IIRC, that matters to people trying to report a bug: if your kernel isn't GPLONLY, then you will have a much harder time trying to get anyone to do anything about a crash. I think that is correct, since with NDISWrapper you just loaded a big blob of who-knows-what into the kernel, which can't help stability.
Where this "blob" is something which is intended to control hardware it's rather hard to sandbox it.
Is it reasonable to assume that every student will carry out their homework assignment in isolation? I don't think it is. It's not really commendable that someone took it upon themselves to go for a more organised approach to 'cheating' but I'd say that if the university wants assignments to be carried out by individuals alone they have a duty to provide invigilated exam halls rather than setting a practically unenforceable condition and kicking anyone out who they happen to find breaking it.
Do they even state this requirement anywhere or is it simply an assumption?
Thousands of other students will have broken this rule in the past sitting around a library table or a kitchen counter - why did the university let them get away with it?
No doubt some of them even called people on the telephone or posted to usenet.
I believe the correct line is "Everyone has the potential to be a terrorist given the right environment, the right situation, and the right materials." Scary, but true. Someone once said that the only difference between terrorists and freedom fighters is the way history views them, and that's absolutely true when you think about it.
Actually it can be an even simpler case of "what side do you support"?
The Boston Tea Party bordered on a terrorist act when you think about it. And don't get me started on the American Revolution.
A more recently example would to compare be the "French Resistance" in the second world war with what is going on in Iraq right now...
We need to pull our heads out of our collective backsides and realize that terrorism is a problem as a direct result of our nation's foreign policy decisions, and realize that the only way to remove the threat of terrorism is to have a Middle East policy that makes sense. We can start by not pressuring OPEC nations to lower oil prices every time our economy gets bad. That, of course, starts with an energy policy that makes sense. The bottom line is that our federal government is directly responsible for the terrorist threat we face, both in terms of the policies that drove these people over the edge and in terms of having previously provided material support to terrorists on more occasions that I can count---who do you think put Hussein and the Taliban in power in the first place? And now we're supposed to trust them to fix the problem? I don't think so.
Interestingly you manage to miss the "elephant in the room" aspect of US foreign policy towards South West Asia. With this most illogical piece of interventionism (which no doubt has Washington and Jefferson spinning in their graves) being very much the "sacred cow" of US foreign policy.
Firstly, politicians tackle complex, real-world issues with overly simplistic solutions. Often these 'solutions' are the result of 'think of the children' or 'homeland security' knee-jerk reactions to challenging geopolitical events. Pollies seem to regard the value of the solution is in being seen to react rather than being seen to react appropriately.
Politicans may well have a different definition of "appropriate" than either the general population or the interests of their country. There are plenty of things which "pollies" would virtually never do. Which could easily include the best actual solutions.
When you have the government spying on Americans with essentially no oversight, you're setting up a system that can readily be abused.
It also reduces effectivness of law enforcement. Left to their own devices cops are likely to be too busy spying on the politically incorrect and those attempting political change through democratic means to have much time for terrorist conspiracies, gangsters, high crimes, etc.
If they actually named the specific people who were spied on improperly, then those individuals could at least file a lawsuit.
It would probably be better if the the people who did the spying were named, preferably as defendents in a criminal court.
Stazi couldn't keep constant surveillance over all of the citizens of East Germany because the technology did not exist to obtain, process, store, and organize this data. Yet they tried, and got fairly close to being able to track anyone who even remotely questioned the regime.
Yet they completly failed to spot that the GDR was about to become history...
Now we're getting close to the point where total surveillance of the citizenry is actually feasible. To expect that bureaucracy will go ahead with such a project is awfully optimistic. The goal of any political system is the preservation of status quo, and total surveillance is a very important step to ensure that no perturbations to the system can result from any member of the population that chooses to think for themselves.
Such mass surveillance is unlikely to be much use in dealing with a planned revolution. Indeed it's unlikely to even be much use in dealing with a competent terrorists conspiracy. Knowing that such surveillance exists enables it to be either worked around or used to diseminate misinformation. It's also highly likely that the worst "bad guys" will be the ones running the operation, either from the start or they will soon infiltrate it.
Only if we define "crime" as "an action that violates, or credibly threatens to violate, the rights of another". Reducing prostitution, drug use, etcetera, by 20% isn't a goal worth sacrificing a damn thing.
It would be perfectly possible to reduce crime significently by abandoning prohibition and treating prostitution like any other business.
Reducing real crime is a worthy goal - but we must understand that every unjust arrest is a kidnapping, every warrantless search is an instance of trespass, every unjustified shooting by a cop is a murder.
