" How about if made by a famous woman named Mercedes? "
She would most likely lose. For example there was a guy named Tim Allen who created a web site called timallen.com. Tim Allen the comedian and actor sued tim allen (lowercase) and won the rights to "his" name and the domain.
Why is Tim Allen the real Tim Allen and tim allen not the real Tim Allen? Because he has more money and more fame that's why. Anbody else who is named Tim Allen does not have the rights to that name whether they were born before or after the real Tim Allen.
"From that viewpoint going with Microsoft sounds like the smart thing to do. "
An alliance with Microsoft always looks good on paper. It's probably pretty good financially too until the day MS stabs you in the back and takes off with you technology or customers.
A few years ago most of the hospitals and schools in the US were running on unix boxes and mainframes with dumb or X terminals. Then somebody made the fateful decision to get rid of all those terminals and install windows instead.
Chances are very good that the person who made that decision is still in the same position. To now make a decision to move away from windows would be like admitting that you were wrong when you made a decision to move to windows in the first place. A CIO would rather die then to lose face like that.
American schools and hospitals will not even condier switching unless there is a turnover in the CIO position.
I don't think anybody argues that MS office is higher quality. The question is this. "Is it worth the extra quality?" In other words "is OO good enough for me to save a couple of hundred thousand dollars with?"
"but I get the feeling that nothing will make you even consider the alternatives. And that's kind of sad."
There is nothing sadder and a corporate apologist. When I was in High school many many years ago there were people who used to wear Nike shirts and shoes and thought they were superior to people wearing any other brand of shoes. There were guys who would pledge allegience to Ford or Chevy and put little bumber stickers on their cars denigrating the other manufacturer.
I always thought these people were suckers. Dupes who provided free advertising to big corporations for free. I never understood their motives nor did I ever ask. So let me ask you? why are you here astro turfing for MS? What do you get out of it? Does MS really need your help in defending themselves against little old me? Don't they already have a PR dept which spends millions of dollars a year on advertising?
BTW if your canned answer is that you fight FUD please provide a link to a post you made on gotdotnet.com or microsoft.com forums where you attacked MS fanboys for spreading FUD against linux.
"Microsoft have been found guilty of anti-trust breaches. Commercial strongarming, illegally using their monopoly position, call it what you will. They have NOT been found guilty of commercial espionage."
OK. But they have been found guilty. They have been sued many many times for stealing technology and backstabbing. Most were settled eventually by MS coughing up hundreds of millions of dollars.
"And SCO may be acting unethically, but I've yet to see them found guilty of anything except stupidity"
Then you are blind, or purposfully ignorant.
" To use your analogy, if a child was molested in your neighborhood, would you go chasing down the billionare convicted of white collar fraud, or point the finger at the whiny little kid from down the road who tattles on everyone? I wouldn't. And neither should you."
Neither. I would look in my neigborhood to see who was a convicted child molester, who had previous records of criminal behavior, who was hanging out by the park staring at children. In other words my first suspects would be the people most likely to commit such a crime.
In this case occams razor and common sense dictates the same thing. Sleazy unethical people do sleazy unethical things. People tend to attack their enemies. MS and SCO are sleazy unethical people. MS has said many times the linux and open source are their enemy.
" Why do people like you automatically assume that this attack is different from any other attack just because their happening to the servers of Linux distros and advocates"
Why? Because they all used the same vulnaribility which was not known to anybody. They all attacked linux projects (no freebsd ones). They concentrated their attacks on repositories.
"Is it too much for you to imagine that someone wants to put backdoors into Linux?"
Again who would want to do such a thing? I would think that list would include lots of rich and powerful companies currently yelling and screaming about how Linux is un-american don't you?
"The irony of it is, people like you are the first to scream FUD whenever someone says something about Linux, and here you are sewing the same seeds against "them" (Microsoft, SCO, whoever else you hate at the moment)."
SCO and MS have a history of acting illegally and unethically. It's natural to look to them first. If a child was molested in your neigborhood would you first check to see if a known child molester did it? I would.
I hope whoever did this was stupid enough to leave some tracks on at least one of the servers. It would be interesting to know who was behind all this.
OSS has pissed off a lot of very rich and powerful people and those people could pay top dollar for a good cracker so they may never get caught.
This is a pretty typical jihadist response. To you there is no difference between me not believing in your god and me be "rubbishing" your religion. In other words you are either with us or against us.
