It is not illegal for the manufacturer of a product to "fix" their own price. If you carry apple products, you carry them at the price apple spesifies. That is the agreement you sign when you become a vendor.
This is not well publicized, but it is true.
So Best Buy (et al) are not "singling out" apple for this no discount policy. Apple it doing it to the product on purpose.
For various reasons, people don't think of the iPod as having any competetors, and are looking for an iPod per se, instead of a portable media player with (some list of ) features.
So the product leader is charging a price that they feel the market will bear.
For comparasion, check out the price scheudles for Rolex as opposed to Timex. Not just the difference in magnitude of the prices, but in termos of how often each go on (discounted) sale.
Not really, SCO's claims (against IBM) are two fold:
1) SCO claims that IBM agreed that anything they (IBM) created for inclusion in a UNIX system would "naturally" have its copyright vested directly back to the SCO code base because without that code base nobody would have ever been able to envision the new work. (That is, that when IBM invented JFS, they could only do so in the context of having been under the largess of information [trade secrets etc] provided by the UNIX source.)
2) That IBM willfully ignored the encumberance created by item 1 by delivering that source to third parties (namely the Linux kernel maintainers and the GPL-using world at large.)
This is actually a contravention of the WHOLLY ORIGINAL nature of the work done by IBM. The claim is based on the idea that since IBM knew certian "trade secrets" and such via access to the soruce code, there could never be a "blank editor" secenrio.
That is refuted by the evidence of "clean room" procedures and so on.
=== At this point everying SCO claims of IBM is finished, but... ===
Where you are missing the point, and where the "coppied source" stuff is comming from, is that SCO is making a lot of colateral claims in the press (court of public opinion) based on the idea that "someone, but we aren't going to say it was IBM nudge-nudge-wink-wink" copied a bunch of their (SCO's) code into linux at some point, but we (SCO) cannot say who, what, or when such acts took place."
In their wacked-out legal theory, that completely unsubstanciated claim has similarly removed the "blank editor" nature of each and every person who has ever seen the Linux source code, and therefore there has never been, and can never be, a WHOLLY ORIGINAL contribution to the linux kernel. Further, since it is now impossible to have a WHOLLY ORIGINAL contribution, it must be furhter impossible for any person to have made a contribution to the work "significant enough" for them to retain any rights to their work. Under this legal theory, SCO's provanance is so strong that they are the sole holder of any copyright interests and therefore they can ignore the GPL where it was attached to other peoples code.
The argument is patently (no pun 8-) absurd for several reasons, not the least of which is the complete lack of anything aproaching "evidence" of any such code, let alone enough to warrent strippig 100% of the Linux contributors of 100% of their rights.
IF SCO *COULD* prove that 100% strippage (or lets say 99.9%) then they didn't violate the GPL because there was no MEANINGFULLY ORIGINAL work done by any party other than themselves (or their predecessors in interest).
The INSTANT that there is *ANY* MEANINGFUL ORIGINAL WORK in the Linux kernel not 100% indebited to SCO code, then SCO *DID* release their (whatever) percent work under the GPL by engaging in that PROVEN distribution of the Liunux kernel from their own site with the terms.
Further, if they *DO* in fact own-by-provanance 100% of the Linux kernel then it is *IMPOSSIBLE* for them not to have NOT KNOWN this, since overriding interest of that scope (near 100% is, in theory, hard to miss 8-) would, by definition, been obvious at a glance. So with thay obvious ownership leaking from every line of code, they *STILL* provably distributed the code more than once with the GPL as the governing provenance.
In any case, their act of provanance is irretreivable unless the GPL is totally anathma to legal theory (it isn't) and therefore void.
If it (the GPL) *WERE*, however, anathma to legal theory, then every other GPL distribution SCO made (Samba etc), and is making today even though they alledge to know the licence they have is invalid, MUST then be a knowing and willful violation of copyright.
They (SCO) has essentially argued themselves into a self-contradictory and otherwise nonsensical legal corner.
Fortunately (for them), they have only done this in the court of public opinion. Were they to (when they) present this to a legal court they will enter into a world of hurt, because it is provably crap.
The details of the contract from the GPL which govern are encompased in the following:
1) That SCO did receive the Linux kernel under the GPL.
2) That SCO did either modify existing code or add additional code to that kernel.
3) That SCO did gather those modifications together, thus creating a derrivative work
4) That SCO did then distribute that derrivative work either:
4a) as a compostite work under the GPL as requrired by their inclusion of the GPLed code they did not create themselves
OR
4b) in direct and deliberate contravention of the governing agreement (the GPL) and thus in violation of US and International copyright law.
5) That SCO did, through the actions of their employee(s), also directly submit many/some/all of those modifictions to the central management facilities of the Linux kernel, with the understanding that accpetance of such submission was prima-facia evidence of agreement to allow others to distribute those changes under the GPL.
In the case of 4a and 5, separately and taken togher, SCO needs must have put at least one chain of provenance of that code under the terms of the GPL
In the case of 4b SCO has spesifically and directly broken the law and may be held liable before a civil (or ciriminal in the DMCA age) court.
In no case is SCO stripped of their ability to separately distribute their WHOLLY ORIGINAL code (art) under any ADDITIONAL terms they wish, establishing a separate entitiy and provanance for such further distribution.
They MAY NOT, however, "take back" the GPLed provanance because they spesifically waived that right when they established that provanance.
They also MAY NOT separately distribute under new/separate/other provinance any elements (art) of their manufacture which are not themselves WHOLLY ORIGINAL.
The last is the fine point that makes some people barf up FUD so easily. If I sit down with a clean editor and make (say) a serial driver module that can be linked to the Linux kernel, I may keep it to myself, distribute it under GPL, or distribute it (separate from the kernel) under any other termis I choose. In fact I may do ALL THREE at the same time. The blank editor (and presuming the absence of significant copying) creates a "new work" with no provanance.
If I start with the *EXISTING* linux kernel serial driver, then I may keep it to myself or distributed it under the GPL, but I *MAY *NOT* distribute it under other terms I choose. The original work retains its provinance, and so its legal standing within my new work.
This is no more different than writing a novel. If you write a novel from scratch it is yours. If you write by simply editing my novel it is still mine even though it is also now kind of yours.
The only grey area comes when you write a new novel on a blank page, by reading all of my work, and then basing "significant" portions of your novel on the characters and situations that you harvested out of my work. [This being why you, for instance, cant write (and expect to publish with impunity) your own "Star Trek" novel without the permission of Paramount, who owns "Star Trek" just now.]
Thing the first, contracts do not have to be "signed" only "agreed to", a signature is only and singularly prima-facia evidence of agreement, not some magic fairy-dust of holy cannon with powers obscure and sublime.
Thing the second, the contract is right there for you to read, it is called the "General Public License".
The prima-facia evidence of agreement is, in fact, the act of distribution. The only legal way to distribute a work governed(*) by the GPL is to agree to the GPL.
If it(+) is not evidence of agreement, then it is INSTANTLY and UNARGUABLY prima-facia evidence of copyright infringement. Remember the whole $150,000 each instance penalty and all that?
