I could see some big money here being a "movie and music inspector" as well as a little precedent that could make the cases less destructive. This third party could make the court's job easier by allowing quicker access to the drive under more balanced conditions.. with an impartial third-party judges would accept the evidence more readily, and investigation would be more consistent for plaintiffs because this company would develop standards of inspection the court would sign-off on, the RIAA would be cut short asking for "everything" buy the court looking to expedite things.
Downside is that if you've got Kazza or other stuff installed and sharing you're nailed... but the third-party could probably mirror your drive and get you back running sooner rather than taking your whole kit every time.
lawyers get paid to argue their point by any means necessary within a hair's-breath of breaking the law. It's tolerated in court because the other side also has a lawyer doing the same thing... so we let them all be petty and cruel and live with it.. you never know when the other side is honest, or just a pathological lier.
what they are refering to in the article is "boxed" software. PHBs are always getting marketed the next "big thing" and swamping the budget and admin's time with disconnected "fashionable" programs that don't really get the work done. It's like how Microsoft advertizes how a few cheap MCSEs can buy Microsoft servers and make the "dinosaurs" go away with magic electronic access everywhere. What's not in the pitch is that it takes admins to glue all the pieces together in a MEANINGFUL way! in my own company our windows guys are basiclly babysitters for the servers.. they have no time or money allocated to actually design somethign with all the great tools they already own... and the parent corp is always wanting to add more great stuff that will be "amazing" but keeps them as "babysitters" instead of actually improving the users' performance.
it does look like that. in 1998 it was only barely possible to implement that on Irix machines.. by 2003 when the patent was actually approved Nvidia and Ati were doing "floating point" but definately not the same type that SGI was doing.. their's was drastically different... much like comparing a chevy 350 to a mazda rx7... they're way different, I'd guess SGI ammended it's claims to include the "cheap" stuff they missed out on and fired all the engineers for.
The patent was orginally filed in 1998, but granted in 2003? that was about he time SGI started laying off the people that would create Nvidia and 3Dfx... I believe ATi has been around much longer. But That means they missed 5 years of graphics cards.. 5 years!!!! That's the ENTIRE time 3DFX was actually selling cards plus some. That's much to long to be considered seriously in an industry where stuff was obsolete in 6 months for much of that same time period. This reaks of a "submarine" that was tweaked at the last minute to hijack everybody else that outdid them by leaps and bounds.
My issue was not with "secret" stuff like sales, customers, profits, etc, but with the private/interpersonal stuff. Accidentally reading an email where you know the situation and the boss is totally unprofessional and out of line to another supervisor... That stuff eats at you really badly. You shouldn't say anything because you only know part of the story, but when you know somebody got fired unfairly (not criminally, just the boss being an Ass) but the boss says different it really wipes out trust. I had several bosses that did that at my last job and while they were nice to me, they were very two-faced to other people..
At my company we use iSeries and do much the same thing. The main security password is stored in a safe and the account logged. It's the "keys to the kingdom" and only needed every so often. We also use ticket tracking so that every highlevel access has to have a matching ticket... helps keep us honest. The safe password is also kept by the plant manager and HR so if the whole department was wiped out they could replace us. or at least try to.
my company has something like that on our data. We have IT level accounts set up with logging of all the commands entered (granted this is iSeries not windows) so the people with power are being watched. We even have the admin account set up so nobody usese it and with a password in a safe if we all don't come to work. again, that full access admin account is on a log sheet each week if it gets used.. somebody has to answer for it and document it. It's not perfect, but 90% of stuff is tracked now, and the 10% not trackable would take special skill to get around... hard enough to prove that somebody intended to do damage and not just a mistake on the job.
simple, the VP of sales want's his computer fixed NOW, so he expects a low-level help desk guy he points at to just "fix it" reguardless of "clearance" or what's on the machine. They don't want to wait for the "cleared" sys admin to come help them. It's the equivelant to the low tech method of creating a spill or stop up a toilet...if you want to get where your not supposed to be in a hurry pretend to be the janitor! nobody notices the people that clean up and let them work all day with little to no supervision.
