I can see why it would legitimately bother others, though, particularly if they expected their posts to expire and disappear a week or two after they were written, and not to show up on a potential employer's report six years later.
What's the dividing line here? I assume a news server that holds posts for 6 days is okay. How about 6 weeks? 6 months? Storing posts for six years is just a difference in degree.
Claiming that people should have seen this coming and put "x-no-archive: yes" on everything they posted a decade ago is simply unrealistic.
People should have seen this coming and not posted anything they want to retain full copyright rights on to a network which, by design, republishes those posts to anyone who asks as well as to countless servers who don't ask. Your very NNTP headers could be interpreted (in fact, must be interpreted for news servers to operate correctly without breaking the law) as broad permission to copy and redistribute the post's contents, and I'd hate to be the author who tries to retroactively and arbitrarily limit that permission by suing a Usenet server.
(Of course, in practice if all you're concerned about is getting rid of your old messages rather than hurting Google, then Google does have a procedure for pulling your messages off of their server.)
You can make a similar argument for web caches now. Until a year or two ago, with things like the Wayback Machine and Google Cache coming up, a search engine was just a search engine, and always linked to your site. The need to use robots.txt to protect your material simply didn't exist on the same scale then.
I think the argument against web caches is much stronger, in fact. Is there anything in HTTP which has the same sense of being an implicit grant of permission and/or request to redistribute? I suspect that one of these days somebody will try and trump the spirit of the internet with the letter of the law in a copyright suit against someone like archive.org.
No license can be: the only way any SCO-owned code is going under the GPL is if SCO employees with the authority to do so specifically release it under that license. It'll be up to a court to decide whether leaving it on their webserver for months with the license attached "counts".
Now, granted, placing their code under the GPL may be the only way of keeping themselves in compiliance with the GPL for the code they sold and redistributed, and therefore the only way of protecting themselves from being sued for hundreds of thousands of counts of copyright infringement by each of hundreds of kernel developers, but for all we know they'll prefer the lawsuits.
As soon as we learned of the infringement in Linux, the code was immediately removed from our website and we thoughtfully warned the Linux community of the problem.
Their removal postdates their "thoughtful warnings" by months.
Only the copy of your ad on a user's computer was replaced, and since that replacement was done by software the user installed then that should be his prerogative. I doubt you have his signature on some contract requiring him to view your ads. The only grey area I see here is the "under the radar" installation of most of these software products, which means in practice that the user probably never intended to start switching around his ad banners, he just clicked "OK" on a EULA that said something about ad swapping on page 4.
A. Complaining that consumer technology is advancing too slowly: For instance, we've got DDR-II slowly trickling in, mostly on video cards. Why frickin' bother? Where's the goddamned MRAM? Where's our truly solid state hard drives?
B. Complaining that consumer technology is advancing too quickly: It really sucks to spend $100 on a great CD-R or something, only to see that same company put out something nearly twice as fast less than a year later.
IMHO this movie wasn't as good as T2, but it was better than the first Terminator, and what made most of the difference was that it could laugh at itself. Fumbling with car keys and blood splatters from off screen are a little cliched, but not exactly laughably bad images; the only real unintentional groaner was the "blow up ten supercomputers" line.
And the intentional humor more than made up for it. There were a couple failed tries ("She'll be back" was too obvious to be funny, for instance), but most of it came off well. Redoing the "naked Arnold walks into a bar to steal clothes" scene, but then tongue in cheek replacing the bar with a male strip club, was hilarious. The Terminator's exchanges with Kate managed to be witty without breaking character, as were the first few Terminatrix scenes.
T2 took some of this plot, but conveniently forgot that the humans were about to win, and created the second movie.
Humans were about to win in the "original" T1 timeline. (note that it can't be really "original", since the original timeline could have included a John Connor whose conception was the product of time travel) In the T2 timeline, the computers had the advantage of the "head start" that the Terminator's captured circuitry gave them, and so presumably had another chance to send back a time traveler. In the T3 timeline, presumably a side effect of the "delayed" Judgement Day was another opportunity.
AAMOF, with the destruction of the Terminator in T2, there are to be no systems left.
