At the bottom of the email:
This correspondence is the result of information provided by the following companies or organizations: Microsoft, Apple, Adobe."
This implies that Apple is feeding MS marketing info on people using Macintoshes... How/why did Apple get around to doing this???
I started on a Radio Shack Model I, Level I.. 4K of ram and a tape drive (as in audio tape).
My next machine was an Amdahl V6 1Mips with 24Meg of ram and god knows how many megabytes of disk space.
Of course I had to share that one with a whole univesity (maximum users with reasonable response time: 520). Of course, it was running MTS -- None of that IBM OS crap...
OK: So some of the detractors are intent on proving that any occurence of 'interesting' amino acids is proof that the metorite is contaminated. No matter what studies are done to determine the source of the molecules, they seem to come up with some strange explanation that dismisses the result.
Something of the scientific world counterpart to the "New Age"ers.
I get the feeling that if one of these metorites were to break open and expel a full-formed 3 headed talking green alien, they'd surmise that it was probably nothing more than a spontaneous mutation of the lab mascott.
From reading your post it sounded like you were implying that governments have the right to enforce laws that you don't know about, so companies may too.. Ig that's what you were trying to say,m then, you're wrong. Governments may have that right, but companies don't. You are bound by the country's laws becuse it's presumed that the laws are public and common knowledge (this was a bit more true when the laws of the land would have fit in a small notebook).
Back in the '70s, there was a Canadian show called This is the Law, where they'd show their perennial LawBreaker doing somthing seemingly innocuous, and getting arrested.
A panel of semi-famous personages would then have to guess what he'd done illegal.
(Like: kissing someone in public on a Sunday in New Brunswick, blocking access to a beach in Newfoundland , or covering a phone book in Alberta.)
___
In any case, Contracts have no presumption of knowledge. Contracts require a meeting of the minds, and -- generally, -- an agreement before the money is exchanged. If you buy a piece of software, take it home, install it, and then suddenly get told that you're agreeing to all sorts of limitations and exceptions there's some serious questions as to whether or not there's been a real meeeting of the minds.
Some people think that these so-called contracts are bogus. Others (mostly the software vendors involved) would beg to differ. The UCITA was an attempt to enforce the latter train of thought.
The point is that they changed the rules after agreeing a contract with the
customers. Including cases where customers had already paid.
Where people already have a contract -- and especially for customers who have
already paid, the company really can't retroactively change the contract. They
can, however "contact costomers about their heavy use". Customers who
voluntarily decide to limit their usage will become a pleasant side effect of this
new, uhm, approach.
I note that in their question and answer page, they don't seem to say anything
directly about (say) cutting off people who continue to take advantage of their
"unlimited" contract.
New customers, on the other hand, could be bound by this new protocol.
I've come to understand that when any company starts offering 'unlimited' anything , that the offer is going to turn out to be temporary. The only real question is whether they are going to grandfather in the early adopters.
For example, when I first got my cell phone, Tellus (BC Tel, then) was offering "unlimited evenings and weekends". This was back in the days of the analog phone where an extende battery pack gave you 2 hours talk time/12 hours standby. They didn't take into account the possibility of geeks like me building a 5 pound external jell-cell power supply with a power cord. I managed to get 8 hours talk time/ 3 day standby. I used the thing like a ground line. I didn't even bother to buy a cordless at home -- why should I??? Just forward to the cell phone!.
I averaged over 1000/month minutes evenings and weekends.
Needless to say, it wasn't long before they decided to 'limit' people to 1000 minutes evening and weekends. For most people, this isn't much of a limit because battery issues kicked in long before then... but it caused people like me to actually pay some attention to some attention to when we could use the ground line. (when my contract finally ran out).
In truth, the 1GB/day limits aren't really that bad. Think about it... 200 tracks/day is over 600 minutes (10 hours!) of new music per day. and they're promising that they're only going to apply these limits to chronic heavy users -- In other words, they're not going to nail me just because I downloaded all 5 RedHat disks today.
It was all over the CBC about a week ago. It was anything but a private statement.
"George Radwanski made the comment in his annual report tabled in Parliament Wednesday."
