The original Film rating system had four ratings: G, M, R, and X. M for mature came before R, and meant roughly "age 12 or 13 ought to be all right". After a while, M became GP. Then GP was turned into PG. Then PG 13 was split off from PG cause PG was moving from meaning 12 or 13 to 8 or 9 in most people's views. Then they added NC-17, so that movie about the life of Henry Miller with the neat scene featuring the twin contortionists wouldn't get it an X. XXX was invented by the advertizing industry, and never part of the real rating system.
So, where's this one to one translation? Movie M meant about 13, but game M comes after T? Doesn't T mean Teen? So Game M is movie R? Right? And Game T is Movie M, but Movie M is really Movie PG, I meant GP, I mean PG-13.
If T means teen, then M should be above teen, right? So what's the difference between Above Teen and Adults Only? We have 20 year olds who don't count as adults now?
Now you know why parents are clueless (about this, I mean). What makes you think we understood the movie rating system either?
Me, I picked movies I thought wouldn't warp the kid too bad. If she wanted to watch something like Hellraiser 3, I let her persuade me now and then, talked about it with her afterwords, and encouraged her to take a responsible attitude. I checked for peer pressure, asking if any of her friends were telling her she was a chicken if she didn't see the latest splatter flick. If she had had nightmares and woken up yelling "Freddy's gonna eat me!" I would have been a little more rigid, but she stayed the kind of kid who remembers it's all special effects.
I'm not arguing that video games create violent people, but there isn't a fixed amount of violence already inside people that can be let out or bottled up either. People adjust the level of violent behavior they will consider from day to day, often from moment to moment. Often, getting a temporary release of violent feelings makes the option to use violence again seem more attactive, not less. Getting away with a violent act tends to make a person think they can keep getting away with choosing violence as their increasingly preferred option.
I seriously doubt playing GTA is enough to nudge the average person over the top, as you put it. However, watching as little as two or three hours a day of standard TV will expose a person to thousands of incidents of televised violence. Most of those will show unrealistic consequences. (For every "cop has to make a split second decision, and oops, it's a kid with a toy gun", there's hundreds of hours of shows where the 'good guy" is the one who never gets hit, and always shoots accurately enough that divine justice guides the bullet to do an appropriate amount of damage to the 'bad guy'). Then add a few hundred thousand commercials whose message is, "you suck, unless you buy this.", and we're not talking about the old average person anymore, we've redefined average.
Take a kid who regularly experiences real violence in school or from a lousy home life, up that amount of TV to eight hours a day oe so, then add a few hundred hours of Quake, GTA, or whatever to the mix. That's not average, but there are a hundred thousand people out there who fit that unaverage profile. The result? You said it yourself: Our society is in very great trouble indeed.
People shade ATMcreens because: 1. People don't want someone else being able to read their PIN #. 2. Often they're in that big room with the blue ceiling, and hard to read from glare (It's that big lightbulb they use there).
To be fair, I suspect the prior poster was thinking more along the lines of:
"How can a company compete HONESTLY when the playing field is not level?"
which can be a fair criticism.
To answer it, consider this. Other posts to this thread have mentioned cities or municipalities doing the work themselves, and finding out that it cost only about 10% of what they were quoted by commercial concerns. Local governments have also looked at providing their own broadband because they want to reach poorer neighborhoods that some businesses consider unprofitable, or to create a special tier of services for schools and other such reasons.
Based on their own statements, interested businesses seem to be steering towards "cherry picking", wanting to select the wealthyest customers, and even ignore a share of these that are above the average for their middle class neighborhoods. Yes there are exceptions to this, and I suspect those exceptions are the ones who will make money in the long run.
I'd say net access is moving towards a ubiquitous model, and the only way to make money there is to do like the grocery store chains, and aim for a relatively modest profit margin. Most groceries are glad to get 3 to 4% or so. That price is mostly because there's lots of competition, not because the government is involved. Notice that margin is very low even though food is _not_ a luxury item, and most of us can't put off purchasing it indefinitely. Can you imagine if a grocery store chain said, "Yes, there's lots of competitors, and some people even plant their own gardens or take up deer hunting just to give us less business, but if the government would just stop giving away cheese, we could have a 10% per annum profit margin.". Would anyone take that claim seriously? (Well here on slashdot, someone would.).
