Generally speaking, if you attempt to purchase something, and the vendor does not follow through, you can go back to the credit card company and ask them to reverse the charges. The vendor ends up not only not getting paid, but a penalty is applied as well - both in immediate money and in the percentage that the credit card company charges the vendor to be able to use their service.
This often works even if you do get what you purchased, but it just plain doesn't work, as was evidenced when my neighbour bought three trees from a local greenhouse, one died within the week of being replanted, and when the greenhouse wouldn't respond, he told them he was going to ask Visa to reverse the charges. He had a new tree the next day. (No, Visa wasn't involved - but the vendor knew what would happen... he'd lose more money than the cost of the tree.)
It's not necessarily the case that there is anything wrong with the cop taking the job. He may have done a bang-up job preparing the evidence for the prosecution. We don't know. However, I don't think that's the issue at hand. The ex-cop needs to not merely avoid impropriety. He absolutely must avoid the appearance of impropriety. His actions and perceived honour can make or break the case based on his credibility. And now his credibility is shot.
If he's a lead detective, he absolutely cannot take a position with anyone for whom he has gathered evidence for trial. The appearance of impropriety should be enough to quash that. Further, he should have an absolute duty to relate to his commanding officer and the prosecution the offer of the position, whether the offer was during the investigation (which would result in him being removed from the investigation immediately, some sort of sanction against the petitioner, and possibly even the abandonment of the entire investigation) or afterward (which should result in sanctions against the petitioner, even if it's a slap on the wrist). If Swedish law has similar discovery rules as the U.S., the prosecution should then immediately inform the defense. And the cop cannot take the job unless the entire action is dropped with prejudice.
If he's a peon in the investigation, though, the rules are different, though not completely. Informing the lead detective (who is likely their CO) and the prosecution is still required, and their telling the defense still is likely required, depending on the law, and he can only take the position if the lead detective and the prosecution agree that they don't need any of the work he put into the investigation. Generally, this would mean that the prosecution feels confident that they can argue "inevitable discovery" and that the evidence itself could not be tainted. In this case, THEN he could take the job. Though I doubt that WB would be hiring a peon;-)
The simple reason why you want to have a commercial desktop that is different from the commercial server is that you really don't want to field support calls from secretaries, shipping and receiving, salescritters, general managers, and any other non-techie about how to get Apache, FTP servers, and the like, all working. From a techie perspective, RH's workstation offering was maddening in that these things were missing, but from a support perspective, it would be maddening to try to support all those non-techies that don't really need what they're trying to use (and the first key to security is to shut down or not even install what you don't need).
As for support for Ubuntu - some IBM products do support it, e.g., DB2.
Personally, I've found Gentoo easier to install than XP. Especially when something goes wrong. Not that I'd suggest to my mother or wife to try to install either...
While you're right that not all monopolies are illegal, that doesn't mean that there isn't a subset of monopolies that are illegal. From a layperson's perspective, any monopoly taken through the court systems and found to be in violation of the region-specific version of anti-trust laws can be called an illegal monopoly without fear of slander/libel charges (using truth as a defense).
From the prosecutorial perspective, it's a bit more convoluted, but simply put, we could say they were charged with being an illegal monopoly while the trial was underway.
If they haven't been charged, then you can only suspect them of operating illegally without exposing yourself to slander/libel charges.
There most definitely are illegal monopolies. Thus the splitting of Bell. Thus the long trial and settled-out-of-court slap on the wrist of IBM. Thus the sanctions demanded of (and largely ignored by) Microsoft in the US. But the US isn't the only region that has found Microsoft guilty of illegally abusing their monopoly position. So has the EU. Thus, I'd suggest that we'd be fully in the right declaring not only the obvious that they are a monopoly, but that they've abused it in a manner inconsistent with the law: an illegal monopoly.
I'm not sure that many ISPs would give up their logs to just anyone asking for it. Some, sure, but not many. At the very least, a subpoena of some sort would be required, and the logs could be pruned by then.
I'm not sure where you work, but where I am, if my manager, or her manager, or anyone in my management chain decides to disagree with me, there's really not much I can do other than document the hell out of it, so I can whip it out when the shit hits the fan. Sometimes, things that affect you just simply don't get to be your call.
