Of course, since SuSE seems to try to ship versions of every package they can find, to the point where they really take advantage of a DVD's capacity, it's not really surprising that they find themselves offering a lot of patches.
Temporary suspension for a first offense -- enough to get their attention.
Ban for the semester or the academic year for a re-offense. If they whine about needing the network, direct them to the public computers which are presumably locked down to the point where even idiots should have some trouble spreading their idiocy, and which should have sufficient software for academic purposes -- e.g. word processing, typesetting, compilers, graphing, et al. No exceptions just 'cause their parents are rich and spoil 'em silly.
Generally speaking, it's extremely likely that your school's network TOS prohibits assorted forms of abuse of the network. Participating in DOSing the network should certainly qualify, even if by gross negligence, especially when caused by willful ignorance.
The article actually specifies a few tests. One test involved the segmentation of pi's digits (10-digit chunks), and interpreting consecutive triples of these distances as points in 3-dimensional space. The experimenters then considered the distribution of the magnitudes of these vectors against a particular idealized distribution which is presumably that of independent digits and coordinates. This short bit does not specify how they compared distributions, but there are a number of statistical tests that may apply.
So here it's not a question of "is pi random", but "how likely is it that the decimal digits of pi, interpreted in a specific and arbitrary fashion, could arise from a specific distribution which likely presumes independent identically-distributed digits?"
In terms of randomness, it's a symbol string, and an infinite one at that. In theory one could measure the Kolmogorov complexity (sometimes expressed as the shortest possible length of two parts: the string necessary for a Universal Turing Machine to function as a specific TM, defining the 'model'; and the string that provides instructions for this particular instance, e.g. model parameters/data). A more 'random' string should be less easily predictable and require more symbols for the UTM to replicate it, compared to a string that can be represented by few parameters.
Of course, there's the slight problems that (a) the choice of UTM does matter, and (b) it's incomputable in the general case.
Law & Order? I've been wondering when NBC will just rename itself the "Law & Order" network given how many versions they've been running simultaneously... now that's saturation.
Personally, I wouldn't mind seeing more dystopian futurism instead. John Brunner's "Stand on Zanzibar" offers a nice backdrop, perhaps.
Have a look at DSLR prices, and the cost of lenses. While they're not yet ubiquitious, they ARE selling pretty well -- at about a grand apiece for a cheap body, and a very wide or telephoto lens can easily set you back a couple of thousand. A tripod and head to hold it all can cost several hundred more, if you want to go carbon fiber. It's a fairly expensive hobby if you want to shoot something that you can't shoot well with a (generally much cheaper) portrait lens.
Compared to that, Photoshop is a small expense. There's your potential market.
Although actually JASC (well, now Corel) might have even more reason to complain -- as a much less expensive competitor, if Photoshop couldn't be readily had for free, JASC might be scooping up sales instead.
In a really extreme case, it can become a criminal matter. There's the No Electronic Theft Act, which elevates things into that sphere if the value of the infringement material within a certain time period exceeds a (fairly large) threshold, IIRC. And there have been murmurings about criminalizing the leaking of of unreleased media, I believe.
Also, civil and criminal proceedings are not mutually exclusive. Ask OJ about the wrongful-death suit sometime.
There's a concept called contributory copyright infringement that could likely nail the downloader.
There are two reasons why they're not being sued en masse, however.
One is that as a practical matter, it's far harder to track a downloader than it is to find a server that's offering files. A file request can be used to find servers, but to find a downloader you'd need pretty broad eavesdropping or to lure a downloader to one of your servers.
The second is that the spokes can't do anything without the hubs. Scare people into not offering copyrighted materials online, and it won't matter how many people are trying to download.
If I buy a Canon 350D or other mass-market digital SLR, and a lens or two, I'm already spending enough money that would make me an obvious potential customer for Photoshop CS -- plus it's a product that would actually be very useful for me. Even owners of cheaper cameras sometimes spend considerable time post-processing. *shrug*
For the slightly less serious, Adobe offers PS Elements.
