There are two main themes I have noticed with the anti-globalization movement.
First, they have no alternative. The entire movement is defined by what it is against, not by what it is for.
Second, large sections of the movement have no qualms with using false arguments and violence to advance their agenda.
For example, the anti-trade (supposed parody) gatt.org flatly accuses AIDS drug manufacturers of genocide. Saying that creators of drugs which cure AIDS actually are killing people afflicted with the disease is not only audacious, but logicaly incoherent. However, gatt.org does not let facts get in the way.
The anti-globalization protests have PRETENDED to be non-violent (and indeed some groups are). However, there are a large number of groups which have no qualms with blatant destruction and violence, and even more groups tolerate those groups and are thus tacitly complicit. If the movement really was non-violent, why are so many police needed to prevent full scale riots like Seattle?
And when violence does occur, members of the movement engage again in misinformation by blaming the police. Last time I checked, it wasn't the police who were looting stores and setting cars ablaze. If one actually watches the news in detail, the protestor who was shot in Genoa was killed as he was attempting to hurl a fire extinguisher at the head of a policeman. (Sounds pretty close to attempted 2nd degree murder to me.)
Members of the anti-globalization movement at the BARE MINIMUM must confront why their message and method is so attractive to violent thugs.
The direct issue with this item appears at first to be DMCA related, but in my view the root cause issue is a highly politicized agenda driven site which is trying to use ANY topic and ANY issue to score political points against global trade related organizations.
Examining the site, I would realize it is not the true WTO site, but MANY people are not as well informed. The site appears remarkably realistic, uses the WTO logos and nowhere does it say its a parody. The site is blatantly and unarguably attempting to use deception and fraudulent argument to advance its political agenda.
Imagine there was a linuxkernel.org which looked exactly like the REAL kernel.org but gave out kernels patched to provide root access on port 80. The point of trademarks is to provide authenticity to information and a product. Reading something in the New York Times conveys something about its accuracy and the source of the information.
When you have guerrilla groups attempting to use false trust to advance their agenda, not only is it cowardly, but it is against the law.
A friend of mine lives in Canada and was shipping it down to California (he goes to school here). The package was held up at the border for a week for some reason and eventually got through after he had to contact fedex (and I think fax his passport or something like that).
Anyway, when it finally arrived, it was fairly screwed up. Among things, the side was bashed in and the CPU fan had ripped off the processor and done some damage bouncing internally in the computer.
After running through a few hoops with fedex (he had to take it to a computer place to get inspected etc...) they reimbursed him to the tune of around $1000 I believe (I assume it was insured btw).
I wonder if any chance customs might have caused the damage or if it is somehow related to inspecting more packages. My friend at least turned out alright ($1000 goes a long way with today's prices).
The point is, if costs are spiralling out of control, at some point someone needs to pull the punch from the party.
Imagine that you have invested $50,000 in a business that is now going to go bankrupt, management says they can keep it afloat for another month if you cough up another $30,000. Next month, they ask for another $40,000.............People appear don't have the guts right now to axe the whole thing, but congress isn't going to continue to throw cash at a budgetary AND scientific boondogle.
The ISS has had absurd cost overruns and has science of incredibly low merit. Read over some posts and notice there is absolutely no informed person has ANYTHING GOOD to say about the science being done on it. It's cost is estimated somewhere in the $80 billion dollar range?!?!?
Also, when examining NASA, I would look at manned and unmanned seperately. Unmanned missions have had lots of interesting things going on, but the manned side has been a cash hemmorage.
I think you're right. Because the ISS and the shuttles are manned missions, incredible safety measures and costs start enterring the picture.
So why are we sending people into space still? We're no longer in a my spaceship is better than your spaceship deal with the Russians. The ISS and the shuttle program need to be considerred on their merit alone, and given the huge cost and questionable scientific value of experiments done up there, I don't see why we're doing it at all.
On the non-manned mission side, NASA has pushed a whole new approach of smaller and cheaper space vehicles and satellites. Using this strategy, NASA has gotten more satellites into space and had the first mission to Mars in decades.
