A good point that the "Findings of Fact" are published, and this has been used to determine MS's guilt. But I believe that more evidence _can_ be introduced in the punishment phase of the trial. Federal law may be different, but Texas state law does allow this.
This email would be used as evidence that MS is recidivist or habitual violator, and requires more severe punishment.
Apologies if this is a repeat, but I cannot read all 925 comments.
Microsoft is threatening Slashdot by email. MS is trying to prevent the spread of it's specifications. Yet published specs is one of the remedies that Microsoft itself proposes for the punishment phase of the anti-trust trial. This email casts doubt on how sincere (complete) MS would be in publishing specifications.
I recommend roblimo get in touch with the DoJ anti-trust team and apprise them of this email and situation. AFAIK, they have a brief to file soon. Sure,/. may not be beyond reproach, but MS certainly has to answer for it's conduct too. It may influence the court case towards structural remedies if MS cannot be trusted with conduct remedies.
I simply cannot believe that MS would be so stupid as to send this email out. They may have the right to, but it seems to me very dangerous for them. Imagine the headlines "MS gangs up on techie site".
Don't get me wrong, I very much like Alpha's. I have three Multias, one each running Linux RH5.2, OpenBSD and Compaq Tru64 (hobbyist).
But take a look at the 21264 datasheet: 107W [sic] maximum power/heat at 633 MHz (2.35V & 46Amps). This is HOT, but it's also 0.35 um process. If they shrink it to the current 0.18 um, DEC could bring it down to ~20W @ 1.4V. Very competitive.
Is this the real game? Do you need to add something to make it fair use?
Well, that's easy: MP3's take up about one-tenth the storage media and transmission time of the original uncompressed music. It certainly adds _alot_ to the original music by being able to transmit and store it much easier.
I can't comment on the other issues such as is it fair use to make an MP3 of a different copy.
Email, webhits and network traffic can obviously be logged. Whether it is, or whether those logs are analysed is a different matter.
But if you have sufficient access to your own desktop, shouldn't you be able to kill the logger? What are common logger names to we can seek&distroy? Or are they usually hidden process that can evade the tasklist?
Metallica retains copyright [rare], but I presume has granted an exclusive licence to Elektra. Does your contract oblige you to enforce your copyright? How vigorously? Can you post the terms? Is this the main motivation behind your suits?
Has Metallica been enticed/threatened (failure to enforce copyright) into these suits? Could you even tell us if you were? I hear lawyer's words when you speak [chatroom].
Metallica is one of the very few artists who retain copyright in their music. Good for you. So it is one of the very few who can sue directly rather than an unsympathetic record company suing.
This now helps the RIAA because Metallica is more likely to win and establish a valuable precedent. I look for this not to settle. Is that why 10 "John Does" who are unlikely to all agree to settle?
But who knows? A jury just might decide mp3's are "fair use" (lower-quality excerpts), especially if it was scrubbed Brittany Spears fans rather than Heavy Metal punks. Does the RIAA care if the suit alienates Metallica from it's fans?
It used to be much worse. By my estimation, induhvidualism was at it's nadir and corporatism at it's zenith around the late 1950's. Things broke over the fall of McCarthy, Sputnik and Kennedy's election. Since then, there have been the Hippie & anti-Vietnam movements, and much more.
Sure, corporatism is still struggling, and can inflict considerable damage. But people don't think the same way they used to, and the corps are in decline. Look at how there has been major turnover in corporations fortunes. MS & Cisco didn't exist 20 years ago, and now they've overtaken GM & GE.
Most importantly, people's attitudes have changed. Very few think that corps are particularly well intentioned. So they will always be watched.
I never saw Melissa, but I did get three copies of ILOVEYOU thanks to the corporate-wide mailing list. That was this morning. Since then, our mailadmins have done an admirable job, and I've seen none. I'm glad somebody took Melissa as a wake-up call.
Perhaps the best hope is to compare cracking code with criticism, parody or satire which are already protected. All relate some original work (CSS), and are published without the consent of the original author (MPAA) and usually in the face of his vigorous objections.
