The purpose of copyright law is to grant a temporary monopoly on the rights to copy a piece of art - be it a painting, song, book or whatever. A bit like a patent provides a temporary monopoly on an invention.
The fact that a lawsuit has been won by the copyright owner demonstrates that the law does exactly what it was intended to do - set out a series of punishments for those who would break the law and copy a piece of art which they have no right to do.
I can see two bones of contention here, but they're more related to how the law is designed than whether or not it's working as intended:
1. Is the law morally justifiable? 2. Is the process of enforcing the law fair?
Both are very reasonable questions. If they're something which is important to the general public, then they'll probably become issues at the next election. But right now, I'd imagine most politicians are more interested in the easy political points - things like crime, education, war in Iraq - than those which are generating a lot of noise on/.
If the defendant has wireless, who's to say that the spoofing wasn't "next door neighbour with a laptop using her wireless" rather than "rogue person hacking ISP's routing tables"?
is Microsoft going to make it accessible only to Windows Vista machines, thereby forcing the entire medical system and any potential clients to upgrade, followed by years of lock-in?
Not at all. It will be web based, and provided you're running Internet Explorer 8 you're fine.
Oh, didn't we mention? IE 8 will be Vista with SP1 only.
Earn credibility... read the post you're replying to. There is such a thing as Microsoft SQL Server 2003, which was what I posted. Also, at least one company has been on the wrong end of an audit despite being little more than "a few licenses" out of compliance - eg. http://www.news.com/2008-1082_3-5065859.html - I don't know how big the company is but if it's any significant size, "a few dozen licenses" is nothing.
1. How do they do the audit? Do they install some sort of software or what? What if my systems are locked down tight, do they expect me to give them a user account with admin rights? Or visit every system in turn? 2. Who pays the auditors? Because as far as I can tell, if I'm going to have to buy licenses for everything anyway, and they expect me to pay the auditors, I may as well just buy the licensing and have done with it. 3. No business on Earth is 100% compliant. Mainly because the goalposts are set to make it impossibly difficult.
Example 1: Adobe let you upgrade to Creative Suite CS2 from a variety of other packages. But you need a license for those other packages. Let's say you find an invoice and license documentation for the package you upgraded from - and find that it was itself an upgrade of some earlier package. But that was bought so long ago that you've destroyed the invoices. Most countries limit how long you have to keep such documentation for tax reasons, but there's no such limitation for software licensing.
Example 2: The Microsoft SQL Server 2003 License. I'm not going to reproduce it here; google it and read it. First person who can explain it in plain English in less than 3 paragraphs gets a beer.
Given this, and assuming your level of compliance is otherwise pretty good, do they give you the opportunity to say "Really? We've missed out a single £500 license? Not to worry, we'll buy one now" or do they immediately sic the attack dogs on you for all they can get?
Shame on you. Buying music is the same as supporting terrorists.
Well, seeing as the RIAA and the MPAA have said:
"I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone." (Jack Valenti, MPAA)
"It is the single most insidious Web site I've ever seen--it's like a burglar's tool," (Ron Stone, Gold Mountain Management)
"It seems doubtful that there would be a market for MP3 recording devices but for the thousands and thousands of illicit songs on the Internet." (RIAA statement made around the time they were suing Diamond about the Rio).
I really don't see how you can interpret such statements as anything other than an attempt to spread FUD.
If you're prepared to accept terror as an advanced state of fear (which I accept is a certain leap of faith) then yes, they are terrorists. They just use words rather than explosives.
I don't know about the music industry, but the movie industry is the other side of the same coin (heck, it's often divisions of the same company) and DVDs generally say something along the lines of:
WARNING
THE MOTION PICTURE CONTAINED ON THIS DVD
IS PROTECTED UNDER COPYRIGHT LAWS.
THIS DVD IS SOLD FOR HOME USE ONLY
AND ALL OTHER RIGHTS ARE EXPRESSLY RESERVED
BY THE COPYRIGHT OWBER OF SUCH MOTION PICTURE.