At the exact same time, NASA has also been pursuing the International Space Station, which is neither cheap, small, nor effective. It is currently only being manned by a skeleton crew, so they can't hardly do any experiments. Furthermore, it has been recently pointed out that the ISS wobbles a bit, which could render many microgravity experiments useless. Basically, the ISS is an endeavour to pay hundereds of millions if not billions of dollars for experiments of very questionable scientific value.
Consider all the interesting science that could be done if this were instead channelled into real science.
I don't see how battling Microsoft by giving shitty support benefits anyone. How is a consumer helped if his new computer doesn't work out of the box with his current Internet connection?
Furthermore....
"Linux to battle Microsoft by trying to be difficult to install and hard to use."
I'll give anyone 10-1 odds XP is supported within six monthes. They probably just don't want tech support calls going to them about OS upgrade issues that should be going to Microsoft.
This may be taking a little news blurb too far, but I take this as just another example on how governments are so behind in understanding technology that in many cases they are functionally irrelevent. If they do end up passing a privacy bill I imagine it would either contain measures like this and be patently absurd, or the more likely case of being a watered down legalistic reaffirmation of the way business is currently done.
Far too often when the legislators foray into the online technological world, it becomes a spectacle of trying to keep logically unsound metaphors from being grounds for stupid legislation. Absurdities abound such as Al Gore comparing the government's role in the interstate highway system to the fiber optic Internet backbone. (He said something along the lines of wanting the backbone government run until some AT&T, Worldcom etc... folks sat him down and explained how it actually works to him). We get the standard key escrow legislation attempts every few years that are technologically unworkable in addition to just being plain stupid.
Sometimes they get it right (Internet sales tax ban), and I could see some legislation along the lines of requiring companies to actually FOLLOW their posted privacy policies, but I'm just generally suspicious when people who generally don't know much at all about technology are writing the rules.
Back when I was in high school,I ran tech for my school paper (we had 30 ppl on production staff). Anyway, the REAL sys admin (read asshole) never wanted to give us access privileges to do anything useful that we needed to do. Rather than wait forever to go through administration, I decided to quietly just monitor his computer to maintain a current list of admin passwords so I could make what changes I needed to any computer so the paper could work. However, I don't think this strategy scales up past high school.
Anyway, if access conditions are too draconian, it's impossible to even do basic stuff like running a school paper. EG., we needed to add jpegconvertor on some machines to do fast conversion from tiff to jpeg for the online edition.
Development environments (as I have experienced) require a larger width of tools. Indeed, if you're program itself deals with the registry, this appears to make things much harder to test except on specific machines. If you're doing less low level stuff, only having access to basic user land may be sufficient (can you still install programs but under a user level instead of admin level?)
On the otherhand, my university's large distributed unix environment would be a good example of a system which has a strong level of security and supports development. This is more of a function of the general root user permissions distinction than anything particularly special, but we have an absurd number of machines mostly running solaris and all having access to the same afs file system. They're fully loaded with everything one can think of, and if you need something, in standard unix style one can get a tar.gz, build it oneself, and stick it in the local directory. Maybe even make a ~user/bin and add it to your path. People can change permissions on their OWN afs directories/subdirectories via afs file system controls (in addition to basic unix permissions) so that groups have shared directory space etc... etc....
I've been out of windows too long to be honest to know how this compares on teh details (if at all) to a win2k environment.
It seems to me the main purpose of the proposed lockdown is to increase reliability, lower support costs, lower possibility of software piracy, and increase security. 1&2 seem fairly moot to me as as a developper, one hopefully isn't running to IT every week with some new software problem. 3&4 seem more legitimate company concerns that can't be instantly answerred with developper knows best. 3 involves trust between managers and developpers and 4 involves competence and continual diligence on the part of developers.
My personal opinion is that a two tier system is neccesary. Back to my uni comparison, if I develop stuff on the university system, it gets backed up everynight etc... etc..., but I can't test software on restricted ports etc...., so I could run that on my system. Do most work on computers supported by company infastructure but have other privately supported ones available for anything else.
