I assert that Open Source Software - available widely through the internet - has the potential to provide our nation's enemies
And of course, Darl is completely leaving out the fact that Linux was developed by a non-American, outside the US... As was Minix before it. My point being that Linus Torvalds and Andrew Tanenbaum couldn't give a rat's ass about computing capabilities that are restricted by U.S. law at the time when they were developing Linux and Minix, because they weren't subject to US law at the time.
Well, of course they are Linux users. Why wouldn't they be? Linux is a derivative work of code they own, BSD. Doubly so, by virtue of containing proprietary code and techniques illegally appropriated and inserted into Linux. Of course they'll use it...
Bwaahhhahhahh - Sorry, could keep a straight face while saying that...
As part of the effort to protect our intellectual property rights, The SCO Group has met with several U.S. government agencies.
Good point. And it's not just government agencies using Linux that Darl would be aiming at. Let's not forget that the NSA is distributing a derivative work, SELinux.
They want "free as in we can grab it and sell it for money" software. Free as in, you do the work, they take the profit and give you zilch, software.
Which would only work until the next release of any given package, in which the author(s) would register worldwide copyrights/trademarks/patents and explicitly deny licensing to money-grubbing corporations like SCO.
Even if SCO really believes they can steal all GPL software, why would they think people would go on handing over the goods? Are they that insane?
By "residents" do you mean "US citizens currently residing in the US"? How about Green Card holders, or the various work permit holders (H1, L1, etc)? These people are not allowed to vote, yet are required to pay tax.
In some parts of the country it can take up to 10 years for a legal immigrant to progress from visa to green card, and then there's a further 5 year wait before he can apply for citizenship
...and I'm glad that Bell Labs is at least pretending to care about my wishes.
So, where exactly do you suppose the user gets to be picky about disclosing their location? At their cell phone, or at the telco's tracking center? I think you're assuming that the user can tell his cellphone not to give away his location. What if the phone always gives away its location, and when the user think he's turning it off, he's really only sending a flag to the tracking center saying "don't give away my location"? If that's so, the tracking center would still know exactly where you (or your phone anyway) have ever been, and who passed near you. All it would need would be a legal order (or a pocketful of cash) for the center to disclose your movements.
The example given was restaurants and other businesses. I think a perfectly reasonable way to respond to a cell phone popup would be to go into the restaurant or business and ask for the manager, then explain to him that for as long as they use popups, you won't be doing any business with them.
You'd need to actually care enough about it to do that though.
How many of them actually touch, or need to touch, the computers that send the spam? These people are well experienced at hiding their tracks.
I still think that a better solution would be to cane the people whose products are spam-advertised. Make it illegal to advertise via spam, then you can kick the crap out of anyone who uses it. Such users *have* to be relatively easily locatable, or people couldn't actually buy their products...
Well, it could be possible for the client to generate a fingerprint before uploading a file, and bang out a request to a central repository to check it to make sure it wasn't registered. That still runs into the extra/missing frame/byte/overlay problem - the fingerprint wouldn't match if the data were subtly altered.
I'd be very surprised if the various P2P clients couldn't filter out files listed on some master list. The problem is, though, what do you filter on? Some mystical hash of the contents? Changing one byte would change the hash without seriously damaging the content...
More to the point - a ripped file probably wouldn't match the officially distributed checksum anyway, and if you use some kind of "more or less matches" algorithm in the file deletion robot/spyware, someone will eventually lose something vital.
Face recognition cameras would have to be pretty fucking smart to be able to deal with a wide range of faces, especially when, at the moment, there's no law against:
1) growing/shaving beards/moustaches; 2) switching between eyeglasses, contacts, sunglasses (plain dark or mirrored); 3) switching between various kinds of hats and/or wigs; 4) cutting, shaving or growing hair; 5) etc...
Static intersection camers would need to focus on relatively close faces, so it would be trivial to "switch faces" between cameras, effectively disappearing.
But all that's irrelevant. What are the cameras looking for? Faces of known terrorists, presumably? Yeah, that worked really well the day the WTC came down. Wasn't Atta a known terrorist? Yet he was in the country, learned to fly a plane, then walked onto one. OK, so automated face recognition might have picked Atta out more reliably than a tired, overworked gate guard.
How many of Atta's associates were also known terrorists at the time of the attack? How many other "American Taliban's" are there, born and raised in the USA and therefore able to pass a background check? How many terrorists of other nationalities whose faces are not known? How many false positives will occur?
Personally, I'd bet that when the dust settles, SCO's assets will belong to IBM or one of the other companies counter-suing SCO.
In fact, if SCO really does owe Novell 95% of the license fees they collected from MS and Sun, SCO may already be technically bankrupt, owing Novell a lot of cash that they handed out to their lawyers.
