This sounds to me a rather simple idea. Corporation CEOs are rich people. And as a condition for taking up their position, they should be required to make a substantial investment in the company. Nobody should trust a Fortune 500 / FTSE 100 company to a CEO who isn't willing to bet some of his/her own money on their own skill as a CEO. And they should be required to keep this investment until at least 2-3 years after they step down.
This way they will win or lose depending on how the company performs over time, not last quarter.
Suspected criminals are often detained without visitors or communication (apart from their solicitor). This is clearly censorship, as they are not allowed to communicate with anyone. The reason is to stop them from having evidence destroyed or tampered with on their instruction.
During a police operation, if it was seen to be important to block lines of communication (phone lines, mobile phone signals) for the suspects during the operation (i.e. to stop them from calling for backup, or destroy evidence), they most definitely would do this. This is, in essence, censorship.
Twitter is no different. If Twitter was being used to call in backup from gang members during a raid, or to allow them to organise an armed defence, then it most certainly would be right to block the suspect's access to Twitter during the operation.
Conclusions may well be wrong, but thinking about these issues and deciding on the moral right of them is not. Otherwise we are simply fundamentalists and no better than extreme religious nutters.
"Given that there are legally blind people enjoying movies, his statement boils down to "I don't enjoy movies". What kind of defence is that?"
No. He is statement boils down to: "I don't enjoy movies. You may or not believe me, but due to my disability it is highly likely that I am telling the truth".
Testimony is evidence. The judge or jury has to decide whether they believe that the testimony is truthful or not. If there is a particularly good reason why the testimony is convincing, then the judge is obviously more likely to believe it.
"There is absolutely no doubt in your mind. The human body and mind is remarkable, and humans make the most of the senses they have, and don't dwell on those they don't have. Only the healthy people can afford to do that."
I call hand-waving bullshit on this. A film can be experienced using two senses; sight and hearing. If you have only one of these senses, then your experience of the film is by definition impaired. Whether you can still have enjoyment out of it depends on how much of the film can be enjoyed using only your hearing. A drama or a Tarantino film may be quite enjoyable without the images, but an action film where most of the audio is explosions is unlikely to give the blind anything at all. But unless the film has no pictures (in which case it isn't a movie), then there is by definition going to be some loss of experience for the blind. "The human body and mind is remarkable" my ass, tell this bullshit to a blind person and he'd laugh at you.
"Wait, when a consumer spends a dollar for a iBlah, it's a vote for closed garden."
This is a straw man. The argument here is not that people WANT a closed garden, it is that they don't care. I sincerely doubt that openness figures in people's minds when they buy a consumer product and Apple have proven this with the iPad sales vs. any other tablet. So Android's lead in the phone market is likely to be to something else. Most likely the availability of low-end Android handsets.
Obviously, this is an indirect consequence of the closed garden. Apple does not compete for low-end markets, so there is no low end iOS devices. However, if Samsung didn't compete for low end Android phones, someone else would because Android is open.
But this doesn't change the fact that the consumer doesn't care about openness, even if they do care about some of the indirect consequences, and if Apple decided to compete for the low-end market by introducing an iPhone Nano, they would most likely own that market as well.
"Half of smart phone sales are Android phones [talkandroid.com]. Sounds like the average person has jumped enthusiastically into a more open world than iOS, at least for their smart phones."
No. I hear this all the time, but the argument is hollow. Apple does not sell low-end smart phones, and they only compete for the top dollar market. In the UK, we're talking 24 month contracts at £35+ per month. Android phones can be had for 18 month contracts at £20 per month, basically half the price. Obviously, these cheaper phones have a very slow processor, poor screen and are extremely "plasticky". I am willing to bet that Android does not hold the lead in the high-end market.
So these sales does not prove that the average person has jumped enthusiastically. If anything, they have so far reluctantly got in the water because it is too expensive to stay on the beach. Unless you can show that Android holds the lead in the market that Apple actually competes in, the sales figure means nothing in this argument.
with open('foo.txt') as inputfile: process(inputfile)
which explicitly garbage-collects inputfile as soon as it falls out of scope. If you use that pattern you'll never need to close the file (and it would in fact be a pretty dumb thing to do)."
