It is legal to resell things "not marked for individual sale" provided you provide the markings (if any) required by your state/city/province/whatever. Items which are a part of a multipack might not have e.g. nutrition information, cancer/allergy warnings, serving information, etc.
Sorry, but 17 USC 117 provides you the right to make a copy of software to your computer in the course of using it. You don't need the EULA to do so. The EULA is merely an attempt to take away rights you already have.
The rental thing is different -- rental of software is specifically prohibited by law in most cases (console games are an exception). Again, the EULA doesn't come into play.
It's actually at least theoretically not necessary to modify Windows to work with a non-Dell computer. You can modify the computer instead, so Windows thinks it's a Dell.
How about if all catalog companies refused to ship to any address than the billing address? Well, screw gift shipments and to heck with sending stuff to work because I'm not at home when the UPS driver comes.
How about if online purchases always require all customers to use single-use card numbers? A lot less online purchases get made, because it becomes a royal pain in the ass.
Better security is possible, but as with better physical security, there's a cost.
Yes, you could have a USB dongle, effectively making access to your account depend on something you have as well as something you know. Now you've created compatibility and support nightmares and blocked Mac and Linux users out. You could make it work from one registered PC... and now you can only access your account from that computer, which makes online banking a lot less useful.
Yes, effectively fixing the problem is expensive. But it's expensive for the users, no matter who the problem is assigned to. Put enough onus on the banks, and they'll simply get rid of the service as too expensive. Who wins in that scenario?
I understand you, I simply disagree. I've been working in fields which are NOT pure CS (medical imaging, embedded systems) and still found plenty of use for CS skills. I claim you have it entirely backwards: usually, the domain-specific knowledge is the lesser part of the job; you need to know how to write software to solve problems, and what the problems are is secondary.
Things like web apps are exactly the opposite -- there, the domain specific knowledge is more important and the actual software is mostly a solved problem. A pure CS-type person will be far more at home writing embedded software or simulation software (very heavy in the sort of math a CS degree entails), than writing a boring old Web app which just takes the users input, checks for errors, and dumps it into a database.
If you think the CS is the easy part, you're probably either the type of person for whom it comes naturally, or you think that CS is just programming. It isn't.
Guess what. You've just pretty much gone back to the dark ages. Everyone has a set of programs installed on their computer by the priesthood, and that's all they can run. Might do something about viruses. Definitely reduces the utility of the machines.
#3: Hacking worthless Holding your adversary's skills in contempt is generally not a good idea. Refusing to learn them is just plain stupid. And, of course, hacking (even the black-hat sort the PC prefer to call "cracking) isn't what he says it is. Learn a particular exploit? Any script kiddie can do that. Figuring out how to identify holes and develop exploits, that's another thing entirely, and as useful for a security professional as lock-bypassing is for Medeco.
#6: Sit on your duff and let the other guy take the lumps.
Sure, you CAN do that. But there's reward as well as risk in adopting the new stuff. And consider that if everyone took that strategy, progress would be entirely stifled. His IT exec who waited two years to put in wireless may have saved money -- but he also had two years without wireless, which may have cost him more.
Oddly enough, my first job out of school (as a CS major) required that I know about semaphores and mutexes and the like. My current job, which is in the embedded area, involves some other very CS-typical stuff like ECC codes. In between I've worked in the medical devices field and doing business software.
Software is software; the domain-specific knowledge you can pick up on the job. Pretty much have to, in fact, because it tends to be _so_ specialized there's little you could do beforehand to learn. Particularly in business software; while everyone's doing basically the same thing, they're all doing it in slightly different ways.
A post-carbon society? Never happen. Hydrocarbon fuels from all sources run out, what we have is societal collapse. There just isn't another sufficient source of energy, no matter how much handwringing greens do about how we haven't eliminated our dependence on fossil fuels. We haven't eliminated it because there's no other choice. There's not enough wood or vegetable oil in the world to handle a small fraction of the world's energy needs. Nuclear is politically impossible and it ain't portable enough anyway. The rest of the so-called alternatives are both insufficient AND impractical.
