Under English Law, one may say untrue things about someone and not be liable (sic) for libel (sic). This would be true if you said Ian Huntley (a convicted child killer) is into beastiality, for example. He has such a lousy reputation anyway, it's impossible to further tarnish it, however outrageous a lie about him one tells.
But truth is an absolute defense against the charge of libel and slander in England, as it is (I imagine) everywhere. It's what it means; to libel (sic) is to tell a damaging untruth.
"The Eureka rebellion is considered by some historians to be the birthplace of Australian democracy. It is the only Australian example of armed rebellion leading to reform of unfair laws. The Southern Cross flag has been used as a symbol of protest by organisations and individuals at both ends of the political spectrum."
Sounds foundational to me. Why shouldn't it count, just because the rebels mostly weren't born in Oz?
A CITY IN CHINA has required Internet café operators to replace pirated software with legitimate versions - the officials primarily pushing Linux.
Nanchang, the capital of China's Jiangxi province has around 600 Internet cafés which will be affected by the order - yet some are moaning about the cost of legal software.
Cafes which don't adhere to this order however, will lose their licence to operate.
"We recommend the use of Red Flag Linux server operating system or Microsoft Windows Server operating system," said the directive issued by Nanchang's Cultural Department.
Although Windows will be an option for the cafes, Linux seems to be the preferred OS as officials seem to have struck a deal with a local Red Flag Linux distributor to install licensed software and provide two years of support.
Ren Xiaojie, general manager of a software distribution company said, "We're using domestically produced Red Flag software, and have set a standard one-time fee of 5,000 yuan (about £150) for each Internet cafe, which includes a lifetime license, and we will provide all Internet cafe owners two years of maintenance support for free."
The Business Software Alliance, established to fight software piracy, estimated that the rate of software piracy in China was more than 80 percent last year which highlights the intensity of the problem.
Every big storm or unusual meteorological event these days is automatically assumed to be yet another affect of global climate change. According to some, it's even causing forest fires and earthquakes.
In England, the largest quakes are indeed caused by global warming.
In February earlier this year we had 4.9 magnitude quake with an epicentre 10 miles north east of Lincoln, in the East Midlands. Andrew Orlowski covered it for The Register here. Or rather he covered the uselessness of our mass media when it comes to even the simplest types of research and reporting (the sort you can do without stirring from your chair).
Anyway, you were doubting that global warming can cause earthquakes. How can such a thing happen? Well, simple really, the north of Britain is still bouncing back after the weight of ice pushed it down in the last ice age. And that process happens in fits and starts.
This: "who would want to run a Linux distro from 2001? (That's how old XP is). Answer is nobody, unless your hardware is so old that you can't run anything newer."
I think I know what you're trying to say here, but dude, you should know the newest Linux kernel will run on the oldest 386. So there's no need to use old distros on ancient hardware, none at all. You can use latest software on an old box, just so long as that old box is physically capable.
This year's Puppy (for example) will run just fine on that old Win95 box.
"Let's say you own a large rural property, and someone sets up a drug lab deep in the forest. Just because in some cases people might be unaware of what's happening on their property, it doesn't make sense to make drug labs illegal?"
It's your analogy that makes no sense. The drug labs would be illegal, but if the landowner was not involved in any way, how has he or she been criminal?
By your "reasoning" the Gov't should be prosecuted for all of those marijuana plants folks plant in wilderness areas.
That's only because you haven't read or understood the GPL. It would be smart to consult a lawyer if it's a live issue to you; but, here's a direct quote...
The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it. For an executable work, complete source code means all the source code for all modules it contains, plus any associated interface definition files, plus the scripts used to control compilation and installation of the executable.
In general terms, one needs to be able to modify the source code, recompile it, and run it, OK.
Of course that requires "scripts used to control compilation and installation of the executable". And the GPL is completely clear and explicit on that point.
Strange ethics here --- it sounds as if you are making excuses for Mr. Vang's corporate delinquency. Almost blaming Marcus for it. Weird, or what?
Look, the company got a clear "heads-up" and ignored it. That the alert was delivered in less-than-perfect English is irrelevant. I mean, the company should have known better even without Markus pointing out their transgression.