This is actually what most (all?) C++ File I/O libraries do and certainly the standard fstream libraries. As long as you create your file stream on the stack (and I can't think of a reason not to), the file handles will be taken care of by RAII. As soon as it goes out of scope, the destructor will be called, which will close the file handle.
This Tutorial actually explicitly closes the file handle, but I wish it didn't, or at least made it explicitly clear that it isn't necessary as long as you use scope efficiently.
Instead you have to make do with this statement. "In case that an object is destructed while still associated with an open file, the destructor automatically calls the member function close()."
"What if you interpret stealing to be "Obtaining non-free content without paying for it". Now it doesn't matter whether you shoplift it, or download it. No matter which way you try to bend words, downloading movies is a form of theft"
Interpretation would not be enough. You would have to redefine the word theft.
You commit two major sins in this debate. The first is the straw man of assuming that just because someone objects to equating copyright infringement with theft that they approve of copyright infringement. The second straw man is that in your attempt to ridicule to opponent you misrepresent him by mentioning a coupel of his possible lesser important arguments, leaving out the biggest reason that copyright infringement is not theft.
Theft takes an object away from the original owner. If someone steals my car, the spiteful part of me may hope that the thief won't enjoy it, but the major reason I'm feeling pissed off is that I no longer have a car. Copyright infringement does no such thing. Since copyright infringement doesn't share the most important property of theft, it is not theft.
Copyright infringement, may take a sale away from the copyright holder. This is by no means certain, the infringer may not have legally licensed/purchased even if he couldn't get it for free. At best you can say that copyright infringement take away a potential sale. In some cases this is not even true, since some infringers does indeed end up purchasing the product.
So these two actions are different and the reason copyright holders want to equate them is an attempt to get more sympathy from the public. This attempt at redefining the word "theft" is disingenuous but you seem to have fallen for it nonetheless.
Note that this post does not mean that I approve of copyright infringement. It is a different action, but it may still be objectionable.
"It's perfectly good logic. This individual's defense boils down to 1) All blind people cannot enjoy movies. 2) I am a blind person. 3) Therefore, I cannot enjoy movies, had no motive for downloading this movie, and could not have done so."
No. His defence was basically that he is legally blind and doesn't enjoy movies". He never said that "all blind people cannot enjoy movies", he said that HE doesn't enjoy movies because he is blind. There is absolutely no doubt that being blind detracts from the movie experience, and the existance of a minority which still finds some enjoyment in movies does not mean he is lying about this.
Obviously a judge would have to decide whether he/she believed him, but given that he majority do not enjoy movies, it is likely that he is telling the truth.
Qualifier: I'm not a Tory and dislike David Cameron.
But I'd give David Cameron the benefit of the doubt in this case. He has not said the government will ban social media or block it during riots. He has just said that he will ask a group to consider whether it would be right. The conclusion may well be "no it isn't right", but as of yet we have absolutely no idea how broad or limited the conclusions will be.
In any case it is important to consider the cultural differences between Britain (and in this case I believe Western Europe) as opposed to the US. Europeans tend to have a more relaxed attitude to free speech. Most consider the right approach to be Free speech with qualifiers, i.e. slander, privacy, inciting hate, child pornography, truth in advertisement, etc. There is always a discussion as to where you draw the line, but this isn't isn't usually considered a binary choice.
I recognise that the US may have a larger share of people who believe that any sort of censorship is wrong, and this is cool. But in this case it doesn't really matter what you think. England (I'm going to assume England only here and ignore the subtleties of UK vs Scots law, etc) is not the US and its laws should surely be representative of its own people?
How is this relevant to the discussion, you may ask? Well, it may be utterly impossible that blocking social media during a riot is compatible with the US libertarian view of free speech, but it isn't totally out of the question that Cameron's group can come up with a plan to block social media during riots which is compatible with the majority definition of free speech in England.
I am, in fact, sceptical that he may come up with a sensible solution which involves social media blockage, but I'm willing to hear what his working group has to say on the matter before I make up my mind.
