I wonder what his repeat statistics are in comparison to other places that run taxpayer funded country clubs.
Mistreating your prisoners so severely that theydieinjail before they've even been convicted of anything does tend to drop your repeat offender rate pretty low.
But the factual answer to your question is that, according to an ASU professer who studied that exact thing, "there was no significant difference in recidivism observed between those offenders released in 1989-1990 and those released in 1994-1995." (Arpaio's first term as sherriff started in 1992.) That's on top of the fact that arrests for actual serious crimes (that is, other than the crime of "being Hispanic") are plummeting, and the FBI claims a 70% increase in violent crimes and a 166% increase in homicides for this clown's county over the past 5 years. Given how absolutely horrible a job he's doing at actually enforcing the laws, it really is mind-boggling how many people buy into his PR stunts and keep relecting him.
I'm sure it'll come up elsewhere, but you can't really talk about "unintended" ways of playing a game without bringing up Dwarf Fortress. Though I suppose it's hard to specify what the "intended" way to play is, I'm sure it didn't originally involve killing goblins by catapulting them into the ceiling with a drawbridge.
Thankfully that's not the case. The last thing we need are more activist judges.
Actually, the last thing we need is more idiots using the term "Activist Judge" and displaying their complete ignorance of the whole point of our judicial system.
A general car driver WILL say "the engine is broken" if the engine, drive-train or ANY other mechanical part between engine and wheels seems to malfunction. That goes about many of you computer experts as well.
I find this analogy, plus the one from the article:
Ok, itâ(TM)s not really fair to pick on people for not knowing something that isnâ(TM)t in their field. Iâ(TM)d hate for a doctor to mock me because I donâ(TM)t actually know where my liver is or what on earth the spleen is for.
completely ridiculous, and entirely misses the point. Clearly I would hope that my auto mechanic doesn't expect me to know every piece of my engine. Nor would I expect my doctor to assume that I can pinpoint every organ in my body and it's function.
But if I told my mechanic that my engine was broken because there was a hole in my trunk, or complained about headaches to my doctor when my stomach hurt, I would look like an absolute idiot. People need to take some responsibility to understand the tool they are using. Hell, how long does it take to double-click on "My Computer" and see that "local disk" is just one part?
For the record, I tend to believe his claim, since 1. The Director of Digital Communications at TWC right now is Jeff Simmermon, and 2. The same username on other services (e.g. Twitter, YouTube) seems to be the same guy.
However, his first post was 4:00 on 12/31/2008, so you can clearly see why the veteran/.'s around here would be a tad suspicious. Just saying.
So that's what UID numbers are up to as of today...
Unbelievable. The director of communications comes on to explain exactly what most people are wondering about, and YOU critqique him for not having a Slashdot account before today.
I think you mean:
"A random anonymous new user to/. who claims to be, and may or may not be, the director of communications..."
What this means in English is that if the cable provider sells ESPN to someone, they must buy ESPN to resell it (obviously) but must also buy ESPN2 (and others). However, there is nothing that requires them to actually provide those chanels to anyone. So, they can easily sell and provide ESPN and only ESPN to anyone they want. They just have to charge the cost of ESPN plus extras or they will lose money on it.
So you're saying the cable companies should *pay* for channels no one wants, *charge me* for the channels no one wants, but not actually *give me* the channels no one wants?
In your mind, that scenario makes *more* sense than just sending the channels they have down the wire and letting me decide not to watch it?
No. We'd have a handful of Linux distributions. Christ, is there some kind of hidden/. rule that says we're not allowed to have any story about "fixing" Linux without people bringing up that same retarded false dichotomy?
I agree. Clearly there are only two diametrically opposed options here. Either we immediately cease all development and enhancement of Linux and agree that the current kernel version is the absolute perfection of open source, or everyone formats their hard drives and installs Vista.
There couldn't possibly be a middle ground anywhere in there.
I can't give you a good reason it's not used. I can give you the realistic reason: because most programmers have some deep-rooted visceral hatred of white space no matter how much more readable it makes your code. (At least I haven't seen anyone on/. make the argument that it makes your source files "too big", which is one I deal with at work from fresh-from-college juniors all the time.)
