Computer trade rag columnists get taken on junkets like this all the time. Microsoft's name comes up most in such accusations, but the truth is everybody does it; it's also fairly common for "articles" or "reviews" to be nothing more than canned press releases from the company making the product.
Much of the time a magazine big enough to have several columnists cover an issue will let one or two say bad things about a major advertiser's products as long as there are sycophants on staff who can be counted on to "balance" that bad press.
There are also apparently professional interviewees who give whatever comments are required to fit the slant of a particular story. Eventually you notice these guys cropping up more and more as word gets around that they can be counted on to deliver.
There was also the more benign case of Jerry Pournelle, who never called a tech support line that didn't like him when he wrote for BYTE. Everybody knew who he was so they treated him like a demigod, and it skewed his view of customer service in the industry.
Does anyone know if this is also tackling newsgroups on University systems?
Most university systems made a concerted effort to avoid their groups "leaking" to the outside world. You mention UVa -- the news admin there when I had an account on darwin.clas got the occasional question of "why do some 'internal' groups keep showing up on other servers?"
The answer was cross-posting. If an article is cross-posted to an internal group and another group, it can "leak" the group as other servers will sometimes automatically add groups in Newsgroups: headers that they don't already have, pending review by the news admin. (This used to be much more common than it is today.) Then of course you would have people following up to both groups, which would lead to non-internal users' posts "leaking" back in, and people complaining "why does my ISP carry uva.general, but not others? Fix it, UVa-news-admin-person!"
These days many sites (such as MindSpring) simply reject articles cross-posted between internal and external groups.
AT&T was established as a regulated monopoly. There could have been an FCC mandated interoperability but there was not and we got the monopoly instead.
No it wasn't. AT&T was the direct descendant of the Bell system. Bell was *the* phone company for decades. You even got the phone from them (because they mandated that you do so). Bell wasn't established as a regulated anything, it was just the phone company that grew fastest and eventually absorbed whatever other companies' territory there was.
Unless you literally mean "the establishment of AT&T as a separate descendant of Bell from the local-service Baby Bells", in which case my apologies. Most people who spout off about the "AT&T breakup" don't realize that prior to the Bell breakup, there was no AT&T as a separate entity, so I've come to assume that anyone who talks about AT&T and early telco history is saying "AT&T" when they mean "Bell".
Phone service is now considered a natural monopoly, along with power, gas and cable, because the infrastructure requirements are so high. Because they all require expensive and/or widespread infrastructure to compete on an equal footing with existing players, it's hard to break into a locked-up market. We as a society have determined that competition in essential services is a good thing, even if it means imposing a burden on a company judged to be a monopoly (read: forced granting of infrastructure access to potential competitors).
Now, although I work in the industry and consider Internet access an essential service for me, I don't think in general it should be government-regulated as a "utility". I think ultimately it's pointless for AOL to try to keep OSCAR fully closed, but it's their right to do so as long as they are technologically able to.
The big question I have is, where is AOL making money on this that makes it even a little deal for them?
Two things: one is the ad space at the top of the official AOL client (which right now is showing an ad for AOL 6.0, so they're not making money on it, but it's still free promotion for them).
Secondly (and, IMHO, more importantly), the exclusivity of AIM is a "hook". It's something AOL can claim that no one else can. In short, it's a prestige thing: "We're the biggest. To be part of the biggest you have to come to us."
Ironically enough in light of that second point, AOL users actually have less IM functionality than AIM users. It was only with AOL 6.0 that AOL users could finally set an IM away message. 7.0 may bring AOL to parity with AIM, but that's just a guess.
The official Linux/Java/Express clients have about the same level of IM functionality as AOL users have.
I'm going to try and keep this from turning into a gun-nut rant, because I'm not a gun nut. However, I do believe in the 2nd amendment.
TrevorB wrote: Maybe I'm stupid and Canadian, but in an urban population with a decent sized police force, there should be no good reason for people to have to carry around weapons.
This is true, to a point. However, there is a balance: there are many things the US police are not allowed to do, or are supposed to go to a great deal more trouble to do, compared to Canada or the UK. Greater citizen freedoms mean less police power, including less police power to stop criminals. That means in some cases citizens feel (and actually have) the need to supplement police protection with self-protection.
I mean, Jesus, I remember driving in LA on vacation and seeing a cop in her squad car with the shotgun holster mounted right in the front seat. I mean, holy shit, that thing's loaded.
OK, but a) that was a cop, not an ordinary citizen, and b) that was LA. LA can be a dangerous place, especially for a cop. Ditto New York, Chicago, Detroit, or DC.
An aside here to all you kiddies who like to get up in "the man's" face: I don't like getting pulled over. But by god I'm polite about it. There are bad cops out there, but the good cops outnumber them at least 10 to 1, and what's just another speeding ticket to you is (to the cop) potentially a life-or-death situation. Next time you get pulled over, don't give them a reason to be afraid of you, OK?
I try not to think about how many loaded weapons there must be if I enter into a family restaraunt in the states with my kids.
Probably not as many as you think. Most of the people I know don't own guns. Most of the ones that do don't have concealed-carry permits or own more than one gun per adult in the house. And most of the ones who have concealed-carry permits have them more as a just-in-case measure, rather than actually carrying a gun 24 hours a day in an armpit holster. Our concealed-carry laws are really strict and just transporting a gun in your car (say from your home to the shooting range) that's not in plain sight can run you afoul of them. If I ever feel the need to buy a gun for my own safety, the first thing I intend to do before buying it is get my CCW permit.
Yes, there are a lot of guns in the US, but the numbers are skewed by criminals who have nests of guns (far too many think they're going to be all macho and have a real gun battle with the cops one day) and by legitimate collectors who have a lot that they might or might not ever actually shoot.
Another aside: here in the state of Virginia you have to have completed an NRA (National Rifle Association) or other state-approved gun-safety course, or be in a special category like police or military, before you're allowed to carry concealed. This tests not just general safety, but proficiency. You have to fire 40 shots in a designated time and hit a target on at least 37. It's not military-grade proficiency, but it's harder than you think.
Virginia also has a program called EXILE with mandatory minimum sentences for possession of a gun by a convicted felon and other things. I don't like mandatory minimums in general, but the program seems to be working well (it was implemented after heat came down from other states accusing Virginia of being the source for guns used by felons there).
The bottom line seems to be: places like Canada and the UK have a cultural trust of their governments, while we have a cultural distrust of ours. That translates into our desire to be more capable of using personal force to protect ourselves -- by our own choice, we need to.
This was the whole point of OpenDoc, a great technology Apple killed because it was taking too long to become commercially viable. For awhile Apple had the Cyberdog browser, which was based on OpenDoc components.
The idea behind OpenDoc was, instead of having an HTML plugin for your e-mail client, and an e-mail app in your browser, and both of them in your newsreader, you'd have a system-wide HTML rendering engine (say), and a systemwide audio player, video player, etc. In effect OpenDoc components were "plugins" available throughout the OS to any app that cared to use them.
Now I hear people talking about "document-centric computing" and "component app architecture" and I want to smack Apple for killing this back in '95. If they'd just put it in maintenance mode or even "cold storage" it could, today, be a mature, robust technology that would make MacOS X a killer desktop OS.
