See, you think you're being clever but all you're doing is proving the point. The fact that somebody is being an idiot doesn't mean you aren't as well. Nor does it excuse your being one.
Steve Ballmer has a disease with his hatred for open source? Call up the newspapers, that's clearly breaking news! But so do you, and the other people who perpetuate the exact same thing back at them. "But he started it!" is a two-year-old's response. You're every bit as bad as he is, you just lack the resources to perpetuate it on his scale.
In your rush to bash people for not having an infallible solution, you're making two awfully big assumptions:
1. That they're intending this to have any effect whatsoever on people actively trying to disguise the source of the leak; and,
2. That a solution isn't worthwhile if it doesn't survive whatever geek-haxxor workarounds you can come up with.
This is exceptionally poor security for classified information. That's not its intent. It's poor security against people actively disguising themselves by "run[ning] it through the thesaurus algorithm a few more times." So be it.
It's still going to catch that guy who wants to show how in the know he is and forwards it to his buddies who post it on a website, and I'm sure there are far higher incidences of that than industrial espionage or whatever it is you're maligning them for not tackling.
I wouldn't personally implement a system like this, but the fact that it doesn't cover all potential circumstances doesn't mean it's worthless. I don't know why Slashdotters always have such a hard time grasping that.
It would be nice if they didn't obstruct access to the information if somebody wants it.
Apple has done nothing but make the situation worse. Instead of letting them just have the information and giggling as they tried to make 15 fires seem like a huge risk to our children!!! Apple decided to give them a half-page story about how they did everything in their power to stop a news agency from getting government consumer safety reports (as if they had any chance of that working in the first place) before they ever have to bother with presenting pesky facts and figures.
So urine screening has worked by testing metabolite levels as a patient responds to thiopurine treatment?
You're obviously being purposefully (and uselessly) facetious. The fact that this patent covers thiopurine has nothing to do with the novelty of the patent; in fact, just the opposite. If theirs was truly such a great discovery, why are they not claiming to own the knowledge of tying metabolites to the levels of drug metabolism in general? Why specifically do they need to craft their claim such that it only applies to thiopurine? Is this the biotech equivalent of patents that take something we've been doing for 50 years, append "on the Internet" to it and look around for people to sue?
We've known about drug metabolites since 1840, with much of the research coming in the 1950s. We've recognized the importance of making tests for these metabolites for various reasons since the 1970s. These patents were filed in 1999 and 2001 and granted in 2002 and 2004 (respectively).
Essentially, this is no different than testing you for diseases. You're not tested for having a disease, you're tested for the presence and quantities of the anti-bodies for that disease in your blood. Metabolites are basically leftover material from the metabolism of a particular drug, and more means you've metabolized more.
So what is the novelty? How has it not been common knowledge for--take your pick--forty, sixty or one hundred and eighty years? How on earth should a patent have been granted for a process by which you count something we've known should be counted for decades? They obviously make no claim to having discovered the specific process, they just added "of thiopurine" at the end of what we've been doing for fifty years and looked around for somebody to sue.
If the developers are uncertain which option would work best, why not ask the community?
If the developer is struggling to figure out what works best, then perhaps asking the community could work--but that's not really the same thing as "voting rights," nor would there be any particular reason that they should restrict commentary to the people who've given them some money.
Keep in mind that in order for this to work, we're either talking reeeeally large donations or tens of thousands of donors. Just managing that many people with the "right" to demand weekly builds and demand changes is going to be a full-time job, even if you develop a community-based moderation system similar to Slashdot or Digg or what-have-you.
Pledging to a feature is a bad idea in most cases. Occasionally things are simple enough to be able to just be slipped in somewhere in the process, but most changes are ones that are going to need to be planned for at a very early stage. You also have the problem of actually collecting your money. What do you do? Announce that the pledged money is worth it and then try to collect? You're almost guaranteed not to collect 100% of it. Do you yank the feature and waste time and money returning all the pledges if it turns out you only collect 75%? 50%?
Speaking as somebody who does some programming--and nothing nearly as complex as game development--I can tell you that nothing pisses me off more or hurts the end product as consistently as meddling from people who don't know what they hell they're doing and don't know what's actually going on in the development process. Maybe you personally are a programming savant capable of making fully educated suggestions for a foreign code base, but your 10,000 friends who donated alongside you aren't going to be. Even most professional venture capitalists are smart enough not to involve themselves in the process as much as you seem to want to be involved, for what I'm sure would be a significantly smaller donation. Too many cooks in the kitchen and all that.
Second, if distributing GPL'ed software by means that completely preclude it from being used without Windows is not a violation of the GPL, should it not be?
Why? Because you don't like Windows?
Look, suck it up. The GPL is about freedom, and that includes for your mortal software enemies. So long as they are releasing any changes they made to the code (and in all likelihood they just bundled it up and didn't change a thing) they're in full compliance with both the letter and the spirit of the GPL.
This is as stupid as asking whether or not people should be allowed to license software under the GPL if it only runs on Windows. Spiteful non-issues like this are one of the major things that give open-source/free software movements a bad name.
Besides that, they are nowhere NEAR the level of dickhead moves that MS pulled to build/maintain its certified monopoly.
Give them time.
