It also has to be nontrivial, have some creative aspects, etc.
Some things that courts have ruled are not copyrightable include phone lists and opcodes. You can copyright the presentation or mnemonics, but since only phone number reaches Bob Smith and only one particular bit code adds the contents of the BX register to the accumulator this information is not copyrightable.
Wrong, copyright applies to every non-trivial work. Publication and intent to publish is largely irrelevant.
You don't even have to think hard to come up with countless examples of things that clearly need protection but are never published. All proprietary source code. All internal work product. All backup tapes and discs.
But copyright does not trump all other interests, specifically copyright does not prevent the documents from being used in a criminal investigation or civil discovery action. It doesn't even prevent the documents from being used in making arguments to open a criminal investigation or initiate a civil suit.
IMHO (and as a non-lawyer who has a strong professional interest in civil liberties) what Diebold is doing is legally no different from some sick bastard who videotapes himself drugging and raping women trying to prevent his victims from taking the video to the police. The harm caused by allowing the complaints to be squelched is far greater than the harm caused by forcing disclosure against the wishes of the copyright holder.
Now if Diebold was sending C&D orders to prevent their inclusion in a general interest book on computer voting systems... then they might have a case. In that case the memos would be used to enrich somebody else, not to call attention to a matter of critical public interest.
Really broken analogy
on
Hackers On Atkins
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· Score: 4, Informative
That's a really broken analogy - one of the cornerstones of the Atkins diet is that you need to do regular exercise. You aren't going to save money by dropping your gym membership - if anything you're going to spend more money on athletic equipment and membership fees.
Beyond that, there's been a number of studies that say ALL diets cause loss of muscle mass if you don't exercise... a loss which can usually be stopped by regular exercise.
The Atkins diet has some additional restrictions, with two big ones being eliminating both caffeine and aspertame. So no diet Mt. Dew, if you strictly follow the diet.
There's a serious disconnect in the priorities of law enforcement, but the correct response is far from clear.
Consider three cases - a single loss of $10k, a hundred people losing $1k, or 10,000 people losing $100.
There's no way the $100 loss would be investigated by any law enforcement agency, but it's the largest loss by far. Meanwhile the single loss of $10k is the smallest aggregate loss by far, but most people are going to really feel that loss while the $100 loss is usually (but not always) easily absorbed.
Does this mean that the $100 loss should get highest priority? I would say not... but then again a single complaint may be the tip of the iceberg on losses affecting many people.
There's no easy answer... but ignoring the cumulative loss or the coarsening effects on society on certain offenses (e.g., how my anger at clearly fradulent spam has colored my perception of ALL flyers, handbills, etc.) isn't the right answer either.
I suggest you read/watch James Burke's excellent series "The Day the Universe Changed," his other industrial history series whose name escapes me at the moment, or old columns in Scientific American.
History shows us exactly what happens when patent law (and presumably trademark and copyright law) serves the "owner" alone, not society as a whole. You clearly don't know that Britain had 100-year patents for a while... and she made no significant contribution to chemistry or industrial processes during that time. Like copyright today a person could not extend on a process developed on the day of their birth - they and their children (and even many of their grandchildren) would be dead long before the patent expired.
Meanwhile other countries, notably Germany, refused to respect the terms of British patents and had short patent durations themselves. If something was developed on the day you became an apprentice, you could probably use it as a journeyman and could certainly extend it as a master.
Germany industry flourished, and a backwards agrarian society became an industrial powerhouse that far exceeded the capabilities of the British industry they 'stole' from within a working lifetime. The US followed a similar path, although it's not quite as striking here since we didn't break a centuries-old pattern.
History is unambiguous on this question. Terms short enough to fit several consecutive patents into a working lifetime promote progress and innovation. Terms longer than a working lifetime stop innovation in its tracks and serve no useful purpose to society. They do, however, allow lazy CEOs to freeze the marketplace with them on top, and since the marketplace is frozen you see prices jacked up with none of the money "wasted" on research or innovation.
IIRC, Microsoft has repeatedly tried to screw over this company through extra-legal means. It's one thing to ask for mercy after a fair fight, it's another thing to ask for mercy after trying to make the case "go away" by driving the plaintiff into bankruptcy (and snatching up the patents at the fire sale), etc.
