To reply to my own post, we also have tonnes of laws which obviously violate the European Convention. E.g. we have a special law against blasphemy in published media - but it only applies to Christianity! Mary Whitehouse successfully used it in about 1978 to bankrupt a gay rights magazine (one of its readers had written a poem asking if Jesus was gay, and they published it).
You have correctly identified two areas of British law where "guilty until proven innocent" does (or will) apply - current libel laws, and the forthcoming Criminal Justice act. However, with any luck the European Court will shoot down both as violations of human rights.
So GCC is just going to up and magically disappear[?]
Nope. But anyway, you could always write stuff in assembly language so who needs a compiler anyway.
The point is that toolkits, languages etc. improve over time. Once upon a time, an assembler was all you needed to write state-of-the-art software. Now, everyone would agree that a compiler is essential. At some point in the future, something will come along that is miles better than what open source software has to offer today, to the extent that the current offering will no longer be considered adequate to write good apps.
If the open source offering doesn't continually improve fast enough, this will mean that effectively you *have* to use proprietory compilers, libraries, languages etc. to be able to write stuff as good as your contemporaries.
You may think that a C compiler will always be enough to write quality apps. There are doubtless still people who think that assembly language is all you need to write quality apps. Without GCC, most of the free stuff today would never have been written. It will be like that if future free tools do not keep pace with proprietory offerings.
The author of this "ask slashdot" seems to think that commercial software is going to somehow kill the open source movement.
This won't happen for as long as the proprietory software available is limited to *applications*. If it starts to extend to compilers, middleware etc. then we are in danger of getting back to the stage when you can't even begin to write a modern application without relying on non-free proprietory technology.
If I come back from work one day to find someone has stuck a poster on my front door championing human rights in Burma, I'll take it off thanks very much
What if the poster is your tenant and has paid to use your front door as a forum? That's more like what's happened here.
if you use facilities kindly made available to you at no cost [...]
It isn't at no cost. Students pay rent and tuition fees. A student's choice of which university to attend may be influenced by things like "you can run a webserver from your bedroom". So network access is *not* free, it just comes bundled with rent/tuition fees. If my landlord cuts the phone cable cos someone tells him I'm making nuisance calls, I'll sue him.
the average Oxford student is [overprivileged or geeky]
Maybe true on average but not in all cases. The best physics teacher I have ever met got into to Oxford from a crap state school. Hello Philip Britton if you're reading this! (which I doubt)
9.2 seems incredibly sweeping. If I put up a research paper showing that racism is endemic in the police, that will cause annoyance and inconvenience [to the police]. If 9.2 is enforced properly, JANET should be sued for misrepresenting itself as a network suitable for sharing academic information. As for "needless anxiety", who is to say what "needless" is? This website has illustrated an important point so I would say it was arguable whether the anxiety was needless.
Hmmm, it pisses me off that Oxford has a women-only college. There must be many people like me who find that annoying. So their website is "likely to cause annoyance" and should be yanked under 9.2.
But Hull is better than Oxford - just ask Blackadder.
and so Cambridge would have no grounds to sue for defamation. Oxford would laugh themselves silly
But the RIAA have no grounds to sue in this case, and I can't see Oxford cranking up its sense of humour. My thought was if they are that gullible, let's take advantage of it.
But the British don't have a right to free speech.
Er, do as of 1993, under the European Convention on Human Rights. Although currently it's a bit useless because you have to go all the way to the European Court of Justice to get it enforced. As of October, the convention will be part of British law (not just European law) so it will be easier to get upheld.
Gotta love a monarchy.
It is a somewhat bizzare form of government we have.
universities don't have all that much money, especially for lawyers
As has been pointed out, that doesn't apply to ox.ac.uk. But anyway, if you're a level B domain and your users are allowed and expected to run web servers, there's no excuse for not knowing at least a basic amount of the legality of stuff, for example that DeCSS isn't even remotely illegal [in the UK] and so any attempt to litigate would get thrown out of court.