(OLE, incidentally, just "happened" to appear after OpenDoc; the difference was Apple tried once and called it a failure -- Microsoft is still trying, even though few would call OLE a "success". I wonder how much of Microsoft's dominance comes from simple bloody-mindedness like that.)
IANAL, but I've read a number of times that for libel to hold up, three things have to be proved:
1. Untrue information was published.
2. The author knew the info to be untrue.
3. The author published the false info with the intent to harm another party.
Yes and no. First, #2 should read, "...knew, or reasonably should have known..." That is, just because you hear something doesn't mean you can print it on the front page as a fact. You need to have independent verification, and even then your butt might be in a sling if it turns out what you heard is wrong. I wrote a weekly column for a local paper for two years and my editor was a stickler on this point. The best verification is internal documents, or quotes from internal sources who have reason to know whereof they speak. Also, you always at least try to give the subject of the accusations a chance to comment on anything negative you print about them.
The thing about all this is, journalists are not required (at least in the US) to disclose their sources. So you could theoretically make up an "anonymous source", but after a few stories based on such made-up "sources" fall flat, you're going to get looked at pretty hard (and there was recently a high-profile case of a journalist who made up anonymous sources and ended up publicly disgraced).
Also, I believe journalists operate under a special set of rules, much like stockbrokers, doctors, lawyers or several other professionals do. There's a civil cause of action called "reckless disregard", which is basically libel without the intent to harm. Basically if you print something that could be injurious if it's untrue, and it's discovered that you didn't properly verify it beforehand, you can get slapped with reckless disregard. It probably won't land you in jail, but it probably will get you fired, or at severely demoted/reprimanded. In theory this matters even if what you print is true but in practice it only comes out when the paper gets egg on its face for printing your harebrained speculations.
Property, like speech, is not a qualified right, and nor should it be. If you are allowed to tell me what I can't do with my own property, then tomorrow you'll be allowed to tell me what I can't do with my own mouth which, after all, is just a property interest of mine.
You, as an advocate of property rights, claim the right to own and use anything in any manner you want, without interference. Fine. But I, as an advocate of property rights, claim that same right. You have no more right to interfere with my environment than I have to interfere with yours. If your stereo is playing so loud that I cannot hear the rare birds that I'm trying to record on my property, then you are interfering with my right to enjoy my property as I see fit. Conversely, I don't have the right to come over and demand that you stop smoking even though it's not actually coming onto my property, simply because I dislike smoking.
When two equal and absolute rights are in conflict, both parties should back off. Usually that means you run your stereo at a reasonable hour, and I don't call the cops even though I find it slightly annoying that I can hear you listening to nothing but, say, Ricky Martin all day.
Perhaps I don't fully understand the case, but it seems to me that a temp worker knows he's not getting benefits. Hence the reason that they are usually paid more per hour.
I worked for a company that used permatemps. It might be different from the way MS did it, but I interviewed with the company and filled out my half of a W-4. Only after I was "employed by" them did I find out that I was actually a contractor through a staffing company. No benefits, no paid time off... zip. At that point I realized they had very carefully avoided referring to me as an "employee of" their company during the whole process.
Contractors were second-class citizens in every way, including the attitude of some of the employees and management toward contractors as a class.
Turns out that since the company was owned by a parent, and ParentCo had declared "thou shalt not have more than X number of employees", they were hiring contractors in this manner to meet their staffing needs.
As near as I've ever been able to figure, this is the whole raison d'etre of this and various "staffing companies" or "contract agencies" like them. They never have any contact with the employees they've "hired", they just cut paychecks and issue a W-2 at the end of the tax year. Every other decision about the "independent contractor" is made by the employer who contracted with the staffer. If they let the contract employee go, the staffer just terminates them instead of reassigning them.
I even had it relatively easy. A bunch of people who were employees faced a choice of leave, find another job in another department, or get shafted when their departments were converted from employee-staffed to contractor-staffed. At that point all of customer support and all of QA were contractor-staffed.
I'm not saying all staffers and contract agencies work this way, or even most of them, but a disturbingly high number certainly seem to.
I also believe in most states being salaried being salaried implies that overtime isn't an option. When I worked for a Federal contractor, I could put in as many hours as I wanted. However, only the first 40 counted.
Nope. A lot of people believe it. Almost every employer says it and I think most of them honestly believe it too. It's another case where what everyone knows is wrong. In your specific case, you were probably an exempt employee, in which case you were most likely either a supervisor, self-employed, or one of a few specific professions or job descriptions. In general an employee who primarily takes task direction from a manager is not exempt, but it sounds like you were self-directed.
The downside, of course, is if everybody rose up and demanded the overtime owed them, a lot of companies would literally go broke paying back wages.
In traditional regulated full time labor large companies are required to offer all sorts of benefits, [many of which are of no use to some workers, i.e. paid family leave is required, but some workers are single and never have any oppurtunity to take advantage of it, nonetheless, it is factored into the cost of their employment and the determination of their salary].
Picking on family leave, which states require it? The federal government doesn't. They do require that employers allow certain employees up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave, like the requirements for employees in the National Guard.
(You better believe they're serious about leave for Guard duties too. Some employers tried to weasel on it after the Gulf War, and they got slapped down pretty hard. It's even a screwy form of low-grade job security for some people, because it's scrutinized pretty hard if you fire someone just before or after their summer service, not even talking about during...)
I know many large companies who hire multitudes of contractors for this very same reason. But, as far as I know...having a bunch of contractors is legal. Any ideas why temps are not legal but contractors are?
In a word, they're not. The law interprets employee vs. contractor vs. temp by what the nature of the employee's duties are and the context they're performed in, rather than titles or employment classifications.
So the government legislates that we work 40 hour weeks. Thats all great and dandy if thats what I want to work; but suppose I want to work (and be paid for) 60 hour weeks for 9 months then take three months off every year? Oops, thanks to the laws I can't do that. California has a law which roughly mandates a work week of 5 days, 8 hours each. But sysadmining sometimes requires 12 hour days when things are crashing, and 4 hour days when there's nothing going on. Thanks to california lawmakers I'm technically in violation of the law.
Does California mandate a 40-hour work week, or just a 40-hour base week? I heard something about 37-hour weekly limits in Britain but didn't hear about any such law in CA.
In any case, in the rest of the US that I've lived in, it's been 40 hours at regular pay plus time and a half for hours over that. And yes, that applies to salaried employees too, unless they're exempt. (Simply being salaried, or having a contract, does not make one exempt. And if you're an employee, a contract cannot change your exempt status.)
The bottom line in any employer-employee contract is that the employee is free to leave at any time. If he does not, then he is not being 'abused' by the company for which he works. All whining about abuse of employees etc is besides the point entirely, IMO. The simple fact is that these employees have a choice, and they have chosen to work for Microsoft.
And Microsoft has chosen to do business in the US. In so doing, they have also chosen to do business under US employment law.
You can call somebody whatever you want, but the federal employment rules recognize job descriptions over job titles. In other words, if I hire someone as an employee, then tomorrow, even though they're doing the same thing under the same conditions, say "You're a contractor, you get no benefits, suck it up and deal," that ain't gonna fly with the IRS or the Dept. of Labor.
