Heh, OK, the thought of IBM threatening to sue as a Linux copyright holder hadn't really occurred to me. It seems a bit far-fetched, still, to claim that they GPL'ed their code incidentally, but it does seem a bit more pertinent under that light.
"2. The more I read, the more I think this is going to come to a legal test of the GPL."
I strongly doubt that. SCO is suing IBM under their alleged contract violation, not under any copyright or intellectual property violations. I don't feel like searching down the exact quote, but Darl MacBride said something like, "Intellectual property is for enforcing rights between strangers. Contract law is much stronger; contract law is for when you know the other party. In this case, we will be using contract law." Something like that; you get the idea.
Pyrrho, did you even read what I was replying to? Not the argument that shipping Linux made their code GPL (this is a whole other issue which I've discussed in previous posts). I was talking about the argument that not prosecuting certain violations means that SCO cannot prosecute any violations, which is patently untrue, regardless of your post.
I don't really feel like going in-depth on the other argument, but I will address it briefly. Basically, the argument goes, SCO accidentally GPL'ed their code. In order for this to apply, SCO would have to be the one who released the code under the GPL. This is incorrect; the alleged SCO code that was included when SCO released their own distro under the GPL was not released by SCO, it was being redistributed. The initial release, allegedly, was done by IBM, which is therefore invalid in that it was not released by the code owners.
Also, this argument ignores the specifics of the SCO/IBM argument, which is not IP at all but, rather, about contractual violations; there are no "is this wrong" issues here; the only issue is whether it happened. If IBM did in fact release SCO code, it was certainly a contract violation.
And I don't see what IBM's lawyers have to do with it; what I meant was that it is silly to assume that such a simple flaw exists in SCO's reasoning without even doing any legal research first. IBM's lawyers, to my knowledge, have never used either of the above mentioned arguments publicly, and I would be quite surprised if those arguments made it into the court case, seeing as it is about contract violation and not IP.
Absolutely right; thats why from a I-don't-give-a-shit-about-law-just-let-me-write-co de standpoint the whole thing is silly. Just say what code is copyright and let the kernel developers fix it.
This pretty much clears it up from our end. Linux is (or will be) in the clear, which is pretty much all we probably care about. For IBM, however, this is not nearly the end of the story.
If IBM did violate their contract with SCO (I know this is something we all don't want to talk about much), they did do something pretty shitty. I can't speak for coders everywhere, but I would whole-heartedly agree with SCO right now if someone stole something I'd written. So IBM could face a huge amount of damages, not to mention the possible revokation of their Unix licenses. So I suppose its slightly possible (I doubt this would happen; they'd probably just pay some outrageous new license fee) that this could be the death of AIX. Couple that with a pretty severe hit to the reputation of Linux (imagine trying to convince a suspicious CEO about the wisdom of a grassroots OS now) and you've got a pretty large Unix marketshare drop. Which probably adds up to boosts for Windows and, if Sun has their way (big if; the big problem with Sun is not the quality of their OS but the cost of their hardware), a big boost for Solaris.
All of this is more corporate fallout than anything that applies to the hobbiest or home-users, but it makes the point that this whole thing does get rather complex.
You miss the point. This is not law. SCO is not contractually bound not to prosecute anyone who is a "SCO user," in the sense that you could find a loophole in that decision and avoid prosecution. The decision to prosecute or not is a personal, non-binding one. If they say, "Oh, well, I meant that they would not be prosecuted for use of SCO, not that I won't prosecute anyone who ever used SCO" (which is obviously what they do mean, anyway), you can't say, "Well, that's not what you said." If they want to sue you, they certainly can.
Furthermore, many people are posting here that "SCO is approving the use of their code in Linux under the GPL! Nyah nyah!" Well, there's a far cry from not prosecuting certain individuals and approving the use. If you stole SCO's code but only had $50 in your bank account so they chose not to prosecute you, they could still prosecute RedHat for doing the same thing. By your logic, the failure to prosecute home users is a blanket approval, which it truly isn't. It's just a cost-benefit analysis; they have little to gain from suing home users.
In certain IP cases, failure to enforce IP ownership does constitute a grant to public domain of that IP, but this is not a wholesale failure to prosecute, only a leave given to a few specific alleged violators. This is meaningless. Of course SCO won't sue SCO users; this is not in any way a legal flaw (and, no offense to all those armchair lawyers, but I'm sure SCO had their legal team review all actions they've taken prior to taking them, so I doubt you'll find any "loopholes").
As a prior response to your post pointed out, this is not already law in the United States and is, in fact, considered unconstitutional (see FindLaw).
I don't see what lawsuits you think are faced by not granting the right of reply, newspapers are largely exempt from libel in common law, provided that the publication does not appear to be intentionally malicious. So short of the most irresponsible, blatantly partisan newspapers, lawsuits should not be a huge concern. Again, this is the Anglo common-law precedent, and I have no idea how it is in your apparent home of Germany.
That your focus is on personal injury rather than freedom to report shows a rather different perspective from the American one. The general consensus of our Supreme Court is that freedom to communicate without fear of repurcussions, especially when the communication is critical or antagonistic towards those with more power, is a crucial check against tyranny; indeed, the press has often been referred to in the US as the fourth branch of government.