Reviewers generally don't perform unauthorized releases. Therefore, their impact is not normally actionable barring, say, libel. If a reviewer *did* libel a film, it'd be a safe bet that any measureable drop in sales would be seized upon for justification for a larger sanction.
An unauthorized redistribution with potentially very significant damages, however, is a different kettle of fish. And damages do tend to get considered in civil suits, so they do matter.
all they are losing is money that they could have made, in theory
That's still hurting them directly, when it happens. For a more concrete but non-filesharing example, if a stockbroker executes a market-sell order with an unusually wide gap between the selling price and the buying price, and pockets the difference, that's costing the seller money "that he could have made". And it's a very real loss -- one that is tolerated in small amounts, as part of the broker's ordinary compensation, but not one that is supposed to be very large.
If "Random Blockbuster-Wannabee with No Plot or Acting" movie were leaked, people download it, and word-of-mouth spreads that sitting through it is worse than catching herpes from an morbidly-obese partner with deadly body odor so that many people that would have risked buying tickets movie-unseen decide not to, that's real damage.
It's arguably deserved damage from a moral point of view that the studio shouldn't have elected to release such garbage, but that doesn't mean that the courts would ignore the legal argument that real damage was done by reducing potential sales Sales that rely on unsuspecting customers are still sales, and the lack of them still reduces revenue.
It looks like it's an industry group doing the random selection, not the authorities. Well, they may be the same if it's a state-owned or influenced enterprise, but I'm not assuming that. *shrug*
The industry group is under no obligation to be remotely fair in who it sues, I would think. And, if it can get a similar effect (scaring a certain fraction of the intended audience) while paying its attorneys for fewer hours on fewer defendants, it would make financial sense to do so.
Well, they could always impose a sentence to trumpet it to the world about how they're serious about stamping out copyright infringement, even on foreign-owned material, and then reduce the sentence when the reporters stop covering the case. Oh, and warn the victim not to go talking about it to the press, either.
This fellow may have been selected to serve as an example, but it's not necessarily for the benefit of the domestic audience.
Depends where you are, perhaps. In the United States, I'd say -- almost certainly not, for two main reasons:
(1) The person offering it on BitTorrent is probably not authorized to distribute (or else you wouldn't be asking *shrug*) so you're risking accusations of contributory copyright infringement. The downloads don't happen by themselves, and it takes two to tango.
(2) I don't think there's a positive right to a replacement by such means. You may have the right to make a backup of your own DVD's contents for archival purposes, subject to DMCA-related restrictions, but it's not a blanket right to get copies by any means that you see fit.
Bear in mind that this story relates to China. There, it's whether the authorities bother to charge you that matters, not whether you're innocent or guilty. Proof of innocence is less important than having the luck to not be a pawn sacrificed to reduce China's image as an infringement-happy country.
Congress has a lot of sway over issues that could potentially affect Microsoft's profitability.
For instance, if Congress got all worked up and zealously legislated all sorts of privacy legislation regarding tracking cookies and data sharing, it might influence what Microsoft or its competitors do or would do.
Likewise, they're probably interested in future employees (or candidates, really) having decent education, at least when it comes to mathematics and problem-solving -- they're an information-based, technological company and it's better for Microsoft to be able to choose from a pool of technologically skilled people rather than having to perform massive on-the-job training.
Touch employment-related visas, or how a company can treat long-term contract workers, and likewise it'll affect what Microsoft and the rest of the industry can do.
Or if Congress decided to legislate on how current search engines sell ads based on other entity's trademarks... obviously, as this would have a huge potential impact on the search-engine business in which Microsoft has some interest, you'd expect them to try to have their say.
They weren't always busy in Washington, but if the Federal government legislates in ways that would affect them it only makes sense for them to try to have their say. It's not really affecting Microsoft much, however, whether other companies can discriminate against homosexuals. Hence, unless its shareholders specifically push for this through introducing and approving resolutions, they really have little reason to lobby on this issue.
