Your argument was good and almost convincing until the last part. You see, Google isn't doing business with these people. And that's the whole point of it. That's what they wanted Google to do - do business with them, i.e. get a share of what Google makes in profit thanks to the news they publish.
It's not Google stopping to buy their newspapers, as per your example. Rather on the contrary - stopping to do that (without paying) was what the case was all about.
However, they didn't use their de facto powers to attack Google, they used the court system as our society intents, because that (resolving dispures) is what the court systems are for.
Google is welcome and planning to use the same means to get a different ruling. They've been acting restrained and responsibly in all those cases.
I also think the jerks on/. who project their dreams of power on Google or MS ("leave europe!") are probably working minimum wage jobs for a good reason. Shooting someone just because you happen to have the gun isn't how society works anymore.
You live in Belgium, excellent. Have you ever lived in an actual socialist country, to compare?
I'm a German, we've had an excellent long-term experiment in socialism in a part of our country. My family has friends from Russia. An ex-girlfriend of mine was from Poland and my wife's family is from Romania. I'm entirely certain that in order to consider western European countries "socialist", you have to have an extremely tainted, simplified and biased view of the world - and absolutely zero first-hand experience of actual socialist countries.
but I'd think if they're copying in less than 10% or so of t *beep* comprehension error. Please re-read article. Please note especially the word "Belgium". Please repeat the states of the USA and check if "Belgium" is on that list. If not, remove reference to USA copyright law from argument before continuing.
This reminds me of when France was going to force Apple to open iTunes, and Apple said fine, we'll leave. Or when the EU took on Microsoft. On this planet, MS didn't leave the EU, nor did they any other muscle flexing. On planet slashdot, a few people talked about the "we're a big american company, we can do what we want, if the commie europeans don't want us, we'll just leave" approach, but were generally ridiculed.
Large corporations are especially easy to control, because they've got so much to loose. Back when Google was a startup without assets in every other corner of the world, they were much more difficult to get for local courts.
So in other words, you think it's ok to use force in order to make a point, regardless of whether you're right or not - or in this case, even though an impartial judge has already declared that you're wrong?
Did anyone forget to tell you that the Wild West has been over for a century or two?
Belgium isn't a socialist country. I'll refrain from the usual anti-american comments, though they've rarely been more adequate.
Belgium is a constitutional monarchy, and it's current prime minister is a member of the VLD party, which started out as a right-wing party and has since moved towards a centrist view.
You can read it all on Wikipedia if you spend 30 seconds looking for it. Provided you don't consider reading a socialist skill.
Anyone with law expertise here who can tell at what point they cross the line to criminal extortion in the US?
Over here in Germany, the line is clear: Threatening someone with unlawful consequences. A threat of bringing a lawsuit isn't illegal. A threat like this one could be, because they're interfering with the suit before it has started. Don't they?
Speech (free or not) assumes a speaker. A speaker, by definition, is someone capable of speech, i.e. a human being. A speaker can speak for someone else, but not as someone else - e.g. the "speaker of the house" speaks for the house, but he isn't the house. Most importantly, part of his responsibilities is to make it clear if he is, right now, speaking "for the house" or "as himself".
The request to properly identify who you are speaking for does not limit the speech itself, and is not an abridgement of free speech.
In most european countries, there are two kinds of "personhoods". Natural persons are you and me, while corporations but also clubs and other kinds of organisations are legal persons. The difference is recognized, though it is seldom made explicit in the laws.
I doubt anything at MS happens by chance. So this leak isn't and while it might hurt Vista adoption a little, it's probably just enough in the future to not change decisions about today and this year. However, it just might keep people on the windos platform, because they have something besides the trainwreck Vista to look forward to now.
I say this is a marketing move to prevent people looking at Vista with disgust and deciding to jump ship to something else entirely (OSX, Linux, Solaris, whatever).
One, this is 100% vaporware, if even the MS insiders have no clue about the central changes.
Two, any bets that over the next months, especially around the launch of OSX Leopard, we'll be hearing "leaked" info about all the really cool and advanced stuff that's going to be in Longhorn SP2, err... "Vienna" ? Then, of course, when it ships in 20012, none of them will actually be there. History repeats itself...
Why is everyone forgetting the small important detail that makes a world of difference?
MS is a software company that very late in the game added some hardware to their portfolio when they needed to expand.
Apple is a hardware company that manufactures some software in order to sell more boxes.
