In the meantime, I'll give you the example that motivated my comments.
I don't think that's a good analogy, though. If Linus himself posted that code or those binaries, then he gave his explicit permission to distribute them. If the messages were posted by someone else, and their posting violated the terms of the GPL, then Linus could petition Google to pull them - just as the RIAA could petition Google to remove their artists' songs (if put there by someone other than the copyright holder).
I think a better analogy is Slashdot itself, which is basically a limited-scale Usenet workalike. Posters own their messages (read the message at the bottom of each page), but they post here with the clear and obvious knowledge that their message will be read by thousands of strangers. I truly can't imagine that any judge would support a lawsuit against Slashdot by a reader who claims that Slashdot doesn't have the right to display their message. Of course they do! That's the entire purpose of the system. And because the poster knew that before they sent their message, I don't think they'd have much recourse against Slashdot doing exactly what they were asked to do.
But again, you don't have the right to post content you don't own, and the legitimate owners would have every right to ask it to be pulled. That's an entirely different issue than this lawsuit, though.
I think I'm being trolled, but I'm waiting for Quickbooks to fire up inside Qemu and I've got some time to kill.
Storage and redistribution are not the same thing, no matter how much you'd like it to be. For instance, I have a very large archive of MP3s from CD's I've bought. I cannot legally redistribute them without the copyright holder's consent.
But when storage is one of the primary design requirements, they're close enough to the same thing for gov'mnt work. This isn't like SMTP, where servers are expected to delete messages after they've passed on. Rather, NNTP servers are required to store their traffic for a while - that's how the system works.
So, Google just happens to have an undefined expiration time on their NNTP server, and have provided a web interface to it. What else are they doing that every other NNTP server in the world is not?
Sorry, you're wrong. As a copyright holder, I do have the right to dictate how my content is distributed.
Not always. I'd be interested in hearing you explain to the judge how you released your message with the explicit goal of unlimited worldwide distribution, but don't want it distributed. It's not like you can accidentally post to Usenet; you had to jump through hoops to put your words out there. What would a reasonable person expect to happen to them once they've entered the global network of computers designed to spread them around?
Archiving and redistributing aren't the same thing.
Sure they are. Google just happens to run an NNTP server with a pretty interface and a long expiration time. There're tens of thousands of messages stored on my own server, reader for public distribution, at this very moment.
What if I posted a licence with my content stating that only nntp servers and individuals could redistribute what I have posted?
As long as we're throwing out goofy ideas: what if I scream into a restaurant that no one is allowed to tell anyone else what I'm about to say?
When you contract with a carrier of a wide-open public medium to deliver your message to the world, you have no right to expect that another carrier of that medium won't deliver to someone you didn't expect, or in a form you didn't anticipate.
I don't see how creating an archive of billions of copyrighted works [...]
You left out "that were submitted to a store-and-forward global distribution system with the intent of disseminating them as widely as possible, knowing full well that they would be archived, folded, spindled, and mutilated".
In other news, every public mailing list in the known universe does the exact same thing. Gonna sue Yahoo! Groups because they're publishing the email that you deliberately sent to 1,500 strangers?
You're looking for The Adventures of Cookies and Cream. It's more puzzle-centric than action-oriented, and you have to cooperate: winning is impossible otherwise, and you share the score.
My wife (a game newbie) and I love it, and have given it as a gift to other sets of mismatched friends. Seriously, spend the $20 or whatever and give it a shot. She'll love you for it!
Why should my losses be tied to my income at all if we're talking about pain and suffering?
I support a limit of about $5,000 for pain and suffering. Again, why should this be a lottery?
And even worse, the problem with actual damages tied to earnings is that they don't consider future earnings possibilities well at all.
Other legal actions don't consider future worth; why should this? If my house burns down, I can't sue for 20x the value on the possibility that real estate prices might spike. If my car gets wrecked, I can't sue for 20x the value on the possibility that it might one day be a valuable collector item. And yet, you want to sue for 20x the tangible, calculable value of your career on the longshot that it, too, may be worth a lot more some day.
