When do lawyers enforce DRM, is Computer Science and encryption / cipher technology a mandatory part of law degrees these days? Apple have been acting more litigious than even SCO in the last few months, there does not seem to be a week go by without them suing or threatening somebody.
Quite bizarre and self-destructive behaviour to be sure. Meanwhile Free Software developers and affiliated companies can put resources towards developing better products, services and software. You would have to think that the endless legal paper shuffling and lawyering would start to put a strain on company funds that would better be spent elsewhere, like repairing the bad PR of their past moves.. they will be seen in the same light as the MPAA/RIAA if they keep up this sort of mindless trigger-happy belligerence.
Taking the internet as a whole entity it begins to resemble a biological model, similar to cells comprising a whole creature, or a population of individual creatures comprising an ecosystem, subject to the same points of frailty and weakness. Infections break out all the time, a constant war is waged between organisms competing for scarce resources - food, territory, and the like. Or cpu time, disk space and bandwidth.
Genetically uniform populations are wiped out easily by viruses that are quicker to adopt, and are easily able to invade the cell and get it producing and distibuting more viruses in a chain-reaction.
What is interesting is that no biological system has a really large number of easily infectible hosts that have survived for any length of time, they have inevitably died out. The numbers of the initial population are irrelevant, a larger population simply means there are more target hosts for predatory orginisms to feed upon, which accelerates the process of the demise of the species. The only thing that will enable them to survive is geological isolation, or adaptation and evolution of more effective immune systems, feeding habits, physical robustness, intelligence, and other survival traits.
That being the case, the biological model is a warning that systems that do not adopt will inevitably perish. What is the biological equivalent of an anti-botnet botnet? A retrovirus would more akin to the sasser worm, in which a virus tries to repair the vulnerability that enabled it to infect the host/cell in the first place.
I'm not defending or endorsoring either viewpoint here, but thought I'd just throw out a few ideas as to why this might be..
Many people regard the MPAA/RIAA and related groups as criminal, or at least, corrupt and evil to the point of borderline criminality. This viewpoint comes about when looking at the history of these groups, the bribery, extortion, racketeering, exploting and impoverishing artists, buying abusive laws via corrupt politicians, press-releases that are full of blatant lies, and last but not least, sueing dead people, grandmothers and 13 year old girls. For the same reason that people are cheered by the thought of a child molester being killed in prison, the perception is that copyright infringment committed against the MPAA/RIAA is an ethical, legitimate act because they are criminal and evil. 'Natural Justice' will assert itself.
The MPAA/RIAA are corporations. They are above the law in many of the ways that actual human beings are not. Perhaps you feel that corporations are not entitled to the rights of people, or you merely feel they have been granted too much power. Either way, copyright infringment against these groups could be seen as 'restoring the balance', regaining rights that people have lost, and that corporations should never have been granted.
Copy protection. Constitutionally, copyright is granted for 'limited times' yet via the DMCA and any technology that is labelled as 'copy protection' the period of copyright becomes infinite - it is never legal to break the copy protection and gain access to the work. You might consider the unlimited nature of copyright enforced by these means to be illegal, and in violation of the 'limited times' mandate. Ergo, any material with copy protection violates a requirement of copyright, so is not protected by copyright, and may be distributed and copied freely in a similar fashion to Public Domain works.
I would love to hear the viewpoints of others in a rational, non-inflamatory way as well.
Ditto. The cognitive dissonance and hypocrisy in labeling those who make and launch Qassam rockets as terrorists, while the IDF blow up crowds of innocent palestinians with their own rockets on a regular basis is mind-boggling.
I cant imagine how mentally damaged and dysfunctional the average IDF soldier must be to endose and carry out atrocities like this.. Its no small wonder their generals are screening out independant thinkers in favour of people more easily moulded into mindless unquestioning killing machines.
My reading of that goes along the lines of 'It applies to everyone but we will apply it to anyone we please based on guidelines and criteria that we certainly wont reveal and likely dont even exist at all'
The government can profit by fining those who break the law. Therfore, it is in the best interests of the government to encourage as much crime as possible ( and hence secure a revenue stream for themselves ) - what better way to do this than by keeping laws secret such that they cannot be followed!