Apple is every bit as horrible as Microsoft, they just haven't yet had enough clout to make their dickhead moves sting as hard as Microsoft has. IPod monopoly or not, they're working awfully hard to catch up.
No, but they do lose a significant user experience advantage over their competition
Apple fanboi much?
They're doing this because they think it makes them more money, either from iPod sales or trying to extort fees from Palm and others who want to inter-operate. All the rest is nonsense. They don't give a crap about you or your user experience except as it affects the likelihood of you purchasing their products.
Personally, I am completely unsurprised by this turn of events.
Nobody is, but it truly takes some twisted non-logic to blame Palm for it.
I think that all of Apple's executives would be shot in the head by their shareholders for throwing away an estimated $120 million per year and $0.09-$0.14 per share profit for absolutely no reason other than spitefulness. And rightly so.
Granted, the costs are speculative, but even by Apple's own admissions they're not operating at a loss; they're turning a profit. A profit, in this sense, that means that everybody is paid, all royalties paid, all hardware and bandwidth paid for. In a business that other than a few support people and a few techs, essentially runs itself. You don't throw that away.
All sites hosting images will just be required to filter for those images which have torrents inside
I'd certainly need to be required--by law--to do that if I were the owner of any sort of image hosting website. "Try to decode the torrent" means time and computing power on my side, and for absolutely no benefit to me or my business. In fact rejecting images is actually bad for my business; it's actively pushing users away, all for the benefit of some mega-corp that isn't me and that frankly I don't care about.
I wouldn't be particularly worried about a lawsuit. If people are essentially using steganography to hide torrents in images hosted with me, the RIAA would be extremely hard-pressed to show that I'm somehow involved in whatever piracy goes on merely by not going out of my way to scan the images on their behalf.
Maybe they'd be able to buy themselves such a law, but that's what it would take. My business' job is not to support the RIAA. (Hypothetically, of course.)
Your comment is both funny and insightful, but at least coupled with my own experience it also goes to validate the psychologists' concerns.
I have terrible, terrible eyesight, that got progressively worse for years. I don't remember where I started on that chart as far as being able to read it, but I distinctly recall moving from two lines down to one line down and finally, at one point, to the big "E." You inform them you can't read lower lines and so they move up (or you try and you flub them and they move up), and eventually you get the question: "Can you read the top line?"
I honestly didn't know if I could or not. It was blurry, to be sure, but I could "see" it; I could make it out. Couldn't I? Or was my vision just near enough the line that I saw the pattern I knew it to be in the semi-randomness of the blur? I really didn't know, and I don't know today. All I can say for sure is that the next time I went to the eye doctor my vision had gotten slightly worse again and I knew the E was blurry enough that I couldn't actually make it out and only knew what was there.
That, mind you, on an exam that it's in my own best interests to be forthright on and I had trouble based on having seen the chart in advance. Now fast-forward to a hypothetical case where I have to take some psychological inkblot test; it's almost certainly in my best interest to give them an answer they might want to hear. I'm probably in a situation where they either already think I'm crazy or are trying to screen crazy people out of something (a job, a security clearance, whatever). Great from their perspective--but passing the test is what's in my own best interest from my own.
As far as the inkblots go, I question their usefulness in general, which is why I tend to be ambivalent about whether or not they get published. To whatever degree they ARE useful though, I can certainly see the argument that publishing them diminishes it.
His opinions would be attacked and discarded faster the Joe the Plumber.
And it would pretty much without exception be the proper thing to do.
Look, everybody is entitled to their own opinions and everybody is entitled to express those opinions. Personally, I don't use Twitter. I don't see the point of it except in exceptionally limited circumstances, and even then it's a stretch. But to claim that people who use Twitter are "idiots" who are somehow going to be the downfall of democracy is so ridiculous that such statements SHOULD be attacked and discarded in record time. If somebody's going to make claims like that, they'd best have something substantial to back them up other than "people tweet stupid things."
As far as your original thesis, there are plenty of ways to express existing opinions of whether or not Twitter is worthwhile. The problem is that to be taken seriously you can't just throw out whatever silly statements you want to see what sticks. Even that one quote from this kid in the summary is hard for me to take seriously unless he elaborates on the point; otherwise it seems he's just printing his assumption as fact and assigning causality where it may not exist. (Tweets are pointless because kids know they're not being read? How about because most of your 15 year old friends don't really have anything important to say most of the time, so if they say anything most of it will be pointless?) I think somebody with a few minutes of spare time could make a compelling case that the vast majority of the content on Twitter is absolute trash, and a few minutes of spare time later there could be an equally compelling rebuttal, and they'd probably both be correct. So what?
On the other hand, neither Gandhi or MLK hid from the consequences of what they did. Indeed, accepting the consequences is what civil disobedience is all about.
They also didn't destroy unrelated peoples' property to make a point like these people did. Whether it's wise or not, many of these people aren't going to have backups of their own photos, and I'm not sure if ImageShack is going to be able to restore them from backup either. In any event, it's going to cost ImageShack thousands of dollars to try to figure out what happened, close the holes, repair the damage, restore what they can and move on. And neither ImageShack nor the people whose photos were altered can realistically influence whether or not any security hole details are released in the future. It would be like Rosa Parks yanking white people out of their cars and throwing them on the street to protest the seating laws on the bus. None of these people are part of the problem except in the most generic of ways.