As I recall, there was speculation that the plantiff was so pissed off that they might refuse to grant MS a license *at any cost.* Think about the anger required to turn your back on a billion dollars or so, to hurt the other guy as badly as he tried to hurt you.
In that context, of course the plantiff will demand that MS live with the consequences of the ruling *today*. Not in their "next release" (which may be years off), not even "tomorrow." Today. If that means that MS has to contact Dell and Compaq and HP and the rest and tell them that they have to cease all sales of Windows boxes because "MSIE is now fully integrated into the operating system," so be it. Microsoft made this bed by its own bad acts.
N.B., I'm not saying that I agree with this retaliatory attitude. But at the same time the problem with brutally suppressing your critics is that you force the one who finally beats you to be even meaner and nastier than you. Gates and Ballmer and the rest had to know this.
Nope, no crypto. A mouse click alone is sufficient.
"Signatures" are actually a very complex field. Courts have held that a hand-written check, unsigned, is "signed" under the UCC because the rest of the check indicates intent to pay. I believe they've even held this with check printed out on a printer but unsigned. And of course we all know of checks stamped or signed by machine.
The key thing in these examples is that they're all recurring payments in an existing relationship. People should always seek more information when providing something of real value to an unknown party.
What are the circumstances behind the change? Could it be something as simple as people parking domains on a server running Linux, then converting to a live system hosted on Windows 2003 because that's what they know best? Since Windows 2003 still has relatively lwo market penetration, it would show high but really meaningless growth and predation rates.
I don't know if you're old enough to remember it, but "boxen" comes from "vaxen," plural of DEC VAX minicomputers. The size of your closet, with the computing power of your palm pilot, and we were damn glad to have them.
I don't remember if it was Digital or somebody else who started "vaxen" instead of the more awkward and easily mispronounced "vaxes."
You've got to be kidding. Several artists have discussed their contracts in great detail, and it's well known that the worst thing for new artists is to have a massive runaway success on their first album because they'll sell ten million albums yet end up millions in debt to the studio. Ask TLC, or Expose, or....
Yeah, you know I think you really can fly when you jump off that cliff if you REALLY believe you can! Why don't you try it?
As for your claims about what scientists are saying, listen to what they're really saying. No scientist, unless he's dealing with some loser dressed upn as a Jedi Knight, will say that FTL travel is impossible. They'll say that it's inconsistent with the known laws of physics, that FTL travel breaks causality in the same way as ttime travel, etc.... but that our physical models are not only possibly wrong, they're known to be wrong when you get to quantum gravity. If you then say "warp drive" he'll kick you out of your office, but if you grab a book on tensor analysis you'll see stuff that would make the wildest fantasy seem pedestrian.
But that's the rub. A "Golden Era" story could have a bright HS student who taught himself basic calculus, or had it at a decent HS. Today's story would need to tensor analysis or heavy computational mathematics, stuff that makes college seniors flinch if they know it at all.
If anyone thinks the ability to understand Morse code means anything today, do a quick experiment.
1) Try teaching somebody to understand Morse code at 5 WPM, then 12, then 20.
2) Try teaching somebody to understand Morse code starting at 20 WPM, or better yet 30 WPM.
The first is difficult - learning "dot dot dot dash" is a "V" at 5 WPM does NOT translate to faster speeds.
The second is actually fairly easy. You don't hear the individual tones, you hear didididah and it doesn't take long for people to learn to spell out words (spoken and heard) with the new synonyms.
The problem? The people who learn to understand Morse at 30 WPM can speak it, but they can't key it... especially with the dead cat and two pieces of piano wire that the Old Farts(TM) use as an example of the type of equipment a ham should be able to use in an emergency. Worse, they can't understand or key it at 5 WPM either since that's s
o
s
l
o
w
that it would be as meaningless as human speech would be to you if it was slowed down by a factor of 6 or more.
You need to study your Constitutional law a bit more closely.
For about 80 years after the adoption of the Constitution you're correct in your claim that state governments were not bound by the restrictions imposed by the federal Constitution in the Bill of Rights. Indeed, many states had state Constitutions that openly defied the federal BOR, e.g., I believe that the Georgia constitution required all office holders to be "Christians in good standing" (whatever that means).