that's not quite true. For companies that just buy Dell they'll be stuck with Vista when it comes out.. MS MIGHT let Dell backsell XP like they did 2000, but this time around I doubt it. That means when the Boss demands a new PC IT will be stuck trying to "make it work" because Vista testing is not complete, or the companies must-have app is not ready... nothing like forced hoop-jumping to waste everybody's time and money.. and it's a lot of money wasted!
I hear you... try installing without a floppy for the modern disk controllers!!! XP still won't take CD or USB keys for drivers at boot time! What a crock, MUCH of the problem people have is related to THAT feature missing! If you could load up a CD or USB key with all the drivers before you start it would save HOURS on an XP install. But alas, even that wouldn't work because every vendor has to use their own EXE for DRIVERS instead of a standard format. Now if you're installing Dells it's really easy, unless you add something non-Dell.
But LCARS was "published" on TNG well before Microsoft had Windows! That's what makes it interesting. Most computers in 1988 were still text only MS Dos.. or Mac. The art directors came up with a way of using computers that's still slightly ahead of what we have now. Yes, it was just "play" but they used that method for nearly 15 years of sets and props.. it's had a lot of thought put into it, even if not by "programmers".
MS has all those things in the works for Office 2007. They have a beta photo editing program...it's not photoshop, but it's getting good reviews comparable to "elements".... Not a good time to be Adobe after they hung those mac users out to dry with CS2 not showing up for intel macs yet.
Ha, you gotta be kidding, a company really focused on the customer's opinion would not enter a market with such a conflict of interest in the first place. See, MS owning any Antivirus is a conflict of interest with their own partner ISVs as well as that business has a conflict with producing good security from the start.
It's kind of like an Accounting Auditing firm that also sells consulting services to the same clients to reduce taxes or improve investments... while sending a different team of auditors to verify the results are 'legal'... we had that scam too!
exactly, there's a lot of hype over a relitively minor thing. There are bigger changes made to corperate software all the time that make more demands of USERS without offering anything in return.
in case 1, for instance Drupal or phpMyAdmin could put a folder for source and a link in the copyright section telling how to get it.. you couldn't remove that function from the program if the authors put it in there, if you run it on your systems. That leaves most projects at a fork stage right now, but that's nothing new.
In case 2, yes, they are specifically targeting companies like Tivo.. now understand that the *IAA puts the encryption requirements in their constant attempts to sue them and shut them down. But Tivo uses Linux that's freely available, as do most of the really cool entertainment gadgets that record, store, distribute entertainment nowdays. For kicks, don't feel so bad about TiVo though... their using Free Software certianly hasn't stopped them from getting software patents on the little bits they might have added, and using those bits to shut other people down from making their own devices even though those people aren't even looking at TiVo's code. There's even been talk of going after Myth, but that's too far for them to go without a huge fight... some way to reward the "free" help they got hey! Don't feel bad, they lived by "Free Software", they can die by it too... that's how capitalism works!
That's the whole problem with corperate mags like forbes. If Cisco was sued for 100 million dollars for not paying for corperate code from say Microsoft, Forbes would not be calling anybody "jihadists", just corperate lawyers seeking proper damages, and why Cisco's management didn't cover their assets properly. But because the people are releasing Free software somehow they don't have the same rights to expect their license followed?
wrong, history has proven that while Stallman's path is "the road not traveled", his views on corperate control of culture via copyright and patents have almost all come true verbatim. And key members of the industries view our current "freedom" as "consumers" as too much. RMS is about making sure SOMETHING remains truely, legally FREE. In the current corperate culture, that's extremely hard.. 75% of the "free" software on your computer you got legally for free (without money) is not FREE... you can't look at it to see how it works, you can't use it how you wish.. you may not even own the works you create with the program. But somebody let you have such a great thing for "free". That's the issue! Imagine when everything uses software, and everything needs you to give up special permission to the "owners" in order to get your work done... hell in a good part of the country, employeers can make you sign away rights so you can't even GIVE away works you create.
