I disagree that we're much better at keeping records. The records exist, sure, and often they're stored on the most reliable media we have. You could have said the same thing 1000 years ago as well, and yet despite the abundance of records and the reliability of storage, not enough survived to give a detailed picture of many events. I suspect the same will be true 1000 years from now.
Chevys and Fords both have to meet basic engineering standards and pass various safety, reliability, and performance specifications to be street-legal. Therefore, while each has its adherents who will argue as to superior performance, construction, or durability, both are fairly sure to be reliable, competently engineered, and safely built.
There are no such standards for computer software. The few standards organizations that do exist (in this case, W3C would apply, as well as IETF and perhaps a few others) do not have the power to enforce their standards. One cannot make any assumptions about the quality, feature set, reliability, performance, or safety of a piece of computer software. Even toasters, to which computers have been compared, are subject to testing in UL or similar lab environments to ensure at least that the product does meets minimal safety standards (though there is no guarantee that it will actually toast anything). Therefore the software market is more wide-open than any other, and caveat emptor is the order of the day.
Risk in software selection is minimized by reading impartial product reviews, performing evaluations in isolated test environments, closely following known issues and patches, and in the case of large customers, purchasing support and warranty contracts. For the individual user, a simple survey of the product landscape and frequent attention to security issues will suffice. Even a casual evaluation of web browsers by the most novice computer user will show that IE has, by a huge margin, the most security problems, both in number and severity. A look at a few reviews will show that it offers no significant feature advantages over other products in its space, and in fact lacks some features its competition includes. Worse still, the manufacturer has a history of ignoring, downplaying, and denying security problems in its products; thus, the actual number of known vulnerabilities is probably much greater than the number publicly circulated.
This type of information is easily gathered by a nontechnical individual in a matter of a few minutes. It seems only prudent that someone who is about to entrust a piece of software with his or her personal, financial, and professional information (and run it on a computer for which he or she is wholly responsible) would take the time to gather this information.
General Motors and Ford operate in a tightly regulated industry with a history of significant legal judgments and market punishment against manufacturers of inadequate products. Therefore all products, while differing in various aspects of performance, aesthetics, and quality, are guaranteed to meet certain minimum standards and have a certain level of manufacturer backing. Microsoft and its competitors operate in an unregulated, uncontrolled industry with little history of product liability litigation and a sales structure which heavily favours them in the event of such litigation. Compliance with any standards which may apply to their products is wholly voluntary, and warranties are nearly always explicitly disclaimed.
In the former environment, even ignorant buyers are unlikely to find themselves with a grossly inadequate vehicle. However, ignorant buyers of computer software are virtually certain to end up in the unenviable position of owning a license to use a defective product, with no ability to recover compensation of any kind, including for damages caused by the software.
Chevy and Ford have fanboys. It may well be that browsers do also. But nowhere in this discussion have I advocated any particular product as an alternative to IE; in fact I have explicitly avoided doing so. There are numerous options, and each buyer is encouraged to seek the one they believe is most likely to function properly. As someone familiar with the field, I do not believe that anyone can honestly form the opinion that IE is that option.
However... I'm sure people in the mechanic websites make fun of people like us all the time too because we phuck up our cars all the time.
I'm sure they're justified in doing so, too. When I need something done to my car, I take it to a mechanic so that the work is done right. Likewise, when someone needs a web browser, I expect them to rely on software written by people who know what they're doing. I might ask a mechanic for reference customers, and consult the Better Business Bureau or local car club to make sure his work is of good quality. A sensible mechanic who needs a browser might check the Internet for references on a particular browser, also to make sure the work is of good quality.
See any parallels here? There's no excuse for not doing one's homework. There are plenty of articles available and accessible to the lay computer user that describe the some of the many problems with IE. There's no reason for an intelligent user not to read them and make an informed decision. Quite frankly, as an expert in the field of software, I do not believe any intelligent user could make an informed, good faith decision to use IE. Therefore I conclude that most users are not intelligent, are not acting in good faith (ie they don't care about the quality of the products they use), or are too lazy to spend five minutes gathering information. Since the latter two are just subcases of the first, it's safe to assume that 90% of computer users are not very intelligent. This is independent of any expert bias - their use of IE is not foolish because they're expected to understand the problems with IE on a technical level, it's foolish because there's no need to understand those details in order to see that IE is not a quality product and is in fact unsafe to use. I don't need to understand intimate details about strengths of materials, bending moments, and energy absorbtion to know that a car is unsafe if its gas tank is likely to explode in a collision. In the same way, I don't need to understand the details of exploiting a buffer overflow to know that a browser which is known to compromise a user's personal information is unsafe.
Flamebait? Call it whatever you like, but if people spent 1/10 as much effort making sure they had a safe, effective, reliable computing environment as they spend to ensure the same about other aspects of their lives - such as their cars - there wouldn't be an IE as we know it today.
I for one do not rely on IE in any way, shape, or form. This will never change. I encourage these crooks and deviants to exploit away. The only way for IE to get fixed or evicted by market forces is for those who use it to be hit hard by attacks. Letting Microsoft off the hook is inappropriate. The page should come down only when all the holes it describes are patched. My response, were I in Pivx's place, to any such request would be "I'll remove the page when its contents are no longer relevant. Where are the patches?"
I work for a business who would like to do nothing more than play by the rules, but all kinds of barriers have been put up in our way.
I suggest you communicate this sentiment to your industry association lawyers, who have created most of these barriers with their stall tactics in the legal system. If the FTC had simply been allowed to go ahead with the original plans then you would no doubt have had a copy of the list in a timely fashion and there'd be no doubt or uncertainty about whom you may call and whom you may not. There'd be no uncertainty either about the owner of the complaints process, or how to file a complaint, from the other side.
If you really wanted to play by the rules, you'd call off your dogs, accept the fact that over 40 million of us don't want to buy whatever you're selling (and we don't even need to know what it is, to know that), and focus your attentions on the minority of people who have nothing better to do than talk to your underpaid, abused employees - and might actually buy something!
And, really, it could be a lot worse for you - it could have been an "OK to Call" list instead...think anyone would actually sign up? Keep up the maneuverings and you just might get to find out.
Hit the nail right on the head there, boy!
on
The Cult of the NDA
·
· Score: 1
This is especially striking considering how few startups are actually pursuing unique ideas.
Right, so what's not to understand? How many companies really want everyone to know that they're working on boring unoriginal projects? Especially in a bubble economy, hype and speculation could mean the difference between a billion dollar IPO and a quiet death. Really, if you don't have anything worth investing in, isn't it better to make people think you might by being quiet and secretive, so you can swindle them and get out of town?
Nothing has changed; snake-oil salesmen never described the ingredients of their medicines, claiming only that they were "patented" or "secret" - no sense trying to sell sasparilla at 100 times the cost, is there?
This should be offered as an optional add-on service. It's often done in the business world, and it's called managed services. You might pay your provider to firewall for you, to manage traffic, to balance loads, to provide switching or routing, and other services. Firewalling is a type of service I might well want my ISP to provide, so long as it's under my control. This could reduce the investment I might need to make in hardware (routers, firewalls) or software (so-called "personal" firewalls, cleanup tools) and thus be a good value.