I hate to nitpick, but I've yet to see anyone in IT actually upgrading a major version of the kernel. This is nearly unheard of except small, specialised Linux-shops. People tend to stick with whatever version came with their current version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux or whatever their vendor is (I'm going to assume RHEL for the rest of this post with little or no loss of generality).
Red Hat may issue small kernel upgrades, but they don't even change the minor kernel version, just the patch level version through the life cycle of that RHEL version. So the only time enterprise server customers update their major kernel versions are when they upgrade their version of RHEL. And even this is rare. The enterprises I've seen will commission a server rack with RHEL already on it and fully configured from their supplier. And they will stick with this until the rack is end of life, only installing service packs and security updates on it.
Because of this, the Linux kernel version matters very little to most enterprise customers. They care more about using an established well tested version of RHEL. I.e. not wanting a new version until it is at least a year old with new bugs ironed out. And the Linux kernel versions matter little to the Linux distributors, because they have all the inside knowledge to whether Linux version 3.1 is a major upgrade or not. This leaves me thinking that the kernel version number actually is actually ONLY relevant to students and hobbyists.
Please correct my reasoning here, because I struggle to see why you find the Linux kernel version so important. Firefox versions, fine, but why the Linux kernel version?
Some of those old activists have made it into power in Europe, where I believe the system tends to be more forgiving about these things than the US. The ones that have made it, however, are older, wiser (?) and more sanitised versions of their 60s selves.
Professional soldiers do not volunteer to each war. They voluntarily sign up to be in the army but then have to go to whatever war the government has decided to send them to. Many of them would have signed up to protect and serve their country. They deserve the respect and decency to be sent out to wars based on reality, not lies.
Granted, it is still not the same as simply being drafted.
"This is just catching up to the state of the art of the mid 90s, when people started (perfectly reasonably) ripping unencrypted cds to their hard drives. These people are now no longer criminals."
Just to nit pick. They are making the action legal in the future. However all of us that have done so in the past and might well do so again before the law comes into effect are still filthy criminals. We broke the law and we could technically still be arrested and prosecuted for it even after the law comes into effect.
"But if the encryption prevents things you're allowed to do (so, soon format shifting...?) then there must be a way round that."
Not really. Being "allowed" to do something does not mean you have a right to do so. This is also a common misconception regarding the US Fair Use doctrine. Fair Use is not a right, but it is a defence you can use in a case against you.
The difference may seem subtle, but if it was "a right", then companies wouldn't be allowed to use encryption to stop you from exercising your rights. Since format shifting will be merely "allowed", the media companies will still be allowed to use DRM to stop you from doing so.
I doubt any front bench politician would have the balls to call for format shifting to become a right.
"No contract, no ownership. If he signed ownership of his work over, it's their code, not his. If he didn't, it's still his"
I'm not sure you're giving decent legal advice here. No contract != no ownership. Rather, no contract means that there is a default ownership specified by law and this ownership is not necessarily clear.
IANAL, but if the code was created as part of his job then courts are likely to deem it "work-for-hire" if ownership wasn't explicitly given to him in a contract. Certainly, the code I write during office hours would belong to my company even if copyright assignment to them wasn't specified in the work contract. This may even apply out of office hours depending on whether it was likely I was doing office work or not. I.e. just because I was at home when I checked in some new features to the company software, does NOT mean that those features are copyright me.
Since this guy has admitted to working "day and night" for this company, a court would likely believe the company if they stated this was part of his work. If the code was also integrated into the work code, then he really is struggling.
It is a very good idea to keep your work and and hobby coding completely separate and never let them touch each other in any way unless explicitly discussed in a written agreement.
" In the UK, the smallest denomination is 1p which is worth 1.6 cents. I frequently give such coins to my niece as play money..."
I know this is off topic, but I thought I'd add to this. I'm an advocate for getting rid of the 1 and 2p coins. The equivalent has already been done successfully in other countries (i.e. Scandinavia. For instance in Norway the smallest coin is 50 ore, which is more or less equivalent to 5p) with little or no complaints. It would save money and it would get rid of a big irritation.