But then there was a minor spat over exactly what the Constitution actually meant and who it actually applied to... and ever since the end of the Civil War there's been unanimous concensus that the federal BOR applies to ALL levels of government. It doesn't matter if the Alabama state constitution allows a judge to erect a 20' statute of a burning Buddha in his courtroom, the federal constitution prohibits such displays under the 'establishment' clause.
More generally, I find this argument and the judge's argument VERY disturbing because they seem to be rolling back the clock to the days where whites were kings and blacks were out in the fields picking cotton. Nowhere in the Ten Commandments is there any prohibition on slavery. Nowhere in the Bible is there any prohibition on slavery - in fact the Bible often mentions God's chosen people having slaves. If God's laws supercedes the US Constitution, does that mean that the constitutional ban on slavery is unenforceable?
I hasten to add that I have no reason to believe that the OP believes this. I find it very possible that he came across a site that seemed to make a persuasive argument and didn't realize how much was omitted. But I am beginning to wonder if there's an organized group behind this that wants to roll back civil rights.
Unless college RAs have suddenly gotten a lot more intelligent, a blanket rule like that will give you a bigger headache as the Mac and Linux users complain about you requiring everyone to run Windows. You are, implicitly, in insisting everyone run Windows software before they can connect to the network.
It's clear that very, very few posters here have engineering or physical science backgrounds.
It's easy to say 'we should adopt' to changing circumstances. We should be like silly putty, adjusting to our environment.
But what happens if you whack silly putty hard? Hint: it doesn't smoothly deform. All systems have a maximum response rate, and if you exceed it the damage goes WAY up. Another good example is water - it's soft if you're diving from a diving board, but harder than concrete if you've reached terminal velocity in your fall.
Prior economic displacements have primarily hit people with limited job skills. If you got your job with a HS diploma - if that - then you can be quickly retrained for something else. You'll take a pay cut as you go from one field to another, but you can recover fairly quickly. The biggest problems faced by people who lost textile and manufacturing jobs wasn't that there were no other jobs, but that these jobs were clustered so people had to move to other parts of the country to restart their careers.
But the jobs that are being outsourced literally leave many people permanently displaced. Really top-flight software developers usually (not always) have a college degree and a lot of experience. To be sure there are plenty of one trick ponies with far less, but it takes time to learn how to see the whole picture. And we're lucky - the other fields being outsourced (radiologist, tax attorney, etc.) require professional degrees and years of experience to be really good.
If you're outsourced in your 20s, you can still get reestablished in a new field. But if you're in your late 30s and 40s, entering what should be your most productive years with the best pay that you use to educate your kids and set aside money for your retirement... where are you supposed to go? Even with a college degree it will take years to get a comparable education in another field, more years to establish yourself... and the clock is ticking the entire time. Even if you manage to get back to your original salary, you'll lose out on decade(s) of return on your investment.
That's why this situation is so dire. One of my friends has kids just entering college, and he's had to discourage them from getting technical degrees because he doesn't want them to invest years of their lives into something that will be considered worthless by the time they start getting good at their job. Where will that leave the US in the 2020s and beyond?... Oh yeah, I forgot. Most people already act like technology is magic, so it won't matter if a generation or two keeps far away from the technical disciplines. We'll just sue any other country that develops any new technology that would leave us in the well-deserved dust.
NASA isn't getting criticized because it doesn't have perfect safety, it's getting nailed because it has TWICE ignored clear evidence of significant problems and failed to perform even cursory investigations until after the loss of an orbiter and crew.
There was clear evidence of problems with the O-rings before the Challenger was lost. NASA had somebody produce some really cryptic plots, but nobody bothered to really investigate whether the cooler weather on some of these launches might have an influence. It takes a real genius to reduce this to dipping an o-ring into a glass of ice water, but any competent investigator should have been able to reduce the data to plots of damage vs. various independent variables such as temperature at launch or overnight lows.
With Columbia, the arrogance of management is far more stunning. It KNEW that the insulation had flaked off, it KNEW that the insulation had caused surface damage in the past, and it KNEW that some areas on the leading edge of the wing are much more vulnerable to damage than others because of access points. It could have test fired foam at wing mockups at any time, just to have hard proof instead of just hunches that the foam could never cause significant damage to an orbiter... yet it did nothing.
