I'm not a GNU fanboy, but the GPL works wonderfully.
You see, SCO shipped Linux for years. They did so, knowingly, under the GPL. The GPL was their license.
They claimed that they stopped shipping Linux as soon as they could when they realized that IBM was "dumping UNIX code into Linux". That's hogwash, but that's not my point.
The point is that now, when they claim there were pre-IBM copyright violations, they are caught by the GPL. They shipped all that code included in Linux and other supporting programs under the GPL.
If they believed there was SCO code hidden in Linux, shipping under the GPL means they approved of it.
With so much money apparently out there to be made, slimy spammers will turn to using discardable domains with valid domain sender and MX records.
They don't have to change machines, either. Just reconfigure the virtual hostname and DNS info, and they're ready to spam.
If I were into that kind of thing, here's what I'd do: write a script to set up a virtual domain with a DNS server, sendmail, and some firewall rules. Buy a list of domains, acquire a few zombies for mail proxy, and "4. Profit!". You could rotate domains hourly, or keep several up at once, all sharing the same hardware. If one gets blacklisted (and you care), just buy another domain name.
SenderID doesn't say anything about the mail server accepting mail, so pesky, bandwidth-choking bounce messages aren't a problem. A spam server can just drop any requests for incoming port 25. The resources are wasted on the machines which generate the bounces, not on the spam server. That's one reason why spam is profitable.
Everybody knows that Google's expenses will be lower, being a pure technology company. It's a new era, and the old rules don't apply.
Pop! [sound of tongue removed from cheek].
Actually, I think Google's long-term stock value depends on how they spend the cash they've raised. It's the old story from the dotboom, investors are really paying Google to be their fund manager, giving them money to see who they'll buy.
I think their performance as a tech company (as opposed to their performance as a holding company) depends mostly on their ability to keep out SEO spam.
The reason Mr. Gore's comment about "taking initiative in creating the Internet" is so widely lampooned is its manifest braggadocio. It does no good to pretend he never tried to make the claim, or that he wasn't trying to get more credit than he was due.
I was working as a student support tech at the University of Illinois. My boss, who had been in Marc Andreesen's department, said he was having trouble with some Unix thing. Being the only approachable Unix type around, she asked me to help him. I called or emailed him, and agreed to come take a look at his workstation.
In my august wizardness I never found the building, so I never got to meet Marc or solve his problem.
I can't believe they didn't even mention my central role in Netscape's development.
That was the motto a corporation I used to work for came up with. They meant that they are a people-first, family-oriented, nice company.
It never seemed right to me, but I couldn't place the problem until recently, driving past a shell of one of their former buildings. Your vision is supposed to come from your values, which should be part of you. If your values come from your vision, that means that your guiding principles are a result of desires, which can change with the winds of economics.
In their case, the talked about family and values, but they still expected 70-hour weeks.
They downsized me in preparation for a dotcom buyout. When the dotcom that bought them went under, the original management bought the company back for a lot less than they sold it for.
I'm so frustrated with the lack of vision in the world.
The cell phone companies should be selling phones that come with good quality headsets and double as MP3 players. Make a higher-end model that is a real PDA. Maybe make a low-end model with ( *gasp* ) no screen at all. Someone would buy them if they were cheap enough.
Why aren't they? Myopia and strategizing, I guess. The hardware companies have given over their sales front end to the carriers, who are busy coming up with calling plans with "free" this or that (for only $49.95/mo) to get you locked in for a year. And consumers are programmed to like it that way.
Or maybe only geeks want to listen to the music of their choice and not carry around a Batman's utility belt full of gadgets?
Hello, Fujitsu? Get me Sales. SALES, dammit. Thank you. Damn foreigners. Sales? Yeah, gimme 5.3 million of your little robot guys. Yeah, I said 5.3 million. My minion, er, secretary will give you the details.
Hello, Colt? Get me Sales. SALES, dammit. Thank you. Damn kids. Sales? Yeah, gimme 5.3 million of your 7000D handguns. Yeah, I said 5.3 million. My, er, secretary will give you the details.
