I didn't say backwards hardware compatibility, I said, backwards compatibility. Kernels change dramatically. New drivers won't run on old kernels, old drivers won't run on new kernels. Software which depends on kernels is exactly the same way. If it's not being updated by someone it won't work anymore.
Yes in the open source world you can fix things that get out of date, but there is absolutely no concern as to what will go out of date or what impact that will have on things.
Microsoft hashed the release of Vista, but the Linux community of all people has no right to talk about new releases making drivers incompatible. Backwards compatibility doesn't exist in the linux world.
The problem with this survey is that it does't take into account how long they'd stop for.
A lot of folks stop speeding for a while after they get a warning from a cop. Virtually none of them stop speeding forever.
Most people stopped using the networks which got downed, and if there's a high chance of getting caught using a particular service then yeah they're going to stop, but with encrypted connections, and the general fact that ISP's will only do what they're forced to by law or which benefits their bottom line, and you're probably looking at a pretty low number of people actually getting caught, so you're looking at pretty low risk.
I know the brits tend to have a please sir give me some more attitude when it comes to government shafting(or so it seems lately, though the US isn't much better), but this seems rather silly.
Windows really has very little to do with 5 9's reliability or the lack of it. Yes rebooting your server is inconvenient, and yes you probably shouldn't be running anything requiring 5 9's on a windows box(unless it's exchange or AD of course), but the problem with 5 9s isn't about having to reboot your server or properly scheduling maintainence(not to mention that scheduled maintainence can be considered outside uptime in some SLA's).
The problem with 5 9s is redundent systems. If you really want that kind of uptime you need to clone your infrastructure, including the physical server room. That's expensive. You need to have staff available on call, not just for major outages, but for everything involved with that system, and you have to pay that staff.
This makes the whole thing a cost benefit. I don't like having my internet down(though it happens pretty rarely and usually involves some dickhead cutting a line somewhere) and I don't like having my mobile phone down(which doesn't usually happen and is more often the fault of my phone than the networks), but the inconvenience of losing these services isn't worth the amount of money necesary to have that kind of uptime. It doesn't cost me anything but hassle to lose my internet, if it did I'd have a business connection with connectivity assurances.
It's more similar than you'd think, logically speaking at least.
As far as I recall, in the US at least, all land is actually owned by the government(on behalf of the people). The deed grants you specific monopoly rights to the land. Theoretically speaking the government can void your deed at will, though for obvious reasons they rarely do.
IP is the same sort of situation, all ideas belong to the commons, but the government grants you monopoly control over certain rights to that idea. Similarly copyright infringement is a lot like more like trespass than it is theft, someone is violating one of the monopoly rights granted to you by the government.
As such, perhaps a property tax of some sort might be in order.
However, rather than the shotgun sale provision(whereby if you value a certain thing at a certain price you have to sell it at that price), something along the lines of a limitation of recoverable losses might be more appropriate.
If you force people to sell then you allow large companies to buy the work of smaller entities that while not currently profitable, might, in the future be profitable for that creator. You also cause all sorts of problems for the GPL as they'd have to either pay incredibly large taxes or sell off everything they own to Microsoft or some other large congolmerate.
However a limited recoverable losses provision would be much more helpful. It wouldn't affect things like for profit use(where all profits are recoverable), but if you limited what a copyright holder could sue for(excluding profits derived) to some portion of the declared taxation value at the time of the infringement, you'd basically achieve most of the stated goals.
Companies might not be forced to give up their old libraries, but they'd have to either pay full taxes on them or their recoverable worth would be virtually nothing so if you got sued it'd be for very little money. Basically only the most recent/popular songs would really be worth suing over presuming no for profit use.
The great firewall of China doesn't even effectively filter content, and the Chinese can back up their filter with guns, how on earth does Rudd think this is going to work here?
He didn't do anything that renders him unfit for employment. However this is the united states we're talking about and while you might have to pay out a severence package if you do there's nothing legally to stop you from firing someone for pretty much any reason that doesn't violate affirmative action. Which is a bit odd I always thought. It's not ok to fire someone because they're a woman, but it's perfectly ok to fire a woman because you don't like the way she cuts her hair.
Not too terribly difficult actually, depending on your definition of automation.
I can create a system whereby if a customer is forced to wait over half an hour they are automatically given a free desert and implement it only by providing appropriate instructions to my staff.
Toshiba has canned HD-DVD, there was even an article on it on Slashdot. Toshiba make HD-DVD, why in the name of god would Microsoft continue to sell a product based on a technolgy that the company that owns the technology has given up on.
If this had happened before Toshiba caved it'd have been different, but it didn't. Microsoft got stuck with a loser(pause for the cheers, vista jokes, general fanboism), and they've ditched it and are moving on.