This testing is expensive, of course, but it's really not that much when compared to the cost of a normal launch (isn't that approaching a billion dollars per launch now?), or the various costs associated with the loss of an orbiter and crew. It's akin to failing to spend $10 to check something on your car even though you knew that a mistake would mean that the car would erupt into a fireball and kill everyone inside if you're wrong.
Don't be so quick to dismiss all regulations as unnecessary interference. Some are nothing but lobbyists freezing out the competition, but others addressed real problems.
The bottom line is if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck and is being baked with an orange glaze and served to hungry diners, it's a duck. Paypal is a bank and the sooner it is treated as one the better off everyone will be -- too many people have been burned by arbitrary and opaque dispute resolution policies. VoIP that replaces conventional phone service *is* phone service and the users need to have the same protections (e.g., against unauthorized wiretaps, arbitrary charge dispute resolutions, etc.) as regular phone service users, etc.
All of the code examples I've seen have come from BSD-licensed code. This code can be freely reused, but is no more in the public domain than is GPL code.
The GPL is a license to distribute code, nothing more. The copyright remains with the developers, and nothing that happens to the GPL should ever change it -- it is remarkably hard to put something into the public domain today, and AFAIK all precedences required somebody to explicitly affirm that intent. At most a court can rule the license invalid which leaves SCO unable to legally distribute Caldera, its "Linux Personality," its bundled Samba,.... but everyone who has a copy of Linux will be free to continue using it since the copyright owners have clearly made their intent to allow use (and certain forms of distribution) very clear.
But even if we make this assumption for the sake of argument, what does it gain SCO? If anything this would seem to be their worst nightmare.
> The biggest test of your ideals is when someone you don't like is taking advantage of them. Just as believing in freedom of speech means you have to support the right of people to say things you don't like...
Don't oversimplify the situation. Drawing an analogy to Freedom of Speech, what you rightly say must be protected is the right of, oh, Microsoft to make extensive use of BSD-licensed code in its products. Hell, for all I care they can bundle GPL'ed code as long as they adhere to its terms.
But Freedom of Speech does have limits. Not that horrible "falsely yelling fire in a crowded theater" decision from a century ago - the courts have long upheld contrary views.
But you don't have the right to incite a riot. You don't have the right to disturb my peaceful enjoyment of my own property. You don't have the right to use mechanical means to prevent others from hearing me. That's why "fighting words" laws have been upheld, and laws regulating space on the basis of time, manner and place.
More generally, it's usually acceptable to make use of something provided by others (or society as a whole) while criticizing it, but not acceptable to use it while demanding that all others give up all rights to it.
>If they really want to live "off the grid" and not participate in society, screw 'em. They shouldn't get any gov't supplied and organized benefits from my taxes.
> I've chosen to participate in society and will not support an individual who wants to live outside society, they're on their own.
Just how far are you willing to take this?
By your argument, I can freely steal what little they own. It's up to them to protect themselves and aren't entitled to police protection.
I can hunt and kill them like vermin. Why go on a prairie dog hunt when you can hunt hobos?
What about tourists from other countries? From other states? From the next town over?
I'm know you were thinking about something else when you wrote "benefits," but do you really want to make the argument that we should not be equal under the law?
I'm not sure how many contributers there are to the Samba project, but it's almost certainly far fewer than to the Linux kernel, GNU tool chain, etc.
The bottom line is that they may be able to take direct action: change the license to "GPL-SCO." That's a stock GPL license with an extra clause superceding all others and explicitly prohibiting the use of the software on SCO systems, on any system owned by SCO regardless of the OS used, or distribution in any form by SCO or its successors. Finally, since SCO is claiming that none of these licenses are valid anyway there would be a final clause inserted by the lawyers that basically say that if the rest of the license is invalidated then SCO owes a licensing fee of US$1,000,000,000 per CPU, payable immediately. A billion dollars/CPU to the people who actually wrote the code is no less unreasonable than SCO trying to collect a kilobuck/CPU from Linux users who never invited SCO to the table.
In short, if they want to support MS products but refuse to accept the standard license, they can damn well write the code themselves. The same applies to any other application they use.
This is a bit more direct that what the GCC group is supposedly considering - dropping SCO hardware from the list of supported hardware - but it's clear that SCO isn't going to stop until the feds get off their ass and start prosecuting these clowns.
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It also has to be nontrivial, have some creative aspects, etc.
