A large proportion of spam IS illegal -- Ponzi schemes, "miracle" drugs that don't work, Nigerian bank scams, attempts at stock pump-n-dump, off-shore internet gambling, copyright infringement, importing pharmaceuticals, and other miscellaneous fraudulent activities. That's because most of these can't be advertised legitimately.
Commerce *is* subjected to regulation, you know...
It looks like Morrison and Foerster is suing on its own behalf rather than some other party, and that the spammer had continued to spam even after being warned.
Oops. So when can we expect a) spammers filtering to avoid spamming law firms, and b) law firms offering e-mail aliasing to avoid the spammers?:)
I think that you two agree, actually -- I read the thread starter's last sentence as a criticism of TechTV given that what he listed (news meant to make you BUY BUY BUY) might instead be referred to as "marketing".
Incomplete solution. Some software packages include their *own*, possibly tweaked, versions of zlib, so even creating a new static library and recompiling won't work with those -- you'd need to edit the source of every package that has its own private version, as well.
So unless he's done THAT, or every maintainer of every package he uses is on the ball, he can't really be sure.
Quite a few people can, at universities and other sites. They just need to sign NDAs, that's all. Also, given that they take several hundred interns per year, and they aren't all fanatical Gates fans, there's a fair bit of opportunity for internal leaks as well.
Human soldiers don't suddenly get stupid if you cut off communcations. If you use, say, 'bots, either they're autonomous in which case you have to be VERY good and VERY careful programming them -- I'm guessing that battlefield situational analysis is *hard*, especially in, say, urban environs where innocent civvies are involved -- or they're remote-control, in which case there's potential for jamming or disabling.
Some console game companies may be doing well. But PC? What about Interplay, or Sir-Tech? Note that Sir-Tech specifically had trouble collecting payments from overseas distributors -- folks who basically *were* pirating for money, because they weren't paying.
Microprose, SimTex, Broderbund, Atomic Games, Strategic Simulations Inc, Spectrum Holobyte... there are a lot of names you don't see that often anymore in that industry. I'm not saying piracy killed them, but the industry has had a fair number of casualties, so are they really thriving?
*shrug*
(Honest question, actually. I don't know that much about the financials of the companies that are still in the game.)
Bull. Take apart your car. You can break it down into components, and you can verify how much of it works -- at a large scale, anyway. You can even replace the engine or make other significant modifications.
Yet, the car manufacturers are still liable if they screwed you over badly, by, say, having utterly unreliable engines -- even though you COULD possibly fix it yourself.
And there are many small companies that do have potential liabilities without needing to retain lawyers. Generally, it helps if they're more competent than, say, incompetent programmers.
But a lot of serious bugs do come from developer incompetence or carelessness, not compatibility issues. Look at Sendmail, for instance -- it has a long, long history of bugs, and most of them involve *just* Sendmail and aren't terribly configuration specific. Ditto for IIS bugs -- many of them are built-in.
Things like buffer overflows are bad, period. There's extremely few reasons to, say, wantonly accept user input without checking length -- that's rammed into the head of beginning programming students, for cryin' out loud. "Handle border cases", we scream at them. "Don't trust the client" is another common refrain for server-client systems. Many issues come from when programmers just apparently don't give a damn about doing the right thing. "Don't ship with hard-coded back-door passwords" is another common-sense example.
Most of that has NOTHING TO DO with system requirements, and EVERYTHING to do with not coding carefully. It's not like, gee, whoops, your code randomly mutates and develops security flaws ON ITS OWN.
So it's perfectly acceptable for Red Hat to supply a daemon that gradually eats all acceptable filehandles, or for a buggy filesystem driver to destroy somebody's data?
Cute. That's like saying that, just because you *could* examine and rebuild your car transmission yourself, it's perfectly fine for it to burst into flame with high probability on warm days.
Here's the problem, 'tho -- what if the only market for a product cannot afford it? For instance, there aren't that many wealthy nations that have had large outbreaks of sleeping sickness. The medicine for that, therefore, tends to be very rarely produced, if ever, because those who need it can't pay for it on their own and those who can pay for it, generally don't need it.
In that case, the "charge the wealthier more" model doesn't apply, and you're basically stuck at...
a) Exemption from IP law. ISTR that there are actually some treaty provisions in which protections for pharmaceuticals can be waived under very limited circumstances, but I could be merely imagining things...
b) Public funding, which, yes, might drive up the price a bit, unless price controls are imposed.
c) Private funding, which might have the same effect.
d) Local companies ignoring IP law and reverse-engineering the drugs anyway. This happens to some degree already -- the pharmaceutical companies know that being too zealous enforcers might count for bad press.
e) Locals get screwed. This also happens a great deal today.