The lawyer seems to have worked out an intriguing twist on the DeCSS case. While the DMCA is ostensibly about regulating copyright and hence well within the legitimate purview of Congress, it does have First Amendment implications. The real question will be whether the prohibition on publishing cracking code is seen as a necessary limitation on Freedom of Speech.
Freedom of Speech is _not_ absolute. You can't falsely shout "Fire" in a crowded theatre. Nor can you slander or libel others. The issue will boil down to whether the cracking code is a separate work. We all know it is, but do Judges? They will have to be convinced, and some have shown themselves capable [Penfield].
Mechanizing agriculture was sure an important development. It freed 80% of the population to go work on something else (manufacturing) although the dislocation cost was high.
But IMHO, almost as important were the developments in agrichemicals and genetics to improve crop yields.
Ah... now it becomes clear: RIAA via Electra records pressure Metallica into suing MP3 as condition of continued distribution.
RIAA cannot sue MP3 directly because of adverse publicity from artists ["No I am no suing because I don't own my own music"]
So they choose a band who has rejected the slavery deals. Probably offered them improved distro. I see an awful lot of Metallica's new S&M CD out in non-heavy-metal channels. And then use this "fredom loving" band to reduce listener freedom.
The Greatful Dead must be laughing so hard as to bust a gut!
Agreed on the troll. But I almost always surf with images off. Not that they can be turned on in lynx!
I wonder how many others routinely surf images OFF?
Slander by abbreviation ASSUMES prejudice
on
The Eroded Self
·
· Score: 2
One of the key points of this article is about having one juicy nugget taken out of context, amounting to slander/libel. Well, this has always happened. Electronics has just made the process much easier both by making the searching easier, and giving much more material to search.
Ultimately, this can only be worrysome if the nugget receiver is prone to prejudice. For to make an important decision based on a small anecdote is judging without sufficient information--prejudice. But many people certainly are. How do you protect yourself against them?
The author clearly would like to deprive them of information by erecting privacy walls. What they don't have, they cannot misuse. Even if this were possible, there will always be something that can be misused. I do not think this is a good solution. How do you protect yourself against the irrationality of others? No-way.
My preference is to educate people to be more critical of their info sources and more open/tolerant of the reported subjects. Having seen the insides of some media stories and seen the resulting bletcherous reportage, my eyes are wide open. I view network TV and mainstream print about the same as I view USENET. Often mistaken, ignorant, posturing or incomplete, but not always.
Building on this, technological development has had other effects.
As noted, communications developments from the telegraph onwards have greatly accelerated the flow of information. This permits much quicker commercial exploitation of novel ideas and products.
But there are other changes. The market is much larger, increasing the rewards of new ideas. There are also many more potential inventors, so the cost of "first to file" is much higher. The likelihood that something would remain uninvented with weaker patents is much lower. Even 5 years is not likely to slow innovation. It would slow filings.
This applies in most areas, but not all. Pharmaceuticals are extremely expensive to develop, and slow to market due to government action (FDA). Some process patents (Unipol for plastics) take a long time (3 years) to build a plant, and need some time to pay back. 17 years might remain apporpriate for them.
I disagree. If it is my base code, I can do with it as I like, including relicencing it for money. If it is somebody else's base code, then I need their permission for the relicence. This is as it should be. Why should I profit from plagiarizing someone else's work?
As for economics, I didn't write the code to sell it. I write code to solve my problems. There is remarkably little cost or anything else lost in sharing it. I think this holds true for the bulk of the OS code. Do not be seduced by the Microsoft "model" [the dark side of the force] that code is written for sale only.
Perhaps I shouldn't reply, since the original post is borderline flamebait. But I do believe the author is sincere. So I will explain why someone might chose GPL, as I did:
I wrote `cpuburn` from a blank sheet of paper, and mostly for own need to assure myself of stability on my overclocked BP6. Then the question arose--What to do with it? I could have released it as shareware, BSD or GPL.
