Well, IANAL, but isn't entrapment where they convince you to do something that you otherwise would not have done? If they don't force you or pressure you into downloading the file (as opposed to just encouraging you to do so) then it isn't entrapment...
Although I'm not American, I was under the impression that corporations can be considered "individuals", from a legal point of view.
Can anyone correct me on that? And if I am right, I have a slightly OT question: is there any reason, then, why Microsoft could not run for a political position?
"control they have over the owners of said proprietary software"?
I'm sorry, but I think it's the control owners of said proprietary software have over them that has prevented more open discussion/acceptance of open source software...
400 homes isn't international news? That's all kinda relative I suppose: being in Australia, we hear about any relative large fire in the US where homes are destroyed, as well as tornadoes etc.
So maybe 400 homes isn't international news in America, but in a lot of other places it is.
Especially when we are talking about 400 homes in our capital city. We're not talking some pokey town in the middle of the bush. If Washington DC had 400 homes burn down in bushfire, would you expect us to know about it?
I've wondered a few times why it would be that we seem to hear about any fires over there, and yet you guys seem to not hear/care about anything over here. I suppose the first instinct is to say (like, unfortunately, most things) "Well, what do you expect? It's not happening in America, so it's not really happening...", but maybe it's also more a matter of what we are tuned to. In Australia, no matter where you live, from a very young age you are taught about bushfire safety and survival. They're so common that it's assumed that you will need to know how to survive/deal with one at least once in your life. So when there are bushfires overseas, we feel for that a lot more, and so show it on TV.
Don't know: as far as I'm aware, there's no real way of doing a good test on that at the moment. We can't really compare that to anything happening over here that you guys would be feeling for right now.
Then again, part of the reason we heard so much of your bushfires last year at least was because of the number of firefighters we sent over to help.
This has been my point all along: my original reply said that the only reason there would be a problem is if they had used MS extensions, and hence they should have realised they were taking risks at the time.
Your original reply to my comment was that the problem wasn't so much how "real" MS' Java is, but how old it is, and now you're telling me that backwards compatibility errors are rare.
I think we're agreeing with each other here. The original poster said that he would "have no end of problems" if the JVM was updated to the Sun one, so we can only assume that his problems will arise from no longer supporting some MS extension, right?
Yes, but how would "no end of problems" come up from updating the JVM? I mean, has Java had that much deprecated that it would cause more problems than solve if updated?
Interesting, but if that were the case, why would he "have no end of problems" if they start shipping the "proper" Sun JVM? If they started shipping the Sun JVM, wouldn't all the problems with the MS one go away?
If this were the case, maybe the biggest problem would be finding a new job...
No, this is a good thing. Just because the product you (unfortunately) support was not written to use the "real" Java, why should everyone else suffer? What was going on with development there, anyway? I'd take a stab and say that someone called out another buzz-word ("Yeah, I like it, but let's write it in Java!") at the time of design...
If you're going to write a Java program, then you should write it to run in Java. Not MS' "Java". You should know that by not writing to the standard, you'll end up in trouble. It would be like me writing an app to use undocumented APIs, and then whinging when they're changed. If I'd have used what I was given properly, I would not have gotten into the mess, and I would have no-one to blame but myself.
The fact that you have to support a program that was not written correctly is not our fault or problem. Don't get me wrong, I feel for you, but that doesn't change anything.
The only thing I would add to this would be the ability to insert a disc with new codecs, and have it all update automatically.
That way, when the time comes and there's a new audio format out, I can throw a disc into the machine, and then I can easily start using CDs that have that music format burned onto it. And of course, I could also just as easily update what games I have to play with MAME.
I also want to be able to record-replay live TV (not sure if thats's covered by Tivo: we don't have them here:( ) and finally have visualisations for when I'm playing music: I generally don't watch TV and listen to music at the same time, so what not have something on screen?
That's only a good analogy if you don't have responsibility/knowledge of your car. The thinking is that if you don't know about the worm, then I should be able to kill it off without your retribution.
If you do know about it, then you take responsibility for what it does to my system.
I think this is a fair, two way street. As the article says, if you don't own the process, then you shouldn't care that I kill it. If you do care that I killed it, that means that you must have known that it existed to begin with, and hence you have to be liable for what it did to my machine.
I just went to the Compiere site and noticed that they have currently placed porting "on hold", sort of, basically asking people to put their money where their mouths are with regards to this port.
