Actually yes, theft does have to be physical because it refers to property, according to the legal definition. And no, 'intellectual property' (a misleading term) does not count as property.
which descibes the legal definitions rather the incorrect definition which seems to be getting more and more popular on Slashdot as more and more incorrect uses of it are made by leading figures in the RIAA and other organisations.
Perhaps they think if they say it enough the legal definition will change? Not likely.
Yes theft is an often misused concept in regards to copyright infringement, but in this case it wasn't.
In terms of law: no it's not theft. (It's not stealing either). No physical objects were removed from anyone's possession. It's not theft!
A simple test for theft: take a picture of the object before it is stolen, then take another picture after the crime. You can see that the object is gone! If you cannot do this, then it's not theft!
I applaud them for their server sales, but I hope that they will soon develop a power efficient chip for laptops. At the moment they have nothing that can compete with Intel's M chips. Do they have plans to compete with Intel for this market or are they happy to stay in the server market?
Firefox has been downloaded 75 million times via the web interface . See my earlier post to see why I believe he majority of Linux users are not included in this count, due to not downloading it via the website.
The only thing we can be sure of is that Firefox is popular. As pointed out elsewhere, exact figures are impossible to obtain. The statistic is still interesting and useful though.
Huge amounts of work had to be discarded (can not have virus/spyware getting into this software), which probably cost this company no less than 100K
The software was discarded? Were there no backups? I assume that the software was developed in-house, so don't you have the source code? Or did the viruses infect the source-code too? That would be some neat trick! Don't blame Microsoft for your company's incompetence.
Actually if you use portage I think it probably would be counted, since the ebuild downloads it from Mozilla (that being the standard way to get source/binary packages in an ebuild - from the maker).
It's true for portage as well. Gentoo uses a system of mirrors so that when you download the source it will try to fetch it from a mirror rather than going to the main site. Watch the screen carefully when you install:
I use Firefox on most of my computers, so I'm responsible for about 5 of those 75 million downloads. 30, if they are counting each patch too.
Don't worry... If you use the built-in update feature of Firefox, your security upgrades are not counted in the total number of downloads. Only downloads via the website are counted.
And when I install I from portage it is also not counted. In fact most Linux users are probably not counted, since most use things like apt-get, emerge, or whatever.
What is the relevance? It gives an idea of the popularity of the product. The number is big, and still increasing. That is all that matters.
My Windows machine at work is currently at 221 hours of uptime.
I was just about to reply to this to say how either you must be lying, or else your system must be horribly insecure because you don't reboot it for the monthly critical updates. Then I noticed you wrote 221 hours and not 221 days.
I have half a mind to install DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.1 on my 1.2 GHz box. Fewer unnecessary services, and programs really will open instantly.
You could try a minimal Linux distribution with a lightweight window manager. It will make your 1.2GHz computer seem very fast.
It is even possible (though probably non-trivial) to run your copy of Paintshop using Wine (a windows compatibility library for Linux). Otherwise there is Gimp which might be able to do the things you need.
Not only will you have a fast system, but also secure, up-to-date and still supported.
Museekster have investigated them and found that they do all their business legally. They have even won an award.
Besides, that Russian organization is licensed for that task in Russia, not the U.S., Canada, or the EU. Royalty percentages in Rubles versus Dollars (or Euros) is not exactly fair.
Rubbish! AllOfMp3.com do all transactions in US dollars. I am sure that the artists can request to receive their royalties in dollars too.
An interesting conspiracy theory, here is another one:
1) Deliberately create security flaw in Windows. 2) Break into government and competitors systems. 3) ??? 4) Profit!
But more likely the security errors they make are purely accidental. Microsoft do use some rotten business tactics occasionally, but I'm sure they wouldn't go as far as to deliberately make it easy to compromise Windows. If they were breaking the law in this way and got caught, it would do their reputation a lot of damage.
Writing secure software is hard, and Microsoft make mistakes, like everyone else.
Get a processor that runs efficiently, then you don't need a fan.
Harddrive noise:
Buy more memory and then you will find that your computer doesn't need to use swap space too much. You can then even turn your harddrives off when not in use, saving even more power and produing less heat.
Laptops run very quietly and consume very little power. Why can't they start putting some of this technology back into desktops?
All this earlier prediction has no use if the coastal cities that are prone to have earthquakes do not have emergency measures like alarms on the beach
Alarm systems are fine for saving some people, but a large number of the deaths would still not have been prevented even if the people had known the tsunami was about to strike hours in advance.
