And would the Mozilla and Konqueror communities fully regression test their changes against all of the various software it might affect..
How often do Microsoft actually do this? Do Microsoft know what all of these cases are? The way Microsoft write "integrated" code there are probably far more relevent cases than any code written to any form of "structured" methadology in the first place. There appear to be plenty of cases where a Microsoft "update" has actually broken things. Which dosn't inspire much confidence in their "testing".
The other side of SCO's contention is that Open Source software creation doesn't have mechanisms in place to prevent the incorporation of unlicensed code in OSS code. Here SCO's argument stumbles: OSS may implement as many or as few "Intellectual Property" safeguards on incorporated code as any commerical software creator.
Possibly more relevent than any claimed checking mechanisms is the chance of getting caught by the copyright holder. In the case of proprietary software both the code itself and whatever IP checking mechanisms might be involved tend not to be open to inspection by other parties.
A commerical house might, wittingly or nor, plagiarize code; we've certainly seen commerical appropriations of GPL'd code.
Nothing in the GPL prevents commercial use or distribution of GPL software. The reason someone can't take GPL code and attempt to apply some other licence to it is copyright law.
Commercial software is built by people who write software that's sold for money.
I've sold software, so it's commercial software. It was written by a friend and myself over a few weeks worth of late nights.
Also "proprietary" and "commercial" are not synonymous when applied to software. There is plenty of proprietary software (mostly drivers and firmware) which is not remotly "commercial". It's also perfectly possible to sell GPL software. (Though this is more likely to be commercially viable with bespoke software than generic "commodity" applications.)
When it comes to commercial software made by vendors who make a business of writing & selling software, then it's written by the coders who can best pass job interviews.
The actual coders could work for a subcontractor or be agency workers anyway.
What really annoyed me was when I worked as a contractor for the Air Force, they had a fighter jet with a new computer system which would fail in the middle of the flight. After some poking around I learned it was a slimmed down version of Windows they were running.
The sad part was they tied it to the propulsion. When the computer crashed, the jet would simply shutdown and at 20,000 feet things could get interesting.
Especially on an unstable, fly-by-wire aircraft.
Ironically, the manufacturer provided restart instructions for the computer and claimed this was perfectly 'normal'. I don't believe this ever moved past the prototype stage.
Were any of the prototypes 2 seat planes? In which case you could have taken someone from the manufacturer up to show them the problem. To save weight you'd only need to give the pilot an ejector seat...
This fear of lawsuits is so strong that many corporations won't even challenge a false copyright. Have you picked up a copy of Shakespeare and looked at the backside of the title page? What's there but a (c) declaration by the publisher. On what? They clearly have a coyright on the modern introduction but not on the plays and sonnets. Brooklyn Law School published an article about this disturbing trend entitled "False Copyrights" about publishers that claim copyright on public domain works.
This is known as "copyright fraud". Which has never been as strongly punishable by law as copyright infringement. Probably because the major offenders here are corporate publishers. It is also possible for copyright fraud to involve work still under copyright. e.g. SCO Linux
I'll tell you "how best to tally the votes and ensure it is done accurately and impartially" in just two words:
By hand.
But if you really must use machines, if it really is more important that it be done quickly than it be done right,
Counting ballots by hand is not exactly slow and scales well. Given that many elections in the US do not take effect until months afterwards time is hardly a problem.
then every aspect of the machines' operation must be absolutely open to public scrutiny at every stage of the process.
It also makes sense to use the simplist machines which will do the job. e.g. paper collators which can sort ballots into only box A marked, only box B marked, etc.
Corporations' rights to make profits are subordinate to individuals' rights to democracy.
Is there any country on the planet where "corporate profit" is a consitutional right?
Talk about a poorly crafted piece of legislation. There are so many ways to abuse this ridiculous thing. It really needs to be amended to get rid of all of these legal like mechanisms that do not involve the courts. You should have to get a judge to issue an injunction to take material offline, not just say "You have to do it".
It can't be quite that simple. Otherwise there would be no way that SCO could continue to make their Linux distribution available. We appear to have a "copyright law" which whilst quite useful for corporates who wish to shut people up isn't much good for dealing corporations seeking to make money through copyright infringement.
