.... And, in urging the world to not visit Linux Today, the requestor unwittingly causes the biggest single-day hitcount for the web site, all by would-be boycotters looking at what they were urged not to look at!
It's a shame, but I have my ad blocker on, and could not see the evil adverts anyway! haha!
The author makes the case that by 'making my Internet connection available to any and all who happen upon it, I have no way to be certain what kinds of songs, movies and pictures will be downloaded by other people using my IP address. And more important, my ISP has no way to be certain if it's me.'
Yeah, but the author does so fully aware of the potential consequences, thereby not really being an ignorant victim.
Put another way: If you open your house to all who come, including fugitives, are you going to be charged with aiding and abetting? What if you do so fully aware of what's going on except you ask no questions because you don't want to hear the answers? My guess is you're liable anyway.
I see why Valenti is so persuasive. Looking at the interview from the point of view of a non-technologist, non-Linux user, the man seems pretty level-headed.
Here is what i got from it:
1) He really believes in his side of the story. It just makes sense to him, and he explains it in a way that makes sense.
2) His argument is simple: Don't copy what you don't have permission to copy.
3) The interviewer was an absolute idiot for approaching his questions from the Linux point of view. Why should Valenti or the RIAA or anyone else assure that there is fucking DVD viewer for Linux???? Why try to put the man on the spot because market forces have not created a Linux DVD player? DUUHHHH! How about asking Valenti about the "fair use" aspect where you cannot make any copies that right now fall under "fair use"?
4) Showing Valenti that anyone can easily make an "illegal" Linux DVD player only makes the man more resolute, and gives ammo to the RIAA. Can you see Valenti saying to some congressmen I know for a fact anyone, and I mean anyone can make a DVD copier! You must erode freedoms now for the sake of our economy!? He could then provide a printout of the interview with the MIT fool who made the wrong point.
Well, I'm sure we got closer to an accord with Valenti by letting him know that MIT nerds building their own HDTVs and DVD players need the freedom to do so... But of course, he's worried about the other 300 million people in the USA and the other 4 billion people in the world.
LOL, you caught me. I was responding to the sublime insinuation in the original post that this guy should have something nasty done to him for responding to spam.
So we shouldn't suppress peoples "right" to do something stupid, like... say, drink 8 pints of beer then drive a 4 tonne truck whilst reading a newspaper and combing their hair.
And this is exactly why we have laws that limit our rights. Don't compare apples and oranges, it takes away from the point you are trying to make.
Yes, why should we judge people who financially support those who commit FRAUD?
You pursue fraud from a criminal fraud point of view (ie, investigate the defrauder and prosecute), not by preventing the poor idiot from buying into the fraudulent idea.
Bullshit! This is no invasion of privacy... First, you are in a public space, so getting taped is no big deal. Second, there has been at least one gang-related shooting in a cyber-cafe in Garden Grove, so you WANT everyone to get taped. In fact, all this is due to Asian gangs and the fact they gather(ed) at a Garden Grove cyber-cafe and just loitered and eventually someone got shot.
Bottom line: If you are in a public space, you can legally get taped. Deal with it.
Lemme guess... The kernel pool thing was run on Diebold voting machines, right? Give himself a 15 hour discrepancy to not make it look suspicious yet still win... No paper trail... hmmmm...
...Ingnorance is no excuse. Of course, IANAL, but I think this would be great for the RIAA...
You are right, you are not a lawyer. For starters, ignorance and lack of control over the content is an excuse. It's a valid excuse if you have a good lawyer. Read the news and take some law classes...
There is nothing inherently wrong with the Open Source movement
There's nothing wrong with socialism and communism either, as long as you speak "in theory." While you can find something wrong with anything if you look with a critical eye, I don't think OSS is at all close to perfect or optimal:
RMS pounces on anyone who does not both kiss his ass (his demand is that his contribution be acknowledged, see the GNU/Linux vs Linux/GNU vs Linux arguments) *and* sponsor his own personal choice method for open source (ie, use the license he prefers).