Homes were flattened, and much of the infrastructure was destroyed. Millions suddenly became homeless and there was little aid available for them. The only water many people could find was impure. People that were already ill had no hope of surviving and diseases spread with no medicine supply to stop them.
Installing some alarms and doing nothing else, will achieve very little. To save more, a lot more aid needs to be given from other countries in the days after the disaster.
Despite all the bad publicity about this game, I can only imagine that it will have a positive effect on sales, as loads of people that otherwise would never have bought this game are now interested in it, purely because of the amount of hype surrounding it.
If you want cheaper than Dell, you'll have to be prepared to deal with that kind of crap.
My point exactly. Dell offer a piece of mind that you know it is going to be good quality, and even if it's not you have someone you can shout at over the telephone. But this is an expensive luxury.
Actually I do always buy very cheap computers and they work (5 so far). Maybe I got lucky, but it has saved me a whole lot of money, plus the specs are much better. With the money I save I can upgrade twice as often.
Oh I think they will make a deal with Microsoft. If they agree to change their name, they'll probably even get a free X-Box, and maybe a couple of games.
I guarantee figuring out how to sell computers for what they do, at the margins they do, takes some imagination.
Even more impressive is how many other internet based companies manage to cut their prices in half again. Dell is not cheap, it is mid-range. It is aimed at people who want good support even if it costs a lot.
Repeatedly threatening to switch to AMD and Linux probably gets them good deals from Intel and Microsoft too. That is a good strategy.
You cannot make your enemy go away by paying them money. You can take out one or two guys, but there will lots of people eager to replace them, especially when they think there will be a huge monetary reward for success (being bought by Microsoft).
Slashdot Mirror
the truth is that there are a lot of people associated with Linux who don't appreciate diversity of opinion, either.
Linux is all about diversity. Just look at how many Linux distros there are.
If you paid $200,000 for that, you were conned!
It let me download it for free. It makes a nice desktop wallpaper though.
A leap year would be a whole new year inserted in the calendar, and it's a possibility in the future that something like this may happen.
Maybe the extra year will be called 2005½.
Theft does not have to be 'physical'
Actually yes, theft does have to be physical because it refers to property, according to the legal definition. And no, 'intellectual property' (a misleading term) does not count as property.
Read:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theft
and:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larceny
which descibes the legal definitions rather the incorrect definition which seems to be getting more and more popular on Slashdot as more and more incorrect uses of it are made by leading figures in the RIAA and other organisations.
Perhaps they think if they say it enough the legal definition will change? Not likely.
Yes theft is an often misused concept in regards to copyright infringement, but in this case it wasn't.
In terms of law: no it's not theft. (It's not stealing either). No physical objects were removed from anyone's possession. It's not theft!
A simple test for theft: take a picture of the object before it is stolen, then take another picture after the crime. You can see that the object is gone! If you cannot do this, then it's not theft!
I applaud them for their server sales, but I hope that they will soon develop a power efficient chip for laptops. At the moment they have nothing that can compete with Intel's M chips. Do they have plans to compete with Intel for this market or are they happy to stay in the server market?
Firefox has been downloaded 75 million times.
Even that is not accurate:
Firefox has been downloaded 75 million times via the web interface . See my earlier post to see why I believe he majority of Linux users are not included in this count, due to not downloading it via the website.
The only thing we can be sure of is that Firefox is popular. As pointed out elsewhere, exact figures are impossible to obtain. The statistic is still interesting and useful though.
Huge amounts of work had to be discarded (can not have virus/spyware getting into this software), which probably cost this company no less than 100K
The software was discarded? Were there no backups? I assume that the software was developed in-house, so don't you have the source code? Or did the viruses infect the source-code too? That would be some neat trick! Don't blame Microsoft for your company's incompetence.
Actually if you use portage I think it probably would be counted, since the ebuild downloads it from Mozilla (that being the standard way to get source/binary packages in an ebuild - from the maker).
://distfiles.gentoo.org/distfiles/firefox-1.0.6-so urce.tar.bz2
It's true for portage as well. Gentoo uses a system of mirrors so that when you download the source it will try to fetch it from a mirror rather than going to the main site. Watch the screen carefully when you install:
emerge --fetchonly mozilla-firefox
>>> Downloading http
I use Firefox on most of my computers, so I'm responsible for about 5 of those 75 million downloads. 30, if they are counting each patch too.
Don't worry... If you use the built-in update feature of Firefox, your security upgrades are not counted in the total number of downloads. Only downloads via the website are counted.