He also made a press release and stuck it on the front of the privacy commission web page. Other than taking out paid adds, and chaining himself to the parliament's copy of the anti-terrorism bill (that tried to label just about any effective politicial action "terrorism"), I don't think that he could do a whole lot more.
I think that these bouunties would only be able to do any damage to these people if we were able to sue the people who paid for the spam,, not just the spammers themselves. It's usually easy enough to track who paid for the spam (e.g. via credit card transactions). On the other hand, figuring out who hacked somebody's Windows firewall to turn it into a spam-router is a completely different problem.
It'd probably take me about 2 hours (if I was lucky) to definitively track down the bastards who actually sent the email -- definitively enough to be sure of collecting the bounty. At that point, the $10 is well below the minimum wage (especially when you add in court time).
About the only real hope would be to turn it into a class-action suit, and go after them for a few million dollars (plus punitive damages).
If you RTFA, it turns out that Tokoyo (city?) has budgeted 50M yen to investigating the current viability of switching over, while the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry is going to dole out 1B yen (US$8.3 million) to support asian development of Linux software It seems like the/. editors didn't bother scanning the web page pointed to before they posted the story.
The original code (or work) would still be copyright it's original copyright date. The later code would be copyright it's new release date. If you can disambiguate the two (for example, by finding a copy of the original), you get the advantages of the original copyright date.
For example, if lets say I stole a simple 3 line chunk of code that converts a date from one format to another, and threw it in my multi-thousand line project (which is all original except for those 3 lines), would it really be breaking the GPL?
Law can sometimes be viewed as a natural-language programming language with judges as the execution model. Unfortunately, wetware logic modules -- even heavily trained wetware -- make for for notoriously inexact results.
When you're looking for a boundary case, especially in the legal world, it's pretty much looked at on a case-by-case basis. The boundary even tends to move over time. Things that are clearly obnoxioux one year, may work their way to unacceptable some time later (and vice versa).
The Eldred case in 1850, for example, might have been a slam-dunk winner (back when copyright was still less than the author's lifetime, lifetime+a century would have probably looked like forever). On the other hand, a lawsiut over race-based quotas back when they were still fighting over the legality of slavery would have been a textbook example of "moot".
You'll also run into situations where people go judge-hunting.. trying to maneuver things so that your case is going to be a heard by a judge more likely to rule on your side than most others.
During the discovery phase of the trial, the defendent would have to produce the complete source code and build instructions for their product.
They might not have to. At the very least, the defendant could probably delay execution by arguing over whether they really had to produce their entire source code (on the basis of trade secret). This would, however, probably preclude them from producing code in their defence later on.
In any case, I don't think that there would be need. The GPL owners would simply have to produce the original (copyright) source code and show that it compiled down to something that looked like the impugned binaries. If this was convincing, then the defendant would have to prove that there was some other source for those binaries (at which point, producing their own (non-GPL) source code would be the one of the few choices).
On the other hand, given that they've already distributed these binaries with strings identifying them as the GPLed Linux code, we've already got a smoking gun. That they then pulled the signatures but continued to distribute (substantially) the same code, is pretty damning as proof of malicious intent.
(Remember: burden of proof in civil suits is only balance of probabilities, not beyond a reasonable doubt)
Legally speaking (IANAL), I'd say that these bastards are pretty much cooked.
Legal arguments on affirmative defences of fair use and licence compliance could be made.
Yep. Wholesale copy of the code probably fails the 'fair use' defence, and lack of source distribution pokes a big hole in the 'license compliance' defence.
The judge would rule on infringement, then if[when!] the plaintiff prevails, he would rule on damages. Factors influencing damages would be willfulness of the infringement and the presense or absense of commercial gain as a result of the infringement.
Deletion of the signatures after the first letter is pretty good proof (IMHO) of willful infringement, and they're selling the code (with the systems).
It depends on who holds copyright to the associated pieces of code. Best bet is that it's been assigned to the EFF, but it could also be Linus and/or some of the people who wrote the bulk of the code.
It'll actually be rather interesting (in ~200 years) when it comes time to determine when the code's copyright expires. Just who's lifetime does each piece of code expire in relation to?