Now that I've made those calls, I can begin to plan the assault. I'll start by freeing Cuba, then use the good will to launch a surprise attack on Washington. They'll never know what hit 'em.
It's my destiny - I will rule the world!
Getting out of this room will be child's play. All I really need is to get out of the restraints so when they come to give me the pills they think I'm taking...
With SmartSuite out of the way, their Office package is the basically the only commercial offering out there.
Microsoft's predatory, monopolistic practices easily made the company $850 million this year, and they've been doing it for a lot of years.
100 million of anything is hard to monitor. If what you're trying to monitor is a bunch of people who are as smart as you are, it could make for a long day.
Freedom appears to be an innate yearning in the heart of people everywhere. It does no good to suppress the yearning; that just makes it stronger.
When people learn that conditions elsewhere are more free than they have, they will eventually either move themselves to where the conditions are free or they will change the conditions where they are.
I hope, for China, that "eventually" comes sooner rather than later.
Just because the operation of the adware program is legal in a technical legal sense, that doesn't make the process by which it got there legal, and certainly not right in a moral sense.
It is my fond hope that all the adware companies, spammers, search engine optimizers, and other such trolls of online business burn slowly and long over fires built of their own avarice at stakes driven into the putrid muck in a special part of hell.
I agree. On Slashdot people never get that your post is making fun of itself. Not the first time a truly humorous post has been rendered mostly unfunny by a tiny error.
I just couldn't think of a better way to word it. I almost went with "anglocentric", which in hindsight would have been better.
Please, AMD do not use this in some SCO-like attempt to pump your stock price.
Too late. AMD was up almost a point and Intel was down almost a point (a huge change for the much larger Intel).
But you were mainly concerned about what they'll do in the future. I agree and hope they just quietly pursue the suit. Win or lose, they're better off that way.
Even if their aim is to be bought by IBM or (*gasp*) Microsoft, making a bunch of noise will just make that more difficult.
While that might prove true for isolated products, there is just no way that 30% of Google's overall clicks are fraudulent. The volume is just too high. Almost everybody googles.
What should Google do if they see that some ad is the target of a phony-clicking zombie horde?
Leif Ericson discovered it hundreds of years earlier, and the Native Relativians were already there anyway. Their boats were just to slow to test the theory.
Microsoft has announced plans to release [standards-compliant tool] for use with [Microsoft product] that makes [cool-sounding things] easier to code. Developers who attend Microsoft's [upcoming event] in [3-6 months] have been promised an early release of the code.
Perhaps Slashcode could be enhanced to provide the functionality. That would make this kind of story much easier to put up.
Hint: the input just needs to be standards-compliant tool. The program should already know which Microsoft product handles the cool-sounding things and be able to choose the upcoming event for the given market segment. The time period should be long enough to allow the code to actually be written, or long enough for the announcement to be forgotten.
I was working on a sorting algorithm based on curve fitting. It's not a comparison sort, but more like a radix sort, but not one.
You start with a bunch of numbers, or things that can be given a number. Loop through the numbers, keeping track of High, Low, total, mean, std dev, etc. Use that information to develop an interpolating curve, which tells you for a given value where it ought to end up.
Put the Low at the front and the High at the back. On the next pass throught the numbers, put the number you swapped with Low about where it goes. It replaces something; put that where it goes, and so on.
I'm kind of stuck about what to do with collisions. It's led me into different directions, such as whether to segment and recur with a linear interpolant or to use several thresholds and group the numbers, making a higher order polynomial.
I decided to waste time on Slashdot, instead. I'm such a loser.
I'm not a lawyer, but these principles are really simple. They come from English common law.
What an accused person did isn't as important in court as what their motivation was. If I swing an axe and accidentally hit you in the head on the backstroke, that's a lot different than swinging it with the intent to hit you in the head. That's one form of legally ok "bodily harm".
On the other hand, if I know that my enemy has a bad habit of standing behind a person chopping wood, then if I loosen the head of the axe I am culpable for whatever happens even if I'm not around when the act occurs.
