Re:People don't seem to get it.
on
Back To SCO
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· Score: 1
Mutating Linux to remove infringing code will not remove SCO's ability to take to court the distributors of any version of Linux which infringed, -past- or present.
Leaving aside the point, made elsewhere, that any such suit would be severely damaged by SCO's active refusal to attempt to mitigate the damage, have you noticed that SCO have made no move towards taking any Linux distributors to court. If they had a glimmer of a case, the distributors would be the obvious target.
I could say the exact same thing about all the drunk English people screaming at their kids and each othere I saw when I went on vacation to Spain
And you'd have a good point, if the topic was drunk holidaymakers. It's not particularly relevant to this lawsuit, though.
Is it now not allowed to notice certain cultural trends? England really does have a lot of people who get drunk and cause trouble on holiday in Spain. America really does have more lawyers than the rest of the world put together. Occasionally one or the other of these observations might be relevant to a slashdot discussion.
(Possibly the parent was making a bad comparison - he thought he was jumping to an unfair conclusion and didn't realise he was seeing a symptom of something which is common knowledge througout Europe)
If she can convince the court/jury in a civil trial that she paid her $30 to Kazaa in good faith for the product/service, expecting that she and her daughter could use it, then she should be able to beat the RIAA.
And that would be the worst possible result for the rest of us. That's throwing the responsibility for breaking the law off the individual and back onto the suppliers of general-purpose software tools. It would be game, set and match to the RIAA; even if they weren't able to go straight back to court and get Kazaa shut down, they would very likely get a law passed in short order banning all P2P because it forces poor 12-year-old girls to infringe copyrights.
The world can do without Kazaa, but we have to cling to the principle that responsibility for breaking the law lies with the individual who does it and not the technology they do it with, or we can wave goodbye to general-purpose computers within a decade.
Re:'windows' mentioned in article.
on
MRAM in 2004?
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· Score: 2, Informative
I don't know about anybody else, but for me waiting for windows to start up is not usually caused by the PC having been powered down.
I'm sure I would have to boot windows just as often with this technology as I do now.
You meant that Free Software is least likely to be affected.
Free Software is effected by programmers writing code and using free licenses. It is affected by many things, including slanderous press releases from dying companies.
This is not a "grammar flame". Correct grammar is not all that important. And only a complete troll would object to a "plagiarize" being spelled wrong. But if you're not sure of the difference between affecting and effecting, you probably mean affecting, and if you use effecting you might end up saying something totally different to what you meant.
That's not to say I approve of filing suit against a preteen.
Well, do you? If not, why not?
When the RIAA were trying to shut down Napster, there were a lot of people saying "Hey, just because it can be used to infringe copyright doesn't mean it should be banned, there are other uses. If people are infringing your copyright, go after the people who are doing the infringing not the tools they use to do it."
Well, I agree, and that's what they're doing, and they're entitled. Since much of their product is aimed at preteens, the people doing the infringing are, to a large extent, preteens.
We have to concentrate our fire on where the RIAA's case is weak. Some examples:
The powers they have to subpoena ISPs are excessive and a threat to privacy
The amounts of damages they claim in civil suits bear no relation to any actual losses
They use corrupt politicians to get bad laws passed which cripple the public domain and damage privacy and freedom to innovate
If you want to abolish copyright, lobby your legislator, but that's a fringe campaign. If you want to defend the right to privacy and the right to make and use general-purpose tools, then arguing that 12-year-olds should be able to copy CD's with impunity is shooting yourself in the foot to a McBridian degree
The reason sites don't prevent deep linking is that firstly, they're incompetent and don't want to bother, and secondly, doing so would cause problems with some browsers (very old ones by now, and it's not something companies worry about as a rule.)
The reason they make progress legally is that the companies complaining, the lawyers, and the judges really don't have any idea how the technology works. It's just magic to them. If they ever think about it, and they most likely don't, they probably think that when you click on a link on a web page you're telling that web site to send you the information in a link. 30 seconds thought would tell them that's rubbish, but that's at least 28 seconds more than they give it.
It's just the same with people who complain about web sites setting cookies. They think it's something imposed on the user by the web site, they don't realise it's something the user is actively asking for via the browser. It's just some "magic spell" that the EVIL web site is casting on them.
I'm getting carried away now, but I'm wondering if reading the Malleus Maleficarum would give me an insight into popular attitutes to technology....
'ancient unix' isn't valid for commercial purposes even though it was licensed under a BSD license.
Oops, SCO OpenUnix or whatever they call it this week just lost the X Window system, developed by MIT and released under a BSD-like license.
Darn, the TCP/IP support written at Berkely and released under a BSD license isn't valid for commercial purposes either.
There seems to be more of this open source stuff around than SCO are aware of...
Correction: no-one starts a capital project in order to lose their own money.