I rejected the first since I would never get any useful suggestions to improve my code. So it was down to BSD or GPL. I rejected BSD since anyone could then lift my code, and incorporate it into theirs without even credit or attribution unless I had the "obnoxious advertising clause" in. Furthermore, they could make improvements that they could sell, but I would never see.
This really stuck in my craw. I don't like plagiarists. I think the amount of BSD code that Micriosoft and Sun hoisted into their proprietary OSes is scandalous. The developers and UC Berkeley got virtually nothing back from them.
By releasing my software GPL, my code stays free. Yes, I restrict other programmers, and that's exactly my intent. Freedom is for the code not programmers, if you pardon the anthropomorthism.
Note also that I retain copyright, and can issue other licences if I wish. If someone is interested in incorporating my code into a commercial ("proprietary") product, then they email me and I'm sure we can agree on something. I would grant them a non-GPL licence. Nothing in the GPL says that it is the exclusive licence issued for any software. The GPL doesn't restrict me until and unless I start incorporating other's GPL work into mine.
I didn't say what the motivation was for striving to improve things. Sometimes it might be for others, but mostly it's for one's self. But that doesn't matter, because humanity gains even if the inventor is only interested in personal gain.
People are showoffs. They get personal rewards from doing better than others. From women who might work at better makeup or dresses to Marie Curie who discovered Radium. Or Bill Gates who created GW-BASIC. To the posters here on/. Even the secrecy of the Manhattan Project didn't stop the scientists involved from getting credit for their work.
And merely showingoff by [posting in alt.comp.hardware.overclocking] helps others [overclockers]. They see that something might be possible. And that is the most important spur to development. The Russians had a much easier time of developing the A bomb because the already knew it was possible [and spying].
This is one reason that IP laws are so dangerous. They encourage development by giving exclusive property rights to the first developer. But these same property rights impede widespread implementation [progress] because the owner wants royalties. Ben Franklin didn't patent his stove for just this reason.
A balance must be struck, and I'm afraid the IP owners are too influential in at least two of the three branches of govt. Oddly, those are the elected ones!
Why do I overclock? Because I'm a human, and humans have this very useful innate desire to improve their surroundings. Think of where we'd be without it.
I know I take a risk when overclocking. That's the whole point--to find out how much risk for how much reward. I know my machine can crash horribly, so I've written tools (`cpuburn`) to test for stability. Yes, Intel has better tools, but they won't give them out without NDA, while my project is GPL.
It all boils down to not taking manufacturers at their word. While they can have more sophisticated testers, they will never test exactly my setup. So I have to test it. Then why should I not push it `til it fails the tests?
I take mfr specs as a recommendation, or at most, a guarantee. But I don't need to accept it. OTOH, I have no right to foist my choice on others [remarking]. That's fraud. And so is trying to return damaged components.
I have no doubt about what you say. But even 1/2 an MRE is alot better than nothing. Getting even 50 or 100 grams of carbohydrate a day (200-400 Calories) will help enormously because the fat reserves have better metabolic pathways when glucose is present.
I seriously doubt you could even absorb 50 grams glucose per day from a patch.
Drinking and patches are very different. You can certainly absorb everything you need from drinking. Even fiber if you put in some psyillum.
But a patch is very limited. You can only absorb milligram quantities from it. Enough for pharmaceuticals and maybe some vitamines (maybe not C though).
But a combat soldier needs 4000 Calories (16.5 MJ) of food energy per day on a continuous basis. Thats 1000 grams of carbohydrates or protein, or 450 grams of fat (unlikely). Your endurance athlete is in much the same situation.
No way you can absorb 1000 grams of carbohydrates per day through your skin. Not even if you sat in a heated jacuzzi/wetspacesuit of 5% glucose.
Now a patch might be a nice placebo, or good to administer some drugs/vits, but is not going to be useful for more than a short (24h) fast.
Slashdot Mirror
A good point that the "Findings of Fact" are published, and this has been used to determine MS's guilt. But I believe that more evidence _can_ be introduced in the punishment phase of the trial. Federal law may be different, but Texas state law does allow this.