It's ok to hurt someone else in defense of yourself, and usually in defense of someone else. You may get stuck proving it, but it's an acceptable course of action. There are all kinds of caveats, like using less-or-equal force than your attacker uses, your anticipation of the situation, etc. You can't trick or bully someone into a fistfight and then shoot them in self-defense.
Copyright infringement is a crime. The examples with bodily harm are just to illustrate the general principles at work.
When a court cites "common law", they're saying that the principle is so well defined that they won't bother listing the case that set it, or in fact, that the origin is lost in antiquity. They might as well say, "This principle should be obvious to anyone".
I think it was so obvious that the lower courts just missed it, getting lost in the argument about the copying VCR tapes. I know I did.
Your examples with guns, crowbars, and head shops are all illustrations of the disastrous results that would have occurred had they ruled that the maker of a device is always liable for its misuse.
Nope, because it's not illegal to do bodily harm. Self-defense may require it. Police and security personnel, and the municipalities that procure them their weapons, could be properly lured by advertisements that promised "bodily harm". But try this out:
"One who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to COMMIT A CRIME... is liable for the resulting acts of CRIME by third parties using the device, regardless of the device's lawful uses."
Make sense now? Once you read it that way, it makes a lot more sense. If I sell you something by saying it will let you break the law, then I can't fall back on its lawful uses once you use it the way I said you should.
Expect an impact on the makers of "radar" detectors.
Promoting your software as a way to grab unauthorized files is like promoting the knife or gun you're selling by saying it's great for mugging tourists. (No, it's not the same level of harm, so just take the analogy for what it's worth).
Promote the tool for its legal purposes, and what someone else does with it is not your problem. That's why gun and knife makers aren't liable for crimes committed with their products.
At least, not yet. This Court is doing some wacky things.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not a GNU fanboy, but the GPL works wonderfully.
You see, SCO shipped Linux for years. They did so, knowingly, under the GPL. The GPL was their license.
They claimed that they stopped shipping Linux as soon as they could when they realized that IBM was "dumping UNIX code into Linux". That's hogwash, but that's not my point.
The point is that now, when they claim there were pre-IBM copyright violations, they are caught by the GPL. They shipped all that code included in Linux and other supporting programs under the GPL.
If they believed there was SCO code hidden in Linux, shipping under the GPL means they approved of it.
With so much money apparently out there to be made, slimy spammers will turn to using discardable domains with valid domain sender and MX records.
They don't have to change machines, either. Just reconfigure the virtual hostname and DNS info, and they're ready to spam.
If I were into that kind of thing, here's what I'd do: write a script to set up a virtual domain with a DNS server, sendmail, and some firewall rules. Buy a list of domains, acquire a few zombies for mail proxy, and "4. Profit!". You could rotate domains hourly, or keep several up at once, all sharing the same hardware. If one gets blacklisted (and you care), just buy another domain name.
SenderID doesn't say anything about the mail server accepting mail, so pesky, bandwidth-choking bounce messages aren't a problem. A spam server can just drop any requests for incoming port 25. The resources are wasted on the machines which generate the bounces, not on the spam server. That's one reason why spam is profitable.
How did you come up with that?
Everybody knows that Google's expenses will be lower, being a pure technology company. It's a new era, and the old rules don't apply.
Pop! [sound of tongue removed from cheek].
Actually, I think Google's long-term stock value depends on how they spend the cash they've raised. It's the old story from the dotboom, investors are really paying Google to be their fund manager, giving them money to see who they'll buy.
I think their performance as a tech company (as opposed to their performance as a holding company) depends mostly on their ability to keep out SEO spam.
The reason Mr. Gore's comment about "taking initiative in creating the Internet" is so widely lampooned is its manifest braggadocio. It does no good to pretend he never tried to make the claim, or that he wasn't trying to get more credit than he was due.
See here.
