The jury decided the penalty, and it's plain ridiculous.
Let's assume we agree that the defendant was, as this juror said, an obvious liar, and guilty on all counts. Should she really lose her house or retirement savings over this?
I'm personally against stealing copyrighted music. But this penalty is waaaaay out of proportion to the crime, IMHO.
I remember when that was announced a while back, nice to see it in a major free distro. Too bad the source code isn't freely distributable, but I'll take the binary with thanks.
It's actually in the long-term best interests of all companies to *not* have this immunity.
This just enables a form of government interference in corporations that is even worse than regulatory laws. Regulations get made in the open and are subject to lobbying and court rulings. Whereas the NSA warrantless spying amounts to the commandeering of the corporate assets and procedures and is enforced by secret laws that (apparently) cannot be challenged in court in any reasonable way.
Even with recompensation that returns a profit on investment, this is a bad deal for corporate independence.
I was listening to a recent This Week in Law podcast on the subject of patents. One lawyer on the panel said that in general, companies that make electronics see the patent problem very differently from biotech companies.
Companies that make electronics are begging for reform because any given product usually touches on hundreds of patents, and any one of those could be used as a threat against that product's launch (via injuction, which extorts them into buying a license rather than let their product become obsolete during lengthy litigation).
Whereas biotech companies tend to invent products that involve a small, manageable number of patents. Therefore biotech companies want patents to remain as strong as possible, whereas computer companies need relief from death by a thousand cuts.
So apparently it's not *just* patent trolls who are against reform.
What happened to all the apologists who said...
on
AMD To Open ATI Specs
·
· Score: 1
- "they can't open their specs (even under NDA) because they'll give away trade secrets"? - "they can't open their specs because the Chinese will make cheap clones"? - "they can't open their specs because they'll get sued for patent infringement"?
Because I sometimes do consulting I recently had a friend ask me about the same issue. Yep, that is pretty much industry standard. It's like binding arbitration clauses: "we the company reserve all legal rights, whereas by agreeing to work for us, you give up all legal rights."
But more companies are getting clued in by open-source developers who need to preserve the rights to stuff they do on their own time, and also academics who do consulting usually need to alter the standard IP deal to preserve their rights also.
The key is to ask the company if they will accept a modification to the IP clause, and sometimes they actually do. It would be handy if there were some vetted, off-the-shelf open-source-preserving IP contract language easily available.
I'm with you on sentiment, but has anyone ever challenged conditions of employment like the McCarthy-era loyalty oaths and actually won?
Myself, I've turned down or not applied for jobs that required more privacy invasion than I felt was justified for a given job, and I let them know why.
Compared to Dell or even HP, the Gateway website was much harder to use when spec'ing out a cheap box. When a big business has poor web-ordering in the year 2007, there's just no way I'm buying anything from them. They either didn't "get" their market, or they only wanted truly brain-dead customers.
(No offense if you, gentle reader, bought one of their systems. Their cardboard boxes with the cow theme were kinda cool.)
That and for the names. Acer needs a place to dump those cheap flat panels and parts , emchines and gateway brand is the exact place to do this , especially the emachines division. Acer is not bad parts so to say but they always seem to break early on the systems I have repaired. Guess this may make systems even cheaper down the line.
I haven't noticed unusual quality problems on the Acer/Acer Peripherals/BenQ stuff I've bought over the years. That said, I would never by a flat panel from anyone without a 3-year warranty.
I'd like to see a Performance Squad attack all the desktop apps and their underlying components.
Not the kernel, but kernel hackers do know a ton about how to get good performance, so if they all took time out from the kernel to make the rest of the desktop snappy that would be just fine with me.
Of course I've seen some efforts at this over the years. Dave Jones' perennial "why userspace sucks" talk, some work by Robert Love, some other GNOME folks looking at memory usage, the recent Intel tool looking at CPU-wakeups eating battery life on laptops, and lots of other pieces of the puzzle.
It would be great if the basics of performance "best practices" would become widely known by desktop app programmers again. Instead we're falling into Microsoft's habit of being lazy about performance and expecting Moore's Law (increasing CPU speed and cheaper RAM) to bail us out.
Now my girlfriend's answer would be different: OpenOffice still sucks too much (feature-wise), and it's keeping her from switching from Windows.
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In the US the max CPU offered on the Ubuntu-loaded Inspiron 530N is currently the E4300. If you want a faster CPU with Ubuntu, you have to go with the (much more expensive) XPS 410N instead of the Inspiron.
Whereas on Dell's FreeDOS-loaded 530N you can go up to the E6420.
