term, even if he is taking your statement more literally than you intended. I wasnt trying to attack you; i was just trying to clarify what he was taking issue with and what the issue was based on. (i was also trying to do so in a more civil way than the original poster had).
I also didn't mean to say that you were inconsistent in your beliefs with respect to capital punishment. I just wanted to point out where the "killing a human being" statement was a little too broad and didnt accurately reflect what you intended to say. I wasnt trying to draw you into a debate about capital punishment.
I make the assumption that a fetus is 'innocent' by default, thus not deserving of death, yet still a living human being.
and under those criteria it would be murder. The sticking point that started this whole thing is just that the law doesnt currently consider a fetus a living human being.
It really boils down to this: the original exception that was taken to your statement was that your statement was phrased in a way that stated "abortion is murder" as a fact as opposed to a belief. If you had said "abortion should be murder", i dont think he would have had a problem, and most people would probably have read your statemtent to mean that. However, this is probably a pet peeve of his and he took exception to it.
Technically, he's right. And that's all he's arguing about is the technical use of the term.
NB Spelling may be off, but it's late...
looked good to me.
The real argument is whether or not abortion (I'll use your term) is killing (no appeal to emotion here buddy) a living human being. If it *is* killing a living human being, then it should be illegal. If not, then it isn't, nor can it be, murder.
I disagree with the assertion that killing a living human being should always be illegal. Self defense, for example, would be a case where i could envision someone killing a living human being legally.
In fact, there is currently legal hearings going on in some state (can't remember which) as to whether killing a fetus through abuse of a pregnant woman counts as murder.
while it may be true that someone is arguing that point in court, and it is true that there is some action to make a federal law that does the same thing, it doesnt change the fact that currently a fetus has no legal personhood (and hasnt for at least 30 years). Therefore abortion is not killing a living human being in the eyes of the law and cannot be murder.
I believe that a fetus is a living human being, from inception on. Therefore, in my mind, it is rightly called murder if you kill it without a trial and court order (a fetus commited of capital crime?)
The law clearly does not agree with your belief that the fetus is a living human being. So calling it murder is incorrect in a legal sense.
by your previous statement, in the first piece of text i quoted, death penalties should still be considered murder. (not really the point, i know. i just wanted to point out the inconsistency so you could refine your point to more accurately reflext what you intended).
You believe, I'm guessing, that it becomes a human being at some arbitrary point in it's development? Thus it is not murder to 'abort' it. Or perhaps you actually have no true opinion, and just blindly follow the letter of the law in this case? You've not said, you've only bitched about my use of the word murder.
I think the guy you are responding to was specifically trying to not make what he believes an issue. His argument was that your use of the term "murder" was incorrect (and i would agree with him). What he believes isnt relevant to that argument.
As far as "blindly following the letter of the law in this case"; murder is a legal term. How the law looks at something is the only relevant way to look at it when determining if something is murder. If you disagree with it, you need to work on getting the law to expand their view of murder.
Until they do, it isnt murder. Maybe it should be murder, but it isnt currently murder.
Gambling is a Vice and an addictive activity (even has a 12 step program to help recovering addicts whose lives have been shattered just like the 12 steps for drugs and alcohol).
Alcohol consumption is legal in the United States. So is consumption of tobacco products (which are also a vice and addictive activity). Why should it being a vice or addictive activity have any bearing on it's legality considering the other legal addictive vices?
There is almost zero difference between the WTO ruling on this case and if they had ruled that Columbia has the right to export cocain.
There is one huge difference. Cocaine use and distribution is illegal in most of the WTO countries. Distribution of cocaine is also illegal in Columbia.
And taken another way the WTO is weaking the vice laws to the lowest common denominator -- anyone for 12 year old denmark kiddy porn?
Kiddy porn is illegal in denmark. The legal age of consent there is 15 years old. Even then, if you are significantly older or more experienced, you can be charged with inducement to sexual activity if they are under 18.
Most kiddy porn comes from Japan (where it is also not legal).
Given this stupid ruling, it's not a stretch at all for the WTO to rule this is legal as well.
i disagree. i think it's a huge stretch. you are comparing them making a ruling about something that is legal in every member country other than the U.S. to them possibly making rulings demanding we legalize things that are not legal in any other member country.
of course, since C and See are homophones, "C COLON" might very well get you to the goatse.cx website also.
i dont know what you think "my purposes" are, but it's irrelevent to what the text says.
The national guard was prominently mentioned in what he posted. It's also prominently mentioned in what i posted. In both posts it is prominently mentioned in exactly the same context. The national guard reference is clearly and specifically referring to the requirements for a female citizen to be considered a member of the militia. It has no bearing on a male citizen's status in the militia.
