The point of GNewSense is to find places where Free Software isn't adequate to have a fully functioning system without binary blobs. If you're a business user [other than a hardware integrator, in which case your tech team might be using it to test your hardware's compatibility in a purely non-proprietary context], a non-FSF-fanatic home user, or otherwise someone in any way marketing-sensitive, you probably don't want to be running a distribution optimized for idiological purity over compatibility and convenience; as such, it's not meant for you. (Business users care about redistributability, of course, but a great many of the relevant binary blobs have that property anyhow. An embedded distribution built for license purity would be interesting to a great many people... but a good number of those users are liable to be skittish about the GPL as well, making their goals and the FSF's align considerably differently -- and Linux-centric embedded-system build toolkits generally already have license-management functionality anyhow).
Given that goal and context, why does the marketing matter?
How does ssh do it? Easy. The FIRST time it says that you have never used this system, and would you like to accept it. If the key EVER changes, you are "thrown out" by default. Bad error!
That system sucks, though: It means that any connections made for the first time while a MITM attack is in place go undetected. DNSSEC + SSHFP (or another mechanism for securely publishing your host keys) is much more secure.
Getting back to Firefox -- if you have a mechanism for securely distributing your private CA to your users, then you're golden -- my last company bundled ours on the install media distributed with our hardware. If you're asking folks to blindly trust that the first time they access your system they're not already subject to an attack, though, you're taking some risks and should be aware of them.
Generally speaking, I agree with your post. However...
Technically there isn't any, c is a subset of c++ so anything you can do in c you can do in c++.
That's a really, really awful way to think about C.
C has a completely different set of best practices and design principals; anyone who puts "C/C++" on a resume I'm reviewing loses points as opposed to listing them separately.
I don't know what the hell you use to wake up remote hosts, but it's really not that complicated.
Uhh... huh. The traditional spec is simple enough: send a packet containing some magic and the target host's MAC address. This means that (1) the packet has to be able to get there (can't do it through a NATting router without a forwarded port open) and (2) you need to know that MAC address (sure, an ARP table entry will help there, but without the conntrack entry or forwarded port it's useless). You can talk about it being "not really that complicated", but unless you've actually written an implementation, I don't know where you get the authority to make that assertion.
"And you want Joe and Jane Average to have to set up port forwarding rules for the voip/IM/whatever providers they're using? Yeah, right."
You're talking about running servers for your phone. Joe and Jane average think you're a freak, and would never talk to you.
Damn straight. I could, if I were inclined, run an Asterisk box on my embedded router and have it do one of the preexisting LAN-friendly wakeup protocols to get the full server (with its disk space and speech-synthesis software and fancy logic and so forth) running. The point of this enhancement is to allow that kind of capability to be used as part of pre-packaged products by folks who... well... aren't me.
Durrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.
You realize the whole reason I've been sticking around in this thread is because it's funny showing you what an idiot and an ass you are, while avoiding descending to your level? It'd be more fun if you were pseudonymous, but hey... can't have everything.
Think of the saying about mud-wrestling with a pig; whether or not the pig appreciates such, doing it without getting dirty is a sport!
I was interested that they used a GPS signal to synchronise their systems.
I can't WTFV (never bothered to install Flash on my system at work, and don't have a sound card here anyhow), but that's no surprise -- a GPS is pretty much the generally accepted way to run your own cheap tier-1 NTP server.
You know, all I need to know is the IP of my machine to wake it up remotely.
Behind a NAT, all I need to do is set a port forwarding rule.
No, you don't just need the IP -- you really do need the MAC address (at least for earlier versions of WoL; newer ones have some alternate keying mechanisms). If you're on the same network segment, the software you're using will look it up for you; if you aren't, it can't.
And you want Joe and Jane Average to have to set up port forwarding rules for the voip/IM/whatever providers they're using? Yeah, right.
You can certainly use MAC-based wake up packets even when not on the same LAN. There is such a thing as a static ARP entry you know.
The lack of an ARP table entry isn't the problem.
Your first line of defense, blocking people who block caller-ID, is redundant. The phone company offers this. Calls will never even get to your house if you enable it. No need to power up for the spam phone calls.
The phone company offers that... and charges for it. Fuck 'em.
You can also handle blacklisting at the phone company end, and much more powerfully. (This will cost you, though).
You do all that to keep people from spamming you? Wow, I'd hate to be a family member who had to legitimately call you.
