While I believe (no, I know) that it's easy to configure a Mac with an Airport card to be a server (since I've done it), I also know that it's not shipped with the server options turned on.
You hit upon a point that I and many others have noticed. I'll go further: her lawsuit and her attitude have guaranteed that the picture of her house will never be unavailable on the web, even if it gets removed from the CCL project! It'll be cached by Google and a dozen or a hundred other websites.
Whatever Hatch thinks should happen to "pirate" computers (and particularly dumb thoughts they are), I suspect there is not a chance that such a law would ever get passed. Even the Berman bill died aborning, and by comparison, it was much less outrageous (although still very outrageous on an absolute scale).
No such bill has been introduced. I doubt any will be. Hatch may be a dunce of historic proportions, but even he must know there is no chance to get a law like that passed.
If you're in this situation now, it is of course too late for this to help, but...
One of my rules for managing career/money/life is to save as much $$ as I can. Largely, it's for a retirement scenario, but it's also a hedge against the day when my employer tries to back me into a situation like this. Because of my savings, I do have the option (the freedom, if you will) to quit without needing another job right away.
The interesting thing is, when you have that type of freedom, you often can take stuff like this more in stride than if you don't have it and feel trapped.
Boies not only won the battle but lost the war with Microsoft (you can hardly blame him for the latter, though), but: he lost Al Gore's case before the Supreme Court. He lost Napster's case against the RIAA.
He's hardly the one to hire if you want to win a high-profile case. He got lucky against Microsoft (Microsoft's tendency to anger judges helped him a lot), but it went downhill from there.
But think of this: Microsoft becomes a customer of SCO to prop up a legal threat to Linux (Microsoft's current most feared competitor at the moment). If the threat succeeds in damaging Linux and the Open/Free Source/Software contingent, it's money well spent. If it fails, nice try, and what's a few million to a company with 44+ billion in the bank? Pocket change.
Using Boies as the leader of the charge may just be one of the most brilliant parts of this strategy. Boies is formerly an enemy of Microsoft, and therefore using him distances Microsoft from the fray. They either win or stay the same and no one could accuse them of actively crushing or attempting to crush Open Source.
If you walk down a public street with a camera, you can take pictures of any house you like without anyone seriously able to challenge your right to do so. If you are in a public place you can take all the pix you want.
The airspace over all our houses is a public place, controlled by the FAA. There have been numerous challenges to this in this country, but generally it's been held that only the Federal Gov't has the jurisdiction to control the airspace. Taking aerial photos is therefore similar to taking photos from the street, in that both are public places.
Adelman has taken these photos of the entire California coastline, even getting permission from the military to photograph the parts controlled by them. He has had several complaints from rich people who object to pix of their houses on the web, but he makes no exception for any of them. He has not singled out Streisand or anyone else, and he is not selling pix of her house for personal profit. The proceeds of sales go, as I understand it, to fund environmental preservation. He is legally allowed to fly in the airspace he was occupying at the time. Finally, hi-res satellite photos of the Streisand compound can no doubt be purchased from a for-profit organization, and presumably these have been available for years with no complaint from Ms. Streisand. So I think her case is pretty weak.
Interestingly, I had no idea that Streisand owned a home on the coast, and even though I knew about the California Coastline project, never would have had much interest in looking at her home. But the news of this lawsuit changed that; I simply had to go look. Adelman made it easy by putting a link to it right on the home page. I'm sure that many people who didn't know about the project at all, or at least didn't care particularly, are now fully informed about it. If privacy is what Streisand is after, she has chosen a funny way to get it. Even if a judge orders the removal of the picture from the website, copies of it will no doubt remain available all over the web. Even if the project is shut down as a result of this suit, and all the pix disappear from the web, the picture of her house will be famous, and will persist as long as there is a web and interest in Streisand.
So, sign it. It's not enforceable anyway, so don't sweat it.
IANAL, you should consult your own first. But this is what mine told me (in California).
It's not legal to take away a person's livelihood in this way. NCA's are usually used to prevent hair stylists from working in a shop and getting a local clientele, and then opening a competing shop in the same neighborhood and taking the clientele to the new shop. So there's a geographical limitation involved, usually.
For tech companies, there may be a time limitation involved rather than a geographical one, but even that might not be enforceable. Certainly, an unlimited NCA is (probably) not enforceable because (see above) it's illegal to take a person's livelihood.
Let me provide a case in point: myself. I'm 50+ (and never mind how + that is!). I got a physics Ph.D. and went to work in wafer fab processing, but early on realized that what I really wanted to do was program computers (as it was called in those days).