Let's stop using that "Spanish" language in any public documents. This is a language that unfairly assigns a 'gender' to every noun.
Actually languages which attach gender to nouns (sometimes it's even possible for the gender attached to the noun to be different from the gender of whatever the noun describes) tend to get a lot less of this nonsense. "Nonsense" being the assumption that "his-", "her-", "-man" have anything to do with gender indication.
I think this whole practice of political correctness should be done away with.
It's been around for a long time.
It is twisting our language too rapidly and preventing the free exercise of speech.
That's what plenty of (varied) political advocates want...
Politicians have to grow and pair and get some thicker skin.
The easiest way to get this is not to have any "professional politicans". Replace them with "regular people" and a lot of stupidity will go away.
They must realize that a language develops because people make new terms and apply new definitions to existing words based on events with which they are familiar. You cannot force us to speak differently just so a puny minority will not be offended.
If people can actually get legislation passed to control how others speak then they are hardly "puny".
There's a difference between political correctness (dumbass term) and using racial slurs. The former is an overreaction to a potential slight, the latter is an attempt to offend.
I'm sure everyone out there in/.dom has has experienced the mailman/mailperson debacle.(milkman, garbage man etc. are all also valid)
In many cases the "man" suffix actually derives from "manus" which means "hand". One of the most abused is "chairman" which is actually gender neutral. The gendered versions being "mr chairman" and "madam chairman".
Hey while we're at it, why not plurally refer to ourselves as Personkind! One small step for a person, one person-of-irregular-height leap for Personkind!
Or you could just write "'mankind" and say it's short for "humankind".
The problem is called "Political Correctness" (aka PC), which purports to be an answer to the problems of racism, but really is a way to practice thought control.
The concept of "Political Correctness" has existed as long as politics has. The only new(ish) bit is that claim that it's "anti-discrimination".
Ironically the Texas A&M administration has decided to enforce such PC positions - we now have a diversity vp with a salary of $170k+ to ensure A&M is friendly to a small minority of minorities who prefer to blaim their failures on bigotry rather than accept personal responsibility and do something about it.
Whilst most likely ignoring a larger number of students who are actually suffering from bigotry but don't meet the strict qualifying criteria for the "small minority of minorities". Of course none of those who do qualify could possibly be bigots who can't handle a hostile reaction from everyone else, could them:). (The ideal situation for a bully being to get themselves considered a "victim"...)
Their job is to make sure the cops get paid and the street lights work. It is NOT to re-invent Think-Speak.
Sounds like they are too busy listening to various political preasure groups. Yet another reason not to have "professional politicans", who are so out of touch with reality that they can't recognise nutcases with axes to grind.
Aside from the charges made against him for the perverted video he was watching (and not to belittle the charges) it would seem that there is a major point that he has been charged with "Theft of Communications". This would suggest that all "Wardrivers" are at risk of being prosecuted for "Theft of Communications" regardless of what data they recieve over someone elses network.
Shouldn't the most important matter be that he was operating a highly dangerous machine without paying proper attention. Since driving the wrong way down a one way street has the immediate potential to injure or kill innocent bystanders. If the "Theft of Communications" is the most serious thing he is being charged with then Canadian legislators really need to sort out their priorities.
Don't pay invoices presented by companies with whom you have no business, unless/until legally compelled to do so by a court.
The fact there are still scams involving bogus invoicing implies that there are companies stupid enough to pay invoices without first asking "did we order this?".
- drinking and driving: we don't like it because drunks injure and kill others. That's pretty fucking bad on the human list of Things You Really Shouldn't Do.
The people hurt by drunk drivers are usually third parties. Who had nothing to do with either the driver, car or alcohol.
- copyright infringement. Harms nothing but profits, if that in this case. Profits don't amount to shit compared to human life - at least to most sane people.
Actually the only thing copyright infringement can harm is a potential for a profit.
And I am SICK and TIRED of people getting caught and whining 'I didn't know' - why don't I get drunk and go out driving, I can just say I didn't know it was against the law. Whether I hurt someone or not, I'd still get taken in if I got pulled over. Why? Because it's against the law. Never mind that lots of people drink and drive all the time, some so much that they drive better than when sober, it's still against the law.