Life doesn't work that way. It never has, and barring societal collapse, it never will.
You have to consider: what if my life is completely ruined by a doctor's bumbling error? [...] Honestly, a $20 million cap sounds ridiculously low for the worst case scenario.
So you honestly believe that your life is worth $20 million? Let's see:
The per capita GDP in the USA is $41,800; we'll use that as a proxy for average income.
The average person, then, has about 28 more years of work at $41,800 ahead of them.
Ergo, you can expect to earn about $1.2 million dollars more before you die.
Please feel free to enumerate the reasons why you should be able to sue for 2000% of your expected total life earnings.
I am for unlimited actual damage compensation. That is, if you can prove that your injury will cost you $50,000,000, then I see no reason why you shouldn't be able to sue for the whole amount. Jackasses like you, though, who want the pain and suffering portion to be a lottery should be taken out and shot for ruining health care for the rest of us.
I find in linux that the binary kernels that come with my distributions seem to load and operate just as fast, if not faster than my custom build of FreeBSD. In linux I have used only binary packages, and the system overall "feels" just as fast, though some operations are a little slower (like loading emacs;)).
I use both Linux and FreeBSD at home and work, and here's my take on it. FreeBSD seems to be designed for maximum throughput, whereas Linux seems to be designed for maximum interactivity. My Linux desktop feels a lot snappier than it did when I was running FreeBSD on the same hardware, but I think I can push more (email / web queries / database transactions ) through our BSD servers than their Linux equivalents.
Still, I know that's a massive generalization and not always true. I usually use Linux for the desktop because many desktop applications are written assuming Linux, and I usually use FreeBSD for the server because administering it is easy and many server apps are tested heavily on it.
While this is not a bot program, per se, how is this not running a bot? It's unattended automated actions performed repeatedly.
Haven't played WoW. Haven't played any other MMORPGs. Don't care about the issue.
Having said that, he was physically sitting in front of the keyboard and manually pressing keys on it, even if only intermittently and distractedly. That's unlike any definition of "unattended" that I'm familiar with.
They make use of "USE" flags which can disable parts of programs you don't want/need.
More importantly, they enable parts of programs you do want/need, even if not many other people do.
For example, my desktop is one of the few *ix machines in my office, and our network is primarily based around Win2k3 and Active Directory. I really, really need Kerberos support in every package that supports it, and configuring 'USE="kerberos"' solves that problem.
This exact issue drove me away from Debian way back when. It made me chose between old Kerberized OpenSSH, or a newer un-Kerberized version (as of today: ssh-krb5 3.8.1p1-10 from OpenBSD 3.5, released 2004-05-01, or ssh 1:4.2p1-7). Gentoo didn't make me choose, so that's what I went with.
Gentoo isn't for everybody, but it has some features that I'd never give up. The ability to pick and choose obscure features that most other people won't need is high on that list.
Life is full of "what ifs". What if my tire falls off on the way home? What if I get Mad Cow or bird flu? What if all these years of good livin' give me a sudden heart attack? What if my coworker goes postal?
And yet I'll drive home tonight, eat some meat, go shopping later on, and hang out with my coworkers. All those bad things could happen, but they won't.
I only mean that you can talk yourself out of any course of action, regardless of how clearly correct it may be, if you make a long enough list of potential problems. In this case, the likely benefit of the school thug keeping his paws off my son was worth the exceedingly small risk of something really bad happening.
I got less than double the performance with that same test
Ah, so a 100% speedup is perfectly believable, but 200% is completely preposterous? Whatever. But even if it was only 50%, it's still 10 times better than the "no more than 5% improvement" being bandied around.
At any rate, I guess you missed the words "on my server". I don't care about your server, or anyone else's. Mine ran measurably faster. Mod me down and whine about it all you want, but it doesn't change the fact that I ran the tests on my system and saw solid results.
Imagine a server room with $1,000,000 worth of hardware. LeonGeeste's 10% speedup would give his boss an extra $100,000 worth of computing ability. You don't think that'd be worth a bonus?
