Their tax policies for businesses are rather less friendly, however. Which is fine if you're an individual but if you run a small business (which lots of people do) is rather less attractive.
AFAICT, their argument is now "Novell didn't sell us the copyrights, but that's not what the intention was when the agreement was signed. So we'd like you to overlook the letter of that agreement and instead consider its original purpose."
Just once, I'd like a judge to say "You know what? At the rate you lot are going, I'm going to be dead before this case is finished. In fact, everyone in this room is going to be dead before the case is finished. So instead I'm ordering that we forget the case altogether and go for a nice picnic and play Frisbee in the park."
IANAL, but AFAIK most legal systems do have a mechanism for stopping vexatious litigants. But it's usually intended to deal with people who waste court time with stupid cases. The sort of person who'd sue McDonalds because there was chicken in their chicken sandwich meal.
Perhaps some lawyer will enlighten me (NYCL?), but my understanding is it's much harder to do that against someone who keeps on coming up with claims which may actually have a sound legal footing at first glance.
In any event, I'd dearly love to know how these lawyers are getting paid now. Unless the law firm has taken it on as some sort of "no-win, no-fee, and if that means appealing until such time as we wind up in front of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court then so be it" basis.
Don't know if anyone else remembers "It's Flashbeagle, Charlie Brown"....
Judge: What are you doing, SCO? SCO: I'm waiting for my sweet baboo.^W^W^W^W^W suing Novell because they assigned us the copyright to Unix. Novell: We did not assign you the copyrights! SCO: Novell sold us the copyright in 1995. Novell: WE DID NOT! SCO: Well, you should have! Judge: Oh, brother.
Of course they're proposing proportional representation, they've got the most to gain from it.
There is another view which says that you inevitably wind up with watered down legislation which in trying to pander to every party doesn't really solve anything. In essence, a true example of "a compromise is what happens when you come up with an idea that doesn't really suit anyone".
Not voting at all, OTOH, is equivalent to saying "You know what? I really don't care who gets in - Labour, Tory, LibDem, Monster Raving Loony, whatever"
The Conservatives have a strong set of policies but they also have a history of foaming at the mouth just as badly as Labour. If they take office it's more or less guaranteed they'll come down on the side of whichever claims to have the biggest business interests.
LibDems, OTOH, seem to like the idea of even more taxes and even more bureaucracy... and frankly we're taxed heavily enough as it is, TYVM. Damned either way, IMV.
Rules are for the guidance of wise men and the obedience of fools. - Douglas Bader.
And Bader was right. In this case, the wise man would have followed the policy until such time as it became obvious that continuing to follow it was dangerous (and frankly, it was pretty damn obvious that it was long before Childs was found guilty), and at that point made some effort to find a way of breaking policy without being held liable for it - if necessary, by getting your lawyer to draft something releasing you from liability.
Come on, most of us on/. are professionals in some capacity. How many times have you seen someone make things worse for themselves because they thought they knew what they were doing? How many times have you said "Why didn't you ask me earlier?"
I am quite certain there isn't a criminal lawyer alive who hasn't thought the same thing on a number of occasions.
Perhaps, but the story author doesn't have an IT guy.
The solution to that is not to have every single member of staff an IT guy in their own right. There are plenty of people in this world who know just enough to be dangerous, I can't think of anything worse than filling an office with such people.
It doesn't help that in many parts of the world there's so much competition that setting up a business being "the IT guy" for a number of small companies is simply not going to pay enough for anyone halfway-competent to want to do it for any length of time.
Powerpoint is trying to solve a problem - that of communicating a lot of complex information efficiently. Which, let's be honest, is a very common problem.
The issue that comes out of it is that a lot of people are absolutely lousy at effectively communicating complex information. Powerpoint allows them to pretend that they are communicating - when in actual fact they're not. They're just droning.
I think a part of the solution here may be education - but I don't mean "educate people at college or when they're in the workplace". Effective communicating together is such an important part of modern society that I think it should be consciously taught at school. I can't speak for others, but most teaching I had in university didn't even attempt to teach techniques to get ideas across - we were just given a brief and told to "prepare a presentation".
