they were elected to serve your interest, not the special interests!
Well, actually they are elected to do what is right. But of course, even on that score they shouldn't support this. Heck, they shouldn't support this thing merely on the basis that the DMCA is non-sensical. It is pure non-sense to claim that anything that can be used for an illegal purpose (even if it wasn't designed for that purpose) is illegal. Follow that kind of reasoning and everything is illegal!
Yes, but they can't really touch that money. People are always saying the same thing about Bill Gates, "Oh, he's just so rich--he's valued at $90 Billion! [or whatever it happens to be this week]". In reality, of course, MS would go downhill pretty quickly if he tried to take all that out.
Clearly, you see the University as a business. Fine. But what about the rights of the University and the citizens that comprise it? What about British sovereignty? This is a lot like 1776 in reverse (except that the MPAA doesn't even have a cursory claim to rule over British citizens and organizations).
If I ran a University and some lawyer from another country came along telling me they were going to sue me for something some student did, I would tell them to buzz off. If that didn't work, I'd complain to the government that we were under attack by a foreign power and we needed to go to war with them. I'm only half kidding.
Far too few people recognize the importance of national and municipal sovereignty. I do, so if you folks need support in "dissolving the bands" I'll be glad to help on this end when the time comes.
It's their network, they say what goes on and what comes off, end of story. If I come back from work one day to find someone has stuck a poster on my front door championing human rights in Burma, I'll take it off thanks very much, because whilst I agree with the cause it's my front door and I say what goes on it.
Actually, it's more like you come home from work one day and find that your landlord has removed *your* poster championing human rights in Burma because lawyers for the government of Burma don't like the message it portrays.
Furthermore, regardless of the free speech involved I don't want my windows smashed by some SLORC party apparatchik.Silly. This only happens if you're *in* Burma. In this case, the MPAA is the Motion Picture Association of *AMERICA* and the University is in the *UK*. Despite all the globalist garbage being spewed today, the UK is still a *SOVEREIGN* nation.
Furthermore, it is _NOT_ the job of Universities to defend some random student's pet cause.
That isn't what happened. Rather, the University caved into being mugged by a bunch of common criminals (AKA lawyers) hailing from an organization engaged in illegal activities in their own country (violating our Constitution) who have no proper jurisdiction over the place in question.
So is VA Linux, Penguin Computing, and a lot of other companies. There is a big difference between commercial (trying to make a profit and charging for goods and services) and proprietary (closing the doors to knowledge and curiosity and cutting oneself off from consumers). If MS were not proprietary I would gladly pay for their stuff. (Well, there's also the issues of their lousy code and questionable business practices but....)
Our system of jurisprudence is perfectly alright; we just don't go by it. The Constitution and Bill of Rights, beautifully constructed, are simply ignored in practice. Things won't change unless enough people here start a) actually reading the documents; and b) caring enough about what they say to fight for them.
I understand what you're saying, and agree that the questions don't really get to the heart of the issue. I would have liked the letter to have stated that:
The posting of the entire document is clearly a violation of copyright and must be removed. The responsible parties are the original posters, not Slashdot or Andover.net. Microsoft will be responsible for contacting them individually and providing proof of their acceptance before removing them. The post(s) by Anonymous Coward will be removed without any approval.
Excerpts from the document for the purpose of review and commentary are permissible under the Fair Use doctrine and must stay.
Links to the document elsewhere are not illegal and must stay.
Comments on bypassing the license are not illegal and must stay.
Speaking for myself WRT the DMCA, I believe it to be unreasonable, immoral, and unconstitutional. The Constitution, being the highest law in the land, takes precedence over the DMCA. To take this further, under inspiration of Thomas Jefferson, I find it to be my civic duty to disobey the DMCA in the most egregious and complete way possible. It is the duty of citizens to disobey unjust and unreasonable laws until they are removed. At least, it is if we respect our heritage (and I do).
I used to live for "The Glorious Meept!!"'s posts but I haven't seen him since the user names went into action--I thought he had disappeared completely. Thanks for pointing this post out!
