Editors, RTFA. This is not about email signatures in the sense of the things people like to put after the "-- " at the end of their emails to add a personal touch; it's about regular signatures (signing your name), and it's about the fact that the LACK of a name or signature in an email means that an email CANNOT be a valid "written offer".
The only thing this means is that if you include your name in your signature (the email signature again, i.e., the part after the "-- "), whatever you wrote in your email can be treated the same way as something you wrote in a regular letter that you signed with your name.
But that's neither surprising nor worrying - quite the opposite. The implicit statement in the story summary that the disclaimers some companies like to put into emails could somehow constitute a valid contract is a big, fat piece of Slash-FUD.
Speaking of which, I propose the term "Slash-FUD" for intentional FUD in and intentionally misleading summaries and headlines of Slashdot stories - the problem seems to have grown so large in recent years that I think it deserves a special name. Death to Slash-FUD! Let that be our battle cry.
Why would it be common sense if he'd end up in a US prison? There's two possibilities:
1) What he did was illegal under British law. In that case, he should be put on trial in the UK, and, if he's found guilty and sentenced, be put into a British prison. 2) What he did was not illegal under British law. In that case, the law should probably be changed; but he should be set free, simply because he didn't do anything illegal. The fact that what he did was illegal *elsewhere* is irrelevant, plain and simple; otherwise, you could also argue that China has a right to ask for the extradition of people who speak out against their government in the USA. (Not that this'd happen, of course, especially since there is - I guess - no extradition agreement between China and the USA, but I think you'll understand my reasoning).
In short, extradition is never necessary and always wrong - so a British guy, living in Britain, being governed by British law and doing something that may or may not be illegal under said British law ending up in a *US* prison is *not* common sense.
Huh? Are you nuts? It might be just me, but there's this bit about "cruel and unusual punishment" in that old document... it's called the "Bill of Rights". Ever heard of it?
For morons like you who don't understand what this means, it essentially boils down to the requirement that the punishment for a crime has to fit the seriousness of the crime. You can't get a death sentence for stealing a pack of bubble gum, for example; and that's not just because the law doesn't allow for it. It's because such a law would be unconstitutional.
That being said, there's another issue here that so far, everyone seems to be glossing over: the fact that he's facing extradition to begin with. Doesn't the UK have laws against computer crime, too? If so, why does he have to be extradited, much less to a country that does not extradite its own citizens to the UK? (Yes, the extradition agreement between the UK and the US is one-way - does anyone still want to tell me that Blair isn't Shrub's lap dog?) And if the UK does NOT have laws against this... well, then he didn't do anything illegal, and cannot and should not be extradited. (Otherwise, using the same reasoning, China could ask for the extradition of people speaking out against its government in other countries, too, for example, and I think that most people would agree that that's not something that should happen.)
And finally, you can't blame him for being anxious. Bush has shown time and again that he doesn't care about whether what he does is legal or not (in fact, he has openly SAID that he considers himself to be above the law); given that, I'm not surprised that the guy is worried.
Sure, he did something wrong, and most likely, he committed a crime under UK laws. But that doesn't mean that his human rights and the constitutional rights he enjoys in the USA and all that simply vanish; and most importantly, it does mean that his dignity simply vanishes.
The Germans have a clause like that in their constitution: "Die Würde des Menschen ist unantastbar" ("human dignity is inviolable") - it's the first clause in their constitution. Maybe it's time we get an amendment like that, too, so that concentration camps like the one on Cuba will be illegal. Well, not that the criminals running the country now would really care, of course...
Something I'm personally reminded of is the "interpolated" resolutions that scanner manufacturers used to use to attempt to trick you into buying their products. I'm not sure if they still do it, but I always found it rather ridiculous that a scanner that had a physical resolution of, say, 600x1200 dpi (already a bit of a stretch in most cases, too) was advertised as being able to scan at 19200x19200 dpi.
"Hackers had been exploiting this problem by installing unauthorized software on PCs."
No, no, no. The fact that "hacker" isn't the correct term to use here anyway nonwithstanding [1], people have been installing unauthorised software on PCs by exploiting this problem, NOT the other way around.
1. Feel free to whine that the general public does use the word "hacker" that way if you want to, but this is Slashdot, and I think we can expect a somewhat higher standard here.
