I don't smoke. But I know people that do. One of the shocking things that anti-smokers can't seem to understand is People Enjoy Smoking Tobacco. It's not something awful that people do only because they are addicted. It feels good, it brings them pleasure.
Plenty of drugs which are far less addictive and far less toxic are completly illegal. Also one of the issues with smoking isn't drugs it's air pollution (including forcing people who just happen to be nearby to injest the drug.) Methods such as eating, drinking, injecting and snorting enable drug users to enjoy their drugs without forcing anything on other people.
Well, if every county had the same voting ballot, I'd grant you this point. They didn't though - that was the big kerfuffle, remember? Different communities were allowed to draw up their ballots differently.
Has this actually been fixed. The simplist method would be everyone voting in the same election gets exactly the same type of ballot paper (also if several elections are being held at the same time each voter has several separate ballot papers. Possibly as an easy to dismantle book if there are more than 2 or 3)
The funny thing is though, when they recounted and included the double-punched ballots where there was a clear-intent (ergo, someone had written a vote down on them) then Gore won by a slight margin.
If there were a significent number of these it would point to a flaw in the operation of the voting. In voters somehow not being able to obtain a new card. Let alone that appropriate procedures to ensure proper security of the ballots whilst they were in contention did not appear to exist.
Since the Depression in the 30s, laissez-faire is not something anybody would ever publicly push again. Witness the New Deal laws being passed without question!
Doubt if it's exactly "without question". Otherwise there would be little need to creativly apply the commerce clause over the 10th ammendment. Even if these laws were not questioned at the time certainly there are people questioning them now.
some modern commercial aircraft can reach 40,000 feet on a good day (NASA use a modified 707 KC-135 airframe for the vomit comet, commercial companies use a modified 727)
It'd seriously question either of these aircraft being called "modern"... Anyway the Russians don't use aircraft from Boeing and ESA use an Airbus.
Actually, the shuttle is a collossal waste of money - it costs an unearthly sum for every launch. The Shuttle lifts about 100 tons, which is impressive, until you recall that 80 of those tons are Orbiter that glide back down.
Exactly why is the orbiter so heavy, is it simply because it has to carry engines capable of lifting it through the most dense part of the atmosphere? IIRC there was a Japanese design which included carrying around a jet engine, only any use once below 40 odd thousand feet, but would make landings easier and mean that the thing would not need a towtruck when it lands.A better way to design a reusable spacecraft is to make the BOTTOM stages recyclable. This way you waste less of your energy lifted stuff that doesn't need to stay up.
The original shuttle design used a manned carrier vehicle arrangement similar to the Russian design
As for Mars, the Shuttle hardly has the thrust capacity to get into a lunar transfer orbit, let alone one to Mars.
Not sure there would be much point in getting the shuttle into such an orbit anyway. It can't carry a decent lunar lander and still needs to get back.
If something like that were to happen, I'd imagine that the GPL would probably be killed in court by high powered lawyers from all the major software companies (not just MS.)
The only way you could "kill" the GPL would be to void copyright protection on software. Effectivly every piece of proprietary software would immediatly enter the public domain.
MS deals with millions upon millions of 'ordinary users' who run dozens of programs that have zlib linked statically (we've just been told) and who have absolutely no idea what zlib is, what their systems use it for or how to patch it (well, they can't, because it's statically linked).
Since all of Microsoft's operating systems support dynamic linking youc an lay a fair bit of blame on Microsoft for choosing to statically link their apps. One of the main advantages of dynamic linking is easy upgrading, either for bug fixes or functionality. Also it was Microsoft's policy to design around a paradigm of end-user administration. How can they reasonably blame anyone else?
With GPL selling of software is impossibel as long as you are not the OWNER of the software.
Utter rubbish, you can sell GPL software for any price someone is prepared to pay you for it, subject to complying with the terms of the licence. Just that since anyone else can compete with you, trying to make massive profits will typically put you out of business.
Why wait for a bug? Scan for "signatures". That's how the use of BSD's TCP/IP stack was determined (that, and the "Regent" copyright).
The BSD licence allows Microsoft to use the code. So why do they need to take the copyright statements out. If they were pirating GPL code they would be utterly stupid to leave any such easy to find indications in.