A PC (including Macs, workstations of various stripes, etc.) is a general purpose computing device; what would be the point in specializing one to run games? The gaming console is designed to that end and does it pretty well (except for the lousy resolution).
I wish to high heaven the DOJ would take a reasonable course of action, like the one proposed in the above post. Breaking them up is just going to make it easier for MS to blame the DOJ, the states, Slashdot, Charlie the Bartender, and whoever else has accused them of being a monopoly. And, frankly, I don't know how many more insipient "they're trying to keep us from innovating!" commercials I can stand; I prefer my meals to stay on the inside.
Unfortunately, the rest of the pathetic, stupid world still clings to the silly notion that there is more in life than overclocked Celerons and k-rad Perl scripts.
You can't mean this! It's...the...end of...life as...we know it!
Like everyone else, IANAL. Just keep it in mind...
"I live under the assumption that my employer cannot tap my telephone or open mail delivered by the US postal service and that I have the right to free speech under the constitution.
Correct. However, I would suppose that this only applies outside of your workplace. No one can (legally) open mail that goes to your house or tap your home phone (although, apparently the FBI can get a court order and do this--this is wrong IMO). Since your employer owns the telephone and computer in your office and you make a contract to work for them, they can monitor you. I think you could look at it as if they were allowing you to use their equipment and have an agreement on what you can and cannot use it for.
Why is my E-mail and my very keystrokes on the computer any different? Please remember my work does not involve national security.
I don't think it really matters. I think that any employer (private or public) can make agreements on what their employees can and cannot do at work.
Also, since this policy was not in effect when I started my employment what are my rights if I refuse to agree with the conditions and log off?"
Now, this is an excellent question that I don't have an answer to at all. I assume that those "you agree so long as you have read this" things are actually binding; otherwise, all those software licenses would be void.
Does Bob's article state anything we didn't already know??
We're not the target audience--his story was on ZDNet.
Most of his points could have been lifted directly from this forum for God's sake
Most ZDNet readers don't come here.
(I wonder if Bob Young reads slashdot).
Probably.
This might provide a reasonable counter argument for the original article, but it would only be worthwhile reading for non-geeks who might not know this already.
You mean like the readership of ZDNet?
Hardly worth a posting on Slashdot.
It was on ZDNet. The Slashdot article is merely meant to keep us up to date on the current status of the ZD invective; no one claimed that this rebuttal would contain innovative and fresh information. In fact, I don't generally follow off-site links from Slashdot--I just read the comments.
I don't know what advertising on Zd costs but I'm sure they'll be making a killing off this. Don't do them the favour.
Does it really matter? I mean, they are in business to make money.
Someone (who is conversant with the technology) must: 1) Read the document; 2) Write a summary of the extensions in their own words; 3) Get the Kerberos development team to extend Kerberos based on the information in your summary.
So long as the Kerberos team didn't read the original document or see any original code, they haven't violated anything and their modifications can be placed under GPL, right? IANAL, so if anyone reading this knows otherwise...smack me down with a cluestick.
I've often had the same thoughts. One of the many reasons I use Linux is to escape the godawful GUIs from Apple and MS. Gnome is alright, I suppose, but it just strikes me as unpleasant. KDE is worse. (Warning: shameless plug follows...) GNUstep and Objective-C are what you want.
Instead of breaking M$ up into little "baby-Microsofts" why don't they just require full disclosure of any and all APIs, file formats, and streaming media protocols for the next 10 years or so? I don't really care if they continue to produce their masterpieces of "innovation" (ahem) so long as they can't pull any of the proprietary tactics proposed in the Halloween Document.
I know that the Navy has some kind of system where a special key-combination will cause the hard drives to melt. It does seem kind of odd that laptops with sensitive information wouldn't have something similar. Or perhaps the information on these laptops isn't really all that important...
But think about who makes the decisions at ABIT. To almost everyone in our society, the word "free" means nothing but gratis; and the people at ABIT who made the decisions are almost certainly business or marketing types who are even less likely to understand another meaning of the word "free." This is the result of the "Call now and receive a FREE GIFT!!!!!!" kind of marketing. The word free no longer has any association with civil liberty. I sometimes think even "liberal software" would be less problematic than "free software."