Trust me, without "crazies" like RMS there would be no ruler to meaure how bad the situation truely is. RMS BEGS people to follow him, but he's not the one out there passing crazy laws like the DMCA, or making 100 billion from "borrowed" code, or suing people for a few songs... those are the capitalists that know what's best for us.
They appear to have tried to follow Spamhaus' rules, but Spamhaus won't have it..won't even tell them what the rules are, just that they've been "flagged" as spammers and there's no more discussion... which has been a known thing on slashdot for a while. The RBL guys are assholes... we all know that, it's inevitable that they'd get sued like this eventually.
The question is what extent is Spamhaus' liability? On one hand they mearly maintain the list of know spam IP and domains.... they don't run the email servers, they don't make the final decision to/dev/null the emails... the email administrators do that. So they should be protected under the rules of basic "free speech". Consider their liability similar to the credit reporting agencies.. companies use credit ratings all the time, but I don't recall the reporting agencies haveing any legal responsibility other than to remove a bad post... if you can prove it! The onus is on the lender to make an educated decision about the customer.
on the other hand, Admins are lazy, and most simply trust the RBL list without even checking. The RBL operators know this and abuse their position on many, many occasions, there's been many slashdot posts about how unfair these guys can be.. because they accept payment for their services, and know email admins are using those lists, when does their "beaurocatic abuse" become full blown "libel"? Now they are not located in the US, so e360's lawyers didn't do a very good legal job, because they should have known the company had no legally accountable assets in the USA. That's poor lawyer-ship. But the whole case is poor judge-ship because he should have known the case was out of his jusristiction and refused it in the first place. The lawyers were trying that stunt SCO pulled a few months ago (with the deposition expressly not allowed by the orginal court) where they intentionally misfile the suit out of juristiction to get an outcome expressly not allowed by another court/ expecting the court to "trap" them once they appear, then claim justistiction. Spamhaus didn't fall for it... good for them, but their tactics still leave them legally open for more suits.
most Email administrators will just point to the RBL and be done with it. My experience is that the "average" email admin is a 40 year old windows PC guy that got stuck with it. They don't care about the mails or users anymore, just keeping the boss happy and following the company policy about blocking "bad things". Hence, when a vaild email gets put on one of these lists by somebody with a bug up their ass and a bad day, it's very hard to actually get email from them ever again. I'm not condoning spamming, but there isn't really a good review process with the RBL maintainiers that diferentiates between Spamming and nusance emails... it's become a beaurocratic mob mentality, that spam makes email administrators' jobs a little harder, so they rebel by punishing users and senders with a "what the hell" attitide.
technically correct. In the base document only STATES could be taxed directly, because they formed the govt, not citizens directly. There is another line about taxes paid by states not being equal accross the states.
The Sixteenth amemdment change that by allowing Congress to tax individuals directly, and also took away the tax equality between the states. The truely "neat" thing about this is that now the Govt can collect funds directly without state intervention. Think of what the political landscape would look like if states could refuse to pay taxes for an illegal war!
simple, their software guys tag a version as production, and ship it off to the certifing authority. That version then satisfies the election officals for "honesty". What Diebold employees were doing was using uncertified patches at the last minute to fix bugs... hours before or even DURING the elections!!! The "company line" was that it was "necessary" for the election, and officals had to accept it or not have voting machines available.
If that's not suspect action then what is? Isn't that the very method of vote tampering we're all discussing?
the whole issue revolves around that issue. The machines sit in closets for 6 months then are drug out for an election. Diebold is supposed to be installing and using certified software, but they can't even do that right. The issues started because Maryland election officials were catching Diebold personel putting patches on without the proper paperwork... and they got VERY upset, wanting to know what they were doing. Even the company refused to cooperate... private software and doing their job and all.