The IRS has a list of guidelines for whether you're likely to be an employee or an independent contractor. None of them is conclusive, nor is any combination, but the more items you answer "yes" to, the greater the likelihood that you're an employee. The IRS will also be happy to make a conclusive determination for an employer if they file a form SS-8.
The basic problem here is employers creating an invalid and unfair artificial distinction between employees and "contractors" to keep their costs down. I won't claim full impartiality here, since I worked as a "contractor" in a job where I too was really an employee, but the law is very clear and it's routinely flouted. Misclassification of employees is probably the most lucrative tax violation bar none that tech companies engage in.
In any case, these are computer programmers and technical types - it's not as though they are working making footballs in the third world for tuppence happeny a day, is it? Doesn't the geek community have better things to worry about than this?
Irrelevant, and silly to boot. A buck is a buck. If I earn $50K, that doesn't make it less wrong for a mugger (or my employer) to steal $20 from me than from a shipyard joe making $20K and supporting 3 kids.
We should take a leaf out of Bill Gates book, and help the truly deprived, and not scratch our own backs here.
Let's also not get all wet and sloppy about that just yet. Note that a) he's giving away blocks of MS stock to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, stock which they liquidate, and b) he gets a big fat tax deduction on it (I guarantee you he's in the 39.6% bracket, so this is not trivial here). So Bill G. gets to look good in the press, get rid of MS stock in huge chunks without alarming Wall Street (and mask his real sells at the same time), and take a huge tax break to boot.
All of which is irrelevant to the main issue here, I just note it for the record.
More importantly, this could suddenly reverse the dominant industry trend of classifying employees-in-fact as contractors to save a couple of bucks. I made your choice, and I don't regret doing so (for other reasons as well), but it's ridiculous that Microsoft and others get away with this. It's a "loophole" that never really existed, and it looks like some big companies might finally pay the price.
You can argue that some employment law is bogus, and I'll be happy to debate that, but let's not make a screwy argument about choice to let businesses weasel out of legal duties they've accepted.
..only two newspapers in America even permit e-mail at the end of all reporters stories.
I'm calling your bluff. Which two are you talking about, and what makes you think they're the only two that allow it? The paper I write for (C-Ville Weekly) not only allows but encourages its writers to be accessible by e-mail. I can't believe we're one of only two newspapers that that's true of.
Perhaps you meant "major" papers, but even in that case, my challenge to you still stands. As for Peter Jennings and World News Tonight, try this feedback form that took me all of a minute to find on abc.com. It may not go straight to Peter Jennings, but guess what: he just reads what he's told to read for the most part, so he's not the person you want to address comments on the news content to anyway.
As a side bit of trivial, you'd be amazed at the number of things we (US) thought of using "small" devices for during the 50's and 60's: civil engineering, fighter-deployed anti-aircraft missles (sure, 1 missle = a squadron of Russian bombers, but I'm sure the folks down wind of that will be _real_ happy...), anti-tank mines, and Jeep-mounted nuke rockets where the range of the missle was less that the lethal radius of the device (I think weapon system was refered to as the Patriot or the Bowie or something like that).
You're thinking of the "Davy Crockett" nuke. The concept, I think, was something similar to shoulder-launched SAMs like the Stinger. The weapon was the M-388 recoilless rifle; the warhead was the Mk-54:
So why will not having cash in the bank tomorrow suddenly make it plunge into the atmosphere? Is someone going to unglug the extension cord to Earth? Are the space landlords going to evict them? Is galactic collections going to show up and reposses their oxy generation unit?
All spacecraft suffer orbital drag from gravitational and magnetic anomalies in the body they're orbiting, friction with the upper atmosphere/interstellar medium, solar flares...
Every "stable" orbit will eventually decay unless the orbiting body is captured by another one passing by. Skylab's orbit decayed in a relatively short time back in the 70s -- I think back then a lot of the mechanisms weren't well-understood. Many satellites carry maneuvering fuel to extend their orbital life, but they eventually run out of fuel and de-orbit as well. If a critical satellite is stranded in an orbit that's about to start reaching the fringes of the ionosphere, sometimes they send the Shuttle up to tow it back out.
Basically, Mir is out of gas and coasting to a stop, just as any vehicle would.
Here in Charlottesville, your choices are Sprint (our ILEC), Ntelos (formerly CFW/Intelos, a local CLEC/ISP), or Cornerstone (a recently-acquired subsidiary of Ntelos).
Sprint being the sleazy telco they are, and their ADSL offerings being way overpriced anyway, I didn't even look hard at them. They also will tell you things like Linux and NAT "won't work -- people have tried, believe me" even though they do (at the moment at least). Basically if you don't have Windows, or at least say you do, they won't talk to you.
CFW's service is MVL. What I can find about MVL leads me to believe it essentially sacrifices top-end bandwidth to get greater distance. I got CFW's 384K MVL service (the other option is 768K) last year, and had it till I moved in June. The service was great, but getting it installed and getting a correct bill from them was a nightmare. They lost my first payment and only recently did they agree to credit anything to my account. This is nothing new for them apparently -- I found at least 3 other horror stories of CFW billing screwups.
Now I've ditched them, and I'm getting service through their subsidiary Cornerstone. This should be a lot better, because I'm actually getting responses to my questions and I know a lot of people there, so billing disputes should be practically nonexistent.
Tips:
Investigate resellers. The only thing they provide is customer service, and they know it. They also know you can usually get it from the source cheaper, so there's incentive for them to get things right.
Know how to contact your state utility regulation board. In most states telcos are a regulated monopoly, so there's usually some oversight board. Here in Virginia that duty lies with the State Corporation Commission, and they wield the baseball bat of authority with a will (a call from them just got me a big chunk of "late fees" removed from my old CFW bill).
Don't let the telco stonewall you. If they say the signal test was bad but you're in reasonable range, ask when the test was done. If it was a long time ago, tell them to test it again.
Be ready to forgo support, but don't hesitate to escalate things if you know it's not a problem on your end. If the LINK light on your modem goes out, don't hesitate to demand to talk with someone in Ops/engineering, regardless of their support policy re: Linux/other freenix -- after all, how could that be an OS problem?
Basically be ready to fight tooth and nail for your consumer rights regardless of what you're told. But then as Slashdotters most of us know that already.
One former employer used passwords "bighair" and "buddy" (the owner's nickname and the owner's dog's name, respectively) for most root or root-like accounts. A few weeks after I left my replacement called to ask if I had been having any fun with the systems. "No, why?" "Baylor [the manager] thinks you've hacked us because he can't get in to the superuser account on any of the boxes."
It wasn't me, but that doesn't mean they weren't hacked either, as there was one other guy who was a walkout like me and just might have been ticked enough to do it. Plus Baylor didn't know a root prompt from a hole in the ground. One day when I came in and restarted the RADIUS server (it had died during the night), he asked "How did you fix a machine in my office while you were sitting in your office?"
Old Man Kensey says "Like it or not, current US law treats intellectual property as property, with penalties for theft, illegal use, etc."
This is completely false. Separate Titles of the US code lay out remedies and penalties associated with patents and copyright, and they differ considerably from the remedies and penalties for crimes such as vandalism or theft.