When faced with the risk of libellous speech versus that of restricted political speech, the prior is always more tolerable than the latter, in the US. The feeling is generally that the damage to one individual's reputation can indeed be severe, but that a) free speech does generally give him the opportunity to reply and b) regardless, the damage to one individual's reputation is far preferable to the damage to the democratic process.
Just imagine, any paper which prints an account of a politician screwing up has to print his account of how it happens; any paper which prints an expose on governmental corruption has to print the government's line as well. This effectively negates free political speech; any criticism is counterbalanced by a public relations spin.
According to OpenSecrets.org, the number 4 largest industry contributer, as a whole, to Sen. Hatch's campaign consists of TV, Movie, and Music producers, trailing Lawers and Law Firms (#1), Pharmaceuticals and Health Products (#2)--who themselves have strong interests in strong IP protections, and Insurance (#3).
Walt Disney donated $17,000 alone (the corporation, not the man). Interestingly enough, Hatch received $20,500 fron Novell, but I don't see any from SCO.
Just some food for thought.
Re:If MS were to use such strategies, would anyone
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Platform Evangelism
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· Score: 1
You make a good point and, in my opinion, should me modded up. Anywho, the question you raise is more detailed than you let on. "God-mode" implies the ability to succeed regardless of performance in the game; this is not the case. Rather, after that critical mass is acheived, the corporation is able to provide services others cannot; Wal-Mart's product line is clearly better for the price than an old Ma and Pa store.
The question here may seem simple, but it is not. The point of competition is ultimately to provide the best services to the consumer (this is not some sort of silly morality tale; Ayn Rand is an idiot). So if the really big Super-Mega-Lo-Marts provide better serivces to the consumer, but choke out competition, which is really better? On the one hand, competition creates Mega-Lo-Marts, but on the other, those choke out competitors.
Capitalist competition is like evolution. Humans, for that matter, are a lot like Wal-Marts; we became who we are by competition, but now we have a vested interest in staying on top by eliminating healthy competition. Were some species to be about to reach a competitive level of intelligence (or, for that matter, carnivorous predation like wolves, lions, tigers, and other animals we've largely wiped out) we would devote ourselves to utterly eliminating that threat.
So evolution, and capitalism, is to some degree self-defeating; once a competitor reaches the point where he can eliminate the game that led to his success, he can, in essence, kick away the ladders and burn the bridges to his success so that no others can approach his position.
Is this healthy? Not for the competition, and probably not for the leader, either. Faced without competition, Wal-Mart, and, according to many science fiction writers and philosophers, human civilization, will stagnate, devoid of any incentive for self-improvement, risk, or adventure.
Unfortunately, I don't really see an answer to this; socialism and communism both tend to eliminate the competition from the get-go, and any system that limits the whole-hearted competition between the leader and the species or businesses attempting to overtake him limits the value of the competition that does take place.
I'll have to sleep on it.
Re:If MS were to use such strategies, would anyone
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Platform Evangelism
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Oh, please. This is just unthinking anti-MS drivel.
Consider for a moment that Wired article on the downfall of SUN Microsystems. One recurring theme in the personality of McNealy, SUN's CEO, is his inability to cooperate with the competition and instead his insistence on turning competitors into enemies and market competition into war.
If MS does this (and they may indeed), this is merely business as usual among many of these corporations. Corporate America is not a day-care facility; companies can and do play hardball. The question is not "does MS want to help or hurt the competition" but rather "did MS engage in illegal anti-competitive practices which are bad for the consumer and bad for the market." I don't see you answering that question.
Wal-Mart destroyed the competition. And, yes, some say Wal-Mart is evil. But all they did is healthy, normal competition, no?
I'm not sure I'd agree with that assessment. With the shiny knights metaphor, anyone, regardless of education or background (or military experience, in this example) is intimidated simply on a gut level. But with computer security, if you are ignorant, you aren't indimidated by the latest firewall or the highest-encryption VPN. And if you know enough to be a threat, you know enough to know what armor works and what doesn't. Unlike your metaphor with medieval knights, the actual conflict is combat, and the defenses are secondary. With computer security, the conflict is the armor; anyone who is a "soldier" is also an armorer who knows what is strong and what is weak.
Name a security measure that is mere intimidation. Name a measure that has no added value and is just shiny armor. (This does, admittedly, apply to local security measures using biometrics; thumbprint scanners are less secure, at least on the consumer-grade, and just cooler looking, but I don't think it applies quite the same way to real network security measures.)
Your point is well-taken, that companies have no incentive to sell something that works above and beyond selling what sells, but it neglects that the two generally do go together and the leaders in the field tend to have true committment to security.
Your assumption is that true security is a theoretical impossibility. On what grounds?
I agree that it's not safe to rely on humans to keep systems patched. But, for one, if most systems are kept patched, a worm like SLAMMER would be useless. This is an obvious point you neglect, but not an interesting one.
More interesting, I think, is the debate over whether there is such a thing theoretically possible as a secure architecture. This is, of course, the idea behind "secure" systems designed to be so from the ground up, such as Palladium. Ethernet, TCP/IP, ARP, and most of the other protocols which make up the 'Net were not designed with security in mind from the bottom up, but rather designed for effectiveness, ease of implementation, and the like. For example, why do Ethernet cards allow promiscuous mode? It makes diagnosing certain problems easier, but it also represents a very big opportunity for all sorts of security vulnerabilities. Or why can MAC addresses be changed so easily? This represents an easy opportunity for mischeif.