Ask nearly anyone familiar with computer setups beyond a single desktop, the vast majority of money spent on IT infastructure is on support. The cost of buying the hardware and software are inconsequential with the cost of getting knowledgable people to keep everything running.
From this standpoint, standardizing os's and software to reduce the number of things that could go wrong and to reduce support costs seems like a good idea.
This especially makes sense if you are going to be running proprietary navy special apps that one would assume are OS dependent. (May require special client server software so that linux for backend doesn't make as much sense.)
Another support cost story....... (sorry people!)
(I'm roughly getting the numbers right) A firm I worked at over the summer, had around 100+ people, everyone had computers etc... and they have two people employed full time pulling down six figure salaries keeping everything running smoothly. The firm had a 711 or something silly that was 911 for computer help.
Basic econ, the cost of supporting an additional windows box is probably a lot less than the cost of supporting a linux box if you don't have any linux boxes already.
I run linux full time now, but I understand that for many situations, windows is a purely acceptable answer.
With the collapse of Eazel, and a new pessimism about linux for the desktop, I think linux UI doesn't neccesarily have a clear concept of where it wants to go from here. Gnome, KDE, a bunch of windows managers, they all work. There are incremental bug fixes, small changes, and important feature additions (anti-aliased text), but a whole new class of ui development probably requires a clear concept of what kind of user the software is targetting.
MacOS looks fucking cool, and they have a clear design concept. They're selling a consumer products computer, not a computer computer. It looks sweet, it goes fast, and ANYONE can use it. The quick start guide for an ibook is 4 color pictures.
The big change they made with OS X is that they made lots of really cool eye candy and put the whole gui on top of an industrial strength bsd unix base. They've succeeded in having a consumer products computer that is CAPABLE of supporting super user expert use.
The linux user is a completely different kind of user. Linux is used in a server market, specialized research computing, and super user geekware. Linux users need/want a functional, nice looking UI, and indeed I think linux UI surpasses windows handilly.
Open source distributed development has its advantages (lots of customizabiliy and options) but it makes a centralized design methadology hard. Things come together, but an organized UI development which links applications, windows manager, OS together etc.... appear hard.
There are tradeoffs in UI design. Powerful expert usage vs. easy for average user. Customizability vs. doing one thing well. The linux console is fantastically powerful, but incomprehensible for the average joe schmo computer user. Can linux really move out of the super user dept? Can it do so more than incrementally? I don't see Linux becoming an average desktop environment anytime in the near future (eg. I don't see linux having enough organization to do something at all like os x), but is it moving there? Does gui only need to be strong enough for server/workstation? The requirements for all these apps are different. Ok, I'll stop rambling.
This isn't a copyright, this is a trademark, and the two are VERY DIFFERENT things. A copyright involves the creation of intellectual property, and this obviously is nothing of the sort.
A fundamental aspect of trademark law (I believe) is trademark maintenance. As came up on the lego article here, lego couldn't allow all kinds of free software with "lego" in it because then they couldn't defend their trademark. Has he done anything to protect his trademark??
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the
freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress
of grievances.
This does NOT conflict with current case law. You can't scream fire in a crowded movie theater, you can't threaten to kill someone, a paper can't without ANY factual basis do a story on someone calling them child pornographers etc...
Having worked on a newspaper before, the first amendment does not (according to court rulings) protect libel, incitement to riot, and obscenity. All these restrictions are pretty commonsensical though and hardly place an undue burden. The courts generally take the first amendment very seriously and place a high standard on proving the above mentioned items.
Libel makes a distinction between a private person and a public person, and with public people, the standard for proving libel is very high (I think accuser has to show that the publisher knowingly knew it was false etc...) Tabloids publish blatantly untrue stories (they claim any semi-intelligent person would know they're untrue) and though people sue on libel grounds, they nearly always win.
