Like what, the government isn't already part of "anybody"?
Nope, they are not. You have authorized the govenment to do certian things with the tax monies you give them willingly. It will be a sorry day when you authorize the government to spend money on equpment and manpower required to listen in on that public network. What do you want your govenment to do for you? Listen to your kid sister whine about NStink? I like that people go to jail for wiretaps and consider that a reasonable check on that kind of activity.
Anything that can help control this kind of abuse is ok by me...at least for now.
Don't use credit cards if you don't like what happens when you do. That's OK by me. You giving the feds permision to tap into my phone line without a warrent? Not OK.
... knowing that a conversation took place can yield information as well.
So? run and use an anoymizer. Works the same way for TCP/IP connections, no? If you don't know your host number the packets can't find the host. If your host does not know your IP, the reply can't find it's way back. No need for the data to be voice over IP.
In the imortal works of Khan, "Let them eat static."
I'm sorry, but the RIAA can't buy out shit, you're way off base here.
OK, Mr. Technical Detail, the Recording Industry Association of America as embodied by the world's five music publishers. The same music publishers who forbid any non-member of the cartel from selling music in any music store that has member music. The same folks that bring us sorry commercial radio, that no on listens to anymore, and that has members seriously considering a computer program to chose "hit music" for us to listen to. The same group that's represented by other industry associations that do much the same thing everywhere in the world.
They have indeed tried to buy up what they can't shut up. They purchased all sorts of "independent" record labels and they continue to pretend the labels are independent, much as many large brands have purchased health food start ups and then filled the containers with their usual shit. The RIAA's efforts to treat an evoloved distribution method like the one needed by vinal, like the effort to sell corn oil and syrup as health food, is doomed to fail.
They don't have enough money and never will. Someone noticed that everyone but the RIAA can do better without the RIAA. So what happens when the RIAA buys out hundreds of independent record lables and shuts them down or otherwise makes them suck? Hundreds of new ones sprout up. If you are a manager who was feeling furfilled making money for yourself and your musicians by promoting good music, you set up a new shop. The artists, who didn't have to give up their rights to their work the last time, walk right on over too.
I agree, the market is flooded with good quality used monitors. Any good local shop that repairs computers will be overflowing with them. You can also find reasonable monitors in the trash. This is because Dell/Gateway/Blah have been selling computers with reasonable monitors that long outlasted the 486 that they came with and some people just have to have "the best". The cheapest place to find a monitor has got to be people like me who collect and hoard them to give them away. Bounce a letter off your local Linux User's Group, you never know what you will find.
I've made good use of these kinds of monitors. The 15" thing that came with my Dell was great and lasted for 10 years. My wife uses a NEC Multisync 3D that I bought for $75. It may not be considered good enough for CAD work these days, but it's a fine general purpose monitor. I have several monitors I pulled from the trash that are very useful for temporary set ups. A neighbor of mine threw out a 15" monitor when he moved. It displays 1078x768 very well and I used it temporarily as a second monitor while I learned how to set up printing on a Debian machine. It's relativly small and light, so when I'm finished it will not be a chore to put it up. I have a few from the trash that needed some minor adjustments, such as focus, and some that worked then died. Most of them can probably be fixed with minor repairs at a competent repair shop, so I'm hanging on to them in case someone I know needs it.
Monitors from CompUSA have been a mixed bag. I used and enjoyed a nice big cheap monitor for about two years, then it joined the pile of not working monitors. When I bought it for around $200 I thought it was a good deal. When it burnt I was not so sure, but bought another one anyway.
Why does everything have to be a fight? Why can't we just think of it as Sun offing something that does this and that they think people want? M$, they fight and intend to exterminate all things non M$ but who else really thinks like that?
"No siree", argued N2H2 in court to block research of their trade secrets, "we would never go to court to stop research into our trade secrets. We won't sue you, Scout's honor." What amazing duplicity.
You say, In other words, what the plaintiff wanted to do is not illegal, so he has no standing to challenge the law.