If he really goes to court claiming that he never had that half-second's thought where he considered the effect it would have on the 911 system to use 911 in that way, while admitting to the rest of the crime, the judge will make those 21 sentences run consecutively and set all fines at maximum. Judges see people admit to everything that can be proved and then try to evade punishment by disputing everything (such as the criminal's state of mind), that has to be inferred, all the time, and few of them have any sympathy for such transparent legal trickery.
The legal resoning is simple: 1. No one but a moron would fail to realize multiple prank 911 calls would disrupt service. 2. This guy wrote computer stuff, so he can't be a moron. 3. Ergo, he thought of it, and he's lieing now. 4. That means he doesn't recognize his guilt, isn't really willing to make amends to society, and needs a good stiff sentence to have time to learn it. 5. Plus, if he's lieing now to try to get off, he may have lied about a lot of other points, so I'll mention to the jury in my closing instructions that they might want to disregard these specific other statements he made if they think he's lieing now too. 6. Now that he's convicted, Let's see if the sentencing guidelines mention agrievating circumstances...
His intention was to disrupt 911, by definition. He wrote a script specifically designed to do just that. His intention was also to use that effect to harm his 18 intended victems.
What your saying is that only his last, ultimate intention counts.
"I intended to hide in the bushes and see the home owner run around trying to wipe burning dog poop off his foot, but I didn't intend for the lighter I held to the bag to set it on fire, that was just a step towards realizing my true intention!"
This is precisely why people who quote dictionaries and think that they are justifying their arguement are usually just adding more heat than light. From your quote, Al-Quaida, black September, the Red brigades, and the provo wing of the IRA aren't terrorists, because they don't any of them live in late 18th century France. There are no living examples of the word Terrorist, and in fact, cannot ever be again. We can all stop using this word now, unless we are talking about French history. Oh, and Bush has won the war on Terror, cause their 100% dead.
So what's your point in offering the definition? I could quote the definition of the word 'dog' as a verb (as in "He dogged the fleeing felon's heels"), and claim that proves those things with the wet noses that always want to be walked at inconveniet times are cats, but quoting Webster that way wouldn't make me right.
In support of that, a large, mostly empty storage array, whether we're talking about RAID 5+ systems or just a box with a 20 gig IDE HD 90% free, is very attractive to some crackers.
1. they can find uses for the space.
2. A less full machine is likely used less regularly, and (they hope) checked less regularly.
3. A less full machine likely hasn't been in use as long, so its (soon to be former) owner is likely to be less experienced.
4. The least full machine of the whole group is likely to belong to the Comparative 14th Century Albegenisian Literature dept., who don't even know they have a server, let alone that there's budget information on it.
Data compartmentalization looks to be a lot more critical than programs in reducing damage. If there's a real relationship, I'd say it's more like "You have less critical personal data on your machine so less chance sombody who does break into it will do any major damage."
As you mention, the average delay in notification has been about a week. Now what's the longest delay in notification? Better yet, have there been any cases where that delay continued past the point of an arrest or dismissial of charges? As you mention, documents "theoretically" include library records. Has there been an actual case where library records were presented as the sole qualifying grounds for more court orders, particularly an arrest warrent? How about being just one of several items of evidence? (and were any of the other items worth more as evidence?)
I don't know the answers to any of these questions offhand. You may, or you may feel the arguements you've already presented are enough for you to trust the current law. I do know who should have been asked these questions and a lot more.
If you hack the registry to show the.lnk extension, all your desktop shortcuts will show.lnk after the names. I don't know of any worm or trojan exploiting this feature, offhand. If you hack.URL, then that text that probably shows as bright blue and goes underlined on mouseover will be even more clearly a URL, but it was probably pretty clear to you already. Maybe if it was an e-mail attachment it didn't show up for asome configurations. Now Shell Handleing Scraps (.SHS), or . PIF's, those you might want to fix if you don't like reading insulting messages in 733+ speak from the 13 year old who now 0WNXORS UR BOX.
Why should it surprise people if this code is clean. The NSA wanted an OS that they could examine, for their own security. They got one, and made sure it was as safe as possible so they could run it internally. Then they did what a government agency is supposed to do, that is, act like the law applied to them as well and respect the GPL. Like it would be smart to bite the hand that feeds them, and have to go back to using an OS they would have a harder time verifying.
Or they realized that what had taken them 3 or 4 hours on site could have been done in 30 min. back at the lab, and if they kept on at that rate, they'd be on site not for 9 days but 27 or so. Maybe they ran into slowdowns from unsupportive or incompetent admins. Maybe there was even a really good reason to want the job done in 7 days instead of 30, like an existing court docket.
