Well, if you are using the linux md raid system, it can use partitions, so if you wanted you could have a small boot- and/or root-partition mirrored on all of the drives with the rest as raid5. Not saying it is the way to go, but it is possible.
And if my server checks the SPF record of the domain in your 'MAIL FROM' against your IP before allowing your SMTP transaction to proceed, how exactly will you be able to fake a message from a SPF-enabled domain? Either the envelope-from is valid or your mail is dropped before you even sent it (provided the SPF-record of the domain is in order). If you set your From: header to be different from your envelope-from, that could be checked at a later time (e.g. procmail or some spam-filter). But the purpose of SPF is to make it impossible to forge the 'MAIL FROM', and if 'MAIL FROM' is correct I can always bother your admin (or the admin of your upstream) if you do something nasty.
That is actually an interesting question. If we construct a large enough computational machine, and it starts behaving like a human, should we allow it the same status as a "true" human? What would the requirements be for "human" status? How about if we add "stuff" to a human brain? How about a "defective" human brain (since we consider people to be humans even with severly damaged brains, what would the status of an equivalent artificial brain be)?
I don't know any easy answers to those questions, but we might very well be forced to answer them in the near future.
Well, in both humans and rats the cells are created by division from one cell created by the fusion of one egg-cell and one sperm-cell. So the difference between the cells on a genetic level is the same no matter what type of cells. On a higher level the differences between the same type of cells in different mammals are probably not that big, so from some perspectives you are probably right. But whether the similarity is useful or not depends on the context, I would e.g. not consider work on rat-neurons to be much different from other experiments on cultures of cells. At least not unless they are preformed on a number of neurons comparable to the size of a rat-brain, in which case I guess you could see it as a rat without parts (most) of its body.
According to HowStuffWorks the egg does indeed create it's own shell. So presumably some precursor to the first egg-laying animal started its life by wrapping a stiff membrane around itself, inside which it grew to a sufficient size.
While BasilBrush is absolutely right, I don't have many years of exprience on the job market, that does not exclude me from having an opinion. And I agree with your statement that people are overreacting. I'm however not agreeing that this is the first application of this. I know people doing freelance work or running small businesses (in the IT business, for a living), and while these nurses are bidding for extra work, a freelancer might not get any work, if his bid is not sufficiently good/low. And if you answer the question "what kind of salery are you expecting?" with too high a number, you might not get the job. I can't see the fundamental new thing about this, it is just work going to does who are willing to do it for the lowest price on a continuous basis instead of on a hiring/firing basis. It allows the nurses to get the extra shifts at a pay they find fair and it might save the hospital from hiring temps at an even higher rate (of which some goes to the agency).
Sure there will be cases of people being screwed under any system, but there is nothing magical about an official bidding system that makes it a particularly screwing system. The alternative might be management handing out extra shifts under some arbitrary system, either benefitting those who suck up or punishing those who make waves. And there is nothing that says that a minimum wage could not apply, a minumum acceptable bid might even be contracted between the employer and the employee. And if you are offered a job where you have to bid for every shift, how is that fundamentally different from being hired on a short term contract at a negotiated salary? It just removes a delay in the feedback loop that determines your salary, meaning that if your work is in demand (and you want to do it) you get an instant raise (win the bidding at a higher rate) and if there is less demand you can still earn money (win at a low bid) instead of getting fired at the first opportune moment. It simply requires you to arrange your life to cope, just like any change in the job situation.
I'm surprised by the 'Bitter Sweet Symphony' story, but I'll bite (I'm not saying it is not true, I just never heard it before, and I'm not in anything near the mood to google it). I did say that the combination was derived from the original Mambo, but as the gpl specifically allows derived works, my impression is that Connelly or the programmer would have rights to the modified work. Those rights will be limited by the gpl, but the general impression from most of the discussions of the legal aspects of the gpl is that control over a project is shared between all of the contributors.
But to be truthful I think we are, as you said, looking at the details which would have to be decided in court.
The copyright on the entire work (original code + mod) will indeed be shared, but there is no clause in the gpl or in regular copyright (AFAIK) that would cause the ownership of the modification itself (the patch or whatever form it was created in, it is quite possible to consider the mod as a seperate work, that is derived from the main work, which the gpl specifically allows) to go to anyone other than either the programmer or Connelly, depending on work for hire status (i.e. the contact/agreement). You might recall that projects like mozilla has in the past done license changes. In those cases the permission from all contributors were needed, since without an expresed assignment of copyright the contributions of the developers remain under their individual copyright, licensed under whatever license was used at that time. Similarly some projects (e.g. QT) retain the sole ownership of their code (presumably by either not accepting outside contributions or ensuring that copyrights are assigned to Trolltech or licensed to them in a sublicensable way) for the purpose of publishing under another license. And the FSF retain sole copyright for the purpose of having maximum leverage to presue violations of their license.