While I agree with that I think you have missunderstood what happened. As horrible as the DMCA is, it did have exmptions for "research". The rulling, however seemed to be that NO expemption applied to the work, so Edelman was prevented from studying the silly software to protect a trade secret. Yahoo has it:
Edelman had asked a Seattle company called N2H2 for a list of sites its software blocks, but was rebuffed. He then went to court to seek permission to reverse-engineer N2H2's product, saying he needed court permission because the controversial 1998 law forbids the dissemination of information that could be used to bypass copyright-protection schemes.... N2H2 claimed that providing such information to Edelman would compromise trade secrets, and that Edelman had no legal standing to be granted such permission because there was no imminent threat he would be sued. U.S. District Judge Richard Stearns agreed, writing in a ruling issued Wednesday that "there is no plausibly protected constitutional interest that Edelman can assert that outweighs N2H2's right to protect its copyrighted material from an invasive and destructive trespass."
It looks fairly straight forward to me. Where did you get your ideas from?
Every company is entitled to keep trade secrets. It either that or they must patent their inventions. Patents require disclosure.
Yes patents require disclosure in return for Federal protection of the exlusive use of the thing described. They are very expensive for a company and they give away all your hard work so that others can use it.
Now, thanks to the DMCA, you don't have to chose. Neat eh? You can have your trade secrets published publically in an encrypted form and the US Government will make sure others don't tell anyone about how it works even when they are bright enough to figure it out. They will protect your feble trade secrets from "invasion"! This is really cool, now no one has to tell anyone anything AND be protected by the government. What a great trade! I pay taxes which are used to keep me from understanding the things I own.
Well, I used to own things. Now that I can't do what I want with them or share what I do with my friends, I think some of my things belong to the people who made it. Just imagine this being applied to software! Oh wait, this is software! Really really neat. If I install that program on my computer so that I'm not tempted to look at things someone else thinks are nasty, I'm not only giving up my right to read, I'm giving up ownership of my computer! That's just unbelievable. Next thing you know, you won't be able to share what you know about BIOS. Well, it's good that other people are willing to be responsible for the things I want to use. That way I don't have to worry when they break. Someone will always take care of me.
So what if contractors don't get all of the nice benefits that employees have. They get paid a lot more than normal employees to make up for it. Anyone who doesn't take into account that they've got to pay their own benefits when considering a contract position is an idiot.
Nice of you to call the victims idiots. Their loss is no skin off your nose, is it? It might be. How do YOU know what those contractors are making? How do you know what choices they have? Do you know what an idiot is? It's someone who says things without knowing what they are talking about or without carefully considering things.
Microsoft ran their personel like they ran their dividens and end user license agreements: dishonest. They were so abusive, the federal government noticed and slapped them in court. Many of those employees were forced to take contracts of be fired. None of them do project based work, which is what contractors are for. They are doing routine ordianry work that most normal companies would hire employees for. What has followed the lawsuit is obviously a punishment for having nerve in the first place.
The crazy thing to read is that other companies are doing the same thing. They are doing it, in part due to the taxes on permenant employees, but more because it's cheaper for them and they can. You might be next. Consider what you would do if given the same choice and have a nice day.
He copied the MS Bios code, modified it, and sold it. It would be no different if I bought myself a copy of MS Windows, made some modifications to it, burned it to CD, and started selling it as my own.
There are two big differences there. First, you must have an Xbox to make use of this BIOS. Second, you are confuseing software and hardware. The issues brought up by this simply point back to the absurdity of granting copyrights to non human readable files. You have really bought a bill of goods to even be thinking the way you are.
On the first point while it's not at all a given that he used M$'s bios in his own there should be nothing wrong with that. It is possible to make a whole bios and I've read that people have done this for the xbox. The FBI would still want to put those folks in jail, but that's beside the point. Because you can't use this bios in anything but an xbox and because you can only use one at a time, there is no difference between the seller physically modifying the bios your machine came with. The modification could happen at the shop, or he could send you a program that would do it for you or you could require the receiver to send back the old bios, or everyone could save themselves a lot of trouble and do just what the seller did. Because no one can offer modifications to the xbox of any kind, xboxes must belong to Microsoft and their franchise is protected by the Federal Govenment.
