Thanks to something called "sovereignty" {the international version of "an Englishman's home is his castle"}, if a person in country A does something in country A which is not against the laws of country A but would be against the laws of country B had that person done it on country B's soil, the authorities in country B cannot take any action against that person.
So even if the GPL is found invalid in the USA {and it can't be - read it, it's airtight} then it still carries weight in the rest of the world. If SCO are to be believed, Linux is in the public domain anyway {and thus can never be copyrighted by anyone}. But it's quite likely that, if anything enters the public domain, it will be SCO UnixWare - either by court order, or by natural lapse of copyright what with the case having dragged on for so long.
Whichever way you look at it, the whole of "Political Correctness" is founded on bullshit. Words are words. Offence is as much in the perception of the offendee as in the intention of the offender.
Take for example the idea that you cannot say "blind", you have to say "visually impaired". How does that make any difference? If someone is blind, they are blind. Using a different name for it does not make them any less blind. The only difference it can possibly make is that you can feel a little less guilty about the fact that you can see and they can't. But you shouldn't be feeling guilty about that in the first place. It probably isn't your fault, after all. It's just the way the world works. {Of course, placing people in denial and making them feel guilty about themselves is a great way to manipulate them. Cf. Dr Benway in Naked Lunch}. "Master" and "slave" when applied to inanimate pieces of hardware are just names. Humans do not keep slaves anymore {so the theory goes} so there is no reason for anyone to be offended by the terms.
Another thing..... in this country, any attack by a white person on a black or asian person is considered a racial attack even if there is a clear non-racial motive. A few years ago in a part of my home city where I no longer hang out, a bunch of under-age white youths were trying to buy booze and cigarettes from an off-licence, and the asian proprietor - mindful that, if he served them, he would {a} prejudice his licence, and therefore his own livelihood; {b} carry some responsibility if the kids got drunk and went out committing crimes; and {c} expose himself to a lawsuit from Little Johnny's parents claiming that the fags he had sold their precious little darling were responsible for his terminal lung cancer - barred them from his shop. Basically he was 100% in the right and they were wrong.
Later, the same kids went to his home and tried to start a fire. The law held that it was a racist attack, even though it was most patently not: it was simple revenge, motivated by nothing more than childish indignation at someone else choosing to behave in accordance with the spirit of the law. Race had nothing to do with it. Whilst I don't doubt that a few racial epithets may have been used in the verbal accompaniments to the violence, my contention is that the primary grievance was not with the shopkeeper's race but with his understandable aversion to a prison sentence. Misrepresenting this as a racial incident only gives ammunition to real racists.
Could McBride or one of his apologists please explain to me how for Linus to give other people permission to use something that the law quite clearly says belongs to Linus, on Linus's own terms, violates any law anywhere in the world? What law says you can't use your own property in the way you think fit?
Ah yes..... you obviously have some nice old Hewlett-Packard test equipment:-) It was good stuff, and its design lifetime was basically forever. And the manuals explained everything.
Unfortunately, modern HP tat is, well, tat. Someone at HP twigged onto the idea that if you build something to last forever, you can only sell one of them to each customer; so they went with the idea that if you build things to break after one year, then you can sell one to each customer each year. Unfortunately, <BLACKADDER>there was a slight flaw in this plan..... it was bollocks.</BLACKADDER> How so? Once the first one breaks, the customer is not going to buy another one from you if they can avoid it, because you annoyed them by selling them something that broke.
There is no good reason - apart from manufacturers' greed - why anything shouldn't last forever, if it is constructed in such a way that parts which wear out {think the "six Bs" - batteries, bulbs, belts, brushes, bearings and blades} / get used up {toner, ink} can be easily replaced. Sooner or later, people will get sick of buying crap, and the market will be ready for a new player offering quality goods.
Titter ye not; for when SCO are exposed for the lying, grasping scumbags thet are, the chances are strong that the SysV source code will enter the public domain by court order. This will mean that there will be a Linux-like, copyright-free operating system widely available; it probably will be used by makers of cheap embedded gismos as an alternative to Linux so they don't have to give out their source code. It also isn't inconceivable that a large sum of money will come the way of the Open Source community, and that could be invested in some form of certification programme {which would end up paying for itself}. "Proper" Linux - GPL-compliant, all source code available - will become respectable. Hardware would feature the familiar penguin logo alongside the Microsoft window panes. Software would proclaim on the box "INCLUDES FULL SOURCE CODE". And people would get suspicious when it didn't!
