"Hi Rogerborg! Please return the enclosed confession, detailing the extent of your copy right violations. In return, we agree to record your confession, but will probably postpone suing you over it until such time as you piss us off or we change our management or strategy."
Further spooky prediction: you'll receive regular queries about how much you've spent on CDs.
"Gee, Rogerborg, we know that you like music, because you told us that you had 10,000 mp3s. Now you say you didn't buy any CDs this year. We find that awfully strange. Isn't the balance of probability* that you've gone back to your wicked ways? Shouldn't you consider buying some CDs? Alternatively, just send us a check direct."
Complete one of these forms, and you'll be the RIAA's bitch for life.
* Note: balance of probability is the criteria in a civil suit. They don't have to prove that you're still filesharing, they just have to convince a court that it's probable, using your own confession against you. In fact, given that their "amnesty" will simply be a statement that they might might not sue you over your confession, they could just sue you over your past actions without having to demonstrate a damn thing. Bitch for life.
I completely agree with you. The system is already so broken and corrupt that it's already a joke. But at least it's theoretically salvageable. If we (as in, the interested few) can't even be sure that the votes are being counted though, then it's over, for good, no going back.
Senator Bob: Nobody's voting. How do we get voters engaged in the political process?
Rogerborg: Hi there! I'm really interested in helping to verify voting procedures. Can I help you audit the source code for electronic voting machines?
Go directly to jail. Do not pass Go, do not collect $20,000,000.
Screwing up voting systems is beyond the pale. No joking. No faux gasps of shock. If this isn't resolved, openly and utterly and rapidly, then the game is over for democracy in the USA.
I worked at a telco where we generated C code on the fly from high level Structured Definition Language for the main call control processing.
It was a great idea... in theory. In theory, it was impossible for the implementation to get out of sync with the detailed design (the SDL). In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is. Some of the features that we had to add simply couldn't be modelled in SDL, plus there were performance issues, and it produced ugly source.
It was used for fifteen years (yeah, pre-ANSI), but it eventually collapsed under the weight of all of the hacks that were required to work around the limitations. We eventually had to admit that the behaviour of the complete source (generated plus all the stuff around it) was now so different from that defined by the SDL that it was no longer worth putting up with the limitations of the SDL.
In the end, we just took a snapshot of the generated code and set developers free to actually fix it rather than hack around it. At that point, there were only a few people left who even knew SDL, so there were very few tears shed. The rest of us cheered, and the product got significantly cleaner as we refactored the bejeesus out of all the generated C and removed the hacks.
I'd recommend giving code generation a try, but don't be ruled by it. Once the product is mature, if the code generation is limiting you, then don't be afraid to drop it and fix the lower level generated code.
Sure, in the words of the great philosopher, Sabrina the Teenage Witch: "It's an opinion. You can't retract an opinion!"
Now, what, precisely, is the view or opinion being expressed here? If we're using Op-Ed as a synonym for "unsubstantiated bullshit masquerading as news" then fair enough. But that's not what you described it as.
Ouch. I bet they were fat and ugly though. Note that I picked Dutch 16 year old guys for a reason. There is absolutely nothing illegal about their side of the deal, but Texas has anti-sodomy laws and an AOC of 18. Is it legal and/or moral to send those images to a 16 year old in Texas?
Heck, we could probably find some country where it's legal for a 14 year old to hump a donkey. How does that effect the morality of distributing images of that act outside of that jurisdiction?
OK, what about images of consensual over 18 man on woman sex, filmed in Texas and send to Iran?
Error, actual informed opinion detected. Abort / Retry / Ignore?
Thanks for expanding on my point, but I think we're pissing up the wind with this one. We're already at the "All I found was kiddie porn, so that's all there is." Given time, it'll be "All kiddie porn is on freenet, therefore all freenet is kiddie porn." Sigh.
Why? When do you get the benefit? The label fucknuts that own you don't see it on their balance sheets, so you're no more valuable to them, nor to your prospective new masters at another label. How many people that fileshare instead of buying CDs go on to buy moichandise (and what's your cut anyway)? How many contribute through musiclink? (hint: fuck all).
Your argument, such as it is, comes back to the assumption that artists make money through touring. Wow. Tell you what, next time I write a book, how about I give it away online to market myself, and make my living through appearing at conventions and opening bookshops?
What you mean to say is "Artists might be better off in the Utopian fantasy world that we'll build if everyone stops buying from RIAA members and none of the 'indie' labels travel to the Dark Side as they expand to fill the demand."
In principle, it's an "if only everyone was as smart and nice as what we am" argument. In practice, it's indistinguishable from filesharing because you don't give a damn about the artists either way.