Wow, yet another garbage patent that does nothing except combine two existing things (search engines and voice-controlled software). Is there anyone in the world who seriously believes that without giving Google a 20-year monopoly on this, nobody would've thought of this?
No, what troops need first and foremost is responsible politics that keep people from resorting to things like roadside bombs in the first place.
Seriously, think about it. Have you ever asked yourself *why* people do things like that? Maybe it's just me, but it might have to do with the fact that we're constantly interfering with them - messing with their internal affairs, assassinating their politicians, selling chemical weapons to dictators, invading them, killing hundreds of thousands of innocents, abducting people, torturing them, stealing their oil (not to mention their archaeological treasures etc.), and so on.
What would you do when another country did that to the USA? Well, maybe most of us wouldn't put up roadside bombs if it happened to us, but would you think of those who fight the invaders as terrorists? You might not like what they do, but you'd probably cheer the attempt to get your country back, at least.
Responsible politics would take this into account and act accordingly. Treat people with respect, and they will treat you with respect as well - or at least, they won't blow you up (some still might, of course, but there's always going to be nutcases, and we certainly have our own share, too - just take the Unabomber, for example). It might take a while until they really trust you that you have changed, but ultimately, isn't it worth it? Defend yourself if you're attacked, but don't attack others, and don't mess with their internal affairs. As soon as you do that, things like roadside bombs will stop being a real problem.
Or, in other words... we've made our bed, so now we have to lie in it. We have nobody to blame for our problems but ourselves.
Why would they have to make anything available under the GPL? They would if they took existing GPL code and modified it or incorporated it into a new project, but as long as they - for example - build a new media player from the ground up, they don't have to do anything.
The issue gets a bit fuzzier if they'd want to add DRM support to the kernel itself, of course; but binary kernel modules are a contentious issue, anyway, and while most people seem to believe that they're a violation of the kernel's license, they have been tolerated so far. But I don't really see why you'd need kernel support here.
Doesn't the existence of pirates *counteract* global warming, though? If anything, the fact that Venus is such a furnace indicates that there aren't any pirates on there.
If this mission confirms that this is indeed the case, it'll be further evidence that the gospel of the FSM is indeed correct.
Freedom of speech isn't the same thing as freedom from consequences - reasonable or otherwise.
OUCH. Using that logic, even China, Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany had freedom of speech - after all, you could say anything you wanted; you just had to deal with the consequences.
Slashdot is like McDonald's, in a way. Glitzy and shiny to lure you in, but when you take a bit, you find that the actual products's pretty lacking. Still, you come back for more, even though every time, you resolve not to.
It's a strange thing, and I'm not resistant to it, either (both with McDonald's and with Slashdot).
"Predictions of.eu becoming the second biggest domain after.com look like they may become true, with Nominet being responsible for "over four million".uk domains, the second biggest namespace."
It seems to me that the grammar's a bit strange there, but it seems that the author wanted to say that.eu looks like it will take over as the second biggest TLD from.uk (which would imply that.uk currently is the second biggest).
Actually, according to LWN.net's distribution list (just updated a few days ago), it's about 500. And if you leave out the inactive ones, it's still more than 450.
It's an illusion. The reason why you *are* being allowed to complain is that your complaints won't change anything, anyway; it doesn't hurt the government, and in fact, it actually *helps* them, since your energy and time is channeled into this cul-de-sac and since you now believe that you don't have it that bad, that you can make a difference, and so on.
That being said, it's not clear to me whether China is more open about what they do, anyway - if you interview a random Chinese person, would they know the ins and outs of what their administration does? Probably not.
Like it or not, the difference between the administrations of China and the USA is much smaller than you might think or like.
And another one is that an armed rebellion simply isn't viable anymore these days. A few hundred years ago, everyone had access to the same weapons, the same intelligence tools, the same everything, and soldiers were often volunteers or draftees; nowadays, you don't have access to any serious weaponry, you don't have the same access to information, and you don't have access to any kind of other military equipment, and most soldiers are indeed professionals who're well-trained and indoctrinated to blindly obey orders and think of you as "the enemy".