Nuclear weapons aren't hard to make. Getting the materials is the awkward bit, but they can be filtered from sea water without fear of detection. Once you've got enough fissile material, all you really need to do is put it in one place and wait for it to get hot. The plans for - presumably patented, though their very existence might deter would-be IP violators - specific weapons may not be available, but the laws of physics on which they depend for their operation are taught in every secondary school. Actually, I remember my sister used to play with stacking wooden blocks when she was about 2 years old, and discovered that a stack higher than a certain number of blocks always falls over without being pushed, and the falling debris can topple nearby constructions. Nuclear fission depends on the exact same principle.
Besides which, the 2nd Amendment says "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed" but it doesn't say what kind of arms; and elsewhere I think the constitution says something about rights not having to be specifically mentioned to be valid anyway; so, in the USA, you have a right to own a nuke!
Perl and PHP usually do that automatically as the script finishes. Though, given the state of things today {variables not appearing automatically, for instance}, it would not surprise me for a picosecond if someone decided that in the next versions, database connections would be left open at the end of the script.
Why would anyone want a BMW? Not only do they put the power to the wrong end, they even brag about it!
You push something along - it has a choice of 180 degrees' worth of directions to go in. You pull something along - it can only come towards you. Think about it. Supermarket trolleys are rear-driven. Need I say more?
BTW, we Brits did not invent front-wheel drive; our neighbours across the channel did. They let us take the credit for it in return for not telling anybody that it was actually Britain, and not France, that invented the metric system.
It depends on the frequencies you use. If the Galileo system used frequencies close to those used by US GPS, then the US probably would interfere with its own satellite system whenever it tried to jam Galileo.
I have a policy of actively avoiding companies who advertise. The more intrusive the method {Spam; advertising in DVDs / videos; that goes double if fast-forward blocked, and the disc goes back to the store as FAULTY} the more extensive the avoidance. If they are spending money on advertisements then they must either be spending less on quality, or cost more. So here you go, big corporations: if you want AJS318 to buy your products, don't advertise them to me - let them speak for themselves. I think most people I know feel the same way.
If I never see another advertisement on TV again, it will be too soon. I already record my favourite satellite programmes {on reliable, analogue, sequential access VHS} just so I can fast-forward through the advert breaks; otherwise they are next to unwatchable what with adverts for get-out-of-debt loans {I'm no expert but if you run into debt, shouldn't the Dish be the first thing to go?}; sue-me-quick legal shysters {"Had an accident that wasn't your fault? Profit!!!"; JML tat {breaks as soon as you unpack it}; mobile phones {Is there really anybody who hasn't got one and doesn't have a good reason not to get one?}; "savings plans" where you put away 10 a month for the first year, your payments increase geometrically and you eventually get back less than half of what you paid in; and various companies' versions of even cheaper car insurance {some for over-50s, some for women only, mostly for people with over 4 years bonus}. When I have the wireless on, I always listen to Radio 2 or Radio 4 - good old advert-free BBC.
A HDD-based video recorder which can record and play back from different parts of the disc would be great, as it would give you the ability to watch almost-live {say 10' later than the sheduled start time} and fast-forward through the adverts till you eventually caught up with the broadcast. Of course, you would have to be able pause the playback anytime whilst carrying on recording.
Just when are these people - the people whose wages we, as the consumers of their products, are paying - going to realise that our private screens and speakers are not their public hoardings?
..... or is it copyright law which is being violated here? Copyright law says you need permission from somebody to distribute copies of stuff. The GPL is permission to distribute copies of stuff as long as you comply with certain conditions. If somebody has been distributing binaries without making the source code available, then the permission granted by the GPL is automatically withdrawn.
If these companies are simply distributing binaries compiled from unmodified sources available on a site such as kernel.org, then there is not much of a case, because the source is already available elsewhere. They might be able to weasel out of their obligation by claiming someone else already has fulfilled it for them. However, if the kernel source has been in any way modified, then the GPL certainly requires source code to be made available in order for permission to copy to be granted. And it could be argued that the act of configuring the kernel constitutes a modification, or at least requires for the.config file to be released.