According to Florian Mueller, an anti-patent campaigner who watched the public part of the meeting, a minister from Luxembourg said the directive is being adopted to ensure that the Council adheres to its processes and to avoid creating problems for other directives.
"We are adopting the position for institutional reasons so as not to create a precedent which might have a consequence of creating future delays in other processes," the minister said, according to Mueller.
My translation: As bad as this is we have to pass every directive that comes our way, no matter what it is. Why did the deciding body decide to defy the regulations that govern it that require the constsituents to be in approval? It stinks like criminal corruption to me, I wonder who has bribed or threatened who.
Does this mean any member with extreme political views can introduce nasty fascist directives that the Council has no choice but to approve? Madness!
I first discovered this project about 2 weeks ago when the linux build was at v0.9, while searching for Linux ports of Elite. It must be one of the best free software games currently available on Linux.
I loved the original ( though I never got past one the early campaign missions because combat was nearly unwinnable without a joystick ) and have found the remake to be excellent.
The Linux 1.0 release which I downloaded via bittorrent here yesterday has fixed many of the small niggling issues I had with 0.9, and the gameplay has been greatly improved.. there are many more ships in game now, huge dogfights you can participate in or watch from the sidelines, and you can buy new types of ship that were not available in the original.
Schibler sees the inclusion of InfiniBand as a testament to the maturation of the technology.
"Now that the technology has matured to such a point that Linus has accepted it into the kernel, the way is paved for greater distribution of the code and accelerated deployment of the technology," Schibler said.
Its a very satisfying feeling to hear 'Our technology is now mature enough to work with linux' rather than 'Linux is now mature enough to work with our technology'. The maturity of Linux then seems to have been largely accepted as a given, rather than being seen as a new kid on the block, or a hobbyist OS as it once used to be.
Kudos to Linus and the developers for many years of excellent work!
It isnt stealing from the state as the state has no right to your money in the first place. Or do you regard changing ISPs or telcos as stealing from the first ISP or telco that you were a customer of? What if I cancel my Cable TV subscription and take up golf or surfing or gardening instead, does that make me a thief also?
If the buggy whip makers had a corrupt government they could manipulate, then they would have lobbied to make cars illegal because they cut into the lucrative buggy whip market and their profits.
Its symptomatic of government corruption and corporations exploiting and colluding with the criminals in government in order to make money. No more, no less. And sadly, its hardly uncommon.
I was thinking more along the lines of the GNU Hurd kernel plus glibc/gcc/GNU userland plus Portage for app/sw installs and updates. A frankenstein-type melding of different technologies to be sure, but one with as many core deficiencies and limitations removed as possible, IMHO.
Killing Linux would require making an OS that is everything Linux is today, plus more. An OS that has more driver support, runs on more hardware platforms, has more software, more choice, more stability, more security and more freedom.
If such an OS came along it would be a 'better linux than linux' in a manner of speaking. Though Linux may be the best OS today, thats certainly no reason to be fearful or nervous of a superior OS coming along and taking the world by storm. I welcome such a situation!
An erosion of property rights ( real property and not the ill-named intellectual property ) is a sign that the country is heading towards a state of either lawlessness ( if the victims rebel ) or serfdom ( if the victims meekly surrender ). Neither of these two situations is very desirable or pleasant.
The doublesided standard of people VS corporations in eminent domain is fairly disgusting as well; it is being abused as much as the patent system is, operating far from the original intent of the framework. Could you imagine a city permitting the homeless to move into and occupy the head offices of some large corporation in the name of eminent domain?
Corporations are vulnerable to having their corporate charter revoked however. I suppose all copyrights, patents and trademarks owned by the corporation at that point in time become Public Domain material usable by anyone without restriction.. or would the government seize and retain ownership of these?
