It gets a long treatment on slashdot, eclipsed by another article an hour later, and then forgotten until some magistrate actually reads the complaint and decides to skip it.
>They claim it can't be revoked. No idea why. All the AACS has to do is revoke all xbox 360 device >keys and the hack will no longer work on new discs.
Uh, wouldn't that be a recipe for a lawsuit from Microsoft? Don't the words "sued by Microsoft" stop pretty much any decision making process?
>The OP should just resign instead of installing unlicensed MS software, if he is ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN that the company didn't purchase an >"install as much as you want" license.
This is commonplace, and the OP needs to make sure before he does something stupid (like posting on Slashdot). It's not even all that expensive. I've made many a legal copy of Microsoft software, that would certainly look like "piracy" to someone who didn't realize we had a site license that allowed us to do exactly that.
I'd go as far as to say it's somewhat *uncommon* for a company of a certain size to have site licenses for OS's and office applications, not to mention MSDN licenses. And maybe not every entry-level IT clerk is told the details of the licensing.
Might be pretty stupid and embarrassing to confront these people about their "piracy" only to be told about the site license.
Then again, maybe the OP really has been asked to commit copyright infringement by his employer. It behooves him to know for sure, and then consult a lawyer. Maybe he should make an appointment with the General Counsel of the company.
"You should also brush up your resume, although if you do get fired for refusing to do something illegal, I would think that most civilized jurisdictions would consider that to be wrongful dismissal."
Of course, winning a wrongful termination suit doesn't translate to "early retirement with the CEO's wealth transferred to your bank account."
The first thing I would do is to have a confidential meeting with an HR manager, and explain specifically that you have been asked to do something that you believe is a crime. I would want to receive in writing that the company officially does not consider this to be a crime. Follow the instructions to the letter.
If you are ever in court, show this official statement to the opposing counsel, and let them know you are showing it to them before the judge. It will end the story.
>You try to write Microchip assembly code without GOTOs.
If you're talking assembly code, lots of high level languages compile all kinds of things into jumps anyway.
Few people seem to have actually read Dijkstra's letter, and even fewer seem to realize the context he wrote it in. Dijkstra's most insightful comment was in regard to human cognition, not programming language design. He was observing that we have great ability to visualize a static graph, but to visualize a dynamic graph "evolving in time" is "relatively poorly developed." This was the central point of Dijkstra's argument, and it was what he considered GOTO to be harmful to.
I don't believe Dr. Dijkstra would have any problem with the use of a goto statement, say, to dispose of heap-allocated data in a loop abortion, for instance. On the other hand, I wonder if he was amused by all the "considered harmful" things that were written over the years, often by people who completely missed his point.
We are told that the current primary campaigns have taken in more money than any in history, and even though Obama isn't leading this front, he has more cash than several previous campaigns *put together*. The Obama campaign has taken in more than $25 million just in the first quarter of 2007, according to the Washington Post. I wonder if there is more to the story than we are told, like where the guy did something to piss of a campaign manager. I also wonder if Obama himself is personally involved in any of this, or even realizes there is a controversy about it.
I also wonder why Joe doesn't simply file for a TRO against MySpace, since they violated their own terms of service when they disabled his access without his consent. I suspect there is more to the story than we are being told.
Be a popular resource on the web and you'll get indexed with no fuss. In fact, it could become a problem. I had a site that was, in a word, unmaintained. I didn't care, it was simply a file repository for certain wiring diagrams that I tended to reference, and I didn't make any effort to promote or hide the links. So what eventually happened, is that certain Google searches put my personal website high on the list, and I started getting traffic to my website, and with that came large logfiles, voluminous spam, and frequent "offers" to buy my domain name (although the offers never specified a price the person was willing to pay, so I simply ignored every single one of them.)
Occasionally I would write back and say "how much are you going to offer."
Finally, someone came back with a number, and I sold them the domain name. It's "searchportal.information.com" now, and I get a certain amount of amusement in the fact that the thing that I had linked there, which was of interest to nobody but myself as far as I was concerned, is the top link on that particular search page. Of course it leads nowhere but other spammy links.
It never occurred to me that people would want to intentionally increase their ranking. I always wanted ways to decrease mine. Ended up selling the domain name for a nice wad of cash, because the traffic it was generating was a problem.
1. Judging from his writing ability, I do not believe he should be given a High School diploma. 2. I believe the US Marine Corps has a higher standard for literacy than what is indicated by the paper. 3. "No quarrel on you qualifications as a writer, but as a teacher, don't be surprised on inspiring the first cg shooting." That's close enough to a direct threat that I can fully understand why the police chose to get involved.