And, for good measure, neither Gandhi nor MLK threatened to hurt even more people if their demands aren't met. "Do what we say or we'll destroy more things" is closer to terrorist than protester, much less peaceful protester. MLK and Gandhi's actions sparked debate on what's right and what's wrong; these guys make it perfectly clear that they've made up their minds and everybody had best fall in line before they get angry.
Maybe these people are right and maybe they're not. Maybe they'll get their way and maybe they won't. History will tell all of that. Either way, it's hard to argue they're not a bunch of petulant, self-righteous children undeserving of admiration.
It's not blind adherence to a law that determines whether somebody should be admired for their actions, it's their motives and their methods. To bring it back to the grandparent's comment, "the ends justify the means" has and will continue to be one of the most dangerous ideas in the history of the world.
If you're my friend, that's a fact about me. Why should Facebook own that fact?
They don't. You're perfectly free to enter such information on any site you want, including power.com.
But who are you, and who am I? How does a site differentiate MadFarmAnimalz from whatever-the-hell-state-you're-in from MadFarmAnimalz from some-other-state, or from the same state but who isn't you? There's some degree of work that went on there, some sort of system set up that makes it easy for you to do so, some degree of infrastructure to support such activities. And of course, being a corporate interest, they want to pay their employees and make some money at the same time.
Why should Facebook have to make it easy for somebody to take all of the work they did, combine it with all of the work similar sites did, and drag your traffic to their own site? Why should Facebook permit other sites to use their work and their popularity to make some other group of people money, or otherwise erode their own interests? Why should they permit those activities in violation of their own Terms of Service (which I'm quite sure is where their original lawsuit came from)?
I don't know if they have a case, legally speaking, nor do I know whether or not I feel they should. From a business perspective it's a no-brainer. Your option as a user is to frequent a service that's more open with your sharing your information elsewhere, if one exists. If it doesn't, or it's inferior either in technical aspects or in terms of their network size, well, that's what defines the power of the Facebook brand. Of course they should defend that.
The amount of fluid ejected during male orgasm (at least for me) is directly proportional to how enjoyable it is.
Got a reference? Otherwise we're just going to assume you're pulling things out of your ass. And then speculate as to what those things are, I'd imagine.
It would be if it were used to maintain their market dominance or if it were used to harm the consumer by controlling aspects of the market to keep prices high or to keep prices lower than alternatives.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but haven't they paid fines twice in the last 15 years or so for doing exactly that? IE, price fixing on CDs? I seem to remember that both times they did so without admitting fault, but I don't think that changes anything.
I'm not a big "zomg government in corporations' pockets!!" guy, but how many times does one fine a group of companies for conspiring to control market prices before one decides that there's a problem actually needing to be fixed? And how many times can those same people pass up opportunities to try to do something about it before we're left without choice but to question their motives or competency?
I actually still remember my first nine-digit, changed-monthly numeric password to a dial-in BBS called God's Country which ran on DDial on six 300 Baud modems in Apple ][e's. I think I was like 10 at the time, so it would have been about 15 years ago.
Oddly I don't remember any other of the passwords though. I'm not sure why that first one made such an impression when, say, the last one didn't.
Well, I'm no expert but an Export Control Officer sounds awfully like a person whose job it is to tell this professor that he's about to break the law. He doesn't have to listen, I suppose; nobody does. But it does remove his ability to plead ignorance on the topic. He was warned that exactly what happened might happen. No sympathy from me there.
This is about as much YRO (which has meant YR for a long time now anyway) as any other mundane contractual disputes that turn up.
I agree that this is a flimsy case for an article supposedly talking about our rights, as if sharing sensitive information under a government contract is somehow a right. That said, I wouldn't boil it down so far as "any other mundane contractual dispute" if we're talking about something that comes with jail time. That's not a breach of contract issue, that's a broken law issue.
I know it's fashionable on Slashdot to use the word "strawman" when one wants to be modded up, but knowing what one actually is tends to help ones chances of it happening.
His argument wasn't a strawman. You said that people who are going to legitimately buy the game will now pirate it because of LAN support being dropped, and he rebutted that these people were going to pirate the game anyway. Agree or disagree, but that's not a strawman. There's absolutely no misrepresentation of your position, he just thinks it's bull. He's not taking yours as position of every would-be pirate any more than you yourself had no issue with supposing to know the minds of other people.
For what it's worth, I agree with him. Very few members of "the community" who are going to pirate this game will do so because LAN support does not exist, though I suspect that an awful lot of them are going to claim that to be the reasoning. It just sounds so much better than "I wanted it for free." Starcraft is a good game or it's not; it's worth the price or it's not. To suggest that any significant portion of people think lack of LAN support makes it not worth the price when it was 20 minutes before is disingenuous. They can still play the exact same game, they just have to have an Internet connection. That's hardly disqualifying for most people, particularly those with enough disposable income to have a fairly new computer and to buy a new video game in the first place.
