Why does it seem that most users are of below-average intelligence?
Most people are below average intelligence, because most people are stupid, but a few people are smart, and those people are really smart, except when they're stupid, which is most of the time. So yes, everyone is below-average.
I'm going to try one last time to explain this, because it's pretty simple and I think you can see the point if you're willing to try.
CI has no standing to sue AOL. You, as an independent ISP, have no standing to sue AOL. The "people" who have standing to sue are AOL's customers and other entities with contractual relationships to AOL.
I'll agree with you whole-heartedly that AOL is screwing a lot of their customers by lack of diligence in maintaining their blocklists. Those customers have the ability (even the responsibility) to take several different kinds of action against AOL's incompetence -- they can "complain"; they can switch to a better ISP; they can sue AOL individually or even get together and start some kind of class action.
I just don't know how to make it any clearer: independent ISPs and webhosts such as yourself have NO ABILITY OR RIGHT to decide AOL's email acceptance policy. I am in no way disagreeing that AOL's blocking policies are screwed up and causing problems for everyone, customers and bystanders alike. As a bystander all you can really do is "complain" -- you can make suggestions, even demands, but they have final authority over their mail servers, not you, and not the government. If you had your way, this year you'd be telling AOL how to run their network; but next year some "direct marketer" in Florida would be telling you how to run your network and me how to run mine. No thanks!
The "media circus" is a good idea: the more people who know about AOL's deficiencies, the more people can put pressure on AOL to correct them. Customers will leave in droves; customers with real damages will sue; competing ISPs will institute sane policies and prosper; maybe AOL will take notice and clean up their act, or maybe they'll just go down the drain and become irrelevant. Get together with other ISPs and draft some kind of "industry standard" mail acceptance policy, then use persuasion and competitive pressure to get it widely accepted and implemented. But getting courts involved to FORCE them to accept mail from unrelated networks is the WRONG approach, because (among other reasons) I can absolutely guarantee that such tactics will eventually be turned around and used against you and me.
Spam friendly? What part of the scenario that I listed above did you not understand?
He probably doesn't understand the part where you're cheering on government involvement in the case. A court ordered AOL to stop blocking mail from CI's customers. The government has no business telling AOL what email from external, unrelated sites they MUST accept.
Intelligent people think AOL should be accountable to their customers and other entities with whom they have entered into contracts. If AOL's customers are pissed about CI-routed mail being blocked, they should be the ones taking action against AOL. If CI wants to force AOL to accept their customers' email, they should make some kind of contractual arrangements to that effect with AOL.
It's pretty hillarious how you demand that people shut up if they don't run an ISP or a web-hosting company. Yeah, like nobody else has any right to an opinion on the matter. I run a mail server (just a little one, for about a half dozen people) and I bloody well have an opinion on the matter. I block mail from spam-friendly organizations, and that's that. If my "customers" (friends with accounts in my domain) don't like it they can try to persuade me to change this policy or make other arrangements for email. If they were actual paying customers I guess they could probably sue me. But some webhosting company I've never heard of, halfway across the continent, doesn't get any say in the matter.
I agree that AOL is screwed up and blocks email for utterly stupid and bogus reasons. I disagree that unrelated outside parties have the right to FORCE them to do otherwise. Let AOL's customers decide.
My particular type of DSL is still regulated, so this FCC thing isn't a direct threat to me, but 40% of Covad's business is line-shared ADSL which is what just got deregulated. Qwest (my ILEC) will most likely continue line-sharing, because they're so backward and primitive about DSL they'd just as soon let Covad take care of it. But Covad is hanging by its fingers on the edge of bankruptcy and you can bet Verizon will stomp on those fingers at its earliest opportunity.:(
It's worse than that for some of us. For me, it's Covad or nothing. Qwest will not sell me DSL at all. Covad provides me with 768k SDSL, but Qwest says I'm out of range.
If this ruling meant an extra $20/month for DSL I'd grit and bear it, but most likely it means Covad will finally go under and I'll be back on dialup. Yay.
"...provided the resulting materials are treated hereunder as part of the original SOFTWARE PRODUCT."
Notice that it says "treated... as". It most certainly does not transfer ownership of the "resulting materials" back to SCOX. If IBM publishes or relicenses those "resulting materials" in a manner inconsistent with their Unix license then that may be breach of contract, but certainly not copyright violation, since IBM still owns the code it created.
In short, SCOX does not own the copyright on code that licensees add to their versions of Unix (AIX, Dynix, IRIX, etc).
SCOX is attempting (in their PR) a vast extension of the scope of derivative works, using this license clause ("treat... as a part of") for leverage. It's not going to work in general, and their much narrower legal attack on IBM will also fail due to IBM's special exemption from that clause.