Read: it's an admission that current and previous versions of Microsoft Windows are complicated to the point that the user may have to fiddle with things, rather than just plugging in things and watching them "just work". Ideally, users wouldn't have to track down updated drivers or worry whether nVidia Destructronihilator Driver v. 6.234WHQLFOOBARILLUMINATI breaks -this- game while being the only version that -that- game works well with but can work with a third game provided tha a certain OpenGL optimization option is disabled.
Things don't "just work" as often as users would like; they may work well, with effort, but it would be a reasonable selling point if one could minimize the necessary effort.
A symbolic link is/not/ a file in more than one directory; it's a file (or inode entry, rather; directories included) in one directory, with pointers to it from other directories. If you delete the master copy the others point to, it no longer exists at all but the pointers remain.
A hard link is a file in more than one directory, and is treated *exactly* as a file in all of those directories, whereas a symbolic link may nor may not be treated as the file (e.g. 'tar' can be set to dereference the symlink... or not.) They're limited to being within the same filesystem, however.
Perhaps I'm just insane, but I'd wonder whether LaTeX would be useful for the students.
Not the administrators, not the business types... but for those students who expect to go to colleges where reasonably high-quality papers rife with structure and citations are the norm, or who will be taking just about any course involving numerous equations, the beauty of being able to type something like
or to do automatic numbering of figures, tables \ref{tab:ooga_booga} and references \cite{it_is_really_that_easy} will probably save a lot of head-banging-on-wall time. It's a hell of a lot faster than working with Word's Equation Editor or FrameMaker, both of which I had the intensely wonderful time using until I bothered to learn TeX.
And it lets people use their favorite text editor, while standard packages and classes such as 'book' mean less fiddling with custom margins or other non-meat-and-potatoes deals.
"Before it constitutes distribution, there must be a positive act by the owner of the shared directory, such as sending out the copies or advertising that they are available for copying."
Isn't this a fundamental part of file distribution? Even in a decentralized model where nobody tracks who's offering what ("advertising that they are available for copying") the server, before sending a file, presumably must have positively and actively responded to a request for the file ("I have what you're looking to copy"). Wouldn't this constitute a positive act? Unless the downloader is actively exploiting unintended behavior of the servers and searching each one individually without their participation, e.g. through security violations, it's rather different from merely walking by and seeing that a book is near a copying machine. The P2P server's sharing is used with the intent to let people download that particular content, not just to provide random functionality which the end user might consider to include duplication; a library's primary service is not providing books for duplication and therefore is a very different case.
Futhermore, given the likelihood that the majority of P2P users are/not/ Canadian (well, except on private networks?) is there a really a reasonable presumption that the downloader -is- Canadian and therefore allowed to download?
The Court had its reasons, but I find the rationale rather odd.
It may not be necessary for every case, but that doesn't mean that well-funded marketing and distribution isn't a powerful advantage in general.
Witness something like "American Idol", which is a series that basically *is* about the marketing of singers (and the international-scale humiliation of pathetic tone-deaf wannabes, at least judging from previews talking about the worst the show has to offer -- I don't watch, myself). Even a *loser* on that show has parlayed his "fame" into movie deals, IIRC.
Actually, for me -- and probably others -- it IS the bookselling portion that makes Amazon important.
It's a hell of a lot faster to search their database than to trawl a series of local bookstores when searching for a relatively obscure volume, especially if it's long out-of-print or an unpopular import. A brick-and-mortar store can't afford to stock every obscure volume on its shelves, and if both the store and Amazon would have to search for a while and ship it to me there's little reason for me to make the trip to the store.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, if you add it up, SuSE might take the cake for sheer volume.
e.g. patches for SuSE Linux 9.3 x86
It's a long list considering that the distribution release isn't that old. In fact, all those updates seem to be from last month.
Even if you just look at security issues, well, SuSE Linux has its share.
SuSE Linux security advisories (since '92)
Of course, since SuSE seems to try to ship versions of every package they can find, to the point where they really take advantage of a DVD's capacity, it's not really surprising that they find themselves offering a lot of patches.
Closer in geography, try Mao's Red Guards -- although Scouts are probably a bit younger.