Given the quality of some of the presentations I've seen over the years - from managers, trainers and lecturers alike - I'd say that nobody is really being taught how to get ideas across. Maybe nobody knows how, and so there's nobody to teach anyone else.
It's Internet transparency that has been uncovering and unraveling the abuse scandal that has brought on a crisis within the Catholic Church. Although I'd be hard-pressed to say I was "shocked" that the Pope has no apparent interest in uncovering a network of evil, horror and corruption within the Church, I can and will say that I am disappointed.
That's simply not true. The Pope has gone on record to say he is deeply saddened by all this, and he has proposed real concrete action to address this issue.
Specifically, the action he recommends is prayer.
No, I am not joking. From the Pope's letter to Irish Catholics:
14. I now wish to propose to you some concrete initiatives to address the situation.
At the conclusion of my meeting with the Irish bishops, I asked that Lent this year be set aside as a time to pray for an outpouring of God’s mercy and the Holy Spirit’s gifts of holiness and strength upon the Church in your country. I now invite all of you to devote your Friday penances, for a period of one year, between now and Easter 2011, to this intention. I ask you to offer up your fasting, your prayer, your reading of Scripture and your works of mercy in order to obtain the grace of healing and renewal for the Church in Ireland. I encourage you to discover anew the sacrament of Reconciliation and to avail yourselves more frequently of the transforming power of its grace.
The MOST EFFECTIVE alternative is turning them over to the police with all the evidence! THAT IS what happens to MEN... humans and that is ALL THAT A PRIEST is to me. He may represent CHRIST but if he is practicing illegal acts, he is a man and a criminal. For the church to do otherwise makes it criminal too, in my book.
Arguably it's criminal in the legislature of quite a few civilised countries, too.
In the UK we have perverting the course of justice which you most certainly can be imprisoned for if you know somebody did something wrong and, when questioned by police, you lie to cover it up. I'd be astonished if lots of other countries didn't have similar laws.
What we tend to do is keep a Linux CD and or Flash drive handy just in case. That allows us to boot into Linux and access the HD from Linux to fix corrupt files and such.
I took this one step further - I have booting from LAN set up to give me a menu offering to reinstall Windows, install any of a number of Linux distributions, boot an Ubuntu live CD and a number of tools (most usefully DBAN). The potentially-damaging options are password protected to protect people from themselves. Seems silly to mess around with trying to find a blank CD, burn it, then forget all about it so have to do the same again when I've got a dirty great fileserver at my fingertips.
My next step is going to be enhance this so I can have a PC with a specific MAC address rebuild Windows. This isn't difficult per se but IME most of the commercial tools which do these things assume that you don't have much of an existing infrastructure to do this, so I either need to roll my own (should be easy enough considering what I've already got) or work around this limitation.
Depends on the remote imaging software - some integrates with your existing infrastructure.
Not that it matters much - IME a lot of people don't bother switching their PC off overnight anyway. I would seriously consider it - it's just a shame there's no standard way of reconfiguring boot options once the PC has booted.
One good thing about A/V software - since I started sharing the above rant with family members, especially the in-laws, the requests for tech support from me have gone way way down. I think that my anti-A/V views have gotten me labeled as some kind of tinfoil-hat-wearing nut who shouldn't be allowed anywhere near their computers.
Frankly, if they persist in using Windows and they are the sort of people who need to ask for tech support, you are some kind of nut if you honestly think the cure's worse than the disease.
Okay I work at a small firm so we don't have the problems or the tools to deal with the problems that you would have dealing with a thousand PCs. But how do you just reimage a PC remotely when the OS will not even boot?
Well, even if you don't have PCs with remote management (which adds a fair bit to the cost), you can configure them to boot from the LAN first.
All you do then is set up your imaging system to reimage all the impacted PCs. Seeing as they're stuck in a reboot loop (that's what this update did), shouldn't take too long for them to get a new image.
Actually, I can see that happening. Few of smaller games studios can afford to make a game which royally flops; it's not difficult to see a scenario where one is released with such harsh DRM that it winds up acquiring a reputation comparable to Windows ME within a week of release.
Let us say, for the sake of argument, that you live in the middle of the fucking desert a couple of thousand years ago.
You are (by accident of birth) quite high in your society's hierarchy - but a lot of things that we take for granted these days simply don't exist in the middle of this fucking desert.
