Despite the fact that airbags kill more children than school shootings [forthepeople.org], the government continues to legislate guns out of existence and airbags into existence.
This is not arbitrary. Both compulsory airbags and gun control are argued to have greater benefits than costs. That's not inconsistent or arbitrary, that's just a utilitarian argument.
So too shall the government legislate Microsoft out of existence
Ridiculous hyperbole. The chances of that happening are zero point zero percent.
Arbitrary conclusions
like yours, fueled by illogical arguments, are making you look like a troll.
Congratulations: Incorrect, Irrelevant and Illogical - all in one sentence! If Slashdot had decent moderation categories your post would be at -3 by now.
That's correct. That was the subject of a prior lawsuit, which was settled by MS paying Sun on the order of $1m, and agreeing not to ship their old "broken" version of Java after a sunset date (2004?), and agreeing that their contract with Sun (which allowed them to hack on their own version of Java) was terminated. (But IANAL and this is from memory.)
Note that out-of-court settlements like the above do not set any precedent either way.
And how is Java different from, say, Mozilla or Phoenix?
Point of fact: Java is being used (right now) to write far more cross-platform code than the Mozilla.org codebases. (Although the two needn't be mutually exclusive.)
If this isn't overturned, get ready for about 1,000,000 lawsuits from software makers clambering to get their product included with Windows.
1,000,000 software makers haven't been specifically targeted by MS antitrust violations. And for Java, bundling is an appropriate partial remedy - but obviously this approach doesn't scale, and no judge in his or her right mind would think it does.
That's exactly the sort of sneaky nonsense I would expect from MS. But I think it'll backfire - I think they'd get more customers if they stated the subscription price upfront.
Actually, no, it seems to me (from reading the first paragraph of the link) like the LoC actually has statuatory authority to determine what the DMCA exceptions should be.
Yes but it was sold in the US. Do you think a company with offices in the US could expect to sell dope from Amsterdam to US customers over the Internet? I don't think so! It'd get charged with selling illegal drugs.
Ah well, I don't worry about that kind of thing - I code in Java, and I trust the soundness of the JVM and the libraries it depends on. Exploitable buffer overruns are pretty hard to code in Java!
How can you disconnect the vast revenues made by the copyright cartel from inflated salaries?
How can you at the very same time allege that laws are distorting the movie market and then go on to claim that "good actors" are getting "free market prices"? You're deluding yourself.
Elcomsoft's product did violate the DMCA, according to the jury. But they didn't knowingly break the law, so they were let off on condition they didn't do it again.
Do you understand now??
The number of people who don't reading the fricking articles amazes me.
All a codification does is make it easy for some people to argue that anything not explicitly covered in the "Bill of Rights" is not a right at all.
Not at all. Those who would conflate moral and legal rights are sophists.
What it does do is provide legal machinery to protect your rights. If you don't have codified rights it's your word (that you have right X) against the governments (that you don't). If you do have a constitution and legal precedent, it's your word and hopefully yards of precedent, against the government's. Guess which is better?
Also, where a constitution (or human rights act) does not cover an important right adequately, you can add amendments or new laws. So lack of coverage (especially of rights that weren't even conceived of at the time of founding, like say rights viz-a-viz designer babies, or the right of vegan prisoners to receive vegan food), is not an insurmountable problem.
Any code that reads input from "untrusted" sources (you can argue about what that includes, but it definitely should include "arbitrary, random Internet sites") should be "bulletproofed" against every theoretically possible input. But no, the culture of programming is not set up to do things that way, in too many *cough*MS*cough* cases.
It means that offering a product which can beat protected CDs, for example, is legal.
Unfortunately you have clearly not fully read the relevant clause of the DMCA, or the article, nor even the comment you replied to, for if you had you'd know this is the exact opposite of the truth. The jury ruled that the Elcomsoft software was illegal, but they let them off because Elcomsoft didn't know it was illegal.
Sometimes the sheer huge amount of people on slashdot who don't read the articles annoys me.
Yeah, you can change the permissions on NT too, but then you run the risk that nothing will work.
You have to have an admin who really knows what they're doing (unlike those at my school, who made it so that Explorer wouldn't run on login (!?) on the demonstration machines). And even then you still have lots of software that won't run properly except when run as Admin.
On Red Hat you already have permissions set up for you, and you don't really have to change much. Yes, users can choose their own wallpaper etc. - but what's wrong with that? They should be allowed to do that if it doesn't affect anyone else or cause system instability.
You're obviously new here - you made two mistakes. You replied to a comment instead of the article itself. And the text in italics is not written by "Mr. Hemos", it's written by the article submitter.
The idea that silence, or the idea of silence, can be copyrighted is nuts. Ideas cannot be copyrighted! He shouldn't have given them a six figure sum! Only some small amount that would be less than the cost of fighting the case.
The trouble is that some people these days feel they need really expensive lawyers to win even knockdown cases. That doesn't seem to make sense to me. Perhaps it's a social status thing - it's social death to some to be seen to be hiring a cheap lawyer. That's the only reasonable explanation I can think of. (Here in the UK the loser can even be made to pay the costs of the winner.)
