Before, I was expecting them to claim, "Gee, Your Honor, we had simply forgotten to take those files off of our servers! Whoops!" if they ever got called into court for copyright violation by any kernel contributors. Now, though, they've proven that they're aware of the files they're distributing and that they're continuing to do so deliberately. Here's hoping it doesn't take too long before some of the 400 people in/usr/src/linux/CREDITS whose copyrights SCO is violating start suing their asses.
Remember, this is SCO we're talking about - they view contracts as weapons to be used against their business partners, and have even said so to the media.
It's not even enough to read the contract carefully before signing, since you can't be sure that they won't have some interpretation of a term like "derivative work" that has nothing to do with the law but that will give them incentive to fire off another lawsuit anyways.
Because at least five SCO executives need to go to jail for stock manipulation and fraud, and spend the next ten years as some bad men's wives?
But more seriously: How many lawsuits do you think IBM would be hit with in the next decade, if they were to reward this sort of behavior? SCO so far has made two basic claims: that anything IBM ever wrote and distributed with AIX is now a "derivative work" and belongs to SCO, and that Linux has a few copied lines of code which can only be identified in secret presentations that make it impossible to check which direction any copying went in.
There are probably hundreds of small companies that could make equally ridiculous claims and wild threats against IBM. If those companies believe that they'd have to actually win a case in court, then they won't even try. If, however, they believe that they can just make a lot of noise and get bought out for ten times what they're worth, then the ink won't even be wet on IBM's check for SCO before other moneygrubbers start getting in on the action.
About five years ago I configured my computer to automount floppies and CD-ROMs when their mount point was accessed, to not cache writes to the floppy drive, and to autounmount those media a few seconds after the last access to their mount point stops. It's been working like I like it ever since.
I'm occasionally stunned, after all that time, to see how many distributions are still fiddling with KDE or Gnome CD-watching daemons, special kernel patches, etc. to try and get reasonable behavior out of removeable media without just putting a couple lines in the config files for autofs.
I hope that this post was modded "Interesting" as in a "Look at that hobo with the tin-foil hat shouting about John Lennon and the KGB. Isn't that interesting." sort of way.
Yeah, you tell him! It makes much more sense to believe that Microsoft would shell out millions of dollars to SCO for a vague "intellectual property license" they won't need then to believe that they would do so as an attempt to fund an attack on some of their major competitors.
Yes, it is true. You can distribute it to whoever you want in both Original and Digested form, and are allowed to charge a modest distribution fee for this service.
Not so fast. KFC has claimed that one of their secret herbs and spices was used in the preparation of the food at this picnic, and so you will need to pay their family meal price for every plate that you eat. They won't tell you which spice it is, so the picnic organizers can't change their recipes, but they have mentioned owning "pepper" and "paprika", despite having never actually grown any herbs themselves.
Sure, it's easy for companies to see open source as a platform or environment for their products, but what happens when open source starts to move into their territory?
They either freak out and commit SCOicide, or they try and find more territory.
So far Oracle seems to have been doing the latter. It's not as if there aren't any open source databases, it's just that people trust Oracle to provide features and performance beyond what the alternatives currently deliver. If the alternatives catch up, then Oracle will have to produce something else to make their products more valuable.
And really, is there anything wrong with that? It isn't exactly common economic practice to make a product once and then expect to sell the same product over and over again until the end of time. The Econ 101 rule that price tends toward marginal cost is oversimplified, but it's not that far off, and with software your marginal cost is zero. Even if you never had price warring competitors or open source alternatives to worry about, eventually you run out of customers, who don't need to purchase your product twice because it never wears out.
I would have expected someone else to mention this already, but I don't see it among the high-scoring posts, so let me spread the meme:
First, as some people have pointed out, open source is not a magic bullet or even close to being a sufficient solution for preventing election tampering. Even if you know that the published voting machine source code is secure (and it will be a lot harder to verify this in a situation where the coders may have a huge incentive to insert accidental-appearing back doors deliberately) you still have to make sure that the hardware has no back doors, that the compiler has no back doors, that the computers used to load the software onto the voting machines have no back doors... it's just not feasable to make a trustworthy system that can do all that. We'd be better off sticking with paper.