The problem, of course, is that most who really want a consumer-style connection won't go for it because they can't see any benefit to the added cost; becoming a worm or virus transmission vector annoys others but does not usually degrade the infected user's consumption experience and therefore managed firewall services don't make sense. The solution to this is an addendum to terms of service that stipulate that systems which are reasonably believed to be infected with a worm or virus and are adversely affecting networks as a result will be dropped from the network and no refunds will be given. Service will be restored only after a professional (partnership or more managed service opportunities here...) has inspected the system and found it clean of any such threats. Since this will be both annoying - unexpected service termination - and expensive - hourly fees for system checks won't be low - users will find this type of low-cost insurance valuable and useful. Probably enough so to pay an extra 3 or 4 bucks a month, surely enough for the ISP to make a nice profit as well.
The real problem is Sobig. Blaster is at most a mild annoyance. Why? Because you can patch the hole that allows blaster in, and you are protected. The only time blaster causes a problem is if you get infected. Otherwise it's pretty much a non-event. So, if you take reasonable action to protect yourself, blaster is harmless.
Not the case for Sobig. This type of worm actually does the most damage to noninfected hosts in the form of a continuous, massive DDOS attack. Those who are infected have some excess network usage but otherwise no real harm. Those who are not infected, and who take steps to keep systems up to date and not click random attachments, get inundated with huge volumes of worthless mail. The mail, of course, need not be delivered, but the consumption of network resources is nevertheless enormous.
I don't much care if the ignorant and the stupid suffer the wrath of blaster and its ilk, but the punishment of the innocent that worms like Sobig cause must stop. (unproven speculation follows...) If I were the head of the FBI I would sic every single computer crime expert at my disposal on the trail of the Sobig author(s) and the probable spammer syndicate that's funding them. Once they're all caught, I'd like to see the ISPs providing these spammers with bandwidth go down as well for racketeering and enterprise corruption - they benefited from the racket established by the spammers and worm-wranglers and the illegal activity they've engaged in. This isn't really novel legal thinking either, it's a simple matter of demonstrating the existence of a conspiracy and showing who benefits from it. Many a mobster has gone down on a shakier theory than this one.
I can't speak for ppc, but I can talk a bit about sparc and sparc64. sparc64 is a first-class port managed continuously by David Miller. It generally tracks progress of x86 fairly closely and can be expected to work at almost any time. sparc(32) however, is barely hanging onto critical mass and 2.6 will, sadly, probably be the last seriously supported kernel for that platform. Development will happen late in the cycle and it's unlikely to work at all before 2.6.2 or so. I'm working on it now, as are a handful of others, but we don't have a lot of time and debugging takes a long time on such slow systems...
I'm responsible for all IT support contracts for my company (no we are not a tiny startup). After seeing how people struggle just to successfully communicate problems to support techs who are usually only 1/10 as intelligent, not to mention familiar with the products, I've mostly stopped buying software support. I'll still buy hardware support, so we can get replacement hardware when it breaks, but otherwise it's just a waste. I don't think I've yet seen a case where a software support contract helped us solve a single problem - that applies to Microsoft, Compaq, Dell, Cisco, and Avaya at least. These are top companies in their fields, and we have expensive support contracts, but nothing comes of it. Even talking to tier 3 techs is usually useless.
I can't understand why anyone thinks software support is vital. I consider it a waste of money by managers who just want to cover their asses. In this economy, it's much more cost-effective to hire excellent staff on your own team than to pay premium prices for incompentent vendor support.
the majority of viruses written attack Microsoft products
Why is it that when I read this, my first thought is "oh, so now Microsoft is going to be writing lots of viruses for other platforms...how nice"? There's more than one way to skin cats, and Microsoft always seems to pick the way that does harm to its competition. Benefits to its own customers are seldom a serious consideration.
Maybe I'm just overly cynical this morning...but tell me you didn't think the same thing...
...with high-end Sony CRTs. Other people may have a similar lifetime's worth of good experience with other specific technologies, but I've never been disappointed with a Sony Trinitron "professional" CRT. The GDM-520PS is highly recommended, and anything in that same family and range is certain to be top quality. Clear, sharp, fine, and bright. No problem with high scan rates. I won't even look at anything else, and I'll buy them site unseen so long as they're NIB. Just my $0.02.
Not only are the ads clearly marked and easy to ignore, they're often *gasp* RELEVANT! Sometimes I'm looking to buy something, or looking to see who's selling it, or just trying to find out what something is worth. In those circumstances, Google's ads can save a lot of time by directing me to the company that makes the product I just searched for. Sure, I ignore Amazon's featured links and the other obvious "trolls" but just as often the ads are actually what I'm looking for when I'm not searching for mailing list archives.
There may be no quick fix but there is always a quick workaround. The cure might be worse than the disease but that's a call for my organisation to make on the basis of our business needs, not CERT or Microsoft or the government or anyone else. Therefore I demand full disclosure. The last thing I want is to be 0dayed while someone sits on the vulnerability waiting for some slowass vendor to get their shit in order. Besides, I have the sources to all my software; I don't need any fucking vendor to fix it for me. The only responsible disclosure is full disclosure. Anything else can only help vendors who don't want to look bad and the truly elite crackers who have no trouble finding vulnerabilities without any help.
So while I don't think much of this joker's "I'll release this shit at 7pm Friday to fuck over the admins" attitude, I'd still rather information be released like that than not at all. Really, though, by the time CERT is even thinking about releasing anything, chances are it's been known in the rest of the world for ages. If you want a hot tip, I heard that CERT is about to release an advisory on sendmail and its supposed vulnerability to some poorly-written worm. Better patch now!
CERT is a joke. "Responsible disclosure" is a joke. This d00d is a joke and is most likely a lamer who has probably committed enough felonies to warrant three lifetimes of Bubba-supplied assrape, but nothing says that only good people can do the world a service.
Yes, but they don't think that way. Remember, the Oracle guys take them to lunch every day, and let them sit in their skyboxes at football games. Where's the incentive to develop alternatives? Worse still, the people the big guys use for development are usually not what we'd think of as competent; typically they are consultants from other big firms like PWC or Accenture. Most of them, given the source for postgres, would stare blankly into space for six weeks, add on a few crufty modules, and vanish leaving no documentation. Of course, the big guys *could* hire some people with existing postgres experience or even a couple guys from Oracle or IBM, for a lot less than they would spend on the next Oracle project, but they won't. Why? Two reasons: first, the guys from Accenture give them tickets to baseball games and golf tournaments and a lot of free lunches; second, Oracle, whatever problems it's given them, has been working more or less well, and sticking your neck out for change is a sure way to get your head chopped even if the new project causes fewer problems than Oracle would have.
The safe, easy, personally satisfying thing to do is exactly what's always been done - hire a large well-known company, maybe two or three, to install massively complicated, undocumented, hideously expensive proprietary software. Then hire them to maintain it. And enjoy all the free stuff they give you while you cover your ass and project the image of a real go-getter.