Some things that courts have ruled are not copyrightable include phone lists and opcodes. You can copyright the presentation or mnemonics, but since only phone number reaches Bob Smith and only one particular bit code adds the contents of the BX register to the accumulator this information is not copyrightable.
Wrong, copyright applies to every non-trivial work. Publication and intent to publish is largely irrelevant.
You don't even have to think hard to come up with countless examples of things that clearly need protection but are never published. All proprietary source code. All internal work product. All backup tapes and discs.
Of course Diebold retains copyright to its memos.
But copyright does not trump all other interests, specifically copyright does not prevent the documents from being used in a criminal investigation or civil discovery action. It doesn't even prevent the documents from being used in making arguments to open a criminal investigation or initiate a civil suit.
IMHO (and as a non-lawyer who has a strong professional interest in civil liberties) what Diebold is doing is legally no different from some sick bastard who videotapes himself drugging and raping women trying to prevent his victims from taking the video to the police. The harm caused by allowing the complaints to be squelched is far greater than the harm caused by forcing disclosure against the wishes of the copyright holder.
Now if Diebold was sending C&D orders to prevent their inclusion in a general interest book on computer voting systems... then they might have a case. In that case the memos would be used to enrich somebody else, not to call attention to a matter of critical public interest.
That's a really broken analogy - one of the cornerstones of the Atkins diet is that you need to do regular exercise. You aren't going to save money by dropping your gym membership - if anything you're going to spend more money on athletic equipment and membership fees.
Beyond that, there's been a number of studies that say ALL diets cause loss of muscle mass if you don't exercise... a loss which can usually be stopped by regular exercise.
The Atkins diet has some additional restrictions, with two big ones being eliminating both caffeine and aspertame. So no diet Mt. Dew, if you strictly follow the diet.
There's a serious disconnect in the priorities of law enforcement, but the correct response is far from clear.
Consider three cases - a single loss of $10k, a hundred people losing $1k, or 10,000 people losing $100.
There's no way the $100 loss would be investigated by any law enforcement agency, but it's the largest loss by far. Meanwhile the single loss of $10k is the smallest aggregate loss by far, but most people are going to really feel that loss while the $100 loss is usually (but not always) easily absorbed.
Does this mean that the $100 loss should get highest priority? I would say not... but then again a single complaint may be the tip of the iceberg on losses affecting many people.
There's no easy answer... but ignoring the cumulative loss or the coarsening effects on society on certain offenses (e.g., how my anger at clearly fradulent spam has colored my perception of ALL flyers, handbills, etc.) isn't the right answer either.
I suggest you read/watch James Burke's excellent series "The Day the Universe Changed," his other industrial history series whose name escapes me at the moment, or old columns in Scientific American.
History shows us exactly what happens when patent law (and presumably trademark and copyright law) serves the "owner" alone, not society as a whole. You clearly don't know that Britain had 100-year patents for a while... and she made no significant contribution to chemistry or industrial processes during that time. Like copyright today a person could not extend on a process developed on the day of their birth - they and their children (and even many of their grandchildren) would be dead long before the patent expired.
Meanwhile other countries, notably Germany, refused to respect the terms of British patents and had short patent durations themselves. If something was developed on the day you became an apprentice, you could probably use it as a journeyman and could certainly extend it as a master.
Germany industry flourished, and a backwards agrarian society became an industrial powerhouse that far exceeded the capabilities of the British industry they 'stole' from within a working lifetime. The US followed a similar path, although it's not quite as striking here since we didn't break a centuries-old pattern.
History is unambiguous on this question. Terms short enough to fit several consecutive patents into a working lifetime promote progress and innovation. Terms longer than a working lifetime stop innovation in its tracks and serve no useful purpose to society. They do, however, allow lazy CEOs to freeze the marketplace with them on top, and since the marketplace is frozen you see prices jacked up with none of the money "wasted" on research or innovation.
IIRC, Microsoft has repeatedly tried to screw over this company through extra-legal means. It's one thing to ask for mercy after a fair fight, it's another thing to ask for mercy after trying to make the case "go away" by driving the plaintiff into bankruptcy (and snatching up the patents at the fire sale), etc.
As I recall, there was speculation that the plantiff was so pissed off that they might refuse to grant MS a license *at any cost.* Think about the anger required to turn your back on a billion dollars or so, to hurt the other guy as badly as he tried to hurt you.
