It is not a bad law. It is a unique and inventive use of a law intended to punish people who crack into systems.
It doesn't matter if it can or is intended to be used against genuine criminals. If it is so broadly written that it can be used to turn a minor breach of contract into a federal felony it is a bad law, period.
Breaking a contract is a matter of civil law not criminal, and is punishable only by restitution of actual and punitive damages, not prison time. The actual damages caused to MySpace by her actions are at most harm to their reputation, but even that they would have a hard time showing. The proper punishment for false registration in this case is no more than terminating the account.
And, they have a point as the terms of service for MySpace state that, in order to use the service, one must provide correct information.
People can put just about anything into their Terms of Service. Can you honestly say that you have even read every TOS for every site you have membership on? Do you honestly believe that it is reasonable to charge someone with a felony for not following any random thing that is put into the TOS? Do you honestly think that providing a false name is the same level of crime as hacking a system? Because that is exactly what the prosecution is arguing in this case, and from reading the law, that seems to be what it says.
If you commit a heinous crime, they will charge you with every single criminal act they can find no matter how small.
I wouldn't mind them busting her with dozens of small crimes, if the punishment for each of those crimes was proportional to the offense. I do have a problem with them bending the law to prosecute a minor offense as a felony.
Slashdot would love for you to believe that this is something new that's never been done before that will have incredibly powerful effects in the future when the opposite is true.
Yes this has been happing for a long time. That doesn't make it right, nor does it mean it can't be changed for the better - many things have over the course of human history.
I should keep count of how many "articles" here aren't actually news but heavily biased editorials designed to feed the paranoid.
How is this paranoia when it is actually happening, and as you pointed out has been happening for a long time. Seems like a pretty grounded, realistic point of view to me.
Yeah, this is becoming a real problem with the preprint journals. Media groups like New Scientist will run a hyped-up story on some "ground-breaking new development" which will have propagated through the blog echo-chamber before other scientists have even had a chance to review it. It's not enough for the media to completely butcher the science they do present, now they have to present results which haven't even had cursory review. It's no wonder the public doesn't trust science considering what is is being presented to them.
It also creates unnecessary drama within the science community by means of the Leonardo DiCaprio affect - the more people hype a star the more everyone else hates them. The author of these papers are usually legitimate scientists who just made an honest mistake, whose only crime was submitting their preprint to ArXiv just like thousands of other scientists. But now they are suddenly being framed as "genius underdog" / "cocky attention whore" by the media and scientists.
The only reason that the preprint journals exist is as a loophole to get around normal journals posting rules. I'm really hoping that preprint journals will fade away as more reviewed papers are published for free X months after their journal publication date.
I don't even know that it is an issue of technology. Cops don't seem interested in investigating theft of any sort. They certainly don't try to track down thieves. They are used to filling out theft reports in situations where they know an insurance company want to see it, but otherwise they don't even bother with that.
I'd be more willing to say that the cost/benefit ratio of investigating that sort of crime was too low, if they didn't waste so much time and money on even smaller crimes.
Paying for a utility that you aren't using 90% of the time is just money down the drain, whereas property almost always increases in value, usually by enough to offset taxes and maintanance.
Furthermore, depending on how trendy of a vacation spot the cabin is, it may not be all that expensive (ie much less than their main house in the city).
Besides, having dialup on the road is really useful. Motel internet service is a complete rip-off and many of them don't have free wireless.
A similar system is used quite frequently today where water is pumped uphill into a reservoir at night, and then run through a hydro-electric plant during the day.
It isn't just that electricity costs more during the day though. With a traditional (coal or nuclear) power plant, it is less energy efficient to run at reduced capacity compared to running at full capacity (I think it has to do with the pressure in the steam chambers). You also waste a fair bit of energy to starting and stopping a plant. However, hydro-electric generators don't have as big of a problem with this.
So even with the energy losses incurred by changing state twice, it actually ends up being more energy efficient to keep the plant running at ideal capacity at all times and using the pump storage to balance the load than it does to try and balance the load with the coal plant itself.
With wind power it makes even more sense - the wind blows when it wants to, and if it's at night when people aren't using the energy you either let it go to waste or find some way to store it.
This line of discussion rarely, if ever, comes up in the context of the other two branches of government, for some reason.
Because having one congressman out of >600 kick the bucket isn't that big of a deal. Loosing a president is.
With justices, congress isn't given a list of folks to choose from. If they were I'm sure that everyone would be considering how long a justice could be sitting on the court when making their decision. But as it is, age is not a valid reason to reject the selection of an otherwise acceptable justice, so there's not much to be said about it outside the closed doors of the president's nominee selection process.
