These files are quite large, yes I know, but the installation is quite straightforward once you burn them onto CDs. Just reboot with the first CD in the tray and follow on screen instructions. As a system administrator you may be also interested in knowing that those patches do not break the system and are guaranteed to leave you with a perfectly well working and stable OS.
Oh, and a, er, don't try to register this as a patch level with M$ or anything like that. Since the system will be exceptionally stable once you patch it you may never need to contact M$ seeking support anyway. So why bother.
Well, it is not. Breaking the law does not automatically constitute an unethical act. The reason is twofold. One, is that the law in question (the one being broken) has nothing to do with ethics. Example: breaking a speed limit on a completely empty highway in the middle of the day, somewhere in the middle of nowhere, like in Utah or Montana. Speed limits usually do not follow common sense (read: should depend on particular circumstances on the road, time of day, season of the year, wheater conditions, traffic, etc.). Such laws are dictated by available means for enforcing them and simplicity of obeying them without the need to make a sofisticated, educated judgement among public, if the law should apply or not, which obviously would yield statistical effectivness. The law can not afford this kind of uncertainty, thus it has to be simplistic enough in expense of violating common sense and depriving itself of ethical aspect.
Second, much more important case of ethically questionable law is the law that's unfair by itself. Obvious example: legislation behind slavery. If you had liberated a slave (providing an aid to escape, killing a slave hunter, providing a shelter for a fugitive slave, etc. and thus breaking the law obviously), would you consider such an act unethical?
I deliberetly chose the example of slavery. Because what we are (rarely) discuss here is the repetition of the same principle in law: enslavement. It's just ideas in this case, instead of human beings.
Sharing songs (or any other copyrighted material for that matter) IS ethical because sharing ideas and useful arts is ethical and sharing in general is ethical. If someone tells you it's not, he's a thief and a liar. It's also ethical by the same token as liberating slaves. It may just take another 100 years to be recognized as such. The idea of all people being equal and eligible for freedom wasn't born at the dawn of mankind either, but rather took couple thousand years to emerge. It doesn't make it though less obvious (from XXI century point view at least). After all, the IP crap is like what, 2, 3 hundred years old? (ok, 4 hundred maybe if you count the first patent ever, awarded by some moronic English king, where, by the way, most of moronic and opressive legislative traditions came from and are still followed, for no good reason, by American legal tradition, despite its so beautiful roots stemming from The Enlightement times)
So, here's what you guys should take into consideration before bashing file sharers as law brakers and thus deserving wrath from RIAA and other slave hunters:
1. Ideas and their (abstract) expressions can NOT be owned. I hope this one is pretty obvious in 2003.
2. Ideas and their (abstract) expressions have no monetary value, since they can be copied infinitely. It's a no brainer as well, as in X/INFINITY==0.0;
3. Only the act of creativity has an associated cost and thus monetary value (the X above). This and only this deserve a reward/compensation/reimbursment, NOT the actual result, which should immediately fall into public domain!
4. Which brings us to another pretty obvious and fair idea, that "useful art creators" as the Constitution calls them, should be rewarded for their work only once, LIKE EVERYBODY FUCKEN ELSE!!! Ever saw a plumber demanding commission on a per usage basis for his bath tub work? A corporate programmer to be paid on per sold copy basis for his program? No? How come? May be, just because it's a natural freaking law to pay once for a work performed once, huh???
5. Reward for creativity has nothing to do and does not require the ownership of the work in question (see 1. and 6.)
6. Financial wellbeing of creators is not a sufficient reason to violate common sense (see: 1. and 2.) and (especially) natural law by means of creating artificial scarcity of ideas. Or raping human psychology as addressed by the post I'm responding to.
7. 'Piracy' means an act of [possibly violent] act of assaul
Should developers/users be afraid of the iron fist of moronic law in this case?
Or is it perfectly legal and VIA can not do anything about it? They seem to have an interest in suppresing such efforts though, since they've stated they are interested in revealing the code only to entities that want to make a buck off of it.
So, even if DMCA dosn't apply here, are there any chances they could be nasty about it?
U-Boot
Slashdot Mirror
Hi, I thought this could be useful and worth +5 [Informative]:
3 86/*.iso
In case of difficulties one might experience trying to get to M$ update site to get patches, here is another source:
http://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/9/en/iso/i
These files are quite large, yes I know, but the installation is quite straightforward once you burn them onto CDs. Just reboot with the first CD in the tray and follow on screen instructions. As a system administrator you may be also interested in knowing that those patches do not break the system and are guaranteed to leave you with a perfectly well working and stable OS.