Or at least "attempted murder".
t won't do to reduce "street crime" by increasing "state crime".
Especially when a crime perpetrated by a police officer is treated more leniently than one perpetrated by anyone else.
The way things are today, these "security departments" are just spending a shitload of public money and delivering nothing but fear and disinformation. They haven't caught anyone that wasn't knocking on their front door in the first place. FBI / CIA is a joke.
Or they would be were it not for the fact that they don't even appear to have caught everyone who was "knocking on their front door"... Had they been you'd have expected them to have netted quite a varied assortment of terrorist groups.
One definition of insanity is performing the same action over and over again and expecting different results. This applies to Congress who seems to think passing more legislation will stop the behavior of the intelligence community. It applies to the Intelligence community who have been eavesdropping on us since the 50's and STILL didn't stop 19 foreign nationals from hijacking a few planes and crashing them into buildings.
With the response being "more of the same". Rather than thinking (just maybe) "we need to try something different". e.g. going after all known terrorists regardless of their motivation and ethnicity. Even (or should that be especially) those the US (and other "friendly" governments support). The reason this would not happen is that the majority of the people which would be arrested would probably not be Moslem. Even "worst" some of them would be members of the US Government, Christians, atheists or citizens of "friendly countries".
The bottom line is that our society is split. Some are willing to give up civil liberties for a sense of security while others feel that our country's strength lies in our civil liberties and it should not be taken away because what the terrorists want.
Except that it often isn't that simple. A significent proportion of the former want other people's civil liberties infringed whilst their own are protected. Rarely do you find government officials lining up to be spied on...
He said the prevailing attitude seemed to be "Catch the Bad Guy." At first, this doesn't sound like it conflicts with the LAPD's motto: "To Protect and Serve." But, he explained, there's a huge difference when you think about it: "Catch the Bad Guy" implies treating everyone in a poor fashion just to maybe catch a bad guy.
Except that it probably isn't "everyone", e.g. what's likely to happen when the "Bad Guy" is another cop (not even LAPD)?
"To Protect and Serve" implies that everyone is innocent, and explicitly that the police must protect everyone and serve the communities in a good fashion as a priority, rather than suspect everyone and treat them badly.
Treating people badly is also likely to create "Bad Guys".
That's a huge problem right there. Those are the same people who say "I have nothing to hide," but when you ask for all their bank statements and keys to their doors and video cameras in their house... (just keep suggesting more stuff until...) they balk.
And maybe some of the perception is that the government is this magical entity, not made up of people who are your neighbors, or that jerk that cut you off this morning, etc.
Quite a few of them appear to continue to have complete faith in government. Even with lots of evidence that the people involved are likely to be less trustworthy than the average person.
But he didn't have a problem with the concept of copyright itself, which makes you an idiot for bringing him up in the first place. The GPL works through copyright. It could not work without copyright.
But it might well work with copyright with was radically different from that currently practiced. e.g. an extreme reduction in copyright term might well be irrelevent to GPL software, but very bad to the MPAA & RIAA.
But we know that there is no scarcity on the bits themselves, and the copyright only creates the scarcity. What bothers me, and probably a lot of other people, is that they act like we're taking a physical object when we're not. If I download a song that I will never buy anyway,
It's the "will never buy anyway" bit which is important. In reality "lost sales" are probably only apply in a tiny minority of "downloaders".
unlike someone stealing a car, or a dvd off the shelf, or any of the other ridiculous bullshit analogies that they use.
The theft of a physical object can easily have costs higher than the value of the item in question, including increased insurance costs, time verifying that it hasn't just been misplaced, consequential costs of not having it, etc, etc.
Honestly, I doubt we'd be having any of these discussions if the length of copyright was something short and fixed, like twenty years. We'd all have the sense that creative contribution needs to be relatively continuous, rather than being something that you can get lucky on once and then live off forever. You know what, if you can't figure out a way to make a profit on something after twenty years, too bad, you should lose your chance.
Even 20 years is probably excessive. How many people can remember exactly what they were doing on the 7th of March 1988?
If you weren't able to make anything else in those intervening twenty years that's worth buying, too goddamn bad for you.
Especially if you have lived off the state for those 20 years.
You don't understand, those laws are great! I mean sure, people still get murdered, but it's more likely to be with a knife that a GUN *shrieks hysterically*. Wouldn't you feel much better to have yourself or a family member killed by a knife instead of a GUN *shrieks hysterically*.
Except that it appears to be the case that "banning" guns actually increases murders with guns.
Any organized crime syndicate worth their weight is going to understand how to encrypt data and use hidden volumes.