So, I looked for ways to get there without going back to school, and discovered that there was a niche supporting process and device simulation code (written in (ugh) FORTRAN, but it was programming, anyway). I took advantage of an opportunity to branch into circuit simulation, and once I was something of an expert at that, went to a startup as their SPICE expert. I drifted along in that job for many years, went through a couple of mergers, and served as a group manager for a while.
When I was surplused from that job, I worked on simulation and modeling at a small company supporting a contract. When that dried up, I had (at age 48) about three directions I could have gone, but chose to get into signal integrity simulation as a support person (rather than a coder, although there were opportunities to write code also). My background in simulation made it natural to branch into signal integrity. That job, in turn, led to an offer for the "job of a lifetime" at age 51, and I've not felt it necessary to look any further (so far, anyway). At present, I can either work for a vendor of SI software or for one of their customers as a supporter of the software. This is in a field that will only become more in demand as system speeds push past the 1GHz range. I figure that I can be employed as long as I want to be, and age has not mattered much.
In fact, the last few job searches I've done have landed me at companies that appeared to value older employees for their experience; I suspect there are many such companies.
Looking at where I came from, there was no way to predict that I would end up where I am now. Every move was logical at the time, and grew out of prior experience.
While I wasn't a computer science major, and I wasn't a mere programmer or software engineer, I suspect my experience in terms of career evolution is not that unusual.
Maintaining employability in any technical field can be summed up in three rules: Look for jobs that will build on what you already know and let you branch into new areas and learn new things (never stop learning); when you find a job, start looking/thinking about the next job (you are working for yourself primarily and only secondarily for your company); and finally, build a network of friends so you can get them or their bosses to hire you should the need come (networking is job one).
That wasn't the "appeal." Verizon asked the Judge that made the original ruling to reconsider.
The appeal is a whole 'nother thing. Right now, Verizon
has 14 days (less however many have already passed since
the ruling) to seek a stay to that order or pony up. Presumably the appeals court is being asked to grant the stay...
Stay tuned!
Spam is not going to stop. It will continue despite laws and regulations which do not apply world-wide and are difficult or impossible to enforce.
Oh, I dunno. Fax SPAM was effectively stopped by law; is there any reason to believe that an effective Federal law won't work to at least reduce the volume?
Larry Lessig's proposal for a law, which is actually being introduce by my own Representative, Zoe Lofgren, may very well reduce the flow
I would like to see that law include provisions for going after companies that hire spammers, rather than just the spammers themselves. I don't believe that there is such a provision in the current proposal, but it's been a few weeks since I read it, so I might be wrong. But that might be a helpful addition, if it's not already there.
Finally, I read recently that there are only about 180 major spammers responsible for most of the spam we get. 180 people is not an impossible number to arrest, charge, and shut down. The remaining bit players will probably dry up if the major guys and gals are gone...
Re:ya! a real tragedy!
on
Secret Empire
·
· Score: 1
Been a while since I read that, but as I recall, that was one view expressed by certain characters, and (almost certainly) not Forsyth's view.
Whether or not Adobe's software is perfect isn't even remotely relevant to the issue.
But I think it IS relevant. If you read the text of the DMCA, one of the issues is whether the copy protection is "effective." And I'm surprised that Elcomsoft's attorney apparently didn't make some hay out of that. But maybe that was dealt with in pretrial motions and stipulations. Dmitri made the point in his original talk that the Adobe copy protection was lame, and therefore might not be considered "effective."
Re:I believe he has had only one really good book
on
Prey
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The question is, which one was it?
I've read a few of MC's books, and guess I enjoyed JP, but I'm mostly disenchanted with MC's perennial theme of "technology is bad, and technologists are at once stupid, arrogant, and evil." Prey sounds like more of the same to me, so I'm not sure I'll bother reading it.
I'd rank them somewhat higher, oh 10 or so. Sure, it's a minor annoyance to me now that I use Apple's Junk Mail filter, but when a third of all messages sent are spam and spam threatens to make email costly for recipients and useless to boot, I'd say that's a pretty heavy cost for the personal gain of a few antisocial jerks.
I'm with you on this. I thought the article was unnecessarily negative. I still think the adaptive filtering scheme (or Bayesian filtering if you prefer) has great potential. I'm using Apple's version very successfully; I haven't had more than a few false positives or false negatives in over a month, and even the few false positives I've had were not really that important to me (none were from friends, family, etc). I think the idea has merit, and if everyone would use this approach, I suspect the effectiveness of Spam itself would plummet.