That their ignorance will now cost them is their fault alone -- no-one else's.
I guess it didn't occur to the Romans just to ask people where they were born? It's really amazing they built an Empire that lasted centuries, given they were that stupid, isn't it?
That's the thing about religion. Once you allow yourself to believe (to quote another poster here) that...
"a cosmic Jewish Zombie who was his own father can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree"
... well after you swallow all that, you can make yourself believe *anything*.
"Freedom of speach doesn't include the rights to criticise, inflame, insult or anything else that someone else finds personally offensive"
That would mean freedom of speech doesn't include the right to make offensively stupid posts.
I'm not sure you've thought this thru (y'daft muppet).
"the Romans really did require everyone to return to the town of their birth to be taxed around 5 B.C."
Nah. There's no evidence the Romans were that stupid, none at all. Or perhaps you can provide a link for this nugget of religiously believed disinformation?
What would be the point of counting people where they were born rather than where they are now? And how would you know people went to the right place anyway? Why does only *one* of the four gospels mention it?
It would have caused massive disruption for no good reason. And such a bizarre and irrational act would have left loads of traces in the Roman civil records and other literature. There are none.
It's worth noting that most of the actions taken to keep religion out of public schools are undertaken by [i]other religionists[/i] and not by atheists.
ID is a religious concept, and not all religions buy into it. So plenty of religious folk don't want to see it promulgated in their local schools.
"... having critical services hosted externally is Just Plain Stupid"
That would include banking and checking information, would it? Or is financial data magically exempt from the imperative that everything must be on one's own machines?
It's just not true that "hardly anybody uses a pure64 system". The IBM iSeries (now called i5) machines are mainstream platforms and they are 64bit and up. There's plenty of big iron out there that is 64-bit and up.
Here's one advantage. In a conventional system, the handle (memory location) of an object is reused -- but this can lead to problems of garbage collection and create security problems. With enough memory space, one does not need to reuse handles, as you won't run out in less than a few years. That's plenty of time to fir in a reboot!
Huge numbers of possible memory locations makes possible the simplest and most foolproof engineering response to pointer re-use. Which is, just don't re-use pointers at all!
That's how the term is being used in this context. Mainly to mean fanciful, and more generally, silly or absurd.
It can also mean happy and cheerful, jolly, even
Oh yeah. The sex thing too.
I see what you're getting at, but it's not true that the game involves violence -- it's virtual. Nor do all MMORPG's revolve around fictonal violence. But how about the ancient war game of chess? Can international chess tournaments via the net be under threat here?
Look, it's not even a contact sport like football! Technically, that's violence, just like boxing. The rules of contact are different, is all.
Teenagers do some crazy stuff -- and I am *not* recommending this in any way. But it's slightly relevant, so I'll mention it.
As a kid, a few times we'd soak a rag in paraffin and place it a convenient external corner, a concrete surface where two walls met at a right angle. Then we'd take a bicycle pump, suck up a load of *paraffin* (not petrol), aim it carefully at the blazing rag from a distance of a couple of feet, and then blat out the paraffin really hard. (I know, I know).
The result was impressive... A huge fireball would erupt and entirely envelope the, uhh, experimenter. Huge, but very brief. The effect was enough to somewhat scorch the hair, but that's about it, tho it did leave a whiff of paraffin about the person, as I recall. Whether you want to call that an explosion or not is semantic. But the point of the article is that the fireball that accompanied the breakup of the Challenger no more tore it apart than those paraffin fireballs blew us kids apart.
"there are people who want to get rid of all forms of intellectual property, and ensure that everything is Free as in liberty and Free as in cash - and force everyone else to do the same"
Exactly wrong, bud. It is the believers in "Intellectual Property" who need to use force to stop folks using ideas, or methods, or forms of speech or code. Without that State-backed force or the threat of it, all those things would be as free as the air.
But if you can "try-before-you-buy" (so to speak, you know what I'm getting at) *why* exactly would anyone choose to use a buggy and hard-to-use product in the first place?
If I have physical access to a computer it is mine
Spot on. That's it. End of story.
