Dude, the university is not giving student names to RIAA. Rather, they are just forward letters to students identified by IP addresses. If the "accused" is innocent - as in never having illegally downloaded copyrighted songs while in university - you would bet that he/she will raise a stink and the lawsuit, if any, will be dropped once a probable source of confusion - insecure network, public access to a computer in dorm is explained to the plaintiff.
If Bill Gates sent you a letter claiming that you hit his car and asking for $3K in repairs, would you just settle because you are "scared of a big corporation" even when you know you are innocent?
If the school will not only not lift a finger to protect their students, but hand them over to the RIAA to a silver platter, then don't attend these colleges!
I take it that you have some meaningful explanation of why a university should protect students from consequences of a currently unlawful activity. Are we talking about students making highly creative derivative works from copyrighted music? Is copying taking place because the music conveys political protest and got censored? If this is just a student who didn't want to pay a tenner for a rap CD, I am not sure what educational/social value is there to protect.
If RIAA was to sue the student based on the information in the letter, they would open themselves to counterclaims of deceptive business practices and even racketeering. Given that a student would be able to declare bankruptcy for any significant judgement while RIAA members have billions of dollars in the bank, risks would far outweigh the benefits of such a lawsuit. I say the letters are exactly what they look like.
Yes, in the same way as running a game or a video authoring application under a time-sharing operating system "drastically lacks in performance". In overwhelming majority of cases, it has been found that stability, ease of maintenance and convenience of using 3rd party libraries with non-trivial algorithms are well worth the not-so-drastic performance penalty. Besides, in userspace you can use pthreads to take advantage of multiple CPUs/cores in todays computers. Writing an explicitly multi-threaded kernel driver is not trivial.
Just because some code controls a piece of hardware doesn't mean that a runaway pointer in it should cause a panic or even corrupt files by messing up filesystem buffers. This will also enable device drivers to make use of all available userspace libraries, with sophisticated algorithms that would never be used if all code had to be written from scratch and non-pagable.
Oh, so you also always carry a calculator, an alarm clock, a calendar and a sokoban game in your pockets? Must get awkward, especially if you still need a pack of Camels and a lighter.
Well, if you are not interested in unplugged use, why do you care if your battery lasts 10 minutes? On the other hand, if you need the flexibility, you can put up with an $100 part that needs to be replaced every couple of years.
US population is around 300 million people, world's is 6.6 billion. It seems reasonable to assume that the rest of the world has much more than 1/20th prevalence of talented individuals (who also get a chance to at least go to school) as US. Do you see anything wrong with some of them coming to work in famous american research facilities? Does it reflect badly on us that we don't overbreed and perhaps show a bit of ecological responsibility in an otherwise wasteful society?
You are actually making the opposite point from what you intended. Most families have multiple desktops and notebooks and could realistically benefit from pooling hardware for realtime home video editing, gaming, distributed backups or math/physics educational software. Yet, it takes geeks who only use OSS to actually set up clustering.
As for money part, we are talking about project abandoned by original developers. With proper legal support though, OSS would be easier to profit from than CSS as other people would create derivative works and pay you royalties.
Indeed, why should you trust a private company (that too made up of former black hats) to be any more moral/law abiding than elected officials under public oversight? I think you should become as passionate about politics as you are about open source.
A good start will be to encrypt old versions of files with a public key, for which the private key will, as a factory default, not be retained. As an explicit user action, a new key pair can be generated, and the private key saved on a USB drive and/or encrypted with a conventional password. There will be no way for unauthorized users to distinguish between these two cases and compel the owner to reveal the password that he/she may or may not have.
Coupled with a filesystem design that uses fresh secure random numbers to encrypt each file and directory catalog and stores per-file keys in a frequently overwritten area, it would be probably impossible even for highly financed government agencies or industrial spies to bring back deleted or changed files.
HIV directly infects brain, causing dementia and, if you take anti-viral drugs that do not cross blood-brain barrier for long enough, probably death. AIDS patients are much sicker than those taking immunosuppresant drugs after a transplant. Opportunistic infections are only part of the story, you would die from AIDS even if you lived in a sterile glass bubble.