Really? I didn't know that. Every time the cops stop me, they are absolutely convinced I'm stoned* , and they do that shine the flashlight in your eyes to see if they adjust trick. Any idea what that is about?
* I've never used the stuff in my life, but I have long hair and talk slowly so I guess that makes me a stoner.
All that extra bulk on the right side of a 104 keyboard has the effect of either pushing the main part of the keyboard to the left (increasing wrist strain) or pushing the mouse further to the right (real fun to reach for it, you know...)
Amen. The problem is that I really do use the arrow keys and the home / end keys a lot, especially in windows. I mean in most linux apps you can get by without them (Ctrl f,b,p,n,a,e are fairly universal), but in Windows it just isn't possible.
I find that whenever I use a compact keyboard, after I get used to the layout it is fine so long as it is the only keyboard I use. And in some cases I prefer the different layout (like the ctrl key). But if I have to use any other computers/keyboards regularly then the slight differences just slow me down too much.
I really wish I could find a keyboard that ditched the keypad (or moved it to the left) but kept the standard arrangement for all the other keys.
I've been using changeip.com for dynamic DNS and have had no problems with it. Domain name registration is $15 (or $13 if you have more than one) and adding Dynamic DNS is $6.
From everything I've heard, NASA wasn't planning on using the CEV with the Ares V, just with the Ares I (and toying with the idea of an Ares IV). For certain, there have been performance shortfalls of the Ares I which are the primary driving factor in reducing the weight of the CEV. The driving factor for the Ares V would be the cargo weight requirements for moon missions.
If they, as a commercial entity, are distributing GPL'd software executables, regardless of whether it is modified or not, they are required to either:
A) Include the full source with the binaries. B) Include a written offer for the source with the binaries.
The written offer must be transferable, and good for at least three year. You may charge a nominal fee to cover the costs of distributing the source. Non-commercial distribution allows a third option of providing the written offer which you received from another party.
That said, I have never seen a written offer for source code, and everyone just looks the other way about that as long as the distributor makes the source code available in some way.
I doubt anyone will read this, but because it hasn't been said yet:
The time-bombing mechanism clause is in the EULA in order to warn users that the commercial distro can be used on a trial-basis, which will disable itself after some time. It is actually even more innocuous then that. The time-bomb clause only applies to the beta release. This isn't something that they put in and then took out of the final release after second thought. It was intentionally in the beta release and only the beta release because they didn't want people to continue using the beta after the final version had been released. This is an extremely common clause to have in commercial pre-release software, and not a foreshadowing of what to expect from Novell's final licenses in the future.
You still aren't reading/understanding that first half. In summary:
BY INSTALLING OR OTHERWISE USING THE SOFTWARE (INCLUDING ITS COMPONENTS), YOU AGREE TO THE TERMS OF THIS AGREEMENT.
Term. This Agreement becomes effective on the date You legally acquire the Software and will automatically terminate if You breach any of its terms. Upon termination of this Agreement, You must destroy the original and all copies of the Software or return them to Novell and delete the Software from Your systems.
You may not, without Novell's prior written consent not to be unreasonably withheld, publish or disclose to any third party the results of any benchmark test of the Software.
So by using the software you agree to follow the terms of the license, in particular you agree that you do not have permission to distribute benchmark results. If you do so, then you are in breach of the agreement, and your license to use the software is revoked.
That second half of the paragraph does not remove or nullify the consequences of violating the terms of the license - it just adds an additional consequence. Namely, that you have to give Novell permission to benchmark you products.
To expand on what cp.tar already said, from the second paragraph of the license:
The Software is a modular operating system comprised of numerous components that may be accompanied by separate license terms. The Software is a collective work of Novell; although Novell does not own the copyright to every component of the Software, Novell owns the collective work copyright for the Software. Most of the components are open source packages, and most of the components are neither developed nor owned by Novell. Your license rights with respect to individual components accompanied by separate license terms are defined by those terms;nothing in this agreement shall restrict, limit, or otherwise affect any rights or obligations You may have, or conditions to which You may be subject, under such license terms; however, if You distribute copies of any component independent of the Software, You must remove all Novell trademarks, trade dress, and logos from each copy. Because the (L)GPL prohibits distributors from placing any additional restrictions on the software, none of the rest of the license applies to (L)GPLed portions of the distribution.