Drunk drivers frequently kill and injure people as well as damaging property. A car is a machine which if misused can easily cause damage to objects and people. Hence operating a car on the public roads is regulated. AFAIK there are no recorded cases of downloading copyrighted material over the Internet causing any injury to any person at all. There are all sorts of laws around, including some very daft ones. People only tend to obey laws which have some rational basis anyway.
That's not the same thing - the theatre provided you with a seat for no charge. They have limited physical resources i.e. seats and you consumed some portion of that without giving any payment. If you download a song off the Internet, the record company still has the same number of compact discs for sale.
The crux of the matter is that "intellectual property" is not the same as physical property. In the past when the only way to distribute "intellectual property" was attached to a piece of physical property this distinction didn't cause any problems. However over the past few decades IP has become less and less well tied to its media. Over the last 30 or so years machines capable of copying and storing IP have become available to many people. What the Internet does is enable any IP to not only be divorced from a media but also sent anywhere on the planet.
Maybe we ought to let people distribute those works then -- if the laws are at such odds with people's expectations of how things ought to work that we're seeing lawsuits by industry against children, it sounds as though the laws are in serious need of reform.
Or at least a collision between corporate advocates and "for the good of the children" advocates:)
It's a bit like prohibition basically -- everyone at the time thought it was a good idea, but no one lived up to it, and it turned out to be mind bogglingly stupid. We were best rid of it.
Prohibition is still around, just the name changes. The current one is "war on drugs".
I think you've hit the exact problem with these laws right on their collective heads. There's no way for the defendant to be considered innocent until they hire a lawyer. So therefore the burden of proof, which was thought to be something the prosecution had to deal with, is now on the defendant. They have to fight and pay a LOT of money in order to prove to the judge what they knew all along. This isn't right and it certainly isn't civil. Copyright law, as it stands today, is purely in the interest of corporate political donors.
It appears to be "corporate biased" regardless of who is plaintiff and who is defendent. Are there any cases of an individual getting massive damages from a corporate infringing copyright? If the law were even handed you'd expect a number of companies to go bankrupt (e.g. SCO) for copyright infringement.
The argument that people are hurting "the artists" by trading music on the internet is extremely weak. Most active musicians make most of their money by playing live shows.
They may make most of the money from their music from live shows. But there are plenty of musicians who's main income is from something else.
No one ever said that the laws had to be favorable towards their making money. There used to be a thriving industry in patent medicines in this country -- then we created the FDA and it ran all of those snake oil hucksters out of business. This was not a bad thing, despite destroying their ability to make money.
There is no natural right for a business to make a profit. Nor is there any right to make money from a specific business model. Regardless of how much time and money might have been "invested" or how profitable that business model might have been in the past.
We only grant copyrights in the first place due to a belief that we're better off doing so than we would be if we didn't; certainly through most of history we didn't have copyrights and no one complained.
Copyright originally came into existance in response to the printing press. As a way for the state to prevent "subversive literature" from being published. The idea of copyright being something to protect the rights of creators of works is a century or so more recent.
There's a lot of playing of semantics goes on surrounding the issue of "terrorism".
I believe one could certainly make the argument that the United States government is war-like, militaristic, or aggressive.
The US Government has certainly supported terrorist in the past. They may well still be doing so.
However, "terrorist" acts are defined as those particularly designed to strike fear into a populace, usually characterized by intentional attacks on civilian targets.
Claiming to be "hunting terrorists" is an excuse which regular militaries can use to cover for any "terrorism" they might happen to get up to.
The World Trade Center attacks were designed to promote fear amongst westerners, and were targeted at civilians, so those are terrorist attacks.
We don't know what these attacks were actually designed to do. Since we don't actually know who was involved. With the offical conspiracy theory being amongst the least credible.
However, the current attacks by rebels in Iraq,
Actually they are "militiamen" rather than "rebels". Since the attacks are against an invader, rather than the Iraqi government.
Could you use a directional version of it to disable bomb circuitry? Ok, actually that's a bad idea, cos the bomb would probably go off, but I'm pretty sure if you could design something with a directional capability - kinda like a big overpowered microwave, it'd make a great anti-missile system for commercial jets.
Would probably work even better against military aircraft. Including "stealth" aircraft and cruise missiles. Just the thing for a country under threat of air attack...