They're whitelisted... the ones I actually want to talk to, anyhow.
Voicemail. Great. So if I call John and he's not there, I get his voicemail. I have to call again and press 3 for Sarah, to find out she's not there. I call again and press 4 to find out Bob is there, thankfully. I just wanted to know what time the BBQ was, fucker.
Fine theory. Moot in practice. We don't do family outings -- we're antisocial like that. Plus, if you were someone we cared about, you'd be on the whitelist to get the forward-to-cell-phone option instead of going to voicemail. (Incoming is POTS [for faxing support], outgoing is cheap VoIP, so we can do that with only one POTS line).
The only person who ever calls with the intent to talk to whichever arbitrary person happens to be here is my father-in-law, and if I ever care enough I'll write a custom rule for him.
Telemarketers routinely spoof caller ID. You're blocking and blacklisting is ineffective.
Nope -- it works just fine; we got most of our spam from the same 3 caller IDs. Further, most telemarketers won't bother to go through the who-are-you-calling-for? menu, so even for those that aren't blacklisted the phones never ring.
Evidence against them? Now you're talking out of your ass. I defy you to litigate against any of them.
I file FCC complaints on a regular basis. Having actual records to back up something I'm swearing to on the paperwork gives me warm-and-fuzzies.
Faxes, eh? Who the hell still receives faxes? And why touch sourceforge when a simple Dell printer/copier/fax supports pdf conversion and e-mailing/forwarding/blocking/whatever of faxes out of the box?
Our Dell printer/copier/fax is out in the living room, and that part of the house isn't wired. Faxing is too sensitive to jitter to reliably connect it over voip with one of the SPAs, the model we own doesn't do the PDF thing and, ya know, I might actually do this shit because I think it's fun. Beats wasting my time playing World of Warcraft or something.
Oh -- and as far as "who the hell receives faxes" -- I did (in a work-related function) until I changed jobs a few months ago.
You send a specific packet across the internet to raise the power state of the targeted host. Until someone does something other than that, it doesn't matter what they fucking call it.
Okay, I see where the problem here is -- inadequate information about the problem space.
The old technology required that the sending host know the MAC address of the system to be woken up; those are only available within a LAN segment, and there's certainly no way some arbitrary caller initiating a phone call is going to know it.
The old technology didn't allow any kind of access from the other side of a NATting router, even if the remote end did know your MAC address, because when your system is asleep you're not keeping any connections open, so the NAT table entries allowing any UDP streams previously available are going to eventually time out, making your machine un-wakeable
This solution keeps the NIC alive enough (sending an occasional packet to whomever you're allowing to wake your computer) to keep your masquerading router aware that there should be bidirectional connectivity available, even when your computer is in sleep mode.
If you wanted to save electricity you'd have a normal fucking phone and answering machine, VoIP or not.
Yes, but I also want my spam-filtering rules in place. Folks need to go through a menu to actually ring any of the phones in the house; anything without Caller ID gets a message telling them why they're getting hung up on (and is then hung up on); anything I've blacklisted gets hung up on without even ringing the phones; different members of my household have different voicemail boxes, and a distinctive ring is used to indicate who the call is for; and incoming calls are recorded so I have evidence against the $@!@$#^ spammers who keep calling my house. And faxes are received and sent through iaxmodem, so there's no paper wasted in processing them. It's shiny, see!
Wake on LAN is wake on LAN. You can implement whatever standard you want, but it's the same thing.
And a steamship is like a raft -- they both float, after all. You can implement whatever floating-thing you want, but it's the same thing.
If you have VoIP, then you probably have a phone. Who the hell would turn their phone off?
Huh? I'd like to be able to turn the Asterisk server that runs the answering machine for my house off -- saves electricity, after all.
If you use your PC for VoIP, wake on LAN is even more elementary.
What do you mean by "elementary"? "Important"? Maybe, but it doesn't exist right now in a form that's actually useful for that purpose; that's part of what this technology fixes.
"Dual booting machine"? It's two bloody machines in one case! I'd hardly call that "dual booting"; to the contrary, it's new and novel (and damned cool).
Wake on LAN isn't very useful for a VoIP call that's coming through you from some arbitrary place off the Internet via your local NAT setup. (Your NATting router handles SIP forwarding and triggers wake-on-LAN before handoff? That's great, if it exists).
Dual booting has pretty much nothing at all to do with a technology that runs a completely separate ultra-low-power computer embedded inside your laptop.