Many people even think the incitement to riot standard is sometimes held too high. A court of appeals in the US recently held that an anti abortion site which listed the names and addresses of doctors (and even put a line through those names after one was murderred) was legal. The message of the site was very clear, but they didn't explicitly state it.
If anyone says "I believe in the first amendment, BUT..." that person probably, at their core, doesn't. People ranting against hate crimes often fall in this camp.
First, explicit incitement to riot is NOT protected by the first amendment. If a website picks some day and advocates some awful murderous thing on that day, I'm sure the FBI can legally take them out.
Also, anyone involved in posting on a website or running one leaves a massive electronic trail, and if indeed is at some level involved, would make it vastly easier in my opinion to identify and locate. If there is a credible hate group out there, use their own web dealings to ID the members etc...
With search engines, the amount of logs kept by web sites and isps, it's hard for me to figure out how running a website is a huge plus and not a gigantic potential liability for these hate groups. It that allows infiltration, monitoring, and detection. What's easier for the CIA to penetrate, a group of 10 planning in Afghanistan or an irc chat room? It's also even harder to see what banning this kind of speech would productively do, as it would do nothing to stop any actual use of the Internet for planning horific acts.
It surprises me how people who work and live in an environment that grew mightilly through the lack of government interference can be so nostalgic for the heavy hand of big brother.
Just like to say I'm just an average joe that can read yahoo and use a calculator.
http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/010412/2256.html
TeleGeography estimates that Trans-Atlantic deployed bandwidth will total 214 gbps in 2001, which comes to approximately 96,300,000 megabytes an hour, and a total capacity of 2,311,200,000 megs per day.
If 100,000 people download a 600meg game, that comes to 60,000,000 megs, which is about 2.6% of total capacity in a day.
It's unlikely that everyone is going to download in an evenly distributed fashion (time and network wise), but all 100,000 won't try to get it in the first day either. It doesn't sound like to me this is going to be a big problem.
Something else that's kind of interesting, the same group says that the "Supply of Lit Bandwidth" will total 1842 Gbps in 2001 (remember they said 214 was deployed), and this group predicts that both of these numbers will roughly double by next year. According to this group, doesn't look like there is no shortage of bandwidth going across the pond.
And don't skimp on the lawyer. I have a couple of friends who got fucked in the ass (not literally heh) over something truly retarded because he went with a public defender.
Get the BEST lawyer you can. Do this before you do anything else!!
Don't talk to admin, don't do anything until you get a lawyer.
Imagine if China were hauling WSJ into court for distributing articles on its American website that hadn't been approved by Chinese censors. And yes, the Dow Jones (parent company) does business in China. Would all you people supporting the prosecution in the Australian case support this hypothetical one?
The most important issue I see in this case, and there have been others like it, is a matter of jurisdiction. Can Australia haul the WSJ into an Australian court because it made a post on servers located in America?
If this court case proceeds and others like it become commonplace, I could hardly imagine the chilling effect it would have. Some people have said that since Dow Jones does business in Australia, they have to comply with all Australian laws regarding the dissemination of information.
WHAT WOULD THIS MEAN IN PRACTICE????
Well, we could take the yahoo approach and block any australian we can find from viewing the non-australian version of a page. Oh, and we would have to do this for other countries too.... There's the Australian page that never criticizes anyone, there's the French page that doesn't make any references to the WWII german memorabilia, there's the special Chinese version which kisses the ass of the Chinese government. Oh, and it's not the chinese government which would be censoring the page, it would be the WSJ! Or, dow jones could have to drop to the lowest common deniminator, providing everyone with the same shitty version that passes muster in all countries.
But this new precedent could move far beyond large corporations. We live in a globalized world, and I could see any small company that has an online website that does some small level of business getting hauled into court. If you want borders to block the flow of information, for companies and individuals to operate only within national borders, then hope the Australian court makes a decision along the same lines as the French.
Slashdot Mirror
There are two main themes I have noticed with the anti-globalization movement.
First, they have no alternative. The entire movement is defined by what it is against, not by what it is for.