Actually I thought KDE is the default environment in Red Hat 7.3 (not sure about 8.0). Many users will run it not knowing any different. But the manual (which as we know many users don't read cover-to-cover) does cover both. Which is as it should be!
So my predictions are that KDE will stay the most popular, but Gnome will stay a force to be reckoned with, because it will still be bundled by Sun and Red Hat and Debian and others.
The way to go is interoperability, which KDE and Gnome have already worked on - NOT the idiotic idea of "picking one and sticking with it".
Because that guy made the idiotic suggestion that people should be forced to use only KDE, or only Gnome, or something. Open source means you can't prevent people replacing parts of their system - as opposed to say Microsoft which can pretty much prevent people (legally and technologically) from replacing the window manager or kernel code in Windows, for example.
In practical terms, the idea of bringing about a situtation where nearly everyone uses the exact same Linux desktop environment, is frankly ludicrous. It will only happen if either KDE or Gnome becomes a "dying project" many years in the future due to lack of interest - no one person or organisation can just issue a divine edict to make that happen.
The Enron executives were responsible for stealing money, gutting their own corporation, and laying waste to their employee's pension scheme, as well as just fraud. The recent nanotech fraud case and others didn't have quite the same impact.
Slashdot Mirror
That's fascist! (At least in peacetime.) I wouldn't live there, personally.
This is not arbitrary. Both compulsory airbags and gun control are argued to have greater benefits than costs. That's not inconsistent or arbitrary, that's just a utilitarian argument.
So too shall the government legislate Microsoft out of existence
Ridiculous hyperbole. The chances of that happening are zero point zero percent.
Arbitrary conclusions
like yours, fueled by illogical arguments, are making you look like a troll.
Note that out-of-court settlements like the above do not set any precedent either way.
Point of fact: Java is being used (right now) to write far more cross-platform code than the Mozilla.org codebases. (Although the two needn't be mutually exclusive.)
If this isn't overturned, get ready for about 1,000,000 lawsuits from software makers clambering to get their product included with Windows.
1,000,000 software makers haven't been specifically targeted by MS antitrust violations. And for Java, bundling is an appropriate partial remedy - but obviously this approach doesn't scale, and no judge in his or her right mind would think it does.
How can you disconnect the vast revenues made by the copyright cartel from inflated salaries?
How can you at the very same time allege that laws are distorting the movie market and then go on to claim that "good actors" are getting "free market prices"? You're deluding yourself.
Elcomsoft's product did violate the DMCA, according to the jury. But they didn't knowingly break the law, so they were let off on condition they didn't do it again.
Do you understand now??
The number of people who don't reading the fricking articles amazes me.
Not at all. Those who would conflate moral and legal rights are sophists.
What it does do is provide legal machinery to protect your rights. If you don't have codified rights it's your word (that you have right X) against the governments (that you don't). If you do have a constitution and legal precedent, it's your word and hopefully yards of precedent, against the government's. Guess which is better?
Also, where a constitution (or human rights act) does not cover an important right adequately, you can add amendments or new laws. So lack of coverage (especially of rights that weren't even conceived of at the time of founding, like say rights viz-a-viz designer babies, or the right of vegan prisoners to receive vegan food), is not an insurmountable problem.
Unfortunately you have clearly not fully read the relevant clause of the DMCA, or the article, nor even the comment you replied to, for if you had you'd know this is the exact opposite of the truth. The jury ruled that the Elcomsoft software was illegal, but they let them off because Elcomsoft didn't know it was illegal.
Sometimes the sheer huge amount of people on slashdot who don't read the articles annoys me.
Yes this story has been on Slashdot twice recently (three times if you count the initial slashdot story that provoked the vigilante action).
You have to have an admin who really knows what they're doing (unlike those at my school, who made it so that Explorer wouldn't run on login (!?) on the demonstration machines). And even then you still have lots of software that won't run properly except when run as Admin.
On Red Hat you already have permissions set up for you, and you don't really have to change much. Yes, users can choose their own wallpaper etc. - but what's wrong with that? They should be allowed to do that if it doesn't affect anyone else or cause system instability.
The trouble is that some people these days feel they need really expensive lawyers to win even knockdown cases. That doesn't seem to make sense to me. Perhaps it's a social status thing - it's social death to some to be seen to be hiring a cheap lawyer. That's the only reasonable explanation I can think of. (Here in the UK the loser can even be made to pay the costs of the winner.)
So my predictions are that KDE will stay the most popular, but Gnome will stay a force to be reckoned with, because it will still be bundled by Sun and Red Hat and Debian and others.
The way to go is interoperability, which KDE and Gnome have already worked on - NOT the idiotic idea of "picking one and sticking with it".
In practical terms, the idea of bringing about a situtation where nearly everyone uses the exact same Linux desktop environment, is frankly ludicrous. It will only happen if either KDE or Gnome becomes a "dying project" many years in the future due to lack of interest - no one person or organisation can just issue a divine edict to make that happen.