Temporary suspension for a first offense -- enough to get their attention.
Ban for the semester or the academic year for a re-offense. If they whine about needing the network, direct them to the public computers which are presumably locked down to the point where even idiots should have some trouble spreading their idiocy, and which should have sufficient software for academic purposes -- e.g. word processing, typesetting, compilers, graphing, et al. No exceptions just 'cause their parents are rich and spoil 'em silly.
Generally speaking, it's extremely likely that your school's network TOS prohibits assorted forms of abuse of the network. Participating in DOSing the network should certainly qualify, even if by gross negligence, especially when caused by willful ignorance.
*shrug*
One can precisely compute arbitrary digits in pi, it seems -- given awareness that it's pi, because it's a constant and not a random process.
The article actually specifies a few tests. One test involved the segmentation of pi's digits (10-digit chunks), and interpreting consecutive triples of these distances as points in 3-dimensional space. The experimenters then considered the distribution of the magnitudes of these vectors against a particular idealized distribution which is presumably that of independent digits and coordinates. This short bit does not specify how they compared distributions, but there are a number of statistical tests that may apply.
So here it's not a question of "is pi random", but "how likely is it that the decimal digits of pi, interpreted in a specific and arbitrary fashion, could arise from a specific distribution which likely presumes independent identically-distributed digits?"
In terms of randomness, it's a symbol string, and an infinite one at that. In theory one could measure the Kolmogorov complexity (sometimes expressed as the shortest possible length of two parts: the string necessary for a Universal Turing Machine to function as a specific TM, defining the 'model'; and the string that provides instructions for this particular instance, e.g. model parameters/data). A more 'random' string should be less easily predictable and require more symbols for the UTM to replicate it, compared to a string that can be represented by few parameters.
Of course, there's the slight problems that (a) the choice of UTM does matter, and (b) it's incomputable in the general case.
Law & Order? I've been wondering when NBC will just rename itself the "Law & Order" network given how many versions they've been running simultaneously... now that's saturation.
Personally, I wouldn't mind seeing more dystopian futurism instead. John Brunner's "Stand on Zanzibar" offers a nice backdrop, perhaps.
The burden of proof for a civil action is considerably lower than that for a criminal prosecution. Consequences can still be pretty ugly, however.
Have a look at DSLR prices, and the cost of lenses. While they're not yet ubiquitious, they ARE selling pretty well -- at about a grand apiece for a cheap body, and a very wide or telephoto lens can easily set you back a couple of thousand. A tripod and head to hold it all can cost several hundred more, if you want to go carbon fiber. It's a fairly expensive hobby if you want to shoot something that you can't shoot well with a (generally much cheaper) portrait lens.
Compared to that, Photoshop is a small expense. There's your potential market.
Although actually JASC (well, now Corel) might have even more reason to complain -- as a much less expensive competitor, if Photoshop couldn't be readily had for free, JASC might be scooping up sales instead.
*shrug*
In a really extreme case, it can become a criminal matter. There's the No Electronic Theft Act, which elevates things into that sphere if the value of the infringement material within a certain time period exceeds a (fairly large) threshold, IIRC. And there have been murmurings about criminalizing the leaking of of unreleased media, I believe.
Also, civil and criminal proceedings are not mutually exclusive. Ask OJ about the wrongful-death suit sometime.
It doesn't change points of law, and the court can award court costs to the winner if it chooses.
I think it's a boxing reference, actually; doesn't throwing in the towel signify yielding?
There's a concept called contributory copyright infringement that could likely nail the downloader.
There are two reasons why they're not being sued en masse, however.
One is that as a practical matter, it's far harder to track a downloader than it is to find a server that's offering files. A file request can be used to find servers, but to find a downloader you'd need pretty broad eavesdropping or to lure a downloader to one of your servers.
The second is that the spokes can't do anything without the hubs. Scare people into not offering copyrighted materials online, and it won't matter how many people are trying to download.
Visit a digital photography forum.