But seriously, I have never heard anyone explain why a private citizen needs to own a fully automatic assault rifle (other than "it's in the constitution", which is the traditional definition of begging the question).
because i want one?
All the rights have limits; for instance it's not free speech to shout "fire" in a crowded theater
actually, it is if there's a fire.
it says all males between 17 and 45 who are able bodied and are, or have declared an intention to become, citizens are de facto members of the militia.
it also says females who are citizens and members of the national guard are also de facto members of the militia.
"This is f*cking brilliant" is not protected speech, never has been, and never will be, and you don't have to be religious to find certain phrases vulgar or offensive.
/. readers can comprehend SCO can not claim that "All your Linux base belong to us," and then pretend they are merely exercising their right to free speech when it is shown that in fact they don't own all of your Linux bases.
actually, it is. The barometer for when speech falls outside of first amendment protection is if it represents a clear and present danger of bringing about substantive evils.
i dont think any reasonable person would say the phrase "this is fucking brilliant" meets that requirement.
To use an example that
actually, until this point of contention is ruled on by a court, SCO can claim that everyone owes them linux licensing fees. Until they prove their claim, nobody has to believe them, though.
and in case you hadn't noticed, that is exactly what is happening. SCO is claiming everyone owes them money for using Linux, and nobody is believing them.
Once a court rules against them, you're right that they cannot say it at that point, but that's because it is fraud. The substantive harm is provable by IBM, Red Hat, etc. at that point.
You might disagree with this, and you might even feel that the use of vulgar language should be encouraged over public broadcasts. However, the vast majority of folks disagree with you.
and you base this assertion about the vast majority of people on.....what?
the "Fire in a crowded theater" example comes from Schenck V. United States. It says falsely yelling fire in a crowded theater and causing a panic is not protected speech.
:
It goes on to say
The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.
This is the barometer that the supreme court defined for determining the limitation on speech.
because in the computer marketplace microsoft enters into exclusionary deals with distribution channels to keep competitors from being able to bring choices to the customers.
In the computer marketplace, microsoft does tie applications to the operating system in a way you cannot remove them.
For example, most Hondas come with a rebranded Honda stereo. These days, you don't even have a choice - the car comes with a stereo. Find me one that doesn't. So is that "unfair" to JVC or Sony or other manufacturers? Seems to me the aftermarket stereo market is quite brisk.
i wonder how brisk it would be if Honda designed the cars so that the stereo couldn't be removed (rewired the ignition sequence to go through the stereo or something). I mean, it's no big deal. If you want a different stereo, just put a blank face plate over the honda one and find another piece of your console real estate to use for your after market stereo.
That wont happen though, because people who are really into stereos would never buy a honda if they did that. That's because they have a choice and the market can effectively regulate itself.
Are you sure that it was Microsoft who forced them to enter the "Free" browser market, and not Mosaic?
I'm sure. One of the principal developers of NCSA's mosaic started Netscape. Mosaic had been around and had been free for a while before Netscape existed. Netscape wasnt forced to distribute their product for free until microsoft entered the picture.
Some of the other NCSA developers started selling Mosaic under the name Spyglass. The codebase for mosaic was licensed by Microsoft to create the original release of Internet Explorer (so, i guess, in a way you could say it was mosaic's fault). According to the CEO of Spyglass, Microsoft then stole the code, stopped paying them the licensing fee and crushed the company. Spyglass survived by giving up on Mosaic and finding a new market. They started developing a toolset for embedding stuff into the windows desktop. After their initial release, Microsoft developed ActiveX and crushed them under a pile of lawyers. They survived by cutting loose that idea too. Now they just look for markets they think microsoft wont care about. (actually, i think they're out of business now)
That story came from the CEO of spyglass, so feel free to consider it biased.
How about the guys who wrote Lynx? Did they force Netscape to release their browser for free?
no. they were around when netscape was charging for their browser. that didnt seem to be a problem.
You seem to have this odd idea that Microsoft were the first people to put out a browser for free.
no, but they were the first company to tie it to the operating system and make restrictive licensing deals that cut off distribution channels from their competitor in the market.
Were you actually around for the whole start of the WWW, or are you one of these people who came later?
yes, i was around for the whole start of the web.
I remember using gopher, even.
I was under the impression there already was a trademarked piece of software called Eclipse
There are no trademark symbols used anywhere on that page with respect to the use of the name Eclipse for that piece of software. I imagine it is not trademarked.
If it were, it might still not be considered an infringement of their trademark since their software has a different market than the eclipse ide.
i dont necessarily agree or disagree with your assertions, but i did note a couple things in your post.