ANY COPYING OR PUBLIC PERFORMANCE OF
SUCH MOTION PICTURE IS STRICTLY PROHIBITED
AND MAY SUBJECT THE OFFENDER TO
CIVIL LIABILITY AND SEVER CRIMINAL PENALTIES.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
There could be a perfectly valid reason for this; after all, in this context it makes sense that you want the people on the team to be reasonably unbiased.
However, it seems to me that the Finnish want it both ways:
1. They want people who are qualified to understand what's going on. 2. They want people who haven't and will not form an opinion either way regarding what the appropriate course of action should be.
To my mind, you cannot possibly have a person who meets both requirements. Anyone who's qualified enough to understand everything at issue is likely to reach their own conclusions.
I dunno if I would mind being a guinea pig when the choice is only to maybe die from the drug or certainly from the disease.
If my understanding is correct, Alzheimer's is a lot worse than that.
You don't generally die of it.
You die because you're generally also fairly frail and you had a nasty fall because your co-ordination isn't so good any more. In doing so you broke a bone and were in the awkward position of being too frail to operate on and too badly hurt to leave alone.
Where exactly are you going to buy a complete system with a fully documented processor, BIOS (or equivalent firmware) and all component parts right the way down to the Verilog (or [insert chip design software here]) source files?
Bearing in mind that even then you need to prove that the chip you hold is the same one described by the source files, and the only way you can guarantee that is if you control the chip fab which produces the chip. Failing that, I suppose you could skim the top off one and examine it with an electron microscope, but the chip is going to be history afterwards so you need at least two chips - and then how do you prove that the one you leave alone is identical to the one you examined in your handy-dandy scanning electron microsocope?
Note: I'm well aware this is absurd. That's the point.
Oh, you can. A typical fireproof safe isn't actually much good for media - they're designed on the assumption you're keeping paper in there, which will survive a much higher ambient temperature. You can get proper data safes, though.
Bottom line is, even with the best safe in the world there's things you can't account for. Whatever happens, in the event of fire there's no way you'll be allowed anywhere near the remains of the building for some time after the fire's gone out - which could be a bit of a problem if that's where your backup tapes are. So it's very dangerous to think "I've got everything important in a fireproof safe - I'm all right".
A safe would be a good investment, most are fire proof which is important too.
I've just been having this exact conversation with my boss. Between us, we came up with a few questions:
This fireproof safe. When the entire building (6 floors, it's on the second) collapses on it as it's weakened by the fire, is it proof against that? What if there's a rather larger safe on a floor directly above it that lands on top of the fireproof safe?
Will it survive a 3 storey drop if the floor collapses as a result of the fire? (Less of an issue for us as we're only on the second floor, but becomes a more valid question the higher you go.)
There's no way we'd be allowed anywhere near the building once the fire's been put out. Will the people responsible for the building send someone in on our behalf? Or will we have a fireproof safe full of important documents which we can't get at?
Let's say for the sake of argument that the safe is directly on a joist so doesn't fall even in the event of the fire being so fierce that the building is almost entirely incinerated. We'd then have a safe 40 feet up in the air on part of the steel frame which was formerly holding up the building, and the only way to get at it would be to erect scaffolding. How do we get around that problem?
I think we eventually concluded that a fireproof safe doesn't really gain you much in the real world.
So all I wanted was to know how to do something, and everyone thought it was a lot of fun to tell me how incompetent I was. If the answer is so obvious, why not explain it? More to the point, if you're such a fricken genius, why not figure out a way to get people the functionality they want in a form they'll understand? I still don't understand why secure authentication is a silly thing to want.
Sounds like you ran right into the sort of mailing list which gives Linux support a bad name. Most mailing lists have got a lot better in the last 5 years, and you're generally in a much stronger position if you already know what product you want to use and you can direct your question at the mailing list dedicated to that product.