The mistake you're making is to think that anyone at the big guys who holds the purse strings actually cares about anyone but himself. The company is secondary at best and the prospect of helping the rest of the world by contributing back to Free Software projects means nothing. This attitude is a requirement for receiving the key to the executive washroom at a Fortune 1000 company.
mySQL is appropriate for upwards of half of all web applications, and could easily own that half of the market. However, that doesn't mean it constitutes a serious threat to the large proprietary database vendors, because that half of the applications are mostly using one or more of:
Microsoft Access
Flat files
XML files
Static content
Client-side scripting
A large-scale database being drastically underutilized
to perform their various functions. In most cases, those functions would be faster, easier to implement, and simpler to manage using mySQL.
For applications with these types of functions, which do not include complex queries, large transaction volumes, rigorous reliability including transaction log backups, recovery, replay, and replication, mySQL represents a major force. Unfortunately for mySQL and those who would have it take over the world, there's not much money available for those applications. Therefore, expect to see mySQL's installed base continue to increase while its revenue-based market share remains small.
For applications which do require features and levels of reliability and capability not offered by mySQL, postgres is the only serious freely-available contender. Even so, postgres is also somewhat less capable than Oracle or DB/2 and will be confined to the middle tier of applications - those which require better reliability and scalability than mySQL can provide but for which funding is scarce. Postgres probably does represent a serious threat to Microsoft's SQL Server, if only because Postgres is platform-independent and supports platforms which can scale beyond anything Windows can run on. Both are otherwise middle-tier products which are not and will never be taken seriously by the largest and most demanding database users.
Who are those users? Banks, government agencies, stock exchanges, payroll and records processing firms, insurance companies, large multi-site call centers, and other huge-scale enterprises. The top proprietary databases offer capabilities that do not yet exist in the Free Software world. For these users, who are less than 1% of all customers but which represent maybe 80% the revenue in the market, there is no substitute. These customers will stay with their existing solutions - Oracle, IBM, Sybase - until the systems running them give out. Then they'll call that company's professional services department and offer them a few million more to upgrade the system. That's the way it works. The system has to be attacked one customer at a time, an expensive and time-consuming process consisting of many lunches, legal bribes, and unrealistic promises.
I think the answer to whether mySQL is a significant threat to dominate the market economically is pretty obvious. Even if mySQL moves up to the middle tier to compete with Postgres and MSSQL and is installed in every application for which it is suitable, the product would still command less than 10% of the revenue in the market.
Large electrolytic capacitors are often just insurance against bad power coming in from the supplies. In the case of an expansion card, that would be the mainboard. Since the mainboard has its own caps, and the power supply has several as well, only factors like load and distance could cause problems for the card. If the rest of your system is working properly, and there isn't anything near the device that would introduce noise, you should be fine. Breaking off caps is something that will have no effect 90% of the time, but then you'll move the device somewhere slightly different and suddenly it flakes out all the time.
Duh, it's the weekend and I'm at home...on my own time. I don't post from work, for the same reason people shouldn't use Kazaa at work. Work is for work, it's not happy fun time.
What if the person who created the work in question is dead?
Finally, a decent question. Well, that question has already been settled by the law in most countries, but whether that settlement is just or beneficial to society is another question. Western - and now worldwide - law is based on corporate ownership, which means that the rights associated with copyright can be owned in common. Specifically, they can sold by their original holders to other individuals or corporations, or even to the public, and the rights they confer remain valid even after the original holder's death.
Therefore, by the laws existing in this time and place, the original artist's death has no effect on the legality of stealing his copyrighted works - if he held the rights, his estate now does; if he sold them, the buyers still do. In either case, if your act would have been theft during the artist's life, it is no less so because of his death.
Now then, whether that represents justice to you depends on which you believe the atom of law ought to be - the human, or the corporation. At present, the corporation is the fundamental particle of law, with a living breathing human treated only as a special case of the corporation. In accordance with this principle, the death of an author or musician is meaningless; the rights to his or her works survive because it is the corporate concepts of ownership - ownership that does not depend on any specific person - which matter most. No matter what it is, *some* corporate body always owns everything.
This legal theory is convenient for governments and lawyers in that it generates huge volumes of paper and many disputes - if somebody owns everything, there can be no limit to disputes, and if the records of ownership are always on paper somewhere, there can be no limit to the pay of those assigned to trace them. It also gives ready cover to those persons seeking to shield themselves from the consequences of their own actions - the actions, one argues, were those of the corporation rather than the perpetrator himself. Nevertheless, this form of law also allows tremendous concentration of capital, since rights of ownership transcend the individual both in space and in time. This provides the fundamental ethical question: is the benefit to society brought about by allowing this concentration of captial over space and time greater or less than the smaller but much more numerous benefits which would accrue by turning over to the public domain an individual's lifetime accomplishments upon his or her death? This question merits careful consideration - in ages past, people lived much shorter lives and were usually more concerned about their decendents' fates than their own, and this thought process spurs creators and innovators by ensuring that the proceeds of their works will survive their deaths and provide for generations yet unborn. It allows a more careful and prudent pattern of investment and stabilises the economy by allowing many individuals to share risks together over a span of many years. But it also contributes to a terrifying concentration of power and to the imbalance between then individual born without corporate backing and the one born with it. And in the modern era, with people living 80 years and more and so often showing little concern for family, might it not be possible for a single individual to accomplish enough in one lifetime that the sum of these individual accomplishments returned to society upon death would be greater than the stabilizing advantages offered by the existence of the corporation?
This is the question you must answer for yourself, before you can properly decide whether the copyright extension law or the DMCA are good or ill, and whether you gain or lose by the continuing prohibition against copying Charlie Parker's works. This is not a trivial question and I'm feeling almost silly for bringing it up in this forum; it is a major philosophical problem the world will have to decide. Personally, I am an anticorporatist, believing in the value of the individual. That makes me a gambler, willing to accept risks both to myself by forgoing the protective shield of a corporation in my own business and to my civilization by forgoing a working system in favour of one untested in modern times. Your choice may be different, but it is not one to make lightly.
As said before If you steal a car thats a crime and if you steal a song - thats a copyright infrigment.
Let's get one thing straight - at this time in this place the Rule of Law states that copyright infringement is a crime. You may reject the Rule of Law, or you may argue that such infringement should not be considered criminal, but it is wrong to assert that it is not.
If evrybody would pay for evry little pice of IP they need/take/use/etc the worlds economy would colaps.
I'll pardon your dreadful spelling on the assumption that you're using a handheld computer with neither keyboard nor stylus. Nobody is suggesting that you must pay for anything. I am stating that when you take something belonging to another person which he or she deems to be of value you are - morally and legally - required to compensate that person at a mutually agreed upon rate. I shall take several examples immediately visible to me: I obtained this browser from the Mozilla project without paying a cent; the creators tell me I am free to use it so long as I follow certain requirements should I choose to distribute it to others. The monitor in front of me was purchased at auction - at a mutally agreeable cash price. The keyboard I type on was a gift from family; I paid nothing for it. And the music playing in the background is a gift from the local radio station; I am free to listen to it as much or as little as I please. None of this did I steal, yet I may use all of it. Much of it contains a great deal of copyrighted materials: the board layouts in the monitor, the code in Mozilla, the original works playing on the radio. My world has hardly collapsed because of it.