Although I don't use it, I think it would be fantastic to see it using an OS database, and so am considering making a donation. If you want this port to come, maybe you would like to hand over a few dollars.
Looking at the current donations, I think it's been a pretty piss poor effort: I don't know how much they've advertised this, but I think it's a real shame that people that are using it at least haven't shown some cash. I'm not sure of the costs associated with Oracle, but I'm sure there'd have to be at least an annual support fee. Surely it would be worth it for most of those users to take a year's worth of support fees and put it towards developing an OS port?
Anyway, if you're interested in making a donation, go to http://www.compiere.org/technology/independence.ht ml
No, I haven't tried this, though only because I hadn't thought of it.
Like you, I will normally help people if they need it: I'm a big fan of having someone else's machine to play with, but quite a number of times I've had "friends of friends" ask for help. They offer money, but they're too closely linked to actually accept it, so this could be a happy medium.
I mean really, most of the people close enough to me to get "unrequited support" already know enough about the things that are important to me 'cause I always end up whinging about it while I'm helpinf them out.
You know what? I don't care if they don't want to contribute, but I will do free work on the one condition that they go and educate themselves a little: learn to think that it's NOT okay for the government to read their e-mail.
If they don't want to do that, that's fine by me. But as I said in my original post, if they don't want to do that, they can pay me my normal hourly rate.
When presented with the two options, my average computer newbie or mother in law is going to want the cheaper option, but to get that they need to realise that I will make sure they learned something.
In a way I'm forcing them (financially) to learn about what's happening to their rights. And I believe that they will see a connection between the fact that I am willing to do this for free if they learn this. ie. it must be valuable to me, a non-computer newbie, so therefore they'll start to wonder why it's that valuable to me to do work for nothing.
I think that they will realise that: 1) I obviously believe in this 2) I obviously want them to believe in this 3) They should obviously believe me that they should want to believe in this
If they come to me for help, and my help comes free but with a little "but hey, you know what...?", wouldn't they begin to realise it's for their own good?
Good in theory, but I think that that would lose the meaning of the process: get people that would not normally know about these groups to slowly become aware: of not only the groups, but also the things that they support. Even if they don't end up donating, at least they will hopefully go to their website, and have a quick read around of what they stand for. Then, the next time they see an article mentioning, for example, the DMCA, they will at least know what the newsfeed is on about.
Project to a point where hopefully you find a critical mass, and what you have helped to do, in fact, is teach people about what rights they are losing, and then we have a chance to actually fight these laws. When you have the general public complaining about laws, you (you being a politician) can't ignore them as easily as you would a group of geeks.
But, to get back to the point of how you will know whether they've donated or not, I think I'll be doing this from now on:
1) Tell them how much it would cost someone else to deal with the problem 2) Tell them that if they donate a small amount of money to a group of your choice, you'll do it for nothing 3) Before doing the work, ask them for proof of the donation
Now, regarding Point 2: I would actually give them a few to choose from, and ask them to choose, after doing just 5 minutes research on each group, and ask them why they chose that particular group.
And regarding Point 3: This gets back to my original point that a donation now isn't necessarily needed: if they didn't donate, ask them at least for a quick rundown on what they consider to be the benefits of that group. Try and convince them to at least join an announcements list. They will eventually see the value in joining, and so it will happen over time.
Finally, if they ask you why they should bother doing at least looking up the groups, tell them the work you'll be doing for them didn't just jump into your head: you had to learn, and all you're asking is for them to do some learning too.
Well, that's what I'll be doing from now on, anyway.
If the article you're thinking of is the same one I'm thinking of, then they didn't undo any editing, but had infact enabled the option to view changes.
This option is only available when the person editing the file tracks changes...
I know, it's being a bit nitpicky, but tracking and viewing changes is a feature, being able to undo changes is a bug.
Just because a program uses IE does not make it "not a real app... a collection of scripts".
Come on, a little more credit, please! It has embedded HTML, yes, and requires IE to display them, yes, but it doesn't just have IE show the pages and be it.
Quickbooks has special tags in the HTML that it then hooks into to add features to the HTML. And if it's anything like Quicken you'll even find links to the actual application through HTTP (eg. http://qw.exe/ ). You can't deny the fact that most of the work is done within the application itself, and only some of the data is represented in HTML. To start with, I'd compare the features presented in HTML (and the work required to present those features!) with those done within the "old-school" application itself.