Second, large sections of the movement have no qualms with using false arguments and violence to advance their agenda.
For example, the anti-trade (supposed parody) gatt.org flatly accuses AIDS drug manufacturers of genocide. Saying that creators of drugs which cure AIDS actually are killing people afflicted with the disease is not only audacious, but logicaly incoherent. However, gatt.org does not let facts get in the way.
The anti-globalization protests have PRETENDED to be non-violent (and indeed some groups are). However, there are a large number of groups which have no qualms with blatant destruction and violence, and even more groups tolerate those groups and are thus tacitly complicit. If the movement really was non-violent, why are so many police needed to prevent full scale riots like Seattle?
And when violence does occur, members of the movement engage again in misinformation by blaming the police. Last time I checked, it wasn't the police who were looting stores and setting cars ablaze. If one actually watches the news in detail, the protestor who was shot in Genoa was killed as he was attempting to hurl a fire extinguisher at the head of a policeman. (Sounds pretty close to attempted 2nd degree murder to me.)
Members of the anti-globalization movement at the BARE MINIMUM must confront why their message and method is so attractive to violent thugs.
The direct issue with this item appears at first to be DMCA related, but in my view the root cause issue is a highly politicized agenda driven site which is trying to use ANY topic and ANY issue to score political points against global trade related organizations.
Examining the site, I would realize it is not the true WTO site, but MANY people are not as well informed. The site appears remarkably realistic, uses the WTO logos and nowhere does it say its a parody. The site is blatantly and unarguably attempting to use deception and fraudulent argument to advance its political agenda.
Imagine there was a linuxkernel.org which looked exactly like the REAL kernel.org but gave out kernels patched to provide root access on port 80. The point of trademarks is to provide authenticity to information and a product. Reading something in the New York Times conveys something about its accuracy and the source of the information.
When you have guerrilla groups attempting to use false trust to advance their agenda, not only is it cowardly, but it is against the law.
A friend of mine lives in Canada and was shipping it down to California (he goes to school here). The package was held up at the border for a week for some reason and eventually got through after he had to contact fedex (and I think fax his passport or something like that).
Anyway, when it finally arrived, it was fairly screwed up. Among things, the side was bashed in and the CPU fan had ripped off the processor and done some damage bouncing internally in the computer.
After running through a few hoops with fedex (he had to take it to a computer place to get inspected etc...) they reimbursed him to the tune of around $1000 I believe (I assume it was insured btw).
I wonder if any chance customs might have caused the damage or if it is somehow related to inspecting more packages. My friend at least turned out alright ($1000 goes a long way with today's prices).
The point is, if costs are spiralling out of control, at some point someone needs to pull the punch from the party.
Imagine that you have invested $50,000 in a business that is now going to go bankrupt, management says they can keep it afloat for another month if you cough up another $30,000. Next month, they ask for another $40,000.............People appear don't have the guts right now to axe the whole thing, but congress isn't going to continue to throw cash at a budgetary AND scientific boondogle.
The ISS has had absurd cost overruns and has science of incredibly low merit. Read over some posts and notice there is absolutely no informed person has ANYTHING GOOD to say about the science being done on it. It's cost is estimated somewhere in the $80 billion dollar range?!?!?
Also, when examining NASA, I would look at manned and unmanned seperately. Unmanned missions have had lots of interesting things going on, but the manned side has been a cash hemmorage.
I think you're right. Because the ISS and the shuttles are manned missions, incredible safety measures and costs start enterring the picture.
So why are we sending people into space still? We're no longer in a my spaceship is better than your spaceship deal with the Russians. The ISS and the shuttle program need to be considerred on their merit alone, and given the huge cost and questionable scientific value of experiments done up there, I don't see why we're doing it at all.
On the non-manned mission side, NASA has pushed a whole new approach of smaller and cheaper space vehicles and satellites. Using this strategy, NASA has gotten more satellites into space and had the first mission to Mars in decades.