And when I install I from portage it is also not counted. In fact most Linux users are probably not counted, since most use things like apt-get, emerge, or whatever.
What is the relevance? It gives an idea of the popularity of the product. The number is big, and still increasing. That is all that matters.
My Windows machine at work is currently at 221 hours of uptime.
I was just about to reply to this to say how either you must be lying, or else your system must be horribly insecure because you don't reboot it for the monthly critical updates. Then I noticed you wrote 221 hours and not 221 days.
Usually uptime is measured in days!
I have half a mind to install DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.1 on my 1.2 GHz box. Fewer unnecessary services, and programs really will open instantly.
You could try a minimal Linux distribution with a lightweight window manager. It will make your 1.2GHz computer seem very fast.
It is even possible (though probably non-trivial) to run your copy of Paintshop using Wine (a windows compatibility library for Linux). Otherwise there is Gimp which might be able to do the things you need.
Not only will you have a fast system, but also secure, up-to-date and still supported.
Museekster have investigated them and found that they do all their business legally. They have even won an award.
Besides, that Russian organization is licensed for that task in Russia, not the U.S., Canada, or the EU. Royalty percentages in Rubles versus Dollars (or Euros) is not exactly fair.
Rubbish! AllOfMp3.com do all transactions in US dollars. I am sure that the artists can request to receive their royalties in dollars too.
The band sees precisely 0 cents of that money.
Wrong!
AllOfMp3.com pays royalties to an authority which redistributes the money to the artists.
An interesting conspiracy theory, here is another one:
1) Deliberately create security flaw in Windows.
2) Break into government and competitors systems.
3) ???
4) Profit!
But more likely the security errors they make are purely accidental. Microsoft do use some rotten business tactics occasionally, but I'm sure they wouldn't go as far as to deliberately make it easy to compromise Windows. If they were breaking the law in this way and got caught, it would do their reputation a lot of damage.
Writing secure software is hard, and Microsoft make mistakes, like everyone else.
Defeating fan noise:
Get a processor that runs efficiently, then you don't need a fan.
Harddrive noise:
Buy more memory and then you will find that your computer doesn't need to use swap space too much. You can then even turn your harddrives off when not in use, saving even more power and produing less heat.
Laptops run very quietly and consume very little power. Why can't they start putting some of this technology back into desktops?
All this earlier prediction has no use if the coastal cities that are prone to have earthquakes do not have emergency measures like alarms on the beach
Alarm systems are fine for saving some people, but a large number of the deaths would still not have been prevented even if the people had known the tsunami was about to strike hours in advance.
Homes were flattened, and much of the infrastructure was destroyed. Millions suddenly became homeless and there was little aid available for them. The only water many people could find was impure. People that were already ill had no hope of surviving and diseases spread with no medicine supply to stop them.
Installing some alarms and doing nothing else, will achieve very little. To save more, a lot more aid needs to be given from other countries in the days after the disaster.
Despite all the bad publicity about this game, I can only imagine that it will have a positive effect on sales, as loads of people that otherwise would never have bought this game are now interested in it, purely because of the amount of hype surrounding it.
If you want cheaper than Dell, you'll have to be prepared to deal with that kind of crap.
My point exactly. Dell offer a piece of mind that you know it is going to be good quality, and even if it's not you have someone you can shout at over the telephone. But this is an expensive luxury.
Actually I do always buy very cheap computers and they work (5 so far). Maybe I got lucky, but it has saved me a whole lot of money, plus the specs are much better. With the money I save I can upgrade twice as often.
Oh I think they will make a deal with Microsoft. If they agree to change their name, they'll probably even get a free X-Box, and maybe a couple of games.
I guarantee figuring out how to sell computers for what they do, at the margins they do, takes some imagination.
Even more impressive is how many other internet based companies manage to cut their prices in half again. Dell is not cheap, it is mid-range. It is aimed at people who want good support even if it costs a lot.
Repeatedly threatening to switch to AMD and Linux probably gets them good deals from Intel and Microsoft too. That is a good strategy.
If you had mobile phones anyway, you can use them to make the emergency calls, and use VoIP for everything else.
You cannot make your enemy go away by paying them money. You can take out one or two guys, but there will lots of people eager to replace them, especially when they think there will be a huge monetary reward for success (being bought by Microsoft).
http://thepiratebay.org/ is legal in Sweden.
But is it legal to link to it from Australia? Or from Denmark for that matter! Maybe I should hide. Or blame Slashdot for autolinking URLs.