You haven't been paying attention to many Open Source proponents if you haven't ever seen them claim that Open Source code is of vastly superior quality than proprietary. Hell, ESR's claim to fame is a whole paper he wrote on that exact topic. For example, the OSI itself puts this claim at the very top of their advocacy document on selling OSS to your management:
The foundation of the business case for open-source is high reliability. Open-source software is peer-reviewed software; it is more reliable than closed, proprietary software. Mature open-source code is as bulletproof as software ever gets. Open Source Case for Business There is a pretty clear divide in the F/OSS community between the OSI-side-people, who view Open Source as a development model that leads to better software with fewer bugs and quicker turnaround; and the FSF-side-people who think of Free Software as a moral imperative that leads to more freedom in addition to better software with fewer bugs and quicker turnaround.
Having worked heavily in both areas of software development, I think this particular article's conclusion was obvious: code quality depends on the people who wrote it, not the process the used to license it. But only people who have done extensive proprietary and open-source development could really see that first-hand, and our opinions are automatically dismissed as being pro-Microsoft shills. Thus, I predict this paper will be roasted over an open flame, crushed into a tiny ball, soaked in gasoline, lit on fire, and ejected into deep space by the most devoted open source proponents in both camps.
I'm not sure how I personally feel about what this lady has been charged with. Frankly, "violating terms of service" seems to be letting her off easy given that (based on the information I have heard or read, at least) she maliciously harassed the victim with the conscious intent of inflicting mental distress -- on an already depressed girl. I'm sure the Feds could be more creative with anti-stalking or anti-harassment or hell, even assault charges if they wanted to.
But Wired's main complaint seems to be this:
That sets a potentially troubling precedent, given that terms-of-service agreements sometimes contain onerous provisions, and are rarely read by users. I agree with them that equating a TOS violation with "hacking" might be a stretch, but it is already well established case law that unreasonable, illegal, or outrageous terms in a contract cannot be enforced. And a TOS agreement is, essentially, a contract between you and the service provider. So we aren't all suddenly going to be charged as felons because the/. TOS says we need to name all our pets Cowboy Neal -- basically the doomsday scenario Wired is trying to paint.
Wow. So many things to clarify. So, first of all, just to get this out of the way:
No it does not beg the question. Seriously, you'd think that seeing us yell about this every time someone uses that phrase wrong on/. would annoy people enough to just stop using it, but no.
Anyway, Mormonism: Their origins are a bit flaky, but only because they happened in the 1800s and not 1800 BC. Just about every major, currently active religion started out with one guy who claimed some special knowledge that only he could know, and was tasked him with spreading that knowledge to the world. See: Moses, Jesus, Mohammad, Gautama Buddha. The fact that people thousands of years ago didn't blink an eye when people made claims like this doesn't make the claim any more or less crazy. And like most other mainstream religions, as time went on Mormonism has tended to shed the most bizarre or "out-there" claims and stick with the basics of preaching their ideas of morality. Granted, Mormon morality is a good bit more strict than most other religions, putting it closer to the "crazy" end of the mainstream spectrum, but their current teachings aren't much different from Catholics, and their rules and restrictions aren't any more or less odd than, save, Jehovah's Witnesses or Seventh Day Adventists.
And, to specifically illustrate the point:
And perhaps you've heard on the news about the Mormon polygamist compound in Texas that was recently raided? Awesome job changing the subject completely there, since we were talking about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, LDS, right up until that sentence. The LDS Church stopped allowing polygamy among its members years ago. Part of this was simple political expedience - they were starting to piss off the non-Mormons in Utah - but part of it was the very process I just described, shedding their more bizarre beliefs and focusing on a more core sense of morality. The group running the compound in Texas is the "Fundamentalist LDS" cult, a bunch of people who were kicked out of the Mormon church precisely because they wouldn't stop doing the crap they've been caught doing. The LDS church is pretty vocal in objecting to even calling that religion Mormon, though they still, in theory, follow the Book of Mormon, so they still refer to themselves as Mormons. This was a big bone of contention with the Mormon church and the cable TV show "Big Love", which was forced to start each show with a disclaimer explicitly stating that the family depicted on the show were not Mormon, they were FLDS. Painting all of Mormonism as somehow wrong because of one fringe group is like claiming all of Christianity is tainted because of those psycho pricks in the Westboro Baptist Church.
I think you misread his statement. He didn't say your "machine" was compromised. He said that the underlying authentication mechanism was compromised, which is quite different. If I were to leave my car doors unlocked, the engine running, and the alarm disabled, then the security system on my car would be compromised; but until someone came along to actually hop in and drive away with it, the car itself would still be working properly.
Similarly, the fact that there is a problem with the OpenSSH package means that the security mechanism that is guarding access to your system is no longer as secure as it was previously thought -- that makes it compromised. The individual systems may or may not have been compromised themselves by way of the compromised security mechanism, but continuing to use OpenSSL knowing it (the key gen algorithm, specifically) is less secure than it should be is just asking for trouble.
It means you can look at it AND modify it and use it [...] Microsoft is playing semantic games OT: I barely managed to stop myself from making the obvious "Symantec makes games?" joke. Shew.
Everyone is playing semantic games here. The word Open has about a dozen meanings just in general conversation, ignoring the handful of extra ones made up by the tech industry. None of them means exactly what the OSI uses as it's definition of "open source". Open Source source code is different than source code that is open because open means things like "visible to all", "permitted access", etc. The OSI really should be calling it Unrestricted Source or something similar (though that's also not quite accurate as there are restrictions, just generally minor ones.)