More than that: it's about controlling the creators of content. I think the music industry knows that if it becomes easy for unknown artists to create and diseminate their wares via the web, it's eventually all over for the "copyright" industry. That's what they are really afraid of, but you'll never hear them say that.
Having read both this letter, and the one by Villanueva, it appears to me that officials of Namibia and Peru are not such fools as Microsoft arrogantly supposed. They are not backwoods rubes, but highly educated individuals. In fact, in Namibia's case, the use of English was positively breathtaking!
When I contrast this with the fools we in America appear to prefer to elect, I get positively discouraged.
Slashdot Mirror
While I believe (no, I know) that it's easy to configure a Mac with an Airport card to be a server (since I've done it), I also know that it's not shipped with the server options turned on.
Automakers don't have a "stance" on car theft.
No. _I Will Fear No Evil_ is the worst. Hands down.
Exactly. As long as customer support is scripted and the scripts are read by droids, there will be no good customer support.
You hit upon a point that I and many others have noticed. I'll go further: her lawsuit and her attitude have guaranteed that the picture of her house will never be unavailable on the web, even if it gets removed from the CCL project! It'll be cached by Google and a dozen or a hundred other websites.
You can get details on the Streisand lawsuit there, also...
No such bill has been introduced. I doubt any will be. Hatch may be a dunce of historic proportions, but even he must know there is no chance to get a law like that passed.
Especially since he serves on Apple's Board of Directors...
It remains to be seen whether it's ineffective or not.
One of my rules for managing career/money/life is to save as much $$ as I can. Largely, it's for a retirement scenario, but it's also a hedge against the day when my employer tries to back me into a situation like this. Because of my savings, I do have the option (the freedom, if you will) to quit without needing another job right away.
The interesting thing is, when you have that type of freedom, you often can take stuff like this more in stride than if you don't have it and feel trapped.
He's hardly the one to hire if you want to win a high-profile case. He got lucky against Microsoft (Microsoft's tendency to anger judges helped him a lot), but it went downhill from there.
But think of this: Microsoft becomes a customer of SCO to prop up a legal threat to Linux (Microsoft's current most feared competitor at the moment). If the threat succeeds in damaging Linux and the Open/Free Source/Software contingent, it's money well spent. If it fails, nice try, and what's a few million to a company with 44+ billion in the bank? Pocket change.
Using Boies as the leader of the charge may just be one of the most brilliant parts of this strategy. Boies is formerly an enemy of Microsoft, and therefore using him distances Microsoft from the fray. They either win or stay the same and no one could accuse them of actively crushing or attempting to crush Open Source.
The airspace over all our houses is a public place, controlled by the FAA. There have been numerous challenges to this in this country, but generally it's been held that only the Federal Gov't has the jurisdiction to control the airspace. Taking aerial photos is therefore similar to taking photos from the street, in that both are public places.
Adelman has taken these photos of the entire California coastline, even getting permission from the military to photograph the parts controlled by them. He has had several complaints from rich people who object to pix of their houses on the web, but he makes no exception for any of them. He has not singled out Streisand or anyone else, and he is not selling pix of her house for personal profit. The proceeds of sales go, as I understand it, to fund environmental preservation. He is legally allowed to fly in the airspace he was occupying at the time. Finally, hi-res satellite photos of the Streisand compound can no doubt be purchased from a for-profit organization, and presumably these have been available for years with no complaint from Ms. Streisand. So I think her case is pretty weak.
Interestingly, I had no idea that Streisand owned a home on the coast, and even though I knew about the California Coastline project, never would have had much interest in looking at her home. But the news of this lawsuit changed that; I simply had to go look. Adelman made it easy by putting a link to it right on the home page. I'm sure that many people who didn't know about the project at all, or at least didn't care particularly, are now fully informed about it. If privacy is what Streisand is after, she has chosen a funny way to get it. Even if a judge orders the removal of the picture from the website, copies of it will no doubt remain available all over the web. Even if the project is shut down as a result of this suit, and all the pix disappear from the web, the picture of her house will be famous, and will persist as long as there is a web and interest in Streisand.
2. Test out new computer hardware/software
3. The thrill of the chase. Some people climb mountains, other people calculate billions of digits of Pi.
IANAL, you should consult your own first. But this is what mine told me (in California).
It's not legal to take away a person's livelihood in this way. NCA's are usually used to prevent hair stylists from working in a shop and getting a local clientele, and then opening a competing shop in the same neighborhood and taking the clientele to the new shop. So there's a geographical limitation involved, usually.
For tech companies, there may be a time limitation involved rather than a geographical one, but even that might not be enforceable. Certainly, an unlimited NCA is (probably) not enforceable because (see above) it's illegal to take a person's livelihood.
