1) To the person who makes the hiring decision, make it clear that the person sucks up more money than they make the company. Make it a pure business decision.
2) Make it easy - very few people enjoy firing people. It is not only confrontational, but it often means admitting you were wrong in hiring in the first place. Give your boss as much of an emotional out as possible.
3) Have the meeting where you solidly and without malice make your case. If your boss isn't going to fire the guy right then and there, but until X, Y, or Z are completed then your boss is going to pussy out. Institutional inertia will set in. Say "I appreciate that you're in a tight spot with this project. What can we do to make this work." When it doesn't work, have a follow up meeting that puts the decision not to fire back in your bosses line of sight, and show that, indeed, it's continuing to not work out. Do NOT say "I told you so." You'll just make your boss resistant.
4) Once the problematic developer is gone, have a follow up discussion that shows it was the right call. Again, don't say I told you so. Say "Thanks for taking care of that. I know it was tough, but it's really working out"
Your job is to make your boss look good by kicking this person to the curb. You're approaching your boss and assisting them in making an informed decision.
Of course, if you're just trying to get someone fired out of spite, that's trickier.
The vast majority of my job in a management capacity is to translate from geek to suit and back again. The guy who owns my company, my direct boss, is not technically minded. The man has fantastic ideas, but couldn't write a lick of code or install a server to save his life.
The company is lucky to have someone like me. Many do not. And in the absence of an interpreter, you bet your ass that closing a lot of tickets in the bug tracker will mean dick when it comes to convincing your boss who doesn't read the bug tracker to not fire you. And frankly, pulling out the metrics to show that you're valuable is exactly the kind of strategic bragging you're arguing against.
You can fire a developer who is leading in resolutions and completed requirements. It happens every day. The job is not just to make sure that you're working your butt off, but that your boss knows it. Help them to make informed decisions. It may suck, but you know what, that's life.
I make the hiring decisions at my company. I check to see if people can solve complex problems. I don't care what language you know. You can learn PHP in a couple of hours. Sure, your first 5.000 SLOC are going to look like whatever language you know best, but right out of college your first 5.000 SLOC are going to suck anyway.
Learning a bunch of languages has the advantage that you learn what concepts are universal to programming and what are just entrenched in the language, but what really matters is learning to think algorithmically, no matter how many languages you know, be it one or one thousand.
It sounds like you've already made your decision about which school you're attending, you just want some assurance that this education won't be wasted. Let me assure you that it won't.
In my experience code reviews trap errors all the time. Second sets of eyes catch stuff like "You forgot to set the status property there" or "that's an off by one error in that loop".
Most commercial code is written with an iterative design/implement cycle. This causes code paths to grow rapidly. A programmer writing the code is constantly updating his mental model of all code paths. A developer coming in on feature complete code has to build his mental model from scratch - he's going to catch code paths and exceptional cases that grew up in development.
In my experience, a solid, robust test suite can automate the edit/run/check cycle while in development, and is great at catching regressions in the future. But short of true waterfall development, where you have an exceptionally rigid spec, it's really really tough to make sure you're test suite catches every code path - especially since modern dev practices (objects/exceptions) create implicit rather than implicit routes through your code.
This is my experience, however. Maybe I'm not working at a high end enough shop that every dev is unlikely to make these kinds of basic-but-potentially-shippable errors. But that's the beauty of a well thought out dev process - those of us less talented can be more likely to produce something of quality.
In my shop, there is no formal code review process. But informally, we all have to maintain this stuff, and there aren't enough of us that everyone gets one nice, clearly demarcated area of responsibility. So in that principle, there is a strong informal process.
In the course of designing a piece of software, or subsystem there is a lot of "Okay, here is my approach. See any pitfalls?" During implementation, there is a lot of over the shoulder "could you take this over?". And once a piece of code is ready to be merged into trunk, a fresh pair of eyes are pulled over, and the code is looked over.
It's a lightweight process, code gets checked numerous times, and we don't run into cases where you suddenly have to review several thousands of lines of code. This has caught numerous bugs, time and time again, and catches the kinds of bugs that user level testing can be the worst at finding - corner cases and intermittent issues.