To most jihadists there is no middle ground. There is no possible way I could not believe in your god and yet let you go on believing what ever kind of god you want to believe in.
In the last election more people voted for Gore then Bush. The margin was even higher when you combine the Gore votes with Nader votes.
Time will tell but I suspect it will be the same the next election.
"According to this, the counties that Bush won had more population and are growing faster than the counties Gore won."
Bush won rural areas and Gore won in urban ones. I don't see where you get that Bush counties had more population. They may be growing faster but that's mainly due the fact large urban areas don't tend to grow very fast.
"I would guess a Bush win would probably be bigger than last time."
Time will tell. Nader won't be running this time so there won't be a third candidate to suck votes away from the democratic candidate. Presuming of course that Diebold does not rig the election.
"'We elect people to high positions in office who suffer from mental illness in believing in 2000-year old fairy tales and fictional omnipotent characters. Then we wonder why they act so irrationally."
You and I know that an non believer would never get elected.
" Between 1992 and 2000, the US was the sole champion of crushing sanctions against Iraq."
So? I was talking about the 80s. After Bush sr. attacked iraq then the sanctions were imposed. You are right though they were crushing. During that war the US targetted lots of infrastructure. We bombed the shit out of water treatment plants, bridges, roads, electrical plants and such. Then imposed sanctions which drastically slowed the ability of iraq to rebuild hoping that the thirsty starving masses would revolt. It was a sad miscalculation which ended up causing almost a million deaths while still keeping Saddam in power.
" The US bombed Iraq several times in that period, including 1998."
Between 1998 and the current war we bombed them whenever we wanted. We were imposing a no fly zone which meant that we were partolling the skies pretty much constantly. I don't think a month went by without some sort of a bomb falling on some body.
"This is the same Iraq that supposedly didn't have any WMDs"
Huh? They didn't have WMDs? How could they have developed them while they were under continuous overflights and surveillance? That was a lie and you believed it. You are not alone though lots of people believe it too even though there is not one shred of evidence to back up the proposition. It's kind of like believing in god I suppose, maybe you don't need evidence, you believe what you choose to believe.
'Clinton also shot cruise missiles into Afghanistan and Africa which missed more than they hit to deflect attention from the Monica Lewinski case."
Yes I remember that. At the time Rush Limbaugh called him a murderer on TV. I noticed that Rush hasn't called Bush a murderer though which just goes to prove my original post.
BTW I notice that lots of people are comparing Bush to Clinton these days saying in effect "see bush isn't any more evil then clinton. Clinton bombed haphazardly too!". I never thought I would see people saying that Bush is no worse then clinton so therefore it's all good.
When clinton proposes govt spending the republicans call him evil when bush does it the democrats call him evil. It's not what you do it's who does it that matters. Don't believe me? Try this on for size.
During the Iran Iraq war Saddam Hussein launched chemical war against the iranians and the kurds. He killed hundreds of thousands of his own people. The UN security council drafted a resolution to condemn him. The US vetoed that resolution. Who was running the US? Reagan, Bush sr, Rumsfeld and Cheney!. The same people that now claim that Saddam is evil were at the time helping him.
Also consider this. Bush has created a brand new govt branch. He has grown the size of the govt more then anybody else in recent history. He has also (almost) created the largest entitlement program since the advent of medicare and social security (the drug benefit). He is running enourmous deficits. Despite all that he is the darling of the conservatives who supposedly are for smaller govt and fiscal responsibility.
If clinton had done what bush is doing FOX news would be comparing him to satan on an hourly basis. When bush does it they love him.
"considering that the US economy was up 8.2% last quarter, which is the highest growth since 1984 -- when Ronald Reagan was president, i'd say it's becoming a lot less of a problem. "
What's puzzling is that there is no rational reason for that kind of growth. The deficit is getting bigger, the trade deficit is getting bigger, the dollar is getting weaker, and the stock market is limping along. I for one am not convinced that those number are for real nor am I convinced that this kind of growth has any legs at all.
Time will tell.
"Bush's approval ratings are still extremely high-- and as long as the democrats can't figure out what their agenda is, none of the nine dwarves are going to beat him."
Approval ratings or not slightly more then half of this country are democrats. He may get re-elected but like the last time it will be by the skin of his teeth.
"This is another tinfoil hat theory that has no real proof to back it up."
Well MS was the first company to pay SCO a ton of money to bankroll this thing. SUN was the second. These companies have repeatedly said awful things about linux and open source sometimes reffering to OSS developers as communists and cancer.