But the developers need to start writing the real-world applications people need to run a business...
"The developers need"? Don't you think developers are better able to say what they need than some guy who uses their stuff for free? I see that particular syntactic reversal all over the place -- it's a rhetorical attempt to shift the burden of ones needs onto someone else. The general formula is to say, "Those people need to [do whatever for us]," when one really means, "We need those people to [do whatever for us]."
If business-people need "better real-world applications", then they should pay for them, or write the software themselves, or just sit patiently and wait for someone else to do it. Amateur developers obviously have no need whatsoever for business software, or they'd be writing such software. Of course not all free software developers are amateurs; some are business-people who probably do need business software, and will eventually get around to writing it when they have time. They'll have more time if you pay them to do it, or at least do something to spark their interest in such a project. Just flat out asserting that they "need" to do it (because you want them to do it) isn't going to work. Actually starting the project sometimes works, even if you don't have the ability to see it through to completion.
The code, in Linux, is distributed under the GPL. Thus the license to use the code in Linux must be GPL-compatible. Caldera's license permitting use of the code was not compatible with the GPL, thus the code cannot be used in Linux. The license was in fact not "the BSD license" but a "BSD-style" license formulated by Caldera for that one product. It doesn't matter what Perens did or didn't mention; the fact is that the "atealloc" code, if it was indeed copied from Caldera's public Unix distribution, was used beyond the scope of its license.
Note that I am not asserting that the code was in fact copied from the Caldera-licensed Unix code. It may have come from somewhere else, under some other license. But you can't point to that Caldera "BSD-style" license as legitimizing use of old Unix code in Linux, since the Caldera license is not GPL-compatible! (This is according to the FSF, who are generally regarded as the primary experts on the GPL.)
"Ah! a very short time," replied the little man of Saturn.
"So too with us," said the Sirian. "We are always complaining of the shortness of life. This must be a universal law of nature."
"Alas!" quoth the Saturnian, "none of us live more than 500 annual revolutions of the Sun." (That amounts to about 15,000 years, according to our manner of counting.) "You see how it is our fate to die almost as soon as we are born; our existence is a point, our duration an instant, our globe an atom. Scarcely have we begun to acquire a little information when death arrives before we can put it to use. I myself do not venture to lay any schemes; I feel like a drop of water in a boundless ocean. I am ashamed, especially before you, of the absurd figure I make in this universe."
Micromegas answered: "Were you not a philosopher, I should fear to distress you by telling you our lives are 700 times as long as yours; but you know too well that when the time comes to give back one's body to the elements, and reanimate nature under another form--the process called death--when that moment of metamorphosis comes, it is precisely the same whether we have lived an eternity or only a day. I have been in countries where life is a thousand times longer than with us, and yet have heard murmurs of its brevity even there...."
Suppose my opponent would gain little by killing me, but would suffer greatly as a result. Then if he decides to go ahead and kill me, that would be his mistake. But I'm bloody well going to interrupt him, because I'd rather live than see him make that particular mistake.
I'm not shaking my fists, I'm grinding my teeth. Then I sit back, close my eyes, and have a nice little fantasy about what I'd do if the spammer were right here in front of me.... Ahhhhhh......
In the immortal words of Vincent Vega:
I just wish I caught 'em doin' it, ya know? Oh man, I'd give anything to catch 'em doin' it. It'a been worth his doin' it, if I coulda just caught 'em, you know what I mean?
I defeat dictionary attacks by rejecting mail from any host that attempts to send to any common name at my domain. The common name list was generated empirically after the first few dictionary attacks hit me. E.g. bob@mydomain.com, joe@mydomain.com, tom@mydomain.com, etc. The dictionary spammers helpfully tend to blast a few dozen such names in a single SMTP session which makes it much easier to block them.
I've learned by this experience not to use a common first name as a permanent email address!
We're all in it together, friend. There are local monopolies on cable modem service almost everywhere, and something like 40% of US households are ineligible for DSL. Not only that, but 79% of all statistics are made up. And yes, I am stalking you. Please stop closing your curtains.
--
A reasonably satisfied @Home^H^H^H^H^H ATTBI^H^H^H^H^H Comcrap customer. "Comcrap -- Hey, It's Better Than Dialup!"
2. If it were my CD, I'd want it back. Since the victim of the robbery is my friend, I'd be sympathetic and cut him some slack. But if he had insurance and the loss were covered, I'd expect him to fork over enough for a new CD. Obviously I'm not going to sue a friend over a lost CD in any case. But if the friend were grossly negligent -- i.e. not just having flimsy locks but, say, inviting crackheads to stay in his living room -- then I'd be pissed, and put the blame on him.