But now that meme I was getting to: we'd be best off combining electronic voting with paper. The obvious way to do so is with paper ballots designed for optically scanned counting (which would give fast results but still leave a paper trail to settle disputes), but cryptographer types have come up with better ideas still. The best system I've seen so far is at vreceipt.com, which lets you verify that your vote was included in the total (but in a way that makes it impossible for anyone else to know who you voted for), and makes it impossible to alter any counted votes (or to add new votes, assuming independent observers are making sure that polling places aren't padding their numbers) or count them inaccurately without a 1-2^bignum chance of being caught. It is possible to obtain election results in a way that prevents tampering but is more convenient and reliable than counting paper ballots. Perhaps it's too early to hold our elected officials over the coals until they implement such a system, but for now we can at least spread the word that such things exist and that for some reason a few people are trying to push tamper-prone closed systems on us instead.
Its descent from a pre-eminent power started in the late Qing Dynasty which was in 1840.
Yes, but that descent was probably hastened because for some reason China had been completely economically and politically cut off from the millions of Chinese colonists who had beaten the Europeans to the Americas back when China had been a pre-eminent power along with the European empires.
What's that you say? There were no such colonists? Well, that explains a little more then.
with computer skills but no prior experience with Linux or Windows XP
In other words, unless they were running these tests for months, this was a "learnability" test, which measured how productive you will be with your computer for the first few days you use it. Unless you're only planning to use the computer for a few days (and other than offices who hire a lot of temps I don't think this is a very common situation) this probably isn't the best measurement to optimize for.
It's the easiest measurement for computer magazines to make, though, so it's probably the closest thing to actual "usability testing" we'll ever see, and it's better than nothing. I just worry that it will lead to companies improving learnability at the expense of useability. It reminds me of the way commercial Linux distributions at one time seemed to be competing to have the easiest damn installation in the world at the expense of post-installation config tools, because all the "reviews" of different Linux distributions stopped shortly after the installation was over.
But seriously, would it kill the poster to include the tiny little fact that gcj stands for "Gnu Compiler for Java?"
Probably not. Nor would it have kill him to explain that a compiler turns source code into a binary executable for a particular architecture, or that IDE stands for Integrated Development Environment, or that a JVM is a Java Virtual Machine, or that RPM stands for Redhat Package Manager, or that GTK+ stands for GIMP ToolKit, or that now it is now used for far more than just GIMP, or that GIMP stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program, or that the included acronym stands for Gnu's Not Unix, or that GNU is a project to write free implementations of operating system components derived around the POSIX model, or that POSIX is a collection of operating system standards based around tradional Unix interfaces.
Doing all of these at once, however, would probably piss everyone off. Explaining just the particular missing piece of information that a specific reader is going to need would be better, but would require Slashdot readers to be more homogenous and Slashdot posters to be more psychic than they are.
The compromise, wherein the word "gcj" is linked to a web page entitled "The GNU compiler for Java", seems to be hard to improve upon.
I've been playing on the Foresight Exchange for a couple months now, and while it's no crystal ball it's an interesting way of making public polls that are weighted both towards how successful a prognosticator a respondant is and how strongly he feels about a particular issue. I'd expect that adding money to the mix in the case of terrorism forecasts would both make the game "more serious" and allow it to act as a sort of anti-terrorism insurance.
What I couldn't believe was that this was the mistake that forced Poindexter to resign! The man waded through Iran-Contra, tried to create Big Brother, but now he's finally getting pensioned off because he wanted to start an idea futures market? That's just weird.
That leaves us with an extremely young child with poor judgment in an uncompensable situation just because someone likes to maintain a rollercoaster in his yard
To make this sentence correct, the word "just" needs to be deleted and the words "and because someone else likes to let their kids run around other peoples' yards unsupervised" added.
It is not the parent's lawsuit -- it is the child's lawsuit.
If it were really the child's lawsuit, then:
The damages would only be taken from the maintainer of the "attractive nuisance" after the parents had demonstrated an inability to pay.
They would be placed in a trust for the child that his guardians could only touch to cover medical bills.
The child would be placed in a foster family away from those parents, who, even if there were no backyard roller coasters, may be unable to successfully raise children in a world with operating railroads, roads full of fast cars, alleys full of junkies and muggers, and all sorts of other dangers that can be lethal to young children running around public (not to mention private) property unsupervised.
The problem with trying to analyze why religions were "made up" and what social purposes (deterrence, discrimination, thought control, etc.) they are used for is that it ignores the possibility that there actually is a God, and that which we call "religion" came to exist as a result of God's revelation of himself, not as a result of random guesses or evil conspiracies.
If that possibility is true, it just means that trying to analyze why one particular religion was "made up" would be pointless, but all the others are still fair game.
What kind of CPU would you need to encrypt 2 MegaPixels of data in a decent amount of time with public key algorithms?