Now, if MS were smart they'd have a standard place for libjpeg.dll, libpng.dll, and zlib.dll but as far as I know there is no such thing. Either the functions are in some other DLLs, or the names are obfuscated.
Or possibly even different bits of them are scattered between other DLLs. Remember that Microsoft's method of making IE part of the OS appears to include deliberatly writing what amounts to "sphagetti code". If things were neatly structured then removing components would be much simpler.
In Windows 2000, open a command prompt window. Type "nslookup". This will drop you into interactive mode for nslookup, which has been ported from UNIX (most likely BSD.)
It would have to be something with a licence such as the BSD licence which makes the code almost "public domain". Since Microsoft wouldn't want to touch anything covered by something like the GPL, since such a licence enforces copyright. They'd look very stupid as a bunch of software pirates moaning about piracy.
Re:Scalability issues
on
Hawaii Wi-Fi
·
· Score: 2
The article was only referring to the big island.
Please read the article before you post.
One of the posters described similar things happening on Maui, where do you think this island has it's telecoms connected to? Odds on all international "landline" traffic anywhere in the main island chain goes through the link(s) described.
There are some rights that you can't waive, though - for example, you can't really sell yourself into slavery in the U.S. even if you wanted to. Such a waiver would not be upheld by the courts. So this is sort of a case like EULAs; we just need the courts to clarify that you really can't waive such a right, so any agreements based on such a waiver are void.
It's better to have a populace aware of their rights. Otherwise it's quite possible for someone to be lied to and intimidated into doing things by the threat of a lawsuit (which if it ever took place would be more risky for the plaintiff than the defendant...)
Aye, but one must remember, that while it's relatively easy to wave consumer rights in many US States, it's very hard to wave consumer rights in the EU (certainly the UK), and indeed to attempt to mandate such is itself often illegal.
It's for this reason that so much product legalese is followed by "this does not effect your statutory rights".
Typically in combination with the "if any of this is legally void the rest still stands" type clause. There are rights which cannot be waived in the US (and many other countries) just that they are not always the same rights. (Also there is AFAIK little interest in "harmonising" customer rights, since they arn't seen as something advantagous to big business.) A basic problem is that most people don't know what inaliable rights they actually have, even in their own country, let alone if they travel elsewhere
I remember having an argument with my bank over copies of statements and the data protection act, tangental I know... "I don't care what your policy is on the data protection act, I'm waving and an act of Parliament under your nose, which carries a little more wait than your written policy"... I got what I wanted.
In other words they are so used to people not knowing their rights and accepting what they think customers rights should be that they are difficult to enlighten. Similarly in the US an act of Congress or appropriate state legislature trumps any "policy". Though certain (large) commercial entities might take a lot of convincing. Also the US constitution should trump anything the US Congress comes up with, Even though it might be an uphill struggle getting the US Federal Government to agree.
Businesses here can only get the mimimum data they need and you can refuse to divulge anything else e.g. travel passes can include address detail in case they are lost (and the company likes you to fill this in for a variety of reasons); however, you don't have to even supply the companys with your real name providing you pay upfront rather than in arrears.
So long as you are not enguaging in fraud it is perfectly legal to give any name you like, including a different name to anyone you deal with.
6. Users have the right to use technology in order to achieve the rights previously mentioned.
You need to somehow make it clear that this applies to any method of doing these things. Regardless of if the technology dates from 1850 or 2850... What makes things such as the DMCA and SSSCA especially bad laws is that they are over concerned with fiddling technical details of current technology. A good law concerns itself only with the "what" rather than the "how".
It is like somebody giving out free basketballs. If the free basketballs were made with defects, you have no basis for forcing the giver to fix your basketball. They have incurred no legal duty to you. There is no quid pro quo.
This isn't relevent to the GPL, because it does involve exchange of "consideration". Also there is an obvious loophole with making simple payment an issue in this way. To avoid any liability sell everything as "buy one, get one free"...
You're expecting ALL software users to be able to inspect software for defects and this is simply not the case. Many people want to use software the way they use a car - and they don't have either the mechanic's drawings & skills or the knowledge to read/fix source.