Microsoft is not using the term Open Source to describe their method of opening their source code because the term has been hijacked by OSI to have one specific meaning out of the dozens of dictionary definitions that could apply (and plus it's trademarked, even though OSI wasn't the first to use it). They are using a different term, Shared Source, precisely because their licenses do not all meet the Open Source definition.
Of course, the reality is that some shared source licenses are absolutely open source because OSI said they are, so the entire argument that shared source is "not the same" as open source is completely misguided. They are two distinct but overlapping terms with their own intended meanings and usages, and the F/OSS community is just trying to invent confusion where none exists because they don't like the fact that OSI approved some of the SS licenses.
I think we are running into the same problem with "closed" that we have run into with "free" for years now. The word is typically used because it is the opposite of open, but both words have a number of subtly different meanings, and every definition of "open" is not the exact opposite of every definition of "closed".
Closed can mean "not allowing access", which covered most proprietary software where the source code is completely hidden from everyone except the copyright holders.
Closed can also mean "not open to the general public", which covers the type of traditional source-code licenses being referenced in the GPP. In this case, there are some people who have access to the code, it's just not publically visible.
There's a third definition of closed, that of "requirement memebership", usually in the sense of a closed union shop or a closed industry trade group. This is very roughly the sense of closed that applies to the some of the shared source licenses, in that the code is open to the public only in the sense that anyone willing to follow all of the "membership requirements" is allowed to use it.
Of course, arguably any license fits into that third category, so the difference between open and closed then falls onto how open or closed those individual requirements are. For example, the limiting of access of derived software to only running on Windows is more closed than allowing derived software to run on any platform.
The FSF has taken to using the term "libre" instead of "free" because it has the explicit connotation of freedom by lack of restructions. There must be terms that are less ambiguous than "closed" that are also appropriate. A poster lower down suggested Visible, which is better but still doesn't distinguish the various degrees to which a company can make its source visible. Unfortunately I like the word "shared" in certain senses but not in others. It has the implications of being available for others to look at, but still being completely owned and controlled by the copyright holder.
Perhaps:
* Public Domain - Or legal equivalent * Open Source - Open with minimal restrictions (BSD) * Free Source - Open but with restrictions (GPL) * Shared Source? Illustrative Source? Read-Only Source? This is where I get stuck. Code that anyone can see but cannot use. * Restricted Source - Available under severe restrictions (confidentiality etc.) * Closed Source - Fully hidden from all but copyright owner
Please can we stay even a bit on topic here? We're talking about a Linux Framebuffer Driver here. You can't use the Linux framebuffer device drivers on Windows because they're not Windows Drivers. That's ignoring the fact that Windows already has all the display drivers it needs to use this hardware, so claiming that VIA "won't support" their hardware on Windows is just ridiculous.
Taking some arbitrary good deed by a hardware vendor and tacking a cynical "I bet it doesn't work on Windows" doesn't make you smart or insightful -- it makes your just another slashdouche.
Certainely not. But between your figure and no exposure at all (almost), there is some room, and it looks odd that did not really start some sort of significant promotion for their technology (unless I missed it). You sort-of missed it. There are portions of their site that are being tested with Silverlight, such as their new MSDN downloads area. They are beta tests, so you only see them if you're one of the random users that gets prompted to participate while using the production site, but they do exist. Also, not that this is a huge plus for SL but it's integrated heavily into the Vista UI already.
Also, lets not forget that SL is new. v1.0 may be a few years old, but it's nowhere near as easy to use as 2.0 is supposed to be, and 2.0 isn't actually out yet. With 2.0 you can code behind SL UI's just like you can code behind an ASPX page, in VS2008, so it will (in theory) be much more accessible.
Frankly, though, I doubt even MS is expecting Silverlight to completely replace Flash -- from what I've seen, it's just too much overhead for some of the simple things. The whole point of Silverlight is to do really complex applications approaching the feature-richness of a Forms application, delivered over the web.
MS does stupid shit that they deserver to be bashed for, such as the whole Open XML fiasco. Posting stories like this just destroys the sites credibility, and makes look like you engage in mindless MS bashing, rather than really looking at issues that are critical to tech savy people. 100% agreement here. We already have one Groklaw for that crap, we don't need another one.
Well, first of all, please realize that my original post was not making any comment one way or the other on the merits of the counterclaims or the judge's ruling. At the time I had only read parts of the motion to dismiss, and was simply replying to the question of why the judge didn't decide to sanction the RIAA's lawyers. My point was that the level of misbehavior needed for actual sanctions against a practicing lawyer is significantly higher than just "submitting stupid briefs". Sanctioning lawyers for submitting properly filed, properly plead motions at an appropriate time is a really bad practice to get in to.
Having actually read their motion for dismiss, and the judge's order denying the motion, I don't even see a hint of anyone actually involved in the case behaving in a sanction-worthy manner. The motion to dismiss raised what appeared to be a legitimate complaint about the judge's ruling in a prior case, citing a recent Supreme Court decision that the RIAA's lawyer believed changed the situation. The judge, by his own words, reviewed that decision and decided that it didn't apply. That means the judge himself felt the motion was at least legitimate enough to consider their argument -- he just didn't waste any time deciding their argument was wrong. The tone of his order was not one of "You idiots, I told you once this crap didn't fly, why did you try again?". It was "Your argument as to why my previous decision should be changed does not seem to apply, so my previous decision stands, so I'm making the same decision now."