You're right: It's just as easy--perhaps easier--to pirate a game than to pay for it. If you want to pirate it, so be it. If others want to pirate it, so be it. I'm not here to pass moral judgments on piracy. But this ridiculous idea that people have ANY sort of right, moral or otherwise, to pirate a video game because it's not presented to them at exactly their price with exactly their set of requirements fulfilled is sickening and tired. You have a right to not buy it. You don't have a right to pirate it and claim it's all somebody else's fault, especially with an excuse so weak as "b-b-b-but LAN support!"
I think the key difference in this case is that he used a photograph of an actual child... her inclusion in this is a type of exploitation.
I suppose, but you're really twisting words around to suit a notion you seem to have already come convinced of. If the best we can do is say "but what if the girl sees it later! Boy will that be embarrassing!" then why the hell is the behavior we're talking about a crime? If I post mean things about you should I be thrown in jail because you might see them one day?
To me, this "crime" is, at best, an unauthorized use of somebody's image. There was no victim. There was no harm. In all reality, the girls would never have even known this was going on until the prosecutors decided to "protect" them from seeing it and thus turned it into an international news story. I bet they know all about it now.
The fact that we can twist words and circumstances around to charge somebody with a serious crime doesn't mean that we should. He exploited these children only if we take "exploited" to mean nothing more than "used a picture of." That's a pretty worthless definition to me.
To continue along those lines, if the punishment for these crimes is as severe as it has become and continues to get more severe, it's going to push me to commit even worse crimes.
Kidnapping, for example. You can get life in prison for it, essentially at a prosecutor's whims. If I ever did something that could be charged as kidnapping, I'd consider the murder to be free. Same for raping a child or what have you. I'd consider my odds of getting away with it better if the witness was dead and the body disposed of than I would hoping I've intimidated or shamed the person enough that they never tell anybody what happened.
Put it all together, and you're making a fairly harmless situation (photoshopping a child's face onto an adult's body) into something that could literally get a child raped and murdered. All so some politicians can claim to be tough on crime? No thank you.
Yes, and those few hundred thousand usually happen to be the ones most affected by it.
To be fair, while the people directly affected by something are naturally going to be the loudest in support or opposition, I'm not sure that they should be the ones most involved in the decisions about it. At their heart, laws deal with interactions between people and that means that a lot of the time they're going to end up in some way harming one group of people or another. Even something as simple as theft harms thieves by putting them in jail for doing it, we just generally accept as a society that that is right and proper; that they deserved their outcome. In less clear-cut cases, some groups end up harmed--sometimes greatly--because doing so is perceived to do more good for more people than the harm it inflicts. It's just a form of utilitariansm.
In other words, laws should be evaluated on their own merits. That includes the complaints of those affected by it, but only as part of a broader outlook. In your example, it's entirely possible that the "bunch of restrictions" placed on dairy farmers has a public health benefit, or serves to drive down costs for the rest of the public. Of course a dairy farmer wouldn't like to see anything cut into his profits, but I think there's something to be said for trying to ensure that even poor people have access to milk without considering it a luxury. Being a libertarian I'm sure you'd argue that the market would handle it and that's fine, but it doesn't necessarily speak against the law.
As for writing letters, I have written a few letters to my representatives and the only time I got a letter back was when I specifically urged them to vote against a certain bill, I revived a nicely written reply assuring me that they were heavy promoters of the bill and they would vote for it [. ..] the only logical explanation is they didn't read it.
Somebody read it, or at least scanned it. They knew enough to know you were writing about a specific bill. As far as the response, rather than chalking it up to inattentiveness or some sort of neglect, the more likely explanation is it's simply a form letter that they sent to anybody who wrote about that particular topic. You obviously disagree with the position, but despite the impersonal nature of the reply, did you come away from reading that with any doubt as to where they stood the matter?
I don't know how many letters a given politician might receive during their term, but it's probably impractical for them to respond to each of them in a personal way.
As for voting, in America if it isn't a republican or democrat you are out of luck.
I agree on a personal level, but the reality is republican or democrat isn't what matters. What matters is what the public is willing to vote people out of office for.
I recall an episode of the West Wing about flag burning. They had a poll that the public overwhelmingly supported an amendment to make flag burning illegal. One pollster tried to spin that as "lead the charge for this amendment and you sew up re-election right now." Another came along later and explained, "he never asked them how much they care." As it turned out, only an exceptionally small minority of a large majority would actually base their vote on the president's support or lack of support for such an amendment.
Back to real life and your example: Even if you're completely correct that "the entire Internet" is overwhelmingly against the DMCA, and even if you're entirely correct that we can extrapolate that to mean the vast majority of the American public is overwhelmingly against the DMCA--and I don't actually believe you've made a strong case for either at this point--how much do these people care? How many are willing to vote their representatives out of office for it? How many are w
Other people already correctly covered the response as far as not being able to pay for it: Hospitals are legally forbidden from refusing treatment based on an inability to pay.
That said, if all other things are the same and you're not Steve Jobs or filthy rich, the actual answer is you die. If he truly got a liver transplant because of a metastasizing cancer... well, he shouldn't have. We're supposed to give donor organs to people in whom they would do the most good. An underlying condition that's highly likely to 1) destroy the new liver and/or 2) kill him relatively shortly is generally considered to be disqualifying for transplant, and with good reason. So either he found somebody who specifically donated a liver to him or, more likely, money and fame talk. After all, would you want to be the hospital that refused to prolong Steve Jobs' life?