The second point is largly covered by the reasoning in the first point. This is a peice of hardware that is being sold. There exists no ready mechanism to modify the bios in an xbox. It was made to controlled by its owners, Microsoft, not its purchasers. If such a mechanism did exist, the bios would be software.
Why is it that we have extended copyright into hardware again? The path between this point and copyrights for binary files is a straight line. A binary file is just an aragement of 1s and 0s, much like a collection of coggs and gears, that have no meaning to humans and do not deserve protection designed for works of art and literature. Free software will remove the profit holding up this system of abusrd laws and things will get better soon.
I imagine you did not read the article or put much thought into it. You obviously did not see the implications of this:
Those who work neither as blue- nor orange-badges may wonder why they should care about Microsoft's practices. The answer is that from day 366 to day 466, Microsoft temps still get paid. Only the check is written not by Bill Gates, but by the State of Washington.
That's one of the way temporary workers have been punished. Real nice of them. Think about doing routine work for M$ and having to take 100 days off every year. Right now that means being unemployed. Washington State might have better benifits than my state where the best you can get in benifits is minimum wage. What a great way to treat the people who get your work done: no retirement, no stock options, 25% of your pay comes from welfare. This is a much larger slap than being called "dash trash" and otherwise treated like an outcast.
Is this what we can expect in the future from Corporate Amercia? Microsoft is one of the few companies that really grew in the last 20 years. If they won't treat their employess well, who will? Reading storries like this makes me sick.
t's not my government. I have the rights that are upheld under my government.
Governments don't uphold rights, they can only respect or violate them. It is up to the people to uphold their rights.
... I can't tell them how to live. What do you suggest otherwise? Going in and bombing them and forcing them to live how I live just because I think I'm right?
Actually, you can and should tell them how to live. This is how we all learn. Bombing, in support of a popular uprising, is not a bad idea but useless otherwise. We must continue to provide as many people with tools and methods they can use to exercise their rights. Encryption to defeat controls on free speech, alternate comunication networks to defeat censorship. Ideas are far more effective than bombs and that is what the Chinese government is fighting. Those tools and ideas are not just for others as you noticed. By protecting our own rights, we do the best job of helping others.
There is much that needs to happen here too. Google is a nice search engine, we need more and better. Search engines should be ecrypted so others can't snoop on what we are interested in. More people should set up encrypted browsing proxies to insure anymous reading. ISPs should hand out static IPs and alow publishing. People should co-operate to make anymous distrubuted publishing available used widely.
It is their country. They can do what they want really.
If you believe that, you have no rights. If you believe that there are no limits to government, obviously anything the government wants to do is OK with you. It's no more true than any two people have the right to kill a third. You have natural rights, one of which is to say and read what you will. It takes positive government action to interfere with that right. Because all governments are supported by the efforts of their people, those that violate natural rights are considered abusive wasters of resources. Abusive governments only exist when you let them and you would let them.
True, nothing new about cracked Microsoft junk. Remember how M$ helped themselves to system access, auto updates and the ability to remove copyright infringing material found? It sounds like they will use this as a pretext to start digging through M$ systems.
The priciple, that Intel can keep others from pin compatibility, is important. Intel has done everyting in its power to avoid direct competition. They have changed their own pinout frequently and threatened others who would follow. AMD has had longer lasting pinouts! The result is 5 or 6 types of i386 motherboards. While, thankfully, instruction set compatibility has been maitained, there is less competition in the motherboard and chip market because of this. Oh well.
There is nothing new about cracked M$ junk. It's how M$ ownz the desktop and it was the leverage in their eXtortion of other companies, hardware, software and service based. Ditto their pro OS's and "server" OSs, though NT never killed Unix and their server push has largely fallen flat due to poor quality.
What's new is the response. They are not just leaving it to their shills the BSA this time and may be using their new EULAs to look at everyone's systems. Quoth the article:
The Microsoft representative made clear that the company will scour the Internet looking for the leaked code. "Our legal department works aggressively on that kind of thing," the representative said. Stolen codes are often traded with the software, typically on Web sites, newsgroups or Internet Relay Chat (IRC).
