(This is something that people often seem to get confused about - open source does NOT always mean its legal)
It doesn't mean illegal. Not even as much as closed source does. How many closed source products have you seen in trouble and how many open? The only open source thing I remember is SCO's lawsuit, which I think everyone agrees is ridiculous. Also Microsoft and Sun paid them millions of dollars in "license" fees (even though 95% should have probably gone to Novell). No one's talking about those liceses, maybe SCO found something in Windows and Solaris that infringed on the copyrights they believe they have? Also, didn't Microsoft have a couple of patent problems recently?
First off, just note that this was an appeals court overturning a dismissal in the employee's favor. This just means it goes back to the lower court to be decided. The judge basically said the complaint was sufficient to go forward to a trial.
I am somewhat torn on the issue, so first my argument against him...
The data on the laptop belonged to IAC, not the employee. It wasn't personal emails to his wife or his personal credit card information. It was data gained during his employment and deleting those files was a malicious act taken after his employment ended. Would anyone here really say it is OK for someone to login to the server on their last day and wipe the company's customer database when they don't have a backup? What about a bank employee deleting financial records? Once you agree that those occurences of deleting data would be wrong, it's just a matter of scale to determine how wrong his actions were.
On the other hand, his contract specifically let him return or delete the data on his laptop. They probably didn't anticipate him leaving this way, and maybe he was supposed to backup those files to the company server or store them there in the first place. I don't think it matters though. When you have a contract (like his employment contract), you HAVE to take the plain meaning of it's words. The judge in the opinion tried several different ways to explain how IAC may have been thinking when they created the contract, but you can only argue that if the actual words of the contract are ambiguous. That is why lawyers make so much money, they are supposed to catch things like that. Saying that he can delete the data before returning the laptop is pretty plain to me. In either case, if the employement agreement was a standard employment contract for the company with minor modifications, any ambiguities must be decided against the drafter. If he has some say in the wording of the contract and had things changed from the first draft that wouldn't be the case though.
Also note that th
Of course, take this all with a grain of salt as I am not a lawyer...
This has to be because of FILE SHARING. If just a few of us had gone to a movie instead of downloading it on the internet, then that poor set painter dude that's always on the screen at my theater could have afforded to send his kids to college so they wouldn't have to paint movie sets for a living. Shame on all of us!
Seriously though, you know the MPAA is going to try using that agrument to get some kind of new legislation passed or in court against some yet to be named foe.
Well for me it's not so much about using a free (or even Free) operating system, but about using a good one. I like a lot of things about Linux and Ubuntu that don't have to do with it being Free or having no cost. However, I would like an easier experience getting things to just work such as DVD, MPEG, and MP3 playing.
Others were right, I did try to install over the old Firefox, which wasn't smart. I didn't know why not though, in Windows I just installed the higher version over the old one. Now is it ok to untar a new version over 1.5.0 since I didn't use apt-get to install it?
I wouldn't mind something like CNR (click-n-run) being available. I'd probably shell out the $20 a year also. I like Ubuntu a lot, but it took me about 2 hours the first night to be able to play and rip MP3 files. I don't want to install the newest JDK from SUN either because I don't really know how or if it would interfere with Ubuntu. I tried installing the new Firefox 1.5.0.1 over 5.10's default 1.0.7 and hosed it pretty good, I couldn't install or remove firefox then. I was finally able to get it working by doing an uninstall and then manually removing the/usr/lib/mozilla-firefox directory, then doing an install again. Now I just run 1.5 from a separate directory. It would be worth $20 just to save me an hour of messing around and it would already have saved 4-5...
What I want to know is why Sun doesn't get together with the Ubuntu team to create a package for the new JDK 1.5. They have a binary installer for Linux, why not have a '.deb' file for Ubuntu? It's free, you just have to click-through Sun's license to get it...