Currently, I'm doing level-3 support, and when the developers decide to go against my advice, I know that I'm going to pay for it later. But I can't stop the release, no matter how egregious - it's not in my job responsibility.
Luckily for me, if something really bad happens and I need to wake up development at 3AM on a Saturday, I know I'm not going to hear about it for a week (that's about how long it'll take to traverse all the appropriate management), and I also know that I'll be able to defend it properly to managers that aren't quite so involved in day-to-day workings of individuals on their teams. And that even if I fail that, I'll still be able to ignore them.
And you're going to use 25-year-old stories to conclude about present-day ambitions, goals, and methodologies? I'm not saying that IBM doesn't still do that, but at least find something recent. For example, without actually looking it up to find a reference, I'm sure I've heard within the last 5 years that IBM makes somewhere around $1B per year on licensing their patents. I'm not sure how the shakedown goes, but I can't imagine it being a pleasant experience for most licensees.
Even then, that doesn't take away from the GP's point: if IBM didn't have the patents, it would likely cost IBM far, far more in license costs than $1B/year (just using the deep-pockets theory of lawsuits, and IBM has DEEEEEP pockets). So it's entirely conceivable that the patent royalties IBM gets are merely a secondary concern to IBM. I'm not saying that this is the real reason, but merely that it's plausible. Nor does it justify that Forbes account of a shakedown attempt, if still used today (in all likelihood, it is, but let's using some more recent evidence, please - statute of limitations likely has run out on charges of Being An Asshole).
That's where I, as a user, have the problem. This question is answered by my manager, not by my IT department. Or, at least, it should be. Bulk licenses can be negotiated by the IT department, but the yes/no call should be answered by my management alone. That's whose budget is paying for the license.
That doesn't mean that my manager could approve anything against corporate policy (P2P, for example). Or that my manager can force IT to support the software. Just the part about whether I really need it to do my job.
Using shaw, I have VPN connections both over UDP and TCP. I've not noticed any problems. I regularly get 1-2MB/s on a 10Mb/s cable over VPN. (Yes, I've seen 2MB/s from wget, not sure how that worked.)
It doesn't seem clear to me at all that you can't use the Express VC++ to write, compile, or distribute open-source applications.
Open source, in my understanding, merely requires that you distribute your source such that someone can recompile it. It does not require you to distribute the compiler with it. Nor does it require that the compiler be open source.
Thus, if your code can compile with Cygwin and VC++, but you distribute the copy you created with VC++, I don't see what the issue would be. Users who want to compile it themselves, and/or modify your code to do something else would have no problems doing so, assuming they had a compiler that works for the code in question. It does not appear to me to be any different than writing code using the Win32 API directly - that can be OSS, too, so why not something compiled with VC++? I didn't distribute the code to the Win32 API, nor to the C runtime library(ies).
IP is about protecting the ability to make a profit from what you've dreamed up. That is very different from protecting the profitability of it, even if "profitability" is just "ability [to] profit" reversed. It changes the emphasis: the emphasis of IP is on ability. Not profit.
If you dream it up (and patent it, trademark it, copyright it, depending on what "it" is), you get the first crack at turning a profit from it. You are still able to fail to do so if you can't find/create a market for it.
Absolutely. And all but one of those applications would merely be collateral damage. (Hosting an online game is probably not allowed on purpose, the rest are probably accidental - which means they're clueless.)
Uploading isn't prohibited. Waiting for, accepting, and responding to incoming requests on any port is. (Nevermind that ftp kinda works that way for non-passive connections.) Thus, putting your photos on a webserver or your video on youtube is fine. Your webcam probably isn't, though you might be hard-pressed to find a techie at comcast that understands why, or why blanket policies are bad policy.
I'm betting that the reason so many of these applications have their own TZ info is that the interface to the existing TZ information is weak. If your only interface is the POSIX API, about all you can tell is whether a time you give is in DST or not. If you want to do anything reasonably fancy (e.g., "Is DST this weekend?" or "what time does DST start/end?"), there is a lot more work involved: you have to create multiple unix times, query the POSIX API for each one, and check the flag returned. And the POSIX API is then doing a lot more work than you really care about, which means wasted time there, too.
Instead, with your own TZ information, you can have your own internal API that accesses exactly the information you want, in the most efficient manner that you can develop (which may not be the most efficient possible given skill and/or time available).