I often hear people say "they're not worthless, if you add enough together". The problem is that you need to gather up 300 of these 1p coins in order to afford ONE pint of beer. If you're given five 1p coins per day and you save every one of them dutifully for 20 years, you'd still have less than £400. This is simply not worth it, as there must be literally hundreds of lower hanging fruit if you wanted to save money.
Also, you can't really refuse them at the shops and giving them as a tip (even if you leave real coins as well) is considered rude. So unless there is a charity box around when I get them, I think I've just decided to start throwing them away rather than put them in my wallet.
"Do you really want 10 racks of servers with high-speed fans spinning away in your basement?"
No. First of all it'd probably be half a rack per home (i.e. the size of a typical UK boiler) and it would probably use water cooling rather than fans, where the waste water actually provides heat and hot water for your home. It is interesting, but obviously the rack owner would have to pay some of the electricity bill in order to make it worthwhile to the home owner. Otherwise it is just expensive water and heating for the home owner.
Overall this could save energy and thus money by utilising the heat produced by the racks in a more constructive manner than currently. However, as TFA states it would also require an absolutely massive upgrade of domestic networking infrastructure. ADSL certainly would not do. This has so far not been cost effective for service providers, but perhaps coupled with the energy savings it may be worthwhile?
I'd still worry about the lack of physical security.
"And why on earth would you want to keep the default ROM on *any* Android phone?"
Avoiding violating your warranty for one thing. Using a well-tested phone and software setup together is a second good reason. The third reason is that not everyone is actually interested in messing around with Android ROMs. They just want a well functioning smart phone out of the box. In most cases I believe this is true for Android. However, I'm seriously regretting having suggested a Samsung android phone to my wife.
The only supported way of syncing this phone and upgrading the firmware in a supported manner is via Samsung Kies. And this software really is a POS. I've heard all the complaints about iTunes, but despite being a pig, it does actually work. It does the job. I've now tried to sync her phone on three different computers with either Kies or the Samsung PC Software suite and it simply will not recognize the phone. I've now given up and plan on returning the phone asap since it is still in warranty.
I've thought about Odin. But frankly, I don't have the time or the energy to be messing around with it.
This is pure bullshit. The only ones that believe this is the norm in Norway are far right wingers who has never been to prison.
Ordinary people are scared of prison regardless of what it's like. Criminals never get stopped by the thought of going to prison regardless of what it's like, although they may turn more ruthless to avoid prison. Ie. when they rob you they always kill you to avoid leaving witnesses.
Preventing crime by scaring criminals with tough sentencing does not work. It just leaves you with a very expensive prison system. Money that could have been spent on education and social equality measures which WOULD reduce crime.
Show me a country that has low crime rates due to a harsh penal system?
"They review, but the reviewers are often just working for the glory (and promotions)."
Glory and promotions for doing peer review? Which world do you live in? Academics get glory and promotions for publishing work in major journals, not for reviewing other people's work.
Prison rape is not considered acceptable in the UK (or most of western Europe) and so the authorities actually try to stamp it out if it happens. As a consequence it is not a major problem.
Prisons in Europe are thus not "Pound me in the arse prisons".
I wonder if judges in the US ever factor this in when they decide upon a sentence.
"The point is clearly that no system connected to the internet is secure, and that it can be cracked given enough skills."
The point is that they are immature and immoral criminal asswipes who hurt people for "lolz" and they are now being hunted by police forces around the world with many of them close to being caught.
Yes, you may learn something from being robbed, but that does not make the robbery ok.
Not sure. Doesn't the majority shareholder still have to act in the interest of the company? AFAIK there are laws as to what the majority share holder is allowed to do as to not ruin the investment that the minority shareholders have in the company.
If it is in Oracle's interest to sue Google for copyright infringement, then I'm not sure if buying 51% of Oracle would really allow Google to cancel that lawsuit.
Slashdot Mirror
This sounds to me a rather simple idea. Corporation CEOs are rich people. And as a condition for taking up their position, they should be required to make a substantial investment in the company. Nobody should trust a Fortune 500 / FTSE 100 company to a CEO who isn't willing to bet some of his/her own money on their own skill as a CEO. And they should be required to keep this investment until at least 2-3 years after they step down.