On the trade secret issue, I believe that it would be a question of compensation from the programmer to Connelly and nothing else, since there can be no trade secret once it has been published.
But as others have pointed out further down, there is doubt about the state of the contract between the programmer and Connelly, and the code in Mambo may indeed be different from the code Connelly claim ownership over.
So if the hospital is a consumer of nursing-shifts and the nurses offer this resource, then, given a sufficient supply of nurses, the bidding would tend to result in the hospital getting the shifts at the rate that the nurses (as a whole) see as the minimum fair (as in: somebody is willing to work at this rate) rate. While I'm not trained or skilled in economy, I'm hard pressed to see how a bidding system could not tend toward the result you describe (given the natural limitations of a real market).
Just because the nurses are making a contientious choice about the value of their work it does not make that work automatically of poor quality. If a nurse delivers poor quality (as determined by whatever standard quality the hospital desides to measure) work the hospital could have a clause in the contract to fire the employee. If the work is very poor both the nurse and the hospital could presumably be sued for mal-practise. One would also expect that the shifts are only available to nurses with the proper qualifications (besides being nurses). How are temp nurses (who might not even be employed by the hospital) managed?
Since Joe is already an employee and is presumably entering a bid for extra work he will still make $9/hour for work he would otherwise not have been offered. Whether the $9/hour is fair compensation is entirely up to Joe. If he does not wish to work the offered shift he can refrain from bidding, or bid at a higher rate.
This would probably still have to obey minimum wage regulations, and if the staff can come to an agreement (perhaps via some form of organisation) they can simply avoid bidding lower than what they consider reasonable.
Well, if the programmer was hired to do the work, it is quite possible that the work falls under the work for hire type of work. Then the copyright on the modification belongs to Connelly (or his company), while the copyright on the original work obviously remains unchanged.
Since Mambo is a server product it is not given that the modified version was ever distributed. If no distribution took place no gpl violation can have occured. And if the programmer was hired to do the work, his involvement is also not sufficient to cause distribution in the sense that is normally considered important in this case (IIRC the FSF specifically says that the gpl is designed such that organisation-internal distribution is OK).
If however Connelly is distributing a modified version, then all that is needed is to aquire a binary (or source) of that version, and under the gpl work can continue from there. Any attempt to interfer on the part of Connelly will void his right to distribute any version of Mambo under the gpl (persumably the only license Connelly has for Mambo). But this depends entirely on Connelly distributing the modified Mambo. If it is only used enternally he may keep his mods as secret as he wish.
Have you remembered to point your secondary mouse (defined as SendCoreEvents) at/dev/input/mice or the equivalent on your machine. I have personally had plugging/unplugging of the external mouse (USB) working on my laptop for several years.
Well, the hardware stops working when you have to upgrade to an OS version that is not compatible with the old driver, obviously. And your claim that the old driver should keep working with newer OS versions makes some very broad assumptions: That the driver interface in the old OS is sufficiently well designed to keep it around (or that legacy drivers remain supported through some kind of wrapper), that there is no security/stability/whatever issues with the interface (would you like to keep a driver interface around if a root exploit was found in it?), and that the binary driver (which nobody can inspect) does not cheat and rely on some feature/bug/randomness not documented in the driver interface.
Are there any major OSes out there where you can pick up a piece of unmaintained (by the vendor) hardware, without OS-vendor supplied drivers, and run it with a driver from a few versions back? I'm not thinking like Win2K -> WinXP, more like Win98 -> WinWP, or Mac OS 8/9 -> OS X? I really would like to know. And as I said, if the new version includes a driver, it doesn't count.
And if we were aiming for such compatibility, it would at least require developers with access to the hardware, and a sufficient supply of machines and other hardware for testing, if you want it to mean anything. If the specs and/or drivers are open, those testers at least have the option of attacking problems from both the kernel and the driver, whereas they are left guessing if the driver is closed.
Well, unless I'm misreading RFC 2821, those email providers are not following the standard.
In general, the retry interval SHOULD be at
least 30 minutes; however, more sophisticated and variable strategies
will be beneficial when the SMTP client can determine the reason for
non-delivery.
If they are retrying faster than 30 minuttes, it must be because they understand the failure, and hence they should know that switching to another server will not work. Besides, what happens when my MX is down or unreachable? Or the inbox is full? Or any other transient failure condition, which is not likely to go away in 30 seconds.