That's what's so screwed up about all this, even Diebold employees weren't following their own companies rules and election offical rules (remember they are the customer). Several Diebold run elections have had outcomes highly suspect... and Diebold is answering concerns with contept for the customers and citizens instead of openness and cooperation.
journalists print stolen/illegally obtained materials all the time... Look at how bad Apple leaks/ HP board directors have gotten... Diebold will probably illegally track and spy on it's employees to find the leak... maybe we can get them that way.. or maybe the Republicans will just get the cops to do it illegally for them.
no, that is why businesses fear open source. That city agreed to a contract, then tried to claim some kind of "soverinty" over the software because the city owned it... If they were a business, they would have been hauled to jail for tying up the people's cars... Businesses fear Open Source like the plague because they're afraid of govenments "buying" software then declaring it "Open Source" they don't have to pay.
Don't like default installs of KDE only because it seems to make the windows error of putting similar settings in different places... but each setting group isn't quite the same as the others. That's the one reason Ubuntu with the super-clean Gnome is making so many fans. It could use a little more splash, but for productivity plain is better than flashy.
Slashdot Mirror
Downside is that if you've got Kazza or other stuff installed and sharing you're nailed... but the third-party could probably mirror your drive and get you back running sooner rather than taking your whole kit every time.
lawyers get paid to argue their point by any means necessary within a hair's-breath of breaking the law. It's tolerated in court because the other side also has a lawyer doing the same thing... so we let them all be petty and cruel and live with it.. you never know when the other side is honest, or just a pathological lier.
what they are refering to in the article is "boxed" software. PHBs are always getting marketed the next "big thing" and swamping the budget and admin's time with disconnected "fashionable" programs that don't really get the work done. It's like how Microsoft advertizes how a few cheap MCSEs can buy Microsoft servers and make the "dinosaurs" go away with magic electronic access everywhere. What's not in the pitch is that it takes admins to glue all the pieces together in a MEANINGFUL way! in my own company our windows guys are basiclly babysitters for the servers.. they have no time or money allocated to actually design somethign with all the great tools they already own... and the parent corp is always wanting to add more great stuff that will be "amazing" but keeps them as "babysitters" instead of actually improving the users' performance.
it does look like that. in 1998 it was only barely possible to implement that on Irix machines.. by 2003 when the patent was actually approved Nvidia and Ati were doing "floating point" but definately not the same type that SGI was doing.. their's was drastically different... much like comparing a chevy 350 to a mazda rx7... they're way different, I'd guess SGI ammended it's claims to include the "cheap" stuff they missed out on and fired all the engineers for.
The patent was orginally filed in 1998, but granted in 2003? that was about he time SGI started laying off the people that would create Nvidia and 3Dfx... I believe ATi has been around much longer. But That means they missed 5 years of graphics cards.. 5 years!!!! That's the ENTIRE time 3DFX was actually selling cards plus some. That's much to long to be considered seriously in an industry where stuff was obsolete in 6 months for much of that same time period. This reaks of a "submarine" that was tweaked at the last minute to hijack everybody else that outdid them by leaps and bounds.
My issue was not with "secret" stuff like sales, customers, profits, etc, but with the private/interpersonal stuff. Accidentally reading an email where you know the situation and the boss is totally unprofessional and out of line to another supervisor... That stuff eats at you really badly. You shouldn't say anything because you only know part of the story, but when you know somebody got fired unfairly (not criminally, just the boss being an Ass) but the boss says different it really wipes out trust. I had several bosses that did that at my last job and while they were nice to me, they were very two-faced to other people..