Most likely, another BS in a similar field is going to mean nothing. It's been years since I ran into a job where a CS masters was desired, but IMO the higher level degree has to mean more than a CIS degree when you already have a CS.
They can just use Google Image Search. Google tells them the site it got the image from, at which point they can go after the site which did misappropriate their images.
Going after Google, which is merely showing thumbnails of publicly available (whether legitimately or otherwise) is missing the point entirely.
Violence only works if it's in response to violence, and even then it's just a temporary fix, not a solution. Remember, I was talking about 'solving' problems, not just making them go away for the night.
Hit 'em hard enough, and they won't come back. Either because they're unable to, or because they lost their taste for messing with you. That's solving the problem. It's a solution you might not have available if you don't have enough force at your disposal, but it's a solution.
And violence (against people) is certainly best employed as a means to an end. The alternative way to employ it is as an end in itself, and that's a really bad thing
BTW, whoever said 'an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind' (and I believe it was Gandhi) missed the point. It's one eye for one eye, and _it stops there_. At worst, twice as many people are blinded as if there were no penalty for destroying another persons eye. Hopefully, the deterrent effect means it's far less than that.
By attacking at Pearl Harbor, Japan was opening the door to war. They knew what war entails; they'd been conducting it for some time by then. They didn't know the means which would be used on them, but that's not really critical.
The definition of "innocent", is in fact, key. The assumption seems to be that civilians are and members of the military aren't. But that's not so. The sailors killed at Pearl Harbor were every bit as innocent as any Japanese civilian killed. The US wasn't at war with Japan, after all. Further, assuming that conducting war against Japan was justified for the US, the soldiers and sailors the US then subsequently sent to war against Japan were _also innocent_. So were all those who would have had to participate in an invasion if the bombs hadn't dropped. On the other hand, those civilians working in munitions factories and such were just as culpable for the war as any Japanese soldier was.
So what you end up with is not a choice of killing innocents to save those who are not innocent, but of killing their people to save your own. There's no morally clean choice, which isn't surprising; morality has already broken down when there's war, so those Marquis de Queensbury-type rules Ms Anscombe pooh-poohs are all you have left.
No guarantee a jury would find them not guilty. The jury could simply go by the letter of the law, or it could be full of people afraid of eeeeviil hackers who throw the book at them.
Ask Merck if you can expect justice from a jury if you're an unsympathetic defendant.
Unfortunately, no one will laugh the charges out of court because the students are technically guilty. It's a damn stupid law but it's quite clear; exceeding your authorization IS computer tresspass.
MS isn't a monopoly any more. In order to claim them so, judges had to use a very restricted field like "operating systems for 80x86-compatible processors". Guess who just entered that arena?
I hadn't heard of Jack Reeve before, but I think he's got it right in his summary of his "Letter to the Editor". The other major important thing he covers in his introduction. That's that in software, the final model IS the product.
I've been saying some of the same things for almost as long (having been taught them the hard way -- by a run-in with both formal software proofs and MIL STD 2167A) Only instead of starting flame wars in respected journals, I've just been bitching to co-workers, walls, workstations, and anything else that would listen. I wish I'd found his essays back then.
Software _isn't_ engineering. Certainly not in the sense civil engineering is. It is not the case that one can write a specification, make a design, analyze the design according to established principles to determine if it meets the specification, and then have lesser-skilled laborers simply crank out code, no matter how much SEI wishes you to believe this.
No one is making an issue over systems which break the legal limits. The legal limits are high enough you're unlikely to be able to break them with a Pringles-can antenna. The gain on a Pringles-can yagi is something like 12dBi. A high-powered wireless card (200mW) puts out 23dBm. That puts you below the 36dB EIRP limit for point-to-multipoint systems.
Personally, I think "let's throw away all privacy on the Internet" pretty much cries out for _1984_ references, but that's just me.