I'm not saying that greylisting is without flaws, or that you get anywhere by complaining to the email providers, but that particular setup sounds rather fragile to begin with. Maybe the greylisting system could disregard hosts with a proper SPF entry in DNS and the email providers/their customers could setup SPF?
While it is not perfect, greylisting is IMHO a step up from a lot of other anti-spam method, which happen too late to give an error to the sending MTA. Then the user is left to deal with various responses sent from the recieving host. And god help them if they both use such a scheme...
According to their FAQ they are integrating a binary translator called QEMU. Their intention seems to be to have the wine libraries native and have them talk to the windows app (still x86) through qemu. This sounds like an interesting idea, especially if their additions to wine and qemu are integrated into the main trees. Then linux on other architectures could likely take advantage (if qemu has been/is ported to that architecture).
Actually: "The company admitted no wrong-doing and received no financial penalties. It claimed it settled to avoid litigation." They settled out of court, so noone was found guilty of anything. All that happened was that they stopped (and the FTC will keep an eye on them).
I don't care to google for the reference (I actually think I read it on dead tree), but I believe that what Nvidia is doing is to divide the screen in an upper and a lower part, with a boundry that is moved according to load. Then the two cards each render one part, communicating over the SLI link (and possibly the PCIe bus), and one of the cards output the finished frame (so one card would have nothing connected to its outputs).
Heck, you could go so far as to give the option to use public key encryption, so that only readers who have the author's public key can read the article, and thus verify that the latest story from John, is actually John, and is not just spoofing the identity.
You've got that mixed up. By definition the public key is public, so...only readers who have the author's public key... is effectively anybody who is interested.
I was under the impression that the one year thing was only if you published the thing first? Can you really keep a patent if someone else provably got the idea before you filled for a patent? What is to prevent people from patenting other peoples ideas? How would they proved that they had the idea first, beyond saying "yes we did", if they did not publish it?
Just one minor nit: If you distribute your binaries and source together, then there is no obligation on you to distribute source to any Tom, Dick, and Harry. They will have to either get the complete package from you or deal with someone who did. The clause 2/3 distribution only comes into play if you distribute the binaries without source.
While it is certainly true that the GPL provide a fairly effectively means to prevent prices from getting unrealistic, it does not prevent you from selling software. Imagine a company that build a piece of software. They then choose to distribute it under the GPL, set up websites/ftp/mailinglists etc., demand a small fee for the download, make sure that paying customers allways get source, and make upgrades easy and frequent (and worhtwhile).
To "rip off" (as in fork the project and become the "official" version) the code from such a project, you would need to provide enough of the infrastructure that the original company provides, keep people interested in your version, and merge any "good" changes (while keeping in mind that you need to pay for each new version (the GPL does not gaurantee you future binaries, and you only get source to the binaries you have)) the original developers make.
Now if the company is charging too much for this service the competing free effort is likely to succed, but I believe that it is possible to hit a pricepoint, where it is more profitable (for the end user) to pay a small subscription/fee than to fork the project (and under the GPL any forks could be merged back in if they pop up and develop something useful). Not that it is easy, but it should be possible.
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Well, if you are using the linux md raid system, it can use partitions, so if you wanted you could have a small boot- and/or root-partition mirrored on all of the drives with the rest as raid5. Not saying it is the way to go, but it is possible.
And if my server checks the SPF record of the domain in your 'MAIL FROM' against your IP before allowing your SMTP transaction to proceed, how exactly will you be able to fake a message from a SPF-enabled domain? Either the envelope-from is valid or your mail is dropped before you even sent it (provided the SPF-record of the domain is in order). If you set your From: header to be different from your envelope-from, that could be checked at a later time (e.g. procmail or some spam-filter). But the purpose of SPF is to make it impossible to forge the 'MAIL FROM', and if 'MAIL FROM' is correct I can always bother your admin (or the admin of your upstream) if you do something nasty.
That is actually an interesting question. If we construct a large enough computational machine, and it starts behaving like a human, should we allow it the same status as a "true" human? What would the requirements be for "human" status? How about if we add "stuff" to a human brain? How about a "defective" human brain (since we consider people to be humans even with severly damaged brains, what would the status of an equivalent artificial brain be)?
I don't know any easy answers to those questions, but we might very well be forced to answer them in the near future.