I don't quite follow how this justified an *arrest*, partly because the person is not a juvenile, and thus, must be dealt with as an adult for things like arrest and arraignment. The guy should insist on every single point of process, sign nothing, and force a judge and jury to hear the witnesses explain what exactly was illegal with the paper. I would indeed make a federal case out of it -- force a District Judge to rule that there is such a thing as an illegal essay -- and then you've got a doomed First Amendment appeal, because I can guarantee the Supreme Court will never rule that there is a compelling state interest that allows a public school to place a prior restraint on the writings of an adult. (It makes all the difference in the world that the defendant is over 18.)
>This (I know it's a bit late) is the last straw. RIAA will never get another dime from me.
I made the controversial decision in 1994 to never buy another RIAA represented product.
Since then I have made a handful of exceptions, in cases where I have personally bought CDs directly from the artist, that is, it went from the songwriter's hand to mine, usually autographed, after his show. I have developed quite a large collection of independently produced and distributed music, and an even larger collection of things that have been released for public consumption by the artists with no intention of monetary gain.
Back in the day, I was a hardcore record collector. I basically started life with a collection of records from the 40s and 50s already handed down to me. I kept it up throughout the whole 60-70s rock era. I collected classical recordings, especially while majoring in music theory at university. For most of my life, buying recordings was one of the major expenses, usually right after rent and food. Since I'm a musician myself and had made a career of it, music purchases weren't merely entertainment expenses, and more than just business expenses. And granted there were lots of freebies. (When you have a lot of records, people give you records, you're making volume trades all the time, plus I worked in public radio, where I got to keep whatever was being thrown away, plus all the good promos.)
Anyway, long story short, I *stopped* buying RIAA-represented music because of the RIAA b.s., and I didn't ever start up again. Instead, I already realized that what was out there beyond the mainstream was far more interesting anyway, and I never looked back. Granted, I was already heavily into alternative and independent stuff to begin with, but the RIAA sent me all the way over.
>Now you have some conspiracy nut convinced that you were part of the team that fired the kill shots.
Yeah, I shot a death ray from my binky, right.
Sorry; my mom worked for the AT&T division that did military commo, in the Dallas office. The office was closed for the parade, but the employees got to go to the building and watch the parade from the windows. The corner of the building is in the Zapruder film, but we are not.
>But he wasn't on the Grassy Knoll, and you sound like a loony.
He was a guest in the parade where Kennedy died, riding in one of the cars in the motorcade. I never said he was on the Knoll. On the other hand, I was on the other side of the plaza (a few months old).
>But the general slashdot bellyaching is that plumbers get paid more that I do, where I have upteen degrees and an IQ in the >stratosphere.
There was this guy who worked in my local laundromat. Basically lived in his van at the laundry; made change, serviced the machines, etc.
Once I talked to him. Turned out he had a Ph.D. in Chem E. from UC Davis, he'd been a university professor for a while, worked in the industry for a while, and then "completely turned his life around" as he put it. It kind of freaked me out, but at the same time, it also marked a point where I stopped stereotyping people based on thing like how they looked/smelled/lived or what kind of menial jobs they had.
Of all the people who were part of the Kennedy motorcade, few if any derived more influence and power afterward, than Jack Valenti. He had an amazing, long life and career, and had a vast influence on the media in the US and the world. I wish I could say I was as sad to see him go as Bob McNamara. Only Henry Kissinger remains, among men for whom I have equal esteem.
What University is "forced" to accept these students AT ALL? Give the spot to someone who took math and science. Or, if someone wants to spend a couple of terms at a junior college taking "remedial" math and can get to the point where he or she qualifies for entry into a science degree program, then accept him or her at that time.
The University science curriculum is difficult enough, at least at the more challenging schools, that even the people who did well in High School Calculus and Physics have to really work hard. It's really not a place for someone who opted out of High School math.
>The sticking point for me is transferring files to something useful. I know someone who couldn't figure out how to transfer a photo from >her phone to her camera
I'm sorry to hear that. On mine, I either just pull out the micro-SD card and plug it into the PC. Some show up as a bluetooth device, I think. Some phone companies want to force you to copy in-band, on their service, for a fee. Don't buy those.
>They controlled the Ohio SOS. They controlled key voting precincts. They controlled the DOJ. They weren't all that careful because they >were damn sure that investigations would go nowhere.