So, I looked for ways to get there without going back to school, and discovered that there was a niche supporting process and device simulation code (written in (ugh) FORTRAN, but it was programming, anyway). I took advantage of an opportunity to branch into circuit simulation, and once I was something of an expert at that, went to a startup as their SPICE expert. I drifted along in that job for many years, went through a couple of mergers, and served as a group manager for a while.
When I was surplused from that job, I worked on simulation and modeling at a small company supporting a contract. When that dried up, I had (at age 48) about three directions I could have gone, but chose to get into signal integrity simulation as a support person (rather than a coder, although there were opportunities to write code also). My background in simulation made it natural to branch into signal integrity. That job, in turn, led to an offer for the "job of a lifetime" at age 51, and I've not felt it necessary to look any further (so far, anyway). At present, I can either work for a vendor of SI software or for one of their customers as a supporter of the software. This is in a field that will only become more in demand as system speeds push past the 1GHz range. I figure that I can be employed as long as I want to be, and age has not mattered much.
In fact, the last few job searches I've done have landed me at companies that appeared to value older employees for their experience; I suspect there are many such companies.
Looking at where I came from, there was no way to predict that I would end up where I am now. Every move was logical at the time, and grew out of prior experience.
While I wasn't a computer science major, and I wasn't a mere programmer or software engineer, I suspect my experience in terms of career evolution is not that unusual.
Maintaining employability in any technical field can be summed up in three rules: Look for jobs that will build on what you already know and let you branch into new areas and learn new things (never stop learning); when you find a job, start looking/thinking about the next job (you are working for yourself primarily and only secondarily for your company); and finally, build a network of friends so you can get them or their bosses to hire you should the need come (networking is job one).
That wasn't the "appeal." Verizon asked the Judge that made the original ruling to reconsider. The appeal is a whole 'nother thing. Right now, Verizon has 14 days (less however many have already passed since the ruling) to seek a stay to that order or pony up. Presumably the appeals court is being asked to grant the stay... Stay tuned!
Oh, I dunno. Fax SPAM was effectively stopped by law; is there any reason to believe that an effective Federal law won't work to at least reduce the volume?
Larry Lessig's proposal for a law, which is actually being introduce by my own Representative, Zoe Lofgren, may very well reduce the flow
I would like to see that law include provisions for going after companies that hire spammers, rather than just the spammers themselves. I don't believe that there is such a provision in the current proposal, but it's been a few weeks since I read it, so I might be wrong. But that might be a helpful addition, if it's not already there.
Finally, I read recently that there are only about 180 major spammers responsible for most of the spam we get. 180 people is not an impossible number to arrest, charge, and shut down. The remaining bit players will probably dry up if the major guys and gals are gone...
Been a while since I read that, but as I recall, that was one view expressed by certain characters, and (almost certainly) not Forsyth's view.
But I think it IS relevant. If you read the text of the DMCA, one of the issues is whether the copy protection is "effective." And I'm surprised that Elcomsoft's attorney apparently didn't make some hay out of that. But maybe that was dealt with in pretrial motions and stipulations. Dmitri made the point in his original talk that the Adobe copy protection was lame, and therefore might not be considered "effective."
I've read a few of MC's books, and guess I enjoyed JP, but I'm mostly disenchanted with MC's perennial theme of "technology is bad, and technologists are at once stupid, arrogant, and evil." Prey sounds like more of the same to me, so I'm not sure I'll bother reading it.
I'd rank them somewhat higher, oh 10 or so. Sure, it's a minor annoyance to me now that I use Apple's Junk Mail filter, but when a third of all messages sent are spam and spam threatens to make email costly for recipients and useless to boot, I'd say that's a pretty heavy cost for the personal gain of a few antisocial jerks.
I'm with you on this. I thought the article was unnecessarily negative. I still think the adaptive filtering scheme (or Bayesian filtering if you prefer) has great potential. I'm using Apple's version very successfully; I haven't had more than a few false positives or false negatives in over a month, and even the few false positives I've had were not really that important to me (none were from friends, family, etc). I think the idea has merit, and if everyone would use this approach, I suspect the effectiveness of Spam itself would plummet.
More than that: it's about controlling the creators of content. I think the music industry knows that if it becomes easy for unknown artists to create and diseminate their wares via the web, it's eventually all over for the "copyright" industry. That's what they are really afraid of, but you'll never hear them say that.
Do we cheat 'em and how!
When I contrast this with the fools we in America appear to prefer to elect, I get positively discouraged.