Why does Dell restrict the Ubuntu-loaded Inspiron to low-end CPUs?
Can somebody explain what it means to have 8 threads per core? I understand that each core is like a separate CPU, and AMD and Intel produce lots of 2-core chips.
But what's the hardware meaning of a thread?
I assume that there is some parallelism that is lighter weight than a full core, perhaps with each hardware thread having certain resources like an address counter and a few registers. So how is a SPARC thread unlike an Intel core? What does the thread own vs. what is shared per-core?
Many TSA screeners -- not most, but enough to matter -- exhibit an attitude towards the public that should be flat unacceptable. And that makes jumping through the hoops all the more irritating, and hurts TSA's image more than anything.
This attitude problem isn't unique to TSA. It happens frequently to low-status people who are given more authority than they know how to handle. It happens to cops and to computer systems administrators who forget that they are ONLY working for the benefit of the people they are mistreating.
If TSA wants to fix it's image, they should look around to law-enforcement and other public-facing agencies and find ones who have been effective training their front-line employees to be both firm and courteous, both vigilant and respectful.
Exactly. That's why we should have checkpoints at major crossings into and out of cities or across state lines. You want the privelege of driving? Well give us a cheek swab for DNA and a rapid drug/alcohol test while were at it. We'll catch a lot more felons that way.
Also, why the hell don't they have x-ray scanners like they use to find drugs in trucks in Afghanistan. I mean, it's not really a search if they don't open your trunk, and besides driving is a privilege to begin with. I'm sure they'd find illegal weapons down south a lot of illegal aliens that way.
Face it, a police state is the only way for lawful people to be safe from the scumbags. So call your Congressmen and demand road checkpoints with DNA matching, instant drug/alcohol testing, and x-ray scanning. Because driving is a privilege and not a right.
the Linux desktop responsiveness definitely improved (in my subjective experience) in the past two years or so. If that was Con's scheduler, then thanks.
At this point I blame GNOME over the kernel for any remaining sluggishness, but then maybe my 1.2GHz athlon is just obso1ee7.
Slashdot Mirror
[This is the part where I say something enough on-topic to justify the stupid joke in the subject line. Use your imagination. Thanks.]
The jury decided the penalty, and it's plain ridiculous.
Let's assume we agree that the defendant was, as this juror said, an obvious liar, and guilty on all counts.
Should she really lose her house or retirement savings over this?
I'm personally against stealing copyrighted music. But this penalty is waaaaay out of proportion to the crime, IMHO.
I remember when that was announced a while back, nice to see it in a major free distro.
Too bad the source code isn't freely distributable, but I'll take the binary with thanks.
...as if millions of URLs cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.
But thanks for playing.
It's actually in the long-term best interests of all companies to *not* have this immunity.
This just enables a form of government interference in corporations that is even worse than regulatory laws. Regulations get made in the open and are subject to lobbying and court rulings. Whereas the NSA warrantless spying amounts to the commandeering of the corporate assets and procedures and is enforced by secret laws that (apparently) cannot be challenged in court in any reasonable way.
Even with recompensation that returns a profit on investment, this is a bad deal for corporate independence.
If I understood TFA correctly.
[But I get your point.]
I was listening to a recent This Week in Law podcast on the subject of patents. One lawyer on the panel said that in general, companies that make electronics see the patent problem very differently from biotech companies.
Companies that make electronics are begging for reform because any given product usually touches on hundreds of patents, and any one of those could be used as a threat against that product's launch (via injuction, which extorts them into buying a license rather than let their product become obsolete during lengthy litigation).
Whereas biotech companies tend to invent products that involve a small, manageable number of patents. Therefore biotech companies want patents to remain as strong as possible, whereas computer companies need relief from death by a thousand cuts.
So apparently it's not *just* patent trolls who are against reform.
That's the boat I'm in. It's either NSAT&T for DSL or Comcast for cable. Or AT&T Wireless (whatever the name is this week) for wireless broadband.
Where's my free-market leverage to get better service, less spying, and no filtering?
It's gonna be coming in handy...
- "they can't open their specs (even under NDA) because they'll give away trade secrets"?
- "they can't open their specs because the Chinese will make cheap clones"?
- "they can't open their specs because they'll get sued for patent infringement"?
Reality. It's a bitchslap sometimes.
I remember when Bubble memory was the next big thing.
We had 16K RAM and we liked it.
Because I sometimes do consulting I recently had a friend ask me about the same issue. Yep, that is pretty much industry standard. It's like binding arbitration clauses: "we the company reserve all legal rights, whereas by agreeing to work for us, you give up all legal rights."