At my company we use iSeries and do much the same thing. The main security password is stored in a safe and the account logged. It's the "keys to the kingdom" and only needed every so often. We also use ticket tracking so that every highlevel access has to have a matching ticket... helps keep us honest. The safe password is also kept by the plant manager and HR so if the whole department was wiped out they could replace us. or at least try to.
my company has something like that on our data. We have IT level accounts set up with logging of all the commands entered (granted this is iSeries not windows) so the people with power are being watched. We even have the admin account set up so nobody usese it and with a password in a safe if we all don't come to work. again, that full access admin account is on a log sheet each week if it gets used.. somebody has to answer for it and document it. It's not perfect, but 90% of stuff is tracked now, and the 10% not trackable would take special skill to get around... hard enough to prove that somebody intended to do damage and not just a mistake on the job.
simple, the VP of sales want's his computer fixed NOW, so he expects a low-level help desk guy he points at to just "fix it" reguardless of "clearance" or what's on the machine. They don't want to wait for the "cleared" sys admin to come help them. It's the equivelant to the low tech method of creating a spill or stop up a toilet...if you want to get where your not supposed to be in a hurry pretend to be the janitor! nobody notices the people that clean up and let them work all day with little to no supervision.
that's not quite true. For companies that just buy Dell they'll be stuck with Vista when it comes out.. MS MIGHT let Dell backsell XP like they did 2000, but this time around I doubt it. That means when the Boss demands a new PC IT will be stuck trying to "make it work" because Vista testing is not complete, or the companies must-have app is not ready... nothing like forced hoop-jumping to waste everybody's time and money.. and it's a lot of money wasted!
I hear you... try installing without a floppy for the modern disk controllers!!! XP still won't take CD or USB keys for drivers at boot time! What a crock, MUCH of the problem people have is related to THAT feature missing! If you could load up a CD or USB key with all the drivers before you start it would save HOURS on an XP install. But alas, even that wouldn't work because every vendor has to use their own EXE for DRIVERS instead of a standard format. Now if you're installing Dells it's really easy, unless you add something non-Dell.
But LCARS was "published" on TNG well before Microsoft had Windows! That's what makes it interesting. Most computers in 1988 were still text only MS Dos.. or Mac. The art directors came up with a way of using computers that's still slightly ahead of what we have now. Yes, it was just "play" but they used that method for nearly 15 years of sets and props.. it's had a lot of thought put into it, even if not by "programmers".
MS has all those things in the works for Office 2007. They have a beta photo editing program...it's not photoshop, but it's getting good reviews comparable to "elements".... Not a good time to be Adobe after they hung those mac users out to dry with CS2 not showing up for intel macs yet.
It's kind of like an Accounting Auditing firm that also sells consulting services to the same clients to reduce taxes or improve investments... while sending a different team of auditors to verify the results are 'legal'... we had that scam too!
in case 1, for instance Drupal or phpMyAdmin could put a folder for source and a link in the copyright section telling how to get it.. you couldn't remove that function from the program if the authors put it in there, if you run it on your systems. That leaves most projects at a fork stage right now, but that's nothing new.
In case 2, yes, they are specifically targeting companies like Tivo.. now understand that the *IAA puts the encryption requirements in their constant attempts to sue them and shut them down. But Tivo uses Linux that's freely available, as do most of the really cool entertainment gadgets that record, store, distribute entertainment nowdays. For kicks, don't feel so bad about TiVo though... their using Free Software certianly hasn't stopped them from getting software patents on the little bits they might have added, and using those bits to shut other people down from making their own devices even though those people aren't even looking at TiVo's code. There's even been talk of going after Myth, but that's too far for them to go without a huge fight... some way to reward the "free" help they got hey! Don't feel bad, they lived by "Free Software", they can die by it too... that's how capitalism works!
That's the whole problem with corperate mags like forbes. If Cisco was sued for 100 million dollars for not paying for corperate code from say Microsoft, Forbes would not be calling anybody "jihadists", just corperate lawyers seeking proper damages, and why Cisco's management didn't cover their assets properly. But because the people are releasing Free software somehow they don't have the same rights to expect their license followed?