Why is that important? Just look at all the dirty tricks of Bill and the gang. They all revolve around trickery unique to software and the fact that the manufacturing cost of software is close to zero (the development is expensive, not the individual unit). OEM lock-in, bundling, giving away stuff to drive out competitors - all things you can't copy verbatim to a market where you actually have to manufacture something.
Oh yeah, there's also the fact that Apple is very good with standards while MS has always re-invented the wheel (usually square).
Oh, please! Have you been looking around? Cables especially are something that almost every non-electronics store charges for as if they were made of solid gold. I'm sure Dell, IBM, etc. will charge you 5-10 times its worth as well. I can go into any random store in the inner city and find CAT-5 cables at prices that I can get a small drum of CAT-5 for in the right shops.
It's tricky to sell machines without windos because MS has been basing what they charge OEMs on a weird calculation that includes whether or not you sell machines without windos. If you do, the OEM license cost rises. Since margins are slim, very few OEMs do.
Yes, most consumers want a PC with windos pre-installed. However, there is enough of a demand for windos-free machines to make it profitable - if you could do it.
I think you'll find, as most retailers have, that if you sell machines without windos installed, MS will jack up your OEM licence fees. Since margins are slim, you'll be out of business or windos-only within the month.
The existence of alternative doesn't mean that the market is a free market. According to the theory, a free market exists if neither a single buyer nor a single supplier controls a dominating share of the market. Dominating != 100%.
The free market theory rests on the assumption that there are many customers and many suppliers and no one from either side owns a dominating share of the market.
In other words: The OS market is not a free market, and hasn't been for well over a decade.
And no, the fact that OSX and Linux and Solaris exist doesn't mean that isn't true. The deciding factor is "dominating share", not "100%".
If you wish to keep your simple views, stop reading now. Otherwise, this'll be a bit lengthy:
The BPjM is there to enforce the laws on the protection of minors ("Jugendschutz"). Its job is, in short, to check on request of certain bodies whether some game (or movie, etc.) should not be available to children. Yes, violence and sex are the usual criteria.
If it is bad for minors, the BPjM will put the title on an "index". That doesn't mean it's censored. The two main effects of being on the index are that a) you can't sell this game to minors and b) you can't run advertisement for the game (because ads are visible to minors). Yes, critics claim that this is de-facto censorship.
And, contrary to what the article claims, Counterstrike is not on the index. There was a request in 2002 and the BPjM checked the title, and decided to not index it. Since there had been a school-shooting earlier, that decision was widely critized, but the fact remains that this/. article is simply false.
For videos, books and music the BPjM regularily decides against indexing due to artistic merit. All in all, the BPjM used to be one of the hate-figures of my teenage days, yes. But that was when computer games were new and "weird", and they've shaped up to a much more reasonable world-view recently.
Maybe the article authors view should be updated to the 21st century.
Try writing your own, say, IRC server. Then write a policy for it. Then we'll talk again.:-)
(disclaimer: I've written policies for mysql, subversion and others. It's not that tricky - if you are trained in SELinux. I doubt any of the professional sysadmins at my company who've no SELinux experience could do it in less than a full week.)
Ah, how simplification allows you to keep a simple world-view:
For example, laws prohibit the sale of Counter-Strike and other titles with blood-depicting graphics switched on. That's not entirely correct. The appropriate laws are for the protection of minors, so the sentence is missing its ending: to minors.
It's the software companies' choice to only produce one version and sell that to everyone. As an adult, I could (the law allows it) buy whatever brutal, bloody games or movies there are. It's just that most software companies decide to not make a difference, probably because it wouuld be more expensive to ship two versions.
There are limitations that apply to adults as well, and which have been much more appropriate to mention after the introduction of the article. For example, the display of nazi symbols is illegal in Germany, except for historic purposes. That means that most games set in WW2 can not show the nazi cross. Wolfenstein and others circumvent this by using the eagle (symbol of the armed forces during the pre-nazi period) instead.
The notion of MAC I was referring to is that implemented by SELinux, which defines fine-grained system call access controls on a per-program basis. [...]
it doesn't matter who runs the program, Actually, it's a per-context basis, and it does matter who runs the program, because I can put it into different contexts based on that information. But yes, the important difference is that programs do not inherit all permissions of the user who runs them.
I still consider jails/chroot to be very different, exactly because of this. In a jail/chroot, the program still runs with all the permissions of its user, it is only limited to a part of the (file-) system.
However, the user can use the security policy administration tool to give the application additional permissions. I see. Yes, that makes much more sense. I'm more familiar with SELinux than with XO, so it appears I missed or misunderstood that part.