Or maybe the FBI agent noticed an admin with long hair and a pot leaf (or a penguin) on his tee shirt, and decided that the company was stalling even though they weren't. Maybe someone was cooperative, but didn't seem eager enough and the FBI guy overreacted.
The point is, we don't have data enough to know, not from this article. Without at least spot audits of the FBI's procedures, there's no way to know, and how do we get an auditor we can all agree to trust?
The law generally says that people can (possibly) bring charges or (usually) sue for undue delays and extra costs those impose. That law established precidents, where 9 days was a very short time. That's because those precidents were established when surface mail often made a check run a week late, when not everybody had phones, or even lived within 10 miles of a telegraph station. Many of those laws go back to times when a bridge wash-out meant you couldn't conclude your business for six weeks, in some cases.
9 days can be a lot to an ISP, but the law will take some convincing that it's unreasonable.
I'm going to try a serious answer to one of your possibly rhetorical questions.
"... wouldn'y you want them using as much BSD code as possible ?"
Yes, with at least a couple of caveats. I wouldn't want them to use code, and then cast FUD on other people's projects for using the same code, or even code from the same sources.
I wouldn't want them to use code developed with a certain methodology, and then cast FUD on that methodology.
I'll just about bet that anyone who writes code cares about these points. Sure, use my code. I don't care if I see a check for it, I don't care if it gets my name up in lights or not. What coder can realistically say "I don't care if you use it and then accuse it of being bad code at the same time.", or "I don't care if you use it and accuse me of being incompetent, or of not caring about security, or of wanting to convert the nation to communism. Go ahead and talk out of both sides of your face about me, I don't care".
With that said, this is often a non-issue with respect to Microsoft. The recent release of some Windows NT 4 and 95 source code shows a Micrsoft with some pretty normal practices and good coders, hobbled by a need to maintain an enormous amount of legacy support. It's a Microsoft that has done a pretty decent job on its own, hasn't swiped code, and has given full credit for those limited BSD based functions it used.
Tracing the published statements of MS starting from this code reveals that they have used it in accordance with liscence, and often gone beyond what is strictly legally required to keep other company's and individual's names associated with the code they wrote, and in some cases to contact originators for specific permission to use the code rather than just take it under the BSD liscence. Of course, this is a) based partly on material that wasn't legally supposed to be in the public's hands, and b) for 95, comprised only about 15% of the core OS, if memory serves.
If we can go by this partial and not entirely legal sample, Microsoft's practices here would have met the GPL's standard as well as they met BSD's. Someone, however, should tell the advertising department and whomever writes press releases to get with the program on a few occasions.
This is partly a question of energy. Rough calculations seem to suggest that the human race will be producing enough power to be able to break down iron oxides on the Martian surface and free oxygen, or to move icy comet cores from the outer system and impact them on Mars, before that many generations have passed.
We don't know much about what technology would make such things possible, but if you draw even a straight line curve from the technology of the past, such as wood heated boilers, through today (fission), and extrapolate, the time till we can spruce up Mars is only a hundred years or so.
Terraforming Venus, on the other hand, takes changing that long rotation. Even if we could strip off the existing atmosphere, and replace it with 15 PSI worth of 70 some odd % Nitrogen, 22% Oxygen, etc., the Venusian day is so long that such an atmosphere would freeze out on the night side.
Even if we can sustain a technological growth rate that may be just plain impossible in the long run, Mars will be doable generations before Venus.
Right, plus it may be that craters are occasionally formed, but at 500+ degrees (C) the surface rock is soft enough to slump over just a few thousand years, so the smaller ones are self erasing.
The usual "motive" made by such claims is that government is hand in hand with "Big Business", and they are hiding the source of new technology they are selling. That conspiracy theory is pretty close to the ones that claim Aliens built the pyramids or the Nazca markings. They all assume that people are generally too stupid to do X without alien help, whether X is pile up stones or make triple bladed razors and non-stick frypans.
That's a more legitimate point. Something that is roughly middle of the road on potential lethality levels, but will be around long enough for records of just where it was buried to get lost, people who handled it to retire, and so on, has some real problem causing potential that does need addressed. If I wasn't already in the thread, I'd give you a +1 insightful point, if I had any points.