Slashdot Mirror
And would the Mozilla and Konqueror communities fully regression test their changes against all of the various software it might affect..
How often do Microsoft actually do this? Do Microsoft know what all of these cases are? The way Microsoft write "integrated" code there are probably far more relevent cases than any code written to any form of "structured" methadology in the first place.
There appear to be plenty of cases where a Microsoft "update" has actually broken things. Which dosn't inspire much confidence in their "testing".
The other side of SCO's contention is that Open Source software creation doesn't have mechanisms in place to prevent the incorporation of unlicensed code in OSS code. Here SCO's argument stumbles: OSS may implement as many or as few "Intellectual Property" safeguards on incorporated code as any commerical software creator.
Possibly more relevent than any claimed checking mechanisms is the chance of getting caught by the copyright holder. In the case of proprietary software both the code itself and whatever IP checking mechanisms might be involved tend not to be open to inspection by other parties.
A commerical house might, wittingly or nor, plagiarize code; we've certainly seen commerical appropriations of GPL'd code.
Nothing in the GPL prevents commercial use or distribution of GPL software. The reason someone can't take GPL code and attempt to apply some other licence to it is copyright law.
Commercial software is built by people who write software that's sold for money.
I've sold software, so it's commercial software. It was written by a friend and myself over a few weeks worth of late nights.
Also "proprietary" and "commercial" are not synonymous when applied to software. There is plenty of proprietary software (mostly drivers and firmware) which is not remotly "commercial". It's also perfectly possible to sell GPL software. (Though this is more likely to be commercially viable with bespoke software than generic "commodity" applications.)
When it comes to commercial software made by vendors who make a business of writing & selling software, then it's written by the coders who can best pass job interviews.
The actual coders could work for a subcontractor or be agency workers anyway.
What really annoyed me was when I worked as a contractor for the Air Force, they had a fighter jet with a new computer system which would fail in the middle of the flight. After some poking around I learned it was a slimmed down version of Windows they were running.
The sad part was they tied it to the propulsion. When the computer crashed, the jet would simply shutdown and at 20,000 feet things could get interesting.
Especially on an unstable, fly-by-wire aircraft.
Ironically, the manufacturer provided restart instructions for the computer and claimed this was perfectly 'normal'. I don't believe this ever moved past the prototype stage.
Were any of the prototypes 2 seat planes? In which case you could have taken someone from the manufacturer up to show them the problem. To save weight you'd only need to give the pilot an ejector seat...
This fear of lawsuits is so strong that many corporations won't even challenge a false copyright. Have you picked up a copy of Shakespeare and looked at the backside of the title page? What's there but a (c) declaration by the publisher. On what? They clearly have a coyright on the modern introduction but not on the plays and sonnets. Brooklyn Law School published an article about this disturbing trend entitled "False Copyrights" about publishers that claim copyright on public domain works.
This is known as "copyright fraud". Which has never been as strongly punishable by law as copyright infringement. Probably because the major offenders here are corporate publishers. It is also possible for copyright fraud to involve work still under copyright. e.g. SCO Linux
I'll tell you "how best to tally the votes and ensure it is done accurately and impartially" in just two words:
By hand.
But if you really must use machines, if it really is more important that it be done quickly than it be done right,
Counting ballots by hand is not exactly slow and scales well. Given that many elections in the US do not take effect until months afterwards time is hardly a problem.
then every aspect of the machines' operation must be absolutely open to public scrutiny at every stage of the process.
It also makes sense to use the simplist machines which will do the job. e.g. paper collators which can sort ballots into only box A marked, only box B marked, etc.
Corporations' rights to make profits are subordinate to individuals' rights to democracy.
Is there any country on the planet where "corporate profit" is a consitutional right?
Talk about a poorly crafted piece of legislation. There are so many ways to abuse this ridiculous thing. It really needs to be amended to get rid of all of these legal like mechanisms that do not involve the courts. You should have to get a judge to issue an injunction to take material offline, not just say "You have to do it".
It can't be quite that simple. Otherwise there would be no way that SCO could continue to make their Linux distribution available. We appear to have a "copyright law" which whilst quite useful for corporates who wish to shut people up isn't much good for dealing corporations seeking to make money through copyright infringement.
Let's stop using that "Spanish" language in any public documents. This is a language that unfairly assigns a 'gender' to every noun.