In that context, of course the plantiff will demand that MS live with the consequences of the ruling *today*. Not in their "next release" (which may be years off), not even "tomorrow." Today. If that means that MS has to contact Dell and Compaq and HP and the rest and tell them that they have to cease all sales of Windows boxes because "MSIE is now fully integrated into the operating system," so be it. Microsoft made this bed by its own bad acts.
N.B., I'm not saying that I agree with this retaliatory attitude. But at the same time the problem with brutally suppressing your critics is that you force the one who finally beats you to be even meaner and nastier than you. Gates and Ballmer and the rest had to know this.
Nope, no crypto. A mouse click alone is sufficient.
"Signatures" are actually a very complex field. Courts have held that a hand-written check, unsigned, is "signed" under the UCC because the rest of the check indicates intent to pay. I believe they've even held this with check printed out on a printer but unsigned. And of course we all know of checks stamped or signed by machine.
The key thing in these examples is that they're all recurring payments in an existing relationship. People should always seek more information when providing something of real value to an unknown party.
Maybe, or maybe not.
What are the circumstances behind the change? Could it be something as simple as people parking domains on a server running Linux, then converting to a live system hosted on Windows 2003 because that's what they know best? Since Windows 2003 still has relatively lwo market penetration, it would show high but really meaningless growth and predation rates.
(begin old fart mode)
I don't know if you're old enough to remember it, but "boxen" comes from "vaxen," plural of DEC VAX minicomputers. The size of your closet, with the computing power of your palm pilot, and we were damn glad to have them.
I don't remember if it was Digital or somebody else who started "vaxen" instead of the more awkward and easily mispronounced "vaxes."
Colorado, and presumably other states, actually have constitutional prohibitions on any voting mechanism that allows a person to prove how they voted.
You've got to be kidding. Several artists have discussed their contracts in great detail, and it's well known that the worst thing for new artists is to have a massive runaway success on their first album because they'll sell ten million albums yet end up millions in debt to the studio. Ask TLC, or Expose, or....
Yeah, you know I think you really can fly when you jump off that cliff if you REALLY believe you can! Why don't you try it?
As for your claims about what scientists are saying, listen to what they're really saying. No scientist, unless he's dealing with some loser dressed upn as a Jedi Knight, will say that FTL travel is impossible. They'll say that it's inconsistent with the known laws of physics, that FTL travel breaks causality in the same way as ttime travel, etc.... but that our physical models are not only possibly wrong, they're known to be wrong when you get to quantum gravity. If you then say "warp drive" he'll kick you out of your office, but if you grab a book on tensor analysis you'll see stuff that would make the wildest fantasy seem pedestrian.
But that's the rub. A "Golden Era" story could have a bright HS student who taught himself basic calculus, or had it at a decent HS. Today's story would need to tensor analysis or heavy computational mathematics, stuff that makes college seniors flinch if they know it at all.
If anyone thinks the ability to understand Morse code means anything today, do a quick experiment.
1) Try teaching somebody to understand Morse code at 5 WPM, then 12, then 20.
2) Try teaching somebody to understand Morse code starting at 20 WPM, or better yet 30 WPM.
The first is difficult - learning "dot dot dot dash" is a "V" at 5 WPM does NOT translate to faster speeds.
The second is actually fairly easy. You don't hear the individual tones, you hear didididah and it doesn't take long for people to learn to spell out words (spoken and heard) with the new synonyms.
The problem? The people who learn to understand Morse at 30 WPM can speak it, but they can't key it... especially with the dead cat and two pieces of piano wire that the Old Farts(TM) use as an example of the type of equipment a ham should be able to use in an emergency. Worse, they can't understand or key it at 5 WPM either since that's s
o
s
l
o
w
that it would be as meaningless as human speech would be to you if it was slowed down by a factor of 6 or more.
You need to study your Constitutional law a bit more closely.
For about 80 years after the adoption of the Constitution you're correct in your claim that state governments were not bound by the restrictions imposed by the federal Constitution in the Bill of Rights. Indeed, many states had state Constitutions that openly defied the federal BOR, e.g., I believe that the Georgia constitution required all office holders to be "Christians in good standing" (whatever that means).