There's no police force.
There's no farm subsidies (though there are farmers, it's a hard life being a farmer in the middle of a fucking desert).
The last couple of years have been tough - there's virtually no water (though the people in the next country have a number of rivers...). As a consequence, many of your people are starving.
There may or may not be such a thing as conscription, but keeping morale up in your army is damn hard. You can barely feed them, FFS.
There is precious little that would be recognised as a legal system two thousand years hence.
There's no international aid - it's every man for himself.
There's little education - those who aren't from a wealthy background (which 99% of your countrymen aren't) don't necessarily understand exactly how bad things are or how best to improve them.
What your people need to survive is some better farmland. And you know exactly what you need to get it - water. Easiest way to get this is to re-settle as many people as you can next to the neighbour's river. Your neighbour is likely to object, however, so you'll have to take it by force. How on Earth do persuade thousands of people to take up arms and invade your neighbour?
Well, like most leaders you're fundamentally a politician. Two thousand years from now you'd spin your people some line about how this neighbouring country has big scary weapons, but that doesn't work so well here because nuclear weapons aren't going to be invented for some time.
The most powerful thing you have available is your own local myths and legends - which include legends about how the world was created by an all-powerful being. Most of your people believe pretty firmly in them. So you spin them a line about how this all-powerful being has promised them the world - on condition they take on any "non-believers". And by an amazing coincidence, there's a whole bunch of non-believers in the next country.
They aren't taking anything away, they just aren't giving you anything anymore. Only on Slashdot could the two possibly be confused by people who call themselves intelligent.
Erm... you are aware it's entirely possible - if not likely - that new games will refuse to function unless you upgrade the firmware?
Slashdot Mirror
Their tax policies for businesses are rather less friendly, however. Which is fine if you're an individual but if you run a small business (which lots of people do) is rather less attractive.
As long as politicians can be grown up about it PR works just fine.
Oh dear. We're screwed then.
AFAICT, their argument is now "Novell didn't sell us the copyrights, but that's not what the intention was when the agreement was signed. So we'd like you to overlook the letter of that agreement and instead consider its original purpose."
Just once, I'd like a judge to say "You know what? At the rate you lot are going, I'm going to be dead before this case is finished. In fact, everyone in this room is going to be dead before the case is finished. So instead I'm ordering that we forget the case altogether and go for a nice picnic and play Frisbee in the park."
I wonder how many large companies are still buying into that FUD.
Considering how fantastically reliable 3.5" floppies are, do you believe anyone ever makes any effort to read those disks you submit?
IANAL, but AFAIK most legal systems do have a mechanism for stopping vexatious litigants. But it's usually intended to deal with people who waste court time with stupid cases. The sort of person who'd sue McDonalds because there was chicken in their chicken sandwich meal.
Perhaps some lawyer will enlighten me (NYCL?), but my understanding is it's much harder to do that against someone who keeps on coming up with claims which may actually have a sound legal footing at first glance.
In any event, I'd dearly love to know how these lawyers are getting paid now. Unless the law firm has taken it on as some sort of "no-win, no-fee, and if that means appealing until such time as we wind up in front of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court then so be it" basis.
Don't know if anyone else remembers "It's Flashbeagle, Charlie Brown"....
Judge: What are you doing, SCO?
SCO: I'm waiting for my sweet baboo.^W^W^W^W^W suing Novell because they assigned us the copyright to Unix.
Novell: We did not assign you the copyrights!
SCO: Novell sold us the copyright in 1995.
Novell: WE DID NOT!
SCO: Well, you should have!
Judge: Oh, brother.
Of course they're proposing proportional representation, they've got the most to gain from it.
There is another view which says that you inevitably wind up with watered down legislation which in trying to pander to every party doesn't really solve anything. In essence, a true example of "a compromise is what happens when you come up with an idea that doesn't really suit anyone".
Not voting at all, OTOH, is equivalent to saying "You know what? I really don't care who gets in - Labour, Tory, LibDem, Monster Raving Loony, whatever"
The Conservatives have a strong set of policies but they also have a history of foaming at the mouth just as badly as Labour. If they take office it's more or less guaranteed they'll come down on the side of whichever claims to have the biggest business interests.