Well, in both humans and rats the cells are created by division from one cell created by the fusion of one egg-cell and one sperm-cell. So the difference between the cells on a genetic level is the same no matter what type of cells. On a higher level the differences between the same type of cells in different mammals are probably not that big, so from some perspectives you are probably right. But whether the similarity is useful or not depends on the context, I would e.g. not consider work on rat-neurons to be much different from other experiments on cultures of cells. At least not unless they are preformed on a number of neurons comparable to the size of a rat-brain, in which case I guess you could see it as a rat without parts (most) of its body.
According to HowStuffWorks the egg does indeed create it's own shell. So presumably some precursor to the first egg-laying animal started its life by wrapping a stiff membrane around itself, inside which it grew to a sufficient size.
Sure there will be cases of people being screwed under any system, but there is nothing magical about an official bidding system that makes it a particularly screwing system. The alternative might be management handing out extra shifts under some arbitrary system, either benefitting those who suck up or punishing those who make waves. And there is nothing that says that a minimum wage could not apply, a minumum acceptable bid might even be contracted between the employer and the employee. And if you are offered a job where you have to bid for every shift, how is that fundamentally different from being hired on a short term contract at a negotiated salary? It just removes a delay in the feedback loop that determines your salary, meaning that if your work is in demand (and you want to do it) you get an instant raise (win the bidding at a higher rate) and if there is less demand you can still earn money (win at a low bid) instead of getting fired at the first opportune moment. It simply requires you to arrange your life to cope, just like any change in the job situation.
But to be truthful I think we are, as you said, looking at the details which would have to be decided in court.
You might recall that projects like mozilla has in the past done license changes. In those cases the permission from all contributors were needed, since without an expresed assignment of copyright the contributions of the developers remain under their individual copyright, licensed under whatever license was used at that time.
Similarly some projects (e.g. QT) retain the sole ownership of their code (presumably by either not accepting outside contributions or ensuring that copyrights are assigned to Trolltech or licensed to them in a sublicensable way) for the purpose of publishing under another license. And the FSF retain sole copyright for the purpose of having maximum leverage to presue violations of their license.
On the trade secret issue, I believe that it would be a question of compensation from the programmer to Connelly and nothing else, since there can be no trade secret once it has been published.
But as others have pointed out further down, there is doubt about the state of the contract between the programmer and Connelly, and the code in Mambo may indeed be different from the code Connelly claim ownership over.
So if the hospital is a consumer of nursing-shifts and the nurses offer this resource, then, given a sufficient supply of nurses, the bidding would tend to result in the hospital getting the shifts at the rate that the nurses (as a whole) see as the minimum fair (as in: somebody is willing to work at this rate) rate. While I'm not trained or skilled in economy, I'm hard pressed to see how a bidding system could not tend toward the result you describe (given the natural limitations of a real market).
Just because the nurses are making a contientious choice about the value of their work it does not make that work automatically of poor quality. If a nurse delivers poor quality (as determined by whatever standard quality the hospital desides to measure) work the hospital could have a clause in the contract to fire the employee. If the work is very poor both the nurse and the hospital could presumably be sued for mal-practise. One would also expect that the shifts are only available to nurses with the proper qualifications (besides being nurses). How are temp nurses (who might not even be employed by the hospital) managed?
Since Joe is already an employee and is presumably entering a bid for extra work he will still make $9/hour for work he would otherwise not have been offered. Whether the $9/hour is fair compensation is entirely up to Joe. If he does not wish to work the offered shift he can refrain from bidding, or bid at a higher rate.
This would probably still have to obey minimum wage regulations, and if the staff can come to an agreement (perhaps via some form of organisation) they can simply avoid bidding lower than what they consider reasonable.
Well, if the programmer was hired to do the work, it is quite possible that the work falls under the work for hire type of work. Then the copyright on the modification belongs to Connelly (or his company), while the copyright on the original work obviously remains unchanged.
Since Mambo is a server product it is not given that the modified version was ever distributed. If no distribution took place no gpl violation can have occured. And if the programmer was hired to do the work, his involvement is also not sufficient to cause distribution in the sense that is normally considered important in this case (IIRC the FSF specifically says that the gpl is designed such that organisation-internal distribution is OK).
If however Connelly is distributing a modified version, then all that is needed is to aquire a binary (or source) of that version, and under the gpl work can continue from there. Any attempt to interfer on the part of Connelly will void his right to distribute any version of Mambo under the gpl (persumably the only license Connelly has for Mambo). But this depends entirely on Connelly distributing the modified Mambo. If it is only used enternally he may keep his mods as secret as he wish.
Have you remembered to point your secondary mouse (defined as SendCoreEvents) at /dev/input/mice or the equivalent on your machine. I have personally had plugging/unplugging of the external mouse (USB) working on my laptop for several years.