Trust me, without "crazies" like RMS there would be no ruler to meaure how bad the situation truely is. RMS BEGS people to follow him, but he's not the one out there passing crazy laws like the DMCA, or making 100 billion from "borrowed" code, or suing people for a few songs... those are the capitalists that know what's best for us.
The question is what extent is Spamhaus' liability? On one hand they mearly maintain the list of know spam IP and domains.... they don't run the email servers, they don't make the final decision to /dev/null the emails... the email administrators do that. So they should be protected under the rules of basic "free speech". Consider their liability similar to the credit reporting agencies.. companies use credit ratings all the time, but I don't recall the reporting agencies haveing any legal responsibility other than to remove a bad post... if you can prove it! The onus is on the lender to make an educated decision about the customer.
on the other hand, Admins are lazy, and most simply trust the RBL list without even checking. The RBL operators know this and abuse their position on many, many occasions, there's been many slashdot posts about how unfair these guys can be.. because they accept payment for their services, and know email admins are using those lists, when does their "beaurocatic abuse" become full blown "libel"? Now they are not located in the US, so e360's lawyers didn't do a very good legal job, because they should have known the company had no legally accountable assets in the USA. That's poor lawyer-ship. But the whole case is poor judge-ship because he should have known the case was out of his jusristiction and refused it in the first place. The lawyers were trying that stunt SCO pulled a few months ago (with the deposition expressly not allowed by the orginal court) where they intentionally misfile the suit out of juristiction to get an outcome expressly not allowed by another court/ expecting the court to "trap" them once they appear, then claim justistiction. Spamhaus didn't fall for it... good for them, but their tactics still leave them legally open for more suits.
most Email administrators will just point to the RBL and be done with it. My experience is that the "average" email admin is a 40 year old windows PC guy that got stuck with it. They don't care about the mails or users anymore, just keeping the boss happy and following the company policy about blocking "bad things". Hence, when a vaild email gets put on one of these lists by somebody with a bug up their ass and a bad day, it's very hard to actually get email from them ever again. I'm not condoning spamming, but there isn't really a good review process with the RBL maintainiers that diferentiates between Spamming and nusance emails... it's become a beaurocratic mob mentality, that spam makes email administrators' jobs a little harder, so they rebel by punishing users and senders with a "what the hell" attitide.
The Sixteenth amemdment change that by allowing Congress to tax individuals directly, and also took away the tax equality between the states. The truely "neat" thing about this is that now the Govt can collect funds directly without state intervention. Think of what the political landscape would look like if states could refuse to pay taxes for an illegal war!
If that's not suspect action then what is? Isn't that the very method of vote tampering we're all discussing?
That's what's so screwed up about all this, even Diebold employees weren't following their own companies rules and election offical rules (remember they are the customer). Several Diebold run elections have had outcomes highly suspect... and Diebold is answering concerns with contept for the customers and citizens instead of openness and cooperation.
journalists print stolen/illegally obtained materials all the time... Look at how bad Apple leaks/ HP board directors have gotten... Diebold will probably illegally track and spy on it's employees to find the leak... maybe we can get them that way.. or maybe the Republicans will just get the cops to do it illegally for them.
no, that is why businesses fear open source. That city agreed to a contract, then tried to claim some kind of "soverinty" over the software because the city owned it... If they were a business, they would have been hauled to jail for tying up the people's cars... Businesses fear Open Source like the plague because they're afraid of govenments "buying" software then declaring it "Open Source" they don't have to pay.
Don't like default installs of KDE only because it seems to make the windows error of putting similar settings in different places... but each setting group isn't quite the same as the others. That's the one reason Ubuntu with the super-clean Gnome is making so many fans. It could use a little more splash, but for productivity plain is better than flashy.