But then there was a minor spat over exactly what the Constitution actually meant and who it actually applied to... and ever since the end of the Civil War there's been unanimous concensus that the federal BOR applies to ALL levels of government. It doesn't matter if the Alabama state constitution allows a judge to erect a 20' statute of a burning Buddha in his courtroom, the federal constitution prohibits such displays under the 'establishment' clause.
More generally, I find this argument and the judge's argument VERY disturbing because they seem to be rolling back the clock to the days where whites were kings and blacks were out in the fields picking cotton. Nowhere in the Ten Commandments is there any prohibition on slavery. Nowhere in the Bible is there any prohibition on slavery - in fact the Bible often mentions God's chosen people having slaves. If God's laws supercedes the US Constitution, does that mean that the constitutional ban on slavery is unenforceable?
I hasten to add that I have no reason to believe that the OP believes this. I find it very possible that he came across a site that seemed to make a persuasive argument and didn't realize how much was omitted. But I am beginning to wonder if there's an organized group behind this that wants to roll back civil rights.
Unless college RAs have suddenly gotten a lot more intelligent, a blanket rule like that will give you a bigger headache as the Mac and Linux users complain about you requiring everyone to run Windows. You are, implicitly, in insisting everyone run Windows software before they can connect to the network.
It's clear that very, very few posters here have engineering or physical science backgrounds.
It's easy to say 'we should adopt' to changing circumstances. We should be like silly putty, adjusting to our environment.
But what happens if you whack silly putty hard? Hint: it doesn't smoothly deform. All systems have a maximum response rate, and if you exceed it the damage goes WAY up. Another good example is water - it's soft if you're diving from a diving board, but harder than concrete if you've reached terminal velocity in your fall.
Prior economic displacements have primarily hit people with limited job skills. If you got your job with a HS diploma - if that - then you can be quickly retrained for something else. You'll take a pay cut as you go from one field to another, but you can recover fairly quickly. The biggest problems faced by people who lost textile and manufacturing jobs wasn't that there were no other jobs, but that these jobs were clustered so people had to move to other parts of the country to restart their careers.
But the jobs that are being outsourced literally leave many people permanently displaced. Really top-flight software developers usually (not always) have a college degree and a lot of experience. To be sure there are plenty of one trick ponies with far less, but it takes time to learn how to see the whole picture. And we're lucky - the other fields being outsourced (radiologist, tax attorney, etc.) require professional degrees and years of experience to be really good.
If you're outsourced in your 20s, you can still get reestablished in a new field. But if you're in your late 30s and 40s, entering what should be your most productive years with the best pay that you use to educate your kids and set aside money for your retirement... where are you supposed to go? Even with a college degree it will take years to get a comparable education in another field, more years to establish yourself... and the clock is ticking the entire time. Even if you manage to get back to your original salary, you'll lose out on decade(s) of return on your investment.
That's why this situation is so dire. One of my friends has kids just entering college, and he's had to discourage them from getting technical degrees because he doesn't want them to invest years of their lives into something that will be considered worthless by the time they start getting good at their job. Where will that leave the US in the 2020s and beyond?... Oh yeah, I forgot. Most people already act like technology is magic, so it won't matter if a generation or two keeps far away from the technical disciplines. We'll just sue any other country that develops any new technology that would leave us in the well-deserved dust.
NASA isn't getting criticized because it doesn't have perfect safety, it's getting nailed because it has TWICE ignored clear evidence of significant problems and failed to perform even cursory investigations until after the loss of an orbiter and crew.
There was clear evidence of problems with the O-rings before the Challenger was lost. NASA had somebody produce some really cryptic plots, but nobody bothered to really investigate whether the cooler weather on some of these launches might have an influence. It takes a real genius to reduce this to dipping an o-ring into a glass of ice water, but any competent investigator should have been able to reduce the data to plots of damage vs. various independent variables such as temperature at launch or overnight lows.
With Columbia, the arrogance of management is far more stunning. It KNEW that the insulation had flaked off, it KNEW that the insulation had caused surface damage in the past, and it KNEW that some areas on the leading edge of the wing are much more vulnerable to damage than others because of access points. It could have test fired foam at wing mockups at any time, just to have hard proof instead of just hunches that the foam could never cause significant damage to an orbiter... yet it did nothing.
