Isn't Choicepoint the group that bungled background checks on some of the freshly minted Homeland Security people? Some were not completed properly and at least 85 felons were subsequently employed in Airport Security.
I forget where I read that - probably in some magazine at the doc's office yesterday...
The guy won the case, now the National Electrical organization, and joined by the Building Code organization are pushing this bill to overturn that case.
I didn't think you could do that - get a new law, or have an existing one altered, and then retroactively apply it to previously settled cases.
If true then, for example, if it became legal to smoke certain currently illegal substances, literally millions of people could flood the appeals courts to get prior convictions overturned or erased from the records. Or suppose that someone discovered absolute proof that the lsat election was rigged, and that in fact Ralph Nader won? Would the SCOTUS appointment of Dubya be reversed and Mr.Nader immediately installed in the White House?
All kinds of chaos would ensue if that kind of thing were possible.
however, who is to say that these feuds don't *help* the community?
Yep, you're right. At least for the early stages of any project. There should be several competing products, and as they mature, the size of the user base will determine which product deserves to survive. Note that I'm not saying that the "better" product should survive, merely that the one people want to use should survive. One or more of the failures could be technically better, but less user-friendly, for example. Forks should happen for the same reason - somebody has a different idea about the way the product should mature. Over time, the lesser used forks would naturally expire, or be merged back into the major branch.
So, some dissent is good, provided it makes the products stronger.
Most of the free software most people use are developed by people getting paid to do so.
Would it be accurate to say that most of the people being paid to develop the popular apps didn't start that way? I mean, didn't these folks start writing the apps in their spare time with no backing specifically for the apps, and then the apps got popular, so they got funding (doesn't matter how) to continue the development? If that's the case, the "amateur" programmers writing those apps on Sourceforge with few users could one day find themselves with a user base to match Apache, Samba, GCC, etc. And a regular paycheck too...
As more of us geeks get the word out, more of the general public will stop paying exhorbitant prices for CDs and DVDs. One of three things will happen:
the RIAA will implode due to lack of funds
the RIAA will implode due to lack of artists
the RIAA will explode to due a suitable application of... erm, never mind...:)
But seriously, we may not see justice in our lifetime, but if we can indoctrinate our kids to visit the secondhand CD stores first, and only buy brand new CDs when the tracks can't be downloaded or bought used-but-in-good-condition, then the RIAA will eventually pass from this world.
Apart from politicians receiving "campaign contributions" in return for favors, another sad thing that seems to slip by unnoticed is this:
They snuck it into a bill...
That, more than anything, shows that the system plays favorites. It should not be possible to alter a bill by slipping in little bits that are substantially different to the primary intent. Need to get something like DRM legally recognised? Tack it onto a bill that's guaranteed to pass.
That, more than anything, shows how low our elected offcials can stoop.
BTW, here's my idea for campaign funding reform: let the politicians only get contributions from the people they're actually hoping to represent. No more big company donations to the parties or to individual politicians, no more scrounging for money across the country. Only allow them to take contributions from the district they hope to represent. That ought to give everyone a fair shake of the dice.
I got one recently at work that was tagged as SPAM by SpamAssassin. In the body of the message, each word had a bogus end-tag, something like this:
B</garden>uy Vi</chair>agra
I don't recall what the actual words were, but they looked like they were randomly pulled from a dictionary. Netscape happily ignored the bogus tags and displayed the cleartext message.
Of course, any spam filter worth using is going to do two things (for sure, and maybe others) with such a message:
tag as spam for multiple bogus html tags
tag as spam after deleting the bogus tags and then finding a word like Viagra.
IIRC, it was taggged as spam for too much html, for having a forged header, and for originating in China.
They can only acquire information that exists... As more people and organisations become aware that this is happening, more information will become "disconnected" - for example, ISPs will only record that Mr.Sixpack paid $X for Internet service, but there will be no record of the websites he visited, or the people he exchanges email with. Corporate policies will require that logs of all kinds only be kept as aggregate numbers, if at all.
Alternatively, people will realize that you can fight fire with fire, and every possible item of data will be recorded, on paper, so that if the Powers-That-Be subpoena information, they'd get a response that would make SCO's million lines of printout look trivial.
That works unless the company leaves due to bankruptcy. You can bet they'll have other things to pay off than a charge for removing unused cabling.
Better than that would be an upfront payment held in escrow for "restoring the building" at the end of the lease. As long as the escrow account pays interest that keeps close to the rising costs of refurbishing, the building owner won't be too far out of pocket. If the company bails out early, at least part of the cost is covered.
