"Why does Canada have to imitate the U.S. in all things?"
They don't have to, they choose to.
"The Canadian people do not want Big Brother "
Both the Canadian and the American governments operate with the affirmed consent of the governed; systems which enjoy the adamant support of the people in the respective nations.
You can make the argument that the people *DO* want Big Brother.
You enumerate some valid points. But you miss mine: The Collateral Damage aspect.
It has become cemented into general mindset, by propaganda, that it is always illegal to copy or distribute any creative work that is copyrighted.
The problem is, this attitude does not take into consideration any copyrighted work whose author *wants* distribution. Should the author be expected to surrender his copyright entirely? Or should there be only a finite number of tightly controlled distribution methods available? Or is it the author's choice?
When the music industry clamps down under the umbrella of "copyright protection", what they are *Really* doing is trying to eliminate a competing distribution method, and they are also laying the groundwork for a fundamentally different sort of copyright than what has historically existed.
You should be able to copyright *and* distribute your work. You should NOT be forced to choose between keeping your copyright and distribution. But I believe that is going to be the net effect of the current trends. Write all the songs you want, but you need to either put them in the public domain or else sign the rights over to "Us" if you want them distributed.
I realize that publishing companies have a right, even a duty to protect their interests, but their right to do so ends abruptly when, in order to make the effort to protect their rights, they abridge MY rights. I am on SOLID legal ground to insist that their rights end where mine begin.
I'm just waiting for the day that a distribution medium is shut down on the basis of copyright infringement, even though the copyright holders had approved of the distribution. I'd think of it as winning the lottery if someone presses charges against me for copying my own music, that I wrote, produced, performed and recorded, that I hold the copyright to, and whose distribution is MY business, and not anyone elses.
The place where I draw the line on this whole copyright question is here: when some party (or the State) decides on my behalf that it is not acceptable to distribute *MY* copyrighted work, that I expressly *WANT* distributed.
I get very tired of hearing how it is "illegal" to distribute copyrighted works. What that is saying to the artist is, you must surrender your copyrights entirely if you want to distribute your work.
But certain corporations are not required to surrender THEIR copyrights if they want to use THEIR chosen distribution method. Foul! Utterly unacceptable abridgement of my rights of equal protection of the law, and other fundamental rights.
Copying of Copyrighted work is NOT automatically illegal, and it is a violation of your rights as a content producer when someone tells you that it is.
If Sun raises a trademark infringement stink over the name "Cobalt", I won't blame them a bit. This is the first situation I've seen in a very long time where I could honestly state that a reasonable person could be confused over the use of the trademark. This is NOTHING like Linux laundry detergent or McDonald's Sheet Metal Fabricators.
This is more like, a computer maker creates an OS and calls it Linux, or a guy named Smith opens a restaurant called McDonald's.
Sure they mark the code, and obviously they can identify the origin of a leak, unless the leaker detected the security system and took countermeasures against it.
But that's beside the point. Some of the source code has gone to organizations in countries where a countract with a US corporation has more value as toilet paper than as a legal document. Whoever started this alleged leak can probably count on never getting another update, or even having their MSDN licenses revoked, but outside the US, there might not even be enumerated consequences for an incident of this nature.
Not that I believe the report. The source code volume is on the order of dozens of gigabytes, according to more credible reports than this one.
If we developed techniques for working with object code, we could forget about the whole concept of source code being something distinct from object. It wouldn't matter if people release source code, since the program *is* the code. The only reason source code is an item that one considers worth guarding, is that dealing with object code is difficult, there's the platform-specific thing, plus source code has a documentation aspect that's lost on compiling, you lose symbols, optimizations happen, etc., etc.
But back in the 6502 days, it didn't concern us much that we only had machine code to work with... Today, it's more a matter of scale than scope...
Windows source code is not some deep dark secret that is locked in a vault, only let out during builds for the product releases.