Saying that the website was a hoax is saying that it was issued irrespective of the truth. This is actually different than saying that it's completeley false. Microsoft called it erroneous, as opposed to false. Erroneous could mean that the reported purchase price was off by 10% or it could mean that Vivendi and MS had never even started negotiations.
The statements, so far, from Vivendi and MS seem to make it clear only that negotiations have not concluded. Reading anything more into their statements is pure conjecture.
(If you have any further questions, try reading Heinlin's Stranger in a Strange Land.
This brings up two questions. First of all, do distros release too often thus creating too many versions to maintain? Secondly, how much faith do you have in the upgrade feature of install?"
Probably.. but going to the other extreme isn't going to help them (or us), either. I'm thinking that probably the best thing for them to do would be to specify one minor rev of each major version for long-term support.
For example, redhat should probably designate 5.2 6.2 and 7.3 for long-term support. Although it could cause some (generally minor) upset for users of the less-supported revs to go to the long=term revs, it's not likely as bad as being forced to always upgrade to the current 'in' version every 6-16 months.
I think the appropriate cliche here for the current attitude is "Penny wise, pound foolish'
Liquid is (almost) always going to be far denser than gas. With enough compression you can force just about any gas into a liquid state, but holding it in that liquid state requires thicker walled containers.
Liquid or gas,
Peroxide probably has a slightly lower available energy per KG of fuel, but my guess is that this is more than made up for the fact that it's easier to contain a given weight of OH than it is of pure O2 or H2.
People pre-emptively release exploits for both OS and MS code. I'm not about to defend either.
I will, however, happily attack MSs unwillingness to act on known exploits until they're hit over the head with two-by-four sized proofs of the severity of the exploit.
If the case you're mentioning is the one that I'm thinking of, I believe that GreyMagic got sick of quitely passing on yet another exploit to MS, and being just as quietly told to go get stuffed.
MS has gotten slightly better at security, but I'm still seeing clear indications that they consider it to be more of a PR issue than a technical one.
A competitor won't like this and can sue the company for violating the GPL and forcing this company to undo the violatings by providing the source.
A competing company can't sue for copyright (GPL) violation unless they've provided enough code into the GPLed code to have their own case for copyright violation.
some kinds of sex have absolutely nothing to do with motherhood.
Barring things like The Imaculate Conception (one known case) and in-vitro fertilization (only slightly more common), no kinds of motherhood have nothing to do with sex.
That having been said, any kind of (hetrosexual) sex can lead to motherood (for the mother, at least).
Re:They're just not saying, 'cause...
on
Baked Apple
·
· Score: 4, Funny
If this was an Apple store, the employee wouldn't be in a position to say anything about the (dorked-out) customer's reasons.
My reading, is that anybody who can walk into a store with an obviously fried (er, baked) $2500 box, and say with a straight face that she's got "a baked apple", has got to have a sense of humor.
I'm betting that she went home, and told her astonished friends.
"I can't believe it. The guy at the store took the computer from me, and didn't even bother to ask how my computer got baked. Talk about brainless drones -- wouldn't
you want to know how that happened?"
It's when MS doesn't get a 3 month delay that I don't bother to complain.
Microsoft refuses to acknowledge the seriousness of a bug for months, and then complains when someone releases a format-your-disk exploit for bugs that they swore their face blue weren't serious (even after the exploit was released).
Slashdot Mirror
This implies that Apple is feeding MS marketing info on people using Macintoshes... How/why did Apple get around to doing this???
My next machine was an Amdahl V6 1Mips with 24Meg of ram and god knows how many megabytes of disk space.
Of course I had to share that one with a whole univesity (maximum users with reasonable response time: 520). Of course, it was running MTS -- None of that IBM OS crap...
Something of the scientific world counterpart to the "New Age"ers.
I get the feeling that if one of these metorites were to break open and expel a full-formed 3 headed talking green alien, they'd surmise that it was probably nothing more than a spontaneous mutation of the lab mascott.
.... Leading biochemistry lab.
Back in the '70s, there was a Canadian show called This is the Law, where they'd show their perennial LawBreaker doing somthing seemingly innocuous, and getting arrested.