In other words, the people abdicated power long before the election. By then it was already too late.
>But what's this about plumbing? I haven't hired a plumber in over 7 years
You have time for it. This probably means you aren't running a business or are any type of artist or working two jobs.
The reason you hire a professional to do a job is because the value of your time to yourself is much higher than the cost of hiring the professional to do the job. In my case, time spent working on cars or plumbing or fixing drywall is time away from either my job, my academic research, or my music practice. (I'm a software developer, a part-time student, and a musician, and no, I do not have time for slashdot.)
>>"not assembler, honest direct machine code" >You mean entering hex codes manually?
"hex codes" are just another crutch for humans who don't want to touch the direct representation, no better than assembly language:-) The computer is organized in *binary* not hex.
To be fair, this is one thing that qualifies as jargon. I expect anyone who claims to have a CS degree to have written three parts of an OS, the Scheduler, the Virtual Memory, and the Filesystem, in one of the classes they took in their senior year.
I don't expect anyone else to know what a scheduler is or what it does.
Essentially, the scheduler is the system process that breaks up all the various programs that want a piece of the CPU, and lets them run. It's the component that makes "multitasking" possible.
There are quite a few issues, and compromises that must be made depending on how a system is used. For example, there are scheduling algorithms that will get a lot of jobs completed in a relatively short time, but will make any interactive processes unusable. And then there are scheduling algorithms that will very efficiently switch between processes making it seem to the user as though multiple programs are running at the same speed as a single program. And then there are algorithms that detect the runtime conditions and adapt.
You got modded up to "funny" so I guess I should have assumed you were trolling.
Slashdot Mirror
>how is this handled?
It gets a long treatment on slashdot, eclipsed by another article an hour later, and then forgotten until some magistrate actually reads the complaint and decides to skip it.
>They claim it can't be revoked. No idea why. All the AACS has to do is revoke all xbox 360 device
>keys and the hack will no longer work on new discs.
Uh, wouldn't that be a recipe for a lawsuit from Microsoft? Don't the words "sued by Microsoft" stop pretty much any decision making process?
>The OP should just resign instead of installing unlicensed MS software, if he is ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN that the company didn't purchase an
>"install as much as you want" license.
This is commonplace, and the OP needs to make sure before he does something stupid (like posting on Slashdot). It's not even all that expensive. I've made many a legal copy of Microsoft software, that would certainly look like "piracy" to someone who didn't realize we had a site license that allowed us to do exactly that.
I'd go as far as to say it's somewhat *uncommon* for a company of a certain size to have site licenses for OS's and office applications, not to mention MSDN licenses. And maybe not every entry-level IT clerk is told the details of the licensing.
Might be pretty stupid and embarrassing to confront these people about their "piracy" only to be told about the site license.
Then again, maybe the OP really has been asked to commit copyright infringement by his employer. It behooves him to know for sure, and then consult a lawyer. Maybe he should make an appointment with the General Counsel of the company.
"You should also brush up your resume, although if you do get fired for refusing to do something illegal, I would think that most civilized jurisdictions would consider that to be wrongful dismissal."
Of course, winning a wrongful termination suit doesn't translate to "early retirement with the CEO's wealth transferred to your bank account."
The first thing I would do is to have a confidential meeting with an HR manager, and explain specifically that you have been asked to do something that you believe is a crime. I would want to receive in writing that the company officially does not consider this to be a crime. Follow the instructions to the letter.
If you are ever in court, show this official statement to the opposing counsel, and let them know you are showing it to them before the judge. It will end the story.
>You try to write Microchip assembly code without GOTOs.
If you're talking assembly code, lots of high level languages compile all kinds of things into jumps anyway.
Few people seem to have actually read Dijkstra's letter, and even fewer seem to realize the context he wrote it in. Dijkstra's most insightful comment was in regard to human cognition, not programming language design. He was observing that we have great ability to visualize a static graph, but to visualize a dynamic graph "evolving in time" is "relatively poorly developed." This was the central point of Dijkstra's argument, and it was what he considered GOTO to be harmful to.
I don't believe Dr. Dijkstra would have any problem with the use of a goto statement, say, to dispose of heap-allocated data in a loop abortion, for instance. On the other hand, I wonder if he was amused by all the "considered harmful" things that were written over the years, often by people who completely missed his point.
>Hell someone patent crappy C# conventions in C++ programs. Take your functors and your constant
>defined members of classes and stay out of my code.
Uh, functors and const correctness were C++ idioms long before C# existed.