No one said anything about "global" authority; it's sufficient that the authority has personal jurisdiction over the dissenter. Yes, we currently have authorities that make the rules and hold you accountable as well as they can if you break them. But that's "as well as they can". If they could always hold you accountable, things would be much different. Imagine a world where every single infraction of every single rule resulted in punishment. Jaywalk? Bang, cop appears and gives you a ticket. Have sex in unapproved position or with an unapproved person? Off to jail. Smoke a joint? Gotcha. Watch a DVD on an unapproved player? Yow, that fine hurts. The inability of authority to hold everyone accountable for their violations of rules is what keeps that authority from being intolerable.
I'll grant you that full accountability to authority _on the Internet_ is not as bad as full accountability in the real world. But it deprives those opposed to the authority of a powerful tool that those in line with the authority continue to have, and in doing so cements the power of that authority.
there would be a lot of advantages to having some form of confirmed identity connected with Internet-based activity, even if it's generally concealed or only anonymously verifiable except to suitable authorities.
There'd be a lot of advantages to ubiqutuous telescreens too. Doesn't make them any less dystopian.
A "suitable authority" which makes the rules and to whom your actions are 100% accountable to is your master, no bones about it. Once they can not only make all the rules but enforce them too (because you can't do anything that isn't easily traceable to you), you are a slave in the strictest sense.
The problem is that the prior art seems to be interpreted narrowly while the claims get interpreted broadly. So if your prior art isn't _exactly_ what's in the patent (e.g. you did it over an RS-232 line instead of the Internet), it doesn't count.
But if you actually implement a system which is slightly different, Microsoft's lawyers will claim their patent covers it. In some cases, even if your system is exactly some piece of prior art. You might be able to win your case.... but with the court's presumption of the patents validity and the fact that their lawyers are better and better funded, you're probably screwed.
If the peaceable protesters were somehow to stop the violent protesters within their own ranks, the powers-that-be would simply insert agents provocateur to act violently and provide an excuse for police retaliation.
Or the police would initiate the action, and claim the response they received was the reason for it. These tactics are old hat, and they pretty much work every time. That's why peacable protest is no longer a viable means for change. The system has adapted to the tactic and neutralized it.
Slashdot Mirror
It is legal to resell things "not marked for individual sale" provided you provide the markings (if any) required by your state/city/province/whatever. Items which are a part of a multipack might not have e.g. nutrition information, cancer/allergy warnings, serving information, etc.
Sorry, but 17 USC 117 provides you the right to make a copy of software to your computer in the course of using it. You don't need the EULA to do so. The EULA is merely an attempt to take away rights you already have.
The rental thing is different -- rental of software is specifically prohibited by law in most cases (console games are an exception). Again, the EULA doesn't come into play.
It's actually at least theoretically not necessary to modify Windows to work with a non-Dell computer. You can modify the computer instead, so Windows thinks it's a Dell.
How about if all catalog companies refused to ship to any address than the billing address? Well, screw gift shipments and to heck with sending stuff to work because I'm not at home when the UPS driver comes.
How about if online purchases always require all customers to use single-use card numbers? A lot less online purchases get made, because it becomes a royal pain in the ass.
Better security is possible, but as with better physical security, there's a cost.
Yes, you could have a USB dongle, effectively making access to your account depend on something you have as well as something you know. Now you've created compatibility and support nightmares and blocked Mac and Linux users out. You could make it work from one registered PC... and now you can only access your account from that computer, which makes online banking a lot less useful.
Yes, effectively fixing the problem is expensive. But it's expensive for the users, no matter who the problem is assigned to. Put enough onus on the banks, and they'll simply get rid of the service as too expensive. Who wins in that scenario?
Mozilla is the original; Internet Explorer is the inferior clone.
I understand you, I simply disagree. I've been working in fields which are NOT pure CS (medical imaging, embedded systems) and still found plenty of use for CS skills. I claim you have it entirely backwards: usually, the domain-specific knowledge is the lesser part of the job; you need to know how to write software to solve problems, and what the problems are is secondary.
Things like web apps are exactly the opposite -- there, the domain specific knowledge is more important and the actual software is mostly a solved problem. A pure CS-type person will be far more at home writing embedded software or simulation software (very heavy in the sort of math a CS degree entails), than writing a boring old Web app which just takes the users input, checks for errors, and dumps it into a database.