This way they will win or lose depending on how the company performs over time, not last quarter.
Suspected criminals are often detained without visitors or communication (apart from their solicitor). This is clearly censorship, as they are not allowed to communicate with anyone. The reason is to stop them from having evidence destroyed or tampered with on their instruction.
During a police operation, if it was seen to be important to block lines of communication (phone lines, mobile phone signals) for the suspects during the operation (i.e. to stop them from calling for backup, or destroy evidence), they most definitely would do this. This is, in essence, censorship.
Twitter is no different. If Twitter was being used to call in backup from gang members during a raid, or to allow them to organise an armed defence, then it most certainly would be right to block the suspect's access to Twitter during the operation.
Conclusions may well be wrong, but thinking about these issues and deciding on the moral right of them is not. Otherwise we are simply fundamentalists and no better than extreme religious nutters.
"Given that there are legally blind people enjoying movies, his statement boils down to "I don't enjoy movies".
What kind of defence is that?"
No. He is statement boils down to: "I don't enjoy movies. You may or not believe me, but due to my disability it is highly likely that I am telling the truth".
Testimony is evidence. The judge or jury has to decide whether they believe that the testimony is truthful or not. If there is a particularly good reason why the testimony is convincing, then the judge is obviously more likely to believe it.
"There is absolutely no doubt in your mind. The human body and mind is remarkable, and humans make the most of the senses they have, and don't dwell on those they don't have. Only the healthy people can afford to do that."
I call hand-waving bullshit on this. A film can be experienced using two senses; sight and hearing. If you have only one of these senses, then your experience of the film is by definition impaired. Whether you can still have enjoyment out of it depends on how much of the film can be enjoyed using only your hearing. A drama or a Tarantino film may be quite enjoyable without the images, but an action film where most of the audio is explosions is unlikely to give the blind anything at all. But unless the film has no pictures (in which case it isn't a movie), then there is by definition going to be some loss of experience for the blind. "The human body and mind is remarkable" my ass, tell this bullshit to a blind person and he'd laugh at you.
"Wait, when a consumer spends a dollar for a iBlah, it's a vote for closed garden."
This is a straw man. The argument here is not that people WANT a closed garden, it is that they don't care. I sincerely doubt that openness figures in people's minds when they buy a consumer product and Apple have proven this with the iPad sales vs. any other tablet. So Android's lead in the phone market is likely to be to something else. Most likely the availability of low-end Android handsets.
Obviously, this is an indirect consequence of the closed garden. Apple does not compete for low-end markets, so there is no low end iOS devices. However, if Samsung didn't compete for low end Android phones, someone else would because Android is open.
But this doesn't change the fact that the consumer doesn't care about openness, even if they do care about some of the indirect consequences, and if Apple decided to compete for the low-end market by introducing an iPhone Nano, they would most likely own that market as well.
"Half of smart phone sales are Android phones [talkandroid.com]. Sounds like the average person has jumped enthusiastically into a more open world than iOS, at least for their smart phones."
No. I hear this all the time, but the argument is hollow. Apple does not sell low-end smart phones, and they only compete for the top dollar market. In the UK, we're talking 24 month contracts at £35+ per month. Android phones can be had for 18 month contracts at £20 per month, basically half the price. Obviously, these cheaper phones have a very slow processor, poor screen and are extremely "plasticky". I am willing to bet that Android does not hold the lead in the high-end market.
So these sales does not prove that the average person has jumped enthusiastically. If anything, they have so far reluctantly got in the water because it is too expensive to stay on the beach. Unless you can show that Android holds the lead in the market that Apple actually competes in, the sales figure means nothing in this argument.
"Finally, Python lets you write code like this:
with open('foo.txt') as inputfile: process(inputfile)
which explicitly garbage-collects inputfile as soon as it falls out of scope. If you use that pattern you'll never need to close the file (and it would in fact be a pretty dumb thing to do)."