Of course, the whole thing might start to get unbelievably messy if someone were to reverse-engineer this firmware and post a source code listing somewhere..... even a load of IFs and GOTOs that would compile to produce the same object code probably would do..... there'd be more than enough work for all the lawyers in the USA sorting out who had violated whose copyright!
Fear of punishment is not the major factor which de-motivates people from crime. That is just a myth which the hang-em-and-flog-em brigade would have you believe, but it is just a facile folly. The truth is that most people who commit crimes do not even imagine that they are going to get caught, let alone punished. Most law-abiding citizens refain from committing crimes because they would not like to be the victim of crime. Altruism is hard-wired into human beings - that is the "dirty little secret" authoritarians don't want you to know. A society that relies on inducing fear in its citizens is doomed to fail eventually. Think about it for awhile: fear can be overcome.
Where is it written you can't use a computer to play DVDs to a television?
Right there in the manual for your graphics card! The thinking behind this is, it is possible that you could plug the computer into a VCR and record the clean picture output from the DVD onto a VHS cassette. The film companies probably are bullying graphics card manufacturers into making it as difficult as possible to copy a DVD to a video cassette. Their attitude seems to be, it's better to have a hundred people unable to use the equipment they bought and own than risk one illegal copy being made. Even so, it might be worth reporting this as a fault. After all, according to the principle of "innocent until proven guilty", if you weren't trying to do anything illegal, you shouldn't be prevented from going about your business {4th amendment in USA?}and if it doesn't work, it's faulty. There may well be a fix, even if the fix is just a BIOS upgrade to force the TV-out off {after all, it doesn't matter much if the socket is absent}. If enough people do this, maybe one of the card manufacturers just might switch their allegiances from Big Business to Common Consumers -- and then they would all have to. {Remember what happened when banks started charging for the hole in the wall? Exactly.} Is there some sort of consumer champion in your area who would show your sob-story to the nation - how a father had to explain to a tearful little girl why she couldn't watch a film she had been given for her birthday on his shiny new computer?
What we really need is a new law that guarantees individuals the right to watch / listen to / perceive in other ways the content of any legitimately-owned pre-recorded audio-visual medium {CD, DVD, video cassette, LP, minidisc or any other To Be Invented} and outright prevents manufacturers from locking formats {anti-competitive behaviour}. That, and non-discrimanatory licencing. Why aren't more sorted people trying to get themselves elected?
Thanks for the info, and thanks for being reasonable enough to point out that it doesn't affect the main argument - there are others who would reject the whole argument on the basis that a side branch contained a mistake.
Why was DeCSS developed for Linux? Because there was nothing else available to do the job. In case anybody has been living in a cave for the past..... well, however long it was..... here's the background.
Jon Johansen had bought and paid for a DVD with his own money, in Norway, subject to Norwegian jurisdiction - where for any non-EU country to try to claim jurisdiction over him would have constituted an act of war. {EU countries can't be at war with one another by definition. Even although it sometimes looks as if they are}. Unfortunately, despite his most valiant efforts, he was unable to locate an open-source application for reading the data on the disc; so he decided to write one himself. Seeing as how he was actually the rightful owner of the disc, the sales receipt implicitly constituted a licence to access the data on that disc which he had bought, paid for and rightfully owned. The contents of the disc may have been encrtypted; but by the act of purchasing the disc using money earned by his own graft he had acquired a legitimate right to decrypt it. As the lawful owner of a DVD, Jon Johansen was by definition not one of the people the encryption was supposed to prevent from accessing the content.
Imagine if you bought a house, but the estate agent did not give you any keys; so you tried to force entry into the house you just bought, and then a bunch of foreign bobbies arrested you because breaking and entering was a crime in their country.
{Apologies for possibly over-emphasising the point that he had bought and paid for the disc with money legitimately earned by hand or by brain - but I think it is quite important to remember that, as the rightful owner of the disc he had bought with his own money, he was perfectly entitled to do what he did, and in fact for anyone else to attempt to deny him the rightful use of his own property by delivering it in a damaged condition is tantamount to vandalism.}
There is a way that the Canadian people could actually end up having a sorted system if this does become law. Unfortunately it requires a high degree of faecal unity on the part of many people.