There remain, however, one or two which I'd don an asbestos suit before asking a question of. And at least one of those is the users mailing list for a commonly used server application.
I mean sure, Linux systems are more built around the concept of "let each task do one small job and do it well", but without a fair bit of knowledge and experience, it's quite possible to screw a system so hard that you can't easily repair it. Particularly once you start getting into the minefield of "install this proprietary app which doesn't come with source, install that binary driver which comes as a kernel module, install the other program from an RPM intended for a completely different distribution".
We remember how the Win9X upgrade fiascoes resulted in so many new breakages that ultimately MS pulled the plug and went completely with the NT code base for Windows.
You need to go a little further back than that. MS had planned to pull the plug for years - Windows ME was never meant to happen, and Windows '98 lasted rather longer than originally planned.
"customers that already have a Windows investment say it seems to make sense to pick the Linux that works with Windows."
Define "works with Windows".
Can speak TCP/IP? Yep, no problem. (I've met plenty of Windows-centric IT people who seem to think networking is some sort of black magic and two different operating systems cannot coexist on a network.)
Can see windows file shares and share files with Windows servers through SMB? Any distribution will do that.
Integrates perfectly with Active Directory, including applying group policies and user authentication? I'm not aware of any distribution which does all of that, though I'm sure you could handle the "user authentication" part easily enough as it's essentially LDAP+Kerberos.
Runs Windows applications? Well, there's Wine, but it's really more a case of "might run your windows application, might not - and if you want support for that application from the app vendor you're almost certainly wasting your time".
Integrates with other server applications such as Exchange and Sharepoint? I'm not aware of any Linux based solutions which do that, but even if there are it's really a function of software on top of the distribution, not the distribution itself.
Did the record company give you replacement records for a nominal fee when they wore out? How about when you started using tapes? How about when one of your CDs gets scratched, will they replace that for a nominal/no fee? As much as they go on about "music being licensed", it isn't, it's bought and sold as if it were a physical product and restrictions are applied as part of copyright law.
They're plain vanilla MP3s with no DRM attached. It's not as if backup is a particularly difficult problem for such files - IMO you're picking holes.
Well, with wordplay you can get away with similar things in England.
The satirical news quiz "Have I got news for you" get away with saying things which may or may not be provable on a regular basis by means of the word "allegedly". As in: "Mr. X spent all night having sex with his secretary. Allegedly."
Ever heard of binary deltas? It's the binary equivalent of diff(1), and if the upgrade process blindly applies a binary delta to a binary which has been hacked around with, it's quite possible that the end result will be unbootable.
That's just Excel trying to be too clever by autoformatting.
The best bit is that not only does Excel apply autoformatting on opening a file, IIRC it attempts to apply the locale of the PC it's running on to the formatting logic it uses. So you email a spreadsheet from your UK office (and in the UK, [num].[num].[num] doesn't usually represent a date) to your Germany office, your German staff complain that something looks wrong and your UK staff can't see what they're talking about.
PPC -> Intel did the same thing again, or will the second Apple drops support for their PPC hardware.
I bought a Mac Mini G4. Not long after they announced the move to Intel, actually - I wanted a Mac and was concerned that the Intel-based systems would be terrible for the first year and wasn't prepared to wait for them to get their act together.
That was two years ago this November. It shipped with Tiger, and so far it looks like I'll be able to run Leopard on it no problem.
Let's assume that the next version of OS X after Leopard doesn't support PPC, and comes out about 2 years after Leopard. I'll still have a Mac which works fine and runs the latest version of OS X almost 4 years after I bought it - and that's assuming I bother to upgrade. I understand Panther is still getting security upgrades, and I see no reason why such a policy shouldn't be followed for some time.
I'm more concerned with the XCode development tools no longer generating PPC/x86 universal binaries, but I don't imagine that will happen until such time as PPC support is dropped from OS X. By which time a 1.25Ghz PPC G4 based system is going to look more than a little aged anyhow.