I hate the name functor because it fails to encapsulate the concepts from topology implied by the term.
>50 grand is chump change to them.
We are told that the current primary campaigns have taken in more money than any in history, and even though Obama isn't leading this front, he has more cash than several previous campaigns *put together*. The Obama campaign has taken in more than $25 million just in the first quarter of 2007, according to the Washington Post. I wonder if there is more to the story than we are told, like where the guy did something to piss of a campaign manager. I also wonder if Obama himself is personally involved in any of this, or even realizes there is a controversy about it.
I also wonder why Joe doesn't simply file for a TRO against MySpace, since they violated their own terms of service when they disabled his access without his consent. I suspect there is more to the story than we are being told.
Ok then, it's in the same category as the first grader getting suspended for shooting with a chicken wing.
Be a popular resource on the web and you'll get indexed with no fuss. In fact, it could become a problem.
I had a site that was, in a word, unmaintained. I didn't care, it was simply a file repository for certain wiring diagrams that I tended to reference, and I didn't make any effort to promote or hide the links. So what eventually happened, is that certain Google searches put my personal website high on the list, and I started getting traffic to my website, and with that came large logfiles, voluminous spam, and frequent "offers" to buy my domain name (although the offers never specified a price the person was willing to pay, so I simply ignored every single one of them.)
Occasionally I would write back and say "how much are you going to offer."
Finally, someone came back with a number, and I sold them the domain name. It's "searchportal.information.com" now, and I get a certain amount of amusement in the fact that the thing that I had linked there, which was of interest to nobody but myself as far as I was concerned, is the top link on that particular search page. Of course it leads nowhere but other spammy links.
It never occurred to me that people would want to intentionally increase their ranking. I always wanted ways to decrease mine. Ended up selling the domain name for a nice wad of cash, because the traffic it was generating was a problem.
1. Judging from his writing ability, I do not believe he should be given a High School diploma.
2. I believe the US Marine Corps has a higher standard for literacy than what is indicated by the paper.
3. "No quarrel on you qualifications as a writer, but as a teacher, don't be surprised on inspiring the first cg shooting."
That's close enough to a direct threat that I can fully understand why the police chose to get involved.
I don't quite follow how this justified an *arrest*, partly because the person is not a juvenile, and thus, must be dealt with as an adult for things like arrest and arraignment. The guy should insist on every single point of process, sign nothing, and force a judge and jury to hear the witnesses explain what exactly was illegal with the paper. I would indeed make a federal case out of it -- force a District Judge to rule that there is such a thing as an illegal essay -- and then you've got a doomed First Amendment appeal, because I can guarantee the Supreme Court will never rule that there is a compelling state interest that allows a public school to place a prior restraint on the writings of an adult. (It makes all the difference in the world that the defendant is over 18.)
>This (I know it's a bit late) is the last straw. RIAA will never get another dime from me.
I made the controversial decision in 1994 to never buy another RIAA represented product.
Since then I have made a handful of exceptions, in cases where I have personally bought CDs directly from the artist, that is, it went from the songwriter's hand to mine, usually autographed, after his show. I have developed quite a large collection of independently produced and distributed music, and an even larger collection of things that have been released for public consumption by the artists with no intention of monetary gain.
Back in the day, I was a hardcore record collector. I basically started life with a collection of records from the 40s and 50s already handed down to me. I kept it up throughout the whole 60-70s rock era. I collected classical recordings, especially while majoring in music theory at university. For most of my life, buying recordings was one of the major expenses, usually right after rent and food. Since I'm a musician myself and had made a career of it, music purchases weren't merely entertainment expenses, and more than just business expenses. And granted there were lots of freebies. (When you have a lot of records, people give you records, you're making volume trades all the time, plus I worked in public radio, where I got to keep whatever was being thrown away, plus all the good promos.)
Anyway, long story short, I *stopped* buying RIAA-represented music because of the RIAA b.s., and I didn't ever start up again. Instead, I already realized that what was out there beyond the mainstream was far more interesting anyway, and I never looked back. Granted, I was already heavily into alternative and independent stuff to begin with, but the RIAA sent me all the way over.
Thanks RIAA.
>Now you have some conspiracy nut convinced that you were part of the team that fired the kill shots.
Yeah, I shot a death ray from my binky, right.
Sorry; my mom worked for the AT&T division that did military commo, in the Dallas office. The office was closed for the parade, but the employees got to go to the building and watch the parade from the windows. The corner of the building is in the Zapruder film, but we are not.