Ever heard the phrase "You can take a horse to water, but you can't make it drink"? At some point you have to consider responsibility transfering to the end user.
You forget the "The Government" IS a "big business interest" itself. (Specifically, I think of it as a gigantic, somewhat shady insurance company that charges mandatory premiums based on your income. ANd property ownership. And purchases (sales tax). And "unemployment insurance". And "Social Security". And...well, you get the idea. You pay your premiums, and the government offers some legetimate insurance (i.e. as with medical insurance, "if something bad happens, we'll pay to deal with it", e.g. if a foreign country were to invade, the US Federal Government Insurance Company would pay for the military to deal with it, and so on). Unfortunately, they also offer some not-so-legitimate insurace, evidently ("If your business model gets outdated, US Federal Government Insurance Company will prop it up with laws"...)
There is also the even less legitimate one of. "If a foreign country is not going out of it's way to make sure some US companies business model works well. (But probably has no intention of invading the US or anywhere else. Then the US Federal Government Insurance Company will pay for some rather more covert arms of the US military to do something about it. Most likely won't tell the US people, probably won't tell most of the US Government either."
We can lobby for making sure that media marked as "public domain" can easily be copied on hardware with copy protection, and deem it illegal for a next generation audio or video device to blindly prevent copying of works, noting that there is a fair amount of free music and video out there.
What about copyright material released under a licence which is incompatable with model of a few large publishers. e.g. something similar to the GPL where anyone can take a novel, piece of music, play, video , etc. and add to it, alter it, re-edit it (or in anyway create a derived work) subject to the condition that any distribution is subject to the same licence. If this kind of licencing is valid under current copyright law for software then it must be valid for any kind of work... There is also the issue of shouldn't any ability to set the scope of copying control be vested in the "author", rather than the publisher...
Slashdot Mirror
i wonder if MS has found a way to make their products addictive too.
That sounds like the "upgrade treadmill"
I don't smoke. But I know people that do. One of the shocking things that anti-smokers can't seem to understand is People Enjoy Smoking Tobacco. It's not something awful that people do only because they are addicted. It feels good, it brings them pleasure.
Plenty of drugs which are far less addictive and far less toxic are completly illegal. Also one of the issues with smoking isn't drugs it's air pollution (including forcing people who just happen to be nearby to injest the drug.) Methods such as eating, drinking, injecting and snorting enable drug users to enjoy their drugs without forcing anything on other people.
Well, if every county had the same voting ballot, I'd grant you this point. They didn't though - that was the big kerfuffle, remember? Different communities were allowed to draw up their ballots differently.
Has this actually been fixed. The simplist method would be everyone voting in the same election gets exactly the same type of ballot paper (also if several elections are being held at the same time each voter has several separate ballot papers. Possibly as an easy to dismantle book if there are more than 2 or 3)
The funny thing is though, when they recounted and included the double-punched ballots where there was a clear-intent (ergo, someone had written a vote down on them) then Gore won by a slight margin.
If there were a significent number of these it would point to a flaw in the operation of the voting. In voters somehow not being able to obtain a new card.
Let alone that appropriate procedures to ensure proper security of the ballots whilst they were in contention did not appear to exist.
and haveing to enter a bogus email upon download and install.
:)
The best one to use would be "support@real.com"
Since the Depression in the 30s, laissez-faire is not something anybody would ever publicly push again. Witness the New Deal laws being passed without question!
Doubt if it's exactly "without question". Otherwise there would be little need to creativly apply the commerce clause over the 10th ammendment.
Even if these laws were not questioned at the time certainly there are people questioning them now.
some modern commercial aircraft can reach 40,000 feet on a good day (NASA use a modified 707 KC-135 airframe for the vomit comet, commercial companies use a modified 727)
It'd seriously question either of these aircraft being called "modern"... Anyway the Russians don't use aircraft from Boeing and ESA use an Airbus.
Actually, the shuttle is a collossal waste of money - it costs an unearthly sum for every launch. The Shuttle lifts about 100 tons, which is impressive, until you recall that 80 of those tons are Orbiter that glide back down.