Wii games seem to be played almost exclusively by little kids, old ladies, and drunk college guys who spent too much goddamn money on a giant ass fucking TV instead of paying student loans, and feel constantly entitled.
This is why WiiBeerPong (or whatever it's called now) was brilliant in its identification of a market niche.
You also don't need a lot of people to agree to fault Nintendo for a class action lawsuit. A lawyer just needs a couple of guys and the reasonable belief that he'll get paid, and he can stir up a lawsuit on behalf of everyone who broke something without their consent.
I worked many moons ago as a tech support agent for BellSouth Internet - of course, my actual employer was ClientLogic, who no longer exists.
The tech support client was different from all the other kinds of phone support that operated in the facility. The others had at most one app - generally a DOS DB driver app for taking orders. and you'd telnet in, and run it. There was no account for accessing the system, and the departments were small enough that employees used the same cubicle day in day out.
The contract with BellSouth required that a number of applications be opened. Each one had a login. They varied by which kind of service you provided - DSL support, Dial Up support, or the various forms of advanced support. Also managing all those windows was terrible on Windows (hah). In the absence of virtual desktops managing as many as 20 mandatory apps got insane.
And,of course, the number of employees exceeded the number of allocated cubicles. So as soon as you stood up, the next shift was grabbing your cubicle, logging out, logging back in, and starting up those apps.
At first, it was standard operating procedure to walk in, go to one of the various machines hanging around, sign into the phone system, which was also the time tracker, log out so that you weren't taking calls on the machine, and let the next guy clock in, while you hunted around for a cubicle, and brought the machine up. But BLS was the only client who had this issue, and a manager was brought in from another department and removed the machine.
All hell broke loose. I was promoted at that point, and effectively, if not officially, had my own cubicle. I was logged into the system all the time, so I didn't have to get into the various fights about the issue, although several people either quit or were fired.
Over a year after leaving, I got a moderately fat check in the mail from the class action lawsuit which had occurred unbeknownst to me. And damn right. I had to arrive early and setup a computer as required by the client in the contract. ClientLogic got more money per call taken from BLS than from other clients because of the additional requirements the techs had to follow - but I don't get paid for doing the actual leg work?
VDPAU is an X extension, and anyone can implement it. It's a competitor to the XvBA extension being developed by AMD, only it exists now, with hardware support, and is derived from an existing technology that has been tested on other OSes.
I truly doubt that. A reasonably powered ultra-cheap laptop has lots of uses in budget stripped locations - remote medical service anyone?
Maybe you won't see white guys in western countries who can afford laptops and don't have high mobility needs AND already have a smartphone purchase these, but that hardly consigns it to purely to the realm of geekdom. Especially PDF support. With the exception of a single DRMed e-book I've yet to find a PDF I couldn't open with an open source solution in decade.
Actually, the opposite should be true. Memory won't "leak" from tab to tab. When the tab gets closed, it's memory gets returned to the OS pool by hook or by crook. Only the UI itself should leak memory over the lifetime of the browser.
If by no difference you mean no difference other than providing physical evidence? Reiser disclosed the location of the body. The justice system, especially in murder cases, considers closure for the victim's family to be very important. Reiser made it possible for loved ones to know exactly what happened, and to perform funeral services. For that, he got a reduced sentence.
There are lots of things I could throw out, sure, but most of them came from principle numero uno - talk to each other. Learn each other's strengths and weaknesses, learn how each other works, learn when a process isn't working for one of you, and learn to evaluate each other's code.
Process is really about leveraging communication to improve the product. So start building that communication.
While I recognize and agree with the point you're trying to make, I think it's a bit overstating the case to call engineers replaceable cogs. If you're working withing a relatively solved problem domain, and we're talking about a certain minimal level of skill, then this is true.
But in _this_ case we're talking about a completely nascent problem space. Caminer's brilliance was recognizing that computers could solve the problem. Yet it still took John Pinkerton with heaps of assistance from the Math Lab at Cambridge to design and build a computer with operating system sufficient to the task.
As the article points out, this kind of traffic can be generated by legitimate applications, like BitTorrent. This is just a reliable way of manufacturing that kind of traffic for analysis.