As well as logic bombs able to destroy data or publish blackmail material. There could also be syndicate members who havn't been arrested.
With the seven day limit, that only allows for a cursory search and not the kind of in depth forensic combing it would take to actually find actionable data.
Politicans would tend to interpret this as "police need more time". Thus would up it to 14-28 days. The police, being only human, would tend to leave things to the last minute... Rinse, repeat.
Yes, they can be shown to lose money, but this is because someone was dumb enough to sign a contract for a cut of the profits rather than the gross. Then the accountants divert some funds through some "production" companies (that are actually owned by the all the same people) to pretend that the movie was actually a big loss, and the people who signed those contracts get squat.
Interesting accounting practices appear to be quite common in other parts of the entertainments industry.
If Forest Gump was produced with the budget management skills of a yappy wiener dog, it made a profit.
A hotdog vendor probably wouldn't stay in business long if they tried to apply the kind of accounting which the entertainments industry appears to get away with.
The problem was that 'Canada was responsible for over half the pirated movies in north america'.
Since more than half of North-America consists of Canada( 3,854,085 sq mi, USA 3,794,066 sq mi ) , small wonder.
Only if the rest of the countries in North-America cover less than 60,019 sq mi in total.
IBM could have bought them out at a couple of points cheap--when they started this lawsuit they weren't trading for that much more than they are now. They didn't because it's more important to make an example of these idiots, and therefore to the larger group of potential future intellectual property trolls,
Most likely too SCO never had any assets worth anything to IBM. Thus IBM shareholders would not approve IBM buying SCO.
3. Do they actually download the file being shared, or some portion thereof?
One thing they must never do is upload. If this were to happen then they lose big time. The only people the RIAA & MPAA members would have left to sue would be the likes of "MediaDefender".
Calm down, "land of the free", doesn't mean you can evade the law. I can't wait until we start arresting losers that leave from NY, go to Jamaica, then to Cuba.
Probably better for them to instead drive drive to Toronto. Then they can use their "Real ID" to get back into the US without any risk of anyone seeing what stamps they have in their passport.
Slashdot Mirror
IIRC, that matters to people trying to report a bug: if your kernel isn't GPLONLY, then you will have a much harder time trying to get anyone to do anything about a crash. I think that is correct, since with NDISWrapper you just loaded a big blob of who-knows-what into the kernel, which can't help stability.
Where this "blob" is something which is intended to control hardware it's rather hard to sandbox it.
Is it reasonable to assume that every student will carry out their homework assignment in isolation? I don't think it is. It's not really commendable that someone took it upon themselves to go for a more organised approach to 'cheating' but I'd say that if the university wants assignments to be carried out by individuals alone they have a duty to provide invigilated exam halls rather than setting a practically unenforceable condition and kicking anyone out who they happen to find breaking it.
Do they even state this requirement anywhere or is it simply an assumption?
Thousands of other students will have broken this rule in the past sitting around a library table or a kitchen counter - why did the university let them get away with it?
No doubt some of them even called people on the telephone or posted to usenet.
I believe the correct line is "Everyone has the potential to be a terrorist given the right environment, the right situation, and the right materials." Scary, but true. Someone once said that the only difference between terrorists and freedom fighters is the way history views them, and that's absolutely true when you think about it.
Actually it can be an even simpler case of "what side do you support"?
The Boston Tea Party bordered on a terrorist act when you think about it. And don't get me started on the American Revolution.
A more recently example would to compare be the "French Resistance" in the second world war with what is going on in Iraq right now...
We need to pull our heads out of our collective backsides and realize that terrorism is a problem as a direct result of our nation's foreign policy decisions, and realize that the only way to remove the threat of terrorism is to have a Middle East policy that makes sense. We can start by not pressuring OPEC nations to lower oil prices every time our economy gets bad. That, of course, starts with an energy policy that makes sense. The bottom line is that our federal government is directly responsible for the terrorist threat we face, both in terms of the policies that drove these people over the edge and in terms of having previously provided material support to terrorists on more occasions that I can count---who do you think put Hussein and the Taliban in power in the first place? And now we're supposed to trust them to fix the problem? I don't think so.
Interestingly you manage to miss the "elephant in the room" aspect of US foreign policy towards South West Asia. With this most illogical piece of interventionism (which no doubt has Washington and Jefferson spinning in their graves) being very much the "sacred cow" of US foreign policy.
Firstly, politicians tackle complex, real-world issues with overly simplistic solutions. Often these 'solutions' are the result of 'think of the children' or 'homeland security' knee-jerk reactions to challenging geopolitical events. Pollies seem to regard the value of the solution is in being seen to react rather than being seen to react appropriately.