There was a/. article in the last year or two about compiling the kernel ( may have been a 2.4.x series build ) on a 72-way E15000 IIRC. It was done in less than a minute, but having a commodity piece of hardware available today that is nearly comparible in this type of performance category at an inexpensive price is an amazing amount of progress.
Though its an UltraSPARC III vs Opteron comparison, so comparing the technology requires a bit more abstraction than a strictly x86-ISA-only set of cpus. Still, you have to admit that Sun will like winning performance prizes, its a long long time since the old but reliable ultrasparc was seen as a speed demon Sun was very quick to announce the next generation V40z (4 x Opteron 852, 8GB PC-3200) that set more than half a dozen performance records at LinuxWorld last week.
Sun also have the edge in that they handle 8 way, 16 way, 32 way, and larger systems regularly. The design experience under their belt will help them bring product to market that utilises similar number of opterons in a single system. HP and IBM are really the only vendors with a hope of bringing out similar hardware, and Sun has been doing it better than either of them for much longer. Sun also are more committed to AMD than Intel, whereas HP & IBM are hedging their bets to some extent. Especially HP, who are still largely operating in Itanium-advocacy mode.
Than again, Suns finances are woeful at the moment, which levels the field a bit as they cant afford extravagant R&D budgets.
The broadcast flag is the legislative equivalant of breaking into my house and putting up big signs everywhere that say "You are a criminal if you read this", it sounds like a scheme invented by a tantrum-throwing 6 year old for the sole purpose of being as obnoxious as possible.
Forcing all manufacturers to sell defective hardware, I dont know about that either. What happened to the free market and consumer choice?
So your old TV breaks down? Too bad, now you have to buy a crippled TV or go without TV entirely. And if you buy the crippled TV and try to repair it yourself, you are a criminal according to the DMCA. And dont even think about discussing the crippleware and ways to break it, thats all illegal too.
If a system will not work with a known-good piece of equipment, then that system is defective and should be returned. I hope it is still under warranty.
Its curious how shipping broken hardware seems to be a standard practice for many vendors now. As others have already said elsewhere in this thread, essentially all PC DVD drives ship broken, and need a firmware update to repair them and restore their full functionality.
Anyone know of other PC server/laptop/desktop hardware that is commonly sold in a broken state? Excluding obvious anomalies like Xboxes that is ; brokenness is mandatory for all Microsoft products.
Well Microsoft did threaten to fire hundreds of people working at Navision, located in Denmark, see this article, if software patents were not accepted by the EU.
You would think behaving like an organised crime cartel would set alarm bells ringing. And now we have a Microsoft-affiliated group making waves in an obvious attempt to destroy transparency, interoperability and fair competition.
The 'facts' they bought to the table in support of their argument are pretty easily refuted, one hopes that the EU sees through this blatant cash and power grab and stays firmly behind their decsion.
But the base project can emulate sparc/sparc64 and ppc, thats no small feat, even if they dont run terribly fast. For the older cpus like the 32 bit SPARCs, an emulated sparc environment might be almost as fast as a hardware sparc system, given the power of the current crop of x86 cpus.
I have to admit, the thought of running MacOSX/PPC and Solaris10/Sparc64 VMs simultaneously on a Linux/x86 box makes me go weak at the knees. I wonder if Alpha support for Target CPU is in the works..
But thinking about the motivations and goals of your enemy in a rational fashion is much too hard!
Its far easier to call them "Bad Men" or "The Great Satan", or the ever popular "Haters of Freedom". "Terrorists" is so old and busted now, "Outposts of Tyranny" is the new hotness.
Bonus marks are to be awarded for every mention of divine authority, religious scriptures, and faith as justification for your actions against these enemies.
If I was working at Navision in Denmark I would be looking to get out of that company as quick as possible. Can you imagine the hit to morale and the panic meetings that this threat would have stirred up at Navison? Navisons' customers must be thrilled with this bit of news also.
I'm guessing that the 800 jobs will start to shrink fairly quickly, not because people are being fired en masse, but because they are abandoning the company for more secure employment.