Well, if it's anything like here in Cambridge, he should at least be able to get his network connection fee back, because yanking a blatently legal page is probably breach of contract. But frankly it'd be better to get a page like that hosted by a free ISP who refuses to yank stuff until there's a court order. [uk2.net anyone?]
Cool, somebody in Oxford put a page up saying "Oxford is better than Cambridge", and I'll send a faked letter, supposedly from the University of Cambridge, threatening to sue for defamation. Then let's see if they remove from their website all claims that they are any good at all.
How many folks think this OS is never going to go away?
There will always be hardcore fans using it. However, in the Internet era, the useful lifespan of an unmaintained operating system is only until the next remote root exploit comes out or the next new technology is impossible for users to get working on it. E.g. does it have IPv6 support? (just one possible death knell for an unmaintained OS)
Wonder if the folks who thought then that they couldn't get fired for buying IBM are sweating
Hmmm, yes, that's the problem with relying on a big vendor for a proprietory solution - in a few years time, "proprietory" can turn into "dead".
As a side note, I wonder what the chances of somebody buying OS/2 are? (I mean to develop, not to use)
Just attacked the comments page with textutils and got some stats about the people who clicked the link. (I'll post them in a follow-up message). Some interesting points:
Amongst clickers, Win2k is already as popular as WinNT.
Nearly all of the Windows clickers were IE users.
Netscape and IE users were equally likely to post more than once.
AC clickers use the same software as logged-in clickers.
I'd love to know how representative the clickers are of the whole of slashdot. IIRC slashdot's Windows/Linux proportions a year ago were about the same as in these stats, so it's possible.
Woman: But what if I want to watch DVDs from a different region? Clerk: Er... Woman: Cos may I remind you that we are in the UK and so pay double the US rate for DVDs. Clerk: Well, the price might drop if... Woman: And they come out six months later here, too. Clerk: But but but... Woman: And what if I want my DVD to play upside down? Clerk: Well you can stand on your head in the lounge. Woman: But for my head to be level with the telly in he lounge, I'd have to float 3 feet in the air and my feet would have to go through the roof. Clerk: Damn! Why is this Lynx form so small? I just thought of a really good argument to beat that silly cow and now there's not enough room for me t
Fair use does not give you the right to copy an entire document verbatim and distribute it to whomever you want.
It doesn't *always* give you this right. But sometimes it does. In this case you could probably argue that quoting the whole document is reasonable because all of it (or all of the part that Microsoft wrote) was relevant to the discussion.
Well, I know of several manufacturers who will sell you a laptop without a hard disk and without charging you for the hard disk. Such laptops will also come without a copy of Windows, but all the manufacturers I've seen still charge you for the Windows license. I know it's absurd, but there it is.
If you go and copy it and post it in full somewhere else, you are committing copyright violation.
Actually, that's not true if what you are doing counts as fair use, e.g. for commenting on the document. E.g. the Daily Mail (in Britain) recently reprinted an entire full-page Guardian article verbatim, with a small box next to it saying how this article proves that the Daily Mail has been right all along. If that can count as fair use then surely so can quoting a spec document to show that the spec is proprietory. (Of course, the newspapers mentioned are in Britain so the case law is probably all different).
Cool, well that's an improvement on a short while ago. But I stand by my claim that they're fewer and further between than they would be if Microsoft had not abused their market power to force "per machine" contracts onto resellers.
Not just once. But if lots of native speakers habitually use that sentence and don't consider it to be invalid, then it does become valid. For example, the following phrases were incorrect at one time but are now valid:
If I was you I'd stop. ["were" used to be compulsory]
It is him. ["he" used to be compulsory]
You and me can swim. ["I" used to be compulsory]
Let me axe you a god damn question [is] wrong
But that's different. If you said that sentence, then said "did I say something wrong", any native English speaker would say that you meant ask and not axe. Wheras if you say "shall we do it different? Hmm did I say something wrong?" many English speakers would find the sentence quite acceptable.