You have to wonder if they will use ISP records of OS use. They could compare the registration records and then use their EULA terms to log into non "activated" machines for which they also have no records and turn them off or alert the BSA of it and other unauthorized software found.
The privacy concern is in the search. In a perfect world that would be bad but the world and M$ in particular are far from perfect. Innocent people will pay the price for trusting M$. People using these keys legitimatly will have their personal files mulled over by M$ clerks and they might be falsly reported to the BSA. People using cracked codes without knowing it will also suffer. A crooked shop or consultant might very well have used the registration codes to extend their earnings.
Ah yes, this is the true joy of the closed source world. You are so grateful for your software that you agree to be searched at any time and treated like a criminal. More irksome than that is that a public network, the internet, will be abused to acomplish the searches. BARF.
The University grants students a "reasonable expectation of unobstructed use of these tools [telephones, the Internet]," knowing that the former will be used to call both classmates (academic use) and parents (nonacademic use), and the latter will be used both for class research (academic use) and reading Slashdot (nonacademic use). The University does not restrict use of the network for legal, non-academic file-sharing, so long as its bandwidth use is not excessive.
Bah! Slashdot is a great research tool.
Other than that, Way to go Princton, that's a great user policy. Please educate my cable and telephone companies.
You ask, How about, "should somebody who isn't familiar with the issues be responsible for teaching them?"
Silly boy, it's a business ethics class and there are no business ethics. There are Software Ethics, Engineering Ethics, Medical Ethics, Legal Ethics and Sales Ethics is "caveat emptor", but there are no business ethics. All "business people" have to do is spit out their marketing and say what a great thing it is they are doing to the consumer. The teacher knows this, but tuition is already paid before the students learn it.
In big general terms he might look into the morality of NDAs, perpetual copyright through encryption and the future of the free press in a consolidated or even nationalized electronic network. That's how all those business folks get their best ideas. Business school is sort of like prison that way. It's cheaper to keep students than inmates, but they can do much more damage when they get out.
I have been suggesting just this thing for Transmeta/IBM/SUN/HP for the last year.... My hat is off to you MS. If you win, it is becuase the good guys are so totally stupid and greedy.
The good guys thought the contest idea was stupid and greedy. It is you know.
What a great defeatist attitude. It's a little like saying "we're all going to die anyway so why not kill ourselves now?"
No, I say we are going to live so let's live well.
Terrorism is not a forgone conclusion and there will not be a better world until you eradicate terrorism and all religous funatics. The question is whether you are willing to lessen some of your civil liberties now or wait until things get so bad that they have to declare martial law?
Eradicate all religous fanatics? Hmmmm, sounds bad. Don't need to violate anyone's rights to do that, no sir-ree. There's a nice place for you just off the coat of Florida. It's a big sunny island where everyone gets along because they have eradicated all the fanatics and their rights. I've never heard of any plane hijacking there. Why don't you go hang out there for a while, I'm sure you will be happy.
Slashdot Mirror
Nope, they are not. You have authorized the govenment to do certian things with the tax monies you give them willingly. It will be a sorry day when you authorize the government to spend money on equpment and manpower required to listen in on that public network. What do you want your govenment to do for you? Listen to your kid sister whine about NStink? I like that people go to jail for wiretaps and consider that a reasonable check on that kind of activity.
Don't use credit cards if you don't like what happens when you do. That's OK by me. You giving the feds permision to tap into my phone line without a warrent? Not OK.
So? run and use an anoymizer. Works the same way for TCP/IP connections, no? If you don't know your host number the packets can't find the host. If your host does not know your IP, the reply can't find it's way back. No need for the data to be voice over IP.
In the imortal works of Khan, "Let them eat static."
OK, Mr. Technical Detail, the Recording Industry Association of America as embodied by the world's five music publishers. The same music publishers who forbid any non-member of the cartel from selling music in any music store that has member music. The same folks that bring us sorry commercial radio, that no on listens to anymore, and that has members seriously considering a computer program to chose "hit music" for us to listen to. The same group that's represented by other industry associations that do much the same thing everywhere in the world.