Why not say evolution? Sure Darwin may have come up with the idea of natural selection, but evolution as a branch of science has been studied and developed by counteless scientists, not just Darwin. Is it an attempt by creationists to paint the theory as one man's idea and not a valid area of study? We don't call a nuclear non-proliferation treaty an "Anti-Einstein Treaty"...
Picking a subsample of the sample you already polled is just bad science. Now they may keep doing studies of groups of 5 dentists until they get a group where 4 prefer Crest... Then you're not just throwing away people in a study that don't agree with your conclusion. Your other studies might have been flawed so you just threw them out:)
When has such a thing happened in the past when they lost? My guess is that they will only let certain people talk and restrict questions to their UnixWARE business. If they say anything it will be about how "Discovery has ended and IBM has delivered many more documents, SCO has already found over 290 violations in Linux..."
Except that it isn't about copyright (right?). Now it's about "methods and concepts" that IBM improperly "disclosed" in violation of their AT&T contract. SCO says it's all about the source code, not copying of the source code but the disclosure of how UNIX does things to the LINUX community. By open-sourcing Solaris, SUN is doing much worse than IBM. All IBM ever did was release ITS OWN CODE under the GPL. It didn't even release code in UNIX that it didn't write. SUN will be releasing all of Solaris, including code that Sun didn't write.
Both above systems suffer from the same legal problem. I interpret the scheme as intending to introduce plausible deniability into the possession of large files of apparently random data. However, a group of people who independently happen to have the same XORed version of a file might be open to "conspiracy to commit" charges IN ADDITION to copyright infringement (unless you can prove that *everyone* *worldwide* has the same XORed version) [compare: possession of a bank card vs. possession of a tampered bank card].
It's about distribution, not about posession or masking what is actually on your hard drive. The people being sued by the RIAA are the ones sharing music. If I'm just sharing files needed to make LINUX then I'm not technically sharing music at all. They can do a search for files A, B, C, and D, but if I only share A and B then I am not sharing the MP3 file. You can't even use what I'm sharing to create the MP3 file. Same goes for someone sharing C and D.
So you do have to download twice as much, unless several files make use of the same random data. For instance, you could use file B to XOR with files 10.MP3, 11.MP3, and 12.MP3 to form randomish data files E, G, and I. Then use those with the original Linux to form data files F, H, and J. If someone has file B, they only need to download E, G, and I to form all three MP3 files. If I only share files A & B and other people only share E & F, G and H, or I and J, then they aren't sharing the music files. This would work well for popular music files. This is no more of a conspiracy than having LimeWire and sharing and downloading MP3s anyway.
The problem becomes getting the metadata and being able to perform a search for "10.MP3" that will tell you that you need files B and E to create it. That could be done with a P2P gnutella-type search over TCP connections where you never know if the results are coming from the peer you are connected to of someone down the line from them. I don't know how bad bandwidth will be tried anyway if you do have to download twice as much data. I just updated from 1 mbit to 6 mbit dsl, I can now download 5 megabytes in 8 seconds if I use my full bandwidth. 6 mbit is as fast as watching a DVD in real-time.
Actually I think this is most useful as a thought experiment and to show how ridiculous copyright law can be. You are talking about conspiracy and worse. The person with files A & B would not even be distributing the music at all yet you would treat them like a criminal. How can it be 'stealing' or 'theft' if the 'owner' can't even recognize what it is you are transfering as 'theirs'? Files A & B are no more owned by the owner of the copyright of the music file than they are by the owners of the copyrights to LINUX.
What if each file to be sent was split into two files of the same size that contained completely random data, but if you XORed them together you would get the original file. Each 'sharer' on the system would only share one of the two files. Anyone downloading it would get gobbledy gook unless they had the other part to the file themselves already. That way you are not actually serving the file since anyone looking at what they get from you will juse see random data. In fact, I could also create 'random' data to make the exact same data turn out to be part of a public domain movie from the gutenberg archives. This would double the bandwidth on the network, but the only sites vulnerable would be indexing sites, which you wouldn't need if peers could index themselves.