*MANY* people have access to the Windows source code. A number of people in my own university have it. There are strict licensing considerations, but when has that ever worked before? Surprisingly, none of the people with source access has ever pulled off the stunt where it's broadcasted. I have always wondered why.
"The pay might not be competitive as it is a government job. "
You might be surprised at how good a federal job actually is. Sure, the starting salaries suck, but that's no different than, say, commercial pilots. You start at a minimal salary, but once you are in the door, you get promotions and raises like clockwork. The most menial federal job can be pretty decent if you start young and stick with it until retirement.
I tried to report dead birds to my state health department. They didn't care. They *so* didn't care. I don't think the functionary even looked up from her novel while she told me on the phone that they do not take reports of dead birds.
Now, I know from numerous public service announcements that, not only is the department supposed to take reports of dead birds, but I am required to make them. So I called the Federal CDC, to find out what was up. Naturally they directed me right back to the same State department that dismissed me earlier. I managed to complain my way up the ladder until I reached someone who at least could tell me *why* they don't take reports (legislature pulled their funding.)
So maybe West Nile Virus will break out in my area, and I will be able to go to DC with the names of the individuals who couldn't be bothered to take reports of dead birds...
"MSNBC makes pains to name the Government as the offender in it's headline"
Rightly so! The "contractor" who is being maligned here was only the LAST in a series of people to violate the basic principle of keeping confidential data confidential. Some government functionary had to drop this ball first, and that person is not only keeping his or her job, but is also not being named in the media.
I want the name of the FIRST person who released this data, not the LAST one!
The question isn't an ethical "how low can they go?"
The question is, have they crossed the line into the legal territory where they have manufactured and distributed a defective product, which has done demonstrable and measurable damage? Let there be civil and criminal penalties!
I still keep a typewriter in my office because it is necessary for certain kinds of forms. Not everybody has moved to webservices, fillable PDF docs, etc.
A typewriter is handy for things that won't fit in a laser printer also. Sure these are few and far between.
>It's utter bullshit. I'm a CS major, and books >typically run between $90 and $130.
I spend more than that in a typical month just on the odd O'Reilly and Addison-Wesley title.
This Rivest/Corman/Leiserson Algorithms book is worth every penny you pay for it. Quality textbooks are well worth keeping, such as James Stewart's Calculus texts. Shame on you if you buy this kind of book and sell it at the end of the semester for $20. These fall in the category of *heirlooms.*
On the other hand, yeah, the $90.00 lab manual that some grad student threw together and doesn't even have Kinko's repro quality, complete ripoff. So get a staff position in a university and work your way up. As soon as you have the clout to do something about it, remember your roots.
>What platform? I wish they would state what it >is.......
VxWorks, from Wind River.
In my mind, the flexibility that ends up in the finished product is much more interesting than the reliability. It's quite cool that they can reprogram the thing from 400 million km, and be reasonably confident that it will still work. Or even, that, if they break it, they can fix it. NASA must do a LOT of work to resolve the conflicting goals of reliability and flexibility.
They really aren't that different. Sure they all have different installers, and different strategies for updates, and different philosophies about when and what should be updated. But they all tend to have much more in common than differences.
For example, they all will be based on a reasonably current version of the kernel. There will be a current-ish version of libc.
Then whatever open source applications are available, will either be installed, or there will be an option to install. There is an enormous amount of variety here within the SAME distribution. The variety is only marginally increased between distros.
My laptop runs redhat, for no reason other than the fact that I felt like trying it out that day. I installed apt and dpkg on it, and it's pretty much a custom hybrid of redhat and debian now. (Not recommended: not only do you need to know precisely what you're doing, but you also have to be completely willing to wipe the whole thing if need be:-)
The whole "this distro or that" is really silly, and stinks of consumerism and label consciousness. It's all the same stuff, they all hit the same walls with hardware compatability and software availabilty. I don't find any of the distro's I've used to be particularly distinct from the others in terms of ease-of-use.
