The file command doesn't look at extensions, therefore they don't exist? I can write a Windows program that doesn't look at file extensions, too. Poof, they no longer exist, either. Whee!
First of all, I'm not equating copyright violation with stealing. Stealing was part of an analagous example.
Secondly, I maintain that violation of a copyright act, whether the act has the words "digital millenium" on the front of it or not, is a copyright violation. It's a tautology.
The Digital Millenium Copyright Act is a law that, in the United States, defines what copyright rights the creator of a digital work has.
To claim that a violation of the DMCA isn't a violation of copyright is completely nonsensical, regardless of how you feel about the public policy or moral issues behind the Act or enforcement of it.
It's like saying "he didn't steal anything, that store's just using the Retail Theft Act to go after him" or "he's not charged with killing someone, he's charged with criminal homicide".
Of course, you'll have a hard time using the software without making another copy of that copyrighted work in your computer's memory (and, most likely, on your hard disk as well.)
You can blather on about "fair use" all you want, but you're unlikely to be using it in a manner that has anything to do with parody or scholarly review, I imagine. Good thing the copyright owner is willing to grant you a license that allows you to make additional copies under certain terms.
If you actually read the sections of the US Code that pertain to copyright, you'll find that distribution is not a required element to copyright violation in the US. Your jurisdiction may vary.
Technically, you may be in violation of the law if you copy a single sentence from a book onto a piece of paper as long as your reasons for doing so don't fall under "fair use" (which is, of course, fairly unlikely, but still technically possible).
Without a license from the owner of the copyright, it's technically illegal to copy software from the disk it's distributed on to your hard drive, except where covered by fair use.
I understand that you're not a lawyer, but could you refrain from making pronouncements about what the law says and the "exactly one" legal limit imposed by it if you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about? Thanks.
One would hope that you're not going to be forced to reveal your password unless the Government establishes probable cause that you've committed a crime.
It's kind of silly to think that an average user with no incriminating evidence encrypted is going to be randomly ordered to turn over a password, and thrown in jail for legitimately forgetting it. It's a disturbing thought that the law, as written, could lead to that, but it's not a compelling argument against using encryption if you're not a criminal.
Using this sort of hypothetical scenario to argue against routine use of encryption is a bit like arguing against keeping sharp knives in your kitchen, because you're afraid the police might claim you stabbed someone with one of them and cleverly removed all forensic evidence of the stabbing from the knife.
I'm pretty sure Darwin didn't have anything to say about intelligence [...] being a factor in natural selection.
I'm pretty sure you won't find a single biologist anywhere (except maybe those who believe in Intelligent Design and still somehow managed to get biology degrees) who doesn't think that intelligence was by far the most important selective factor in the evolution of humans.
There's really no other possible explanation for the comparative size of the human brain, which uses an enormous amount of energy. If intelligence wasn't important to our survival as a species, we wouldn't have it.
Not that I'd equate intelligence with either popularity or with not committing suicide.
The truth is Britney is a big star on radio and TV but she won't be on the internet
Right, because she was only the 8th most popular search term on google for last year. She'll never be able to compete online with all the musicians ahead of her on that list. Well, all 2 of them, who happen to be brother and sister.
Face it, people like crappy pop music, and your favorite indy artist isn't suddenly going to be more popular than crappy pop stars just because they're on the internet now.
They'll just make you type in your SSN, credit card number, birthdate, and mother's maiden name in every time you play.
Sure it will scare away privacy-conscious potential customers (who probably won't buy the software anyway, when they heard about all the spyware that's included), but it will sure make the people who do buy it think twice about selling their account to someone else.
Everyone wins. Or, at least, everyone loses but the developers get to keep people from getting their hands on their precious IP.
Re:I disagree with his statement...
on
Mitnick on OSS
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· Score: 1
In large projects, yes. The vast majority of open source projects are not very large, and probably don't get much code review at all.
I don't know if there's an easy way to get statistics like these, but I'd imagine the average number of developers on all of sourceforge's projects is probably less than 3. With the number on there with no code submitted yet and in status of "Planning" or "Pre-Alpha", it might be under 2.
Sure the Linux kernel or apache is going to benefit from many eyes, but some random project that isn't used by several million people probably isn't.
Re:I disagree with his statement...
on
Mitnick on OSS
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· Score: 1
Have you ever worked on an open source project?
Did you read every line of code to look for potential security flaws, or did you just write code of your own?
Do you think every single other coder involed in the project read every line of code you wrote, and made sure there was no way it could introduce security holes?