Yes I use P2P apps for downloading movies and music. And you know what I went to the cinema 6 times this year(thats once a week) and bought 4 CD with music - two of them were from an artis I firstly heard off on internet... So don't bull me about that I stell from rightful owners.
All except your last sentence is sensible. But the simple fact is that you do steal from the owners of the works you illegally download and enjoy (I am assuming that these are works to which you have not been granted rights; there is nothing illegal about P2P software nor downloading or uploading music or movies). You have taken something, without permission or compensation, which is of value to its owner - the right to exclusive distribution of those works. That is what a copyright is - the right to make and distribute copies and to set the terms by which one is willing to do so. Your actions are theft, and your refusal to admit it is cowardly. If you believe that the concept of intellectual property is immoral, stand and be counted. Do not hide behind the old defense of "it's not theft because I wish to do it and it hurts nobody." Either cease your actions, admit your wrongdoing, or declare the system corrupt. Other options are for the morally weak.
And don't go to moral about it here, becouse evrybody is a copyright infridger (one way or another (you tape a show, sing a song,...))
This is a moral issue; issues of ethics and law always come back, ultimately, to what is right and what is wrong. Trying to avoid the issue of right and wrong in a policy battle is, again, cowardly. Your examples are especially unfortunate; taping a show to watch at a later time for your own pleasure or information is not copyright infringement. Singing a song to yourself or with friends for entertainment is not copyright infringement. Both of these fall, variably, into either fair use doctrine or nonexclusive grants of right to use by copyright holders. It is impossible to argue that stealing a DVD from the corner store is any different from borrowing and then copying a friend's. In both cases, a property owner has been denied compensation for something of value. Buying a DVD, then making a copy of it for yourself, is a different matter entirely. I hope you can learn to see the distinction, because if your arguments are the best we see advanced before the Supreme Court, our losses as a civilization will be horrendous.
There is a clear and solid line between fair use and theft, and your morally deficient arguments in defense of blatant theft are despicable. It's sad that so many people have difficulty distinguishing you - a cowardly thief lacking moral convictions - from me - a staunch advocate of fair use, research, and journalism rights. You'd like others to think your arguments carry some nobility when it is clear they do not.
The challenge for my kind in the coming years will be not to convince the legislatures and courts that the evil conglomerates are wrong but to convince them that you are and that we are not you. This is not a search for some touchy-feely middle ground between misguided leftists and imperialist corporations, it is a principled stand for justice among thieves of two brands seeking only to steal from one another.
I'd love to institute a technical means of preventing this use of network resources. There are two main problems, however - one with which the evil conglomerates can help and one with which they cannot: First, it's difficult to get the attention of management that there is a problem. Letters from lawyers are wonderful for curing management ignorance, and I'm always happy to have one to wave around. Second, it's difficult to prevent people from accessing many types of content, because it can be difficult or impossible to distinguish that which is necessary and germane to work from that which is not. For example, many companies try to prevent their employees from looking for other jobs on company time. A technical solution to this problem might involve programming the proxy server to reject common job-hunting sites. Unfortunately, the folks in HR have a legitimate need to obtain that content. So we either add special cases for HR, block content for everyone, or block it for nobody. When you factor in all the different types of content which might have those types of "redeeming value" to the company, and the variety in people who might need access to them, maintaining the policies becomes extremely costly.
There's little that brochures like the ones presented can do to solve this problem, and it's especially insinuous that the types of content referred to are often undistinguishable from that which employees might legitimately need for business purposes. Nevertheless, this sort of activity does raise management awareness and gives us the possibility of finding and implementing at least partial solutions. Frankly, though, in many cases the problem is best solved by policy rather than technology, and watching the first half-dozen Kazaa addicts get their walking papers will probably be far more effective than the fanciest access control list I could ever devise.
Because it's obvious you've never considered this problem from a real-world perspective - I'd guess from the tone and composition of your commentary that you are no older than 20 and have never worked as a technology professional at a for-profit company - I'm going to ignore your various insults and stick to the facts. The problem as I have presented it is real, and should you find yourself in some years practicing in this line of work, you will face it as well. If you find a solid technical solution, I hope you'll share it with the rest of us at a technical conference; I for one would be grateful. In the meantime I'll be happy enough for the management-level attention the megaliths are trying to raise.
People who work in Fortune 1000 are usually bored stiffless by institutional dreariness of the large company. Or they have become completely transformed by Dilbert syndrome into robots on the outside and boiling-with-rage just-destroy-it-see-if-I-care attitudes on the inside. Having a 1000-to-1 pay ratio between the top executives and the average Fortune 1000 worker ensures that there is a lot of this kind of feeling.
I've worked for an F1000 company, though not as a network admin. Of course the work is boring and uninspiring. That's true of work in a startup too. But this does not justify stealing resources from the company for personal benefit, however greedy the bastards in the big offices might be. I don't have the right to steal from them or shirk the responsibilities I agreed to undertake for them; if their system of operations is intolerable I have the right to quit, and if they have violated the law with respect to my employment I have the right to seek relief in court.
I will be the first to admit that a corporate republic, like any other form of government, may at some point cross the line into tyranny, at which point the responsibility of good men transfers from the Rule of Law to the overthrow of the oppressors. If you believe that your options are so limited that stealing from your employer or the record studios is justified by their behaviour, you are stating that the line has been crossed and you now stand in opposition to the Rule of Law. That is not a position of which you should be ashamed, if you truly believe in it and would willingly dedicate yourself to revolution. But you must stand and declare your belief as opposition to injustice and not hide behind a the cloak of anonymity provided by numbers or technology. Your manifesto must state that the corporate republic has strangled your opportunity to earn a just living from your own efforts and that all cooperative efforts to rectify the injustice have failed. And you must propose an alternative form of government and be willing to die for its establishment.
I do not believe this is the type of opposition to which you have referred. Simply loathing your miserable existence and feeling that it justifies your continuing theft of the work of others is unacceptable. This is the conduct not of great men but of pathetic mice. Obey the Rule of Law or gather the courage to declare it corrupt. You have only those two options and I will never respect the man who refuses to choose between them.
Since everything is illegal in America now it doesn't seem to make any difference anyway, just as much work continues to get done as before.
Respect the Rule of Law or declare it corrupt. Do not hide behind the fact that your work is supposedly unaffected. If you have too little work, request more. If your work is unrewarding, change jobs. If you do not believe you can find a job that makes use of your talents, seek working capital for your own firm. If you believe the capital is being hoarded unjustly to deny you opportunity, declare the system corrupt and work openly for its overthrow. Meekly accepting injustice and hiding your displeasure through subtle theft is disgraceful.
The system administrator goes to each of these people (possible hundreds) and says that unless they give him $100-$200 a month, their names will be turned over to management for termination.