"statistical analyses", "troubling elevations", "younger than the U.S. average", "chilling", "sadly", "Incredibly", "More than 200 plaintiffs", "serious illnesses", "vehemently denied"
Phew, with all those emotive phrases, I'm finding that I have strong opinions on this, despite not having access to the data behind the complaint, and not seeing the phrase "standard deviations" appearing once. I guess because IBM are a big company, they must be evil and therefore guilty, except that they're being sued by SCO, so perhaps they're good and therefore innocent.
One thing's for sure though, I'm not going to wait for them to muddy this with boring old "facts" before jumping to my conclusion.
> So let me get this straight. You went ahead and developed an app using a gpl'd component and then asked the author for non-GPL license?
It's an unusual situation. ezsetup creates a single click Windows installer exe out of a compressed Win CE.cab file. It does this by linking a GPLd self extractor/decompressor stub with the.cab file into a single exe. The ezsetup author never intended for this to mean that the WinCE app had to be GPL licensed, and he told us so explicitely when we asked if we could buy a binary non-GPL license for ezsetup.
The issue is whether this is a derivative work of the self extractor stub, or whether it's a simple aggregation. We'd initially assumed that it was an aggregation, but then we took a closer look at the GPL wording and the way that ezsetup works, and suddenly weren't so sure. At the moment, it's not a problem, because the ezsetup author isn't bothered. But how do we know that at some point, he won't sell rights to the ezsetup source to Microsoft, or SCO, or Generic Evilcorp, who will then come chasing everyone using it claiming that we're breaching their copy rights by using it to release non-GPL products, and offering to sell us a non-GPL version of ezsetup to make the problem go away.
By the way, thanks for leaping to the wrong conclusion based on an incomplete knowledge or understanding of the issues. That's about what I've come to expect from the typical GPL advocate.
...then you have the problem of knowing exactly how many machines you even have across your operation (which may span multiple offices, homeworkers, desktops, laptops and servers), let alone knowing what they're running and how many OS copies you can prove that you've licensed.
I've seen this in practice. Instead of doing the audit, we just bought another fifty or so Win2K Pro licenses (even though we were using NT 4.0!), and as if by magic, the threat disappeared. It was cheaper to do this than to do the internal audit, and certainly cheaper than the consequences of miscounting the number of license receipts compared to physical boxen.
Oh, I think that it's all bullshit, but the numbers make sense.
If I look for and find kiddie porn on Kazaa, it follows that the main use of teh intarweb is kiddie porn, right?
I'll ask again. How exactly did you determine that "the main use of Freenet at the moment seems to be pr0n of a less-than-mature nature"? Please support your assertion with quantitative data.
I'm not saying that you're wrong. In fact, I suspect that you're right. But given the emotive nature of the assertion, I'm going to call bullshit on it until you expand on how you determined the usage of freenet.
Sure, because all "child porn" is illegal and abhorent, because it all involved raping little kiddies. Let's not for one second consider that one person's child porn is another persons record of a loving relationship.
If two 16 year old Dutch guys want to film themselves fucking each other consensually and legally up the asses and then send it to their 16 year old friend in Texas, identify the criminals, the crime, the victim(s) and the appropriate punishment.
Yes, we've cried wolf on oil in the past. Sooner or later we'll be right. When's it going to be? If you don't know, then what's your basis for believing that it's not this time?
I take your point about the ability of OPEC to ameliorate dollar price rises by manipulating the market. I'll clarify; I'm talking about the cost in terms of actual resources and effort to obtain the remaining oil, not the dollar price. Given our utter economic dependence on oil, counting the cost of oil in terms of fiat currency isn't entirely useful.
That's crazy talk ! They won't rise until the far flung distant future. You know, the nightmare science fiction world known only as Beyond The Next Election.
I'm impressed that you have a grasp of the past. Now, how about looking to the future?
Why more companies don't tell them to get stuffed I don't understand. I mean, these are convicted abusive monopolists, it's not as though we have anything to prove to them.
Slashdot Mirror
Bushethics: because we damn well can.
"Hi Rogerborg! Please return the enclosed confession, detailing the extent of your copy right violations. In return, we agree to record your confession, but will probably postpone suing you over it until such time as you piss us off or we change our management or strategy."
Further spooky prediction: you'll receive regular queries about how much you've spent on CDs.
"Gee, Rogerborg, we know that you like music, because you told us that you had 10,000 mp3s. Now you say you didn't buy any CDs this year. We find that awfully strange. Isn't the balance of probability* that you've gone back to your wicked ways? Shouldn't you consider buying some CDs? Alternatively, just send us a check direct."