- Linux zealots abandon their "everything about Solaris sucks and I'll never use it" dogma, or
- Mac zealots abandon their "Intel processors suck and I'll never use one" dogma?
The Mac people are taking an early lead, but anything can happen.
it's the voters who do not understand that what their government is doing exactly what they authorised them to do
Actually, my government is doing plenty of stuff that the people not only never authorized, but expressly forbid, both when the Constitution was drafted and when the legislature made laws specifically forbidding certain behavior that was already banned in a general sense.
You can argue that the people implicitly authorize such behavior by electing a Congress that won't impeach the President for doing such things, but since the last Congressional election took place before these activities were revealed to the people, that wouldn't be a very compelling argument.
And I don't think many people will buy the argument that electing someone as President implictly grants him the authority to break the law, either.
Still, I'll take this system over direct democracy any day. I don't want to even think about how much worse things would be if the government did whatever 50.0001% of the people could be convinced was a good idea, with no limitations placed on what was permissible.
I'm not entirely sure how law works either, but if you think he's going to use that or anything else as his defense, when he's already been covicted and sentenced, you understand the law a lot worse than most people.
See, you're supposed to defend yourself before you're sent to prison.
What ever happened to parents and not the government being responsible for their kids?
Well, if only people would have elected the guy who trusts people and not big government, we wouldn't have all this big government spying on our phone calls and web searches.
Oh wait.
Anyway, when you elect a President named Bush and a Vice President named Dick, what sort of searches are you expecting to see?
In other news, the Bush administration wants to look through Google's records to see how often search results included critique of the war in Iraq.
"We need to see how much of the political commentary online is speech protected by the First Amendment, and how much is dangerous speech that can't be allowed in these extraordinary times," a Whitehouse spokesman said.
I really think we need an amendment to the Constitution that says "the words 'no law' shall be construed by the courts to mean 'no law whatsoever, without exceptions, and this means you, moron.'"
This only works if Google can detect whether your browser supports the ping attribute before it sends the ads. I'm not sure if this is possible. I'm assuming FireFox's User-Agent string doesn't give an indiction of whether the user has disabled pings, and assuming that it's enabled is bad for Google's business if they're wrong and get no data whatsoever about a click on one of the ads, because they've linked directly to the advertiser's website and just hoped they'd get a ping back.
Unless the javascript that fetches the ads in the first place detects whether the browser is going to ping correctly (which in itself would probably be more trouble than it's worth even if it works), I can't really see any way Google could cut out the redirects and still be sure they're logging all the clicks they get.
The only people who would really benefit from this scheme are the advertisers, at the expense of the sites hosting the ads.
If you think the term "minority monopolist" means anything at all, you're so incredibly stupid that you can't really expect anyone to take anything else you say seriously.
By the way, you're paying your soul to the collective Linux monopoly.
If the artist isn't a client of the royalty collection agency, holds the public performace rights to the music, and allows the DJ to publicly perform the music, it's not illegal.
For that matter, if a major-label artist who holds the public performance rights but does license through the rights agency gives you permission to perform without paying royalties, that's legal, too. But you probably want to have it in writing in case the rights agency tries to come after you.
Slashdot Mirror
To be fair to Microsoft, if you count spam zombies as "servers", they've got a huge lead in usage, too.
The file command doesn't look at extensions, therefore they don't exist? I can write a Windows program that doesn't look at file extensions, too. Poof, they no longer exist, either. Whee!
UNIX had filename extensions before DOS existed. I hardly think it's fair to blame Windows.
Secondly, I maintain that violation of a copyright act, whether the act has the words "digital millenium" on the front of it or not, is a copyright violation. It's a tautology.
Making this whole story about how Gervais is the first to do so completely wrong, but we can hardly expect accuracy from something on Slashdot.
To claim that a violation of the DMCA isn't a violation of copyright is completely nonsensical, regardless of how you feel about the public policy or moral issues behind the Act or enforcement of it.
It's like saying "he didn't steal anything, that store's just using the Retail Theft Act to go after him" or "he's not charged with killing someone, he's charged with criminal homicide".
You can blather on about "fair use" all you want, but you're unlikely to be using it in a manner that has anything to do with parody or scholarly review, I imagine. Good thing the copyright owner is willing to grant you a license that allows you to make additional copies under certain terms.
If the government will stop proving on a regular basis that it deserves to be thought of in that way, we'll stop.
Technically, you may be in violation of the law if you copy a single sentence from a book onto a piece of paper as long as your reasons for doing so don't fall under "fair use" (which is, of course, fairly unlikely, but still technically possible).