But more companies are getting clued in by open-source developers who need to preserve the rights to stuff they do on their own time, and also academics who do consulting usually need to alter the standard IP deal to preserve their rights also.
The key is to ask the company if they will accept a modification to the IP clause, and sometimes they actually do. It would be handy if there were some vetted, off-the-shelf open-source-preserving IP contract language easily available.
I'm with you on sentiment, but has anyone ever challenged conditions of employment like the McCarthy-era loyalty oaths and actually won?
Myself, I've turned down or not applied for jobs that required more privacy invasion than I felt was justified for a given job, and I let them know why.
Compared to Dell or even HP, the Gateway website was much harder to use when spec'ing out a cheap box. When a big business has poor web-ordering in the year 2007, there's just no way I'm buying anything from them. They either didn't "get" their market, or they only wanted truly brain-dead customers.
(No offense if you, gentle reader, bought one of their systems. Their cardboard boxes with the cow theme were kinda cool.)
I haven't noticed unusual quality problems on the Acer/Acer Peripherals/BenQ stuff I've bought over the years. That said, I would never by a flat panel from anyone without a 3-year warranty.
I'd like to see a Performance Squad attack all the desktop apps and their underlying components.
Not the kernel, but kernel hackers do know a ton about how to get good performance, so if they all took time out from the kernel to make the rest of the desktop snappy that would be just fine with me.
Of course I've seen some efforts at this over the years. Dave Jones' perennial "why userspace sucks" talk, some work by Robert Love, some other GNOME folks looking at memory usage, the recent Intel tool looking at CPU-wakeups eating battery life on laptops, and lots of other pieces of the puzzle.
It would be great if the basics of performance "best practices" would become widely known by desktop app programmers again. Instead we're falling into Microsoft's habit of being lazy about performance and expecting Moore's Law (increasing CPU speed and cheaper RAM) to bail us out.
Now my girlfriend's answer would be different: OpenOffice still sucks too much (feature-wise), and it's keeping her from switching from Windows.
http://www.eset.com/products/linux.php
In this case I'm talking about the desktops (Inspiron 530N).
I haven't checked the CPU options on the laptops.
In the US the max CPU offered on the Ubuntu-loaded Inspiron 530N is currently the E4300. If you want a faster CPU with Ubuntu, you have to go with the (much more expensive) XPS 410N instead of the Inspiron.
Whereas on Dell's FreeDOS-loaded 530N you can go up to the E6420.
Why does Dell restrict the Ubuntu-loaded Inspiron to low-end CPUs?
Can somebody explain what it means to have 8 threads per core?
I understand that each core is like a separate CPU, and AMD and Intel produce lots of 2-core chips.
But what's the hardware meaning of a thread?
I assume that there is some parallelism that is lighter weight than a full core, perhaps with each hardware thread having certain resources like an address counter and a few registers. So how is a SPARC thread unlike an Intel core? What does the thread own vs. what is shared per-core?
Many TSA screeners -- not most, but enough to matter -- exhibit an attitude towards the public that should be flat unacceptable. And that makes jumping through the hoops all the more irritating, and hurts TSA's image more than anything.
This attitude problem isn't unique to TSA. It happens frequently to low-status people who are given more authority than they know how to handle. It happens to cops and to computer systems administrators who forget that they are ONLY working for the benefit of the people they are mistreating.
If TSA wants to fix it's image, they should look around to law-enforcement and other public-facing agencies and find ones who have been effective training their front-line employees to be both firm and courteous, both vigilant and respectful.
Exactly. That's why we should have checkpoints at major crossings into and out of cities or across state lines. You want the privelege of driving? Well give us a cheek swab for DNA and a rapid drug/alcohol test while were at it. We'll catch a lot more felons that way.
Also, why the hell don't they have x-ray scanners like they use to find drugs in trucks in Afghanistan. I mean, it's not really a search if they don't open your trunk, and besides driving is a privilege to begin with. I'm sure they'd find illegal weapons down south a lot of illegal aliens that way.
Face it, a police state is the only way for lawful people to be safe from the scumbags. So call your Congressmen and demand road checkpoints with DNA matching, instant drug/alcohol testing, and x-ray scanning. Because driving is a privilege and not a right.
the Linux desktop responsiveness definitely improved (in my subjective experience) in the past two years or so.
If that was Con's scheduler, then thanks.
At this point I blame GNOME over the kernel for any remaining sluggishness, but then maybe my 1.2GHz athlon is just obso1ee7.