In Britain, there aren't separate state and federal prisons. Just state prisons, and everyone goes there regardless of whether it is a local or national law or EU directive that has been broken.
The university should certainly be punished for not putting the addresses in the bcc list. It would be much more difficult to track down which of the fellow recipients was responsible for passing the address on.
In the English/Welsh, Scottish and Northern Irish court systems (there is no UK court system), you typically serve half the sentence, but it can be increased up to the full sentence if you behave badly in prison.
The main difference is where you have a life sentence with a recommended minimum term. There, once you have served the recommended minimum term, the parole board (in England) or the equivalent elsewhere, carries out an assessment to see if you are still a risk to the public, and only release you if you are not.
Two years is the maximum, which will be for the most serious cases - mainly repeat offenders. I expect a typical sentence will be about 2 or 3 months, which I think is a reasonable deterrent. Clearly fines are just treated as a business expense, and so people break the law with impunity.
If you read any british newspapers at the moment, you will see our prisons are overflowing, so people are not getting anything like maximum sentences at the moment.
From a tax perspective, it doesn't matter whereabouts you put it on your income statement. It still increases your profits, and you pay more tax on your increased profit.
Of course, if they didn't put the money on their income statement, there would be problems in that department.
That's why TFA talks about *future* versions of FSF software - the versions it releases under GPL3; and why it talks about the additional cost Novell would face if it had to maintain its own GPL2 fork of these programs.
Basically, you look round a website at all the programs available, read the descriptions and screenshots, and decide which one is best for you. Then you click on an install button, it it automagically installs it for you.
You could look round freshmeat or whatever to find your program, then search for it on rpmfind.net or apt-get.org or similar to get the package for your distro, then use urpmi or apt-get or whatever to install it. This just makes the process a lot easier, and it still uses your distro's repository system.
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses ( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected ( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money ( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks (x) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it (x) Users of email will not put up with it (x) Microsoft will not put up with it ( ) The police will not put up with it (x) Requires too much cooperation from spammers (x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once (x) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers ( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists ( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it (x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email (x) Open relays in foreign countries ( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses (x) Asshats (x) Jurisdictional problems ( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes ( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money (x) Huge existing software investment in SMTP (x) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack ( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email ( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes (x) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches (x) Extreme profitability of spam ( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft (x) Technically illiterate politicians ( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers (x) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves ( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering (x) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical ( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable (x) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation ( ) Blacklists suck ( ) Whitelists suck ( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored ( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud ( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks (x) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually ( ) Sending email should be free ( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers? (x) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses ( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem ( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome ( ) I don't want the government reading my email ( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work. ( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it. ( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
I would argue that the problem is not the patent system here, but the FDA approval process. It is creating a huge barrier to entry, and this is the reason we don't get this treatment.
Of course there should be restrictions in an otherwise free market to ensure that medicines are safe, but they need to be balanced against the risk that they become so onerous that we don't get the medicines at all. It looks like the balance is wrong in this particular case.
Or more specifically, it inherits from England. The Scottish legal system doesn't inherit from England, but rather from Roman law, and things about contracts and licensing are very different.
It wouldn't require them to release the source code. It just means they can't legally stop you getting a bittorrent copy, though WGA is still fair game.
You have to remember that the purpose of copyright is not to protect artists' so called "intellectual property", but to encourage wider distribution of their works.
You have to consider whether or not in the internet age, copyright law as it stands is still serving its purpose.
If you take a picture of a house, you own the copyright in that picture (subject to work for hire rules). That of course does not stop other people from taking their own similar pictures of the same house.
You are not allowed to accept cash payments of more than 15,000 Euros without doing lots of ID checks and registering them with the appropriate authorities - HM Revenue and Customs in the case of the UK.
But when you consider that airport security were so busy looking out for people of vaguely Asian appearance trying to blow up planes with water and toothpaste that they didn't notice some Russians bringing nuclear material onto the planes, you realise that current airport security procedures are worse than useless.
Even if the crackbot OCR software works only a small percentage of the time, it is still worth their while using it, as they just need to keep it running again and again until they get in. That's very different from OCRing a document many times, and hoping that one of them comes out right.
No, that wouldn't work, because all the attacker has to do is take the hard drive out and put it as a second drive in another machine. That's most likely what they do anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
They couldn't move to Russia to sell non-DRMed mp3s and still be listed on Nasdaq.