I was working as a student support tech at the University of Illinois. My boss, who had been in Marc Andreesen's department, said he was having trouble with some Unix thing. Being the only approachable Unix type around, she asked me to help him. I called or emailed him, and agreed to come take a look at his workstation.
In my august wizardness I never found the building, so I never got to meet Marc or solve his problem.
I can't believe they didn't even mention my central role in Netscape's development.
That was the motto a corporation I used to work for came up with. They meant that they are a people-first, family-oriented, nice company.
It never seemed right to me, but I couldn't place the problem until recently, driving past a shell of one of their former buildings. Your vision is supposed to come from your values, which should be part of you. If your values come from your vision, that means that your guiding principles are a result of desires, which can change with the winds of economics.
In their case, the talked about family and values, but they still expected 70-hour weeks.
They downsized me in preparation for a dotcom buyout. When the dotcom that bought them went under, the original management bought the company back for a lot less than they sold it for.
Not that I'm bittter or anything.
I'm so frustrated with the lack of vision in the world.
The cell phone companies should be selling phones that come with good quality headsets and double as MP3 players. Make a higher-end model that is a real PDA. Maybe make a low-end model with ( *gasp* ) no screen at all. Someone would buy them if they were cheap enough.
Why aren't they? Myopia and strategizing, I guess. The hardware companies have given over their sales front end to the carriers, who are busy coming up with calling plans with "free" this or that (for only $49.95/mo) to get you locked in for a year. And consumers are programmed to like it that way.
Or maybe only geeks want to listen to the music of their choice and not carry around a Batman's utility belt full of gadgets?
Hello, Fujitsu? Get me Sales. SALES, dammit. Thank you. Damn foreigners. Sales? Yeah, gimme 5.3 million of your little robot guys. Yeah, I said 5.3 million. My minion, er, secretary will give you the details.
...
Hello, Colt? Get me Sales. SALES, dammit. Thank you. Damn kids. Sales? Yeah, gimme 5.3 million of your 7000D handguns. Yeah, I said 5.3 million. My, er, secretary will give you the details.
Now that I've made those calls, I can begin to plan the assault. I'll start by freeing Cuba, then use the good will to launch a surprise attack on Washington. They'll never know what hit 'em.
It's my destiny - I will rule the world!
Getting out of this room will be child's play. All I really need is to get out of the restraints so when they come to give me the pills they think I'm taking
At $11.24B/year, they make that much in a single month.
With SmartSuite out of the way, their Office package is the basically the only commercial offering out there. Microsoft's predatory, monopolistic practices easily made the company $850 million this year, and they've been doing it for a lot of years.
Some days, my faith in the system is tested.
100 million of anything is hard to monitor. If what you're trying to monitor is a bunch of people who are as smart as you are, it could make for a long day.
Freedom appears to be an innate yearning in the heart of people everywhere. It does no good to suppress the yearning; that just makes it stronger.
When people learn that conditions elsewhere are more free than they have, they will eventually either move themselves to where the conditions are free or they will change the conditions where they are.
I hope, for China, that "eventually" comes sooner rather than later.
Just because the operation of the adware program is legal in a technical legal sense, that doesn't make the process by which it got there legal, and certainly not right in a moral sense.
It is my fond hope that all the adware companies, spammers, search engine optimizers, and other such trolls of online business burn slowly and long over fires built of their own avarice at stakes driven into the putrid muck in a special part of hell.
>ruined the humor of the rest of the post
I agree. On Slashdot people never get that your post is making fun of itself. Not the first time a truly humorous post has been rendered mostly unfunny by a tiny error.
I just couldn't think of a better way to word it. I almost went with "anglocentric", which in hindsight would have been better.
Plus I said "to slow" instead of "too slow".
>Ericson was European too
Can't pull any fast ones on you, Can I?
You didn't just fall off the turnip truck.
Too late. AMD was up almost a point and Intel was down almost a point (a huge change for the much larger Intel).
But you were mainly concerned about what they'll do in the future. I agree and hope they just quietly pursue the suit. Win or lose, they're better off that way.