Windows Update patched the Sasser vulnerability seventeen days before the virus was released. Reason why sheep need automatic updates on by default. Even on dial-up, I managed to hit update every Tuesday. The vulnerability patch was an optional update due to the fact that it altered the behavior of patched machines. Mom and Pop who ran Windows Update religiously were still vulnerable.
You miss my point - Windows machines are insecure by default and by design. I had uninfected Windows machines when I ran Windows, but I understood why others were so easily infected. We live in a world where malware is everywhere, and legit software is distributed by exactly the same means as damaged goods - via the internet. I wasn't presuming you were lying about having an uninfected machine. I was presuming you were being ignorant in not understanding how this stuff spread. In retrospect perhaps you were being facetious.
Incorrect - CSV isn't a formal standard, the extra spaces are generally trimmed from the ends of records by most applications, unless wrapped in quotation marks.
They use the computer. For god's sake, you didn't have to go to a website to get the Sasser virus, infected machines would attack random IPs. If you bought an XP machine when Sasser was rampant, I knew many people who were infected on first boot, before they could even install a firewall or virus scanner.
You've never been emailed a Word document (with a VBA virus)? You've never installed AOL (which overwrites your netstack)? Never been redirected to a warez site (via a compromised legit website)? Hell, for years Wal-Mart used to sell software packages full of dubious "shareware", TurboTax was at one point under legal fire for installing a backdoor, you can't put a Sony audio CD in your machine for fear of installing DRM crippleware behind your back, and OEM machines are loaded with potentially insecure adware begging you to upgrade to the full version.
While it's not entirely inconceivable that you have always run Windows machines behind a hardware firewall, run expensive third party antivirus packages, never run other third party software (thus discarding the best reason to use Windows), and use your machine only for browsing websites you are 100% sure are uncompromised, it is absolutely beyond belief to me that you can be running Windows since 3.x days and not be aware of how easy it is for a machine to get loaded with garbage. As I pointed out, it's not even safe to plug in a vanilla XP machine into the internet without risk of being immediately infected.
I realize you're making the reasonable, moderate claim that here. I've done the same in the past. But this shit can no longer stand. I'm just gonna come out and say it - you cannot legitimately argue that piracy is theft. You just can't. I've heard all the damn arguments, and not one of them make sense to an unbiased, educated party. It's like arguing that the world is flat. It just isn't fucking flat, I don't care what it looks like in the desert.
Piracy is like sneaking into a movie theatre. Bam. I've done it. I've created a reasonble fucking analogy that I think holds up to moderate levels of scrutiny. Yet no one ever claimed that sneaking into a movie theatre is stealing. What is it you're stealing? You're getting something for free, but that's not stealing.
Would the judge deny relief to you because you had authorized the private investigator to make the offer?
Of course not, but if you read the brief that is specifically addressed. The Plaintiff's burden when an investigator is hired is to either have the investigator witness infringement by third parties, or provide sufficient circumstantial evidence that infringement seems likely.
The first didn't occur because of the nature of Kazaa, and the second didn't occur because the sheer number of Kazaa users makes it unlikely that singles from multiplatinum records were downloaded from these specific users - if all you are sharing are files of which there are _hundreds of thousands_ or readily available copies in the same network, it is rather unlikely that anyone other than the investigators themselves downloaded the songs.
It should be pointed out, of course, that the EFF's filing is specifically to prevent summary judgment in the RIAA's favor, not to ask for favorable judgment for the defendant. Summary judgment in this case would constitute (in the opinion of the EFF) a dangerous and untenable expansion of copyright law. The RIAA seems to agree since they've removed these very claims from suits filed in the last five months.
I realize this reply is really really really old, but I just now caught it, and I can't really just let it stand.
I simply said that a copyright system which automatically makes non-commercial use not infringe is very close to no copyright system at all, at least in the case of entertainment media. I happen to think that _a_ copyright system is a good idea, the current one in the US is pretty shitty.
So either you misunderstood me, or you think all copyright systems are bad. If the latter, you're going to have to come up with something better than "Tolkien is dead, why should be make any money" and "Author X makes more money (due to the copyright system) because of one infringing case"
I have some criticism here and there of OLPC, and I wonder if it will ever achieve what it hopes to achieve.
