Kazaa and its ilk are merely repackaging someone else's property, intellectual though it may be - the point of the Ford case is he won based on the reality that the patent was BS. The copyrights the music industry owns are not BS.
Your central assertion is invalid. Any form of intellectual property may, or may not be, BS. It is inherently a societal judgment call, a matter of interpretation. You may have a useful distinction if you point out that a copyright to a recording of a musical performance is a broader kind of intellectual property than a specific patent, and therefore harder to overturn on a "technicality". But if that's what you meant, that's certainly not what you said.
Henry Ford repackaged the Selden patent, someone else's intellectual property. This particular piece of IP was overturned in the courts. Filesharing of copyrighted music is also repackaging someone else's IP, and the same overturning might conceivably happen.
But all of this misses the point, which is the action outside of the courtroom. How does an industry fight a groundswell of ill will from the very people--potential customers--it is trying to court as customers? And in this matter, we can all perceive the damage the industry is doing itself with its customer-hostile tactics.
Yes, I said customer. To those who are locked into the incredibly myopic mantra "They're not suing their customers, they're suing filesharers": the two classes certainly intersect in many cases. (What, you never buy CDs because you download music? In logic, that's called a false choice.) So yes, in many cases, RIAA is suing its own customers. In any event, they're certainly suing potential customers, and forcing people into the store at subpoena-point will never work. So let's get past that meaningless part of the argument. See the world in full color, rather than the monochrome you've been using to simplify reality into comfortable binary propositions.
You've hit on the critical point: SCO never defined "adequate". I'm guessing "complete hostile disregard" is now definition #1 for the word "adequate" in the SCO dictionary.
It's a new marketing and PR paradigm! An "adequate market response" means 0% mind share and 0 units moved. An "adequate military response" is abject surrender. (I publicly refrain from France jokes at this point.) "Adequate braking" is brake failure. "Adequate sexual satisfaction" is what most/.ers experience.
"...it's not the path I, or our group, would have gone down."
"Not my idea, I told them it was a bad idea, I warned them, I had nothing to do with it, I wanted no part in this abortion of a business plan, please don't shoot me, I'm just the piano player." That scrambling sound you hear is everyone fleeing the foxhole as the grenade lands at their feet.
However, I'd say that you need at least 8 CPUs or more to take full advantage of Sun's superior hardware/software architecture.
We're speaking of Intel, yes? If we're talking SPARC, I don't know how much Linux factors in. (Of course, if you're buy SPARC, you pretty much have Solaris in the box.)
That said, our organization is giving the Ultra IIIi line a miss. We're going straight from Ultra II to POWER4 in an IBM pseries box. (AIX 5L, though.)
I was doing some window shopping in a large entertainment electronics/computers store tonight, and started playing with a G5 uniprocessor. The salesdrone drifted over and started his sales rap, and I busted in to ask about the dual-processor G5s.
He had to admit they didn't have any in stock, and weren't expecting to get any from Apple for some time.
I guess I know where the dual-G5 systems are all going. Ah, well, it's all for a good cause. I hope.
no, it's like saying "To be able to drink water you must first understand the various ways in which hydrogen and oxygen can combine"
Sage words in this dangerous day. Imaging Drinking 101:
See these two hydrogens and one oxygen? Drink that. See these two hydrogens and two oxygens? DON'T DRINK THAT! Now, throw in some carbon: Two carbons, six hydrogens, one oxygen: Drink that (carefully, preferably well hopped and poured slow). One carbon, four hydrogens, one oxygen: Don't drink that (thin paint with it though).
In order for some entity to levy a fine, there must first be some sort of law broken. As far as I know, there are no laws requiring virus protection or mandatory software/OS updates.
Good point. I've been a Solaris admin since God was a corporal, and the crashdump in the swap slice has save our corporate asses about a zillion times. (Damned UltraSparc II level-0 cache memory bit error...)
I guess I didn't realize that the Linux kernel doesn't do a comparable function. I wonder why not? Solaris seems comfortable locating the swap slice and writing the kernel core dump. Is partition management so much less reliable on x86 boxes? And if so, why is that a limitation for non-x86 Linux kernels, like those for Sun Sparc architectures? Makes you wonder, eh?
Anyone care to wager how soon the government starts awarding contracts/grants to Symantec for its exclusive security solution?