For some of the other stuff look at the article we are discussing.
Under the benevolent dictator, a term used to describe Linus Torvalds, Kai-Shek...
There are several serious intellectial oversights here:
1. Benevolent dictator? Have you asked any of the people that have dared to disagree with China's leadership? Puhleeze! 2. Kai-Shek had control of the whole country. Linus has control over the kernel only. Don't think this matters? Look at all the superior kernels that no one uses because there are no apps for them. Although Linus might indeed be powerful and benevolent, his domain is by no means the whole computing spectrum, and his power to do us all good is severely, severely limited. Think of how successful Kai-Shek would have been if he had not had absolute control of a single facet of government, such as agriculture, economy, imports/exports, energy, health care, education, law enforcement, etc... Kai-Shek and Linus are *not* in the same situation at all.
Within a few short years China was a world power
Again, a nice romatic comment, but you must acknowledge that China has to get away from its communist foundations and embrace capitalism just to stay alive. You also must acknowledge that China's greatness was accomplished with considerable suppression of its populace and numerous and outrageous human rights violations. I do not think you meant to say it would be a good thing if open source did the same things, did you?
Millions of identical workers producing code
But part of the problem is that lots of talent is wasted on unfinished, underdocumented, and redundant projects.
Whatever.... suffice it to say that I don't see the parallel between communist China and the open source communities, nor do I see what open source can learn from a dictator who killed, tortured, and "disappeared" anyone whio disagreed with him, thereby only leaving alive people whyo would call him a "benevolent dictator." The term "dictator" alone implies dissent is silenced.
That's why they put that warning sticker telling people not to do that, so that if they do and electrocute themselves, Conair isn't held responsible.
Well Conair *is* responsible, because they could have done something about it, for example, putting a curcuit breaker on the cord, which they do (that's what the square thing is that is on the end of the hair drier).
There are a couple precedents on this, but I am not a lawyer, I don't remember them, and I frankly don't care enough to look them up. Suffice it to say that if you fail to take a simple extra step to protect your customers from themselves, you are legally liable and negligent. Of course the lawsuits in this theme are about what "simple" means, not about whether they have to take those cautionary steps. But that is about life/death (electrocution in your example). This is more of a product quality issue, so who knows how to predict the outcome of the theoretical lawsuit.
As far as this specific issue goes, well, it reinforces why I do not ever buy Apple.
Whatever... If you make a device and slap a USB port on it you have to assume that people *will* use a USB connection to all sorts of things, not just your own other devices and products.
But as I said, I don't do the Apple thing, so it really does not affect me.
I love the comments on here: The exact same people who advocate doing all them hacks to get Windows stuff to work on Linux/etc are now indignantly piling on top of the guy who did not take the step on reading every possible piece of writing on an iPod (which is made by "so easy to use you don't need a stinkin' manual" Apple). Of course, you do not learn it is not supported until after it's broken, but it's Apple, so it cannot be the company's fault...
Not that I care, given that anything by Apple disinterests me, but it's somewhat fun to see all these hypocrites justify their biases.
Something is fishy here. I watch the newsgroups and spam mailing lists, and I see very few if any legitimate mistakes[...]
Well, I don't keep track of those, but I did not initiate contact there (who would?). I found out which blacklist it was, then found out who to contact, then called them on the phone (I could not e-mail them:-)). If these issues ever get on mailing lists, then I did not do it that way.
What blocklist has been unresponsive to correcting legitimate mistakes they've made? What IP block of yours has been affected?
The block list was the ORBS list. The previous IP block assignee had (apparently) several open relays. As to the IP block, I will refrain from specifying it. All I need is some slashdotter DOSing it because they hate opposite points of view (and no, I don't mean you). I will say this: our ISP is Sprint, for whatever it may matter.