Exactly why is the orbiter so heavy, is it simply because it has to carry engines capable of lifting it through the most dense part of the atmosphere? IIRC there was a Japanese design which included carrying around a jet engine, only any use once below 40 odd thousand feet, but would make landings easier and mean that the thing would not need a towtruck when it lands.A better way to design a reusable spacecraft is to make the BOTTOM stages recyclable. This way you waste less of your energy lifted stuff that doesn't need to stay up.
The original shuttle design used a manned carrier vehicle arrangement similar to the Russian design
As for Mars, the Shuttle hardly has the thrust capacity to get into a lunar transfer orbit, let alone one to Mars.
Not sure there would be much point in getting the shuttle into such an orbit anyway. It can't carry a decent lunar lander and still needs to get back.
If something like that were to happen, I'd imagine that the GPL would probably be killed in court by high powered lawyers from all the major software companies (not just MS.)
The only way you could "kill" the GPL would be to void copyright protection on software. Effectivly every piece of proprietary software would immediatly enter the public domain.
So what is the beef with the GPL?
They only like copyright to work in their favour..
The origional poster implys updates will be slow to trickle in to the Linux install base, while Windows Update offers a shortcut to the process.
A lot of the time Windows Update appears to be more about marketing the latest version of Internet Explorer and co than distributing important fixes.
MS deals with millions upon millions of 'ordinary users' who run dozens of programs that have zlib linked statically (we've just been told) and who have absolutely no idea what zlib is, what their systems use it for or how to patch it (well, they can't, because it's statically linked).
Since all of Microsoft's operating systems support dynamic linking youc an lay a fair bit of blame on Microsoft for choosing to statically link their apps. One of the main advantages of dynamic linking is easy upgrading, either for bug fixes or functionality.
Also it was Microsoft's policy to design around a paradigm of end-user administration.
How can they reasonably blame anyone else?
There is no universal right to retroactively change a contract (in a unilateral matter). Such a right must be granted in an earlier contract.
Isn't one of the objections to UCITA that it does allow such changing of contracts?
With GPL selling of software is impossibel as long as you are not the OWNER of the software.
Utter rubbish, you can sell GPL software for any price someone is prepared to pay you for it, subject to complying with the terms of the licence. Just that since anyone else can compete with you, trying to make massive profits will typically put you out of business.
Why wait for a bug? Scan for "signatures". That's how the use of BSD's TCP/IP stack was determined (that, and the "Regent" copyright).
The BSD licence allows Microsoft to use the code. So why do they need to take the copyright statements out. If they were pirating GPL code they would be utterly stupid to leave any such easy to find indications in.
Now, if MS were smart they'd have a standard place for libjpeg.dll, libpng.dll, and zlib.dll but as far as I know there is no such thing. Either the functions are in some other DLLs, or the names are obfuscated.
Or possibly even different bits of them are scattered between other DLLs. Remember that Microsoft's method of making IE part of the OS appears to include deliberatly writing what amounts to "sphagetti code". If things were neatly structured then removing components would be much simpler.
In Windows 2000, open a command prompt window. Type "nslookup". This will drop you into interactive mode for nslookup, which has been ported from UNIX (most likely BSD.)
It would have to be something with a licence such as the BSD licence which makes the code almost "public domain". Since Microsoft wouldn't want to touch anything covered by something like the GPL, since such a licence enforces copyright. They'd look very stupid as a bunch of software pirates moaning about piracy.
The article was only referring to the big island. Please read the article before you post.
One of the posters described similar things happening on Maui, where do you think this island has it's telecoms connected to? Odds on all international "landline" traffic anywhere in the main island chain goes through the link(s) described.
There are some rights that you can't waive, though - for example, you can't really sell yourself into slavery in the U.S. even if you wanted to. Such a waiver would not be upheld by the courts. So this is sort of a case like EULAs; we just need the courts to clarify that you really can't waive such a right, so any agreements based on such a waiver are void.
It's better to have a populace aware of their rights. Otherwise it's quite possible for someone to be lied to and intimidated into doing things by the threat of a lawsuit (which if it ever took place would be more risky for the plaintiff than the defendant...)
Aye, but one must remember, that while it's relatively easy to wave consumer rights in many US States, it's very hard to wave consumer rights in the EU (certainly the UK), and indeed to attempt to mandate such is itself often illegal.