...For not magically installing a chip on the motherboard of users clamoring for instant-on technology.
...or otherwise pursuing an Instant-On approach centered around their technology. If they withheld Designed for Vista Mobile certifications for laptops with extra chips, you'd better believe there'd be lots of motherboards with extra chips on them.:)
Not that MS did anything wrong by not pursuing this -- but they certainly had (and have) the power.
And in the event that MS implements "awake from internet message" technology -- Slashdot headline of the day:
"Microsoft introduces glaring security exploit as 'feature'"
That's a matter of wrapping appropriate security. The Intel solution doesn't wake on calls from just anybody, and an appropriate Microsoft solution wouldn't either. If they didn't take comparable steps, they'd deserve any ribbing they got.
I know the sentiment is that we don't want to pay for music unless it's in the form of a DRM-free, lossless file which we can give to all of our friends. We want it for $0.10 per track, and when the industry makes it available for $0.10 a track, we'll just say that we want it for $0.05 a track and go about our swashbuckling ways.
I think the popularity of AllOfMP3 at its height belies the truth of that argument. Build it (cheap enough) and they really will come.
i'm not willing to throw our foreign policy for the future under a bus just to get civil unions on a fast track. somethings are more important than others.
(If by "fringe" you mean calling the Iraq war a mistake back before that was popular, I'll agree with you that Obama is a fringe candidate on the topic. Otherwise, I'm not quite sure how you reach that conclusion). Also, I think that getting Supreme Court justices on the bench who will uphold Roe v. Wade is more important than just civil unions, per se -- they are, after all, appointed for life; Bush has done enough damage in that department already.
its funny that he stood by that man in silence those many years. either he tacitly agrees with wrights views or is a moral coward.
Oh, c'mon, now.
The church in question has been known for social progressivism long before Wright made the news, and if you read Obama's books, he talks about some of the issues he had with some of the other churches in Chicago and the leadership thereof; to put it bluntly, he may well have ended up with one of the best of a bad lot.
I grew up attending a church where several of the members of the Board of Elders were people with some of whose views I disagreed with pretty strongly (and disagree with even more strongly now; suffice to say that depending on who was speaking that week, it was either forgiveness-and-salvation or hellfire-and-brimstone... unless it was our small town's banker talking about biblical money management or our high school's history teacher talking about old testament prophecies and their fulfillment, both of whose sermons I thoroughly enjoyed -- I grew up attending a very interesting church); the thing that made that church fairly distinct was that we were encouraged to make our own decisions between the many and varying views of Christianity presented. Anyhow, I'm sure that someone with a video clip of some of our more... interesting... sermons could come up with a claim that I grew up listening to a contemporary of Fred Phelps and cast aspersions on my character by such means, and indeed I considered the board members who took those positions in their sermons good family friends despite (and we all worked together on such projects as building [yes, building a building from the lot up, with our own hands and tools] a battered women's shelter and cooking food for the hungry)... in short, my background is such that I understand very well that people are multifaceted, and just where Huckabee was coming from when he refused to be baited into attacking Obama for his relationship with Wright.
In closing, let me quote Huckabee himself:
Obama has handled this about as well as anybody could. And I agree, it's a very historic speech. I think that it was an important one, and one that he had to deliver. And he couldn't wait. The sooner he made it, maybe the quicker that this becomes less of the issue. Otherwise, it was the only thing that was the issue in his entire campaign. And I thought he handled it very, very well.
And he made the point, and I think it's a valid one, that you can't hold the candidate responsible for everything around him that people may say or do. You just can't, whether it's me, whether it's Obama, or anybody else.
But he did distance himself from the very vitriolic statements. Now, the second story -- it's interesting to me that there are some people on the left that are having to be very uncomfortable with what [Jeremiah] Wright said when they were all over a Jerry Falwell or anyone on the right who said things that they found very awkward and uncomfortable years ago.
Many times those were statements lifted out of the context of a larger sermon. Sermons, after all, are rarely written word-for-word by pastors like Reverend Wright, who are delivering them extemporaneously and caught up in the emotion of the moment. There are things that sometimes get said that if you put them on paper and looked at them in print, you'd say, 'Well, I probably didn't mean to say it quite like that......'
And one other thing I think we've got to remember.
As easy as it is for those of us who are white to look back and say 'That's a terrible statement' -- I grew up in a very segregated South.
