I would expect that the dealer would have a hard time signing this, it would have to be with the manufacturer.
If the manufacturers were presented with 100's of these contracts, they would capitulate immediately. They're in the business of selling cars, not licenses.
Yes, include and advertising fee. Include an advertising fee in your contract which states that in exchange for driving a vehicle that has their Trademarked images (think Make & Model name badge), they will pay you a fee for advertising their product.
There actually are contracts where that happens but I'll be content that they shut up and let me take photos of cars and plaster them on my web page without getting harassed.
It seems like the next time I purchase a car will include a contract where any photographs I (and anyone else) take of cars of that manufacturer's brand will be free of any claim of copyright now and in the future. Any claims by the company that this is not valid will render the contract of sale void and a refund of the purchase costs and the vehicle being purchased will remain in my possession.
I'm sure I can make this nastier, anyone?
If everyone does this, there will be very few car sales unless they capitulate.
Any lawyer types willing to make a public version of this contract everyone can use?
Actually, it's pretty common. If you have had time to write code, it should be the best code you can write.
It works the other way too. I once was required to give some code to solve a problem using standard C++. In the interview, the interviewer said, there were a number of problems with my code, it turned out that each and every "problem" was because the interviewer was not aware of how C++ handled it. So then he said, well, our compiler flags an error - to which I said, then your compiler is not standard C++ so if you want code that runs on your compiler, you need to specify it... Down hill quick.
Needless to say, I didn't get the job and I probably would have sucked there anyway. Since I rely on people actually knowing what they're asking for. It's a major character flaw of mine to fail to apply ESP and give people what they want rather than what they ask for - I'm working on it....
Moral of the story, just because you don't get the job does not mean you can't do the job better than the interviewer. Interviews are flawed but there are few better alternatives to interviewing.
Gmail allows you to connect outlook via IMAP. (See the settings on gmail to enable imap). Configure outlook to connect to gmail. Select the messages you want in gmail and paste them into the appropriate gmail IMAP folder. POC. BTW, I've done this onto any IMAP server. There also exist migration tools that talk imap to imap.
Kudos to the subversion team. The merge and slave sync features are really great.
I've been using subversion since it first came out and I must say it is really easy to use and a dream compared to some of the commercial offerings I have to fight with.
Netpriva has an application level shaping solution. They used to have a "free" trial product. The company was a MBO from a company called "foursticks". Give that a try.
I'm not sure what you mean by "there is literally no information I am passing".
If I generate 1 megabyte of random numbers and call it "The works of JRR Tolkien", at most it may interpreted as satire. It's not even derivtive of any works, if it can be described as a work, it is original.
The fact that you both discard the key after the transfer (one time pad) does not change the fact that you passed an encrypted copyrighted file.
That's kind of the point. In OTP ciphers, the ciphertext and the key are symmetrical, you don't know what is what and you certainly don't know which of the participants copied the original works. The interesting thing is that you can do this with more than two participants making it nigh impossible to find the guy who did "copy" the data.
No question that a copyright was infringed but you need to bring charges against someone, and the law needs to figure out who. If you don't have the "who" then the law is unenforcable.
Still, I'd like to know what a judge would think of this. Mr RIAA is not going to roll over and play dead. What would their argument be ? In this scenario, the RIAA would have to prove I pushed copyrighted bits. However with a one time pad key, there is literally no information I am passing. Does a discussion about the hypothetical amount of information passed even have any weight in something like this. Not only that, my one time pad encrypted file is an original work. If the RIAA did download it, it would be a copyright violation.
I'm not encouraging the use of this, it's really just a curiosity of mine.
Whenever I read the RIAA stories, I keep on thinking, what about a situation where I can communicate some seemingly random bits and someone else makes the effort to reassemble them.
Say for example, I take a digital representation of a copyrighted work, say an mp3 file, and then I proceed to use RAID6 algorithm where I split the file up into 6 chunks, any 4 of which someone can re-create the file. Distribution of 3 of those chunks by me is not a copyright violation since the original work cannot be reproduced. What if someone else unknown by me releases the other 3 chunks. Someone else may retrieve any 4 of those chunks can now reproduce the original work. Either of the suppliers didn't supply the digital bits to create the works.