A fast one, but that's not what you'd do. You'd encrypt a random 128-bit key with the public key algorithm, then use the key to encrypt the image with a fast symmetric algorithm. Even PC public key programs generally work that way.
Installing Windows requires that someone (not necessarily the computer owner, not necessarily even an adult capable of entering into any contract) a button on a dialog box...
I hit Preview on this, but hadn't noticed that I'd managed to drop a out of the sentence anyway. Oh, well, I think it's still obvious which word I.
unless you have XP installed and running in which case you already accepted it
Installing Windows requires that someone (not necessarily the computer owner, not necessarily even an adult capable of entering into any contract) a button on a dialog box that claims to impose on you restrictions on a product after you've already bought and paid for it and for for no additional consideration to you. Maybe that's legally binding, but I'd want to see the court cases upholding it before I paid much attention.
You're right about the problem: even with open source there's no good way for Joe Voter to be certain that the code running on his voting machine is exactly the same as the code he can pull down off some website, and hasn't been tampered with (or subverted in hardware) anywhere along the way.
If you want to see an even better system than randomly unique numbers, though, check out the paper at vreceipt.com. Not only can voters in this guy's system know their vote was tampered with, but they can prove it with their cryptographically signed receipt. Better, still, even though you can use the receipt to prove that your vote was recorded accurately, nobody else can use your receipt to tell what your vote was (and pay you for it, blackmail you about it, or in any other way violate the secret ballot concept).
You'd still need people in the polling places to make sure the number of votes reported matches the number of people who walk into booths, but that's not so hard.
I mean, if there's one country we can count on to resist pressure to place their population's property under a system enforcing centralized control, it's China!
no, I don't buy the "you've given implicit agreement" arguments for a second
So do you think people should be able to sue any Usenet server in the world for copying their posts without explicit permission, or just Google? If the answer is "just Google", then please explain what attributes of Google take away from them the permission that every other news server has.
Slashdot Mirror
Before, I was expecting them to claim, "Gee, Your Honor, we had simply forgotten to take those files off of our servers! Whoops!" if they ever got called into court for copyright violation by any kernel contributors. Now, though, they've proven that they're aware of the files they're distributing and that they're continuing to do so deliberately. Here's hoping it doesn't take too long before some of the 400 people in /usr/src/linux/CREDITS whose copyrights SCO is violating start suing their asses.
Remember, this is SCO we're talking about - they view contracts as weapons to be used against their business partners, and have even said so to the media.
It's not even enough to read the contract carefully before signing, since you can't be sure that they won't have some interpretation of a term like "derivative work" that has nothing to do with the law but that will give them incentive to fire off another lawsuit anyways.
Because at least five SCO executives need to go to jail for stock manipulation and fraud, and spend the next ten years as some bad men's wives?
But more seriously: How many lawsuits do you think IBM would be hit with in the next decade, if they were to reward this sort of behavior? SCO so far has made two basic claims: that anything IBM ever wrote and distributed with AIX is now a "derivative work" and belongs to SCO, and that Linux has a few copied lines of code which can only be identified in secret presentations that make it impossible to check which direction any copying went in.
There are probably hundreds of small companies that could make equally ridiculous claims and wild threats against IBM. If those companies believe that they'd have to actually win a case in court, then they won't even try. If, however, they believe that they can just make a lot of noise and get bought out for ten times what they're worth, then the ink won't even be wet on IBM's check for SCO before other moneygrubbers start getting in on the action.
About five years ago I configured my computer to automount floppies and CD-ROMs when their mount point was accessed, to not cache writes to the floppy drive, and to autounmount those media a few seconds after the last access to their mount point stops. It's been working like I like it ever since.
I'm occasionally stunned, after all that time, to see how many distributions are still fiddling with KDE or Gnome CD-watching daemons, special kernel patches, etc. to try and get reasonable behavior out of removeable media without just putting a couple lines in the config files for autofs.
I hope that this post was modded "Interesting" as in a "Look at that hobo with the tin-foil hat shouting about John Lennon and the KGB. Isn't that interesting." sort of way.
Yeah, you tell him! It makes much more sense to believe that Microsoft would shell out millions of dollars to SCO for a vague "intellectual property license" they won't need then to believe that they would do so as an attempt to fund an attack on some of their major competitors.
Yes, it is true. You can distribute it to whoever you want in both Original and Digested form, and are allowed to charge a modest distribution fee for this service.
Not so fast. KFC has claimed that one of their secret herbs and spices was used in the preparation of the food at this picnic, and so you will need to pay their family meal price for every plate that you eat. They won't tell you which spice it is, so the picnic organizers can't change their recipes, but they have mentioned owning "pepper" and "paprika", despite having never actually grown any herbs themselves.