This isn't rocket science here. Either they had express individual permission to distribute the material from ALL the authors, OR they agreed to the GPL, OR they are copyright thieves. There is no fourth choice with respect to this body of code.
(*) re "governed by the GPL". I can have a body of code (art) and give it to different people with different agreements and understandings attached to each separate transaction. Nothing magically lets one provanance [historical path of possession] jump the curb into another, even if the two pass eachother on the same network adaptor. If SCO *GOT* the material under the GPL, and didn't go back and re-get it under some other more invested agreement with each author (really the holder(s) of copyrights) then they can only distribute it in turn under the rules and restrictions placed on them by the provanance, namely the GPL.
(+) "it" being, "taking the code (art) contributed (and hence, who's copyright is owned/held) by parties other than the distributor".
So if they got it ONLY by GPL they may ONLY pass it on by GPL.
Would that be that a legitamate error was found verified and fixed in public in just about two weeks with no hiding or spin?
If Windows had a memory allocation error (application memory space being the thing controled by brk) of this sort would they allow it to be publicized?
Once they made the "patch" available, would you be able to apply it to every past version of Windows?
Would you be able to verify that the patch was applied to windows?
If Debain's FTP server had been running IIS and windows, what kind of forensic annalysis would have been done, and how LIKELY is it that the *SINGLE* *INCIDENT* compromise would have lead to a complete and detailed report from Microsoft, and a fix?
The "linux is more secure" argument is not (truthfully) based on the idea that linux is inherently error free. It is based on the idea that the persons experiencing the problems can determine what those probems actually are; come up with a fix; have that fix reviewed [and installed] (by all who care) *WITHOUT* needing to waking some sleeping-bear corporations nacient interest in the suffering of their lowly surfs... er... "customers".
I'm using mozilla, and yes, it does classify most of these as spam for me also. So far the only ones not getting the little junk icon are those consisting of a bunch of random words and a single inset HTML image link (which I have Mozilla set to not load from when found in email. 8-)
Spammers *DO* know about Bayesian filters. Of late a large cross section of my spam is arriving with a random block of words in the semi-non-display tags and footer-esque parts of the page. These words have nothing even remotely to do with the nature of the advertised "product" or "service".
This is clearly a response to the Bayesian filter.
The same hacks who make the spam generating software are right there ready to sell their meta-crime to the web-varnishers.
Since the master of the SCSI bus is also the controller the word doesn't come up until you get into the protocol. At the surface it is the controller and its targets...
So, by induction a large selection of our country is made up of targets and the sons and daughters of targets. oh...I don't think that will go over very well, especially with the target-shooting association of america.
Once you vilify a word, instead of its usage, you deprive your self of thought.
The only real solution: "Marklar." Once every person, place, or thing may only be referred to by the gender neutral non-biased "Marklar" then we will be free to progress as a society.
After that you will have to know and fully understand and appreciate that each/every individual whiny self-entitled waste-of-flesh Marklar possesses those vaccuous lack-of-worth traits simply by context... 8-)
YOUR DOOM is only what you let others legislate it to be.
Well, you managed to put a nice technical sheen on supporting the error with an error.
It is true that as far as the user is concerned, the difference between master and slave on an IDE bus boils down to which drive is "first".
However, the terms "master" and "slave" directly relate to the two drives and how they relate to the IDE controller and system. Yes, they don't send commands to eachother, but the master constrains the clocking on the bus and the slave is, well, slaved to the clocking the master negotiates. That is why you must have a master even if there is no slave. Further, "cable select" selects the master via its position on the cable, but it is still the master.
Even a quick google on IDE handshake clocking would reveal to you that there is *TECHNOLOGY* involved in the distinction.
For instance, you always make your fastest device on the IDE bus the master, otherwise, if the slower device were the master the faster device would be bounded to clock with the slower. (Etc.)
My full attention isn't being paid to this post, but it clearly trumps your "but the bios lets me switch them" level of investigation.
It is not so much the questioners that are causing the fall of this society, it is the persons like yourself, willing to answer those questions without even bothering to decide if they have the requsite knowledge.
In that scenerio (machine punches card, varifies punch, stores card) there are two flaws:
1) [trivial but obvious] proving that the physical card path works and "never" experiences an error. "Oh looky, I got it wrong, but the same internal corruption made the 'wrong' card not get diverted to the shreader so it went into the "good vote" box. I'll print another card, still wrong, repeat misroute. RESULT: 20 voters and 3000 ballots in recount box.
1a) [Same thing] but valid votes are lost because little paper routing thing gets stuck sending everything to shreader. RESULT: 20 voters but no ballots in recount box.
Lesson 1: printers *JAM* all the time, paper path handling is one of the *MOST* falable tasks in all of computer science.
2) [Earthshatteringly serious] If the error/exploit is in the code *BEFORE* the card punch activity, then the gaming of the election cant be caught because both the recount and the electronic version were tampered with uniformly. The recount box is just a double-thick lie.
Lesson 2: unless the person can see and check the recount tidbit via low-tech means (e.g. by reading it in daily human language), there is no *real* paper trail.
===
The answer that works:
0) All components must be open source so the equipment, and the recount equipment can be verified.
1) Full (touch screen/whatever) automated voting interface.
2) Said interface prints a card-stock ballot that has the name/issue voted for written/spelled out in english (spanish, whatever) in no uncertian terms and presents that card to the voter IN THE BOOTH.
2a) The card stock ballot also contains a bar-code/dot-region/magnetic ink/whatever machine-readable and key-signed representation of the entire ballot *with* a serial/uniquely generated number, and the voter station software version and checksum in the signature.
2a) THE BALLOT SIGNATURE WILL CONTAIN THE CHECKSUM FOR THE BALLOT INPUT FILE. (we don't want to see "well of course Bush won, in one third of the machines in half of florida, the ballot source datafile didn't mention Gore so they couldn't vote for him on those machines.")
3) The interface asks "is your ballot correct?"
3a) if you say no, the ballot is recorded with its number in the "disparaged ballot at this station" database and the IN BOOTH SHREDER (or at least disposal slot) is used (preferably with scanner to validate that the ballot was, in fact, discarded.)
3b) If you say yes, the machine directs you to take the ballot to the ballot box and stores the ballot information in the "valid ballot from this station" database.
4) Over at the ballot box, the valid ballot is scanned into the "valid ballot at this box" database and then deposited into the locked box.
5) A voter may return to any voting station prior to actually casting their vote into the ballot box, with that ballot printed but not cast and scan-and-shred it, which will make the necessary disparaged ballot record and allow the voter to make their new ballot.
WE THUS BENEFIT FROM THE FOLLOWING CHECKS AND BALANCES:
A) Total number of ballots printed should match total number of ballots disparaged plus total number of ballots cast.
B) Valid Vote tallies from the individual stations should match Valid Vote tallies from the ballot boxes.
C) Each paper ballot is key-signed so its contents can be veried as valid at the machine readable level.