Completely false? Copyright law explicitly recognizes the right of a copyright holder to sell, license or transfer their various rights. Anything US law recognizes can be done with property, the copyright code recognizes can be done with rights to a work.
Why don't you go read the code in question ? It's on the web. The site I use is:
uscode.house.gov
You might want to download the entire document of Title 17, in which case this page is the best:
uscode.house.gov/download.htm
...read Title 17, Chapter 1, sections 106 through 115, especially the various secions whose titles begin with the phrase "Limitations on Exclusive Rights:", and looked very carefully at the different privileges a copyright of a sound recording gives you over a written work.
The same privileges, basically, minus the rights of control over performance & display, and an exception allowing the recording of cover versions. Note that the exceptions to the exclusions to the right of display only apply if the viewers are in substantially the same location as the copyrighted work, and the limitations on exclusive performance rights do not apply to "performances" from recorded media (see definition of "phonorecord" in section 1) -- so you can't squeeze distribution of MP3s into the "performance and display" loophole.
And if you can show me where it says that I am violating any privileges the US government has handed out, when I transfer a copy of a sound recording to another individual and don't receive any money for it, then I will buy you a steak dinner (or equivalent, if steak isn't your thing). I'm serious about this. Be careful, because all the places where it says that you can't do something, it generally says "as allowed in secions 106 through 115" or something similar, and those sections include the "Limitations on Exclusive Rights" parts.
To quote a co-worker, "You silly poof."
I said nothing about transfers of a single copy of a single work. But let's be clear: making a copy and transferring the copy is not a "transfer", it's making and distributing an unauthorized copy. So ripping MP3s from a CD and making those MP3s available on Napster (or MP3.com) doesn't fall under the exemptions in section 109.
MP3.com was essentially a broadcast service. Section 110 covers "Limitations on exclusive rights: Exemption of certain performances and displays". MP3.com arguably does not fall under the protections here because it's a "transmission to the public". Even if you argue that it's not, there's still arguably an "indirect admission charge", namely the eyeballs you bring to their site that generate ad banner revenue (think of the cost-shifting argument against spam e-mail -- time and Internet access cost is a cost). And there's still the royalty issue per the final paragraph of the section.
If you can show me a section that grants an exemption that applies to MP3.com, or Napster, or ripping MP3s and trading them, have at it. No fair citing "fair use" either -- wholesale reproduction of a work is generally not accepted as fair use.
> keeping them longer then 24 hours if
> you do not own the source media is.
Incorrect.
Distributing them and/or aquiring them through unaproved channels (like napster usually) is what is illegal. NOT POSSESSION.
Not as far as I know. Possession of property gained through illegal means results in the confiscation of that property. If you go to a pawn shop and unknowingly buy a stolen car stereo, and the police find the guy who stole it and trace it through the pawn shop to you (and they will), you lose your stereo. Your only recourse in that situation is to get a refund from the shop owner. He could theoretically sue the original thief for the price he bought it for, but in practice pawnbrokers eat the cost of stolen property that's traced.
Like it or not, current US law treats intellectual property as property, with penalties for theft, illegal use, etc.
In fact, once you have a copy, Fair Use applies. This means you may use it. (In fact I think this is the most glaring error in software. Copyright was only ever intended to give a monopoly on copying and distribution NOT use. In fact, the concept of "fair use" gives you directly the legal right to use it, once you have a copy).
Fair use may apply in any situation. But invoking fair use depends on you having a legal means of using that IP. See below...
You may not remember but several months back, there was an article where someone was getting sued over MP3 distribution (napster case or was it another - been so many at this point) and I remember the quote clearly: "Lawyers on both sides of the case agree that fair use would apply, regardless of the legality of the distribution medium"
This sounds like the MP3.com case. In that case, the issue was my.mp3.com, which allows you to stream MP3s off the site of CDs you have had in your physical possession. In that case, the technicality of copyright law means even if the user is not infringing on copyright, MP3.com was, by the very nature of the service provided: they were making money from distribution of musical works without a license.
If I own the CD, fair-use doctrine says it's OK for me to possess or listen to MP3s of the tracks on it, no matter how I acquire them, but that only applies if I have an implied license to that IP (which I do in that case because I own the CD). If I don't own the CD or some other legally-acquired form of the work, I have no rights, fair-use or otherwise, to possess or use those MP3s. And even if it's OK for me to buy the rips, it's not OK for someone else to make money off providing them to me as my.mp3.com did.
A complication in the MP3.com case is that despite some effort to make sure that users really did possess the CDs they were listening to, the practicality was that, as another Slashdot poster said after the judgement, "My CD collection just became the union of the set of all the CD collections of me and my friends." So distribution aside, they were still gonna get busted.
What seems to have people up in arms is that Sun has (essentially) written a cross-compiler that takes Linux/Intel source and produces output for Solaris/Sparc.
What's the problem here?
Is it that the binary might or might not have new code in it introduced by the compiler? If that's the case, the same could be said if, say, Metrowerks distributed the source for these drivers with its compiler. Essentially the GPL under this interpretation forbids shipping binaries of GPL'ed code compiled with a non-GPL compiler. Also, it would mean that any code compiled with a GPL'ed compiler would become GPL'ed if the compiler introduced any foreign code (I don't know if gcc does or not).
I don't think this is a huge concern anyway. The compiler can't pull but so many "dirty tricks" simply because it can't know what the code is supposed to ultimately do. And compilers work at such a low level that the question of what is or isn't "foreign" code with respect to a given set of source is non-trivial, especially with an optimizing compiler.
Is the concern over the fact that Sun isn't shipping the driver source with the driver binaries? Assuming that this is the only concern, does anyone really care? Unless they've changed the source, does it matter to me whether I get the source for tulip.o from Sun or from Donald Becker? More specifically, if I put tulip.o binaries on my FTP site as a convenience for my user-group, am I obligated to distribute tulip.c myself? Is it not enough to say "get the source from the author?" Under a particularly strict reading of the GPL, it would be unacceptable to have tulip.c and tulip.o in the same directory as separate files -- they would have to be zipped together so as to be sure that Section 3 of the GPL could not be breached inadvertently.
Or is Becker just throwing a tantrum because he doesn't like seeing his work used for something outside the scope of his intent (to write a Linux driver)? This is, I hope, a remote possibility, because in itself that attitude defeats the whole point of the GPL, but one that occurs to me to toss out.
They cannot sue you for NOT lying. (Unless, of course, you signed a nondisclosure agreement to the effect that you would not reveal that they are trying to scam the US Patent office.)
If they did hypothetically put that clause in, the whole contract could be considered null & void. Contracts that would compel a criminal act are void, and conspiracy to give false testimony to the US government is definitely a crime.
I don't think anyone can be compelled to testify to anything or sign any document, even a civil matter. I guarantee that, as pointed out, this probably has the "true and accurate to the best of my knowledge" clause on it -- a sword that cuts both ways. They can slam you for giving false info if you sign, but you may optionally completely refuse to attest to anything...