LibDems, OTOH, seem to like the idea of even more taxes and even more bureaucracy... and frankly we're taxed heavily enough as it is, TYVM. Damned either way, IMV.
Rules are for the guidance of wise men and the obedience of fools. - Douglas Bader.
And Bader was right. In this case, the wise man would have followed the policy until such time as it became obvious that continuing to follow it was dangerous (and frankly, it was pretty damn obvious that it was long before Childs was found guilty), and at that point made some effort to find a way of breaking policy without being held liable for it - if necessary, by getting your lawyer to draft something releasing you from liability.
Come on, most of us on /. are professionals in some capacity. How many times have you seen someone make things worse for themselves because they thought they knew what they were doing? How many times have you said "Why didn't you ask me earlier?"
I am quite certain there isn't a criminal lawyer alive who hasn't thought the same thing on a number of occasions.
Perhaps, but the story author doesn't have an IT guy.
The solution to that is not to have every single member of staff an IT guy in their own right. There are plenty of people in this world who know just enough to be dangerous, I can't think of anything worse than filling an office with such people.
It doesn't help that in many parts of the world there's so much competition that setting up a business being "the IT guy" for a number of small companies is simply not going to pay enough for anyone halfway-competent to want to do it for any length of time.
Powerpoint is trying to solve a problem - that of communicating a lot of complex information efficiently. Which, let's be honest, is a very common problem.
The issue that comes out of it is that a lot of people are absolutely lousy at effectively communicating complex information. Powerpoint allows them to pretend that they are communicating - when in actual fact they're not. They're just droning.
I think a part of the solution here may be education - but I don't mean "educate people at college or when they're in the workplace". Effective communicating together is such an important part of modern society that I think it should be consciously taught at school. I can't speak for others, but most teaching I had in university didn't even attempt to teach techniques to get ideas across - we were just given a brief and told to "prepare a presentation".
Given the quality of some of the presentations I've seen over the years - from managers, trainers and lecturers alike - I'd say that nobody is really being taught how to get ideas across. Maybe nobody knows how, and so there's nobody to teach anyone else.
It's Internet transparency that has been uncovering and unraveling the abuse scandal that has brought on a crisis within the Catholic Church. Although I'd be hard-pressed to say I was "shocked" that the Pope has no apparent interest in uncovering a network of evil, horror and corruption within the Church, I can and will say that I am disappointed.
That's simply not true. The Pope has gone on record to say he is deeply saddened by all this, and he has proposed real concrete action to address this issue.
Specifically, the action he recommends is prayer.
No, I am not joking. From the Pope's letter to Irish Catholics:
14. I now wish to propose to you some concrete initiatives to address the situation.
At the conclusion of my meeting with the Irish bishops, I asked that Lent this year be set aside as a time to pray for an outpouring of God’s mercy and the Holy Spirit’s gifts of holiness and strength upon the Church in your country. I now invite all of you to devote your Friday penances, for a period of one year, between now and Easter 2011, to this intention. I ask you to offer up your fasting, your prayer, your reading of Scripture and your works of mercy in order to obtain the grace of healing and renewal for the Church in Ireland. I encourage you to discover anew the sacrament of Reconciliation and to avail yourselves more frequently of the transforming power of its grace.
The MOST EFFECTIVE alternative is turning them over to the police with all the evidence! THAT IS what happens to MEN... humans and that is ALL THAT A PRIEST is to me. He may represent CHRIST but if he is practicing illegal acts, he is a man and a criminal. For the church to do otherwise makes it criminal too, in my book.
Arguably it's criminal in the legislature of quite a few civilised countries, too.
In the UK we have perverting the course of justice which you most certainly can be imprisoned for if you know somebody did something wrong and, when questioned by police, you lie to cover it up. I'd be astonished if lots of other countries didn't have similar laws.
What we tend to do is keep a Linux CD and or Flash drive handy just in case.
That allows us to boot into Linux and access the HD from Linux to fix corrupt files and such.