This is actually what most (all?) C++ File I/O libraries do and certainly the standard fstream libraries. As long as you create your file stream on the stack (and I can't think of a reason not to), the file handles will be taken care of by RAII. As soon as it goes out of scope, the destructor will be called, which will close the file handle.
This Tutorial actually explicitly closes the file handle, but I wish it didn't, or at least made it explicitly clear that it isn't necessary as long as you use scope efficiently.
Instead you have to make do with this statement.
"In case that an object is destructed while still associated with an open file, the destructor automatically calls the member function close()."
"What if you interpret stealing to be "Obtaining non-free content without paying for it". Now it doesn't matter whether you shoplift it, or download it. No matter which way you try to bend words, downloading movies is a form of theft"
Interpretation would not be enough. You would have to redefine the word theft.
You commit two major sins in this debate. The first is the straw man of assuming that just because someone objects to equating copyright infringement with theft that they approve of copyright infringement. The second straw man is that in your attempt to ridicule to opponent you misrepresent him by mentioning a coupel of his possible lesser important arguments, leaving out the biggest reason that copyright infringement is not theft.
Theft takes an object away from the original owner. If someone steals my car, the spiteful part of me may hope that the thief won't enjoy it, but the major reason I'm feeling pissed off is that I no longer have a car. Copyright infringement does no such thing. Since copyright infringement doesn't share the most important property of theft, it is not theft.
Copyright infringement, may take a sale away from the copyright holder. This is by no means certain, the infringer may not have legally licensed/purchased even if he couldn't get it for free. At best you can say that copyright infringement take away a potential sale. In some cases this is not even true, since some infringers does indeed end up purchasing the product.
So these two actions are different and the reason copyright holders want to equate them is an attempt to get more sympathy from the public. This attempt at redefining the word "theft" is disingenuous but you seem to have fallen for it nonetheless.
Note that this post does not mean that I approve of copyright infringement. It is a different action, but it may still be objectionable.
"It's perfectly good logic. This individual's defense boils down to 1) All blind people cannot enjoy movies. 2) I am a blind person. 3) Therefore, I cannot enjoy movies, had no motive for downloading this movie, and could not have done so."
No. His defence was basically that he is legally blind and doesn't enjoy movies". He never said that "all blind people cannot enjoy movies", he said that HE doesn't enjoy movies because he is blind. There is absolutely no doubt that being blind detracts from the movie experience, and the existance of a minority which still finds some enjoyment in movies does not mean he is lying about this.
Obviously a judge would have to decide whether he/she believed him, but given that he majority do not enjoy movies, it is likely that he is telling the truth.
Qualifier: I'm not a Tory and dislike David Cameron.
But I'd give David Cameron the benefit of the doubt in this case. He has not said the government will ban social media or block it during riots. He has just said that he will ask a group to consider whether it would be right. The conclusion may well be "no it isn't right", but as of yet we have absolutely no idea how broad or limited the conclusions will be.
In any case it is important to consider the cultural differences between Britain (and in this case I believe Western Europe) as opposed to the US. Europeans tend to have a more relaxed attitude to free speech. Most consider the right approach to be Free speech with qualifiers, i.e. slander, privacy, inciting hate, child pornography, truth in advertisement, etc. There is always a discussion as to where you draw the line, but this isn't isn't usually considered a binary choice.
I recognise that the US may have a larger share of people who believe that any sort of censorship is wrong, and this is cool. But in this case it doesn't really matter what you think. England (I'm going to assume England only here and ignore the subtleties of UK vs Scots law, etc) is not the US and its laws should surely be representative of its own people?
How is this relevant to the discussion, you may ask? Well, it may be utterly impossible that blocking social media during a riot is compatible with the US libertarian view of free speech, but it isn't totally out of the question that Cameron's group can come up with a plan to block social media during riots which is compatible with the majority definition of free speech in England.
I am, in fact, sceptical that he may come up with a sensible solution which involves social media blockage, but I'm willing to hear what his working group has to say on the matter before I make up my mind.