This brings up another point I wonder about: most companies, when you're dinged for some offense in the employee handbook (e.g. excessive lateness), have you sign a statement that yes, you did commit this offense and were counseled about it. In one case I refused to sign such a document and in another case I signed it. Can an employee be fired for refusing to sign such a thing? (It's a moot point for me, as Virginia is an at-will state, but the question itself intrigues me.) If I don't sign it, is that to my advantage or disadvantage?
Now we're seeing a claim that in a rather fundamental fashion, feature accretion is not a good thing.
This is nothing new. A brief scan of the RISKS Digest archives shows many, many cases going back years where a working system and a new, working-as-intended component were combined with disastrous results. (It always amazes me how many engineers and developers have never read RISKS Digest or the book that Neumann published; one developer at a major Northern Virginia Internet applications developer asked me "Is that a local list in your area? I never heard of it.")
If you don't know what RISKS is, check out comp.risks (the USENET feed of the digest); if your ISP doesn't carry it, either get them to, or change ISPs. It's well worth a few bucks a month more if it comes to that.
I propose a new version of Brooks' Law: "Adding components to a buggy piece of software makes it buggier."
Slashdot Mirror
Much of the time a magazine big enough to have several columnists cover an issue will let one or two say bad things about a major advertiser's products as long as there are sycophants on staff who can be counted on to "balance" that bad press.
There are also apparently professional interviewees who give whatever comments are required to fit the slant of a particular story. Eventually you notice these guys cropping up more and more as word gets around that they can be counted on to deliver.
There was also the more benign case of Jerry Pournelle, who never called a tech support line that didn't like him when he wrote for BYTE. Everybody knew who he was so they treated him like a demigod, and it skewed his view of customer service in the industry.
Fun net.lore: How Jerry Pournelle got kicked off the ARPAnet
Does anyone know if this is also tackling newsgroups on University systems?
Most university systems made a concerted effort to avoid their groups "leaking" to the outside world. You mention UVa -- the news admin there when I had an account on darwin.clas got the occasional question of "why do some 'internal' groups keep showing up on other servers?"
The answer was cross-posting. If an article is cross-posted to an internal group and another group, it can "leak" the group as other servers will sometimes automatically add groups in Newsgroups: headers that they don't already have, pending review by the news admin. (This used to be much more common than it is today.) Then of course you would have people following up to both groups, which would lead to non-internal users' posts "leaking" back in, and people complaining "why does my ISP carry uva.general, but not others? Fix it, UVa-news-admin-person!"
These days many sites (such as MindSpring) simply reject articles cross-posted between internal and external groups.
AT&T was established as a regulated monopoly. There could have been an FCC mandated interoperability but there was not and we got the monopoly instead.
No it wasn't. AT&T was the direct descendant of the Bell system. Bell was *the* phone company for decades. You even got the phone from them (because they mandated that you do so). Bell wasn't established as a regulated anything, it was just the phone company that grew fastest and eventually absorbed whatever other companies' territory there was.
Unless you literally mean "the establishment of AT&T as a separate descendant of Bell from the local-service Baby Bells", in which case my apologies. Most people who spout off about the "AT&T breakup" don't realize that prior to the Bell breakup, there was no AT&T as a separate entity, so I've come to assume that anyone who talks about AT&T and early telco history is saying "AT&T" when they mean "Bell".
Phone service is now considered a natural monopoly, along with power, gas and cable, because the infrastructure requirements are so high. Because they all require expensive and/or widespread infrastructure to compete on an equal footing with existing players, it's hard to break into a locked-up market. We as a society have determined that competition in essential services is a good thing, even if it means imposing a burden on a company judged to be a monopoly (read: forced granting of infrastructure access to potential competitors).
Now, although I work in the industry and consider Internet access an essential service for me, I don't think in general it should be government-regulated as a "utility". I think ultimately it's pointless for AOL to try to keep OSCAR fully closed, but it's their right to do so as long as they are technologically able to.
The big question I have is, where is AOL making money on this that makes it even a little deal for them?
Two things: one is the ad space at the top of the official AOL client (which right now is showing an ad for AOL 6.0, so they're not making money on it, but it's still free promotion for them).
Secondly (and, IMHO, more importantly), the exclusivity of AIM is a "hook". It's something AOL can claim that no one else can. In short, it's a prestige thing: "We're the biggest. To be part of the biggest you have to come to us."
Ironically enough in light of that second point, AOL users actually have less IM functionality than AIM users. It was only with AOL 6.0 that AOL users could finally set an IM away message. 7.0 may bring AOL to parity with AIM, but that's just a guess.
The official Linux/Java/Express clients have about the same level of IM functionality as AOL users have.
TrevorB wrote:
Maybe I'm stupid and Canadian, but in an urban population with a decent sized police force, there should be no good reason for people to have to carry around weapons.
This is true, to a point. However, there is a balance: there are many things the US police are not allowed to do, or are supposed to go to a great deal more trouble to do, compared to Canada or the UK. Greater citizen freedoms mean less police power, including less police power to stop criminals. That means in some cases citizens feel (and actually have) the need to supplement police protection with self-protection.
I mean, Jesus, I remember driving in LA on vacation and seeing a cop in her squad car with the shotgun holster mounted right in the front seat. I mean, holy shit, that thing's loaded.
OK, but a) that was a cop, not an ordinary citizen, and b) that was LA. LA can be a dangerous place, especially for a cop. Ditto New York, Chicago, Detroit, or DC.
An aside here to all you kiddies who like to get up in "the man's" face: I don't like getting pulled over. But by god I'm polite about it. There are bad cops out there, but the good cops outnumber them at least 10 to 1, and what's just another speeding ticket to you is (to the cop) potentially a life-or-death situation. Next time you get pulled over, don't give them a reason to be afraid of you, OK?
I try not to think about how many loaded weapons there must be if I enter into a family restaraunt in the states with my kids.
Probably not as many as you think. Most of the people I know don't own guns. Most of the ones that do don't have concealed-carry permits or own more than one gun per adult in the house. And most of the ones who have concealed-carry permits have them more as a just-in-case measure, rather than actually carrying a gun 24 hours a day in an armpit holster. Our concealed-carry laws are really strict and just transporting a gun in your car (say from your home to the shooting range) that's not in plain sight can run you afoul of them. If I ever feel the need to buy a gun for my own safety, the first thing I intend to do before buying it is get my CCW permit.
Yes, there are a lot of guns in the US, but the numbers are skewed by criminals who have nests of guns (far too many think they're going to be all macho and have a real gun battle with the cops one day) and by legitimate collectors who have a lot that they might or might not ever actually shoot.
Another aside: here in the state of Virginia you have to have completed an NRA (National Rifle Association) or other state-approved gun-safety course, or be in a special category like police or military, before you're allowed to carry concealed. This tests not just general safety, but proficiency. You have to fire 40 shots in a designated time and hit a target on at least 37. It's not military-grade proficiency, but it's harder than you think.
Virginia also has a program called EXILE with mandatory minimum sentences for possession of a gun by a convicted felon and other things. I don't like mandatory minimums in general, but the program seems to be working well (it was implemented after heat came down from other states accusing Virginia of being the source for guns used by felons there).
The bottom line seems to be: places like Canada and the UK have a cultural trust of their governments, while we have a cultural distrust of ours. That translates into our desire to be more capable of using personal force to protect ourselves -- by our own choice, we need to.