I think they meant that ABIT ships some sort of hardware driver that is a modification of the kernel source but only provides that part as a binary. So the "stock" kernel source is there, but ABIT's modifications are binary-only.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, actually they are elected to do what is right. But of course, even on that score they shouldn't support this. Heck, they shouldn't support this thing merely on the basis that the DMCA is non-sensical. It is pure non-sense to claim that anything that can be used for an illegal purpose (even if it wasn't designed for that purpose) is illegal. Follow that kind of reasoning and everything is illegal!
70k ain't bad...
If I ran a University and some lawyer from another country came along telling me they were going to sue me for something some student did, I would tell them to buzz off. If that didn't work, I'd complain to the government that we were under attack by a foreign power and we needed to go to war with them. I'm only half kidding.
Far too few people recognize the importance of national and municipal sovereignty. I do, so if you folks need support in "dissolving the bands" I'll be glad to help on this end when the time comes.
Actually, it's more like you come home from work one day and find that your landlord has removed *your* poster championing human rights in Burma because lawyers for the government of Burma don't like the message it portrays.
Furthermore, regardless of the free speech involved I don't want my windows smashed by some SLORC party apparatchik.Silly. This only happens if you're *in* Burma. In this case, the MPAA is the Motion Picture Association of *AMERICA* and the University is in the *UK*. Despite all the globalist garbage being spewed today, the UK is still a *SOVEREIGN* nation.
Furthermore, it is _NOT_ the job of Universities to defend some random student's pet cause.
That isn't what happened. Rather, the University caved into being mugged by a bunch of common criminals (AKA lawyers) hailing from an organization engaged in illegal activities in their own country (violating our Constitution) who have no proper jurisdiction over the place in question.
The Rich-Text Format.
So is VA Linux, Penguin Computing, and a lot of other companies. There is a big difference between commercial (trying to make a profit and charging for goods and services) and proprietary (closing the doors to knowledge and curiosity and cutting oneself off from consumers). If MS were not proprietary I would gladly pay for their stuff. (Well, there's also the issues of their lousy code and questionable business practices but....)
Our system of jurisprudence is perfectly alright; we just don't go by it. The Constitution and Bill of Rights, beautifully constructed, are simply ignored in practice. Things won't change unless enough people here start a) actually reading the documents; and b) caring enough about what they say to fight for them.
The posting of the entire document is clearly a violation of copyright and must be removed. The responsible parties are the original posters, not Slashdot or Andover.net. Microsoft will be responsible for contacting them individually and providing proof of their acceptance before removing them. The post(s) by Anonymous Coward will be removed without any approval.
Excerpts from the document for the purpose of review and commentary are permissible under the Fair Use doctrine and must stay.
Links to the document elsewhere are not illegal and must stay.
Comments on bypassing the license are not illegal and must stay.
Speaking for myself WRT the DMCA, I believe it to be unreasonable, immoral, and unconstitutional. The Constitution, being the highest law in the land, takes precedence over the DMCA. To take this further, under inspiration of Thomas Jefferson, I find it to be my civic duty to disobey the DMCA in the most egregious and complete way possible. It is the duty of citizens to disobey unjust and unreasonable laws until they are removed. At least, it is if we respect our heritage (and I do).
I used to live for "The Glorious Meept!!"'s posts but I haven't seen him since the user names went into action--I thought he had disappeared completely. Thanks for pointing this post out!
A PC (including Macs, workstations of various stripes, etc.) is a general purpose computing device; what would be the point in specializing one to run games? The gaming console is designed to that end and does it pretty well (except for the lousy resolution).
I wish to high heaven the DOJ would take a reasonable course of action, like the one proposed in the above post. Breaking them up is just going to make it easier for MS to blame the DOJ, the states, Slashdot, Charlie the Bartender, and whoever else has accused them of being a monopoly. And, frankly, I don't know how many more insipient "they're trying to keep us from innovating!" commercials I can stand; I prefer my meals to stay on the inside.
With the DMCA, there is no longer any such thing as "fair use." It has been obliterated.