Your hypothetical is quickly becoming a strawman
????? Well, ok, if you say so. That is exactly what happened, though.
Don't take this the wrong way, but...you are a spammer, right?
Not taken the wrong way and no, we are certainly not spammers. We are financial services company (and no, we don't resell anything, we are not agents of anyone, and we don't do mortgages or any of the frequently-spammed offerings). We don't spam. We don;t even telemarket. Most of our end-line customers probably don't have e-mail accounts either. Anyway, it is a serious, 20+ year old business with several thousand employees. You'll have to take my word on it: We do not spam, nor would our business spruce up if we did. Our customers are not people who would respond to spam.
I guess the only people who don't have a right to their opinion are the owners and users of blocklists, eh?
They do have the right, and they chose to close their servers (ask them why they did not *choose* to weather the storm). I never said they did not, nor did I (or my employer) ever try to silence their opinions or actions.
How did "spam blockers" do anything with YOUR property?
They did not break anything physically, just like spam does not do physical damage either (hey, hard disks spin whether or not they are doing anything). As with spam, the damage was that we had much lost time and productivity when e-mails never got through because of the blacklist. As I said in my message, there was much grief and delay in correcting the situation because of the personalities/priorities of the blacklist admins.
So you are admitting that you are incompentent to do your job
Really? Has your cristal ball told you what my job is? Has it told you where I work? Has it told you what my role was on the crisis? "Who cares about the facts, I just wanna argue," right?
Here's another term for you: "Jumping to conclusions." You know nothng about what I do or what my role is, and definitely, certianly you do not know anywhere near the full story. Now, seeing the kind of approach you are taking, I'm not even going to read the rest of your message. If what you want is a pissing match, go to someone else.
Thanks for taking away my choice of what I do with my own network and computers
Hey buddy, I did not take away anything from you... You don't really believe what you are saying, do you? I think your statement is missing the element of reason.
I just hope you remember this the day someone steps in and forces it upon you what you can and cant do with your system.
The spam blockers already did, and that is what my message is all about. Did you know, for example, that some business are hosted by Earthlink and Earthlink blocks spam to those hosted domains by using some blacklists? That's all fine, but what happens when the blacklist is wrong and critical business communications cannot get through even though *both* sender and receiver are constantly trying to contact Earthlink to resolve the issue... Where does your "it's my choice, dammit" argument fit into this? Should we switch ISP because the blacklist people are not responsive? Or perhaps we should ask our suppliers and customers to switch ISPs instead of us? BUT WAIT!!!! You are talking about NOT forcing people to do anything!
Both people that want to get your email, and those that want to send it, can do so VERY easily with no problems at all from blacklists, if you just choose to not deal with blacklists.
Well, your world might just be small enough for this to hold true, and this would be a solid argument. In my world, where there are many different people e-mailing each other critical communications, and not everyone has direct control over their own servers, and often one depeneds on intermediaries to do the right thing, your argument has been proven dead wrong.
But whatever, to each his own. I did not shut down any blacklist servers myself, so if you feel you have lost something, you are directing your anger at the wrong person. All I know is that life became a lot better when we liberated ourselves from having anything to do with blacklists.
Now, I respect your right to your opinion, just remeber I have a right to have my own (wrong?) opinion too.
Having been unfortunate enough to be assigned an IP block from a previous spammer and having gone through the subsequent ass-kissing I had to do to a black list maintainer that absolutely refused to remove us from the the list, I say the less blacklists there are, the better.
I'm sorry but some of these list maintainers are anal, (VERY) self-righteous, awful people who will not listen, not even when the person at the other end of the line is polite, patient, and takes a polite and amicable approach to the issue of getting removed from the blacklist (and punches a pillow after the phone calls and emails instead of being rude to the person).
I'm sorry but with the hell I had to go through to get removed (too much unwarranted ass-kissing, too much putting up with the "I'm only a volunteer" crap) I am only glad to see these anal a-holes go.