If I buy a Canon 350D or other mass-market digital SLR, and a lens or two, I'm already spending enough money that would make me an obvious potential customer for Photoshop CS -- plus it's a product that would actually be very useful for me. Even owners of cheaper cameras sometimes spend considerable time post-processing. *shrug*
For the slightly less serious, Adobe offers PS Elements.
Reviewers generally don't perform unauthorized releases. Therefore, their impact is not normally actionable barring, say, libel. If a reviewer *did* libel a film, it'd be a safe bet that any measureable drop in sales would be seized upon for justification for a larger sanction.
An unauthorized redistribution with potentially very significant damages, however, is a different kettle of fish. And damages do tend to get considered in civil suits, so they do matter.
all they are losing is money that they could have made, in theory
That's still hurting them directly, when it happens. For a more concrete but non-filesharing example, if a stockbroker executes a market-sell order with an unusually wide gap between the selling price and the buying price, and pockets the difference, that's costing the seller money "that he could have made". And it's a very real loss -- one that is tolerated in small amounts, as part of the broker's ordinary compensation, but not one that is supposed to be very large.
If "Random Blockbuster-Wannabee with No Plot or Acting" movie were leaked, people download it, and word-of-mouth spreads that sitting through it is worse than catching herpes from an morbidly-obese partner with deadly body odor so that many people that would have risked buying tickets movie-unseen decide not to, that's real damage.
It's arguably deserved damage from a moral point of view that the studio shouldn't have elected to release such garbage, but that doesn't mean that the courts would ignore the legal argument that real damage was done by reducing potential sales Sales that rely on unsuspecting customers are still sales, and the lack of them still reduces revenue.
It looks like it's an industry group doing the random selection, not the authorities. Well, they may be the same if it's a state-owned or influenced enterprise, but I'm not assuming that. *shrug*
The industry group is under no obligation to be remotely fair in who it sues, I would think. And, if it can get a similar effect (scaring a certain fraction of the intended audience) while paying its attorneys for fewer hours on fewer defendants, it would make financial sense to do so.
Well, they could always impose a sentence to trumpet it to the world about how they're serious about stamping out copyright infringement, even on foreign-owned material, and then reduce the sentence when the reporters stop covering the case. Oh, and warn the victim not to go talking about it to the press, either.
This fellow may have been selected to serve as an example, but it's not necessarily for the benefit of the domestic audience.
Depends where you are, perhaps. In the United States, I'd say -- almost certainly not, for two main reasons:
(1) The person offering it on BitTorrent is probably not authorized to distribute (or else you wouldn't be asking *shrug*) so you're risking accusations of contributory copyright infringement. The downloads don't happen by themselves, and it takes two to tango.
(2) I don't think there's a positive right to a replacement by such means. You may have the right to make a backup of your own DVD's contents for archival purposes, subject to DMCA-related restrictions, but it's not a blanket right to get copies by any means that you see fit.
Bear in mind that this story relates to China. There, it's whether the authorities bother to charge you that matters, not whether you're innocent or guilty. Proof of innocence is less important than having the luck to not be a pawn sacrificed to reduce China's image as an infringement-happy country.
Congress has a lot of sway over issues that could potentially affect Microsoft's profitability.
For instance, if Congress got all worked up and zealously legislated all sorts of privacy legislation regarding tracking cookies and data sharing, it might influence what Microsoft or its competitors do or would do.
Likewise, they're probably interested in future employees (or candidates, really) having decent education, at least when it comes to mathematics and problem-solving -- they're an information-based, technological company and it's better for Microsoft to be able to choose from a pool of technologically skilled people rather than having to perform massive on-the-job training.
Touch employment-related visas, or how a company can treat long-term contract workers, and likewise it'll affect what Microsoft and the rest of the industry can do.
Or if Congress decided to legislate on how current search engines sell ads based on other entity's trademarks... obviously, as this would have a huge potential impact on the search-engine business in which Microsoft has some interest, you'd expect them to try to have their say.