To those who argue that such a simple tweak isn't worth compensation: he'd be getting paid for the amount of learning it took to get to point that he can implement huge money saving ideas. As the old story says, it's not the price of the fix itself that they're paying for.
I am personally not aware of a single mainstream linux app that does 5% better when optimized for P4 as opposed to generic 386
Running "openssl speed" compiled with "-O3 -march=pentium4" gave about 3 times the performance of "-O" on my server. Being able to handle 3 times the number of SSL connections was certainly worth the 10 seconds required to put correct values in Gentoo's/etc/make.conf.
Fortunately, he's of an age whether my wife and I are the sole authorities in his life, and all other is by extension of us. He obeys his teachers because we've told him to, not because he understands the importance of following instructions (and when not to).
Since he's basically too young to kill or seriously injure another kid - and as this is Slashdot, I fully expect someone to jump in with a story of a three-year-old murderer; keep it to yourself! - there's not much for him to get into external trouble for.
We get along great with our kids' teachers, because they know that we support them and stand by their decisions. I don't anticipate them being upset if/when my kids stand up for themselves.
Bullying is a bigger problem than your simplistic solution of hitting back can solve.
As I don't know your particular situation, please agree that you also don't know mine. Fighting back was the appropriate action in our case, just as it may not be in yours.
Regardless, I'd posit that the difference between a bully and a team player can be as simple as a thorough beat-down at a young enough age. Nip the problem before it turns into a crisis.
Yes, bullies pick out on the apparent "weaker" ones. Why? They are weak, and want power by appearing strong in a social setting.
Yep. Beyond that, I think that minor retaliation is sort of like putting The Club on your steering wheel. It won't dissuade a determined attacker, but the casual thug will almost always move on to easier prey. Fortunately, that analogy breaks down when a significant number of kids fight back: rather can continuing to look for other weak kids, bullies almost universally give up and find something else to do.
I wish I knew this stuff a long time ago. But unfortunately, my father was/is one of the "weaker" ones as well, and well, I was much smaller and knew less than he did at the time.
My dad was one of the "stronger" ones (but in a good way). I just wish it didn't take me until high school to understand what he'd been trying to say. Years of being picked on ended one night at a party when a bully backed me into a corner; I beat the snot out of him, got a few smiles and pats on the back, and was done with the whole business. I'm glad my son is turning out to be a quicker study than I was.
My point is that prevention is better than fighting. With fighting, you can't predict the outcome.
I mostly agree with that. Actual prevention is definitely much better than fighting, clearly. The problem is that no one really has a good idea of how to implement it. While some people wholeheartedly know that suspensions and expulsions will "cure" the issue, other people know that education and nurturing are the clear path to success.
On the other hand, with some fighting you can predict the outcome rather well. Specifically, in small-town middle-class America, the odds favor the idea that kicking the crap out of the elementary school bully will put an end to his actions.
I understand your big picture idea, but don't believe it maps well onto this exact instance.
The bottom line is fighting back against bullies is not nearly as good an idea as it sounds.
I disagree wholeheartedly. My son (and other kids) were being bullied by a kid in his school. I tried talking to the teachers, but they said that their punishments weren't having much effect and the kid's parents weren't interested.
So, I taught my son three rules:
Aim for the nose
Swing hard
He'd never get in trouble from me for hitting back.
I also directly informed the teachers about our plan (their one-word reaction: "good!").
That was two months ago, and after two good smacks in the snout (and one miss - my son missed and nailed him in the eye), the bully is no more. My son wasn't the only one to benefit, either: the other kids realized that this worked pretty well.
I made it clear to my boy that I never, ever condone him starting fights. However, neither will I ever punish him for defending himself.
The newspaper I want today is the one we had 40 years ago.
I was bored in an airport and picked up a copy of the Wall Street Journal out of curiosity. I was surprised to find out that it was as good as I'd heard. Expect a decidedly pro-Capitalism bent to the financial stories, of course, but the international coverage was really comprehensive.
The Christian Science Monitor is also very well regarded, but it's weekly instead of daily, and I can't personally vouch for it.