Not only that, the code is GPL'ed as well, hence making it obligatory for distributors to provide access to this code and all its contents, including "Red Hat" comments.
Lets say CentOS copy the "RedHat" code snippet from any RH authored GPL'ed code and use this on their website. Are they inviolation of the RedHat trademark ( I have never heard any other company threatening others over the use of their company name in this way, the action seems to be with no legal merit ), or are RedHat in violation of the GPL for trying to suppress material licensed in a way that permits unlimited distribution?
I have to agree with this sentiment - in a Free Software world licenses and the predatory obfuscated shenanigans that go with them are quite simply irrelevant.
If a company is fool enough to cripple their software in a legal or technical sense, as Oracle is doing, then there are many competing Free Software alternatives in which this engineered defect is absent. Ditto for the absurdity present in the EULAs of many typical proprietry software products, it makes many of them fit for/dev/null and little else.
Two things seem to have happened here. Firstly, the original lokitorrent.com site at 205.209.128.30 ( see this ) has been shut down, the IP is reachable but no webserver process is listening on port 80.
Secondly, the A record for www.lokitorrent.com has been changed to point from the above address to 216.32.85.114, which whois says is owned by savvis.net, and for which the generic webpage here shows as being owned by www.webbsense.com.
So lokitorrents DNS has been hijacked by the MPAA and is now pointing at a box admined by webbsense, whoever they are. Probably self-appointed 'copyright enforcement' goons-for-hire.
The content for lokitorrent is probably still intact and ready to use should the webserver process be activated again, so the news isnt all bad..
There are other terms for this 'human' policy - tyranny, despotism, law of the jungle.
One would hope that after thousands of years of civilisation that the US ( founded on the principles of freedom, tolerance, and so on ) of all nations would not be so quick to abandon civility and assume the role of the dictator, schoolyard bully or mafia thug.
You ever notice how rabid dogs and rampaging barbarian hordes alike are eventually hunted down and destroyed? Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
It seems like a great chance to promote non-MS Oses for any internet transaction, especially involving financial details.
For all the howls of "Linux is too hard!", "Its not ready for the desktop!", "Joe User cant recompile his own kernel!", you really have to take a pragmatic approach and look at the bigger picture here.
Lets say the victim of this spent $10,000 of time/money learning how to utilise Linux effectively for his business. How to do installs, how to maintain and install software, rudimentary and common tasks. Once any user has a browser in front of them its pretty much intuitive and simple from that point onward, even if they have never used anything other than IE.
This guy would then be $80,000 better off! Now thats what I call a Return On Investment! Microsoft-sponsored TCO studies be damned, its becoming dreadfully clear that use of Linux/MacOS/BSD in this day and age give one hell of an incentive for ordinary users - no more viruses, spyware, random lockups and data corruption, the list of tangible technical benefits goes on and on even if you ignore the idealistic 'freedom' aspects inherent to the GPL and BSD licenses. Its simply a matter of education and time before Joe Average is freed from Windows and that promiscuous petri-dish of an OS finally goes the way of the dinosaur.
What is this 'steal copyrighted music' nonsense, and how does it have any relevance to having a link on a website that points to servers outside of your control?
How does one steal music via the internet anyway? Is this guy using a wifi-controlled robot to tear through the wall of a music shop and make off with a bunch of CDs from the comfort of his home PC?
Its pretty damn absurd when the legal system requires you to be culpible over systems that you have no control over in any way. Not only are you responsible for your own actions, you are the fault of everything bad that everyone else does, you damn thieving pirate terrorist you!!
As an aside, if a server being linked to by microsoft.com was compromised and child porn was uploaded to this server, would you be in favour of Bill Gates, Steve Balmer and other microsoft staff being jailed as sexual offenders and purveyors of child porn? Surely if Joe Sixpack is accountable in this way, corporations should be as well? What if the MPAA or RIAA sites were found to be linking to illegal material in the same way? The RIAA website has in the past had Metallica MP3s located on it and linked for download, why is Hilary Rosen not serving time in a federal prison?