This testing is expensive, of course, but it's really not that much when compared to the cost of a normal launch (isn't that approaching a billion dollars per launch now?), or the various costs associated with the loss of an orbiter and crew. It's akin to failing to spend $10 to check something on your car even though you knew that a mistake would mean that the car would erupt into a fireball and kill everyone inside if you're wrong.
Don't be so quick to dismiss all regulations as unnecessary interference. Some are nothing but lobbyists freezing out the competition, but others addressed real problems.
The bottom line is if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck and is being baked with an orange glaze and served to hungry diners, it's a duck. Paypal is a bank and the sooner it is treated as one the better off everyone will be -- too many people have been burned by arbitrary and opaque dispute resolution policies. VoIP that replaces conventional phone service *is* phone service and the users need to have the same protections (e.g., against unauthorized wiretaps, arbitrary charge dispute resolutions, etc.) as regular phone service users, etc.
What code came from the public domain?
All of the code examples I've seen have come from BSD-licensed code. This code can be freely reused, but is no more in the public domain than is GPL code.
The GPL is a license to distribute code, nothing more. The copyright remains with the developers, and nothing that happens to the GPL should ever change it -- it is remarkably hard to put something into the public domain today, and AFAIK all precedences required somebody to explicitly affirm that intent. At most a court can rule the license invalid which leaves SCO unable to legally distribute Caldera, its "Linux Personality," its bundled Samba,.... but everyone who has a copy of Linux will be free to continue using it since the copyright owners have clearly made their intent to allow use (and certain forms of distribution) very clear.
But even if we make this assumption for the sake of argument, what does it gain SCO? If anything this would seem to be their worst nightmare.
> The biggest test of your ideals is when someone you don't like is taking advantage of them. Just as believing in freedom of speech means you have to support the right of people to say things you don't like...
Don't oversimplify the situation. Drawing an analogy to Freedom of Speech, what you rightly say must be protected is the right of, oh, Microsoft to make extensive use of BSD-licensed code in its products. Hell, for all I care they can bundle GPL'ed code as long as they adhere to its terms.
But Freedom of Speech does have limits. Not that horrible "falsely yelling fire in a crowded theater" decision from a century ago - the courts have long upheld contrary views.
But you don't have the right to incite a riot. You don't have the right to disturb my peaceful enjoyment of my own property. You don't have the right to use mechanical means to prevent others from hearing me. That's why "fighting words" laws have been upheld, and laws regulating space on the basis of time, manner and place.
More generally, it's usually acceptable to make use of something provided by others (or society as a whole) while criticizing it, but not acceptable to use it while demanding that all others give up all rights to it.
>If they really want to live "off the grid" and not participate in society, screw 'em. They shouldn't get any gov't supplied and organized benefits from my taxes.
> I've chosen to participate in society and will not support an individual who wants to live outside society, they're on their own.
Just how far are you willing to take this?
By your argument, I can freely steal what little they own. It's up to them to protect themselves and aren't entitled to police protection.
I can hunt and kill them like vermin. Why go on a prairie dog hunt when you can hunt hobos?
What about tourists from other countries? From other states? From the next town over?
I'm know you were thinking about something else when you wrote "benefits," but do you really want to make the argument that we should not be equal under the law?
I'm not sure how many contributers there are to the Samba project, but it's almost certainly far fewer than to the Linux kernel, GNU tool chain, etc.
The bottom line is that they may be able to take direct action: change the license to "GPL-SCO." That's a stock GPL license with an extra clause superceding all others and explicitly prohibiting the use of the software on SCO systems, on any system owned by SCO regardless of the OS used, or distribution in any form by SCO or its successors. Finally, since SCO is claiming that none of these licenses are valid anyway there would be a final clause inserted by the lawyers that basically say that if the rest of the license is invalidated then SCO owes a licensing fee of US$1,000,000,000 per CPU, payable immediately. A billion dollars/CPU to the people who actually wrote the code is no less unreasonable than SCO trying to collect a kilobuck/CPU from Linux users who never invited SCO to the table.
In short, if they want to support MS products but refuse to accept the standard license, they can damn well write the code themselves. The same applies to any other application they use.
This is a bit more direct that what the GCC group is supposedly considering - dropping SCO hardware from the list of supported hardware - but it's clear that SCO isn't going to stop until the feds get off their ass and start prosecuting these clowns.