I'm not sure if these restrictions would apply to BSD software. For sure Novell is not required by the BSD license to release the software under a BSD license, but they do - a copy of the license is included with all the BSD software. I'm pretty sure the BSD license would override the terms of distribution spelled out in the EULA, but I don't know about the benchmarking section.
It gets especially confusing to me if you were say benchmarking the LAMP stack on SUSE 11 vs other distributions, since that starts to fall under the software as a collection rather than as individual packages.
You may not, without Novell's prior written consent not to be unreasonably withheld, publish or disclose to any third party the results of any benchmark test of the Software. If you release the results of a benchmark, you are in breach of the terms of the EULA, as such your license to the use the software is revoked, and you must uninstall the software (or at least strip out all the non OSS parts, and Novel Trademarks, at which point you might as well just install a different distro):
Term. This Agreement becomes effective on the date You legally acquire the Software and will automatically terminate if You breach any of its terms. Upon termination of this Agreement, You must destroy the original and all copies of the Software or return them to Novell and delete the Software from Your systems. I like the reciprocal benchmarking rights spelled out in the second half of that paragraph, but the first half is a legitimate problem.
From the Top500 Highlights:
* A total of 375 systems (75 percent) are now using Intel processors. This is up from six months ago (354 systems, 70.8 percent) and a represents the largest share for Intel chips in the TOP500 ever. * The IBM Power processors passed the AMD Opteron family and are now (again) the second most common processor family with 68 systems (13.6 percent), up from 61 systems (12.2 percent) six months ago. Fifty-six systems (11 percent) are using AMD Opteron processors, down from 78 systems (15.6 percent) six months ago.
I think another good use for it would be saving server bandwidth on downloads without congesting the last mile the way P2P does. Say you offer several (number varying by demand) staggered multicast streams of a file each at some lowest-common-denominator (DSL) speed. Then you have a client that will connect to however many streams your connection can handle, and then just use P2P to pick up the few stray packets that you miss (since you don't normally resend with multicast).
The overall bandwidth would be much lower than with either individual downloads or P2P, and the bandwidth needed by the server isn't much more than you would need to seed bit torrent. I could see this working particularly well with a subscription style service that automatically downloads new episodes of shows you like when they become available, so the are ready to watch anytime without needed the bandwidth that On-demand requires.
Yep, this is exactly the sort of situation that IP Multicast was created for. It has been part of the IP RFCs since forever. Maybe more incidents like this will convince more ISPs to configure their routers to support it, so we could start using it.
They also pay new pilots a reasonable salary from the beginning with modest raises along the way rather than the extreme form of seniority that other companies practice (or have practiced in the past).
The reason for the post is to tell people who were unable to download it yesterday, because the servers were down, that the window has been extended and they can still download today and have it count for the record. Since slashdot will most assuredly be posting the final official numbers when they come out, posting numbers now would just be a predupe.
I cannot find "AOL online service client" on Google, so I assumed you meant AOL Instant Messenger, which works fine. No, he meant the dialer/brower/mail/IM monstrosity. I'm not surprised that it doesn't work considering how deeply it roots itself into windows when you install it.
Slashdot Mirror
It is not a bad law. It is a unique and inventive use of a law intended to punish people who crack into systems.
It doesn't matter if it can or is intended to be used against genuine criminals. If it is so broadly written that it can be used to turn a minor breach of contract into a federal felony it is a bad law, period.
Breaking a contract is a matter of civil law not criminal, and is punishable only by restitution of actual and punitive damages, not prison time. The actual damages caused to MySpace by her actions are at most harm to their reputation, but even that they would have a hard time showing. The proper punishment for false registration in this case is no more than terminating the account.
And, they have a point as the terms of service for MySpace state that, in order to use the service, one must provide correct information.
People can put just about anything into their Terms of Service. Can you honestly say that you have even read every TOS for every site you have membership on? Do you honestly believe that it is reasonable to charge someone with a felony for not following any random thing that is put into the TOS? Do you honestly think that providing a false name is the same level of crime as hacking a system? Because that is exactly what the prosecution is arguing in this case, and from reading the law, that seems to be what it says.
If you commit a heinous crime, they will charge you with every single criminal act they can find no matter how small.
I wouldn't mind them busting her with dozens of small crimes, if the punishment for each of those crimes was proportional to the offense. I do have a problem with them bending the law to prosecute a minor offense as a felony.
Slashdot would love for you to believe that this is something new that's never been done before that will have incredibly powerful effects in the future when the opposite is true.