Surely there are those who would do this. They represent the worst of our profession and would be among the worst in any group of people. For my part, I think nothing of forgoing a few thousand ill-gotten dollars and expelling these worthless malcontents from my company. The money they siphon from our profits devalues my share as much as theirs and nothing ever justifies theft, or blackmail.
The system administrator has an unfortunate accident. Someone deliberately drove their car over him in the company parking lot. Nobody saw anything. Word starts to circulate in and out of the company that there was a very profitable organized shakedown going on. Management refuses to tell the police anything to avoid scandal.
Unfortunate ends always come to people like these. Act honorably and you will be remembered so.
I'm a network admin, not a manager, and I'm happy to have something like this to give my boss to hand out. I'm neither for nor against the "free everything" mentality - I consider each person who produces something to have the right to distribute it under whatever terms he or she sees fit. Personally I distribute my work freely, and encourage others to do the same; not everyone chooses to do so. But regardless of your beliefs about the RIAA (evil) or the MPAA (evil) or whether you should be permitted to steal their property (you shouldn't), using your employer's property for personal purposes is always wrong. Viewing free porn is not illegal, but unless that is your job, doing so with your company's systems and networks almost certainly goes against both professional ethics and your employment agreement or contract. Therefore you should not do that. The same argument goes for downloading or viewing or listening to non-work-related material - if you're using company property to do it, you are in the wrong. Whether the material is legal or illegal, copyrighted or public domain, offensive, harmless, or valuable is irrelevant. Do it at home, not at work.
So I'm happy to have someone giving ammunition to help put these slackers out of business. The company doesn't need them, and they waste the resources for which I am responsible. Whether they are canned because the CEO worries over his company's legitimate potential liability to the evil conglomerates or because these people are being paid to work and are goofing off instead, means nothing to me. They are abusing company property for personal gain and should be fired. A warning letter like this is a valuable policy tool. That I personally do not care for the conglomerates' heavy-handed tactics does nothing to lessen the validity of their fundamental argument, and does nothing to diminish the value of a document issued by Legal telling slackers to knock off the network abuse.
Your use of Kazaa to steal from those who purchased the musicians is for any reasonable person equal to Microsoft including linux/sched.c in the next version of Windows or to that scruffy-looking man outside stealing my car. All three hypothetical offenders are taking from others without permission. A pity they don't hang cattle rustlers any longer.
People loved hotbot, and altavista too. And lots of people search on yahoo. If yahoo changes, it'll open a big crack.
Yes, but there's a major difference: Google is noticeably better than any other search engine offered to date. So even if other companies can duplicate its quality, people will still use Google. That is the nature of the first mover advantage. This advantage, as so many learned, does not protect you from quantum leaps in technology. Google will fall over and die as soon as someone comes up with something dramatically better - not "about as good" or even "a little better" - dramatically better. Yahoo! is irrelevant in the current market; it's a dinosaur waiting until the end of the extinction to die off, and in any case its search engine is not only not dramatically better than Google, it isn't even nearly as good. Everyone knows it. And almost nobody uses Yahoo! any more for exactly that reason. You want to beat Google, you have to be a lot better. Simple, eh? Now go to it, kids; no whining.
Slashdot Mirror
I disagree that we're much better at keeping records. The records exist, sure, and often they're stored on the most reliable media we have. You could have said the same thing 1000 years ago as well, and yet despite the abundance of records and the reliability of storage, not enough survived to give a detailed picture of many events. I suspect the same will be true 1000 years from now.
There are no such standards for computer software. The few standards organizations that do exist (in this case, W3C would apply, as well as IETF and perhaps a few others) do not have the power to enforce their standards. One cannot make any assumptions about the quality, feature set, reliability, performance, or safety of a piece of computer software. Even toasters, to which computers have been compared, are subject to testing in UL or similar lab environments to ensure at least that the product does meets minimal safety standards (though there is no guarantee that it will actually toast anything). Therefore the software market is more wide-open than any other, and caveat emptor is the order of the day.
Risk in software selection is minimized by reading impartial product reviews, performing evaluations in isolated test environments, closely following known issues and patches, and in the case of large customers, purchasing support and warranty contracts. For the individual user, a simple survey of the product landscape and frequent attention to security issues will suffice. Even a casual evaluation of web browsers by the most novice computer user will show that IE has, by a huge margin, the most security problems, both in number and severity. A look at a few reviews will show that it offers no significant feature advantages over other products in its space, and in fact lacks some features its competition includes. Worse still, the manufacturer has a history of ignoring, downplaying, and denying security problems in its products; thus, the actual number of known vulnerabilities is probably much greater than the number publicly circulated.
This type of information is easily gathered by a nontechnical individual in a matter of a few minutes. It seems only prudent that someone who is about to entrust a piece of software with his or her personal, financial, and professional information (and run it on a computer for which he or she is wholly responsible) would take the time to gather this information.
General Motors and Ford operate in a tightly regulated industry with a history of significant legal judgments and market punishment against manufacturers of inadequate products. Therefore all products, while differing in various aspects of performance, aesthetics, and quality, are guaranteed to meet certain minimum standards and have a certain level of manufacturer backing. Microsoft and its competitors operate in an unregulated, uncontrolled industry with little history of product liability litigation and a sales structure which heavily favours them in the event of such litigation. Compliance with any standards which may apply to their products is wholly voluntary, and warranties are nearly always explicitly disclaimed.
In the former environment, even ignorant buyers are unlikely to find themselves with a grossly inadequate vehicle. However, ignorant buyers of computer software are virtually certain to end up in the unenviable position of owning a license to use a defective product, with no ability to recover compensation of any kind, including for damages caused by the software.
Chevy and Ford have fanboys. It may well be that browsers do also. But nowhere in this discussion have I advocated any particular product as an alternative to IE; in fact I have explicitly avoided doing so. There are numerous options, and each buyer is encouraged to seek the one they believe is most likely to function properly. As someone familiar with the field, I do not believe that anyone can honestly form the opinion that IE is that option.
I'm sure they're justified in doing so, too. When I need something done to my car, I take it to a mechanic so that the work is done right. Likewise, when someone needs a web browser, I expect them to rely on software written by people who know what they're doing. I might ask a mechanic for reference customers, and consult the Better Business Bureau or local car club to make sure his work is of good quality. A sensible mechanic who needs a browser might check the Internet for references on a particular browser, also to make sure the work is of good quality.
See any parallels here? There's no excuse for not doing one's homework. There are plenty of articles available and accessible to the lay computer user that describe the some of the many problems with IE. There's no reason for an intelligent user not to read them and make an informed decision. Quite frankly, as an expert in the field of software, I do not believe any intelligent user could make an informed, good faith decision to use IE. Therefore I conclude that most users are not intelligent, are not acting in good faith (ie they don't care about the quality of the products they use), or are too lazy to spend five minutes gathering information. Since the latter two are just subcases of the first, it's safe to assume that 90% of computer users are not very intelligent. This is independent of any expert bias - their use of IE is not foolish because they're expected to understand the problems with IE on a technical level, it's foolish because there's no need to understand those details in order to see that IE is not a quality product and is in fact unsafe to use. I don't need to understand intimate details about strengths of materials, bending moments, and energy absorbtion to know that a car is unsafe if its gas tank is likely to explode in a collision. In the same way, I don't need to understand the details of exploiting a buffer overflow to know that a browser which is known to compromise a user's personal information is unsafe.
