Maybe some of the content was illegal, but what Pirate Bay did was not - at least by Swedish law (IANASwedeL). All they did was host tiny text files and provice a search database. They were a tracker, not a host.
This is basically the same as American cops raiding Bell because the Yellow Pages lists the phone number of a paper mill, and paper can potentially be used to write harassing letters.
I think the pirate bay will be deemed illegal if the case comes up in front of a jury. It's clear to everyone that they knew they were facilitating piracy - indeed, that was the overwhelming majority of the content they pointed to. If the yellow pages were basically a list of where you could get illegal drugs, and the front page said "Get your illegal drugs here!", I'm sure it would be illegal as well. Even though you wouldn't actually get any drugs along with the yellow pages themselves.
In general, any off-site link might go to illegal material, the content the link points to can be changed at any time, and it's out of your control. You can not be held responsible for this. But if you're main activity is to knowingly link to illegal content, you are in a different category.
That is my interpretation - it will be interesting to see what happens.
My part-time project/dream is a modern re-implementation, where the TeX typesetting algorithms are embedded in a modern (Common Lisp) environment--so you can code TeX formats and macros in a heavy-duty honest-to-god programming language, and have an high-level, truly modular implementation using real data structures that could actually be tweaked and modified to do even funkier typesetting tasks.
That's also the project/dream of Karel Skoupy, who has singlehandedly reimplemented TeX in Java:
If we're buying the right to listen to the music, then we should be able to listen to in in other forms, MP3, etc.
If we're buying the physical product, then the RIAA shouldn't be trying to tax record stores on sales of used albums.
Basically, they can't have it both ways.
Why? Are you saying it's illegal to sell you the license to listen to the music off of that particular cd?
I'm torn on this issue. On one hand I strongly believe in personal freedom - and they should be free to make up any deal they like and it's up to the (informed) consumers to not buy the product. On the other hand, it would really suck not to be able to mp3 my cds...
Ah, so you didn't read the faq. Here's the relevant part:
On Not Reacting Like A Loser
Odds are, you'll screw up a few times, on hacker community forums -- in ways detailed in this article, or similar. And you'll be told exactly how you screwed up, possibly with colourful asides. In public.
When this happens, the worst thing you can do is whine about the experience, claim to have been verbally assaulted, demand apologies, scream, hold your breath, threaten lawsuits, complain to people's employers, leave the toilet seat up, etc. Instead, here's what you do:
Get over it. It's normal. In fact, it's healthy and appropriate.
Written by Eric S. Raymond. It's good advice. Move on.
Re:is this a repeat? anyone remember?
on
Tandys Never Die
·
· Score: 1
been waiting for. With wireless networking, a nice touchscreen, running linux so I can have my own apps on it, sweeet. And if I get bored lounging on the couch listening to music I can browse online news papers, check and read email. I can have it laying around so that people can look through the digital-camera pictures from the latest trip, and with a small wireless keyboard I might even get them to write some comments to the pictures while waiting for me to get ready to leave. It's a bit pricy, but I'd love to have one.
I haven't seen anything in a window manager that interested me since 1993. All I pray for these days is that whatever window manager that gets installed on my systems by default have the decency to put the "close" box in the same place as the last location I got used to, and that it not make me jump through too many hoops to turn off all of the keyboard equivalents that get in the way of Emacs usage.
Sounds like it's time to check out ion: http://www.students.tut.fi/~tuomov/ion/. It's based on non-overlapping windows, made for easy keyboard navigation. Supports prefix keymaps so you can easily avoid key binding conflicts. Give it a try!
Agreed. The latest gen split keyboards have the arrow/home-end buttons the old way. It feels better than the two previous versions too, and there's the 19 'interent' buttons which actually come in handy. I still miss the possibility to raise the keyboard at the spacesbar side from the first gen, instead of the function key side they use now, tough...