But had the entire architecture of the 'Net been designed for security and accountability rather than ease of access and openness from the start (granted, two often-conflicting ideals), would absolute security be possible?
Many say that security is never truly possible without unplugging the computer from the 'Net, turning it off, and embedding it in concrete. This may be exaggeration, but of course it is quite difficult to prove something secure; RSA has not be proven secure, public-key cryptography has not been proven secure, and I don't really see how you could prove any other system secure, either.
This may not be necessary, however. We may not know for certain that RSA is secure, but we assume that the NSA does not know how to factor such large numbers any better than the rest of us, and we assume it to be secure (and such an assumption does appear valid). If enough evidence exists to assume a system to be "practically secure," that is enough for implementaiton.
I have no answers to these questions. But I think to assume such a problem is unanswerable is silly and is itself merely a non-answer. Security may not be an easy goal, but it may be acheivable. At least in some forms, this is clearly the case; it would quite evidently be possible to stop some sorts of attacks, like SLAMMER, in the future, even if theoretical, absolute, security remains un-obtainable.
"freeloader problem--your privately designed cell phones will be replaced with bandwidth suckers that don't do replays. No controlling body, so can't stop it."
Nobody said that there would be no controlling authority (or maybe he did, but it's a baseless assumption).
The ultimate goal of governmental control, in theory (please, I know it does not always work quite this way) is to regulate various aspects of public life in order to best serve the public good. This is the point of intellectual property, this is the point of FCC regulation (unregulated bandwidth use, similar to this example, renders the whole system unusable) and so forth.
A controlling body, quite possibly the FCC, could quite possibly regulate who and what sorts of devices can use the network, perhaps while charging a nominal device tax to pay for regulation, while keeping the access fundamentally free. There is no real reason to assume that this regulation can only happen commercially, or that such regulation renders the network "closed" in some sort of fundamental, sinister way.
As long as we are talking pie-in-the-sky, at least in the short term, assumptions about inability to govern this sort of thing are far less relevant than discussions of technical feasability; if such a thing can be done, and is done, its quite possible to govern it properly.
Such regulation could, of course, be done privately instead. Imagine a cooperative network with a EULA contract for all members that requires certified devices and specific behavior.
I'm expecting a flame or two from techno-anarchists who feel that all regulation, no matter how necessary, is bad. I'm reasonably suspicious of regulation, but here is a clear situation in which regulation is far more necessary than the lack of it.
Much of the arguments positd by the RIAA are based on the fundamental assumption that, as the "RIAA Guy" says, intellectual property is no different than physical property.
Obviously, when you pirate, you deprive the artist of due profit. No one seriously disputes that, to paraphrase Lessig. However, there's been no real discussion of how or why intellectual property is the same or should be treated as the same as physical property.
This position appears to be the position by default; the RIAA-types argue that this is clearly property, how is it different? In reality, from a philosophical, practical, and legal standpoint, IP is simply not the same as physical property and, unless a very good argument to the contrary is presented, should not be treated as the same.
This is perhaps the most irksome lapse in the RIAA's argument, to me. The similarities are there, but there are differences, too.
There is a very good reason for copy protection, as outlined in the Constitution. You'd let anyone make a perfect copy of your car if you weren't trying to sell it; if you were, it'd benefit your business to limit the number of copies floating around so people have to buy it from you. Had you designed the car, you'd want credit for it.
The point that the RIAA misses, though, (or tries to paper over with rhetoric) is that intellctual property is not physical property; the effects and implications of IP theft are quite different and quite complex. To merely say, "Well, it's theft" is to completely miss any real, valuable discussion of the situation and its implications.
You misconstrued what I said about the DG/manetic compass calibration, in so far as you simply restated what I said. The DG is calibrated during the pre-takeoff checklist after engine start and run-up (to provide enough time for the gyro to spin up) and every 15-20 minutes during flight. There is a little table stuck underneath the magnetic compass (the ball compass which floats in kerosene, usually on the dash or right above the windscreen on the cockpit ceiling) which bears the variation due to the airplane's magnetic fields. This is, as you said, calibrated my a trained professional.
Thanks for the info with regard to FCC regulations; read more carefully before correcting something which is already correct;)
erm, yeah, *cough*cough*. I knew that. I considered linking to the article, in true Slashdot fashion, but I figured most of you would know what I was talking about anyway. And its not the amount of "a href" tags which make a good post, its the amount of heart. Or something.
The concern most people have here, though, is not that they have a right not to view the ads; such a right is quite basic, as it goes hand-in-hand with your right not to view TV. This is quite different from a right, however, to view TV without the ads; when you accept an essentially free gift from the networks (however crappy the programming may be) you accept it on their terms; they would be well within their rights to say, "Don't like ads? Don't watch TV." As the ads become more pervasive, this is essentially what they are saying.