Even if their aim is to be bought by IBM or (*gasp*) Microsoft, making a bunch of noise will just make that more difficult.
>30% fraudulent clicks
While that might prove true for isolated products, there is just no way that 30% of Google's overall clicks are fraudulent. The volume is just too high. Almost everybody googles.
What should Google do if they see that some ad is the target of a phony-clicking zombie horde?
Leif Ericson discovered it hundreds of years earlier, and the Native Relativians were already there anyway. Their boats were just to slow to test the theory.
Eurocentric insensitive clods!
Perhaps Slashcode could be enhanced to provide the functionality. That would make this kind of story much easier to put up.
Hint: the input just needs to be standards-compliant tool. The program should already know which Microsoft product handles the cool-sounding things and be able to choose the upcoming event for the given market segment. The time period should be long enough to allow the code to actually be written, or long enough for the announcement to be forgotten.
I was working on a sorting algorithm based on curve fitting. It's not a comparison sort, but more like a radix sort, but not one.
You start with a bunch of numbers, or things that can be given a number. Loop through the numbers, keeping track of High, Low, total, mean, std dev, etc. Use that information to develop an interpolating curve, which tells you for a given value where it ought to end up.
Put the Low at the front and the High at the back. On the next pass throught the numbers, put the number you swapped with Low about where it goes. It replaces something; put that where it goes, and so on.
I'm kind of stuck about what to do with collisions. It's led me into different directions, such as whether to segment and recur with a linear interpolant or to use several thresholds and group the numbers, making a higher order polynomial.
I decided to waste time on Slashdot, instead. I'm such a loser.
Actually, having read the decision/opinion, I think it was a good one.
I'm not a lawyer, but these principles are really simple. They come from English common law.
What an accused person did isn't as important in court as what their motivation was. If I swing an axe and accidentally hit you in the head on the backstroke, that's a lot different than swinging it with the intent to hit you in the head. That's one form of legally ok "bodily harm".
On the other hand, if I know that my enemy has a bad habit of standing behind a person chopping wood, then if I loosen the head of the axe I am culpable for whatever happens even if I'm not around when the act occurs.
It's ok to hurt someone else in defense of yourself, and usually in defense of someone else. You may get stuck proving it, but it's an acceptable course of action. There are all kinds of caveats, like using less-or-equal force than your attacker uses, your anticipation of the situation, etc. You can't trick or bully someone into a fistfight and then shoot them in self-defense.
Copyright infringement is a crime. The examples with bodily harm are just to illustrate the general principles at work.
None of that should be news to anyone. The *AA folks aren't going to sue you unless they have a chance to win.
When a court cites "common law", they're saying that the principle is so well defined that they won't bother listing the case that set it, or in fact, that the origin is lost in antiquity. They might as well say, "This principle should be obvious to anyone".
I think it was so obvious that the lower courts just missed it, getting lost in the argument about the copying VCR tapes. I know I did.
Your examples with guns, crowbars, and head shops are all illustrations of the disastrous results that would have occurred had they ruled that the maker of a device is always liable for its misuse.
> promoting its use to DO BODILY HARM
... is liable for the resulting acts of CRIME by third parties using the device, regardless of the device's lawful uses."
Nope, because it's not illegal to do bodily harm. Self-defense may require it. Police and security personnel, and the municipalities that procure them their weapons, could be properly lured by advertisements that promised "bodily harm". But try this out:
"One who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to COMMIT A CRIME
Make sense now? Once you read it that way, it makes a lot more sense. If I sell you something by saying it will let you break the law, then I can't fall back on its lawful uses once you use it the way I said you should.
Expect an impact on the makers of "radar" detectors.
I don't like the decision, but I see the logic.
Promoting your software as a way to grab unauthorized files is like promoting the knife or gun you're selling by saying it's great for mugging tourists. (No, it's not the same level of harm, so just take the analogy for what it's worth).
Promote the tool for its legal purposes, and what someone else does with it is not your problem. That's why gun and knife makers aren't liable for crimes committed with their products.
At least, not yet. This Court is doing some wacky things.