Our current selection pressures do not include the ability to be born, live and reproduce without assistance of medicine and technology, let alone forage for food in the wilderness. If technology was suddenly to fail, or if we face an epidemic or political unrest, this could mean the whole humanity going extinct. Even defects we consider benign, like bad teeth or color blindness, would be fatal to a band of survivors trying to form a settlement after a catastrophe.
The law also provides for converting a temporary work visa to permanent residence. Obviously, this is absurd if the employer has to interview 300 million US citizens to make sure there is not one of them more qualified to do the job that an H-1 visa holder already has been doing for 2-6 years.
Imaging Ebola that spreads like a flu. Or mosquitos with black widow spider venom. Genetic engineering is probably essential for our long term survival as a species (for example, modern medicine and cultural values sabotage natural selection). But I am not sure we are ready for it at the moment.
You got it backwards. The job was already filled with a non-resident worker through an open interview process where US citizens were welcome and probably slightly preferred due to their language skills and lack of legal expenses. Now, the law requires the company to try to fire this well-qualified employee and replace him/her with a white^H^H^H^H^Hcitizen worker. This is unfair to the hard-working newcomer who put the effort and money to get a US degree and must now sell his house, leave his girlfriend and go back to the country that is going to abuse him. But moreover, it's unlikely that a US citizen will be as well qualified to do this particular job as someone who has been already doing it for a year or two.
Well, with a million pounds properly invested and a move to a safe but inexpensive country/area, you will have 16 hours per day to go visit your friends and spend time with your cute girl/boy - for the rest of your life. I think the respondents failed to consider other lifestyle changes that they would be able to make with the money. And of course, in my area a million bucks buys you a nice townhouse, so the offer is not very compelling if you can not move.
I would resent it too if an anonymous coward was able to score face time with Dianne without any prove that he/she represents the wishes of her constituents. Why don't you collect at least a thousand signatures on a petition amongst your friends, neighbors and co-workers and send THAT to her? I am all for publicly funded political campaigns and deferring most decisions to local governments that are accessible to their constituents. But for things that HAVE to be state or federal issues, we do need some hierarchical system of consensus building rather than politicians just listening to whoever is more aggressive in trying to contact them.
The complaint is coming from a Linux vendor, not from the customer. The merit is that such contracts are only possible for a company in overwhelmingly dominant market position - and it perpetuates such dominance by making the price to install Windows "0" as opposed to real cost of a competitors offer. Such practices have to be outlawed if we want a real capitalist economy with many companies competing with each other on price and innovation rather than a "country within a country" monopoly completely regulating the market - at best, by trickery rather than violence.
Suppose the test is really hard and contains many answers which are wrong, but can be thought as correct by a person who is moderately knowledgeable about the question. Now if you penalize guessing, I may answer 20 questions correctly and 80 with "reasonable" answer which are not correct, my score is 0 assuming 4 questions per choice. On the other hand, someone who answers 10 questions correctly and puts random guesses for the other 90, will likely get a score close to 10.
Basically, multiple choice tests which are so hard that even successful candidates will get most questions wrong are worthless. Consider also the potential of undetectable fraud if, say the janitor cleaning instructors room leaks questions in advance.
Linux runs you! Instead of being an empowering choice for advanced or cost-conscious users, it will mean lack of any non-essential applications that people wouldn't write for free. RMS should make a clear statement to disassociated FSF from this announcement and express support for all personal freedoms, not just freedom of copying.
There is not one case in the world history when communism was defeated with capitalist "us". Think of Russia, China, North Korea, Cuba... Sometimes the people in question, or their relatively enlightened leaders, decided that free market and/or personal freedom to express non-communist ideas is a better way to go, but such change always happened from inside. In fact, "us" capitalists often appear ridiculously under-armed compared to communists. In fact, unarmed communists can not really be considered dangerous or bad, as they are not forcing anyone else to live according to their beliefs.