Rather, critics are bothered by the impact that a totally seperate industry can have on what sort of consumer electronics are even available to us with what capabilities. Were the TV networks to dislike this, they could force contractual agreements with consumers banning the use of these devices (purely hypothetically, of course). But instead they choose a less direct means of asserting their power, which translates to a means of, from a really sinister viewpoint, pacifying the natives.
Rather than openly tell us who's decision it was, the networks use threats and bribes to induce the hardware manufacturers into denying consumers an otherwise profitable and desirable product. This echos far too similarly to the practice of the RIAA of suing the pants off anyone who manufactures software or hardware that appears to threaten them ("Hey, baby, you don't need to sue me to get my pants off...") regardless of significant legitimate use.
This direction-through-indirection is merely annoying at best, but really a terrifying over-stepping of commercial bounds at worst. The government, who supposedly represents us all, is entrusted with the rights to deny us harmful or dangerous products. We trust that such an action is in our best interest, and that the reasons for such an action are the reasons stated up front--no underhanded manipulation is ever acceptible in a democracy--but we have given no such trust to any corporation. When a corporation who's business is televised entertainment, no less, makes for us a decision on what hardware is good and what is bad, it oversteps its commercial bounds.
I don't know. People have been predicting the downfall of the mainstream media for a while for the same reasons. My feeling is that people never notice what is bad unless their is an alternative. People don't say "wow, our society could be so much better if...", they say "wow, our society isn't nearly as good as..." or, in this case, "wow, my TiVo doesn't do nearly as much as so-and-so's..."
The reason that peope have largely lashed back at Big Music is because there is a clear alternative which applies not just to consumers' sense of moral wrongitude, but their pocketbooks: Kazaa, Gnutella, or what-have-you. Until people see the alternative that they aren't supposed to know about, just the abstracted idea of not being able to do something that the technology does allow isn't going to catch the public's attention much.
Look at how people seem to feel about Big Music. Reading that ABC News article about the RIT student who settled with the RIAA by paying them $12,000, I was truly surprised at how openly critical of the RIAA the article seemed to be, at least, for another member of Big Media, so to speak. It's not that there's a whole open political movement, but rather that so many people, including, most likely, the ABC News correspondent, simply share music files and the RIAA has made anyone who shares files their enemy, quite publicly. They made the consumers the enemy, not the other way around.
So why will there be no immediate lash back at Big Media for restricting things like the TiVo? Because whats the illegal alternative? What free software are people going to download onto their box-top sets out of self-interest which will essentially make them unwitting enemies of Big Media? There is none; short of complicated and risky hardware-hacking, people won't be exposed to what they are missing.
If one TiVo-type product is available in the store with ad-skipping, and the other without, sure, there'll be a preference. But if people are never presented with the option? Then there will be no complaints. Just don't let them see what they're missing and no one is the wiser.
Every time this is discussed on/. lots of people say "there is no danger - its just the airlines trying to make a buck on their skyphones".
This is ridiculous. It's not an airline regulation that bans the use of mobile phones; it's an FAA regulation. This applies to general aviation as well as airline flights, too.
Whether the effect is very significant I wouldn't be able to guess (past what the article says) but many instruments are extremely sensetive to electromagnetic fields and thus tuned to precision in the exact field at the spot on the plain in which they are mounted.
For example, the actual compass (as opposed to the directional gyro, a high-speed gyroscope which allows easier reading and does not have turning-errors and the like) is mounted by a trained professional who then parks the plane in a compass rose painted on the ground and computes the deviation on the compass due to metal, electrical currents, and so forth throughout the plane. Adding to those currents and fields could be a minor issue, at the least. Even "E6B" circular slide-rule flight computers are typically made out of plastic or aluminum to avoid throwing off the compass of placed on the dash next to it.
For that matter, its entirely possible that radio navigation aids like VOR or ADF would be sensetive to certain electromagnetic fields.
Even if there were no significant need for this, I highly doubt that an accross-the-board ban would result from the airlines' desire to charge more for phone use. The FAA is incompetent, but not that incompetent. And they seem to err most often on the side of lax regulation, so its not really that bad to see them being strict about something.
So some scientists come up with a novel way to use atomic physics to replace an unreliable and less-useful mechanical part in order to aid their research into the nature of the physical world, in the process creating something similar to an heretofore purely imaginative staple of science fiction, and your biggest complaint is in the wording of a sentence in the press release describing their findings?
Were this the actual paper published, a few of your nitpicking complaints may possibly have a shred of validity. However, saying "about 50 times" instead of finely expressing the actual decimel to the nth significant digit really just makes it easier to read, and, frankly, if you are using the press release, the concise summary of the general idea behind the project, as your primary source of precise factual information on which you intend to plan your entire scientific endeavor, you are a moron. If you needed the significant digits, you'd not be reading the press release.
For those who are anally compulsive enough, or need to assert their own personal superiority at every opportunity, nit-picking can be a great activity. For the rest, it's just irritating.
And don't bother pointing out the irony of my nit-picking your nit-picking because I already realize it.
What are you talking about? You want me to explain to you what the sentence means? It makes perfect sense to me.
Celsius and Kelvin are the same scale, save that the "0" measurement for K is absolute 0, that is, the point at which there is no atomic vibration and thus the material contains no heat energy (since, as you remember, heat is really just the kinetic energy of atoms).
