The US has a weird, hyper-patriotic society that a lot of Europeans find bizarre, brainwashing and militaristic.
Umm, if my memory isn't failing me, don't a lot of countries still have compulsory military service for their citizens? Israel, Kuwait, and Switzerland come to mind. Granted, the first two aren't European, but Switzerland certainly is.
And only giving the franchise to people who have previously served in the military? Screw you! What gives you the right to decide that? What gives those citizens the right to decide how everyone else gets to live? Nothing whatsoever.
That should be obvious. "I have a gun and I have been trained in how to use it to kill you. You haven't." (ObDisclaimer: I haven't fired a gun in over 20 years, and I doubt I even remember which end to hold anymore....)
Your attitude reminds me rather strongly of a segment from an Eddie Murphy stand-up routine. Shorn of the profanity (which constitutes 90% of the content), I'm sure the first slaves to come off the boat refused to bale that cotton. The survivors, having seen what happened to the first few, baled cotton.
In the real world, might really does make right. We don't like it, and we believe that's morally wrong, but it's still true. Only when the mighty have a strong moral backbone does this change.
Beyond that, I actually wish I had a way to apply mod points to an article instead of a comment. This is the worst I've ever seen on slashdot. (Which tells you I haven't been reading as assiduously as most of you, I'm sure...)
I confess that I find it hard to believe that Apple would choose an error message ("Sorry, the operation could not be completed...") when Leopard thinks the operation ("Copy," according to the title bar) actually completed. You may be correct, I don't know Apple's error codes. However, if that error code, 51, actually means some kind of clean-up failed, then I'd consider the error message itself to be a defect. It's seriously misleading.
You're correct that we would need to examine the exact SMB state between the two machines to know which side is buggy, but I just can't buy into the situation you're describing. Occam's Razor, and all that.
Since I don't have a Mac handy, I can't run the experiment you're implicitly suggesting. Anybody else?
Did you miss the part where Leopard reported an error on the copy? (No, really... I'm not being snarky, did you actually miss that screenshot?) Leopard correctly recognized that the transfer had failed, and still deleted the source.
To me, that's a pretty clear bug. What stuns me is that Apple isn't using the underlying "mv" command - since it should certainly deal with this situation. They rolled their own defective version.
Never re-invent the wheel. You'll have a square wheel with 13 lug nuts of all different sizes. Just go to Goodyear and take the tried-and-true.
While I'd also agree that the "illegal copy = lost sale" mantra is nonsense, I don't see it as sanctionable to bring it up in court, particularly if they have evidence (however slender) to back it up. (Outright fraud is another matter; manufactured evidence is perjury, after all.) Once the evidence is presented, it's up to a jury to determine how believable it is. That's a matter of fact, not a matter of law, in determining damages.
Ultimately, the real problem with the legal system is, as you note, that not everyone can afford it. Of course, you can always file Pro Se, but your lack of experience will cost you severely. Sadly, a lot of US legal principles are just that: principles, with no basis in reality.
One of my common rants on the subject is the lack of access to the laws, the text itself. In principle, you shouldn't need to pay to find out what the laws are, so you can follow them! In practice, you'd need to buy a very expensive book. The principle is still technically followed, since you can go to any jurisdictional seat and ask to review the books yourself, for free. (I've done this in fighting a parking ticket, pulling the statute from City Hall.) Can you imagine hopping on your horse and riding out to Washington, DC to review a federal statute because you can't afford to buy the book?
This is improving with the Internet, but there are still some problems. For example, Texas building codes.
RICO is so often brought up in these discussions that I finally went looking to see what it would take to get a RICO indictment and eventual conviction. I'm not so sure that it applies.
Note: I got my RICO information from Wikipedia, so take it for what it's worth.
First off, RICO requires that the individual or groups commit two of 35 different crimes. Extortion is in the list, but not many of the other crimes could apply to the RIAA no matter how far we stretch them. I think even extortion is a bit of a stretch. The ones that are even worth considering are:
Extortion
Fraud
Blackmail
Obstruction of Justice
Racketeering
I think we can ignore things like murder-for-hire, slavery, etc.