Similarly, if I produce a one time pad, the length of the mp3 file and I publish it as "Best of Santana", I have in theory not provided anything other than an unintelligible stream of random bits. However, if someone publishes "the key" that once xor'd with the file I originally published, generates the original file, who is in violation ? I centainly can't be, because I just created a random set of bits, the other person in theory can't be because they only produced a key.
The violator may be the downloader, the person who takes those files and re-creates the original but they're alot harder to catch in this scenario.
IANAL so I'd like to hear what the L's in this discussion have to say about this.
Zonk is an idiot. It doesnt matter which server you steal music from. You are still stealing. Copyright violation is not stealing - they are different things.
Seriously. They seem to be the MOST "anti-consumer-rights" of the so-called "Western" countries. It's just bizarre. Is Australia really a police state? Because that's what it seems like, honestly.
There are a number of factors. Firstly, the population in OZ is about 1/10th that of the US. This means that the market is smaller and the competitive pressures you find in the US are just not as profound in OZ. The telecom supplier in OZ (telstra) is a government created monopoly. The regulations under which Telstra (which owns Bigpond) operate are truly detrimental. No competitor will ever be able to make a dent into Telstra's monopoly unless the government fixes the regulations.
If I was paranoid, I'd say that the Telstra privatization was an example of the government being led by the benefits of the corps rather that the benefits to the people and hence probably corrupt. This is why Australian's who know what's going on are a little touchy with things like removing OO from the "unmetered downloads".
However, the government being 0wn3d by the corps is a title I give to the USA. Medical insurance, medicare prescription plans, ecent FCC decisions, electronic voting machines, Microsoft being let off etc are all pretty nasty examples of the corps taking over the government.
Australia just changed their govenment as will the USA next November. There is some hope that the corps will loose a little control on both changes but the proverbial jury is still out.
Comparing Australia to the USA on this metric doesn't say much I suppose !
Just exactly what is the unmetered file download area?...
Bandwidth caps in Australia are on every ADSL plan. This is usually because the bandwidth costs to the ISP are quite heavy compared to the USA. Most content comes from the US (google, youtube, yahoo etc) and so Telstra (owner of Bigpond) gets to set monopoly prices. To make the bandwidth cap a little more palatable, many (most) ISP's mirror content or large files on servers on their networks so there is no impact on their running costs. In a competitive move, Telstra/Bigpond have done the same thing.
Why Telstra thinks that removing OO from their unmetered server is going to gain them any kudos is a mystery. However, if you put on your monopoly management hat, you can see why. In this case I'd say it's purely evil (tm) as the competitive advantage of not having OO downloadable is next to nothing.
In Australia, ADSL is a joke. Telstra was once a government owned monopoly and now it is a legislated one, owning all the last mile copper and being the only one responsible for installing new phone lines. Telstra also markets it's own ISP - Bigpond.
Telstra has no incentive to make DSL more affordable and has even taken the prior government to court over attempts of the government to do so. It appears that the only thing Telstra and Optus (the co-horts of Telstra) understand is that by holding the reigns on services and service prices in their tight control will make them more money. The "pair-gain" crazyness is another example of just how stupid the situation is.
In defence of Telstra's management, that is exactly what the arrangements of privatization regulations encourage. It really is another one of these privatizations gone crazy scenarios.
It should be of no surprise that Telstra would do this with OpenOffice. I think that the public expect Telstra to have the interests of it's customers as a primary objective but it should be no surprise that the shareholders hold the attention of the management.
The only way to fix this is to remove the monopoly protections. Telstra needs to be changed by the government and it's monopoly broken if Australia is every going to get services that are other than a joke.
Having said that, the new Rudd government has made a pledge to make improvements in internet access, although I think it's going to be a hard one to pull off.
There already exist drive in the sky web services. I suspect Google's gdrive is only a me-too comparable service. If we're so paranoid (which I probably am), then the game is already won by the bad guys. Case in point, over the last year, I have needed to wipe my hard drive clean four times because something went awry, just unexplicable things like network services starting to do strange things. No virus check found anything. With the guise of a Microsoft update, my computer can be surreptitiously surrendering all kinds of information against my will, we don't need a gdrive for that, it's already possible and more than likely happening to almost all who use Windows.
I can think of a few fixes but it's probably not going to be something that will happen fast or without a fight.