This email would be used as evidence that MS is recidivist or habitual violator, and requires more severe punishment.
Apologies if this is a repeat, but I cannot read all 925 comments.
/. may not be beyond reproach, but MS certainly has to answer for it's conduct too. It may influence the court case towards structural remedies if MS cannot be trusted with conduct remedies.
Microsoft is threatening Slashdot by email. MS is trying to prevent the spread of it's specifications. Yet published specs is one of the remedies that Microsoft itself proposes for the punishment phase of the anti-trust trial. This email casts doubt on how sincere (complete) MS would be in publishing specifications.
I recommend roblimo get in touch with the DoJ anti-trust team and apprise them of this email and situation. AFAIK, they have a brief to file soon. Sure,
I simply cannot believe that MS would be so stupid as to send this email out. They may have the right to, but it seems to me very dangerous for them. Imagine the headlines "MS gangs up on techie site".
An excellent point. Sort of like 286/386 days with Harris & AMD outdoing Intel on their own masks.
Don't get me wrong, I very much like Alpha's. I have three Multias, one each running Linux RH5.2, OpenBSD and Compaq Tru64 (hobbyist).
But take a look at the 21264 datasheet: 107W [sic] maximum power/heat at 633 MHz (2.35V & 46Amps). This is HOT, but it's also 0.35 um process. If they shrink it to the current 0.18 um, DEC could bring it down to ~20W @ 1.4V. Very competitive.
But will Compaq make this investment?
Is this the real game? Do you need to add something to make it fair use?
Well, that's easy: MP3's take up about one-tenth the storage media and transmission time of the original uncompressed music. It certainly adds _alot_ to the original music by being able to transmit and store it much easier.
I can't comment on the other issues such as is it fair use to make an MP3 of a different copy.
Email, webhits and network traffic can obviously be logged. Whether it is, or whether those logs are analysed is a different matter.
But if you have sufficient access to your own desktop, shouldn't you be able to kill the logger? What are common logger names to we can seek&distroy? Or are they usually hidden process that can evade the tasklist?
Have you sold out? Your fans are mostly disaffected young men who want to stick it to "The Man". Are you now "The Man"?
Why the 10 "John Doe" suits? Who are you trying to scare? Or are you just trying to avoid a settlement and establish a precedent for the RIAA?
Metallica retains copyright [rare], but I presume has granted an exclusive licence to Elektra. Does your contract oblige you to enforce your copyright? How vigorously? Can you post the terms? Is this the main motivation behind your suits?
Has Metallica been enticed/threatened (failure to enforce copyright) into these suits? Could you even tell us if you were? I hear lawyer's words when you speak [chatroom].
Metallica is one of the very few artists who retain copyright in their music. Good for you. So it is one of the very few who can sue directly rather than an unsympathetic record company suing.
This now helps the RIAA because Metallica is more likely to win and establish a valuable precedent. I look for this not to settle. Is that why 10 "John Does" who are unlikely to all agree to settle?
But who knows? A jury just might decide mp3's are "fair use" (lower-quality excerpts), especially if it was scrubbed Brittany Spears fans rather than Heavy Metal punks. Does the RIAA care if the suit alienates Metallica from it's fans?
It used to be much worse. By my estimation, induhvidualism was at it's nadir and corporatism at it's zenith around the late 1950's. Things broke over the fall of McCarthy, Sputnik and Kennedy's election. Since then, there have been the Hippie & anti-Vietnam movements, and much more.
Sure, corporatism is still struggling, and can inflict considerable damage. But people don't think the same way they used to, and the corps are in decline. Look at how there has been major turnover in corporations fortunes. MS & Cisco didn't exist 20 years ago, and now they've overtaken GM & GE.
Most importantly, people's attitudes have changed. Very few think that corps are particularly well intentioned. So they will always be watched.
I never saw Melissa, but I did get three copies of ILOVEYOU thanks to the corporate-wide mailing list. That was this morning. Since then, our mailadmins have done an admirable job, and I've seen none. I'm glad somebody took Melissa as a wake-up call.
