True: that's why, as I recommended, they should all specify who's liable for what and what the caps are.
That's what happens today. The license almost invariably specifies that the software vendor is not liable beyond the cap, and the cap is the purchase price. Any other scheme to assign liability would be equally arbitrary.
If you break a vase for $10,000, they award $10,000 + admin. costs. It's really simple.
The problem is that for popular end-user apps, the potential real damages could run into the $Billions in the event that the app has remote vulnerability that enables a destructive Internet worm. It's long been a well-known fact that you can't positively prove that a piece of software is totally free of bugs, so this risk will always exist.
Only mega corporations will be able to afford the premiums to insure for such huge potential risks, so innovation in network-connected user applications could just about grind to a halt.
Most likely all of the liability will be assigned to the application developer by the legal process. However, in actuality most of the liability really belongs on the OS vendors (Unix, Windows and Mac included) that have created a security model that is woefully inadequate for dealing with remotely connected sockets, as well as to the end users who continue to buy such OSes and haven't pushed for major overhauls OS security. Maybe if the end users were forced to pay their own insurance premiums, they'd demand a better platform to run their programs.
What does MythTV offer that you don't have with MCE?
For me, one killer feature is MythTV's timestretch. Maybe MCE and/or other PVRs have it, but Googling it only seems to come up in association with MythTV. (This feature speeds up the playback while keeping the sound pitch normal.)
I've found that most shows can be sped up by a factor of 1.4X without me really even noticing it. Things like plodding documentaries are usually acceptably watchable at 1.7X speed. Between skipping commercials and 1.7X speed, I can watch an hour-long show in 25 minutes.
This feature has saved me a lot of time. I've easily made up for the extra time I spent setting up the MythTV system. (I figure that the risk that my head will actually end up exploding like on Max Headroom is negligible.)
It's obvious that Linux has user interface problems that are holding it back on the desktop. For example, most apps take '-x' style options. However, confusingly, many apps have now added '--foo' options.
What's worse, some frequently used apps don't conform to any options standards at all. 'ps' takes a confusing mixture of options, some with dashes and some without, which are mutually incompatible. 'tar' needs some options without dashes, and some with. 'dd' uses a totally different keyword-based scheme like 'foo=bar'. And 'find' has its own little expression language on the command line.
Clearly, grandma isn't going to be able to use Linux until all of these confusing option schemes are made more consistent.
Perhaps everyone should stop worrying about how they are going to record the next episode of The OC and start wondering why they have the right to record that episode.
Because the law and decades of court decisions explicitly give them that right.
So as software developers, we can tack on licenses such as the GPL to determine how our works are used... but networks cannot tack on restrictions to how their media is used.
There is nothing in the GPL that attempts to restrict your standard fair use rights, such as making a backup copy or loading the program into RAM. The GPL only deals with redistribution rights. The GPL gives you broad redistribution rights with some conditions attached. It is well understood that for a TV show, the producers give you zero redistribution rights. But redistribution has nothing to do with you taping a show.
This proposed law is about revoking rights that you already explicitly have, such as timeshifting shows, and transferring them to the content producers. These particular rights are not addressed by the GPL; the GPL simply assumes that you retain the standard rights that you already have under the law.
The other thing to consider is that you'll need a relatively large tower case and a beefy PS in your system in order to accommodate the vacuum tube-based NICs. Those things are big and hot, and most use two or three PCI slots.
What the hell do you want out of a media player ready to go out of the box beyond the ability to play mp3s & cds? XMMS does a great job of this and is standard on every ready built distro I've used (FC and DamnSmallLinux).
XMMS on Fedora Core won't play MP3s. IIRC, they even yanked the MP3 decoder source out of the SRPMs. I had to download a real copy of the XMMS source and compile it from scratch to play MP3s on FC.
That would be incredibly stupid. If even one nuke remained unaccounted for, they could retaliate by manually sneaking into one of our cities if necessary.
In fact, any nuclear armed adversary would realize that they couldn't win an all-out missile exchange with the US, so they would probably hide their warheads during the run up to a war. This would create a highly effective deterrent against a first strike by the US.
Given the quality of information "infiltrators" gave us about the weapons of the Iraqi regime, your idea of locating all of the nukes in China with Taiwanese spies is laughable.
Ummmm...how can you be 100 percent focused on Windows and still develop Office for the Mac?