You can't mean this! It's...the...end of...life as...we know it!
Help me!
(Falls over dead)
"I live under the assumption that my employer cannot tap my telephone or open mail delivered by the US postal service and that I have the right to free speech under the constitution.
Correct. However, I would suppose that this only applies outside of your workplace. No one can (legally) open mail that goes to your house or tap your home phone (although, apparently the FBI can get a court order and do this--this is wrong IMO). Since your employer owns the telephone and computer in your office and you make a contract to work for them, they can monitor you. I think you could look at it as if they were allowing you to use their equipment and have an agreement on what you can and cannot use it for.
Why is my E-mail and my very keystrokes on the computer any different? Please remember my work does not involve national security.
I don't think it really matters. I think that any employer (private or public) can make agreements on what their employees can and cannot do at work.
Also, since this policy was not in effect when I started my employment what are my rights if I refuse to agree with the conditions and log off?"
Now, this is an excellent question that I don't have an answer to at all. I assume that those "you agree so long as you have read this" things are actually binding; otherwise, all those software licenses would be void.
We're not the target audience--his story was on ZDNet.
Most of his points could have been lifted directly from this forum for God's sake
Most ZDNet readers don't come here.
(I wonder if Bob Young reads slashdot).
Probably.
This might provide a reasonable counter argument for the original article, but it would only be worthwhile reading for non-geeks who might not know this already.
You mean like the readership of ZDNet?
Hardly worth a posting on Slashdot.
It was on ZDNet. The Slashdot article is merely meant to keep us up to date on the current status of the ZD invective; no one claimed that this rebuttal would contain innovative and fresh information. In fact, I don't generally follow off-site links from Slashdot--I just read the comments.
I don't know what advertising on Zd costs but I'm sure they'll be making a killing off this. Don't do them the favour.
Does it really matter? I mean, they are in business to make money.
I'm using it right now and I think it looks absolutely disgusting; but that's just personal opinion... ;)
1) Read the document;
2) Write a summary of the extensions in their own words;
3) Get the Kerberos development team to extend Kerberos based on the information in your summary.
So long as the Kerberos team didn't read the original document or see any original code, they haven't violated anything and their modifications can be placed under GPL, right? IANAL, so if anyone reading this knows otherwise...smack me down with a cluestick.
I've often had the same thoughts. One of the many reasons I use Linux is to escape the godawful GUIs from Apple and MS. Gnome is alright, I suppose, but it just strikes me as unpleasant. KDE is worse. (Warning: shameless plug follows...) GNUstep and Objective-C are what you want.
Instead of breaking M$ up into little "baby-Microsofts" why don't they just require full disclosure of any and all APIs, file formats, and streaming media protocols for the next 10 years or so? I don't really care if they continue to produce their masterpieces of "innovation" (ahem) so long as they can't pull any of the proprietary tactics proposed in the Halloween Document.
I know that the Navy has some kind of system where a special key-combination will cause the hard drives to melt. It does seem kind of odd that laptops with sensitive information wouldn't have something similar. Or perhaps the information on these laptops isn't really all that important...
But think about who makes the decisions at ABIT. To almost everyone in our society, the word "free" means nothing but gratis; and the people at ABIT who made the decisions are almost certainly business or marketing types who are even less likely to understand another meaning of the word "free." This is the result of the "Call now and receive a FREE GIFT!!!!!!" kind of marketing. The word free no longer has any association with civil liberty. I sometimes think even "liberal software" would be less problematic than "free software."
I think they meant that ABIT ships some sort of hardware driver that is a modification of the kernel source but only provides that part as a binary. So the "stock" kernel source is there, but ABIT's modifications are binary-only.
I could get into some serious trouble with one of these things! ;-)
That's an excellent idea. I'll be getting some free time soon...[maniacal laughter]
THE SPEED LIMIT IS 45 NOT 110 YOU JACKASS SO GET OFF MY BUTT ALREADY BEFORE I SLAM ON MY BRAKES AND MAKE YOU REGRET EVER SEEING ME!!!
Hey, that felt good!