Actually languages which attach gender to nouns (sometimes it's even possible for the gender attached to the noun to be different from the gender of whatever the noun describes) tend to get a lot less of this nonsense. "Nonsense" being the assumption that "his-", "her-", "-man" have anything to do with gender indication.
I think this whole practice of political correctness should be done away with.
It's been around for a long time.
It is twisting our language too rapidly and preventing the free exercise of speech.
That's what plenty of (varied) political advocates want...
Politicians have to grow and pair and get some thicker skin.
The easiest way to get this is not to have any "professional politicans". Replace them with "regular people" and a lot of stupidity will go away.
They must realize that a language develops because people make new terms and apply new definitions to existing words based on events with which they are familiar. You cannot force us to speak differently just so a puny minority will not be offended.
If people can actually get legislation passed to control how others speak then they are hardly "puny".
There's a difference between political correctness (dumbass term) and using racial slurs. The former is an overreaction to a potential slight, the latter is an attempt to offend.
Except that the former can easily be both.
I'm sure everyone out there in /.dom has has experienced the mailman/mailperson debacle.(milkman, garbage man etc. are all also valid)
In many cases the "man" suffix actually derives from "manus" which means "hand". One of the most abused is "chairman" which is actually gender neutral. The gendered versions being "mr chairman" and "madam chairman".
Hey while we're at it, why not plurally refer to ourselves as Personkind! One small step for a person, one person-of-irregular-height leap for Personkind!
Or you could just write "'mankind" and say it's short for "humankind".
The problem is called "Political Correctness" (aka PC), which purports to be an answer to the problems of racism, but really is a way to practice thought control.
The concept of "Political Correctness" has existed as long as politics has. The only new(ish) bit is that claim that it's "anti-discrimination".
Ironically the Texas A&M administration has decided to enforce such PC positions - we now have a diversity vp with a salary of $170k+ to ensure A&M is friendly to a small minority of minorities who prefer to blaim their failures on bigotry rather than accept personal responsibility and do something about it.
:). (The ideal situation for a bully being to get themselves considered a "victim"...)
Whilst most likely ignoring a larger number of students who are actually suffering from bigotry but don't meet the strict qualifying criteria for the "small minority of minorities". Of course none of those who do qualify could possibly be bigots who can't handle a hostile reaction from everyone else, could them
Their job is to make sure the cops get paid and the street lights work. It is NOT to re-invent Think-Speak.
Sounds like they are too busy listening to various political preasure groups. Yet another reason not to have "professional politicans", who are so out of touch with reality that they can't recognise nutcases with axes to grind.
Aside from the charges made against him for the perverted video he was watching (and not to belittle the charges) it would seem that there is a major point that he has been charged with "Theft of Communications".
This would suggest that all "Wardrivers" are at risk of being prosecuted for "Theft of Communications" regardless of what data they recieve over someone elses network.
Shouldn't the most important matter be that he was operating a highly dangerous machine without paying proper attention. Since driving the wrong way down a one way street has the immediate potential to injure or kill innocent bystanders.
If the "Theft of Communications" is the most serious thing he is being charged with then Canadian legislators really need to sort out their priorities.
Don't pay invoices presented by companies with whom you have no business, unless/until legally compelled to do so by a court.
The fact there are still scams involving bogus invoicing implies that there are companies stupid enough to pay invoices without first asking "did we order this?".
- drinking and driving: we don't like it because drunks injure and kill others. That's pretty fucking bad on the human list of Things You Really Shouldn't Do.
The people hurt by drunk drivers are usually third parties. Who had nothing to do with either the driver, car or alcohol.
- copyright infringement. Harms nothing but profits, if that in this case. Profits don't amount to shit compared to human life - at least to most sane people.
Actually the only thing copyright infringement can harm is a potential for a profit.
And I am SICK and TIRED of people getting caught and whining 'I didn't know' - why don't I get drunk and go out driving, I can just say I didn't know it was against the law. Whether I hurt someone or not, I'd still get taken in if I got pulled over. Why? Because it's against the law. Never mind that lots of people drink and drive all the time, some so much that they drive better than when sober, it's still against the law.
Drunk drivers frequently kill and injure people as well as damaging property. A car is a machine which if misused can easily cause damage to objects and people. Hence operating a car on the public roads is regulated.