What you're describing there is a seperate issue, and maybe a more significant one, from concerns such as marking a long term waste dump so that even the total collapse of western civilization won't create a risk, or the issues surrounding spent fuel recycling. I'm not sold on your arguement yet, but it raises an interesting set of questions.
Is there some isotope, that particularly fits most or all of the following parameters? 1. Has a half-life of, say, 1 to 25 (or maybe 50) years. 2. Emits an energetic gamma in at least one of its major decay paths. 3. Will be found in industy nuclear waste in amounts much greater than there are any current uses for. 4. Is financially far from a break even point if we tried recovering and reusing it. 5. Has some particular problems besides being hot (i.e. its decay products include a gas that embrittles our best container technology, or it's chemically very toxic).
Possibly, there are some particular isotopes that have many or all of these problems at once. Those sound like the core of the problem, as you're describing it.
First, I'm not a Lawyer, and anyone actually considering going to court needs to become familiar with the laws of their own applicable jurisdictions, and obtain the help of a qualified professional in whatever fields of law apply. With that said, you obviously aren't one either. The term "Piracy" doesn't appear that way in just any standard dictionary. Get a legal reference, such as the judge uses, and see if it appears that way there. The written law is the only standard that applies in court, and there, all those "standard references" do NOT create a standard. piracy is specifically a legal term, and so in a courtroom, that's the way it is expected to be used, and the judge has every right to expect professionals to stick to that use.
Friend is a word that appears in most dictionaries. It has a legal definition as well, If you doubt the two are different, you can go to a courtroom, and claim to be there as a "Friend of the court", and insist that you be allowed to use the word Friend in the normal manner in defining that. Please note I don't recomend you actually try this, in fact I strongly recomend you don't. Amicus Curae is not the same thing as, "I feel like laws are a good thing".
If Perl user's hadn't created the annual Obfuscated Perl contests, people wouldn't say such mean things about how the code looks... Uh, no wait, isn't there one of those for C too? Well, if Perl had come along after the flaws in C++ were arround long enough to become really apparent, like Python... Whaddya mean, it did? Uh, If Perl was distinguishable from line noise, people wouldn't say ugly, so there!
You're CN. By definition, any person who uses the term Chaotic Good is a D&D player, and all D&D players are Chaotic Neutral, just ask any DM. (and don't try to weasel out of it by claiming you DM). By the way, when's the game this weekend?
The most common letters in order, are supposed to be ETAOINSHRDLU. You can't go by wheel, since they don't allow guessing vowels till you buy them. ETAOIN... may be a tiny bit off if the many new words coined since the 50's have shifted things, but I doubt that it's off by more than a single pair of letters shifted a place each way.
Thank you for letting me be pedantic about what is doubltess the more minor part of your post. That was fun.
The Jargon file matters more than some think. I remember downloading it from a BBS at 1200 baud with my C-64, before this newfangled interweb thingie came along. With hundreds of terms that sounded interesting, and nothing like Googleing for it on the horizon yet, the reader had to work for it, like finding a physical copy of the Orange book and actually reading it, cover to cover, three times. The Jargon file was like the MIT model railroading club, or working for Xerox/PARC, for people who couldn't afford attending the former or yet get hired by the latter. It was many a common man's introduction to hacking.
1. The DCMA uses a 5x multiple for damages. All comparable laws, including civil suits under RICO, have a cap of only 3 times. This is a detremental law, if you like that part in the constitution about "cruel and unusual punishments" as well as you like property rights. The fact that that 5x multiple creates a cap of 150,000 dollars (US) per incident is itself an indicator that not only the multiple, but the base penalty, is vastly disproportionate to the crime.
2. Until recently, the RIAA's members have enjoyed a growth rate and profit margin well above the average of businesses in the USA. As is apparently always the case, there are legitimate market forces trying to drag any such industry into line with the general trend. RIAA litigation is aimed at making it look like industry downturns are purely the result of illegal activity instead of legal circumstances, and can be stopped by legal action. This bolsters stock prices in excess of performance as well as having the direct effect you cite. Consider too, that until most of the fools get out of the market, entertainment stocks will already have some inflation due to percieved glamour, and so in theory should already skew the economy in a negative manner.