Debian has always been, by far, the easiest to install. I suppose the command set for dselect is pretty stupid, but really, it could hardly be easier to install and maintain. Redhat totally blows in the ease-of-installation and maintenance department. It *LOOKS* like it's easier. People *SAY* it's easier. But it actually turns out to be a royal pain. It's all the same software, all roads lead to Rome, and you get to the same place. Why all this argument about which one's better? That kind of talk is appropriate for Coke and Pepsi, Ford and Chevy, and so forth.
"The only game in there which might have been a bit over-the-top for someone that young was Star Trek (for sheer length)"
Actually, the Checkers game has a really bizarre learning algorithm. Pretty nifty for an 8K machine or whatever you had. There's a 6-pawns game in there too that had some complexity.
"Evil spammers probably also use toothpaste. Does that make everyone who uses toothpaste evil?"
No... The object must be something the accusers do not themselves use or engage in. They aren't Open Source developers, but they probably use toothpaste, or at least have friends that do.
>And gives SCO ammunition (whether real or >imagined) to press its case.
We WANT SCO to press their case! If they drop the case now, there remains some shred of credibility to their claims. They need to pump the stock price up to $200 on their lies. Then the trial needs to happen, and not only be found against SCO, but also to lead to racketeering and perjury charges agains the execs, in additon to securities fraud, and also disbarrment of Boies and any partners in his law firm who were parties to this case.
If they drop the case now, they will not only spin the whole thing as a victory, but the financial press will buy it lock, stock and barrel, investors will pour money into the company, and there will remain a credible cloud of doubt as to the licensure on the linux kernel.
SCO has no case. But they have thus far avoided making demonstrably false statements under oath. And they seem to have avoided violating any laws regarding publicly traded stock. But from the start, they have certainly made it appear as if that's where they are headed. I say give 'em the rope.
"Ok, we choose to make improvement X which will save an average of about 0.5 lives per year at a cost of $4 million per year, but we will not make improvement Y which would save an estimated 10 lives per year at a cost of $800 million per year."
There is a world of difference between actuaries making a projection, and execs making the decision AFTER the death toll is mounting.
Strategic planning is one thing. Engineer your system to be as safe as you can economically make it and hope for the best. Most of the time, it's a successful strategy. But when you FAIL, and when your failure starts DIRECTLY KILLING PEOPLE PREDICTABLY, it becomes a crime to do nothing about it.
The big problem with Ford and the Pinto situation was that they had, seven years earlier, made claims to the government about widespread safety improvements, as part of their lobbying efforts. Also, Ford's own documentation showed that *EVERY* rear-impact test resulted in a gas tank rupture. They knew about the problem before the first car was even in production.
I understand the engineering issues, where you make choices in design. But this is different. I truly believe that Lee Iacocca should personally be doing life without parole in a Michigan prison, because he knew precisely what he was doing, and was directly responsible for hundreds of deaths.
It's one thing to design a product with a dangerous flaw, but it's quite another to intentionally leave the flaw, knowing it's going to kill people, and spelling out in black and white what it will cost to settle with the lawyers and relatives of the people you killed.
I suspect with *today's* lawyers you'd be a lot more careful -- at least I wouldn't think it's a foregone conclusion that you can come out of a lawsuit where you've killed someone, short of bankruptcy... Even FoMoCo! (They seem to have come close to the edge on the Firestone tire deal.)
The 70's were a different scene in terms of litigation. They're just lucky no judge's kid wrecked a pinto.
Slashdot Mirror
"Why does Canada have to imitate the U.S. in all things?"
They don't have to, they choose to.
"The Canadian people do not want Big Brother "
Both the Canadian and the American governments operate with the affirmed consent of the governed; systems which enjoy the adamant support of the people in the respective nations.
You can make the argument that the people *DO* want Big Brother.
You enumerate some valid points. But you miss mine:
The Collateral Damage aspect.
It has become cemented into general mindset, by propaganda, that it is always illegal to copy or distribute any creative work that is copyrighted.
