Spider Robinson hits the nail pretty squarely, but too squarely for the bought politicians to ever understand him. The only thing they care about being infinite is bribes^Wcampaign contributions.
The lawsuit doesn't surprise me. Like I ranted, when the system gets out of whack, corrections occur naturally, and the system has been getting out of whack for a long time.
I wonder what the future will be like, say in 50 years. I see the extreme that I ranted against. The world separates into the above ground, where the big boys fuss over legal copyrights and patents, and the under ground, where the vast majority of people just do what they want and copyright is as foreign a concept as caviar was to a peasant from 1500.
But I don't expect that, the natural corrections will do something before it gets that far. I don't think a simple muddling thru is the outcome, I expect it rather to be comething completely different. It will be interesting.
I have always wondered what would happen when the IP mafia went too far. A common fiction theme is carrying some oddity to to an extreme that is not possible. Sometimes it seems to be laziness, other times intentional.
Slashdot itself is full of these extreme types of worry. People get all het up over copyright holders locking down 1+1=2 (or Intel's version, 1+1=1.999998; perhaps Intel was merely ahead of its time, eh?), and the world of creativity coming to an end, where it is not possible to write a program without every line infringing somebody's copyright or patent. It always seemed a silly take to me. But this has all been worry for nothing. The more any system gets out of whack, the more natural corrections pop up. The farther out of whack, the more intense the corrections.
I like the looks of this, we have more and more natural corrections all the time, little ones and bigger ones. GPL is a natural correction, quite ingenious, the ultimate hack to make a system subvert itself. Remixes like this are great, they put the big labels on notice that they can't control everything. Kazaa is helping.
Let the big boys waste their time and money on copyrights and patents. When they control too much, everyone else will ignore them, just as they do with Kazaa, just as they do with this album. These big boys will go the way of all dinosaurs.
Languages ARE defined by usage. Dictionaries follow usage, they do not govern it. People don't learn to read dictionaries before they learn to read and speak.
Languages evolve. Words you use today had different meanings 50 years ago. Computer, for instance, meant people who do computations, by hand or with calculators. No doubt they were just as miffed at the new fangled meaning as you are by the new fangled meaning of hacker. Too bad!
Look up interesting phrases sometime, you would be amazed at how meanings have changed to the opposite of what they used to mean. Look up history of various words. The only languages which can be defined by a dictionary are dead languages like Latin and ancient Greek.
I took a Japanese course many years ago, night class several times a week. One of the stories I wrote for this class included mention of the northern CA town of Chico. I wrote it in Japanese as chi-ko, she said no, write a long o, chi-ko-u, because it is no longer a Spanish word, it is now an American name of an American town, and pronounced with a long o. The more I thought about it, the more I reckoned she was right. Words change when they are adopted from one language into another.
Japanese did an interesting job on the name of the country Mexico. The Mexican pronunciation of Mexico is May-hee-ko, which works beautifully just like that in Japanese. But they got the name of the country from Americans, so (at least 30 years ago), the Japanese word for that country is pronounced as May-kee-hee-ko.
I like an old joke, when someone gives you grief about pronouncing a city or country name wrongly... what is the capital of France? Nope, not pair-us, it's pah-ree. What's the capital of Germany? Wrong, Berlin is the capital of Deutschland.
Language is what it is. People can quibble all day about whether words have been hijacked by idiots, but language is what it is, and if 99% of the population understands hacker to be evil, then the 1% had better be aware of it.
What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. If all this is true, how come Indians aren't eager to outsource all the jobs back to the US? Hard to believe they are so altruistic.
There's the trick... Every religious tradition we have begins with the Divine revealing Itself to man, either directly or through an intermediary.
And why should anyone believe an intermediary?
I tell you, it seems to me the height of arrogance to say "The Divine selected me to tell all you heathens what is going on. Yes, this supreme, all knowing, all seeing, all powerful diety, who made us all and everything around us.... step right up folks, let me tell you all about it."