Hopefully as the article suggests, the sale will be forestalled, and some judge will finally put a stake in this monster once and for all.
I doubt it. A bankruptcy judge's job is essentially to ensure that SCO's creditors get the maximum amount of money back under the law. From that perspective, liquidation tends to be a fairly lousy solution, particularly for companies deeply in debt. A buyer is, of course, the best solution: Somebody willing to assume that debt and, hopefully, turn the company around to making some money again. Then it can start to pay back its creditors and if it falls apart again, well, you're just right back at the liquidation stage -- little lost but time.
So unless the judge can determine this is nothing but a bullshit stalling tactic on the part of SCO--and I doubt any judge would do so without at least a hearing or two on the matter--they're almost certain to let it pass.
Slashdot Mirror
See, you think you're being clever but all you're doing is proving the point. The fact that somebody is being an idiot doesn't mean you aren't as well. Nor does it excuse your being one.
Steve Ballmer has a disease with his hatred for open source? Call up the newspapers, that's clearly breaking news! But so do you, and the other people who perpetuate the exact same thing back at them. "But he started it!" is a two-year-old's response. You're every bit as bad as he is, you just lack the resources to perpetuate it on his scale.
In your rush to bash people for not having an infallible solution, you're making two awfully big assumptions:
1. That they're intending this to have any effect whatsoever on people actively trying to disguise the source of the leak; and,
2. That a solution isn't worthwhile if it doesn't survive whatever geek-haxxor workarounds you can come up with.
This is exceptionally poor security for classified information. That's not its intent. It's poor security against people actively disguising themselves by "run[ning] it through the thesaurus algorithm a few more times." So be it.
It's still going to catch that guy who wants to show how in the know he is and forwards it to his buddies who post it on a website, and I'm sure there are far higher incidences of that than industrial espionage or whatever it is you're maligning them for not tackling.
I wouldn't personally implement a system like this, but the fact that it doesn't cover all potential circumstances doesn't mean it's worthless. I don't know why Slashdotters always have such a hard time grasping that.
It would be nice if they didn't obstruct access to the information if somebody wants it.
Apple has done nothing but make the situation worse. Instead of letting them just have the information and giggling as they tried to make 15 fires seem like a huge risk to our children!!! Apple decided to give them a half-page story about how they did everything in their power to stop a news agency from getting government consumer safety reports (as if they had any chance of that working in the first place) before they ever have to bother with presenting pesky facts and figures.
You're obviously being purposefully (and uselessly) facetious. The fact that this patent covers thiopurine has nothing to do with the novelty of the patent; in fact, just the opposite. If theirs was truly such a great discovery, why are they not claiming to own the knowledge of tying metabolites to the levels of drug metabolism in general? Why specifically do they need to craft their claim such that it only applies to thiopurine? Is this the biotech equivalent of patents that take something we've been doing for 50 years, append "on the Internet" to it and look around for people to sue?
We've known about drug metabolites since 1840, with much of the research coming in the 1950s. We've recognized the importance of making tests for these metabolites for various reasons since the 1970s. These patents were filed in 1999 and 2001 and granted in 2002 and 2004 (respectively).
Essentially, this is no different than testing you for diseases. You're not tested for having a disease, you're tested for the presence and quantities of the anti-bodies for that disease in your blood. Metabolites are basically leftover material from the metabolism of a particular drug, and more means you've metabolized more.
So what is the novelty? How has it not been common knowledge for--take your pick--forty, sixty or one hundred and eighty years? How on earth should a patent have been granted for a process by which you count something we've known should be counted for decades? They obviously make no claim to having discovered the specific process, they just added "of thiopurine" at the end of what we've been doing for fifty years and looked around for somebody to sue.
Sounds familiar. They're patent trolls.
If the developer is struggling to figure out what works best, then perhaps asking the community could work--but that's not really the same thing as "voting rights," nor would there be any particular reason that they should restrict commentary to the people who've given them some money.
Keep in mind that in order for this to work, we're either talking reeeeally large donations or tens of thousands of donors. Just managing that many people with the "right" to demand weekly builds and demand changes is going to be a full-time job, even if you develop a community-based moderation system similar to Slashdot or Digg or what-have-you.
Pledging to a feature is a bad idea in most cases. Occasionally things are simple enough to be able to just be slipped in somewhere in the process, but most changes are ones that are going to need to be planned for at a very early stage. You also have the problem of actually collecting your money. What do you do? Announce that the pledged money is worth it and then try to collect? You're almost guaranteed not to collect 100% of it. Do you yank the feature and waste time and money returning all the pledges if it turns out you only collect 75%? 50%?
Speaking as somebody who does some programming--and nothing nearly as complex as game development--I can tell you that nothing pisses me off more or hurts the end product as consistently as meddling from people who don't know what they hell they're doing and don't know what's actually going on in the development process. Maybe you personally are a programming savant capable of making fully educated suggestions for a foreign code base, but your 10,000 friends who donated alongside you aren't going to be. Even most professional venture capitalists are smart enough not to involve themselves in the process as much as you seem to want to be involved, for what I'm sure would be a significantly smaller donation. Too many cooks in the kitchen and all that.
Why? Because you don't like Windows?