Part of their focus on Windows is deflecting as much anti-trust scrutiny as possible. By ensuring that a token competitor remains marginally viable, they are helping to lower the risk that their Windows business will face further legal attacks.
By picking a token competitor that shares their closed-source business model, they avoid the appearance of validating alternative business models that threaten the profit margins that they've traditionally been able to command. That's why you see them selling Mac products but not Linux products.
Do you really believe that if push came to shove, if arguments came to missiles and bombs, that the United States would be incapable of taking over the oil fields of a major producer, and then securing production and delivery?
Oil production and delivery are incredibly vulnerable to sabotage. It's highly unlikely that we'd get much oil out of a country whose populace was actively resisting our efforts. We'd be better off in such a circumstance with a crash program to convert domestic coal to oil and gas just as Germany did in WWII.
and fight our possible enemies, be they Chinese, Arab, or, um, French?
We are never going to fight the Chinese or French since they both have weapons that could incinerate our major cities.
Debt is bits and paper.
That's true, and we're probably eventually going to just devalue the debt so that we never really pay it back, even without a war.
There's an easy technical fix to this problem: Start a nuclear war at the location of this peering point. Then by design the Internet will route around that area, and communications will be reestablished.
For one thing, does anybody believe that the blood really could have lasted that long no matter what it was preserved in?
Yes, blood is made out of atoms. If the atoms are embedded in a durable impenetrable container, they're not going anywhere as long as the container remains intact. The molecules that made up the blood may degrade, but the atoms all remain in place.
Arguments like this don't matter anyway. If you believe that an invisible man is fscking with our minds by creating a young universe that he filled with all types of evidence that makes it look old (including fossils, geological features, astronomical phenomena, cosmic redshifting and background radiation, minerals on earth and other planets, and myriad other observations, many down to the subatomic level) then all bets are off. You don't need to argue that carbon dating is flawed: in that scenario all carbon samples were rigged when they were created, so worrying about the scientific validity of any dating technique is futile.
Most US corporations have executive portfolios with M$ stock, and therefore resist anything that threatens their personal wealth.
However, most executives also own or have options on big chunks of their employers' stocks.
For example, take someone who has 30% of their assets in their own company and 2% in MSFT stock. Would it make sense for him to direct his company to take $100 out of their bottom line and transfer it over to Microsoft's?
In other news, carbon monoxide and other emissions from gasoline engines have long been related to increased health problems.
Those pollutants have been greatly reduced by catalytic converters and other emissions controls.
Diesel's not perfect, but it's not any worse than burning any other hydrocarbon fossil fuel, like gasoline.
Current US diesel fuel is not compatible with catalytic converters, but gasoline is. Until that's fixed, most gasoline vehicles in the US will emit far less pollutants than diesel vehicles.
However, a tariff is a tax paid on imported goods which is not charged on similar locally produced goods. It therefore preferentially favors locally produced goods.
A "use tax", OTOH, is a uniform tax paid on all goods of the same type, regardless of the origin. Therefore, one can argue that a use tax is not a tariff on interstate commerce at all, and has nothing to do with interstate commerce.
In fact, exempting imported items from use tax essentially creates a "negative" tariff, and it preferentially favors imported items. Maybe *that's* unconstitutional (if negative numbers are treated consistently with positive numbers, anyway:).
Unfortunately, you may have a point. It might be tough to prove that Google's scheme is legal. The problem is that current copyright laws were written before online indexing was a possibility, so this area is very fuzzy.
However, it's blatantly obvious that such an index is a huge benefit to the public, to the authors, to their publishers and to google. It's a win/win/win/win situation. Keeping in mind that copyright is supposed to be a system enhances the public benefit, Congress should pass a law which explicitly permits Google or anyone else to scan and index online any work as long as appropriate measures are put in place to prevent wholesale downloading. IMO, under such a law such indexers might be required to register with the copyright office before they start, but they should be allowed to do their work without fear of legal attacks and without having to pay royalties.
I'm not holding my breath though, as congress seems to have lately lost the ability to pass any meaningful or useful legislation whatsoever.
No, this is actually an example of the free market in action: Microsoft produces a product, and that product's features don't fit the needs of a potential customer, so they're buying from other vendors.
Microsoft is free to either alter their product to meet this customer's requirements, drop the price enough to change the requirements calculation, or forego that customer's business. This is no different than options for producers of any other product in any market.