In Britain, there aren't separate state and federal prisons. Just state prisons, and everyone goes there regardless of whether it is a local or national law or EU directive that has been broken.
The university should certainly be punished for not putting the addresses in the bcc list. It would be much more difficult to track down which of the fellow recipients was responsible for passing the address on.
If you read TFA, you will see that the increased punishment is for unauthorised trade in all personal data, not just email addresses.
In the English/Welsh, Scottish and Northern Irish court systems (there is no UK court system), you typically serve half the sentence, but it can be increased up to the full sentence if you behave badly in prison.
The main difference is where you have a life sentence with a recommended minimum term. There, once you have served the recommended minimum term, the parole board (in England) or the equivalent elsewhere, carries out an assessment to see if you are still a risk to the public, and only release you if you are not.
Two years is the maximum, which will be for the most serious cases - mainly repeat offenders. I expect a typical sentence will be about 2 or 3 months, which I think is a reasonable deterrent. Clearly fines are just treated as a business expense, and so people break the law with impunity.
If you read any british newspapers at the moment, you will see our prisons are overflowing, so people are not getting anything like maximum sentences at the moment.
From a tax perspective, it doesn't matter whereabouts you put it on your income statement. It still increases your profits, and you pay more tax on your increased profit.
Of course, if they didn't put the money on their income statement, there would be problems in that department.
That's why TFA talks about *future* versions of FSF software - the versions it releases under GPL3; and why it talks about the additional cost Novell would face if it had to maintain its own GPL2 fork of these programs.
Basically, you look round a website at all the programs available, read the descriptions and screenshots, and decide which one is best for you. Then you click on an install button, it it automagically installs it for you.
You could look round freshmeat or whatever to find your program, then search for it on rpmfind.net or apt-get.org or similar to get the package for your distro, then use urpmi or apt-get or whatever to install it. This just makes the process a lot easier, and it still uses your distro's repository system.
Other home recording devices includes things like the Sky+ box, which is distributed by the same satellite TV company that broadcasts the TV channels.
Your post advocates a
(x) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
(x) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(x) Users of email will not put up with it
(x) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
(x) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(x) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
(x) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(x) Asshats
(x) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
(x) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
(x) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
(x) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(x) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
(x) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
(x) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
(x) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
(x) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
(x) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
(x) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!
I would argue that the problem is not the patent system here, but the FDA approval process. It is creating a huge barrier to entry, and this is the reason we don't get this treatment.
Of course there should be restrictions in an otherwise free market to ensure that medicines are safe, but they need to be balanced against the risk that they become so onerous that we don't get the medicines at all. It looks like the balance is wrong in this particular case.
And even if they were, it doesn't stop Sun, as the copyright holder, from releasing it under whatever licence they want.
Or more specifically, it inherits from England. The Scottish legal system doesn't inherit from England, but rather from Roman law, and things about contracts and licensing are very different.
It wouldn't require them to release the source code. It just means they can't legally stop you getting a bittorrent copy, though WGA is still fair game.
The backdated stock options in Apple currency?
You have to remember that the purpose of copyright is not to protect artists' so called "intellectual property", but to encourage wider distribution of their works.
You have to consider whether or not in the internet age, copyright law as it stands is still serving its purpose.
If you take a picture of a house, you own the copyright in that picture (subject to work for hire rules). That of course does not stop other people from taking their own similar pictures of the same house.
When you consider how much longer they last than incandescent bulbs, the capital cost (the amount you pay to Walmart) alone makes them cheaper.
I've got 7W in my bedside lamp. It is a CFT spot bulb, so it works out pretty bright if you point it on the book.
You are not allowed to accept cash payments of more than 15,000 Euros without doing lots of ID checks and registering them with the appropriate authorities - HM Revenue and Customs in the case of the UK.
But when you consider that airport security were so busy looking out for people of vaguely Asian appearance trying to blow up planes with water and toothpaste that they didn't notice some Russians bringing nuclear material onto the planes, you realise that current airport security procedures are worse than useless.
Spamassassin already blocks messages with a very high ratio of html tags to text, so it would get those messages.
Even if the crackbot OCR software works only a small percentage of the time, it is still worth their while using it, as they just need to keep it running again and again until they get in. That's very different from OCRing a document many times, and hoping that one of them comes out right.
No, that wouldn't work, because all the attacker has to do is take the hard drive out and put it as a second drive in another machine. That's most likely what they do anyway.