If you want to talk about the likelihood of the counterclaims being adjudicated and the RIAA being found guilty -- I'd put the odds right around zilch. They settled once before, probably as much to save the money it would cost to try the claims, and make the bad publicity go away, as for any belief that they'd lose. Which means that no matter how much or how little they think they are likely to succeed in their defense, they'll probably just pay this defendant to go away.
Honestly, the claims the defendant is making look a bit thin to me. Anti-trust law is not something I'm intimately familiar with, but this "Noerr-Pennington doctrine" that the RIAA's lawyer kept referring to appears to have exactly the effect that the claim it does -- it grants blanket protection against exactly the charges being levied at the RIAA for doing exactly what the RIAA is doing. If they were to go to trial, I'm not terribly confident they'd be found guilty of abuse of process, unfair trade practices, etc. just for filing lawsuits to protect their copyrights. It all hinges on if the suits they are filing can be classified as "sham" law suits. I really have no idea if they could or couldn't, or even if this Noerr-Pennington thing really applies, but even though the RIAA's arguments didn't meet the required standard for a motion to dismiss, they seemed solid enough to stand up during an actual trial.
Also, let me be clear, that I'm certainly not saying the RIAA isn't right in the way they're behaving. I'm also not arguing that they couldn't be fined or sanctioned or otherwise punished under some other statue or rule. I just think anti-trust-style charges are going to be tough to prove.
I doubt his complaints were this specific; I have no doubt that there is legacy cruft in the.NET Framework somewhere, but so far the only notable example I've run across in my development is the decision to use a signed integer for buffer lengths in the stream code (makes it annoying since Array.Length is an unsigned in and Stream.Write takes a signed int so you can't write a whole array in one step). As far as this window handle issue -- that's like saying that Cocoa is old and outdated because you can't use a GUI object before you call new() on it. It's just how things work.
NYCL's optimism not withstanding, lawyers getting sanctioned for misbehavior isn't nearly as commonplace as you would hope, or as the summary would suggest. It takes a lot for a judge to decide that a lawyer's behavior was so blatently illegal that they need to be sanctioned. Overall, I think that's a good thing, otherwise lawyers may be too concerned about sanctions and potentially ignore possible legal avenues that may benefit their client. In this case, the RIAA's lawyer's supporting memorandum is pretty ballsy to flat out tell the judge he was wrong, but lawyers do that kind of thing all the time. For example, that's basically the definition of an appeal -- "Judge, you screwed up, let me show you how with sufficient evidence to change your mind." If the law firm really did, in what passes for "good faith" in civil law, believe that the judge's prior ruling was flawed, they had every right to submit a motion saying so, with evidence, which they did.
I mean, look for much crap the SCO legal team has gotten away with without so much as a slap on the wrist (yet). And look how long it took Jack Thompson to get sanctioned for acting like a blatant lunatic.
I hope that's not his complaint because it's flat out untrue. In Windows, there isn't a single "GUI" thread (though it's often easier to behave as if there were) but each visual element is "owned" by the thread that called whichever OS-level API call allocated its resources. In.NET every "Control", which is the base class for everything that has a UI, includes a very easy to use method called Invoke() that you can pass a delegate (.NET function pointer) into and have it run on the appropriate thread. This is such beginner-level stuff I even found it in a CS101 college freshman VB book.
And, to answer your concerns from a lower-down post, the reason the remarks in the MSDN article are so scary is because MS has made sure that every possible idiotic mistake you could make has been documented. At the risk of way oversimplifying things -- every Windows visual element has a handle (basically, an opaque value that's analogous to a pointer) associated with it. The API calls to create visual element return this handle to the process, and the owner thread uses that handle to do anything it needs to in the future. However, since the.NET Control classes are wrappers around the non-object-oriented Win32 API, there is a possibility that you could run code on a Control before the class has actually allocated a handle, meaning the control isn't yet valid. At this point, the whole issue of cross-thread conflicts is moot because there's no control handle for the thread to own, but it's still not exactly "safe" to try to interact with the control.
In order for this to be a problem you'd have to fire off background threads in some constructor or have them try to access a form before you've even bothered to display it, which is a pretty weird thing to try and do -- but if you do it, MS has a way for you to figure that out and do the right thing anyway.
Clearly this story is a hoax. No slashdot editor would EVER stoop to -- well -- EDITING a story before posting it!
The good news is, even if Krvaric doesn't comment on this story in time to be relevant, he'll have at least 9 more tries over the next month as the story gets reposted.
You must have had access to the sooper sekrit article with all the illustrations in it. The Ars article I read a blatent Mac fanboy bragging about Cocoa, with an extra two tacked-on pages of hyperbole and baseless accusations about how much.NET sucks, backed up with exactly 1 concrete example: that you have to know which Windows Forms operations are thread-safe (hint: none of them). He even finishes that thought by pointing out that most other GUI frameworks have exactly the same problem. I can probably rattle two dozen cases from memory in the old Win32 API where MS made obviously retarded design choices, but he can't even come up with a single actual.NET class method that he doesn't like when he's writing an article about it?