While this is going on, you could lobby your MPs {assuming that is what they are called in Canada} to ensure that if any royalty fees are charged on downloaded music, they should be payable directly to the performer {assuming the performer is the copyright holder} and not exceed the amount that would have been paid had the songs downloaded been obtained on the least expensive pre-recorded medium available {whether this be cassette, CD, LP, MiniDisc or To Be Invented}. If Avril Lavigne {faute de mieux} gets x cents when I buy one of her albums, I don't see why it makes any difference to Avril Lavigne if I just make a copy of the album and pay her the same x cents directly. I mean..... obviously it makes a difference to the record company - just like it makes a difference to McDonalds when you eat at Burger King.
And, of course, in the case of unauthorised downloading, you would only ever be held liable for those x cents per track - not the thousands of dollars the RIAA conjures up out of thin air. Call me quaint and old-fashioned, but if you steal a dollar you should pay back a dollar; or at the worst no more than what would buy when you come to pay it back,whatever a dollar would have bought when you stole it.
It would be interesting to see exactly what objections anyone could raise to this proposal. I've even come up with a name for it: non-discriminatory licencing. Basically, if an artist allows a record company to package up and distribute their work for a fee, they have to allow anyone to do the equivalent job for the same fee; anybody's money is as good as anybody else's.
Having thought about this, I really think that there is already something that can be used against Diebold and their cronies.
Treason.
Deliberately rigging a voting machine to produce false results and get your preferred candidate elected is an attempt to compromise the democatic process by which a country is ruled..... if that isn't treason, I don't know what is. Even in the UK, you can still get the death penalty for treason, so in the kill-crazy USA, it's a foregone conclusion. But how do you impose the death penalty on a corporation? Kill everyone who works there? Forcibly wind it up and seize its assets? Check your laws first, but I'd love to see a copper read someone their rights..... "You are under arrest for high treason and plotting against the king. You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you say may be given in evidence." {Yeah, I know that's the British version, but that's what I'm more familiar with}.
It also makes sense to use the simplist machines which will do the job. e.g. paper collators which can sort ballots into only box A marked, only box B marked, etc.
Good point. Makes the public scrutiny part easier.
It is interesting to note that the UN does not declare that humans have any right to form corporations. Not even unprofitable ones.
Another good point, but they probably will weasel out of it by saying they have been doing so for ages.
Ooops..... the abbreviation for "Scotland" as used in international sporting events {being what I was trying to parody} does rather resemble an abbreviation for a rather nasty corporate piece of work, doesn't it? Maybe the whole population of Scotland should take it out on Darl McBride for abusing their abbreviation? Actually, that's rather a pleasant thought:-)
If you use a ; between commands, they will be executed in sequence. If you use && between commands, if the first one returns an error, the second won't be executed. This might be important if you do something like
cdparanoia -B; for i in *wav do; lame -h $i && rm $i; done
'cause you really don't want to delete the wave file if for some rason you didn't make an mp3 of it.
So instead of choosing a product that was all out in the open, and where he could have audited the code for himself, your boss went for a closed-source product where he wasn't allowed to open it up and check how it worked and furthermore couldn't be sure there wasn't already a serious security vulnerability put there by Microsoft.
Hiding your source code does nothing to help your security. If a programme is written securely, you can publish the source code and nobody will be able to crack it. If a programme is not written securely in the first place, the source code might make it a little easier to crack; but the chance that someone will crack it "accidentally" is independent of whether or not they have seen the source code. And published source code is subject to continuous audit. Which is precisely why we see vulnerabilities in open-source software..... there is just no way to keep them secret. They appear, they get fixed, it is really not a big deal. Closed-source software can harbour vulnerabilities for a long time before anybody has reason to sort them out. If only a few people are suffering, it's easy for a large corporation like Microsoft to weasel out of fixing a "minor" problem..... at least, until it gets to the point where they can no longer blame the customer anymore.....
Your boss seriously needs to learn about the disinfectant power of daylight. Either that, or you're a troll. Considering that installing and configuring Apache consists of typing apt-get install apache in a root xterm, I suspect the latter.
Well, it depends on how you look at it. Sure..... open source stuffs up occasionally. When we have a problem, everybody knows about it and it gets fixed. Whereas with closed source, the vendor can live in denial, pretending nothing has hapened, until the problem becomes serious enough to warrant attention.