For instance, let's say I have LINUX.TGZ and it is 5mb long exactly (old version of the kernel;). I create a 5 MB stream of random bytes (A) and xor LINUX.TGZ with it to get another 5MB stream of random bytes (B). Then I take my MP3 of "Enter SandMan" (SANDMAN.mp3) which is also 5 mb and I XOR it with (A) to get another seemingly random stream of bytes (C). This way I can keep people from listening to my music without having (A). Then I xor LINUX.TGZ with (C) to get another seemingly random stream of bytes (D). I could then do a search for (A) by MD5 HASH and download it. Then I could do a search for (B) by MD5 hash and download it. Combining those two files would give me LINUX_KERNEL_0.99.TGZ. Now if I do a search for either (C) or (D) by MP3 hash and download it, I can reconstruct the others.
Combine (A) and (B) and you get LINUX
Combine (A) and (C) and you get ODE_TO_ME.mp3
Combine (C) and (D) and you get LINUX
Therefore, if I only share (A) and (B) on my hard drive, I can upload both parts needed to make LINUX to other users. If my friend shares (C) and (D) on their hard drive, it is the same, you can use both parts to create LINUX. Now if someone were to download (A) from me and (C) from my friend, they could illegally use them to recreate the SANDMAN.MP3 file, but why would someone want to break copyright law? My friend and I are just serving the parts to make LINUX.TGZ which is perfectly legal.
"There were hundreds of encumbrances to open sourcing Solaris. Some of them we had to buy out, others we had to eliminate. We had to pay SCO more money so we could open the code -- I couldn't say anything about that at the time, but now I can tell you that we paid them that license fee to expand our rights to the code,"
That really puts a hurting on SCO, IBM is probably after the evidence of this as well. SCO has pretty much given up on proving copyright violations, if you look at their oppositions to IBM's 10th counterclaim and more recent filings, they actually had the audacity to say that it was never about copyright. Anyway, their current theory is that IBM violated their contract with AT&T because they gave Linux inside information about how UNIX works, enabling it to grow much faster than it should have. Of course they have admitted themselves that there were no trade secrets left in Unix (Kevin McBride to Judge Wells in open court) when they dropped their trade secret claims back in early '04. So they are claiming that some intangible and indefinable quality of UNIX was given to Linux by IBM in violation of their contract. If SUN is open-sourcing Solaris with SCO's blessing, they really can't claim that IBM did anything wrong.
Microsoft and Sun paid tens of millions of dollars to SCO in early 2003. Caldera (who is now SCO) had run their Linux business into the ground and after purchasing the UnixWARE from Santa Cruz in 2001 (to purportedly make Linux and Unix play better together), they ran it into the ground as well. Without that influx of cash, SCO would not have had the money to pursue the lawsuit against IBM. It just happens that SUN (IBM's largest Unix competitor) and Microsoft (who has a lot to gain from the discrediting of Linux) paid tens of millions of dollars to SCO and the only substantial thing they got in return was the lawsuit against IBM. IBM is also seeking information from SUN and HP because SCO gave them a clean bill of health, and they have distributed and made public much of the information that forms the basis of the lawsuit against IBM.
PDF is really designed to store a document in electronic format exactly as it would appear on the printed page. If you print it, it will look exactly like the author intended. This (and HTML in general) are meant to convey information and let it be displayed differently on different devices.
If a company copies someone elses idea and puts out a matching product they directly affect the original persons ability to make money, so in sense they "steal" the original persons oppurtunity to profit from there idea.
But then I would guess your someone who copies music from the internet and other people because its not "stealing" and therefore with your logic your not hurting anyone.
So by your logic, if I cut out a singer's tongue, I would only be stealing from them since I took away their oppurtunity to profit from their ideas?
Just because someone objects to the improper use of the English language doesn't make them an anti-copyright fanatic or an anarchist. By using the terms "theft", "stealing", and "piracy" when talking about violations of the copyright laws you are doing a disservice to everyone.