They have indeed tried to buy up what they can't shut up. They purchased all sorts of "independent" record labels and they continue to pretend the labels are independent, much as many large brands have purchased health food start ups and then filled the containers with their usual shit. The RIAA's efforts to treat an evoloved distribution method like the one needed by vinal, like the effort to sell corn oil and syrup as health food, is doomed to fail.
They don't have enough money and never will. Someone noticed that everyone but the RIAA can do better without the RIAA. So what happens when the RIAA buys out hundreds of independent record lables and shuts them down or otherwise makes them suck? Hundreds of new ones sprout up. If you are a manager who was feeling furfilled making money for yourself and your musicians by promoting good music, you set up a new shop. The artists, who didn't have to give up their rights to their work the last time, walk right on over too.
Game over, you lose.
I'm waiting for the day someone tells me that my monitor has been fooling me for years. I'm happy with my wife too. =:>
I've made good use of these kinds of monitors. The 15" thing that came with my Dell was great and lasted for 10 years. My wife uses a NEC Multisync 3D that I bought for $75. It may not be considered good enough for CAD work these days, but it's a fine general purpose monitor. I have several monitors I pulled from the trash that are very useful for temporary set ups. A neighbor of mine threw out a 15" monitor when he moved. It displays 1078x768 very well and I used it temporarily as a second monitor while I learned how to set up printing on a Debian machine. It's relativly small and light, so when I'm finished it will not be a chore to put it up. I have a few from the trash that needed some minor adjustments, such as focus, and some that worked then died. Most of them can probably be fixed with minor repairs at a competent repair shop, so I'm hanging on to them in case someone I know needs it.
Monitors from CompUSA have been a mixed bag. I used and enjoyed a nice big cheap monitor for about two years, then it joined the pile of not working monitors. When I bought it for around $200 I thought it was a good deal. When it burnt I was not so sure, but bought another one anyway.
Why does everything have to be a fight? Why can't we just think of it as Sun offing something that does this and that they think people want? M$, they fight and intend to exterminate all things non M$ but who else really thinks like that?
"No siree", argued N2H2 in court to block research of their trade secrets, "we would never go to court to stop research into our trade secrets. We won't sue you, Scout's honor." What amazing duplicity.
While I agree with that I think you have missunderstood what happened. As horrible as the DMCA is, it did have exmptions for "research". The rulling, however seemed to be that NO expemption applied to the work, so Edelman was prevented from studying the silly software to protect a trade secret. Yahoo has it:
Edelman had asked a Seattle company called N2H2 for a list of sites its software blocks, but was rebuffed. He then went to court to seek permission to reverse-engineer N2H2's product, saying he needed court permission because the controversial 1998 law forbids the dissemination of information that could be used to bypass copyright-protection schemes. ... N2H2 claimed that providing such information to Edelman would compromise trade secrets, and that Edelman had no legal standing to be granted such permission because there was no imminent threat he would be sued. U.S. District Judge Richard Stearns agreed, writing in a ruling issued Wednesday that "there is no plausibly protected constitutional interest that Edelman can assert that outweighs N2H2's right to protect its copyrighted material from an invasive and destructive trespass."
It looks fairly straight forward to me. Where did you get your ideas from?
Every company is entitled to keep trade secrets. It either that or they must patent their inventions. Patents require disclosure.
Yes patents require disclosure in return for Federal protection of the exlusive use of the thing described. They are very expensive for a company and they give away all your hard work so that others can use it.
Now, thanks to the DMCA, you don't have to chose. Neat eh? You can have your trade secrets published publically in an encrypted form and the US Government will make sure others don't tell anyone about how it works even when they are bright enough to figure it out. They will protect your feble trade secrets from "invasion"! This is really cool, now no one has to tell anyone anything AND be protected by the government. What a great trade! I pay taxes which are used to keep me from understanding the things I own.
Well, I used to own things. Now that I can't do what I want with them or share what I do with my friends, I think some of my things belong to the people who made it. Just imagine this being applied to software! Oh wait, this is software! Really really neat. If I install that program on my computer so that I'm not tempted to look at things someone else thinks are nasty, I'm not only giving up my right to read, I'm giving up ownership of my computer! That's just unbelievable. Next thing you know, you won't be able to share what you know about BIOS. Well, it's good that other people are willing to be responsible for the things I want to use. That way I don't have to worry when they break. Someone will always take care of me.