If there's "green" subsidy on offer, you can make yourself money by losing the taxpayers money
That's just a general point. Renewable energy projects tend to attract subsidies or tax breaks, but not in every case, and it doesn't mean they're automatically a bad idea.
Hey, pompous I'll take. I've been accused of being pompous by a
Conservative MP, and I had to accept I was dealing with an expert.
I'm incurably curious as to what you thought was self-contradictory... s/They disrupt/Such corrections disrupt/ would remove an ambiguity in my first paragraph.
To summarise: if someone writes "there" when they mean "their", don't sweat it, it doesn't matter. If someone writes "up" when they mean "down", it's worth correcting them -- for one thing, they might point out they meant what they wrote, in which case you've cleared up a misunderstanding. Saying "effect" instead of "affect" is more like saying "up" instead of "down" than it is like mistyping a word or splitting an infinitive.
Example: "The planned redundancy program will not be affected by the new management team" == keep on sending those resumes out. "The planned redundancy program will not be effected by the new management team" == It's all cancelled, your job's safe!
Just because "horseless carriage" is anachronistic doesn't mean we shouldn't regulate cars, for example.
I've read (and it's probably a UL, but it's sort-of-relevant anyway) that there's a bye-law that London taxis have to carry a bag of oats at all times, as an early animal-welfare regulation.
Certainly not. Grammatical and spelling errors should not be criticised or corrected in a forum like this. They disrupt the flow for no useful gain.
However, your post had perfect grammar and perfect spelling. The only slight thing wrong with it is that it meant something entirely different to what you intended. In this particular case, the meaning of "effect" makes so little sense that I could tell that you really meant "affect", but you cannot count on this always being the case if you do not learn the difference between the two words. In some contexts, the words are practically opposites.
He meant that each particular commercial UNIX "flavour" would only run on one or two architectures, and that moving from one hardware platform to another nearly always made you move from one flavour of UNIX to another. That's pretty clear if you read his next sentence.
This meant that a AIX running on an R6000 was different from Solaris running on a SPARC.
-- UNIX is a trademark of SCO. No, hang on, it isn't, is it?
And whats fair? There's no free trade. The US give large amounts of money to their own steel manufactures so they can compete with the EU
And this is controversial. It leads to arguments in GATT, possible trade wars, whatever. In principle, that sort of thing is generally agreed by governments to be a bad thing.
MS would be delighted to get this Asian software initiative considered to be the same kind of thing, but in fact it's not the same kind of thing at all, because this is the governments choosing domestic producers over foreign producers for government systems.
Slashdot Mirror
Mutating Linux to remove infringing code will not remove SCO's ability to take to court the distributors of any version of Linux which infringed, -past- or present.
Leaving aside the point, made elsewhere, that any such suit would be severely damaged by SCO's active refusal to attempt to mitigate the damage, have you noticed that SCO have made no move towards taking any Linux distributors to court. If they had a glimmer of a case, the distributors would be the obvious target.
I could say the exact same thing about all the drunk English people screaming at their kids and each othere I saw when I went on vacation to Spain
And you'd have a good point, if the topic was drunk holidaymakers. It's not particularly relevant to this lawsuit, though.
Is it now not allowed to notice certain cultural trends? England really does have a lot of people who get drunk and cause trouble on holiday in Spain. America really does have more lawyers than the rest of the world put together. Occasionally one or the other of these observations might be relevant to a slashdot discussion.
(Possibly the parent was making a bad comparison - he thought he was jumping to an unfair conclusion and didn't realise he was seeing a symptom of something which is common knowledge througout Europe)
If she can convince the court/jury in a civil trial that she paid her $30 to Kazaa in good faith for the product/service, expecting that she and her daughter could use it, then she should be able to beat the RIAA.
And that would be the worst possible result for the rest of us. That's throwing the responsibility for breaking the law off the individual and back onto the suppliers of general-purpose software tools. It would be game, set and match to the RIAA; even if they weren't able to go straight back to court and get Kazaa shut down, they would very likely get a law passed in short order banning all P2P because it forces poor 12-year-old girls to infringe copyrights.
The world can do without Kazaa, but we have to cling to the principle that responsibility for breaking the law lies with the individual who does it and not the technology they do it with, or we can wave goodbye to general-purpose computers within a decade.
I don't know about anybody else, but for me waiting for windows to start up is not usually caused by the PC having been powered down.
I'm sure I would have to boot windows just as often with this technology as I do now.
What's the range of 802.11b again?
You meant that Free Software is least likely to be affected.
Free Software is effected by programmers writing code and using free licenses. It is affected by many things, including slanderous press releases from dying companies.
This is not a "grammar flame". Correct grammar is not all that important. And only a complete troll would object to a "plagiarize" being spelled wrong. But if you're not sure of the difference between affecting and effecting, you probably mean affecting, and if you use effecting you might end up saying something totally different to what you meant.