I am in that third group of developers this article was supposedly written for. I absolutely abhor poorly written code, cheap workarounds, etc. And I make a living off.NET and I love it. I usually find that the Framework already does anything I'd expect a base class library to do and a bunch more. The code I write against it is way more elegant than what I typically see from, say, your random GTK app. Is that because.NET is inherently better than gtk, glib, glibc, etc? No, I don't sit around whining about how Microsoft "blew it with developers" because they didn't write all my code for me... I spend my time writing good code.
Not really. The goal isn't to make Ubuntu "as easy to use as Vista". The goal is to make Ubuntu "usable by everyone". Comparisons to Windows will only invite the subconscious tendancy to stop when Ubuntu reaches parity, no matter how counter-intuitive it may be.
Doing things the "Windows way" is frequently easier because people are familiar with it, in which case it makes sense. But there are plenty of things Windows gets way wrong that Linux can get right.
Specifically, the 14th Amendment makes the Bill of Rights (the 1st 10 amendments to the Constitution) specifically applicable to the states and allows the federal government to create legislation that abrogates sovereign immunity of the states if, and to the extent, necessary to abolish the vestiges of slavery.
While that was the purpose of the 14th Amendment at the time, it actually has much broader powers than merely abolishing slavery. Amendment XIV intentionally mimics the language of Amendment V, in that it forbids the states from "depriv[ing] any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law;". This Amendment is the reason that the freedoms express in various constitutional amendments are now applied to the states, despite clearly being directed toward Congress, e.g., the federal government, and not the states.
In this case, Congress attempted to apply that standard to copyright law, by claiming that violation of copyright deprived the copyright holder of "property", and because of the states' normal immunity to federal suit, did so "without due process". In order for this law to pass Contitutional muster, it must fall clearly within the scope of that 14th amendment clause, for the reason you mentioned: if no constitutional amendment expressly grants Congress the power to override the 11th Amendment, Article I forbids them from doing so.
What the court found, based on earlier decisions, was that this particular law did not meet the strict test for determining if it fell legally within the 14th Amendment. Read in isolation that Amendment does seem to cover this particular action, but the Constitution cannot be read in isolation. In order to balance Amendment XIV with Amendment XI, the courts impose limits on how free Congress can get with its 14th Amendment powers, which are similar to the limits the Court places on Congress's attempts to limit First Amendment rights. Specifically, the law in question must be designed to address a specific infringment in the most specific and limited means possible. Since the Copyright Remedy Clarification Act was essentially preemptive (the Court didn't find the "evidence" used to support the act as being very consistant), and because there are other remedies for the copyright holder (individual suits; breach of contract suits; etc), the Court found that Congress overstepped their bounds with this act.
Our whole justice system is based on the accuser having to provide evidence against the accused, and that the absence of evidence counts for the defendant, never the accuser.
This is an accurate way of expressing the doctrine of presumption of innocence, which is completely irrelevant here, for several reasons.
We can start with the fact that it only applies to criminal trials where the state is prosecuting a citizen for an alleged crime. This is not one of those. It is a civil trial, as part of a motion to quash evidence (by the "defendant", no less). During civil trials there are many cases where the non-moving party is required to prove that the moving party's accusations are incorrect. Just off the top of my head, from reading several summary judgement motions today, is the fact that the non-moving party (the "defendant" in your statement, though it may actually be the plaintiff) is required to come up with some sort of material issue of facts to refute a summary judgement motion. The person making the motion (the "accuser") doesn't lose just because they cannot prove that no such issue of fact exists: it is presumed that no such issue exists until proven otherwise by the "accused".
In a broader sense, all motions in civil trials generally work this way. One party makes a motion, and sets forth all of its evidence in support. The other party makes a reply motion, and sets forth all of its evidence to refute. The judge weighs all of the evidence and decides which is more compelling. The same thing happens if the case ever makes it to trial: the jury (or judge, if appropriate) is not required to find in favor of the defendant just because of scant evidence. The case is decided on "preponderance of evidence", and "slim evidence" trumps "no evidence" by that measure. If one party moves to have the court take some action and the other party does nothing to refute it, the action is generally taken by default (in cases where the court clearly disputes the validity of the evidence, it could in theory deny a motion of its own accord, but that's extremely rare).
But most importantly, even were this a criminal trial and MediaSentry were accused of a crime, there is evidence that implicates them as being the "guilty" party. The evidence is not, as this thread seems to imply, logs of MediaSentry IP addresses being used (see below), but even if that were the evidence, it's still something. It's still enough for the defendant to have some burden of refuting or discrediting that evidence.
----
Having said all that, I actually went and looked at all the evidence of MediaSentry's illegal evidence gathering, and unless I'm missing something, it has nothing to do with MediaSentry's IP addresses. The exhibits filed with the court are a series of documents provided by MediaSentry that are the result of a MediaSentry investigation. That is about as conclusive as you can get that MediaSentry was conducting an investigation. (Note that the summary, and TFA originally, wrongly implicate the 2008 C&D order. What the lawyers are actually referring to is the original charge of operating without a license that led to the C&D order.)
You don't need to tech kids to write in C++ for them to learn how bad an idea lack of GC is. Just give them some existing code and tell them to chase buffer overruns and memory leaks
You don't need to tech (sic) kids to write in C# for them to learn how bad an idea of GC is. Just give them some existing code and tell them to chase memory leaks and finalisation issues.
One small mistake there. I just looked it up on m-w.com. In neither British nor American spelling do you spell "Java" with a "C" or "#".