Even if 99% of the population *were* upset to the point of demanding change, what could they do? The soap box doesn't work because we live in a system where only two parties have the power, and where anyone else simply does not and never will stand a chance. The ballot box doesn't work because elections are manipulated. The jury box doesn't work because the "president" simply declares himself to be above the law, because congress is controlled by his own party as well, and because the courts are either powerless themselves (the lower courts) or gleichgeschaltet (SCOTUS). And finally, the ammo box won't work for the above reasons.
I still like to think that things aren't *that* bad... and maybe they aren't, compared to other countries like China. But I also really wonder whether what we see is only the tip of the iceberg, and if the iceberg itself isn't just as big as that in China, for example. Sure, you won't get arrested for being a member of a minor party, for example, but that may just be because there's no way for you to change things, anyway - you're being allowed the have the illusion that you can change things, which keeps you from seeing what things *really* are like and from *really* trying to change them.
It sure is ironic that you're willing to put this much trust into a Slashdot comment, which itself is also by its very nature an unverified claim from an anonymous (or at least pseudonymous) source...
What exactly would be the crime, though? As much as I sympathise, I don't know what's legally wrong with what D-Link is doing. If you run a publicly accessible server, then you should expect the public to access it; and if you don't like that, take measures to prevent it from happening.
Of course, trying to talk to D-Link is not a bad idea, either, but if this was a crime, then one could just as well argue that it's a crime when Google crawls a website without explicit permission - and I'm not even talking about caching or indexing the page here, just about connecting to the web server at all.
There's an even bigger problem with this: namely, that as soon as business *complies* with these things, it'll be perfectly legal for them to spam you. Oh, sure, you can opt-out, but that's a lot of hassles when you receive spam from thousands of companies; and what's more, how are you going to distinguish spam from compliant companies (where the opt-out links works as advertised) and other sorts of spam that provide you with "opt-out" links that, in reality, are merely used to verify email addresses etc.?
Licensing spam is like allowing people to break into your house and steal your stuff provided they leave you a business card and offer you an opportunity to opt out for the future.
Slashdot Mirror
Editors, RTFA. This is not about email signatures in the sense of the things people like to put after the "-- " at the end of their emails to add a personal touch; it's about regular signatures (signing your name), and it's about the fact that the LACK of a name or signature in an email means that an email CANNOT be a valid "written offer".
The only thing this means is that if you include your name in your signature (the email signature again, i.e., the part after the "-- "), whatever you wrote in your email can be treated the same way as something you wrote in a regular letter that you signed with your name.
But that's neither surprising nor worrying - quite the opposite. The implicit statement in the story summary that the disclaimers some companies like to put into emails could somehow constitute a valid contract is a big, fat piece of Slash-FUD.
Speaking of which, I propose the term "Slash-FUD" for intentional FUD in and intentionally misleading summaries and headlines of Slashdot stories - the problem seems to have grown so large in recent years that I think it deserves a special name. Death to Slash-FUD! Let that be our battle cry.
Why would it be common sense if he'd end up in a US prison? There's two possibilities:
1) What he did was illegal under British law. In that case, he should be put on trial in the UK, and, if he's found guilty and sentenced, be put into a British prison.
2) What he did was not illegal under British law. In that case, the law should probably be changed; but he should be set free, simply because he didn't do anything illegal. The fact that what he did was illegal *elsewhere* is irrelevant, plain and simple; otherwise, you could also argue that China has a right to ask for the extradition of people who speak out against their government in the USA. (Not that this'd happen, of course, especially since there is - I guess - no extradition agreement between China and the USA, but I think you'll understand my reasoning).
In short, extradition is never necessary and always wrong - so a British guy, living in Britain, being governed by British law and doing something that may or may not be illegal under said British law ending up in a *US* prison is *not* common sense.
Huh? Are you nuts? It might be just me, but there's this bit about "cruel and unusual punishment" in that old document... it's called the "Bill of Rights". Ever heard of it?
For morons like you who don't understand what this means, it essentially boils down to the requirement that the punishment for a crime has to fit the seriousness of the crime. You can't get a death sentence for stealing a pack of bubble gum, for example; and that's not just because the law doesn't allow for it. It's because such a law would be unconstitutional.