What I find amazing is the fact that NONE of the statistics support any of these positions. According to two recent studies - one by the AMA and the other by the Harvard Public Policy school (?, I believe the Harvard Medical Practice Study) - both found that:
- malpractice, at least as defined by negligence, is fairly common
do you have the definition of negligence handy? the abstracts of the studies you cite do not define it. they also dont define their definition of negligence for the purposes of the study. (i'm sure the study does, but i dont have accounts on those websites, so i cannot read anything but the abstract)
from the abstracts, though, it appears that about 1% of medical events result in adverse events resulting from negligence.
that doesnt really seem that common to me.
- of those with valid claims, only about 1% actually bring suit against a doctor
This seems (From the abstracts, at least) to be an incredibly vague point. How are claims determined to be valid if they are not filed? Were suits not filed because settlements were reached? Were they technically valid, but so insignificant it wasnt important to the patient? I'm not sure that there is any meaning in this statistic.
- of those who bring suit, only 1% are successful
i didnt find this statistic in the abstracts. Do you have a more specific place i should look to find this data?
i did find the statement that most malpractice claims were for adverse effects not resulting from negligence. this seems to imply that the majority of malpractice claims are for actions that do not constitute malpractice. (of 51 claims filed in the study, only 8 were for actions that constituted malpractice). i'm not sure if that is an accurate inference to make, though, because the information in the abstracts is vague. (that's not a condemnation, it's an abstract, after all)
This means that 1/100 of a percent of incidents of malpractice actually result in an award.
i'm not sure that's a fair assumption. 1/100 of a percent of malpractice cases that were deemed valid resulted in a lawsuit that was successful. Does this take into account settlements? Is there a difference between the definition of actionable malpractice in law and actionable malpractice in the study?
I would also be interested in knowing how many malpractice claims for actions that were not negligent were successful.
Then you have the fact that the review committees in every case are made up of doctors and professionals,
the studies you have cited were all compiled and presented by doctors, weren't they? it seems to me that doctors are exactly who you want evaluating claims of medical malpractice.
Do you happen to have a link for the NY study about 10 doctors being responsible for nearly 50% of the cases? I didnt see that in the abstracts in your other post.
Why were they practicing? Because the medical review boards hed declined to suspend their licenses for the incidents. These are people like the guy who operated on the wrong side of his patients skull, the guy who carved his initials into his patients abdomens etc.
in the case of the guy who carved his initials, his license was revoked. It took 5 months to revoke his license, but it was revoked. I didnt see the guy operating on the wrong side of his patient's skull story.
Well, I guess the smear machine is getting up to speed.
just for clarity's sake, i'd like to point out that the smear machine that produced all that was Wesley Clark, not Bush.
of course, it being done to smear him doesnt change the fact that there's a lot of supporting evidence for it.
But if they reject it in any manner, then they can't redistribute anything licensed under it and if they do they're just making themselves lawsuit fodder.
they can reject the GPL for a specific application and that does not affect their acceptance of it on other GPLed applications. If they were to accept the GPL on the linux kernel and reject it for nmap, they could distribute the linux kernel, but could not distribute nmap.
the only way they could reject the GPL on one application and have it affect other applications (barring invalidating the GPL outright, which i dont think will ever happen) is if they violated the oft mentioned estoppel rules. (at least, that's the only way i can think of)
tenths of books, eh?
so you and your brother played a lot of Synnibar?
I disagree. As the president of Pixar, his job is to do what's in the best interests of the company. If his admins came to him and said they wanted to make a render farm using a bunch of xeons running linux and he told them to use Apple products instead, just because he's in charge at apple, he wouldnt be doing what is in the best interest of Pixar. He'd be doing what's in the best interest of Apple, and that's not his job at Pixar.
Since everyone thought it was just dandy to package someone else's graphics system (XFree) with their Linux distribution, these is exactly the sort of consequences one should expect.
yeah. it's ridiculous of alan cox to think he can just use the graphics system he worked on for the graphical desktop of the linux distribution he worked on.
seriously, though, the consequences (barring a reconciliation) are that the project will be forked and the work of the people who made the license change will be abandoned and reimplemented. The original project will end up marginalized as they ignore their users' desires.
it seems like this was anticipated by the people who created freedesktop.org and just happened faster than they could get a replacement ready.
i disagree. SCO have been trying desperately to patch the huge holes in it's lawsuit. They are just too big to patch, is all.
(you did mean the lawsuit when referring to SCO's flagship product, right?)
I was just illustrating that sandboxing an application under a unique user account was a silly, and merely masks the underlying problem.
i wouldnt say it's silly. There are some cases where you cannot solve the underlying problem and sandboxing becomes an acceptable damage mitigation solution. As i understand it (and i could be wrong about this), this was a solution microsoft used to deal with a root exploit involving SqlServer.