...not Michael Lanier, who coined that particular phrase ("virtual reality").
The idea behind OpenDoc was, instead of having an HTML plugin for your e-mail client, and an e-mail app in your browser, and both of them in your newsreader, you'd have a system-wide HTML rendering engine (say), and a systemwide audio player, video player, etc. In effect OpenDoc components were "plugins" available throughout the OS to any app that cared to use them.
Now I hear people talking about "document-centric computing" and "component app architecture" and I want to smack Apple for killing this back in '95. If they'd just put it in maintenance mode or even "cold storage" it could, today, be a mature, robust technology that would make MacOS X a killer desktop OS.
(OLE, incidentally, just "happened" to appear after OpenDoc; the difference was Apple tried once and called it a failure -- Microsoft is still trying, even though few would call OLE a "success". I wonder how much of Microsoft's dominance comes from simple bloody-mindedness like that.)
IANAL, but I've read a number of times that for libel to hold up, three things have to be proved:
1. Untrue information was published.
2. The author knew the info to be untrue.
3. The author published the false info with the intent to harm another party.
Yes and no. First, #2 should read, "...knew, or reasonably should have known..." That is, just because you hear something doesn't mean you can print it on the front page as a fact. You need to have independent verification, and even then your butt might be in a sling if it turns out what you heard is wrong. I wrote a weekly column for a local paper for two years and my editor was a stickler on this point. The best verification is internal documents, or quotes from internal sources who have reason to know whereof they speak. Also, you always at least try to give the subject of the accusations a chance to comment on anything negative you print about them.
The thing about all this is, journalists are not required (at least in the US) to disclose their sources. So you could theoretically make up an "anonymous source", but after a few stories based on such made-up "sources" fall flat, you're going to get looked at pretty hard (and there was recently a high-profile case of a journalist who made up anonymous sources and ended up publicly disgraced).
Also, I believe journalists operate under a special set of rules, much like stockbrokers, doctors, lawyers or several other professionals do. There's a civil cause of action called "reckless disregard", which is basically libel without the intent to harm. Basically if you print something that could be injurious if it's untrue, and it's discovered that you didn't properly verify it beforehand, you can get slapped with reckless disregard. It probably won't land you in jail, but it probably will get you fired, or at severely demoted/reprimanded. In theory this matters even if what you print is true but in practice it only comes out when the paper gets egg on its face for printing your harebrained speculations.
Property, like speech, is not a qualified right, and nor should it be. If you are allowed to tell me what I can't do with my own property, then tomorrow you'll be allowed to tell me what I can't do with my own mouth which, after all, is just a property interest of mine.
You, as an advocate of property rights, claim the right to own and use anything in any manner you want, without interference. Fine. But I, as an advocate of property rights, claim that same right. You have no more right to interfere with my environment than I have to interfere with yours. If your stereo is playing so loud that I cannot hear the rare birds that I'm trying to record on my property, then you are interfering with my right to enjoy my property as I see fit. Conversely, I don't have the right to come over and demand that you stop smoking even though it's not actually coming onto my property, simply because I dislike smoking.
When two equal and absolute rights are in conflict, both parties should back off. Usually that means you run your stereo at a reasonable hour, and I don't call the cops even though I find it slightly annoying that I can hear you listening to nothing but, say, Ricky Martin all day.
Perhaps I don't fully understand the case, but it seems to me that a temp worker knows he's not getting benefits. Hence the reason that they are usually paid more per hour.
I worked for a company that used permatemps. It might be different from the way MS did it, but I interviewed with the company and filled out my half of a W-4. Only after I was "employed by" them did I find out that I was actually a contractor through a staffing company. No benefits, no paid time off... zip. At that point I realized they had very carefully avoided referring to me as an "employee of" their company during the whole process.
Contractors were second-class citizens in every way, including the attitude of some of the employees and management toward contractors as a class.
Turns out that since the company was owned by a parent, and ParentCo had declared "thou shalt not have more than X number of employees", they were hiring contractors in this manner to meet their staffing needs.
As near as I've ever been able to figure, this is the whole raison d'etre of this and various "staffing companies" or "contract agencies" like them. They never have any contact with the employees they've "hired", they just cut paychecks and issue a W-2 at the end of the tax year. Every other decision about the "independent contractor" is made by the employer who contracted with the staffer. If they let the contract employee go, the staffer just terminates them instead of reassigning them.
I even had it relatively easy. A bunch of people who were employees faced a choice of leave, find another job in another department, or get shafted when their departments were converted from employee-staffed to contractor-staffed. At that point all of customer support and all of QA were contractor-staffed.
I'm not saying all staffers and contract agencies work this way, or even most of them, but a disturbingly high number certainly seem to.
I also believe in most states being salaried being salaried implies that overtime isn't an option. When I worked for a Federal contractor, I could put in as many hours as I wanted. However, only the first 40 counted.
Nope. A lot of people believe it. Almost every employer says it and I think most of them honestly believe it too. It's another case where what everyone knows is wrong. In your specific case, you were probably an exempt employee, in which case you were most likely either a supervisor, self-employed, or one of a few specific professions or job descriptions. In general an employee who primarily takes task direction from a manager is not exempt, but it sounds like you were self-directed.
The downside, of course, is if everybody rose up and demanded the overtime owed them, a lot of companies would literally go broke paying back wages.
In traditional regulated full time labor large companies are required to offer all sorts of benefits, [many of which are of no use to some workers, i.e. paid family leave is required, but some workers are single and never have any oppurtunity to take advantage of it, nonetheless, it is factored into the cost of their employment and the determination of their salary].
Picking on family leave, which states require it? The federal government doesn't. They do require that employers allow certain employees up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave, like the requirements for employees in the National Guard.
(You better believe they're serious about leave for Guard duties too. Some employers tried to weasel on it after the Gulf War, and they got slapped down pretty hard. It's even a screwy form of low-grade job security for some people, because it's scrutinized pretty hard if you fire someone just before or after their summer service, not even talking about during...)
I know many large companies who hire multitudes of contractors for this very same reason. But, as far as I know...having a bunch of contractors is legal. Any ideas why temps are not legal but contractors are?
In a word, they're not. The law interprets employee vs. contractor vs. temp by what the nature of the employee's duties are and the context they're performed in, rather than titles or employment classifications.
So the government legislates that we work 40 hour weeks. Thats all great and dandy if thats what I want to work; but suppose I want to work (and be paid for) 60 hour weeks for 9 months then take three months off every year? Oops, thanks to the laws I can't do that. California has a law which roughly mandates a work week of 5 days, 8 hours each. But sysadmining sometimes requires 12 hour days when things are crashing, and 4 hour days when there's nothing going on. Thanks to california lawmakers I'm technically in violation of the law.
Does California mandate a 40-hour work week, or just a 40-hour base week? I heard something about 37-hour weekly limits in Britain but didn't hear about any such law in CA.
In any case, in the rest of the US that I've lived in, it's been 40 hours at regular pay plus time and a half for hours over that. And yes, that applies to salaried employees too, unless they're exempt. (Simply being salaried, or having a contract, does not make one exempt. And if you're an employee, a contract cannot change your exempt status.)