And besides: who cares, even if it is a collection of scripts? I can't find a better product, so I use it. And if you would deny using the best product simply for the fact that it's a script, then you obviously would prefer to use your computer as a form of self-congratulating toy than a tool to get the job done. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but you do seem to infer that there's something wrong with any other alternative.
And I love the trolling "get off your ass and help write a Linux equivalent". Is that a "help me write" or "help write me" a Linux equivalent?
If it's the former, why post AC: how are we going to help you if we don't know who you are? And if it's the latter, you can just get stuffed.
I have one question: when we all compare the speed of Java to C, are we necessarily comparing the JVM to a compiled C application? How does a natively compiled Java app (through GCC-Java) compare to a compiled C application?
I agree, especially when the historical definition of "download" infers moving data from a large machine to a PC (despite who initiated the act). Which is exactly what is happening in this instance.
I think part of the whole deal with these mod chips, though, was that as the consoles themselves didn't actually provide copy protection (ie. the consoles didn't stop you copying, they just didn't let you use copies), the mod chips were not circumvention tools.
Hence, they were not illegal in that sense, either.
Here's the question: Would a typical user, confronted with a large dinosaur-like thing that walks on its back legs and has things down its back, and breathes fire, and has a name ending in "zilla", be likely to infer an association between that product and Godzilla?
Yes, the user would.
This question refers to the logo, as opposed to the browser name, right? Because the way I see it, is "Would a typical user, confronted with a benign web browser, and has a name ending in 'zilla', be likely to infer an association between that product and Godzilla, the well-known dinosaur?"
No, the user would not. Well, they might through the name, think they sound similar, but then again, would the user assume that this means that the owners of Godzilla have decided to not only go to the effort of creating web browsers, but then changing the name of the product? No.
The logo, I understand Toho to have a problem with, the product name, I don't. People cannot confuse a dinosaur with a web browser when they have different names.
There's always the option of gcc-java, which provides support for compiling Java to native code.
I don't think the comparison should be "Java Vs. C++", but "Java in a VM Vs. C++". I know that's where the thread is leading to, but that's not how it started...
Slashdot Mirror
Well, IANAL, but isn't entrapment where they convince you to do something that you otherwise would not have done? If they don't force you or pressure you into downloading the file (as opposed to just encouraging you to do so) then it isn't entrapment...
Although I'm not American, I was under the impression that corporations can be considered "individuals", from a legal point of view.
Can anyone correct me on that? And if I am right, I have a slightly OT question: is there any reason, then, why Microsoft could not run for a political position?
It would be interesting to see parliament on fire, if only to see how many people really wouldn't piss on a politician, even if they were on fire...
"control they have over the owners of said proprietary software"?
I'm sorry, but I think it's the control owners of said proprietary software have over them that has prevented more open discussion/acceptance of open source software...
400 homes isn't international news? That's all kinda relative I suppose: being in Australia, we hear about any relative large fire in the US where homes are destroyed, as well as tornadoes etc.
So maybe 400 homes isn't international news in America, but in a lot of other places it is.
Especially when we are talking about 400 homes in our capital city. We're not talking some pokey town in the middle of the bush. If Washington DC had 400 homes burn down in bushfire, would you expect us to know about it?
I've wondered a few times why it would be that we seem to hear about any fires over there, and yet you guys seem to not hear/care about anything over here. I suppose the first instinct is to say (like, unfortunately, most things) "Well, what do you expect? It's not happening in America, so it's not really happening...", but maybe it's also more a matter of what we are tuned to. In Australia, no matter where you live, from a very young age you are taught about bushfire safety and survival. They're so common that it's assumed that you will need to know how to survive/deal with one at least once in your life. So when there are bushfires overseas, we feel for that a lot more, and so show it on TV.
Don't know: as far as I'm aware, there's no real way of doing a good test on that at the moment. We can't really compare that to anything happening over here that you guys would be feeling for right now.
Then again, part of the reason we heard so much of your bushfires last year at least was because of the number of firefighters we sent over to help.
This has been my point all along: my original reply said that the only reason there would be a problem is if they had used MS extensions, and hence they should have realised they were taking risks at the time.