I used to work at a University that benefitted from a similar deal. A local company moved to new premises and my boss managed to arrange to salvage cable from their old building. We picked up hundreds of feet of old Ethernet cable that we could not have afforded otherwise. Mind you, this was back in the days when the orginal 1/2-inch thick coax was all the rage, so it was sturdy stuff. We rewired the University library with it, converting from 9600 baud X.25 to 10Mb Ethernet.
I'd prefer to think that AT&T are concerned about the way voters rights are being hijacked by a few eVoting machine companies... If they really own a patent on evoting machine, maybe the next election will be honest.
But the problem is that *all* of those questions are moot in the world of laptops and VPNs.
It gets worse - some people I know work for a company whose stated policy is to enable mobile computing. Whenever an old desktop is aged out, it's replaced with a laptop that the user is expected to take home at the end of each day. Sure, corporate policy also dictates certain anti-virus and personal firewall software, but virus signatures are not always up to date, and the personal firewall almost certainly doesn't filter email...
You're assuming SCO are going after one of the parties involved - maybe they're planning on suing the judge for reaching the wrong decision, or AT&T's lawyers for handling the case badly?
Dunno about the rest of it, but if SCO starts beating on AT&T they might find it very difficult to get phone service. Ever.
OK, so I don't know if AT&T as such provides any kind of phone service in Utah, but there has to be some kind of contact between the various Baby Bells and other phone companies and I can just imagine a quid-pro-quo call between some level of executives.
It needn't be too subtle either - a backhoe can do a substantial amount of damage to buried cables...
Suppose that happened and a bunch of independant artists had links to their works removed? Would that be grounds for a class action lawsuit against RIAA? The indies could suffer actual and quantifiable damages if their works disappeared from search engines as a direct result of the RIAA claiming that those works were RIAA-copyright...
OK, so that's stretching a bit - assuming enough indies would band together to kick the RIAA - but I can dream, can't I?:)
OK, so could Google be told "remove all links to possibly infringing sites"? Or could Google tell the RIAA, "we'll remove only the links you tell us about?" If the latter, I'd bet on Google outlasting the RIAA...
The ISP has no real obligation (no business contracts, etc.,) to even care about RIAA. Why in the world would an ISP bend over like this?
Follow the money... Who has more lawyers, more money, more lobbyists, more Senators, more Congressmen, etc? Any random ISP, or the RIAA? For Senators/Congressmen, insert whatever politicians are locally appropriate (e.g. MPs in UK). That's why the ISP would bend over...
If the law says they have to be able to provide records, and if a court tries to subpoena such records, not having them as a matter of policy is going piss off the judge... If they're very lucky, and have a good lawyer, they might get away with apologising and promising to collect logs in future. Chances are, though, the judge will want to slap someone hard.
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I forget where I read that - probably in some magazine at the doc's office yesterday...
I didn't think you could do that - get a new law, or have an existing one altered, and then retroactively apply it to previously settled cases.
If true then, for example, if it became legal to smoke certain currently illegal substances, literally millions of people could flood the appeals courts to get prior convictions overturned or erased from the records. Or suppose that someone discovered absolute proof that the lsat election was rigged, and that in fact Ralph Nader won? Would the SCOTUS appointment of Dubya be reversed and Mr.Nader immediately installed in the White House?
All kinds of chaos would ensue if that kind of thing were possible.
Yep, you're right. At least for the early stages of any project. There should be several competing products, and as they mature, the size of the user base will determine which product deserves to survive. Note that I'm not saying that the "better" product should survive, merely that the one people want to use should survive. One or more of the failures could be technically better, but less user-friendly, for example. Forks should happen for the same reason - somebody has a different idea about the way the product should mature. Over time, the lesser used forks would naturally expire, or be merged back into the major branch.
So, some dissent is good, provided it makes the products stronger.
Would it be accurate to say that most of the people being paid to develop the popular apps didn't start that way? I mean, didn't these folks start writing the apps in their spare time with no backing specifically for the apps, and then the apps got popular, so they got funding (doesn't matter how) to continue the development? If that's the case, the "amateur" programmers writing those apps on Sourceforge with few users could one day find themselves with a user base to match Apache, Samba, GCC, etc. And a regular paycheck too...
Did you miss the memo about voting machines legally ripping off the voters?
Simply put, it means that policitians are as much a saleable commodity as just about anything else.
the RIAA will implode due to lack of funds
the RIAA will implode due to lack of artists
the RIAA will explode to due a suitable application of... erm, never mind... :)
But seriously, we may not see justice in our lifetime, but if we can indoctrinate our kids to visit the secondhand CD stores first, and only buy brand new CDs when the tracks can't be downloaded or bought used-but-in-good-condition, then the RIAA will eventually pass from this world.