Yes this has been happing for a long time. That doesn't make it right, nor does it mean it can't be changed for the better - many things have over the course of human history.
I should keep count of how many "articles" here aren't actually news but heavily biased editorials designed to feed the paranoid.
How is this paranoia when it is actually happening, and as you pointed out has been happening for a long time. Seems like a pretty grounded, realistic point of view to me.
What does CIA and FBI not sharing info have anything to do with FISA warrants?
Yeah, this is becoming a real problem with the preprint journals. Media groups like New Scientist will run a hyped-up story on some "ground-breaking new development" which will have propagated through the blog echo-chamber before other scientists have even had a chance to review it. It's not enough for the media to completely butcher the science they do present, now they have to present results which haven't even had cursory review. It's no wonder the public doesn't trust science considering what is is being presented to them.
It also creates unnecessary drama within the science community by means of the Leonardo DiCaprio affect - the more people hype a star the more everyone else hates them. The author of these papers are usually legitimate scientists who just made an honest mistake, whose only crime was submitting their preprint to ArXiv just like thousands of other scientists. But now they are suddenly being framed as "genius underdog" / "cocky attention whore" by the media and scientists.
The only reason that the preprint journals exist is as a loophole to get around normal journals posting rules. I'm really hoping that preprint journals will fade away as more reviewed papers are published for free X months after their journal publication date.
I don't even know that it is an issue of technology. Cops don't seem interested in investigating theft of any sort. They certainly don't try to track down thieves. They are used to filling out theft reports in situations where they know an insurance company want to see it, but otherwise they don't even bother with that.
I'd be more willing to say that the cost/benefit ratio of investigating that sort of crime was too low, if they didn't waste so much time and money on even smaller crimes.
Paying for a utility that you aren't using 90% of the time is just money down the drain, whereas property almost always increases in value, usually by enough to offset taxes and maintanance.
Furthermore, depending on how trendy of a vacation spot the cabin is, it may not be all that expensive (ie much less than their main house in the city).
Besides, having dialup on the road is really useful. Motel internet service is a complete rip-off and many of them don't have free wireless.
A similar system is used quite frequently today where water is pumped uphill into a reservoir at night, and then run through a hydro-electric plant during the day.
It isn't just that electricity costs more during the day though. With a traditional (coal or nuclear) power plant, it is less energy efficient to run at reduced capacity compared to running at full capacity (I think it has to do with the pressure in the steam chambers). You also waste a fair bit of energy to starting and stopping a plant. However, hydro-electric generators don't have as big of a problem with this.
So even with the energy losses incurred by changing state twice, it actually ends up being more energy efficient to keep the plant running at ideal capacity at all times and using the pump storage to balance the load than it does to try and balance the load with the coal plant itself.
With wind power it makes even more sense - the wind blows when it wants to, and if it's at night when people aren't using the energy you either let it go to waste or find some way to store it.
Wow, you managed to finish typing the post and submit it while sleeping? You sir, are a truly dedicated slashotter. I salute you.
This line of discussion rarely, if ever, comes up in the context of the other two branches of government, for some reason.
Because having one congressman out of >600 kick the bucket isn't that big of a deal. Loosing a president is.
With justices, congress isn't given a list of folks to choose from. If they were I'm sure that everyone would be considering how long a justice could be sitting on the court when making their decision. But as it is, age is not a valid reason to reject the selection of an otherwise acceptable justice, so there's not much to be said about it outside the closed doors of the president's nominee selection process.
Really? I didn't know that. Every time the cops stop me, they are absolutely convinced I'm stoned* , and they do that shine the flashlight in your eyes to see if they adjust trick. Any idea what that is about?
* I've never used the stuff in my life, but I have long hair and talk slowly so I guess that makes me a stoner.
All that extra bulk on the right side of a 104 keyboard has the effect of either pushing the main part of the keyboard to the left (increasing wrist strain) or pushing the mouse further to the right (real fun to reach for it, you know...)
Amen. The problem is that I really do use the arrow keys and the home / end keys a lot, especially in windows. I mean in most linux apps you can get by without them (Ctrl f,b,p,n,a,e are fairly universal), but in Windows it just isn't possible.
I find that whenever I use a compact keyboard, after I get used to the layout it is fine so long as it is the only keyboard I use. And in some cases I prefer the different layout (like the ctrl key). But if I have to use any other computers/keyboards regularly then the slight differences just slow me down too much.
I really wish I could find a keyboard that ditched the keypad (or moved it to the left) but kept the standard arrangement for all the other keys.