The bottom line in any employer-employee contract is that the employee is free to leave at any time. If he does not, then he is not being 'abused' by the company for which he works. All whining about abuse of employees etc is besides the point entirely, IMO. The simple fact is that these employees have a choice, and they have chosen to work for Microsoft.
And Microsoft has chosen to do business in the US. In so doing, they have also chosen to do business under US employment law.
You can call somebody whatever you want, but the federal employment rules recognize job descriptions over job titles. In other words, if I hire someone as an employee, then tomorrow, even though they're doing the same thing under the same conditions, say "You're a contractor, you get no benefits, suck it up and deal," that ain't gonna fly with the IRS or the Dept. of Labor.
The IRS has a list of guidelines for whether you're likely to be an employee or an independent contractor. None of them is conclusive, nor is any combination, but the more items you answer "yes" to, the greater the likelihood that you're an employee. The IRS will also be happy to make a conclusive determination for an employer if they file a form SS-8.
The basic problem here is employers creating an invalid and unfair artificial distinction between employees and "contractors" to keep their costs down. I won't claim full impartiality here, since I worked as a "contractor" in a job where I too was really an employee, but the law is very clear and it's routinely flouted. Misclassification of employees is probably the most lucrative tax violation bar none that tech companies engage in.
In any case, these are computer programmers and technical types - it's not as though they are working making footballs in the third world for tuppence happeny a day, is it? Doesn't the geek community have better things to worry about than this?
Irrelevant, and silly to boot. A buck is a buck. If I earn $50K, that doesn't make it less wrong for a mugger (or my employer) to steal $20 from me than from a shipyard joe making $20K and supporting 3 kids.
We should take a leaf out of Bill Gates book, and help the truly deprived, and not scratch our own backs here.
Let's also not get all wet and sloppy about that just yet. Note that a) he's giving away blocks of MS stock to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, stock which they liquidate, and b) he gets a big fat tax deduction on it (I guarantee you he's in the 39.6% bracket, so this is not trivial here). So Bill G. gets to look good in the press, get rid of MS stock in huge chunks without alarming Wall Street (and mask his real sells at the same time), and take a huge tax break to boot.
All of which is irrelevant to the main issue here, I just note it for the record.
More importantly, this could suddenly reverse the dominant industry trend of classifying employees-in-fact as contractors to save a couple of bucks. I made your choice, and I don't regret doing so (for other reasons as well), but it's ridiculous that Microsoft and others get away with this. It's a "loophole" that never really existed, and it looks like some big companies might finally pay the price.
You can argue that some employment law is bogus, and I'll be happy to debate that, but let's not make a screwy argument about choice to let businesses weasel out of legal duties they've accepted.
I'm calling your bluff. Which two are you talking about, and what makes you think they're the only two that allow it? The paper I write for (C-Ville Weekly) not only allows but encourages its writers to be accessible by e-mail. I can't believe we're one of only two newspapers that that's true of.
Perhaps you meant "major" papers, but even in that case, my challenge to you still stands. As for Peter Jennings and World News Tonight, try this feedback form that took me all of a minute to find on abc.com. It may not go straight to Peter Jennings, but guess what: he just reads what he's told to read for the most part, so he's not the person you want to address comments on the news content to anyway.
As a side bit of trivial, you'd be amazed at the number of things we (US) thought of using "small" devices for during the 50's and 60's: civil engineering, fighter-deployed anti-aircraft missles (sure, 1 missle = a squadron of Russian bombers, but I'm sure the folks down wind of that will be _real_ happy...), anti-tank mines, and Jeep-mounted nuke rockets where the range of the missle was less that the lethal radius of the device (I think weapon system was refered to as the Patriot or the Bowie or something like that).
You're thinking of the "Davy Crockett" nuke. The concept, I think, was something similar to shoulder-launched SAMs like the Stinger. The weapon was the M-388 recoilless rifle; the warhead was the Mk-54:
http://www.fas.org/nuke/he w/U sa/Weapons/Allbombs.html
Also check out a comment from a member of a unit that was to have used them in the event of attack (entry of 2000 June 25, 00:25:12).
So why will not having cash in the bank tomorrow suddenly make it plunge into the atmosphere? Is someone going to unglug the extension cord to Earth? Are the space landlords going to evict them? Is galactic collections going to show up and reposses their oxy generation unit?
All spacecraft suffer orbital drag from gravitational and magnetic anomalies in the body they're orbiting, friction with the upper atmosphere/interstellar medium, solar flares...
Every "stable" orbit will eventually decay unless the orbiting body is captured by another one passing by. Skylab's orbit decayed in a relatively short time back in the 70s -- I think back then a lot of the mechanisms weren't well-understood. Many satellites carry maneuvering fuel to extend their orbital life, but they eventually run out of fuel and de-orbit as well. If a critical satellite is stranded in an orbit that's about to start reaching the fringes of the ionosphere, sometimes they send the Shuttle up to tow it back out.
Basically, Mir is out of gas and coasting to a stop, just as any vehicle would.
Sprint being the sleazy telco they are, and their ADSL offerings being way overpriced anyway, I didn't even look hard at them. They also will tell you things like Linux and NAT "won't work -- people have tried, believe me" even though they do (at the moment at least). Basically if you don't have Windows, or at least say you do, they won't talk to you.
CFW's service is MVL. What I can find about MVL leads me to believe it essentially sacrifices top-end bandwidth to get greater distance. I got CFW's 384K MVL service (the other option is 768K) last year, and had it till I moved in June. The service was great, but getting it installed and getting a correct bill from them was a nightmare. They lost my first payment and only recently did they agree to credit anything to my account. This is nothing new for them apparently -- I found at least 3 other horror stories of CFW billing screwups.
Now I've ditched them, and I'm getting service through their subsidiary Cornerstone. This should be a lot better, because I'm actually getting responses to my questions and I know a lot of people there, so billing disputes should be practically nonexistent.
Tips:
Basically be ready to fight tooth and nail for your consumer rights regardless of what you're told. But then as Slashdotters most of us know that already.
It wasn't me, but that doesn't mean they weren't hacked either, as there was one other guy who was a walkout like me and just might have been ticked enough to do it. Plus Baylor didn't know a root prompt from a hole in the ground. One day when I came in and restarted the RADIUS server (it had died during the night), he asked "How did you fix a machine in my office while you were sitting in your office?"
Old Man Kensey says "Like it or not, current US law treats intellectual property as property, with penalties for theft, illegal use, etc."
This is completely false. Separate Titles of the US code lay out remedies and penalties associated with patents and copyright, and they differ considerably from the remedies and penalties for crimes such as vandalism or theft.
Completely false? Copyright law explicitly recognizes the right of a copyright holder to sell, license or transfer their various rights. Anything US law recognizes can be done with property, the copyright code recognizes can be done with rights to a work.
Why don't you go read the code in question ? It's on the web. The site I use is:
uscode.house.gov
You might want to download the entire document of Title 17, in which case this page is the best:
uscode.house.gov/download.htm
The same privileges, basically, minus the rights of control over performance & display, and an exception allowing the recording of cover versions. Note that the exceptions to the exclusions to the right of display only apply if the viewers are in substantially the same location as the copyrighted work, and the limitations on exclusive performance rights do not apply to "performances" from recorded media (see definition of "phonorecord" in section 1) -- so you can't squeeze distribution of MP3s into the "performance and display" loophole.
