... which the Slashdot title does not exactly convey.
From TFA, what happened is the domain was registered and used to distribute material without consent of the right owner(s), the infringement was obvious, the registrar was notified, and did not take action beyond passing the notice to the website owner. *This* lack of action is what made them liable; TFA even explicitly states that generally, registrars are not liable if they do act promptly upon serious requests.
For work-related passwords, my boss has every right to know my passwords if I get sick
Hmm, no, he has every right to access your professional data for sure, but this does not necessarily require him to know your passwords. Back when I was doing IT for a 25-odd people company, I'd briefed people that their password was like their signature: personal, and if some manager asked them their password, they should redirect the manager to me (happened a few times, each time the request was baseless and rejected, and when there was an actual problem, it was solved without anyone having to let anyone else know their password). Heck, I'd briefed everybody never to tell me their password.
Further, there should be a distinction between copyright for the purposes of acknowledging a work's creator (which should be automatic, and not expire), and copyright for the purposes of commercialising the work (which should be opt-in, and short). (I believe EU copyright already makes this distinction to some degree.)
Indeed, at least in France: we have "moral" rights (correct attribution of the author, respect to the author's work) which cannot be sold or otherwise taken away from the author (even after their death and even beyond the 50 years limit), and there are "patrimonial" rights which govern anything related to commercial use of the work, and which can be sold.
How about different terms depending on whether the rights owner is a person or a company?
For instance, physical authors, whom may want to ensure survival of their direct descendance, could enjoy up to say thirty years from death (or less if all immediate descendants have become adults able to sustain themselves), whereas companies, which seek profitability, would only enjoy at most 10 years from publication (or less if profitability has obviously been reached eariler).
Of course, actual criteria for either case could be discussed. I chose the ones above as examples only.
Zero, one, two. I have three stones. That makes no sense.
That's because you're mistaking the states and transitions. The right description is "I have zero stone. I pick a stone. I have one stone. I pick a stone. I have two stones. I pick a stone. I have three stones and there a no stones left to pick". IOW, you see the three transition, or actions, of counting "one", "two" and "three", but you map these actions to the first three states (thus ending on the third state) instead of placing them between the four states (thus ending on the fourth one).
Still interesting, but show me a count of things at Zero. Physically, if there is nothing there to be represented, why is it counted?
It is counted because it was expected and missing, or it was present then removed, or it is the lack of something expected to come. Think of someone who has a dept to pay but has no money, or who has a dept to pay and just enough money, or who starts his life with no possessions yes. In all three cases, a count of zero is considered, and even though Romans did not represent zero as they did other numbers, the concept of zero money was perfectly accessible to them, either in a comparison, or as a result of subtraction, or as the start of an accumulation.
A. Maybe you don't, but that does not apply to "programmers", only to an imaginary set of "programmers" which you consider yourself a member of.
B. Iterating is not necessarily entirely different from counting.
After all, the whole calculus thing stems from the latin for "small stone", which was the way to count livestock, by enumerating them. Start with no stone in hand; pick one stone per animal when you lead them some place; drop one stone per animal when you take the animals back; make sure you have no stone left, none missing either when all animals have passed. IOW... count from zero up, and then back to zero.:)
re: reinvestment, I have not seen indications or amounts in the letter. However, considering the economy in France, I suspect part of the move is to save money in order for the agencies to compensate whatever budget cut they might be hit with. That some of the saving be reinvested is rather positive in this light.
Re: Open Office (actually Libre Office, but let's not be too picky): maybe to its full power it is a piece of crap compared to the full power of MS Office. However, my wife, who cannot be said to be a FOSS zealot in any way, uses Libre Office (and Ubuntu) daily on her home computer and so far has never complained about any shortcomings of LO. And the reason is, she does not use it to its full power, nor does she use MS Office to its full power, and when you compare the suites for daily mundane use, they perform just as well.
Re: Subversion: ever heard of Git? Again, maybe it doesn't fit everyone's bill. But for my OSS-related hobbies as well as my day job, Git has not exhibited any shortcoming so far -- quite the opposite in fact.
Now could you please repeal that 3-strikes law? It makes you a bunch corporate lapdog douche bags.