The problem is, this attitude does not take into consideration any copyrighted work whose author *wants* distribution. Should the author be expected to surrender his copyright entirely? Or should there be only a finite number of tightly controlled distribution methods available? Or is it the author's choice?
When the music industry clamps down under the umbrella of "copyright protection", what they are *Really* doing is trying to eliminate a competing distribution method, and they are also laying the groundwork for a fundamentally different sort of copyright than what has historically existed.
You should be able to copyright *and* distribute your work. You should NOT be forced to choose between keeping your copyright and distribution. But I believe that is going to be the net effect of the current trends. Write all the songs you want, but you need to either put them in the public domain or else sign the rights over to "Us" if you want them distributed.
I realize that publishing companies have a right, even a duty to protect their interests, but their right to do so ends abruptly when, in order to make the effort to protect their rights, they abridge MY rights. I am on SOLID legal ground to insist that their rights end where mine begin.
I'm just waiting for the day that a distribution medium is shut down on the basis of copyright infringement, even though the copyright holders had approved of the distribution. I'd think of it as winning the lottery if someone presses charges against me for copying my own music, that I wrote, produced, performed and recorded, that I hold the copyright to, and whose distribution is MY business, and not anyone elses.
Since when is CDDA copy-protected?
The place where I draw the line on this whole copyright question is here: when some party (or the State) decides on my behalf that it is not acceptable to distribute *MY* copyrighted work, that I expressly *WANT* distributed.
I get very tired of hearing how it is "illegal" to distribute copyrighted works. What that is saying to the artist is, you must surrender your copyrights entirely if you want to distribute your work.
But certain corporations are not required to surrender THEIR copyrights if they want to use THEIR chosen distribution method. Foul! Utterly unacceptable abridgement of my rights of equal protection of the law, and other fundamental rights.
Copying of Copyrighted work is NOT automatically illegal, and it is a violation of your rights as a content producer when someone tells you that it is.
If Sun raises a trademark infringement stink over the name "Cobalt", I won't blame them a bit. This is the first situation I've seen in a very long time where I could honestly state that a reasonable person could be confused over the use of the trademark. This is NOTHING like Linux laundry detergent or McDonald's Sheet Metal Fabricators.
This is more like, a computer maker creates an OS and calls it Linux, or a guy named Smith opens a restaurant called McDonald's.
Sure they mark the code, and obviously they can identify the origin of a leak, unless the leaker detected the security system and took countermeasures against it.
But that's beside the point. Some of the source code has gone to organizations in countries where a countract with a US corporation has more value as toilet paper than as a legal document. Whoever started this alleged leak can probably count on never getting another update, or even having their MSDN licenses revoked, but outside the US, there might not even be enumerated consequences for an incident of this nature.
Not that I believe the report. The source code volume is on the order of dozens of gigabytes, according to more credible reports than this one.
If we developed techniques for working with object code, we could forget about the whole concept of source code being something distinct from object. It wouldn't matter if people release source code, since the program *is* the code. The only reason source code is an item that one considers worth guarding, is that dealing with object code is difficult, there's the platform-specific thing, plus source code has a documentation aspect that's lost on compiling, you lose symbols, optimizations happen, etc., etc.
But back in the 6502 days, it didn't concern us much that we only had machine code to work with...
Today, it's more a matter of scale than scope...
It *amazes* me that it hasn't been routine.
Windows source code is not some deep dark secret that is locked in a vault, only let out during builds for the product releases.
*MANY* people have access to the Windows source code. A number of people in my own university have it. There are strict licensing considerations, but when has that ever worked before? Surprisingly, none of the people with source access has ever pulled off the stunt where it's broadcasted. I have always wondered why.
"This would make said population very susceptible to all sorts of diseases. That is somthing to be concerned about."
Sounds like a self-correcting system to me.
"The pay might not be competitive as it is a government job. "
You might be surprised at how good a federal job actually is. Sure, the starting salaries suck, but that's no different than, say, commercial pilots. You start at a minimal salary, but once you are in the door, you get promotions and raises like clockwork. The most menial federal job can be pretty decent if you start young and stick with it until retirement.