If you want daily local news, though, then I suggest you buy a police scanner and attend town hall meetings - I haven't lived anywhere with decent local reporting in years. An alternative would be to hire a bum as your own personal roving reporter. The writing might not be so hot, but it'd probably be cheaper than buying a local paper and definitely much more interesting.
It's using those pieces in novel ways that constitutes invention.
Without question, you are correct.
Now, please tell me how assigning a retail price to an item is novel and I'll gladly concede that MercExchange isn't a pack of frickin' thieves that would have been dragged out and shot in less litigious times.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think that's a good analogy, though. If Linus himself posted that code or those binaries, then he gave his explicit permission to distribute them. If the messages were posted by someone else, and their posting violated the terms of the GPL, then Linus could petition Google to pull them - just as the RIAA could petition Google to remove their artists' songs (if put there by someone other than the copyright holder).
I think a better analogy is Slashdot itself, which is basically a limited-scale Usenet workalike. Posters own their messages (read the message at the bottom of each page), but they post here with the clear and obvious knowledge that their message will be read by thousands of strangers. I truly can't imagine that any judge would support a lawsuit against Slashdot by a reader who claims that Slashdot doesn't have the right to display their message. Of course they do! That's the entire purpose of the system. And because the poster knew that before they sent their message, I don't think they'd have much recourse against Slashdot doing exactly what they were asked to do.
But again, you don't have the right to post content you don't own, and the legitimate owners would have every right to ask it to be pulled. That's an entirely different issue than this lawsuit, though.
Storage and redistribution are not the same thing, no matter how much you'd like it to be. For instance, I have a very large archive of MP3s from CD's I've bought. I cannot legally redistribute them without the copyright holder's consent.
But when storage is one of the primary design requirements, they're close enough to the same thing for gov'mnt work. This isn't like SMTP, where servers are expected to delete messages after they've passed on. Rather, NNTP servers are required to store their traffic for a while - that's how the system works.
So, Google just happens to have an undefined expiration time on their NNTP server, and have provided a web interface to it. What else are they doing that every other NNTP server in the world is not?
Sorry, you're wrong. As a copyright holder, I do have the right to dictate how my content is distributed.
Not always. I'd be interested in hearing you explain to the judge how you released your message with the explicit goal of unlimited worldwide distribution, but don't want it distributed. It's not like you can accidentally post to Usenet; you had to jump through hoops to put your words out there. What would a reasonable person expect to happen to them once they've entered the global network of computers designed to spread them around?
Sure they are. Google just happens to run an NNTP server with a pretty interface and a long expiration time. There're tens of thousands of messages stored on my own server, reader for public distribution, at this very moment.
What if I posted a licence with my content stating that only nntp servers and individuals could redistribute what I have posted?
As long as we're throwing out goofy ideas: what if I scream into a restaurant that no one is allowed to tell anyone else what I'm about to say?
When you contract with a carrier of a wide-open public medium to deliver your message to the world, you have no right to expect that another carrier of that medium won't deliver to someone you didn't expect, or in a form you didn't anticipate.
You left out "that were submitted to a store-and-forward global distribution system with the intent of disseminating them as widely as possible, knowing full well that they would be archived, folded, spindled, and mutilated".
In other news, every public mailing list in the known universe does the exact same thing. Gonna sue Yahoo! Groups because they're publishing the email that you deliberately sent to 1,500 strangers?
My wife (a game newbie) and I love it, and have given it as a gift to other sets of mismatched friends. Seriously, spend the $20 or whatever and give it a shot. She'll love you for it!
I support a limit of about $5,000 for pain and suffering. Again, why should this be a lottery?
And even worse, the problem with actual damages tied to earnings is that they don't consider future earnings possibilities well at all.
Other legal actions don't consider future worth; why should this? If my house burns down, I can't sue for 20x the value on the possibility that real estate prices might spike. If my car gets wrecked, I can't sue for 20x the value on the possibility that it might one day be a valuable collector item. And yet, you want to sue for 20x the tangible, calculable value of your career on the longshot that it, too, may be worth a lot more some day.