Complete one of these forms, and you'll be the RIAA's bitch for life.
* Note: balance of probability is the criteria in a civil suit. They don't have to prove that you're still filesharing, they just have to convince a court that it's probable, using your own confession against you. In fact, given that their "amnesty" will simply be a statement that they might might not sue you over your confession, they could just sue you over your past actions without having to demonstrate a damn thing. Bitch for life.
I completely agree with you. The system is already so broken and corrupt that it's already a joke. But at least it's theoretically salvageable. If we (as in, the interested few) can't even be sure that the votes are being counted though, then it's over, for good, no going back.
Go directly to jail. Do not pass Go, do not collect $20,000,000.
Screwing up voting systems is beyond the pale. No joking. No faux gasps of shock. If this isn't resolved, openly and utterly and rapidly, then the game is over for democracy in the USA.
I worked at a telco where we generated C code on the fly from high level Structured Definition Language for the main call control processing.
It was a great idea... in theory. In theory, it was impossible for the implementation to get out of sync with the detailed design (the SDL). In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is. Some of the features that we had to add simply couldn't be modelled in SDL, plus there were performance issues, and it produced ugly source.
It was used for fifteen years (yeah, pre-ANSI), but it eventually collapsed under the weight of all of the hacks that were required to work around the limitations. We eventually had to admit that the behaviour of the complete source (generated plus all the stuff around it) was now so different from that defined by the SDL that it was no longer worth putting up with the limitations of the SDL.
In the end, we just took a snapshot of the generated code and set developers free to actually fix it rather than hack around it. At that point, there were only a few people left who even knew SDL, so there were very few tears shed. The rest of us cheered, and the product got significantly cleaner as we refactored the bejeesus out of all the generated C and removed the hacks.
I'd recommend giving code generation a try, but don't be ruled by it. Once the product is mature, if the code generation is limiting you, then don't be afraid to drop it and fix the lower level generated code.
Sure, in the words of the great philosopher, Sabrina the Teenage Witch: "It's an opinion. You can't retract an opinion!"
Now, what, precisely, is the view or opinion being expressed here? If we're using Op-Ed as a synonym for "unsubstantiated bullshit masquerading as news" then fair enough. But that's not what you described it as.
Ouch. I bet they were fat and ugly though. Note that I picked Dutch 16 year old guys for a reason. There is absolutely nothing illegal about their side of the deal, but Texas has anti-sodomy laws and an AOC of 18. Is it legal and/or moral to send those images to a 16 year old in Texas?
Heck, we could probably find some country where it's legal for a 14 year old to hump a donkey. How does that effect the morality of distributing images of that act outside of that jurisdiction?
OK, what about images of consensual over 18 man on woman sex, filmed in Texas and send to Iran?
Error, actual informed opinion detected. Abort / Retry / Ignore?
Thanks for expanding on my point, but I think we're pissing up the wind with this one. We're already at the "All I found was kiddie porn, so that's all there is." Given time, it'll be "All kiddie porn is on freenet, therefore all freenet is kiddie porn." Sigh.
Oh, I believe you, Coward, I just have no rational basis for doing so.
>I was searching for regular porn on freenet
You were searching on Frost. Frost is not freenet, as Kazaa is not teh intarweb. We're talking about freenet. Freeeeeenet.
Who? Who supports it? Cite references.
Why? When do you get the benefit? The label fucknuts that own you don't see it on their balance sheets, so you're no more valuable to them, nor to your prospective new masters at another label. How many people that fileshare instead of buying CDs go on to buy moichandise (and what's your cut anyway)? How many contribute through musiclink? (hint: fuck all).
Your argument, such as it is, comes back to the assumption that artists make money through touring. Wow. Tell you what, next time I write a book, how about I give it away online to market myself, and make my living through appearing at conventions and opening bookshops?
Yes, they're -$1 better off. Nice grasp of arithmetic you've got there.
What you mean to say is "Artists might be better off in the Utopian fantasy world that we'll build if everyone stops buying from RIAA members and none of the 'indie' labels travel to the Dark Side as they expand to fill the demand."
In principle, it's an "if only everyone was as smart and nice as what we am" argument. In practice, it's indistinguishable from filesharing because you don't give a damn about the artists either way.
"statistical analyses", "troubling elevations", "younger than the U.S. average", "chilling", "sadly", "Incredibly", "More than 200 plaintiffs", "serious illnesses", "vehemently denied"
Phew, with all those emotive phrases, I'm finding that I have strong opinions on this, despite not having access to the data behind the complaint, and not seeing the phrase "standard deviations" appearing once. I guess because IBM are a big company, they must be evil and therefore guilty, except that they're being sued by SCO, so perhaps they're good and therefore innocent.