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Dude, the university is not giving student names to RIAA. Rather, they are just forward letters to students identified by IP addresses. If the "accused" is innocent - as in never having illegally downloaded copyrighted songs while in university - you would bet that he/she will raise a stink and the lawsuit, if any, will be dropped once a probable source of confusion - insecure network, public access to a computer in dorm is explained to the plaintiff.
If Bill Gates sent you a letter claiming that you hit his car and asking for $3K in repairs, would you just settle because you are "scared of a big corporation" even when you know you are innocent?
If the school will not only not lift a finger to protect their students, but hand them over to the RIAA to a silver platter, then don't attend these colleges!
I take it that you have some meaningful explanation of why a university should protect students from consequences of a currently unlawful activity. Are we talking about students making highly creative derivative works from copyrighted music? Is copying taking place because the music conveys political protest and got censored? If this is just a student who didn't want to pay a tenner for a rap CD, I am not sure what educational/social value is there to protect.
If RIAA was to sue the student based on the information in the letter, they would open themselves to counterclaims of deceptive business practices and even racketeering. Given that a student would be able to declare bankruptcy for any significant judgement while RIAA members have billions of dollars in the bank, risks would far outweigh the benefits of such a lawsuit. I say the letters are exactly what they look like.
Yes, in the same way as running a game or a video authoring application under a time-sharing operating system "drastically lacks in performance". In overwhelming majority of cases, it has been found that stability, ease of maintenance and convenience of using 3rd party libraries with non-trivial algorithms are well worth the not-so-drastic performance penalty. Besides, in userspace you can use pthreads to take advantage of multiple CPUs/cores in todays computers. Writing an explicitly multi-threaded kernel driver is not trivial.
Just because some code controls a piece of hardware doesn't mean that a runaway pointer in it should cause a panic or even corrupt files by messing up filesystem buffers. This will also enable device drivers to make use of all available userspace libraries, with sophisticated algorithms that would never be used if all code had to be written from scratch and non-pagable.
Oh, so you also always carry a calculator, an alarm clock, a calendar and a sokoban game in your pockets? Must get awkward, especially if you still need a pack of Camels and a lighter.
Well, if you are not interested in unplugged use, why do you care if your battery lasts 10 minutes? On the other hand, if you need the flexibility, you can put up with an $100 part that needs to be replaced every couple of years.
US population is around 300 million people, world's is 6.6 billion. It seems reasonable to assume that the rest of the world has much more than 1/20th prevalence of talented individuals (who also get a chance to at least go to school) as US. Do you see anything wrong with some of them coming to work in famous american research facilities? Does it reflect badly on us that we don't overbreed and perhaps show a bit of ecological responsibility in an otherwise wasteful society?
You are actually making the opposite point from what you intended. Most families have multiple desktops and notebooks and could realistically benefit from pooling hardware for realtime home video editing, gaming, distributed backups or math/physics educational software. Yet, it takes geeks who only use OSS to actually set up clustering.
As for money part, we are talking about project abandoned by original developers. With proper legal support though, OSS would be easier to profit from than CSS as other people would create derivative works and pay you royalties.
Indeed, why should you trust a private company (that too made up of former black hats) to be any more moral/law abiding than elected officials under public oversight? I think you should become as passionate about politics as you are about open source.
A good start will be to encrypt old versions of files with a public key, for which the private key will, as a factory default, not be retained. As an explicit user action, a new key pair can be generated, and the private key saved on a USB drive and/or encrypted with a conventional password. There will be no way for unauthorized users to distinguish between these two cases and compel the owner to reveal the password that he/she may or may not have.
Coupled with a filesystem design that uses fresh secure random numbers to encrypt each file and directory catalog and stores per-file keys in a frequently overwritten area, it would be probably impossible even for highly financed government agencies or industrial spies to bring back deleted or changed files.
Smoking causes erectile dysfunction and low sperm count. Sounds like Darwinism all right.
HIV directly infects brain, causing dementia and, if you take anti-viral drugs that do not cross blood-brain barrier for long enough, probably death. AIDS patients are much sicker than those taking immunosuppresant drugs after a transplant. Opportunistic infections are only part of the story, you would die from AIDS even if you lived in a sterile glass bubble.