Let's just suppose you are running an OpenSource project. Do you have money to patent your invention, or do you have to wait until that someone else does it for you (microsoft for example) and they sue you?
You don't get it. If you have implemented a solution and cannot or don't want to patent it, you have at least established "prior art." that prevents MS from patenting it, or if they do get it past the patent authorities, it allows someone later on to invalidate the patent later on.
If Open Source projects are *really* as innovative as its biggest proponents claim, then what's to worry about if OSS will always beat a commercial interest to the punch?
After all, evil entities like Microsoft have never really intented anything or innovated, right?:-)
A much bigger threat is allowing patented technologies to become formally-adopted standards...
This guy calls himself a journalist ans writes imcomplete sentences like these:?
The most incisive critique of games journalism currently out there.
This is only a subject and no verb. The sentece says nothing. Sorry, but I cannot take anyone seriously when their writing gets in the way of the message, whatever the message is.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a shame, but I have my ad blocker on, and could not see the evil adverts anyway! haha!
Yeah, but the author does so fully aware of the potential consequences, thereby not really being an ignorant victim.
Put another way: If you open your house to all who come, including fugitives, are you going to be charged with aiding and abetting? What if you do so fully aware of what's going on except you ask no questions because you don't want to hear the answers? My guess is you're liable anyway.
So, anyone want to be the test case in court?
Here is what i got from it:
1) He really believes in his side of the story. It just makes sense to him, and he explains it in a way that makes sense.
2) His argument is simple: Don't copy what you don't have permission to copy.
3) The interviewer was an absolute idiot for approaching his questions from the Linux point of view. Why should Valenti or the RIAA or anyone else assure that there is fucking DVD viewer for Linux???? Why try to put the man on the spot because market forces have not created a Linux DVD player? DUUHHHH! How about asking Valenti about the "fair use" aspect where you cannot make any copies that right now fall under "fair use"?
4) Showing Valenti that anyone can easily make an "illegal" Linux DVD player only makes the man more resolute, and gives ammo to the RIAA. Can you see Valenti saying to some congressmen I know for a fact anyone, and I mean anyone can make a DVD copier! You must erode freedoms now for the sake of our economy!? He could then provide a printout of the interview with the MIT fool who made the wrong point.
Well, I'm sure we got closer to an accord with Valenti by letting him know that MIT nerds building their own HDTVs and DVD players need the freedom to do so... But of course, he's worried about the other 300 million people in the USA and the other 4 billion people in the world.
What an awful interview!
LOL, you caught me. I was responding to the sublime insinuation in the original post that this guy should have something nasty done to him for responding to spam.
And this is exactly why we have laws that limit our rights. Don't compare apples and oranges, it takes away from the point you are trying to make.
You pursue fraud from a criminal fraud point of view (ie, investigate the defrauder and prosecute), not by preventing the poor idiot from buying into the fraudulent idea.
If the guy wants to buy from spammers, let him. We have to fight spam from another angle, not by supressing people's rights to do stupid things.
Bullshit! This is no invasion of privacy... First, you are in a public space, so getting taped is no big deal. Second, there has been at least one gang-related shooting in a cyber-cafe in Garden Grove, so you WANT everyone to get taped. In fact, all this is due to Asian gangs and the fact they gather(ed) at a Garden Grove cyber-cafe and just loitered and eventually someone got shot.
Bottom line: If you are in a public space, you can legally get taped. Deal with it.
Lemme guess... The kernel pool thing was run on Diebold voting machines, right? Give himself a 15 hour discrepancy to not make it look suspicious yet still win... No paper trail... hmmmm...
You are right, you are not a lawyer. For starters, ignorance and lack of control over the content is an excuse. It's a valid excuse if you have a good lawyer. Read the news and take some law classes...