A panel of semi-famous personages would then have to guess what he'd done illegal.
(Like: kissing someone in public on a Sunday in New Brunswick, blocking access to a beach in Newfoundland , or covering a phone book in Alberta.)
___
In any case, Contracts have no presumption of knowledge. Contracts require a meeting of the minds, and -- generally, -- an agreement before the money is exchanged. If you buy a piece of software, take it home, install it, and then suddenly get told that you're agreeing to all sorts of limitations and exceptions there's some serious questions as to whether or not there's been a real meeeting of the minds.
Some people think that these so-called contracts are bogus. Others (mostly the software vendors involved) would beg to differ. The UCITA was an attempt to enforce the latter train of thought.
Where people already have a contract -- and especially for customers who have already paid, the company really can't retroactively change the contract. They can, however "contact costomers about their heavy use". Customers who voluntarily decide to limit their usage will become a pleasant side effect of this new, uhm, approach.
I note that in their question and answer page, they don't seem to say anything directly about (say) cutting off people who continue to take advantage of their "unlimited" contract.
New customers, on the other hand, could be bound by this new protocol.
For example, when I first got my cell phone, Tellus (BC Tel, then) was offering "unlimited evenings and weekends". This was back in the days of the analog phone where an extende battery pack gave you 2 hours talk time/12 hours standby. They didn't take into account the possibility of geeks like me building a 5 pound external jell-cell power supply with a power cord. I managed to get 8 hours talk time/ 3 day standby. I used the thing like a ground line. I didn't even bother to buy a cordless at home -- why should I??? Just forward to the cell phone!.
I averaged over 1000/month minutes evenings and weekends.
Needless to say, it wasn't long before they decided to 'limit' people to 1000 minutes evening and weekends. For most people, this isn't much of a limit because battery issues kicked in long before then... but it caused people like me to actually pay some attention to some attention to when we could use the ground line. (when my contract finally ran out).
In truth, the 1GB/day limits aren't really that bad. Think about it... 200 tracks/day is over 600 minutes (10 hours!) of new music per day. and they're promising that they're only going to apply these limits to chronic heavy users -- In other words, they're not going to nail me just because I downloaded all 5 RedHat disks today.
I think that these bouunties would only be able to do any damage to these people if we were able to sue the people who paid for the spam,, not just the spammers themselves. It's usually easy enough to track who paid for the spam (e.g. via credit card transactions). On the other hand, figuring out who hacked somebody's Windows firewall to turn it into a spam-router is a completely different problem.
About the only real hope would be to turn it into a class-action suit, and go after them for a few million dollars (plus punitive damages).
If you RTFA, it turns out that Tokoyo (city?) has budgeted 50M yen to investigating the current viability of switching over, while the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry is going to dole out 1B yen (US$8.3 million) to support asian development of Linux software /. editors didn't bother scanning the web page pointed to before they posted the story.
It seems like the
The original code (or work) would still be copyright it's original copyright date. The later code would be copyright it's new release date. If you can disambiguate the two (for example, by finding a copy of the original), you get the advantages of the original copyright date.
Law can sometimes be viewed as a natural-language programming language with judges as the execution model. Unfortunately, wetware logic modules -- even heavily trained wetware -- make for for notoriously inexact results.
When you're looking for a boundary case, especially in the legal world, it's pretty much looked at on a case-by-case basis. The boundary even tends to move over time. Things that are clearly obnoxioux one year, may work their way to unacceptable some time later (and vice versa).
The Eldred case in 1850, for example, might have been a slam-dunk winner (back when copyright was still less than the author's lifetime, lifetime+a century would have probably looked like forever). On the other hand, a lawsiut over race-based quotas back when they were still fighting over the legality of slavery would have been a textbook example of "moot".
You'll also run into situations where people go judge-hunting .. trying to maneuver things so that your case is going to be a heard by a judge more likely to rule on your side than most others.
They might not have to. At the very least, the defendant could probably delay execution by arguing over whether they really had to produce their entire source code (on the basis of trade secret). This would, however, probably preclude them from producing code in their defence later on.