Somehow that just amuses me, that I should pay attention to anyone that arrogant and full of himself.
If I remember correctly, they refused to carry any other traffic except at exorbitant prices.
That's what Microsoft has been doing... by their arm twisting, they raised the prices of software for everybody. Dell could not sell computers except with a Microsoft O/S unless they wanted to pay exorbitant prices for the rest of the computers. They couldn't preload other software on PCs. Lots of little things which made it more expensive for everybody. You have only to look at the cheap deals being negotiated all over to see what could have been charged here many years ago. Microsoft didn't collect $50 billion in cash by being Mr Nice Guy. Look at their annual revenues and compare to Wal-Mart, then look at their cash hoards... Wal-Mart has competition, Microsoft doesn't.
When every PC has to come preloaded with the latest Office, forcing everybody else to upgrade... that's a monopoly. A little research on the history of monopoly legislation is a real eye opener. 100% market share is by no means the way to find monopolies.
How about you think for yourself rather than letting the government do it for you, hm?
I suppose I should let you do my thinking for me, eh? Is that how it works, if you think so, everyone who disagrees is a government lackey?
First: The appeals court specifically ruled the decision was valid, just not the remedy. That's several more judges, not just one.
Second: by not appealing, and letting the conviction stand, Microsoft has legally admitted that yes they are a guilty monopoly, and have opened the floodgates to a zillion cuts in civil suits. Those civil suits now are able to start with the presumtption that Microsoft is indeed a monopoly. They do not need to wade thru months of testimony and millions of dollars in pre-trial discovery and court costs to prove that all over again. Microsft would have appealed if they thought there was any chance of dragging it out, but they decided they sweet slap they got was better than their chances in a retrial.
As for as evidence, it doesn't take much of a look to find they have been cooking the books to maintain their steady profits, or to find that yes indeed they have been able to charge monopoly prices for their products. Perhaps you ought to research what it means to be a monopoly. It doesn't just mean government required payments and products. There have been many corporate monopolies for your research. You will find Microsoft is right up there with Standard Oil and the railroads and every other robber baron from a hundred years ago. 95% is a monopoly.
... is the deal that Microsoft made with the Shrub administration when it came in, to water down the antitrust case as far as possible. You can't deny that has been a good deal for the politicians, lots of money was had from that.
And for you moderators without any clues, here is one...:-) and several more;-):-O =:-O
You are the quibbling sort, always looking for any excuse to avoid reality. Microsoft has been convicted of being a monopoly, and has not appealed it; Microsoft thereby admits to being a monopoly.
One of the classic anti trust cases involved a railroad bridge across the Mississippi River. There was no other suitable location for a bridge crossing within hundreds of miles. The railroad was convicted of being a monopoly, because there was no practical alternative.
You are the kind of quibbler who would say, oh they could ship around Cape Horn. Oh, they could build a new railroad and bridge hundreds of miles out of the way. Oh, they could barge it across.
Bullshit. Disney itself may not be a monopoly, but Microsoft sure is, tried, convicted, and admitted. And Disney's membership in the MPAA sure taints them with monopolistic practices.
I have reported several stories as dups. Never got any direct answer, but they disappeared from/. within a minute. If it helps any, I have always included the original URL in my email.
Maybe you reported it as a dup just before it went live, and then it was too late. If only a few people bother to tell daddypants, odds are that once in a while they will be too late. Suppose only one out of a hundred is a dup, maybe that is reasonable odds. Also, if I see one hundred red new articles, and report the occasional dup, which gets yanked, but once in a while I am too late or ignored, I would remember that fuckup more than the successful ones.
I have read, probably Groklaw, that copyright transfer is not automatic, and has to be done explicitly in writing at the PTO or whoever handles it. Reagardless of what that contract says is necessary, if SCO did not explicitly ask for those copyright transfers, and if Novell did not sign any over to SCO, then they were not transferred. My understanding has been that SCO has to explicitly state they need the copyright transfers, and why, and Novell has to agree. None of this has occurred.