The systems destroyed in T2 delayed the invention of these self-aware computers, but didn't prevent them. Thanks to Moore's law, the superchips that people could have invented with help by 1997 were instead invented independently a few years later.
Okay, if I've done a little bit to soothe your plot holes, perhaps someone can help with one of mine:
If Skynet has no "central core", then what exactly is it that they were agonizing over hooking up to the internet when Kate's father finally typed 'Y'? And if this was the first access Skynet had to the internet, how did it manage to start some massive computer virus in the first place?
That was one of the little details that I liked: even though those two clueless cops didn't recognize that they were hauling an imposter, Kate stopped running toward it and realized she wasn't looking at her fiancee even before the change started.
Last time I checked, I didn't need to compile Office2000 from source, and it installed just by popping the CD in and answering a few questions. Can you say the same about Linux?
Yes, except I didn't need a CD (network download) and didn't have any questions to answer.
If you have any other queries or trolls, don't hesitate to ask.
Re:Personally involved in Oregon (portland) linux.
on
Ostrich Lessons In Oregon?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
We installed linux at a few schools anyway, on their network cores, only to come back later and see that the admins had come around and installed win2k right behind us.
You installed software (on "network cores", no less) behind the systems administrators' backs, and you were expecting something different to happen?
By documenting prior art, you can invalidate any patents filed later by third parties on the same technology.
By filing a defensive patent, you can negotiate against any patents filed later by third parties on different but still obvious (*cough* - 1-click anything - *cough*) technology.
Since the patent office seems to currently approve patents on "doing something people have done for centuries... but with a computer!" this may be necessary.
Of course, I'd want to see in writing something which grants open source software a perpetual license to use such patents, as opposed to say Red Hat's "we promise not to enforce our patents against free software unless someone buys us out or we change our minds" promise.
When I see something that costs $1.99, mind thinks "One hundred and ninety-nine". When I see something that costs $2.00, my mind thinks "Two". I can't imagine that I'm the only person with this reaction, either. I'd like to know if there have been any sort of rigorous studies done to show which sorts of prices people perceive as being higher.
No, it isn't. Only one side of that limit is infinity; to see the other side (assuming n is positive) try evaluating at x = -.1, -.01, -.001, etc. Then the limit is negative infinity.
If you try to put those both together into a normal limit expression, you can form series with no upper bound, series with no lower bound, and series with neither. It doesn't get much more undefined than that.
Has anyone ever known a cause so perfect (much less a cause like "computer technology evangelism") that it didn't have at least a few vocal morons supporting it?
And frankly, I wonder why they're not doing it already. Red Hat has always been fine with adding non-free CDs to their distribution (to the boxed sets, anyway, not available for download), and it seems like these would be good things they could add for no additional price.
Red Hat would have to make people click through the JVM license before they even downloaded the CD.
The practical reason for this is that people assume that Linux is all open source, so they can make copies of Red Hat CDs for friends, put Red Hat CDs up on P2P networks, etc.; closed source licenses may not permit that. (Java's license doesn't).
The legal reason for this is that some closed source licenses even try to take away rights that you would normally have under copyright law! The license on the J2RE 1.4.1 download at sun.com, in particular, includes this popular odious clause:
Unless enforcement is prohibited by applicable law, you may not modify, decompile, or reverse engineer Software.
That's the sort of thing you need to make people agree to before download, if you want it to be enforceable.
For one last practical reason behind Red Hat's policy, multiply this restriction by 20, as everybody has to click through the individual license for every single piece of non-free software on the CD. At least with Windows you usually buy your software one EULA at a time, so it's less annoying.
Unfortunately, it's probably too late to make the rest of the world start using it. Go to any large PC dealer's homepage (I picked Dell to verify my "workstations can cost less than $3000" claim) and see whether or not they claim to also be selling workstations.
They're not referring to tritium; they're referring to He3, a helium isotope. The solar wind has been spraying it out for billions of years, but it's too light for the Earth's atmosphere to hold. The moon has even lower gravity, but apparantly Helium 3 gets stuck in the surface rock there.
If a random stranger off the internet can download an entire copyrighted song from you, you're hardly within your fair use rights, are you? All the FBI has to do is connect to file sharing networks themselves and download+save the copyrighted data as evidence. The only hard part is then tying an IP address to a prosecutable person.