So, it really boils down to who's going to be first in line to carve off slices when SCO declares bankruptcy.
OK, good. It's like I thought - SCO are hallucinating again. I mean, it would be like Ford saying that because my wife drives a Ford Taurus, I wasn't allowed to buy a Chevy truck...
So, if you have a real, honest-to-god Unix license, that precludes you from also using Linux? Isn't that anti-competitive? Or illegal in some other way?
And one day they'll try that on someone who: 1) actually wrote, performed & recorded the work in question; 2) has his friend-of-the-family lawyer right there beside him;
and then they'll find out what a can of worms looks like... It would help enormously if the artist main employer was the local police dept. C'mon guys, surely there're some cops that also write/perform on the side? Can't a couple of you get together and starting kicking these bozos?
To which the obvious response is, blank out the serial number in the image and print off non-numbered notes. Then you can either run the prints back through and print the numbers using a fairly simple spreadsheet, or use a rubber stamp kit (John Bull Printing Kit, anyone?).
I get the impression that you can scan and save the image, it's just when you try to print it out at the normal size that Photoshop takes steps. The law provides for making copies that are either much smaller than life-size (probably not so good for collectors), or much larger, which would allow you to examine the detail.
Anyway, it may not be the images that are being detected - it could be the colors... I remember someone in the paper pulp business telling me once that ordering a certain rag/woodfibre combination would get you a visit from some guys in suits, as would ordering "money-green ink".
1) would the marketing dept of the casino want to reproduce actual-size bill, or much-large-than-life? Reproductions are legal if either: partial; smaller than real; much larger than real; single sided.
2) If the law says "thou shalt not make a product that can copy money", then Adobe would be exhibiting gross negligence (at the very least) if their product was in fact able to produce lifelike copies of money.
I suspect very, very few people would ever realise that Photoshop was "crippled" in this way.
For a long time now I've thought the same about political campaigns - anyone who can't put together a good, solid argument promoting themselves, but instead simply trashes their opponent, doesn't deserve to get elected.
Thank you for making my point. Right now, SCO as a company has some value - they have products (that nobody is buying), probably some IP, whatever it really was they bought from Novell, etc. It would cost IBM money to buy them out, and it wouldn't really prove anything, except that IBM has money and is likely to buy out anyone that irritates them enough.
I think we're all agreed that the only reason SCO shares have value at the moment is because of all the hype and the potential of a $3Bn settlement from IBM, assuming SCO wins.
If they lose in court, though, they'll disappear like mist on a warm summer day and IBM will own a set of offices in Utah. If I were IBM, I'd be inclined to erase the building and replace it with a park.
Why would IBM want to buy SCO, when they can pound them into the ground, and then be handed their assets in settlement by the judge? Much more satisfying for all concerned - well, all that matter, anyway...:)
Or maybe the author has already got the result he wanted - a list of machines where a user can be expected to blindly click on a link... Could be some kind of research project, or maybe it's a new approach to spamming. For instance, what would it be worth to an advertiser to be able to buy a list of user names that could be relied on to click random links?
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And of course, Darl is completely leaving out the fact that Linux was developed by a non-American, outside the US... As was Minix before it. My point being that Linus Torvalds and Andrew Tanenbaum couldn't give a rat's ass about computing capabilities that are restricted by U.S. law at the time when they were developing Linux and Minix, because they weren't subject to US law at the time.
Well, of course they are Linux users. Why wouldn't they be? Linux is a derivative work of code they own, BSD. Doubly so, by virtue of containing proprietary code and techniques illegally appropriated and inserted into Linux. Of course they'll use it...
Bwaahhhahhahh - Sorry, could keep a straight face while saying that...
Good point. And it's not just government agencies using Linux that Darl would be aiming at. Let's not forget that the NSA is distributing a derivative work, SELinux.
Which would only work until the next release of any given package, in which the author(s) would register worldwide copyrights/trademarks/patents and explicitly deny licensing to money-grubbing corporations like SCO.
Even if SCO really believes they can steal all GPL software, why would they think people would go on handing over the goods? Are they that insane?
In some parts of the country it can take up to 10 years for a legal immigrant to progress from visa to green card, and then there's a further 5 year wait before he can apply for citizenship
So, where exactly do you suppose the user gets to be picky about disclosing their location? At their cell phone, or at the telco's tracking center? I think you're assuming that the user can tell his cellphone not to give away his location. What if the phone always gives away its location, and when the user think he's turning it off, he's really only sending a flag to the tracking center saying "don't give away my location"? If that's so, the tracking center would still know exactly where you (or your phone anyway) have ever been, and who passed near you. All it would need would be a legal order (or a pocketful of cash) for the center to disclose your movements.