If I said: "I'm going to buy a vehicle. I need a minivan, so I won't be buying a Ferrari given their current offerings.", would anybody accuse me of attempting to "Undermine the Free Market!!!" or yell "You'll destroy sports car innovation!!!"?
If Apple (and to some extent GNOME) can do it, then so can KDE.
Apple didn't do it. They use the Model T paintjob approach: They just don't let you tweak a lot of stuff that you should be able to tweak.
I use a lot of the obscure preferences in KDE. There are plenty of dumbed down alternatives out there already; KDE doesn't need to try to be another one of those.
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That's what happens today. The license almost invariably specifies that the software vendor is not liable beyond the cap, and the cap is the purchase price. Any other scheme to assign liability would be equally arbitrary.
The problem is that for popular end-user apps, the potential real damages could run into the $Billions in the event that the app has remote vulnerability that enables a destructive Internet worm. It's long been a well-known fact that you can't positively prove that a piece of software is totally free of bugs, so this risk will always exist.
Only mega corporations will be able to afford the premiums to insure for such huge potential risks, so innovation in network-connected user applications could just about grind to a halt.
Most likely all of the liability will be assigned to the application developer by the legal process. However, in actuality most of the liability really belongs on the OS vendors (Unix, Windows and Mac included) that have created a security model that is woefully inadequate for dealing with remotely connected sockets, as well as to the end users who continue to buy such OSes and haven't pushed for major overhauls OS security. Maybe if the end users were forced to pay their own insurance premiums, they'd demand a better platform to run their programs.
For me, one killer feature is MythTV's timestretch. Maybe MCE and/or other PVRs have it, but Googling it only seems to come up in association with MythTV. (This feature speeds up the playback while keeping the sound pitch normal.)
I've found that most shows can be sped up by a factor of 1.4X without me really even noticing it. Things like plodding documentaries are usually acceptably watchable at 1.7X speed. Between skipping commercials and 1.7X speed, I can watch an hour-long show in 25 minutes.
This feature has saved me a lot of time. I've easily made up for the extra time I spent setting up the MythTV system. (I figure that the risk that my head will actually end up exploding like on Max Headroom is negligible.)
Desktop? Now, don't get me started on xterm's confusing array of options. It's one of the worst offenders!
What's worse, some frequently used apps don't conform to any options standards at all. 'ps' takes a confusing mixture of options, some with dashes and some without, which are mutually incompatible. 'tar' needs some options without dashes, and some with. 'dd' uses a totally different keyword-based scheme like 'foo=bar'. And 'find' has its own little expression language on the command line.
Clearly, grandma isn't going to be able to use Linux until all of these confusing option schemes are made more consistent.
Because the law and decades of court decisions explicitly give them that right.
So as software developers, we can tack on licenses such as the GPL to determine how our works are used... but networks cannot tack on restrictions to how their media is used.
There is nothing in the GPL that attempts to restrict your standard fair use rights, such as making a backup copy or loading the program into RAM. The GPL only deals with redistribution rights. The GPL gives you broad redistribution rights with some conditions attached. It is well understood that for a TV show, the producers give you zero redistribution rights. But redistribution has nothing to do with you taping a show.
This proposed law is about revoking rights that you already explicitly have, such as timeshifting shows, and transferring them to the content producers. These particular rights are not addressed by the GPL; the GPL simply assumes that you retain the standard rights that you already have under the law.
The other thing to consider is that you'll need a relatively large tower case and a beefy PS in your system in order to accommodate the vacuum tube-based NICs. Those things are big and hot, and most use two or three PCI slots.
XMMS on Fedora Core won't play MP3s. IIRC, they even yanked the MP3 decoder source out of the SRPMs. I had to download a real copy of the XMMS source and compile it from scratch to play MP3s on FC.
What if they're broadcasting instructions on how to build equipment that gets around your limitations?
In fact, any nuclear armed adversary would realize that they couldn't win an all-out missile exchange with the US, so they would probably hide their warheads during the run up to a war. This would create a highly effective deterrent against a first strike by the US.
Given the quality of information "infiltrators" gave us about the weapons of the Iraqi regime, your idea of locating all of the nukes in China with Taiwanese spies is laughable.
Part of their focus on Windows is deflecting as much anti-trust scrutiny as possible. By ensuring that a token competitor remains marginally viable, they are helping to lower the risk that their Windows business will face further legal attacks.