For some reason, things get invented in different places at roughly the same time. Vide the telephone {Alexander Graham Bell, SCO and Elisha Gray, USA}; the electric light bulb {Joseph Swan, ENG and Thomas Edison, USA} and the gramophone / phonograph {Emil Berliner, DBR and Thomas Edison, USA}. There are other examples, and I'm sure other countries have their own versions of who invented what.
Also realise that, despite what the mass media are fond of telling you, good guys actually outnumber bad guys by one hell of a margin.
Now, if both these principles - parallel invention and criminals in the minority - are true, then not only would the probability of a particular open source software vulnerability being discovered by a good guy be greater than the probability of it being discovered by a bad guy, but it is quite likely that if a bad guy were to discover a vulnerability, then a good guy also would discover it around the same time. Well, parallel invention has been proven throughout history, and good guys really do outnumber bad.
Never judge someone on the basis of corrected mistakes. Most people don't get things right first time, and it's better to admit to a mistake and show how you fixed it than to pretend you never make mistakes.
I'll tell you "how best to tally the votes and ensure it is done accurately and impartially" in just two words:
By hand.
But if you really must use machines, if it really is more important that it be done quickly than it be done right, then every aspect of the machines' operation must be absolutely open to public scrutiny at every stage of the process. Corporations' rights to make profits are subordinate to individuals' rights to democracy.
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Thanks to something called "sovereignty" {the international version of "an Englishman's home is his castle"}, if a person in country A does something in country A which is not against the laws of country A but would be against the laws of country B had that person done it on country B's soil, the authorities in country B cannot take any action against that person.
So even if the GPL is found invalid in the USA {and it can't be - read it, it's airtight} then it still carries weight in the rest of the world. If SCO are to be believed, Linux is in the public domain anyway {and thus can never be copyrighted by anyone}. But it's quite likely that, if anything enters the public domain, it will be SCO UnixWare - either by court order, or by natural lapse of copyright what with the case having dragged on for so long.
Whichever way you look at it, the whole of "Political Correctness" is founded on bullshit. Words are words. Offence is as much in the perception of the offendee as in the intention of the offender.
..... in this country, any attack by a white person on a black or asian person is considered a racial attack even if there is a clear non-racial motive. A few years ago in a part of my home city where I no longer hang out, a bunch of under-age white youths were trying to buy booze and cigarettes from an off-licence, and the asian proprietor - mindful that, if he served them, he would {a} prejudice his licence, and therefore his own livelihood; {b} carry some responsibility if the kids got drunk and went out committing crimes; and {c} expose himself to a lawsuit from Little Johnny's parents claiming that the fags he had sold their precious little darling were responsible for his terminal lung cancer - barred them from his shop. Basically he was 100% in the right and they were wrong.
Take for example the idea that you cannot say "blind", you have to say "visually impaired". How does that make any difference? If someone is blind, they are blind. Using a different name for it does not make them any less blind. The only difference it can possibly make is that you can feel a little less guilty about the fact that you can see and they can't. But you shouldn't be feeling guilty about that in the first place. It probably isn't your fault, after all. It's just the way the world works. {Of course, placing people in denial and making them feel guilty about themselves is a great way to manipulate them. Cf. Dr Benway in Naked Lunch}. "Master" and "slave" when applied to inanimate pieces of hardware are just names. Humans do not keep slaves anymore {so the theory goes} so there is no reason for anyone to be offended by the terms.
Another thing
Later, the same kids went to his home and tried to start a fire. The law held that it was a racist attack, even though it was most patently not: it was simple revenge, motivated by nothing more than childish indignation at someone else choosing to behave in accordance with the spirit of the law. Race had nothing to do with it. Whilst I don't doubt that a few racial epithets may have been used in the verbal accompaniments to the violence, my contention is that the primary grievance was not with the shopkeeper's race but with his understandable aversion to a prison sentence. Misrepresenting this as a racial incident only gives ammunition to real racists.
Could McBride or one of his apologists please explain to me how for Linus to give other people permission to use something that the law quite clearly says belongs to Linus, on Linus's own terms, violates any law anywhere in the world? What law says you can't use your own property in the way you think fit?
I am interested to know this.