It's for this reason that so much product legalese is followed by "this does not effect your statutory rights".
Typically in combination with the "if any of this is legally void the rest still stands" type clause. There are rights which cannot be waived in the US (and many other countries) just that they are not always the same rights. (Also there is AFAIK little interest in "harmonising" customer rights, since they arn't seen as something advantagous to big business.)
A basic problem is that most people don't know what inaliable rights they actually have, even in their own country, let alone if they travel elsewhere
I remember having an argument with my bank over copies of statements and the data protection act, tangental I know... "I don't care what your policy is on the data protection act, I'm waving and an act of Parliament under your nose, which carries a little more wait than your written policy"... I got what I wanted.
In other words they are so used to people not knowing their rights and accepting what they think customers rights should be that they are difficult to enlighten.
Similarly in the US an act of Congress or appropriate state legislature trumps any "policy". Though certain (large) commercial entities might take a lot of convincing. Also the US constitution should trump anything the US Congress comes up with, Even though it might be an uphill struggle getting the US Federal Government to agree.
Businesses here can only get the mimimum data they need and you can refuse to divulge anything else e.g. travel passes can include address detail in case they are lost (and the company likes you to fill this in for a variety of reasons); however, you don't have to even supply the companys with your real name providing you pay upfront rather than in arrears.
So long as you are not enguaging in fraud it is perfectly legal to give any name you like, including a different name to anyone you deal with.
6. Users have the right to use technology in order to achieve the rights previously mentioned.
You need to somehow make it clear that this applies to any method of doing these things. Regardless of if the technology dates from 1850 or 2850... What makes things such as the DMCA and SSSCA especially bad laws is that they are over concerned with fiddling technical details of current technology. A good law concerns itself only with the "what" rather than the "how".
It is like somebody giving out free basketballs. If the free basketballs were made with defects, you have no basis for forcing the giver to fix your basketball. They have incurred no legal duty to you. There is no quid pro quo.
This isn't relevent to the GPL, because it does involve exchange of "consideration". Also there is an obvious loophole with making simple payment an issue in this way. To avoid any liability sell everything as "buy one, get one free"...
You're expecting ALL software users to be able to inspect software for defects and this is simply not the case. Many people want to use software the way they use a car - and they don't have either the mechanic's drawings & skills or the knowledge to read/fix source.
Ever heard the phrase "You can take a horse to water, but you can't make it drink"?
At some point you have to consider responsibility transfering to the end user.
You forget the "The Government" IS a "big business interest" itself. (Specifically, I think of it as a gigantic, somewhat shady insurance company that charges mandatory premiums based on your income. ANd property ownership. And purchases (sales tax). And "unemployment insurance". And "Social Security". And...well, you get the idea. You pay your premiums, and the government offers some legetimate insurance (i.e. as with medical insurance, "if something bad happens, we'll pay to deal with it", e.g. if a foreign country were to invade, the US Federal Government Insurance Company would pay for the military to deal with it, and so on). Unfortunately, they also offer some not-so-legitimate insurace, evidently ("If your business model gets outdated, US Federal Government Insurance Company will prop it up with laws"...)
There is also the even less legitimate one of. "If a foreign country is not going out of it's way to make sure some US companies business model works well. (But probably has no intention of invading the US or anywhere else. Then the US Federal Government Insurance Company will pay for some rather more covert arms of the US military to do something about it. Most likely won't tell the US people, probably won't tell most of the US Government either."
We can lobby for making sure that media marked as "public domain" can easily be copied on hardware with copy protection, and deem it illegal for a next generation audio or video device to blindly prevent copying of works, noting that there is a fair amount of free music and video out there.
What about copyright material released under a licence which is incompatable with model of a few large publishers. e.g. something similar to the GPL where anyone can take a novel, piece of music, play, video , etc. and add to it, alter it, re-edit it (or in anyway create a derived work) subject to the condition that any distribution is subject to the same licence.
If this kind of licencing is valid under current copyright law for software then it must be valid for any kind of work...
There is also the issue of shouldn't any ability to set the scope of copying control be vested in the "author", rather than the publisher...