I'm sick of this story, it's all over the news everywhere and it's not news. If Microsoft had decided to keep going on HD-DVD after Toshiba had given up that'd be news(and idiocy).
To answer your question, the difference is who holds the copyright.
One school of thought is that if you hire a photographer to take photos of something that it's an instance of work for hire, which means that the copyright, and therefor the negatives, belong to you(as the person doing the hiring). In this instance you can take the negatives and get as many copies of them made in whatever fashion you like, and do anything you like with them, including sell them to a company for advertising purposes.
This is a relatively sensible view, and you'll find that when most photographers get other photographers to do work for them that this is the kind of deal they insist on getting.
The counter argument you get from photographers(and the idea which many of them base their business model around) is that because what they do is "art", that it cannot be work for hire, and therefor they own the copyright and the only way for you to get reproductions of the work is from them. They tend to charge a rather ridiculous fee for the reproductions(though usually a lower one for the actual photography), and the really sneaky ones won't charge you anything at all since then it's definitely not work for hire.
As a business model it doesn't really work anymore, because most people hold the idea that photographs they've paid someone to take of them and their kids should belong to them, and therefor have absolutely no problems copying them without the consent of the theoretical copy right holder. Add to that the idea of better scanners and it's pretty much a non viable startup which only works because most people are too cheap to pay up front for a photographer who is willing to price themsslves at a rate which makes work for hire profitable.
Regardless however this argument doesn't apply to the case in question as the plaintiff most definitely was not involved in work for hire as he didn't take the photograph at the defendent's request.
With the way the American political system is set up, a vote for a third party is a vote for the major party which is most against your ideals. This is a fact of life.
If you want to change that, campaign for instant run-off voting in federal elections. Write your congress critter, put your little geeky heart and soul into it, because until you get run-offs third parties in the US are screwed.
That's not to say that third parties do particularly well anywhere in the western world, and they're never likely to work particularly well in a non parliamentary system, but at least with run-off voting when you vote for Nader and Nader doesn't win, your vote goes to someone who can(in the Australian system where I live now, it's either the person you specifically said would be your next choice or whoever the party/person you've voted for has negotiated for the votes to go to).
You still end up with the same schlubs in office, but at least you get to show who you really wanted to vote for and if enough people agree with you you could actually put someone in.
Also get over your self righteous bullshit. I know you hate the majority parties, and I know they have a lot of faults. Nader was a good candidate(a little unrealistic, but a good one), but if you think that voting with your heart was worth 8 years of dubya then you're an asshat.
AJAX isn't as quick as a native front end, but an AJAX front end onto a massive backend would, in this case at least, be a lot faster than a native front end onto your home PC.
They're not getting it wrong, they're refusing to make a decision. It's a cop out, plain and simple, as was Dred Scott(pretty much exactly the same copout actually he wasn't a person/citizen so he couldn't sue to determine whether he was a person/citizen or not).
The supreme court knows that making this decision has major consequences regardless of which way they decided. If they shut down the wiretaps and there's another terrorist attack they could be blamed, and they'd basically be deciding that most of the current administration have commited criminal acts. If they decide in favour of the wiretaps then they open up pandora's box, and basically destroy the idea of privacy in America forever.
They're hoping that a change in admistration will make the problem go away so they don't have to make the decision. This isn't a new thing, it isn't a "political" thing it's an issue of general human cowardice.
The folks who are currently being wiretapped will get screwed(as did Dred Scott), but that's not new either.
Ideally they'd come out and say "this is unconstitutional" and stop all of it, but issues regarding implicit rights like privacy(and for that matter even explicit rights like free speech) can be very divisive, and the court would much rather not be involved at all.
Given that in the current political climate the court could quite easily decide in favour of wire tapping and basically make the current realities a permanent fixture, I'm perfectly happy for them to not decide at the moment.
From TFA, it looks like someone asked the government whether they'd consider a three strikes policy and the government being a government has said that they'll watch what happens with the Brits and consider it. Which sounds lik politicion(weasel) speak for "we don't want to tell whoever is asking no because then they might get upset, but we don't want to actually do anything either".
Rudd wants to get broadband to more homes not less, and most governments know stuff like this would be wildly unpopular, and the ISPs have exactly the same financial reasons(increased monitoring costs, loss of revenue from cancelled subscriptions, potential repercussions from improper cancelations), so are just as likely to fight.
Personally I doubt even the Brits who have a much more invasive approach towards their citizens than we do are going to pass something like this, it's political suicide to try and save something that probably can't be saved.
I've been using Vista for a while. So I'll weigh in on those.
1) Don't know, don't care, the PC market now is vastly different than it was even when XP was released, comparing 1st month sales figures matters to accountands, but up or down don't say much about whether an OS is good or bad. You might possibly be able to compare 1st month non OEM sales, but even that wouldn't make a lot of difference.