If they enforced this in the right way: at least 10% of the largest violators caught and subjected to a few hundreds of dollars of fines, like speeding tickets, then I'd be in favor of it. Note that for this to be reasonable a "violator" is someone who is actually uploading and downloading large amounts of copyrighted data, and NOT someone like Napster that maintains filename indices or someone like the RPI student who just wrote a freaking search engine.
Of course, I don't expect them to police things that way: judging by events so far we'll see random identification of just a few violators, but with life-destroying punishments ranging from multi thousand dollar fines to jail time.
If Hatch had his way, how many innocent people would have their computers destroyed because their children, employees, friends, and neighbors decided to illegally download some MP3s onto their computer?
Yahoo Finance reports the book value of SCOX as $0.67 per share, or roughly $8 million dollars. (Note: yes, this is about 6% of their stock prices, and yes, I am really ticked that my stock market accounts don't let me sell short)
So how did they blow $270 million in three years? Did Microsoft bounce its settlement check or something?
Not looking at their source code would simply perpetuate the idea that there is something magical about software copyright that isn't the same as literature copyright, music copyright, etc. If you're a writer, do you avoid reading any material written by someone else? If you're a musician, are you afraid to listen to anyone else's copyrighted song? Of course not. As a programmer you shouldn't have to be afraid of these things either.
Ironically, this idea is exactly what SCO would like to encourage: they don't just want to be able to sue anyone who copies what they've written, they want to sue anyone who writes an original implementation of the same solution, or even someone who writes a different solution to the same problem!
SCO claims no ownership interest in any portion of such a modification or DERIVED BINARY PRODUCT that is not part of a SOURCE CODE PRODUCT.
If I'm reading this right, then even if IBM did manage to get themselves into a stupid "we have rights to any operating system code you write after looking at our SysV code" contract with AT&T, it should be superceded by the "any modified code you write that isn't part of our original code isn't ours" contract that SCO offered everyone later.
Slashdot Mirror
I can see why it would legitimately bother others, though, particularly if they expected their posts to expire and disappear a week or two after they were written, and not to show up on a potential employer's report six years later.
What's the dividing line here? I assume a news server that holds posts for 6 days is okay. How about 6 weeks? 6 months? Storing posts for six years is just a difference in degree.
Claiming that people should have seen this coming and put "x-no-archive: yes" on everything they posted a decade ago is simply unrealistic.
People should have seen this coming and not posted anything they want to retain full copyright rights on to a network which, by design, republishes those posts to anyone who asks as well as to countless servers who don't ask. Your very NNTP headers could be interpreted (in fact, must be interpreted for news servers to operate correctly without breaking the law) as broad permission to copy and redistribute the post's contents, and I'd hate to be the author who tries to retroactively and arbitrarily limit that permission by suing a Usenet server.
(Of course, in practice if all you're concerned about is getting rid of your old messages rather than hurting Google, then Google does have a procedure for pulling your messages off of their server.)
You can make a similar argument for web caches now. Until a year or two ago, with things like the Wayback Machine and Google Cache coming up, a search engine was just a search engine, and always linked to your site. The need to use robots.txt to protect your material simply didn't exist on the same scale then.
I think the argument against web caches is much stronger, in fact. Is there anything in HTTP which has the same sense of being an implicit grant of permission and/or request to redistribute? I suspect that one of these days somebody will try and trump the spirit of the internet with the letter of the law in a copyright suit against someone like archive.org.
No license can be: the only way any SCO-owned code is going under the GPL is if SCO employees with the authority to do so specifically release it under that license. It'll be up to a court to decide whether leaving it on their webserver for months with the license attached "counts".
Now, granted, placing their code under the GPL may be the only way of keeping themselves in compiliance with the GPL for the code they sold and redistributed, and therefore the only way of protecting themselves from being sued for hundreds of thousands of counts of copyright infringement by each of hundreds of kernel developers, but for all we know they'll prefer the lawsuits.
As soon as we learned of the infringement in Linux, the code was immediately removed from our website and we thoughtfully warned the Linux community of the problem.
Their removal postdates their "thoughtful warnings" by months.