That's why there are no memory leaks in C/C++ code
The last few large projects I have worked on with C++ had no issues with memory leaks on product release and these were servers that run for months. Proper use of smart pointers and correctly designed classes is not that hard. The last Java based product I worked on had all kinds of leaks and issues.
In my last gig, we had a continuous build process going for all builds and unit tests for lots and lots of things. The release bits was selected from a build from the continuous build system which automatically deployed to the test servers once selected - which meant that nothing was done by hand other than selecting which build. If the nature of the fix was such that with confidence problems would be caught in unit tests, then we would limit the amount of other testing. The build time was about 2 hours (because of the unit test run) and so if we did everything right, we could get a fix out within 24 hours depending on the complexity of the fix itself. There was no "build" guy, everyone on the team was responsible for the build. We used a home grown "tinderbox" like system which meant that we had very accurate knowledge of what fixes went into what builds. The build directories and test results were automatically kept if there was a build error so it could be examined manually if there was a failure. Intermittent failures came up all the time and were snuffed out because of the ability to go back and check. On windows builds, unit tests that segv'd allowed you to drop into the debugger saving a huge amount of time not having to re-create a failure scenario. On linux builds it would core dump which allowed it to be re-examined. This system could be improved upon in many ways but it was very very cool.
Dear Mr Vivendi - The technology exists to make a competitive product to itunes for reasonable cost. You're welcome to compete against itunes. Before you go and try to compete, there is a reason why itunes is successful and I suggest that by the time you get it, you'll understand that unless you compete on price you're going nowhere fast. The only way to make more money really is to produce more music that people want to buy (WHAT A CONCEPT).
Plus technology is reaching such a quality and cheapness level that the overhead of redundant checking is too much of a cost or disadvantage for the minuscule chance that something may be corrupted.
Are you sure? The actual cost is minuscule and significantly less than the cost of potential errors.
Yes. They are, but considerably less fallible with ECC. Remember, "I can give you the wrong answer in zero seconds." There's no point in computing at all unless there is a very high degree of confidence in computational results. Software is just as fallible as hardware but again, I can, and do, make considerable effort in making it less fallible.
I am the default sysadmin for a family member's business. There was a time where the system was fraught with network failures on a constant basis. Printers stopped working, wan, stopped working etc without any apparent explanation. So called "experts" were called out to fix the problem which was fixed and broken the next day. Each and every time there was a failure, the cost was significant - huge, far more than ECC RAM. Just the time it took to rule out memory failure was more than the cost of ECC RAM. Under your fatalistic mode, he would be relegated to continual system failures. I reconfigured the systems, made some DHCP addresses virtually static and dropped the PPPOE in the box and put it on a Linux server, etc etc. It's been well over a year now and the only failure has been the occasional power interruption and my forgetting to set services to run on reboots. MUCH MUCH more reliable.
As for flipping bits. DRAM is particularly susceptible to background radiation while the CPU data paths are not for various reasons and there is far more silicon devoted to memory than there is to the CPU, hence using ECC over main memory is a huge deal. I have had alot of experience and I know that memory is a significant cause of reliability issues hence again, the cost of ECC RAM is minuscule compared to the benefits.
ECC - corrects errors. So even if you have a faulty bit, it is both detected AND corrected which makes it so that you don't have to worry about somthing that would otherwise have stopped you in your tracks.
I find it very strange that you have a distinction between "mission critical" and some user's machine. I have a very high expectation and whenever there is a fault, I will diagnose it to remove it. Anything which is unrepeatable wastes alot of my time and so ECC ram removes a large set of those problems - for an extra 20% investment, it's not even above the noise of other things.
They live in the real world, where computers are fallible...
Computers are machines and don't need to be designed to be fallible. ECC is a small insurance policy to avoid problems exactly like the one you described. How much time did you spend on burning CD's that were no good, or running various memtests, not to mention the possible corrupted data you ended up saving and other unknown consequences ? Had you bought ECC RAM, your problem would have been corrected or more than likely detected not to mention that the memory manufacturers would need to push up their quality needs. The extra money for ECC would become miniscule if everyone bought only ECC RAM.
Equating human fallibility to physical fallibility makes little sense. If we sought to use the same standards you're proposing for electrical engineering to say civil engineering, it would extend to it being OK for a building to topple because they're "fallible" - not good.