What I'm saying is that there's a difference between verbal slip-ups and a genuine shift in the rules of English grammar. People adhere too closely to rules printed in books about English grammar, and criticise genuine colloquial usage. Linguists consider usage (minus slip-ups) to be the definitive guide.
Slashdot Mirror
To reply to my own post, we also have tonnes of laws which obviously violate the European Convention. E.g. we have a special law against blasphemy in published media - but it only applies to Christianity! Mary Whitehouse successfully used it in about 1978 to bankrupt a gay rights magazine (one of its readers had written a poem asking if Jesus was gay, and they published it).
You have correctly identified two areas of British law where "guilty until proven innocent" does (or will) apply - current libel laws, and the forthcoming Criminal Justice act. However, with any luck the European Court will shoot down both as violations of human rights.
Yeah, or maybe he can work in a patent office and process the Toblerone patent.
Nope. But anyway, you could always write stuff in assembly language so who needs a compiler anyway.
The point is that toolkits, languages etc. improve over time. Once upon a time, an assembler was all you needed to write state-of-the-art software. Now, everyone would agree that a compiler is essential. At some point in the future, something will come along that is miles better than what open source software has to offer today, to the extent that the current offering will no longer be considered adequate to write good apps.
If the open source offering doesn't continually improve fast enough, this will mean that effectively you *have* to use proprietory compilers, libraries, languages etc. to be able to write stuff as good as your contemporaries.
You may think that a C compiler will always be enough to write quality apps. There are doubtless still people who think that assembly language is all you need to write quality apps. Without GCC, most of the free stuff today would never have been written. It will be like that if future free tools do not keep pace with proprietory offerings.
This won't happen for as long as the proprietory software available is limited to *applications*. If it starts to extend to compilers, middleware etc. then we are in danger of getting back to the stage when you can't even begin to write a modern application without relying on non-free proprietory technology.
What if the poster is your tenant and has paid to use your front door as a forum? That's more like what's happened here.
It isn't at no cost. Students pay rent and tuition fees. A student's choice of which university to attend may be influenced by things like "you can run a webserver from your bedroom". So network access is *not* free, it just comes bundled with rent/tuition fees. If my landlord cuts the phone cable cos someone tells him I'm making nuisance calls, I'll sue him.
a.b.c.d == d + 256*c + 256^2*b + 256^3*a. It's just the IP number written slightly different - you can also do it in hex or octal IIRC.
Maybe true on average but not in all cases. The best physics teacher I have ever met got into to Oxford from a crap state school. Hello Philip Britton if you're reading this! (which I doubt)
9.2 seems incredibly sweeping. If I put up a research paper showing that racism is endemic in the police, that will cause annoyance and inconvenience [to the police]. If 9.2 is enforced properly, JANET should be sued for misrepresenting itself as a network suitable for sharing academic information. As for "needless anxiety", who is to say what "needless" is? This website has illustrated an important point so I would say it was arguable whether the anxiety was needless.
Hmmm, it pisses me off that Oxford has a women-only college. There must be many people like me who find that annoying. So their website is "likely to cause annoyance" and should be yanked under 9.2.
But Hull is better than Oxford - just ask Blackadder.
But the RIAA have no grounds to sue in this case, and I can't see Oxford cranking up its sense of humour. My thought was if they are that gullible, let's take advantage of it.
MPAA and DCMA can't touch you. RIAA can send thugs with baseball bats round.
Er, do as of 1993, under the European Convention on Human Rights. Although currently it's a bit useless because you have to go all the way to the European Court of Justice to get it enforced. As of October, the convention will be part of British law (not just European law) so it will be easier to get upheld.
It is a somewhat bizzare form of government we have.