Thus, what they meant is that at this temperature, were it measured in K instead of C, it would be 50 times greater than room temperature measured in K. Want me to draw you a picture?
And I don't understand what you think is amateurish about saying "degrees Kelvin." This is the correct syntax, just as you would say "degrees Celsius" or "degrees Farenheight." There is no such thing as a "Kelvin," so, were they to say "in Kelvins" they'd just sound stupid. Were you trying to be funny? What are you talking about? You even admitted that you are too far removed from your science courses to know, so why are you complaining about the syntax used by real-life honest-to-goodness scientists?
I hate to be rude, but I just don't understand what you are talking about. Perhaps you'd due better to start your reading here.
That's ok; some guys post vulnerabilities on bugtraq riddled with "dis" and "dat" instead of "this" and "that" and comments about 9th-grade math homework and granny porn. Ugh.
No, what would be ironic would be if you had a thousand spoons but all you needed was a knife. Or if it rains on your wedding day. Or, especially, if its a free ride but you've already paid.
I think that song is singlehandedly responsible for most people losing all conception of the meaning of the word "ironic."
Just because you think it should be does not mean it is illegal under the PATRIOT Act.
The PATRIOT Act, as far as I know, does not ban any sort of encrypted communication; the Supreme Court has ruled, if I'm not mistaken, that private and anonymous speech is a fundamental component of the First Amendment right to free speech.
Furthermore, this is truly not different from encrypted e-mail or anything else, which, as a prior poster pointed out, was not used by any of the September 11 terrorists.
Guns are restricted, sure. An irresponsible person with a gun is quite dangerous. Even a responsible person with a gun can be dangerous. But the right to encryption technology is not about the right to bear arms in order to prevent a dictatorship (a necessity which is a bit outdated at this point). The right to private speech is not only still necessary, perhaps even more so, with groups like the NSA who intend to be able to intercept any communication worldwide (and have historically given little regard to constitutional restrictions). The right to private, free speech is a fundamental intellectual right which is always crucial no matter what the need or consequence.
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Anyone who needs to join an organization for those with high IQ's has self-esteem problems, intelligence problems, or both.
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Heh, OK, the thought of IBM threatening to sue as a Linux copyright holder hadn't really occurred to me. It seems a bit far-fetched, still, to claim that they GPL'ed their code incidentally, but it does seem a bit more pertinent under that light.
I strongly doubt that. SCO is suing IBM under their alleged contract violation, not under any copyright or intellectual property violations. I don't feel like searching down the exact quote, but Darl MacBride said something like, "Intellectual property is for enforcing rights between strangers. Contract law is much stronger; contract law is for when you know the other party. In this case, we will be using contract law." Something like that; you get the idea.
I don't really feel like going in-depth on the other argument, but I will address it briefly. Basically, the argument goes, SCO accidentally GPL'ed their code. In order for this to apply, SCO would have to be the one who released the code under the GPL. This is incorrect; the alleged SCO code that was included when SCO released their own distro under the GPL was not released by SCO, it was being redistributed. The initial release, allegedly, was done by IBM, which is therefore invalid in that it was not released by the code owners.
Also, this argument ignores the specifics of the SCO/IBM argument, which is not IP at all but, rather, about contractual violations; there are no "is this wrong" issues here; the only issue is whether it happened. If IBM did in fact release SCO code, it was certainly a contract violation.
And I don't see what IBM's lawyers have to do with it; what I meant was that it is silly to assume that such a simple flaw exists in SCO's reasoning without even doing any legal research first. IBM's lawyers, to my knowledge, have never used either of the above mentioned arguments publicly, and I would be quite surprised if those arguments made it into the court case, seeing as it is about contract violation and not IP.
This pretty much clears it up from our end. Linux is (or will be) in the clear, which is pretty much all we probably care about. For IBM, however, this is not nearly the end of the story.
If IBM did violate their contract with SCO (I know this is something we all don't want to talk about much), they did do something pretty shitty. I can't speak for coders everywhere, but I would whole-heartedly agree with SCO right now if someone stole something I'd written. So IBM could face a huge amount of damages, not to mention the possible revokation of their Unix licenses. So I suppose its slightly possible (I doubt this would happen; they'd probably just pay some outrageous new license fee) that this could be the death of AIX. Couple that with a pretty severe hit to the reputation of Linux (imagine trying to convince a suspicious CEO about the wisdom of a grassroots OS now) and you've got a pretty large Unix marketshare drop. Which probably adds up to boosts for Windows and, if Sun has their way (big if; the big problem with Sun is not the quality of their OS but the cost of their hardware), a big boost for Solaris.
All of this is more corporate fallout than anything that applies to the hobbiest or home-users, but it makes the point that this whole thing does get rather complex.
Furthermore, many people are posting here that "SCO is approving the use of their code in Linux under the GPL! Nyah nyah!" Well, there's a far cry from not prosecuting certain individuals and approving the use. If you stole SCO's code but only had $50 in your bank account so they chose not to prosecute you, they could still prosecute RedHat for doing the same thing. By your logic, the failure to prosecute home users is a blanket approval, which it truly isn't. It's just a cost-benefit analysis; they have little to gain from suing home users.