The US government already has contracts with Symantec for network and client security products. They're not exclusive, though. (Yet). For instance, Department of Defense has three different antivirus product vendors from which you can download and install any of several of their products. (Assuming you have admin privs on the machine in question, an unlikely assumption given the stringent configuration control military desktops are usually kept under.)
You're right, it's a nitpick, and offtopic too. And so is this.
The hero of our story is an Air Force loadmaster. Managing one or more Air Force transports. (In-theater, makes me think C-130 Herky-birds.)
Military Airlift Command (MAC) (or Military Air Transport Service (MATS) if the story is before 1966) served in-theater airlift in Viet Nam for facilities of all services. I'd be willing to guess the downrange destination was a Marine Corps base. Hence the Navy supply Ensign. Quite plausible, you see.
Not only that, but when printing to a teletype, you had to add a few null characters at the end of every line (along with CR and LF, of course) to give the carriage time to return, and the line time to feed.
Military teletype message formats required that end-of-line sequence be CR-CR-LF. Second carriage return re-homed the carriage after it had bounced away from the left stop. (Yeah, the carriage on an ASR-33 could move that fast!)
Without it, the margin would wander slowly to the right.
Aah, nostalgia. My first programming job was mainframe assembler for the message switch system at (US) Air Force Global Weather Central. I got to learn Baudot and the performance characteristics of teletypes quite intimately.
No.
When I speak or write words mean exactly what *I* intend them to mean. No more, no less.
When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone,
"it means just what I choose it to mean--neither more nor less."
-- Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass
On the other hand:
You keep using that word. I do not think that word means what you think it means -- Inigo Montoya, The Princess Bride
Yup, pedantic, guilty as charged. Go ahead and mod me down; I can afford it.
This begins to look like some elaborate corporate version of "suicide-by-cop".
You know, dude in wife-beater t-shirt and cutoffs starts a loud confrontation, barricades and arms himself, gets armed representatives of The Authorities (tm) sucked in, and then threatens said representatives with his weapon. SWAT dude has to pull the trigger, and then it's goodbye cruel world.
Damn near foolproof way to off yourself once the hardcore tactical team is on scene, and it's technically not suicide!
So, We've got SCO (bad mullet, tank-top, and raggy jeans) waving his 9mm around at everyone, including some folks that just finished getting heavy-handed on some folks between the Euphrates and Tigris. Like I said, suicide-by-cop.
There are a lot of factors, indeed, but at in least one US military IT acquisition that I'm familiar with, the choice of OS platform was driven purely by purchase cost. That's why this contract chose Major-Brand (tm) PCs with some flavor of RedHat (with support contract) to succeed Sun Ultra workstations running Slowlaris(tm), the incumbent system in the field. Customer wanted to drive the acquisition cost down down down.
Even the greediest government agency has to operate within budget, after all. And in the US military, budgets have held mostly constant while obligations associated with things like war-fighting have gone up, so your non-combat line items get shrunk to make up the difference.
OK, so the French have invented a "native" word to supplant the import. They've only been doing that since about the 17th Century.
We Anglophones on the western side of the pond have been borrowing French words practically without modification for about that long, but probably because we're lazy. I'd guess that the trend is older than that--look how many "English" words are lifted directly (or near-directly) from French. Some of these date back to the 11th Century (Norman conquest).
Maybe we do that to piss off the French? (You know, word-squatting, complete with mangling their pronounciation.)
Why won't he sue Richard Stallman, while he's at it? After all SCO has said that whole programs were copied ("stolen" if your will) and we know that Linux is a kernel (and quite monolithic at that), not a bunch of programs.
I suggest counter-suing for defamation of character. Just how much is an international reputation worth? Linus could end up owning SCO. Now *that* BE would justice. -rick
Geez, like "I hope I can countersue the drug dealers so I can own their crackhouse." Ick!
<pedantic> Foldoc's reference is quoted from ESR's "Jargon File". (This fact foldoc does indirectly acknowledge). </pedantic>
So far as I can tell, the Jargon File's definition is canonical in the geek community. I believe it's the oldest, anyways; I recall seeing the definition in a early-90s text version.
First of all, I must state that Debian isn't the most newbie friendly distribution out there....
NetBSD isn't the most newbie-friendly kernel, either. I'm just starting my NetBSD/Amiga journey and it's frustrating sometimes. (I'm not a total newb, either; I'm a longtime Solaris and GNU/Linux admin. Still, it's a fun kind of frustration. Hackerbuzz, I think.)