They weren't always busy in Washington, but if the Federal government legislates in ways that would affect them it only makes sense for them to try to have their say. It's not really affecting Microsoft much, however, whether other companies can discriminate against homosexuals. Hence, unless its shareholders specifically push for this through introducing and approving resolutions, they really have little reason to lobby on this issue.
The implication is that it doesn't "just work".
Read: it's an admission that current and previous versions of Microsoft Windows are complicated to the point that the user may have to fiddle with things, rather than just plugging in things and watching them "just work". Ideally, users wouldn't have to track down updated drivers or worry whether nVidia Destructronihilator Driver v. 6.234WHQLFOOBARILLUMINATI breaks -this- game while being the only version that -that- game works well with but can work with a third game provided tha a certain OpenGL optimization option is disabled.
Things don't "just work" as often as users would like; they may work well, with effort, but it would be a reasonable selling point if one could minimize the necessary effort.
Nitpicking, but no; it's ln -f, not ln -sf.
/not/ a file in more than one directory; it's a file (or inode entry, rather; directories included) in one directory, with pointers to it from other directories. If you delete the master copy the others point to, it no longer exists at all but the pointers remain.
A symbolic link is
A hard link is a file in more than one directory, and is treated *exactly* as a file in all of those directories, whereas a symbolic link may nor may not be treated as the file (e.g. 'tar' can be set to dereference the symlink... or not.) They're limited to being within the same filesystem, however.
Perhaps I'm just insane, but I'd wonder whether LaTeX would be useful for the students.
Not the administrators, not the business types... but for those students who expect to go to colleges where reasonably high-quality papers rife with structure and citations are the norm, or who will be taking just about any course involving numerous equations, the beauty of being able to type something like
$y = \sum_{i=1}^{\infty} \sqrt{\frac{\log a}{\partial b}}$
or to do automatic numbering of figures, tables \ref{tab:ooga_booga} and references \cite{it_is_really_that_easy} will probably save a lot of head-banging-on-wall time. It's a hell of a lot faster than working with Word's Equation Editor or FrameMaker, both of which I had the intensely wonderful time using until I bothered to learn TeX.
And it lets people use their favorite text editor, while standard packages and classes such as 'book' mean less fiddling with custom margins or other non-meat-and-potatoes deals.
Very strange.
/not/ Canadian (well, except on private networks?) is there a really a reasonable presumption that the downloader -is- Canadian and therefore allowed to download?
"Before it constitutes distribution, there must be a positive act by the owner of the shared directory, such as sending out the copies or advertising that they are available for copying."
Isn't this a fundamental part of file distribution? Even in a decentralized model where nobody tracks who's offering what ("advertising that they are available for copying") the server, before sending a file, presumably must have positively and actively responded to a request for the file ("I have what you're looking to copy"). Wouldn't this constitute a positive act? Unless the downloader is actively exploiting unintended behavior of the servers and searching each one individually without their participation, e.g. through security violations, it's rather different from merely walking by and seeing that a book is near a copying machine. The P2P server's sharing is used with the intent to let people download that particular content, not just to provide random functionality which the end user might consider to include duplication; a library's primary service is not providing books for duplication and therefore is a very different case.
Futhermore, given the likelihood that the majority of P2P users are
The Court had its reasons, but I find the rationale rather odd.
It may not be necessary for every case, but that doesn't mean that well-funded marketing and distribution isn't a powerful advantage in general.
Witness something like "American Idol", which is a series that basically *is* about the marketing of singers (and the international-scale humiliation of pathetic tone-deaf wannabes, at least judging from previews talking about the worst the show has to offer -- I don't watch, myself). Even a *loser* on that show has parlayed his "fame" into movie deals, IIRC.
Actually, for me -- and probably others -- it IS the bookselling portion that makes Amazon important.
It's a hell of a lot faster to search their database than to trawl a series of local bookstores when searching for a relatively obscure volume, especially if it's long out-of-print or an unpopular import. A brick-and-mortar store can't afford to stock every obscure volume on its shelves, and if both the store and Amazon would have to search for a while and ship it to me there's little reason for me to make the trip to the store.