Seriously -- when you were writing on a 24 line terminal in a line editor, yeah, maybe minimizing blank lines was important. My IDE displays 50+ lines of code at a time, with collapseable regions. If any single logical block of code is so long that I have to scroll excessively to follow it, I likely have much bigger problems than just lots of braces.
It prevents the easier types of tampering -- man in the middle. That is, the only way to silently tamper with an encrypted page is to do so on the server pre-encryption. Without encryption, anyone that controls any part of the data stream can tamper with the data before you get it and you'd never know unless they screwed up.
I've always liked the way Bank of America handles logins, though I'd like it more if the whole site was encrypted.
On their unencrypted home page, all you get to enter is your user name or ID. Then you submit to a page that pulls back what they call a "Site Key" -- in this case it's a photograph and associated phrase that you picked when you sign up. On that (encrypted) page you enter your password.
This means that, by the time you've entered your password, you know that:
* The site taking your password has a valid security certificate * The site taking your password claims to know who you are based on your user ID. * The site taking your password knows you told them to show you a picture of a full course breakfast. * The site taking your password knows what funny words associate in your brain with bacon and eggs.
From a consumer perspective, this makes me pretty confident that I'm really logged into Bank of America; it opens them up to the brute force attack looking up valid user names but I'll let them deal with that.
Of course, when he says "software" he really means "users," and when he says "users" he really means "developers," and that inaccuracy of terminology doesn't help him make his point clearly.
Of course, half the people talking about this issue make a similar mistake; There's no mistake here, excepting your mistake in trying to confuse the behavior of the GPL to make it seem less restrictive to users. But lets remove the confusing terminology from the picture, lets call users and developers people and lets call the software, well, software.
The GPL limits what people can and cannot do with the software. The people cannot do anything that limits how the software can be used, copied, modified, or distributed. Whether those people are developers, users, managers, lawyers, it doesn't matter. The GPL license is designed to keep the software free for everyone else (other users, developers, managers, lawyers, etc) to use as they see fit.
Far be it from me to impose some sanity on your rabid anti-lawyer pro-GPL rant, but I suspect your entire FUD argument is predicated on the absence (which I assumed was implied) of a the article "the" in two places. As in, the sentance should read:
Companies are also required by the new GPL to license to others all patents they own or control related to the open source software, even those not related to code they add to the open source software, and even if they did not own the patents at the time they distributed the open source software. This statement, based on the text of the GPL, is completely accurate. The section in question reads:
If, pursuant to or in connection with a single transaction or arrangement, you convey, or propagate by procuring conveyance of, a covered work, and grant a patent license to some of the parties receiving the covered work authorizing them to use, propagate, modify or convey a specific copy of the covered work, then the patent license you grant is automatically extended to all recipients of the covered work and works based on it. What this says is, if you distribute any copy of a GPL'd program, and give anyone license to any patents that it may contain, you must grant those licenses to everyone. Note that this part of the Patents section is completely independent of the "contributor's patent claims" section that precedes it -- it applies to anyone who wants to distribute any covered version, modified or not.
Which errors of fact, in particular, are you speaking about? His article is pretty short on facts -- his point is so simple and obvious he really doesn't need many. But the ones I see are pretty dead on. In fact, he seems light years ahead of many software developers with his understanding of F/OSS based on this statement:
Open source software had its origins in the free software movement. By now, most open source users understand that free refers to freedom, not to price. The new lesson is that the freedom belongs to the software, not to users. You are not free to do whatever you want with the open source software and may find yourself in a legal fight if what you do restricts the freedom of the software. Beyond that, his facts seem to be basically the following:
Companies that are violating the GPL are being rightfully sued for it and settling.
The new version of the GPL explicitly restricts things, like the Tivo situation and web services, that used are legal loopholes in the GPLv2
Distributing software covered by the GPL v3 imposes new limitations on how you use your patent portfolio.
Things your company used to rely on to make a profit, like keeping trade secrets and requiring patent licenses and forcing support contracts for upgrades, all may now fall afoul of the GPL v3.
His conclusion: If you're going to use GPLv3 software, make damned sure you know what you're doing. If you can't abide by the terms of the license -- don't use it.
I fail to see how any of this article is anything but common sense and a completely accurate assessment of how open source software works in a closed-source business.