Your original reply to my comment was that the problem wasn't so much how "real" MS' Java is, but how old it is, and now you're telling me that backwards compatibility errors are rare.
I think we're agreeing with each other here. The original poster said that he would "have no end of problems" if the JVM was updated to the Sun one, so we can only assume that his problems will arise from no longer supporting some MS extension, right?
Yes, but how would "no end of problems" come up from updating the JVM? I mean, has Java had that much deprecated that it would cause more problems than solve if updated?
Interesting, but if that were the case, why would he "have no end of problems" if they start shipping the "proper" Sun JVM? If they started shipping the Sun JVM, wouldn't all the problems with the MS one go away?
If this were the case, maybe the biggest problem would be finding a new job...
No, this is a good thing. Just because the product you (unfortunately) support was not written to use the "real" Java, why should everyone else suffer? What was going on with development there, anyway? I'd take a stab and say that someone called out another buzz-word ("Yeah, I like it, but let's write it in Java!") at the time of design...
If you're going to write a Java program, then you should write it to run in Java. Not MS' "Java". You should know that by not writing to the standard, you'll end up in trouble. It would be like me writing an app to use undocumented APIs, and then whinging when they're changed. If I'd have used what I was given properly, I would not have gotten into the mess, and I would have no-one to blame but myself.
The fact that you have to support a program that was not written correctly is not our fault or problem. Don't get me wrong, I feel for you, but that doesn't change anything.
The only thing I would add to this would be the ability to insert a disc with new codecs, and have it all update automatically.
:( ) and finally have visualisations for when I'm playing music: I generally don't watch TV and listen to music at the same time, so what not have something on screen?
That way, when the time comes and there's a new audio format out, I can throw a disc into the machine, and then I can easily start using CDs that have that music format burned onto it. And of course, I could also just as easily update what games I have to play with MAME.
I also want to be able to record-replay live TV (not sure if thats's covered by Tivo: we don't have them here
That's only a good analogy if you don't have responsibility/knowledge of your car. The thinking is that if you don't know about the worm, then I should be able to kill it off without your retribution.
If you do know about it, then you take responsibility for what it does to my system.
I think this is a fair, two way street. As the article says, if you don't own the process, then you shouldn't care that I kill it. If you do care that I killed it, that means that you must have known that it existed to begin with, and hence you have to be liable for what it did to my machine.
Just a small correction for you: it's AMI doing this, not AMD. I, too, am a big fan of AMD, but I don't really care too much who writes my BIOS.
Although I don't use it, I think it would be fantastic to see it using an OS database, and so am considering making a donation. If you want this port to come, maybe you would like to hand over a few dollars.
Looking at the current donations, I think it's been a pretty piss poor effort: I don't know how much they've advertised this, but I think it's a real shame that people that are using it at least haven't shown some cash. I'm not sure of the costs associated with Oracle, but I'm sure there'd have to be at least an annual support fee. Surely it would be worth it for most of those users to take a year's worth of support fees and put it towards developing an OS port? Anyway, if you're interested in making a donation, go to http://www.compiere.org/technology/independence.ht ml
No, I haven't tried this, though only because I hadn't thought of it.
Like you, I will normally help people if they need it: I'm a big fan of having someone else's machine to play with, but quite a number of times I've had "friends of friends" ask for help. They offer money, but they're too closely linked to actually accept it, so this could be a happy medium.
I mean really, most of the people close enough to me to get "unrequited support" already know enough about the things that are important to me 'cause I always end up whinging about it while I'm helpinf them out.
Everything in moderation, I suppose...
You know what? I don't care if they don't want to contribute, but I will do free work on the one condition that they go and educate themselves a little: learn to think that it's NOT okay for the government to read their e-mail.
If they don't want to do that, that's fine by me. But as I said in my original post, if they don't want to do that, they can pay me my normal hourly rate.
When presented with the two options, my average computer newbie or mother in law is going to want the cheaper option, but to get that they need to realise that I will make sure they learned something.
In a way I'm forcing them (financially) to learn about what's happening to their rights. And I believe that they will see a connection between the fact that I am willing to do this for free if they learn this. ie. it must be valuable to me, a non-computer newbie, so therefore they'll start to wonder why it's that valuable to me to do work for nothing.
I think that they will realise that:
1) I obviously believe in this
2) I obviously want them to believe in this
3) They should obviously believe me that they should want to believe in this
If they come to me for help, and my help comes free but with a little "but hey, you know what...?", wouldn't they begin to realise it's for their own good?