That being said, there's another issue here that so far, everyone seems to be glossing over: the fact that he's facing extradition to begin with. Doesn't the UK have laws against computer crime, too? If so, why does he have to be extradited, much less to a country that does not extradite its own citizens to the UK? (Yes, the extradition agreement between the UK and the US is one-way - does anyone still want to tell me that Blair isn't Shrub's lap dog?) And if the UK does NOT have laws against this... well, then he didn't do anything illegal, and cannot and should not be extradited. (Otherwise, using the same reasoning, China could ask for the extradition of people speaking out against its government in other countries, too, for example, and I think that most people would agree that that's not something that should happen.)
And finally, you can't blame him for being anxious. Bush has shown time and again that he doesn't care about whether what he does is legal or not (in fact, he has openly SAID that he considers himself to be above the law); given that, I'm not surprised that the guy is worried.
Sure, he did something wrong, and most likely, he committed a crime under UK laws. But that doesn't mean that his human rights and the constitutional rights he enjoys in the USA and all that simply vanish; and most importantly, it does mean that his dignity simply vanishes.
The Germans have a clause like that in their constitution: "Die Würde des Menschen ist unantastbar" ("human dignity is inviolable") - it's the first clause in their constitution. Maybe it's time we get an amendment like that, too, so that concentration camps like the one on Cuba will be illegal. Well, not that the criminals running the country now would really care, of course...
Something I'm personally reminded of is the "interpolated" resolutions that scanner manufacturers used to use to attempt to trick you into buying their products. I'm not sure if they still do it, but I always found it rather ridiculous that a scanner that had a physical resolution of, say, 600x1200 dpi (already a bit of a stretch in most cases, too) was advertised as being able to scan at 19200x19200 dpi.
Short answer: they don't.
Argh:
No, no, no. The fact that "hacker" isn't the correct term to use here anyway nonwithstanding [1], people have been installing unauthorised software on PCs by exploiting this problem, NOT the other way around.
1. Feel free to whine that the general public does use the word "hacker" that way if you want to, but this is Slashdot, and I think we can expect a somewhat higher standard here.
Wow, yet another garbage patent that does nothing except combine two existing things (search engines and voice-controlled software). Is there anyone in the world who seriously believes that without giving Google a 20-year monopoly on this, nobody would've thought of this?
Yup, that's definitely the kind of app a first-time windows user would run on their own computer, at home, in their spare time. Yeah.
No, what troops need first and foremost is responsible politics that keep people from resorting to things like roadside bombs in the first place.
Seriously, think about it. Have you ever asked yourself *why* people do things like that? Maybe it's just me, but it might have to do with the fact that we're constantly interfering with them - messing with their internal affairs, assassinating their politicians, selling chemical weapons to dictators, invading them, killing hundreds of thousands of innocents, abducting people, torturing them, stealing their oil (not to mention their archaeological treasures etc.), and so on.
What would you do when another country did that to the USA? Well, maybe most of us wouldn't put up roadside bombs if it happened to us, but would you think of those who fight the invaders as terrorists? You might not like what they do, but you'd probably cheer the attempt to get your country back, at least.
Responsible politics would take this into account and act accordingly. Treat people with respect, and they will treat you with respect as well - or at least, they won't blow you up (some still might, of course, but there's always going to be nutcases, and we certainly have our own share, too - just take the Unabomber, for example). It might take a while until they really trust you that you have changed, but ultimately, isn't it worth it? Defend yourself if you're attacked, but don't attack others, and don't mess with their internal affairs. As soon as you do that, things like roadside bombs will stop being a real problem.
Or, in other words... we've made our bed, so now we have to lie in it. We have nobody to blame for our problems but ourselves.
Why would they have to make anything available under the GPL? They would if they took existing GPL code and modified it or incorporated it into a new project, but as long as they - for example - build a new media player from the ground up, they don't have to do anything.
The issue gets a bit fuzzier if they'd want to add DRM support to the kernel itself, of course; but binary kernel modules are a contentious issue, anyway, and while most people seem to believe that they're a violation of the kernel's license, they have been tolerated so far. But I don't really see why you'd need kernel support here.
Wait, Jerry Zucker?
Of course they're dual-booting windows - how else are employees supposed to play the latest games?
Doesn't the existence of pirates *counteract* global warming, though? If anything, the fact that Venus is such a furnace indicates that there aren't any pirates on there.