If I could validate every data path in my computer at up to a 20% premium I would. That's better than an insurance policy. It happens to be that RAM is especially susceptible to errors that are very difficult to diagnose or even repeat and so reducing the probability of such errors is desirable, and at a small price like ECC RAM, it's a bargain of an insurance policy.
BTW, I'm not saying that you don't put procedures in place to deal with hardware failure. I'm saying that treating the problem may be far more effective than treating the symptoms.
Slashdot Mirror
If the manufacturers were presented with 100's of these contracts, they would capitulate immediately. They're in the business of selling cars, not licenses.
Yes, include and advertising fee. Include an advertising fee in your contract which states that in exchange for driving a vehicle that has their Trademarked images (think Make & Model name badge), they will pay you a fee for advertising their product.
There actually are contracts where that happens but I'll be content that they shut up and let me take photos of cars and plaster them on my web page without getting harassed.
a)...nobody at the dealership would have the authority to negotiate such a contract...
b) ... published a series of extremely defaming pictures of cars rotting in junkyards...?
c) Think about this and you might have a clue why they aren't selling those rights.
a) The authority signing such a contact would need to be specified in the contract.
b) AFAICT, they would all be original works and so they don't have any say in those under today's law.
c) Since they have no rights to sell on b) I can imagine that they can't be sold...
I'm sure I can make this nastier, anyone?
If everyone does this, there will be very few car sales unless they capitulate.
Any lawyer types willing to make a public version of this contract everyone can use?
Is there a small claims court kinda thing in your state and would that have worked?
Actually, it's pretty common. If you have had time to write code, it should be the best code you can write.
It works the other way too. I once was required to give some code to solve a problem using standard C++. In the interview, the interviewer said, there were a number of problems with my code, it turned out that each and every "problem" was because the interviewer was not aware of how C++ handled it. So then he said, well, our compiler flags an error - to which I said, then your compiler is not standard C++ so if you want code that runs on your compiler, you need to specify it... Down hill quick.
Needless to say, I didn't get the job and I probably would have sucked there anyway. Since I rely on people actually knowing what they're asking for. It's a major character flaw of mine to fail to apply ESP and give people what they want rather than what they ask for - I'm working on it....
Moral of the story, just because you don't get the job does not mean you can't do the job better than the interviewer. Interviews are flawed but there are few better alternatives to interviewing.
Gmail allows you to connect outlook via IMAP. (See the settings on gmail to enable imap). Configure outlook to connect to gmail. Select the messages you want in gmail and paste them into the appropriate gmail IMAP folder. POC. BTW, I've done this onto any IMAP server. There also exist migration tools that talk imap to imap.
I've been using subversion since it first came out and I must say it is really easy to use and a dream compared to some of the commercial offerings I have to fight with.
Thanks for all the hard work...
Netpriva has an application level shaping solution. They used to have a "free" trial product. The company was a MBO from a company called "foursticks". Give that a try.
If I generate 1 megabyte of random numbers and call it "The works of JRR Tolkien", at most it may interpreted as satire. It's not even derivtive of any works, if it can be described as a work, it is original.
That's kind of the point. In OTP ciphers, the ciphertext and the key are symmetrical, you don't know what is what and you certainly don't know which of the participants copied the original works. The interesting thing is that you can do this with more than two participants making it nigh impossible to find the guy who did "copy" the data.
No question that a copyright was infringed but you need to bring charges against someone, and the law needs to figure out who. If you don't have the "who" then the law is unenforcable.
Still, I'd like to know what a judge would think of this. Mr RIAA is not going to roll over and play dead. What would their argument be ? In this scenario, the RIAA would have to prove I pushed copyrighted bits. However with a one time pad key, there is literally no information I am passing. Does a discussion about the hypothetical amount of information passed even have any weight in something like this. Not only that, my one time pad encrypted file is an original work. If the RIAA did download it, it would be a copyright violation.
I'm not encouraging the use of this, it's really just a curiosity of mine.
Say for example, I take a digital representation of a copyrighted work, say an mp3 file, and then I proceed to use RAID6 algorithm where I split the file up into 6 chunks, any 4 of which someone can re-create the file. Distribution of 3 of those chunks by me is not a copyright violation since the original work cannot be reproduced. What if someone else unknown by me releases the other 3 chunks. Someone else may retrieve any 4 of those chunks can now reproduce the original work. Either of the suppliers didn't supply the digital bits to create the works.