That said, I find Dvorak's comments to be horrifically offensive. The ignorance and pretension with which he is critical of OLPC and, by extension, any project that does anything other than ship limited, non renewable resources to countries where it can be stolen by corrupt bureaucrats is frankly disgusting. And the assumptions underneath! That you'll only ever make a one time charitable donation to a third world country in your life! If I didn't know that Dvorak was doing this only to be contrary, I'd say that his rhetoric belied someone who had never deeply considered the problem in third world nations before writing the damn article.
The truth is that third world countries desperately need infrastructure and education. They'll never be able to compete in the world wide industrial market, even if they have natural resources, but given sufficient education they can compete in the world information market. Is Dvorak really so short sighted as to not see that? Kids who grow up with computers can become information workers, and that requires no more infrastructure than a cheap laptop and bandwidth. But apparently that's a long term investment that Dvorak can't see - though I doubt he would be so critical of a similar education initiative in the US, which already has established resources in computer education. How hypocritical.
And there is more - a single laptop can service a large number of children, technology like the XO-1 that could let kids onto the internet can foster a generation supportive and understanding of democracy and free markets without growing up in one. I could go on and on (for example, that the nations themselves are sometimes purchasing these laptops), but I think around here I'd be preaching to the choir.
So, sure, if you're only ever going to spend $200 dollars in charitable donations in your lifetime, spend it on food for starving kids. If you don't mind giving a little more then consider investing in the future of these children, rather than just hemorrhaging money into life support and hoping the situation gets better on its own.
God, making non-commercial use non-infringing is a TERRIBLE idea. You might as well throw out copyright entirely (which might not be as bad an idea).
For example, if I copy "The Lord of the Rings" onto blank DVDs, and give them to friends, upload them to the internet, and set up a big fat pipe for getting them, it's all non commercial! I didn't make a cent!
If we're going to have a copyright system at all, it should permit creators to profit from their work, at least for a little while.
Slashdot Mirror
1) To the person who makes the hiring decision, make it clear that the person sucks up more money than they make the company. Make it a pure business decision.
2) Make it easy - very few people enjoy firing people. It is not only confrontational, but it often means admitting you were wrong in hiring in the first place. Give your boss as much of an emotional out as possible.
3) Have the meeting where you solidly and without malice make your case. If your boss isn't going to fire the guy right then and there, but until X, Y, or Z are completed then your boss is going to pussy out. Institutional inertia will set in. Say "I appreciate that you're in a tight spot with this project. What can we do to make this work." When it doesn't work, have a follow up meeting that puts the decision not to fire back in your bosses line of sight, and show that, indeed, it's continuing to not work out. Do NOT say "I told you so." You'll just make your boss resistant.
4) Once the problematic developer is gone, have a follow up discussion that shows it was the right call. Again, don't say I told you so. Say "Thanks for taking care of that. I know it was tough, but it's really working out"
Your job is to make your boss look good by kicking this person to the curb. You're approaching your boss and assisting them in making an informed decision.
Of course, if you're just trying to get someone fired out of spite, that's trickier.
The vast majority of my job in a management capacity is to translate from geek to suit and back again. The guy who owns my company, my direct boss, is not technically minded. The man has fantastic ideas, but couldn't write a lick of code or install a server to save his life.
The company is lucky to have someone like me. Many do not. And in the absence of an interpreter, you bet your ass that closing a lot of tickets in the bug tracker will mean dick when it comes to convincing your boss who doesn't read the bug tracker to not fire you. And frankly, pulling out the metrics to show that you're valuable is exactly the kind of strategic bragging you're arguing against.
You can fire a developer who is leading in resolutions and completed requirements. It happens every day. The job is not just to make sure that you're working your butt off, but that your boss knows it. Help them to make informed decisions. It may suck, but you know what, that's life.
I make the hiring decisions at my company. I check to see if people can solve complex problems. I don't care what language you know. You can learn PHP in a couple of hours. Sure, your first 5.000 SLOC are going to look like whatever language you know best, but right out of college your first 5.000 SLOC are going to suck anyway.