One thing's for sure though, I'm not going to wait for them to muddy this with boring old "facts" before jumping to my conclusion.
> So let me get this straight. You went ahead and developed an app using a gpl'd component and then asked the author for non-GPL license?
It's an unusual situation. ezsetup creates a single click Windows installer exe out of a compressed Win CE .cab file. It does this by linking a GPLd self extractor/decompressor stub with the .cab file into a single exe. The ezsetup author never intended for this to mean that the WinCE app had to be GPL licensed, and he told us so explicitely when we asked if we could buy a binary non-GPL license for ezsetup.
The issue is whether this is a derivative work of the self extractor stub, or whether it's a simple aggregation. We'd initially assumed that it was an aggregation, but then we took a closer look at the GPL wording and the way that ezsetup works, and suddenly weren't so sure. At the moment, it's not a problem, because the ezsetup author isn't bothered. But how do we know that at some point, he won't sell rights to the ezsetup source to Microsoft, or SCO, or Generic Evilcorp, who will then come chasing everyone using it claiming that we're breaching their copy rights by using it to release non-GPL products, and offering to sell us a non-GPL version of ezsetup to make the problem go away.
By the way, thanks for leaping to the wrong conclusion based on an incomplete knowledge or understanding of the issues. That's about what I've come to expect from the typical GPL advocate.
>If you are a small shop, an audit is easy
Fair enough.
>and if you have a large shop
...then you have the problem of knowing exactly how many machines you even have across your operation (which may span multiple offices, homeworkers, desktops, laptops and servers), let alone knowing what they're running and how many OS copies you can prove that you've licensed.
I've seen this in practice. Instead of doing the audit, we just bought another fifty or so Win2K Pro licenses (even though we were using NT 4.0!), and as if by magic, the threat disappeared. It was cheaper to do this than to do the internal audit, and certainly cheaper than the consequences of miscounting the number of license receipts compared to physical boxen.
Oh, I think that it's all bullshit, but the numbers make sense.
Why are you talking about Frost when we're talking about freenet? I quote: "Frost is a p2p app that works on top of Freenet"
If I look for and find kiddie porn on Kazaa, it follows that the main use of teh intarweb is kiddie porn, right?
I'll ask again. How exactly did you determine that "the main use of Freenet at the moment seems to be pr0n of a less-than-mature nature"? Please support your assertion with quantitative data.
I'm not saying that you're wrong. In fact, I suspect that you're right. But given the emotive nature of the assertion, I'm going to call bullshit on it until you expand on how you determined the usage of freenet.
Sure, because all "child porn" is illegal and abhorent, because it all involved raping little kiddies. Let's not for one second consider that one person's child porn is another persons record of a loving relationship.
If two 16 year old Dutch guys want to film themselves fucking each other consensually and legally up the asses and then send it to their 16 year old friend in Texas, identify the criminals, the crime, the victim(s) and the appropriate punishment.
>last time I checked freenet, just about the only content I could find was child porn
How, pray tell, did you find kiddie porn on freenet without knowing what you were looking for? Where exactly did you actively seek out and find the keys for kiddie porn?
You're mistaken, trolling, or you're an active kiddie pornographer. Which one it is?
Yes, we've cried wolf on oil in the past. Sooner or later we'll be right. When's it going to be? If you don't know, then what's your basis for believing that it's not this time?
I take your point about the ability of OPEC to ameliorate dollar price rises by manipulating the market. I'll clarify; I'm talking about the cost in terms of actual resources and effort to obtain the remaining oil, not the dollar price. Given our utter economic dependence on oil, counting the cost of oil in terms of fiat currency isn't entirely useful.
Sure, but that's just one anecdote. Surely the overall figures don't back you up? I mean, how dumb would we have to be to cut back on hydro power?
Uh oh. That dumb.
>Should oil prices ever rise
That's crazy talk ! They won't rise until the far flung distant future. You know, the nightmare science fiction world known only as Beyond The Next Election.
I'm impressed that you have a grasp of the past. Now, how about looking to the future?
The price for turning over "naked PC" buyers used to be 5 Microsoft Games, a Fossil watch, and a grill and lawn chair combo. But they don't even need that; a disgruntled employee or ex-employee can easily sic the BSA or Microsoft directly on to a company.
Why more companies don't tell them to get stuffed I don't understand. I mean, these are convicted abusive monopolists, it's not as though we have anything to prove to them.
No. It wouldn't.