Life doesn't work that way. It never has, and barring societal collapse, it never will.
So you honestly believe that your life is worth $20 million? Let's see:
Please feel free to enumerate the reasons why you should be able to sue for 2000% of your expected total life earnings.
I am for unlimited actual damage compensation. That is, if you can prove that your injury will cost you $50,000,000, then I see no reason why you shouldn't be able to sue for the whole amount. Jackasses like you, though, who want the pain and suffering portion to be a lottery should be taken out and shot for ruining health care for the rest of us.
So you live in a hyperexpensive place, drive an SUV, and own one of the more expensive personal computers made.
Dude, I think I've found your problem, and it has nothing to do with the external world.
Signed,
Used Oldsmobile drivin', cheap 4900 sq ft house livin', homebuilt PC usin' guy with money left over each month.
I use both Linux and FreeBSD at home and work, and here's my take on it. FreeBSD seems to be designed for maximum throughput, whereas Linux seems to be designed for maximum interactivity. My Linux desktop feels a lot snappier than it did when I was running FreeBSD on the same hardware, but I think I can push more (email / web queries / database transactions ) through our BSD servers than their Linux equivalents.
Still, I know that's a massive generalization and not always true. I usually use Linux for the desktop because many desktop applications are written assuming Linux, and I usually use FreeBSD for the server because administering it is easy and many server apps are tested heavily on it.
Haven't played WoW. Haven't played any other MMORPGs. Don't care about the issue.
Having said that, he was physically sitting in front of the keyboard and manually pressing keys on it, even if only intermittently and distractedly. That's unlike any definition of "unattended" that I'm familiar with.
More importantly, they enable parts of programs you do want/need, even if not many other people do.
For example, my desktop is one of the few *ix machines in my office, and our network is primarily based around Win2k3 and Active Directory. I really, really need Kerberos support in every package that supports it, and configuring 'USE="kerberos"' solves that problem.
This exact issue drove me away from Debian way back when. It made me chose between old Kerberized OpenSSH, or a newer un-Kerberized version (as of today: ssh-krb5 3.8.1p1-10 from OpenBSD 3.5, released 2004-05-01, or ssh 1:4.2p1-7). Gentoo didn't make me choose, so that's what I went with.
Gentoo isn't for everybody, but it has some features that I'd never give up. The ability to pick and choose obscure features that most other people won't need is high on that list.
Life is full of "what ifs". What if my tire falls off on the way home? What if I get Mad Cow or bird flu? What if all these years of good livin' give me a sudden heart attack? What if my coworker goes postal?
And yet I'll drive home tonight, eat some meat, go shopping later on, and hang out with my coworkers. All those bad things could happen, but they won't.
I only mean that you can talk yourself out of any course of action, regardless of how clearly correct it may be, if you make a long enough list of potential problems. In this case, the likely benefit of the school thug keeping his paws off my son was worth the exceedingly small risk of something really bad happening.
Ah, so a 100% speedup is perfectly believable, but 200% is completely preposterous? Whatever. But even if it was only 50%, it's still 10 times better than the "no more than 5% improvement" being bandied around.
At any rate, I guess you missed the words "on my server". I don't care about your server, or anyone else's. Mine ran measurably faster. Mod me down and whine about it all you want, but it doesn't change the fact that I ran the tests on my system and saw solid results.
Imagine a server room with $1,000,000 worth of hardware. LeonGeeste's 10% speedup would give his boss an extra $100,000 worth of computing ability. You don't think that'd be worth a bonus?
To those who argue that such a simple tweak isn't worth compensation: he'd be getting paid for the amount of learning it took to get to point that he can implement huge money saving ideas. As the old story says, it's not the price of the fix itself that they're paying for.
Running "openssl speed" compiled with "-O3 -march=pentium4" gave about 3 times the performance of "-O" on my server. Being able to handle 3 times the number of SSL connections was certainly worth the 10 seconds required to put correct values in Gentoo's /etc/make.conf.