3. Both the truth and relevance of the last poster's general statement is demonstrated by point 1.
Slashdot Mirror
The original Film rating system had four ratings: G, M, R, and X. M for mature came before R, and meant roughly "age 12 or 13 ought to be all right". After a while, M became GP. Then GP was turned into PG. Then PG 13 was split off from PG cause PG was moving from meaning 12 or 13 to 8 or 9 in most people's views. Then they added NC-17, so that movie about the life of Henry Miller with the neat scene featuring the twin contortionists wouldn't get it an X. XXX was invented by the advertizing industry, and never part of the real rating system.
So, where's this one to one translation? Movie M meant about 13, but game M comes after T? Doesn't T mean Teen? So Game M is movie R? Right? And Game T is Movie M, but Movie M is really Movie PG, I meant GP, I mean PG-13.
If T means teen, then M should be above teen, right? So what's the difference between Above Teen and Adults Only? We have 20 year olds who don't count as adults now?
Now you know why parents are clueless (about this, I mean). What makes you think we understood the movie rating system either?
Me, I picked movies I thought wouldn't warp the kid too bad. If she wanted to watch something like Hellraiser 3, I let her persuade me now and then, talked about it with her afterwords, and encouraged her to take a responsible attitude. I checked for peer pressure, asking if any of her friends were telling her she was a chicken if she didn't see the latest splatter flick. If she had had nightmares and woken up yelling "Freddy's gonna eat me!" I would have been a little more rigid, but she stayed the kind of kid who remembers it's all special effects.
I'm not arguing that video games create violent people, but there isn't a fixed amount of violence already inside people that can be let out or bottled up either. People adjust the level of violent behavior they will consider from day to day, often from moment to moment. Often, getting a temporary release of violent feelings makes the option to use violence again seem more attactive, not less. Getting away with a violent act tends to make a person think they can keep getting away with choosing violence as their increasingly preferred option.
I seriously doubt playing GTA is enough to nudge the average person over the top, as you put it. However, watching as little as two or three hours a day of standard TV will expose a person to thousands of incidents of televised violence. Most of those will show unrealistic consequences. (For every "cop has to make a split second decision, and oops, it's a kid with a toy gun", there's hundreds of hours of shows where the 'good guy" is the one who never gets hit, and always shoots accurately enough that divine justice guides the bullet to do an appropriate amount of damage to the 'bad guy'). Then add a few hundred thousand commercials whose message is, "you suck, unless you buy this.", and we're not talking about the old average person anymore, we've redefined average.
Take a kid who regularly experiences real violence in school or from a lousy home life, up that amount of TV to eight hours a day oe so, then add a few hundred hours of Quake, GTA, or whatever to the mix. That's not average, but there are a hundred thousand people out there who fit that unaverage profile. The result? You said it yourself: Our society is in very great trouble indeed.
People shade ATMcreens because:
1. People don't want someone else being able to read their PIN #.
2. Often they're in that big room with the blue ceiling, and hard to read from glare (It's that big lightbulb they use there).
"Long-haul is just overbuilt presently.".
Or long haul is built sufficiently, but "last mile" fiber is underbuilt to put a proper workload on it.
To be fair, I suspect the prior poster was thinking more along the lines of:
"How can a company compete HONESTLY when the playing field is not level?"
which can be a fair criticism.
To answer it, consider this. Other posts to this thread have mentioned cities or municipalities doing the work themselves, and finding out that it cost only about 10% of what they were quoted by commercial concerns. Local governments have also looked at providing their own broadband because they want to reach poorer neighborhoods that some businesses consider unprofitable, or to create a special tier of services for schools and other such reasons.
Based on their own statements, interested businesses seem to be steering towards "cherry picking", wanting to select the wealthyest customers, and even ignore a share of these that are above the average for their middle class neighborhoods. Yes there are exceptions to this, and I suspect those exceptions are the ones who will make money in the long run.
I'd say net access is moving towards a ubiquitous model, and the only way to make money there is to do like the grocery store chains, and aim for a relatively modest profit margin. Most groceries are glad to get 3 to 4% or so. That price is mostly because there's lots of competition, not because the government is involved. Notice that margin is very low even though food is _not_ a luxury item, and most of us can't put off purchasing it indefinitely. Can you imagine if a grocery store chain said, "Yes, there's lots of competitors, and some people even plant their own gardens or take up deer hunting just to give us less business, but if the government would just stop giving away cheese, we could have a 10% per annum profit margin.". Would anyone take that claim seriously? (Well here on slashdot, someone would.).