Nice of you to call the victims idiots. Their loss is no skin off your nose, is it? It might be. How do YOU know what those contractors are making? How do you know what choices they have? Do you know what an idiot is? It's someone who says things without knowing what they are talking about or without carefully considering things.
Microsoft ran their personel like they ran their dividens and end user license agreements: dishonest. They were so abusive, the federal government noticed and slapped them in court. Many of those employees were forced to take contracts of be fired. None of them do project based work, which is what contractors are for. They are doing routine ordianry work that most normal companies would hire employees for. What has followed the lawsuit is obviously a punishment for having nerve in the first place.
The crazy thing to read is that other companies are doing the same thing. They are doing it, in part due to the taxes on permenant employees, but more because it's cheaper for them and they can. You might be next. Consider what you would do if given the same choice and have a nice day.
There are two big differences there. First, you must have an Xbox to make use of this BIOS. Second, you are confuseing software and hardware. The issues brought up by this simply point back to the absurdity of granting copyrights to non human readable files. You have really bought a bill of goods to even be thinking the way you are.
On the first point while it's not at all a given that he used M$'s bios in his own there should be nothing wrong with that. It is possible to make a whole bios and I've read that people have done this for the xbox. The FBI would still want to put those folks in jail, but that's beside the point. Because you can't use this bios in anything but an xbox and because you can only use one at a time, there is no difference between the seller physically modifying the bios your machine came with. The modification could happen at the shop, or he could send you a program that would do it for you or you could require the receiver to send back the old bios, or everyone could save themselves a lot of trouble and do just what the seller did. Because no one can offer modifications to the xbox of any kind, xboxes must belong to Microsoft and their franchise is protected by the Federal Govenment.
The second point is largly covered by the reasoning in the first point. This is a peice of hardware that is being sold. There exists no ready mechanism to modify the bios in an xbox. It was made to controlled by its owners, Microsoft, not its purchasers. If such a mechanism did exist, the bios would be software.
Why is it that we have extended copyright into hardware again? The path between this point and copyrights for binary files is a straight line. A binary file is just an aragement of 1s and 0s, much like a collection of coggs and gears, that have no meaning to humans and do not deserve protection designed for works of art and literature. Free software will remove the profit holding up this system of abusrd laws and things will get better soon.
What's worse than having one clueless boss who's just another cog in a big organization? Having two of them.
Those who work neither as blue- nor orange-badges may wonder why they should care about Microsoft's practices. The answer is that from day 366 to day 466, Microsoft temps still get paid. Only the check is written not by Bill Gates, but by the State of Washington.
That's one of the way temporary workers have been punished. Real nice of them. Think about doing routine work for M$ and having to take 100 days off every year. Right now that means being unemployed. Washington State might have better benifits than my state where the best you can get in benifits is minimum wage. What a great way to treat the people who get your work done: no retirement, no stock options, 25% of your pay comes from welfare. This is a much larger slap than being called "dash trash" and otherwise treated like an outcast.
Is this what we can expect in the future from Corporate Amercia? Microsoft is one of the few companies that really grew in the last 20 years. If they won't treat their employess well, who will? Reading storries like this makes me sick.
"Let them eat cake" indeed. Fuck you Joe.
Governments don't uphold rights, they can only respect or violate them. It is up to the people to uphold their rights.
Actually, you can and should tell them how to live. This is how we all learn. Bombing, in support of a popular uprising, is not a bad idea but useless otherwise. We must continue to provide as many people with tools and methods they can use to exercise their rights. Encryption to defeat controls on free speech, alternate comunication networks to defeat censorship. Ideas are far more effective than bombs and that is what the Chinese government is fighting. Those tools and ideas are not just for others as you noticed. By protecting our own rights, we do the best job of helping others.
There is much that needs to happen here too. Google is a nice search engine, we need more and better. Search engines should be ecrypted so others can't snoop on what we are interested in. More people should set up encrypted browsing proxies to insure anymous reading. ISPs should hand out static IPs and alow publishing. People should co-operate to make anymous distrubuted publishing available used widely.