Craig's speech is all about the nightmarish future of an open
source world, and is rather heavy on predictions. But then
Craig's job at Microsoft is to make gambles on the future of
technology. According Marlin Eller's account in "Barbarians
Led By Bill Gates", one of Mundie's first acts at Microsoft was
killing the company's 1993 low-bandwidth Net project in favour
of the *real* future - broadband interactive TV. That said,
once Gates caught on to this Interweb thing, Mundie was first
to catch on. "We'll tune it for all the platforms, then get
hardware companies to build accelerators for it", he
predicted, of the Net's most guaranteed success - VRML. Oh,
then he masterminded that whole WebTV deal, spending $425m MS
mad money on the sure-fire Internet/TV convergence. "We view
the Internet as one of the 'features' of digital TV services",
he eerily prophesised in 1998. "PC this year, PC-TV's next
year", he again predicted - in 1997. Going further back,
Mundie features in "Soul of a New Machine" as the nameless guy
who loses the race to build a supercomputer. His own
supercomputer company went bust in 1992. Should anyone believe
his observations about the future of Open Source? As Mundie
himself once said "We persist. We're driven by some innate
belief about how these things are going to unfold." Even, it
seems, when they unfold in completely the opposite
direction.
If this will keep the average guy from unauthorized copying of music maybe the hard drive copy right protection system will take a rest. A problem with enforcing copy right is of course that it makes legal use very inconvienient. (What nerds do isn't that relevant given their relative numbers.) I wish them all the luck in this, and they will sure as hell need it.
Gone now? Damn, I just changed the hidden setting "Annoy me with that sodding paper clip" from "Contstanly" to "When I least expect it". You're saying I can't use it? That's the last drop, I'm dropping MS Office!
For home users stamping out a document or two I don't think it matters much, so let them install whatever they like.
For a small or medium size company thinking of going over to Linux I really think Star Office on a nice box is good enough. I've had great success with both MS Word documents and powerpoint presentations. It's a matter of trying how it works with a bunch of typical documents. Of course, you need to keep a windows installation around just in case, but it shouldn't be a showstopper for a many people wanting to switch to linux. YMMV.
Not only did they revolutionize file compression using high-tech math, they managed to code it such that the executable (on x86 i assume) is a valid jpeg depicting a toy monkey with some bananas. Now *THAT* is art.
"It utilizes a two-pass bit-sieve to first remove all unimportant data from the data set. Lzip implements this quiet effectively by eliminating all of the 0's. It then sorts the remaining bits into increasing order, and begins searching for patterns."
Slashdot Mirror
Let's face it, it's illegal and they got caught.
Maybe some of the content was illegal, but what Pirate Bay did was not - at least by Swedish law (IANASwedeL). All they did was host tiny text files and provice a search database. They were a tracker, not a host.
This is basically the same as American cops raiding Bell because the Yellow Pages lists the phone number of a paper mill, and paper can potentially be used to write harassing letters.
I think the pirate bay will be deemed illegal if the case comes up in front of a jury. It's clear to everyone that they knew they were facilitating piracy - indeed, that was the overwhelming majority of the content they pointed to. If the yellow pages were basically a list of where you could get illegal drugs, and the front page said "Get your illegal drugs here!", I'm sure it would be illegal as well. Even though you wouldn't actually get any drugs along with the yellow pages themselves.
In general, any off-site link might go to illegal material, the content the link points to can be changed at any time, and it's out of your control. You can not be held responsible for this. But if you're main activity is to knowingly link to illegal content, you are in a different category.
That is my interpretation - it will be interesting to see what happens.
I beleive that I am the only human posting to slashdot and the rest are all machine generated.
What makes you believe you're human?
export PROMPT="[%n@%m %3~] # "
Try it - its a really nice interactive shell.
http://www.cs.inf.ethz.ch/~skoupy/
http://www.ntg.nl/eurotex/skoupy.pdf
I'm torn on this issue. On one hand I strongly believe in personal freedom - and they should be free to make up any deal they like and it's up to the (informed) consumers to not buy the product. On the other hand, it would really suck not to be able to mp3 my cds ...
At least for the linux version, you'd just drop the nice part of the cpu usage. With dnetc running at nice priority it would still be relevant.
Written by Eric S. Raymond. It's good advice. Move on.
Sure, this:
2 20 7
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/07/24/125
It would be nice if you could make the complete list of browser id strings along with count once in a while (each month :)) available.