The example given was restaurants and other businesses. I think a perfectly reasonable way to respond to a cell phone popup would be to go into the restaurant or business and ask for the manager, then explain to him that for as long as they use popups, you won't be doing any business with them.
You'd need to actually care enough about it to do that though.
I still think that a better solution would be to cane the people whose products are spam-advertised. Make it illegal to advertise via spam, then you can kick the crap out of anyone who uses it. Such users *have* to be relatively easily locatable, or people couldn't actually buy their products...
Well, it could be possible for the client to generate a fingerprint before uploading a file, and bang out a request to a central repository to check it to make sure it wasn't registered. That still runs into the extra/missing frame/byte/overlay problem - the fingerprint wouldn't match if the data were subtly altered.
More to the point - a ripped file probably wouldn't match the officially distributed checksum anyway, and if you use some kind of "more or less matches" algorithm in the file deletion robot/spyware, someone will eventually lose something vital.
1) growing/shaving beards/moustaches;
2) switching between eyeglasses, contacts, sunglasses (plain dark or mirrored);
3) switching between various kinds of hats and/or wigs;
4) cutting, shaving or growing hair;
5) etc...
Static intersection camers would need to focus on relatively close faces, so it would be trivial to "switch faces" between cameras, effectively disappearing.
But all that's irrelevant. What are the cameras looking for? Faces of known terrorists, presumably? Yeah, that worked really well the day the WTC came down. Wasn't Atta a known terrorist? Yet he was in the country, learned to fly a plane, then walked onto one. OK, so automated face recognition might have picked Atta out more reliably than a tired, overworked gate guard.
How many of Atta's associates were also known terrorists at the time of the attack? How many other "American Taliban's" are there, born and raised in the USA and therefore able to pass a background check? How many terrorists of other nationalities whose faces are not known? How many false positives will occur?
In fact, if SCO really does owe Novell 95% of the license fees they collected from MS and Sun, SCO may already be technically bankrupt, owing Novell a lot of cash that they handed out to their lawyers.
So, it really boils down to who's going to be first in line to carve off slices when SCO declares bankruptcy.
No... See the self-inflicted wounds? - it's clearly suicide...
OK, good. It's like I thought - SCO are hallucinating again. I mean, it would be like Ford saying that because my wife drives a Ford Taurus, I wasn't allowed to buy a Chevy truck...
So, look as it as bait... IBM/Intel inviting SCO to stick their necks out even further...
So, if you have a real, honest-to-god Unix license, that precludes you from also using Linux? Isn't that anti-competitive? Or illegal in some other way?
More to the point, NAT was designed to allow multiple computers to share an outbound connection.
1) actually wrote, performed & recorded the work in question;
2) has his friend-of-the-family lawyer right there beside him;
and then they'll find out what a can of worms looks like... It would help enormously if the artist main employer was the local police dept. C'mon guys, surely there're some cops that also write/perform on the side? Can't a couple of you get together and starting kicking these bozos?
To which the obvious response is, blank out the serial number in the image and print off non-numbered notes. Then you can either run the prints back through and print the numbers using a fairly simple spreadsheet, or use a rubber stamp kit (John Bull Printing Kit, anyone?).
Anyway, it may not be the images that are being detected - it could be the colors... I remember someone in the paper pulp business telling me once that ordering a certain rag/woodfibre combination would get you a visit from some guys in suits, as would ordering "money-green ink".
2) If the law says "thou shalt not make a product that can copy money", then Adobe would be exhibiting gross negligence (at the very least) if their product was in fact able to produce lifelike copies of money.
I suspect very, very few people would ever realise that Photoshop was "crippled" in this way.
For a long time now I've thought the same about political campaigns - anyone who can't put together a good, solid argument promoting themselves, but instead simply trashes their opponent, doesn't deserve to get elected.
I think we're all agreed that the only reason SCO shares have value at the moment is because of all the hype and the potential of a $3Bn settlement from IBM, assuming SCO wins.
If they lose in court, though, they'll disappear like mist on a warm summer day and IBM will own a set of offices in Utah. If I were IBM, I'd be inclined to erase the building and replace it with a park.
Why would IBM want to buy SCO, when they can pound them into the ground, and then be handed their assets in settlement by the judge? Much more satisfying for all concerned - well, all that matter, anyway... :)
Or maybe the author has already got the result he wanted - a list of machines where a user can be expected to blindly click on a link... Could be some kind of research project, or maybe it's a new approach to spamming. For instance, what would it be worth to an advertiser to be able to buy a list of user names that could be relied on to click random links?