And I think that you have to cut some slack -- and I'm going to be probably the only conservative in America who's going to say something like this, but I'm just telling you -- we've got to cut some slack to people who grew up being called names, being told you have to sit in the balcony when you go to the movie, you have to go to the back door to go into the r
yup, people are starting to see through his slick marketing image. and mccain is gaining on him. chock up another clinton voter for mccain.
How could you support both Clinton and McCain? I could see going off to a 3rd party, or deciding not to vote at all... but Clinton and McCain are night and day on the issues. Let's look at some of the wedge issues:
Abortion - McCain is proudly and staunchly "pro-life", and believes that Roe v. Wade must be overturned. Clinton has long defended Roe v. Wade. Obama takes the position that abortion is unfortunate, and should be avoided where possible, but should not be illegal (and thus favors upholding Roe v. Wade).
Stem cell research - Clinton and Obama oppose the ban on stem cell research. McCain has a statement on the subject with quite a lot of weasel words -- but the bottom line is that he believes stem cell research is immoral and should be illegal.
Marriage - Obama and Clinton see civil unions with the full benefits and rights of a traditional marriage as a politically acceptable stopgap measure. McCain staunchly supports marriage being restricted to its traditional definition, and is unclear on his position on civil unions.
As you may recall from the primary, Obama and Clinton's positions were both very near the Democratic party line, making them difficult to distinguish on the issues at times -- but while McCain may have cultivated a reputation as a maverick, he toes the Republican line. If you care about how the country is run, "slick marketing image" or no, I find it hard to see how one could abandon Clinton for McCain.
Maybe in his campaign speeches. Not in his lectures as a law professor. Not in his book.
...and also not not in his speeches over the last two years focusing on an individual issues (as opposed to campaign speeches, in which context explaining why one is a better choice than one's opponents is, after all, the whole point). I understand from his former students that even these are vastly simplified and unnuanced compared to the lectures he gave when teaching -- lectures which, far from telling left-leaning students on a campus with right-leaning faculty what they wanted to hear, asked them questions that challenged (and helped them refine) their beliefs.
Don't you understand? Obama is completely black-and-white in his assertions that his political opponents are wrong, wrong, wrong about how they see things. His completely, unshakably clear on how wrong everyone else is.
Maybe in his campaign speeches. Not in his lectures as a law professor. Not in his book.
Whatever intellectual horsepower or rhetorical elegance he posesses is being applied to and is in the service of a very patch-work, self-defeating, confused set of principles.
Try "nuanced"; read his second book for a better understanding -- not only of the principals in question, but of the importance of considering multiple points of view (as opposed to only a single, black-and-white view of the world based on one particular set of partisan principals) in making positions.
Can viewing the world in shades of gray lead to a charge that one must have a (presumptively black-and-white) view which is inconsistent, constantly shifting, "patch-work" or "self-defeating"? I suppose it may... but that doesn't prevent it from being The Right Thing.
On the whole, I agree that judges should have a great deal of discretion with regard to damages -- and if only applied to cases of commercial infringement (particularly where the costs of the licenses are such that the risk of a £5000 fine is inadequate deterrent), this adjustment makes a great deal of sense, and is something I can happily support.
That said: A wide range is one thing. A range where the top end of the scale is so outrageous as that we see applied to private infringement cases, on the other hand, is quite another -- and gives the parties enforcing their rights undue leverage to extract settlements even in cases where those settlements are unwarranted merely by waving the threat of that maximum punishment at their oft-unsophisticated targets. Last time I was called to sit on a jury, we were first asked if we could envision possible facts for a case regarding the action in question which would justify both the maximum and minimum penalties associated. I can foresee no possible circumstances in which I could call taking away a person's home for maintaining an illicit music collection justice; to prevent threats of that stripe from being used to bully even innocents into settling, the range of applicable penalties should have its top end more carefully constrained. Perhaps a larger but overall, rather than per-work, statutory minimum -- coupled with a maximum penalty which scales as a multiplier of market value (and commercial/noncommercial nature) -- would serve.
Indeed, statutory minimums are a great deal of the problem (at least in the US): Minimums which seem reasonable on their face can become far less so in the context of modern technology allowing a single action to infringe a large number of copyrights; for instance, faced with an individual downloading a single file containing a collection of 200 copyrighted ROMs via a mechanism (such as BitTorrent) which shares this file with others, US courts have no freedom to award less than $100,000 unless it can be affirmatively shown that the party in question was ignorant of the law (a circumstance in which the $40,000 minimum penalty the court is then forced to award is almost certainly not what the legislature intended either). Further, regulations passed with the intention that they only apply to commercial infringement have been amended for use against noncommercial infringement (ie. by defining infringement for any kind of gain -- explicitly including access to other copyrighted works -- as commercial), exacerbating this situation further.