Actually, this law, or more precisely the HADOPI which the law has created, has come under criticism from the government for its costly inefficiency: so far, HADOPI managed only to bring a single case to court, and it was an textbook example of a non-voluntarily infringer who was found guilty mostly because he tried to prove his innocence and despite his obvious intent to comply with the law (details upon request) -- and was fined a gigantic EUR 150 (plus court fees I guess).
Besides, HADOPI did nothing regarding fostering legal music and video offers, which was the second half of its mission.
Analysts (usual caveats apply) here tend to think HADOPI as it stands will not survive.
150e doesn't cover the expenses generated by the proceedings though.. so I guess it's true french.
Well, this is assuming that EUR 150 is all he'll have to pay.
However, in France (just like in many other places and possibly even yours), the losing side of the trial may have to pay a fine (here, the 150 euros), but also bears the costs of the trial, or "dépens"), which I think are the proceeds you are speaking of.
So I guess it (meaning your comment) is true... lacking in the fact-checking department.:)
Hope this (meaning my explanation) helps, if ever so slightly, a lessening of broad-prejudice-based commenting in the future.
What he wanted to say was this: Was sailing SSW at position 33 degrees N 72 degrees W. First mate, who you may recall was appointed in New Guinea against my wishes and is probably a head-hunter, indicated by signs that something was amiss. It appears that quite a vast expanse of seabed has risen up in the night. It contains a large number of buildings, many of which appear pyramid-like in structure. We are aground in the courtyard of one of these. There are some rather unpleasant statues. Amiable old men in long robes and diving helmets have come aboard the ship and are mingling happily with the passengers, who think we organized this. Please advise.
His questing finger moved slowly down the page, and stopped. Good old International Maritime Codes. They'd been devised eighty years before, but the men in those days had really thought hard about the kind of perils that might possibly be encountered on the deep. He picked up his pen and wrote down: "XXXV QVVX." Translated, it meant: "Have found Lost Continent of Atlantis. High Priest just won quoits contest."
Strategy (1) of always making sure that the resources are there just doe not work, because there will always be more demand than the available resources and these resources are ultimately limited.
Strategy (2) does not work because people downloading (and payingà more will still clog the net to the point that people paying less (and downloading less) won't be able to download what little they pay for.
Make sure to read the contract. What bandwidth exactly do they sell you? Usually, bandwidth is guaranteed, if it is at all, between you and them only. Beyond that, they cannot and will not guarantee anything.
It would be hard to say what you suggest, because of the N customers among whom the bandwidth should be shared, not all *require* 1/Nth of it. Some will happily use far less, and some will want far more. So in this model of equality, some bandwidth would be wasted to people who did not even ask for it, and will be unavailable to some people who could have made use of it.
Leave the technical details to the specialists; I simply wanted to put the concept into simple terms anyone could understand
Why do you think the saying "the Devil is in the details" exists? Because, precisely, any solution where you "leave the technical details to the specialists" means someone just *assumed* that what they see as a solution is feasible, whereas actually only the detailed analysis by a specialist will tell if it is -- and usually conclude it is not, at least not without a good load of devilling.
We French have a name for such holy solutions, we call them yakafokons ("Y'a qu'à - faut qu'on", i.e. "You just need to - Somebody should").
English-speaking people who ever read Murphy's Law book II also recognize the concept: a complex problem always has a simple, easy to understand, wrong solution.
So that would be an "equalize by IP address" rule. But not all IPs consume the same amount of data; so that would be "weighted equalize by IP address", or it would favor small traffic IPs -- not neutral.
But then, the weight for an IP would be provided by an IP... Honest IPs would send out their real needs (if they ever can determine that, actually) and dishonest IPs would send out exaggerated needs to be sure to get what they actually need, thus causing the honest ones to starve.
My question makes no sense only in a situation of infinite resource availability. Alas, such a situation is unrealistic (and a waste of resources which, at this point of our history, would seem quite inappropriate). Even a network which would be sized to withstand, on average, the current demand, occasional peaks are inevitable, and packets have to be dropped then -- how do we choose which packets to drop?