The whole point of GNU and Linux was to make a working _free_ system
You may *think* that's the whole point of Linux, but that doesn't make you right. Based on the early history of Linux development, I'd say the whole point was to make a "better" PC-based UNIX-like OS. "Free" just happened to be a convenient and effective way to go about it.
Linux is an OS, GNU is a philosophy. Don't confuse the two.
Incidentally, is it most people's experience that "We're so used [sic] cable and satellite television reception problems that we don't even notice them anymore"?
It's certainly not mine. I can tell you that, in the 4 years that I've had my Verizon cell phone, I don't remember ever losing a call that wasn't my fault (battery died, walked into an elevator, etc.) The only problems I have with my cell phone can be blamed on crappy hardware, mostly that cell phone speakers are god awful. I don't have satellite TV, but my cable rarely goes out -- not counting the week long outage when Orlando got hit by three consecutive hurricanes, I can only recall twice in four years losing cable TV service, and maybe a half-dozen times losing Internet service, and never more than an hour at a time. I haven't actually done the math, but if that's not 99.999% uptime it's pretty damned closed.
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The FBI is way more intelligent than you give them credit for. Clearly:
<span style="display:none;">Top Secret</span ><span style="display:inline;">REDACTED</span >
Open Source Case for Business There is a pretty clear divide in the F/OSS community between the OSI-side-people, who view Open Source as a development model that leads to better software with fewer bugs and quicker turnaround; and the FSF-side-people who think of Free Software as a moral imperative that leads to more freedom in addition to better software with fewer bugs and quicker turnaround.
Having worked heavily in both areas of software development, I think this particular article's conclusion was obvious: code quality depends on the people who wrote it, not the process the used to license it. But only people who have done extensive proprietary and open-source development could really see that first-hand, and our opinions are automatically dismissed as being pro-Microsoft shills. Thus, I predict this paper will be roasted over an open flame, crushed into a tiny ball, soaked in gasoline, lit on fire, and ejected into deep space by the most devoted open source proponents in both camps.
But Wired's main complaint seems to be this: That sets a potentially troubling precedent, given that terms-of-service agreements sometimes contain onerous provisions, and are rarely read by users. I agree with them that equating a TOS violation with "hacking" might be a stretch, but it is already well established case law that unreasonable, illegal, or outrageous terms in a contract cannot be enforced. And a TOS agreement is, essentially, a contract between you and the service provider. So we aren't all suddenly going to be charged as felons because the
No it does not beg the question. Seriously, you'd think that seeing us yell about this every time someone uses that phrase wrong on
Anyway, Mormonism: Their origins are a bit flaky, but only because they happened in the 1800s and not 1800 BC. Just about every major, currently active religion started out with one guy who claimed some special knowledge that only he could know, and was tasked him with spreading that knowledge to the world. See: Moses, Jesus, Mohammad, Gautama Buddha. The fact that people thousands of years ago didn't blink an eye when people made claims like this doesn't make the claim any more or less crazy. And like most other mainstream religions, as time went on Mormonism has tended to shed the most bizarre or "out-there" claims and stick with the basics of preaching their ideas of morality. Granted, Mormon morality is a good bit more strict than most other religions, putting it closer to the "crazy" end of the mainstream spectrum, but their current teachings aren't much different from Catholics, and their rules and restrictions aren't any more or less odd than, save, Jehovah's Witnesses or Seventh Day Adventists.
And, to specifically illustrate the point: And perhaps you've heard on the news about the Mormon polygamist compound in Texas that was recently raided? Awesome job changing the subject completely there, since we were talking about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, LDS, right up until that sentence. The LDS Church stopped allowing polygamy among its members years ago. Part of this was simple political expedience - they were starting to piss off the non-Mormons in Utah - but part of it was the very process I just described, shedding their more bizarre beliefs and focusing on a more core sense of morality. The group running the compound in Texas is the "Fundamentalist LDS" cult, a bunch of people who were kicked out of the Mormon church precisely because they wouldn't stop doing the crap they've been caught doing. The LDS church is pretty vocal in objecting to even calling that religion Mormon, though they still, in theory, follow the Book of Mormon, so they still refer to themselves as Mormons. This was a big bone of contention with the Mormon church and the cable TV show "Big Love", which was forced to start each show with a disclaimer explicitly stating that the family depicted on the show were not Mormon, they were FLDS. Painting all of Mormonism as somehow wrong because of one fringe group is like claiming all of Christianity is tainted because of those psycho pricks in the Westboro Baptist Church.
I think you misread his statement. He didn't say your "machine" was compromised. He said that the underlying authentication mechanism was compromised, which is quite different. If I were to leave my car doors unlocked, the engine running, and the alarm disabled, then the security system on my car would be compromised; but until someone came along to actually hop in and drive away with it, the car itself would still be working properly.
Similarly, the fact that there is a problem with the OpenSSH package means that the security mechanism that is guarding access to your system is no longer as secure as it was previously thought -- that makes it compromised. The individual systems may or may not have been compromised themselves by way of the compromised security mechanism, but continuing to use OpenSSL knowing it (the key gen algorithm, specifically) is less secure than it should be is just asking for trouble.
That doesn't work. Cuz as we all know, that bird, you cannot change. Kinda goes against the spirit of the GPL.