Our current selection pressures do not include the ability to be born, live and reproduce without assistance of medicine and technology, let alone forage for food in the wilderness. If technology was suddenly to fail, or if we face an epidemic or political unrest, this could mean the whole humanity going extinct. Even defects we consider benign, like bad teeth or color blindness, would be fatal to a band of survivors trying to form a settlement after a catastrophe.
Well, what do you make of plague and smallpox?
The law also provides for converting a temporary work visa to permanent residence. Obviously, this is absurd if the employer has to interview 300 million US citizens to make sure there is not one of them more qualified to do the job that an H-1 visa holder already has been doing for 2-6 years.
Imaging Ebola that spreads like a flu. Or mosquitos with black widow spider venom. Genetic engineering is probably essential for our long term survival as a species (for example, modern medicine and cultural values sabotage natural selection). But I am not sure we are ready for it at the moment.
No, it would be an argument that a group of lab researchers are Gods for this particular bacteria.
You got it backwards. The job was already filled with a non-resident worker through an open interview process where US citizens were welcome and probably slightly preferred due to their language skills and lack of legal expenses. Now, the law requires the company to try to fire this well-qualified employee and replace him/her with a white^H^H^H^H^Hcitizen worker. This is unfair to the hard-working newcomer who put the effort and money to get a US degree and must now sell his house, leave his girlfriend and go back to the country that is going to abuse him. But moreover, it's unlikely that a US citizen will be as well qualified to do this particular job as someone who has been already doing it for a year or two.
Well, with a million pounds properly invested and a move to a safe but inexpensive country/area, you will have 16 hours per day to go visit your friends and spend time with your cute girl/boy - for the rest of your life. I think the respondents failed to consider other lifestyle changes that they would be able to make with the money. And of course, in my area a million bucks buys you a nice townhouse, so the offer is not very compelling if you can not move.
I would resent it too if an anonymous coward was able to score face time with Dianne without any prove that he/she represents the wishes of her constituents. Why don't you collect at least a thousand signatures on a petition amongst your friends, neighbors and co-workers and send THAT to her? I am all for publicly funded political campaigns and deferring most decisions to local governments that are accessible to their constituents. But for things that HAVE to be state or federal issues, we do need some hierarchical system of consensus building rather than politicians just listening to whoever is more aggressive in trying to contact them.
The complaint is coming from a Linux vendor, not from the customer. The merit is that such contracts are only possible for a company in overwhelmingly dominant market position - and it perpetuates such dominance by making the price to install Windows "0" as opposed to real cost of a competitors offer. Such practices have to be outlawed if we want a real capitalist economy with many companies competing with each other on price and innovation rather than a "country within a country" monopoly completely regulating the market - at best, by trickery rather than violence.
Suppose the test is really hard and contains many answers which are wrong, but can be thought as correct by a person who is moderately knowledgeable about the question. Now if you penalize guessing, I may answer 20 questions correctly and 80 with "reasonable" answer which are not correct, my score is 0 assuming 4 questions per choice. On the other hand, someone who answers 10 questions correctly and puts random guesses for the other 90, will likely get a score close to 10.
Basically, multiple choice tests which are so hard that even successful candidates will get most questions wrong are worthless. Consider also the potential of undetectable fraud if, say the janitor cleaning instructors room leaks questions in advance.
Linux runs you! Instead of being an empowering choice for advanced or cost-conscious users, it will mean lack of any non-essential applications that people wouldn't write for free. RMS should make a clear statement to disassociated FSF from this announcement and express support for all personal freedoms, not just freedom of copying.
There is not one case in the world history when communism was defeated with capitalist "us". Think of Russia, China, North Korea, Cuba... Sometimes the people in question, or their relatively enlightened leaders, decided that free market and/or personal freedom to express non-communist ideas is a better way to go, but such change always happened from inside. In fact, "us" capitalists often appear ridiculously under-armed compared to communists. In fact, unarmed communists can not really be considered dangerous or bad, as they are not forcing anyone else to live according to their beliefs.