...including not just public funding, but also private philanthropists. If memory serves, one of the main focuses of the Gates Foundation happens to be immunizations in the Third World. I don't know whether it's negotiated any terms with drug companies regarding drugs that would otherwise be economically non-viable, however.
Re:Stealing other countrys ideas
on
Patent Nonsense
·
· Score: 1
Intellectual property treaties. WIPO isn't exactly just a forum for wining and dining, after all.
Kills the motivation for innovation? Not really -- after all, it won't stop somebody else from making your idea obsolete if they come up with something better, which means that simply resting on your laurels is a Bad Idea; and if there aren't patents at all, it might be a lot cheaper to simply sit back, wait for others to spend millions or billions on research, and then to reverse-engineer what they've done and mass-produce it.
There's a difference between taxing the income based upon the property, and the property itself.
They already have the power to tax income from intellectual property in terms of taxing corporate revenue; IP isn't special in that way.
However, taxing IP *as an asset* is tricky because of the difficulty of assessing it. What is the fair value of the copyright of Microsoft Windows 2000, for instance? One can assign a cost of a *license*, but that's not the same thing. That particular copyright hasn't been up for grabs for a while, so establishing a fair market value would be incredibly difficult.
In some areas, like Allegheny County (PA/USA) there's enough trouble assessing *land*, which does trade hands sufficiently often at a variety of levels so that in theory assessors could do a half-decent job of estimating how much people's property is worth. It's the source of perpetual local complaining regarding who got screwed over and who didn't.
From a cracker's POV, I doubt they care that much about *all* web sites. If I were on that side of the fence, I'd be focusing on the ones with juicy credit card databases and so forth -- in other words, the big e-commerce sites, like online vendors, transaction processors and so forth. How many of those run Apache? 60%? More? Less?
Slashdot Mirror
A large proportion of spam IS illegal -- Ponzi schemes, "miracle" drugs that don't work, Nigerian bank scams, attempts at stock pump-n-dump, off-shore internet gambling, copyright infringement, importing pharmaceuticals, and other miscellaneous fraudulent activities. That's because most of these can't be advertised legitimately.
Commerce *is* subjected to regulation, you know...
It looks like Morrison and Foerster is suing on its own behalf rather than some other party, and that the spammer had continued to spam even after being warned.
:)
Oops. So when can we expect a) spammers filtering to avoid spamming law firms, and b) law firms offering e-mail aliasing to avoid the spammers?
I think that you two agree, actually -- I read the thread starter's last sentence as a criticism of TechTV given that what he listed (news meant to make you BUY BUY BUY) might instead be referred to as "marketing".
Or, "big iron"...
Incomplete solution. Some software packages include their *own*, possibly tweaked, versions of zlib, so even creating a new static library and recompiling won't work with those -- you'd need to edit the source of every package that has its own private version, as well.
So unless he's done THAT, or every maintainer of every package he uses is on the ball, he can't really be sure.
Interesting. ISTR that the LGPL was originally for that purpose -- to allow you to link with GPL'd code without needing to GPL/LGPL your own code.
Quite a few people can, at universities and other sites. They just need to sign NDAs, that's all. Also, given that they take several hundred interns per year, and they aren't all fanatical Gates fans, there's a fair bit of opportunity for internal leaks as well.
Human soldiers don't suddenly get stupid if you cut off communcations. If you use, say, 'bots, either they're autonomous in which case you have to be VERY good and VERY careful programming them -- I'm guessing that battlefield situational analysis is *hard*, especially in, say, urban environs where innocent civvies are involved -- or they're remote-control, in which case there's potential for jamming or disabling.
I suspect that those currently fighting in Afghanistan would disagree with you. Air can't do it all -- not even close.
Some console game companies may be doing well. But PC? What about Interplay, or Sir-Tech? Note that Sir-Tech specifically had trouble collecting payments from overseas distributors -- folks who basically *were* pirating for money, because they weren't paying.
Microprose, SimTex, Broderbund, Atomic Games, Strategic Simulations Inc, Spectrum Holobyte... there are a lot of names you don't see that often anymore in that industry. I'm not saying piracy killed them, but the industry has had a fair number of casualties, so are they really thriving?
*shrug*
(Honest question, actually. I don't know that much about the financials of the companies that are still in the game.)
Aside from that, I don't think Mr. Grove would appreciate the government making *any* requirements on how Intel designs its chips, DRM or no.