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The purpose of copyright law is to grant a temporary monopoly on the rights to copy a piece of art - be it a painting, song, book or whatever. A bit like a patent provides a temporary monopoly on an invention.
/.
The fact that a lawsuit has been won by the copyright owner demonstrates that the law does exactly what it was intended to do - set out a series of punishments for those who would break the law and copy a piece of art which they have no right to do.
I can see two bones of contention here, but they're more related to how the law is designed than whether or not it's working as intended:
1. Is the law morally justifiable?
2. Is the process of enforcing the law fair?
Both are very reasonable questions. If they're something which is important to the general public, then they'll probably become issues at the next election. But right now, I'd imagine most politicians are more interested in the easy political points - things like crime, education, war in Iraq - than those which are generating a lot of noise on
All the patches in the world won't do any good with a badly operated server.
If the defendant has wireless, who's to say that the spoofing wasn't "next door neighbour with a laptop using her wireless" rather than "rogue person hacking ISP's routing tables"?
The former is easy. The latter, less so.
is Microsoft going to make it accessible only to Windows Vista machines, thereby forcing the entire medical system and any potential clients to upgrade, followed by years of lock-in?
Not at all. It will be web based, and provided you're running Internet Explorer 8 you're fine.
Oh, didn't we mention? IE 8 will be Vista with SP1 only.
Earn credibility... read the post you're replying to. There is such a thing as Microsoft SQL Server 2003, which was what I posted. Also, at least one company has been on the wrong end of an audit despite being little more than "a few licenses" out of compliance - eg. http://www.news.com/2008-1082_3-5065859.html - I don't know how big the company is but if it's any significant size, "a few dozen licenses" is nothing.
So perhaps someone who has can enlighten me:
1. How do they do the audit? Do they install some sort of software or what? What if my systems are locked down tight, do they expect me to give them a user account with admin rights? Or visit every system in turn?
2. Who pays the auditors? Because as far as I can tell, if I'm going to have to buy licenses for everything anyway, and they expect me to pay the auditors, I may as well just buy the licensing and have done with it.
3. No business on Earth is 100% compliant. Mainly because the goalposts are set to make it impossibly difficult.
Example 1: Adobe let you upgrade to Creative Suite CS2 from a variety of other packages. But you need a license for those other packages. Let's say you find an invoice and license documentation for the package you upgraded from - and find that it was itself an upgrade of some earlier package. But that was bought so long ago that you've destroyed the invoices. Most countries limit how long you have to keep such documentation for tax reasons, but there's no such limitation for software licensing.
Example 2: The Microsoft SQL Server 2003 License. I'm not going to reproduce it here; google it and read it. First person who can explain it in plain English in less than 3 paragraphs gets a beer.
Given this, and assuming your level of compliance is otherwise pretty good, do they give you the opportunity to say "Really? We've missed out a single £500 license? Not to worry, we'll buy one now" or do they immediately sic the attack dogs on you for all they can get?
Shame on you. Buying music is the same as supporting terrorists.
Well, seeing as the RIAA and the MPAA have said:
"I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone." (Jack Valenti, MPAA)
"It is the single most insidious Web site I've ever seen--it's like a burglar's tool," (Ron Stone, Gold Mountain Management)
"It seems doubtful that there would be a market for MP3 recording devices but for the thousands and thousands of illicit songs on the Internet." (RIAA statement made around the time they were suing Diamond about the Rio).
I really don't see how you can interpret such statements as anything other than an attempt to spread FUD.
If you're prepared to accept terror as an advanced state of fear (which I accept is a certain leap of faith) then yes, they are terrorists. They just use words rather than explosives.
I don't know about the music industry, but the movie industry is the other side of the same coin (heck, it's often divisions of the same company) and DVDs generally say something along the lines of:
WARNING
THE MOTION PICTURE CONTAINED ON THIS DVD
IS PROTECTED UNDER COPYRIGHT LAWS.