Another complaint is the selection of packages out there.... Complaining that Debian doesn't have Cool-Binary-Nonfree-Package-XYZ is like complaining that iptables doesn't run on windows.
I don't distribute, so if ultra-whizzy-non-Free-package isn't available I won't miss it. I'll port it on my own if source is available under any circumstances, or write a functional equivalent if not. (Licenses, GPL or otherwise, mean very little to me beyond whether I can use the source or not.)
Other then the package management, the one area where Debian really, truly shines (IMHO), is the wide collection of ports out there, and that Debian (unlike many other distributions out there) does not treat non-x86 users as lower-class citizens.
I joyfully note the 680x0 portbranch. I suppose it builds OK under NetBSD/Amiga. Happy times! (At least, as soon as I can get the 1.6.1 kernel to stop panicking.)
Slashdot Mirror
Your central assertion is invalid. Any form of intellectual property may, or may not be, BS. It is inherently a societal judgment call, a matter of interpretation. You may have a useful distinction if you point out that a copyright to a recording of a musical performance is a broader kind of intellectual property than a specific patent, and therefore harder to overturn on a "technicality". But if that's what you meant, that's certainly not what you said.
Henry Ford repackaged the Selden patent, someone else's intellectual property. This particular piece of IP was overturned in the courts. Filesharing of copyrighted music is also repackaging someone else's IP, and the same overturning might conceivably happen.
But all of this misses the point, which is the action outside of the courtroom. How does an industry fight a groundswell of ill will from the very people--potential customers--it is trying to court as customers? And in this matter, we can all perceive the damage the industry is doing itself with its customer-hostile tactics.
Yes, I said customer. To those who are locked into the incredibly myopic mantra "They're not suing their customers, they're suing filesharers": the two classes certainly intersect in many cases. (What, you never buy CDs because you download music? In logic, that's called a false choice.) So yes, in many cases, RIAA is suing its own customers. In any event, they're certainly suing potential customers, and forcing people into the store at subpoena-point will never work. So let's get past that meaningless part of the argument. See the world in full color, rather than the monochrome you've been using to simplify reality into comfortable binary propositions.
Sounds reasonable to me, as long as the money actually pays (ultimately) to disassemble the computer and reuse the materials or components.
It's a new marketing and PR paradigm! An "adequate market response" means 0% mind share and 0 units moved. An "adequate military response" is abject surrender. (I publicly refrain from France jokes at this point.) "Adequate braking" is brake failure. "Adequate sexual satisfaction" is what most /.ers experience.
"...it's not the path I, or our group, would have gone down."
"Not my idea, I told them it was a bad idea, I warned them, I had nothing to do with it, I wanted no part in this abortion of a business plan, please don't shoot me, I'm just the piano player." That scrambling sound you hear is everyone fleeing the foxhole as the grenade lands at their feet.
Yeah, never mind, I'm just cynical.
Better life through technology, indeed.
I blink and answer "Neon," I thought I'd blow her mind.
Existential Blues, T-Bone Stankus
Used without permission, please don't sue me!
We're speaking of Intel, yes? If we're talking SPARC, I don't know how much Linux factors in. (Of course, if you're buy SPARC, you pretty much have Solaris in the box.)
That said, our organization is giving the Ultra IIIi line a miss. We're going straight from Ultra II to POWER4 in an IBM pseries box. (AIX 5L, though.)
He had to admit they didn't have any in stock, and weren't expecting to get any from Apple for some time.
I guess I know where the dual-G5 systems are all going. Ah, well, it's all for a good cause. I hope.
Sage words in this dangerous day. Imaging Drinking 101:
See these two hydrogens and one oxygen? Drink that.
See these two hydrogens and two oxygens? DON'T DRINK THAT!
Now, throw in some carbon:
Two carbons, six hydrogens, one oxygen: Drink that (carefully, preferably well hopped and poured slow).
One carbon, four hydrogens, one oxygen: Don't drink that (thin paint with it though).
"Turing. You are under arrest."
William Gibson, Neuromancer
I guess I didn't realize that the Linux kernel doesn't do a comparable function. I wonder why not? Solaris seems comfortable locating the swap slice and writing the kernel core dump. Is partition management so much less reliable on x86 boxes? And if so, why is that a limitation for non-x86 Linux kernels, like those for Sun Sparc architectures? Makes you wonder, eh?