Ah yes ..... you obviously have some nice old Hewlett-Packard test equipment :-) It was good stuff, and its design lifetime was basically forever. And the manuals explained everything.
..... it was bollocks.</BLACKADDER> How so? Once the first one breaks, the customer is not going to buy another one from you if they can avoid it, because you annoyed them by selling them something that broke.
Unfortunately, modern HP tat is, well, tat. Someone at HP twigged onto the idea that if you build something to last forever, you can only sell one of them to each customer; so they went with the idea that if you build things to break after one year, then you can sell one to each customer each year. Unfortunately, <BLACKADDER>there was a slight flaw in this plan
There is no good reason - apart from manufacturers' greed - why anything shouldn't last forever, if it is constructed in such a way that parts which wear out {think the "six Bs" - batteries, bulbs, belts, brushes, bearings and blades} / get used up {toner, ink} can be easily replaced. Sooner or later, people will get sick of buying crap, and the market will be ready for a new player offering quality goods.
Obviously someone around here hasn't used phpmyadmin much then .....
Nuclear weapons aren't hard to make. Getting the materials is the awkward bit, but they can be filtered from sea water without fear of detection. Once you've got enough fissile material, all you really need to do is put it in one place and wait for it to get hot. The plans for - presumably patented, though their very existence might deter would-be IP violators - specific weapons may not be available, but the laws of physics on which they depend for their operation are taught in every secondary school. Actually, I remember my sister used to play with stacking wooden blocks when she was about 2 years old, and discovered that a stack higher than a certain number of blocks always falls over without being pushed, and the falling debris can topple nearby constructions. Nuclear fission depends on the exact same principle.
Besides which, the 2nd Amendment says "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed" but it doesn't say what kind of arms; and elsewhere I think the constitution says something about rights not having to be specifically mentioned to be valid anyway; so, in the USA, you have a right to own a nuke!
No, they don't, which might have something to do with why you don't see too many of them in Sainsbury's car park, or on the A52 in the mornings.
Perl and PHP usually do that automatically as the script finishes. Though, given the state of things today {variables not appearing automatically, for instance}, it would not surprise me for a picosecond if someone decided that in the next versions, database connections would be left open at the end of the script.
Of course, I always close mine anyway 0:-)
Why would anyone want a BMW? Not only do they put the power to the wrong end, they even brag about it!
You push something along - it has a choice of 180 degrees' worth of directions to go in. You pull something along - it can only come towards you. Think about it. Supermarket trolleys are rear-driven. Need I say more?
BTW, we Brits did not invent front-wheel drive; our neighbours across the channel did. They let us take the credit for it in return for not telling anybody that it was actually Britain, and not France, that invented the metric system.
It depends on the frequencies you use. If the Galileo system used frequencies close to those used by US GPS, then the US probably would interfere with its own satellite system whenever it tried to jam Galileo.
I have a policy of actively avoiding companies who advertise. The more intrusive the method {Spam; advertising in DVDs / videos; that goes double if fast-forward blocked, and the disc goes back to the store as FAULTY} the more extensive the avoidance. If they are spending money on advertisements then they must either be spending less on quality, or cost more. So here you go, big corporations: if you want AJS318 to buy your products, don't advertise them to me - let them speak for themselves. I think most people I know feel the same way.
If I never see another advertisement on TV again, it will be too soon. I already record my favourite satellite programmes {on reliable, analogue, sequential access VHS} just so I can fast-forward through the advert breaks; otherwise they are next to unwatchable what with adverts for get-out-of-debt loans {I'm no expert but if you run into debt, shouldn't the Dish be the first thing to go?}; sue-me-quick legal shysters {"Had an accident that wasn't your fault? Profit!!!"; JML tat {breaks as soon as you unpack it}; mobile phones {Is there really anybody who hasn't got one and doesn't have a good reason not to get one?}; "savings plans" where you put away 10 a month for the first year, your payments increase geometrically and you eventually get back less than half of what you paid in; and various companies' versions of even cheaper car insurance {some for over-50s, some for women only, mostly for people with over 4 years bonus}. When I have the wireless on, I always listen to Radio 2 or Radio 4 - good old advert-free BBC.