Without a license from the owner of the copyright, it's technically illegal to copy software from the disk it's distributed on to your hard drive, except where covered by fair use.
I understand that you're not a lawyer, but could you refrain from making pronouncements about what the law says and the "exactly one" legal limit imposed by it if you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about? Thanks.
It's kind of silly to think that an average user with no incriminating evidence encrypted is going to be randomly ordered to turn over a password, and thrown in jail for legitimately forgetting it. It's a disturbing thought that the law, as written, could lead to that, but it's not a compelling argument against using encryption if you're not a criminal.
Using this sort of hypothetical scenario to argue against routine use of encryption is a bit like arguing against keeping sharp knives in your kitchen, because you're afraid the police might claim you stabbed someone with one of them and cleverly removed all forensic evidence of the stabbing from the knife.
I'm pretty sure you won't find a single biologist anywhere (except maybe those who believe in Intelligent Design and still somehow managed to get biology degrees) who doesn't think that intelligence was by far the most important selective factor in the evolution of humans.
There's really no other possible explanation for the comparative size of the human brain, which uses an enormous amount of energy. If intelligence wasn't important to our survival as a species, we wouldn't have it.
Not that I'd equate intelligence with either popularity or with not committing suicide.
Right, because she was only the 8th most popular search term on google for last year. She'll never be able to compete online with all the musicians ahead of her on that list. Well, all 2 of them, who happen to be brother and sister.
Face it, people like crappy pop music, and your favorite indy artist isn't suddenly going to be more popular than crappy pop stars just because they're on the internet now.
I'm sure we'll all be in a hurry to listen to your legal "insight".
Sure it will scare away privacy-conscious potential customers (who probably won't buy the software anyway, when they heard about all the spyware that's included), but it will sure make the people who do buy it think twice about selling their account to someone else.
Everyone wins. Or, at least, everyone loses but the developers get to keep people from getting their hands on their precious IP.
I don't know if there's an easy way to get statistics like these, but I'd imagine the average number of developers on all of sourceforge's projects is probably less than 3. With the number on there with no code submitted yet and in status of "Planning" or "Pre-Alpha", it might be under 2.
Sure the Linux kernel or apache is going to benefit from many eyes, but some random project that isn't used by several million people probably isn't.
Did you read every line of code to look for potential security flaws, or did you just write code of your own?
Do you think every single other coder involed in the project read every line of code you wrote, and made sure there was no way it could introduce security holes?
- Linux zealots abandon their "everything about Solaris sucks and I'll never use it" dogma, or
- Mac zealots abandon their "Intel processors suck and I'll never use one" dogma?
The Mac people are taking an early lead, but anything can happen.
Actually, my government is doing plenty of stuff that the people not only never authorized, but expressly forbid, both when the Constitution was drafted and when the legislature made laws specifically forbidding certain behavior that was already banned in a general sense.
You can argue that the people implicitly authorize such behavior by electing a Congress that won't impeach the President for doing such things, but since the last Congressional election took place before these activities were revealed to the people, that wouldn't be a very compelling argument.
And I don't think many people will buy the argument that electing someone as President implictly grants him the authority to break the law, either.
Still, I'll take this system over direct democracy any day. I don't want to even think about how much worse things would be if the government did whatever 50.0001% of the people could be convinced was a good idea, with no limitations placed on what was permissible.
See, you're supposed to defend yourself before you're sent to prison.
Sounds practical.
Well, if only people would have elected the guy who trusts people and not big government, we wouldn't have all this big government spying on our phone calls and web searches.
Oh wait.
Anyway, when you elect a President named Bush and a Vice President named Dick, what sort of searches are you expecting to see?
"We need to see how much of the political commentary online is speech protected by the First Amendment, and how much is dangerous speech that can't be allowed in these extraordinary times," a Whitehouse spokesman said.
I really think we need an amendment to the Constitution that says "the words 'no law' shall be construed by the courts to mean 'no law whatsoever, without exceptions, and this means you, moron.'"
Unless the javascript that fetches the ads in the first place detects whether the browser is going to ping correctly (which in itself would probably be more trouble than it's worth even if it works), I can't really see any way Google could cut out the redirects and still be sure they're logging all the clicks they get.
The only people who would really benefit from this scheme are the advertisers, at the expense of the sites hosting the ads.
By the way, you're paying your soul to the collective Linux monopoly.
For that matter, if a major-label artist who holds the public performance rights but does license through the rights agency gives you permission to perform without paying royalties, that's legal, too. But you probably want to have it in writing in case the rights agency tries to come after you.