I took this one step further - I have booting from LAN set up to give me a menu offering to reinstall Windows, install any of a number of Linux distributions, boot an Ubuntu live CD and a number of tools (most usefully DBAN). The potentially-damaging options are password protected to protect people from themselves. Seems silly to mess around with trying to find a blank CD, burn it, then forget all about it so have to do the same again when I've got a dirty great fileserver at my fingertips.
My next step is going to be enhance this so I can have a PC with a specific MAC address rebuild Windows. This isn't difficult per se but IME most of the commercial tools which do these things assume that you don't have much of an existing infrastructure to do this, so I either need to roll my own (should be easy enough considering what I've already got) or work around this limitation.
Depends on the remote imaging software - some integrates with your existing infrastructure.
Not that it matters much - IME a lot of people don't bother switching their PC off overnight anyway. I would seriously consider it - it's just a shame there's no standard way of reconfiguring boot options once the PC has booted.
One good thing about A/V software - since I started sharing the above rant with family members, especially the in-laws, the requests for tech support from me have gone way way down. I think that my anti-A/V views have gotten me labeled as some kind of tinfoil-hat-wearing nut who shouldn't be allowed anywhere near their computers.
Frankly, if they persist in using Windows and they are the sort of people who need to ask for tech support, you are some kind of nut if you honestly think the cure's worse than the disease.
Okay I work at a small firm so we don't have the problems or the tools to deal with the problems that you would have dealing with a thousand PCs. But how do you just reimage a PC remotely when the OS will not even boot?
Well, even if you don't have PCs with remote management (which adds a fair bit to the cost), you can configure them to boot from the LAN first.
All you do then is set up your imaging system to reimage all the impacted PCs. Seeing as they're stuck in a reboot loop (that's what this update did), shouldn't take too long for them to get a new image.
In a different time, the common phrase for such behavior was;
Sure, but how many good carpenters mess around with shitty tools?
They're not the only profession to do this. Teachers are just as bad.
Actually, I'm talking about religion in general terms.
Actually, I can see that happening. Few of smaller games studios can afford to make a game which royally flops; it's not difficult to see a scenario where one is released with such harsh DRM that it winds up acquiring a reputation comparable to Windows ME within a week of release.
Let us say, for the sake of argument, that you live in the middle of the fucking desert a couple of thousand years ago.
You are (by accident of birth) quite high in your society's hierarchy - but a lot of things that we take for granted these days simply don't exist in the middle of this fucking desert.
There's no police force.
There's no farm subsidies (though there are farmers, it's a hard life being a farmer in the middle of a fucking desert).
The last couple of years have been tough - there's virtually no water (though the people in the next country have a number of rivers...). As a consequence, many of your people are starving.
There may or may not be such a thing as conscription, but keeping morale up in your army is damn hard. You can barely feed them, FFS.
There is precious little that would be recognised as a legal system two thousand years hence.
There's no international aid - it's every man for himself.
There's little education - those who aren't from a wealthy background (which 99% of your countrymen aren't) don't necessarily understand exactly how bad things are or how best to improve them.
What your people need to survive is some better farmland. And you know exactly what you need to get it - water. Easiest way to get this is to re-settle as many people as you can next to the neighbour's river. Your neighbour is likely to object, however, so you'll have to take it by force. How on Earth do persuade thousands of people to take up arms and invade your neighbour?
Well, like most leaders you're fundamentally a politician. Two thousand years from now you'd spin your people some line about how this neighbouring country has big scary weapons, but that doesn't work so well here because nuclear weapons aren't going to be invented for some time.
The most powerful thing you have available is your own local myths and legends - which include legends about how the world was created by an all-powerful being. Most of your people believe pretty firmly in them. So you spin them a line about how this all-powerful being has promised them the world - on condition they take on any "non-believers". And by an amazing coincidence, there's a whole bunch of non-believers in the next country.
In the country I live this updated EULA has no legal bearing whatsoever. You might want to check yours.
Ah, good, so you'll sue Sony as soon as they roll out an enforced firmware update?
Frankly, the only way I see that happening is if Sony roll out an update that mass-bricks PS3s.
They aren't taking anything away, they just aren't giving you anything anymore. Only on Slashdot could the two possibly be confused by people who call themselves intelligent.
Erm... you are aware it's entirely possible - if not likely - that new games will refuse to function unless you upgrade the firmware?