My understanding was that SCO had to specifically ask for those additional transfers, they had to specifically state it was necessary in order for them to exercise their previous rights. Since SCO did not in fact state this, they didn't get the additional rights.
But I could be wrong, and everything is so fuzzed up, it will take years to settle. Not even that $50M will cover their expenses in the meantime.
No, authentication would only kill anonymous email for those who have no need for anonymous email. Authenitication would not kill random email from strangers, it would only kill anonymous email.
There are very few people who need to send anonymous email, such as whistleblowers. They don't send to just anybody, they send to specific people, ombudsman, lawyers, police, and they would still have to allow anonymous email. I imagine useful anonymous email is one out of a million.
99.999% of anonymous email is spam. With authentication, 99.999% of spam will never get past the headers; the smtp server will drop the connection rudely, or reject it permanently. Spam only works now because they can make a profit when only 100 out of a million recipients respond. When that million is cut down to a few hundred because it was not authenticated, they would still need those 100 responses, which they won't get out of such a small mailing, and they will quickly go out of business.
Spam would wither so fast it would make even Aunt Sally smile.
Of course... we live in a digital world... information and energy come in packets called quanta... even speakers convert these digital quanta into discrete positions of a cone to push air molecules around to trigger discrete movements of ear hairs to simulate analog. We can't do anything in analog.
Most, if not all, ethernet chips have a promiscuous mode. Normally they are configured to ignore all packets with a destination address other than theirs. But they have a promiscuous mode where they capture all packets.
It is trivial to capture other packets on the same ethernet.
Their basic tactic has always been "embrace, extend, extinguish" - not "steal, sue, squash".
You might want to talk to the many companies Microsoft has stolen from, notably Stac (I think was their name). Sue? Squash? Yep, sounds like Microsoft. You must be living in some weird dream world.
6) If SCO does not have sufficient information in its possession, custody, or control to specifically answer any of IBM's requests that are the subject of this order, SCO shall provide an affidavit setting forth the full nature of its efforts, by whom they were taken, what further efforts it intends to utilize in order to comply, and the expected date of compliance. SCO is required to provide such answers and documents within thirty days from the date of this order. All other discovery, including SCO's Motion to Compel is hereby STAYED until this Court determines that SCO has fully complied with this Order.
Notice... if they don't comply, they have to state why, and how they tried, and only have thirty days from back in December to do it, and they still can't get to their own discovery until IBM's discovery is complete. All SCO would do is make their own case weaker and weaker.
I live in the boonies. Bears have been on my deck just outside the bedroom sliding glass door. My neighbor half a mile away has had mountain lions on his deck.
Now I don't know about you, but if that bear had come thru the glass door, I'd like to have some means of encouraging him to go elsewhere. I have a shotgun for that purpose, loaded with bird shot, buckshot, and slugs.
Furthermore, there have been idiots come around, lookie loos who no one knows, pretty certain they are looking for houses to plunder. It would take the cops half an hour to get here.
I like my gun. I may be in the bears' and lions' natural home, and I will not bother them as long as they stay away from this particular 1600 sq ft that it MY home.
This was back in the old days when the earth did not rotate as fast and was farther from the sun, so a year then was longer than now. Plus, without all the chemicals in food and water and beer, kids grew up faster. This also explains why the life expectancy was so much "shorter", with adults dying off at age 40. This is like Martian years vs Earth years: old Earth long years vs modern short years.
Slashdot Mirror
Spider Robinson hits the nail pretty squarely, but too squarely for the bought politicians to ever understand him. The only thing they care about being infinite is bribes^Wcampaign contributions.
The lawsuit doesn't surprise me. Like I ranted, when the system gets out of whack, corrections occur naturally, and the system has been getting out of whack for a long time.