Everyone is playing semantic games here. The word Open has about a dozen meanings just in general conversation, ignoring the handful of extra ones made up by the tech industry. None of them means exactly what the OSI uses as it's definition of "open source". Open Source source code is different than source code that is open because open means things like "visible to all", "permitted access", etc. The OSI really should be calling it Unrestricted Source or something similar (though that's also not quite accurate as there are restrictions, just generally minor ones.)
Microsoft is not using the term Open Source to describe their method of opening their source code because the term has been hijacked by OSI to have one specific meaning out of the dozens of dictionary definitions that could apply (and plus it's trademarked, even though OSI wasn't the first to use it). They are using a different term, Shared Source, precisely because their licenses do not all meet the Open Source definition.
Of course, the reality is that some shared source licenses are absolutely open source because OSI said they are, so the entire argument that shared source is "not the same" as open source is completely misguided. They are two distinct but overlapping terms with their own intended meanings and usages, and the F/OSS community is just trying to invent confusion where none exists because they don't like the fact that OSI approved some of the SS licenses.
I think we are running into the same problem with "closed" that we have run into with "free" for years now. The word is typically used because it is the opposite of open, but both words have a number of subtly different meanings, and every definition of "open" is not the exact opposite of every definition of "closed".
Closed can mean "not allowing access", which covered most proprietary software where the source code is completely hidden from everyone except the copyright holders.
Closed can also mean "not open to the general public", which covers the type of traditional source-code licenses being referenced in the GPP. In this case, there are some people who have access to the code, it's just not publically visible.
There's a third definition of closed, that of "requirement memebership", usually in the sense of a closed union shop or a closed industry trade group. This is very roughly the sense of closed that applies to the some of the shared source licenses, in that the code is open to the public only in the sense that anyone willing to follow all of the "membership requirements" is allowed to use it.
Of course, arguably any license fits into that third category, so the difference between open and closed then falls onto how open or closed those individual requirements are. For example, the limiting of access of derived software to only running on Windows is more closed than allowing derived software to run on any platform.
The FSF has taken to using the term "libre" instead of "free" because it has the explicit connotation of freedom by lack of restructions. There must be terms that are less ambiguous than "closed" that are also appropriate. A poster lower down suggested Visible, which is better but still doesn't distinguish the various degrees to which a company can make its source visible. Unfortunately I like the word "shared" in certain senses but not in others. It has the implications of being available for others to look at, but still being completely owned and controlled by the copyright holder.
Perhaps:
* Public Domain - Or legal equivalent
* Open Source - Open with minimal restrictions (BSD)
* Free Source - Open but with restrictions (GPL)
* Shared Source? Illustrative Source? Read-Only Source? This is where I get stuck. Code that anyone can see but cannot use.
* Restricted Source - Available under severe restrictions (confidentiality etc.)
* Closed Source - Fully hidden from all but copyright owner
Please can we stay even a bit on topic here? We're talking about a Linux Framebuffer Driver here. You can't use the Linux framebuffer device drivers on Windows because they're not Windows Drivers. That's ignoring the fact that Windows already has all the display drivers it needs to use this hardware, so claiming that VIA "won't support" their hardware on Windows is just ridiculous.
Taking some arbitrary good deed by a hardware vendor and tacking a cynical "I bet it doesn't work on Windows" doesn't make you smart or insightful -- it makes your just another slashdouche.
Also, lets not forget that SL is new. v1.0 may be a few years old, but it's nowhere near as easy to use as 2.0 is supposed to be, and 2.0 isn't actually out yet. With 2.0 you can code behind SL UI's just like you can code behind an ASPX page, in VS2008, so it will (in theory) be much more accessible.
Frankly, though, I doubt even MS is expecting Silverlight to completely replace Flash -- from what I've seen, it's just too much overhead for some of the simple things. The whole point of Silverlight is to do really complex applications approaching the feature-richness of a Forms application, delivered over the web.
Well, first of all, please realize that my original post was not making any comment one way or the other on the merits of the counterclaims or the judge's ruling. At the time I had only read parts of the motion to dismiss, and was simply replying to the question of why the judge didn't decide to sanction the RIAA's lawyers. My point was that the level of misbehavior needed for actual sanctions against a practicing lawyer is significantly higher than just "submitting stupid briefs". Sanctioning lawyers for submitting properly filed, properly plead motions at an appropriate time is a really bad practice to get in to.
Having actually read their motion for dismiss, and the judge's order denying the motion, I don't even see a hint of anyone actually involved in the case behaving in a sanction-worthy manner. The motion to dismiss raised what appeared to be a legitimate complaint about the judge's ruling in a prior case, citing a recent Supreme Court decision that the RIAA's lawyer believed changed the situation. The judge, by his own words, reviewed that decision and decided that it didn't apply. That means the judge himself felt the motion was at least legitimate enough to consider their argument -- he just didn't waste any time deciding their argument was wrong. The tone of his order was not one of "You idiots, I told you once this crap didn't fly, why did you try again?". It was "Your argument as to why my previous decision should be changed does not seem to apply, so my previous decision stands, so I'm making the same decision now."
If you want to talk about the likelihood of the counterclaims being adjudicated and the RIAA being found guilty -- I'd put the odds right around zilch. They settled once before, probably as much to save the money it would cost to try the claims, and make the bad publicity go away, as for any belief that they'd lose. Which means that no matter how much or how little they think they are likely to succeed in their defense, they'll probably just pay this defendant to go away.