THIS DVD IS SOLD FOR HOME USE ONLY
AND ALL OTHER RIGHTS ARE EXPRESSLY RESERVED
BY THE COPYRIGHT OWBER OF SUCH MOTION PICTURE.
ANY COPYING OR PUBLIC PERFORMANCE OF
SUCH MOTION PICTURE IS STRICTLY PROHIBITED
AND MAY SUBJECT THE OFFENDER TO
CIVIL LIABILITY AND SEVER CRIMINAL PENALTIES.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
There could be a perfectly valid reason for this; after all, in this context it makes sense that you want the people on the team to be reasonably unbiased.
However, it seems to me that the Finnish want it both ways:
1. They want people who are qualified to understand what's going on.
2. They want people who haven't and will not form an opinion either way regarding what the appropriate course of action should be.
To my mind, you cannot possibly have a person who meets both requirements. Anyone who's qualified enough to understand everything at issue is likely to reach their own conclusions.
I dunno if I would mind being a guinea pig when the choice is only to maybe die from the drug or certainly from the disease.
If my understanding is correct, Alzheimer's is a lot worse than that.
You don't generally die of it.
You die because you're generally also fairly frail and you had a nasty fall because your co-ordination isn't so good any more. In doing so you broke a bone and were in the awkward position of being too frail to operate on and too badly hurt to leave alone.
Where exactly are you going to buy a complete system with a fully documented processor, BIOS (or equivalent firmware) and all component parts right the way down to the Verilog (or [insert chip design software here]) source files?
Bearing in mind that even then you need to prove that the chip you hold is the same one described by the source files, and the only way you can guarantee that is if you control the chip fab which produces the chip. Failing that, I suppose you could skim the top off one and examine it with an electron microscope, but the chip is going to be history afterwards so you need at least two chips - and then how do you prove that the one you leave alone is identical to the one you examined in your handy-dandy scanning electron microsocope?
Note: I'm well aware this is absurd. That's the point.
Oh, you can. A typical fireproof safe isn't actually much good for media - they're designed on the assumption you're keeping paper in there, which will survive a much higher ambient temperature. You can get proper data safes, though.
Bottom line is, even with the best safe in the world there's things you can't account for. Whatever happens, in the event of fire there's no way you'll be allowed anywhere near the remains of the building for some time after the fire's gone out - which could be a bit of a problem if that's where your backup tapes are. So it's very dangerous to think "I've got everything important in a fireproof safe - I'm all right".
I've just been having this exact conversation with my boss. Between us, we came up with a few questions:
I think we eventually concluded that a fireproof safe doesn't really gain you much in the real world.
MS would be better off making a unix distro around NT's kernel rather than bolt the rest of Windows on to a linux kernel.
It wouldn't be a Unix distro then.
So all I wanted was to know how to do something, and everyone thought it was a lot of fun to tell me how incompetent I was. If the answer is so obvious, why not explain it? More to the point, if you're such a fricken genius, why not figure out a way to get people the functionality they want in a form they'll understand? I still don't understand why secure authentication is a silly thing to want.
Sounds like you ran right into the sort of mailing list which gives Linux support a bad name. Most mailing lists have got a lot better in the last 5 years, and you're generally in a much stronger position if you already know what product you want to use and you can direct your question at the mailing list dedicated to that product.
There remain, however, one or two which I'd don an asbestos suit before asking a question of. And at least one of those is the users mailing list for a commonly used server application.
Vista fixes that nicely, right the way from the start of the installation process:
"Windows installation wants to install the following file: NTOSKRNL. Cancel or allow?"
"Windows installation wants to install the following file: rundll32.exe. Cancel or allow?"
"Windows installation wants to install the following file: cmd.exe. Cancel or allow?"
"Windows installation wants to install the following file: notepad.exe. Cancel or allow?"
"Windows installation wants to install the following file: mspaint.exe. Cancel or allow?"
"Windows installation wants to install the following file: randomthing.dll. Cancel or allow?"
Show me a modern OS that isn't complex.