2) I haven't used every piece of hardware on the market, but personally speaking I've experienced more hardware incompatibility on Linux than on Vista. A couple of things didn't work right away, and a couple of things required work arounds, but the same has always been true of my Linux system, and at least Microsoft didn't shaft driver developers simply because they disapprove of the way they license their own product(see the whole GPL export debacle a few years back). Hardware compatibility is really a hardware vendor thing anyway.
3)I do Integration work for a living and I don't even know what they mean by this one. I don't really want to integrate my OS with applications, I just want them to run. Do they mean that older applications don't take advantage of Aero or something? If you can explain this one to me, I'd be happy to hear it.
4) The Vista security model is substantially better than the XP security mode, and if we stopped blaming the UAC nags on Microsoft and instead pointed the finger at the lazy software developers who won't right their Windows App code to run in user space instead of as an admin we'd be a lot closer to the truth.
5) In a business environment deploying an new OS or OS version is expensive, and licensing is rarely the largest portion of that. I suppose if you were running your XP machines with Automatic update on pointing directly at windows update instead of at a SUS server, the activation requirement could be expensive or tedious, but that's a relatively small subsection of businesses really.
6) Any new version of anything is unpopular with some parts of business, making a major change to the environment is expensive and risky. My company is just upgrading to XP now, so it's relative popularity in business is really only important to accountants.
7) Haven't really noticed this much, there was a period back last year when they patched it a bit and it got less stable, but aside from the fact that your regular IT people are less familiar with the interface and so it's a bit harder for them to find stuff, it's not been much more difficult for me. In my experience the OS is rarely the cause of support calls anyway. Most issues are with third party apps, spyware, data corruption etc, and 2000 and XP had plenty of wierd it's easier to wipe the system than fix it bugs too.
8) Matter of opinion really I've never found anyone who believed that a developers response time was quick enough, and as I've not been sitting waiting with baited breath for a patch on Vista yet I can't realy talk about the response time. SP1 is taking a while, but that's a big patch set.
9) Total garbage, but no more garbage than any other claim by any government, third party vendor, OS manufacturer, or anything else. No content filtering system is effective, and unless you plan on running your home network like a corporate LAN you're not going to stop your kids from looking at what they want to look at, and even then you're not likely to stop them.
10) If you're not running a bleeding edge environment(which applies to 99% of the corporate world) waiting for a new version of anything to get patched a few times isn't a bad idea. Vista's not worthless pre SP1, but it'll presumably be better post SP1.
A lot of this quiz is marketing spiel, and I hate market droid speak as much as everyone else, but Vista has been the victim of the greatest FUD campaign I've ever seen for software, so maybe they needed market spiel.
Actually that law doesn't say what you say it does. Note knowing or having reason to know or intending that the same will be unlawfully employed. It's not saying you can't teach someone how to make a bomb, it's not saying you can't learn to make a bomb. It's saying that it's not ok to teach someone who you know is going to use that bomb how to make a bomb.
The reason to know is a bit wishy washy, but it's probably just a catch all for situations where you have a guy who goes into a room full of plans to blow something up claiming he didn't know that's what they were going to do with the bomb.
Personally I think this law is probably pretty much unecessary, as IMO, knowingly providing someone the means to commit an illegal act in this fashion should be covered under "conspiracy to commit _______" offense tree.
It's not illegal to sell a man a gun, but if someone asks you to sell him a gun so he can murder his wife you're treading on dangerous ground if you do it, and five years and a fine is probably pretty lenient.
The Blu-Ray victory was decided before the battle even started.
Sony owns the rights to movies, and continues to make movies. So long as they were willing to suck up some potential losses there were always going to be movies you couldn't get on HD-DVD.
Toshiba doesn't own movies, and so in order to hold out they would have had to bribe/coerce a media company that had no vested interest in which technology would win out to hold out, or generate sufficient momentum via superior quality/price/features that Sony couldn't afford to hold out anymore.
HD-DVD isn't sufficiently better(if it's better at all) than Blu-Ray to make it the overall market winner. Sony doesn't want to give up blu-ray the way they did with Mini-Disc. Everyone else just wants to sell product(ideally a whole new copy of everyone's dvd library the way they did with CD) and doesn't really give a rats which format wins.
Studios and Publishers seem to be fleeing the battle a lot quicker than I might have guessed, but without a massive difference in quality or penetration HD-DVD was doomed eventually.
Enlightened Self Interest and Ethics are not the same thing. Being ethical is about doing the right thing because it's the right thing, not because it's the most profitable thing to do.
Excluding issues regarding long term vs short term profitability and Executive bonuses, public companies can always be expected to maximize profits, and while having managers that are smart enough to realize that at times doing the right thing is the most profitable thing to do is an indication of a much better class of managers than seems to be the norm it's not the same thing as being ethical.