If you believe that, you have no rights. If you believe that there are no limits to government, obviously anything the government wants to do is OK with you. It's no more true than any two people have the right to kill a third. You have natural rights, one of which is to say and read what you will. It takes positive government action to interfere with that right. Because all governments are supported by the efforts of their people, those that violate natural rights are considered abusive wasters of resources. Abusive governments only exist when you let them and you would let them.
True, nothing new about cracked Microsoft junk. Remember how M$ helped themselves to system access, auto updates and the ability to remove copyright infringing material found? It sounds like they will use this as a pretext to start digging through M$ systems.
The priciple, that Intel can keep others from pin compatibility, is important. Intel has done everyting in its power to avoid direct competition. They have changed their own pinout frequently and threatened others who would follow. AMD has had longer lasting pinouts! The result is 5 or 6 types of i386 motherboards. While, thankfully, instruction set compatibility has been maitained, there is less competition in the motherboard and chip market because of this. Oh well.
What's new is the response. They are not just leaving it to their shills the BSA this time and may be using their new EULAs to look at everyone's systems. Quoth the article:
The Microsoft representative made clear that the company will scour the Internet looking for the leaked code. "Our legal department works aggressively on that kind of thing," the representative said. Stolen codes are often traded with the software, typically on Web sites, newsgroups or Internet Relay Chat (IRC).
You have to wonder if they will use ISP records of OS use. They could compare the registration records and then use their EULA terms to log into non "activated" machines for which they also have no records and turn them off or alert the BSA of it and other unauthorized software found.
The privacy concern is in the search. In a perfect world that would be bad but the world and M$ in particular are far from perfect. Innocent people will pay the price for trusting M$. People using these keys legitimatly will have their personal files mulled over by M$ clerks and they might be falsly reported to the BSA. People using cracked codes without knowing it will also suffer. A crooked shop or consultant might very well have used the registration codes to extend their earnings.
Ah yes, this is the true joy of the closed source world. You are so grateful for your software that you agree to be searched at any time and treated like a criminal. More irksome than that is that a public network, the internet, will be abused to acomplish the searches. BARF.
The University grants students a "reasonable expectation of unobstructed use of these tools [telephones, the Internet]," knowing that the former will be used to call both classmates (academic use) and parents (nonacademic use), and the latter will be used both for class research (academic use) and reading Slashdot (nonacademic use). The University does not restrict use of the network for legal, non-academic file-sharing, so long as its bandwidth use is not excessive.
Bah! Slashdot is a great research tool.
Other than that, Way to go Princton, that's a great user policy. Please educate my cable and telephone companies.
Silly boy, it's a business ethics class and there are no business ethics. There are Software Ethics, Engineering Ethics, Medical Ethics, Legal Ethics and Sales Ethics is "caveat emptor", but there are no business ethics. All "business people" have to do is spit out their marketing and say what a great thing it is they are doing to the consumer. The teacher knows this, but tuition is already paid before the students learn it.
In big general terms he might look into the morality of NDAs, perpetual copyright through encryption and the future of the free press in a consolidated or even nationalized electronic network. That's how all those business folks get their best ideas. Business school is sort of like prison that way. It's cheaper to keep students than inmates, but they can do much more damage when they get out.
No, Visa is.
The good guys thought the contest idea was stupid and greedy. It is you know.
What a great defeatist attitude. It's a little like saying "we're all going to die anyway so why not kill ourselves now?"
No, I say we are going to live so let's live well.
Terrorism is not a forgone conclusion and there will not be a better world until you eradicate terrorism and all religous funatics. The question is whether you are willing to lessen some of your civil liberties now or wait until things get so bad that they have to declare martial law?
Eradicate all religous fanatics? Hmmmm, sounds bad. Don't need to violate anyone's rights to do that, no sir-ree. There's a nice place for you just off the coat of Florida. It's a big sunny island where everyone gets along because they have eradicated all the fanatics and their rights. I've never heard of any plane hijacking there. Why don't you go hang out there for a while, I'm sure you will be happy.