At the exact same time, NASA has also been pursuing the International Space Station, which is neither cheap, small, nor effective. It is currently only being manned by a skeleton crew, so they can't hardly do any experiments. Furthermore, it has been recently pointed out that the ISS wobbles a bit, which could render many microgravity experiments useless. Basically, the ISS is an endeavour to pay hundereds of millions if not billions of dollars for experiments of very questionable scientific value.
Consider all the interesting science that could be done if this were instead channelled into real science.
I don't see how battling Microsoft by giving shitty support benefits anyone. How is a consumer helped if his new computer doesn't work out of the box with his current Internet connection?
Furthermore....
"Linux to battle Microsoft by trying to be difficult to install and hard to use."
Doesn't quite make sense.
I'll give anyone 10-1 odds XP is supported within six monthes. They probably just don't want tech support calls going to them about OS upgrade issues that should be going to Microsoft.
Does this mean every site I visit will have two pop ups? One asking if it can put cookies on my computer and the other describing what a cookie is?
This may be taking a little news blurb too far, but I take this as just another example on how governments are so behind in understanding technology that in many cases they are functionally irrelevent. If they do end up passing a privacy bill I imagine it would either contain measures like this and be patently absurd, or the more likely case of being a watered down legalistic reaffirmation of the way business is currently done.
Far too often when the legislators foray into the online technological world, it becomes a spectacle of trying to keep logically unsound metaphors from being grounds for stupid legislation. Absurdities abound such as Al Gore comparing the government's role in the interstate highway system to the fiber optic Internet backbone. (He said something along the lines of wanting the backbone government run until some AT&T, Worldcom etc... folks sat him down and explained how it actually works to him). We get the standard key escrow legislation attempts every few years that are technologically unworkable in addition to just being plain stupid.
Sometimes they get it right (Internet sales tax ban), and I could see some legislation along the lines of requiring companies to actually FOLLOW their posted privacy policies, but I'm just generally suspicious when people who generally don't know much at all about technology are writing the rules.
Back when I was in high school,I ran tech for my school paper (we had 30 ppl on production staff). Anyway, the REAL sys admin (read asshole) never wanted to give us access privileges to do anything useful that we needed to do. Rather than wait forever to go through administration, I decided to quietly just monitor his computer to maintain a current list of admin passwords so I could make what changes I needed to any computer so the paper could work. However, I don't think this strategy scales up past high school.
Anyway, if access conditions are too draconian, it's impossible to even do basic stuff like running a school paper. EG., we needed to add jpegconvertor on some machines to do fast conversion from tiff to jpeg for the online edition.
Development environments (as I have experienced) require a larger width of tools. Indeed, if you're program itself deals with the registry, this appears to make things much harder to test except on specific machines. If you're doing less low level stuff, only having access to basic user land may be sufficient (can you still install programs but under a user level instead of admin level?)
On the otherhand, my university's large distributed unix environment would be a good example of a system which has a strong level of security and supports development. This is more of a function of the general root user permissions distinction than anything particularly special, but we have an absurd number of machines mostly running solaris and all having access to the same afs file system. They're fully loaded with everything one can think of, and if you need something, in standard unix style one can get a tar.gz, build it oneself, and stick it in the local directory. Maybe even make a ~user/bin and add it to your path. People can change permissions on their OWN afs directories/subdirectories via afs file system controls (in addition to basic unix permissions) so that groups have shared directory space etc... etc....
I've been out of windows too long to be honest to know how this compares on teh details (if at all) to a win2k environment.
It seems to me the main purpose of the proposed lockdown is to increase reliability, lower support costs, lower possibility of software piracy, and increase security. 1&2 seem fairly moot to me as as a developper, one hopefully isn't running to IT every week with some new software problem. 3&4 seem more legitimate company concerns that can't be instantly answerred with developper knows best. 3 involves trust between managers and developpers and 4 involves competence and continual diligence on the part of developers.