There's a fine line between extortion and blackmail. In both cases, there's a threat for gain. "Pay up or else!" In extortion, the threat is generally something illegal; for blackmail, the threat is normally something that would be legal, if it weren't being done as part of the threat for gain. Certainly, the RIAA is well within the bounds of legal behavior to bring lawsuits, and the courts are very reluctant to limit access to the courts under any circumstances.
To show extortion, one would need to demonstrate that bringing the suits is, itself, improper. That's not impossible, particularly if we can prove that the RIAA threatened litigation that it knew it couldn't win, but there are other rules for dealing with threats of frivolous lawsuits. My knowledge of that end of the law is pretty shaky — does anybody know what those rules are? Does anyone know if one can use them to demonstrate that the legal threat was, in fact, extortion?
For blackmail, one merely needs to demonstrate that the threat was used for gain. Unfortunately, once again, the courts like to encourage parties to settle. Settlement negotiations are almost impossible to characterize as blackmail.
RICO was written with obstruction of justice in mind. The idea was that organized crime would threaten witnesses, suborn testimony, etc. Some of the things that I've heard in a few RIAA cases do push this line, but I don't think they cross it. There's a big difference between trying to subpoena a minor and depose her outside the presence of her guardian, versus saying "If you testify, I'll kill your pets, your kids, and your grandparents, in alphabetical order."
Fraud only seems to apply if the letters they send out contain fraudulent offers. I'm not sure how this could apply, but it's worth examination.
Racketeering refers to a completely illegal business model - e.g., a "Protection Racket," where you pay for "insurance" against bad things happening to your business — where the bad things are the insurer actively trashing your business. If extortion applies to a large proportion of lawsuits (enough to show a clear, deliberate pattern), then racketeering probably applies as well. However, I don't think extortion could be demonstrated.
Ultimately, much as I'd personally love to see RICO applied, I don't think it does. They key point is that the courts don't like to limit access to the courts, even by a chilling effect. Everybody has a right to their day in court. That, in turn, leads to the abuses we see where a big corporation can afford more and bigger lawyers than small mom-and-pop businesses, who settle cases that they could win because they'd lose more money in legal fees than the settlement.
What we need is a revamp of this part of the legal system. Frankly, I don't see how that can be done without free, government-appointed counsel in every case, which is even less workable than the current system.
Shall we take this comment to mean that you're volunteering to be the courtroom test case? To shell out tens of thousands of dollars to stand up for your rights and the rights of us all?
We all appreciate your sacrifice, hero.
Just because there's a legal defense doesn't mean we want to invoke it. I know I don't.
Let's say on *nix there's a vulnerability that allows for remote ssh access. You can only get in as an unprivileged user, heck, you may even get/dev/null as your shell, but it lets you in. Do you rate down the remote access flaw because of *nix's "baked in " defenses? No! You fix the bug and update.
Well, actually, you do rate it down. This is basic risk assessment, and if it comes to a prioritization of resources — which bug should we fix next? — I want that priority set according to the impact of the problem. Cold, hard, rational assessment, not “ZOMGRemoteAccessExploitWTFBBQOver”
You seem to assume that reducing the rating of a flaw means you don't fix it.
Now, more importantly, from TFA, we have
[The] rating system is clear-cut. If an Internet worm can spread without user action -- the MSRC's definition of "critical" -- on Vista, the vulnerability will be so tagged, Vista-specific security technologies notwithstanding.
This is different from the case you're outlining, and if the bloke in this article is really trying to change these criteria, I've got a real problem with that. If it's the difference between a buffer overrun that allows remote access versus a buffer overrun that allows an outsider to crash that process, I think it's the MSRC that needs to correct their own criteria. Either way, it shouldn't be driven by an outsider, although he can and should make the suggestion to them that certain criteria should be revisited.
I'm a doctoral student in networking. Last year, I had occasion to write an online survey paper on networking traffic models. I used primary sources for everything I could find, and then I used secondary sources for a few papers that were unavailable. During peer review, a few readers complained that I didn't provide derivation or citation for things I'd consider to be required background material (such as the mean inter-arrival time for exponentially distributed arrivals). For those points, I provided a link to the relevant Wikipedia article on, say, the Exponential Distribution. These were all collected in a dedicated “Informational Resources” section, and were all from Wikipedia.