3. You can't get privacy back. Once your information has been "stolen" that's it, the privacy that the "friend" (hostile for-profit corporation) was supposed to be guarding is gone forever. They should pay somehow, or they'll have zero incentive to guard my privacy better in the future.
Yeah, that dumbass should have chosen one of the many other cable modem providers in his area. Or maybe DSL from one of the many competing local phone companies that provide service 3 miles from the C.O. Yeah. Good point. What the hell was he thinking, choosing a lousy provider like Adelphia.
How many of us have had to sit on hold for hours and reformat a hard drive as DOS just to convince the tech support lackey on the other end that a hard drive really is bad?
If you would actually reformat your hard drive just to satisfy some phone monkey, then you really aren't very smart.
Phone monkey: When you get the A Colon prompt type format See Colon.
Me: (glancing at cardboard box containing ready-to-return drive) OK.
Phone monkey: Now hit the why key.
Me: (drumming fingers on tabletop) OK. It says "formatting." Now it says "media error on track 1."
Phone monkey: OK, looks like the drive is bad, here's your RMA number...
Me: Thanks.
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I have an auto-sensing 10/100 hub (not switch) and it does indeed maintain 100 Mbps among the 100 Mbps nodes, in spite of a 10 Mbps node also being plugged in. What I haven't tested is how much actual bandwidth is available to the 100 Mbps nodes while the 10 Mbps node is going full blast. My SWAG is that there's still about 90 Mbps left.
Agreed. By doing nothing, you also keep your options open -- you could potentially make use of the exploit someday should you find yourself in dire straits, academically or financially. Obviously that's a doomsday scenario, but you never know, shit happens. Also an opportunity may someday present itself whereby you can reveal the bug without possibility of negative consequences. Perhaps someone else will discover and exploit the bug and you can help "track it down" and fix it. No one ever need know that you had a head-start.
Oh, they'll still have a suit after RedHat makes a clean kernel... the suit against IBM, for breach of some obscure contract. What they won't have is anti-Linux FUD.
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I'm going to try one last time to explain this, because it's pretty simple and I think you can see the point if you're willing to try.
CI has no standing to sue AOL. You, as an independent ISP, have no standing to sue AOL. The "people" who have standing to sue are AOL's customers and other entities with contractual relationships to AOL.
I'll agree with you whole-heartedly that AOL is screwing a lot of their customers by lack of diligence in maintaining their blocklists. Those customers have the ability (even the responsibility) to take several different kinds of action against AOL's incompetence -- they can "complain"; they can switch to a better ISP; they can sue AOL individually or even get together and start some kind of class action.
I just don't know how to make it any clearer: independent ISPs and webhosts such as yourself have NO ABILITY OR RIGHT to decide AOL's email acceptance policy. I am in no way disagreeing that AOL's blocking policies are screwed up and causing problems for everyone, customers and bystanders alike. As a bystander all you can really do is "complain" -- you can make suggestions, even demands, but they have final authority over their mail servers, not you, and not the government. If you had your way, this year you'd be telling AOL how to run their network; but next year some "direct marketer" in Florida would be telling you how to run your network and me how to run mine. No thanks!
The "media circus" is a good idea: the more people who know about AOL's deficiencies, the more people can put pressure on AOL to correct them. Customers will leave in droves; customers with real damages will sue; competing ISPs will institute sane policies and prosper; maybe AOL will take notice and clean up their act, or maybe they'll just go down the drain and become irrelevant. Get together with other ISPs and draft some kind of "industry standard" mail acceptance policy, then use persuasion and competitive pressure to get it widely accepted and implemented. But getting courts involved to FORCE them to accept mail from unrelated networks is the WRONG approach, because (among other reasons) I can absolutely guarantee that such tactics will eventually be turned around and used against you and me.
Intelligent people think AOL should be accountable to their customers and other entities with whom they have entered into contracts. If AOL's customers are pissed about CI-routed mail being blocked, they should be the ones taking action against AOL. If CI wants to force AOL to accept their customers' email, they should make some kind of contractual arrangements to that effect with AOL.
It's pretty hillarious how you demand that people shut up if they don't run an ISP or a web-hosting company. Yeah, like nobody else has any right to an opinion on the matter. I run a mail server (just a little one, for about a half dozen people) and I bloody well have an opinion on the matter. I block mail from spam-friendly organizations, and that's that. If my "customers" (friends with accounts in my domain) don't like it they can try to persuade me to change this policy or make other arrangements for email. If they were actual paying customers I guess they could probably sue me. But some webhosting company I've never heard of, halfway across the continent, doesn't get any say in the matter.
I agree that AOL is screwed up and blocks email for utterly stupid and bogus reasons. I disagree that unrelated outside parties have the right to FORCE them to do otherwise. Let AOL's customers decide.