In any case, I don't think that there would be need. The GPL owners would simply have to produce the original (copyright) source code and show that it compiled down to something that looked like the impugned binaries. If this was convincing, then the defendant would have to prove that there was some other source for those binaries (at which point, producing their own (non-GPL) source code would be the one of the few choices).
On the other hand, given that they've already distributed these binaries with strings identifying them as the GPLed Linux code, we've already got a smoking gun. That they then pulled the signatures but continued to distribute (substantially) the same code, is pretty damning as proof of malicious intent.
(Remember: burden of proof in civil suits is only balance of probabilities, not beyond a reasonable doubt)
Legally speaking (IANAL), I'd say that these bastards are pretty much cooked.
Legal arguments on affirmative defences of fair use and licence compliance could be made.
Yep. Wholesale copy of the code probably fails the 'fair use' defence, and lack of source distribution pokes a big hole in the 'license compliance' defence.
The judge would rule on infringement, then if [when!] the plaintiff prevails, he would rule on damages. Factors influencing damages would be willfulness of the infringement and the presense or absense of commercial gain as a result of the infringement.
Deletion of the signatures after the first letter is pretty good proof (IMHO) of willful infringement, and they're selling the code (with the systems).
It depends on who holds copyright to the associated pieces of code. Best bet is that it's been assigned to the EFF, but it could also be Linus and/or some of the people who wrote the bulk of the code.
It'll actually be rather interesting (in ~200 years) when it comes time to determine when the code's copyright expires. Just who's lifetime does each piece of code expire in relation to?
Saying that the website was a hoax is saying that it was issued irrespective of the truth. This is actually different than saying that it's completeley false. Microsoft called it erroneous, as opposed to false. Erroneous could mean that the reported purchase price was off by 10% or it could mean that Vivendi and MS had never even started negotiations.
The statements, so far, from Vivendi and MS seem to make it clear only that negotiations have not concluded. Reading anything more into their statements is pure conjecture.
(If you have any further questions, try reading Heinlin's Stranger in a Strange Land.
Probably.. but going to the other extreme isn't going to help them (or us), either. I'm thinking that probably the best thing for them to do would be to specify one minor rev of each major version for long-term support.
For example, redhat should probably designate 5.2 6.2 and 7.3 for long-term support. Although it could cause some (generally minor) upset for users of the less-supported revs to go to the long=term revs, it's not likely as bad as being forced to always upgrade to the current 'in' version every 6-16 months.
I think the appropriate cliche here for the current attitude is "Penny wise, pound foolish'
It depends on what you're looking for. Take a look at what's offered before you run screaming.
Liquid or gas, Peroxide probably has a slightly lower available energy per KG of fuel, but my guess is that this is more than made up for the fact that it's easier to contain a given weight of OH than it is of pure O2 or H2.
I will, however, happily attack MSs unwillingness to act on known exploits until they're hit over the head with two-by-four sized proofs of the severity of the exploit.
If the case you're mentioning is the one that I'm thinking of, I believe that GreyMagic got sick of quitely passing on yet another exploit to MS, and being just as quietly told to go get stuffed.
MS has gotten slightly better at security, but I'm still seeing clear indications that they consider it to be more of a PR issue than a technical one.
A competing company can't sue for copyright (GPL) violation unless they've provided enough code into the GPLed code to have their own case for copyright violation.
Barring things like The Imaculate Conception (one known case) and in-vitro fertilization (only slightly more common), no kinds of motherhood have nothing to do with sex.
That having been said, any kind of (hetrosexual) sex can lead to motherood (for the mother, at least).
My reading, is that anybody who can walk into a store with an obviously fried (er, baked) $2500 box, and say with a straight face that she's got "a baked apple", has got to have a sense of humor.
I'm betting that she went home, and told her astonished friends.
That means that you really shouldn't put Windows on a critical computer.
...
Oh, damn.. I'm gonna get moderated redundant, aren't I?
Microsoft refuses to acknowledge the seriousness of a bug for months, and then complains when someone releases a format-your-disk exploit for bugs that they swore their face blue weren't serious (even after the exploit was released).