In any event: I am at present overdue to go to bed, and so am cutting myself off and doing so presently; if this post is incoherent in parts, please accept my apologies for the same. Coming up with a reasonable balance is a hard problem; I suspect that more universal and effective enforcement, coupled with less unreasonable penalties, would go a long way towards getting things where they need to be; doing that enforcement without infringing on individuals' rights (both right to privacy and the ability to tinker with equipment one rightfully owns) is, however, regretfully difficult.
In areas where the limit is 70mph, I don't doubt that you're right. In areas where the limit is set unrealistically low, on the other hand, the flow of traffic is still near 70mph. If there isn't fear of getting caught, a small group of people will do whatever they can get away with, and a larger group will do what they think is reasonable (which differs from what is legal).
Example: I'm paying for GameTap. One of the games this service gives me access to is Fallout -- but on account of their DRM mechanism I can't access my save games, can't apply patches, and otherwise have less capabilities than I would with the commercial game. I've downloaded a copy off of a well-known BitTorrent site, am playing that instead of the copy delivered via the service I'm paying for, and feel perfectly justified doing so. Is it legal? No -- but I'm acting in a manner I believe to be reasonable.
Having the law so divorced from reasonability that I could have statutory liability greater than the present sale value of my house for this act is frankly unconscionable.
That's just the thing - piracy isn't a norm of society. Protecting rights is the norm of society, and that's what this law is doing.
Piracy is a norm, just as much as breaking the speed limit.
You may not like it, and it may not be a good thing -- we'd have less pollution and fewer fatal accidents if people didn't speed, after all -- but whether it's desirable or not has nothing to do with whether it's reached the point of being the effective status quo.
(While I work with Free Software, the games I play and the software my wife uses for school are commercial, and I do spend money on them; likewise, I've been buying music from Amazon MP3 since it became available. This isn't an attempt to rationalize my own behavior, but rather an observation regarding what's generally considered acceptable behavior in public).
Anyhow, inasmuch as this really is targeting commercial infringers, more power to them -- if, at least, it's actually liable to help. Commercial infringers are scum, and that meme is widespread enough to be considered a norm as well. On the other hand, if it leads to suits targeting individuals for far more than their total net worth for what once would have been a civil violation worth treble actual damages... well, that is thoroughly unfortunate. Even if the police can't pull over and fine folks every time they're speeding doesn't make it acceptable to confiscate a person's car, house and other worldly possessions on the one occasion that they're unfortunate enough to get caught; why is that approach considered acceptable in the context of copyright infringement?
Google shouldn't have removed the video in the first place. At least, that's what I refused to do when I received an obviously invalid DMCA request for one of my own customers site.
That's a very dangerous thing to do -- you're depriving yourself of the "safe harbor" protections that would mean that only your customer, and not you yourself, has liability. Sure, the claim may be invalid -- but if they try to haul you into court alongside your customer, it would be nice to be able to get yourself back out again with minimal time and expense, yes?
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The point of GNewSense is to find places where Free Software isn't adequate to have a fully functioning system without binary blobs. If you're a business user [other than a hardware integrator, in which case your tech team might be using it to test your hardware's compatibility in a purely non-proprietary context], a non-FSF-fanatic home user, or otherwise someone in any way marketing-sensitive, you probably don't want to be running a distribution optimized for idiological purity over compatibility and convenience; as such, it's not meant for you. (Business users care about redistributability, of course, but a great many of the relevant binary blobs have that property anyhow. An embedded distribution built for license purity would be interesting to a great many people... but a good number of those users are liable to be skittish about the GPL as well, making their goals and the FSF's align considerably differently -- and Linux-centric embedded-system build toolkits generally already have license-management functionality anyhow).
Given that goal and context, why does the marketing matter?
That system sucks, though: It means that any connections made for the first time while a MITM attack is in place go undetected. DNSSEC + SSHFP (or another mechanism for securely publishing your host keys) is much more secure.
Getting back to Firefox -- if you have a mechanism for securely distributing your private CA to your users, then you're golden -- my last company bundled ours on the install media distributed with our hardware. If you're asking folks to blindly trust that the first time they access your system they're not already subject to an attack, though, you're taking some risks and should be aware of them.