D) Simple recounts would consiste of rescanning, a full audit recount would consist of scanning the ballots in a machine which is programmed to recreate on the display what the ballot should have printed on it. (So a human can read both the screen and the paper to verify that what was printed in words matches what was printed in machine readable format.)
E) While there will end up being some irregularities because of things like a person voting at the station but then not depositing their ballot, and some slack will be added to the system, anyth
Part of what people forget about the whole internet P2P and music "must equal" bad evil piracy equation is that it is often simply and painfully false. Consider...
I have several years worth of consistent migration of data on my computer. (e.g. directories that go back 5 years and have been accumulating crud for that long.) Several times in interval my computer was a "common asset" of the house (free for random roommate use).
I have reciently relaized that I have five different song variants of "little bunny foo foo" ensconced in a music folder and this prompted me to remember a discussion.
It seems that I and my roomate were discussing the (musical) idea of "variations on a theme" and we settled on looking for little bunny foo foo variants spesifically because of its parallells to "twinkle twinkle little star." [Look up variants on that classic theme, it is fairly fascinating.]
We did this using (the original) napster.
This was an act of casual, everyday scholarship that was completely singularly enabled by (classic) napster in a way that iTunes (or modern napster) can not satisfy. It was very "star trek" in that we went to the computer, asked it for a spesific datum, and got a good and immediate cultural cross-section without ads, fluff, "curent marketing influences", or spending $.99 per sample or anything. The intellectual question was asked, persued, and answered. Which is, in theory, the goal of having the internet in the first place.
The very P2P nature of napster provided the instant set-processing that was singularly apporprate to the discussion. The proper set-theory intersection of "all available music that people found actively interesting (enough to put online) at that time" and "all versions of little bunny foo foo" was representitive and interesting and the conversation was valuable and enlightening.
It wouldn't have been worth $5 to search out and buy the individual tracks, partly because these tracks are hideous, but more-so because the search itself if done today (by artist and label across different sites and comercial interests) would have killed the casual curiosity that engendered the research.
Also, since one of the "tracks" is Cartman (from South Park) singing a snippit of LBFF, that wouldn't even *BE* available because it isn't a proper "musical track".
So I don't listen to these tracks, and there there isn't even a remote possiblity that I would have ever bought these tracks. (god do they reak. 8-) Their availability was, however, immediatly useful at a purely intellectual level.
===
Another original napster persuit was picking a song title, searching that song title, and then, rather than downloading that title you would pick one near-by poster of that title and explore their share directory jus to see what they had and how they had chosen to label and group their downloads.
Or just look at all the variant "genre" tags for one spesific title.
This is, I beleive, the nature and type of research the P2P-scraping companies are selling to the RIAA.
It certianly was a way to find new directions to explore. For example, I am "too old" for Green Day's demographic, but I was share-space-scraping and I found the song "Warning". The title alone was interesting enough to prompt a listen. Now I am "sparse fan" of their work.
(and I *BUY* what I like)
That would never have happened in the non-P2P for-pay systems as they exist today.
With only corporate and marketing input but with no personal personality to go by, there are no "threads of interest" to see and follow in the sterilized offerings.
===
The cancerous idea that only students or professors at formal institutions ever engage in scholarship is anathma to the cultural mind.
Worse, the partitioning of music into "offerings" and "services" and the concommitant exclusion of things because "that's not music, its comedy" (etc) is the kind of commercialization that silently destroys cas
Re:eh.. no Firefly... No peace... 8-)
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Actually, the scene was a tad rough, but no more so than could be adequately ascribed to the newness of the show. The bigest technical flaw of the scene was the 3-d misplacement of the intake (it was too close to the loading dock ramp thingy in the CGI).
From a pure character development and consistency standpoint, however, the scene was spot on. Given the "new old-west" angles to the world and all the backstory involved, all the actions were completely honest.
Given that it was "the old west" and the chief thug of the local crime boss had just basically sworn that he was going to kill Mal and co (the last thing you'll see speach) the only "honest" thing to do would be to kill the thug.
Multiply that by (everyone but Jane)'s desire to *not* have to kill the reset of the thuggs *and* to get the "you go your way and we'll go mine" message back to the thug crime boss, that quick action was decisive and highly "least harm".
Multiply again by the "no body no compications" undertone of the presented (in)justice system being consistently presented.
It was the exactly correct character action.
From a production/presentation standpoint, that it was done with humor *and* regret kept the act from "over-hardening" the genere for the show.
Compare it to Mal's later action (in like the last aired episode) when he *doesn't* flush Jane out of the lock. The entire byplay between Mal and Jane in that sequence, showed actual character development in both of them.
That the producers were willing and able to envision their characters origins as "less than heroic" and allow those same characters to *evolve* without necessarily *refining* (e.g. all paries were not being inexorably drawn to a Star Trek ideal, nor frozen as Star Trek main characters [Jungian archtypes]) was, for TV, both daring and innovative.
[Quote] There is a separate patent license available to parties interested in implementing software programs that can read and write files that conform.../begin tinfoil-hat
Simply put, by publishing the "standard" but preventing it from being *USED* as a standard, Microsoft can now BLOCK reverse enginered products from interroperating.
"Your honor, we published our _stnadard_ with clearly stated patent licensing restrictions. We contend that the defendants did not reverse engineer the material but simply excerpted the information from our publication. There was no clean-room so we want an injunction against the distribution of this [theiving] competitive product."/end tinfoil-hat
By publishing the format but *NOT* opening the standard for use Microsoft effectively casts any conformant implementation into question, and gains a club with witch to beat open software implementations to death in court.
And even so, only the premium (dearly expensive) versions of the Word product will create the XML output anyway.
The only real answer is to walk away.
"the only wining move is not to play" -- sappy over-anthropomorphized computer from Wargames (but it had a point... 8-)
eh.. no Firefly... No peace... 8-)
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I liked Farscape well enough, I would even consider myself a fan.
But from the moment Mal pushed that guy through the engine intiake on his ship I knew that Firefly was a better show. (e.g. if the two were scheduled against one another, I would have to choose the Fly...)
So yea, I would be happy to see more Farscape, but the cancelation of Firefly should have caused riots... 8-)
If you can not be replaced, you can not be promoted. Whenever I work one of my ongoing quests is to train the guy who I think should replace me. Espeically for the meinal chores.
(And never tell a new employer about your extensive background in network administration. If you do, you will end up the defacto administrator no matter what you are supposed to be doing. And it will be a zero-time-allotted and a 100% competency reqiuired "unoffical" duty to boot. 8-)
Granted, if it is a posting for your job, and you know you have nowhere to go at the company, it is a bad thing. But no so bad as being escorted from the building just after meeting the new guy Jimbo.
It's worse *not* to see the posing that offers the world your job. 8-)
Fox News is lying stupid shills for the propigation of lazy thinkers in this country. Read Al Franken's book to discover just how fatuous and misleadable the american people are.
The book goes a long way to explaining how screwed up this country is just now, and why. It draws nice lines between us everyday americans and the evil, out-of-control, butt-heads running our country just now. The connection to and with Fox news and the daily atrocities that are our Bush-era "forign policy" is nicely laid out there.