Good in theory, but I think that that would lose the meaning of the process: get people that would not normally know about these groups to slowly become aware: of not only the groups, but also the things that they support. Even if they don't end up donating, at least they will hopefully go to their website, and have a quick read around of what they stand for. Then, the next time they see an article mentioning, for example, the DMCA, they will at least know what the newsfeed is on about.
Project to a point where hopefully you find a critical mass, and what you have helped to do, in fact, is teach people about what rights they are losing, and then we have a chance to actually fight these laws. When you have the general public complaining about laws, you (you being a politician) can't ignore them as easily as you would a group of geeks.
But, to get back to the point of how you will know whether they've donated or not, I think I'll be doing this from now on:
1) Tell them how much it would cost someone else to deal with the problem
2) Tell them that if they donate a small amount of money to a group of your choice, you'll do it for nothing
3) Before doing the work, ask them for proof of the donation
Now, regarding Point 2: I would actually give them a few to choose from, and ask them to choose, after doing just 5 minutes research on each group, and ask them why they chose that particular group.
And regarding Point 3: This gets back to my original point that a donation now isn't necessarily needed: if they didn't donate, ask them at least for a quick rundown on what they consider to be the benefits of that group. Try and convince them to at least join an announcements list. They will eventually see the value in joining, and so it will happen over time.
Finally, if they ask you why they should bother doing at least looking up the groups, tell them the work you'll be doing for them didn't just jump into your head: you had to learn, and all you're asking is for them to do some learning too.
Well, that's what I'll be doing from now on, anyway.
If the article you're thinking of is the same one I'm thinking of, then they didn't undo any editing, but had infact enabled the option to view changes.
This option is only available when the person editing the file tracks changes...
I know, it's being a bit nitpicky, but tracking and viewing changes is a feature, being able to undo changes is a bug.
Just because a program uses IE does not make it "not a real app... a collection of scripts".
Come on, a little more credit, please! It has embedded HTML, yes, and requires IE to display them, yes, but it doesn't just have IE show the pages and be it.
Quickbooks has special tags in the HTML that it then hooks into to add features to the HTML. And if it's anything like Quicken you'll even find links to the actual application through HTTP (eg. http://qw.exe/ ). You can't deny the fact that most of the work is done within the application itself, and only some of the data is represented in HTML. To start with, I'd compare the features presented in HTML (and the work required to present those features!) with those done within the "old-school" application itself.
And besides: who cares, even if it is a collection of scripts? I can't find a better product, so I use it. And if you would deny using the best product simply for the fact that it's a script, then you obviously would prefer to use your computer as a form of self-congratulating toy than a tool to get the job done. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but you do seem to infer that there's something wrong with any other alternative.
And I love the trolling "get off your ass and help write a Linux equivalent". Is that a "help me write" or "help write me" a Linux equivalent?
If it's the former, why post AC: how are we going to help you if we don't know who you are? And if it's the latter, you can just get stuffed.
I have one question: when we all compare the speed of Java to C, are we necessarily comparing the JVM to a compiled C application? How does a natively compiled Java app (through GCC-Java) compare to a compiled C application?
I agree, especially when the historical definition of "download" infers moving data from a large machine to a PC (despite who initiated the act). Which is exactly what is happening in this instance.
Well, according to the Jargon file, anyway...
Hence, they were not illegal in that sense, either.
Yes, the user would.
This question refers to the logo, as opposed to the browser name, right? Because the way I see it, is "Would a typical user, confronted with a benign web browser, and has a name ending in 'zilla', be likely to infer an association between that product and Godzilla, the well-known dinosaur?"
No, the user would not. Well, they might through the name, think they sound similar, but then again, would the user assume that this means that the owners of Godzilla have decided to not only go to the effort of creating web browsers, but then changing the name of the product? No.
The logo, I understand Toho to have a problem with, the product name, I don't. People cannot confuse a dinosaur with a web browser when they have different names.
I don't think the comparison should be "Java Vs. C++", but "Java in a VM Vs. C++". I know that's where the thread is leading to, but that's not how it started...
Much better lie than what I was using before...
I don't know... I think it would still be easier to "turn someone on" with some sweet talk than with a syringe full of Nitric Oxide..