To give an example. Protecting my employees from harmful radiation because if I don't I'll get sued for a lot more than it costs to put in appropriate safety precautions and I'm pretty likely to get caught is good business. Protecting my employees in a third world country where I can buy off the government for less than it'll cost me to make their jobs safer simply because it's the right thing to do is ethics.
Very few publicly traded companies are ethical. This is partially due to legal obligations to maximize stockholder value and in the US to the current culture of "If you make money off it and don't get caught then it's ok", but it's mostly because of the fundamental nature of public companies. The metric used to determine the value of a publicly traded company is its share price. Share price is determined largely by profits. There is no metric built into share price which measures whether a company is ethical or not, only if it's profitable.
This is why the idea of Business Ethics is generally considered an oxy moron. Not because businesses don't on occasion get a result that is identical to the one which would have resulted from ethical behaviour, but because ethics are rarely the deciding factor and in cases where the ethical solution is not at least neutral to share holder value, and ideally directly beneficial, Business Ethics are in fact often legally prohibited.
That said, many private companies, non profits, not for profits, etc are allowed to make decisions based on ethics and occasionally do, but the idea of Ethics in a publicly traded company is a joke.
NoScript isn't the solution to the problem. Javascript has a lot of good uses and is vitally important to the development of pretty much any page that isn't either just a flat file, or using way too much even less secure flash. Flat HTML pages are fine for certain applications, and server side technologies have their place, but if you want a responsive, interactive web page, then you need javascript.
Browsers have to ensure that their javascript interpreters are secure, and that they have ways to block, or make harmless most malicious attacks. If we just say "oh that's not important because people can just block scripts with noscript, then we don't get any further and we further stunt the growth of web technologies.
Apple is in the same shape, they're an American company and because region encoding doesn't inconvenience Americans(for the most part at least) region coding is enforced there. It's not their fault, it's jut that's the law and the law is actually followed because no one minds it.
There's a fundamental disconnect between people on Slashdot and the real world. Consumers don't care at all about DRM, they care about restrictions on what they consider normal use(which is different than fair use).
On Slashdot, people are against DRM on principle, any and all DRM is bad(and for that matter any and all copyright is bad).
In the real world, people don't care about anything which doesn't affect their life. They can play their iTunes songs on their iPods, they can play their iTunes songs on their PC, they can burn their iTunes songs onto a CD and play it in their car, or in their stereo. They can even rip the songs they just burned and put them on a competing media player, upload them to the internet and share them with their friends.
Apple's DRM doesn't affect the lives of regular people so they don't care.
People do care about things which affect their lives(as this sort of nonsense would). This is why in pretty much every country in the world that isn't part of region 1, off the shelf DVD players(despite advertising to the contrary) are regionless. You buy a Sony DVD player in Australia(where I live) and stick a dvd from the US in it and it'll play right off the bat, because region encoding screws everyone outside of region 1 and the consumers wouldn't stand for it.
Microsoft gets shafted in this regard because they're based in the US and have to follow US law(which is based on catering for the needs of companies who want to screw people and citizens who are in region 1 and get first tier dvd releases in the first place).
If the RIAA tried to put this sort of thing on someone's computer and they couldn't play their pirated media files, or they couldn't play the sound recording from their grandkids, or the cd they bought years go, they'd go apeshit.
The ethics without observation is the large scale not small scale. The fundamental idea of communism(at least as I read it) is the idea of the evolution of society.
In the small and perfect scale the guy on the street is your cousin, or your neighbour, which is to say he's a person. You know who he is and his fate matters to you.
As you expand society, and particularly economics out to the macro scale, the guy you screw over to make your million is just another guy, he doesn't have a face, he's not real. Communism is when the fact that we don't know who the guy is doesn't stop us from caring about his well being.
We can already see this even in the United States. The pure capitalism of the old days when worker safety didn't matter, there was no minimum wage, etc. The laws we enact and the ways in which we view corporations and the economy have changed over time, and while we aren't living in the perfect society yet, and we may never do so, we're closer now economically at least than we were a hundred years ago(at least if you discount the last 8 years).
The problem with Soviet Communism is that they tried to take this process of societal and economic evolution and ignore the evolution component. Human beings may eventually evolve into gigantic floating heads that feed off the energies of the stars. However regardless of whether this is true or even possible you can't decree that as of this date everyone is going to be a floating head. That's what Lenin and his lot tried to do with Communism, they tried to say we're going to legislate the future into being the present.
If you wrote the code in your own time on your own PC, and it's not directly applicable to what you are doing at work(which it doesn't sound like is the case. Then you can get a lawyer as the "all your IP are belong to us" rules are usually largely unenforcable. Most employment contracts(and a lot of non employment contracts) contain lots of draconian clauses which the courts will throw out but most people will never challenge.
If however the code was written on company time, company resources, or as part of your job, or it's a derivative product of what you do at work, as seems to be the case, then it belongs to the company. There are no ifs ands or buts about this and there's no legal gray area. You don't own it you can't release it.