They weren't exactly citations, they were more a matter of, “If you're reading this paper and you lack the fundamental background, here's where you can catch up.”
I wonder if that use would fall under the ban in TFA?
Yup, and I wrote a book database to do this, too, back in 1991. It maintained the book database pre-sorted by different fields: Author, Title, etc. A sextupuly-linked list. I wouldn't do it that way today, and I certainly wouldn't write it in Turbo Pascal, either....
I'd be surprised if a majority of Slashdot readers couldn't claim prior art.
Actually, it isn't a matter of the mugger. It's the employer (or other authority figure) that tries to coerce you to reveal your vote and who makes decisions based on it.
Same principle, and I'm sure this wass the sort of scenario you had in mind.
Thank you. Before I posted the exact same comment, I decided to see if anyone else said it even better -- which you did.
This entire news story is a waste of time and gratuitous bad PR for a company that's actually behaving very reputably. It's hard to argue with an "opt-in" system like this. The TOS nonsense about cancelling service is pretty clearly directed at account owners, not casual readers. In other words, if you opt for the "Sponsored+" status and then try to get the benefits without holding up your end of the bargain (showing ads on your journal), you get dumped. This is akin to buying a car, refusing to make the payments, and then complaining when the creditor repossesses.
I'm a LiveJournal user, and I use it mostly to keep up with the lives of friends of mine in far parts of the country (and world). If I found the advertisements truly obnoxious, I'd either drop the "Sponsored+" journal from my friends list, or buy the paid account.
Technically, UCE doesn't have to be spam, by the definition you're using. If I send a single, targeted UCE to you (just to you), then I'm not saying the same thing over and over and over again, am I?
Targeted UCE tends to be less offensive, but I still classify it as spam and refuse to buy from sellers who advertise this way.
Text only. Amen. This is something I almost never see anymore, and it's why I run weird odd-ball offbeat IM clients that nobody uses (naim, pork).
I want something that's pure text, something I can run within a screen session on a linux box, then walk away. Detach, go home, attach from there and pick right up where I was - with all of the messages I received while I was gone. This is one of the things naim does best, since it was designed with this in mind.
Your IM discussion is really just you typing to someone on the other end. Why should it be complicated beyond that?
I know, now it sounds like I want to go back to the days of IRC. Well... Aside from the myriad problems I used to have with it, yes.
Are there any other decent text-based clients I'm missing? I definitely want to know about it!
I'm a bit surprised that Harald dodged the question in the article...
This preliminary injunction follows a series of out-of-court settlement agreements that the netfilter/iptables project has concluded within a short period of time. When asked about the reasons for the sudden rise in legal pressure for GPL compliance, Harald Welte, Chairman of the Netfilter Core Team states:
"We are not in any way opposing the commercial use of free and open source software. Specifically, there is no legal risk of using GPL licensed software in commercial products. But vendors have to comply with the license terms, just like they would have to with any other, even proprietary software license agreement."
Nice, and it's always good to remind the media that there's no restriction on selling open source in this manner. But.... That wasn't the question. Why now, brown cow? Why is there a sudden enforcement flurry now?
This is exactly the sort of non-answer that raises my hackles when listening to politicians. It especially bothers me when it's "one of us," a member of the open source community. I can't imagine why Welte would be dodging the question, so I can only assume he's very worried about giving the wrong impression.
Actually, the LD50 isn't the only thing that matters. Once, back in a psychopharmacology course, I worked out the minimum amount of coffee to put one into a toxic psychosis. I made a bunch of assumptions - very strong coffee, low but realistic body mass, no built-up tolerance. The minimum turned out to be about 18 cups of coffee in a 30-minute period, or about a pot and a half. The time factor matters, though, and I guarantee most every geek here has built up far too much tolerance to go postal off of that!
This needs to make mainstream press, and DAMN QUICK.
Definitely. Now, how do we accomplish that? I don't have contacts with the press. I've got contacts on at least one dem campaign team (surprisingly, not Dean!), even contacts in the defense industry, but the press? Nothing. Who does? How do we get this in front of them?