I found the reactions to what you posted revealing. They vary from "That's so bleedin' obvious it was hardly worth saying" -- to guys throwing ad-hominem hissy fits at you for daring to say it. It is sad that so many folks react in that silly hysterical sort of way when obvious truths they want to deny are aired.
In the real world, if you've got the box, you're essentially in (eventually). The *only* protection is physical security -- preventing access to the box in the first place.
Yes, there are road bumps that can be put in the way, like decent disk encryption. That should certainly cause some problems for the particular method you described, if it is done properly, for you would then also need to glean the pass-phrase somehow (if it hasn't ended up in the swap file or elsewhere on the hard disk in plain text). But I think your general point is still valid.
For disk encryption is just like having "secure content" on DVDs or in music files or whatever. If you have full access to the playback device, then no digital protection mechanism is going to work, just because the playback device decodes the encrypted info. That is, the user has both the encrypted data ("digitally protected") data *and* the cypher to decrypt that data into a readable form.
So for encryption to protect your data, there needs to be a separation of the playback device (the PC in this example) and where the decryption key is stored. If the pass-phrase is stored on the PC, then we are back to the situation of having both the encrypted data *and* its key.
Even so, the pass phrase still needs to be entered into the machine at some point. And, at that point, the pass-phrase is in plain text, and liable to end up on the swap file in plain text too... For the machine to be secure, one has to be certain that the typing in of the passphrase cannot be snooped on by any method, and that it leaves no traces anywhere on the hard drive.
This sounds like a tall order to me. Do-able, but by no means straightforward. To my mind, it seems *very* unlikely that anyone who fails to grasp the importance of the physical layer of security would be able to understand how to secure the other layers either.
Slashdot Mirror
You've got that arse-backwards, I'm afraid.
Under English Law, one may say untrue things about someone and not be liable (sic) for libel (sic). This would be true if you said Ian Huntley (a convicted child killer) is into beastiality, for example. He has such a lousy reputation anyway, it's impossible to further tarnish it, however outrageous a lie about him one tells.
But truth is an absolute defense against the charge of libel and slander in England, as it is (I imagine) everywhere. It's what it means; to libel (sic) is to tell a damaging untruth.
I googled it, and I discover
"The Eureka rebellion is considered by some historians to be the birthplace of Australian democracy. It is the only Australian example of armed rebellion leading to reform of unfair laws. The Southern Cross flag has been used as a symbol of protest by organisations and individuals at both ends of the political spectrum."
Sounds foundational to me. Why shouldn't it count, just because the rebels mostly weren't born in Oz?
A CITY IN CHINA has required Internet café operators to replace pirated software with legitimate versions - the officials primarily pushing Linux.
Nanchang, the capital of China's Jiangxi province has around 600 Internet cafés which will be affected by the order - yet some are moaning about the cost of legal software.
Cafes which don't adhere to this order however, will lose their licence to operate.
"We recommend the use of Red Flag Linux server operating system or Microsoft Windows Server operating system," said the directive issued by Nanchang's Cultural Department.
Although Windows will be an option for the cafes, Linux seems to be the preferred OS as officials seem to have struck a deal with a local Red Flag Linux distributor to install licensed software and provide two years of support.
Ren Xiaojie, general manager of a software distribution company said, "We're using domestically produced Red Flag software, and have set a standard one-time fee of 5,000 yuan (about £150) for each Internet cafe, which includes a lifetime license, and we will provide all Internet cafe owners two years of maintenance support for free."
The Business Software Alliance, established to fight software piracy, estimated that the rate of software piracy in China was more than 80 percent last year which highlights the intensity of the problem.
Every big storm or unusual meteorological event these days is automatically assumed to be yet another affect of global climate change. According to some, it's even causing forest fires and earthquakes.
In England, the largest quakes are indeed caused by global warming.
In February earlier this year we had 4.9 magnitude quake with an epicentre 10 miles north east of Lincoln, in the East Midlands. Andrew Orlowski covered it for The Register here. Or rather he covered the uselessness of our mass media when it comes to even the simplest types of research and reporting (the sort you can do without stirring from your chair).