"That's the reason for the increased push for DRM and tightening copyright laws."
One thing the Internet *is*, a significant influence on the forces of law and government.
That's nothing to sneeze at.
I tried to report dead birds to my state health department. They didn't care. They *so* didn't care. I don't think the functionary even looked up from her novel while she told me on the phone that they do not take reports of dead birds.
Now, I know from numerous public service announcements that, not only is the department supposed to take reports of dead birds, but I am required to make them. So I called the Federal CDC, to find out what was up. Naturally they directed me right back to the same State department that dismissed me earlier. I managed to complain my way up the ladder until I reached someone who at least could tell me *why* they don't take reports (legislature pulled their funding.)
So maybe West Nile Virus will break out in my area, and I will be able to go to DC with the names of the individuals who couldn't be bothered to take reports of dead birds...
> It has a proven track-record of working (eg:
>France under Napoleon, the modern EU, the US of
>fucking A!).
There are compelling arguments that each of your examples is/was an unmitigated disaster.
"The title of this article is a crime to the English language."
You must be new here!
"The problem is that the bill is designed for data theft, not for dipshits giving it away for free. "
Let's see... so if I steal your car, take a joyride, and then give it away for free, I shouldn't worry about prosecution?
"MSNBC makes pains to name the Government as the offender in it's headline"
Rightly so! The "contractor" who is being maligned here was only the LAST in a series of people to violate the basic principle of keeping confidential data confidential. Some government functionary had to drop this ball first, and that person is not only keeping his or her job, but is also not being named in the media.
I want the name of the FIRST person who released this data, not the LAST one!
The question isn't an ethical "how low can they go?"
The question is, have they crossed the line into the legal territory where they have manufactured and distributed a defective product, which has done demonstrable and measurable damage? Let there be civil and criminal penalties!
I still keep a typewriter in my office because it is necessary for certain kinds of forms. Not everybody has moved to webservices, fillable PDF docs, etc.
A typewriter is handy for things that won't fit in a laser printer also. Sure these are few and far between.
>It's utter bullshit. I'm a CS major, and books
>typically run between $90 and $130.
I spend more than that in a typical month just on the odd O'Reilly and Addison-Wesley title.
This Rivest/Corman/Leiserson Algorithms book is worth every penny you pay for it. Quality textbooks are well worth keeping, such as James Stewart's Calculus texts. Shame on you if you buy this kind of book and sell it at the end of the semester for $20. These fall in the category of *heirlooms.*
On the other hand, yeah, the $90.00 lab manual that some grad student threw together and doesn't even have Kinko's repro quality, complete ripoff. So get a staff position in a university and work your way up. As soon as you have the clout to do something about it, remember your roots.
>What platform? I wish they would state what it
>is.......
VxWorks, from Wind River.
In my mind, the flexibility that ends up in the finished product is much more interesting than the reliability. It's quite cool that they can reprogram the thing from 400 million km, and be reasonably confident that it will still work. Or even, that, if they break it, they can fix it.
NASA must do a LOT of work to resolve the conflicting goals of reliability and flexibility.
They really aren't that different. Sure they all have different installers, and different strategies for updates, and different philosophies about when and what should be updated. But they all tend to have much more in common than differences.
For example, they all will be based on a reasonably current version of the kernel. There will be a current-ish version of libc.
Then whatever open source applications are available, will either be installed, or there will be an option to install. There is an enormous amount of variety here within the SAME distribution. The variety is only marginally increased between distros.
My laptop runs redhat, for no reason other than the fact that I felt like trying it out that day. I installed apt and dpkg on it, and it's pretty much a custom hybrid of redhat and debian now. (Not recommended: not only do you need to know precisely what you're doing, but you also have to be completely willing to wipe the whole thing if need be:-)
The whole "this distro or that" is really silly, and stinks of consumerism and label consciousness. It's all the same stuff, they all hit the same walls with hardware compatability and software availabilty. I don't find any of the distro's I've used to be particularly distinct from the others in terms of ease-of-use.