I've been using changeip.com for dynamic DNS and have had no problems with it. Domain name registration is $15 (or $13 if you have more than one) and adding Dynamic DNS is $6.
From everything I've heard, NASA wasn't planning on using the CEV with the Ares V, just with the Ares I (and toying with the idea of an Ares IV). For certain, there have been performance shortfalls of the Ares I which are the primary driving factor in reducing the weight of the CEV. The driving factor for the Ares V would be the cargo weight requirements for moon missions.
Because Apple's products always ship on time, and developers have no complaints whatsoever about the iPhone API.
If they, as a commercial entity, are distributing GPL'd software executables, regardless of whether it is modified or not, they are required to either:
A) Include the full source with the binaries.
B) Include a written offer for the source with the binaries.
The written offer must be transferable, and good for at least three year. You may charge a nominal fee to cover the costs of distributing the source. Non-commercial distribution allows a third option of providing the written offer which you received from another party.
That said, I have never seen a written offer for source code, and everyone just looks the other way about that as long as the distributor makes the source code available in some way.
I doubt anyone will read this, but because it hasn't been said yet:
The time-bombing mechanism clause is in the EULA in order to warn users that the commercial distro can be used on a trial-basis, which will disable itself after some time. It is actually even more innocuous then that. The time-bomb clause only applies to the beta release. This isn't something that they put in and then took out of the final release after second thought. It was intentionally in the beta release and only the beta release because they didn't want people to continue using the beta after the final version had been released. This is an extremely common clause to have in commercial pre-release software, and not a foreshadowing of what to expect from Novell's final licenses in the future.You still aren't reading/understanding that first half. In summary:
BY INSTALLING OR OTHERWISE USING THE SOFTWARE (INCLUDING ITS COMPONENTS), YOU AGREE TO THE TERMS OF THIS AGREEMENT. Term. This Agreement becomes effective on the date You legally acquire the Software and will automatically terminate if You breach any of its terms. Upon termination of this Agreement, You must destroy the original and all copies of the Software or return them to Novell and delete the Software from Your systems. You may not, without Novell's prior written consent not to be unreasonably withheld, publish or disclose to any third party the results of any benchmark test of the Software.So by using the software you agree to follow the terms of the license, in particular you agree that you do not have permission to distribute benchmark results. If you do so, then you are in breach of the agreement, and your license to use the software is revoked.
That second half of the paragraph does not remove or nullify the consequences of violating the terms of the license - it just adds an additional consequence. Namely, that you have to give Novell permission to benchmark you products.
I'm not sure if these restrictions would apply to BSD software. For sure Novell is not required by the BSD license to release the software under a BSD license, but they do - a copy of the license is included with all the BSD software. I'm pretty sure the BSD license would override the terms of distribution spelled out in the EULA, but I don't know about the benchmarking section.
It gets especially confusing to me if you were say benchmarking the LAMP stack on SUSE 11 vs other distributions, since that starts to fall under the software as a collection rather than as individual packages.
* The IBM Power processors passed the AMD Opteron family and are now (again) the second most common processor family with 68 systems (13.6 percent), up from 61 systems (12.2 percent) six months ago. Fifty-six systems (11 percent) are using AMD Opteron processors, down from 78 systems (15.6 percent) six months ago.
I think another good use for it would be saving server bandwidth on downloads without congesting the last mile the way P2P does. Say you offer several (number varying by demand) staggered multicast streams of a file each at some lowest-common-denominator (DSL) speed. Then you have a client that will connect to however many streams your connection can handle, and then just use P2P to pick up the few stray packets that you miss (since you don't normally resend with multicast).
The overall bandwidth would be much lower than with either individual downloads or P2P, and the bandwidth needed by the server isn't much more than you would need to seed bit torrent. I could see this working particularly well with a subscription style service that automatically downloads new episodes of shows you like when they become available, so the are ready to watch anytime without needed the bandwidth that On-demand requires.
Yep, this is exactly the sort of situation that IP Multicast was created for. It has been part of the IP RFCs since forever. Maybe more incidents like this will convince more ISPs to configure their routers to support it, so we could start using it.
They also pay new pilots a reasonable salary from the beginning with modest raises along the way rather than the extreme form of seniority that other companies practice (or have practiced in the past).
The reason for the post is to tell people who were unable to download it yesterday, because the servers were down, that the window has been extended and they can still download today and have it count for the record. Since slashdot will most assuredly be posting the final official numbers when they come out, posting numbers now would just be a predupe.