Anyway, you were doubting that global warming can cause earthquakes. How can such a thing happen? Well, simple really, the north of Britain is still bouncing back after the weight of ice pushed it down in the last ice age. And that process happens in fits and starts.
I daresay similar things happen in North America.
* web and email -- Check!
* support for youtube and flickr -- Check!
* IM -- Check!
* printer support -- Check!
Seems you just don't know what you're talking about, I'm afraid.
But is there any value at all in thought experiments than *cannot* be carried out, even in principle?
This: "who would want to run a Linux distro from 2001? (That's how old XP is). Answer is nobody, unless your hardware is so old that you can't run anything newer."
I think I know what you're trying to say here, but dude, you should know the newest Linux kernel will run on the oldest 386. So there's no need to use old distros on ancient hardware, none at all. You can use latest software on an old box, just so long as that old box is physically capable.
This year's Puppy (for example) will run just fine on that old Win95 box.
"Let's say you own a large rural property, and someone sets up a drug lab deep in the forest. Just because in some cases people might be unaware of what's happening on their property, it doesn't make sense to make drug labs illegal?"
It's your analogy that makes no sense. The drug labs would be illegal, but if the landowner was not involved in any way, how has he or she been criminal?
By your "reasoning" the Gov't should be prosecuted for all of those marijuana plants folks plant in wilderness areas.
That's only because you haven't read or understood the GPL. It would be smart to consult a lawyer if it's a live issue to you; but, here's a direct quote...
The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it. For an executable work, complete source code means all the source code for all modules it contains, plus any associated interface definition files, plus the scripts used to control compilation and installation of the executable.
In general terms, one needs to be able to modify the source code, recompile it, and run it, OK.
Of course that requires "scripts used to control compilation and installation of the executable". And the GPL is completely clear and explicit on that point.
Strange ethics here --- it sounds as if you are making excuses for Mr. Vang's corporate delinquency. Almost blaming Marcus for it. Weird, or what?
Look, the company got a clear "heads-up" and ignored it. That the alert was delivered in less-than-perfect English is irrelevant. I mean, the company should have known better even without Markus pointing out their transgression.
That their ignorance will now cost them is their fault alone -- no-one else's.I guess it didn't occur to the Romans just to ask people where they were born? It's really amazing they built an Empire that lasted centuries, given they were that stupid, isn't it?
That's the thing about religion. Once you allow yourself to believe (to quote another poster here) that ...
"a cosmic Jewish Zombie who was his own father can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree"
"Freedom of speach doesn't include the rights to criticise, inflame, insult or anything else that someone else finds personally offensive" That would mean freedom of speech doesn't include the right to make offensively stupid posts. I'm not sure you've thought this thru (y'daft muppet).
"the Romans really did require everyone to return to the town of their birth to be taxed around 5 B.C." Nah. There's no evidence the Romans were that stupid, none at all. Or perhaps you can provide a link for this nugget of religiously believed disinformation? What would be the point of counting people where they were born rather than where they are now? And how would you know people went to the right place anyway? Why does only *one* of the four gospels mention it? It would have caused massive disruption for no good reason. And such a bizarre and irrational act would have left loads of traces in the Roman civil records and other literature. There are none.
It's worth noting that most of the actions taken to keep religion out of public schools are undertaken by [i]other religionists[/i] and not by atheists. ID is a religious concept, and not all religions buy into it. So plenty of religious folk don't want to see it promulgated in their local schools.
Well, it's not real estate, is it, it's no form of real property.
Most IP -- stuff like films and music that the MAFFIA are interested in -- is a product of the imagination. Imaginary property is exactly what it is!
What would John Locke say?
"... having critical services hosted externally is Just Plain Stupid"
That would include banking and checking information, would it? Or is financial data magically exempt from the imperative that everything must be on one's own machines?
It's just not true that "hardly anybody uses a pure64 system". The IBM iSeries (now called i5) machines are mainstream platforms and they are 64bit and up. There's plenty of big iron out there that is 64-bit and up.