I hate to nitpick, but I've yet to see anyone in IT actually upgrading a major version of the kernel. This is nearly unheard of except small, specialised Linux-shops. People tend to stick with whatever version came with their current version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux or whatever their vendor is (I'm going to assume RHEL for the rest of this post with little or no loss of generality).
Red Hat may issue small kernel upgrades, but they don't even change the minor kernel version, just the patch level version through the life cycle of that RHEL version. So the only time enterprise server customers update their major kernel versions are when they upgrade their version of RHEL. And even this is rare. The enterprises I've seen will commission a server rack with RHEL already on it and fully configured from their supplier. And they will stick with this until the rack is end of life, only installing service packs and security updates on it.
Because of this, the Linux kernel version matters very little to most enterprise customers. They care more about using an established well tested version of RHEL. I.e. not wanting a new version until it is at least a year old with new bugs ironed out. And the Linux kernel versions matter little to the Linux distributors, because they have all the inside knowledge to whether Linux version 3.1 is a major upgrade or not. This leaves me thinking that the kernel version number actually is actually ONLY relevant to students and hobbyists.
Please correct my reasoning here, because I struggle to see why you find the Linux kernel version so important. Firefox versions, fine, but why the Linux kernel version?
Some of those old activists have made it into power in Europe, where I believe the system tends to be more forgiving about these things than the US. The ones that have made it, however, are older, wiser (?) and more sanitised versions of their 60s selves.
I agree. But just because many saw through the WMD lie, doesn't make it any better.
Professional soldiers do not volunteer to each war. They voluntarily sign up to be in the army but then have to go to whatever war the government has decided to send them to. Many of them would have signed up to protect and serve their country. They deserve the respect and decency to be sent out to wars based on reality, not lies.
Granted, it is still not the same as simply being drafted.
"This is just catching up to the state of the art of the mid 90s, when people started (perfectly reasonably) ripping unencrypted cds to their hard drives. These people are now no longer criminals."
Just to nit pick. They are making the action legal in the future. However all of us that have done so in the past and might well do so again before the law comes into effect are still filthy criminals. We broke the law and we could technically still be arrested and prosecuted for it even after the law comes into effect.
"But if the encryption prevents things you're allowed to do (so, soon format shifting...?) then there must be a way round that."
Not really. Being "allowed" to do something does not mean you have a right to do so. This is also a common misconception regarding the US Fair Use doctrine. Fair Use is not a right, but it is a defence you can use in a case against you.
The difference may seem subtle, but if it was "a right", then companies wouldn't be allowed to use encryption to stop you from exercising your rights. Since format shifting will be merely "allowed", the media companies will still be allowed to use DRM to stop you from doing so.
I doubt any front bench politician would have the balls to call for format shifting to become a right.
"No contract, no ownership. If he signed ownership of his work over, it's their code, not his. If he didn't, it's still his"
I'm not sure you're giving decent legal advice here. No contract != no ownership. Rather, no contract means that there is a default ownership specified by law and this ownership is not necessarily clear.
IANAL, but if the code was created as part of his job then courts are likely to deem it "work-for-hire" if ownership wasn't explicitly given to him in a contract. Certainly, the code I write during office hours would belong to my company even if copyright assignment to them wasn't specified in the work contract. This may even apply out of office hours depending on whether it was likely I was doing office work or not. I.e. just because I was at home when I checked in some new features to the company software, does NOT mean that those features are copyright me.
Since this guy has admitted to working "day and night" for this company, a court would likely believe the company if they stated this was part of his work. If the code was also integrated into the work code, then he really is struggling.
It is a very good idea to keep your work and and hobby coding completely separate and never let them touch each other in any way unless explicitly discussed in a written agreement.
"That's true. He is also free to continue pushing the GPLed version that has already been released. You cannot retroactively de-GPL code."
Only if he had permission from management to GPL it in the first place. If he did this without asking anyone, then the GPL licensing is null and void.
" In the UK, the smallest denomination is 1p which is worth 1.6 cents. I frequently give such coins to my niece as play money..."