Similarly, if I produce a one time pad, the length of the mp3 file and I publish it as "Best of Santana", I have in theory not provided anything other than an unintelligible stream of random bits. However, if someone publishes "the key" that once xor'd with the file I originally published, generates the original file, who is in violation ? I centainly can't be, because I just created a random set of bits, the other person in theory can't be because they only produced a key.
The violator may be the downloader, the person who takes those files and re-creates the original but they're alot harder to catch in this scenario.
IANAL so I'd like to hear what the L's in this discussion have to say about this.
Which plan ?
There are a number of factors. Firstly, the population in OZ is about 1/10th that of the US. This means that the market is smaller and the competitive pressures you find in the US are just not as profound in OZ. The telecom supplier in OZ (telstra) is a government created monopoly. The regulations under which Telstra (which owns Bigpond) operate are truly detrimental. No competitor will ever be able to make a dent into Telstra's monopoly unless the government fixes the regulations.
If I was paranoid, I'd say that the Telstra privatization was an example of the government being led by the benefits of the corps rather that the benefits to the people and hence probably corrupt. This is why Australian's who know what's going on are a little touchy with things like removing OO from the "unmetered downloads".
However, the government being 0wn3d by the corps is a title I give to the USA. Medical insurance, medicare prescription plans, ecent FCC decisions, electronic voting machines, Microsoft being let off etc are all pretty nasty examples of the corps taking over the government.
Australia just changed their govenment as will the USA next November. There is some hope that the corps will loose a little control on both changes but the proverbial jury is still out.
Comparing Australia to the USA on this metric doesn't say much I suppose !
Bandwidth caps in Australia are on every ADSL plan. This is usually because the bandwidth costs to the ISP are quite heavy compared to the USA. Most content comes from the US (google, youtube, yahoo etc) and so Telstra (owner of Bigpond) gets to set monopoly prices. To make the bandwidth cap a little more palatable, many (most) ISP's mirror content or large files on servers on their networks so there is no impact on their running costs. In a competitive move, Telstra/Bigpond have done the same thing.
Why Telstra thinks that removing OO from their unmetered server is going to gain them any kudos is a mystery. However, if you put on your monopoly management hat, you can see why. In this case I'd say it's purely evil (tm) as the competitive advantage of not having OO downloadable is next to nothing.
In Australia, ADSL is a joke. Telstra was once a government owned monopoly and now it is a legislated one, owning all the last mile copper and being the only one responsible for installing new phone lines. Telstra also markets it's own ISP - Bigpond.
Telstra has no incentive to make DSL more affordable and has even taken the prior government to court over attempts of the government to do so. It appears that the only thing Telstra and Optus (the co-horts of Telstra) understand is that by holding the reigns on services and service prices in their tight control will make them more money. The "pair-gain" crazyness is another example of just how stupid the situation is.
In defence of Telstra's management, that is exactly what the arrangements of privatization regulations encourage. It really is another one of these privatizations gone crazy scenarios.
It should be of no surprise that Telstra would do this with OpenOffice. I think that the public expect Telstra to have the interests of it's customers as a primary objective but it should be no surprise that the shareholders hold the attention of the management.
The only way to fix this is to remove the monopoly protections. Telstra needs to be changed by the government and it's monopoly broken if Australia is every going to get services that are other than a joke.
Having said that, the new Rudd government has made a pledge to make improvements in internet access, although I think it's going to be a hard one to pull off.
There already exist drive in the sky web services. I suspect Google's gdrive is only a me-too comparable service. If we're so paranoid (which I probably am), then the game is already won by the bad guys. Case in point, over the last year, I have needed to wipe my hard drive clean four times because something went awry, just unexplicable things like network services starting to do strange things. No virus check found anything. With the guise of a Microsoft update, my computer can be surreptitiously surrendering all kinds of information against my will, we don't need a gdrive for that, it's already possible and more than likely happening to almost all who use Windows.
I can think of a few fixes but it's probably not going to be something that will happen fast or without a fight.
The last few large projects I have worked on with C++ had no issues with memory leaks on product release and these were servers that run for months. Proper use of smart pointers and correctly designed classes is not that hard. The last Java based product I worked on had all kinds of leaks and issues.