Learning a bunch of languages has the advantage that you learn what concepts are universal to programming and what are just entrenched in the language, but what really matters is learning to think algorithmically, no matter how many languages you know, be it one or one thousand.
It sounds like you've already made your decision about which school you're attending, you just want some assurance that this education won't be wasted. Let me assure you that it won't.
In my experience code reviews trap errors all the time. Second sets of eyes catch stuff like "You forgot to set the status property there" or "that's an off by one error in that loop".
Most commercial code is written with an iterative design/implement cycle. This causes code paths to grow rapidly. A programmer writing the code is constantly updating his mental model of all code paths. A developer coming in on feature complete code has to build his mental model from scratch - he's going to catch code paths and exceptional cases that grew up in development.
In my experience, a solid, robust test suite can automate the edit/run/check cycle while in development, and is great at catching regressions in the future. But short of true waterfall development, where you have an exceptionally rigid spec, it's really really tough to make sure you're test suite catches every code path - especially since modern dev practices (objects/exceptions) create implicit rather than implicit routes through your code.
This is my experience, however. Maybe I'm not working at a high end enough shop that every dev is unlikely to make these kinds of basic-but-potentially-shippable errors. But that's the beauty of a well thought out dev process - those of us less talented can be more likely to produce something of quality.
In my shop, there is no formal code review process. But informally, we all have to maintain this stuff, and there aren't enough of us that everyone gets one nice, clearly demarcated area of responsibility. So in that principle, there is a strong informal process.
In the course of designing a piece of software, or subsystem there is a lot of "Okay, here is my approach. See any pitfalls?" During implementation, there is a lot of over the shoulder "could you take this over?". And once a piece of code is ready to be merged into trunk, a fresh pair of eyes are pulled over, and the code is looked over.
It's a lightweight process, code gets checked numerous times, and we don't run into cases where you suddenly have to review several thousands of lines of code. This has caught numerous bugs, time and time again, and catches the kinds of bugs that user level testing can be the worst at finding - corner cases and intermittent issues.
Wii games seem to be played almost exclusively by little kids, old ladies, and drunk college guys who spent too much goddamn money on a giant ass fucking TV instead of paying student loans, and feel constantly entitled.
This is why WiiBeerPong (or whatever it's called now) was brilliant in its identification of a market niche.
You also don't need a lot of people to agree to fault Nintendo for a class action lawsuit. A lawyer just needs a couple of guys and the reasonable belief that he'll get paid, and he can stir up a lawsuit on behalf of everyone who broke something without their consent.
I worked many moons ago as a tech support agent for BellSouth Internet - of course, my actual employer was ClientLogic, who no longer exists.
The tech support client was different from all the other kinds of phone support that operated in the facility. The others had at most one app - generally a DOS DB driver app for taking orders. and you'd telnet in, and run it. There was no account for accessing the system, and the departments were small enough that employees used the same cubicle day in day out.
The contract with BellSouth required that a number of applications be opened. Each one had a login. They varied by which kind of service you provided - DSL support, Dial Up support, or the various forms of advanced support. Also managing all those windows was terrible on Windows (hah). In the absence of virtual desktops managing as many as 20 mandatory apps got insane.
And,of course, the number of employees exceeded the number of allocated cubicles. So as soon as you stood up, the next shift was grabbing your cubicle, logging out, logging back in, and starting up those apps.
At first, it was standard operating procedure to walk in, go to one of the various machines hanging around, sign into the phone system, which was also the time tracker, log out so that you weren't taking calls on the machine, and let the next guy clock in, while you hunted around for a cubicle, and brought the machine up. But BLS was the only client who had this issue, and a manager was brought in from another department and removed the machine.
All hell broke loose. I was promoted at that point, and effectively, if not officially, had my own cubicle. I was logged into the system all the time, so I didn't have to get into the various fights about the issue, although several people either quit or were fired.
Over a year after leaving, I got a moderately fat check in the mail from the class action lawsuit which had occurred unbeknownst to me. And damn right. I had to arrive early and setup a computer as required by the client in the contract. ClientLogic got more money per call taken from BLS than from other clients because of the additional requirements the techs had to follow - but I don't get paid for doing the actual leg work?