Politicans may well have a different definition of "appropriate" than either the general population or the interests of their country. There are plenty of things which "pollies" would virtually never do. Which could easily include the best actual solutions.
When you have the government spying on Americans with essentially no oversight, you're setting up a system that can readily be abused.
It also reduces effectivness of law enforcement. Left to their own devices cops are likely to be too busy spying on the politically incorrect and those attempting political change through democratic means to have much time for terrorist conspiracies, gangsters, high crimes, etc.
If they actually named the specific people who were spied on improperly, then those individuals could at least file a lawsuit.
It would probably be better if the the people who did the spying were named, preferably as defendents in a criminal court.
Stazi couldn't keep constant surveillance over all of the citizens of East Germany because the technology did not exist to obtain, process, store, and organize this data. Yet they tried, and got fairly close to being able to track anyone who even remotely questioned the regime.
Yet they completly failed to spot that the GDR was about to become history...
Now we're getting close to the point where total surveillance of the citizenry is actually feasible. To expect that bureaucracy will go ahead with such a project is awfully optimistic. The goal of any political system is the preservation of status quo, and total surveillance is a very important step to ensure that no perturbations to the system can result from any member of the population that chooses to think for themselves.
Such mass surveillance is unlikely to be much use in dealing with a planned revolution. Indeed it's unlikely to even be much use in dealing with a competent terrorists conspiracy. Knowing that such surveillance exists enables it to be either worked around or used to diseminate misinformation.
It's also highly likely that the worst "bad guys" will be the ones running the operation, either from the start or they will soon infiltrate it.
I take the fact that they announce their errors as a good sign. They could simply hide it like most other governments.
Are the errors they are announcing a random selection or are they only bothering to announce the most minor ones?
Only if we define "crime" as "an action that violates, or credibly threatens to violate, the rights of another". Reducing prostitution, drug use, etcetera, by 20% isn't a goal worth sacrificing a damn thing.
It would be perfectly possible to reduce crime significently by abandoning prohibition and treating prostitution like any other business.
Reducing real crime is a worthy goal - but we must understand that every unjust arrest is a kidnapping, every warrantless search is an instance of trespass, every unjustified shooting by a cop is a murder.
Or at least "attempted murder".
t won't do to reduce "street crime" by increasing "state crime".
Especially when a crime perpetrated by a police officer is treated more leniently than one perpetrated by anyone else.
The way things are today, these "security departments" are just spending a shitload of public money and delivering nothing but fear and disinformation. They haven't caught anyone that wasn't knocking on their front door in the first place. FBI / CIA is a joke.
Or they would be were it not for the fact that they don't even appear to have caught everyone who was "knocking on their front door"... Had they been you'd have expected them to have netted quite a varied assortment of terrorist groups.
One definition of insanity is performing the same action over and over again and expecting different results. This applies to Congress who seems to think passing more legislation will stop the behavior of the intelligence community. It applies to the Intelligence community who have been eavesdropping on us since the 50's and STILL didn't stop 19 foreign nationals from hijacking a few planes and crashing them into buildings.
With the response being "more of the same". Rather than thinking (just maybe) "we need to try something different".
e.g. going after all known terrorists regardless of their motivation and ethnicity. Even (or should that be especially) those the US (and other "friendly" governments support). The reason this would not happen is that the majority of the people which would be arrested would probably not be Moslem. Even "worst" some of them would be members of the US Government, Christians, atheists or citizens of "friendly countries".
The bottom line is that our society is split. Some are willing to give up civil liberties for a sense of security while others feel that our country's strength lies in our civil liberties and it should not be taken away because what the terrorists want.
Except that it often isn't that simple. A significent proportion of the former want other people's civil liberties infringed whilst their own are protected. Rarely do you find government officials lining up to be spied on...
He said the prevailing attitude seemed to be "Catch the Bad Guy." At first, this doesn't sound like it conflicts with the LAPD's motto: "To Protect and Serve." But, he explained, there's a huge difference when you think about it: "Catch the Bad Guy" implies treating everyone in a poor fashion just to maybe catch a bad guy.
Except that it probably isn't "everyone", e.g. what's likely to happen when the "Bad Guy" is another cop (not even LAPD)?
"To Protect and Serve" implies that everyone is innocent, and explicitly that the police must protect everyone and serve the communities in a good fashion as a priority, rather than suspect everyone and treat them badly.
Treating people badly is also likely to create "Bad Guys".
That's a huge problem right there. Those are the same people who say "I have nothing to hide," but when you ask for all their bank statements and keys to their doors and video cameras in their house... (just keep suggesting more stuff until...) they balk.