Die SCO, die. Spare us from all the lame jokes...
Don't get your hopes up.
Sure, it's easy for companies to see open source as a platform or environment for their products, but what happens when open source starts to move into their territory?
They either freak out and commit SCOicide, or they try and find more territory.
So far Oracle seems to have been doing the latter. It's not as if there aren't any open source databases, it's just that people trust Oracle to provide features and performance beyond what the alternatives currently deliver. If the alternatives catch up, then Oracle will have to produce something else to make their products more valuable.
And really, is there anything wrong with that? It isn't exactly common economic practice to make a product once and then expect to sell the same product over and over again until the end of time. The Econ 101 rule that price tends toward marginal cost is oversimplified, but it's not that far off, and with software your marginal cost is zero. Even if you never had price warring competitors or open source alternatives to worry about, eventually you run out of customers, who don't need to purchase your product twice because it never wears out.
You'll want to check out their thoughts on tax shelters in MMORPGs and the risks involved.
I would have expected someone else to mention this already, but I don't see it among the high-scoring posts, so let me spread the meme:
First, as some people have pointed out, open source is not a magic bullet or even close to being a sufficient solution for preventing election tampering. Even if you know that the published voting machine source code is secure (and it will be a lot harder to verify this in a situation where the coders may have a huge incentive to insert accidental-appearing back doors deliberately) you still have to make sure that the hardware has no back doors, that the compiler has no back doors, that the computers used to load the software onto the voting machines have no back doors... it's just not feasable to make a trustworthy system that can do all that. We'd be better off sticking with paper.
But now that meme I was getting to: we'd be best off combining electronic voting with paper. The obvious way to do so is with paper ballots designed for optically scanned counting (which would give fast results but still leave a paper trail to settle disputes), but cryptographer types have come up with better ideas still. The best system I've seen so far is at vreceipt.com, which lets you verify that your vote was included in the total (but in a way that makes it impossible for anyone else to know who you voted for), and makes it impossible to alter any counted votes (or to add new votes, assuming independent observers are making sure that polling places aren't padding their numbers) or count them inaccurately without a 1-2^bignum chance of being caught.
It is possible to obtain election results in a way that prevents tampering but is more convenient and reliable than counting paper ballots. Perhaps it's too early to hold our elected officials over the coals until they implement such a system, but for now we can at least spread the word that such things exist and that for some reason a few people are trying to push tamper-prone closed systems on us instead.
Its descent from a pre-eminent power started in the late Qing Dynasty which was in 1840.
Yes, but that descent was probably hastened because for some reason China had been completely economically and politically cut off from the millions of Chinese colonists who had beaten the Europeans to the Americas back when China had been a pre-eminent power along with the European empires.
What's that you say? There were no such colonists? Well, that explains a little more then.
The key phrase is here:
with computer skills but no prior experience with Linux or Windows XP
In other words, unless they were running these tests for months, this was a "learnability" test, which measured how productive you will be with your computer for the first few days you use it. Unless you're only planning to use the computer for a few days (and other than offices who hire a lot of temps I don't think this is a very common situation) this probably isn't the best measurement to optimize for.
It's the easiest measurement for computer magazines to make, though, so it's probably the closest thing to actual "usability testing" we'll ever see, and it's better than nothing. I just worry that it will lead to companies improving learnability at the expense of useability. It reminds me of the way commercial Linux distributions at one time seemed to be competing to have the easiest damn installation in the world at the expense of post-installation config tools, because all the "reviews" of different Linux distributions stopped shortly after the installation was over.
But seriously, would it kill the poster to include the tiny little fact that gcj stands for "Gnu Compiler for Java?"
Probably not. Nor would it have kill him to explain that a compiler turns source code into a binary executable for a particular architecture, or that IDE stands for Integrated Development Environment, or that a JVM is a Java Virtual Machine, or that RPM stands for Redhat Package Manager, or that GTK+ stands for GIMP ToolKit, or that now it is now used for far more than just GIMP, or that GIMP stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program, or that the included acronym stands for Gnu's Not Unix, or that GNU is a project to write free implementations of operating system components derived around the POSIX model, or that POSIX is a collection of operating system standards based around tradional Unix interfaces.
Doing all of these at once, however, would probably piss everyone off. Explaining just the particular missing piece of information that a specific reader is going to need would be better, but would require Slashdot readers to be more homogenous and Slashdot posters to be more psychic than they are.