There's nothing wrong with socialism and communism either, as long as you speak "in theory." While you can find something wrong with anything if you look with a critical eye, I don't think OSS is at all close to perfect or optimal:
RMS pounces on anyone who does not both kiss his ass (his demand is that his contribution be acknowledged, see the GNU/Linux vs Linux/GNU vs Linux arguments) *and* sponsor his own personal choice method for open source (ie, use the license he prefers).
For some of the other stuff look at the article we are discussing.
Under the benevolent dictator, a term used to describe Linus Torvalds, Kai-Shek...
There are several serious intellectial oversights here:
1. Benevolent dictator? Have you asked any of the people that have dared to disagree with China's leadership? Puhleeze!
2. Kai-Shek had control of the whole country. Linus has control over the kernel only. Don't think this matters? Look at all the superior kernels that no one uses because there are no apps for them. Although Linus might indeed be powerful and benevolent, his domain is by no means the whole computing spectrum, and his power to do us all good is severely, severely limited. Think of how successful Kai-Shek would have been if he had not had absolute control of a single facet of government, such as agriculture, economy, imports/exports, energy, health care, education, law enforcement, etc... Kai-Shek and Linus are *not* in the same situation at all.
Within a few short years China was a world power
Again, a nice romatic comment, but you must acknowledge that China has to get away from its communist foundations and embrace capitalism just to stay alive. You also must acknowledge that China's greatness was accomplished with considerable suppression of its populace and numerous and outrageous human rights violations. I do not think you meant to say it would be a good thing if open source did the same things, did you?
Millions of identical workers producing code
But part of the problem is that lots of talent is wasted on unfinished, underdocumented, and redundant projects.
Whatever.... suffice it to say that I don't see the parallel between communist China and the open source communities, nor do I see what open source can learn from a dictator who killed, tortured, and "disappeared" anyone whio disagreed with him, thereby only leaving alive people whyo would call him a "benevolent dictator." The term "dictator" alone implies dissent is silenced.
I have always and always will feel stupid people that damange themselfs and their own belongings deserve what they get.
Then why all this bitching on here about Windows and the "damage" it causes? Well whatever...
Well Conair *is* responsible, because they could have done something about it, for example, putting a curcuit breaker on the cord, which they do (that's what the square thing is that is on the end of the hair drier).
There are a couple precedents on this, but I am not a lawyer, I don't remember them, and I frankly don't care enough to look them up. Suffice it to say that if you fail to take a simple extra step to protect your customers from themselves, you are legally liable and negligent. Of course the lawsuits in this theme are about what "simple" means, not about whether they have to take those cautionary steps. But that is about life/death (electrocution in your example). This is more of a product quality issue, so who knows how to predict the outcome of the theoretical lawsuit.
As far as this specific issue goes, well, it reinforces why I do not ever buy Apple.
But as I said, I don't do the Apple thing, so it really does not affect me.
See you got it wrong... Slashdot is NOT a journalistic site... for many reasons.
Not that I care, given that anything by Apple disinterests me, but it's somewhat fun to see all these hypocrites justify their biases.
Well, I don't keep track of those, but I did not initiate contact there (who would?). I found out which blacklist it was, then found out who to contact, then called them on the phone (I could not e-mail them :-)). If these issues ever get on mailing lists, then I did not do it that way.
What blocklist has been unresponsive to correcting legitimate mistakes they've made? What IP block of yours has been affected?
The block list was the ORBS list. The previous IP block assignee had (apparently) several open relays. As to the IP block, I will refrain from specifying it. All I need is some slashdotter DOSing it because they hate opposite points of view (and no, I don't mean you). I will say this: our ISP is Sprint, for whatever it may matter.
Your hypothetical is quickly becoming a strawman
????? Well, ok, if you say so. That is exactly what happened, though.
Don't take this the wrong way, but...you are a spammer, right?