In my last gig, we had a continuous build process going for all builds and unit tests for lots and lots of things. The release bits was selected from a build from the continuous build system which automatically deployed to the test servers once selected - which meant that nothing was done by hand other than selecting which build. If the nature of the fix was such that with confidence problems would be caught in unit tests, then we would limit the amount of other testing. The build time was about 2 hours (because of the unit test run) and so if we did everything right, we could get a fix out within 24 hours depending on the complexity of the fix itself. There was no "build" guy, everyone on the team was responsible for the build. We used a home grown "tinderbox" like system which meant that we had very accurate knowledge of what fixes went into what builds. The build directories and test results were automatically kept if there was a build error so it could be examined manually if there was a failure. Intermittent failures came up all the time and were snuffed out because of the ability to go back and check. On windows builds, unit tests that segv'd allowed you to drop into the debugger saving a huge amount of time not having to re-create a failure scenario. On linux builds it would core dump which allowed it to be re-examined. This system could be improved upon in many ways but it was very very cool.
Dear Mr Vivendi - The technology exists to make a competitive product to itunes for reasonable cost. You're welcome to compete against itunes. Before you go and try to compete, there is a reason why itunes is successful and I suggest that by the time you get it, you'll understand that unless you compete on price you're going nowhere fast. The only way to make more money really is to produce more music that people want to buy (WHAT A CONCEPT).
Sarcasm right ?
Are you sure? The actual cost is minuscule and significantly less than the cost of potential errors.
Yes. They are, but considerably less fallible with ECC. Remember, "I can give you the wrong answer in zero seconds." There's no point in computing at all unless there is a very high degree of confidence in computational results. Software is just as fallible as hardware but again, I can, and do, make considerable effort in making it less fallible.
I am the default sysadmin for a family member's business. There was a time where the system was fraught with network failures on a constant basis. Printers stopped working, wan, stopped working etc without any apparent explanation. So called "experts" were called out to fix the problem which was fixed and broken the next day. Each and every time there was a failure, the cost was significant - huge, far more than ECC RAM. Just the time it took to rule out memory failure was more than the cost of ECC RAM. Under your fatalistic mode, he would be relegated to continual system failures. I reconfigured the systems, made some DHCP addresses virtually static and dropped the PPPOE in the box and put it on a Linux server, etc etc. It's been well over a year now and the only failure has been the occasional power interruption and my forgetting to set services to run on reboots. MUCH MUCH more reliable.
As for flipping bits. DRAM is particularly susceptible to background radiation while the CPU data paths are not for various reasons and there is far more silicon devoted to memory than there is to the CPU, hence using ECC over main memory is a huge deal. I have had alot of experience and I know that memory is a significant cause of reliability issues hence again, the cost of ECC RAM is minuscule compared to the benefits.
ECC - corrects errors. So even if you have a faulty bit, it is both detected AND corrected which makes it so that you don't have to worry about somthing that would otherwise have stopped you in your tracks.
I find it very strange that you have a distinction between "mission critical" and some user's machine. I have a very high expectation and whenever there is a fault, I will diagnose it to remove it. Anything which is unrepeatable wastes alot of my time and so ECC ram removes a large set of those problems - for an extra 20% investment, it's not even above the noise of other things.
Computers are machines and don't need to be designed to be fallible. ECC is a small insurance policy to avoid problems exactly like the one you described. How much time did you spend on burning CD's that were no good, or running various memtests, not to mention the possible corrupted data you ended up saving and other unknown consequences ? Had you bought ECC RAM, your problem would have been corrected or more than likely detected not to mention that the memory manufacturers would need to push up their quality needs. The extra money for ECC would become miniscule if everyone bought only ECC RAM.
Equating human fallibility to physical fallibility makes little sense. If we sought to use the same standards you're proposing for electrical engineering to say civil engineering, it would extend to it being OK for a building to topple because they're "fallible" - not good.
If I could validate every data path in my computer at up to a 20% premium I would. That's better than an insurance policy. It happens to be that RAM is especially susceptible to errors that are very difficult to diagnose or even repeat and so reducing the probability of such errors is desirable, and at a small price like ECC RAM, it's a bargain of an insurance policy.
BTW, I'm not saying that you don't put procedures in place to deal with hardware failure. I'm saying that treating the problem may be far more effective than treating the symptoms.