Obviously the implementation has to be proven. The finer details of the specification as well. I've been part of the SELinux development since shortly after its public announcement. The core principles didn't change, but a lot of design details have, and a policy from 2003 is somewhat difficult to translate into a 2006 policy (haven't yet looked into what changes 2007 brought).
Many of those changes were necessary to prevent flaws and potential holes.
Whatever else they may want to say, no one can argue that this isn't one of the grandest experiments in the history of computing. *nod*
Slashdot Mirror
Your argument was good and almost convincing until the last part. You see, Google isn't doing business with these people. And that's the whole point of it. That's what they wanted Google to do - do business with them, i.e. get a share of what Google makes in profit thanks to the news they publish.
It's not Google stopping to buy their newspapers, as per your example. Rather on the contrary - stopping to do that (without paying) was what the case was all about.
Yes, the newspapers cried.
/. who project their dreams of power on Google or MS ("leave europe!") are probably working minimum wage jobs for a good reason. Shooting someone just because you happen to have the gun isn't how society works anymore.
However, they didn't use their de facto powers to attack Google, they used the court system as our society intents, because that (resolving dispures) is what the court systems are for.
Google is welcome and planning to use the same means to get a different ruling. They've been acting restrained and responsibly in all those cases.
I also think the jerks on
You live in Belgium, excellent.
Have you ever lived in an actual socialist country, to compare?
I'm a German, we've had an excellent long-term experiment in socialism in a part of our country. My family has friends from Russia. An ex-girlfriend of mine was from Poland and my wife's family is from Romania. I'm entirely certain that in order to consider western European countries "socialist", you have to have an extremely tainted, simplified and biased view of the world - and absolutely zero first-hand experience of actual socialist countries.
Large corporations are especially easy to control, because they've got so much to loose. Back when Google was a startup without assets in every other corner of the world, they were much more difficult to get for local courts.
So in other words, you think it's ok to use force in order to make a point, regardless of whether you're right or not - or in this case, even though an impartial judge has already declared that you're wrong?
Did anyone forget to tell you that the Wild West has been over for a century or two?
Belgium isn't a socialist country. I'll refrain from the usual anti-american comments, though they've rarely been more adequate.
Belgium is a constitutional monarchy, and it's current prime minister is a member of the VLD party, which started out as a right-wing party and has since moved towards a centrist view.
You can read it all on Wikipedia if you spend 30 seconds looking for it. Provided you don't consider reading a socialist skill.
Anyone with law expertise here who can tell at what point they cross the line to criminal extortion in the US?
Over here in Germany, the line is clear: Threatening someone with unlawful consequences. A threat of bringing a lawsuit isn't illegal. A threat like this one could be, because they're interfering with the suit before it has started. Don't they?
Speech (free or not) assumes a speaker. A speaker, by definition, is someone capable of speech, i.e. a human being. A speaker can speak for someone else, but not as someone else - e.g. the "speaker of the house" speaks for the house, but he isn't the house. Most importantly, part of his responsibilities is to make it clear if he is, right now, speaking "for the house" or "as himself".
The request to properly identify who you are speaking for does not limit the speech itself, and is not an abridgement of free speech.
In most european countries, there are two kinds of "personhoods". Natural persons are you and me, while corporations but also clubs and other kinds of organisations are legal persons. The difference is recognized, though it is seldom made explicit in the laws.
I doubt anything at MS happens by chance. So this leak isn't and while it might hurt Vista adoption a little, it's probably just enough in the future to not change decisions about today and this year. However, it just might keep people on the windos platform, because they have something besides the trainwreck Vista to look forward to now.
I say this is a marketing move to prevent people looking at Vista with disgust and deciding to jump ship to something else entirely (OSX, Linux, Solaris, whatever).
One, this is 100% vaporware, if even the MS insiders have no clue about the central changes.
Two, any bets that over the next months, especially around the launch of OSX Leopard, we'll be hearing "leaked" info about all the really cool and advanced stuff that's going to be in Longhorn SP2, err... "Vienna" ? Then, of course, when it ships in 20012, none of them will actually be there. History repeats itself...
No, my reading-impaired friend, the index is not equivalent to censorship. As an adult, I can buy titles on the index just fine, no problem at all.
Why is everyone forgetting the small important detail that makes a world of difference?
MS is a software company that very late in the game added some hardware to their portfolio when they needed to expand.
Apple is a hardware company that manufactures some software in order to sell more boxes.