Holy crap am I glad you aren't my legal counsel.
But, I see SUSE as the following.
A Linux system that you can buy (note not OpenSUSE) without the fear of being sued by Microsoft for the duration of the licensing agreement between the two companies.
For that reason, I would not recommend SUSE to any business at all. I can just imagine the look on my CEO's face if our legal department sent this memo. "It is our conclusion that, by using Linux, you may be (but likely are not) taking on legal liability for patents which Microsoft may (but likely do not) have, that may be infringed (but likely are not) by Linux. Additionally, if you purchase SUSE Linux directly from Novell, you are guaranteed that Microsoft will not sue you for any such patents for at least some period of time in the future. So we strongly recommend you go with Red Hat".
Here's the part that I don't get. If by some cosmic stroke of bad luck, there is something infringing in Linux, and only SUSE Linux is indemnified, then you gain protection by using it. If, as we all know, there isn't anything infringing in Linux, then the indemnification pledge is meaningless fluff, and what the hell's the difference which distro you pick?
I don't think that is what the deal is about. Msft's business model does not work unless msft can control the standard. Their business model worked just fine before they were big enough to "control" anything. In fact, that's sort-of how they got to be that big. It never ceases to amaze me how ready the groktards are to condemn a company for doing what every company since the beginning of the free market are trying to do: make money.
Msft wants linux to be legally encumbered. Msft is getting Novell to agree that all other version of linux are violating msft patents. This is supposed to create one legal version of Linux, and all the rest are illegal. Good thing Linus and all those other developers gave Novell the permission to "agree" that they were violating patents they've never even seen. Of course Microsoft wants Linux to be using its patents and be liable for huge amounts of monetary damages -- that doesn't make it true. And even if it were, they're going to have a hard time being that selective in their patent licenses with open-source code written by thousands of people. The simple, conspiracy-free truth is that they're acting like any other large tech company with a huge patent portfolio would act, and hedging their bets just in case someone else screws up big time.
Right now, there is no way msft can kill off linux in the same manner that msft has killed off msft's proprietary competitors. But, if there is only one linux, and this linux is commercial product, then it becomes much easier for msft to kill off, or at least contain the problem. Microsoft killed off it's proprietary competitors with the controversial and predatory technique of not sucking as much. Seriously, I know most of the kids here on/. probably weren't around before there was a Windows 95, but have you ever seen an old Apple II or Mac OS? Commodore? Tandy? DesqView or DRDOS or OS/2 or any of those other OS's and applications that Windows was "competing" against? Windows might be a pile of junk by todays standards, but compared to what it was up against it may as well have been ordained by God. It would have taken a concerted effort at sucking by Microsoft just to stay even with those crap-fests in sales, let alone go out of business.
So, in some twisted, accidental sense, you're right. Microsoft can't kill off Linux or OS X the way it did every previous competitor because those two are actually worth using. But somehow we expect MS not to adapt its business strategy to compensate for the fact that someone actually managed to come out with a quality competing product? Get real.
Well, first off, you managed to find one exception to the general rule that the federal Constitution doesn't apply to private organizations. One out of 7 Articles and 27 Amendments seems like "a few" to me. Of the remaining amendments, the vast majority relate to things that don't even apply to private owners: voting rights, election rules and term limits; restrictions on the court system; taxing regulations; etc. As counter-examples, private property owners are certainly allowed to forbid the exercise of your "rights" to the following items that are found in the Bill of Rights:
* Right to bear arms * Right to free speech * Right to practice religion * Right to assemble * Right not to be searched without cause
As for the second part: Article I of the Constitution explicitly grants Congress the power to pass any law that is "neccessary and proper" in the execution of its enumerated powers. The 10th Amendment very purposely does not reserve only "expressly granted" or "explicitly granted" powers to the federal government, precisely to allow such implied powers to exist. Interstate commerce would be much different today without highways, and arguing that the FTC and SEC are not involved in commerce is just ridiculous. Though, I would love to see a world where the FCC's power was limited to that part of its job that is actually neccessary and proper (regulating the use of public airwaves to facilitate interstate commerce and communications).