Well, the hardware stops working when you have to upgrade to an OS version that is not compatible with the old driver, obviously. And your claim that the old driver should keep working with newer OS versions makes some very broad assumptions: That the driver interface in the old OS is sufficiently well designed to keep it around (or that legacy drivers remain supported through some kind of wrapper), that there is no security/stability/whatever issues with the interface (would you like to keep a driver interface around if a root exploit was found in it?), and that the binary driver (which nobody can inspect) does not cheat and rely on some feature/bug/randomness not documented in the driver interface.
Are there any major OSes out there where you can pick up a piece of unmaintained (by the vendor) hardware, without OS-vendor supplied drivers, and run it with a driver from a few versions back? I'm not thinking like Win2K -> WinXP, more like Win98 -> WinWP, or Mac OS 8/9 -> OS X? I really would like to know. And as I said, if the new version includes a driver, it doesn't count.
And if we were aiming for such compatibility, it would at least require developers with access to the hardware, and a sufficient supply of machines and other hardware for testing, if you want it to mean anything. If the specs and/or drivers are open, those testers at least have the option of attacking problems from both the kernel and the driver, whereas they are left guessing if the driver is closed.
My bad, misremembered the definition.
If they are retrying faster than 30 minuttes, it must be because they understand the failure, and hence they should know that switching to another server will not work. Besides, what happens when my MX is down or unreachable? Or the inbox is full? Or any other transient failure condition, which is not likely to go away in 30 seconds.
I'm not saying that greylisting is without flaws, or that you get anywhere by complaining to the email providers, but that particular setup sounds rather fragile to begin with. Maybe the greylisting system could disregard hosts with a proper SPF entry in DNS and the email providers/their customers could setup SPF?
While it is not perfect, greylisting is IMHO a step up from a lot of other anti-spam method, which happen too late to give an error to the sending MTA. Then the user is left to deal with various responses sent from the recieving host. And god help them if they both use such a scheme...
Thanks.
According to their FAQ they are integrating a binary translator called QEMU. Their intention seems to be to have the wine libraries native and have them talk to the windows app (still x86) through qemu. This sounds like an interesting idea, especially if their additions to wine and qemu are integrated into the main trees. Then linux on other architectures could likely take advantage (if qemu has been/is ported to that architecture).
I'm pretty sure it does. Or forgetting to use $USER@$HOST when sshing into another machine from a user you are not normally using.
Actually: "The company admitted no wrong-doing and received no financial penalties. It claimed it settled to avoid litigation." They settled out of court, so noone was found guilty of anything. All that happened was that they stopped (and the FTC will keep an eye on them).
I'm not disagreeing with you, but apples and oranges can be compared quite well ;-)
I don't care to google for the reference (I actually think I read it on dead tree), but I believe that what Nvidia is doing is to divide the screen in an upper and a lower part, with a boundry that is moved according to load. Then the two cards each render one part, communicating over the SLI link (and possibly the PCIe bus), and one of the cards output the finished frame (so one card would have nothing connected to its outputs).
You've got that mixed up. By definition the public key is public, so ...only readers who have the author's public key... is effectively anybody who is interested.
I was under the impression that the one year thing was only if you published the thing first? Can you really keep a patent if someone else provably got the idea before you filled for a patent? What is to prevent people from patenting other peoples ideas? How would they proved that they had the idea first, beyond saying "yes we did", if they did not publish it?
Just one minor nit: If you distribute your binaries and source together, then there is no obligation on you to distribute source to any Tom, Dick, and Harry. They will have to either get the complete package from you or deal with someone who did. The clause 2/3 distribution only comes into play if you distribute the binaries without source.
While it is certainly true that the GPL provide a fairly effectively means to prevent prices from getting unrealistic, it does not prevent you from selling software. Imagine a company that build a piece of software. They then choose to distribute it under the GPL, set up websites/ftp/mailinglists etc., demand a small fee for the download, make sure that paying customers allways get source, and make upgrades easy and frequent (and worhtwhile).
To "rip off" (as in fork the project and become the "official" version) the code from such a project, you would need to provide enough of the infrastructure that the original company provides, keep people interested in your version, and merge any "good" changes (while keeping in mind that you need to pay for each new version (the GPL does not gaurantee you future binaries, and you only get source to the binaries you have)) the original developers make.
Now if the company is charging too much for this service the competing free effort is likely to succed, but I believe that it is possible to hit a pricepoint, where it is more profitable (for the end user) to pay a small subscription/fee than to fork the project (and under the GPL any forks could be merged back in if they pop up and develop something useful). Not that it is easy, but it should be possible.