Slashdot Mirror
When do lawyers enforce DRM, is Computer Science and encryption / cipher technology a mandatory part of law degrees these days? Apple have been acting more litigious than even SCO in the last few months, there does not seem to be a week go by without them suing or threatening somebody.
Quite bizarre and self-destructive behaviour to be sure. Meanwhile Free Software developers and affiliated companies can put resources towards developing better products, services and software. You would have to think that the endless legal paper shuffling and lawyering would start to put a strain on company funds that would better be spent elsewhere, like repairing the bad PR of their past moves.. they will be seen in the same light as the MPAA/RIAA if they keep up this sort of mindless trigger-happy belligerence.
Taking the internet as a whole entity it begins to resemble a biological model, similar to cells comprising a whole creature, or a population of individual creatures comprising an ecosystem, subject to the same points of frailty and weakness. Infections break out all the time, a constant war is waged between organisms competing for scarce resources - food, territory, and the like. Or cpu time, disk space and bandwidth.
Genetically uniform populations are wiped out easily by viruses that are quicker to adopt, and are easily able to invade the cell and get it producing and distibuting more viruses in a chain-reaction.
What is interesting is that no biological system has a really large number of easily infectible hosts that have survived for any length of time, they have inevitably died out. The numbers of the initial population are irrelevant, a larger population simply means there are more target hosts for predatory orginisms to feed upon, which accelerates the process of the demise of the species. The only thing that will enable them to survive is geological isolation, or adaptation and evolution of more effective immune systems, feeding habits, physical robustness, intelligence, and other survival traits.
That being the case, the biological model is a warning that systems that do not adopt will inevitably perish. What is the biological equivalent of an anti-botnet botnet? A retrovirus would more akin to the sasser worm, in which a virus tries to repair the vulnerability that enabled it to infect the host/cell in the first place.
I'm not defending or endorsoring either viewpoint here, but thought I'd just throw out a few ideas as to why this might be..
Many people regard the MPAA/RIAA and related groups as criminal, or at least, corrupt and evil to the point of borderline criminality. This viewpoint comes about when looking at the history of these groups, the bribery, extortion, racketeering, exploting and impoverishing artists, buying abusive laws via corrupt politicians, press-releases that are full of blatant lies, and last but not least, sueing dead people, grandmothers and 13 year old girls. For the same reason that people are cheered by the thought of a child molester being killed in prison, the perception is that copyright infringment committed against the MPAA/RIAA is an ethical, legitimate act because they are criminal and evil. 'Natural Justice' will assert itself.
The MPAA/RIAA are corporations. They are above the law in many of the ways that actual human beings are not. Perhaps you feel that corporations are not entitled to the rights of people, or you merely feel they have been granted too much power. Either way, copyright infringment against these groups could be seen as 'restoring the balance', regaining rights that people have lost, and that corporations should never have been granted.
Copy protection. Constitutionally, copyright is granted for 'limited times' yet via the DMCA and any technology that is labelled as 'copy protection' the period of copyright becomes infinite - it is never legal to break the copy protection and gain access to the work. You might consider the unlimited nature of copyright enforced by these means to be illegal, and in violation of the 'limited times' mandate. Ergo, any material with copy protection violates a requirement of copyright, so is not protected by copyright, and may be distributed and copied freely in a similar fashion to Public Domain works.
I would love to hear the viewpoints of others in a rational, non-inflamatory way as well.
Ditto. The cognitive dissonance and hypocrisy in labeling those who make and launch Qassam rockets as terrorists, while the IDF blow up crowds of innocent palestinians with their own rockets on a regular basis is mind-boggling.
I cant imagine how mentally damaged and dysfunctional the average IDF soldier must be to endose and carry out atrocities like this.. Its no small wonder their generals are screening out independant thinkers in favour of people more easily moulded into mindless unquestioning killing machines.
My reading of that goes along the lines of 'It applies to everyone but we will apply it to anyone we please based on guidelines and criteria that we certainly wont reveal and likely dont even exist at all'
The government can profit by fining those who break the law. Therfore, it is in the best interests of the government to encourage as much crime as possible ( and hence secure a revenue stream for themselves ) - what better way to do this than by keeping laws secret such that they cannot be followed!
