This is a HORRIBLE article. Forget, for now, that it seems to be a disjointed series of sentences and let's focus on the "concern".
Word of the decision to award the contract to I.B.M. to build a production version of a computer that is now intended for [DARPA] has created widespread concern in the past week among some computer scientists involved in designing and building the nation's high-performance computers. [...] Placing it in Illinois, however, has led to expressions of concern in California and Pennsylvania, where computing laboratories also bid on the contract. Okay, that's nice. What is this widespread concern? Does it have to do with the bidding process? If so, why? Why does putting it at UIUC make a difference? Maybe the next paragraph will tell us:
The machine will become a magnet for the world's most advanced and challenging scientific research projects... [Exclamations that it's a special machine and an unfortunate comparison with Hubble] Guess not. Perhaps Horst Simon had something enlightening to say:
"The process needs to be above all suspicion. [...] It's in the interest of the national community that there is not even a cloud of suspicion, and there already is one." Anything on the nature of this "cloud of suspicion", New York Times?
It will also represent an extraordinary shift in the balance of computing power between military and scientific computing centers in the United States. For most of the last two decades, the fastest computers in the United States have been located at either the national laboratories at Los Alamos, N.M., or Livermore, Calif. I thought not.
You are correct, but that's a whole different point than the GPs. The GP said that if you violate the GPL, your bridges are burned forever and ever, amen. You can't make it right, you can't fix it. One simple mistake and you are done forever.
However, there's absolutely NOTHING the GPL that says that at all. The GPL is pretty straightforward, really: If you abide by our terms, you can distribute. If you don't abide, you have no right to distribute. Valve/ID are now abiding by the terms**, so they can distribute. Case closed.
Because of their Steam technology, they were even able to retroactively distribute the copy of the GPL to everyone they had already distributed the software to. That makes them fully compliant with every distribution they've done. Case beaten like a dead horse.
** (This is assuming that Valve/ID will honor requests for the source code, of which I've not heard a yea or nay on.)
Well, if it was just the PI Number, then everyone would be typing 3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375 10..... and so on on the keypad forever!
Um -- I'm sorry but you are really stretching the imagination here.
It would take some serious leaps of logic to say that snapping a picture (5 seconds) and doing something else for 9 minutes and 55 seconds equals 10 minutes of "photography occurring" or "taking photographs". And where did you get 100ft area? That wasn't in the text at all. You seem to be sewing your case out of whole cloth here.
Let's come back to reality now. NYC lives and breathes on tourism. They bend over backwards and sideways to keep tourists coming to the city. They even make cab drivers go through training to be nicer to tourists. NYC will do absolutely nothing at all to jeopardize tourism in any way because they'd be cutting their own throats -- and they know it.
The way it's written no one even has to be taking photographs for it to apply. One member of the group merely having a camera visible is enough to trigger these new rules. Sorry to reply a second time, but I missed this little gem of FUD the first time.
You are right, it doesn't say they have to be taking photographs, except for every single paragraph. It plainly states, over and over, "the taking of photographs" (subdivision (a)), "Filming, photography, production, television or radio remotes occurring on City property" (subparagraphs (1)(i), (ii), and (iii)) and "Filming or photography occurring on City property" (subparagraphs (2)(i), (ii), and (iii)).
Having a camera visible is not "photography occurring" nor "the taking of photographs".
I've read the proposed policy over and over and I can not for the life of me see where you are getting this idea.
So -- here's the requirements: 1) First, you have to be on city property for this to apply. That is, on the streets, sidewalks, parks, etc where filming for long periods of time impedes other people's use of the same public property.
2) One person - no permit needed
3) 2, 3, or 4 people - no permit needed unless longer than 30 minutes in one place
4) 5 or more people with no tripod - no permit needed unless longer than 30 minutes in one place
5) 5 or more people with one tripod - no permit needed unless longer than 10 minutes in one place
6) Two or more tripods - permit needed.
It's really that simple. Amateur photographers and sightseers do not need to film in one place longer than a half hour. A "let me take a picture of you in front of the Jumbotron" does not take a half hour. If it takes you or anyone else longer than 10 minutes to get your shot or are clogging the streets with multiple tripods and a gaggle of people, then you have almost certainly gone past "amateur" status.
Your "detain and question anyone with a camera" remark was plain and simple fear mongering.