AFAIK there are no recorded cases of downloading copyrighted material over the Internet causing any injury to any person at all.
There are all sorts of laws around, including some very daft ones. People only tend to obey laws which have some rational basis anyway.
That's not the same thing - the theatre provided you with a seat for no charge. They have limited physical resources i.e. seats and you consumed some portion of that without giving any payment. If you download a song off the Internet, the record company still has the same number of compact discs for sale.
The crux of the matter is that "intellectual property" is not the same as physical property. In the past when the only way to distribute "intellectual property" was attached to a piece of physical property this distinction didn't cause any problems. However over the past few decades IP has become less and less well tied to its media. Over the last 30 or so years machines capable of copying and storing IP have become available to many people. What the Internet does is enable any IP to not only be divorced from a media but also sent anywhere on the planet.
Maybe we ought to let people distribute those works then -- if the laws are at such odds with people's expectations of how things ought to work that we're seeing lawsuits by industry against children, it sounds as though the laws are in serious need of reform.
:)
Or at least a collision between corporate advocates and "for the good of the children" advocates
It's a bit like prohibition basically -- everyone at the time thought it was a good idea, but no one lived up to it, and it turned out to be mind bogglingly stupid. We were best rid of it.
Prohibition is still around, just the name changes. The current one is "war on drugs".
I think you've hit the exact problem with these laws right on their collective heads. There's no way for the defendant to be considered innocent until they hire a lawyer. So therefore the burden of proof, which was thought to be something the prosecution had to deal with, is now on the defendant. They have to fight and pay a LOT of money in order to prove to the judge what they knew all along. This isn't right and it certainly isn't civil. Copyright law, as it stands today, is purely in the interest of corporate political donors.
It appears to be "corporate biased" regardless of who is plaintiff and who is defendent. Are there any cases of an individual getting massive damages from a corporate infringing copyright? If the law were even handed you'd expect a number of companies to go bankrupt (e.g. SCO) for copyright infringement.
The argument that people are hurting "the artists" by trading music on the internet is extremely weak. Most active musicians make most of their money by playing live shows.
They may make most of the money from their music from live shows. But there are plenty of musicians who's main income is from something else.
No one ever said that the laws had to be favorable towards their making money. There used to be a thriving industry in patent medicines in this country -- then we created the FDA and it ran all of those snake oil hucksters out of business. This was not a bad thing, despite destroying their ability to make money.
There is no natural right for a business to make a profit. Nor is there any right to make money from a specific business model. Regardless of how much time and money might have been "invested" or how profitable that business model might have been in the past.
We only grant copyrights in the first place due to a belief that we're better off doing so than we would be if we didn't; certainly through most of history we didn't have copyrights and no one complained.
Copyright originally came into existance in response to the printing press. As a way for the state to prevent "subversive literature" from being published. The idea of copyright being something to protect the rights of creators of works is a century or so more recent.
So long as we're playing semantics,
There's a lot of playing of semantics goes on surrounding the issue of "terrorism".
I believe one could certainly make the argument that the United States government is war-like, militaristic, or aggressive.
The US Government has certainly supported terrorist in the past. They may well still be doing so.
However, "terrorist" acts are defined as those particularly designed to strike fear into a populace, usually characterized by intentional attacks on civilian targets.
Claiming to be "hunting terrorists" is an excuse which regular militaries can use to cover for any "terrorism" they might happen to get up to.
The World Trade Center attacks were designed to promote fear amongst westerners, and were targeted at civilians, so those are terrorist attacks.
We don't know what these attacks were actually designed to do. Since we don't actually know who was involved. With the offical conspiracy theory being amongst the least credible.
However, the current attacks by rebels in Iraq,
Actually they are "militiamen" rather than "rebels". Since the attacks are against an invader, rather than the Iraqi government.
Could you use a directional version of it to disable bomb circuitry? Ok, actually that's a bad idea, cos the bomb would probably go off, but I'm pretty sure if you could design something with a directional capability - kinda like a big overpowered microwave, it'd make a great anti-missile system for commercial jets.
Would probably work even better against military aircraft. Including "stealth" aircraft and cruise missiles. Just the thing for a country under threat of air attack...