Oh, and a, er, don't try to register this as a patch level with M$ or anything like that. Since the system will be exceptionally stable once you patch it you may never need to contact M$ seeking support anyway. So why bother.
First of all: who said it's unethical?
Well, it is not. Breaking the law does not automatically constitute an unethical act. The reason is twofold. One, is that the law in question (the one being broken) has nothing to do with ethics. Example: breaking a speed limit on a completely empty highway in the middle of the day, somewhere in the middle of nowhere, like in Utah or Montana. Speed limits usually do not follow common sense (read: should depend on particular circumstances on the road, time of day, season of the year, wheater conditions, traffic, etc.). Such laws are dictated by available means for enforcing them and simplicity of obeying them without the need to make a sofisticated, educated judgement among public, if the law should apply or not, which obviously would yield statistical effectivness. The law can not afford this kind of uncertainty, thus it has to be simplistic enough in expense of violating common sense and depriving itself of ethical aspect.
Second, much more important case of ethically questionable law is the law that's unfair by itself. Obvious example: legislation behind slavery. If you had liberated a slave (providing an aid to escape, killing a slave hunter, providing a shelter for a fugitive slave, etc. and thus breaking the law obviously), would you consider such an act unethical?
I deliberetly chose the example of slavery. Because what we are (rarely) discuss here is the repetition of the same principle in law: enslavement. It's just ideas in this case, instead of human beings.
Sharing songs (or any other copyrighted material for that matter) IS ethical because sharing ideas and useful arts is ethical and sharing in general is ethical. If someone tells you it's not, he's a thief and a liar. It's also ethical by the same token as liberating slaves. It may just take another 100 years to be recognized as such. The idea of all people being equal and eligible for freedom wasn't born at the dawn of mankind either, but rather took couple thousand years to emerge. It doesn't make it though less obvious (from XXI century point view at least). After all, the IP crap is like what, 2, 3 hundred years old? (ok, 4 hundred maybe if you count the first patent ever, awarded by some moronic English king, where, by the way, most of moronic and opressive legislative traditions came from and are still followed, for no good reason, by American legal tradition, despite its so beautiful roots stemming from The Enlightement times)
So, here's what you guys should take into consideration before bashing file sharers as law brakers and thus deserving wrath from RIAA and other slave hunters:
1. Ideas and their (abstract) expressions can NOT be owned. I hope this one is pretty obvious in 2003.
2. Ideas and their (abstract) expressions have no monetary value, since they can be copied infinitely. It's a no brainer as well, as in X/INFINITY==0.0;
3. Only the act of creativity has an associated cost and thus monetary value (the X above). This and only this deserve a reward/compensation/reimbursment, NOT the actual result, which should immediately fall into public domain!
4. Which brings us to another pretty obvious and fair idea, that "useful art creators" as the Constitution calls them, should be rewarded for their work only once, LIKE EVERYBODY FUCKEN ELSE!!! Ever saw a plumber demanding commission on a per usage basis for his bath tub work? A corporate programmer to be paid on per sold copy basis for his program? No? How come? May be, just because it's a natural freaking law to pay once for a work performed once, huh???
5. Reward for creativity has nothing to do and does not require the ownership of the work in question (see 1. and 6.)
6. Financial wellbeing of creators is not a sufficient reason to violate common sense (see: 1. and 2.) and (especially) natural law by means of creating artificial scarcity of ideas. Or raping human psychology as addressed by the post I'm responding to.
7. 'Piracy' means an act of [possibly violent] act of assaul
Should developers/users be afraid of the iron fist of moronic law in this case?
Or is it perfectly legal and VIA can not do anything about it? They seem to have an interest in suppresing such efforts though, since they've stated they are interested in revealing the code only to entities that want to make a buck off of it.
So, even if DMCA dosn't apply here, are there any chances they could be nasty about it? U-Boot
For pete's sake, I don't give a jack about bad movies or replacement for lightbulbs or silent pumps for water-cooled PCs.
Where is my freakin' daily dose of SCO stories?!!!
Oh gosh, I'm so addicted, somebody help me please!
ub96