Perhaps the best hope is to compare cracking code with criticism, parody or satire which are already protected. All relate some original work (CSS), and are published without the consent of the original author (MPAA) and usually in the face of his vigorous objections.
The lawyer seems to have worked out an intriguing twist on the DeCSS case. While the DMCA is ostensibly about regulating copyright and hence well within the legitimate purview of Congress, it does have First Amendment implications. The real question will be whether the prohibition on publishing cracking code is seen as a necessary limitation on Freedom of Speech.
Freedom of Speech is _not_ absolute. You can't falsely shout "Fire" in a crowded theatre. Nor can you slander or libel others. The issue will boil down to whether the cracking code is a separate work. We all know it is, but do Judges? They will have to be convinced, and some have shown themselves capable [Penfield].
Mechanizing agriculture was sure an important development. It freed 80% of the population to go work on something else (manufacturing) although the dislocation cost was high.
But IMHO, almost as important were the developments in agrichemicals and genetics to improve crop yields.
Ah ... now it becomes clear: RIAA via Electra records pressure Metallica into suing MP3 as condition of continued distribution.
RIAA cannot sue MP3 directly because of adverse publicity from artists ["No I am no suing because I don't own my own music"]
So they choose a band who has rejected the slavery deals. Probably offered them improved distro. I see an awful lot of Metallica's new S&M CD out in non-heavy-metal channels. And then use this "fredom loving" band to reduce listener freedom.
The Greatful Dead must be laughing so hard as to bust a gut!
Agreed on the troll. But I almost always surf with images off. Not that they can be turned on in lynx!
I wonder how many others routinely surf images OFF?
One of the key points of this article is about having one juicy nugget taken out of context, amounting to slander/libel. Well, this has always happened. Electronics has just made the process much easier both by making the searching easier, and giving much more material to search.
Ultimately, this can only be worrysome if the nugget receiver is prone to prejudice. For to make an important decision based on a small anecdote is judging without sufficient information--prejudice. But many people certainly are. How do you protect yourself against them?
The author clearly would like to deprive them of information by erecting privacy walls. What they don't have, they cannot misuse. Even if this were possible, there will always be something that can be misused. I do not think this is a good solution. How do you protect yourself against the irrationality of others? No-way.
My preference is to educate people to be more critical of their info sources and more open/tolerant of the reported subjects. Having seen the insides of some media stories and seen the resulting bletcherous reportage, my eyes are wide open. I view network TV and mainstream print about the same as I view USENET. Often mistaken, ignorant, posturing or incomplete, but not always.
Building on this, technological development has had other effects.
As noted, communications developments from the telegraph onwards have greatly accelerated the flow of information. This permits much quicker commercial exploitation of novel ideas and products.
But there are other changes. The market is much larger, increasing the rewards of new ideas. There are also many more potential inventors, so the cost of "first to file" is much higher. The likelihood that something would remain uninvented with weaker patents is much lower. Even 5 years is not likely to slow innovation. It would slow filings.
This applies in most areas, but not all. Pharmaceuticals are extremely expensive to develop, and slow to market due to government action (FDA). Some process patents (Unipol for plastics) take a long time (3 years) to build a plant, and need some time to pay back. 17 years might remain apporpriate for them.
I disagree. If it is my base code, I can do with it as I like, including relicencing it for money. If it is somebody else's base code, then I need their permission for the relicence. This is as it should be. Why should I profit from plagiarizing someone else's work?
As for economics, I didn't write the code to sell it. I write code to solve my problems. There is remarkably little cost or anything else lost in sharing it. I think this holds true for the bulk of the OS code. Do not be seduced by the Microsoft "model" [the dark side of the force] that code is written for sale only.
Actually, I can possibly want more! Alot of these notices get buried in boilerplate, or some "Help->About" button.
Perhaps I shouldn't reply, since the original post is borderline flamebait. But I do believe the author is sincere. So I will explain why someone might chose GPL, as I did:
I wrote `cpuburn` from a blank sheet of paper, and mostly for own need to assure myself of stability on my overclocked BP6. Then the question arose--What to do with it? I could have released it as shareware, BSD or GPL.