It makes perfect sense to presume that MS is behind all this. It's just like them to something like this and they even hinted at doing something like this in one of the haloween documents.
If it walks like a duck... well you know the rest.
"Lastly, although IANAL, I believe that even if there isn't a law explicitly prohibiting an activity you can still file a civil suit against someone as long as you can show you have been harmed somehow."
You are right. In America anybody can sue you for anything. I can sue you because I think you are ugly if I want to.
This "you can always take it to court" argument is used very frequently by the liberterians and I find the argument bogus. The founding fathers set into place a careful balancing of powers by the three branches of govt. The liberterians want to gut two of those branches (executive and legislative) and transfer all the power to the judicial. What's worse is that they want to concentrate that power in the civil branch of the justice system.
Anybody who has been through a civil trial will tell you how long it takes to get any kind of a justice and how much it costs. Sure you can sue some big corporation but don't expect a result for decade or so while the case is being appealed and expect to go bankrupt in the meantime.
Sounds like a recipe for the worse kind of distopia to me.
If so then it's a bad bill. The answer to a bad bill is not a lack of oversight. The bill should be restructured to provide more control and power to the people that the data is being collected on.
"Sure in the end it may be bad for you, but hey, sometimes the truth hurts."
That's why we have invented things like governments and laws.
Re:Who's really looses out here?
on
Who Owns The Facts?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
"Why do people so consistently miss the fact that less government involvement neatly solves problems like these?"
Because it does not. In this case if there was no govt regulation then all data collected would be de-facto property of whoever collected it. In a world without govt you would have absolutely zero control over what a corporation could do with "your" information. The best that you could possibly hope for would be to try and sue the corporation which would go nowhere because the corporation would not be breaking any laws.
Slashdot Mirror
Le me guess what she has to say...
"Dean is a traitor and a terrorist".
Did I get it right?
" How about if made by a famous woman named Mercedes? "
She would most likely lose. For example there was a guy named Tim Allen who created a web site called timallen.com. Tim Allen the comedian and actor sued tim allen (lowercase) and won the rights to "his" name and the domain.
Why is Tim Allen the real Tim Allen and tim allen not the real Tim Allen? Because he has more money and more fame that's why. Anbody else who is named Tim Allen does not have the rights to that name whether they were born before or after the real Tim Allen.
It's would be funny if it was not true.
Everybody should write to the IT press and let them know but don't hold your breath.
The IT press is little more then PR extentions to whoever is taking out advertisements.
"From that viewpoint going with Microsoft sounds like the smart thing to do. "
An alliance with Microsoft always looks good on paper. It's probably pretty good financially too until the day MS stabs you in the back and takes off with you technology or customers.
Add this to your list.
If I don't choose to buy your CD am I a thief? Aren't I depriving you of money by not buying your product?
A few years ago most of the hospitals and schools in the US were running on unix boxes and mainframes with dumb or X terminals. Then somebody made the fateful decision to get rid of all those terminals and install windows instead.
Chances are very good that the person who made that decision is still in the same position. To now make a decision to move away from windows would be like admitting that you were wrong when you made a decision to move to windows in the first place. A CIO would rather die then to lose face like that.
American schools and hospitals will not even condier switching unless there is a turnover in the CIO position.
I don't think anybody argues that MS office is higher quality. The question is this. "Is it worth the extra quality?" In other words "is OO good enough for me to save a couple of hundred thousand dollars with?"
"but I get the feeling that nothing will make you even consider the alternatives. And that's kind of sad."
There is nothing sadder and a corporate apologist. When I was in High school many many years ago there were people who used to wear Nike shirts and shoes and thought they were superior to people wearing any other brand of shoes. There were guys who would pledge allegience to Ford or Chevy and put little bumber stickers on their cars denigrating the other manufacturer.
I always thought these people were suckers. Dupes who provided free advertising to big corporations for free. I never understood their motives nor did I ever ask. So let me ask you? why are you here astro turfing for MS? What do you get out of it? Does MS really need your help in defending themselves against little old me? Don't they already have a PR dept which spends millions of dollars a year on advertising?
BTW if your canned answer is that you fight FUD please provide a link to a post you made on gotdotnet.com or microsoft.com forums where you attacked MS fanboys for spreading FUD against linux.