You can ask your company to transfer copyright of the code to you, or you can ask them to release the code GPL, but if they won't do either of those things then there's absolutely nothing you can do legally.
If you were to release this code as GPL without one of those two things happening then the license would be invalid and you, as well as quite possibly anyone else using your code could be held liable.
Communism according to Marx is the small town writ large. That's it. No magic, no huge government aparatus, no secret police, it's just the idea that as we evolve as a society we will find a way to interact economically with each other in a billion person city the way we did when we had a town of 20 and we knew everyone. It's basically ethics without observation.
It's not so much a paradox as a matter of point of view. In the US all the rights of citizens are written down. If it's not written down it's not a right, so therefor the police/executive will do anything that they're not prevented from doing(after all it's not written down so it's not a right) and will try and push the rights people do have as far as they're allowed to go.
In Australia and elsewhere, the rights aren't written down and so by extension you can't claim that things that aren't written down aren't rights, therefor the police/executive have to make decisions as to what is right and wrong and so they have to square the decisions they make against their own moral compass and are less likely to be complete tools, the same goes for the judiciary.
That said of course there are some rather inane laws, and the AFP and ASIO(roughly our equivilant of the American FBI and CIA respectively) have been taking the American approach a little too much lately in the name of hunting down terrorists(and making complete tits of themselves on occasion), but all in all, rights are only as good as their enforcement. The Soviets had the freest constitution in world history, but it didn't mean much when the KGB came for you in the night, Australia doesn't really grant a whole lot of rights to anyone in the constitution, but for the most part we're freer than most down here.
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Yes in the open source world you can fix things that get out of date, but there is absolutely no concern as to what will go out of date or what impact that will have on things.
Microsoft hashed the release of Vista, but the Linux community of all people has no right to talk about new releases making drivers incompatible. Backwards compatibility doesn't exist in the linux world.
A lot of folks stop speeding for a while after they get a warning from a cop. Virtually none of them stop speeding forever.
Most people stopped using the networks which got downed, and if there's a high chance of getting caught using a particular service then yeah they're going to stop, but with encrypted connections, and the general fact that ISP's will only do what they're forced to by law or which benefits their bottom line, and you're probably looking at a pretty low number of people actually getting caught, so you're looking at pretty low risk.
I know the brits tend to have a please sir give me some more attitude when it comes to government shafting(or so it seems lately, though the US isn't much better), but this seems rather silly.
The problem with 5 9s is redundent systems. If you really want that kind of uptime you need to clone your infrastructure, including the physical server room. That's expensive. You need to have staff available on call, not just for major outages, but for everything involved with that system, and you have to pay that staff.
This makes the whole thing a cost benefit. I don't like having my internet down(though it happens pretty rarely and usually involves some dickhead cutting a line somewhere) and I don't like having my mobile phone down(which doesn't usually happen and is more often the fault of my phone than the networks), but the inconvenience of losing these services isn't worth the amount of money necesary to have that kind of uptime. It doesn't cost me anything but hassle to lose my internet, if it did I'd have a business connection with connectivity assurances.
As far as I recall, in the US at least, all land is actually owned by the government(on behalf of the people). The deed grants you specific monopoly rights to the land. Theoretically speaking the government can void your deed at will, though for obvious reasons they rarely do.
IP is the same sort of situation, all ideas belong to the commons, but the government grants you monopoly control over certain rights to that idea. Similarly copyright infringement is a lot like more like trespass than it is theft, someone is violating one of the monopoly rights granted to you by the government.
As such, perhaps a property tax of some sort might be in order.
However, rather than the shotgun sale provision(whereby if you value a certain thing at a certain price you have to sell it at that price), something along the lines of a limitation of recoverable losses might be more appropriate.
If you force people to sell then you allow large companies to buy the work of smaller entities that while not currently profitable, might, in the future be profitable for that creator. You also cause all sorts of problems for the GPL as they'd have to either pay incredibly large taxes or sell off everything they own to Microsoft or some other large congolmerate.
However a limited recoverable losses provision would be much more helpful. It wouldn't affect things like for profit use(where all profits are recoverable), but if you limited what a copyright holder could sue for(excluding profits derived) to some portion of the declared taxation value at the time of the infringement, you'd basically achieve most of the stated goals.
Companies might not be forced to give up their old libraries, but they'd have to either pay full taxes on them or their recoverable worth would be virtually nothing so if you got sued it'd be for very little money. Basically only the most recent/popular songs would really be worth suing over presuming no for profit use.
The great firewall of China doesn't even effectively filter content, and the Chinese can back up their filter with guns, how on earth does Rudd think this is going to work here?