In certain IP cases, failure to enforce IP ownership does constitute a grant to public domain of that IP, but this is not a wholesale failure to prosecute, only a leave given to a few specific alleged violators. This is meaningless. Of course SCO won't sue SCO users; this is not in any way a legal flaw (and, no offense to all those armchair lawyers, but I'm sure SCO had their legal team review all actions they've taken prior to taking them, so I doubt you'll find any "loopholes").
You don't hear me complaining. ;)
I don't see what lawsuits you think are faced by not granting the right of reply, newspapers are largely exempt from libel in common law, provided that the publication does not appear to be intentionally malicious. So short of the most irresponsible, blatantly partisan newspapers, lawsuits should not be a huge concern. Again, this is the Anglo common-law precedent, and I have no idea how it is in your apparent home of Germany.
That your focus is on personal injury rather than freedom to report shows a rather different perspective from the American one. The general consensus of our Supreme Court is that freedom to communicate without fear of repurcussions, especially when the communication is critical or antagonistic towards those with more power, is a crucial check against tyranny; indeed, the press has often been referred to in the US as the fourth branch of government.
When faced with the risk of libellous speech versus that of restricted political speech, the prior is always more tolerable than the latter, in the US. The feeling is generally that the damage to one individual's reputation can indeed be severe, but that a) free speech does generally give him the opportunity to reply and b) regardless, the damage to one individual's reputation is far preferable to the damage to the democratic process.
Just imagine, any paper which prints an account of a politician screwing up has to print his account of how it happens; any paper which prints an expose on governmental corruption has to print the government's line as well. This effectively negates free political speech; any criticism is counterbalanced by a public relations spin.
Walt Disney donated $17,000 alone (the corporation, not the man). Interestingly enough, Hatch received $20,500 fron Novell, but I don't see any from SCO.
Just some food for thought.
The question here may seem simple, but it is not. The point of competition is ultimately to provide the best services to the consumer (this is not some sort of silly morality tale; Ayn Rand is an idiot). So if the really big Super-Mega-Lo-Marts provide better serivces to the consumer, but choke out competition, which is really better? On the one hand, competition creates Mega-Lo-Marts, but on the other, those choke out competitors.
Capitalist competition is like evolution. Humans, for that matter, are a lot like Wal-Marts; we became who we are by competition, but now we have a vested interest in staying on top by eliminating healthy competition. Were some species to be about to reach a competitive level of intelligence (or, for that matter, carnivorous predation like wolves, lions, tigers, and other animals we've largely wiped out) we would devote ourselves to utterly eliminating that threat.
So evolution, and capitalism, is to some degree self-defeating; once a competitor reaches the point where he can eliminate the game that led to his success, he can, in essence, kick away the ladders and burn the bridges to his success so that no others can approach his position.
Is this healthy? Not for the competition, and probably not for the leader, either. Faced without competition, Wal-Mart, and, according to many science fiction writers and philosophers, human civilization, will stagnate, devoid of any incentive for self-improvement, risk, or adventure .
Unfortunately, I don't really see an answer to this; socialism and communism both tend to eliminate the competition from the get-go, and any system that limits the whole-hearted competition between the leader and the species or businesses attempting to overtake him limits the value of the competition that does take place.
I'll have to sleep on it.
Consider for a moment that Wired article on the downfall of SUN Microsystems. One recurring theme in the personality of McNealy, SUN's CEO, is his inability to cooperate with the competition and instead his insistence on turning competitors into enemies and market competition into war.
If MS does this (and they may indeed), this is merely business as usual among many of these corporations. Corporate America is not a day-care facility; companies can and do play hardball. The question is not "does MS want to help or hurt the competition" but rather "did MS engage in illegal anti-competitive practices which are bad for the consumer and bad for the market." I don't see you answering that question.
Wal-Mart destroyed the competition. And, yes, some say Wal-Mart is evil. But all they did is healthy, normal competition, no?
Name a security measure that is mere intimidation. Name a measure that has no added value and is just shiny armor. (This does, admittedly, apply to local security measures using biometrics; thumbprint scanners are less secure, at least on the consumer-grade, and just cooler looking, but I don't think it applies quite the same way to real network security measures.)
Your point is well-taken, that companies have no incentive to sell something that works above and beyond selling what sells, but it neglects that the two generally do go together and the leaders in the field tend to have true committment to security.
I agree that it's not safe to rely on humans to keep systems patched. But, for one, if most systems are kept patched, a worm like SLAMMER would be useless. This is an obvious point you neglect, but not an interesting one.
More interesting, I think, is the debate over whether there is such a thing theoretically possible as a secure architecture. This is, of course, the idea behind "secure" systems designed to be so from the ground up, such as Palladium. Ethernet, TCP/IP, ARP, and most of the other protocols which make up the 'Net were not designed with security in mind from the bottom up, but rather designed for effectiveness, ease of implementation, and the like. For example, why do Ethernet cards allow promiscuous mode? It makes diagnosing certain problems easier, but it also represents a very big opportunity for all sorts of security vulnerabilities. Or why can MAC addresses be changed so easily? This represents an easy opportunity for mischeif.
But had the entire architecture of the 'Net been designed for security and accountability rather than ease of access and openness from the start (granted, two often-conflicting ideals), would absolute security be possible?