"Microsoft have been found guilty of anti-trust breaches. Commercial strongarming, illegally using their monopoly position, call it what you will. They have NOT been found guilty of commercial espionage."
OK. But they have been found guilty. They have been sued many many times for stealing technology and backstabbing. Most were settled eventually by MS coughing up hundreds of millions of dollars.
"And SCO may be acting unethically, but I've yet to see them found guilty of anything except stupidity"
Then you are blind, or purposfully ignorant.
" To use your analogy, if a child was molested in your neighborhood, would you go chasing down the billionare convicted of white collar fraud, or point the finger at the whiny little kid from down the road who tattles on everyone? I wouldn't. And neither should you."
Neither. I would look in my neigborhood to see who was a convicted child molester, who had previous records of criminal behavior, who was hanging out by the park staring at children. In other words my first suspects would be the people most likely to commit such a crime.
In this case occams razor and common sense dictates the same thing. Sleazy unethical people do sleazy unethical things. People tend to attack their enemies. MS and SCO are sleazy unethical people. MS has said many times the linux and open source are their enemy.
The GPL is not really being challenged by this suit. IBM brought it up in the countersuit but the original SCO suit has nothing to do with the GPL.
"We don't need another SCO."
As long as MS and Sun are around they will find an SCO to do their bidding for them.
" Why do people like you automatically assume that this attack is different from any other attack just because their happening to the servers of Linux distros and advocates"
Why? Because they all used the same vulnaribility which was not known to anybody. They all attacked linux projects (no freebsd ones). They concentrated their attacks on repositories.
"Is it too much for you to imagine that someone wants to put backdoors into Linux?"
Again who would want to do such a thing? I would think that list would include lots of rich and powerful companies currently yelling and screaming about how Linux is un-american don't you?
"The irony of it is, people like you are the first to scream FUD whenever someone says something about Linux, and here you are sewing the same seeds against "them" (Microsoft, SCO, whoever else you hate at the moment)."
SCO and MS have a history of acting illegally and unethically. It's natural to look to them first. If a child was molested in your neigborhood would you first check to see if a known child molester did it? I would.
I hope whoever did this was stupid enough to leave some tracks on at least one of the servers. It would be interesting to know who was behind all this.
OSS has pissed off a lot of very rich and powerful people and those people could pay top dollar for a good cracker so they may never get caught.
This is a pretty typical jihadist response. To you there is no difference between me not believing in your god and me be "rubbishing" your religion. In other words you are either with us or against us.
To most jihadists there is no middle ground. There is no possible way I could not believe in your god and yet let you go on believing what ever kind of god you want to believe in.
In the last election more people voted for Gore then Bush. The margin was even higher when you combine the Gore votes with Nader votes.
Time will tell but I suspect it will be the same the next election.
"According to this, the counties that Bush won had more population and are growing faster than the counties Gore won."
Bush won rural areas and Gore won in urban ones. I don't see where you get that Bush counties had more population. They may be growing faster but that's mainly due the fact large urban areas don't tend to grow very fast.
"I would guess a Bush win would probably be bigger than last time."
Time will tell. Nader won't be running this time so there won't be a third candidate to suck votes away from the democratic candidate. Presuming of course that Diebold does not rig the election.
"'We elect people to high positions in office who suffer from mental illness in believing in 2000-year old fairy tales and fictional omnipotent characters. Then we wonder why they act so irrationally."
You and I know that an non believer would never get elected.
" Between 1992 and 2000, the US was the sole champion of crushing sanctions against Iraq."
So? I was talking about the 80s. After Bush sr. attacked iraq then the sanctions were imposed. You are right though they were crushing. During that war the US targetted lots of infrastructure. We bombed the shit out of water treatment plants, bridges, roads, electrical plants and such. Then imposed sanctions which drastically slowed the ability of iraq to rebuild hoping that the thirsty starving masses would revolt. It was a sad miscalculation which ended up causing almost a million deaths while still keeping Saddam in power.
" The US bombed Iraq several times in that period, including 1998."
Between 1998 and the current war we bombed them whenever we wanted. We were imposing a no fly zone which meant that we were partolling the skies pretty much constantly. I don't think a month went by without some sort of a bomb falling on some body.
"This is the same Iraq that supposedly didn't have any WMDs"
Huh? They didn't have WMDs? How could they have developed them while they were under continuous overflights and surveillance? That was a lie and you believed it. You are not alone though lots of people believe it too even though there is not one shred of evidence to back up the proposition. It's kind of like believing in god I suppose, maybe you don't need evidence, you believe what you choose to believe.