Look, suck it up. The GPL is about freedom, and that includes for your mortal software enemies. So long as they are releasing any changes they made to the code (and in all likelihood they just bundled it up and didn't change a thing) they're in full compliance with both the letter and the spirit of the GPL.
This is as stupid as asking whether or not people should be allowed to license software under the GPL if it only runs on Windows. Spiteful non-issues like this are one of the major things that give open-source/free software movements a bad name.
Give them time.
Apple is every bit as horrible as Microsoft, they just haven't yet had enough clout to make their dickhead moves sting as hard as Microsoft has. IPod monopoly or not, they're working awfully hard to catch up.
Apple fanboi much?
They're doing this because they think it makes them more money, either from iPod sales or trying to extort fees from Palm and others who want to inter-operate. All the rest is nonsense. They don't give a crap about you or your user experience except as it affects the likelihood of you purchasing their products.
Nobody is, but it truly takes some twisted non-logic to blame Palm for it.
I think that all of Apple's executives would be shot in the head by their shareholders for throwing away an estimated $120 million per year and $0.09-$0.14 per share profit for absolutely no reason other than spitefulness. And rightly so.
Granted, the costs are speculative, but even by Apple's own admissions they're not operating at a loss; they're turning a profit. A profit, in this sense, that means that everybody is paid, all royalties paid, all hardware and bandwidth paid for. In a business that other than a few support people and a few techs, essentially runs itself. You don't throw that away.
I'd certainly need to be required--by law--to do that if I were the owner of any sort of image hosting website. "Try to decode the torrent" means time and computing power on my side, and for absolutely no benefit to me or my business. In fact rejecting images is actually bad for my business; it's actively pushing users away, all for the benefit of some mega-corp that isn't me and that frankly I don't care about.
I wouldn't be particularly worried about a lawsuit. If people are essentially using steganography to hide torrents in images hosted with me, the RIAA would be extremely hard-pressed to show that I'm somehow involved in whatever piracy goes on merely by not going out of my way to scan the images on their behalf.
Maybe they'd be able to buy themselves such a law, but that's what it would take. My business' job is not to support the RIAA. (Hypothetically, of course.)
Your comment is both funny and insightful, but at least coupled with my own experience it also goes to validate the psychologists' concerns.
I have terrible, terrible eyesight, that got progressively worse for years. I don't remember where I started on that chart as far as being able to read it, but I distinctly recall moving from two lines down to one line down and finally, at one point, to the big "E." You inform them you can't read lower lines and so they move up (or you try and you flub them and they move up), and eventually you get the question: "Can you read the top line?"
I honestly didn't know if I could or not. It was blurry, to be sure, but I could "see" it; I could make it out. Couldn't I? Or was my vision just near enough the line that I saw the pattern I knew it to be in the semi-randomness of the blur? I really didn't know, and I don't know today. All I can say for sure is that the next time I went to the eye doctor my vision had gotten slightly worse again and I knew the E was blurry enough that I couldn't actually make it out and only knew what was there.
That, mind you, on an exam that it's in my own best interests to be forthright on and I had trouble based on having seen the chart in advance. Now fast-forward to a hypothetical case where I have to take some psychological inkblot test; it's almost certainly in my best interest to give them an answer they might want to hear. I'm probably in a situation where they either already think I'm crazy or are trying to screen crazy people out of something (a job, a security clearance, whatever). Great from their perspective--but passing the test is what's in my own best interest from my own.
As far as the inkblots go, I question their usefulness in general, which is why I tend to be ambivalent about whether or not they get published. To whatever degree they ARE useful though, I can certainly see the argument that publishing them diminishes it.
And it would pretty much without exception be the proper thing to do.
Look, everybody is entitled to their own opinions and everybody is entitled to express those opinions. Personally, I don't use Twitter. I don't see the point of it except in exceptionally limited circumstances, and even then it's a stretch. But to claim that people who use Twitter are "idiots" who are somehow going to be the downfall of democracy is so ridiculous that such statements SHOULD be attacked and discarded in record time. If somebody's going to make claims like that, they'd best have something substantial to back them up other than "people tweet stupid things."
As far as your original thesis, there are plenty of ways to express existing opinions of whether or not Twitter is worthwhile. The problem is that to be taken seriously you can't just throw out whatever silly statements you want to see what sticks. Even that one quote from this kid in the summary is hard for me to take seriously unless he elaborates on the point; otherwise it seems he's just printing his assumption as fact and assigning causality where it may not exist. (Tweets are pointless because kids know they're not being read? How about because most of your 15 year old friends don't really have anything important to say most of the time, so if they say anything most of it will be pointless?) I think somebody with a few minutes of spare time could make a compelling case that the vast majority of the content on Twitter is absolute trash, and a few minutes of spare time later there could be an equally compelling rebuttal, and they'd probably both be correct. So what?
Fair point.
On the other hand, neither Gandhi or MLK hid from the consequences of what they did. Indeed, accepting the consequences is what civil disobedience is all about.