Am I the only one who's first thought was not "Great, let's blow them off the air!"? My first thought was "Hmmm... I could join the organization and see what tools they use, see where the addresses are coming from, etc., etc. Know thine enemy.
My second thought was "Um, wait, the hordes of rabid slashdotters will be wreaking major havoc on the list o exposed addresses. I don't want my address on that list - my ISP would nuke me in a heartbeat with the major-league smack-down that's coming."
Anybody else here want to be a volunteer from the audience?
There's an easy away around the EULA. I always install my EULAed software stoned drunk. No contract is valid if you're not in your sane mind.
Another alternative is to have your 5 year old child to install the software. He can't agree to anything.
So for double safety, I should get my 5-year-old drunk and have her install the software? Come to think of it, she'd probably do a better job than I would, anyway!
Another important point with contracts: the courts have been known to discard clauses that the signatory could not reaonably have expected to be present. The original precedent - I don't have the actual citation handy, I'm sure someone can google it up - was a case where a man signed a friend into the hospital. He thought he was signing consent forms; there turned out to be a clause wherein he agreed to take financial responsibility for the medical bills if the patient was unable to pay. Well, when the bill came due he refused to pay and went to court, where the court agreed that a reasonable person would not expect to find such a clause in the contract.
Given the nature of some of these clauses, particularly on the security patches, I don't think the courts would hold them valid, completely aside from the other obvious points that have been brought up. (Lack of negotiation, consideration, etc.)
HOWEVER, this doesn't mean that the RIAA are in the wrong necessarily. If they want to enforce the copyrights that they hold, they have to do something. I have always preferred the idea of targeting individuals who were infringing rather than mass lawsuits against "P2P", which was their tactic until recently. The method for doing this should be through normal legal channels though, not based on "PR".
Yeah, but at the same time they need to get the word out. A lot of people genuinely don't realize that what they do is illegal. Doe's lawyer even makes the same point: teenagers in an environment where they can't be expected to know that what they are doing is illegal. I actually know a couple musicians who think that, because they are musicians and need access to musical works to practice for covers, think that this gives them a right to infringe - perfectly above-board and legally. They honestly believe this, and they tell their friends, too!
So, to protect legitimate copyright claims (yes, legit. I'm talking law, not ethics, not justifications!), the RIAA has to get the word out. They can buy publicity spots and crank out the infommercials. Will anybody listen? Not even during the Superbowl! Or, they can make a few examples, make them firmly, juice them for PR and maybe scare people into listening. It's unfortunate, but there just isn't any better alternative for them to protect their intellectual property.
More importantly, and more germanely, they don't necessarily need the massive subpoena authority granted under section 512. They could still pick a representative handful of people and make their lives a living hell, and make sure the rest of the unaware file-sharing community knows it. Coming from RPI as I did, and personally knowing one of our $97 Billion RIAA Sweepstakes Winners, I'd sit up and take notice in a hurry. It only takes having one person you know get nailed before you stop and think about it.
I think it goes without saying that, as a community, we generally believe that they're better off not enforcing these claims too vigorously. We've all seen the studies that, as sharing goes up, so do sales. But holding to a broken business model doesn't change their rights under broken US law.
Wee, bonnie McBride said in one of the interviews (CRN):
CRN: Why do you say that? What's happening behind the scenes? Might this case be resolved quietly, rather than become the intellectual property case of the century?
McBride: They're putting this on a [slow, legal] path. But customers have been putting pressure on IBM to get this resolved. This is not a case IBM can get knocked out on--they'd be filing motions to dismiss the case [if they thought they could win]. Our case is up to $3 billion--they'd have to come up from a few hundred million dollars to settle. Every month we keep finding more and more [Linux code that violates our Unix System contract]. We'd want a settlement and royalty [on Linux] going forward.
Now, I'm a big proponent of not just blindly listening to what people say. Legal cases are generally public record, are they not? That means we should be able to find out who's really delaying things, and how? Unfortunately, not having much experience with the US legal system, I wouldn't have the faintest clue how to go about this. Does anybody else? Who's really dreading the courtroom?