Generally speaking, I agree with your post. However...
That's a really, really awful way to think about C.
C has a completely different set of best practices and design principals; anyone who puts "C/C++" on a resume I'm reviewing loses points as opposed to listing them separately.
Uhh... huh. The traditional spec is simple enough: send a packet containing some magic and the target host's MAC address. This means that (1) the packet has to be able to get there (can't do it through a NATting router without a forwarded port open) and (2) you need to know that MAC address (sure, an ARP table entry will help there, but without the conntrack entry or forwarded port it's useless). You can talk about it being "not really that complicated", but unless you've actually written an implementation, I don't know where you get the authority to make that assertion.
Damn straight. I could, if I were inclined, run an Asterisk box on my embedded router and have it do one of the preexisting LAN-friendly wakeup protocols to get the full server (with its disk space and speech-synthesis software and fancy logic and so forth) running. The point of this enhancement is to allow that kind of capability to be used as part of pre-packaged products by folks who... well... aren't me.
You realize the whole reason I've been sticking around in this thread is because it's funny showing you what an idiot and an ass you are, while avoiding descending to your level? It'd be more fun if you were pseudonymous, but hey... can't have everything.
Think of the saying about mud-wrestling with a pig; whether or not the pig appreciates such, doing it without getting dirty is a sport!
I can't WTFV (never bothered to install Flash on my system at work, and don't have a sound card here anyhow), but that's no surprise -- a GPS is pretty much the generally accepted way to run your own cheap tier-1 NTP server.
No, you don't just need the IP -- you really do need the MAC address (at least for earlier versions of WoL; newer ones have some alternate keying mechanisms). If you're on the same network segment, the software you're using will look it up for you; if you aren't, it can't.
And you want Joe and Jane Average to have to set up port forwarding rules for the voip/IM/whatever providers they're using? Yeah, right.
The lack of an ARP table entry isn't the problem.
The phone company offers that... and charges for it. Fuck 'em.
Not as powerful as what I can do locally.
They're whitelisted... the ones I actually want to talk to, anyhow.
Fine theory. Moot in practice. We don't do family outings -- we're antisocial like that. Plus, if you were someone we cared about, you'd be on the whitelist to get the forward-to-cell-phone option instead of going to voicemail. (Incoming is POTS [for faxing support], outgoing is cheap VoIP, so we can do that with only one POTS line).
The only person who ever calls with the intent to talk to whichever arbitrary person happens to be here is my father-in-law, and if I ever care enough I'll write a custom rule for him.
Nope -- it works just fine; we got most of our spam from the same 3 caller IDs. Further, most telemarketers won't bother to go through the who-are-you-calling-for? menu, so even for those that aren't blacklisted the phones never ring.
I file FCC complaints on a regular basis. Having actual records to back up something I'm swearing to on the paperwork gives me warm-and-fuzzies.
Our Dell printer/copier/fax is out in the living room, and that part of the house isn't wired. Faxing is too sensitive to jitter to reliably connect it over voip with one of the SPAs, the model we own doesn't do the PDF thing and, ya know, I might actually do this shit because I think it's fun. Beats wasting my time playing World of Warcraft or something.
Oh -- and as far as "who the hell receives faxes" -- I did (in a work-related function) until I changed jobs a few months ago.
Okay, I see where the problem here is -- inadequate information about the problem space.
This solution keeps the NIC alive enough (sending an occasional packet to whomever you're allowing to wake your computer) to keep your masquerading router aware that there should be bidirectional connectivity available, even when your computer is in sleep mode.
Yes, but I also want my spam-filtering rules in place. Folks need to go through a menu to actually ring any of the phones in the house; anything without Caller ID gets a message telling them why they're getting hung up on (and is then hung up on); anything I've blacklisted gets hung up on without even ringing the phones; different members of my household have different voicemail boxes, and a distinctive ring is used to indicate who the call is for; and incoming calls are recorded so I have evidence against the $@!@$#^ spammers who keep calling my house. And faxes are received and sent through iaxmodem, so there's no paper wasted in processing them. It's shiny, see!
And a steamship is like a raft -- they both float, after all. You can implement whatever floating-thing you want, but it's the same thing.
Huh? I'd like to be able to turn the Asterisk server that runs the answering machine for my house off -- saves electricity, after all.