Here's one advantage. In a conventional system, the handle (memory location) of an object is reused -- but this can lead to problems of garbage collection and create security problems. With enough memory space, one does not need to reuse handles, as you won't run out in less than a few years. That's plenty of time to fir in a reboot!
Huge numbers of possible memory locations makes possible the simplest and most foolproof engineering response to pointer re-use. Which is, just don't re-use pointers at all!
incomplete =! can only guess
incomplete == some data
Even hear of ice core samples? Or sedimemtary analysis?
Ahh, ignorance -- what confidence it can give a person!
That's how the term is being used in this context. Mainly to mean fanciful, and more generally, silly or absurd. It can also mean happy and cheerful, jolly, even Oh yeah. The sex thing too.
I see what you're getting at, but it's not true that the game involves violence -- it's virtual. Nor do all MMORPG's revolve around fictonal violence. But how about the ancient war game of chess? Can international chess tournaments via the net be under threat here?
Look, it's not even a contact sport like football! Technically, that's violence, just like boxing. The rules of contact are different, is all.
WOW isn't even close.
Teenagers do some crazy stuff -- and I am *not* recommending this in any way. But it's slightly relevant, so I'll mention it.
... A huge fireball would erupt and entirely envelope the, uhh, experimenter. Huge, but very brief. The effect was enough to somewhat scorch the hair, but that's about it, tho it did leave a whiff of paraffin about the person, as I recall. Whether you want to call that an explosion or not is semantic. But the point of the article is that the fireball that accompanied the breakup of the Challenger no more tore it apart than those paraffin fireballs blew us kids apart.
As a kid, a few times we'd soak a rag in paraffin and place it a convenient external corner, a concrete surface where two walls met at a right angle. Then we'd take a bicycle pump, suck up a load of *paraffin* (not petrol), aim it carefully at the blazing rag from a distance of a couple of feet, and then blat out the paraffin really hard. (I know, I know).
The result was impressive
Your point was about the use of force.
It is the believers in "Intellectual Property" who need to use force to stop folks using ideas, or methods, or forms of speech or code.
No should or shouldn't about it. It's just the way it is.
"there are people who want to get rid of all forms of intellectual property, and ensure that everything is Free as in liberty and Free as in cash - and force everyone else to do the same"
Exactly wrong, bud. It is the believers in "Intellectual Property" who need to use force to stop folks using ideas, or methods, or forms of speech or code. Without that State-backed force or the threat of it, all those things would be as free as the air.
I think we should be told!
If I have physical access to a computer it is mine
Spot on. That's it. End of story.
I found the reactions to what you posted revealing. They vary from "That's so bleedin' obvious it was hardly worth saying" -- to guys throwing ad-hominem hissy fits at you for daring to say it. It is sad that so many folks react in that silly hysterical sort of way when obvious truths they want to deny are aired.
In the real world, if you've got the box, you're essentially in (eventually). The *only* protection is physical security -- preventing access to the box in the first place.
Yes, there are road bumps that can be put in the way, like decent disk encryption. That should certainly cause some problems for the particular method you described, if it is done properly, for you would then also need to glean the pass-phrase somehow (if it hasn't ended up in the swap file or elsewhere on the hard disk in plain text). But I think your general point is still valid.
For disk encryption is just like having "secure content" on DVDs or in music files or whatever. If you have full access to the playback device, then no digital protection mechanism is going to work, just because the playback device decodes the encrypted info. That is, the user has both the encrypted data ("digitally protected") data *and* the cypher to decrypt that data into a readable form.
So for encryption to protect your data, there needs to be a separation of the playback device (the PC in this example) and where the decryption key is stored. If the pass-phrase is stored on the PC, then we are back to the situation of having both the encrypted data *and* its key.
Even so, the pass phrase still needs to be entered into the machine at some point. And, at that point, the pass-phrase is in plain text, and liable to end up on the swap file in plain text too... For the machine to be secure, one has to be certain that the typing in of the passphrase cannot be snooped on by any method, and that it leaves no traces anywhere on the hard drive.
This sounds like a tall order to me. Do-able, but by no means straightforward. To my mind, it seems *very* unlikely that anyone who fails to grasp the importance of the physical layer of security would be able to understand how to secure the other layers either.