By picking a token competitor that shares their closed-source business model, they avoid the appearance of validating alternative business models that threaten the profit margins that they've traditionally been able to command. That's why you see them selling Mac products but not Linux products.
Well, the VFAT with long filenames, which is the subject of these patents, was developed for Windows95.
Oil production and delivery are incredibly vulnerable to sabotage. It's highly unlikely that we'd get much oil out of a country whose populace was actively resisting our efforts. We'd be better off in such a circumstance with a crash program to convert domestic coal to oil and gas just as Germany did in WWII.
and fight our possible enemies, be they Chinese, Arab, or, um, French?
We are never going to fight the Chinese or French since they both have weapons that could incinerate our major cities.
Debt is bits and paper.
That's true, and we're probably eventually going to just devalue the debt so that we never really pay it back, even without a war.
The US government disagrees with you, and it is currently running a vast experiment test their theory.
There's an easy technical fix to this problem: Start a nuclear war at the location of this peering point. Then by design the Internet will route around that area, and communications will be reestablished.
This filesystem avoids those problems with its ACQ implementation.
Believe what you want. Like I said, there's no point discussing it if the evidence was rigged.
Yes, blood is made out of atoms. If the atoms are embedded in a durable impenetrable container, they're not going anywhere as long as the container remains intact. The molecules that made up the blood may degrade, but the atoms all remain in place.
Arguments like this don't matter anyway. If you believe that an invisible man is fscking with our minds by creating a young universe that he filled with all types of evidence that makes it look old (including fossils, geological features, astronomical phenomena, cosmic redshifting and background radiation, minerals on earth and other planets, and myriad other observations, many down to the subatomic level) then all bets are off. You don't need to argue that carbon dating is flawed: in that scenario all carbon samples were rigged when they were created, so worrying about the scientific validity of any dating technique is futile.
This is not Airbus vs. Boeing. Boeing is planning to use these same chips in its planes as well.
However, most executives also own or have options on big chunks of their employers' stocks.
For example, take someone who has 30% of their assets in their own company and 2% in MSFT stock. Would it make sense for him to direct his company to take $100 out of their bottom line and transfer it over to Microsoft's?
Those pollutants have been greatly reduced by catalytic converters and other emissions controls.
Diesel's not perfect, but it's not any worse than burning any other hydrocarbon fossil fuel, like gasoline.
Current US diesel fuel is not compatible with catalytic converters, but gasoline is. Until that's fixed, most gasoline vehicles in the US will emit far less pollutants than diesel vehicles.
A "use tax", OTOH, is a uniform tax paid on all goods of the same type, regardless of the origin. Therefore, one can argue that a use tax is not a tariff on interstate commerce at all, and has nothing to do with interstate commerce.
In fact, exempting imported items from use tax essentially creates a "negative" tariff, and it preferentially favors imported items. Maybe *that's* unconstitutional (if negative numbers are treated consistently with positive numbers, anyway :).
However, it's blatantly obvious that such an index is a huge benefit to the public, to the authors, to their publishers and to google. It's a win/win/win/win situation. Keeping in mind that copyright is supposed to be a system enhances the public benefit, Congress should pass a law which explicitly permits Google or anyone else to scan and index online any work as long as appropriate measures are put in place to prevent wholesale downloading. IMO, under such a law such indexers might be required to register with the copyright office before they start, but they should be allowed to do their work without fear of legal attacks and without having to pay royalties.
I'm not holding my breath though, as congress seems to have lately lost the ability to pass any meaningful or useful legislation whatsoever.
No, this is actually an example of the free market in action: Microsoft produces a product, and that product's features don't fit the needs of a potential customer, so they're buying from other vendors.
Microsoft is free to either alter their product to meet this customer's requirements, drop the price enough to change the requirements calculation, or forego that customer's business. This is no different than options for producers of any other product in any market.
If I said: "I'm going to buy a vehicle. I need a minivan, so I won't be buying a Ferrari given their current offerings.", would anybody accuse me of attempting to "Undermine the Free Market!!!" or yell "You'll destroy sports car innovation!!!"?
Apple didn't do it. They use the Model T paintjob approach: They just don't let you tweak a lot of stuff that you should be able to tweak.
I use a lot of the obscure preferences in KDE. There are plenty of dumbed down alternatives out there already; KDE doesn't need to try to be another one of those.