Only the copy of your ad on a user's computer was replaced, and since that replacement was done by software the user installed then that should be his prerogative. I doubt you have his signature on some contract requiring him to view your ads. The only grey area I see here is the "under the radar" installation of most of these software products, which means in practice that the user probably never intended to start switching around his ad banners, he just clicked "OK" on a EULA that said something about ad swapping on page 4.
Which of the following is inconsistent?
A. Complaining that consumer technology is advancing too slowly:
For instance, we've got DDR-II slowly trickling in, mostly on video cards. Why frickin' bother?
Where's the goddamned MRAM? Where's our truly solid state hard drives?
B. Complaining that consumer technology is advancing too quickly:
It really sucks to spend $100 on a great CD-R or something, only to see that same company put out something nearly twice as fast less than a year later.
C. Doing both at once.
IMHO this movie wasn't as good as T2, but it was better than the first Terminator, and what made most of the difference was that it could laugh at itself. Fumbling with car keys and blood splatters from off screen are a little cliched, but not exactly laughably bad images; the only real unintentional groaner was the "blow up ten supercomputers" line.
And the intentional humor more than made up for it. There were a couple failed tries ("She'll be back" was too obvious to be funny, for instance), but most of it came off well. Redoing the "naked Arnold walks into a bar to steal clothes" scene, but then tongue in cheek replacing the bar with a male strip club, was hilarious. The Terminator's exchanges with Kate managed to be witty without breaking character, as were the first few Terminatrix scenes.
T2 took some of this plot, but conveniently forgot that the humans were about to win, and created the second movie.
Humans were about to win in the "original" T1 timeline. (note that it can't be really "original", since the original timeline could have included a John Connor whose conception was the product of time travel) In the T2 timeline, the computers had the advantage of the "head start" that the Terminator's captured circuitry gave them, and so presumably had another chance to send back a time traveler. In the T3 timeline, presumably a side effect of the "delayed" Judgement Day was another opportunity.
AAMOF, with the destruction of the Terminator in T2, there are to be no systems left.
The systems destroyed in T2 delayed the invention of these self-aware computers, but didn't prevent them. Thanks to Moore's law, the superchips that people could have invented with help by 1997 were instead invented independently a few years later.
Okay, if I've done a little bit to soothe your plot holes, perhaps someone can help with one of mine:
If Skynet has no "central core", then what exactly is it that they were agonizing over hooking up to the internet when Kate's father finally typed 'Y'? And if this was the first access Skynet had to the internet, how did it manage to start some massive computer virus in the first place?
That was one of the little details that I liked: even though those two clueless cops didn't recognize that they were hauling an imposter, Kate stopped running toward it and realized she wasn't looking at her fiancee even before the change started.
Last time I checked, I didn't need to compile Office2000 from source, and it installed just by popping the CD in and answering a few questions. Can you say the same about Linux?
Yes, except I didn't need a CD (network download) and didn't have any questions to answer.
If you have any other queries or trolls, don't hesitate to ask.
We installed linux at a few schools anyway, on their network cores, only to come back later and see that the admins had come around and installed win2k right behind us.
You installed software (on "network cores", no less) behind the systems administrators' backs, and you were expecting something different to happen?
By documenting prior art, you can invalidate any patents filed later by third parties on the same technology.
By filing a defensive patent, you can negotiate against any patents filed later by third parties on different but still obvious (*cough* - 1-click anything - *cough*) technology.
Since the patent office seems to currently approve patents on "doing something people have done for centuries... but with a computer!" this may be necessary.
Of course, I'd want to see in writing something which grants open source software a perpetual license to use such patents, as opposed to say Red Hat's "we promise not to enforce our patents against free software unless someone buys us out or we change our minds" promise.
When I see something that costs $1.99, mind thinks "One hundred and ninety-nine". When I see something that costs $2.00, my mind thinks "Two". I can't imagine that I'm the only person with this reaction, either. I'd like to know if there have been any sort of rigorous studies done to show which sorts of prices people perceive as being higher.
The limit as x approaches 0 of n/x is inifinity.
No, it isn't. Only one side of that limit is infinity; to see the other side (assuming n is positive) try evaluating at x = -.1, -.01, -.001, etc. Then the limit is negative infinity.