A good chunk of the book is about just how fragile Fox News is. They lie so much and slant so much more that if they were to ever really lose the eisteme of the un-informed right in this country they would flounder and die immediately.
They (Fox News) must be desperate to prevent the first/next pinhole in the blow-up-doll of thier a-moral veneere.
Pitty really...
I wish I lived in a free country just now. Or at least in one smart enough to know that just which wool is being pulled over whos eyes and how.
So like I went to this party and we were going to watch the TV but like I forgot my TV-PASS so like when they called everbody to pony up and plug in their passes I had to leave. The people tracker knew there were 25 people in the house.
Thing was, after I left, they coudn't watch it anyway because there were 24 people in the house but the host hadn't rented a TV-Party hub so he only had ten slots on the built in hub.
So like the pary went indoor/outdoor. They got the lead curtins out and hung them on the windows so that the people-tracker wouldn't see the people outside and it was totally a drag because everytime someone went in the house to pee the TV cut out.
Finally the police showed up. The people tracker called them when it noticed the counts tripping up repeatedly. The TV control board totally garnished the guys house because one of the other guys didn't have his pass with him at all and nobody could prove he han't been watching because people weren't trading up their keys every time they traded places. The lead curtins were illegal too.
So like, its a good thing I left, because everybody at the party got fined $150,000 for piracy and the guy throwing the party caught two years in jail.
That's the last time I party with Fred's group... I won't be able to get into Penn State if I like totally have a record for piracy...
What is the punishment lifecycle for this kind of abbuse? They fixed it pretty fast but it burned a hole in their credibility out here in user land.
How fast do we forgive? Do we forgive at all? How many releases will receive strict scruteny before Belkin regains "acceptable vendor" status? Are we now intent on scrubbing all their products for any exploit on the "fool me once" principle?
In summary you have bought a "router" that has its internal configuration updated by an external event.
That is, I (or anybody on the inside of my net, not just an administrator) can click on a link delivered from outside my area of control and that link SETS A FLAG IN MY ROUTER....???!
So now I have my router with its optional firewall support watching the data transport and reconfiguring itself in response.
This is such a bad idea it is unspeakable.
What if the first guy to see the web page and who isn't the rightful administrator, accepts?
How long until a nice buffer-overrun attack lets a malicious server reporgram my router?
How much of the CPU in the router is wasted looking at each HTTP request in search of this flag setting?
Belkin is "stealing" cycles and security from their customers.
You combine an essential failure to reason with a wonderfully concise lack of insight.
In truth it wasn't the nature of the two systems (BitKeeper vs CVS) but the very nature of an interface existing between two systems.
It is (verrily 8-) the programatic equivlant of many eyes in action.
Multiply that, your core error, by the straw-horse of communitizing the open-vs-closed nature of the two products.
It is the particular script that spanned the gap that "caught it".
But further still, the "many (human) eyes" never played in to the operation. Someone electronically installed a hack and it was caught by a script (which script may or may not have underwent peer review). That that same hack would have then had to face peer review only doubles the effectiveness the the kernel's management paradigm.
So "yea, it was caught by a script" yields NO POSSIBLE VALID INDICTMENT of open over closed source models.
Quote: On the other hand, if your link says "Download Copyrighted Music Here -- the RIAA can kiss my ass"
Actually, IMHO, the RIAA can indeed then kiss your ass. You are not guilty. Take a pass. The total amount of harm exposing linkers to legal redress far exceeds any interest we have in protecting individual copyright holders. Note that this is *not* a rabbid "I think copying music is fine" stance. It is the well-considered opinion of a software developer and would-be fiction author.
The reasoning:
1) It would not be at all undesireable to have a world full of would-be linkers and an utter absence of persons willing to host infringing material. If you can stop the hosts, you have won.
2) It is, amusingly, quite desireable for the RIAA (et. al.) to leave the linkers unmolested. By finding a good set of aggressive linkers and just watching their pages, the rights conservators would be leveraging "a small army" of scavengers into their single greatest anit-piracy investigative service. Dozens, nay, hundreds of iscestious linkers seeking out every morsel of content to steal is a freaking boon to the copyright holders. The fact that the RIAA is too stupid see this and use it to their advantage is no kind of argument in favor of reclassifying an entire category of free speach and abbusable interdependency into an actionable category of human behavior.
3) There are so many things more important than the Music/Movie/Software industry's profit margin (sorry guys, it is true though) that would be implicitly harmed by the tedious protectionist precident of making linking to something an officially contributory act. In an ideal world everyone would already be holding themselves responsible for their own actions; barring that ideal, we have an overriding interest in protecting the "useful" aspects of linking that totally trumps the niche interest in exposing the "abbuseful" aspects engendered by the music/movie/software pirate.
4) Lawsuits and Takedown actions generate more "cash entropy cost" on the legal system and economy than the lost proffit being protected. (unless you beleive that some 12 year old actually cost the RIAA 250 million dollars...) This is an expense that we, the honest people, do not deserve to have to pay. Blocking the RIAA et. al. from enacting this squander upon us all is "for their own good".
With respect to the profit margins etc, the place where the rights conservator organizations/lobies (RIAA, MPAA, etc) fall flat on their face is where they try to pretend that there are only two classes of people: purchasers and thieves. Their logic is based on the unsupportable position that the theives will become purchasers if they have no way to steal. Rediculous.
With respect to any given work there is a set of particular classes of people:
1) Absolute Adopters. These people will own the work and don't care about the cost. (rabid fans, stalkers, prestege hounds, collectors, and (odly) librarians)
2) Avid Adopters. These people will buy if the cost is anything aproaching reasonable.
3) Casual Adopters. If the price is right, they buy, but if not, they are content to do without. you know, however it works out is fine. Most People for Most works fall into this category.
4) Circumstantial Acceptors. (Borderline Apathetic consumers.) If it comes into their possission (nearly) without cost or effort, they won't go out of their way to get rid of it. Circumstantial Acceptors are, on the average, the TV and Radio consumers.
5) Averted Audience. They don't want the product, won't buy it, and won't take or keep it if it comes into their possession. (e.g. my personal opinion of "Avant garde" and Hip-Hop puts me in this category for those genres. These forms do not speak to me and disrupt my listening experience. If it comes up on my play list/radio station I delete it or change the channel. Your preferences may usefully vary.)
6) Adversiaral Opponent. This is Tipper Gore vs "bad" Rock an
Slashdot Mirror
... as in "price fixing".
It is not illegal for the manufacturer of a product to "fix" their own price. If you carry apple products, you carry them at the price apple spesifies. That is the agreement you sign when you become a vendor.
This is not well publicized, but it is true.
So Best Buy (et al) are not "singling out" apple for this no discount policy. Apple it doing it to the product on purpose.
For various reasons, people don't think of the iPod as having any competetors, and are looking for an iPod per se, instead of a portable media player with (some list of ) features.
So the product leader is charging a price that they feel the market will bear.