>In theory, 99.7% uptime is a system outage of 6 hours once a quarter for maintenance.
No! That outage is not considered in the uptime requirement, since it's *scheduled*.
>But he wasn't on the Grassy Knoll, and you sound like a loony.
He was a guest in the parade where Kennedy died, riding in one of the cars in the motorcade.
I never said he was on the Knoll. On the other hand, I was on the other side of the plaza (a few months old).
>Jack was not an evil person.
He had a role in the coverup of the Kennedy assassination, and in the escalation of Vietnam. That alone qualifies one forever as "evil person."
Sorry if that's offensive to his family. I would expect any reasonable family members to have estranged themselves from this evil man decades ago.
>But the general slashdot bellyaching is that plumbers get paid more that I do, where I have upteen degrees and an IQ in the >stratosphere.
There was this guy who worked in my local laundromat. Basically lived in his van at the laundry; made change, serviced the machines, etc.
Once I talked to him. Turned out he had a Ph.D. in Chem E. from UC Davis, he'd been a university professor for a while, worked in the industry for a while, and then "completely turned his life around" as he put it. It kind of freaked me out, but at the same time, it also marked a point where I stopped stereotyping people based on thing like how they looked/smelled/lived or what kind of menial jobs they had.
Of all the people who were part of the Kennedy motorcade, few if any derived more influence and power afterward, than Jack Valenti.
He had an amazing, long life and career, and had a vast influence on the media in the US and the world. I wish I could say I was as sad to see him go as Bob McNamara. Only Henry Kissinger remains, among men for whom I have equal esteem.
What University is "forced" to accept these students AT ALL? Give the spot to someone who took math and science. Or, if someone wants to spend a couple of terms at a junior college taking "remedial" math and can get to the point where he or she qualifies for entry into a science degree program, then accept him or her at that time.
The University science curriculum is difficult enough, at least at the more challenging schools, that even the people who did well in High School Calculus and Physics have to really work hard. It's really not a place for someone who opted out of High School math.
>Ok, where was I...
I think you were explaining how it was someone else's fault you could not compete successfully in your art market.
>The sticking point for me is transferring files to something useful. I know someone who couldn't figure out how to transfer a photo from
>her phone to her camera
I'm sorry to hear that. On mine, I either just pull out the micro-SD card and plug it into the PC. Some show up as a bluetooth device, I think. Some phone companies want to force you to copy in-band, on their service, for a fee. Don't buy those.
>They controlled the Ohio SOS. They controlled key voting precincts. They controlled the DOJ. They weren't all that careful because they
>were damn sure that investigations would go nowhere.
In other words, the people abdicated power long before the election. By then it was already too late.
>But what's this about plumbing? I haven't hired a plumber in over 7 years
You have time for it. This probably means you aren't running a business or are any type of artist or working two jobs.
The reason you hire a professional to do a job is because the value of your time to yourself is much higher than the cost of hiring the professional to do the job. In my case, time spent working on cars or plumbing or fixing drywall is time away from either my job, my academic research, or my music practice. (I'm a software developer, a part-time student, and a musician, and no, I do not have time for slashdot.)
>Getting a TCP/IP stack running on a Z80 is no mean feat, so I'm guessing no, your washing machine probably doesn't have network support.
The electronic rain gauge designed and produced by my organization is controlled by a Z80 and reports via TCP/IP or serial.
>>"not assembler, honest direct machine code"
:-)
>You mean entering hex codes manually?
"hex codes" are just another crutch for humans who don't want to touch the direct representation, no better than assembly language
The computer is organized in *binary* not hex.
>I thought Linux used Cron as a scheduler ?
To be fair, this is one thing that qualifies as jargon.
I expect anyone who claims to have a CS degree to have written three parts of an OS, the Scheduler, the Virtual Memory, and the Filesystem, in one of the classes they took in their senior year.
I don't expect anyone else to know what a scheduler is or what it does.
Essentially, the scheduler is the system process that breaks up all the various programs that want a piece of the CPU, and lets them run. It's the component that makes "multitasking" possible.
There are quite a few issues, and compromises that must be made depending on how a system is used. For example, there are scheduling algorithms that will get a lot of jobs completed in a relatively short time, but will make any interactive processes unusable. And then there are scheduling algorithms that will very efficiently switch between processes making it seem to the user as though multiple programs are running at the same speed as a single program. And then there are algorithms that detect the runtime conditions and adapt.
You got modded up to "funny" so I guess I should have assumed you were trolling.