My particular type of DSL is still regulated, so this FCC thing isn't a direct threat to me, but 40% of Covad's business is line-shared ADSL which is what just got deregulated. Qwest (my ILEC) will most likely continue line-sharing, because they're so backward and primitive about DSL they'd just as soon let Covad take care of it. But Covad is hanging by its fingers on the edge of bankruptcy and you can bet Verizon will stomp on those fingers at its earliest opportunity. :(
If this ruling meant an extra $20/month for DSL I'd grit and bear it, but most likely it means Covad will finally go under and I'll be back on dialup. Yay.
In short, SCOX does not own the copyright on code that licensees add to their versions of Unix (AIX, Dynix, IRIX, etc).
SCOX is attempting (in their PR) a vast extension of the scope of derivative works, using this license clause ("treat ... as a part of") for leverage. It's not going to work in general, and their much narrower legal attack on IBM will also fail due to IBM's special exemption from that clause.
You mean like this?
If business-people need "better real-world applications", then they should pay for them, or write the software themselves, or just sit patiently and wait for someone else to do it. Amateur developers obviously have no need whatsoever for business software, or they'd be writing such software. Of course not all free software developers are amateurs; some are business-people who probably do need business software, and will eventually get around to writing it when they have time. They'll have more time if you pay them to do it, or at least do something to spark their interest in such a project. Just flat out asserting that they "need" to do it (because you want them to do it) isn't going to work. Actually starting the project sometimes works, even if you don't have the ability to see it through to completion.
Note that I am not asserting that the code was in fact copied from the Caldera-licensed Unix code. It may have come from somewhere else, under some other license. But you can't point to that Caldera "BSD-style" license as legitimizing use of old Unix code in Linux, since the Caldera license is not GPL-compatible! (This is according to the FSF, who are generally regarded as the primary experts on the GPL.)
Obviously he meant "standing" rather than "jurisdiction." So he's not a lawyer, so sue him already.
I'd prefer not to be sued by mistake.
If my opponent's mistake hurts me more than it hurts him, then I'd be a fool not to interrupt him, old military saying or no.
In the immortal words of Vincent Vega:
Same here, I thought: That's a good start.
I've learned by this experience not to use a common first name as a permanent email address!
--
A reasonably satisfied @Home^H^H^H^H^H ATTBI^H^H^H^H^H Comcrap customer.
"Comcrap -- Hey, It's Better Than Dialup!"
2. If it were my CD, I'd want it back. Since the victim of the robbery is my friend, I'd be sympathetic and cut him some slack. But if he had insurance and the loss were covered, I'd expect him to fork over enough for a new CD. Obviously I'm not going to sue a friend over a lost CD in any case. But if the friend were grossly negligent -- i.e. not just having flimsy locks but, say, inviting crackheads to stay in his living room -- then I'd be pissed, and put the blame on him.
3. You can't get privacy back. Once your information has been "stolen" that's it, the privacy that the "friend" (hostile for-profit corporation) was supposed to be guarding is gone forever. They should pay somehow, or they'll have zero incentive to guard my privacy better in the future.
4. Analogies suck.
Yeah, that dumbass should have chosen one of the many other cable modem providers in his area. Or maybe DSL from one of the many competing local phone companies that provide service 3 miles from the C.O. Yeah. Good point. What the hell was he thinking, choosing a lousy provider like Adelphia.
Phone monkey: When you get the A Colon prompt type format See Colon.
Me: (glancing at cardboard box containing ready-to-return drive) OK.
Phone monkey: Now hit the why key.
Me: (drumming fingers on tabletop) OK. It says "formatting." Now it says "media error on track 1."
Phone monkey: OK, looks like the drive is bad, here's your RMA number...
Me: Thanks.
Always has been, always will be.
I have an auto-sensing 10/100 hub (not switch) and it does indeed maintain 100 Mbps among the 100 Mbps nodes, in spite of a 10 Mbps node also being plugged in. What I haven't tested is how much actual bandwidth is available to the 100 Mbps nodes while the 10 Mbps node is going full blast. My SWAG is that there's still about 90 Mbps left.
Agreed. By doing nothing, you also keep your options open -- you could potentially make use of the exploit someday should you find yourself in dire straits, academically or financially. Obviously that's a doomsday scenario, but you never know, shit happens. Also an opportunity may someday present itself whereby you can reveal the bug without possibility of negative consequences. Perhaps someone else will discover and exploit the bug and you can help "track it down" and fix it. No one ever need know that you had a head-start.
Oh, they'll still have a suit after RedHat makes a clean kernel... the suit against IBM, for breach of some obscure contract. What they won't have is anti-Linux FUD.