I know this is off topic, but I thought I'd add to this. I'm an advocate for getting rid of the 1 and 2p coins. The equivalent has already been done successfully in other countries (i.e. Scandinavia. For instance in Norway the smallest coin is 50 ore, which is more or less equivalent to 5p) with little or no complaints. It would save money and it would get rid of a big irritation.
I often hear people say "they're not worthless, if you add enough together". The problem is that you need to gather up 300 of these 1p coins in order to afford ONE pint of beer. If you're given five 1p coins per day and you save every one of them dutifully for 20 years, you'd still have less than £400. This is simply not worth it, as there must be literally hundreds of lower hanging fruit if you wanted to save money.
Also, you can't really refuse them at the shops and giving them as a tip (even if you leave real coins as well) is considered rude. So unless there is a charity box around when I get them, I think I've just decided to start throwing them away rather than put them in my wallet.
"Do you really want 10 racks of servers with high-speed fans spinning away in your basement?"
No. First of all it'd probably be half a rack per home (i.e. the size of a typical UK boiler) and it would probably use water cooling rather than fans, where the waste water actually provides heat and hot water for your home. It is interesting, but obviously the rack owner would have to pay some of the electricity bill in order to make it worthwhile to the home owner. Otherwise it is just expensive water and heating for the home owner.
Overall this could save energy and thus money by utilising the heat produced by the racks in a more constructive manner than currently. However, as TFA states it would also require an absolutely massive upgrade of domestic networking infrastructure. ADSL certainly would not do. This has so far not been cost effective for service providers, but perhaps coupled with the energy savings it may be worthwhile?
I'd still worry about the lack of physical security.
"And why on earth would you want to keep the default ROM on *any* Android phone?"
Avoiding violating your warranty for one thing. Using a well-tested phone and software setup together is a second good reason. The third reason is that not everyone is actually interested in messing around with Android ROMs. They just want a well functioning smart phone out of the box. In most cases I believe this is true for Android. However, I'm seriously regretting having suggested a Samsung android phone to my wife.
The only supported way of syncing this phone and upgrading the firmware in a supported manner is via Samsung Kies. And this software really is a POS. I've heard all the complaints about iTunes, but despite being a pig, it does actually work. It does the job. I've now tried to sync her phone on three different computers with either Kies or the Samsung PC Software suite and it simply will not recognize the phone. I've now given up and plan on returning the phone asap since it is still in warranty.
I've thought about Odin. But frankly, I don't have the time or the energy to be messing around with it.
This is pure bullshit. The only ones that believe this is the norm in Norway are far right wingers who has never been to prison.
Ordinary people are scared of prison regardless of what it's like. Criminals never get stopped by the thought of going to prison regardless of what it's like, although they may turn more ruthless to avoid prison. Ie. when they rob you they always kill you to avoid leaving witnesses.
Preventing crime by scaring criminals with tough sentencing does not work. It just leaves you with a very expensive prison system. Money that could have been spent on education and social equality measures which WOULD reduce crime.
Show me a country that has low crime rates due to a harsh penal system?
"They review, but the reviewers are often just working for the glory (and promotions)."
Glory and promotions for doing peer review? Which world do you live in? Academics get glory and promotions for publishing work in major journals, not for reviewing other people's work.
Prison rape is not considered acceptable in the UK (or most of western Europe) and so the authorities actually try to stamp it out if it happens. As a consequence it is not a major problem.
Prisons in Europe are thus not "Pound me in the arse prisons".
I wonder if judges in the US ever factor this in when they decide upon a sentence.
"The point is clearly that no system connected to the internet is secure, and that it can be cracked given enough skills."
The point is that they are immature and immoral criminal asswipes who hurt people for "lolz" and they are now being hunted by police forces around the world with many of them close to being caught.
Yes, you may learn something from being robbed, but that does not make the robbery ok.
Not sure. Doesn't the majority shareholder still have to act in the interest of the company? AFAIK there are laws as to what the majority share holder is allowed to do as to not ruin the investment that the minority shareholders have in the company.
If it is in Oracle's interest to sue Google for copyright infringement, then I'm not sure if buying 51% of Oracle would really allow Google to cancel that lawsuit.
Obviously this is all academic anyway.