And maybe some of the perception is that the government is this magical entity, not made up of people who are your neighbors, or that jerk that cut you off this morning, etc.
Quite a few of them appear to continue to have complete faith in government. Even with lots of evidence that the people involved are likely to be less trustworthy than the average person.
But he didn't have a problem with the concept of copyright itself, which makes you an idiot for bringing him up in the first place. The GPL works through copyright. It could not work without copyright.
But it might well work with copyright with was radically different from that currently practiced. e.g. an extreme reduction in copyright term might well be irrelevent to GPL software, but very bad to the MPAA & RIAA.
But we know that there is no scarcity on the bits themselves, and the copyright only creates the scarcity. What bothers me, and probably a lot of other people, is that they act like we're taking a physical object when we're not. If I download a song that I will never buy anyway,
It's the "will never buy anyway" bit which is important. In reality "lost sales" are probably only apply in a tiny minority of "downloaders".
unlike someone stealing a car, or a dvd off the shelf, or any of the other ridiculous bullshit analogies that they use.
The theft of a physical object can easily have costs higher than the value of the item in question, including increased insurance costs, time verifying that it hasn't just been misplaced, consequential costs of not having it, etc, etc.
Honestly, I doubt we'd be having any of these discussions if the length of copyright was something short and fixed, like twenty years. We'd all have the sense that creative contribution needs to be relatively continuous, rather than being something that you can get lucky on once and then live off forever. You know what, if you can't figure out a way to make a profit on something after twenty years, too bad, you should lose your chance.
Even 20 years is probably excessive. How many people can remember exactly what they were doing on the 7th of March 1988?
If you weren't able to make anything else in those intervening twenty years that's worth buying, too goddamn bad for you.
Especially if you have lived off the state for those 20 years.
You don't understand, those laws are great! I mean sure, people still get murdered, but it's more likely to be with a knife that a GUN *shrieks hysterically*. Wouldn't you feel much better to have yourself or a family member killed by a knife instead of a GUN *shrieks hysterically*.
Except that it appears to be the case that "banning" guns actually increases murders with guns.
Any organized crime syndicate worth their weight is going to understand how to encrypt data and use hidden volumes.
As well as logic bombs able to destroy data or publish blackmail material. There could also be syndicate members who havn't been arrested.
With the seven day limit, that only allows for a cursory search and not the kind of in depth forensic combing it would take to actually find actionable data.
Politicans would tend to interpret this as "police need more time". Thus would up it to 14-28 days. The police, being only human, would tend to leave things to the last minute... Rinse, repeat.
Yes, they can be shown to lose money, but this is because someone was dumb enough to sign a contract for a cut of the profits rather than the gross. Then the accountants divert some funds through some "production" companies (that are actually owned by the all the same people) to pretend that the movie was actually a big loss, and the people who signed those contracts get squat.
Interesting accounting practices appear to be quite common in other parts of the entertainments industry.
If Forest Gump was produced with the budget management skills of a yappy wiener dog, it made a profit.
A hotdog vendor probably wouldn't stay in business long if they tried to apply the kind of accounting which the entertainments industry appears to get away with.
The problem was that 'Canada was responsible for over half the pirated movies in north america'.
Since more than half of North-America consists of Canada( 3,854,085 sq mi, USA 3,794,066 sq mi ) , small wonder.
Only if the rest of the countries in North-America cover less than 60,019 sq mi in total.
IBM could have bought them out at a couple of points cheap--when they started this lawsuit they weren't trading for that much more than they are now. They didn't because it's more important to make an example of these idiots, and therefore to the larger group of potential future intellectual property trolls,
Most likely too SCO never had any assets worth anything to IBM. Thus IBM shareholders would not approve IBM buying SCO.
Using this 21% loan to file appeals is a lot like using your credit card to buy lottery tickets.
Can you have a credit card if you are bankrupt?
This time please use holy water and lawyers made of silver.
:)
They'd tarnish too quickly
Maybe instead all the lawyers opposing SCO should change their last name to "Summers".
3. Do they actually download the file being shared, or some portion thereof?
One thing they must never do is upload. If this were to happen then they lose big time. The only people the RIAA & MPAA members would have left to sue would be the likes of "MediaDefender".
Calm down, "land of the free", doesn't mean you can evade the law. I can't wait until we start arresting losers that leave from NY, go to Jamaica, then to Cuba.
Probably better for them to instead drive drive to Toronto. Then they can use their "Real ID" to get back into the US without any risk of anyone seeing what stamps they have in their passport.