Honestly, the claims the defendant is making look a bit thin to me. Anti-trust law is not something I'm intimately familiar with, but this "Noerr-Pennington doctrine" that the RIAA's lawyer kept referring to appears to have exactly the effect that the claim it does -- it grants blanket protection against exactly the charges being levied at the RIAA for doing exactly what the RIAA is doing. If they were to go to trial, I'm not terribly confident they'd be found guilty of abuse of process, unfair trade practices, etc. just for filing lawsuits to protect their copyrights. It all hinges on if the suits they are filing can be classified as "sham" law suits. I really have no idea if they could or couldn't, or even if this Noerr-Pennington thing really applies, but even though the RIAA's arguments didn't meet the required standard for a motion to dismiss, they seemed solid enough to stand up during an actual trial.
Also, let me be clear, that I'm certainly not saying the RIAA isn't right in the way they're behaving. I'm also not arguing that they couldn't be fined or sanctioned or otherwise punished under some other statue or rule. I just think anti-trust-style charges are going to be tough to prove.
I doubt his complaints were this specific; I have no doubt that there is legacy cruft in the .NET Framework somewhere, but so far the only notable example I've run across in my development is the decision to use a signed integer for buffer lengths in the stream code (makes it annoying since Array.Length is an unsigned in and Stream.Write takes a signed int so you can't write a whole array in one step). As far as this window handle issue -- that's like saying that Cocoa is old and outdated because you can't use a GUI object before you call new() on it. It's just how things work.
NYCL's optimism not withstanding, lawyers getting sanctioned for misbehavior isn't nearly as commonplace as you would hope, or as the summary would suggest. It takes a lot for a judge to decide that a lawyer's behavior was so blatently illegal that they need to be sanctioned. Overall, I think that's a good thing, otherwise lawyers may be too concerned about sanctions and potentially ignore possible legal avenues that may benefit their client. In this case, the RIAA's lawyer's supporting memorandum is pretty ballsy to flat out tell the judge he was wrong, but lawyers do that kind of thing all the time. For example, that's basically the definition of an appeal -- "Judge, you screwed up, let me show you how with sufficient evidence to change your mind." If the law firm really did, in what passes for "good faith" in civil law, believe that the judge's prior ruling was flawed, they had every right to submit a motion saying so, with evidence, which they did.
I mean, look for much crap the SCO legal team has gotten away with without so much as a slap on the wrist (yet). And look how long it took Jack Thompson to get sanctioned for acting like a blatant lunatic.
--K
I hope that's not his complaint because it's flat out untrue. In Windows, there isn't a single "GUI" thread (though it's often easier to behave as if there were) but each visual element is "owned" by the thread that called whichever OS-level API call allocated its resources. In .NET every "Control", which is the base class for everything that has a UI, includes a very easy to use method called Invoke() that you can pass a delegate (.NET function pointer) into and have it run on the appropriate thread. This is such beginner-level stuff I even found it in a CS101 college freshman VB book.
.NET Control classes are wrappers around the non-object-oriented Win32 API, there is a possibility that you could run code on a Control before the class has actually allocated a handle, meaning the control isn't yet valid. At this point, the whole issue of cross-thread conflicts is moot because there's no control handle for the thread to own, but it's still not exactly "safe" to try to interact with the control.
And, to answer your concerns from a lower-down post, the reason the remarks in the MSDN article are so scary is because MS has made sure that every possible idiotic mistake you could make has been documented. At the risk of way oversimplifying things -- every Windows visual element has a handle (basically, an opaque value that's analogous to a pointer) associated with it. The API calls to create visual element return this handle to the process, and the owner thread uses that handle to do anything it needs to in the future. However, since the
In order for this to be a problem you'd have to fire off background threads in some constructor or have them try to access a form before you've even bothered to display it, which is a pretty weird thing to try and do -- but if you do it, MS has a way for you to figure that out and do the right thing anyway.
Clearly this story is a hoax. No slashdot editor would EVER stoop to -- well -- EDITING a story before posting it!
The good news is, even if Krvaric doesn't comment on this story in time to be relevant, he'll have at least 9 more tries over the next month as the story gets reposted.
You must have had access to the sooper sekrit article with all the illustrations in it. The Ars article I read a blatent Mac fanboy bragging about Cocoa, with an extra two tacked-on pages of hyperbole and baseless accusations about how much .NET sucks, backed up with exactly 1 concrete example: that you have to know which Windows Forms operations are thread-safe (hint: none of them). He even finishes that thought by pointing out that most other GUI frameworks have exactly the same problem. I can probably rattle two dozen cases from memory in the old Win32 API where MS made obviously retarded design choices, but he can't even come up with a single actual .NET class method that he doesn't like when he's writing an article about it?
.NET and I love it. I usually find that the Framework already does anything I'd expect a base class library to do and a bunch more. The code I write against it is way more elegant than what I typically see from, say, your random GTK app. Is that because .NET is inherently better than gtk, glib, glibc, etc? No, I don't sit around whining about how Microsoft "blew it with developers" because they didn't write all my code for me... I spend my time writing good code.
I am in that third group of developers this article was supposedly written for. I absolutely abhor poorly written code, cheap workarounds, etc. And I make a living off
Not really. The goal isn't to make Ubuntu "as easy to use as Vista". The goal is to make Ubuntu "usable by everyone". Comparisons to Windows will only invite the subconscious tendancy to stop when Ubuntu reaches parity, no matter how counter-intuitive it may be.