Flamebait? Call it whatever you like, but if people spent 1/10 as much effort making sure they had a safe, effective, reliable computing environment as they spend to ensure the same about other aspects of their lives - such as their cars - there wouldn't be an IE as we know it today.
Bad move, guys. I'm sickened.
I suggest you communicate this sentiment to your industry association lawyers, who have created most of these barriers with their stall tactics in the legal system. If the FTC had simply been allowed to go ahead with the original plans then you would no doubt have had a copy of the list in a timely fashion and there'd be no doubt or uncertainty about whom you may call and whom you may not. There'd be no uncertainty either about the owner of the complaints process, or how to file a complaint, from the other side.
If you really wanted to play by the rules, you'd call off your dogs, accept the fact that over 40 million of us don't want to buy whatever you're selling (and we don't even need to know what it is, to know that), and focus your attentions on the minority of people who have nothing better to do than talk to your underpaid, abused employees - and might actually buy something!
And, really, it could be a lot worse for you - it could have been an "OK to Call" list instead...think anyone would actually sign up? Keep up the maneuverings and you just might get to find out.
Right, so what's not to understand? How many companies really want everyone to know that they're working on boring unoriginal projects? Especially in a bubble economy, hype and speculation could mean the difference between a billion dollar IPO and a quiet death. Really, if you don't have anything worth investing in, isn't it better to make people think you might by being quiet and secretive, so you can swindle them and get out of town?
Nothing has changed; snake-oil salesmen never described the ingredients of their medicines, claiming only that they were "patented" or "secret" - no sense trying to sell sasparilla at 100 times the cost, is there?
The problem, of course, is that most who really want a consumer-style connection won't go for it because they can't see any benefit to the added cost; becoming a worm or virus transmission vector annoys others but does not usually degrade the infected user's consumption experience and therefore managed firewall services don't make sense. The solution to this is an addendum to terms of service that stipulate that systems which are reasonably believed to be infected with a worm or virus and are adversely affecting networks as a result will be dropped from the network and no refunds will be given. Service will be restored only after a professional (partnership or more managed service opportunities here...) has inspected the system and found it clean of any such threats. Since this will be both annoying - unexpected service termination - and expensive - hourly fees for system checks won't be low - users will find this type of low-cost insurance valuable and useful. Probably enough so to pay an extra 3 or 4 bucks a month, surely enough for the ISP to make a nice profit as well.
Not the case for Sobig. This type of worm actually does the most damage to noninfected hosts in the form of a continuous, massive DDOS attack. Those who are infected have some excess network usage but otherwise no real harm. Those who are not infected, and who take steps to keep systems up to date and not click random attachments, get inundated with huge volumes of worthless mail. The mail, of course, need not be delivered, but the consumption of network resources is nevertheless enormous.
I don't much care if the ignorant and the stupid suffer the wrath of blaster and its ilk, but the punishment of the innocent that worms like Sobig cause must stop. (unproven speculation follows...) If I were the head of the FBI I would sic every single computer crime expert at my disposal on the trail of the Sobig author(s) and the probable spammer syndicate that's funding them. Once they're all caught, I'd like to see the ISPs providing these spammers with bandwidth go down as well for racketeering and enterprise corruption - they benefited from the racket established by the spammers and worm-wranglers and the illegal activity they've engaged in. This isn't really novel legal thinking either, it's a simple matter of demonstrating the existence of a conspiracy and showing who benefits from it. Many a mobster has gone down on a shakier theory than this one.
I can't speak for ppc, but I can talk a bit about sparc and sparc64. sparc64 is a first-class port managed continuously by David Miller. It generally tracks progress of x86 fairly closely and can be expected to work at almost any time. sparc(32) however, is barely hanging onto critical mass and 2.6 will, sadly, probably be the last seriously supported kernel for that platform. Development will happen late in the cycle and it's unlikely to work at all before 2.6.2 or so. I'm working on it now, as are a handful of others, but we don't have a lot of time and debugging takes a long time on such slow systems...
I can't understand why anyone thinks software support is vital. I consider it a waste of money by managers who just want to cover their asses. In this economy, it's much more cost-effective to hire excellent staff on your own team than to pay premium prices for incompentent vendor support.
Why is it that when I read this, my first thought is "oh, so now Microsoft is going to be writing lots of viruses for other platforms...how nice"? There's more than one way to skin cats, and Microsoft always seems to pick the way that does harm to its competition. Benefits to its own customers are seldom a serious consideration.
Maybe I'm just overly cynical this morning...but tell me you didn't think the same thing...
...with high-end Sony CRTs. Other people may have a similar lifetime's worth of good experience with other specific technologies, but I've never been disappointed with a Sony Trinitron "professional" CRT. The GDM-520PS is highly recommended, and anything in that same family and range is certain to be top quality. Clear, sharp, fine, and bright. No problem with high scan rates. I won't even look at anything else, and I'll buy them site unseen so long as they're NIB. Just my $0.02.
Not only are the ads clearly marked and easy to ignore, they're often *gasp* RELEVANT! Sometimes I'm looking to buy something, or looking to see who's selling it, or just trying to find out what something is worth. In those circumstances, Google's ads can save a lot of time by directing me to the company that makes the product I just searched for. Sure, I ignore Amazon's featured links and the other obvious "trolls" but just as often the ads are actually what I'm looking for when I'm not searching for mailing list archives.
So while I don't think much of this joker's "I'll release this shit at 7pm Friday to fuck over the admins" attitude, I'd still rather information be released like that than not at all. Really, though, by the time CERT is even thinking about releasing anything, chances are it's been known in the rest of the world for ages. If you want a hot tip, I heard that CERT is about to release an advisory on sendmail and its supposed vulnerability to some poorly-written worm. Better patch now!
CERT is a joke. "Responsible disclosure" is a joke. This d00d is a joke and is most likely a lamer who has probably committed enough felonies to warrant three lifetimes of Bubba-supplied assrape, but nothing says that only good people can do the world a service.
The safe, easy, personally satisfying thing to do is exactly what's always been done - hire a large well-known company, maybe two or three, to install massively complicated, undocumented, hideously expensive proprietary software. Then hire them to maintain it. And enjoy all the free stuff they give you while you cover your ass and project the image of a real go-getter.
The mistake you're making is to think that anyone at the big guys who holds the purse strings actually cares about anyone but himself. The company is secondary at best and the prospect of helping the rest of the world by contributing back to Free Software projects means nothing. This attitude is a requirement for receiving the key to the executive washroom at a Fortune 1000 company.
- Microsoft Access
- Flat files
- XML files
- Static content
- Client-side scripting
- A large-scale database being drastically underutilized
to perform their various functions. In most cases, those functions would be faster, easier to implement, and simpler to manage using mySQL.For applications with these types of functions, which do not include complex queries, large transaction volumes, rigorous reliability including transaction log backups, recovery, replay, and replication, mySQL represents a major force. Unfortunately for mySQL and those who would have it take over the world, there's not much money available for those applications. Therefore, expect to see mySQL's installed base continue to increase while its revenue-based market share remains small.