I wonder what the future will be like, say in 50 years. I see the extreme that I ranted against. The world separates into the above ground, where the big boys fuss over legal copyrights and patents, and the under ground, where the vast majority of people just do what they want and copyright is as foreign a concept as caviar was to a peasant from 1500.
But I don't expect that, the natural corrections will do something before it gets that far. I don't think a simple muddling thru is the outcome, I expect it rather to be comething completely different. It will be interesting.
I have always wondered what would happen when the IP mafia went too far. A common fiction theme is carrying some oddity to to an extreme that is not possible. Sometimes it seems to be laziness, other times intentional.
Slashdot itself is full of these extreme types of worry. People get all het up over copyright holders locking down 1+1=2 (or Intel's version, 1+1=1.999998; perhaps Intel was merely ahead of its time, eh?), and the world of creativity coming to an end, where it is not possible to write a program without every line infringing somebody's copyright or patent. It always seemed a silly take to me. But this has all been worry for nothing. The more any system gets out of whack, the more natural corrections pop up. The farther out of whack, the more intense the corrections.
I like the looks of this, we have more and more natural corrections all the time, little ones and bigger ones. GPL is a natural correction, quite ingenious, the ultimate hack to make a system subvert itself. Remixes like this are great, they put the big labels on notice that they can't control everything. Kazaa is helping.
Let the big boys waste their time and money on copyrights and patents. When they control too much, everyone else will ignore them, just as they do with Kazaa, just as they do with this album. These big boys will go the way of all dinosaurs.
SCO UNIX(R) is a Proven, Stable and Reliable Platform
So is a rock.
SCO UNIX(R) is backed by a single, experienced vendor
No one else wants anything to do with it.
SCO UNIX(R) has a Committed, Well-Defined Roadmap
Yep, whatever appears in Linux, appears in SCO UNIX(R) years later.
SCO UNIX(R) is Secure
So obscure that no one notices when it is cracked.
SCO UNIX(R) is Legally Unencumbered
... by any legal sense whatsoever.
Languages ARE defined by usage. Dictionaries follow usage, they do not govern it. People don't learn to read dictionaries before they learn to read and speak.
Languages evolve. Words you use today had different meanings 50 years ago. Computer, for instance, meant people who do computations, by hand or with calculators. No doubt they were just as miffed at the new fangled meaning as you are by the new fangled meaning of hacker. Too bad!
Look up interesting phrases sometime, you would be amazed at how meanings have changed to the opposite of what they used to mean. Look up history of various words. The only languages which can be defined by a dictionary are dead languages like Latin and ancient Greek.
I took a Japanese course many years ago, night class several times a week. One of the stories I wrote for this class included mention of the northern CA town of Chico. I wrote it in Japanese as chi-ko, she said no, write a long o, chi-ko-u, because it is no longer a Spanish word, it is now an American name of an American town, and pronounced with a long o. The more I thought about it, the more I reckoned she was right. Words change when they are adopted from one language into another.
... what is the capital of France? Nope, not pair-us, it's pah-ree. What's the capital of Germany? Wrong, Berlin is the capital of Deutschland.
Japanese did an interesting job on the name of the country Mexico. The Mexican pronunciation of Mexico is May-hee-ko, which works beautifully just like that in Japanese. But they got the name of the country from Americans, so (at least 30 years ago), the Japanese word for that country is pronounced as May-kee-hee-ko.
I like an old joke, when someone gives you grief about pronouncing a city or country name wrongly
Language is what it is. People can quibble all day about whether words have been hijacked by idiots, but language is what it is, and if 99% of the population understands hacker to be evil, then the 1% had better be aware of it.
What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. If all this is true, how come Indians aren't eager to outsource all the jobs back to the US? Hard to believe they are so altruistic.
There's the trick ... Every religious tradition we have begins with the Divine revealing Itself to man, either directly or through an intermediary.
.... step right up folks, let me tell you all about it."