Not taken the wrong way and no, we are certainly not spammers. We are financial services company (and no, we don't resell anything, we are not agents of anyone, and we don't do mortgages or any of the frequently-spammed offerings). We don't spam. We don;t even telemarket. Most of our end-line customers probably don't have e-mail accounts either. Anyway, it is a serious, 20+ year old business with several thousand employees. You'll have to take my word on it: We do not spam, nor would our business spruce up if we did. Our customers are not people who would respond to spam.
I guess the only people who don't have a right to their opinion are the owners and users of blocklists, eh?
They do have the right, and they chose to close their servers (ask them why they did not *choose* to weather the storm). I never said they did not, nor did I (or my employer) ever try to silence their opinions or actions.
How did "spam blockers" do anything with YOUR property?
They did not break anything physically, just like spam does not do physical damage either (hey, hard disks spin whether or not they are doing anything). As with spam, the damage was that we had much lost time and productivity when e-mails never got through because of the blacklist. As I said in my message, there was much grief and delay in correcting the situation because of the personalities/priorities of the blacklist admins.
Really? Has your cristal ball told you what my job is? Has it told you where I work? Has it told you what my role was on the crisis? "Who cares about the facts, I just wanna argue," right?
Here's another term for you: "Jumping to conclusions." You know nothng about what I do or what my role is, and definitely, certianly you do not know anywhere near the full story. Now, seeing the kind of approach you are taking, I'm not even going to read the rest of your message. If what you want is a pissing match, go to someone else.
Haha! I have also been known to say "empty void"!
Hey buddy, I did not take away anything from you... You don't really believe what you are saying, do you? I think your statement is missing the element of reason.
I just hope you remember this the day someone steps in and forces it upon you what you can and cant do with your system.
The spam blockers already did, and that is what my message is all about. Did you know, for example, that some business are hosted by Earthlink and Earthlink blocks spam to those hosted domains by using some blacklists? That's all fine, but what happens when the blacklist is wrong and critical business communications cannot get through even though *both* sender and receiver are constantly trying to contact Earthlink to resolve the issue... Where does your "it's my choice, dammit" argument fit into this? Should we switch ISP because the blacklist people are not responsive? Or perhaps we should ask our suppliers and customers to switch ISPs instead of us? BUT WAIT!!!! You are talking about NOT forcing people to do anything!
Both people that want to get your email, and those that want to send it, can do so VERY easily with no problems at all from blacklists, if you just choose to not deal with blacklists.
Well, your world might just be small enough for this to hold true, and this would be a solid argument. In my world, where there are many different people e-mailing each other critical communications, and not everyone has direct control over their own servers, and often one depeneds on intermediaries to do the right thing, your argument has been proven dead wrong.
But whatever, to each his own. I did not shut down any blacklist servers myself, so if you feel you have lost something, you are directing your anger at the wrong person. All I know is that life became a lot better when we liberated ourselves from having anything to do with blacklists.
Now, I respect your right to your opinion, just remeber I have a right to have my own (wrong?) opinion too.
Troll? I post a description of a bad experience I had and I am labeled a troll? Geez!
I'm sorry but some of these list maintainers are anal, (VERY) self-righteous, awful people who will not listen, not even when the person at the other end of the line is polite, patient, and takes a polite and amicable approach to the issue of getting removed from the blacklist (and punches a pillow after the phone calls and emails instead of being rude to the person).
I'm sorry but with the hell I had to go through to get removed (too much unwarranted ass-kissing, too much putting up with the "I'm only a volunteer" crap) I am only glad to see these anal a-holes go.
You don't get it. If you have implemented a solution and cannot or don't want to patent it, you have at least established "prior art." that prevents MS from patenting it, or if they do get it past the patent authorities, it allows someone later on to invalidate the patent later on.
After all, evil entities like Microsoft have never really intented anything or innovated, right? :-)
A much bigger threat is allowing patented technologies to become formally-adopted standards...
The most incisive critique of games journalism currently out there.
This is only a subject and no verb. The sentece says nothing. Sorry, but I cannot take anyone seriously when their writing gets in the way of the message, whatever the message is.