That, more than anything, shows that the system plays favorites. It should not be possible to alter a bill by slipping in little bits that are substantially different to the primary intent. Need to get something like DRM legally recognised? Tack it onto a bill that's guaranteed to pass.
That, more than anything, shows how low our elected offcials can stoop.
BTW, here's my idea for campaign funding reform: let the politicians only get contributions from the people they're actually hoping to represent. No more big company donations to the parties or to individual politicians, no more scrounging for money across the country. Only allow them to take contributions from the district they hope to represent. That ought to give everyone a fair shake of the dice.
I don't recall what the actual words were, but they looked like they were randomly pulled from a dictionary. Netscape happily ignored the bogus tags and displayed the cleartext message.
Of course, any spam filter worth using is going to do two things (for sure, and maybe others) with such a message:
tag as spam for multiple bogus html tags
tag as spam after deleting the bogus tags and then finding a word like Viagra.
IIRC, it was taggged as spam for too much html, for having a forged header, and for originating in China.
How about the guarantee that they'll send their DMCA attack-lawyers after you if you attempt to decode their list?
They can only acquire information that exists... As more people and organisations become aware that this is happening, more information will become "disconnected" - for example, ISPs will only record that Mr.Sixpack paid $X for Internet service, but there will be no record of the websites he visited, or the people he exchanges email with. Corporate policies will require that logs of all kinds only be kept as aggregate numbers, if at all.
Alternatively, people will realize that you can fight fire with fire, and every possible item of data will be recorded, on paper, so that if the Powers-That-Be subpoena information, they'd get a response that would make SCO's million lines of printout look trivial.
Better than that would be an upfront payment held in escrow for "restoring the building" at the end of the lease. As long as the escrow account pays interest that keeps close to the rising costs of refurbishing, the building owner won't be too far out of pocket. If the company bails out early, at least part of the cost is covered.
I used to work at a University that benefitted from a similar deal. A local company moved to new premises and my boss managed to arrange to salvage cable from their old building. We picked up hundreds of feet of old Ethernet cable that we could not have afforded otherwise. Mind you, this was back in the days when the orginal 1/2-inch thick coax was all the rage, so it was sturdy stuff. We rewired the University library with it, converting from 9600 baud X.25 to 10Mb Ethernet.
I'd prefer to think that AT&T are concerned about the way voters rights are being hijacked by a few eVoting machine companies... If they really own a patent on evoting machine, maybe the next election will be honest.
It gets worse - some people I know work for a company whose stated policy is to enable mobile computing. Whenever an old desktop is aged out, it's replaced with a laptop that the user is expected to take home at the end of each day. Sure, corporate policy also dictates certain anti-virus and personal firewall software, but virus signatures are not always up to date, and the personal firewall almost certainly doesn't filter email...
They can't realistically sue the whole world for using *NIX derivatives either, but that doesn't semm to be stopping them...
Isn't that CEO-speak for "buy me out", or "please take over my company"??
Make that I.P. Unix and you'll probably be hearing from SCO shortly...
You're assuming SCO are going after one of the parties involved - maybe they're planning on suing the judge for reaching the wrong decision, or AT&T's lawyers for handling the case badly?
OK, so I don't know if AT&T as such provides any kind of phone service in Utah, but there has to be some kind of contact between the various Baby Bells and other phone companies and I can just imagine a quid-pro-quo call between some level of executives.
It needn't be too subtle either - a backhoe can do a substantial amount of damage to buried cables...
OK, so that's stretching a bit - assuming enough indies would band together to kick the RIAA - but I can dream, can't I? :)
OK, so could Google be told "remove all links to possibly infringing sites"? Or could Google tell the RIAA, "we'll remove only the links you tell us about?" If the latter, I'd bet on Google outlasting the RIAA...
Follow the money... Who has more lawyers, more money, more lobbyists, more Senators, more Congressmen, etc? Any random ISP, or the RIAA? For Senators/Congressmen, insert whatever politicians are locally appropriate (e.g. MPs in UK). That's why the ISP would bend over...
If the law says they have to be able to provide records, and if a court tries to subpoena such records, not having them as a matter of policy is going piss off the judge... If they're very lucky, and have a good lawyer, they might get away with apologising and promising to collect logs in future. Chances are, though, the judge will want to slap someone hard.
OK, it's a poor attempt at humor, but then it is Monday morning...