Here's another thought that wouldn't generally come to mind. I don't get a lot of formal exercise. My diet is lousy. I'm still thin as a rail. Why?
People cite metabolism. I think I remember reading an article once - if anybody can find this one for me, PLEASE let me know!! - where they studied the notion of a metabolism and found evidence that it was not a significant factor. (Actually, they went so far as to imply that it was a myth - not sure I agree with that part.) They put people with different "metabolisms" into sealed environments. Then they tracked every single piece of intake and every activity. The result? The higher metabolism people didn't actually burn more calories with the same intake and activities. They didn't have the same activities at all! They fidget!!
I'm just as bad. Here I sit, reading slashdot, and both my legs are jiggling under my desk like a pair of hamsters in love. I keep it under control in front of customers/managers/the Nobel Prize Committee, but anytime I'm in my own private cube, I fidget as much as most slashdotters mastu... Um, let's not go there.;-)
Is there a copy of you reading this article? A person who is not you but who lives on a planet called Earth, with misty mountains, fertile fields and sprawling cities, in a solar system with eight other planets? The life of this person has been identical to yours in every respect. But perhaps he or she now decides to put down this article without finishing it, while you read on.
Am I the only one that, on reading this first paragraph, decided to put the article down without finishing it?
Slashdot Mirror
Umm, if my memory isn't failing me, don't a lot of countries still have compulsory military service for their citizens? Israel, Kuwait, and Switzerland come to mind. Granted, the first two aren't European, but Switzerland certainly is.
That should be obvious. "I have a gun and I have been trained in how to use it to kill you. You haven't." (ObDisclaimer: I haven't fired a gun in over 20 years, and I doubt I even remember which end to hold anymore....)
Your attitude reminds me rather strongly of a segment from an Eddie Murphy stand-up routine. Shorn of the profanity (which constitutes 90% of the content), I'm sure the first slaves to come off the boat refused to bale that cotton. The survivors, having seen what happened to the first few, baled cotton.
In the real world, might really does make right. We don't like it, and we believe that's morally wrong, but it's still true. Only when the mighty have a strong moral backbone does this change.
Beyond that, I actually wish I had a way to apply mod points to an article instead of a comment. This is the worst I've ever seen on slashdot. (Which tells you I haven't been reading as assiduously as most of you, I'm sure...)
I confess that I find it hard to believe that Apple would choose an error message ("Sorry, the operation could not be completed...") when Leopard thinks the operation ("Copy," according to the title bar) actually completed. You may be correct, I don't know Apple's error codes. However, if that error code, 51, actually means some kind of clean-up failed, then I'd consider the error message itself to be a defect. It's seriously misleading.
You're correct that we would need to examine the exact SMB state between the two machines to know which side is buggy, but I just can't buy into the situation you're describing. Occam's Razor, and all that.
Since I don't have a Mac handy, I can't run the experiment you're implicitly suggesting. Anybody else?
Did you miss the part where Leopard reported an error on the copy? (No, really... I'm not being snarky, did you actually miss that screenshot?) Leopard correctly recognized that the transfer had failed, and still deleted the source.
To me, that's a pretty clear bug. What stuns me is that Apple isn't using the underlying "mv" command - since it should certainly deal with this situation. They rolled their own defective version.
Never re-invent the wheel. You'll have a square wheel with 13 lug nuts of all different sizes. Just go to Goodyear and take the tried-and-true.
Barratry is not under RICO, as I understand it.
While I'd also agree that the "illegal copy = lost sale" mantra is nonsense, I don't see it as sanctionable to bring it up in court, particularly if they have evidence (however slender) to back it up. (Outright fraud is another matter; manufactured evidence is perjury, after all.) Once the evidence is presented, it's up to a jury to determine how believable it is. That's a matter of fact, not a matter of law, in determining damages.
Ultimately, the real problem with the legal system is, as you note, that not everyone can afford it. Of course, you can always file Pro Se, but your lack of experience will cost you severely. Sadly, a lot of US legal principles are just that: principles, with no basis in reality.