I suspect that this all is the reason why, for example, Java has its own TZ info built-in, rather than calling to the C API.
What we basically need is for the POSIX timezone API to expand beyond asctime, difftime, gmtime, localtime, mktime, strftime, strptime, timegm, and tzset: the ability to query the underlying tz data set in a portable way (unix/linux/mac, windows, mainframes, etc.) that is valuable in our modern internationalised market.
Y'know... I'm not sure I would have waited until the threat of contempt arose. It'd give me a bit more leeway in my response.
I'm thinking that the university should not have emailed the student records, but printed them. And all the IP logs. All of them. And sent that print-out via registered mail or courier or something (something that needs a signature). It'd weigh 40 or 50 pounds, I'm sure. Thousands of pages of paper. (Even better if you can get it all out via dot-matrix feed paper - one nice long page).
I wouldn't do something so overt as print it in 3-point font or wingdings - that'd just be asking for the judge to slap me silly. 9-point font is probably the best I could get away with without pissing off the judge. And it'd still be thousands of pages.
Why email it when that makes RIAA's data-mining so much easier? Well, other than a contempt charge looming - which is why I probably would have tried to send the paper earlier, so I wasn't already pissing the judge off.
Re:You need to clarify your question
on
Ethics In IT
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· Score: 1
Think of it as the difference between a politician and a serial killer.
I haven't checked, but I seem to recall that IBM promised not to use any of their patents against open source software. I wonder, then, if it's possible to get IBM to consider looking at anyone who starts suing open source users for use of the plaintiff's patents to see if the plaintiff might be infringing on an IBM patent (of which, I hear, there are a few).
IBM probably wouldn't even need to actually do anything. Just have their lawyers say, "Hmm, I wonder if you're infringing on our patents." I doubt many of these cross-licensing agreements have been tested in court, so given that, this may even give Microsoft pause.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not disagreeing with you, but please tell me how that works out when you try to call Apple for support ;-)
(I anxiously await the updates on groklaw about the lawsuit you file ;-) )
Generally speaking, if you attempt to purchase something, and the vendor does not follow through, you can go back to the credit card company and ask them to reverse the charges. The vendor ends up not only not getting paid, but a penalty is applied as well - both in immediate money and in the percentage that the credit card company charges the vendor to be able to use their service.
This often works even if you do get what you purchased, but it just plain doesn't work, as was evidenced when my neighbour bought three trees from a local greenhouse, one died within the week of being replanted, and when the greenhouse wouldn't respond, he told them he was going to ask Visa to reverse the charges. He had a new tree the next day. (No, Visa wasn't involved - but the vendor knew what would happen... he'd lose more money than the cost of the tree.)
It's not necessarily the case that there is anything wrong with the cop taking the job. He may have done a bang-up job preparing the evidence for the prosecution. We don't know. However, I don't think that's the issue at hand. The ex-cop needs to not merely avoid impropriety. He absolutely must avoid the appearance of impropriety. His actions and perceived honour can make or break the case based on his credibility. And now his credibility is shot.
If he's a lead detective, he absolutely cannot take a position with anyone for whom he has gathered evidence for trial. The appearance of impropriety should be enough to quash that. Further, he should have an absolute duty to relate to his commanding officer and the prosecution the offer of the position, whether the offer was during the investigation (which would result in him being removed from the investigation immediately, some sort of sanction against the petitioner, and possibly even the abandonment of the entire investigation) or afterward (which should result in sanctions against the petitioner, even if it's a slap on the wrist). If Swedish law has similar discovery rules as the U.S., the prosecution should then immediately inform the defense. And the cop cannot take the job unless the entire action is dropped with prejudice.
If he's a peon in the investigation, though, the rules are different, though not completely. Informing the lead detective (who is likely their CO) and the prosecution is still required, and their telling the defense still is likely required, depending on the law, and he can only take the position if the lead detective and the prosecution agree that they don't need any of the work he put into the investigation. Generally, this would mean that the prosecution feels confident that they can argue "inevitable discovery" and that the evidence itself could not be tainted. In this case, THEN he could take the job. Though I doubt that WB would be hiring a peon ;-)
Just my thoughts on it.