They also didn't destroy unrelated peoples' property to make a point like these people did. Whether it's wise or not, many of these people aren't going to have backups of their own photos, and I'm not sure if ImageShack is going to be able to restore them from backup either. In any event, it's going to cost ImageShack thousands of dollars to try to figure out what happened, close the holes, repair the damage, restore what they can and move on. And neither ImageShack nor the people whose photos were altered can realistically influence whether or not any security hole details are released in the future. It would be like Rosa Parks yanking white people out of their cars and throwing them on the street to protest the seating laws on the bus. None of these people are part of the problem except in the most generic of ways.
And, for good measure, neither Gandhi nor MLK threatened to hurt even more people if their demands aren't met. "Do what we say or we'll destroy more things" is closer to terrorist than protester, much less peaceful protester. MLK and Gandhi's actions sparked debate on what's right and what's wrong; these guys make it perfectly clear that they've made up their minds and everybody had best fall in line before they get angry.
Maybe these people are right and maybe they're not. Maybe they'll get their way and maybe they won't. History will tell all of that. Either way, it's hard to argue they're not a bunch of petulant, self-righteous children undeserving of admiration.
It's not blind adherence to a law that determines whether somebody should be admired for their actions, it's their motives and their methods. To bring it back to the grandparent's comment, "the ends justify the means" has and will continue to be one of the most dangerous ideas in the history of the world.
They don't. You're perfectly free to enter such information on any site you want, including power.com.
But who are you, and who am I? How does a site differentiate MadFarmAnimalz from whatever-the-hell-state-you're-in from MadFarmAnimalz from some-other-state, or from the same state but who isn't you? There's some degree of work that went on there, some sort of system set up that makes it easy for you to do so, some degree of infrastructure to support such activities. And of course, being a corporate interest, they want to pay their employees and make some money at the same time.
Why should Facebook have to make it easy for somebody to take all of the work they did, combine it with all of the work similar sites did, and drag your traffic to their own site? Why should Facebook permit other sites to use their work and their popularity to make some other group of people money, or otherwise erode their own interests? Why should they permit those activities in violation of their own Terms of Service (which I'm quite sure is where their original lawsuit came from)?
I don't know if they have a case, legally speaking, nor do I know whether or not I feel they should. From a business perspective it's a no-brainer. Your option as a user is to frequent a service that's more open with your sharing your information elsewhere, if one exists. If it doesn't, or it's inferior either in technical aspects or in terms of their network size, well, that's what defines the power of the Facebook brand. Of course they should defend that.
Got a reference? Otherwise we're just going to assume you're pulling things out of your ass. And then speculate as to what those things are, I'd imagine.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but haven't they paid fines twice in the last 15 years or so for doing exactly that? IE, price fixing on CDs? I seem to remember that both times they did so without admitting fault, but I don't think that changes anything.
I'm not a big "zomg government in corporations' pockets!!" guy, but how many times does one fine a group of companies for conspiring to control market prices before one decides that there's a problem actually needing to be fixed? And how many times can those same people pass up opportunities to try to do something about it before we're left without choice but to question their motives or competency?
I actually still remember my first nine-digit, changed-monthly numeric password to a dial-in BBS called God's Country which ran on DDial on six 300 Baud modems in Apple ][e's. I think I was like 10 at the time, so it would have been about 15 years ago.
Oddly I don't remember any other of the passwords though. I'm not sure why that first one made such an impression when, say, the last one didn't.
Well, I'm no expert but an Export Control Officer sounds awfully like a person whose job it is to tell this professor that he's about to break the law. He doesn't have to listen, I suppose; nobody does. But it does remove his ability to plead ignorance on the topic. He was warned that exactly what happened might happen. No sympathy from me there.
I agree that this is a flimsy case for an article supposedly talking about our rights, as if sharing sensitive information under a government contract is somehow a right. That said, I wouldn't boil it down so far as "any other mundane contractual dispute" if we're talking about something that comes with jail time. That's not a breach of contract issue, that's a broken law issue.
I know it's fashionable on Slashdot to use the word "strawman" when one wants to be modded up, but knowing what one actually is tends to help ones chances of it happening.
His argument wasn't a strawman. You said that people who are going to legitimately buy the game will now pirate it because of LAN support being dropped, and he rebutted that these people were going to pirate the game anyway. Agree or disagree, but that's not a strawman. There's absolutely no misrepresentation of your position, he just thinks it's bull. He's not taking yours as position of every would-be pirate any more than you yourself had no issue with supposing to know the minds of other people.
For what it's worth, I agree with him. Very few members of "the community" who are going to pirate this game will do so because LAN support does not exist, though I suspect that an awful lot of them are going to claim that to be the reasoning. It just sounds so much better than "I wanted it for free." Starcraft is a good game or it's not; it's worth the price or it's not. To suggest that any significant portion of people think lack of LAN support makes it not worth the price when it was 20 minutes before is disingenuous. They can still play the exact same game, they just have to have an Internet connection. That's hardly disqualifying for most people, particularly those with enough disposable income to have a fairly new computer and to buy a new video game in the first place.
You're right: It's just as easy--perhaps easier--to pirate a game than to pay for it. If you want to pirate it, so be it. If others want to pirate it, so be it. I'm not here to pass moral judgments on piracy. But this ridiculous idea that people have ANY sort of right, moral or otherwise, to pirate a video game because it's not presented to them at exactly their price with exactly their set of requirements fulfilled is sickening and tired. You have a right to not buy it. You don't have a right to pirate it and claim it's all somebody else's fault, especially with an excuse so weak as "b-b-b-but LAN support!"