Many say that security is never truly possible without unplugging the computer from the 'Net, turning it off, and embedding it in concrete. This may be exaggeration, but of course it is quite difficult to prove something secure; RSA has not be proven secure, public-key cryptography has not been proven secure, and I don't really see how you could prove any other system secure, either.
This may not be necessary, however. We may not know for certain that RSA is secure, but we assume that the NSA does not know how to factor such large numbers any better than the rest of us, and we assume it to be secure (and such an assumption does appear valid). If enough evidence exists to assume a system to be "practically secure," that is enough for implementaiton.
I have no answers to these questions. But I think to assume such a problem is unanswerable is silly and is itself merely a non-answer. Security may not be an easy goal, but it may be acheivable. At least in some forms, this is clearly the case; it would quite evidently be possible to stop some sorts of attacks, like SLAMMER, in the future, even if theoretical, absolute, security remains un-obtainable.
Nobody said that there would be no controlling authority (or maybe he did, but it's a baseless assumption).
The ultimate goal of governmental control, in theory (please, I know it does not always work quite this way) is to regulate various aspects of public life in order to best serve the public good. This is the point of intellectual property, this is the point of FCC regulation (unregulated bandwidth use, similar to this example, renders the whole system unusable) and so forth.
A controlling body, quite possibly the FCC, could quite possibly regulate who and what sorts of devices can use the network, perhaps while charging a nominal device tax to pay for regulation, while keeping the access fundamentally free. There is no real reason to assume that this regulation can only happen commercially, or that such regulation renders the network "closed" in some sort of fundamental, sinister way.
As long as we are talking pie-in-the-sky, at least in the short term, assumptions about inability to govern this sort of thing are far less relevant than discussions of technical feasability; if such a thing can be done, and is done, its quite possible to govern it properly.
Such regulation could, of course, be done privately instead. Imagine a cooperative network with a EULA contract for all members that requires certified devices and specific behavior.
I'm expecting a flame or two from techno-anarchists who feel that all regulation, no matter how necessary, is bad. I'm reasonably suspicious of regulation, but here is a clear situation in which regulation is far more necessary than the lack of it.
Obviously, when you pirate, you deprive the artist of due profit. No one seriously disputes that, to paraphrase Lessig. However, there's been no real discussion of how or why intellectual property is the same or should be treated as the same as physical property.
This position appears to be the position by default; the RIAA-types argue that this is clearly property, how is it different? In reality, from a philosophical, practical, and legal standpoint, IP is simply not the same as physical property and, unless a very good argument to the contrary is presented, should not be treated as the same.
This is perhaps the most irksome lapse in the RIAA's argument, to me. The similarities are there, but there are differences, too.
There is a very good reason for copy protection, as outlined in the Constitution. You'd let anyone make a perfect copy of your car if you weren't trying to sell it; if you were, it'd benefit your business to limit the number of copies floating around so people have to buy it from you. Had you designed the car, you'd want credit for it.
The point that the RIAA misses, though, (or tries to paper over with rhetoric) is that intellctual property is not physical property; the effects and implications of IP theft are quite different and quite complex. To merely say, "Well, it's theft" is to completely miss any real, valuable discussion of the situation and its implications.
Being a bigger geek than Steve Urkle: Priceless.
You misconstrued what I said about the DG/manetic compass calibration, in so far as you simply restated what I said. The DG is calibrated during the pre-takeoff checklist after engine start and run-up (to provide enough time for the gyro to spin up) and every 15-20 minutes during flight. There is a little table stuck underneath the magnetic compass (the ball compass which floats in kerosene, usually on the dash or right above the windscreen on the cockpit ceiling) which bears the variation due to the airplane's magnetic fields. This is, as you said, calibrated my a trained professional.
Thanks for the info with regard to FCC regulations; read more carefully before correcting something which is already correct ;)
erm, yeah, *cough*cough*. I knew that. I considered linking to the article, in true Slashdot fashion, but I figured most of you would know what I was talking about anyway. And its not the amount of "a href" tags which make a good post, its the amount of heart. Or something.
Rather, critics are bothered by the impact that a totally seperate industry can have on what sort of consumer electronics are even available to us with what capabilities. Were the TV networks to dislike this, they could force contractual agreements with consumers banning the use of these devices (purely hypothetically, of course). But instead they choose a less direct means of asserting their power, which translates to a means of, from a really sinister viewpoint, pacifying the natives.
Rather than openly tell us who's decision it was, the networks use threats and bribes to induce the hardware manufacturers into denying consumers an otherwise profitable and desirable product. This echos far too similarly to the practice of the RIAA of suing the pants off anyone who manufactures software or hardware that appears to threaten them ("Hey, baby, you don't need to sue me to get my pants off...") regardless of significant legitimate use.
This direction-through-indirection is merely annoying at best, but really a terrifying over-stepping of commercial bounds at worst. The government, who supposedly represents us all, is entrusted with the rights to deny us harmful or dangerous products. We trust that such an action is in our best interest, and that the reasons for such an action are the reasons stated up front--no underhanded manipulation is ever acceptible in a democracy--but we have given no such trust to any corporation. When a corporation who's business is televised entertainment, no less, makes for us a decision on what hardware is good and what is bad, it oversteps its commercial bounds.