A HDD-based video recorder which can record and play back from different parts of the disc would be great, as it would give you the ability to watch almost-live {say 10' later than the sheduled start time} and fast-forward through the adverts till you eventually caught up with the broadcast. Of course, you would have to be able pause the playback anytime whilst carrying on recording.
Just when are these people - the people whose wages we, as the consumers of their products, are paying - going to realise that our private screens and speakers are not their public hoardings?
..... or is it copyright law which is being violated here? Copyright law says you need permission from somebody to distribute copies of stuff. The GPL is permission to distribute copies of stuff as long as you comply with certain conditions. If somebody has been distributing binaries without making the source code available, then the permission granted by the GPL is automatically withdrawn.
.config file to be released.
..... even a load of IFs and GOTOs that would compile to produce the same object code probably would do ..... there'd be more than enough work for all the lawyers in the USA sorting out who had violated whose copyright!
If these companies are simply distributing binaries compiled from unmodified sources available on a site such as kernel.org, then there is not much of a case, because the source is already available elsewhere. They might be able to weasel out of their obligation by claiming someone else already has fulfilled it for them. However, if the kernel source has been in any way modified, then the GPL certainly requires source code to be made available in order for permission to copy to be granted. And it could be argued that the act of configuring the kernel constitutes a modification, or at least requires for the
Of course, the whole thing might start to get unbelievably messy if someone were to reverse-engineer this firmware and post a source code listing somewhere
Fear of punishment is not the major factor which de-motivates people from crime. That is just a myth which the hang-em-and-flog-em brigade would have you believe, but it is just a facile folly. The truth is that most people who commit crimes do not even imagine that they are going to get caught, let alone punished. Most law-abiding citizens refain from committing crimes because they would not like to be the victim of crime. Altruism is hard-wired into human beings - that is the "dirty little secret" authoritarians don't want you to know. A society that relies on inducing fear in its citizens is doomed to fail eventually. Think about it for awhile: fear can be overcome.
What we really need is a new law that guarantees individuals the right to watch / listen to / perceive in other ways the content of any legitimately-owned pre-recorded audio-visual medium {CD, DVD, video cassette, LP, minidisc or any other To Be Invented} and outright prevents manufacturers from locking formats {anti-competitive behaviour}. That, and non-discrimanatory licencing. Why aren't more sorted people trying to get themselves elected?
Thanks for the info, and thanks for being reasonable enough to point out that it doesn't affect the main argument - there are others who would reject the whole argument on the basis that a side branch contained a mistake.
Why was DeCSS developed for Linux? Because there was nothing else available to do the job. In case anybody has been living in a cave for the past ..... well, however long it was ..... here's the background.
Jon Johansen had bought and paid for a DVD with his own money, in Norway, subject to Norwegian jurisdiction - where for any non-EU country to try to claim jurisdiction over him would have constituted an act of war. {EU countries can't be at war with one another by definition. Even although it sometimes looks as if they are}. Unfortunately, despite his most valiant efforts, he was unable to locate an open-source application for reading the data on the disc; so he decided to write one himself. Seeing as how he was actually the rightful owner of the disc, the sales receipt implicitly constituted a licence to access the data on that disc which he had bought, paid for and rightfully owned. The contents of the disc may have been encrtypted; but by the act of purchasing the disc using money earned by his own graft he had acquired a legitimate right to decrypt it. As the lawful owner of a DVD, Jon Johansen was by definition not one of the people the encryption was supposed to prevent from accessing the content.
Imagine if you bought a house, but the estate agent did not give you any keys; so you tried to force entry into the house you just bought, and then a bunch of foreign bobbies arrested you because breaking and entering was a crime in their country.
{Apologies for possibly over-emphasising the point that he had bought and paid for the disc with money legitimately earned by hand or by brain - but I think it is quite important to remember that, as the rightful owner of the disc he had bought with his own money, he was perfectly entitled to do what he did, and in fact for anyone else to attempt to deny him the rightful use of his own property by delivering it in a damaged condition is tantamount to vandalism.}
There is a way that the Canadian people could actually end up having a sorted system if this does become law. Unfortunately it requires a high degree of faecal unity on the part of many people.
..... obviously it makes a difference to the record company - just like it makes a difference to McDonalds when you eat at Burger King.