I rejected the first since I would never get any useful suggestions to improve my code. So it was down to BSD or GPL. I rejected BSD since anyone could then lift my code, and incorporate it into theirs without even credit or attribution unless I had the "obnoxious advertising clause" in. Furthermore, they could make improvements that they could sell, but I would never see.
This really stuck in my craw. I don't like plagiarists. I think the amount of BSD code that Micriosoft and Sun hoisted into their proprietary OSes is scandalous. The developers and UC Berkeley got virtually nothing back from them.
By releasing my software GPL, my code stays free. Yes, I restrict other programmers, and that's exactly my intent. Freedom is for the code not programmers, if you pardon the anthropomorthism.
Note also that I retain copyright, and can issue other licences if I wish. If someone is interested in incorporating my code into a commercial ("proprietary") product, then they email me and I'm sure we can agree on something. I would grant them a non-GPL licence. Nothing in the GPL says that it is the exclusive licence issued for any software. The GPL doesn't restrict me until and unless I start incorporating other's GPL work into mine.
I didn't say what the motivation was for striving to improve things. Sometimes it might be for others, but mostly it's for one's self. But that doesn't matter, because humanity gains even if the inventor is only interested in personal gain.
/. Even the secrecy of the Manhattan Project didn't stop the scientists involved from getting credit for their work.
People are showoffs. They get personal rewards from doing better than others. From women who might work at better makeup or dresses to Marie Curie who discovered Radium. Or Bill Gates who created GW-BASIC. To the posters here on
And merely showingoff by [posting in alt.comp.hardware.overclocking] helps others [overclockers]. They see that something might be possible. And that is the most important spur to development. The Russians had a much easier time of developing the A bomb because the already knew it was possible [and spying].
This is one reason that IP laws are so dangerous. They encourage development by giving exclusive property rights to the first developer. But these same property rights impede widespread implementation [progress] because the owner wants royalties. Ben Franklin didn't patent his stove for just this reason.
A balance must be struck, and I'm afraid the IP owners are too influential in at least two of the three branches of govt. Oddly, those are the elected ones!
Why do I overclock? Because I'm a human, and humans have this very useful innate desire to improve their surroundings. Think of where we'd be without it.
I know I take a risk when overclocking. That's the whole point--to find out how much risk for how much reward. I know my machine can crash horribly, so I've written tools (`cpuburn`) to test for stability. Yes, Intel has better tools, but they won't give them out without NDA, while my project is GPL.
It all boils down to not taking manufacturers at their word. While they can have more sophisticated testers, they will never test exactly my setup. So I have to test it. Then why should I not push it `til it fails the tests?
I take mfr specs as a recommendation, or at most, a guarantee. But I don't need to accept it. OTOH, I have no right to foist my choice on others [remarking]. That's fraud. And so is trying to return damaged components.
I have no doubt about what you say. But even 1/2 an MRE is alot better than nothing. Getting even 50 or 100 grams of carbohydrate a day (200-400 Calories) will help enormously because the fat reserves have better metabolic pathways when glucose is present.
I seriously doubt you could even absorb 50 grams glucose per day from a patch.
Drinking and patches are very different. You can certainly absorb everything you need from drinking. Even fiber if you put in some psyillum.
But a patch is very limited. You can only absorb milligram quantities from it. Enough for pharmaceuticals and maybe some vitamines (maybe not C though).
But a combat soldier needs 4000 Calories (16.5 MJ) of food energy per day on a continuous basis. Thats 1000 grams of carbohydrates or protein, or 450 grams of fat (unlikely). Your endurance athlete is in much the same situation.
No way you can absorb 1000 grams of carbohydrates per day through your skin. Not even if you sat in a heated jacuzzi/wetspacesuit of 5% glucose.
Now a patch might be a nice placebo, or good to administer some drugs/vits, but is not going to be useful for more than a short (24h) fast.