And if you can show me where it says that I am violating any privileges the US government has handed out, when I transfer a copy of a sound recording to another individual and don't receive any money for it, then I will buy you a steak dinner (or equivalent, if steak isn't your thing). I'm serious about this. Be careful, because all the places where it says that you can't do something, it generally says "as allowed in secions 106 through 115" or something similar, and those sections include the "Limitations on Exclusive Rights" parts.
To quote a co-worker, "You silly poof."
I said nothing about transfers of a single copy of a single work. But let's be clear: making a copy and transferring the copy is not a "transfer", it's making and distributing an unauthorized copy. So ripping MP3s from a CD and making those MP3s available on Napster (or MP3.com) doesn't fall under the exemptions in section 109.
MP3.com was essentially a broadcast service. Section 110 covers "Limitations on exclusive rights: Exemption of certain performances and displays". MP3.com arguably does not fall under the protections here because it's a "transmission to the public". Even if you argue that it's not, there's still arguably an "indirect admission charge", namely the eyeballs you bring to their site that generate ad banner revenue (think of the cost-shifting argument against spam e-mail -- time and Internet access cost is a cost). And there's still the royalty issue per the final paragraph of the section.
If you can show me a section that grants an exemption that applies to MP3.com, or Napster, or ripping MP3s and trading them, have at it. No fair citing "fair use" either -- wholesale reproduction of a work is generally not accepted as fair use.
> keeping them longer then 24 hours if
> you do not own the source media is.
Incorrect.
Distributing them and/or aquiring them through unaproved channels (like napster usually) is what is illegal. NOT POSSESSION.
Not as far as I know. Possession of property gained through illegal means results in the confiscation of that property. If you go to a pawn shop and unknowingly buy a stolen car stereo, and the police find the guy who stole it and trace it through the pawn shop to you (and they will), you lose your stereo. Your only recourse in that situation is to get a refund from the shop owner. He could theoretically sue the original thief for the price he bought it for, but in practice pawnbrokers eat the cost of stolen property that's traced.
Like it or not, current US law treats intellectual property as property, with penalties for theft, illegal use, etc.
In fact, once you have a copy, Fair Use applies. This means you may use it. (In fact I think this is the most glaring error in software. Copyright was only ever intended to give a monopoly on copying and distribution NOT use. In fact, the concept of "fair use" gives you directly the legal right to use it, once you have a copy).
Fair use may apply in any situation. But invoking fair use depends on you having a legal means of using that IP. See below...
You may not remember but several months back, there was an article where someone was getting sued over MP3 distribution (napster case or was it another - been so many at this point) and I remember the quote clearly: "Lawyers on both sides of the case agree that fair use would apply, regardless of the legality of the distribution medium"
This sounds like the MP3.com case. In that case, the issue was my.mp3.com, which allows you to stream MP3s off the site of CDs you have had in your physical possession. In that case, the technicality of copyright law means even if the user is not infringing on copyright, MP3.com was, by the very nature of the service provided: they were making money from distribution of musical works without a license.
If I own the CD, fair-use doctrine says it's OK for me to possess or listen to MP3s of the tracks on it, no matter how I acquire them, but that only applies if I have an implied license to that IP (which I do in that case because I own the CD). If I don't own the CD or some other legally-acquired form of the work, I have no rights, fair-use or otherwise, to possess or use those MP3s. And even if it's OK for me to buy the rips, it's not OK for someone else to make money off providing them to me as my.mp3.com did.
A complication in the MP3.com case is that despite some effort to make sure that users really did possess the CDs they were listening to, the practicality was that, as another Slashdot poster said after the judgement, "My CD collection just became the union of the set of all the CD collections of me and my friends." So distribution aside, they were still gonna get busted.
What's the problem here?
Is it that the binary might or might not have new code in it introduced by the compiler? If that's the case, the same could be said if, say, Metrowerks distributed the source for these drivers with its compiler. Essentially the GPL under this interpretation forbids shipping binaries of GPL'ed code compiled with a non-GPL compiler. Also, it would mean that any code compiled with a GPL'ed compiler would become GPL'ed if the compiler introduced any foreign code (I don't know if gcc does or not).
I don't think this is a huge concern anyway. The compiler can't pull but so many "dirty tricks" simply because it can't know what the code is supposed to ultimately do. And compilers work at such a low level that the question of what is or isn't "foreign" code with respect to a given set of source is non-trivial, especially with an optimizing compiler.
Is the concern over the fact that Sun isn't shipping the driver source with the driver binaries? Assuming that this is the only concern, does anyone really care? Unless they've changed the source, does it matter to me whether I get the source for tulip.o from Sun or from Donald Becker? More specifically, if I put tulip.o binaries on my FTP site as a convenience for my user-group, am I obligated to distribute tulip.c myself? Is it not enough to say "get the source from the author?" Under a particularly strict reading of the GPL, it would be unacceptable to have tulip.c and tulip.o in the same directory as separate files -- they would have to be zipped together so as to be sure that Section 3 of the GPL could not be breached inadvertently.
Or is Becker just throwing a tantrum because he doesn't like seeing his work used for something outside the scope of his intent (to write a Linux driver)? This is, I hope, a remote possibility, because in itself that attitude defeats the whole point of the GPL, but one that occurs to me to toss out.
They cannot sue you for NOT lying. (Unless, of course, you signed a nondisclosure agreement to the effect that you would not reveal that they are trying to scam the US Patent office.)
If they did hypothetically put that clause in, the whole contract could be considered null & void. Contracts that would compel a criminal act are void, and conspiracy to give false testimony to the US government is definitely a crime.
I don't think anyone can be compelled to testify to anything or sign any document, even a civil matter. I guarantee that, as pointed out, this probably has the "true and accurate to the best of my knowledge" clause on it -- a sword that cuts both ways. They can slam you for giving false info if you sign, but you may optionally completely refuse to attest to anything...
This brings up another point I wonder about: most companies, when you're dinged for some offense in the employee handbook (e.g. excessive lateness), have you sign a statement that yes, you did commit this offense and were counseled about it. In one case I refused to sign such a document and in another case I signed it. Can an employee be fired for refusing to sign such a thing? (It's a moot point for me, as Virginia is an at-will state, but the question itself intrigues me.) If I don't sign it, is that to my advantage or disadvantage?
Now we're seeing a claim that in a rather fundamental fashion, feature accretion is not a good thing.
This is nothing new. A brief scan of the RISKS Digest archives shows many, many cases going back years where a working system and a new, working-as-intended component were combined with disastrous results. (It always amazes me how many engineers and developers have never read RISKS Digest or the book that Neumann published; one developer at a major Northern Virginia Internet applications developer asked me "Is that a local list in your area? I never heard of it.")
If you don't know what RISKS is, check out comp.risks (the USENET feed of the digest); if your ISP doesn't carry it, either get them to, or change ISPs. It's well worth a few bucks a month more if it comes to that.
I propose a new version of Brooks' Law: "Adding components to a buggy piece of software makes it buggier."