My personal opinion is that a two tier system is neccesary. Back to my uni comparison, if I develop stuff on the university system, it gets backed up everynight etc... etc..., but I can't test software on restricted ports etc...., so I could run that on my system. Do most work on computers supported by company infastructure but have other privately supported ones available for anything else.
Ok, I've rambled enough.
Ask nearly anyone familiar with computer setups beyond a single desktop, the vast majority of money spent on IT infastructure is on support. The cost of buying the hardware and software are inconsequential with the cost of getting knowledgable people to keep everything running.
From this standpoint, standardizing os's and software to reduce the number of things that could go wrong and to reduce support costs seems like a good idea.
This especially makes sense if you are going to be running proprietary navy special apps that one would assume are OS dependent. (May require special client server software so that linux for backend doesn't make as much sense.)
Another support cost story....... (sorry people!)
(I'm roughly getting the numbers right) A firm I worked at over the summer, had around 100+ people, everyone had computers etc... and they have two people employed full time pulling down six figure salaries keeping everything running smoothly. The firm had a 711 or something silly that was 911 for computer help.
Basic econ, the cost of supporting an additional windows box is probably a lot less than the cost of supporting a linux box if you don't have any linux boxes already.
I run linux full time now, but I understand that for many situations, windows is a purely acceptable answer.
With the collapse of Eazel, and a new pessimism about linux for the desktop, I think linux UI doesn't neccesarily have a clear concept of where it wants to go from here. Gnome, KDE, a bunch of windows managers, they all work. There are incremental bug fixes, small changes, and important feature additions (anti-aliased text), but a whole new class of ui development probably requires a clear concept of what kind of user the software is targetting.
MacOS looks fucking cool, and they have a clear design concept. They're selling a consumer products computer, not a computer computer. It looks sweet, it goes fast, and ANYONE can use it. The quick start guide for an ibook is 4 color pictures.
The big change they made with OS X is that they made lots of really cool eye candy and put the whole gui on top of an industrial strength bsd unix base. They've succeeded in having a consumer products computer that is CAPABLE of supporting super user expert use.
The linux user is a completely different kind of user. Linux is used in a server market, specialized research computing, and super user geekware. Linux users need/want a functional, nice looking UI, and indeed I think linux UI surpasses windows handilly.
Open source distributed development has its advantages (lots of customizabiliy and options) but it makes a centralized design methadology hard. Things come together, but an organized UI development which links applications, windows manager, OS together etc.... appear hard.
There are tradeoffs in UI design. Powerful expert usage vs. easy for average user. Customizability vs. doing one thing well. The linux console is fantastically powerful, but incomprehensible for the average joe schmo computer user. Can linux really move out of the super user dept? Can it do so more than incrementally? I don't see Linux becoming an average desktop environment anytime in the near future (eg. I don't see linux having enough organization to do something at all like os x), but is it moving there? Does gui only need to be strong enough for server/workstation? The requirements for all these apps are different. Ok, I'll stop rambling.
This isn't a copyright, this is a trademark, and the two are VERY DIFFERENT things. A copyright involves the creation of intellectual property, and this obviously is nothing of the sort.
A fundamental aspect of trademark law (I believe) is trademark maintenance. As came up on the lego article here, lego couldn't allow all kinds of free software with "lego" in it because then they couldn't defend their trademark. Has he done anything to protect his trademark??
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the
freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress
of grievances.
This does NOT conflict with current case law. You can't scream fire in a crowded movie theater, you can't threaten to kill someone, a paper can't without ANY factual basis do a story on someone calling them child pornographers etc...
Having worked on a newspaper before, the first amendment does not (according to court rulings) protect libel, incitement to riot, and obscenity. All these restrictions are pretty commonsensical though and hardly place an undue burden. The courts generally take the first amendment very seriously and place a high standard on proving the above mentioned items.
Libel makes a distinction between a private person and a public person, and with public people, the standard for proving libel is very high (I think accuser has to show that the publisher knowingly knew it was false etc...) Tabloids publish blatantly untrue stories (they claim any semi-intelligent person would know they're untrue) and though people sue on libel grounds, they nearly always win.