According to Florian Mueller, an anti-patent campaigner who watched the public part of the meeting, a minister from Luxembourg said the directive is being adopted to ensure that the Council adheres to its processes and to avoid creating problems for other directives.
"We are adopting the position for institutional reasons so as not to create a precedent which might have a consequence of creating future delays in other processes," the minister said, according to Mueller.
My translation: As bad as this is we have to pass every directive that comes our way, no matter what it is. Why did the deciding body decide to defy the regulations that govern it that require the constsituents to be in approval? It stinks like criminal corruption to me, I wonder who has bribed or threatened who.
Does this mean any member with extreme political views can introduce nasty fascist directives that the Council has no choice but to approve? Madness!
I first discovered this project about 2 weeks ago when the linux build was at v0.9, while searching for Linux ports of Elite. It must be one of the best free software games currently available on Linux.
I loved the original ( though I never got past one the early campaign missions because combat was nearly unwinnable without a joystick ) and have found the remake to be excellent.
The Linux 1.0 release which I downloaded via bittorrent here yesterday has fixed many of the small niggling issues I had with 0.9, and the gameplay has been greatly improved.. there are many more ships in game now, huge dogfights you can participate in or watch from the sidelines, and you can buy new types of ship that were not available in the original.
Schibler sees the inclusion of InfiniBand as a testament to the maturation of the technology.
"Now that the technology has matured to such a point that Linus has accepted it into the kernel, the way is paved for greater distribution of the code and accelerated deployment of the technology," Schibler said.
Its a very satisfying feeling to hear 'Our technology is now mature enough to work with linux' rather than 'Linux is now mature enough to work with our technology'. The maturity of Linux then seems to have been largely accepted as a given, rather than being seen as a new kid on the block, or a hobbyist OS as it once used to be.
Kudos to Linus and the developers for many years of excellent work!
It isnt stealing from the state as the state has no right to your money in the first place. Or do you regard changing ISPs or telcos as stealing from the first ISP or telco that you were a customer of? What if I cancel my Cable TV subscription and take up golf or surfing or gardening instead, does that make me a thief also?
If the buggy whip makers had a corrupt government they could manipulate, then they would have lobbied to make cars illegal because they cut into the lucrative buggy whip market and their profits.
Its symptomatic of government corruption and corporations exploiting and colluding with the criminals in government in order to make money. No more, no less. And sadly, its hardly uncommon.
I was thinking more along the lines of the GNU Hurd kernel plus glibc/gcc/GNU userland plus Portage for app/sw installs and updates. A frankenstein-type melding of different technologies to be sure, but one with as many core deficiencies and limitations removed as possible, IMHO.
Killing Linux would require making an OS that is everything Linux is today, plus more. An OS that has more driver support, runs on more hardware platforms, has more software, more choice, more stability, more security and more freedom.
If such an OS came along it would be a 'better linux than linux' in a manner of speaking. Though Linux may be the best OS today, thats certainly no reason to be fearful or nervous of a superior OS coming along and taking the world by storm. I welcome such a situation!
An erosion of property rights ( real property and not the ill-named intellectual property ) is a sign that the country is heading towards a state of either lawlessness ( if the victims rebel ) or serfdom ( if the victims meekly surrender ). Neither of these two situations is very desirable or pleasant.
The doublesided standard of people VS corporations in eminent domain is fairly disgusting as well; it is being abused as much as the patent system is, operating far from the original intent of the framework. Could you imagine a city permitting the homeless to move into and occupy the head offices of some large corporation in the name of eminent domain?
Corporations are vulnerable to having their corporate charter revoked however. I suppose all copyrights, patents and trademarks owned by the corporation at that point in time become Public Domain material usable by anyone without restriction.. or would the government seize and retain ownership of these?