I mean sure, Linux systems are more built around the concept of "let each task do one small job and do it well", but without a fair bit of knowledge and experience, it's quite possible to screw a system so hard that you can't easily repair it. Particularly once you start getting into the minefield of "install this proprietary app which doesn't come with source, install that binary driver which comes as a kernel module, install the other program from an RPM intended for a completely different distribution".
We remember how the Win9X upgrade fiascoes resulted in so many new breakages that ultimately MS pulled the plug and went completely with the NT code base for Windows.
You need to go a little further back than that. MS had planned to pull the plug for years - Windows ME was never meant to happen, and Windows '98 lasted rather longer than originally planned.
From the summary:
"customers that already have a Windows investment say it seems to make sense to pick the Linux that works with Windows."
Define "works with Windows".
Can speak TCP/IP? Yep, no problem. (I've met plenty of Windows-centric IT people who seem to think networking is some sort of black magic and two different operating systems cannot coexist on a network.)
Can see windows file shares and share files with Windows servers through SMB? Any distribution will do that.
Integrates perfectly with Active Directory, including applying group policies and user authentication? I'm not aware of any distribution which does all of that, though I'm sure you could handle the "user authentication" part easily enough as it's essentially LDAP+Kerberos.
Runs Windows applications? Well, there's Wine, but it's really more a case of "might run your windows application, might not - and if you want support for that application from the app vendor you're almost certainly wasting your time".
Integrates with other server applications such as Exchange and Sharepoint? I'm not aware of any Linux based solutions which do that, but even if there are it's really a function of software on top of the distribution, not the distribution itself.
And if your house burns down you'd lose both.
Did the record company give you replacement records for a nominal fee when they wore out? How about when you started using tapes? How about when one of your CDs gets scratched, will they replace that for a nominal/no fee? As much as they go on about "music being licensed", it isn't, it's bought and sold as if it were a physical product and restrictions are applied as part of copyright law.
They're plain vanilla MP3s with no DRM attached. It's not as if backup is a particularly difficult problem for such files - IMO you're picking holes.
Well, with wordplay you can get away with similar things in England.
The satirical news quiz "Have I got news for you" get away with saying things which may or may not be provable on a regular basis by means of the word "allegedly". As in: "Mr. X spent all night having sex with his secretary. Allegedly."
Ever heard of binary deltas? It's the binary equivalent of diff(1), and if the upgrade process blindly applies a binary delta to a binary which has been hacked around with, it's quite possible that the end result will be unbootable.
That's just Excel trying to be too clever by autoformatting.
The best bit is that not only does Excel apply autoformatting on opening a file, IIRC it attempts to apply the locale of the PC it's running on to the formatting logic it uses. So you email a spreadsheet from your UK office (and in the UK, [num].[num].[num] doesn't usually represent a date) to your Germany office, your German staff complain that something looks wrong and your UK staff can't see what they're talking about.
PPC -> Intel did the same thing again, or will the second Apple drops support for their PPC hardware.
I bought a Mac Mini G4. Not long after they announced the move to Intel, actually - I wanted a Mac and was concerned that the Intel-based systems would be terrible for the first year and wasn't prepared to wait for them to get their act together.
That was two years ago this November. It shipped with Tiger, and so far it looks like I'll be able to run Leopard on it no problem.
Let's assume that the next version of OS X after Leopard doesn't support PPC, and comes out about 2 years after Leopard. I'll still have a Mac which works fine and runs the latest version of OS X almost 4 years after I bought it - and that's assuming I bother to upgrade. I understand Panther is still getting security upgrades, and I see no reason why such a policy shouldn't be followed for some time.
I'm more concerned with the XCode development tools no longer generating PPC/x86 universal binaries, but I don't imagine that will happen until such time as PPC support is dropped from OS X. By which time a 1.25Ghz PPC G4 based system is going to look more than a little aged anyhow.
That's quite possible in XP - but I don't think it's on the fly, I think you have to set it at the login stage.