Just because the tools are there to prevent the problem doesn't mean they will be used. No home user will use a system where they can't run a program of their choice (which you seem to acknowledge).
i agree that the tool existing doesnt mean it will be used. my point was that it is available if the user is so inclined. realistically, it doesnt matter how much security your operating system has built into it if the user decides it's too inconvenient and turns it all off.
However, you don't need to have active scripting in your mail client to have a flaw present which allows arbitrary code to run. A flaw could exist in HTML rendering code, MIME decoding, the code which displays the subject line, etc...
sure, we saw this last year (i think) with a buffer overflow in the subject line of some mail reader (i forgot which one, maybe mozilla?). For that kind of thing, you're really at the mercy of the patch process for the application (unless you have the source and ability to patch it yourself, but that doesnt apply to generic users).
The same solutions that you describe can be implemented on a Windows system with the tools currently available. Nobody does it, because it's a pain in the ass for the user.
i dont think the cron job nightly backup idea is a pain in the ass. you could even build an install system for it that would set it up for the user to backup and restore their directory to the last backup. that doesnt mean the user would actually use it, though.
The post you originally responded to was working from the context of employees at a company with an IT department, though. That makes things like the backup and noexec ideas more feasible since someone other than the typical user would be managing the system (and also means protecting other user accounts becomes more important)
realistically, home machines of users who are non-technical would be screwed in a way that, to them, might not be quantifiably better than how screwed they'd be on a windows box.
in the original context of the conversation, though (corporate users with an IT dept), i still think the damage mitigation of linux over windows is a big deal.
Sure, while we're at it, let's create separate accounts for the word processor, gimp, the application you use to transfer pictures from your digital camera ...
...
while i agree that creating a separate account just for mail is extreme, your examples dont really compare (except probably the word processor one). Those other applications are not a concern for virus propagation.
The problem still remains -- damage is done.
but that wasnt the point. the point wasnt that viruses cause damage at all. the point was it is much easier to minimize the damage a virus can cause in linux than in windows.
So a 'well written' worm will contain the text:
"Hey, check out this cool new game...you'll have to run 'chmod 755' on the file after saving it before you can run it." The problem still exists. In fact, with all of the stupid things people email each other your user will already be conditioned that such an operation is a normal thing to do.
i'm pretty sure that if you mount the filesystem noexec, chmod will not give you executable permissions on files on that filesystem. I agree that people will do stupid things and no amount of engineering can stop that. But i dont think this piece of social engineering would work on a noexec filesystem.
Tangentially related (and solely my opinion), i think the windows ui encourages people to do stupid things.
>On top of that, there's no active scripting to exploit in most linux mail clients.
There no KNOWN active scripting exploit. And there's that "most" word
I didnt say there were no active scripting exploits in linux mail clients. i said there is no active scripting to exploit. I included the "most" because i'm not personally familiar with all mail clients that exist for linux and expect there's probably one out there that does have an active scripting language in it.
It doesn't matter about the other users. The ability to get one user's address book means that the worm will probably end up being sent to your other users.
in the case of a family (since i used that example earlier), i would agree. If it gets one family member's address book, it'd probably propagate to the rest of them. The damage done to them can still be minimized.
In the case of a more public server (like a university email account server or something) i wouldnt agree. (which i recognise isnt really the situation we are talking about)
the point wasnt that you can prevent damage from happening at all. the point was that you can minimize the damage in a way that is significant to the user. The user doesnt have to be fucked because he doesnt have to lose all his data; and that makes it better.
Limited in the sense that the user can lose all of their data, but the system still boots. The user is still fucked, because they lost all their data. Somehow, that doesn't really seem any better to me.
really? it seems a lot better to me....especially if you have more than one user of the machine (like, say, a family). Sure, your stuff got nuked. Your wife and your kids still have all their stuff though.
Besides, if you're really worried about it, you can create two accounts; a work account and a mail account. Then crap in your inbox cannot nuke your work.
Alternatively, you can set up a cron job to do nightly backups so a virus hosing your home directory only trashes work done since midnight the night before.
Meanwhile, your 30 gigs of riaa hated mp3s are safe and your porn collection is safe (and you can make it so your wife can't find it...maybe we should be promoting this as a reason to switch to linux).
Additionally, all of the worms that depend on the user launching them on windows could do an equal amount of 'damage' in the unix world. No special permissions are required for them to do their thing.
well, the afore mentioned noexec would stop them in their tracks. On top of that, there's no active scripting to exploit in most linux mail clients. Other user accounts are easily protected from having their address books read by these kinds of worms (i'm not sure if they grab multiple user address books in windows, so this may be a non-issue).
sure, they only require executable permissions to do their thing once they are run, but how are they going to get run?