For comparasion, check out the price scheudles for Rolex as opposed to Timex. Not just the difference in magnitude of the prices, but in termos of how often each go on (discounted) sale.
Rank(ing) has its priveleges...
Eh, lets see:
-- In five years, everybody will be using fourth-generation languages (our 4GL, etc) for everything except the lowest level of hardware support.
-- You wont need programmers at all if you use our programmerless rule development interface. (See, NetExpert 8-)
Basically, the any-idiot "enabling" technologies that were supposed to do away with all forms of having to know how a computer works.
[Includes "death" of C and C++, Java, Perl, etc in favor of Power-Builder-esque symbolic/graphical program construction systems.]
yea, sure... 8-)
[/embarrassed-public-sigh 8-)]
I am supprised no AC jumped on me for that one... 8-)
Not really, SCO's claims (against IBM) are two fold:
.
1) SCO claims that IBM agreed that anything they (IBM) created for inclusion in a UNIX system would "naturally" have its copyright vested directly back to the SCO code base because without that code base nobody would have ever been able to envision the new work. (That is, that when IBM invented JFS, they could only do so in the context of having been under the largess of information [trade secrets etc] provided by the UNIX source.)
2) That IBM willfully ignored the encumberance created by item 1 by delivering that source to third parties (namely the Linux kernel maintainers and the GPL-using world at large.)
This is actually a contravention of the WHOLLY ORIGINAL nature of the work done by IBM. The claim is based on the idea that since IBM knew certian "trade secrets" and such via access to the soruce code, there could never be a "blank editor" secenrio.
That is refuted by the evidence of "clean room" procedures and so on.
=== At this point everying SCO claims of IBM is finished, but... ===
Where you are missing the point, and where the "coppied source" stuff is comming from, is that SCO is making a lot of colateral claims in the press (court of public opinion) based on the idea that "someone, but we aren't going to say it was IBM nudge-nudge-wink-wink" copied a bunch of their (SCO's) code into linux at some point, but we (SCO) cannot say who, what, or when such acts took place."
In their wacked-out legal theory, that completely unsubstanciated claim has similarly removed the "blank editor" nature of each and every person who has ever seen the Linux source code, and therefore there has never been, and can never be, a WHOLLY ORIGINAL contribution to the linux kernel. Further, since it is now impossible to have a WHOLLY ORIGINAL contribution, it must be furhter impossible for any person to have made a contribution to the work "significant enough" for them to retain any rights to their work. Under this legal theory, SCO's provanance is so strong that they are the sole holder of any copyright interests and therefore they can ignore the GPL where it was attached to other peoples code.
The argument is patently (no pun 8-) absurd for several reasons, not the least of which is the complete lack of anything aproaching "evidence" of any such code, let alone enough to warrent strippig 100% of the Linux contributors of 100% of their rights.
IF SCO *COULD* prove that 100% strippage (or lets say 99.9%) then they didn't violate the GPL because there was no MEANINGFULLY ORIGINAL work done by any party other than themselves (or their predecessors in interest).
The INSTANT that there is *ANY* MEANINGFUL ORIGINAL WORK in the Linux kernel not 100% indebited to SCO code, then SCO *DID* release their (whatever) percent work under the GPL by engaging in that PROVEN distribution of the Liunux kernel from their own site with the terms
Further, if they *DO* in fact own-by-provanance 100% of the Linux kernel then it is *IMPOSSIBLE* for them not to have NOT KNOWN this, since overriding interest of that scope (near 100% is, in theory, hard to miss 8-) would, by definition, been obvious at a glance. So with thay obvious ownership leaking from every line of code, they *STILL* provably distributed the code more than once with the GPL as the governing provenance.
In any case, their act of provanance is irretreivable unless the GPL is totally anathma to legal theory (it isn't) and therefore void.
If it (the GPL) *WERE*, however, anathma to legal theory, then every other GPL distribution SCO made (Samba etc), and is making today even though they alledge to know the licence they have is invalid, MUST then be a knowing and willful violation of copyright.
They (SCO) has essentially argued themselves into a self-contradictory and otherwise nonsensical legal corner.
Fortunately (for them), they have only done this in the court of public opinion. Were they to (when they) present this to a legal court they will enter into a world of hurt, because it is provably crap.
Sorry, blew the post...
The details of the contract from the GPL which govern are encompased in the following:
1) That SCO did receive the Linux kernel under the GPL.
2) That SCO did either modify existing code or add additional code to that kernel.
3) That SCO did gather those modifications together, thus creating a derrivative work
4) That SCO did then distribute that derrivative work either:
4a) as a compostite work under the GPL as requrired by their inclusion of the GPLed code they did not create themselves
OR
4b) in direct and deliberate contravention of the governing agreement (the GPL) and thus in violation of US and International copyright law.
5) That SCO did, through the actions of their employee(s), also directly submit many/some/all of those modifictions to the central management facilities of the Linux kernel, with the understanding that accpetance of such submission was prima-facia evidence of agreement to allow others to distribute those changes under the GPL.
In the case of 4a and 5, separately and taken togher, SCO needs must have put at least one chain of provenance of that code under the terms of the GPL
In the case of 4b SCO has spesifically and directly broken the law and may be held liable before a civil (or ciriminal in the DMCA age) court.
In no case is SCO stripped of their ability to separately distribute their WHOLLY ORIGINAL code (art) under any ADDITIONAL terms they wish, establishing a separate entitiy and provanance for such further distribution.
They MAY NOT, however, "take back" the GPLed provanance because they spesifically waived that right when they established that provanance.
They also MAY NOT separately distribute under new/separate/other provinance any elements (art) of their manufacture which are not themselves WHOLLY ORIGINAL.
The last is the fine point that makes some people barf up FUD so easily. If I sit down with a clean editor and make (say) a serial driver module that can be linked to the Linux kernel, I may keep it to myself, distribute it under GPL, or distribute it (separate from the kernel) under any other termis I choose. In fact I may do ALL THREE at the same time. The blank editor (and presuming the absence of significant copying) creates a "new work" with no provanance.
If I start with the *EXISTING* linux kernel serial driver, then I may keep it to myself or distributed it under the GPL, but I *MAY *NOT* distribute it under other terms I choose. The original work retains its provinance, and so its legal standing within my new work.
This is no more different than writing a novel. If you write a novel from scratch it is yours. If you write by simply editing my novel it is still mine even though it is also now kind of yours.
The only grey area comes when you write a new novel on a blank page, by reading all of my work, and then basing "significant" portions of your novel on the characters and situations that you harvested out of my work. [This being why you, for instance, cant write (and expect to publish with impunity) your own "Star Trek" novel without the permission of Paramount, who owns "Star Trek" just now.]
This is not that hard people... 8-)
Thing the first, contracts do not have to be "signed" only "agreed to", a signature is only and singularly prima-facia evidence of agreement, not some magic fairy-dust of holy cannon with powers obscure and sublime.
Thing the second, the contract is right there for you to read, it is called the "General Public License".