One of my common rants on the subject is the lack of access to the laws, the text itself. In principle, you shouldn't need to pay to find out what the laws are, so you can follow them! In practice, you'd need to buy a very expensive book. The principle is still technically followed, since you can go to any jurisdictional seat and ask to review the books yourself, for free. (I've done this in fighting a parking ticket, pulling the statute from City Hall.) Can you imagine hopping on your horse and riding out to Washington, DC to review a federal statute because you can't afford to buy the book?
This is improving with the Internet, but there are still some problems. For example, Texas building codes.
RICO is so often brought up in these discussions that I finally went looking to see what it would take to get a RICO indictment and eventual conviction. I'm not so sure that it applies.
Note: I got my RICO information from Wikipedia, so take it for what it's worth.
First off, RICO requires that the individual or groups commit two of 35 different crimes. Extortion is in the list, but not many of the other crimes could apply to the RIAA no matter how far we stretch them. I think even extortion is a bit of a stretch. The ones that are even worth considering are:
I think we can ignore things like murder-for-hire, slavery, etc.
There's a fine line between extortion and blackmail. In both cases, there's a threat for gain. "Pay up or else!" In extortion, the threat is generally something illegal; for blackmail, the threat is normally something that would be legal, if it weren't being done as part of the threat for gain. Certainly, the RIAA is well within the bounds of legal behavior to bring lawsuits, and the courts are very reluctant to limit access to the courts under any circumstances.
To show extortion, one would need to demonstrate that bringing the suits is, itself, improper. That's not impossible, particularly if we can prove that the RIAA threatened litigation that it knew it couldn't win, but there are other rules for dealing with threats of frivolous lawsuits. My knowledge of that end of the law is pretty shaky — does anybody know what those rules are? Does anyone know if one can use them to demonstrate that the legal threat was, in fact, extortion?
For blackmail, one merely needs to demonstrate that the threat was used for gain. Unfortunately, once again, the courts like to encourage parties to settle. Settlement negotiations are almost impossible to characterize as blackmail.
RICO was written with obstruction of justice in mind. The idea was that organized crime would threaten witnesses, suborn testimony, etc. Some of the things that I've heard in a few RIAA cases do push this line, but I don't think they cross it. There's a big difference between trying to subpoena a minor and depose her outside the presence of her guardian, versus saying "If you testify, I'll kill your pets, your kids, and your grandparents, in alphabetical order."
Fraud only seems to apply if the letters they send out contain fraudulent offers. I'm not sure how this could apply, but it's worth examination.
Racketeering refers to a completely illegal business model - e.g., a "Protection Racket," where you pay for "insurance" against bad things happening to your business — where the bad things are the insurer actively trashing your business. If extortion applies to a large proportion of lawsuits (enough to show a clear, deliberate pattern), then racketeering probably applies as well. However, I don't think extortion could be demonstrated.
Ultimately, much as I'd personally love to see RICO applied, I don't think it does. They key point is that the courts don't like to limit access to the courts, even by a chilling effect. Everybody has a right to their day in court. That, in turn, leads to the abuses we see where a big corporation can afford more and bigger lawyers than small mom-and-pop businesses, who settle cases that they could win because they'd lose more money in legal fees than the settlement.
What we need is a revamp of this part of the legal system. Frankly, I don't see how that can be done without free, government-appointed counsel in every case, which is even less workable than the current system.
Shall we take this comment to mean that you're volunteering to be the courtroom test case? To shell out tens of thousands of dollars to stand up for your rights and the rights of us all?
We all appreciate your sacrifice, hero.
Just because there's a legal defense doesn't mean we want to invoke it. I know I don't.
Well, actually, you do rate it down. This is basic risk assessment, and if it comes to a prioritization of resources — which bug should we fix next? — I want that priority set according to the impact of the problem. Cold, hard, rational assessment, not “ZOMGRemoteAccessExploitWTFBBQOver”
You seem to assume that reducing the rating of a flaw means you don't fix it.
Now, more importantly, from TFA, we have
This is different from the case you're outlining, and if the bloke in this article is really trying to change these criteria, I've got a real problem with that. If it's the difference between a buffer overrun that allows remote access versus a buffer overrun that allows an outsider to crash that process, I think it's the MSRC that needs to correct their own criteria. Either way, it shouldn't be driven by an outsider, although he can and should make the suggestion to them that certain criteria should be revisited.