What do you mean by "elementary"? "Important"? Maybe, but it doesn't exist right now in a form that's actually useful for that purpose; that's part of what this technology fixes.
Wake-on-LAN is a standard, not a concept.
"Dual booting machine"? It's two bloody machines in one case! I'd hardly call that "dual booting"; to the contrary, it's new and novel (and damned cool).
Wake on LAN isn't very useful for a VoIP call that's coming through you from some arbitrary place off the Internet via your local NAT setup. (Your NATting router handles SIP forwarding and triggers wake-on-LAN before handoff? That's great, if it exists).
Dual booting has pretty much nothing at all to do with a technology that runs a completely separate ultra-low-power computer embedded inside your laptop.
Not that MS did anything wrong by not pursuing this -- but they certainly had (and have) the power.
That's a matter of wrapping appropriate security. The Intel solution doesn't wake on calls from just anybody, and an appropriate Microsoft solution wouldn't either. If they didn't take comparable steps, they'd deserve any ribbing they got.
I think the popularity of AllOfMP3 at its height belies the truth of that argument. Build it (cheap enough) and they really will come.
Did you read the Huckabee quote? To the end?
I think what it says is important.
You consider foreign policy Job 1? If so, I'd expect that you'd take what the rest of the world thinks into account.
(If by "fringe" you mean calling the Iraq war a mistake back before that was popular, I'll agree with you that Obama is a fringe candidate on the topic. Otherwise, I'm not quite sure how you reach that conclusion). Also, I think that getting Supreme Court justices on the bench who will uphold Roe v. Wade is more important than just civil unions, per se -- they are, after all, appointed for life; Bush has done enough damage in that department already.
Oh, c'mon, now.
The church in question has been known for social progressivism long before Wright made the news, and if you read Obama's books, he talks about some of the issues he had with some of the other churches in Chicago and the leadership thereof; to put it bluntly, he may well have ended up with one of the best of a bad lot.
I grew up attending a church where several of the members of the Board of Elders were people with some of whose views I disagreed with pretty strongly (and disagree with even more strongly now; suffice to say that depending on who was speaking that week, it was either forgiveness-and-salvation or hellfire-and-brimstone... unless it was our small town's banker talking about biblical money management or our high school's history teacher talking about old testament prophecies and their fulfillment, both of whose sermons I thoroughly enjoyed -- I grew up attending a very interesting church); the thing that made that church fairly distinct was that we were encouraged to make our own decisions between the many and varying views of Christianity presented. Anyhow, I'm sure that someone with a video clip of some of our more... interesting... sermons could come up with a claim that I grew up listening to a contemporary of Fred Phelps and cast aspersions on my character by such means, and indeed I considered the board members who took those positions in their sermons good family friends despite (and we all worked together on such projects as building [yes, building a building from the lot up, with our own hands and tools] a battered women's shelter and cooking food for the hungry)... in short, my background is such that I understand very well that people are multifaceted, and just where Huckabee was coming from when he refused to be baited into attacking Obama for his relationship with Wright.
In closing, let me quote Huckabee himself:
How could you support both Clinton and McCain? I could see going off to a 3rd party, or deciding not to vote at all... but Clinton and McCain are night and day on the issues. Let's look at some of the wedge issues:
As you may recall from the primary, Obama and Clinton's positions were both very near the Democratic party line, making them difficult to distinguish on the issues at times -- but while McCain may have cultivated a reputation as a maverick, he toes the Republican line. If you care about how the country is run, "slick marketing image" or no, I find it hard to see how one could abandon Clinton for McCain.
Let me amend myself a little:
Maybe in his campaign speeches. Not in his lectures as a law professor. Not in his book.
Try "nuanced"; read his second book for a better understanding -- not only of the principals in question, but of the importance of considering multiple points of view (as opposed to only a single, black-and-white view of the world based on one particular set of partisan principals) in making positions.
Can viewing the world in shades of gray lead to a charge that one must have a (presumptively black-and-white) view which is inconsistent, constantly shifting, "patch-work" or "self-defeating"? I suppose it may... but that doesn't prevent it from being The Right Thing.
On the whole, I agree that judges should have a great deal of discretion with regard to damages -- and if only applied to cases of commercial infringement (particularly where the costs of the licenses are such that the risk of a £5000 fine is inadequate deterrent), this adjustment makes a great deal of sense, and is something I can happily support.