He didn't do anything that renders him unfit for employment. However this is the united states we're talking about and while you might have to pay out a severence package if you do there's nothing legally to stop you from firing someone for pretty much any reason that doesn't violate affirmative action. Which is a bit odd I always thought. It's not ok to fire someone because they're a woman, but it's perfectly ok to fire a woman because you don't like the way she cuts her hair.
I can create a system whereby if a customer is forced to wait over half an hour they are automatically given a free desert and implement it only by providing appropriate instructions to my staff.
It's autmoated, but it's not automated.
If this had happened before Toshiba caved it'd have been different, but it didn't. Microsoft got stuck with a loser(pause for the cheers, vista jokes, general fanboism), and they've ditched it and are moving on.
I'm sick of this story, it's all over the news everywhere and it's not news. If Microsoft had decided to keep going on HD-DVD after Toshiba had given up that'd be news(and idiocy).
One school of thought is that if you hire a photographer to take photos of something that it's an instance of work for hire, which means that the copyright, and therefor the negatives, belong to you(as the person doing the hiring). In this instance you can take the negatives and get as many copies of them made in whatever fashion you like, and do anything you like with them, including sell them to a company for advertising purposes.
This is a relatively sensible view, and you'll find that when most photographers get other photographers to do work for them that this is the kind of deal they insist on getting.
The counter argument you get from photographers(and the idea which many of them base their business model around) is that because what they do is "art", that it cannot be work for hire, and therefor they own the copyright and the only way for you to get reproductions of the work is from them. They tend to charge a rather ridiculous fee for the reproductions(though usually a lower one for the actual photography), and the really sneaky ones won't charge you anything at all since then it's definitely not work for hire.
As a business model it doesn't really work anymore, because most people hold the idea that photographs they've paid someone to take of them and their kids should belong to them, and therefor have absolutely no problems copying them without the consent of the theoretical copy right holder. Add to that the idea of better scanners and it's pretty much a non viable startup which only works because most people are too cheap to pay up front for a photographer who is willing to price themsslves at a rate which makes work for hire profitable.
Regardless however this argument doesn't apply to the case in question as the plaintiff most definitely was not involved in work for hire as he didn't take the photograph at the defendent's request.
If you want to change that, campaign for instant run-off voting in federal elections. Write your congress critter, put your little geeky heart and soul into it, because until you get run-offs third parties in the US are screwed.
That's not to say that third parties do particularly well anywhere in the western world, and they're never likely to work particularly well in a non parliamentary system, but at least with run-off voting when you vote for Nader and Nader doesn't win, your vote goes to someone who can(in the Australian system where I live now, it's either the person you specifically said would be your next choice or whoever the party/person you've voted for has negotiated for the votes to go to).
You still end up with the same schlubs in office, but at least you get to show who you really wanted to vote for and if enough people agree with you you could actually put someone in.
Also get over your self righteous bullshit. I know you hate the majority parties, and I know they have a lot of faults. Nader was a good candidate(a little unrealistic, but a good one), but if you think that voting with your heart was worth 8 years of dubya then you're an asshat.
AJAX isn't as quick as a native front end, but an AJAX front end onto a massive backend would, in this case at least, be a lot faster than a native front end onto your home PC.
The supreme court knows that making this decision has major consequences regardless of which way they decided. If they shut down the wiretaps and there's another terrorist attack they could be blamed, and they'd basically be deciding that most of the current administration have commited criminal acts. If they decide in favour of the wiretaps then they open up pandora's box, and basically destroy the idea of privacy in America forever.
They're hoping that a change in admistration will make the problem go away so they don't have to make the decision. This isn't a new thing, it isn't a "political" thing it's an issue of general human cowardice.
The folks who are currently being wiretapped will get screwed(as did Dred Scott), but that's not new either.
Ideally they'd come out and say "this is unconstitutional" and stop all of it, but issues regarding implicit rights like privacy(and for that matter even explicit rights like free speech) can be very divisive, and the court would much rather not be involved at all.
Given that in the current political climate the court could quite easily decide in favour of wire tapping and basically make the current realities a permanent fixture, I'm perfectly happy for them to not decide at the moment.
Rudd wants to get broadband to more homes not less, and most governments know stuff like this would be wildly unpopular, and the ISPs have exactly the same financial reasons(increased monitoring costs, loss of revenue from cancelled subscriptions, potential repercussions from improper cancelations), so are just as likely to fight.
Personally I doubt even the Brits who have a much more invasive approach towards their citizens than we do are going to pass something like this, it's political suicide to try and save something that probably can't be saved.
1) Don't know, don't care, the PC market now is vastly different than it was even when XP was released, comparing 1st month sales figures matters to accountands, but up or down don't say much about whether an OS is good or bad. You might possibly be able to compare 1st month non OEM sales, but even that wouldn't make a lot of difference.