While this is going on, you could lobby your MPs {assuming that is what they are called in Canada} to ensure that if any royalty fees are charged on downloaded music, they should be payable directly to the performer {assuming the performer is the copyright holder} and not exceed the amount that would have been paid had the songs downloaded been obtained on the least expensive pre-recorded medium available {whether this be cassette, CD, LP, MiniDisc or To Be Invented}. If Avril Lavigne {faute de mieux} gets x cents when I buy one of her albums, I don't see why it makes any difference to Avril Lavigne if I just make a copy of the album and pay her the same x cents directly. I mean
And, of course, in the case of unauthorised downloading, you would only ever be held liable for those x cents per track - not the thousands of dollars the RIAA conjures up out of thin air. Call me quaint and old-fashioned, but if you steal a dollar you should pay back a dollar; or at the worst no more than what would buy when you come to pay it back,whatever a dollar would have bought when you stole it.
It would be interesting to see exactly what objections anyone could raise to this proposal. I've even come up with a name for it: non-discriminatory licencing. Basically, if an artist allows a record company to package up and distribute their work for a fee, they have to allow anyone to do the equivalent job for the same fee; anybody's money is as good as anybody else's.
Treason.
Deliberately rigging a voting machine to produce false results and get your preferred candidate elected is an attempt to compromise the democatic process by which a country is ruled
Ooops ..... the abbreviation for "Scotland" as used in international sporting events {being what I was trying to parody} does rather resemble an abbreviation for a rather nasty corporate piece of work, doesn't it? Maybe the whole population of Scotland should take it out on Darl McBride for abusing their abbreviation? Actually, that's rather a pleasant thought :-)
So instead of choosing a product that was all out in the open, and where he could have audited the code for himself, your boss went for a closed-source product where he wasn't allowed to open it up and check how it worked and furthermore couldn't be sure there wasn't already a serious security vulnerability put there by Microsoft.
..... there is just no way to keep them secret. They appear, they get fixed, it is really not a big deal. Closed-source software can harbour vulnerabilities for a long time before anybody has reason to sort them out. If only a few people are suffering, it's easy for a large corporation like Microsoft to weasel out of fixing a "minor" problem ..... at least, until it gets to the point where they can no longer blame the customer anymore .....
Hiding your source code does nothing to help your security. If a programme is written securely, you can publish the source code and nobody will be able to crack it. If a programme is not written securely in the first place, the source code might make it a little easier to crack; but the chance that someone will crack it "accidentally" is independent of whether or not they have seen the source code. And published source code is subject to continuous audit. Which is precisely why we see vulnerabilities in open-source software
Your boss seriously needs to learn about the disinfectant power of daylight. Either that, or you're a troll. Considering that installing and configuring Apache consists of typing apt-get install apache in a root xterm, I suspect the latter.
Well, it depends on how you look at it. Sure ..... open source stuffs up occasionally. When we have a problem, everybody knows about it and it gets fixed. Whereas with closed source, the vendor can live in denial, pretending nothing has hapened, until the problem becomes serious enough to warrant attention.
For some reason, things get invented in different places at roughly the same time. Vide the telephone {Alexander Graham Bell, SCO and Elisha Gray, USA}; the electric light bulb {Joseph Swan, ENG and Thomas Edison, USA} and the gramophone / phonograph {Emil Berliner, DBR and Thomas Edison, USA}. There are other examples, and I'm sure other countries have their own versions of who invented what.
Also realise that, despite what the mass media are fond of telling you, good guys actually outnumber bad guys by one hell of a margin.
Now, if both these principles - parallel invention and criminals in the minority - are true, then not only would the probability of a particular open source software vulnerability being discovered by a good guy be greater than the probability of it being discovered by a bad guy, but it is quite likely that if a bad guy were to discover a vulnerability, then a good guy also would discover it around the same time. Well, parallel invention has been proven throughout history, and good guys really do outnumber bad.
Never judge someone on the basis of corrected mistakes. Most people don't get things right first time, and it's better to admit to a mistake and show how you fixed it than to pretend you never make mistakes.
I'll tell you "how best to tally the votes and ensure it is done accurately and impartially" in just two words:
By hand.
But if you really must use machines, if it really is more important that it be done quickly than it be done right, then every aspect of the machines' operation must be absolutely open to public scrutiny at every stage of the process. Corporations' rights to make profits are subordinate to individuals' rights to democracy.