The prima-facia evidence of agreement is, in fact, the act of distribution. The only legal way to distribute a work governed(*) by the GPL is to agree to the GPL.
If it(+) is not evidence of agreement, then it is INSTANTLY and UNARGUABLY prima-facia evidence of copyright infringement. Remember the whole $150,000 each instance penalty and all that?
This isn't rocket science here. Either they had express individual permission to distribute the material from ALL the authors, OR they agreed to the GPL, OR they are copyright thieves. There is no fourth choice with respect to this body of code.
(*) re "governed by the GPL". I can have a body of code (art) and give it to different people with different agreements and understandings attached to each separate transaction. Nothing magically lets one provanance [historical path of possession] jump the curb into another, even if the two pass eachother on the same network adaptor. If SCO *GOT* the material under the GPL, and didn't go back and re-get it under some other more invested agreement with each author (really the holder(s) of copyrights) then they can only distribute it in turn under the rules and restrictions placed on them by the provanance, namely the GPL.
(+) "it" being, "taking the code (art) contributed (and hence, who's copyright is owned/held) by parties other than the distributor".
So if they got it ONLY by GPL they may ONLY pass it on by GPL.
Period.
Exactly what crow is that?
Would that be that a legitamate error was found verified and fixed in public in just about two weeks with no hiding or spin?
If Windows had a memory allocation error (application memory space being the thing controled by brk) of this sort would they allow it to be publicized?
Once they made the "patch" available, would you be able to apply it to every past version of Windows?
Would you be able to verify that the patch was applied to windows?
If Debain's FTP server had been running IIS and windows, what kind of forensic annalysis would have been done, and how LIKELY is it that the *SINGLE* *INCIDENT* compromise would have lead to a complete and detailed report from Microsoft, and a fix?
The "linux is more secure" argument is not (truthfully) based on the idea that linux is inherently error free. It is based on the idea that the persons experiencing the problems can determine what those probems actually are; come up with a fix; have that fix reviewed [and installed] (by all who care) *WITHOUT* needing to waking some sleeping-bear corporations nacient interest in the suffering of their lowly surfs... er... "customers".
I'm using mozilla, and yes, it does classify most of these as spam for me also. So far the only ones not getting the little junk icon are those consisting of a bunch of random words and a single inset HTML image link (which I have Mozilla set to not load from when found in email. 8-)
Spammers *DO* know about Bayesian filters. Of late a large cross section of my spam is arriving with a random block of words in the semi-non-display tags and footer-esque parts of the page. These words have nothing even remotely to do with the nature of the advertised "product" or "service".
This is clearly a response to the Bayesian filter.
The same hacks who make the spam generating software are right there ready to sell their meta-crime to the web-varnishers.
I haven't had too look sideways at SCSI in about six years so I guess they got the multiple initiators thing working.
Of course, if you look a the box your SCSI [wahtever] card came in, I bet it still says "controller" 8-)
Since the master of the SCSI bus is also the controller the word doesn't come up until you get into the protocol. At the surface it is the controller and its targets...
So, by induction a large selection of our country is made up of targets and the sons and daughters of targets. oh...I don't think that will go over very well, especially with the target-shooting association of america.
Once you vilify a word, instead of its usage, you deprive your self of thought.
The only real solution: "Marklar." Once every person, place, or thing may only be referred to by the gender neutral non-biased "Marklar" then we will be free to progress as a society.
After that you will have to know and fully understand and appreciate that each/every individual whiny self-entitled waste-of-flesh Marklar possesses those vaccuous lack-of-worth traits simply by context... 8-)
YOUR DOOM is only what you let others legislate it to be.
It is true that as far as the user is concerned, the difference between master and slave on an IDE bus boils down to which drive is "first".
However, the terms "master" and "slave" directly relate to the two drives and how they relate to the IDE controller and system. Yes, they don't send commands to eachother, but the master constrains the clocking on the bus and the slave is, well, slaved to the clocking the master negotiates. That is why you must have a master even if there is no slave. Further, "cable select" selects the master via its position on the cable, but it is still the master.
Even a quick google on IDE handshake clocking would reveal to you that there is *TECHNOLOGY* involved in the distinction.
For instance, you always make your fastest device on the IDE bus the master, otherwise, if the slower device were the master the faster device would be bounded to clock with the slower. (Etc.)
My full attention isn't being paid to this post, but it clearly trumps your "but the bios lets me switch them" level of investigation.
It is not so much the questioners that are causing the fall of this society, it is the persons like yourself, willing to answer those questions without even bothering to decide if they have the requsite knowledge.
sigh.
In that scenerio (machine punches card, varifies punch, stores card) there are two flaws:
1) [trivial but obvious] proving that the physical card path works and "never" experiences an error. "Oh looky, I got it wrong, but the same internal corruption made the 'wrong' card not get diverted to the shreader so it went into the "good vote" box. I'll print another card, still wrong, repeat misroute. RESULT: 20 voters and 3000 ballots in recount box.
1a) [Same thing] but valid votes are lost because little paper routing thing gets stuck sending everything to shreader. RESULT: 20 voters but no ballots in recount box.
Lesson 1: printers *JAM* all the time, paper path handling is one of the *MOST* falable tasks in all of computer science.
2) [Earthshatteringly serious] If the error/exploit is in the code *BEFORE* the card punch activity, then the gaming of the election cant be caught because both the recount and the electronic version were tampered with uniformly. The recount box is just a double-thick lie.
Lesson 2: unless the person can see and check the recount tidbit via low-tech means (e.g. by reading it in daily human language), there is no *real* paper trail.
===
The answer that works:
0) All components must be open source so the equipment, and the recount equipment can be verified.
1) Full (touch screen/whatever) automated voting interface.
2) Said interface prints a card-stock ballot that has the name/issue voted for written/spelled out in english (spanish, whatever) in no uncertian terms and presents that card to the voter IN THE BOOTH.
2a) The card stock ballot also contains a bar-code/dot-region/magnetic ink/whatever machine-readable and key-signed representation of the entire ballot *with* a serial/uniquely generated number, and the voter station software version and checksum in the signature.
2a) THE BALLOT SIGNATURE WILL CONTAIN THE CHECKSUM FOR THE BALLOT INPUT FILE. (we don't want to see "well of course Bush won, in one third of the machines in half of florida, the ballot source datafile didn't mention Gore so they couldn't vote for him on those machines.")
3) The interface asks "is your ballot correct?"
3a) if you say no, the ballot is recorded with its number in the "disparaged ballot at this station" database and the IN BOOTH SHREDER (or at least disposal slot) is used (preferably with scanner to validate that the ballot was, in fact, discarded.)
3b) If you say yes, the machine directs you to take the ballot to the ballot box and stores the ballot information in the "valid ballot from this station" database.
4) Over at the ballot box, the valid ballot is scanned into the "valid ballot at this box" database and then deposited into the locked box.
5) A voter may return to any voting station prior to actually casting their vote into the ballot box, with that ballot printed but not cast and scan-and-shred it, which will make the necessary disparaged ballot record and allow the voter to make their new ballot.