Thomas is a 30-year pioneer whose projects include a computer with a 3D display, instant response, able to run every available OS and application simultaneously, virtually no power consumption or moving parts and complete security - and whose physical component is about the size of a pack of playing cards.
Wow! I wanna know when this is coming out. I'd love a computer...
With a 3D display
Instant response (does that mean all applications execute instantly?)
Runs every available Os and Application simultaneously
Uses virtualy no power consumption or moving parts
Has COMPLETE SECURITY
Is about the size of a pack of playing cards
Sounds like the basis for my perfect notebook system!
By all means, let the Chinese government be the sole source of information for its people. Google going black in China will vastly improve the freedom of all!
This slashdot article would be more interesting if it had been posted within two months of the forum post it is about. It would also help if these topics haven't been covered by four other articles in the meantime.
but the likelyhood of that second drive causing you data loss due to a failed array is infinitesimally smaller. It's guaranteed with RAID5, and the chance for RAID10 is inversely proportional to the number of disks in the array.
Assumption: You are talking about the six drives in the RAID 10 array being three sets mirroed drives striped, if you are talking about using three drives for each mirros so that the data is double-redundant, you are taking away the price benefit.
So, while adding more drives makes the chance that a second failure will hose data less likely, it makes the chance of such a failure occurring more likely. If you have 4 drives, you have two mirrors. Take the probability of any single mirror having both drives fail and you can multiply that by the number of mirrors you are striping to get the probability of data loss occuring. Having a second drive fail in a different mirror merely means that you came 1/2 way to failure twice.
Some SATA drives are approaching SCSI's reliability, but you really don't know what you're getting most of the time. I just two Maxtor drives fail in a RAID-1 array last year in a Dell computer I had. Maybe one had failed and I just didn't get informed, maybe they both blinked out around the same time, I don't know. I decent SCSI setup will have tools to alert you when there's a problem. I think most SATA drives are around 600,000 hours MTBF, but I think that is measured as part-time usage (i.e. drive on for 12 hours, drive off for 12 hours) where SCSI's 1,200,000 hours MTBF is measured as 24x7 operation. If SCSI drives are twice as reliable and you get notifications of problems, then the chance of having two drives fail before you can get one replaced is much smaller with SCI, even in RAID 5.
I'm quite dissappointed in the quality of new games and I therefore recommend that the gaming industry double their prices. Sure the games are a load of dung for the most part, but the money will enable the next generation of games to be that much better, right?
What about the/. article just a few days ago. All the guy did was delete an account of his supervisor and he got
three months of imprisonment, three months of home detention and three years of supervised release, plus a $5,000 fine and $20,350 in restitution.
The monetary point where the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act kicked in was $5,000. Since it took IBM contractors $20,350 in time to find the problem and get the guy his account back, the judge used that number as damages. If we count our time to find and remove this rootkit as damages, Sony is WAY over the limit. I say we send some execs to jail and see if they want to break the law like that again.
Slashdot Mirror
I am somewhat torn on the issue, so first my argument against him...
The data on the laptop belonged to IAC, not the employee. It wasn't personal emails to his wife or his personal credit card information. It was data gained during his employment and deleting those files was a malicious act taken after his employment ended. Would anyone here really say it is OK for someone to login to the server on their last day and wipe the company's customer database when they don't have a backup? What about a bank employee deleting financial records? Once you agree that those occurences of deleting data would be wrong, it's just a matter of scale to determine how wrong his actions were.
On the other hand, his contract specifically let him return or delete the data on his laptop. They probably didn't anticipate him leaving this way, and maybe he was supposed to backup those files to the company server or store them there in the first place. I don't think it matters though. When you have a contract (like his employment contract), you HAVE to take the plain meaning of it's words. The judge in the opinion tried several different ways to explain how IAC may have been thinking when they created the contract, but you can only argue that if the actual words of the contract are ambiguous. That is why lawyers make so much money, they are supposed to catch things like that. Saying that he can delete the data before returning the laptop is pretty plain to me. In either case, if the employement agreement was a standard employment contract for the company with minor modifications, any ambiguities must be decided against the drafter. If he has some say in the wording of the contract and had things changed from the first draft that wouldn't be the case though.