If this mission confirms that this is indeed the case, it'll be further evidence that the gospel of the FSM is indeed correct.
OUCH. Using that logic, even China, Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany had freedom of speech - after all, you could say anything you wanted; you just had to deal with the consequences.
Second Life money can be converted to real money, actually. Why do you think everything costs so much on there?
Yeah... and while we're at it, why don't we give a nice and shiny abacus instead of a boring old laptop, too?
Don't vote, code.
Slashdot is like McDonald's, in a way. Glitzy and shiny to lure you in, but when you take a bit, you find that the actual products's pretty lacking. Still, you come back for more, even though every time, you resolve not to.
It's a strange thing, and I'm not resistant to it, either (both with McDonald's and with Slashdot).
"Predictions of .eu becoming the second biggest domain after .com look like they may become true, with Nominet being responsible for "over four million" .uk domains, the second biggest namespace."
.eu looks like it will take over as the second biggest TLD from .uk (which would imply that .uk currently is the second biggest).
It seems to me that the grammar's a bit strange there, but it seems that the author wanted to say that
Actually, according to LWN.net's distribution list (just updated a few days ago), it's about 500. And if you leave out the inactive ones, it's still more than 450.
It's an illusion. The reason why you *are* being allowed to complain is that your complaints won't change anything, anyway; it doesn't hurt the government, and in fact, it actually *helps* them, since your energy and time is channeled into this cul-de-sac and since you now believe that you don't have it that bad, that you can make a difference, and so on.
That being said, it's not clear to me whether China is more open about what they do, anyway - if you interview a random Chinese person, would they know the ins and outs of what their administration does? Probably not.
Like it or not, the difference between the administrations of China and the USA is much smaller than you might think or like.
And another one is that an armed rebellion simply isn't viable anymore these days. A few hundred years ago, everyone had access to the same weapons, the same intelligence tools, the same everything, and soldiers were often volunteers or draftees; nowadays, you don't have access to any serious weaponry, you don't have the same access to information, and you don't have access to any kind of other military equipment, and most soldiers are indeed professionals who're well-trained and indoctrinated to blindly obey orders and think of you as "the enemy".
Even if 99% of the population *were* upset to the point of demanding change, what could they do? The soap box doesn't work because we live in a system where only two parties have the power, and where anyone else simply does not and never will stand a chance. The ballot box doesn't work because elections are manipulated. The jury box doesn't work because the "president" simply declares himself to be above the law, because congress is controlled by his own party as well, and because the courts are either powerless themselves (the lower courts) or gleichgeschaltet (SCOTUS). And finally, the ammo box won't work for the above reasons.
I still like to think that things aren't *that* bad... and maybe they aren't, compared to other countries like China. But I also really wonder whether what we see is only the tip of the iceberg, and if the iceberg itself isn't just as big as that in China, for example. Sure, you won't get arrested for being a member of a minor party, for example, but that may just be because there's no way for you to change things, anyway - you're being allowed the have the illusion that you can change things, which keeps you from seeing what things *really* are like and from *really* trying to change them.
It sure is ironic that you're willing to put this much trust into a Slashdot comment, which itself is also by its very nature an unverified claim from an anonymous (or at least pseudonymous) source...
What exactly would be the crime, though? As much as I sympathise, I don't know what's legally wrong with what D-Link is doing. If you run a publicly accessible server, then you should expect the public to access it; and if you don't like that, take measures to prevent it from happening.
Of course, trying to talk to D-Link is not a bad idea, either, but if this was a crime, then one could just as well argue that it's a crime when Google crawls a website without explicit permission - and I'm not even talking about caching or indexing the page here, just about connecting to the web server at all.
There's an even bigger problem with this: namely, that as soon as business *complies* with these things, it'll be perfectly legal for them to spam you. Oh, sure, you can opt-out, but that's a lot of hassles when you receive spam from thousands of companies; and what's more, how are you going to distinguish spam from compliant companies (where the opt-out links works as advertised) and other sorts of spam that provide you with "opt-out" links that, in reality, are merely used to verify email addresses etc.?
Licensing spam is like allowing people to break into your house and steal your stuff provided they leave you a business card and offer you an opportunity to opt out for the future.