The simple reason why you want to have a commercial desktop that is different from the commercial server is that you really don't want to field support calls from secretaries, shipping and receiving, salescritters, general managers, and any other non-techie about how to get Apache, FTP servers, and the like, all working. From a techie perspective, RH's workstation offering was maddening in that these things were missing, but from a support perspective, it would be maddening to try to support all those non-techies that don't really need what they're trying to use (and the first key to security is to shut down or not even install what you don't need).
As for support for Ubuntu - some IBM products do support it, e.g., DB2.
Personally, I've found Gentoo easier to install than XP. Especially when something goes wrong. Not that I'd suggest to my mother or wife to try to install either...
While you're right that not all monopolies are illegal, that doesn't mean that there isn't a subset of monopolies that are illegal. From a layperson's perspective, any monopoly taken through the court systems and found to be in violation of the region-specific version of anti-trust laws can be called an illegal monopoly without fear of slander/libel charges (using truth as a defense).
From the prosecutorial perspective, it's a bit more convoluted, but simply put, we could say they were charged with being an illegal monopoly while the trial was underway.
If they haven't been charged, then you can only suspect them of operating illegally without exposing yourself to slander/libel charges.
There most definitely are illegal monopolies. Thus the splitting of Bell. Thus the long trial and settled-out-of-court slap on the wrist of IBM. Thus the sanctions demanded of (and largely ignored by) Microsoft in the US. But the US isn't the only region that has found Microsoft guilty of illegally abusing their monopoly position. So has the EU. Thus, I'd suggest that we'd be fully in the right declaring not only the obvious that they are a monopoly, but that they've abused it in a manner inconsistent with the law: an illegal monopoly.
I'm not sure that many ISPs would give up their logs to just anyone asking for it. Some, sure, but not many. At the very least, a subpoena of some sort would be required, and the logs could be pruned by then.
I'm not sure where you work, but where I am, if my manager, or her manager, or anyone in my management chain decides to disagree with me, there's really not much I can do other than document the hell out of it, so I can whip it out when the shit hits the fan. Sometimes, things that affect you just simply don't get to be your call.
Currently, I'm doing level-3 support, and when the developers decide to go against my advice, I know that I'm going to pay for it later. But I can't stop the release, no matter how egregious - it's not in my job responsibility.
Luckily for me, if something really bad happens and I need to wake up development at 3AM on a Saturday, I know I'm not going to hear about it for a week (that's about how long it'll take to traverse all the appropriate management), and I also know that I'll be able to defend it properly to managers that aren't quite so involved in day-to-day workings of individuals on their teams. And that even if I fail that, I'll still be able to ignore them.
I suspect that Google was going to be a big target regardless of whether they kept quiet about their attempts or not...
And you're going to use 25-year-old stories to conclude about present-day ambitions, goals, and methodologies? I'm not saying that IBM doesn't still do that, but at least find something recent. For example, without actually looking it up to find a reference, I'm sure I've heard within the last 5 years that IBM makes somewhere around $1B per year on licensing their patents. I'm not sure how the shakedown goes, but I can't imagine it being a pleasant experience for most licensees.
Even then, that doesn't take away from the GP's point: if IBM didn't have the patents, it would likely cost IBM far, far more in license costs than $1B/year (just using the deep-pockets theory of lawsuits, and IBM has DEEEEEP pockets). So it's entirely conceivable that the patent royalties IBM gets are merely a secondary concern to IBM. I'm not saying that this is the real reason, but merely that it's plausible. Nor does it justify that Forbes account of a shakedown attempt, if still used today (in all likelihood, it is, but let's using some more recent evidence, please - statute of limitations likely has run out on charges of Being An Asshole).
local != common
I'm not sure the double entendre was intended or not, but ... "different tune" - I like it.
That's where I, as a user, have the problem. This question is answered by my manager, not by my IT department. Or, at least, it should be. Bulk licenses can be negotiated by the IT department, but the yes/no call should be answered by my management alone. That's whose budget is paying for the license.
That doesn't mean that my manager could approve anything against corporate policy (P2P, for example). Or that my manager can force IT to support the software. Just the part about whether I really need it to do my job.
Using shaw, I have VPN connections both over UDP and TCP. I've not noticed any problems. I regularly get 1-2MB/s on a 10Mb/s cable over VPN. (Yes, I've seen 2MB/s from wget, not sure how that worked.)