This was a public service announcement
That's not to say I approve of filing suit against a preteen.
Well, do you? If not, why not?
When the RIAA were trying to shut down Napster, there were a lot of people saying "Hey, just because it can be used to infringe copyright doesn't mean it should be banned, there are other uses. If people are infringing your copyright, go after the people who are doing the infringing not the tools they use to do it."
Well, I agree, and that's what they're doing, and they're entitled. Since much of their product is aimed at preteens, the people doing the infringing are, to a large extent, preteens.
We have to concentrate our fire on where the RIAA's case is weak. Some examples:
If you want to abolish copyright, lobby your legislator, but that's a fringe campaign. If you want to defend the right to privacy and the right to make and use general-purpose tools, then arguing that 12-year-olds should be able to copy CD's with impunity is shooting yourself in the foot to a McBridian degree
The reason sites don't prevent deep linking is that firstly, they're incompetent and don't want to bother, and secondly, doing so would cause problems with some browsers (very old ones by now, and it's not something companies worry about as a rule.)
The reason they make progress legally is that the companies complaining, the lawyers, and the judges really don't have any idea how the technology works. It's just magic to them. If they ever think about it, and they most likely don't, they probably think that when you click on a link on a web page you're telling that web site to send you the information in a link. 30 seconds thought would tell them that's rubbish, but that's at least 28 seconds more than they give it.
It's just the same with people who complain about web sites setting cookies. They think it's something imposed on the user by the web site, they don't realise it's something the user is actively asking for via the browser. It's just some "magic spell" that the EVIL web site is casting on them.
I'm getting carried away now, but I'm wondering if reading the Malleus Maleficarum would give me an insight into popular attitutes to technology....
'ancient unix' isn't valid for commercial purposes even though it was licensed under a BSD license.
Oops, SCO OpenUnix or whatever they call it this week just lost the X Window system, developed by MIT and released under a BSD-like license. Darn, the TCP/IP support written at Berkely and released under a BSD license isn't valid for commercial purposes either.
There seems to be more of this open source stuff around than SCO are aware of...
Correction: no-one starts a capital project in order to lose their own money.
If there's "green" subsidy on offer, you can make yourself money by losing the taxpayers money
That's just a general point. Renewable energy projects tend to attract subsidies or tax breaks, but not in every case, and it doesn't mean they're automatically a bad idea.
Hey, pompous I'll take. I've been accused of being pompous by a Conservative MP, and I had to accept I was dealing with an expert.
I'm incurably curious as to what you thought was self-contradictory... s/They disrupt/Such corrections disrupt/ would remove an ambiguity in my first paragraph.
To summarise: if someone writes "there" when they mean "their", don't sweat it, it doesn't matter. If someone writes "up" when they mean "down", it's worth correcting them -- for one thing, they might point out they meant what they wrote, in which case you've cleared up a misunderstanding. Saying "effect" instead of "affect" is more like saying "up" instead of "down" than it is like mistyping a word or splitting an infinitive.
Example: "The planned redundancy program will not be affected by the new management team" == keep on sending those resumes out.
"The planned redundancy program will not be effected by the new management team" == It's all cancelled, your job's safe!
Just because "horseless carriage" is anachronistic doesn't mean we shouldn't regulate cars, for example.
I've read (and it's probably a UL, but it's sort-of-relevant anyway) that there's a bye-law that London taxis have to carry a bag of oats at all times, as an early animal-welfare regulation.
Certainly not. Grammatical and spelling errors should not be criticised or corrected in a forum like this. They disrupt the flow for no useful gain.
However, your post had perfect grammar and perfect spelling. The only slight thing wrong with it is that it meant something entirely different to what you intended. In this particular case, the meaning of "effect" makes so little sense that I could tell that you really meant "affect", but you cannot count on this always being the case if you do not learn the difference between the two words. In some contexts, the words are practically opposites.
So, (-1, Meaning error)
There really should be a moderator option for this.
He meant that each particular commercial UNIX "flavour" would only run on one or two architectures, and that moving from one hardware platform to another nearly always made you move from one flavour of UNIX to another. That's pretty clear if you read his next sentence.
--UNIX is a trademark of SCO. No, hang on, it isn't, is it?
Any better suggestions anyone?
And whats fair? There's no free trade. The US give large amounts of money to their own steel manufactures so they can compete with the EU
And this is controversial. It leads to arguments in GATT, possible trade wars, whatever. In principle, that sort of thing is generally agreed by governments to be a bad thing.
MS would be delighted to get this Asian software initiative considered to be the same kind of thing, but in fact it's not the same kind of thing at all, because this is the governments choosing domestic producers over foreign producers for government systems.
So would it be "unfair" for, say, the Pentagon to announce it wanted to use software developed in the USA in preference to overseas products?