If you try to put those both together into a normal limit expression, you can form series with no upper bound, series with no lower bound, and series with neither. It doesn't get much more undefined than that.
Has anyone ever known a cause so perfect (much less a cause like "computer technology evangelism") that it didn't have at least a few vocal morons supporting it?
And frankly, I wonder why they're not doing it already. Red Hat has always been fine with adding non-free CDs to their distribution (to the boxed sets, anyway, not available for download), and it seems like these would be good things they could add for no additional price.
Red Hat would have to make people click through the JVM license before they even downloaded the CD.
The practical reason for this is that people assume that Linux is all open source, so they can make copies of Red Hat CDs for friends, put Red Hat CDs up on P2P networks, etc.; closed source licenses may not permit that. (Java's license doesn't).
The legal reason for this is that some closed source licenses even try to take away rights that you would normally have under copyright law! The license on the J2RE 1.4.1 download at sun.com, in particular, includes this popular odious clause:
Unless enforcement is prohibited by applicable law, you may not modify, decompile, or reverse engineer Software.
That's the sort of thing you need to make people agree to before download, if you want it to be enforceable.
For one last practical reason behind Red Hat's policy, multiply this restriction by 20, as everybody has to click through the individual license for every single piece of non-free software on the CD. At least with Windows you usually buy your software one EULA at a time, so it's less annoying.
Unfortunately, it's probably too late to make the rest of the world start using it. Go to any large PC dealer's homepage (I picked Dell to verify my "workstations can cost less than $3000" claim) and see whether or not they claim to also be selling workstations.
What is a "workstation" other than a higher price (and yes, $3000 qualifies these days) and higher performance desktop?
They're not referring to tritium; they're referring to He3, a helium isotope. The solar wind has been spraying it out for billions of years, but it's too light for the Earth's atmosphere to hold. The moon has even lower gravity, but apparantly Helium 3 gets stuck in the surface rock there.
If a random stranger off the internet can download an entire copyrighted song from you, you're hardly within your fair use rights, are you? All the FBI has to do is connect to file sharing networks themselves and download+save the copyrighted data as evidence. The only hard part is then tying an IP address to a prosecutable person.
If they enforced this in the right way: at least 10% of the largest violators caught and subjected to a few hundreds of dollars of fines, like speeding tickets, then I'd be in favor of it. Note that for this to be reasonable a "violator" is someone who is actually uploading and downloading large amounts of copyrighted data, and NOT someone like Napster that maintains filename indices or someone like the RPI student who just wrote a freaking search engine.
Of course, I don't expect them to police things that way: judging by events so far we'll see random identification of just a few violators, but with life-destroying punishments ranging from multi thousand dollar fines to jail time.
If Hatch had his way, how many innocent people would have their computers destroyed because their children, employees, friends, and neighbors decided to illegally download some MP3s onto their computer?
Whoops; I need to read more carefully.
Yahoo Finance reports the book value of SCOX as $0.67 per share, or roughly $8 million dollars. (Note: yes, this is about 6% of their stock prices, and yes, I am really ticked that my stock market accounts don't let me sell short)
So how did they blow $270 million in three years? Did Microsoft bounce its settlement check or something?
Not looking at their source code would simply perpetuate the idea that there is something magical about software copyright that isn't the same as literature copyright, music copyright, etc. If you're a writer, do you avoid reading any material written by someone else? If you're a musician, are you afraid to listen to anyone else's copyrighted song? Of course not. As a programmer you shouldn't have to be afraid of these things either.
Ironically, this idea is exactly what SCO would like to encourage: they don't just want to be able to sue anyone who copies what they've written, they want to sue anyone who writes an original implementation of the same solution, or even someone who writes a different solution to the same problem!
SCO claims no ownership interest in any portion of such a modification or DERIVED BINARY PRODUCT that is not part of a SOURCE CODE PRODUCT.
If I'm reading this right, then even if IBM did manage to get themselves into a stupid "we have rights to any operating system code you write after looking at our SysV code" contract with AT&T, it should be superceded by the "any modified code you write that isn't part of our original code isn't ours" contract that SCO offered everyone later.