From TFA:
VDPAU is an X extension, and anyone can implement it. It's a competitor to the XvBA extension being developed by AMD, only it exists now, with hardware support, and is derived from an existing technology that has been tested on other OSes.
I truly doubt that. A reasonably powered ultra-cheap laptop has lots of uses in budget stripped locations - remote medical service anyone?
Maybe you won't see white guys in western countries who can afford laptops and don't have high mobility needs AND already have a smartphone purchase these, but that hardly consigns it to purely to the realm of geekdom. Especially PDF support. With the exception of a single DRMed e-book I've yet to find a PDF I couldn't open with an open source solution in decade.
Actually, the opposite should be true. Memory won't "leak" from tab to tab. When the tab gets closed, it's memory gets returned to the OS pool by hook or by crook. Only the UI itself should leak memory over the lifetime of the browser.
If you're looking for a *nix, lightweight, WebKit based browser, may I suggest Midori?
http://software.twotoasts.de/
If by no difference you mean no difference other than providing physical evidence? Reiser disclosed the location of the body. The justice system, especially in murder cases, considers closure for the victim's family to be very important. Reiser made it possible for loved ones to know exactly what happened, and to perform funeral services. For that, he got a reduced sentence.
How is that like the inquisition again?
I make mailing list software for a living. I've seen our customer's lists.
120,000 is a nice, respectable number for someone who actually has everyone opt-in. Especially when we're talking one guy.
There are lots of things I could throw out, sure, but most of them came from principle numero uno - talk to each other. Learn each other's strengths and weaknesses, learn how each other works, learn when a process isn't working for one of you, and learn to evaluate each other's code. Process is really about leveraging communication to improve the product. So start building that communication.
While I recognize and agree with the point you're trying to make, I think it's a bit overstating the case to call engineers replaceable cogs. If you're working withing a relatively solved problem domain, and we're talking about a certain minimal level of skill, then this is true.
But in _this_ case we're talking about a completely nascent problem space. Caminer's brilliance was recognizing that computers could solve the problem. Yet it still took John Pinkerton with heaps of assistance from the Math Lab at Cambridge to design and build a computer with operating system sufficient to the task.
Is it perhaps excessive "use" of "quotation" marks?
As the article points out, this kind of traffic can be generated by legitimate applications, like BitTorrent. This is just a reliable way of manufacturing that kind of traffic for analysis.
You miss my point - Windows machines are insecure by default and by design. I had uninfected Windows machines when I ran Windows, but I understood why others were so easily infected. We live in a world where malware is everywhere, and legit software is distributed by exactly the same means as damaged goods - via the internet. I wasn't presuming you were lying about having an uninfected machine. I was presuming you were being ignorant in not understanding how this stuff spread. In retrospect perhaps you were being facetious.
Incorrect - CSV isn't a formal standard, the extra spaces are generally trimmed from the ends of records by most applications, unless wrapped in quotation marks.
They use the computer. For god's sake, you didn't have to go to a website to get the Sasser virus, infected machines would attack random IPs. If you bought an XP machine when Sasser was rampant, I knew many people who were infected on first boot, before they could even install a firewall or virus scanner.
You've never been emailed a Word document (with a VBA virus)? You've never installed AOL (which overwrites your netstack)? Never been redirected to a warez site (via a compromised legit website)? Hell, for years Wal-Mart used to sell software packages full of dubious "shareware", TurboTax was at one point under legal fire for installing a backdoor, you can't put a Sony audio CD in your machine for fear of installing DRM crippleware behind your back, and OEM machines are loaded with potentially insecure adware begging you to upgrade to the full version.
While it's not entirely inconceivable that you have always run Windows machines behind a hardware firewall, run expensive third party antivirus packages, never run other third party software (thus discarding the best reason to use Windows), and use your machine only for browsing websites you are 100% sure are uncompromised, it is absolutely beyond belief to me that you can be running Windows since 3.x days and not be aware of how easy it is for a machine to get loaded with garbage. As I pointed out, it's not even safe to plug in a vanilla XP machine into the internet without risk of being immediately infected.