I'm not a spammer, so I object to your use of the "you" pronoun. Bull. You doth protest too much, methinks, and you know far too much about this business "the owner you know" has to not be a part of it somehow. I suspect you see this owner every time you look in the mirror.
You won't click an ad and purchase, but for every one of you there are 100 of your peers that will. Actually, it's the other way around. With less than 1% response rate, for every one of us that won't there's another 100 of us that also won't.
Remove the word "legitimate" and take the quotes off the word spam. There's no difference between what you (I'm sorry, the 'owner you know') do and what you call "true spammers" do. You are still dealing in unsolicited commercial mass emails that people don't want.
In fact, looking over your list of what makes this enterprise "legitimate", every single one of them involves circumventing and defeating the protections that people and ISPs spend a lot of time and money to put up and maintain to keep this mail away. You mention the cost to the ISP in your last line, but utterly ignore that your "legitimate" version is ALSO at the cost of the ISP, in the increased manpower and hardware costs to adjust to your "legitimate" circumvention methods.
Basically, they have what they call markers (actually small images) on literally millions of Websites What they call "markers", the rest of the world calls web bugs.
A lot of personal proxies (such as Privoxy) filter out crap like this. The kind of user that would use a product like Privoxy is also the kind of user that would tend to use Firefox. Makes me wonder if the Firefox numbers might not actually be a little higher overall.
All those contracts are legit and above board, right? what have you got to hide? Ah, the rally cry of the oppressor and the totalitarian -- the same verse sung by those who strip civil liberties and banish privacy. It is shocking to hear someone on Slashdot, of all places, use it. For a second I thought you might have been being sarcastic, but I don't think that's actually the case here.
Whether you are being sarcastic or not, there are many reasons why companies keep their contracts confidential. Corporate espionage is a big one. Simple privacy (our agreement with X is none of your damned business) is another. Where there is some public interest in the contents of a contract, such as those with the government paid for by tax dollars, there are volumes of laws, rules, and regulations already that dictate what must be disclosed, to whom, and when.
My guess is that Dell "can't", not because of not migrating decisions to other sales channels, but rather because of pre-existing contractual obligations to RedHat and Novell. It's possible and, given how stubborn Dell is being, quite probable that Dell has a contract with RedHat and Novell saying specifically that they "can't" sell any other flavors of Linux to business customers in exchange for discounts and customer support assistance.
If my hunch is correct, it really wouldn't matter how far up the chain you went. It's highly unlikely you'll talk an executive to breach a contract with a strategic partner so they can sell one laptop to a ma-n-pa NPO.
The article is misleading. Dell will sell businesses workstations and even servers with Linux on it, but not Ubuntu Linux. If you go to www.dell.com/linux, you can see that all the Linux-based business hardware is, in fact, RedHat.
It is quite obvious that Dell has a contractual agreement with RedHat that the only Linux that Dell will sell to business customers is RedHat, probably in exchange for RedHat kicking in support for those systems. They legally could NOT sell Ubuntu to this guy as a business, because it would have been a breach of contract with RedHat.
Don't want to pay the Microsoft tax and support Dell in its efforts to support Linux? Great! Buy a RedHat-based Linux workstation instead, then do what you want with it.
While I know you were kidding, what you say is actually incredibly insightful. Laws such as this have a tendency to backfire in completely unintended ways and I think you might have stumbled across one of them.
Kids want to go to these sites and this proposal would make it all but impossible for kids to go to them. Let's face it, most parents won't bother with all this crap and red tape just so Little Timmy can waste more time on MySpace rather than doing his homework. However, kids are kids and when faced with a challenge that they will think is decidedly "unfair", they will try to find ways around it -- including going to complete strangers to vouch for them.
Of course, in order to vouch for them, those strangers will need lots and lots of personal information.........
This isn't about free speech or anything like that
This is very much about freedom of speech -- Google's freedom of speech. Specifically, Google's right to advertise and to index what they want (within legality) and not advertise or index what they don't want.
I believe that time has come already -- especially after the approval of the patent protecting "A method by which to produce through an electronic medium a greeting and salutation to a planetary body."
And that would be the "different APIs" that I just referred to. Here's a newsflash. There are API differences between 1.4 and 5.0. Most of them are backwards compatible. A few (such as the enum keyword) are not. The places where backwards compatiblity is not perfect is well-documented and ALL of them are easily fixed. Here's a page with the details: http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/compatibility.html.