That said: A wide range is one thing. A range where the top end of the scale is so outrageous as that we see applied to private infringement cases, on the other hand, is quite another -- and gives the parties enforcing their rights undue leverage to extract settlements even in cases where those settlements are unwarranted merely by waving the threat of that maximum punishment at their oft-unsophisticated targets. Last time I was called to sit on a jury, we were first asked if we could envision possible facts for a case regarding the action in question which would justify both the maximum and minimum penalties associated. I can foresee no possible circumstances in which I could call taking away a person's home for maintaining an illicit music collection justice; to prevent threats of that stripe from being used to bully even innocents into settling, the range of applicable penalties should have its top end more carefully constrained. Perhaps a larger but overall, rather than per-work, statutory minimum -- coupled with a maximum penalty which scales as a multiplier of market value (and commercial/noncommercial nature) -- would serve.
Indeed, statutory minimums are a great deal of the problem (at least in the US): Minimums which seem reasonable on their face can become far less so in the context of modern technology allowing a single action to infringe a large number of copyrights; for instance, faced with an individual downloading a single file containing a collection of 200 copyrighted ROMs via a mechanism (such as BitTorrent) which shares this file with others, US courts have no freedom to award less than $100,000 unless it can be affirmatively shown that the party in question was ignorant of the law (a circumstance in which the $40,000 minimum penalty the court is then forced to award is almost certainly not what the legislature intended either). Further, regulations passed with the intention that they only apply to commercial infringement have been amended for use against noncommercial infringement (ie. by defining infringement for any kind of gain -- explicitly including access to other copyrighted works -- as commercial), exacerbating this situation further.
In any event: I am at present overdue to go to bed, and so am cutting myself off and doing so presently; if this post is incoherent in parts, please accept my apologies for the same. Coming up with a reasonable balance is a hard problem; I suspect that more universal and effective enforcement, coupled with less unreasonable penalties, would go a long way towards getting things where they need to be; doing that enforcement without infringing on individuals' rights (both right to privacy and the ability to tinker with equipment one rightfully owns) is, however, regretfully difficult.
In areas where the limit is 70mph, I don't doubt that you're right. In areas where the limit is set unrealistically low, on the other hand, the flow of traffic is still near 70mph. If there isn't fear of getting caught, a small group of people will do whatever they can get away with, and a larger group will do what they think is reasonable (which differs from what is legal).
Example: I'm paying for GameTap. One of the games this service gives me access to is Fallout -- but on account of their DRM mechanism I can't access my save games, can't apply patches, and otherwise have less capabilities than I would with the commercial game. I've downloaded a copy off of a well-known BitTorrent site, am playing that instead of the copy delivered via the service I'm paying for, and feel perfectly justified doing so. Is it legal? No -- but I'm acting in a manner I believe to be reasonable.
Having the law so divorced from reasonability that I could have statutory liability greater than the present sale value of my house for this act is frankly unconscionable.
Piracy is a norm, just as much as breaking the speed limit.
You may not like it, and it may not be a good thing -- we'd have less pollution and fewer fatal accidents if people didn't speed, after all -- but whether it's desirable or not has nothing to do with whether it's reached the point of being the effective status quo.
(While I work with Free Software, the games I play and the software my wife uses for school are commercial, and I do spend money on them; likewise, I've been buying music from Amazon MP3 since it became available. This isn't an attempt to rationalize my own behavior, but rather an observation regarding what's generally considered acceptable behavior in public).
Anyhow, inasmuch as this really is targeting commercial infringers, more power to them -- if, at least, it's actually liable to help. Commercial infringers are scum, and that meme is widespread enough to be considered a norm as well. On the other hand, if it leads to suits targeting individuals for far more than their total net worth for what once would have been a civil violation worth treble actual damages... well, that is thoroughly unfortunate. Even if the police can't pull over and fine folks every time they're speeding doesn't make it acceptable to confiscate a person's car, house and other worldly possessions on the one occasion that they're unfortunate enough to get caught; why is that approach considered acceptable in the context of copyright infringement?
That's a very dangerous thing to do -- you're depriving yourself of the "safe harbor" protections that would mean that only your customer, and not you yourself, has liability. Sure, the claim may be invalid -- but if they try to haul you into court alongside your customer, it would be nice to be able to get yourself back out again with minimal time and expense, yes?
(Not a lawyer, not legal advice).
Heh.
You win the Internet. :)
Done any actual research to back that, or extrapolating to others based on your own tendencies?