More the the point, I never once, in the post you're answering, made any statement about government authority even close to what you're refuting. Unless you'd like to make the same argument as the original post, that the 10th Amendment grants blanket permission for everyone to do anything they want as long as the Constitution doesn't forbid it, I'm not sure what your point is.
What. The. Fuck. "There is now law that says you must be allowed..." What the hell is that? Since when were activites implicitly blacklisted and then only allowed once added to a whitelist? Since the beginning of human history, or thereabourts. You may have heard of this concept, it's called "private property", and you aren't even allowed to enter my private property until I give you permission to do so.
You seem to be very vocally confused about exactly what's going on here, so perhaps a bulleted list will be of some assistance:
* This is the United Kingdom, not the US, so the Constitution means fuck-all to anyone involved.
* Even if this were the United States, you'd still be horribly wrong. With very very few exceptions, nothing in the Constitution has any jurisdiction over private organizations. I direct you to the first words of the First Amendment as an example: Congress shall enact no law...
* Finally, the Constitution doesn't even remotely say what you claim it says. The confusion you seem to be having is over the Tenth Amendment. It says that any "power" (power to make laws) not expressly given to the Federal Government, is automatically given to the states. It says absolutely nothing about whatever laws the states may or may not have that aren't written in the Constitution.
That's just for starters, so perhaps you should take a political science course or two before your next ill-informed/. rant.
And there is no law that says you must be allowed to use your PDA while on their property. Your choices are to abide by their policy or leave their park.
Of course, even your example doesn't hold up to scrutiny everywhere. In Florida, where I am unfortunately enough to reside, if you are in my house without my permission and I kill you, there's a solid 80% chance I won't even be charged with a crime. We have a cutesy name for it: the "Castle Doctrine". But, like your example, that law completely irrelevant to the situation in TFA.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder what his repeat statistics are in comparison to other places that run taxpayer funded country clubs.
Mistreating your prisoners so severely that they die in jail before they've even been convicted of anything does tend to drop your repeat offender rate pretty low.
But the factual answer to your question is that, according to an ASU professer who studied that exact thing, "there was no significant difference in recidivism observed between those offenders released in 1989-1990 and those released in 1994-1995." (Arpaio's first term as sherriff started in 1992.) That's on top of the fact that arrests for actual serious crimes (that is, other than the crime of "being Hispanic") are plummeting, and the FBI claims a 70% increase in violent crimes and a 166% increase in homicides for this clown's county over the past 5 years. Given how absolutely horrible a job he's doing at actually enforcing the laws, it really is mind-boggling how many people buy into his PR stunts and keep relecting him.
I'm sure it'll come up elsewhere, but you can't really talk about "unintended" ways of playing a game without bringing up Dwarf Fortress. Though I suppose it's hard to specify what the "intended" way to play is, I'm sure it didn't originally involve killing goblins by catapulting them into the ceiling with a drawbridge.
Thankfully that's not the case. The last thing we need are more activist judges.
Actually, the last thing we need is more idiots using the term "Activist Judge" and displaying their complete ignorance of the whole point of our judicial system.
How about referring to the guy in the office next to yours by his name.
Yes, because that always works.
Me: "My buddy from work is gonna meet us at the Star Trek move; he'll probably get there before me. "
Friend: "That's cool, I'll give him his ticket. What's he look like?"
Me: "um... his name is Ken?"
I find this analogy, plus the one from the article:
completely ridiculous, and entirely misses the point. Clearly I would hope that my auto mechanic doesn't expect me to know every piece of my engine. Nor would I expect my doctor to assume that I can pinpoint every organ in my body and it's function.
But if I told my mechanic that my engine was broken because there was a hole in my trunk, or complained about headaches to my doctor when my stomach hurt, I would look like an absolute idiot. People need to take some responsibility to understand the tool they are using. Hell, how long does it take to double-click on "My Computer" and see that "local disk" is just one part?
For the record, I tend to believe his claim, since 1. The Director of Digital Communications at TWC right now is Jeff Simmermon, and 2. The same username on other services (e.g. Twitter, YouTube) seems to be the same guy.
However, his first post was 4:00 on 12/31/2008, so you can clearly see why the veteran /.'s around here would be a tad suspicious. Just saying.
So that's what UID numbers are up to as of today...