Why is that important? Just look at all the dirty tricks of Bill and the gang. They all revolve around trickery unique to software and the fact that the manufacturing cost of software is close to zero (the development is expensive, not the individual unit). OEM lock-in, bundling, giving away stuff to drive out competitors - all things you can't copy verbatim to a market where you actually have to manufacture something.
Oh yeah, there's also the fact that Apple is very good with standards while MS has always re-invented the wheel (usually square).
Oh, please! Have you been looking around? Cables especially are something that almost every non-electronics store charges for as if they were made of solid gold. I'm sure Dell, IBM, etc. will charge you 5-10 times its worth as well. I can go into any random store in the inner city and find CAT-5 cables at prices that I can get a small drum of CAT-5 for in the right shops.
That's definitely not an Apple "feature".
It's tricky to sell machines without windos because MS has been basing what they charge OEMs on a weird calculation that includes whether or not you sell machines without windos. If you do, the OEM license cost rises. Since margins are slim, very few OEMs do.
Yes, most consumers want a PC with windos pre-installed. However, there is enough of a demand for windos-free machines to make it profitable - if you could do it.
I think you'll find, as most retailers have, that if you sell machines without windos installed, MS will jack up your OEM licence fees. Since margins are slim, you'll be out of business or windos-only within the month.
The existence of alternative doesn't mean that the market is a free market. According to the theory, a free market exists if neither a single buyer nor a single supplier controls a dominating share of the market. Dominating != 100%.
The free market theory rests on the assumption that there are many customers and many suppliers and no one from either side owns a dominating share of the market.
In other words: The OS market is not a free market, and hasn't been for well over a decade.
And no, the fact that OSX and Linux and Solaris exist doesn't mean that isn't true. The deciding factor is "dominating share", not "100%".
If you wish to keep your simple views, stop reading now. Otherwise, this'll be a bit lengthy:
/. article is simply false.
The BPjM is there to enforce the laws on the protection of minors ("Jugendschutz"). Its job is, in short, to check on request of certain bodies whether some game (or movie, etc.) should not be available to children. Yes, violence and sex are the usual criteria.
If it is bad for minors, the BPjM will put the title on an "index". That doesn't mean it's censored. The two main effects of being on the index are that a) you can't sell this game to minors and b) you can't run advertisement for the game (because ads are visible to minors). Yes, critics claim that this is de-facto censorship.
And, contrary to what the article claims, Counterstrike is not on the index. There was a request in 2002 and the BPjM checked the title, and decided to not index it. Since there had been a school-shooting earlier, that decision was widely critized, but the fact remains that this
For videos, books and music the BPjM regularily decides against indexing due to artistic merit. All in all, the BPjM used to be one of the hate-figures of my teenage days, yes. But that was when computer games were new and "weird", and they've shaped up to a much more reasonable world-view recently.
Maybe the article authors view should be updated to the 21st century.
Try writing your own, say, IRC server. Then write a policy for it. Then we'll talk again. :-)
(disclaimer: I've written policies for mysql, subversion and others. It's not that tricky - if you are trained in SELinux. I doubt any of the professional sysadmins at my company who've no SELinux experience could do it in less than a full week.)
It's the software companies' choice to only produce one version and sell that to everyone. As an adult, I could (the law allows it) buy whatever brutal, bloody games or movies there are. It's just that most software companies decide to not make a difference, probably because it wouuld be more expensive to ship two versions.
There are limitations that apply to adults as well, and which have been much more appropriate to mention after the introduction of the article. For example, the display of nazi symbols is illegal in Germany, except for historic purposes. That means that most games set in WW2 can not show the nazi cross. Wolfenstein and others circumvent this by using the eagle (symbol of the armed forces during the pre-nazi period) instead.
I still consider jails/chroot to be very different, exactly because of this. In a jail/chroot, the program still runs with all the permissions of its user, it is only limited to a part of the (file-) system. However, the user can use the security policy administration tool to give the application additional permissions. I see. Yes, that makes much more sense. I'm more familiar with SELinux than with XO, so it appears I missed or misunderstood that part. Obviously the implementation has to be proven. The finer details of the specification as well. I've been part of the SELinux development since shortly after its public announcement. The core principles didn't change, but a lot of design details have, and a policy from 2003 is somewhat difficult to translate into a 2006 policy (haven't yet looked into what changes 2007 brought).
Many of those changes were necessary to prevent flaws and potential holes. Whatever else they may want to say, no one can argue that this isn't one of the grandest experiments in the history of computing. *nod*
Actually, I think the proper english translation would be: "I'm so fucking rich that I can insult my customers in public and get away with it."