For applications which do require features and levels of reliability and capability not offered by mySQL, postgres is the only serious freely-available contender. Even so, postgres is also somewhat less capable than Oracle or DB/2 and will be confined to the middle tier of applications - those which require better reliability and scalability than mySQL can provide but for which funding is scarce. Postgres probably does represent a serious threat to Microsoft's SQL Server, if only because Postgres is platform-independent and supports platforms which can scale beyond anything Windows can run on. Both are otherwise middle-tier products which are not and will never be taken seriously by the largest and most demanding database users.
Who are those users? Banks, government agencies, stock exchanges, payroll and records processing firms, insurance companies, large multi-site call centers, and other huge-scale enterprises. The top proprietary databases offer capabilities that do not yet exist in the Free Software world. For these users, who are less than 1% of all customers but which represent maybe 80% the revenue in the market, there is no substitute. These customers will stay with their existing solutions - Oracle, IBM, Sybase - until the systems running them give out. Then they'll call that company's professional services department and offer them a few million more to upgrade the system. That's the way it works. The system has to be attacked one customer at a time, an expensive and time-consuming process consisting of many lunches, legal bribes, and unrealistic promises.
I think the answer to whether mySQL is a significant threat to dominate the market economically is pretty obvious. Even if mySQL moves up to the middle tier to compete with Postgres and MSSQL and is installed in every application for which it is suitable, the product would still command less than 10% of the revenue in the market.
What a silly question.
Large electrolytic capacitors are often just insurance against bad power coming in from the supplies. In the case of an expansion card, that would be the mainboard. Since the mainboard has its own caps, and the power supply has several as well, only factors like load and distance could cause problems for the card. If the rest of your system is working properly, and there isn't anything near the device that would introduce noise, you should be fine. Breaking off caps is something that will have no effect 90% of the time, but then you'll move the device somewhere slightly different and suddenly it flakes out all the time.
Why would Microsoft be concerned with supporting something that doesn't exist? There are no operating systems other than theirs...
Duh, it's the weekend and I'm at home...on my own time. I don't post from work, for the same reason people shouldn't use Kazaa at work. Work is for work, it's not happy fun time.
Finally, a decent question. Well, that question has already been settled by the law in most countries, but whether that settlement is just or beneficial to society is another question. Western - and now worldwide - law is based on corporate ownership, which means that the rights associated with copyright can be owned in common. Specifically, they can sold by their original holders to other individuals or corporations, or even to the public, and the rights they confer remain valid even after the original holder's death.
Therefore, by the laws existing in this time and place, the original artist's death has no effect on the legality of stealing his copyrighted works - if he held the rights, his estate now does; if he sold them, the buyers still do. In either case, if your act would have been theft during the artist's life, it is no less so because of his death.
Now then, whether that represents justice to you depends on which you believe the atom of law ought to be - the human, or the corporation. At present, the corporation is the fundamental particle of law, with a living breathing human treated only as a special case of the corporation. In accordance with this principle, the death of an author or musician is meaningless; the rights to his or her works survive because it is the corporate concepts of ownership - ownership that does not depend on any specific person - which matter most. No matter what it is, *some* corporate body always owns everything.
This legal theory is convenient for governments and lawyers in that it generates huge volumes of paper and many disputes - if somebody owns everything, there can be no limit to disputes, and if the records of ownership are always on paper somewhere, there can be no limit to the pay of those assigned to trace them. It also gives ready cover to those persons seeking to shield themselves from the consequences of their own actions - the actions, one argues, were those of the corporation rather than the perpetrator himself. Nevertheless, this form of law also allows tremendous concentration of capital, since rights of ownership transcend the individual both in space and in time. This provides the fundamental ethical question: is the benefit to society brought about by allowing this concentration of captial over space and time greater or less than the smaller but much more numerous benefits which would accrue by turning over to the public domain an individual's lifetime accomplishments upon his or her death? This question merits careful consideration - in ages past, people lived much shorter lives and were usually more concerned about their decendents' fates than their own, and this thought process spurs creators and innovators by ensuring that the proceeds of their works will survive their deaths and provide for generations yet unborn. It allows a more careful and prudent pattern of investment and stabilises the economy by allowing many individuals to share risks together over a span of many years. But it also contributes to a terrifying concentration of power and to the imbalance between then individual born without corporate backing and the one born with it. And in the modern era, with people living 80 years and more and so often showing little concern for family, might it not be possible for a single individual to accomplish enough in one lifetime that the sum of these individual accomplishments returned to society upon death would be greater than the stabilizing advantages offered by the existence of the corporation?
This is the question you must answer for yourself, before you can properly decide whether the copyright extension law or the DMCA are good or ill, and whether you gain or lose by the continuing prohibition against copying Charlie Parker's works. This is not a trivial question and I'm feeling almost silly for bringing it up in this forum; it is a major philosophical problem the world will have to decide. Personally, I am an anticorporatist, believing in the value of the individual. That makes me a gambler, willing to accept risks both to myself by forgoing the protective shield of a corporation in my own business and to my civilization by forgoing a working system in favour of one untested in modern times. Your choice may be different, but it is not one to make lightly.
Let's get one thing straight - at this time in this place the Rule of Law states that copyright infringement is a crime. You may reject the Rule of Law, or you may argue that such infringement should not be considered criminal, but it is wrong to assert that it is not.
If evrybody would pay for evry little pice of IP they need/take/use/etc the worlds economy would colaps.
I'll pardon your dreadful spelling on the assumption that you're using a handheld computer with neither keyboard nor stylus. Nobody is suggesting that you must pay for anything. I am stating that when you take something belonging to another person which he or she deems to be of value you are - morally and legally - required to compensate that person at a mutually agreed upon rate. I shall take several examples immediately visible to me: I obtained this browser from the Mozilla project without paying a cent; the creators tell me I am free to use it so long as I follow certain requirements should I choose to distribute it to others. The monitor in front of me was purchased at auction - at a mutally agreeable cash price. The keyboard I type on was a gift from family; I paid nothing for it. And the music playing in the background is a gift from the local radio station; I am free to listen to it as much or as little as I please. None of this did I steal, yet I may use all of it. Much of it contains a great deal of copyrighted materials: the board layouts in the monitor, the code in Mozilla, the original works playing on the radio. My world has hardly collapsed because of it.
Yes I use P2P apps for downloading movies and music. And you know what I went to the cinema 6 times this year(thats once a week) and bought 4 CD with music - two of them were from an artis I firstly heard off on internet... So don't bull me about that I stell from rightful owners.
All except your last sentence is sensible. But the simple fact is that you do steal from the owners of the works you illegally download and enjoy (I am assuming that these are works to which you have not been granted rights; there is nothing illegal about P2P software nor downloading or uploading music or movies). You have taken something, without permission or compensation, which is of value to its owner - the right to exclusive distribution of those works. That is what a copyright is - the right to make and distribute copies and to set the terms by which one is willing to do so. Your actions are theft, and your refusal to admit it is cowardly. If you believe that the concept of intellectual property is immoral, stand and be counted. Do not hide behind the old defense of "it's not theft because I wish to do it and it hurts nobody." Either cease your actions, admit your wrongdoing, or declare the system corrupt. Other options are for the morally weak.