Or, IOW, how do we choose which packets to keep, and which ones do we send first? How do you "handle" competing packets in scarse resource situations? First come, first serve? That would favor heavy traffic and hurt lightweight protocols -- not to mention TCP vs UDP inequalities before packet latency. Equalize by port? That's calling for people to use nonstandard ports. Equalize by traffic? That hurts high traffic protocols. So what do you suggest?
So, again: what in technical terms, barring universals and ambuiguity, is net neutrality, i.e. how do you apply net neutrality in real conditions?
For that matter, we could probably even get away with less letters. Some of them are redundant when you get down to it. What you need are enough letters that you can easily denote all the different sounds that are valid in a language. You don't have to have a dedicated letter for all of them either, it can be through combination (for example the oo in soothe) or through context sensitivity (such as the o in some in context with the e on the end). We could probably knock off a few characters if we tried. If that is worth it or not I don't know but we sure as hell shouldn't be looking at adding MORE.
... and you'd end up with an alphabet the size of the Roman alphabet, no less. After all, it *is* the result of what you describe (the set of letters being rather constant across all countries using it, but the rules for 'decompressing' back into sound varying for each country, of course).
I have already reviewed both the French law and my contract, and both allow me to host a SMTP server -- Free even provides explicit support for it, which makes their action toward Trend even less acceptable.
BTW, the European directives specifically mandate that end users be able to use and provide services as they so decide.
Let's not get too excited here. Free does good things indeed, and I have a good overall opinion on them otherwise I wouldn't be their customer any more; but there are times where they fuck up pretty heavily, such as a couple of months ago, when they provided all of their customer IP ranges to Trend Micro's MAPS for inclusion to the DUL. In essence, they told a major provider of spam rejection lists that no Free customer is allowed to host their own SMTP server -- which is plain wrong: Free customers are allowed to host whatever service they want. But now, many recipients systematically reject their direct mail deliveries as spam. By providing these IP ranges to Trend, Free essentially worked *agaist* their contract with their customers -- and worse yet, it seems Free is unable to have an IP removed from the DUL.
Slashdot Mirror
... which the Slashdot title does not exactly convey. From TFA, what happened is the domain was registered and used to distribute material without consent of the right owner(s), the infringement was obvious, the registrar was notified, and did not take action beyond passing the notice to the website owner. *This* lack of action is what made them liable; TFA even explicitly states that generally, registrars are not liable if they do act promptly upon serious requests.
"On second thought: you're fired."
For work-related passwords, my boss has every right to know my passwords if I get sick
Hmm, no, he has every right to access your professional data for sure, but this does not necessarily require him to know your passwords. Back when I was doing IT for a 25-odd people company, I'd briefed people that their password was like their signature: personal, and if some manager asked them their password, they should redirect the manager to me (happened a few times, each time the request was baseless and rejected, and when there was an actual problem, it was solved without anyone having to let anyone else know their password). Heck, I'd briefed everybody never to tell me their password.
Further, there should be a distinction between copyright for the purposes of acknowledging a work's creator (which should be automatic, and not expire), and copyright for the purposes of commercialising the work (which should be opt-in, and short). (I believe EU copyright already makes this distinction to some degree.)
Indeed, at least in France: we have "moral" rights (correct attribution of the author, respect to the author's work) which cannot be sold or otherwise taken away from the author (even after their death and even beyond the 50 years limit), and there are "patrimonial" rights which govern anything related to commercial use of the work, and which can be sold.
How about different terms depending on whether the rights owner is a person or a company?
For instance, physical authors, whom may want to ensure survival of their direct descendance, could enjoy up to say thirty years from death (or less if all immediate descendants have become adults able to sustain themselves), whereas companies, which seek profitability, would only enjoy at most 10 years from publication (or less if profitability has obviously been reached eariler).
Of course, actual criteria for either case could be discussed. I chose the ones above as examples only.
Zero, one, two. I have three stones. That makes no sense.
That's because you're mistaking the states and transitions. The right description is "I have zero stone. I pick a stone. I have one stone. I pick a stone. I have two stones. I pick a stone. I have three stones and there a no stones left to pick". IOW, you see the three transition, or actions, of counting "one", "two" and "three", but you map these actions to the first three states (thus ending on the third state) instead of placing them between the four states (thus ending on the fourth one).