'Clinton also shot cruise missiles into Afghanistan and Africa which missed more than they hit to deflect attention from the Monica Lewinski case."
Yes I remember that. At the time Rush Limbaugh called him a murderer on TV. I noticed that Rush hasn't called Bush a murderer though which just goes to prove my original post.
BTW I notice that lots of people are comparing Bush to Clinton these days saying in effect "see bush isn't any more evil then clinton. Clinton bombed haphazardly too!". I never thought I would see people saying that Bush is no worse then clinton so therefore it's all good.
When clinton proposes govt spending the republicans call him evil when bush does it the democrats call him evil. It's not what you do it's who does it that matters. Don't believe me? Try this on for size.
During the Iran Iraq war Saddam Hussein launched chemical war against the iranians and the kurds. He killed hundreds of thousands of his own people. The UN security council drafted a resolution to condemn him. The US vetoed that resolution. Who was running the US? Reagan, Bush sr, Rumsfeld and Cheney!. The same people that now claim that Saddam is evil were at the time helping him.
Also consider this. Bush has created a brand new govt branch. He has grown the size of the govt more then anybody else in recent history. He has also (almost) created the largest entitlement program since the advent of medicare and social security (the drug benefit). He is running enourmous deficits. Despite all that he is the darling of the conservatives who supposedly are for smaller govt and fiscal responsibility.
If clinton had done what bush is doing FOX news would be comparing him to satan on an hourly basis. When bush does it they love him.
"considering that the US economy was up 8.2% last quarter, which is the highest growth since 1984 -- when Ronald Reagan was president, i'd say it's becoming a lot less of a problem. "
What's puzzling is that there is no rational reason for that kind of growth. The deficit is getting bigger, the trade deficit is getting bigger, the dollar is getting weaker, and the stock market is limping along. I for one am not convinced that those number are for real nor am I convinced that this kind of growth has any legs at all.
Time will tell.
"Bush's approval ratings are still extremely high-- and as long as the democrats can't figure out what their agenda is, none of the nine dwarves are going to beat him."
Approval ratings or not slightly more then half of this country are democrats. He may get re-elected but like the last time it will be by the skin of his teeth.
This project deserves more visibility.
"ne example of a potential abuse would be for the NFL to claim it "owns" the rights to scores and stats from NFL games."
If they claim that then it's truly ridiculus. It just shows what a slippery slope the concept of intellectual property is.
"This is another tinfoil hat theory that has no real proof to back it up."
... well you know the rest.
Well MS was the first company to pay SCO a ton of money to bankroll this thing. SUN was the second. These companies have repeatedly said awful things about linux and open source sometimes reffering to OSS developers as communists and cancer.
It makes perfect sense to presume that MS is behind all this. It's just like them to something like this and they even hinted at doing something like this in one of the haloween documents.
If it walks like a duck
"Lastly, although IANAL, I believe that even if there isn't a law explicitly prohibiting an activity you can still file a civil suit against someone as long as you can show you have been harmed somehow."
You are right. In America anybody can sue you for anything. I can sue you because I think you are ugly if I want to.
This "you can always take it to court" argument is used very frequently by the liberterians and I find the argument bogus. The founding fathers set into place a careful balancing of powers by the three branches of govt. The liberterians want to gut two of those branches (executive and legislative) and transfer all the power to the judicial. What's worse is that they want to concentrate that power in the civil branch of the justice system.
Anybody who has been through a civil trial will tell you how long it takes to get any kind of a justice and how much it costs. Sure you can sue some big corporation but don't expect a result for decade or so while the case is being appealed and expect to go bankrupt in the meantime.
Sounds like a recipe for the worse kind of distopia to me.
"This bill is formalizing this concept."
If so then it's a bad bill. The answer to a bad bill is not a lack of oversight. The bill should be restructured to provide more control and power to the people that the data is being collected on.
"Sure in the end it may be bad for you, but hey, sometimes the truth hurts."
That's why we have invented things like governments and laws.
"Why do people so consistently miss the fact that less government involvement neatly solves problems like these?"
Because it does not. In this case if there was no govt regulation then all data collected would be de-facto property of whoever collected it. In a world without govt you would have absolutely zero control over what a corporation could do with "your" information. The best that you could possibly hope for would be to try and sue the corporation which would go nowhere because the corporation would not be breaking any laws.