Unbelievable. The director of communications comes on to explain exactly what most people are wondering about, and YOU critqique him for not having a Slashdot account before today.
I think you mean:
"A random anonymous new user to /. who claims to be, and may or may not be, the director of communications..."
What this means in English is that if the cable provider sells ESPN to someone, they must buy ESPN to resell it (obviously) but must also buy ESPN2 (and others). However, there is nothing that requires them to actually provide those chanels to anyone. So, they can easily sell and provide ESPN and only ESPN to anyone they want. They just have to charge the cost of ESPN plus extras or they will lose money on it.
So you're saying the cable companies should *pay* for channels no one wants, *charge me* for the channels no one wants, but not actually *give me* the channels no one wants?
In your mind, that scenario makes *more* sense than just sending the channels they have down the wire and letting me decide not to watch it?
Not so loud, RMS might hear you.
Ubuntu: The best choice for those who don't want to have to choose.
Oh, and re the "elitist attitude" you won't find that on the Ubuntu forums.
It was pretty elitist of you to say that.
No. We'd have a handful of Linux distributions. Christ, is there some kind of hidden /. rule that says we're not allowed to have any story about "fixing" Linux without people bringing up that same retarded false dichotomy?
I agree. Clearly there are only two diametrically opposed options here. Either we immediately cease all development and enhancement of Linux and agree that the current kernel version is the absolute perfection of open source, or everyone formats their hard drives and installs Vista.
There couldn't possibly be a middle ground anywhere in there.
I can't give you a good reason it's not used. I can give you the realistic reason: because most programmers have some deep-rooted visceral hatred of white space no matter how much more readable it makes your code. (At least I haven't seen anyone on /. make the argument that it makes your source files "too big", which is one I deal with at work from fresh-from-college juniors all the time.)
Seriously -- when you were writing on a 24 line terminal in a line editor, yeah, maybe minimizing blank lines was important. My IDE displays 50+ lines of code at a time, with collapseable regions. If any single logical block of code is so long that I have to scroll excessively to follow it, I likely have much bigger problems than just lots of braces.
It prevents the easier types of tampering -- man in the middle. That is, the only way to silently tamper with an encrypted page is to do so on the server pre-encryption. Without encryption, anyone that controls any part of the data stream can tamper with the data before you get it and you'd never know unless they screwed up.
I've always liked the way Bank of America handles logins, though I'd like it more if the whole site was encrypted.
On their unencrypted home page, all you get to enter is your user name or ID. Then you submit to a page that pulls back what they call a "Site Key" -- in this case it's a photograph and associated phrase that you picked when you sign up. On that (encrypted) page you enter your password.
This means that, by the time you've entered your password, you know that:
* The site taking your password has a valid security certificate
* The site taking your password claims to know who you are based on your user ID.
* The site taking your password knows you told them to show you a picture of a full course breakfast.
* The site taking your password knows what funny words associate in your brain with bacon and eggs.
From a consumer perspective, this makes me pretty confident that I'm really logged into Bank of America; it opens them up to the brute force attack looking up valid user names but I'll let them deal with that.
If that's the case then it's been around for years and isn't really that big a deal. :x
Legalize highly explosive fireworks and wait a month?
Of course, half the people talking about this issue make a similar mistake; There's no mistake here, excepting your mistake in trying to confuse the behavior of the GPL to make it seem less restrictive to users. But lets remove the confusing terminology from the picture, lets call users and developers people and lets call the software, well, software.
The GPL limits what people can and cannot do with the software. The people cannot do anything that limits how the software can be used, copied, modified, or distributed. Whether those people are developers, users, managers, lawyers, it doesn't matter. The GPL license is designed to keep the software free for everyone else (other users, developers, managers, lawyers, etc) to use as they see fit.
arrangement, you convey, or propagate by procuring conveyance of, a
covered work, and grant a patent license to some of the parties
receiving the covered work authorizing them to use, propagate, modify
or convey a specific copy of the covered work, then the patent license
you grant is automatically extended to all recipients of the covered
work and works based on it. What this says is, if you distribute any copy of a GPL'd program, and give anyone license to any patents that it may contain, you must grant those licenses to everyone. Note that this part of the Patents section is completely independent of the "contributor's patent claims" section that precedes it -- it applies to anyone who wants to distribute any covered version, modified or not.