The compromise, wherein the word "gcj" is linked to a web page entitled "The GNU compiler for Java", seems to be hard to improve upon.
I've been playing on the Foresight Exchange for a couple months now, and while it's no crystal ball it's an interesting way of making public polls that are weighted both towards how successful a prognosticator a respondant is and how strongly he feels about a particular issue. I'd expect that adding money to the mix in the case of terrorism forecasts would both make the game "more serious" and allow it to act as a sort of anti-terrorism insurance.
What I couldn't believe was that this was the mistake that forced Poindexter to resign! The man waded through Iran-Contra, tried to create Big Brother, but now he's finally getting pensioned off because he wanted to start an idea futures market? That's just weird.
That leaves us with an extremely young child with poor judgment in an uncompensable situation just because someone likes to maintain a rollercoaster in his yard
To make this sentence correct, the word "just" needs to be deleted and the words "and because someone else likes to let their kids run around other peoples' yards unsupervised" added.
It is not the parent's lawsuit -- it is the child's lawsuit.
If it were really the child's lawsuit, then:
The damages would only be taken from the maintainer of the "attractive nuisance" after the parents had demonstrated an inability to pay.
They would be placed in a trust for the child that his guardians could only touch to cover medical bills.
The child would be placed in a foster family away from those parents, who, even if there were no backyard roller coasters, may be unable to successfully raise children in a world with operating railroads, roads full of fast cars, alleys full of junkies and muggers, and all sorts of other dangers that can be lethal to young children running around public (not to mention private) property unsupervised.
The problem with trying to analyze why religions were "made up" and what social purposes (deterrence, discrimination, thought control, etc.) they are used for is that it ignores the possibility that there actually is a God, and that which we call "religion" came to exist as a result of God's revelation of himself, not as a result of random guesses or evil conspiracies.
If that possibility is true, it just means that trying to analyze why one particular religion was "made up" would be pointless, but all the others are still fair game.
But I don't see anyone complaining that the OSDL certainly has a vested interested here and is hardly to be expected to provide an unbiased report.
I do. His username is "grennis".
ftp://ftp.caldera.com/pub/updates/OpenLinux/3.1.1/ Server/CSSA-2003-020.0/SRPMS/
It's not as recent as the 2.4.19 kernel they're distributing, but this one does have source code and GPL license included.
What kind of CPU would you need to encrypt 2 MegaPixels of data in a decent amount of time with public key algorithms?
A fast one, but that's not what you'd do. You'd encrypt a random 128-bit key with the public key algorithm, then use the key to encrypt the image with a fast symmetric algorithm. Even PC public key programs generally work that way.
If they encrypt with a public key then they might as well not encrypt.
Google is your friend.
Doofus.
And it sounds like you need all the friends you can get.
Installing Windows requires that someone (not necessarily the computer owner, not necessarily even an adult capable of entering into any contract) a button on a dialog box...
I hit Preview on this, but hadn't noticed that I'd managed to drop a out of the sentence anyway. Oh, well, I think it's still obvious which word I.
unless you have XP installed and running in which case you already accepted it
Installing Windows requires that someone (not necessarily the computer owner, not necessarily even an adult capable of entering into any contract) a button on a dialog box that claims to impose on you restrictions on a product after you've already bought and paid for it and for for no additional consideration to you. Maybe that's legally binding, but I'd want to see the court cases upholding it before I paid much attention.
You're right about the problem: even with open source there's no good way for Joe Voter to be certain that the code running on his voting machine is exactly the same as the code he can pull down off some website, and hasn't been tampered with (or subverted in hardware) anywhere along the way.
If you want to see an even better system than randomly unique numbers, though, check out the paper at vreceipt.com. Not only can voters in this guy's system know their vote was tampered with, but they can prove it with their cryptographically signed receipt. Better, still, even though you can use the receipt to prove that your vote was recorded accurately, nobody else can use your receipt to tell what your vote was (and pay you for it, blackmail you about it, or in any other way violate the secret ballot concept).
You'd still need people in the polling places to make sure the number of votes reported matches the number of people who walk into booths, but that's not so hard.
I mean, if there's one country we can count on to resist pressure to place their population's property under a system enforcing centralized control, it's China!
no, I don't buy the "you've given implicit agreement" arguments for a second
So do you think people should be able to sue any Usenet server in the world for copying their posts without explicit permission, or just Google? If the answer is "just Google", then please explain what attributes of Google take away from them the permission that every other news server has.
It's still there.
For some reason I'd thought they named the RPM "kernel" like Red Hat does, so my search for ker* didn't bring up a "linux-2.4..." RPM.