If he really goes to court claiming that he never had that half-second's thought where he considered the effect it would have on the 911 system to use 911 in that way, while admitting to the rest of the crime, the judge will make those 21 sentences run consecutively and set all fines at maximum. Judges see people admit to everything that can be proved and then try to evade punishment by disputing everything (such as the criminal's state of mind), that has to be inferred, all the time, and few of them have any sympathy for such transparent legal trickery.
The legal resoning is simple:
1. No one but a moron would fail to realize multiple prank 911 calls would disrupt service.
2. This guy wrote computer stuff, so he can't be a moron.
3. Ergo, he thought of it, and he's lieing now.
4. That means he doesn't recognize his guilt, isn't really willing to make amends to society, and needs a good stiff sentence to have time to learn it.
5. Plus, if he's lieing now to try to get off, he may have lied about a lot of other points, so I'll mention to the jury in my closing instructions that they might want to disregard these specific other statements he made if they think he's lieing now too.
6. Now that he's convicted, Let's see if the sentencing guidelines mention agrievating circumstances...
His intention was to disrupt 911, by definition. He wrote a script specifically designed to do just that. His intention was also to use that effect to harm his 18 intended victems.
What your saying is that only his last, ultimate intention counts.
"I intended to hide in the bushes and see the home owner run around trying to wipe burning dog poop off his foot, but I didn't intend for the lighter I held to the bag to set it on fire, that was just a step towards realizing my true intention!"
This is precisely why people who quote dictionaries and think that they are justifying their arguement are usually just adding more heat than light. From your quote, Al-Quaida, black September, the Red brigades, and the provo wing of the IRA aren't terrorists, because they don't any of them live in late 18th century France. There are no living examples of the word Terrorist, and in fact, cannot ever be again. We can all stop using this word now, unless we are talking about French history. Oh, and Bush has won the war on Terror, cause their 100% dead.
So what's your point in offering the definition? I could quote the definition of the word 'dog' as a verb (as in "He dogged the fleeing felon's heels"), and claim that proves those things with the wet noses that always want to be walked at inconveniet times are cats, but quoting Webster that way wouldn't make me right.
In support of that, a large, mostly empty storage array, whether we're talking about RAID 5+ systems or just a box with a 20 gig IDE HD 90% free, is very attractive to some crackers.
1. they can find uses for the space.
2. A less full machine is likely used less regularly, and (they hope) checked less regularly.
3. A less full machine likely hasn't been in use as long, so its (soon to be former) owner is likely to be less experienced.
4. The least full machine of the whole group is likely to belong to the Comparative 14th Century Albegenisian Literature dept., who don't even know they have a server, let alone that there's budget information on it.
Data compartmentalization looks to be a lot more critical than programs in reducing damage. If there's a real relationship, I'd say it's more like "You have less critical personal data on your machine so less chance sombody who does break into it will do any major damage."
As you mention, the average delay in notification has been about a week. Now what's the longest delay in notification? Better yet, have there been any cases where that delay continued past the point of an arrest or dismissial of charges?
As you mention, documents "theoretically" include library records. Has there been an actual case where library records were presented as the sole qualifying grounds for more court orders, particularly an arrest warrent? How about being just one of several items of evidence? (and were any of the other items worth more as evidence?)
I don't know the answers to any of these questions offhand. You may, or you may feel the arguements you've already presented are enough for you to trust the current law. I do know who should have been asked these questions and a lot more.
If you hack the registry to show the .lnk extension, all your desktop shortcuts will show .lnk after the names. I don't know of any worm or trojan exploiting this feature, offhand. If you hack .URL, then that text that probably shows as bright blue and goes underlined on mouseover will be even more clearly a URL, but it was probably pretty clear to you already. Maybe if it was an e-mail attachment it didn't show up for asome configurations.
Now Shell Handleing Scraps (.SHS), or . PIF's, those you might want to fix if you don't like reading insulting messages in 733+ speak from the 13 year old who now 0WNXORS UR BOX.
"(nobody will trust them ever again)"
Like the average slashdotter trusted them now.
Why should it surprise people if this code is clean. The NSA wanted an OS that they could examine, for their own security. They got one, and made sure it was as safe as possible so they could run it internally. Then they did what a government agency is supposed to do, that is, act like the law applied to them as well and respect the GPL. Like it would be smart to bite the hand that feeds them, and have to go back to using an OS they would have a harder time verifying.