There are times when it's appropriate.
I'm a doctoral student in networking. Last year, I had occasion to write an online survey paper on networking traffic models. I used primary sources for everything I could find, and then I used secondary sources for a few papers that were unavailable. During peer review, a few readers complained that I didn't provide derivation or citation for things I'd consider to be required background material (such as the mean inter-arrival time for exponentially distributed arrivals). For those points, I provided a link to the relevant Wikipedia article on, say, the Exponential Distribution. These were all collected in a dedicated “Informational Resources” section, and were all from Wikipedia.
They weren't exactly citations, they were more a matter of, “If you're reading this paper and you lack the fundamental background, here's where you can catch up.”
I wonder if that use would fall under the ban in TFA?
Yup, and I wrote a book database to do this, too, back in 1991. It maintained the book database pre-sorted by different fields: Author, Title, etc. A sextupuly-linked list. I wouldn't do it that way today, and I certainly wouldn't write it in Turbo Pascal, either....
I'd be surprised if a majority of Slashdot readers couldn't claim prior art.
Actually, it isn't a matter of the mugger. It's the employer (or other authority figure) that tries to coerce you to reveal your vote and who makes decisions based on it.
Same principle, and I'm sure this wass the sort of scenario you had in mind.
Thank you. Before I posted the exact same comment, I decided to see if anyone else said it even better -- which you did.
This entire news story is a waste of time and gratuitous bad PR for a company that's actually behaving very reputably. It's hard to argue with an "opt-in" system like this. The TOS nonsense about cancelling service is pretty clearly directed at account owners, not casual readers. In other words, if you opt for the "Sponsored+" status and then try to get the benefits without holding up your end of the bargain (showing ads on your journal), you get dumped. This is akin to buying a car, refusing to make the payments, and then complaining when the creditor repossesses.
I'm a LiveJournal user, and I use it mostly to keep up with the lives of friends of mine in far parts of the country (and world). If I found the advertisements truly obnoxious, I'd either drop the "Sponsored+" journal from my friends list, or buy the paid account.
Technically, UCE doesn't have to be spam, by the definition you're using. If I send a single, targeted UCE to you (just to you), then I'm not saying the same thing over and over and over again, am I?
Targeted UCE tends to be less offensive, but I still classify it as spam and refuse to buy from sellers who advertise this way.
Text only. Amen. This is something I almost never see anymore, and it's why I run weird odd-ball offbeat IM clients that nobody uses (naim, pork).
I want something that's pure text, something I can run within a screen session on a linux box, then walk away. Detach, go home, attach from there and pick right up where I was - with all of the messages I received while I was gone. This is one of the things naim does best, since it was designed with this in mind.
Your IM discussion is really just you typing to someone on the other end. Why should it be complicated beyond that?
I know, now it sounds like I want to go back to the days of IRC. Well... Aside from the myriad problems I used to have with it, yes.
Are there any other decent text-based clients I'm missing? I definitely want to know about it!
What on earth makes you say "when racism is gone?" I figure that's about as likely as my Lotto ticket.
I'm a bit surprised that Harald dodged the question in the article...
Nice, and it's always good to remind the media that there's no restriction on selling open source in this manner. But.... That wasn't the question. Why now, brown cow? Why is there a sudden enforcement flurry now?
This is exactly the sort of non-answer that raises my hackles when listening to politicians. It especially bothers me when it's "one of us," a member of the open source community. I can't imagine why Welte would be dodging the question, so I can only assume he's very worried about giving the wrong impression.
Actually, the LD50 isn't the only thing that matters. Once, back in a psychopharmacology course, I worked out the minimum amount of coffee to put one into a toxic psychosis. I made a bunch of assumptions - very strong coffee, low but realistic body mass, no built-up tolerance. The minimum turned out to be about 18 cups of coffee in a 30-minute period, or about a pot and a half. The time factor matters, though, and I guarantee most every geek here has built up far too much tolerance to go postal off of that!
Definitely. Now, how do we accomplish that? I don't have contacts with the press. I've got contacts on at least one dem campaign team (surprisingly, not Dean!), even contacts in the defense industry, but the press? Nothing. Who does? How do we get this in front of them?