The reason that peope have largely lashed back at Big Music is because there is a clear alternative which applies not just to consumers' sense of moral wrongitude, but their pocketbooks: Kazaa, Gnutella, or what-have-you. Until people see the alternative that they aren't supposed to know about, just the abstracted idea of not being able to do something that the technology does allow isn't going to catch the public's attention much.
Look at how people seem to feel about Big Music. Reading that ABC News article about the RIT student who settled with the RIAA by paying them $12,000, I was truly surprised at how openly critical of the RIAA the article seemed to be, at least, for another member of Big Media, so to speak. It's not that there's a whole open political movement, but rather that so many people, including, most likely, the ABC News correspondent, simply share music files and the RIAA has made anyone who shares files their enemy, quite publicly. They made the consumers the enemy, not the other way around.
So why will there be no immediate lash back at Big Media for restricting things like the TiVo? Because whats the illegal alternative? What free software are people going to download onto their box-top sets out of self-interest which will essentially make them unwitting enemies of Big Media? There is none; short of complicated and risky hardware-hacking, people won't be exposed to what they are missing.
If one TiVo-type product is available in the store with ad-skipping, and the other without, sure, there'll be a preference. But if people are never presented with the option? Then there will be no complaints. Just don't let them see what they're missing and no one is the wiser.
This is ridiculous. It's not an airline regulation that bans the use of mobile phones; it's an FAA regulation. This applies to general aviation as well as airline flights, too.
Whether the effect is very significant I wouldn't be able to guess (past what the article says) but many instruments are extremely sensetive to electromagnetic fields and thus tuned to precision in the exact field at the spot on the plain in which they are mounted.
For example, the actual compass (as opposed to the directional gyro, a high-speed gyroscope which allows easier reading and does not have turning-errors and the like) is mounted by a trained professional who then parks the plane in a compass rose painted on the ground and computes the deviation on the compass due to metal, electrical currents, and so forth throughout the plane. Adding to those currents and fields could be a minor issue, at the least. Even "E6B" circular slide-rule flight computers are typically made out of plastic or aluminum to avoid throwing off the compass of placed on the dash next to it.
For that matter, its entirely possible that radio navigation aids like VOR or ADF would be sensetive to certain electromagnetic fields.
Even if there were no significant need for this, I highly doubt that an accross-the-board ban would result from the airlines' desire to charge more for phone use. The FAA is incompetent, but not that incompetent. And they seem to err most often on the side of lax regulation, so its not really that bad to see them being strict about something.
Were this the actual paper published, a few of your nitpicking complaints may possibly have a shred of validity. However, saying "about 50 times" instead of finely expressing the actual decimel to the nth significant digit really just makes it easier to read, and, frankly, if you are using the press release, the concise summary of the general idea behind the project, as your primary source of precise factual information on which you intend to plan your entire scientific endeavor, you are a moron. If you needed the significant digits, you'd not be reading the press release.
For those who are anally compulsive enough, or need to assert their own personal superiority at every opportunity, nit-picking can be a great activity. For the rest, it's just irritating.
And don't bother pointing out the irony of my nit-picking your nit-picking because I already realize it.
Celsius and Kelvin are the same scale, save that the "0" measurement for K is absolute 0, that is, the point at which there is no atomic vibration and thus the material contains no heat energy (since, as you remember, heat is really just the kinetic energy of atoms).
Thus, what they meant is that at this temperature, were it measured in K instead of C, it would be 50 times greater than room temperature measured in K. Want me to draw you a picture?
And I don't understand what you think is amateurish about saying "degrees Kelvin." This is the correct syntax, just as you would say "degrees Celsius" or "degrees Farenheight." There is no such thing as a "Kelvin," so, were they to say "in Kelvins" they'd just sound stupid. Were you trying to be funny? What are you talking about? You even admitted that you are too far removed from your science courses to know, so why are you complaining about the syntax used by real-life honest-to-goodness scientists?
I hate to be rude, but I just don't understand what you are talking about. Perhaps you'd due better to start your reading here.
That's ok; some guys post vulnerabilities on bugtraq riddled with "dis" and "dat" instead of "this" and "that" and comments about 9th-grade math homework and granny porn. Ugh.
I think that song is singlehandedly responsible for most people losing all conception of the meaning of the word "ironic."
The PATRIOT Act, as far as I know, does not ban any sort of encrypted communication; the Supreme Court has ruled, if I'm not mistaken, that private and anonymous speech is a fundamental component of the First Amendment right to free speech.
Furthermore, this is truly not different from encrypted e-mail or anything else, which, as a prior poster pointed out, was not used by any of the September 11 terrorists.
Guns are restricted, sure. An irresponsible person with a gun is quite dangerous. Even a responsible person with a gun can be dangerous. But the right to encryption technology is not about the right to bear arms in order to prevent a dictatorship (a necessity which is a bit outdated at this point). The right to private speech is not only still necessary, perhaps even more so, with groups like the NSA who intend to be able to intercept any communication worldwide (and have historically given little regard to constitutional restrictions). The right to private, free speech is a fundamental intellectual right which is always crucial no matter what the need or consequence.
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Anyone who needs to join an organization for those with high IQ's has self-esteem problems, intelligence problems, or both.