Doing things the "Windows way" is frequently easier because people are familiar with it, in which case it makes sense. But there are plenty of things Windows gets way wrong that Linux can get right.
Are you new hear? Since when did not having valid facts on our side stop us from emotionally whining about imagined abuses?
-K
Specifically, the 14th Amendment makes the Bill of Rights (the 1st 10 amendments to the Constitution) specifically applicable to the states and allows the federal government to create legislation that abrogates sovereign immunity of the states if, and to the extent, necessary to abolish the vestiges of slavery.
While that was the purpose of the 14th Amendment at the time, it actually has much broader powers than merely abolishing slavery. Amendment XIV intentionally mimics the language of Amendment V, in that it forbids the states from "depriv[ing] any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law;". This Amendment is the reason that the freedoms express in various constitutional amendments are now applied to the states, despite clearly being directed toward Congress, e.g., the federal government, and not the states.
In this case, Congress attempted to apply that standard to copyright law, by claiming that violation of copyright deprived the copyright holder of "property", and because of the states' normal immunity to federal suit, did so "without due process". In order for this law to pass Contitutional muster, it must fall clearly within the scope of that 14th amendment clause, for the reason you mentioned: if no constitutional amendment expressly grants Congress the power to override the 11th Amendment, Article I forbids them from doing so.
What the court found, based on earlier decisions, was that this particular law did not meet the strict test for determining if it fell legally within the 14th Amendment. Read in isolation that Amendment does seem to cover this particular action, but the Constitution cannot be read in isolation. In order to balance Amendment XIV with Amendment XI, the courts impose limits on how free Congress can get with its 14th Amendment powers, which are similar to the limits the Court places on Congress's attempts to limit First Amendment rights. Specifically, the law in question must be designed to address a specific infringment in the most specific and limited means possible. Since the Copyright Remedy Clarification Act was essentially preemptive (the Court didn't find the "evidence" used to support the act as being very consistant), and because there are other remedies for the copyright holder (individual suits; breach of contract suits; etc), the Court found that Congress overstepped their bounds with this act.
This is an accurate way of expressing the doctrine of presumption of innocence, which is completely irrelevant here, for several reasons.
We can start with the fact that it only applies to criminal trials where the state is prosecuting a citizen for an alleged crime. This is not one of those. It is a civil trial, as part of a motion to quash evidence (by the "defendant", no less). During civil trials there are many cases where the non-moving party is required to prove that the moving party's accusations are incorrect. Just off the top of my head, from reading several summary judgement motions today, is the fact that the non-moving party (the "defendant" in your statement, though it may actually be the plaintiff) is required to come up with some sort of material issue of facts to refute a summary judgement motion. The person making the motion (the "accuser") doesn't lose just because they cannot prove that no such issue of fact exists: it is presumed that no such issue exists until proven otherwise by the "accused".
In a broader sense, all motions in civil trials generally work this way. One party makes a motion, and sets forth all of its evidence in support. The other party makes a reply motion, and sets forth all of its evidence to refute. The judge weighs all of the evidence and decides which is more compelling. The same thing happens if the case ever makes it to trial: the jury (or judge, if appropriate) is not required to find in favor of the defendant just because of scant evidence. The case is decided on "preponderance of evidence", and "slim evidence" trumps "no evidence" by that measure. If one party moves to have the court take some action and the other party does nothing to refute it, the action is generally taken by default (in cases where the court clearly disputes the validity of the evidence, it could in theory deny a motion of its own accord, but that's extremely rare).
But most importantly, even were this a criminal trial and MediaSentry were accused of a crime, there is evidence that implicates them as being the "guilty" party. The evidence is not, as this thread seems to imply, logs of MediaSentry IP addresses being used (see below), but even if that were the evidence, it's still something. It's still enough for the defendant to have some burden of refuting or discrediting that evidence.
----
Having said all that, I actually went and looked at all the evidence of MediaSentry's illegal evidence gathering, and unless I'm missing something, it has nothing to do with MediaSentry's IP addresses. The exhibits filed with the court are a series of documents provided by MediaSentry that are the result of a MediaSentry investigation. That is about as conclusive as you can get that MediaSentry was conducting an investigation. (Note that the summary, and TFA originally, wrongly implicate the 2008 C&D order. What the lawyers are actually referring to is the original charge of operating without a license that led to the C&D order.)
One small mistake there. I just looked it up on m-w.com. In neither British nor American spelling do you spell "Java" with a "C" or "#".
You may *think* that's the whole point of Linux, but that doesn't make you right. Based on the early history of Linux development, I'd say the whole point was to make a "better" PC-based UNIX-like OS. "Free" just happened to be a convenient and effective way to go about it.
Linux is an OS, GNU is a philosophy. Don't confuse the two.
It's certainly not mine. I can tell you that, in the 4 years that I've had my Verizon cell phone, I don't remember ever losing a call that wasn't my fault (battery died, walked into an elevator, etc.) The only problems I have with my cell phone can be blamed on crappy hardware, mostly that cell phone speakers are god awful. I don't have satellite TV, but my cable rarely goes out -- not counting the week long outage when Orlando got hit by three consecutive hurricanes, I can only recall twice in four years losing cable TV service, and maybe a half-dozen times losing Internet service, and never more than an hour at a time. I haven't actually done the math, but if that's not 99.999% uptime it's pretty damned closed.
--K