Many people even think the incitement to riot standard is sometimes held too high. A court of appeals in the US recently held that an anti abortion site which listed the names and addresses of doctors (and even put a line through those names after one was murderred) was legal. The message of the site was very clear, but they didn't explicitly state it.
If anyone says "I believe in the first amendment, BUT..." that person probably, at their core, doesn't. People ranting against hate crimes often fall in this camp.
First, explicit incitement to riot is NOT protected by the first amendment. If a website picks some day and advocates some awful murderous thing on that day, I'm sure the FBI can legally take them out.
Also, anyone involved in posting on a website or running one leaves a massive electronic trail, and if indeed is at some level involved, would make it vastly easier in my opinion to identify and locate. If there is a credible hate group out there, use their own web dealings to ID the members etc...
With search engines, the amount of logs kept by web sites and isps, it's hard for me to figure out how running a website is a huge plus and not a gigantic potential liability for these hate groups. It that allows infiltration, monitoring, and detection. What's easier for the CIA to penetrate, a group of 10 planning in Afghanistan or an irc chat room? It's also even harder to see what banning this kind of speech would productively do, as it would do nothing to stop any actual use of the Internet for planning horific acts.
Maybe they should spend their time and money trying to not go bankrupt as opposed to trying to get rid of their customers.
preach it!
It surprises me how people who work and live in an environment that grew mightilly through the lack of government interference can be so nostalgic for the heavy hand of big brother.
Just like to say I'm just an average joe that can read yahoo and use a calculator.
http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/010412/2256.html
TeleGeography estimates that Trans-Atlantic deployed bandwidth will total 214 gbps in 2001, which comes to approximately 96,300,000 megabytes an hour, and a total capacity of 2,311,200,000 megs per day.
If 100,000 people download a 600meg game, that comes to 60,000,000 megs, which is about 2.6% of total capacity in a day.
It's unlikely that everyone is going to download in an evenly distributed fashion (time and network wise), but all 100,000 won't try to get it in the first day either. It doesn't sound like to me this is going to be a big problem.
Something else that's kind of interesting, the same group says that the "Supply of Lit Bandwidth" will total 1842 Gbps in 2001 (remember they said 214 was deployed), and this group predicts that both of these numbers will roughly double by next year. According to this group, doesn't look like there is no shortage of bandwidth going across the pond.
And don't skimp on the lawyer. I have a couple of friends who got fucked in the ass (not literally heh) over something truly retarded because he went with a public defender.
Get the BEST lawyer you can. Do this before you do anything else!!
Don't talk to admin, don't do anything until you get a lawyer.
Imagine if China were hauling WSJ into court for distributing articles on its American website that hadn't been approved by Chinese censors. And yes, the Dow Jones (parent company) does business in China. Would all you people supporting the prosecution in the Australian case support this hypothetical one? The most important issue I see in this case, and there have been others like it, is a matter of jurisdiction. Can Australia haul the WSJ into an Australian court because it made a post on servers located in America? If this court case proceeds and others like it become commonplace, I could hardly imagine the chilling effect it would have. Some people have said that since Dow Jones does business in Australia, they have to comply with all Australian laws regarding the dissemination of information. WHAT WOULD THIS MEAN IN PRACTICE???? Well, we could take the yahoo approach and block any australian we can find from viewing the non-australian version of a page. Oh, and we would have to do this for other countries too.... There's the Australian page that never criticizes anyone, there's the French page that doesn't make any references to the WWII german memorabilia, there's the special Chinese version which kisses the ass of the Chinese government. Oh, and it's not the chinese government which would be censoring the page, it would be the WSJ! Or, dow jones could have to drop to the lowest common deniminator, providing everyone with the same shitty version that passes muster in all countries. But this new precedent could move far beyond large corporations. We live in a globalized world, and I could see any small company that has an online website that does some small level of business getting hauled into court. If you want borders to block the flow of information, for companies and individuals to operate only within national borders, then hope the Australian court makes a decision along the same lines as the French.