Or they realized that what had taken them 3 or 4 hours on site could have been done in 30 min. back at the lab, and if they kept on at that rate, they'd be on site not for 9 days but 27 or so. Maybe they ran into slowdowns from unsupportive or incompetent admins. Maybe there was even a really good reason to want the job done in 7 days instead of 30, like an existing court docket.
Or maybe the FBI agent noticed an admin with long hair and a pot leaf (or a penguin) on his tee shirt, and decided that the company was stalling even though they weren't. Maybe someone was cooperative, but didn't seem eager enough and the FBI guy overreacted.
The point is, we don't have data enough to know, not from this article. Without at least spot audits of the FBI's procedures, there's no way to know, and how do we get an auditor we can all agree to trust?
The law generally says that people can (possibly) bring charges or (usually) sue for undue delays and extra costs those impose. That law established precidents, where 9 days was a very short time. That's because those precidents were established when surface mail often made a check run a week late, when not everybody had phones, or even lived within 10 miles of a telegraph station. Many of those laws go back to times when a bridge wash-out meant you couldn't conclude your business for six weeks, in some cases.
9 days can be a lot to an ISP, but the law will take some convincing that it's unreasonable.
I'm going to try a serious answer to one of your possibly rhetorical questions.
"... wouldn'y you want them using as much BSD code as possible ?"
Yes, with at least a couple of caveats. I wouldn't want them to use code, and then cast FUD on other people's projects for using the same code, or even code from the same sources.
I wouldn't want them to use code developed with a certain methodology, and then cast FUD on that methodology.
I'll just about bet that anyone who writes code cares about these points. Sure, use my code. I don't care if I see a check for it, I don't care if it gets my name up in lights or not. What coder can realistically say "I don't care if you use it and then accuse it of being bad code at the same time.", or "I don't care if you use it and accuse me of being incompetent, or of not caring about security, or of wanting to convert the nation to communism. Go ahead and talk out of both sides of your face about me, I don't care".
With that said, this is often a non-issue with respect to Microsoft. The recent release of some Windows NT 4 and 95 source code shows a Micrsoft with some pretty normal practices and good coders, hobbled by a need to maintain an enormous amount of legacy support. It's a Microsoft that has done a pretty decent job on its own, hasn't swiped code, and has given full credit for those limited BSD based functions it used.
Tracing the published statements of MS starting from this code reveals that they have used it in accordance with liscence, and often gone beyond what is strictly legally required to keep other company's and individual's names associated with the code they wrote, and in some cases to contact originators for specific permission to use the code rather than just take it under the BSD liscence. Of course, this is a) based partly on material that wasn't legally supposed to be in the public's hands, and b) for 95, comprised only about 15% of the core OS, if memory serves.
If we can go by this partial and not entirely legal sample, Microsoft's practices here would have met the GPL's standard as well as they met BSD's. Someone, however, should tell the advertising department and whomever writes press releases to get with the program on a few occasions.
This is partly a question of energy. Rough calculations seem to suggest that the human race will be producing enough power to be able to break down iron oxides on the Martian surface and free oxygen, or to move icy comet cores from the outer system and impact them on Mars, before that many generations have passed.
We don't know much about what technology would make such things possible, but if you draw even a straight line curve from the technology of the past, such as wood heated boilers, through today (fission), and extrapolate, the time till we can spruce up Mars is only a hundred years or so.
Terraforming Venus, on the other hand, takes changing that long rotation. Even if we could strip off the existing atmosphere, and replace it with 15 PSI worth of 70 some odd % Nitrogen, 22% Oxygen, etc., the Venusian day is so long that such an atmosphere would freeze out on the night side.
Even if we can sustain a technological growth rate that may be just plain impossible in the long run, Mars will be doable generations before Venus.
Right, plus it may be that craters are occasionally formed, but at 500+ degrees (C) the surface rock is soft enough to slump over just a few thousand years, so the smaller ones are self erasing.
The usual "motive" made by such claims is that government is hand in hand with "Big Business", and they are hiding the source of new technology they are selling. That conspiracy theory is pretty close to the ones that claim Aliens built the pyramids or the Nazca markings. They all assume that people are generally too stupid to do X without alien help, whether X is pile up stones or make triple bladed razors and non-stick frypans.
That's a more legitimate point. Something that is roughly middle of the road on potential lethality levels, but will be around long enough for records of just where it was buried to get lost, people who handled it to retire, and so on, has some real problem causing potential that does need addressed. If I wasn't already in the thread, I'd give you a +1 insightful point, if I had any points.