Fortunately, he's of an age whether my wife and I are the sole authorities in his life, and all other is by extension of us. He obeys his teachers because we've told him to, not because he understands the importance of following instructions (and when not to).
Since he's basically too young to kill or seriously injure another kid - and as this is Slashdot, I fully expect someone to jump in with a story of a three-year-old murderer; keep it to yourself! - there's not much for him to get into external trouble for.
We get along great with our kids' teachers, because they know that we support them and stand by their decisions. I don't anticipate them being upset if/when my kids stand up for themselves.
As I don't know your particular situation, please agree that you also don't know mine. Fighting back was the appropriate action in our case, just as it may not be in yours.
Regardless, I'd posit that the difference between a bully and a team player can be as simple as a thorough beat-down at a young enough age. Nip the problem before it turns into a crisis.
Yep. Beyond that, I think that minor retaliation is sort of like putting The Club on your steering wheel. It won't dissuade a determined attacker, but the casual thug will almost always move on to easier prey. Fortunately, that analogy breaks down when a significant number of kids fight back: rather can continuing to look for other weak kids, bullies almost universally give up and find something else to do.
I wish I knew this stuff a long time ago. But unfortunately, my father was/is one of the "weaker" ones as well, and well, I was much smaller and knew less than he did at the time.
My dad was one of the "stronger" ones (but in a good way). I just wish it didn't take me until high school to understand what he'd been trying to say. Years of being picked on ended one night at a party when a bully backed me into a corner; I beat the snot out of him, got a few smiles and pats on the back, and was done with the whole business. I'm glad my son is turning out to be a quicker study than I was.
I mostly agree with that. Actual prevention is definitely much better than fighting, clearly. The problem is that no one really has a good idea of how to implement it. While some people wholeheartedly know that suspensions and expulsions will "cure" the issue, other people know that education and nurturing are the clear path to success.
On the other hand, with some fighting you can predict the outcome rather well. Specifically, in small-town middle-class America, the odds favor the idea that kicking the crap out of the elementary school bully will put an end to his actions.
I understand your big picture idea, but don't believe it maps well onto this exact instance.
I disagree wholeheartedly. My son (and other kids) were being bullied by a kid in his school. I tried talking to the teachers, but they said that their punishments weren't having much effect and the kid's parents weren't interested.
So, I taught my son three rules:
I also directly informed the teachers about our plan (their one-word reaction: "good!").
That was two months ago, and after two good smacks in the snout (and one miss - my son missed and nailed him in the eye), the bully is no more. My son wasn't the only one to benefit, either: the other kids realized that this worked pretty well.
I made it clear to my boy that I never, ever condone him starting fights. However, neither will I ever punish him for defending himself.
Apache and MySQL could be running wide-open, but if the OS only allows five concurrent inbound connections to port 80, then not much else matters.
That's two words.
I was bored in an airport and picked up a copy of the Wall Street Journal out of curiosity. I was surprised to find out that it was as good as I'd heard. Expect a decidedly pro-Capitalism bent to the financial stories, of course, but the international coverage was really comprehensive.
The Christian Science Monitor is also very well regarded, but it's weekly instead of daily, and I can't personally vouch for it.
If you want daily local news, though, then I suggest you buy a police scanner and attend town hall meetings - I haven't lived anywhere with decent local reporting in years. An alternative would be to hire a bum as your own personal roving reporter. The writing might not be so hot, but it'd probably be cheaper than buying a local paper and definitely much more interesting.
I think I'll name my hobo Bernstein.
Yeah, but the p{a,n}m* tools don't seem to always process them.
Unfortunately, neither pnmscale nor pamscal seem to do the trick (but identify would recognize the results if they did):
or, perhaps, gasp, pamscale does not support multi-image PNM files?
Unfortunately, I think that's the key. Thanks for trying to help, though!
Without question, you are correct.
Now, please tell me how assigning a retail price to an item is novel and I'll gladly concede that MercExchange isn't a pack of frickin' thieves that would have been dragged out and shot in less litigious times.