Running code written against the 5.0 API and attempting to integrate it with code written against the 1.4 API may cause you problems if you hit one of the snags listed in that page above -- just like attempting to integrate code written against one version of GTK+ with code written against another version might cause you problems. Integrating code compiled for two different platforms WILL cause you problems. Period.
The hell you aren't talking about forward compatibility. Your original post was you running Java code compiled for Java 5.0 in a Java 1.4 JRE, knowing exactly what would happen. Given that the JRE is a virtual machine and not an interpretter, what you did was exactly like compiling a C program for the P4 architecture and complaining that it crashes when run on a 386. Don't start changing your story now.
If you want to boil down your arguments to their core, you are really complaining that integrating code written against different versions of the API will break and somehow Java is the only environment where that happens.
You are being really disingenuous and you know it.
So recompile the 5.0 code with a VM target of 1.4 or fix whatever is wrong with the servlet that makes it incompatible with 5.0. Neither should be that hard to do.
Version incompatibilities is hardly a "Java only" thing. Try writing code for one version of Qt or GTK+ or some other library and link it with code with another version and watch the fun. Just the other day, the GIMP started to crash on my workstation because GAIM updated the shared GTK+ library to an incompatible version. I guess C++ and GTK+ sucks too.
Try running a Perl 5 script with objects inside a Perl 3 interpretter. Try running Python 2.0 list comprehension features inside Python 1.4. With Python 3.0, a LOT of stuff that's currently deprecated in Python will be removed altogether, meaning a lot of current Python scripts will no longer run in Python 3.0.
This is how things are. It happens with C, C++, Perl, Python, you name it. To single out Java for not being perfectly forward and backward compatible is being a little overly biased.
So you attempt to run code compiled for Java 5.0 environment in a Java 1.4 or earlier JRE and it blew up... surprise surprise. While Java is pretty good at being backwards compatible, it never made the claim of being forward compatible -- and its a little unfair for you to expect Java or any other language to be so. At least it told you in plain English why it failed ("Unsupported Class Version").
I suppose you are saying this is somehow worse than dynamically linking a C/C++ executable against the wrong version of a library where you get more helpful errors like "Segmentation Fault".
The RIAA isn't into SLAPP suits. A SLAPP suit would be the RIAA suing Slashdot for libel, loss of income/goodwill, intentional emotional distress, and general grinchiness because of all the horrible "lies" Slashdot has posted about them for the sole purpose of getting Slashdot to stop valid criticism of the RIAA's activities.
The RIAA, on the other hand, file bunches of indiscriminate lawsuits in a rather scattershot manner. That's about as far removed from the planned, strategic, calculated lawsuits that make up a SLAPP as one can get.
Not at all. IM is pretty much the "buddy list and primarily 1-on-1 chat" paradigm. IRC is more of a chat room, of which there are many many examples that predate it, going back to old BBS systems. IRC itself was a replacement for an old chat room system called MUT. In fact, IRC wasn't even the first chat room system to run over TCP/IP.
Slashdot Mirror
You are correct, but that's a whole different point than the GPs. The GP said that if you violate the GPL, your bridges are burned forever and ever, amen. You can't make it right, you can't fix it. One simple mistake and you are done forever.
However, there's absolutely NOTHING the GPL that says that at all. The GPL is pretty straightforward, really: If you abide by our terms, you can distribute. If you don't abide, you have no right to distribute. Valve/ID are now abiding by the terms**, so they can distribute. Case closed.
Because of their Steam technology, they were even able to retroactively distribute the copy of the GPL to everyone they had already distributed the software to. That makes them fully compliant with every distribution they've done. Case beaten like a dead horse.
** (This is assuming that Valve/ID will honor requests for the source code, of which I've not heard a yea or nay on.)
Well, if it was just the PI Number, then everyone would be typing 3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375 10..... and so on on the keypad forever!
Um -- I'm sorry but you are really stretching the imagination here.
It would take some serious leaps of logic to say that snapping a picture (5 seconds) and doing something else for 9 minutes and 55 seconds equals 10 minutes of "photography occurring" or "taking photographs". And where did you get 100ft area? That wasn't in the text at all. You seem to be sewing your case out of whole cloth here.