There was a /. article in the last year or two about compiling the kernel ( may have been a 2.4.x series build ) on a 72-way E15000 IIRC. It was done in less than a minute, but having a commodity piece of hardware available today that is nearly comparible in this type of performance category at an inexpensive price is an amazing amount of progress.
Though its an UltraSPARC III vs Opteron comparison, so comparing the technology requires a bit more abstraction than a strictly x86-ISA-only set of cpus. Still, you have to admit that Sun will like winning performance prizes, its a long long time since the old but reliable ultrasparc was seen as a speed demon
Sun was very quick to announce the next generation V40z (4 x Opteron 852, 8GB PC-3200) that set more than half a dozen performance records at LinuxWorld last week.
Sun also have the edge in that they handle 8 way, 16 way, 32 way, and larger systems regularly. The design experience under their belt will help them bring product to market that utilises similar number of opterons in a single system. HP and IBM are really the only vendors with a hope of bringing out similar hardware, and Sun has been doing it better than either of them for much longer. Sun also are more committed to AMD than Intel, whereas HP & IBM are hedging their bets to some extent. Especially HP, who are still largely operating in Itanium-advocacy mode.
Than again, Suns finances are woeful at the moment, which levels the field a bit as they cant afford extravagant R&D budgets.
The broadcast flag is the legislative equivalant of breaking into my house and putting up big signs everywhere that say "You are a criminal if you read this", it sounds like a scheme invented by a tantrum-throwing 6 year old for the sole purpose of being as obnoxious as possible.
Forcing all manufacturers to sell defective hardware, I dont know about that either. What happened to the free market and consumer choice?
So your old TV breaks down? Too bad, now you have to buy a crippled TV or go without TV entirely. And if you buy the crippled TV and try to repair it yourself, you are a criminal according to the DMCA. And dont even think about discussing the crippleware and ways to break it, thats all illegal too.
Horseshit, the lot of it.
If a system will not work with a known-good piece of equipment, then that system is defective and should be returned. I hope it is still under warranty.
Its curious how shipping broken hardware seems to be a standard practice for many vendors now. As others have already said elsewhere in this thread, essentially all PC DVD drives ship broken, and need a firmware update to repair them and restore their full functionality.
Anyone know of other PC server/laptop/desktop hardware that is commonly sold in a broken state? Excluding obvious anomalies like Xboxes that is ; brokenness is mandatory for all Microsoft products.
Well Microsoft did threaten to fire hundreds of people working at Navision, located in Denmark, see this article, if software patents were not accepted by the EU.
You would think behaving like an organised crime cartel would set alarm bells ringing. And now we have a Microsoft-affiliated group making waves in an obvious attempt to destroy transparency, interoperability and fair competition.
The 'facts' they bought to the table in support of their argument are pretty easily refuted, one hopes that the EU sees through this blatant cash and power grab and stays firmly behind their decsion.
But the base project can emulate sparc/sparc64 and ppc, thats no small feat, even if they dont run terribly fast. For the older cpus like the 32 bit SPARCs, an emulated sparc environment might be almost as fast as a hardware sparc system, given the power of the current crop of x86 cpus.
Supported target and source processors
I have to admit, the thought of running MacOSX/PPC and Solaris10/Sparc64 VMs simultaneously on a Linux/x86 box makes me go weak at the knees. I wonder if Alpha support for Target CPU is in the works..
But thinking about the motivations and goals of your enemy in a rational fashion is much too hard!
Its far easier to call them "Bad Men" or "The Great Satan", or the ever popular "Haters of Freedom". "Terrorists" is so old and busted now, "Outposts of Tyranny" is the new hotness.
Bonus marks are to be awarded for every mention of divine authority, religious scriptures, and faith as justification for your actions against these enemies.
If I was working at Navision in Denmark I would be looking to get out of that company as quick as possible. Can you imagine the hit to morale and the panic meetings that this threat would have stirred up at Navison? Navisons' customers must be thrilled with this bit of news also.
I'm guessing that the 800 jobs will start to shrink fairly quickly, not because people are being fired en masse, but because they are abandoning the company for more secure employment.