2) I haven't used every piece of hardware on the market, but personally speaking I've experienced more hardware incompatibility on Linux than on Vista. A couple of things didn't work right away, and a couple of things required work arounds, but the same has always been true of my Linux system, and at least Microsoft didn't shaft driver developers simply because they disapprove of the way they license their own product(see the whole GPL export debacle a few years back). Hardware compatibility is really a hardware vendor thing anyway.
3)I do Integration work for a living and I don't even know what they mean by this one. I don't really want to integrate my OS with applications, I just want them to run. Do they mean that older applications don't take advantage of Aero or something? If you can explain this one to me, I'd be happy to hear it.
4) The Vista security model is substantially better than the XP security mode, and if we stopped blaming the UAC nags on Microsoft and instead pointed the finger at the lazy software developers who won't right their Windows App code to run in user space instead of as an admin we'd be a lot closer to the truth.
5) In a business environment deploying an new OS or OS version is expensive, and licensing is rarely the largest portion of that. I suppose if you were running your XP machines with Automatic update on pointing directly at windows update instead of at a SUS server, the activation requirement could be expensive or tedious, but that's a relatively small subsection of businesses really.
6) Any new version of anything is unpopular with some parts of business, making a major change to the environment is expensive and risky. My company is just upgrading to XP now, so it's relative popularity in business is really only important to accountants.
7) Haven't really noticed this much, there was a period back last year when they patched it a bit and it got less stable, but aside from the fact that your regular IT people are less familiar with the interface and so it's a bit harder for them to find stuff, it's not been much more difficult for me. In my experience the OS is rarely the cause of support calls anyway. Most issues are with third party apps, spyware, data corruption etc, and 2000 and XP had plenty of wierd it's easier to wipe the system than fix it bugs too.
8) Matter of opinion really I've never found anyone who believed that a developers response time was quick enough, and as I've not been sitting waiting with baited breath for a patch on Vista yet I can't realy talk about the response time. SP1 is taking a while, but that's a big patch set.
9) Total garbage, but no more garbage than any other claim by any government, third party vendor, OS manufacturer, or anything else. No content filtering system is effective, and unless you plan on running your home network like a corporate LAN you're not going to stop your kids from looking at what they want to look at, and even then you're not likely to stop them.
10) If you're not running a bleeding edge environment(which applies to 99% of the corporate world) waiting for a new version of anything to get patched a few times isn't a bad idea. Vista's not worthless pre SP1, but it'll presumably be better post SP1.
A lot of this quiz is marketing spiel, and I hate market droid speak as much as everyone else, but Vista has been the victim of the greatest FUD campaign I've ever seen for software, so maybe they needed market spiel.
The reason to know is a bit wishy washy, but it's probably just a catch all for situations where you have a guy who goes into a room full of plans to blow something up claiming he didn't know that's what they were going to do with the bomb.
Personally I think this law is probably pretty much unecessary, as IMO, knowingly providing someone the means to commit an illegal act in this fashion should be covered under "conspiracy to commit _______" offense tree.
It's not illegal to sell a man a gun, but if someone asks you to sell him a gun so he can murder his wife you're treading on dangerous ground if you do it, and five years and a fine is probably pretty lenient.
Sony owns the rights to movies, and continues to make movies. So long as they were willing to suck up some potential losses there were always going to be movies you couldn't get on HD-DVD.
Toshiba doesn't own movies, and so in order to hold out they would have had to bribe/coerce a media company that had no vested interest in which technology would win out to hold out, or generate sufficient momentum via superior quality/price/features that Sony couldn't afford to hold out anymore.
HD-DVD isn't sufficiently better(if it's better at all) than Blu-Ray to make it the overall market winner. Sony doesn't want to give up blu-ray the way they did with Mini-Disc. Everyone else just wants to sell product(ideally a whole new copy of everyone's dvd library the way they did with CD) and doesn't really give a rats which format wins.
Studios and Publishers seem to be fleeing the battle a lot quicker than I might have guessed, but without a massive difference in quality or penetration HD-DVD was doomed eventually.
Excluding issues regarding long term vs short term profitability and Executive bonuses, public companies can always be expected to maximize profits, and while having managers that are smart enough to realize that at times doing the right thing is the most profitable thing to do is an indication of a much better class of managers than seems to be the norm it's not the same thing as being ethical.
To give an example. Protecting my employees from harmful radiation because if I don't I'll get sued for a lot more than it costs to put in appropriate safety precautions and I'm pretty likely to get caught is good business. Protecting my employees in a third world country where I can buy off the government for less than it'll cost me to make their jobs safer simply because it's the right thing to do is ethics.
Very few publicly traded companies are ethical. This is partially due to legal obligations to maximize stockholder value and in the US to the current culture of "If you make money off it and don't get caught then it's ok", but it's mostly because of the fundamental nature of public companies. The metric used to determine the value of a publicly traded company is its share price. Share price is determined largely by profits. There is no metric built into share price which measures whether a company is ethical or not, only if it's profitable.