And don't go to moral about it here, becouse evrybody is a copyright infridger (one way or another (you tape a show, sing a song,...))
This is a moral issue; issues of ethics and law always come back, ultimately, to what is right and what is wrong. Trying to avoid the issue of right and wrong in a policy battle is, again, cowardly. Your examples are especially unfortunate; taping a show to watch at a later time for your own pleasure or information is not copyright infringement. Singing a song to yourself or with friends for entertainment is not copyright infringement. Both of these fall, variably, into either fair use doctrine or nonexclusive grants of right to use by copyright holders. It is impossible to argue that stealing a DVD from the corner store is any different from borrowing and then copying a friend's. In both cases, a property owner has been denied compensation for something of value. Buying a DVD, then making a copy of it for yourself, is a different matter entirely. I hope you can learn to see the distinction, because if your arguments are the best we see advanced before the Supreme Court, our losses as a civilization will be horrendous.
There is a clear and solid line between fair use and theft, and your morally deficient arguments in defense of blatant theft are despicable. It's sad that so many people have difficulty distinguishing you - a cowardly thief lacking moral convictions - from me - a staunch advocate of fair use, research, and journalism rights. You'd like others to think your arguments carry some nobility when it is clear they do not.
The challenge for my kind in the coming years will be not to convince the legislatures and courts that the evil conglomerates are wrong but to convince them that you are and that we are not you. This is not a search for some touchy-feely middle ground between misguided leftists and imperialist corporations, it is a principled stand for justice among thieves of two brands seeking only to steal from one another.
There's little that brochures like the ones presented can do to solve this problem, and it's especially insinuous that the types of content referred to are often undistinguishable from that which employees might legitimately need for business purposes. Nevertheless, this sort of activity does raise management awareness and gives us the possibility of finding and implementing at least partial solutions. Frankly, though, in many cases the problem is best solved by policy rather than technology, and watching the first half-dozen Kazaa addicts get their walking papers will probably be far more effective than the fanciest access control list I could ever devise.
Because it's obvious you've never considered this problem from a real-world perspective - I'd guess from the tone and composition of your commentary that you are no older than 20 and have never worked as a technology professional at a for-profit company - I'm going to ignore your various insults and stick to the facts. The problem as I have presented it is real, and should you find yourself in some years practicing in this line of work, you will face it as well. If you find a solid technical solution, I hope you'll share it with the rest of us at a technical conference; I for one would be grateful. In the meantime I'll be happy enough for the management-level attention the megaliths are trying to raise.
I've worked for an F1000 company, though not as a network admin. Of course the work is boring and uninspiring. That's true of work in a startup too. But this does not justify stealing resources from the company for personal benefit, however greedy the bastards in the big offices might be. I don't have the right to steal from them or shirk the responsibilities I agreed to undertake for them; if their system of operations is intolerable I have the right to quit, and if they have violated the law with respect to my employment I have the right to seek relief in court.
I will be the first to admit that a corporate republic, like any other form of government, may at some point cross the line into tyranny, at which point the responsibility of good men transfers from the Rule of Law to the overthrow of the oppressors. If you believe that your options are so limited that stealing from your employer or the record studios is justified by their behaviour, you are stating that the line has been crossed and you now stand in opposition to the Rule of Law. That is not a position of which you should be ashamed, if you truly believe in it and would willingly dedicate yourself to revolution. But you must stand and declare your belief as opposition to injustice and not hide behind a the cloak of anonymity provided by numbers or technology. Your manifesto must state that the corporate republic has strangled your opportunity to earn a just living from your own efforts and that all cooperative efforts to rectify the injustice have failed. And you must propose an alternative form of government and be willing to die for its establishment.
I do not believe this is the type of opposition to which you have referred. Simply loathing your miserable existence and feeling that it justifies your continuing theft of the work of others is unacceptable. This is the conduct not of great men but of pathetic mice. Obey the Rule of Law or gather the courage to declare it corrupt. You have only those two options and I will never respect the man who refuses to choose between them.
Since everything is illegal in America now it doesn't seem to make any difference anyway, just as much work continues to get done as before.
Respect the Rule of Law or declare it corrupt. Do not hide behind the fact that your work is supposedly unaffected. If you have too little work, request more. If your work is unrewarding, change jobs. If you do not believe you can find a job that makes use of your talents, seek working capital for your own firm. If you believe the capital is being hoarded unjustly to deny you opportunity, declare the system corrupt and work openly for its overthrow. Meekly accepting injustice and hiding your displeasure through subtle theft is disgraceful.
The system administrator goes to each of these people (possible hundreds) and says that unless they give him $100-$200 a month, their names will be turned over to management for termination.
Surely there are those who would do this. They represent the worst of our profession and would be among the worst in any group of people. For my part, I think nothing of forgoing a few thousand ill-gotten dollars and expelling these worthless malcontents from my company. The money they siphon from our profits devalues my share as much as theirs and nothing ever justifies theft, or blackmail.
The system administrator has an unfortunate accident. Someone deliberately drove their car over him in the company parking lot. Nobody saw anything. Word starts to circulate in and out of the company that there was a very profitable organized shakedown going on. Management refuses to tell the police anything to avoid scandal.
Unfortunate ends always come to people like these. Act honorably and you will be remembered so.
So I'm happy to have someone giving ammunition to help put these slackers out of business. The company doesn't need them, and they waste the resources for which I am responsible. Whether they are canned because the CEO worries over his company's legitimate potential liability to the evil conglomerates or because these people are being paid to work and are goofing off instead, means nothing to me. They are abusing company property for personal gain and should be fired. A warning letter like this is a valuable policy tool. That I personally do not care for the conglomerates' heavy-handed tactics does nothing to lessen the validity of their fundamental argument, and does nothing to diminish the value of a document issued by Legal telling slackers to knock off the network abuse.
Your use of Kazaa to steal from those who purchased the musicians is for any reasonable person equal to Microsoft including linux/sched.c in the next version of Windows or to that scruffy-looking man outside stealing my car. All three hypothetical offenders are taking from others without permission. A pity they don't hang cattle rustlers any longer.
Yes, but there's a major difference: Google is noticeably better than any other search engine offered to date. So even if other companies can duplicate its quality, people will still use Google. That is the nature of the first mover advantage. This advantage, as so many learned, does not protect you from quantum leaps in technology. Google will fall over and die as soon as someone comes up with something dramatically better - not "about as good" or even "a little better" - dramatically better. Yahoo! is irrelevant in the current market; it's a dinosaur waiting until the end of the extinction to die off, and in any case its search engine is not only not dramatically better than Google, it isn't even nearly as good. Everyone knows it. And almost nobody uses Yahoo! any more for exactly that reason. You want to beat Google, you have to be a lot better. Simple, eh? Now go to it, kids; no whining.