It doesn't seem clear to me at all that you can't use the Express VC++ to write, compile, or distribute open-source applications.
Open source, in my understanding, merely requires that you distribute your source such that someone can recompile it. It does not require you to distribute the compiler with it. Nor does it require that the compiler be open source.
Thus, if your code can compile with Cygwin and VC++, but you distribute the copy you created with VC++, I don't see what the issue would be. Users who want to compile it themselves, and/or modify your code to do something else would have no problems doing so, assuming they had a compiler that works for the code in question. It does not appear to me to be any different than writing code using the Win32 API directly - that can be OSS, too, so why not something compiled with VC++? I didn't distribute the code to the Win32 API, nor to the C runtime library(ies).
IP is about protecting the ability to make a profit from what you've dreamed up. That is very different from protecting the profitability of it, even if "profitability" is just "ability [to] profit" reversed. It changes the emphasis: the emphasis of IP is on ability. Not profit.
If you dream it up (and patent it, trademark it, copyright it, depending on what "it" is), you get the first crack at turning a profit from it. You are still able to fail to do so if you can't find/create a market for it.
Have you ever thought that your own paid-for movies are just data?
Absolutely. And all but one of those applications would merely be collateral damage. (Hosting an online game is probably not allowed on purpose, the rest are probably accidental - which means they're clueless.)
Uploading isn't prohibited. Waiting for, accepting, and responding to incoming requests on any port is. (Nevermind that ftp kinda works that way for non-passive connections.) Thus, putting your photos on a webserver or your video on youtube is fine. Your webcam probably isn't, though you might be hard-pressed to find a techie at comcast that understands why, or why blanket policies are bad policy.
It's only malicious if it's wrong.
(Sorta like truth as a defense against slander.)
I'm betting that the reason so many of these applications have their own TZ info is that the interface to the existing TZ information is weak. If your only interface is the POSIX API, about all you can tell is whether a time you give is in DST or not. If you want to do anything reasonably fancy (e.g., "Is DST this weekend?" or "what time does DST start/end?"), there is a lot more work involved: you have to create multiple unix times, query the POSIX API for each one, and check the flag returned. And the POSIX API is then doing a lot more work than you really care about, which means wasted time there, too.
Instead, with your own TZ information, you can have your own internal API that accesses exactly the information you want, in the most efficient manner that you can develop (which may not be the most efficient possible given skill and/or time available).
I suspect that this all is the reason why, for example, Java has its own TZ info built-in, rather than calling to the C API.
What we basically need is for the POSIX timezone API to expand beyond asctime, difftime, gmtime, localtime, mktime, strftime, strptime, timegm, and tzset: the ability to query the underlying tz data set in a portable way (unix/linux/mac, windows, mainframes, etc.) that is valuable in our modern internationalised market.
Y'know ... I'm not sure I would have waited until the threat of contempt arose. It'd give me a bit more leeway in my response.
I'm thinking that the university should not have emailed the student records, but printed them. And all the IP logs. All of them. And sent that print-out via registered mail or courier or something (something that needs a signature). It'd weigh 40 or 50 pounds, I'm sure. Thousands of pages of paper. (Even better if you can get it all out via dot-matrix feed paper - one nice long page).
I wouldn't do something so overt as print it in 3-point font or wingdings - that'd just be asking for the judge to slap me silly. 9-point font is probably the best I could get away with without pissing off the judge. And it'd still be thousands of pages.
Why email it when that makes RIAA's data-mining so much easier? Well, other than a contempt charge looming - which is why I probably would have tried to send the paper earlier, so I wasn't already pissing the judge off.
So ... which one is the bad one again?
It's different because in one scenario, the vendor is lying, and in the other, the vendor is only telling half-lies.
:-P
I haven't checked, but I seem to recall that IBM promised not to use any of their patents against open source software. I wonder, then, if it's possible to get IBM to consider looking at anyone who starts suing open source users for use of the plaintiff's patents to see if the plaintiff might be infringing on an IBM patent (of which, I hear, there are a few).
IBM probably wouldn't even need to actually do anything. Just have their lawyers say, "Hmm, I wonder if you're infringing on our patents." I doubt many of these cross-licensing agreements have been tested in court, so given that, this may even give Microsoft pause.