His conclusion: If you're going to use GPLv3 software, make damned sure you know what you're doing. If you can't abide by the terms of the license -- don't use it.
I fail to see how any of this article is anything but common sense and a completely accurate assessment of how open source software works in a closed-source business.
A Linux system that you can buy (note not OpenSUSE) without the fear of being sued by Microsoft for the duration of the licensing agreement between the two companies.
For that reason, I would not recommend SUSE to any business at all. I can just imagine the look on my CEO's face if our legal department sent this memo. "It is our conclusion that, by using Linux, you may be (but likely are not) taking on legal liability for patents which Microsoft may (but likely do not) have, that may be infringed (but likely are not) by Linux. Additionally, if you purchase SUSE Linux directly from Novell, you are guaranteed that Microsoft will not sue you for any such patents for at least some period of time in the future. So we strongly recommend you go with Red Hat".
Here's the part that I don't get. If by some cosmic stroke of bad luck, there is something infringing in Linux, and only SUSE Linux is indemnified, then you gain protection by using it. If, as we all know, there isn't anything infringing in Linux, then the indemnification pledge is meaningless fluff, and what the hell's the difference which distro you pick?
So, in some twisted, accidental sense, you're right. Microsoft can't kill off Linux or OS X the way it did every previous competitor because those two are actually worth using. But somehow we expect MS not to adapt its business strategy to compensate for the fact that someone actually managed to come out with a quality competing product? Get real.
--Mike
*sigh*
Well, first off, you managed to find one exception to the general rule that the federal Constitution doesn't apply to private organizations. One out of 7 Articles and 27 Amendments seems like "a few" to me. Of the remaining amendments, the vast majority relate to things that don't even apply to private owners: voting rights, election rules and term limits; restrictions on the court system; taxing regulations; etc. As counter-examples, private property owners are certainly allowed to forbid the exercise of your "rights" to the following items that are found in the Bill of Rights:
* Right to bear arms
* Right to free speech
* Right to practice religion
* Right to assemble
* Right not to be searched without cause
As for the second part: Article I of the Constitution explicitly grants Congress the power to pass any law that is "neccessary and proper" in the execution of its enumerated powers. The 10th Amendment very purposely does not reserve only "expressly granted" or "explicitly granted" powers to the federal government, precisely to allow such implied powers to exist. Interstate commerce would be much different today without highways, and arguing that the FTC and SEC are not involved in commerce is just ridiculous. Though, I would love to see a world where the FCC's power was limited to that part of its job that is actually neccessary and proper (regulating the use of public airwaves to facilitate interstate commerce and communications).
More the the point, I never once, in the post you're answering, made any statement about government authority even close to what you're refuting. Unless you'd like to make the same argument as the original post, that the 10th Amendment grants blanket permission for everyone to do anything they want as long as the Constitution doesn't forbid it, I'm not sure what your point is.
You seem to be very vocally confused about exactly what's going on here, so perhaps a bulleted list will be of some assistance:
* This is the United Kingdom, not the US, so the Constitution means fuck-all to anyone involved.
* Even if this were the United States, you'd still be horribly wrong. With very very few exceptions, nothing in the Constitution has any jurisdiction over private organizations. I direct you to the first words of the First Amendment as an example: Congress shall enact no law...
* Finally, the Constitution doesn't even remotely say what you claim it says. The confusion you seem to be having is over the Tenth Amendment. It says that any "power" (power to make laws) not expressly given to the Federal Government, is automatically given to the states. It says absolutely nothing about whatever laws the states may or may not have that aren't written in the Constitution.
That's just for starters, so perhaps you should take a political science course or two before your next ill-informed
And there is no law that says you must be allowed to use your PDA while on their property. Your choices are to abide by their policy or leave their park.
Of course, even your example doesn't hold up to scrutiny everywhere. In Florida, where I am unfortunately enough to reside, if you are in my house without my permission and I kill you, there's a solid 80% chance I won't even be charged with a crime. We have a cutesy name for it: the "Castle Doctrine". But, like your example, that law completely irrelevant to the situation in TFA.