As has been pointed out, that doesn't apply to ox.ac.uk. But anyway, if you're a level B domain and your users are allowed and expected to run web servers, there's no excuse for not knowing at least a basic amount of the legality of stuff, for example that DeCSS isn't even remotely illegal [in the UK] and so any attempt to litigate would get thrown out of court.
Well, if it's anything like here in Cambridge, he should at least be able to get his network connection fee back, because yanking a blatently legal page is probably breach of contract. But frankly it'd be better to get a page like that hosted by a free ISP who refuses to yank stuff until there's a court order. [uk2.net anyone?]
What law would you say it could possibly violate? Remember we don't have things like UCITA and DCMA here [yet].
Remember what that lawyer tried so hard to get Ali G to understand. "American law doesn't apply in the UK. You can't *ever* ``plead the fifth'' here!"
Cool, somebody in Oxford put a page up saying "Oxford is better than Cambridge", and I'll send a faked letter, supposedly from the University of Cambridge, threatening to sue for defamation. Then let's see if they remove from their website all claims that they are any good at all.
There will always be hardcore fans using it. However, in the Internet era, the useful lifespan of an unmaintained operating system is only until the next remote root exploit comes out or the next new technology is impossible for users to get working on it. E.g. does it have IPv6 support? (just one possible death knell for an unmaintained OS)
Hmmm, yes, that's the problem with relying on a big vendor for a proprietory solution - in a few years time, "proprietory" can turn into "dead".
As a side note, I wonder what the chances of somebody buying OS/2 are? (I mean to develop, not to use)
I'd love to know how representative the clickers are of the whole of slashdot. IIRC slashdot's Windows/Linux proportions a year ago were about the same as in these stats, so it's possible.
Woman: But what if I want to watch DVDs from a different region? ... ... ...
Clerk: Er
Woman: Cos may I remind you that we are in the UK and so pay double the US rate for DVDs.
Clerk: Well, the price might drop if
Woman: And they come out six months later here, too.
Clerk: But but but
Woman: And what if I want my DVD to play upside down?
Clerk: Well you can stand on your head in the lounge.
Woman: But for my head to be level with the telly in he lounge, I'd have to float 3 feet in the air and my feet would have to go through the roof.
Clerk: Damn! Why is this Lynx form so small? I just thought of a really good argument to beat that silly cow and now there's not enough room for me t
It doesn't *always* give you this right. But sometimes it does. In this case you could probably argue that quoting the whole document is reasonable because all of it (or all of the part that Microsoft wrote) was relevant to the discussion.
Well, I know of several manufacturers who will sell you a laptop without a hard disk and without charging you for the hard disk. Such laptops will also come without a copy of Windows, but all the manufacturers I've seen still charge you for the Windows license. I know it's absurd, but there it is.
Actually, that's not true if what you are doing counts as fair use, e.g. for commenting on the document. E.g. the Daily Mail (in Britain) recently reprinted an entire full-page Guardian article verbatim, with a small box next to it saying how this article proves that the Daily Mail has been right all along. If that can count as fair use then surely so can quoting a spec document to show that the spec is proprietory. (Of course, the newspapers mentioned are in Britain so the case law is probably all different).
Cool, well that's an improvement on a short while ago. But I stand by my claim that they're fewer and further between than they would be if Microsoft had not abused their market power to force "per machine" contracts onto resellers.
Not just once. But if lots of native speakers habitually use that sentence and don't consider it to be invalid, then it does become valid. For example, the following phrases were incorrect at one time but are now valid:
But that's different. If you said that sentence, then said "did I say something wrong", any native English speaker would say that you meant ask and not axe. Wheras if you say "shall we do it different? Hmm did I say something wrong?" many English speakers would find the sentence quite acceptable.
What I'm saying is that there's a difference between verbal slip-ups and a genuine shift in the rules of English grammar. People adhere too closely to rules printed in books about English grammar, and criticise genuine colloquial usage. Linguists consider usage (minus slip-ups) to be the definitive guide.