If you think the CS is the easy part, you're probably either the type of person for whom it comes naturally, or you think that CS is just programming. It isn't.
#2: Enumerating goodness.
Guess what. You've just pretty much gone back to the dark ages. Everyone has a set of programs installed on their computer by the priesthood, and that's all they can run. Might do something about viruses. Definitely reduces the utility of the machines.
#3: Hacking worthless
Holding your adversary's skills in contempt is generally not a good idea. Refusing to learn them is just plain stupid. And, of course, hacking (even the black-hat sort the PC prefer to call "cracking) isn't what he says it is. Learn a particular exploit? Any script kiddie can do that. Figuring out how to identify holes and develop exploits, that's another thing entirely, and as useful for a security professional as lock-bypassing is for Medeco.
#6: Sit on your duff and let the other guy take the lumps.
Sure, you CAN do that. But there's reward as well as risk in adopting the new stuff. And consider that if everyone took that strategy, progress would be entirely stifled. His IT exec who waited two years to put in wireless may have saved money -- but he also had two years without wireless, which may have cost him more.
Oddly enough, my first job out of school (as a CS major) required that I know about semaphores and mutexes and the like. My current job, which is in the embedded area, involves some other very CS-typical stuff like ECC codes. In between I've worked in the medical devices field and doing business software.
Software is software; the domain-specific knowledge you can pick up on the job. Pretty much have to, in fact, because it tends to be _so_ specialized there's little you could do beforehand to learn. Particularly in business software; while everyone's doing basically the same thing, they're all doing it in slightly different ways.
A post-carbon society? Never happen. Hydrocarbon fuels from all sources run out, what we have is societal collapse. There just isn't another sufficient source of energy, no matter how much handwringing greens do about how we haven't eliminated our dependence on fossil fuels. We haven't eliminated it because there's no other choice. There's not enough wood or vegetable oil in the world to handle a small fraction of the world's energy needs. Nuclear is politically impossible and it ain't portable enough anyway. The rest of the so-called alternatives are both insufficient AND impractical.
Most likely, another BS in a similar field is going to mean nothing. It's been years since I ran into a job where a CS masters was desired, but IMO the higher level degree has to mean more than a CIS degree when you already have a CS.
They can just use Google Image Search. Google tells them the site it got the image from, at which point they can go after the site which did misappropriate their images.
Going after Google, which is merely showing thumbnails of publicly available (whether legitimately or otherwise) is missing the point entirely.
Yeah, it's pretty rich for someone using the DMCA to accuse the receipient of such notices of being evil.
Hit 'em hard enough, and they won't come back. Either because they're unable to, or because they lost their taste for messing with you. That's solving the problem. It's a solution you might not have available if you don't have enough force at your disposal, but it's a solution.
And violence (against people) is certainly best employed as a means to an end. The alternative way to employ it is as an end in itself, and that's a really bad thing
BTW, whoever said 'an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind' (and I believe it was Gandhi) missed the point. It's one eye for one eye, and _it stops there_. At worst, twice as many people are blinded as if there were no penalty for destroying another persons eye. Hopefully, the deterrent effect means it's far less than that.
By attacking at Pearl Harbor, Japan was opening the door to war. They knew what war entails; they'd been conducting it for some time by then. They didn't know the means which would be used on them, but that's not really critical.
The definition of "innocent", is in fact, key. The assumption seems to be that civilians are and members of the military aren't. But that's not so. The sailors killed at Pearl Harbor were every bit as innocent as any Japanese civilian killed. The US wasn't at war with Japan, after all. Further, assuming that conducting war against Japan was justified for the US, the soldiers and sailors the US then subsequently sent to war against Japan were _also innocent_. So were all those who would have had to participate in an invasion if the bombs hadn't dropped. On the other hand, those civilians working in munitions factories and such were just as culpable for the war as any Japanese soldier was.