Debian has always been, by far, the easiest to install. I suppose the command set for dselect is pretty stupid, but really, it could hardly be easier to install and maintain. Redhat totally blows in the ease-of-installation and maintenance department. It *LOOKS* like it's easier. People *SAY* it's easier. But it actually turns out to be a royal pain. It's all the same software, all roads lead to Rome, and you get to the same place. Why all this argument about which one's better? That kind of talk is appropriate for Coke and Pepsi, Ford and Chevy, and so forth.
"The only game in there which might have been a bit over-the-top for someone that young was Star Trek (for sheer length)"
Actually, the Checkers game has a really bizarre learning algorithm. Pretty nifty for an 8K machine or whatever you had. There's a 6-pawns game in there too that had some complexity.
"Evil spammers probably also use toothpaste. Does that make everyone who uses toothpaste evil?"
No... The object must be something the accusers do not themselves use or engage in. They aren't Open Source developers, but they probably use toothpaste, or at least have friends that do.
>And gives SCO ammunition (whether real or
>imagined) to press its case.
We WANT SCO to press their case! If they drop the case now, there remains some shred of credibility to their claims. They need to pump the stock price up to $200 on their lies. Then the trial needs to happen, and not only be found against SCO, but also to lead to racketeering and perjury charges agains the execs, in additon to securities fraud, and also disbarrment of Boies and any partners in his law firm who were parties to this case.
If they drop the case now, they will not only spin the whole thing as a victory, but the financial press will buy it lock, stock and barrel, investors will pour money into the company, and there will remain a credible cloud of doubt as to the licensure on the linux kernel.
SCO has no case. But they have thus far avoided making demonstrably false statements under oath. And they seem to have avoided violating any laws regarding publicly traded stock. But from the start, they have certainly made it appear as if that's where they are headed. I say give 'em the rope.
Nobody gives a shit about any email virus.
"Hmm, what does the former CEO of Chrysler have to do with Ford?"
He was running Ford before and during the Pinto era. It's somewhat due to that whole scandal that he left, and then took over Chrysler.
"Ok, we choose to make improvement X which will save an average of about 0.5 lives per year at a cost of $4 million per year, but we will not make improvement Y which would save an estimated 10 lives per year at a cost of $800 million per year."
There is a world of difference between actuaries making a projection, and execs making the decision AFTER the death toll is mounting.
Strategic planning is one thing. Engineer your system to be as safe as you can economically make it and hope for the best. Most of the time, it's a successful strategy. But when you FAIL, and when your failure starts DIRECTLY KILLING PEOPLE PREDICTABLY, it becomes a crime to do nothing about it.
The big problem with Ford and the Pinto situation was that they had, seven years earlier, made claims to the government about widespread safety improvements, as part of their lobbying efforts.
Also, Ford's own documentation showed that *EVERY* rear-impact test resulted in a gas tank rupture. They knew about the problem before the first car was even in production.
I understand the engineering issues, where you make choices in design. But this is different. I truly believe that Lee Iacocca should personally be doing life without parole in a Michigan prison, because he knew precisely what he was doing, and was directly responsible for hundreds of deaths.
It's one thing to design a product with a dangerous flaw, but it's quite another to intentionally leave the flaw, knowing it's going to kill people, and spelling out in black and white what it will cost to settle with the lawyers and relatives of the people you killed.
I suspect with *today's* lawyers you'd be a lot more careful -- at least I wouldn't think it's a foregone conclusion that you can come out of a lawsuit where you've killed someone, short of bankruptcy... Even FoMoCo! (They seem to have come close to the edge on the Firestone tire deal.)
The 70's were a different scene in terms of litigation. They're just lucky no judge's kid wrecked a pinto.
"Ten Billion Dollars, your honor."