Bull. Take apart your car. You can break it down into components, and you can verify how much of it works -- at a large scale, anyway. You can even replace the engine or make other significant modifications.
Yet, the car manufacturers are still liable if they screwed you over badly, by, say, having utterly unreliable engines -- even though you COULD possibly fix it yourself.
And there are many small companies that do have potential liabilities without needing to retain lawyers. Generally, it helps if they're more competent than, say, incompetent programmers.
Then you have zero right to use the software.
But a lot of serious bugs do come from developer incompetence or carelessness, not compatibility issues. Look at Sendmail, for instance -- it has a long, long history of bugs, and most of them involve *just* Sendmail and aren't terribly configuration specific. Ditto for IIS bugs -- many of them are built-in.
Things like buffer overflows are bad, period. There's extremely few reasons to, say, wantonly accept user input without checking length -- that's rammed into the head of beginning programming students, for cryin' out loud. "Handle border cases", we scream at them. "Don't trust the client" is another common refrain for server-client systems. Many issues come from when programmers just apparently don't give a damn about doing the right thing. "Don't ship with hard-coded back-door passwords" is another common-sense example.
Most of that has NOTHING TO DO with system requirements, and EVERYTHING to do with not coding carefully. It's not like, gee, whoops, your code randomly mutates and develops security flaws ON ITS OWN.
So it's perfectly acceptable for Red Hat to supply a daemon that gradually eats all acceptable filehandles, or for a buggy filesystem driver to destroy somebody's data?
Cute. That's like saying that, just because you *could* examine and rebuild your car transmission yourself, it's perfectly fine for it to burst into flame with high probability on warm days.
*shrug*
It's their money. If they believe that they can afford to work on it, why not?
Real DBMS software tends to have very heavy-duty logging and recovery systems, compared to filesystems that only log metadata and so forth.
Bogus comment. It's perfectly comprehensible -- although Ballmer's answer could have been simplified to, "We hope not."
Here's the problem, 'tho -- what if the only market for a product cannot afford it? For instance, there aren't that many wealthy nations that have had large outbreaks of sleeping sickness. The medicine for that, therefore, tends to be very rarely produced, if ever, because those who need it can't pay for it on their own and those who can pay for it, generally don't need it.
In that case, the "charge the wealthier more" model doesn't apply, and you're basically stuck at...
a) Exemption from IP law. ISTR that there are actually some treaty provisions in which protections for pharmaceuticals can be waived under very limited circumstances, but I could be merely imagining things...
b) Public funding, which, yes, might drive up the price a bit, unless price controls are imposed.
c) Private funding, which might have the same effect.
d) Local companies ignoring IP law and reverse-engineering the drugs anyway. This happens to some degree already -- the pharmaceutical companies know that being too zealous enforcers might count for bad press.
e) Locals get screwed. This also happens a great deal today.
...including not just public funding, but also private philanthropists. If memory serves, one of the main focuses of the Gates Foundation happens to be immunizations in the Third World. I don't know whether it's negotiated any terms with drug companies regarding drugs that would otherwise be economically non-viable, however.
Intellectual property treaties. WIPO isn't exactly just a forum for wining and dining, after all.
Kills the motivation for innovation? Not really -- after all, it won't stop somebody else from making your idea obsolete if they come up with something better, which means that simply resting on your laurels is a Bad Idea; and if there aren't patents at all, it might be a lot cheaper to simply sit back, wait for others to spend millions or billions on research, and then to reverse-engineer what they've done and mass-produce it.
There's a difference between taxing the income based upon the property, and the property itself.
They already have the power to tax income from intellectual property in terms of taxing corporate revenue; IP isn't special in that way.
However, taxing IP *as an asset* is tricky because of the difficulty of assessing it. What is the fair value of the copyright of Microsoft Windows 2000, for instance? One can assign a cost of a *license*, but that's not the same thing. That particular copyright hasn't been up for grabs for a while, so establishing a fair market value would be incredibly difficult.
In some areas, like Allegheny County (PA/USA) there's enough trouble assessing *land*, which does trade hands sufficiently often at a variety of levels so that in theory assessors could do a half-decent job of estimating how much people's property is worth. It's the source of perpetual local complaining regarding who got screwed over and who didn't.
From a cracker's POV, I doubt they care that much about *all* web sites. If I were on that side of the fence, I'd be focusing on the ones with juicy credit card databases and so forth -- in other words, the big e-commerce sites, like online vendors, transaction processors and so forth. How many of those run Apache? 60%? More? Less?
*sigh*
:), he'd probably have gotten a +1 Funny instead of a -1 Flamebait.
If he'd been inane enough to include a