Also note that th
Of course, take this all with a grain of salt as I am not a lawyer...
Seriously though, you know the MPAA is going to try using that agrument to get some kind of new legislation passed or in court against some yet to be named foe.
Well for me it's not so much about using a free (or even Free) operating system, but about using a good one. I like a lot of things about Linux and Ubuntu that don't have to do with it being Free or having no cost. However, I would like an easier experience getting things to just work such as DVD, MPEG, and MP3 playing.
Way to submarine some quality open-source projects with patented code.
What I want to know is why Sun doesn't get together with the Ubuntu team to create a package for the new JDK 1.5. They have a binary installer for Linux, why not have a '.deb' file for Ubuntu? It's free, you just have to click-through Sun's license to get it...
Why not say evolution? Sure Darwin may have come up with the idea of natural selection, but evolution as a branch of science has been studied and developed by counteless scientists, not just Darwin. Is it an attempt by creationists to paint the theory as one man's idea and not a valid area of study? We don't call a nuclear non-proliferation treaty an "Anti-Einstein Treaty"...
Picking a subsample of the sample you already polled is just bad science. Now they may keep doing studies of groups of 5 dentists until they get a group where 4 prefer Crest... Then you're not just throwing away people in a study that don't agree with your conclusion. Your other studies might have been flawed so you just threw them out :)
When has such a thing happened in the past when they lost? My guess is that they will only let certain people talk and restrict questions to their UnixWARE business. If they say anything it will be about how "Discovery has ended and IBM has delivered many more documents, SCO has already found over 290 violations in Linux..."
Except that it isn't about copyright (right?). Now it's about "methods and concepts" that IBM improperly "disclosed" in violation of their AT&T contract. SCO says it's all about the source code, not copying of the source code but the disclosure of how UNIX does things to the LINUX community. By open-sourcing Solaris, SUN is doing much worse than IBM. All IBM ever did was release ITS OWN CODE under the GPL. It didn't even release code in UNIX that it didn't write. SUN will be releasing all of Solaris, including code that Sun didn't write.
So you do have to download twice as much, unless several files make use of the same random data. For instance, you could use file B to XOR with files 10.MP3, 11.MP3, and 12.MP3 to form randomish data files E, G, and I. Then use those with the original Linux to form data files F, H, and J. If someone has file B, they only need to download E, G, and I to form all three MP3 files. If I only share files A & B and other people only share E & F, G and H, or I and J, then they aren't sharing the music files. This would work well for popular music files. This is no more of a conspiracy than having LimeWire and sharing and downloading MP3s anyway.
The problem becomes getting the metadata and being able to perform a search for "10.MP3" that will tell you that you need files B and E to create it. That could be done with a P2P gnutella-type search over TCP connections where you never know if the results are coming from the peer you are connected to of someone down the line from them. I don't know how bad bandwidth will be tried anyway if you do have to download twice as much data. I just updated from 1 mbit to 6 mbit dsl, I can now download 5 megabytes in 8 seconds if I use my full bandwidth. 6 mbit is as fast as watching a DVD in real-time.
Actually I think this is most useful as a thought experiment and to show how ridiculous copyright law can be. You are talking about conspiracy and worse. The person with files A & B would not even be distributing the music at all yet you would treat them like a criminal. How can it be 'stealing' or 'theft' if the 'owner' can't even recognize what it is you are transfering as 'theirs'? Files A & B are no more owned by the owner of the copyright of the music file than they are by the owners of the copyrights to LINUX.