Still interesting, but show me a count of things at Zero. Physically, if there is nothing there to be represented, why is it counted?
It is counted because it was expected and missing, or it was present then removed, or it is the lack of something expected to come. Think of someone who has a dept to pay but has no money, or who has a dept to pay and just enough money, or who starts his life with no possessions yes. In all three cases, a count of zero is considered, and even though Romans did not represent zero as they did other numbers, the concept of zero money was perfectly accessible to them, either in a comparison, or as a result of subtraction, or as the start of an accumulation.
After all, the whole calculus thing stems from the latin for "small stone", which was the way to count livestock, by enumerating them. Start with no stone in hand; pick one stone per animal when you lead them some place; drop one stone per animal when you take the animals back; make sure you have no stone left, none missing either when all animals have passed. IOW... count from zero up, and then back to zero. :)
re: reinvestment, I have not seen indications or amounts in the letter. However, considering the economy in France, I suspect part of the move is to save money in order for the agencies to compensate whatever budget cut they might be hit with. That some of the saving be reinvested is rather positive in this light.
Re: Open Office (actually Libre Office, but let's not be too picky): maybe to its full power it is a piece of crap compared to the full power of MS Office. However, my wife, who cannot be said to be a FOSS zealot in any way, uses Libre Office (and Ubuntu) daily on her home computer and so far has never complained about any shortcomings of LO. And the reason is, she does not use it to its full power, nor does she use MS Office to its full power, and when you compare the suites for daily mundane use, they perform just as well.
Re: Subversion: ever heard of Git? Again, maybe it doesn't fit everyone's bill. But for my OSS-related hobbies as well as my day job, Git has not exhibited any shortcoming so far -- quite the opposite in fact.
Now could you please repeal that 3-strikes law? It makes you a bunch corporate lapdog douche bags.
Actually, this law, or more precisely the HADOPI which the law has created, has come under criticism from the government for its costly inefficiency: so far, HADOPI managed only to bring a single case to court, and it was an textbook example of a non-voluntarily infringer who was found guilty mostly because he tried to prove his innocence and despite his obvious intent to comply with the law (details upon request) -- and was fined a gigantic EUR 150 (plus court fees I guess).
Besides, HADOPI did nothing regarding fostering legal music and video offers, which was the second half of its mission.
Analysts (usual caveats apply) here tend to think HADOPI as it stands will not survive.
Thanks. Love your fries.
Want some frogs with that? :)
150e doesn't cover the expenses generated by the proceedings though.. so I guess it's true french.
Well, this is assuming that EUR 150 is all he'll have to pay.
However, in France (just like in many other places and possibly even yours), the losing side of the trial may have to pay a fine (here, the 150 euros), but also bears the costs of the trial, or "dépens"), which I think are the proceeds you are speaking of.
So I guess it (meaning your comment) is true... lacking in the fact-checking department. :)
Hope this (meaning my explanation) helps, if ever so slightly, a lessening of broad-prejudice-based commenting in the future.
What he wanted to say was this: Was sailing SSW at position 33 degrees N 72 degrees W. First mate, who you may recall was appointed in New Guinea against my wishes and is probably a head-hunter, indicated by signs that something was amiss. It appears that quite a vast expanse of seabed has risen up in the night. It contains a large number of buildings, many of which appear pyramid-like in structure. We are aground in the courtyard of one of these. There are some rather unpleasant statues. Amiable old men in long robes and diving helmets have come aboard the ship and are mingling happily with the passengers, who think we organized this. Please advise.
His questing finger moved slowly down the page, and stopped. Good old International Maritime Codes. They'd been devised eighty years before, but the men in those days had really thought hard about the kind of perils that might possibly be encountered on the deep. He picked up his pen and wrote down: "XXXV QVVX." Translated, it meant: "Have found Lost Continent of Atlantis. High Priest just won quoits contest."
in Good Omens, by Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett.
So this model works on a strategy of waste and artificial pricing ?
Strategy (1) of always making sure that the resources are there just doe not work, because there will always be more demand than the available resources and these resources are ultimately limited.
Strategy (2) does not work because people downloading (and payingà more will still clog the net to the point that people paying less (and downloading less) won't be able to download what little they pay for.