I suppose, but you're really twisting words around to suit a notion you seem to have already come convinced of. If the best we can do is say "but what if the girl sees it later! Boy will that be embarrassing!" then why the hell is the behavior we're talking about a crime? If I post mean things about you should I be thrown in jail because you might see them one day?
To me, this "crime" is, at best, an unauthorized use of somebody's image. There was no victim. There was no harm. In all reality, the girls would never have even known this was going on until the prosecutors decided to "protect" them from seeing it and thus turned it into an international news story. I bet they know all about it now.
The fact that we can twist words and circumstances around to charge somebody with a serious crime doesn't mean that we should. He exploited these children only if we take "exploited" to mean nothing more than "used a picture of." That's a pretty worthless definition to me.
To continue along those lines, if the punishment for these crimes is as severe as it has become and continues to get more severe, it's going to push me to commit even worse crimes.
Kidnapping, for example. You can get life in prison for it, essentially at a prosecutor's whims. If I ever did something that could be charged as kidnapping, I'd consider the murder to be free. Same for raping a child or what have you. I'd consider my odds of getting away with it better if the witness was dead and the body disposed of than I would hoping I've intimidated or shamed the person enough that they never tell anybody what happened.
Put it all together, and you're making a fairly harmless situation (photoshopping a child's face onto an adult's body) into something that could literally get a child raped and murdered. All so some politicians can claim to be tough on crime? No thank you.
Justice Clarence Thomas.
To be fair, while the people directly affected by something are naturally going to be the loudest in support or opposition, I'm not sure that they should be the ones most involved in the decisions about it. At their heart, laws deal with interactions between people and that means that a lot of the time they're going to end up in some way harming one group of people or another. Even something as simple as theft harms thieves by putting them in jail for doing it, we just generally accept as a society that that is right and proper; that they deserved their outcome. In less clear-cut cases, some groups end up harmed--sometimes greatly--because doing so is perceived to do more good for more people than the harm it inflicts. It's just a form of utilitariansm.
In other words, laws should be evaluated on their own merits. That includes the complaints of those affected by it, but only as part of a broader outlook. In your example, it's entirely possible that the "bunch of restrictions" placed on dairy farmers has a public health benefit, or serves to drive down costs for the rest of the public. Of course a dairy farmer wouldn't like to see anything cut into his profits, but I think there's something to be said for trying to ensure that even poor people have access to milk without considering it a luxury. Being a libertarian I'm sure you'd argue that the market would handle it and that's fine, but it doesn't necessarily speak against the law.
Somebody read it, or at least scanned it. They knew enough to know you were writing about a specific bill. As far as the response, rather than chalking it up to inattentiveness or some sort of neglect, the more likely explanation is it's simply a form letter that they sent to anybody who wrote about that particular topic. You obviously disagree with the position, but despite the impersonal nature of the reply, did you come away from reading that with any doubt as to where they stood the matter?
I don't know how many letters a given politician might receive during their term, but it's probably impractical for them to respond to each of them in a personal way.
I agree on a personal level, but the reality is republican or democrat isn't what matters. What matters is what the public is willing to vote people out of office for.
I recall an episode of the West Wing about flag burning. They had a poll that the public overwhelmingly supported an amendment to make flag burning illegal. One pollster tried to spin that as "lead the charge for this amendment and you sew up re-election right now." Another came along later and explained, "he never asked them how much they care." As it turned out, only an exceptionally small minority of a large majority would actually base their vote on the president's support or lack of support for such an amendment.
Back to real life and your example: Even if you're completely correct that "the entire Internet" is overwhelmingly against the DMCA, and even if you're entirely correct that we can extrapolate that to mean the vast majority of the American public is overwhelmingly against the DMCA--and I don't actually believe you've made a strong case for either at this point--how much do these people care? How many are willing to vote their representatives out of office for it? How many are w
Other people already correctly covered the response as far as not being able to pay for it: Hospitals are legally forbidden from refusing treatment based on an inability to pay.
That said, if all other things are the same and you're not Steve Jobs or filthy rich, the actual answer is you die. If he truly got a liver transplant because of a metastasizing cancer... well, he shouldn't have. We're supposed to give donor organs to people in whom they would do the most good. An underlying condition that's highly likely to 1) destroy the new liver and/or 2) kill him relatively shortly is generally considered to be disqualifying for transplant, and with good reason. So either he found somebody who specifically donated a liver to him or, more likely, money and fame talk. After all, would you want to be the hospital that refused to prolong Steve Jobs' life?
I doubt it. A bankruptcy judge's job is essentially to ensure that SCO's creditors get the maximum amount of money back under the law. From that perspective, liquidation tends to be a fairly lousy solution, particularly for companies deeply in debt. A buyer is, of course, the best solution: Somebody willing to assume that debt and, hopefully, turn the company around to making some money again. Then it can start to pay back its creditors and if it falls apart again, well, you're just right back at the liquidation stage -- little lost but time.
So unless the judge can determine this is nothing but a bullshit stalling tactic on the part of SCO--and I doubt any judge would do so without at least a hearing or two on the matter--they're almost certain to let it pass.