The US government already has contracts with Symantec for network and client security products. They're not exclusive, though. (Yet). For instance, Department of Defense has three different antivirus product vendors from which you can download and install any of several of their products. (Assuming you have admin privs on the machine in question, an unlikely assumption given the stringent configuration control military desktops are usually kept under.)
The hero of our story is an Air Force loadmaster. Managing one or more Air Force transports. (In-theater, makes me think C-130 Herky-birds.)
Military Airlift Command (MAC) (or Military Air Transport Service (MATS) if the story is before 1966) served in-theater airlift in Viet Nam for facilities of all services. I'd be willing to guess the downrange destination was a Marine Corps base. Hence the Navy supply Ensign. Quite plausible, you see.
Military teletype message formats required that end-of-line sequence be CR-CR-LF. Second carriage return re-homed the carriage after it had bounced away from the left stop. (Yeah, the carriage on an ASR-33 could move that fast!)
Without it, the margin would wander slowly to the right.
Aah, nostalgia. My first programming job was mainframe assembler for the message switch system at (US) Air Force Global Weather Central. I got to learn Baudot and the performance characteristics of teletypes quite intimately.
When I speak or write words mean exactly what *I* intend them to mean. No more, no less.
When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean--neither more nor less."
-- Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass
On the other hand:
You keep using that word. I do not think that word means what you think it means
-- Inigo Montoya, The Princess Bride
Yup, pedantic, guilty as charged. Go ahead and mod me down; I can afford it.
On a lighter note, it seems that we've slashdotted them. HAH! (Or maybe it's the decrepit firewall here.)
You know, dude in wife-beater t-shirt and cutoffs starts a loud confrontation, barricades and arms himself, gets armed representatives of The Authorities (tm) sucked in, and then threatens said representatives with his weapon. SWAT dude has to pull the trigger, and then it's goodbye cruel world.
Damn near foolproof way to off yourself once the hardcore tactical team is on scene, and it's technically not suicide!
So, We've got SCO (bad mullet, tank-top, and raggy jeans) waving his 9mm around at everyone, including some folks that just finished getting heavy-handed on some folks between the Euphrates and Tigris. Like I said, suicide-by-cop.
Even the greediest government agency has to operate within budget, after all. And in the US military, budgets have held mostly constant while obligations associated with things like war-fighting have gone up, so your non-combat line items get shrunk to make up the difference.
Hmmm... Curry.... (drools)
OK, so the French have invented a "native" word to supplant the import. They've only been doing that since about the 17th Century.
We Anglophones on the western side of the pond have been borrowing French words practically without modification for about that long, but probably because we're lazy. I'd guess that the trend is older than that--look how many "English" words are lifted directly (or near-directly) from French. Some of these date back to the 11th Century (Norman conquest).
Maybe we do that to piss off the French? (You know, word-squatting, complete with mangling their pronounciation.)
but I haven't yet seen this title in the non-fiction aisles. Strange.
I cry -1 Troll and a further -1 "You fail it, Troll!"
Yeah, what happened to "GNU/Linux"?
Geez, like "I hope I can countersue the drug dealers so I can own their crackhouse." Ick!
<pedantic>
Foldoc's reference is quoted from ESR's "Jargon File". (This fact foldoc does indirectly acknowledge).
</pedantic>
So far as I can tell, the Jargon File's definition is canonical in the geek community. I believe it's the oldest, anyways; I recall seeing the definition in a early-90s text version.
NetBSD isn't the most newbie-friendly kernel, either. I'm just starting my NetBSD/Amiga journey and it's frustrating sometimes. (I'm not a total newb, either; I'm a longtime Solaris and GNU/Linux admin. Still, it's a fun kind of frustration. Hackerbuzz, I think.)
Another complaint is the selection of packages out there.... Complaining that Debian doesn't have Cool-Binary-Nonfree-Package-XYZ is like complaining that iptables doesn't run on windows.
I don't distribute, so if ultra-whizzy-non-Free-package isn't available I won't miss it. I'll port it on my own if source is available under any circumstances, or write a functional equivalent if not. (Licenses, GPL or otherwise, mean very little to me beyond whether I can use the source or not.)
Other then the package management, the one area where Debian really, truly shines (IMHO), is the wide collection of ports out there, and that Debian (unlike many other distributions out there) does not treat non-x86 users as lower-class citizens.
I joyfully note the 680x0 portbranch. I suppose it builds OK under NetBSD/Amiga. Happy times! (At least, as soon as I can get the 1.6.1 kernel to stop panicking.)