Make sure to read the contract. What bandwidth exactly do they sell you? Usually, bandwidth is guaranteed, if it is at all, between you and them only. Beyond that, they cannot and will not guarantee anything.
It would be hard to say what you suggest, because of the N customers among whom the bandwidth should be shared, not all *require* 1/Nth of it. Some will happily use far less, and some will want far more. So in this model of equality, some bandwidth would be wasted to people who did not even ask for it, and will be unavailable to some people who could have made use of it.
Leave the technical details to the specialists; I simply wanted to put the concept into simple terms anyone could understand
Why do you think the saying "the Devil is in the details" exists? Because, precisely, any solution where you "leave the technical details to the specialists" means someone just *assumed* that what they see as a solution is feasible, whereas actually only the detailed analysis by a specialist will tell if it is -- and usually conclude it is not, at least not without a good load of devilling.
We French have a name for such holy solutions, we call them yakafokons ("Y'a qu'à - faut qu'on", i.e. "You just need to - Somebody should").
English-speaking people who ever read Murphy's Law book II also recognize the concept: a complex problem always has a simple, easy to understand, wrong solution.
So that would be an "equalize by IP address" rule. But not all IPs consume the same amount of data; so that would be "weighted equalize by IP address", or it would favor small traffic IPs -- not neutral.
But then, the weight for an IP would be provided by an IP... Honest IPs would send out their real needs (if they ever can determine that, actually) and dishonest IPs would send out exaggerated needs to be sure to get what they actually need, thus causing the honest ones to starve.
Doesn't seem neutral to me.
My question makes no sense only in a situation of infinite resource availability. Alas, such a situation is unrealistic (and a waste of resources which, at this point of our history, would seem quite inappropriate). Even a network which would be sized to withstand, on average, the current demand, occasional peaks are inevitable, and packets have to be dropped then -- how do we choose which packets to drop?
Or, IOW, how do we choose which packets to keep, and which ones do we send first? How do you "handle" competing packets in scarse resource situations? First come, first serve? That would favor heavy traffic and hurt lightweight protocols -- not to mention TCP vs UDP inequalities before packet latency. Equalize by port? That's calling for people to use nonstandard ports. Equalize by traffic? That hurts high traffic protocols. So what do you suggest?
So, again: what in technical terms, barring universals and ambuiguity, is net neutrality, i.e. how do you apply net neutrality in real conditions?
All right. This appears simple. Now *is* it simple, i.e., how do you go about implementing this in practice?
This would imply that net neutrality can be easily defined in simple terms; what, according to you, are those terms exactly?
For that matter, we could probably even get away with less letters. Some of them are redundant when you get down to it. What you need are enough letters that you can easily denote all the different sounds that are valid in a language. You don't have to have a dedicated letter for all of them either, it can be through combination (for example the oo in soothe) or through context sensitivity (such as the o in some in context with the e on the end). We could probably knock off a few characters if we tried. If that is worth it or not I don't know but we sure as hell shouldn't be looking at adding MORE.
... and you'd end up with an alphabet the size of the Roman alphabet, no less. After all, it *is* the result of what you describe (the set of letters being rather constant across all countries using it, but the rules for 'decompressing' back into sound varying for each country, of course).
I have already reviewed both the French law and my contract, and both allow me to host a SMTP server -- Free even provides explicit support for it, which makes their action toward Trend even less acceptable.
BTW, the European directives specifically mandate that end users be able to use and provide services as they so decide.
Let's not get too excited here. Free does good things indeed, and I have a good overall opinion on them otherwise I wouldn't be their customer any more; but there are times where they fuck up pretty heavily, such as a couple of months ago, when they provided all of their customer IP ranges to Trend Micro's MAPS for inclusion to the DUL. In essence, they told a major provider of spam rejection lists that no Free customer is allowed to host their own SMTP server -- which is plain wrong: Free customers are allowed to host whatever service they want. But now, many recipients systematically reject their direct mail deliveries as spam. By providing these IP ranges to Trend, Free essentially worked *agaist* their contract with their customers -- and worse yet, it seems Free is unable to have an IP removed from the DUL.