What you're describing there is a seperate issue, and maybe a more significant one, from concerns such as marking a long term waste dump so that even the total collapse of western civilization won't create a risk, or the issues surrounding spent fuel recycling. I'm not sold on your arguement yet, but it raises an interesting set of questions.
Is there some isotope, that particularly fits most or all of the following parameters? 1. Has a half-life of, say, 1 to 25 (or maybe 50) years. 2. Emits an energetic gamma in at least one of its major decay paths. 3. Will be found in industy nuclear waste in amounts much greater than there are any current uses for. 4. Is financially far from a break even point if we tried recovering and reusing it. 5. Has some particular problems besides being hot (i.e. its decay products include a gas that embrittles our best container technology, or it's chemically very toxic).
Possibly, there are some particular isotopes that have many or all of these problems at once. Those sound like the core of the problem, as you're describing it.
All the hairs on the back of my neck stood up as I wrote that, but I did specify "claims".
First, I'm not a Lawyer, and anyone actually considering going to court needs to become familiar with the laws of their own applicable jurisdictions, and obtain the help of a qualified professional in whatever fields of law apply. With that said, you obviously aren't one either.
The term "Piracy" doesn't appear that way in just any standard dictionary. Get a legal reference, such as the judge uses, and see if it appears that way there. The written law is the only standard that applies in court, and there, all those "standard references" do NOT create a standard. piracy is specifically a legal term, and so in a courtroom, that's the way it is expected to be used, and the judge has every right to expect professionals to stick to that use.
Friend is a word that appears in most dictionaries. It has a legal definition as well, If you doubt the two are different, you can go to a courtroom, and claim to be there as a "Friend of the court", and insist that you be allowed to use the word Friend in the normal manner in defining that. Please note I don't recomend you actually try this, in fact I strongly recomend you don't. Amicus Curae is not the same thing as, "I feel like laws are a good thing".
If Perl user's hadn't created the annual Obfuscated Perl contests, people wouldn't say such mean things about how the code looks ... Uh, no wait, isn't there one of those for C too? Well, if Perl had come along after the flaws in C++ were arround long enough to become really apparent, like Python ... Whaddya mean, it did? Uh, If Perl was distinguishable from line noise, people wouldn't say ugly, so there!
You're CN. By definition, any person who uses the term Chaotic Good is a D&D player, and all D&D players are Chaotic Neutral, just ask any DM. (and don't try to weasel out of it by claiming you DM). By the way, when's the game this weekend?
The most common letters in order, are supposed to be ETAOINSHRDLU. You can't go by wheel, since they don't allow guessing vowels till you buy them. ETAOIN... may be a tiny bit off if the many new words coined since the 50's have shifted things, but I doubt that it's off by more than a single pair of letters shifted a place each way.
Thank you for letting me be pedantic about what is doubltess the more minor part of your post. That was fun.
The Jargon file matters more than some think. I remember downloading it from a BBS at 1200 baud with my C-64, before this newfangled interweb thingie came along. With hundreds of terms that sounded interesting, and nothing like Googleing for it on the horizon yet, the reader had to work for it, like finding a physical copy of the Orange book and actually reading it, cover to cover, three times. The Jargon file was like the MIT model railroading club, or working for Xerox/PARC, for people who couldn't afford attending the former or yet get hired by the latter. It was many a common man's introduction to hacking.
1. The DCMA uses a 5x multiple for damages. All comparable laws, including civil suits under RICO, have a cap of only 3 times. This is a detremental law, if you like that part in the constitution about "cruel and unusual punishments" as well as you like property rights. The fact that that 5x multiple creates a cap of 150,000 dollars (US) per incident is itself an indicator that not only the multiple, but the base penalty, is vastly disproportionate to the crime.
2. Until recently, the RIAA's members have enjoyed a growth rate and profit margin well above the average of businesses in the USA. As is apparently always the case, there are legitimate market forces trying to drag any such industry into line with the general trend. RIAA litigation is aimed at making it look like industry downturns are purely the result of illegal activity instead of legal circumstances, and can be stopped by legal action. This bolsters stock prices in excess of performance as well as having the direct effect you cite. Consider too, that until most of the fools get out of the market, entertainment stocks will already have some inflation due to percieved glamour, and so in theory should already skew the economy in a negative manner.
3. Both the truth and relevance of the last poster's general statement is demonstrated by point 1.