WE THUS BENEFIT FROM THE FOLLOWING CHECKS AND BALANCES:
A) Total number of ballots printed should match total number of ballots disparaged plus total number of ballots cast.
B) Valid Vote tallies from the individual stations should match Valid Vote tallies from the ballot boxes.
C) Each paper ballot is key-signed so its contents can be veried as valid at the machine readable level.
D) Simple recounts would consiste of rescanning, a full audit recount would consist of scanning the ballots in a machine which is programmed to recreate on the display what the ballot should have printed on it. (So a human can read both the screen and the paper to verify that what was printed in words matches what was printed in machine readable format.)
E) While there will end up being some irregularities because of things like a person voting at the station but then not depositing their ballot, and some slack will be added to the system, anyth
Part of what people forget about the whole internet P2P and music "must equal" bad evil piracy equation is that it is often simply and painfully false. Consider...
I have several years worth of consistent migration of data on my computer. (e.g. directories that go back 5 years and have been accumulating crud for that long.) Several times in interval my computer was a "common asset" of the house (free for random roommate use).
I have reciently relaized that I have five different song variants of "little bunny foo foo" ensconced in a music folder and this prompted me to remember a discussion.
It seems that I and my roomate were discussing the (musical) idea of "variations on a theme" and we settled on looking for little bunny foo foo variants spesifically because of its parallells to "twinkle twinkle little star." [Look up variants on that classic theme, it is fairly fascinating.]
We did this using (the original) napster.
This was an act of casual, everyday scholarship that was completely singularly enabled by (classic) napster in a way that iTunes (or modern napster) can not satisfy. It was very "star trek" in that we went to the computer, asked it for a spesific datum, and got a good and immediate cultural cross-section without ads, fluff, "curent marketing influences", or spending $.99 per sample or anything. The intellectual question was asked, persued, and answered. Which is, in theory, the goal of having the internet in the first place.
The very P2P nature of napster provided the instant set-processing that was singularly apporprate to the discussion. The proper set-theory intersection of "all available music that people found actively interesting (enough to put online) at that time" and "all versions of little bunny foo foo" was representitive and interesting and the conversation was valuable and enlightening.
It wouldn't have been worth $5 to search out and buy the individual tracks, partly because these tracks are hideous, but more-so because the search itself if done today (by artist and label across different sites and comercial interests) would have killed the casual curiosity that engendered the research.
Also, since one of the "tracks" is Cartman (from South Park) singing a snippit of LBFF, that wouldn't even *BE* available because it isn't a proper "musical track".
So I don't listen to these tracks, and there there isn't even a remote possiblity that I would have ever bought these tracks. (god do they reak. 8-) Their availability was, however, immediatly useful at a purely intellectual level.
===
Another original napster persuit was picking a song title, searching that song title, and then, rather than downloading that title you would pick one near-by poster of that title and explore their share directory jus to see what they had and how they had chosen to label and group their downloads.
Or just look at all the variant "genre" tags for one spesific title.
This is, I beleive, the nature and type of research the P2P-scraping companies are selling to the RIAA.
It certianly was a way to find new directions to explore. For example, I am "too old" for Green Day's demographic, but I was share-space-scraping and I found the song "Warning". The title alone was interesting enough to prompt a listen. Now I am "sparse fan" of their work.
(and I *BUY* what I like)
That would never have happened in the non-P2P for-pay systems as they exist today.
With only corporate and marketing input but with no personal personality to go by, there are no "threads of interest" to see and follow in the sterilized offerings.
===
The cancerous idea that only students or professors at formal institutions ever engage in scholarship is anathma to the cultural mind.
Worse, the partitioning of music into "offerings" and "services" and the concommitant exclusion of things because "that's not music, its comedy" (etc) is the kind of commercialization that silently destroys cas
Actually, the scene was a tad rough, but no more so than could be adequately ascribed to the newness of the show. The bigest technical flaw of the scene was the 3-d misplacement of the intake (it was too close to the loading dock ramp thingy in the CGI).
From a pure character development and consistency standpoint, however, the scene was spot on. Given the "new old-west" angles to the world and all the backstory involved, all the actions were completely honest.
Given that it was "the old west" and the chief thug of the local crime boss had just basically sworn that he was going to kill Mal and co (the last thing you'll see speach) the only "honest" thing to do would be to kill the thug.
Multiply that by (everyone but Jane)'s desire to *not* have to kill the reset of the thuggs *and* to get the "you go your way and we'll go mine" message back to the thug crime boss, that quick action was decisive and highly "least harm".
Multiply again by the "no body no compications" undertone of the presented (in)justice system being consistently presented.
It was the exactly correct character action.
From a production/presentation standpoint, that it was done with humor *and* regret kept the act from "over-hardening" the genere for the show.
Compare it to Mal's later action (in like the last aired episode) when he *doesn't* flush Jane out of the lock. The entire byplay between Mal and Jane in that sequence, showed actual character development in both of them.
That the producers were willing and able to envision their characters origins as "less than heroic" and allow those same characters to *evolve* without necessarily *refining* (e.g. all paries were not being inexorably drawn to a Star Trek ideal, nor frozen as Star Trek main characters [Jungian archtypes]) was, for TV, both daring and innovative.
Read the legal restrictions in the link.
/begin tinfoil-hat
/end tinfoil-hat
[Quote] There is a separate patent license available to parties interested in implementing software programs that can read and write files that conform...
Simply put, by publishing the "standard" but preventing it from being *USED* as a standard, Microsoft can now BLOCK reverse enginered products from interroperating.
"Your honor, we published our _stnadard_ with clearly stated patent licensing restrictions. We contend that the defendants did not reverse engineer the material but simply excerpted the information from our publication. There was no clean-room so we want an injunction against the distribution of this [theiving] competitive product."
By publishing the format but *NOT* opening the standard for use Microsoft effectively casts any conformant implementation into question, and gains a club with witch to beat open software implementations to death in court.
And even so, only the premium (dearly expensive) versions of the Word product will create the XML output anyway.
The only real answer is to walk away.
"the only wining move is not to play" -- sappy over-anthropomorphized computer from Wargames (but it had a point... 8-)
I liked Farscape well enough, I would even consider myself a fan.
But from the moment Mal pushed that guy through the engine intiake on his ship I knew that Firefly was a better show. (e.g. if the two were scheduled against one another, I would have to choose the Fly...)
So yea, I would be happy to see more Farscape, but the cancelation of Firefly should have caused riots... 8-)
(ok, maybe my tone *was* a little flame-baitish but one wonders if the moderators had read the book before forming their opinion of my opinion... 8-)
If you can not be replaced, you can not be promoted. Whenever I work one of my ongoing quests is to train the guy who I think should replace me. Espeically for the meinal chores.
(And never tell a new employer about your extensive background in network administration. If you do, you will end up the defacto administrator no matter what you are supposed to be doing. And it will be a zero-time-allotted and a 100% competency reqiuired "unoffical" duty to boot. 8-)
Granted, if it is a posting for your job, and you know you have nowhere to go at the company, it is a bad thing. But no so bad as being escorted from the building just after meeting the new guy Jimbo.