Let's come back to reality now. NYC lives and breathes on tourism. They bend over backwards and sideways to keep tourists coming to the city. They even make cab drivers go through training to be nicer to tourists. NYC will do absolutely nothing at all to jeopardize tourism in any way because they'd be cutting their own throats -- and they know it.
You are right, it doesn't say they have to be taking photographs, except for every single paragraph. It plainly states, over and over, "the taking of photographs" (subdivision (a)), "Filming, photography, production, television or radio remotes occurring on City property" (subparagraphs (1)(i), (ii), and (iii)) and "Filming or photography occurring on City property" (subparagraphs (2)(i), (ii), and (iii)).
Having a camera visible is not "photography occurring" nor "the taking of photographs".
I've read the proposed policy over and over and I can not for the life of me see where you are getting this idea.
So -- here's the requirements:
1) First, you have to be on city property for this to apply. That is, on the streets, sidewalks, parks, etc where filming for long periods of time impedes other people's use of the same public property.
2) One person - no permit needed
3) 2, 3, or 4 people - no permit needed unless longer than 30 minutes in one place
4) 5 or more people with no tripod - no permit needed unless longer than 30 minutes in one place
5) 5 or more people with one tripod - no permit needed unless longer than 10 minutes in one place
6) Two or more tripods - permit needed.
It's really that simple. Amateur photographers and sightseers do not need to film in one place longer than a half hour. A "let me take a picture of you in front of the Jumbotron" does not take a half hour. If it takes you or anyone else longer than 10 minutes to get your shot or are clogging the streets with multiple tripods and a gaggle of people, then you have almost certainly gone past "amateur" status.
Your "detain and question anyone with a camera" remark was plain and simple fear mongering.
Remove the word "legitimate" and take the quotes off the word spam. There's no difference between what you (I'm sorry, the 'owner you know') do and what you call "true spammers" do. You are still dealing in unsolicited commercial mass emails that people don't want.
In fact, looking over your list of what makes this enterprise "legitimate", every single one of them involves circumventing and defeating the protections that people and ISPs spend a lot of time and money to put up and maintain to keep this mail away. You mention the cost to the ISP in your last line, but utterly ignore that your "legitimate" version is ALSO at the cost of the ISP, in the increased manpower and hardware costs to adjust to your "legitimate" circumvention methods.
A lot of personal proxies (such as Privoxy) filter out crap like this. The kind of user that would use a product like Privoxy is also the kind of user that would tend to use Firefox. Makes me wonder if the Firefox numbers might not actually be a little higher overall.
Whether you are being sarcastic or not, there are many reasons why companies keep their contracts confidential. Corporate espionage is a big one. Simple privacy (our agreement with X is none of your damned business) is another. Where there is some public interest in the contents of a contract, such as those with the government paid for by tax dollars, there are volumes of laws, rules, and regulations already that dictate what must be disclosed, to whom, and when.
My guess is that Dell "can't", not because of not migrating decisions to other sales channels, but rather because of pre-existing contractual obligations to RedHat and Novell. It's possible and, given how stubborn Dell is being, quite probable that Dell has a contract with RedHat and Novell saying specifically that they "can't" sell any other flavors of Linux to business customers in exchange for discounts and customer support assistance.
If my hunch is correct, it really wouldn't matter how far up the chain you went. It's highly unlikely you'll talk an executive to breach a contract with a strategic partner so they can sell one laptop to a ma-n-pa NPO.
The article is misleading. Dell will sell businesses workstations and even servers with Linux on it, but not Ubuntu Linux. If you go to www.dell.com/linux, you can see that all the Linux-based business hardware is, in fact, RedHat.
It is quite obvious that Dell has a contractual agreement with RedHat that the only Linux that Dell will sell to business customers is RedHat, probably in exchange for RedHat kicking in support for those systems. They legally could NOT sell Ubuntu to this guy as a business, because it would have been a breach of contract with RedHat.
Don't want to pay the Microsoft tax and support Dell in its efforts to support Linux? Great! Buy a RedHat-based Linux workstation instead, then do what you want with it.
occupo = to take into possession, seize
oris = mouth (auris = ear, btw)
While I know you were kidding, what you say is actually incredibly insightful. Laws such as this have a tendency to backfire in completely unintended ways and I think you might have stumbled across one of them.