Am I the only one who's first thought was not "Great, let's blow them off the air!"? My first thought was "Hmmm... I could join the organization and see what tools they use, see where the addresses are coming from, etc., etc. Know thine enemy.
My second thought was "Um, wait, the hordes of rabid slashdotters will be wreaking major havoc on the list o exposed addresses. I don't want my address on that list - my ISP would nuke me in a heartbeat with the major-league smack-down that's coming."
Anybody else here want to be a volunteer from the audience?
Ye Olde Blockquote:
So for double safety, I should get my 5-year-old drunk and have her install the software? Come to think of it, she'd probably do a better job than I would, anyway!
Another important point with contracts: the courts have been known to discard clauses that the signatory could not reaonably have expected to be present. The original precedent - I don't have the actual citation handy, I'm sure someone can google it up - was a case where a man signed a friend into the hospital. He thought he was signing consent forms; there turned out to be a clause wherein he agreed to take financial responsibility for the medical bills if the patient was unable to pay. Well, when the bill came due he refused to pay and went to court, where the court agreed that a reasonable person would not expect to find such a clause in the contract.
Given the nature of some of these clauses, particularly on the security patches, I don't think the courts would hold them valid, completely aside from the other obvious points that have been brought up. (Lack of negotiation, consideration, etc.)
Yeah, but at the same time they need to get the word out. A lot of people genuinely don't realize that what they do is illegal. Doe's lawyer even makes the same point: teenagers in an environment where they can't be expected to know that what they are doing is illegal. I actually know a couple musicians who think that, because they are musicians and need access to musical works to practice for covers, think that this gives them a right to infringe - perfectly above-board and legally. They honestly believe this, and they tell their friends, too!
So, to protect legitimate copyright claims (yes, legit. I'm talking law, not ethics, not justifications!), the RIAA has to get the word out. They can buy publicity spots and crank out the infommercials. Will anybody listen? Not even during the Superbowl! Or, they can make a few examples, make them firmly, juice them for PR and maybe scare people into listening. It's unfortunate, but there just isn't any better alternative for them to protect their intellectual property.
More importantly, and more germanely, they don't necessarily need the massive subpoena authority granted under section 512. They could still pick a representative handful of people and make their lives a living hell, and make sure the rest of the unaware file-sharing community knows it. Coming from RPI as I did, and personally knowing one of our $97 Billion RIAA Sweepstakes Winners, I'd sit up and take notice in a hurry. It only takes having one person you know get nailed before you stop and think about it.
I think it goes without saying that, as a community, we generally believe that they're better off not enforcing these claims too vigorously. We've all seen the studies that, as sharing goes up, so do sales. But holding to a broken business model doesn't change their rights under broken US law.
Wee, bonnie McBride said in one of the interviews (CRN):
Now, I'm a big proponent of not just blindly listening to what people say. Legal cases are generally public record, are they not? That means we should be able to find out who's really delaying things, and how? Unfortunately, not having much experience with the US legal system, I wouldn't have the faintest clue how to go about this. Does anybody else? Who's really dreading the courtroom?
Here's another thought that wouldn't generally come to mind. I don't get a lot of formal exercise. My diet is lousy. I'm still thin as a rail. Why?
People cite metabolism. I think I remember reading an article once - if anybody can find this one for me, PLEASE let me know!! - where they studied the notion of a metabolism and found evidence that it was not a significant factor. (Actually, they went so far as to imply that it was a myth - not sure I agree with that part.) They put people with different "metabolisms" into sealed environments. Then they tracked every single piece of intake and every activity. The result? The higher metabolism people didn't actually burn more calories with the same intake and activities. They didn't have the same activities at all! They fidget!!
I'm just as bad. Here I sit, reading slashdot, and both my legs are jiggling under my desk like a pair of hamsters in love. I keep it under control in front of customers/managers/the Nobel Prize Committee, but anytime I'm in my own private cube, I fidget as much as most slashdotters mastu... Um, let's not go there. ;-)
Am I the only one that, on reading this first paragraph, decided to put the article down without finishing it?