And of course, perceived country of origin would be interesting, no matter how inaccurate.
been waiting for. With wireless networking, a nice touchscreen, running linux so I can have my own apps on it, sweeet. And if I get bored lounging on the couch listening to music I can browse online news papers, check and read email. I can have it laying around so that people can look through the digital-camera pictures from the latest trip, and with a small wireless keyboard I might even get them to write some comments to the pictures while waiting for me to get ready to leave. It's a bit pricy, but I'd love to have one.
Is the USER_AGENT logged? Any public statistics? Would be interesting to know both web browser and OS ...
Sounds like it's time to check out ion: http://www.students.tut.fi/~tuomov/ion/. It's based on non-overlapping windows, made for easy keyboard navigation. Supports prefix keymaps so you can easily avoid key binding conflicts. Give it a try!
> There are many examples of rapidly-developed Free alternatives to commercial (or perceived "un-Free") software:
:-)
>
> * Emacs
That made my day. As any 5 years + emacs user how `rapidly developed' s/he considers emacs to be
Agreed. The latest gen split keyboards have the arrow/home-end buttons the old way. It feels better than the two previous versions too, and there's the 19 'interent' buttons which actually come in handy. I still miss the possibility to raise the keyboard at the spacesbar side from the first gen, instead of the function key side they use now, tough...
http://www.ntk.net/ :
Craig's speech is all about the nightmarish future of an open
source world, and is rather heavy on predictions. But then
Craig's job at Microsoft is to make gambles on the future of
technology. According Marlin Eller's account in "Barbarians
Led By Bill Gates", one of Mundie's first acts at Microsoft was
killing the company's 1993 low-bandwidth Net project in favour
of the *real* future - broadband interactive TV. That said,
once Gates caught on to this Interweb thing, Mundie was first
to catch on. "We'll tune it for all the platforms, then get
hardware companies to build accelerators for it", he
predicted, of the Net's most guaranteed success - VRML. Oh,
then he masterminded that whole WebTV deal, spending $425m MS
mad money on the sure-fire Internet/TV convergence. "We view
the Internet as one of the 'features' of digital TV services",
he eerily prophesised in 1998. "PC this year, PC-TV's next
year", he again predicted - in 1997. Going further back,
Mundie features in "Soul of a New Machine" as the nameless guy
who loses the race to build a supercomputer. His own
supercomputer company went bust in 1992. Should anyone believe
his observations about the future of Open Source? As Mundie
himself once said "We persist. We're driven by some innate
belief about how these things are going to unfold." Even, it
seems, when they unfold in completely the opposite
direction.
If this will keep the average guy from unauthorized copying of music maybe the hard drive copy right protection system will take a rest. A problem with enforcing copy right is of course that it makes legal use very inconvienient. (What nerds do isn't that relevant given their relative numbers.) I wish them all the luck in this, and they will sure as hell need it.
Gone now? Damn, I just changed the hidden setting "Annoy me with that sodding paper clip" from "Contstanly" to "When I least expect it". You're saying I can't use it? That's the last drop, I'm dropping MS Office!
I liked the screenshot version, part of the Things You Wish Your Computer Had series that circled a while back.
:).
Fittingly, I got it as a MS Word doc, and saved it onto http://www.stud.ntnu.no/~reneky/hmmm/hmm.htm. If you haven't seen it go ahead - it's good
For home users stamping out a document or two I don't think it matters much, so let them install whatever they like.
For a small or medium size company thinking of going over to Linux I really think Star Office on a nice box is good enough. I've had great success with both MS Word documents and powerpoint presentations. It's a matter of trying how it works with a bunch of typical documents. Of course, you need to keep a windows installation around just in case, but it shouldn't be a showstopper for a many people wanting to switch to linux. YMMV.
Not only did they revolutionize file compression using high-tech math, they managed to code it such that the executable (on x86 i assume) is a valid jpeg depicting a toy monkey with some bananas. Now *THAT* is art.
From the faq:
"It utilizes a two-pass bit-sieve to first remove all unimportant data from the data set. Lzip implements this quiet effectively by eliminating all of the 0's. It then sorts the remaining bits into increasing order, and begins searching for patterns."
Cute. Wonder what sort algorithm they use.