Not only that, the code is GPL'ed as well, hence making it obligatory for distributors to provide access to this code and all its contents, including "Red Hat" comments.
Lets say CentOS copy the "RedHat" code snippet from any RH authored GPL'ed code and use this on their website. Are they inviolation of the RedHat trademark ( I have never heard any other company threatening others over the use of their company name in this way, the action seems to be with no legal merit ), or are RedHat in violation of the GPL for trying to suppress material licensed in a way that permits unlimited distribution?
I have to agree with this sentiment - in a Free Software world licenses and the predatory obfuscated shenanigans that go with them are quite simply irrelevant.
/dev/null and little else.
If a company is fool enough to cripple their software in a legal or technical sense, as Oracle is doing, then there are many competing Free Software alternatives in which this engineered defect is absent. Ditto for the absurdity present in the EULAs of many typical proprietry software products, it makes many of them fit for
Two things seem to have happened here. Firstly, the original lokitorrent.com site at 205.209.128.30 ( see this ) has been shut down, the IP is reachable but no webserver process is listening on port 80.
Secondly, the A record for www.lokitorrent.com has been changed to point from the above address to 216.32.85.114, which whois says is owned by savvis.net, and for which the generic webpage here shows as being owned by www.webbsense.com.
So lokitorrents DNS has been hijacked by the MPAA and is now pointing at a box admined by webbsense, whoever they are. Probably self-appointed 'copyright enforcement' goons-for-hire.
The content for lokitorrent is probably still intact and ready to use should the webserver process be activated again, so the news isnt all bad..
There are other terms for this 'human' policy - tyranny, despotism, law of the jungle.
One would hope that after thousands of years of civilisation that the US ( founded on the principles of freedom, tolerance, and so on ) of all nations would not be so quick to abandon civility and assume the role of the dictator, schoolyard bully or mafia thug.
You ever notice how rabid dogs and rampaging barbarian hordes alike are eventually hunted down and destroyed? Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
It seems like a great chance to promote non-MS Oses for any internet transaction, especially involving financial details.
For all the howls of "Linux is too hard!", "Its not ready for the desktop!", "Joe User cant recompile his own kernel!", you really have to take a pragmatic approach and look at the bigger picture here.
Lets say the victim of this spent $10,000 of time/money learning how to utilise Linux effectively for his business. How to do installs, how to maintain and install software, rudimentary and common tasks. Once any user has a browser in front of them its pretty much intuitive and simple from that point onward, even if they have never used anything other than IE.
This guy would then be $80,000 better off! Now thats what I call a Return On Investment! Microsoft-sponsored TCO studies be damned, its becoming dreadfully clear that use of Linux/MacOS/BSD in this day and age give one hell of an incentive for ordinary users - no more viruses, spyware, random lockups and data corruption, the list of tangible technical benefits goes on and on even if you ignore the idealistic 'freedom' aspects inherent to the GPL and BSD licenses. Its simply a matter of education and time before Joe Average is freed from Windows and that promiscuous petri-dish of an OS finally goes the way of the dinosaur.
What is this 'steal copyrighted music' nonsense, and how does it have any relevance to having a link on a website that points to servers outside of your control?
How does one steal music via the internet anyway? Is this guy using a wifi-controlled robot to tear through the wall of a music shop and make off with a bunch of CDs from the comfort of his home PC?
Its pretty damn absurd when the legal system requires you to be culpible over systems that you have no control over in any way. Not only are you responsible for your own actions, you are the fault of everything bad that everyone else does, you damn thieving pirate terrorist you!!
As an aside, if a server being linked to by microsoft.com was compromised and child porn was uploaded to this server, would you be in favour of Bill Gates, Steve Balmer and other microsoft staff being jailed as sexual offenders and purveyors of child porn? Surely if Joe Sixpack is accountable in this way, corporations should be as well? What if the MPAA or RIAA sites were found to be linking to illegal material in the same way? The RIAA website has in the past had Metallica MP3s located on it and linked for download, why is Hilary Rosen not serving time in a federal prison?