And why should anyone believe an intermediary?
I tell you, it seems to me the height of arrogance to say "The Divine selected me to tell all you heathens what is going on. Yes, this supreme, all knowing, all seeing, all powerful diety, who made us all and everything around us
Somehow that just amuses me, that I should pay attention to anyone that arrogant and full of himself.
If I remember correctly, they refused to carry any other traffic except at exorbitant prices.
... by their arm twisting, they raised the prices of software for everybody. Dell could not sell computers except with a Microsoft O/S unless they wanted to pay exorbitant prices for the rest of the computers. They couldn't preload other software on PCs. Lots of little things which made it more expensive for everybody. You have only to look at the cheap deals being negotiated all over to see what could have been charged here many years ago. Microsoft didn't collect $50 billion in cash by being Mr Nice Guy. Look at their annual revenues and compare to Wal-Mart, then look at their cash hoards ... Wal-Mart has competition, Microsoft doesn't.
... that's a monopoly. A little research on the history of monopoly legislation is a real eye opener. 100% market share is by no means the way to find monopolies.
That's what Microsoft has been doing
When every PC has to come preloaded with the latest Office, forcing everybody else to upgrade
How about you think for yourself rather than letting the government do it for you, hm?
I suppose I should let you do my thinking for me, eh? Is that how it works, if you think so, everyone who disagrees is a government lackey?
First: The appeals court specifically ruled the decision was valid, just not the remedy. That's several more judges, not just one.
Second: by not appealing, and letting the conviction stand, Microsoft has legally admitted that yes they are a guilty monopoly, and have opened the floodgates to a zillion cuts in civil suits. Those civil suits now are able to start with the presumtption that Microsoft is indeed a monopoly. They do not need to wade thru months of testimony and millions of dollars in pre-trial discovery and court costs to prove that all over again. Microsft would have appealed if they thought there was any chance of dragging it out, but they decided they sweet slap they got was better than their chances in a retrial.
As for as evidence, it doesn't take much of a look to find they have been cooking the books to maintain their steady profits, or to find that yes indeed they have been able to charge monopoly prices for their products. Perhaps you ought to research what it means to be a monopoly. It doesn't just mean government required payments and products. There have been many corporate monopolies for your research. You will find Microsoft is right up there with Standard Oil and the railroads and every other robber baron from a hundred years ago. 95% is a monopoly.
... is the deal that Microsoft made with the Shrub administration when it came in, to water down the antitrust case as far as possible. You can't deny that has been a good deal for the politicians, lots of money was had from that.
... :-) and several more ;-) :-O =:-O
And for you moderators without any clues, here is one
You are the quibbling sort, always looking for any excuse to avoid reality. Microsoft has been convicted of being a monopoly, and has not appealed it; Microsoft thereby admits to being a monopoly.
One of the classic anti trust cases involved a railroad bridge across the Mississippi River. There was no other suitable location for a bridge crossing within hundreds of miles. The railroad was convicted of being a monopoly, because there was no practical alternative.
You are the kind of quibbler who would say, oh they could ship around Cape Horn. Oh, they could build a new railroad and bridge hundreds of miles out of the way. Oh, they could barge it across.
Bullshit. Disney itself may not be a monopoly, but Microsoft sure is, tried, convicted, and admitted. And Disney's membership in the MPAA sure taints them with monopolistic practices.
Get real.
I have reported several stories as dups. Never got any direct answer, but they disappeared from /. within a minute. If it helps any, I have always included the original URL in my email.
Maybe you reported it as a dup just before it went live, and then it was too late. If only a few people bother to tell daddypants, odds are that once in a while they will be too late. Suppose only one out of a hundred is a dup, maybe that is reasonable odds. Also, if I see one hundred red new articles, and report the occasional dup, which gets yanked, but once in a while I am too late or ignored, I would remember that fuckup more than the successful ones.
It's probably open sores.