I realize you're making the reasonable, moderate claim that here. I've done the same in the past. But this shit can no longer stand. I'm just gonna come out and say it - you cannot legitimately argue that piracy is theft. You just can't. I've heard all the damn arguments, and not one of them make sense to an unbiased, educated party. It's like arguing that the world is flat. It just isn't fucking flat, I don't care what it looks like in the desert.
Piracy is like sneaking into a movie theatre. Bam. I've done it. I've created a reasonble fucking analogy that I think holds up to moderate levels of scrutiny. Yet no one ever claimed that sneaking into a movie theatre is stealing. What is it you're stealing? You're getting something for free, but that's not stealing.
Of course not, but if you read the brief that is specifically addressed. The Plaintiff's burden when an investigator is hired is to either have the investigator witness infringement by third parties, or provide sufficient circumstantial evidence that infringement seems likely.
The first didn't occur because of the nature of Kazaa, and the second didn't occur because the sheer number of Kazaa users makes it unlikely that singles from multiplatinum records were downloaded from these specific users - if all you are sharing are files of which there are _hundreds of thousands_ or readily available copies in the same network, it is rather unlikely that anyone other than the investigators themselves downloaded the songs.
It should be pointed out, of course, that the EFF's filing is specifically to prevent summary judgment in the RIAA's favor, not to ask for favorable judgment for the defendant. Summary judgment in this case would constitute (in the opinion of the EFF) a dangerous and untenable expansion of copyright law. The RIAA seems to agree since they've removed these very claims from suits filed in the last five months.
I realize this reply is really really really old, but I just now caught it, and I can't really just let it stand.
I simply said that a copyright system which automatically makes non-commercial use not infringe is very close to no copyright system at all, at least in the case of entertainment media. I happen to think that _a_ copyright system is a good idea, the current one in the US is pretty shitty.
So either you misunderstood me, or you think all copyright systems are bad. If the latter, you're going to have to come up with something better than "Tolkien is dead, why should be make any money" and "Author X makes more money (due to the copyright system) because of one infringing case"
I have some criticism here and there of OLPC, and I wonder if it will ever achieve what it hopes to achieve.
That said, I find Dvorak's comments to be horrifically offensive. The ignorance and pretension with which he is critical of OLPC and, by extension, any project that does anything other than ship limited, non renewable resources to countries where it can be stolen by corrupt bureaucrats is frankly disgusting. And the assumptions underneath! That you'll only ever make a one time charitable donation to a third world country in your life! If I didn't know that Dvorak was doing this only to be contrary, I'd say that his rhetoric belied someone who had never deeply considered the problem in third world nations before writing the damn article.
The truth is that third world countries desperately need infrastructure and education. They'll never be able to compete in the world wide industrial market, even if they have natural resources, but given sufficient education they can compete in the world information market. Is Dvorak really so short sighted as to not see that? Kids who grow up with computers can become information workers, and that requires no more infrastructure than a cheap laptop and bandwidth. But apparently that's a long term investment that Dvorak can't see - though I doubt he would be so critical of a similar education initiative in the US, which already has established resources in computer education. How hypocritical.
And there is more - a single laptop can service a large number of children, technology like the XO-1 that could let kids onto the internet can foster a generation supportive and understanding of democracy and free markets without growing up in one. I could go on and on (for example, that the nations themselves are sometimes purchasing these laptops), but I think around here I'd be preaching to the choir.
So, sure, if you're only ever going to spend $200 dollars in charitable donations in your lifetime, spend it on food for starving kids. If you don't mind giving a little more then consider investing in the future of these children, rather than just hemorrhaging money into life support and hoping the situation gets better on its own.
God, making non-commercial use non-infringing is a TERRIBLE idea. You might as well throw out copyright entirely (which might not be as bad an idea).
For example, if I copy "The Lord of the Rings" onto blank DVDs, and give them to friends, upload them to the internet, and set up a big fat pipe for getting them, it's all non commercial! I didn't make a cent!
If we're going to have a copyright system at all, it should permit creators to profit from their work, at least for a little while.