So what you end up with is not a choice of killing innocents to save those who are not innocent, but of killing their people to save your own. There's no morally clean choice, which isn't surprising; morality has already broken down when there's war, so those Marquis de Queensbury-type rules Ms Anscombe pooh-poohs are all you have left.
No guarantee a jury would find them not guilty. The jury could simply go by the letter of the law, or it could be full of people afraid of eeeeviil hackers who throw the book at them. Ask Merck if you can expect justice from a jury if you're an unsympathetic defendant.
Unfortunately, no one will laugh the charges out of court because the students are technically guilty. It's a damn stupid law but it's quite clear; exceeding your authorization IS computer tresspass.
MS isn't a monopoly any more. In order to claim them so, judges had to use a very restricted field like "operating systems for 80x86-compatible processors". Guess who just entered that arena?
I hadn't heard of Jack Reeve before, but I think he's got it right in his summary of his "Letter to the Editor". The other major important thing he covers in his introduction. That's that in software, the final model IS the product.
I've been saying some of the same things for almost as long (having been taught them the hard way -- by a run-in with both formal software proofs and MIL STD 2167A) Only instead of starting flame wars in respected journals, I've just been bitching to co-workers, walls, workstations, and anything else that would listen. I wish I'd found his essays back then.
As a student, Gauss famously stumbled across that one. And all good programmers know the anecdote.
Software _isn't_ engineering. Certainly not in the sense civil engineering is. It is not the case that one can write a specification, make a design, analyze the design according to established principles to determine if it meets the specification, and then have lesser-skilled laborers simply crank out code, no matter how much SEI wishes you to believe this.
No one is making an issue over systems which break the legal limits. The legal limits are high enough you're unlikely to be able to break them with a Pringles-can antenna. The gain on a Pringles-can yagi is something like 12dBi. A high-powered wireless card (200mW) puts out 23dBm. That puts you below the 36dB EIRP limit for point-to-multipoint systems.
Personally, I think "let's throw away all privacy on the Internet" pretty much cries out for _1984_ references, but that's just me.
No one said anything about "global" authority; it's sufficient that the authority has personal jurisdiction over the dissenter. Yes, we currently have authorities that make the rules and hold you accountable as well as they can if you break them. But that's "as well as they can". If they could always hold you accountable, things would be much different. Imagine a world where every single infraction of every single rule resulted in punishment. Jaywalk? Bang, cop appears and gives you a ticket. Have sex in unapproved position or with an unapproved person? Off to jail. Smoke a joint? Gotcha. Watch a DVD on an unapproved player? Yow, that fine hurts. The inability of authority to hold everyone accountable for their violations of rules is what keeps that authority from being intolerable.
I'll grant you that full accountability to authority _on the Internet_ is not as bad as full accountability in the real world. But it deprives those opposed to the authority of a powerful tool that those in line with the authority continue to have, and in doing so cements the power of that authority.
There'd be a lot of advantages to ubiqutuous telescreens too. Doesn't make them any less dystopian.
A "suitable authority" which makes the rules and to whom your actions are 100% accountable to is your master, no bones about it. Once they can not only make all the rules but enforce them too (because you can't do anything that isn't easily traceable to you), you are a slave in the strictest sense.
The problem is that the prior art seems to be interpreted narrowly while the claims get interpreted broadly. So if your prior art isn't _exactly_ what's in the patent (e.g. you did it over an RS-232 line instead of the Internet), it doesn't count.
But if you actually implement a system which is slightly different, Microsoft's lawyers will claim their patent covers it. In some cases, even if your system is exactly some piece of prior art. You might be able to win your case.... but with the court's presumption of the patents validity and the fact that their lawyers are better and better funded, you're probably screwed.
If the peaceable protesters were somehow to stop the violent protesters within their own ranks, the powers-that-be would simply insert agents provocateur to act violently and provide an excuse for police retaliation.
Or the police would initiate the action, and claim the response they received was the reason for it. These tactics are old hat, and they pretty much work every time. That's why peacable protest is no longer a viable means for change. The system has adapted to the tactic and neutralized it.