This is why the idea of Business Ethics is generally considered an oxy moron. Not because businesses don't on occasion get a result that is identical to the one which would have resulted from ethical behaviour, but because ethics are rarely the deciding factor and in cases where the ethical solution is not at least neutral to share holder value, and ideally directly beneficial, Business Ethics are in fact often legally prohibited.
That said, many private companies, non profits, not for profits, etc are allowed to make decisions based on ethics and occasionally do, but the idea of Ethics in a publicly traded company is a joke.
Browsers have to ensure that their javascript interpreters are secure, and that they have ways to block, or make harmless most malicious attacks. If we just say "oh that's not important because people can just block scripts with noscript, then we don't get any further and we further stunt the growth of web technologies.
Apple is in the same shape, they're an American company and because region encoding doesn't inconvenience Americans(for the most part at least) region coding is enforced there. It's not their fault, it's jut that's the law and the law is actually followed because no one minds it.
On Slashdot, people are against DRM on principle, any and all DRM is bad(and for that matter any and all copyright is bad).
In the real world, people don't care about anything which doesn't affect their life. They can play their iTunes songs on their iPods, they can play their iTunes songs on their PC, they can burn their iTunes songs onto a CD and play it in their car, or in their stereo. They can even rip the songs they just burned and put them on a competing media player, upload them to the internet and share them with their friends.
Apple's DRM doesn't affect the lives of regular people so they don't care.
People do care about things which affect their lives(as this sort of nonsense would). This is why in pretty much every country in the world that isn't part of region 1, off the shelf DVD players(despite advertising to the contrary) are regionless. You buy a Sony DVD player in Australia(where I live) and stick a dvd from the US in it and it'll play right off the bat, because region encoding screws everyone outside of region 1 and the consumers wouldn't stand for it.
Microsoft gets shafted in this regard because they're based in the US and have to follow US law(which is based on catering for the needs of companies who want to screw people and citizens who are in region 1 and get first tier dvd releases in the first place).
If the RIAA tried to put this sort of thing on someone's computer and they couldn't play their pirated media files, or they couldn't play the sound recording from their grandkids, or the cd they bought years go, they'd go apeshit.
In the small and perfect scale the guy on the street is your cousin, or your neighbour, which is to say he's a person. You know who he is and his fate matters to you.
As you expand society, and particularly economics out to the macro scale, the guy you screw over to make your million is just another guy, he doesn't have a face, he's not real. Communism is when the fact that we don't know who the guy is doesn't stop us from caring about his well being.
We can already see this even in the United States. The pure capitalism of the old days when worker safety didn't matter, there was no minimum wage, etc. The laws we enact and the ways in which we view corporations and the economy have changed over time, and while we aren't living in the perfect society yet, and we may never do so, we're closer now economically at least than we were a hundred years ago(at least if you discount the last 8 years).
The problem with Soviet Communism is that they tried to take this process of societal and economic evolution and ignore the evolution component. Human beings may eventually evolve into gigantic floating heads that feed off the energies of the stars. However regardless of whether this is true or even possible you can't decree that as of this date everyone is going to be a floating head. That's what Lenin and his lot tried to do with Communism, they tried to say we're going to legislate the future into being the present.
Unsurprisingly this failed.
If however the code was written on company time, company resources, or as part of your job, or it's a derivative product of what you do at work, as seems to be the case, then it belongs to the company. There are no ifs ands or buts about this and there's no legal gray area. You don't own it you can't release it.
You can ask your company to transfer copyright of the code to you, or you can ask them to release the code GPL, but if they won't do either of those things then there's absolutely nothing you can do legally.
If you were to release this code as GPL without one of those two things happening then the license would be invalid and you, as well as quite possibly anyone else using your code could be held liable.
Communism according to Marx is the small town writ large. That's it. No magic, no huge government aparatus, no secret police, it's just the idea that as we evolve as a society we will find a way to interact economically with each other in a billion person city the way we did when we had a town of 20 and we knew everyone. It's basically ethics without observation.
In Australia and elsewhere, the rights aren't written down and so by extension you can't claim that things that aren't written down aren't rights, therefor the police/executive have to make decisions as to what is right and wrong and so they have to square the decisions they make against their own moral compass and are less likely to be complete tools, the same goes for the judiciary.
That said of course there are some rather inane laws, and the AFP and ASIO(roughly our equivilant of the American FBI and CIA respectively) have been taking the American approach a little too much lately in the name of hunting down terrorists(and making complete tits of themselves on occasion), but all in all, rights are only as good as their enforcement. The Soviets had the freest constitution in world history, but it didn't mean much when the KGB came for you in the night, Australia doesn't really grant a whole lot of rights to anyone in the constitution, but for the most part we're freer than most down here.