It's worse *not* to see the posing that offers the world your job. 8-)
Fox News is lying stupid shills for the propigation of lazy thinkers in this country. Read Al Franken's book to discover just how fatuous and misleadable the american people are.
The book goes a long way to explaining how screwed up this country is just now, and why. It draws nice lines between us everyday americans and the evil, out-of-control, butt-heads running our country just now. The connection to and with Fox news and the daily atrocities that are our Bush-era "forign policy" is nicely laid out there.
A good chunk of the book is about just how fragile Fox News is. They lie so much and slant so much more that if they were to ever really lose the eisteme of the un-informed right in this country they would flounder and die immediately.
They (Fox News) must be desperate to prevent the first/next pinhole in the blow-up-doll of thier a-moral veneere.
Pitty really...
I wish I lived in a free country just now. Or at least in one smart enough to know that just which wool is being pulled over whos eyes and how.
So like I went to this party and we were going to watch the TV but like I forgot my TV-PASS so like when they called everbody to pony up and plug in their passes I had to leave. The people tracker knew there were 25 people in the house.
Thing was, after I left, they coudn't watch it anyway because there were 24 people in the house but the host hadn't rented a TV-Party hub so he only had ten slots on the built in hub.
So like the pary went indoor/outdoor. They got the lead curtins out and hung them on the windows so that the people-tracker wouldn't see the people outside and it was totally a drag because everytime someone went in the house to pee the TV cut out.
Finally the police showed up. The people tracker called them when it noticed the counts tripping up repeatedly. The TV control board totally garnished the guys house because one of the other guys didn't have his pass with him at all and nobody could prove he han't been watching because people weren't trading up their keys every time they traded places. The lead curtins were illegal too.
So like, its a good thing I left, because everybody at the party got fined $150,000 for piracy and the guy throwing the party caught two years in jail.
That's the last time I party with Fred's group... I won't be able to get into Penn State if I like totally have a record for piracy...
So now the real question...
What is the punishment lifecycle for this kind of abbuse? They fixed it pretty fast but it burned a hole in their credibility out here in user land.
How fast do we forgive? Do we forgive at all? How many releases will receive strict scruteny before Belkin regains "acceptable vendor" status? Are we now intent on scrubbing all their products for any exploit on the "fool me once" principle?
Quite a quandary.
In summary you have bought a "router" that has its internal configuration updated by an external event.
That is, I (or anybody on the inside of my net, not just an administrator) can click on a link delivered from outside my area of control and that link SETS A FLAG IN MY ROUTER....???!
So now I have my router with its optional firewall support watching the data transport and reconfiguring itself in response.
This is such a bad idea it is unspeakable.
What if the first guy to see the web page and who isn't the rightful administrator, accepts?
How long until a nice buffer-overrun attack lets a malicious server reporgram my router?
How much of the CPU in the router is wasted looking at each HTTP request in search of this flag setting?
Belkin is "stealing" cycles and security from their customers.
Not smart.
You combine an essential failure to reason with a wonderfully concise lack of insight.
In truth it wasn't the nature of the two systems (BitKeeper vs CVS) but the very nature of an interface existing between two systems.
It is (verrily 8-) the programatic equivlant of many eyes in action.
Multiply that, your core error, by the straw-horse of communitizing the open-vs-closed nature of the two products.
It is the particular script that spanned the gap that "caught it".
But further still, the "many (human) eyes" never played in to the operation. Someone electronically installed a hack and it was caught by a script (which script may or may not have underwent peer review). That that same hack would have then had to face peer review only doubles the effectiveness the the kernel's management paradigm.
So "yea, it was caught by a script" yields NO POSSIBLE VALID INDICTMENT of open over closed source models.
Quote: On the other hand, if your link says "Download Copyrighted Music Here -- the RIAA can kiss my ass"
Actually, IMHO, the RIAA can indeed then kiss your ass. You are not guilty. Take a pass. The total amount of harm exposing linkers to legal redress far exceeds any interest we have in protecting individual copyright holders. Note that this is *not* a rabbid "I think copying music is fine" stance. It is the well-considered opinion of a software developer and would-be fiction author.
The reasoning:
1) It would not be at all undesireable to have a world full of would-be linkers and an utter absence of persons willing to host infringing material. If you can stop the hosts, you have won.
2) It is, amusingly, quite desireable for the RIAA (et. al.) to leave the linkers unmolested. By finding a good set of aggressive linkers and just watching their pages, the rights conservators would be leveraging "a small army" of scavengers into their single greatest anit-piracy investigative service. Dozens, nay, hundreds of iscestious linkers seeking out every morsel of content to steal is a freaking boon to the copyright holders. The fact that the RIAA is too stupid see this and use it to their advantage is no kind of argument in favor of reclassifying an entire category of free speach and abbusable interdependency into an actionable category of human behavior.
3) There are so many things more important than the Music/Movie/Software industry's profit margin (sorry guys, it is true though) that would be implicitly harmed by the tedious protectionist precident of making linking to something an officially contributory act. In an ideal world everyone would already be holding themselves responsible for their own actions; barring that ideal, we have an overriding interest in protecting the "useful" aspects of linking that totally trumps the niche interest in exposing the "abbuseful" aspects engendered by the music/movie/software pirate.
4) Lawsuits and Takedown actions generate more "cash entropy cost" on the legal system and economy than the lost proffit being protected. (unless you beleive that some 12 year old actually cost the RIAA 250 million dollars...) This is an expense that we, the honest people, do not deserve to have to pay. Blocking the RIAA et. al. from enacting this squander upon us all is "for their own good".
With respect to the profit margins etc, the place where the rights conservator organizations/lobies (RIAA, MPAA, etc) fall flat on their face is where they try to pretend that there are only two classes of people: purchasers and thieves. Their logic is based on the unsupportable position that the theives will become purchasers if they have no way to steal. Rediculous.
With respect to any given work there is a set of particular classes of people:
1) Absolute Adopters. These people will own the work and don't care about the cost. (rabid fans, stalkers, prestege hounds, collectors, and (odly) librarians)
2) Avid Adopters. These people will buy if the cost is anything aproaching reasonable.
3) Casual Adopters. If the price is right, they buy, but if not, they are content to do without. you know, however it works out is fine. Most People for Most works fall into this category.
4) Circumstantial Acceptors. (Borderline Apathetic consumers.) If it comes into their possission (nearly) without cost or effort, they won't go out of their way to get rid of it. Circumstantial Acceptors are, on the average, the TV and Radio consumers.
5) Averted Audience. They don't want the product, won't buy it, and won't take or keep it if it comes into their possession. (e.g. my personal opinion of "Avant garde" and Hip-Hop puts me in this category for those genres. These forms do not speak to me and disrupt my listening experience. If it comes up on my play list/radio station I delete it or change the channel. Your preferences may usefully vary.)
6) Adversiaral Opponent. This is Tipper Gore vs "bad" Rock an