I have read, probably Groklaw, that copyright transfer is not automatic, and has to be done explicitly in writing at the PTO or whoever handles it. Reagardless of what that contract says is necessary, if SCO did not explicitly ask for those copyright transfers, and if Novell did not sign any over to SCO, then they were not transferred. My understanding has been that SCO has to explicitly state they need the copyright transfers, and why, and Novell has to agree. None of this has occurred.
My understanding was that SCO had to specifically ask for those additional transfers, they had to specifically state it was necessary in order for them to exercise their previous rights. Since SCO did not in fact state this, they didn't get the additional rights.
But I could be wrong, and everything is so fuzzed up, it will take years to settle. Not even that $50M will cover their expenses in the meantime.
No, authentication would only kill anonymous email for those who have no need for anonymous email. Authenitication would not kill random email from strangers, it would only kill anonymous email.
There are very few people who need to send anonymous email, such as whistleblowers. They don't send to just anybody, they send to specific people, ombudsman, lawyers, police, and they would still have to allow anonymous email. I imagine useful anonymous email is one out of a million.
99.999% of anonymous email is spam. With authentication, 99.999% of spam will never get past the headers; the smtp server will drop the connection rudely, or reject it permanently. Spam only works now because they can make a profit when only 100 out of a million recipients respond. When that million is cut down to a few hundred because it was not authenticated, they would still need those 100 responses, which they won't get out of such a small mailing, and they will quickly go out of business.
Spam would wither so fast it would make even Aunt Sally smile.
And thank you for noticing. Maybe I need more smilies....
Of course ... we live in a digital world ... information and energy come in packets called quanta ... even speakers convert these digital quanta into discrete positions of a cone to push air molecules around to trigger discrete movements of ear hairs to simulate analog. We can't do anything in analog.
IANAP
Most, if not all, ethernet chips have a promiscuous mode. Normally they are configured to ignore all packets with a destination address other than theirs. But they have a promiscuous mode where they capture all packets.
It is trivial to capture other packets on the same ethernet.
Their basic tactic has always been "embrace, extend, extinguish" - not "steal, sue, squash".
You might want to talk to the many companies Microsoft has stolen from, notably Stac (I think was their name). Sue? Squash? Yep, sounds like Microsoft. You must be living in some weird dream world.
6) If SCO does not have sufficient information in its possession, custody, or control to specifically answer any of IBM's requests that are the subject of this order, SCO shall provide an affidavit setting forth the full nature of its efforts, by whom they were taken, what further efforts it intends to utilize in order to comply, and the expected date of compliance. SCO is required to provide such answers and documents within thirty days from the date of this order. All other discovery, including SCO's Motion to Compel is hereby STAYED until this Court determines that SCO has fully complied with this Order.
... if they don't comply, they have to state why, and how they tried, and only have thirty days from back in December to do it, and they still can't get to their own discovery until IBM's discovery is complete. All SCO would do is make their own case weaker and weaker.
Notice
I live in the boonies. Bears have been on my deck just outside the bedroom sliding glass door. My neighbor half a mile away has had mountain lions on his deck.
Now I don't know about you, but if that bear had come thru the glass door, I'd like to have some means of encouraging him to go elsewhere. I have a shotgun for that purpose, loaded with bird shot, buckshot, and slugs.
Furthermore, there have been idiots come around, lookie loos who no one knows, pretty certain they are looking for houses to plunder. It would take the cops half an hour to get here.
I like my gun. I may be in the bears' and lions' natural home, and I will not bother them as long as they stay away from this particular 1600 sq ft that it MY home.
At least enough to not use it once it's been soiled .
This was back in the old days when the earth did not rotate as fast and was farther from the sun, so a year then was longer than now. Plus, without all the chemicals in food and water and beer, kids grew up faster. This also explains why the life expectancy was so much "shorter", with adults dying off at age 40. This is like Martian years vs Earth years: old Earth long years vs modern short years.
then you could have dual processing.