For instance, let's say I have LINUX.TGZ and it is 5mb long exactly (old version of the kernel ;). I create a 5 MB stream of random bytes (A) and xor LINUX.TGZ with it to get another 5MB stream of random bytes (B). Then I take my MP3 of "Enter SandMan" (SANDMAN.mp3) which is also 5 mb and I XOR it with (A) to get another seemingly random stream of bytes (C). This way I can keep people from listening to my music without having (A). Then I xor LINUX.TGZ with (C) to get another seemingly random stream of bytes (D). I could then do a search for (A) by MD5 HASH and download it. Then I could do a search for (B) by MD5 hash and download it. Combining those two files would give me LINUX_KERNEL_0.99.TGZ. Now if I do a search for either (C) or (D) by MP3 hash and download it, I can reconstruct the others.
Therefore, if I only share (A) and (B) on my hard drive, I can upload both parts needed to make LINUX to other users. If my friend shares (C) and (D) on their hard drive, it is the same, you can use both parts to create LINUX. Now if someone were to download (A) from me and (C) from my friend, they could illegally use them to recreate the SANDMAN.MP3 file, but why would someone want to break copyright law? My friend and I are just serving the parts to make LINUX.TGZ which is perfectly legal.
Microsoft and Sun paid tens of millions of dollars to SCO in early 2003. Caldera (who is now SCO) had run their Linux business into the ground and after purchasing the UnixWARE from Santa Cruz in 2001 (to purportedly make Linux and Unix play better together), they ran it into the ground as well. Without that influx of cash, SCO would not have had the money to pursue the lawsuit against IBM. It just happens that SUN (IBM's largest Unix competitor) and Microsoft (who has a lot to gain from the discrediting of Linux) paid tens of millions of dollars to SCO and the only substantial thing they got in return was the lawsuit against IBM. IBM is also seeking information from SUN and HP because SCO gave them a clean bill of health, and they have distributed and made public much of the information that forms the basis of the lawsuit against IBM.
PDF is really designed to store a document in electronic format exactly as it would appear on the printed page. If you print it, it will look exactly like the author intended. This (and HTML in general) are meant to convey information and let it be displayed differently on different devices.
Just because someone objects to the improper use of the English language doesn't make them an anti-copyright fanatic or an anarchist. By using the terms "theft", "stealing", and "piracy" when talking about violations of the copyright laws you are doing a disservice to everyone.
- With a 3D display
- Instant response (does that mean all applications execute instantly?)
- Runs every available Os and Application simultaneously
- Uses virtualy no power consumption or moving parts
- Has COMPLETE SECURITY
- Is about the size of a pack of playing cards
Sounds like the basis for my perfect notebook system!By all means, let the Chinese government be the sole source of information for its people. Google going black in China will vastly improve the freedom of all!
This slashdot article would be more interesting if it had been posted within two months of the forum post it is about. It would also help if these topics haven't been covered by four other articles in the meantime.
So, while adding more drives makes the chance that a second failure will hose data less likely, it makes the chance of such a failure occurring more likely. If you have 4 drives, you have two mirrors. Take the probability of any single mirror having both drives fail and you can multiply that by the number of mirrors you are striping to get the probability of data loss occuring. Having a second drive fail in a different mirror merely means that you came 1/2 way to failure twice.
Some SATA drives are approaching SCSI's reliability, but you really don't know what you're getting most of the time. I just two Maxtor drives fail in a RAID-1 array last year in a Dell computer I had. Maybe one had failed and I just didn't get informed, maybe they both blinked out around the same time, I don't know. I decent SCSI setup will have tools to alert you when there's a problem. I think most SATA drives are around 600,000 hours MTBF, but I think that is measured as part-time usage (i.e. drive on for 12 hours, drive off for 12 hours) where SCSI's 1,200,000 hours MTBF is measured as 24x7 operation. If SCSI drives are twice as reliable and you get notifications of problems, then the chance of having two drives fail before you can get one replaced is much smaller with SCI, even in RAID 5.
I'm quite dissappointed in the quality of new games and I therefore recommend that the gaming industry double their prices. Sure the games are a load of dung for the most part, but the money will enable the next generation of games to be that much better, right?
Is Qwest going to start charging me for purchases I make by phone call?