Kids want to go to these sites and this proposal would make it all but impossible for kids to go to them. Let's face it, most parents won't bother with all this crap and red tape just so Little Timmy can waste more time on MySpace rather than doing his homework. However, kids are kids and when faced with a challenge that they will think is decidedly "unfair", they will try to find ways around it -- including going to complete strangers to vouch for them.
Of course, in order to vouch for them, those strangers will need lots and lots of personal information.........
This isn't about free speech or anything like that
This is very much about freedom of speech -- Google's freedom of speech. Specifically, Google's right to advertise and to index what they want (within legality) and not advertise or index what they don't want.
If they use their position to censor speech unnecessarily, then yes I totally support that.
So, you support real-life criminal harassment over silly crap that happens on a volunteer-run free website? Wow.
You really need to get a sense of perspective, dude.
I believe that time has come already -- especially after the approval of the patent protecting "A method by which to produce through an electronic medium a greeting and salutation to a planetary body."
And that would be the "different APIs" that I just referred to. Here's a newsflash. There are API differences between 1.4 and 5.0. Most of them are backwards compatible. A few (such as the enum keyword) are not. The places where backwards compatiblity is not perfect is well-documented and ALL of them are easily fixed. Here's a page with the details: http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/compatibility.html.
Running code written against the 5.0 API and attempting to integrate it with code written against the 1.4 API may cause you problems if you hit one of the snags listed in that page above -- just like attempting to integrate code written against one version of GTK+ with code written against another version might cause you problems. Integrating code compiled for two different platforms WILL cause you problems. Period.
You are just being obtuse at this point.
The hell you aren't talking about forward compatibility. Your original post was you running Java code compiled for Java 5.0 in a Java 1.4 JRE, knowing exactly what would happen. Given that the JRE is a virtual machine and not an interpretter, what you did was exactly like compiling a C program for the P4 architecture and complaining that it crashes when run on a 386. Don't start changing your story now.
If you want to boil down your arguments to their core, you are really complaining that integrating code written against different versions of the API will break and somehow Java is the only environment where that happens.
You are being really disingenuous and you know it.
So recompile the 5.0 code with a VM target of 1.4 or fix whatever is wrong with the servlet that makes it incompatible with 5.0. Neither should be that hard to do.
Version incompatibilities is hardly a "Java only" thing. Try writing code for one version of Qt or GTK+ or some other library and link it with code with another version and watch the fun. Just the other day, the GIMP started to crash on my workstation because GAIM updated the shared GTK+ library to an incompatible version. I guess C++ and GTK+ sucks too.
Try running a Perl 5 script with objects inside a Perl 3 interpretter. Try running Python 2.0 list comprehension features inside Python 1.4. With Python 3.0, a LOT of stuff that's currently deprecated in Python will be removed altogether, meaning a lot of current Python scripts will no longer run in Python 3.0.
This is how things are. It happens with C, C++, Perl, Python, you name it. To single out Java for not being perfectly forward and backward compatible is being a little overly biased.
So you attempt to run code compiled for Java 5.0 environment in a Java 1.4 or earlier JRE and it blew up... surprise surprise. While Java is pretty good at being backwards compatible, it never made the claim of being forward compatible -- and its a little unfair for you to expect Java or any other language to be so. At least it told you in plain English why it failed ("Unsupported Class Version").
I suppose you are saying this is somehow worse than dynamically linking a C/C++ executable against the wrong version of a library where you get more helpful errors like "Segmentation Fault".
The RIAA isn't into SLAPP suits. A SLAPP suit would be the RIAA suing Slashdot for libel, loss of income/goodwill, intentional emotional distress, and general grinchiness because of all the horrible "lies" Slashdot has posted about them for the sole purpose of getting Slashdot to stop valid criticism of the RIAA's activities.
The RIAA, on the other hand, file bunches of indiscriminate lawsuits in a rather scattershot manner. That's about as far removed from the planned, strategic, calculated lawsuits that make up a SLAPP as one can get.
If you want to speak strictly about web software, you shouldn't include MySQL.
Not at all. IM is pretty much the "buddy list and primarily 1-on-1 chat" paradigm. IRC is more of a chat room, of which there are many many examples that predate it, going back to old BBS systems. IRC itself was a replacement for an old chat room system called MUT. In fact, IRC wasn't even the first chat room system to run over TCP/IP.